by Joe Hart
“Does that mean that Sara’s ... that she’s—” I couldn’t bring myself to say it, and looked from Kotis to Fellow, my eyes asking, pleading.
“If something is said or seen in the Field of Lies, it is untrue. Your daughter is surely alive,” Fellow said as he stood and placed a gentle hand on my arm.
Relief swam through me and I nearly staggered. Sara was alive. And if she was alive, then I could hope that Jack and Jane were too.
I walked in an unsteady line to where Kotis stood. He studied me with open contempt, and I braced myself for another blow, but none came. “I’m truly sorry,” I said after a moment of meeting his gaze. “I would like to apologize to your owl and thank him for saving me.”
“He ain’t an owl, whatever that is,” Kotis said, but I saw his brow soften. “He’s a reacher, one of the last of his kind. And he’s missin’ feathers now because of you, and they won’t ever grow back.”
I studied the empty spots on the bird’s wings where the monster in the fog had broken or pulled the feathers out during their battle. The brown and black tones of the feathers that seemed familiar before now looked strange up close, and I saw that they were all bordered with a metallic silver. In fact, the edges looked sharp, as if they could slice not only air but flesh and bone. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Could I please say thank you?”
Kotis remained stoic for almost a minute, and just when I thought he wasn’t going to answer, he tilted his head to the side and whispered something to the mass of feathers on his shoulder. A few seconds later, the bird unfurled its wing and its head appeared. I saw that its eyes were black and ringed with gold, the color of the last escaping rays of a sunset. Its beak opened and an impatient click issued from within.
I looked the animal in the eyes and spoke as though I were apologizing to a person. “I’m truly thankful for your help earlier, and I’m very sorry you were injured.” Any absurdity I felt at speaking to a bird was dispelled when its eyes blinked and the rounded crown of its head titled forward in a small bow. Without meeting my gaze again, it promptly re-covered its head with a wing and was still.
“He’s more forgivin’ than I am,” Kotis said as he ran a hand in a gentle stroke over the bird’s frame.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
Indecision battled on the giant’s wide face, as if telling me would concede something he didn’t want to let go of. “Scrim,” he said at last.
“Scrim,” I repeated. “What’s it mean?”
“It means, it’s his bloody name, that’s what it means,” Kotis said, shaking his head as he turned away. I glanced at Fellow, who hid a small grin beneath his hand.
We rested for a while at the edge of the fog, although we moved a little farther away despite Fellow’s assurances that nothing could cross the bridge from the field. We could make no fire since there was nothing really to burn except the dead stalks covering the ground like spiny whiskers. Instead, we sat in a semicircle, speaking little as the rotating sun moved clockwise around us.
“What did you throw out of your pocket at the shadows before we crossed the bridge?” I asked Kotis after an extended bout of silence. He merely looked at me for a time before digging into his vest. He drew out a handful of dark chunks and tossed them to me. A few landed on the ground, but I caught the majority of the round lumps. They were fibrous and black, about the size of quarters. When I brought them closer to my face, I smelled strong spices and smoke.
“Dried cobble,” Kotis said. “Cured meat,” he offered after I tipped my head to one side.
“Do the things in the fog eat this stuff?” I asked, picking up the jerky that lay on the ground.
“I’ve no clue, but it was all I had to throw at the demons,” Kotis said.
I glanced at him, waiting for an insult to fly from his lips, but to my amazement a wry smile bloomed there. I looked at Fellow, who grinned, and then back at Kotis, who chuckled deep in his chest. I laughed then, realizing that Kotis had been as terrified as the rest of us. Soon we were all laughing together, the tension of the day easing out naturally through a conduit that seemed to transcend not only races but worlds as well.
I lay back on the ground, flattening a spot large enough to encompass my body, and let the mirth fade away. Sleep pulled at me, and within minutes my eyes fluttered closed and I was gone.
Fellow nudged me awake sometime later. Time seemed inconsequential, yet was also the most precious thing in the world to me. It was fluid and slipped away with only the variance of the sun passing around us, rubbing me raw with thoughts of how long my family had been gone. As I rose from the ground I tried to envision where they were, in what hell they subsisted, and what horrors they endured. The enormity of the sorrow that pushed down on me was almost too much, and I shoved it away to the wings of my thoughts, where it waited to smother me again with its wet blanket darkness.
“Which way next?” I asked, brushing myself off.
“Not that way, that’s for sure,” Kotis said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the fog. “If I never go through that place again, it’ll be too soon.”
“This way,” Fellow said and pointed at an angle just to the right of the line we’d been traveling.
“How can you be sure?” I asked as we began to walk.
“Because that’s the direction we’ll find the next forest,” he responded.
I frowned. “How can you know? Have you been through here before?”
He shook his head and turned his orange eyes my way. “I’ve never set foot past the edge of the bridge before today. The trees call to me.”
Kotis drew even with me, his long stride equaling two of mine. “Little ropy bastard can find a tree in a thousand-mile desert, he can,” the giant said.
“But is that where my family is, near the next forest?”
Kotis shrugged. “It’s the best we’ve got to go on.”
Scrim’s head appeared from beneath his wing and he eyed me with his brilliant gaze. I marveled at the intensity of the look, the intelligence that shone out like two beams of light.
“He really understands what we say, doesn’t he?” I asked, motioning to the bird.
“Oh, he understands more than you know there, wanker,” Kotis said, giving me a glance. Four hours before I would have bristled at the insult, but something had given a little after sharing the laughter in the field. Though my jaw still hurt where he’d punched me, I knew that there was no venom in his words now. “He’s the only thing in this land that can touch those demons in the mist.”
“Please quit calling them that,” Fellow said quietly ahead of us.
Kotis opened his mouth and then shut it. I looked at him questioningly, and he merely shook his head and stroked Scrim’s feathers before clearing his throat.
“I raised Scrim here from an egg. He was a gift from my father when I became old enough to hunt and defend our home. We been side by side ever since.”
“But he’s not really a pet, is what you’re saying,” I said.
“No, he’s not even really bound to me at all. He could fly off at the first whim he had and never return, but he always comes back, don’t you, you flying shitbag!” Kotis poked Scrim in the ribs, who responded by clicking his long beak with a sound like a pair of scissors closing. Kotis leaned closer to me and cupped a hand conspiratorially around the side of his mouth. “I think he comes back because of my shinin’ personality.”
I laughed and Kotis looked ahead, his black eyes gleaming. I thought I caught a shake of Scrim’s head before he leapt from his perch into the air and soared away.
We walked in silence for miles after that. The ground rolled in familiar-feeling plains that I knew from growing up in the Midwest. I could imagine the unending fields studded with rows of corn or barley. Other than the slight rises and falls of the ground, the fields we trekked across were unremarkable. I strained my eyes and turned several times, trying to spot something, a bird, a rock, a tree, anything, but there was nothing, just an ocean of brown st
ubble that may have existed at the same height for a millennia.
My thoughts returned to Jane and the kids as we walked, the chorus of our feet a drumbeat to the soundtrack of a life that seemed impossibly far away. For some reason I kept thinking of the last time Jane and I had fought. I’d been drunk, and it hadn’t rained for weeks. I remembered how she’d looked at me, pinned me to the wall with a gaze that every person in a relationship comes to hate: the look of true hurt. Her eyes now floated before me and blotted out the dismal landscape that surrounded us. They’d shone with barely restrained tears, tears that begged to fall but couldn’t, somehow held by the curvature of her eyes or by sheer will, I wasn’t sure which. The words she said lingered in my ears and drowned out the light breeze that ruffled my shirt. It just hurts, Michael, that’s all. I won’t leave you, but you’ve got to do something for me. Find a way to fight it that won’t destroy you, or us. Please.
I swallowed and wiped at a tear, hating myself for wanting a drink at that moment. I saw Kotis glance at me, and I turned away to look back the way we’d come so I didn’t have to meet his gaze.
A shadow stood on the last rise behind us.
I sucked in a breath and felt my muscles flinch. The figure wavered like a mirage and then folded in half, then in half again, until it was gone from sight. I heard Kotis stop, noticing I’d quit walking.
“What is it?” he rumbled as he stepped beside me.
I pointed to the last hill we had come over. “There was something there. It was there and then gone.”
Fellow moved to my other side and gazed at where I pointed. “Are you sure, Michael?”
“Yes, I’m sure, it was standing there watching us, it almost looked like—” I stopped, fear closing in on me like a tide. “Are you sure they can’t come out of the fog?” I asked hoarsely.
“Their kind cannot cross the river,” Fellow said. His voice was low and reassuring, but I felt a chill run through me as I remembered how the black thing in the fog had broken apart and capered away.
“Let’s keep an eye on our tails, eh?” Kotis said. Scrim flew from the sky, and Kotis put out a thick forearm for him to perch on. Several long clicks and a short screech stuttered from the bird’s open beak, and Kotis squinted, listening.
“He says there’s something ahead, less than a mile over the next hill.”
“What is it?” Fellow asked.
“I’m not sure, he keeps saying.” Kotis paused, looking at Fellow and then me. “He keeps saying ‘death, death.’”
Chapter 6
The House of Bone
It took us ten minutes before we crested the last hill and saw it. At first, we thought it was a massive forest growing in serrated angles that prodded the twilight sky and that Fellow’s sense of direction was dead-on. But as we drew closer it became apparent that it wasn’t a forest at all. The first thing I noticed was the smell. I’d gotten used to the autumnal air—the odors of cold earth, fallen leaves, and organic decay. The new smell on the wind was one of death, the potent stink of spoiled flesh, and it brought the sound of flies buzzing, even though there were none in sight. The color was the next thing that struck me. The shapes ahead were white. There were no soft browns or blacks to indicate trunks or bark. There was only a monochrome, devoid of color.
We walked several more steps before Fellow froze and spoke without looking at either of us. “Kotis, is this what I think it is?”
Kotis looked at Fellow for some time before realization dawned on his face and his eyes widened. “You got to be shittin’ me,” he said.
“What?” I asked, glancing between the two of them.
Fellow finally turned and looked at me, his face holding an undeniable amount of fear. “This is the place of death in our world. It is where all things come to die, and those that don’t come are brought.”
“Brought? Brought by what?” I asked. Fellow pulled his gaze from mine and looked fleetingly at Kotis before walking away. Kotis followed, and I had no choice but to do the same.
The closer we got the more detail began to take shape. What looked like trees before now became sharper, more curved. I noticed a few gray tinges here and there within the white. The mass before us stretched away in either direction until I lost sight of it, and I was reminded of the fog. I wondered if the world I stood in now had no solid dimensions, the vision of those seeing it being its only real limitations.
I was again about to ask what it was we were approaching when I saw something that I recognized, and stopped. What I thought was some sort of structure or abstract architecture became identifiable, and I felt my mouth open as my aching jaw slackened.
Bones.
Millions or trillions, perhaps more. They were stacked with wild abandon in crisscrossing patterns, interlocked in a macabre jigsaw puzzle. They were polar white, with patches of gray age setting in on some. Some were broken and twisted, leaving jagged edges to catch the low light and spray their uneven shadows onto their brethren. The pile was at least fifty feet high and relatively uniform except for a few places where several rib cages towered over everything, unfathomable in their height because I knew no animals that possessed bones of that size.
“Oh my God,” I said. Fellow and Kotis stood staring at the spectacle for some time before turning to me, their faces holding no reassurances. “What is this?” I asked.
“Death’s gathering. Everything that lives here comes to die in this place,” Fellow said in a low voice. He spoke as though he was afraid something might hear him.
“I almost didn’t believe it existed,” Kotis said with a small amount of awe. “I mean, I knew, but seeing it is something different.”
The number of bones was so staggering my mind faltered trying to comprehend it. I looked at the skeletal wreckage and tried to pick out something familiar, but saw nothing that resembled anything on Earth. Many of the bones were so massive they defied logic to a mind that considered dinosaurs and blue whales large. I spotted a bleached skull with two spiny horns sprouting from each side that was the size of a compact car. Its forehead was riddled with what I thought was decaying holes at first, but then saw that they were eye sockets, all twenty of them.
“We have to find a way through,” Fellow said.
“Scrim, find us a passage, eh?” Kotis said to the bird, which flapped away down the face of the twisted mass. We began to walk in the direction Scrim flew, our heads turning constantly to gaze at the pile beside us. It was only a few minutes later when Scrim returned, speaking to Kotis of a break in the wall, but by then we could already see it.
There was a wide swath through the bones, forming a V channel that shot up on either side like an enormous hall. The ground was packed solid as though many feet had trodden there, pressing the dirt into a highway between death’s walls. The passage twisted away out of sight a hundred yards in, and a quiet hush fell over us as we gazed inside.
“There’s no other choice,” Fellow said, seemingly reading my mind. “We have to go through.”
Kotis grunted and I licked my lips. Even the fog hadn’t instilled a sense of dread like the one that coiled within my stomach as I looked at the path. But Fellow was right, there was no other way through. The words of a song came to me then. Something about walking through hell on feet made of glass.
We stepped into the canyon, our footsteps echoing off the walls around us. I had the feeling of walking into a cave, even though the sky above us was open. The smell I noticed earlier only increased with each step, and soon I was resisting the urge to pull my T-shirt over my mouth and nose to block it.
There was something else too, and at first I couldn’t put my finger on it. But then I noticed Kotis turning his head back and forth, examining the gaps in the bones around us. The feeling was of being watched. I was about to say something when a clatter and movement drew my eyes past Fellow, who stopped and braced his feet on the hard ground.
A few bones fell end over end down the edge of the passage and came to rest on the path. I scanne
d the wall where they’d fallen from and saw nothing in the stacks. Scrim let out a small cry and then hissed as he ruffled his wings. All of us watched for something more, but after several minutes of silence we moved on. The trail twisted like a snake, first right, then left, then back again, almost in a full circle before straightening out. The entire time I felt eyes on my skin, pushing against it and raising goose bumps more than once as I glanced over my shoulder expecting something to be there, inches behind me.
After nearly an hour of walking, a clearing appeared ahead, with a dark spot at its center. The dark area gradually took form, and I saw that it was a house, of sorts. Its walls were made of the largest bones I’d seen yet, their ends disappearing into the ground like tent stakes. Here and there windows were cut out, opening unto perfect squares of darkness. A spire shot from the top of the structure and looked like an auger shell my uncle gave me when I was nine. He’d picked it up on a beach in Vietnam during his tour there, and placed it in my hand, telling me it was from a country where monsters lived. My father had reprimanded him, saying not to fill my head with nonsense and things I didn’t understand. His words chilled me as I gazed at the bone house. There are places where monsters live, Michael. Don’t ever go where your heart tells you not to. Everything in my being told me not to walk into the clearing, but Fellow and Kotis continued on, and I followed.
The clearing was circular, like a meteor had plummeted and burned a hole in the bone field, and pools of dark water sat in depressions. We avoided these without words, an unspoken agreement that only heightened my fear when I looked down into one and saw no bottom. The bone house was also circular, and for a moment I was reminded of Stonehenge. This place was desolate and alien, and I wanted nothing more than to circumvent the house and continue past it, to run from there with all the strength I had left; but we walked on, each of us controlling our fear in our own way.
