The Land's Whisper

by Monica Lee Kennedy

  Bending the rules, he thought grimly.

  He stretched his shirt up and bent his chin down into it, hoping to fashion a breathing mask of sorts, but eventually abandoned the hopeless scheme and inhaled the pungent air through clenched teeth.

  This guy is a disease.

  He swung his legs up onto the porch in the awkward gait of the singly shod, and rushed upon the door that lay half open. It was a mistake that nearly cost him dearly. In a leap, he danced his way around dozens of needles—identical to the barbs of the pit— that protruded from the floor, slicked with narcotic.

  Brenol cursed at the rashness of his actions. He had sped into a house where anyone could have been waiting. He internally berated himself toward better caution. He breathed again, yet relief was far from present.

  He barely glanced about before his breath caught in his throat. Along one wall was a collection of grotesquely mounted heads. There were fourteen altogether, and every last one was human.

  Brenol had seen taxidermy once when he was small. He had gone with his mother to measure a suit for a wealthy man in the area. Felint Chestnut. The name alone was enough to prickle the hair on his arms to a stand. He had never wanted to see the eerie live-death again.

  But here he was with something even more nightmarish.

  The shock of the intelligent mounted in this manner was more than disturbing. It was soul-lurching. The men’s features had been formed in idiotic expressions, the creator apparently taking some element of demented pleasure in demonstrating his superiority, even in death. Their eyes were all yellow, the same golden hue of Crayton’s. While mesmerized by the nefarious scene, Brenol forced his vision aside as he sensed his stomach starting to turn.

  It was then that he saw the fifteenth head, forgotten on the floor. This one was a fleshy woman, with attractive features that somehow coexisted with a serpentine cunning that startled even in death. She did not have the golden eyes of the rest, just an ordinary brown to match her ordinary locks. The head was also less carefully mounted than the rest—just awkwardly affixed to wood, with features unchanged. Smudges that could have been excrement marred both cheek and neck. It were as though an evil toddler had taken over the house of horror: lacking brains, but full of learned hatred.

  Brenol’s mind tingled as he remembered the inane humming. Fingers had to have learned all this from someone, he thought as he abandoned the heads to his search. But who is the mastermind? Crayton? Yet that image did not seem to fit either.

  Whoever was the boss must be gone, he thought. This place is too nasty for anyone with a mind.

  Brenol blinked with intentional exaggeration to focus himself and set to pillaging the place. The cottage was full of inconsistencies. There were aspects that showed meticulous organization and intelligence: medicine cabinet with bottles lined and labeled, notebooks with smooth, neat cursive writing, an odd set of tools with jars of sand, rock, and soil, a measuring station. These were clean and precisely cared for, and they contrasted sharply with the backdrop of litter and sewage: dirty pots, cans, dishware in heaps upon the counters and floors, fecal matter in corners, soiled linens tossed to the side, fish bones, sticks, socks, dirt, grime, rotting fruit.

  He scoured hastily for several more minutes yet found nothing that could be of use. His impatience and frustration strangled him. No time. Darse doesn’t have time. Again, he thought of the ax outside, and again dismissed it. It was far too heavy for him to effectively wield against a grown man.

  What then? What?

  Screams landed flatly upon the house, and his panic crested. Brenol scooped up a dirty rag, wrapped four of the longest needles in it, and raced toward the barn. Crayton’s unmoving frame filled the path while wails wafted through the air like song. Brenol paused, weighing the risk and time. The man was leashed, but he did not care to find out how long that tether was. He pressed his lips together in decision, removed a single needle and knelt to the crumpled man. The metal felt cool in his hot hand. It slid into the flesh of Crayton’s extended arm like a fork into a cooked potato. The man did not even stir.

  Brenol glanced around with a faint hope of eyeing his lost boot, but surrendered the article to the need for haste. He left the needle embedded in skin and moved toward the now terrifyingly silent barn.

  Why so quiet? His flesh crawled in angst, but his head pulsed in a quick throb. Only a moment elapsed before his ears pricked to the blood-curdling hum of Fingers. Brenol lowered himself behind a bush and peered out from between the fronds. Fingers emerged from the barn, flushed and chuckling, his fingers drumming upon his chest. His fat face beamed, but his eyes spoke more than all else: delighted, stimulated, sated, evil. No remorse rested there, only mirth. Darse, and any creature mounted on his wall, were—and always would be—his play things.

  All of Brenol’s emotions flared, but he choked them in, for there simply was no time to sift through and make sense of them. Brenol had to do something—anything—before Fingers discovered Crayton, armed himself, caught Brenol, returned to the shed…

  The youth wrestled off his single boot in the hopes of restoring agility. He dropped it silently in a tuft of grass and crept forward with heart thundering and palms sweating. The dirt felt cool beneath his toes, and he realized he and Darse now shared this vulnerable bareness. The knowledge was but a drop in his ocean of terror; he brushed it aside.

  Fingers hummed while replacing the board with a soft thud. Brenol crept closer to the exposed back, gripping a needle in each hand, just an arm’s length now from the stench and sound. He drew his right hand behind his ear and lunged, plunging the barb deeply into the fleshy shoulder, and immediately leaped out of reach. Fingers spun around to face his opponent, and his eyes bounced from fury to confused delight.

  “Another pet!” He grinned and held out both hands to Brenol, as though offering a comforting embrace. “Another pet!” he repeated, and his smooth baby face locked into a toothy grin.

  Brenol waited tensely.

  As though all sense had been delayed until that moment, the man let out a tiny howl. He wagged his arms in desperation toward his back but was unable to reach the protruding needle. Brenol watched in intrigued horror.

  Fingers could not determine which item needed to be addressed first: Brenol or his discomfort. He pouted his lips out in indignation. “What it that? Bad pet!”

  He floundered around, alternating his attempts to remove the embedded barb and to sneak up on Brenol. The man could accomplish neither. Brenol dodged him nimbly, thankful he had removed his boot. Within a minute, the drug began to take effect, Fingers’s movements becoming exaggerated and his speech heavily slurred. Even his piano hands had lost their pep, the fluid motions turning spastic, and then still.

  The size of the man seemed to be preventing the soporific from fully taking him, so Brenol darted forward to plunge in a second needle. In his rush, a burr drove up into the ball of his leading foot. He overcompensated with a jump from the other and crashed down upon knees in a smarting slide. The needle in his hand sank into his own right thigh. Brenol cried out in both pain and alarm, extracting the needle with a whimper.

  It tingled and stung, and in a blink he felt the area growing numb. He cursed himself, leaped up in haste—ignoring the burr and its sting—and drove both the removed and final barb into Fingers’s back. The man flinched and flopped like a beached whale, and his mouth began to foam. Brenol did not stay to watch further.

  With panicked hands he clumsily handled the barn door’s board and shouted to Darse. He could hardly formulate the words with his tripping tongue, but knew he must somehow tell Darse about Fingers and Crayton before the drugs stole him.

  Please be alive. Oh, please.

  He flung the door wide and found his friend upon the floor. Darse lay just as broken as he had several hours previously, crumpled and grim, but now he peered up with startled golden eyes. Brenol gaped but set to work on his bonds, fumbling as the narcotic took effect, and babbled his story out as best he could. T
he room began to slide in streaks, and sounds elongated. Within another minute, he collapsed in a thud beside Darse.

  ~

  The moment was pregnant with peril, and Darse felt incapable of juggling all the complexities of the situation. Three asleep, and small Bren likely for the longest. No antidote, no med kit. The stranger—Crayton—Brenol had spoken of alarmed him more than anything, for he was out of sight and unknown.

  What do I do? I can barely move.

  He groaned but refused to allow his vision to drop down to the jutting bone that would surely paralyze his heart.

  What do I do?

  His hands groped his temples, yet it was no use. His mind was frozen in the terror he had just endured. From the fingers. From the razing cream…

  I can’t think about it. No! I must get out. We must get out. Think, Darse! Think!

  He reexamined the contents of Brenol’s pack. Still no miracles.

  He sat, listening to both the soft breathing of Brenol and the husky wheeze of the man outside. He took a breath—a deep one. And another. And as it usually did, his reason cleared, and he saw what lay before him. He allowed his mind to play against itself, like a child learning dukla, knowing the choice would surface.

  I could bind them.

  But if there’s another who returns? They all go free…

  And even if they managed to escape somehow?

  I don’t even know if there is a jail here.

  In the end, Darse could only see two options: kill the two, or escape effectively. He did not know if he had it in him to do either.

  He peered across to the copper head. The thought of anything happening to him—or any other Brenol—curdled his stomach. He did not know the entirety of this situation, but it was plain neither Crayton nor Fingers meant well. He could not leave these men to continue their activities… If Brenol were captured again simply because he had been too scared to stop them, Darse knew he would never forgive himself. This—his love for Brenol—alone drove his will into steel.

  Darse grit his teeth and began to scoot forward, his body crying out in revolt with every fraction of movement.

  ~

  Scenery, thoughts, time—they were a blur to Darse. The only reality he experienced was the imminent need to prevent the two villains from waking. The thought of inflicting death upon either was harrowing, but his options were few.

  He scooted by Fingers, guessing that the other would wake first since he had been drugged earlier. Fingers could wait.

  Or am I simply trying to postpone the inevitable?

  Regardless, he told himself, he will get his turn. The thought sobered and sickened him; Darse did not find pleasure in killing, despite what had happened in the shed.

  In the shed…

  He dragged his sorry body forward across the soil in a crawl, but soon recognized it would be impossible to go much farther. Already he groaned and fought back the sickening waves of nausea from the intensity of the pain. His rib throbbed mercilessly, but that could be endured. It was his leg. Even glancing at it intensified the unbearable surge that blossomed from the white bone.

  Darse’s leg seized suddenly, and the agony threatened to steal his consciousness. He sucked in deep gulps of air until his vision cleared and his jaw unlocked. He glanced around for sticks in reaching distance, but found none that would suffice for a splint. He spied some loose branches ahead, and he scooted forward with sharp breaths. He was repaid with several good and solid poles, one of which could be used as a cane.

  With torturous effort, he sliced his pants away from the wound with Brenol’s short blade and used the cloth to secure several boughs in place. The splint was far from perfect, but it made hobbling possible as long as he gripped the make-shift cane and delicately dragged the limb without encumbering it in the slightest. A feather’s worth of weight resting upon it sent him shuddering.

  And so he continued, faint with pain and dizzy with desperation. He could have spit farther than he could shuffle in three minutes, but he refused to quit, and his mind coursed with adrenaline and purpose. Whenever his thoughts returned to the barn and the moments with Fingers, he almost barked at himself to focus. It was too great a darkness to relive at the moment.

  It took the better part of an hour to locate the wiry man.

  Crayton lay with his head in a shallow pool of blood and his face the pallor of cream, lifeless and cooling. Darse gingerly pushed the head to one side with his makeshift cane, with as few movements as possible, and the death blow became evident: a gash in the temple. While it had not killed him immediately, Brenol’s rock had accomplished more than he had intended. Darse sighed in relief. The dull pocket knife, and his weak soul, were free for a few more minutes.

  He rested, but in those moments, his heart turned as brittle as a cracker. Somehow the stranger’s death, while initially being a relief, now clung to him as ruthlessly as a contagion: his toes were sticky and painted crimson-brown, his vision was stamped with the skull wound, and his nostrils flared with sickly onion reek. He faced away to return to the barn and reeled.

  To the mountain of flesh.

  Will I regret it?

  His mind somehow circled with this thought—perhaps in order to escape the physical pain—but he knew it was futile: he must do it. There was no safe haven, no protection, and therefore no alternative under these immediate circumstances. Tying the man up would never ensure their escape. Nothing would stop the lunacy that diseased Fingers.

  The monotony of pain and his preoccupied mind brought him to the barn before he would have expected. His heart pounded wildly, and his breath suspended in his throat at what he saw.

  Fingers was gone.

  ~

  Brenol awoke and found himself in motion. A grogginess weighed upon him, but he fought against it, working to move mind and limbs. He blinked his eyes tightly and then strained the lids open.

  If only I could remember…

  It all became too much, and he succumbed again to sleep.

  ~

  Brenol was jolted again to consciousness. With newfound clarity and ease of thought, he slowly began to work over where he was, like a babe who wakes in the night no longer snuggled tightly in his mother’s arms.

  Fingers.

  His eyes snapped open and took in wooden walls. He was inside of the loathed contraption—the cart—and suddenly ossified in terror. His eyes darted to his dirty pack beside him and to his leg, which stung with an aching throb where the barb had buried into flesh.

  The pace of the cart was bizarrely slow. It slid forward a few digits, paused, and then began again. Each roll brought the wheels singing out in a faint treeak. Brenol quietly drew his hand down to extract the burr in his foot. He wanted to be able to move easily and quickly if needed. Finally, he maneuvered his body around to peer out a crack, filled with trepidation.

  He exhaled in extreme relief. It was Darse. Darse! Darse was pushing the cart! The man hobbled forward on one foot, careful not to jostle his injured leg too much, then leaned his body forward to utilize the weight of his own body as pushing leverage, moving the cart only a hand span before beginning the process anew.

  Brenol pulled himself up to a sit. The motion rocked the cart slightly, and Darse tottered in his efforts. His breathing was heavy and rough, rattling like an unsecured shutter in a gale.

  “Bren?” he heaved.

  The boy stood—with care, on the chance that narcotics still lingered in his limbs—and surveyed his friend fully over the cart’s edge. The smile dissolved from Brenol’s face. The eyes—it had been real. They were still as yellow as a rotting dandelion. And more—he was cadaveric: features drawn and gray, pant leg cut off, splint bloody and awkwardly wound to left leg, white bone protruding from blackened dried blood, sweat dripping from face and chest, feet bare, utterly filthy.

  But the eyes. The eyes were chilling.

  “You ok?” Brenol whispered.

  “Get down,” Darse said tersely and pushed the cart’s lever to colla
pse the contraption. “Fingers got away. Don’t know where…”

  Brenol clambered out. He was surprised at how awake and refreshed he was. The narcotics left little residue, at least following this long a stretch. He clasped Darse’s arm and guided the man down into the cart’s base. Darse whimpered and shook, but did not speak. He lowered himself into a supine splay and closed his eyes. Brenol could now see blood seeping from gashes in the man’s feet. He cringed, then consciously edged away from the cart’s lever, shuddering at the sharp snap resonating in his memory.

  Darse’s breathing slowed and became more regular as he rested. “I had to get you out somehow…haven’t stopped moving…even…even if I haven’t gotten far.”

  Darse sighed, but his mind’s commands continued to echo inside, as regular as his drumming pulse: Move, move, move, move. The cadence had pushed him through twilight and the cold night. His leg had grown numb hours ago. It had been only willpower, sheer willpower, pushing him forward to escape an even greater hell.

  “How long, Darsey?” Brenol asked. It was astonishing Darse had even moved, let alone wheeled a cart through the darkness. It was beyond the bounds of possibility.

  “Hours. It’s morning now.” He blinked. It was as much a revelation to himself as it was to Brenol.

  Darse exhaled softly. He could feel collapse approaching. “Help. Help me. You must push. Don’t stop ’til we’re safe…”

  Brenol tentatively raised the sides of the cart once he was sure his friend was entirely secure. He heard one last mumble, so he again lowered the sides to draw near to his friend.

  “…map,” Darse whispered, with eyes shut. Brenol spied and grasped it from Darse’s pocket, and began the arduous journey.

  ~

  That day Brenol trod matrole after matrole, sickened by the weight of Selet’s eye and his own crippling loneliness. He was powerless to do anything but walk, advancing the cart laden with his friend, his golden-eyed friend, and it was nearly impossible to manage a path with the contraption. His feet met stone, thorn, and bark and grew raw with stubs and slices.