So absorbed in his grief, he was unable to do anything for himself, never mind ease her suffering. By the evening of the third day, he had been two days without sleep, and though he lay prostrate beside her, the damnable cries had roused him to one final effort, though he knew it to be futile. The coals had burned to a low crackle, and the room had grown cold. Though even the hottest fire had failed to warm her, she sobbed all the worse with those low burning coals, and he could not bear it. “I am cold, my God, it is…you have best collect…” she had gasped in a dry, raspy croak that was the last decipherable utterance he would ever hear from her. With one final effort, he had broken his chair upon the stonework of the fireplace and cast the fragments onto the andirons. Throwing on his overcoat, he had stomped out into the blinding, raging snow to fetch more wood from the barn. All was white, and he could see nothing but his own feet as he felt his way to the barn door. Then as now, he had found the bunker empty and resolved to get whatever he could from the distant woods. He never saw her again.
He came back to himself forlorn and dejected on the flat slate outcrop. He was sobbing uncontrollably and had trouble remembering why he was out so far in the wood again. Finding himself in this impasse, he looked up and around in the fading light and regarded with chilling suddenness that he was no longer alone. There was a figure at the distant end of the gulch, standing erect and seemingly regarding him silently. His heart stopped, and then bulged in his chest and thumped a single thump so loud that he knew the sound had echoed along the length of the ravine. The doleful, despondent figure bore no countenance that he could perceive. Over its head, a dark grey hood lay, and its arms lay across its waist, each hand seemingly clasping the other.
It was uncommon for Evander Holbrook to encounter other people in this region, never mind in these woods, and though he had no experience with otherworldly beings he knew at once this figure was not one of his community. Surely, he had never seen any person so clad before. It wore no hat, no frock, and no coat of any kind. Whatever it wore seemed to be seamless and pulled over its head. Its trousers were a strange blue and hung loosely about its shapeless legs as if they were naught but cloth, empty of flesh’s form. Suddenly, it looked from side to side and began staggering forward, its head bend low. The man, if man it was, moved slowly and silently, its footfalls on the rocks made no sound as wood soled shoes did, and it seemed not to regard its environs as it moved.
Evander Holbrook was held enthralled by the form, rapt in his attention and too engrossed by its alien movements to hail it with a greeting or otherwise follow normal protocols of society. He did not yet notice that the sun had fallen completely away and the wood was growing darker by the minute, the ravine shrinking in on itself as the light fled out into the west. He was conscious that he had not moved as much as a finger since first noticing this silent presence and he took a second now to eye his rifle lying on the ground, not because he felt any malevolent purpose to the figure, but because he felt so entirely unsure of everything all of the sudden. He was cold, colder than ever before, so cold that air drew hard like ice water into his lungs and blood ran so cold that it burned like fire as it coursed through his veins, seeking out every remote and distant extremity of his being and chilling them until they dropped from his jurisdiction, one by one, into numbness. Presently he had control only over his eyes, which he held fixed upon the hooded form, now only rods away.
After what seemed an eternity of doubt, he mustered his strength and leapt up, grabbing his rifle and shouldering it as he cried out to the creature, “Whatever you are halt and account for yourself!” The form halted, and raised its head, cocking it to one side as if listening for some distant sound. Almost immediately it began shambling towards him again, head down. The hooded figure seemed to be bearing down directly on him, and though he saw it to be unarmed, the malice he attributed to it in his accelerating horror knew no bounds. “Halt!” he cried. “Halt and explain yourself!” He paused, then added with quaking voice, “This is my land and you trespass! State your name sir!” There was no response, nor any noticeable slackening of the creatures pace. “Halt!” Evander screamed. He brought his gun to half-cock and filled the flashpan with powder, thumbing down the frizzen as he backed up the slope of the ravine, step by step. “You trespass on my land and must halt!” He brought his rifle to full cock and lifted it to shoulder, aiming at the beings bobbing faceless head. “Not a step farther!” he stammered. He began to once more order the thing to halt, but all further words failed him as the grotesque being lowered its form to climb up the ravine wall on all fours, its black raiment darker than the darkness of the evening.
He pulled the trigger and a flash of white lit up the gulch, yet the rifle refused to discharge. It was but a flash in the pan. Before he knew where he was, Evander Holbrook found himself running headlong through the woods, in spite of his limp, heedless to his aching leg. He scraped through bushes and brambles, bounding off of hemlocks and through pine groves as he fumbled with his powder to refill the pan of his rifle. His heart was a hammer punching at his ribs, and his throat was choked and gasping for air as his lungs shared room with the pulsating organ.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
It rumbled and thundered in his chest so that he felt it must explode or his ribs give way. His head swam. No cannonade or musketry of the war had ever affected him so. He had run from the British at Kip’s Bay, after seeing a man torn by a cannonball, and even in the shameful heights of his cowardice that day he had not known horror equal to this. On that day, he had run so that he might live. He had known he was safe the instant that his legs began pumping and running from the field. He felt no such assurance of safety now. Now he ran because he felt his pursuer had some power beyond life or death. Something otherworldly was stalking him, patiently and inexorable, insistent and uncompromising.
Whenever he looked back, he saw it, moving slowly and steadily forward, silent and persistent in its work. He ran on, though he was still not sure if the thing had even acknowledged his presence. Soon, he tripped violently on a fallen log and lay panting in the pine needles. He kneeled and placed his weight on a low pine bough as he squinted in the gloom and sought a mark or feature that was familiar to his property. No characteristic seemed friendly to him, and certainly no mark or sign jumped out to point the way. It was almost wholly dark now, and he could see little but the trunks of trees in his immediate quarter. Looking behind him, he saw the dark shape climbing over a fallen oak, hand and foot. He tried to calm his trembling arms as he took careful aim at the being, which was moving slowly and presenting an easy mark. He aimed low, at its waist, and lightly squeezed the trigger. This time he felt the kick, heard the snap, whoosh, and bang in quick succession as his view was enveloped in the acrid sulfurous smoke. Without waiting, he ran.
He felt that he was heading back towards his house, and at every moment expected to stumble from the tree line and see his fence and his barn jutting through the fog. He suddenly became aware of the cold wind whipping his face and looking up, the tops of the trees were bending and waving to the east in a sudden tempest of wind. The wind moaned eerily in the pines and up and up, miles beyond them, he saw the fog clearing eastward and revealing a cold yellow moon. He only stopped for a second, but it held him in its gaze. During this time, he stood thoughtless and for all he knew it was years passing before him. No thought of fear or cold or love or life came to him, and he thought not of himself nor of the forest, nor of his house or barn or his Rebecca. He may not have even been there on that spot beneath that pallid moon or felt the eastward wind suddenly change to westward over that very spot. For that moment he didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. It all didn’t matter because it all simply wasn’t. He felt he could embrace this nothingness at his will and he felt comfortable in stepping into the feel of the nothing and giving up his fear and the cold and the wind and the wood and the ghastly silent thing that seemed to have paused in its movements as he had paused in his. Among the dry cold rocks, the changing
wind whirled and took to the west, bearing with it a flurry of brown leaves.
Ezra Holbrook breathed suddenly and wondered if he had not been breathing for some time, such was his gasp at the rush of cold air into his lungs. He shivered with cold and shook violently as he hadn’t in a long while. He tried to remember where he was or why he was in the forest. The fire! He recalled. “Yes! I must get some wood to help us last this storm.” He could not find his rifle now, but the snow was beginning to fall thick and he could not see very far past the limits of the hemlocks in which he stood. He gave up looking for it, he could return in the morning and try to locate the gun, and it was wood and warmth they needed on a night like this. Pine was not his preferred fuel; it burned badly when green and didn’t last long. Hemlock he felt gave off a poisonous reek. Yet, he could not be picky, he had left only a few logs on the hearth when he’d set out, and by now the house must be freezing. How could he forget to fill the wood bunker? Never had he made a blunder so stupid. Never mind that snow in October was rare; he had always been prepared before. Damn his mind for such a mistake. And damn it for not being able to find his woodpile in the snowy woods, he must cut a wider path as soon as time would permit. When his arms had clutched as much pine and hemlock as he could carry, he began moving at a quickening pace back towards his house. He did not see the hooded being standing over his rifle in the white woods. He did not look back.
Before him, he noticed a change in the light. While behind and beside him he saw naught but the whitish blast of the storm; before him he saw an orange glow through the trees. Shadows danced demonically as the flickering light flashed through the gaps in pine needles, bare branches, and the skeletal hulks of the autumnal forest. Through the snow, the light seemed to throb and fade in intensity, at times disappearing almost completely. He followed the orange light, and as he suspected, he emerged into a clearing. All around him, it was white; the snow had not lifted. Yet, it was colder than before. The fog of twilight had given way to blinding snow, but even so, Evander Holbrook could see the source of the orange glow not a quarter mile away. It was his house, and it was burning on one side. He dropped his load and ran now, thinking only of Rebecca, helpless in her bed where he had left her. He had been away too long, and he tried not to think of her lying helpless in the flames.
He stumbled across his orchard; his boots caked with heavy wet snow. He stumbled and fell multiple times but finally reached the barn. As he slung the snow from his eyes, he saw that flames were licking madly at the eaves and showers of sparks carried upwards through the sheets of blinding snow. He heard a cry now, faint but growing as the direction of the wind shifted to rage fervently into his face. The voice carried on the wind was distant, lonely, cold, dry, and thin. It was the saddest voice he had ever heard, and it cut him so deeply he felt his heart must stop and his soul must give in to bottomless despair. The shriek rose and rose, and faded from his ears as it ascended far above into the depths of the blowing storm. With a final show of his failing strength, he ran onwards towards his home and arrived adjacent to his front door in time to hear his wife’s final screams. He tried to reach her, but the inferno was too great. The blast drove him back from the doorframe and back into the swirling drifts of snow. He cried and yelled for her, but she spoke no more and as the house collapsed into ruin and a pillar of embers rose into the storm Evander Holbrook fell into spasms of shuddering despair as the snows covered him over and he knew no more but the damnable cold that surrounded him forevermore.
The young man was hot, and he removed his grey hooded sweatshirt and hung it on an old broken bough. The sun was still fairly high for four thirty, and the fog had lifted soon after he left his car. He cursed that he had worn jeans on a hike. Even though it was late October, it was still fairly warm, and the exertions in the forest had given him a healthy sweat. He gasped for breath and looked around. As the fall air played over his bare sweating arms, he shivered, and for the first time that evening felt cold. He noticed that the warm breeze that had been with him all afternoon had gone. He put his hoodie back on and resumed his hike. He reached a grove of pines and stopped again. The air was still here and the trees stood silent as if watching him and awaiting his movements. This irrational feeling came upon him abruptly, and for a time he stood still listening for the sounds of the wind above the trees. It was still.
The wind had been his only companion that afternoon. It had blown away that thick white fog and revealed the sun. It had cooled him as he walked, and in his hooded sweatshirt he had thanked God for it on such an abnormally warm day. Even in the deep ravine below he had felt its presence in the soft murmur of the boughs and the sight of the many dropping leaves. Here, all sound was muted, and the clean clear air was almost unnervingly still. The birds of twilight had ceased making their calls. He was anxious, but it soon passed. He scolded himself for thinking like a fool. It was an odd place, but the night was coming and perhaps the weather was changing again. The spot he had reached was new to him, though the forest was not.
He had often come here with his grandfather, who in his youth had known all of the area as if it were his own. Together, they had collected artifacts from years past, most of them found on or near the hill near which he now stood. Most were farm implements, rusting and pulled with difficulty from the grip of countless years of fallen leaves. At home on window sills and mantelpieces were glass bottles and the more intact and interesting articles that the forest had yielded to him. His grandfather, as a youth had found an old gunlock not far from here, rusted but still laying with its flint in place. He had never found anything so interesting as all that, but the thought of new discoveries kept him coming here in his youth, though now, in his adulthood, he found more interest in the trees and the singing of the narrow brook down in the ravine.
But this place felt different. This place he had never been. The pines were tall and old, and the needles kept the growth down and provided a carpet at least twenty square yards. The area looked almost disturbingly orderly as if kept clear of the brambles, vines and low growth that cut across much of the rest of the woods. He had lost the trail ten minutes before, and the seeds of panic had begun to take root, but he had hiked these woods before and knew roughly how to get out. He checked the compass app on his phone, which confirmed his intuition and walked on curiously. At least the odd sulfurous smell was gone. He had smelled it faintly by the brook and thought it might be some old rotten vegetation. After a moment, the whiff was gone, and he forgot about it. But then he had walked into a much stronger and more concentrated reek in the woods further on. It was bitter and acrid and carried a metallic tang to his nostrils. He’d never smelled anything like that before and was glad he had gotten clear of its source and left it behind him.
The discovery of the pine grove intrigued him. Most of the woods were scrub brush, oaks, and hemlocks; in the ravine near the brook, he had seen many elms and a few silver maples. He had collected a few acorns that he wished to try growing in his cellar over the winter. But this stand of white pine was worth exploring. There was something to it, and he wondered if the orderly lines below the needles were not perhaps the work of man. He walked onward, and now in the midst of the pines, the air seemed even more still, and he was filled with a feeling of hesitancy. He moved slowly. Despite all his watchful caution, he stubbed his toe on something hard, nearly tripped, and realized with sudden horror that he had stumbled upon an uncovered well, its opening completely concealed by a lattice of dead branches and fallen leaves. It took him a moment to recover from the rush of adrenaline. He stared down into the well and could see no bottom. He shivered at the thought. Such things were not unheard of in Connecticut, and he thanked God that he had not stepped into its gaping maw.
Moving aside, he noticed the clearer the rectangular pattern in the pine needles, and saw that what he had before regarded as just another pine tree was, in fact, an old and crumbling chimney. The stone had cracked and tumbled halfway up, and what was left was blackened, the mortar s
plit by years of freeze and thaw. He grew excited; perhaps even his grandfather had not found this place. He knelt by the chimney and picked up a few stones, clearing the old fireplace of debris, trying to find anything of interest. There was an old andiron, rusted and ruined, buried under the pine needles and detritus. There was a ring of flaky metal that crumbled as he held it up; he thought that it might have been a cook pot or cauldron. Below that, was a layer of dirt, which proved surprisingly easy to kick aside. As he kicked more and more of the years of accumulation away he uncovered more and more of the old stone hearth. Suddenly, he stopped and jumped back with a jerk and a shout that would have been heard for a mile if it had not been smothered in the closeness of the pines. There in the corner of the hearth, deep in the back of the firebox, was the small skeleton of a young woman.
Siren Song
By Anna Yeatts
A strand of saliva hung from the corner of Ryu's mouth as he watched the bullfrog's ivory throat flutter in and out. He pushed the hunger away, skewering the bullfrog with the talon on his forefinger. The bullfrog twitched and squirmed, releasing its bladder in a warm trickle down Ryu's hand. Ryu sniffed it. His soon-to-be mate would enjoy such a delicacy after her rebirth.
Dark Light Book Three (Dark Light Anthology) Page 32
