by Daniel Mills
Consider his account, how she haunts it about the edges. A voice in the night. A presence upstairs. She was invisible to him, or nearly so. He mistook spirit for flesh and flesh for the spirit and this was his final error. After two years in the vale, he forgot himself and scribbled in this book as though he really were alone in the house for all my mother read it while he slept and once she wrote in its pages when he was away. Strange that my father makes no mention of this. Probably he never read the things she wrote or realized they were there but continued to confide himself to this journal until the night he died.
Let me wait only til the morning, he wrote. For the first hints of color in the orchard.
He lowered his pencil, his head. He slept in the chair, exhausted, and did not stir when Mother descended the staircase. She had heard the explosion in the wood, and wondered, and spied the journal clutched between his hands. She eased it from his grip. She had no light but stood by the window to read of what he had seen and all that he intended.
The grave I dug and must unbury.
She closed the book, let it slip from her hands. It struck the ground but he did not wake. She turned and climbed the steps. Her tread was soft to make no sound and she reached the nursery where she had taken to sleeping through the daylight, singing songs to the crib by night. Back then it was still broken, heaved upon its side where my father had cast it down. One of the legs lay splintered on the floor, a length of cherry-wood crowned with jutting nails. She retrieved it from the floor, held it in both hands. She went downstairs.
The sun was up, birds singing to meet it. She crossed the room to the chair in which he slept. She stood over him with the light at her back. Her shadow fell across him and he awoke.
Afterward, when it was done, she dragged him by his armpits to the orchard. The grave was open, dug deep but short where it was meant for a dog rather than a man. She folded his knees into his gut and bundled him into it.
His hands she arranged over his breast, the fingers laced together. The face she covered with soil, kicking at the ground to rain down earth and apples til the grave’s walls collapsed and he vanished into the ground. Only the white hands visible. They sat upon his chest, folded together, as though he were praying.
An apple tree grows there now, its branches naked as are those of the trees surrounding and there is snow in the air, spring snow. The lights are drawing near. At dusk they creep out of the valleys to dance upon the ridgelines, cutting paths in the snowfall. The south glowers with them. They float in a sky where there should be only birds.
Mother and I are the last left in these hills. Game is scarce, the farms have failed, and the wolves departed years ago. When I was younger, I would hear them in the woods at night or find their tracks of a morning. Sometimes they left rabbits for us in the garden, scraps of savaged meat which Mother collected from the ground to cook for our supper.
Once I woke from a nightmare to find the pack of them gathered before the house. They were seven in number, seated in a row with heads uplifted. Motionless, silent. They were keeping watch, it seemed, with the moon behind them turning all to silver, even the sparks of their eyes.
But that was decades ago and the land itself is altered. The forests were cut for timber, harvested like wheat, and a dam was built down the river. The town is under the water and so too the great pines, submerged about their middle but still growing, still spreading, just like the river which is now a lake and rises with each rainfall.
Soon the waters will reach the orchard, the house. We will be gone. We depart in the morning, making for the north where there are wolves yet, and winter, and no lights to hide the stars from view. I do not yet know what will become of this book. It is my decision, says Mother, and I think perhaps I will bury it with Father. Or perhaps I will take it with us when we go and carry it at my breast, keeping it hidden as my mother did, and for so many years, til the winter’s night she sat with me and told of its existence.
I was thirteen—old enough, she judged. We sat together after supper, the stove between us roaring. Inside the fire danced, turning blue-white at the tips and buffered by the chimney-wind. Mother vanished into the shadows then reappeared beside me, the journal in her hands.
This book belonged to your father, she said. It’s written in his hand, which was counted a fine one. He was known for it when he was young, but it suffered, I think, for the cold of this place and there are passages inside which I cannot make out. Others I know well enough to speak from memory though the words they weren't meant for me.
She placed the book in my hands. It smelled of mold, of Mother, and black damp had seeped into the binding. The inside pages were rippled with it, rank upon rank, forming waves barbed with the lines of his script: David Stonehouse, Exile.
It is yours now, she said. This book was all he left us when he died and I’ve carried it with me for years so you might know him by it. The journal bears his name but there are pages inside on which he never wrote. He died before his story’s close and so the end is ours to tell as we would and in our way.
Mother’s voice, the things she told that night.
How she buried my father in the orchard. How she wandered from the house and was lost to the wood. She crashed through underbrush, trampling down thicket in a haze of mist and birdsong and the journal under her arm.
The day was getting on, the sun swinging slowly to south. She came to the river and followed its course to the pine-grove and the rings of sparse growth surrounding, undercut by pine-roots, those two graves within sight of one another, two crosses listing, about to fall.
Sunset, the sky aflame. Fitch’s grave was sited between two snags. The gash was shallow, not two feet down, and lined with chips of bone which once had been a man. Still it sufficed. She lay down within it and rested her head against the earthen wall with its webs of shattered root and the cross above her, its shadow thrown down.
The weather turned. She did not move though she shook for hunger, for cold, her eyes closed fast and the rain running over them. She lay with the journal on her breast, covered with both hands, waiting down daylight and dark alike until all remembering failed her and she passed beyond herself into the moon of another night.
The stars dazzled. Mother knelt over the open grave. The clothes she wore were new like robes of the spirit donned at meeting while the body which lay before her was half-decayed, blotchy with rot and clad in scraps of cloth recalling the sack in which a babe takes form.
Pine-roots fastened about the exposed skull. They beat through the wires of its hair, their rhythm slow and even, sounding in the earth below her knees and in the milk which filled her breasts, dribbling through the dress she wore.
She buried herself. She collected the journal from the corpse’s grasp and filled the grave with her hands, raking her fingers through soil til the nails were cracked and bloodied and she heard a splashing from the river.
Wolves. The pack surfaced out of the water. They swept silently up the bank, moving seven abreast and the great male at the center. He was gray-black and grizzled and the unsheathed organ swung between his hind-legs, red as the roots beneath her feet. The pack slowed, stopped, all eyes turned to Mother where she stood, trembling.
The male advanced. He bore down on her as upon his prey and on his back he carried the child. She rode him bareback, straddling the ridge of his spine. Her knees fitted to his ribs. Her small hands knotted in the fur at his neck. She was naked but wore the loops of her hair about her to conceal her face so the two were nearly indistinguishable, child from beast.
The wolf halted before her. His breath blew into her face, damp and stinking of slaughter. Mother opened her arms to him, her hands. He snarled. The red tongue snapped, teeth shining, but the child remained motionless upon his back, watching through the curtains of her hair.
Please, Mother said, and offered it up, the heart from her chest, and because it was given he would not take it but lowered his head, and looked away, and so the child came to her.
Mother held the baby close. Her body was frigid but the child’s was warm and her breasts dripped for the heat of it. Milk sopped through her shirtfront, making clouds where it splashed in the mud and moonlight shimmering in streaks on the ground.
Drink, she said, and this I remember. River’s song, the wolves withdrawing. Softness of skin together and the smell of earth about her. My fingers opened, closed: they grasped at nothing. The moon went out of the sky and we slept.
Publication History
“Below the Falls” first appeared in Nightscript I (ed. C.M. Muller), 2015 and was subsequently reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016 (ed. Paula Guran), Prime Books, 2016.
“The Woman in the Wood” first appeared in The Children of Old Leech (eds. Ross E. Lockhart & Justin Steele), Word Horde, 2014.
“Lucilla Barton (1857-1880)” is original to this collection.
“Lilies” was first published under the title “Unhallowed Ground” (electronic format only) DarkFuse, 2012. It has been extensively rewritten for this collection.
“The Lake” first appeared in Aickman’s Heirs (ed. Simon Strantzas), Undertow Publications, 2015 and was subsequently reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 27 (ed. Stephen Jones), PS Publishing, 2016.
“A Shadow Passing” first appeared in Autumn Cthulhu (ed. Mike Davis), Lovecraft eZine, 2016.
“The Distant Deserted Sea” is original to this collection.
“Lincoln Hill” was first published in verse form in The Silent Garden (eds. The Silent Garden Collective), Undertow Publications, 2018.
“A Sleeping Life” first appeared in The Madness of Doctor Caligari (ed. Joseph S. Pulver, Sr), Fedogan & Bremer, 2016.
“Arena” first appeared in Nightscript II (ed. C.M. Muller), 2016.
“Canticle” first appeared in Marked to Die (ed. Justin Isis), Snuggly Books, 2016.
“The Account of David Stonehouse, Exile” was first published as a limited-edition chapbook by Dim Shores Press, 2016.
Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to Michael Kelly and Undertow Publications and to C.M. Muller, Ross Lockhart, Justin Steele, Simon Strantzas, Mike Davis, The Silent Garden Collective, Justin Isis, and Sam Cowan. I am likewise indebted to the encouragement and vision of the late Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Without him many of these stories simply would not exist.
Passages from St. John of the Cross’s “The Song of the Soul and the Bridegroom” and “Stanzas of the Soul,” quoted in “Canticle,” are taken from public domain translations by David Lewis (1909) and E. Allison Peers (1959), respectively.
About the Author
Daniel Mills is the author of Revenants and Moriah and the creator of historical crime podcast These Dark Mountains. His nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Vermont.
