The Collected Short Fiction, page 157
Craven didn’t read Latin. Victor had mastered it, Craven knew because he’d spent a long evening on the internet, panning for gold. Victor passed away at home seven years ago. Obituaries always say “passed away” if the details are prurient or scandalous. A brief mention in Variety also played the death coyly. Craven figured it had to be an OD or suicide.
Framed photographs of young, lush Deborah in the buff were salted here and there throughout the house. A smaller photo was tucked into an alcove—Deborah, perhaps thirty-five, in a string bikini on the deck of a boat. White ruins dotted a distant, hazy shoreline. Victor clutched her waist. He wore a Hawaiian flower print shirt and grimaced at the camera, tongue protruding; a comedian strangling on an invisible noose. Someone knelt on Deborah’s other side. A man with large hands (his head was cut off by the frame) and wide shoulders under a linen tunic. The man pinned the shiny corpse of a squid to the deck with a spear from a spear gun. The squid’s tentacle lifted slightly, forty years frozen in mid-convulsion.
Craven once jokingly asked her if Victor practiced black magic. She took it seriously, or pretended to. He tried. He committed fully. We had a third child, you know. Victor was a disappointment to our father. Whatever she meant by that—Deborah had a mind full of cats. Her games and her delusions were often inseparable.
Dusk claimed the land as Craven finished. The wind picked up and a hard rain started in. Thunder boomed, closer and closer. Artemis slunk away to hide under the bed. The dog feared few things except storms. She developed that dread back when Craven hiked the Olympics during late summer and high winds lashed the trees. Man and dog cowered inside a flimsy tent. Men rationalize forces beyond their control. Dogs do not.
Craven experienced a pang of nostalgia as he fetched a camp stove from the garage. He boiled tea for Deborah and they sat at the island in the kitchen. A large black skull candle flickered between them. Tall shadows climbed the walls.
She poured cream from the mouth of a pewter faun. “I dreamed I went to a café in a small town. A girl in an apron came around and poured complimentary tea for the morning customers. Everybody drank tea and either died or fell into a coma. I did not drink the tea. On the next table lay an old book with gilt lettering. Part of the title read—Conversing with a Barbed Tongue. Someone behind me said, Yes, that one. Pick it up. The horrible whisper frightened me. I leaned over and picked up the book. It smelled like a piece of soft wood that had lain in the muck of a swamp. The pages were gummy with mold. My hand went numb. I woke to you standing there like a slowly spreading Adonis.” She waited for him to respond. Finally, she said. “What would you say it means?”
“Dreams never mean jack shit.” He gulped hot tea. She had revealed a dream, which represented a first in their relationship. He should feel some sense of closeness, of bonding. He felt uneasy instead. A taboo had been broken, a line crossed.
Lightning hissed near the yard and its blue stroke cast Deborah’s face into a death mask. He jumped. She smiled patronizingly. “Conversing with a Barbed Tongue. That’s suggestive, don’t you think? Like a rare tract an exorcist would stash in his files with a bottle of good wine for a paperweight. Or a tract the Witchfinder General keeps in his traveling satchel of horrors.”
“It also sounds like a chapter some fallen angel would dictate to some Franciscan monk,” he said, smiling to let her in on the joke. “The Apostles got theirs. I’m sure a demon would jump at the chance to say its piece for the record.”
“The weather channel forecasted this storm on Tuesday.” She apparently disliked it when he spoke more than one sentence at a go.
“I suppose that means your dinner party is canceled.” He tried not to sound smug.
“Yes and no. There might be a gathering.” She took his hand and kissed his fingers. Her eyes gleamed with tears, although her unkind smile remained. “I hope not. But if they decide to visit, I am sorry.”
“Hey, your place, your rules. Kind of weird to come over in this weather, though.” He laughed and squeezed her hand in a gesture of cheap graciousness.
She pulled away and stared into the skull flame. “I minored in music.”
”Oh? Makes sense. Useful skill for an actress.” Craven lifted the cup to his lips. Empty.
“Aspiring actress then. I dabbled in so many things during college. The world didn’t truly open for me until I met Victor.” Deborah reached into a drawer and brought forth a flute and delicately held it to the light. The instrument glinted, dull, loveless, and the color of dried blood. “This is Strident Caller.”
“Your flute has a name. I knew a coal miner who played a harmonica. Every single night after supper. He didn’t name it or anything.”
“His wasn’t an object of power.”
“No. It was a plain old cheap harmonica.”
“Objects of power are always named. Strident Caller is a recorder, not a flute. My family has passed her down through generations. Hollowed from a child’s radius in the days of antiquity, she belongs to a set of nine. A recorder, lyre, didgeridoo, hichiriki, drum, whistle, sitar, violin, and a horn.” Deborah went to the center of the kitchen. She breathed notes through the recorder. Her black silk robe clung to her breasts and hips as she swayed to a harsh, discordant melody. Thunder served as her metronome. Her playing was terrible and compelling.
Craven’s stomach felt odd. “Uh, wow. Does your family own the other instruments?”
She stopped playing, although she didn’t lower the recorder. “That would be utterly mad. Nobody owns such instruments. We are stewards.”
“Sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“I am not terribly accomplished. Victor trained as a pianist in childhood. Law school stripped that joy from him. He became cruel after our honeymoon. He showed me the world, for a price. I was his slave. Our son too, until he fled home and lived with my sister in Alaska. To think a cold, hostile land would prove more nurturing than his own home.” She rotated, bent at the waist and shook her buttocks with the aplomb of a burlesque dancer. The recorder notes climbed a notch.
“A slave?”
Three long notes that bled dry. She looked over her shoulder at him. “You think I’m melodramatic.”
“Deb, your ass is dramatic. That’s all I know.”
“Men enslave women in a thousand small ways. Victor’s possession of me was simply more overt. Early on I defied him. I only complied half the time. He decided fifty percent wasn’t adequate.”
Down the hall and slightly muffled, Artemis howled. She snarled and then fell silent. Craven didn’t enjoy the shrill fluting either. Or the rolling thunder. The cacophony set his teeth on edge.
Deborah ceased playing mid-note. “Not all music soothes the savage breast.” She straightened and remained motionless for several seconds. “The great dark is gathering around us. Strident Caller is like a needle that pierces the black membrane and sucks ichor of the devil gods. It will begin in a moment.”
The flame of the skull candle bent to the left and licked the wax rim.
“Deborah!” Someone shouted from downstairs. Deep and authoritative and angry. “Bring him to me!”
“Who’s that?” Craven stage-whispered. He’d almost fallen off his stool.
She finally turned around and sighed theatrically. “Take a guess.”
“I don’t have a clue. Although, I am sure I just pissed your old man’s favorite robe.”
“You sorry sonofabitch!” a different angry voice cried from the same direction as the previous.
Craven pinpointed the roaring to the billiards room. He’d locked the exterior doors and seen no one during his sweep of the premises. An intruder could’ve hidden in a closet or under a table. Unpleasant explanation. Although, every explanation was unpleasant.
The stranger said, “Deborah! Deborah! Deborah! Deborah! Deborah! If I have to come get him…”
“You’d better go,” she said. Her tone was mild. “He’ll come up here. He’ll come, and then…”
Craven snatched the biggest butcher knife from the block. “The fuck I will. Is this a joke? Where’s your cell? Get Five-Oh on the horn.” He whistled for Artemis. Normally a dependable watch dog, the sound of a stranger’s voice should have brought her running.
“Jesse, calm yourself.” Deborah smiled. Unctuous and facile. Flies and honey and so forth.
“The fuck I will. Artemis!”
“Jesse—”
“The phone. Give me the goddamned phone.” He realized he’d pointed the knife at her and tried to rein himself in. “The phone, Deb.” He followed her chin gesture and took the pearl-case cell from where it lay upon a knick-knack shelf. He hit 911 and as the circuits did their thing, he watched the stairs that spiraled downward into gloom.
The angry voice boomed through the speaker, “YOU SMARMY BASTARD! NOW YOU’VE DONE IT! PUT DEBORAH ON!”
Mushrooms, peyote, acid, nitrous, glue, melted Styrofoam…at one time or another Craven tripped balls on pretty much every substance that could take a man for a ride. Looking into Deborah’s luminous gaze, a madman on the cell in his left hand, cleaver clutched in his right while thunder crashed and lightning blazed, he entertained the notion she’d slipped something into his tea, because the moment stretched and his emotions felt too unstable. “Deb, are you screwing with my mind? Why?”
She played a treble note. Yellow eyes flickered in the shadows. Artemis padded into the kitchen and sat next to Deborah, head pressed against the woman’s leg. They stared at Craven. He stepped forward, not entirely clear in his head what he meant to do, and the dog bared her fangs. Artemis didn’t growl and that was far worse.
“Shit.” He remembered nursing her with an eyedropper and how she’d looked at him as if he were everything in the universe. The sting of tears surprised him almost as much as Artemis offering to take his hand off at the wrist. He backed to the top of the stairs and listened. Ceiling timbers creaked and wind chimes sang. “Whoever’s down there, better run. I’m gonna put the hurt on you, pal.” He sounded convincingly rough and ready—the command voice he’d learned from listening to cops. He’d summoned this voice in the past when confronted by fellow vagrants vying for a patch of ground, or intimidating teenagers who thought a seedy dude hitching along the highway would make excellent sport.
He went to his room and dressed with the haphazard efficacy of a man in a hurry to escape before an angry cuckolded husband arrived on the scene. Pants and shoes make a world of difference when it comes to prowling through a dark house. No use wasting precious mental energy in a vain attempt to sort the situation beyond his grasp of the apparent facts—Deborah was a kook (old news) and she’d put one of her whack-job socialite buddies (or her weird gardener) up to shenanigans. He didn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut as to who, what, or why. The cleaver went tucked into his belt and he selected a nine iron from Victor’s golf bag in the closet. It swished reassuringly as he executed a few practice swipes in the air.
A flash of orange light caught his attention. He peered outside. Fire engulfed the Datsun. Andy stood nearby, naked but for Wellingtons, and inked with kraken tentacles. The gardener smoked a cigarette, his head tilted to regard Craven’s window. The sycamores and the grass of the lawn reflected the blaze. Hooded figures lurked amid the undergrowth, obscured by darkness and whipping smoke.
Deborah’s recorder bleated from the kitchen. Its melody rapidly descended through a complex sequence of stops and blats, then ceased. The storm died at that moment as well, and the house fell silent. Craven hustled back, yet she and Artemis were already gone. Two choices presented themselves to his tunnel vision—bolt through the front door and make a break for the road, or venture into the basement and attempt to collect his turncoat dog as that’s where the crazy widow must have taken her. Probably only had a few seconds to decide before the cultists, or whomever skulked in the woods, busted through the door to drag him away for ritual sacrifice or gods knew what.
Really, no decision at all. He followed pale, shifty lamplight down into a passage. He glanced into a succession of rooms—billiards, guestrooms, bath, storage--each empty. At the end of the hall double doors painted white and black let into a home theater. The doors parted. Reddish light dripped.
Deborah knelt at the threshold. Her hair lifted, as if pulled by a strong wind. “You wouldn’t come. You wouldn’t submit. The membrane is tender, but resilient. It always seals. He takes blood with him. Always blood.”
Past her, within the room itself, a disk of watery red light shimmered on its edge like a freestanding mirror. An entire vista of hellish landscape suggested itself—a lunar maw and jagged, mountainous fangs; a sea of crimson, rolling vertically. A man’s silhouette receded toward the heart of the disk, slightly hunched and dragging an inert object. The front door crashed in above. Deborah covered her eyes and bowed her head. Craven simply reacted. He ducked into the spare bedroom, wriggled through the window, and ran until he reached the highway. A guy in a BMW eventually gave him a lift to Kingston.
The police took his report with straight faces. Two cops visited Deborah. A young cop and a much older cop. All the old cop said upon their return was that she’d decided not to press charges. Craven was not welcome at the house and his meager belongings were in a box in the trunk of the patrol car. The young cop handed over the box with a bland expression of professional disdain.
The box contained spare pants and shirts, socks, and Artemis’s vaccination tags. Craven had no idea what to do next. The old cop told him there was nothing to do except get gone while the getting was good. He did.
A couple of years later, Craven hopped a train chugging through California. He shared a cold boxcar with a hobo who did a tour in the Persian Gulf. The men drank a bottle of Knob Creek and talked about their lives as the engine traveled through haunted industrial star fields.
He told the hobo about the time he’d escaped a bunch of Satanists. After a long silence, the hobo asked him, why are you crying, man? and he rolled over and dreamed of being hunted through the primeval forests of the Olympic Peninsula, Artemis a fleeting shadow—sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, always near.
Craven lurched to his feet. Still drunk and half in the dream, he went to the gate and screamed her name, “Artemis! Here, girl!” He clutched the gate and leaned precariously into the wind. The train rushed onward and carried him farther and farther away.
Dawn splintered far off at the rim of galactic nothingness. He left the train and ambled to a park near a withered forest. The dead forest decayed beside a river that had slowed and stopped. He slept with his face pressed against a picnic table. The rough wood smelled of acid rain and whiskey and his own bile. The edge of the sun broke through the crust and burned white as the eye of an acetylene flame. He raised his head and watched a mutt wandering listlessly among busted glass and scraps of paper. Pigeons scattered from its ragged path. Craven whistled. The black dog swung around unsteadily. Collarless and skinny as a stick. Its matted sides heaved. One eye drooped shut. Dry foam caked its muzzle.
Craven had a hank of beef jerky in his pocket. He shook the jerky and whistled again. His lips were cracked and it sounded feeble. The dog limped toward him, whining deep in its chest and panting. He dropped the jerky. He held his hand the way a man does over the heat of barrel fire, shifting it this way and that. The dog whined again, yawned frightfully, and bit him with seeming diffidence. One chomp of green fangs, sunk in good and deep. The dog thrashed as instinct commanded, and finally released. It wheeled stiffly, like an automaton, and moved away and eventually disappeared into some underbrush.
Dark blood oozed and filled the punctures in Craven’s hand. Blood dribbled down the back of his arm; its tributaries dripped onto the table and spread. He wrapped his hand in a bandanna. The bandanna had been with him for a while, but he couldn’t recall where he’d picked it up. Wearied beyond repair, he rested his forehead against the wood. The sun kept coming, kept drilling through the icy shell of night and burned the top of his skull like it might actually thaw him out.
Nobody ever came to the abandoned park except for hobos, scavengers, and birds. In a while, sparrows began to flit down from the dry branches and peck around the bench and atop the table. Much later, a bird alighted upon Craven’s shoulder. It plucked at his hair. He let it.
Rex
First published in Gigantic Worlds, 2015
Not yet available in this collection.
Snorre And Spot Approach The Fallen Rock
First published online, 2015
The man dreamed of his gray, rheumy-eyed dog, missing for many years now.
“I always loved you!” the dog said. “Even when I did wrong!” The dog did not speak as men speak, of course. His notched ears crumpled and he howled. But it meant the same thing.
“I always loved you as well, you incorrigible asshole,” the man tried to answer. He could not speak because it was a dream.
The man woke and kicked dirt over the ashes of the fire. No more water, no more hardtack or jerky. His snowshoes had gone up as kindling smoke. He leaned his pack and rifle against a tree. He buttoned his coat and tightened the laces of his boots.
Sky and the earth were the same. Cold as the metal of his broadhead axe. Icicles snapped from his beard. Tiny icicle tears snapped from his lashes when he blinked.
The man was no tracker, although he’d lived in the woods and knew how to survive. He limped in ever widening circles along the slope of the mountain and eventually cut across the dog’s trail. Flakes of old blood glittered in the tracks. North.
