As the sun rose that morning, a raven flew from a high coal seam
in the mountains. By noon, with the foothills at his tail, he
watched his shadow far below. Black as his feathers, the tormented
silhouette skimmed the dry plains and crashed through the windblown
shrubs. As the sun set, he saw his destination, the diamond back
of a creek snaking through a valley prickly with brush. He swooped
out of the sky and landed on a brittle branch. The raven had
not flown to this place for pleasure, no; his baleful call broached
something more sinister.
There hunched a house, naked upon the valley edge. It was on
a hill so far removed from any city that, at night, there was
only moonlight and darkness. This house was at the end of one
fork of a dusty path that twisted its way up from the skeleton
thicket in the valley below. The other tine led to a rickety
bridge that crossed the creek and went up the opposite side of
the valley where a little wooden drink house perched.
The collar of the valley was a desolate place. Only the wind
knew the barren landscape, drifting across plains of dust to
caress these two buildings with soft cherishings. The sky was
so large here that the ground cringed from the daylight and shied
away when the stars shone.
Gary fell in love with Lily, who lived in the house on the hill.
She asked him to move in and, knowing little more of her than
that he loved her, he agreed. With the sun blazing overhead,
he spent the afternoon unpacking his belongings and thinking
of the creases in Lily’s fingers.
“I want no one else but you above me,” Gary said in the darkness
of her bedroom that first night. Behind the dust-muddled windowpanes, the moon
was so sharp that it threatened to prick the sky and make it bleed stars. “I
want no one else but you to breathe.”
In the timid light from the thorn moon outside, Gary thought he saw Lily’s
cheeks bunch into a smile. The house settled to sleep, its angles odd and roof
bent like a drunkard. It stirred occasionally from the music and sporadic shouts
that drifted across the valley from the little wooden drink house on the opposite
hill.
***
The windows of the drink house were bright and cast orange graves on the trampled
grass outside. The smoke of frying meat came from a crooked metal chimney that
seemed to have been plopped into the weathered shingles as if it was some distracted
afterthought. Inside the bar, sitting at a battle-scarred table littered with
dead soldiers, sat Russ.
The waitress wandered by and Russ reached out, grabbed the waist of her blue
jeans and stopped her in her tracks. The drink she carried spilled to the dirty
floor where the wood swelled and then sighed, thirsty for the beverage.
“I’ll have ‘anner,” Russ slurred.
“No you won’t goddamnit, Russ.” She spun around, her face flushed
furious. “Go home, you spilled my order. As n’if this building ain’t
drunk enough tonight. It can barely stand up anymore.” The waitress had
a gorgeous gap between her two front teeth.
Russ swore and cursed his way to the door and continued cursing until it closed
behind him. He stood for a moment in the rectangle of light pouring out from
the window before starting down the path. Russ muttered to himself, to the rocks
in the road and to the weeds that grew beside the path. The smell of meat smoke
and the living noises from the drink house faded behind him. The path led him
down the hill, into the tangled thicket of the valley floor. This was a dead
place. In the moonlit shadows, the brush looked like gnarled bones stuck on end
in the mud.
He muttered blindly. Liquor plugged his ears against the strangled gurgle of
the creek and the shrouded whispers coming from the snarled confuse. He did not
even turn his thoughts to Herb, as this place demanded.
Not a fortnight ago, under a full halo of stars, Herb had stumbled down the hill
from the drink house and had wandered off the path. He had not been seen since.
Rumour had it that the whispers ate him. Rumour had it that the whispers could
drive sane men mad, send a person running from the path and into a trap where
the ground would swallow them whole, leaving nothing behind but the farty fragrance
of stagnant muck. The whispers talked about the structure of hate, control and
mercy.
The pitch of the path changed and Russ found himself struggling up the opposite
side of the valley. The rotting film of the valley deep faded behind him and
Lily’s house sprouted from the horizon before him. It sat shadowed and
broken, exposed atop the hill. Russ fumed at the building, at its crooked angles
and at its stooped stature. One always had to look up to Lily’s house,
he thought, because it perched there on its throne. His fumings turned to the
witch who lived inside.
She is probably sleeping under her downy covers at this very moment, Russ thought.
He could almost smell the sweetness of her sleep.
These musings brought his voice to shout.
“Vile woman,” he hollered from his belly, past his aching heart,
his throat growing raw.
“You turned my love to ruin.” His booming voice echoed against the
house, his ears swallowing his own poisons.
“All I can see is this rubble,” Russ shouted and punched at the sky,
causing the moon to flinch and the stars to tremble. He continued to shout, a
gust of wind whipped tails of dust across the path.
Inside the house, Gary jolted upright, a hand on Lily who lay beside him. It
took his drowsy mind a moment to comprehend what the noise was but as soon as
he figured that someone was befouling the name of his beloved, he leapt from
bed. Pulling up a pair of pants he had snapped from the bedroom floor, Gary bounded
down the stairs two at a time. The tarnishings became clear as he opened the
front door, they became deafening as he ran from the porch, his mind burning
hot with the desire to silence the stumbling fool in front of the house. Gary
struck Russ to the dirt with one grievous blow. He stood over the unconscious
form, legs apart and bare chested in the moonlight.
“Leave him be,” Lily wailed from the bedroom window. “He’s
just some poor drunkard.”
The pounding rage in Gary had settled in his ears, over his eyes and was louder
than Lily’s pleadings. It left him blind to the havoc he was about to wreak.
Gary turned to the porch and grabbed the straw broom, which, in times of less
turmoil, functioned to clean dust and grass from the wooden planks. He spun on
the animal lying in the dirt and he felt the goodly weight of the broom handle.
It rose above his head and dealt a fatal blow to the back of the animal’s
skull. A last gasp of breath escaped from Russ’s mouth, causing the dust
at his lips to bloom and wilt with equal speed.
Gary’s black wrath did not end at the death of the animal, no. He raised
the broom handle again and brought it down with some might. He beat the corpse
again and again until the broom handle became slick, glazed in starlight. Even
still, he beat the corpse until there was no bone left to break and no skin left
to bruise. His own laboured breathing struggled to drown out the pulpy sounds
from the mass before him. Gary stopped only when the broom handle broke and its
jagged fracture snagged the sky, getting caught in the fabric overhead.
It was then that the fatal shawl lifted from Gary’s senses and, layer by
layer, what had been accomplished became clear. Between the gulping breaths that
struggled to feed his spent muscles, Gary could hear the music and laughter drift
quietly across the valley from the drink house. There was the smell of the dust
which had been disturbed by his effort and finally, there was the quiet whimper
from the bedroom window. Gary’s eyes focused on a bead of blood that sat
in the dust, now a ball of mercury with a sugary coating of grit. An errant breeze
blew up from the valley, carrying with it the fetid smell of the creek. He stood
in silence until he heard Lily’s voice come from above him.
“You must take that down into the valley. Hide it in the chaparral, far
from the path where it will go unfound.” Lily’s voice trembled.
Gary nodded numbly and set about the gruesome task of collecting Russ’s
gore.
“You must do this and never come back here.”
She threw a shirt and sweater out the window. They landed on the path between
Gary and the house.
The noise of Lily closing the bedroom window knocked Gary to his knees. He had
reeled at the words the animal had spoken and had found himself in a moment of
ill control. Now, arching forward to touch his forehead to the ground, Gary cried
at the idea of never seeing Lily again.
By the time the horizon became slick with morning’s stain, Gary had the
corpse underground near the river, deep in the gnarled copse of the valley bottom.
He had tied a loose thread of grey yarn from his sweater to a naked branch near
the path so he could find his way out. It had been a struggle getting the body
through the deceptive tangle. With every step, steely branches grabbed with desperation
at Gary’s purpose. With every step, his sweater unraveled a little more.
Exhausted, Gary had dug a shallow hole with his hands and then mounded dirt over
the animal.
Once his task was done, Gary leaned against the earthen mound and slept through
the day. This was where he found a sad sleep, one infected with fleeting dreams
of Lily, and awakened to a weary evening’s twilight. He waded ankle deep
into the creek and splashed water to wash the muck and gore from himself and
from his clothes. In the last gasp of light, Gary followed the thread of yarn
back to the path. With the sound of Lily’s last words floating in the dark
above him, he crossed the rickety bridge and started up the hill to the drink
house.
Gary found that he could barely construct a smile as he sat by a window with
an empty glass in his hand. He could see the queer lines of Lily’s house
across the valley and he could see Lily’s silhouette dancing in the window.
Only when a second silhouette joined her did he blink and his smile turned to
bitter acid. The warmth of the bar, the liqour he drank and meat he ate did little
to lighten the funk that festered, coiled in his chest. Every outburst of laughter
from the fellow patrons became tainted with mockery. Gary breathed in the meat
smoke and held it in until his lungs were saturated with its vile grease. And
when the waitress found it fit to put him out in the night, he stood like a tombstone
in the light coming from the bar window. He listened to the muffled laughter
and tasted the drunken night air before staggering along the path, down into
the valley where the moon and stars would be obscured. Gary would neither see
the raven dancing in the mud beside the path nor would he hear the warnings whispered
from deep within the tangled thicket.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bradley Somer is an archaeologist and writer who lives in Calgary.
He has had work published in (orange) magazine, Matrix, Qwerty, Grey
Borders, Carousel, Existere, Murderous Signs and in John B. Lee’s
anthology Body Language (Black Moss Press). Read some of his writing
at www.bradleysomer.com.
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