It's drawn here by sugar they hang in plastic globes on sundecks. Thick molasses pumping through arteries trained like cold pipes. The mammoth rises to life out of ice, wounds bleeding tar from the remembered pale of neanderthal glory days. It steps out of age, vulnerable to carnivorous bears that haunt the wasteland north and stalk the evergreen entrail of fire-truck slug tracks. Smells like steel and creaking plumbing shedding rust. Pure blood spills down the course violin tendons where a Prince's perfect shot has crippled the meaty fortress creature.
Somewhere in Iqaluit the Eskimo Messiah plays divine right of survival with a sled of dogs and a Darwinian harpoon. His lance is tipped with a pyramid barb, given Anubis decisions over the weight worth of sustenance through the cold season. Does he see in the icy pools, mastered by surgeon's devotion, the probability of frost shatter? Wedges spiking cruel brahma torture.
Understand the precise agony of biology's monument falling out of history or existence, charred and consumed by humanity. We starving hug pillows and hope for warm stomachs, setting sleep against the hummingbird needles in chest valves. Compare to me a cirrhosis abortion on bed sheets. I am King's heart weasel. I am Wilde's Saint Sebastian.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Loudhailer
Author's Note: Loudhailer
Loudhailer is about putting everything on the line, balancing plastic birds by their beaks on miniature pyramids, about risk and reward (I didn't use the Oxford comma, eh?). This collection follows the lifespan of a decision, step by tentative step. Forfeit is Hell as a human head, Flight risk disturbed contentment, Falling Action infatuation, Dear Deaf Wife blind withdrawal, and Ejection Seat escape with consequences. Prepare for heavy allusion.
Forfeit (Below!)
Flight Risk
Falling Action
Dear Deaf Wife
Ejection Seat
FORFEIT
You are cordially invited to Hell, the writhing, manipulative core of the world; holding its Aegis wall against an idea that harmony will sacrifice all the devouring veils. The deveil sits on his amygdala throne. He is Lucifer, beautiful, and he has no horns. He has sold his trident to God for a shield.
It's the Tokyo that deception built, an engine that fuels its towering industries—that promotes success at the consequence of individual freedom. The hive-mind of contracted prosperity, where Karl Marx shudders in a padded corner. Archangel is escorted to the shoulder of Japan like a vampire, into the bedroom of Hiroshima with an Atom bomb. When the game's on, Hell's goalie holds a man's skull (for its neurocranium durability). This is the life of a soul slipped on rosary pearls and is wading in its inky vices.
You are Machiavelli's Godzilla courtier. As warm as this feels, I am still a fallen traitor who will burn at the Celestial stake without the guidance of your perfect victory. Demolish me. My shield is strong and bones unbroken. He desires your wings for himself again.
Loudhailer is about putting everything on the line, balancing plastic birds by their beaks on miniature pyramids, about risk and reward (I didn't use the Oxford comma, eh?). This collection follows the lifespan of a decision, step by tentative step. Forfeit is Hell as a human head, Flight risk disturbed contentment, Falling Action infatuation, Dear Deaf Wife blind withdrawal, and Ejection Seat escape with consequences. Prepare for heavy allusion.
Forfeit (Below!)
Flight Risk
Falling Action
Dear Deaf Wife
Ejection Seat
FORFEIT
You are cordially invited to Hell, the writhing, manipulative core of the world; holding its Aegis wall against an idea that harmony will sacrifice all the devouring veils. The deveil sits on his amygdala throne. He is Lucifer, beautiful, and he has no horns. He has sold his trident to God for a shield.
It's the Tokyo that deception built, an engine that fuels its towering industries—that promotes success at the consequence of individual freedom. The hive-mind of contracted prosperity, where Karl Marx shudders in a padded corner. Archangel is escorted to the shoulder of Japan like a vampire, into the bedroom of Hiroshima with an Atom bomb. When the game's on, Hell's goalie holds a man's skull (for its neurocranium durability). This is the life of a soul slipped on rosary pearls and is wading in its inky vices.
You are Machiavelli's Godzilla courtier. As warm as this feels, I am still a fallen traitor who will burn at the Celestial stake without the guidance of your perfect victory. Demolish me. My shield is strong and bones unbroken. He desires your wings for himself again.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Winters for our Sins 0
the anarchy, wales, 1140
There is a period in English history that owes its acknowledgment to a series of nine manuscripts called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Through study of these documents, historians are able to bridge the gap between the abandonment of Roman Britain in year 410 and the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066 AD. A challenge presents itself in the nature of the annals, as each version of the script belongs to a separate monastery or abbey of Old England. There are places within the Chronicle where one interpretation contradicts its counterpart and experts must turn to other medieval sources for clarity. Despite the subjective contribution of each scribe, the Chronicle is considered the most decisive historical record of that age.
History is filled with pockets of uncertainty. Through investigation, we are able to correlate dates and events until we have sewn archived patchwork into a steadfast timeline. The knowledge granted by this timeline is passed down through our generations until it becomes tradition. Before long, we believe in our traditions without questioning their reliability. It is the responsibility of the historian to ensure that history, in its purest, medieval prose, does not escape tradition. History forgotten to tradition is as history that was never written in the first place.
In England, in Worcester, an Anglo-Saxon monk whose name was simply John had dedicated his life to the Chronicon ex chronicis, a key contribution to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Until his death in 1140, events were described in his life's work as accurately as he might depict them. It is believed that John relied on sources other than his own to complete the vast body of scripture and until recently, all of these sources were lost.
In a letter preserved at the Cathedral Church of Saint Mary and Saint Ethelbert in Hereford and addressed to the Bishop of Herefordshire, a man styling himself as Lupus vir pontifex requests a copy of the late John's Chronicon ex chronicis. The letter is dated to the Winter of 1141. It was assumed that the penman was Bishop Wulfstan II of Worcester who went by the title "lupus", or "wolf", the first portion of his Old English name, and that the date on the parchment was a mistake in the interpretation. Bishop Wulfstan died in 1023 and was buried in the monastery of Ely in Cambridgeshire. He could not have written the letter.
Because of the intricacies of the letter's delivery, historians dismissed the date incongruence and would later dismiss the letter as a possible fault in their trustworthy resources. Its value as lead to a tenth Anglo-Saxon manuscript went unexplored. Only recently, under scrutiny, was a discovery made that "Lupus vir pontifex", the name on the original letter, and "Lupus episcopus", the pen name of Bishop Wulfstan II, did not have the same meaning. "Lupus episcopus" translates to the bishop wolf and "Lupus vir pontifex" translates to the bishop wolf man.
When investigating the origins of Lupus vir pontifex, historians find threadbare ties to the wilderness of southeast Wales in what is now called Monmouthshire and was then titled the Kingdom of Gwent. They attribute the lack of background information to this location as well as the date on the original letter, 1141 AD, which places the Bishop's rule during The Anarchy, or the reign of King Stephen of Normandy.
Gwent was a successor kingdom of Wales, originally a Roman military base and later a fortified network of Norman castles. It was divided into Lordships and each was given to a Marcher Lord responsible for pressing the Welsh border. The lords of each citadel were granted freedom to rule by their own law, invented or adopted from the neighboring Welsh, and were never considered a wholly legal appendage of England. By all descriptions they were dangerous frontier societies, at war and starving for immigration.
This story takes place in the best known location of Lupus vir pontifex, in the moorland of the Welsh Marches, where acidic ecology promotes the complete destruction of Marcher empires. 1140 is a difficult year for England but news has not reached its western border. King Stephen, the Norman King of England, has been imprisoned at Bristol by the Empress Maude and leaves his country in civil war. England is in anarchy and its citizens, given to Bishops and the laws of Christ, perform only for the moral weight of God's eyes. The age of poverty and murder gives no credit to divinity.
Crist and alle his sayntes slept. Mare thanne we cunnen sæin, we tholeden xix wintre for ure sinnes.
Christ and all his saints slept. More than we can say, we suffered nineteen winters for our sins.
-The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
NEXT: WINTERS FOR OUR SINS I
There is a period in English history that owes its acknowledgment to a series of nine manuscripts called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Through study of these documents, historians are able to bridge the gap between the abandonment of Roman Britain in year 410 and the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066 AD. A challenge presents itself in the nature of the annals, as each version of the script belongs to a separate monastery or abbey of Old England. There are places within the Chronicle where one interpretation contradicts its counterpart and experts must turn to other medieval sources for clarity. Despite the subjective contribution of each scribe, the Chronicle is considered the most decisive historical record of that age.
History is filled with pockets of uncertainty. Through investigation, we are able to correlate dates and events until we have sewn archived patchwork into a steadfast timeline. The knowledge granted by this timeline is passed down through our generations until it becomes tradition. Before long, we believe in our traditions without questioning their reliability. It is the responsibility of the historian to ensure that history, in its purest, medieval prose, does not escape tradition. History forgotten to tradition is as history that was never written in the first place.
In England, in Worcester, an Anglo-Saxon monk whose name was simply John had dedicated his life to the Chronicon ex chronicis, a key contribution to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Until his death in 1140, events were described in his life's work as accurately as he might depict them. It is believed that John relied on sources other than his own to complete the vast body of scripture and until recently, all of these sources were lost.
In a letter preserved at the Cathedral Church of Saint Mary and Saint Ethelbert in Hereford and addressed to the Bishop of Herefordshire, a man styling himself as Lupus vir pontifex requests a copy of the late John's Chronicon ex chronicis. The letter is dated to the Winter of 1141. It was assumed that the penman was Bishop Wulfstan II of Worcester who went by the title "lupus", or "wolf", the first portion of his Old English name, and that the date on the parchment was a mistake in the interpretation. Bishop Wulfstan died in 1023 and was buried in the monastery of Ely in Cambridgeshire. He could not have written the letter.
Because of the intricacies of the letter's delivery, historians dismissed the date incongruence and would later dismiss the letter as a possible fault in their trustworthy resources. Its value as lead to a tenth Anglo-Saxon manuscript went unexplored. Only recently, under scrutiny, was a discovery made that "Lupus vir pontifex", the name on the original letter, and "Lupus episcopus", the pen name of Bishop Wulfstan II, did not have the same meaning. "Lupus episcopus" translates to the bishop wolf and "Lupus vir pontifex" translates to the bishop wolf man.
When investigating the origins of Lupus vir pontifex, historians find threadbare ties to the wilderness of southeast Wales in what is now called Monmouthshire and was then titled the Kingdom of Gwent. They attribute the lack of background information to this location as well as the date on the original letter, 1141 AD, which places the Bishop's rule during The Anarchy, or the reign of King Stephen of Normandy.
Gwent was a successor kingdom of Wales, originally a Roman military base and later a fortified network of Norman castles. It was divided into Lordships and each was given to a Marcher Lord responsible for pressing the Welsh border. The lords of each citadel were granted freedom to rule by their own law, invented or adopted from the neighboring Welsh, and were never considered a wholly legal appendage of England. By all descriptions they were dangerous frontier societies, at war and starving for immigration.
This story takes place in the best known location of Lupus vir pontifex, in the moorland of the Welsh Marches, where acidic ecology promotes the complete destruction of Marcher empires. 1140 is a difficult year for England but news has not reached its western border. King Stephen, the Norman King of England, has been imprisoned at Bristol by the Empress Maude and leaves his country in civil war. England is in anarchy and its citizens, given to Bishops and the laws of Christ, perform only for the moral weight of God's eyes. The age of poverty and murder gives no credit to divinity.
Crist and alle his sayntes slept. Mare thanne we cunnen sæin, we tholeden xix wintre for ure sinnes.
Christ and all his saints slept. More than we can say, we suffered nineteen winters for our sins.
-The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
NEXT: WINTERS FOR OUR SINS I
Monday, September 01, 2008
Improfitable Contention
Author's Note: Improfitable Contention
"Choose a suitable design and hold to it" says William Strunk Jr. while E.B. White nods in the (white) background. They make a believable pair, but I'm not wholly convinced. Why commit just half your mind to paper?
Improfitable Contention deliberately goes against a single design, telling of apathy and humanity in a relationship between two brothers. The collection borrows from Loudhailer's momentum to create something strong that's knotted with theories of the human condition.
Ricky is Six (Below!)
Relative Darkness
Tired Boy
RICKY IS SIX
Ricky is this many (he holds up six fingers). Just turned six. He got a baby slugger baseball bat and an Orioles cap for his birthday and he carried them everywhere he went. His real birthday was on Wednesday, earlier in the week, but Ricky's parents are busy so they told his older brother Simon to take care of the celebration. Simon was told to do whatever Ricky wanted all weekend, and Ricky wanted to go to the carnival in town.
Simon is not an altogether unfair brother. He understands that it's Ricky's birthday but his entire weekend will be ruined if he takes Ricky to the carnival all day for both days. He has determined that it's fair if, on the second day, he brings Ricky along to the movie he plans on seeing with friends. It's a violent movie, but he'll find a way to smuggle Ricky in one way or another, even if Ricky doesn't like violent movies.
'God, Ricky. You don't like any of these rides. You won't even go on the Killer Koaster with me. Why did you want to come to the carnival anyway?'
'That's not true, Thimon!' said Ricky. He couldn't say Simon because he was missing two teeth. 'I want to go on the Mirrors Ride!'
'The Mirrors Ride? Do you mean the Hall of Mirrors? That's tame. Let's go on the Dragon Adventure.' said Simon. He had been here all day and was tiring of the kiddie area despite his efforts at enthusiasm. It was getting dark and he would have to take Ricky home soon anyway.
'Just one last ride, Thimon! Let's go on the Mirrors Ride!' said Ricky, persisting.
'Okay, fine, but this is the last one. When we get out of this ride we have to go home or Mom and Dad will be mad, got it?'
'Yes!' said Ricky. He was naturally excited, as any six year old would have been. His older brother was taking him to the Hall of Mirrors.
It isn't a good idea to go to the Hall of Mirrors after dark but the attendants were teenagers who didn't care about the rules. They even let Simon in for free because he was popular in highschool.
'There. The Hall of Mirrors. I'm going to race you, Ricky. We both go inside and see who makes it out first. Ready? Go!' said Simon. Before Ricky knew it, Simon was gone. He had disappeared inside the dark assembly of distorted mirrors.
'You're supposed to stay with me, Thimon!' Said Ricky, but Simon did not reply. Ricky ventured into the Hall of Mirrors alone.
Because of the shapes of the mirrors, Ricky's reflection was twisted and deformed. He knew he looked a lot like Simon in physical features but the mirrors made it impossible to tell whether he was looking at Simon or whether he was looking at a taller, hourglass illusion of himself. Ricky had never been in a Hall of Mirrors before, this was his first time. He bumped into the glass so that his nose tingled with pain and he started to cry.
'Don't cry, Ricky. You're six now. You're not a baby anymore.' came Simon's voice.
'But it's dark and I don't know where you are, Thimon!' replied Ricky. He became increasingly lost. It was dark enough now that the entrance blended perfectly into the seamless black. Only in places did the glass show dim mirror images that jeered at Ricky and frightened him.
'Maybe you are a baby. Are you going to have me hold your hand all your life?' said Simon. 'I'm leaving. If you can't find your way out then you probably deserve to stay here.'
This caused Ricky to cry even more. He wished he had gone on the Dragon Adventure instead. His tears only clouded his vision and turned the reflections into watery monsters.
'Thimon!' he shouted, but Simon didn't answer. He was all alone. Simon probably left out the exit door and was abandoning him in the maze. He could be here for 17 years.
It was this terrible idea that brought even the immature mind of Ricky to the conclusion that he must act for his own survival. He took his baby slugger baseball bat in both hands and started swinging at the glass panes. He had destroyed at least three full panes before he heard Simon shouting.
'Ouch, Ricky stop! You hit me right in the knee!' he said. 'Stop, before you get us both in trouble!'
Ricky smiled. In the pane of mirror that remained he thought he saw himself for the first time.
'Let's go. Quick. The exit is just straight this way.' Simon said. He pulled Ricky out of the mirrored building and into the carnival street.
'Thimon?' Ricky asked.
'What?' Simon replied.
'Mom says we can go to the carnival again tomorrow, and not the movies.'
"Choose a suitable design and hold to it" says William Strunk Jr. while E.B. White nods in the (white) background. They make a believable pair, but I'm not wholly convinced. Why commit just half your mind to paper?
Improfitable Contention deliberately goes against a single design, telling of apathy and humanity in a relationship between two brothers. The collection borrows from Loudhailer's momentum to create something strong that's knotted with theories of the human condition.
Ricky is Six (Below!)
Relative Darkness
Tired Boy
RICKY IS SIX
Ricky is this many (he holds up six fingers). Just turned six. He got a baby slugger baseball bat and an Orioles cap for his birthday and he carried them everywhere he went. His real birthday was on Wednesday, earlier in the week, but Ricky's parents are busy so they told his older brother Simon to take care of the celebration. Simon was told to do whatever Ricky wanted all weekend, and Ricky wanted to go to the carnival in town.
Simon is not an altogether unfair brother. He understands that it's Ricky's birthday but his entire weekend will be ruined if he takes Ricky to the carnival all day for both days. He has determined that it's fair if, on the second day, he brings Ricky along to the movie he plans on seeing with friends. It's a violent movie, but he'll find a way to smuggle Ricky in one way or another, even if Ricky doesn't like violent movies.
'God, Ricky. You don't like any of these rides. You won't even go on the Killer Koaster with me. Why did you want to come to the carnival anyway?'
'That's not true, Thimon!' said Ricky. He couldn't say Simon because he was missing two teeth. 'I want to go on the Mirrors Ride!'
'The Mirrors Ride? Do you mean the Hall of Mirrors? That's tame. Let's go on the Dragon Adventure.' said Simon. He had been here all day and was tiring of the kiddie area despite his efforts at enthusiasm. It was getting dark and he would have to take Ricky home soon anyway.
'Just one last ride, Thimon! Let's go on the Mirrors Ride!' said Ricky, persisting.
'Okay, fine, but this is the last one. When we get out of this ride we have to go home or Mom and Dad will be mad, got it?'
'Yes!' said Ricky. He was naturally excited, as any six year old would have been. His older brother was taking him to the Hall of Mirrors.
It isn't a good idea to go to the Hall of Mirrors after dark but the attendants were teenagers who didn't care about the rules. They even let Simon in for free because he was popular in highschool.
'There. The Hall of Mirrors. I'm going to race you, Ricky. We both go inside and see who makes it out first. Ready? Go!' said Simon. Before Ricky knew it, Simon was gone. He had disappeared inside the dark assembly of distorted mirrors.
'You're supposed to stay with me, Thimon!' Said Ricky, but Simon did not reply. Ricky ventured into the Hall of Mirrors alone.
Because of the shapes of the mirrors, Ricky's reflection was twisted and deformed. He knew he looked a lot like Simon in physical features but the mirrors made it impossible to tell whether he was looking at Simon or whether he was looking at a taller, hourglass illusion of himself. Ricky had never been in a Hall of Mirrors before, this was his first time. He bumped into the glass so that his nose tingled with pain and he started to cry.
'Don't cry, Ricky. You're six now. You're not a baby anymore.' came Simon's voice.
'But it's dark and I don't know where you are, Thimon!' replied Ricky. He became increasingly lost. It was dark enough now that the entrance blended perfectly into the seamless black. Only in places did the glass show dim mirror images that jeered at Ricky and frightened him.
'Maybe you are a baby. Are you going to have me hold your hand all your life?' said Simon. 'I'm leaving. If you can't find your way out then you probably deserve to stay here.'
This caused Ricky to cry even more. He wished he had gone on the Dragon Adventure instead. His tears only clouded his vision and turned the reflections into watery monsters.
'Thimon!' he shouted, but Simon didn't answer. He was all alone. Simon probably left out the exit door and was abandoning him in the maze. He could be here for 17 years.
It was this terrible idea that brought even the immature mind of Ricky to the conclusion that he must act for his own survival. He took his baby slugger baseball bat in both hands and started swinging at the glass panes. He had destroyed at least three full panes before he heard Simon shouting.
'Ouch, Ricky stop! You hit me right in the knee!' he said. 'Stop, before you get us both in trouble!'
Ricky smiled. In the pane of mirror that remained he thought he saw himself for the first time.
'Let's go. Quick. The exit is just straight this way.' Simon said. He pulled Ricky out of the mirrored building and into the carnival street.
'Thimon?' Ricky asked.
'What?' Simon replied.
'Mom says we can go to the carnival again tomorrow, and not the movies.'
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Winters for our Sins IV
the diocese
"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for you have borne the Saviour of our souls. Holy Mary, mother of god, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."
"Tomas." Said the Prince-Bishop. He was very tall and his arms could reach incredible lengths from the sleeves of his habit. He opened one hand before the kneeling priest. "Tomas, may I have a moment with you in privacy?"
Dashiell shuffled his legs off the bench where he had been waiting and glanced in the direction of Caer Gwaun's figurehead. Oberon had big, black eyes, and he stared back until the younger man looked away.
"I guess I'll go." Dashiell said. "Tomas?"
"Oh. Yes. I'll meet you outside Simonette's?"
"Yeah."
Dashiell climbed to his feet and left through the long hall that led to the Chapel causeway. There were many other passages but most of them were closed with heavy, wooden doors. Two large open corridors spread from either side of the pulpit, turning north at right angles and meeting in the courtyard. Beyond the courtyard was the Chapter House, the Baptism chamber, several large lecture theatres, and housing for monks. Oberon kept a small collection of gifted choristers as students, devoting the upper floors to their accomodations.
"You keep odd company, Tomas. Is this a penance of yours? My acquaintance placed you in the square with the daughter of vagabond Conell's." Said Oberon. He had curled his white beard in Babylonian style. The pulpit was empty and its echo gave weight to the Bishop's reprimand. "We both know don't we, Tomas, where that decision will take you. The Estershire Abbot is still cleaning up after your last conquest."
Tomas closed his eyes against the stern words. He looped his rosary between forefinger and thumb and let it hang. He didn't like to be reminded about Sherisse, and Oberon exploited this weakness.
"I'm not with Simonette the way you think." He said. "I think that she's a good, moral person. She's quite virtuous, more than you can judge by appearance."
He looked at the hall of pillars where Dashiell had been sitting among the arches moments before. The whole place was empty. Oberon had a number of maids, but none of them were intimate with him. He'd sworn from a young age that the Prince-Bishop was just the mouth of that Chapel and that his eyes were in every cross and mural. Tomas knew that privacy was something he would never achieve. Within the diocese, his choice was between exposed deception and rewarded obedience.
"She does not attend mass or concern herself with worship. You will learn that you can not be responsible for every beautiful woman's soul. I am sorry that she will not be joining you in Heaven."
"She might yet. You can't condemn a person who has not made their choice."
"Mhm. Very noble, but we have a different task in mind for your reparations." Oberon said, and he paused. "Are you still joining me for this evening's communion?"
Tomas looked at him seriously. This was god's house and any negative feelings were projected for the Lord himself to judge. For this reason, Tomas remained cool against the Bishop's disrespect. "I am. But I'd like to know the task now if you can tell me." He said.
The Prince-Bishop took several steps away from his priest and turned so that his pontifical gown caught a generous light from the stained glass window. "I know how eager you are to join Sheriff Weldon's war brigade against those creatures."
"They found another child victim, near the diocese gate. That's so close. What if it had been one of the choristers?"
"Yes, I'm aware. He was a noble's son. Which is why you're being assigned for duties within the Caer."
Tomas rose and straightened his garments. He was freshly washed and the wound on his palm had healed weeks before. "I don't understand, Lord Bishop."
"Nobles are involved now, Tomas. If they discover we have a ... Wair, creature, here among the apostlic fellowship. That cannot happen." Oberon said. "Nor do I think of you as a creature. You are close as you were my own son." He added, noting Tomas's frown.
The Bishop approached the lecturn at the pulpit's center, taking the steps slowly. He was an older man but he didn't require the crosier for support. His color and posture both conveyed the radiance of perfect health, and he was certain in each word. Senility had no foothold in the man's presentation.
"When I found you, Tomas, I knew that God had plotted this difficult path for you. Your skin, it was all a rash. You were just an infant, but your crying would bring about the lycanthropy. No mother would feed you. And so we hid you away, God's gift, so that we might one day understand this terrific plague upon us."
He turned a key in the lecturn drawer and produced a small pouch that was hidden in the sleeve of his gown. "I have a present for you. But I'll tell you about your Penance first, child." He said. "The father of this young girl, Simonette is her name? He's very clever. And he hasn't been giving tithe to the Catholic Church. I want you to find him and collect those dues."
"You send a priest for taxes, Lord? Why not a decimator or knight who is better suited?"
"Because you underestimate her father. I have sent several, and he is able to avoid them. I'm sending you now, because I know that you will honor my wishes. You brought about the murder of a young girl, Tomas. Because of you she is damned."
Oberon let his voice ring fiercely in the hall. Like he always did when they talked about Sherisse, Tomas got the haunted feeling that Oberon's words were overheard by someone else in the lonely pews. He had confidence that the papal leader, in all of his omniscient abilities, would not be so foolish. The Prince-Bishop was startingly aware of his enemies.
"You don't want me to see Simonette anymore. That's why I'm given this penance."
"I am doing you a favor." Said Oberon.
Tomas wanted to snarl. He drew the beads of the rosary in his hand and curled it into a fist. "I'm going now. You said you had the medicine I asked for."
"Yes, a present." Oberon smiled. "It's for when you're feeling particularly out of sorts." He took a moment to enjoy Tomas's furious expression before lowering his sleeve and dropping a pouch onto the lecturn. "Take it."
Tomas did. He opened the ribbon that held the pouch closed and brought the opening to his nose for a better look. "Flowers?"
"Cousin flowers of the mandrake plant. We grow them in the diocese gardens. I believe you'll enjoy their effect as a muscle restraint. You may not be able to transfigure, says the Chaplain who grows them, if you can manage to promptly consume the dosage. It's what you wanted, isn't it?"
"What's the recommended dose, and has it been tried?"
"Two flowers crushed with a pestle is recommended. You will be the first to try. Trafford can't seem to keep his hands on a Wair long enough to discover anything worth citing."
Tomas pulled the small pouch closed and tied it at his belt. He heard the door swing and Sister Kimbra walked in. An older couple was with her and the husband was carrying his arm in a sling.
"The church does not perform Charlatan miracles!" Boomed Oberon, without a second glance. He was looking at Tomas and the priest could tell that the persuasion in the phrase was meant for him. Tomas took pity on the poor and injured.
The older woman flinched at the ruthless tone of her city's regent and had Kimbra guide her to the dais steps for prayer.
"I'm going." Said Tomas, quietly. "I'll give you what I can get from Conell tomorrow."
He left Oberon with the parishoners and went out the causeway to the gardens. The large archway was open today because the fog on the peat lakes was tamed by recent rainfall. Children loved the diocese because they were forbidden to play there, but very little snow was left for them to enjoy. Tomas could usually spot them anyway, hiding among the leatherleaf, and they weren't there that afternoon.
He turned Oberon's gift with his fingers and opened the petals out onto his palm. He was familiar with the mandrake root but this flower was a peculiar, violent orange. The Chaplain gardner must have been busy—Tomas had seen these blossoms in soil beds across the chapelyard. He would show them to Simonette when he got to Avery.
NEXT — PREVIOUS
"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for you have borne the Saviour of our souls. Holy Mary, mother of god, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."
"Tomas." Said the Prince-Bishop. He was very tall and his arms could reach incredible lengths from the sleeves of his habit. He opened one hand before the kneeling priest. "Tomas, may I have a moment with you in privacy?"
Dashiell shuffled his legs off the bench where he had been waiting and glanced in the direction of Caer Gwaun's figurehead. Oberon had big, black eyes, and he stared back until the younger man looked away.
"I guess I'll go." Dashiell said. "Tomas?"
"Oh. Yes. I'll meet you outside Simonette's?"
"Yeah."
Dashiell climbed to his feet and left through the long hall that led to the Chapel causeway. There were many other passages but most of them were closed with heavy, wooden doors. Two large open corridors spread from either side of the pulpit, turning north at right angles and meeting in the courtyard. Beyond the courtyard was the Chapter House, the Baptism chamber, several large lecture theatres, and housing for monks. Oberon kept a small collection of gifted choristers as students, devoting the upper floors to their accomodations.
"You keep odd company, Tomas. Is this a penance of yours? My acquaintance placed you in the square with the daughter of vagabond Conell's." Said Oberon. He had curled his white beard in Babylonian style. The pulpit was empty and its echo gave weight to the Bishop's reprimand. "We both know don't we, Tomas, where that decision will take you. The Estershire Abbot is still cleaning up after your last conquest."
Tomas closed his eyes against the stern words. He looped his rosary between forefinger and thumb and let it hang. He didn't like to be reminded about Sherisse, and Oberon exploited this weakness.
"I'm not with Simonette the way you think." He said. "I think that she's a good, moral person. She's quite virtuous, more than you can judge by appearance."
He looked at the hall of pillars where Dashiell had been sitting among the arches moments before. The whole place was empty. Oberon had a number of maids, but none of them were intimate with him. He'd sworn from a young age that the Prince-Bishop was just the mouth of that Chapel and that his eyes were in every cross and mural. Tomas knew that privacy was something he would never achieve. Within the diocese, his choice was between exposed deception and rewarded obedience.
"She does not attend mass or concern herself with worship. You will learn that you can not be responsible for every beautiful woman's soul. I am sorry that she will not be joining you in Heaven."
"She might yet. You can't condemn a person who has not made their choice."
"Mhm. Very noble, but we have a different task in mind for your reparations." Oberon said, and he paused. "Are you still joining me for this evening's communion?"
Tomas looked at him seriously. This was god's house and any negative feelings were projected for the Lord himself to judge. For this reason, Tomas remained cool against the Bishop's disrespect. "I am. But I'd like to know the task now if you can tell me." He said.
The Prince-Bishop took several steps away from his priest and turned so that his pontifical gown caught a generous light from the stained glass window. "I know how eager you are to join Sheriff Weldon's war brigade against those creatures."
"They found another child victim, near the diocese gate. That's so close. What if it had been one of the choristers?"
"Yes, I'm aware. He was a noble's son. Which is why you're being assigned for duties within the Caer."
Tomas rose and straightened his garments. He was freshly washed and the wound on his palm had healed weeks before. "I don't understand, Lord Bishop."
"Nobles are involved now, Tomas. If they discover we have a ... Wair, creature, here among the apostlic fellowship. That cannot happen." Oberon said. "Nor do I think of you as a creature. You are close as you were my own son." He added, noting Tomas's frown.
The Bishop approached the lecturn at the pulpit's center, taking the steps slowly. He was an older man but he didn't require the crosier for support. His color and posture both conveyed the radiance of perfect health, and he was certain in each word. Senility had no foothold in the man's presentation.
"When I found you, Tomas, I knew that God had plotted this difficult path for you. Your skin, it was all a rash. You were just an infant, but your crying would bring about the lycanthropy. No mother would feed you. And so we hid you away, God's gift, so that we might one day understand this terrific plague upon us."
He turned a key in the lecturn drawer and produced a small pouch that was hidden in the sleeve of his gown. "I have a present for you. But I'll tell you about your Penance first, child." He said. "The father of this young girl, Simonette is her name? He's very clever. And he hasn't been giving tithe to the Catholic Church. I want you to find him and collect those dues."
"You send a priest for taxes, Lord? Why not a decimator or knight who is better suited?"
"Because you underestimate her father. I have sent several, and he is able to avoid them. I'm sending you now, because I know that you will honor my wishes. You brought about the murder of a young girl, Tomas. Because of you she is damned."
Oberon let his voice ring fiercely in the hall. Like he always did when they talked about Sherisse, Tomas got the haunted feeling that Oberon's words were overheard by someone else in the lonely pews. He had confidence that the papal leader, in all of his omniscient abilities, would not be so foolish. The Prince-Bishop was startingly aware of his enemies.
"You don't want me to see Simonette anymore. That's why I'm given this penance."
"I am doing you a favor." Said Oberon.
Tomas wanted to snarl. He drew the beads of the rosary in his hand and curled it into a fist. "I'm going now. You said you had the medicine I asked for."
"Yes, a present." Oberon smiled. "It's for when you're feeling particularly out of sorts." He took a moment to enjoy Tomas's furious expression before lowering his sleeve and dropping a pouch onto the lecturn. "Take it."
Tomas did. He opened the ribbon that held the pouch closed and brought the opening to his nose for a better look. "Flowers?"
"Cousin flowers of the mandrake plant. We grow them in the diocese gardens. I believe you'll enjoy their effect as a muscle restraint. You may not be able to transfigure, says the Chaplain who grows them, if you can manage to promptly consume the dosage. It's what you wanted, isn't it?"
"What's the recommended dose, and has it been tried?"
"Two flowers crushed with a pestle is recommended. You will be the first to try. Trafford can't seem to keep his hands on a Wair long enough to discover anything worth citing."
Tomas pulled the small pouch closed and tied it at his belt. He heard the door swing and Sister Kimbra walked in. An older couple was with her and the husband was carrying his arm in a sling.
"The church does not perform Charlatan miracles!" Boomed Oberon, without a second glance. He was looking at Tomas and the priest could tell that the persuasion in the phrase was meant for him. Tomas took pity on the poor and injured.
The older woman flinched at the ruthless tone of her city's regent and had Kimbra guide her to the dais steps for prayer.
"I'm going." Said Tomas, quietly. "I'll give you what I can get from Conell tomorrow."
He left Oberon with the parishoners and went out the causeway to the gardens. The large archway was open today because the fog on the peat lakes was tamed by recent rainfall. Children loved the diocese because they were forbidden to play there, but very little snow was left for them to enjoy. Tomas could usually spot them anyway, hiding among the leatherleaf, and they weren't there that afternoon.
He turned Oberon's gift with his fingers and opened the petals out onto his palm. He was familiar with the mandrake root but this flower was a peculiar, violent orange. The Chaplain gardner must have been busy—Tomas had seen these blossoms in soil beds across the chapelyard. He would show them to Simonette when he got to Avery.
NEXT — PREVIOUS
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Winters for our Sins III
caer gwaun
Its name in Welsh meant bog fortress, which was accurate. One cream colored wall, stretching miles, had lost its foothold on the marsh and was slumping into ruin. The architectural vertigo belonged on something wooden and crumbling; a lumberjack's shack with leaning rafters or the wet, discarded trees that a storm left behind. The otherwise magnificent city was relegated to Roman Catholic authority because of this same location. If anyone had thought to check up on Caer Gwaun in the decade of strife that fell upon England, they would have found a prosperous urban settlement of guild less merchants and of farming citizens earning just enough of their own yields to fuel a miniature papal empire. The diocese, seat of the citadel's Prince-Bishop Oberon, formed one-eighth of the city's total walled territory—including sheltered, in-field farms and enough nutrient-rich soil for dedicated three-season crop rotation. The result of careful tithing and outside trading was a fortress of mystic individuality.
Caer Gwaun was sculpted of hybrid granite that shone a dusty rose in dry weather and loomed in gothic grays when the rain fell. Its city walls had six irregular vertices that, in part because of geographic contours, could not become the perfect Star of David that Marcher Lords desired. Each corner piece rose in a stout tower that housed day laborers conscripted by the Prince-Bishop to battle England's anarchic front. More often this disenchanted militia brought trouble to the City; allowing beggars, criminals, and outlying farmers through the closed-entry barricades. A single day laborer might bring his immediate family, his brothers, and his neighbors with him through the guarded entry. In that way Caer Gwaun's looming Portcullis gate, that had proved indomitable against armies of ferocious Normans, was defeated by the desperate poor.
The city's military began with Shire-reeve Weldon Trafford, whose title was handed down from days when Caer Gwaun had been a moated keep and its tiny, established village. Trafford himself was only twenty-seven but accomplished in tournament and military escapades. He may not have belonged to the staunchest of noble bloodlines, but his impressive horsemanship and vibrant youth were a compelling combination. The military followed Trafford because they wanted to, and clad in chain-mail decorated with rosary crosses, he was a gleaming spectacle of warfare.
A falcon flying above the fortress would see in its domain the priority of the governing body within. The diocese was a vast country against the north most wall, where climbing to the height of a French cathedral lay the Chapel of the Radiant Hand. Surrounding the Chapel was a causeway in place to prevent the resident mud from dirtying the Pope's sandals. Pope Innocent II hadn't visited Caer Gwaun since his initial tour of Britain and the causeway remained a symbol of the church's elevated status among its parishioners. Beyond the causeway, the temple gardens stretched until a groomed forest of bog oak, leather leaf, and carnivorous sundew flowers housed the chapel in the heart of a deciduous labyrinth. The shade provided by the climate and territory meant that, lying beneath a blooming layer of lichens, pools of peat formed a brooding lake.
The southern half of the citadel surrounded a network of beaten roads. They opened like veins around the crowded farm and merchant quarters. The occasional wealthy landowner might reside in a wooden or granite tower and these flanked the roads like sentinel chimneys, nestled in a rolling collection of brown and white houses. Set aside in the land too treacherous for trade carts, the Baron's manor slumped into the wilds of his fallow estate. The serfs of his household had long since joined the citizens of the Caer and the Baron now lived in a humble property; left to count his dwindling riches and his swiftly departing authority. The old estate was left haunted by timid red deer that knocked about with the alms-seeking homeless. It too was sinking.
Trafford brought his horse about to stall the procession of Caer Gwaun's justice. They were sixteen healthy, capable knights, most over the age of thirty and all of them united by the thrills of their quarry. Before 1140, hunting was done for wild boar, for stag, and for grouse with the hunting dogs. Trophies were miniature: enough to feed a family, but never enough to brag about. The animals of the moor were gaunt, sickly things that survived on cloudberries and this new enemy brought opportunity for glory that southern England's backwater armies would never see from traditional combat.
No road connected Caer Gwaun to the body of its nation. It was an isle of civilization in the wilderness of Norman hunting grounds. The citadel gate met with a broad, wooden bridge crossing the more hostile of marsh pools and dropped abruptly into the thick of Hen Coedwig, where winter perched on dead branches of pine and oak trees. That bizarre white thing, snow, was fraying at its edges and browning with soil where it met with the obstinate moor.
The knights had been reluctant to stop for long on the eerie ride outside the city and their twice-daily rounds left horse droppings in relic mounds, like a voodoo ward of territorial filth. Trafford remembered a particularly gruesome display. Among all those hoof-prints and pressed into the brown trail of bowel leavings, they found Smith Oswin in a different kind of smear. He was bloody as a butchered hog and removed of his face. Big streaks of shit and crimson tore down his shirt and raked over his naked legs. They only knew him for the apron that he wore and a styled moustache trimmed like the horse's shoes he shaped for their attachment (it remained on his skull like crust on a child's sandwich. Someone or something was picky about its delicacies). His intimate parts had been taken.
Because predators are busiest at dawn and dusk, the clergy decreed a military perimeter to be established at both hours of the day and for precisely one hour. Either for fear of the superstitious moon or in contest with its pagan representation, no soldiers were stationed by authority during the evening. Brave men volunteered themselves as watchmen for outlying fields where the fog came early and shut lumberjacks away in their huts. They were poor and had little wood to spare for their own lodgings.
The wet weather gave all trees a slumping, wicked appearance. A way had been carved into the woods over time and left a pock-marked ring of stumps around the Citadel that was navigated by horses but still hostile to wagons. Trafford and his militia traveled this ring from the wooden bridge and southern portcullis, counter clockwise along the northeast wall and to a small, formal passage in the headboard of the diocese. The circuit meant that a majority of the southwest fields were left unsupervised by the military. This region had been abandoned for a generation and any farmers still claiming property in the area were as wild as the hounds or were hunters fearless of the animal threat.
Rumor began years before that a witch had settled into an abandoned farmhouse on the southwest border of Coedwig. She was either the cause or in concert with the wulven predators. "Nonsense", Trafford would tell his men, though they never finished their loop around the city's perimeter. He left that one part of the country unpatrolled on strict orders from the Catholic Church. When spring came, he would petition authority for the priveledge of an investigation in those parts, but Trafford hated winter. He felt its chill in his heart and bones. The Sheriff's wife took their children to her father's during this bitter season, for the warmth of an insulated merchant house. Trafford was left to send his nights in cold contemplation of the crisis at hand. He took whores, but the relief of their body heat was temporary.
"Those goddamn devils, Shire-reeve! Betyore they is all gibberin' an' dancing like mad wimmins out south! Why is the Bishop wastin' our time?" Cried Evander, a knight whose threadline connection to nobility was through an uncle.
"Cause they got reasons." Trafford said. He was astride a dun horse- a genetic rarity. It was taller and more resilient than the other horses, and wore a draping of Caer Gwaun's stag emblem. Someone had imported the beast from Rome on the church's coin.
"Reasons like they got'a cut our numbers, huh! Markets are thin on crop, Shire-reeve. You ain't got a lie to us forever." He said. Evander's voice carried from the back of the patrol line. He was eight horses behind Trafford, who was two horses behind the scout Dashiell, their vanguard.
"Sirrah, you ought to shut your slat, else Trafford makes you the next victim of 'lycanthropy'." Said Kenrick. He was two horses behind Trafford and was a firm contender in regional jousting meets. He was also great with a sword, which is why Trafford drafted him. Wairwulves played by no gentleman's rule.
A long silence met Kenrick's remark, helped along by melting snow that still masked the plodding of hooves. Every man knew that Trafford had manned another, like-purposed squadron of knights earlier in the year. Precisely what fate they met was a mystery, but each's wife was now a widow. The more romantic thinkers believed that a battle took place and its results left only Trafford, an unparalleled combatant, alive to deliver the news. The wiser men, those who were sober to crueller, political incentives for murder, doubted that a battle had happened at all.
"Aye, Kenrick!" Evander shouted.
"Huh?" The jouster replied.
"Think they loot your wallet when they gut you? Them hounds is smart. Fancy my woman has been prayin' for me to get bit. She got her eye on this gown she seen in the city. Bloody spinster."
Kenrick smiled. He was missing one canine tooth, which challenged his smooth appearance. The other teeth were yellowing with age.
"Why don't we ask the Shire-reeve!" Cried Evander. "Traffa, you seen 'em hounds take a man's coin? Muss be some paws they got a' carry off the coin from your last patrol. All the money the church pays n' it going to nothing but forest pups. Say, rumor's that your wife got a new city home, Traffa."
"Quit it, Evander. Rule of the patrol: you've got to mind the man who's riding behind you. I'm that man, and I'm getting the idea that it isn't so bad if the wulves take you after all. Church can turn a blind eye on my sword in your ribs, 'cause you're a trouble maker." Said Bear Marston. He was a hulking noble, slow to the draw in a battle of wits, but certainly respected for his size.
Evander grunted.
"Besides," said Bear, "Dashiell's seen something. Look, he pulled his horse around."
Dashiell, who was born of the Welsh wilderness, had a special understanding of the moor country. He was a young man with an innocent, earnest expression and a tendency to ride into fog and out of sight. Full patrols would pass where Dashiell said nothing and the horses plodded along with bickering and laughter. When he turned to the crowd behind him it was with sincerity that kept every man's attention.
"Hold your steeds! Bring around to the front! Mind the Sherriff!" Came a call from behind Trafford's horse. Dashiell was pointing a horse-whip to the west where dark shapes slumped against Hen Coedwig's treeline.
"The hounds! Draw your arms and keep your hands free from their fangs!" Someone shouted.
Trafford held up his hand, though he was listening to Dashiell's report with a wrinkled brow, and reigns were pulled in accordance to the command. Most men had noticed by now the shapes near the forest and were squinting to see.
"Another body." Said Evander. "Wonder whose it is. Prolly a wood-cutter type. We got what? Eight a' those?"
No one answered him. Trafford was grave and Dashiell looked a shade of ill. The knights, who were predominantly noble-blooded, were not accustomed to death in the way that commoners were. Only Trafford and Kenrick of the group had seen a great share of battle. It was not this way with the Sheriff's first patrol, whose men had been the Prince-Bishop's initial choice for military support.
"Sir Marston, please join me at the front." Called Trafford.
Bear Marston rode forward inquisitively and drew his reigns next to Dashiell's horse. Trafford put a hand on the giant man's shoulder and the two of them followed their scout lead to the corpse pile. The remainder followed slowly at a distance. They watched Trafford dismount, strike a torch on the edge of his saddle, and turn the limp forms one by one to show their faces.
"That one has the red hair, it's got a' be Marston's son." Said Evander. "It's why he's over there."
"What? Marston's son? What is he doing outside the Caer?" Asked Kenrick.
"What was he doing. They're going to have Marston cleanse him, light him up." Said Evander.
"Jesus. Be quiet, aye? You have no respect, Sirrah."
"I'm saying it how it is, Kenny. You ain't think it's a little excessive? Take a flame an' torch that bloodsucker, or the magicks and the voodoo are gonna getch you in the night? I'll remind you a' how serious you take it when you got a' saw through the neck bone a' your precious little boy to make sure he ain't coming back from his grave a' bite you good. An' make you a Wair Wulf."
"I would do it." Replied Kenrick. "I would do it if it meant that my son, or my wife, or anyone for that matter, didn't rise from their after life with that wild soul. You've seen what they did to Oswin. It ain't a natural thing."
"But you got a' be living to change into a Wair Wulf. It's the bite that gets into your blood an' it makes you grow fur."
"Yeah? And how do you know, Evander? How do we know you're not one of their kind? You knew it was Marston's son up there when Trafford hadn't said nothing."
Marston's large figure was kneeling over the crumpled body of the red-headed boy. He was given a serrated knife by Trafford and there was a slight noise when it cut the bone. The head was cut free and placed beside the body, bloodless as what of the boy's fluids were left had congealed and were worn down the rips in his shirt. Trafford performed the same operation on two other casualties. They filled the mouths with powder, closed the eyes, and burned the remains.
The smell of cooked meat made Trafford hungry, but he wouldn't say anything. He took an article from each corpse—a snippet of cloth or hair as proof of death—and sealed them into parcels for the church scribes. Most of the dead were recognized by the squad but the occasional faceless victim was recorded under "John Smith" or "Unknown". Trafford didn't care which.
"That's the beauty of the thing, huh?" Said Evander. "None of us got any idea if the other is a Wair Wulf. You got a chipped tooth at your front there, Kenrick, but I ain't said nothing. You get that biting someone?"
"Yeah. I tore the throat out of the last man who got his mug in the Sheriff's business. And you're not far off, Evander. My temper's been tried already."
"Thought so. Definitely a Wulven."
When Trafford had finished the burial, he tucked the spade into his pack and made the announcement that no pursuit would be made for the creature responsible. Any tracks or blood trails were from the morning, and it would be dark when they crossed the border into the southwest lair. An acquaintance of Bear Marston muttered slurs about cowardice to the big man and Trafford pretended not to hear. He was expecting them. Marston was quiet and looked at the smoldering burial mound with a fixed jaw. Only Dashiell and the Sheriff had seen that he was crying when he forced the knife to his son's throat.
Trafford's house was a modest, peasant's home built against Caer Gwaun's south wall. He was a noble, but stone and mason-fees weren't something he would spend his riches on. The house was larger than usual in that it had a second bedroom, belonging in the warm season to the Sheriff's two daughters. They were with their mother now toward the north edge of the town's square.
He inherited the place from the last Shire-reeve, a miserable military man who was found dead at his dining table, poisoned. Trafford's little girls wouldn't eat in the room where the old Sheriff died so he partitioned it as a business office that was now littered with charts, maps, and blacksmithing equipment. He had intended on forging something better suited to trapping and killing a Wairwulf but several failed designs left him hopeless in the effort. Oswin was the blacksmith and Oswin was dead.
He dropped into a burnished business-chair and thought about his daughters. And he thought about Marston's son. They didn't take his face, why didn't they take his face? They're just animals. They don't care what they eat, as long as it's dripping blood. No. The others had their faces taken. This one was special. They wanted him to live.
NEXT — PREVIOUS
Its name in Welsh meant bog fortress, which was accurate. One cream colored wall, stretching miles, had lost its foothold on the marsh and was slumping into ruin. The architectural vertigo belonged on something wooden and crumbling; a lumberjack's shack with leaning rafters or the wet, discarded trees that a storm left behind. The otherwise magnificent city was relegated to Roman Catholic authority because of this same location. If anyone had thought to check up on Caer Gwaun in the decade of strife that fell upon England, they would have found a prosperous urban settlement of guild less merchants and of farming citizens earning just enough of their own yields to fuel a miniature papal empire. The diocese, seat of the citadel's Prince-Bishop Oberon, formed one-eighth of the city's total walled territory—including sheltered, in-field farms and enough nutrient-rich soil for dedicated three-season crop rotation. The result of careful tithing and outside trading was a fortress of mystic individuality.
Caer Gwaun was sculpted of hybrid granite that shone a dusty rose in dry weather and loomed in gothic grays when the rain fell. Its city walls had six irregular vertices that, in part because of geographic contours, could not become the perfect Star of David that Marcher Lords desired. Each corner piece rose in a stout tower that housed day laborers conscripted by the Prince-Bishop to battle England's anarchic front. More often this disenchanted militia brought trouble to the City; allowing beggars, criminals, and outlying farmers through the closed-entry barricades. A single day laborer might bring his immediate family, his brothers, and his neighbors with him through the guarded entry. In that way Caer Gwaun's looming Portcullis gate, that had proved indomitable against armies of ferocious Normans, was defeated by the desperate poor.
The city's military began with Shire-reeve Weldon Trafford, whose title was handed down from days when Caer Gwaun had been a moated keep and its tiny, established village. Trafford himself was only twenty-seven but accomplished in tournament and military escapades. He may not have belonged to the staunchest of noble bloodlines, but his impressive horsemanship and vibrant youth were a compelling combination. The military followed Trafford because they wanted to, and clad in chain-mail decorated with rosary crosses, he was a gleaming spectacle of warfare.
A falcon flying above the fortress would see in its domain the priority of the governing body within. The diocese was a vast country against the north most wall, where climbing to the height of a French cathedral lay the Chapel of the Radiant Hand. Surrounding the Chapel was a causeway in place to prevent the resident mud from dirtying the Pope's sandals. Pope Innocent II hadn't visited Caer Gwaun since his initial tour of Britain and the causeway remained a symbol of the church's elevated status among its parishioners. Beyond the causeway, the temple gardens stretched until a groomed forest of bog oak, leather leaf, and carnivorous sundew flowers housed the chapel in the heart of a deciduous labyrinth. The shade provided by the climate and territory meant that, lying beneath a blooming layer of lichens, pools of peat formed a brooding lake.
The southern half of the citadel surrounded a network of beaten roads. They opened like veins around the crowded farm and merchant quarters. The occasional wealthy landowner might reside in a wooden or granite tower and these flanked the roads like sentinel chimneys, nestled in a rolling collection of brown and white houses. Set aside in the land too treacherous for trade carts, the Baron's manor slumped into the wilds of his fallow estate. The serfs of his household had long since joined the citizens of the Caer and the Baron now lived in a humble property; left to count his dwindling riches and his swiftly departing authority. The old estate was left haunted by timid red deer that knocked about with the alms-seeking homeless. It too was sinking.
Trafford brought his horse about to stall the procession of Caer Gwaun's justice. They were sixteen healthy, capable knights, most over the age of thirty and all of them united by the thrills of their quarry. Before 1140, hunting was done for wild boar, for stag, and for grouse with the hunting dogs. Trophies were miniature: enough to feed a family, but never enough to brag about. The animals of the moor were gaunt, sickly things that survived on cloudberries and this new enemy brought opportunity for glory that southern England's backwater armies would never see from traditional combat.
No road connected Caer Gwaun to the body of its nation. It was an isle of civilization in the wilderness of Norman hunting grounds. The citadel gate met with a broad, wooden bridge crossing the more hostile of marsh pools and dropped abruptly into the thick of Hen Coedwig, where winter perched on dead branches of pine and oak trees. That bizarre white thing, snow, was fraying at its edges and browning with soil where it met with the obstinate moor.
The knights had been reluctant to stop for long on the eerie ride outside the city and their twice-daily rounds left horse droppings in relic mounds, like a voodoo ward of territorial filth. Trafford remembered a particularly gruesome display. Among all those hoof-prints and pressed into the brown trail of bowel leavings, they found Smith Oswin in a different kind of smear. He was bloody as a butchered hog and removed of his face. Big streaks of shit and crimson tore down his shirt and raked over his naked legs. They only knew him for the apron that he wore and a styled moustache trimmed like the horse's shoes he shaped for their attachment (it remained on his skull like crust on a child's sandwich. Someone or something was picky about its delicacies). His intimate parts had been taken.
Because predators are busiest at dawn and dusk, the clergy decreed a military perimeter to be established at both hours of the day and for precisely one hour. Either for fear of the superstitious moon or in contest with its pagan representation, no soldiers were stationed by authority during the evening. Brave men volunteered themselves as watchmen for outlying fields where the fog came early and shut lumberjacks away in their huts. They were poor and had little wood to spare for their own lodgings.
The wet weather gave all trees a slumping, wicked appearance. A way had been carved into the woods over time and left a pock-marked ring of stumps around the Citadel that was navigated by horses but still hostile to wagons. Trafford and his militia traveled this ring from the wooden bridge and southern portcullis, counter clockwise along the northeast wall and to a small, formal passage in the headboard of the diocese. The circuit meant that a majority of the southwest fields were left unsupervised by the military. This region had been abandoned for a generation and any farmers still claiming property in the area were as wild as the hounds or were hunters fearless of the animal threat.
Rumor began years before that a witch had settled into an abandoned farmhouse on the southwest border of Coedwig. She was either the cause or in concert with the wulven predators. "Nonsense", Trafford would tell his men, though they never finished their loop around the city's perimeter. He left that one part of the country unpatrolled on strict orders from the Catholic Church. When spring came, he would petition authority for the priveledge of an investigation in those parts, but Trafford hated winter. He felt its chill in his heart and bones. The Sheriff's wife took their children to her father's during this bitter season, for the warmth of an insulated merchant house. Trafford was left to send his nights in cold contemplation of the crisis at hand. He took whores, but the relief of their body heat was temporary.
"Those goddamn devils, Shire-reeve! Betyore they is all gibberin' an' dancing like mad wimmins out south! Why is the Bishop wastin' our time?" Cried Evander, a knight whose threadline connection to nobility was through an uncle.
"Cause they got reasons." Trafford said. He was astride a dun horse- a genetic rarity. It was taller and more resilient than the other horses, and wore a draping of Caer Gwaun's stag emblem. Someone had imported the beast from Rome on the church's coin.
"Reasons like they got'a cut our numbers, huh! Markets are thin on crop, Shire-reeve. You ain't got a lie to us forever." He said. Evander's voice carried from the back of the patrol line. He was eight horses behind Trafford, who was two horses behind the scout Dashiell, their vanguard.
"Sirrah, you ought to shut your slat, else Trafford makes you the next victim of 'lycanthropy'." Said Kenrick. He was two horses behind Trafford and was a firm contender in regional jousting meets. He was also great with a sword, which is why Trafford drafted him. Wairwulves played by no gentleman's rule.
A long silence met Kenrick's remark, helped along by melting snow that still masked the plodding of hooves. Every man knew that Trafford had manned another, like-purposed squadron of knights earlier in the year. Precisely what fate they met was a mystery, but each's wife was now a widow. The more romantic thinkers believed that a battle took place and its results left only Trafford, an unparalleled combatant, alive to deliver the news. The wiser men, those who were sober to crueller, political incentives for murder, doubted that a battle had happened at all.
"Aye, Kenrick!" Evander shouted.
"Huh?" The jouster replied.
"Think they loot your wallet when they gut you? Them hounds is smart. Fancy my woman has been prayin' for me to get bit. She got her eye on this gown she seen in the city. Bloody spinster."
Kenrick smiled. He was missing one canine tooth, which challenged his smooth appearance. The other teeth were yellowing with age.
"Why don't we ask the Shire-reeve!" Cried Evander. "Traffa, you seen 'em hounds take a man's coin? Muss be some paws they got a' carry off the coin from your last patrol. All the money the church pays n' it going to nothing but forest pups. Say, rumor's that your wife got a new city home, Traffa."
"Quit it, Evander. Rule of the patrol: you've got to mind the man who's riding behind you. I'm that man, and I'm getting the idea that it isn't so bad if the wulves take you after all. Church can turn a blind eye on my sword in your ribs, 'cause you're a trouble maker." Said Bear Marston. He was a hulking noble, slow to the draw in a battle of wits, but certainly respected for his size.
Evander grunted.
"Besides," said Bear, "Dashiell's seen something. Look, he pulled his horse around."
Dashiell, who was born of the Welsh wilderness, had a special understanding of the moor country. He was a young man with an innocent, earnest expression and a tendency to ride into fog and out of sight. Full patrols would pass where Dashiell said nothing and the horses plodded along with bickering and laughter. When he turned to the crowd behind him it was with sincerity that kept every man's attention.
"Hold your steeds! Bring around to the front! Mind the Sherriff!" Came a call from behind Trafford's horse. Dashiell was pointing a horse-whip to the west where dark shapes slumped against Hen Coedwig's treeline.
"The hounds! Draw your arms and keep your hands free from their fangs!" Someone shouted.
Trafford held up his hand, though he was listening to Dashiell's report with a wrinkled brow, and reigns were pulled in accordance to the command. Most men had noticed by now the shapes near the forest and were squinting to see.
"Another body." Said Evander. "Wonder whose it is. Prolly a wood-cutter type. We got what? Eight a' those?"
No one answered him. Trafford was grave and Dashiell looked a shade of ill. The knights, who were predominantly noble-blooded, were not accustomed to death in the way that commoners were. Only Trafford and Kenrick of the group had seen a great share of battle. It was not this way with the Sheriff's first patrol, whose men had been the Prince-Bishop's initial choice for military support.
"Sir Marston, please join me at the front." Called Trafford.
Bear Marston rode forward inquisitively and drew his reigns next to Dashiell's horse. Trafford put a hand on the giant man's shoulder and the two of them followed their scout lead to the corpse pile. The remainder followed slowly at a distance. They watched Trafford dismount, strike a torch on the edge of his saddle, and turn the limp forms one by one to show their faces.
"That one has the red hair, it's got a' be Marston's son." Said Evander. "It's why he's over there."
"What? Marston's son? What is he doing outside the Caer?" Asked Kenrick.
"What was he doing. They're going to have Marston cleanse him, light him up." Said Evander.
"Jesus. Be quiet, aye? You have no respect, Sirrah."
"I'm saying it how it is, Kenny. You ain't think it's a little excessive? Take a flame an' torch that bloodsucker, or the magicks and the voodoo are gonna getch you in the night? I'll remind you a' how serious you take it when you got a' saw through the neck bone a' your precious little boy to make sure he ain't coming back from his grave a' bite you good. An' make you a Wair Wulf."
"I would do it." Replied Kenrick. "I would do it if it meant that my son, or my wife, or anyone for that matter, didn't rise from their after life with that wild soul. You've seen what they did to Oswin. It ain't a natural thing."
"But you got a' be living to change into a Wair Wulf. It's the bite that gets into your blood an' it makes you grow fur."
"Yeah? And how do you know, Evander? How do we know you're not one of their kind? You knew it was Marston's son up there when Trafford hadn't said nothing."
Marston's large figure was kneeling over the crumpled body of the red-headed boy. He was given a serrated knife by Trafford and there was a slight noise when it cut the bone. The head was cut free and placed beside the body, bloodless as what of the boy's fluids were left had congealed and were worn down the rips in his shirt. Trafford performed the same operation on two other casualties. They filled the mouths with powder, closed the eyes, and burned the remains.
The smell of cooked meat made Trafford hungry, but he wouldn't say anything. He took an article from each corpse—a snippet of cloth or hair as proof of death—and sealed them into parcels for the church scribes. Most of the dead were recognized by the squad but the occasional faceless victim was recorded under "John Smith" or "Unknown". Trafford didn't care which.
"That's the beauty of the thing, huh?" Said Evander. "None of us got any idea if the other is a Wair Wulf. You got a chipped tooth at your front there, Kenrick, but I ain't said nothing. You get that biting someone?"
"Yeah. I tore the throat out of the last man who got his mug in the Sheriff's business. And you're not far off, Evander. My temper's been tried already."
"Thought so. Definitely a Wulven."
When Trafford had finished the burial, he tucked the spade into his pack and made the announcement that no pursuit would be made for the creature responsible. Any tracks or blood trails were from the morning, and it would be dark when they crossed the border into the southwest lair. An acquaintance of Bear Marston muttered slurs about cowardice to the big man and Trafford pretended not to hear. He was expecting them. Marston was quiet and looked at the smoldering burial mound with a fixed jaw. Only Dashiell and the Sheriff had seen that he was crying when he forced the knife to his son's throat.
Trafford's house was a modest, peasant's home built against Caer Gwaun's south wall. He was a noble, but stone and mason-fees weren't something he would spend his riches on. The house was larger than usual in that it had a second bedroom, belonging in the warm season to the Sheriff's two daughters. They were with their mother now toward the north edge of the town's square.
He inherited the place from the last Shire-reeve, a miserable military man who was found dead at his dining table, poisoned. Trafford's little girls wouldn't eat in the room where the old Sheriff died so he partitioned it as a business office that was now littered with charts, maps, and blacksmithing equipment. He had intended on forging something better suited to trapping and killing a Wairwulf but several failed designs left him hopeless in the effort. Oswin was the blacksmith and Oswin was dead.
He dropped into a burnished business-chair and thought about his daughters. And he thought about Marston's son. They didn't take his face, why didn't they take his face? They're just animals. They don't care what they eat, as long as it's dripping blood. No. The others had their faces taken. This one was special. They wanted him to live.
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Thursday, March 13, 2008
Winters for our Sins II
estershire
In Estershire, where Deerdown meets Rutherston Walk and old Mrs. Eyton keeps a quaint garden of lavender growing by the road, a house had been supported by an unusual pair of stilts. It had a conventional door and, for being the property of a rich merchant, three front-facing windows with wooden shutters closed and sealed against the cold. The door and the entry path flanked the village street while the largest portion of the house, the bedroom chambers, were added in later years when the rising price of cooperage and the design of a marketplace brought prosperity to the household.
Winston Quirke, the cooper of the Shire and the leading exporter of waterproofed in the Marcher Kingdoms, built this loft for his daughter. The village hated him for it.
Her name was Sherisse and she wore her hair down in the square, dressed her ears with flowers, and represented everything that was inappropriate to anarchic England. When she turned fourteen and her figure took the attention of married peasants, the women of Estershire revolted in their slander circles. Sherisse was the only daughter of a rich merchant and could afford to live a luxurious lifestyle and to avoid the spinning wheel that others of her demographic obliged. Stories were invented of how she spent her free time; from corner-working to midnight rituals of witchcraft in their vicious spectrum. Despite the rumors, Sherisse continued her practice of coy nonchalance and, in secret, spent most of her time with a man she met from Caer Gwaun. He was a priest—a holy man whose piety she adored. A fire was flickering weakly beyond the loft shudders where she currently attended to him. He had injured his hand on his way through the woods.
"Don't go to the trouble, Sheri. They'll push a way out on their own. It's that way with human skin," he said. Along with the fireplace, the room was lit by a candle by the bedside where the two of them sat. Linens were layered and styled in Sherisse's extravagant manner. An embroidered pillow had been sewn by her grandmother and propped against a wooden headboard.
"You need a surgeon. You'll get the gangrene. And don't give me anything about divine purification. You are a man like the farmers that I see without fingers. If we are to be married then I want this one to wear a ring like when Barons take wives. You would wear a ring to show me devotion?"
"I would. Of course I would."
"Then let me take your hand and you can tell me how lovely I am while you bite on this branch."
She dipped the paring knife she was holding in a pot of coals, wiped it clean with a rag, and began digging in his palm. Her motions were delicate and strong but she had not been trained. He bled in lines down the swollen underside of his hand where it was punctuated by knifetip wounds and by large pine splinters and where the epidermal layer was rubbed away by friction. A glistening sweat of pus had reacted to rigorous washing and was inching its way down his wrist.
"Your poor finger," she said, twisting with the knife. "This one is barely anything but bone. We had better get you a proper walking stick so you don't trip again."
He nodded obediently, and his eyes were welled in the extent of pain. His mind wandered to the Wairwulf and to the chase that happened prior. He could never share this memory with her—she wouldn't let him take that road again, and he wouldn't have her company in those vast winter evenings before a trade route was established.
"I just need a bandage. We'll use my father's wool and you'll be more comfortable." She said, and she ducked down the stairs before returning with the gauze. The man kept his palm upward where the series of holes were leaking a generous pool into its center. When she wrapped the wounds, there was enough fluid to create a glue.
"Promise me you will pray to God for your behalf." She told him.
He, who had pulled the stick from his teeth and placed it on the table, nodded.
"And mine? You can't rot, Tomas. It would be terrible."
"I promise. I can't lose my hand, either."
He placed his bandaged palm at an angle of extreme care and stretched back across the matting. Sherisse abandoned her knife to the corner table and curled beside him, resting her head on his stomach. Her blonde hair had been braided in the way she prefered and she struggled, at that angle, to keep the purple lilac from crumpling on her ear.
"It doesn't make me sick, your blood." She said.
He made a low sound of recognition.
"I usually get sick when I see blood, or when someone is injured, and I have to turn away. It's not like that with you. Is that silly?"
"Not really, I guess. I don't like seeing my own blood. I couldn't be a soldier."
"Well you belong with the church. I believe we're all destined for a position decided before we are born. It's all written in stars and in Heaven." She said, and she arched her back. Being sixteen, she had adjusted to the contour of her frame and could bend in ways that weakened her male company. She listened to him swallow hard when she forced her breasts up toward the lip of the tiny yellow frock.
"And what's yours?" He asked. He placed his own head of tangled hair on the pillow and was staring at the steepled roof.
"I will be a beautiful wife and will make beautiful children whom shall inherit the fortune of my family."
He smiled down at her. She had hazel eyes that flicked with confidence and a rosy complexion where her happiness at that moment caused a visible glow. She had no reason to doubt herself.
"Tell me again about heaven. What it's like, and what you see when you're there." She said.
"No man knows what heaven is like exactly. You see a great tunnel and stairs that climb to gates that are tended by Angels. In revelations, the Kingdom of Heaven will descend upon Earth as a holy citadel. I suppose it could look like Caer Gwaun." He mused.
"That's blasphemy." She struck him, and placed her hand on the leg of his trousers. "Those big walls are unsightly. There must be orchards like when I read of Eden."
He paused, smirking. He was five years her senior and the desire in her body language was transparent.
"Sherisse, are you tempting me toward sins out of wedlock?"
She curved herself further so she could look at him upside down with a guilty slant to her eyes. "We're getting married. I could make the arrangements now. I have a ring of my mother's in the drawer down stairs."
She climbed on top of him and pushed his chest down against the matting, careful not to harm his bandaged hand.
"I want you to. With sin, it's always the woman who decides. How can it be something wrong when my body, that God has created in his own vision, tells me it is right?"
"It's a tribulation, Sher."
"You don't have to do anything. I know how—Livia told me. You cannot very well fight me with your hand, and it would be no crime. No one would know the difference except me."
"I just don't think it's a good idea," he said. "I would be guilty of influencing you."
He stiffened awkwardly and kept his eyes on the fireplace behind her. Watching him, she let out a furious sigh and, driven to conquest, held her provocative stance above. She could not understand at her age and her beauty that someone might not desire her.
"I'm tired, anyway. Can't you lay beside me?" He asked. He began to speak again but he was interrupted.
She silenced him as women will with a hurried kiss and a clash of teeth. She straddled low and put a warm hand under his shirt, undressing his trousers and forcing her open thighs around his bare mid-section. He relaxed into her motions and their kiss became a tangle of distracted lips while each body found its place within the other. The straps of her frock slipped over her shoulders to allow her tempting chest to bounce and she, in the glorious pain of her first sexual venture, let go a carnal moan.
She hooked her neck over his shoulder to press her lips and her tongue to his flesh there. She breathed against his skin like a vampire, savouring the taste of foreign enzymes. When he shuddered, she drove her pace against the pain it caused her loins. Her heart was racing, her tongue was numb, and his hand on her back lit a fire within her. His fingers gave her a delightful sensation of pressure that stole from the warmth at her abdomen. She at once realised that he was scratching her—deep enough that her blood dripped from the lacerations.
"Tom!" She cried. Her hand to her mouth, she pulled a mat of hair from behind her lower lip. She struggled her way and squirmed upon him but he was deep within her. When she looked down at him, Tomas was no more a man. Thick brown fur had covered his face. He had developed between his eyes a lupine snout. The proportion of his jaw had drawn like a dog's and she could see fangs behind his gentle mouth, pacified by a dreaming expression. It, as she had been, was at heights of this experience.
It made no growl when it opened its rows of teeth, looking at Sherisse with a lover's serenity and sinking incisors into the cartiledge of her nose. She felt hot blood erupt from the crushed blood vessels and stream down her breasts as those delicate olfactory bones were taken from her face. There was a tugging at the corners of her scalp where the skin was being pulled before it broke apart across her cheek and just under her eye, exposing those mysterious muscles that focused one's vision. She no more felt the sting of that beast between her legs, and her senses were flooded by the clumsy grinding of bone being snapped and swallowed. She realized in a clarity of panic that she must reach the knife on the bedside table.
The creature that Tomas had become was as an upright standing man. It had distinct legs and a hulking torso, swollen with muscles that stretched above the bone. It pulled her to its taught stomach with a taloned, five fingered hand that plunged into the white flesh at her lower back. Its right hand remained bandaged and rubbed against her wildly in an attempt to grip the girl's side.
In her rush of terror, Sherisse knew she had freedom of her left arm. When she turned her head away from the nipping jaws, the skin of her face peeled away and she could feel it dangling there in a flap. Without a nose, the cool air from the shutters brought blood down her throat and into her lungs. She felt a great weight in her head and an invasive shadow spread from the corners of her vision. With her fragile arm extended, she took the paring knife from the bedside table in her fingertips.
The creature that had become of the man she loved was writhing beneath her in the motions of animal intercourse. She could taste, with the iron of blood that streamed down her lips, the foul qualities of its breath. The girl let out a greivous howl that curdled in her throat from the fluids of injury. She had lost her beautiful young face and with it, as a woman of that era, her identity. Rage that welled deep within her crumpled before the mastery of despair. She held the knife to her milky neck and cut into the veins like a saw.
When that hybrid animal left Sherisse to decay she was hardly a skull and a yellow braid. It wore Tomas' jacket in a parody of human behavior. It had no sense to draw the trousers from its ankles and tore at them until they separated into gators. Speckled with red and with pieces of the woman's face, it lumbered down the stairs and toward the door with the intelligent reflex of a bipedal ape. It realized the location of the doorknob at once and released itself into the Estershire evening.
St. Benedict, his mouth agape and in the crescent moonlight, looked down upon the little world with creases of black rust that is known to situate on tarnished silver after a time without polish. The lanterns of scribes that had been winking late that night now rested unattended in black windows. For the overcast skies, few stars could pierce the rolling fog. The beast in the Shire street licked its lips and looked about with the depth of a profound discovery. It had seen its own hand, wrapped in woolen gauze, and studied this with glassy innocence before scraping the material and its caked blood on the pebbles. Sniffing primitively about itself, the creature developed a wounded air. It stood six feet to its full height and whimpered quietly before experiencing shame or fear and bolting for the concealment of the churchyard brush. Adam and Eve with the same expression concerned themselves with clothing as this beast, on his hind quarters, struggled with murder.
"Who goes there!" cried a voice, belonging to a man. It came from the church, one door swung wide.
At the sound, the beast recoiled and stepped from the gloom into the open walkway.
"Lord have mercy." Said the priest. He cast a lantern's light on the bloodstained scene. "Tomas, what have you done?"
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Thursday, March 06, 2008
Winters for our Sins I
hen coedwig
A terrible field of winter stretched between Caer Gwaun and her wilderness, white and sparse as a canvas robbed of substance. Slow dunes of powder fell upon the heather patches and the hinter grass that rolled solemnly toward Estershire. Not a single animal, beast or man, had lain his foot upon this country, for her embrace was a barren, frigid death. There were no footprints this morning to mar her perfect empty qualities. The snow stretched to boundaries of conifers, separated by miles in every direction, and fog bred between these like a bowl of steaming froth. Along the eastern edge of the moor, a figure struggled up the bank of climbing cedar. His stirring was amplified by evidence that he was the only living thing in that plain.
The traveler was a strong height and width, though bent from the weight of his various parcels, which were, strapped in leather and tugging like bundled corpses, provisions for a journey. He had prepared for pitfalls with a set of wooden planks that fastened at his ankles and extended from beneath his broken boots. These left curious serpentine trails along the edge of the wood, swept by a whip of horse hairs to keep his stead free of dogs and wild men. In the England of 1140 AD, neither pursuer was unlikely.
While the clearings of the forest were covered in snow, little had carried through the canopy of pine trees to dust its wooded floor. The man now found his skis unnecessary and spent a hurried moment unfastening their ropes. His fingers, bitten pink by frost, were still of a young man's hand.
Estershire, a budding Marcher town, was six miles east through a twiggy maze called Hen Coedwig that spun its way among the mist like entangled spiders. To scare children, tales were passed of the wood's ability to pull those of weak footing through the earth where they became food for lice. An educated traveler knew that this was not unfounded, as many injuries resulted of tangled roots that wrought the tiny paths. For this reason, Lords and Barons were encouraged to pilot in the company of an entourage. Due to an increasing instance of missing persons, commonfolk were keen to follow this same practice.
The burdened man passed steadily among the decidious limbs and bramble. He wore a draping of fur on his shoulders that, when he leapt from bank to bank, had him looking intensely wild. King Stephen of Normandy was in custody of his country's rebellion—captured and crownless. His absense forgave looters, villains, and highwaymen their untamed professions.
It became clear as he moved that the man had traveled this way before. He knew each wand-like strand of ash that reached for his boots on the path. It would be an hour at his pace before the palisade of the distant shire and, for the danger of oncoming darkness that accompanied 6 o'clock, he stopped only twice to take hot uisce* (whiskey) from a canteen.
Hen Coedwig, at its center, was an ancient dome of wiry oak. The decay of frost had crumpled any foliage left by autumn. An occasional farmland bird, hungry in this season without corn, would shriek overhead and call starving to the heavens for amnesty. The haunted sound turned the head of the journeyman. He had brown unshorn hair and in his eyes was reflected a quivering fear—addressing the tranquil behavior of the wilderness with such paranoia that an icy salt swelled at his tear ducts. His terror was not unfounded; there, standing at an intersection of twisted maple, a beast was watching.
The creature was a monster of tremulous proportion. It had a thick, long neck of shag that shimmered with dew and a slat of teeth, like a whale's, that shone as a bar of drooling ivory keys. Its rubbery lips were spread to release a cautionary growl.
"Wairwulf." Cried the man: the saxon term for a victim of lycanthropy. The creature was such a size that it could be nothing other. The Caer Gwaun moor hounds, hulking as they were—a cunning invasion upon the countryside—were five hands smaller than this beast.
These smaller had not arrived suddenly. Assembling as strays and pressed by famine, they developed into packs and gathered their confidence. In the years before 1140 they were inconvenient scavengers. Since the anarchy of King Stephen's capture, they had taken to the nation's liking for murder.
In the frigid horrors of that scene, the Wairwulf advanced upon its prey. It moved on taloned pads that aided its hunter's instinct for silence. It possessed the withered shoulders of a horse and prepared to leap, drawing its head low in a stance from which it would tear the piping of the jugular vein and nestle its cold, wet nose in free-flowing blood.
As it is natural for even a brave man to do, the traveler stood motionless, parrying his quarry the way a grounded robin does before taking flight. He stumbled into a run that was hampered by the residual frost and by the weight of his pack. Shambling through peeking ferns and over systems of gnarled oak that had given this forest fame, he moved toward Estershire in the east. There was hope in the village's palisades, where was stationed a lord's militia of twenty men who, trained to savagery by this season of chaos, would fell the beast in pursuit.
It was late afternoon and no ritual moon hung in the sky. No sky was seen for the fog that pressed from rivers yet unnamed that split the wood. It would seem for this that the dead branches of Hen Coedwig held a batton canopy of unspun cotton and that the race taking place beneath them came from a gently padded nightmare. The Wairwulf began its chase at a prideful trot that carried no demeanor of hunger. It would likely paw at its prey and, while they were known for their habit of devouring both face and entrails, murder for the cruelty of the affair. This was the intention that it wore as it moved easily behind the burdened man, dripping the remains of its previous victim from a tassel on its noble snout.
Less than a mile of wilted forest remained before the shire. From a bird's eye and beyond that layer of fog, the village was a small fortress of farms and merchant quarters, centering around a barracks lodging and the Lord's own manor. It spread 9 acres north to south and three fourth's that wide—a peaceful and primitive place where in England and in this age there were few. The church was the tallest building in Estershire with its silver image of St. Benedict, scriptures in hand and reaching into clouds, preaching holy unity unto all.
The man continued his stumbling run with the incredible endurance of adrenaline, veering on angles as his feet gave way to numbness and occasional unsteady ground. He had drawn a picket-shaped ski from his saddle of belongings and was bearing it like a stake. The wood was weak and had splintered. In places, wet and rigid needles of its composure had forced their way into his palm and dotted the frost behind him with a cookie trail of blood. The wulf, sniffing viciously at these patches as it moved, was driven to hunger by the steely scent. It broke from the playful trot and snarled at intervals of madness. So near was the growling that the man would turn his head to watch and had not, in his haste, seen the outlying roots of an Oak—a crooked Hen Coedwig patriarch with its fingers set about like tentacles in an assertion of gnarled authority. The journeyman was thrown to his hands and knees, refusing to part with the splintering picket in his right hand and, in the fall, shredding the skin from his palm. He held the ski like a sword in his maimed fingers and pointed it at the pursuing creature, having rolled to his back where he was protected from the Wairwulf's lunge.
Several yards away stood the beast that was chasing him. Its head was broad and regal, belonging to tawny maned cats of Roman myth. Like a headdress, feathers of wet fur stuck at angles that concealed the trim of the creature's neck. A cleft separated the single ridge of its scaly nose where some warlike gesture had left a scar. Below this, and as it moved, all four delicate paws touched the earth beneath.
The man trembled but he made no sound. There are rabbits that, when cornered, can scream like a child. The traveler was so sure in the complete solitude of this locale that he, for his pride, kept a silent resolve. His eyes glazed with terror when they met those of the Wair, that gleamed as the shadow stepped closer like glassy pools of swimming ice. He could see in them the humane and primordial language of a challenge—as all animals, when confronted by a stare, feel somewhere in them the rouse of battle.
An eerie breeze pulled a stream of fog through the clearing behind the man. Beyond it, lamps in Estershire were lighting for the evening in the single window houses of wattle and daub. He was a minute's jog from the palisades, in the border clutches of Hen Coedwig. He would be devoured and slain. It was, in this circling mist, that the Wairwulf halted. It saw something unsavory in its victim's nature that broke the advancing motions of its attack. The creature stopped; it brought its massive snout into the air and howled a long, low wail. When it rounded and withdrew into the haunting woods, the man remained slumped on the floor of the clearing—his parcels dismantled and the picket clenched in his swollen red fist.
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Monday, December 17, 2007
Return to Sender
I write this for you, Champ. Because you won this last game. I sat here solitary, pushing your pieces across the checker board in the way that I imagined you would want them—and you're still beating me. There's nothing tactical to it. I'm here and you're, where you are, climbing ladders fucking snakes. Slide, right?
I wanted to tell you that a part of me, the part that craves a tall vanilla sky with my protein shake, is twisting inside my guts en rotisserie. There's a feeling like a Ferris Wheel and then you're done, climbing into an addict's dream for anything that will stop the relentless hungry throb. I get the sweetest fleeting glimpses of codeine and cocaine. I want someone's supreme opiate, but I'm sure you're aware.
Because you lost your game, too. I'm gripping the table and puking up my Baja Chicken Tacos. "It's the Flu of the season". You smile at me in the car and suddenly I'm bulimic. You didn't know the end was coming with those teeth across your face.
Set your twenty pieces on a 10x10 board.
Hey.
Are you okay.
I wanted to tell you that a part of me, the part that craves a tall vanilla sky with my protein shake, is twisting inside my guts en rotisserie. There's a feeling like a Ferris Wheel and then you're done, climbing into an addict's dream for anything that will stop the relentless hungry throb. I get the sweetest fleeting glimpses of codeine and cocaine. I want someone's supreme opiate, but I'm sure you're aware.
Because you lost your game, too. I'm gripping the table and puking up my Baja Chicken Tacos. "It's the Flu of the season". You smile at me in the car and suddenly I'm bulimic. You didn't know the end was coming with those teeth across your face.
Set your twenty pieces on a 10x10 board.
Hey.
Are you okay.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The Queen's Croquet Ground
When you were here before, couldn't look you in the eyes. We're both beheaded crescent smiles, curled and nervous like hedgehogs struck by the flamingo beak that she's wailing in our direction. The plan's the cards I deal. Take a heart, Ace, and we'll clash coquette. We might survive de spite planting a dying white tree in Wonderland.
You're in this for more than I am, Blind Ante. Wish it weren't a gambling wheel that had me rolling roulette (well fuck me Freddy. My ball of black karma's landing on a higher number each August).
There's something mad-hatter about the way I'm Overlooking this hedge maze—the Jack Torrence perspective. I'm frosty and crazed this time around but you're the one that's getting lost, Tommy.
And I'm juggling the Queen's executioner axe. I hate sharp edges and I hate these fucking card competitions.
Ha, hahahaha-ha.
* * * *
Hark: A potentate conquerer is streaking a blood path across the basement. We chameleons blend our calico stripes into the collection of bitter wallflowers. Jury and family divided, there's nothing Cheshire about watching the King of Hearts fold to a condemning Crown.
You're in this for more than I am, Blind Ante. Wish it weren't a gambling wheel that had me rolling roulette (well fuck me Freddy. My ball of black karma's landing on a higher number each August).
There's something mad-hatter about the way I'm Overlooking this hedge maze—the Jack Torrence perspective. I'm frosty and crazed this time around but you're the one that's getting lost, Tommy.
And I'm juggling the Queen's executioner axe. I hate sharp edges and I hate these fucking card competitions.
Ha, hahahaha-ha.
* * * *
Hark: A potentate conquerer is streaking a blood path across the basement. We chameleons blend our calico stripes into the collection of bitter wallflowers. Jury and family divided, there's nothing Cheshire about watching the King of Hearts fold to a condemning Crown.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Duck Hunt
He was a good man, I think. Finally graduated to writing love songs. Didn't believe he'd ever be here, understanding what lovesick radio spam felt like on the inside of inspiration. Purgatory is a burning sensation, indecision, and he's paying for his crimes against god.
I'm here, I'm straddling a coffin. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. You, choose sleep, it's easier.
Go
Give'er.
Gun it.
That woman with her cell phone at the stop light didn't either. I don't want to be the duck that bumps into walls of a Nintendo screen, waiting for your Miniature Australian Whatever. BANG, right?
Did you hit me or am I flying away?
You had an alibi and it's smiling at me from someone else's eyes. And in dreams; I see you September and I'm losing the crystal image of your face in my head. We're decomposing.
Hit me with your shovel, kiss me, I won't feel it. You were the last person I lived for. Remind me, my flesh in flames and laying beside you, that I survived a piece of hell. Another duck, another day.
World was on fire and no one could save me but you.
What a wicked game to play.
I'm here, I'm straddling a coffin. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. You, choose sleep, it's easier.
Go
Give'er.
Gun it.
That woman with her cell phone at the stop light didn't either. I don't want to be the duck that bumps into walls of a Nintendo screen, waiting for your Miniature Australian Whatever. BANG, right?
Did you hit me or am I flying away?
You had an alibi and it's smiling at me from someone else's eyes. And in dreams; I see you September and I'm losing the crystal image of your face in my head. We're decomposing.
Hit me with your shovel, kiss me, I won't feel it. You were the last person I lived for. Remind me, my flesh in flames and laying beside you, that I survived a piece of hell. Another duck, another day.
World was on fire and no one could save me but you.
What a wicked game to play.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Hell's Clarion
Author's Note: Hell's Clarion
They say that great authors maintain a state of starvation. It's in a guide to writing somewhere, forget where. Hell's Clarion is a collection composed while starving, laying around on the stiff white carpet of my first attempt to move out and getting to know the darker side of the human stomach pit, its surrounding organs, and rug burn.
I See Dead People (Below!)
Duck Hunt
The Queen's Croquet Ground
Return to Sender
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
See. Because it's fucking tough to get one to date you. I mean, to a zombie I'm only a hunk of flesh. Braaaains. No, flesh (The love of brains is indiscriminate in the case of a real zombie, and believe me. All that matters is the quality of edible).
What happens next, Bruce? And if someone spies me talking to a dead person? Bruce? I'll tell them you're an imaginary friend. 100% idealism and wishful thinking. I can't hear you, Bruce, you're mumbling. Or are you talking at all? Loss of motor functions. Right.
The coroner and I—we share this love of cadavers. Mine's dying faster than the corpse on his table.
I threw my heart into a hearse last week and it's one aorta in the grave. Sorry.
They say that great authors maintain a state of starvation. It's in a guide to writing somewhere, forget where. Hell's Clarion is a collection composed while starving, laying around on the stiff white carpet of my first attempt to move out and getting to know the darker side of the human stomach pit, its surrounding organs, and rug burn.
I See Dead People (Below!)
Duck Hunt
The Queen's Croquet Ground
Return to Sender
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
See. Because it's fucking tough to get one to date you. I mean, to a zombie I'm only a hunk of flesh. Braaaains. No, flesh (The love of brains is indiscriminate in the case of a real zombie, and believe me. All that matters is the quality of edible).
What happens next, Bruce? And if someone spies me talking to a dead person? Bruce? I'll tell them you're an imaginary friend. 100% idealism and wishful thinking. I can't hear you, Bruce, you're mumbling. Or are you talking at all? Loss of motor functions. Right.
The coroner and I—we share this love of cadavers. Mine's dying faster than the corpse on his table.
I threw my heart into a hearse last week and it's one aorta in the grave. Sorry.
Friday, March 30, 2007
The Last
You are very swiftly becoming a two-dimensional keepsake. There used to be a store, and you'd, I don't remember. You can smell the envelope glue of an album, heavy sheets turning the forest that a child has drawn with a crayon. And a plastic coating like that bag you had over your head before she screamed, mother, poked a hole—saved you.
Someone has bitten their fingernails and raked you with them. But you, no, I don't think so. Pristine, you are meant for better things than this, that, anything, really. You'll keep yourself, you think, and it's only later that you stamp your feet, wonder, what the whimsical fuck you got yourself into. A snare—scratch and sniff.
And me? I've all-along forgotten where I put you. I am just now realizing that you're probably behind that shutter, there, under a pile of clothes—loyal to the end.
Someone has bitten their fingernails and raked you with them. But you, no, I don't think so. Pristine, you are meant for better things than this, that, anything, really. You'll keep yourself, you think, and it's only later that you stamp your feet, wonder, what the whimsical fuck you got yourself into. A snare—scratch and sniff.
And me? I've all-along forgotten where I put you. I am just now realizing that you're probably behind that shutter, there, under a pile of clothes—loyal to the end.
Christmas, Special
I wrote this over the course of two hours in a Vancouver Mall, sitting, waiting for the train, a conversation resonating. Exercise Salt-shakers.
--Ian
CHRISTMAS, SPECIAL
by Ian Goodwin
--Ian
CHRISTMAS, SPECIAL
by Ian Goodwin
EDDIE – Neurotic. Casually dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and wearing a latex Halloween mask.
MOTHER/ VIRGIN MARY – Serpentine, Frail. Wearing her Sunday best and gold jewelry. Virgin Mary costume where applicable.
TICKET ATTENDANT/ANGEL – Uniform. Angel costume where applicable.
UGLY THEATRE GOER/JOSEPH – Middle-aged, lonesome, glasses. Shepherd costume where applicable.
THEATRE MALE – Stereotype.
THEATRE FEMALE – Stereotype.
PURGATORY – Archaic. Fire-colored leotard/dance costume.
BABY JESUS – Doll prop substitutes for lack of real child.
TWO FIERY HANDS – Painted fire color.
SCENE I
MOTHER: Spawn of your father!
EDDIE: Mom-he-needs-our-tickets!
Baking Cocaine for Carly
Isn't this hell: the asphalt we strike in falling?
Dust on an old photograph
on a decaying port city,
on cars and egos, pressing their desires for haste into a single lane.
Tar and tobacco and thiamine hydrochloride, the human exhaust
and the sulfurous yellow that calls to the eye.
It sounds like my sister: a smother-smack of lip polish
the munificent spray of Versace Pink and Paris Hilton's latest,
of intoxicated daydreams,
of penitentiary doors, closing—an oven's glass.
Cake and catharsis and kindergarten coloration: the human vice.
A vice-grip icing hold, drying like wax from a one-year candle.
Because she's baking cocaine for Carly,
I'll relapse just a bit this time.
(Just for today.)
Dust on an old photograph
on a decaying port city,
on cars and egos, pressing their desires for haste into a single lane.
Tar and tobacco and thiamine hydrochloride, the human exhaust
and the sulfurous yellow that calls to the eye.
It sounds like my sister: a smother-smack of lip polish
the munificent spray of Versace Pink and Paris Hilton's latest,
of intoxicated daydreams,
of penitentiary doors, closing—an oven's glass.
Cake and catharsis and kindergarten coloration: the human vice.
A vice-grip icing hold, drying like wax from a one-year candle.
Because she's baking cocaine for Carly,
I'll relapse just a bit this time.
(Just for today.)
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Changeling
Because he is an actor
he spends an extra moment with reflections,
licking ring and forefinger
saliva keeping a side-part from
caving carnal persuasion.
Paralysis: he is his own delirium snakebite
A cadaver
dancing on a stage in someone else’s window
when they spied him.
The hypnosis of a varnished politician
placed on a bench seat,
preened,
and shot (somewhere between jive and tango)
Because he had buried something here
long returning like a dog.
No.
He saw an angel once, at the height of a stairwell,
chained to its own decaying matter.
That’s what he was.
and sacrifice the threading of his chrysalis.
Because he had buried something here
in peppermint paradise
striped symbiotic swirls of vinyl siding and floral foliage
that a butterfly couldn’t cry for.
Kip-shuck.
A shovel trying rocks and rife,
his roots and the roots of a wood,
a red eyed face
and nothing more painful
than finding nothing.
he spends an extra moment with reflections,
licking ring and forefinger
saliva keeping a side-part from
caving carnal persuasion.
Paralysis: he is his own delirium snakebite
A cadaver
dancing on a stage in someone else’s window
when they spied him.
The hypnosis of a varnished politician
placed on a bench seat,
preened,
and shot (somewhere between jive and tango)
Because he had buried something here
long returning like a dog.
No.
He saw an angel once, at the height of a stairwell,
chained to its own decaying matter.
That’s what he was.
and sacrifice the threading of his chrysalis.
Because he had buried something here
in peppermint paradise
striped symbiotic swirls of vinyl siding and floral foliage
that a butterfly couldn’t cry for.
Kip-shuck.
A shovel trying rocks and rife,
his roots and the roots of a wood,
a red eyed face
and nothing more painful
than finding nothing.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Whither Away So Early
Author's Note: Whither Away So Early
Whither Away So Early is the result of a gothic fiction English course and the theory of gothic space. It plays with a Lovecraft voice that's old enough to be its father, an even older fairytale, and a modern townhome. STET the confined style, reader; confinement is the blood (sherry?) of this story. Further:
Consider nature as oppression and artifice as a defense against oppression. It is natural to be curious and impossible to hide from the natural world what is artificial. A wolf might fool a little girl, dressed as a grandmother, but it doesn’t fool the axe of the lumberjack. Whither away so early, Little Red Riding Hood?
To Nathan. From a scrawling in the drywall.
Caffeinated beyond a biological need for sleep, Nathan, wearing socks, awaited a body temperature that would convince the shedding of his polyester bedspread. In the morning hours that crept toward a Thursday dawn, bedroom walls were the sagely gray of Dorothy's Kansas. Eve had left the television on in the sitting room outside and its malevolent whisper was passing through Nathan's open doorway.
The town-home suite was an unfurnished cement that gave hollow weight to noise and allowed conversations to extend beyond walls; allowed the mystery of human privacy, in unanimous understanding, its broadcasted revelation. Nathan knew, for example, that through layers of gyp-rock that supported his pillow there was a woman who dabbled in acoustic guitar, a stairwell, and a failing marriage. In contemporary flair, the architecture had sacrificed any desire for secrecy. As in many other communities, the lifeblood of Forest Crescent was its stream of gossip, incorporeal in that deadbolt locks and Venetian blinds were useless to ward the jaws of the rumor-mill.
Nathan folded aside the quilt and stepped into the dark on sweaty cloth. In the sitting room there was only a mug that Eve had used to sip the last of a Kahlua bottle before late evening shut her, sleepy, behind the door of the brown bedroom opposite. The television was its dormant, black self aside the shadows of modern furniture that ran the length of the carpeted floor. In absence of its dialogue drone, Nathan located the source of the whispering, like careless led on the surface of paper, as a peculiar white rectangle on the far and vacant wall. He was careful not to approach. It was assumed until now that the two-inch breadth of plaster, angling in the symmetry of an archway, was a fortification of the drywall. Where the graying surface met in a seam, a fresh, white border had been flattened to a length at which it sealed the archway with cement.
Stumbling backward in the darkness of 3:00 am, Nathan toppled a tower of cardboard used recently for storage. Here the steady whisper became an abrupt hush. The silence was cause for a panicked Nathan to cross the unfurnished room in three flighted bounds, lock his bedroom door to the grayscale of night, and plunge into the comforting warmth of a polyester bedspread.
The subtle sound of a toothpick trying its way into the lock of the bedroom doorknob brought Nathan to an upright start of goose-down and reverberating nightmares. It was five hours later and the early autumn light was peeking through the narrows of the window covering.
"Eve?"
"Breakfast." Called the door, making the nuance of an unlocking click.
"Your brother left early. I thought to bring you breakfast in bed." Chimed the voice, lower than his own but with the melody of an experienced song.
Evangela was smooth and lean and cat-like when she stepped into the room, arms balancing the precarious plated assembly of sausage and egg. The lapels of her mock Japanese robe were scarcely fastened by the lazy knot of its sash. In the room of dying plants she could have been a purple lilac, bending toward the crevices of sunlight that would spare the decay of her winter season. A taste, a quench.
“Curse him if he stays late, too. His employer has him leashed.” She ranted, and stepped to the bedside with a rattle of silverware.
"Shit. Thursday, isn't it?" Said Nathan, distracted."Ninon has errands?"
"Groceries." He told her, catching the plate in his lap and pressing a fork into the egg flesh. "You know her and sherry."
Eve spent a time in settling herself on the sofa chair. When she tossed Nathan a mandarin orange, he left the peel and the innards on the window ledge uneaten.
"Awful." She mouthed, disguising the food with a delicate hand over her mouth. "Suppose when I am old and withered I'll have more self respect than her, grace of God be it that I live that long."
"Well, if drunk means happy, Eve. You can't say no to sick grandma."
When Nathan knocked that evening, the shell of something answered Ninon's door in a flannel nightgown and yarn slippers. The preternatural moonlight on his grandmother's porch framed a quaking monster against the liquid woods on every side. Lip curling like a wild thing of the nocturnal world, Ninon made a rabid gesture for Nathan's shoulder, striking him on the red sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt. He stood, and, in the autumn chill, let her try to hug him.
Her name was skewed baby talk for 'Nonna', the Italian word for grandma. She told him once that Ninon made her sound like a French seductress. Fancy, he thought, that a woman so elegant in her graces might die to the rigidity of Parkinson's tremor. Insisting on an isolated life, Ninon's fountain of youth was two bottles and a McCain's frozen cake every Thursday. Chocolate. When she had finished an aided goblet she could move, even speak, without pressure of her crippling biology, and in that wooded refuge there was no one to judge a broken woman's talents in either.
"What is it I hear of this girl you have?" Ninon asked when there had been due time for transformation. The glass of sherry was habitually refilled.
"Eve? Ninon, she's my brother's wife." Nathan said, but he wasn't surprised by her choice of conversation.
"You two look so much alike. Doubtless you could fool her."
"They're married." He asserted. When Ninon spoke again, all suggestion of her illness had been taken by the sweet influence of cheap liqueur.
"You're taller. You're broader. He won't keep her if he drowns himself in books, you know."
"Well, she's no bigger in the belly, so you can give up on great-grandkids for the time being."
This statement silenced her. If it weren't for the look of controlled wisdom in her eyes, Nathan would have thought it the Parkinson's that had done the evil.
“And is there anything new with—?”
“No. No, there’s nothing new. I don’t know. Talk to him yourself.”
“Well, he has a new job, doesn’t he?”
“If he does, he hasn’t said anything. Call him if you like.” Nathan replied. This routine was common practice; everywhere he went there was an overwhelming interest in the menial changes of his brother’s life. It was small talk for the sake and purpose of just that, but it was killing him as it had done slowly for the last six months.
"Next week bring your brother." She told him at the door.
He nodded a liar's nod. Ninon had established every wall with a crucifix, 'house blessing', she called it. If only by proximity, the collective Jesus stare kept him from answering in full.
Where canary grass dunes became the manicured slope of fenced perfection, Nathan pulled a right and continued over the mess of speed bumps. Through the gated causeway was a civilized gathering of taupe structural frills and windows, large, like picture frames. Each dioramic house gave shadow puppet shows to the sleeping valley, their windows the free-for-all dream of any kid with a telescope. It was later than Nathan expected and his own house, lamp-less save for a flicker of light in the sitting room, wore the expression of dormancy. The hour of night provided a treble-sharp corruption to the whistle of his sunroof and to every other sound of the evening.
He stepped across the bark mulch to the entrance of Number Twenty, through the foyer, down the stairwell, and into the basking glow residing there. All was once more slumbering, out of boredom or necessity, and left Nathan to address the scrawling vendetta that stared at him from across the room: a door. Where there had been the white allusion to an archway there was now a distinct doorway, round, medieval and gothic in design. The source of the slow light was a hairline indication that some means of flashlight or lantern had been managed in the room beyond. Did he wake his brother and Evangela to include them in the terrific discovery? How in God’s name could there be a room just there without an intrusion into Ira and Karen’s property next-door?
Nathan made for the television remote and drowned the familiar whisper in trance-music videos offered on channel twenty-four. He positioned himself on the couch so that he could see the flicker of motion that twinkled in the door’s frame. After fifteen minutes, in the same panic as yesterday’s evening, he locked himself in the paper-thin stronghold of his bedroom—losing sleep to the neon allure of the numbers on his clock radio.
There is a certain charm in waking up at 2:00 in the afternoon; skipping breakfast, lunch, and submitting to the waste of a day’s productivity. Nathan never opened his blinds anymore, and so the weak orange radiance that fell through their slivers was only a reminder of nature’s guilt trip. It's called “God Speaks” when light shines that way through the clouds of a horizon. Nathan determined that his window was issuing judgment before rising, yawning, and turning the dial on an electric heater. Eve was upstairs, maybe, and would make him feel worse by showing a dazzling contrast to his pajamas. He didn’t care. Maybe he would tell her about the door, and his brother, if he was home.
“The door,” he thought, and opened his own, turning groggily into the sitting room where the unfurnished portion of the basement suite was full of uniform white tool-marks in the drywall. He dreamt it, he was sure now, and the rest of the week would go on this way. There was no doorway to be witnessed.
“Funny.” He told Eve, in the kitchen, then. “Was it three or four days that a person becomes delusional without sleep?”
She was rinsing dishes, her eyes to the wall, and he was leaning on the island counter. They were surrounded by cluttered surfaces and wilted indoor plants.
“I think four. And you can die if you don’t sleep properly for ten. I saw it on House.”
"Then I think I’m starting to die. Maybe I have the plague.”
She smiled at his reflection in the tiles bordering the sink. “You were like a log when I went into your room this morning. Consider your claim of insomnia doubted.”
“You came into my room?” He asked.
“Well, you were sleeping late. I thought something was wrong. And I needed your laundry.” She said, filling the cramped aisle of kitchen with the smell of Palmolive oranges. A bracelet and her wedding ring were laying golden on the cutting board. She had a box full of similar treasures that was hidden away from burglars in a forbidden niche of the crawlspace.
When you’re in your early twenties, time can cheat you for days at a time. Mid-week is a tip-toe relationship between hustle and laze, juggling obligations and struggling with the itch to live free for the hell of it. It was easier for Nathan in that basement suite, he knew, and his years were getting on, but the effortlessness of a sheltered lifestyle appealed to the androgens in him; he would rather sit on leather couches, get drunk and watch hockey games. This mentality governed a ruthless pace at which Thursdays came and went, as well as a sworn, blood-born burden of inherited liability. This following Thursday found him in haste, digging through the garage freezer for a battered stockpile of identical cakes that he would share in devouring when he arrived at Ninon’s. The bottles for delivery were on his passenger seat already, chilling in the overnight air.
The remainder of daylight was concealed by a brooding storm when he finally set upon the drive, hitting speed bumps at 60 kilometers. The perfect hill was lined with lamp posts, some shattered and others the quiet black of malfunction. Rabbit warrens on the opposite edge of the fence-line housed creatures that fled at the indication of notice, leaving only a bramble stare of Himalayan blackberry, prickly and irritable on all fronts. He stopped the car on the sensor at the mouth of the roadside and waited for the hallmark of Forest Crescent’s gated community to swing lethargically open.
A minute passed and the gate remained motionless, Nathan's headlights illuminating the limp iron bars that were to be, time and again, a nuisance. Slamming his door, he made his way into the rain and put his weight against the gate’s right limb. It was sleek and black like a contemporary appliance but would budge only slightly before deciding on a rattling defiance. Somewhere without the blare of a radio station, thunder sounded.
“Fuck!” he swore, vainly. “Fucking prison!”
He said this to no one, finding amusement in the idea of a natural disaster isolating all of the high-maintenance mother hens in their Columbia Cabinet kitchens. The Strata Council, a band of semi-retired yuppies who suckled subliminal monthly fees from all property owners, had heralded the gate as an ingenious method of crime prevention. A simple power outage was keeping them from their tanning appointments, and a gradual line of SUV’s crowded the asphalt slope.
It was comical, how frail the housewife empire became in the robbery of its electric vitality. Forest Crescent, as vehicles glided back to the exteriors of their garages (neither would they open for the lack of electron gold), became a husk of artificial defenses—bowing in all directions to the surrounding wild and to, in this instance, the reminder of nature’s conquest. Seven minutes of very poor driving found Nathan back at Number Twenty. He could have walked home in five, and was dejectedly irate when he called to the shadowed hall.
“Evangela, you here?”
“Power’s out.” Her voice came from a crook in the dining area. None of the clocks gave their usual night-time ambiance and he could have been a blind-man for his worth at navigation.
“We have any flashlights or anything?”
“We have … this.” She stifled, tossing the switch on a yellowed lantern. It was a dust-laden blue with a large, black carrying handle. Resulting of the decades-old flashlight was Eve’s face in a seductive gleam, corrupted by the jack-o-lantern shadows of her beauty.
Nathan touched the light-switch dial instinctively on their way downstairs, the stepwork creaking under the duo’s feet. It wasn’t until they both stood upon the throw-rug of the landing that Eve’s hands, cold as hooks, went to tickle Nathan with fear—the way a girlfriend does in a movie theatre or the way a child buries his fingers in parental pant-legs. A voiceless agreement had them both angling their heads to see, on the far side of the sitting room and in a slick of refracting light, an archway.
“Nathan!” Eve gasped.
“I know. I see it. I’ve … seen it.”
“Do you suppose?”
“What? That it leads somewhere?” He asked.
“That we should call someone. Half the neighborhood is playing cards by candlelight.”
“No. … no.” he stated, already on his way across the floor. He let his hand out behind him in a motion for Eve to give him the decaying lamp-light. In its beam, the door, never as it had been seen prior, was revealed in a splendor of ornate and gem-studded inlay. It was surely elaborate, and in his curiosity to know if it had been painted there, Nathan put his hand upon the shimmering surface. The handle at his waist was curving and cold.
“Open it.” Eve commanded. She was taken with powerless marvel and showed little reluctance in taking the last few strides into the accommodating alcove.
“You want me to?”
Without an answer, he went ahead and turned the handle in a downward motion, pulling the space-shuttle-thick archway into an open position and exposing for all its grandeur the capacity of prohibited knowledge beyond.
Evangela had her hand on his waist and her chin on his shoulder. When she gave a series of screams—not screams of surprise, but shrieks of agonizing realization—Nathan was taken by her hypnotism and a ringing in his ears. He did not know exactly what he looked upon, that pranced in the doorway to the tune of Eve’s mating roar. He would later tell the Strata Council that it was an abomination of anything natural while chicken-clucks from his audience praised the creature’s path to hell.
In this room with a single candle there was a collection of rough, matted hair that heaved like a childhood tornado. The mass of which hung from the skeletal frame of something Cro-Magnon, though in the shimmering, jeweled presence of the door it was plain to possess a snout and a lupine jaw that closed with drool. Looking like a scolded dog, it interrupted its course of stamping on an ink-spill parchment floor to stare. The whisper was a scrape of overgrown talons on nesting paperwork.
Nathan heard the sliding-glass break, then, in the manner that a soldier hears a gun-shot underwater. First an axe and then the heroically poised Fireman, Ira from next-door, bolted into the sitting room from the balcony. There was a moment’s clatter before a Good Samaritan militia had the beast surrounded and slain, shaking Nathan, holding Eve, and closing passage forever to that impossible room—where acts of Satanism birthed demons unkind to civil tradition. Nathan didn’t let his vision break with tears. The silver of the drywall seams were soaking blood, like sherry.
Whither Away So Early is the result of a gothic fiction English course and the theory of gothic space. It plays with a Lovecraft voice that's old enough to be its father, an even older fairytale, and a modern townhome. STET the confined style, reader; confinement is the blood (sherry?) of this story. Further:
Consider nature as oppression and artifice as a defense against oppression. It is natural to be curious and impossible to hide from the natural world what is artificial. A wolf might fool a little girl, dressed as a grandmother, but it doesn’t fool the axe of the lumberjack. Whither away so early, Little Red Riding Hood?
To Nathan. From a scrawling in the drywall.
Caffeinated beyond a biological need for sleep, Nathan, wearing socks, awaited a body temperature that would convince the shedding of his polyester bedspread. In the morning hours that crept toward a Thursday dawn, bedroom walls were the sagely gray of Dorothy's Kansas. Eve had left the television on in the sitting room outside and its malevolent whisper was passing through Nathan's open doorway.
The town-home suite was an unfurnished cement that gave hollow weight to noise and allowed conversations to extend beyond walls; allowed the mystery of human privacy, in unanimous understanding, its broadcasted revelation. Nathan knew, for example, that through layers of gyp-rock that supported his pillow there was a woman who dabbled in acoustic guitar, a stairwell, and a failing marriage. In contemporary flair, the architecture had sacrificed any desire for secrecy. As in many other communities, the lifeblood of Forest Crescent was its stream of gossip, incorporeal in that deadbolt locks and Venetian blinds were useless to ward the jaws of the rumor-mill.
Nathan folded aside the quilt and stepped into the dark on sweaty cloth. In the sitting room there was only a mug that Eve had used to sip the last of a Kahlua bottle before late evening shut her, sleepy, behind the door of the brown bedroom opposite. The television was its dormant, black self aside the shadows of modern furniture that ran the length of the carpeted floor. In absence of its dialogue drone, Nathan located the source of the whispering, like careless led on the surface of paper, as a peculiar white rectangle on the far and vacant wall. He was careful not to approach. It was assumed until now that the two-inch breadth of plaster, angling in the symmetry of an archway, was a fortification of the drywall. Where the graying surface met in a seam, a fresh, white border had been flattened to a length at which it sealed the archway with cement.
Stumbling backward in the darkness of 3:00 am, Nathan toppled a tower of cardboard used recently for storage. Here the steady whisper became an abrupt hush. The silence was cause for a panicked Nathan to cross the unfurnished room in three flighted bounds, lock his bedroom door to the grayscale of night, and plunge into the comforting warmth of a polyester bedspread.
The subtle sound of a toothpick trying its way into the lock of the bedroom doorknob brought Nathan to an upright start of goose-down and reverberating nightmares. It was five hours later and the early autumn light was peeking through the narrows of the window covering.
"Eve?"
"Breakfast." Called the door, making the nuance of an unlocking click.
"Your brother left early. I thought to bring you breakfast in bed." Chimed the voice, lower than his own but with the melody of an experienced song.
Evangela was smooth and lean and cat-like when she stepped into the room, arms balancing the precarious plated assembly of sausage and egg. The lapels of her mock Japanese robe were scarcely fastened by the lazy knot of its sash. In the room of dying plants she could have been a purple lilac, bending toward the crevices of sunlight that would spare the decay of her winter season. A taste, a quench.
“Curse him if he stays late, too. His employer has him leashed.” She ranted, and stepped to the bedside with a rattle of silverware.
"Shit. Thursday, isn't it?" Said Nathan, distracted."Ninon has errands?"
"Groceries." He told her, catching the plate in his lap and pressing a fork into the egg flesh. "You know her and sherry."
Eve spent a time in settling herself on the sofa chair. When she tossed Nathan a mandarin orange, he left the peel and the innards on the window ledge uneaten.
"Awful." She mouthed, disguising the food with a delicate hand over her mouth. "Suppose when I am old and withered I'll have more self respect than her, grace of God be it that I live that long."
"Well, if drunk means happy, Eve. You can't say no to sick grandma."
When Nathan knocked that evening, the shell of something answered Ninon's door in a flannel nightgown and yarn slippers. The preternatural moonlight on his grandmother's porch framed a quaking monster against the liquid woods on every side. Lip curling like a wild thing of the nocturnal world, Ninon made a rabid gesture for Nathan's shoulder, striking him on the red sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt. He stood, and, in the autumn chill, let her try to hug him.
Her name was skewed baby talk for 'Nonna', the Italian word for grandma. She told him once that Ninon made her sound like a French seductress. Fancy, he thought, that a woman so elegant in her graces might die to the rigidity of Parkinson's tremor. Insisting on an isolated life, Ninon's fountain of youth was two bottles and a McCain's frozen cake every Thursday. Chocolate. When she had finished an aided goblet she could move, even speak, without pressure of her crippling biology, and in that wooded refuge there was no one to judge a broken woman's talents in either.
"What is it I hear of this girl you have?" Ninon asked when there had been due time for transformation. The glass of sherry was habitually refilled.
"Eve? Ninon, she's my brother's wife." Nathan said, but he wasn't surprised by her choice of conversation.
"You two look so much alike. Doubtless you could fool her."
"They're married." He asserted. When Ninon spoke again, all suggestion of her illness had been taken by the sweet influence of cheap liqueur.
"You're taller. You're broader. He won't keep her if he drowns himself in books, you know."
"Well, she's no bigger in the belly, so you can give up on great-grandkids for the time being."
This statement silenced her. If it weren't for the look of controlled wisdom in her eyes, Nathan would have thought it the Parkinson's that had done the evil.
“And is there anything new with—?”
“No. No, there’s nothing new. I don’t know. Talk to him yourself.”
“Well, he has a new job, doesn’t he?”
“If he does, he hasn’t said anything. Call him if you like.” Nathan replied. This routine was common practice; everywhere he went there was an overwhelming interest in the menial changes of his brother’s life. It was small talk for the sake and purpose of just that, but it was killing him as it had done slowly for the last six months.
"Next week bring your brother." She told him at the door.
He nodded a liar's nod. Ninon had established every wall with a crucifix, 'house blessing', she called it. If only by proximity, the collective Jesus stare kept him from answering in full.
Where canary grass dunes became the manicured slope of fenced perfection, Nathan pulled a right and continued over the mess of speed bumps. Through the gated causeway was a civilized gathering of taupe structural frills and windows, large, like picture frames. Each dioramic house gave shadow puppet shows to the sleeping valley, their windows the free-for-all dream of any kid with a telescope. It was later than Nathan expected and his own house, lamp-less save for a flicker of light in the sitting room, wore the expression of dormancy. The hour of night provided a treble-sharp corruption to the whistle of his sunroof and to every other sound of the evening.
He stepped across the bark mulch to the entrance of Number Twenty, through the foyer, down the stairwell, and into the basking glow residing there. All was once more slumbering, out of boredom or necessity, and left Nathan to address the scrawling vendetta that stared at him from across the room: a door. Where there had been the white allusion to an archway there was now a distinct doorway, round, medieval and gothic in design. The source of the slow light was a hairline indication that some means of flashlight or lantern had been managed in the room beyond. Did he wake his brother and Evangela to include them in the terrific discovery? How in God’s name could there be a room just there without an intrusion into Ira and Karen’s property next-door?
Nathan made for the television remote and drowned the familiar whisper in trance-music videos offered on channel twenty-four. He positioned himself on the couch so that he could see the flicker of motion that twinkled in the door’s frame. After fifteen minutes, in the same panic as yesterday’s evening, he locked himself in the paper-thin stronghold of his bedroom—losing sleep to the neon allure of the numbers on his clock radio.
There is a certain charm in waking up at 2:00 in the afternoon; skipping breakfast, lunch, and submitting to the waste of a day’s productivity. Nathan never opened his blinds anymore, and so the weak orange radiance that fell through their slivers was only a reminder of nature’s guilt trip. It's called “God Speaks” when light shines that way through the clouds of a horizon. Nathan determined that his window was issuing judgment before rising, yawning, and turning the dial on an electric heater. Eve was upstairs, maybe, and would make him feel worse by showing a dazzling contrast to his pajamas. He didn’t care. Maybe he would tell her about the door, and his brother, if he was home.
“The door,” he thought, and opened his own, turning groggily into the sitting room where the unfurnished portion of the basement suite was full of uniform white tool-marks in the drywall. He dreamt it, he was sure now, and the rest of the week would go on this way. There was no doorway to be witnessed.
“Funny.” He told Eve, in the kitchen, then. “Was it three or four days that a person becomes delusional without sleep?”
She was rinsing dishes, her eyes to the wall, and he was leaning on the island counter. They were surrounded by cluttered surfaces and wilted indoor plants.
“I think four. And you can die if you don’t sleep properly for ten. I saw it on House.”
"Then I think I’m starting to die. Maybe I have the plague.”
She smiled at his reflection in the tiles bordering the sink. “You were like a log when I went into your room this morning. Consider your claim of insomnia doubted.”
“You came into my room?” He asked.
“Well, you were sleeping late. I thought something was wrong. And I needed your laundry.” She said, filling the cramped aisle of kitchen with the smell of Palmolive oranges. A bracelet and her wedding ring were laying golden on the cutting board. She had a box full of similar treasures that was hidden away from burglars in a forbidden niche of the crawlspace.
When you’re in your early twenties, time can cheat you for days at a time. Mid-week is a tip-toe relationship between hustle and laze, juggling obligations and struggling with the itch to live free for the hell of it. It was easier for Nathan in that basement suite, he knew, and his years were getting on, but the effortlessness of a sheltered lifestyle appealed to the androgens in him; he would rather sit on leather couches, get drunk and watch hockey games. This mentality governed a ruthless pace at which Thursdays came and went, as well as a sworn, blood-born burden of inherited liability. This following Thursday found him in haste, digging through the garage freezer for a battered stockpile of identical cakes that he would share in devouring when he arrived at Ninon’s. The bottles for delivery were on his passenger seat already, chilling in the overnight air.
The remainder of daylight was concealed by a brooding storm when he finally set upon the drive, hitting speed bumps at 60 kilometers. The perfect hill was lined with lamp posts, some shattered and others the quiet black of malfunction. Rabbit warrens on the opposite edge of the fence-line housed creatures that fled at the indication of notice, leaving only a bramble stare of Himalayan blackberry, prickly and irritable on all fronts. He stopped the car on the sensor at the mouth of the roadside and waited for the hallmark of Forest Crescent’s gated community to swing lethargically open.
A minute passed and the gate remained motionless, Nathan's headlights illuminating the limp iron bars that were to be, time and again, a nuisance. Slamming his door, he made his way into the rain and put his weight against the gate’s right limb. It was sleek and black like a contemporary appliance but would budge only slightly before deciding on a rattling defiance. Somewhere without the blare of a radio station, thunder sounded.
“Fuck!” he swore, vainly. “Fucking prison!”
He said this to no one, finding amusement in the idea of a natural disaster isolating all of the high-maintenance mother hens in their Columbia Cabinet kitchens. The Strata Council, a band of semi-retired yuppies who suckled subliminal monthly fees from all property owners, had heralded the gate as an ingenious method of crime prevention. A simple power outage was keeping them from their tanning appointments, and a gradual line of SUV’s crowded the asphalt slope.
It was comical, how frail the housewife empire became in the robbery of its electric vitality. Forest Crescent, as vehicles glided back to the exteriors of their garages (neither would they open for the lack of electron gold), became a husk of artificial defenses—bowing in all directions to the surrounding wild and to, in this instance, the reminder of nature’s conquest. Seven minutes of very poor driving found Nathan back at Number Twenty. He could have walked home in five, and was dejectedly irate when he called to the shadowed hall.
“Evangela, you here?”
“Power’s out.” Her voice came from a crook in the dining area. None of the clocks gave their usual night-time ambiance and he could have been a blind-man for his worth at navigation.
“We have any flashlights or anything?”
“We have … this.” She stifled, tossing the switch on a yellowed lantern. It was a dust-laden blue with a large, black carrying handle. Resulting of the decades-old flashlight was Eve’s face in a seductive gleam, corrupted by the jack-o-lantern shadows of her beauty.
Nathan touched the light-switch dial instinctively on their way downstairs, the stepwork creaking under the duo’s feet. It wasn’t until they both stood upon the throw-rug of the landing that Eve’s hands, cold as hooks, went to tickle Nathan with fear—the way a girlfriend does in a movie theatre or the way a child buries his fingers in parental pant-legs. A voiceless agreement had them both angling their heads to see, on the far side of the sitting room and in a slick of refracting light, an archway.
“Nathan!” Eve gasped.
“I know. I see it. I’ve … seen it.”
“Do you suppose?”
“What? That it leads somewhere?” He asked.
“That we should call someone. Half the neighborhood is playing cards by candlelight.”
“No. … no.” he stated, already on his way across the floor. He let his hand out behind him in a motion for Eve to give him the decaying lamp-light. In its beam, the door, never as it had been seen prior, was revealed in a splendor of ornate and gem-studded inlay. It was surely elaborate, and in his curiosity to know if it had been painted there, Nathan put his hand upon the shimmering surface. The handle at his waist was curving and cold.
“Open it.” Eve commanded. She was taken with powerless marvel and showed little reluctance in taking the last few strides into the accommodating alcove.
“You want me to?”
Without an answer, he went ahead and turned the handle in a downward motion, pulling the space-shuttle-thick archway into an open position and exposing for all its grandeur the capacity of prohibited knowledge beyond.
Evangela had her hand on his waist and her chin on his shoulder. When she gave a series of screams—not screams of surprise, but shrieks of agonizing realization—Nathan was taken by her hypnotism and a ringing in his ears. He did not know exactly what he looked upon, that pranced in the doorway to the tune of Eve’s mating roar. He would later tell the Strata Council that it was an abomination of anything natural while chicken-clucks from his audience praised the creature’s path to hell.
In this room with a single candle there was a collection of rough, matted hair that heaved like a childhood tornado. The mass of which hung from the skeletal frame of something Cro-Magnon, though in the shimmering, jeweled presence of the door it was plain to possess a snout and a lupine jaw that closed with drool. Looking like a scolded dog, it interrupted its course of stamping on an ink-spill parchment floor to stare. The whisper was a scrape of overgrown talons on nesting paperwork.
Nathan heard the sliding-glass break, then, in the manner that a soldier hears a gun-shot underwater. First an axe and then the heroically poised Fireman, Ira from next-door, bolted into the sitting room from the balcony. There was a moment’s clatter before a Good Samaritan militia had the beast surrounded and slain, shaking Nathan, holding Eve, and closing passage forever to that impossible room—where acts of Satanism birthed demons unkind to civil tradition. Nathan didn’t let his vision break with tears. The silver of the drywall seams were soaking blood, like sherry.
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