Everyone's least favorite fantasy series returns. For a little while. It lost the custody case and can only visit on weekends.
Chapter 21
“Epiphany”
Rhett
Seeing that long, looming, face mere inches from mine triggered something deep inside, a primal surge, a newfound will to survive. My hands left the blade and flew to the rough leather grip and I began to automatically back up, gaining distance to put the point right against the wolf’s nose. It reeked of fresh blood. What, or who did they kill this time and leave writhing on the ground as their body twisted and contorted?
It didn’t do so much as bat an eyelid at my sudden aggression. The eyes hung at shoulder-level. “Really, just go back to what you were doing, it would be easier for both of us.”
The voice wasn’t spoken at all; the wolf’s jaw didn’t move. It seemed to come from everywhere, projected straight into my mind. Peter described it before: the night he was bitten, the same black wolf spoke to him. But why could it speak and Peter and Joby couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?
“Still standing there?” he asked, noting my unresponsiveness. “You know, pointing swords at anyone is kind of rude. Just put it down and I’ll make it quick. What happened to your friends was tragic, I know, and I won’t be so careless this time.” His lips pulled back slightly, flashing the tips of his massive canines in the moonlight.
A small, dark corner of my brain told me to lay down the sword and feel his teeth against my pulsing veins as he severed them one by one. I fought the thought back and held the leather grip tighter as the hum of its steel pulsed through my blood. Anger thickened and clung in my arteries and built up pressure. Anger at Joby, anger at Peter, anger at this thing that took them away from me. I pulled the sword back into a more flexible position to swing or block any sudden attack. I could feel my muscles coil and tense as they contracted. Three more pairs of red eyes blinked into the moonlight. My throat thirsted for revenge.
“I’m not interested in dying anymore.”
“Are you really sure about that? What were you out here for?” Pairs of eyes moved to my flanks. I was surrounded like prey. “You should have heard the screams of your blond friend, all big and tall and strung out on the ground, shrieking like a little girl while we took little bits out of him to keep him screaming for as long as possible. He fell silent halfway through, so he was a bit of a bore. Or what about the brown haired one? That one was a fighter. We got a thrill hunting him down. He hid himself amongst the trees by splattering his blood everywhere. Impressively clever, so I let him go. We met him a second time, after he transformed. Tried to fight, but there was no more satisfying sound than crushing his neck between my teeth.” He pressed forward, pushing the sword closer to me. “So go ahead, sacrifice yourself, atone for their suffering.”
It was something the sword disagreed with.
There was a flash of light and blood flecked onto the blade. A small liquid line appeared under the speaking wolf’s right eye. A small, dark droplet grew at the bottom and fell into the grass. I tracked it all the way down its slow-motion descent.
The wolf glanced and winced from the wound on its face, then its eyes ignited as they burned into me. “So that’s how you want it to go, boy?”
I never really noticed the moment I had become afraid. My train of thought suddenly dissolved into a mindless echo chamber of I fucked up and I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to die, leaving no room for any other thought. But hadn’t I wished for this? Perhaps I didn’t have any idea what waited for me on the other side? Fear spread from my gut to the rest of my body. Tense muscle became limp noodles as I stumbled backwards.
They began laughing, growling. Psychotic laughter that came from everywhere and drunk on adrenaline and thrill echoed around me. My heart raced, my eyes bounced around trying to find an opening between the wolves, but somehow my body remained still and steady, ready to react. I looked like I was in control, but I was panicking inside. One slip and this tissue-paper equilibrium would be messily torn apart. Between the wolf to my left and behind me, there was a slighter wider gap than in any other direction.
I don’t know when or how the alpha decided he needed to end it, but the stalemate ended with a leaping roar that I ducked under and then ran for the treeline.
The next moment that I experienced coherently enough to understand what I was doing, branches and brush clawed at my bare skin. I was running, feet pounding the dirt, body smashing through the woods and dodging trees as they loomed ahead. The entire forest seemed to be right on my heels, turning itself inside out to get me, trying to get one hit in, trying to pull me down. I knew that the wolves could run faster than me, knew that understood the forest better than me, knew that they were fueled by the chase and driven by the hunt. I wasn’t going to let them get me.
One of my feet suddenly stopped moving and my inertia threw me onto the ground. The leaves above and behind me crashed and I lashed out with blade, not thinking about how I managed to keep holding on to it or if I knew who my assailant was or what to do. I felt resistance against the blade, something soft and fleshy that quickly gave way and emitted a yelp and tore off the way it came. The woods became very quiet after that. I sat in the darkness for a few minutes and then I picked myself up and continued running, following some invisible, magnetic path home.
The sky was still dark when I reached the back door; no more than three or four hours must have passed. But in that short span of time something strange had happened: death was something I was no longer ready for, satisfied with, there were things still needed to be done. Mixed emotions swirled in my mind, my heart. My chest heaved and I held down sobs that pulled at my throat and tears gathered up in my eyes and slid down my cheeks. I felt every speck of dirt and sweat and blood that coated my body and I felt hot and ashamed for reasons too numerous and beyond comprehending.
I didn’t carry through killing myself.
I decided to kill myself.
Cognitive dissonance was such a wonderful thing. But after standing out under the starry sky, letting the heat and uncertainty radiate out and leaving my mind clear once more, the shame of my decision to commit suicide won out. I had to keep living, whether I like it or not.
I cleaned the blood off the sword with the garden hose. The steel strangely felt in places that had been covered in black blood. Some of the blood even held on, pooling into thin, linear letters along the middle of the blade as if filling they were paint filling in engravings. By some miracle I still had the scabbard and I shoved the sword into it before the amount of magic I witnessed tonight got to my brain. I found my shirt tightly twisted around the scabbard, another small miracle.
The door opened with a relieved sigh, warm air welcoming me back home. The clock in the kitchen read four minutes to three. The sword went back up onto the mantelpiece, me to my bed. Thankfully I was sleepless. All the new questions would have manifested as some eldritch horror in my dreamscape. Why and how did the wolf talk? What was wrong with the sword? Where did the lettering come from? What did it mean? How did it harm the wolves while eight shots from a .45 didn’t do anything? Whose blood was it? Were Joby and Peter even still alive? I had no proof of their continued existence for a month.
I must have eventually fallen asleep at one point as the windows suddenly got brighter. Daylight revealed a web of red scratches and small cuts on my chest and arms and neck. More stuff to cover up, more evidence of self harm. Catharsis. Flagellation. Release of my sins. I fished a new shirt from the closet, a gray cotton button-down. I lost the heart for prints a long time ago. They felt uncomfortably loud and cheerful.
Mom was none the wiser. That or she didn’t make it obvious. Breakfast was held in silence. It was frozen hash browns, pale yellow and oily from improper preparation. Something troubled Mom, her eyes stared off into space. Did she find out where I went last night? Or was it something else? Mom kept the clinic open on Sundays. The drive to town was silent. The woods were silent. The wind held its breath. The streets of town were silent save for the rumble of the car. The town was so small there wasn’t even a church, or a sense of unity. I thought I heard a low bouncing sound coming from the trunk, the ghost of the wolf unable, unwilling, to vacate the car and my mind. It was just the suspension.
Mom pulled into the vet clinic. On the other side of the parking lot stood the white SUV, still belonging to Idaho Fish and Game. The same two agents stood beside it, leaning on the hood, expecting us. She chose a space and rolled down the window on my side, just enough for air to flow through as if I was a dog being left in a mall parking lot for hours on end. “Stay here,” she ordered before stepping out.
Through the crack in the window, I was able to pick up their conversation and watched them through the rear window and mirrors. The rabies test turned up negative because the sample was contaminated. The entire sample, the whole head, did not contain any wolf DNA. It was all human. The tall one noted that the lab sent them an angry email asking if it was some sort of sick joke. This was mixed reassurance. I wasn’t crazy, that’s for sure, but that meant that Peter and Joby were still real. They were still out there and I was responsible for them.
The bones and teeth revealed another anomaly in the wolf. The dental growth and growth in the bones showed that the wolf was at least eighteen years old, far older than what was expected in the wild. Mom suggested that they were captive, explaining their lack of fear towards humans, but the agents refuted, saying that captive wolves would have more active closer to town, even begging. They also noted that the wolf was in unbelievably good health for its advanced age. The teeth were all intact, the eyes were healthy, and there was no evidence of any age-related conditions in brain and muscle tissue. But the human DNA was troubling.
What did they think of it? They mentioned Tusk, terrible movie as it was, but Kevin Smith had nothing on the madman potentially living in the woods. It had a wolf’s skull, a wolf’s skin, but at its deepest level it was human. Perhaps it was only an anomaly, perhaps the assistant wasn’t wearing gloves. Either way, it was impossible to say that the wolves rabid. They didn’t know the wolves weren’t even wolves. It was a secret held by a select few.
Secrets. Werewolves. Dead people who weren’t dead and missing people that were still missing. Two boys loving each other in a small Idaho town. Such a thing was supposed to be impossible, the sickness should have wilted in the light of their faith and strength of community. Everyone was so insistent in their purity that they sought to suppress anything potentially or actually subversive. Joby and I always meant to confess our feelings in private but when people begin to behave out of the norm, walking together, eating together at lunch, hanging out and getting closer than hanging out, rumors get started. It started with some teachers or store owners watching us a little closer and kids at school shying away from us, but as the snow retreated further into the mountains, crueler, more direct abuse became uncovered: insults, harassment, a spring-locker door opening in my face. The school staff and other adults were complicit or collaborating. They didn’t help even when I was being shoved around right in front of them. Glares beat down me everywhere even if their eyes loosened and lips turned into a smile if I was right in front of them. Friends tried to overlook the thing that made Joby and me aliens but one by one they grew too disgusted with it and gave up, hoping to salvage their own reputations by turning on us. Soon, our only allies were ourselves.
I didn’t want to go back to Elk Crossing, but the isolation was a blessing. Out here, it was like fleeing to another planet. Quiet, alone, no one caring about who we were because there was no one. But that left no one to accept us either. The quiet tormented me more than the hate. I envied the wolves. They didn’t care who you were. Wolves were wolves. There were no Protestant or Catholic or gay or straight or normal or abnormal wolves. They are animals, but they are such better people than us. We allowed our minds to corrupt ourselves, build walls that were impossible to build physically but we acted like they existed because everyone imagined it in our minds. We had beautiful, open, curious minds but chose to close them off from the smallest challenges.
I often wondered it if was better if Joby and I just called it off and fit back into the mold and we were tempted more than often to become normal again. The hospitable, friendly normal that just underneath its skin boiled with hate and rigidness. But we were too far gone, pushed into a pit and taunted with frayed rope ladders of false acceptance. Society wasn’t going to just allow two outcasts back in, and so Joby and I did the same. We shouldn’t have to change to be accepted, but being allowed back to through the only open door I knew by just doing one thing was so tempting. He knew it too. But somehow I found the resolve to hold onto my anchor rather than risk landing on a rocky shore even if the waves were forty feet high. Now my anchor was gone, and the waves were taking me closer to shore and out to sea based on its current mood. I needed to find the chain again but I just didn’t know how.
The driver’s door popped open and Mom dropped into the seat and slammed the door. “Well, that was that; this whole thing just keeps getting stranger and stranger,” she huffed. I heard the SUV’s door slam in the distance and it trundled away behind us. We sat in silence. I wondered what she thought about the revelations. She didn’t look like her world had been shattered, just sick of how long this has been going on. I guessed that if I had an actual life I would try to get forget this fiasco as fast as I could.
After a while she got out of the car and motioned me to do the same. She fished her clinic keys out of her pocket and handed me a few dollars to buy lunch or something to entertain myself with, assuming that they were open at this hour on a Sunday. It wasn't so much that there was church on Sunday - there was no church in town at all - but it seemed that people here truly respected the Sabbath and kept their prayers private as well.
Lucas’s shop was closed, business was essentially dead on Sundays. Every other storefront, all six of them, was a row of dark windows and ‘closed' signs. Except for the Rabid Moose, the good-old general goods store that was a staple of all small stereotypical western town. It had to stay open on the off-chance of snagging anyone lost or stupid enough to come here. The Hansens’ mud-splattered SUV was the only car in the lot, parked askew and sprawling across two spaces. A small flicker of hope danced in my chest, hoping that it was Hank’s signature poor driving but the idea was gone before it even properly manifested. Hank is dead, and it was all my fault.
I stepped inside. Meats of various species teased my nose and mingled with other, more artificial scents in store: cotton, cleaners, plastic. They were carried by cold, humid air from a humming swamp cooler from somewhere above me. I hated humidity. The mugginess clung to my throat. In the back of the store, the top of a person’s head floated in front of the refrigerators, topped in messy black hair and tilting back and forth as if reading book spines behind the glass. Muddy boot prints danced across the linoleum and wandered into the back room. The metal table with the heat lamps to keep the meals-to-go warm was at the back of the store, in between the refers and register. I’ll get a good look at which Hansen the browser would be over there. A part of me desperately hoped it would be Hank, even though I’ve seen him being lowered into the ground and dirt shoveled over him. Just before I passed the last shelf, the thick smell of alcohol reached my nose and burned the inside of it. It’s Mr. Hansen. His hair and beard were a twisted mass of black, oily strands going gray in some places. His skin was flushed red and lined from stress and sorrow. His eyes were dull and plain like a painted wall. His features only projected sadness. Before me was someone completely defeated and destroyed, grief personified. I was almost jealous.
I grabbed one of the little warm plastic containers with a sandwich inside and kept my back to Mr. Hansen as I waited for Mr. Velez to come out and ring me up. Behind me a fridge door opened with a puff of cold air and there was a clank of bottles. For something that wasn’t my business I was kind of scared of what might be in store. It’s illegal to purchase alcohol while intoxicated in Idaho. You can’t even buy it sober on a Sunday. Footsteps fell into line behind me, waiting. I couldn’t tell if it was patient or not, I didn’t want to look at him anymore even though we shared the same sorrow. His alcohol-laced breath lightly pushed at the back of my neck. I needed to check out and get out of here. I don’t want to see what was going to happen when Mr. Hansen stepped up to the register. Velez had a breathalyzer under the counter, but I’m not sure it that would stop him.
Mr. Velez finally plodded around from the restaurant portion of the building, crossing the front of the store. His cowskin boots left a thin track of mud across the floor. He got behind the counter and charged me six dollars and dropped the sandwich in a paper bag and I moved to get out of the store as fast as I could before Mr. Hansen tries to purchase alcohol on a Sunday while drunk.
“Hey, hold on a bit,” Velez called out behind me. I froze.
He held out a few bills and coins in an outstretched hand but he was saying something else in his eyes. His was fighting something inside him, working up courage to let it out. He bit his lower lip.
He sighed. “Change.”
“Thanks.” I pushed through the doors and back into the warm, air. Mountain air, crisp, clean at any temperature. I drank it in deeply, clearing my lungs off the clammy, chilling smoke, releasing the tension in my chest. The doors opened again and a set of boots tapped the concrete and my chest caved in from shock. I kept looking straight ahead as Mr. Hansen stood beside me on the edge of the sidewalk staring at nothing, reeking of alcohol.
He said nothing and I said nothing. Both of us unwilling to speak first, both not knowing what to say. I spotted a picnic table not far down the sidewalk and saw my opportunity to escape. As soon as I turned away Mr. Hansen spoke. “Wait, uh, I need to talk to you.”
I dared not face him, continuing to walk to the picnic bench in silence and bracing for a liter of lager to crash into the back of my head. He followed me, the slow gait of his worried footfalls carrying him to my table and he sat down across from me so I could see him. His blue button-down shirt was stained with three different colors and wrinkled. He was wearing an unseasonable leather jacket to warm the cold heart inside him. His eyes had flecks of white and blue like weak ice already breaking up. His sad features repulsed and attracted at the same time. I wanted to both get away from this sorrow and comfort it.
“What do you want to tell me?” I turned the bag over and fished the sandwich out of the container, still warm and juicy. “I’m listening.”
My elbows played with a piece of peeling wood on the side of the table, waiting for him to speak. “It’s tough. Maybe we’re just a little too out in public.” So much for that. “Are you, uh, willing to talk somewhere else? I’m not comfortable with talking out here, but I really need to get it off of my chest.”
A part of me was curious and another part of me didn’t want to be burdened with more sorrow. Saying no was still an option. “Where?”
“If we could talk at my house, that would be great.” He got up and walked back to his SUV. I noticed a six pack of cans swinging by his leg as he strode. He got into his car and drove out of the lot. Maybe the alcohol was just on his clothes.
I looked back at the clinic down the street. Mom wouldn’t like me running off, but that dream from so long ago told me that Hansen had answers. But what if he didn’t? He seemed just as clueless as I was, ignorant of the hows or the whys but only aware of what’s going on. Perhaps he only wants to talk. We will only talk. I knew the footpath through the woods to his house.
The old logging roads took me past the Patinov’s sitting at the front of its cul de sac of rented cabins. I saw Anna standing on the porch, staring off into space. I thought about going up to her, but what would be the point? What would we talk about? I watched her as I moved along the treeline. She never noticed me, she kept her eyes forward, slim figure leaning on the railing, looking, waiting with pale, dull blue eyes. Waiting for her brother to come back to her, stepping out of the woods lithe and strong, dirty blond hair curling over his broad, tanned shoulders, standing on two legs. He had to be in two legs. The real Joby. As if through telepathy her chest sighed at my thought of his name, and she rested her head on her arms. That put her head in the light, freckled skin glowing softly. The path snaked up the slope, deeper into the woods, and I lost sight of her among the trees.
It was a short walk to the Hansen house after that. Somehow it looked gloomy even in the bright afternoon sun. The grass grew haphazardly in tufted bunches. The entire structure seemed to sag as if affected by some negative energy. Hansen’s SUV rested under a leaf-coated carport despite it only being late July. The windows were dark and ivy strung up and down and across the the brick walls and sideboarding, accurately reflecting a person who no longer cared about life much less yard work. The boards of the porch creaked and sighed, breathing dust as I walked over to the front door and gave it a solid rap.
A thumping sound emanated through the door, gaining in volume and strength as the source of it approached. It stopped right behind the door. I found myself staring at the wood in front of me, looking at every whorl, line, crack, chip in the paint hoping to find a gap just wide enough to look through. It had a nice cherry finish, slightly weathered from the harsh Idaho winters, but there was no gap to be found. The spyhole was one-way only.
The thumping shifted to my left and there was a rustling of curtains in the window there, but it stopped before I peeked around for a look. The woods behind me were oddly quiet.
Then the door clicked as the deadbolt retracted and the doorknob rattled and the door pulled back into the darkness. Hansen stood in the portal, half covered by the door, revolver in hand.
“It's you,” he said. “You’re quick.”
“It's not like I have anything better to do.”
“Come in.” And I did.
The interior was just as dark as the windows implied. Sunlight filtered through the blinds and curtains in dusty beams and casted everything inside shades of blue and gray like a noir film. Hansen dumped his revolver into a basket on the coffee table. I picked up right behind him, flipping open the cylinder. Empty. I flipped it back and replaced it.
He wordlessly bade me to sit down on the couch as he disappeared into the kitchen. There was a yellow glow of light and sigh as the fridge opened and closed and Hansen came back with two cans of beer. He sat opposite me, the wrinkles clearly crossing his skin in the monochrome darkness. His hair curled and twisted in a million different ways. The revolver sat between us, grip facing the ceiling, barrel pointed at some disc cases and keys. Brass house keys, old-fashion keys, steel car keys with black plastic with the Volkswagen logo - Hank’s car keys.
“It’s not loaded,” he said softly. He bent over and popped a can open. He left it on the table.
“I know.”
“It’s unloaded because I keep on thinking about killing myself. It’s a strange feeling, isn’t it? Your mind is torn. You’ve either done too much damage or you can hope that you can fix it. I was veteran of Desert Storm. Marines. If there was one thing they taught you in the service, it’s that the fight is never over. But what if you were going to lose either way? What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I didn’t know either, so I kept going. No direction, just going somewhere. Medically discharged for ‘complications’. DU gun runs danger close gave me something like a milder version of radiation poisoning. I met Sarah in the hospital, she was a nurse and we fell in love with each other. Even with the risks, she gave me two beautiful, perfect children and helped me find a job as a ranger here in this beautiful country. Peace and quiet, maybe some intriguing mystery over the eleven years we’ve been living here but that’s all part of the wildness of it all, right? And then one year I lost my daughter.” He sighed, his eyes wet with the shame of being a terrible father.
“I spent nine years searching for her, holding on to the hope I could somehow find her, somehow bring her back. Nine year hoping that she remembered us, longer than she’d been with us. I was obsessed … and I let that obsession consume me. Leave no one behind, especially your family. And it destroyed me. It destroyed my family. It killed my son and drove away my wife. No. I did. I did. At least Sarah had the sense to give up and leave but I … can’t.”
I was the one that set this train wreck back into motion, but I didn’t have the strength to admit it.
“What is there left for me?” He produced a single .357 shell from his shirt pocket, rolling it in his fingers. “Answer me.”
“I don’t know.” You still have your life, but this much damage? Was it really worth continuing?
“But how can I live with myself now? After I’ve destroyed everything? I’ll let you know, I’ll let you know. Don’t let grief destroy you. You and Joby were close, I know, but holding on is such a stubborn, terrible thing.”
I still wanted to hold on. I knew he was out there, but his return seemed increasingly unlikely. Hansen took the revolver and opened the cylinder, loading the shell and snapping the cylinder closed. I knew what he was going to do. I wanted to stop him, but I didn't know how to say it and if I did I wouldn't have the strength.
Hansen got up, looked at me one last time, and walked out the back. I sat there, listening to his footsteps. The door.
A single bang from behind the house.
Cowards. All of us.
Submitted January 24, 2016 at 12:08AM by morgisboard http://ift.tt/1SDYcK1 HFY
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