A-Sides

by Victor Allen

  **********

  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, all art is surface and subtext, and the artist dives beneath at his own peril. Mark Wright understands what it is like to lose himself in his art, to go too deep, to cut to the bone and all the way to the cancerous growth of an artist's obsession. Nothing and everything is real: some things too false, some things, like an ex with an ax to grind, too murderously tangible in his fantasyland. The reach of The Lost Village is long, its appetite mean. Nobody would get out alive…

  Available at www.wandilland.com

  Wandil Land

  By

  Victor Allen

  Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

  From Wandil Land...

  October 14

  Summer's fleeting span had passed by the second week of October, bespoken by the yellowing of the leaves on the now fruitless pear trees. As if in compensation, apples hung in heavy, pulsing bunches. Patches of red had erupted like small fires in the Maple trees. When he had gotten up this morning, the water flowing in his sink had been cold, unwarmed by the length of pipes that now ran through the earth which had finally given up its summer heat. At night the chill came on more quickly. The moon, it seemed, had been full forever, rising red and burning bright silver by midnight, but still unable to dim the stars that now shone through air clear of summer haze.

  The first pumpkins and sweet potatoes had come in and the corn was gone, the brown shocks now dry as kindling in the fields. White potatoes were plentiful, but peaches and plums were small and scarce. Scuppernongs and Muscadines (what his mother had always called “bullets”) were coming on strong. The second growth of cabbage had matured into dense, heavy heads, a little yellower now, but bug free. A surfeit of edible, fall squash glutted the fields. There were bright orange Hubbard squash, white ten toes squash, buttercup, butternut, spaghetti, acorn, and turban squash. Decorative gourds had begun to appear around the town, hanging from porch awnings and scattered about on tables. All the berries were pretty much gone and David had realized as early as three weeks ago that summer was over when the watermelons had disappeared. What came next were the cold weather crops; turnips, and collards, and rutabagas and winter wheat.

  The next cross quarter festival was just over the horizon. The Big One. Samhain, Wilma called it. Halloween, Whisper Storm called it, with that familiar, dour note in her voice. God knew, the woman would complain if you hung her with a new rope.

  He had slipped away that morning while Wilma was busy. He had managed to avoid a return to the Rose of Sharon tree and felt he could live without seeing it again for a dozen lifetimes. But there were other mysteries in this town yet to explore. His daughter was here, his wife had made her life here, and maybe he was kidding himself in believing that his own life lay anywhere else but here. But he couldn't dismiss the gentle warning Jerry Potter had given him. Potter was a man who was probably at the end of his best years, his story told in the red snaps of broken capillaries in his eyes and his unsteady hands and sallow complexion, but David wasn't willing to dismiss all of his experience from his good years so quickly.

  What David really wanted was to see what lay at the end of Yankee Burying road. He wanted to form his own impression of the place without Wilma's all knowing voice in his ear.

  He picked his way down the unused trail that wove toward the northeast corner of the farm lands. The wind that blew through the variegated leaves of the trees was cool and dry, though the sun was out. Here, there were no tended fields and somewhere unknown, but always near, the cairns of Avalon. The woods were wild and barbaric. He felt watched, if by nothing other than the animals that lived here. He was trespassing into the abode of some elemental creature; something greater than himself.

  Just as he was about to come out at the end of Yankee Burying Road, something made him look up to his right. He saw a fox at the edge of the forest, its bat ears perked up, looking at him like a keenly alert dog. Its eyes were wide and liquid as it regarded him, sitting still as stone. David stopped. He had seen many a dead fox on the side of the road, but this was the first live one he had ever seen. He felt a little pang of wonder. The fox turned and kind of whipped away, moving like a leaping mongoose, its puffy tail trailing, and vanished into the woods. It was a quick, catlike movement that caught David off guard. That same sixth sense that had caused him to look up in the first place dragged his gaze to the left. A yearling deer, antlerless, stared at him silently. It grazed a bit, looked up, grazed a little more, then looked up again. Large, brown, wet eyes looked at David with an almost human expression in them and David's heart stumbled. He heard a grating, chuffing bellow – a scary sound if you didn't know what it was- and the deer bounded into the woods, heeding the call of the buck for its herd. He could vaguely see their bodies moving through the trees. The way the animals had regarded him made David think of stoic Spartans guarding the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian masses, as if human souls inhabited the bodies of the animals. Wilma had spoken obliquely of reincarnation and David almost believed the deer could be Jeannie, free at last from the miserable bonds that had bound her in life; free to run and live in a place where she wasn't hunted.

  It was a weird feeling he just couldn't shake.

  As he stepped out of the woods, he wasn't sure what to expect, but what he found at the end of Yankee Burying road was more horrific than the Rose of Sharon tree.

  The first artifact wasn't so bad, but its sheer size was intimidating. Planted perfectly upright was a sturdy crucifix built from Ash. Sparse, fall parched grass crunched under his feet at its base. It jutted twelve feet into the sky with a crosspiece at least six feet wide. It was massively thick, a foot and a half in diameter. It's gray wood was glass slick and must have been over a hundred years old.

  But beyond this lay the real horror.

  Growing in six concentric circles for a diameter of fifty yards were vast Oak trees, their trunks as smooth and limbless as telephone poles. They had either grown or been planted in geometric precision. Each was a perfect sixty feet tall, their leafy crowns sprouting directly from the tops of their untapered trunks in mushroom like parasols that interlocked in a visually impenetrable canopy. At the base of each tree was a leaning, gray marker. Etched on the markers, in the same white markings as the stones at the Rose of Sharon tree, were crude crosses and the names and ranks of the luckless, Yankee sailors that had met their deaths here.

  Jim Ambrose, Seaman, June 5, 1864.

  Evan Ball, Yeoman, June 5, 1864.

  Civil war sailors, most likely part of the Yankee blockade, better than two hundred, all counted. Invaders or castaways, their fate had been the same. Shaking his head, David made his way through the brooding giants toward the center of the circle, noting with unresolved horror the old, sun-washed bones protruding from the midst of the hearts of the trunks. A half a skull with its jawbone open and filled with the growth of the trunk -as if it had taken a huge bite from the tree and couldn't quite manage it- jutted out. One eye socket was buried, the other gazing out hollowly in empty air. David saw the green waters of the Atlantic beyond through the empty space between cheekbone and jaw. On some of the trees, the bare flat surfaces of ribs girdling the trunks barely peeked out from the overspreading wood. As he drew deeper into the living relics, he saw long bones -leg and arm bones- wrapped in living, wooden flesh. The occasional, salt tarnished brass button gleamed dully from the imprisoning bark. He got the uneasy impression that the trees had, as saplings, been lopped off, their ends sharpened, and these hapless victims impaled and left to decay. The only thing that kept him fascinated instead of frightened was the fact that – whatever had happened here- had happened well over a hundred years ago.

  In the center of the circles he discovered a burrow constructed of broken limbs and driftwood. It was seven feet in diameter and seemed to blend into the ground like the den of some vulpine animal. He stuck his head into its black maw to get a look around and was immediately driven out by its wild, musky smell.
A smell of rotten meat and putrefacting vegetable matter. But he had seen enough to realize the den was constructed around a partial section of the ancient, busted ribs of the Yankee vessel. Most of the craft had been eaten away by worms and the bulk of the derelict was either broken up out in the surf or buried in the ground, but he had seen dull brass fixtures and black, rust thickened iron castings scattered in the darkness of the den.

  Outside in the fresh air, David moved around to the rear of the den. Previously hidden from view, the black corpus of the boat's anchor was half buried in the soil, the links of its heavy chain trailing from its eye and rooting into the earth. With all the care of a prize winning artisan, someone had carved a sign out of a glass smooth slab of wood and had lashed it to the iron anchor with a chain as stiff and rust coated as the anchor itself. It hung there lopsidedly with a faintly, sardonic air.

  IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.

  He pushed on, growing cold from the inside. He recognized the phrase, but didn't know what it meant. It was as mysterious and unsettling as the carved word Croatoan from Roanoke Island.

  He was now eager to come out on the other side of the eerie killing ground and get out on the sand and into the sunlight. The surf crashed fifty yards away and he walked out onto the sand, feeling the arid breeze drying the sweat on his brow. His forehead furrowed as he saw a cylindrical post about four feet high with something atop it planted in the sand at the surf's edge, too far away to see detail, but obviously something man made.

  He plodded warily over to the... whatever it was. As he scanned the beach from side to side he saw two more of the things, one each on his left and right, planted twenty five yards from each other on either side of the center post. As he approached the demarcation line at the furthest incursion of the surf, he looked the first of the things face on.

  Fastened to the top of the straight, three inch diameter post with cruciate bindings of vines was a heavy, elaborately carved totem. Though vines couldn't rust or tarnish, if they had been able to, the ones binding this totem would have.

  The totem itself was of a triple faced woman, carved untold years ago out of dense Oak. As he faced it with his back to the surf, the carving looking to the left, or East, was a smooth, young woman, the face unwrinkled and the eyes wide and curious. The middle face was a mature woman with a few creases in her face, the forehead lined, the jowls beginning to droop, the deep set eyes looking wisely toward the north. The third face, gazing to the west, what Wilma called the Otherworld, was a wizened old crone, wrinkled and sagging, the nose grown long and hooked, the chin pointed. Nothing could approach from the sea without being observed by one of the faces of the triple goddess. The only way to approach the triple goddess was from behind, the town side. As he had felt at the Rose of Sharon tree, this eerie, spooky relic made his soul tremble. David extended his hand and let his fingers roam over the intricate, wind and sand eroded features of the carving.

  “Stanton Dru,” A voice said from behind him. “She calls it Stanton Dru.”

  David whirled around, the sudden shock from this intrusion making his heart hammer. Whisper Storm had appeared from nowhere. She stood before him, back draped by the churning ocean waters, dressed today not in her habitual black, but in something like a gray, sack dress. Like a beachcomber, she was barefoot, her face clear of makeup and unhealthily white.

  She seemed tired, less combative today, the fire in her eyes not even embers. Quickly gathering his wits, David saw her wet footprints tracking down the beach, parallel to the surf. She had walked up on him unawares while he was deep in observation of the totem. He hadn't warmed to the woman; couldn't say he really liked or disliked her, but he felt no great joy at seeing her. She passed by David and walked further inland into the shade of the trees. David followed her until she stopped.

  “Stanton Dru,” David repeated. “What is it?”

  “It's her place. Their place. You thought it was all a harmless bit of folklore, some ancient culture kept alive by one dotty woman. Now you know what they're capable of. They wanted Rose and she fought them. Now they want your daughter and they're using you to get to her. She needs to be baptized. She needs to be washed in the blood of Christ.”

  She looked up at David, her eyes dreamy and misty behind her glasses. “We could do it here, purging her soul in the very shadows of her bloody, Pagan idols. Jesus will still the waters, like He did at the Sea of Galilee.”

  David put a calming hand on her forearm, willing himself to be patient.

  “Not now, Miss Storm. This isn't the time or the place to discuss this. You can't really take this seriously. This isn't the eighteenth century.”

  Whisper cut her eyes to the impossibly perfect circles of trees where silent skeletons screamed their death agonies endlessly into living wood.

  “Even after this, you still think it's a joke?”

  “Not a joke. History. A hundred and fifty years have passed. Whatever happened here and whoever did this are long gone. This place is no different from a battlefield where the guns have gone silent.”

  Whisper seemed to debate saying something, then remained silent. Perhaps her more docile demeanor was her attempt at a peace offering. At her age, she hadn't made the arduous trek for her health. She meant to speak to him alone.

  “It happened during the War of Northern Aggression,” she said, looking at David. “The rebels knew better than to use our little town as a staging area for the blockade runners. Some things endure even through the horrors of war. But not the Yankee sailors. Maybe their vessel ran into difficulties; maybe they wanted to invade the town. Who knows? But their biggest mistake was not in being Yankees. It was in being Christians. Maybe they saw the abominations carried on by the bloody Irish in this town. Maybe they tried to put a stop to it with their guns and cannon. It didn't matter.” Whisper swept her arm around at the brooding trees.

  “This is what happened. Men of pure Christian blood. English blood, and they were martyred for it. From that day forward, the sentinels of the Triple Goddess were placed here and none have bothered us since.”

  “Triple Goddess?”

  “Their unholy trinity. Birth, death, renewal. Earth, air and water. Past present and future. Ignorance, learning, wisdom.” She gave David a sly look.

  “You think me a backwards old woman, intolerant and blinded by my faith. They see me as filled with typical Christian greed. Life isn't enough for us, they say. We want eternity, too. But I'm no fool. I know my enemy.”

  “How can you know all this,” David asked. “Certainly what happened here was horrible, but horrible things happen in war.”

  Whisper regarded him knowingly. “You saw the sign on the anchor? Do you know what it means?”

  “No.”

  “It was a sign given by God to the Roman general Constantine, the first Christian emperor. There was a great civil war in Rome in the year 312 with Constantine and Maxentius vying for control of the empire. Camped out the day before the ultimate battle and outnumbered by the legions of Maxentius, Constantine saw a flaming Cross of crucifixion written across the sky by God's finger and the words 'In hoc signo vinces' written on it. That night he ordered his legions to paint the sign of the cross on their shields and the next day his army emerged victorious.”

  “And,” David prompted. “What does it mean?”

  “'By this sign we conquer,'” she said simply.

  David recalled his uncomfortable impression that the sign was mocking. The sign of the cross hadn't been enough to save the Yankee sailors. That made him think of the den he had found and he wondered if Whisper knew anything about that.

  “It's the lair of the Green Man,” she told him. “Their all encompassing deity. I had hoped he was finally gone, but I've seen him from time to time, skulking through the fields, watching from the trees. But my God protects me and it's my Christian duty to protect others, to warn others, no matter what they think of me. This town is the last unspoiled place in this country and once
the heathens are stamped out, it will be the closest thing to heaven we have on earth.” She paused. “Someone has to save the children, even if their parents won't.”

  “Miss Storm,” David said, not rising to the bait. “I've been to the cross quarter festivals. There's no sacrifice going on, nothing evil. Can't you just let Wilma be?”

  “Do you think they would let you see it? An outsider? I said they were evil, not stupid. They work in darkness, but they hide in the open.” She grasped David's right hand with her left and traced an outline around the caduceus on his forearm, his almost new tattoo. “They've placed their devil's mark on you already. But you have the makings of a good, Christian man. I can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice when you sing in church. But your soul is at risk here. And your daughter's soul.” She gently pressed David's arm away from her grasping hand. “Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Moore. You might just get it. I'll pray for you.”

  She abruptly pushed past David and began to trudge away the way she had come.

  “Miss Storm...”

  She didn't acknowledge his call as she walked away from the relics of Stanton Dru and back up the beach. He watched her as she slowly shuffled her way up the sand, never looking back.

  Once out of sight, David took a last look at the disturbing totems of the triple goddess. He wanted to get out of here, but he couldn't make himself go back into the sunless ruins of Stanton Dru and past the lair of the Green Man.

  He walked back along the beach, following in the wet footprints of Whisper Storm.