“What we gonna eat out here?”
“Whatever comes our way. Squirrel, coons, chestnuts, all the plants and bounty of the land Our Lord provides. Simple. Real simple.”
Leeda walked along a blossom covered path, her ears lullabied by water nymph songs. She saw eyes watching her from behind bushes ahead, and paused. As she approached the seductive eyes that looked at her, a cloven hoof slid from behind the bushes, followed by a bristle-haired leg. The aroma of a restive animal beguiled her senses and she continued toward it. When the bushes spread before her, the naked faun, goat up to the waist, man or almost man the rest, smiled enticingly, and moved aside for her to be with him.
In the grotto, agitated with pleasure, Russell’s rhythm increased, a different nymph coupled to him, while others by him hummed to the playing lyre.
In the soothing pool, his checks ripe cherry from pleasure, Gus floated on his back. His arms rested over nymphs floating along his sides, as another daintily traveled upon him.
Nathan ran through the forest, its prickly paths seeming to open as he approached. Playful nymphs he chased ran before him. When he passed into a green knoll, the naiads broke into dance, the mountains sang, and the surrounding trees’ leafy limbs swayed to the honeyed music. The lasses took his hands, and tumbling, several danced, and several others fanned the embers they enticed.
On a quilt of soft pine needles, Leeda knelt astride her lover. But for his satyr’s horns, his face was the face of Nathan. He smiled not as she would imagine Nathan to, but mischievously, and she was not displeased. However it had happened, she was with him somehow. Her heated desire for him had inflamed as long as she’d known him. She hoped it would not cool. The mountain smells, its sprigs, rivers and soils, and her desired animal before her, all mixed. They said Earth you are good and you care about me, and you give me your blessings and fulfill my hopes. The smell of the not far water, the mossy grotto, the drying bodies on the heated ledges, all thick with life and love as she imagined, passed through her head hammering with delight, and pulsed down to her belly and lower back, and warmly melted there.
Overcome with powers of delight that they’d never experienced, the forest visitors plied without end with nymphs and faun. They did not sleep, they did not rest, they did not tire. The day did not end and night did not come to cool them or darken their thoughts. The maidens danced and played, sung and strum stringed instruments. The faun played his flute. His songs summoned his own playful soul mate to his place, where aroused they would enjoy one another to the peaks of their desire.
Russell’s masculine powers in the grotto did not weaken, just as they did not for any of the yulen males. Instead, they each grew to know and expect the power of seven. None had ever failed, but they’d never know such pleasure from the acts that men and woman engaged in. It was a revelation. It was an awakening none of them expected or imagined. To know pleasure as men and women did, they had wondered of but never understood. In fact, they had thought it rather worthless, as it contained no value for personal survival. Suddenly, they thought, in the delicious pool’s waters—how wondrous!
On the warming stone ledges, how dear and gently the place received their aches. In the grotto, the nearby meadow, the satyr’s hidden rest, the surrounding woods that soothed with nature’s music, they lost their pain and concerns. The discovery of bodily pleasures that men and women knew, what a gift, but how and who was responsible—what god—not that it mattered.
Not all the power of yulen, not the power of what they sought, not their escape from torment the end late season allowed, nothing in their lives had prepared them for the luxury they experienced. All that Leeda wondered was, was this love? If so, had they fallen in love with the creatures of the forest, or with the forest itself?
As the helmsman of their journey recovered from a rest upon the drying rocks, and he looked again to embrace the water nymphs frolicking and calling him from the inviting pool, he heard a scream. A chill went down his body. He suddenly became cold. The scream echoed from the grotto, but only the lissome nymphs played there and called to him. A cloud passed, the first he saw all day. The arm he leaned on grew weary and slid along the slate, and he sensed sleep coming to his closing eyes. All went dark, and just before it died, he heard his name, and then his mind say I am cold. . . . “Nathan,” he heard said again. “Nathan, get up.” Someone stood on the ground next to him. He saw the man’s boots, legs. It was Gus’ voice, he heard. “Nathan, let’s go.” Gus said.
Nathan stood from the cold slate rock he rested on.
“We fell asleep,” Gus said.
“Some sleep,” Sammy said, standing next to Gus.
“Crazy dream,” Nathan said, rubbing his temples.
“The plant,” Gus said. “The berries Hain had us ingest. Hallucinogenic. You hallucinated.”
“We all did,” Leeda said, looking peeved.
“Didn’t happen?” Nathan said, trying to shake his fog.
“Whatever it was that you remember it was a dream. Pipe dream,” she said. “A pleasant, fantasized hallucination the cunning Mr. Hain no doubt had reason for. He drugged us.”
“We were drunk, Nathan,” Gus said. “Drunk like men.”
“And they want to cure alcoholism?” Sammy said.
“Alright,” Nathan said. “We were intoxicated, but it’s over. Pretty dreams maybe. I don’t know for the rest of you but—”
“Oh definitely pretty, Nathan,” Sammy said. “For you, Leeda? Did you dream of me?”
“She certainly looks sufficiently irritated to have dreamed of you, Sammy,” Gus said, stepping off the slate rocks to follow Nathan and Leeda.
“I’m certainly not feeling any better for it,” Sammy said following.
“And Sammy, you don’t look it,” Leeda said. “You’re in late season, aren’t you?”
“Maybe, no, I don’t think so. And I’m so sorry I didn’t provide everyone with my calendar before we left. Shoot me. I never expected this trip to last more than a long weekend. Gus’ famous test, I imagined, as I think everybody else, several days effort, not the trek to—my late season. But in any case, Leeda, I’m not in late season.”
“But you are,” she said. “Nathan, Gus, did you see him?”
“You are in late season, Sammy. Don’t you feel it?”
“No. No. Not really,” Sammy said confused.
“Well you are,” Nathan said, stopping and looking at him. “If we had a mirror, you’d see.”
“Look at your hands,” Leeda said. “Your thinned skin, fingers noticeably bony, the gnarled wrists. Your face, if you could see it, obvious. Eyes protruding, sockets starting to recede, your hair thinning.” She reached and easily pulled out a tuft of his hair. “Skin’s yellowed, liver-like spots, wrinkles all over. Open your mouth . . . Yes, teeth starting to rot. You’re in late season. Admit it.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“Oh . . . Oh . . . Oh!” Gus said, looking at his device. “We have been in these woods for nearly three weeks!”
“Three weeks . . . ,” Leeda said unbelieving.
“You sure, Gus?” Nathan said.
“Over two weeks. It’s why Sammy’s so changed and—”
“Russell! Where’s Russell?” Nathan said.
“Russell,” Gus realized.
“Russell!” Nathan called.
“Russell! Russell!” they chimed. “Russell!” their calls echoed, not over a small pool and grotto, but over a lake. “Russell!”
“Oh! Oh no! Over there!” Leeda pointed beyond to fallen tree trunks jutting from shore into the water.
They ran along the edge of the lake. Taking long tree branches, they extended them into the water beside the decaying log where a fully dressed body floated face down. Slowly they pulled the body onto the shore. It was Russell, not that they could tell by his face when they turned the body over. The face was gone, features eaten, the hanging flesh the consistency of soaked white bread.
“He must have been walking on that log and falle
n in,” Gus said.
“Or walked in,” Leeda said, tears welding in her eyes. “Walked in after something or . . . someone. Oh G-Gus,” she cried, falling into his embrace. “What are we doing here?”
Gus bit his lip and looked across the water. He’d grown in consternation toward the increasingly wild and potentially dangerous youth, and he had even wished the boy were not with the group, but never had he wished him ill.
“Strike up one more for Mr. Hain,” Sammy said, falling back to sit on a log, the unfailing weight of his advanced cycle signaling to him it had indeed arrived.
Nathan pushed Russell’s body back over face down.
“Best not to see him like that, Leeda,” Gus said. But then Nathan took the corpse by the hair and seat, and with a powerful thrust tossed it back into the water.
“You’re not going to bury him?” Leeda screamed.
“No,” Nathan said, sorrow etched over his lowering face. “Earth will bury him fine.”
Leeda started sobbing. “Maybe they were right, Mr. Nols. Calling us monsters.”
“Leeda, no,” Gus said.
“Monsters, many of them are—men—and monsters maybe some of us as well.”
“Everything in life happens for a reason, Leeda,” Gus said, consoling her. “Everything balances on the wheel of nature. Everyone serves a purpose.”
“And what reason do men serve?” Sammy said despondent. “Hain, who brought us here, drugged us, and caused this?”
“There is a reason for their wantonness and our—”
“Torment and persecution!” Sammy yelled, standing to his feet, his wasting, late season face shacking with as close to rage as their natures allowed.
“Blast it, Samuel!”
“Cool it, Baron,” said Nathan. “For sure you’re right. If there’s a god, he knows the reason, and he must be enjoying himself.”
“Would be very boring for him otherwise,” Sammy said.
“I think you’re right, Sammy,” Nathan said.
“The fish and snapping turtles certainly thank you, Nathan,” Leeda said bitterly, watching the watery commotion around Russell’s body as it floated out into the lake.
“I don’t make the laws, Leeda,” Nathan said.
“Thank goodness,” she responded, leaving Gus, and walking back along the lakeshore.
“And let us hope,” Gus said to Nathan as he also turned to leave, “that you, I, we, never do.”
Sammy stood, took a broken branch to lean on, and using it as a staff, paused as he passed Nathan looking out at Russell’s fed-on body. “Every dream, Nathan, has its price,” he said, following the others into the woods to locate where to exit The Enchanted Forest.
As if ejected from a dream, Macon Early’s eyes sprang open. “We’re goin’,” he said, stepping out of the passenger seat of his Caddy where he’d lounged snoozing.
“Alright!” Josiah and Joseph Henry hollered, dropping what they were doing, which amounted to lazing around. “Don’t think I could stomach eatin’ another squirrel,” Josiah said.
“Any more roasted chestnuts, and I’ll vomit,” said Joseph Henry, tightening his belt.
“I like squirrel and chestnuts,” Joseph said, leaving the parked car at the forest’s entrance, and getting in line behind his brothers already following their father away.
“Where to, Pa?” Josiah called.
“North as commandeth The Lord.”
“Maybe we can get some hot baths on the way.”
“However The Lord sees fit.”
“Wish he’d a saw fit to fix the car’s engine,” Josiah whispered to Joseph Henry.
As the shapes of Reverend Early and his sons sank below a hill beyond the forest’s edge, Nathan and his enduring band left the deep woods behind, and entered the Early camp. Perplexed by the parked Cadillac in front of them, for an instant they wondered if they were relapsing into their hallucinogenic state.
“I’m not going near it,” Sammy said. “I know it’s going to turn into a pumpkin.”
“Mystifying indeed,” said Gus.
“Anything from Hain about the car?” Nathan asked.
“No. It seems like the remains of an encampment,” he said, eyeing the campfire, litter, and animal bones.
“Oh let’s hope the car’s for us to drive to soft hygienic beds,” Sammy said.
“Hain,” Gus said, looking at his device’s screen.
“I detect you have left the woods, Gus,” Hain said, seated in his comfortable armchair sipping a drink, the oil painting in its stand. “Wasn’t it . . . enchanting?”
“Very entertaining, Conrad,” Gus said, not amused.
“Oh? Did someone enjoy his visit so much he decided to stay?”
“It may please you to know we’ve lost another of our company.”
“Really? My condolences. Which?”
“The youngest.”
“Ah, the rebel. No one else?”
“Mr. Hain, this is cruel what you’ve done,” Leeda said.
“Oh? . . . Did someone’s bubble burst? Cold return to reality, my dear?”
“Doubly cold coming out of where you put us, but nothing compared to losing Russell. Cruel, is what you’re doing.”
“And what am I doing, deary?”
“Continuously endangering us.”
“Then go home, lovely lady. I have little patience for your pains, yulen pains, pains as they are, the pains of beasts.”
“Is that what we are to you, Mr. Hain?” she said.
“I have no interest in speaking with you further. Gus, are you continuing?”
Gus looked around at the others.
“Does the car work?” Sammy asked.
“Car?” Hain said. “You will continue on foot until further notice. Yes or no, Gus?”
Gus again looked around for any objections, followed by Nathan doing the same.
“Yes,” Gus said.
“That’s the spirit boys and girl. Instructions are being sent.”
“Mr. Hain,” Sammy said. “Does The Book say why we’re allergic to water, and offer a cure?”
“There are no cures to the afflictions of this life, sir.”
“I wasn’t seeking something that dramatic, Mr. Hain. Maybe a band-aid.”
“I take my suffering seriously, sir. Terrible as you may think life afflicts you, my own pain, I assure you, is far greater.”
“Okay, band-aid out, hydrophobia in. Thank you, Mr. Hain,” Sammy said, leaning on his staff to walk to the car and sit.
“But yes, the book offers hope on many little things.”
“And of love?” Leeda asked the screen.
“Love? That is a big thing. Love? I’ll tell you, dear beauty, love is the worst thing you can know. Consider yourself lucky as yulen you don’t know love and cannot know it.”
“The Book doesn’t speak of it, then.”
“But it does, and how to gain it. And if you do make it here and take possession of this book, I hope that if there is one thing you realize, it’s love. And I hope you are punished with as much pain from love as I have been punished. That would please me very much, beautiful lady. Gus! Bon voyage. I hope to see fewer but some of you after the next test. Bundle up, my yulen. Bye-bye.”
“Such an inspiring and warmhearted man,” Sammy said, resting and listening from the Caddy.
“We go this way,” Gus said, pointing south, in the opposite direction as their pursuers. “South and then east again.”
“Come on Sammy.” Nathan called. “Bring your walking stick.”
“I think I’ll call it Oscar . . . although Hain’s closing remark makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t replace little Oscar with a warm fur coat. Just saying. Wait up for a fraying old yulen!”
XVII
The Early party kept north, hugging the forestlands to the east. All the while on two days journey the Reverend Early hardly spoke. Then on a drizzly afternoon along a single lane mountain road, they came upon a horse pulled flatbed whose wheel had s
werved into the roadside channel. “How do,” Macon said to the black robed priests removing a load of building stones from the conveyance. “I’m the Reverend Macon Early, and these are my sons, and I see that I have the privilege of meeting like-members of the cloth in yourselves.”
The bearded, apprehensive looking men paused, listened, and nodded, but did not answer.
“Looks like you could use some help. There’s a reason why we come this very way, after all. Boys, help these men of the cloth with their unfortunate task.”
The Early boys followed the patriarch’s instruction. They helped the priestly men unload the flatbed, and when done, assisted pushing the wheel out of the ditch. At no time did the robed men speak to them or among themselves. When the flatbed waited reloaded, the priests nodded politely, got on, and reined the team of horses to go. They turned surprise when on the elder’s command, the Good Samaritans jumped onto the truck. The priests presumed the travelers merely wanted a lift closer to their destination. They became perplexed later when the driver stopped the horses for the outsiders to dismount, but they remained. The elder waved the driver on, his and his staying on the flatbed. The truck turned onto an even narrower dirt road covered with potholes. No one spoke during the bumpy winding ride, and eventually the friars pulled up to an abbey.
Macon jumped off the flatbed and walked to a construction site at the side of what he took to be a church. It was, an ancient one of stone and mortar, and the wall that many other robed priests worked on, had fallen or been torn down, he couldn’t tell. When the men saw him, they stopped to look at the strangers. They watched the oldest of the four inspect their work. His eyes passed over their stonemasonry, the tiled slate roof, and then to the crucifix on its front apex, and he seemed to approve. Nodding and mumbling, he turned back to the ones who brought him.
After a session of sign language and grunts, the priests understood that the eccentric man with wild eyes wanted to meet the place’s leader. One of them led him through a stone archway to a building in a cloister with many small led glass windows. There, in a cell-like room bare of décor but a wall crucifix, an elderly man robed like the others greeted him.
Yulen: Return of the Beast – Mystery Suspense Thriller (Yulen - Book 2) Page 18