The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  “I never said it was nice there,” Arwen said. She looked even more hawklike with her hair pulled back. “Maybe it was for a time. I was in a relationship that wasn’t healthy and didn’t end well. I needed breathing room.” She didn’t look down or away but watched my face while she spoke. “I had to get away, but I didn’t have money or a place to stay. So that’s what led me here. With my tail between my legs. Only there’s no Mom or Dad to greet the prodigal daughter.”

  “How’d you get here if you took the bus halfway across the country?” I couldn’t recall hearing any car outside, though I’d been down in the basement. Just the sound of the doorbell.

  “Hitched,” Arwen said, like she did it all the time. “Then I hiked from the main highway.”

  A few hours later, after we washed the dishes, I showed Arwen the raven I’d rescued, telling her that it had struck the glass of the big bay windows.

  “I hate those windows,” she said. “They’re hell on the local bird population.”

  The raven watched us from his spot high up, his neck swiveling, pebbly eyes glittering.

  “Albert keeps his golf clubs up in that loft. That bird is going to shit it full.”

  “Sorry about that.” I noted how she called her old man by his first name.

  “Don’t be. He has it coming.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I led Arwen down to the basement where I’d rigged together two computers by a LAN cable, one a Dell that my dad bought for me when I started college, the other a base model I’d built from the motherboard up, loading it with the latest equipment, a geeked-out Nvidia GeForce 256 graphics card, Soundblaster Live for audio, and a Pentium III processor that hummed with 750 MHz of power. I fired up the system until the flickering screen awaited my DOS commands.

  Arwen didn’t care about my flunking out of college, which she said was for “future corporate burnouts,” but after I told her about The Land she wanted to see it in motion. It was nice to have someone to talk to for a change. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been.

  After a few minutes the screen filled with the new opening montage, a cutscene that showed a dragon’s-eye view of a three-dimensional castle, skulls impaled on poles and ravens swarming in great clouds as a dark figure paced the ramparts, his cloak flapping out behind him. The speakers throbbed to a moody soundtrack, heavy on synth, uploaded from Napster. Flickering, the screen now showed a new scene: a lone man fleeing through the trees, his belled fool’s cap bobbing as he runs. He twists his neck, straining to hear the distant sound of hounds baying, and then he flees deeper into shadowy woods.

  Kaiser barked from his kennel in the next room, disturbed by the tinny sounds echoing from the speakers.

  “You did all this?” She sounded genuinely impressed. Maura hadn’t ever seen the actual thing in motion.

  I swiveled in my desk chair. “It’s not finished yet. Watch this.” The montage had given way to a top-down, isometric scene. To get an isometric view instead of the traditional 2D offered by the game engine had taken additional scripting and programming with eight-directional pixel movement, but the work was worth it if I could make a world a gamer could get lost in.

  A black mouse-controlled arrow hovered god-like over the fool in the woods. I clicked on him to move him deeper into the trees as the hounds bore down on him, baying through the speakers. He didn’t get far before they caught up to him. I clicked one hound and the fool slashed out with his clumsy kitchen knife. It howled and fell, but the others closed in, lunging. Then the king’s hunters followed and their arrows whipped thick through the leaves. The screen flashed light and dark once more before showing the man’s head, his belled fool’s cap now blood-spattered, mounted on the ramparts, a raven pecking at one eye socket. “Game over, man,” I said in my best Bill Paxton imitation.

  “Yikes,” said Arwen. “But what happens if he gets away?”

  “That’s the thing. He’s supposed to find the queen. He was the one who helped her escape. Everyone else who was part of the plan is dead. He doesn’t know where she is or what’s happened to her, but if the king finds her before he does he’s going to use her magic to bring about Armageddon.”

  “I’ve never been much of a gamer, but this is really cool.” Arwen leaned over the top of my chair. She smelled, not unpleasantly, of clove cigarettes. “It’s like an interactive movie. Why’d you sound so bummed earlier?”

  “The beta’s so filled with bugs that it’s unplayable. No matter how hard I try, no matter which direction I send the man, he always dies. Always. The hounds find him and then the hunters. I’ve made the first game where the hero dies every time. He’s doomed no matter what.”

  “Like Max von Sydow,” she said. “From The Seventh Seal,” she added. “It’s an old Ingmar Bergman flick. Max von Sydow plays a knight hunted by death.”

  I swiveled again in the seat to face her.

  “You should see it,” Arwen said, raising one eyebrow. “Seriously. For research and all. Albert has a copy on eight-millimeter. We could watch it, if you wanted.”

  Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning

  I had to walk Kaiser before joining Arwen in the den. After a week here I no longer bothered with snowshoes since we’d tamped down a navigable path through the pines on our rambles. A flurry of snow spin-drifted through the bare birches. We went as far as our aching bodies would allow us, pausing to pay homage to the koi goldfish, entombed in their icy pond. The big grandfather pines shrugged off sleeves of snow as we walked under the burdened boughs, but otherwise the woods were hushed and whispery. The quiet made me nervous. A shadow waited out here in the trees, beyond the furthest edge of my vision. I sensed it, a residue lingering from the carnage of the ravens. These had become the woods of a Hawthorne story, I thought, where a wanderer might encounter the devil out seeking new converts.

  One night at the bank I remember asking Maura why she thought the original settlers had named so many places in the wilderness after the devil. The Devil’s Spine. The Devil’s Backbone. Even our own Wind River flowed out of a gorge called the Devil’s Maw. “Some of the most beautiful places in the country. Why pin a name for evil on them?”

  “Lucifer was the most beautiful of the angels,” Maura had said, musing as she brushed a lock of hair from her eyes. “Those places are breathtaking . . . but they might also kill you.” In the deepening cold, I remembered how beautiful Maura had been to me and thought about the Rose of Sharon and Pastor Elijah. My unfinished business. I didn’t feel nervous or afraid about confronting her husband, only a sense of urgency. Sunday couldn’t come soon enough.

  These long walks hurt, but I needed the exercise. I had to rebuild the muscle in my legs and hips, especially since I’d been skipping my physical therapy sessions. I was done with doctors and traction machines. I wanted to keep going, but Kaiser’s breathing had grown ragged. Fearing the dog’s great heart would burst in his chest, I led him back home. By the time we reached the grove, I smelled wood smoke. The Gingerbread House loomed over the birches, a fairy-tale vision, smoke spiraling from the chimney. Arwen must have kindled a fire in the big stone fireplace. In just a couple of days, she had made herself at home, the banished princess restored to her realm.

  In the mudroom, I stamped my boots and Kaiser shook snow from his fur. We ambled into the den with its high, arched ceilings and bay windows, enjoying the heat of the stone hearth. She’d brightened the place already. I didn’t see her right away, not until I looked in the bunker room that adjoined the den. Along with his massive movie collection, old man Kroll kept many of his books there, locked away behind glassed-in lawyer bookcases. These, too, were “off-limits” he had explained, though it seemed strange to me, to give a person keys to your gun cabinet but lock away the books. Arwen sat legs-crossed on the wood floor, coffee-table-sized tomes spread around her. She didn’t even look up, not until I knelt beside her and picked up one of the books she h
ad taken from the shelf. The leather cover read Gemäldegalerie Linz, and the pages inside, yellow and filmed by age, featured large sepia photos of artwork.

  “Do you know what it is?” she said, setting aside her own book.

  The leather cover was soft and green-skinned. The book felt eerie and alive in my hands. I shook my head.

  Arwen scooted closer and took it gingerly from me. “This is his favorite,” she said. The high gloss of the photo in its casing showed a Renaissance scene, gaily dressed couples preparing for some feast or dance, the hounds a blur of movement at the edge.

  “Looks kind of ominous,” I said.

  “No kidding,” she said. “It’s about death. Well, sex and death. But that’s what all art is about.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I didn’t like these kinds of pronouncements. Everything seemed to be about death these days, even my anatomy class. Even what little I’d learned about sex turned out to be about death. I was ready for a change of subject.

  “There’s a movie about it, too. Albert owns one of the last eight-millimeters. Maybe the last.” She put her finger on the page. “This one’s a silent film. It’s about this evil, witch-like woman who seduces a father and son. The son kills his own father and then turns all the churches in town into whorehouses and places of devil worship. Then, death himself . . .”

  “To think I had him pegged for a rom-com sort of guy.”

  “Funny,” she said, without smiling. “So, death—”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re not one of those people who talks during movies? Who gives away the ending?”

  Now Arwen laughed. “Sorry. I get carried away when it comes to old movies. But no talking is a good rule.”

  “And that old projector. It really works?” The old man had forbidden it.

  She folded the book closed and smiled. “You’re not too busy with your studies?”

  I shook my head. “What’s the title on the album mean?”

  Arwen turned away and caged the book back on its shelf, locking it away behind glass. “These photos were intended for an art museum. It was to be built in Linz, Austria.”

  Linz? I searched my mind for the significance of the place. “Was to be built?”

  She looked at me over her shoulder, quirking one eyebrow. “If I said any more that would be giving away the ending. I’ll get that projector going.”

  Late afternoon into evening we watched movies, me dozing in and out in the La-Z-Boy beside her. I admit to sleeping through much of Die Pest in Florenz, but Arwen didn’t seem to mind. We took a short break for summer sausage sandwiches with German mustard and to make popcorn and then settled in for The Seventh Seal. A double matinee with gothic movies featuring scenes of Armageddon. It was a way to pass the time.

  While the projector rolled, I snuck peeks at Arwen. I liked her silhouette in the flickering light of the eight-millimeter, the spectral shine of her sharp profile, the intense way she loved these movies. Her face lit up by the screen, her hair pulled back, she looked like a dark version of Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby. The second movie, The Seventh Seal, fascinated me: Max von Sydow’s chess game with Death in order to forestall his own demise, his longing to accomplish one meaningful thing before his time was up, the plague and the mad witch burning at the stake, the picnic that is the closest vision to any kind of heaven, one found on earth and not in the hereafter, and the final danse macabre as Death sweeps him up. I loved it, though I knew it would follow me into my dreams. The fool in the game I was designing would have a face now: Max von Sydow’s.

  I ducked out with a quick good night when the credits rolled and got ready for bed, knocking back a Percocet along with my migraine med and anti-depressant, so I could float off to sleep in a warm, narcotic haze. “Maura, where are you?” I said softly after turning off my lamp. I climbed under the covers and squeezed into my pillow, trying to conjure her face as I had earlier in the snow. More than anything, I wanted to dream of her again that night. Such longing only carried me into nightmare.

  When I slept there was a woman screaming in my dream. At least I thought I was dreaming at first, because it felt like I was inside one of those movies we had just watched. Her strangled cries shocked me awake. Maura? Was it her? How did she get here? I remember wandering down the hall. Awake or asleep? All these years later, I’m not sure. The fabric of my reality, between narcotic dream and cloudy waking, felt tissue-thin.

  I stumbled down the hall, following the calls, not knowing what was happening. The voice led me to the garage door. I remember the cold seeping under the door, how I paused to wonder if I should be feeling such physical sensations in my sleep. I didn’t want to open the door. I knew I didn’t want to see whatever waited for me on the other side, but I didn’t have any choice. The doorknob like a hunk of ice in my palm, I twisted it open.

  Arwen, clad in a long black dress, sat on the concrete steps. She held the raven in her lap, wrapped in a bloody towel. How had she coaxed it from its hiding place? Her other hand, red with blood, clutched a hooked knife dulled by rust.

  “What’re you doing?” My voice sounded tinny and faraway, echoing as if from speakers.

  She turned to look at me with her dark, almond-shaped eyes. “I split the tongue,” she said. “So it can tell us the message it has brought.”

  The swaddled raven gasped for breath in her grip. The pink tongue that flicked out from the glossy beak was cruelly forked, a devil’s tongue. And when it cried out, it spoke in Maura’s frightened voice, “Help me. Lucien, please. You have to help me.”

  I woke in the clean wash of sunlight, my heart pulsing in my throat. I knew the folklore about splitting a raven’s tongue so it could talk. I felt sure that the shadow that had fallen over me after the ravens killed each other had followed me from the woods. I worried that it lived inside me now and would the rest of my life.

  Sunday morning, I arrived at Rose of Sharon early. Deacon Roland shook my hand and greeted me by name. He ushered me inside and introduced me to an elderly white-haired woman. Mother Sophie, the fabled woman from Maura’s stories. I hadn’t seen her at the previous service.

  Wearing a long dress of yellowing ivory, the old woman held out both arms in greeting, pressing her large, soft hands over my own. My palms were sweating, even though I’d just come from the frigid outdoors. She seemed to take notice of how this place made me nervous, squeezing my hands briefly before releasing me. “Meshach,” she said when she heard my name. “You have a lot to live up to with a name like that.”

  “My parents got used to disappointment early on.”

  She frowned. “You are a child of God. Don’t shrink to fit yourself to the world.”

  I didn’t say anything, afraid of further betraying myself. There was something both magisterial and elephantine about her, a giantess with sharp blue eyes and a sonorous voice. I wouldn’t have even known that she was blind if Maura hadn’t told me. The usual Lucien might have said something mocking in response to her, but the words wouldn’t come. Here I was Meshach. Here the words froze in my mouth because sometimes Maura said similar things, her hands at the nape of my neck, touching the curls above my collar. You are going to do great things, Lucien. One day you’re going to make someone very happy.

  “Where’s the preacher?” I said when I found my tongue, because I hadn’t spotted Maura’s husband yet or her daughter.

  “Mother Sophie is the preacher,” Roland said, stepping in. “She’s the senior pastor and Pastor Elijah is her associate. He has some private matters to attend to and will be gone the next couple of weeks.”

  “Private matters?” Mother Sophie said. “There’s no reason to be elliptical, Deacon. Eli is getting The Land ready.”

  “Oh,” I said, because that also sounded fairly elliptical. I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I had no idea yet where The Land was. I needed to find my way into their inner
circle if I was to ever discover any ideas about where Maura had gone and what had happened to her. This would be harder to do without her husband around. I already felt a little foolish for forgetting that Mother Sophie was the senior pastor, an odd arrangement for a right-wing church.

  “You will stay for coffee, Meshach,” the old woman said. Her voice was pleasant, but it was not a question. “I would like to talk further with you.” She turned and walked away, her long dress sweeping the shag carpet.

  This time I sat far away from Roland and his Saturday night special. People filed in and filled the rows, though none sat right by me. I saw a few families, the children squeezed in between the adults. Some of the men wore blazers like Roland, though they often had sweatshirts on underneath, big belt buckles and blue jeans. The women, who were mostly white, all wore dresses, but a few had raven hair they wore so long it hung to their hips. These women had the high cheekbones and darker skin of Ojibwe from a nearby reservation. This also took me by surprise. I had not thought Indians would be welcomed in a white supremacist church, but then again, Rose of Sharon didn’t advertise itself as such. No more than thirty strong, they were a younger congregation than I expected, and not skinhead punks in black shirts and jeans or bearded Unabomber loners like I had first pictured.

  I picked up fragments of their conversation, mostly ordinary things about the weather, the coming snow. They stole glances in my direction but didn’t engage me directly. So far as I could see there were no clocks in this room, but they were ready when Mother Sophie raised her arms and called them to worship with the hymn “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.”

  “For the world is overcome,” goes one line in the hymn. Someone forgot to tell the world, I remember thinking. After the opening hymn, Mother Sophie led us in a short prayer before starting into her sermon. If I had been disappointed by the ordinariness of my first visit here, she more than made up for it.

  Gray wattles swung from her neck and arms as she gestured and called for us to take up our Bibles and turn to the Book of Revelation. I didn’t know my Bible well, those few years of Sunday school mostly focusing on kid-friendly stories, Jonah getting swallowed by the whale, Noah’s Ark, Moses parting the Red Sea. That kind of thing. So I had little idea what I was in store for. She started by talking about current events and described the turmoil in the Middle East (when is there not turmoil there?), saying this was but one sign fulfilling the prophecies. She spoke of a star named Wormwood that was going to fall from the sky and contaminate the waters of the earth. Then she began to read from the chapter, speaking of dragons with horned heads rising up from the sea. Strange chimera, half-leopard and half-lion, scarred by past wounds. How the people bowed in wonder before the beast.