The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  I grazed my fingers over the top of Maura’s hand. She glanced away from me to the security camera that monitored the lobby and outer parking lot, where Toby’s Fiero spewed exhaust under the lamps.

  I turned, wondering why she was bothering with the camera, and saw him pulling away. “I didn’t think he’d ever leave,” she said, and put her other hand on my chest where my heart knocked against my rib cage. “I want to do something else for you.”

  In the year and a half we had known each other I had daydreamed this moment over and over, but still when it happened it took me by surprise. She leaned in, her eyes closing, and kissed me on the mouth. That kiss broke me in half. It was like walking out of the dark, silent movie of my life into full sunshine, split open by light. Urgent and forbidden. I was too startled to even close my own eyes. I don’t know how long we kissed before she reached down, her hand stroking my erection through my slacks. Her hand at my belt, her voice a husky whisper, she said, “Pronto, pretty boy.”

  I could hear Arwen stomping down the hallway in a huff, and I was afraid she was going to knock at my bedroom door. I squeezed the stone one last time in my fist. After Maura vanished I learned that an agate of this size is worth hundreds of dollars. I stuffed it in my nightstand drawer and went to apologize.

  “Forget it,” Arwen said over her bowl of cornflakes. “You’re not a perv, are you?”

  “What? Of course not. I’m safe as houses.” Whatever that meant. This house no longer felt safe. Nothing in my world did.

  “That’s good, because we each need our own space.” She ate another spoonful and gestured at my formal wear, my Oxford shirt, navy blue sports pants and shiny wingtips. “You have an interview this morning?”

  I shook my head, though it had felt good to dress formally, like I was heading into the office. I had spent most of these last weeks in a hospital gown or sweatpants. In truth the question about the interview rankled me. The enormous hospital bill had eaten up most of the insurance money. I was going to need to find work soon, or move back home at the end of winter. These were things I wasn’t ready to think about. “I went to church.”

  Arwen frowned. “I didn’t know you were religious.” She said this in the same tone of voice she had used to ask me if I was a pervert.

  This would be a good time to bring up how she had said she would only be here for a few days. Those days had passed and she had settled in and showed no signs of leaving. Yet, because I had walked in on her in the bathroom, I felt on the defensive. I had longed for a winter of quiet, but instead I had been beset by strange wonders and dark strangers. I thought of an old story by Saki I’d read in high school, “The Open Window,” about a young man who heads into the country hoping for rest, but ends up being tormented by a girl who tells spooky lies. Arwen looked like she carried around her share of ghosts. I needed to get at her story. “So what if I am?”

  “I just didn’t think you were one of those people.”

  “One of those people?” I couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice.

  “Bandwagon people.”

  “Oh, well it’s not like I ran off and joined a commune of hippies or anything.”

  Arwen picked up her sloshing bowl of cereal and carried it to the sink. I took Kaiser for a walk, and when I got back, Arwen was gone. I searched the house, but didn’t find her anywhere. The glass lawyer bookcase had been left open, the Gemäldegalerie Linz lying on the floor, open to show a copper broadside of a couple picnicking in the Alps, a brunette feeding strawberries to a man in a fedora, everything in black and white, except her hands were painted red, as were his lips. Her red-stained hands and his glazed mouth gave what should have been a bucolic scene an aura of the grotesque. I clapped the album shut and stored it in the glass prison the Krolls had made for it, as if it were a creature that needed to be locked away.

  There were no new dishes in the kitchen sink, no sign any coffee had been brewed. I knocked several times at the locked bedroom door where she’d taken up residence, hoping to apologize, but there was no response. I was fairly certain I sensed her presence on the other side of the door, but I wondered if she had really left. Without her around, the house felt emptier than ever. Wrong somehow.

  I stopped in the garage to fill the raven’s dish with crushed dog food and freshen the bowl of water. It watched from its silent perch in the rafters. “If I split your tongue what secrets would you tell?” It cocked its head, studying me with glossy black eyes. I thought for a moment about leaving the garage door open and letting it escape. Was it healed enough? Did this dark garage feel as much like a prison as my hospital room? “You need a name,” I said to the silent bird. “How about Edgar?”

  The raven stared. I left it alone to feed.

  Arwen’s apparent disappearance bothered me. I took Kaiser out on another walk, looking for traces of Arwen’s small prints, but other than the tracks my Continental had made coming down the long driveway earlier that morning, the snow was undisturbed. After a half hour of stumbling around, a bitter wind drove us back inside.

  I spent much of the rest of the day in the basement, sketching a menagerie of creatures from the Book of Revelation in a notebook first and then digitizing them in Adobe Photoshop before I could set them in motion as sprites in the RPG Maker program. I had not realized before this that the queen in my story would be pregnant and that the child she carried had a special importance, a child that might save the world if she could get away from her evil husband. Maura’s child, brought back to life in my game. Powered by a fresh pot of coffee, I fell into a familiar fugue state that came over me whenever I dove deep into coding, still trying to save my Max von Sydow stranded in his maze of trees.

  By the age of twenty-one I’d been working with computers for a full third of my life, starting at fourteen when my teacher, whose real-life name was Mr. Drudge, acquired a host of brand-new Zeos 386sx computers and promptly banned students from playing any games in the lab, unless we programmed the games ourselves. I quickly learned BASIC and MS-DOS coding, which I used to create simple copycats of classics such as Pong, Space Invaders, and Joust for myself and other students.

  A year later, after being stranded at a bus stop for a half hour in below-zero windchill, I used a maze algorithm program I’d created to plat out the streets of my suburb and map more efficient routes for drivers, a program I sold for eight hundred dollars to the district. This windfall bought my first desktop, a Commodore Amiga 500, the best gaming machine out there at the time. Buoyed by early success, I started programming games in BASIC and Easy Amos for the system before taking on the Amiga’s actual assembly language.

  The creation of Frankenstein’s Dream, a Zelda-style RPG, absorbed the next two years of my life. As the lonely monster, you roamed high mountain villages in 8-bit glory, avoiding the torch-bearing villagers while seeking out food. If cornered you could kill lone villagers easily, but doing so cost you soul-damage, and if you sustained too much you lost any control over the avatar and could only sit and watch as Frankenstein rampaged through the land until enough villagers gathered to burn him alive. I worked on it until I couldn’t do any more solo with the program without a publisher, which you could only find through copy parties in those days. I talked my parents into investing in the scheme, and together we did market research, created promotional materials, and when it came time my dad and I flew all the way to Stockholm for a copy party where we pitched the game to Niflheim Publishing. The game was accepted and scheduled for publication in late 1993. This should have been the realization of a dream, but I’d made a major mistake in programming the game in a closed-assembly language for the Amiga. In 1994, after a series of missteps, the Amiga’s parent company of Commodore went bankrupt, which caused Niflheim to fold a few months later. Not a single copy of Frankenstein’s Dream was ever distributed. My parents lost several thousand dollars and I lost a couple years of my life.

  In the first cu
tscene I ever created, the lonely monster confronts his maker, and it’s not the mad scientist you expect, but a woman, the author of Frankenstein herself, a digitized Mary Shelley. “Why did you make me?” he asks in the scene.

  “So that I would not be alone,” she says. “We are not meant to be alone. You must live.”

  As a teenager, I had been a little in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Hear my tale, her creature called across the centuries. A ghost story, written by a woman haunted by the death of her own child, by the death of Percy Shelley’s first wife, who drowned herself after her husband ran off with Mary, then only a teenager. A ghost story written by an adulteress weighted down by guilt in the “Year without Summer,” when a volcanic eruption caused the skies to rain ashes over Europe and her nightmare vision became a living, breathing thing. I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together, she would write. And this is what I must do, I thought. My nameless fool must find a way to live.

  I could not fail. I had to finish this game. One day, Maura, wherever she was, might see it in motion. One day my parents would see it as well. And no matter what happened, they would see they had not been wrong to have faith in me.

  I worked past dark, stopping now and then to listen for Arwen’s return. She didn’t have a car or any mode of transportation. Where had she gone? Or was she still in her room? I had just leaned back in my squeaky desk chair when the power went out.

  In the pitch-dark, I fumbled my way to the outer room. Even standing before the big bay windows there was little light, the moon hidden behind clouds. A cold wind pressed at the glass from outside. Kaiser slept through it all on his dog bed, his snoring loud beside the door.

  In the faint light coming through the windows I picked my way up the spiral staircase and searched in a drawer near the phone, where I’d spotted a flashlight after first arriving here. Once I found it and clicked it on, the first thing I noticed was the pad next to the phone—the pad where the Krolls had written down their phone number and address on South Padre Island—was no longer there. Arwen must have taken it. Where the hell was she?

  I felt a migraine coming on from spending all day staring at a glowing screen. I went back to my bedroom and took a sumatriptan and Percocet, shut off the flashlight, and waited to float off on the dreams of Lethe, hoping for a vision of Maura. Yet, tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I cursed myself for drinking coffee past four o’clock; too much caffeine still coursed in my veins.

  This was why I was still awake when the wolves came, as old man Kroll had promised they would. As if they sensed me vulnerable in the house, in the dark and creeping cold.

  I heard them long before I saw them. Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I got up and traipsed down the hallway in my boxer shorts and t-shirt, passing Arwen’s locked door, noticing light spilling under the sill. She was back and she must have found a candle. Or she had never left. I didn’t know what was going on, but I left her alone and followed the sound of the wolves, as if summoned.

  In the moonless dark they were a sound rather than a shape, a sibilant question voiced in the night, their barking rising in pitch until one of them loosed a wail, as if pierced. I didn’t hear anything sad in their singing. It seemed more celebration or greeting. They were calling out not just to the night or the cloud-shrouded stars but to Death himself. The night was their church, and this was their hymn of the hunt. They knew Death and walked with him and brought it to other creatures of the wood, and they knew he stalked them as well, but they were not afraid. They sang, rejoicing in their sleek coats against the long night.

  I couldn’t imagine taking up the .30-06 as Kroll had instructed. I listened and I heard the hunger in their song, but not the shadow as I had felt with the ravens. When they drifted away in search of prey, I went back to my room and crawled under my covers. With the power out, it was already chilly in the house.

  So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find Arwen waiting for me under my quilt.

  She turned over in the bed and lifted the sheets for me. She was dressed in a blue nightie, her feet bare. “Can I stay with you?” she whispered, her face in shadow. “I can’t stand the sound of them. And I’m so cold.”

  I hesitated. Was this a betrayal of Maura? But the chill in the room had raised goose pimples on my arms, so I climbed in beside her, laying on my right side, my good side, the only way I could sleep without pain. In the queen-sized bed there was room enough for both of us to sleep without touching, but at first it was no warmer here. Waves of cold radiated from her skin. Arwen shivered as she turned over to face me. I was going to ask her where she’d been or why she hadn’t answered when I knocked, but she spoke first. “Who’s Maura?”

  “What?”

  “You talk in your sleep,” she said. “Like there’s someone in the room with you. It’s kind of spooky actually.”

  “I’m spooky? Where were you all day?”

  “Asleep,” she said in a subdued voice. “I wasn’t feeling well. So are you going to tell me who she is?”

  “Someone I knew.”

  “Someone you lost.” She propped herself up on one elbow, waiting for the story.

  I told her all I knew and suspected, the abusive marriage, how Maura knew to take freshly counted bills that couldn’t be traced, how she had a daughter I was convinced she wouldn’t leave behind. I kept on, the whole story spilling out.

  Arwen was quiet, but she scooted closer to me on the bed. “Unless you didn’t really know her,” she said.

  I considered this. How much do we ever know about one person? Even someone we think we’re close to. “All I know is I got into a wreck after dropping her off at the hospital.” I touched my skull, parting the hair to expose the mark along my temple where I’d cracked the windshield, forgetting the raw scar wouldn’t be visible in this dark. “I haven’t been right since.”

  “Who has?” Arwen touched the scar with one cool hand. “I knew you had a story.”

  I told her a little more, about the Christian Identity church and Mother Sophie’s sermon on the End of the World. “I need to find out what happened.”

  “So that’s why you went to church.”

  “The main reason, yeah.”

  Arwen settled into her own pillow, apparently satisfied. “She’s gone, either way,” she said in a sleepy voice. “Maybe let her be gone. These people sound dangerous from what you’ve told me. You don’t fuck with fascists.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “That’s because you have a death wish.”

  I bridled at this, though I knew it was partly true. Wasn’t that my whole reason for staying here rather than going home to Chicago? Did some part of me long for apocalypse, for the whole world to come crashing down as mine had around me?

  And what about you, Arwen, what’s your story? In prying the mystery from me, I couldn’t help noticing she’d avoided saying anything about herself. I turned to ask her, but her eyes were shut, her body softly breathing. We lay together, not quite touching, our bodies warming under the blankets, and somehow even the not-touching felt oddly intimate, the small space between us charged with energy.

  Maura, oh Maura. I don’t know what to do anymore. I only know I can’t stop until I find out what happened to you.

  Of Mountains Moving

  On Tuesday morning, I went looking for The Land. The address Roland had given me took me into the wilderness that bordered state forest land, along winding gravel roads crowded by towering red and white pines, needles gleaming silver in the freezing sleet. Roland had drawn me a map by hand, but I got turned around and ended up heading the wrong way for a good twenty minutes before I realized my mistake. The freezing rain clung to my windshield wipers until they scraped against the glass like claws. Half-blind before an iced-over window, I had to drive much slower than I wanted. Whatever study they had planned I would be at least an hour late.


  Was this a sign that I should just turn around? Maura had told me that Elijah’s aggravated assault conviction had been plea-bargained down from attempted murder, the victim attending the trial in a wheelchair. Yet, I kept going, picking my way over gravel roads, the wheels slurring for purchase, until I came around a bend.

  I knew the place immediately when I saw it. From the road I could only make out the barest glint of the Airstream trailers and mobile homes pitched among jack pine and cedar on a slope of southern exposure. A torrent of snowmelt gushed down a channel near the driveway, ice bobbing in the dirty current. I didn’t know if I could get the Continental up such a steep road, slick with running slush.

  I gunned the engine hard, fighting with the steering wheel to keep from sliding off into the engorged creek that paralleled the driveway. At one point I passed a deer stand near the driveway, and I glimpsed a man in a rain poncho, a walkie-talkie held to his face. Higher up, I coasted to stop at a pullout where a motley assortment of vehicles parked: a rusting Ford station wagon and several trucks, including a tow truck with winter’s salvage printed on the side. So, he really was here. To prepare a way, Mother Sophie had said, implying that he needed prayer because of some kind of breakdown. He was here with Sarah at The Land, a place where Maura had never wanted to return to. Here among a Family that was not a family of blood but belief, home in a hiding place armed against the end of the world. What the hell was I doing?

  By the time I parked the Continental, reversing it in so I would have an easier time picking my way down, Roland had come out to greet me, dressed in a slicker and a wide-brimmed hat, an umbrella hoisted over his head, the cherry of a cigarette burning in his mouth. He came to my side of the car and held up the umbrella to shield us both. “We thought you weren’t going to come,” he said when I opened my door and climbed out stiffly, my hip aching after the long drive.