And there was so much more.
So much more to be beheld.
Purple bell heather. Sprite daisies.
Red clover. Pimpernel. Willow herb.
Sheep’s bit. Crab apple. Mayweed.
Spotted orchids. Periwinkle.
Sweet natural scents and musky perfumes from the pollinating flowers and the budding trees permeated the air. But underneath all of it, the stench of rot. Of something gone spoiled and fetid.
Maybe it was all that underlying mud.
Turned back to a sloppy quagmire.
Blame the spring rains, perhaps.
Perhaps it was something more.
For somehow Oliver couldn’t shake the sense the whole thing was like a giant black and white photo that’d been too-hastily colorized. Some of the colors too garish and others too bland.
As if death impersonating life.
It was a feeling he could not shake as the wild overgrown garden beyond the front double stable doors presented its own seemingly mendacious kaleidoscope of the too-garish and the too-bland as the spring slipped into summer, the nights ever shorter still, and the days stretching off into eternity, alternating between periods of familiar cold gray fog that still managed to disorient and chill to the bone and sunny-muggy days beneath those otherwise flat blue skies with swarms of buzzing, biting, stinging insects, and the somnolent chorus of crickets serenading from the paddock at night.
Bluebells. Yellow gorse. Primrose.
They choked the overgrown garden.
Amongst other more cryptic things.
Thorny things that pricked.
Thorny things that scratched.
Including a tangle of black flowers.
With deep crimson stamens.
Appearing velvety to the touch.
But were anything but.
The nursery in the spare bedroom was now ready. Holding its breath behind its closed and locked door with every last little thing now in its proper place. Crib. Diaper bin and changing table. Rocking chair. The space brightened with wallpaper. Yellow.
The antique mirror still on the wall.
Abby unwilling or unable to toss it out.
Even as she refused to stare into it.
To stare into its dark cold flat glass.
At times so decidedly hollow and deep.
The cherubs on their fluffy white clouds.
Still offering their playful little smiles.
Dopey little eyes observing silently.
As they waited. Patiently waited.
Along with the finished nursery.
That had been the spare bedroom.
That was no longer hollow.
No longer that in the end.
Not unlike his wife.
Or so Oliver ruminated as he stared at his wife, his Abby, sitting out on the front stoop, her eyes closed, her flushed face turned toward a desultory breeze pushing off that cold gray sea.
On a fading summer’s day.
A warm humid day turned to dusk.
His neck sticky with dried sweat.
As fog tendrils crept along the cliff.
Preparing to quietly ambush the isle.
Promising a cold and shivery night.
Stirring in those woods, too.
As if born of those dark trees.
And not of the sea at all.
He noticed singing swallows and martins in full flight, but taking a wide berth around the small stone cottage, avoiding, seemingly, at least to his fuzzy mind, the congregation of black birds, ever-watchful, silently jostling about, gathered on the pitched roof of the barn above him. Their numbers growing by the day. Night.
Also waiting. Patiently waiting.
Oliver gradually turned back to Abby.
Following their spooky sightline.
That congregation of black birds.
She was uncomfortably pregnant.
Quite bursting at the seams now.
It would any day. Night.
Her eyes slowly fluttered open to find him in the barn loft beneath the undulating shadow of those black birds, silently staring at her. Staring at that which was magically growing inside of her.
The breeze tickling at his ears:
Offering a dark indefatigable whisper:
As darkness slowly fell on the isle:
Stealing the last of the light:
It was meant to be their summer home, but when Polly discovered she was with child after many years of trying, they decided to stay.
They were strange birds who kept mostly to themselves.
Especially after the child was born.
John, its father, was a devout man.
Came to believe the child a cursed thing.
Drowned it in the bog in the woods.
In the woods behind the house.
For it was afflicted, you see.
Oliver waited until his very-pregnant wife, his Abby, managed to rise from the chair on the front stoop with a deep sigh and enter the small stone cottage after a warm humid day turned to dusk with a cold fog stirring in those dark trees and those ever-watchful black birds jostling about on the steep pitch of that barn roof above him before finally lifting a whiskey flask to his parched lips.
A whiskey flask previously hidden.
Hidden neatly beneath his shirt.
Tucked there against his belt.
He then pondered the thin path.
Pondered it with glassy eyes.
As he took a long burning sip.
The path vanishing into those woods.
Into that dark curtain of trees.
Stirring with that cold gray fog.
A gray fog now turning to black.
With the coming of the night.
A night that would not end.
Not really, not quite ever.
At least not for Oliver.
29.
THE BLACK FOG GREETED the coming dawn and created, as it had done before, an unending state of night as the moon inexorably grew fat again. Grew pregnant as it peeked down through that thick swirling black fog trespassing now even in the presumed daytime of this to be long and unending night.
Oliver stood before his students.
Before their taciturn unblinking eyes.
The children reserved and quiet.
Reserved and quiet, as always.
How do you know when the moon has had enough to eat? he thought and nearly giggled out loud. Nearly giggled out loud insanely.
Their small desk were cleared.
Their bookbags neatly packed.
The blackboard freshly scrubbed.
For this was the very last day.
The very last day of the term.
Before the summer recess.
“Go on, then,” he said.
The strange children rose in relative unison from their rows of cleared desks and, shouldering their bookbags, filed from the classroom in a similarly creepy-orderly fashion with only the whispering shuffle of their shoes and the black fog waiting for them all beyond the outer doors. Waiting to embrace them. To swallow them.
Oliver locked-up the classroom.
Then moved down an inner-corridor.
He paused briefly at an outer door.
Before that malaise of black fog.
Swirling about. Hiding and revealing.
The shuffling parade of small children.
And that ever-present watchful moon.
Hung there against the dark overcast sky.
Opposite the pale orb of a dying sun.
The cold gray sea now turned to black.
And in the air that dead rotten smell.
Of something gone spoiled and fetid.
Oliver shivered despite a heavy sweater.
Despite it already being late June.
Before a world turned apocalyptic.
Then slowly waded out into the fog.
Into that thick swirling black fog.
Leaning into its cold wet embrace.
Even as he
also felt himself resisting it.
Perhaps it was only just that thick swirling black fog itself dulling his already dull senses. Perhaps it was just a simple carelessness. A simple, if just rather quite unremarkable lack of paying the proper attention after so many long sleepless nights. Regardless of the reason, in the end, as he turned a corner of the school building, heading for the parking lot and the Q5 silently waiting in the murkiness, hugging his own bookbag to his chest as if already protecting himself from a collision he simply had no reasonable right to anticipate (the lesson plans contained therein already beginning to grow quite stale), Oliver found himself stumbling rather clumsily over his own shuffling feet and slamming into a passing boy on a bicycle.
A rather fat boy on a bicycle.
Knocking him off that bicycle.
The fat boy making a whining noise.
A terrible whining noise as he fell.
As he fell and ripped his pants.
Skinning his fat knee.
It all happened so quickly and yet in a horrible slow motion as if defying the known laws of the universe. The rather fat boy tumbling over the handlebars. Not unlike Humpty Dumpty. Whining. Squealing. Trousers making an awful ripping noise. Blood appearing on his fat knee from a shallow cut above a sandpaper-like road rash oozing more blood. The boy’s eyes, the color of that flat blue, if now almost-forgotten, summer sky, rounding wide beneath a tidy cut of rusty-red hair gone dreadfully astray. Almost as if the boy’s very scalp were untidily sliding right off his bovine head.
He lay there. Shocked. That fat boy.
There on the cold hard ground.
The fallen bicycle tangled at his feet.
Staring up with those round eyes.
Neither unblinking nor taciturn.
And he neither reserved nor quiet.
Still whining. Squealing terribly really.
A quite morbidly honest reaction.
The other children pausing in the fog.
In that thick swirling black fog.
Staring with expressionless horror.
As if witnessing something ill-mannered.
Something boorish. Indecorous.
The fat boy seemed to realize all of this and he fell silent. The startled machinations of his fleshy face dissolving back to a familiar polite, if creepy mask. Oliver apologized, anyway, and attempted to help the poor child gather his scattered books and personal belongings. Including a broken silver necklace on the sidewalk.
Appearing and disappearing.
In the shifting tendrils of black mist.
Winking dully in the dimness.
Oliver scooped it up (even as the fat boy reluctantly protested with another soft whine, another squeal really) and found the necklace to possess a most peculiar charm. A charm that had presumably hung well-hidden beneath the boy’s shirt and sweater.
The charm featured the moon in its now very familiar four stages cresting a majestic thorn tree backlit by a comparably large ruby-red orbiting body.
A blood moon.
Oliver just stared at it.
Just stared at the peculiar charm.
Cold, yet warm to the touch.
Blinking. Shivering.
The fat boy frowned and snatched the necklace and the charm with a plump hand from Oliver and hushed as if in dark piety:
“…Tehi!! …Tegi!!...”
The fat boy, then, despite that bum knee drooling thin rivulets of blood down his leg beneath his torn trousers, climbed ponderously back onto the bicycle, its front rim bent, several spokes broken, and tried to ride off, wobbling precariously a few meters, or so, as the front wheel whipped this way and that, threatening to dump him right over again, before somehow finding his balance and vanishing into the fog before Oliver could think to respond.
Oliver just stood there a spell.
Just stood there a spell afterward.
The other children now moving again.
Assuming they’d ever really stopped.
Just stood there in the black fog.
That black fog swirling about him.
Beneath that fat ghost of a moon.
And that pale orb of a dying sun.
Shaken really. Quite shaken.
Unsure if he could trust his own ears.
Unsure if he’d heard what he thought he’d just heard. Or if he’d simply imagined it. There were so very many things he was so very uncertain about these days after so many long sleepless nights. And so very many things he thought he had perhaps imagined.
Or at the very least misinterpreted.
Like perhaps that malefic little charm.
Had he really just seen what he thought he had?
Or had it only been a figment of imagination?
A figment of his overtired and fuzzy mind?
Not unlike the fat boy’s pious refrain?
He really needed to sleep.
He really hadn’t slept for weeks.
If not months, frankly.
If ever, on this dark little isle.
Or so he tried to convince himself.
Standing there in the black fog.
Swirling about him.
30.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, Oliver endured yet another long and sleepless night, the black fog beyond the double-hung window shifting about not unlike black smoke, finding the odd crack and crevice along the window frame border, silently slipping into the dark bedroom and swirling about him as if attempting to communicate with him. A phantasmal game of charades.
As if full of puckish spirits.
Swirling about Abby, too.
(With Charlemagne between them.)
(Snoozing rather contently, the beast.)
Nudging her in her restless sleep.
Making her sleep more restless.
Causing her to toss and turn and moan softly.
Oliver attempted to dismiss the puckish spirits with a vigorous wave of the hand as if shooing off a bothersome housefly, but only managed to momentarily displace them in the bedroom darkness before they returned, darker than the surrounding blackness, drawing his attention to the rise and fall of Abby’s abdomen. Eventually encouraging him to place a hand there on the unborn child.
He allowed his hand to rest there.
Tempting the unborn child to move.
Tempting it to communicate with him.
Something it never seemed to do.
Meanwhile, outside the double-hung window, past the playfully swirling black fog slipping in and out of the bedroom via the odd crack and crevice along the window frame border, Oliver could see that fattening moon was now nearly full and rather startlingly large, indeed. Bursting at its very own seams, hung heavily over that dark woods in that dark overcast sky turning ever darker as thick menacing black clouds rolled off the sea. The thick menacing black clouds portending a wicked storm to herald-in Midsummer’s Eve.
Midsummer’s Eve, he thought.
His hand still there on Abby.
Still resting on the unborn child.
Hiding in there from him. It.
Rather spookily so. It.
Where had the time gone?
And why wouldn’t it move for him?
Why wouldn’t it speak to him?
It often spoke to his wife, his Abby. He’d watched her sitting quietly alone with it when she thought he was otherwise occupied. Her pale hands on her abdomen. A queer smile on her face.
Why would it not speak to its father?
What secrets did they share? Abby and it?
It was just then, as these troubling questions plagued him, Oliver noticed, just inside the dark woods at the edge of the property, shadows moving about in the foggy night. Large and small. Dancing and cavorting about in the heavy darkness amongst the disfigured trees, the black fog swirling about them. The dancing and cavorting shadows indeterminate, but also somehow fairy-like.
Possibly moving in a circle.
Or a series of concentric circles.
These odd fairy-like shadows.
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If he allowed his mind to go there.
If he convinced himself of it.
Of such terrible silly nonsense.
In this dark land of folklore.
Before the black fog concealed them.
Erasing them in the darkness.
Not unlike a clever magician’s illusion.
The black fog more like smoke than ever.
Under that fattening moon nearly full.
On the cusp of Midsummer’s Eve.
The next morning, just after dawn, Oliver stood at the edge of the woods in a cold drizzly rain beneath the black clouds, the playful black fog swirling about him. And it occurred to him perhaps it had only been the black fog itself he’d witnessed through the double-hung window making mischief at the wooded edge.
But then he knelt down in the rain.
At the threshold of the path.
The thin path entering the woods.
His yellow boots caked with mud.
That mucky foul-stinking mud.
To find the ground pockmarked.
Pockmarked as if by hooves.
If he allowed his mind to go there.
If he convinced himself of it.
Oliver stood back up and straightened himself as if that might somehow straighten his thoughts. He peeked into the woods heavy with dew, the black fog stealing between the trees in the pockets of dark gloom. The woods deafeningly quiet. Almost too quiet.
Not unlike the child inside his wife. It.
He turned back toward the cottage, feeling altogether now unsettled. Unhinged. Only to be rather horribly startled--
By an object hung in a tree.
From a short and twisted limb.
A small doll-like figure.
Made from chalk and dry straw.
And clumps of fiery red hair.
He stared at it with wonderment.
Then, with a frown, snatched at it.
Exposing a thick brown twine.
To which the doll was knotted.
The twine pulled taut, snapping purposefully, and in the process, setting ablaze a heretofore unseen wooden matchstick.
The doll became engulfed in flame.
Full of a most unnatural light.
Purple, marigold, red, and blue.
Before disintegrating to ash.
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