Stolen Tongues

by Felix Blackwell

  There was little doubt the Impostor sensed it too.

  Then, he said something I did not expect. The words felt like a fist bashing against my skull, and upon hearing them, everything started to spin.

  “Tell me about the child, Felix.” Nathan’s voice wafted effortlessly from its throat. “Tell me about the child.”

  Before I could speak, the Impostor whirled around and glared at me. My knees came straight out from under my body and I collapsed onto the wet grass.

  Staring down at me, boring into my soul with lidless eyes, was the face of Nathan – my friend, my protector, the son of a man who had given his life to help me. Now his skin was hard and bruised, his scalp flayed, his eyes tormented. His features didn’t quite fit the skull they’d been stretched over, and the whole mess was propped up by a body that rattled with loose, collected bones. A slimy black liquid dribbled out of the mouth and spattered onto my chest when he cackled. As the creature loomed over me, a familiar little pouch bobbled around his neck, emptied of its former contents and now overflowing with severed fingers.

  The creature spoke a phrase in the language of Tíwé’s people – the same one Nathan had uttered over the phone to make Faye sick – and I began vomiting profusely as I lay there on the ground.

  “Tell me about the child,” he said once more. The lips spread in an expression of malevolent joy, baring the rotten maw of a long-dead wolf. Nathan’s calm voice seeped out of it. “Let me speak to the one who followed you home.”

  I gasped for air but couldn’t impel my body to move. The creature took a few steps toward me, and I slammed shut my eyes, expecting to feel those hideous fangs in my neck. Instead, I heard his footsteps approach, and then recede in the opposite direction. I smelled his stench as he passed over me. When I opened my eyes, he was already in the distance, moving quickly. Back toward my neighborhood. Toward my house.

  “Followed you home,” he repeated, voice echoing in the cold night air. “Followed you home. Followed you home.”

  Chapter 44

  When I was three years old, my parents took my brother and me to Yosemite for a vacation. We were joined by two other families that my mother knew from work, so we all stayed in a giant cabin together. At some point during our stay, one of the other kids came down with some kind of stomach bug. It didn’t take long for the illness to spread to all the children, and eventually I began vomiting uncontrollably. My father could not hide his disgust, and refused to come near me. This made me cry. A lot. My mother came to the rescue and consoled me, but the damage was done. My dad’s horrified expression imprinted itself on my mind forever, and taught me that there is something to fear about being sick.

  I’m twenty-eight years old now, and I’ve spent years of my life being paranoid about throwing up. Emetophobia controls much of my existence. It makes me afraid to share someone’s drink, afraid to eat without washing my hands, afraid to get on rollercoasters, to fly in planes, to try new things or go to new places.

  At some point after decades of living with this phobia, I’ve almost forgotten what causes me to regard all those things with fear. The possibility of vomiting becomes subconscious; I don’t really think about it anymore. I simply fear everything that could cause me to be sick, and yet I have no immediate explanation for why I am afraid anymore. I just am.

  That possibility no longer lingers at the precipice of my conscious thoughts. But the Impostor found it anyway. He reached deep into my nightmares and pulled out what terrifies me the most. He brought it out and used it against me. Repeating Nathan’s spiritual purge didn’t just disable me there in the field; it was a reminder. A reminder of his remarkable power to turn my own flawed humanity upon me. A reminder that he was planning to make me suffer in the most personal of ways. The At’an-A’anotogkua was designing a personal hell for me, and was nearly ready to drag me down into it.

  And so the world collapsed on me. I lay there on the ground, puking my guts out, knowing that my fiancée was asleep and unguarded while a terrible being strode toward her through the dark. He beckoned her in every voice she knew, calling out her name in all his stolen tongues. He whispered things that would make her happy. He made her promises. He begged for help and mimicked the cries of children. He capitalized on her innate motherly instincts, on her buried memories, and on the vulnerability of her unconscious state. And all I could do was stagger around and wait for the thrum of my death-gripped heart to subside.

  After a few blurry moments, the first light of morning poured into my vision, illuminating my way out of the park. My pulse recovered from its frenzy, and the numbness of my limbs faded. The acrid taste in my mouth, for once, didn’t paralyze me. I tore through the streets to get back to my house. I had no plan.

  Many lights were on in the homes that lined our street, and the sky over the eastern foothills blazed dawn-red.

  A few of my neighbors had heard me shouting, and were now standing on their driveways with cell phones or flashlights in hand. I ran past them, telling them to look out for a prowler, and ducked into the walkway of our condo. I hoped that their watchful gazes would discourage the creature from making another appearance.

  The front door sat wide open. I couldn’t remember if I’d left it open while sleepwalking, but I assumed that the creature was somewhere inside my house. I entered, squinting through the darkness and calling out Faye’s name.

  The bed was empty. Its sheets lay across the floor as if Faye had been dragged from them. I shouted her name and searched the rooms, growing more frantic with each passing second. When I couldn’t find her anywhere, I leaped down the stairs, hoping to catch one of the neighbors and ask if they’d seen my fiancée. Just as I reached the front door, a person’s silhouette appeared in the corner of my eye.

  It was Faye. She stood in front of the sliding glass door that led out to the backyard. She remained perfectly still, except for her hand, which gripped the door handle so tightly it trembled.

  “Thank God,” I sighed, slamming the front door shut and ensuring it was locked.

  Faye muttered something, but I couldn’t hear it. All I could see was the featureless outline of her body, and her breath that fogged the glass in front of her.

  “Are you alright?” I asked, moving toward her.

  “I saw him,” she whispered. The door frame shuddered under the strength of her grip.

  “He was here.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked, looking over her shoulder and surveying the yard.

  “I saw him,” she said again.

  Faye backed into me and stumbled. I caught her before she fell. She looked up into my eyes with a panic I knew too well. She’d finally met her biggest fan.

  “I saw his face,” she whispered, pointing a shaky finger at the glass. “I saw his face.”

  There, streaked across the glass where she’d been standing, was an oily black handprint.

  Faye and I forced ourselves to stay awake through the next few hours. We communicated only with pen and paper, for fear that the creature might still be listening somewhere outside. During that time, we heard three distinct sets of footsteps across the roof, and two different knocks on the door. Children laughed all around the perimeter of the house. Occasionally there were long periods of silence, but even then, I could not relax. The image of Nathan’s eyes staring into me with otherworldly malice haunted my thoughts. The ache of his loss gnawed at my heart so hungrily that I could not even speak it to Faye.

  We waited until the sun climbed high in the morning sky. As the noises faded and the world brightened, Faye went to the window to look outside.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said, confidence rising in her voice. “I know what to do.”

  Chapter 45

  Faye’s new boss was generous enough to give Faye the day off, so we had a long weekend to set her plan into motion. We sipped Nathan’s wretched tea after concluding that it did more good than harm, and Faye spent her time furiously drawing, journaling, and texting with her mom and sis
ter. She explained little, but I could tell by her demeanor that everything she did had a purpose. Angela called me to set up her visit, and seemed genuinely disturbed by the fact that I refused to talk about our situation over the phone. I asked her to bring sage, to which she replied, “I’m not that kind of Indian.”

  Over the next two days, I periodically heard Faye crying in private. She had certainly entered some kind of mourning process, long-delayed by years of denial, and I now bore witness to the lifelong impact of her loss. She sobbed for hours on end, and stared at the scrapbook all the while. Never have I seen a person in so much pain. But, my fiancée assured me that she would be alright, and simply asked that I have faith in her. I obliged. Faye knew herself better than anyone, even me, and seemed confident in her ability to rid us of the shadow that loomed over our lives. And so, I put my faith in her judgment.

  I cried too. Nathan never answered any of the thousand calls I made to his phone that weekend. Neither did Ranger Pike. My heart was certain of Nathan’s ghastly fate, but my brain still had to know for sure. The wait was agonizing.

  Finally, on Saturday night, my phone rang. I was in the middle of heating soup for Faye. When I saw that it was the ranger, a sudden dread washed over me. The phone felt like a twenty-pound brick in my hand.

  “Hello?” I said. It came out almost a plea.

  William skipped all pleasantries and said, “You better sit down.”

  “Just tell me,” I begged. “Just tell me.” My heart pounded so hard it shook my vision.

  William cleared his throat and tried to speak with composure, but I could hear the sorrow in his voice.

  “We got a call from one of Nathan’s relatives,” he said. “Told us he’d been missing a few days. Thought he went camping with his buddies, but none of them knew where he was. On my route yesterday morning, I dropped by the Spencer cabin—”

  There was a long silence, which told me more than words could say. A jolt of desperate rage flashed through me. I’d warned Nathan not to go back there.

  “We got city cops everywhere up here now,” William continued. “Whole mountain’s shut down. Weren’t no bear this time. They’re up here lookin’ for a murderer.”

  The ranger heard my muffled sobs.

  “That’s enough then,” he said. “They were my friends too, Felix. Family to me.”

  “Tell me,” I repeated. “I have to know.”

  “I can’t, Felix. It just don’t make any sense yet. Maybe if we wait for an official—”

  “Tell me what you know,” I demanded.

  William sighed.

  “Somethin’ happened up there at the cabin. They did somethin’ to him. I don’t understand it. Our coroner up here’s deferrin’ to the boys in Denver, so we gotta wait some more. He ain’t ever seen anything like it. It’s horrible. Just horrible.”

  The news singed every nerve in my body; pain radiated up from my stomach across every limb. My scalp tingled. Fuzzy gray static began to form around my vision. I felt like passing out.

  “I called for backup right when I got there,” William said. “Went inside, found a hell of a puzzle. Bathroom window been forced open. Don’t get why, though, because the front door was unlocked. That’s how we came in.

  “Seemed like two people been in there recently. Bedroom door was locked from the inside, but the door leadin’ from that room out to the back was open. Wide open. Somebody’d been stayin’ in that bedroom for a few nights. Food and all kinds of weird shit in there. Some dead rabbits and a chipmunk or somethin’ too.

  “We found Nathan’s satellite phone on the couch in the living room. Your number was the last one he dialed, Felix.”

  The static pressed closer to the center of my vision.

  “I never got a missed call,” I replied, exasperated. “I never heard from Nathan at all. I called him a hundred times.”

  “Might notta gone through,” the ranger replied. “I found his buck knife jammed into the wall outside the bedroom door. He’d been carvin’ symbols and words all over the house. Took pictures of ‘em, but nobody in his community ever seen anythin’ like ‘em before. Specialist at Boulder says some of ‘em are Hopi and Zuni words, but Nathan didn’t speak them languages. Neither did Tíwé. Nobody on their reservation does.

  “There was a big carving of a dreamcatcher on the outside of the bedroom door, and non-lethal amounts of blood spattered on the carpet and the wall there in the hallway. If that ain’t weird enough, on the inside of the bedroom door, we found little marks everywhere. Like someone been poundin’ and scratchin’ on it.”

  William explained to me what the sheriff and his men had hypothesized: that Nathan had been sitting on the floor in the hall for a day, maybe even two. Someone was in the bedroom, but the door remained locked. Whoever was in there, it was possible that he and Nathan were having some sort of conversation. At no point was the electricity or heat functioning in the cabin, because it had been shut off after I was rescued on my second visit. This meant that however long Nathan had stayed, he remained in the dark and in near-freezing weather each night.

  The K-9 team found two pairs of tracks leaving the cabin, one from the back door in the bedroom, the other from the front door. They both headed into the woods across the field. The tracks joined together, indicating that although the two people had left the house separately, they had walked side-by-side into the woods.

  They found Nathan’s body approximately a quarter mile in, buried upside-down with his legs erupting from the soil at the knee. Upon exhumation it was discovered that his face and scalp had been flayed. There were deep lacerations in his back that appeared to be claw marks, and carvings on his arms that looked self-inflicted. The unofficial cause of death, however, was suffocation. He’d been buried alive.

  If it is true that we have souls, I felt mine die in that moment. I remained in the kitchen, speechless, watching as Faye’s soup boiled over and splattered across the stove.

  “You ever go down into that cellar?” William asked, shaking me from my stupor.

  “N—no…it…it was locked.”

  “Must’a been,” he replied. “Both ‘em doors been ripped

  off. Whatever was inside is gone now. Taken.”

  The rest of the night slipped by in silence. If the Impostor made any noise outside, I was oblivious to it. Faye slept soundly, thanks to the effect of Nathan’s final gift. I sat at the living room table with a single lamp on, wistfully remembering the warmth of Tíwé’s smile, and the liveliness of his eyes against his weather-beaten face. I recalled the feeling of camaraderie that Nathan had always made me feel; from the day we met, he treated me like his brother. The wicked grins they donned while worn by the Impostor still haunted me – but my heart knew that those were petty torments. They faded and gave way to the memories I had of the real Tíwé and Nathan.

  I went online and made the largest donation I could afford to their community, to help cover some of the cost of their funeral ceremonies. Afterward, I wrote a long letter to both of them. I intended to read it at their place of burial someday, when all this was over.

  For now, we had a pest to eradicate.

  Chapter 46

  It was Sunday. Angela arrived at our home just before nightfall, immediately hugging Faye and demanding to know what was going on. She looked deeply unsettled, and I wondered if she knew about Tíwé’s and Nathan’s deaths. In that moment I remembered what Nathan had told me on Pale Peak: “We don’t speak the names of the dead for some time.” I decided to avoid the subject altogether unless Angela brought it up. Her green eyes reminded me of his, and it only struck me then that she might have been his mother.

  I took Faye’s drawings outside and scattered them around the yard on Faye’s instruction. She had sketched more pictures of her own nightmares, and of memories from when she was little. She had even drawn a man that looked like Christopher – or at least how she imagined he might look, had he survived and grown up. Many of the pages contained annotations, and som
e even had stories from Faye’s childhood. At our front door, I placed my favorite of the bunch: a portrait of five-year-old Faye holding a baby.

  The sky darkened. Back inside, Faye dimmed the lights and lay under a blanket on the couch. She had the remarkable ability to nap at any time of day, and was even more prepared to fall asleep quickly due to our recent all-nighter. She refused Nathan’s tea this time, and instead told me, “Wake me up when he gets here.”

  In under a half hour she was out cold, leaving Angela and me to discuss the situation at the dining room table. I explained my hypothesis on Faye’s grief.

  “She buried that pain so deep that she didn’t even dream of it,” I said. “She totally erased Christopher from existence. I just don’t get how.”

  “It makes sense,” Angela replied, keeping her voice low. “Extreme denial might force something way down inside, but there’s more than one way for it to get out.”

  “Do you believe us?” I asked. “Do you believe her?”

  We looked to the couch. Faye’s chest rose and fell rhythmically. Her face looked serene.

  “I believe something remarkable is happening here,” Angela offered.

  “He’s real,” I said. “I’ve seen him. I’ve touched him. He did this.”

  I pulled down my collar, revealing the scars on my chest.

  “Well,” she said, after a moment, “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “What are you doing?” Faye blurted out. “You need help with that?” Angela and I listened intently, but after a few more strings of babble, I realized that Faye was dreaming about her coworkers.

  An hour passed. I could tell that Angela was beginning to regret making the drive.

  “Maybe we need to take a more direct approach,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “She talks to him, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Angela said, moving to the kitchen window and peering outside, “what makes you think he always comes to her? Maybe she calls out to him.”