She told them of the villagers and how they had unearthed something — something from the village that was there before their own. How they had prayed to it and how, before long, the village itself was swallowed by the thing they had called.
She whispered, half smiling — all the better to scare her children — about the children given to the village by the others.
“Long after the people were no more, the lights were sometimes seen,” she said, mimicking an old woman’s voice. “And the people became fearful and offered some of their own children to appease what walked abroad at night. Three were given, and the lights stopped.” She leaned in close, hands rising into claws to either side of her head. “Though it is said they are lonely and crave more brothers and sisters, a mother even, and hunger for what they were denied!”
The children shrieked, but recovered quickly. “Where is it?” her daughter asked.
Mora did not answer, but she knew. Stories or not, they all knew.
It lay on the other side of the red forest, so called because of the unusual color of the trees there. Some of the more adventurous children, those who dared each other to wander the forest’s edge, said they could sometimes see lights twinkling through the trees.
One day, a man walked into the village; he was one of the whites from the far west beyond the delta. Mora knew of them, had even met one when she was a girl and her father took her to where the river flowed down out of the hills.
His appearance was bad. His clothes were torn to pieces; at first, the villagers thought perhaps he had been attacked by one of the big cats often seen in the long grass.
Mora was the first one to go to him, and the look in his eyes told her no cat had done this.
She knew fear and perhaps a flicker of madness when she saw it. It was the same as the look in those who sometimes died of fever; their last days filled with raving and waking dreams they couldn’t escape.
At first, he didn’t seem to see her, until she reached out and touched his arm. He looked at her, blinked, and something that was almost a smile creased his face. He said something in what Mora recognized as the white’s language. She knew some of the words, but nothing he said made sense.
She shook her head, but the man kept smiling. He uttered more words, each in different tongues, until she recognized a dialect she understood. It wasn’t her own, but came from the people over the hills, who were said to have many dealings with the whites.
“What happened to you?”
He reached for her with both hands as the first tears ran down his dirt-streaked cheeks. “So much,” he muttered, then his eyes rolled up into his head and he fell to the ground.
Ligmon came into the hut where they put the man. Two of the elders, a man and woman who knew something about medicine, tended him. Mora watched from the side, curious about what would become of him.
“Someone should go over the hills and find some of his people,” Ligmon said. “They will want to know about him.”
“Seta should go; he’s the fastest.”
“He is. I will tell him.” He turned to leave, but stopped when he saw that Mora remained where she was. “You want to stay? The elders will see to him.”
“I want to be here if he wakes up.” “Why?”
Mora couldn’t say why, but something in the man’s voice and that look in his eyes made her want to hear anything he said. It was part of her nature, and while Ligmon knew better than to argue with nature, this was different.
“You will only get in the way,” he told her, regretting his words, but not showing it. “His people will want to know what happened to him.”
Ligmon thought about it and left the hut to find Seta. Mora went closer to the pallet the man lay on while the elders burned herbs in bowls around about him, creating a cover of smoke to hold the man’s soul to his body.
“Can you say what did this?”
“His wounds are not bad,” the first elder said, grinding more herbs between her hands over a smoking bowl.
“It is his mind and spirit that are most afflicted,” said the second.
The man stirred quietly for a moment, his head moving quickly from side to side and his hands clenching and unclenching as though he was trying to grab hold of something. The elders wafted more of the sickly smelling smoke over him, but this did little to still his body. His head moved faster and faster, until his back arched and his mouth opened without sound escaping.
Something fell from the pocket of his ruined clothes, landing on the dirt floor with a dull chunk. The second elder looked for it and held it up to the light. When the first saw it, she made a sign to the spirits and waved the smoke about even more fiercely.
“What is it?” Mora felt their fear, but did not understand it.
Hanging on a leather thong was a small stone, of the kind the elders would carve to ward something off or else call something to them. Mora had not seen one in a long time, not since she was a child, for they were made only rarely. The skill needed was great, and the stones needed were hard to find.
She did not recognize the symbol carved onto its face.
They did not answer, but the second elder clasped it in both hands and held it close to the burning embers in one of the bowls. So near did he hold it that his hands began to blister with the heat.
“It is better if you go,” he told her. “There is more we must do.”
Feeling she would get no more from them, Mora left the hut without a backwards glance, though she found it hard to push the symbol on the stone from her mind.
Seta returned early the next morning. He was reckoned the fastest man in the village and had won many contests to prove it, but even he could not have made the journey in so short a time.
He went to Mora before seeing anyone else, and for a moment, she did not recognize him.
The look on his face was not one she remembered seeing before. “What is it?”
Seta caught his breath. “It is better if you see, but first, I must eat and take water.”
She offered him her table and he went to it, but turned before sitting. For a moment, the odd look crossed his face again.
“You should bring your sword.”
Mora was not as young as she had been and struggled to keep up with Seta as they jogged across the delta. The going was slower in the long grass; neither was eager to meet one of the big cats.
“Where are we going?” Mora saw he was not leading her towards the hills, but to the edge of the red forest.
“You will see,” he said and pointed ahead. Dark shapes were circling near the trees, more than boded well.
The birds had picked at the bodies, but Mora could see none of them had died well. What was more disturbing were the ones they found tangled up in the fat roots of some of the trees, as if the trees themselves had grown hungry at the feast laid before them.
They were all whites, and Mora recognized their dress. Her father had called them soldiers, one of the few words in the white’s language she knew.
“They go on into the forest, but I don’t know how many.”
Mora could not remember ever being this close to the red forest. No one came here; there was no reason to do so. You had to be mad to want to go there in the first place, but Seta had overcome his fears and come as close as any. Now she had to as well.
“I don’t know how they died,” she told him. As badly pecked at as the bodies were, she could see no sign of how they had met their end. No tracks and no other dead; whoever killed them must have been skilled indeed to leave none of their own dead or sign of their passing.
A thought came to her and she passed under the shade of the first trees.
“Mora!” Seta hissed, but as brave as he was, he would come no closer to stop her.
The air was still and close under the branches, but the bodies had no smell in spite of how rotten they were. Mora paid them no mind, but looked at the ground instead, searching for disturbances. She found nothing. It did not make sense, but then, a great de
al about the last two days did not make sense.
She found Seta shifting anxiously from foot to foot when she passed back the way she had come.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing,” she said, then looked at the bodies again. “I’ve never seen men killed in this way,
nor so many whites.”
“Should I carry on to the hills?”
Mora shook her head slowly. “No, not yet.” “We go back?”
“We go back,” she agreed, then knelt and looked at the closest man. He was young, not much older than her eldest son. His youth still hung about him, no matter that the birds had taken his eyes. “I think we will find more answers from the living.”
The two elders still tended the white man and now he was awake, if only a little. Mora came into the hut and watched them for a time, not sure about what to say. Night had fallen, but torches were lit inside so they could perform their work.
“Has he said anything?”
“Not yet,” said the first elder.
“We think he was waiting, perhaps for you,” said the second.
Mora went to the pallet and the two elders gave her room to sit alone with him, but did not leave the hut. “Do you remember me?” she asked, using the dialect she knew he more or less understood.
His eyes opened slowly and found hers. “Yes, I remember.”
“We found the others near the edge of the forest.” “Then you know.” It was not a question.
“What happened?”
“We passed through an empty village and camped near it before crossing the forest. It was a strange place, do you know it?”
Of course Mora did, but did not say so, only nodded so he would continue.
“In the night, we heard nothing. No birds or animals; it was as quiet as any place I have known, like a grave.”
She did not understand this last word; he had slipped into his own tongue. He tried to explain the word and she finally took the meaning.
“When we went into the forest, things started to happen.” His hands began to tremble. “First, one man and then another went missing, just gone in the moment of a blink. I felt as if someone was breathing on my neck, but when I turned, there was nothing.”
“You saw nothing?”
“Only felt it. Even the trees seemed to be looking at us, or something in them we could not see. The air was so still and close, like it was trying to slow us.”
She thought again of the quiet under the branches and agreed it was so.
“I don’t know when we started to die. I think it was after we saw the dark man.” He did not appear to mean dark of skin, but that he was in shadow when they saw him. “Made of it, I thought. I did not see him clearly, but he was tall…I don’t remember…only the screams and the lights,” he choked out, then turned away and held his hands together under his chin, muttering words in his own language.
Feeling she would get nothing more from him, Mora patted his shoulder and left his side. The elders watched her, and a glance passed between them as she left the hut.
The first followed her. “You have been to the forest?” “I have,” Mora said without turning.
“There will be a sign and a price.”
Mora stopped and faced the old woman. “What are you talking about?”
“The whites have gone somewhere they should not have, that was bad enough.” She raised an old, withered hand and pointed over Mora’s shoulder. “Look.”
Lights danced in the sky above the red forest. Seen from so far, they looked the glow of fireflies, which meant they must be big. They joined with each other, making blobs and bigger shapes, before separating again. Mora stood transfixed, as did several of the villagers still awake at this hour. Before long, most of them were watching.
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing good,” the elder said. “Nothing good at all.” “The fifth village.”
“Do not speak its name,” the elder said as she cupped a hand to her mouth. “They can hear, even from so far.”
“I do not care,” Mora lied. “We need to speak of it.”
The elder looked around at the faces of the crowd; most were turned up to the lights still dancing in the sky.
“Come with me.”
Lighting more bowls of burning herbs, the elder wafted them around the room. They were in her own hut, because she said it was safer to talk there.
“The last time this happened, I was a girl and your grandfather hadn’t yet been born.” She crossed to the small fire pit and hung a kettle over it; filled with water, it would boil slowly over the embers.
“In that time, we still went to the fifth village. There were still people there.” “My grandfather never spoke of it.”
“None of us do. We’ve forgotten, or tried to,” the elder said. She stirred the water in the kettle, dropping in a handful of mixed leaves. “They were different, the folk who lived there. They kept to older ways than the rest of us.” She managed to smile. “Calling it the fifth village is wrong. It was the first in the delta.”
“Everyone’s village is the first.”
“This one was the true first, the original. All the others were built later. Much, much later, in fact.”
“You said they were different. How?”
The elder ladled tea into two cups, taking one for herself and handing the other to Mora.
They drank at more or less the same time, and Mora was surprised at the bitter taste of the brew as the elder gulped hers down.
“Differences in skin color…only small ones, mind. Clusters of pigment around their eyes and on their arms. Looked like paint.”
“They were born that way?”
The elder nodded. “We always called them the Marked, but that was rude and our parents told us not to.”
“How else were they different?”
“They kept other gods, not the spirits or the Mother. I never knew their names…and even if I did, I wouldn’t speak them,” she replied, then drank more of her tea. “Sometimes they would use words in a language I never heard before. Maybe they were names, I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
The elder looked around, then wafted more of the smoke around the hut. Only when she was satisfied with its thickness did she continue.
“A child went missing, then another. We thought it might have been a cat or something, but it wasn’t. The Marked brought them back to us later, but they were changed. Not the same, even though they looked no different. I never met any children from their village, not in all those years.”
“They harmed the children?”
“No…not exactly. But they could speak some words in the strange language and spoke about things they couldn’t have known about. They knew secrets about people it was impossible to know.”
Mora let her tea sit and grow cold.
“After the third child was taken, my father and some men went to the village. They weren’t looking for a fight, but they were ready for one all the same.”
The elder looked into the fire, the kettle still steaming gently over it and fitfully puffing out steam.
“They were gone a day and a night, and that was when the lights first appeared. Eight men
went with my father and only two came back, without the child. My father said the village was a dead place now, but he offered nothing more.”
“You never saw the lights again?”
“Only sometimes, but only then if you went too close to the forest, like they were trying to guide you.”
She could sense what the elder was going to say next.
“The white or a child, probably a child. They will give one or the other to the village.”
Mora stood and left the hut.
Ligmon was in their hut and the children were with him. He looked anxious.
“Seta is moving the white here. You and he need to watch him,” she told him. “Why?”
She looked at the small ones gathered around him. “I bore your children,
that’s all you need to know.”
He pursed his lips, but finally nodded. “What about you?”
Before she could answer, Seta brought the white inside. The man looked better, but was still drawn and pale.
“Mora,” Seta said, laying down his burden. “They’ve taken a child, one of Jesa’s twins.” Mora gripped the handle of her sword. “Stay here, both of you.”
She caught the group as they were leaving the village: two men and the second elder. One of the men held the little boy; he was crying for his mother, but they paid him no mind.
Mora stepped in front of them.
“It is the only way,” the second elder began. “No.”
One of the young men stepped forward, hand reaching for his dagger. Mora drew her sword and had the point pressed against his neck before he could move again.
“I will go. I went into the forest. I will go in this one’s place,” she said, nodding to the still- crying child.
The elder seemed to consider it, perhaps weighing the chances his young companions had against her. He nodded and Mora dropped her blade. The man stepped back, hands raised in front of him.
“And if it is not enough that you go?” “Then nothing will be.”
Even in darkness, Mora found the spot easily enough. She listened for the calls of the birds still feeding on the dead. They did not seem afraid to go so close to the forest, but she did.
She could feel something in the air, and when she got close enough, the lights overhead stopped dancing and disappeared. They were simply extinguished as if they were never there. If the forest was still in the daytime, it was dead at night. No sounds reached her and even the buzzing of insects was absent.
She knew the way, more or less; everyone knew where the fifth village was, whether they would speak of it or not.
Mora felt like she was being watched, but saw and heard no sign of who or what might be doing so. Her sword felt heavier than she remembered; she wanted to set it down, if only for a moment.
No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) Page 11