A Mythos Grimmly

by Morgan Griffith

  The Sovereign of Fear then wordlessly assured the child that a third bestowment would be made in due course.

  If this was fear, Joseph wondered why the emotion was spoken of so unfavourably by so many. Here was wonder and otherness.

  Would you know yet more?

  Joseph, hearing the question with the ears of his heart, nodded enthusiastically.

  My Gift is One: the knowledge that there is nothing to fear. This Gift is thrice-given, but the third is the final seal...

  The boy raised his arms.

  The hand within the hood wriggled its fingers into a fresh gesture. A soft ruffling sound stirred somewhere to Joseph’s right.

  Meshes of shadow quickly dissolved into an aura of light so blazing that Joseph had to shut his eyes against it. A moment later he felt the lace veil slipping onto his face like a tight mask, one that blinded him, snatched his breath.

  Joseph struggled, shrieked, but both were futile. Only after the Sovereign of Fear had deigned to release him was Joseph once more able to breath, to scream, to stand.

  He found himself in a nocturnal wood. The moonlight was wan, sickly. Though there was no chill to the air, Joseph was unable to stop shuddering.

  From the glen, the Sovereign of Fear stepped forward. My first gift is to awaken you, should you wish to know the secret nature of fear...

  Joseph nodded.

  The secret is...you have nothing to fear...

  And with that, a pale mist surged from the black folds of the Sovereign’s robe. It slid quickly and crossed the gap between eidolon and child. Joseph found himself touched by the fog; a benediction that utterly transformed his surroundings.

  Where there had been a mere cluster of trees and wild grass, something vast and ominous now stood. Each massive old growth tree seemed to suggest a presence far older. The stars above glared like numberless eyes, scrutinizing Joseph’s every twitch and tremor. The mild breeze now bristled with a chorus of inhuman voices, each so eager to share, to instruct. Toad and owl conveyed a new and awful sentience from their respective hiding places. Joseph somehow knew that these and all other fauna of the night were now only too eager to share their secret languages with him.

  All was alive, all moved independently and serenely, not in the spaces Joseph knew, but between them.

  Never forget... the Sovereign assured him. You have nothing to fear...

  His bravery, or perhaps simply his naivety, was plucked. Joseph felt his shudders fading. He took a cautious step forward, his first true step on the Way Nocturnal. The child was enraptured to find that the denizens of this Way were only too pleased to invite him to their company.

  And so it was from that night forward. Though the Sovereign of Fear did not appear again for another five years, Joseph Curwen began to withdraw from the world of men and became increasingly ghoulish, increasingly Other.

  His initiations fueled an unnatural independence that Joseph’s father and many of his peers could not help but notice. That he was becoming something different was obvious to all in Salem-Village. What troubled their heads was that no one, not even the village’s latest minister, would articulate just what it was they feared young Curwen was becoming.

  Shortly after his fifteenth birthday Joseph encountered the Sovereign of Fear for the second time.

  I have come to bestow my second gift, should you choose to accept...

  Joseph’s mind was boiling with questions, with secrets he’d been longing to share, but the Sovereign showed no interest in such trivialities. Finally Joseph whispered that he accepted the second gift.

  The gift was an instruction for the boy to leave the new world. He was to travel to a remote corner of Europe, to the rarest of all academies of true learning: the Scholomance. There Curwen would be instructed by the living Devil who would teach the language of birds and the deepest pleasures of the flesh.

  Joseph once more accepted.

  The Sovereign handed him the flower with its labial folds. Before he dissipated, the Sovereign reminded that Joseph had nothing to fear.

  And so at age fifteen Joseph Curwen found his way (with unnatural ease) to the mountain lake south of the Hungarian city of Nagyszeben. He carried the lace doily in his pocket, and each day at eventide Joseph would find new coins had materialized there, along with clearly demarcated maps to show him the way.

  Upon reaching Nagyszegben Joseph swam across the tiny lake, to the remote island that sat untouched by anything but dark waters. Upon this island, a half-ruined building, within which Joseph found the Devil and his concubines, each of whom were dizzyingly wise and painfully beautiful. For many years Joseph Curwen remained cloistered in the satanic academy’s walls of primal stone. He learned and yearned, lusted and fed.

  In 1692, his thirtieth year, Joseph’s education was deemed complete. Enraptured with the world, for he had gleaned its manifold secrets, Curwen returned to his beloved Salem in search of new experiences in the new world. There he met kindred spirits such as Edward Hutchinson, with whom he exchanged a variety of secrets.

  In the summer of that year rumours abounded that Curwen, Hutchinson and other “wytches” received “the Marke” from a darksome figure who appeared in the woods near Hutchinson’s abode.

  But lesser known accounts (namely, the final entries in the celebrant’s own Booke of Shadows) suggest that the Sabbath in the woods had a different character for Joseph Curwen.

  After receiving “the Marke”, Joseph encountered the Sovereign of Fear, whereupon the third and final teaching was bestowed.

  Once more the hooded avatar reminded Curwen that he had nothing to fear.

  Then, peeling back his sleep-sheet raiment, the Sovereign unveiled his final bestowment.

  His exposed torso was a freshly-dug grave. Eager worms burrowed through the upset soil that was piled around the edges of the pit. The grave itself was a vacancy, a void bereft of all the pleasures Joseph had known in his life. What waited for him with the infinite patience of the inevitable was pure absence, dissolution, vacancy.

  This was nothing. And it terrified Joseph Curwen to his very core.

  He ran shrieking from the woods that night, constantly glancing back over his shoulder to confirm that the grave was gliding after him. It slid across the night air, slowly and gracefully. It filled Joseph’s ears with the sounds of coffin lids being nailed snugly shut, of clumped earth raining down upon a stifling box. Of the realization that death would not make him nothing, rather it would make him aware of nothing. He would spend eternity in that vacancy, aware of its dark nothingness, its futility, its utter lack of taste, of agonies, of pleasures. He would not even have the faculty to cry out against this torment. Joseph knew that he would be a passive witness to his own oblivion.

  Arriving back at his home that night, Joseph Curwen swore an oath to himself: he would not go gently into that vast night. A single lifetime was not enough to yoke the pleasures of flesh and terra firma, to suss out the pleasures that lay beyond the realm of the senses.

  And so his life became one of obsessive study. He penetrated the secrets of alchemy, of necromancy, and became a frequenter of charnel grounds, the sight of whose graves with their wind-smoothed, anonymous markers instilled in him a terrifying reminder of precisely what he was running from. Death, specifically the ability to triumph over it, became his reason for being. He had disposed of the lace doily after a recurring nightmare saw him being lowered into his grave with the enlarged doily serving as his pauper’s shroud.

  It is said that Joseph Curwen never recovered from the Sovereign’s final bestowment, and that the chasing grave pursues Joseph without rest. From body to body leapt the soul of Joseph Curwen, each incarnation fueled by two desires: to partake in the pleasures of the Earth, and to learn those chymical secrets that might stave off the stalking pit that wants nothing more than to envelope its guest in the ironic final teaching: we have nothing to fear. For nothingness is what stalks Joseph Curwen to this day.

  Jumping off the bridge into
the river was the quickest way to learn to swim in Samuel George's neighborhood. He knew to kick swiftly and wiggle his hips and shoulders to reach the bottom. His mother had never been able to afford swimming lessons, but after nine seasons of practice he was as good as anyone else he knew.

  The water was cold and got colder the closer he got to the bottom, but he'd been in the water for a long time and was well adapted to the temperature. He came here almost every day as long as the temperature was tolerable from early March to late October. The elbow in the river had a remarkably deep basin that kept the beachfront tract almost static.

  Today, the water flowed slowly, making the basin completely still. It was the perfect time to catch crayfish. And since his friends had decided to go to school today, he had them all to himself. His eyes caught movement from a patch of long freshwater grass, so he turned his body and aimed at the area.

  Samuel reached through the grass with his right hand and grabbed the tail of the rust-colored crustacean. He brought the butterfly net in his left hand around in front of him and cocked his wrist to open the net. He dipped the crayfish into the threshold of the butterfly net and pulled up to send it to the bottom with seven other crayfish, but not before the tiny creature swung around and nicked his finger with its pincers.

  Samuel flinched. He couldn't count how many times he'd been pinched today, but this cut deeper than the others. Spinning around, he twisted the net to cut off the entrance for any enterprising crayfish with escape on their minds. He kicked off the soft river bed to ascend quickly to the surface.

  He sucked in lungfuls of air and swam over to a shallower area closer to a large rock protruding above the water's surface. He pulled himself up, sat on it and dumped the contents of the butterfly net into the already teeming ice cream bucket full of crayfish.

  As he sucked the blood from his finger, Samuel looked into the bucket and watched as the swirling mass of crayfish climbed over each other in a frantic attempt to escape. He laughed a little at their helplessness, but he quickly tightened his face into a squint as they continued to try and climb the wall of the ice cream bucket.

  It was a hypnotic and cyclical process. One would stand on the back of his fellow prisoner, get himself completely vertical up the wall of the bucket and fall over to the side, only to have the one he was standing on do the same. He had to admit that it was commendable that they never gave up. The activity continued, randomly, and yet patterned all at the same time as he watched, rapt.

  A branch snapped, pulling Samuel's attention away from the bucket of crayfish. It came from his left. He looked across the river at the sun drenched river bank below the Catholic cemetery. He would often see people there placing flowers for loved ones, but not today. He turned back and looked further up the bank, into the shaded cedars dipping out over the water.

  The sun made it difficult to see anything that far away in the shade. Samuel squinted, focusing on a patch of green. Something black moved behind the leaves. The tree shook as whatever it was left the riverbank.

  Fearing a bear, Samuel put the lid on the ice cream bucket and stomped through the water back to the beach. He slipped his wet, bare feet into his sneakers and walked quickly home.

  “I brought dinner,” Samuel said walking through the front door and dropping the ice cream bucket full of water and crayfish. A few tiny splashes of murky water popped through the holes perforated in the bucket's lid and landed on the kitchen counter.

  “No,” Samuel's mother said walking up to the bucket, “you brought me work.”

  She peeled off the lid and looked down into the bucket.

  “For God's sake, Samuel. There must be fifty of them!”

  “Forty-two.”

  She sighed heavily.

  “Dinner's in the oven. It'll be ready in twenty minutes. Enough time for you to dump these fellas back in the river and come back.”

  “Mom,” Samuel pleaded.

  “No.” She turned back to the sink where she was peeling carrots. “When you're back we can talk about school.”

  Samuel stiffened as he turned to carry the bucket back to the river.

  The sun began to set, bathing the world in a pervasive pink. He walked quickly because his mother's tone meant he should be back in time for dinner. Jogging down the gravel embankment that doubled for a parking lot when families came to spend the day, he stopped halfway. Instead of walking down to the river's edge, he cut in and scaled the rock face.

  Samuel stepped carefully along a small ridge that took him out over the middle of the river, roughly twenty feet above the water. The rock was warm, having faced the sun for much of the day. He took the lid off of the bucket and dumped the crayfish into the river. He was right above where he found most of them, and they were tough enough to survive the drop. He leaned back against the rock and looked out at the world around him for a moment.

  He saw the mountains completely surrounding him. The valley had been his people's home since before recorded time, but he didn't care about any of that. All he knew was that you had to drive over one of two mountain passes in order to leave this shit-hole. The remnants from the mill dumped into the river downstream, made the place stink in the summer when the water level receded and things started to cook in the sun. But Samuel supposed that anything could be beautiful if you really didn't look that hard at it.

  Samuel made to leave by slowly turning back around, but he was struck for a moment by a feeling he couldn't give voice to. It felt, perhaps, that he was being watched. He swung his head back around to where he'd looked only minutes earlier, the dark shaded patch of leaves. From his vantage point, he could see behind it much better.

  This time, he could see that it was definitely a black hairy creature of some kind. It was not a bear, because it looked like it was standing on two legs. Peeking out from behind the trunk of a small maple tree, he could see one luminous yellow eye.

  ___

  “I saw a bigfoot,” Samuel said through a mouthful of lasagna.

  “Sure, you did,” his mother said, finally sitting down across the small table from him. “There's no such thing, Samuel. You know that.”

  “Grand-dad told us all about the bigfoot he saw on Haida Gwaii.”

  “Your Grand-dad said a lot of things. Not all of them were true.” She took a bite of lasagna before continuing. “Your Grand-dad used to say you were a lot like him. I got a phone call today to prove it.”

  Samuel raised his eyes to look at his mother. She looked down at her plate and took another small bite of lasagna. He looked back down.

  “I got a call from Abby...someone today,” she said.

  Abby? Oh!

  “Miss Gordon. She's my counsellor.” Samuel liked Miss Gordon enough, but she had that whole 'save the world one kid at a time' vibe that he found annoying. She was pretty though.

  “She said you've been at school one day this week, and that you've been lying about why you've been gone.”

  “Well – “

  “Said that you said you were communing with Spirit Bear as part of a cultural retreat.”

  Samuel remained silent.

  “You're not just lying; you're making yourself look stupid. You're going to school tomorrow. Period.”

  ___

  Samuel remembered when he would dread being called to the principal's office. That was a few years ago. Now it was a welcome change from being in class.

  His days of caring about school were long gone.

  “Have a seat, Mr. George.”

  Mr. Waite was every high school principal, or at least that's what Samuel and his friends said. Tall enough to be imposing, but thin enough to be considered weak, Waite was a distant administrator, preferring to have his cult of counsellors and vice principals do the day-to-day management of the school. Being called in to his office was a show of dire circumstances. Last resort kind of stuff.

  His office was small and mostly barren. A couple of certificates and diplomas in dark wooden frames and a matching, thin bookshe
lf with old, leather-bound books were the only things in it other than his desk, fancy black chair and two less fancy guest chairs.

  Miss Gordon sat smiling at Samuel from one of them. Samuel took his time sitting in the other. Mr. Waite gestured toward the chair the entire time, unmoving.

  Samuel looked from Gordon to Waite. Gordon was pretty with shoulder-length brown hair and bright green eyes. She oozed genuine niceness. Waite was painfully average-looking with a sweat-covered bald head and eyes so dark they almost entirely lacked color. As different as they were, Samuel still saw two white people trying to imprison him.

  “Miss Gordon tells me your days of attendance are far outweighed by your truancy. When you do decide to grace us with your presence – today, for example – you're almost an hour tardy.”

  Samuel tried not to smirk at the word 'tardy.'

  “You're a promising student, Mr. George. Last semester you were on Miss Gordon's list of students who would need help seeking post-secondary funding. Now, it not only looks like you won't graduate next year, but I'm grasping at straws for reasons not to expel you. What have you been doing these past few months?”

  “I've been on a series of vision quests,” Samuel began.

  Abby Gordon audibly sighed and turned away.

  “Raven led me astray. He tricked me and drew me down a long path. I should have known better.”

  “Mr. George...Samuel, I have been an educator in this district for twenty-seven years. I have been at the forefront of First Nations education policy in this district, in this province. I taught your mother. Don't presume to fool me, confuse me, or play on some cultural shame I might have so that I won't call you out on your bullshit. Think about what your elders might say about you using cultural based lies in order to validate skipping school. Smarten up and go back to class.”