Brimstone

by Daniel Foster

  He opened the windows about a third of the way, wide enough to let in some morning light, but not wide enough for the harsh brightness to fall on the forge or his anvil. He faced his anvil. Now how do I forge with one arm? Normally, he would have swung his hammer with one hand and held the tongs, which in turn held the hot iron, with the other. He could use the holdfast to pin the hot iron to the anvil, but it would take time to pin down and then loosen each piece. Everything was going to take more time. I can only do half the work that Pa and I did together. He touched his left arm. But with only one arm, I can’t even do that much. Garret started to panic. How am I going to feed us? How am I going to buy the things we need?

  Garret missed his Pa so badly that he sank to his knees in front of his anvil, held his injured shoulder, and bit his lip until it hurt. The shop door creaked. Garret leaped to his feet, not quite fast enough to keep the customer from seeing him kneeling and slumped. It was Mr. Carson, a short, heavyset man with quick eyes and an easy smile.

  “Mr. Carson,” Garret said, trying to straighten out his expression. “What can I do for you?”

  Carson dropped his eyes to his feet and seemed to be struggling internally. When he raised them back to Garret, there was defeat in his expression. “Son, I’m so sorry about your Pa.”

  Garret had a wooden knot in his throat, so he just nodded. Carson shuffled his feet and didn’t leave. So there was more. The longer Carson stood, the more dejected he looked until he finally asked, with a tinge of hope in his voice. “You haven’t, by chance, finished mending my scythe blade yet, have you?”

  Pa’s dead, my shoulder’s broken, the funeral was three days ago, when could I have finished it?

  But he only said, “No sir.”

  Carson seemed to slump further. Garret couldn’t understand why he was so bent on having it done, especially when he didn’t seem impatient.

  “Well,” Carson said at length, his voice hoarse with defeat. “I guess I’d better take it then.”

  Garret was confused. “I’ll have it done as soon as I can. I can start on it now, if you want.”

  The offer only humiliated Carson further. “Son, I’m sorry, but I’d better take it now. And my old lady’s stove plate, too.”

  Garret didn’t know what to say. There was no one else in town who could mend either of them. They were useless as long as they were broken. Garret reached for some sort of answer that would make sense. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long, Mr. Carson. I’ve… we’ve…” Garret’s voice broke. “I’ll have them done by the end of the day.” Hot tears stung Garret’s eyes. “Don’t want a customer to be unhappy.”

  At that, Carson looked about to cry with frustration, but instead, he picked up the pieces of his scythe and his broken iron stove plate, deposited some money in their place as if Garret had fixed them, and then carried them both out the door. He didn’t close it behind himself. Garret stared after him.

  Not ten minutes passed before Mr. Orem arrived from next door. Garret was working as hard as he could, which meant he was dropping a lot of things and shuddering with pain every time the hammer impact wracked his broken shoulder.

  Garret lied to Orem, insisting his shoulder was fine. When Orem looked dubious, Garret insisted he’d get to Orem’s tire as soon as his shoulder was better, sooner if possible, but Orem remained uncomfortable and awkward. He looked away and opened his mouth several times, his face regretful, but no words of explanation came out. After several strained moments, he took his tire, wagon wheel and all, and left. Garret watched him go, and a leaden feeling began to settle. What did Orem plan to do with it? It wasn’t as if he could take the wheel anywhere else. The Vilner’s shop was the only blacksmith shop in town. Garret tried to focus on reforging the broken halves of butcher Gunther’s knife.

  Garret had to keep fighting waves of sadness and depression, which made him want to throw things and give up. Eventually, he had to improvise with a couple hold-downs and a hardy to pin both ends of the broken blade while still having them hot enough to forge weld. Garret swung the hammer at a slight angle so that it would connect with the center of the blade first, and when it hit, he felt the weld join.

  He was surprised to look up and find both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Harrelson standing in the door. Garret glanced at the angle of the sunbeams through the windows. They were slanting, but still strong. Both men should still be at work in their fields this time of day. They’d made a special trip to town. Pa had already sharpened Mr. Johnson’s plough share. It was the last thing he’d done before he’d died.

  Garret swallowed and blinked hard. So Johnson’s plough was ready, but Garret hadn’t had time to sharpen Mr. Harrelson’s chisels. It was a simple job, but several places down the list. Garret offered to sharpen them on the spot, but Harrelson refused, avoided Garret’s eye, collected his tools and left.

  Strangely, Mr. Johnson didn’t seem happy to learn his plough was sharpened and ready. He was reluctant to hand over the money until Garret, in growing desperation and embarrassment said, “Mr. Johnson, it’s the same price we charge you every year.”

  Garret didn’t realize what was happening until quitting time rolled around, and Mr. Medly came into the shop to pick up his old sled runners. Garret had just begun to pry the metal from the wood when Medly kicked the door open as he usually did.

  A great wash of sadness had taken Garret not many minutes before, which made it hard to relax and focus on his work, which brought mistakes, which set him back, which frustrated him almost to the point of fear, so when the door opened with a blow from Mr. Medly’s booted foot, Garret snapped at him, “Pa’s asked you not to do that on several occasions, sir! I’ll thank you not to do it while he’s gone!”

  Medly strode to the anvil, his pinched face more dour than usual. “He ain’t comin’ back. He’s dead, and you best square with that.”

  In a fit of temper, Garret threw down his hammer and leaned on the anvil, not caring how much bigger Medly was. “Did you come down to get your tracks? ‘Cause they’re not done.”

  “I’ll take ‘em now.”

  “I said they’re not done!” Garret’s bark rang in the smithy, and Medley’s eyebrows went up.

  All the strength of anger drained out of Garret’s chest and his arms sagged at his sides. His shoulder was killing him, throbbing with pain, worsening each time he brought the hammer down against the anvil. The whole left side of his body was pulsing with it.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I’ll get it done as soon as I can.”

  “You’re done now,” Medly spat and snatched the track on which Garret was working. Scanning the shop, Medly spied his other track leaning against the work bench, snatched it as well and strode out, leaving the door open. Garret sat down behind the anvil and leaned against it. His shoulder ached fiercely, but not as badly as his heart. Realization crept on him and the tears came. Mr. Malvern had made good his threat. He’d said something to run the townsfolk away from Garret’s shop. He wasn’t just going after Garret, he was going after Garret’s family. There was no other blacksmith in town, but what did it matter? Mr. Malvern could probably afford to buy everybody in town new tools and wagon axles until Garret’s family starved.

  Garret cried and cried, and it always seemed that the tears would ease the pain inside, eventually allowing him to realize he could go on, he should go on… but not this time. As he cried, the hole inside only seemed to gape wider.

  As the sun disappeared, people came into the shop in droves. Maybe they knew Garret was hidden behind his anvil, maybe they didn’t. He heard their footsteps tracking in and out, by ones, twos, and threes. Occasionally, someone muttered a word of greeting, most were silent with shame. Before nightfall, they had emptied Garret’s workbench of everything he needed to survive.

  He did not know how long he sat behind his anvil, alternately weeping for Pa, sitting quiet and empty, then weeping for Molly, then sitting quiet and empty again, then weeping for his family. At some point, the sun disappear
ed. At some later point, somebody who was walking past on the board walk leaned into the shop and shut the door. They must have assumed he’d gone home and stupidly left the door wide open. Garret was spent. He sat until the sky blackened like charcoal and the shop darkened. He sat while his forge fire burned low, beginning to smother.

  He sat until it seemed all light was gone.

  * * *

  Only when the day had faded, leaving Garret alone in the dark did he hear the soft hissing sound. The sound swelled so gradually that by the time Garret realized he was hearing it, he had no idea how long it had been going. At first he ignored it, buried in inner misery. The sound grew and grew, not loud, but deep, like a swift undercurrent beneath the surface of an idle river.

  It was the growing light, though, not the hiss, which brought Garret back to himself. It came from the forge. Instead of the mellow orange glow that always seemed to touch the corners of his best dreams, the forge was glowing yellow, and brighter than if Garret had been pumping the bellows. As the light waxed through the smithy, making each dark tool stand out, Garret stirred. He blinked and pushed himself more upright with his good arm.

  The hissing sound continued, but began to waver and twist, as if the sound was folding over on itself like his Ma would fold and wring a wet cloth. No, more complicated than that—mutters, almost words, sounds as intricate and well-woven as a scarf. Garret’s neck hair stood on end, and the yellow glow continued to brighten, heating towards white. Despite Garret’s position on the floor beneath the fire pot, he could feel the building heat. He eased away, trying not to make a sound.

  The hissing sound kept folding, tying around itself, punctuating as if into sentences. Garret stood and backed toward the work bench. Suddenly, like a sharp intake of breath, the hissing stopped and all sound in the shop, from the crackling flames to Garret’s soft bootsteps, seemed to rush into the forge. The flames out of the coal bed contracted also, shrinking towards the center of the coal bed while growing blindingly white.

  In a flash and rush of heat, the flames exploded outward from the forge. Garret flung himself to the floor, miraculously not injuring his left shoulder further. As he fell, he saw something emerge from the forge. Perhaps he didn’t exactly see it, but saw where it was standing because the flames wrapped around it, outlining its shape. It appeared to have the form of a person, but beyond that, Garret could see no details. As if it was there and yet wasn’t quite there, or as if it was standing not in the air, like Garret, but hiding behind the air, stretching it around itself like a mask.

  Garret scrambled for the door on all fours, but his shoulder punished him mercilessly, and he ended up on his face in the dirt. Behind him, the whatever-it-was crossed the shop to the far wall. At least, that seemed to be its general location. A heavy chain lifted free (in the hand of the thing, Garret felt sure) from its hook among an assortment of other long odds and ends. The chain had been in the shop as long as Garret could remember, along with the other old iron brick-a-brack left over from his grandfather’s blacksmithing days.

  The figure carried the chain back across the shop. It looked more as though the chain was floating in thin air. The figure tossed it into the forge. Garret was trying to decide whether or not to try to run for the door again, when all the windows in the shop swung closed. The hinges on most of them needed to be oiled, but this time they didn’t make a sound.

  The forge began to brighten again, moving from orange to yellow to white-hot: hotter than Garret thought possible. The heat built until it drove Garret up against the wall. It was searing him as he sat on the floor. He cried out in pain and fear, and the light faded, dropping abruptly back to yellow.

  The figure reached into the fire with a bare hand and pulled out the chain. It glowed white-hot, and flames wreathed it. The iron itself was burning away into the air, but it clanked solidly when the figure slung it across Garret’s anvil.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, Garret worried the severe heat difference might crack his anvil, but the old chunk of iron held. Garret’s hammer floated up into the air in the hand of the figure before falling like a bolt of lightning. The entire smithy shuddered under the blow, and the anvil and hammer cried Iron.

  Again and again, the hammer fell, pounding the white-hot chain, rattling the ground beneath Garret’s behind. The hammer strikes flattened, drew, and pulled in ways Garret couldn’t have managed with all the tools in his shop. The shape of the chain was changing quickly under the blows, but after the figure pounded the ends together into a closed loop, Garret lost track of how the shape was being altered. It was glowing so brightly, and the figure was moving it so deftly that Garret couldn’t keep up. It was as if he was watching the first blacksmith the world had ever seen—a person who had been forging since the first daybreak.

  The hammer fell and fell, and the white form on the anvil began to take a delicate, flowing shape. The anvil cried again and again and the tools on the cart and the work bench jostled each time the hammer struck.

  One final blow, and it was finished. The near-visible thing dropped its work, still white-hot, into the quench bucket. All the water in the bucket flashed to steam, blowing the bucket to pieces. The steam filled the shop, but through the haze, Garret saw the fire flare, and the figure walk away into the forge as if it was walking down a long hallway. As it vanished, the figure spoke two silent sentences to his mind.

  The right path will always be open to you, young one. Choose it and live.

  The forge fell back to a dim smolder, and all the pressure in the air, which Garret hadn’t realized he’d been feeling, was suddenly relieved. One of the windows creaked, sagging a bit on its hinges. The forge glowed a lethargic, dull orange. Garret let out a long shuddering breath, which he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

  He got to his feet and made his unsteady way towards the quench bucket, or what was left of it. Fragments of it had been blown to all corners of the smithy. Even the iron banding had been shredded like paper. As he knelt beside where the quench bucket had stood, Garret eyed a chunk of its wood, driven several inches into his anvil stump. He had been fortunate not to be struck by a flying piece.

  On the shattered bottom of the bucket lay what the figure had forged from the chain. The last wisps of steam curled away from it. Garret bent close. Were his eyes lying to him? The thing at the bottom of the bucket wasn’t a chain. It wasn’t metal at all. Garret held the back of his hand over it to check the temperature. It was quite cool. He picked it up, and it folded over his hands in soft layers. It was thick, grey fur.

  It was an animal pelt, soft as a dove, but sturdy. It was the same length as the chain, but in a closed loop. The pelt had been fashioned into a strap of sorts, roughly six inches wide and tailored to hang from the shoulder down across the chest and around the opposite hip, like the military sashes Garret had seen in pictures. It was also seamless.

  Garrett turned it inside out. Tanned hide greeted him. It was definitely an animal skin, and Garret knew what kind. He had seen this luxuriant grey fur before, when he was a boy, visiting his father’s brother in Illinois. His eyes and his hands both agreed: Garret was holding a wolfstrap.

  * * *

  Garret sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the wolfstrap which hung over the corner of his door, furry and thick in the lamplight. Sarn’s bed was empty, which was good. Right now, Sarn was better off anywhere other than here. The creeping blackness of Pa’s death had done nothing to stabilize Ma. Now she had even more fuel for the anger and imbalance that drove her, and everywhere else in the world other than Pa to aim it.

  But for once, Garret wasn’t preoccupied with that. He was focused on the wolfstrap. He was excited. Terrified. Enthralled, even though he had no idea why. Garret scooted to the edge of his bed and leaned towards it. It was like a naked woman, standing in the corner of his room, beckoning him with the motion of her hand, the full curves of her breasts, and the teasing pout of her lips. He wanted to touch it so badly that the desire worried hi
m.

  When first he’d picked the strap up out of the broken bucket, he thought little of it, other than its strangeness. His mind was occupied with trying to process what he had witnessed. Had it been a ghost? A demon? A god? Something had forged an animal pelt out of iron and implicitly given it to him. What should he feel in the wake of an event so inexplicable, other than small and afraid? But all the abasement had disappeared the moment Garret lifted the wolfstrap to his face to smell it.

  He didn’t know why he’d done it. Maybe he was curious to see if it smelled like hot coals and metal, or like fur. The instant the pelt touched his face, it grabbed hold of him. No, that wasn’t the right way to think of it. The pelt had roused something in him, in a part of himself that he did not know existed. Some other beast, some other nature, which had laid dormant all his life, suddenly stirred. It did not wake, but it felt the call of the wolfstrap, and it turned restlessly in its sleep.

  Garret didn’t remember dropping the wolfstrap or stumbling or anything other than suddenly finding himself crouched on the floor of the shop several feet away from it, panting, his vision black and white, his nose and ears singing with overwhelming sensory alerts.

  Now he sat on his bed, eager but uncomfortable, because he hadn’t brought it home. Yet here it was. He’d staggered out the shop door, trying to cover his ears and his nose at the same time, hoping to quell the flood of sensory information his human mind couldn’t process. He’d made it home, stumbled into his bedroom, desperate to find his brother and beg for help. But Sarn was gone. So Garret had sunk to the edge of his bed, where he now sat, and tried to calm down. The hyper-senses were gone, having sunk to normal on the way home. As he’d sat there, having no idea what to do, a single thought had slipped through his mind. He wanted to touch the wolfstrap again. He wanted to hold it. To inhale the intoxicating scent of wolf.

  That was when the wolfstrap appeared, hanging from the corner of his closet door a few feet away from him. It dropped into existence, unfurling from nowhere, like a curtain let down. It appeared, and even swung gently until gravity stilled it. So Garret sat, and Garret stared.