by S. A. Hunt
“At the time, I didn’t know who he was, so I pretended it was E. R. Brigham reading to me. Like...a bedtime story, I guess. It probably sounds weird, but in a way, I liked to think of him as a—as a sort of dad. Those times. Since I didn’t have one.”
When I looked up, Sawyer was gazing intently into my face. “That’s why I want this so bad. He did something very special for me, even if he didn’t know it. And I want to give back, y’know? I want to see his dream get finished. And after reading the stuff you’ve done—the autobiography about the dude in the mountains Bear With Me, the comic book you did a few years ago...I even caught the play in Chattanooga you cowrote with Marshall Davies right before you went into the Army.”
“Really?” I asked. I didn’t bother asking how he knew I’d been in the Army. Most readers knew at least the largest events of my life. “What were you doing in Chattanooga?”
“I was on my way home from college and my layover got cancelled. The snow.”
“Oh, right. That was a fun night.”
“Mm-hmm,” nodded Sawyer. “I actually went hoping your dad would be there, but no such luck.”
“Yeah, he didn’t get around to my things. He didn’t go to my graduation from Basic Training, either. Nobody did.”
“That sucks. I’m sorry, dude.”
“No big thing. What’s your email address?” He gave it to me and I entered it into my phone with his number. “This way if you need to send me large passages of text—or vice versa—you can,” I said, standing up. “Hey, I gotta go. Gotta catch up with my mom. Talk to you later.”
“Yeah,” Sawyer said. He picked up the camera, but didn’t turn it off.
When I got outside, everybody was already in the car, my mother driving, the Pontiac idling. They were listening to the latest pop music fad song on the radio, at such a low volume I didn’t realize there was anything playing until I walked up and leaned on the window. The car was spotless but still smelled of the agent’s cigarettes.
Bayard glanced at me over his shoulder. “Hey kid, you gonna be in town for a while?”
“Yep. I want to look through my dad’s working notes and take a look at some of his old haunts. See if anything inspires me.”
“That sounds like a good idea. I’ll be heading back to California in the next day or two myself.”
The clouds were darkening again, threatening the green birches and pines of Blackfield with warm, dirty rain as they danced their swaying tango, flickering paler shades of money green in the cooling September breeze.
“Thank you for doing the right thing,” she said, tucking a lock of her graying, once-auburn hair behind her ear. “Agreeing to at least attempt the book really made all the difference. I was back there and heard the sweetest things they were saying to each other about you. They’re all excited, son.”
“Kid, if it makes a difference, I can send out one of my other guys to help you. I’m sure one of them will be more than happy to collaborate on the final Fiddle book,” said Bayard.
I was beginning to feel introspective and morose. If this was a movie, I’m sure the poignant, haunting, minimalist piano score would have started playing around the time I had walked up to the car.
“No,” I said, “I think this is something I have to do on my own. My dad did it alone.”
All alone, I thought, gazing out at the scenery, the aging country storefronts, the gas stations, the mom-and-pop restaurants, the dead and dying commercial vestiges of yesteryear—drugstores, craft knick-knack shops, local-owned department stores—and seeing none of it.
_______
I sat in my motel room, watching the darkness gather between the curtains, until the only light I could see by was the ferocious glow of my laptop screen. I felt as if I were floating in a black void without end or beginning, my last remaining anchor the blinding empty-white rectangle in front of me, like some window in the wall of reality that opened onto the featureless wasteland of my brain. I wanted to reach through, pull the words out by the neck, and shake them until a story came out.
I turned on the lamp. On the table next to the laptop was one of three boxes of my father’s notes on the Fiddle series.
I had been looking through them in the hour since I’d gotten back from the funeral, but nothing was registering. All I could think of was the sight of my father in the coffin and how old he’d looked. That was the point in which it had struck me just how long it had been since I’d seen him last.
I’d never even gotten the chance to say goodbye, and what dug even deeper than that was the epiphany that until now, I had always had the opportunity, I hadn’t cared about taking it.
“Why didn’t you call?” I asked the box.
I got up and went out, putting on my shoes as I fled the question.
_______
A few minutes’ walk from the motel was a burger joint named Jackson’s, staffed by local college kids. Blackfield is a school town, so just about everywhere you went your transactions were handled by children, the vast majority of them as slender and attractive as the cast of your average cable TV teen drama. It was like living in Neverland.
When I walked in (pulling open a door that had a baseball bat for a handle), it felt as if I’d walked into some sort of cave overgrown with a strange green fungus.
Once my eyes acclimated to the dim interior of the dive, I realized that the walls and ceiling were wallpapered with dollar bills. They were taped, glued, and stapled to every structural surface in eyesight, and signed with everything from Sharpies to ink pens.
I took a booth in the very back of the L-shaped restaurant, by the restroom, out of sight of both the front door and the bar, where a television was touting a football game at top volume. After a few minutes of ogling the dollars on the walls and wondering what the insurance policy on the place could possibly be, a waitress approached me and took my order.
As soon as she left, I opened my laptop on the table and stared at the blank word processor. The icon in the corner told me that there was wireless internet coming from somewhere, and lo and behold, it was unlocked. According to the name—”Cap’n Pacino’s”—it belonged to the coffee shop two doors down. I logged on and busied myself reading the news.
The media’s half-assed coverage of the funeral was on a few lesser-known aggregators and social news sites. Fark, with a “Sad” tag and a comments section full of thugs and geeks flinging epithets and threats at each other. Reddit’s literature communities.
They were replete with apoplectic debates over the quality of The Fire and the Fiddle and comparisons with Tolkien, Saberhagen, King’s Dark Tower series, G. R. R. Martin, outrage at my outrage, outrage at my initial refusal to pick up my father’s mantle and please the masses, threats and promises to murder me outright both if I did and if I didn’t continue the series.
I ordered a hamburger, but I don’t remember eating it.
As the boy trickled his way down the hillside, picking his way among the rocks, he saw a woman hanging laundry on a line. “Blessed be!” she wailed when she saw him. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick! I thought you’d fallen somewhere or got ate up by a wild dog.”
“I was just nappin. I fell asleep waiting for the train to come in and I missed it,” said the boy. He was wiping his eyes; he had obviously been crying. “Pah’s not gonna be riled at me, is he?”
“No, I spose not. I’ll talk to him,” she said, flicking a towel at him. “Get on in the house and get ready for dinner.”
“Yes’m.”
“Save my heart, I swear, I thought for sure you were dead, son. Don’t scare me like that again!”
—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 1 “The Brine and the Bygone”
The Wolf and the Dragon
I WENT BACK TO MY ROOM AND put the laptop back on the table, then started filling the bathtub. By this time it was a little after 9, prime time for a good hot soak. I dug through the bag I’d come back with and mixed a Black Russian. Call me all the names you like, but I�
��m a fool for coffee, and beer is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. Well—maybe the second most. I’ve had to eat some pretty nasty things.
I sat on the couch staring at the box of crap on the table, sipping my drink, listening to the bathtub fill with hot water. “Why did you have to die and leave this shit for me?”
Splatter, splatter, sip, sip, feel sorry for yourself, rationalize, splatter, splatter, angst, angst, sip, sip. I put the drink down and picked up a notebook. Flipping through it, I found page after page of intricate pictures and unintelligible text.
Complex sketches filled entire pages: drawings of grim-faced men and women—young and old, hideous and beautiful—in dark armor of industrial make and artisan design, with rippling chain-mail shrouds and dozens of insectoid, overlapping segmented plates. Exploded diagrams of firearms of all shapes and sizes, with gruesome and inventive ammunitions, and decorative etchings of mythical beasts.
There were also bizarre, baroque conveyances that reminded me simultaneously of futuristic hovercrafts from old Johnny Quest cartoons and illustrations of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Likewise, there were pages that were nothing but articles written about hundreds of different subjects, filling the paper from margin to margin, with footnotes scribbled against the edges.
There were words that made no sense, exotic names and terms in some curling, sinuous handwriting of a language I was wholly unfamiliar with. It was a vast compendium of what amounted to multimedia glossolalia.
There was a small planner-style journal that looked like it had seen twenty miles of rough road. I picked it up and began to leaf through it, turning each onion-skin page as if I were a Vatican historian examining the Dead Sea Scrolls. After a few minutes of reading, I realized I was looking at some sort of creation myth.
“When time was young, the universe was not so different.
“Stars drifted, without origin or destination, in a never-ending void while the laws of nature fell into place like stones settling on the bed of a stream. This was the period of first-birth.
“Slumbering in the womb of the void was the wolf-god Oramoz—the true name of Measure and Order itself—and She was an ancient and powerful creature. She was luminescence and righteousness and distance incarnate, Her slender body stretching across the Universe, held together by a million points of light.
“Her husband the dragon-god Angr’manu--the true name of Time, Chaos itself—was a wrathful being in an eternal state of flux, sleek and obscure, whose driving essence was to destroy and sunder and scatter. He was made of darkness and hours, and was everywhere at once, infinite and absolute, without measure.
“Oramoz was deeply familiar with the workings of the universe. Her soul was intertwined with the basic structure of nature as it matured and developed. She was there to witness the creation of the rules, and She knew how to manipulate them. The Dragon Angr’manu—Her husband since birth—knew nothing of this important structure around Him. He was a belligerent glutton answerable to no one. Thus the wolf-god Oramoz felt that it was Her inherent duty to maintain order in the cosmos.
“Every morning, the dragon-god Angr’manu devoured Himself tail-first, second by minute swallowed whole, turning the Present into the Past, Now into Then, and while Oramoz slept in the evening, She dreamt of the coming Future, thus ensuring the survival of Her husband.
“To allow Time to devour itself entirely would be folly. To allow Angr’manu to swallow himself meant the end of time.
“The Wolf gazed into the darkness in which She drifted, and became restless. Her dreams had gone awry, and She had seen herself dozing in deep valleys of lush green forests under the rays of a warm golden sun, supping Her fill of oceans sparkling blue.
“The beauty of the place She saw in Her dreams was so endearing next to the cold and unforgiving abyss, She decided to form it out of the very fabric of the Universe.
“And so, taking a part of Herself and a part of Her husband, Oramoz crafted the elements—Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind—from darkness and light, and used them to build Her paradise while Angr’manu slumbered. It took a long time, long even for gods.
“She made Her mistakes in the process, churning out worlds of barren rock and freezing winds, poisonous air and boiling water. These Oramoz set aside as raw material.
“Finally, Oramoz succeeded in devising a habitable world.
“She shaped it into a perfect orb and named it Behest. With Her claws the Wolf dug the valleys out of the land, and the piles of earth She put aside became majestic peaks. A nearby point of light kept it warm as She worked, Her sweat seeping into the stone underfoot, glowing red and flowing hot.
“Almost done, the Wolf looked over what She had made and appreciated it. Then, inspired, She formed the creatures of the world out of the four elements in the forge of Her love, for it was as strong as the hardest metal, as bright as the hottest star.
“Man sprang from Her heart and populated Behest in multitudes, praising their creator in scripture and song. The years were like days to the immortal people of Behest, untouched by the oblivious Time.
“When Oramoz finished, She rested.
“By and by the Dragon awoke, noticed what the Wolf had made, and came to see. He saw the hope and delight in ageless mankind, and wept in His anger at what She had done behind His back. While the Wolf slept sparkling in the night sky, Angr’manu forgot to consume Himself and instead began to devour the world.
“Men withered and died. Mountains crumbled, oceans evaporated, and Angr’manu grew and grew as Oramoz unwittingly dreamt Him anew. Eons passed while the Wolf slept. Civilization developed, nations rose and fell. Oceans swelled and sank. The world slipped into the eager jaws of entropy.
“This was the end of the first age.
“Angr’manu had grown hoary and long by the time Oramoz awoke, and fat on the meal He had made of the corroded iron-and-glass world of Behest.
“The Wolf, incensed by Her husband’s mischief, flew into a rage and cut Him in twain in a battle that shook every universe. The world of Behest, lodged in the gullet of the Time Dragon, split as well—into two separate worlds divided by a gulf of time and space: Zam and Destin. It was a great, ferocious duel that raged across the sky for half an age, and in their fury the bloodshed of the Dragon and of the Wolf mixed.
“After the great sundering, Oramoz lay on the the shore, covered in blood, and wept over what she’d done. Her tears trickled down and filled that great Void, and became the Sea of Dreams, Vur Ukasha, the ocean from where all stories flow.
“During the battle, a nomad by the name of Ahan Lith, who was the daughter of the daughter of the son of the first woman, Chawah, happened upon a drop of this mixed, tainted blood as it hurtled from the black sky one evening in the emerald wilds. This holy droplet fell into the lake from which Ahan was filling her water-skin. Drinking of it, she was filled with the power of Oramoz and Angr’manu alike.
“Sitting in the shade of a palm tree, Ahan achieved perfect understanding. Thus the first true enlightened came into being, blessed with the knowledge of the secret workings of the universe.
“Ahan Lith possessed a righteous soul and bore herself with grace and charity. She was canonized by the clergymen of the religion of Oramoz and became a holywoman, rising into a status of the highest nobility. She married, and begat seven children, almost all of whom continued in their own lives and are detailed in dozens of hidden gospels long lost to time.
“Their descendants are known as the Etudaen.
“In time, a certain fungus began to grow by that vaunted lake, drawing life from the waters and swelling with the knowledge and power of the Wolf and of the Dragon. It still grows there, serving as a doorway into true understanding of the self, and bestows the possessor with the ability to alter both space and time. It is called the Acolouthis, and it is the sacred secret of the longevity and prowess of the warriors of Destin, the Gunslingers and the Grievers.”
Jesus Christ. The
lady or the tiger, right?
I tossed it aside and picked up another notebook to be presented with the same sort of fish-eyed madness. Reams and reams of dead tree-flesh littered with the artifacts of a lost world that never existed. The sheer Lovecraftian absurdity of it all made me laugh.
As I took up my glass of vodka again, I had a race of adrenaline that singed my heart with a tongue of flame and I kicked the box off the table, scattering its contents all over the boring green carpet.
I got up and shut off the bathwater, and laid in the tub for a while until I had finished the Russian, savoring the feel of my skin tightening from the heat and the cold air on my face.
When I was done, I dried off, poured another Russian over the sink, and came back to a very cold motel room. Instead of turning up the heat to combat the early autumn chill, I put on a pair of pajama bottoms and a hoodie pullover with the Harper’s Ferry flintlocks embroidered on the back of it. Thus armored, I set to the task of picking up the journals and notebooks and putting them back into the box.
Under the final notebook was a bronzy little house key, its teeth worn from use.
_______
My father’s house stood back from the road, a dark-eyed sentinel almost invisible in the woods. As I pulled up in the driveway, the headlights of my ancient Mercury Topaz wheeled across the hulking shadow and transformed it into a white two-story plantation house. E. R. Brigham’s green ‘86 Chevy Nova was still sitting where we’d left it this afternoon when Bayard and I had come to fetch my father’s Fiddle material.
The windows of the car were filmy with dust. I walked up the drive and pointed my cellphone into the backseat. To my relief, no one was sitting there.