by S. A. Hunt
There was an ineffable malice to it that I could not place, as if there was something back there with that light, something on the outside watching me through those holes.
They twinkled that way because there was someone outside the sky walking back and forth trying to get a better look at me.
I didn’t want to be watched anymore. I hated being out in the open.
I got down and groveled in the dirt, thought about digging to China, then crawled into the bushes, trying to find a place to hide from that terrible sky-warden.
Claws of grass scraped at my face and naked back as I found my way through it, cutting and bruising my knees, pushing sprays of rattling thistle out of my path. I fought to understand, to feel the right way in the darkness.
In my searching I put my hand on something that moved away from me with a growl. I recoiled, and kept moving.
I must have crawled a mile.
I looked up, over my shoulder, through the cottony milkweed and realized the moon(s) was still in the sky. I wiped drool from my chin with my forearm, wiped it on my filth-caked pants. When had the moon(s) ever not been there?
I found a break in the brush and dragged myself out into a clearing. As I emerged, a scraggly hand of bristle raked across the hole in my arm and a kaleidoscope grenade went off next to my face. I fell over and screamed into the many-colored ripple trilling from my thirty-two-flavor Crayola wound.
The riot of shades evaporated as something rustled in the desert grass. Something big.
I paused, unmoving, my breath held, listening through the scuff of the wind.
“Who’s there?”
I was answered with silence.
The suspense was killing me. I stood up and, glancing at the trash-bag sky, peered over the brush.
I was surprised to see a lantern bobbing in the darkness. It dangled from the end of a chain, attached to a pike held aloft by a man in a monk-brown robe. He looked like an angler that had reeled in one of the stars.
“Hello?” I asked, feeling a slow panic rise up within me. “Hello? Could you help me? I’m really—”
The monk turned and left, the lantern swinging as he walked. I ran through the briars and I ran through the brambles to catch up, careless in dagger-thorns where a rabbit couldn’t go. Their tips stung my skin as I crashed through them, my hand clasped gently over my wound to protect it.
I approached him and explained myself. My voice sounded like a death rattle; I was doing little more than whispering. “Friend, sir, you don’t know me but I’m in a bit of trouble.”
The monk said nothing, simply kept walking. I met his pace and walked alongside him.
“I’ve been drugged, and my friends are gone.”
We wandered for a while across the desert floor like deep-sea divers, he in the lead, holding the swaying lantern out like a Catholic censer. I considered several times trying to make small talk, but his hood obscured his face. The thought of conversating with him unnerved me. One question was eating at me, though.
“Where are we going?” I asked, waving away a fly.
He still did not answer.
We walked for a very long time. We passed a butte, tunneling through the semisolid shadow of the gargantuan rock formation with his teetering light. We crossed several dry riverbeds, sliding down into the arroyo and trudging back up the other side, knocking loose rocks down the bank. The robed man traveled like a mountain goat, negotiating the precarious land with ease and grace.
I noticed by and by that something had been painted on the back of his coarse linen robe. It was the stylized head of a bull, the snout protruding down to his buttocks, the broad horns hooking across his shoulder blades.
The eastern horizon was beginning to lighten as the coarse sands gave way to rocky soil and great expanses of heather and wheatgrass listing in sideways air. I could see a monolithic structure on a rise at the other end of a colossal field, silhouetted by the coming day.
As we got closer, wading through a landscape furred with the color of pennies and hoared by the soaking frost of the morning, I began to recognize it as a house. It was a familiar house, two stories, white, with a roomy porch and leggy Roman columns that went all the way up to the topmost roof.
The monk walked up the stoop and onto the porch. He hung the lantern from a hook and leaned the pole against the wall, then produced a key, unlocked the door, and went inside. I followed him into the house and closed the door behind me, shutting out the distant sighing of the sea.
I was standing in a grand two-story foyer, looking up at the mezzanine of the second floor. There was no furniture. The floor was bone-pale wood planks, the walls unpainted sheetrock. Plastic sheeting was nailed over the windows to keep the draft out. A massive chandelier hung over my head like the sword of Damocles refracted into a thousand blades of cloudy ice.
The sheer whiteness caught the light from the windows and made a drafty, wintry tomb out of the house. I could’ve said the house had never been lived in, that it was new, except for the cobwebs in the corners and the unmistakable sickly-sweet yeasty smell of old age.
The floor looked so washed-out because it was covered in a carpet of dust. To my left, there were eight spots of clean floor: one big square indicated by four clean spots, and a smaller rectangle that abutted the square, visible the same way.
I looked around for the monk, and wandered through a bare living room into a kitchen.
There were cabinets, and nothing in them. The fridge, though it was running (better catch it!), was hollow as well. I climbed the sweeping staircase in the foyer and found the monk in an austere study, standing in front of a window that overlooked the field in front of the house.
He gazed through the opening of his hood at the tousled grain, and the sparse boulders that threw tall, sharp purple shadows across the ocean of copper.
I stood beside him, but I still couldn’t see his face. He spoke.
“Welcome to the House of Water.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am whoever you need me to be.”
“Are you a hallucination?”
“That depends,” said the monk-robed figure, “Are you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. The only other thing in the room was a fold-up card table with an antique vinyl turntable on it.
The bay window flooded the room with a diffuse white light that seeped into the gray floorboards and wall joists, pulling woolen blue shadows from secret places. The high vaulted ceiling was crosshatched with beams and buttresses.
“That’s the question,” he said.
I sighed. I could see this turning into an Abbott and Costello skit. “Yes, it is, that why I’m asking you it.”
“He’s coming.”
“Who’s coming?”
“Exactly. And you’d better come up with an answer before he gets here. This house won’t protect you from him forever.”
“Who is he?” I asked. “You’re talking about the—the man, the one that brought the whirlwind. The man that followed me.”
“The man goin’ round taking names.”
I stood there with him staring out the window. I looked down at the rug we were standing on, a big rectangle of Persian carpet busy with red and blue curlicues, paisley tadpoles, and gold mandalas. Eventually I realized that the darkened west was obscuring the faint anti-glow I’d felt in the sticks of Synecdoche.
He was out there.
“He comes not for what you need, but for what you do not want,” said the monk. “He is the unremembered man. He is the shadow, not the shadow-caster. He is the shadow of forgotten things, of neglect and of apathy and of lost cities. He is the end of all stories. He was the end of mine.”
The monk reached up and tossed off his hood.
Ed Brigham (Lord Eddick Bridger) smiled at me.
He said, “You have come here to show him that he will not be finishing this one.”
I backed away from him in fright and surprise. “You’re a hallucinat
ion,” I said. “You can’t be real. I came to your funeral. I saw you dead in your coffin.”
Ed gave me a sort of sad smirk. “You don’t sound happy to see this old face.”
“I am—I guess. It’s just...a shock. You can’t be real.”
He turned back to the window. “I’m real, believe me. I’m just not your father.”
“What?”
“I’ve been around a long time,” said the robed man. “A long, long, long time. I don’t remember who I am, but I am not your father; he remains yet interred. Some call me the Mariner. Some called me the Duke of the Field. You may call me Ink, if you like. It’s the only name I remember.”
“Okay,” I said, stepping closer to get a better look at his face.
When I was close to him, he glanced at me over the rim of his spectacles, which had whited over with the glare from the window, and smiled kindly.
At this distance, I could tell that there was something odd about his face. Moments when it felt as if I were looking at someone else through a pane of glass with Ed Brigham painted on it. Occasionally a ripple of vagueness would flicker across his features, rendering them indistinct for an instant.
“Once,” he said, “I used to be much more than the useless old man you see before you. Men prostrated themselves before me in a bid for mercy and compassion. Temples were erected in my honor.”
He let the sentiment linger, then turned to me in a stage-aside and said, “I was a big shot, in other words,” and chuckled. “Then he came and took it all away as punishment for my hubris. What they say is definitely true: you don’t know what you got until it’s gone. All that I had gained, all that should have been important to me, wasn’t. And I lost it.
“He took my very face,” he said, softly raking his fingertips across his face. The gesture distorted his features only long enough for me to blink, and then he was my father again.
“She couldn’t—wouldn’t—give me back who I once was, but she gave me a new face and a new lease on existence. The face of the Father. In exchange, I agreed to stay here, in the Void-Between-The-Worlds, and serve as a guide, a signpost for all those who are lost. The keeper of the lighthouse, the House of Water, at the edge of the boundless sea.”
Dead ladybugs lay in a scarce pile where the window met the floor, dozens of tiny orange-and-black marbles. As I noticed them, I also caught sight of the rosebushes lining the front porch. They were a lush blood-crimson.
“The face of the Father,” I said. “Everyone’s father.”
“You catch on quick. Edward must have been very proud of you. I’m glad you have not forgotten his face.”
When I looked away from him, the Mariner, in the corner of my eye, was not Ed. He was something wholly outside of familiar, it was the visage of something unimaginably ancient and scarred. Looking at him was like looking at a pterodactyl and seeing only a sparrow.
“I didn’t see him much. I don’t really know how he felt about me.”
“A broken family...story as old as time.”
“You said she. Who is She?”
“She has many names in many lands, on many worlds, as I once did, but in Destin she is called the Wolf.”
“Oramoz,” I said. “The Wolf, who cut the Dragon in two and rendered Behest into the twin worlds Zam and Destin.”
“An allegory for the truth. It is different in every world, in every culture. Turtles all the way down!” the Mariner laughed, and then he squinted at me.
“You are different. You have passed through here before. Most of your kind coming from Destin are the young men and women that come here of their own volition, seeking the truth that will enlighten them so that they can go home as warriors, not drained of fear, and no longer possessed by it, but armed with it.”
“I’m here from Zam,” I said. “Believe me, I am not here of my own free will. I was force-fed a hallucinogen.”
“Is that so?” chortled the Mariner. “Have you considered the fact that you may have been given a key?”
“A key?”
“It takes many forms in many worlds. In Destin, it is the Acolouthis, the Sacrament, used by both the Grievers and the Kingsmen as a rite of passage. The origin is always different, but the destination is always the same. Those who are here, are here to seek something. Not all of them survive the seeking. Not all seekings happen by accident.”
“What am I here to find?” I asked.
“Don’t ask me,” said the Mariner, in his friendly Ed-voice, so much like a Jimmy Buffett version of Santa Claus that I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had stepped into a theatrical showing of Miracle on 34th Street with the reel spliced into The Endless Summer. I’d forgotten how charismatic my father could be. Or was that the Duke of the Field? “I am merely the horse that brought you here. It is you that must drink.”
I wanted to tell him that his cryptic magic-surfer bullshit was beginning to stir my ire, but the sight of him at the periphery of my vision was prohibitively startling. Whatever he was and whatever he looked like, the mariner Ink, the Duke of the Field, was not my father.
“You said that what the shadow took from you was of importance,” I said.
“It was,” said the Mariner. “I wasted it. All of it. He takes away everything extraneous about you. He strips you away, strips you of your strength, your identity, your love, your hate, until there is nothing left but the core of you, and then—when he’s got the last bit of you over a barrel, when there’s nothing left of you but your will—he’ll crush it. A fate I narrowly avoided myself. If you do not treasure it, he will take it. He is the ultimate thief, the thief of hubris.”
I took his words and pondered them. I noticed a thin sheaf of paper on the fold-up card table. There was also a chair, tucked neatly up under it, a wooden one with a wicker seat and slat back. It seemed very brittle as I pulled it out, and creaked when I sat on it.
“He took my friends,” I said. “Does that mean I didn’t treasure my friends?”
Ink-Ed stood silently by the glass, staring out at the meadow. When I’d sat down, I’d noticed a rigid object in my pocket. I pulled it out and discovered the fountain pen from the satchel. Digging in my pocket made my shoulder hurt like hell. “Hey, is there any way I can patch up my arm? It’s killing me.”
He spoke without turning. “The bathroom.”
I found the bathroom down the hall, just where I expected it to be. There was no curtain in the shower. I ran the tap over my wound, wincing until the cold water and the dopamine dulled the pain. When I opened the medicine cabinet, there was a roll of gauze inside, some clean cloth, and a bottle of alcohol so old the label was flaking off.
I steeled myself and poured the alcohol over my shoulder. I could hear it hissing, but then the pain rumbled in, so powerful I swore, and had to lash out and kick the clawfoot bathtub with a bellish bonnnnnng.
When I returned to the study in my new dressings, the Mariner gave me a sidelong glance. “Sounded like it hurt.”
“Yeah, you could say that. So what am I supposed to be doing here?”
“The voo-doo that you-do so well.”
“Voo-doo?”
“You do.”
“Do what?”
“Remind me of the babe....”
I sat down at the card table again. “I can’t believe you just made a Labyrinth and a Blazing Saddles joke.”
“You’d be surprised what an old pair of TV rabbit-ears can catch here.”
“After the week I’ve had,” I said, picking up the pen, “There’s not a lot that surprises me lately.”
I contemplated the joke, taking into consideration the sheaf of paper on the table in front of me. I was so hungry I had reached that gnawing, hollow stage where your mouth runs over with saliva at every thought of food. The food poisoning had worked itself out of my system, but I knew there was nothing in the fridge downstairs. What did Ink eat?
Voo-doo, I thought. Concentrate on the task at hand. You’re here to do your voo-doo. What is my voo-doo?
What is the voo-doo that I do so well?
“He’s here,” said Ed-Ink.
I meant to get up, but he waved me back into the chair. Somewhere he had procured a glass tumbler of some milky liquid and was drinking it. A droplet of condensation slid off of the tumbler and landed on the toe of one of his roper boots with a tap.
“What is that?” I asked.
“What is what?”
He knew very well what I was referring to. “The glass in your hand.”
The Mariner smacked his lips and held the drink up to the morning light. “I think it’s Swarovski.”
“Where the hell would you get—” I began, getting up to join him at the window.
The Mariner wheeled on me. “I thought I told you to stay put. You need to focus. The fear will come soon enough.”
The sky was a panoply of storm-iron, darkening at the horizon and rising to a dusky rust color overhead, making it feel as if we were inside of a giant spool of brown yarn. It scrolled by at a blistering pace like the walls of a hurricane.
There was someone standing in the wind-swept grass of the meadow, so far away that I could only determine that he was dressed in a pale yellow overcoat and Stetson. From here he looked like the Marlboro Man as imagined by Stephen Gammell. The wind tugged at the tail of the man’s jacket like a little boy trying to get his mother’s attention.
He took something out of his vest with a bone-white hand and examined it.
I was going to ask Ink about his mention of fear, but I had no need anymore.
“Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind,” he recited, “—be sober, and hope to the end.”
I went back to the table and sat down. I was supposed to be doing something, but what? Writing? I had paper and pen. Drawing? As I thought about it, the Mariner took a sip and gestured to me with his glass. The tinkle-crackle of his ice settling punctuated his question.
“What was the first thing Sawyer Winton ever said directly to you?”