Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  During the long summer afternoons he would hide under the covers and try to sleep, imagine that his skin was molting. He would grow to many times his size in his dreams and he would destroy his room.

  He passed no one else on the trail; no one was out working, or even lazing about, no voices echoing down the valley. No more houses, either, not even abandoned ones. Now and then something would rustle through the brush alongside the trail, animals of some kind, although whatever wildlife was native to the place was staying out of his way. Maybe because he was a stranger.

  He reached Rayburn Twist, near the top of the mountain, around sunset. If there used to be a paved road through the town there wasn’t one now. A wider passage of compressed clay and traces of wheel ruts with weeds growing out of them.

  He didn’t see any cars, or signs of their recent passage. No one said hello, but he saw several women perched up on the weathered grey porches, staring down at him with somber, broken faces. He waved, but they didn’t wave back.

  Josh thought maybe it would be better to find some place more official than a private residence. If not a mayor’s office (he couldn’t imagine there was one), at least a store. At a store they might talk to him—even here a store owner might want to encourage business.

  A couple more houses with women on the porches. One old lady waved and he waved back. He was beginning to wonder if this was a town of all women when he saw an old man in a rocker sitting on the ground outside his house, a shotgun across his lap. The man looked stuffed, except for the rocking, and Josh didn’t try for his attention, turned his head and kept walking.

  A little girl peered at him from beside a tree. Her face was as pale as something out of a cave, her eyes grey in her dirty face.

  “Is there a store?” he asked, smiling broadly. She didn’t smile back but she pointed.

  The battered old building looked like all the others except for “Store” painted in faded black letters beside the front door. Three men standing at the counter turned to look at him. On the wall behind them a lot of shelves displayed very few goods—a few cans, some boxes, a few bags. Most of it looked aged and out of date. On the counter itself, however, were some fairly fresh-looking bags of meal and beans.

  “My name’s Josh Morgan. I lived here a long time ago, with my mother—”

  “Emmett Morgan’s boy.” One of them stepped forward and studied Josh. His face was a series of flaps of skin, as if it no longer fit his skull. He raised an arm that looked too long and too thin for his body. “You look like him, or the way he was before.”

  One of the other men chuckled. “He means before he got old. I’m Andrew, Josh. We’re cousins.”

  The third man laughed then. “Hell, Andrew. We’re all cousins up here.” And then all three of them laughed.

  “My father, so he’s alive? He’s living here somewhere?”

  They stopped laughing then. “Don’t live here, but he checks in from time to time,” Andrew said. “He checks in.”

  Josh was taken into one of the houses where he met dozens of people, all introducing themselves as cousin this-or-that, or aunt this-or-that. Most of them were elderly, his mother’s age and older. The women looked sad even when they smiled. All the men seemed to have that same skin condition—which was too much of it, finally, as if they’d lost a large amount of weight very fast.

  “So, I reckon you’ll be seeing your daddy while you’re here?” one of the women asked, which caused the rest of them to quiet their talking for a time.

  “If he’s around,” Josh replied. “If not, maybe some of you could tell me something about him, and about the rest of the family too, if you would. My mother never told me much.”

  “Your ma never should have taken you out of the Twist in the first place, especially with you being a son in the family.” The others tried to shush the woman. “‘Specially when you ain’t reached your majority yet.”

  “Majority? I’m thirty-five years old.”

  “Think you’re an old codger, do ye?” one of the old men chuckled. “Well, maybe out there. But up here, you’re just a naup.” A little girl giggled, and Josh realized then that some younger people were in the room. He looked around and saw them hiding behind the older women and back against the walls, little kids and teenagers with sullen, red, and pockmarked faces. He saw, too, the pale young girl who had first pointed the store out to him. They nodded at each other.

  There was a meal at some point, and another round of introductions, and a sweet drink home-brewed from roots and berries that made him sleepy. But he was already tired, having hiked most of the day to get up there. He didn’t even remember going to bed.

  When Josh got up the next morning there was no sign of anyone else in the house. He searched the rooms that were open and knocked on those doors that were locked, but there was no answer. He figured they’d all gone out to jobs and chores. A couple of the women in the house were quite old, but he supposed up here everybody was expected to work. They had a lot of mouths to feed.

  He stepped outside. The air was warm, but there was a taste of fall. Smoke hung over the trees up the rise ahead of him, at the top of the Twist.

  The pale young girl from the day before suddenly appeared at the edge of those trees and waved.

  “Hey there!” he cried. “You must be Cousin Something-orother.” The girl just smiled and waved some more. “Is that smoke I see?”

  She looked back up the hill in the direction of the smoke. Then she turned around and motioned him to follow her. She kept her distance, but she stopped periodically to make sure she didn’t get too far ahead of him. Finally they cleared the trees, and the hill .continued a few more feet, ending in two great lips of stone poised as if speaking to the sky from the top of the mountain. The creek bubbled out of there, and steam floated above it.

  “So this is where the creek starts?” But she had run ahead again, and was pointing at something at the top, mounds of smooth clay by the stone lips.

  He walked up to her, and she backed away. He looked down.

  They were the ends of enormous clay tubes, or maybe smokestacks, maybe chimneys, that went down into the water as far as he could see. Water filled them, but if he looked closely, and God knows he didn’t want to, he could see that dark shapes swam just beneath the surface in each one. Around the edges were large pellets of mud, like bricks, that had been worked and smoothed. And several bits of shattered armored plate, like thin flat sections of bone, worn and scratched and frayed along the edges.

  Something seemed to move inside him, as if a rib or a muscle had slipped free. It wasn’t painful, but it felt dreadful just the same.

  That night there was another huge supper. And more of that sweet root drink, which he was beginning to see as some blend of dessert and liquor. It left him soft and sleepy and barely able to move.

  He didn’t even notice the old people leave. Suddenly it was just him with the younger ones—the sullen teenagers; the anxious- looking twenty-somethings; that shy, pale girl whom he’d come to think of as his only friend in this strange homeland. There were even a few babies in the mix, squalling and fussing in the arms of the older children.

  Andrew appeared in front of him. “You’re oldest of these, I reckon, so you’re in charge of these youngins, but not for very long, I ‘spect. Visiting day, you see. Won’t be long now.”

  When Andrew left, the pale girl looked over at Josh, but not smiling. Josh tried to get to his feet but couldn’t quite manage it. “Visiting day? Did he say visiting day?”

  He heard the rumble. The whole house shook. Some of the smaller kids fell onto the vibrating floor. Josh thought of how much he missed Arlene.

  A dozen or so came in, but they more than filled the room. Some of the little kids were crying “Crawldaddies! Crawldaddies!” and squealing with delight.

  He kept thinking how scared his own son Trace would have been, and how much he missed him.
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br />   And they did have human arms, or what might have once been human arms, too many of them, and they walked on them, and some of the arms did have faded tattoos. They moved as if they had broken backs, their heads hanging down as they crawled over the furniture and gathered their children up in their enormous daddy arms. “Crawldaddies! Crawldaddies!” the children cried, and even Josh found himself whispering it as he felt the changes beginning inside, as his own father held him up in his powerful backwards Daddy arms.

  Three Dreams of Ys

  Jonathon Thomas

  Survivor’s guilt is ridiculous, for crissakes. Mom was ninety, smoked a pack of clove cigarettes every other day, fried breakfast, lunch, and supper, and took pride in spending $10 tops on a weekly liter of vodka. Miraculous that she held out so long.

  Too bad ornery spirit didn’t inhabit self-reliant flesh. Till she died my life was on pause, and the transparency of this to us both couldn’t have enhanced her sunset years. It must be my view of death as positive outcome that eats at me sometimes, like now, as I roam Breton tidal flats instead of sizing up the hotel where I contemplate sinking my inheritance.

  The tidewater in this plaza-sized basin has dwindled to a silty channel. Skiffs, dories, and shallops lie tilted on glutinous sand till incoming sea refloats them. They describe an unruly horseshoe within the hoofprint outline of the basin. Sure, the collective tonnage of small craft rests stably atop the slime, but that’s no guarantee one wrong step wouldn’t mire me knee-deep.

  Besides which, the pickings are slim for any self-respecting beachcomber. Maybe motorboat traffic discourages shells and other marine oddments from accumulating. On this blank slate of a beach, the merest suggestion of a half-buried nub, casting a thimble’s worth of shadow, looms conspicuous. It lures me out between the semicircle of boats and the shallow cleft of the channel. Water oozes up around my loafers as they indent potential quicksand.

  I’m already queasy at prospects of engulfment before I bend low and start digging, and churn up the dizzying ferment of seafloor muck. I gag haplessly as grubbing fingers free a tetrahedron the width of outspread hand. Its angles and heft suggest I’ve salvaged a chunk of cornice. I stop to swab off gunk with a handkerchief only after slogging back past the cordon of high-and-dry vessels.

  Stubborn grains cling, but the wet sheen on bluestone helps me distinguish traces of carving. Over how many centuries have ocean currents smoothed bas-relief designs into tentative line drawings? On one face the letter S has been rotated in series to form a pinwheel, and alternating spirals and triskelions fill the loops of each letter.

  The adjacent face startles me when I recognize it is, in fact, a face. Oversized eyes are round with pinpoint irises, as if in goggling trance. The nose has dwindled to a tiny bracket, like an upside-down upholstery staple, and the mouth is a somber hyphen. Sufficient hatch marks rise from crescent forehead to suggest bristly hair continuing beyond my fragment’s broken edge.

  No matter how I tilt and squint at these faint incisions in April sun, they won’t resolve into a familiar style. I should have paid more attention in Art History class, not that it would have materially aided my two decades hawking real estate. I give up and drop my arm. Maybe ask at the hotel if similar rubble has ever cast ashore.

  Quavery, singsong French spins me around. “Please, do not discard that! I know where it is from!” Despite my bilingual upbringing, lilting dialect takes some seconds to process.

  Has black-clad codger been sitting on the nearest dory all along, practically a silhouette merging with dark hull? His thin jacket flaps in the nippy breeze. A patch of sun on one knee reveals pinstripes in woolen trousers. Hat with circular brim and round, shallow crown puts me in mind of country priest or ancient Roman peasant. I try to soft-pedal skepticism as I shout back, “How can you tell where it’s from?”

  He waves cavalierly at unburied treasure. “I would know that face anywhere!”

  My skepticism lingers. The codger must be thirty feet away and would need sharpshooter vision to spot abraded features that fade into random scratches at arm’s length. But meanwhile, where are my manners, forcing a pensioner to strain vocal cords? I tread closer till his patronizing smile unsettles me. Gap teeth lend him the mordancy of a jack-o’- lantern. “Your little objet trouvé,” he volunteers, “it is from Ys, of course!”

  “From where?”

  Now the pensioner gapes in disbelief. “You are here in Douarnenez and know nothing of Ys?”

  “Should I?”

  He feigns mild umbrage at my ignorance. Or is he feigning? “Ys was the most splendid city ever in Brittany, the richest, the oldest. It became great eons ago when the bay itself was young, not yet fully grown.” He nods oceanward. “You could have stood here and seen dry land out to the horizon, and on that horizon were the shining bronze and silver roofs in the port of Ys. Douarnenez was among its beggarly suburbs.”

  He rattles off fairytale spiel like a tour guide. “But in later centuries, every king had to rebuild ramparts and dikes as the waves invaded and then surrounded their city, whose foundations came to be fathoms below the surface of the bay. Finally men could not prevail against God’s will. Before the birth of Charlemagne, the pitiless sea destroyed the palaces, the counting houses, the temples, and plunged them into the deep.

  Some blame a spoiled and wicked princess for tampering with the sluice gates.” He shrugs as if recommending I digest this one detail with a grain of salt.

  Sounds like Atlantis envy to me, a Chamber of Commerce ploy to enliven dull boondocks with contrived lore. Saying so to earnest informant, though, would be cruel. Or will he slyly parlay his lecture into a plea for cash, as seems the case whenever characters accost me? I proceed on a sensibly even keel. “Shouldn’t I surrender this artifact to the authorities? Isn’t it considered state property?”

  He sagely shakes his head. “The government does not believe in Ys.”

  “So keep it? Is it supposed to be lucky?”

  His narrow gaze appraises my piece of legendry. “It is too big to go under your pillow. Still, you should dream of Ys if you put it under your bed. This I learned from my grandmother.”

  “Have you had such dreams? What was the city like?”

  The codger purses bloodless lips. “Nobody believes the dreams of a penniless fisherman like me.” A line, if ever I heard one, to tug at the heartstrings of a soft touch.

  Let’s save us both some time and shilly-shallying. “I appreciate this information and your generosity in giving me this relic. But it’s more rightfully yours, and I’d rather not be an ugly American. What would you like for it?”

  At first the codger regards me quizzically. What the deuce am I talking about? Then he gets it, and blows up at perceived insult. My apologies, my appeals for calm make no dent in the wall of bellowing indignation. I back away, prattling futile amends, reluctant to turn around lest he boil over and charge after me. Halfway up rocky path to the cliff-top hotel, I check on his position. He hasn’t budged. Perhaps waiting for the tide to raise his vessel. Is that his laughter amidst the almost human cackle of gulls, or simply the gulls?

  The vista from the hotel ranks among its less perishable assets. It occupies a headland, cloverleaf-shaped in aerial view, that probably won’t erode away and deposit it next to Ys for another century or two. In that respect, the hotel’s a sound investment.

  The site presents another underutilized advantage. Research indicates tourism on the upswing in Brittany, and the Auberge des Falaises, at its slight remove from the village, should attract upscale guests averse to mixing with the hoi polloi. However, that fails to factor in the current owner and his larval complexion, earth-tone wardrobe, and midlife dejection plainer than mine.

  Architecturally this is a diamond in the dirt. Sheer façade, narrow multipaned windows, a row of pointy dormers in a steeply pitched roof cry out for allusions to “petit chateau” and “manor.” Sadly, such grandiosity
is moot behind tarnished green eaves and maroon walls mottled with white spackle patches. Blatant disrepair, dead rhododendrons out front, and a “For Sale” sign beside rusty-hinged door aren’t helping. A less demoralized hotelier than Monsieur Kervigo might have summoned the wherewithal to cease operations, but here I am, with the staff and facilities all to myself.

  E-mails in flawless French spelled out why I was coming. Yet on my arrival, reminding Kervigo I was the prospective buyer rated the blandest acknowledgment, as if I’d declared myself a pipefitter or a dentist. How depressed he must have been not to brighten at golden chance to unload his depressing business. And ever since, I’ve been left on my own, like any other lodger. No, I won’t be soliciting his opinion about my fistful of enchanted debris.

  My first afternoon on the premises, I begin to tally deficiencies inside and out. Obsolete furnace, leaky plumbing, rickety fixtures, threadbare carpets, mold in the vents top the list after cursory once-over. The kitchen’s little more than a pantry and couldn’t handle half-capacity in the dining room, even if can-openers do most of the prep work. None of the employees qualify as spring chickens, and they mope as if to one-up the boss’s apathy. Not a curtain rod or banister but would flunk the white-glove test.

  I’m too discouraged at the number of shortcomings in pocket notepad to put them in perspective by sorting the cosmetic from the profound. At suppertime I brave the dining room, where the staff and I at separate tables partake of ratatouille with no seasoning beyond the nagging tang of metal. Hard ciders, then snifters of calvados, help blunt my critical edge. They also break down resistance to nudging bluestone in among the dust bunnies and grit under creaky bed frame.