by Rod Redux
The old man ogled Tanka, indecisive, then finally spoke: “It’s… been a long time… but I speak Poha,” he said haltingly. His voice was a rasping screech.
“Who are you?” Tanka asked.
The old man lowered his stick. The quaking of his flesh eased. “I am Traweek. Who are you?”
“I am Tanka.”
“You are Poha?”
Tanka nodded.
“How come you to be napping in my forest?” the old man asked, emboldened by Tanka’s civility.
“Your forest?”
The old man nodded. “The forest of the Onemara.”
“You are Onemara?”
The old man grinned, displaying the three rotten teeth that time, in its generosity, had deigned that he should keep. “I am the last.”
Tanka frowned. “The last? There are no other Onemara?”
The old man nodded. “All the rest… dead.” He cackled, repeated the words in a singsong voice. “Dead-dead-dead! All the rest are dead! Hee-hee!” He swung his stick as he sang, eyes glittering.
“How did they die?” Tanka demanded, but some small movement he’d made frightened the old man. The Onemara whined and scuttled away, clutching his pointed stick.
“Wait! Wait,” Tanka called soothingly.
The old man settled down, staring at him suspiciously.
“Where do you stay?” Tanka asked. “Can I stay with you tonight? I do not want to sleep in the open again.”
The old man blinked. Slowly, he smiled. “I dreamed of you last night,” the old man, Traweek, said softly. He chortled. “Yes, I dreamed. Me!” He thumbed his chest as if proud of the fact, as if no other men dreamed but him.
“In your wetus?” Tanka asked.
The old man’s face twisted. He looked like he’d bitten into something sour. “I do not sleep in a wetus!” he said contemptuously. “You think I trust the Great Spirit to leave me in peace? It took all the rest, didn’t it? It took them all, one by one! They worshipped it, yet it took them.”
“What took them?” Tanka asked. “Are you speaking of the thing in the treetops?”
“Come with me,” Traweek said, turning and limping away. “Night is coming, and we must conceal ourselves if we wish to see the morning light. The Great Spirit might well have plans for you, but it is also a hungry god.”
The old man lowered out of sight as he descended the hill. Tanka glanced toward the westering sun, then scrambled to his feet and chased after.
The old man glanced back as Tanka came up behind him, but he did not speak. Face set, the old man picked his way carefully down the slope.
They descended the steep hill side by side, and when the unsteady old man slipped once, near the bottom, Tanka caught him by the elbow.
Traweek nodded at him gratefully.
At the foot of the hill, the old man pointed with his stick. A faint path wound through the underbrush.
“This way,” the old man said.
4
Traweek brought the warrior named Tanka to the place where he slept. It was a cave with a narrow entrance, situated at the foot of a sandstone bluff, and not far from the spot Tanka had fallen in despair.
Tanka was a big man, broad in the chest, with a slightly protruding belly. He had to suck in his gut to pass through the narrow cleft in the rock face, but the chamber beyond was roomy enough once they were inside, and there was even a bit of light filtering in through a small opening in the ceiling-- a single ray of sunshine, red and weak now so near to dusk.
Tanka stood in the center of the cave, staring at the chink of light, his mouth drawn down in consternation. He could sense the mass of all the earth and stone above him, pressing down upon his body like a physical weight. It made him apprehensive. Still, it was better than sleeping in the open.
He turned his attention to the old man, who was busy at the entrance. The ancient creature was wheezing and muttering under his breath, piling branches and animal hides before the entrance of the cave. He realized the old man was blocking the entrance, but he did not move to assist him, even though the wizened creature’s arms quaked and his breath came out in harsh gusts as he tried to shift heavy stones into place.
Tanka wanted to ask the old man why he blocked the entrance, but feared the answer he might receive. He could no longer afford to refute the supernatural. His experiences in the forest of the Onemara had cured him of his arrogance.
With the entrance blocked, the old man collapsed onto his furs, panting, in the center of the cavern.
Tanka sat down nearby, curling his nose at the smell of the old man’s bedding. He fingered his new companion’s hides. They had been inexpertly tanned, and they stank of spoiled meat and urine. The hair was falling out of them, too, he saw. A clump had come loose in his fingers. Tanka wiped his hands on his thighs and tried to get comfortable, but it was hard to ignore the stench of the furs.
The old man was singing softly under his breath.
Tanka watched in the day’s last light as the old man’s white head lowered to the ground. He heard blowing. Saw the dim red glow of hot coals. Smelled smoke.
Traweek gurgled happily as his tinder caught fire. He fed small pieces of dry bark and branches to the lapping yellow and blue tongues, then offered the hungry flames some larger pieces of wood.
A short time later, the cavern was bright with the glow of the fire. The shadows of the two men juddered on the walls, uninvited guests. Traweek reclined, grinning at Tanka proudly. He gestured toward his fire, and Tanka nodded, acknowledging the old man’s “accomplishment”.
“Do you have food?” Tanka asked. Now that he was safe, his stomach had begun to gurgle at him again, demanding sustenance.
The old man’s smile faded. “No food,” he said, but he evaded Tanka’s gaze.
Tanka glanced toward the mound of furs the old man’s eyes had skipped across when he looked away. Was there food hidden there?
“Perhaps I can hunt for us in the morning, if I am not too weak from hunger,” Tanka suggested.
The old man laughed derisively.
Tanka scowled. “Do you mock me?”
“There are no animals in this forest!” the old man suddenly shouted. His eyes twitched toward the entrance of the cave, the heap of skins and branches blocking the entrance. “Not anymore,” he said, lowering his voice, and he shot Tanka a meaningful glance.
Tanka’s scowl deepened. What did that mean?
The old man stared into his fire for a minute or two, yellow light glinting in the dark caverns beneath his brows. Tanka watched him without speaking. Finally, the old man heaved a sigh. He rose stiffly and crossed to the heap of furs he’d glanced toward a moment before. He bent forward and pushed the hides around, then stood upright and tossed something toward his guest.
“There!” he snapped. “It is all I have!”
Tanka fumbled to catch the root the old man had flung in his lap. He brought it to his nose and sniffed it. The lumpy root had little scent, other than the smell of earth, and looked like a fat woman with big breasts and hair trailing from her toes. It was not a root that he was familiar with. He looked at Traweek skeptically.
The old man flopped down across the fire from him, chewing on a similar root… or rather, gumming it enthusiastically. He paused to say, “Eat!” and resumed gnawing at his tuber. In the dim and twitching light, it appeared to Tanka that the old man was chewing on a child’s dismembered foot.
Tanka sniffed the root again, then took an experimental nibble. The fibrous root had about as much taste as it had scent, meaning none, but he was too hungry to be critical. He bit off a bigger chunk and chewed rapidly.
Seeing him tear into the root, the old man grinned and nodded. A rope of saliva depended from his chin.
Tanka devoured the fibrous root in minutes, then reclined on the stinking furs, the vegetable matter lying in his gut like a stone. He was not satisfied, but at least his belly was a little less empty. He longed again for Muoie’s cooking, then smacked his l
ips, thinking that his tongue felt fat and tingly.
Traweek’s small fire had filled the cave with heat and smoke and a low orange glow. Tanka watched the light glimmer on the rivulets of moisture that seeped down the curving walls. The walls of the cave were crowded with black markings, Tanka saw. Onemara writing. Tanka didn’t know what they meant, but they were scrawled thick and close on the rough sandstone surface.
“What do those markings mean?” Tanka tried to ask, but his tongue had gone to sleep and the words came out all mushy and tangled together. It felt like there was a toad in his mouth.
Tanka smacked his lips and blinked. His eyelids had grown heavy.
The old man laughed, but the sound of his laughter was strange. It was no longer high-pitched and raspy. Rather, it was low and oddly stretched out, like one might stretch out the pine resin his people sometimes chewed.
Tanka looked toward the Onemara, alarmed, but his distress was strangely distant, stretched out like the elder’s voice.
The old man began to crawl across the cave toward him.
But… he has too many arms! Tanka thought.
He shut his eyes and opened them, but the old man still had too many limbs. Each time one of the old man’s arms or legs moved, there seemed to be five or six more of them, mimicking the actions of the original… only a moment or two later.
I must be dreaming, Tanka thought, mesmerized by the sight of all those arms and legs. Yes, that is what this is. I fell asleep.
He closed his eyes to the grotesque vision, thinking to propel himself toward other more comforting dreams, and his thoughts drifted away in the dark behind his eyelids.
His head rolled back limply on his shoulders.
5
He dreamed that night as the Onemara dreamed, or so the warrior named Tanka believed.
There were many legends about the Onemara among the people of his village. It was rumored that they were skinwalkers, that they could command the spirits and their shamans could dream the future. From time to time, one of the Poha set off for the land of the Onemara, seeking counsel from the spirits or visions of the future. That is how Tanka knew of the haunted forest: from tales told around the campfire by his father and his father’s father when Tanka was a boy, and from fearsome tales brought back by those who dared to visit the lands of the Onemara, and lived to tell of it. He had believed them to be superstitions then, but now he knew. Now, he dreamed.
The images that danced in his mind were disjointed, and some of them were far too strange for a simple man like Tanka to interpret, but Tanka remembered all of them when he awoke the next morning, his flesh slick with an oily and foul-smelling sweat, his head swollen with pain.
He dreamed of Muoie’s dying, of the wind screaming in the black winter sky and snow clawing at the flap of their domed tent like the white fingers of death. The blood, Muoie’s cries, the helpless horror he had felt as he plunged his hand inside his wife’s womb and tried in vain to turn the body of their child so that it could be delivered.
He dreamed of Muoie lying dead, her bloody legs splayed before him, and how he had wrapped her cold body in their bedding, her belly still swollen with child, and pulled the corpse to the far side of their wetus, for the storm had not let up and he did not dare to put her outside for fear the wolves would drag her body away. He had hunkered down on the other side of the hut and put his face in his hands and trembled as the wind screamed outside, afraid he would go mad, had already gone mad, that he had killed her and that was why there was so much blood on his hands.
He dreamed his unborn child came to him that winter night. The boy came as the wind screamed and the snow snuffled at the flap of their hut, and the child had climbed into Tanka’s arms, a beautiful toddling boy with thick black hair and Muoie’s solemn features, but when Tanka embraced him and stroked the boy’s hair from his brow, he saw that the child’s eyes were white and soulless.
Tanka pushed the creature from his lap in his dream, his blood turning to ice at the sight of the thing’s lifeless eyes, and he woke with a start in the old man’s cave, a hoarse cry flying from his lips
He did not know what time it was-- still night, he presumed, the fire guttering, the shadows thick in the cave.
He could hear the old man laughing.
Tanka rose to his elbows with great effort, his head spinning, and spied the Onemara crouched near the entrance of the cave. The old man’s bony shoulders were shaking with mirth, but when he turned his head to look at Tanka, the low red light of the fire glimmered on tears.
They looked like blood in the scarlet light.
There was a resounding crash in the forest outside the cave, trees splintering with a sound like thunder, as if a storm of lighting was lashing the earth. It sounded like the entire wilderness beyond their hiding place was being laid to waste. An inhuman shriek lanced into the wind and darkness, the cry of something monstrous and infuriated, and the old man laughed even harder, tears dripping from his face.
Tanka fell back, retreating from the fearsome sounds, diving back into his dreams like a frightened child into his bedding.
He dreamed of his brother Oy’he. Handsome, favored Oy’he. Oh, how their mother had doted on him! How their father’s breast had swelled with pride at the sight of him! Even Tanka’s brothers had fawned over the child, all save Tanka, who hated his brother as he hated no other living thing in the world. Oy’he, who was slim where Tanka was stout, beautiful of face where Tanka was plain, quick of thought where Tanka was dense.
Once, Tanka had pushed Oy’he over the side of the tall earthen mound their home resided upon, and though his younger brother was merely bruised by the fall into the grassy avenue below, several villagers had seen him shove his brother over the edge and reported his trespass to their father. Their father had beaten Tanka with a switch until his legs and back were crisscrossed with bloody stripes.
When his brothers nicknamed Oy’he “Little Hawk” sometime later, Tanka had steadfastly rejected the honorific, calling him “Little Skunk” instead. He said it with a smile, as if teasing him affectionately, but in his heart Tanka felt anything but affection for his brother. There was only bitterness and jealousy in him for Oy’he.
Oy’he—whose lean, tan form made all the village girls fall onto their backs, legs spread. Oy’he – who was kind to the elderly, a paragon of virtue.
When Oy’he took Anatissa, the most beautiful woman in the village, for a mate, Tanka had ranted at Muoie half the night. “He will grow tired of her in one season! Does she really think such a dog will not stray? Every woman in this village goes into heat when he passes!”
Muoie had laughed at him, saying, “Your brother is a handsome man. Still, you should not be jealous of him.”
“And why not?” Tanka had demanded, shouting at his pregnant wife. “Must I favor him as the Great Spirit has favored him, as my parents favored him my entire life? Can one soul not be charmed by his smile, or must the whole world turn with joyous anticipation at the very tread of his heel?”
Unimpressed by his rancor, Muoie had turned with a sniff. Shaking her head with disdain, she returned to her sewing.
He dreamed of killing Oy’he that night.
As the fire crackled and smoke drifted like dreaming spirits inside the cave, Tanka dreamt, at last, of murder.
He dreamed that he had risen, that he had slipped out through the narrow fissure into daylight and was walking along a footpath through the creaking forest. He strode forward, his face set with grim determination. His feet met the earth with certainty. The forest opened up ahead of him, guiding his steps, urging him on. At the summit of a steep hill, a large stone lay in his path. A boon. He paused to scoop it up.
He passed through dappled shade and patches of bright sunshine, the rock cradled in his arms, until at last he came to the edge of a rugged bluff. There below, at the foot of the steep rock face, Oy’he lay among the stones, his legs twisted, his handsome features obscured by a glaze of dried black blood.
<
br /> Somehow Oy’he had tumbled over the side of the cliff, or lost his footing climbing down. Or perhaps…
Perhaps something had pushed him.
His legs, Tanka saw, were broken, his brow split open by the rough edge of one of the large stones that littered the talus.
As Tanka descended carefully to the scree below, Oy’he roused. He called out to Tanka.
“Brother…! Help me!” he moaned, his voice a weak rasp.
Oy’he’s eyes rolled toward him, delirious, as Tanka finished climbing, and a trembling hand rose to grasp the cusp of Tanka’s pants leg. “I am injured, brother,” he whispered, and his throat convulsed as he tried to swallow. “My body… is broken.”
Tanka glared down at Oy’he. The stone he had carried down the side of the bluff hung heavy in his hands.
“Brother… please,” Oy’he hissed.
Tanka’s eyes flashed. His lips split into a triumphant grin. “At last,” he said, and then he raised the stone above his head.
He held it there, savoring his victory, and then he brought it down.
Again.
And again.
And again.
In the Belly of the Beast
"I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny movements inside."
--Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
The Thing in the Road
1
Jane wasn’t sure what shot across the road as she navigated the winding lane that led to Forester House. It was so fast and dark she didn’t get a good look at it. She was also distracted by the GPS, which was going cuckoo on the dash, chiming maniacally and gibbering in what sounded like some garbled version of pidgin Latin. It startled her badly, whatever the thing was, and caused her to instinctively jerk the wheel to the right.