The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  Still, he got his shoulders into it and didn’t complain. He was bound and determined to go up this hillside even if he had to drag me.

  “Buddy, if this tunnel gets any lower, I’m sure as hell not crawling after you!”

  It did not get much lower. I had to duck my head, but I was going hunched over anyway. I couldn’t believe how steep it had gotten. We talk about the hills around here, but they’re not like you get up by the mountains, when you have actual honest-to-God valleys. I must have been going downhill at a gentle slope for most of the walk to have an incline like this waiting for me.

  Oh well, at least it’d be downhill on the way back.…

  I tried to say this to Bongo, but I was wheezing and he was making that raspy whrrrff noise that meant his collar was cutting into his neck. I couldn’t go any faster, but he wasn’t about to stop.

  About five minutes before we both died, light bloomed around us. Bongo took three steps into grass and froze.

  I took two more steps and fell to my knees on top of a mountain that shouldn’t have been there.

  5

  I was on a bare, grassy hillside scattered with stones, and that was impossible. I could see for miles in every direction, and that, too, was impossible.

  I started to laugh. It wasn’t that it was funny. It was just that if I laughed, it wasn’t serious. I’ve heard that people who get shot start laughing sometimes, that they’ll tell you they’re fine even when they’re holding their guts in with their hands.

  As it happens, I knew exactly where I was, or at least I knew what where I was was, if that makes any sense. It was an Appalachian bald.

  I only know this because of Aunt Kate, and I’m probably getting it wrong, but as I understand it, it’s a thing that happens in the southern mountains where you get the top of a hill that ought to be covered in trees, and instead it’s all grass, as if someone has been lugging a lawnmower up a few thousand feet. There’s no reason for it to be grass and nobody’s quite sure why it’s not a forest. Hence the name bald.

  Our family vacations to the Great Smoky Mountains involved visiting a bunch of balds. I didn’t really mind. After a couple of days in Pigeon Forge, home of hillbilly mini golf, hillbilly laser tag, and hillbilly bumper cars, a bare grass hillside started to seem positively restful. And it made Aunt Kate really happy. There’s a bunch of plants that only grow on balds, so botanists get very excited and narrate the plant life while they wander around on their knees. “Ooh! Creeping St. John’s Wort!” and so forth.

  I say all this to indicate that I know an Appalachian bald when I see one—or at least a bald of some sort. I guess it’s possible I wasn’t in the Appalachians after all, since, as I may have mentioned earlier, this was completely impossible.

  There aren’t any balds near my grandmother’s house. There aren’t any mountains near my grandmother’s house. There are very gentle hills, sometimes cut away into miniature river valleys. There are absolutely, positively, not the sort of hills where you stand on top and gaze over the landscape and see the horizon tinted blue-orange in the distance.

  I knelt atop the bald and gazed at the blue-orange horizon.

  “This is fucked up,” I told Bongo.

  Bongo was looking around warily. His ears were up and alert as if he was hearing something. When I spoke, his tail wagged once in acknowledgment, but he was holding it in the stiffly upright curl of a dog on the job.

  White stones littered the grass. I don’t know much about rocks. If Aunt Kate had been a geologist, I could probably talk for hours about glacial remnants and thrust faults, but she wasn’t, so hey, they were big white rocks.

  Right. Geography lesson over. I was somewhere impossible.

  I dug my knuckles into the grass and touched dirt. The world was not painted on some kind of enormous canvas designed to fool random dog walkers.

  So my options were that I was dreaming, hallucinating, or that Bongo and I had just walked a few hundred miles in twenty minutes.

  “Or aliens,” I told Bongo. “Maybe we’ve had missing time. Maybe we were abducted. Did you get probed? I don’t think I got probed.” My nether regions did not feel any different than they normally felt. I assume you notice that sort of thing.

  I stood up. Nothing much happened.

  I turned in a circle, passing the leash from hand to hand. Behind me, where we had come up, stood the tunnel of trees. There were thin, scruffy bushes around the entrance. They hadn’t leafed out yet, or perhaps they were dead.

  The tunnel seemed very small and very steep. I had a hard time believing that I’d climbed it at all, and getting back down was going to be an experience. It seemed to go straight down, surrounded by the bare branches, which were layered densely on top of one another until they faded together like dark smoke. If I tried to go back down through the bushes instead, I was going to get flayed alive by twigs, assuming I could get through them at all.

  I turned away from the tunnel and looked out across the bald.

  On two sides, it seemed to fall away sharply, but the third side, opposite the tunnel, stretched out in a gentle slope, littered with stones.

  Bongo was facing that direction, and when I took a step, he strode out as if we were going for a perfectly normal walk. His ears and tail were still up, though, and I had the impression that he was thinking very hard about something (or more accurately, that his nose was thinking very hard about something. Bongo’s nose is far more intelligent than the rest of him, and I believe it uses his brain primarily as a counterweight).

  His nose was working now, nostrils flaring in and out.

  Well. I reasoned that either one of two things was going to happen. Either I would go down the tunnel and be in the woods behind my grandmother’s house—in which case either my understanding of geography was completely and utterly messed up or Something Weird Was Going On—or I would go down the tunnel and discover myself somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains and have to walk to a ranger station and get a lift to a rental car place so that I could drive home (and yes, Something Weird Would Be Going On).

  Neither of these situations seemed likely to change if I went forward and investigated the rest of the bald for twenty minutes, and for all I knew, there would be a sign from the Park Service saying, “This is an amazing optical illusion and you are actually at sea level.”

  We went forward.

  A little breeze sighed over the grass, rippling it in fine, straw-colored waves. When I looked into the distance, I saw more hills. They had the same dark, smokelike quality of bare branches as the ones around the tunnel. And the ones around my grandmother’s house, for that matter.

  As my heart slowed from my run up the hill, I began to think that I was being stupid.

  I could still be behind my grandmother’s house. It’s totally possible.

  I’m going to go into Pondsboro and say, “Did you know there’s a bald there?” and they’re going to look at me like I’m stupid and say, “Yeah, obviously, that’s Moonshine Hill,” or something like that. And maybe I’ll just have been looking in completely the wrong place all this time and didn’t notice the hill.

  And then I’m gonna feel like an idiot for thinking that it was aliens.

  One’s own idiocy is often a cheering thought. I veered to the left, wondering if I’d be able to see my grandmother’s house, which would make me feel better about the whole thing.

  Bongo gave me one of his human-going-the-wrong-way looks, but allowed himself to be led to the edge of the bald. His nose stayed pointing in the original direction, though, which provided an interesting physics lesson in how a hound’s body can rotate around a fixed point.

  I got to the edge, such as it was—at least, the point where the slope became steep enough that I didn’t feel like going any farther—and saw more bare trees, rank upon rank. No roads, not that that meant anything. The trees could be in the way. All those dark trees sinking down into a valley and rising up again into another hill and another, a whole circle of hills aro
und this one, hung with endless colorless trees.

  I’ll say, “Did you know that there’s a whole bunch of hills?” and they’ll say, “Yeah, obviously, that’s the Moonshine Range. You’re in hill country. What did you expect?” And I’ll feel like an even bigger idiot.…

  I dug my nails into my palms.

  I wasn’t in hill country. I knew I wasn’t. But—

  Well, either I was wrong or the hills were. And while I have known people—and dated at least one—who would stubbornly maintain that they were right in the face of geography, I am not one of them. Which is why we’re no longer dating, among other reasons.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m in hill country.”

  Bongo strained at the leash, nose working. I let him lead across the bald, through the gray rocks.

  A shape coming out from under one rock startled me badly for a minute, until I realized that it was a small tree, or had been at some point in the distant past. It was the bleached gray-white color of dead wood, and it twisted around like a snake, gnarled by wind and weather. Aunt Kate would have been thrilled by it, I’m sure—a tree growing on a bald, where trees were supposed to grow but didn’t.

  I was less thrilled. It looked diseased.

  Bongo was still going forward. His head was up, not down, not tracking but scanning for… something.

  Maybe a bird. I remembered birds in the last bald. Little warbly things that buzzed, each buzz going up and up like a question.

  I couldn’t hear any birds here. Not even the apparently invisible woodpeckers that seemed to fill the woods around Grandma’s house, tap-tappa-tap… tapping.

  Well, a woodpecker wouldn’t find much to eat up here, would it? That one tree wouldn’t make a meal for anybody.

  I glanced over my shoulder toward the tunnel—and shrieked.

  Bongo yanked on the leash in surprise, then turned and cowered behind my legs. He was hoping I would protect him from whatever made me scream, but the end result was that he pulled me off-balance and I fell backward over him, and we landed in a flailing heap on the grass.

  “God—shit—damn!” I said, or something like that.

  We sorted ourselves out. The leash got wrapped around my thigh and I had to do some unwrapping, complicated by Bongo trying to climb in my lap to make sure that I wasn’t mad at him.

  I felt like an idiot for yelling. But I’d been badly startled when I turned around and saw that on this side, every one of the gray rocks was carved into a shape.

  The carvings were the same sort as the deer-stone in the backyard, but bigger. They had weight, like… oh, those giant stone Olmec heads in South America, say. Some of them even looked a bit like those heads, with leering human faces on them. The style was different, don’t get me wrong, but there was the same feeling of mass.

  I got up and went over to one. It looked as if it went down into the ground instead of sitting on top of it.

  Hell, maybe it did. There could be weird ridges of rock sticking up that someone had carved into various shapes. Rocks did that, didn’t they?

  I could have poked it, I suppose, but that would have involved touching one. I didn’t want to touch one. It looked like it would be cold, which would be normal for stone, but some part of my brain insisted that it would be warm, maybe not like a human but like a lizard lying out in the sun, and then I’d probably have to run screaming. I kept my hands to myself.

  I’m an editor. I have a vague knowledge of botany gleaned from my aunt and a highly specific knowledge of one particular breed of dog. I don’t know anything about archaeology or modern art. I couldn’t tell you if the carvings were ten years old or ten thousand.

  I mean, probably they weren’t ten thousand. Were there even humans here then? Were there still mammoths wandering around? Err… hmm. Probably not mammoths. Ten thousand years ago was before the pyramids, but after mammoths, wasn’t it?

  I was a bit hazy on the details. Normally I’d look it up on my phone, but…

  Actually, that was a great idea. I took out my phone, turned it on—it was at about 5 percent power, no signal—and took a photo of the nearest head. It made the camera noise, then immediately shut off.

  Stupid damn phone.

  Bongo peed on the dead tree in a meditative fashion.

  The carved face glared at me. It had bulging eyes and an almost nonexistent nose. Its lower lip was pulled down to reveal broad, flat teeth that went most of the way to the ears.

  It wasn’t the most pleasant thing I’ve ever seen.

  All the carvings were like that. They weren’t all faces. Some of them were animals, like the deer-stone, but even the animals were messed up. Their hind legs curled up into their bellies and over their backs, or their mouths were open like they were screaming or panting or laughing. They were elongated and earless, like snakes.

  A couple had swollen bellies and long breasts that wrapped around their bodies like their legs. I put an involuntary arm across my chest. It was painful just to look at that.

  As a modern art installation, it was grotesquely effective. As prehistoric art… Well, I’d wonder a bit about the people who made them.

  Also, I’d wonder why there wasn’t a park ranger standing over them to slap anybody who got out a can of spray paint. I’m pretty sure that you can’t just have ancient ruins lying around without some idiot tagging the things.

  I’ll say, “Hey, guys, I was up on those hills that are apparently in my backyard and there’s all these carved rocks,” and they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a State Historic Site, the Moonshine Hill Stones. Didn’t you see the sign?” and I’ll say, “Isn’t there supposed to be a ranger or something?” and they’ll say, “Well, you know, budget cuts…” and we’ll nod sadly about the way local government cuts things like this, and also education, but the police department gets an armored assault vehicle even though they mostly deal with rogue cows.…

  I went a little farther through the stones. Bongo was getting annoyed with my frequent stops, but really, these were fascinating. Like gargoyles, only not as friendly. You got the impression that gargoyles were there to chase away evil spirits.

  These things looked like they were there to chase away gargoyles.

  A whole line of them lay flat on the grass in front of me, and here I could tell that they actually went underground, either partially buried or actually anchored into the hill itself.

  Two were pretty clearly supposed to be humans. They lay curled up on their sides, arms over their heads, as if they were sleeping or weeping or dead.

  I couldn’t even begin to guess what the other ones were. I took a few steps back, hoping they’d come into focus the way the deer-stone had, but they didn’t. They were just contorted masses of lines, twisting around in unpleasant, erratic ways. The carver had clearly heard of the golden ratio and wanted no truck with it.

  For all their abstraction, though, you got the feeling that they were supposed to be alive, the way the snaky animals were alive. They were the creepiest of the lot.

  Bongo yanked on his leash again.

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “Let’s go see what you’re after.”

  I felt a bit of a chill turning my back on the carved stones. The flat ones were close enough to one another that I had to walk carefully so as not to touch one. Bongo picked his way between them like a dancer.

  There were more ahead of us, though. They got bigger as we followed the curve of the bald forward and down, and the carved lines contorted in the corners of my vision. It was all very creepy.

  I found myself humming tunelessly to ward off the creepiness. If only there had been birds calling, or something! But there was just Bongo and me, two little creatures toiling down the grass through the forest of silent stones.

  “Oh Susanna…,” I sang, not very well. “Don’t you cry for me…”

  I looked behind me again. We’d come far enough down the slope that the top of the bald was no longer visible. Several of the stones were outlined against the sky, dark gray on li
ght gray.

  “I’ve come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.…”

  Where on earth had I learned that song first? We sang it in grade school, but I remember knowing different lyrics and getting frustrated that the teacher sang it wrong. They sang “The sun was so hot I froze myself” and I knew it as “The sun so hot I froze to death.” Arguably I was a morbid child, but I must have gotten that from somewhere.

  My father used to sing it, I think. Or maybe my mother, who had died so long ago that I could hardly remember her.

  Your mother’s probably here under these stones right now.

  It was such a weird and intrusive thought that I fumbled the chorus. “I… ah. Right. And if I do not find her, then I will surely die… and when I’m dead and buried, oh, Susanna, don’t you cry…”

  All the dead are here under the stones.

  I don’t want you to think that I was being mind-controlled or something. It wasn’t from outside me. It was just the unpleasant little voice that pops up in the middle of the night to remind you about the stupid thing you did in high school, or to whisper that maybe there’s a monster under the bed. But something about the stones and the creepiness and the isolation of this place made it louder.

  Keep walking and you’ll walk out of the sky and down the hill down under the ground among the stones among the dead.…

  “The fuck?” I said out loud, which shut the voice up for a second.

  Bongo glanced back to make sure I wasn’t swearing at him, then kept leading me forward.

  There was a tall stone ahead of us. He seemed to be headed for it. “All right,” I told him. “That far, and then we go back. This place is weirding me out.”

  this place this place is weirding this is the weirding under the ground the weirdlings come out to play and then the sun freezes them into stones but they’ll move again when your back is turned.