by J Seab
Everam stood quietly before the house braced against his staff, his eyes closed, and his breaths slow and controlled. Snow coursed about the grounds, nose low to the ground, tail tucked, movements skittish. A low whine escaped her as she stopped before Everam, still sniffing the air about her. She looked up at him, her tail swishing briefly, but Everam took no note of her, so she sat next to him, subdued but her senses alert, and waited patiently.
There was a wrongness about this place, Everam sensed.
It wasn’t the fire, the charred branches from the oaks drooping over the burnt shell of the Lamont home. Nor was it the empty corrals and untended fields, the unnatural stillness. There was more.
Everam opened his awareness, let the faint echoes of space and time waft through his mind.
There was a lingering evil in the ethers, a crisscrossing of miasma that corrupted the smooth harmony of life and environment. The signs were unmistakable, the tracings still raw and withering within seething masses of darkness, like layers of roiling thunderheads billowing in conflicting directions by chaotic winds.
Unmitigated violence had occurred here.
He reached out his awareness to the knot of turmoil and channeled the tracings through his mind. He suppressed a recoil, the instinct to flee, to banish the agonies and terrors from his awareness. But, grimly determined, Everam let the ripples from the past envelop him.
He sensed the jagged edge of hot brutality and lust invade the space-time bringing evils of torture and murder.
A swirl of shadowed wraiths rippled in from the forest edge, their forms suggesting human but they were indistinct; more a boil of blackened eddies and twists of smog that surged across the open land to the farmhouse.
A darkness split from the mass and thickened about the farmhouse door. A coruscation of confusion and fear flashed, a hard edge of malevolence thrust. A scream of agony blasted through the darkness, pushing it aside a moment, and then radiated outward, warping the ethers, leaving snarls of chaos in its wake.
Spasms of terror beat furiously within a thickness of lust that then churned toward him. Another tangle of ropy darkness twisted in. Crusted spikes speared from its mouth. The thickness of lust flared a moment and then retreated into the house, merging with those that agitated within.
Two other spasms of terror were jerked from the house and heaped with the first. A bright ember of interfering light was snuffed. Whirls of stygian mist coalesced about them spurting pusses that flooded through the tattered remnants of the homestead’s peace and serenity.
The maelstrom of evil ebbed for a moment. The spasms of terror, drained of will and hope, faded.
An expectant stillness gathered within the ethers. There was a stir, a gathering of intent. The hard edge of malevolence thrust out again—once, twice, thrice. A paroxysm of evil mushroomed upward, blasting away the vestiges of light and love that imbued this space-time.
Blood-red shadows, deeper but less turbulent now, moved back toward the forest, leaving festering pools in their wake, the embers of life and future dying within.
Everam opened his eyes, shuddering uncontrollably. He fought against the thick pall of anger and hatred that saturated the ethers about him, pounding at his senses, urging him to rouse the Patrol, track down the invaders and smash them, showing them no more mercy than they showed their victims.
But he knew that this was not the way, that he would only become another victim of the evil that saturated this place.
He eased himself to the ground next to Snow and folded his legs beneath him, his staff resting across his lap. She pressed against him. He wrapped his arms around her neck and hugged her close, feeling the warmth of their love and companionship soaking into him, subduing the anger that threatened to break him. He held her for several minutes, her musky odor soothing, reassuring. The heaving within his chest calmed. He released her, leaned back, and softly asked, “What do you see, Snow girl?”
She lifted her head. “Bad,” she yap-barked. “Air bad.” Snow licked at Everam’s hand. “Go?” she asked hopefully.
He ruffled her ears. “Soon, girl. What makes air bad? Wolf, bear?”
Snow shook her head emphatically. “No, no. Bad-man rot.” Snow pressed tighter against Everam’s leg, her head swiveling about, vigilant. “Go soon,” she said, wishfully, looking into Everam’s eyes. “Soon,” she repeated.
Everam placed his staff on the ground next to him, holding it lightly with one hand. Eyes still open, he pushed away the fuming hatreds that threatened to engulf him and let his thoughts return to his vision of the past. He retraced the events of the assault in his mind, superimposing them upon the scene as he saw it today. He looked toward the forest. The rogues came from that direction, after dark. There was only a handful, five or six at most. There, only a few paces from where he sat, they committed the atrocities. They then set fire to the home and dragged the bodies into the trees.
Everam’s gaze lingered for a few moments, and then he stood. Snow jumped up, eager to leave this place, her normal curiosity and desire to explore absent. Everam signaled her to stay, telling her that he wasn’t ready to go yet. He walked over to the Lamont home and paused at the threshold, sensing the violence that occurred there, and then entered. He searched through the wreckage. Most everything was burned, the roof partially collapsed, but he did note that all the lamps he could find were lectric. It seemed certain that a toppled oil lamp didn’t cause the fire.
Despite the fire and dark chaos, there was still a lingering sense of love and caring within the structure. This had been a happy family. Images of laughter and play coursed through his mind. He savored them for a moment, rejoicing in the joys spread by the family as they passed through this space-time. He fixed these thoughts foremost in his mind, let its light wash outward to begin the process of healing. It would never occur if he fueled the discord with more hatred. Such thinking was shallow, false—reactionary. It resolved nothing in the long run.
He went outside and walked over to a spot on the ground that was churned and broken. The taint was strong here. He bent to one knee and examined the ground closely, sifting earth and plant through his fingers. Finally, he lifted a sample to his nose and smelled it.
No doubt. This was where the young girl, Alicia, her mother and sister, and even their little dog were assaulted and killed. Everam’s head bent in sorrow, images of waste and a future that could never be burning through his mind.
Sighing deeply, weary, he pushed to his feet and forced himself to continue. He decided it would be best if he remained afoot. Moon Shadow was grazing in a grassy meadow and would be fine for an hour or two. Calling to Snow, he headed toward the tree line, examining the ground as he went.
There were still plenty of signs of the rogues’ passage. They were certainly not skilled trekkers. He followed the signs into the forest. Broken brush and disturbed ground made their path easy to follow. As the undergrowth grew thicker they must have picked up the bodies and carried them rather than dragged them. This made the path obscure, difficult to follow for Everam’s untrained eye.
He called Snow over, asked her to track. Reluctantly, her tail low, she complied, nose close to the ground, tracking the taint that trailed deeper into the trees. Everam followed. He needed to find the spot where they dumped the bodies, then return to Meldon and locate a trekker to trace their path farther and discover their origin. Was there more to this than a band of rogues gone insane? It certainly wasn’t a pack of rabid wolves or bears. Snow would know the difference. He knew the difference. This was a deliberate, unprovoked assault on a defenseless family. But who? And why?
A kilometer into the forest, Everam found where they had buried the bodies. Snow coursed out, pawed at the ground, looked back at Everam, and whined. Everam joined her, idly stroking the back of her neck as he surveyed the site. It was in a small clearing atop a slight hill. The rogues had tried to conceal the location but their efforts were crude, the ugliness of their deeds easily detected.
Ever
am, standing over the site, felt the stench of the rogue’s evil emanating from beneath the ground. But he refused to leave it to fester. He clasped his hands before him and plunged his awareness through the blackness to the core of shared joys and love within, encouraging it to seep forth, leaving its traces of good to gradually banish the evil.
Everam smiled, his memories of the Lamont’s no longer tainted by a pall of hatred and vengeance. The rogues would be dealt with but he would not add to their evil with more of his own.
It was time to return to Meldon. He looked up through the break in the canopy of trees. It looked like he needed to hurry. The clouds were thickening overhead and there was a cold wind shifting in from the north. The promise of an early snow swirled in the air.