by T C Donivan
“You may stay if you like Clayton,” Spencer said from across the room as if reading my mind. His words unnerved me.
“I wish to rejoin the living,” I told him.
I could see him smile at me in the darkness, a diabolical expression on his face, his eyes aglow like the woman Arsinoe’s. I snuggled closer to Annie.
Chapter 30 – Wolves On The Highway
The path into the Deisidaimonía Mountains was cut as if by the hand of a drunken mapmaker. In places, it narrowed to less than two feet in width while overhanging thousand foot gorges, in others, the surface dissolved into soft gravel that made the footing treacherous as quicksand. The animals our friend Sam had provided us were wild mustangs barely broken to the saddle. Their front legs danced like trained circus seals, their nostrils flaring as they stared into the abyss. I thought every turn of the trail would be our last.
The previous night’s storm had dissipated, but as we climbed into the mountains, a new batch of clouds boiled up from its peaks casting the already gray day into darker shades of despair. The weather turned cold and traces of sleet began to spit from the sky.
Spencer had nearly returned to himself by then, the effects of his winter’s self immolation having magically melted away. Our scout, Arsinoe, was dour and uncommunicative and had chosen a mule as her means of transportation. She whipped the beast mercilessly, swearing at him as she pushed on into the wilderness. Spencer took delight in our guide’s cussedness, goading the foolish woman on, inviting her to race him along the dangerous paths. The dog, Mordecai, was equally active. Twice, he tumbled over the side, only to scramble back over the top again minutes later. Annie and I held as far behind the rest as we could for fear of being swept to our doom by their recklessness.
We had ascended to the highest peak by midday and stopped in a level clearing filled with scrub trees to rest and eat. Frost covered the ground, the wind whipping savagely across the mountain. Annie and I shivered beneath our thin coats. Luckily our host had prepared a small feast of cold meat and fruit for us. Arsinoe took no nourishment, her small beady eyes never leaving Spencer who wandered about, nibbling on a chicken leg. He suddenly cried out with delight.
“Apples!”
He plucked a handful and came dashing back to us. As he offered them up, I remembered Sam’s words.
“They might be poison,” I said.
Spencer glared at me with disdain. “You believe that stupid old man?”
Annie spoke up, “Spencer, we have no idea what’s safe here. Black may be white and white may be black.”
“Persephone ate the forbidden fruits of Hades and was sentenced to return there forever,” Arsinoe said.
Spencer glared at her. “You’ve suddenly become garrulous.”
He held the apple up to the dim light of the distant sun. He put it to his mouth and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. A chill ran through me. Then he laughed and threw the apples over the side of the mountain. He sat down cross legged beside Arsinoe.
“What did you do to end up here?” Spencer asked. The strange little woman stared at the ground and said nothing. Spencer goaded her, “I expect you amounted to nothing in life and less in death.”
Arsinoe made a cradle of her arms “I was a nursemaid,” she croaked.
“And what did you nurse – Billy-goats and kittens?” Spencer sneered.
“The King’s child.”
“A sad child he must have been,” Spencer said.
“I painted pictures for him.”
“Portraits or landscapes?” Spencer asked.
“Portraits, like the kind you made of your woman after she died,” she said in a voice cold as the wind that swirled about our feet.
Spencer was taken aback, his jollity misting away. “What do you know of my portraits?”
She leaned forward and placed a finger upon Spencer’s temple. “I can see it in here. I have worms in the brain. You and I are alike.”
“I’m nothing like you!” Spencer said angrily. He got up and stalked around the horses. After a few minutes he stormed back. Some of the white had returned to his hair and the gauntness to his cheeks. “Come on, you always were a slow eater. Let’s get started,” he commanded.
“When will we reach the lake?” Annie asked.
“The woods are deep and the path is long,” Arsinoe replied.
Unlike our ascent, the path down the mountainside was less precipitous. The trail wound through tall, green pines in boulder strewn meadows, but ice covered the narrow road making it treacherously slow going. By now the winter storm had covered the sky, rendering the day nearly black as midnight. Chain lightning crackled all around us illuminating snow squalls in funnel-like plumes. Terror plagued me. I remembered the day Elijah and I had been caught out on the prairie. It seemed a million miles and a thousand years distant, a child’s delight compared to this nightmare tempest. As the light faded, animal sounds began to emanate from the forest. The haunting shrill of a wolf rippled through us like the cold hand of Hell itself.
We rode on, the trail turning like a corkscrew across frozen creeks and jagged, snowy ravines. The tree branches were heavy with ice and cobwebs thick as spun wool. The chatter of wild animals was a symphony of dissonant supplication to invisible gods. Except for the well beaten path we followed, no signs of settlement were visible. Arsinoe rode ahead of us. She reined in her mule suddenly as she topped a rise at the summit of a gorge.
“Turn around, go back!” She shouted.
By then we were nearly to the top of the chasm and could not retreat without tumbling backward over one another down the icy road. As our half tamed ponies struggled to the top, we saw a wild scene played out before us. Twenty yards ahead in the road, three men were battling for their lives against a horde of gigantic white wolves. Several of the beasts stood on their hind legs, while others leaped about on all fours. The men had dismounted and were using their horses as shields. As I watched, one of the beasts wrapped itself over a horse’s flank, molding to it as if it had no bones in its body and tore its throat out with a single rake of its claws. The animal’s eyes flashed white amid a spray of blood, then reared up and fell upon its side writhing for a moment before it died, the wolf clinging tight as a leech to its succulent host. The man who held the horse’s reins had only a club for a weapon. He stumbled backward, swearing as the wolf slipped off the horse carcass and closed on him. Recognition came to me.
“Sebastian!” I called out.
He glanced up, the wolf nearly flaying him alive as he did. He sidestepped the blow and fell into a hand to hand struggle with the beast. Without thinking, I pulled the pistol from my belt and kicked my horse’s flanks. Arsinoe called after me to stop, but I rode into the fray, wolves on every side of me. I leveled the pistol and fired at pointblank range into one the beast’s head that was menacing Sebastian. The creature howled and keeled over. Sebastian retreated.
The scene was nightmarish. The beleaguered men fought with clubs and bare hands. I heard a pistol shot and turned to see Annie killing another of the beasts. I pushed my horse into the wolf pack, attempting to trample them, but they were too quick. I shot and killed two more. The remnants of the pack broke and began to run into the woods. One of them lingered at the edge of the forest, staring at me with blood red eyes, his tongue lolling out over impossibly long, sharp teeth before he too joined his companions. A hand clapped my leg and I looked down in amazement.
“Zenobia!”
The good doctor stared up at me seeming as alive as the day I had met him. “It’s good to see you lad. If you hadn’t come when you did, the wolves would have eaten us for sure,” he said.
Arsinoe rode up. She screamed at me, her small round face beet red, “Damned fool! I told you to turn around. You listen to me when I give orders if you want to live long enough to see the other side of the lake!”
I ignored her and got down from my horse, embracing first Zenobia and then Sebastian. Annie joined us. Tears of joy filled our eyes.<
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“You’re alive,” I said, staring at them both in disbelief.
Sebastian looked at me oddly. “Of course I’m alive. What else would I be?” He asked.
Mordecai ran racing around their feet until he became dizzy and fell over. Spencer got down and embraced Sebastian as well. While he did, Zenobia took me aside.
“Careful what you say. The boy doesn’t remember how he got here. He hasn’t accepted it yet.”
I stared dumbly at Zenobia, realizing the last time I had seen him was when I had sewed his dead body into a blanket and dropped it into a hole in the ground. The realization frightened me. He quickly moved to put me at ease.
“This is a strange place Clayton. Simply accept it until it’s time to move on,” he said.
“But Annie and Spencer and I aren’t dead,” I explained.
His eyes grew wide. “Mozart did it. He got you through!” His expression at first joyous, turned wistful. “What happened that day?” He asked. I told him the tale of how we had come to be there and all we had seen so far. “Fantastic,” he said.
“Who’s your friend?” I asked nodding toward the other man they had been battling the wolves with.
“Oh, come and let me introduce you. We met him on the trail ten days ago. He’s quite good company. He’s an easterner like us.”
“Is he…” I could not finish the sentence.
“Dead, yes,” Zenobia answered.
Sebastian had already introduced Annie and Spencer to his new traveling companion. He turned to me with excitement. “Clayton, I’d like you to meet Tyrus, he’s a writer like you.”
He took my hand in a manly grip, nearly crushing the fingers. I smiled through the pain, feeling the bones afterwards to make sure he had not broken anything. He was a stout, baldheaded man with an enormous handlebar mustache and a serious expression painted upon his broad face. He wore a long coat and patched britches held up by suspenders. His eyes had a vacant look that stared into as if I were invisible.
“You’re blind!” I blurted out.
“Yes I am, thank you,” he replied cheerfully.
“But how did you manage before Sebastian and Zenobia found you?” I asked.
“The birds of the air do not sow or reap; and yet the heavens feeds them,” he replied.
I was at a loss for words, the unreality of the situation overwhelming me. Though we had been told time and again that we walked in the land of the dead, to encounter two lost souls I had so recently seen either on their deathbeds, or wrapped in winding sheets with dirt shoveled in their faces, was unnerving. Annie sensed my desperation and stood beside me, acting as an anchor to my sanity.
“Matthew 6:26,” she said.
He turned his unseeing eyes to her. “I do not know your Matthew, but the expression was old when I was young and Odysseus had not yet made his pilgrimage.” He reached out and took her hand in his as surely as if he were sighted. “We owe you our lives, I think. You rode to our rescue like the doomed heroes of Thebes.”
“What were those things?” I asked summoning up my nerves.
“Wolves, of course,” Tyrus replied
“They walked on two legs,” I said.
Tyrus walked over and prodded the one I had shot through the head with the end of his walking stick. Its snout was a foot and a half in length, the incisors that protruded from its jaw, a full six inches. The hind legs were shaped like a wolf’s, but elongated enough in the lower half to allow it to stand nearly upright. The front legs were equally malformed, the digits of the paws were slender with two hinged joints like a human’s.
“Canis Lupus,” Tyrus pronounced.
“Are they common in these parts?” I asked.
“There are more since the winter. It was a cold spring. They’re ranging further for their prey,” he said.
“Timber wolves,” Arsinoe observed.
“A hybrid I should think,” Tyrus put in.
“This one probably had a Comanche for a mother,” Spencer said.
The comment produced a round of laughter among the dead men. I was of two minds, one wanting very much to know every detail of Zenobia’s journey into Hell, the other desperately wanting to get away for fear of what I might learn.
“We must be going, we have to be in Ezekiel’s City by tomorrow night,” I said.
“It’s a full day journey to the lake. You’ll have to spend the night here on the mountain. We have a camp some miles below, why don’t you share it?” Tyrus offered.
The notion of bunking up with dead men made my skin crawl, but I could see no way out. After all, Sam’s crew had been the same. The difference being, that I had known none of them in life.
“There’s nothing queer about you is there?” Arsinoe asked.
The question brought a round of guffaws from Tyrus and the others. Arsinoe found no humor in their flippancy. She mounted her mule and rode off ahead. With great reluctance, we started down the mountain trail after her.
Chapter 31 – The Mythmakers
Tyrus had established a camp about a mile off the trail on the edge of a plateau that overlooked the far side of the mountains. He had built a lean-to covered in pine branches and furnished the interior with animal skins he had trapped using crude, but clever devices such as snares and deadfalls. Sebastian and Zenobia had yet to build a shelter and slept beneath the starless sky. Though the night was black as pitch, from the edge of camp I could see the dim reflection of the murky waters of the Alcyonian Lake at the foot of the mountains.
For supper, we dined on a stew of wild roots and meat whose origin I did inquire of. Afterward, we sat around the campfire. The night was uncommonly still, save for the occasional sound of the distant growl of a predator or whimpering death knell of its prey. We exchanged bland pleasantries about our homes on ‘the other side’. I found the exercise stiff given the restriction of limiting our questions due to Sebastian’s somnambulant state.
I could tell Spencer was bored. Mordecai slept at his feet and he would provoke the dog, dropping grains of sand into his ear. The sad beast would twitch and struggle, but never fully awaken. I found in his sad state a metaphor for our own condition. The conversation had drifted away and I expected we would soon wander off to sleep, when Spencer began to goad Arsinoe instead of the dog.
“Tell us about your portraits nursemaid. Are they lifelike? Do you imitate the old masters, or prefer one of the new schools? Are you any good?” He asked. Mordecai lifted his head and stared at the funny little woman.
Arsinoe took a drink from the water flask she carried and spat into the fire. It sizzled as if frying fat had been flung into water. “I am an old master,” she replied in a voice that crackled like broken glass beneath a boot.
“What colors do you prefer – powder blue and cherry pink?” Spencer asked.
“Crimson and Burnt Sienna. Blood and Earth. Once you begin to stir them together, they become inseparable,” she answered.
Tyrus eyed her suspiciously. “I know your work. It’s a celebration of death.”
“Where have you seen it?” Arsinoe asked.
“In Ezekiel’s City,” he said.
“You’ve been to Ezekiel’s City?” I asked. Tyrus nodded. “Do you know how to find the way out of this place?”
“Who should want to ever leave here? I call this country a paradise,” Sebastian piped up.
“Don’t you want to move on, to somewhere more peaceful?” Annie asked. I could feel her heart go out to the lost lad, the mothering instinct that all women harbor rising to the fore.
Sebastian chuckled. “Why? There are plenty of animals to kill and woods to explore. The weather is unpredictable, but this is my idea of heaven. When I die, I hope to go someplace like this,” he said.
“We will move on, someday, when the time is right,” Zenobia said.
“The way out?” I asked.
Tyrus began to answer, but Spencer was not through with his childish provocation of our guide, “Come now Arse old girl, you’re not
being entirely honest with us. Tell us more. Paint us a picture with words. Are you too inarticulate to explain what it is you do? Or are you too ashamed?”
Arsinoe’s eyes grew as beady as a snake’s, waves of emotion boiling from her. “That old fool Sam painted fables. I paint the world as it is, full of butchers and whores. Gore splatters the walls and blood runs in rivers. Men sit in the dark and masturbate to it as if it were a beautiful woman.” I felt as if I would vomit at her words.
“I should like to see it,” Spencer said hopefully.
“Tell us about Ezekiel’s City Mr. Tyrus, please,” Annie begged.
Tyrus hunched toward the fire. “It’s a horrible place. You will not like it. It is populated by the sorts of subhuman refuse your scout speaks of.”
Arsinoe bristled. “I wouldn’t denigrate a whore you eastern snob. You might have one for a mother.”
Tyrus became quiet for a moment. When he spoke, he answered in an even voice, “I know you well, you who suckled the wolf.”
Though it was a blind man and a woman who argued, I could sense violence lurking within their words. I held Annie’s hand, thinking to shield her should a fight break out between the unlikely pair. She gripped mine with equal determination. I watched her study the two, her keenly developed survival instincts essaying the pair as closely as me. Zenobia moved near Sebastian.
“Delightful entertainment!” Spencer shouted slapping his knee. “Now let us talk about this hellhole we’re in. The names would seem to indicate it is related to the Greek mysteries? You’ve been here longest, what say you Ty?”
“Spencer!” Zenobia said sharply with a glance toward his young charge.
“I’m tired of protecting your boy Zenobia. It was a chore in life and beyond endurance in death. He knows it on some level. Let him make what he will of it,” Spencer said.
Tyrus seemed unaware of Zenobia’s predicament and began to expound as a professor would before a classroom, “The classical myths, Greek, Roman, Norse, all evolved naturally, over the course of centuries. They were the reflection of homogenous cultures. From what I’ve seen, this place is neither one, nor the other, but an amalgamation of several. Fixed landmarks disappear from the landscape and reappear in entirely different places. The only constants are the ones you hold in your mind.”