A few silent moments passed before the old man finally spoke. “Now it is my turn for the introductions. I am Donal Feeney, mayor of Methow, or—what remains of Methow.”
He frowned at the town around him.
“Mister Mayor,” I said respectfully.
“Let me introduce you to the town’s remaining council members. This lovely dimanian to my left is Councilwoman Sarah Eustis. She’s served Methow for going on twenty years now.”
A small dimanian woman of considerable age with straight spiky horns growing from her brow and one single horn sprouting from the back of her head nodded in greeting. Her face was drawn, and her eyes nervously studied our movements. Her eyes flicked around as if she expected one of us to attack.
What had these people gone through?
Mayor Feeney continued. “The fellow looming over in the Big House is Councilman Enoch Boden. He doesn’t come out much. Catches chill easily and sun stroke even quicker. You’ll likely meet him later. Old as dirt but he’s an amiable sort.”
“Pleased to meet the council,” I said, giving my best caravan master smile.
“Finally, the maero charged with protecting the town: Sheriff Joul dal Habith.”
Joul dal Habith was a maero with dark-gray skin and a thicker frame than any maero I had ever seen. Like most of their race he was at least as tall as Wensem but he was twice as wide. He seemed to carry himself with a bit more presence, too. He seemed less dreamy, as if he was more in the moment. It was clear who was the master of Methow, and it wasn’t Feeney.
“Please to meet you,” he said in a rumbly voice. He extended a thick seven-fingered hand with fat grubby fingers that enveloped my own.
“Indeed. Sorry about the scare,” I said. I swallowed my emotions as I spoke. “We found one of my crew… in the forest… I—er—I overreacted.”
“Dreadful. By the Firsts. So dreadful,” he said with a shiver. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Your reaction makes sense. I had a similar reaction when I found one of my deputies out there. I’d worry about the sanity of any person if they came across the Forest of the Dead and took it in stride.”
There was something off about this guy. He seemed oddly sane and pleasant for being surrounded by so much death. The almost absent way in which he talked about the scene outside didn’t sit well. The stench alone was a constant reminder. How could all this become normal? How could you face something like this and learn to talk about it so casually? How could these people not be driven insane?
“What happened here?” I asked.
“Well—”
“We will tell you,” said Feeney, interrupting. “We will. Come. Come. We don’t have much food but we can offer you coffee or tea. That we seem to have in abundance. We will drink coffee and we will talk.”
The wizened old mayor turned and addressed the gathered crowd. “Go back to your homes, citizens. We will meet at the usual time. No need to be gawking at Mister Bell here. No need. Not for now, at least.”
The sheriff, the mayor, and Councilwoman Eustis walked before us, leading us across the empty square and toward the big, off-white building at the northern side of town.
The words “Sunflower High School” were carved into the granite stone around the main entrance. Over it, hand-painted in red were the words “Big House.”
We lagged behind as the leaders of Methow took to the steps.
“This is too weird,” said Samantha. “Something’s not right.” She paused and then added with a bitter smile. “Outside of the obvious, I mean.”
“Well, I don’t think any of them are strong enough to hurt us. The sheriff might be trouble, he seems the most calm about this whole situation. The clarity in his voice, the smile, it was…”
“…weird,” said Samantha, finishing the sentence. “It was weird.”
“Let’s talk with them and see what’s up. Maybe they can point us in the direction of Tin’s killer.”
Samantha hugged her arms and frowned. “I don’t like this, Wal.”
“I don’t either.”
“Mister Bell,” called the sheriff from down the hall. “We’re in here.”
We walked towards the sound of his voice into what had once been a teacher’s lounge but had now become a kind of nerve center for the town. A crude drawing of the village was scrawled and annotated on a chalkboard dominating one entire wall while papers and notes were stuck with push pins into cork-boards along another. Long dead sodium lights hung from the ceiling dripping with cobwebs. It was clear the town had been without power for a while.
Lamps stained black from ages past were lit and scattered around the tables and on top of bookcases, immersing the room in a dull gray light. A wall of windows was boarded shut and only slivers of light could be seen through the slats.
“You should not have come,” said Feeney yet again. He and the two members of the council took seats and beckoned for us to sit opposite of them.
The sheriff folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the windowed wall, becoming a silhouette.
The shadowy man we had seen lurking in the doorway of the Big House upon our arrival slipped into the room behind us. He came around the side of the table and took a seat next to the mayor.
“I’m Enoch Boden. I’m sorry I couldn’t have greeted you personally. Health isn’t what it used to be,” he said and smiled at me. He wore a heavy hood despite being indoors. His features were barely discernible beneath the shadow.
Boden was a tall man with a weak smile, swarthy olive skin, and sharp bird-like eyes. He was human and seemed like he had once been handsome. Like the sheriff he looked healthier than most, though that wasn’t saying much. The homeless and addicts of Lovat look healthier than these people.
Like the mayor and the councilwoman, Boden had a scared rabbit look to him and the absent dreamy quality to his tone.
I waved a hand dismissively and introduced myself, Wensem and Samantha. We sat across from the council in rickety chairs and studied our hosts.
“Coffee? Tea?” asked Feeney.
“No thanks,” I said. The scent from the Forest was dulled somewhat within the walls of the school but its memory lingered. I doubted I could keep much down.
“You should not have come,” Feeney said again, still in that dreamy voice.
“Right,” I said. “You mentioned that. Something is seriously wrong here.”
“Mhmm,” the mayor said.
“We heard rumors,” Samantha interjected. “A road priest told us about the Forest of the Dead. We weren’t sure it could be believed. Then…”
Her voice trailed off.
“Oh? We had a priest once. A Reunified one. Nice chap. He was taken and impaled over a year ago. Along the western side of the Forest. Dreadful. Liked acorn bread. His sermons were often too long. I miss him. He was a good bridge partner,” Feeney said, his sentences more stream of consciousness than anything cohesive. He stared at a spot over my shoulder. The two other council members stared at their folded hands and said nothing.
I looked at Samantha and caught her brief frown before I turned back to the Methow council. “Why are you still here? Why haven’t you left?”
The council looked at one another and frowned. Heads shook and shoulders shrugged sadly. I waited for some sort of answer. Eventually it was the sheriff who spoke up.
“We can’t,” he said.
“We can’t,” echoed Feeney.
“But why?”
Feeney began to speak, and his answer made my stomach sink.
SIXTEEN
“WE’RE TRAPPED.”
I blinked and opened my mouth to ask a question but I was cut off by the mayor’s wavery voice. “Methow used to be a prosperous town. Sure, we were a little off the beaten path but we made enough to support the families here and we were slowly growing year over year. The Kadath copper mine was doing well, and there were a few successful logging crews working the slopes. Even with all the rumors surrounding the Broken Road our harvests were larg
e enough to attract the occasional caravans.
“I lived here my whole life, all sixty-three years of it and I didn’t believe a word of the stories about where I lived. I had never seen a bandit or a ghost or a cannibal. We used to joke about it.”
“Kept the riffraff out,” Councilman Boden added with a shadowed smile. “It is kind of how folk talk about Lovat’s weather. Rains all the time. Clouds going on forever. Dreadful place.”
Samantha, Wensem, and I all smiled and nodded. Lovat’s weather was always the first topic of conversation with visitors. You either adapted or moved.
“So how are you trapped?” Wensem asked softly. “We came up to the town easily enough. The road, while rough, is passable.”
“Everything has changed. It started with the landslide.”
The sheriff interrupted. “About five years ago a landslide cut off the Kadath. It’s built in a narrow gulch near the top of the mountain. The slide destroyed half the mining camp and killed many of the miners. The Kadath closed down after that.”
“We should’ve taken that as a sign,” said the mayor. “Our prosperity was turning. Then last fall, little over a year ago, the nightmares began.”
I felt a cold tremor down my spine. Samantha and Wensem also seemed to shift uncomfortably.
Feeney continued. “The nightmares spread through the town. Fathers, mothers, children—whole families were affected. The screams came. Eventually we were all screaming, even if we bottled it up inside.”
“What kind of nightmares?” Samantha questioned, leaning forward almost eagerly.
“It varied slightly per person. Some saw ruins. Some thought it was Methow but it seemed ancient. Dry stones lifting from a desert. Ancient towers broken by siege machines. Hooded and shadowy figures moving about broken battlements, yellow leering faces in the cracks of walls. We thought those were the worst but some began to dream of a figure… we call him the Red Man. He wears dark red robes. You never see his face. Only his form, his bizarre shadow… it was wrong somehow. I have no words to describe it but it was wrong.”
I shuddered visibly.
“Are you... having these dreams?” asked the old man in a creaky voice.
“Yes,” Samantha, Wensem, and I said at once. We looked at one another, eyes wide.
“Exactly those dreams,” said Wensem. “To the letter.”
A knot formed in my guts. We’d need to discuss this after our meeting with the council.
Councilman Boden jumped in next. “The dreams were bad, but we thought maybe it was a side effect of our isolation, a small community dealing with the stories about the Broken Road.”
“Then the noise came,” said Feeney.
Boden nodded. “It was… I don’t know how to describe it. It was familiar and yet like nothing else. Part scream and part laugh. The miners said it sounded like a tunnel machine tearing itself apart. Otherworldly. Awful.”
He shook slightly, and turned to gaze absently towards a corner of the room. The sheriff shifted uncomfortably. “People began leaving town after that. First a few wains here and there, and then whole caravans of them, good people, honest folk.”
“Scared folk,” said Councilwoman Eustis.
The sheriff agreed. “We searched the mine. Nothing. Some folks thought it was Victory. So we checked the hillsides and found nothing. A few believed it was the devil being tortured by angels. Others theorized the Firsts returned and were wreaking havoc on some elemental plane of existence we couldn’t comprehend. We never found the cause.”
“How long ago was this?” I asked.
The sheriff shrugged. “Beginning of this year. Maybe... six months? Eight? Time has gotten funny. Sleep comes too easy….”
Feeney seemed to snap back into reality and continued his story. “Dreams and noises stole the sleep from us! We sleep, yes, but we do not rest. It makes us tired and sluggish. I cannot remember the last time I slept a full night. I always loved how quiet this area was. Things were so easy, so simple then. This valley was once home to almost a thousand souls. After the night scares came and people left we dwindled to a few hundred, a handful of what it was before.”
“Not long after that the disappearances started,” Eustis added.
“This is eerily similar to our own experiences coming here.” I looked to my friends on either side of me. “We’ve had the dreams, we’ve heard the noise, and we’ve had people go missing.”
“Why’d you keep coming?” asked the sheriff.
I was wondering that myself.
“To find our people,” said Wensem. “We don’t leave a caravaneer behind.”
“Is that who you found in the Forest?” asked Councilman Boden.
I nodded.
“Our first went missing in the early summer,” Feeney said. “It’s been a hot year. The weather has been unpredictable. Seasons are funny now, they don’t follow themselves liked they used to. We got snow a few months ago. Mid-summer and snow! Then rain washed it all away. Then this damnable heat.”
Feeney’s voice drifted off and he seemed to examine a space in the air between us. Like his words had gotten stuck in a spiderweb and couldn’t shake free.
“Mister Mayor?” I finally asked, but noticed the shake of the sheriff’s head. A warning? Feeney seemed to ignore my question but after a few more moments he slipped back into his story.
“Young Walter Brenton was the first we saw dead. He was a dimanian smithy. An apprentice but eager, hardworking, and always wanting to improve. There was no job he’d turn down. His teacher left a few months earlier when the nightmares began, but Walter had remained. Still working for the community, mending what needed to be mended, fixing what needed to be fixed. He was a good lad.
“After the noises came he started to break down. More than the rest of us. We’d find him in the corner of his shop when things grew quiet. Curled up in a ball, shaking. Rocking back and forth. Hands pressed tight against the sides of his head. It was too much for him. After a few weeks he packed up a cart, kissed us farewell, and set off eastward down the Broken Road to seek his fortune and to escape the racket.
“Two mornings after he left, we found him.”
I cringed, knowing where this story was going.
Feeney’s eyes moistened as he continued.“Two hunters found his body hanging just outside of town. He was impaled. Half his right leg missing.”
Feeney paused and fell into his awkward silence. He stared at a space in the air in front of him, his eyes unfocused.
These people are slowly being driven insane.
“What did you do?” asked Samantha.
Feeney slipped out of his haze and seemed to become lucid for the first time in our meeting, his eyes burning with anger. “We brought him down, of course!”
I said nothing, not sure how to react to his sudden clarity. Eventually he drifted back into his sleepy tone and continued.
“We left the poor boy in the doctor’s office and made preparations to bury him. The next morning, however, he was gone. Missing from the table. His grave remained empty. That’s when the abductions started in earnest.”
The sheriff jumped in at this point. “Started simple enough. The disappearance of Walt’s body… then one of the men who helped pull him down from the stake, dimanian by the name of Clément, disappeared. Went to bed with his wife and when she woke up he was gone.”
“Did he run away?” I asked.
Feeney’s eyes narrowed. “No. They both showed back up. Impaled outside town. The doc examined both of them. Walt was much the same as before. Clément had been sewn up, and when the doc opened him up he found him as hollow as an old stump. Strange words were written over his body in blood… It wasn’t Strutten.”
I shuddered and felt Samantha’s hand reach for my own. I gripped it, and we shared our warmth with one another. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that in brighter times I would have relished the touch. Now it was just keeping us grounded.
“Same as before we pulled down thei
r bodies, only this time we buried them the same day. Two more people disappeared that night. They showed up a few days later, with Walt and Clément alongside of them, exhumed from their graves. Re-impaled and hanging among the freshly disappeared.
“We kept taking them down. Letting them die in peace, offering them burial.”
“It didn’t work though,” said Councilwoman Eustis. “They would be dug up and impaled again the next day and more people would disappear. They closed around the town.”
“The town thought it was someone on the inside doing it,” said Boden. “People were getting into fights. Accusations were made.”
“More people tried to leave,” said Eustis. “We’d watch them go, and they’d show up staked as well.”
“We couldn’t leave,” said the mayor. “We were trapped.”
“Finally we realized when we didn’t touch them, no one else would go missing. The disappearances would slow and then almost stop,” said the sheriff. “The noise would come. The nightmares would remain. But nothing would happen to our people. We’d all wake in our beds. We’d all be able to go about our business.”
Feeney snorted a bitter laugh. “That was the start of the Forest. The saplings, as it were. Those too afraid to remain, or those brave enough to try and leave, would be impaled along the edge of the town.
“It didn’t take long before we couldn’t bear it. How could anyone? How could you go about with the naked corpses of your neighbors hanging right outside?”
“You can’t,” I said flatly.
“You can’t,” agreed the mayor.
“We all did it,” said Boden. “Together. We took down the bodies. We broke whatever chaotic code our kidnappers follow.”
“It was a punishment,” said Feeney. “We all know it. We all know it.”
“Punishment?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t like the answer.
A silence fell across the table. Four pairs of eyes blinked at us. I could feel my throat going dry and my heart thumped quicker inside my chest.
Old Broken Road Page 15