Songs for The Lost E-Book

Alexander Zelenyj

• Herausgeber: Independent Legions Publishing
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Horror, SCI-FI and Weird story collection, Speculative Fiction at its best.
First digital edition of the work, Cover Art by Giampaolo Frizzi.
The lonely and the regretful and the downtrodden, the furious and the woeful and the damaged; all facing the futility of living in a world of malice, loss and loneliness; all desperately seeking salvation while forging through the miles of pain marking every step of the path to Paradise . . .
A farmer sings a nightly funeral dirge, summoning something from far across the fields. A cavalry troop finds Heaven or Hell in the hills. A reporter witnesses the final inexplicable moments of a saucer suicide cult. A boy and his grandfather hear a message from an un-guessed world beneath their feet. A boxer faces his greatest nemesis during the strangest of storms. a platoon is faced with a terrible choice in the jungle. A garage band and their loyal fans disappear as part of the fulfillment of a prophecy. An outpost of Roman Legionnaires is terrorized by an ancient evil. Two alien children forge a unique pact with two Earth children. A strange door opens in the middle of a burning summer day. A seasoned detective interrogates a vengeful angel responsible for the haunting of an entire city. A bounty hunter accepts a mission to hunt another man's demon. A husband and wife receive a long-awaited message from the sky. A broken girl is bestowed a gift from the moon. A group of troubled misfits search for Heaven in a violent future. A brother and sister await the greatest fire the world will ever see...
All these Songs for The Lost, and other ghosts, too...
This collection also contains an introduction by David Rix and a foreword by Brian A. Dixon.

Leseprobe

Alexander Zelenyj – Songs for the Lost

ISBN: 978-88-99569-04-4

Copyright (Edition) ©2016 Independent Legions Publishing

Copyright (Text) ©Alexander Zelenyj

1° edition epub/mobipocket: 1.0 April 2016

Digital Layout: Lukha B. Kremo - [email protected]

Cover Art by Giampaolo Frizzi

Alexander Zelenyj

Songs for the Lost

Somewhere a band is playing Oh listen, oh listen, that tune!

If you learn it you'll dance on forever In June...

and yet June... and more...June...

And Death will be dumb and not clever And Death will lie silent forever

In June and yet June and more June

- Ray Bradbury, from Somewhere A Band Is Playing

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A lot of wonderful people offered their support, inspiration, friendship and wisdoms throughout the writing of this collection. They know why their names are here, and I hope they know how grateful I am for them:

My mom, of course; my dad; Dan and Cindy Zelenyj; Tom and Laurie Zelenyj; Lindsay McNiff; Kevin Durda; Rachel Blok; Claudio and Catherine-Mary Sossi; Nik and Leisa Pieczonka; Rachel Eagen; John Ditsky; Liam and Mara O’Donnell; Nick Angelini; Chris Piccolo; James Karlsen; Andrew Murphy; Ben Denes; Jeff Rogers; David Owen; Ian McIntosh; Dennis Hunkler; Mary Kaye Lucier and Luciana Rosu; Tania Amine Esquivel; Shannon Duench; Joy Donaldson; Sarah Sinasac; Lucyfur; Brian A. Dixon and Adam Chamberlain of Fourth Horseman Press; David Rix and Douglas Thompson of Eibonvale Press; and Elizabeth Walker.

...as well as any spectres I may have forgotten.

THREE BILLION AND SIX

An Introduction by David Rix

Emotions are there to sing about . . .

It is now the best part of six years since the clock first struck 3 Billion A.M. That seems a long time, for a writer, for a publisher and purely for human beings living their lives. For myself, my own 3 Billion A.M. ghosting of the roads still continues but it is the far stranger London streets that I am ghosting, not the Thanet Way. The press has developed from 5 titles to 25, yet still remains what it has always been – the delicate art of sitting at a computer trying to coax the world to leave me alone sufficiently to make a few books. Out there, many many more of you will have learned just what a ghosted road at 3 Billion A.M. is – and many many more of you will have learned to sing, whatever your singing language.

So at 3 Billion + 5.5 years (to be precise), plenty has changed – yet plenty more also remains the same. Perhaps indeed, the most crucial things. The pain and chaos of the world never seems to fade – the shattered glass that is the human soul never seems to heal – and just may be our companion for eternity. That’s the depressing thought with which I shall launch this entire massive volume.

But bear with me . . .

If you have read Alexander Zelenyj’s previous book, Experiments At 3 BillionA.M., then you will have some idea what to expect. In terms of styles and affiliation, this new collection if anything only spreads wider. The list of genres that Songs For The Lost touches upon is a large one:

• surrealism

• magical realism

• literary

• gritty realism

• subtle to extreme horror

• science fiction

• weird western

• weird war fiction

• children’s fiction

• urban fantasy

• fabulism

• weird erotica

• Bizarro

• psychedelia

• modern fairy tale/fable

• pulp

• noir

• superhero fiction

• poetry

• as well as other less defined things

This suggests a diverse range of styles, which is true, but you will find more here that is common than different, I think. The author is using these familiar genre trappings to perform a seduction – to give you a comforting wash of something familiar while at the same time acting as a guide beyond that familiarity to somewhere else. To a literary area that fits very well with the ‘genre’ that Eibonvale Press has embraced – slipstream. The literary writing that exists between the cracks, the parasitic fiction that draws on all yet is enslaved to none.

The result is that, as you read these stories, you will find them unexpectedly profound, challenging, harsh, painful and thoughtprovoking. Indeed, more than once you might find yourself shaken to the core – summoned to think and feel, or deal with events on levels that are rare for this or any kind of writing. And the reason for this is simple: the true main theme of these stories is not any kind of alien or apocalypse, god or phantasm, the main theme is very distinctly human emotion and human nature at its most extreme. Human pain on a level that is very real.

In many books, films and TV, the approach to pain and emotion are something that might be called casual and theatrical – a puppet show or pantomime, a spectacle rather than an immersive or actual experience. The action hero punched in the face, the tormented heroine wandering dreamily through the stage of a story, the ironic and jaded horrors of the slasher or torture porn genres . . . Often it is dismissed, and at the very least understated and unreal – even in much horror writing, where the basic mandate is to explore extreme experience. Meanwhile though, back in reality, pains and fears and horrors of all types tend to be squashed and smothered, censored and veiled, politely kept out of the way or hidden under a cloth. It suddenly turns out that fears are something we are frightened of, horrors are horrifying, and pains are painful. Who knew? And so we try to sanitize them from this world. But the result of that is a weird dichotomy, with the fake and fantasy world more immediate to many than the reality. This is something that may prove problematic since one can assume that such horrors, so deeply involved in reality, our natural instincts and what we are as a species, are something that need to be faced not forgotten. One cannot hide from horror without leaving oneself open to horror.

And the questions come . . .

How different are we at heart from a bloody and cruel nature? How do our capacities for nurturing and aggression fit together? What exactly is our role in the world? Are we then an entity seeking to rise above our natural roots or an animal with delusions of morality? Why is it that both of those options feel like a betrayal?

I am not sure that there are any answers to these questions yet – at least ones that attempt to acknowledge the inherent contradictions within us and the fuzzy non-absolute nature of all reality. However, by writing straight from the heart and with unflinching honesty, Zelenyj manages to do what many writers fail at and really takes some deep wading steps into the pains and despairs of reality and humanity, far far removed from the fantasy land of action heroes or space operas. It was this that made the stories stand out 6 years ago when the clock struck 3 Billion A.M. – and this only slightly smaller yet considerably more focussed volume certainly follows down that same ghosted road.

It’s not that the ‘message’ of Songs For The Lost is one of universal despair though, by any means. This needs to be clarified. Just as in reality, our own darkest emotions and experiences rarely come with total blackness.

The dark emotions – desperation, despair, regret, repression, pain, fury – engender a parallel need for escape, and with it a kind hope. In a way, one could even see this as the formation of a bizarre form of spirituality, though not in a particularly religious sense – and it is this rather desperate and illuminating hint of spirituality that forms the singing heart of the book. In spite of the hardship and horror and maddening, soul-destroying sense of futility that sometimes seem to fill the world, people still persevere, still go on living and hoping – even if that hope may be transmuted into a craving for some kind of paradise or redemption from without. And just as the concept of Utopia never really exists, so the concepts of paradise or redemption can shift and change – they may be positive, negative or illusory. And as with many quests for either escape or illusion, the costs can sometimes be high.

Beyond even this though is the effect it has on the reader, which is also far more complicated than mere black and white. My own first encounter with this kind of deeply emotional horror was the very complex film Suicide Circle (Jisatsu Sākuru) by Sion Sono – a film many regard as impenetrably murky, dark and even dangerous. But the first and greatest impression that film left was astonishment that having been dragged through such a wasteland, the end result was so life-affirming. After you pass through those valleys, it only leaves you with a realisation of just how beautiful beauty can be – how incredibly warm the human can be – and how precious and powerful life itself actually is.

Like Experiments, this is a big book – a big container full of a very strong and heady wine, intended to be dipped into and savoured. It will be a companion for a long time, maybe on those nights when you need a fix of human emotion in your quiet bed . . . or need to sing a song again, for the world or yourself to make sense.

Even one without either words or music, for the language of songs is infinite . . .

FOREWORD

by Brian A. Dixon

Ray Bradbury once offered advice to all those daring enough to take up a pen or challenge the typewriter: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” The threat, Bradbury knew, is real. His writings are a gift to all those fortunate enough to have ever become drunk off his prose. Alexander Zelenyj is just such a man. He has been drunk on Bradbury ever since he first picked up a copy of The Martian Chronicles. He discovered the battered paperback in the back of a classroom and, enchanted by the cover artwork, immersed himself in the novel, ignoring the day’s lessons at school. Songs For The Lost is a testament to the fact that Mr. Bradbury proved himself to be a far more inspiring teacher. Zelenyj would go on to write intoxicating prose of the sort that proves none are more impervious to the brutal offensive waged by so-called reality.

When Alex refers to the author as Sir Ray Bradbury, he isn’t being flip. His debt and devotion are transcribed in every line of his poetic stories, as evident as his debts to H. P. Lovecraft, China Mieville, Richard Matheson, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bradbury’s is a world that exists between genres, a place of signs and wonders in which the inhuman is introduced only as means of demonstrating who we really are. In even his most startling or unsettling tales there is something that charms us. Ask him about these stories and Alex will speak of the “romance” of Bradbury, that bewitching sense of comfort and beauty that accompanies those tales that deliver us beyond the boundaries of recognized reality. It is an uncommon quality in fiction. Once its influence is observed in this collection’s tales of dark roads and higher powers, it signals what you will find in the literature from this remarkable author from Ontario, Canada.

The first short story I read by Alexander Zelenyj—my Martian Chronicles, so to speak—was “The Demon Takeover of Windsor, Ontario.” As the editor of Revelation magazine, dedicated exclusively to publishing apocalyptic fiction, I was sifting through a slush pile of narrative doom and brimstone more brutal than anything described in the magazine’s biblical namesake. Here was a story that piqued my interest with the title. Eyebrow raised, I began to read: “The voice in the plastic receiver at my ear had died along with the lights in the small convenience store.” That’s how it began. A tale as fleeting and mesmerizing as a kiss in the dark, this was a story of fear, of perseverance, of the collapse of our culture and the enduring dominance of nature. It was a tale that captured the human spirit and served it up raw, without any hint of condescension or glamour. I found myself immersed in a weird and wondrous universe that I was utterly unprepared for. I’ve been drinking up his words ever since.

As an editor and as a reader, Alex is continually surprising me. Like the best of bizarro geniuses, he stands as a talent who defies definition. Just when I think that I know what to expect from him, he’ll unleash a work both experimental and astounding. Throughout the years he has proven himself to be a captivating storyteller, an accomplished scholar, and a dedicated professional. Alex is as comfortable composing song lyrics for the meta-fictional Deathray Bradburys as he is examining the mythological influences evident in modern cinema. In eagerly taking on alternate history and slipstream anthology projects alike he has risen to artistic challenges that would have left lesser writers retreating to more comfortable corners of their creativity. Through it all, his imagination and his boundless enthusiasm remain undiminished. There is an infectious quality about the words that he weaves. Believe me when I tell you that it is the essence of the man himself, the product of a personality both captivating and inspirational.

Those within earshot at the end of my day know that after more than ten years of editing Revelation magazine I have grown weary of the apocalypse. The undead are insatiable, that dusty road through a postapocalyptic wilderness is never-ending, and the judgment of mankind is as inevitable as it is epic. The end of the world takes its toll. Truly great storytelling in this vein calls for an inspired approach, as in any genre, and no author is better suited to confidently guiding us beyond our limits than Zelenyj. There is something of the apocalypse in each and every one of his stories. Indeed, though we have published strange tales by talents from all over the world, he has graced the pages of Revelation more often than any other author. He has left his mark on the magazine and on each and every one of its readers.

Stories written by Zelenyj are inherently apocalyptic, imbued with a palpable sense of spiraling chaos and mounting unease, but after sampling the short stories presented in this collection you will learn that for him the end faced by mankind is only the beginning. Here is an author who eagerly deconstructs familiar literary genres before reassembling the jigsaw pieces into something astonishing and new. The title story offers a standout example. “Songs For The Lost” is a novella like no other. It is neither space opera nor fairy tale, though there are moments when it seems to be both. Though it bears the hallmarks of the American Western it is not beholden to the heritage of any one time and place. It is a breathtakingly beautiful story of solace and redemption. The longings and laments of its cast of misfit characters are familiar to us at once, even if those characters are alien to us all.

Songs For The Lost cannot be categorized, raising a worthy question. Why do we reach for books such as this? We read so that we may experience the world through eyes that are new, and the experience is never more satisfying than when we are in the hands of a storyteller as inventive as Alexander Zelenyj. From “The Demon Takeover of Windsor, Ontario” to “Songs For The Lost”, his stories have quickened my pulse and set fire to my imagination. They delight even as they dizzy. Perhaps the experience is stimulating because this is not mere psychedelic fantasy. Dipping into the bizarro universe woven by his inebriating narratives is like peering beneath the cracked and peeling veneer of reality. Zelenyj is a mad yet marvelous seeker, an eccentric impresario, a conductor of dreams as charming and hypnotic as Rod Serling himself. Follow him and you will find yourself among lost souls touring abandoned hopes and forbidden dreams at the edge of an impossible paradise. Each story concludes with a wink signaling that he knows what you have always felt, deep down—that there is more to this life than meets the eye.

And therein lies the power of Alexander Zelenyj. We fill up our lives with the familiar, with mundane routines and ridiculous consumer products, laments and trifles and limitations. Through it all there is an ache deep inside of us. It is the ache of an unspoken truth, the key to surviving the destruction wrought by reality. Stories such as these share that truth, the promise that keeps us going. Life in this universe is more strange and dangerous and wonderful than you have ever been led to believe.

Two heroes gone,

but never gone

The ancient stars they burn strong.

THE FIRE THAT WE DESERVE

And he woke. And he’d taken the fire from his dream and brought it with him into the world.

And the world was on fire.

- Unknown

The rustle of the surf soothes. It’s an old voice. It’s been friendly to us two beach children for a very long time. It’s offered solace to the world since the beginning, I think wondrously, as if this is the first time I’ve considered this idea. We’re beyond reach of its foamy spray in our place on the concrete promontory overlooking the deserted beach but I yearn for its touch. We’ve been here for hours, watched dusk submerge the sun into the lake and the moon materialize as if from nothing overhead and colour the beach in winter light.

The lonesome sound of a loose chain knocking gently in the breeze against the boarded-up concession stand drifts to us. The stone fountains marking the length of the beach at regular intervals look like small sculpted shrines from our vantage. The wooden lifeguards’ lookouts spike from the sand like miniature Wickermen, looking dismal and lonely devoid of watchful human occupants. Sand particles dance across our bare feet like the delicate touch of spiders. It’s been too long since last we’ve visited this childhood haunt. In its care, I feel nearly safe, as it used to make us feel similarly hidden from the world during our youth.

“Let’s get down closer to it,” I say, nodding beyond the guardrail and towards the foamy shallows.

“Okay,” she says, distantly. It’s hesitance making her voice this way, removed. She makes no move to vacate her place adjacent to the monolithic totem pole rearing skywards. I examine her. It’s the quintessential her. Shoulders bowed earthwards as if in obeisance to something divine; face round and pale and like the moon; eyes pensive and lost-looking; too thin, her simple garb of plain white t-shirt hanging raggedly over her bare legs, the dull green suggestion of the bikini she wears beneath peering through in the moonlight. I look beyond her: the totem pole at her side is stout, and dwarfs her small frame beneath its shadow. Its rolling basalt plain of carven visages seems to glare hungrily at her. Men have looked at her this way in her life. She’s usually only looked away, and wisely, but the world’s gaze has occasionally been as tenacious as the colossal carven eyes watching her now; distended and grotesquely immense, black wooden lips curling into malign leering mockery while she fidgets helplessly before them.

I urge her once more, “Please? Let’s get closer.”

“Okay.”

We place our bare feet onto the peeling metal railing separating observation platform from beach – making certain to avoid disturbing any of the myriad corpulent spiders suspended in their sticky beds among the metal bars – and leap lightly up and over and into the sand. Its soft touch is welcoming. I feel young again leaping like this. We’ve discussed the simple and nostalgic joy of this very act and motion in this selfsame place toomany times to comment on it now but I feel the need to do so besides. Still I resist, though, and only face silently the surf surging before us.

She takes my hand. It feels good. We’re wholly transformed now, young again in this place, holding hands like child siblings do before this simple act of companionship grows awkward to the eyes of observers. We drift across the sand until the sun-stored warmth of its caress turns wet and cool beneath our feet – soon the tide is licking languidly about our ankles.

“Are you upset that I’ve made us come here tonight?” she asks in a subtly imploring tone.

“I’ve learned to trust your dreams,” I tell her simply.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” I’m quick to say. “It’s...It’s amazing. I’m lucky to have seen it so many times.” Fear tickles me along my spine, though; a feathery ghost-presence along the nape of my neck; a gusting breath over my heart.

We walk along the tide line. The languor of the day has been refreshed by the chill of post-dusk. A splashing sounds nearby and we look but find nothing in the white foam or murky depths beyond, and walk on.

We pause a moment later, at her behest. She faces the lake. I stare out, too. Its immensity makes us as motes, another pair of sand granules. It’s the sea and the ocean and all the space of the world. I can’t distinguish its conclusion and the darkening sky’s beginning.

“The lake,” she says, dreamily. “It’s beautiful tonight.”

“Very,” I agree. “It’s where we came from.” I hear the immensity of the words, feel foolish and melodramatic until she responds.

“It is. I guess it’s fitting, somehow, that...”

We haven’t spoken of it since the day before, when she’d come to my house; taken my hand; cried; spoken with difficulty through her tears; explained her new dreams; reminded me of her old dreams, although I’d of course needed no reminding; explained that they’ve come together at last, old and new merged as she’d always known that they would.

I believed her, of course. As I always have. She’s my sister, and she’s shown me her queer truths countless times. I felt unprepared. She understood. I cried, too. She held my hand through it.

Then, today, near dusk, we’d come here to watch the spectacle, together in this place of old sanctuary for us; among the ancient rusted steel tangles of the jungle gym; the observation platform with its concessions and wooden benches overlooking the sand; and the beach itself, which took us into its sandy folds on many nights when we’d felt utterly abandoned in a bitter-tasting world but for each other. Drifting onto the property earlier, we’d felt like ghosts arriving at the time when the main body of beachgoers had been departing, bundles of blankets and baskets in tow, skin bronzed from their tenure beneath the sun. We’d watched the stragglers dissipate, too, like occasional sand specks blown at a zephyr’s behest onto the abutting grassy sward to the rear of the beach and the adjacent lawns and sleepy neighbourhood streets beyond.

I feel calmer now, in our solitude, though only just. I murmur, “Do you think? I mean, do you really think...Tonight? That it’s tonight?”

“...Yes.” The old certainty infuses her voice. There is no more doubting: tonight is the time.

A pair of gulls appear from the darkness over the water and pass low over our heads. Their cries are unnerving. They remind me of children in pain, but of course I don’t say this to her. A moment later and several more follow, imitating the wails of their predecessors. When yet a dozen more materialize from the air, she comments simply, “Look.”

I nod. “Where are they coming from?” Where they’re coming from isn’t really the thought which troubles me, of course. They come from some innocent place: a distant beach; a strand of sandy knolls to the north; a copse of thin trees; nests; speckled eggs. But what urges their frantic and headlong flight? The unspoken question rides the air between us like a spirit presence.

She makes no answer to what I’ve said or left unsaid and when I look to her I see her staring fixedly along the tide line in the direction we’re following. I pursue her line of vision – the long line of crabs scuttling from the spume astounds the eye; like medieval siege engines they roll forth in frantic waves towards the haven of dry beach country, while some of their prodigious number float lifelessly on all sides; armoured husks painted black with what appears some unknown fiery touch and bobbing heavily in the rolling shallows.

We watch together a while, bewitched by the spectacle. Eventually she says, “Because I wanted us to see it together. If I’m right and it’s the end. I want us to see it. Like this. Together. Who else would I want to be with now?” She looks to me. Her eyes are haunted, desperate.

“Okay,” I tell her, and add, “Me too...And you’re always right.”

She doesn’t need to offer explanation, of course but, as is her nature, she seeks to besides. “You were the only one who helped during that time... You know. A sister couldn’t ask for a better brother. It was a dark time. I felt so alone. But I had you. And I got through...I wanted us to be here together...”

She drifts off, and I’m crying and I know that she is, too. This mutual faltering disheartens me. I need her strength if I’m to stand and face this gathering wind and the squall it heralds. A younger brother learns to depend on his elder sister in these ways. I wait, and allow my ragged breathing to subside accordingly in the gradual mellowing of my hysteria.

The tears dry on my face in the subtly energized air.

We stop walking without speaking of doing so. We scan the horizon in silence. Something stirs there. From the far west to the remotest east as far as can be seen. A black flickering in the lingering torchlight of daytime which limns the plane where water meets sky.

“Do you see?” My voice is soft, scared. I cringe at the weakness in it, so un-brotherly.

“Yes. I’ve seen this before.” Her words drop firmly into the rising wind, as charged as the newly sizzling air.

I’m shaking my head. Somehow it feels as though I must make the gesture in accompaniment of the words, “I’m sorry your dreams have been this way. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Still I’m sorry. My God. Look at it. You were a little girl when you first...”

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” The elder sister once again comforting and offering strength to the faltering younger brother. I resign myself to her greater courage, and ask:

“Will it...Will it hurt? Will it hurt very much?”

“...No.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m sorry.”

The horizon surges blackly. A violent claret burns there.

“What did we do that...What did we ever do? To have this come for us like this? I mean, it’s not...fair.” I’m speaking louder now, in accordance with the rising wind, the sand lifting from earth and tapping at our faces.

“We must have done something,” she says stonily, assuredly. “For something like this to come...Something like this can’t be random. This...

There has to be a reason for this.”

It makes sense. I think of the wrongs that I’ve committed in my life, and those done to me and to my poor, sweet sister. There have been many when I consider closely. My heart clenches when I think of her as a child burdened beyond her years. I shiver in the wind. I blink in the sandstorm pelting my cheeks. We stand resolutely in our places in the face of it. There is a battering of our calves then: we look and see that the lake is spitting up its denizens. Carp and salmon pelt us, slipping in the current rushing between our legs, piling into each other where our legs bar their passage. Their silvery scales are blackened, as if burnt by some extremely powerful incendiary source. Several gulls and sparrows litter in the lake detritus about our bare feet, too, shrivelled and curled into themselves, feathers likewise scorched.

“My God,” I mutter. A nausea is rising from my belly. I anticipate its arrival in my throat and wince, seek to swallow in an ineffectual attempt to sway its imminent presence.

She says, “I’m happy that mom and dad are gone. And spared this.”

“Me, too,” I say, watching the surging waters in the distance. “My God, me too.” I add, “Despite what they were,” and hope that I haven’t said too much.

“We’ve all done something,” she says. “Everyone’s done something wrong. In an entire life, who doesn’t? Collectively, taken together...We deserve this.”

Pride fills me: she’s my sister. This wise woman and predictor of inclement horizons. So mature and brave-eyed. She’s not finished delivering her wisdoms, though.

“I’m glad we’re here. I...I always feel young when we’re here.”

I smile at the words, somehow. Somehow they’ve urged this impossible reaction from me in this tremendous moment. “Me, too. Always.”

We watch the horizon. It seethes. It moves in so startlingly vast a manner that it spellbinds the eye. It indicates the scale if not the enigmatic nature of the calamity stirring there.

It’s been on my mind all day. I let the words out into the rising gale wind. “I never forgot, did you know? I always remembered and I always believed you. That day when we were kids, and playing in the backyard. You’d seen...this. You’d seen this. You’d fallen asleep on the lawn chair with a comic book across your lap. I was reading in a chair beside you. You woke up screaming. You tore the comic in half. Two pieces. Completely in half. You screamed so much. You flailed around on the patio. Mother ran out from indoors, losing her mind, thinking you’d been bitten by a snake. Shenever believed anything you told us, of course. About that. Like she never believed everything else, too.” I gesture waterwards, and say, “You screamed this picture out loud. I was so scared, because I believed you. I always did.

From that afternoon onwards especially. You were only six years old. And so many times since then, too. You saw this.”

She’s nodding. Emotions are vying for ownership of her features. She succeeds in maintaining a stoic gaze trained towards the brewing horizon. She’s so grateful for me but she’s always been the stronger of us.

We’ve remained on the same course during our walk, parallel to the tide line, but the water level’s risen substantially within the past several minutes, as has its temperature: gone is the lake’s cool touch, replaced with a monstrously amiss warmth that burns the skin. Something thuds into my calf. I look and see the stiff gull, its soaked and charred feathers imbuing it with an appallingly pathetic appearance. It’s been blasphemed – I notice then that its head is missing. A thick layer of ashen black surrounds the wound. We’re examining it wordlessly when a human arm bobs between us: long and burly, it had once belonged to a robust man. It, also, is charcoal black, and crumbling in long strips in the pitching current.

She gasps a moment later. Her hands fly to her mouth as she seeks to stifle a cry which she doesn’t completely succeed in doing. I look away, too, but likewise not before witnessing the collection of blackened limbs roll in with the perverted tide; legs and arms of varying sizes, several torsos and loose heads like black coconuts bobbing in the scalding waves. Meat pieces which once formed whole men and women; flesh components of sailors and fishermen and families enjoying their final midnight sail.

Three-quarters of a child drifts towards us, severed roughly from the knees downwards; face absent in the wake of a great ash countenance flaking apart in long sheets of black. An amorphous lump, festooned with seaweed clumps and which holds some lingering indefinable semblance to a dog or other large animal rolls past us, slapping the packed sand as it’s hurled beachwards.

An enormous wooden plank rears from the surf nearby, remnants of a boat carcass; turns about wildly; disappears in the spume like a giant ladle into a violent cauldron. An ashen buoy rises from the depths, too, and is likewise interred beneath the weight of roiling water immediately after appearing.

The moonlight illuminates the scene bleakly. I loathe its wan light for the things it shows us even as I understand my own misplaced conceit.

We teeter in the gale wind. Water laps at our knees. Soon our thighs are submerged. We falter in the watery wake but make our stand where we are. The beach behind will give us no shelter, of course. There can be no shelter from this. Her dreams told this and we have evidence of their veracity before us. Hands raised as paltry shield against the sand whipping at our eyes, we only continue to scan the distance.

It’s near to us where we stand huddled close, rocking in the mightysquall. The small hairs on my forearms are reaching anxiously to meet it. It’s nearly upon us. A light burns profoundly on the water. It burns the very lake away. It’s bearing down upon our tiny shred of beach. In its embrace individual wrongs are razed. I think of our parents interred in cemetery silence and feel no joy in knowing that this will be my final thought of them.

“It’s here. It’s finally here.”

Her voice in the raging air is soft but certain. Its sound reflects her as I’ve always known her to be, perfectly. Its sound is strong, its timbre courageous if faltering: she faces this thing as she can. She doesn’t turn and seek to escape its wrath. There is no reason to attempt this and she refuses besides. I love her. I communicate this love through a vigorous clenching of her hand in mine. When she returns this embrace, I feel as though I may be prepared for what is coming.

“Thank you for always believing me.” She’s shouting her words now. The courage in her voice remains. “You were the only one.”

The reliable rustle of the surf is no more – our old friend is gone. In its place a tempest roars such as has never roared on this beach or any other sandy strand before. In its cacophony we continue to clasp each other’s hands and this, as ever, is the strongest we can be.

Peace

YOUR BONE SPIDER WILL FIND YOU

She fingered the keen blade extending from the finger-smudged plastic base of the pocketknife. Its edge, caught in the moon’s light, flashed a silvery smear through her tears. She pressed the blade against the throat of the snow-white kitten pinioned between her knees, wincing as she did this but resolute in her action. She paused there, though, unable to go on. The animal’s plaintive, mournful meowing shook her. Its soft emerald gaze seemed to implore her. She closed her eyes on the moon-coloured picture of her great cowardice and fury. A moment passed. A wind from off the river gusted through the great desolate yard, chilling her in her denim jacket. She shivered against its insistence, her bangs annoying her eyes and her cheap plastic earrings jangling loudly as she trembled. With as steady a hand and determined a mind as she could muster she pressed the blade into the kitten’s scrawny throat.

Her wrist was then caught in an unyielding grip. She tried turning about to confront her assailant but, thrown off-balance, only toppled onto her side amid the tufts of wild grass spiking into her face, momentarily blinding her where they shot up through the time-shattered cement. She felt the knife pried from her fingers, discerned through the pounding rush of blood like a river in her ears the heavy breathing of the man behind her, and the renewed frightened yipping clamour of the kitten from somewhere near at hand.

She ceased her futile struggles, allowing her arm to grow limp in his grasp. She waited, heart hammering, until the kitten’s saviour released her. Cowering, she peered over her shoulder. Gradually, her vision cleared, and the man coalesced from the star field against which he stood silhouetted. His eyes were hard but solemn. They burned in their appraisal of her. She couldn’t help but look away from them, to examine her hands in her lap, the frayed cuffs of her jeans, her fingernails bitten down low and the grime wedged behind them. She took her first impression of him with her, though, and saw his dishevelled hair, unshaven features, wan skin, filthy sweatshirt and jeans as if he lived in the streets, or perhaps in this very lot behind the derelict warehouse.

She looked to him after a prolonged moment had passed in silence, found him looking into the middle of the vacant lot with his intense stare. She peered there, too, saw the snowy kitten padding there, away from her and her knife. When next she looked to the man his eyes were beholding her, accusatory but still curiously sympathetic, impelling her against her will to look to her hands again. They looked small, she thought distantly, thin-fingered and too weak to wield knives effectually.

She saw from the corner of her eye as he raised an arm. She followed his hand gesturing in the direction of the river somewhere in the night. More specifically, she understood, he pointed towards the skeleton of the warehouse before them. Its belly had long ago been eaten by fire. Its roof, she saw, had collapsed inwards. Long fire-blackened wooden and steel support beams spiked outwards from the rubble like an enormous splintered ribcage. The structure’s aura of death and abandonment had called to her when she’d wandered through the lot thirty minutes earlier, and found the kitten pawing at a spot in the grass, looking startled at her presence, shaken in the crisp wind, utterly lost in the night.

Suddenly the man’s hand was beside her face, palm out as if offering her to take hold and be guided from the lot by him. He turned his gaze to the warehouse and then again to her, beckoning still with his hand.

A ball of fear unfurled itself in her stomach at this invitation. “I’m not going with you,” she said indignantly. “Fuck you, man.”

The man’s voice was younger-sounding than his weathered features appeared, his tone firm but its timbre un-coarse, un-ravaged by time. “Oh yes, you will.”

The man’s striking incongruity startled her, his unremittingly calm demeanour and grave gaze unsettling. She watched him with a hard, angry stare. She considered her proximity to the street beyond the empty warehouse towering between her and freedom. She considered her small voice in this large unfrequented lot near to the river past midnight on an icy Fall night when most sensible, untroubled people were indoors and sleeping and wandering in their good or bad dreams. She watched his tranquil but uncompromising eyes a moment longer without words and then finally she spat at him, audaciousness in her voice and a seething look of disdain in her gaze, “I’m not scared of you. Fuck you. Let’s go then. Come on.” She stood and led the way towards the shell of the warehouse hulking at the periphery of the weed-choked lot.

The man eyed her curiously, then followed in her fuming wake like a thunderstorm blowing across the cement and into the black mouth of the derelict building.

The place smelled of rotten wood and old fire. The floor was filmed in ash and dust and debris. Shadows ruled the immense room despite the moonlight pouring through the hole where the roof had once been and illuminating the central portion of the space.

She walked brazenly into this moonlit area, feeling immediately as though the shadows surrounding her had begun to encroach into the lunar light. Once there she turned about, extending her arms defiantly. “I’m here. Okay. Now what, man?” Her eyes, the man saw, were angry and dark. He looked into them. He watched her without words, and then only nodded sympathetically, a gesture which infuriated the girl further. “Well, what the fuck, man? What do you want? Eh? What do you want from me? Have I got something you want, man?”

His voice was soft following hers, a caress from the shadows pooled before her. “This is a lesson for you. To not do things like you tried tonight. To not add to the darkness and foulness in the world, when it’s not in you to do. How...How old are you?”

She grew silent at this. Dark suspicion returned into her appraisal of his indistinct form. Her mouth moved as if to speak but no words came. Emotions played across her features, naked in the lunar light for the man to examine as closely as he wished: her telltale emotions, with the added weakness of her general unattractiveness: speckled around her mouth with tenacious acne whose presence haunted her no matter how diligently she scrubbed her face with soap-lathered washcloth each night before bed and upon waking every morning; the hint of purple lingering among her brown chin-length hair from when she’d dyed it herself several days before, the only way she could afford, with grape-flavoured Kool-Aid, so that teachers would look at her disapprovingly and certain boys with interest; her thin lips and makeup-less cheeks and eyes as un-feminine as a boy’s. Grown discomfited by this unexpected turn in their strange exchange, the girl fidgeted in her place, but remained standing helplessly beneath the man’s scrutiny.

Then, as if he’d extracted something from her that he’d wished to learn, the man said with a solemn, teacherly tone, “There.” His hand stabbed from the shadows and was pointing with a grubby finger into the darkness beyond her. He stepped forward a step and she saw his feral eyes devouring her, as if he gained strength from her great unease. “Look!” he seethed with greater vehemence, until she turned in her place and followed his gesturing hand.

When it became evident that she discerned nothing in the shadows he placed his hands on her small shoulders and edged her forward step by incremental step. Her instinctual resistance to his pushing her forward ceased, and she allowed him to move her easily. Then, when they were bathed in the shadows beyond the perimeter of the moon-washed central space, his whisper guided her: “There, in the heap of rock and wood. In with the bones, those pale sticks rising from the debris in the centre. It moves there.”

She wondered if the wan timbers rising from the heap were indeed bones, felt an instant queer thrill and revulsion at the thought. They watched silently. Then, there, amid the blackened wood and soot-smudged bricks and bones, she saw long, slender skeletal legs unfolding.

She held her breath reflexively. She placed a hand across her mouth as if she might cry out though no sound issued from her. She looked with incredulity at the great pale spider and the bones over which it traveled. She sought to fathom the weird spectacle of it floating in the dilapidated warehouse remains like some malign spirit or scavenger. Its size was staggering – both her hands placed beside one another would be dwarfed by it. It wove a strange pattern with its nimble legs, making a soft but clear percussion in the huge quiet, a sound of sticks rattling across the rubble. She remained standing in her place though her revulsion of the thing urged her to hasten away. She shuddered, no longer discerning the man’s hands where they remained resting – gently now – on her narrow shoulders.

“I first found it ten or more years ago,” his foul-breath whisper came in her ear. “Crawling on a homeless man laying dead in a room of rubble. The man’s skin was like ash, grey, powdery. He looked like his life had been drained from him. His neck, though, was dark, black with bruises. Like he’d been choked to death. It was perched on his chest. It seemed to be... watching me walk towards them through the room. It didn’t move, just sat there on the hobo like it owned him. I guess it did.”

She heard his words as if in some peculiar time-delayed manner and murmured, feeling as if too-long after he’d fallen into silence, “What... What is it? I’ve never seen a spider so big. Not even in books.”

He eyed her curiously. A tender look entered his gaze, as if he suddenly realized the age of the girl he was observing. “A spider? Is that what you see?”

She nodded, noting absently the strange nature of the man’s question. Turning to him, feeling suddenly greatly afraid, she whispered, “What do you see? I mean – what is it?”

But he only watched her with his new eyes of unsettling sympathy, and then turned to observe the gargantuan thing once more.

They watched it a while, and then he told her, “I see a great...hand. I see a large, strong hand. Masculine and muscular. Fingers long, hard. With long, dirty nails. That’s what I see. It’s...It belongs to the homeless man, the hand. It’s the hobo’s hand I see.” He paused, and she heard him swallow deep in his throat, and the pause before he next spoke seemed to her to be one wherein he gathered himself. Then, “It’s the hobo who stole me when I was around your age, with a knife at my throat in the lot behind the convenience store behind the house where I lived with my parents in the neighbourhood just beyond this lot. He was younger then. Quick and strong. His hands were quick and strong. And awful. When I saw him next, he was dead, in this warehouse. I come here to...to see it. I come here to see it and give my thanks. It’s always here. Here and elsewhere, too. I’ve seen it throughout the city. In overgrown fields, on the hoods of cars in driveways after dark. Once inside a locker in the change room at the downtown gym, stuffed into the bottom of the locker like a grey baseball mitt. Once it was on the porch of a well-to-do house on the south side, a giant hand spread open in the middle of one of the two chairs sitting there, facing each other at midnight.” He paused, and swallowed audibly again, and making his voice gentle, said, “I see it often hanging from bars in jungle gyms, in schoolyards around the city. In sandboxes and the steel-and-wood skeletons of bleachers, and in school parking lots. I’ve looked inside dusty old school buses parked there, and found it on the leather seats, waiting. For me, though, it’s always here, in this place. This place is the place I see it without fail. I know this place. I know this place well. It’s good that...It’s good that you see it, too.”

Her breath had been stolen by his revelation. She felt tendrils of cold snake all along her body beneath her denim jacket and t-shirt and jeans. Her heart crashed behind her chest. She turned to the spider, saw its hackle-like forest of pale fur spiking from its rotund body, its baleful grey eyes beholding them coldly, its long, needle-like legs perched delicately in its place atop the mountain of rubble. She felt the words rising up from her like vomit, unbidden and unwanted, bitter and shameful.

She said, in the quietest of whispers, though it sounded like thunder in her ears, “I woke up yesterday. In the middle of the morning. He...He was...He was raping me. Raping me. Oh God...” And she wept softly, and shook violently.

In the bated silence they felt acutely the thing watching them with its cold avid gaze, unmoving in its perch, as if estimating their intent, weighing their sin or innocence.

After a moment, the man spoke, softly, too. “Then it’ll find him, too. It finds everyone, I think. They wake up one day, they look up one day, and they’re face to face with themselves, like they’ve never been before. I hope it finds him soon. I’m...I’m sorry I frightened you.”

She nodded. She wept harder, hugging her thin arms about herself.

The man whispered, “I mean that. I am sorry, but I saw you, young and angry and foolish with a knife in your hand. I saw your future, of regret, and, and...I wanted you to know. I saw your eyes, and I wanted you to know about...this.”

He let her have another moment of silence and grief. Into it she eventually murmured, “I didn’t mean to want to hurt the kitten. I’ve never done anything like that before...”, trailing off, dismal and small.

“I know,” the man said to her. “I know.”

He let her cry. He wept, too, as he did on nights such as this.

And all the while the pale thing remained there with them, unmoving but watching, silvered in moonlight and kingly in its throne of debris and dilapidation, like a protector of the place and perhaps them convened within it, too.

When the girl’s crying ceased several minutes later, the man murmured, “Here.” She looked to his hand proffered her. In the centre of his palm lay her pocketknife, its blade folded into its rounded plastic shell. She stared at it. She shook her head, denying the idea of it. He dropped it among the dust and stones at their feet.

Eyeing the thing on the summit of ruins, she said, “Are there...Are there really bones there in all that rock and wood?”

“There are bones everywhere,” he told her softly, watching the rubble with her. “The city’s filled with them.” Then he turned to her. “Goodbye,” he said. “I have to go home now.”

She eyed him curiously. She wondered, for the first time, about the man’s home, his life outside of the night and this place of shadows and moonlight and memories. She wondered about those things which interested the man, his hobbies and passions, the everyday activities in which he engaged, and the people – the friends or family – with whom he shared his days. He eyed her with a peaceful gaze over his shoulder as he trudged through the toppled warehouse.

He left her like this, in the dust and ashes. A great fear stabbed its way into her heart in her new aloneness. She shivered and cast huge eyes around the chaos of shadows surrounding her. Her nostrils seemed wholly filled with the aftermath of fire and death. She considered the thing before her, like an amputated appendage belonging somehow always to the city. She wondered of its other forms, in the lost, weeping eyes of others like herself and the haunted man who brought her here to this place. She wondered what other awful aspects of human beings ghosted the streets and alleys and lots and fields, and she shuddered. She shuddered a long deep shudder, and her hands ached from the chill air, or else from a deeper cold awakened in her at the new knowledge she had about the world and the things happening in its secret folds.

She stooped and retrieved the pocketknife from the floor. She eyed the crooked landscape of wood and stone and bone. To the spider she said, in a clear voice, “His name’s Frank. Just so you know. His name’s Frank and he stinks like sweat, and his breath stinks like vinegar. He’s hairy all over. Thick hair all on his back and arms and chest like a big tarantula. I hate him more than anything in the world.”

The spider, watching her, placed two of its long legs together before itself as if in prayer.

She turned from it and its kingdom of rubble and bones. She hurled the pocketknife she’d been savagely clutching – conscious even as she did so of her girlish throw, weak and crooked and nowhere near the middle of the wall she’d been targeting – and fled the shadowed place.

Moonlight drenched her anew when she arrived in the vacant lot. The air tasted cleaner somehow than before as she sucked it into herself despite it being the same city-air of smog and foundry fumes she knew every day. She relished its faintly acrid tinge but with the subtle suggestion of the nearby river permeating it, too, icy and aquatic, the perennial smell of the docks, where old boats lay tethered bobbing in the current, where dirty ducks occasionally were to be found, too, misplaced in the chemical waters with their pretty emerald plumage and innocent passage.

And to the night, quite like a fervently-uttered prayer, she seethed, “Just you wait. Just you wait.” And she felt relieved, expelling that fury from herself with the words, and the great burden of it like all the concrete and stink and badness of the city filling her up and blown out like smoke into the air.

She turned eastwards and began her fearful and brave walk home. And, strangely, the longer she walked the cleaner the air tasted, the cleaner her thoughts seemed to become, unsullied with dreams of blood and vengeance that had never really been like her to dream at all.

Twins burning.

DYING DAYS OF TREASURE SPIDERS EVERYWHERE

The projects burned before them: children hung like listless simians from the rusted skeleton of the decrepit jungle gym; the black and white trash tenants of the townhouses haunted their porches languorously, drinking bottled beer and smoking cigarettes while watching the street with despondent eyes; the occasional car rattled past trailing exhaust and adding a chemical stink to the already pungent reek of late-staying June bugs that stippled the house fronts and streets and sidewalks.