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________________short stories
Beating of the Bones
Religion has throughout infinite centuries of time played a binding role in the order of man, ruled by the unseen and questionable in feeble hope that, amongst the millions, they could earn their own individual salvation in times of adversity. The only real “God” was one assumed to be content in remaining anonymous and invisible, and yet through some scholarly figment of the imagination or by some accidental omnipresence, public secrets are established; and everyone loves a good secret. People not hardened by the practice of living needed the massive crutch of second chances, an assurance that they are wounded out of love, as was the excuse of many a drunkard father to his young sons, and that there may be a period after death where “things would be better next time”. It would be blasphemous to think that this sole reason in which countless of lives were reduced to the metaphorical lamb in holy war and conflict never existed.
In the shingled, hazed light of an Autumn Sabbath day, no one seemed to be in a rush to be anywhere. Marooned in the vast expanse of British moors deep in the countryside, a small community thrived in its amenity. As feeble as it was, it could hardly have been called a community. The flat, infinite expanse consisted of a road, a gas station, a large lake and an estate in long disrepair. Caecilius sat idly on the crumbled, nearly ancient wall of the Victorian manor, casting his eyes away from a rampant, frolicking sibling, exploring a giddy fascination of his own footprints in the moss and crabgrass. His gaze spliced between the parallel of sky and plain, almost symmetrical to each other, as the very earth itself seemed constant, dead and uninhabited as far as his eyes could see. Even the biting winds which swept over them incessantly felt like the hungry ghosts of those lost in the medium, gasping their reminiscent last breaths on the back of his neck.
A week before, their mother was buried in the far end of the local Roman Catholic church, which enraged her eldest son. Again shunned away from even her own family, alienated. He himself was reduced to pleading with the bishop to even allow her to have a proper burial, his father refusing to do so himself. His indifference and insensitive lack of sympathy struck pinholes in the cork which bottled a brewing hatred.
“Suicide is a deadly sin, my son. We feel empathy for your loss, but we can not harbor unsaved souls in our churchyard. Please understand.”
He understood that his mother wasn’t even catholic.
He was still in the mourning process when the decision was made to move from their Dublin home in Ireland to the British countryside. Or rather, the decision was made for them; rather abruptly. Their father seemed too anxious, too careless, to avoid the suspicious stench of guilt which hung over him like a wafting, noxious cloud. The younger brother, more delirious by the sudden dismantling of his life routine than anything, was oblivious to what his elder had believed had came to pass, ever silent.
His brooding attracted the attention of the younger brother, whom ran out of things to entertain himself with at this point. With exasperated huffs and puffs, he managed to scramble his tiny body up onto the wall, displacing a bit of rubble which crackled and fell to the ground with a hiss of sand. Staring out into the bleak expanse and, not so ironically, unaffected, he kicked his heels against the face of the mason work.
“Methusela?”
“What?”
“I didn’t see any other kids since we got here. Do you think there are any?”
“No, Vince. There’s only two or three buildings out here, and none of them houses except for ours. There aren’t going to be any for a couple of miles around.”
“Oh.” Conversation ceased, stricken into submission by his older brother’s cold tone. He had been like this for the last few days, not even considered a reaction of their mother’s recent death anymore.
“I wish mommy was here. She’d always have something fun for us to do.”
“Me too, buddy.” A pause. “You’ve been a big boy about this. Remind me to take you out to someplace fun after we get settled in, okay?”
“Okay! I’m gonna go find my room and put some stuff in it.”
At that, he ran off, leaving the other silent, complacent and concerned. With the high pitched murmur trailing off in the distance towards the house and whatever other sound being swept away by the wind, he was again engulfed by the vacuum. Now would have been a good time to leave before he began to hear things like those people in the Poe short stories, where one would go insane from the silence and begin to eat their own flesh. Well of course he would know what that felt like—he lived in England. Probably even on wretched moors not too unlike this one. There was a small dirt road which traveled down the length of the old, crumbling wall, and as he walked it he surveyed many a garter snake which had holed up refuge in the rotted-out holes along the walls. There were dozens of them. By the time he reached the main road, he counted thirty six and wondered just how many more hordes lay in wait out among the heath.
The only trees to be seen for several hundred acres around resided like a faerie ring around the small lake earlier identified from the back of a moving pickup, the tips seen distinctly from over the antiquated service station which made the area look even more like a tourist ghost town. Tucking his hands gingerly in his stone rutted blue jeans, his only good pair, he treaded across the main road while avoiding foot deep potholes in the clay. He vaguely made out a petite, shriveled figure through the scuffed fiberglass as he cut across the pump stations, for this reason deciding not to disturb her. He wasn’t too accustomed to talking to elderly people. In all his personal honesty, he was a little perturbed by people who may be wiser than himself, an egotist in spirit.
The lake lay just beyond that, feeling a bit drawn to it, about the only minutely intriguing thing within several miles around. It just seemed so bizarre for something like that to be able to exist when the soil seemed so saturating. The spontaneous overgrowth signified its age by at least a few years if not more, which made his assumptions seem undermined, having no logical reason for feeling this way other than his own egotism in assuming that nature abided by what he silently decreed should be so. Methusela, noticing himself occasionally, retained this way of thinking subconsciously, not that it was a noticeable enough mental trait to get him to pay much mind to it.
Kneeling down into the incline of the sloping bank, he slowly leaned back into the grass and stiffly resided there for a few minutes. From this angle he took note of an overcast sky, the entire right span on the sky seeming to become engulfed by an inky black tempest while the other lingered, quiet and expecting. The fierce, assaulting winds he experienced earlier must have carried the storm in. A cackling roar erupted simultaneously with the roar of tires overwhelming rubble as it glided into the old plantation gates. Father was home from the nearby port town Swansea, picking up legal transportation documents and the like. One more excuse, other then impending rain, not to get up.
The heavy atmosphere lagged the bulbous rain clouds within a few miles, allowing him a little careless dozing for the first time in weeks. He was never a night person, but found himself since his mother’s death pacing hallways and the suspended walkways of sleazy motels into all hours of the night. His eyelids racked with dark circles and his body stiff with exhaustion, even his younger brother began to become concerned while blanketed in his obliviousness, sneaking his nightlight into his brother’s room to ward of any closet monsters that may have been keeping him awake. The few minutes of peace put closure to his insomnia. The attraction here was in good judgment.
When a few slivers of water fell pooling into his eyes, he considered just turning his head and letting the water run off, not having to get up to keep from drowning like a duck. However, the downpour picked up and his complete indifference to it couldn’t deny the rising waters lapping inches from his heels. The wind picked up as well, setting a wind chill and giving a hard caliber to the rain which now fell like needles, no longer comfortable and ignorable. In his irritation, he sat up and began to root himself into the slant so not to slip in the mud and into the body of water, though as he began to trudge up the incline, his proceeding anywhere was abruptly halted before an eerie presence. His eyes were blurred in the flurry of rain, coming down in barrages of spattering arrows which reddened his flesh, but he could still make out an ominous figure not but a few feet from his scrambling position. He crouched down again to maintain some balance in the stormy discord, raking a pair of nails into the mud.
“I was wondering when you were going to show, and as I suspected, you are right on schedule.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady.” He felt like a soaking dog and felt irritable because of it. She at least could have had enough sense to bring an umbrella is she knew he was out here. Common courtesy and all.
“You should have more respect for your elders, boy. Of course you don’t know. If you don’t know why you’re still out here in the rain talking to some stranger old woman, than it should go without saying that you don’t know.” At this point, they were both bogged down with water, neither seeming to care in their distraction as if it were as natural as was to waterfowl.
“What? ..Okay. Point taken.”
He immediately began to claw his way up bank, the soil now slick and saturated with water, slipping across the under-earth with remote ease and making this all the more difficult. Finally, like reaching the peak of a mountain, ignoring the relation of the three-foot slope, he passively ducked out of the way of the elder woman’s imposing figure—petite but the sleeves stiffened with muscular shoulders and forearms befitting one forty or fifty years younger than she. It was these same brick laid forearms that clothes-hanged the boy back down the slope and partially into the rising waters, whip lashing a great wave into the opposite direction.
“Ka..!” He clutched his throat and gasped, laboriously pulling his front torso out of the rising waterline, too stunned to flee and his recovery coming too late as a pair of sharp nails dug into his shoulders, again paralyzing him in a sort of surreal shock. It’s always the situations you run out in sequence in your head, knowing exactly what to do, that you’re always one thought process behind when they actually occur. Before he thought to plant a foot into the bank and take to running out of violent situation, he felt the back of his skull ricocheting off a rounded river rock and into the water, a pair of clamping, iron hands clutching his throat and pushing him mere inches beneath the water. It seems like ages before there was a lapse in the amazing strength of the woman, allowing him to sit up and choke down air from around the raindrops, sputtering and disoriented. He was too blinded with algae and murky water to notice a younger face jutted into his own, the tip of a curious helm combing through the top of his head.
“To think now, that your father isn’t even bothered that you’re not home in this storm and your brother too timid to go out and look for you. It’s a pitiful existence to be surrounded in, isn’t it my boy?” Her aged, raspy tone was still similar to that of what became of the old woman, almost seeming to shout and scream over the roaring downpour, vaguely rising and falling with her like the great congregations who bend at the will of their pastors. “And look at you now, wet and sopping and ready to die. Don’t you just hate being the center of the melodrama?” The boy could only choke in reply, still shuddering at the feeling of pond water coating the inside of his lungs.
“But I have a proposition for you.” His soaked hair drizzled down his back as his entire post-adolescent weight was lifted clear out of the water and mud, the tips of his limp feet barely grazing the turbulent surface, his assaulter restrengthening her grip under the boy’s slack jaw. He could only pry at the hard, strangely gnarled fingers, ignoring the fierce pounding in the back of his head and sting in his eyes to at least seem alert and possessing of his full attention. The intermission of heavy battering allowed some fury to fester towards his attacker, but the figure he now saw before him didn’t resemble the old woman nor any old woman he had seen before her. His full length suspended into the air and his head didn’t even measure to her shoulders, thorny and scaled like her arms and legs and back. Like any normal human being laying eyes on something depicted in cavern walls, he was struck still with awe, rebelliousness and an alien sense of terror. A hint of satanic, burning coals peered out from beneath the helm of armored bone. “I can kill you quietly, here, and make it look like a suicide. No one would question it, I think. Or,” she paused, emphasizing one taloned finger towards the side of his face, depicting a bit of impersonal gesture, “ you can listen to my alternative.”
“What alternative?”
“That’s none of your business unless you decide what you want to do. I’m spoon feeding you a shred of dignity, take it or humor me.”
It didn’t seem necessary for a Mesolithic god to give their children a choice if they were theirs to direct. It could be suggested it was to humor them, as children were arrogant and often as self-absorbed as their birth mothers. The rain died and morning rose, wherein a tattered young man strode down the outside of the manor wall from which he came, making little effort to avoid the pits of mud and stagnant water. A faint cry of exasperation erupted from the distant porch as his brother, rising early, caught a hint of platinum hair from over the wet, blackened wall. He couldn’t respond in time to it, however, gazing with an obsession into the worn pits of the walls and finding the empire of snakes vacated, gazing out onto the saturated moors with pupils a transparent tinge of bloody, burning coals.
"You better run like the wind, out of the lightning."
~Mallory W.
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