THE THRESHOLD

By John Hood


Ms. Raines tugged the steering wheel of the silver Lexus gently to the right and slid around a white cargo van with the word Budget emblazoned on it in big vinyl letters, which was turning left onto the Rhinecliff bridge. She stomped firmly on the go pedal and smiled with inward satisfaction at the sucking sound of increased fuel consumption as the thirsty carbs of the big vee six gulped fuel and the late model sedan leaped through the moonlit intersection.

Budget, she thought. Suckers.

Anybody who would rent a van from a company called Budget would have to be a loser by definition, she conjectured; I mean, we know you’re a loser by the fact that you’re renting a cargo van with“do it yourself” stamped all over it, but why advertise your insufficient means and remove any shadow of a doubt, jackass? Okay, admitted, she was driving a rental sedan, but that was business, and it didn’t have “short on cash” stencilled on the door panels. In the unlikely event she had ever needed to rent a cargo van, she figured she would have looked for one from the "slumming for the fun of it” or “wanted to see how the other half lives out of abject curiosity” rental agency, just so people would know she wasn’t a bottom feeder.

Ms. Raines braked slightly as the shocks absorbed a stiff jolt from a bump in the road. The Lexus bounced a bit, then steadied as she continued north up 199 towards route 9G at a better than ample speed. She swerved a bit around a cyclist. Stupid kid, she thought. Dumb ass college kids on bicycles out at night on back roads. She knew she was close to Herald College, a big liberal arts school that consisted of a rambling series of 1880s farmhouses and brownstones and a selection of more recent buildings tucked into the woods on the east side of the Hudson. If you didn’t know it was there you would never guess at its presence. You could hardly tell the boys from the girls at these places, she thought; same clothes, same blackberries and mp3's, same candy-ass politics. These little prima donnas were in for a shock when they got to the real world, alright, but then again she figured there were enough of their ilk around to sustain their cosy fantasies.

“Still, we don’t want to kill one of them, do we Sheila...” she muttered.

Not especially since those two Vodka Martinis from the late meeting in Poughkeepsie would still register. She eased off on the gas a bit. (Attagirl Sheila...take it easy.)

Sheila Raines it in, she thought. Ha ha ha. (Mrs. Raines didn’t raise any stupid children...)

Sheila Raines over everything was more the way she liked to think of it; and she liked the fact that she had lots of money and some power, and that she was going to get more of same. As a rising star junior executive from a plastics firm that had one of the largest footprints in the New York state area, a great deal more money and influence were hers for the taking, she knew,
provided she had the cojonés to go after it and not worry too much about the bleeding bodies she left in her wake, as far as her business rivals were concerned. But she didn’t want to fuck up her game with troublesome charges stemming from a traffic accident.

She had actually decided a long time ago that she would be ready to commit murder to further her own interests, and she knew she was smart enough to get away with it. All you had to do was establish a rock solid alibi, and then make sure there was no body, and no murder weapon to be found. True, it was difficult to avoid contaminating a crime scene with DNA evidence, but in the absence of a weapon and a body, a conviction would be very difficult with a good defence lawyer, especially in the event of a personal business relationship with the victim...

But this wasn’t one of those times, and she didn’t need a DUI or vehicular manslaughter conviction to spoil her plans. These college kids were just about ready to leave the school for summer recess, but just now they were still all over the area doing whatever the hell college kids do, so she’d best watch it. Anyway, Christ knew what the hell were they doing biking around the roads at this hour? She glanced at the digital clock on the dash. It was well past midnight. Didn’t they have to get to bed? Study or something? What the fuck?

What the fuck...that was what she had thought when her secretary had informed her by phone that there had been a mix up in the scheduling of the Poughkeepsie meeting and they had needed to reschedule for an evening get together at a restaurant. She recalled with a curious pleasure the verbal whipping she had given the girl for her part in the “mix-up". Sheila had sensed that she was crying as she nervously stammered her apologies. Good. Maybe that’ll teach the foolish little bitch to be more efficient.

Sheila Raines all over everybody. (Damn her secretary anyway!)

_________________________

Sheila was growing very fatigued.

It would be such a god damn waste of time to stop for the night, but she figured it would be crazy to go on much further. She grudgingly resolved to stop at the next likely spot and get a room.

She continued up 9G, dimly remembering that she had to go north about another ten or fifteen miles before the woods thinned out on either side of the dark road. There was a little town there, on the other side of the toll bridge, where she thought she remembered seeing a small and somewhat shitty motel. Right now it didn’t much matter to her if it were as shitty as hell. She was starting to drift and badly wanted to get off the road.

Besides, Sheila was becoming uncomfortably aware that an involuntary picture of her dead brother was forming in her mind. She tried to shake him off, but he just kept hanging there in front of her. Jesus, what a bastard he had been to her when they were small. He had really liked to scare her, really seemed to get a fucking kick out of it.

Suddenly she was in the middle of a full fledged sense memory;

It’s late summer and the air is hot and humid. She is back in her parents house in Rochester and they are out for the evening-no-they are away overnight, and she is alone with her brother. She is thinly dressed in a little t-shirt and her underpants. Donald has tied her to a chair in the middle of the basement with one of those stretchy pink plastic skipping ropes. It hurts her hands; she knows the pink of the skipping rope will have turned whiter where it is stretched around her thin little wrists but she can’t see this in the dark, she just knows it. She could get out of the knots, she thinks, but she is afraid to move because he has turned out all the lights and is slowly circling her in the darkness making terrifying soft throaty wailing noises. He is calling her name in a weird quavering voice...

“Sheila...Sheee-la...SHEEE-LAAH...”

She is weeping now, terrified and furious and filled with hate, hate for her horrible mean brother, and her stupid pig-eyed mother and her filthy drunken father, and she cries out in spite of her fear

“no...no...stop it Donald, please stop it, I’m scared...”

Her tears streaming down her cheeks now. She is shaking with fright and rage and misery, and she can hear the warm August wind making a high rushing sound in the tall leafy boughs of the enormous trees outside the house. She has the ghastly idea that something is coming in from the night to devour her brother, and she will be left alone in the blackness, half naked and tied to the chair.

“SHEEEE-LAAH!” her brother wails.

Sheila shook her head and rubbed her tired, tear stained eyes with one hand as she steered the Lexus with the other. The memory dream was gone, but her brother still swam in the air just outside the front windshield. He appeared to be trying to speak to her, but it seemed as if it was an effort for him to achieve audible volume; eventually she began to hear his familiar voice moaning in that old frightening way he had...

“Sheeilaah...don’t stop...Sheila...don’t stop the car...keep on driving Sheeilaah...”

Sheila saw a red sphere glowing inside her dead brothers head. It was a traffic light. It didn’t register for a second, then she stomped on the brakes hard and the car skidded to a halt, rubber whining on the dry pavement. She watched in horrified fascination as her brothers image sped away and up into the night, a terrible beseeching look on his pale features, his wails echoing in the night air.

“Fuck you, Donald...fuck you.” She thought as she waited for the light to turn green. When it did, she gunned the motor and started over the toll bridge. She pulled up at the toll booth and flashed her express pass. The guy in the booth grimaced out at her, his face looming out of the darkness, caught in a beam of light.

“You OK, lady? You look like you seen a ghost...” He rattled. She realized there were beads of perspiration running down her forehead and she was clutching the steering wheel in a death grip

“I’m fine.” she barked curtly and stepped on the gas.

_________________________

A sign saying “Welcome to Cottingham...stay for awhile” swam past in the darkness. She was just a mile or so northwest of the turnoff for the thruway.

Cottingham, New York; there wasn’t much to it. An Ultramar gas bar, a generic looking diner, a clutch of distressed houses around the crossroads, one or two rusty light industrials, that was pretty much it. Nobody around, nothing going on. She saw a dim orange glow ahead about a quarter mile and made for it. She was pretty sure this was where she had remembered noting the location of a (shitty) motel. Rolling up to the amber lights, her memory was confirmed, there was an old motel on the east side of the road.

The Wayside motel, Cottingham New York, looked like it had seen better days. Or maybe not. Maybe it had always been a mouldy rat hole with threadbare grass coloured carpeting on the cement walkways lining the front facade. Looked like about thirty units, with a dingy little office on the north side. There was a mom and pop Italian restaurant next door, closed for the night. Too bad, thought Sheila; she could have used some pasta and meat sauce, it might have helped to alleviate the severe headache she was working on. Just as well. It was too late to eat...she just wanted to go to sleep, wake up early and get the hell out of here.

Sheila got out of the Lexus and walked slowly and a little unsteadily at first, over to the office. She pushed open the door and went inside. The air was stale and the odour of mould and cleaning fluids assailed her, making her feel nauseated. What a dump. She crisply smacked a bell on the counter, and after a bit the night guy emerged from a back room. He had an unpleasant face; sort of Germanic looking in a regular folks kind of way but with pale blotchy skin and eyelids that looked too tight, no eyebrows, thin lips and a pointy beak. She found herself strangely repulsed by his appearance, his peculiarly nasty physicality. He had a name tag; “Jim”.
The creepy dude gave her an appraising look and licked his lips. She smiled coldly. Sheila liked to think of herself as kind of a young Sybil Sheppard type; she was a million miles out of this losers league, but she arched her back and thrust out her hip just to tease him a little. Just give him a little look at what he’s never gonna get, make him sweat a bit.

“Evening Ma’am.” He offered.
“I’d like a room for tonight...how much?” said Sheila, her expression cool.
“Guess you’re in luck. Got one left, room 3. It’s around the back. It’s $66 for the night. Check out is 11 a.m. We can give you a wake up call, if you like?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” Sheila gave him money and he handed her the key. She turned and began to slowly walk out to the car, swaying her hips just a little.
“There’s ice and a pop machine in the hall, miss.” he called after her.
“Ma’am?” He called again, his tone questioning. She turned and looked back at him.
“Yes...?”
“There’s another motel about quarter mile down on the other side...” he began. She raised her eyebrows incredulously.
“So?”
“It’s just...well, some people don’t like number 3 is all, miss...we’ve had some, uh, complaints in the past...concerning number 3." She threw her head back and laughed.
“What, is it haunted?” She couldn’t believe he was giving her this shit.
“We’ve had some complaints. Some people just don’t like number 3, is all...I just feel it’s fair to let you know there’s been complaints before, and...” She cut him short, her expression now icy.
“Look, Jimbo, I’m not expecting the Ritz, so do me a favour and spare me the local colour...I’m a little too tired for that crap, alright?”

She turned on her heal and strode to the Lexus, ignoring his reply.

Sheila guided the car around a tightly curved driveway on the south end of the building leading to the rear of the motel, and pulled into the spot in front of #3. There was a tall stand of trees at the west side of the parking lot, screening the motel from the Hudson. Nobody in the other units was making any sound, and the place was pretty dark, save for a few lights over some of the doorways. She took her overnight case from the passenger side seat and went to open the unit door.

The key turned easily in the lock and she swung open the door and felt for a light switch. Finding one, she flicked it and a soft glow lit up a dresser with a mirror and a TV set. The room was small and neat, and smelled a good deal cleaner than the office, which was more than she had expected. She stepped inside and threw her bag down, flipped another switch. A fixture came on over the two queen size beds. There was a night stand, and next to the bed on the wall enclosing the bathroom there hung a large motel style painting, sort of a “Sunrise at Malibu” type of thing. The curtains over the wide picture window facing the parking lot were tightly drawn. The room was cool.

Sheila slid her dress down over her thighs and let it drop to the floor, stripped off her underwear and drew a bath, let it fill while she arranged her things. When the tub was ready, she slipped into the water and closed her eyes, just let it all go away for a bit. She began to sink into a dreamy state almost immediately, and she went with it, just letting a series of colours wash through her mind. Sleep overcame her.

She woke with a start, water splashing onto the floor, disturbing images of a violent dream still flashing in her head; images of her brothers tortured pleading face, a lurid purple landscape, the motel night man, his face a grinning mask and an overwhelming sense of something, some bestial monstrosity stalking her. She felt sick, her head aching and spinning, waves of nausea coursing through her. What the hell, she had only had two martinis. She hadn’t eaten anything unusual, hadn't eaten anything at all actually...

(maybe that was the problem?)

No. Ridiculous. Hunger never made her feel like this. She realized the water had gone very cold, much colder than the air in the room and she was shivering hard. She lurched to her feet and as she moved toward the bathroom door, grabbing a scanty bath towel, she became aware of a sickly cast of pale coloured light suffusing the larger part of the motel room.

Sheila stumbled through the bathroom door into the bedroom. The room seemed to spin and dip giddily around her and she had the momentary idea that maybe the night guy had somehow slipped her some kind of drug. She heard a weird clangorous noise behind the window, an unearthly humming, ringing sound.

(What the fuck was going on around here? What the fuck is this shit?)

She moved to the bed and fell down onto it, and as her head rolled over drunkenly she saw the painting and a shocked scream issued from her throat. Where “Sunrise at Malibu” had previously hung, another much different painting was now suspended. It was oriented vertically, unlike the horizontal format of the generic beach scene, and its dimensions were much larger, much too large for the wall space. The painting seemed to generate its own weird light, and the image that light revealed would have been entirely appropriate to a really high end horror magazine, but in the context of the cheap motel room seemed completely inappropriate and terrifying. It showed some kind of a monster or demon, with long writhing tentacles that had a sickening oily sheen. The tattooed skull was grotesquely crowned with enormous shiny black horns and the huge jaws were wide open revealing a row of cruel fangs. It was magnificently painted. How the hell had it come to be here?

Sheila was losing her grip very quickly as she contemplated what kind of weird sick fucker would have come in and placed that bloody thing on the wall as she dozed in the tub just behind the partition. She struggled upright and reached for the phone. The fucking creep in the office. This must be his idea of a (totally fucked up) joke. She would let him know that his ass was in a sling. She grabbed the phone and put the receiver to her ear. The phone made weird ringing humming sounds, but she couldn’t get a dial tone.

The television set flickered on.

Sheila felt herself go limp with dread as the image on the TV screen resolved. It featured the character from the painting. He seemed to be leading some kind of a dance. A hoard of smaller but similiar creatures cavorted around the horned grotesque. They danced and gyrated obscenely in a wasted landscape amidst huge bonfires fed with what could only be cadavers.

Sheila, still naked, dropped the towel and sprang for the door. She grabbed the knob and yanked, pulled, pounded on the door. It wouldn’t budge. This situation was rapidly losing it’s appeal to her, and she gave another desperate attempt to wrench open the unyielding portal of the spinning, hideously coloured motel room.

Room 3 at the Wayside.

Ask for it by number. You’ll fucking love it...hah ha ha hah...
She shrieked with laughter as she thought of night guy Jim’s words.
“We’ve had some complaints...”

ha ha fucking ha.

If someone had somehow tried to do a number on her, she conceded that they had done a hell of a good job. The horror DVD coming on by itself had been a great touch. This was just a hell of a set up, that had to be it. she calmed herself a little and went towards the TV.

It was unplugged.

Sheila clutched her head in her hands and rocked back and forth on her feet. The phone was off the receiver, and it was playing a stereo version of the sound scape coming from outside, in a high, thin, tinny tone. She turned slowly and went to the window. She clutched at the dark heavy drapes and thrust them open, half knowing what she would see.

She screamed again despite this awareness, a shrill desperate scream devolving into drawn out broken sobs. Outside the window where the Hudson river should have flowed behind a tall dark green stand of woods, there stretched a vast ochre and ash coloured landscape, a barren blasted heath with a sickening coppery green sky. The horrid charnel plain seemed to undulate and give forth with a discordant nauseating music, a sort of ringing hum. In the distance, many miles away a gibbering crowd of oily blackish things advanced over the charred ground, moving inexorably towards the motel window.

The phone rang. It had somehow hung itself up. She laughed at this as she picked up the receiver. It was Jimbo, the night guy. He spoke to her in a disagreeable nasal whine.

“I guess they’re coming for ya...sorry Ma’am...it ain’t nothing personal. They’ve been trying to get through for years, maybe for always, I don’t know. Anyway, we found out from others a long time ago that if we sort of...feed someone to them...uh...every now and then...it sort of seems to keep ‘em at bay...”

He coughed, as though he was embarrassed.

Sheila somehow realized in the small still functioning part of her mind that it was useless to scream threats of retribution. She dropped the phone down on the hook and reached for her night bag, pulled out her make up kit and went slowly into the bathroom. She applied make up to her face, selecting a particularly alluring shade of red for her lips, and then went to the bed and stretched out, naked, upon it and waited for them to come and take her.

THE ROAD AWAY FROM SUMMER

By John Hood


The sky was washed with lazy pastel colours and the muted scent of earth and the perfume of wildflowers and grass filled the cool still air. He turned to look back to the west at the pale rays of the midafternoon sun. They silhouetted a tall stand of evergreen against the backdrop of the waning day. Evening waited in the wings while a blackbird sang. Pale purples and mauves and cool thin blues swam unconcernedly amid the insubstantial cloud scape evolving slowly in the upper atmosphere.

Warmth from the heat of day still rose from the dusty gravel. His mind was quiet as he idled along the road. He gently kicked at the stones and scrubbed his feet in the dry dust. The last rain had fallen days ago and the road was bone dry but the forest on either side was still moist and damp and verdant. The woods murmured gently, whispering about silent black pools of clear fragrant water and juniper and grotesque formations of granite mantled with soft cool moss. The woods stretched back into the unimaginable distance to the south. There was no reason at all why they should not go on forever. To the west and north, there were tall trees and giant spines of fantastic rock, and then the lake; the wide cold shining lake.

A frog hopped erratically across the wide track. There was no one to disturb it. He watched the little animal as it disappeared into the brush on the far side. There was nothing to do but watch the little speckled green creature. He couldn’t go back the way he had come, he knew. Nothing to do but amble along.

The summer people were gone; handsome golden haired young men and the lovely young women with their tanned delicious flesh. The happy carefree revellers who sported effervescently in the sunshine and dove like nubile otters from the rocks into the refreshing blue green waters of the lake to emerge with smiling faces full of milk white teeth. Who reclined in relaxed postures in the crevices of the giant cradle of rock...and who played noisy games and rushed to and fro in powerful boats. They were all gone away now. The lake retreated back to a primaeval silence, the gentle waters lapping at silent empty shores. A few lights glistened on the waters edge at night, but no sound issued from the dwellings they weakly illuminated. Even many of the birds had gone away, although a secretive loon ducked beneath the water and swam rapidly to the west, emerging far out of sight in the middle of the vast body of water.

Sometimes at night amid the darkened timber an old and solitary woman sat alone in an isolated cottage, gazing out at the water.

For now, it was still day, although the sun sank lower in the sky. Far away across the lake, an enormous Heron with a glistening trout in his beak stretched his wide wings and lifted into a wan violet hemisphere pregnant with emptiness, flew with muscular wing beats marking time in a haunting cadence above the cold dark water to alight in the creek mouth several miles to the south, settling in a nest strewn with the bones of fish. No one witnessed its flight.

He picked up a sharp stone and sent it spinning into the woods. Crisp cracking noises echoed briefly then were gone.

The boy was gone, some time now, grown and gone away south behind the endless trees. Far behind the damp still woods. He remembered when they too had splashed in the sun sparkled water and curled up on the warm lichen painted rock or walked the heat scented sidewalk in the village miles away, enjoyed the cold sweetness of soft ice cream or the pleasure of rich food. He knew that the trees ended somewhere down beyond the back of the forest but that he could never go down there to find the boy. All that remained was to walk along the quiet road into the cooling air of the incipient evening.

Of course, the woman was gone too. Once in a mossy clearing of the ageless forest she had offered him her sleek lovely sinuousness while birds flitted and insects hummed their industry. She had indulged him in her fragrant opalescent tender body, her white lustrous skin taut and intoxicating under the warm summer sun, leaving no secret denied, no intimacy withheld. He drank of her crimson mouth and tasted her winy flavour, their lips exploring each others youthful voluptuousness with gentle passion.

The memory of it danced before him like a diaphanous tapestry, suffused with deep rich colour but as insubstantial as a rainbow. He reached out to grasp the almost palpable sensation. Overhead a circling hawk uttered a shrill cry and the memory took flight like a startled doe.

He knew less of where she had gone, but all the more fully that she was beyond recovery. He could barely remember how and when their confederation had been possible. It was as a dream from another lifetime, a memory plucked from someone else's store of recollection, hardly his own to preserve anymore. He stood for a moment and buried his face in his sympathetic hands, shuddered with grief. What death could possibly be more cruel, he thought, than the death of kindly disposition? Passions life span was by definition brief, like a beautiful exotically scented flower that blooms radiantly and expires as suddenly as it was birthed, but surely compassion was ageless? To endure the murder of gentle concern by the indifference of wicked circumstance seemed an injury to grievous to sustain. Nature offered him no alternative to sustaining it.

He shrugged, feigning an insouciant attitude, and resumed his walking.

Just ahead, the road dipped into a cool shady little declivity and swung around to the northwest, graciously yielding to a fantastic spur of anamorphic rock studded with spiny saplings of birch. At this juncture, another, narrower road led away into the deepening shadows of the forest.

He knew that road. It led to a place in the forest that had once been a summer camp for children. Log huts laid down on the sodden forest floor, on the leeward slope of a heavily wooded ridge had provided a point of departure for his youthful imagination to travel to terrifying places. A large empty building which had served as a meeting lodge stood in a clearing, Years ago when as a child he had wandered there alone, frightened and fascinated, deep in some flight of fancy, it already seemed as though it had been abandoned so long that no one knew or cared of its existence anymore. He had no wish to go down that road. He knew now that there were phantoms lurking there, best left undisturbed.

The lengthening shadows slowly stretched out their tendrils on the road ahead of him.

He followed the swing of the road around to the left and picked up his pace a bit. Here the tall trees penned in the roadway even closer; the road described a series of serpentine undulations. Long, smooth, massive humps of granite rose up on either side looking like so many stone whales rising from a leafy green sea. It was curious how tangible the big openness of the lake was behind the timber to his left, and how much he could feel the density of the woods on the other side; it seemed he could feel it as much as know it. A few hundred yards ahead the road swung hard to the left and the forest receded briefly to the east. He could see this open space at the end of a canyon of green. The scale and shape of the landscape was imprinted on his memory.

He passed a pool of water filled with vegetation. Frogs hopped off the banks into the green soup and poked up their heads. The ribbon of sky widened above him as the timber let back across a boggy field to the east, and climbed like a green regiment up the gigantic granite staircase of a rocky promontory to the west.

He turned to look at the rock cliff. He felt the useless impulse to fling himself at it, to struggle through the impenetrable brush, ascend the fiendishly difficult slope and stand atop it. He wished to see the lake from that vantage point, but knew that it was an impossibility. Once as a child he had attempted the ascent and very nearly come to grief in a seemingly bottomless pool of brackish ooze at the foot of the rocks. He craned his head upwards to gaze into the heavens. He wished to be lifted up, to rise up over the trees and hang weightless in the gently moving air. The empathetic sky seemed to salve him with pale gentle grey mauve light. He could have fallen to the ground alone to rest, wept quietly for a while.

He continued up the rising ground to the north.

He climbed the slope and hung poised on the apex of a solid ridge of stone, a screen of high timber to the left, and an empty darkened dwelling overlooking the low marshy terrain to the east, then crossed over and stood at the entrance to a little valley with pleasant meadows on either side. He remembered this as a place of long dry yellow grass waving in a sultry breeze and baking heat, shimmering dryly in the relentless noon sun of a day long passed. His brother had climbed a tree and fallen from the lower boughs. The deep grass below had concealed a hidden danger; brutal shards of broken glass had leapt out and cruelly lacerated his brothers right hand. The fresh blood flowed liberally, spattering the uncaring dust. He had felt the sting of the wound himself and gaped with horror at the whitening contused edges of the livid gash.

The stoic older boy had bound his hand in a cheerful old bandana, and they had gone on their way. The tree still stood like a lonely sentinel.

He passed from the haunted little valley and continued by rippling meadows of tall grass, the forest gradually closing in around him once more. The land dropped gently away again, into a darkening thicket where the road described another series of snaking curves past an ancient gate of trees and a fence that marked an obscure boundary whose meaning had vanished long ago. On the other side the woods closed in still tighter and formed a lattice of boughs overhead, faintly admitting enough light to throw a lace of dappled shadows upon the ground. The surrounding landscape was drowned and swampy. To the left, an open body of water that was too large and deep to be a pond and yet not quite a small lake trended back into the woods to terminate at a sheer smooth rock face some sixty feet high. Drowned dead timber and cattails, marsh plants lent an eerie atmosphere to the mysterious profound pool.

Across to the right, yet another road branched back into a choking wood. A narrow rocky difficult track led back deep into the forest to a tragic haunted clearing. Long ago a sunburnt house with wooden sides weathered a petrified silver grey had stood there in a waving sea of parched tall grass amid the shoals of weirdly smooth curvilinear rock carved by a receding glacier. The forlorn structure was a shell; its exterior deceptively intact, while the treacherous interior was a decaying mess of jumbled debris, its plaster and lathe skeleton laid bare. The empty windows had brooded mutely at an unknown sequence of abandoned dreams and aspirations. The house had stood empty long, long before he knew of its existence, and now it was gone, disappeared into the shallow tentative soil that lined the rock, nurturing seedlings. The hopeless farm which had yielded only stones was gone back, reclaimed by the forest. As far as he knew, no one still living, besides himself, was aware or cared of its former existence. He was certain that he had not dreamed it, however. An abject windmill, rusted to a brilliant burnt orange hue, had once stood like the watchtower of a salient bastion on a heart rendingly ambitious foundation of fieldstones; the disc of its metal blades had sung like an orange emblem against the deep blue complimentary sky. It too was gone.

He remembered another building. An immense barn. As a child the barns appearance to him had seemed more desultory, more decrepit than the dry spare house. Its moss tinged siding fell away in places to reveal the interior of the structure. It had stood apart from the house, closer to the encircling forest and seemed damper, more decayed. He recalled the shocking epiphany that was the product of his childish curiosity. He had entered the rotting structure, half conscious of the danger in doing so, foolishly intrepid. He had explored the various chambers within; their earlier functional quality obscured by an aura of menace. Coming from the back of the building towards the great barn door, he had noticed that many of the massive floor boards were gone, revealing a dim frightening space of uncertain dimension underneath. His gaze fell on a large form of unexpected texture wedged luridly under the flooring. At first the form had no meaning, but then lightning flashed from the clear blue sky and his mind screamed silently in shock and dismay. The mummified corpse of a horse, the skull festooned with thin strips of dried leathery skin, the teeth bared in a hideous grin, the dank empty sockets glaring accusingly at him, lay in an impossible position under the flooring. He froze in horror.

He had the horrid idea that there might be other livid ghoul horses rising out of the crumbling floor behind him, but was afraid to turn and look for fear that the nightmare thing before him would spring up and bar his exit. He took a sudden step and the floorboard sprang rottenly beneath his tread. He had the ghastly notion that he would be pitched forward and fall with his face next to the gruesome unclean monstrosity, that he would become entangled with the angry rotten remnant, unable to escape, locked in a sickening embrace. He made a mad dash for the opening and burst out into the sunlight shuddering with horror. At a safe distance he turned on an island of stone in the grassy sea and sank to his knees wringing his hands, to stare back at the wretched barn. His mind was repelled by the seemingly unlikely aspect of the discovery; who would leave an animal in such a situation? It felt like an obscenity. He couldn’t conceive of circumstances which would allow for it. Only years later did it occur to him that possibly the animal, grazing, had wandered into the trap of the building long after its abandonment and come to grief unknown and unfound. He knew of certain farms in the district whose animals might have had free reign here. The memory of this unwelcome discovery taunted him. All traces were gone now, he knew, the rotting barn and it’s disturbing occupant collapsed into the thin soil.

He hastened on.

He turned north and headed briskly along into the deepening evening. The purple grey sky stretched limitlessly away, a striated pattern of vast feathery veins of thin cloud superimposed against it in great gently curving arcs ten miles above the cooling earth. He stopped briefly to gaze at the black silently moving water in the creek, looking down from the bridge into the little chasm where the old mill had stood many years ago. Cold white cascades flooded across the sharp stones to the west and then slowed in a whirling pool to flow away through the trees and fields to the lake .

He moved on angrily.

Presently he came to the place where the gravel road, wider now, debouched onto the blacktop at a tee junction. The houses on the side of the road where quiet, empty. Childrens toys littered the ample lawns and driveways, but there was no other sign of life. The ancient rusty grey barn on the right stood against the slowly darkening grey sky, brooding, alone. He pulled his jacket tighter around him as the last warmth of the day, rising from the pavement, retreated before a chilling gust rising in the northwest. The suggestion of autumn was unmistakable and mournful. A rusty yellow and black road sign indicating the terminus, pocked with bullet marks, vibrated in the freshening breeze. The sound of the wind rose, keening along the lonely road.

He began to hike along the shoulder of the rural route, past fields and another, smaller swampy lake to the south that sung quietly with the sound of marsh life but betrayed evidence of no human presence. He took less notice of his surroundings now, but seemed more intent on keeping a pace. The road wended past dark still houses and around a sharp banked curve to the north where a single large tree had stood to mark the entrance to another old country road. The tree had been cut down some years ago, with the curious and unwelcome effect that the familiar corner had seemed drained of identity, as if its singular oneness had somehow been diminished.

The topography here was studded with sturdy ridges of rock, and his legs ached from climbing a succession of sharp little rises. He could see the village crowning the crest of the last, largest ridge to the north, set down in a little forest of shade trees like a miles long green and brick red ship moored in an endless sea of amber fields. He wearily bested the last long slow ascent and slowed his pace again as he entered the leafy corridor that led north up to the main crossroads in town. Stately old homes of brick and wood with rambling verandahs and widows walks stood on either side of the wide street. They were uniformly quiet, devoid of the evidence of habitation.

The highway that ran away east and west provided the main street of the little village, intersected at the main crossroads with the north and south route he had come up on. He approached the crossroads now, and looked up at the traffic light that hung above the four way stop, swinging and rocking in the cold steady stream of wind out of the northwest.

Its signals flicked maddeningly slowly in a hypnotizing rhythm from green to amber to red. There were no cars, no drivers to be guided by the admonishing coloured lamps.

He looked briefly at the splendid old town hall, then across to the grocery store, which was closed up and dark inside. He peered down the main street and thought he saw a pickup truck pull away and head out of town to the east, away and gone. The old chip truck stood closed up next to the little park with the stone monument. No one was around. The wind gusted lustily down the main street, sweeping up clouds of dust.

He turned to the west and headed out of town on the lonely highway.

He knew that a dozen or so miles along this road there was another town, a lovely spot where a rising church steeple stood like a signpost at the end of another long slender seductively beautiful lake. A busy marina and several other charming attractions would draw crowds of holiday makers in the high summer, but now the place would be quiet, somnolent, the season ended.

It might seem now as though a thousand years could pass before the warmth would return, the carefree happy people would come back to the sun dappled waters and pleasant streets and cosy restaurants and inns. Further to the west, after the snug comfort of the town, the ground rose higher and the landscape became sour and sullen, almost threatening. There was a great wide tract that seemed unloved, the low impenetrable tangle of ground cover and unkempt evergreens stretching back of the road along the top of a crest of unforgiving granite ridges into the endless north. It seemed as though it was a region that people only hurriedly passed through on their way to another more salubrious destination. It was impossible to surmise what ghosts might inhabit this painful forsaken landscape.

Here, however, the countryside still seemed cultivated if desolate. The sky was a deep mauve now. He walked along the gently curving highway, gazing down the slopes to the south at the fields and stands of timber. He looked up as the wind whistled. Enormous black crows perched on the swaying lines. One of them took flight with a hoarse cackle and flew north with powerful sweeps of its glistening inky wings. He followed its flight as the great black bird went away over a cornfield to the west.

The black iron gate hung a little ways open on rusty hinges.

The iron gate marked the entrance to a lonely little plot of ground. The little quiet place was bounded on the north and west by tall fields of late corn and a stand of trees to the east delineated the boundary to the next lot. Silent stones stood in a forlorn little company in the small humble burial ground. He pushed open the black wrought iron gate and went down the barley discernible track that marked the centre of the graveyard. Over in the back corner of the quiet place, to the northwest, nestled by a fence in the crook of the two bordering cornfields there was a stone, smaller than the rest and with idiosyncratic markings by the hand of its carver, that made it distinct from the others.

He paused for a moment and turned to look back at the crows on the wire. They were gone.

Then he knew that this road would always be his, and his alone. He would keep coming back to this place. He sank to his knees and fell forward onto the damp turf. He pressed his face to the soil and his tears mingled with the dew. He did not know what had become of his sisters; he could not remember his mother, and this stone marked the place where the ashes of his father and his only brother lay beneath the cold clay.