Xeno Sapiens (51 page)

He fell through the doorway, the meager heat
inside the trailer shocking to his numb body. He slammed the door
shut behind him.

The noises stopped.

It was as if someone had lifted the needle
from a record. The night was as still and silent as it had ever
been. Still shivering, Mark wiped the condensation from the glass
window in his door and peered outside.

Just within his field of view and off to his
left, the steady shape of the church was dark and quiet, as
brooding and lifeless as castle lions. He looked at the wishing
well. The harsh wind had died to nothing and he tried to see if the
parched weeds around it still whipped in that alien, subterranean
wind. They showed no movement, rigid as steel beams. He couldn't
see the sinkhole at all.

He switched on the overhead light and sat on
his bed, pulling an extra blanket around him. He knew his jaw
muscles would be sore the next day from the strenuous chattering of
his teeth. He huddled inside his blanket, ragged pain edging into
his cut feet as his body slowly warmed. Once in a while the
serpent's tail of the wind whipped down and made the trailer lean.
He would look up, eyes wide, before returning to hide in his
blanket, realizing all at once just how small and used up he had
become. How this place had turned him from a man to a withered
coward with no balls, whimpering like a whipped animal in its den.
He had thought it was because of the betrayal of all those who were
near to him, but it was this place that had instigated that
betrayal. He had been duped.

His glance strayed to the faceless Eleanor
on the wall, her eyes regarding him with her self-serving mockery,
then to Anna's portrait. The brightness and understated sadness he
had so lovingly crafted into her expression comforted him a little.
Already knowing what he would see, he stood up slowly and went
around the bed.

The blank canvas now had the beginnings of a
painting on it. Just the bare outlines of a woman in a black dress,
a newborn in a crib in a darkened room, a doorway with another
woman standing there…

**********

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, all art is
surface and subtext, and the artist dives beneath at his own peril.
Mark Wright understands what it is like to lose himself in his art,
to go too deep, to cut to the bone and all the way to the cancerous
growth of an artist's obsession. Nothing and everything is real:
some things too false, some things, like an ex with an ax to grind,
too murderously tangible in his fantasyland. The reach of The Lost
Village is long, its appetite mean. Nobody would get out alive…

Available at
www.wandilland.com

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From
Wandil Land...

Summer's fleeting span had passed by the
second week of October, bespoken by the yellowing of the leaves on
the now fruitless pear trees. As if in compensation, apples hung in
heavy, pulsing bunches. Patches of red had erupted like small fires
in the Maple trees. When he had gotten up this morning, the water
flowing in his sink had been cold, unwarmed by the length of pipes
that now ran through the earth which had finally given up its
summer heat. At night the chill came on more quickly. The moon, it
seemed, had been full forever, rising red and burning bright silver
by midnight, but still unable to dim the stars that now shone
through air clear of summer haze.

The first pumpkins and sweet potatoes had
come in and the corn was gone, the brown shocks now dry as kindling
in the fields. White potatoes were plentiful, but peaches and plums
were small and scarce. Scuppernongs and Muscadines (what his mother
had always called “bullets”) were coming on strong. The second
growth of cabbage had matured into dense, heavy heads, a little
yellower now, but bug free. A surfeit of edible, fall squash
glutted the fields. There were bright orange Hubbard squash, white
ten toes squash, buttercup, butternut, spaghetti, acorn, and turban
squash. Decorative gourds had begun to appear around the town,
hanging from porch awnings and scattered about on tables. All the
berries were pretty much gone and David had realized as early as
three weeks ago that summer was over when the watermelons had
disappeared. What came next were the cold weather crops; turnips,
and collards, and rutabagas and winter wheat.

The next cross quarter festival was just
over the horizon. The Big One.
Samhain
, Wilma called it.
Halloween
, Whisper Storm called it, with that familiar, dour
note in her voice. God knew, the woman would complain if you hung
her with a new rope.

He had slipped away that morning while Wilma
was busy. He had managed to avoid a return to the Rose of Sharon
tree and felt he could live without seeing it again for a dozen
lifetimes. But there were other mysteries in this town yet to
explore. His daughter was here, his wife had made her life here,
and maybe he was kidding himself in believing that his own life lay
anywhere else but here. But he couldn't dismiss the gentle warning
Jerry Potter had given him. Potter was a man who was probably at
the end of his best years, his story told in the red snaps of
broken capillaries in his eyes and his unsteady hands and sallow
complexion, but David wasn't willing to dismiss all of his
experience from his good years so quickly.

What David really wanted was to see what lay
at the end of Yankee Burying road. He wanted to form his own
impression of the place without Wilma's all knowing voice in his
ear.

He picked his way down the unused trail that
wove toward the northeast corner of the farm lands. The wind that
blew through the variegated leaves of the trees was cool and dry,
though the sun was out. Here, there were no tended fields and
somewhere unknown, but always near, the cairns of Avalon. The woods
were wild and barbaric. He felt watched, if by nothing other than
the animals that lived here. He was trespassing into the abode of
some elemental creature; something greater than himself.

Just as he was about to come out at the end
of Yankee Burying Road, something made him look up to his right. He
saw a fox at the edge of the forest, its bat ears perked up,
looking at him like a keenly alert dog. Its eyes were wide and
liquid as it regarded him, sitting still as stone. David stopped.
He had seen many a dead fox on the side of the road, but this was
the first live one he had ever seen. He felt a little pang of
wonder. The fox turned and kind of
whipped
away, moving like
a leaping mongoose, its puffy tail trailing, and vanished into the
woods. It was a quick, catlike movement that caught David off
guard. That same sixth sense that had caused him to look up in the
first place dragged his gaze to the left. A yearling deer,
antlerless, stared at him silently. It grazed a bit, looked up,
grazed a little more, then looked up again. Large, brown, wet eyes
looked at David with an almost human expression in them and David's
heart stumbled. He heard a grating, chuffing bellow – a scary sound
if you didn't know what it was- and the deer bounded into the
woods, heeding the call of the buck for its herd. He could vaguely
see their bodies moving through the trees. The way the animals had
regarded him made David think of stoic Spartans guarding the pass
at Thermopylae against the Persian masses, as if human souls
inhabited the bodies of the animals. Wilma had spoken obliquely of
reincarnation and David almost believed the deer could be Jeannie,
free at last from the miserable bonds that had bound her in life;
free to run and live in a place where she wasn't hunted.

It was a weird feeling he just couldn't
shake.

As he stepped out of the woods, he wasn't
sure what to expect, but what he found at the end of Yankee Burying
road was more horrific than the Rose of Sharon tree.

The first artifact wasn't so bad, but its
sheer size was intimidating. Planted perfectly upright was a sturdy
crucifix built from Ash. Sparse, fall parched grass crunched under
his feet at its base. It jutted twelve feet into the sky with a
crosspiece at least six feet wide. It was massively thick, a foot
and a half in diameter. It's gray wood was glass slick and must
have been over a hundred years old.

But beyond this lay the real horror.

Growing in six concentric circles for a
diameter of fifty yards were vast Oak trees, their trunks as smooth
and limbless as telephone poles. They had either grown or been
planted in geometric precision. Each was a perfect sixty feet tall,
their leafy crowns sprouting directly from the tops of their
untapered trunks in mushroom like parasols that interlocked in a
visually impenetrable canopy. At the base of each tree was a
leaning, gray marker. Etched on the markers, in the same white
markings as the stones at the Rose of Sharon tree, were crude
crosses and the names and ranks of the luckless, Yankee sailors
that had met their deaths here.

Jim Ambrose, Seaman, June 5, 1864.

Evan Ball, Yeoman, June 5, 1864.

Civil war sailors, most likely part of the
Yankee blockade, better than two hundred, all counted. Invaders or
castaways, their fate had been the same. Shaking his head, David
made his way through the brooding giants toward the center of the
circle, noting with unresolved horror the old, sun-washed bones
protruding from the midst of the hearts of the trunks. A half a
skull with its jawbone open and filled with the growth of the trunk
-as if it had taken a huge bite from the tree and couldn't quite
manage it- jutted out. One eye socket was buried, the other gazing
out hollowly in empty air. David saw the green waters of the
Atlantic beyond through the empty space between cheekbone and jaw.
On some of the trees, the bare flat surfaces of ribs girdling the
trunks barely peeked out from the overspreading wood. As he drew
deeper into the living relics, he saw long bones -leg and arm
bones- wrapped in living, wooden flesh. The occasional, salt
tarnished brass button gleamed dully from the imprisoning bark. He
got the uneasy impression that the trees had, as saplings, been
lopped off, their ends sharpened, and these hapless victims impaled
and left to decay. The only thing that kept him fascinated instead
of frightened was the fact that – whatever had happened here- had
happened well over a hundred years ago.

In the center of the circles he discovered a
burrow constructed of broken limbs and driftwood. It was seven feet
in diameter and seemed to blend into the ground like the den of
some vulpine animal. He stuck his head into its black maw to get a
look around and was immediately driven out by its wild, musky
smell. A smell of rotten meat and putrefacting vegetable matter.
But he had seen enough to realize the den was constructed around a
partial section of the ancient, busted ribs of the Yankee vessel.
Most of the craft had been eaten away by worms and the bulk of the
derelict was either broken up out in the surf or buried in the
ground, but he had seen dull brass fixtures and black, rust
thickened iron castings scattered in the darkness of the den.

Outside in the fresh air, David moved around
to the rear of the den. Previously hidden from view, the black
corpus of the boat's anchor was half buried in the soil, the links
of its heavy chain trailing from its eye and rooting into the
earth. With all the care of a prize winning artisan, someone had
carved a sign out of a glass smooth slab of wood and had lashed it
to the iron anchor with a chain as stiff and rust coated as the
anchor itself. It hung there lopsidedly with a faintly, sardonic
air.

IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.

He pushed on, growing cold from the inside.
He recognized the phrase, but didn't know what it meant. It was as
mysterious and unsettling as the carved word
Croatoan
from
Roanoke Island.

He was now eager to come out on the other
side of the eerie killing ground and get out on the sand and into
the sunlight. The surf crashed fifty yards away and he walked out
onto the sand, feeling the arid breeze drying the sweat on his
brow. His forehead furrowed as he saw a cylindrical post about four
feet high with something atop it planted in the sand at the surf's
edge, too far away to see detail, but obviously something man
made.

He plodded warily over to the... whatever it
was. As he scanned the beach from side to side he saw two more of
the things, one each on his left and right, planted twenty five
yards from each other on either side of the center post. As he
approached the demarcation line at the furthest incursion of the
surf, he looked the first of the things face on.

Fastened to the top of the straight, three
inch diameter post with cruciate bindings of vines was a heavy,
elaborately carved totem. Though vines couldn't rust or tarnish, if
they had been able to, the ones binding this totem would have.

The totem itself was of a triple faced
woman, carved untold years ago out of dense Oak. As he faced it
with his back to the surf, the carving looking to the left, or
East, was a smooth, young woman, the face unwrinkled and the eyes
wide and curious. The middle face was a mature woman with a few
creases in her face, the forehead lined, the jowls beginning to
droop, the deep set eyes looking wisely toward the north. The third
face, gazing to the west, what Wilma called the Otherworld, was a
wizened old crone, wrinkled and sagging, the nose grown long and
hooked, the chin pointed. Nothing could approach from the sea
without being observed by one of the faces of the triple goddess.
The only way to approach the triple goddess was from behind, the
town side. As he had felt at the Rose of Sharon tree, this eerie,
spooky relic made his soul tremble. David extended his hand and let
his fingers roam over the intricate, wind and sand eroded features
of the carving.