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The winter wind tore through the Allegheny River valley, whistling through the pines and black cherry branches long ago stripped naked by the cool autumn days. The moon was high and bright in a cloudless sky as the young boy sat on his back porch, staring over the railing. He’d covered himself generously with a thick blanket and his stocking cap sat tightly about his head. His thin, gloved hands grasped a richly warm cup of hot chocolate that he’d made for himself after crawling from his bed. Despite all these things, he could not escape the icy fingers of a chill that seeped not from the outside and the cold winter night, but rather grew from the inside, from some dark and primal fear that had roused him from his sleep. He took another sip from the sweet, hot brew and wiped at his nose. His breath turned to smoke in the cold air and drifted away toward the moon. Over the railing of his back porch, the ground was covered in snow and glowed in a ghostly fashion. His father had built their home on a bald spot of land in the Allegheny Forest; a spot that had been rendered nearly barren long ago by voracious logging without any replenishment of the forest’s understory. Without the protective canopy the small things had succumbed to the elements and withered away, never to return. In the winter the snow covered this wide, empty spot and transformed it into a lunar landscape, though a few hundred yards behind his house the ground sloped up again, and the cold white ground disappeared from view at the edge of the dark, densely wooded forest that stood untouched. The boy wondered what had stopped those loggers from charging up the hill so long ago, and what had kept them away ever since.
He thought he knew, if only a little. There was no escaping the dread that the treeline imposed on him. It was this that troubled him, ate away at his sleep, called him from his bed in the middle of the night to come and sit and stare fearfully at the black mass of timber that loomed at the top of the hill, winterbare branches swaying and groaning with the wind. Soon his cup of cocoa would be gone, and his eyes would grow tired and he would eventually find some amount of sleep, ironically, at the foot of the very thing that disturbed it each night. |
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“Matthew?”
The boy’s eyes snapped open and he tore his head up from the desk so quick that he felt a twinge and pop of muscles. He saw his classmates, heads turned and staring at him as his teacher stood at the front of the room, hands on her hips and a scornful look upon her face.
“Sorry,” he muttered as he wiped away at the little bit of saliva that coated his chin.
“Well, perhaps you could join us for the last five minutes of class if it wouldn’t be too much to ask,” she quipped, pointing to the clock on the wall that read 3:25. The other kids chuckled and snickered.
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes as the teacher picked up where she’d stopped to awaken him, droning on about the branches of government. When the bell rang, Matthew shoved his books into his well-worn backpack and flung it over his shoulder. As he slipped past the front row of desks toward the door, he could feel her disdainful gaze upon him.
“I’ll expect you to be better rested on Monday.”
He nodded his head as he cut his eyes to the floor. “I hope so, Ms. Trotter.”
Moments later, he was thrust into the throng of other children as they poured through the school’s side doors and out into the cold afternoon. While many boarded the familiar cheese colored buses, Matthew slipped around back of the school toward the football field, where he would pick up the trail that took him through a small stand of trees to the road. He walked home most every day, preferring it to that grueling continuation of junior high that was embodied by the ride on the bus to and from school.
Soon, he rounded the final corner in the road and started up the driveway to his home. Traffic to and from his house was what could be considered infrequent, and because of this the snow that covered most of the mountain soil was thick and wet beneath his feet as he broke through it with every step. His father was not in the habit of taking the family car out often. The few times he had in recent years, he’d forbidden Matthew to come along on his strange and unknown errands. Then again, strange and unknown was precisely how he would describe the way his father had been for a long while, the reason for it unknown and unknowable to his only son. As Matthew neared the house, he tried hard not to stare up at the dark stand of trees that seemed to lean hungrily toward the lonely structure.
The front door groaned open with its usual protest and once inside Matthew slipped off his shoes and coat, tossing them on the floor next to the door. It was something that his mother would not tolerate; not when she and his father had been married, and not when he visited her during the summer down in Macon, the place in Georgia he called his true home.
He could hear the TV blaring from the downstairs room. Father’s room, he called it, for it was where his father slept and spent nearly all his time, constantly watching taped episodes of old shows like The Avengers, The Man from UNCLE and various quiz shows. A comedy like The Honeymooners was occasionally on the menu, and was a nice break because his father would laugh hysterically and often provide a gut-busting synopsis of the scene after the fact. This he would do whether there was anyone there to listen or not, though when Matthew was around he enjoyed it because it was the most his father ever spoke. When he lived there during the school months, it was Matthew who kept up on most all the housework, including making a meal for dinner. He crept down the stairs to father’s room, where he stood at the threshold and watched the pungent cigar smoke drift from where his father sat in the recliner, rocking rhythmically back and forth.
“Hey, Dad,” he offered.
His response came in the form of a fresh puff of cigar smoke.
“I’m gonna make dinner. Chicken and rice.”
He waited for a moment before turning to walk back upstairs.
“Chicken and rice is nice,” came the reply.
Matthew nodded and made his way into the kitchen where he set about getting a couple chicken breasts in the oven. Eating in that house was more about sustenance than taste, though he had picked up a few things from visiting his mother in the summers. Meals were basic and bland, based entirely on the foodstuffs and other household supplies that his father had delivered once a week from the mom and pop grocery several miles down the valley. All the bills were paid automatically, drawn from the account that had been set up with the money his father had received after the accident at the mill. The medicine that his father took daily showed up every month like clockwork, and it was this myriad of pills alone that enabled his father to move about at all without pain. While the accident hadn’t rendered his legs completely useless, pain was a constant way of life and any prolonged use or exertion of the muscles was met with additional pills. The medicine, or perhaps something else, had long ago begun to affect his father’s mind in ways that made him obstinate and odd. Hence the constant viewing of old TV programs and the notebooks that his father kept secreted away, full of scrawled messages he believed to be hidden in the shows. Thus was life for Matthew Hanlon.
When dinner was cooked, he pulled up a couple of TV trays and a chair next to his father and they ate in silence, but for the flashing television tube and the continuing adventures of John Steed and Mrs. Peel. |
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Long after his father had gone to sleep, Matthew had crawled into his bed and lay on his side next to the reading light with a library copy of Poe’s collected works. He was deep into the first stanzas of “The Raven” when there came a knock at the front door. So out of the ordinary was this event that the young boy thought surely he’d misheard, that perhaps Poe’s dark weave of words were beginning to trick his mind. Then it came again, and he sat up in bed this time, listening closer. When he heard it a third time, he rose from his bed and padded down the hall to the den. The door was closed and locked, but as he stood there it came again; a fourth and louder rapping on the door.
Uncommon though it might be, he told himself there was no reason to fear a thing so common had he been anywhere else. He held his breath as he clicked the lock back and turned the knob.
“Only this and nothing more,” he whispered to himself as he cracked the door open and peered through.
The porch light illuminated not a monster, but a pale stranger who stood on the front porch. It was dark and the tall, thin man had a heavy coat bound about him and seemed to wince at the whistling wind that sang from the black mountainside.
The stranger looked at him with the most magnificent and piercing blue eyes.
“Matthew Hanlon?”
The boy was taken aback a moment, though he nodded his head.
“Mind if I come in?” the stranger asked.
The scintillating blue of those eyes was striking, and the young boy instantly felt comfort and certainty upon looking into them.
“Sure,” he replied as he began to swing the door wide open. Then something caught him, some inner voice snapped at him and he drew back and stopped his hand.
“Uh . . . no,” he began, unsure of what to say, “Can I help you?”
At this the stranger smiled and nodded his head. “They said you’d be strong.”
Matthew wrinkled his brow. “Who said?”
“The dreams,” the pale man replied, quite matter-of-factly. “You dream, too. So much it won’t let you sleep.”
It was strange, but the young boy felt an overwhelming sense of trust for this person at his threshold.
“I’ve seen it, too,” the stranger whispered, his slow and familiar southern drawl suddenly noticeable.
Without further thought, Matthew opened the door wide and welcomed the man in. The door now closed, the stranger shook off the cold and rubbed his hands together in a warming fashion before stretching a hand out in greeting. A moment passed while Matthew’s mind tried to sort out what had just happened, and what was happening. His thoughts drifted to the poem. A raven at the door, this was. A white raven whose coming was surely a portent.
“Matthew, I’m Levi,” he said as the young boy clasped his chilled, strong hand. “And I’m here to help.”
The boy nodded. “I believe you are.”
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They sat at the kitchen table, the young boy and the pale man, sipping cups of cocoa and speaking of things that would scarce be understood outside of those walls. Levi had asked him how long he’d felt it, the thing he called the “trouble in the wood.” Matthew explained that it had been only earlier this school year that the dreams had begun troubling him. Late in the summer, after he’d come back from Georgia, he was walking in the forest by his home, just walking. It was something he often did, to separate himself from the sometimes imposing gray fog that came along with being back in Pennsylvania, back at school, looking after his father as much as the strange man would allow himself to be looked after. Normally, it helped give him some peace of mind where he could not find it elsewhere
“You got no friends?” Levi asked.
“No, not really,” the boy explained. There were some kids he ate lunch with, part of what was known in the school as the freaks club, but they mostly just talked about punk music and swapped tapes with each other. He never talked much about his life, or his father, who was a bit of a local spook story among the kids; a kind of joke. The old crippled hermit on the mountain.
Levi listened and smiled warmly. “They make fun of you, don’t they? Some of them . . . because of the way you talk.”
“Yeah,” Matthew nodded. Indeed most everyone at the school he’d been in class with knew from his slow drawl that he wasn’t from the valley. “They call me a hick.”
The pale man shook his head. “All your people from Macon?”
He nodded and smiled, thinking of the warm Georgia sunshine he so often missed.
“How about your people?”
Levi took a long sip of his cocoa and set it down on the table. “Alabama, mostly. But I’m from all over, so . . .”
“I’ve never been to Alabama.”
“Well,” Levi began, clearing his throat a little, “I’ve been to Macon. Seemed like good folks there.”
There was a moment of stilted silence as they both dwelled on the fond memories of their own homeplaces, so very much in contrast with the frigid dark that sprawled across the hills outside.
Matthew went on to tell him about walking in the woods that one late summer day, out by the old stone house when a terrible feeling had enveloped him. It had inspired within the boy a panic he’d never felt before. Unable to assuage his own fears, he’d decided to run like hell out of there and back to the house, though he kept looking all around him and over his shoulder as he did so.
“I felt like . . .” the boy struggled for the words, staring down at the kitchen table as though they’d appear before him.
“Prey,” Levi remarked, cutting the silence.
He looked up and into those wild blue eyes. Silently, he nodded his head.
“Did something happen to you?” Levi’s body leaned in, his voice lowered to a near whisper.
“When?” came the perplexed reply.
“Before. Before that day in the forest. Something that changed the way you see things?”
He nodded his head slowly as he thought back. When he had come back at the end of last summer, only a few days after his thirteenth birthday, he’d had an awful dream and woke up to find his pillow and sheets drenched in sweat, his body cold and trembling. He’d dreamt he was a passenger on a bus winding its way through the dark mountain roads. There had been lots of folks on it along with him, all talking and having a time. The savage rain of a thunderstorm beat on the windows and the wind would thrash the bus every so often. Without warning, there had been such noise, then screaming as the bus tipped on its side and went sliding down through the darkness. Crashes and shattering, then a sense of bone-chilling cold and wetness. It was then that he woke up. Days later, he’d seen on the front page of the local paper that a tour bus in the valley had lost control in a storm, tumbled down the hillside and crashed into the river. Bodies were still turning up miles downstream, it had read.
The pale man half-smiled, a sense of understanding about him. “That’s when it woke up in you.”
“When what . . . ?” the boy began but the stranger reached across the table and placed his finger squarely between the boy’s two eyes.
“Your sight, the othersight,” he said.
As his finger lingered there, Matthew could feel a burn and tingle from that spot on his forehead that seemed to spread like fire along his scalp.
“So what do we do?”
Levi sat back and drained his cup of cocoa.
“For tonight, nothing,” he said. “I know you want to put this to rest, and I do too. That’s what I’m here for. But for tonight, we just sleep.”
“And dream,” he added.
“No,” Levi smiled, “Tonight you sleep. I will dream.”
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It was the first dreamless sleep Matthew remembered having in a long while. He struggled from its sweet embrace and wiped his eyes as he sat up in bed. The sun poured in through the window and something about the whole world seemed brighter. He saw that Levi had abandoned the thin pillow and blanket on the floor where he’d slept and was sitting up against the far wall and staring inquisitively at his own hand, turning it front to back as if looking for something.
“Hey,” Matthew managed groggily.
The stranger smiled and looked up at him. “Morning.”
“I slept,” the boy remarked.
“Yes, you did,” Levi said as he stood up and wandered to the window, drawing the thin white curtains aside. “It’s still out there, though.”
Matthew sighed, his shoulders slumping.
“Hey now, don’t despair just yet,” the pale man said and placed a warm hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Did you dream?”
Levi nodded. “I know what must be done now, and something of the trouble itself.”
“What . . . ?” he started, but was silenced by a wave of Levi’s hand.
“I’m sure your father is hungry, Methias.”
He crinkled his brow. “Who’s Meth . . .” but was again cut off.
“It’s almost eleven. Come to think of it, I could use a bite myself. We’ll eat, then I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.”
With that, the stranger disappeared down the hallway and Matthew was left to gather himself. As he scrambled some eggs and bacon in the kitchen, he could not help but go often to the sliding glass windows that opened to the back porch and look curiously at the pale man, who stood at the bottom of the snow-covered hill, staring up into edge of the troubled wood, contemplating. |
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Levi was sitting at the kitchen table when Matthew finished his scavenging about the house for the things the pale stranger had asked him to find. He dumped them onto the kitchen table and sat down across from him, anxious to hear of the dreams.
The pale man stared weirdly at the blade of the razor knife which lay on the table next to the matches, candle, and ballpoint pens; beneath them a blank sheet of white paper.
“The ruins of the old stone house in the woods,” Levi said, “that is the center of the trouble; the thing. It was brought here, brought by old, dark magic . . . and someone is keeping it there.”
Matthew’s eyes were wide with wonder at this statement. “Who?”
With a sigh, Levi began the tale of what his dreams had revealed. The old stone house had been built on an old site of power on the mountainside, built there by a man who fancied himself a wizard of some kind. The simple wooden shack he’d built served as a refuge for him, away from the prying eyes of others in the nearby town where he was employed as apprentice to a metal smith. It had been a place where he could go to study the strange and wyrding ways of magics from an ancient age of mankind. These were rites meant to give the sorcerer sight into dark dimensions that lay beyond the veil of earthen life; to give him the ability to communicate with beings that dwelled there, and to summon them into this world. It was around the turn of the last century when this man had decided to perform such a summoning and meant to bind the thing to his service and his will. The old wizard had prepared for days for the working, and when the time came he performed the rites with feverish anticipation, calling forth something he called a shambler. As his ceremony neared its apex, a burst of light as time and space was ripped in twain heralded the arrival of the thing. Its form was gigantic, and he reeled away from it instinctively, though he knew the shambler was bound to him with the symbols etched onto a pewter amulet he’d made and enchanted in the days before. Still, the summoned thing was wild with confusion at its new surroundings, and wilder still with the utterly inhuman hate and hunger that ran through the veins of its abominable limbs.
“What happened then,” Levi continued in low, hushed tones, “I couldn’t see. But something terrible befell the old wizard, and he was suddenly . . . gone.”
“Gone?”
The pale stranger nodded. “Yes, gone.”
There was a moment of silent consideration as both of them considered the multitude of possibilities.
“Anyway,” Levi continued, “no matter what happened to the wizard, the fruit of his magic still walks the forest. Which, I think, means that the amulet is still there, too . . . somewhere.” The pale stranger glanced out the windows around the back porch. “Keeping it bound to that place.”
Matthew nodded his head. “But why me? Why do I have the nightmares?”
“Because you opened yourself to it. Not intentionally, no; but your inner eye opened sometime before that day you had in the forest. That’s why you felt it.”
“Because I . . . ?” Matthew began.
“Because you can see it, Methias, if only in dream. All others, most of them, who have gone there before you . . . they couldn’t see it, or understand what they were seeing. Some were lucky, I think. Some weren’t. Most have avoided the place.”
For a moment, the boy considered it. “Who is Methias?”
Levi smiled. “You are. Sometimes we chosen ones have a name unknown to most. Methias is your name; your dream name.”
The boy’s mind was now reeling with questions but before he could ask any more the pale stranger took up the paper and one of the pens and began scrawling something.
“This,” Levi held up the paper, displaying what he’d drawn, “will protect us.”
The boy saw the shape in the black ink of the pen. It was a five pointed star, though skewed as if it were caught up in the dragging force of an ocean wave. Within its center, a lone and staring eye of flame. He wasn’t sure why, but he recoiled from it a little.
“Now,” the pale stranger said as he put down the paper, “let me light that candle, and you check the blade. Make sure it’s good and sharp. I’m not fond of pain.”
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It was hours after that when the boy stood out in the dark and cold of the night, staring up at the hungry trees. He looked up at the pale stranger next to him, who simply gazed into the forest with a stare that might pierce a thousand yards. The white face of the moon was high and bright in the sky, their breaths a ghostly cloud escaping their lungs. The man turned to look at the boy, and placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“Always remember your name of power,” he said.
The boy nodded, grateful of the encouraging words though he was unsure of the meaning. With that, they stepped forward into the dark stand of trees and very soon the white landscape behind them was a memory. Matthew screwed up his courage and led the way through the wood that he knew so well. Onward they trudged through the cracking of the forest floor covered with spent, frozen leaves and putting their hands up to part the way through low-hanging limbs and spindled branches. Sooner than he’d hoped Matthew saw the ragged stones of the old house coated in the moonlight, and for a brief moment he considered succumbing to the fear that grew inside him with every step. Onward he went, though, until they had cleared the dense collection of trees that surrounded the structure. It was there that he heard the footfalls of his pale companion stop, and he did likewise. Seeing the remains of the old structure before him, he took a few steps backward until he could see Levi from the corner of his eye.
They were protected. This he knew, for he had scrawled the symbol himself into the flesh of the pale man as he’d been directed to. Uneasily, he had taken the razor to the stranger’s flesh and carved the outlines of the symbols deep into Levi’s pale skin. He’d never seen such blood as that which spilled forth from the stranger’s hands, but as he’d been instructed he poured the black ink into the gaping lines of the wound. As if enough pain had not been achieved, the stranger commanded him to hold the hot flame of the candle against his flesh so it might stop the bleeding and forever seal within his flesh the mark which Levi cryptically referred to as the mark of the Elders.
They stood in dead silence for many moments before the hair on Matthew’s arms began to rise and that evil cloud began to edge its way into his mind. Levi scowled, feeling the same foreboding blackness as it rushed through the trees toward them. It was coming. He couldn’t see it, nor hear it, but there was no mistaking the impending certainty. The boy’s fear was desperate and took hold; every instinct screamed at him to flee at once. He ignored it and stiffened his resolve.
Levi looked at him, his wild blue eyes fixed intently on the boy. “It comes,” he remarked.
The boy edged closer until he could feel Levi, and pinched his fingers on the fabric of the pale stranger’s long, black coat. Then there was a sun-bright flash that tore through the dark of the cold evening, and revealed in its wake the shadow of a colossal terror.
“Stay with me!” he heard Levi shout over the strange sucking sound that followed.
It was then that the shambler stood before them. Its terrible, pale eyes made a mockery of the moonlight which dappled shadow upon its lumbering form. Every limb thick as the oldest hickory, it howled a cry into the black that invaded not only the ears, but the very minds of those present. A sickening maw opened, salivating in hunger as it lunged toward them. Levi raised his hand as the symbol, emblazoned in the flesh of his left palm, seemed to glow hotter than any coals the boy had ever seen. In a moment of panic, the boy had fallen from his hold on the pale stranger and stumbled backward. His courage discarded, he scrambled to regain his footing and leapt backward, concerned only with leaving the black, troubled forest behind. After taking a few steps, he glanced back and saw the embattled stranger with a smoky shield that seemed formed of the air itself emanating from the tips of his fingers as the shambling thing loomed forward with its hungry jaws. Matthew slowed his retreat, feeling compelled to provide aid, though he knew not how. As his steps faltered, he felt the ground beneath him snap and give way, then found himself plummeting downward into a deep, earthen darkness that even moonlight would strain to find. |
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Levi was struggling against this horror from a world beyond. Its two massive arms, each one gnarled into claws at their end, swung at him time and again, their wild movements punctuated occasionally by the snapping of its jaws as it leered toward him but was repelled by the protection the sign.
Then, accompanied by the same sucking noise that had heralded its arrival, it was gone; sucked into the ink of the night. The stunning silence invaded his ears as he stumbled backward, switching his feet and looking around with stolen breath. Levi knew instinctively it would come again. To appear and disappear was its nature; the method of its hunt. His protection had served him well, but it was only as strong as the will and spirit of the one who wielded it, and he felt himself becoming tired. When it appeared just behind him and snatched at his arm, one of the teeth bared in its unearthly maw tore through the fabric of his sleeve, and he was spun around where he raised his emblazoned hand and fended off its next attack.
With anger, he spat at the thing. “The Great Fear has named you a hound of the black pharaoh, and as such I have no fear of you!”
As it towered above him, it settled for a moment, cocking its head as if in recognition of something he’d said. Then it cried monstrously to the night and set its wide, white eyes upon the insolent prey that lay beneath the protection of the elders’ sign. Even its tiny mind and limited capacity for reason could recognize it was only a matter of time. |
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Matthew stared up at the night through a dark tunnel above. As he shook the fall from his head, he struggled to understand his surroundings. The flashlight was nearby, shining up on an unremarkable part of the earthen wall around him. It was enough to tell him that he lay at the bottom of a chamber that had been hewn by the hands of men to tap the mountain waters that had long since abandoned it. He thrashed about at the bottom of the old well, desperately clawing for a way to tear himself free of the muck in which he found himself imbedded. As he slipped his fingers through the muck in hopes of a handhold, he felt the distinct contours of a skull. Sinking deeper, his hands slipped down the disjointed neck bones to the cold metal adornment that lay there
His eyes opened wide as he realized he’d discovered the resting place of the amulet, and of the wizard who’d born it. The constant clacking of long-forgotten bones beneath his feet as he clawed his way along the root-woven wall toward the night above left no doubt about that.
When at last Matthew dug his fingers into the cold, hard soil of the surface, he felt them tire and slip. It seemed for a moment that his strength might fail entirely and he would find himself plummeting backwards down the well once more. But he steeled his resolve, and reached further, slowly dragging himself from the pit and tossing away the frozen deadfall of the forest which had cloaked the old well. Lying at the edge of the pit, he saw only the sky. He cried to the cold stars for the stranger, summoning what was left of his voice. |
The pale stranger was staring at the moonlight glinting along the edge of one of the shambler’s incisors when he heard the boy’s voice. His focus was robbed as he turned to see Matthew lying on his side, caked with mud but clutching something that glinted in the moonlight. It was the black wizard’s amulet! In that moment of realization, he felt the knowledge bare itself to his mind. The shambler had lost its summoner to the depths of a hole in the earth that not even the old mountain wizard had known of, and this beast of the Old Ones had haunted this wood ever since.
His lack of focus nearly cost him his life, as he felt the wind of the great claw that swept across from above. Luckily it slashed only a flesh wound across his chest and neck, then pulled away as Levi turned to face it and poured his waning energy into the protection shield. Still the thing drove onward, backing him down as he crawled backward along the forest floor. He kept the shambler at bay for what seemed an impossibly long time, his will and his energy to uphold the shield slipping away with the passing of every second. The reserves of his powerful will began to draw upon their last, and he prepared himself for the end that would come at the rending of those gnashing, spear-like teeth.
In that moment of hopelessness, he saw the boy rush forward, his young legs charging the terrible shambler with every step, the boy holding the amulet before him as if he could command the thing to retreat. Levi cried out to him, knowing that he had no such power, knowing that the power of protection and command belonged not to the bearer of the amulet but the wizard that had brought about its existence. The amulet itself was simply a terrible binding, a chain that would forever lash the abomination to the world of mankind.
“Methias, no!” Levi cried out.
Such was for naught, though, as the boy charged forward without the benefit of the elders’ protection. Dumb and hungry, the shambler turned its attentions from Levi to the one who ran toward it. It bared its gnashing jaws in a terrible grin and lunged forward, deftly snatching Matthew up by his leg.
Levi could see the young boy dangling from the jaws of the beast bathed in white moonlight.
“The amulet!” Levi cried, “The amulet must be destroyed!”
The boy’s eyes went wide and glazed as the pain set in. Copious amounts of blood poured down the gnarled flesh of the shambler’s jaws. Matthew’s hand went limp as he was carried on high by the thrashing of the shambler and the shining amulet fell to the frozen leaves. The beast seemed sated for the moment and the air around it began the strange shimmering that heralded the shambler’s shifting away into its own terrible dimension; to a place where it could feed on its quarry in peace.
The amulet lay useless on the ground. Levi scrambled toward it and upon feeling the cold metal clasped in his hand, he stared upward at the grisly sight.
“Methias!” he screamed to the night.
Undaunted, the shambler tossed its young prey high into the air playfully and as the boy came plummeting downward to its waiting incisors, the beast caught him by the same leg which had by then been torn to its bone-white center. As it clamped down on him, Levi heard the boy’s leg snap like a twig and then Matthew fell to the ground.
Just then Levi saw his opportunity, for though the shambler was shifting out of their world for the moment, but would doubtlessly return within seconds to finish off the pair. Unless its binding accompanied it to that unnamable place of horror that had spawned the thing.
“Make right my aim,” Levi whispered to the night as he raised the amulet in his fist and then sent it flying far above toward the gaping jaws of the beast. As the white hot flickering light reached its apex, the sorcerer’s amulet went sailing past the shambler and disappeared. The thing cast one last confused glance toward the pale stranger lying on the ground, then felt its essence beckoned elsewhere. The wind died down and the light dissipated and the trouble which had so long haunted the forest disappeared, leaving only silence and darkness in its wake. |
Days later, they sat in awkward quietness at the table, neither one of them making much effort to look long upon the other. The boy’s gaze seemed perpetually bound to the floor or looking out at some far-off thing that was beyond even Levi’s power of sight. The dreams and visions; they directed him only so far, showed him only so much. They had not prepared him for the sight of young Matthew sitting there, one leg planted firmly on the ground while what was left of the other dangled there absently, swathed in bandages.
“Well,” the boy offered with a smirk, “at least now I will get some sleep.”
Matthew rose from his chair, planted an old wooden crutch beneath his arm and hobbled toward the stairs that led down to his father’s room. Before he turned and descended those few steps he managed a bitter smile.
“Thank you,” he said.
Levi’s spirit sank and went dark as he watched the boy amble down the stairs and take a seat next to his father, leaning his crutch against the chair. Cigar smoke drifted through the still, dank air and the light from the television flashed, casting a long shadow of the crutch across the floor. The pale stranger lowered his head and turned away as an old Honeymooners episode continued to play across the screen. Despite Ralph Cramden’s comedic antics, what chilled his blackened heart was the deafening absence of laughter. |
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