Fugue State: stories

Wander

And after many days of wandering — days of bitter cold, days in which we wore out what remained of our shoes and then lost toes and then wrapped our feet in rags, days in which we were hard-pressed to decide what wounded and floundering flesh was safe to consume and what must be passed over, days when we passed warily by other tribes of men such as ourselves, days when we were forced to decide whether to haul one another forward or abandon one another along what remained of the roadside — we came at last to a place not utterly undone by devastation. The snow and ice first acquired a different sheen, and then grew slick underfoot, and then began to give way to water and soon was entirely gone. God in his mercy had left it undiscovered and awaiting us, or so we believed at the time.

The feeling returned to our fingers for the first time in many months. There were a dozen dwellings intact and sufficient among the ruins, and we made our way into one to find there the dead huddled together dry and hollow now, their bodies like emptied sacks. We lay them with respect in one of the beds of the house and sealed the room because the living should not hold ground in common with the dead. Then we took, from cabinets and closets, dried goods and cans, and many of these proved still edible, and for the first time in many days we did not have to scrabble for food.

We chose a room and tore the planking from the floor and built just outside the house a fire and slept the sleep of the dead.

But in the morning, we began to recall the dead boarded into the room beside us and began to wonder if we had sinned in our actions against them. Our leader, Hroar, determined that we must show them our respect by aiding them on their way to heaven, and so with the smoldering remnants of our fire we made of their house a pyre and let it burn until the dead were nothing but smoke.

“We must,” Hroar told us, “find a dwelling free of the dead and make of it a dwelling for the living.”

We chose another of the still standing dwellings and entered therein and there too we found the dead, their bodies dry and hollowed out, like emptied sacks. There were nowhere signs of life, only a thin settling of dust over all things. We took from the house all goods and cans and stripped it of what lumber it could spare and still be a pyre, and then commended the dead to God’s notice and set the house aflame.

It proved the same with each dwelling standing, each clotted with the dead. Quickly we learned to approach the window of each dwelling and, seeing the dead, leave them undisturbed. It was Hroar who would have it thus, for, he asked, Why would God have left the town for us to discover if our only purpose was to destroy it? No, he said, if they were not disturbed, the dead would be willing to await their reward.

Thus at the end of the second day we had not found a dwelling to call our own. And when we camped, it was not within a shelter but on open ground, and though the ground was free of ice and we now had food and fuel for fires, many grumbled against Hroar and even suggested that we should merely heap the dead together and burn them all and keep their dwellings for ourselves.

On the third day we awoke to find our faces and hands strangely tender with heat and Hroar himself missing. We huddled together and consulted one another as to what should be done, and might in fact have left that place had we known a place to go. As it was, we clung to each other and sometimes searched through the ruins around us. Here too we found bodies, but not nearly so many, and most of them little more than piles of ash. Here too we saw, on what remained of building walls, strange figures: human in size and shape, but with their limbs and bodies odd and misshapen, as if the shadows of monsters had been torn from them to become immobile and fixed, and this filled us with dread.

The place which at first had thus seemed so much a deliverance to us now seemed a warning or perhaps a punishment. There were even those of us who claimed to see in the shadowed figures a premonition of our own deaths.

Hroar returned late in the day, claiming to have found a dwelling free of the dead, a wide and sumptuous hall with room for all, our new home. Let us rejoice, he proclaimed, for our wandering may cease at last.

We rejoiced and then did follow him. He led us through the ruined settlement and to the heart of the rubble and there, buried and hidden, where before we had seen only destruction, was a strange dwelling, partially covered over but seemingly intact. Under his direction we cleared a path to the doorway as best we could and then clambered our way inside.

It was, as he had claimed, a great hall, sufficient to accommodate all our tribe and even more. It was, as he said, intact, though the small windows along three sides were blocked and filled with rubble. Indeed, we would have been vexed to see for darkness were there not a glow from one corner of the room. There, at the juncture of wall and floor, was a hole brimmed with water, and through that hole came a bluish light and heat, and looking closer one could see the shape of a blinking eye. The water was hot and, as one reached into it and toward the blue eye, became hotter still. There were, too, here and there on the walls, the same dark shadows that we had seen elsewhere, but with more frequency here. Yet Hroar, who had shared none of our speculations about these markings, was of the belief that they were merely the guardians of the place itself, there to protect the place and preserve it for ourselves.

“This place is a gift from the true and living God,” he was quick to say. “He has prepared it for us.” And though many of us had our misgivings, we quelled them, found a place for ourselves on the floor, and slept.

I slept soundly and without dreams until the deep of the night, when I awoke to a strange rushing and gurgling sound, and when I opened my eyes the blue glow was gone. I could see nothing, but could hear some of my comrades stirring and some crying out, and the room growing hot and strange until there was the same rushing and gurgling and the blue glow began to return and the room started to cool. Then I sat up and looked about me in the half-light and saw many of my comrades in similar posture, but all of us finally lay down one by one and returned to sleep.

And yet when we awoke, it was to find our two comrades closest to the watery hole both dead, one side of their bodies afflicted with deep and grievous wounds. Some of the men behind them had wounds on their faces and hands as well, and yet they claimed to have felt nothing, and then we knew we had been victim of the creature whose eye we had seen in the hole. Hroar, full of fury, plunged his hand deep into the water to try to pluck out the monster’s blue eye, but brought back a hand boiled and stripped of much of its flesh.

We burnt the bodies of our comrades, and then we took counsel from Hroar and it was determined that as the creature had come at night it was a creature of darkness and would come again at night, at which time we would set upon it and lay it low. We prayed to God for strength and spent the day preparing our weapons.

The night again was peaceful until very late, when we heard the same rush and gurgle and the blue glow vanished. Immediately we were on our feet and striking about near the watery hole, the hall growing hotter until one of us managed to ignite a torch. But then we saw nothing except the water drained from the hole and the eye gone and terrible wounds on our hands and chest and arms — wounds that continued to grow without any tangible agent inflicting them, until one of our number, Hrafn, fell, and the remainder of us, sorely afflicted and knowing not where to strike, fled the hall.

The wounds continued to suppurate no matter how we tried to heal them. When several of us finally ventured back into the hall, we found the hole again filled with water, and the creature, eye staring balefully up at us, had returned to its lair. Hroar, heavy of heart and loath to lose more men, commanded us to leave the hall.

But we did not return to our wandering, instead circling day after day just outside the settlement that contained the hall we had thought offered unto us by God. Hroar, despite his boiled and dying hand, despite the wounds on his arms and face and chest, could not let go of the idea of the hall, of the end of wandering. And though we had been too sorely afflicted to venture a return to the hall itself, we had long followed Hroar and would not abandon him. So we stayed circling the town, while Hroar himself lost first his hand and then, from infection, his forearm. He grew gaunt and gray and ceased to speak. A few of us deserted him but the rest, stalwart, remained. There was, after all, food here for a time and wood to burn, and we were happier than we had been wandering — though the same could not be said for our Lord Hroar, who daily grew less of a man, more of a ghost.

Sometimes other wanderers would stumble into our midst. We would feed them and I would recount to them the tale of our lost hall and invite them to join us as we waited for God to relieve our suffering. To a man they declined, for who would swear fealty to a one-armed and maddened lord?

So we stayed and awaited God’s will. We awaited Hroar’s death, which would release us from our awful circling and allow a more aimless wandering. And yet he did not die. He was reduced to little more than a man of bone, eyes hollow in his sockets, but still did not die. Indeed, there were those among us who began to fear that he did not die because he was already dead, and these soon slipped away in the dead of night and were not seen or heard again. But the rest of us remained fatally bound to Hroar.

And then one day a man came who seemed unlike the others we had encountered, a man broad of face and of limb, a good head taller than even Hroar, and with teeth filed sharp. He hailed us from afar and asked to approach and we beckoned him to share our meal. He sat and ate silently with us and when he was done asked which was Hroar, the mighty lord of a people laid low? He had heard tales of the warrior who had been given by God a hall of ancient design only to lose it again and he was here to offer his fealty, to help Hroar recover his hall.

Hroar stood. He commended the stranger for his bravery and asked of him his name and the name of his father.

“I have no father,” the man said. “As for my own name, I have none.”

He would, he said, challenge our enemy and regain our hall, and thus make a name for himself. Our Lord Hroar swore to him that if he would do as he said, he Hroar would take him unto his bosom as his son and heir, and the name the man would have would be Hroar’s own.

He stayed with us until the fall of darkness, and then several of us led him to the hall and prayed over him and let him enter therein to meet his fate. I shall admit that I for one was not sorry to be far from him. For how, I wondered, can a man have no father? So I further wondered if he were in fact a man such as you and me or another creature entirely.

All night we huddled together. We heard his cries and the bellowing of the beast, or told ourselves we did. We heard the rush and hiss of the creature as it slid, invisible, from its hole to the attack, or told ourselves we had. We huddled and awaited him until, at last, as the sky grew light, we spied him lurching through the ruins, looking as if he had been flayed alive. His arms were stripped of skin to the muscle, and his face, too, looked as though it had been burnt away so that one could see bone, and his eyes too had gone blind and had sizzled away in the sockets. His hand, like that of Hroar, was boiled away and he could no longer move its fingers, and when he breathed, blood pearled like sweat on the skinned surface of his chest. And again I could not help but wonder, Is this in fact a man or another being entirely?

He told the story of his battle with the creature and how when the water had rushed away he had seized its stony hide and not let go until it broke to pieces and the creature was dead. It was safe to return, he claimed, and then asked Hroar to give him a name. But before the mad lord could answer, the man turned his eyes back to examine the inside of his skull and died.

We built for him a pyre and laid his body upon it and burnt him, the few remnants of his skin charring and sizzling, his leg splitting from heat to reveal a strange and silky bone, quickly consumed. We prayed over him, and Hroar breathed a secret name into the flames for him to take with him and stop his wandering, and then he was gone.

As for us? We returned to the great hall to find it still thrall to the same eerie glow, to find ourselves still observed from the water by the same baleful blue eye. And yet Hroar claimed to be certain that the creature, if not yet dead, was dying, for had not the nameless stranger said as much? And did not the eye itself seem fractured now, less vivid, imbued with less light? We must, he told us, stand fast. We must trust our God and then nothing shall touch us.

We have followed him so long we do not know how to stop. And so we remain in the hall, lit by the monster’s eye. Night has come and we are deep into it. I am writing by the glow of our enemy as he bides his time and awaits his chance to destroy us. I am writing in hopes of persuading myself to stay and face this death, I am writing in hopes of persuading myself to flee. Perhaps there is a third path for me, but as of this writing I have not discovered it. When the eye shuts and the monster forces itself upon us, I shall either be gone and wandering tribeless and alone, or be beside my brothers and wandering the paths of the dead. May God, if he exists, have mercy upon us all.