Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

Hell from the East

My path to sickness began the day General Lee surrendered his sword. That coward laid down his arms, and so me and my brother took our rifles and headed west. Wasn’t sure where we was heading, just away. My brother didn’t make it far. He’d survived the Battle of Sharpsburg but was brought down by a persistent cough. Fell off his horse and never got back up. I’d seen more dead than any vicar, but that don’t make me immune to its sad effects. Many a drink and several fistfights later, I found myself in a new army. They gave me a uniform I was more familiar shooting at than buttoning across my chest, and somehow slid from a war between brothers to this frontier life hunting natives. It was all about killing a man you didn’t know. That made it easier, keeping them strangers. Knowing them makes the killing hard.

My father had raised me and my brothers in the pine-studded hills of Virginia, just outside of Staunton. Pa gave me my first rifle, pointed at a squirrel, and told me to shoot. Men more dear to me than my father have been handing me guns and directing my fire ever since. I still find it strange how a man can lose at a war and then enlist in another with his enemy. But there are no real sides in this life except the barrel of a gun and the butt of a gun, and I know where I prefer to stand.

After enlisting, they stationed me at Fort Morgan. This was years before that unfortunate incident at Wounded Knee Creek. It was before the world heard of the Ghost Dance that was driving the natives mad. What we would one day call the Messiah Craze, and would lodge in my ear like a starving tick, had yet to cause trouble on those plains.

Fort Morgan was a lot like the endless Confederate encampments I had endured while serving. The only difference was that the fort didn’t relocate in the morning; it had far fewer men moaning and dying in tents; and it was less prone to abandonment at night. I reckon Colorado was a long way for a man to run home from. Most soldiers out there had already done their running, and Fort Morgan was where they’d ended up. Their final resting spot was a scrabble of tents and rickety shacks ringed by a shoddy wall of pine stumps where the best that could be said was they fed you twice a day. Two muddy tracks came in straight as an arrow from the east, cut right through Fort Morgan, and disappeared out the other end toward the west. In one direction, a flat nothing where only the dust stirred and a creek petered out and was swallowed by the cracked earth; in the other, ancient and impossibly tall mountains stood with white tops like old men. The hell in between was our home.

In the spring and all through the summer—when the gray brows on those granite men to the west receded with the melts and the creek raged—an endless caravan of poor people with rich dreams appeared along the twin-rutted road from territories east. They passed through on their way to California, and our sworn duty at Fort Morgan was to see that their scalps moved right along with them.

Those were the melts and the busy months—spring and summer. Autumn and winter were a harder time at the fort. Men took to cards and more drink than the good Army allowed, and each of us spent our share of nights in the pen sobering up and feeling like asses for mistakes we barely remembered. Those were the hard months—and in the eighteen hundred and sixty-eighth year of our Lord, they got suddenly harder.

I was out with Private Collins taking in a pair of deer when Lieutenant Randall took the sickness. The lieutenant had been away from the fort for near on eight weeks. A trail scout, he spent most of his time up in the hills living in a tent like a native and looking for less damnable passages between those brutish mountains. He was always a bit peculiar, but nothing to presage him wandering back into camp and murdering five good men in cold blood. Yet that’s just what he did; four of his fellow enlisted men were shot dead, plus a half-Indian cook named Sammy. Randall shot each of them in the head before someone managed to wing him and put an end to the slaughter. Why they didn’t kill him on the spot, I’ll never know.

Private Collins and me returned from our hunt too late to help with anything but the digging. Saw the aftermath, though: brains and skull and hair that took me right back to the war. They was already mopping it up, and so we were handed shovels. Now, nobody consulted me for my legal expertise, but Justice would’ve been served by shooting Lieutenant Randall right there on the spot. But the good Army of the United States of America has its own sense of justice. There are trials and spectacles afforded a man before his chest is riddled by a firing squad. There are nights spent in the pen. Which is how I found myself nursing a blister from the shoveling, sitting there on a hard bench outside the holding cell, taking my shift at watching Lieutenant Randall so that he weren’t shot dead by some enterprising fellow before dawn.

On the bench across from me was my hunting partner and shovel mate, Private Collins. I surmised that his presence was to make sure I didn’t scratch that itch of justice, either. I was keeping an eye on him and he on me, and both of us on the lieutenant. Randall, meanwhile, snored and babbled like only the guilty and outright crazy could manage on the eve of their probable execution. What could make a man break camp one morning and ride in to shoot his comrades in their skulls? Morbid curiosity had me itching to know. I tried to discern some of what he was saying in his sleep—but couldn’t make out a word.

“That’s Red talk,” Collins told me.

I turned to the private and realized I’d been leaning forward on my bench, my face scrunched up in concentration. I tried to relax. “You understand what he’s mumbling?” I asked, keeping my voice down.

Collins chewed on the end of an unlit cheroot, and then spat a dab of tobacco between our feet. “Arapaho,” he said, matter-of-factly. Private Collins had that air about him, that supreme confidence that got on some men’s nerves. He had also bagged both deer that morning, firing before I had the chance. Still, I liked him.

“What’s he saying?” I asked. The only Indian I recognized was their war cries, when the hair on the back of my neck was translation enough.

Collins shrugged and sucked on his cigar. “Used to take an Arapaho whore in Mason,” he said. “I know what their language sounds like, can catch a few words, but unless he starts talking about how thick my member is…” He smiled. And not for the first time, I wondered why I liked this man yet despised so many others.

“Why the hell is he dreaming in Arapaho?” I asked, still whispering. It was strange that I wanted the man in that pen dead but cared not to disturb his sleep. Collins turned toward the dimly lit cell.

“Reckon he done and gone native. Happens. Too much time up in the hills. Or maybe he’s been heading into Mason and taking up with my whore.” Collins laughed, but Randall didn’t stir.

I settled back on my bench and marveled at a man who could sleep through what might be the last night of his life. More than justice, I was thirsty for answers. I decided, come morning, I would ask the major if Collins and I could go hunting for something up in those hills besides deer.

Major Jack Lawson was a peculiar leader of men. Part eccentric and part mountain man, he was the reason Fort Morgan had a grand piano and a small library but no decent latrine. Music and books—and somehow shitting in bare holes in the dirt—were all apparently good for our souls.

Turned out the major was just as curious about Randall’s sudden madness as we were. He gave us his blessing to ride out in search of clues.

Collins knew where Randall had set up camp the previous autumn, and so we followed an angry stream up through the pines and aspens and cottonwoods that made up the scruff around the old mountain’s neck. Stumbling on a native camp, it took a moment to realize that it was in fact Randall’s place. An army-issue tent lay draped across a lean-to of woven branches. A half-finished structure of limbs and sticks jutted up nearby, a rough circle with a tall pole in the center. Around the camp, every tree within a hundred feet had been felled, the trunks radiating outward as though they’d been knocked over by a terrible blast. Gnawed stumps stood out everywhere. I noticed how cleanly they’d been hewn, not an errant strike to be seen, none of the work of a madman.

“Took down enough trees for a second Morgan up here,” I remarked. I peered inside Randall’s abandoned tent and found nothing amiss. The bedroll was laid out like it expected to be slept in, a set of pots and cutlery innocently nestled in one corner. It smelled of leather and sweat and man, even with the air cold enough to fog my breath. Collins poked a smoldering log in the fire pit with a stick and was rewarded with a flight of embers, like bees startling from a hive.

“Don’t think he was after the timber,” Collins said. He left the pit alone and headed past the tent to the half-completed structure that’d made me think this was an Indian campsite. Shielding his eyes, he glanced up at the autumn sky. “I reckon he was out to fell the shade, is what.”

I looked up as well. The morning sun slid shyly behind a bank of clouds. “‘Fell the shade’?” I asked.

“It’s a sun hut.” Collins waved his arm. “They dance in it. The Arapaho do.”

There was a loud snap in the woods. We both turned toward the sound. There was a flash of white as a deer bounded away from us and through the cottonwoods. I turned to Collins, who I suspected knew more of the Arapaho than the moans of a Mason whore.

“What kind of dance?”

Collins watched the deer a moment longer, then scanned the woods. Finally, he turned to the odd structure, whose walls curved upward like an unfinished dome. A pole sat in the center that I figured was bound to support an arching roof; but I would find out later that the hut was finished just as it stood.

“All I know is what little I’ve heard. Pretty sure it started with the Arapaho, but other tribes have taken part. Spreading like those damn Mormons, like some kinda religion.” Collins pointed to the sky. “They dance around a pole and stare up at the sun for days. They see things. Hear voices. And then they probably get drunk on peyote and shove feathers up their arses for all I know.”

He shrugged and pulled out his cheroot. To my amazement, Collins bent and grabbed a smoking fag from the fire and lit the thing with noisy puffs. Maybe he figured we’d already chased away the deer and to hell with the smoke. Or maybe he’d seen enough death the day before to stop saving the thing for a morrow. Or perhaps the talk of ghosts and whispers had stirred his nerves. I watched his white exhalations rise toward the clouds, and the sun reemerged to peer down at us.

“I guess you were right,” I told Collins.

He raised an eyebrow and threw the fag back in the fire.

“I think Lieutenant Randall has done and gone native. Maybe fell for some squaw and started seeing us as the enemy.”

The private pinched something off the end of his tongue and inspected it. “Maybe,” he said. But it sounded like he doubted it. He smoked his cheroot like it would be his last and studied the sky as if the sun up there knew something we didn’t.

The two of us shared our findings with the major later that morning and handed over Randall’s tent, bedroll, and mess kit. Collins drew a straw for the firing squad; I didn’t. The both of us had missed the court-martial, which hadn’t taken long. Three witnesses said he did it, and Randall hadn’t uttered a word of defense. We heard he stared at the ceiling the entire time before being led back to the pen.

I should have gotten some sleep before lunch—only had a few hours the night before—but I volunteered to ride out with some others to see about another rustling, a strange disappearance of cattle from a rancher to the east.

On the ride out, I sidled my horse next to John McCall’s. McCall had grown up in the Arizona territory, had missed the war entirely, and knew as much about Indians as any of us. He used to keep a feather stuck in his cap until the major told him to lose it. When pressed, McCall admitted he’d heard of the Sun Dance. He was surprised to hear about the hut near Randall’s tent, said he thought it must’ve already been there. I told him about the felled trees. McCall didn’t have much to say after that. We rode along in silence, the sun beating down on us, the horses growing warm, the featureless landscape making it feel like we hardly moved.

While the others went to talk to the rancher about his missing cattle and the burn marks some lightning strikes had left in the grass, I rode the fence line looking for a break in the thorny wire. I was sure the rancher had already checked his fence, but in my experience the most likely culprit to make off with a few head of cattle were those few head of cattle. I expected to see them milling about on the side of the trail where the grass grew tallest. It was getting on noon, and the flies buzzed something fierce. Amazing it could be cool in the morning up in the hills and so damn hot come afternoon on the plains. My mouth was dry and tasted of the dirt kicked up by my horse. Shaking my canteen, I decided to take it easy on the water. Before long, I found a drooping wire in the fence and dismounted to take a closer look.

Was only the top wire amiss. A sprightly cow might make the jump, but unlikely. Wiping my neck, I glanced up accusingly at the high sun. Not a cloud in the sky. I remembered something I’d learned early on in Kansas: there were tribes who would only come at you in the morning from the east. They would ride in, and you couldn’t see their arrows in the glare. Before they attacked, one of their scouts would sit on a hill every morning, high on his horse, feathers blazing, and would be as good as invisible. Ghosts, bringing hell from the east. They would keep an eye on their enemy until it was time to rain death. Devious sons a’bitches.

The sun shone bright that day as I scanned the sky—and finally I had to look away. I didn’t believe what Collins and McCall had said about dancing around and looking up at that fiery beast. A man couldn’t stand two seconds staring at it. And maybe I was delirious from lack of sleep; or thinking about a man I had known who was at that moment being shot in the chest by my compadres; or maybe it was the sight of those I’d buried the day before; or I was just being powerfully curious and not thinking straight. But I felt an ungodly tug… and so I looked up and tried to return the gaze of that great yellow monster in the wide blue sky.

The burn was intense and immediate. It made my brain hurt somewhere deep between my brows. The squinting was involuntary. My horse made a sound and pawed at the air with one hoof. “Steady, now,” I told him, taking the reins and turning away, unable to take it any longer. Blinking tears, I could see a green image in my vision, a disk the color of fresh grass. I wondered if this was what they claimed to see, those who danced and saw what weren’t there.

The wire fence drooped like it was melting in the sun. A faint wind blew dust across my boots. Back toward the fort, mountains rose from the flat desert, impossibly tall, the white on their tops growing with the cold months. I blinked and blinked and wondered what in the hell I was doing out there. How could anyone dance around for three days and stare at the sun? Determined, I gave it another try. I would go for the count of twenty, pain be damned. If an Arapaho could do it, so could I.

Throwing my head back, I squinted at the sun and met it like a man. Again, the feeling was like claws raking my eyeballs. There was a primitive urge to look away, like a thumb on a hot pan. I forced my eyes open wider, muscles in my face quivering in complaint, tears streaking down my cheeks. I lost count. I swayed, my balance funny, and reached for a fence post to steady myself. As my horse clomped down the road, I ignored him. There was nothing but white and heat, both penetrating straight into my brain. I hopped in place and cursed nothing in particular, just said “shit” and “damn” while the tears streamed out, but no bright light was stronger than this Virginia boy.

I had to’ve gone to a count of twenty, but I decided to keep going a bit more. I had the water in the canteen, could dump that in my eyes after and put the fire out. There was no thought of going blind. That fear would come later. I was just enduring the pain because, goddamnit, it wasn’t going to beat me.

My neck cramped up, but now something had taken hold of me, some wild thought that this was the right thing to do, to stare at the sun for as long as I was able. Releasing the post, I drifted around in circles there in the dirt, admiring the shapes and colors as they spun in my vision. I saw purple. I saw strangers swim through the sky. When my lids clamped down involuntarily, I used my fingers to pry them open again. The burn and pain went straight through me until it felt like an itch being scratched. I spun and spun and felt the barbed wire catch at my trousers. The fence would keep me in. I thought of Collins spinning around in his little Indian hut. The barbs were suddenly those sticks, poking at me, corralling me. The light shone right through my eyes, down to the base of my skull, and deep into my neck where words are formed. My face grew warm, but now the bright light was cool as it swam through me. I could hear myself laugh. The horse drew away farther, and I cared little.

When the vision came, it was a thunderclap. A sudden roar, though I realized the words had been there before. They were the buzzing in my brain, nonsense words, but I knew what they meant. I saw them like shapes and things, like swirling dreams. There was shouting, someone on the road with me, a man with my own voice. Crying and crying, fingers pinned my eyes open, and I never wanted to look away from the sun again. I loved it in that instant. I wanted it to fall out of the sky and enter me through my eyeballs; I wanted to let it blow me across the prairie and set everything on fire, to burn that land ahead of its coming, to make room. I saw men and women and children fall before me. I saw an infant thrown into the flames, blood in everyone’s eyes. And the voices, these words foreign and understood that came like pictures directly into my head, this voice on the road that spoke as I spun and spun between the barbed wire and my skittish horse, they sounded like the tongue of a Red Man.

I woke up and men were dead. My men. Something told me there had been a killing. My head throbbed like my heart was trapped in my skull, had swollen up, and needed out. It took a moment to realize my eyes were open but I wasn’t seeing anything. I could barely make out a shape in front of my face when I waved my hand before it. Groping about, I felt a bunk beneath me, a wall of steel bars behind. I was in the pen. I could feel the firing squad lined up, instruments of death aimed at my chest, could see the men I’d killed.

“Sir, he’s done stirred.”

Voices and shuffling feet. I had Arapaho on my tongue, the taste of silver and fire, words like pictures drawn in the dirt, telling me what to do. Something alien had communicated with me. A part of it lived deep inside.

“Drink some water, son.”

There was a hand on my wrist, a hand reaching through the bars. A tin of water was pressed into my palm, sloshing cool on my forearm. My lips stung as I drank. I pulled the cup away and touched my mouth, found my lips swollen and cracked. My throat burned. But the horrible throbbing in my eyes and my brain drowned out these lesser hurts.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Major?” My voice was a pale shadow of its old self. I drank more, ignoring the sting of my fouled lips. “What did I do?” I asked.

“They found you face-up in the dirt, babbling like you had a few too many. Your horse came back to the fort without you.”

“I can’t see.”

“That’s what you’ve been sayin’. Doc said to put you in here where it was dark, that it should come back. You rest up, okay? Can’t afford to lose any more of my men.”

“How many?”

I could hear the boards creak as the major shifted his weight. “How many of what, son?”

“Did I… How many dead?” Memories and visions were mixed up in my head. Words I knew and words I didn’t. There were flashes of green and swimming lights in my eyes like an angry campfire. Something was telling me to kill or that I already had, hard to tell which.

“Get some rest. I’ll send some food over.”

I nursed my water and decided I hadn’t done the things I thought I had. But I could feel the urge. Some silent screaming beneath my skin, something directing my bones. I was reminded of a visit to Richmond when I was a boy. A friend of my mother’s was a pastor there, took us to his great big church. There was a belfry terribly high off the ground, a circuit of rickety stairs, and at one corner you could peer down at the street like a bird. And something in me felt this urge to jump out and go plummeting down, something so strong that I had to back away and clutch my father, even though I was too old to be holding his hand. And now this demon was in my blood again, but this time to hurt others.

Long after the tin cup was dry, I continued to pass it back and forth between my hands. It was Collins who brought me my supper.

“You gone and blinded yourself, ” Collins said, a voice in the darkness. Hinges pealed as he let himself into the pen, and I realized the door had never been locked. I hadn’t killed no man. Not that day, anyhow.

The plate was warm as he rested it on my knee. A fork was pressed into my palm. “You manage all right?” he asked. “See anything yet?”

I shook my head. I saw things, but not like he meant.

“I blame myself, ” Collins said. “But what was you thinking?”

“I weren’t,” I admitted. “Just started and couldn’t stop.”

Collins laughed. “Most take a glance and know it’s a bad idea.”

I groped around the plate with my fork, found some resistance, some weight. Took a sniff of potatoes and blew on ’em in case they was hot. How anyone lived with such blindness, I couldn’t fathom.

“I heard voices,” I told Collins. I wasn’t sure I’d ever tell anyone, but it just came out. “Voices and… I had a vision.” I swallowed the potatoes and shook my head. Patches of murk swam in the darkness, a vague discernment of shapes. I’d welcome just seeing my own hands.

“You heard voices. You mean when they scooped you off the road?”

“Before.” I peered at where I thought Collins stood, where I heard him. “They were telling me to do awful things. I think Randall was poisoned by the sun.”

“Randall was poisoned by the Arapaho. He was babblin’ that nonsense right up until we shot him. You just need some sleep is all.”

I nodded and ate, and Collins gave me silent and invisible company. By nightfall, it felt as though some of my eyesight was returning, but not much. I fell asleep on that cot for drunkards, madmen, and murderers—and wondered which of them I was.

When I awoke, it was not yet dawn. My internal clock had unwound from the late shifts and lack of sleep. But I could see my hands, and my lips only partway stuck together. Groping about, I let myself out of the pen and sought my own bunk.

Along the way, with my fingers brushing cedar clapboards to keep from spinning in circles, I noticed the pinpricks of tiny lights in my vision. It was pitch-black across the fort, and it was like somehow the brightest of stars were able to penetrate my blindness. But no: it was my eyesight returning.

I stopped and marveled at the tiny spots of light in that infinite darkness. The voices were out there, straining to be heard. There was a madness in my soul, an invader.

It hadn’t taken a full hold of me, but its claws had left marks. It was the same madness I’d seen in the war cries of the natives we fought with. It was the madness Randall had seized upon. A cry from some distant throat telling me that this land was someone else’s and that a reckoning was coming. That was the sight I’d seen: a land wiped clean and taken by those who didn’t belong, a land of dead and missing cattle to starve us the way we’d done with the buffalo, a time of great sickness and men dying beyond counting, with infection rained down from the heavens like some poisoned blanket.

This was the calling. I heard it clearer that night than I ever would again. I stood there for what felt like hours, searching for those pinprick stars and marveling at how our own sun was said to be one like them. Our sun, where native tribes stood sentinel in the morning so we couldn’t see them coming, where they would watch and watch and plan their deadly raids. Many a time, they had brought hell on us from the east with the rising of the sun, the Arapaho and the Sioux and the Apache, but I reckoned we’d done the same and that others might do it to us one day. Generations back, a man with my name had crossed a wide sea and brought his own hell from the east. Others would come. It were folly to think we’d be the last.

That was my vision, what I saw clearly that night in my blindness and with an earful of strange voices. I saw the night and its lights like never before. There was a far and dark sea out there, hanging over me. A dark sea that ships sailed on, scouts arriving at dawn to watch over us, vast fleets to rain down by dusk. But it was not yet dusk. It was early yet. And those stars were like campfires impossibly distant where strange men spoke in strange tongues and conjured war. They spoke with words that I could not fathom but could see like scratches in the dirt, could see like a calling to do bad things on their behalf.

I tried to explain this to whoever would listen, but they would only lock me up for my troubles. They would lock me up before I ever got the chance to heed those voices the way Lieutenant Randall had. I was locked up years later and therefore not a part of that massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, which put an end to the war with our red kin. I was locked up while more cattle went missing and a great sickness swept the land, millions and millions of people dying like my brother had. It has not yet come, this thing from the east that whispers for me to clear the land in preparation. It has not yet come. But something stirs and will talk to those crazy enough to look and listen. There is something across that dark sea, across that expanse of space that men saner than me say no one will ever cross, but I wager my red brother thought the same thing of the deep blue Atlantic that lapped their former shores—and here we are. We who hailed from the east, who came from that rising sun too bright to see, who came first with scouts across the pitch-black, standing tall and ignorant and proud atop some deadly ridge.

Very few of my stories came as assignments or via writing prompts. Most are ideas that have been percolating for a long time. I enjoy the luxury of writing whatever seizes me, rather than being stuck writing the same type of story over and over. “Hell from the East” was different. I was invited to submit something for an anthology, and the stories needed to be “weird Western.”

I’ve always been a fan of this genre, which makes it strange that I’d never explored it on my own. The TV show Firefly is a weird Western in a way. Science fiction is the new frontier, a role that Westerns used to play. And survival on the edge will mean relying on cobbled-together technology, being in sparsely populated areas, and a dive back into lawlessness at times.

The theme I wanted to explore with this story is the idea of alien invasion and the settling of the New World. There’s a legend that some Native American tribes would raid during the rising sun and ride in from the east, so they were hidden in the glare of the sun. This got me thinking of how Europeans arrived from the east, and kept arriving from the east, conquering, stealing land, spreading disease. They had bizarre machines and gadgets. They arrived on strange ships. Europeans were the alien invasion.

In this story, the invasions are nested. As we push west, there’s a different threat coming. And you can only see it if you stare into the sun.

The Black Beast

In the Long Ago, there was a beast who couldn’t be caught. She roamed the woods by a small village, where the men would hunt for her and the women would lay traps for her, but the beast could not be caught. She taunted them from the tree line in their own tongue, calling out her eternal threat of “Just wait.”

“Just wait,” she would screech, over and over, trying to scare them. She would fly through their hunting parties and their traps, laughing and mocking them, “Just wait.”

One day, an old man from the village was fetching water down by the stream when the beast came close, as she was fond of doing. The man ignored the beast. He no longer had fear in his heart for her. Despite the many close calls of his youth and her eternal threats, she had never done him any lasting harm.

Standing on the rocks that jutted out over the stream, he lowered his bucket toward the distant gurgling far below, passing the braided rope through his wrinkled hands. While the swaying bucket descended through the air, the beast came closer, her belly to the grass, her breathing audible.

The man let the currents of the stream catch the rim of the bucket and waited for it to be filled no more than halfway; he could stand to hoist no more. Snapping it from the foam, he pulled the bucket hand over hand and set it on a flat moss-covered rock. He wheezed from the effort while the beast crept closer, her shoulders down, her tail slicing the air.

The old man knew the beast was there. He ignored her, but being so close reminded him of younger days, days spent chasing this beast who could not be caught, his hands swishing at air, her screeching laughter, him and his friends in the dirt, hugging nothing. And now the black beast was nearer than ever, taunting him, and he knew in his old bones that he had one lunge yet.

Smiling to himself, remembering what it felt to be young and lithe and full of power, he smeared his feet into the moss, working his toes into their soft grip. Slowly, ever so slowly. He bent his knees and reached for the bucket as if to carry it off. The water inside was still moving. Joints creaked like bent wood, and he saw in the bucket a wrinkled reflection of himself. With one hand, he unknotted the long fetching rope from the bucket. “Just once more,” he whispered to his bones. “Like old times.”

The fetching rope was salty as he placed it between his teeth. Behind him, he could hear the animal creeping closer, attempting to torment him with her shadowy presence.

Whirling, the old man leapt for the beast. He was airborne again, flying, arms wide, eyes taking in the whole world. He saw the black fur on the beast ripple with alarm, saw the tail drop, the paws splay in the dirt, the head jerk as it prepared to run, but then he was on her, catching what couldn’t be caught. They rolled to the ground. The old man scrambled to the beast’s back and wrapped his legs around her midsection, hooking his feet together. His arm went across her neck where it was impossible to bite. The rope went quick around one paw, and then another. Old hands make the best knots. Her back legs were looped with the rest of the rope, all of it done in a moment.

The beast screeched madly and bit at the air, but she could not move. The old man looked from her heaving ribs to the roofline of the village far up the hill. Someone would have to come for him, he thought. He imagined the stories they would tell, his children and grandchildren. They would be telling this story forever.

“What of you, beast?” he asked. He rested on his knees. One of the beast’s dark eyes swiveled his way. “Long have you mocked us, and yet here you are.”

The beast stopped biting the air and seemed to smile. The old man had taken note of her reach, the limit of her snarling mouth. He did not fear her and moved closer, double-checking his knots.

“They said you couldn’t be caught,” the old man wheezed. The knots were secure. He had done it. He searched himself for injury, for some claw mark, but found none.

“Who says?” the beast asked, with that voice that had all the years taunted and promised so much.

“Everyone,” the old man replied. He looked down at her black fur, gleaming in the sunlight. The day was brighter, his head lighter from the exertion.

“And what do they know of me?” the beast asked, her voice subdued.

The old man said nothing. He looked back to the village, wondering how long it would take for someone to notice he had not returned.

“I will tell you what of me,” the beast hissed.

The old man turned.

“Come,” she said. Her tongue slid out and smoothed her whiskers. “Bend low and I will tell you of this chase we make.”

The man laughed, but he was indeed curious to hear. He glanced back toward the village, saw the bucket and felt suddenly thirsty, but he bent closer to the animal’s smiling teeth, remembering well their range and keeping out of it.

“Tell me your story,” the old man said. He was dizzy with the opportunity to know the unknown. “Start at the beginning.”

“It is not my story I tell,” the beast said. “And I know nothing of beginnings.”

And with that, the beast stretched her neck much further than it had reached before, and she bit the old man. It was a deep and mortal wound, sudden and sure. The man staggered back, clutching at it, knowing from the great gush that it couldn’t be held.

With a single claw, the beast parted the fetching rope bound around her wrists, then sliced the knots holding her hind legs.

“I run from you, and you chase me,” the beast said. She stood on her great paws. “You call me uncatchable, but the truth is contrary. The day comes when all men catch me. All men.”

The old man from the village fell back in a pool of his own blood. His life was draining away, soaking the moss.

“Just wait,” the beast said, her voice no longer shrill. “Just wait, I tell them, but it makes you hurry all the more.”

This was a story I wrote and published online for a short while, but the link broke in a website update and I never fixed it, so it was pretty much lost. It wasn’t until we started putting together this collection, and this book’s editor, John Joseph Adams, kept asking me if I was sure that was everything, that I found it through the back end of my website. I read it years after having written it, and it was all new to me. I had a vague recollection of having written it, but that was it. This is a terrifying feeling.

It’s the feeling of seeing an old photograph and a flood of memories of that entire day, an entire period of your life, rushing back into consciousness. Where were these memories before? How did a single key unlock so much? Would those memories have been lost forever without that small reminder? The illusion of permanence and memory are too convincing.

The worst is waking up in the morning remembering that you had a great idea the night before, but this is all you can remember: the idea of the idea. It’s the scrap of writing on an ancient Greek scroll extolling the wisdom, genius, and virtue of some writer whose works have been lost to time. Perhaps it’s better not knowing. If we’re going to lose these parts of ourselves, the only salvation is to lose the memory of having had them. Or is it?

When I was younger, I wrote about death a lot. This happened as I was losing my religion and my belief in eternal life. “The Black Beast” is about loss of life, but in its discovery on an old server, and the panic of how much else may have been lost with no memories to even inspire a search, it can also be a story about losing something else: our sense of selves.

Tragic is a story about a mother losing a child and spending the rest of her life searching for him. Even worse is a mother waking up one day with no child and no cause to even begin the search. Because the child is still out there. What we lose is still missing.

The Good God

The words spread like fidgeting ants across dry parchment. One moment they were not there; the next moment, an incredible story of gods that no sane mortal would believe. The parchment trembles in the hands of enraged Eshu. Fire leaks from the dark devil’s veins, and the parchment is engulfed in flickering, dancing orange flames. Allowing the letter to fall, it is ash before it reaches Eshu’s cloven feet.

“Kill him,” Eshu says.

Badu, the dark lord’s right hand, bows in apology. Eshu had a long habit of cleaving his right hand and growing one anew. Badu had only been on the job a thousand years. He was just getting to know his way around the aiye called Earth. “Sire, we’ve been over this. If you kill him, he will be born again elsewhere, and it will take us many moons to find him once more.”

“But killing him feels good,” Eshu says. His knuckles crackle as he makes a fist, the sound of logs in a hot fire. The two lords stand facing the cube of obsidian in which noble Olodumare, the damned bringer of light, sits entombed.

“Yes, m’lord. I know how it feels. But death will set him free.”

Eshu exhales tendrils of smoke from his nostrils. “He will be free anyway. My bastard nephew always finds a way. This light, it slips through the slimmest of cracks. And my minions never cease to fail me.”

Badu waits to be smote to oblivion. Every muscle and tendon tenses in anticipation. Badu spends much of his time waiting to be smote. One day, he knows he will be right.

“We have him now, m’lord,” he says. “These messages he sends will not get far, and the people of this aiye do not know the power in their hearts.”

Badu has thought many centuries on this. The cell of obsidian, with its thousand and one facets, is itself like a black heart in the center of the aiye. Inside that solid case of stone sits Olodumare, a god of pure light. Olodumare in his cage is very much like the speck of hope that lies in men’s hearts. The way the world was going, there was no way it was getting out.

Eshu turns and spits a wad of flame in Badu’s direction. “Light leaks like water through the tightest of fists,” he growls. “Darkness reigns a generation, perhaps, and then goodness takes most of what we fight for. There must be an end to this cycle, to hope, to—”

“Sire—”

Eshu silences Badu with a claw. A leaf of parchment flutters through the air, summoned out of nothingness by Olodumare, the son of the divine creator, imprisoned in black obsidian. Words like ants crawl across the parchment, a plea to anyone who might listen. Eshu turns the note to ash. Across the great cavern, more fluttering notes can be seen, moving like lazy moths. They too burst into flame. So many…

“I have killed the boy more times than I can count,” Eshu says, as he watches the summoned notes succumb to his dark magic. “But he is born anew. I have put him in stone again and again, but one of you will get too close and hear his words and be in thrall like fools, freeing him. And now these missives, fluttering like insects across the aiye called Earth. They will release him. Some will get infected with the light. So I might as well kill him. Enjoy these years like days before he comes of age and realizes what he is again—”

“Sire, if I may—”

Eshu turns, his hand lifted as if to smite. He hesitates when he sees Badu holding one of the notes between his black claws.

“I have an idea,” Badu says. “One that might keep the lightness hidden away for good.”

In Kogi state there is a river long cursed. Fish from this river remain raw, however long you cook them. If you are injured by the bones of these fish, the wound will never heal. Badu grew up along the banks of this river in Kogi state. In his throat there is a cut from a fish he caught as a child. It fills him with pain every time he swallows. It will do so until the end of time.

But time is a funny thing, and it can be bent to the will of the great god of darkness Eshu. Bent, but not broken. Very little can slip through. Meaningless trifles. No more than words, like the words that pass through solid obsidian and the darkest of hearts.

Badu swallows, painfully, and writes another letter. In years hence, he will come to type the same words on little machines. Time is bent, Eshu straining under the weight of such a burden, and these words are passed back in time—black insects to flutter in the aiye called Earth, but the Earth of old, the Earth of superstition, the Earth that learns not to listen.

In the heart of foul obsidian, the good god Olodumare brings thoughts together like callused palms. He forces them out into the aiye, the real world, and pleads with the good people there. He sends them to all the people, for all are good. All are light inside of darkness. All are like him.

The years wear on, and Olodumare realizes he is not reaching the people. No one believes in gods anymore. The riches of knowledge no longer hold sway. Only the yellow glint of gold. Perhaps because the light is everywhere else fading upon the aiye called Earth.

So the words change. The story changes. Pleading. Begging. Notes for years, sealed in envelopes, and later just words made of phosphors of light, sent to everyone, for all are that shard of light encased in darkness.

In a chamber deep in the bowels of the aiye called Earth, the iron-mule Badu swallows and writes, swallows and writes. He has been doing this for generations, his words sent everywhere that words can go. Because flames can only consume so much; and words can only drown in more of the same. Words everywhere, until they can’t be trusted.

I spent the better part of a year in Africa prior to setting off on my journey around the world. While my sailboat was being built, I had time to drive around this new-to-me continent and try to understand its history. One of the things I discovered was a rich mythology of gods I’d never been exposed to before.

There is no one Africa. There are thousands of them, many overlapping and in conflict and cooperation with each other. Religion and family are powerful forces here, and there are religions aplenty.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice were the unanswered prayers. The economic disparity between the haves and have-nots in South Africa is vast and disheartening. The wealthy exist alongside townships that are little more than plywood, corrugated tin, and strewn refuse. Inhabitants of these townships walk hours each way to clean the houses of the wealthy for a pittance. Where prayers are said the most, it becomes obvious how little they are answered.

Time spent in Africa got me thinking about the prayers we ignore: the people we drive by on the side of the road without picking them up; the charities we don’t support; the time we don’t volunteer. There are so many people asking that we begin to treat it all like spam. And how many frivolous things are prayed for every day? How much time would a god spend blessing those who’ve sneezed with little time for anything else?

All these ideas went into a story about a god who subsists on hope and is today starving for lack of it. His pleas to us are drowned out by the clever requests of evil gods that our spam filters delete. How are we to know the difference? Are we not gods to many with the cruel power to ignore?