THE TIME-EATER

by Adam Bolivar

I am alone. I live in a farmhouse in the wilds of western Massachusetts. Loneliness is a condition that I have experienced for most of my life. And it is a condition I do not expect to change before my life comes to an end. But this was not always the case. There was a brief duration when I was not alone. It was during this time that my life changed forever. It was then that I learned my true nature. For I am cursed with a singular affliction, a disease like no other.

Every day I visit the centuried foundation of a house in the woods. I stand inside the ruin and drink in the oldness of the stones, the history of the place. Next to the foundation is a well, whose ancientness fills me with bliss. I stand near the well, but never too near, lest I am tempted to climb down into it. I am wary of that after what happened. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let me start in Boston, where I was born, and where I spent my youth. Boston was a perfect place for one such us I, for of all the cities in this country it is the one most filled with antiquity. There is such a wealth of graveyards and churches to be found there! I used to run my fingers along the winged skulls carved into smooth grey slate; I sat in the white pews once occupied by men who wore powdered periwigs and proclaimed, “God Save the King!”

But merely visiting the old places was not enough. I began furtively stealing pieces of the past for myself: a chip of slate from a gravestone, a hand-forged iron nail from a church. And then I would sleep with these objects under my pillow and dream of times when my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents had walked the earth.

By morning, however, the antiquity would somehow be drained from the stolen object. It would feel as ordinary as something that had been manufactured yesterday, and have no power to inspire the dreams I craved.

I took to stealing larger and larger things. In the dead of night, I removed entire gravestones, and, crazed with delight, curled up with them in my bed like cold lovers. But even these prizes would lose their potency after a few days, and I would discard them like empty husks of corn.

Then, on my third-and-twentieth birthday, I received a letter from a cousin of mine named William, who lived in Shutesbury, near our family seat. The letter was brief, and after a few opening pleasantries invited me to come stay with him at his house.

The invitation was well-timed, for I was beginning to feel a sense of desperation at my nightly thefts, that I should be caught soon, and yet unable to stop myself. Perhaps a visit to the country was just what I needed to get a hold of myself. Though as a rule I am loath to use such a modern instrument as a telephone, I made a hurried exception to call William and finalise the arrangements.

The next obstacle was travelling from Boston to western Massachusetts. I was forced to purchase a ticket on a frighteningly contemporary omnibus, and forebear an excruciating two-hour journey surrounded by nothing but painful modernity and the vulgar stares of my fellow passengers. At last, the ride came to a merciful end in Amherst, and I found myself waiting in the November chill for William to arrive. It was not long before his automobile appeared, and with an awkward nod, he took my suitcase, and spirited me to his home in Shutesbury. Thankfully, William’s tastes also ran towards the old-fashioned, and the farmhouse where he lived dated to the mid-1800’s, an early enough vintage to keep me comfortable.

That night, however, my longings vexed me. I tried to resist the temptations of antiquity, but the craving overpowered me. I stole from my bed and crept outside into the moonlight, drawn inexorably to the ruined barn behind my cousin’s farmhouse. The barn was nigh upon two hundred years old, and exquisitely decayed.

I pried loose a pair of hand-forged nails from the doorframe, intent on smuggling them to my bedroom. But I was surprised in my furtive labors, and futilely attempted to secrete the stolen nails in my coat pocket.

“Richard,” said my cousin sternly. “What are you doing out here?”

“N-n-nothing,” I stammered. “Just getting some air. I was having difficulty sleeping.”

“What are you putting in your pocket? Some nails from my barn?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

William fixed me with his clear blue eyes and, guiltily, I turned away. He smiled kindly and clapped me on the shoulder. “No need to be ashamed, cousin. I too feel the longings for old things.”

“You do?” I cried, almost unable to believe my ears.

“It is a family curse, passed down to us from our grandfather. We are chronophages. Time-eaters.”

So there was a name for my affliction. Time-eater.

William sighed. “Keep the nails for tonight. But tomorrow I will show you another way to live. A better way.”

I followed him back into the warmth of the farmhouse. Settling into my bed, I put the cold iron nails under my pillow. Their antiquity was just enough to dull my craving, and I fell into a shallow, dreamless sleep.

The next morning, I accompanied William on a walk through the woods behind his house. The trees were barren, their denuded branches grasping towards heaven like supplicating hands. We spoke little and the silence was broken only by the sound of our feet crunching the dry, dead leaves.

At last we reached the destination to which William had been guiding me. Deep in the woods we came upon the stone foundation of a house. It was very old, doubtless from Colonial times, and the antiquity reverberated in this place like the echoes of a beautiful symphony.

My eyes lighted upon a stray scrap of lumber, a surviving fragment of the original house. Three exquisite hand-forged nails jutted from the jagged wood, and my fingers involuntarily moved to pry them loose. But William grasped my wrist and stared at me with those blue eyes of his.

“No,” he said. “You don’t need to take them. Just feel. Can’t you feel the antiquity all around you?”

He let go of my wrist. Instead of taking the nails, I resisted, and held my open palm above them. I could feel the waves of oldness flooding into me like the flush of warmth one feels after imbibing an excellent wine.

I stood that way for a number of minutes and then a most extraordinary thing happened. I could see the faint traces of the house shimmering around the foundation, as it had been when it was still standing.

The ghost image became more distinct, and I could see a man and a woman inside the house. The man wore a brown frock coat and knee breeches. He sat at a table drinking ale from a brass tankard and read a leather-bound edition of Plutarch’s Lives. The woman wore a bonnet and hoop-skirt, and sat at a spinning wheel, gently coaxing a thread from spindle to distaff as she spun her husband a new waistcoat.

William and I stood there entranced, watching the lingering images of this long-dead man and his wife for the rest of the day. I am certain he saw the same thing as I, although we never spoke of it. Finally, the sun sank low in the sky, and the bare-branched trees were casting grotesque shadows over the forest. William nudged my shoulder and broke my trance. The house vanished like a morning mist, leaving behind nothing but a stone foundation once again.

“We should head back,” he said.

Dumbly I nodded my affirmation. We turned to head back to the warmth of William’s farmhouse, and I realized that my hands and feet were numb from standing in the late-autumn chill for so many hours. Then I noticed something I had not seen before and stopped.

The low stone ring of an old well poked up from the ground next to the foundation of the house. I stared down into the hole and the darkness stared back up at me. Powerful waves of antiquity were drifting up from the well like fragrant smoke from an incense burner. I was transfixed, and stood staring down the well until William took my arm and gently pulled me away.

“What is at the bottom of that well?” I asked. “It feels very old. Very old indeed.”

“I don’t know,” he said, although he looked away, not meeting my gaze as he usually did. “Come now. I don’t think it is wise that we should linger here after dark.”

Reluctantly, I followed my cousin away from the well and out of the woods, where we retired to the sanctuary of his farmhouse for a modest meal of bread and butter and boiled potatoes.

Twice more we visited that house in the wood, and other secret places that William showed me. Each night I found it easier to fall asleep than the last, sated after a day’s immersion in old things. But on the third night, I was awoken by disturbing dreams. In the dead of night I heard a voice calling to me from outside. “Richard. Riiiichard! Come to me. I need you. Come to me now...”

Hastily donning my clothes, I stole from my cousin’s farmhouse, shutting the door quietly behind me. The voice was coming from the forest. Of course it was. And I knew just where it was leading me.

I found myself standing before the well. My legs had brought me there of their own accord. Just as they now stepped over the threshold and carried me down a long vertical tunnel of absolute darkness. My fingers and feet found protruding blocks of stone that served as steps, helping me to climb downwards into the unknown.

At last the narrow well opened up into a large underground chamber with a ceiling, walls and floor of stone. The protruding steps continued along the wall of the chamber, guiding me downward until I found myself at the bottom. It should have been pitch-dark here, but somehow there was a dim greenish glow whose source I could not ascertain.

And then I saw her. Standing before me was a woman dressed in the sombre clothing of another era: a black bonnet and black hoop-skirted dress that was tattered almost to shreds. The woman’s skin was pale and greenish, though I couldn’t tell if the verdant hue was her skin’s natural tint or merely an effect of the weird light in the chamber.

She beckoned me towards her, and I stepped closer, enchanted by her. She was beautiful. And old. Antiquity wreathed her body like a subtle perfume.

“Richard, no!”

The enchantment was broken my cousin’s urgent voice, which echoed around the chamber harshly. He scrambled down the steps and rushed to stand between me and the black-clothed woman. William was holding a silver ankh engraved with symbols I didn’t recognise. The woman skittered away from the ankh, holding her hands in front of her, as if the sight of it caused her pain.

William turned toward me. “Go back, Richard!” he shouted. “She wants to make you as she is...” Taking his eyes off the woman had been a mistake. She struck William’s hand, causing him to drop the ankh, which clattered to the floor with a metallic ring.

Not waiting to see if my cousin was following me, I flew up the steps, climbing back up into the darkness of the well. I heard William’s screams behind me, and I knew then that he would not escape. I hauled myself out of the well and lay on the ground panting, my breath misting in the cold night air.

I waited until morning, but William never emerged. His screams had stopped suddenly as I was climbing, and since then I had heard nothing but silence from the darkness of the well.



Fifty years have passed since that terrible night, and still I live in my cousin’s farmhouse by the wood. I never seek the company of others, only venturing to town long enough to purchase the necessities of life, and then returning immediately to the life of a hermit.

Every day I enter the woods and visit the foundation of the vanished house. And I stand before the well that sits beside it. The antiquity that bubbles up from the well refreshes me like a fountain of cool water in the desert.

One day I may climb down it again and join my cousin and that beautiful woman. One day I shall become as they are. But not yet. Not just yet. Back I go to the farmhouse at the end of another day.

~ ~ ~

Be sure to return Next Week for the continuation of
G. Alden Davis's uncanny descent into THE FOLD,

 as Part 5 goes up Monday, Nov 16 on 

The Freezine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction

THE FOLD: 4

by G. Alden Davis

First was the change in gravity. Almost immediately I felt as if I was pulling against some misaligned, weighty force. It pulled at me, as if to force me down, lower to the ground. It felt like wind blowing hard against my skin, and my lips burst open spilling dozens of ceramic tiles out that once had been my teeth. They came out bloodless, painless, as if they dropped out frequently. I held a few in my hand, but as more spilled out I lost grip on the sliding pile and the whole thing upset. My teeth scattered out in the gravity well of below.

“How?” I pondered, rendered a feeble simpleton by the sting. I grimaced drunkenly as I felt the drool streaming from my wide and distorted lips. My vision served little purpose in this dark space, so I closed my eyes to be spared any disorienting glimpse. When I did an explosion went off, thunder and sparkling fire come to life, crackling through my inner ears and shuddering in my gut.

Intricate flowers unfolded from protruding stems and thrust openly out at me, each one trilling an indescribable fluting tune. The fervor of their playing caused the nether-wind to blow back my hair, and as I watched they bloomed, bloomed, bloomed.

The field of flowers before me fell under dark blue shadows. As the false day ended, each petal luminesced, as if a string of tiny, multicolored bulbs was strung along its curvatures.

TWO

When the roaring madness of ever-entwining glow-strands stopped, and the cacophony of voices ceased whisper-shouting in my face, I was aware of the loud protest of a rumbling and empty stomach. I immediately felt sweetly sick, like a mouthful of honey after running a dash. After a moment of crawling in black sand I again felt the rush of my situation take me over, like a surf of frightening and careless strength. I ran and ran, into the dark that shot sparks and flares like snarling scares across the matrix that held up my courage. I had gone and gone, only twice striking my head on some jutting protrusion.

How long had I been here now? I had lost consciousness at least twice, so at most I might have lost a day to that weird exhausted sleep. But the stubble of my chin and the taste in my mouth bespoke evidence of greater time passing, perhaps two days, or even more.

I looked around, testing the effects of the venom in my systems. My surroundings struck me with no more strangeness than I had come to expect from this shadow realm beneath a labyrinth of redrock; they were eroded in that manner that gave them the structure of bones, and in some cases, whole chambers resembled an enormous cage of windblown ribs, with hollows like eye sockets where no eyes should ever be. I expected that the chill and at least half my fear was the nerves in my body still captive in the grip of hoodoo poison, shaking against frigid chains in a dying attempt to shrug off that inhuman, numbing oppressor.

How could it still be in my system after two days? How else am I seeing any of this down here in the dark? I heard a distant humming approach, that never seemed to arrive. Blue sparks danced into my vision from the stage wings of my periphery.

Consciousness became an object that I dropped, and I once more fell, not into slumber, but into an absolute mental dissolution.

In a black sea I floated with the buoyancy of a bottled message. Stars rippled out against that watery sky, nova raindrops striking the slick of paved night. Lightning flashed and crackled bright streaks around the profile of a distant peak.

Drums were rumbling murmurous intonations in the shadows of shallow caves, hammered by the callused fist pads of the last of a lost tribe. Somewhere the wise ones began to hum dim in their nearing slumber while spiced air and fruited waterfalls crashed from broad canyons.

It calmed and warmed briefly as on a hot summer day, and the sun pressed on me like the grip of a missed friend. Cool cloudshadows occasionally shrouded the noble glare of that giant star, and with the wind came the scent of split corn. Something distant burned, a thin column of smoke near the horizon weaving up until stranded.

A blast of black feathers struck me in the face. Flapping wings folded my sight into unread tomes, closed and dusty scrolls held still with unbroken seals.

Then the birds burst out from my eyes, omens of oncoming flux. They flew out and away, leaving in their wake only a single feather, which drifted to where I stood on a slight and peculiar breeze.

I was no longer near the cave, though I could not recall escaping that twisted dark. The feather at my feet was in fact the only source of black in my otherwise bright surroundings. I watched as it rotated slow in the blow of a gentle wind, like a compass needle seeking magnetic north. It finally came to rest, indicating a direction I could not guess but presumed was east. My eyes, tight in a squint to prevent injury from the occasional drifting sand, followed the finger of feather towards the far and faded horizon. As I focused my attention towards this distance, I caught the faint hammer of skin-drummers, drifting like memories on a sweet and shifting wind. Had I not heard that same rhythm before, in a time not so long ago? I wrestled with the door latch to this secret mental room, but found it shut against all prying. Still, that flattened cadence called, drawing in and out of the audible like the ocean casting sporadic surf to a sandless, rock-strewn beach.

Following both the feather and the sound of drums, I stepped to the invisible path and began the final leg of quest.

The sand was a sea of blood beneath the furnace-stare of the single star that served as a sun on this forgotten world. The star was too small and bright to be our familiar, terrestrial Sol, and I had no doubt as to the overpowering otherness of the place I found myself. The ground seemed composed of ordinary sand, but upon inspection revealed a startling oddity. Each grain, tiny as it was, had faceted sides and a notably regular shape. Not all grains were identical, but in families formed of perfect polyhedrons. The result of this geometry was a sand packed firm and smooth. Around my footprints, the pattern was broken only slightly, like a puzzle half together.

As I traveled that vast hardpack, I watched my shadow lengthen before me. It was a fellow traveler in this mystic footrace, growing taller and thinner as it slowly took the lead.

The air’s subtle cooling confirmed my shadow’s rumor; the star was setting behind us. It’s failing warmth drew weakly at my back while my face pressed on into the cooling night. The hues of dawn were streaked and smeared into the somber tones of dusk, and so glorious was the spectacle of the setting star’s sleepy death-throes that I hardly questioned the extreme brevity of day. Warmth faded with the retreating light, leaving skeletal fingers to play at my nape, where a feline mother might grasp her child to pull it from harm’s way.

While this unfathomed land resembled the early, luminous paintings of the unexplored American west, I felt in the rearmost of my mind that all was entirely amiss. Scarce memories of my journey to this netherworld were depicted in a broken image, as if a demon-wind had scattered a sand-painting. I fought the gale in an attempt to restore some formal order, but it resisted these attempts and scattered more of my memories away. Only hints of former details remained. The instincts which had survived the storm, however, were not so dulled as to ignore the alarm of my strange situation.

With the nagging ache of a dream being lost to the day, I moved on across the blood colored sand. I was unaware of the regular way it accepted each footfall, spilling equal particles from the craters of every step. Slowly a procession of these identical tracks spread out behind me, and in not looking back I left unread the message of my own passing.

The star deepened, and the blood-sand took on the septic hue of a scab. Bathing the desert in it’s dead glare, the scowling star inspected its loss. Dark shadows ran like oil from every protruding rock. Slim lines contoured the dunes they were drawn over, stretching into the darkness which lay ahead.

Ignorant of the throb of my peds, concerned only with reaching whatever conclusion this madness concealed, I followed my confused intuition onward for a time much greater than years.

The fathomless night spread her arms over me in the failing warmth of an August ember. Whatever world I had become lost upon, I was glad for the last fraction of fire. I feared that the night’s glacial extreme might well freeze.

Ahead, the sand seemed packed flat by flood and cracked by flaming days. Each fracture shone in the phase of it’s fractaling break, hairlines dividing the dark clay in a pattern that lead to a horizon thrust through with standing stones. These fingers of rock protruded through the crust seemingly miles distant, though the fading light could have depicted them at only a quarter of that away.

As I stumbled on towards the cluster, I noticed that the light provided by the setting star grew brighter at the rock-ring’s center. It was clearly mustered within that gathering, stone grasp. Whatever might stand amidst that focus could indeed besmirch a lurch onward. After a few yards of travel I concluded that whatever the cause of that luminous increase, I had but a short way to reach it. The contradiction of it’s distance only moments before went unnoticed as I broke into a lumbering run. There was a feeling of rising urgency stirring in the air, like a gate swinging shut on a dream.

One hundred yards from the monolithic cluster I became aware of a sound that had risen to replace the former drumming. While being somewhat percussive, it was not at all like drums. From summer daydreams came the image of drying sheets waving on a line, of galleon sails furling in a strong wind. It’s familiar, kite-flying rustle relaxed me, like a runner called to pause by the cheer of a long lost friend. I stopped hammering the sand with my swollen feet and stood in silence, listening.

I focused a tilted ear and distinguished that whatever was flagging the wind was approaching, so I brought my eyes to bear behind and skyward. Peering into the star-flecked void I saw a dark shape scrape the otherwise smooth marble of space. My mouth was immediately dry.

As the shadow neared, gliding on the ice of night, I could distinguish elements beneath its noise, and sought to discern their origin. The backbone of this cadence was the obvious beat of wings, not the buzz of insect flight nor the cushioned flap of raptors. This was greater, a wingspan of worlds, in sync with the splash of brass cymbals or steel scales sliding in rows.

In my mind’s eye I saw a burning bird, a phoenix in a mushroom cloud, a falling star called Wyrmwood. I saw the colors of lost dances, a wheel within wheels, the turning of cosmic clocks.

Most of all, as this giant thing sailed across the vast blackness towards the sparkle of standing stones, I held to the impression not of its arrival, but of it’s return. Inside my head a voice whispered names in guttural, forgotten tongues.

“Garuda,” the hoarseness pronounced. “Coatl,” it repeated, which a clap of thunder punctuated.

As the rolling roar echoed against the slickrock, I clamored up the slight rise of dunes which held the circle of stones away from the rest of the desert. As I reached the crest, my eyes adjusted to the dim and strange light.

Within the circle stood heavy shapes. Figures glinted from ancient, metallic masks as a dim fire of coals danced light into the ring.

THE FOLD continues MONDAY, with Part 5

Tune in TOMORROW, for the FRIDAY SHORT STORY,
The Time-Eater, by Adam Bolivar

THE FOLD: 3

by G. Alden Davis

I lifted heavy feet and set out, following the wash between towering sandstone cliffs. Their surface was sculpted by ages into interconnected sockets, like the empty eyes of melted skulls. As I progressed into that tight pass, I found it hard not to think of the flanking walls as unnatural, so strangely contorted were those vague faces which lined both sides. When the passage grew so thin I had to move sideways, I had the unnerving sensation that the stiff rock I pushed through had moved against me. I jerked past the narrow and ran some distance once free of that strangling tight. In the deepening shadows of the folding canyon my footing was lost and I fell from my run into the sand. Some thing beneath me cracked loudly and my legs disappeared in a flash as I sank to my waist. Sharp crystalline scraped at my legs and belly, and blind panic was my reaction. Crying out, I kicked with both feet, feeling bitten and scratched as I did. But even as I felt the pain some of those horrible sharps gave way. Clutching down, I grabbed a handful of flat, knifelike objects that protruded from the dark hole I was half within.

Then a great snapping shook the ground and I was falling, seeing in my clenched hand large shards of gypsum crystal. I recalled in a flash the many gypsum sinkholes legendary to the area, and with only this as comfort I fell into the dark.

For exactly how long I was within that pitch black freefall, I cannot say. I seemed to fall forever down the throat of that sinkhole, as if the aperture was itself a portal into a strange and distorted space. I could sense that the shaft was irregular, and felt outcroppings race by as I dropped.

Then I struck, flat on my back against an unexpected direction. Stars and spots of light burst across my vision and I blacked out.

What thoughts occupied my shaken mind during that dreadful loss were thankfully discarded when, at last, I once more became aware. A sound like electric surf receded from a roar to background hiss and my ears popped with a pressure drop. The lack of light within the lowers proved to be a puzzle for my eyes, as awakening to pitch left no pattern for my sight. As the sound changed, I felt an emerging sense of space; like blinded bats using facial sight, I could “see” the reflected sound of my own breathing. The walls of this cave stood out in the false color of moonlight on mars, a scattering of luminescent moss giving rise to visons of outer space, of nebulous dims against eternal, oppressive black.

Still, it was enough to attempt navigation, so I got to my feet and put my hands out slowly before me.

I fought to focus in the fungal glow, hands out to ward peril in the dark.

“Skratchitack--”

My breath caught in my throat like a broken bone; I had heard a sound, gentle but sinister in my blindness.

“--skrichatick-“

It was a sliding, a soft and chitinous scraping, as if a profusion of jointed parts were flexing or spreading, just out of reach in the ink of the dark. I coughed out against the dust, and at that involuntary bark, the scraping scattered out, spreading in grim stereo the escape of a number of creatures. They sounded echoes, small and fast.

Dexterity is not overrated in the pitch black, and as I stepped through the dark with growing confidence, my feet were betrayed by a hazard. I tripped, true enough, face-first and reeling into a rushing steep.

Hands out, I braced for the ground.

The sting came quick and terrible, flooding pain and numbness into a brushstroke of fiery gloom. Poison flared hot and immediately infectious, crawling up the tunnels of my palms' starfish network, illuminating them in scalding bright to my otherwise blinded eyes.

What curse I had spat as I slammed my hand flat against that thorncrawler thing is by now lost in the panic of fear and venomous senses which fell upon me like a rain in a sulfur spring.

So great was that change in my sight that I thought for a split that some light had been lit in the uncompromising black. Then I discerned that the glow was in channels and hollows, like the slick of a stream-stone, channeled thin as a luminous pencil. Naturally stepping back, I beheld with flashing senses a pattern in those glowing cracks, one that spoke of lore and perhaps of strange fires. Forgotten kindling of dreams sparked alight inside me, and I saw spider shapes in the sharp mist contained in narrowing channels of cracks.

My fingers, now torches bright with their own agony, wept wet fire as I slid them into the familiar yet alien shapes that seemed traced in the swampgas stuff, in the cracks that looked like pictures, in the vision that seemed like dreams. Something in the rock flexed and parted, and as the light razored out of that twisted place it split my mind at its' natural narrow. All got thick and black. A cold, molasses sleep lasting but a moment.

I awoke to the sound of my fingers screaming.

Somehow in my feint I had advanced down that newly formed narrow, past the place I might have naturally fallen, and into the throat of a slick and maddening mine. My hand had jammed in a crack that had ridged narrows. With effort that flared red in my phosphorus vision, I yanked my fingers from the crack with snapping like a break.

The ache began to fade, yet I still could not find a reason for the light that came in tendrils out of the wet cracks. There seemed to be a pattern within the pattern of that odd and sinister lace. Something somehow sentient but quite different from our own strain of being. Something that could customize its camouflage better than a chameleon. Then my ears popped.

The sensation of something great passed through the slickrock, and I felt pressure from its titanic weight, like a ship is moved by the near passage of a whale just beneath. I thought I heard a moan, deeper than deep and way low.

I stumbled through those dim tights, still aware of that thin, icy air that came and went like the breath of a snoring god who barely rested against an intruder such as I supposed myself to be. I thought of some great weapon of thunder kept by this slumbering titan, and in answer there came a corresponding quake and rumble.

Somewhere out there, maybe way out there, back in the land of cactus and hot desert sun, a storm was beginning. I could tell from even its virginal roar that it would shake this deep place, and I became afraid.

It could have been that fear that saved me, for it honed my swirling and distorted senses into a semi-focused eye. I stopped short of a disturbing orifice that stood like a thorned doorway ahead, and I smelled its stink from across that cold air.

There was deep blackness in the back of that crack from which an evil vapor hissed, and as that nefarious gas was released it fluoresced into visible mist. Swirls parted the flow with a wind as gentle as a last breath, and in that rotten exhaust I could discern an almost unthinkable smart. It was as if beneath the odor and steam lay a beast that would feed on people. I at last stepped back from that almost unbearable heat.

Black rock sharps like broken glass barbs were all the terrain offered for as far in the dim I could peer, which was as I looked back, quite far.

The lichens and slimes that embedded the rift within moist cracks had adapted the glow of that smoldering mist, and far back in the cavernous blacks were suspended vast webworks of these incandescent plants. I had not seen them before due to some photosynthetic cue taken from the flare of gas in the air, and even as I watched those odd algae lost their adopted light and dropped, one by one, into black out of sight.

Thunder much closer now rumbled and I felt I could see it, not as a flash but of sounding my sight. I realized then that perhaps that previous sting to the palm had contained some toxin that was now at work dancing mischief across my nerves and systems. My heart thumped thunder of its own at this; of course I had been stung, but had I forgotten that in my fear of this stinking dark?

That flash then might have only been some flaming synapse snuffing in the flat back end of my brain, not some external beast in an almost growl stalking just out of sight. In fact, if that poison was strong enough, I supposed I could be dying in a state of hallucination that would obscure the change from life to death, and I might go on believing in my own tortured existence far beyond the threshold of it’s unnatural end.

That thought caved in on itself, and all the surrounding activity sank in the pit it created and was gone.

I recall falling forward through the maw of that stinking threshold as my mind and hand lost purchase and shot down in the slight. In that last slip of grope I felt the moment extend by parameters which flexed chromatic. Time shrank, then stretched, in a complex sequence that was undoubtedly a survey of the rings in my soul’s trunk. I aged, and with every tock I slipped into black, my familiar and dreamless void.

So complete was that intoxicated blackout that I failed to awake through what must have been repeated collisions with the walls of that twisted pit. Dreamless and thick, like drowning in glue or sinking like a mammoth in tar.

When I came to, I was flat on my back, which throbbed as if snakes had died in my spine and rotted. After a time of just breathing, slow and directly, I began to look about. The light was even worse than before, as the mossy crops which had so nobly lit the higher chambers for some reason did not or would not grow in this depth. I was glad for the extra width my pupils attained as a side-effect of the psychoactive sting. It allowed in this dark for the gathering of photons so scattered they registered naught.

I had a sudden feeling of startling unreality, and folded back my odd perceptions into an origami shape that forced feedback along my trace memories.

What was I doing here, anyway? Had I just left the car and walked so far and been so hot? I had fallen into a bad hole and something nasty had stung me, now I was cold and the poison of the thing was making shapes clod in the shadows of this slickrock cavern. Nothing really weird had happened until after the stinger had loosened its juice into me, had it? I could not recall but something tanged sharp on my tongue, a sour memory or birth of a thirst.

I had stayed far from drugs for most of my life, and my knowledge of altered states is small. Yet I found myself tripping, it felt very hard, and who could tell what freak that kind of stuff could bring on?

I resigned myself to a cruel and toxic ride.

That is what I got.

THE FOLD continues tomorrow with Part 4

THE FOLD: 2

by G. Alden Davis

Of what odd visions composed my dreams that night I am mercifully unaware, but I do know that I slept in a tangle with the steering wheel, horribly cramped, until the next day’s sun had risen enough to force me awake with its burn. I was immediately and almost frantically disoriented, an abnormal state for a traveler like myself, and it took several anxious moments to collect my rattled mind. In doing that I recalled an odd sensation, as if something had been moving things about within me, and had replaced them somewhat out of sorts. Shaking off this sensation, as I said, took some time, during which several situations arose that stirred such discomfort as to eclipse that lingering discord entirely.

Up to now you have listened without comment, and shown no signs of scorn or humor, but now is where this tale shall take a turn towards the mad, and I stand the risk of appearing ninety degrees slanted off track. But I hasten to urge you, listener; hear me out with that same charitable ear, and by the end of this you may be a changed person, and the Earth may yet stand some slim degree of hope.

As I said, I awoke somewhat at a mental loss, and upon unfolding my cramped limbs from behind the wheel I saw that my physical state was sadly reflective of my drowsy mind; I was not, as I had thought, on the shoulder of that fat black snake of Interstate. The road that stretched out in front and behind me was reddish hardpack, with gravel at odd spots where the countless sandstorms had let it remain. I stretched out my legs and took a few steps around the car, searching the horizon for signs of direction or omen, as either would have been a welcome guest to my otherwise unsettled mind. I found only greater puzzlement when regarding the parking job I had done with the car; it was pulled off the road at an angle of complete perpendicularity, offering no clues as to which direction I had come. The sand and dust of the tough, rutted road had been blown in the night since my passing, and all traces of tracks that the wheels might have left were erased. At this my unease rolled over in my gut, like an awakening snake swallowed whole while sleeping.

My next thought for some semblance of navigation was the sun, yet even that was proven hopeless. Before I could look from the road to the sky, I saw my shadow was spread beneath me. I confirmed the sun’s neutral position directly above. Hours would pass before it had moved enough to offer foolproof direction, and in my shaken state I could not sit and wait. A choice, then, had to be made as to which way I might strike out, and as a man of reason even when panicked I grabbed into the back seat for my binoculars.

Peering through and adjusting the sights seemed to have a focusing effect on my mind, and as I panned slowly across the flat sand towards the distant red hills I had a momentary sense of shimmering against the otherwise stable horizon. Tracking back towards the phenomenon, I saw that it seemed localized, as if caused not by the permeating heat but by something akin to evaporation. I continued to rotate my vision, trying to take in any distinction, any slight intonation of proper direction, but found only red sand and rock, the latter of which in places seemed eroded into foreign and intentional formations.

Locating nothing but a single raven that passed far off before fleeing from view, I climbed back into the sauna of the enclosed car and quickly cranked the key.

The nothingness which occurred shook me with a force that may as well have been the thunder of an angry father. Again I turned the key, feeling the parts of the ignition switch rotate with metallic friction, but without the familiar stir of the engine. The stone that my heart had become began to hurt, as if I had just swallowed a large cube of ice. I recalled with a blast a nightmare of being shot in the chest.

These thoughts of frost and crusting fear made me react to the heat with a powerful thirst, my mouth since dried in denial of the deep terror leaking from my eyes as slightest tears. That the sun had been black or the land aflame could not have added to the shock of that car when again and again it failed to start. Only my natural calm, and practiced, meditative breathing kept me from shrieking from that point on.

For indeed, a mental picture was forming, of a puzzle in which I was forced to be part, whose picture was as of yet indiscernible but whose implications in design led to impressions of chaos and blurs of pain.

Still that thirst persisted with the stale draught of mouth which only those who have slept in the desert can know, and I almost cried out when I recalled the four remaining bottles nestled on ice in the back. There was a taste of the deep malt in my mouth even before I could reach behind to unlatch the cooler. It was a hoax of my senses, which had locked on to the only saving factor in an otherwise grim situation.

It was with that imagined froth on my lips that I screamed, exploding with such recoiling horror that I felt my throat roughen and tear before that cry subsided. For when I pried the lid from the ice chest, a puff of humid vapor escaped along with a smell as faint as bones. Within that hollow, where ice should have been, there was only sand. The bottles were gone, which I proved to myself by dragging my hands frantically through that accursed red dust, over and over, as if I could stumble across them in that small container of sand. I began to laugh then, and it was that dry laugh, emitted from my lips but not my own at all, that frightened me the most.

After a long session of rest that resembled trembling paralysis, I managed to blot out the enormous and dark puzzle that loomed like a dropping shadow around me. I got out of the car, a wise enough choice as it was a literal oven within there. In a rare flash of foresight I reached back into the superheated car and retrieved the binoculars. The nearest shade was beneath the oddly eroded rock formations I mentioned earlier, so not knowing for certain which way on the road would lead out of this desolation, I struck out on foot in the direction I thought to be north.

The sun was a constant weight, at times feeling like a relentless flaming stone pressing me harder still, until I felt my legs would give or my spine would snap under its forging and furious glare. There was one point during that first long walk, what I estimate timidly as halfway, where I came to the conclusion that the sun was not moving at all, that no change had occurred in the direction of its flare nor the cast of my shadow on that blood red sand. That time was somehow suspended was the next jump in logic to make, and while I now surmise your growing skepticism, I must ask your restraint again, perhaps stronger still, to avoid casting aside all my hunches and conclusions with the natural loathing of hoax. By my tale’s end you will have given up all doubt in the implausible to steel your defense against the impossible.

Just when I had concluded that the unchanging sands were infinite, and that those increasingly odd formations were somehow forever away, I came to a place where water had long ago eroded a wash, now deep and dry, with a pebble-strewn bottom about ten feet below me. The zigzag path of the miniature canyon led roughly towards the formation I had chosen as my obligatory destination, and for a reason unknown but oddly comforting, I wanted to be below the horizon line, out of sight.

I followed that narrow for what must have been many miles, and upon occasion that lonely channel would meet with another, and branch off. Wanting to be able to backtrack in a hurry was another inexplicable notion that I valued at the time, so I remained true to the widest concourse in what proved to be a deepening, convoluted gorge.

Still, the sun was a flat fire above me.

After a time that seemed to heat and stretch with the baking day I at last found shade in a patch beneath an outcropping rock. As I fell against the cliff in a sweating pant, I gasped for the cooler, shaded air, drinking it in like thick liquid mint. Sitting until I caught my breath, I found my eyes tracing the many tracks in the sand, all sizes, and of various odd and troubling shapes. It appeared this area was utilized by an assortment of creatures, some of which left tracks I could not identify. Even the familiar marks of lizards and insects seemed to wander in an odd, almost cursive way. I had the sudden feeling of viewing but not seeing, an awareness of a whole that had yet to become tangible. I felt certain a clue to my dilemma lay hidden in the crisscrossed animal paths, that I was staring at letters yet could not read the words they collectively formed.

A scream from above shook me instantly to my feet with a handful of sand, and I hurled it immediately into the air at the source of that terrible screech. Before my eyes could distinguish it’s black form against the flare of full sun, the raven was pelted by the fine powder and burst from its perch into flight.

Thunder was my heart in a lightning cage of ribs. So great had that scare been in contrast to my previous exhausted repose that I was by comparison quite energized. Adrenaline had restored my power while robbing me of calm. Knees like loose hinges stretched me shakily to my feet, and I saw when I stood that my sweat had left a spot damp in the dust. I also saw a small pile of pebbles on the outcrop of rock where the bird had rested, and bent in to get a better look.

Not pebbles, but kernels of dried corn were piled into a tiny cairn there, a detailed and carefully stacked formation that indicated from its base the four cardinal points. I found myself thinking of small beings, and tiny secrets in the hollows they built. So great was the precision of the stack, however, that I felt certain no animal was capable of the feat. Every kernel was placed so that its smallest end pointed outward in a radial fashion, reminiscent of a starfish, or the sun.

Recalling that angry enemy summoned back the scorching heat I had in my daze entirely misplaced. My skin was growing taught, and my shoulders had begun to burn. I peered up through cracked fingers and saw that the sun was free of the tractor that held it for hours at the zenith of its passing. It was now moving, however imperceptibly, towards afternoon. Soon there would be a cooler if not comfortable climate. I smiled as I thought of that golden, late afternoon glow that was the finale of each summer day.

My smile departed, considering the lengthy shade of night.

THE FOLD continues tomorrow 

with Part 3

THE FOLD: 1

by G. Alden Davis

ONE

If there is danger in glimpsing an unknowable truth, dear reader, I say put this manuscript down and back away. Treat it’s unthinkable teachings as pools of lava or quicksand and skip over them as you quickly pass, intact. It has often been suggested by the thinkers of our time that the human mind lacks the ability to assemble all it knows. That seeming weakness is in truth our greatest blessing. We are protected by forgetfulness. We are shielded by dreams and hope for something greater. We are kept from the great horrors of existence by the inability to add it all up. The Big Picture eludes us to our benefit; the bright colors of day are matched by the clinging black of night. Every joy ends in screaming. Every gain is equaled by loss.

It is not without some jeopardy that you hear this tale, and from the outset I should say that a modern person such as yourself will undoubtedly have some trouble accepting it as truth. You sit amongst the structures of civilization within the bright of a normal day. You stride the earth’s surface as its seeming master, unaware the hidden hierarchies established long before your line began. It is within this more ancient region we will travel as we follow the trail to truth.

If you have come for mere entertainment, then again, recant yourself from this tale for it will surely not satisfy. Dismiss yourself now, that I may take those who already know; the value of story is in the moving towards a conclusion, rather than the capture of a tidy and moral end. We will capture nothing tonight, only lure out curious beasts that stalk beyond the reach of our communal light. We will not own them as trophies, but instead prize their memory, their mystery.

We will be glad to not know.

Such things as are told herein do not fit in your world.

They have their own realm, one of lost direction, missed chances, deep pools of shadow and narrow natural formations. This place is known to only a few remote souls who can dare to distance themselves from everything--conveniences certainly but also more basic things. Water and company, the sound of other voices and the feeling of fresh ideas are all scarcities. One trades those things for the open sunlit sky and a clear window to the stars at night. The open range and ragged hoodoo horizon are a wealth of spirit that comes with being here, being alone, being among.

The silence here hums a subtle song to itself, and only those of such slow pace can chance to hear a stanza, never more, of this unbearably lost cadence. In such a flattened place, time passes differently. It has been said that time and space are parallel lines that meet, and here on the hardpan it has never shown so clear. Without the forests and hills to add structure and pace, time spreads flat across the playa, slowed to a crawl, with pools forming in the slightest unevenness of a regular horizon. Men have sought such barren badlands for solitude and escape since the first runaway set foot to the sand. History is rife with tales of outlaws who escaped both justice and fate in equal parts once they found the right place.

Progress covers the globe in metal a foot thick. Within our own American countryside, only the deserts and wastes are left more or less alone. Perhaps it is some poison that afflicts the very soil in spots, a stain that drives even nature away.

Within the flats are hidden slots that barely reveal a feature to the open air. The narrowest of cracks in the redrock flats can lead down into tight mazes of eroded rock and choking time. The twists and sculpted forms, illuminated by refracted and frozen light, hidden so slightly away from the seldom-trodden central basins are but one of the marvelous deceptions the region has tucked away.

There is a spiritual badland out here, offering nothing to life in the way of shelter or nourishment. No seeds take root. Any that do are torn away by the savage climate of these lost or forgotten lands.

Those native to the west share tales of such things; lies that the desert tells, tricks that it plays, and even songs that it sings, to warn or to lure. In every case it is a place of super nature, where worlds of strange design meet and meld. Drawn by the quartzite in the rock and sand, beings from very distant points visit to congress with mankind.

Visible to the intrepid, who brave the flats and slots, are rock panels carved with the images of these strange beings. In a growing number of cases these images are the last thing explorers see before succumbing to terrible thirst or heat.

Yet none of this is brought to light in brochures of attractions or travel agent pitches. There it is a brief nuisance, passed over with scarcely a comment. The long hot highways that do cross it are merely an excuse to turn up the air and speed, open it up and race for the next, leagues-away city.

The American Wasteland, the high desert of the continental southwest, has become a spread of lonely signs on ever-widening spaces. Most signs out here, and there are not many, are unkempt, inaccurate, and dangerously out of date. Population signs announce ghost town inhabitants to those who slow long enough to read. Numbers that were generous in the town’s heydays are now much closer due to dying things being drawn there for ages.

The deserts of southwest America offer much of that shattered frontier; harsh landscapes, dusty wastes and endless Martian redrock. There in the lands between the Midwest and west coast lie the most intemperate and unforgiving folds of earth anywhere. Deemed a burden to exploit for riches beneath the skin, this land was then left forgotten, like a skull turned to stone by the sun. Early explorers, being sailors by trade, called these giant crags ‘reefs’ after their oceanic coral counterparts. In truth, and unknown to men of those days, the whole of the Great Basin was once an ancient sea, making such an analogy wholly appropriate. There are times in the deep night, after one has sped for hours across history’s dried seabeds, when a reef will loom out of the dark. Enormous and powerful in passing, the sharp shapes suggest dorsal fins and teeth to a tired mind and jerk such a driver awake.


It is to these barren and blasted places our path will lead, away from your green New England hills, once the subject of their own dark love of crafted myths, dark no longer in the light of cities which never sleep. The American coasts are each thriving models of opposing progress, showcases of new ideas and new objects. The mysteries and horrors have fled inland, much as disease never strikes at the edge. Just as it is always that central soft tissue that is attacked, it is always some spot at the end of a long and twisting trek, that spawns such terrible suffering. Monsters crawl from caves.

The New England hills and odd, backwater towns have long since disclosed their secrets. Even places with names like Dreadwich and Harkam, once so deeply drawn in shadow that it seemed night most times, have become whitewashed boardwalks and perfect, painted homes.

Progress pushed in from the sea and inadvertently forced the shadows that survived to escape. In the least it was a monstrous migration to lands less trampled by men. Yet however distant and spread, these lands were already claimed by their own native myths, and the arrival of strange ones made for a crude and unquiet binding.

It is time to commit, reader. Choose now. Follow me on this journey, from the familiar settings of your tranquil abode, out into the night of unreason, towards uninhabitable places painted gold by a frozen sun. Or refuse to play. Put down the tale and go seek lighter fare in the company of others, and laughter. Should this walkabout lead into the darkness you may long to hear your own.

I first came to know those foreign hills and wild, unlivable lands much by accident. Faced with a stretch of unemployed freedom, I decided to drive cross-country and absorb what I could of the states. The first few days were mundane as I left the city. Every year it seems another day is lost to the extrication of oneself from the system, and more effort is required to make that break.

On day five I raced across the uncurved horizon from Kansas to Colorado and slammed headfirst into the Rocky Mountain Range, seeming all the steeper due to the last four days of flatland.

Most key moments in my life have come at the golden time between afternoon and evening and this was no different; there on the curved ribbon of asphalt that wound razorwire through sidewinder pass, I hit a high point. Of course it could have been the elation of having a month ahead of me. There in the sheer golden glow of sunlight bent by ancient granite slabs I had a moment that seemed like a fire inside me lighting. Something connected and seemed clear. I was on a path to something magnificent.

Hours later I was cursing along that limitless black stretch of asphalt. It tears across America like a constrictor breaking its victim’s bones in order to accord the swallow.

All day I had been humming at high-speed, air conditioning roaring against that angry flatland sun, and with the onset of the evening hours casting the west in gold, I gladly rolled down the window and rested my elbow on the sill as I drove. The air remained warm, but had dropped considerably in a very short time. As it brushed and whipped at my hair, I could catch the occasional hint of sage, and the distant, deeper musk of night.

Moths began to appear, most swirling in self-destruction before the relentless stare of my high-beams. Through the rush of wind I could detect an odd chittering, as if a great many crickets were performing in tandem for the arriving silence of sleep. Their harmony seemed somehow strange of tone, though I am no stranger to the sounds of insects, being fascinated by them since childhood. But somehow, with those I was hearing there was a distinguishable difference, though vague enough to elude description save that it left me just barely shaken, somehow the more nervous in my solitude on that limitless road.

The prospect of a hotel in this void of vanishing sand and emerging stars seemed an anachronism in what was a primitive, ruined land. Should I have seen one, a dash of neon far up on the flat, I surely would have discounted it as a mirage.

Often I think of what a different chain of events might have occurred if only a few elements of that night were altered. If the scalding sun had not drained my strength, taking with it my normally sharpened senses, or if I had ordered black coffee instead of dark beer at that far-distant truck stop.

Whatever the case, I soon found that the occasional grit which blew in the wind acted as surely as the sandman’s legendary tonic, and I was forced to pull off for what I believed would be a brief and mundane nap. I saw a dirt track heading off to the left, to the south of my westward path. I nodded even as I signaled, with no driver in sight, and pulled off the blacktop to sleep for an hour or two.

Click here for part 2 of 

THE FOLD