Bone Pattern

Burning Chasm in His Flesh- September 5, 2014

Wayland came for me this afternoon.  It was the first cool day we have had in a long time, and he brought rain in with him.  He knocked on my door, and I had heard him open the screen and so his hand was raised when I open my apartment to him.  He is neither terrible tall nor short, a little plump.  Bearded and dark eyed.  He carried a wicker basket on a leather strap over his shoulder.

Frequently in the deep, you wind up living in places the shallow post will not deliver to.  So people start running messages, like Wayland.  I do bits of it myself, but not too often.  He has devoted himself to travelling on secret roads, and I still stand with one foot on shore, almost.

He took me south.  We walked in the shallows along Pennsylvania for a bit, the took a turn into an alley.  From there buildings grew further apart.  Grasses grew tall up between them and the slender, weedy saplings rose high above our heads.  Soon even these faded away and we walked in pale grasslands beneath spattering rain and a leaden sky.  

Wayland did not speak much, although our journey lasted several hours.  Once, he bid me stop and turn my gaze to the ground.  A shadow passed us over, while he whispered to me not to look.  I do not know what that was.

At last we came upon a house set into a hollow in the deep grassland.  This deep, Lydia and Fisher would be only the palest shadows on the surface world.  The house sprawled across the earth, dark wooden walls and a stone roof.  By the time we get to the door, I was shivering.  I had not realized how cold it would be out there.  

Curtains were drawn on all the windows I could see.   The house had a desolate feeling.  All its eyes tured inward.  I knocked on the door and we waited.  Minutes passed, and I knocked again.  I heard the shuffle of feet approaching at last and the door opened to reveal Lydia.  A plushly plump woman, as Ellis had said.  But tired now, and drawn.  Her hair pulled into a tangled ponytail.  She wore a ragged grey sweater and long  black skirt.  We stared in silence at each other for a moment.

"Lydia, this is Calix," Wayland said, and I was relieved.  Her shadowed gaze moved to him.  "The Weaver told me to bring her to see you."

"I guess you had better come in," Lydia said in a voice like the last leaves falling in Autumn.

A long, low hallway.  Closed doors on either side.  Lydia led us back into a kitchen hung with fragrant herbs in bunches and we sat at a gouged wooden table.  Without a word, Wayland reached into his basket and withdrew a stack of books.  Most of them, I was surprised to see, were simple books from the shallow world.  New horrors by Richard Gavin and Caitlin R Kiernan.  At the bottom, a slim little chapbook by Margaret Bashaar.  She smiled at the gift, ran her fingers over the fine paper that bound the copy of "Letters from Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel." 

"The Weaver sent these too?" she asked Wayland and received a nod in return.  

She lifted the stack of books and added them to a small collection on a shelf, pushing aside several red jars to do it.  When she sat down again, she looked less vague.  Her eyes met mine and she searched my face.

"Why has the Weaver sent you here?"

So I told her my story.  Described the room beneath the temple, and the trapdoor leading further.  Told her of the boutiful artifacts it contained.   She watched me at first, but as my tale went on, her eyes drifted away, until she looked only at the table and her hands.

"I know who collected all the things in that cache," she said.

"Who?"

"My brother."

We sat in silence after that.  I tried to find the words to ask for more.  Something in her weary face tied my tongue.  She stared at the table and I stared at her.  Until Wayland shifted and scraped his chair against the floor.  The noise brought her back a bit and she looked up at me.

"You had better come and see him."

Lydia led and I followed, out of the kitchen and to a locked door.  She pulled a ring of keys from beneath her sweater, suspended on a chai, and searched through for the correct one.  Wayland remain seated where he was.  I saw him watching the window, not looking at us as we left.  We followed another hallway to its end, at another locked door.  

They key rattled in the lock and the door swung open.

Fisher was laid out in the room beyond.

Fisher was the most beautiful person I have ever seen.  Cream colored skin washed warm with pink at his cheekbones and eyelids.  The kind of delicate features you see in anime made real.  Dark lips slightly parted.  His head thrown back.  But black spots ran up the smooth hollow beneath his ribs, clustered at his collarbone, and just touched the corners of his eyes and the bridge of his nose.  Each with its own painful heart of red.  His fingers twitched, eyes searched restlessly beneath his lids, but Fisher did not move.  Did not open those eyes with their long lashes.

He was laid upon a table, draped and swathed in ivory fabric that grew dark and blackend at the edges. Candles clustered around him, as though drawn this his light that was an echo of their own.   The room was dim and cold, despite the golden haze of candlelight.  It was more a tomb than a sickroom.

Lydia pulled up the shroud that wound around his hips.  Pulled it back to reveal the scorched borehole that pierced that perfect flesh.  Smoke rose from the edges of the gaping wound.  His flesh was torn and dangling into a blasted hole that smoldered.  

When Lydia blew upon it, blackened skin glowed dully, like heated iron.  Like banked coals waking.

Fisher did not wake.  One breath followed another.

The hell of his flesh burned and he was perfect in his slumber.

I cannot finish this today.  I cannot tell you more.  Not now.   

Tomorrow I will finish this tale.  Tell you of the tunnel in Fisher's flesh.  And the trapdoor in the earth.

Not now.

I wish I could turn back.