Smoke-Mouth is a dystopian supernatural novella, serialized in twelve projected parts. This is Episode Nine.
Click HERE to start at the beginning. Click HERE to head back to the Navigation Page.
Previously, a place of respite revealed a sinister secret.
In this episode, escape is attempted, and illusions are challenged.
—
If you enjoy this tale, please help it gain a bit of traction by liking, commenting, sharing, and restacking. Every bit of engagement boosts posts in the algorithm and helps this story to find its audience!
If you’re interested in following along with this story through the summer and into September, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE to receive every weekly installment in your inbox!
Ellen wandered the valley with a heavy head and heavy hooves, alone.
It seemed to stretch on forever, a vast jibbering darkness. None of the sounds or smells was familiar to her. In her own haunted forest, she had at least known the paths of the night-creatures, had at least known the old lumber roads that snaked between camps. But not here. Here, nothing was as it should be. Unsettled.
Even the river ran red, mumbling over the stones like a mouthful of bloody teeth.
Ellen snorted, shied, yet walked on. She sought the scent of the two women and the little demon-bird, the little taloned thing. But no matter how far she carried on, she never could seem to find a trace of them.
She felt this loss as something very like shame, or as close to shame as a horse can feel. Her fear—her constant companion from her long-limbed, knock-kneed birth—had taught her to pick up and run run run whenever danger drew close. So she obeyed.
After the initial shock of the scream beside her ear, the shadows only she could see, her heartbeat had slowed and her breathing had hitched and she realized that she had separated herself from the closest thing she had to a herd in a very, very long time.
Alone. Alone again, and maybe forever.
Her halter, loose around her face from getting caught on brambles and branches in her escape, seemed to weigh even heavier on her than she had ever felt before. She followed the blood-red river, peering up at a sky full of unfamiliar stars.
It was in this wandering along the river that she found the bones.
Lying in a clearing, straddling the river running through it like an artery, was the long, languid “s” curve of a giant, picked-clean skeleton. The leering skull lying on its side had sharp teeth and a frowning jaw, and the thick cartilage of the powerful tail lay in a wide corona like a ghostly fan.
Ellen regarded the skeleton, withers shivering and muscles tensing to run. She had seen something like it before, many times, when the men in the lumber camps of Vail had caught and eaten fish from the rivers and streams. Salmon, it was called, and they threw the bones into the rubbish yard when they had picked them clean. But never like this. Never so large, so grand.
The face of the dead thing drew her near. There was a scent of tragedy about it. A loneliness that Ellen felt, and understood.
Cautious, she stepped forward and gently brushed the nose of the skull with her own.
For a moment, like a flash of lightning, Ellen saw the valley as it really was: sweet-smelling and soft with moss, familiar stars tumbling overhead, all of the scents and sounds of the best of forests restored. But it faded as the touch of the skull faded, and the dark and gloomy curtain drew back over the world.
“You see how it was,” said a soft, deep voice, somewhere in Ellen’s simple, sorrowful mind. “You are the first to see it truly for a long, long time. It is all I see in my dreams.”
Ellen stepped back, hindquarters drawing parallel with the skeleton, keeping one eye on it. The red river slid by underneath it, unbothered.
“Don’t go,” said the voice. “Please. I am so alone. So alone.”
Ellen stood still, tail twitching. She snorted softly.
“It was not always so. Coulee was never meant to be alone. Once, I swam the upper waters of this valley with my kin, my brides, my children, unseen by human eye. Huge flocks of us soaring through the treetops like birds in dappled swarms! The power! The beauty! But the witch of Tintagel lied to me. I was promised her friendship. Instead, she stole my power and fuels it with souls. Souls! She twisted my valley, and she hunted my kin to extinction.”
The skull seemed to shudder, empty eye huge and black and desperate as it leered up at the night sky.
“Coulee was not meant to be alone,” the voice whispered.
Ellen did not understand many of the things the skull spoke of, but she understood that. She knew that she had not been built for loneliness. She remembered Grass and Spring and Mother, and the other horses in a great running herd before there were whips and fences and reins and lumber. The power! The beauty! Indeed.
And her horse-heart squeezed with fear and shame when she thought about the two women and the little demon-bird, and how she had left them, and how she yearned to find them again. Ellen the phantom was not meant to be alone, either.
She stepped forward again, ignoring the steady drumbeat of her panic, and lowered her head so that she could rest the flat of her soft white brow against the skull.
As she did so, the loosened halter finally gave way and slipped from her head into the gaping jaw, snagging on the sharp teeth and resting there.
There was a long whooshing sound, like a rattling sigh. Ellen’s mane stirred with a spectral wind, and the lightning-flash vision of the restored valley sank deep and stayed, spreading like spilled wine out from the skull at the heart of the forest, as the halter—saturated with every ounce of Ellen’s one-hundred-years of memories, of herds, of humans, of hands, of soft words and hard work—was swallowed, consumed, by the invisible tongue of Coulee.
“Oh,” said the soft voice, rich with fullness. “What a gift! What a gift!”
Ellen raised her heavy head up as the black treetops began to rustle and part with the passage of something truly magnificent.
*******
“Get up,” said Jenny-Dog.
But the dark barn swallowed her words, and the imprisoned people only looked up at her briefly, then turned away. Not even Joe would look at her. Bastard.
“Get up,” she said again. “We’ll take you away from this place.”
None of them moved.
Jenny was so tired. She kneeled down beside Joe. “Help me,” she said. “You once spoke for God as His prophet. Speak for me, now. For them. Tell them to get up.”
He shook his head, weakly. “Why, Jenny? To lose our heads in the valley? To be consumed in the dark? No. I no longer speak for anyone. It only leads to pain.”
He shifted his handless right arm meaningfully, but would say no more.
Bastard!
Jenny stood up. To Pellig she said, “Out. Out, out. Let’s seek Lula.”
They left the gloomy barn into the sunshine of mid-morning, closing the small door carefully behind them, and were careful to sneak around the side of the old building to avoid being seen.
“So it was a lie,” said Pellig, as they handrailed the paddock fence back toward the farmhouse. “The rat poison story. Your husband lives.”
Jenny saw the bloated, bruised face of him, blood dried around his lips, and she swallowed back a wave of nausea. “People can get married more than once, Pellig. Time enough for tales later and I’ll ask you not to lecture me about truth. How long have you known what we were walking into by wandering on this cursed land?”
“I didn’t. Not at first.”
“Then when did you discover it?”
“Not too long after we arrived,” he said, calmly.
She stopped and looked down at him. “Why didn’t you tell us? As soon as you suspected? You refused the food, but you said nothing.”
Pellig blinked. “If it’s truth you want: it did cross my mind to leave you both here and continue on alone. It seemed a…natural salvation from your company.”
Jenny grunted. “You would have left us to this fate?”
Pellig shrugged his thin shoulders, but his many-eyed face was pinched with something like regret. “My kind is not known for altruism.”
Jenny sighed. She was so very tired. “You changed your mind, and I suppose I should be grateful for that. Pellig, you and me have got to learn to change our stripes, somehow. Might take a miracle, but…”
It was hard to remember Yelm, now. Jenny tried. She tried to remember her long solitary days, her five-finger paths, her many sleeping-places and her jars of supplies and the creek where she kept things cold. She thought she was happy, then, with no one else to think about or care for except herself.
It galled her to think so, but in Pellig, in this little wounded oil-feathered beast, she saw so much of her conflicted self. A little ghoul.
“You hide out here somewhere. I have to find Lula,” she said, finally. “We can’t stay here in this place a minute longer.”
Without a backward glance, she limped across the field toward the house.
*******
The farmhouse was full of rooms. Jenny had no idea which one was Lula’s.
It was enough of a journey to climb the stairs with how exhausted she was. But once she reached the top, she found halls and corridors full of doors, an impossible amount. This house is big, but it ain’t that big, she thought.
There was nothing else to do but try every door. Some were locked outright. Some were missing doorknobs. Some, up close, were simply painted to look like doors. Some opened into completely empty rooms—no furniture, just white walls and echoing floors—and some opened into a dead-drop down to the field below, the cursed valley yawning out on the horizon like a dark smudge in the strange sunshine.
Tintagel was all illusions wrapped around nothing, thin glimmering membranes like soap bubbles with empty centers. It was maddening.
With each new door, with each new trick, Jenny felt her mind snip and snap a little more, the panic rising in her like bile, her head shaking no no no no
I have to find Lula. I have to find her. I have to.
When she finally found Lula’s room, she was surprised to find that it was right beside hers. The two of them had been sleeping side-by-side the whole time.
She entered and found Lula lying in bed. The fool-girl was pale with illness, and the wide-brimmed hat was on the floor in a corner, as if it had been dropped and forgotten.
“Lula?” Jenny crossed to the bed and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Lula, wake up.”
Lula’s eyes fluttered open. “Jenny, go on away. I’m real tired.”
“Me too.” Jenny sat beside her on the bed. “But there will be time enough for sleep later on, in a safer place. We’ve got to get out of this house. Right now.”
“I can’t,” Lula said, and her voice began to tremble. “I can’t, Jenny.”
“You can, and you have to. If you sleep now you’ll be here forever, and what about Smoke Mouth? What about it? It’s closer now than ever. We’re so close.”
Lula looked at Jenny for a long moment, then turned her face away. “I don’t think it’s there anymore,” she whispered. “I don’t think it was ever there.”
Jenny felt ice snake down her spine. “What are you talking about? You saw it. We saw it from the highway south of Elbe. Don’t you remember?”
Lula began to cry softly. It was a truly despairing sound, empty and harsh and horrible. Jenny had never heard Lula cry like that. Back in Vail, under the weight of the forest’s sorrow, she had heard her first sign of the girl’s hidden sadness. But this was different. This was true hopelessness, and it terrified her.
You followed a lie, Jenny-girl, straight into doom. Who’s the fool now?
Jenny shook her head. Shook until her thoughts came unstuck and rattled free.
Should have stayed in Yelm. Should have stayed happy and alone. Ghoul! Stupid!
“No,” said Jenny, half to herself and half to the listening walls of Tintagel. “No. This place isn’t real. It’s all lies. But that damn mountain is real.”
Golly-gawd, Jenny. Do you know how you sound?
There were people in the barn, too empty of strength to move. Joe was in there, and Lula was heading for the same fate.
“That damn mountain is real,” said Jenny. Her voice sounded strange to her ear. It sounded like someone else. It sounded like—
She stood, and she picked up the wide-brimmed hat from the floor where it had fallen. She held it gently, felt the way it had been softened with use.
With shaking hands she raised it, and she set it on her head. It fit perfectly. It fit right.
She looked at herself in the mirror over the vanity in Lula’s room. In this house of illusions, the mirror spoke truth: it was Genevieve Lucille Douglas, all grown up and wearing her father’s hat.
They had left this hat behind in Union after her father died. Jenny had begged and begged her mother to let her bring the guitar with her to Wolf’s Head, but the hat stayed behind. It was probably for the best; the guitar eventually met its fate on the meeting-place pyre, and the hat likely would have, too.
Staring at her own reflection in the mirror, Jenny thought maybe she had left something else behind in that womb-red house. Maybe she had been walking around incomplete all this time, and the best of herself was living a whole separate life somewhere else, until their two paths finally found each other.
Turning, she regarded Lula.
Golly-gawd, Jenny, but she looks a lot like you!
Jenny took the hat off her head and brought it over to Lula. She held it out.
“This is real, Lula,” she said. “I am real, and so are you. This isn’t where it ends. Now get up. Get up and finish it. I can’t do it without you, and we both know it.”
The fool-girl turned to look back at Jenny, at the hat. She reached out with tentative fingers and took it. She sat up, slow and bleary-eyed.
“I’m awful hungry,” she said.
Jenny nodded. “We ain’t eating another bite here. But we’ll find something soon enough, as long as we’re clear of this place. Up, up.”
With Jenny’s help, Lula climbed out of bed and the two women leaned on each other, staggering out of the bedroom and down the stairs, moving as one crippled animal. The illusory guests milling and lounging downstairs watched them go, smiling like automatons. Jenny ignored them. She was only worried about Morgan, but the golden-haired woman was nowhere to be seen.
They left the house through the back door where Pellig was waiting.
“Quickly,” he said. “Quickly, quickly.”
To the barn they went. To the barn as fast as they could go.
*******
In the barn, Jenny led Lula to the middle of the old room where they stood together, Pellig on Jenny’s shoulder. Lula’s wide eyes were impossibly wide at the sight of the people imprisoned, hopeless heads hanging low.
“This is where she wanted us,” she said. “This is where we would be if we stayed and slept and ate anything more.”
Jenny nodded. “But it won’t happen. Tell them where we’re going.”
So Lula stood as straight as she could, took a deep breath, and said, “We’re headed to Smoke Mouth. To the mountain. We’re headed south, out of this valley and away from this place. And we want you to follow us. Out of the valley, certainly, and then wherever you please.”
The imprisoned people shifted in the gloom. Struggled to raise their heads.
“There is a sky out there with real stars,” Lula continued, “and there are good beds and real food and sweet company out there, too. We’ve known it. You’ve known it, too, once upon a time. Do you remember?”
A few managed to look up at her, their lips working as if they wanted to speak.
“Remember it,” Jenny said. “Remember what you forgot.”
Joe Tuesday was the first to climb to his feet where he swayed on weakened legs.
“I remember fields of rolling gold,” he said. “Wind in the trees. I remember rain.”
He looked at Jenny, and she smiled at him. Yes. Yes, yes. Speak, prophet!
“I remember bread, fresh from the oven,” said a woman sitting near the door. “I remember homemade jam.”
“I remember my grandmother’s quilt,” said another man. “It was soft.”
Around the space, voices rose in clamor.
“I remember candles.”
“I remember kisses.”
“I remember laughter.”
“I remember the feel of a cat’s fur.”
All around the barn they stood, shaky on their legs like newborn foals. Dozens of them. Dozens of people, caught by Morgan’s kindness and trapped by hopelessness. They stood and looked to Jenny and Lula.
“Come with us out of this valley,” Jenny called above the voices. “Let the witch stay here alone in her cursed house.”
And they all tumbled out of the barn, resolute in the shocking sun, blinking in the sudden brightness and sighing in the warmth. They left the barn one by one and Jenny and Lula waited to make sure that none were left behind before they, too, followed.
Morgan was there. The golden-haired woman stood tall in the field beside the barn, shaking her head, and the newly-freed people trembled under her gaze. Out of one trap and into another!
“No, friends,” she said, soothingly. “Not back into the valley. It’s too dangerous out there for you! It’s a place of peril and pain! You’ll only be consumed in the dark. Come into the house and eat. Restore your strength.”
The people of the barn shifted and worried, turning from one side to the other, looking for the hope that had visited them so fleetingly.
Jenny stood firm with Lula on one side, Joe on the other, and Pellig on her shoulder.
“It’s done,” she said. “Away from this place we’ll go. It’s nothing but a magic trick.”
It was then that a great sighing sound was heard, rushing over the treetops from somewhere deep in the valley. And with the sound came a great drawing-back as of a curtain and the illusion that had settled over Tintagel’s farmhouse began to peel away like cheap paint: sagging roof, cracked foundations, broken shutters, windows spiderwebbed with cracks.
The effect spread and spread and the people watched, marveled, as it revealed everything to be a lie. Every blade of grass. Every branch.
Then, behind Morgan’s back, a shape could be seen climbing up the hill from the valley road, running brilliantly as a scudding cloud in high wind.
It was a pale horse, translucent in the bright summer sun.
As she climbed toward them, Ellen left a trail of truth in her wake: the vineyard vines crumbled to dust, the fences weathered and jumbled like broken bones, the outbuildings and farm equipment rimed with rust and lichen. Morgan’s tricks lay in tatters, and the golden-haired woman began to wail.
“Ellen! Hello!” Lula called. “You found us!”
The horse nickered and gamboled her heavy feet with joy. Then she turned her body south and looked back over her shoulder, as if to say Follow me! Follow me out!
So Jenny, Lula, Joe, and Pellig followed the horse, and the others followed after them.
They passed Morgan as she shrieked and cursed Coulee’s name. They saw the illusion over her own body withering away, shriveling her, shrinking her, but they did not stay to bear witness. The witch of Tintagel had stolen enough of their moments.
Ellen led the crowd down the hill to the road. Without its veil of darkness the valley was just a valley, now; no frights invented by Morgan to scare the unsuspecting into the trap of her house. No strange sounds or frightening shadows. And the road was just a road, crumbled concrete overgrown with weeds and lined with trees. Even the unfamiliar river sang sweet and clear without Morgan’s enchantment upon it.
They followed the pale snip of Ellen’s twitching tail south and south. They walked and walked until Tintagel was too far in the distance to haunt them.
When they had walked their way out of daylight, they found a clearing in the trees large enough to hold them all—ringed with berry bushes and wild apple trees—and they lit small fires and ate and spoke softly and found places to sleep.
While Lula and Pellig and Joe fell asleep where they lay, Jenny sat beside Ellen, wishing she could stroke the horse’s ghostly side.
“Thank you for coming back to us,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
And the horse and the woman sat side-by-side, breathing lightly, staring up at the newly-restored stars, the shifting clouds, and the ghostly shapes of giant dappled fish—powerful and beautiful—swimming flick-tailed through the valley’s treetops.
Click HERE to read on! ⏩
Click HERE to head back to the Navigation Page. 🏔
✨Talebones runs on YOUR support! ✨
My Tip-Jar! - Enjoying this story? Show your appreciation with a one-time tip!
Work With Me! - Looking for an editor, beta reader, proofreader, or copywriter? Look no further! Check out my Work With Me page for rates and services.
Shop My Books! - Explore my self-published works, both ebook and paperback, available from various retailers!
Visit the Gift Shop! - Grab a piece of Talebones swag for your very own! Mugs, tees, hats, sweatshirts, and more, updated seasonally!
This is the kind of story that makes me want to go back and get my English master's so I can teach a college class purely to make them read it and write 10 page papers on it.
Breathtakingly beautiful, that was... Especially that last sentence.