Greetings, Talebones Readers!
DISCLAIMER: This is a horror tale, and therefore may contain themes and situations that are darker than my average fare.
Reader discretion is advised.
This is the fifth part of a multi-part short story.
Read Day One, or
Read Day Two, or
Read Day Three, or
Read Day Four.
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DAY FIVE
When Cal finally fell asleep in the uneasy silence, he dreamed that the knocking had come after all. But it was different.
Soft and sweet, a lover’s knock. Inquisitive. Hopeful.
And when he had opened the door, he found an arm lying there on the porch. Fingers stiff with death, pale and bloodless as a birch-bough. It was riddled with scars.
A gift, like the dead mice that cats bring to their owners in careful jaws, their wild hunter’s eyes gleaming with pride.
The trees—or something within—seemed to watch and wait for his reaction.
Cal knelt to pick it up, but woke before his fingers touched the cold skin.
*******
It snowed overnight.
Not much. Not enough to look pretty, but just enough to make everything else look dingy in contrast. At some point in the night, the rain had chilled, softened, and settled, dusting the paths and rooftops and the gravel parking lot of the lodge. It stuck to Cal’s boots as he walked up to breakfast. It was the sort of snow he remembered as a child in the Kirkland suburbs, deeply disappointed because it wasn’t enough to cancel school. Not even enough to make a snowball larger than a ping-pong ball.
At breakfast, Richard was especially talkative. More waxing poetic about his work. More art talk. More soul-organ. Cal attempted to follow the conversation, but his gaze kept straying to Richard’s cardigan sleeves, knowing what they hid, knowing now why Richard’s painting of his ex-wife had seemed so muted and unsettling.
Some artists bleed for their art, they say.
“Anyway, you’ve heard enough about me to last a lifetime,” Richard said finally, catching his breath and turning his attention to his cooling pancakes. “What about your book? How is it coming along?”
Cal noticed, maybe for the first time, that Richard asked that question very casually. As if he already assumed the answer. Small talk. Oh, it’s fine. But Cal decided it was only fair to give Richard a heaping helping of honesty. Repay the favor.
“You know,” Cal said, “I may finish an entire first draft this week. It’s crazy. I’ve never worked so fast and so well. It’s like something is working through me. Know that feeling?”
Cal kept his eyes on his food, but he could tell that Richard paused briefly in lifting the fork to his mouth.
“Oh?” the old man said, after chewing and swallowing.
Cal nodded. “I think you’ve got me believing in muses, Richard. I think Imp might be giving me a break. God knows I need it.”
Richard smiled, but it was a thin gesture at best. What Cal had seen flicker over the old man’s face a few days before had returned, and stayed. It was jealousy. The thorny, vining kind. The kind that climbs.
“I myself have completed three canvases and I’m moving on to my fourth,” the old painter said, uncharacteristically nonsequitur, even rude.
Cal sipped his coffee, but his mind was racing. The old man is trying to compete with me. The hell?
“Your personal best is still five in a week, right?” Cal said. He felt a sick shiver of something like vindication, watching the old man squirm.
Richard chuckled lightly. “Yes, five.”
“You’ve only got two more days to beat it. Set a new record. I’ll put in a good word with Imp, for you.”
Richard lowered his fork and looked at Cal. His face had turned to stone, eyes to steel. “Have you been dreaming about it, Thornton?”
“About what?”
“About it.”
“I don’t—”
Richard grabbed his wrist on the table, fast as a biting snake, and Cal flinched. That arm. Riddled with scars, hidden under the cardigan sweater. Pale as death.
Richard hissed, “Thornton, Imp is my muse. Mine. It chose me.”
“Let go of me.”
“It only gives its gifts to me, do you understand? Not some two-bit paperback writer. Thirty years, and only me.”
“Except two years ago.”
The old man’s hand loosened in surprise, then pulled away.
Cal met the old man’s eyes as calmly as he could. “You ever think maybe that Imp thing is only after whatever it wants, Richard? Maybe it’s not a muse. Maybe it’s a parasite. Maybe it’s feeding off of you. Taking, instead of giving. Did that occur to you, or were you too busy jacking off to your own success and literally bleeding yourself dry to please some thing in the woods?”
Richard stared hard at Cal, breathing deeply, eyes narrowing.
“Imprimatura, Thornton. The stain that colors everything else. You don’t…understand. You don’t know. Imp has made me what I am. It chose me.”
Cal shook his head. “That’s easier to believe, isn’t it? It’s easier to believe that your career was given to you by some supernatural fairytale than to face facts. If Imp exists, maybe it smelled blood in the water. And you were just weak enough to keep giving it what it wants instead of being your own man. Your own artist.”
Richard blinked.
Cal, like a man possessed, kept going. All the tension of the week spilled its banks.
“Is that what happened between you and Tanya, Richard? Maybe she thought she was marrying an artist, but was unprepared to marry a washed-up wackjob—”
Richard slammed his chair back and stood. The chair tipped on its rear pair of feet, hovered, then clattered to the floor. In response to the sound, Eileen materialized in the dining room doorway but wisely stayed at a distance, her eyes wide, her face pale.
Richard pointed a quivering finger at Cal. He loomed over the table, bathed in the sickly light from the window.
“You can’t take it away from me, Thornton. Not you, not anyone else. Imp is mine.”
And with that, the old man stormed away. Seconds later, the door of the lodge slammed shut, echoing down the hall.
Eileen approached the table slowly. “Is everything…okay, Mr. Thornton?”
Cal sighed. Rubbed his temples with his hands. He could still feel the claw-like grip of Richard’s fingers on his wrist.
“Creative types, Eileen,” he said. “We’re sensitive souls.”
*******
Cal was afraid to go back to his cabin, but he couldn’t admit it to himself. It felt like a mouth, open and waiting to be fed. So he went for a walk. He walked across the parking lot to Graft Creek, then turned and followed along with the dark, sluggish tributary for a while. The low clouds hovered overhead, heavy hands full of more snow.
The creek passed the gravel lot of the lodge before winding into a patch of woods, and Cal continued to walk its length, picking his way through stands of ferns and tangles of willow shrubs. There was a trail, but it was overgrown. Still, he didn’t know where he was going or how long he intended to walk. There was some small part of him that had never stopped being five years old, maybe, and desperate to hide when things felt overwhelming. He half-hoped to kill time, to forget about the book, to avoid having to see the lights on in Richard’s cabin, the shadow of the old man at his blood-soaked canvas. He half-hoped that if he walked long enough and far enough, everything would change.
But the deeper into the woods he got, the more Cal was aware of a feeling. It started very subtle, just the slightest tug, like a small child worrying at the hem of his parka. But it swelled, this sensation of being pulled. Invited. Drawn in.
He thought of his dream, of the lover’s knock on the cabin door. Soft and sweet. Hopeful.
Soon the lodge had completely disappeared behind him, and Cal felt the heartbeat of the place, a pulsing through the soles of his boots upward. Something was here, with him. Something alive.
He rounded a bend in the creek and came face to face with an odd sight.
Lying across the creek, diverting it slightly from its path, was a crown of roots, bare and skeletal, reaching skyward. Half again taller than Cal himself, what once had been a gigantic tree had fallen in the wind of some past storm and the bare feet of the giant now stretched out round in a mockery of a sun, a dark corona, stricken black with time. The creek water pooled and deepened below it before finding its way around and continuing on. As the water tumbled past it made a sound, a subtle coughing sound, trapped under the tangle.
The roots were surrounded by the fluttering, frantic movement of dozens of moths, drawn—somehow—to the black void at the center.
Cal felt deeply afraid of the fallen corpse of the tree, though he could not say why. Perhaps it was the way that the maw at its base disappeared into nothing. Or maybe it was the moths, creatures addicted to light now drunk on darkness.
Despite his fear he drew forward, like the moths, staring into the dark space where nothing glimmered, and feeling it look deeply into him in return.
He groaned softly, felt lightheaded. His legs buckled, bringing him to his knees, a gesture of gratitude and humility.
Imp.
An echoing scrabbling sound, like the helpless flutter of gloved fingertips against glass, a death-rattle from deep within the bowels of the dead tree. Approaching, approaching, rushing down the length of it toward Cal.
Imp.
A shape appeared at the mouth of the void.
Cal opened his mouth to scream but it was stolen from him.
The world went dark.
*******
When Cal woke, he was lying on his back with his arms and legs stretched out, as if he had fallen asleep in the middle of making a snow angel. He sat up, but there was nothing amiss, no shape standing over him, nothing lurking in the trees.
Just the coughing creek, the reaching tangle of roots, and the fluttering moths, uncaring.
All he knew was that he had an absolutely insatiable urge to write.
A hunger. No, a starvation.
Cal rose, quickly. He followed the creek back the way he had come, walking fast. Nearly running. If the cabin was a mouth, open and waiting, he would feed it. He was ready to give it whatever it wanted. Anything.
Inside, door closed and locked, Cal barely stopped to take off his coat and boots. He did not make coffee. He did not pause at the computer, did not stop to think.
He sat. He typed. His fingers flew over the keys. His eyes were on the screen, but not seeing it. He wrote, unconscious, slipping into a flow like falling into a dark river with stones in his pockets.
He typed so long and without stopping that the tips of his fingers turned numb, rubbed raw, and one—chapped and dry from the mountain air—began to bleed. The drop spread across the keyboard as he typed. He did not notice.
If Richard can bleed for his art, why can’t I?
This time he knew—he knew!—that someone was standing behind him as he wrote. He knew it, but could not turn around to look. He knew it, as the softness of a hand slid across his neck, his shoulders, a resting grip as someone drew near.
Not a he, an it.
Hello, Imp.
The spirit had no mouth, and did not speak. But it rested its soft hands on Cal’s shoulders and watched each word fly across the page, scented the air for the iron tang of Cal’s blood on the keyboard.
Cal wrote for hours, bleeding, and knew that he had been chosen.
*******
When he woke in the dark, it was not three in the morning. It was midnight. And yes, there had been a knocking on his door. Yes, he had heard it. It was not a lover’s knock. It was firm and commanding.
He slipped out of bed, padded to the door.
“Richard?”
“Open the door, Cal.”
It was Richard, yes, but his voice sounded strange. Deeper still than ever, almost resigned. Exhausted, as though he had traveled for weeks on foot to arrive here, on the porch. It was the voice of the inevitable.
Cal crossed to the window and twitched the curtain aside. Snow was falling in earnest, piling up, and though Cal could not see the porch fully through the window he could see Richard’s shoulder and back, his arm wearing that damned cardigan.
But in the soft light of the low bruised sky, Cal caught a glimpse of something in Richard’s hand. It glinted. It shone, metallic.
Richard was holding a knife.
“Open the door, Cal,” Richard said, again. “It’s time to settle this.”
Did Cal think he could get away with challenging Richard without reprisal... I think maybe imp is engaging in a blood sport, even feeding off this conflict!
Sally, whyyyy??? 🫣