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 third part of a multi-part short story.
Read Day One, or
Read Day Two, or
Read Day Three.
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DAY FOUR
The twenty minute drive from the lodge to the nearest city of Yelm was a winding two-lane highway, dim in the pre-dawn darkness. It was still early morning, around six, but commuters lined the road in front and behind Cal, heading to Olympia or Lacey or up to the military base at Fort Lewis.
The closer he got to civilization the better Cal started to feel; small houses thickened around him, here and there a church or a gas station, and pretty soon he was in what passed for a downtown core in the modest city. At its heart, his destination: a Starbucks, round green sign ablaze.
Cal pulled in, grateful—maybe for the first time—for the corporate sameness of the little coffee shop, the way it felt familiar in what had become an unfamiliar place. In the lobby he turned on his phone and checked his messages. No calls from the lodge. Not that he truly expected there to be, but the fear lingered there. He imagined a worried message from Eileen, voice cracking with bewilderment: Why did you leave us, Cal? Why?
He did, however, have a voicemail from his agent. He ignored it for now, tapped over to his mobile browser, instead. Typed Graft Creek Lodge into the search bar.
What popped up was all the normal stuff: the lodge’s homepage, review sites, a few blog entries, an archived news article from the Nisqually Valley News, celebrating some anniversary of the lodge’s opening. Cal scrolled and scrolled, past the first search results. He was looking for…something. For something suspicious. For a one-star review. For anything negative or strange about the lodge.
But there was nothing like that. Not even when he searched for Graft Creek Lodge news. Or Graft Creek Lodge haunted. Nothing.
He considered, then typed in Richard Avalon painter.
Articles, interviews, gallery pages ticked past as he scrolled. Plenty of information. But again, nothing the least bit odd or suspicious about the painter. He was well-regarded and moderately successful. The worst Cal found was a less-than-glowing review of a gallery opening in which Richard had been the headliner, but the criticism didn’t seem to be aimed at Richard directly.
“Can I get anything started for you?”
Cal looked up and the green-aproned barista smiled. He hadn’t realized he had been standing in front of the pastry display case that long.
“Oh. Yeah, sorry. Uh…twelve-ounce Americano, please.”
As she wrote his order on the cup and turned to the register, Cal cleared his throat. “Hey…um…do you know anything about Graft Creek Lodge?”
She looked up smiling. “For sure! We go out there in the summer for family camp. Every year since I was little, and now I take my kids. It’s gorgeous. One of my favorite places on earth. Have you been?”
Cal swallowed, nodded, but did not elaborate. He handed her his card to pay, defeat settling on his shoulders.
He took his coffee to the bar by the window and sat, looking out at the morning movement of cars at the main intersection in the middle of Yelm, and listened to the voicemail from his agent.
“Hey, Cal! I hope you’re having such a good time out there, getting lots done. I know you won’t get this for a few days, but wanted you to know that the publisher has asked for an in-person meeting on the twenty-sixth, once you get back. They haven’t given me the lowdown of what they want to talk about, but uh…I guess, I’m just hoping this week is…fruitful. For you. I’m not…I’m not worried, and you shouldn’t be either, but…”
There was a pause as he heard her sigh, then, “Anyway, sorry, let’s talk as soon as you get back into cell range, okay? Bye, Cal.”
Cal lowered the phone to the bar, sipped his coffee, and let his eyes wander to his car in the parking lot. His suitcase was in there, packed and ready. After last night, after the nightmares and the disembodied knocking, he had packed everything and left the cabin, sneaking away. Eileen had his card on file. She could charge him for the whole week, for two weeks if she liked…he hadn’t cared. He wasn’t staying another moment in that place.
The sun was rising, lifting the light, but it promised to be a day of low clouds and potential rain. Despite how sure he had been when he was driving away from the lodge, his agent’s words were echoing in his mind, standing on one side of the mental scale across from a few bad dreams and a weird old painter with his own problems.
Cal, you need this.
He groaned, squeezed his fingertips against his closed eyes.
I’m going crazy.
And he was. He really felt that he was. He had wanted so desperately to find vindication in those search results. A sinister sounding article, a weird visitor review, something. He had nothing concretely negative to go on about the lodge except feelings, except an unnamed dread. Was that enough, to blow up the best writing week of his life a few days before a potentially career-ending meeting?
You could just go. Right now. Go home.
His stuff was in his car. No one was stopping him. He hadn’t broken any laws. He could just go, hit the freeway back to Seattle and his Belltown apartment. Finish the book there.
If I can.
It was sudden. The force of that thought—small, plaintive, the little boy deep within—almost stole the breath from his lungs. The horrible if. What if he couldn’t finish the book? What if the bullshit magic at the lodge was real enough to save his entire career? What if, by leaving, he was making the biggest decision of his life?
Who gives you permission, Mr. Thornton?
It was nearly seven when Cal finished his coffee and slipped his phone back into his pocket, powered off.
If he left now, he could be back well before Eileen served breakfast at eight.
I’m going to finish this damn book if it kills me.
*******
If anyone noticed Cal’s absence that morning, no one said a word. Eileen and Richard were their usual cheery selves at breakfast. Richard admitted to taking a sleeping pill the night before, and was pleased when Cal told him that it had clearly worked. Richard had not visited him again.
Cal decided not to say that something else had.
When Cal got back to the cabin, he spent a little time unpacking all over again, although he decided to keep some of his clothes in his suitcase. No real reason, and it didn’t really mean anything. It was just a symbolic gesture, at best.
I could leave anytime I want.
When the laptop and all his work things were spread out on the desk, he decided to get started again. He looked back over the manuscript, reading the passages that looked unfamiliar. The ones he didn’t remember writing.
Though the idea of writing unconsciously made him nervous, he reasoned that at least the passages were good. If he was going to write like a man possessed, at least it produced worthwhile work.
With a grimace, he shook off the word possessed and got started.
Within a half an hour, he was deeply grateful that he had not gone home. His fingers flew over the keyboard. The ideas came thick and fast. So fast, in fact, that he started to feel sick. More than once he turned to look over is shoulder, feeling as though someone was reading the words as he was writing them. Willing him to continue.
Let it be printed.
Nothing but empty air was behind him, black bears and salmon on the wallpaper gazing at him with impassive eyes. But the feeling persisted, a fluttering against his skull.
He wrote and wrote, losing himself. Losing track of time, of the minutes ticking by, of his desperate need to piss and the tension in his shoulders. He wrote and wrote, the book becoming a living thing, his fingers the heartbeat, words streaming along the page like blood in veins.
I can’t stop, he thought, and it was both exhilarating and terrifying, a loss of control. I can’t stop.
In a waking dream, Cal thought of bonfires, leaping toward heaven. Of humans sitting around the flames, telling stories.
He thought of what might be drawn through the dark trees to the unfamiliar light.
*******
Cal woke up. He didn’t realize he had even fallen asleep.
He was lying on his arms, crossed on the desk next to the laptop. The screensaver displayed landscape stock photos, patiently waiting. Outside the window, dusk had fallen.
He sat up, and felt hungover. Head throbbing. Neck sore. Tongue dry.
He blinked, blearily, and froze in his seat when his dry tongue felt…something soft against his palate.
Gingerly he opened his lips, reached in with shaking fingers, and drew it out.
A moth. A moth in his mouth, the size of a half-dollar coin, dead and sodden in his palm.
“Shit!” Cal threw the thing away from him, a terrified reflex, and went straight to the kitchenette to take a swig from the bottled water in the mini-fridge.
Dammit. He swished and spat, over and over, trying to clean the feeling of soft dust out of his mouth, the phantom sensation of crawling, wriggling, squirming…
He leaned over the kitchenette counter for a long time, breathing, trying to calm his heartbeat.
In the commotion his laptop had booted up, back to the page of his manuscript, cursor blinking, ready. Cal went back to the computer and stared.
He had written twenty pages that day alone. Twenty. And as he scrolled through, he remembered very little of it. But damn was it good.
The dead moth lay on the floor by the bathroom, like a crumpled leaf. He glanced at it, shivering.
I fell asleep with my mouth open, he decided, though he honestly didn’t know if that was true. And it crawled in. That’s all.
Avoiding the unsettling alternatives, he checked his watch. It was just past time for dinner, a perfect excuse to change the scenery. The cabin walls seemed watchful.
He bundled up and headed out into the evening, grateful for the air, soothing his sore head. The rain that had threatened all day had finally started to fall, light mist turning the trail to glimmer and the lights of the lodge to safe harbor.
He passed Richard’s cabin. The old man’s lamps were aglow, and his shadow at the canvas was serene.
No dinner again for Richard, Cal thought.
At the lodge, Eileen set Cal up with a baked potato with all the toppings at the usual table by the window. The rain picked up, lashing against the glass, but with the warmth and the food, Cal felt a little bit better.
Before Eileen could disappear into the office, Cal said, “Eileen, could we talk?”
He gestured to the seat that Richard usually sat in. She hesitated—ever the professional, she never sat with the guests at meals—but slipped into the chair, looking a little nervous.
“I’ll be honest with you, and I hope you’ll be honest with me,” Cal said. “Ever since coming here, I’ve been…experiencing some pretty freaky stuff. Dreams, and sounds…”
She nodded, giving away nothing in her expression.
He didn’t know how to continue. He had expected more confusion from her, or surprise, or denial. But she gave him nothing. So finally, he said, “There's something weird about this place, and I'd like to know what it is. Please.”
Eileen pursed her lips, looked down at her hands in her lap. Then, she said, “I wish I had a good answer for you, Mr. Thornton. But I really don’t.”
Cal gave her a stern look. “Come on. You know what I'm talking about. You at least know what Richard says, the way he worships Graft Creek. He won't shut up about it.”
“What Mr. Avalon is experiencing is real.” Eileen said it firmly. “But I truly couldn’t tell you why. My late husband who bought this place—God rest him—couldn’t understand it, either. But we all saw it take hold.”
She thought about her next words with care. “Graft Creek is home to something. I don’t know, maybe the thing wanders up and down the whole Nisqually Valley, I have no idea. But it is here, often. Mr. Avalon is right about that.”
Cal felt a chill waft through the room, though no one had opened a door. “What is it?”
“Old. Invisible.” Eileen shrugged. “Who knows? The Indigenous folks called the area shelm, the land of the dancing spirits. Maybe one of those spirits is still here. Maybe dancing isn’t all it does.”
She looked out the window, eyes distant. “It chose Richard. A long time ago, when he first came here. Chose him, and whenever he’s here it lingers so that all of us can feel it. Except the last time. That was difficult on him. He struggled. I don’t know why it didn’t come. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t show.”
She glanced at Cal, then. “I wonder. Maybe it’s not here for him this year, after all.”
Cal ignored the implication. “Richard calls it his muse.”
Imp.
Eileen shrugged and stood, as if an invisible timer had gone off and she was no longer allowed to sit. “I don’t know anything about muses. I’m not a creative person, Mr. Thornton, not like you and Mr. Avalon. All I know is that it doesn’t show up when we host family camps, or business people getting away from the city, or any of our other year-round events. It only shows up when the artists are here. The creators. Something about the creativity, the silence, the work. It's drawn here.”
Like a moth to a flame.
She dismissed herself, made a hollow excuse, left Cal to his meal. But he quickly found that he had lost his appetite.
*******
Walking back to his cabin in the true dark, the rain had strengthened. It fell in sheets, frigid and heavy, the kind of rain still considering whether it will switch over to snow.
As he passed Richard’s cabin, the glimmer of the light reflecting off the falling drops, Cal had a sudden impulse.
Quietly, he climbed the porch steps on soft feet, hoping any creaking would be masked by the sound of the rain. He inched over to Richard’s front window. An attempt had been made to draw the curtains, but a gap about a hand’s-width wide remained, glowing with the light from within.
Cal carefully leaned over, letting the closed curtain shield most of his body, peering through the gap.
Richard was standing with his back to Cal, facing an easel he had set up at the opposite wall. He had moved the lamps in the room to shine properly on his work, but it made the shadows look stark and strange and exaggerated as the old man moved. He was starting a fresh canvas, brushing an initial stain over the white.
Imprimatura.
Cal watched as Richard dabbed his brush into the stain, then swiped it over the surface. The liquid was in a simple glass jar, separate from the paint on his palette. It was a thick, deep red. And as the old man swiped it across the canvas, it dried dark, almost brown.
Imprimatura.
Cal blinked. Richard wasn’t wearing his cardigan, and his exposed arms were riddled with bandages, spotted and stained.
Just as the old painter looked over his shoulder, as though someone had called his name, Cal pulled himself away from the window, heart thundering in his chest, panic ringing in his ears.
He ran to his own cabin, rain lashing at his face, and did not stop to breathe until he had closed and locked the door.
*******
At three in the morning, Cal’s body woke him, ready and waiting.
But there was no knocking.
He lay in the darkness for a long time, staring up at the invisible ceiling above him. Imagining himself floating, flying, dissolving into dust. Wishing there was a light to escape to, warmth to draw near. Wishing even for the sound of helpless wings against glass, a sign that he was not alone.
No knocking ever came.
The bereft silence was arguably worse.
Can one make … friends with the spirit?
It seems it requires some sacrifice in exchange...wondering what, if any will be required of Cal? Yikes!