Smoke-Mouth is a dystopian supernatural novella. This is Episode Sixteen.
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Previously, a small reconciliation, and a new resolve.
In this episode, a gathering against the dark.
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Autumn’s earliest overtures lay like a mist on the mountainside with uncharacteristic modesty.
These days, Amanda felt the creeping cold like the ticking of a clock. Soon there would be no more fuel, and not too long after, there would be no more food. Routine and habit would keep them alive for only so long. The tower looming over them would stand as a monument to their failure.
No one was coming to save them.
In the gloom of the cabin, Amanda listened to the disapproving cluck of the space heater as she scrawled midday progress notes on the clipboard.
It felt more and more as though she were merely recording the last days of a doomed city, the macabre mundanities of the long-besieged.
The door opened, interrupting the scratch of the pen, and Veer’s shadow spilled across the floor.
Amanda glanced up from the page and met his eyes. They were unfamiliar, wild with some mixture of fear and excitement. Her heart thrilled, but she scarcely knew why.
He beckoned her with his hand, a hurried gesture, and then vanished back out into the milky mountainlight.
After a moment’s startled pause, Amanda picked up the clipboard and pen, grabbed her coat, and left the gloom of the cabin to follow him.
Even before Veer could bring her to the place where he clearly wanted her to stand, she could hear it.
Voices. Upraised voices, coming from further down the mountain. But they were not screaming nonsense like the engineers in the valley.
They were talking. Real talk.
Veer looked at her, studied her face, and she knew why. He thought he had gone crazy. He thought he was the only one who could hear it.
She shook her head, then nodded her head, then shook it again.
no you’re not crazy, yes I hear it, no I don’t understand it, but yes, but no—
Amanda started forward down the trail, as if to follow the sound, but Veer threw out an arm to stop her. Their soundless language failed in a situation like this; their routine had been so settled for so long that they needed a broader lexicon…or to resort to the old way.
Amanda raised the clipboard, flipped over one of the official record sheets covered in her scrawl, and wrote on the back: we should go look!
He blinked, took up the pen, wrote, what if it’s a trap?
She shrugged at him, wrote: die now, or die later
He considered this. But in the pause, the voices down below fell silent.
Amanda’s heart beat fast in her chest.
No, no, no! she thought, wildly. Don’t leave!
She didn’t wait for Veer. She couldn’t. She pitched forward running, desperate with the desire to catch up with the speakers, the voices, before they left the mountain.
They think we’re dead! They don’t know! We’re alive! We’re alive!
She wished she could cry out to them, wished with all her heart that she could scream, cry, roar—
Please don’t leave us!
She could hear Veer’s footsteps behind her, the flail of his hands pushing aside the reaching shrubbery, the alpine scrub. She didn’t turn to look.
They left the grove of twisted trees and pitched headlong down the meadow road, green like a carpet, lined with summer’s last nodding anemones, and Amanda’s heart squeezed when she didn’t see any people on the trail ahead, or anywhere on the slope.
But as she continued to jog down the trail, there was something. A snip of color, out of place, further on. So she kept running, Veer catching up long-legged behind her.
As they drew closer, Amanda slowed, confusion weighing heavy on her brow.
The snip of unusual color was a coat. A patchwork coat, worn by the limp, curled apostrophe of a dark-haired girl, lying in the path as though dead.
Amanda’s heart pounded in her chest, a perplexed tattoo.
I’ve seen her before. I dreamed this girl.
Amanda and Veer approached on cautious feet. There were scuffs of other footprints on the trail below the place where the girl lay, leaving unreadable marks like an alien alphabet. Perhaps she had been pursued up the mountain? Perhaps she had traveled with others, and they had left her here? But why?
Amanda knelt down beside the girl while Veer straightened and lifted his eyes to the sky, scanning for angels.
The girl lay like a crumpled doll, but unwounded, as if something had torn the life from her and let her collapse in place. Amanda reached out to feel her pulse.
It fluttered under the soft skin of the girl’s throat, very faint.
Amanda turned to look up at Veer and she nodded.
His expression was unsure.
Amanda wrote on the clipboard’s page: she’s alive - we can’t leave her here
He took the pen for a moment, as if he might argue with her, but then handed it back. He lifted the girl into his arms—effortless, for he was strong and she was slight—and began to carry her back up the trail to the cabin.
Amanda rose. At her feet was a wide-brimmed hat, crushed somewhat by the girl’s body. A small thing, a simple thing, but Amanda picked it up, brushed it off, and followed Veer up the hillside.
*******
Elsewhere and hours later, down in the valley at the foot of the mountain, Ellen the ghost-horse stood poised, listening. Waiting.
As twilight spilled across the landscape, the sounds of the shrill nocturnal screams started up. But Ellen did not shy or spook at the sounds. Instead, she swiveled her pale ears this way, that way, listening for a particular voice.
It did not take long; she knew it could not be far away. And when she found it, she followed it without hesitation.
As she passed through the valley—so many valleys she had wandered since leaving the misery of Vail!—she was vaguely surprised to find that fear, her ancestral shadow and constant companion, lingered further behind her than usual. After all, had she not faced dangers of all kinds without the prickle-twitch of skin, the bolt of feet? Had she not stood nose-to-nose with death and danger many times, and found only certainty and an unconventional companionship? A herd without compare?
It was a herd she thought of, now, as she picked her way over the valley floor. Family. The gathering of souls against the dark.
Two women and a little taloned thing had formed a small herd, certainly, but formidable. She thought of them, and she felt only purpose.
The shrilling voice was nearer, now, and Ellen slowed her pace as she crested a rise and saw the screamer.
It was the man in uniform. The one who had joined the women only a day or so earlier and led them safely to the mountain road. He was twisted in the agony of his own terror, eyes closed tight and hands clutched to his ears as he roared his throat raw. Fear rolled off of him like smoke, acrid, and Ellen snorted softly, but she did not let the smell frighten her.
She had seen him healed once by Lula’s song, and she knew it could be done again.
She approached him on strong, solid hooves. When he saw her—an impossible thing, a bright thing in the night—he lowered his hands from his ears, staring, considering.
Remembering.
When she was satisfied that he knew her, Ellen continued on. She knew he would follow. And he did.
As she continued on, Ellen thought of Coulee, the grand old lord of a forgotten world, and the swarms of his dappled kin swimming through the treetops. She thought of birds. She thought of buzzing bees in the meadow flowers.
Herd! Flock! Family!
She needed more.
She followed the sound of the nearest screamer—a woman, in the same uniform as the man who already trailed behind her. The woman was wild-haired and bloody from scraping and scratching herself raw. But when she saw the ghostly horse, her eyes filled with tears—an impossible thing!—and she followed, too, in silent wonder.
Ellen knew they all would. She could not stop.
There was too much to do before daylight.
*******
In the cabin, in Amanda’s bed, the patchwork girl slept deeply.
Nothing they could do would wake her. No abrupt sound, no gentle jostling of her shoulder. So they let her sleep on while they found chores outside to do to keep themselves busy, peering into the cabin every so often to make sure all was well and unchanged.
Amanda puzzled over the girl’s presence on the mountain. She certainly didn’t look like anyone sent to help them or check up on them. Just an unlucky traveler, perhaps.
But why—why in God’s name—would anyone travel here?
It was as though she had wandered out of a different world entirely. And nothing could explain the voices, either, or the other sets of footprints on the trail.
Amanda knew better than to see any strange thing as anything other than an omen, these days. Hope was in shorter supply than the fuel or the food.
But she had seen it in her dreams: this patchwork girl, standing on the sun-drenched mountainside. She had heard the girl’s voice, singing sweet echoes to the sky.
What could it possibly mean?
When evening finally draped itself over the mountain, Amanda and Veer limped down from the tower’s foot where they had been watching the angels conduct their nightly sabotage, helpless to do anything to stop it.
As they traveled the well-worn paths to the cabin, there was something different about the quality of the night, something nudged just slightly askew from normal, but Amanda couldn’t place it.
They approached the cabin and peered in to see the girl still sleeping deeply, unmoving, the wide-brimmed hat hanging from the metal bedframe like a dark halo.
But instead of going in to get ready for bed, Veer nudged Amanda gently with his elbow. Then he found a place on the cabin’s slim porch to sit, draping his long legs off the un-railinged edge, leaning back on his hands to look out at the trees and up at the emerging stars.
After a moment, Amanda followed his lead and came to sit beside him, closer than she had ever dared to be, and he did not lean away.
The break in habit was simple but exhilarating. He was beautiful, and so kind. For the love of God, she hoped she would be able to tell him so someday.
Amanda tilted her own head back to look up at the stars. There had been a time when she had loved sitting out here in the evenings, listening to the frog-songs and the rustle of alpine wind in the trees, but that was before she knew the true cruelty of this place: the punishment of the angels, the pain of losing your teammates one by one to madness or death, the unstoppable crumbling of the tower. That was back when she thought they were going to fix everything, that they were the guardians of a bright hope. Despair had long since suffocated that notion.
But sitting beside Veer, leaning to look up at a wide sky, she suddenly felt the mountain as a firm thing underneath them. A wounded thing, but faithful. Whatever disease had infested the flesh of this place, the bones were still solid. The bones would outlast them all. And that gave Amanda a comfort that she could not quite explain, even if she had been able to speak the words aloud.
It was then that she realized what was different about the night air. The screaming engineers in the valley were quieter than she had ever heard them, as if some bright-fingered thing had turned down the volume on a crackling radio.
In the ever-stilling quiet, the frogs were singing again.
Maybe they never stopped, Amanda thought, with no little wonder. Maybe the terror just drowned them out. Maybe fear is just forgetting.
The alpine wind tousled the treetops, gentle and reassuring. In the valley, the voices continued to go quiet: a gradual soothing, a slow snuffing of guttering candles.
Amanda looked up at Veer—I know you, I know you, I haven’t forgotten—and found his hand in the dark, heartbeat-warm.
In response, he drew her closer, closer, until they were wrapped in each other’s breath, delicate as a gasp, wordless as blood in the veins.
Thank you for reading! 🏔
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ELLENNNNN YAHHH
Indeed, a herd is protection, a herd is comfort, a herd is family, continuity, celebration of life, of love, of hope! This is good!