Pellig

Smoke-Mouth: Episode Five

Smoke-Mouth is a dystopian supernatural novella, serialized in twelve projected parts. This is Episode Five.

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Previously, the travelers attempted a hazardous river-crossing.

In this episode, Jenny and Lula walk a ruined road along a silent lake.

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Morning dawned with a cricky neck and the promise of a sticky stillness, the summer clouds knitting tight and pulling low and gray over La Grande.

Jenny-Dog waited patiently under the hemlock for Lula to emerge from the old post office with breakfast. She could hear the moving-around of feet inside, the sleepy morning chatter of a handful of low voices. The rest of the crowd must have wandered off to their own beds overnight, while Jenny slept.

When Lula finally stepped out the front door and off the porch, Jenny was pleased to see that the fool girl was back to looking like herself: her clothes and patchwork coat had been cleaned and dried, her wide-brimmed hat sat jaunty on her two long dark braids, and her wide eyes were bright. She came to find Jenny under the hemlock, carrying two chipped bowls of oatmeal fragrant with cinnamon and honey and melted butter.

“I’ve got me a ride,” Lula said, as she handed Jenny one bowl and sat under the hemlock with her to eat. “There’s a kind old man with a truck who drives down to Alder Lake most mornings, and the folks here say he’ll be obliged to take me. After that I’ll have to walk it. The roads are too bad for driving.”

Jenny grunted and looked out at the overgrown lawn across the way where Ellen was mumbling at the grass. A junco perched on her too-solid harness, unbothered by the gentle movement of the horse’s head until Ellen shook her mane and the bird took off into the air.

“What will you do?” Lula asked, not looking up from her oatmeal.

Jenny made a show of thinking about it, although in truth she had thought of little else all night. La Grande was the sort of place she might have been happy in, if it weren’t for the electric lights and the bastard cigarette smoke. And the people.

Yes, too many people.

A quiet fear had taken root in the pit of her gut the further from Yelm she got, that the world had gone on without her, left her without a place to be.

“Should this old man have room in his truck—” here Jenny shrugged, devil-may-care-and-I-certainly-don’t “—I might as well tag along.”

“Oh?” Lula barely hid a gentle smile behind her spoon.

“Can’t stay here,” Jenny said. “The lights, the people…it’s too much. I can’t do it. Who knows? Maybe there are better prospects around Alder Lake.”

Who knows? Who knows? You keep saying that, Jenny. Better prospects further on, who knows? But it’s clear no one knows, leastways you…

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad,” Lula said. “And I was hoping you’d say it.”

Jenny squinted at Lula. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to Smoke-Mouth with you. It doesn’t mean that at all.”

Lula nodded. “I know. But I’m still glad. Been alone for a while, and your company has me spoiled.”

They ate the rest of their meal in companionable silence, and when their bowls were empty, Lula took them inside where she said her goodbyes to the good people of La Grande.

*******

The old man pulled the ancient pea-green Chevy Cheyenne around to the front of the post office and waited patiently while Lula and Jenny climbed in, their bags full of supplies and well-wishes.

Jenny had never seen such a rickety old machine; it appeared to be held together with twine, bungee cords, and fervent prayer. The truck’s bed was full of piles and piles of scrap, tools, old furniture, bags of clothes, toys, appliances.

“Morning,” the old man shouted amiably over the truck’s pained idling. “Just kick the junk out of the way down there.”

The junk in question was mostly empty coffee mugs and gum wrappers on the floor of the cab. Lula eased in beside the old man—wide-brimmed hat resting in her lap—and Jenny sat by the window, grateful that it was ajar so she could feel the cool air on her face. It had been a long time since she rode in a car, and every nerve of her body felt like it wanted to climb up and out through her mouth.

“I’m Teddy,” the old man said as he cranked the gear-shift and the truck crept forward onto the highway, groaning. “Trader Teddy, they call me.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Lula said. “I’m Lula, and this is Jenny.”

Jenny watched out the window as Ellen kept easy pace with the truck, tail flicking back and forth like the rooster-tail of a boat. It didn’t seem to bother the ghost-horse at all; she seemed never to get tired, and Teddy was clearly averse to driving any faster than fifteen miles an hour.

“Me’n Duchess are happy to oblige you,” Teddy said, patting the old truck’s dashboard with a fond, arthritic hand. “What’s taking you to Alder Lake?”

“Just passing through it,” Lula said. “I’m headed on to Smoke-Mouth, and Jenny here is looking for a quiet place to settle permanent. She’s not much for people.”

Teddy nodded in something like approval. “Too right.”

The two-lane highway south of La Grande was in surprisingly good shape, merely frayed at the edges but stable and smooth enough for old Duchess to rumble along unimpeded. It was bordered by fields thick with blooming Scotch broom, peppered with old houses and stands of fluttering alders whispering among themselves. The low clouds swelled with a potential for rain.

“Have you lived in La Grande long?” Lula asked.

“My whole life,” Teddy replied. He had thick spectacles on his face and a wad of peppermint gum in his mouth. “I’m real lucky. When the quakes came, we were only shook up for a year or so before we figured out how to get the dam workin’ again. We’ve had power near the whole time since then. Real lucky.”

“That means Tacoma’s powered up, too,” Jenny said, half to herself. It hadn’t occurred to her that the bigger cities might be fully powered, operating as normal while the rest of the region was in the dark.

But Teddy shook his head. “Not likely, at least not from us. We kept those sumbitches out of it, made it real tough for ‘em. We had a man living in La Grande back then, an expert; he rerouted the power away from the grid so we could keep hold of it. Don’t ask me how, I’m no engineer. The angels helped out with that, I’ll tell ya. Candidly, I think they like it when we tussle.”

Lula cocked her head. “Why wouldn’t you want Tacoma powered up?”

“Cuz it’s ours,” Teddy said. “The power’s ours. We’re the ones sittin’ on the river. We’re the ones who should have it. We’re the lucky ones. Everyone says so.”

“The military will come. They came to Yelm,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, we heard about that.” Teddy scowled, his voice taking on a note of real ferocity foreign from his kindly face. “Those JBLM sumbitches, we heard about that. They’re trying to connect Seattle and Portland again. They think that’ll fix it. The angels won’t like it, and we won’t be making it easy for ‘em either. It’s ours, I’m telling you.”

Jenny-Dog leaned her temple against the edge of the open passenger window and tried to remember what it was like, before the quakes. The way everything was easy. Phone calls and Internet and driving and sending packages in the mail. It had all been so very easy. Too easy, maybe. Too easy to talk, and too easy to lie. If the military were trying to reconnect Seattle and Portland, repair the pathways between the two cities, what would it mean? Nothing could ever be the same.

Please God, don’t let it be the same, Jenny thought, and the thought rattled fretful in her skull with the rattling of Duchess’s ancient and rickety suspension. Please God, never again.

Despite Teddy’s glacial pace the drive was not long, maybe just half an hour down the highway. The first ghostly glimpse of the lake appeared in front of them, just a gray snip through the trees, a hint at a much larger body of calm water at the foot of mist-wreathed hills.

“That there’s Alder Lake,” said Teddy. “People made that, not nature. It’s a reservoir. They had to flood the old town of Alder to make it, and it’s still under there somewhere.”

The highway twisted around into a scattered hamlet of houses but Teddy kept going, following the line of the lake for a little while until they reached an abrupt end. On the right was a mismatched collection of trailers, RVs, and tents bunched together in a field beside the lake. Up ahead, the highway was barricaded with a tumble of barrels, scrap metal, and other flotsam and jetsam.

Teddy pulled the truck up to the barricade and stopped, turning the engine off.

“And here we are,” he said. “Alder Lake, or at least the part of it folks live on.”

A few men had emerged from the tents and trailers in the field and were standing with arms crossed, waiting for Teddy. Behind them, women and children lingered at cookfires and tables with bench seats.

“I’d invite you in, but the Eagle’s Nest folks are a bit skittish,” Teddy said. “This is where you’ll have to walk from. The stretch of road along the north side of the lake got real shaken up in the quakes, so walk careful.”

“Thank you for your help,” Lula said. “We’ll be real careful, we promise.”

They climbed out of the truck, shouldering their bags, but Teddy beckoned them back around to his open window, turning his attention to Jenny.

“Been thinking on your hopes of finding somewhere to settle,” he said. “I suggest Elbe. It’s at the farthest east point of the lake. It’s empty—folks from there either came up here or went straight to Tacoma, from what I hear—but it’s got plenty of good places to hide out. Real quiet, real solitary.”

Despite herself, Jenny was charmed by the old man’s consideration. She thanked him, a bashful muttering sound.

“And a word to the wise,” Teddy continued, to both of them. “Past here it’s mostly empty, but there’s a few cracked melons that live further on along the lake, in the woods. Don’t linger, and don’t speak to anyone. You’ll reach Elbe before dark if you stay alert and keep pace. Hear me?”

“We hear you,” Lula said, smiling. “And we appreciate it.”

Jenny-Dog reached into her bag and pulled out the old paperback. Emboldened by the old man’s kindness, she held the book up for him to see through his thick glasses.

“In all your piles of junk, have you ever seen a book like this one?” she asked. “My copy’s missing the last chapter.”

The old man studied the roughened cover thoughtfully, but shook his head. “No, no, can’t say as I have. But listen here, you’re welcome to whatever you can find back there, if it can help you in your walk.”

Jenny and Lula climbed up and stood on Duchess’s rear tires so they could rummage around in the back of the truck. Jenny did not find her book, but she was pleased to unearth some supplies she knew would come in handy. A new sharp knife, better than the old one she’d been carrying around. A sturdy length of rope. A can opener. A better pair of boots, worn but strong. A screwdriver.

She left her old knife and boots in trade and put the new supplies into her bag and the new boots on her feet.

For her part, Lula emerged from the rubbish triumphant, holding aloft a red plastic four-stringed instrument, a child’s ukulele. “Look here!” she said. “Look what I found!”

She strummed it, and the instrument made an out-of-tune thunking sound.

The phantom sensation of guitar strings under her own fingertips made Jenny swallow back a wave of nausea. “You know how to play that thing?”

“Not yet, but I’ll learn it,” Lula said. The ukulele was small enough to fit into her bag with only the nut and headstock poking out the top. She slipped it in carefully and hopped out of the truck.

“Goodbye, Teddy,” Lula said, then she patted the truck with affection. “Goodbye, Duchess.”

“You mind what I told you,” Teddy said. “Don’t linger along the lake. Stay alert and keep pace.”

They promised him they would, and they rounded the barricade and began their long walk to Elbe.

*******

The ruin of Alder’s highway appeared about a half-mile past the barricade.

The two-lane road running along the edge of the lake was cracked and split as though something very large and very heavy had walked on it. It was pocked with great upheavals of concrete, scatterings of pavement, and stands of opportunistic weeds and brambles that had grown up through the cracks in an attempt to take it all back.

Lula and Jenny found themselves scrambling and bouldering over the concrete, hand over hand and careful boot-step over careful boot-step. Ellen light-footed herself up the small hillocks and cliffs easy as anything, waiting for the two women as they struggled their way across the jumble.

Despite the challenge, Jenny-Dog thought that the worst of it might be the silence. Manmade Alder Lake was all chilly quiet. No call of lake-birds, no lapping of waves. Even the gentle wind seemed to stir its surface not at all. The scrambling of boots and hooves on the rocks reported like gunshots in the stillness. Every echo made Jenny flinch with the fear that they might awaken something sleeping nearby.

The exhausting journey completely ate away at the morning, and it was high noon before they reached the first sign of respite. An old campground lay on the lake-side of the highway with an overgrown meadow of a lawn inside of a loose fence and a raised view of the lake.

“Can we stop here?” Lula asked.

Jenny paused. You know what the old man said, Jenny-girl. And you don’t ignore good advice. That’s how you stay clever.

But there was no use in climbing onward without taking a brief rest. So Jenny said, “Let’s be quick, and not linger.”

They limped into the old campground and found a spot to sit under the arms of an alder. They rested, rationing a simple meal of plums and home-baked biscuits packed for them by the lucky people of La Grande, drinking freshwater bottled for them from La Grande’s fortunate wells. Ellen milled in the meadow, swish-tailed, keeping a wary animal eye on the lake. She was skeptical of silence. She had known it, and known what could be born in it.

Jenny glanced up at the clouds. The threat of summer rain still hovered in the air, but held off. At least for now.

They had not sat for long, had only eaten a little between them, when a horrible shrilling sound split the silence in half and left it bleeding, raw. It was an unearthly sound. The scream of a terrified thing, a dying thing, and it was coming from the woods on the opposite side of the ruined highway.

Jenny-Dog slipped easy into the mode of a prey-animal—clever Jenny!— and motioned Lula to follow.

You’ve lingered too long, Jenny!

Lula took gentle hold of Ellen’s halter and they all scrambled together into a nearby patch of brush where they could stay hidden yet look down at the highway, watching for any movement.

The shrilling sound rose again, a horrific yowl, and the trees parted.

Jenny watched, tongue pinned to the roof of her mouth in fascinated terror, as a group of a half-dozen figures emerged from the thick woods. They were monsters, blurry-edged beings with misshapen legs and arms and heads, antlered and dark-eyed things. They walked steady-footed and with purpose across the cracked highway toward the edge of the lake, not far from Jenny and Lula’s hiding place.

“The hell are they wearing?” Lula whispered.

Oh Jenny! You were fooled!

Lula was right. They weren’t monsters at all, but people wearing disguises made of twisted tree-limbs and twigs and sticks. One of them carried a small rusted canary cage in their branch-fingered hand. It was from this cage that the shrilling sound continued, tremulous and afraid.

The bizarre cluster crossed the highway, picking their way over a path they had clearly traveled many times. On the other side, they stepped down to the edge of the silent lake. There they settled the canary cage on an old tree stump. They circled it, facing the lake, and raised their strange arms in some kind of supplication. They stood like this for what seemed like an eternity. And then—their task clearly completed—they turned and left, crossing the highway once more and disappearing into the trees. All was done in complete silence save for the screaming in the cage.

Jenny and Lula looked at each other.

“Now what do you suppose that was all about?” Lula murmured.

“I’d never venture to guess,” Jenny replied.

Lula looked down at the cage where the small thing within was still squealing and thrashing. “I hate hearing a critter cry like that.”

Not like any critter I’ve ever heard, Jenny thought.

“Should we go and help it?” Lula asked.

Jenny shook her head. “We’ve already lingered too long. You remember what the old man said.”

Lula sighed. “I can’t bear it, Jenny. Please.”

Jenny was about to say no, to say it firm, but Lula had already moved away from her, toward the cage.

Jenny looked at the treeline, but it seemed that the people in their tree-branch attire were well and truly gone. So she followed Lula, leaving their hiding place and scrambling down the hillock to the lakeshore and the big tree stump.

It wasn’t until they got close that Jenny realized what was in that foul, rusty little cage.

Golly-gawd, Jenny—

It was an angel. But a very, very small one, about the size of an undersized crow. Its flat, owlish moon face was peppered with a spider’s worth of blinking eyes and a wide beak, panting in its desperation to escape, to get away.

“Idiots!” the little thing shrieked. “Damn you!”

It rested on the bottom of the cage for a moment, breathing hard, before it noticed the two women and began thrashing all over again. Ellen the horse would go no closer, snorting and pawing at the ground, unsettled by the creature’s noise.

“What should we do?” Lula asked, turning to Jenny.

Jenny’s mind raced. “It’s an angel. We should leave it.”

“But it’s so small,” Lula said. “I can’t imagine what harm it could really do. I didn’t know they could talk.”

Jenny didn’t, either. “The big ones don’t seem to bother,” she said. “I suppose if you’re small you gotta find other ways to handle your problems.”

“Touch me and die, damn you!” cried the tiny thing in the cage.

Lula leaned down so she was eye-level with the angel. “Calm yourself, or you’ll make it all worse.”

The angel paused, peering at Lula. “You can hear me.”

She nodded. “Sure can. You’re making an awful racket.”

This seemed to take the little thing aback. It eyed Lula and Jenny with marked suspicion. “You ain’t supposed to understand me.”

“Well, we can,” Lula said. “What did those folks leave you here for?”

The angel blinked again, all of its many eyes, glancing between Lula and Jenny. “I’m a sacrifice, see. To the Submerged God of Alder. Damn them!”

“Sort of a small sacrifice, ain’t you?” Jenny said.

The angel fluffed its feathers, offended. “And damn you, too!”

“My, but you’re testy,” said Lula. “Don’t you want to get out of there? You don’t want to get eaten by the whatchamacallit God of Alder, do you?”

The angel rested, leaning itself against the side of the cage. One wing was cocked at an unnatural angle and one clawed foot was pulled up against its oily feathered belly; no doubt it had been injured in whatever scuffle had landed it in this mess. “There is no God of Alder. I’d just starve.”

“Why do the folks think there’s a god here, then?”

“Because of the town,” the angel said. “There was a town down there, before they flooded this place to make the lake, so why not a god to live in it? There’s always someone willing to haunt a graveyard with gods and monsters, if given the chance. These folk are just cracked enough to do it. Your type always seem prone to that sort of thing.”

Jenny eyed the treeline. “We’ve lingered too long, Lula,” she said. “We have to go.”

To the angel, Lula said, “We need to be moving on if we’ll reach Elbe before dark. You want us to let you out or not?”

The angel considered. Finally, it nodded. “If you would.”

Jenny pulled the screwdriver she had taken from old Duchess out of her bag. It took a bit of fiddling with the padlock the acolytes of Alder had used to chain the cage closed, but soon enough the door was open and the angel clumsily flopped to the earth below, limping on one leg and holding one wing all wrong.

“Damn them,” it muttered. “Damn them all.”

It struggled away from them, and they watched it go.

“You sure you’ll be alright?” Lula called after it.

The angel didn’t answer.

Jenny shrugged. “Ungrateful little cuss, ain’t he?”

But Lula followed after the angel in its slow, painful progress.

“Hey,” she said. “Why don’t you come along with us? We’ll carry you so you can give that leg and wing a rest.”

The angel looked up at her, many eyes flaring. “Carry me? Carry me? I’ll spare myself the indignity, thank you.”

“Ain’t no indignity in accepting help,” Lula said. “Anyway, it’d be a damn sight more dignified than how you’re looking now.”

The angel stopped, panting hard. It turned to look over its feathered shoulder, saw how little ground it had managed to cover, and seemed to wilt a little.

“Where did you say you were going?” it asked.

“Elbe,” said Lula.

The angel sighed. “Fine, then.”

Lula lowered her hand and the angel used its small curved beak to hoist itself up, climbing carefully and slowly until it reached her shoulder where it crouched under the cover of the wide-brimmed hat and scowled.

“I’m Lula,” said Lula. “Do angels have names?”

“We do,” said the angel. But it offered nothing more.

“Well?”

It sighed again, a beleaguered wheezing sound.

“Pellig,” it said. “I’m called Pellig.”

*******

They reached the derelict town of Elbe at dusk. It blossomed around them before they even realized they had wandered into it.

In honor of its origins as a railroad stop, some enterprising soul in Elbe had long ago turned two parallel lengths of track at the entrance of town into a novelty motel with the train cars as rooms, colorfully painted and fully furnished. Across the street was a small gas station and grocery store. Despite her exhaustion, Jenny took it all in with a glimmer of hope.

This could be it, Jenny. This could be home.

“I see what Teddy meant,” Lula said, as they walked down the street and surveyed the lay of the land. She was careful not to move her head too much; Pellig was dozing fitfully in the crook of her neck. “This looks right up your alley, Jenny.”

Jenny nodded, inwardly pleased. It would do just fine.

Fatigued to the depths of their bones they chose a train car room at the far end of the second line, hidden from sight of the road. They didn’t expect anyone to happen by, but even so.

As they climbed up the rickety makeshift porch and in through the unlocked door, Jenny caught a glimpse of a little white church across the overgrown field. Just a small white church, bright like a beacon in the gathering night. In the foreground, Ellen lay like a pale smudge in the grass, looking up at the stars like she was wont to do.

It pinpricked. It was beauty, and it hurt.

Jenny shook and shook that sight away and entered the train car.

Inside, the narrow room was in surprisingly good shape considering it hadn’t been touched in years. There were two twin beds inside, and plenty of bedding. A layer of dust lay on everything and the sealed windows and doors gave the interior a stuffy warmth, but once she and Lula opened everything up, aired it out, and fluffed the blankets and pillows to be rid of the dust, it was cozy enough. No power or water, sure, but that was to be expected.

Lula made a place for the sleeping Pellig to rest on a spare pillow nestled on top of a bureau. She and Jenny sat down to eat hearty from their supplies and then—finally, and in locked-door four-wall safety—settle in to sleep.

*******

Though she was tired, Jenny lay awake for a while, long after Lula had slipped off to sleep. The hands of her memories kept pulling at her fingers and toes like desperate children, eager to climb into her dreams. The sharp buzz of guitar strings under her calloused fingertips. The warm feeling of a full belly, of singing in her throat, of a hand between her shoulder blades, of a sea-breeze ruined by the dull poison of cigarette smoke—

“You know what she is, don’t you?”

Jenny startled at the soft voice and pushed herself onto her elbows to look at Pellig. The angel was awake on his perch atop the bureau, eyes glowing softly in the gloom, staring at her.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“The girl,” Pellig said. “You know what she is?”

Jenny shook her head. “I know better than to listen to an angel, that’s what’s what.”

Pellig laughed, maybe. A reesking sound. “You’re smarter than she is. If you had your way you woulda left me in that cage.”

Jenny nodded. “Likely so. Can you blame me?”

“I can’t. But your type never does seem to learn.”

“And your type seems to thrive on making trouble.”

Pellig closed all of his eyes at the same time, turning his face into a round void of darkness, before opening them again. “We all have a purpose,” he said. “It takes skill to make trouble well. It’s a craft.”

Jenny tilted her head, marble roll one way, marble roll the other.

“You’re just fortunate that Lula’s kinder than me,” she said. “Go to sleep now and savor it while you can.”

Pellig fluffed his feathers and blinked one eye at a time, a slow rippling tide of a gaze across his moon-shaped face.

“She ain’t telling you everything,” he said. “Just know that.”

And then he turned his face to the wall, and all was quiet except the fall of the promised rain, a soft whispering sound against the train car’s windows.

Jenny opened her mouth to say something more, then closed it again. Her memories climbed up to sit on her chest, filling the stillness left by Pellig’s words.

Outside, the God of Alder emerged from His sunken home and walked the ruined highway in stricken silence, bereft without a gift to feast on.

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