Smoke-Mouth is a dystopian supernatural novella. This is Episode Fourteen.
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Previously, Jenny and Lula followed their renewed sense of purpose toward its inevitable conclusion.
In this episode, an encounter at the foot of the mountain threatens to end the journey.
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The remaining miles to the mountain rose against Jenny and Lula like living sentinels throwing themselves in the way, hills and rills and glens, rises of rock and thick patches of old bearded evergreens. There were no real roads to speak of, only ghostly lines and ruts in the earth, long swallowed up by underbrush and choked with downed limbs.
Jenny and Lula picked and stumbled their way through the dense woods, Ellen flitting here and there alongside them, a white flag of determination, not surrender.
Up and down, miles and miles crawled away underneath them. Time seemed to forsake them; the rainforest was curtain-thick, the sky always hidden. But unlike the sorrowful tide of Vail, this forest seemed to wait and watch, alert to catch their every movement.
The two women spoke little that first day, and only in hushed tones. They did not have enough breath in their lungs to hike and talk. And when night finally fell, they found a safe cleft in an obliging stone to curl up and sleep, exhausted.
But it was not long after sunset on that first night when they were roused from their exhausted sleep by screaming, somewhere in the not-so-distance.
It lifted into the air like the calling of owls or coyotes, a chorus of wailing rising up and hovering over the treetops. Many voices, all in a cacophony.
It was not the call of animals or birds, but human beings, their inarticulate throats harsh with the effort of sound.
In response to the noise, Jenny lifted herself up onto one elbow to listen, but Lula lay still, her wide eyes haunted in the dark, but unsurprised.
“You recognize it,” Jenny said. “You’ve heard it before.”
Lula nodded. “Lots of times, in my dreams.”
“How come I haven’t?”
“You might’a done,” Lula said. “You just aren’t used to it yet. You’re not used to listening for any pain but your own. Takes practice.”
She said it gently, kindly, but Jenny still felt it like a wound. “I spent a lot of time afraid, that’s all.”
“I know. That’s the thing about pain. It all sounds the same until you start to heal. It all harmonizes until then. Until you can hear how wrong it is.”
Jenny wasn’t sure she understood, but it rang true, the way Lula’s riddles often did. “I was waiting for you to show up. I know that now.”
Lula nodded.
The screams continued on, a gibbering chaos in the dark. Lula considered them with a sober expression, then said, “It’s sorrow, you know. They are afraid. Lost.”
Jenny listened, and yes. She could hear that, now, if she focused past her own fear. The sounds were the sounds of panicked terror, lost children wandering in the dark, but not children at all. Grown people, afraid.
“Lay down,” said Lula. “They’re not looking for us. They’re not aware of anything but themselves. Lay down and sleep.”
The fool-girl turned over, and Jenny lay back down. She clung to Lula’s certainty in the midst of the unholy racket, and soon she fell asleep.
*******
The morning of the second day was slick with drizzling autumn rain. Jenny and Lula rose to continue their hike to the mountain, though neither relished the thought; the cleft in the stone was not as cozy as the boxcars of Elbe or as safe as the meeting hall of New Riffe, but it certainly was drier and softer than walking in the mess.
It was a small blessing that the thick canopy of trees overhead protected them from the worst of the rain, but it did not shield them from the moist cold of the air, the breath of some dying god, stealing easily through their clothes and boots, leaving them shivering.
The screaming had stopped at some point around sunrise, but the quiet was arguably worse. Jenny fancied that the screamers must be lingering nearby, watching them, soundless mouths open with a desire for blood. She jumped at every shivering shadow in her peripheral vision, fearing an ambush that never came.
The closer they drew to the mountain’s ashen skirt, the more Jenny became aware of a strange push and pull, a strong paradoxical tide: one force pulling them closer, and the other pushing them away. It left her thoughts in a swirl of confusion, as if madness licked at her heels and waited for her to turn and open her arms to it.
She had not dreamed of the mountain as long as Lula had. But she had seen the faces of the people who waited there: the woman and the man, yearning for rescue. And whether they were real or not, she felt a desperate need to find out for herself, and help them if she could.
So she kept the madness at her back, and followed Lula forward.
*******
On the second night, they found a new sleeping place on the leeward side of a rise, a corona of exposed roots from a tilted fir tree acting as a sort of canopy, and settled themselves under it. The rain had resolved itself into a fine mist, so the women lit a small fire, just enough for comfort and a bit of warmth to dry their boots, and lay down beside it. Ellen kept guard nearby.
Once again the screams rose just after sunset, a great harsh wailing over the treetops as of a people in great pain. But Jenny listened to it differently this night. Without the surprise, she could hear the sadness clearly.
“Who do you suppose they are?” she asked, warming her hands by the small, pale fire.
Lula raised her head. “Not sure. Maybe the mountain drew them here and rejected them. Or maybe something else got ‘em.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Jenny said.
Lula shrugged. “We can’t be the only dreamers. Not with something this big. Mountains and towers and haunted forests and abandoned cities and quakes and all…that’s big stuff. We can’t be the only ones.”
“Then what makes us special?”
“Nothing much, probably.”
Ellen wandered past in her slow patrol around the area, and Jenny watched the phantom as she slipped through the trees, faithful and true and stalwart, the solid tattoo of her heavy hooves a comforting heartbeat.
“I don’t know,” Jenny said, quietly. “I think there’s something we’ve got that others don’t. How many others can say they’ve done what we done? Seen what we seen?”
Lula considered this. “Are you sorry?”
“For what?”
“For leaving Yelm and following along with me?”
Jenny grunted, a sound that felt at once familiar and yet part of another skin, another self. “Nah, I ain’t sorry. I didn’t know what I needed until I got it. Seems like that’s the way these things go.”
The women lapsed into a comfortable silence at this, listening to the wails of the lost souls in the woods and the crackle of their fire as it mumbled discontentedly at the damp branches they fed it.
Finally, Lula reached for her bag and pulled out the red plastic ukulele. She handed it to Jenny, and after a slight hesitation, Jenny took it.
“You sure it’s wise?” Jenny asked. “What with the screamers about?”
Lula smiled. “They’re not out to hurt us. I want you to play something.”
Jenny shook her head faintly. “I don’t remember much.”
“You remember enough. Play something.”
Jenny tuned up the ukulele—my Jenny-Dog has fleas!—and then cradled it in her arms, thinking back. Back to the womb-red house in Union, the nodding heads of orange poppies, the long table by the sea, her father seated at its end. His lithe fingers on the neck of the guitar he built with his own two hands. The wide-brimmed hat, a dark halo around his head.
And she started to play. It was just a simple song her father used to sing. She didn’t remember the words, just the melody. She played, tentative at first, but then strong, the song coming back to her as she formed the chords. First the action, then the memory. First the trust, then the faith.
Stretch out your hands and be healed.
It was Lula who sang. That strange voice of hers, rich and feral, like it had been in the boxcar of Elbe, lifting wraith-like into the air, curling above them like smoke, and dissipating out into the gloom of the sodden woods.
The mountain air seemed to hold Lula’s voice like a bank of cloud, drawing it close. Helen inhaled the sound, exhaled it again. Smoke Mouth, indeed. The place and the song were made for one another. It was Lula who knew the words, and Jenny played on, and she fancied that even the screamers paused to listen.
The shrieking in the woods stilled, faded away. There was only song, like Helen herself had hushed the landscape to hear.
Quiet now.
I’m listening.
It was then that Jenny saw Ellen shy sideways, her white tail whipping in surprise, and Jenny turned to see what had shocked the mare.
Just outside the circle of light formed by the fire was a human figure, hunched and cringing, drawn toward the sound of the song.
“Lula,” Jenny said, sharply, and Lula stopped singing. The women stood to their feet as the cringing figure approached the fire.
“No, no, no, please,” said the wretched thing, a tangle of terrified arms and legs, thin-ribbed and hollow-eyed, its voice a harsh croak. “No, please, don’t stop…”
It reached out with a sharp-fingered hand, made a sound like a weary sigh, and then collapsed into the leaf litter at the other side of the fire.
Jenny and Lula stared at the shape on the ground for a moment, waiting for a trap, for the figure to rise again and leap at them. But there was none, and it did not.
Jenny set down the ukulele, pulled her knife out of her bag, just in case, and approached.
It was a man. Or at least it once had been; he had been starved to bones, to a shadow of human form. He was shaggy and unkempt, and wore some kind of dark, filthy uniform or coveralls.
Jenny and Lula shuffled him over to the fire and lay him there to recover. He was covered in cuts and bruises, but no obvious serious injuries. The sewn-in name-patch over his heart read NORTHCOTE.
“Suppose that’s his name?” Jenny asked.
Lula shrugged. “I reckon so. Solves who’s been out there screaming. Just people, like him.”
As if in response, with Lula’s song ended, the chorus of screaming had started back up again in the distance. But the man at their fire slept deeply, as if under a spell.
“He’s here now,” said Jenny. “So he’s ours to watch until morning, I expect. We’ll take turns. I’ll start. You get some sleep.”
Lula nodded and found a place to lay down to sleep. Jenny sat by the fire, keeping watch, her fingertips still vibrating with the feel of the ukulele strings.
*******
In the morning—a gloomy dawn, but rainless, thank God—Lula knelt beside the man to wake him gently while Jenny stood nearby, knife at the ready.
Lula attempted to give him water, which he accepted, slowly waking, reaching up with a shaking hand to touch the felt of her wide-brimmed hat as if some revelation was perched there.
“You were singing,” he said. His voice was strained from overuse, from long nights of shouting in the dark. “Thought I dreamed it, but I didn’t. I followed the song.”
“Is Northcote your name?” Lula asked.
He paused and blinked at her. “I think so.”
She touched the patch on his breast. “Says it here.”
“Then it must be,” he said. “Hard to say. Been weeks since anyone used it.”
“What are you doing out here?” asked Jenny. “Where did you come from?”
He thought about this—and any thought seemed to take a tremendous effort of will—before raising his arm to point toward the mountain’s peak, hidden by the trees.
“Up there,” he said. “I was there, before I was here.”
“What’s there?” Jenny asked.
“The tower.”
It was Lula who had said it, not the man, Northcote. He peered between their faces, still trying to understand. “The tower, yeah,” he said. “There’s a tower up there. I was…I was there. I don’t remember how long ago.”
“What’s the tower for?” Lula asked.
Northcote licked chapped lips, paused again to consider deeply before responding. “It’s a radio tower. It’s…it’s meant to connect Portland back to Seattle. Ten attempts, ten teams have tried. We always fail.”
“Fail how?”
The man blinked. “It’s the creatures, the…the flying things. Angels. They attack and sabotage. They have the power to steal speech and give us bad dreams. Terrible dreams, so real, so real...”
He shuddered, and a wave of fear passed over his face, as if he was peering past Lula into another world, slipping away from them.
Lula gently touched the patch over his heart again.
“Northcote,” she said, “we need to fix the tower. Will you help us?”
For a moment it seemed that he had left them completely, but his focus slowly returned to her face and he shook his head. “You can’t. No one can, not with those filthy angels around. And even if you could, I’m not…I’m not an engineer. I worked logistics, that’s all. Mapping, supply chain, inventory…I don’t know anything about how it works and I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to repair it.”
“Even so,” Lula said, “I need to get there. It’s all led to this, and I can’t give it up now. If you know mapping and logistics, then you must know the roads. Hell, you probably made ‘em. Can you help us find the path that’ll take us up there, at least?”
Northcote looked into her eyes and seemed to find something there. Something long searched for, but unspeakable.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I know the roads. I’ll show you the way.”
*******
The starved man was true to his word. After sharing some of their rations for breakfast and only a few minutes of looking to the thin snips of sky through the trees for orientation, he set off confidently eastward, the two women and the phantom mare following along behind him.
It took an hour of walking, but when they finally pushed through a patch of underbrush and emerged onto a dirt road—cleared only in the last six months or so, rutted with tire tracks, and only just being reclaimed by the woods—Jenny and Lula were suitably impressed.
“Well done, Northcote.” Lula whistled, smiling.
“I’ll be,” Jenny said. “He knows the roads, alright.”
“Told you I did,” the man said, but was clearly pleased by their admiration, a soft veil of color rising to his thin cheeks. “Shit, I don’t know how I forgot. I don’t even know how long I forgot for, and it was here the whole time.”
“I’ll bet the angels scrambled your mind,” Lula said. “They’re hellbent on keeping anyone from fixing that tower. I wonder why.”
Northcote shrugged. “Seems to me that any critter standing in the way of something has a reason. Maybe they don’t want us talking. The minute Seattle and Portland connect, that’s when things get easier for us. We can rebuild. We can communicate.”
“We become harder to control,” Jenny said, quietly. She thought of the mayor of New Riffe, his suit reeking of angel-smell, and the promises the creatures had made him. She thought of the captives in the barn of Tintagel, Ellen’s silent and eternal circles in Vail, Pellig in his cage by Alder Lake. Hell, she thought of herself, hiding from the church folk’s songs and walking her finger-trails through the solitude of Yelm.
We’re all easy pickings when we’re alone.
The road led them straight through the remaining forest, but when the trees finally thinned and fell away from them, the landscape that greeted them at the foot of the mountain was no more welcoming.
Above them they could see Helen’s northern slope, slanted downwards from the blast that had shaken it so many decades before. And from the distant crater all the way down to where they stood was a miles-long moon-scape of pumice stone, punctuated with boulders and the skeletons of flattened tree trunks, bristling with the only scrubby plants that dared to grow in such a windswept place.
The mountain seemed to lean toward them. But whether in welcome or in warning, no one could say.
Here, rising above the lingering smell of ash and soot, was another smell. Oily, sticky, and lingering.
“Angels are near,” Jenny whispered into the quiet. “We have to keep moving.”
Northcote’s road circled the mountain’s foot heading eastward, so they followed it, keeping the barren landscape on their left side and the thick forest on their right. They followed it a mile or so before they reached a new road, cut into the stone, heading up toward the mountain’s crest.
“The tower road,” said Northcote, pointing up to their left. “It leads up.”
“Then up is where we’re going,” Lula said.
So their climb began. Up the slope, climbing the road that had been designed for heavy vehicles, re-supply, and maintenance. Up and up, through the ashen world, drawn by Helen’s own voice.
Closer. Closer. Nearly there!
Jenny tipped her gaze up and saw it, if only for a moment: a cluster of small cabins, about two miles up the slope. Beyond that, a skeletal frame of steel, wreathed in mist. A field of anemones draped down the mountainside like a waterfall. She had seen these shadows in her dreams, and now they were real. Alive.
There it is, she thought. There it is!
But she heard Northcote inhale beside her, a quick and panicked Oh God!, and she whirled to look, but she knew what she would see before her eyes landed on it.
She could smell him.
It was Pellig, perched on a downed tree that had fallen beside the road—a giant, sun-bleached bone—blinking all of his many eyes at the scene before him.
“Pellig?” Lula said. “Where have you been?”
But the angel was looking at Jenny. “I warned you,” he said. “So many times, and you can’t fault me for any of this. I warned you. I did. You can’t ask for more than that.”
“You wouldn’t dare stop us now,” Jenny said, hoping she was right. “We’re so close, Pellig.”
“Too close.” He sighed, turning his attention to Northcote. “Don’t know you, but I suspect you’ve been a real help to them. That’s a shame.”
Northcote had faced the angel bravely, but something seemed to come over him, a force he could not control. He had no time to make a reply before his face blanched, terror overriding every ounce of reason he had regained in the past hours, slipping back into the cringing animal they had met the night before. He turned and tore off down the slope, disappearing around a corner.
“Why did you do that?” Jenny hissed. “He meant no harm to anybody.”
Pellig shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. They’re watching. Don’t you understand? They’re watching me. I can’t let you anywhere near that tower. It’s done. This is your last chance to turn and go. Take it.”
Lula stepped forward, the grief of his betrayal written across her face in visible lines. “Pellig, let me pass. Alone, if that suits you. But you know I won’t stop until I get up to that tower.”
“I know.” Pellig looked at her, and something like sorrow passed over his strange owl-like features. “And I’m real sorry, Lula.”
And then…Lula collapsed. Crumpled to the ground in a heap of patchwork and dark hair, the light having left her eyes. The red ukulele clattered out of her bag into the dust.
Jenny swore, her sharp voice echoing along the mountain’s side, and she pitched forward, throwing herself to the ground next to Lula. But the fool-girl was still. Unbreathing.
“The hell did you do!” Jenny shrilled at the angel. “Lula saved your rotten life, you bastard! She was kind to you!”
“I repaid that debt many times over,” said Pellig. “But no more. This is the heart of it. There were many places to end it before you got here, but you’ve walked all the way to the heart of it and I asked…I begged you…”
“Pellig—” she said, and stood, but then…she stopped. Her lips moved, but she felt no vibration in her throat. Her words disappeared into the air, her tongue clung useless to the roof of her mouth.
And she felt it. The rising in her of terror, paranoia. The singsong rattle of her thoughts like marbles in her mind, the distrust, the feral loneliness of another self, another skin, another time. Like the Jenny she had become was only a costume, and there was nothing but a terrified creature underneath, waiting to re-emerge with dirty fingernails and unkempt hair.
Jenny-Dog, what a ghoul you are!
Jenny-Dog, I missed you, I missed you! Welcome back!
She looked down at the lifeless girl on the ground, and did not recognize her. She raised her eyes to stare at the angel, her head twitching side to side as the good memories seeped through her fingers and away, but he only sighed.
“You were better off in Yelm,” he said. “Alone. Just as I was better off along the shores of Alder Lake, alone. Lula led us both into this mess. But all is well, now, Jenny-Dog.”
She watched, wordless and afraid, cowering like prey, as the dark-feathered creature lifted away into the air, calling, “All is well, all is well, all is well...”
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All I can say is, this better not be the end. Great Episode!
Well S.E., you have me at the end of my tether, all seems hopeless... I understand, self sacrifice is not in the cards for Pellig no matter how he sees his obligation, and that is what it would be if he didn't stop these two. Right? Follow orders or die? Me or thee?