Smoke-Mouth is a dystopian supernatural novella. This is Episode Fifteen.
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⭐NOTE: Heyyy, we’re back! 😂
Here’s the deal: at long last, it has come to my attention that I have been WAY too hung up on how long this story is “supposed” to be, and I have effectively hamstrung myself creatively in the process and added silly pressure that didn’t need to be there. So, to fix that, please be aware that I am going to write this thing until it’s over, and I have no idea how many more episodes that’s going to take. In the end, I would rather give you all a good story than make arbitrary promises about the story’s length.
Thank you for being so kind and patient with me. I don’t feel I deserve it, but I am extremely grateful for it. ♥
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Previously, an encounter at the foot of the mountain threatened to end the journey.
In this episode, a small reconciliation, and a new resolve.
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Oh, Jenny! Jenny, what a ghoul you are!
Welcome back! Welcome back!
Jenny-Dog twirled and twisted her long hair in her hands, and she wove like a dark thread through the towering trees.
She did not know how long she had been walking, or where she had come from, or where she might go.
She had no paths here. She did not know the scents.
This was not Yelm. This was not Wolf’s Head, or Union. This was nowhere.
Golly-gawd, where am I?
Her skin prickled in the strange alpine cold. The shadow of a mountain rose over her, cast an early dusk over the valley.
Where am I? O Jenny, Jenny-girl, where are we?
Jenny-Dog wandered lonely in the gathering twilight of the mountain’s leeward side. She did not know the murmur of these trees or the whistle of this wind. She stumbled over crumbled boulders, tumbled roots, and she ignored the rumble of her guts—hungry, cold, alone.
There was a scent on her, an old scent already fading. It clung to her hair, to her clothes, to her boots.
The scent of a stranger.
It was a good scent, but fading. It was nearly gone, stolen by the passing of the hours.
As the dark drew in, screams rose from elsewhere in the valley. Some were close by, and some were far away. They were screams of torment, sorrow. Jenny-Dog skittered like a prey-animal from place to place, terrified into senselessness.
Little ghoul, what are you afraid of?
She couldn’t speak. Her throat refused to work. Could not even grunt or wheeze or whine, like any self-respecting animal might. She twitched her head this way, that way, twisted her hair in her fingers. She flitted like a lonely ghost from here to there, only stopping to sleep for a little while under this tree, then that tree, before waking and stumbling on again.
The night sky wheeled over her. In her addled mind were memories, rattling around like pebbles, none distinct enough to take hold of, to turn in her palm.
O Jenny, little Jenny, it’s all back to normal now.
Good good good—
She slept, she woke. Soon enough, she couldn’t tell the difference. The screaming in the valley was like the yowl of coyotes, the way they gibber and sob.
Still, she walked on.
How does it end, Jenny? How does it end?
*******
When dawn came it was bitter cold, silent. Jenny-Dog woke from her latest sleeping-place and wandered onward again, back sore from dozing upright and feet bitten from the chill within her boots.
She was thirsty. So very thirsty.
Jenny-Dog stumbled forward, scenting the air for water. She did not know these paths. She did not know these trees; they glowered down at her, impassive strangers.
Soon enough, she caught the whisper of running water on the breeze. She followed the sound to a little creek, busy with its own rumors and swell-proud with mountain snow-melt.
Jenny-Dog knelt beside the creek on the cold stones and drank from it like an animal would, face downward and hands splayed.
It’s only right, little ghoul.
When her thirst was satisfied, she sat back on her haunches, wiping the rivulets from her chin. The water had cleared some of the fearful fog from her mind, woken her with its chill. She turned one way, downstream, then turned the other, upstream. Seeing as there was no reason not to, she decided to follow the creek’s path down until she couldn’t anymore.
Why not? Why not?
So she started to walk, following the winding of the creek, trying to follow its subtle, murmured narration. It was not interested in explaining itself, and she could not ask questions.
About a mile down, when the sun was high enough to read by, Jenny-Dog stopped again to take another drink. This time she used her palm, cupped to hold the icy stuff. It tingled against her teeth and froze her throat on the way down, but it was alive in a way few things are. A leaping water, the kind that bites.
This time, when she looked up, something on the opposite bank a few yards downstream caught her eye.
It was a small lump of something, sitting half-in, half-out of the shallows.
Jenny-Dog rose from the creekside, looked for a narrow place to cross, and tiptoed careful on the slippery stones until she drew near to what looked like a small lump of dark feathers.
Something to eat, maybe, if it isn’t too long dead…
But she crouched down beside it, and the scent of it rose up to meet her nose like a tendril of smoke brushing her face. Jenny-Dog tilted her head, let the marble of a memory slide down, down, down toward her ear.
The smell was familiar.
She reached out and lifted up the sodden lump of feathers, water sliding off of it and into the shallows, a tiny applause of droplets.
The head lolled to one side. It was like a bird, about the size of a crow, but the face was flattened out like an owl’s face.
It had been attacked by something ferocious, rageful. Where once there had been many eyes, now they had all been disfigured, as by the purposeful rasp of angry claws.
All except one.
At the feel of her touch, this final unwounded eye opened and fixed Jenny-Dog with a golden stare, before closing again so that the thing could make a sound. A strange, coughing, quiet laugh of grief.
“Of course…” the thing said, a crazed and quiet keening. “It’s you. Of course…of course…”
*******
Not far from the creek’s bank, as a second dusk rolled off the mountain, Jenny-Dog managed to get a small fire going with the matches she had in her pack, supplies she had completely forgotten about over the last day.
What else have I forgotten?
She had carried the little bird-thing with her for the last miles, tucked warm under her arm, and now she settled it beside the fire to dry its oily feathers while she rummaged through the pack. She found small parcels of food, a knife and other tools. She found an old paperback book, the last pages ripped away.
How does it end, Jenny?
The pack contained something else, too: the scent of the stranger. It wafted up as she looked through what was contained inside. She couldn’t catch hold of it, but it comforted her…and grieved her.
It did not take long for the creature by the fire to stir, weakly stretching its wings. Its disfigured face was a mess of scabbing and dried blood, lines of clawmarks. The one good eye found Jenny in the dark.
“Come here,” it said, a soft male voice. “Come closer, Jenny.”
She should have been surprised that he knew her name, but she wasn’t. She crawled closer, and the thing blinked long, and something shifted in her throat. A warming, an opening as of a long-locked door.
She hummed, and made sound.
“There,” said the bird-thing, with a deep, resigned sigh. “I fixed that, if nothing else.”
Pellig. One pebble fell into place, a slow cascade before the rest could follow.
“I shoulda left you by that creek,” Jenny murmured, her throat husky with two days of forced silence, sliding herself back and away from him so she could rest her spine against an obliging pine. “Who messed your face like that?”
Pellig shuffled, sore, trying to find a comfortable position.
“The others,” he said. “What I did to you was too little too late, it seems. They felt they had given me enough chances to come good, and enough was enough. Can’t say I blame them.”
Jenny nodded. Her anger was a bewildered warmth under her breastbone as the memories slid into place, Pellig’s vicious enchantment wearing away like the melting of ice. How long had she been under its spell? Days?
“You’re a damn fool,” she said, too exhausted to put much malice behind the words. “You’re a murderous bastard. Worse, you’re a liar.”
Pellig winced, but said nothing in reply.
“I suppose you were that from the start, all along, but I hoped—” Jenny interrupted herself with a startled laugh. “Yes, I hoped. Golly-gawd, Jenny…”
Across the valley, the nightly screaming started, a chorus of pain. Jenny listened with a hollow terror. Northcote was out there again, alone and afraid. Sweet Ellen, too. And Lula, lying in the dust…
“You killed her, Pellig,” Jenny said, so soft, throat frozen like she had taken a sip from the creek.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I did. Maybe not. I don’t know.”
Jenny looked up at him, relief turning her fingertips tingly. “If you didn’t, then there’s a chance to set things right.”
Pellig’s one good eye flared in the light from the weak fire. “Didn’t you hear? I’ve had too many chances.”
“Clearly not. You’re here, aren’t you?”
Pellig turned to glare at her. “Call me a liar, but you’re worse than me. You’re worse than me for harm, too. You keep giving me chances because you think it’ll absolve you of something. It won’t. If I am your dark and feral and vindictive little heart, Jenny Douglas, then you’re going to have to tear me out completely to be rid of your guilt, find some kind of purity. You can’t be healed till I’m dead and gone for good. Admit it.”
He fluffed his feathers for emphasis. The rippling disfigurement on his face was like the crazing in a potter’s glaze.
Jenny considered. “I don’t think that’s right,” she said, finally. “I’ve followed a piece of me all the way to this mountain, and she never gave up on me, no matter how much I failed her.”
An ember in the fire popped. Hiss. Lip-smack kiss of heat.
“We’re some kind of spectrum, I think. And if that’s so, then Lula is the best of us,” Jenny continued. “Rip us apart and there will always be threads, like that silly patchwork thing she’s always wearing. You’re a damn fool, Pellig, but so am I, and if you haven’t learned to let me love you by now, I’m not sure you ever will. Those things you call your kind, they maimed you, because their acceptance was always going to be conditional.”
She paused. “Lula would never treat you like that. So neither will I.”
Pellig, who did not have a brow in any human sense, furrowed with confused hope, then turned away.
“You’ll never be able to trust me,” he said, quietly, leaving the words unspoken: Because of what I am. Because of what I’ve done.
Jenny shrugged. “I can trust that you’re trying. Ain’t we all?”
At this, the dark little angel fell silent.
Jenny reached out with a gentle hand, and Pellig—after a moment’s hesitation—let her pick him up and draw him into her lap. She took a soft shirt from her pack, wet it with water she had jarred from the creek, and carefully cleaned away the dried blood from his feathered face, his many puckered eyes, now blinded forever.
He quivered in her hands, a little lump of pain and sorrow and shame. Jenny didn’t know if angels could weep, but she imagined he might if he could. In the distance, the valley rang with lamentation.
When she was done, she nestled Pellig into the warm crook of her arm. She thought he might protest, but there was no pride left in him. He leaned easy against her, resting his head on his back, closing his one good eye in sleep.
Jenny tilted her face to the place where she knew the stars were spinning cold and naked over the mountain’s crown, hidden by the curtains of the trees, and she whispered, “Tomorrow, we’ll try again.”
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Exorcising the demons are we...😉!!!! Perfect
And welcome back Pellig, it is a tough lesson, this appeasement thing, eh...
Glad to see this story back from hiatus. There's been something very meta about the challenges it has faced in publication that adds to the experience for me.