Smoke-Mouth is a dystopian supernatural novella. This is the Epilogue.
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Previously, what was broken found repair.
In this episode, a midsummer day, two years after.
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They run.
In her dreams she can see them, running light-footed up and down the slopes, twin flickers of light and shadow and wild hair and dirty feet. Sometimes they look identical, and sometimes they look so different they belong to different worlds. But she can see them, and she knows they can see her, even if they don’t always show it.
They run the valleys, looking for strays. They top the peaks, laughing full-bellied in the thinness of the air. They stream down like water, like mountain water, like mountain rain.
And they sing. They are always singing.
Up to the tower they run, and they circle around the engineers who live there now and work there now and keep all in repair. They whisper comfort, and they offer ideas, and they soothe the sleep of those who remember when dark shapes filled the skies.
They are never alone, because they have each other.
It’s a ghost story, now, passed like a rumor: a phantom horse and a patchwork girl on the mountain. But no one ever sees them.
The dreamer is the only one allowed.
The dreamer is the only one who knows.
*******
It was midsummer, two years gone since the summer, and Jenny Douglas stood at the edge of a world both new and very old.
Behind her was a house. Her house, womb-red with year-fresh paint. Below her was the water, a tongue of the distant sea, shouldering gently against the stone wall that protected the neighborhood from the highest tide.
Jenny stood from pulling weeds out of the bed of California poppies, golden heads nodding sleepy in the sun, and stretched her back. The little town of Union was a small beating heart in a resurrected land. All up and down the Row, her neighbors were outside, cleaning up their yards and painting their fences. Someone’s radio was playing, and she heard the kids singing their own tune at the little school up the hill. It was a song she hadn’t heard before.
Always something new, these days.
She took off her gardening gloves and left them on the flagstones next to the garden and meandered back up to the house, passing the long table with its many chairs.
Pellig sat perched on the back of a chair, sunning himself like a very small cormorant, one good eye closed in rapture.
As she passed, Jenny said, “Can I charge you to set the table?”
“You can charge me,” Pellig said, without opening his eye. “But only a fool expects miracles.”
She laughed and carried on into the back door of the house. It was too warm, even with all of the windows and doors open to the breeze. Thankfully, there wasn’t much left to do, and no need to turn on the stove.
A pile of lemons rested on the counter, and Jenny rolled up her sleeves. She cut each lemon in half, squeezed the halves in the glass citrus juicer, and poured the fragrant juice into a large crock. It had been some kind of magic when lemons reappeared in the local store after so many long years. A sign of healing Jenny hadn’t thought to hope for.
Two years earlier, after the mountain, after the tower, Jenny—with Pellig in her arms—had headed back the way she came, passing through the blossoming city of New Riffe. She found Joe and the survivors of Tintagel still there, and together they had walked back the long road north, finding it changed in ways that were subtle but profound. Empty of angels. Empty of gods and monsters.
Like a tilled soil, waiting for whatever came next.
North and west they went, weaving up and up through a world blinking awake, radio static and flickering lights and chatter. So much chatter. It would take time to put all the dominos back upright again, but Jenny knew where she was headed, and Joe and a handful of the others followed. Some peeled away to their own long-abandoned homes. Some lingered in safe places along the way. But Jenny carried on.
When she arrived in Union, she found it deserted. There hadn’t been many living there to begin with, and when the quakes came, those folks wisely left their homes behind to seek safety in Idaho, in Canada, in Oregon.
But the little red house had been abandoned for longer than the quakes. It stood weather-worn against the sea wind, but stronger and sounder than Jenny imagined it would be.
The rooms and halls still smelled like Lula.
Jenny moved herself into the little red house, and the rest of the survivors found their own places nearby. For a year or so they lived like squatters, fearful that the original owners would return and cast them out. But they didn’t.
After the repair of the tower, things changed slowly. The electricity came back, a strange and quiet magic. It happened all at once, some flipping of a switch miles away. City plumbing followed soon after. Local television channels fuzzed to life. Radio stations popped up like dandelions, a new one every day. Jenny heard rumors that the Internet was working, too, but she didn’t own a computer, so she couldn’t be sure about that.
The Row of homes along the sea wall in Union became a community, a little family. The houses were repaired, repainted, and the gardens re-planted. They gathered for meals sometimes, and reminisced about the eight years lost to time.
It was a gathering like this that Jenny prepared for, that midsummer. Her neighbors would bring the food. She would provide the long table, just like her father always had.
Lost in thought, she cut and squeezed lemons into the crock over and over again. When all the lemons were spent she poured in the water and the sugar, cup by cup, and stirred with a wooden spoon until a knock on the front screen door’s frame startled her.
Jenny paused, wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. No one around here bothered to knock. They simply called out, especially if the door was open.
But as she approached the screen door, she could see that the stranger’s silhouette was unfamiliar but friendly. He was clean-cut and dressed for the fickle maritime summer: t-shirt under flannel, jeans, well-worn tennis shoes. His hat, an old baseball cap, was in his hands.
She pushed open the screen and rested on the threshold. When he saw her, his eyes lit up bright and his cheeks flushed.
“Oh,” the man said. “It’s you. I can’t…I mean, hi. Hello.”
It was the voice that placed him.
Jenny let her surprise travel to her face. “That you, Northcote?” she said.
He smiled. Nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s me.”
She shook her head, awed, trying to reconcile the healthy, relaxed man in front of her with the scrawny engineer she had met in the valley two years earlier.
“I’m pleased to see you,” she said, and she was. “How the hell did you find me all the way out here?”
When he laughed, it was a gentle sound, but nervous at the edges. “I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you. I didn’t mean to bother you, I just…I needed to see if you were really here. I needed to prove it to myself, I guess.”
There was a silence, then. Awkward and prolonged. He cast his eyes to the floor, like he had broken something and was trying to figure out how to clean up the shards.
But before he could panic utterly, Jenny stepped back from the doorway and held the screen open. “Come on in, will you? I’m just in the middle of making lemonade. We’re having a big dinner here tonight, whole row’s coming over.”
He stepped inside, grateful for the reprieve, and closed the screen gently behind himself. She headed back toward the kitchen, and he followed her.
“I saw your team on TV a while back,” Jenny said. “Amanda and Veer got some kind of award, didn’t they?”
“They did,” Northcote said, with genuine warmth. He settled himself in one of the two chairs at the small kitchen table against the window, staying out of Jenny’s way. “Well deserved for how long they stayed out there and everything they went through.”
Jenny nodded. “Want some lemonade?”
She saw him consider refusing, but he nodded shyly. “I would love some.”
When she handed him the glass, he took a sip, then set it down on the table, and another strange silence settled over everything.
“How did you find me, Northcote?” Jenny asked, ladling lemonade from the crock into a glass pitcher.
He looked up at her, and something flickered across his face—fear? hope?—before he said, “I, uh, I had a dream about it. About you. Living here. I just…knew. That doesn’t make any sense, though. But here you are.”
Jenny waited, stirring the lemonade in the pitcher, even though the sugar was already dissolved.
Northcote continued, “When I got home to Portland, after everything…it was a whirlwind. There was so much to do, now that the tower was working. They sent us out on other repair projects all over the region, and I was so grateful for the movement and the momentum. It let me forget. But after a while, when everything started to click together, I got this…this real fear that, uh…”
He took another sip of the lemonade, as if he might find liquid courage in it, and his hand shook. “No one, ah…no one understood me. No one back home believed me. About everything that happened out there. About the angels, about you…”
“Your teammates were there,” Jenny said.
“We were scattered out to other projects. We lost touch, and life took over everything, and…I started to worry that I had made it all up. That I was crazy. All that was left was the ghost stories. You know about that?”
Jenny shook her head.
“There are still teams that live out on Mount Saint Helens, to maintain the tower. And they talk about…something out there. It watches them, or watches over them…I don’t know.”
Twin flickers of light and shadow.
A phantom horse and a patchwork girl.
Only the dreamer can see them.
Only the dreamer knows.
Jenny nodded, but didn’t say anything.
Northcote slid the glass back and forth between his hands, a slow hiss along the table’s grain. “I guess, I just needed to see you for myself. I needed to know for sure I didn’t make it all up.”
Jenny studied him for a moment. Then she picked up the pitcher of lemonade and said, “Grab that crate, will you? And follow me.”
The crate in question was full of clean glasses. Without hesitation, Northcote picked it up, leaving his own lemonade on the table, and he followed Jenny through the back of the womb-red house and onto the stone patio that overlooked Hood Canal.
Summer had landed sweet on the saltwater tongue of the lapping sea, and the tide was high and blue against the rock wall. The long table had a dozen chairs waiting beside it, and strutting up and down its length was Pellig, carefully placing mismatched silverware and folded homemade cotton napkins at each place with his nimble, clawed feet.
Jenny set the pitcher in the center of the table and pointed to a place where Northcote could set the crate of glasses.
But Northcote was standing, frozen, staring at Pellig—the last angel left in the world.
Pellig stopped what he was doing, holding a spoon in one foot, and said, “Rude to stare. Downright insulting when you’ve got double the good eyes of the thing you’re staring at.”
Northcote blinked and looked away, to Jenny, with a helpless expression.
She laughed and shrugged. “Proof, should you need it.”
And Northcote, in spite of himself, laughed too. Then he looked out at the water, the sweep of lawns connecting the Row, the long table, the nodding poppies. He set down the crate of glasses and breathed in, deep. There was relief visible in the slope of his shoulders and the steadying of his hands.
“We were there,” Jenny said. “It was real. And if you stay for supper, you’ll meet others just like us, who know how it was. I hope you will.”
Northcote smiled, and he held out his hand to her. He was handsome, in his way. She hadn’t forgotten that.
“We never formally met,” he said. “Name’s Tom. Tom Northcote.”
Jenny took his hand; it was warm and strong.
The summer air was filled with songs. The kids up the hill, and a girl on a distant mountain peak. It reminded Jenny of Yelm, sometimes—of the church people, and their hymns, and the way they sang, somehow, through eight lost years of fear.
She wondered if they were still singing somewhere on the prairie, over the roar of radio static and the chatter of electricity.
She smiled up at Northcote, and it was Lula’s smile. A fool-girl’s smile.
“I’m Jenny,” she said.
And she was.
END
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I am unwell but deeply satisfied.
Beautiful, perfect closure. 💚