One.

1

Silent. Sudden. Awake. Inhale. Exhale. Silence unbroken. Arms pressed against my chest. My panic fizzles out before it can fully ignite. No need to struggle; I realize they are my own. I pull my fists from my chest and wipe my palms together to dry them.  My sleeping bag feels constricting tonight. My sweaty skin sticks to it. There is something in the air. It soaks into my bones and compels me to shed my covers. Tonight I belong to the night.

I step into clothes and out into the dark. My breath is almost tangible as it pours from my lips. A cough escapes, breaking the silence of the night and dissipating my breath’s illusion. I pause on the doorstep. The orange glow of the side porch light doesn’t ward off the night’s dark fingers that wrap me up and pull me out. My footsteps on the gravel seem an affront to the silent landscape ahead of me. Each mechanical step takes me deeper into my master’s embrace. Gravel gives way to the dirt drive and my footsteps soften. I release the breath I wasn’t aware I was holding as another raspy cough parts my lips in a visible plume.

I step off the road and onto a thin path. Round a bend and my path is blocked. Before me, standing a silent vigil, is a dark figure. His back to me, he stares off along my future path. It seems my brother feels the pull as well. He needs not say it; I see enough written in the long angular shadows of his face. I come abreast and we stare along the road.

“The meadow…” is all I can manage but it seems enough.

His profile bobs slightly in the gloom and I take it as a nod. The world comes into crisp colorless clarity before us and I realize we couldn’t turn back now if we tried. My body isn’t mine at this point; hasn’t been mine since I awoke.

Cough Cough    cough.

Three quick bursts escape before we are again enveloped by the silence. In near unison we lean forward and begin to walk towards the silent voice in the dark distance. Three days from full, the moon bathes us in light from over my left shoulder and highlighting the silhouettes of distant mountains on every side. The night feels otherworldly in its illumination. Our shadows betray the night’s true potential as they cut dark swatches across our path. Their edges are sharp and crisp, but their shape distorts and undulates, as if alive, as the uneven ground passes beneath them. Down a short shallow slope to our left lies the bank of the lake. To our right waist high grass covers the slope up towards a sporadic tree line. Stretching ahead of us the road becomes swathed in moonshade as it enters the woods. Here is true night. Here the darkness is black. I imagine myself pausing at the edge. Imagine that I still exist in a world of rational thought. I need time to think about what I am doing. Enough time to realize that I need to turn back; I have gone further then I can handle already.

The night has a different agenda and it is far too late for me to fight it. Our stride doesn’t even falter as our shadows are devoured by the woodland moonshade. They meld and our outlines are lost. The silence whispers in my ears and I realize it has been talking to me all along. Tempting me out of bed. Leading me somewhere. It grows louder now.

On either side of us slender aspen ascend out of the motionless tall grass. In the dark the grass is the color of fog and has an eerie delicate texture. There is only a whisper of wind at our backs yet the shadows dance at the corner of my eyes. My footsteps feel hurried now but I can’t slow down.

We are getting closer.

An owl protests our march from away behind us across the still lake. It is a warning made in vain; my brother and I can no more stop walking then a raindrop can halt its plummet.

Cough.

Suddenly, as the road goes around a bend, the meadow blossoms off to the left. The voice without words silently roars in my ears and echoes through me. We are nearly there. The grass is short here and we make our way swiftly to the pale stone in the center of the field. The stone is worn smooth and is roughly the size of a tractor tire. Here my brother’s booted heavy footfalls finally come to a rest but my feet wont stop here. Along the edge of the meadow the grove of tall white trees looks like a whale’s grin and it is here my feet head. The whale’s silent voice, as I have come to think of it, whispers me on like a swarm of bees in my head. The world blurs as tears fill the edges of my eyes. I can’t go. I shouldn’t.

As I pass into the first layer of baleen I panic. I grasp the nearest white bristle and force my feet to stop; bracing my weight against the powdery bark. Wide-eyed, I pear into the belly of the beast. The rabbit hole extends before me and I dig in my heals against the gravity.

A breeze nuzzles my back like a mighty inhalation. It sucks me inward. The leaves above my head sound distinctly like rain. I lean my head back and gaze up. I am instantly mesmerized with my throat exposed to the yawning forest that is the whale’s gullet. I am just a troublesome morsel stuck in the teeth of a mighty predator. A single thought breaks through the trance: ‘I should leave before the tongue comes to dislodge me.’ A hand on my shoulder snaps me out of it with a jump. How did I not hear my brother’s approach?

Cough Cough.

“I don’t want to go.” More to myself then over my shoulder to him.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be right behind you.”

My hands release the tree and I dislodge my shoulder from its braced position. I nod, not breaking eye contact with the source of the screaming voice in my head. I raise my foot. The path down the whale’s tract is laid out ahead of me. My foot falls. Leaves flatten under it. My other foot rises. The forest is so dark ahead.

Crunch.

The silence reassures me that the path is easy. The voice has discovered English.

Crunch.

Its vocabulary grows with each step. Its promises grow more flamboyant.

Crunch.

I raise my foot. Away in the distant woods behind me a noise breaks the silence. The trance is broken before my foot hits the ground. The roaring voice in my head ceases. All that stretches in front of me is suddenly only a grove once more. The whale’s baleen are yet again only aspen. The noise that released me now echoes in my head. It fills the void left behind when the silent voice fled. It sounded like a hoof slipping on a rock. A heavy hoof. It came from way in the distance; across the meadow and deep in the woods near the lake. To have been audible at this distance it had to have been a very heavy creature.

Crunch.

I think all this in a split second and whirl around to face the noise. In the middle of the meadow I see my brother turn to look off in the same direction. I brush a snagged stick off my shoulder and wipe the tears from my eyes with the sleeve of my left arm. I hurry out of the tree line and jog across the field to his side.

“What was that?”

“It came from over there. Sounded like from Dead Calf Pond.”

I turn to look at his profile against the night. A shiver slides along the entire length of my spine and were the hairs on the back of my neck short enough they would have been standing strait up. Instead it results in an odd prickling sensation along my neck.

I had just been to the dry pond bed that day and I could still visualize its occupants. What seemed mildly spooky during the day now sent my legs to shaking slightly in the air I just realized was cold. The place was akin to a shambles. The cracked dry earth of the pond was crisscrossed with fallen trees and littered with bones. The bones of the calf, for which it got its name, had long ago been ground to dust but this place never had a shortage of bones. Earlier today I had counted and photographed four horse skulls and a smear of random bones across the bed. What I remembered most vividly and what now stood in my mind was the complete spine that was draped upside down over a fallen log. The pelvis at one end had looked like the deformed skull of a massive frog like creature. The ribs weren’t attached anymore and were instead splayed out haphazardly along the cracked earth.

A fresh breeze broke my thoughts. Wisps of hair detached and were tossed in front of my eyes. I turned to reassure myself that the tree line was again just that, trees. The whale had departed. It fell back into the windless shifting shade. For now at least. I could feel the voice still lingering there in the grove.

How fierce must this new creature of the night be to silence my captor? I jog to catch up with my brother who has begun to trudge back across the meadow, which we had earlier traversed. I keep my head cocked right, trying to spot movement from the pond’s direction. The moon is a great pupil-less eye above the treetops and it gives me what I am looking for. As its gaze pierces my eyes shapes began to twist in the gloom of the trees. My eyes flick feverishly around, but every time they lock on a point, the movement is elsewhere. Ever present in my peripherals.

My coughing distracts my growing panic long enough to realize we have left the wide road home. Where is my brother going? What compels him to wander now? We have left the trees behind. To either side the grass is tall and a ghostly grey. It sways gently now in a breeze I can’t feel. The grass parts ahead of us to let a snake of black earth meander through it. I see only ten feet of path before it bends and is lost in the fields of grass. Over the grass to the left the moon reflects off the lake. The vegetation along the shallow bank makes it look like a swamp.

I no longer have to turn my head to look towards the dry pond. Dead Calf is directly ahead of us. Our path leads us to a large scattering of rocks. It is here my brother stops. Standing abreast once more we gaze forward into the thirty yards of forest that separates us from the dry pond. There is no trace of wind and the night is once again silent. Although tense, this silence is remarkably comforting. It is a true silence.

“Lets get out of here. I want to get to bed.” I hope my fear is properly masked. As far as I know it has been a normal walk to him. I can only guess that he experienced the whispering silence. I turn and hop down. I return into the field of tall grass and begin along the path. My brother doesn’t follow. At least I don’t hear his boots behind me. Ah there it is. He must have just paused for a moment. His steps are like hooves on the packed earth.

“Make more noise why don’t you?” I joke nervously over my shoulder. He must not have heard the laughter in my voice because the noise stops.

“I’m only joking man…” I turn to find myself alone on the dark footpath.

“Um hello? Where did you go?”  He must have heard the other tone in my voice. My nerves are quite apparently thin with my next vocalization. Perfectly punctuated by a crack in my voice.

“It’s not funny man. You can stop hiding.” The ‘hiding’ is only a cracked whisper into the seemingly empty night. My pulse quickens as my blood feels like it solidifies in my veins. My heart beats double quick to distribute to oxidized supply. My world condenses. All I see is the field of pale grass and the black dirt snake winding through it into the unknown. The trees, the lake, the mountains they simple don’t exist anymore.

Alone.

The darkness seems to creep in on my world. The edges of the field darken and fall away. My circle closes in. I have little time. A fit of coughing seizes me. I grip my side and collapse to my knees. The dirt path flies up at my face and I catch it with my right hand. The skin of my palm splits on stone. A trickle of warm blood mixes with the cool soil. The coughing subsides and I rear back on my knees. What is left of the grass is at eye level. The field is little more then a murky white pool in the darkness. I hear movement in the grass and spin my head. Nothing.

Again, this time from behind.

Pivot.

Nothing.

“This is neither the place nor time for one such as yourself. You had your chance.” My mouth falls open and I spin one last time. My bleeding palm leads my swing and connects with something cold. So cold. Like metal in a meat cellar. The puddle of grass evaporates and I faint face forward into the complete darkness.