Geralt is a witcher, a man who hunts the monsters of the world.  This world is a medieval world on the low fantasy end: there are magicians, but they are treated with a mixture of distrust and respect, with many powerless charlatans mixed with actual mages who are just as scheming.  A witcher knows some magic, but distrusts magicians and their kind, as much as the general public mistrusts witchers.  A common theme is how the occupants of towns need witchers to dispose of their monsters, but once the monsters are gone, they don’t watch the witcher hanging around.

The novel is written with one common story, and every other chapter a short story told as if it were a flashback.  The main story involves Geralt recuperating from some wounds as a temple in a town as the local prince’s intolerant knights demand he leaves immediately.  That story itself is more of a setup for the individual stories rather than its own tale, much like an episode of KungFu.  The main story ends on a pseudo-cliffhanger, assumedly setting the stage for the next book, which I expect to be one full story rather than collected tales.

Overall, the stories are interesting and enjoyable, showing different sides of the witcher and the world.  The world is based heavily on folklore, particularly the darker side of Grimm’s fairytales.  Every monster is out of European folklore, and there are references here and there to stories we know such as Cinderella, Snow White, etc.  These references are only slightly humorous, instead showing how those tales fit in this darker world.  Intolerance runs deep in these stories, both of the witcher as well as magicians.  Kings do as they will and town elders will make the deals they need to for the town to remain safe, even if those aren’t the most moral things.  There are some good people, but many more people trying to get by, who are willing to trade in some ethical high ground for some success.

Geralt himself is a dour man who is generally not very talkative.  He does have his rules.  While he is always willing to kill monsters for money, he refuses to kill people for money, not matter his skill at it.  Though he shows himself supernaturally capable of defeating monsters, he is an older protagonist, one who is seeing his skills slowly tarnish as age creeps upon him.  The world is changing and less monsters to kill means less money for him, so there’s a definite feeling from him that his way of life will eventually end.  His character gets more interesting later in the novel, where stories include a companion, the lecherous and boastful troubadour Dandilion, who provides not only commentary to lighten things for the reader, but is himself a source of plot developments, as he foolishly acts when the far more careful and controlled witcher would not.

The style of fantasy is interesting.  The world and the characters at first glance is very similar to the sword and sorcery seen more in 1970s fiction such as Leiber and Moorcock.  But the writing of the fiction is a much more comfortable fantasy style seen more in 1980s and 1990s higher fantasy fiction.  This is generally more readable for most readers, but of course lacks the descriptions of scantily clad females and hordes of gold found in the earlier style.

Overall, this is a worthwhile read if you enjoy fantasy, and a nice introduction to yet another dour swordsman to follow the adventures of.  While for the most part there’s nothing amazingly new, both the world and the witcher himself have qualities to distinguish themselves and make this world worth reading.

I remember a time in high school where I took a trip to the beach.  Growing up on Long Island, the beach was always accessible within about thirty to forty minutes of driving, which meant I almost never meant.  The same way I’ve never been to the top of the Statue of Liberty, something nearly every Manhattan tourist schedules.  Sure I went to the beach a few times with parents when younger, but I just didn’t in my high school and junior high years.  Perhaps I ran with too pasty-faced a crowd that sun worshipping was never a suggested topic.  Maybe they traded in their offerings to Apollo for those to Dionysus – I know later on this was definitely true.

On this day, I went to the beach by myself.  It was a hot Sunday afternoon in August.  By hot, I mean the heat and sunlight could sear the flesh off an unfurred animal within minutes, leaving mere bones, as if attacked by some crowd of solar piranhas. Yes, worse places have worse summers.  But in New York, August is some hellish month where both heat and humidity assail you and you wish that you can pull off your own skin to be cooler.  Woe to those who need to use subways in August.

I ended up planning a beach trip on a lark.  While normally on a Sunday it would rare that I’d be up before the crack of noon, I had to be up early this particular Sunday for a training class at work.  I was working at a retail bookstore owned by corporate masters.  On Sundays the store opened later, so the corporate powers wanted the training before the store opened, so that the entire staff could be there without a risk of lacking coverage on the floor.  This meant all of us had to be there at 8am on a Sunday, nothing any of us were happy about.

The training was on shrinkage.  Unfortunately, this is not about the phenomena of shrinking genitals on a cold day or getting in colder water – that would have been a much more riveting training that we would have not been falling asleep during.  One wonders what they could have trained us on that topic – is there really a professional and corporate solution to wang shrinkage?  Unfortunately, the true topic was on merchandise shrinkage.  This is a clever way of saying theft.  In retail, the concept of the pool of merchandise shrinking without it being bought and exchanged for profit is known as “shrinkage”, the stock shrinking without performing its purpose.

For a retail store, this meant shoplifting.  Unfortunately for our groggy 8am minds, this wasn’t as simple as “don’t let shoplifting happen”.  Due to the litigious nature of our society, there are all sorts of rules about shoplifting.  For example, employees are not allowed to touch customers in any way, as they can be sued.  Even if we see them put something in their pocket, can’t touch them.  Even if we see them put something in their pocket, we just report it and watch them.  They are not technically shoplifting until they step outside the store, as they could take it out of their pocket at any time and purchase it.  Even if they walk out with merchandise, we can’t grab them, tackle them, or anything.  Instead, we call mall security, who I assume would walk up to the shoplifter (if they could catch up to them), wave a donut at them, peer menacingly over their beer gut, and then watch in futility as the shoplifter walked away.

This of course amounts to a great deal of work for little to no payoff.  The fact that we could not touch or do anything about a shoplifter, merely whisper suspiciously made it particularly frustrating.  We were told that one tactic is to give them “excellent customer service”, continually asking if they need help, which sometimes broke their nerve.  To explain more clearly, since we were not allowed to touch or accuse them, if we saw someone steal something, it was recommended we aggressively ask them if they need any help finding anything else, basically trying to pester them and dick-move them into putting it back and leaving.  At the end of the training, I felt like I shouldn’t even bother noticing shoplifters.  If I noticed them, it was work and nothing could be done.  Better to keep a cheerful opinion that those Pokémon cards similar went for a walk, rather than to deal with all I couldn’t do to deal with the kid who stole them.

We did learn much of what not to do.  Do grab, yell, or do any of the obvious things you’d think to stop a thief.  Don’t be a hero.  This was less in cases of shoplifting, but full on armed robbery.  We all chuckled at the sheer ridiculousness of someone robbing a bookstore, but then our recently transferred general manager chimed in.  She recounted an anecdote from a previous store where just that thing happened.  An armed robber somehow entered through the loading dock, and was waving a gun around the receiving area where the books are taken out of boxes and scanned in.  Some heroic employee saw the robber, but the robber hadn’t seen her.  So she leaped on the robber’s back to subdue him.  Unfortunately, this just ended up with her getting pistol whipped.  Afterwards, to add insult to injury, she was fired.  Heroics were against the company byline.

Corporations hate heroes.

After this terribly uplifting training, I was already awake at a relatively early hour, so I decided to go to the beach.  I had decided I was a little too bookish, and I could go with a bit of a tan.  I was also of the age where there is great interest in seeing scantily clad females in a beach setting, and perhaps finding some way to meet and talk to said scantily clad females.  So off to Jones Beach I went.

Once there, I wandered among screaming children, massive families, and frat boys drinking beer.  I did see girls of the scantily clad nature, but they ran in packs, quite a deterrent to the lone hunter.  As I set up my beach towel, I watched as those wild packs of bikini girls did such noteworthy things as played volleyball, listened to music, generally acted too cool to notice anyone around them, and applied suntan lotion.

Stripping down to my swimsuit, I also decided I needed to apply suntan lotion.  And here is where we get to the crux of this memory.  I was, as I mentioned, unfamiliar to tanning as an adult.  All previous cases were when I was a child and did not care.  At the same time, I had no one to ask or confirm things out.  So I fell short at the suntan lotion instructions: “Apply liberally.”

Now of course as an adult with a far more pretentious vocabulary than necessary, I know what that means.  They were saying “apply generously”, as in slather it on like you were preparing the glaze a ham or like you needed lubrication to slip into a tight and uncomfortable spot.  I know this now.  But at the time, there was confusion.  I had only heard liberal in a political sense, not in a suntan lotion application sense.

I sat and thought about it.  This was the early nineties, the era of George Bush Sr and his New World Order.   This was a man who had tried to remove the right of habeas corpus during his presidency, luckily failing.  This was when Neo Conservatism was on the rise.  Unlikely regular Conservatism, Neo is very forward about restricting rights, pushing a religious agenda.  For years I had grown up hearing of Bush and Reagan eras pushing agendas to enforce morality, restricting free speech, rights, etc.

So when I thought about liberal vs conservative, I often saw liberalism fighting against the excesses of Neo Conservatism, fighting against the restrictions they pushed on individual rights.  So unlike the convention meaning and term of liberally as “more” and “excess”, I saw them as actually more even handed and moderate.

I re-read the suntan lotion bottle.  Clearly this meant I should apply the lotion moderately or lightly.

You see the flaw here?

Hours later, I found myself red like a lobster.  There were some patches where I wasn’t quite so red, where I had applied the lotion a bit more “liberally” than others, but overall, I was bright red.  And unfortunately, since there were few lobster-fetish girls on the beach that day, there was no scantily clad meetings or love to be found.

So I say this to all the product manufacturers out there, to all those who design the labels on bottles, boxes, unguents, and lotions: don’t use politically charged terms on your labels.

A friendly hand shook me awake.

“Mom?” I said groggily, wondering when my bed had become so uncomfortable and covered with faux leather.

There was a giggle and then a drawling response.  “I ain’t your mom, Sugah.  Don’t make me feel so old.”

I sat up and groggily returned to my senses.  I was still in the roadside diner in Oklahoma.  I had finished my very delicious burger and fries.  Audrey said she’d work on getting me a ride, so she let me sit down in the corner booth for a while.  Since it was late, she wasn’t sure when a ride would show up.  At a certain point, I had just gotten so tired.  I told myself I would just lay and relax for a few minutes, but I guess sleep overtook me.

I squinted out the windows and saw it was morning – just barely.  The sun was just barely over the horizon, the daylight much more gold than I had ever seen it.  If I hadn’t been so tired, my eyes so red, I would have enjoyed it more.  Instead I found myself searching my backpack to see if I had sunglasses.  No luck.

When I had gotten more of my bearings, Audrey came back over to me.  “I did find you a ride, Sugah.  Never let it be known that Audrey doesn’t come through.”

I stood up, grabbed my backpack and thanked her profusely.  She handed me a paper bag with a muffin which she claimed was “on the house” by way of it being a day old.  That was fine with me.  I continued thanking her before stepping outside into the blinding morning to find my ride.

Squinting through the darkness, I found myself shocked at who my ride was.  It was the humongous trucker, Bill.

Welcoming me with a handshake and a grunt, he led me over to his truck.  As massive as him, it was parked off the road, as I had seen it last night.  He opened the door for me and then I climbed up onto the massive beast, putting myself in the passenger spot.  I looked behind and noticed that this truck had a sleeper.  I realized that Bill had eaten dinner last night, than slept a few hours in the truck.  Audrey must have woken me right before he was to leave.

He slid himself into the driver seat.  I had never realized before how big the front seat in a truck is.  In most vehicles, being in the passenger seat puts you right next to the other person.  In a truck, you only feel like you are in the same room as the person, both staring out the same windshield.  Between us was a massive console of knobs, levers, gearshifts, and buttons.  I didn’t realize so much was needed to drive a massive truck, but maybe he had the augmented version with ejector seats and surface-to-air missiles.  I know if I drove a truck, I’d have that model.

“Ready?” he uttered briefly, turning the ignition, causing the entire truck to shudder as if the roar of a monster.

Admittedly, I was nervous.  As I had mentioned, the redneck trucker stereotype was still fresh in my mind.  Sure, he was doing me a solid, and I had to be appreciative of that.  But I wondered what this trip was going to be like.  Sheepishly I gave him a smile and a thumbs up.  He kicked the truck into gear.

In minutes were rolling down the highway at seventy five miles per hour, the roar of diesel fuel and the vibration of the truck the only things I could feel.  The scenery rushed by, but I wouldn’t dare open the window.  I’m sure poisonous diesel fumes would be sucked back in through the window.

We sat in silence for the first hour.  It was only an hour in when Bill finally grunted something about Route 66.  “Sometimes Route 66 is called the Mother Road.”  He paused.  “It was John Steinbeck that first called it that.”  Then there was silence.

I smiled appreciatively at that, but had no real comment.  I had no real comment on the Mother Road or on Steinbeck, other than if Bill wanted me to be George to his Lennie, I was willing to dive out of the moving truck at any point.  I had no desire to live off the fat of the land on a rabbit farm, and there’d be nothing but trouble when he tried to stroke some chick’s hair.

There was a long silence, then Bill had another fact about Route 66.  “The whole original Route 66 isn’t drivable.  Some of it is closed, and some of it can’t fit a truck on it.  Interstates have taken the place of Route 66, so no one needs to drive it.  People have to make an effort to drive it.”  He paused again.  “I try to drive it as much as I can.  I make up the time on other roads.  It’s just sad it’s not used.  A lonely, unused part of America.”

He made a few more of these informative declarations, each a little longer than the next.  On the longer ones, I actually had enough to comment back on.  And after a while, we slowly eeked out something like a conversation.  It was strange, but the longer I spoke to him, I sort of started to get a feel for this man called Bill.

Bill was a thoughtful man, far more than you would think.  There was much in him that he reasoned out in his head, long before it reached any sort of speech.  Truly an introvert, he rarely spoke without thinking ahead.  He was also a man purely of inertia.  In the same way that bodies at rest tended to remain at rest, Bill’s mind and social skills were the same way.  He was a man of few words if you interacted with him briefly.  If you said Hello to him, you’d most likely get a grunt from him, because he hadn’t spoken in a while, so it was an uphill action to speak.  But sit him down somewhere, start slow, and the man would open up.  His inertia would be overcome, and he would be able to keep talking.  So spending hours with him in the truck allowed me to really get to know Bill.

I had to change my opinion of him as a redneck.  He wasn’t in the way we would think.  He was not thoughtless, uneducated, stupid, or low class.  There was some of what we associate with rednecks, but that was not his fault.  Growing up in Arkansas, that’s all he knew.  He grew up with country music, chicken fried everything, grits, and a strange set of values.  You can take a man away from his place of birth, but typically something carries over.  Sure he may learn new things, new ways.  But like us all, anything new we don’t learn tends to default back to how we learned it growing up.  Those things can change too, but if we never try to change them, they tend to be the habits we learned way back when.  Such were Bill’s habits.  If he had lived in a cosmopolitan city, he might have been someone else.  But as a trucker, travelling the heartland, there were certain things that were going to stay the same.

So all in all, though it started slow, it was a good trip with Bill.  He had some company for his drive, and I got to somewhat revise my view of redneck truckers.  Slightly.  There’s always one exception.

We rode for twelve hours before it was time for us to part.  My butt was heavily numbed and I could feel the rattling of the truck in my bones.  I could not imagine a world with sensations of buttedness and stable bones.  The truck pulled into a rest stop as the sun began its descent from the sky.

“This is your stop, little buddy,” said Bill.

For a moment I had a strange flashback of Gilligan’s Island, but it mercifully passed quickly.  As I opened the door, I said.  “Thanks, Bill, it’s been a pleasure.”

He gave me a bashful smile with a grunt.  I closed the door and the truck rode off.  I looked around the rest stop.  Currently it was empty except for a few tourists using bathrooms, getting touristy maps and buying worse-than-typical lunches from the McDonalds.

I rubbed my hands together.  Which of these suckers would be giving me my next ride?

Overjoyed as I was at being back in civilization, that still left me in an uncertain position.  I had been dropped somewhere along Route 66.  For those not familiar with the intimates of American geography, Route 66 is a very long road.  It stretches from California through the middle of America and then up to Chicago (though some biased readers may suggest that it begins in Chicago and ends in California instead).  I knew that I was on it, but I didn’t know where.  Before my sojourn through the wasteland, I had thought that I was in Texas or New Mexico.  But after that dream-like experience of dark worlds and walking houses, all bets were off on where I ended up.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I was in Oz.

Lost with only a backpack full of meager possessions is in some people’s minds a very romantic way to get to know a place.  Having been there, I disagree.  Sure, if this were Paris, Rome, London or New York City, I might agree.  But when you’re on a highway at night with darkness as far as the eye can see, you are not very endeared to the desolate expanse.  I was tired and hungry, weary of travelling and wanting a bed where I didn’t expect a crazy person to wake me up with cryptic words in the middle of the night.

And so I walked.  The good thing about roads is they go one way or another.  Walk far enough and long enough, and you’ll find something.  It’s important not to second guess yourself, though you inevitably will; about an hour in, you become sure that only five minutes from your starting point in the other direction was the cheapest, comfiest hotel in the world that allows guests to sleep away and gorge themselves on a continental breakfast based on the promise of money via Western Union in the morning.  When it’s you, tired feet, dark nothing, and only the occasional beams of fast moving cars, your thoughts don’t have to be rational or practical.

Yes, there were cars passing me.  That’s the only way I knew I wasn’t in some Omega Man scenario – oh, no, the old man had returned me to my world, but years later after a plague wiped out humanity and I am the last man – dum dum DUM!  Even if it were a Planet of the Apes scenario (either way I get to be Chuck Heston), the apes wouldn’t drive cars, they’d ride around on those horses in their black leather.  A car, even though more efficient, is not very imposing when you’re enslaving another intelligent race.

But yes, cars.  None that I could flag down, of course.  I’m not sure if they could even see me before they were practically on top of me, driving at sixty miles per hour.  And if they could see me, I’m not sure if they would stop.  It’s a good many years since Jack Kerouac’s On The Road America or even the carefree road life of Easy Rider.  Serial killers and news reports have made people very gun shy on the whole hitchhiking situation.  I’m not saying there aren’t some kind souls who still do it, it’s just perceived as a much more dangerous thing these days.  The unfortunate result of that was me having to jump out of the way of oncoming cars that didn’t slow down, their drivers probably never seeing my middle finger in the dimming darkness behind them.

In the middle of nowhere you find strange things.  I bet no one even knew about half the things on the road in the middle of nowhere.  Lacking a flashlight, my eyes had to adapt to the moonlight, welcoming the rare light on the road.  So I tripped and stumbled when I found the boot.  Lying on the shoulder of the road was a single leather boot, old and unhappy.  Not a cowboy boot, just a lone brown boot of creased and bent leather.  Not two boots, mind you.  I glanced around and could not find the companion piece of footwear, just the sole boot.  Stretching the bounds of my curiosity, I reached inside, hoping not for some danger like a scorpion or a venomous snake who had curled into the boot like an old mother with countless children.  No, there was nothing harmful, if you discount the funky smell which emanated from inside.  Instead I found what seemed like a torn scrap of paper.  When I finally reached the next road light, I discovered that it was a well-worn ten dollar bill.  Lucky break for me.  That elevated my road funds to, including my lucky John F Kennedy half-dollar, to $10.50.  I wasn’t going to buy any bridges anytime soon, but maybe I could buy a meal now.

That was fortuitous, because after another while of walking, I found a diner.  I didn’t know how long I walked, and I know it probably felt longer than it was.  But from afar I saw the diner, lit up with neon, a glimmering jewel in the darkness.  I knew now how those who saw mirages in the desert felt.  A shimmering oasis would present the same amount of hope and unlikelihood as a garish neon diner would in the middle of the night on a dark road.

As I got closer I saw that this diner was the extremely traditional sort of diner you sometimes don’t see anymore.  Like some mythical beast of stainless steel and neon, this oblong trailer-shaped building was the traditional mass produced pre-fab diners that they shipped all across America via railway cars, plopping them down whenever there were hungry people and some entrepreneur willing to make a buck off said hungry people.  To say they don’t make them like this anymore is an understatement.  Whoever did own this one kept it well-maintained.  The street lamps around it made it shine in the darkness.  A pink neon sign proclaimed it the “Nighthawk”.  At least I knew it would be open.

I passed by the handful of  cars and trailer trucks parked in front of the diner; some were parked on the small square of concrete that the diner sat on, while others were parked in the well-worn dirt around the diner.  I felt something akin to glee as I walked up the steps, glancing in the windows at the well-lit inside drowned in fifties nostalgia and neon.  I lovingly touched the stainless steel door handle with its uncomfortable grip.  I paused for a second, took a deep breath and opened the door.

I lingered a moment in the door way, looking around, causing some of the customers to stare at me.

“Large Marge sent me,” I said.

After a long pause where nobody got the reference, I sat down at one of the stools in front of the counter.  Real faux red leather seats, just like they used to make them, long ago in a time before I was born.  But part of the whole vintage fad is being almost religiously affectionate towards things that allow you to reminisce about times when you weren’t born, so I think I was covered.  I spun a full 360 around in the chair, trying to not be too loud with my “Wheeeee!” exclamation.

I got a dirty look from the burly fellow on the stool next to me.  On second thought, with the girth and size of the man, I have no way of know if he actually just took up the stool next to me, he could easily take up both that stool and the stool next to it.  Sure, I could make jokes about the sheer enormity of the man’s gut and ass (“When’s the baby due, and will it come out a fan of Budweiser, or will you have to wean it onto it?” “Do they make retail pants to make such a huge plumber’s crack, or do you have them custom made?”), but he was a big man all over.  His forearms seemed the thickness of my neck, covered in a coarse hair I’m sure he sold for use in wire brushes used for the most extreme hair styling catastrophes.  He wore a collared flannel shirt and a dark, coarse beard which removed any suggestion of a neck to the point where viewers would begin to wonder if he still had a neck, or if it had collapsed under the weight of his enormous head, that head coming to a wobbly rest on the massive slab that was the man’s torso.

Upon his head he wore a rather worn baseball cap which proclaimed his name to be “Bill”, which would have been a surprise to no one.  He was clearly a trucker, and here in the heartland of America (I still assumed), he fit a stereotype.  All the fat redneck truckers had names like Bill, or Biff, or Joe Bob, or Rick, or Rex, or Big Jim.  They never seemed to differ.  Of course, I know by saying that, I would now meet some exception to the rule.  I’ll be sitting in a roadside diner, and a trucker will walk in with the name Thelonious stitched into his hat, a name given him by overzealous jazz enthusiast parents.  Willing to drop my stereotypes about truckers, I would ask him about jazz and the works of his namesake.  Turning to me with a sneer of disgust, he would remark, “Jazz is for fags,” then he would burp right in my face, poisoning with toxic beer fumes, before returning to his chicken fried steak.

Surprisingly, this particular instance of the Platonic trucker stereotype, our Bill, was not eating chicken fried steak.  Instead he was eating apple pie, which would have looked delicious, if I actually liked apples.  Of course, that did not rule out him having chicken fried steak earlier.  Chicken fried steak would have actually helped to nail down what state I was in, since it was a southern dish, particularly Texas and Oklahoma.

I realize that some of my readership may never have heard of chicken fried steak or if they have heard of it, they have never actually seen it.  I know when I first heard of such a notion, I had imagined something different.  I had imagined a thick, juicy, rare steak that had been flash fried in the same way someone might fry a Twinkie (also a southern delicacy) or fried ice cream.  Instead, chicken fried steak relies on a very thin cut of beef, some flour, and a pan frying.  Historians and chicken fried steak haters would suggest that it really is a form of schnitzel, but don’t believe their lies.  When chicken fried steak is drowned in the appropriate amount of white pepper gravy (appropriate amount = when you think it’s too much) is one of the most American foods out there; assuming your America is both southern and heavily fried.

I put my hand on one of the menus on the counter, both to check for chicken fried steak and maybe order something, but the waitress materialized out of nowhere and placed her hand on it.

“No offense, Sugah, but you look pretty rough.  I need to confirm you can pay for things before you order them.”

I sighed but understood her point.  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the crumpled ten dollar bill, which I placed on the counter.

“Welcome to the Nighthawk, Sugah,” she said, taking her hand off the menu and wandering over to another customer.

I’d like to point out that it is not simply writing for local color that causes me to write “Sugah” for her dialog.  If you had met her, you would know the way she said that word, no letter “R” was within twenty miles of the word.  “R”s had been deported to Europe, and we can get along fine having sugah in our coffee without them.  Seriously though, she was a doll.  Older, so not one I would go for, but as sweet as the “Honey”s and “Sugah”s she repeated continuously.  I’m pretty sure I could create a fairly successful internet meme of edited footage of her saying “Honey” and “Sugah” set to “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies.

I did find chicken fried steak on the menu.  I had hoped for some of the rumored things I have heard of that I wanted to try, like chicken fried bacon, but alas, not on this menu.  I settled on a regular burger, which was within my price range, still leaving me a dollar or two of my own.

When she took my order, I asked the waitress the pertinent question: “Where the hell am I?”

She started, “Well, Route 66 will run a few more miles before it hits – “

I stopped her.  “I mean,” I said sheepishly, “What state am I in?”

She looked at me weird then laughed.  In backpedal mode, I lied some story about how I was hitchhiking, and some crazy guy decided in the middle of nowhere that I had to get out of his car immediately, and since I hadn’t been paying attention to the road I really didn’t know where I was.  It sounded plausible, if not rambling.  Still, it got me an answer.

I was in Oklahoma.

I’d have a joke here, if I had any knowledge of Oklahoma.  But I got nothing.  There’s no TV or school textbook stereotypes of Oklahoma.  Here’s the best I got.  Oklahoma: Texas’s Hat.  See?  Nothing.

After she took my order, the waitress, who I knew now as Audrey, came back and talked to me.  Hearing an account such of mine demanded she try to get as much of my life story as possible.  Obviously, there would be believability issues if I told her the entire thing, so I told her the relevant parts.  She learned that I was without resources and a thousand or so miles away from home.  I probably had taken far too long on this summer trip, and now I just wanted to get home.

Sure, I embellished for purposes of drama, making myself seem more of a lost and hopeless case than maybe I was.   Then again, as I thought in my mind of my actual experiences, they were so outlandish that I had no way of knowing that I hadn’t been slipped a drug at some point and then spent the past few weeks in a ditch somewhere hallucinating fanciful experiences.  So yeah, maybe I was that hopeless.  I knew at this point I had only two fifty to my name and a backpack full of scavenged items.

Whatever the reason, Audrey took pity on me and decided to help me.  As she put my hamburger on the table, she said she’d try to find a ride for me.  She wasn’t sure how far, but perhaps a regular might take pity.  I thanked her as I bit down on my burger.  I wasn’t sure where things were going to go, but sometimes it’s hard to be too depressed in the face of a tasty burger.

The next night couldn’t come soon enough, yet I almost wished it never came.  I wanted to put my plan into action, to get back at the old man, but I was also almost paralyzed with fear.  From all of Emily’s allusions and half-dropped inferences, the old man was dangerous.  I didn’t know how dangerous.  Worse, I worried that he’d somehow know before I made my move.  He always seemed to know everything; I needed to make sure he wouldn’t know this.  I tried to avoid showing it on my face, and put up a mask of irritability all through the day.  But with his dark eyes, I wondered every second in his presence whether those eyes were staring through me to the truth.

Somehow I made it to nighttime without him mentioning anything.  He called me outside while he began preparations to enter the Dark.  While he had a backpack of stuff he didn’t have on our previous jaunt into the Dark, otherwise the ritual to enter was the same.  I questioned him about the trip while he was still preparing.

“So we’re going into the Dark to…” I prompted, which just caused him to stare at me as he measured an amount of powder from a pouch using his palm.

After a period of silence, I answered my own question.  “So we’re going into the Dark to strike at Swearing Jim?”

“Yes,” he said flatly.  “I believe that’s your name for him.”

“What is it we’re going to do exactly?”

“Eh?” he said.

“I mean, are you going to be all ‘Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Sleep! Sleep!’ or are you going to do something else?”

He raised his eyebrow at me and stared for a moment.  “My methods are unimportant.  All you need to know is to follow and to carry.”

“But, shouldn’t I know some things?  Will it be dangerous?”

“There will be no danger that you have to worry about.”

“But what is it I shouldn’t be worrying about?  Are we going to fight?”

“There may be fighting,” he said thoughtfully.  “If things do not go well.”

“But if things go well –“ I started, but he silenced me with a hiss.

“I must prepare now.”

He mumbled to himself through his final preparations, then he started his singing, which either opened the way to the Dark, or he was showing off the dulcet tones of his singing voice.  As I sat there, I realized that nothing had helped my concerns.  I had hoped he could say something that would give me second thoughts.  If he had said something that would have conflicted with the idea that he’d sell me up the river, then I might have paused in my plan.  Yet nothing did.  The fact that he was keeping me ignorant of what we were going to do made me even more suspicious.

I watched the ritual a little more closely this time.  At no point did I even imagine that I could somehow do magic or whatever he did.  But for my plan I just needed to figure out the levers of it, the most important parts.  I knew that by the time he finished singing, I’d have to go forward with what I knew.  Once I started, abandoning it and explaining would be difficult.

Following along still wasn’t helpful.  Strange singing, something with powder.  And then he swept his hand out – no wait, he was just scratching.  There, powder into the fire and the strange color.  More singing, more singing.  Then he spills the gems in line.  More singing.

His voice rolled to a silence.  He sat for a moment with his eyes closed, unmoving.  Then his eyes opened slowly and he looked at me.  “We are ready.  Take the backpack.”

“No special face paint this time?” I asked, picking up the backpack.

“None,” he said.  “Follow,” he said as he stepped over the line of gems and disappeared.

With a reluctant sigh, I followed him.  The Dark looked like I remembered it.  Very black, lit only by the white fire.  The house looked as monstrous as it did before.  He signaled for me to stop, and then rooted around in the backpack for something.  As he did, I heard the strange cry of a bird.

“What was that?”

“Ignore it,” he said.

“But what if I didn’t want to ignore it.  What if I was concerned that it was actually something dangerous?”

“Ignore it,” he growled, pulling something from the backpack.  As I turned around I noticed it was a disc like a dinner plate.

“Is that from the Franklin Mint?” I asked.

He sneered at me.  “This compass will point the way.”

I looked over his shoulder as he focused on the disc.  It was full of strange arcane writings (or perhaps the McDonalds menu written in Arabic, I really couldn’t tell), but it was still a plate with no other parts.

“I think your compass is missing a needle,” I said.

“The needle cannot be seen,” he said, “so it can show the unseen.”

“But then how do you see where you should go?”

He hissed at me and I dropped it.  He stared at the disc for a while, then he began a slow walk towards the darkness.  I reluctantly followed, stopping a few paces from the impenetrable blackness.  He seemed prepared to walk right through it.

“How will we see through that?” I asked.

“No need, we have the compass.”

“But how do we see?”

“There’s no need.  All you need to know is follow me.  If you keep that thought you will be safe,” he said.

He did not wait for my reply and stepped forward into the darkness and disappeared.  It was not like when someone steps from a lighted area into darkness, where one can see them vaguely.  No, he disappeared immediately, the impenetrable blackness swallowing him completely.

“Follow,” I heard his voice say, but it was different.  Muffled, garbled, and farther away than I would expect.

I stared at that inky blackness.  I wondered if now was time to put my plan into action, or whether I should follow longer.  The longer I stared at the blackness, the more I was uncomfortable with it.  There was a wrongness to it that prickled my senses.  The old man wanted me to follow him into that?

I reached out my hand, to just have the tips of my fingers touch the blackness.  The second my fingers touched the blackness I yanked them back.  It was cold, so horribly cold.  But that was not the worst of it.  It was like an electric jolt through my mind.  I saw everything I was ever afraid of, from shadows as a little kid through the paranoia that my clone was homicidal.  At the same time, my mind was filled with every bad thing I had ever done, everything I had ever regretted.  It was like all of my buttons were pushed at once.

How could do old man go into that?  How could he be enveloped by such madness?  It would turn me into a broken man so quickly.  He must have iron will or balls of steel.  Possibly both.  There was no way I would go through the black.  My plan had to start then, before he realized I wasn’t following.

I ran back to the fire, and saw the comforting swirls of the exit back into the real world.  Stepping through it, I wasted no time tossing the backpack down.  My goal was to trap the old man in the Dark.  Which meant I had to undo whatever was keeping the entry open.  I had no idea how effective this was, but since it took him a while to open it, I figured at best it would take him a while to get back without it.  With luck he’d be trapped there.

I kicked through the line of gems, dispersing them as much as I could.  I opened all the old man’s remaining pouches of powder and tossed handfuls of each on the fire, turning it a myriad of colors.  Only when I found the right one did it go out completely as it had a few nights prior.  Hesitantly, I stepped over the broken line of gems.  On the other side of the line, the night was still night, the house not monstrous.  I had broken the power to send people there; I hoped I had also broken its power to send the old man back.

Even though I thought I might have trapped the old man, I treated things as if my time was short.  I ran into the house and began shouting for Emily.  I kept shouting as I packed what few belongings I had together.  Then I walked to the door of the study.  I was rattling the handle when Emily showed up.

“Shut up, he’ll hear you!” she said in a hushed voice.

“I’ve trapped him in the Dark, it’s time for us to make our escape!”

“You WHAT?”

“He’s trapped,” I said.  I took a few steps back and rammed the study door with my shoulder.  It hurt but stayed locked.  I did feel it give a little.  “I put out the fire and broke the line.  He can’t use it to get back.”

“I’m not sure it works that way…” she said, as I rammed the door again.  She winced from the sound of impact.  “What are you doing?”

“If there’s something, anything to help us escape, it’s going to be in here,” I said, ramming the door again.

“We don’t know what’s in there,” she said, her arms crossed.  “It could be bad.”

“Whatever it is, we need it!” I said in a gasping breath as I rubbed my shoulder.  “Go grab your things, we’re leaving.”

She watched as I rammed my shoulder at the door again.  It was beginning to splinter.  “I’m not going,” she said.

“You’re coming,” I said.  “Grab your stuff!” I rammed the door again.

With a splintering crack, the door burst open and I stumbled into the room.  Behind me Emily peered around the corner into the room.

I’m not sure what I expected to see in the study.  Books lining the walls, a big desk, candles?  Bodies stacked in the corner like Bluebeard?  His secret collection of vintage Barbie Dolls?  Somehow none of that was true, yet all of that was true.  The center of the room was taken up by a large circle made with white paint.  Around it sprawled all sorts of arcane symbols.  Some of those connected with other smaller circles around the room.  Most of the objects in the room were on the outskirts.  There were some books, old volumes frayed and covered with burned down candle wax.  There were bones in various places around the room.  There were also dolls, but not Barbie Dolls.  No, these were strange traditional dolls, maybe more porcelain mannequins, their faces cracked, symbols drawn on them in strange places.  In one of the smaller circles I saw a full skeleton and the doll of a young girl.  There was something very familiar.

I began to hear the old man’s singing.  I looked around, but could not find its source.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.  “Come in here and tell me where it’s coming from.”

“I am not going in there,” she said, dread in her voice.

“Why not?  I just need to know if you hear it.  Come in here.”

“Nothing would get me to go into that room,” she said, her voice near tears.

At this point I saw the old man singing.  Not in the room.  It was almost as if in my mind’s eye I could see him.  I looked at the room, but also somehow saw the old man sitting in the Dark near that white fire.  He was singing while fiddling with his damn pouches.

“I can see him!” I said.

“Where?” she said, her head swinging around outside the room.

“In my mind,” I said.  I began to look around the room, frantically.  Maybe there was a map.  Maybe a compass with a real needle on it.  Maybe there was something that could help us.

“In your mind?” she asked.  Her voice was freaked out.

“I can see him somehow,” I said, grunting as I overturned a table with books and a skull.  A jar of something broke on the ground.  Something skittered away from the jar.

All of the pots and metal hanging from the ceiling all over the house began to slowly bang together.  It was almost as if there was a wind blowing inside the house.

“I don’t like the sound of that…” she said.

“I don’t either!” I said, knocking over a stack of books, looking for something that would help us.  But I found nothing.

I raced out of the room as the clanging got louder and louder.  I could hear the singing in my head growing louder and louder.  “We’re getting out of here!”  I said, grabbing my few possessions and walking out to the deck.

“I can’t come, I really can’t,” said Emily, reluctantly following me out to the deck.

“You have to come!  We have a chance to be rid of him!”

“Then go!” she said.  “You be free!”

I stepped down the deck stairs and stood on the dirt.  “You need to come now!  Listen to that, he’s coming!  Somehow the old bastard is coming back!”

She looked behind her, at the house with the clanging of pans, her face white with fear.  Still, she clung to the wood railing, refusing to leave the deck.

“Look, I just can’t come!” she said.

“I don’t care what he did to you, now’s your time to escape!”

“It’s not that!  I just can’t.  You won’t understand!”  Her voice was screeching, her eyes tearing.

I stepped up one stair and went to grab her, but she flinched.  “No!”

“We need to go!” I said.  In my mind, the old man’s song was so loud, the clanking of the house so strong.  Whatever was going to happen was going to happen soon.

“Please, no!”

At the time, I decided she was hysterical, she really didn’t know what she wanted.  But she needed to get away.  I grabbed her hand and then stepped back down, yanking her partly down the stairs.

When I grabbed her hand, I didn’t notice at first how cold it was.  My hand tingled the whole time I held it.  It was light and lacking in substance.  I barely held it; I only held and yanked based on the idea of it being a hand.  It was strange, but at the time I didn’t notice.

As I yanked her forward, she crossed some invisible line.  I know that now.  Her hand and her head crossed over this line, crossed over the divider between the house and the outside world.  In that moment, I saw –  I truly saw.  In that moment I realized exactly why she couldn’t leave.  I realized all the reasons she had given, I understood all the real meanings between her cryptic allusions.  I realized exactly what I had seen in that study.  As I yanked her forward, her hand and head changed.  Pale flesh turned to gray flesh, old and decaying.  A hand of flesh turned to a hand of bones.  Her face changed from a pale and scared young girl to that of a desiccated corpse.  But even with that change, that face was still her face.  I looked upon the face of death: Emily’s death.

I let go and yanked my hand back, falling back upon the ground.  She stepped back up onto the deck, tears in her eyes.  We stared at each other for a long moment.  I was in shock, and she was afraid, truly afraid.  I knew the exact secret she didn’t wish me to know.

“I’m sorry,” she cried.  “I’m sorry.  I couldn’t tell you.  I couldn’t!”

The clanging of pots and the singing grew to a crescendo.

“He found me,” she said, “out in the wasteland.  Dead.  I was dead already!  But he wouldn’t let me go!” She wailed.  “He just keeps me here and doesn’t let me go…”

The singing grew louder and I could see the old man so clearly, sitting cross legged, his hand full of a strange powder.  Then all at once, he stopped singing.  His eyes were dark and he had a cruel smile.  It was almost… it was almost as if he could see me and that was why he smiled.

Then he blew the powder out of his hand.  As he blew, I felt my body lifted as if I weighed nothing.  I felt myself tossed into the air, out into the strange sky, tumbling through space.  It must have been a good twenty seconds I tumbled, but it seemed an eternity.  The next thing I felt was myself tumbling onto the ground, hitting my shoulder hard.  I rolled over a few times and just missed cracking my head on asphalt.

Asphalt… there was a road here.  Double yellow line down the center, white painted lanes and everything.  I was in the ditch on the side of the road.  Usually being there is considered a bad thing, but in this case, I was happy to be there.  A real road!

It was nighttime, but a real nighttime.  The sky was clear and there shone a real moon.  This was nothing like the wasteland’s sky.  I picked myself up and dusted myself off.  I rubbed at my sore shoulder.  A car swept by me on the road, briefly illuminating me in its headlights.

I looked up at the road sign.  Route 66.

There was no singing, no Emily.  I didn’t know where I was, but I was back to civilization.  I was happy to be back.  But for one moment, my happiness was soured when I remembered that she was still there.  Dead or not, she didn’t deserve all that.  There was the plaintive cry of some strange bird as I began my walk down the road.

I went to bed after the house stopped moving.  It lowered itself in a stretch of wasteland that looked very much like the last place it was.  Had we really gone anywhere?  Was this place all the same?  How could the old man tell we’re in the right place?

When I woke up the sun was already going down.  Days seemed very short in this place and nights seemed endless.  I had no real way to time them, since there was not a single clock in the house.  I had lost my watch long ago.  The only other way to keep time was to count in my head, and I didn’t care that much.  This left the passage of time so subjective amongst the other weirdness going on.

“We go into the Dark again tomorrow night.”

It was the old man’s casual declaration over dinner.  We sat at the old table acting somewhat civilized with white plates and cheap silverware.  It was just him and I; as far as I knew, he was still unaware that I knew about Emily.  Our dinner was the roasted meat of a bird.  It seemed somewhat like chicken, somewhat like quail, yet neither.  After thinking about it for a while, it was no bird that I had ever seen or heard of.  At that moment I decided to stop thinking too much about it, in case I found myself unable to finish dinner.

“Why are we going back in there?” I asked.

“Unfinished business,” he said.  “I finally have my opportunity to strike at the one that marked you.”

“I mean, why are we going back in?  I’m not really worried about him anymore.  I can sit this one out.”

His face twisted into a dark glare.  “While you are in my house, you follow my commands.”

“Sure, Dad, but I was kind of interested in leaving at some point anyway.”

“Your debt is still unpaid.”

“When will it be paid?  I appreciate you saved my life, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but how much is enough?  You keep mentioning things I have to do, but not telling me until the day before what I need to do.  I guess I just want to know when that debt will be fulfilled.”

“I will tell you when you are done and no longer needed,” he said icily.

“Great, I’ll just hang around here while you string me along.  I’m sure some day I’ll be useless and you’ll let me know.  So what wildly dangerously thing do you want me to do this time?  Hock a loogie in the Devil’s face?  Ride the world serpent?  Steal fire from the gods?  Tell Goths that Peter Murphy isn’t really that great?”

The old man stared at me with dark eyes for a long moment until I calmed down.  “We are simply going into the Dark together and search for the one who marked you.  I demand no crazy stunts, nor anything more complicated than you following me.  I will ask you to carry a few things.”

“So you just need a pack mule?”

“It is more than that,” he said.  “But as far as what you will need to actually do, it is just follow and carry.  I will take care of the rest.”

I leaned back in my seat and scanned his face.  I didn’t buy it.  There was something missing.

“And when do I get to leave?” I said, changing the subject.  “When is all this done?”

“When your debt is – “

“Yeah, yeah, I get that,” I said.  “You can say that over and over.  And sure, it’s probably true.  But you have some sort of secret Debt Meter in your head that I’ll never see.  I need to know how close I am.  How long will it be?  When will be the last time I need to do something for you?”

He said nothing and simply rubbed his chin in thought.

“Will this be the last time?  If I do this for you, will I be able to go?”

I looked at him expectantly.  I had such hope that this would be the last time, and that after this I could go.  Maybe I could finally go home.

“No,” he said flatly.

I was crestfallen.  I frowned and tried to latch onto hope.  “What about the time after that?”

“No,” he said again.

I almost flipped the dinner plate in front of me into the air with rage, but I held onto myself.  “You know what, fuck you,” I said and got up front the table.  I walked out of the house, while the old man said nothing behind me.

I walked outside to the deck and leaned on the railing while I looked out into the utterly desolate crap of the universe.  Truly this was a wasteland; nothing but crap for miles around, while I was in the crap capital, the goddamn Fortress of Shit Solitude.  How had I gotten here?  How could I get away?

I fixed my vision as far as I could see, and I saw nothing.  I wanted to leave, and that meant by foot.  But no matter what direction I looked in, there was nothing for miles.  How did one get out of this place?  How did I get into this place?  I had seen bones out there; were those from others who had tried to walk away?

I debated with myself over the old man’s intentions.  He was definitely dealing with some hardcore shit here, some dark shit.  That didn’t exactly make him Mr. Nice Guy.  But when I fell almost dead on his doorstep, he did take me in and get me back to health.  He did remove the mark and protect me from the hound that came after me.

On the other hand, I had Emily’s warnings.  The old man only used people.  If he helped me, it’s because he got something out of it or because he wanted me to owe him.  He certainly had a debt on me now.  She had said he would keep using me until he used me up; only then would he let me go, if there was anything to let go.  With his arbitrary debt scale, that could be the case; I already felt like he was just stringing me along.

I thought for a while as the night sky shifted.  I was tempted to just step off the deck and start walking.  There was a certain liberation in the idea of just walking away from the whole situation, even if there was a possible death out there.  I had walked across a desert half dead before.  It was that memory which narrowly kept me from doing it.  Instead I continued thinking, exploring the worst possibilities.

The worst possibilities were what Emily had said.  He wanted to use me.  How would be the worst?  He could secretly be some monster, and once out in the Dark he would devour me.  Scary and possible, with all I had seen.  But if he wanted my death, he had many opportunities, so why wait?  On the good side he could want an apprentice, but that seemed unlikely.

Why would he still want me?  What did I have that he wanted?  I had no power, I had no possessions.  So far the only thing of value was my link to Swearing Jim, and that the old man had removed.  The old man had some kind of feud with Jim, but what could I do?  It seemed they were going to fight or somehow bargain for power.

I stared off into the desert before a thought crawled up my neck, causing my hair to stand on end.  Worth. Bargain. Power. Jim.  My only worth seemed to be in my connection to Swearing Jim.  He wanted me for some unknown reason.  The old man wanted power, which Jim seemed to have.  He had just moved the house here based on some reading he got from the hound.  Tomorrow night I was simply to follow the old man into the Dark.  Something in my mind put together a horrible thought.

The old man was going to trade me to Swearing Jim for power.

I tried to think in my mind of reasons why this might not be true.  I knew I was jumping to conclusions.   But somehow that crazy intuition screamed in my mind, something deep inside me said it was right.  But then I had second thoughts.  Even though he was an ass, the old man saved my life, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt.  I wondered if maybe I should go talk to the old man.  Even if I didn’t ask him outright, maybe I would see something in him to make me doubt my conclusion.

I walked back to the dining table, but it had already been cleared, the old man long gone.  The study door was closed, as always.  I walked around the first floor but didn’t find him.  I returned to the dining area and sat down at the table in thought.  I remained fixated upon the tumult in my head before I became aware and heard the noises.

Most late nights I had been in my room so I hadn’t been able to hear it.  But here the sound radiated from the ceiling.  The old man’s bedroom must have been directly above the dining area, which would have been an odd choice if the house’s layout wasn’t cramped.  And here as I sat, I heard it and it made my stomach crawl.

From above me came the noises of what it other contexts could be called “lovemaking”, but there was no love involved.  Here were the noises of sex, brazen and rough.  I could hear the pants and grunts of the old man.  While creepy and disgusting to think about, that’s not what disturbed me.  No, I could hear Emily as well, but her sounds were not of enjoyment.  They were of pain and sorrow, plaintive cries falling upon deaf ears.  I could hear in those noises the essence of their relationship, the essence of the old man’s control.

It made me shudder, it made me uncomfortable.  It fueled a rage in me like none other.  For all the things that the old man might have done to me, all of that paled next to the wrongs he had done her and continued to do to her.  No, at that moment it was clear the old man was my enemy and to think of him as otherwise was to be misguided, deluded.

In my rage, my own darkness settled upon me.  I began to develop a plan.  One of desperation, one of vengeance.

After my trip to and from the Dark, the old man retreated to his study.  When he freed me from my imprisonment in my room, I was told that the second floor was off-limits as well as a first floor room behind a heavy door.  It is this room he entered and then closed the door.  I guessed it to be a study, but in truth I had no idea.  The door was always closed.

A few minutes later, that same singing began emanating from the room, filling the house.  I wasn’t sure the acoustics, but there was not a room in the house you could not hear it well.  I’m not sure if there was some resonance, but even the pots, pans, and metal strangeness hanging from the ceiling of each room seemed to resonate with that sound.  It was all a little too weird for me and it made my head feel funny.  I retreated to the deck.

There was one admonishment that the old man had said before secluding himself in that study.  He said not to leave the deck or the house.  That was fine with me when he said it.  There was nothing for miles around, and all that was left from our foray into the Dark was the smoldering embers of a fire pit.  But now with that weird vibration, I wanted to go for a walk and get away.  Instead, I stood on the deck, leaning on the railing and staring out into the wasteland.

I sensed her before I heard her, that latter probably impossible, since she moved with an amazing silence across the planks of the deck.  Emily came around the deck from the back side of the house.  At first I didn’t turn to face her.

“Climb out a window or something?” I asked, referencing the fact that there was only the single door to the house.

“Something like that,” she said, walking over and leaning on the railing about ten feet to my left.

“I had to get out of the house,” I said idly.  “Something about that singing rattles me right now.  Not sure if it’s the fillings in my teeth.”

“Trust me,” she said, “you have no idea how much I agree with you.  He wants me to stay in the room when he does this, but…  I think I’d be ill if I stayed in there.”

I chuckled.  “Yeah, seems like it could get that bad.”

What I missed at the time was her staring back at me, her face completely serious.

“I’m guessing things went well out there,” she said finally, changing the topic.

“I guess it did,” I said.  “Why did you think that?”

“He’s happy for once,” she said.  “You can feel it all through the house.”

“Yeah, I bet that is a rare event.”

“How are you after all that?” she asked.

“Me?  I guess I’m okay,” I said.  “Rattled, mainly.  That Dark is some fucked up shit.  I’m unharmed I guess, if that’s what you’re asking.”  I raised my left arm to her and showed her the bare skin where the handprint once was.  “No longer marked, that’s something.”

“That’s good,” she said, trailing off.  “But that’s how he works.  He makes you think he’s doing something for you, but it’s ultimately more for him.”

“Well, I have no illusions that it was all done for him.  I just got something out of it.”

“Yes, but after a while, he stops pretending that you’re getting something.  Then it’s all about his plans.”  She paused.  “Please leave as soon as you can.”

I waved my hand at the expanse of wasteland.  “Go where?  There’s nothing for miles.  I don’t even know what direction to go.  I’d need a map, a compass, a bunch of water.  Stuff he’s not going to just give me when he thinks he needs me.  Maybe when we’re done.”

“He’s never going to be done with you, not before it’s too late.  Just leave while you can.”

“What about you?” I said, turning towards her pale face.  “You could get a map, we could leave together.”

“No, I can’t leave.  At least you can.  Being out there would be much better than being here,” she said gloomily.

“Why does he keep you here?” I asked.

“He believes that being with me will bring him power,” she said.  “I don’t want to be here.  I wish I was… elsewhere.”

“Then leave!  Walk out into the desert.  Or come with me.  You act like he has you in chains, but you are out here disobeying him.  I’m not sure what codependency he’s brainwashed you with, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  You can walk away if you want to.”

There were tears in her eyes when she looked away.  “You think you know what’s going on, but you don’t!  You’re like him!  You just think you can make everything better by pushing and forcing!”

There was a silence as she looked away and sobbed.  My face flushed with embarrassment, I looked back at the wastes.  The sound of the singing was louder, reverberating through the entire house.

A few minutes later she spoke again.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.  I don’t really know you, and I know you’re trying to help.  But you can’t, really.  No one can.  But I can help you.  Run.  Please leave when you can.  Others have come before you, others who sought him out.  He chewed them all up, taking everything he could, then cast them off.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” I said.  “But I’m strong.  I can keep myself from getting too deep into anything weird.”

“That’s what the others said.  He is a wicked man, more wicked than you think.  You’ll think you’ve beaten his game and you’re playing him, then he’ll drop the curtain and realize it’s been his game the entire time.”

“Is that what happened to you?  Are you one of the ones who looked for him?”

“No, he… found me.”

“How did he – “

“No,” she said sternly.  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.  Something rippled through me.  Emily and I locked eyes.  She felt it too.

In a moment, the house started rumbling and straining.  Was it an earthquake?  I grabbed the railing to steady myself.  Emily did the same.

“This is one of the few fun parts of being here,” she said with a wan smile.

The rumbling continued as I struggled to keep to my feet.  With a strange sense of vertigo, I noticed that the ground was falling away.  In a moment I realized that the ground wasn’t moving, the house was rising up into the air.  It slowly rose until it was twenty feet in the air.  I grabbed the railing and looked down, craning my neck to see under the house.

What I saw were two long legs sprouting from the house.  They were thin animal legs, with two clawed feet clutching the ground.  Once the house was at its full house, the legs took a step forward, then another, beginning to move at a good pace.

“Huh, chicken legs,” I said, mostly to myself.

I looked out into the wasteland as we moved forward, feeling the wind in my face.  I kind of understood what dogs felt like when they stuck their heads out of cars.  But in my case, it was a chicken-powered house that I rode in.  Perhaps said dogs would be unimpressed with my choice in locomotion.  Dogs are haters.

I watched for some idea of where we were moving, but it all looked the same.  Dunes and broken earth.  Occasionally there was a dead tree or bones of some animal.  I’m not sure how anybody navigated in this.  Just where exactly was I?  I don’t remember hearing that Texas or New Mexico were this desolate.  I had heard people complain there was nothing in them, but this went beyond such flip complaints.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Emily shrugged.  “He’s the only one that can make sense of this place.”

“This place?  America?”

She slowly shook her head as her eyes revealed disappointment.  “We’re not in America.  Or rather, not the America you’re thinking of.  I’ve never seen a map, but he might have one.  I’ve only been in his study once, but it’s full of strange things.  All his secrets are in that room.  I can’t even get inside even though I’m…” she trailed off and then caught herself.  “Resourceful.  Even though I’m resourceful, I can’t get in.”

“So he just walks around the wasteland in his house?”

“He’s got some plans,” she said.  “He’d say ‘wheels within wheels’ or some such thing.  He’s always at war with someone.  It’s all in pursuit of power.  That’s all he’s ever cared about.”

“Power?  To what end?”

“Power is the end.  Power leads to more power.”

“That’s somehow sad to me,” I said.  “Power seems like it’d be cool, but it’s about what you can use it to do.  I don’t think I’d want power to sit in a house in the middle of nowhere and chase more power.  I’d want to go live large or something.”

She gave something akin to a muffled chuckle.  “I’d love to see his face when he heard such an idea.  It would probably be his version of the Emperor having no pants.”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you even close to happy,” I said.

Her expression instantly dropped.  “I’ll say that precisely because you don’t want power is why you need to leave here immediately.  Power and control are his hooks.  If he finds he can’t use you like that, you won’t last here long.”

“Can he really do that?  You make it sound like he can just murder people and get away with it.  Are there bodies stacked in the basement?  Err, in the chicken legs?”

Her face was glum as she answered.  “Out here, the only law is the law you bring with you.  And while we’re in his house under his will, it’s his law.  Don’t delude yourself.  He can do anything he wants to you here.”

“That’s not encouraging…”

“No, it’s not.  It’s why you must leave.”  She then cocked her head.  There was a definite reduction in the volume of the singing.  “He’s finishing up.  I need to go back before he notices I’m gone.  Please, leave while you can.”

I gave a shrugging nod as she disappeared around the back of the house.  I looked down and notice that the legs were walking slower.  We would be coming to rest soon.  I thought about what she said.  This did seem an odd place and I didn’t trust the old man.  I knew I should leave and I should bring Emily with me.  But where would I go?  But after all Emily said, there was a bigger question.

Would he even let me leave?

It was nighttime when we began.  The fire was burning, offering a wavering heat against the cold and windy night.  The old man sat cross-legged on the ground near the fire.  He had just finished grinding something with his mortar and pestle when he beckoned me over.

“Sit.  I need to paint your face so that the hound cannot see you.”

I reluctantly sat.  I hoped that he was painting my face with something cool, like the face paint from KISS.  Only not the Cat or the Star Child.  Those would be lame.    I’d want the Demon or Space Ace.  I wonder if he had one of those frilly rocker wigs.

It tickled for a while as he painted with his brush, but finally he said “Done.”  I looked around for a mirror but found none.  I reached up to touch my face but he grabbed my hand.

“Even a single touch could ruin it.  Do not touch your face.”

“Sure,” I said, and sat there with a stupid half-smile.  If you’ve ever had your face painted before, you know there’s an implicit trust to it.  You never see your face until afterwards when they show you the mirror.  You could find their painting was terrible.  Worse, they could have painted something other than what you expected.  I didn’t know how to feel, as the old man could have painted “I’M A GIANT DOUCHE” on my face and I had no way to know.

The old man moved some odds and ends around him.  Various pouches, jars and bags were arrayed around him.  He stared up at the sky for a long moment.  I looked but all I saw were fast moving clouds on a dark sky.  No real moon, no real stars.   I’m not sure what he was looking for, but he must have seen it.

He began to sing.  It was similar to his other songs.  It did sound very Native American.  Something about the cadence I had heard when Discovery channel had a piece.  I wasn’t sure if I bought his story about these songs pre-dating them; but I really had no way of verifying them until I had more own Native American tracker to ask about it.  I wondered if Tonto always thought the Lone Ranger was deeply racist.  It was a stupid thought, but there really wasn’t much else to do; the old man’s song went on and on, and all I could do was sit there stupidly.  I might as well have thought about Western fiction prejudice.

The song was repetitive and incomprehensible, but I could feel its vibration.  The man was very passionate in his singing.  Certain parts of it were punctuated with him grabbing something from a pouch or shaking something.  At one point he grabbed some powder from a bag and threw it in the fire.  There was an immediate puff of smoke and then fire turned bright blue for a second.  It returned to its original color, but the fire that previously was fighting the wind now it roared as if the wind were not there.

At one point, he opened up a pouch and spilled it along the ground.  I saw a line of glittering gems.  Maybe they were just crystal or broken glass, but I remember them flickering blue in the flame-light.  Sapphire, I guessed, but the old man was tricky.  Hell, even if they were sapphire, I’m sure he would claim it was something special instead.  Either some heretofore unknown substance, or some type of exotic sapphire, like sapphire blessed with the turds of the north wind.  I was getting a good for feel his cryptic way of speaking.

Finally his singing ceased, and there was a tangible silence.  I heard the wind vaguely, but it did not howl like before.  I could hear the crackling of the fire.  I could see the reflection of the flames in the old man’s eyes.

“We are ready,” he said simply.

“Okay,” I said stupidly.

“There is one last thing you should know,” he said, before stopping for the longest pause in the history of mankind.  “My paint will make you invisible, but it will still be able to smell you.”

“Oh goddammit, is there anything else I should know?” I said incredulously.  “Do you plan to set me on fire at the last minute too?”

He grunted.  “I say smell, but it is not truly smell.  It senses your life.  It is this sense that will bring it here.  It is how it tracked you.  My paint will still make you invisible.  However, if it is very close it will be able to sense your life when you breathe.”

“How close are we talking?”

“Five, maybe ten feet.  Are you a big breather?”

My jaw opened in the biggest are-you-fucking-kidding-me-are-you-serious-how-the-fuck-should-I-know expression, complete with half-shrugged shoulders and hands turned upwards in a sign of having nothing.

“If it gets that close,” he said.  “You will need to hold your breath.  If it senses your breathing, it will find you even with the paint.”

“This just keeps getting worse and worse.”

“Follow the rules,” said the old man, “And no harm will come to you.  You are still of use, I would rather you survived.”

“Your ‘glowing’ concern is noted,” I said glumly.

“Once inside the Dark, all you have to do is wait.  The hound will show.  It will not find you and it will leave.  Once it is gone, you can come back.”

“That’s it?  Just wait?”

“Yes,” he said simply.  He paused.  “Don’t wander off.  If you get lost there is no guarantee I can find you.”

I didn’t think it was that easy.  I knew there was probably something he wasn’t telling me.  Still I moved on.  “So how do I get to the Dark?  Do you sprinkle me with pixie dust?”

His eyes narrowed but he did not answer that concern.  He spread arm towards the line of gems.  “Step over this line.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”  His voice flat, his eyes dark.

I shrugged and rolled my eyes, awkwardly standing up and wiping sand and dirt from my pants.  I looked at the line of gems.  They still flickered in the fire light, but other than that they looked normal.  Surely the old man was insane.  He definitely knew some herbal remedies, he knew a few songs, and he talked a good game.  But some other world called the Dark?  Preposterous.

I smiled sardonically.  If I were going to prove to him it was silly, I’d have to show him.  He thought this was real.  I sighed and stepped over the line of sapphires.

And I was standing on the other side of the line.  There was no sensation of vertigo, no rush and a push, no swirling maelstrom, not even any cool Dr. Who intro effects.  I was on the other side of the line looking at sandy wasteland.  As I expected, nothing happened.  His Dark was bullshit.

I turned around with a knowing and condescending smile, prepared to tell the old man he was simply crazy.  But when I looked, the old man was gone.  I could see the spot in which he sat, as well as his paraphernalia, but he was gone.  There was no way he could have gotten up and walked away so quickly.  I looked in the immediate area, but did not find him.

However, my quick look around showed me what I did not see at first.  While I was still where the old man and I had sat, things were different.  The fire, for example.  It burned a clean white.  Gone were the yellow and red flames.  It burned with a stark white flame.  When I looked at the line of sapphires, they glittered differently in the white fire light.  Above them I could now see a faint shimmering.  At least now I had my swirly scifi effects.

When I looked at the house, I had a rude awakening.  While I could tell that it was the house, it had changed.  Before it was a simple wooden cabin, creepy only by its solitary place in the desolate wasteland and all the associations that Hollywood slasher flicks had given it.  Now it was horrible in its own right.  It was as if someone had taken that wooden structure and mutated it.  Where before its shape and structure was functional, now it had extraneous additions.  Slanting surfaces, additional windows, an expansion of multiple floors.  The roof now bent at strange angles.  Where before the cabin simply sat, now it hunched over, peering down at me and the fire.  It was now a strange monstrosity almost ready to scuttle away on a multitude of insectoid legs at any moment.  I was positive I wasn’t going in there; not while it was like this.

There was no sky.  That’s not to say there was now ceiling or something else.  No, where there was sky there was just black.  No clouds, no moon, no vague illumination of any sort.  Just a flat blackness.  This same blackness surrounded me.  The fire was the only illumination I could see.  Where the fire ended there was this same blackness.  Unlike regular darkness where there was a gradation, this was a sudden contrast.  I could see the ground was revealed by fire light, then at some point there’s a hard line where there was just blackness.

Don’t wander off?  Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.  I just want to wander into oppressive blackness.  It’s my idea of a good time.  Let me just put on a red shirt, suggest we split up, say “I’ll be right back,” have teenage sex, take a shower, and wander into the dark place where I can’t see anything.  Even the creepy cabin monstrosity was a better option.  By the weirdly white fire was a fine place for me.

So I waited.

Admittedly I looked at the shimmering line of gems a few times, wondering if I should just go back.  This place was creepy to a factor of ten.  Just waiting here was unnerving.  All I could do was stare at the black, stare at the fire, or stare at the cabin.  The having nothing to do or look at was probably the worst part.  Next time I enter the Dark (if I am unfortunate enough to have a next time), I bring a magazine.

I’m not sure how long it was that I waited.  I had no frame of reference for the passing of time save my heartbeat and the flickering of the white flames.  Even those flames seemed to not flicker as I was used to, as steeped in strangeness as they were.  Worse, the flames made no noise.  This place was silent, but occasionally I heard vague far off sounds.  A laugh, a bark, an undecipherable whisper on the wind.  The problem is, I’m not sure if I heard them.  They were so brief, so infrequent, and so low in volume, I was unsure if they were actually in my head – frantic impressions from my subconscious just trying to fill the silence.  After I heard one, I’d listen a moment more for repetition, but nothing.  Some deep part of my brain stopped me from trying more than that.  Pure instinct told me I didn’t want to listen that far down, to open myself to what things might be whispering and laughing in the blackness.

My waiting was finally ended by a howl, loud enough that I knew it was real.  I swiveled my head and looked into the blackness.  My muscles were tensed.  After the howl, there was nothing for a full minute.  I wondered if it was a false alarm, but then I saw the creature.

I saw it shamble out of the blackness, scuttling across the floor on legs and feet, a gray thing spit out of the black wall.  It was humanoid, but it walked bent-over, using its hands to walk as much as its feet.  It was not fluid like a four-legged creature would be, or even a man mocking a four-legged animal.  No, the movements were disjointed, depending far more on its left arm than its right, causing its shoulder to always be angled with the right side up.  It sometimes shambled diagonally instead of forward, a vast inefficiency in its movements.

As it grew closer, I could see it better.  It was a man, in a way.  It had long emaciated limbs, sharp bony joints sticking out.  Its skin was a sallow gray, as I imagine decayed flesh looks like, if zombie movies carried any truth.  Its belly was distended, so it appeared this bony ragdoll somehow had a flopping beer gut.  It had a face of jowly features: the eyes sunken, the mouth carved into a perpetual frown, the skin threatening to flop off the skull at any moment.  The head was mostly bald, but white hair sporadically stuck out from its head.  It spent most of the time sniffing the ground as it shambled, but every so often it would stick its head up and sniff the air.

When it was close, I could hear its incessant sniffing, just like a dog.  It clearly had tracked something here.  The old man was probably right.  It came here for me.  Now I had to hope that the old man’s mojo did what it should.

As it approached the fire, it stopped and lifted its head.  Its sunken eyes stared around.  I was struck by the sadness and despair deep in those eyes.  I had expected some diabolical hatred, but those eyes were human.  Whatever was deep inside that thing despaired.  Yet, as I looked at its hands, I noticed long fingers that held even longer claws.  Those claws had dried brown splotches.  Even if sad, that made it no less dangerous.

Even though it looked around, it made no reaction it saw me.  In fact, I watched as its vision panned straight over me if I were not there.  It was confused by this, taking another moment to sniff the ground, then another to look around.  I could almost read its actions as it wondered why I wasn’t here, even though the trail led to this place.

It moved closer to me, and I knew to follow the old man’s advice and hold my breath.  I watched as it shambled close to me, sniffing and looking.  The presence of it was disgusting, so as it came closer to me, I took a few steps backwards, still holding my breath as I felt my pulse race.  It moved closer to me again, and I stepped back.  Unfortunately, my footing wasn’t what I thought, and my foot came down on softer ground than I expected.

I reeled backwards, falling to the ground on my back.  The impact of my back on the ground caused me to let out my breath.  The creature immediately jerked its head in my direction.  I quickly inhaled another breath and held it, wishing that the creature had not sensed me.  I dared not move; I had forgotten to ask the old man if it could hear me.

The creature trotted around, smelling the ground near me.  At first I could see it, but then it left my field of vision.  I dared not move.  I still held my breath.  I could hear it sniffing.   Then I came upon an ugly realization.  It was at my feet sniffing my shoe.

I tried to keep myself calm.  Sniffing my shoe was fine, it would soon move away.  The old man’s paint would keep me safe.  Right?

That sense of security was broken when I felt it began to sniff up my leg.  In another moment, I realized it was climbing on top of me, sniffing.  For a moment I thought all was lost, but then I realized it was sniffing me as if I were the ground.  While technically a win for me and the old man’s paint, it meant the creature was climbing on top of me, sniffing up the entire length of my body as I desperately held my breath.

I’ll admit the crotch sniffing was more uncomfortable than fearful, but as it neared my face I began to sweat.  This added to my troubles.  First, I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be able to hold my breath.  Second, the sweat itself.  Could it smell my sweat?  Would the sweat begin to mar the paint on my face?

In another moment, I had a bigger issue.  It was sniffing my face.  Or rather, it was sniffing the air just inches from my face.  My heart raced.  If it lowered its face just a little lower, it would touch my face.  I noticed that it had some dog-like drool on its mouth.  I saw that it began to hang from its mouth it an ever-lengthening strand.  I willed it to move away.  I willed that strand of drool away from my face and the protective paint.

And then I had a realization I will always remember.  One that I wished I didn’t have.  It nearly made me breathe right then and there, but somehow I held on.

I found myself looking past the drool, into the face of the creature and its sad eyes.  I somehow found myself examining that face.  And in a moment I realized I recognized that face.  I had known him only weeks, but he had been a friend during that time.  And when I looked at those eyes, I knew it wasn’t a creature wearing his visage, but it was him.

This thing before me was Kirby, my friend and trainer from the Hobo Boxing Tournament.

Bile began to well in my throat, but I ignored it, pushing it back down.  The old man had said that the one who was after me had marked me, but I never really thought about it.  He had clearly pointed to the handprint.  Whose hand was that?  Whose minion was Kirby?  Swearing Jim.  It was always Swearing Jim.

My mind immediately focused back to the present where one strand of drool was hanging precariously down over my face.  The creature had paused and continued its sniffing.  My lungs were bursting.  I didn’t know how much longer I could hold it.  Yet that drool continued to lengthen more and more.  I was sure it was over.

But somehow it wasn’t.  I saw the drool began to fall, I saw that this was it, but the creature then moved forward, so that disgusting piece of drool fell in my hair instead of my face.  I’m not sure I have ever been so happy about something vile getting in my hair as that moment.  I almost sighed in relief, but kept on holding my breath, my lungs in agony.

After it moved completely off me, the creature stopped, its head held in the air sniffing, listening.  I heard something that sounded almost like a whistle.  I’m not quite sure, because I could hear little besides my pulse pounding in my ears.  Whatever it was, as soon as the creature heard it, it changed its demeanor.  It stopped sniffing and ran off, exiting the clearing from the same patch of blackness that it appeared from.

I let out my breath and gasped for air, my lungs rasping and my heart pounding.  I had never held out my breath so long.  I wondered if this meant I should try out for the college swim team when I got there.  Maybe, except I’ve never been one for Speedos.  I gasped, filling my lungs with as much air as I could.  Then, a moment later I clawed at my hair, trying to get that awful drool out of it.

When I was finally breathing semi-normally and wasn’t a shaking wreck, I pulled myself to my feet.  The silence of this place never consoled me so much.  With shaking footsteps, I walked into the shimmer above the line of sapphire gems.  Once again I felt nothing, but I was greeted by the sounds of a roaring fire and howling wind.

I collapsed on the ground next to the old man, somehow still maintaining a semi-sitting posture.  “It’s done,” I said tiredly.  “It came and went.”

“I know,” said the old man.  He was chewing on something he put in his mouth when he saw me step back into this place.  Then a strange expression came over his face.  Something I’m not sure I ever saw again.  It almost seemed like… pleasure.

“You did good,” he said.  “I now know where he is.”

“That’s what you wanted, right?”

“Oh yes,” he said.  Then he spit whatever he was chewing on my left arm.

“Ewww, that’s disgusting!  If you’re going to chew tobacco, you could at least – AHH!”

My arm began to burn.  I looked down and saw that he had spit some brown splatter on the hand print bruise I had received from Swearing Jim.  It was translucent, so I wasn’t too far off suggesting it was chewing tobacco, but that’s not what this was.  I felt a burning sensation.  Had he just spit acid on me?  I almost turned to attack him, but in a few moments the pain was gone.  I looked down at my arm again, and any evidence that I had a bruise was gone.  My arm was clean.  No handprint. I looked back at the old man in wonder.

“You’re welcome,” he said, not bothering to look at me as he gathered his belongings.  In particular, I watched as he threw a handful of white dust in the fire which put it out immediately, leaving us in a strange moonlight.  Then he broke the line of sapphires by gathering them up.  “You’re no longer marked, so he can’t track you anymore.  More importantly, he can’t track me if you’re with me.”

He stood up and walked to the house stairs without waiting for a response.

“Time to move the house,” he said.

“Of course it came for you,” the old man said.  He said it so matter-of-factly when I asked, like I was stupid to ask.  He didn’t even turn to look at me as he continued his preparations.  “You’ve been marked.  He sends his hounds after you.”

“So it was a dog!” I said, obvious relief in my voice.

He paused and turned to look at me with a smile.  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

We sat outside the house.  He had built a fire pit in the dirt and sands outside.  Now he was placing objects and scratching out a circle.  He had placed various pouches and sacks on the ground.  He had allowed me outside of the room that had been my prison, but I had to come with him.  So far he had asked me to do nothing more than carry firewood out to the fire pit.  I was glad to at least have clothes.  He found a white T-shirt and jeans.  They were not the old man’s size, and clearly not Emily’s.  It left an unanswered question in my head of whose they were.

From outside, I saw the house more clearly.  It was really more of a wooden cabin than a house.  It was built with obvious planks, unpainted and weathered by the elements.  A wooden, railed deck wrapped around the entire house.  I sat on the stairs of the deck while I watched him work.

“What was it then?” I pushed.

“I did not lay eyes upon it.  A minion, probably.”

“A minion?  What are we dealing with, a supervillain?  I expect you to die, Mr. Bond!”

“I would not make jokes when you are the one it seeks,” he said grimly.

“But you kept it away last night, right?  What was that singing anyway?  Native American?”

He gave a short derisive laugh.  “The Native Americans once used these songs, but do not any longer.  These songs are older than them.  These songs were whispered on the wind for centuries before they came to this continent.”

“Then who sung them?” I asked.  “There wasn’t anyone here before that.  Even Mormon Jesus came later.”

He gave me a knowing look and a hint of a smile but said nothing.

“Regardless of where they come from and your historical inaccuracies,” I said, “you do know the songs, so you could keep this hound or whatever away tonight, right?”

“I could, but I won’t,” he said, going on with his preparations.  He was grinding something with his mortar and pestle again.

“What?  Why not?” I said.  I looked up at the sky.  It was so hard to see the sun here.  I could see light and clouds, but never the sun.  It was afternoon though, and getting quite close to evening.

“I want it to come.  It will come for you.  That’s why you’re useful.”

“Whoa, wait a second.  You want to see it, that’s great.  You can have a goddamn tea party with it, have a goddamn bromance pride parade through the center of Happytown.  But I want nothing to do with it.  I want to places that include the traits of ‘safe’ and ‘inside.’”

“You will do what I say,” he said forcefully, his dark eyes fiery.  I had to look away when he stared at me like that.  “You fell upon my doorstep dead like a dog.  I nursed you back to health and expelled venom from your veins.  Until your debt is paid you are mine to do with as I please.”

“Do with?”  In my mind I remembered Emily and how she was supposed to be confined to his room.  “Wait a minute.  I’m open minded, but I don’t really get into that sort of thing… I mean, some do, and that’s totally cool, but for me….”

“You will go into the Dark tonight.”

“The dark?  Like you want to shut off all the lights?  I’ve never needed a night light, but being in complete darkness in someplace I don’t know is a little unnerving…”

“The Dark is a place, you babbling fool.  A place of power close to our own.  It is just beyond the edges of what we see in the night, beyond the shadows.  It is a place of spirits and power.”

“So it’s like a parallel universe?”

“No, the Dark is the Dark.  In some areas it looks like our world, like a muddied reflection.  The Dark will reflect the secrets, the lies, the within.  In other places, the Dark reflects the hidden insides of people rather than places.  Sometimes the Dark has nothing to do with our world at all.”

“What the fuck am I going there for?” I asked.

“To meet the hound, of course.”

“WHAT?”

“I need to pinpoint the location of his master.  If his hound comes here, I have ways of tracing him back to his master.”

“So I am bait?” I asked.  This was getting worse all the time.

“You are bait,” he said, without any mirth or sarcasm.  He pointed the hand-shaped bruise on my arm.  “They will come for you tonight either way.  In the Dark, you will meet on equal footing.”

“You want me to kill this thing?  I’ve punched some hobos, but this is way out of my league.”

He laughed.  “Far out of your league indeed.  You would die if you tried to fight.”

“Then what?  Are you sitting here waiting for me to say, ‘Oh sure, let me go get gutted while Megistus does what he needs.  That’s the type of debt-payer I am!’”

“No, you fool.  I will be protecting you.  It will know you are there, but it won’t be able to see you.  You need only enter the Dark and remain their undetected.  It will come for you, but when it does not see you, it will leave.  That is all I need.”

“That’s it?  Really?” I said with relief.  “That’s not so bad.  It just seems like there should be some sort of a catch.”

There was a catch.

I’m not sure how I really knew.  The room was silent except for my breathing.  I woke up from sleep into near darkness, but somehow I still knew that someone was in the room with me.

I searched the room, my eyes finally resting on a shape I could make out by the light spilling under the door.  It wasn’t the old man; the silhouette was wrong.  The faint light gave the suggestion of blonde hair and a smaller build.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The figure immediately tensed.  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be here.”  A nervous female voice.

“Who are you?” I asked again, a little more frantically, fumbling near the bed.  I couldn’t remember if there had been a lamp on the nightstand or not.

I heard footsteps along the wood floor, then a match was lit next to the bed.  A pale face in flickering light.  She touched her fingers in front of her mouth to signal quiet, then lit a small candle.

She sat down in the chair next to the bed.  I had only the inconsistent light from the candle she held in her lap, but I could see she was pretty.  She was around my age, slim.  The lighting coming from below gave weird shadows to her face, making it look hollower than it should have been.  I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were; her irises were lost in shadow.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“Emily,” she whispered.  “I’m sorry, I can’t stay long.  He can’t know I was here…”

“Are you his daughter?”  I asked.

“No,” was all she said, but the frown on her face revealed much more.

“Then are you –“ I started before she interrupted.

“I came here to warn you,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of him.  Don’t trust him.  He’ll help you – he’s already helped you – but there are strings attached.”  She stared sadly down at the candle.  “Don’t let him get his hooks in you.”

“Does he have something on you?”  I asked.  “Are you in trouble with the law?”

“No, it’s not like that,” she said.  “I just…  I shouldn’t be talking about it.  While I am here, I need to obey his rules.”

“Obey?”

“I shouldn’t be talking about it,” she said, turning her head to stare off into the darkness.  I thought I saw a tear roll down her cheek, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Does he hurt you?  Is he doing things to you –“  I reached out my hand to touch her arm, to comfort her, but she flinched, pulling back.  Her face was full of confused fear.  She got up from the chair and walked over to the wall, trying to compose herself as she now leaned against the wall.  There was an awkward silence between us.

“Is Megistus his real name?” I asked, trying to break the silence.

She gave a choked laugh, just a single chuckle that forced its way through a half-closed throat of sadness.  “No, it’s not his name.  He doesn’t tell anyone his name.  He believes it will give them power over him.”

“Just a name?” I asked.

“He’s paranoid, but that doesn’t mean there’s no reason for it,” she said.  “If he doesn’t already know your name, don’t tell him.  Don’t give him any more of yourself than you have to.  Don’t let him get power over you.”

“Like he has over you,” I ventured.

She winced, then forced a smile.  “Yes, like he has over me.”  That smile then became an introspective frown.  “Promise me you’ll leave here as soon as you can.”

“I promise,” I said, “I promise that I’ll try to take you with me.”

She let out another choked laugh.  “Don’t promise that.  I understand your intention, but it’s futile.”  Her face grew serious.  “I can’t go.  I just can’t.  Just promise me if you have a chance to leave you’ll take it.  Please.”

“I promise,” I said reluctantly.

“Good,” she said.  Outside the house, we heard the wind pick up, howling against the walls.  The hanging metal objects inside the room and outside the house began to clang together.  “I need to go,” she said.

“Will I see you again?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said.  “It can only be when he’s not around or is busy.  If he knew I spoke to you…”

“He won’t,” I said.  “It will be our little secret.  But if I can sneak out of this room –“

“Don’t,” she said.  “If he thinks you are after his secrets, it won’t be good for you.”

“But if I do sneak out of this room,” I continued anyway, “where can I find you?  Do you have a room?   A door I can knock on?”

She stared at the floor for a long time before answering.  “No,” she said softly.  “I’m not supposed to leave his room.”

She turned her back to me quickly, before I could respond.  “I have to go,” she said, then blew out the candle.  Everything was dark for a moment while my eyes adjusted, and she took that moment to leave.  All I heard was the door open vaguely and then I could no longer sense someone in the room.

* * *

The walls of the house rattled later that evening.  Not the wind, this was something more malevolent.  I was woken from sleep by the sound of something pounding against the wall.  My first drowsy thought was that the old man was knocking on my door, but I felt the impact on one of the external walls.

There was still a wind, and it caused all the pots and wind chimes to clank.  But over the noise of the wind, I heard the barking of what I first thought to be a wild dog, maybe a wolf.  Every time something struck the wall, there was a snarling and barking.  The more I tried to listen to the sound, the more I realized it wasn’t a dog.

The sounds were the type a dog would make: there was barking and snarling.  But the sound was off.  It didn’t sound like something that would come out of the throat of a dog.  Probably not a wolf either.  There was something different about these sounds.  I had a quick laugh to myself that it almost sounded like the sound of a man trying to make the sounds of a dog.  This was silly at first.  Then, as I realized this could very well be the sound, my moment of mirth passed and I started to feel very uncomfortable.

After a minute or two of this assault on the house, I began to hear singing.  This was much like the singing I heard during my dazed recollections.  It was half song, half chanting.  It was very clear to me that this song came from within the house.  It started low and became stronger.

As the song got stronger, the attacks on the house became less until finally, with a weak bang against the wall, there was a squealing whimper.  I heard some trotting back and forth on the other side of the wall, then nothing else from the thing on the other side.  The singing soon stopped, and the house sat in silence.  Not even the wind blew anymore.

I had trouble getting to sleep after that.  The experience itself was a crazy one that set my pulse going.  But that was not what kept me up.  If it were just fear, just adrenaline, it would have faded and exhaustion overtaken me.  No, it was a thought that kept me up.  It was something bouncing around in my brain that raised my pulse again whenever it slowed.  I couldn’t sleep that night because I had a sinking suspicion that the old man confirmed for me the next morning.

Whatever was out there had come for me.