Prologue

 

 

 

And He Wakes Up…

-Prologue-

 

It wasn’t so much a sensation of waking up, but rather an awareness of being awake that greeted him in the middle of nowhere. It stumbled into itself in mid stride, on a careless two-track road between the rolling and elevated sprawl of some vast and ownerless golden meadow. After a peculiar and mysterious absence, all five of his senses seemed to converge at once…although ideas of what is or is not peculiar did not occur to him, and therefore did not mean much upon his awakening. At first there was just the sound of footsteps, and nothing else…only darkness and the soft scuffling of shoes on the dirt. How long he had vacantly listened to this, he couldn’t be sure, but at some point a slow enveloping sensation arrived in what he instinctively recognized as the breeze. It danced, listless yet urgent, and syphoned through his exposed upper body, erratically lifting his dark swathe of hair and drawing away the warm moisture in its roots.

The acutely cool sensation around his brow at once sparked life into his ability to see. It was not a gradual transition, nor an instant transition…it was as though there was no transition at all; as if someone had severed that part of the film reel. It was like he had somehow immediately forgotten the process as soon as it was over, as though distracted he had somehow looked away for a moment, and missed it. Yet there was nothing to distract him that he could recall, and as suddenly as he had found himself savoring the breeze, he swiftly found himself gazing at the broad vista of the immensely disturbing landscape that he was marching through.

Around him the world was shadowless and empty, and close above dark colors growled and contracted, slowly churning a thickly painted roof of gray ultramarine clouds with stark white torn-paper edges. The land underneath, a shifting yellow watercolor canvas seemed oddly luminous with the surreal glow of the tall drifting grass. It was as though the sky and the land failed to belong to the same time, or world, and this subtle off-ness made him uneasy. There was a vague sense of pressing purpose about, yet he felt no particular urge to recall what it was. If he found it pertinent to dwell on how he had found himself walking down this road, he would find himself utterly unable…for beyond an intrinsic knowledge of that which drifted into his slow path, he had no memory…no name, or conscious history that he could recall…nor did he possess the idea that this was somehow not right. His mind was fresh, and blank, and intoxicated with child-like contentment, yet behind it lurked something else that gave him an nervous yet somewhat pleasant feeling. For yes, the road was beautiful, and yes, he felt lucid and as sober as ice water…but something was wrong, and whatever this lurking wrongness happened to be, he would have felt, with stolid certainty, that it had little to do with the unnoticed fact that he had no idea how he arrived on this random and forgotten path through the broad rippled field.

He carried on in a casual and assured pace, arms swaying carelessly by his sides; head raised and tilted back slightly with languid unease. He was almost completely nude, save a pair of cheap shoes and some thin gray shorts, though he barely noticed…his focus was cleanly hewn to the rich earthy scent of the wind tearing across the landscape…the loud whispery sound of it, smooth and vanquishing, sending bits of dust and dead grass chattering across his torn shorts and sandy loafers.

The road climbed lazily up one of the swells and he leaned forward slightly as he ascended, arms rocking a bit more sternly at his sides, crickets and grasshoppers leaping and diving out of the way. Ahead he could make out the black jagged tips of an old tree reaching out of the hill top’s horizon, the grass at the peak seeming to wave and mingle with the branches. To his left, a piece of dry off-white cloth lay strung out in the wheat stalks, fluttering lazily in the wind. He rotated his head slowly with the sight of it, mesmerized, and wondered questions at it. How old are you, my little rag? What job did you have in ages gone by? And then he passed it completely, and his head would rotate no more, snapping back into place like an old rotary telephone dial.

The gradually sinking crest of the hill before him, unsteady and unusual in front of the high swiftly moving skies, slowly faded into a broad vantage point, revealing in a rounded moment the great expanse of the rapidly unsettling countryside. Next to the road at the crest of the hill was a jagged crab apple tree, leafless and squat-topped, and beyond it the two track road continued down the hill, around a swell, up another, and out of sight. Beyond the tree and the trail the landscape was barren, golden, and endless…riddled with the swell like pattern of a close-up ocean snap shot.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and stretched his finger tips towards the earth. He savored the delicious air in his nose and throat and exhaled quick enough to extinguish a birthday cake. He hungrily consumed another breath, and then another, until his head was utterly saturated with the fresh enriching atmosphere of the plain’s breeze. He opened his eyes to the unnerving sky, and looked down the hillside once again, curiously startled. Off in the distance, across the plains and far removed from the windy road stood a gray shape he hadn’t noticed before…something square and jutting and unnatural. He tore himself from the path immediately, and cut a straight line down the hill and through the grass…and although the structure looked as though it were miles away, he seemed to come upon it almost immediately.

He was standing a few yards away from what appeared to be a sinking farm house. With no road o

r path or trampled grass leading to it, save his own, he had no idea how the decrepit old place came to be here, or why. The gray wooden siding had long been stripped of its paint and vitality, and behind the old rippled window panes the drawn white curtains said no more. A smokeless stone chimney raised its old broken arm from the side of the house, its question long forgotten.

He circled the house slowly until the hideous front of it rotated into sight. A slumped porch canopy supported by wooden beams hung low over what should have been the front door. There was no actual porch, only a thin patch of dead field grass unhappily dwelling in the shadow of the overhang. Where the front door should have been a gaping black rectangle stared back at him, and were it not for the fact that the shade of black was the dark richness of emptiness itself, he may have assumed that it were merely paint. Where light should have feathered in around the fringes of the door frame there was nothing, and as he noticed this, an alien noise erupted from the dwelling. He stepped forward, curious and uneasy…the sound wasn’t sharp, but rather wide, and seemed to come from the entire house, or perhaps the entire field. It roughly reminded him of a deep intake of breath, and the silence that followed seemed significantly more eerie and unusual than the noise itself…as though whatever had taken the breath was holding it a moment, poised to blow. He suddenly felt possessed by a desperate need to get out of the field, and ran mindlessly through the doorway and into the darkness beyond it.

 

 

There were people inside, and had he been self aware in any way, he may have been surprised. Upon stepping through the door there was a moment when he could see only blackness, and then at once he noticed the dim fire burning in what he suspected was the center of the room. A small pile of glowing wood coals and ash with a twisted pot of stewing sludge smudged in the center of it. A trio of round orange faces loomed over it like specters, skin illuminated by the sick glow of the fire. This putrid light seemed to be caught only by the faces of the three, and lingered not upon anything else that may have been in the room. One orange hand materialized between the faces and the fire, and slid down to stir the mixture with a ladel. The atmosphere struck Him as cozy and lived in, and the scent of it reminded him of the hallway between his grandmother’s kitchen and laundry room. Nothing about the presence or expressions of the dwelling’s inhabitants suggested anything but resigned contentment, despite the peculiarly sinister lighting.

"Grab a seat," said one, as absently as a mother to a child who had just wandered in for supper. He said nothing and approached the three, a cheap metal stool melting into view as he neared the fire. He pushed it aside gently, its sharp legs dully complaining against the dirt floor. He stepped passed it, pulled it back, and sat down.

"What’s for supper?" He inquired. One of the three turned around, it’s orange face pinching into blackness, while one of the others continued to stir the meal. He took a moment to take a more scrupulous look at his hosts. The one stirring the soup appeared to be an older man with twisted facial hair, whose approximate age was impossible to determine through the dirt and light stains on his face. Behind him sat another man who was blatantly young, his squinting eyes peering and glittering through a dirty hairless face. All three seemed to be adorned in dark ratty clothes, with dusty hoods concealing their hair.

The third orange face rolled back into sight, and as He politely looked on he was surprised to discover that it was a woman. There were long sparse whiskers on her lumpy face, and small deep eyes that seemed used to being behind glasses. Her wrinkled and twisted hand appeared above the simmering pot holding a small tin cup by its wire handle, and the man with the beard lifted a bubbling cask of the dark liquid with the ladle and dumped it slowly into the cup. The ladle drained itself, and the man tapped it twice on the side of the cup gently before returning it to the stew. She handed it wordlessly to Him.

"Thank you," he said, and reached out with both hands. She placed the cup in his open palm, and resigned control of the handle before the bottom of it burned him. He sat back, lifted the cup to his nose, and a million lights on the switchboard of his senses suddenly sparked to life as he breathed in the scent of it. Though he still had no idea what it was, the aroma was light and savory, and the immediate sensations the scent of it brought him were akin to youthful Halloweens, and Friday morning school cancellations due to heavy snow. His breath came out heavy and helpless when he at last released it, a drunken smile stamped on his face.

"It smells wonderful! What is it?"

The old man smiled at him a moment and said nothing, returning his attention once again to the stew, continuing to stir it with the ladle. The young one made no expression and looked away. The old woman didn’t move. He was taken aback slightly by his hanging unanswered question, and awkwardly decided to push it out of the air with another; "So, why are you all here, anyway?"

The old man stopped stirring and looked up at him, eyes suddenly gleaming and intelligent…a faint smile hiding behind his chapped lips. "Don’t you know where you are, son?" The old one asked flatly, and without inflection. The air jolted at the statement, and he felt a sudden tremor reverberate through him, and through the house. Bits of dust and sand fell from the ceiling planks and sprinkled the room. The old woman looked up a moment, and then returned to her hunched posture. The young man continued gazing out a window that he hadn’t, until now, noticed. It was a standard four-panel storybook window, and it held the soft blue glow of twilight. He could see the golden tip of the field’s horizon, but the sky was too bright in the houses darkness to behold anything but washed out light. A piece of poetry, it’s source and motive forgotten, floated into h

is head…

"Do not ask ‘what is it?’…let us make our visit…"

…and with it came another tremor, this one significantly more intense. His vision vibrated. One of the window panes cracked with a shrill icy sound, another shattered completely and fell into the grass outside, a few shards of it clinking down on the windowsill. Something upstairs groaned and fell over, and a royal plume of dust and sand came raining down from above.

He returned his gaze to the dinner party and noticed two alarming things. First, that the woman and the young man had somehow gotten up and left as silent as thieves during the few seconds he spent peering outside, which seemed impossible, and second, that the older man was talking to him, and had been talking to him. The man’s expressions lifted and shifted, his mouth calmly and absently shaping words in the standard and somewhat erratic pattern of normal conversation, but there was something missing. He couldn’t hear a single word the man was saying. He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, and was beginning to suspect that the last tremor had robbed him of his hearing, until the old man finished his silent dialogue, ending on a word that He did hear.

Like any bored student lost in thought whom the teacher suddenly calls on to answer a question they weren’t paying attention to, Vincent heard his own name. "What?" He began, "What did you–" But his response was interrupted by ear splitting thunder. The house shook and buckled on rotten foundations. Planks of wood came crashing down from above, and the walls likewise fell inward in an accelerating black cloud of debris. Somehow the sound of the rampant chaos slowly faded to mute in his ears, while the destruction around him seemed only to intensify. The old man sat staring at him, motionlessly locked in eye contact, smiling…until he disappeared like the sound, behind the fading cloud of dust and debris.

…..Vinnie…….Vinnneeeee……….. Vin!!… VIN GET UP!!….

 

 

 

 

(to be continued…)