Dead Sand: Part 1-The Cage

Hello, everyone! So, the previous part I posted for the The Mauler was the last, due to copyright safety and all that. So, I'm going to go ahead and post a few parts from the 3rd installment. Let me know what you think!

The fire bleeds into him. It seeps into his bones like the water from a downpour of rain into drought-stricken land that lies cracked and dry as a corpse left to rot in the desert. He feels it fill him so much that he can gather it into the palm of his hand like a clod of soft clay. He digs his fingers into it, mushes it, molds it, rubs it in until it riddles the creases of his palms and fingers. The power with which the fire rushes into him is vitalizing beyond anything he’s ever experienced. Bloodlust, victory, reward, love, sex…they are chaff to the wind compared to this. Compared to the way it infuses him now, he was a void. Dry and unfilled. Now the fire consumes, its teeth ravenous and tenacious, biting and hacking away the festering decay that wraps around his being and replenishing him with newborn life to the point that he feels like a sunflower widening its arms to embrace the sun, or a butterfly breaking the shell of its chrysalis to spread its wings.

But then the roaring comes, like a storm shattering a cool desert night’s silence, or a monstrous wave breaking upon sharp and jagged rock. The fire burns now, with pain beyond reach or measure. It burns through his veins, feet to stomach to skull, like venom laced acid. It simmers and scolds his flesh, tearing into his chest, his lungs, his heart, his soul. It slithers and coils around the core of his being, its razor-sharp barbs ripping deep, and then squeezes with the force of a god in the form of an anaconda made of barbed wire.

And he screams…

There are places in the mind. Dark places, violent places. Where a man must reach into that most savage and feral part of himself, where he was both sane and insane. The part that is the most unyielding, unbreakable, unstoppable. A place that bent neither to pain or hesitation. Fear and irresolution were alien to it as a cage was to a freeborn wolf, or a leash to a drifting coyote on its long prowl. These places harbored such paradigms and made them grow. Made a man the most powerful he could be. Tapped into his inner core, his inner animal. More than animal. A monster. A demon. A killer.

This was where the Wendigo waited: in a cage of bones forged of steel. Hawthorn made it to the last of the steps and stood at the cage’s bars. There was a curious emotion that ran up his spine, poking him with hot needles all the way through to his chest. Was it fear? No, couldn’t be. Fear had been a stranger to him for ages now. But it was something. Something he couldn’t quite touch. Perhaps…acceptance? That he was about to see this thing and therefore acknowledge its presence within him? Or was it simple curiosity? To finally see this menace again, after so long. Perhaps it was desire. Desire for relief, for closure. Finality. Absolution. To have this done and over with. Maybe even defeated. Yet…he doubted that.

Enough thought. Hawthorn spoke into the cage. “I’m here.”

At first the only thing to be seen in the cage was shadow, a silent void. Then it came forward. A shape with no form. A phantom wrapped in ebony twilight. It only spoke.

“About time.” The voice was ageless and supreme. Menacing to the darkest of abysses. Cruel and cold.

“Make it quick, creature. I have other things to do.”

The creature laughed. “Such as? Lead that thief to his certain death? You know it’s only a matter of time before he slits your throat while you sleep.”

“He won’t even ever get close to gettin’ that chance. And besides, I don’t sleep, remember? You did away with that a long time ago.”

The Wendigo laughed again.

“Now speak your point. I’m gettin’ restless.” Hawthorn said, conscious of the hard and bleeding edge in his voice.

“How long has it been now, Hawthorn? Since you and I first met?”

Hawthorn gritted his teeth. He had neither the time nor the tolerance for this palavering. But the Wendigo and he needed to talk. It was inevitable.

“About twenty years.” he said.

“Twenty years?” the voice said, feigning surprise. “It feels like it’s been so much shorter. I still remember how it was before we became one.”

“We are not ‘one’.”

The Wendigo ignored him. “I still remember what you were like.”

Hawthorn felt a boiling begin in his chest. “Leave it.” he said, venomously.

“You were such a strapping young man. Bright, brilliant, handsome. So chivalrous, so respected. You practically had the whole of North Point eating out of your hand.”

“I said leave it.” Hawthorn said, edging closer to the cage’s bars.

“Especially that woman…what was her name?”

“Leave it!” Hawthorn said, holding the bars now.

Though the shape was intangible, Hawthorn got the sense it had just lifted its head up in remembrance. “Ahh. Now, I remember. Charlotte Rochester. That was her name.”

“I’m warnin’ you!”

He felt the creature meet his eyes. Staring right into them, through to his soul and into his existence. “How long has it been, Hawthorn, since she betrayed you?”

Hawthorn yelled, and it echoed throughout the dark space, falling silent and empty. The bars of steel bone separated, yielding and succumbing to his rage-fueled strength. He reached through and into the darkness. But it was not he who grabbed the creature and pulled it out; it was the creature who grabbed and pulled him in.

The darkness swallowed him whole. He spiraled through endless oblivion. His mind raced at the speed of light; whirling, whirling, whirling. His heart pounded like a drum of war. He screamed and no sound came out. He felt himself pulled up from the ground to heights unimaginable. And he heard the creature’s laugh. The laugh of the Wendigo. Its eyes came out from the void; great, wide, consuming as the sun. Colored green. They stared down at him like those of a god. “How long since you came back, tired, scarred, and dead from war to find her betraying you? Tossing and moaning in bed with another man?”

“Enough!” Hawthorn yelled. He reached down to find his guns; they were gone. The eyes gleamed monstrously, shifting from green to red with the grace of a sliding curtain. They winked out suddenly, evanesced into nothing. Darkness again.

The creature’s voice came from every direction, hammering against his ears, like he was trapped inside the depths of can as a child battered it with a stick. He covered his hears, pressing them flat to his head as much as he could. But they kept coming, kept pounding, kept shelling. The voice and the voices.

“How long since you thought of their faces? Harlan, Whitcomb, Staverton? Your men, your friends, your FAILURES?”

He saw them. Harlan, laughing until the last as his broken and hundred-times-pierced body gave out its final breaths. Whitcomb, bathed in fire as he brought the Grendel down. Staverton, as he disappeared behind the Gate of Horn. Lost and gone. His men, his responsibilities. His failures. And so many more. Dead. His fault, his neglect. All of them.

The maelstrom sucked him in, further, further…

The voice came louder, magnified by the storm around him.

“What do you think of me Hawthorn? A mirage, an illusion, a FIGMENT? A side-effect of the experiment that made you what you are, borne in the throes of a fire-dream? I am as much a part of you as your arm, your heart, your loins! I am the teeth of your rage, the blade of your being, the wrath of your will! I am not a bastard, not a mutation, not a deformity, to your soul! I am YOUR SOUL!”

Hawthorn yelled to the end of time. “YOU ARE NOT!”

“I AM!”

Suddenly he was on his knees, panting, all breath gone. His insides felt like that of an old cornsack. Used and worn thin to the last strand. He muscles and limbs were like wet sand, slippery and heavy. Sweat poured in torrents from every orifice on him, soaking through his shirt and jeans. He looked up from the darkness and saw the creature’s smile before him. Nothing but teeth, sharp as needles.

“Accept me, Hawthorn.”

Hawthorn cried, his tears coming out broken and pathetic.

“Accept me.”

He was yanked off his feet. The creature had him by the throat. The eyes of the Wendigo burned him as they went from green to red in their ceaseless cycle.

“ACCEPT ME!”

 

He pulled his gun on Dance’s head. The thief went still as a cornered mouse, locked in place by the gaze of the gun’s barrel. “Get back to your blankets, Dance. And get your damn hand off my arm.”

The Thief, straight-faced as a statue and unperturbed, retreated slowly back to his sleeping place. “Well, you’re welcome for checking to see if you’re alright.” the thief said.

Hawthorn holstered his gun and wrapped himself a cigarette. “I’m fine.”, he said, and took a drag.

“Well, you don’t look fine. You’ve been stuck in that trance now ever since I dozed off.”

“What concern is it to you?” Hawthorn said, still smoking and looking out across the night-blanketed plains of sand. Without the sun, the sand took on a ghostly pallor, looking more like mounds of moon-dust rather than bone-dry seas of choking-stuff they were. The night sky itself was glorious, with miles of starry clusters exploding with brilliance as far as the eyes could see. There were times when the Wilds were the most forbidding and treacherous piece of land ever to exist in the lives of men, but tonight it was peaceful. Not a coyote or cricket sounded, and all the snakes slept. It was an eerie silence that dared betray notes of tranquility alongside underlying trickery. Yet the Wilds and the desert had let them be, and so Hawthorn did the same.

Dance spoke. “Well, seeing as you’ve saved my life twice already, I figured I owed you at least that.”

“I never thought you a man of such honor and esteem, Dance.”

The thief shrugged. “Join the club.”

“How do I know you weren’t tryin’ to snatch my knife?” Hawthorn said.

At that, the thief laughed. “My dear bounty hunter, have you not learned by now that if that had been my intent, you wouldn’t still be alive?”

Hawthorn in return chuckled his own. He finished his cigarette, threw it to the sand, and so reckoned the thief’s words fair.