Such a peculiar thing, when something feels amiss and you’re trying not to allow your imagination to play the worst tricks it knows, the way the obsessions and compulsions take over. A plan of helpless desperation begins to hatch: if you can just dial the same phone number enough times, or look out a window, or down a street, you can eventually materialise someone out of thin air.
With me, it was the garden, patrolling its blossoms and fronds and leaves every twenty or thirty minutes. Had Heather walked here, stood there? What had I missed a half-hour ago that was in plain view? All along envying the ravens their undipped wings and their sharp eyes.
While walking past a section of the wall, for a moment it was tough to say who had startled whom more — me, or one of the ravens. With a harsh squawk and a flurry of shiny black wings, it came bursting out from behind a veil of ivy, at the same level as my knees, and it was only after it had rejoined its clan along the top of the wall, some tattered morsel glistening in its beak, that the unlikeliness of this struck me: from behind the ivy?
Where was there room enough?
I stood before the spot that had disgorged the raven, and even though I didn’t want to reach a hand into that dense greenery and pull it aside, this had to be done. And in the cavity newly revealed, there she was, or at least as near as I could tell it was her.
Seconds. Or hours. How long? Goddamned if I know. No matter how many times I bunched the ivy shut, like a curtain, then pushed it aside again, I could not change what I was seeing. Our Heather, my Heather, between stone teeth.
It occurred to me to start ripping the ivy away, so I began tugging it free a few tendrils at a time where it had anchored its roots into rock, and while I did this, yesterday’s grim little rhyme crawled through my head like the tiniest of worms.
Fe fi fo fum,
I smell the blood of an American
Features revealed — an enormous eye, glaring directly at me as I stripped it bare; a nostril the size of a basketball.
Be she alive or be she dead
The hollow in which she lay crushed was but the mouth.
I’ll grind her bones to make my bread.
Hours. Or seconds. How long? I couldn’t know, since time did not permeate here, aware only that Vanessa was running across the gardens from the house and I was meeting her halfway, trying to hold her back while shaking my head and telling her, ‘No, no, you don’t want to go back there and see this,’ and of course she did because you can’t tell a person a thing like that and expect her to listen.
Hours. Or days. Living by the clock and the sun again, when it seemed that Vanessa and I could only look at each other as if the other were to blame somehow, and finally her voice broke and she said, ‘We can’t just stay here, and we can’t leave her out there, out in that thing’s mouth, we have to tell someone…’
‘You go,’ I murmured. ‘I’ll stay and make sure… nothing else happens.’
Alone, then, I returned to the garden, half of me wanting so badly to follow Vanessa into the world of badges and inquests, because I would at least know my way around there, while the other half longed to follow Heather, if only I understood how, and leave Vanessa behind to find her own way, wherever and whenever she was able.
Because I wondered if, in the dawn, heeding nature’s call, Heather hadn’t finally heard the voice she’d always yearned to hear.
As I waited, I realised that last night we had got sidetracked and I’d never told a story of my own about this place. But for the time being I simply didn’t have the heart to contrive one, and decided that Vanessa’s tale would do, because in a way I was living it now, listening for Heather in case she called out for me to come, follow — you won’t believe what I’ve found on the other side of the inside of the wall.
But the only sound I heard was made by some of the ravens, who plainly had more purpose to their lives than I ever did, as their smooth claws found purchase halfway down one blank section of weathered wall, and slowly, with infinite patience and an intelligence I would never have dreamt of, they began using their beaks like chisels to render yet another likeness of their masters.
I was no threat.
Brian Hodge lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he also locks himself away with an ever-growing digital studio of keyboards, samplers, didgeridoos, and assorted noise-inducing gear, in the guise of an alter-ego recording project dubbed Axis Mundi. Its first offerings can be heard on the CD accompanying limited edition hardcovers of the re-release of the author’s debut novel, Oasis. Hodge has written seven novels, most recently Wild Horses, published as a lead hardcover by William Morrow, and has recently completed his next book, Mad Dogs. He has also published around eighty short stories and novellas, many of which have appeared in the collections The Convulsion Factory and Falling Idols. About ‘Now Day Was Fled as the Worm Had Wished’, he says: ‘It’s the second of two stories written back-to-back whose titles derive from lines in Beowulf that I find particularly haunting and evocative. The other was “Far Flew the Boast of Him”, and they both, in different ways, indulge a longstanding fascination with the icons and lore of pagan antiquity, and the ways in which — in some places at least — the worlds of then and now seem to intersect.’
DAVID J. SCHOW
Why Rudy Can’t Read
Rudy skinned his knuckles on Teresa’s teeth when he backhanded her, but it was only a quick spasm of pain and two dots of blood. Teresa would fix things up later. She always did. If he didn’t fucking kill her this time.
‘Shit! Puta! You bang some fucking guy in our own bed?! You’re so fucking stupid I see condom wrappers in the fucking bathroom?! Bitch, you’re too fucking stupid to live!’
Teresa felt her eye swell shut and tasted her own blood. She registered the blows but did not care about them. Rudy would entertain no protest. He was like that when he got mad, but otherwise he was an okay guy. He stuffed her panties into her mouth and anally raped her. Whenever she twitched or made an unsolicited sound, he chopped her sharply across the back of the neck until her eyes rolled up and she finally swooned into unconsciousness.
She woke up as he dragged her by the hair and dumped her into the shower. ‘Clean yourself up, whore.’
Rudy hit the sack and would sleep for at least twelve straight hours. The advantage — sometimes — of Rudy’s odd talent was that he needed lots of sleep, to recharge.
Slowly, methodically, Teresa began by touching her split lip. The scab there was gelid, half-formed. It withdrew as the swelling receded. She undid the contusion on her eye by stroking it with her index and middle fingers together. The fingers themselves ceased to throb, and healed. She dealt with her torn and damaged rectum, then repaired her womb. She had done it before, when Rudy had got her pregnant. With a touch, she caused sperm and egg to magically separate. There was no wayward tissue to evacuate. In ten minutes, she was whole again, and well enough to bathe.
Lavishing her power on herself had exhausted her reserves. It tired her out, made her no better than Rudy. She, too, would need sleep.
Her toilet completed, she crawled naked into bed next to Rudy, who grunted and draped one arm over her hipbone. She touched his bloody knuckles and they healed right up. He’d be a different man when he woke up, and they’d probably make love.
She couldn’t see any reason to tell him her infidelity had occurred nowhere but inside her own mind.