And then one day a man came who seemed unlike the others we had encountered, a man broad of face and of limb, a good head taller than even Hroar, and with teeth filed sharp. He hailed us from afar and asked to approach and we beckoned him to share our meal. He sat and ate silently with us and when he was done asked which was Hroar, the mighty lord of a people laid low? He had heard tales of the warrior who had been given by God a hall of ancient design only to lose it again and he was here to offer his fealty, to help Hroar recover his hall.
Hroar stood. He commended the stranger for his bravery and asked of him his name and the name of his father.
“I have no father,” the man said. “As for my own name, I have none.”
He would, he said, challenge our enemy and regain our hall, and thus make a name for himself. Our Lord Hroar swore to him that if he would do as he said, he Hroar would take him unto his bosom as his son and heir, and the name the man would have would be Hroar’s own.
He stayed with us until the fall of darkness, and then several of us led him to the hall and prayed over him and let him enter therein to meet his fate. I shall admit that I for one was not sorry to be far from him. For how, I wondered, can a man have no father? So I further wondered if he were in fact a man such as you and me or another creature entirely.
All night we huddled together. We heard his cries and the bellowing of the beast, or told ourselves we did. We heard the rush and hiss of the creature as it slid, invisible, from its hole to the attack, or told ourselves we had. We huddled and awaited him until, at last, as the sky grew light, we spied him lurching through the ruins, looking as if he had been flayed alive. His arms were stripped of skin to the muscle, and his face, too, looked as though it had been burnt away so that one could see bone, and his eyes too had gone blind and had sizzled away in the sockets. His hand, like that of Hroar, was boiled away and he could no longer move its fingers, and when he breathed, blood pearled like sweat on the skinned surface of his chest. And again I could not help but wonder, Is this in fact a man or another being entirely?
He told the story of his battle with the creature and how when the water had rushed away he had seized its stony hide and not let go until it broke to pieces and the creature was dead. It was safe to return, he claimed, and then asked Hroar to give him a name. But before the mad lord could answer, the man turned his eyes back to examine the inside of his skull and died.
We built for him a pyre and laid his body upon it and burnt him, the few remnants of his skin charring and sizzling, his leg splitting from heat to reveal a strange and silky bone, quickly consumed. We prayed over him, and Hroar breathed a secret name into the flames for him to take with him and stop his wandering, and then he was gone.
As for us? We returned to the great hall to find it still thrall to the same eerie glow, to find ourselves still observed from the water by the same baleful blue eye. And yet Hroar claimed to be certain that the creature, if not yet dead, was dying, for had not the nameless stranger said as much? And did not the eye itself seem fractured now, less vivid, imbued with less light? We must, he told us, stand fast. We must trust our God and then nothing shall touch us.
We have followed him so long we do not know how to stop. And so we remain in the hall, lit by the monster’s eye. Night has come and we are deep into it. I am writing by the glow of our enemy as he bides his time and awaits his chance to destroy us. I am writing in hopes of persuading myself to stay and face this death, I am writing in hopes of persuading myself to flee. Perhaps there is a third path for me, but as of this writing I have not discovered it. When the eye shuts and the monster forces itself upon us, I shall either be gone and wandering tribeless and alone, or be beside my brothers and wandering the paths of the dead. May God, if he exists, have mercy upon us all.
In the Greenhouse
After nearly ten months of struggling to write Craven Words, the introductory study of novelist Roger Craven that he had been commissioned to write by Craven himself, Sindt reached an impasse beyond which he was certain he could not progress. He destroyed the one hundred and seventy page manuscript, abandoning sheets to fire at measured intervals, and then promptly wrote Craven to inform him of what he had done. I cannot, Sindt wrote upon the back of a postcard, complete the study I agreed to write. I fear I find myself inadequate to the task of circumscribing your prose.
This note was not entirely truthful. Rather, Craven’s work, which had initially intrigued Sindt because of its concern with dislocation and possession, its insistence on postulating all human relations as a form of torture, had upon further scrutiny fallen apart. Craven’s oeuvre contained, Sindt felt, not a single original idea. During months of research and composition, he became increasingly convinced that Craven’s work amounted to nothing.
He mailed the postcard and endeavored to force Craven from his mind. After boxing up Craven’s books, he committed them to his basement. He was now Cravenless, he told himself, locking the basement door behind him.
It was thus with considerable chagrin that several weeks later Sindt discovered in the mailbox an envelope inscribed in a familiar hand. There was Craven, in his mailbox, admittedly in condensed form, beckoning to him. When Sindt opened the envelope, the letter within invited Sindt to visit, asking the favor of your company, forgiving all, asking only that you come spend a few weeks with me.
Having failed to accomplish what Craven had asked of him, Sindt had no desire to visit the writer. The visit could be nothing but uncomfortable for both of them. He wrote to excuse himself, suggesting that he could not come at that particular moment, pleading pressing business, urgent matters. Craven wrote in return that he would ask only this single thing of Sindt, that Sindt come stay for a few days immediately, and that he would demand nothing further of him ever again. As you failed to write the study you yourself repeatedly assured me you would write, Craven claimed, this is the least you can do.
To reach the house, Craven had written, one left the train station and traveled west on foot half a mile until one arrived at a taxi stand. From there, one traveled by taxi on what was referred to as the logging road, following it upward to its terminus. There one would discover a footpath that led through a stand of trees — pines — and wound about until it issued into the clearing in which one would find at last the house.
As it turned out, the trip from train station to taxi stand was in fact several miles rather than half a mile, and what Craven had referred to in his letter as the logging road was, according to the taxi driver, properly called the timber road. As the taxi climbed said road, Sindt wondered if Craven had purposefully mangled these details or if he had simply underestimated the mileage, misremembered the road. Certainly Sindt could not blame Craven for having misled him in such fashion, considering his failure to write Craven Words. But in that case, he wondered, why invite me to visit at all?
He paid the driver and then set off through the pines (what was left, apparently, of the timber the road had been named after), coming at last upon the house itself. The house was made all of stone, the roof of slate, a squat tower jutting out. It rested on relatively flat land, with some sort of greenhouse beside it, the mountain rising behind. Like something out of Craven’s work, Sindt thought, and felt a pressure start up in his head. Craven himself was waiting for him under the archway before the front door. He was wearing what could only be described as a Tyrolean walking costume, complete with lederhosen and a hunter’s cap. He seemed pleased to see Sindt, and quickly led him into the house, where he prodded him into the room he referred to as the parlor. It was an uncarpeted and drafty chamber, floored with stone flags, empty save for the two of them and two wooden chairs set before an extinguished fire.