So we followed the unpaved road for a little bit, then cut across the fields, into the woods, beneath the brilliant stars, and what, I ask you, is wrong with this picture?
There are things I’ve left out.
The first is that I hated my brother intensely. I didn’t show it, but I’d nursed my hatred in secret almost since when he was born. I didn’t even know why at first. He was smarter than me, cleverer. My parents liked him best. When we were very young, he broke my toys because he could. He did better in school. (Ours was perhaps the last one-room school in the country, so I saw when he won all the prizes. That meant I’d lost them.) But more than that, he was the one Uncle Alazar had showed a special interest in. It was Joram’s dreams that Uncle had entered into, so that Joram would sit up in his bed sometimes and scream out words in strange languages, and then wake up in a sweat and (absurd as it seems) sometimes come to me for comfort. And I pretended to comfort him, but I was false, always false, and I held my hatred in my heart.
This was all very distinct from sounds you heard overhead at night, that might have been squirrels or just the wind rattling branches, or a voice you heard from far off, like somebody shouting from a distant hilltop and you couldn’t make out what they said, only the wailing, trailing cry. That was all my father had ever heard, or my grandfather, or my great-grandfather, because the gods, or Those of the Air, or even centuries-lost-departed-uncles did not communicate with us all that often, and it was very special when they did. Which of course made my brother very special.
And I was not. That was the next thing.
I had lied to Elder Abraham. I had heard nothing, myself. Once again I was false, and to lie to the Elder like that is a blasphemy, but I did it, and I had no regrets.
I had also promised my father that I would take care of my brother. That promise I would keep. Oh, yes. I would take care of him.
We walked through the woods in the dark, for miles perhaps. My brother was in some kind of trance, I think. He was humming softly to himself. His eyes were wide, but I don’t think he was seeing in the usual way. I had to reach out and push branches out of the way so he wouldn’t get smacked in the face. Not that I’d mind him being smacked in the face, but that didn’t fit with what I intended, not yet. He seemed to know where he was going.
Uncle was in the treetops. I heard him too now, chittering, scrambling from branch to branch, his wings and those of his companions flapping, buzzing, heavy upon the air.
Joram began to make chittering noises, not bird sounds, more like the sound of some enormous insect, and he was answered from above.
I looked up. There was only darkness, and I could see the stars through the branches, and once, only once, did I see what looked like a black plastic bag detach itself from an upper branch and flutter off into the night; or that might have been a shadow.
I let Joram guide me, even though he couldn’t see. I had to reach out and clear the way for him, but he was the one who led me on, even as we descended into a hollow, then climbed a ridge on the other side. The trees seemed larger than I had ever seen them, towering, the trunks as thick as houses; but that may have been a trick of the dark, or the night, or the dream which was pouring into my brother as he chittered and stared blindly ahead, and maybe I wasn’t entirely lying after all, and maybe I really did feel a little bit of it.
We came to a particularly enormous tree, a beech it felt like from the smooth bark, with a lot of low branches all the way down the trunk to the ground. My brother began to climb. I climbed after him. By daylight, in the course of normal kid activities, I actually was a pretty good tree climber, but this wasn’t like that at all. We went up and up, and sometimes the angles of the branches and the trunk itself seemed to twist strangely. Several times my brother slipped and almost fell, but I caught hold of him, and he clung to me, whimpering slightly, as if he were half awake and scared in his dream.
Did he know what I intended? He had every right to be scared. Hah!
Still we climbed, and now there were things in the branches with us, only way out on the swaying ends, and the branches rose and fell and rose and fell as half-seen shapes alighted on them. The air was filled with buzzing and flapping sounds. Joram made sounds I hadn’t know a human throat could ever make, and he was answered by multitudes.
Then the branches cleared away, and we were beneath the open, star-filled, moonless sky, and Those of the Air circled around us now. Joram and I sat where the trunk forked, my arm around him, while with my other hand I held onto a branch. I could see them clearly, black creatures, a little like enormous bats, a little like wasps, but not really like either, and one of them came toward us, chittering, its face aglow like a paper lantern, its features human or almost human; and I recognized out legendary relative, the fabled Uncle Alazar whose special affinity to our family brought him back to this planet on such occasions as tonight, when the signs were as they needed to be and the dark, holy rites were to be fulfilled.
Now that Uncle was here, and I had used my gibbering brother to guide me to him, I had no further use for Joram, whom I had always hated; so I flung him from me, out among the swaying branches, and down he felclass="underline" screaming, thump, thump, thump, crash, thump, and silence.
I was almost surprised that none of the winged ones tried to retrieve him, but they didn’t.
Uncle Alazar hovered before me, his eyes dark, his face inscrutable.
“I am afraid my brother isn’t available,” I said. “You will have to take me instead.”
And they did take me. Hard, sharp fingers or claws seized hold of me from every side. Some grabbed me by the hair and lifted me up.
I was hanging in the air, with wings whirring and flapping and buzzing all around me, and yes, I was terribly afraid, but also I was filled with a fierce, grasping, greedy joy, because I had done it and now Uncle Alazar would have to reveal the secrets of the darkness and of the black worlds to me, and I would become very great among our people, a prophet, very special indeed, a great one, perhaps able to live for centuries like Elder Abraham or Brother Azrael.
Uncle’s face floated in front of mine, filled with pale light. He spoke. He made that chittering sound. It was just noise to me. He paused. He spoke again, as if expecting a reply. I tried to reply, imitating his squeaks and chirps or whatever, and then, suddenly, he drew away, and made a very human “Hah!” sound, and they dropped me.
Down I went, through the branches: screaming, crash, thump, thump, thump, crash, thud. There was so much pain. I couldn’t move. I don’t know if what followed was a dream, because the next thing I knew Zenas had found me, he of the stiletto-sharp stick-like fingers, remember? He was naked, and very thin, his body elongated, almost like a snake, with way too many ribs, and his face was partly a man’s face, with a wild mass of hair, but his eyes were multi-faceted and there was something very strange about his mouth. His jaws moved sideways like those of a praying mantis or a hornet, and he leaned down, out of my field of view, and came up again with a mouthful of bloody flesh. Zenas was eating me. I felt the bones of my legs crunching. I screamed and screamed and he went down and came up again with his mouth full, and gulped it down the way an animal would, and went back for more. I knew this couldn’t be happening. It was impossible. I should have been dead by now. I should have bled to death, my guts gushing out like water from a balloon that’s been slashed open. I went on screaming and the pain just wouldn’t end. It went on and on. I pounded my fists on the ground to try to make it stop, but it did not stop.