The Price of Grief -- Short Horror (Read it now or die alone)

Carl Menston stands on the cold tarmac with her locket in his hand. Stops there on the lit pathway guiding the other passengers away from the MD80 and toward the small Prince George Airport. The rectangular structure is walled with glass, squares segmented like a fly’s eye. The wind rips at his clothes, at the hair and jackets of the women who scoot around him to make their way. One casts a nettled look over her shoulder. He doesn’t react—can’t react. Those pieces are dried, a cancerous hardpack of lifted clay discs. She’s gone. 

His Kaitlyn is gone.

*

The man moving the cargo isn’t careful with it, despite the clearly marked sticker, bright orange, block letters:

               

HUMAN REMAINS

Menston raises his voice to scream—realizes too late that he’s still whispering. His voice was the first thing to go. Then the will to use it, the will to replace its emptiness with nourishment, and finally the will to moan. He remembers the last time he used it, shivering over old photo albums—Kaitlyn’s first swimming lesson, her first school dance, a black and white of her in profile silhouetted against a Malibu sunset. Reliving those halcyon days away from Canada in which he’d fancied himself an expat. Those moments that, like all moments, end.

He stops trying to yell. Says nothing. It’s just meat in there now. Organs forestalled by the corrupting elements sewn into their genetic chain. The funeral she’ll never have isn’t what Menston’s thinking about as the luggage monkeys wheel the patched-lumber coffin on rolling dollies to the truck. He’s thinking about the legend in the woods. 

It’s been years since he’s been home. With mother desiccating in the piss-smelling convalescence of the Gramble House and father drinking himself to death out in the Yukon, he’s had no reason to visit. No reason to remember the humble beginnings of his success. But now, with death, with his life field harrowed and exposed for the barren waste it is, he has one at long last.

The Grove of Silence.

*

He rents a cabin forty miles northeast (Menston, like many, have never fully adjusted to the adoption of the Metric System). The place is a leaning sarcophagus hemmed in by graveyards of farm equipment, the neighboring fields planted with fodder adapted to survive the sunless winters. Trees stand tall and dark against a sky the slate of pagan altars. He searches the clouds for a blood-trench, the place the gore will run when humanity awakens to the fact the earth, like them, like everything, is dying. He sits all night before a cottonwood fire with the locket in his hands, wondering if it’s true or even possible. Wondering too how far he has degenerated to find merit in such a plan.

Next morning he writes in his journal:

She was nineteen. She was perfect. He stole her. All the love I’d poured into her. All the hours and years. Gone. I thought vengeance would yield something—break me open enough to reveal some pocket of light, hiding way down. But no. No pockets. No light. My torso is a chasm filled with lead.

Then he stands, wipes his eyes against the sensation of tears only to find his cold hands dry. He marches into a yard the color of smoke-cured bone. Holds her locket up to the sky. There is no sun today. It’s nearly winter. The scent of rain, of pine, of livestock offal, reaches him. The scent of desperation and lonely fathers.

Menston gets in his truck and drives.

*

The legend is eons old. The indigenous folk speak of the Silent Grove with the same matter-of-fact tone they use when speaking of money or food. A thing actual. A thing that bleeds. He’s read about the region’s pipelines, the logging, the deforestation. Frak, frak, frak. Cleave the guts and throw the carcass. He realizes as he takes the left turn up into the mountains that the forest might not be there anymore. Chewed into toothpicks and summer homes and cellulose for human consumption. Wood in food. The thought baffles him. Makes him realize how lost they are as a collective tribe. Now they farm each other. They strip title and voice and condense to numbers. Images. Flat things on paper to be shredded and wiped clean.  

No homes on the road. Only trees. Their dark emerald armor sends the echo of sensation through his hollowness. He remembers running through these trees. Searching for moose, deer, foxes, pumas, hawks, weasels, anything. He remembers fighting invisible dragons with pieces of deadfall that in his hands became spears of burnished steel. Then the encroaching pressure of adulthood. The confusion of being for doing. The frantic climb for status. Malibu. The thespian Daughter of Chaos that would abandon him after birthing their child. The movie business. Corruptions of art. The flattening of freethought into housed thought—contained thought. His entry into that field with so much vision, so much raw talent… and the homogeny of script-for-profit protocol that became his trade. The money and fame and creative ennui. But also the sacrifice. Anything for the precious jewel that would always be his little girl.

And now?

Nothing.

A mountain road.

The Grove of Silence.

*

He steps out of the truck, acid burning in his gut. Fog moils through the trees, which are tall and regal, their lower branches fallen to blight but their crowns pluming with the majesty of kingly peacocks. He jumps into the truck bed and prises the top of the crate loose. Stands there and looks down at Kaitlyn. Her blonde hair leached of color. The skin so pale it’s almost gypsum, a window into the tendons once so filled with life.

He brushes her cheek with numb fingers. “My little girl.”

Not so little anymore. Not really. Large enough to dream of entering the industry in which her father had built his empire. A thing he forbade, knowing what women sometimes did to get ahead, and what the men in seats of import enforced from their powerthrones of decadence. One minor role and then the drugs, the soirees, the slipping away of that careful girl who was always ten minutes early. A monster hatching from within, insatiable, confused. And the money. The favors. The debts. A theft gone wrong. And a man named Carlo who delivered her vigilante sentence.

Menston had crushed Carlo’s head with a cinderblock on the roof of a parking garage in West Hollywood. Watched his eye slip free of its socket like an over-hard egg. Carlo had begged Menston to kill him, but he’d taped his mouth instead and watched him shiver. Watched him throb. When it was done, he’d nodded to the Chaldeans hired through a third party. They’d wrapped Carlo in a rubber sheet with breathe holes and hauled his half-conscious body to God knows where. He remembers the strong cologne of the one named Beni, his black whiskers, the way he’d leaned out the window of the black van and asked, “What should we do?”

And Menston saying, “Keep him alive as long as you can. Make every second hurt.”

*

Menston hangs her locket on the pale tree in the center of the grove. There are other totems—maybe hundreds—faded and pressed flat by winter. Teddybears. Braids. Feathers. Toys. All manner of morbid curios. When he studies them, he doesn’t see things; he sees the rotten shapes of children and lovers, and the grieving shadows of those who stand watch.  He sees himself swallowed in this number. Music to his ears. To be swallowed. Consumed. A cosmic digestion into the excreta that is an eternity made of so much human pulp.

He slices his palm with a pocket knife. Paints a red arc of blood across the tree’s pale trunk.

Then he waits.

*

Noise wakes him in the darkness. He sees he’s fallen asleep on his knees, chin buried against his chest. A thump and clap unchains itself through the trees. Then the unmistakable slide of rough sawn wood being tipped.

“Kaitlyn?” His voice becomes something monstrous in its echo, boomeranging through the fog. “Kaitlyn?”

He stands, legs numb, frost in his beard. Drags his feet through eons of duff and deadfall and soldier moss. He claws at the fog with his hands, tries to clear it. Then stops, galvanized by fear and awe and disbelief. He thinks this a dream, like the one where Carlo’s evicted eye becomes Kaitlyn’s silver locket on a field of burning snow. He slaps himself. Slaps himself harder.

“Are you real?” he asks the nude woman, bone white but for the bruised discs around her eyes. She seems to buffer, melting in and out of the fog, the cold. He can’t tell if she’s standing or floating. Coils of limp blonde hair are stuck to her shoulder, her neck. It looks like ivy.

She says nothing. Just opens her arms. Beckons him.

Menston runs to her with an animal cry, the days of silence breaking forth in a multitude, a flood. On the third step the legs beneath him fold with the sound of snapped wicker. The pain is tremendous, blinding. He reaches out to break his fall. Watches both forearms collapse on impact, the skin crumpling in like foil. He rolls onto his back, gasping, his limbs four ropes of meat.

To see her standing above him. Not so thin now. But filling up. Engorging as a rubber bladder fit snuggly to a faucet. Her filmy eyes begin to clear. The brittle hair grafted to her skin unfurls with sudden volume. She stretches her neck. Kneels down to brush his cheek.

It’s working. He mouths the words because his throat no longer works. He can feel it sinking. Can feel his organs collapsing one by one. There isn’t much pain. There is mostly wonder.

“Thank you ... Daddy.”

It’s the last thing he hears as he slips into the darkness. But not before registering the roughness of her fingers…

The unfamiliar accent of her voice.  



[NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Some stories sit with us for years before making it onto the page. But sometimes also for minutes. Seconds. Some of them emerge from the void fully formed, as was the case with the one you're about to read. It had been a terrible day. Terrible. The content of the surrounding world was no different than the days before it. But the viewer's lens was flecked with blood. Cracked beyond recognition. A nightmare paralax transforming banality into monstrous loneliness. I sat at my work desk, grieving over the corpse of my life. Then opened up a word document and, forty five minutes later, was staring at what you see below. I'm happy to announce the loneliness has ebbed. Catharsis no doubt helped move things along. With love--CS]