Just looking at it, you would never think my town was evil. Elmsworth is like any burg strung out like cavities between the molars of Vancouver and Olympia. More bars than churches, seasonal loggers, and long stands of empty buildings Amazon ate alive. Spanaway Avenue is where the fire hit in ‘66. Where the Mayor chose to erect a pulp refinery that’s had more accidents than any plant in the State. It’s where Richard Nixon visited before Olympia and Seattle, and said of it to his aid, “It’s the kind of place you forget about until you’re alone at night. And, Matthew, the thoughts aren’t good ones.”
I’ve lived here all my life. Watched it. Came to conclusions that shouldn’t be discussed. Most say the Millers are cursed, since first our lot cut wood down the coasts of Ireland. It’s more a joke than anything, a target for the cruelty of children that around these parts mostly grow into mistrustful adults. But there’s truth there, a believable folklore. Maybe it’s the same way some dark patch of woods in each town comes to be known as haunted. There’s a frequency that forgotten parts of us can sometimes read. We build stories to explain that.
My great uncle Eustice cut six people to pieces. He’d been holed up in the woodcamp back before these parts had roads. Oxen and mules and rivers were still the way of logging, and the old growth plots were tucked deep into the mountains. Loggers could be away for weeks at a time with nothing but each other, tallow lamps, and booze. The First Peoples were chased off these parts around 1870, but before they left they made an effort to warn the settlers to avoid it. Little good it did.
No one knows why Eustice did it. My Great Uncle didn’t drink and usually spent the last hours of daylight combing his Bible. He was a quiet thoughtful man. In the foreman of the Belvedere Logging Company’s written report, Eustice was last seen riding naked on a mule into the woods, coated in the gore of his doings, the helve of his Dutch heavy-ax cocked over his shoulder the way a redcoat might hold his gun. The pieces of his crew were in such small scraps they blended like stew meat. Even the town undertaker, who’d received the remains in burlap tarps that left two bloody trails through the middle of town, had trouble making heads or tails of what was left. Which bothered everyone who knew the quiet Eustice Miller. To render chuck that fine with an ax that large meant he’d been up there in the darkness for hours, maybe days.
My great-grandfather Albert, Eustice’s only surviving brother, became a kind of thug in town after that. From what I’ve pieced together, when some city prospector from the East needed disappearing, they called Al Miller. The Belvedere Logging Outfit held a firm grip on cascade ranges all the way down through Oregon. Jacob Belvedere had dealings with Herst and JP Morgan. Their dark fraternity guarded resources the way wolves will guard a carcass, deciding which pieces are left for the crows. Far as I can figure it, when a bear came along they sent my great grandfather to put it down. The muscle eventually brought a governorship, and it was my Father, mayor of this town, that finally erected the pulp refinery.
I know I’m going fast. But, well, I need to. There’s a sound in the wind tonight. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve heard it before. By my figuring, the earth is an instrument. There are some places wind can play it like a reed, and Elmsworth is one of them. Music is old. On the heels of the spearhead came the flute. Our myths have painted music in fair light. But every coin has its other side. Some tones soothe beasts to sleep. And, well...
Some tones wake them up.
*
My mind ain’t what it used to be. My knuckles are old and swollen and need rest between these sheets. I still sit on the board of Miller Holdings, Inc. as a majority shareholder, but I’m no more than the rusting award they keep on the wall and invite to mumble on the stage of the annual Christmas Banquet. I haven’t made a decision that wasn’t made for me in a post-it on my shareholders’ report in two decades. Art Landon’s chicken scratch never used to bother me. We used to laugh about it by saying a drunk buffalo tap-dancing with a pen in its ass stood a better chance of legibility than Art’s cursive. But not now. There isn’t much to laugh about. I sometimes see that writing in my dreams. There is something hiding in his penmanship. I have someone looking into it. You probably think I’m crazy, and I haven’t even gotten to the worst of it.
Well, let me prove the opposite. The Miller’s curse is not financial in nature. It takes the form of infamy and horrendous ends. Eustice and the Ax. Great-Grandpa Al and his empty car parked out on Langley’s Bridge. My father and the fire of ‘66. The Miller men are fated to exit the stage of life in tragedy or mystery, and usually both. I went to U of W and got a double major in Business and Land Management. I was the first to capitalize on the conservationism initiative and lobbied for the Governor, my father’s colleague, to incentivize undeveloped land with grants that paid more money than parceling ever could. We own millions of acres across the US and Canada now (turns out other states felt the same about leaving land pristine). And you know who was there with me every step of the goddamn march? Arthur Landon. Hell, it was his idea to expand beyond Washington, and a good one.
I’m a multimillionaire. You might hate me for that but you shouldn’t. I can tell you, one red cent above a million stays red. Above ten million, a tax return is about as captivating to read as a completed crossword puzzle. After accumulating enough wealth for you and your family, the money becomes abstract. You elevate in influence, which means you elevate in the company you keep. Socioeconomics is a runged ladder. Seeing a middle-class income from the fourth rung looks about the same as seeing multimillions from the twentieth. It’s all in the perspective of vantage.
I am old. If both of us are lucky, I’ll reach my point before either of us falls asleep. Art comes by to see me once a month. He always brings a bottle of Scotch, and I always give it to the maid. It’s a ritual. Last month Art brought with him a list of acquisitions and I believe I connected something I shouldn’t have. There’s no way he could know that I, old coot extraordinaire, had picked up the hobby of occult investigations in Washington State. It started innocently enough, about a decade ago. A documentary on the Rainier Lights, followed by the occasional treatment of insomnia with a dose of Coast-to-Coast AM. There are things in this state that cause deep feelings of mistrust at the prospect of walking isolated through its woods. 144 people went missing last year on land reserves from Elmsworth to Snoqualmie. The 5 hour drive is quite beautiful, unless you have this information tucked into your pocket. Of those 144 people, logic can assume at least half got lost the old-fashioned way and died of exposure. But the other 72? What happened to them?
If you connect these metrics with the last known sites visited, you began to chart clusters on the map. Amid every cluster within five miles is a patch of old-growth land, same as Eustice used to cut. I wish I knew how to tell a story so it could mean to you what it means to me. I wish you could feel the tightening in my guts like a circlet of old wet roots. But you can’t, and I can’t, and you’re just going to have to bear with me.
I was twelve when my father took me to the pulp refinery. His governorship meant the papers were trussed up in a blind trust, but mark my words, a fly didn’t fart in that building without Clement Miller knowing its pitch. “This is going to make us a lot of money, son.”
I didn’t give a buffalo nickel about money. But I nodded and smiled and placed the word down like a stepping stone so he could keep on walking. “How?”
“Composites,” he said. “Trash to a logger. But that’s why he swings an ax. We, son, traded the plot for the boardroom for a reason. China, Europe, and Mexico live on that trash. Food, clothing, housewares, packing materials--Shit, Billy, they eat the stuff for breakfast. There’s even a doctor in Brookhaven who thinks he can turn it into fuel. This state’s pulp plants make scrap wood with the old wood. A goddamn circle. But what do we think of circles, Billy?”
“They’re for squares,” I said, on cue.
“They’re for squares,” Clement agreed. He had a hell of grin and when he shot it down at me it wasn’t all that strange that we lived in a mansion. Al Miller had left six supply-chains to his family, and Clement had used those donations to buy support for his first campaign. He only wanted to politic insomuch as it greased the State paperwork and bought favors. Favors he was happy to return from his position. I learned a lot from him.
Standing in the shadow of the open iron gait, the sun peeking from the cloud coverage that dominates this edge of the world, we heard a man scream. Clement’s grin didn’t dim its wattage, but the eyes narrowed, furtive as I flinched and gripped his leg. “Don’t worry, son. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
But the next scream caught some gristle, curled at the end like a trowel dragging up pieces of lung.
Clement pushed me away and ran into the freshly graveled driveway. He made it halfway before a man in a Levi’s jacket staggered out of the sidedoor to the plant. I still remember the way the blood stayed on the wall where is half-chopped arm swung into it. There was chaos to the movement, the way a butterfly cuts through wind. The denim was dark with blood, threshed, little bits of bone and tendon bright pink and chalk white, gushing onto the clean crushed rocks.
“My arm!” The man yelled. “Just turned on. Just turned on, oh Christ, my arm.”
My father caught the man before he fell, and his screams for help hushed back before the crash of waves, the hiss of static, a heartbeat I could feel within the land. The therapist Clement made me see said that was shock, the autonomic sounds of blood and pressure experienced beneath a cushion of trauma. But Dr. Forstill never saw the charts and maps in my study with their clusters of bright red dots.
Were he alive now, I think he’d be inclined to agree with me.
The sound was the appetite of this place.
*
That was the first of many accidents. What would you say if I told you those injuries correlated with celestial events? That a measurable increase of five-x could be charted on paper same as my clustered red dots? You’d probably say what Art said, what anyone with a college education will say when confronted with the hidden power of numbers.
“It’s proportional coincidence.” Art sipped his Scotch. We were on the screened porch and the summer sun had not yet fully faded from the trees across the Lake, though it was almost 9:00PM. “Data is a skewed narrative. Shit, we’ve been selling corporate growth charts that way since Carter thumbed this country’s ass.”
I was quiet. It is my habit these days. “Maybe so.”
“Definitely so.” Art flicked a disarming smile across the table, elbows on his knees. “So what will you do with all of this? Have you thought about it yet?”
He meant my house, my shares, my lake, and I wished he’d shut up about it. “I ain’t dying yet, Art.” I sipped. “You’re just too much fun.”
“This economy is shit for farmers, and 400 acres is about to default in Yakima County. Clarice at Morgan Stanley slipped the details in an email. I think we should allocate some resources.”
“We own enough land, Art.” I sat forward and we both winced at the pop in my lower back, sharp as a green branch. “Hell, we’re second in line behind the BLM.”
“Certain land is more precious than other land.” There was something beneath his smile, that same something beneath his penmanship. “And this is land we want.”
Maybe it was the Scotch, but I was cagier than usual. “Why do we want it, Art?”
“You’re gonna do this to me now, Bill?” He scoffed and laughed into his hand, wiping his nose, a sure sign he was caught off guard. You see, there is an animal protectiveness to Art that comes out in his gestures. Were he wolf, he would have popped his gums across that table. “How many of my decisions have resulted in losses?”
“Art, that’s not--”
“How many, William?”
“Not a one … but it isn’t about that.”
“We run a corporation. Not a nonprof. It is about that.”
“I didn’t say no, Art. I asked why. You might outcircle these tin hips on a dance floor, but my mind works just fine. Now …” I leaned back and sipped my Scotch, and hell, I even shot him the old Clement Miller smile, a grin that on this old face, with these capped teeth, resembled an ecstatic donkey. “All this posturing just makes me curious.”
“We know what that did for the cat.”
“Are you calling me a pussy?” We both laughed, and whatever darkness was there passed from the level of human registry. “Quit being a sissy and spit it out, King Arthur.”
“Geology,” he said and looked down, a tad embarrassed. “There is a special geology to this land.”
“Buried treasure? Oil? You’re dancing at the edges, Art. Give me the meat.”
“Meat,” he repeated, and the word, his voice, the backlit edge of sky behind the trees that in that light burned as the great serrated fins of a butcher’s implement; I hear now in the dreams that wake me at least twice a week.
Art looked up and it occurred to me how only a decade stood between his robustness and my decrepitude. He drank, smoked, chewed through women like cournels on a cob, and yet looked 25 years my junior. Full iron hair. Pink gums. A present albeit softening muscularity. Not until that night, that moment, with the word flapping in the silence between us as big as the moon itself, did I asked myself why it should be that way.
“We’re buying it, Bill. The deal’s done. And I’m only going to tell you this once because I love you like the older brother I never had. Sitting out here in the quiet isn’t good for you. You were a wolf once. And wolves die without their pack. The path of acquisition, negotiation, the uncut gem of some new venture, is the prize of the hunt. It keeps us sharp. Do you take my meaning?”
I had edged my elbows to my knees and was looking at him as one might watch a viper emerge from the blankets of a crib. I took his meaning for the iceberg tip it was, knowing acres of unglimpsed ice sprawled beneath. “Do you believe that?” I asked, slow and careful. “That litany?”
“Bill. Every goddamn word.”
“I’ve been watching things out here. Making my own observations.”
“Oh?”
Suddenly, I was aware of all that quiet, the slosh of the lake, the quiet erosion of the shoreline I owned for miles in all directions. I was aware that the maid was gone and the nearest hospital was forty minutes away. I was aware of him. I sat back and smiled. “I’ve observed how much I hate to haggle … and love to fish.”
He grinned but Arthur Landon wasn’t done with me just yet. When the beta rises in challenge, even after it gives its belly, the bigger, stronger alpha will sometimes still draw blood. “The bridge was an ugly business, Bill. Hell, you walked through that like a gunnery vet. I say you’ve earned the right to fish to your heart’s content.”
*
The moon hung full like a wound in the darkness long after Art’s Tesla was gone. I thought long and hard about the bridge. The tour bus. The pieces of asphalt cracking and falling through to expose rebar laid before Eisenhower tamed Japan. I imagined the faces of children and Europeans on vacation, of college students dragged along by lovers for a backwood taste of Americana, smashing into the safety glass to be free from the vehicle slowly being taken into the jaws of gravity. In my dreams they press like rats. They pile over each other and step on the small and weak and suffocate them into the leather seats. I can hear their bones being crushed. And the great steely twangs of suspension cords boomeranging across the canyon. I can even hear the stones below calling with open, craggy arms. Fall here, right here, I’ll catch you, my darlings.
I purchased the land that the bridge, a government easement, stood upon. It was my last acquisition. 66 people died. 18 were children. Numbers, again, telling stories of such subtlety they are easy to miss. Shortly thereafter I bought the lakehouse and the lake and created a corporate vacuum that Arthur was more than willing to fill. When a man is shot, there are some who blame the bullet and some who blame the one who aims. But few ever blame the barrel. Plot 78 was one of three proposals arranged on my desk that afternoon. The one in the middle. And any street hustler or psychologist will confirm that, given three choices, the human mind will often choose the middle. It is the sensible choice, shored up neatly on each side, a statistical probability.
I bet you can guess who placed the papers there.
There’s more you should know about my great-grandfather, first. I have a picture I keep in the drawer of the roll-up desk in my study. It sits before a bay window that looks out over the lake. The sun never shines directly in that window, and the temperature is always sensible. The photograph shows my father in a tweed suit and bowlers cap. If not for the old growth pines behind him, you’d think it was Industrial England. His handlebar mustache is thick and black as pitch, his eyes dark chips of ice. And at his side is Claymore. In every bit of paperwork that didn’t burn in ‘66, Claymore is the only word that proves the man next to my Grandfather ever existed. I don’t know if it’s a surname or a first name. I don’t know where he’s from. I know only that he is tall and thin and bears a striking resemblance to Arthur Landon. It isn’t Art (that would be crazy, and I have limits). To describe Claymore’s face as menacing would be robbing it of its black subtlety. It’s more, well … like a lake. The way the dark cold waters here will go so still you’d swear it was a deep blue cut of glass that not a living thing could occupy. His face embodies the depth and cunning carved into the hindbrain of the crocodile. I sometimes dream of Claymore on the bridge, patiently flexing a garrote with two cork handles as the bus tumbles to its end.
Claymore vanished around the time my great-grandpa Al did. Langley’s Bridge has a story all its own. My company owns the land beneath it, and the forests that skirt Brookhaven. Would you believe there are more deaths on Langley’s bridge than the Golden Gate? Not from suicides alone. But from heart-attacks, strokes, stumbles and the like. The land there, too, is hungry.
You’re likely wondering why I haven’t mentioned my grandfather, and the truth to that is I have no idea who he was, what he did, or where he went. My father only ever mentioned him once, and he was drunk and anguished and staring into the study’s fire. “The only thing he taught me was how to spend money like I’d never seen it in my life. Traipsing around Europe and Arabia with his whores and witches. Filling my head with stories, like the time he bartered with a giant in the Caucasus mountains, or sailed through Amazonia into a pocket of land that opened up to a hollow earth. A charlatan, son. A self-proclaimed wizard. The only trick he ever pulled with any success was keeping the family holdings in the black.” I remember asking Clement if he was dead, because that seemed obvious--it was a Miller we were talking about.
My father only grimaced into the fire and sipped his bourbon. I believe he was crying.
This is my cross. The lineage of a murderer, a thug, a charlatan wizard, and a politician. They’ve weighed my neck like ship links for as long as I could think. And maybe that’s why I rose to greatness, why I made every effort to scrub clean the blood left scattered by my forebears. Good old-fashioned shame. When a man lives in such deep shadows, he does what he can to make his own light. He schmoozes, grants favors, philanthropizes at every turn. He tries to build such beauty that those beholding it might never search for his ugliness. Though I have wandered far from the bloody grove of Eustice and the empty Rolls Royce of Al, the rope around my waste has reached its limits. At times like these, at night, alone, in a silence broken only by the occasional hoot of an owl hunting in the darkness, I feel its pull returning me. To the place that waits for every Miller.
The land.
*
Arthur has always enjoyed the art of the soiree. Women, booze, and twice that I can prove: hallucinogens; these are cornerstones of his relationship with living. The great piece of business advice I harvested from Clement was this: always hire your weakness. A great leader is made so by the motley henchmen that surround him, each with their own deliberate skillset. Automated machines might do well to remain identical, but human businesses are held together by radical differences. This is why I let it be what it was. You can’t pour a gallon from a pint, and as much as I’d like Art to not smell of booze or perfume, or disappear for long stints of time in which he’d return claiming the innocent researcher of new prospects, I measured him by his results.
He said so on the porch that night and wasn’t lying. Art bullseyes every negotiation I’ve sat in. Maybe that’s another reason him asking after the affairs of my living trust bothers me so much. I’m afraid he might find a way to convince me to hand it over. I know more about Art than he knows about me. Six months ago I hired a private detective to look into him. Ash Raincrow is as expensive as they come, former military special forces, and survivor of the Poli Massacre, which is something you’ve probably never read about and shouldn’t on account of its ability to make one question the nature of all things. The half-Navajo wears his hair cropped and is the tall, wiry type that will run five easy miles well into his seventies.
“Landon likes young women.”
“I know that.”
Raincrow looked at me in the cold abrupt way men do when it is obvious the one who has spoken doesn’t know shit from shinola. “Young,” he said again. “The details are in the dossier. Once a week, he parks at the rest area out past Spanaway Avenue and takes a horse into the woods.”
This was the most surprising news of anything. If cappuccino-drinking Art could seat a horse, you could paint my face and photograph it, and I told Raincrow as much. Until he showed me the pictures.
“Surveillance on horseback isn’t impossible, but unwise. The woods are too thick for a drone. I cut his trail by foot but lost it, which is saying something. No scat or broken branches.” Raincrow pulled a topographical map from a distressed leather bag and laid it on the table that, not one week ago, Art had looked across and hissed that single word: Meat.
“He vanishes around here.”
I looked long and hard at the area Raincrow had circled. I couldn’t speak.
“It’s an old woodcamp. They did weekend tours in the eighties but the animal rights activists bankrupted the pack station that serviced it, and now it’s mostly a selfie destination for tourists who aren’t too fat to mind a 20 mile uphill hike.”
“I know it,” I said, and coughed. “My great-uncle logged there in the 1870s.”
“Eustice?” Raincrow faded to silence and nodded. “I did some research on you, too, Mr. Miller.”
“After Antoni Poli, I imagine you would.”
That got his attention, but it also got a half-cocked grin. “He went again last night. With one of his girls. About three miles from the woodcamp, there were a lot more shoe-prints. By my count, at least twelve other riders were with him. They take other trails from other places. I didn’t lose the tracks this time.”
My skin prickled. A little at first, but soon it felt as if an army of ants was marching along my spine. “What did you find?”
“A tree.”
“A tree?”
“A giant of a tree, Mr. Miller. It must be ancient. Looks like a sequoia, but pale. I googled it and can’t find anything that resembles what that tree might be. And then there’s this.” He pulled another photograph, that showed a brownish handprint stamped into the pale spongy bark. “I scraped it and sent it to a colleague at the Crime Lab in Seattle. We should know more in three days.”
“What do you think this is?”
Raincrow leaned back and looked out across the lake. “I don’t like to jump to conclusions unless they poke me in the chest.” He looked at me dead-flat, and I was reminded of the way the coroner had looked at me when they pulled the charred body of my father from the fire--like the thing itself stood total and encompassing beyond the use of words to make sense of it. “I believe they fed that girl to something, someone, or perhaps each other. About this time I usually ask for a bonus and pass it to the cops.”
“We own the cops, Mr. Raincrow.”
He nodded. “I was afraid of that.”
*
That night I dreamt of Claymore with his cork-handled garrote, standing under the burning roof of the refinery. His face glistened with sweat as he levered the handles of his wire. My father fell to his knees with eyes that neared popping before the head was shorn clean from his shoulders, shattering to ashes on the cement. The ground exploded upward at that point and the bus came tumbling up from hell and toward the burning ceiling, as if by some trick of reversed gravity. I could see faces pressed to its windows, my father’s and uncle’s and great-grandfather’s amongst them. The great bus tumbled upward like a satellite through the emptiness of the warehouse. Claymore raised his hands in reverence. The air danced with fireflies of burning wood. “Behold,” the voice of God said from everywhere. Only the voice was Arthur Landon’s.
I woke in a cold sweat and tried to make sense of the pieces writhing in me like tentacles. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, but there beside it was a certainty that they led to the same fleshy trunk, the same answer. Maybe it’s not that the Millers are cursed, I thought for the first time. Maybe it’s that we are fated.
Where the layman sees chaos, the enlightened man sees cooperation. Alan Watts said that. I raced to the office where I keep my maps and clicked on the banker’s lamp. The green light fell around the red-headed pins, making the clustered disappearances glow purple. 144 divided by half is 72. Half of that is 36. 6 goes into 36 six times.
“Six, six, six,” I whispered, and as I did I saw the bridge again, the headline in that morning’s paper that had greeted me on my desk, where Art was waiting, smoking a cigarette in the early morning light. His face had conveyed of condolence and support, but right then it seemed more the postured expression of an actor. The bold black typeface blinked in the center of my mind.
66 DEAD ON BRIDGE LEFT UNREPAIRED SINCE 1908
“Sixty-six,” It came out in a quaver and I sat hard. The rolling chair almost toppled me but I caught the desk. Even 1908, added together in a sequence, was 18. Which could fit three sixes, easy as you please. “Jesus,” I gripped my face, squeezed until my knuckles ached. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
Only Jesus had nothing to do with it. Not even John in his hellish vision understood what the Mark of the Beast actually meant. All along it had been here in Washington. Maybe everywhere. Hidden in the patterns.
That was the moment I decided. Not because it was wise, but because I’d finally glimpsed the clockwork of this awful machine. The notes of a musical scale, discordant or harmonious to all human ears. The molecular chain of crystal formations. The spiral of the nautilus shell. I saw the world then not as a globe, but a churning spiral beneath its crust. Most of you live your life oblivious of its workings. You mourn circumstance and tragedy as chance. But some glimpse the strings anchored into our impulses. Some are bound up within the trenches of that shell.
Its movements are predictable, like a train.
And if you know where and when a train will pass, with enough grit, you can blow its rails.
*
I already know what the papers will say, and don’t much care. I won’t be around to read them. When they burst into my home, with a warrant issued by the District Attorney my contributions put into office, they’ll find my room plastered with articles of natural disasters and gruesome accidents and label me a madman. Let them. I have come to know much and more about the ambivalence of evil. It is our morality--ideas, in other words--that entretch that divide of light and darkness into being. We hack at trees, mow our grass as vainly as if it were our own facial hair, and weep not a moment for the butchery. I gore fish through the face and drag them up by their jaw for pleasure in my old age. It is the value system of The Pure that imbues evil with the motive to violate that purity. But the truth is simpler.
When a stomach is hungry, the body eats.
I tracked down Art to an address unknown to me until Raincrow’s dossier. It’s out in Brookhaven County, four miles from the Bear Claw Inn, where five mutilated bodies were discovered. The motel sits on a ghost map, where tourists spend the night for five times the price, buying t-shirts from the gift shop. If Washington is an apple, there is a tunnel of rot that marches from Brookhaven to Elmsworth, soft enough to push your finger through.
The cabin was modern from the outside: framed in redwood, with a bay of windows facing west to catch the sunset. I shattered the windowed backdoor with my .38 revolver, not sure if I was prepared to use it. In the anteroom I paused to listen, thought of calling out his name but restrained that inner urge to be decent about this. There was something mephitic in the air, like burning relays or leaking coolant. It clung in the back of my throat. The house was spotless, luxurious, and empty as Claymore’s eyes. Over the fireplace loomed a picture of Indians being swallowed by a monolith. Their faces weren’t horrified, but vacant as a school of fish, as they marched into the swirling darkness of the rock. Painful feedback throbbed between my temples and I finally tore my eyes away. But there were more paintings in the hallway. The smell here was even worse, made my lungs start to burn. I covered my mouth with an elbow.
These paintings showed more. Men with animal heads gathered around a tree so tall it stretched beyond the frame. Their arms were raised. A pit gaped in the ground before them, birthing roots that blurred with motion. Another showed a prehistoric twelve-point buck with the muscularity of a lion, bleeding and half-rotten, as it loped through blurred gray trees. What looked like thick misshapen skulls peeked from glassed alcoves next to garlands of what might have been crows feet. The last painting made my nose start to bleed. In it small cloaked figures skulked in a blasted field of felled trees. The landscape reminded me of St. Helens, but instead of a volcano, stretching high into the atmosphere of the background was the segmented body of a blind white worm.
I must have cried out because Art’s voice came from the basement stairs ahead of me. “William. How nice of you to visit. Come down, won’t you? We’ll have a Scotch.”
There is a timeless, thoughtless recession of sensation in which a man is reduced to an animal, and that moment comes in the face of mortal danger. When I heard his voice lilt up from the same place as that corrosive smell, the 72 years of accumulated identity were yanked from me like a scalp. It was a bundle of nerve-endings that made its way down those stairs, bunching at every crepitation of moist wood. The narrow walls dripped with humidity. The descent went on for so long I wonder now how I ever heard him calling.
The floor at the bottom had the giving quality of ground moss. The chamber was perhaps one hundred feet across, low-ceilinged, the walls carved from what looked to be basalt. Two torches hung from iron eyelets fastened into opposite ends of the rotunda, which left almost everything in darkness. Art sat at the opposite end in a wooden throne.
Torchlight framed half his face. “We have so much to talk about, Willy. Take that torch and let’s have ourselves a sit. Trace the wall with your hand. You’ll want to trust me on that.”
I took the torch and swung it out slowly, afraid it might make contact with something in the room. “It smells awful,” I said. A foolish first response. Still trying to keep things convivial, to hide my head in the sand. “What the hell is this place, Art?”
“They ask the same of our palaces when they happen upon them.”
I traced a hand along the wet rounded wall to venture closer. Those steps took forever. I never took my eyes from him and he never blinked. “Is the place in the woods like this? The place you take the girls?”
“No. That place is a mouth. This place…” He hesitated and closed his eyes to search for the precise phrase. “Is a Subconscious.”
As I neared, I saw there was another throne beside him, smaller. Neither was made of wood, but stone, carved up from the same matter as the walls. “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”
“Do you know why the homo erectus went extinct, Willy?”
I didn’t answer.
“Laziness. Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis journeyed high into the mountains for the choicest flints, roamed leagues through howling blizzards for the choicest herds. They were the first innovators. The Neaderthal understood that glory demanded everything of an organism. Distance and toil. The progenitors of work ethic.”
“A rose appears intelligent to a weed.”
“A rose is intelligent, Willy. You think a limbic system procures intelligence? I say the opposite is true. Look at you now. Shivering on your quest. To do what, exactly? Add value to a life wasted at the buffet of profligacy? While you searched for answers in the stars, I negotiated with the darkness of inner earth. The answers have never been up, Willy. But down.” He pulled the torch from the wall behind him and threw it.
I turned to watch it tumble, lighting a throat of solid stone that was the center of that room. We both waited, and when there was no thump, no sound at all, I turned to see him crouching on his throne, perched chimplike on the balls of his feet.
“It goes forever,” he said.
I remembered that night on the lake, him looking down and saying, with a touch of embarrassment, the Geology is special.
“This is why we’re in the land business, isn’t it, Art?”
“This is the tip of the iceberg. The subconscious is unaware of itself. Here, at best, we can watch it labor to dream, attempt to remember.”
“What do you do in the woods?” I raised my gun. “What do you do with the girls?”
He smiled easily, as if this should be plain. “I feed it. What your great-uncle did, and his brother after. What your Grandfather did across Europe and the Middle East. What your father reluctantly did in the fire of ‘66 when he could no longer shirk his duty. But it ends with you. The sonless, wifeless, dry-in-the-balls William Albert Miller. Even your name denies remembrance. You were born the fading memory of a greater time. When toil and distance meant something.”
“You’re saying my father knew what this was?”
“Oh, yes. Lumber Baron, to Governor, to Mayor, to Businessman. The Miller legacy is a tide of receding influence. The impotence of the Crown. But today, Willy. Today that Crown passes to me.”
“You’re not the one with the gun.”
“You think death is enough? I sat at your grandfather’s side. And his son. And his son. And now I am the son, William. This is my birthing chamber.”
His jaw cracked down to his neck, opening like a flower. Arthur jumped and I shot and shot again, screaming and falling back into the wall. His body staggered sideways and tumbled into the pit, swallowed by silent darkness.
I stood over it for a long while with the torch trembling in my hand, praying for sound. But none came. And could I be certain the other men of my family had not done the very same, awakening slowly to the snake in their garden only to cut off its head?
You think death is enough?
Was this really a pit before me, I wondered?
Or a gateway?
*
The ride will be hard, but I’ve hired Raincrow to show me the way, paid him triple his premium fee to remove himself within a mile, and triple that again to forget we ever did business. There are answers in those woods. I’ve visited our other sites. Seen things that I missed before. Peculiar tilts to the land that now, with new suspicion, appear as bold as smoke signals. The earth is an instrument, as I’ve said. And those that created it might have done so as a type of maze. A game. A labyrinth. That bitter chemical taste hasn’t left the back of my throat. I believe my body is changing. Retracting like muscle into its shell. I can no longer feel my fingers or toes. The outer edges of my limbs feel useless to me, like things I should remove. The sunlight hurts my eyes.
My dreams are now simpler. I am a cave-thing determined to survive. I strike flint by accident and throw sparks onto tinder. I dance in the simple marvel of fire. I breathe undeserved meaning into the empty deadlight stars. While all around me, in the darkness, hungry giants watch and await the germination of my worship.
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