1/30
Day 1/30
I should perhaps mention that I am dead.
My birth occurred in the vicinity of 1719, or perhaps 1722. The details soften over time, and if you have years enough to your credit, no one minds if you become imprecise. I might not call this a benefit, exactly, but it’s certainly a side effect.
My memory is better when it comes to holding on to the things I’d rather forget. I died in 1742, at the age of twenty-three (or, possibly, twenty). It was a May midnight, and into the darkness of my master’s house crept the decrepit miller’s son. His eyes were blue. I remember that very clearly indeed.
The ancientness of ancient history is no excuse for sentimentality. I can pick up those memories and blow the dust from them if I wish. I can bring them to me with arms I no longer have and embrace them as the horror of the now.
I don’t particularly like to, but there you are.
Let me dwell on another story. It leaps at me in the dark like a clutching thing; it stretches out in front of me, gradually getting smaller as it goes into the distance. The horizons of these memories are sharper than any others. The outlines of the players are clear as day.
English wild-woods, just emerging from winter, snow still melting, birds returning. The turn of the year in 1837.
How can you know these things, is the question. You have no eyes to see; no brain to know that you have no eyes to see. Because you are dead.
Well, it’s true. I am dead. But I see because I have no eyes to close: I see everything. I know because I am knowing. Do you understand? There’s a little life left in me yet. Long after breath, it hangs on. You’d be surprised at its stubbornness. You’d be surprised at the desperate clutch of its grip.
The theft started it. It’s true the thief was hungry. True also he was clumsy. He reached for bread and when he found a snarling dog instead, he made a mistake and bit it. The dog leapt about with a shout that sounded like surprise. It was a large dog, and though the thief was no small man himself, the mouth of one was considerably bigger than the other, armed with considerably more teeth.
The thief could not win this fight, though he scrabbled in the wreckage of the door for a plank, for a nail, for any wicked splinter. The only splinters he found lodged in his hand.
The dog, meanwhile, showed hackles and mad eyes and teeth. It took over the room, shadow looming, and increased to three times its original size. Its bark woke the neighborhood, and the dead. It leapt for the thief, feinted, shrank away for just long enough.
The thief was going places.
The man’s long legs propelled him backwards from the wreckage of the baker’s door. His feet unerringly found the uneven rise where the unpaved alley met the hard-packed road, and he stumbled and sat in a puddle. There was a momentary, quiet little lull of a daze. Then the dog came anxiously to find him, like a good host.
"Back!" shouted the thief, warding off the dog with a handful of air as he pushed awkwardly to his feet; though whether he was shouting instructions to the animal or instructions to himself it was unclear. He certainly took himself at his word, turned his back and left the dog behind, racing for the road out of the village.
A significant amount of others were awakened by now. The dog had been no accident. The thefts they’d heard of would not be perpetrated in their own small town, not on this night, not by this thief. Righteous justice hung heavy in the air. The men breathed it in as they stood, pulling on trousers and loose-tied boots. The dog was joined by his fellows, and they tore off, yelping joyfully. They bumped and swung into each other, biting at their brother’s neck, a mass of dogflesh rolling roiling down the road to Calgary.
The thief hit the road running, and his heels struck the air. He was not dispossessed of any sort of grace. His strides were fluid, though his breath came badly. His coat- too short, ragged, a dusty and disconcerting brown- flew out behind him, and the frigid night air walked icy fingers up his bare back. He’d used the last rag of his last shirt as a tourniquet weeks ago. It was still solid-crusted around his left arm, awkwardly tied with his bad hand.
The hounds were following fast. Their yelping reached out to him, trembling, quavering, calling through the distance for thief blood. Behind it were the belated yells of angry men, the thumps and poundings of horse hooves. He swerved to the left and leapt the ditch, half full of sickly water and rancid greenery. His steps more tentative now in the uneven ground, he made for the woods across the field. The road would lead there eventually, but not quickly enough.
He picked his way, feet lifting comically high, through the hillocks and the thick clumps of grass. The fields were still thawing, had not yet been plowed. A rabbit snatched itself away from under his feet, and he staggered to the left. A curse burst loudly from him.
The pursuing roil of dogs, which had just gone by on the road, stopped and lifted their heads, turning in his direction. With a few eager shouts, they goaded themselves into action again, splashed through the muddy water of the ditch, and ran for the thief. A few of them were momentarily sidetracked into pursuit of the rabbit. There was some satisfaction in that, but the thief tucked it away for later. He was occupied with running for his life, at the moment.
Through the field, up the rise leading to the woods. He made the tree line, panting for breath. The dogs ran the heels of the hill, waiting to approach, waiting for the disappear. Torches moved mysteriously through the grass. There was a start, a curse, a fall, and the grass smoldered wetly for a few minutes before others approached the fallen man and stamped it out. Rabbits did not take sides in the wars of men.
The thief leapt into the trees as though to embrace them. They pulled him in like lovers, sheltered him in the shadow and robbed him of the last of his sight. The woods were ancient, dark and deep; they hid him from the men and hid him from himself. He wandered into trees nose-first. He found what rocks there were with his toes. The trees bowed over him and prayed for his eternal soul; the thief, raised momentarily by monks, had a distrust of displays of piety on behalf of others, and shrank mistrustfully away from the righteous leafy crowns.
The woods demanded respect of him, and pushed together till he was hard-pressed to find a way through.
The thief had an inborn horror of small places. Perhaps it was the handful of formative years in a monastic cell; perhaps it was latent memories of his own difficult birth. Perhaps it was preemptive anguish at the thought of being locked up for his crimes. Whatever the cause, the woods seemed to sense it, and there was an echo of a windy chuckle as the branches caught at the thief’s ragged clothing. The sheltering shapes turned ominous and strange. It came to the thief suddenly that the dogs had seemed reluctant to enter.
They had entered now, though. The yelps and bays skirled around the trunks to reach him. Bark echoed from bark, and the trees let the pursuers through.
In the dark of the now-silent shapes, a slit just wide enough for the thief to slip through. He held his breath, and for a moment was embraced on either side by reaching, wicked trees.
Through and through, then, and panic was throttling him, fear was crouched on his shoulder nibbling at his ear. Abused by his own emotions, he crashed forward through strange thick undergrowth, picking up thistles and leaves in long lank hair. The madness of the chase was getting to him- there seemed to be a light up ahead. There seemed to be a noiseless light, a silent moving, and then a crack as of a pistol shot, and the trees came alive and stepped waltzing aside.
He’d stumbled upon a revelry, there in the woods, of trees with four limbs and hands and feet, and sylphs and fairies and monsters. There was a cart in the middle of the clearing, and the creatures swarmed over it, picking and combing through the contents curiously. Their hands were deft and delicate, the only recognizable features. On the face of one, a thick mat of leaves, all interwoven and entwined. The head of another was a horse, with a long mobile jaw, and it spoke silently as it turned a human skull over and over in its hands.
The fear and the panic that had accompanied the thief did not abandon him now, in his hour of need. They bit fingers deep into his skin, sent him stumbling backwards into the eager embrace of the trees, and the particularly vicious jab of a branch in his right thigh called a yelp from him as loud as the dogs’. The creatures stilled, their heads turned towards him. He was frozen against the impassive backdrop of the wicked woods, for a moment; when he found he could try to run, he found quickly afterwards that he couldn’t move. The tree had snaked its limbs around him securely, and though it held him chastely, it held him fast.