Chapter One: The Orphan

A Chapter by tworeeler

A learned man came to me once.
He said, "I know the way, " come."
And I was overjoyed at this.
Together we hastened.

Soon, too soon, were we
Where my eyes were useless,
And I knew not the ways of my feet.
I clung to the hand of my friend;
But at last he cried, "I am lost."

- Stephen Crane

Chapter 1: The Orphan

“I can tell you all you need know of God, my boy. He is quite insane. He is in fact beyond all reasoning or understanding, never mind those subtler faculties of spite or compassion. You seek proof? Look around you. These are the Last Days, the chapters of a testament yet unwritten. One which speaks volumes of lightless days, of a terrible suffering - of pain and torment for their own sake. A feast of pain, a surfeit…the wailing of the newly born and most unsuccored; the pleading shriek of disconsolate mothers rising as in song, gone forever unanswered. It divines no greater understanding of His plan; it imparts no great wisdom. Where that primitive and protean God once held us cowed and cajoled with blood and tempest, offering us cautionary fables around desert campfires - where the New became flesh and blood, that He might reason with us, to appeal vainly to our very humanity, to our absent conscience...but then, we remember how this all ended…

So now, being neither the God of redemption through torturous expiation, nor the loving Father of mankind who stayed Abraham’s hand at the last, He visits pain as its own justification; pain without end, infinite, without hope of absolution. Through us, He has borne witness to His own fall from grace. Perhaps He is mad…or perhaps He’s merely grown callous, as a child grown bored with its pet. We have proved ourselves incapable of learning, and so suffering is visited without reason or passion, with evidence neither of savor nor succor. He continues to punish man’s pride in willful ignorance, his lust and viciousness, his greed and intemperance, but no longer seeks repentance. He knows us well enough by now not to expect obeisance, much less contrition. He offers in kind the same callow, churlish dismissal we’ve shown our munificent creator. No lesson there; no need to look for one.”

The old man wheezed a belabored sigh which terminated in a fit of wet, rheumatic coughing. A strand of snot hung unnoticed from one nostril. His long, wizened and ash-grey face held a solemn (though still vaguely self-satisfied) air; he spoke with skeletal fingers laced in the manner of some studied circumlocutor. Leaning slightly back in his chair " a chair warped, weather-worn and frail, as if to suit his frame " he lit the cigarette which hung damply from his enormous lower lip. The rain had been falling in the valley for nearly a month, seemingly without pause, and if one didn't light his cigarette quickly he would find that he could not light it at all.

The two sat, oddly juxtaposed: the old man a thing desiccate, bled of hope and of color, sallow-skinned and stoop-shouldered, head bent, eyes forever downcast " a product of time and bitterness, of slow, painful entropy. The boy was terse and attentive, his eyes betraying a fleeting, injured animal wariness " he was seemingly distrustful of all things, yet unable at that age to have said or wondered why. He was furtively eager, hungry for his elder’s apparently hard-won wisdom, yet still unconvinced of its veracity. Though these two, however markedly peculiar in their dissimilarities, did not seem complimentary, they were also somehow strangely alike " as of two heteromorphic forms or phases of the same life-form. Their two-man theater in the round lay at the fallow, rainslicked and untilled outskirts of civilization " that interminable steel and stone tangle, in sight of both Land's End and the borderlands of the untamed elder Northern wilds. The two would talk in turn, of life’s many regrets and of a great love " a need for loving, the giving of love. They spoke of their fellow countrymen, at times maudlin and morose with longing and pride " at others spitting with venomous, cursing negation " voices often lost to the screams of headsaws, the great muted rumble of distant logging wheels. An occasional whiff of burnt coal oil or creosote would reach them where they sat, stinging pained tears from their eyes.

The boy could not recall exactly when or why he had first taken to shadowing the old man, for he had oft dismissed the elder’s rambling as rote misanthropy, the ramblings of a lunatic. He wondered at times if he hadn’t simply interrupted the old man, engaged in endless discourse with only himself. The boy felt unaccountably compelled to follow him there, to that piebald patch of earth, beyond the abrupt terminus of that unpaved and dead-ended street (where had been assembled and arranged the rusted aluminum card table and pair of tattered, weather-worn school chairs). He had in fact spent countless hours there, listening with no small disdain to these middling, peripatetic philosophies of a withered old cynic, cringing inwardly at his notions and silently refuting every hollow posit and supposition. The old man " self-proclaimed sophist and theologian, who railed against a God he had no true belief in " claimed to grasp an overall understanding of the universe's grander design, of each’s place within it. He would sit, bent-backed, picking bits of tobacco from his teeth, asking endless and morally labyrinthine questions of the boy, preemptively dismissing his answers with a wave of his creased and spotted hand. The boy supposed that in all the world, given his limited options and experience, there were worse places that he could have spent this time. He had witnessed firsthand how vices of drink and idleness had brought ruin to so many of his fellows, his supposed betters; how their own truths could corrupt and poison the incautious mind. But still how the old man did go on...

The boy had taken lately to ignoring the withered cynic completely, diverting the entirety of his thoughts upon the sounds of nature. In particular, the river which lay only a short distance from where they sat. He imagined he recognized the shapes of words in that faint, glottal mutter; a repetitious mantra in its ever-flowing waters, phrases and incantations voiced in some strange prehuman tongue. Concentrating, he could even imagine that he understood something of their meaning, and that those voices were not entirely unfamiliar to him. It was only after an unmeasured span of time " perhaps hours, spent absorbed in the sounds of that river " that it finally occurred to him that he should go and seek it out. He stood without excusing himself, and crossed the slight downward grade that fed into the river. The old man continued proselytizing, apparently heedless of his departure.

It had not rained quite so heavily during that particular day, and so the bank remained still fairly solid underfoot. The going was somewhat treacherous in the gathering dark, as there were the grasping arms of dead trees, scattered among all the shapeless, rusted metal debris which had washed there upon the shore. Their shadow forms loomed as phantasms in the hazy castoff glow of the city lights. He picked his way gingerly among them, wandering about the shore until finding an ideal place " a small, waterlogged peninsula that stood just slightly above a bend in the rushing, churning current. He found he preferred to relieve himself in the open air, to feel the cold night air caress his puckered skin. It was a contentment rarely known to him, a sensation torturously erotic. Fixed as he was in this peculiar reverie, he grew slowly hypnotized by the sound and movement of the water. His breathing became slow and even, his expression softening, attention lost to that peculiar liquescent discourse, that language older than man’s knowing " a speaker which required no audience.

As he shook away the sensation, eerie and yet somehow calming, shivering now with unease, he became aware of a movement upriver " of some malformed object floating in slow, gentle, centrifugal motion, a movement strangely dancelike. The thing was weighted so as to drift lazily within the current that carried it, in all the halting deliberation of a funeral procession. This phantom shape, in the time it took to approach where he stood, remained frustratingly obscure, half-submerged in dark, moonglittering water. He could hear the old man calling, from somewhere behind him and far away. As this object, in its terrible and delicate transit, finally came near enough to see " swung toward him by the current as if through design or providence " he pitched suddenly forward, collapsing to his knees. He dug fingers into cold, wet earth and vomited. The act loosed a sound from within him " a thing guttural and animally lamenting " which provided mournful bass vibrato to the contralto of a scream rising in his head. He did not then notice the appearance upriver of several other forms, similar in size and shape to the first, moving in identically unhurried circles.

He dreamed that there was a child. This child walked at a distance behind a faceless man whom he took to be the child's father " he knew that he was not the child, for he watched this scene from a remove, a point far above. Yet he felt a child's fear. He knew, somehow, that the abandonment of this child would mean its demise, and that the child's demise would be his own. The child continued, stumbling and struggling through the dense growth of a forest primeval. The father strode without concern or backlooking, the space between the two gradually becoming insuperable. He offered no word of encouragement, of reassurance. The ground began to incline sharply, impossibly, the way that it only could in dreams; the footing more treacherous, more impossibly overgrown with angry, grasping vines and stinging nettles. Their forms appeared at times to be clutching at the boy’s feet, pulling him downward. No sound disrupted the still evening air. After an endless time spent clawing and struggling, ever-upward, the boy raised his head from these labors to gauge his progress. With a great heartsick feeling, he seemed to realize that his father was lost from sight " as his breath quickened in panic, the surrounding colors of leaf, land and sky dimmed perceptibly. An effluvium of decay seeped from within the damp of trodden soil; sudden sounds from the darker reaches of forest grew, low and full of a malevolent sentience. The sky became a starless negative, and all around was felt a thing gathering, drawing in closer... they could not see the sun.

                He awoke in darkness, shivering upon a sodden heap of moldering sawdust. He recognized the smell. The old man stood nearby, in the castoff light of early morning, scribbling absently upon an oil-stained scratch pad. He acknowledged the boy's return to wakefulness with a small nod of his head.

                "Man wants to see you." He said without looking away from his work. “I hid you in here, but he sussed you out as missing.” He turned then, hunched in the manner of a monk deep in prayer " still writing " and walked away.

                The boy rose, tasting bile, wincing at the muffled thrum that wracked his head. It took a moment to orient himself in the dark of the tiny room, but after a moment of panic he found his way out of the dank and woodsmelling antechamber. There was no longer the noise of men at work; no hurried movements, no shouting or men's curses. By the lighted glow of the outer windows, he saw gathered at the river a procession of men, standing among sheets of wet tarpaulin. They were unmoving, heads slightly bowed. One carefully fished a thing heavy and waterlogged from the shallows. The boy continued down the hallway to the foreman’s office, though his pace had grown now unhurried, contemplative.

                The door to the office was opened, its interior lit glumly by a single flickering tallow candle. He entered, taking deliberate, measured steps so as to convey a childish approximation of efficacy. The dust in the room swirled about his feet. The foreman sat gazing at a place just above the boy’s head, hands rested palm-down upon the table, face deeply reflective. The man at first seemed unaware of his presence there, though his pose had the appearance of having been affected thusly to achieve some effect. His face was unreadable, a cipher. So too was the wood reproduction of a mounted Christ which hung in the shadows and cobwebs behind him. Both stoic, equally ambiguous.

                "What's that?" the man said faintly " his voice somnolent, toneless. "A ghost?”

                The boy did not speak " unaccustomed as he was to being in the presence of his betters, he felt gutsick and was sweating in apprehension. He could not stand to meet the foreman’s eyes, yet found he could not look elsewhere. He’d only once before laid eyes on this man, and upon that first meeting had been curtly dispatched to his labors without so much as a glance or word of acknowledgement. The planing mill had agreed to take him on as a charity case, and paid him accordingly " someone hired peripherally, meant to fetch and carry, to sweep and clean the latrines. Inasmuch as he served in this lowly capacity, he’d unconsciously adopted a constant attitude of subordination: head lowered penitently, fingers laced behind his back, as of one awaiting the passing of sentence. His gaze wandered to the floor. The room echoed with all the drear stillness of an empty church. The man laughed, though there was no joy in the sound. The boy cowered.

                "Of what use is a ghost in this world?" the foreman asked, but again the question was entirely rhetorical.

A pale, overcast morning sky was met from below by a black miasma which rose churning from the cloacal depths of cruel-looking smokestacks. At noon, a low rise of heavy clouds brought the rain to wash away its traces, returning ashes to earth, dust to dust. The boy sat alone by the shore, half-facing the ocean.

He weighed a nebulous idea, numbed and detached, of begging for work at the sulphur pits. The idea was halfhearted, dismissed out of turn. He knew nothing of sulphur or its quarrying, nor did he find any particular interest in learning " he had received schooling enough in fire and brimstone during his early tenure at the orphanage. There were other jobs to be had, though each were certain to have paid far less than the stipend the mill had allowed him " would in all likelihood have been all the more tiring and thankless for the effort. He considered himself lucky (though this thought in itself was no true comfort) that there were neither woman nor child depending upon his return, awaiting hungry and needing. This thought led inevitably to a vague regret for not having these things, to the void which their absence created. He did not care to think of how unremarked his presence (or its lack thereof) would go in this world upon his passing from it. These thoughts tired him, and so he slept a while.

At mid-day, he set out in the direction he had earlier come from. Though still with no clear intention or destination in mind, he walked purposefully, determinedly, until he found himself at a familiar street. He followed the street to where it abutted a patch of bare earth, to the table and two chairs that stood waiting. The old man sat slumped, his arms folded across his round belly. He slept. The boy sat carefully in the seat opposite, attempting to stifle its creaking. He thought of waking the old man, but knew the ensuing conversation would offer no surcease or consolation. They sat for a time that way, in silence. When the old man finally awoke, at the whistle’s shrill call, he groggily asked of the boy if he had any tobacco.