The Mockingbird Legends

A Postmodern Gothic Tale. Coming of Age Rural in a Dissolute Time.

Forty

By the time Lachlan approached the north end of the peafield overlooking the trailhead it was dusk and an isolated stormfront was being driven in from the northwest by the gale. He had remained in the oak dozing awhile following the passage of the manhunters on the trail of the crone. He had awoken to a trace aroma of smoke entering his nares.

Rumbling of thunder then, sheeting of lightning. Thalassic windvoicings, a concert for all the world like some distant naval battle. The moon had risen full and the air smelled of tidal bulge. In the gloaming he could clearly discern the spoor of Willa where she had left the peafield back-when in that already distant and irretrievable and perhaps even irrelevant past and he gave chase to the memory of her receding form, striding right out as she had been striding right out. He could see her receding before him superimposed on his mind’s eye as though extant now only in celluloid frames passing over illuminated panes. He could see her as though she still strode, the dark flames of her hair rising and coiling and running with the wind.

He came then upon a mass of mixed spoor. The tracks of the crone were distinct in places and he bent to make catalogue where they were not obscured by the pugmarks of hounds, the spoor of the man Gunderson in the company of his own nemesis - his spoor there, too, his Keds, the sort of footwear a child would don leaving the sort of track a child would leave only triple or even quadruple the size. The track of the crone, a flat-soled sneaker imprint as well, modest in size and with the right toe dragging, scribing in the path with each step a convex arc. She had come up onto the benchland perhaps seventy yards beyond the the head of the peafield and then had turned west into the peas angling for the far side of the field. The spoor of the combined procession through the dense crop looking like one of Asa’s Clydesdales had passed. The crone must have then traced a half-round, heading south aways and then back east to where they had all passed beneath him there in the oak with the catamount having come in from the southwest. No doubt they had the woman by now. The men, or the cat, or both.

Cloudtide swallowed the moon. Lightning struck to the west over Langdon and warm rain slashed down in a sheeting surf. Pausing briefly now, arms aloft for the cleansing. He continued sodden then down the sloping approach to his truck. He made the mental note that coming upslope directly from the asylum as they all must have they would not have seen his own track, not have known of his presence that day. He retrieved his keys from his pocket and unlocked the door and got in and stripped off his shirt and put it on the cushioned bench beside him. The windshield steamed and he cracked his window open and leaned over and cranked the passenger window and the windshield cleared. He decided to take the scenic route home through the hollow and out past the Hotel and then north through East Langdon and dipping back northwest into the valley once more and over the Bailey Bridge. He turned out east on the old highway and entered a visceral dark with the high canopy arbored overhead like an army of skeletal hands and it made him wonder not for the first time if the sun were not the nucleus and the planets the electrons composing a single atom of some unimaginable galactic beast larger than the universe. The pavement was streaming spume and illumination was poor, but by the time he passed Caleb’s entryway the rain and wind were both already diminishing in the fleeting fashion of August storms, when they came at all.

In the floor of the hollow the moon broke to reveal a glowing white phantasm lurching spastic across the riverbridge. Dragging the right foot on the outside toe. He slowed the truck and trailed the steaming apparition, keeping it just at the edge of the headlight’s illumination. It was moving deceptively fast and cleared the bridge and angled off across a muddy level open that had hosted a flea market that day but now stood vacant in the blue lunar wash. He crossed the bridge slowing almost to idle and rolling his window down to better track the progression of the thing. The rain had nearly stopped.

It was the beldame. He turned onto the muddy lot and approached more closely. The white shift he had seen earlier that day was soaking now, plastered to her cadaverous armature and bleeding braided channels of greyish effluvium to the hem. Her shoes were the white sneakers such as the elderly often chose and in turning she revealed a familiar caprine profile, hair plastered to the head and runoff sluicing from her nose and chinhairs. He pulled up at an angle in front of her, forcing her to stop.

Missus Ambrose… I’d like to take you home.

End Book Two