Being Epic

I’m finishing up A Cavern Ripe with Dreams, the sequel to A Seed On the Wind. A version will undoubtedly go out to Patreon patrons before I start shopping the combined novellas around as a single entity.

This story owes a great deal to both William S. Burroughs’ Junky (indeed, the protagonist is named Bill in his honor) and Joe R. Lansdale’s Drive-In, a book I found immensely freeing and exhilarating in its sheer WTFery and bravura. If you’ve read A Querulous Flute of Bone, it’s the same world, that of the co-writing project The Fathomless Abyss.

From part of today’s writing:

Bill felt a rush of fear, but a kind that he had never experienced before, something like the fear you feel when someone tells you a frightening story that they believe is true. A terror that was convincing yet somehow dilute. A terror that was not his, somehow.

A fear that was enjoyable.

He realized that it was the creature. That he was feeling its emotions. That if he closed his eyes, he could still see the room like a ghostly overlay across the darkness behind his lids.

He wondered if it experienced the same phenomenon, this double life. He put his hand up and touched it with a fingertip, stroking along the coarse fur that was still damp with eggy fluid. It smelled like newly-split wood, rare and sharp. As he touched it, it shuddered but stayed still, like a woman whose innermost core had been touched, who feared and craved more. At the thought, he grew hard, and he felt it shudder again before it curled tighter around his neck.

He lay there with it around his neck, savoring the mental taste of it, dipping in and out of its perceptions. After a while, his bladder drove him into standing and using the chamber pot beneath his bed. As he pissed, he could feel the creature tasting his sensations in turn.

It made him curious. Settling back onto the bed, he took a syrette from the bedside table, already loaded with honeypain. He injected it in his wrist and lay back to feel the twofold sensation.

First it felt as though the back of his eyes had dissolved, only to be filled with a subtle warmth that flowed out from them, flowing through him until he was only a zone of temperature and sensation, as though he was warm water in a bath, only an outline. But always with that lurking presence perceiving him, keeping him whole. He had loved honeypain for its ability to take him outside himself, but now he realized that it was nothing compared to the creature.

He tried to think at it, to see if it would answer him, but all his thoughts were blurred by the honeypain. He could hear only his blood drumming in his veins, a hard and insistent beat that told him he was alive, as it had before, for sometimes when he was dipped deep in these reveries, he thought himself dead. Now he had that beat but more ““ the creature curled on his chest. Part of him but not part.

After a while he slept.

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I’m enjoying on retreat in California right now, which will explain what provoked this piece.

California Ghosts

When you walk in the hills in southern California, through stands of pine and tall grass, up shaly mountains where the sides fall away steeply and the rock splinters rather than crumbles, you can hear the sound of the wind in the treetops, making them sway, making them creak. Stand still and you will hear the little noises, the sound of a deer’s delicate steps, far away a Stellar’s jay scolding some interloper, the click and tap of falling rocks.

There are ghosts out there in the hills, walking the ridges, slipping among the trees, but they are mostly animal ghosts, the memories of deer and mountain lions, a flicker of rattlesnake among the grass stalks, an eagle’s shadow floating over the earth.

If you find a human ghost alone out there while walking, approach it with caution. Groups of ghosts are left behind by villages and tribes, and many of them died peacefully, among those they loved. Solo ghosts are usually ghosts who came to a violent end, blade or bullet or even bared teeth, and they do not want to be disturbed.

If such a ghost blocks your path, stand still enough to hear the protests of the pines, the slide of dust downhill. Do not look them in the eye, but at a point past their shoulder. At first they will know this for a ruse, but give it time and they will falter. Finally they will turn away and vanish, because you can never see the back of a ghost, and you will be free to move further.

There are other dangers in the hills, but you know if you keep walking towards the sunset, eventually you will find the ocean ““ perhaps cliffs dropping down, perhaps sand and rock sloping. There are more ghosts in the ocean than anywhere else, but that is because it is so very large, and most of them are fish and gulls, whose ghosts pay no attention to humans. Sit on the shore and listen again. You’ll hear it say, Why go on walking? and Who knows why the wind blows?

And when you realize that the only sounds you cannot hear are your breath, your heart, your body, you will know you are a ghost yourself, ready to go down to the sea, and swim there in the water, in the waves alive with noise.