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Some people in the super-secret group requested a little of my NaNoWriMo and I wanted to tuck it away in a dark corner of the internet like, say, my journal on Gaia! Keep in mind this is raw and unedited and may/probably does contain notes to myself in parentheses. The title is The Spirit of Morning Ridge. Some background on this scene: A girl runs away to her grandparents' home in a tiny mountain town for some R&R. Her dad hires private investigator Jake Marlin to track her and he does, stays in the town overnight due to a storm down the mountain. The first night...
Chapter 5
Jake was in a grim-looking boat, something heavy in his hands. The walls were high around him, as waves beat mercilessly on the hull, and someone just vomited. Jake looked down to see an M1 Garand rifle in his hands and himself along with everyone nearby in 1940s military fatigues. They all looked half-awake, zoned out into some sort of trance. A taller man by Jake slapped him on the shoulder.
“Keep your head down, you can do it,” he said. And then again and again.
“I heard you, okay?” Jake said, but the sound droned on without the man’s mouth moving until the metal ramp started to drop from the front. Jake’s heart froze a second as it happened, but when the gate fell he was hiding under a table with a British family in a dark room, everything black and white. An air raid signal sounded outside somewhere, droning in and out. The image started to fade and turn grainy like an old photograph, but the siren was as real as anything. Jake closed his eyes tightly, hearing it like it were right outside. When he opened them he was staring at the ceiling of the Hargrove residence, the siren still going. Jake got to his feet and pointed his head around, ran to the window and looked outside. Past frosted glass was searing red and panicked townspeople running this way and that. Jake opened the door, stepping into the snow in his bare feet. There, two houses down across the road, a home was completely wrapped in a curtain of fire. The wide base of the flame wicked up and pointed in the middle like a flower bud stretching for the sky. Jake saw Dane blasting through a break in the door with a thick water hose while other townsfolk ran back and forth with buckets, tossing what they could just to haul asses back to their homes for more. Jake stepped into his hiking boots without tying them and ran to his car, digging through a mess in the trunk before reaching the fire extinguisher.
This isn’t going to do a damn thing, Jake thought, but brought it anyway. He jogged back through the snow, past townsfolk, taking a place as close to the fire as he could stand. He unleashed the chemical spray from the fire extinguisher, but, as he thought.
“This isn’t doing a damn thing!”
“Jake, just use the buckets!” Dane yelled over the confusion and the siren. The fire had already dried the ground surrounding the house and singed bits of grass and pine needles feet away.
Jake emptied the last of the tank and tossed it somewhere, grabbed an empty bucket laying nearby and ran back into the Hargrove home. He filled it up and ran out to sling it onto the house. Everyone in town was there doing the same. Thirty-something in all, running back and forth to their homes for more water, tossing it, scampering back with the empty bucket. The flame was thinning a bit, but still much too hot to even get near. Dane had his bare feet planted into the snow and probably the ground beneath as if he were rooted to the spot, feeding water from the hose trailing to the tower. Ten minutes of rushing back and forth had a path beaten through the snow to each house, and the flame finally contained at least within the house. Dane soaked the inside while the others finished by attacking any opening still leaking smoke.
Finally the house rested, a charred mass of lumber collapsed in on itself. Dane shut off the hose and dropped it by his feet just to look on at the destruction for a while. People milled about, gathering in groups, shivering in cotton robes. One woman didn’t, she stood upright staring at the remains, like she had been for the whole ordeal, now that Jake thought about it. Dane walked over to her.
“Gladys, what in God’s name happened?”
She just stared, looking right through him. The ruins smoked and steamed, a board that had almost burned through cracked and fell, clunking somewhere inside.
“It’s gone, I got rid of it.”
“Got rid of it? Gladys, have you lost your mind? You mean your house?”
“No,” she said, moon shining off her wide eyes, “that horrible demon.” (I can do better than this. Find a better, more haunting phrase.)
“Gladys,” Dane started, but couldn’t think of more to say. He looked at her for a long while, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Gladys come into my home, you need to get warm.”
Jake came out with the blanket he’d had through the night and put it over the woman’s shoulders as she walked towards the house.
“What happened?” Jake said.
“The wolf,” Dane said.
They entered the place behind Gladys. She sat down, wrapped in the blanket. Gladys Feintwrite was a thin woman nearing sixty-five. Her hair stringy and gray, reaching halfway down her nightgown. She was still looking forward, vacant expression, slumped posture. Dane sat across from her.
“I know you’re pretty far out there right now, Gladys. But I want you to tell me what happened.”
Gladys finally looked at him, square in the eyes. She closed her mouth, then shook her head.
“You think I’m crazy. I know you do. Because you never saw it.”
Dane wiped his feet with a towel Jake brought by, then put them in front of a space heater.
“Just talk to me. If I think you’re crazy I’ll keep it to myself.”
“You haven’t seen it. Some of the others have, once, maybe twice. But not me. It was always there. Almost every night. I’d look outside and see something, a blur, go behind a house, or a tree. Or I’d see a jaw opening and closing in a shadow. I’d hear the softest footsteps in my house while I tried to sleep. My head always hurt, I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t be happy. It was always there, always somewhere. Sometimes I’d see it clear as day. That wolf was as big as you are, or sometimes it would be like a regular wolf. But always, always white as ******** death. And those eyes, they aren’t even eyes. They’re just empty pits--I--I don’t know how it sees.”
Jake looked over at Dane, then back at the woman. He said nothing, so the woman continued.
“I was walking into my room and there it was, sitting on my bed proud-as-all-get-out. I can’t be sure it was looking at me, but it’s face was pointed at me. It opened its mouth as if to show me its teeth, but it didn’t make a sound, didn’t growl. I don’t even know how I made it to the door, but I threw the kerosene lamp into the bedroom and ran out of the house, locking the door behind me. I leaned on that door until it was too hot to stand, then I let the flames consume that demon.”
Dawn was just coming up outside, letting a welcome glow in through the windows in stead of a sinister one.
“I want to sleep so badly,” Gladys said, and then no more. She slowly let her head lay on the armrest of the couch and closed her eyes. Dane rubbed a hand over his face and took in a long breath. Jake stood and put on some socks, then properly tied on his boots and pulled on his coat. Dane met Jake just outside the door. Both of them looked on at the ruins of Gladys’ home.
“That’s not the first I heard of the evil wolf,” Jake said.
“Yeah?”
“Girl in a donut shop in Vail told me about it, said it was freaking people out. I had no idea just how much.”
“The hyper blonde one? She probably heard about it from me. I’ve never seen it personally, but at least half the town has. It’s been popping up for the last couple months. But never anything like this. Just a passing glimpse most of the time. Some say it’s appeared right in front of them, say it comes with the most surreal sense of fear. Like they can’t keep themselves together. Hell of a thing.”
“I’ll say.”
Jake walked over to the ruins and squatted down to look at a piece of the burnt wood. There was still a faint heat radiating from the site. Jake pulled away boards, climbed around near the middle. Every board was weak and near snapping. He threw some around, looked at burn marks over everything. Eventually there was a spot where a bed could have been. Wire frame still left somewhat in-tact, but everything else burned through. Jake poked at and through more boards, but there was no charred wolf carcass, nor any half-incinerated wolf bones. Just a lot of really burnt wood. Jake dropped a board and clambered his way out of the ruins covered in suit. He shook off his coat and used snow to wash his hands.
“Nothing?” Dane said. Jake just shook his head. But then again, spirits don’t leave behind remains. The snow was clearing up, somehow. Sun hidden behind layers of clouds to the east, but clear overhead.
This fire at least was very real. Half the townsfolk have seen the wolf. Could I really be dealing with an incorporeal being? I guess just like that I’m involved now.
Jake put his hands in his coat pockets and looked down the road, then back up. Homes on each side, barns, animals making noises in pens. And somewhere, maybe, a wolf spirit.
 ArmasTermin · Tue Nov 08, 2011 @ 10:27am · 0 Comments |
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