redwetgrin

[redwetgrin]

Cassette 1-1

Henry left me his tapes.

I got them today in the mail. They were loose and clacking around like teeth in this damp cardboard box. I didn’t know what I was looking at. At first. 

What a fucking mess.

I knew he was recording things, but I didn’t know what, or how much. Or for how long or - I didn’t know.

I thought there might be a note inside or something, like a message or an instruction. Like he’d tell me what to do, how to fix this. And that’s - that’s crazy. Because this can’t be fixed, right? It can’t be fixed. It can’t be fucking fixed.

Fuck.

I’m going to transcribe them. 

And I’m not much with a typewriter, it’s - probably going to take me forever, and I’ll probably mess it up or something. But it’s - something I can do. And I don’t really want to listen to all this shit - just so you know, it feels gross and invasive and fuck you Henry for making me do this. I don’t want to. I didn’t want these.

But I can’t think of any other reason you would have sent me this unless you wanted me to - listen. And maybe this will give me something to do, something to focus on. Keep my hands busy. Figure out exactly who you were, and what you thought was happening.

Okay. That’s it. This already sounds way too dramatic and more mysterious than it actually is. Because we know the truth, right? I know the truth. Even if I don’t want to admit it (and the truth is I miss you. I know you probably won't ever read this, when would you read this? But I miss you, I miss you. I’m sorry.)

Cassette 1-1

My name is Henry Mitternacht.   I am 35 years old.  I live at 12 Queen Street, Bleakness, Saskatchewan.  It is - what day is it?  February 13th, 1967.  These are facts.  

What else, what else? Mitternacht means midnight. That’s what my mother told me, I don’t speak German, but it sounds right. What reason would she have to lie about something like that, except a potential flair for the dramatic? It’s something she must have given me, perhaps, passed down in her blood like  it was fallen arches or hemophilia.  My mother was an actor once, and a poet.  Before she came here.  People in this town used to look down their noses at her, squint at her through suspicious eyes.  ‘An actress,’ they would say, like any moment she might start screeching Beckett at them.  

Admittedly, that was years ago.  Now she is one of the locals, going to church, knitting blankets for - I don’t know, anyone who needs a blanket.  No one looks at her with suspicion. Now they just look at me.

My father is Ewald.  Was. Ewald. This is important.  He owns ... owned the grocery store on Main Street.  I work there bagging - worked there.  Bagging groceries.  Difficult work, evidently, as I’ve been forced into early retirement. 

Not really. But I am taking some time off to - focus on my health.  I have been - as mother says - unwell.  The sort of ‘unwellness’ that is not discussed in polite company and oh, Bleakness is nothing if not polite.  On the surface anyway. On the surface, all the dirt is swept flat and clean, but take a spade to it, dig down into the black and you will find worms.

I have lived here all the days of my life.  

We used to have a hospital, and I was born with a heart that didn’t want to beat until it finally gave in to pressure and expectation.  The hospital closed soon after, as everything here does.

I’d barely call Bleakness a town, just a cluster of houses and shops on a flat stretch of dark prairie.  They make jokes about the prairies being flat, and Bleakness certainly lives up to the stereotype.  

It is flat like the flat of an axe.  

A string of piano wire or a line of morse code.  

Dot dot dot - dash dash dash - dot dot dot.  Mayday mayday.  

Please.  Send.  Help.

In the winter it is deathly cold and in summer the earth boils and at night the sky is pitch black and the size of the sea. Most people move away if they can, but I - can’t.  It’s my mother, of course, after everything I - don’t want to leave her alone.  She shouldn’t be alone, not here.

I am speaking to you now - recording this, because - in case someone is listening in.  I don’t want anyone to say these things aren’t true or that I imagined anything. I can’t trust people not to change their stories, they’re always changing their stories, and too many of them are -

(creak of door, footsteps)

(woman’s voice - Ida, Henry’’s mother?):  Henry, are you talking to someone?

Henry: I’m making a phone call.

Ida: Sorry darling, I didn’t realize.  I just heard you alone in here. Have you eaten yet? I’ve made sulz if you want it. Your pills were on the counter -

Henry: I’m on the phone.

Ida: All right, darling.

(Door shutting).

Henry:  Souse of sulz, for those of you who did not grow up in small-town German desperation, is a mass of pork meat and gelatinous fat.  I cannot stand the smell of it, and our house always smelled of it when I was a child.  It still smells like it now, I don’t care how much vinegar she pours on it.

What was I saying? I was talking about - these tapes. These tapes will be my proof, my record of events. If anyone finds out I’m doing this, and I don’t have the proof, they might -  say I’m crazy.  

People already say I’m crazy. 

Luckily, I don’t care about people.  

My father is dead.  That is another fact. He died when I was ten years old.  One doesn't want to make themselves the centre of the universe around which every unhappy accident revolves like a planet but, in this case, it was my fault.  I believe it was my fault.  

It was my fault.  

It was February and we were driving. We shouldn't have gone out, and I didn't want to.  It was cold as chattering teeth, a treacherous night, impossible to recover from.  What snow we'd had in January had hardened into a crust that covered everything: the roads, the trees, the people.  My dad had to scrape the windshield of his truck for three years before he had enough clear glass to see through.  He was taking me to hockey try-outs in Kindersley.  I'm certain you can imagine how thrilled I was about it.  I was - well I suppose you don't know me, don't know what I’m like.  I was - not the kind of boy for whom hockey held any sort of interest.  I was - a different sort of boy then.  

Different sorts are not always tolerated in Bleakness.  They certainly weren't tolerated by my father.

Not that he was a beast or a brute or anything.  I didn't get much more than the occasional cuff to the side of the head and only when I probably deserved it.  I was a difficult child, as I'm sure you have guessed.  I had a lot of loud opinions and big words.  I read too much - that was what my father thought.  Read too much and spent too much time alone.  So he did what he could to connect with his queer little son, but he much preferred to keep his distance, and I preferred that too.  There's only so many baseball gloves you can buy a child before you realize that they're never going to be the next Joe Sewell.

But that year, something happened to my father - some spark reignited in the empty chambers I'd once occupied in his heart, because he suddenly took an interest.  

It was hateful, frankly - having this near stranger watching me when I came home from school, asking what I was up to, asking me what I was reading even. 

Jesus, once he invited me to go ice-fishing with him and his friend from the Lion’s Club.  Just us men, sitting around a hole in the ice, talking about - what - sports? War? Luckily my miserable body came through for me and became spectacularly ill before I had to make up an excuse or fake my own death, and I was able to spend a day in front of the fire with Daphne Du Maurier.  My mother made gingersnaps and gave me tea with lemon.  

Bliss.

Isn't that sad? I can remember a limited number of things about my father, but my fondest memories are the narrow escapes I had from his company.  Sharp little moments of triumph.

So it was February - just like it is now - and I was ten, and my father got it into his head that I should take up hockey.  His friends' sons were all playing, and while Bleakness does not have a rink, there was a rink one town over. My father had the absurd notion that hockey would build my confidence, and - even worse - that I would develop some sort of masculine athleticism that he’d found lacking in my bony ten-year-old self thus far.  I can’t fault the man for trying.  I made it clear that I would not be going and that I hated all the boys in my class and they hated me right back (this wasn’t strictly true, Erik Chow was serious and too smart for his own good -which I generally approved of - and I tolerated Joshua Gillen because he shared his comics and laughed when he didn’t understand me instead of socking me and calling me a fat-head.)  

My protests fell on deaf ears of course.  When my father set his mind to something, especially something involving my self-improvement, there was no stopping him.  We drove out in the darkness to Kindersley, tires spinning on the lonesome prairie road. Upon arrival at the rink. I shortly revealed my complete lack of potential, mortifying my father in front of his flannel-wearing peers.  I think I may have run headfirst into the boards and gotten a nosebleed but - maybe that’s just embellishment.  

This was all a long time ago and I’ve - things have happened since then.  Things that - make some of this a bit difficult.  To remember.

So my father took me home early - in disgrace, naturally.  He didn’t speak to me for most of the ride, just ground his teeth together like he could gnash his way to a better son.  That suited me fine, I excelled at staring out windows into the endless snowing night. I’d been raised on the prairies after all.  

We were halfway home, about thirty minutes out of town, when the car blew a tire.  This would not normally be a problem - my father kept spares - but the powder of snow on the road hid a layer of ice as shining and black as onyx. As he tried to keep the car steady, he over-corrected, landing us in the ditch on the opposite side.

We barely made a sound as we came to a stop, just a soft whomp like the smack of wet wool.  And there we stayed.

“Fuck bastard shit-ass truck.” My father let loose a spew of expletives that I still remember, horrified and thrilled by the sudden linguistic violence, the kinds of words I could read as I liked but by no means was allowed to say.  Our situation - stuck in a ditch, in the dark, in the freezing cold - did not strike me as desperate.  My father was so brutally competent, I half expected him to lift the truck free with his bare hands.  That's one thing I'll say for my father - I may not have felt loved or understood or seen when I was with him, but I certainly felt safe.  

I think that night was perhaps the last time I felt safe for - awhile.

He tried to rock the truck free, tried slamming on the gas, tried pushing, but there was nothing to be done.  We were there for the foreseeable future, or until one of the other boy’s fathers came down the road to Bleakness. That was too long to wait, and my father was a man of action.  He had a pack of emergency candles which he lit, lining them all along the dashboard like a birthday cake.  He said, "listen, Henry. Kindersley isn't that far back, I can walk it in an hour.  I’ll probably run into someone before then anyway.  You stay with the car and I'll come back for you. Turn the car on, just for a minute or two every so often.  Don't you leave it running and don't you fall asleep or the battery will die and there'll be no getting out of here in the morning.  You understand?"

When he opened the door, hinges creaking in the cold, I would like to tell you that I said I loved him.  

That I told him to be safe.  

But instead I - I think I said something like "I didn't want to play stupid hockey. This is your fault," or - a handful of words equivalently awful.  I sneered at him and he left shaking his head, muttering under his breath about what a little S.O.B. I was.  He left the keys in the ignition, and made sure the doors were locked before he started off down the road, boots crunching on the snow.  

Crunch crunch like teeth and cereal.  Crunch crunch away he went.

I waited.  Surrounded by candles, growing gradually dimmer, I waited for him to come back.  

And like the son my father believed I was, I fell asleep.

I don’t know what woke me up. Some days I think it was the sound of someone singing but - that can’t be right.  It was a familiar song, like a lullaby, or - maybe I dreamt that part. The cold must have woken me up, that’s it, the sudden smack of it, hurting my mouth when I opened it to breathe.  I woke up shuddering, pulling my coat tight around myself, trying to find some feeling left in my skin.  The candles - on the dashboard - had all burned out.  They sat there, fat and lifeless in their little tin cups.  

I was all alone.  There were no lights on the road, no sound, not even wind.  The snow had stopped falling and the sky was clear.  The only light was the moon, and that night it was huge and yellowed like the teeth of a leering, delighted stranger.  

I wanted to be home.  I wanted my dad to be coming up the road in a friend’s car, ready to berate me for falling asleep.  I wanted to be anywhere other than here.

Frost had gathered on the windows while I slept and - I’m certain I remember this - it had a strange pattern to it.  I’ve sketched it since then, just so I don’t forget - it has to be real.  Each window was covered with five long lines of frost curling out from a thick centre.  It gave the impression of hands, like each window had a long-fingered hand scraping at the glass, trying to get inside.  I was grateful that my father had locked the doors, certain that if he hadn’t, those long cold hands would have touched me while I slept.  

Would have reached beneath my skin and turned my blood to ice.

I was becoming a bit panicked. I tried the keys but the battery had died, or the engine was frozen or - something.  Even if the truck had started, I don’t know what I would have done.  I wouldn’t have been able to get it out of the ditch. 

I felt like crying but I also felt angry.  Angry at my father for leaving me, angry at myself for being miserable at hockey, angry that I lived in a tiny town with awful roads and hideous winters instead of somewhere warm and cultured with architecture and a theatre at the very least -

I was ten years old. There was a lot of anger in my small heart.

That was when - now this part is true, even though it feels unreal sometimes.  Can the cold make you hallucinate?  I should have asked the doctors that.  Maybe - no, I remember this.  

I remember this. It’s a fact.

The trees that lined the road trembled.  The branches snapped and bowed as something made its way out of the woods.  I couldn’t see what it was at first. Something hidden by the shadows of the trees - something huge and hidden. 

But then it came to stand right in front of the truck, lit entirely by the moon.  I could see it clearly then.

It was a black horse.  

I am not afraid of horses.  

Was not afraid of horses.  

I grew up surrounded by farms and farmers, had ridden ponies at fairs and the occasional birthday party I managed to get invited to.  But this horse -

It was sick, or injured, or something terrible had happened to it.  It could barely walk, shambling as if its legs had been broken and healed poorly.  Some of the joints seemed to bend the wrong way or not bend at all.  It brought to mind almost - a spider instead of a horse.  As it approached the truck, I could see it was starving, ribs visible, even some of the nobs of its spine.  

I was not afraid of horses.  

Any other animal, I might have gotten out of the truck, seen if there was something I could do for it, or a brand that tied it to a certain farmer.  But I knew - some part of me knew that if I got out of that truck, if I approached that horse, something horrible would happen. Something ugly and violent and final.

The horse walked closer, towards the hood of the truck. It lowered its head so it could look right at me.  Gusts of breath steamed from its nostrils in the cold night, and its upper lip was either pulled back or - or just gone.  

It tilted its head back, smelling the air.  I could see the bloody pink of its gums and the huge row of its yellowed teeth, the roots of them black with rot.  It almost looked like it was smiling.  

I remember it scuffing its hooves against the snowy ground and I thought it was going to charge the truck, run forward and smash through the glass and then - then it would have me between its teeth, chewing right down until it hit bone -

The glass was fogging up with my breathing.  I was too afraid to move, the fear like a wall of stone, holding me in place on the frozen vinyl seat. I watched the horse paw at the ground, grinding its huge teeth together. Waiting.  And then I remembered - my father’s axe.  A tiny hatchet that he brought everywhere with him, like his tools and his jerry-can.  It was nothing, barely a weapon, but in the moment it felt like a talisman against the dark. He kept the axe underneath his seat, and I would have to move quickly for it.  I would have to take my eyes off the horse.  I would have to -

So I did. Holding my breath, I leaned over, reached beneath the seat. I felt the wooden handle in my fist, pulled the hatchet out quickly. I cut myself on something, some rusted piece of wire or a spring - I still have the scar across the back of my hand. 

I’m certain that is where I got that scar. I’m nearly - positive.  Sometimes when it gets cold, it almost feels like it’s burning, like the wound is still fresh.

When I sat up, the horse was gone. 

There were still dark track marks on the ground where its hooves had scraped like butchers’ knives, carving away at meat.  But otherwise, there was no sign of it.  

I did not imagine it. 

It was there. That’s a fact.

I sat in that truck, holding tight to the axe, waiting for the creature to return.  I sat there, shaking, until I realized - that the sky was getting lighter.  The night was passing, and I was still alive.  It is a child’s belief that nothing awful can happen in the daylight, and I was a child then. I thought I was safe.  I would be all right.

And then I remembered that I was alone.  And it was freezing.  And my father had not returned.

“What if the black horse found him?” I thought. “What if he’s hiding somewhere or trapped? What if he’s been hurt?”

I had the axe now, and had survived the night.  I felt a strange sense of power, as if I would have it in me to save my father.  Be the son he deserved - or at least the son he felt entitled to.  So I took the axe and the keys to the truck and I unlocked the door.  And here I might be - mistaken but - I seem to remember there was something on the road.  In the tracks our tires left in the thick crust of ice, I remember - something shiny.  Was it just the ice? No it was copper-coloured, I think.  Copper coloured and scattered like stars. Like pennies.

I must be remembering it wrong.  Perhaps there was nothing.

I set out on the road back to Kindersley.  

I kept turning around to look behind me, I remember that. I was frightened that the horse might suddenly leap out of the woods and come after me again.  But the sunlight turned the whole world white and clean. I was suddenly less afraid than - perhaps - I ought to have been.  

It wasn’t long before I came upon the house.

An abandoned, tilting farmhouse, just visible from the road. I thought to myself, perhaps my father had been cold and gone to that house to warm up on his way back to town.  Perhaps he had fallen asleep. 

It was highly unlikely - my father would doubtlessly have walked until his feet fell off before he would admit to having human needs such as warmth.  But it made sense to me at the time.  I was very young and I - had not slept much.  So I trudged through the snow toward the farmhouse - its splintering, grey boarded walls, its windows like sad, sightless eyes, run through with cataracts.

The door was open when I reached it.  

That should have been a good sign, but instead it filled me with unease.  What if I found someone else in this rotten home, what if someone other than my father lay in wait for me? 

The black horse.

Or someone else. I knew enough about our town - even at ten -to know that people sometimes went missing, and not to go down by the train tracks after dark where Strange Men waited, and not to go to the old Peterson Place, never, not even on a dare.

Children still did, of course, but I was a good little boy who listened to his mother.  And no one ever dared me to do anything.  I was not the type to - anyway it doesn’t matter.  What matters is, I was aware of the nature of danger, the presence of threat.  I felt it, in this doorway, I felt it leaking out of this farmhouse. Like the smell of black mould and dead mice, I knew that something very bad was inside.

But I went inside anyway.

The first thing I noticed was the darkness.  It was difficult to see with all the grime corroding the windows, and no wires or lamps to be lit.  I squinted until my eyes adjusted. 

Then I noticed the hole.

In the middle of what once had been a living room or dining room or something, the floorboards had been pulled up.  They had been stacked neatly in a circle and were covered with a scattering of dirt.  As if someone had been digging beneath them, tunnelling below the house.

And - someone had.

There is a phenomenon called terminal burrowing.  

Burrowing - I do not know why the word fills me with such dread, but it always has. It makes me think of skin, think of something digging holes and making homes beneath it.  Under it.  

Terminal burrowing occurs in the last stage of hypothermia.  The body - reverting back to its animal nature - begins to dig, to burrow, to hide.  People have been found frozen to death beneath wardrobes, inside closets.  Any sort of safe, dark, enclosed space will suit the purpose.  

I found my father there, beneath the floorboards of that house.

There were splinters wedged underneath his fingernails, blood sitting in his nail-beds like ink.  His ears and nose were frozen black, and his lips were pulled back in a wide, tight grin.  Later, I overheard my mother say that his mouth had been full of dirt, as if in his last panicked moments he had used his teeth to dig still further underground. 

He was trying to hide. From the cold - or something else. Trying - to burrow.

If anyone tells you this isn’t true, you’ll know that they are lying to you.  You’ll have these tapes, you’ll be able to check. That’s why it’s so crucial to keep a record. They might make you think that you’ve imagined it all, that the pieces are all jumbled in your head but you’ll listen to the tapes and you’ll know it’s not true.  

Henry. You’ll know.

I’m going to talk to other people, record their stories as well. I’m recording phone calls, I’ve tapped the lines. Just to be safe. It’s not just me, it’s everyone here and I’m not making this up. I’m going to - figure it out. I can figure it out, and if I’m careful about it, I’ll have proof.  

There was a black horse.  I saw it.  

(Silence except for the sound of Henry breathing. The silence goes on and on.)  

Henry: Damn it. I’ll just - for research.

(The sound of a rotary phone being dialled. Ringing on the other line.)

Man’s voice (Jamie, librarian):  Bleakness Public Library.

(Silence.)

Jamie: Hello? Can I help y-

Henry: I’m - what are your hours today?

Jamie: We’re open until 6 pm.

(Silence.)

Jamie: Hello?

(Sound of phone being hung up.)

Henry: The Bleakness Public Library is open until 6 pm. And I’m - anyway, that is a fact.

[redwetgrin]