Inheritors

The haft of the axe feels familiar in my hands as I look out through the darkness.  The rain lashes against me, but I was soaked to the skin the moment I walked outside, and I don't imagine I can get much wetter. Lightning slithers across the sky, touching down somewhere to the east, somewhere in the valley, and for a moment all the land is bathed in a pale light.  I can see the fence to the corral is broken.  I'll have to see to that tomorrow.  In the meantime the animals are too scared to run away.  Part of me wishes I knew what that felt like.

I take one step, then another, wringing the axe handle in my fists, and then the thunder rolls across the plain, shaking my heart loose in my chest.  I feel it through my feet, in my bones, before I hear it, louder than anything in years, rumbling up through the valley like a megaphone, the mouth of some demon cast down to this purgatory with the rest of us.

Another bolt of lightning arcs through the sky and that's when I see the tracks, an uneven stride betrayed by the footprints, unnatural deep, in the mud, filled with water, already half-drowned in the deluge.  I tighten my grip and turn around slowly in the yard, eyes narrowed against the rain.  Not that it matters.  The land is bathed in darkness and me right along with it, the only light coming from my doorway, weak and tentative, casting shadows more than illuminating.

But then I see it, off to the east, below the horizon somewhere, somewhere in the valley where that lightning hit, there's a glow, faint and cold, but it's there, otherworldly and altogether unpleasant.  It's not much of a light, on a clear night with the moon out you wouldn't see it at all, but in this black it's shining clear across the plain, through the rain and right into my soul.  Then I see the figures moving with their damaged gaits exaggerated against the glow, casting shadows a mile long behind them.  First one, then two.  Then five.  Moving towards the glow, moving down into the valley, and I am afraid.

I hear a heavy footstep on the threshold behind me and I stand stock-still, and suddenly I know that the axe I carry is as useless as the arms that hold it, dead and numb.  I close my eyes tight, trying to will this fate away, but I know better.  Nobody dies in their bed anymore.

It steps down from the porch and I can hear it breathing.  My vision goes white and I think for a second about my end, but then the thunder crashes and, jarring every thought from my head and all there is is the rain and the fear and that thing beside me, slogging through the mud, breathing, breathing.

It moves past me, heading off into the storm towards the valley and that glow, and soon its sound is lost in the night.

Long after it's gone I'm still standing there, breathing slow and hard, and I turn back to my house and walk to it, never again turning my gaze to the valley and that terrible glow.  I bar the door behind me and set the lamp on the table.  I sit with my back to the wall, the axe across my knees, and I wait.



9 December 2013