GHOST RIVER

Chapter IV

THE GODS OF GHOST RIVER

“This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words,

and indeed in thought.”

- T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

••••

My face pressed into the ground, sand scraping my cheek. I lift myself up… Mist swirls, there is no color, grey, white, and a tinge of black. Eyes adjusting, light-toned rocks appear and disappear between the fog, phantoms of water vapor moving eerily through the strange terrain. Dawn is closing in, but I’ve no sense of time. No feeling in my fingers or toes, no sensations, just sight. A mournful cry breaks the stillness. Distant, chilling, incomprehensible, too organic to be machine, too raw to be animal. Wandering, I wind through pillars of natural stone, compelled by something just beyond my comprehension. Frigid water trickles at my feet, a mountain stream, dissonant, yet another incongruence within the barren desert. Ravening thirst I must quench, desperation, I’m deeply dehydrated. Cupping my hands, I scoop up the liquid, in my palms ripples dance in the muted ambience. I drink, the flavor is clear with a slight mineral aftertaste. Strangely satiated, grateful for this little bit of solace, finally a slice of relief, maybe hope. As if awakened from a dream, awareness returns to my skin, the moisture in the air biting.

Another sorrowful yowl breaks the silence.

My blood runs cold, that sound. Am I in danger? But I’m drawn to the noise, like a moth to a flame, continuing up the watery path, the cold cutting into my feet. Guardian pinnacles of earth give way to stark sandstone peaks. Silhouetted on a titanic boulder straight ahead of me, something strange gathers. Strands of matter, threads of ebony, tissue and sinew, weaving the formless into form. A mound of materialization, muscular shoulders lead to enormous leathery wings, sickle-shaped talons piercing the arid ground. A neck, long, with unkempt fur arises, luminous orbs, tiny rings of gunmetal the pupils, an outlandish amalgamation of canine features. Its visage imbibes that of the jackal, fox, wolf or none of the above, it’s as though the being is just an approximation of things that exist in the tangible world. The glow of daybreak permeates through the feathery tips of the creature’s mane as it lets out a deafening howl with the rising sun.

I stagger backwards, nearly toppling over. Fibers weft, the vision in the blackness, the fiend in the night, it is she. One being. One curse. Fear courses through me, I must be dead and… and this is hell. The bullet slicing through my back, I died before I hit the water... Or just maybe, this horror, this illusion finds causation in the final wasting moments of the expiration of my mind. That concluding pulse as the oxygen leaves my cells, alone in my dingy basement hostel. Pounding my fists into my head, I scream.

A genuine look of surprise crosses the bestial face. Eyes widening, the inky demon murmurs softly. Soothing, a sensation washes over me, a moment of clarity, calm. Pausing, I take a shallow breath, pushing through ache of my fresh bruises.

“I’m dead… right?”

Bowing slightly, the shaggy fur of her neck flows with the follow-through of her shaking head. A gesture that suggests a tangible answer… an answer of no.

“What the fuck happened? What the fuck are you? What the fuck is going…”

A thunderous roar smashes into me, her ivory teeth bared savagely.

Shadow Flesh

I stare blankly at this… response, paralyzed. The mist of daybreak dissolves, evaporating with the brightening sky. Naked, I feel exposed, nowhere to hide, that animal side of myself creeping forth. Run you fool, run. But part of me is mesmerized, that human addiction, honed in on an impending disaster, the fixation that appears when one observes cars colliding in slow motion.

Calm Stillness

Reverence

The Old Ones’ Rest

The shadowy creature leaps from her perch, slowly traversing the rock with unnatural fluidity, closer and closer. Her form leers over me, easily as tall as the of largest of grizzly bears standing on their hind feet, but her limbs are planted, the idea of this being stretching to its full height turns my blood to sand. The pulsations of cells pushing through the narrow walls of the capillaries in my face grow pointed and sharp. She tips her head to one side, awaiting a reply… a reply left wanting, I can’t discern meaning from her words. She stares, black canine lips curling. She blinks with irritation, a true first.

Sheltered

Storm Passes

Broken One

With the countenance of a bat-like grim reaper, she circles around me, her gaze unbroken. Keeping her within my line of sight, a facet of myself fears she’ll rip me apart. Alive, I still have skin in the game, that great game of survival. Letting out a deep ratting exhale, somewhere between exasperation and fury, she launches herself into the sky. Powerful arms guiding enormous ebony wings, riding the air current, gathering distance, soaring into the rising sun, her silhouette enveloped by light.

••••

Awake. Cobalt heavens greet me, a realm of color. My dream felt so clear, it could be real. Rubbing my eyes, I pull myself up. To my surprise, I’m in the identical location to my sleeping vision, trapped in the same groove in space and time, blond rocky pillars exactly as they were in my dreamscape. Disoriented, I study the waking world, the sun just a hair higher in the sky, saturation fitting my expectations of materiality. Am I still asleep? Was I conscious?

I look down, clothing returned, my shirt still crusty with dried blood, the entrance and exit of the bullet torn through the material. My hands are raw, throbbing, flesh sheared to pieces by a day of clinging to stone. I breathe deeply, the aching cramp in my side visibly improved. I must be hallucinating intermittently; it’s the only thing that makes any sort of sense. That creeping thought, could Nico have spiked my water bottle? Sounds on brand for him.

Tissue denaturing. Ebony fur. Violent eyes.

I clutch my head.

Nico’s eyes wide. Haunting sound. Meat and sinew raw. Blood pooling.

I feel numb. What if it’s all true, all of it? Reality is sliding away, a whole nightmare world of monsters stalking the darkness, but by all accounts it’s at very least, half true. Nico is a one-man horror show, a murderer, abandoning me to die alone in the desert. Somehow it’s easier to accept that my mind is dissolving into trauma induced madness. Those silver orbs of chaos, pure malice, imbedded in her houndish features, a thought too frightening to accept. Pushing it down deep within me, I try to swallow my distress. Okay, what do I know with certainty? Start from there, break it down into small logical chunks. My ruined shirt proves that Nico shot me. But the absent injury, therein lays the incongruity, that jarring missing piece of the puzzle. Could it be Dizzy’s blood? Somehow, he was wearing my clothes when he died? Possible, but unlikely, I can’t rule it out.

Burning. Leaking. Am I dying?

No matter what happened, I’m in the wilderness, by myself, no gear or resources… lost. A feeling gnaws at me, heavy like a stone in my gut, Nico is dead, I can’t shake it; somehow I know it to be true. But, why? Did I kill him…? Who knows what I’d do if I where in the midst of an involuntary psychedelic trip, but conscious me isn’t a murderer. I’m in full control, weight in my feet, standing steady to keep the anxiety at bay. I don’t even carry a gun, just a knife, and only sometimes. I frantically search my pockets to be greeted by… nothing. See, no utility knife, no wallet, and no phone. Just a runner at heart, so vulnerable, unbearably soft, I slip away from confrontation. I don’t antagonize, standing stoic, silent. I’m a stone on the ground while the world carries on around me… without me.

Did she destroy him? Violent eyes, snarling maw… Is this beast something I cooked up to keep my mind from fracturing like an eggshell? That mental paralysis eating me alive…

Shadow Flesh. Ink in water…

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

A breeze on the morning air sends a chill down my spine. It’s a welcome relief from the sweltering day before. A healthy reminder of where I am, an anchor holding me to materiality, keeping my mind from spinning. I lift myself up, the sand grains tumbling from my tank top. My ravenous hunger and thirst washed away by some unseen force, strangely whole, maybe, I’m even comfortable?

Looking out upon the vast landscape, recognition adds to my tether to the tangible. The famous landmark, O’chohca, stretches out to the west, ribbons of rock visible from across the basin. From my vantage point, I’m standing upon a great sandstone mountain above the valley. A distant black thread snakes through the bluff to the west, could this be the road from my memories?

Vivid ashen light pours from the thing’s throat…

Shuddering at what I truly hope isn’t my recollection. I pull my wandering thoughts aggressively back to my task, I might only be a mile or two away from where I lost consciousness the second time. That is, if I can even trust my brain… Pushing these thoughts from my mind, all of this is irrelevant, I need to find people or a town… the City of Vermillion. If I just cut straight west, I’ll hit civilization eventually. In all of this devising, scorching sun climbs higher, unforgiving, the frying pan is heating up. I need to move. My gut sinks, same shit, different day, why do I always end up high above where I need to be, with no easy way down.

Box canyons… right!

I hate it, but it’s the only way. Removing the greasy unwashed hair from my eyes, I pull thick strands behind my ears. I need to see without obstruction, tumbling into the abyss doesn’t seem like a great way to die. Shaking the powdery sediment from my boots, I start forward, tiptoeing through that shallow trickle of water, once a phantasmal stream in my dream, larger than this now tiny string of puddles. Carved by wind and rain, crags in the rock loom over me. Branching into a series of small two-story canyons, I pick the artery furthest to my right. I can only trust my gut, so far I’m alive… so far so good. I delve into the miniature chasm, a labyrinth, maybe there’s a Minotaur awaiting me at the end… Or something worse, with raven fur, the pure essence of rage so palpable, it gave itself form… a body.

Soul of the storm.

Wandering through the gaps in the rock, the path grows unnervingly narrow, only to widen as I find myself contorting my slightly wide shoulders through the opening. I find myself tracing the tips of my fingers along layers of ancient sand that sweeps before me. The fossil of a small shelled creature tumbles from the wall. I pick up the being from another time, reminded of splashing in the creek with my bother, searching for mineral treasures, all those summers ago. My fingers dance across the invertebrate, sienna and scallop-like, but with features suggesting something foreign to the world I know today. An ancestor spirit telling stories of prehistoric deserts touching a long vanished coastline, written in these grainy walls, long before cities, long before man, and maybe even, long before dinosaurs. I pocket this find, maybe a sign that somebody is watching over me.

A gust whistles through the crag, the wind feels like it’s taunting me, laughing at my foolish moment of nostalgia. That little twinge that puts unbearable pressure on the furrows of my already collapsing mind. The path meanders, and fractures, keeping to the right, I’m still moving slowly down in elevation, crawling towards my incremental goal. The warmth of the day doesn’t touch me, sheltered in this river of stone, weight in my heavy boots, grounded, identity lost. I’m this place and this place is me.

Dizzy’s ruined body. Bats and moths.

Walls shorten as the depth of this once domineering path becomes level with the ground. My passage opens to a cliff edge, the dauntingly magnificent landscape crystallizes into my vision, below me, an immense box canyon creates a curving horseshoe in the desert. It stretches deep, its fair walls mocking my progress. There are overhangs, but no clear path to descend… this will take some rock climbing. I sigh, my heart dropping. I don’t want to even estimate its depth, the end result will be my death, no matter the height, if I misstep.

I can do this! For the first time in days, I’m not fighting exhaustion, my mind alert, my muscles tremble with manic energy. The idea of a cigarette doesn’t seem nearly as satisfying as it did yesterday. I tear two strips of cloth from the bottom of my ruined shirt and wrap them around my damaged palms, every tool I have helps.

Moving carefully towards the edge of the ravine, I’m light on my feet, my roots as a dancer returning. I traverse the sides, analyzing every ledge, every crack, and every fissure. About a hundred and thirty feet from the southern tip of the box canyon, there seems to be a sturdy continuous overhang that extends just enough to place my boots on it. It’s a good starting place. If I get stuck or my path ends, I can traverse back and try again.

“Here goes,” I mutter to myself.

I place my foot onto the cliff edge, grasping the wall with my battered hands. It holds. I inch my boots down the path. Still holding. Good. Again. I'm aloft. Good. Again. I'm traversing the block with ease. Descending, twenty, thirty, fifty feet. I glance at the valley, so deep and distant, it has a pale blue hue. My stomach sinks, vertigo hits me like a train smashing into a wall. Yesterday, dissociation was my friend, today reality is punching me in the face. Fuck heights. I cling desperately to the protrusions in the rock, grasping the threads of my thoughts, trying to stave off a full-blown panic attack.

Panting, tears streaming down my face, I focus on my breath. One, two, three, exhale. One, two, three, inhale. One, two, three… Keep it even. Find composure. Don’t hyperventilate. Sensation creeps back into my fingertips. It’s working! Calm washes over me, and my freak out fades as quickly as it appeared. Forwards sixty feet, seventy feet, eighty feet. Moving quickly and assuredly now. Piece of cake, I’m taking this at just the right pace. My confidence is soaring; by the end of this I will be the best human at traversing box canyons. My path is narrowing, only the balls of my feet anchored to this ribbon of stone. I’m not worried, the path continues, wrapping around the edge of the cliff, uninterrupted. It looks like it widens! Yes!

CRACK!

Pebbles skitter. My esophagus is in knots. I’m on my back. Floating. Falling. Plummeting.

Well fuck.

Time dilates. I’m weightless… cloudless sky and the canyon wall. At least I won’t witness the ground as my brain splatters out of my ears. Surrender... I tried.

Shooting towards me, onyx smoke, a column of darkness, an inconsistency juxtaposed against the radiance of the summer day. Just another coping mechanism, my mind getting one final delirious moment, the last flickers of consciousness scrambling to comprehend its own demise. Out of the shadow, two points of silver light, no…too large to be points, materialize. The haze is alive, gnashing ivory teeth emerge from gloom, followed by great leathery wings. Pulled by instinct, I extend my arm, reaching for the shape, even as its maw widens, threatening to swallow me whole.

Blackness…

… Wind roaring, ripping past my face. My cheek pressed against soft fur, a slow deep heartbeat, an unfamiliar cadence reverbs against my ear. Swaying helplessly back and forth on my stomach, my nerves are reluctant to respond. My senses dulled, all I can do is flex the tips of my fingers and toes, met with that feeling of tiny pinpricks of electricity firing into my extremities. But my vision remains blurry, a fog of amorphous shape and color. My guts drop, the sensation of an elevator in motion. Velocity. The movement below me flows with the natural roll of a tidal wave.

I push my arms to action, to no avail. MOVE DAMN IT! Utilizing all of my will to force myself upwards, I veer, there’s give. Sitting up abruptly, I pull muscles in my abdomen, nearly losing my balance, that nauseating dip hitting the pit of my diaphragm as I careen backwards. Struggling to keep a hold, I clutch a fistful of mane.

GRRRREIIIIIIIH! SKKKKHRREEEEIIIIIHHH!!!

A thunderous cry leading into an unearthly shriek lurches the sight back into me. Clear sky, and the boundless wilderness soar below me, vast and uncaring. My hand death-grips strands of pitch-black hair, peppered with small silver and blue grey filaments, leading to an elongated neck. Oh no, oh no, no, no… It is she. The one place I don’t want to be, trapped on the back of this monstrous bestial creature, is there no escape, stuck in this limbo between the desert and this hallucinatory demon. Back and forth forever, with no end in sight, bound to this… Ouch, fuck!

I’m tossed about violently, her shoulder blades cut into my thighs, her arms rotating with ferocity through her sockets, breaking my spiraling thoughts. A single enormous hateful eye swivels towards me as she tilts her head back. Narrowed as it glares, the tissue in the snout taught and bulging, her fangs clearly bared just out of view. I attempt to make my body smaller, trying to dip my head out the range of her unbound stare. So stupid, why am I even bothering, she’s just going to throw me off and I’ll splat like that damn bug that pelted me in the face. Minutes pass… nothing… what is she waiting for… What does she want from me? I gulp, fighting with myself on what my next course of action should be. Jumping is out, all I can conceivably do is stay? Can I make it less irate? Well, maybe. So stupid, but I got nothing else. Gathering all the strength I can muster, I look into the great stormy orb. The further I descend into her steely eye, the more alien it feels, a constellation of exploding colorless nebulas, an instant in time I can’t describe, somehow intact in a single frame, the pupil a ring of colorless singularity. Nothing like the mammalian features the entity chooses to wear, or really, any animal I can think of. An involuntary spasm shivers through me, as I sheepishly nod in the thing’s direction.

A low rumble reverberates through her neck and chest. Had the specter been smaller, this might have been a purr, but it reads more like an eerie rattle. She turns from me, drawing her attention to an invisible path. She doesn’t seem to care about my presence, one way or another. Her priorities lie elsewhere, over these sandstone cliffs through the webs of unforgiving canyons. Somehow her visage fits within the energy of this place, she is as much a part of it as the rock and scrub. That unnerving feeling of a million invisible specters watching, so deeply integral to the essence of these arid lands. Could beings like her lurk in all of these spaces, just out of sight, forgotten to the bustling world that long left the wilds behind?

The demon is absolutely real… I don’t think I could imagine this much crisp detail, this much sensation, this much force, this much… agony. Releasing that twisted clutch of mane, I push myself forward to avoid getting bruised by her shoulder blades. Stable at last, I thread my fingers around new fibers, careful not to tug, I don’t want to make her furious. Shuddering, the thought of Nico’s spine cracking against the rigid sandstone, her jaws destroying his frail flesh... And that light, that haunting, piercing sound. I know what happens when her rage ignites. Exhaling through my stress… I shake it off, there is nothing to be done, just find my inner peace, and hope I’m not her next kill.

“I’m grateful,” what the actual fuck Riley? I’m genuinely shocked at the words that spill out of my mouth.

Pointy ears twitch. To my surprise, the violence of her flight lessens. I suck in a little more air, waiting for a shift, that return to agitation, but nothing… a state of near tranquility takes her body. Layers of the arid land dance below me as we sweep between the sandstone crags of the desolate cream hued mountain. From here, it looks less like peaks, more akin to a huge continuous blond stone ridge lifted by the geologic forces of an immense plateau. We ascend over the mesa, greeted by verdant prairie sage. A small group of elk browse, one lifts his immense head, half grown antlers coated in velvet catch the sun. A harem of does follow in earnest, their busy grazing interrupted by beating wings. I’m strangely mesmerized by these immense animals, somehow they’re familiar, like greeting long lost friends. Upon seeing the beast, they prance east to avoid our trajectory, yet, she doesn’t deviate from her course; their existence is immaterial to her.

The plains plunge frighteningly into a huge crimson valley, nearly two thousand feet down from the rolling edge of the plateau. My heart sinks, my stomach once again in my throat, that feeling of death, the death I earned this morning, the universe waiting to collect on my mortality with another devastating fall. Her ears flick. She notices my dread; she smells the scent of it on me. She glances back, that same petrifying eye lingering on the sad excuse of a person I am. She huffs, the way a hound does when it itches to get a finer taste of a delectable aroma. A peculiar tide of warmth smashes into me, the same sensation deep in my chest, the intensity turned up. Unbalanced, I try to wrap my head around what just happened, did I just get walloped with euphoria? Exhaling, the execution is brutal, chemicals in the mind aren’t supposed to transition with such ferocity… but I appreciate the thought. I examine the valley, the distance growing less disorientating, that biological glow lingers, what the ancestors might have called good medicine.

We coast into the basin, her wings fixed, the invisible currents of air guiding us, the thermals lose strength as we descend until we are only a few stories above the ground. The juniper branches so close, I can nearly reach out and touch them. Flight is a powerful experience; I’m insignificant, but also colossal at the same time. Within and without. The once rusting ground peppered with desert shrubs abruptly spills into a vast gorge. It’s hair-raisingly deep, that same fair rock as the immense ridge guarding O’chohca makes up its sheer walls. Wings folding, the shadowy demon dives into the pit, accelerating, but with my anxiety quelled, all that is left is the thrill. A treacherous olive river snakes through the canyon, bending dramatically from side to side, the bleached rock sliced open with this natural saw, millions of years of the water’s relentless grinding, the end result breathtaking to behold.

Ghost River Grants.

It occurs to me, this watery path must be Ghost River, another sight I’d hoped to leave well in the past. But something in the lizard part of my brain tries to engage with the entity again, the words falling out of my mouth before I comprehend what I’m doing.

“You dragged me out,” I shout manically at the beast. Shit… this is how it ends, she’ll just dislodge me from her back and let the river consume my miserable hide.

That single eerie orb pivots into view, as a wary grunt emanates from her black lips. Okay, not being propelled to my death, that’s a good sign… But maybe less talking from me would be a good idea. I run my fingers through the soft mane, a gesture that I hope conveys my appreciation. She turns away from me, only to drop another few hundred feet. I could get used to this, wind ripping past me, calm enveloping me. I stretch out my arms opening up my fingertips, wisps of wind flowing between the digits, imagining her wings are my own, it’s complete freedom, my sadness falls away, a lost and distant thing. Accelerating, my heart pounds in my ears, as we bank left and right between the goosenecks of the ravine.

Light breaks the shade of the canyon wall, the fractured gorge shrinking in the distance, an abrupt end to the structure I’d grown to assume was eternal. The pastel tinges of the desert reflecting off of distant buildings, the City of Vermillion, on the left, it has to be. Early afternoon sun pierces brilliantly through the sky, her shadowy wings glowing with translucent orange as the gleam catches them. Too small to be a major stop on any map, but too big to be considered little, is an apt way to describe the town itself… a blot on the crisp western horizon, part industrial town, part mild agricultural municipality, and part oversized truck stop. Maybe a population of ten thousand or slightly more, but who can really tell. At a distance, only the downtown appears to have two story buildings, the rest is flat and uniform.

The enormous bat-like creature stays southwest of Vermillion, resigning herself to stay unnoticed. With the grace of a swan, she lands on the bank of Ghost River, a comfortable span from the first disappointing houses. Still at last, I scramble to safely dismount the slanting spine of the demon. Instead, I manage to tumble with the coordination of a drunk person, headfirst off of her shoulders onto the ground.

THUD!

“Damn it,” I wobble to my feet, unsure if the unearthly being snorted at my expense in response to my clumsiness. Maybe, it’s just my anxious thoughts laughing at me.

My body is surprisingly sore, muscles I didn’t know existed in my slight frame are making their presence aggressively known. Turning to the beast, she sits on short legs, her lengthy winged arms propping up her muscular chest, a pillar of black, unkempt fur, and bitterness. For all of my height, I likely only stand to the base of her towering neck. She leers, her face inscrutable. As before, I reach out to stroke the ruff around her neck, one last expression of respect… and maybe, thanks. The visage of form disintegrates though my fingers, ebony mist, strange particles carried by the arid current off into the distance, embers of the sun glinting off of their surface, until there’s nothing left.

I’m alone again… Alone again.