Penumbra - Chapter 1

Shards of terracotta clay fanned out across the yellow dirt, skipping into Choya bushes and under what was left of the exploded boat. A disquieted critter, maybe a lizard, skittered from underneath the wreckage and into the treacherous thicket of cactus in the failing light. I dropped my Red Ryder down on the boat shell and shook my head. “Not making that mistake again” I muttered to myself. It didn’t matter if the mysterious critter had a diamond ring around its little tail. Nothing was worth going anywhere near a Choya bush.

With gnarled, green limbs covered stem-to-stern in inch-long white needles stretching over 6 feet tall, Choya was called “Jumping Cactus” for a reason. If you so much as brushed into it, the inconspicuously barbed white needles would latch into your skin or clothing. Your well-intentioned response would be to pull away, which takes an entire segment of the vicious cactus along for the ride, turning one puncture into dozens.

I wince, memories of my last encounter fresh in my mind. A low howl drifted over the dusty scrubland, the shifting skies turning from ochre-yellow, to purple like a sprig of lavender. The bright sun had disappeared behind the Yucca Valley ridge half an hour ago, and the air was beginning to lose its vitality, taking on that chill that heralds the deserts army of dangers.

As if to confirm, a pair of neatly synced howls, higher in pitch, replied to the first. A chorus of *yip* and chortling barks followed, most distressingly, from the other side of the blasted boat from where I was sitting. The pack of coyotes that usually hung around the house in the evening was separated. The low howl was west of where I was standing, the enthusiastic young chorus of replying pups was southeast. The pack would be merging soon, and I was in between.

It’s way past time to go home, I resigned. Biting my lip and picking up the BB rifle, I flung the last of the small clay pots out into the green cloister of spiky Joshua Trees. They eagerly grew out of the shade on the other side of the boat shell. The trees came to life in a flutter of wings and grey tempest accompanied by an urgent “pwheepwheepwhee…” that grew quieter as the pair of Mourning Doves evades my carelessness.

I allow myself a moment of regret at being a colossal jerk. But the ongoing performance of howls makes me grimace dramatically at the trees and amble off southwest towards home. The coyotes of the southern Californian desert are no bigger than your average medium-sized dog. And they are typically half starved, mangy, and cowardly to a fashion. But you never took a chance when there was a large group of them. That same weakness broods a desperation that flies in the face of logic and reason, and I didn’t think my BB gun was going to dissuade the pack from the prospect of a meal.

I passed the “slag pile”, my name for a loose mound of blackened charcoal next to an old metal kiln, rusted through and riddled with conspicuous holes. Squinting, I peered into the gloom between a pair of Yucca plants, eyes tracking an odd silver glimmer sliding around the backside of the shooting, jagged flora. Everything in the desert seems to be jagged, pointy, or poisonous. Sometimes all 3. But the silver, smoky glow was foreign. It captured my attention as quickly as a wildfire.

I rubbed my eyes on the collar of my shirt, my vision clouded by the sweat brought by evening heat. Edging around the perimeter, the sight didn’t make any immediate sense. The ground on the other side of the Yucca was covered in a thick smoke; not a roiling, choking murk that signaled a fire nearby, but a thin, indecipherable haze that clung to the ground, sweeping silently toward my feet. It hid the rocks and choppy scrub on the desert floor, giving the appearance that the world had dropped off, miles beneath me, and I was aloft on a sea of pale mist. Lighthouses of green Joshua and Yucca, twisting spires of sparse sagebrush, and angry Choya seemed to rise through the roiling vapor from distant shores below.

The sea at my feet did not reflect the ocean overhead. The sun had long set, and its dying luminance was a poorly-recalled story, its legend stronger in memory. Instead, the mist was a mute curtain of curls, having danced its way around my ankles now. My breath caught in my throat with a sharp sound. I didn’t know what to expect from what my eyes were seeing. But the mist brought no discomfort. No sensation at all, really.

Instead I felt a keening in my gut. What the vapor lacked in sensation it brought on instead in razor-sharp grief and mounting turmoil. My breath was gone, replaced by short gasps as the weight of mortality was seated on my shoulders like a ruler seated on its throne. Flashes of eternal longing and unspoken words consigned to silence robbed me of reason. I was an old man who let opportunity pass him by, the stench of cowardice my final fragrance. I was a twisting zephyr on a field without trees, my motivation spent and the product of my existence too meager a sum for words. I was shattered faith and tight fists clasped around an infant, wretched in agony and begging to hear its cry, and noxious umbra closed in as I knew I never would.

My eyes were clamped shut, but I still witnessed countless visions of terrifying loss. My ears were a torrent of crashing woe and regret. I smelled only blackened stone and felt nothing through the convulsions brought on by what felt like the entire sum of the world’s lamentation.

This seemed to go on for an eon, not that I could comprehend that span of time. So deep was my incarceration in abhorrent and alien regret not my own, I hardly noticed the mist retreat from my ankles. It swept southwest toward the house on the back of an unseen mare, a formless rider on an invisible steed. Collecting in the center of the clearing, it began to rise, leaving the expanse of dark dirt uncovered again as it gained form.

Two legs manifested first, toes without cover, lithe and muscular from the shin to the quads. As the hips and torso came into being, so too did a pair of clenched fists, disjointed from the body and hovering, wrist and arm following behind.

My head had cleared by now, and the surreality of the situation was beginning to come home to roost in my mind. Something was very wrong with this. I shouldn’t be here.

Surprisingly, a second pair of hands formed, hovering just above the first, an arm forming in imitation of the pair of now fully formed arms below it. The chest of the vapor-being was forming. Its torso from navel to collarbone was poor in detail, as it was still only roiling vapor that constituted this form, but a pair of holes sat where its sides should be, passing through the being like a pair of air intakes. It reminded me of the engines on a fighter plane.

All four arms connected to the main body, finalizing in a head without facial detail. The last touch was for the remaining smoke, still drifting in a gentle cyclone around the figure, to form into a crown of eight long braids that extended down the back of the figure and drifted to the floor like a bridal veil. A pair of piercing, glowing yellow orbs sat where eyes would be. As I stared, paralyzed, it became clear the eyes were not glowing in the traditional sense. It was more like they were windows. Ovular and set in a facade of clear smoke, the dusk and dawn shone through them both as though the sky behind the figure was one of nautical twilight.

It seemed the form was female, and it stood and regarded me. Its shape was unclear, yet lithe and curved. Its eight braids trailing behind it, and Its bare feet hung pointing at the earth as it hovered just above it. The silence of approaching night was heavy and sobering. No gales crooned. No doves hoo’ed. The meeting of Coyotes had not called out since I spotted the mist, and their cries did not puncture the gloom now.

I could not find speech. My mouth simply opened and closed and my head shook slightly in disagreement. My mental faculties were returning, despite the incredulity of that I just witnessed, but words eluded me. As I attempted to speak, the figure angled its head to one side, pointing one of its eyes of dying sunlight at me in a cautionary glare. It shook its head ominously, mimicking my dissent. It raised a finger to the space where its lips would be, and its yellow eye narrowed.

Silenced by this imposing specter of smoke and sunlight, I could only stand, mouth agape as my hands dropped to my sides. I took one step back when a voice filled my head like a too-early alarm when you haven’t slept enough. The voice was deep but feminine, a tone like wind though an unexplored cavern, or like a spring rupturing fresh ground and cascading over my ears like a newborn river.

The work is complete. The gloaming time has come. Wellspring of clarity, denial of purpose. I have riven the mountains with my shout. The earth will render up its remorse. I will swath myself in a robe of its winds, her glimmering depths are to be a jewel upon my finger. No tears fall from my face to succor the parched seas. For you, child, are the vessel to the wages of my will, the goblet in my church, and I am its ecclesiarch.

I struggled to comprehend what I was hearing. A church…? What was gloaming?

Struggle not your fate and the burden shall be light. But should you instead cling to senseless purpose, you will suffer. You are the wick upon the wax of your kin. The brighter you burn, the more their agony consumes you. Bear this well, I will complete my work, and you shall feel no more.

The voice faded, and the figure turned from me, its braids beginning to dissimilate into fog again. My throat tightens as questions begin to bubble up. My fingertips tremble, pins and needles rising with every attempted syllable.

“What did you do to me?”

With the emergence of those words, the figure vanished on a gust of wind. Almost immediately, her threat is made very clear as the weight comes crashing down on me again. Only this time, the world yields to utter night as my body hits the dirt.