Chapter 5
The Road To The Past
The Buick chugged along the barren black road, along the man-made scar across the wrinkled old face of the Earth, the American Dustbowl, a pockmark of Earth's earthen cheek. It sputtered along the road like the little engine that thought it could, bumping a little along the rocks of the road that threatened to bring the vehicle to a halt.
The horizon spanned across everywhere, nothing but dust and gritty sand miles wide, the place felt as if it were the apocalyptic battleground of powerful battles years before, so powerful that all life in the area died from the sheer force of the fighters, whoever they may have been.
If you stood in the middle of that barren land, you really did feel like the last creature on Earth.
Courage would've felt that same emptiness had it not been for the Starmaker's gentle whispers of directions as she navigated the road, her tentacles soothingly cool and rubbery against his cheeks, as he carefully turned the wheel left or right. The road was mainly straight but it had its smaller turns here and there.
As they went further down the road, they knew of what was going to be halfway to their destination but hoped it wouldn't come, wishing that they would not be unlucky enough to encounter such a ghost of Courage's past. But in their hearts, they knew it would come.
Ghosts of the past always come when you never want them to.
It was nearing sunset when they reached halfway down Route 13. The barren land now became red like the flesh of a lobster, cracked ground spanning everywhere, the cracks seeming to be crooked mouths gasping for water.
A lone pile of wood was the only thing against the horizon that would disturb the barren emptiness. A dilapidated mess of a shack now fallen into ruin, burnt halfway through with the wood black as night. It looked no longer like a safe little run-down home, but a wrecked place of angered abuse run down beyond the ground, run down right into Hell itself.
Courage caught sight of the top floor remains from the passenger window of the Buick. And his head began to hurt with a whining pain as he reminisced against both his and the Starmaker's will. He just heard it all, felt it all through him...but it wasn't enough.
He turned off the engine by disconnecting the ignition wires.
What are you doing?
"I'm going...home." The word felt like a bullet, from the warm gun called happiness. But this sounds wrong as happiness isn't meant to hurt.
Because this wasn't happiness he felt. This was guilt. He was happy of one thing, but the consequences of guilt overlapped that tremendously, like the shadow of a giant thunderstorm before the lone flower of a field.
But...you will only feel pain if you do go into that place. Why?
"I...want to feel it."
Feel what?
"I want to feel...pain. I want to be punished for...for...what I did." Without another word, he sidled over the seat and exited the car. His paws hit the hot cracked ground toes first. As he did so, he felt nostalgia sweep over him. Whether it felt like the beating wings of the angels or the black cloak of the Reaper himself he could not tell. It was a cool breath to his mind, yet offered a soft breeze of safety and at the same time a harsh gust of guilt. But he knew he had to go forward.
So he did. He walked towards the wrecked remains of the Bagg farm, the lone house skeleton with its burnt out flower boxes and porch roof seeming to offer a welcoming wooden hand to shade you from the unforgiving desert sun. He reached the wooden steps up into the house, the soft thuds like beating hearts under his feet, seeming to mock his existence and encourage his guilt with every thud. He entered the house with the Starmaker still latched to his head, ducking instinctively under the doorway for sake of his companion.
The burnt floor of the Baggs' living room was now cool, but as black as an iron stove, with having another connection to it as well from its condition and the amount of soot and ash that permeated into the wood, infused to form this dark visage of the humble house boards and into the wall where there once was yellow wallpaper.
On the right, Courage saw the stairs leading upwards, burnt through and probably unfit to climb up. Sweeping right was the broom closet at the back and closer to him were the two chairs that Muriel and Eustace used to inhabit, now cooked to black, starchy and crinkled or destroyed. One of them, the chair Eustace sat at and which was closer to the door, was knocked back flat on its headrest. Muriel sat at the further away one, a rocking chair that used to have a stool next to it if she were doing some knitting. But that one, being made entirely of wood, was nothing more than firewood in a poorly little pile of ash and hardened black sticks. For Courage to see such a sight felt the same as the burning of the Eiffel Tower to the French would be.
An oval rug would've been between the chairs and the left wall, which still had the husk of a 1950's era box television against it, complete with wooden box shape, one cooker-style twistable knob, bug-like antennas of two crooked rods poking out and four thick legs.
Beyond that was the kitchen. Courage walked across the room and as he did, his head whined with a migraine, a migraine brought from his ever-accusing guilt.
He saw the familiar face of Eustace. Hatchet-faced with large jutting chin like a steam iron and tiny bifocals with ever angry expression under his scruffy old brown cap. The man also wore green dungaree overalls with yellow faded shirt underneath with those black shining clown-size shoes . He walked towards him, holding something...his shadow he saw in front of him, taking slow deliberate paces, the heartbeat slow and callous with each deep thud.
The flashback subsided and he stood dizzily for a moment trying to refocus. The Starmaker did not say anything but merely observed Courage as he continued his painful return to the only home he ever knew of. He walked into the kitchen, seeing the burnt out cupboards that now held nothing, not even cobwebs. The cooker and sink were a little rusted from abandonment but seemed to age not too badly from the incident of Bagg Farm. The back door which had a badly twisted screen on it lay in front of him, dog door fitted at the bottom. To the right of Courage and against the wall, a table and two chairs had been broken apart completely, perhaps by someone in a rage-
He had it. He reached his pure limit. He could see his own paws before him tearing into the wood like a rabid animal, feeling his voice in his now harsh throat, he had been screaming a lot. His arms grabbed legs and ripped them from each other, table and chairs becoming limbless within minutes. He took one table leg, thick and hefty, almost like a baseball bat. He held the thin end in one paw and patted the thicker end in the palm of the other, as if he was going to be batting.
He'd be batting, alright.
Another flashback, this one felt closer to the truth of his memories. He took one of the table legs before him, but it was burnt enough to be severely weakened. He tried to mimic his memories, holding it one paw and patting his other paw's upside-facing palm, trying to recollect something by the repetition of actions, try and have deja vu lead him with an almost psychic strength.
Nothing. Nothing came. He considered that since he held something in the other flashback, he was experiencing events backwards. So he turned around and headed into the living room, looking at Eustace's much-loved armchair. He tried to summon forth some emotion, anger or sadness even with his guilt trying to hold him back with a feel of painful mockery.
Again, nothing came. The memories would not come of his own willing. They would have to come when they were ready.
He decided to look in the cupboards but found something at the jamb of the back screen door, that he had forgotten about.
His bowl. His small bowl that had COURAGE emboldened proudly on its broad rim. He smiled at it as he picked it up, sniffing the faint traces of the food Muriel gave him, the slobber that resulted from such food and the faint chemical trace of washing up liquid which cleaned it.
That was always a good morning breakfast. Muriel's pie. Such a delicious mixture of fruit and pastry that he felt he is in Shangri-la every time he even saw the mouth watering pastry like a cake, in its tinfoil like a large cupcake except served hot and made differently. The smell was such a tantalising cornucopia that he never ever managed to guess how she made them. An old recipe of her family, she had told him. Perhaps she even told him once, she trusted him that much.
The last time he ever tasted Muriel's elixir-like pie was...that day.
The day when everything fell apart.
He would never have thought that the taste of Muriel's pies to the memories of his tongue would ever have run afoul. But now, they tasted cold and sour, not hot and sweet anymore. His smile just once seemed to have appeared in the sweeter moments of that flashback, but then it disappeared, like the pulse of life on a dying patient, his frown a silent flatline of his happiness.
He turned away from the kitchen, and looked up towards the stairs and the more open roof with its many charred holes here and there as if a giant blunderbuss shotgun had fired through it. The stairs seemed worn down and would probably never carry the weight of a human.
But for a dog and a squid, it might be light enough. With one cautious pawstep, he felt the creak on the first step like a prolonged cackle of welcoming him home, or rather like a prolonged moan of pain for being awoken from its rest.
Either way, the dog was going upstairs. Some of the upper levels had stood strong against the fire, and he knew he could find more about that day if he found anything else.