A/N: suicide, references to rape
.
.
.
.
.
i
The family who first built it are long gone, their bones ground into the same dry red dust that characterizes the rest of Lentimas Town. It is sturdy, made of fine, strong bricks and baked clay, whipped by winds from all sides. There are trees leading to the entrance - originally, they had been hoping for a plantation, but then the drought had come and wiped out their lives' work.
The father is the weakest - dreams ruined, beset by a legacy of melancholia carried on from his father, a lover of scotch straight from the bottle, hemmed in by the screeching sound of dry wind-flung dirt hitting the windows. He is the first to go, hanging himself with a length of hemp rope from the beams in the main foyer.
His wife goes the next year, dead of a stroke in her rocking chair.
His two daughters stay for a while, making a small living for themselves by making pottery and selling it in the town market. The youngest leaves on her thirtieth birthday, full of wanderlust and bitterness at the town and the miserable circumstances they have fallen into. The eldest stays, and dies a withered old woman in her sleep.
ii
A man and his wife move in a decade after the previous owners have gone their own way. He is a clay worker, making bricks from dawn until dusk, while she is a seamstress. Though his face grows desert-rugged, tanned by the sun and lined by hard work, her beauty seems to increase with each passing year. Some of the townsmen watch her as she buys her groceries, admiring her mocha-colored legs, her luxurious mane of ink-black hair, her lips like the sweet pink flowers which bloom on the desert cacti when the rains come.
One night, while the husband is molding clay, they come into her house. She invites them in warmly, offering them drinks and food, not knowing what they have planned. Two of the men hold her down against the wooden floor, one ties her mouth shut so she cannot scream, three tear off her clothes, and the leader shows her his pet, a fierce young houndoom with a breath hot enough to send cracks shooting up the clay and brick walls. He tells her that her bones will splinter and split just as easily as this hardy clay will. Roughly, each one has their go at her, laughing and cheering as her eyes run and her skin writhes in pain.
Then, they make a mistake. During his turn, the town treasurer's hand slips and he bangs her head against the corner of a table, causing her to go limp against him. Thinking she is dead, the others flee and leave him to fend for himself. The treasurer panics and hides her body in the library, but when he tries to find his way out, the light in his hand is extinguished and a heavy blanket of darkness falls upon him. Terror seizes his heart like a vise, his throat closing up and his hands clawing feverishly at his lips while he chokes on his own spit, body jerking like a fish.
When the husband returns, he finds his wife laid out at the top of the stairs, not moving at all. He is crying as he closes her eyes, stretching out her corpse on their bed, and slashing his wrists with his shaving razor. The guilty townsmen will find them a week later, bloated with decay, and they will be shaken.
iii
There is a little boy who lives there with his parents and his lillipup. The lillipup is soft and he licks, and the boy is filled with joy for his pet and his pet is filled with joy for the boy. Lentimas is not a place for boys or their dogs, but the two of them make do. Sometimes, if the weather is favorable, they might climb the rocky cliffs behind their house and look for curious - a bit of shell, an old arrowhead, an odd twig, the desiccated remains of some ancient insect unlucky enough to settle down in a desert where the sun rarely shines, and the rains are scarce.
On his tenth birthday, the lillipup dies quite abruptly. The doctor who examines the dog says that the cause is inexplicable, some strange weakness of the heart. The boy is distraught and buries his beloved dog in the backyard, sweating and grunting as he uses a shovel to carve out a burial place for the lillipup. His parents look on, mournful, as their son's hands blisters and he widens the grave, inch by terrible inch, lowering his pet in with shaky hands.
No more than a day later, the lillipup returns. The boy is ecstatic to be reunited with his beloved, but his parents are less sure. They are frightened by it. It must be a stray, they think. Lucky him. Lucky us. Now he will not cry and mourn and he will smile again. But these things do not happen every day. The dog looks like the boy's pet, but it is not quite the same. His mother finds that the dog carries a new, unpleasant stench that refuses to leave even when she wafts the smoke of grasses and flowers through the rooms of the house, or when she gives it bath after bath and scrubs its mangy coat vigorously. His father notes that the dog does not eat as much as it used to, that it does not romp and lick happily as it used to. Instead, it glares sullenly at them from the boy's lap while he strokes its fur with childish naivete, oblivious to the fact that the dog is not quite whole, not quite intact.
Gradually, their little household of four shifts. The boy is woken from his sleep by nightmares of an empty space and a pile of quivering rags. The mother hears a crablike scuttling when she washes in the bathroom. The father is disturbed by the way furniture seems to move around while they are not looking. None of them feel at ease. An undercurrent of anxiety has taken over, permeating every fiber of their waking lives like an itch that cannot be scratched.
A shopkeeper who has become a good friend to the boy and his family finally grows concerned after he has not heard from them or seen them for a month. Walking over to their house with a basket of fresh fruit strapped to his shoulder, he knocks once, twice on the door. No one answers, so he jiggles the doorknob and finds it, surprisingly, to be loose.
Inside, he calls out, asking if anyone is home. He is about to leave when he hears a curious growling. The noise comes from the top floor, in one of the bedrooms. He pushes the door open, tense, and sees the lillipup walking in circles, snapping at its own tail. As soon as it spots him, it gives a shriek (of a definite human quality, he will tell his listeners later) and bolts through his legs, out the front door, where it is never seen again.
The shopkeeper returns to his store, cold through and through, his mind buzzing unpleasantly. Placing the basket on the counter, he reaches for an apple, only to recoil in disgust when his fingers sink easily into a rotting piece of fruit gone the color of dirt. Everything else in the basket is the same way as the apple, he discovers, and he pitches the entire thing out into the trash. For the rest of his life, he does not go near the house again, even though the memory of the boy and the dog remain fresh in his head until he dies.
iv
In the fall, five years gone by, a writer buys the house. He is handsome and charming, brilliant with words, and the townspeople look on him and his doings with a kind of awe. By now, the house's history is known by many, the writer included. He is hoping he will find his own brand of genius in the house, that he will be able to do here what he has not been able to do anywhere else. So he sets up shop, with his desk and his typewriter facing the window, and he writes.
During the winter, he writes for hours. Pages are filed away hastily, fingers itching to press against the keys. What he is writing is profound. Insightful. He has already sent some samples to his publisher, who is lauding the quality of his work, praising him as the visionary of the century. For a time, he does not even eat, living off of praise and that mania that grips writers so when they are in the heat of their work, when the ideas are quicksilver-fast and every word rolls onto the page just right. The feeling that is truly nonpareil. At 10:00, the writer retires to his bed, exhausted but pleased with what he has written today, and what he will write tomorrow, and so on.
By accident, or by chance, he stumbles across the library one day while he is on a break, thinking deeply about the plot points he will cover next chapter and which threads will be resolved and which will not. Leaning heavily against a wall, he imagines he hears a hollow thump. Intrigued, he raps his knuckles against the wall several times before going and finding a box of tools. Delicately, he pries a piece of wooden board (so well hidden that it was practically indistinguishable from the rest of the paneling) away and peers into the gloom of the old library.
Inside, the writer is filled with excitement. All the classics are here: Milton, Alighieri, Joyce, Hemingway, Poe. There are so many books to be read, so many words to draw inspiration from. So much to do. He promptly moves his writing desk and typewriter into the library, yearning to be surrounded by the towering bookstacks and smell the heady musk of old paper. Once he is inside the library, it seems, the ideas come even faster. He is kept awake by ideas jittering in his brain, an angry nest of wasps demanding to be released, to be given form.
During his spare time, he peruses the collection of books, scoffing at the poor fool who would leave and abandon such a wealth of knowledge. One book he finds particularly enchanting. It is a slim black volume, lacking a title and an author (all the better, the writer smiles, as it bears a certain mystique) but filled with pages and pages of poetry. Poems about the seasons. Poems about men and women and children. Poems about sex and lovers. Poems about murder and torment. Poems startling in their complexity, in their ability to evoke emotions that the writer never thought possible. Whoever it was that wrote the book must have been a prodigy on par with greats such as Shakespeare or Frost.
Lines jump out at him. Words. Descriptions of a man with half a soul, a locked chest made of living gold, a soothsayer who divined futures by fornicating with a seviper, a patch of unearthly darkness which would creep up on worlds and devour them whole. Glass lightning. Icy fire. A garden of dead flowers tended to by an angel with three heads and three arms. The writer finds himself drawn to the poems, reading all of them twice in order to better grasp their purpose and meaning.
At the end is a single page left unfilled, bearing only the name (presumably) of the final poem the book's maker had intended to write. "He Who Walks Within", it reads, followed by blank spaces and dots of ink. The writer is greatly troubled by the words. He wonders what the poem would have been about and what the title signifies. He wonders about He Who Walks Within and the shadowy author who penned all the works preceding it, but who failed to finish this last page. It haunts him. It makes him gnash his teeth in frustration as he thinks and thinks and thinks about meanings and words and the poetry in the dark book, about the last unfinished piece. He abandons work on his novel and devotes his time to the book, pondering its meaning, the intent of the words, of language.
The writer dreams. In his dream, he is inside a black room. His own body appears beneath him as a wavering, transparent thing. The room is cold and dry. A pile of rags lies in the room's center, twitching occasionally. He walks towards the pile, touching a scrap of tattered fabric hesitantly. Immediately, it springs into life in his hands, wormy and damp, making him recoil in loathing of that dreadful feeling. The rags coalesce, obtain form and definition. A pair of blue eyes emerge and stare at him, through him, into him.
"Who are you?" he asks.
"I am He Who Walks Within," it replies, simply.
He is curious. "Are you the writer of the book?"
"I am the god of sands, of desert chills and longing." Its eyes grow brighter to the point of becoming entirely white, so bright to look at that it hurts. "And you have come to me with a wish. Tell me what you seek."
"The end of your poem." He is shivering, weeping. "Tell me how it ends. I must know."
"Is that your wish?" it asks, voice rasping, the sound of wind lashing the rocks.
"Please," he begs. "Please."
Gliding across the floor, it wraps him in its cloak, which is warm and soft, and he does recoil but moves to embrace it, the warmth that spreads from it to him and unites them both as one thought, one creature in mind and soul. "So you shall know," it says, white-blue eyes swirling. "The words are yours. All of them. Everything that has been created - they are yours."
He wakes in the library, facedown on his desk, fingers ground to stumps. His vision is swimming, tears and blood. The words are here. Now they are gone. The words have left him and they will not return, will not ever return in his lifetime. That thing took the words from him and stripped him bare.
Desperately, he finds the book where it has fallen on the floor and flips through it. Empty. All empty. The words have deserted. The writer howls and stumbles through the shelves, looking for the books. Gone. Everything is vanished, is no longer there.
"Give them back!" he screeches.
Upstairs, to the old writing-room. He finds a pen, inkless. Into the skin. Into soft flesh.
"Found you," he squeals. "Found you!"
The writer writes, and the house is silent.
v
Once, a tribe had lived on the land where the house stood now. Before the drought had come and killed what remained of the plants, the valley had been fertile. Three prominent clans rose and fell on the valley where Lentimas would be built, centuries later.
There had been a stream, and the rapidash that the tribe had trained to fight in wars all went in and put out their fires and drowned. The grass-dwelling creatures fell ill with blight and corruption. A man stood at the highest point and offered his heart to the ground, but still these things came and did not stop.
A young woman is going to the stream to get water. She smiles at the fish that swim through it, peering at her with their glassy eyes before they swim on. The water is sweet and pure, and she places the jug on her head and turns to walk back to the camp.
She stops, suddenly, and looks down at her feet. A twig has caught her dress. She carefully removes it and walks ahead, squeezing in between a pair of bushes. Again, she must stop. Some brambles have gotten ahold of her dress and resist her attempts to push through them. They hold her tight in that narrow space with a grip like iron. The woman is afraid. With a yell, she tears free of the bushes, ripping long gashes in the material of her dress and cutting deeply into her thighs. Sobbing, she stumbles back to the tents where a healer tends to her cuts and she tearfully recounts what happened.
Their harvest is shrinking year by year. The dirt is becoming hard and packed, resisting their attempts to till the land. The chief says that they may have to relocate if it continues. Already, the grasses are dying and hard stone is jutting out instead.
The chief is the tribe's spiritual advisor, so he leaves his tent at night and performs a ritual that will perhaps help him find out how he can solve the problem of the land growing infertile. He finds a wild animal and slaughters it, casting its blood and innards into a fire to be offered to the Woman in the Moon, who is the patron goddess of his clan and who has often offered him wisdom in times of trouble past. But now she is quiet; her voice does not reach his ear. The moon, which has dwindled down to a tiny crescent, does not answer, but looks down impassively on their tiny valley and observes the land as it devours itself.