Yaddo
The spring horde of amorous couples, idle fisherman, and families enjoying their afternoon picnic that had usually haunted the shores of Lake Lonely was absent. It was nearly four in the morning, and over the black water, warm may breeze was lonely & suicidal. It made no difference, whatsoever; nobody could see the spectral longship as it emerged, jumping through the space, trout-like and tall. However, as the beaked prow punched through the surface, for I moment I heard the birds recoil and stop in their early morning song, and felt the wind quiet itself. Then I hurried from the deck, nearly falling over in my haste. In the world of the quick everything resumed; for the flesh world had little sensation for tribulations and agonies of the spirit,
"Mr. Steele, I have no words left to thank you. I am speechless. Just the regulations you had to shirk to get me this far from the official hierarchy harbor… Not to mentions the Spectres…" Steele's offer to sail through the Tempest all the way through to the Lake Lonely, a known tourist destinations that was an hour's brisk walk from Yaddo still made me fuzzy deep inside. Whatever inside meant now when the outside was rotting six feet under the name that was never truly mine.
(Semantics Syv. Semantics, semantics, semantics …)
""Don't mention it, Ms. Plath. Demons or legion men could never stop me from aiding the soul in need. Just watch yourself, alright. Whatever made you come running back here in this state is no business to joke about."
Filled to my teeth with gratitude I knew there was little time for exchange of courtesies; I had to find Zoey before she gets herself in more trouble than she was currently in. I ran through the rotting underbrush that had surrounded the lake, knowing that I am about to emerge upon a hiking trail, leading west; that trail should take me through the small woods back to the tarmac road that encircled Saratoga Springs Golf Course, and then across the Adirondack Northway, new four- lane turnpike always buzzing with traffic, right in the west, part of Yaddo. I hoped I could find my way from there to the Gazebo- Yaddo' s west part was a dense forest, ancient, dark and rarely traversed since the days of the pilgrims. I remember getting lost there once in my breathing days. I was riding a bike fortified into my thoughts and daydreams when I found out that I cannot find my way. It was twilight, and everywhere around me, old black oaks stood like grim sentinels, some of them, entwining their knobbed arthritic branches above the narrow trail, blocking the last blood flow of sunlight. The sense of fear and detachment was the most beautiful and yet most frightening feeling in the world, and I felt the maddening urge to go deeper, to completely lose myself in the depths of this magical place. To find me a place where the leaves are dying in the dew of times long gone, and to lie there and die as the next generation of foliage covered me never to be found. Instead, I found my way back to the old marble Victorian, and wrote like a mad girl. I never wrote so well and so free then after taking my bike to these secluded spots deep in the bosom of the forest; it certainly lacked the friendly atmosphere of poetic outing that was Katrina Park, but the creative rush it gave me was of the different kind; me and the inner, raw natural rhythm of poetry were one.
(One and one and one is three. Me, you and poetry. Forever and ever. You have tried to end it but guess what? Nothing can end despair and loneliness. You might just as well try to tell the seasons to stop changing. Or you might try to end it right now. I have heard Oblivion looks great this time of the year).
I went around the golf course, encircling its tall, white wooden fence. Even it my deathsight, it didn't look so derelict and old like most of the things I have gazed upon in the Skinlands. Sometimes, it seemed to me that golf courses and shopping malls can never die. Small circle of local wraiths that have haunted it, all of them passionate golfers during their breathing years was probably somewhere inside, perhaps listening to the venerable grocer Freemont as he told then for the millionth time his sad tale of his dead-beat son who sold their grocery store to cover his numbers lottery debt down in Atlantic city. It was good no one was out there to see me, because I was a pitiful sight. My hair was wild, the expression on my face was probably murderous and blank since I could sense the Shadow going stronger; it fed on my fear and guilt and I have been feeling a wagonload of both since Five Point café. There was a gaping wound on my shoulder where the relic bullet had struck me. The pain still cut me sharply with each sudden movement and the ectoplasm stained the left side of my work-blouse and my blue business suit a mean dark red. Seasoned legionnaires always said that bullet wounds are not such a big deal when you are dead; McDouglas had been wounded in his breathing days and several times here during the Mayflower rebellion and he claimed that relic bullets barely sting compared to what he felt when a bootlegger shot him in the knee. Good slumber and bit of burned emotional juice always helped (he sneered and said that he had to drink himself to an early grave to witness a world in which happy thoughts were actually helping) and after they'd heal the wounds left no visible scars upon the corpus, unlike claws of the Spectres and Stygian steel. I had no personal experience with getting shot, but I could feel that the pain in my shoulder was strong and persistent, hardly an agony but still worrying.
Turnpike was surrounded with the kind of fence they use to prevent wildlife from wandering into the highway. I walked right through it and continued to run across the turnpike. The Skinlands automobile drove right through me, and trying not to jump back; after all those years of being dead, letting the car come at you at full speed still felt deeply and intuitively wrong sometimes. There wasn't many cars- the only the couple of early morning drivers rushed on towards New York City, gaze of their headlights sternly cutting through the dissipating darkness.
I crossed to the other side embarking upon small stretch of grass. The blades of grass seemed threateningly sharp around my calves, like thin razors ready to cut right through my stockings. I passed through them, and as the breeze leaned them towards me, their sharp tips sometimes seemed to stab right into my ankle, disappearing inside me. In a moment of joyous insanity I remembered that in the first days of my afterlife I had been wondering why our feet don't fall right through the earth since we are insubstantial and able to pass through solid object. When I asked Cletus about, he just smiled and said that we are used to feel about ourselves as natural part of the ground; unlike the other built or grown, living or unloving, sense of ground underneath us is something that had been there since we could remember ourselves existing, and in a way it was more real to us than anything else. Everything could be an illusion, but place on which we stand must be real instead we would lose all the consciousness about ourselves, and our ego would dissipate like dust in the wind. Some people I have known during my breathing days, interested in Indian philosophy considered that prospect welcoming, but to me it was outright horrifying. Things that are, can feel the ground beneath their foot soles, because to float is to fall.
Eternally. I approached the edge of the woods, with spears of grass poking out of my lower legs. They were every bit as dark and ancient as they were forty years ago. The old, wise trees, crooked with foreboding age and yet dignified and threatening, guarded every step of my, blocking the wind and the sunlight leaving the gloomy forest interior untouched. No one could pass, nothing could come in – the place was isolated from outer world, and only the alien thoughts of the trees and shrubbery could live here. Out there around the park, and main Yaddo building the college people, poets writers and artists could laugh, talk and weave their most intimate abstract thoughts and impulses into words and images, typographic imprint of their spirits adding new stars to the celestial parliament of Gutenberg's Galaxy. Out here thoughts and emotions weaved themselves, pure & organic, they spiderwebbed in the calloused tree branches, creating a firm safety net. I felt the ageless presence unmolested by the talk and walked of the living usher me inside. It was there, whatever it was; the hollows in the sides of the trees were its dark, inquiring eyes, grey, almost fossilized bark grown with ivy and mistletoe was its impenetrable armor, protecting it from being truly comprehended by anyone. My ears, sharpened by death were able to catch every sound. Nervous skitter of small animals and scratching noises of insects making their way through the fallen leaves filled the air clogged with damp aroma of decay. Some of the branches sported long green manes of moss hanging down from them, Fairy hair, green and alive, smelling of forgotten ages, scented by solitude and darkness. An electrifying shudder went through me as I soaked all of it in, the shudder of fear, not the throat clenching panic that made my dark side feel alive but good fear, the kind of eerie feeling that made Mary Shelley write Frankenstein or that made thousands of teenagers feel sexual rush when they watch scary flicks in the suburban drive-ins.
There were voices, faint but audible somewhere below the music of the forest that came from the Skinlands. I stopped dead in my tracks. The forest trail led me to the familiar place. There was a slope to my left, descending at a steep angle. It was grown in shrubbery and small oaks with a few decorative Russian pine trees, their pyramidal treetops slanted at impossible angles. The scent of water lilies told me that a small decorative pond was down there, waiting behind the row of trees. For many a time I used to swim in that pond, its waters shallow but cold and refreshing during summer months. Voices were coming from down there, at least three of them, not trying very hard to be silent. I also heard familiar metal clangor and sigh of soulforged armors. Legionnaires! There was a faint hope that Archie had enlisted some aid in looking for Zoey, and I wanted to get to them, but my newly awakened lizard sense, was telling me it was better to be careful.
(Maybe you're just being territorial, Syv. What are they doing on your domain anyway? You haven't invited them or asked them to sort your crap out for you, haven't you?)
Instead of calling for help I sneaked carefully towards the voices, hiding behind the brushes, before walking through them. Soon I came upon the pond. Peeking from behind small pine tree, I noticed a shape on the other shore by the wooden pier. My heart (I didn't know you had one anymore."It's a figure of speech, you bore! Leave me be now!") began to race. It was Archie's treasured relic Corvette, left there door askew. There was something wrong; he would never leave his Vette like that. Then the voices came nearer and I retreated deeper into the forest listening. There were at least two of them- male with the strong commanding voice, and another male, seemingly much younger speaking with a strong New York accent.
"He must be somewhere around here, for sure." New Yorker mused, "He would never leave his car like that."
"Never mind him, Mick" the other spoke briskly. "Centurion Edward wants us to find Plath lady and the little bitch. He is around, but he is unarmed. If he resists in any way, he will feed the Oblivion."
"Maybe we should capture them and sell them down in Bronx." Third voice. Slow, with a pronounced drawl that sounded almost mocking. "I know a man that would pay good Oboli for three thralls, no questions asked."
"You can do whatever you wish with him, but Edward wants bitches for questioning. No doubt he'll have them forged into swords. They know too much already and the big man cannot risk them coming back."
I saw them patrolling the banks, legionaries they were, two of them dresses in plate armor, armed with long spears. Third one seemed different. He was tall and almost unnaturally gaunt with long, dirty brown hair framing his elongated face. All of his features were extended into long unnatural grin, as his sharp eyes pierced the trees along the coastline. He didn't' wear any armor but a green jacket, similar to the one worn by commandos. There was this weird symbol on the breast of his jacket, not any legion symbol, but a black tangled line branching into seven smaller lines on its upper part, reminiscent of the seven- headed cobra extended out of the fakir's basket. Instead of a spear he clutched wicked implement, a machete of black Stygian steel. They were coming towards my hiding, place, now less than twenty feet away from me. A claw of horror gripped me as I saw his face. He was grinning, not like a madman, but like a determined killer, stone faced behind the row of displayed teeth. His eyes were sharper than his blade, and I knew he will sense me if he comes to the spitting distance of me. There was no sense in trying to slip away- my Shadow would betray me to him, call him forth gleefully.
My shoulder started bleeding again and I saw his nostrils react to the smell.
"The bitch is here. I know it"
There was a sense of helplessness, paralyzing and cold, but I shook it away. I was in Yaddo after all, and despite almost everyone in Saratoga Springs knowing Yaddo was my haunt, only Cletus and I knew it was my fetter. I brought the passionate sense of belonging I felt for that place into my mind and felt myself pleasantly disappearing. The Machete man came to the pine behind which I had been hiding, but I was no longer there, although I could perfectly see the confusion in his eyes.
In one short moment I became Yaddo.
