SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Just as I was about to swing, I caught a glimpse of a reflection in the glass.

Jonas. Again.

I faced him instead of the windows, axe still lifted.

“Is having a visitor so bad?” he asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Is that why you’re smashing your windows?”

I scowled. What were my windows to him?

“Aren’t you afraid of demons?”

Was he mocking me? I met his eyes, but aside from seeming more gold than green today, I couldn’t find a change in his impassive expression.

His eyes looked back into mine, and whatever he saw there, he believed.

“Leave the windows. If you wish to be alone, I won’t come back.”

“What about the next man who wanders this mountain?”

“The people of the mountain know this cabin. They will not approach.”

I was afraid I already knew the answer as I asked my next question. “Why not?”

“It’s haunted,” he answered. “But there’s no reason to be afraid of ghosts…if you aren’t afraid of demons.”

All I said was: “Oh.”

He turned to go.

“So you won’t be back?”

He didn’t break stride or turn back as he answered. “I wouldn’t be here now, except to save your windows.”

And with that, he was gone. I watched him vanish into the woods, and then I watched the sun vanish into the land, and the windows remained.

I tracked the moon for nearly a full cycle and did not see another living soul. Nor a dead one either, which was something of a comfort. I was growing daily more certain of you, and had no wish to be haunted by your father’s shade, or by whatever spirit plagued the cabin.

Another moon waxed and waned, journeying across the windows each night as I lay sleepless on my pallet, and by then, I was sure that even if Jonas never came back, I would not be alone in my cabin before the year was out.

I kept myself as busy as I could, in those waning days, but it was difficult with the land still and unchanging around me. Before coming to the mountain, my life had been ruled by the tides. When the fishers went out and when they returned. When the beaches at the base of the cliffs were passable and when the sea would sweep you from your feet. Here, without the tyranny of the sea, I had to turn to the subtle sky: where the sun and moon and stars counted each day into the next. The days grew shorter, the nights grew longer, the moon and I grew rounder, and Jonas returned.

I had my axe in hand when he appeared, but only because I was chopping wood. I was almost always chopping wood in those days; I did not know the winters of the mountain, and the thought of the cold and the dark terrified me. I noticed a shadow out of place, turned to find him, and we both found the great swell of my belly between us.

My hands clenched my axe, waiting for him to speak. My grey-blue eyes dared his honey-brown ones to say something, as the sea taunts the unwary sailor. His gaze flicked down to you for barely a moment, and then returned. Then he held up one arm and revealed a flash of silver. My breath caught.

He had brought a fish.

I tended to the coals below as he tended to the fish above, and then we shared the heat and the meal in silence. The sleek scaled creature was large for a river fish, but would have been dwarfed by the wonders my parents daily pulled from the sea, or had done, until the day the sea had pulled them back. Its flesh tasted of rain, not salt, but I reveled in it. Between us, we finished the fish and polished the pan with our bread-crusts.

I was the one who broke the silence. “Are you going to ask?”

At least he didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. “Should I?”

For some reason, that made me angry: the implication that my trials were none of his concern. Not that they were. It wasn’t as though he burdened me with his affairs, whatever they might have been. I realized I didn’t think of him as the sort of man who had affairs, beyond roaming the mountains and occasionally breaking bread behind the windows of a misplaced sea-woman. I scowled at him.

“Aren’t you worried the father was a demon?”

He looked up from his plate. “Wasn’t he?”

I started. “Is it that obvious?”

He choked on a laugh. If he hadn’t managed to keep it behind his teeth, I think I would have hit him with the pan.

“You are with child, and yet you have fled your home to a haunted cabin in the mountains. You are brave, resourceful, determined, and I would not want to face you in a rage. But yes, it is obvious.”

I sighed, and left the pan where it lay. It was true. In a different way, it should have been obvious to me as well: the whirlwind romance in the shadow of my grief over my parents’ deaths—the grief that had left my soul open and vulnerable. The consuming passion that suddenly evaporated on the night—I later calculated—you had been conceived. Fortunately, my head cleared quickly, and I did what needed to be done. The demon was dispatched, his flesh burned in the hidden cave where I found him, directly below our bed. The bed burned too, and I fled in the night with little more than the clothes on my back, the axe in my hands, and the useless glass of my old windows tied into a bundle. I didn’t look back; I knew I would never return. The neighbors would see the unearthly golden flames and assume I had perished with my lover.

Or perhaps they assumed that I was the demon. With neither of us there to question, there was no way to know for sure.

“What if I’m the demon?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If you were, you’d have killed me.”

“Maybe I’m a patient demon.”

Another shrug. “There are worse ways to die on the mountain. And if you’re that patient, maybe you won’t ever kill me. And if you don’t, does it matter if you’re a demon?”

Did it? It had been desperately important by the sea. Was this yet another way this place was foreign from the place of my birth? The old fishermen had always said the hills were haunted; it was why we buried our dead in the land. But perhaps this is what they had meant. Perhaps on the land, all men and women were demons.

I frowned. “Are you a demon?”

He considered the question. “I don’t think so. I’m not planning on killing anyone.”

And if he wasn’t, did it matter if he was a demon? I wasn’t sure. So that was where we let the matter rest.

They say that a demon cannot resist the lure of its own flesh. That if it begets or conceives a child of a human, its hunger for the life and soul nestled within its own copy will only grow, until it must consume the source or die. They say that a demon will run to the ends of the earth once the scent of its child is in its nostrils. A demon mother can usually force herself to wait until the child’s natural time. A demon father can almost never be that patient. The stories of rent flesh and dismembered infants make my own tale seem tame and happy.

The days continued to pass, and while the moon waxed and waned, I only swelled…to fullness and beyond. Outside, I chopped wood to the eaves, and inside, I laid supplies to the rafters. Jonas returned occasionally and although he assured me the winters were mild, with you beating constantly at my insides, I couldn’t afford to believe him.

I began to have nightmares. I dreamed about the night I killed your father: the shock that went up my arms as my axe hit his spine and separated his head from his shoulders, the hollow-melon sound of his head hitting stone, the smell of his flesh as it charred and bubbled. Then I dreamed that something had gone wrong. That he had not died. That as I was crippled by the pains of labor, he arrived to eat both our souls. In some dreams he returned looking as he did when I first saw him, in others, he arrived half-consumed by flame, still smoking.