William Gay - Twilight

He dried his hands as best he could on the lining of the coat and lit a match. A low ceiling over his head, loose paper hanging in shreds. On the wall across the ruin of a fireplace. A litter of old newspapers, broken boards. The match went out, and he could hear the rain drumming on the tin roof. Within a half hour he had a cheery fire going in the fireplace and he was crouched before it feeding it broken pieces of boxing he had ripped off a partition wall. The room was lit with a hellish orange light and he had the firebox fairly stuffed to the damper with splintered chestnut before he ceased and he just sat on the hearth for a time basking in the heat. He’d never felt anything better and he hadn’t known such cold as he’d been existed. He’d kept the bag sheltered from the rain as best he could, and now he ate the lunch she’d packed. Thick slabs of yeast bread smeared with butter and jelly. Loose ground coffee in a folded paper tied with floursack ravels. He could smell the coffee through the paper and he had a taste for a cup but he could find no sort of pan about.

When he had eaten he stripped off his clothes and put the steaming coat back on and buttoned it around him. He leant boards against the brick mantle and hung his trousers and shirt to dry. He went on gathering wood for a while until he had a great pile mounded before the hearth. The chestnut burned fiercely hot but it was dry as tinder and there wasn’t much last to it.

He gathered a stack of old newspapers to read and sat as close to the hearth as the heat would permit. An eye to the boards cocked against the mantle, he had to be forever turning his clothes lest they scorch. He chewed a handful of the coffee raw, swallowing the bitter essence, and tried to read, but he was utterly weary, and the stories the papers told were strange and surreal and whole sentences tilted and slid off the page into the fire.

When the clothes were dry he put them on and restoked the fire one last time, and with a stack of newspapers for a pillow and the coat for a blanket he went to sleep. His dream was strange and fevered.

He was on a blasted heath where the trees were sparse and dead. Birds he couldn’t put a name to clustered their bare branches and called mournfully ahead of him and fell silent at his approach, then resumed when he’d passed as if they’d announce his entry into this sepia world of shades. He moved on a thin skift of snow that a sourceless wind kept setting in motion and settling back and all there was was the white snow and the black skeletal trees.

The weary road he traveled wound gently downhill toward a vague depression in the earth and he kept trudging on and after a time he could see another traveler approaching, a black figure seeping across the snowy landscape like a line of ink dripping down the snowy page, and he came to think that across a vast distance he was approaching a mirror image of himself.

When they met they ceased walking without speaking for a time and hunkered in the frozen roadbed to rest. The man took out a sack of Country Gentleman and rolled himself a cigarette with deft economy of motion and offered the tobacco then when it was refused pocketed it.

Then Tyler knew him.

Why, you’re Clifford Suggs, he said. Wait till Claudelle and Drew hear about me running up on you. Drew thinks you were lost down a mineshaft, and they’ve been hunting you for years.

The man exhaled acrid blue smoke from his nostrils. Beneath the felt hatbrim his shadowed face studying Tyler with a kind of distant amusement.

I don’t know who you are or how the story come to you, but you got it turned around backwards. I’m the one been huntin them. They’re the ones that’s gone.

Tyler was studying his shoes where the snow was compressed into a thin sole of transparent ice and between his feet were little curling strands of grass all seized in tubes of ice and when he looked back up the man’s face with the curious illogic of dreams was gone. In its place was a yellowed skull with a few strands of lank dead hair. Within the skull there was furtive movement. He leant to see. A rat’s sharp gray face peered through an eyesocket and all about the eyeholes the bone was chamfered with teethmarks, but the rat would not fit. It withdrew, turning, trying the other eyehole then growing claustrophobic and agitated and turning endless upon itself within the bony confines of the skull but there was no way out.

At some unclocked hour the rain ceased and Sutter was on the move almost immediately, wending his way through the brush which dripped continually in small echoes of rain. He was trying to remember where the house was, and he kept making false starts and recovering and going on, and after a while a wornlooking disc of moon eased out of the broken clouds and hung there like a flare to guide his path.

When he came upon the barn lot it was all shadow and white light and where water stood it gleamed in the moonlight like pooled quicksilver. He stopped here to study the house. It seemed cloaked in sleep. He leant against a stall door to rest and he could hear a horse snuffling in the stable and he could hear the quick disquieted movement of its hooves. It seemed to be turning restlessly about in the stable.

Outside in the barnlot he looked up and the pale moon was directly over him and allencompassing. It appeared to be lowering itself onto the earth and he could make out mountains and ranges of hills and hollows and dark shadowed areas of mystery he judged to be timber and he wondered what manner of beast thrived there and what their lives were like and the need to be there twisted in his heart like an old pain that will not dissipate. As he watched, enormous birds stark and dimensionless as the shadows of birds passed the remote face of the moon, wings beating slow and stately and silent and they were like birds that had once existed but did no more and he could not put a name to them. They were at once familiar and foreign, archetypes from some old childhood dream that was lost to him.

There in the shadows he seemed a darker shadow than those he moved among, some beast composed wholly of the ectoplasm of the night and with some arcane magnetism drawing to itself old angers and discontents and secret and forbidden yearnings freefloating in the humming and electric dark. The sleeping house seemed to be waiting for him, and he went on toward it.

He went on up a muddy grade past an old pickup truck hopelessly mired in the sucking clay, and he didn’t even notice it. He was thinking: You better be here. They better hope you are because whatever happens if you ain’t will be on your head. He crossed onto the porch and began to hammer on the door.

For a time he could hear nothing. He hammered again as if he’d rouse the dead, and there was an abrupt scuttling of claws across the floor and a fierce yip yip yip of a small dog on the other side of the door. The dog was growling and sounded as if it were tearing the door from its hinges and its barking was wellnigh hysterical.

Shut up, you little son of a bitch, he told it. A woman’s muffled voice said, What on earth? Then: Claude. You wake up, Claude. Then silence, but he could imagine the man swinging his legs off the creaking bed and sitting so for a moment and running a hand through sleeptousled hair, then going to the door.

Shut up, a voice told the dog. You the Lost Sheep back? it asked the door.

Yes, Sutter said, as lost a sheep as ever was.

The door opened onto a musky sleepy dark. Somewhere in the room a match flared. He could smell kerosene, stale whiskey breath, taste the residue of old unspent angers. A lamp was lit and adjusted to a dim yellow glow. Shadows flitted about the walls and ceased.

What the hell? Claude said. He added inanely, It’s three o’clock in the mornin, as if perhaps Sutter had merely stopped to inquire the time.