Winterland Page 4
“Funny.” Joseph shook his head. “Naw. Some bonds can’t be broken that easy. Besides, this isn’t your world, Eunice. You’ve been granted access. Blessed, you could say. But your mother has nurtured Mordant far too long. And the longer you let it live, the stronger it gets. And the more personal.”
The last thing she needed right now was for things to get more personal. She shook her head, struggling both to comprehend Joseph’s enigmatic answers and to keep up with him. Behind them, Mister Mordant grumbled something about being overmatched and outnumbered, and the inevitability of his demise. Did she really want to go on with this?
Without looking at her, Joseph said, “And you should stop biting your nails.”
A flush of embarrassment swept over her. Eunice wiped her fingers on her jeans and forced her arm to her side. The habit had returned with a vengeance.
“Listen,” said Eunice. “You said you'd help me.”
“I am helping you.”
“Yeah, but…” Eunice wheezed. “You talk in riddles. Can’t you just give me a straight answer?”
“My answers only seem like riddles to you because you’ve spent so much of your life avoiding the answers.”
“Avoiding the answers?” She scowled and said defensively, “Rehab wasn't exactly avoiding answers. Sheesh!”
Joseph looked sideways at her and then conceded, “You're right. It was a good start.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Despite turning pouty, Eunice knew Joseph was right. Rehab was a great start. Nevertheless, she had spent her life avoiding the answers, hiding behind chemicals and regrets. Grousing about the childhood that should have been. Fessing up to her addictions was just the beginning of the process.
“Listen,” Joseph said, as if he sensed her drifting off into a funk. “Right now, your mother’s inspired from your efforts. She’s proud of you. You can take heart in that. The only problem is she’s made a mess of things. There’s so much junk to maneuver just to get to her. Either way, if you just stay on it and if you can get to the end of this highway, my riddles will make perfectly good sense. All right?”
She stared into the growing gray looming ahead of them. The notion that her mother was actually inspired by Eunice’s stay in drug rehab struck her as rather astounding. At death’s door, things like this probably happened. Remorse. Contrition. Then again, maybe her mother was just medicated out of her mind.
“Okay. I'll try,” she said, glancing back at Mordant. “But I wish he didn't have to come with us. He gives me the creeps.” She forced an exaggerated shiver. “And how does he know so much about me?”
“This is the way she came, Eunice. What she knows, he knows. They’re related in ways you can’t imagine.”
“Related?! That’s an awful thought.”
“You ain’t kidding. But if you're gonna save her, you have to bring him. That’s what she wants. She’s gotta be the one to sign off on his claim. But I have to warn you—he knows a lot more about the two of you than you realize.”
“That’s comforting.” Eunice cringed at the thought. “My mother—she’s the one who used to call me Missy. Actually, it was Miss E—as in the letter E. That’s what it stood for. It just came out as Missy to everyone else. But she was the only one who called me that. Her,” Eunice glanced at Joseph, “and the men she… serviced.”
Joseph looked sideways at her.
“She had to pay the bills, and after my dad left…” Eunice shrugged.
A moment of uncomfortable silence passed between them. How long had it been since Eunice mentioned—even hinted at—her mother’s prostitution? She quickly turned and stared blankly down the road.
“Ooch!” Mordant suddenly shrieked. “Help! Help me!”
At the sound of his awful, helium-high shriek, Eunice spun around to see the creature tamping the ground with his feet, his arms flailing in panic.
“What is it?” Eunice cried. “What's wrong?”
Mordant frantically jabbed his hands towards the foggy road ahead of them and sputtered, “Musn’t go! Musn’t go! Mmph! Worse than Mordant!”
“What’s he talking about?”
“Monsters!” Mordant bawled. “Barbs and choppers. Br-r-rph! Downstream—no place for pretties. No!”
She turned to Joseph for help, when Mordant lunged toward Eunice pleadingly. “Please, Missy! We can…” He scanned the area. “We can stay. Here, look!” He began gathering debris, scuttling about like some lunatic ant, assembling a crude pile. “A fire—see? Settle in. Warm the bones. Br-r-r.” He shook his jowls, then issued a sad smile and gazed longingly at Eunice.
Eunice peered at Mordant, and then turned to Joseph. “What's he afraid of?”
“The Trench,” Joseph said somberly. “He knows it’s coming.”
Eunice gazed back down the road. “The Trench?”
“It happened when she was young,” Joseph said. “Nothing but a swamp now. A really awful swamp, at that.”
She turned back to Mordant who had plopped onto the ground with his legs crossed Indian style, and sat rubbing his hands together as if he were warming himself at an invisible fire.
“What’re you doing?” she said.
Mordant looked up at her with puppy dog eyes.
“No,” said Eunice emphatically. “We are not staying.”
“Oh-h-h. Please!” Mordant scrambled to his feet and approached her with a pitiful groveling. “Trouble ahead. Fights and frizzles. Mmph! Big trouble!”
Joseph watched them intently, as if her next move were of utmost importance.
“We're not staying.” Eunice straightened and looked down the highway. “My mother wants you, so you're coming with me.”
Suddenly a drift of fog wafted by and Mordant wailed at its chilly touch.
“Eunice!”
It was Joseph. She turned to the space where he’d been, but he was gone.
“Eunice!”
She squinted up ahead, but the landscape seemed to have changed. Either that or someone was tinkering with her point of view. Eunice took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she reopened them, Joseph now stood on what appeared to be a precipice, his hair gusting about his face. He motioned her forward.
Somehow, she knew Mordant must follow her. So Eunice began trudging toward Joseph. Making her way past huge slabs of upturned asphalt, she reached the rim of a great chasm and stood next to her guide, gaping. An immense fault line appeared to have cleaved the highway. Perhaps two hundred feet below them the highway descended into a basin of mist. It was the Trench. Twisted tree limbs rose from this languid sea of fog and behind it, the ringed sun stared on like an unblinking eye. The distant melancholy moan began, echoing across the vast gray horizon.
“It’s the swamp of Mlaise,” Joseph said somberly.
She looked at him, incredulous.
He raised his hand, as if to stop her. “Don’t even say it.”
“We’re supposed to hike through that? And do it by nightfall?” Eunice shook her head in dismay. “And I get how many chances?”
“This is it.” Joseph started angling his way down the crumbling escarpment.
Eunice watched and then called after him, “Can I at least get some better shoes?”
“You have everything you need,” Joseph responded. “Just keep moving forward. That’s all you ever need to do.”
SEVEN
They scrabbled downward through boulders and black earth. Eunice’s eyes burned. The swamp reeked of chemical toxins and vegetative mold. Mordant’s warning about monsters had set her on edge and she kept stopping to gaze down into the gloom of Mlaise. If this really was her mother’s world, she could only imagine the types of beasts that lived here. Mister Mordant was proof of that.
They reached the bottom and Eunice hunched forward, panting, with her hands on knees. Mordant collapsed nearby and sat whining about ulcers, blisters, and the unfairness of destiny.
“If this is a dream,” Eunice wheezed, “it’s an awfully tiring one.”
“This looks bad.” Joseph seized her forearm. “Whatever you do, do not leave the stream. Do you hear me?”
“But I—”
“Do you hear me?!” Joseph demanded.
She turned and watched as the cloudy veil bore down on them. “Yes. I hear you.”
“If we get separated, keep following the stream. No matter what he says.”
“Me?” Mordant squalled. “Why me?”
“Stay to the stream,” Joseph said, ignoring the grub man. “Do you understand?”
The thought of being alone in the fog, in this god-awful netherworld with Mister Mordant made her cringe. “Yes,” she said. “I hear you. But I don’t plan on getting separated. Do you?”
He didn’t answer.
“And I can still go back, right?”
Yet Joseph had tilted forward, bracing himself against the onrushing wall of fog.
Mlaise swept over them like a ghostly current, biting through her clothing and stinging her flesh. With it came a blinding gray. Mordant shrieked from somewhere nearby. Eunice peered into the mist, wincing at its spray, holding her breath as the gloom enveloped them. Winterland disappeared. The charred asphalt. The black stream. The burning sky. All was swallowed in the ghostly haze. Except for the patter of moisture, her mother’s world went strangely silent.
“Joseph?” Eunice finally whispered.
But there was only the murmur of mist.
“Joseph.” She groped blindly into the murk, growing more frantic. “Joseph!”
“I’m right here.” He put his hand on her shoulder.
She jolted and then slumped forward in relief.
Together they turned and stared into the swamp of Mlaise. As her eyes adjusted, shadowy forms began to take shape around them, outlines of withered trees tilted between slabs of upturned road. A soft chirring, as that of insects, droned to life. The stillness seemed to awaken the world.
“This is the way she came.” Joseph’s tone was dour.
“How did she ever make it through this?”
“Beats me. But you should be thankful she did.”
Thankful? That notion had never crossed Eunice’s mind and confronting it here, in the face of this dismal marsh, seemed all the more revelatory.
Joseph said, “She wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West, you know?”
A slight, perhaps playful smile curled the edges of his lips.
Eunice looked away. “Maybe you’re right.”
Mordant’s bleating had descended into an incessant whimper. She could hear him squirming around on the moist tarmac nearby. His agitation grated on her nerves. Trudging through this swamp was bad enough without having to listen to his tortured sniveling.
As if sensing her annoyance, Joseph said, “Okay. We gotta keep moving. It’s worse when you stand still.”
“Burrows,” Mordant moaned. “Brph! Needs the burrows.”
She heard him scramble to his feet.
“We’re not finding any burrows,” Eunice growled. “Now, c’mon.”
“The stream is that way.” Joseph pointed. “We can—”
“Mordant finds ‘em! Yes! Leads the way.” The grub man waddled out of the fog, wringing his hands. “I was emperor once, ‘member? Know the nooks and knotties.”
“No,” Eunice snapped. “If my mother made it, then we can make it. Now stop your—”
“Doomed!” Mordant bawled. “We’re all doomed! Dust and bones, that’s our lot. Phft! The pretty’s lost her sense. Temptin’ fate, she is. Oh-h-h. Fate—it’s a twisty one. And nature. Can’t win there. Fate ‘n nature. Fate ‘n nature. Doomed! Got us doomed.”
Eunice gritted her teeth at Mordant’s bellyaching.
“Fate ‘n nature,” Mordant continued carping. “Ain’t no winnin’! At their mercy, we are. All of us! Waste and wither. Grrrph! No fightin’ the tide. Futile, it is. The tide—you felt it, Missy. Tides’o comin’. High tide. Oh-h-h. Ain’t my fault. I just stir the pot and serve the stew. That’s my motto. Blame the pretties. They let the—”
“Would you shut up!” Eunice snapped. “Geez! It’s bad enough we can’t see anything. Listening to you only make things worse.”
Mordant stumbled backwards, his eyes swollen in shock.
Eunice glared at him, welling with annoyance. “So what? So what if fate and nature’s against us, huh? We’re supposed to just roll over? Life sucks and then you die?” Eunice swiped her hand through the air in disgust. “No wonder my mother went nuts. Listening to you, who wouldn’t?”
The creature’s mouth quivered.
Her heart drummed in her temples. Then a flush of embarrassment swept over Eunice. She was startled by her outburst. Her mother had always been a sucker for sorrow and self-pity, the perpetual family martyr. Eunice despised it then, and she despised it now. Wallowing in one’s lot was suicidal. Nevertheless, she mustn’t allow this creature to get under her skin.
The grub man slowly retreated into the fog, muttering to himself.
“C’mon,” Joseph finally said to her. “Let’s get going.”
She peered at the shadowy silhouette of the miserable creature. Then she sighed heavily, and nodded. “Right.”
As they went, the visibility increased enough to make out the swampy terrain. Skeletal stalks rising between asphalt fissures revealed a perpetual autumn. Her hair began to tangle and drip moisture. Their words and movements, even the sticky coiling of the stream was amplified in that gloomy tent.
She thought about her Audi station wagon on the 210 freeway and the traffic jam she had left. Joseph had assured her it was not far away. Maybe it was still right here, in some strange parallel dimension. But even that assurance could not dissuade her of some immanent madness.
Joseph finally located the stream, yet it was barely a yard’s width and little more than black sludge. The stench returned and she curdled her nose at the reminder of the pestilent tree that fed this rivulet. Dark roots snaked their way upward, forming columns and tiers along the shoreline before rising into the fog. Sheer pale blossoms budded against the black wood, swaying like ghostly anemones in an invisible ocean. Who knew that hell had flowers?
They walked on, following the slurry brook as it descended into Mlaise.
The surreal landscape seeped into her psyche, gumming up her thoughts. It seemed as though time stood still here, as if the fog had not just shrouded them, but cocooned her in a distant dream.
Missy.
She had done her best to force that name from her mind. Yet Mordant had pried it free like a fossil from some ancient strata. Though she tried to resist the temptation, Eunice found herself listening to the creature as he dawdled behind them. Who was he? Just one of her mother’s inner voices? And how was he attached to her family? Or to Eunice herself? Mordant’s groans and grousing were an ever-present reminder of his proximity, and a reminder of the terminal pessimism which once had poisoned her mother.
She watched Joseph plod through the gloom ahead, disquiet coiling about her…
…and then a tune, faint and airy, caught her attention.
“I was standing by the window
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw the hearse come rolling
To carry my mother away.”
It was distant, but unmistakable. The old hymn from her childhood. And the voice was that of a child.
“Who is that?” She stopped, turned, and peered into the gray curtain, mesmerized by the distant minstrel. “Who is that singing?”
“Oomph!” Mordant stumbled to a stop behind her.
She craned forward. “That voice. It sounds familiar.”
“Will the circle be unbroken
Bye and bye Lord, bye and bye
There`s a better home a waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the
sky.”
“It’s Emma,” Mordant said, surprise in his tone. “She made it. Hmmph!”
“Emma?” she said, dreamily.
The name seemed to awaken some long-forgotten ethos, like a curio unearthed from a dusty bin, or a picture from one’s childhood.
Emma. Of course.
Eunice’s family had an unusual affinity for E names. Aunt Ellie. Uncle Ern. Eunice’s sister, Emerald. And of course, her mother. Eunice thought it was weird and often vowed that, if she ever had children, she would stay as far away from E names as possible. At the moment, William and Zoë were high on her list.
“Emma?” Eunice peered at Mister Mordant. “You don’t mean…?”
He stood terribly poised, peering at some distant point in the fog.
“Granny Em. That’s what I used to call her.” She followed his gaze into the gloom. Then she said absently, “She killed herself, you know.”
EIGHT
Two things happened simultaneously, neither of which struck Eunice as peculiar. The moment she realized they had wandered from the stream and that Joseph was nowhere to be found, the fog parted to reveal a quaint cottage with warm lights glowing through steamy panes. Perhaps she had mistakenly wandered into Thomas Kinkade’s head along the way.
Eunice stared at the cottage. It looked familiar. The singing came from here, and now she knew it was not that of a child.
“I said to the undertaker
Undertaker please drive slow
For this lady you are carrying
Lord, I hate to see her go.”
“That voice.” Eunice cocked her head. “I know that voice.”
“’Course you do,” Mordant said distantly.
For some reason it did not seem odd to Eunice, this house in the fog on a highway of dreams. The melancholy tune and the glowing warmth. It was as if some long-forgotten chord was being strummed deep inside her. Joseph said Eunice had brought her own reality with her.
Maybe this journey was not about her mother at all.
She meandered forward, studying the house. Flowering vines in lush shades of blue and violet graced its footings, grappling up tilted trellises and twining into the dank air. She did not bother to ask how such a dreary world could sustain such rich foliage, for the house seemed like such an oddity, something straight out of a nursery rhyme or gothic poem. And the singing…