Honest Darkness

Jacob was ordered to leave before nightfall. Nobody trusted him at night anymore. He finished eating at the farmhands’ table, wiped the paste of sweat and sawdust from his brow, and walked to the hitching post on the property’s edge, where the travelers’ tethered mounts nervously tapped their hooves on the threshold of a vast and stygian desert. The farmer, Garner, watched him suspiciously from the kitchen window. Jacob noticed this and moved with hateful slowness so that his exit would come annoyingly close to the advent of dark.

Drenched in the residue of his work and warmed by the mild tinder of his payment-meal, he departed. Miles ahead, the sun descended behind the sierra-knuckled horizon. He glanced back. The farm radiated in the distance, an infernal globe that exuded the demonic smog of bonfires, flickered with the shadows of winged creatures and whispered with the presence of faint, insignificant human life. He kept riding, the plug of a half-full stomach eroding with every trot.

The moon peered over the highest peak, outlining its lithic lodestar and precariously orienting him in the desert void. He floated past prickly bushes and splintered elbows of stone, narrowly missed near-invisible craters, and leapt at every primeval howl that hurled through the boundlessness like blindly fired arrows. His horse paused to sniff the carcass of a pronghorn, but the sight sickened Jacob and he kicked the horse onward.

After several dread-filled hours, he stopped, removed his hat, and squinted through the dense night. A pale button of light was pinned to the mountain’s lapel. He rode to the base of the incline, located at a thin and snaky trail cut back and forth across the climbing rock, and cautiously steered a path toward the roosting glint.

Partway up the mountain, the track levelled into a platform. It was a pleasant spot: elevated, remote, and gifted with a clear view of the desert plain. There was a domicile up ahead, its flaxen gleam stamped upon the backdrop of gnarled rock. A shrivelled mass of juniper trees engulfed the glow, like protective fingers shielding a candle’s flame, so he couldn’t ascertain the building’s exact contours. There was a shed behind the thicket, as well as a slumbering chicken coop and a garden whose well-kept produce shone like jellyfish in the moonlight.

He dismounted, hitched his horse to a twist of igneous rock, and ducked

Owen Schalk

through the fragrant trees. The home was smaller than he expected; there were at least five strides between the trunks and the walls, and enough space above the ceiling to erect a steeple. One sylvan outlier had angled into the building’s upper corner, and forced the home to bend under the weight of its warped spine.

He knocked upon the tilted door. It squealed open, and a frayed old man appeared before a shudder of firelight. He was draped in shabby burlaps, his skin was gnarled and chipped, and the silver mold that stubbled his jaw pulsed with the taut flickers of the flames. He was only as tall as Jacob’s chest; scratching his neck, he straightened, extending his spine and staring his visitor in the eye.

“Evening, sir,” Jacob nodded. “Got any work?”

The man’s gaze narrowed. He glanced inside furtively, and then turned back, pensive and distracted. He kept itching his neck.

“I need somewhere to sleep,” Jacob added. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“Hm,” the old man grunted. Slowly, his back bowed to its natural stature. He dropped his hand. “Yes, yes, okay. Come with me.”

Jacob stepped back. The man scuttled outside, almost doubled over. His movements were wide and ungainly, as though hindered by some inner pain. He staggered as he led Jacob to the side of his home that overlooked the expanse.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a large square window that faced the plain. “This is the window, see? I can look out while I eat dinner, or while I’m trying to fall asleep, and see nearly to the end of the world. Heh, I saw you coming, better believe that.” He gestured to a small black tree, no higher than Jacob’s shoulder, which had sprouted up the exterior wal—a half-grown sapling, frozen in demise. “But there’s this tree here, you see?” He swatted a branch dismissively. “An old cedar. Long dead. I don’t like it anymore. It’s a bleak sight, don’t you think? Despairing. It spoils my view.”

“You want me to chop it down?”

“No, no, no,” he asserted, waving his arms. “I want you to bring it back to life.”

Jacob watched the man carefully, scouting for a hint of jest. When his seriousness persisted, Jacob rubbed his eyes, inhaled the cool, lucid mountain air, and said, “Well, I’ll try. But if I can’t manage it, should I chop it down?”

The old man chewed his lip. After a moment, he shrugged. “I suppose. Yes, yes, if that’s the case, then I suppose it’s time. The axe is by the chicken coop if you need it.” He rounded the corner, scurried through the canted door, and appeared in the glass next to Jacob. When Jacob stared at him curiously, the old man rolled his eyes and waved toward the cedar. He leaned his elbows on the windowsill and watched.

Jacob hesitated, then edged up to the tree. To avoid offending the man, he conjured an expression of intense concentration, and knelt. On a whim, he

slithered a hand through the cage of splintered branches and placed his fingers around its brittle spine. The bark was flaked, scaly, strangely cold. It felt almost pathetic against the firm flesh of his palm. He tightened his grip and waited, struggling to guise his pantomime behind a façade of sincerity.

Minutes passed. The night was quiet, as crisp and clean as onyx. As time went by, his fake cerebration gradually deliquesced into a genuine calmness, a real, unforeseen meditation. Without thinking, he kissed his other palm and slunk it around the trunk. The sensation doubled. The texture of the rotted cedar spilled through his palms, down his arms, and into his spine; it drizzled out his feet, hardened, and rooted him within an endogenous bubble of tranquility. He lost all sense of time, space, and personality.

Far down on the plain, a single wolf yelped; a second later, a pack of lamentations careened through the night. His fantasy shattered. He gasped and broke free.

“So?” asked the old man, his voice bulbous against the glass.

“It’s gone,” he answered, rubbing his eyes. “There’s nothing I can do.”

The man shook his head mournfully. “Well, damn it all.” He stroked his beard and said, “Eh, the way of the world, isn’t it? Get the axe. I can use the firewood.”

Jacob looked at the frail, helpless tree, and felt a sadness for the task ahead of him. A bird jostled its nest somewhere in the juniper membrane, either taking leave or returning, and the entire net of branches shook with consternation. Glumly, he fetched the weapon and hacked the tree into a bundle of emaciated logs. He dropped them at the door and called: “Can you spare some water for my horse?” The old man grabbed the firewood and pointed outside the trees, to the chicken coop. Between a discarded knife and an anthill-sized stack of feathers sat a bucket, rimmed with dirty foam. Jacob examined its contents for a long time before scooping it up and delivering it to his horse, who guzzled its contents.

He left the bucket there and dove back into the junipers. Midway through, a branch snagged his ear. It yanked. He winced, detached himself, and stumbled into the enclosure. He swore and pawed at the ripped pinna. Purplish sparkles slid down his fingertips. He cleaned his ear with a rag and entered the old man’s slanted, one-room home.

The smell of roasting meat greeted him. He looked around. The floor was dirt. There was a bed on one side of the room, with a rusty shovel planted at its foot, and on the opposite end a wooden table and a squat iron stove. The table was next to the window, and from his seat the old man could monitor the flames, check the meal’s progress, or gaze into the darkness-flooded desert. On the wall above his chair hung an intriguing ornament, round and flat, like a plate, with a malachite sheen and a filigree of gold tracing its center.

“Join me,” the old man said, nodding to the other chair. A tin mug of whiskey awaited him.

“Thank you,” said Jacob, sitting. His eyes remained on the plate.

“That’s much better,” the man grinned, indicating the window. “Isn’t the view so much nicer now?”

Jacob looked through the glass and saw blackness. There was a thin dandruff of stars in the upper half, barely visible through the junipers. He nodded and sipped his drink.

The old man snatched a metal rod and poked the base of the cedar logs, prodding a spark and a crackle. “Where’d you leave from, young man?”

“Garner’s farm. It’s a short trek down the plain.”

“I know Garner.” On a tray above the flames, pink meat sizzled grey. He extracted the rod and aimlessly nudged the chunks of chicken. “Doesn’t he let his workers stay the night?”

“Usually, but it was a big job. Even the stables were packed.”

“Hm…it’s not like Garner to turn a man away.” He jabbed the rod into the dirt and leaned back. “Headed somewhere in particular?”

“Well, for a time I was thinking about going west. A friend of mine went over there to hunt scalps. He says the money’s good, but I don’t know if that’s for me.”

“Too grisly?”

“I think so. I’ve never killed before. I prefer simpler work. Farm work.” He dabbed his ear, and came back with a crust of dried blood. He rubbed it on his pants and self-consciously slugged his drink. “For the moment, though, I’m wandering. Trying to find a home I can settle for.” He met the old man’s gaze and realized with discomfort that he was being probed. His eyes floated upward, toward the ornament. “Where’d you get that?”

The man turned, as though he’d somehow forgotten about his lone decoration. “A traveler gave it to me years ago. He told me it’s an ancient artifact. Thousands of years old.”

“Is that gold?”

“Could be. The fellow said it’s from Mexico. Maybe it’s Aztec, maybe it’s Mayan. He didn’t know, and I certainly don’t. Either way, the damned thing’s been around for centuries, if he’s to be believed.” He faced Jacob. His expression was different. The curiosity was gone, replaced by a stern suspicion. Jacob fidgeted. “Do you think he was telling the truth?”

“I don’t know. I never met him.”

“Do you value honesty, young man? More than anything else?”

The auric tracery lapped hypnotically in the flames, its specks ranging like fireflies through an emerald twilight. “I’d say I do.” The green sank into a yawning tunnel above the old man’s head. It didn’t sparkle. The flames could find no purchase in its depths.

“Hm.” He scowled, and bent to examine the meat. “Honesty is one of the

rarest qualities in the world. Sometimes I doubt it’s ever existed.” He rumbled his throat and spat into the maw of the stove, narrowly missing the tray. His saliva hissed. “You know, I used to think it was possible to stumble upon honesty. Before I moved here, I’d wander the streets of my town and ask to speak with the most honest man, hoping to restore my hopes for humanity. I realized, eventually, that it was an impossible task. See, if honesty almost definitely doesn’t exist, then how can you trust someone’s word when they send you after an honest man? Most likely they’re lying, or they’ve been deceived.”

He sat back. A breeze flowed through the junipers. The membrane susurrated, and a smattering of dust scraped the window. “But after years of searching, I did find a man—one honest man, in a town of thousands.” He tipped forward, rapt by his own recollections. The closer he came, the less influence the flames held over his features. “Would you like to meet him?” he asked, a gloomy visage distanced from the light.

Jacob searched the room nervously. “Is he here?”

“Yes, he’s here.” He shot up, handed Jacob the rod, and scampered to the other side of the house. “Watch the meat.” With frenzied excitement he cracked his knuckles, snatched the shovel, and plunged its point into the dirt at the foot of his bed. The flames copied his fervor, undulating feverishly as he threw clod after lumpy clod into the middle of the room, sometimes with so much ferocity that pebbles ricocheted off the iron stove. A heap formed between them. Just as it rose above the bed’s height, he stabbed the shovel into the floor and fell to his knees. He thrust his hands into the hole, grimaced, and yanked loose a large rectangular chest.

Jacob muttered a prayer. His grip on the metal rod was sturdy, defensive.

The old man slammed the box down, tinkered with some latches, and tossed open the lid. He reached inside, seized an object with both hands, and lifted it into the tremulous firelight. Jacob lowered the rod. Between the old man’s palms, shadows licked the skull’s eye sockets, nasal cavity, and gnarled brown teeth. He turned the face toward Jacob and mimicked its smile.

“Do you understand?” he asked, scrambling to the table with the skull in his hands. “The only honest man in the world. Do you get it?”

“I…I don’t know…”

“Darkness! Darkness is the closest thing to honesty in the world, and nobody knows darkness like the dead!” He set the skull beside them, in place of a third table setting. “Light is nothing but a magic show. It gives things shape in order to mislead, and people gullibly accept those shapes as reality, and this fake reality turns each and every one of them into a different kind of liar. But this…” He patted the stained cranium like a pet. “This is what honesty looks like. This is the only thing honesty looks like. Hand me that poker, the chicken is burning.”

When Jacob didn’t respond, the old man plucked the rod from his grasp and flipped the chunks. Once they were cooked, he took two clay plates from the top

of the stove and evenly distributed the meat. Jacob chewed silently, eyes moving between the dangling artifact and the skull. Its cavernous eyeholes studied the nightscape contentedly.

“I tell everyone that comes here,” the old man said, juices dribbling down his chin, “if you value honesty as much as you claim, you’d be more like the skull.” He slurped his whiskey. “You’ve gone awfully quiet. Got anything to say?”

Jacob looked out the window and said, “That cedar…how long was it there?”

“Long before I showed up. It was why I chose to build here. I liked how the little guy looked, nestled in with the junipers. It was like a cub curled up with its parents.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. Couldn’t be helped.”

After they ate, the old man stacked their plates on the stove and topped off his whiskey. Jacob declined a refill. While downing the final sip, the man raised a finger and said, “It almost slipped my mind. Before you go to sleep, I want to give you something.”

“Give me what?”

He went to the chest, which he’d left open on the floor, and dug a tiny cylindrical item out of its depths. He returned to the table and extended his hand over the skull.

“I give one to all my guests.” Jacob leaned forward. There was a pinkie-sized vial on his palm. It was filled with a murky amaranthine liquid, and plugged by a shred of burlap. “I make it from juniper berries. Did you know they can be poisonous? I ate a batch when I first got here and almost killed myself.” Jacob gingerly picked the vial out of his hand. “If you truly value honesty as much as you say, you won’t think twice about drinking it. You don’t have to do it right now—I’m not so vain that I need to see it—but in the future, after you’ve thought about what I’ve said.” Wordlessly, Jacob pocketed the poison. “Now, I’m going to sleep. You got a blanket you can throw down?”

He nodded and retrieved his bedroll from the horse, which had passed out beside the drained bucket. When he returned, the old man was asleep on the bed. A tempest of snores clattered gracelessly up his chasmal gullet.

Jacob sighed. He scanned the room exhaustedly: the hole in the dirt, the open chest, the mound in the middle of the floor, the skull on the table, the ancient plate. He wrung the bedroll broodingly. A moment passed, and he pulled the vial out of his pocket. A wind rattled the branches, scratched at the windowpane. He dropped the bedroll and crouched in the dirt next to his unconscious host.

The cloth plug came out easily. He threw it aside and carefully positioned the vial above the man’s gaping mouth. Very gently, he tipped the opening forward, and a single droplet disappeared into the snoring pit. Jacob froze, waited, and added another drop.

A minute later, the vial was empty. He leaned close and watched, curiously, as the old man’s throat closed and a mild convulsion pumped his chest up and down. The movement intensified. Seconds later his eyes flung open, blurry with blood, and his snores became grating wheezes of pain. The old man rolled toward him but Jacob moved aside, letting him thump onto the ground. He studied the man as he died in the dirt.

Jacob stood, checked his ear for blood, and surveyed the home once more. The first thing he took was the plate.