Artwork: Run for the Trees by Will Jacques

Outsiders
Damir Salkovic

Four hours on the highway, coupled with fitful sleep the night before. Grains of sand scratched the insides of Leah’s eyelids. She couldn’t remember her dreams, but they had been bad enough to push her into wakefulness before dawn, her skin clammy, blood roaring in her ears. Setting out on the road and beating the early morning rush seemed like the most reasonable choice. Yet a lane closure had backed up traffic on the bridge, it had taken her forever to get out of the city, and now she was regretting the second cup of coffee, thinking about all the rest area bathrooms she had passed on her way.

Leaves were turning as she drove into the foothills of the Adirondacks, yellows and reds shading the edges of green. The last town before the cabin was no more than a handful of decrepit houses scattered on either side of a two-lane road, sagging porches and boarded-up windows and not much else. She stopped at the lone gas station to fuel the car and buy provisions – canned soup, peanut butter, sardines, crackers. There was a fridge at the cabin, the owner had claimed, and a generator for power, but she decided not to take chances. Besides, fatigue and the unpleasant dregs of her dream had killed her appetite: she felt slightly queasy in both stomach and mind. After a moment’s hesitation, she added a sixpack of beer and a pack of Lucky Strikes to her tally, slapped them down on the dusty counter like a gesture of defiance.

Maybe she’d stay a week, she thought, as she hauled the cardboard box with the groceries out to the car. For the most part, she made herself not think about it. Maybe a week, maybe a month. Enough time to decide what to do next, but not long enough for the money to run out. Things were different now. After eight years of living under glass, she was back in the real world, facing real problems, with no one to step in and wave them away.

A truck pulled into the station, the driver craning his neck to get a good look at her. Leah tried to make herself smaller, pushed her sunglasses higher up on the bridge of her nose. Getting noticed wasn’t part of the plan, but in a town this small it was inevitable. Not that it mattered: John hated the backcountry, never left the city if it could be helped. The very thought of him driving around in his Maserati, showing her photo to recalcitrant townsfolk, was beyond preposterous.

Rented under a false name, the cabin lay in a wooded hollow in the mountains, at the end of a dirt track half-hidden by thick brush and tall trees. Her estranged husband would have a hell of a time finding her, provided that he took the time to look in the first place: his last voicemail had been vaguely threatening, but to Leah it sounded like he was more concerned about his business interests than infuriated by her absconding.

Throughout their marriage, she had suspected that several of John’s associates existed on the other side of the law, or took steps to conceal their identity. But as she never asked questions, and he never volunteered information, she didn’t know enough to pose a risk to whatever he was doing. To John, her departure should be no more than a mild annoyance: he wasn’t a jealous or vengeful man, or one given to strong emotions of any kind. That was part of the problem. Over the past few years he had barely noticed her, the distance between growing until they became strangers, all connection between them lost.

Yet in the voicemail John had sounded genuinely upset, his voice shaking in spite of his best efforts. More upset than she had thought possible. At first she had taken it for anger, or betrayal, but later she realized that it was something else. Fear, raw and blind, breaking through the careful facade of control. Which made her afraid in turn, eager to cover her tracks.

Leah gripped the wheel tighter as the asphalt gave way to dirt and the car began to judder over ruts. For the better part of a decade, she had been the perfect trophy for her husband, surrounded by servants, without a worry in the world. Pretty and sweet, educated and worldly enough to dazzle with witty dinner conversation, or to play the perfect hostess at parties. Never enough to have ambitions of her own.

In the first days of her escape, she’d felt no anxiety, only a mix of elation and horror over what she’d done, the sense of having regained agency of her life. Yet once the novelty wore off, reality was setting in. She had a fine arts degree and no work experience to speak of. Over the years, she had lost touch with her college friends, and her few surviving relatives were scattered all over the country, in no position to help.

But she would make it somehow. She would pick up the pieces and go on.

Trees closed over her like a green vaulted ceiling. Leah reached into her purse, took out the ugly figurine and placed it on the dashboard. She did this without thinking, almost unaware of her actions. It felt right. Tapping a cigarette out of the pack, she lowered her window and lit up. The car radio emitted nothing but tinny static, but she didn’t need music. A song itched at the back of her skull, a summons that seemed to emanate from the very center of her, soothing the turmoil within.

She drove on, the road vanishing beneath her tires, the eyes of the stone idol unblinking, watching the forest filter past.

###

Two days prior, Leah had heard through a mutual acquaintance that John was out of town and decided to capitalize on the opportunity to collect her belongings from their home. She had been staying in a five-star hotel in Manhattan, racking up a small fortune in credit card charges, dreading the moment her card would be declined. At least she would have her clothes and jewelry to sell when John inevitably decided to cut her off. So far he had sulked in silence, but earlier that week she had received a frosty call from his lawyer, informing her that steps were being taken to ensure she didn’t siphon off a dime from his esteemed client – that privilege, evidently, being reserved only for attorneys and their fees.

This was it, she thought: a chance to recover not only her things, but also that part of herself that John had kept subdued – with no little help from her – in their years together. If she gave in to lassitude and despair, she knew she would forever remain tethered to her soon-to-be-ex-husband, living off whatever handouts he was willing to dole out. The thought drove her out of the hotel, into a cab and across the water to Cobble Hill before she could talk herself out of the idea.

She stood outside the brownstone for a while, smoking and watching passersby, gathering the nerve to go in. The lights were off and there was no movement behind the windows: the regular help was away and the cleaners were not due before Thursday. It felt wrong to sneak into her own home like a thief, but there was no way around it. Let John know she wasn’t going to disappear from his life without laying claim to what was hers by right.

As soon as she let herself in, she felt watched. Hardly surprising, given John’s fixation on security systems, motion-detector cameras covering every angle and corner, sensors patiently monitoring everything from temperature to power consumption to the raising and lowering of window shutters. The house – opulent, but not quite a mansion, John had always been very cautious about showing off his wealth – was silent and still. Daylight filtered through the tall, arched windows without penetrating the dimness within. Lifting her chin and squaring her shoulders, Leah marched past the tracking camera eyes and up the stairs, to the master bedroom.

It took her the best part of an hour to go through her clothes and pick out her favorites, which she dumped into two large suitcases. She contemplated taking one of the cars, quickly decided against it. John was paranoid about security. She couldn’t be sure, but it wasn’t impossible that he’d had homing devices installed in both vehicles. Leah didn’t anticipate having to flee where her husband couldn’t find her – that epiphany was still some twenty-four hours in the future – but neither did she want him aware of every move she made.

Musing over this, she went into John’s study, crossed to the wall safe behind his desk. She had never opened it, but her husband, for all his obsession with control, was bad with numbers. The lock gave in after four tries, the combination a scramble of their birthdays, and the door swung open, releasing a faint smell of must and brine.

The safe was deeper than she would have guessed. She pushed her arm in almost to the shoulder, past what looked like tens of thousands of dollars in neatly stacked bills, rummaging for her jewelry box. Her fingers encountered rustling paper, then something cold and hard, like glass. Leah retrieved the object, a frown creasing her face. It was a framed page from what looked like the world’s oldest manuscript, the paper scuffed and brown with age. The foreign, curled lettering was incomprehensible to her, but the illustrations beneath the text held her attention. Stylized and crude, reminiscent of ancient paintings found in caves, the images made Leah’s skin crawl. They seemed to reach in past her eyes, touch some place deep in her mind that she had hitherto been unaware existed.

Disgusted and eager to leave the house, she thrust the frame as far into the safe as possible and groped further. The box was at the very limit of her reach; she grasped one corner and tugged it out into the light, spilling notes and documents onto the study floor.

No wonder it felt so heavy. She picked up the strange object that had lain on top of the box, held it up to the light. A lump of smooth stone, about the size of her fist, black but shot through with blue and green threads, like marble. It was carved into a grotesque shape, neither humanoid nor reptilian but somehow both at once.

Sunlight caught the surface, a flash so sudden she had to close her eyes against it. Bizarre visions danced across the backs of her eyelids. She had the impression of the floor giving way beneath her, of floating across an interminable abyss. Vast voices filled her head, blanking out all conscious thought. She smelled the ocean, heard waves lap against old rocks, the splashing of titanic forms in the distance.

Leah set the stone down on the desk, took an instinctive step back. Odd, but the figurine’s touch both repulsed and entranced her: a warm, pleasurable feeling spread from the pit of her stomach even as her hand recoiled with revulsion, probably just lightheadedness from not having eaten since dinner yesterday. But the stone idol and the framed page stuck in her mind like a splinter under a fingernail, refusing to be dismissed.

As she transferred the contents of the box to her purse, she wondered how much she really knew about the man she’d married. John headed an arbitration firm, representing investors interested in marine resource exploitation and deep-sea mining. But he had never gone into detail about what this entailed, had always been quick to steer any conversations about his work to other topics. At dinner parties and office events, she had met a number of his business connections, almost invariably elderly and peculiar-looking. The newest firm with the oldest clients in the industry had been a running joke between them, back when they still went through the trouble of making each other laugh. John’s family was either deceased or estranged, and he always had an excuse ready for not attending her family gatherings.

Could he be involved in something illegal? All the more reason to put some distance between them, leaving no hint of her whereabouts. Another taxi took her to the Hertz car rental on Fifty-fifth Street, where she rented a nondescript Subaru and drove to an even more nondescript motel on the city’s outskirts. Having pawned most of her jewelry and sold six pairs of barely worn shoes to a high-end second-hand shop, she picked up the keys to the rental cabin, spent a night watching TV and guzzling cheap wine, then headed out of town, alone with the doubts that assailed her mind.

###

The cabin looked rustic but well-maintained, its interior sparse and clean, the trees letting in plenty of light. A solar-powered system pumped water from a nearby well and there was enough cordwood stacked next to the stove to see any occupants through the winter. Leah lugged her suitcases into the small bedroom and dumped them on the narrow but comfortable-looking bed. Cell reception was poor to nonexistent, and the dusty implement hanging on the wall didn’t seem to be connected to anything. The thought of breaking a leg, or falling ill with no way to get in touch with help, gave her pause, but only briefly. She had come here to get away from her old life; isolation was what she desired most.

She arranged her supplies in the pantry and realized that she was ravenous. Leaning against the sink, she opened a can of spaghetti and devoured it cold, washing it down with lukewarm beer. Outside, the forest rustled and creaked, sunlight flecked the grass, danced between the long shadows of the trees. Leah wondered if there were still beasts up here in the mountains, wolves and bears and cougars. Ordinarily the notion would have disturbed her, but now it felt almost comforting.

Leah closed her eyes and tried to visualize the landscape, ridges and valleys and promontories, blanketed by hardwood and pine. Rolling eastward, past the flickering dots of human settlements, to the blue-gray of the ocean, vast and primordial, caves, honeycombed primordial rock, tunnels opening on sunless shores and ancient boneyards, secrets forever buried from the light. A strange sense of belonging accompanied the vision: she was part of the scenery, as tall as the mountains, as implacable as the sea. Draining the dregs of her beer, she went into the bedroom to unpack.

Unseen eyes scrutinized her as she worked, making the hair at the nape of her neck rise up in alarm. Leah stuffed a pile of clothes into a drawer, turned round, fighting panic. The small stone figurine stared at her from the nightstand, its not-quite-human face inscrutable. She had to have picked it up when she got out of the car, although surely she would remember having done so. Its presence unnerved her in a way she couldn’t quite describe to herself, as if it were radiating wrongness through the room.

Gingerly she picked it up, bracing herself for another shock. She felt only the cold smoothness of the stone in her hand. The mantelpiece in the living room would be a more fitting place for it, yet it felt even more out of place there, leering down at her like a malevolent gargoyle. Wandering from room to room, she tried to find a place for it, discarding one option after another. She wanted the ugly thing nowhere near her when she sat down to eat, or went to sleep. Finally she shoved it into an empty desk drawer, shutting it from sight, if not entirely out of mind.

Yet the touch of the stone lingered on her skin, the weight of the statuette just right in the nest of her palm. It was no surprise that its eyes followed her across the threshold of sleep, burning eyes the size of dinner plates, golden and bisected by vertical pupils. Whispers filled her dream, the voice of the sea drifting in through the open windows, across the distance. Old impulses stirred in her, inchoate and terrifying. The pupils dilated into pits of the purest black, taking her in.

###

Over the next weeks, Leah fell into a simple routine of reading, napping and taking long hikes in the forest. A deep, contented calm settled over her, as if she had found what she’d been searching for all her life. Always slight of build, her long rambles left her lean but wiry, burned off her city-dweller pallor. When she looked at herself in the mirror – once a habit bordering on obsession, now no more than an afterthought – a stranger looked back at her, a face hard and determined, one that she didn’t mind growing into. She made basic meals and devoured them with little ceremony, often out of the pan or package, food she had carefully avoided since her college days. The sharp scent of pine resin and the chirping of insects, coupled with the good, strong feeling of taxed muscles, proved a better soporific than any sleeping aid she’d ever taken.

Her dreams frightened her at first, powerful and elemental, full of rage and blind destruction, a sense of expanding beyond the sky, plunging into the abyssal void beyond. Worlds shrivelled and were shorn of life beneath her burning gaze; other universes were beckoning, realities unfolding like a dance of veils, spilling untold wonders. She was a force of nature, a being of unbound power, racing across plains and plateaus in vast leaps, plunging into the blackness of the ocean, her titanic lungs bellowing a call to the vast forms cavorting about in the depths. The dreams would leave her shaken and sweat-damp, but curiously energized. Sometimes they drove her from bed in the predawn hours, left her smoking on the front porch and staring at the black wall of silent pines, feeling insubstantial, unreal in a way she could not put into words, like the forest and hills and sky were no more than props used by something beyond her understanding to explain itself to her.

Days passed by, the nights getting colder, the breath of the wind from the mountaintops carrying the first hints of winter. Leah felt like a woman remade, imbued with a new sense of purpose, awakened to a fresh understanding of herself. What she didn’t feel like was going back to the dreariness of everyday life, returning to the city, or anything resembling civilization. It was time for a trip to the general store. She could get a signal in town, call the owners and extend her lease on the cabin and restock her shelves, kill two birds with one stone.

After the silence of the forest, the noise of the inhabited world seemed earsplitting, the scant traffic a hellish roar throbbing in the confines of her skull. Faces appeared hostile and alien, remote from her in a way she struggled to define. Even the call she made to the cabin’s owners barely registered on the surface of her mind. All she could think about were the mountains, the wide open spaces, her grip on reality like a safety net around something mysterious and unfathomable opening inside her.

She paid for her purchases and hurried back to the Subaru without bothering to count her change. As she slammed the door shut behind her, she caught sight of a dark SUV parked behind the gas pumps. Its tinted windows and out-of-state plates didn’t strike her as odd. Yet the image kept returning to her as she drove back to the cabin, casting frequent glances at her rearview mirror; it hovered in her thoughts during her afternoon walk, the shower and dinner that followed, while she got ready for bed. Without pausing to question her motives, she removed the stone idol from its confinement and placed it on the ledge of her bedroom window, facing the hills. It just felt right, like a piece of a puzzle fitting into place. After her book had dropped on her face twice, waking her up, she gave up on trying to read, turned the lights off and was asleep in seconds.

###

The following morning Leah heard the faint rumble of an approaching car engine. She started, almost spilling her coffee, convinced that any moment she’d see John coming down the driveway, storming to the door. Just as unexpectedly as it had appeared, the noise faded to silence. Leah crossed to the living room windows, barely daring to breathe.

Was he out there, dragging the moment out, letting her stew in her fear? Not knowing seemed worse than confronting the problem head on. The old Leah might have locked herself in and cowered in the farthest corner, but the new one refused to be afraid. Throwing the door open, she stepped out on the front porch, fists clenched, eyes scanning the closed ranks of trees.

So intent was she on watching the forest that she almost missed the flash of something bright on a rise above the road, gone as soon as it had appeared. Leah felt her heart leap up into her mouth. Someone was up there, right where the track veered off into her driveway.

Watching her.

Her legs carried her off the porch and several steps along the gravel when she heard the car start up and drive away. By the time she reached the top of the driveway, there was nothing to see but the road and fallen leaves, the naked branches of hardwoods stark and black against the green of the pines. Tyre tracks, deep and wide, scored the mud on the side of the road, like the vehicle had left in a hurry. Close to the tracks, a spur trail led up the steep hillside. From halfway up, the cabin would be in plain view, as if laid out on the palm of a hand.

Leah managed to get back to the cabin and bolt the door behind her before her legs gave out, dumping her on the kitchen floor. Panic dried her mouth, coppery and bitter. Hikers passed through the woods often enough. Someone may have gotten lost, used the shoulder to turn around. It could have been a coincidence, but she didn’t think so. Whatever explanation she tried to offer, her mind countered with the image of the SUV at the gas station, the driver invisible behind dark glass. She knew with cold certainty that she was no longer safe here. John had found her hideaway, would be heading for the cabin as soon as his spy, or spies, gave him the news.

Oddly, the realization which should have terrified her brought no dread, other than that initial microsecond of alarm. Instead she felt drowsy, her limbs leaden, her eyelids weighed down with sleep. It had to be the aftermath of an adrenaline crash. She dragged herself to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, the mattress folding around her, drawing her in deeper. This was no time for a nap, she should be packing her belongings, getting back on the road again. But holding onto her thoughts was an impossible task. A void unfolded inside her, a black chasm into which her consciousness was sinking, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane. Leah slept, curled on her side, the stone figurine clutched in both hands, and dreamed of the sea.

###

In her dream-state, the noise of the crickets beyond the window morphed into the roll and crash of waves, the low, subaural hum of the deep. Yet it wasn’t the sea she dreamed of, but the forest, wide and untrammelled, the way it must have been in aeons past, when the few humans who inhabited it wore hides and huddled in caves, burning fires to keep out the dark. Through this forest she moved with the ease of a ghost, barely stirring the tops of the evergreens, feeling as tall as the sky, the earth trembling in the wake of her passage.

Far below she could see the road, a thin ribbon of dirt winding through the expanse of green, a dark spot sliding along it like a bead on a string. In a vertiginous twist of perspective, the ground rushed closer. She could make out the SUV with the out-of-state plates, see the man behind the wheel, burly and balding, his jaw set in grim lines of concentration as he took the curves at speed. He must have sensed the shadow fall on him: he looked up, his confusion giving way to sheer terror as he beheld a face the size of a barn looming over the car, a body as vast as a skyscraper blocking out the sky. So pitiful was his purpose, so banal his labors, that it stilled the wrath in her: she could taste the horror inside him, the atavistic knowledge buried beneath it, as potent to her changed senses as the headiest wine. Hesitant, she reached down, her claw covering the SUV, either to destroy it or arrest its motion. Before she could make up her mind, the driver wrenched the wheel, a silent scream twisting his features, and the car went into a roll.

One moment she was inside the tumbling, careening vehicle, watching through the man’s eyes as the earth and sky traded places, the wall of trees growing through the cracks in the windshield. The next she was starting up in bed, sweaty and breathing hard, squeezing the effigy until her knuckles hurt.

But she had seen. She had understood. The knowledge burned inside her, spreading through every cell, seared onto her mind. As if a dam had burst, visions poured into her head: a city by the sea, steel and glass towers reflected in the waves, a shadow creeping across them as something vast eclipsed the sun, an island shambling out of the water, a volcanic island on legs, its thousands of fluted mouths piping a weird, discordant melody. Throngs were darkening the sand, thousands of people milling across it, wading into the water, answering the call, the sea rising to their chests, clasping its hands over their heads, the wailing song lulling them to sleep.

She saw John, kneeling in what looked like the atrium of a luxury hotel, surrounded by men and women in white, gold-trimmed robes. His two-thousand-dollar suit wet, his expensive haircut plastered to his head, his eyes closed in rapture as a robed man in a jewelled headdress poured a chalice of foul, slimy water over him: a baptism, or an initiation. The sight sickened her: she hated herself for looking, for not being able to stop the images from coming. Just like John couldn’t know, or preferred not to think about what his greed had done to him, what his client-revellers worshipped, masked in symbols and mysticism, the true power behind their wealth and influence, a promise they, or their fathers, or their fathers’ fathers had made to the thing beneath the sea.

It was her promise now. In the deepest, darkest part of her, something was awakening after millennia of sleep, stretching colossal limbs, unfurling leathery wings that spanned the horizon.

###

The following morning Leah packed up her suitcases, got into her rental car and drove down the mountain.

Lights flashed about a mile or so down the road, a police cruiser and an ambulance parked as close to the forest as possible. A tow truck was hauling a heap of twisted, fused wreckage from a ravine just off the shoulder. Black metal, out-of-state plates. Around the road, trees lay splintered and scattered, like blades of grass trod by a giant’s feet. She waited patiently for an ashen-faced police officer to wave her on, drove around the chaos carefully and headed for the highway without looking back.

Her newfound power was a raw thrum in her nerves, faint but undeniable, a herald of greater transformations to come. Let John and his hired goons track her down. She was ready to make an example out of them all. She could barely wait.

Humming softly to herself, Leah surrendered to the call of the ocean, an invisible string gently drawing her home.

 

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