Chasm
Elias, 1879
Author’s note: This story centers around a hunt. There is an (off-screen) animal death, and graphic depictions of animal butchery. There is lots of blood and some minor sexual content. Take care of yourselves.
Elias watched Anderson wipe bloody hands on his dungarees. At their feet, a colossal elk lay on its back, split from throat to tail, its body steaming in the cool air.
“Too bad the boys at camp won’t see them big antlers,” Anderson said with a grin. “‘Bout the biggest I ever saw.”
The elk’s head, crowned with branching antlers tall as saplings, had been removed, a sawing procedure that made a raspy sound Elias could feel in his molars. Each pull on the blade had been ecstatic, releasing flesh from hide, severing the rubbery arteries and crunchy windpipe.
The head now sat upright on a ragged stump of neck, its velvet muzzle buried in sparse grass. Its antlers clawed the sky like lightning bolts in reverse.
Elias had propped it up that way, muscling it into place against a rock. He had thought it funny, and somehow appropriate, for the animal to watch the proceedings. But now the elk’s eye seemed fixed on him. Neither empty nor docile, the eye shimmered a fiery amber, fringed with dark lashes that looked as if they could blink.
“Think they’ll believe us?” Elias asked, stepping out of its sight-line. He found himself relieved they couldn’t haul the head back.
“They best believe the meat,” Anderson laughed, taking a swig from his flask.
He and Elias had tied the elk’s legs to four small trees to hold it, open and vulnerable, while Anderson made the long incision. Dressing the elk was splashy, physical work, and while Anderson moved expertly, he was a fraction of the size of the beast. He sweat gloriously, his compact body contorting, muscles strained.
Elias was keen and attentive; the sight of so much blood had clarified his mind, sharpened his senses. He was riveted by the ritual— the exacting steps done just so, the way he never knew what was coming next until Anderson made a move. Though he hadn’t been the one to shoot the beast, its capture felt completely personal.
And now, with the elk’s torso open and his hands gloved in crimson, Anderson began to untie its legs.
“Get on in here, Eli,” said Anderson. “Help me shove ‘im over.”
Elias placed his palms on the elk’s flank and dug his boot heels into the dirt. He felt embodied in a way he never had. The animal radiated heat. Its hide prickled with wiry hairs. Anderson grunted.
The carcass rolled onto its side and Elias– who had been a schoolteacher back East, with no experience in such practicalities– suddenly understood why they had bothered to drag its body to the top of a small rise.
With gravity’s help, Anderson reached a hooked blade into the cavity and worked out a mass of purple guts in a sack-like membrane. They plopped onto the earth and wobbled a ways downhill.
The air seemed to waver. Anderson’s competence with blade and flesh was captivating. Elias shivered, his chest dotted with gore, the skin on his arms crackling with gooseflesh. The eye flashed, drawing his attention.
He wished they could kill it again.
It was men’s work on the frontier, life-and-death work that moved the blood and built a fire in the gut. Elias felt hungry and powerful and alive. He had been chosen for this. He felt a tight pulse in his pants and tugged on the seam.
At the same time, his gaze landed on a twitching bit of purple jelly stuck to the other man’s crotch.
Blood painted Anderson’s arms, his clothes, even his boyish face, and when he smiled his teeth shone out of the mess.
“Pull yerself together there Eli,” he said, as he pinched the bit of tissue, squishing it into his pants. He stopped, hand on himself, and winked.
Elias blew out a long breath but didn’t look away. He stuck his tongue into his cheek, leaving things open a moment longer than he should. Anderson coughed and turned back towards the elk.
“Best if we debone ‘im out here,” he said, chewing a bloody thumbnail. “No need to haul out a hundred pounds of bones.”
“Right,” Elias said, bringing his own thumb to his mouth. The elk’s blood tasted sweet and stony.
“Takes ‘round an hour,” Anderson continued. He looked at the sky, which had gone a shade toward dusk. “Might take us into the night.” He leveled his eyes at Elias.
Elias felt his chest squeeze.
“You get started, Anderson. I’ll fetch us some water from the stream.”
“Andy.”
“Right. Andy.” The intimacy of the nickname dried his throat. Possibilities rose from the dirt.
Anderson squatted down by the elk’s head, curling his hand around a thick antler. He seemed to be counting under his breath.
“Shit,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Twenny points…” Anderson’s voice faded. He looked down at his boots.
“Twenty…what?”
“I hope he wasn’t The One.”
“The One– ?”.
Anderson shrugged, chewed his lip. The yellow eye stared past him to Elias.
“Heard things, is all.”
“Things?”
The head was haloed with flies, unperturbed by Anderson’s closeness. The men were quiet for a long moment.
“Things,” Anderson sighed, getting to his feet. “‘Bout a twenty-point elk. ‘Bout the particular patch of woods he reigns. Not a place I want to disturb, exactly.”
He shook his head, fishing his flask from his pocket.
“Legends, is all.”
With the toe of his boot, he nudged the huge sack of viscera. It rolled down the rock face, leaving a wet trail, and came to rest against a tree.
“Legends,” Elias tried to say in agreement, but it came out as a question.
“Best we get back ‘fore dark.”
Elias was unnerved. He thought the men had understood one another. He thought, when Anderson asked him to go hunting…
The Reverend’s stern, grey eyes appeared in his mind. Suddenly, the elk’s gory neck, its unblinking eye and jiggling innards, the blood that seemed to be everywhere revolted him.
Passing the hateful animal’s head, Elias kicked out a foot and knocked it over, sending flies into disarray. It rocked at a weird angle, huge antlers holding it off the ground. Dust coated the animal’s wet eye, but didn’t blot it out.
By the time he reached the bottom of the ridge, Elias had lost his swagger. He felt cold and exhausted. He spit the bloody taste out of his mouth.
It had been nearly a year since he had left icy Wisconsin, digging deep into his soul to find the courage to follow Reverend Watson to their Promised Land. Sixty-five Watsonite men had departed Madison; just fifty-one made it to California.
Soon they would have enough of a settlement to bring in some women, he reassured himself for the hundredth time. A woman would stop his nonsense. A woman would fix him.
But imagining himself though a woman’s eyes, he felt he could drown in shame. He had the overwhelming urge to hide— from Anderson, from Reverend Watson, who would see the sin on him plain as day.
Rather than head for the stream, he turned toward a shaded hollow at the base of a Redwood tree. There, in the comforting dark, he decided to pray for strength and endurance, to return to his men’s work with a clear mind.
As he approached the hollow he began to get a sense of the size of the tree straddling it, surely the biggest he had ever seen. Its bark was rusty red, softened with flaky gray lichen, with grooves bigger than Elias’s outstretched hand. The hollow was deep, velvety black. From its mouth streamed a cold mushroomy breeze.
He craned his neck to the crown, and found himself blinded by the glare of the bright noon sun.
He tried to estimate how much wood was in such a tree. He viewed it with hungry desperation, wishing for a team of men with saws to let their will fly at this great pillar of resource. To bring these giants down to size; God’s trees turned to wagon wheels, spoons, bedposts, sawdust. That’s how they would claim the land.
He stepped back. Looking at the sky again, he felt his heart drop. The sun, directly overhead, burned a hot shaft of light through the foliage onto his upturned face.
The midday sun.
But it wasn’t noon. It was an hour from sunset. Two, at best.
He spun around, but the ridge was gone. No longer the sloping rock face he had scrambled down, he saw a chalky cliff soaring into the sky. He felt a sickening vertigo as he realized he had somehow climbed to the bottom of a deep chasm.
Looking down he now saw his hands and arms were red with fresh blood. It seeped into the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and across his gut, soaked black-red on the front of his pants. He wiped at his arms but could find no injury. The blood sheeted off him then came back, replenished from some unseen source.
Worse, the bloody seam of his pants distended, his wretched desire pulsing, tormenting him.
Elias pressed his hands to his crotch. He called out for help, hesitantly at first, unsure he wanted to be found in such a state. His voice ricocheted off the impossible cliff walls and echoed back. The noon sun, eerily focused on that tiny patch of earth, bore down its heat. He felt his head for an injury— had he fallen off the cliff?— but everything was intact.
He thought to pray but his panicked mind couldn’t settle on the words. When he clasped his hands they were wet, dripping as if he had dipped them in a bucket of blood. Viscous drops fell from his fingers and landed on the pine needles at his feet.
“God–,” was all he could spit out, and sticky saliva stretched between his lips as he sputtered. He adjusted himself, squeezing his legs together. “God! Oh God, please God…”
On the back of his neck he felt a warm exhale, an insistent pressure nudging him into the hollow. He dared not turn around. He heard the elk’s snort, pictured its black muzzle tracing the grass, its sawed-off neck soaking gore into the earth. He relived his relish at the death of the beast, his proximity to Anderson, his thirst for blood and flesh. What did Anderson say? Twenty points? He fell to hands and knees, weeping, and crawled into the tree’s belly.
Around him were great roots, cold and serpentine, wood walls thick and impenetrable. In the dark, that earthy smell turned to something sulfurous, rotted, decaying. He gagged as it pushed into his throat.
Was there a Devil’s Elk? A Devil’s Wood?
Deep in the cavern, something glinted in the dark. Some kind of surface or membrane that held the glare from the sun and flashed it back at him. He didn’t want to go deeper, but when he turned around, the passage he had stooped through was no larger than a fist. Only a yellow dot remained in the wood, and as he lunged for it, it seemed to roll towards him. A pupil. A blink. The elk’s eye gleamed out from the wood, regarding him with slow hate.
He threw himself backward, whimpering and crying, his slippery hands sliding across the ground.
He was trapped in a Hellmouth with nothing but his sins.
Scrambling away from the eye, he crawled toward the flash in the dark heart of the tree. He reached out a trembling hand until it met something cold. Ice? No, glass. He smudged it with that awful blood that would not dry. He knocked on it. It sounded hollow; maybe it would break.
And then he saw her face.
An angel! Bathed in spotless white, she had a round, beautiful face, youthful and unmarred, and her cheeks were pink and glowing. He lurched towards her, gory hands sliding across the glass, nearly blotting out his view. She flinched and spun like she was searching for something. He yelled and she turned away, eyes full of tears.
She could see, he realized. She could see the rotten center of him, his failure as a man, his turn away from God.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry for all of it!” Saliva flew from his mouth as he babbled pleas for deliverance.
“Have you been sent to punish me? Oh, please, please answer!” The angel’s eyes were wide, her mouth open in a silent scream.
“I am not a good man. I am a sinner, I have sinned, oh please, allow me to repent!”
He pulled off his boot and bashed it against the glass, desperate. The angel covered her face.
“Deliver me! Save me from this Hell! I’ll do anything!” The sound echoed through the tree with a horrible emptiness, but the surface held.
A bright light flooded the glass, and then the angel was gone. He gasped for air in the putrid dark, his body sagging, boot dangling in a bloody hand. All was lost.
When Elias opened his eyes, he was lying in the open air. A full moon had risen and lit the forest silver. His arms were dry, clotted with dirt and smudges of dried blood.
He wondered if the whole thing had been a dream.
He got to his feet, stumbling as his knees gave out once and then again. He realized he was wearing only one shoe; the other nowhere near. He remembered taking off his boot, trying to smash through glass with it— but still, he wondered how any of that could have been real. A window, inside a tree? He ran his hands across his head and neck, checking for injuries, and he recalled doing that before too.
He limped and clawed his way up the ridge, tears and snot streaming as he took in his new reality.
At the top, he sat back on his heels and wondered at the scene he beheld. The earth was soaked in gore. The vile sack of viscera had burst, spilling its mess of offal and tunnels across the rock face. Hordes of ants and beetles shivered across its tangled blue Hell.
Then there was a pile of bones, stained black in the moonlight, big black birds fighting over the dreck. Elias retched.
The elk’s head, with its evil, watchful eye, was nowhere.
He wondered how long Anderson would have waited for him, if the man had considered camping out, or even looked for him at all.
Or was a lost soul left to die alone?
If this was a test, he would fail. Had already failed, he knew, in every possible way. He didn’t belong with the Watsonites. Here he would succumb to hunger and terror, his useless body food for bugs and birds, his ruined soul pinned forever to the spot he knelt.
Then he remembered the angel, with her perfect smooth face, her big true eyes beholding him in all his filth and wretchedness. The divine in the tree, how she had flinched from him. How she had cried.
He thought of the way she turned her back.
Had he crawled to the very edge of Hell, only to come back alive? Or was he in Hell now, having been judged and found wanting?
Would he spend eternity on this dark ridge or would he die here alone, rejected on Earth as he was in Heaven?
The sounds of the forest rose around him— owls and insects, winds and whispers and creaking wood. Elias fell forward to his palms, pressing his forehead to the rocky soil, digging his fingers into the earth. The dust was warm and smelled like life.
Wow! The way the saw made a raspy sound Elias could feel in his molars is sort of how I felt about this whole piece!
such a tangle of possibilities and visceral description...what is going on!!!!