Those harsh insistent winds of the west
Tale
First night
I sing my lullaby:
Sleep now baby till the morn sleep now baby to the dawn The child-tearer won't get to you won't tear your eyes and look them through Won't take your eyes to look at you so sleep now babe the whole night through
My child sleeps on as the door shakes at the impatient pushes of the wind. It shivers, this door: krrraaa-grrraaa, krrraaa-grrraaa, in time with the baby's pulse, as if the great unmastered thing that seeks admission through that fragile door shudders with its cravings in time with a child's tiny heartbeat.
But this cannot be so. The god of storms is also the god of strangers and of the color red. We have nothing red in our house that could attract his desires, nor do we ever tolerate strangers. And it's known among us that the wind is the breath of the storm, and the storm is not a beast. If it were, it could be tamed at least.
What comes in the night of our dreams is given a name. Child-tearer. Or child-stealer. Baby-mauler, and so on… And many other, more correct but definitely forbidden names, for the utterance of which a taboo-breaker will be whipped until he learns to hold his tongue.
My wife sleeps also, across the room with the goats and the dogs. It's a heap of stacked-up animal bodywarmth that beckons me over. But I remain awake. Someone has to be the watcher.
Vile creatures shall be seen upon the earth. There are no bounds to their malice. By their strong limbs the vast forests of the world shall be laid low; and when they are fill'd with food they shall gratify their desires by dealing out affliction, terror, and death to every living thing.
Second day
Day comes, but there's no break in the storm, which loves the day as much as the night. The wind still shakes the door tirelessly like an unbidden visitor but there's no fear in that noise during the day. My wife wakes, sees to the baby, which still has her eyes, and I milk the goats and then sleep. The bitch Jowser suckles at the goat's udder and I let her - what harm in it? There's milk enough to go round. Millet boiled in goat's milk. Porridge then the oblivion of no-dream.
My wife wakes me: there's an actual man at the door. Knocking. Not the wind. A human man. A stranger. She wants me to go. Not open the door. Just go to the door.
Now the door shakes with two rhythms out of step, like strangers who disagree while striding alongside each other on the plain. There's the wind shaking with the pulse of a child's blooming heart, and then there's the knock of this stranger. He calls out and it is indeed a man's voice but it is not in our language.
He knocks some more. I sign to my wife to put out the fire. She’s already clasped her hand over our child's mouth and the little one is voiceless now. We’re still.
There’s a brief time over the next hour when the knocking of the stranger at the door is in time with the shaking of the wind, and it seems the door will break with the doubled force of it. But it holds, and then the knocking and the shaking are out of phase again. Then the knocking is gone, and remains only the shake-shake, shake-shake of the wind to the time of an infant's heart.
It is now dark and cold and there is no more daylight left. The child is given leave to wail again, the goats wander and nuzzle with the dogs. I kill a chicken, the one that never lays. My knife is blunt and it takes a lot of effort. Nothing can keep its edge where this wind blows - it is the curse of strangers and redness. We catch the chicken blood in a bowl and heat it for a broth. Millet and blood and milk, a pink blossom of stirabout porridge, and then full night.
Nothing shall remain on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursu'd, disturb'd, or spoil'd, and that which is in one country remov'd into another.
Second night
The lullaby doesn't work this time. Only when I walk around from wall to wall and back again does the child's restless wailing get stilled. I bless her eyes with the Charm of the Good Eyes Against Bad and then pass her to my wife as she nestles amid the warm bodies of the beasts. She hasn't said a single word all day except to warn of the stranger. She looks too exhausted or too witless or too dispirited to speak. She dozes or drifts there among the dogs and the goats.
I watch against the door on my unbalanced little stool. It rocks this way then that way. Like the rocking of sleep, like the shaking of doors or the knocking of strangers. I doze or drift as I wobble and face the shaking door.
And their bodies shall be made the tomb and the conduit of all the living bodies they have slain, for to pass hereunder.
Third day
In the morning the child is gone. My wife swears she had her arms around her all the time as she slept. Nothing could have taken our daughter. But something has. Uselessly, I yell at her and slap her. Uselessly, she screams at me and slaps herself. None of this is helping.
The wind's shake at the door has changed its tone and rhythm overnight. I dreamt that it changed and when I came awake it really had changed.
Now I'm emboldened to open the door and look out. My wife hides beneath the heap of goat and dog bodies in the corner and I stand there ready to pull the door open. Now the shake is broader and slower, kuuuh-guuuuh, kuuuh-guuuuh, like an adult's beating heart. Maybe it's my heart.
The child's name is Sara. Where is Sara? Where are Sara's eyes now? The urgency of these questions pulls me, pushes me, against and away from my fear.
I snatch open the door and look out.
The wind blows in a torment of sand and snow, dust and frost, as if the storm is undecided about its own season. It wants it all, summer and winter and sky and earth.
A stranger strides up, a man clothed in red with a white misty left eye, walking with a stick. He walks up to where I stand in the doorway, the wind whipping round his grey scraggles of hair.
"What do you want?" I ask him. He says nothing, but looks me over with his good right eye, pale blue and worrisome.
"Do you have my daughter?" I ask. Again, nothing. He leans in to sniff me like a dog meeting another dog.
"Where is she now? What have you done with her eyes?" I shout at him, and make as if to strike him.
He hits me hard with his stick, and pushes past me where I lie on the ground. He steps inside the house and closes the door. The wind stops now. There is a silence all around on the plain, but the wailing of a woman and the barking of dogs and the bleating of goats all muffled from inside the cabin. Whatever snow and frost has fallen on the ground begins to melt and the dust drinks it thirstily.
Now it is sundown, and to the west the sky is red and gold as the robes of kings. To the east rises the star known as the Watcher, pale blue and shimmery. There's the wailing of a child out that way in the darkness where the night crawls high.
O earth, why do you not open and hurl them into the deep fissures of thy vast abysses and caverns, and display no longer in the sight of the gods so cruel and horrible a monster?
Third night
Is it still a storm? Now the wind has stilled and there is no more snow or frost, no dustdevils rising and dancing on the plain. But there are blue lightnings far out to the west where the strangers live. Black breaks in the stars which are signs of clouds with their heavy burden. And hard dark roilings of far-off noise that cover the nearer wailing of a sightless child.
Out here I have my blind Sara and my beaten self. Inside the stranger enjoys my wife, my beasts, my warm home. I hear grunting and shrieks and unrecognized words of anger or joy. He is either a god or a vagrant, but in the end it makes no real difference. He’s dispossessed me, and it was what I imagined all along it would be like. Maybe I summoned him with my watching and my words.
What Sara's lost eyes have seen cause her dark empty sockets to weep and her small body to shake. I cannot make her see any more of such things. I won’t fight the stranger. Maybe she will be a greater prophet than I have been.
We will wander off in the daybreak and find a new place with almond trees and running streams. I will carry her and sing a soft lullaby that makes it all well again.
A prophecy
We dream... soon we see a house of brick and we enter in. In it a number of monkeys, baboons, and all of that species, in chains, grinning and snatching at each other.
The weak are caught by the strong and with a grinning aspect, the strong ones first couple with and then devour the weaker, plucking off first one limb and then another till the body is left a helpless trunk.
After grinning and kissing it with fondness they devour this too. Here and there we see an ape that picks the live flesh off its own tail to eat...
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This is stunning. As in, I am stunned. I was mesmerised, and enamoured, and revulsed that I was enamoured and entranced by this awe-ful tale.
Fabulous work.
This is a tremendous story and I read it with admiration, but it did not make me feel safe or content at all! You have disturbed me deeply with your wonderful frights.