A walk in the dark - an outlaw's tale

[snurpt]

Three leagues and a quarter, past the old Sycamore tree, across the shallow brook and up sheep dung hill is where the last known sighting of the outlaw had occurred. The hill had since been paved over, a small chapel erected atop it. The brook had dried out after most of the river water had been diverted to supply the farmers' fields. The Sycamore was cut down, some of the wood used to build that chapel. An apple orchard now ran in neat rows past the brook's bed. The outlaw hadn't returned. People didn't remember him, being busy with their daily lives and for the most part uninterested in the less savory episodes of the past. Life was quiet here, the law was respected and the common folk didn't dabble in the occult and the weird. Not since the lofty days of yore, when oil barons and railway magnates had divvied up the land between themselves, when the common man and woman had been in danger of being ground up between the ever accelerating wheels of progress and exploration, when a quick gun hand and the right mystic phrase could turn a fortune or spell death. But time had a way of bleeding color from these recollections until they were just like faded photographs and distant memories, less substantial than schoolyard chants and bedtime stories. Time was the great devourer, the merciless metronome of life that drove ever onward, ever forward, never back. Or so it would seem, but some very few did indeed remember. They waited, they watched and they prepared for what would inevitably resurface.

The old spirit speaker had grown weary of his task. He had inherited it from his father, who in turn had been instructed by his father before him. The line of spirit speakers went back several generations. Each subsequent iteration believed the old stories a little less, took their duty a little easier until it was the last spirit speaker sitting beneath an apple tree, idly carving on his walking stick and gazing up at the chapel occasionally. Nobody would begrudge him a little respite from the midday sun. He lived a life of abstinence. He didn't drink, he didn't gamble. He had no family of his own, no son to pick up the sacred duty in his stead and no wife to reassure him of the importance of his task. He told himself he had chosen to abstain, and that it was a good and sensible thing to bring an end to a ridiculous and outdated superstition. But there was the tiniest part of him that believed and that wanted to believe and to see and experience even the slightest hint of the extraordinary, the unnatural and the magical. That part refused to acquiesce, and tiny though it was, it meant he came back to the chapel time and again, hope diminishing with each visit but persisting against the odds.
There was a book one of his predecessors had penned. It ranked somewhere between a diary and a gospel, not quite spiritual but not a scientific account, either. The pages were scuffed and faded, the spine broken and fixed repeatedly and some of the pages penned over by one disillusioned forebear or another. The spirit speaker kept the book with him on his visits, sometimes flicking idly through the small number of chapters. He knew most of the book by heart, even though he gave no heed to its content. But in his life of abstinence and frugality, this small token was a treasure he would never admit to cherish.
Noon had come and gone. He had eaten a few apples, drank most of his water and was chewing on the last bit of sausage, trying to suck a little more salty essence from the tiny morsels of meat between his teeth. This day, like so many before it, he would eventually get exhausted from inactivity and rise from his post, make his way back to town and try his luck at finding a task that would pay enough for yet another week of straw mattresses, watery soup and maybe a bath if fortune was really smiling on him.

Night finally settled into its familiar pose, no clouds dimming the moonlight that fell between the apple trees. Yet the air was pregnant with the promise of a thunderstorm, bird and bug having long since made for shelter. The silence at the foot of the hill was oppressive and thick. With a start, the spirit speaker woke, although he was at a loss at what had startled him. At first, he supposed it was the tree's shadow looming over him, but the shape was out of proportion, the lower parts more wide and pronounced than the top, gently swaying without a breeze. Then the old man realized that the moon was ahead, not behind. The shadow was man-shaped. There was a silent figure standing over him, face hidden by a scarf, eyes buried in shadow. The specter remained perfectly still, its unfathomable gaze piercing through the man's flesh and soul. Involuntarily, the spirit speaker clutched his book, knowing without a doubt in his mind that before him was the purpose of his existence, but unable to fathom the monumentality of the moment. Then, the figure spoke, words falling to the surface of the spirits speaker's conscience like tombstones embedding themselves into hallowed ground.

"Ah'm here, 'though Ah reckon the place is grown diff'rent wi' time. Tell me, man, what is the time, then?"

The voice was rumbling and unpleasant, like a freight train coming to a stop with screeching breaks, like boulders straining against each other before an avalanche and like a tree branch bending under the weight of overripe fruit. It was a voice like a butcher's cleaver in its finality for the chicken's neck and it allowed no excuses. The spirit speaker's gaze traveled past the shade and up the hill towards the chapel, the faint outline of which he could just barely make out. It was impossible to discern in the light of the moon, but he was convinced the front door was standing slightly ajar, with a darkness deeper than any moonless night seeping through the crack. The thing that had spoken to him was not for this world, but had been of it, once. Not now, though, and not ever again, thus the purpose of the spirit speakers, who guided these travelers towards whatever waited for them.

"Time...", the old man managed to force from his dry throat, "...to go."

[snurpt]

Nothing in this world or the next was ever certain beyond a reasonable degree of uncertainty. The axiom had been thoroughly established by a spirit speaker many generations ago following prolonged debates with the spirits of the deceased as well as other, more ephemeral entities, or so the book claimed. It went to show that while any one spirit speaker may have went their entire life without ever so much as encountering a single disembodied soul, another could have been beset by specters and haunts just out of the womb. And while some of the restless dead may have been searching for a means to move onto whatever fate awaited them, more than one spirit speaker had had to come to the painful realization that some among the disembodied masses were intent on causing as much grief and mayhem as was spiritually possible. The warnings about the outlaw being just such an agent of chaos had been driven home for as long as anyone in the line of fathers and sons could remember. The book spoke of the outlaw at length, his many and various misdeeds, his penchant for cruelty and the imaginative ways of ensuring that misfortune fell on anyone in his path. This last bit of lore stuck to the front of the old man's mind as he led the outlaw out of the orchard and toward the town. The chapel hadn't been able to contain the apparition, after all. It now fell on the lone spirit speaker to try his utmost at making sure nobody else got hurt. He had been chosen for this task, just as his father and grandfather before him, down through the generations that had sat watch at the foot of the hill. Such was the threat of the outlaw that an entire bloodline had been tasked with waiting for the inevitable return of this ancient evil.

"Yer thoughts are loud, man. Ah'm not the devil, or some demon come ta claim yer soul. Ah'm jus' a simple trav'ler. If yer point me in the right direc'shun, Ah'll be outta yer hair like 'at."

The outlaw snapped his fingers, making the old man jump. Without turning to look back, he knew there was a wicked grin under the scarf that hid the lower part of the other... thing's face. The spirit speaker felt that piercing gaze between his shoulder blades and quickened his step. Better to get this over with quickly, one way or another. "That's the spirit!", he could imagine his father say approvingly. "Stop dawdlin' and get crackin'!", his grandfather would have cawed between coughs. That man had lived off coffee and tobacco for decades, which had sustained him well into his nineties. Something told the spirit speaker his own life expectancy had shortened considerably within the last hour.
They reached the town church when the street lamps were casting their dim glow onto empty streets, the clock quickly approaching midnight. The priest and his entourage of spinsters had long retired to their respective chambers, but the spirit speaker knew that the entrance to the sacristy had a faulty lock that could be forced with a deft push. Once inside the church, they made their way to the pulpit. Beyond that, there was a trap door to the right of the altar, hidden under a heavy rug. A creaking, dusty ladder vanished into the dark chasm below, but it was a path the old man had taken many times before, though usually alone. At the foot of the ladder, he reached to his left and found a lantern waiting. As he lit the wick, the crypt yawned ahead in dull tones of brown and grey, swallowing sound and light and hope in equal measure. Wordlessly, the old man led the way down, as the path descended at an increasing angle and the walls contained a few bones at first, but became towers of ribs and skulls quickly. The morbid decor played tricks on the eyes and the mind, suggesting movement were there shouldn't be any, and shadows where by all accounts the light should pierce. As the path leveled out once more, the air suddenly grew colder and a slight draft brushed past the spirit speaker's ears. They were closing in on the destination of their silent journey, but he couldn't feel any relief at the prospect of arriving there. Again, his companion spoke up without invitation, clearly privy to the old man's thoughts.

"Don't hold yer breath. Can't ye smell the promise of possibility? Soon, ye'll go back to that listless, soulless life o'yers, and Ah'll move on!"

The spirit speaker was wary, as he had long learned that the words of any disembodied entity were to be taken with a grain of sensible disbelief. That went doubly and triply so for the outlaw, he was certain.