Laurel Falls

Laurel Falls

by

Henry Mitchell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 Henry Mitchell

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Printed in the United Kingdom

First Printing, 2016 Alfie Dog Limited

The author can be found at: authors@alfiedog.com

Cover Photograph: Ronnie McCall

Published by

Alfie Dog Limited

Rose Bank, Norton Lindsey,

Warwickshire, CV35 8JQ

Tel: 07712 647754

Dedication

To Kate, who remembers it all.

Acknowledgements

Never enough thanks to Rosemary J. Kind, my longsuffering, merciful and occasionally ruthless publisher and editor, who has shepherded me through three novels and a couple dozen short stories so far. At my age, that may be as far as I get, but I still have hopes. Without her oversight, insight, encouragement, correction and admonition, you wouldn't have anything worth reading from me.

Deep and abiding appreciation and gratitude to David Longley and Deb Coulter who took time from their own worthy projects to read and critique my manuscript before I dared show it to Editor. Only the truest friends tell you what they don't like about your story.

Special thanks to Ronnie McCall for another splendid cover illustration. He saw it first.

I owe great debt to my neighbors in Saluda, North Carolina, and my spiritual family at Church of the Transfiguration, who always forgive me when my made-up characters resemble some of them rather closely. My little stories are theirs as much as mine.

Unbounded love and unceasing allegiance to Jane Ella Matthews, who still manages with grace and charity to live in the same house with me while I write.

About the Author

Henry Mitchell has authored a collection of short stories, Dark on the Mountain, and a trilogy of novels, The Summer Boy, Between Times, and Laurel Falls, about Benjamin Drum, wild child, time traveler, reluctant photographer, lover of mountains.

Henry and his wife, Jane Ella Matthews, and their canine caregiver, Simon, live in the village of Saluda, population 713, in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. He is currently working on his fourth novel, Belief, a mystery involving religion and murder, and a second collection of short stories.

Contents

LANDFALL

HIGHWAYMAN

WEDDING

ASHES

RENDING

BORDERLANDS

TIME’S SHADOW

MENDING

AFTERGLOW

All deepest thanks and ever soulful praise

For this most beautiful and borrowed day

On loan from Maker for these flying hours

To be returned as soon as it is filled

With what true gentle words and healing deeds

As enfleshed Grace beset with us can manage;

If sorrow is the interest paid on love

Then love’s the debt that never can we pay,

For Maker keeps no score on those She dreams,

No credits marked, no debits set apart

To mar the lovelit ledger of Her heart.

-a Collect by Fairmorning of Wilderest

LANDFALL

She drifted with the cloud, dispersing her substance among airborne droplets and vapors. Shadow was not her favorite Stream, but her Rider had been in this bleak, malnourishing world now too long. While his gifts yet grew, his psyche was devolving day by day. He had become disparted, and dangerous. She meant to bring him home, if indeed they still had a home. Though the Rider had sprung from Shadow, and come back to himself here, he was not made for this realm. What he was made for he had forgotten.

She gathered herself, fell like a raptor down between the mountains toward the city below. People on the streets could not see her, but a few glimpsed her umbra slide across their path and looked up to see the pale sky where she had been an instant before. In a space between glances from souls passing by, she assembled herself into a form familiar to her, but not one she had inhabited recently. The Rider would remember, though, and perhaps recognize her shape. Her wings, invisible when spread, took on form and hue as they folded close around her body like a dress and cape the color of heather, the hood thrown back under a cascade of cinnamon hair. The hem of her skirt almost swept the ground, veiling her bare feet from public view.

She felt the cold, without being hurt by it. Through her soles, she read the places she trod. She marveled at how efficiently humans were made for unity with their surroundings. Other blooded creatures in Shadow were shielded from the harsh edges of their environment by fur, scales, shells and calluses. In compensation for their insularity, they were granted some extraordinarily keen sense, like sight, or smell or hearing. Humans on the other hand, were left tender and open to everything. Touch, taste, music and color were all so abundantly accessible to them within the full range of their comprehension. Yet they shut themselves away from the sources of their joy, behind walls and clothes and rules and electronics and mind-numbing drugs, addicted to screens and displays, but fearful of any direct experience of reality. They wanted everything but could receive nothing nourishing.

HIGHWAYMAN

Simon Ryder folded the note he’d just read for the fifth time, slipped it into his coat pocket, looked through the window at the street. Sparse traffic passed in the gray light. A few pedestrians moved hurriedly toward some anticipated warmth, except for one man, who apparently had no place to go, looked to be about Ryder’s age, though Ryder knew he was undoubtedly much younger.

Ryder still had time to go to church, and thought he might, just for the Bach. He’d never encountered a culture beyond Shadow so addicted to atrophied traditions and so immune to transformative insight. Bach, at least, remained alive in the music, and somewhere else these people would never dare to go, even if they knew the way. Bach knew much more about them than they knew about him. Ryder knew them as well by now as he knew himself, still had a lot to learn about both. He stood, buttoned his coat, picked up his hat.

On his way to the door he stopped by the register and handed a ten to the young woman behind the counter, who appeared on the brink of tears the whole hour since Ryder came in. Take a coffee, black, to that guy sitting on the curb outside.

She looked over Ryder’s shoulder, nodded, and silently took the bill.

And don’t worry. Ryder smiled, something he didn’t do often, but more often now than he used to. He still loves you, Janet.

Startled, Janet mouthed soundlessly, How? But Ryder was gone out into the cold.

As he passed the figure huddled on the curb, Ryder flung his aura around the derelict. It would dissipate fairly quickly, but the man would feel less of the cold until his coffee arrived. The coffee might clear his head enough for him to remember there were still people willing to take him in and help him toward another chance at life. Ryder couldn’t read much beyond that, but he knew the man wasn’t alone as he imagined. Connections abounded in the outer worlds as much as in the Labyrinth. The same threads wove through every Stream.

Ryder wished his Flyer were here. She would be able to wrap the derelict warm for the night and plant a few sane thoughts in his head. Ryder was learning her skills, but had worlds to go yet before he gained the Flyer’s depth of being. He still missed her, after all their separation, although, as Ryder had begun to understand, for the Flyer, a long time was no time at all. In any case, he had no doubt they would be joined again, sooner or later as if they never parted. Right now, he was betting on sooner. The note in his pocket read My darling boy. Can we talk? Let me find you. M. He found the envelope on his table when he came into the coffee shop, guessed someone had forgotten their mail until he read his name on it. When he unfolded the sheet inside and saw the runes Owl had taught him on the Other Side, he realized the message had not come to him by any Shadow messenger, but through the Labyrinth, across times and continuums and dimensions. He had no doubts about the sender, could think of only one M in all those vastnesses who would call to him now.

Ryder turned the corner and the icy wind caught him full in the face. He pulled his hat down on his brow, leaned into the gale and, a darkness within a darkness, bore down on the church.

In her former life, Spring Creek Congregation stood alone on the block, surrounded by old oaks and mossy tombstones. The creek, her namesake, had long since disappeared into a culvert under the streets, the graves all vacated, their occupants moved, like their descendants, to greener yards in the suburbs. SCC, as her congregants usually referred to her, still resided under her own steeple, but joined flank to flank with neighboring shops ranged along the street. The church school at the rear had for some years been repurposed to lease as condominiums. Ryder lived in one of them. After most of the congregation fled the scene, the institution survived on judicious endowments, rental incomes, and sparse offerings from the ever-changing assortment of street people who sat in the pews on Sunday and slept in them through the week.

Ryder did not consider himself a Christian. Neither did he count himself a stranger to Word enfleshed. When the quirky and mischievous pastor inquired about his religious leanings, Ryder said he was an Incarnationist. When the minister didn’t question further, Ryder assumed he’d been understood. But the church was a place where he went with some regularity, to be gathered back into himself and find unity with lessons learned during the week.

He contributed funds when he attended. Occasionally, he might join in singing a hymn, though his voice wasn’t natured for singing. Sometimes he followed the sermon, invariably well crafted and occasionally relevant. He always listened to the Bach, played on a huge pipe organ with skill and unchurchy fervor by a professor from the local university. Whenever he was in church, Rider felt alive in some deep way he didn’t in most places, and he never went there without remembering a favorite axiom of a young woman he used to know in another place and time, We are all dead, don’t you know? We are only real when we are in the music.

The prelude was not Bach, as Ryder hoped for, but Vaughn Williams, variations on some old folk hymns. The interwoven melodies lifted Rider away into a vision where, somehow outside himself, he confronted a man impossibly tall, in a long black coat down to his knees, his wide brimmed hat pulled low, hiding his face in its shadow, a darkness concealing a deeper darkness still. The tall man opened his coat to reveal a brightness of undyed linen under a flaming crimson vest embroidered with emerald twinings of ivy among golden thorns. Then the man took off his hat and reached out with it as if inviting Ryder to take it. He saw his own face smiling at him. He didn’t know why the face terrified him, but it did.

The preacher lifted his arms and drew the assembly into a prayer which Rider didn’t hear, though prayer aptly described his state of consciousness. Not a questing or questioning so much as open waiting, the emptiness, against all hope and reason, become expectant for fullness. When Ryder became aware of the church again, an unshaven, scruffy parishioner, who looked as destitute as the man on the curb, stood at the lectern behind a large open bible and read scripture from an old translation. After a few sentences Ryder quit listening. He was thinking that Jesus obviously was much less addicted to scripture than most who claimed to follow his teaching. An overwhelming awareness of an arrival somewhere nearby roused Ryder from his hermeneutical musing. He resisted the impulse to turn around and see if the church doors were blown open. He didn’t feel, though, the icy draft he expected, but a bright movement through him, a lifting, an expanding, an incoming. Finally, after long years alone in this Shadow, now he was not.

He looked up from his still-open hymnal, saw the woman sitting a few feet away on the pew. Lost in his own head, Ryder hadn’t seen her come in. She looked like nobody he was acquainted with, but tantalizingly familiar. About his age, he thought, looked again, couldn’t judge her age at all. She could have been a fresh young girl or a well maintenanced crone. Somewhere beyond years, she was simply present and beautiful. He resisted the urge to reach out and touch her hand to be sure she was real.

Greg Spark’s homily was lost on Ryder, whose mind, when he managed to quit staring at the woman on the pew beside him, conjured a vision, either memory or portent, of a frosted autumn morning when Charon’s three dogs ran past him with Benjamin Drum right behind them. Before he could fix the image in his head, the sermon ended and the organ trickled out a partita for harpsichord arranged for organ, and Ryder finally got the Bach he came for.

He stood with the others, saw the woman had disappeared. He couldn’t quite settle on the strangeness in her aura, not identifiable but neither quite unknown. As he reached the door of the church, it came to him. Only one soul could have kept him from grasping it at the time – she had no shoes on her feet. Suddenly Ryder knew She had found him. He stood on the steps, buttoning his coat and scanning the street and the shadows for nobody who was there.

The preacher came out the door behind him. Looking for somebody, Ryder?

Greg startled him just short of embarrassment. Ryder shook his head. That woman sitting beside me in church. I thought I knew her, but she seems to have slipped away.

The Reverend Sparks smiled. She was a striking woman wasn’t she? Have you had your supper yet?

Ryder shrugged. I haven’t, actually. I’ve been running on caffeine all day.

Greg laughed. I know about that. Come on down to Molly’s with me, and we’ll get some real nourishment. You’ll save me from eating by myself. If I’ve somebody to talk to, I won’t pig out.

He hadn’t had time to think much about food lately, but promised good company, Ryder discovered he was hungry, after all. He nodded to the preacher and they walked off down the street, turning the corner onto Lincoln. He could see the flickering blue neon ahead hesitantly proclaiming Sloan’s Cafe. Ryder wished they’d get their sign fixed, launched that thought at the sign, and it burned bright and steady while they approached.

How’s the family? Ryder asked, as he held the door open for his friend.

The boys are back at school, and Roberta’s off on one of her conferences. Hopefully, I can stay out of trouble until she gets back.

The cafe was crowded as usual, but Molly Sloan spied them coming in, waved, and they followed her formidable bulk through the press toward a table, miraculously vacant.

Beaming down on them, Molly asked, Y’all drinking tonight?

Guinness, said Greg.

Coffee, please, said Ryder.

If you ever asked for else, I’d die of the shock. Molly shook her head in mock dismay, and hauled away toward the kitchen. Ryder thought she resembled a galleon under full sail.

He took off his coat, gestured to Greg. I’m going to hang this out of the way. You want me to take yours?

Sure, mumbled Greg, shrugging loose from his own and handing it over.

Ryder took their coats and hung them on a rack among numerous other wraps and jackets and umbrellas and a couple of trusting and naïve bags. By the time he got back to their table, his coffee was already steaming at his place, and Greg had begun communing with his beer. Ryder put the coffee to his lips tentatively. As he expected, hot enough to regret. He added cream, as much to cool as for taste.

Greg’s expectant gaze demanded a comment on his homily. Ryder didn’t want to admit he hadn’t been present to most of it. You’re quite good at this stand-up business, Greg. Why haven’t you gotten a better gig by now?

The preacher laughed, ruefully, it seemed to Ryder. The more they pay you, the more they want to put words in your mouth. I’m better off where I am. Besides, I would miss all of you wandering through my life. What about you, Ryder? What keeps you in this backwater town?

Ryder sipped his coffee, cooler just enough now that he dared take a swallow. Molly returned with menus she clearly expected not to be useful. Ryder looked up at her and queried, What’s good?

Stew’s good, Molly confirmed.

Ryder nodded, Molly looked expectantly at Greg.

I’ll have a Cobb salad, the preacher said brightly.

Molly sighed, feigning disappointment. Y’all are so adventuresome, and sailed off again, flinging reassurance in her wake, I’ll send you some bread.

Greg’s hopeful stare told Ryder that he still expected an answer to his question. It’s a long story, Preacher.

Greg had mischief in his eye. Too long to tell?

Too long even to remember, Ryder said quite seriously, his mind already wandering away and beyond.

Much of it, he didn’t remember in fact, although a good part had come back to him over the years. He meant to kill that boy. He remembered that quite clearly. The boy had been a dire threat. Exactly what sort of threat, Ryder had never been able to recall, but he remembered what stayed his hand. When the child looked up at him, Ryder saw the face in his childhood’s mirror. And he let the Labyrinth take him from that place, washing him of all his disappointments and failures and wrong choices, cleansing him from all misguided duties and misplaced loyalties, as well as from loves and friendships and all he cherished, until he landed clean and blank as an unborn among the People. They gave him a new name and a new life and made him back into a man. They gave him home and belonging and purpose, taught him that courage is deadly without compassion, that power apart from perception is impotent, that discipline serves nothing without discernment, that no man is truly himself by himself. His gift to them was Elizabeth. Her gift to him was the way into Shadow. And for all the reasons he knew and for all the reasons eluding him yet, Rider never went back to the world he presently had only the vaguest memories of. He had become a tired man in a dying landscape. He didn’t know whether to judge his life an exile or a pilgrimage.

Your stew’s getting cold, accused Molly, pulling Ryder back into his moment. She refilled his coffee cup without asking.

Greg shook his head to another beer. Maybe just a glass of tea, Molly.

Molly took the empty mug. I’ll be right back, children, and made off toward the kitchen again. Greg picked at his salad while he waited for his tea, regarding Ryder with an expression that might indicate either concern or curiosity or a blend of both. Ryder wondered, how long had he been trancing out? I’m getting sloppy, he told himself. Not present when I should be.

More to fill the silence than to gain information, he ventured, "Gregan, not a common name in these parts. Were your folks Irish?

Greg laughed like he’d heard a joke. Oh, no, my people are local from way back. Like Cherokee. My dad’s name was Greg and my mother was Ann. I think they really wanted a girl. Where are your folks from?

Ryder swallowed his bite of stew, tried to look thoughtful. I didn’t know my folks. I grew up in a little river town called Beaverdam. My foster father was the mayor. He wasn’t married. There were just the two of us.

He hoped the preacher wouldn’t begin an interrogation, was relieved when Gregan looked at his watch and admitted, As usual, I’m late. The preacher picked up his check, motioned for Ryder to keep his seat. See you in church, and bustled away to settle with Molly and fetch his coat.

Ryder savored his stew. Molly told the truth about it. Between spoonsful, he mulled over his vision in church, playing it all again in his head. Not a remembrance, nothing that happened to him in Shadow, or any stream of his experience, he was sure of that much. A warning, perhaps, or a summons? The mystery still itched his thoughts as he went to the register and paid for his dinner, retrieved his coat, and with a wave to Molly was out the door.

Before light the next morning, Ryder exited his apartment to find Charlie Charon’s hounds sitting in the street, waiting for him. They were much friendlier than the last time he’d seen them. They huddled close together in the cold, looking like a huge three-headed coydog, but moved apart to follow him down the street to the parking garage where he kept his van. He opened the rear door of the van, and the dogs jumped in. Before he pulled out into the street, Ryder glanced back over his shoulder. The dogs sprawled on a blanket, seemingly fast asleep, a canine tangle with three heads.

#

Four miles left to Shelton Crossing. Tired and dull-headed after his long drive over the mountain, Simon Ryder thought he might stop there for coffee before tackling the last thirty twisting miles above the river up to Asheton. His beat-up van made poor substitute for the Flyer, but she’d flown away after her beloved boy. When he found the boy, now grown into a man, he would find the Flyer.

As the van labored up an incline, a red Corvette loomed suddenly close behind on a sharp curve, weaving in the mirror, impatient to pass. The stony flank of the mountain hugging the road just left of the pavement dropped away on the right several hundred feet to the river below. Given a place to pull over, Ryder would have, just to be rid of the fool in the red car. After shadowing his bumper for a mile, the Corvette swung around his van, too close on the blind curve, and roared up ahead and past the next bend. When he came round the mountain, Ryder saw the red roadster stopped on a pull-off,