Weldaghost

She dreamt that she saw it, and when she opened her eyes it was almost true, the house
she'd fallen
asleep in was gone forever. As if it had decayed while she was away and went the fast way of
last year's snow.
No bed beneath her, no pillow to hug against her head. Pine needles and twigs and stripped
bark. Evergreens
arrowing out of the earth and playing frail voodoo with the overfed, cattle clouds. The sun
already setting
along the knife-light of the mountains. She had been dreaming she was walking in such-and-such
a place,
as if a pickup had run out of gas miles and years behind her, and instead of the obvious, following
the road
she was on, for fear or impatience she stepped into the woods and tracked the long shadow that
walked a few
paces beyond her. In the pine barren boil around her, birds and not a sound, then clear
calls and
no birds. Albino moss, ferns like enormous exit wounds. A chill of something bearded with
no eyes
standing between birches. Back when she had a house she'd heard stories from people who'd had
girlhoods. Tall tales
overgrown like fingernails. Tubers so long and bloodless and twisted they braided into a mesh
you could
catch sparrows or flies in. Out beyond the hunting camps, beyond the branch cairns that appeared
overnight
and no one knew why, there was some kind of new mammal, some horror on two legs wearing a
suit of
human hair. No evidence, but people just knew it. No children gone missing only to appear weeks
later like
something
chewed pressed to a windshield. Dozens of turkey hunters hadn't seen it. The ranger boy in his
fire tower
had never managed to spot it cresting a far hill. Without any credible visage to aim their fears at
they
went on talking it about it anyway, building it up, feeding it, describing it, dressing it with so many
naked descriptions
the dim, collective thousands out there in the wilder parts began to come together, bond like fat
clucks of
mercury, and spin flesh and bone around the skein they were imagining. A Weldaghost hadn't
breathed snout
or set paw in that country until they'd fed it, patiently and foolishly, like parents fashioning a
golem from
a stillborn. Then chickens did get threshed. Cattle did burst their bellies. Snakes did hang from the
lowest branches
in stripped rows. Only the unimaginative, the least superstitious were spared. Literal as potatoes
miles away
from the nearest knife, they tallied the dead and didn't blame it on some mythological scourge, some
Grendel
of the American hills. They told the law, "killers, escape convicts maybe" and cut the treelines with
their floodlights
with skeptically loaded calm. Wherever they looked for months was down the barrel of a gun. No
beast stepped
to fill its silhouette. The folks who talked courted it, what they thought. The people who didn't leave
moved to
town and watched more television. They kept themselves busy wearing a culture crown. If they forgot,
who could tell
but their roosters, slaughtered into separate wings in a stable. Next to three dead mares and a bucket
of chunky milk
kicked over. She'd been the last to believe and the last to leave, and on the night she'd packed her
stuff and
forced every inch of her car to hold it, there'd been this dream, and in her sleep she went to it, and
spun like
light around its spindle she'd come out the other side and instead of new morning and a road out
she found
brittle leaves clinging with fugue static to her nightgown. Her place was long gone, the forest was
all around. Must have
been what the earliest settlers must have felt, when their tents split and in that instant their dying
fires went out.
She sat up and let the dark take account. Barefoot, skin like a kite of moonlight, white as a white
girl can get
without showing every sinew underneath, each rib and between them the slick throb of organs. So
dark any
bit of light moved like sound. So the frost wore snail teeth and button wet of nearby eyes felt her
through the
acoustics of the hour. Maybe three, four in the morning. Or three, four at night. Those hours less
than late and
more than early. Everything out there could hurt her, but only if she walked or sat still. If she could
keep on
dreaming, maybe she would already know the way back, though there was nothing left of home.
She tried to
blink but couldn't. Good evidence she was dreaming. So she stood up and got going. Up the far
bank, over
rock locks and under roots of holler. The swarm of one element around her, fractally spinning off
trees and
dry bushes and boulders. At the third crest of the third hill, in a crackle of mud broken fresh under
a heavy foot, she
turned and saw it: a hun hulk of something big and straw-bound and dirty. The air coming off of it
anal and
rancid. Too exposed without a sleepwalker's drugged sense of stealth, she stood and took it and
fed it
the passive five feet of her weak presence. But nothing moved. It didn't see or show her. Rather
was busy
doing something involved and woebegone to the thick side of a great tree. Spelling its bowels?
Scratching a
rash? No, a trick of light off her own skin showed her. The two-armed, two-legged thing was
threshing
the tough bark off, tossing lengths of it to the ground. Fifteen minutes of that and it paused as if
some impulse
inside it was done. Then did one small thing she would never forget and which was the sole
witness she brought
back with her to this land where civilization thunders: pressed its whole face, snout, maw and all
to the tender
unborn bark beneath. Now why would it do that, she wondered even then but years later. If
underneath all that there was
nothing to kill or chase or eat. Crouching there, almost ashamed, almost as if it were
hiding from something.