a
little cabin in the woods
Tom
Rowan’s private cabin is outside of Norton, past Otherwood, a forty-minute
drive on back roads through the New York wilderness. He takes his huge old car as far as he can, parking it in a
small gravel lot at the foot of a tall hill, and then hikes himself up the
1500-foot trail with a stout walking-stick, a rucksack on his shoulders.
It
is beginning to fade to twilight when he reaches the top of the hill, and he
takes a moment before going inside the cabin – a strange affair built partly
of sectioned logs in cement, and partly of close-fitting stone, and partly of
dark brick – to look over the rolling expanse of countryside, the turning
leaves being touched by the gloaming. Then
he unlocks the door.
In
a few minutes he has brought back outside the makings of a fire, which he builds
in the round pit marked with stones a little ways in front of the patchwork
cabin. When it is going strong, he
takes from his rucksack a cut of lean steak folded in waxed paper, some small
potatoes wrapped in foil, and bottle of red wine and a pewter cup.
The potatoes he places carefully in the coals of the fire.
The steak he threads onto the end of a long iron skewer, and using a
thick section of oak log for a chair, sits down to roast his dinner. As it cooks, he uncorks the wine, cradling the skewer under
his arm as he does, and pours a measure of it into his cup, and drinks.
When
the meat is cooked, it is full-on dusk, and the stars have begun to appear.
He eats from the skewer, using a rough cloth napkin from time to time to
clean his hands and his beard, washing it down with long draughts of wine.
When he has finished the steak, he brings the potatoes from the fire one
at a time and eats them with salt, holding them in their foil wrappers.
A pull of wine follows each of them.
When the last of the potatoes has been eaten, and his bottle half-drunk,
he takes from his sack a little vial of powder, pulls the stopper, and takes a
pinch of its slightly pungent-sweet contents in his fingers and tosses it into
the flames, whispering something low as he does.
Then he sits back on his stump chair and lights his clay pipe, and waits.
Some
time passes, and the last of the light fades.
There is no moon at all, but a blanket of diamond stars overhead.
Tom listens carefully to the night sounds in the woods, until, after a
while, he hears the noise of something large making its way through the brush
and trees.
Then,
by the light of the fire, he can make out a shape coming up out of the woods to
the top of the hill.
It is something like the trees, and something like the
hill itself, and something like a coral reef, full of things that wave and
flutter, withdraw and reemerge. It
moves on a number of rootlike limbs in a sort of lurching, rolling motion, the
thick ropes of its mass twisting and shifting around each other.
It has long tendril-arms, twenty or more, and other organs of unknown
nature that float through and over its body like bubbles in a stew.
And it is covered in eyes.
“Caartosc,”
says Tom Rowan, through the blue cloud of his pipe smoke. “I wasn’t sure
you’d come.”
- Of
course, Covenantus, says Caartosc. Its
voice is a choral whisper, like bees underwater.
“I’m afraid I need your advice,” says Tom, pouring wine.