Underneath the Ravens

 

Rain Graves

The Great Hall of the Mountain King was vast, but unforgiving in its nature. It had been dug deep into the belly of Mount Tamalpais, with molded earthen walls covered in concrete brought in by the Romans who worshipped him as a god—though it was not known how they came to be there, or why they left. The King leaned against a natural hearth, running his fingers over the volcanic rock, which had been worried smooth over thousands of years.

Above him hung stalactites, long and crystalized, jutting down like daggers pointed at his head. He could not die, however, and these were the bars of his prison that kept him down, deep under the gate. Beyond that gate was a house that had sat empty for over a hundred years…until now.

He heard what the hound heard. It prowled restlessly of late, growling under footsteps that made the foundation of the house creak and yawn.

The last time the hound was awakened had been when the house was built. As the happy couple moved into it, the hound breached the threshold of the gate, stole into the nursery, put its great paws onto the crib within, and squeezed its muzzle through the bars. As silent and sweet as death, it drank the breath from that baby and, on the morning, the baby was no more. Soon after, the house went vacant and peace was restored to the hound, but not to the King.

The ravens that once circled the mountaintop were circling the house now. With the hound’s ears, he could hear them clicking and cawing. There must be a hero, the King thought. I can feel it in my bones… He will come, and I will be free.

~

The path through the woods was long and winding, often only one lane, and full of switchbacks that carried Joe, Marta, James and the twins up the mountain. The air cooled under the shade of the redwoods and they laughed as they went. When the trees parted to show the house they had rented for the weekend, Marta gasped, “It’s a mansion! Look at that—it’s beautiful!” Everyone marveled at their luck.

“It’s like staying in a hacienda or something,” said Samantha.

Her twin sister added, “Yeah, like Cabo.”

Jessie was a lot less to look at, thought Joe, as he sized up Samantha in her white tennis shorts and navy blue polo. If Sam failed to succumb to his planned charm, Jessie would do.

~

James kept silent as he walked through the house, marveling at all the rooms on each floor, wondering how anyone could afford that kind of luxury on a daily basis. I guess they can’t, he thought, or they wouldn’t be renting it to us so cheap. He climbed the servants’ stairs to the third floor and the heat was marked, so close to the sun. A single atrium stood in the center of the floor, with a glass skylight that hadn’t been cleaned in decades. Still, the light filtered in through the clouded glass to bathe a garden beneath it that seemed to hum with life.

When James reached the rear of the house, he felt different. There was a window across the room. He could see the twins on the tennis court below, laughing and lazily playing a game. He wiped his neck and forehead with a handkerchief that came away soaked in sweat. He placed his bag on the bed and began to unpack. As he put his jacket in the closet, he thought he heard a faint, low growl. It unsettled him. He listened hard to hear it again, but the sound was gone. The unsettled feeling it gave him did not change, but as the dinner bell rang, it was forgotten.

~

“Do you think this place is haunted?” Marta took a slow sip of her wine as she lay in the grass on the front lawn under the full moon.

Joe lay beside her, chewing on a blade of onion grass. “Doubt it,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure the caretaker must have a mean dog. I heard it growling outside my bathroom window when I was cleaning up for dinner.”

Marta looked at him, trying to hide her feelings. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll protect you.”

Joe heard the purr in her voice, decided Marta was better than nothing, and went in for the kiss. He was not disappointed.

In the distance, there were footsteps in the woods.

“Come on,” Joe said. “Let’s go upstairs.” Marta smiled, took his hand, and went into the house. No one saw her follow him up the grand, twisting staircase. They vanished into the darkness, breathing heavily.

~

As the Mountain King lay awake in his bedchamber, he heard the hound howling and tried to listen with its ears to hear what it heard. Instead, he saw a hungry couple rutting like pigs in the dark, all sweat and salt. He longed to taste the flesh of a woman again, but could only bear the vision for a moment. The echo of his loneliness was too great to torture himself with further. It stirred him to wakefulness that hurt. How long had it been since he felt that pain? He thought, Too long.

He reached out again with the hound’s alert senses and took over its reluctant mind, then willed its body to move past the gate, up and into the house. The King roamed the halls of the house without a sound, searching for the rhythm of the right heartbeat.

He followed the scent of sex to the couple, now spent, lying in a room filled with satin and lace. Relics were everywhere, talismans, too. They prevented him from crossing the threshold and he turned away, disappointed. They would have been so weak and easy to take, he thought.

His paws took him down the hall and up the stairs to the third floor, where faint music was playing on a Victrola at the far end of the house. The hound began to fight his will over its body as soon as it saw the atrium. Quelling the urge to panic in the animal, he avoided it as widely as possible. With all its poisons and pollens, the Fey kept the garden as deadly to him as it had ever been, protecting the angels above the mountain, through the skylight, and hiding the gate to hell, his mountain home, below.

The Mountain King paused at the threshold to the door where the music wafted in and out on the breeze from the open window. James was reading a book, lying on the bed. The hound whined, just a little, so he would see it in the doorway.

“Hey, there. Where did you come from?” asked James. “Are you hungry?”

The King’s excitement nearly burst him out of the animal, but he quashed the anticipation, and waited. Patience was a learned and practiced thing. He wagged the hound’s tail but did not cross.

James reached over to the plate beside his bed, which had a sandwich on it. “Best BLT around, and I’m feeding it to the dog,” he muttered and pulled a piece off the uneaten half. “Want some bacon?”

The King lifted the hound’s paws and willed it to sit up and beg…waiting for the words.

“Come here, boy. Come on! Come in. That’s right. Good boy!”

The hound’s features flashed a sinister set of teeth. The Mountain King crossed the threshold into the room. When he reached James, he pushed himself up and out of the body of his guardian. The moment his soul left, the hound lashed out, teeth gnashing, to devour the hand that was feeding him. The hand left James’s wrist instantly. The bone came away clean. James cried out, but the sound was muffled by the music. He held his arm in disbelief, staring at the apparition of the King before him.

“You are the new King now, boy. And I am free.”

“I don’t understand! What’s happening to me? Oh, God, I’m dying…”

“Not quite,” said the Mountain King.

James felt weakness creeping into him as his blood drained out of the severed artery, onto the hardwood floor. The hound was feasting greedily on the flesh of his hand, tearing it from the bones, pawing at the fingers, as it tore tendon, muscle, and skin.

The King dipped his ghostly finger into the blood and the finger became flesh. With each hand, he cupped the blood as best he could and smeared it over himself, making his body opaque, then fully formed. James sunk down to the floor and began to fade. The King took off his gauntlet and handed it to him.

“Put this on your severed hand,” he said, then reached for his crown. “And this upon your head. You are the new King now. This hound will keep you.”

James lost consciousness after that. The hound dragged his soul down again through the sleeping house, past the gate, and into the Great Hall of the Mountain King. He would not wake again for some time. When he did, he would be alone.

As the old King watched the new one go to his throne, he said, “You shouldn’t have let me in, boy. But then, how could you have known? Our legends are lost on this world.”

He left the house and looked up at the bright moon above it, one last time, before leaving Mount Tamalpais. He saw the ravens come back to circle above the house, like infinity. Then he walked on.