The Night Mountain

Jeffrey Alan Love

 

There is a mountain that lives in the night. Do you see it?

 

 

We walked in darkness. It was a long way to go. Perhaps it never ended, and this was what I deserved. To climb forever. To never know rest. To push my way through grasping branches and brambles, to bark my shins on ancient rocks, to be shat on by these two bone-white birds that hung silent, floating, just beyond my reach. At times I saw the lights of distant cities through a thinning of trees. Far below on the dark plains. Who moves down those streets, I wondered. Who sits at those windows and watches the night mountain?

Lina walked ahead of me, the baby in her arms. She never slowed, never seemed to tire. She had always been strong. I carried the box in one hand. Behind me, his panting breath loud in my ears, came the beast-faced man.

 

 

The baby was not yet a week old when the beast-faced man delivered the box.

It was a small box, made even smaller by being in the beast-faced man’s oversized hands. It was made of wood, dark-grained and polished in such a way that looking at it you felt you saw a great distance within it. That if you held it up to your eye you would see things long hidden, long wished for, nightly dreamed of and then forgotten. All the things that fled with waking. That it might be a small window to another place, a place where someone like the beast-faced man made sense, for he didn’t make much sense to me standing there on my porch in his flapping black clothes, his wild and knotted hair, his beard that could not conceal his teeth.

He was my wife’s brother, though I did not know that then.

“You the father,” he said, his voice a low thrum I felt in my guts. “Congratulations.”

I found I could not look away from the box, from his hands, whether it was the box itself that held me bewitched or fear of looking directly at his face I could not say. There was no breeze, but his hair moved at the edges of my vision, the locks curling and uncoiling like so many snakes. He held out the box to me.

“For the mother.”

I hesitated, so he reached out, gently took my hand, and folded it around the box. His hands were rough, the skin thick, but his touch was tender, as though he was afraid of breaking either of us. The box was warm, and I thought I felt the slightest of scrapings from within it as it curled into my palm. An odor rose from it in slow pulses that reminded me of early morning runs on streets wet with rain.

“For the mother,” he said again, and then he was gone, as if he had never been there.

In my hand breathed a box.

 

 

The beast-faced man had been surprised when I stepped through the box with Lina and the baby. Perhaps he thought I had no idea, that I was blissfully unaware of certain facts. That I was in the dark.

She came to me from out of a lake, I wanted to say. I have some idea. I know some things.

I know enough to be afraid.

“There’s the little fellow,” the beast-faced man said, looking down upon the baby. “What’s his name?”

Lina said something quietly then, words I could not understand, but whatever it was it was not my son’s name.

“His name is Alexander,” I said. Lina reached over and squeezed my hand. I bent down and kissed the top of Alexander’s head, breathed in the perfect smell of him.

“Well, if his name is Alexander than mine is Bel,” said the beast-faced man. He held out his hand to me, and I shook it. His touch was not so gentle this time, but I was able to look him in the eye now. In the night his eyes glinted, and when he spoke the inside of his mouth flared as though a flame lived inside of him.

“He won’t be able to keep up,” said the beast-faced man to Lina as he released my hand. “Say your goodbyes now.”

“He’ll keep up,” said Lina.

Bel laughed, licked his teeth.

And then we had begun to walk. Though it was night, it was not dark yet. I could see the trunks of the trees, the sawtoothed grasses that waved and thrashed, a giant bridge in the sky that stretched from horizon to horizon. Clouds moved as a sea above us, high and twisting, crashing and sliding against each other. They were gray, pewter, lit at times from within by strobing flashes. In their movement I saw the shape of a spear, the scales of a snake, the six-fingered hand of a god.

Now Lina held the baby so that his head rested on her shoulder. He no longer slept. His eyes were open. He watched me as we climbed.

Behind me Bel roared, and Lina changed direction slightly. Further up, always up, the night mountain’s slope. Weaving through the darkness, between the night trees, the two birds like ghosts haunting our heads. Lina’s face turned away from me, her hair hanging like a veil.

My son’s eyes twinkled in the night.

 

 

Before the baby was born everyone talked about the joy to come, and no one talked about the fear. No one had told me how I would feel as I stood in the dark listening to him breathe for the first time, more aware of his body than my own. That I would gladly stop my own breath if it meant his could go on forever. I couldn’t sleep for fear of what might happen if I wasn’t there to hear it. To prime his lungs, his little hummingbird heart, with my fear.

 

 

We broke free of the trees to an endless rising expanse of dark rock. The bone birds followed, and swooped down around my head, by my ears. As they swung past they whispered to me in a language I did not know.

“Do not talk to them,” said the beast-faced man behind me. “They are tricksters. They will act otherwise, but all they want is to chew on your liver, pluck out your eyes, unspool your brain.”

“What do you want?” I asked, not looking back.

“This,” he said. “My sister home. Forgiven. Safe.”

We walked on in silence for a minute. Lina, with her long strides, was far beyond us.

“But I also want her happy,” he said.

The birds laughed, and he waved his arm to shoo them away.

I slipped then, and fell heavily onto the stone slope. The birds sang. The beast-faced man helped me up, and on his fingers I saw blood. I had sliced my hand open upon a ridge of sharp rock and felt nothing. He sniffed at the blood on his fingers, rubbed them together, and then looked at me.

“When she came to you, how did you think this could possibly end?”

He flitted out his tongue, licked the tip of his finger, tasted my blood.

“I shouldn’t go any further,” he said. “Hurry. You may still be able to catch up to them.”

 

 

I stumbled up the mountain. What did I want? My son to live forever? For all I knew he would. What truly lurked beneath his skin I did not know, except that there was a half of it that was me. Did I wish to keep him from ever feeling pain, to never be hurt? In my own life it had taken being hurt to grow up, to become who I was now. Perhaps that was it, then.

I didn’t want my son to grow up. I wanted him to be my little boy forever. I wanted him to be a little boy forever.

I didn’t want him to change.

I wanted him to need me there, breathing with him, breathing with him.

 

 

I called to Lina but she could not hear me. The further up we went the louder it became. Things moved in the spaces between the stones, calling out. Great engines roared and bellowed from the bridge’s heights, casting smoke and sparks into the sky, lighting the bellies of the clouds the color of dried blood. The sparks flew about my head. The sparks laughed at me. Boulders shaped into molten-faced statues of men dotted my path, fine designs etched in wandering lines upon them. Something like insects swarmed at my feet, chittering. When I looked back, I could still see the dark silhouette of the beast-faced man, the birds perched on his shoulders, whispering in his ears as they flapped their white wings about his head as though to urge him on.

 

 

Then there were no more lights from above or below, and the sound washed away, as if I had breached some border beyond which it could not pass. I could not tell where the mountain ended and the darkness began. All was night. Only the sound of my feet upon the strange earth told me that I had not walked right off the mountain and into nothingness. The beast-faced man was no longer behind me. Far ahead of me Lina and Alexander walked hand in hand in a void. My son, walking. His first steps. He was stretched out now, leaner, taller. His hair moved to unfelt winds.

“Wait,” I called, and summoned what energy I had left to hurry after them. I could feel the blisters starting on my feet. How many hours had we been walking? Why would they not stop? Clouds descended, swallowed me, and I found myself in a hazed white nothingness.

“Wait,” I heard another voice call. I turned, but could not see who had spoken. If anything moved, I could not see it. I plunged forward, hoping I had not lost sense of the direction Lina had gone.

“Wait for me,” I called. “Please wait.”

I ran. I fell. I fell again. I left a trail of blood on the mountain. The clouds wrapped themselves around me. Slivers of light slashed down like rain. Above my head I heard the flapping wings of the birds, the barest hint of their unknown tongue. Stones shifted beneath my feet. Something grasped at my legs and I stumbled. I fell out of the cloud and into cold water.

A lake atop the mountain.

 

 

I stood shivering, the water up to my waist. Mist rose from the surface. Small waves pushed and pulled at me. My feet sunk down into mud. Along the shore clung weeds as fine as the hair of a child. The bone birds perched upon a moss-covered stone, still as statues, watching me. My hand pulsed blood into the water. I called out for Alexander, for Lina, and my voice slid away across the surface of the lake as if it were frozen.

The birds slipped off the stone and into the water. They dove down, and when they surfaced they were no longer birds. They sang to me then, and though I did not know the words I understood what they were saying.

This was as far as I could go.

I still carried the beast-faced man’s box. I let it drop into the lake.

Something beneath the water brushed against my leg. Something took my hand. Something pressed the box back into my hand.

 

 

On my nightstand sits a plain wooden box. It is polished in such a way that you feel you can see a great distance within it. That if you held it up to your eye you would see things long hidden, long wished for, nightly dreamed of, never forgotten.

There is a mountain that lives in the night. There is a lake in the clouds where my love swims. There is a place in the darkness where my son is safe.

Just over there.

Look out the window. Do you see it?