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Donovan sat on the porch while a placid
bull grazed reluctantly on the sparse weed poking its way up through the sandy
earth. Topper was an overweight, brown and white spotted beast that was
well past his performance age and was now in a continuing state of biological
decline. Donovan was never fond of the bull. Topper just never sat
well with him after the ‘incident’. Well, to be fair, after the twelfth, worst and final ‘incident’.
Donovan had not always the keeper of his family’s lot or the caretaker of the
quickly approaching cave-in that was his family’s farmhouse, but things change.
With a roof impending toward collapse much like the battered down beast that
contently licked the ground beside him. No sir, Donovan was not always
the master of an untilled field of rotten roots and sea-salt. After his
father and mother died, Donovan was something else entirely; entirely
worthless.
“Well Toppy what do you think? A
new roof for your life? Little paint to cover up the cracking walls
and this place will almost look better than our outhouse,” muttered Donovan
coolly. He craned his head up, looking around the curve of the porch at
the fading, humbled, pre-conquest home.
Donovan looked at the venerable Hereford
bull chewing with relentless focus, and hesitantly reminisced about the night
of October 13th, 2109.
Hatteras –
October 13, 2109
Donovan walked into the watering hole
with a slight stagger, hiccupping as he went. The eyes of patrons
in attendance that evening rolled; Donovan was already drunk, even before he
entered the perimeter of The Crabby Hole, Little Hat’s single deli and evening
center of distilled forgetfulness. His clothes and skin stank of ripe
potato gin, the only liquor cheap enough for Don to drink casually, fermented
in an old plastic sack under family’s house porch. Not much by way of
alcoholic variety after the Sweet Conquest, or the Pleasant Domination, or
whatever the Throne called it these days. There were still some old
timers, Bubble Pete being one, who crack a tale or three about a primo cache of
Kraken Rum they discovered forty years back, buried beneath the
beach-sand. Don liked to sit in the porch swing and remember its spiced
flavor while sipping something profoundly less pleasant.
The stash boasted ‘Private Stock’
labeling and Don would gulp away the afternoon in the depression of that fine
drink always and forever being ‘gone’. Donovan had never tasted this
illustrious spiced rum, which had acquired mythic proportions over the years
but by golly, after enough of his self perfected potato tub-gut, it became any
drink he could think of, and so often it was the exotic taste of a Kraken’s
foreign delight.
Donovan noticed that the music shuddering
through The Hole, jangling out of an old electric stereo powered by a greasy
and ancient car battery, had come to an abrupt halt. The waitress, a fine
young mother-of-two and the youngest of the town’s Galloway siblings, had
stopped the music. This would not do.
Donovan twirled about as gracefully as a
tranquilized sea bass, colliding with Bob Robards, then tripping off the leg of
Sallyanne Suey. Stumbling across the chipped wooden floor, Donovan mustered
enough strength to carry on his awkward rampage until he finally crashed into
Craig Miller’s Ankine wife and their two children, toppling them onto the ground with
a hard thud that could hardly be heard for all the crying. Mr. Miller,
who was a man small of stature and less than hardy to say the least, managed to
fall last, the whole Miller family buried under the considerably broad bulk of
Donovan Servius.
Donovan rose to find Mrs. Miller beneath
him, covered in food and slop, red-eyed and vehement.
“Donovan Servius, your father is a good man, a good, good man! You, son are a
disgrace to his name,” She yelled over the wailing of her children, red-faced
and frightened, as if a building and not a man had fallen over and onto them.
“Oh
come now Patty, give us a kiss!” replied Donovan, leaning in only to find
hard-fisted rejection.
Patty Miller, thin as a rake and five foot two inches tall, had to nearly jump
to strike Donovan across his broad face.
Donovan’s buzz was removed as if pulled from his skin, however a rising
stupidity was always sure to follow such hard medicine. In his present
condition, Don could only return such treatment in kind. Donovan lifted
the woman into the air with one hand while striking her across the face with
the other. Patty landed a foot from where she formerly stood, blood
jumping from her mouth went she hit the salty wooden floor. A lone white
tooth danced across the floorboards, coming to rest just outside a mouse hole
like some miniature special delivery.
While Donovan tried to get his rolling
mind around what had just happened, The Crabby Hole’s patrons stormed into him
one after another. Hands grabbed at his tattered shirt, gaining leverage
to push him out of the door and back into the sunlight. They pushed at
him as if he were a stubborn and violent ass refusing to go uphill, which from
a certain point of view he was, exactly.
Donovan pulled himself free and went at
each of the grabby townsfolk, some two at a time, until they were all finished
and laid out. Finished, some fled the building. Patty Miller was
off to gather Gordon Brown, the elderly and Hag-bought Sherriff. Some,
like the unfortunate Mr. Miller and Mrs. Suey lay on the floor, worse for wear
and in some instances broken and bare.
Donovan took a knee, his head swirling
like a hornet’s nest and vomited a sour and purple concoction. The Hole’s
shaded interior made the regurgitation look like a melted animal. It was
in the freedom of a vomit-cleared mind that Don realized just what he had
done. Donovan’s eyes flashed over the faces remaining in the
restaurant. James, the rail-thin owner, stared in angry disbelief.
The waitress had fled, outside or to the back room. Wendy Barber, the
sheriff’s granddaughter, stood in the corner wearing a muddy dress and a small,
strange smile. Don’s faced flushed with shame, and the room seemed to
spin wildly, at such velocity that he could hardly tell any longer where he
stood. When the door spun into sight, he bolted out of the
building.
Donovan ran, he ran as fast as he could,
which for his condition seemed to be superhuman. The running stopped when
he reached the shoreline and then he dove, dove into Hag’s Cove. Donovan
did not know where he was going if he would ever see Little Hat again and he
did not care. He had hurt so many, laid low so many good people in a
bought of ridiculous drunkenness. The water brushed his cheeks just like
his mother’s hand once did, tucking Don into bed. Cool and cleansing and
the last thing he’d feel before dark fell. He was stone sober in seconds.
Donovan had always been rambunctious, a
tendency made profound with the forced removal of his family. He could
count on his hands how many times his father had whooped him raw for swimming
in the Hag’s Cove. Nine times including the day he tried to stop Sheriff
Cane from delivering his swaddled sister into the waters of the Hag. Nine
times including the desperate day he and Alex dragged his parents drowned-blue
bodies from the waves to keep them from being owned by the Woman of the Water.
Today, no special day now say thank ya, that nine rounded to ten.
Exhausted and disoriented Donovan
stopped paddling and sank briefly, the cold water striking his eyes and
nostrils, forcing him to cough and whirl about. When his vision cleared
Donovan was facing the shoreline and to his surprise there was someone on the
beach, shaped short and plain. Donovan’s eyes became round and large,
noticing the familiar weak-kneed walk rushing across the sand and toward the
Hag’s Pillar. It was Milly, once his girl, not his girl any longer.
She shouted his name over the water, voice filling the sea sky. Shoes
kicked off and into the sand, Milly rushed into the retreating waves.
“Milly!” cried Donovan as he paddled forward, attempting to gain to control
over his limbs.
Swimming toward one of the only remaining people who cared about the life of
Donovan Servius, Donovan noticed something out of the corner of his eye rise up
from underneath the water. He allowed himself the briefest of seconds to
catch a small glimpse of what moments ago must have been darkly beneath
him. A tangled snag of stringy hair mixed with muck and salt waved its
way toward Donovan like sentient seaweed. A shape, barely suggesting the
feminine, rolled huge behind dark ropey curls. It rose quickly in the
hopes of catching the drunken swimmer off guard. Donovan could feel the
water around him bulge with the thickness of her accent.
No longer feeling self-destructive,
Donovan surprised his guest with a sudden burst of speed. Driving his
arms again and again into the deep water, kicking to the rhythm that his heart
beat and paying no mind to the creature that pursued him nearly as fast with
little to no effort. Donovan was scared, he had never seen her
properly, never understood the magnitude of fear she inspired, and never
thought anything could be worse than the dead and rotting puppets she sent to
shore for her bidding.
With little water remaining between him
and the shore and the struggling shape of Mildred ‘Milly’ Zehn, Donovan thought
of the only thing that he could do, and do well at this moment in an effort to
stop the hungry creature pursuing him; piss. Piss hard and fast and send
the bitch back, choking on sour urine. A sterile yellow cloud drifted out
from the leg of his pants and drifted into the water behind him. It did
not take long for the ragged mop of hair to recede as Donovan burst forth from
the water taking Milly into his arms and off into the shrubs beyond the
beach. Donovan ran hard, fast, his legs burning from the night’s events,
he would not stop until he could no longer see the shore, until he could
convince himself that it was all a drunken hallucination and that it was not
real, that she, the keeper of Hag’s Cove was not real. Just when Donovan
felt safe enough and tired enough to stop, ready to release Milly and drop
soaking into brambles and grass, they heard a scream. A deep, gargling
and unintelligible shout.
Donovan imagined the Hag swimming beneath the shallows, screeching and howling
as the gut had its way with her eyes and throat, furious to be denied her meal,
clawing relentlessly at her eyes and face until the sting subsided and she was
left in the dark alone.
Donovan crashed to the ground at the boundary of his family home, sending Milly
toppling into the fence that held old Topper within. Donovan quickly
crawled to her side and released and sighed deeply at the sound of her sweet
voice stating, “I’m alright.”
Donovan sat up on his knees looking back to make sure he was not followed when
something clubbed him on the back of his head and he fell. Fell down,
fell to sleep fell away and was not particularly upset for it. Donovan
lay just outside his doorstep unconscious.
The
next morning Donovan was roused by a cold sheet of water striking his
face. He lurched upward shivering and startled to find the girl he
rescued, or perhaps rescued him, from a very bad dream.
“What the hell? What did I do to deserve that?” he complained.
“Waking you up,” Milly chided, one hand smartly on her hip, the other holding
Topper’s rusty pail.
“Not nice, not nice at all Mils.” Don wiped the water from his face, then
shaking it off of his hands.
Milly
chuckled slightly, turning her back to him and walking toward the gate.
“What were you thinking going down to the shore, alone for Queen’s sake! And
stepping into the water? You know the stories, you know-“
“I
followed you! After you for what you did! Anyway, You’ve been in the cove
lots of times, more than anyone else. She’s never come up before…“
“Dammit Milly. Just shut it! Do you have any idea? You could
have been-“
“Killed?” barked a loud voice from behind Donovan.
“Eaten, I was going to say.”
Roman Galloway stood on the Servius family porch, cleaning a
knife. “Yeah, eaten. She would do, I’d think. Maybe yet
still, now that you’ve roused her we’ll have to give her something.” Roman tucked his broad knife into a thick sheath
hanging from his belt. Donovan could see the American Eagle stamped
there, briefly, before it disappeared beneath the leather. “Just about
got all of Little Hat demanding that I feed you back to that bitch in the Cove
for what you pulled yesterday. You got a death wish, boy? “
Donovan stood, red in the face and unable to deny it.
“Milly, go home to your mother and let me talk to Donovan alone.”
Milly looked ready to argue, but a stern look from the heavy-faced,
heavily muscled blacksmith made her reconsider. She bowed slightly, and
was off without another look at Donovan.
“That girl adores you, don’t you let her make you think different.”
“Isn’t she shagging your son?“
“Keep that language in your mouth,” Roman growled. “I should finish what
you started last night!” Roman jumped down from the porch and walked
across the lawn. The gate banging behind him, Topper looking on, Roman
stomped right up to Donovan and looked him in the eye. Roman was the only
man in town who could match Donovan in size and exceed him in strength.
Years of pounding an anvil had hardened his muscle and bone into steel as right
and solid as anything made.
“She’d still be your if not for the
drink. You know it,” Roman stated soundly. “Why on Earth would you
want to feed another Servius to the water?”
Donovan stood silent, steaming, defensive.
“Milly cares about you. Alex and the Zehn’s care about you. Your
father was my best friend…” Roman looked at Donovan with heated eyes, “Don’t
make us bury the last of you.”
Roman held the stare, but his face
softened. “Milly’s heart can’t take anymore of this brawl’n and
surliness. Why? Why do you do this to yourself?“
Donovan burst, “I love the rush, I love the fog. I love how it makes me
forget my life, forget the shackles that keep us here by the Cove, forever
trapped by that salty bitch, in her sewer, in this overflowing shit-pot we all
call home. What do I care what Mils thinks? What do I care after
everything I’ve lost?”
“Come with me son, there is something I want to show you and then if you want
I’ll kill you or drown you, or give you up to Sheriff Brown, or whatever your
heart desires.”
“Isn’t that what you are here for? To give me up to that traitor,
Brown? Isn’t that what you do?”
Donovan accused.
“I
act in his stead, and make the place a damn sight more livable for it.
It’s long known the town hates Brown and his. I make sure that the Hag
gets only what she’s deserved. Cows and criminals and outcasts, instead
of children. I decide what to tell Brown. He and the Hag and Little
Hat will believe me if I tell them that you’re crazed and ready to drown for
the Chill Feast. They’ll believe me if I tell them you are mad with
grief, or calm at least. They believe me because I always tell the truth,
Servius.” Roman turned, walking back toward the gate.
Donovan ground his teeth and followed after the town blacksmith.
The two walked around the side of the house, until they found the Topper’s
roofed pen. The small building stank and leaned, suffering from total abandon
rather than simple neglect. Topper stood next to it, shitting and eating
contently.
“Mr. Galloway, why are we here? I
hate this cow. I really hate this cow.”
“Old Topper? Why?”
“Um, because he’s old? Won’t pull
the plow? Work’s actually harder with him around, his shit’s too sour to
fertilize with and the stench of it seeps into every recess of my nose and I
cannot escape it because my dead father, your friend, built his pen right next
to our house.”
Roman chuckled heartily and
grinned “He did at that. Got Zehn to help him, if I ‘member
right. But what you are failing to see is what is significant about
Topper.”
“He is an ugly ox with one good horn,
one that’s not even proportionate to his head. He’s crippled and worse
than useless,” Donovan waved his thick arms around, gesturing wildly toward the
beast. “I’d chop him up and eat the bastard if I didn’t think his beef
would taste like the floor of The Hole…”
“No son, no. He is all that is
left of the unicorn.”
“What, Queen take it, is a
unicorn?” Donovan asked, confused.
“Broken down, venerable, nearly blind
from the cancer in his eyes, yet he remains. Special. Rare.”
“Look, it’s not a unicorn, or whatever.
It’s a Hereford,” Donovan muttered, turning his back to Roman and starting to
walk away through the thick grass. “My dad told me that polled Hereford
bulls like Topper were bred to not have horns, this awful reject has’m,”
chuckled Donovan sadly.
“I don’t believe Topper’s horn was a
mistake, especially when Topper’s family line was perfected to be polled and
had been for more than ten generations.”
“How do you-“
“Really? You have to ask me that?
I know I’m the town smithy, but I’ve got cows too. In an occupied
territory what else do I have available to me to do around here? Go to
The Hole on Wednesdays and watch oldies on the tube? Besides, your dad
was an expert on Cow lore, long line of dairy farmers. Hard to know him
for a minute and not come off educated on the subject.” Roman sighed,
“I’m sure you remember.”
“And you wonder why I’m suicidal?”
“Son, as much as you hate this cow you
have to understand that you and he are both the same.”
“Nice.”
“Not beasts of burden Donovan, both rare
and special. You are anomalies, things that by normal circumstances
should have never happened. Do not waste your gift son, you strength, and
your heart. Save them, cherish them, pass them on so that others can have
a chance to discover a new life, far away from here far from any tyrant’s
grasp.”
“You, you think I’m special?”
Donovan asked, doubtful and slightly annoyed.
“I know you’re special, and that Little
Hat will need your gifts if they are to ever find a weakness in Hag’s defenses,
if they ever wish to leave this place or stay in peace. You were meant to
serve these people Donovan, just as we are all meant to do our part. Mine
is to make things, sometimes protect folks from Brown and his ilk. Who
knows what your part will be?”
“I want to murder that swampy
bitch. I want to kill the creature that took everything I ever loved,”
Servius bleated, alarmed and suddenly angry and crying.
Roman nodded slowly. You’ll need your life and freedom for that to ever
come to pass. Patty Miller’s tooth is the thing. Can’t heal that
back. You’ll need to make reparations to keep the town from rallying a
lynch mob to hang you, and you will have to square yourself with each and every
one of the other people you hurt. Start doing some good if you expect to
see a change, and to make change. Start being part of the solution and
stop blaming yourself for things you can’t control. Don’t make yourself
into another problem, town’s got plenty.”
Roman’s voice turned low, sad.
“It’s not your fault son, what happened to your sister or your parents.
Never was. Channel that anger and make something good of it.” Roman
sighed again, his eyes shifting and lost in memory, “Do you remember you’re your
father used to say to you when you’d get into trouble? You’re father used to
say, ‘I don’t care how many bags of seed it takes to thwart the mighty Donovan, but we’ll seed all the land if
that is what it will take to finish you.’ Channel your anger Donovan, and
you’ll find greater release than any drink could give.”
Finished, Roman left by the gate and walked down the path back to town.
Grateful in the way that only brushing against death can make you, Donovan
changed after that. Not easily and not directly, but he changed. He
stopped drinking, burning his stash of potato-gin that first afternoon after
Roman left back to town. He stopped brawling. Hardening his fists
instead against the earth, sowing the seeds of what would be a failed crop.
Failed, but to no fault of Donovan’s.
Roman Galloway made Donovan his
responsibility, feeding the Hag four good milk cows and his only bull that
winter, sacrifice equal to what the she demanded for the boy’s slight. By
summer of the following year, anyone in Little Hat would call Donovan reformed,
but the young man did not stand entirely innocent. He retained a dire
hate for the poison elf bitch feeding off the town from beneath the water, a
hate more powerful than that held by anyone else in Little Hat or the other
little towns sprinkled along the Outer Banks. A hate that would cause
real change, once Donovan found the right method, the appropriate weapon, to
end her reign forever and good.
And still, for all Roman’s effort,
Donovan never did grow to like that bull.
Hatteras -
August 2110
Donovan sold Topper to the Galloway
family, on Roman's insistence, stacking the exchanged furs and wrapping them
with twine. He shook Roman Galloway's calloused hand and walked on to do
the house shopping.
Donovan was an immense man, built like
fortress. Broad shouldered, torso like a cinder block, the young man
towered over the other townsfolk of Hatteras. He bought fruit, grains,
and affordable meats. Selling the cow had been a desperate stroke,
Donovan's family gone, the year's planting failed, and money desperately needed
to repair the house. The roof had fallen in during a storm the weekend
prior and while Donovan could do the labor, he didn't have the skills.
His last stop was with the carpenter,
Harold Zehn. He'd been a friend of the carpenter's son, Alex, since they
were children running through the sands with only hints of fear of what could
grab at them from the waves. The fear was better developed, now.
Donovan was on his way home, having
secured a good price from Harry for his home's repair, when the young man
became certain he was being followed. Donovan turned, seeing a man
walking behind him on the narrow road out of the town common. He was old,
almost fifty if a day, with short knife-cut hair. He was bearded, the
hair salted with gray, and walked with a slight limp.
Donovan stood, and waited for the man
while taking his measure. He carried no pack, held no weapons or tools,
yet seemed burdened by the pace of his walk.
"Donovan Servius," The
stranger stated, as if identifying an animal in the forest. Donovan
replied in the affirmative, but the man seemed disinterested in the
affirmation. "I would like to make your acquaintance."
