Beast
At dusk, he carried a small backpack into the park, unfurled a one-man pop-up tent near the ablutions of the main camping ground. The tent screamed vivid yellows and blues—jarringly incongruent with his craggy face and deadpan expression.
Until recently, it had been his son’s. From the many times they’d come here together. Way back when anything still mattered.
It was a warm day. Birds sang. The occasional deer presented itself as though contracted to add to the scene. In the distance, children swam in a mirrored lake, laughed. People were grilling meats—whiffs of sweet, smoky death. They spoke about things they cared about. They loved and hated and strived and celebrated. They clung to life and the world and all its ephemeral beauty.
The man had nothing in common with them. Not anymore. He couldn’t wait to get away from here.
The backpack held no clothing. Only matches, a bag of roasted almonds, two large water bottles, an old Swiss army knife, a bottle of whisky. It was all he needed for where he was heading. Soon, he would need even less, would need nothing at all.
The man started a fire, drank whisky straight from the bottle, scowled at the campers, hoping to convey his earnest desire not to be disturbed.
To no avail. Here she came. She always did.
Always a stranger. Always exactly the same person.
‘Hello,’ said a fat woman on her lumbering way to the showers. She carried a pink towel and a pink toiletry bag. She regarded him, the bottle of whisky, his tired, lined, desolate face. The look of a man lost and desperate and worn to the bone.
She probably considered herself a good person. Someone that was trying to help. They always do.
The man said nothing, took another sip of whisky, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand.
‘Are you hiking the waterfalls tomorrow,’ asked the woman, gave a limp little grin, gestured west to the hulking cloud-ringed mountains.
‘No,’ said the man, feeling like that single word was already more than anyone should expect of him.
‘Oh,’ said the woman, taken aback by his quiet belligerence. Her eyes narrowed with determination. She persisted. ‘Surely not the Shadowed Valley,’ she asked, even though there were only two paths from here, one east, one west, and his answer had eliminated the western way.
‘None of your business,’ said the man, watched her face contort with ire. Virtue never ran deeply, mused the man. Always a façade. Mostly for the benefit of the ostensibly gracious.
The woman took that as an affirmative. ‘You really shouldn’t,’ she said, exuding good intentions. ‘There are dark things there. Don’t know whether you’ve heard. It’s not a good place. People who go there never come back,’ she said, stating common knowledge like it was arcane. ‘I know sometimes things get bad and people want to give up, but there’s always hope,’ she added, putting a plump hand between her breasts. ‘I really believe that,’ she said.
‘Maybe you should mind your own business,’ said the man, took another swig.
‘Oh my,’ said the woman, her face betraying a procession of conflicting emotions.
‘I’m over there,’ she waved, after a while. ‘My husband’s a pastor,’ she said. ‘If you need someone to speak to.’
He gave her the finger, spat whisky at her feet.
‘Oh my,’ said the woman, hand to neck. She shuffled away huffily, hips swaying like a brown bear.
The man dreamed of the boy, his begotten beloved.
Every night, he dreamed of the boy.
Some of the dreams were memories, others a collage of impressions, not all factual, but all true.
Tonight, he dreamed of the boy running and hooting on a vast lush meadow while he stood by a barbeque flipping burgers.
In this dream the man was happy. The sun shone dazzlingly and birds twittered in surrounding woodlands. The air smelled sweet, herbaceous. Everything was picture-perfect, or his memories had made it so.
And she was there. His chosen beloved. Her hair caught fiery red as she threw her head back and laughed. Together, they watched their boy, grinning, sharing a beer and a joint.
Here came the boy, running toward the man, his face smeared muddy, his legs stained grass-green, his eyes bright, jubilant, made of light and life and everything pure and joyous. The man tousled the boy’s dirty blonde hair and felt like the luckiest guy alive.
He woke briefly in the night, listened to bats swoop, rubbed at his tear-stained face.
The next morning presented itself with harrowing beauty.
To the man, it seemed unnatural, disdainful, that the world could be this way. Bright, blue, verdant, full of cheerful carefree life. It grated against his inner realm. It seemed like a lie.
It was a world, a sight, he had once shared with his son over a cup of sweet tea, eating baked beans with hot sauce and soft salty fried eggs, excited for the day’s adventures.
An alien world. A fake world.
The man had a hangover, but had risen early. Sometimes the authorities came, he knew, tried to stop anyone intending to take the lesser route, the way east, the journey into shadow. Sometimes they brought a psychologist. Some simpering, bleeding-heart imbecile. He’d seen it before. Before he could even conceive why anyone would do that. Why anyone would venture into the Shadowed Valley.
He left the tent and what remained of the bottle of whisky, stalked away down the narrow path east. Like magic, in little more than a dozen steps, the world behind him fell away. Even the sounds. And its warmth.
The path was narrow, rocky, overgrown, arched over with limp tree branches and stringy sickly-looking lichen. It swallowed him. It was cool and shaded and soothing. The path sloped down. He wanted to go down. Going down felt natural. The way things were meant to be. Away from the light.
He longed for darkness. Darkness to soothe what light had scorched. Darkness to pull his mind farther and deeper, away from the world, away from his self. Away from memory. Away from humanity. Maybe even away from his shame.
At about midday, the man took a break, soaked his feet in a muddy rivulet, chomped away at his bag of almonds. He was not thinking about anything in particular. He was not feeling anything notable. In fact, he was trying not to think or feel. He’d concluded thinking and feeling were pointless, gave nothing in return but pain and despair. And this inner emptiness seemed easy here. As though quiet and calm seeped into him from the soil. He hoped the emptiness would deepen. That it would eventually erase him.
It was only later, in the twilight, that he started hearing the dark things. Whispers like broken breezes. The voices of things that gathered in the Shadowed Valley. Everyone knew of the dark things. Not what they were, but that they were. He’d heard it rumored there were dark things this far from the Shadowed Valley. Not many. Only occasionally. People said they were bestial, monstrous things, that they ate the flesh of dead hikers, that they hunted in the gloom, that they were fragments of shattered souls.
The man wasn’t scared of the dark things. He was scared of the world and the sun’s brightness. He was scared of children’s laughter. He was scared of hope and happiness and love. He wasn’t scared of dying, if that was what their presence forbode.
He slept well that evening. He lay in a hollow under the roots of a dying tree. The soil was moist and smelled of blood. It was cold and he had nothing to cover himself, but he figured he’d have to get used to being exposed to the elements anyway. Might as well start now. One went to the Shadowed Valley to be one with nature, thought the man. Not to fight it.
At some point he woke to a cold full moon blindingly on his face. He could feel them watching. He could hear them on the periphery of his vision. Dead eyes. Blinking in the night.
Do with me as you please, thought the man, fell asleep again.
He woke to a world dimly lit, couldn’t tell what time it was.
Not that it mattered. In the other world, he thought, the sun sat high. But here, halfway between that glittering fallacy and the realm he yearned for, the sun nearly never peeked and, when it did, it did so coyly, as though regarding something depraved.
He undressed, left all his clothes, his backpack, everything in the backpack, everything he had, in the hollow.
He would not enter the Shadowed Valley like a man. Carrying human things. He’d go like an animal. Empty-handed. With nothing but his body. He’d go without thoughts and hopes and aspirations. Without fear of death.
He shivered in the cold. By noon, his feet were bleeding, his back ached.
Never mind, thought the man, pressed along. He would die or get stronger, it seemed to him. Didn’t matter which. Pain was true, thought the man—unlike the myth of pleasure.
By mid-afternoon, he was hungry and thirsty. He drank water from a puddle, wondered whether it would make him sick.
All around him the forest floor creaked. Soft footfalls following. It comforted him knowing the dark things were there, watching. It comforted him knowing the tales were true.
A deer crossed his path, sped away.
He saw no other animals. Big or small. No birds. Nothing. Just worms and beetles, moths, a couple of spiders.
Even though it was dusk when the man arrived in the Shadowed Valley, it was pitch-black under the canopy, in the shade of the now invisible neighboring mountains.
A black river ran nearby, gurgled like a giggling infant. Something about the trees spoke to the man of elderly bodies, crooked, broken, leaning at hunchbacked angles, disjointed. The soil smelled like dead things long returned to the earth. It squished soothingly under his tender feet.
And everywhere there were eyes. In the trees, in the gray-dead shrubbery, poking out of the river. The dark things murmured, but now there was a multitude and when they got close the man could catch snatches of what they spoke about.
They spoke of life and their contempt for it. They breathed about the grace of obscurity. They murmured about freedom in death. They welcomed him in their midst, from where the living never departed. They laughed, but not with joy.
The man felt at home.
Many moons rose and fell on his decay.
Darkness came and nestled up, took a hold, flourished.
His memories fed the soil, his thoughts carried the wind, his heart bled into water.
While despair fed, he unmade himself, became what was left when there was nothing left.
For the beast, time did not flow. As a man, time had seemed like a river going steadily onward, from one point to the next. But now it appeared as a rippling pool, stirring from center to periphery and back again, so that every instant seemed interminable, every season like a blink of an eye.
The beast did not know how long it had been in the Shadowed Valley, or that there was anything beyond the Shadowed Valley. It did not think in terms of here or there, then or now. It could conceive of such things, but didn’t. Doing so would have seemed like fantasy, dissonant with reality as the beast experienced it.
It had become like the other dark things that had been something else before they’d come here—mostly people, sometimes animals. But other things, too. Liminal things. Things coalesced out of misery and the shards of shattered souls. Things that had appeared from cracks laid bare in space and time, which came from places humans did not know of, or only dreamed of.
The beast dwelled in the putrid murk of the Shadowed Valley and watched its own body change. When it had been a man, it suffered from cold and hunger and pitied itself. But that had changed. Nature did not get cold or hungry, didn’t feel sorry for itself. Nature flourished or floundered. Where it flourished, other parts died. Where it floundered, other parts thrived.
The Shadowed Valley knew no absolutes, had no morality.
Its body had morphed into a thing that wasn’t really a body anymore, had become mostly an idea of a contrivance with a function. The beast did not think or feel as it had when it was a man. It knew and it responded. It was neither happy nor sad, would have been hard pressed to make the distinction.
It was, simply, a beast.
It could sense the specter of the man it had once been, but only vaguely, like disjointed childhood memories, some of them true, others distorted by fancy.
It lay under mosses and leaves. It scooped cold fish from the river to feed on, devoured such occasional furry creatures as foolishly crossed its path, munched on beetles and worms. It listened to the wind in the trees and the whirring of insects and the voices of other dark things, and it learned that everything spoke, that everything had words, that everything, even the air and soil, the river and all dead decaying things, were very much alive.
The beast lived for the nights. It always yearned for the moon. It fled every sliver of sunlight that lost its way to the valley floor. To the beast, the moon was kind and welcoming, the mother of dark things, a gateway. It spoke to the moon and the moon answered in countless bleak voices.
And so it lingered, brooding mindlessly, even though it had no notion whether it was meaningfully alive, or even whether being alive mattered at all.
In their broken voices, the trees whispered memories, and when the beast listened, it could hear.
The trees remembered when the Shadowed Valley had been a valley like most other valleys. When it was light and green, full of life and beauty, when they still breathed soft and sweetly, and the river chortled and held fat pink trout.
Sometimes, the trees spoke of upheaval. They remembered the occasional flood, shuddered at memories of raging fires. They witnessed death and life. So much death and life that they’d come to learn it was all the same one thing. The trees reminisced of countless seasons, of droughts, ice-cold winters, blazing summers, how the valley had always found ways to renew itself. Back then, the valley wasn’t at odds with anything, said the trees, didn’t resist or resent anything, accepted whatever came its way.
And so the beast knew that, sometime long ago, the valley subsisted calmly, danced lightly along with the rhythms of the world, at its own pace and in pace with everything else. Such darkness as it held, said the trees to the beast, like night and long dim winters, was nothing more than the brief absence of light, and made the light, when it returned, seem brighter and warmer than it would have without the darkness.
Back then, remembered the trees, the valley was neither good nor bad. It just was. A valley.
When people first started coming to the valley, they passed through unimpressively, remembered the trees. Sometimes they fished and made small fires, and they were always noisy. But, at first, they did not come often, and never stayed long.
Then came the people who never left and the valley changed, said the trees and shook their leaves angrily. People drawing dark things in their wakes. People that brought with them forms of death that were alien to the valley. Death that never decayed, never stopped rotting. Death that didn’t feed the soil, but corrupted it. Their darkness was something other than the absence of light, said the trees. It was like a living thing. It had weight. It wouldn’t dissipate, not even in the brightest light. If anything, it challenged the light, choked the light and all things that needed light. It fed on itself. It fed on everything else. Like a cancer.
These people brought other strange things too, told the trees. They carried wounds that never healed. They had pain that extended beyond their bodies. They brought anger and resentment and hate. They longed for things like subjugation and desecration and destruction, and they breathed all this venom into the valley. They held unnaturally to pasts long gone, fixated on imaginary futures, never understood that the valley knew only the present. Their darkness was insatiable, said the trees. They supped on an endless wellspring of misery.
One day, the trees remembered sadly, septic, despoiled, the valley extracted itself from the world, a realm now anathema to its new twisted nature, like pus around an abscess.
But the people still found it, and kept on coming.
It was winter and the moon shone full and azure through the canopy, hazed the edges of the trees, made them look like twisted dreams.
The beast sat high up on a bough of a dead tree, the decadent decay of fallen leaves in its nostrils, staring unseeing at the stark icy landscape.
To the extent it could be still be considered a physical thing, it now consisted of stringy limbs, bones revealed through taut stained skin. It had a gaze that glimmered palely in the night, like specks of light reflected far in the depths of a deep black well. It was emaciated but felt no hunger, no desire at all. All it did, day in, day out, was to wait for the end, whenever that may come.
The beast saw her coming from afar, her crimson head bobbing. A face, a rotten remembrance of love, a foul scorching remnant. She was naked and shivered, drew closer.
Something jarred in the beast. Something raw. A small light lit in a far hidden corner. Something that belonged to a man that had once had tears, both of joy and misery. A memory of beauty stuck behind a tall black wall. Then it was gone.
Snuffed.
Now she stood in a clearing not far from the beast, looked around nervously. Her gaze was wide and clear, pools of sorrow. Dark things flitted and murmured around her, and she lifted her hands protectively, like swatting at bugs. To the beast she seemed scared, scarred.
The woman was looking for the man the beast had once been. She had no wish in her soul but to be distorted in the darkness by her own darkness, to convert her broken soul into a broken body. But she wanted him to know. She wanted him to see her suffering, to understand that his abandonment had driven her to this destruction, that it was his fault.
She wanted that man to suffer.
But that man was gone. That man had suffered and passed. Even if the woman saw the beast sitting on the bough, she would not have known it had once been that man.
For a while, quietly, the woman lingered. She went to the river and drank. She called out the name of a man that no longer existed. The name cut at the beast like an old, jagged blade. She fell on her knees, crawled to a fallen tree, propped herself up against it, wept till she fell asleep.
The beast jumped from the tree lightly like a cat, walked into the night, a shadow in the shadows.
About the Author
Daniel Burnbridge is a South African author of speculative fiction, with work published or forthcoming in several magazines and anthologies, including Journeys Beyond the Fantastical Horizon (Galaxy’s Edge), Amazing Stories and Aurealis. He is the winner of the 2023 Mike Resnick Memorial Award for best science fiction short story by a new author.