[First published on Facebook on 19/4/2015]
Day 83(?)
It’s coming up on three months now since I moved to Hope Springs, Eternal. Or so I think; it’s hard to keep track of time these days, with the hazy hours that blur into each other and a memory like molasses. My life outside this strange and quiet place seems almost like a dream these days – except I’m still not convinced that Hope Springs is not itself the dream.
Things are different here in so many ways; I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface. The ever-present, ever-moving black cloud. The lake that seems almost alive. The constant heat-haze. The fertile sand. The schoolhouse that never seems active and which no-one mentions. The occasional amphibious rains. The fact some people are adamant they’ve seen their dead loved ones out in the surrounding desert.
Meribah.
It’s what I do now. It’s almost what I live for – perhaps it is, in fact. I investigate everything that piles up in this town. I’d like to think that I’m slowly getting to the bottom of Eternal’s secrets, but in reality I’m finding mysteries faster than I’m solving them.
It rains newts in the evening again. I’m trapped in Eke Elegua’s house until it stops.
Sometimes I think Eke knows all the secrets I’m trying to uncover already, but lets me work them out on my own for his own reasons. Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll get to the bottom of this town one day and what’ll be there is just broad-shouldered, coal-skinned Eke Elegua, laughing his big, broad laugh. But if he knew this rain was coming, he apparently didn’t think to avoid inviting anyone over for a drink and a card game.
Eke and I sit at the window with Meribah and Sheriff Philemon, watching the storm. Most games are better with four, and Eke knows everyone in town well enough to open his home to them. I invited Meribah; Sheriff Philemon invited himself.
“This storm’s different,” says Meribah. Apart from Eke, she’s just-about the only person who actively supports my investigations, and I’ve started to get the impression she’s been interested in this stuff for longer than I have and just waiting for someone to talk to about it. The storm certainly is different this time. The black cloud is right overhead, and the newts are falling through it. A surprising number of them were surviving the fall, by the look of it. We could just-about make out the lake from here, with the newts falling into it. Those ones didn’t come back up. Most obvious, though, are the flashes of lightning that light up the scene for us. It’s hard to make out, but it looks like the lightning bolts are originating at the ground.
“Never had an electric one before?” I presume. Meribah nods, her forehead wrinkling as her eyes narrow slightly. “The gods are restless” is what Eke says, and he laughs that laugh. I ask him if they get many gods around here. It’s a joke – I’ve started making them more often again – but it’s also a question to which I don’t know the answer for sure. Eke laughs again, harder, and tells me, “I ain’t ever had one right before me, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find a few skulking behind a man in a place like this.”
It’s late by the time the storm stops. The air outside smells of old blood and burnt fabric. I try not to step on any newts on the way home. I fail on one count, and get a static shock for the crime.
Day 84
An emergency town meeting is called early in the morning. Somebody went out in the storm, and they didn’t come back.
There aren’t very many children in Hope Springs. Johnny Scarlatina is one of the youngest of the townsfolk, and one of very few that still lives with his mother. For reasons unknown to me, the mother is known only as Nana, even to Eke. She’s understandably distraught.
We scour the town and the immediate surrounding area. When that doesn’t work, we head into the desert in teams. The black cloud is hovering over the lake. The haze is everywhere as usual. I drive around, and ask a lot of nearby farmers over the car phone to keep a look out. I run out of numbers before I find any sign of Johnny.
There’s still no sign by the time I admit defeat and decide to catch some sleep rather than pass out at the wheel of a moving vehicle. Eke and the sheriff have ever resorted to checking Venom Gulch. Dr Raphael Jackal is looking after Nana Scarlatina after she had some kind of anxiety attack. I know a little of how she feels. My insides are tightened in familiar knots as I drift away.
Day 86
A couple of search parties haven’t returned from the open desert.
Everyone else has come back empty-handed.
A request for reinforcements has been placed to New Michigan. I even tried to check the schoolhouse that nobody else acknowledges, but every way in is locked.
Even Eke Elegua is quiet and grim today.
Day 87
By the time I wake up, Johnny has returned. Eke let himself into my house and waited downstairs to tell me.
He doesn’t comment on the fact I’ve started sleeping in the bedroom.
There are two problems remaining. Firstly, when Johnny returned he was missing all of the skin from his back and part of his arm. Eke tells me not to worry about him; apparently Dr Jackal has worked greater miracles before. Secondly, we’re still missing nearly a dozen people from the search parties.
I spend most of this day in the car, too, but this time I take Meribah and her revolver. Just in case.
Day 89
It’s when I feel I really need some space to think that I still come out to sit here by the lake, even after what happened to Nehushtan.
Over the past couple of days, we’ve recovered the whole town’s population. Some came home of their own accord; others we found slumped or wandering in the desert. Everyone that was lost was missing skin from somewhere on their body. Dr Jackal is swamped.
Johnny says he doesn’t remember anything since the storm. From what I gather, it’s the same or similar with the others.
Meribah won’t go near the lake for much at a time, but Eke visits and tells me she’s wondering if we should search the desert some more. I decide I’d rather not until I know what I expect to be facing. I hope she agrees.
Day 94
Since Johnny, there’s been something of a trend. People of all ages, colours, genders – they keep vanishing overnight and coming back missing skin. Dr Jackal’s been treating a constant stream, although he treats them surprisingly well.
The sheriff is sure there’s some kind of wild animal out there that’s attacking them. He keeps organising armed search parties. He talks a lot about the Hope Springs sandcat of ’82 and the “business with the coyote”. Eke laughed at that, in private, but it wasn’t his usual laugh. It almost sounded bitter. Something about seeing Eke rattled makes me shiver deep in the bones. “Sandcat weren’t anything like this,” Eke tells me, blowing cigar smoke into the breeze. “Coyote would be appalled. This is something far else. Unnatural.”
Eke got me in touch with Nana. She’s invited me for tea tomorrow. I’m interested to see how Johnny’s doing now.
Day 95
I wake up freezing cold and drenched in sweat, from a nightmare that makes very little sense. In the dream, I was in the desert, but at the same time I was somewhere else, and there were altogether far too many stars, fighting for position in the sky. Silhouetted against them was a creature. It looked something like a horse, I think, but it was as if the whole landscape was focused on this one thing.
And something else. In the dream, I had no skin. Where my skin was meant to be, there was some kind of fabric instead.
Somehow, I knew that the fabric was something called velveteen.
When I move to the bathroom to wash, I find a note from Meribah, presumably placed there by Eke, who has no concept of personal space because it’s in his nature to fill all the space you give him. Meribah’s been speaking to Jackal’s patients. Found a pattern, the note reads. Ask Scarlatina about the rabbit.
Nana Scarlatina is a genial woman when she’s not worried about her son, and obviously a very proud mother. I get the impression she wouldn’t notice if her son was up to something strange. Her maternal filter would glaze over it like almost everyone in this town glazes over almost everything. Johnny’s a bright kid and polite enough, like everyone in the town, but he seems distracted. He picks up a cream cake with the arm that’s still bandaged. I ask him about the rabbit, and he puts the cake down again.
“Show him the rabbit, dear,” Nana urges him. “He’s getting very into the crafts lately,” she adds to me, proudly. Johnny produces a handmade object, like a stuffed animal, almost completed. It’s red. I recognise the pattern on the fabric, but not from anywhere real.
“Velveteen.”
I don’t even realise I’m saying it. “Cheaper than real velvet and just as good,” Nana says, cheerfully. “Better,” insists Johnny, almost absent-mindedly. “Things that are already real have less potential,” he explains.
“I told you he was into the crafts,” jokes Nana. I say very little more. My mind is full of the image of the velveteen rabbit.
Day 96
The sheriff’s search parties continue to find nothing, and they’re running out of areas to search.
After she shuts up shop for the day, Meribah and I meet at Eke’s, to compare notes. Over a glass of rum, she tells us that all of Jackal’s patients have started versions of the same project. She’s spoken to a few of them, and to Isis Lavandiere, who runs the only fabric store in town. They’re all buying velveteen, and they’re all making rabbits.
I tell her Johnny’s almost finished his. I also, after some hesitation, tell her about my dream. Eke smiles, almost proudly. “Always listen to your dreams, young’uns,” he says. “They tell you what your brain is doing when you’re not looking”. And he laughs his big laugh.
After a while of thoughtful silence broken only by Eke shuffling a pack of cards, Meribah speaks again. “Have you noticed the one question nobody’s asking?” she asks me, gazing around what can be seen of the town from Eke’s porch. I haven’t, so she tells me: “Where did the newts go?”
I stare at her. But she’s right. We cleaned up all the dead newts after the storm, but I have no idea where the live ones went. Eke laughs again, and he reaches into Meribah’s coatsleeve and produces a newt, like a magic trick. “I caught this fella stuck in my drainpipe after the storm,” he tells us. “You can ask him, but I can’t say for sure if he’ll answer.” When I look at the newt, I feel the ghost of the static shock I picked up on my way home that night.
I find myself uncomfortable for the rest of the day. As if my mind wants to be elsewhere and there’s something wrong with my body. That in itself is not new to me, but this time, I keep mentally picturing my own skin as made out of fabric. When night comes, I lie awake, uncomfortable and honestly a little scared.
Day 97
It’s hard to tell whether what happens to me in the early hours of the morning is a waking dream, a normal dream, or a fever dream. I’m tossing and turning and flinching at feelings it’s difficult to describe, and at some point, by some means, I’m in the twisted desert again, under all those unnatural stars. My skin feels electrically charged, and it shifts between normal and velveteen whenever I’m not paying attention. And in front of me is the creature again. It looks like a huge, wild stallion – if a wild stallion was made out of human skin.
It’s a patchwork of dried, sand-blasted but unmistakable sheets of skin in every colour of the human spectrum, visibly torn from backs and limbs and chests, the ragged edges stitched together with what looks for all the world like sinew, somehow pounded into the shape of a horse. The upper part of the head and neck is mostly formed by a torn back and part of an arm, the exact size and colour of Johnny Scarlatina. It doesn’t change position, but something moves behind the skin where the eyes would be on a normal horse, and I get the impression it’s looking at me.
“What are you?” I ask, or I hear myself asking. The Skin Horse speaks. It has a mouth, but inside its mouth there is only more stitches and more skin.
“I am many things,” it tells me. “I am the voice in the wilderness and the forerunner and the gatekeeper, but now by your devotion and sacrifice I am REAL.”
I don’t understand that in the dream any more than I do in reality. I don’t have many options other than fear or anger, so I choose something in between.
“What the hell do you want with Hope Springs?” I ask the Skin Horse. It tells me, “We need your love. We need your sacrifice. That is how we become real.” I ask it who ‘we’ means, and it tells me again, “I am the forerunner that opens the gate. By the sacrifice of flesh, I am become real. I bring about the sacrifice of flame, by which the Velveteen God is made real.”
The Skin Horse raises its head, and I follow its gaze. There is, if you’re looking for it, a shape in the stars. The way they’re clustered, if I squint a little, an outline appears in the void. It’s the outline of a rabbit.
Next thing I know, I’m running, sprinting through the desert, and I’m sure I can hear cantering behind me, getting closer.
When I wake up, I’m not in my bed. I’m lying on the ground outside my door. And on the far side of town, I can just-about make out the glow of a fire.
I reach the burning Scarlatina house at the same time as Eke does. In the pitch-back night lit only by the glow of the burning building, Eke in his dressing gown almost looks like a disembodied white robe. There’s no sign of Nana, but Johnny is standing outside, gazing at the flames, grasping his completed stuffed rabbit. “Everything else has to burn,” Johnny tells us, without taking his eyes off the fire, “for the rabbit to become real.” I look up at the roof. Sparks are blowing off towards other buildings in the breeze. I think of how many people there are, spread throughout the town, almost finished their own little rabbits. You could lose a town that way. We could lose this town that way.
Eke has produced a cigar from somewhere. He crouches down and takes something from the hand Johnny isn’t holding the rabbit in. It’s a matchbox. Eke lights his cigar and gestures in another direction. “Well look at that,” he says to Johnny, who turns his head. Eke blows a smoke ring over him. Johnny coughs, shakes his head in confusion, blinks, looking at the fire again, and then faints into Eke’s arms.
Eke hands me the matches and the rabbit. “Find what’s responsible,” he instructs. “Stop it.” I nod, mutely. He takes a little bottle of rum from his dressing gown pocket, drinks a sip and hands the rest to me. “You’re gonna need this more than me,” he tells me. He lays Johnny gently on the ground a safe distance away and runs into the burning house.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s that at times like this, when I’m scared and I don’t know what to do, what I need is a friendly face, and preferably a familiar one. Meribah’s is the most familiar face in town, and friendlier than any except Eke’s. She’s already awake when I reach her house. Not because of the fire, but because she took Eke’s newt home and she’s been watching it. When I go in, the newt is walking up and down the length of the wall, searching for a way out. Meribah tells me it seems to know where it wants to go, and it’s always the same direction.
There’s no logic to the decision, beyond a few circumstantial coincidences. The newt storm was the night Johnny went missing. The newt wants to go somewhere specific for no apparent reason, like Johnny did. That’s about all we’ve got, but we need to do something and we don’t have any better plans, so we take the newt outside, place it on the ground, and follow it out of the town.
Shortly after sunrise, we spot a shape in the distance, heading towards us just as the newt leads us towards it. After a few minutes more, it becomes clear what the shape is.
The Skin Horse trots towards us. It has no expression, so we can’t tell what it might be thinking. Its soft, fleshy hooves make very little sound as they tread on the sand.
Meribah has her revolver on it within seconds. The newt scampers to it, and when it gets near there is an electrical discharge from newt to Skin Horse, before the amphibian stops moving entirely and the Skin Horse steps over it. It says nothing, but it doesn’t even slow down when Meribah threatens it. Soon, its close enough for me to clearly make out where one patch of skin ends and another begins. I can see Johnny Scarlatina’s former back still stretched across its head.
“Shoot it,” I tell Meribah. She doesn’t need much convincing. The bullet hits the monster in the back of its fake mouth, and tears a hole all the way through and out the back of its head.
The Skin Horse doesn’t stop moving. The torn skin flaps with the movement of its hoofbeats. From the holes, a dozen strips of skin and sinew unfurl like streamers and begin to whip back and forth, like the tongues of snakes tasting the air. Meribah shoots it again and again and again, and each hole she puts in it only reveals more writhing skin-feelers from within, until it looks less like a horse at all and more like some shredded alien god.
I don’t know whether it’s coming from the mass of human flesh advancing on us or just from the inside of my head, but I hear the Skin Horse’s voice again, the same as it was in the dream. It tells me our efforts are futile. It tells me it cannot be defeated. It tells me that the Velveteen God will follow through the door it opens, and we shall cease to be real. It tells me that it cannot be destroyed, because it is real. It whips a bundle of feelers towards me and tries to snatch the velveteen rabbit from my grasp.
I open the bottle of rum Eke gave me and pour half of it over the rabbit toy in my hand. I jam the rabbit’s head into the neck of the bottle, twisting it until it stays in there of its own accord. I hand the makeshift Molotov to Meribah and strike one of Johnny’s matches.
I tell the Skin Horse it has badly misunderstood what being real means.
I touch the flame to the alcohol-soaked rabbit and Meribah hurls it into the ragged, feeler-choked jaws of the Skin Horse. Just for good measure, she sends her last revolver bullet after it.
The fireball shreds what remains of the Skin Horse’s head completely, and the burning remains stagger and collapse. There is the piercing, terrible scream of a horse in agonising pain, and then there is silence.
The stitches have burned away and come undone, and charred, foul-smelling fragments of skin are flapping idly across the ground in the wind. Here and there, there are nuggets of broken glass. Of the velveteen rabbit, there is no sign.
Day 99
I’ve slept soundly the past two nights. No-one else has gone missing, and the sheriff is satisfied enough to call off his search parties. Eke somehow managed to save not only Nana and Johnny, but most of their house and its contents, and although I don’t know enough about medicine to have any idea how he did it, Dr Jackal has gotten nearly everybody healed back to normal now.
Meribah and I collected together all the half-made velveteen creations from the former patients, paying them whatever they demanded from dear old Uncle Aloysius’s money. Today, just to make sure, we make a bonfire out in one of the fields behind the town and we burn them all.
I tell Eke what happened as soon as I can get a private word. He nods as if it was to be expected, and tells me that “It’s a dangerous thing to think you know everything there is about being real. Especially round these parts.” He also tells me I owe him a pocket-sized bottle of rum, which I guess is fair, although come to think of it he’s never shown any signs of worrying about running out before, so I’m sceptical as to whether he’d really miss it.
While I’m at Eke’s, Nana and Johnny Scarlatina arrive with cupcakes, which apparently is their way of saying thanks. Somehow the day ends up with the two of us teaching the two of them card games all evening. Most games are better with four, after all.
At about half seven it starts raining newts again. They’re only the usual kind this time. “The gods are at peace again,” Eke tells us, looking out at the amphibious precipitation, and he laughs. I take a good look at the skin on the back of my hand. Right now, I can’t see anything wrong with it.
“Maybe they are,” I agree. “Maybe they are.”
***
[DISCLAIMER: I have never actually read Margery Williams’s ‘The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real)’. To my knowledge, however, none of the characters within it are gods of any kind.]
The Court of Ranternal Affairs 