Changeling (2 page)

Remorse veins the air. I hate it. And in hating it, I feel remorse all the more strongly.

The boy has seen me, in the same way the farmer of long ago had seen me for an instant in glory upon the barrow I warded, in the second his eyes re-fleshed to smooth-grained rowan. The instant of the boy’s blinding reveals me. The thunder of his skull shattering from scores of small stones thrown by a blast of charcoal and sulphur had been uglier than the sounds of wooden orbs pulled by the tongs of a blacksmith. The boy’s eyes that had been made stone had been burst by stone.

The house, with the sundering of the boy’s mind, has fully accepted the maledictions spoken to the boy over the passing years. They now invisibly wright the walls. They are the hated legacy of a hated place that holds the curse of a youth dying by his own violence within it.

The house is like the barrow. It is like the great stone I slept under by the roadside. Yet those places had been free to the air and sky. These invested walls hold me; they have been taught to grip fast the anxious worry that first snared me. They hold the boy who had found no release for his stifled remorse other than through thunder, fire and stones thrown through smooth and oiled pipes of metal. His remorse chokes me and thicket-traps me fast.

I am the conscripted midwife to the haunting of this place. The boy is that which haunts. He had seen me in the instant of his death. He is lonely and afraid of what I might be in the un-fleshed spaces of the place that had been home to him, and that shall be his home past death. His fear of me perpetuates the poison he had been fed; it no longer needs to be spoken. Yet despite his fear I cannot reach him. He is visible, yet untouchable as the grain of wood beneath beeswax.

We shall haunt this place separately until it falls.

Michael Marano is a former punk rock DJ, bouncer, and the author of the modern dark fantasy classic
Dawn Song
, which won both the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Awards, and which will be reprinted by ChiZine Publications in 2013, to be followed by two sequels. For more than 20 years, his film reviews and pop culture commentary have been a highlight of the nationally syndicated Public Radio Satellite System show
Movie Magazine International
. His non-fiction has appeared in alternative newspapers such as
The Independent Weekly
,
The Boston Phoenix
and
The Weekly Dig
, as well as in magazines such as
Paste
and
Fantastique
. His column “MediaDrome” has been a wildly popular feature in
Cemetery Dance
since 2001. He currently divides his time between a neighbourhood in Boston that had been the site of a gang war that was the partial basis of
The Departed
and a sub-division in Charleston, SC a few steps away from a former Confederate Army encampment. He can be reached at
www.michaelmarano.com
.

“Changeling” originally appeared in
Last Pentacle Of The Sun: Writings In Support Of The West Memphis Three
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004).