Chris & Kevin — Part IV: "We Dyed It Red"

Muted Reunion — Explosion — Forbidden Path — Journey Begun

---

By now the sun had already set and instead there shone a myriad of stars like reminders in the night of the light that used to be, and Kevin had awoken sweating and gasping on his porch. He dreamed of burning buildings and bloodied roads and in the dream he experienced an unspeakable loss but already the essence of it slipped away from him. Then he remembered Heroth and his fee.

He saw the old man just ahead, illuminated by the glimmering river, slouched on some rock, speaking to an unsteady silhouette. He started over swaying and blinking away his morbid visions. When he reached them he recognized Chris immediately. Chris recognized him also. They both acknowledged each other with widening eyes and slacking jaws but their reunion was subsumed within the old man’s sermon, who seemed to have forgotten about them both.

“It was Grumkin who found it. Turns out about a mile off along the edge o’ the cliff was this great big waterfall bursting from somewhere underground. You’d never seen anything like it. So much water. So clear. So blue. Like, like… hell, I don’t know. It was enough water to feed this town about a million times over. It had this glow about it. Like something blessed. I tell ya. It had no business bein in such a country. I don’t know how Grumkin saw it. I found em layin with his head over the edge screaming his sorry guts out but none of us could make a damn thing over all that water. By then we already felt the ground shook with the Silverhearts comin’, so I looked over myself and barely, just barely, I saw what Grumkin saw. Oh, hey there Kevin, when did you get here?”

“Just now. You never told me this story before.”

“You two know each other?” asked Chris.

Heroth seemed puzzled. “You two know each other?”

They both smiled and started to say how much of an understatement that was but then they paused as they realized they hardly knew each at other at all. They frowned at one another, like scholars puzzling out the use of a freshly excavated artifact.

Heroth smiled. A child’s smile on a face withered and old. “Well,” he said. “I saw a whole lotta bird shit. I tell ya.”

“Bird shit.”

“No shit.”

“I tell ya. I done thought there ain’t nothin livin up on that flatland of a shithole but apparently there’s this species of hawk that live there. Ashhawk they’re called.

“Asshawk?” asked Chris, and Kevin looked at him disapprovingly but then looked away laughing silently into his palm.

Heroth noticed none of this. “Big birds,” he said. “Big as a horse. Apparently they make their nests in crevices up in high places and what Grumkin saw was one of them nests dug out in the cliffwall near the waterfall. And so we each of us collected our ropes and we tied em to one sturdy boulder we’d found and we climbed down there one by one, though that rope was about as stable as my pissstream on a drunken morning, I tell ya. And the Silverbastards done shook the ground so hard with their comin they disturbed the horses. We had to leave em there. No choice. By then it was maybe two three hours we got left. We got down there and lucky for us there’d been nothing but o’ couple giant eggs that scared the shit outta me, I tell ya. And then Grumkin, he had this thought. He was our fire man, see. Anything you point to he could blow up. You know how them gnomes are. I swear he could gather the sweat outta my asscrack and make a bomb outtavit. And apparently birdshit is some highly flammable shit. Did you know that? Hmm? Did you?”

They didn’t.

“Yeah well. Grumkin put us to work. He had us chippin at the walls and burnin up our bows for char while he’d been chippin at them clumps of shit. Then he had us pissin over that mixture he made. Don’t ask me why. He had us strip to cover it against the wet air, and I tell ya, if one of them Ashhawks came by right then I don’t know what wed’ve done. Hell, even at our best selves, which we most certainly ain’t been, I wouldn’t bet on us against one pissed off mamahawk comin home to find a pack of strangers meddlin in her toilet. And the ground over us done shook harder and harder till it stopped shaking entirely and we could hear them lookin for us even over the water. Their steps. Right above us. I tell ya. Just boom. Boom. Boom. Like giants from some legend. ‘Cept they were real and they were there to make a salad outtavas. And we just sat there pissin our pants. Waitin on Grumkin’s call. By the gods I can still hear it. Just boom. Boom. Boom. Quite a thing it is. Bein hunted. I tell ya.”

He was silent for some time. Chris and Kevin watched him. He sat staring into the past smiling his dreamy smile as the waterfall hissed out clouds of vapor over the river. The stars in imperceptible movement above, emerging like distorted moons through the mist. The soft gurgling ripples. The nightly choir of crickets.

“We dyed it red,” said Heroth.

Behind them the town was dead asleep. Every window hushed and dark. Old Babi snoring in her rocking chair. Even the wind obliged its silence.

“What?” asked Chris.

“All of it. We dyed it all red.” His eyes contained every star in the night. “A tower of blood. Carryin away all that there was. Stone and bone alike. The dead and the livin. It used to be blue. We dyed it all red. I tell ya.”

Chris swallowed. Kevin crossed his arms. They looked at the lake of their childhood.

Eventually, Kevin said, “you never told me this, Heroth.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No.”

Heroth smiled. “Memories are funny things. Never know when they might come up. Hell I ain’t meant to tell it now. I just been askin this young fella here —“

“Chris,” said Kevin.

“I been askin Chris here about ways up that waterfall and before I knew it I been yappin away and I kept you into the night.” He looked at Chris. “I’m sorry. You said you had to go, I didn’t mean to -“

“Why didn’t you go?” asked Kevin. “Up that waterfall, I mean.”

Heroth blinked between each of them. “Why, I thought you can’t.”

“What? Sure you can. It’s just a quick hike up the Gilded pass, maybe ten minutes.”

“You can’t go up the Gilded pass,” said Chris, “what’s wrong with you?”

“Oh please,” Kevin rolled his eyes. “You don’t believe those stories, now.”

“Those aren’t stories.”

“By the gods.”

“What?” asked Heroth. “What is it?”

“Chris never went past ten years old is what it is.”

“The Gilded pass is cursed,” said Chris. “It’s where the spirit of the vale lives and we can’t go there. Anyone goes there will be eaten by the earth. Especially on a night with no moon.”

Heroth grinned like a child. “Let’s go there.”

“What? No, have you - did you not hear what I just sai —“

Heroth turned to Kevin. “You take me up there you don’t owe me nothin for the trip.”

“Done.”

They set off, Kevin at a brusque march, Heroth limping along, Chris scrambling after them.

“Wait,” he hissed. “You can’t. That’s how One-foot Harpie lost his foot. Stop,” and he kept hissing at them such warnings and further testimonies he had heard from the town’s elders which they themselves had heard from the elders before them, and Heroth and Kevin ignored him still.

They reached Old Babi’s house and tip-toed past her porch where she sat snoring and moved into where the grass was overgrown and wild. It tickled their shins and concealed sharp rocks which Chris kept bumping into in his haste. “Stop,” he called after them. “Stop.” Then they stopped in front of a jagged cliffwall, ascending before them sky-high like some border of the world.

At the base of that wall was a small crevice veiled by a thicket dense with thorns and bladed leaves. Countless chimes hung off those thorns, chimes and effigies and little pieces of rock inscribed with runes, and tiny booklets of prayer. A flat slab of stone lay atop a pair of propped bricks, on top of which were more runes and effigies and booklets and also dozens of yellowed old bones.

“Old Babi,” said Chris, panting, “she lays an offering every full moon to appease the vale.”

“Ugh for fuck’s sake,” said Kevin.

“This is serious. There are strange lights there sometimes. Strange blinking lights no one can explain.”

“That sounds beautiful,” said Heroth.

“I’m not afraid of some lights,” said Kevin, and he pushed through the thicket with his hands nestled deep in his sleeves and extended before him. Heroth smiled at Chris his child’s smile and followed through.

“Dammit,” said Chris. He kept glancing behind him. He tried to peak through the bramble but he could make nothing out. “Dammit.” Then he pushed through as well.

Part V - The Forest and The Descent: https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-v-the-forest

Part I — The Town That Forgot Itself: https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-i-the-town-that

Part II — Lakeside House: https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-ii-lakeside

Part III - The Old Man’s Story: https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-iii-the-old