I remember my eleventh year the best. All the years previous to my eleventh were notable only for their monotony and repetition. But the eleventh was special. Not only for me, but for all the boys who lived on the Gray Shore. That was the year of the Hunt. Even today, our stories of the Hunt are shifting, distorting the concreteness of fact with the shine and glimmer of slight fiction. But I remember it. It was an absolute event and I’ve become worried that the lax nature of our oral tradition may someday compel the full story to break apart into pieces and plays, evermore loosely built on the truthful foundations. So I’m writing this. I realize that writing is only acceptable as a method of communicating, not a means of recordkeeping, but the Hunt is too grand a truth to be ruined by grandstanding or forgetful storytellers. I hope future caretakers will not look upon me too harshly for this indiscretion.
It began, like many things on the Gray Shore, down on the water. Jake Windfall was living in the Green House by the sandbar. Jake was a ruddy kid, with healthy cheeks and rolly arms and legs. He had coveted the Green House for a year, having won it’s lottery the previous summer. He waited patiently and politely for Cole Tidebreaker, the house’s twelfth noted resident (as indicated by notches above the doorframe), to vacate the premises, which he did promptly once his affairs were in order and in his Away Ceremony completed.
Once Cole was gone, Jake moved his possessions into the house and began his Last Leg with abandon, throwing timber and kale parties late into the evening, inviting only his favorite 10th and 11th years. Jake was a particular boy, who liked his things where they went and only where they went, which is how he came to know about the scientist.
The morning of his discovery I was on the black end of the shore, where the rocks are covered by a dark alga so thick most of the newly disattended children sleep there until they can find their first permanent shelters. I was nestled deep in the blackness, reading a limp and blotched novel by Hemingway. I don’t know the title. The cover and first thirty pages were torn away. I only knew it was Hemingway because of the bullfighting and sexually complicated main character.
Jake came racing up to me, his naked torso and chest blazon red and damp. “Someone was in my house last night,” he declared, stopping at the foot of my rock, bending over and holding his knees while he heaved phlegm and heavy air.
“Who?” I asked, not raising my eyes from the text. Jake’s dramatic flare had rather quickly dulled my natural impulse to hasty reaction.
“I don’t know,” wheezed Jake. “That’s why I’m runnin’ up and down this beach like an idiot.”
“A fat idiot,” I corrected, flipping a molded page.
“Shut up and help me find out who was in my house last night.”
Sighing, I slipped off the rock. “Are you missing anything?” I breezed past Jake and headed back towards the Green House.
“Well, nothing that I brought into the house, but I don’t know about the stuff that was in there before.” Jake put up a hand to get me to slow down and wait for him, but I didn’t, so he started trotting after me.
“Then what do you care if someone was in your house?”
“It’s principle, Dylan, and I don’t think you’d like people walking into the Red House and stealing any of your stuff, right?”
“I don’t have anything worth stealing, Jake.” I checked the sun. It was still a ways to midday meal, but my stomach was clenching hungrily.
“Not that you know about.” Jake reached out and grabbed my arm. “I don’t think any of us broke into my house last night, Dylan. The old stuff in that house isn’t worth anything to any of us.”
I was exasperated at this point. “Then who the hell broke into your house, Jake?”
“I think it was Craven,” said Jake, unblinking.
We don’t walk in ignorance, us Children of the Gray Shore. We are educated in literature and language from an early age. We are self-aware. But we still hold to superstitions and myths. Part of us knows there’s a simple truth out there to explain away the things that rattle in the darkness, but the better part of us is aware of how dangerous those simple truths can be.
“Craven?” I mouthed, searching Jake’s eyes for any twitch of mischief. There was none. “What would Craven want with the junk in the Green House?”
“I don’t know, and I’m glad for the not knowing, thank you.” Jake shivered and we both stood a moment in silence. “Betty Wavefloats says she saw something crawl out of my window last night, but she was too terrified to do anything other than hide in her tent. All she knows is that it was big and long and pale and its eyes didn’t reflect the light at all.”
I was dumbstruck. I always fancied myself a cut above the others, even the ones my age and older, but I was rudderless here.
“But Betty’s pretty dumb,” said Jake, breaking through my glaze, “so who knows.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking myself to and continuing onto the Green House, “Betty’s pretty dumb.”
At the Green House I found nothing. It didn’t help that I didn’t know what I was looking for. Jake only knew that someone had been in his house when he noticed that his kale basket was a full meter away from its place just to the side of his cellar door. Betty’s story just confirmed it. We examined the cellar for most of midday and beyond, but without knowing what had been there, there was no way to know if anything was missing.
Having failed to help Jake in any way, I returned to the Red House. The Red House was modest, with a rotted set of steps leading up to a crooked screen door, which I meant to, and still mean to, fix someday. Inside, I went down to the dank cellar and looked around. The top of the cellar just crept above the foundation, so there were windows, but they were mildewed and smoked and very little light made it through to the cellar, even on the brightest days.
There wasn’t anything in my cellar that anyone could have any use for. There was the rotted box of magazines that I someday meant to pick at, and the rusted washer and dryer in the far corner. There was a tool bench with two broken legs and no tools. If there ever was anything of value down there it had long been stolen away by previous residents.
Satisfied that the Red House was utterly without use to me or any mythical phantoms, I left the cellar and the Red House and traveled inland to Mary Waterchill’s tent. Mary was my wife. She lived on the edge of the Ward in a tent that was more patches than original fabric. I always assumed that as I matured I would grow to love Mary, presumably in a more physical way. At that time though, she still didn’t interest me very much.
“Well, Dylan Sandglass, how are you?” she squealed at the sight of me, rolling out from her tent and kissing my hand. “You haven’t visited in so long. Is something wrong, darling?”
“Please don’t call me darling, Mary,” I replied, a little more curtly than I intended to. Fortunately, Mary’s always had thick skin. Almost all the girls on the Gray Shore do. Plus, like most things I said to her, it didn’t seem to register.
“Did you know Joette Fallshare’s with child? Her and Ken only had to try once. How many times do you think we’ll have to try?” Mary asked me questions like this all the time. Not that she wanted me to answer them. I could never answer them better than her anyway.
“I bet five,” she said, dancing into her tent and returning with a sun hat made of reeds. “What do you think?” she asked, handing me the hat. “Do you like it? I made it for you. I don’t want you to get sunstroke.”
“Mary,” I said, rolling my eyes and handing her back the hat. “I’ve never had sunstroke. I don’t think it’s worth wearing a stupid hat over.”
Unfortunately, the girls on the Gray Shore aren’t completely impervious to having their feelings hurt.
“You think it’s a stupid hat,” she quivered, pulling the hat to her breast. “I worked really hard on it.” Mary was never afraid to shed a few tears in front of me.
“No, it’s a good hat,” I covered. “What I came to talk about was something that happened to Jake last night.”
“Something happened to Jake last night? Oh, what was it? Does Meredith know? She’ll be worried.”
“Just be quiet for a second,” I snapped. “He says his house was broken into.”
Mary gasped, a little melodramatically, not that she knew that. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Based on what Betty Wavefloats claims she saw, he seems to think it was Craven.”
Mary screamed.
“Oh, cup it, Mary!” I yelled, a little embarrassed. “Don’t crash out on me. I just wanted to know if you’ve seen anything or heard anybody wandering past the Ward late at night.”
But Mary had crashed out. “Oh my, oh my,” she mumbled to herself. I had a stock of sixth years to teach fundamental literacy to, so I left her there, muttering and crouching beside her tent. I’d read about love so many times, but I just couldn’t imagine ever loving Mary. It just wasn’t there.
That night I camped out across from the Green House with Jake and Ray Treecutter, who was a big kid in his twelfth year we both got along with. We sat up in shifts, waiting to see if anyone or anything would be going through the cellar in the Green House, but there was nothing.
Time passed uneventfully, as it always does on the Gray Shore. Raul Silentearth had his Away Ceremony in late summer. Raul was a pretty popular kid, athletic and good at telling stories, so most of us were sad to see him go. His ceremony was one of the most beautiful I can remember. His Sail and Pyre was exquisite, a slender longboat made of palm and fir, filled with Raul’s favorite wild weeds. At his Give-Away I received his pocketknife, which was a bit dull and rusty, but still useful and a thoughtful gift. His wife, Sandra Cloudform, stood on the shore, holding Raul’s son Isaac to her chest. She cried as Raul took his place at the bow of his Sail and Pyre and it made me wonder if Mary would cry as I sailed off this earth. Of course she would, but what would that mean?
Then, as dusk settled and the sun fell beneath the Galadragoes Island beyond the Sullen Inlet, Jake, Ray, I and three other boys, pushed Raul’s Sail and Pyre off into the horizon. I’ll always remember the calm that rested upon Raul’s face as he held his torch aloft and, at the sound Jake’s battered trumpet, plunged his torch down into the mass of dry weeds and splintered wood that filled his boat. The flames rose quickly and Raul said not a word as his body slunk slowly into the flames. Soon he was gone and his ship followed the current out beyond the horizon
After each Away Ceremony it’s customary to stay a moment by the shore and discuss whoever has gone away, sharing stories of our times together. But Raul was difficult to say goodbye to and the loss seemed too near to discuss. So I said my goodbyes to Sandra and headed back to the Red House, hoping to do some reading and turn in to bed early. As I traversed the Rockline Path, however, I heard a garbled whispering coming from the Green House. The voice reverberated like sand in a tin can, tinkling off the walls and railings of Jake’s basement. It spoke gibberish with a clicking tongue.
I snuck behind a row of bushes and watched the door, listening and waiting. The whispers continued to rattle hollowly throughout the house. After a few moments the whispers lowered, but drew nearer, as the hollow reverberations of Jake’s basement were replaced by the natural resonance of his spacious living room. Then the door opened and he emerged into the natural luminance of dusk.
It was Craven. But it was not Craven as well. On the Gray Shore, we tell the story of a boy who wished not to sail over his final horizon and so lost his body and stranded his soul on the mortal shore. That phantom we called Craven, an apparition fated to wander the high woods above the Gray Shore and slip down at night to feast upon the blood and bones of anyone foolish enough to ponder a life beyond our allotted years. Though his body was dead, that boy who refused his final journey still suffered the effects of age, and Craven is said to be the boy’s man-form.
This creature in the doorframe of the Green House was a man-form, the first seen on the Gray Shore since the New Dawn. But it was no apparition. This was a true man and if he were Craven, he had reclaimed his flesh and blood. His hair was long and knotted together in the back. His fingers were slender and led down to the sharp points of ratty fingernails. His face was covered in a thick and tangled growth of hair and his eyes, as our stories of Craven all say, were black pits, from which no light returned.
The man whispered to himself in a high, grating voice and stole off into the night, around Jake’s fallen fence and off into the low woods that lined the east side of the Rockline Path. Without a moment’s hesitation I bounded from the bushes and followed the man around the edge of the Green House. I saw his hunched form lunging forward into the dense of the low woods, heading east towards the high woods and Black Cliffs. I stayed low and kept pace as silently as I could, though the man was cracking dead branches underfoot like a wild beast.
Together we moved through the low, and then high, woods, him stampeding across rotted husks of fallen monoliths, and I, slinking quickly behind. As he approached the foot of the Black Cliffs he slowed down and moved more cautiously, measuring his steps. I hung back and watched him as he advanced slowly up the face of the cliffs, using his hands and feet to propel himself vertically up the rock face. After a lengthy struggle, he reached a plateau and, stalking across the level rock, left my view.
After a bit of log-footing, I stepped out from the dense growth and began my own ascent up the rocks. The going was difficult and my muscles were not nearly as developed as the man’s, so my progress was slow. Eventually, I arrived at the plateau. Twenty feet beyond the lip of the plateau’s edge there was a split in the rock face, a cave. The entrance was short and formed a triangle no more than five feet high, but even from a distance I could tell the fissure was deep and the cave expansive.
As I approached the opening I could once again hear the high, crackling whisper, which spat and clicked. Only then did I realize that the man must be talking to himself. As at the house, the language seemed to be gibberish, but now words I recognized were slipping through.
“Hmmm…thissss might do,” he hissed. “Uh, and thissss, oh ssssuch-cha ssssplendid ssspecimen. Oh, m-m-might it work? Oh, might it-t-t-t?”
Peering through the slanted opening, I could just make out the man’s slouched form, hovering over something small and metallic. It was too dim to know exactly what the man possessed, but whatever it was, I was certain he had stolen it from the Green House and I had no intention of allowing that theft to stand.
“Who are you?” I bellowed into the cave. The man shrieked, covering his face with his hands. “How did you come to be here?” I yelled from the opening, keeping my distance, although clearly the man was terrified of me.
“N-n-no!” he choked. “Pleeeease-suhs.”
“Who are you,” I shouted again, slowly advancing into the cave. A dim beam of moonlight filtered into the cave, illuminating a cluttered assortment of rusted metal pieces and tattered, mildewed magazines and books. “What are you doing with all this? Have you stolen all of this?”
The man pushed himself into a small enclave and covered his face. “I-I-I jus’ am look-k-king for the ah-ah-ah-others.”
“The others?” I repeated. “Who are you? What is all of this?”
“I-I-I am the sssscient-t-tist,” he stuttered. “I-I-I h-h-had to know-w-w.”
“Know what?” One magazine was open on the floor of the cave. The open page displayed strange geometric drawings. I flipped the magazine over and read the cover. It said, “Morrison Electric Generator Model A-215 Instruction Manual.” “What the hell is this?”
But the man was struck dumb, pushing himself further and further into the wall, his eyes closed, a gnarled hand in front of his face. I didn’t know what to do. So I left the cave and the man and ran back to the shore as quickly as I could. In my mind, I tried to decode what it was about the man that frightened me so much. It wasn’t the simple fact that he was too old – that he had cheated his allotment and somehow avoided his Away Ceremony. He was dangerous somehow. I simply didn’t know how to articulate that.
It was late when I finally returned to the Gray Shore, and approaching early morning. I awoke Jake, as well as Ray Treetcutter and a few other older boys. I told them about the man in the Black Cliffs. At first they didn’t believe me, but Jake was on my side and soon they all agreed to follow me to the Black Cliffs.
Exhausted, but driven by a jittering, indefinable excitement, I scaled the cliffs and raced to the mouth of the man’s cave. He was gone. The metal box and open magazine were gone. A few other items appeared to be gone, but for the most part everything else remained.
“What is all this?” asked Jake, picking up broken metal tubes and wiring.
“Whatever it is, it’s bad,” I said. The other boys muttered an agreement.
“But where’s the man?” asked Ray.
“I think he ran away,” I replied.
“Do you think he was one of us?” asked Jake.
“If he is,” I replied, “he’s old enough to have lived three lifetimes.”
The other boys all shook their heads in disbelief and sorrow. This was a terrible wrong and we all knew the regrettable steps that needed to be taken.
Together we moved through the low, and then high, woods, him stampeding across rotted husks of fallen monoliths, and I, slinking quickly behind. As he approached the foot of the Black Cliffs he slowed down and moved more cautiously, measuring his steps. I hung back and watched him as he advanced slowly up the face of the cliffs, using his hands and feet to propel himself vertically up the rock face. After a lengthy struggle, he reached a plateau and, stalking across the level rock, left my view.
After a bit of log-footing, I stepped out from the dense growth and began my own ascent up the rocks. The going was difficult and my muscles were not nearly as developed as the man’s, so my progress was slow. Eventually, I arrived at the plateau. Twenty feet beyond the lip of the plateau’s edge there was a split in the rock face, a cave. The entrance was short and formed a triangle no more than five feet high, but even from a distance I could tell the fissure was deep and the cave expansive.
As I approached the opening I could once again hear the high, crackling whisper, which spat and clicked. Only then did I realize that the man must be talking to himself. As at the house, the language seemed to be gibberish, but now words I recognized were slipping through.
“Hmmm…thissss might do,” he hissed. “Uh, and thissss, oh ssssuch-cha ssssplendid ssspecimen. Oh, m-m-might it work? Oh, might it-t-t-t?”
Peering through the slanted opening, I could just make out the man’s slouched form, hovering over something small and metallic. It was too dim to know exactly what the man possessed, but whatever it was, I was certain he had stolen it from the Green House and I had no intention of allowing that theft to stand.
“Who are you?” I bellowed into the cave. The man shrieked, covering his face with his hands. “How did you come to be here?” I yelled from the opening, keeping my distance, although clearly the man was terrified of me.
“N-n-no!” he choked. “Pleeeease-suhs.”
“Who are you,” I shouted again, slowly advancing into the cave. A dim beam of moonlight filtered into the cave, illuminating a cluttered assortment of rusted metal pieces and tattered, mildewed magazines and books. “What are you doing with all this? Have you stolen all of this?”
The man pushed himself into a small enclave and covered his face. “I-I-I jus’ am look-k-king for the ah-ah-ah-others.”
“The others?” I repeated. “Who are you? What is all of this?”
“I-I-I am the sssscient-t-tist,” he stuttered. “I-I-I h-h-had to know-w-w.”
“Know what?” One magazine was open on the floor of the cave. The open page displayed strange geometric drawings. I flipped the magazine over and read the cover. It said, “Morrison Electric Generator Model A-215 Instruction Manual.” “What the hell is this?”
But the man was struck dumb, pushing himself further and further into the wall, his eyes closed, a gnarled hand in front of his face. I didn’t know what to do. So I left the cave and the man and ran back to the shore as quickly as I could. In my mind, I tried to decode what it was about the man that frightened me so much. It wasn’t the simple fact that he was too old – that he had cheated his allotment and somehow avoided his Away Ceremony. He was dangerous somehow. I simply didn’t know how to articulate that.
It was late when I finally returned to the Gray Shore, and approaching early morning. I awoke Jake, as well as Ray Treetcutter and a few other older boys. I told them about the man in the Black Cliffs. At first they didn’t believe me, but Jake was on my side and soon they all agreed to follow me to the Black Cliffs.
Exhausted, but driven by a jittering, indefinable excitement, I scaled the cliffs and raced to the mouth of the man’s cave. He was gone. The metal box and open magazine were gone. A few other items appeared to be gone, but for the most part everything else remained.
“What is all this?” asked Jake, picking up broken metal tubes and wiring.
“Whatever it is, it’s bad,” I said. The other boys muttered an agreement.
“But where’s the man?” asked Ray.
“I think he ran away,” I replied.
“Do you think he was one of us?” asked Jake.
“If he is,” I replied, “he’s old enough to have lived three lifetimes.”
The other boys all shook their heads in disbelief and sorrow. This was a terrible wrong and we all knew the regrettable steps that needed to be taken.
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