This is going up a little early today. I have things to do this evening, but I wanted to get this up before I left the house. As before, this story is not proofread.
The Old Man of the Mountain, pt. II
It took John a while to return to slumber after that. His sudden jolt into the waking world had passed unnoticed by his parents, both of whom slept a few feet away on their own bed. He lay there for a while listening to his father’s rhythmic snoring. Eventually though he did return to sleep, which was blessedly dreamless.
He woke in the morning when his parents stirred. He went through his morning duties without comment. He ate his breakfast in silence. If his parents noticed, they must have ascribed it to sulking.
John just kept thinking about the dream. In his mind’s eye all he could see was Tyler’s face cast in stone. What had it meant? Was something bad going to happen? Was he simply frightened by the old man?
John continued to obsess over the dream as he walked towards the schoolhouse. The morning air was cool, and bits of mist still curled around the trees. The image of the fog-filled woods from his dream sprang back to mind, and it made him feel uneasy.
The path to the school was empty, and John trudged along it without enthusiasm. He kicked stones and branches as he went, trying to keep his mind off of his nightmare. It was quiet, but he took some solace in the fact that the sounds of the forest were all around him. This was after all quite familiar territory.
He spied a formless lump by the side of the road. On closer inspection it appeared to be a bag of some kind, little more than a simple sack with a shoulder strap. As he bent down to examine it, he realized it was the bag that Tyler carried to school. He had a sudden moment of panic as he remembered the dream.
The panic was magnified a moment later by a scream from behind him. He snatched up a sick from the ground and whirled, raising it to strike.
“Raaagh!” hollerd Tyler, hands raised in mock-threat. He leaped towards John one more time from from the tree he had been hiding behind, the doubled over laughing.
“You should see the look on your face!” he said, through guffaws. “You look like you’re about to cry!’
John felt his face warm has be flushed with embarrassment. The prank was, he had to admit, probably pretty funny if you weren’t the one thinking his friend was in trouble.
“Jerk,” he said.
“Oh come on!” said Tyler. “It was funny! What’s wrong with you?”
John shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said/ “Let’s get to school.”
Tyler shook his head in reply.
“Uh uh,” he said. “We’re not going to school today?”
“Come on,” said John. “We’re going to get in trouble. Let’s go!”
“No,” said Tyler. “We’re playing hooky. I’ve got a better idea.”
John felt a ball of dread form in his stomach. Something, he knew, was about to go very, very wrong.
“What’s your idea?” he asked. He already knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“I just saw the Old Man again, going that way,” said Tyler. He pointed off into the woods in the direction of a nearby creek.
“Ty,” said John, “We’re not following him. We got lucky our parents didn’t find out we saw him yesterday.”
Tyler took on a sly grin, and he shook his head again, slowly.
“We’re not going to follow him,” he said.
The dread in John’s stomach grew heavier.
“What are we going to do then?” he asked, despite his better judgement.
“We,” said Tyler, “Are going to go see what all the fuss is about. We’re going to go find the old man’s camp.”
John’s jaw dropped open in disbelief.
“Are you crazy?!” he asked. “Nobody finds the Old Man’s camp! Anyone who does never comes back!”
Tyler’s grin didn’t fade/
“I have,” he said, “And I did. Our property is right along his markers, and I’ve been past them plenty of times.”
John just continued to stare at his friend in disbelief.
An awkward silence descended between the two as John continued to stare. Tyler was the first to break it.
“Come on,” he said. “We can do this! The Old Man never hurts anyone that doesn’t deserve it, and we’re just going to look. We won’t touch anything.”
“No,” said John, stamping his foot. “No way. This is crazy. You’re trying to get both of us in trouble. Or hurt. Or killed.”
“Fine,” said Tyler. His smile was gone, and a scowl had replaced it. “You go off to school then.”
He pushed past John to retrieve his bag from the ground. He looped the strap over his shoulder and started walking off, back down the trail towards his parent’s house.
“I,” he said, “am going to check out the camp. You can take your lily-livered butt to school like some coward.”
John watched his friend go, paralyzed with disbelief and indecision. There was no way he could stop Tyler on his own. The dread was gone now, replaced by panic. His friend was now walking off to his doom, and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop him.
Tyler disappeared around a bend in the trail, and John snapped out of his paralysis. He ran towards the school. If he was fast enough he might be able to tell his teacher, Together they might be able to catch Tyler before he crossed over into the Old Man’s territory.
He stopped after only a few steps. He and Tyler were still a fair distance from the school, and still very close to Tyler’s parents’ property. There was no way that John could get a teacher and catch Tyler before he passed the line of standing stones. Once he passed that, no one would chase after him. No adult would risk crossing into the Old Man’s lands and angering him.
They would come up with excuses for why they wouldn’t, of course. They’d say that Tyler was in no danger and they would punish him when he came home. Or they’d say that the Old Man would punish him for them and then bring him home. Whatever they said they were all afraid of the Old Man, and once Tyler crossed the boundary there was nothing that the adults would do until Tyler either returned or had gone missing for a few days.
Tyler was walking off maybe to his doom, and there was no way that John could let him go alone. John said a few words that would have gotten his backside tanned if his mother had been in earshot. Then he dashed off after his friend.
Tyler, for his part, was simply strolling down the path. His pace was so leisurely that John had no difficulty catching up with him. He turned to face John as he approached, walking backwards in the direction of his parents’ farm.
“I knew you had guts” he said, grinning widely.
John shook his head. “This is stupid,” he said. “You’re going to get us both in trouble”
They walked for some time. When they had stopped, they had gone clear across Tyler’s parents’ property (taking care to stay out of sight of the parents). They stopped at the fence line, where the split rails of the fence ran parallel to a line of oblong stones set end-on into the ground. Each stone came up to the boys’ eye level. Each had the Old Man’s symbol carved into it to leave no doubt who the property beyond they boundary they marked belonged to.
John put a hand on his friend’s shoulder as Tyler was climbing through the fence.
“Wait,” said John. “How are we going to find our way back? You’ve never found the camp, right?
Tyler patted the bag. Inside something clinked against something else.
“I brought a hatchet to mark the trees,” he replied. “And lunch. Well, MY lunch anyway, YOU are on your own”
John scowled. One of Tyler’s family’s goats had gotten a whiff of the apple that John normally brought to school with him. The beast had gnawed a hole in his bag to get at it. The apple, along with the bread he had been sent along to school with for a midday meal, had been swiftly consumed by the goat and a nearby group of opportunistic sheep.
“Fine,” he said, pouting.
Tyler laughed, keeping quiet to avoid drawing attention.
“Don’t sulk,” he said. “I’m only kidding. You can have some of mine when we stop to rest. Let’s get going.”
Unable to stall any further, John clambered between the rails of the fence. Tyler waltzed through the marked boundary as though it were of no consequence. John stopped just short. He regarded the nearest standing stone with uncertainty, hesitant to risk crossing into the unknown.
“Come on!” Tyler hissed. “You’re not a coward, are you?” John flushed with embarrassment again, and pushed himself through the boundary.
John wasn’t sure what he expected to feel when he passed between the two nearest stones. He did expect to feel something. Instead he felt nothing. The boundary itself was simply a thing, no more dangerous than any other stone wall. Less dangerous because there was no physical barrier.
With the mental obstacle of the boundary line conquered, some of his hesitation was gone. He took a few quick steps and drew alongside his friend. Together the began the ascent up the mountain.
The mountain itself wasn’t all that imposing. It rose out of a relatively flat surrounding area. It’s slopes were forested, and gradual enough so that it could be climbed on foot. It was steep enough that logging on it would be difficult at best.
The top of the mountain was bald, grey stone. It was the same color of the Old Man himself. One of the legends surrounding him was that he was born from the mountain itself. It was as reliable a legend as any other people told about the Old Man.
It took John and Tyler less than an hour of crashing through the woods before they began to notice the trees growing smaller and smaller. Finally the forest fell away altogether, with a few stunted pines marking the end of the tree line.
As they went Tyler had cut chunks of bark off of a tree every few dozen feet. The wood underneath was soft and in the dimness of the forest appeared to be a bright white, easy to see against the moss-covered trunks of the trees. John stood at the tree line now and looked back into the woods behind him. A reassuring trail of white dots could be seen trailing off back the way they had come.
“What now?” he asked. The mid-morning sun was high and the sky was nearly cloudless. It would be hot soon and the bare rocks wouldn’t provide much shelter from the summer sun.
Tyler shrugged. “Now we look for the camp.”
He pointed to the top of the mountain.
“I say we go all the way to the top and see what we can spot from there.”
It took another hour or so of determined effort to get to the very top of the mountain. By that time the sun was beating down, bright and hot. When he finally got to the apex of their climb however, John didn’t care.
The lands surrounding the mountain spread out around them. John could see for what must have been dozens, or even hundreds of miles. From there he could see places he had never been. He could see places he was sure that his parents had never been. There were ponds, and roads, and fields, and forests, all laid out around him. On the far horizon to the east he could see a glittering line that might have been the sea.
It was an awesome sight, but he was snapped out of his reverie by Tyler’s hand on his shoulder.
“Look!’ Tyler said, pointing down the reverse slope. “Down there!”
A short distance down the mountain, just over the tree line, was what had to be the Old Man’s camp. There was a small log structure, barely a shed, with a moss roof. There was a firepit, and some sort of copper contraption next to it.
Just below the tree line there was a clearing.with a number of bushes in it arrayed as though it were some sort of orchard. Odd stone shapes were partly hidden among them. From this distance neither boy could make out what they were.
“Come on,” said Tyler, “Let’s get going.”
They decended down to the camp. John stopped to examine the copper contraption more closely. Tyler continued past him, heading towards the orchard.
The contraption smelled or turpentine. It was made entirely from copper, and at the bottom it was blackened in a manner that suggested it was heated over the fire. The bottom part was composed of some sort of vessel, like a pot but closed. It had a conical top, with a second, smaller cone jutting out to one side. that was open at the tapered end.
The open end of the smaller cone hung over what looked like an earthen ware pot. A closer look revealed that the pot wasn’t made of clay at all. Instead it was a bowl carved from a solid stone.
“Wow!” came Tyler’s voice from the vicinity from the orchard. John abandoned his examination of the metal contraption to look for his friend. It took only a moment to spot him, as Tyler was jumping up and down, waving both hands to attract John’s attention.
“Come here!” shouted Tyler. “You’ve got to come see this!”
Tyler was standing next to one of the odd stone shapes. John carefully picked his way down the slope towards his friend. The object was partly concealed by one of the high bushes. When John got close enough to make out what it was, he stopped dead in his tracks. His face lost all color.
Tyler stood grinning next to what appeared to be a large stone statue. The statue’s face was contorted in an expression of agony. Its features were entirely lifelike, which was unnerving enough, but that wasn’t the worst of it. John had seen statues before, on trips to larger towns with his parents. He had never, ever seen a statue with teeth, hair, and fingernails.
The Old Man of the Mountain, pt. II
It took John a while to return to slumber after that. His sudden jolt into the waking world had passed unnoticed by his parents, both of whom slept a few feet away on their own bed. He lay there for a while listening to his father’s rhythmic snoring. Eventually though he did return to sleep, which was blessedly dreamless.
He woke in the morning when his parents stirred. He went through his morning duties without comment. He ate his breakfast in silence. If his parents noticed, they must have ascribed it to sulking.
John just kept thinking about the dream. In his mind’s eye all he could see was Tyler’s face cast in stone. What had it meant? Was something bad going to happen? Was he simply frightened by the old man?
John continued to obsess over the dream as he walked towards the schoolhouse. The morning air was cool, and bits of mist still curled around the trees. The image of the fog-filled woods from his dream sprang back to mind, and it made him feel uneasy.
The path to the school was empty, and John trudged along it without enthusiasm. He kicked stones and branches as he went, trying to keep his mind off of his nightmare. It was quiet, but he took some solace in the fact that the sounds of the forest were all around him. This was after all quite familiar territory.
He spied a formless lump by the side of the road. On closer inspection it appeared to be a bag of some kind, little more than a simple sack with a shoulder strap. As he bent down to examine it, he realized it was the bag that Tyler carried to school. He had a sudden moment of panic as he remembered the dream.
The panic was magnified a moment later by a scream from behind him. He snatched up a sick from the ground and whirled, raising it to strike.
“Raaagh!” hollerd Tyler, hands raised in mock-threat. He leaped towards John one more time from from the tree he had been hiding behind, the doubled over laughing.
“You should see the look on your face!” he said, through guffaws. “You look like you’re about to cry!’
John felt his face warm has be flushed with embarrassment. The prank was, he had to admit, probably pretty funny if you weren’t the one thinking his friend was in trouble.
“Jerk,” he said.
“Oh come on!” said Tyler. “It was funny! What’s wrong with you?”
John shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said/ “Let’s get to school.”
Tyler shook his head in reply.
“Uh uh,” he said. “We’re not going to school today?”
“Come on,” said John. “We’re going to get in trouble. Let’s go!”
“No,” said Tyler. “We’re playing hooky. I’ve got a better idea.”
John felt a ball of dread form in his stomach. Something, he knew, was about to go very, very wrong.
“What’s your idea?” he asked. He already knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“I just saw the Old Man again, going that way,” said Tyler. He pointed off into the woods in the direction of a nearby creek.
“Ty,” said John, “We’re not following him. We got lucky our parents didn’t find out we saw him yesterday.”
Tyler took on a sly grin, and he shook his head again, slowly.
“We’re not going to follow him,” he said.
The dread in John’s stomach grew heavier.
“What are we going to do then?” he asked, despite his better judgement.
“We,” said Tyler, “Are going to go see what all the fuss is about. We’re going to go find the old man’s camp.”
John’s jaw dropped open in disbelief.
“Are you crazy?!” he asked. “Nobody finds the Old Man’s camp! Anyone who does never comes back!”
Tyler’s grin didn’t fade/
“I have,” he said, “And I did. Our property is right along his markers, and I’ve been past them plenty of times.”
John just continued to stare at his friend in disbelief.
An awkward silence descended between the two as John continued to stare. Tyler was the first to break it.
“Come on,” he said. “We can do this! The Old Man never hurts anyone that doesn’t deserve it, and we’re just going to look. We won’t touch anything.”
“No,” said John, stamping his foot. “No way. This is crazy. You’re trying to get both of us in trouble. Or hurt. Or killed.”
“Fine,” said Tyler. His smile was gone, and a scowl had replaced it. “You go off to school then.”
He pushed past John to retrieve his bag from the ground. He looped the strap over his shoulder and started walking off, back down the trail towards his parent’s house.
“I,” he said, “am going to check out the camp. You can take your lily-livered butt to school like some coward.”
John watched his friend go, paralyzed with disbelief and indecision. There was no way he could stop Tyler on his own. The dread was gone now, replaced by panic. His friend was now walking off to his doom, and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop him.
Tyler disappeared around a bend in the trail, and John snapped out of his paralysis. He ran towards the school. If he was fast enough he might be able to tell his teacher, Together they might be able to catch Tyler before he crossed over into the Old Man’s territory.
He stopped after only a few steps. He and Tyler were still a fair distance from the school, and still very close to Tyler’s parents’ property. There was no way that John could get a teacher and catch Tyler before he passed the line of standing stones. Once he passed that, no one would chase after him. No adult would risk crossing into the Old Man’s lands and angering him.
They would come up with excuses for why they wouldn’t, of course. They’d say that Tyler was in no danger and they would punish him when he came home. Or they’d say that the Old Man would punish him for them and then bring him home. Whatever they said they were all afraid of the Old Man, and once Tyler crossed the boundary there was nothing that the adults would do until Tyler either returned or had gone missing for a few days.
Tyler was walking off maybe to his doom, and there was no way that John could let him go alone. John said a few words that would have gotten his backside tanned if his mother had been in earshot. Then he dashed off after his friend.
Tyler, for his part, was simply strolling down the path. His pace was so leisurely that John had no difficulty catching up with him. He turned to face John as he approached, walking backwards in the direction of his parents’ farm.
“I knew you had guts” he said, grinning widely.
John shook his head. “This is stupid,” he said. “You’re going to get us both in trouble”
They walked for some time. When they had stopped, they had gone clear across Tyler’s parents’ property (taking care to stay out of sight of the parents). They stopped at the fence line, where the split rails of the fence ran parallel to a line of oblong stones set end-on into the ground. Each stone came up to the boys’ eye level. Each had the Old Man’s symbol carved into it to leave no doubt who the property beyond they boundary they marked belonged to.
John put a hand on his friend’s shoulder as Tyler was climbing through the fence.
“Wait,” said John. “How are we going to find our way back? You’ve never found the camp, right?
Tyler patted the bag. Inside something clinked against something else.
“I brought a hatchet to mark the trees,” he replied. “And lunch. Well, MY lunch anyway, YOU are on your own”
John scowled. One of Tyler’s family’s goats had gotten a whiff of the apple that John normally brought to school with him. The beast had gnawed a hole in his bag to get at it. The apple, along with the bread he had been sent along to school with for a midday meal, had been swiftly consumed by the goat and a nearby group of opportunistic sheep.
“Fine,” he said, pouting.
Tyler laughed, keeping quiet to avoid drawing attention.
“Don’t sulk,” he said. “I’m only kidding. You can have some of mine when we stop to rest. Let’s get going.”
Unable to stall any further, John clambered between the rails of the fence. Tyler waltzed through the marked boundary as though it were of no consequence. John stopped just short. He regarded the nearest standing stone with uncertainty, hesitant to risk crossing into the unknown.
“Come on!” Tyler hissed. “You’re not a coward, are you?” John flushed with embarrassment again, and pushed himself through the boundary.
John wasn’t sure what he expected to feel when he passed between the two nearest stones. He did expect to feel something. Instead he felt nothing. The boundary itself was simply a thing, no more dangerous than any other stone wall. Less dangerous because there was no physical barrier.
With the mental obstacle of the boundary line conquered, some of his hesitation was gone. He took a few quick steps and drew alongside his friend. Together the began the ascent up the mountain.
The mountain itself wasn’t all that imposing. It rose out of a relatively flat surrounding area. It’s slopes were forested, and gradual enough so that it could be climbed on foot. It was steep enough that logging on it would be difficult at best.
The top of the mountain was bald, grey stone. It was the same color of the Old Man himself. One of the legends surrounding him was that he was born from the mountain itself. It was as reliable a legend as any other people told about the Old Man.
It took John and Tyler less than an hour of crashing through the woods before they began to notice the trees growing smaller and smaller. Finally the forest fell away altogether, with a few stunted pines marking the end of the tree line.
As they went Tyler had cut chunks of bark off of a tree every few dozen feet. The wood underneath was soft and in the dimness of the forest appeared to be a bright white, easy to see against the moss-covered trunks of the trees. John stood at the tree line now and looked back into the woods behind him. A reassuring trail of white dots could be seen trailing off back the way they had come.
“What now?” he asked. The mid-morning sun was high and the sky was nearly cloudless. It would be hot soon and the bare rocks wouldn’t provide much shelter from the summer sun.
Tyler shrugged. “Now we look for the camp.”
He pointed to the top of the mountain.
“I say we go all the way to the top and see what we can spot from there.”
It took another hour or so of determined effort to get to the very top of the mountain. By that time the sun was beating down, bright and hot. When he finally got to the apex of their climb however, John didn’t care.
The lands surrounding the mountain spread out around them. John could see for what must have been dozens, or even hundreds of miles. From there he could see places he had never been. He could see places he was sure that his parents had never been. There were ponds, and roads, and fields, and forests, all laid out around him. On the far horizon to the east he could see a glittering line that might have been the sea.
It was an awesome sight, but he was snapped out of his reverie by Tyler’s hand on his shoulder.
“Look!’ Tyler said, pointing down the reverse slope. “Down there!”
A short distance down the mountain, just over the tree line, was what had to be the Old Man’s camp. There was a small log structure, barely a shed, with a moss roof. There was a firepit, and some sort of copper contraption next to it.
Just below the tree line there was a clearing.with a number of bushes in it arrayed as though it were some sort of orchard. Odd stone shapes were partly hidden among them. From this distance neither boy could make out what they were.
“Come on,” said Tyler, “Let’s get going.”
They decended down to the camp. John stopped to examine the copper contraption more closely. Tyler continued past him, heading towards the orchard.
The contraption smelled or turpentine. It was made entirely from copper, and at the bottom it was blackened in a manner that suggested it was heated over the fire. The bottom part was composed of some sort of vessel, like a pot but closed. It had a conical top, with a second, smaller cone jutting out to one side. that was open at the tapered end.
The open end of the smaller cone hung over what looked like an earthen ware pot. A closer look revealed that the pot wasn’t made of clay at all. Instead it was a bowl carved from a solid stone.
“Wow!” came Tyler’s voice from the vicinity from the orchard. John abandoned his examination of the metal contraption to look for his friend. It took only a moment to spot him, as Tyler was jumping up and down, waving both hands to attract John’s attention.
“Come here!” shouted Tyler. “You’ve got to come see this!”
Tyler was standing next to one of the odd stone shapes. John carefully picked his way down the slope towards his friend. The object was partly concealed by one of the high bushes. When John got close enough to make out what it was, he stopped dead in his tracks. His face lost all color.
Tyler stood grinning next to what appeared to be a large stone statue. The statue’s face was contorted in an expression of agony. Its features were entirely lifelike, which was unnerving enough, but that wasn’t the worst of it. John had seen statues before, on trips to larger towns with his parents. He had never, ever seen a statue with teeth, hair, and fingernails.
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