Canyon Red

  Ryan Drawdy

  Canyon Red

  Copyright © 2019 by Ryan Drawdy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  First edition

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  Contents

  The Landing Dock of Failure

  Tangerine

  Lewis Ashe

  That Night

  Interlude

  Brosie’s Song

  Dark, Dark World

  Life After Death

  The First Time

  Monster King

  Hate

  Interlude 2

  A Hole in the Wall

  The Volunteer

  Temperance

  Blaze in a Box

  Purple Pulse

  The Old Well on the Moon

  The Scented Night

  Brosie Remembers

  To Never Be Afraid

  Willow Women

  Belief

  The Bath

  Halloween Princess

  Why She Left

  Absurd

  Earth Empathy

  Found

  The Contract

  What Brosie’s Word Meant

  Nine Out of Ten

  The Bull

  The Orphan

  I Believe It

  Blue Dust

  Canyon Red

  Interlude 3

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1

  The Landing Dock of Failure

  Most other children on Lorn Island were too busy studying to be out in the snow, but nothing was going to stop Brosie from digging a grave for her mother. She did not notice the chill. Yet if the families who had loved ones here in the graveyard were to see her now, they might not be pleased. After all, Brosie’s mother was not dead.

  Or perhaps she was. Brosie only knew that when her mother left, she was alive. She was healthy and breathing in the salty air as she stared her daughter down from a boat. Without shame or explanation. Brosie didn’t want those things. Instead, she dug a grave.

  Through a small opening in the rock wall ahead of her, she could see Worthing Hill far below the canyon on which she was standing. Inside that private community lived Lorn Island’s greatest citizens: those who had left outstanding legacies on society. Brosie had always seen Worthing Hill as bright and majestic, the pinnacle of life. She’d been studying for years as a poet to become the best Lorn Island had ever seen. But now, waist-deep in a shoddy grave, she felt that her legacy was probably going to be buried along with her mother.

  She didn’t feel upset about that.

  After another half-hour of digging, she hoisted herself up onto the snowy ground, spun around to face the graveyard on her bottom, and saw Mr. Ackleford, the grave keeper. It had almost become a ritual to follow him around and pretend that he was a ghost drifting through the headstones. He was always alone, which helped with the illusion.

  The sight of any ghost would have excited Brosie, because she was interested in things that frightened most children. Yet, she had never seen a ghost outside of nightmares and picture books.

  Brosie followed at a distance, peeking from behind a large stone monument close to her mother’s grave. The “ghost” was hard to make out at this distance, and it was only visible for flickering seconds as it drifted behind trees and monuments.

  Brosie knew the graveyard as well as if she’d designed it herself. She crept through it, quickly following the path of the grave-keeper-turned-spirit until she eased her head around a tree and saw him staring back at her with with his hands on his hips and a stern look on his face. She’d cut it too close this time.

  “And what’s this the little lady’s doing to my yard?” he asked, pointing back over to the grave she’d dug. “That’s valuable soil, you know. Costs hundreds to put that shovel into the dirt just there.”

  Brosie cared a lot about her grave, and she would be devastated if her work was ruined before it was finished. But she knew which buttons to press when it came to the grave keeper.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry Mr. Ackleford,” she said, standing up and smoothing her pant legs. “I just thought anyone could dig a grave in graveyards. I thought that’s what they were for.”

  “If everybody was out here digging all the time, how do you think I’m to make any money, huh?”

  “That’s a very good point, sir,” Brosie said humbly. “Again, I’m very sorry. I won’t do it again. I’ll go ahead and get out of your way now.”

  “Now hold on just a half-minute. It’s not a health-wise action for little girls to take, going out and digging graves in the snow. Your father deserves to know what’s been going on here, Brosie Ashe, and I’m not so sure you’re gonna tell him. Come along. I’ll walk you home.”

  This was not a very exciting idea to Brosie. The grave must be finished at all costs, so she thought Mr. Ackleford’s was about the worst idea ever and with the snow scrambling her brain a little, she did the only thing she could think of to get out of it.

  She dove on the ground, grabbed Mr. Ackleford’s ankle, and fake-wept as if she were witnessing the passing of the last whale.

  The grave keeper was stunned. “Oh, Ms. Ashe, how hard this last year must have been on you, with your mama leavin’ and all that. But you’ve still got your papa. Be strong now. You’ll want to stand up and YAAAAAAAA---”

  Mr. Ackleford very quickly had forgotten his grand speech once Brosie’s teeth sunk into the back of his leg. He crumpled onto the snow, and the little girl scrambled away giggling.

  She maneuvered brilliantly around the tombs like a bat who’d lived there all its life. A left around Paladin Seifert’s stone led to the Acklefords’ family burial circle. Better not to run through that. She raced around it, trying to keep her body as low as her legs, the way a slalom skier maneuvers her way down a snowy mountain.

  The entrance gate hung bent and rusted to her right. Metal lettering above the arch read, “Now exiting the landing dock of failure; leave and live greatly, as they could not.”

  “You’ll be paying me for a new leg, missy!” Ackleford yelled after her, out of breath.

  Brosie turned around, easily keeping her distance while running backwards. “If you were anybody at all, you could pay for it yourself.”

  She hit an exposed root with her heel and fell, but her bottom was cushioned by the snow. She giggled more and got up to run again, when she something in the nearby corner of the yard.

  It was a familiar structure, a corner mausoleum. She took one last glance at Mr. Ackleford, who was bent over with his hands on his knees, distracted by the letters on the gate. Then she smirked and hustled around the wall of the mausoleum. She crossed the entrance quickly.

  It was a frightening room in here. Darkness fell over most of the space like a black aquarium. The light from the entrance and one window shone only in particular parts of the room, and even then it was as if the darkness sapped it of life before it could illuminate anything well. The light that did come through was cast on a few statues and ornate stones in the walls, like eerie display pieces. Brosie knew that many of the children in her school came here to frighten themselves. There was nothing they loved more than to be frightened.

  The same could not be said of Brosie. Nothing scared her, not monsters or knives or darkness or ghosts. Nothing had ever scared her—not even once.

  She went to the one window at the back, which was a slit in the middle of the wall whe
re she could watch the grave keeper.

  “He’s pathetic,” Brosie whispered to the statues around her.

  “A lone man

  Aching in his bones

  With solicitude.”

  “What’s solicitude?” she imagined the statues asked her. She was good at imagining.

  “It means he’s a lonely, miserable old man,” she said out loud.

  In fact, solicitude meant something very different; this happened often with Brosie, who considered herself a poet and aimed to be the greatest that Lorn Island had ever seen, but didn’t always know exactly what she was saying.

  She turned away from the window. In the warped sunlight of the entrance, she could see half of a stone figure near her. It was a gargoyle, short and stubby, with small bat-wings slightly raised from its shoulder blades and thick horns curling back from the top of its head.

  “Strange,” Brosie said, moving over to feel the stone. “This one must be new.”

  The left arm of the gargoyle held a stone harp. It was a captivating sight, such a grotesque figure holding an object that inspired gentleness, and such a light instrument made of stuff so heavy. She traced the statue and felt around the harp, beneath which there was a shallow, empty, circular impression, as if something meant to be held there had gone missing.

  “It’s beautiful,” Brosie said to the other lifeless figures. “What should we name him? Captain Sediment? The Angel of Graveyard Music?” She folded her arms very seriously and pinched her eyebrows. “No . . . He’s the guardian of this place. A watcher. We’ll call him The Great Watcher. Watcher the Great, actually. Perfect.

  “Yes, and he’s watching for bad creatures. He doesn’t let them in. If he smells any badness, he plucks a note of doom and that creature has to leave right away. And if he smells greatness, he plays a song just for that creature. Everyone has their own.”

  Brosie smiled, delighted with thoughts of future games. “I don’t know what my song is yet,” she said, walking over to the slit again and staring at an empty plot of grass and graves. “I’ll have to hear it first.”

  “It’ll be a dirge if you keep hanging around these old tombs,” came a voice from the mausoleum entrance. “Come now,” Mr. Ackleford said, waving Brosie over to himself. “Time to go home.”

  Brosie went somewhat willingly. Mr. Ackleford tried to guide her by the shoulder, but the eleven-year-old slapped his hand away. After all, she wasn’t seven.

  “If you only knew what was lurking around here,” Ackleford said, “you wouldn’t keep coming back.”

  “What’s been lurking?” Brosie asked, unable to help herself.

  “Only two of the most horrifying monsters you’ve ever dreamed of. One’s like a great black bear or a mountain lion or something, but it’s the size of my house, I tell ya, though I’ve only seen it at a distance. You can’t mistake its eyes though: bright tangerine and sharp as tacks. Like they’re looking at your innards.”

  “What about the second?” Brosie said.

  “Oh, I call that one the ‘Box-Fan Fiend.’ He comes round here every so often and looks out over the cliffs. He’s got this loud sound around him wherever he goes, like a man-sized box fan. And there’s some kind of a bug that flies around him, real fast, like lightning, so you can’t see what he looks like.”

  “They do sound terrible,” Brosie said. “Ridiculously terrible.”

  “Ay, that’s why all you kids aren’t safe here anymore. How would I explain it to your fathers if you were ripped up by a box fan or burned by them orange eyes?”

  At the entrance to the yard, the grave keeper stopped for just a moment. He glanced up at the lettering above the arch, looked sadly at Brosie as if to communicate some deep wisdom to her without words. But she did not seem to understand.

  “Failure, indeed,” the old man said shaking his head. He left to take Brosie home to her father, and she hoped desperately that he wouldn’t cover over her grave before she returned the next night. With any luck, she might even come across his monsters.

  2

  Tangerine

  Once again, Brosie couldn’t fall asleep.

  Each night, it happened like this: First, she would look at the window in her bedroom, remember her mother, and feel rage, which is a very strong kind of anger. On the night her mother left, Brosie had seen her drift by the window. Actually, Brosie had felt her more than she had seen her, like a gush of nearby wind.

  When you have to sneeze very badly, you can hold your breath or run away or yell, but it’s going to come out one way or another. That’s how rage felt to Brosie. It tore at her from inside like an animal, and all she wanted was to get it out and put it somewhere it would never return from. This is why she had started digging the grave: perhaps she could take the rage out, put it down in the earth, then cover over it to keep it there. But more than that, she thought she might actually want to put her mother down in the earth, along with the rage.

  Every time that thought crossed her mind, Brosie felt guilty. If she really did put her mother down in a grave and cover it over with dirt, her mother’s life would seep away like the water from an old puddle. Brosie would be a murderer, which was a very bad thing to be. People like that were taken into shining white buildings on the edge of town and never seen again.

  And yet it was true: she wanted to do it. It felt as though covering over her mother would finally block out everything she made Brosie feel. All of it, gone, with that last inch of skin smothered in lifeless dirt.

  Then Brosie would feel flattened by shame. What kind of a person has such evil thoughts? It made her weak and dizzy every time, as if she were trying to give up her body for one less hurtful. At the bottom of her cycle, she would cry, and all rationale would be lost. Each time she wished desperately that her mother would come and comfort her through such a confusing mess of thoughts, but then she realized this was never going to happen.

  Which made her feel rage.

  On this night, as on many other nights, Brosie lay in her bed looking straight ahead at her wall, trying not to look over at the window. Her “bedchamber,” as she called it, was faux-torchlit, not out of necessity but her own preference. It felt “more artistic, and unique.” The light was strangely contrasted by the harsh, white electric type peeking under her door from the hallway.

  Her room was very large, with a fireplace directly across from the foot of her bed. The torches lit a few lines of poetry painted in orange above the fireplace on the wall. This is what she was reading now.

  Little orange bats beat

  their wings at the darkness.

  Ooh, yeah, take that darkness.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want on your wall?” her mother had asked when they built the house two years before. “A poem about little bats?”

  “The torches are like little bats, Mama. I can’t help it—that’s what I see.”

  Remembering this caused her to let her guard down just enough to turn to the window when the wind outside blew a plastic bag against it. She turned to the wide windows, which sat above a cushioned nook. Like a child who suspects a closet of holding a ghost and is unable to look away from it for fear it will open and release the spirit, Brosie couldn’t look away. Eventually, she stopped trying to distract herself, threw the covers off, and went to the nook to look out at the harbor they lived near. She felt strange feelings as she watched the still water where her mother had left almost a year before—not sadness, not fear. More like anger.

  How dare her mother keep invading her room like this. She’d been minutes away from one of those nights where she didn’t have to force herself to sleep. Now she felt an inner pull dragging her back to an uncomfortable place, back to the beginning to deal with losing her mother all over again.

  Rage.

  She wouldn’t try to send the little orange bats out the window tonight to go searching; they never listened.

  Instead, she climbed out herself and walked a few stones’ throws to the ocean for the third night
in a row. She walked out to the end of the long dock there, careful to avoid the creaky spots in the wood. When there was no more room to walk, she stopped.

  The cool wind whipped her hair, her favorite sensation. In the water, she saw the reflection of the moon.

  And something else.

  She looked up, and the moon was normal. Down, and there was something in the water obscuring the light, in the shallows not far from the dock. To Brosie, it looked like someone’s head. Since it did not occur to her to be afraid of a head in the water, she slipped down off the dock and waded over. She expected the thing to be soft, like flesh, but when she tried to pull it out of the water it was hard and heavy and wouldn’t move much. Determined, Brosie stood beside it, opposite the shore, and shoved with all her might until she was able to roll it half out of the water and anchored on the sand. She had been right about its being a head . . . sort of.

  It was a statue made of stone, and it did have a head. Its head—and the rest of it—belonged to Watcher the Great, the gargoyle she’d seen in the graveyard.

  She calculated this revelation in her mind, along with others. A new statue had appeared in the graveyard, despite the fact that she knew the place inside and out and had never seen anything new arrive there other than headstones. Now, that same statue was here, in the ocean beside her home. Or it was a twin to the other. Either way, something was going on. Brosie left the statue, ran to her window, leapt and rolled across the cushion inside, and darted to her bed, not bothering to take off her wet dress.

  Her best nights of sleep came when there were good enough distractions to think about until she drifted off. These were topics, stories, and problems that captivated her whole mind, and they had rows and corners and drawers and maps that could occupy her for hours, if need be, before she ever had to look up and out from her inner thoughts.

  And this, this statue, was a mystery worth getting lost in.

  * * *