The Semaphore

The eyeless man decapitated her mother.

The eyeless man decapitated her father.

He tossed their heads and bodies onto the pile of heads and bodies on the floor of the roofless tower.

Like they aren’t people even, she thought. Like they aren’t a thing at all.

She watched from the crooked doorway, rooted by her terror like a sapling to the muddy ground. Sunlight bled down the tower’s shaft and along the pockmarked walls.

The girl had spent her whole life in these woods—nine and a half years. She had passed through this very spot a hundred times. Yet she had never seen this tower before. Because it had never been here until now.

She looked at her father’s head. She looked at her mother’s head. Their expressions were familiar and grotesque, comforting and ruinous. Don’t you look at them, the girl told herself. You aren’t supposed to see them as this.

The girl commanded her legs to move; behind her were the green woods and beyond the woods the village and the summer meadows, the winding roads. But her legs refused to obey. It was not just terror, she knew, that paralyzed her. It was the same force that had impelled her whole village to rise from their beds with the sun, march single-file into the woods, line up at the doorway of this windowless, roofless tower—with no more resistance than if they were lining up for food—and enter one-by-one to meet the eyeless man.

Until there was no one left but her.

Where the eyeless man’s eyes should have been were ditches of pale flesh. He was naked save for a white strap around his throat. His sallow, hairless skin—like his long knife—glinted with streaks of blood. His mouth bent and opened, revealing splintered gray teeth, and his tongue—dark and wrinkled like a prune—protruded from his mouth and wriggled in the air.

The girl recalled suddenly the first time her father had taken her fishing, when she had recoiled from the slimy, twitching bass on the end of her reel and exclaimed that it was ugly.

“Thing’s part of life,” her father had told her. “No thing’s ugly in this life.”

But the eyeless man was not a fish, and if he was of this life then her father was wrong.

The eyeless man seized the girl by her hair and dragged her from the doorway toward the pile of heads and bodies. He smelled like meat left too long in the sun, or the putrid silt of a snail-ridden lakebed. He held the girl forward over the outside of the pile. The warm metal of his knife settled on the back of her neck.

She willed herself to flail, to scream. But she was still and silent.

Her mother had told her that death was just like being asleep. Will I dream any? she wondered. She pictured her father and mother smiling warmly, their heads firmly attached to their bodies. She hoped that if she did dream, it was of them intact, and not as they now were.

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The knife’s blade split the skin on her neck with the ease of a hand through water.

“Antigon,” spoke a deep voice. “Leave it.”

The eyeless man released the girl’s hair. She stumbled forward, finding at once that her legs were hers again. Uncompelled, they turned her to flee.

But a giant bird blocked the doorway.

The girl retreated to the far side of the tower and collapsed against the wall.

The giant bird entered. And as it did the girl could see that it was not a bird, but a man wearing a long mask like a beak or snout. A headdress of rocks and sticks cascaded down his back. He walked with a limp, his long sooty robes dragging on the bloodstained floor.

The eyeless man positioned himself against the wall opposite the girl, hands at his sides.

The man in the long mask stood before the pile of heads and bodies. “We’ve enough now,” he said with a drawl from behind his mask.

A head lost its balance at the top of the pile and rolled to the floor.

The man in the long mask placed his hands together as if to pray. His hands were tattooed in faint, white lines, patterns like the engines of old machines, interlocking and branching toward his fingertips.

“Chalo-wē.” He separated his hands, where a fine white thread suspended between his palms. He spread his hands further until the thread grew taut. He fluttered a finger, then another.

The thread vibrated.

Each vibration produced a distinct, atonal note.

“Casshawn

sul

denoton,” the man in the long mask said.

Nothing responded. He adjusted the angle of his hands.

“…sul

denoton.”

Blood sprang from the girl’s neck where the eyeless man had cut her. She looked on as the pile of heads and bodies began to change. At first she thought flies were gathering. But the dark red specks swarming the pile were not descending on it. They were rising.

Their blood… she thought. Their blood’s coming out.

The blood on the tower’s dusty floor—her friends’ and neighbors’ blood, her mother’s and father’s—receded, sucked back into the pile of heads and bodies. It trembled upward, rising in specks and globs into the air, gathering into a dark red mass. The mass pulsed in phase with the rhythm of the white thread’s dissonant plucks; the faster the man in the long mask played, the more condensed it became, knotting into a wet ball.

“Casshawn

sul

grammath.”

The ball of blood elongated into a thin line, idled for a moment, then shot up through the top of the tower and disappeared into the pale morning sky.

The man in the long mask slowed his fluttering fingers. The plucks changed, slowed and deepened and blended into a single, droning note.

“Casshawn

sul

mis,” he intoned.

The pile of heads and bodies shivered and writhed. They jerked and tumbled, rearranging themselves one atop the other, surging and straightening into the shape of a tower—a smaller tower within this larger one—that reared up, twenty feet tall, and hunkered there, pulsing as if with breath or balance.

Dust skittered along the tower’s floor.

The girl’s body shook.

The eyeless man twisted his mouth into a tight line.

“Casshawn

sul

proxemicon.”

The man in the long mask stilled his fingers and the droning ceased. For a beat he held the thread as tight as law. Then he shook out his hands as if to fling water from them, and the thread fractured into dust.

He fell to his knees before the tower of heads and bodies, and outspread his arms.

“Granmama,” he said, his voice full with reverence. “It has been deep long.”

The tower pulsed, and from it came a sound like gravel underfoot.

“So deep long…” The man gestured toward the girl, who shrank back against the wall. “You’ve got witness, Granmama. It’ll tell of your freeing.”

The tower crackled, its bloodless heads and bodies pale like old paper. Outside, the woods dripped with dew.

“Granmama…” The man’s mask upturned, his voice pitching an octave higher. “I’ll have back all your flesh.” He raised his arms and his sleeves fell away to reveal skin crowded with additional networks of white tattoos. “Nonk’non!” he cried. “Granmama! Oh, Granmama! You’ll be taller than the sky!”