Dirge of the Unbound Read online

  Dirge of the Unbound

  J Sanchez

  Copyright © 2019 by Jeremiah Sanchez

  All rights reserved

  Cover by Warren Design

  https://thebookcoverdesigner.com/designers/warrendesign/

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  For M, For K, For N. For those who seek, but don’t find, reach, but do not grasp. For those who thirst for the unattainable, or those who have succeeded in their desperate endeavor, only to discover that they can never truly be satisfied. Finally, for their counterparts, those who manage to find magic in the mundane. If you are one of the fortunate few who know how to find the poetry in the dishwater, it is a pearl of immeasurable worth. Never let the world take it from you.

  “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

  St Paul to the Corinthians, KJV

  Prologue

  The clusters of stars above the ocean looked more like thin wisps of clouds than points of light. The wind was blowing hard enough across the deck of the catamaran that their skin was slightly gritty with salt from the sea spray.

  A dark-skinned man in bright, loose-fitting clothes finished the knot he was working on and moved to secure another line that had come loose. A woman lounged back in a small alcove that protected her from the wind and watched him work. His white cotton shirt whipped against his wiry frame, occasionally revealing the edge of a tattoo he told her he’d gotten while in the service. It wasn’t true, she knew, but they were both entitled to their secrets. He had small, nimble fingers that moved like spiders across the stretches of rope and soon he was done. Her almond shaped eyes crinkled into a smile and she clapped in delight. He jumped down next to her with a flourish.

  She pulled him close to her and he breathed her in. She had a medley of smells he found intoxicating. Flowers, perhaps lilacs, blended with whiffs of cinnamon and cloves. The brine of the ocean air only enhanced the effect. He buried his face in her hair and she giggled and squirmed.

  “I’ve never met anyone else like you,” he said.

  “There is no one else like me.” She said in her deep, husky voice. Her accent was as hard to place as her features. She was Asian, perhaps Thai? with pronounced cheek bones and full red lips. Her eyes were a shocking, icy blue, almost certainly contacts judging by the dark ring that encircled them. They had made love twice already, but every facet of her incited his passion and soon they were entwined again.

  When he was finished, they were sweating despite the chill in the air. She turned to face him, and her eyes narrowed almost accusingly.

  “Do you love me?” She asked.

  It was his turn to squirm. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. They’d met so recently, he hesitated to call it love, but already he wanted to spend every waking moment with her. Still, love? It was too soon to tell, and he told her as much.

  “You are playing with me,” she said and turned away from him. “My friends warned me about you. They told me that you have other girls.”

  “Funny,” he said thoughtfully, “my secretary told me the same thing about you. She warned me not to take you here.”

  “Did she?” she turned back to him, the hint of a wicked grin on her face.

  “She was actually quite insistent, it seemed like she knew you, but she wouldn’t tell me the details. She’s normally very quiet, it was a little surprising.”

  “She loves you,” she said, still smiling.

  “I’ve suspected as much,” he admitted. “I catch her looking at me sometimes, but she barely ever says a word about herself. Say, did you lose your contacts?” Her eyes were no longer electric blue. They were black. He realized that he’d never actually seen anyone with black eyes before. Deep, deep brown, perhaps, but not black, not on a person. Two small pools of ink looked at him, dark enough that he could see his startled expression in them clearly. From below decks came a loud thump that made him start.

  “I’d better see what that is,” he said and slid out of her arms. Without her warmth, the night suddenly felt cold and vulnerable. He wished that he’d left on at least a bit of clothing. He pried open the hatch that led to the interior of the ship and flicked a switch to turn on the lights, but nothing happened. A moment later he heard something scurrying in the dark. He looked back at her, she’d wrapped herself in a towel against the chill in the air and came up behind him.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know, but you’d better stay here. If an animal somehow snuck aboard then we’d better seal the hatch and head back to port, let the authorities handle it.” He turned back to the hatch to close it and recoiled in horror. A spindly leg broke free of the shadows, as long as his arm and covered in short bristling hairs. It planted itself on the top most step next to his foot. He tried to turn, to run, where he did not know, but her hand was on his chest, stopping him.

  “Now now,” she said, her beautiful face lit in a devilish grin, “a strong man like you surely isn’t afraid of a little spider.”

  “I like his hands,” he heard her say as spiders as big as dogs sunk their mandibles into him. “Save them for me, you may have the rest.” Her black eyes now protruded like bulbs from her face. They were as clear and as cold as mirrors. In them, he watched himself die.

  Weeks later, a mysterious disappearance was reported in the local paper. A wealthy young entrepreneur had vanished, and foul play was suspected. His secretary was a person of interest, as she had vanished at the same time. A reward was offered by his family to anyone with information on either of their whereabouts. It did not mention anyone else. Neither the man, nor his secretary, was ever heard from again.

  Chapter 1

  Only Gamblers can be Dealt a Bad Hand

  “The heart wants what it wants” Kazz imagined himself telling Maki during one of his long walks home. Their conversations played out again and again in his head. Self-doubt piped up and reminded him that reality would never allow a complete understanding between them. The same scenario ran through his head again, like a song woken up to that can only partially be recalled. It never had a beginning or end. It was just an endless, maddening repetition of the same verse.

  “You understand the ache in my chest, do you not?”

  “Yes, of course”

  “And the longing I feel whenever I think of you, do you not?”

  “Completely”

  “And the fire in my veins when I see you with another man, even your husband?”

  “Perfectly”

  It was just the two of them in his world and every word, every nuance, every gesture was perfectly conveyed and understood. Somehow, the weight of his emotions survived the transition from his mouth to her ears. But words carry no more weight than the wind and are gone even quicker, having never been uttered.

  Exhausted, he climbed the last few steps to his door and his walk was over. He spent too much time in his head these days. Tomorrow he would throw himself into his work again and try and put her out of his mind for a bit. He would see her again, he knew, and any chance he might’ve had to keep her from his thoughts would be gone. He rested for a few minutes before reviewing the paperwor
k he needed to have ready for tomorrow. His eyes scanned over the words without taking them in. After reading the same line several times he decided to step away. “This isn’t working.” He said out loud.

  He let the cold water wash away the dirt and the salt from outside. Focus, focus, focus. He wanted to lose himself in his work and find respite, however brief, from thoughts of her. Though men usually have secrets selves, clusters of half-remembered life experiences that subtly influence their behavior, his kind were not usually prone to these things. They were, as a rule, capricious and generally lacking the gravitas that a subconscious needs to grow an idea into a full-fledged obsession. But he was as different from the rest of his kind as they were from humans.

  “Different from them, different from us,” his father had told him. “You will not find happiness with her Kazz”

  “I know, maybe I won’t find it anywhere”

  “Then stay, and when the end comes, I hope it is at least bittersweet. Don’t tell your mother, she will not understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “You are my son and the part of you that will keep you here came from me. I eventually learned to live with it, but I don’t think you ever will. So stay, and find what peace you can, walking among the dreamers.”

  And so, he stayed. The world moved on, but he remained. The rest of his kind passed out of the consciousness of men and became fairytales. Among the many walks of mankind, the fantastic beasts they once dreamed of were nothing more than the archaic remnants of an unenlightened age. Their belief had manifested his kind, and their disbelief had exiled them. All but a few of them had moved on from this world and the ones that remained still mostly obeyed the rules placed on them from their inception. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just who they were. They had the ability to bend or break those rules given the right circumstances, but their nature was largely immutable. They simply wanted to be how they were imagined to be by the dreamers, the humans, so long ago. However, those that remained had already resisted the impulse to leave.

  The Kith, as they called themselves, acknowledged the existence of a great spirit they referred to as ‘The Higher’ and it was from him that the edict was delivered. They knew that to ignore his call to leave this world was a sentence worse than death. Those that obeyed the edict would move on to the land of dreams, those that remained did so because they were bound by something. To either lose or somehow, fulfill, that desire would sever their connection to this world and they would fade. The common term they used for these objects of their obsession was their tether. The connection had to be strong enough to allow for them to resist the call to move on. It was both their strength and curse and it would ultimately be each one of their downfalls. Never before had any of the kin attempted to resist their natures beyond deciding to remain behind.

  However, since the great exodus, the day most of the Kith left the world forever, their natures had become somewhat muddied. Some of their inclinations, like Kazz’s, lent themselves to surviving in human society better than others. His kind were inherently shapeshifters and were known to masquerade as humans under certain circumstances but generally avoided contact with them. To this day, Kazz held a deep distrust of man-made things. He didn’t own a car, though necessity forced him to take the train to and from work. The masses of steel and concrete made still him uneasy however and so instead, he lived in the Japanese countryside.

  Over the years, he had assumed many different forms, but he eventually settled on an appearance he liked. Good-looking, though forgettable and easy to blend in. He kept the straight, black hair native to the humans of this land. A smooth square jaw and deep-set eyes were the vanities he afforded himself. People who spent enough time with him might mark him as a hafu, their word for a half-Japanese person. For most he was just another sarariman, wearing a sensibly priced suit that was perhaps a little baggy and a haggard appearance that was almost part of the uniform. If they looked closely enough, they might notice his eyes were brown but rarely the same shade. In his natural form, he didn’t have the same color acuity that humans did. Black hair was easy enough, but brown eyes proved more difficult and he always had a hard time with the details. His ears were usually aligned, and his nose usually centered but even after all these years he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of hairlines. This, unfortunately, included facial hair and occasionally he would accidentally fix his eyebrows in such a way that gave his face an expression somewhere between curious and confused. He usually realized it only in retrospect after spending the day with his co-workers continuously explaining everything to him in agonizing detail.

  He lived with a few of the other Kith that had remained behind. None of them were of his same species, but they had all accepted the inevitable doom of living as a dream in a world of cold realities. During the age of dreams, they unerringly obeyed the stereotypes imposed on them. After the world moved on their behavioral trajectory broke them partially free of those constraints. Though, most of them had been considered oddities by their own kind even before then. The had to possess a certain inclination for non-conformity to wind up here in the first place, he decided. He was one of the few who held a steady job. Many of them had gone catatonic and required constant care. They ate when fed, slept when put to bed and spent most of their time staring slackly at a television. They made no distinction of what they were watching, sometimes he would come home to find them looking vacantly at a screen filled with snow. When he saw them like that, he would gently guide them to bed before retiring for the night. The rest just spent their time feeding their obsessions. Dreams follow their own logic and so it was with his kind.

  He didn’t mind providing shelter and the little bit of sustenance they needed. He thought that if he was alone, he might go mad. His job as an accountant paid enough to keep everyone alive. More than that, it simultaneously kept him close to her and provided an escape when the thoughts of her became overwhelming. Home was a house from the previous century made in the style of that era. All the hardened surfaces were lacquered wood that had long been worn dull from age and the passing of many slippered feet. The walls were primarily of the sliding, rice-paper variety that dominated Japanese architecture. Many of the ceramic tiles that comprised the roof had blown off and the doors had long since stopped gliding smoothly in their tracks. There were cracks in the windows and the whole house seemed to slouch into its surroundings as if it was a tired old man bracing himself against the side of the mountain. In a more affluent area it might have been condemned but, in the country, it was just accepted as part of the landscape.

  The interior was meticulously maintained except for the room where the more comatose of his kin stayed. That room was bare but for simple bedding and the constant aura of desperation and despair. They slept, and when they slept, they dreamed, and their dreams flavored the air of that place. Outside was an overgrown garden with stone statues that had been weathered down to indistinguishable lumps of rock surrounded by weeds. The outer walls, once white, had turned green with age and a thin layer of moss. It was idyllic in its own way. The house was situated on a flattened-out slope on the side of a mountain. Emerald green rice fields spanned a basin that began at the foot of the land they were on and ended abruptly at a line of trees at the far end of the basin. Strands of ivy were everywhere in their little garden and in one corner wild berries grew and Kazz liked to sit there on hot days and watch the bees go about their work. Their mindless monotony was soothing to him. Absolute purpose, Kazz thought, unburdened by the demands of unattainable concepts such as happiness. If their minds could have had an addiction it would be their work and its demands would always be met. Kazz was an addict too, of a kind, but his drug he had never, and could never, experience.

  They had neighbors, but the denizens of that sad house kept contact with the dreamers to a minimum. The local festivals were the rare exception, because their absence would be a cause for concern. If the locals were suspicious, they didn’t show it. They were unfailingly polite
and Kazz occasionally volunteered to help some of his older neighbors during harvest season. Once in a while, they would even show up with a gift basket of fruits to either thank Kazz for his help or to invite him to a community meeting. Beyond that most of his neighbors avoided the place. There was an unpleasant thickness to the air around his home that made most humans just uncomfortable enough that they rarely dropped by unannounced.

  Kazz woke, as he often did, well before he needed to get up. She was always his first thought upon waking and his last thought before drifting off to sleep. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to hear you, please just fade from my thought for a little while.” He laid in his bed, fitfully tossing and turning without sleeping. Through the window, he could see the first signs of morning. Sleep took him again and he dreamed. It was the same dream, over and over. He would appear to wake up exactly where he had fallen asleep, but it was dark. He knew, with a certainty that only exists in dreams, that if he could only turn on a light, the dream would end. He darted from light switch to light switch frantically trying to find the one that would work and finally wake him up. Only after he had tried every switch in the house would he seem to wake, still in the dream and with the same compulsion. He would repeat this process again and again until he opened his eyes in his bed, sweating from the imagined exertion. Only this time he did not reach for a light. There was no need, he knew he was back in the waking world and it wouldn’t be until tomorrow that he would be trapped in his dreams again. He stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, gathering the will to move. Eventually, his thoughts wandered back to her and, no matter how painful it was to see her, it would be even more painful missing his chance to be close to her again. He sighed and got up to face the day.

  He put his feet onto the chilly wooden floor and it creaked as he padded lightly down a dark hallway lined with sliding rice paper doors. He made it to the shower without bothering to turn on any lights. On his way to the bathroom he stepped over a sleeping hedgehog, carefully walked around a snoring bear and had to edge past a praying mantis the size of a small dog curled up on a tattered beige rug. Kazz was always the first to get up which meant weaving through the hazards of his still comatose brethren. When he got to the bathroom, he saw a massive python curled in the tub.