Private Land
by David L. Duggins"It doesn't look like much," Clark said, squinting, one hand shading his eyes. "Anyway. Not much. Surely the owner wouldn't mind?"
Lochinvar Luck and Shandy were certainly eager to try it; the collies strained at their leashes like puppies, suffused with some new energy - new for them, anyway. The dogs were eleven going on twelve, and had been struck exceedingly mellow in their later years.
So now Julianne had to decide. Was this just a nature walk, or yet another of Clark's bullshit attempts to get her alone so he could stick a hand up her shirt?
And then there was the sign, big and blue, reflective, with white letters: PRIVATE LAND. Below that, in smaller letters: Trespassers will be prosecuted.
"Okay, mister Merry Prankster," she said. "You've got Dale and Barry hiding up there, don't you?" It was hard to see, the path silky with darkness, shadows clinging too thickly for Saturday afternoon. Julianne felt a draft of cool air from up there, like a sigh. She shivered and stepped back involuntarily.
"Nope," Clark said cheerfully. "Dale and Barry are back home, doing the work I'm supposed to be doing." He stepped close, nuzzled her. "So we could have this special weekend together."
Clark kissed Julianne's neck, her ear. He wanted her, had made no secret of it. He'd started maybe three weeks ago, pushing a little, easing off when she pulled back. In those miscue moments he talked about movies or went to the fridge for a glass of iced tea or played with the dogs. Clark adored the dogs. He loved cats, too. He was probably one of those disgusting people who loved everybody and everything.
But Julianne was special. Clark had told her that, whispering it in her ear, hand on her leg, the words moving straight through her.
And she wanted him. But so far, she'd held back. Now that they were two months together, she was nagged by the question. How long would she make him wait? And how long will he wait? How patient is he? It was no complex, her holding back. No major psychological barrier. She was just scared. Twenty-eight years old, a virgin, and scared. She'd been up this path before, many times. Many refusals. Many breakups.
Julianne couldn't see more than ten feet ahead of her. Vegetation grew rainforest-thick, claustrophobic.
"Well?" Clark looked at her. "Yea or nay, milady. Before the mutts yank our arms off."
She shrugged. "You know this place better than I do. Whose property is it?"
"Don't know," Clark said. "I know the road, but I don't know the neighborhood. Know what I mean?" He tickled her.
"Quit it," Julianne said, frowning. Something moved back there, a vague, sliding darkness within darkness.
"Come on," Clark said. "You going to be chicken all your life?"
He stepped up, off the paved road surface and onto graded dirt. A crawling pattern of shadow from the criss-crossed branches overhead fell onto his upper body like a net, covering his head, neck and shoulders. Another step, and the net fell to his waist.
Two more steps and darkness shuttered around him, no longer a net but a door, a door into a room with no windows. Julianne could still see him, but - "Maybe," Julianne said. "Maybe I will be."
"It's cool in here," Clark said, his voice muffled and distant. "Nice. Come on!"
Shandy growled suddenly. Had she seen it too? The shadow?
No, Julianne thought. No one saw it but me.
Clark was walking now, down the path. Away from her.
She stepped up and in, made herself walk a few paces before looking around, like diving into cold water. It didn't do any good to wade, getting wet an inch at a time. That was torture. The scary things had to be dived into.
With scary things, you just had to jump in and hope you could survive the shock.
When Julianne did look around, she gawked like a tourist.
Clark came back to her. "Meet you halfway," he said softly, slipping an arm around her waist. The dogs strained at their leashes, plowing their reborn noses into everything, Luck lifting his leg occasionally to mark territory.
"Pretty, huh?” Clark said.
Pretty.
There were more varieties of flowers here than Julianne had ever seen in one place before. Trellises had been erected at the head of the path to support the six-foot-high wall of vines and flowering climbers. This skeletal framework was almost completely obscured by layered tendrils of bright ivy and multicolored blooms: passion flower, morning glory, honeysuckle and clerodendrum thomsoniae, evergreen climber. All here together, sharing space.
At the base of the trellis, a wide bed overflowed with lobelia, California poppies, candytuft and nemphila in an overlapping blanket of layers. Clematis sprayed from huge-bellied gargoyle-faced pots on either side of the path. Bright colors rioted, moist purples, reds, and yellows sprouting from every angle of vision. The smell was pungent, just short of sickly-sweet.
Julianne didn't know that much about gardening, but it seemed impossible. All these different kinds of flowers, planted together, thriving.
"Funny," Clark said. "You can't see all that color from the road. Just green."
Julianne nodded, suddenly aware of a hot pressure on her ribcage, beneath her left breast. It was Clark's hand. The heat there pulsed raggedly, began to spread. Sweat trickled from Julianne's armpits. She was immediately self-conscious.
How could they have thought it was cool in here?
The path curved gracefully, invisibly. Julianne looked behind her as they walked and saw only flowers closing in behind them.
Julianne took Shandy off the leash and let her roam, Clark doing the same for Luck. The dogs stayed close, brushing a leg every so often for reassurance. Anxious as they had been to enter, they never ventured out of sight.
Clark and Julianne hadn't spoken to each other since they had left the head of the path. But Clark's hand was still there, sending billowing waves of heat into her, like a signal.
Beads of sweat rolled into Julianne’s mouth, tangy across her tongue. Excitement. Anticipation. Not fear.
The trellises had been tapered, dropping off at an angle to the planted beds until they disappeared into the ground. Now Julianne could see a thick evergreen hedgerow behind the trellises, almost six feet in height, neatly trimmed at the top. The growth was insanely healthy, almost fluorescent green.
Behind the hedges, willows draped melancholy branches over the path, silvered filigree brushing their faces when breezes stirred, stroking the crown of Julianne's head as they walked beneath. The ground here was rocky, not the spongy loam Julianne normally associated with riverside walks.
But where there were willows, there was water. Wasn't that right? One of those inane sayings learned as a child...
There must be a stream on the other side of the hedgerow, she thought.
As if on cue, she heard a delicate, clever gurgling, the conversation of moving water with smooth-polished stones.
Julianne was delighted. Clark, she wanted to say. None of this is real. It's making itself up as we walk. I didn't hear the water until I thought about the water. And flowers and hedges and willows all in the same ground? No way. No way.
Julianne imagined what that water would feel like, sprinkled on her face, in her hair, like baptism, deliverance.
Deliverance. From fear.
Julianne looked at Clark. He was bathed in sweat, his shirt sticking to his skin. The buttons had come open in front, displaying the smooth, hairless expanse of ridged skin between his nipples. Beads of sweat hung there, catching light like diamonds.
Interlocking tree branches formed a canopy above their heads, allowing a patchwork of sunbeams through to the ground below. For the first time Julianne noticed that the trees above were gigantic towers, trunks six to ten feet in diameter, branches stretching out horizontally like arms, thick tentacles of vine trailing down, encircling branch and bole.
The humidity increased. Less and less sunlight penetrated the canopy. The cultivated garden with its well-tended, regular trellis-growth fell far behind them. The hedges disappeared, replaced now by a thick swath of tall grass and huge leafy ferns.
The sound of running water was a rumble now, the unseen stream a river.
The path was still trimmed, level, tended. Now Julianne could make out the smooth, planed edges of flagstones beneath her feet. The path had been paved, but thickly covered with debris. To either side, the earth had begun to take on the damp, mossy look that Julianne expected.
There was a waterfall somewhere. She could hear that now, too. How far had they walked? No more than two hundred yards, surely. Who owned this land?
A place like this should be shared. This heat should be shared. There was heat all over her, and sweat, but now there was heat and wetness on top of that, a crazy friction between her legs when she walked that made her feel like shouting.
Something had been awakened inside her, in here.
That thing. That crazy shadow-thing. She'd felt it. Stirring.
Julianne had never been in a jungle or rainforest before, but this was what she had always imagined when she thought about a tropical climate. She opened her mouth to speak, this time really say it:
Clark, I'm making this place. We're walking inside my head.
There was only breath. Hot air. Clark's hand was a steady, burning pressure against her side. Walking, they had moved closer together, shared heat like a sealed envelope.
Julianne did not ask him to move away. Her skin, wet, prickled with something like static charge. Blood throbbed in her groin.
Sounds were coming though now, above the eternal sigh of the water cutting its way through the world. Birds cawing in the trees. Long hissing rushes of something moving through undergrowth. The buzz of insect wings.
And growls.
The dogs stayed at heel, without being instructed.
They had walked for fifteen minutes, perhaps a mile's distance, when Julianne abruptly thought: why haven't we turned back?
It hadn't even occurred to her to turn back. It was all wrong.
The air should have been too cool to support this wild fever of vegetation, the summers too cloudy. There was not enough rain.
It was wrong. But Julianne felt she belonged here. She knew this place, this wrong place, secret place. It was like home.
The waterfall was close. The path curved sharply around, forming a crescent shape. They followed it, keeping carefully to the flagstones.
Julianne wondered what might happen if they strayed from the path. There was no reason to fear it, but there was no reason to leave the path, either.
As they walked the crescent, the path doubling back on itself, Julianne caught glimpses of their footprints through breaks in the dense undergrowth, less than twenty feet of distance straight across. Further out there were washes of color under sunlight -- the flowers -- and further, a sudden rectangular flash that might have been sunlight reflected from a distant car's windshield.
The path crept sinuously along the ground, showing Julianne things she had left behind.
She felt irrevocably changed - something added, something taken away.
The water, thunder in her mind. Another crescent-curve, in the opposite direction.
They broke through the clearing and saw a frothing white tower, spilling down black cliff face into a foaming champagne pool.
A natural ridge of rocks formed the perimeter, polished white and smooth or mossy green.
The pool was circular, unnatural, the eerily perfect symmetry of planned landscaping, a movie set.
Despite that, Julianne felt its desertion, its seclusion: there hadn't been a human presence here for a million years. She knew this.
Clark's hand slid from Julianne's waist to her breast. The nipple went instantly erect, the sudden rush of feeling freezing her breath, like a trapped animal in her throat.
They faced each other.
Julianne's arms looped around his neck and her chin tilted upward, answering a call deeper than consciousness.
Her body seemed to know what to do. Clark kissed her, and she met his tongue with her own, stepping into him, her hips against his. She began to rotate her hips, slowly first, then increasing the tempo as Clark's breathing quickened.
Something lurched in her heart, an interruption in the normal race of beats, and Julianne's body was flooded with sensation. It was as though she had two hearts, one of them dormant until now.
She gasped and tensed as the arrhythmic sensation gripped her, and suddenly she was welded to Clark, points of darkness and moisture and heat. He lowered her to the ground, the soft ground beside the path.
And they were off the path now, something she had feared, but now Julianne didn't care. Her breath was low thunder in her ears, twin hearts at wild gallop and she was pulling Clark's shirt down across his shoulders, not wanting to release him.
Clark broke the kiss and stared down at her, taking off his shirt, unbuttoning and unzipping his pants. Julianne could see the shape of his erection through his underwear. Her whole body seemed to go wet. She took off her own shirt.
Clark undressed her the rest of the way. He slowed down, running his hands over her, lingering here and there, bringing little sparks out of her skin that were almost orgasms themselves. Julianne lay back and let him touch her. When she tried to reciprocate, he moved her hand gently away. "Later."
He was lazy with her until the dark thing growled and rolled over in her chest, demanding. Julianne whispered something, nibbling at Clark's ear. She didn't know what she had said, the voice not her own, but then he was over her and on her, parting her legs and she wanted him, she wanted him inside and yes, yes, he was there, he was almost in there, rubbing against her, he -
And there it was again. Her old friend. The fear.
It's too late now, she warned herself. Too late now, old girl.
Clark pushed, slowly, slowly - and then lunged in to pierce her. Darkness glided over her eyes. Her sweat soured, cooling her skin. She smelled blood.
Julianne's second heart, the black engine of silence asleep in her chest for so long, revved and fell off, revved and fell off.
Clark waited, and then slowly began to move inside her again. He was gentle. He was.
Julianne felt nothing. Whatever had been happening, it was over.
Clark finished in three quick stabs, his back arching, mouth open, spilling sounds. He collapsed on top of her and lay there, dead weight. The dark engine revved. Fell off one last time.
Clark didn't move for a long time. She was uncomfortable, but let him lie.
Eventually, he rolled off, lay on his back next to her.
Julianne felt her normal heartbeat again, the other silenced for the moment. She stood and walked naked to the edge of the pool.
"Where are you going?" Clark asked her sleepily.
To take a bath. To wash you out of me.
She looked down at herself and saw that her skin was covered with rashes of tiny dots, pinpoints of black moisture, as though she were sweating oil. She felt dirty and unsatisfied, suspended between peaks, not allowed to retreat to one or the other.
"For a swim," Julianne said.
She looked into the water. It was deep.
You just had to dive in, and hope you survived the shock.
She did, expecting the water to be very cold, but found instead a mellow bathwater warmth. She stayed under, her eyes open. The water was clear. She could see perfectly.
She watched the black dots peel away from her skin like plastic. More of the black oil oozed from her pores, surrounding her in a cloud of black ink, like an octopus.
Julianne closed her eyes, pinched the lids shut, heart silent in the chamber of her chest as she held her breath.
Then she felt it. Heard it. The other heart. It beat so quietly as to be unnoticeable over the sound of her normal heartbeat, but it was still there.
Julianne opened her eyes. Her pores were dormant, the oily blackness dissipated into warm, clear water.
She kicked her legs, swept her arms around, moving slowly through the silent water, thinking. All that wanting, all that needing, all that buildup to -- what? A slim, bright moment of pain? Blood? Discomfort?
And after that, the black feeling, the dirty feeling, sweating out of her.
The swim felt better, the water caressing all over, sliding into the curves of her body, into the places Clark couldn't reach...
The light changed. Shadows drifted down from above. Julianne looked, and the surface of the water seemed miles above her, eons of distance, another universe.
She swam toward it, surprised when she burst through after only a few strokes.
Clark lay still on the soft moss at the edge of the path, eyes closed, breathing deeply.
Everything looked the same, but something was different. Julianne frowned. Everything was different.
The light. The light was different. Lower.
She had never felt that she was running out of air, never felt the need to breathe. Julianne had been underwater for a long time. Maybe as long as an hour.
The dark engine, idling. It had started, but had never really kicked into gear.
She smiled, a wonderful feeling of sleeping power curled inside her. She padded toward Clark, her bare feet silent against the stones. She knelt, kissed his forehead, the bridge of his nose, his mouth. He awoke, returned the kiss, the caress, hard again.
Julianne let him take the lead, on top again, no foreplay this time, urgent -
She felt it. First there was the warmth and a dull friction, only skin on skin.
And then something seemed to break loose and there was a levitating sensation with the friction, lifting her hips with each stroke.
Smooth.
And good. Suddenly, so good.
The trees were moving. Julianne watched them over Clark's shoulder. The branches, dancing.
There was no wind.
Julianne arched her back, moving against Clark, meeting his thrusts. Oh, yes, it was good this time. This time she could see what all the fuss was about. She was lifting him, he was lifting her, and she was seeing into his mind, the trees were moving, the water roaring, the mossy ground beneath them churning, rolling.
Now it wasn't just the branches moving but the trees themselves, uprooting and scuttling spiderlike, roots exploding up from the ground in a spray of dirt and thunder.
She was cresting the wave, ready to come and Julianne - no no no she wasn't ready yet - not yet -
not yet -
Clark arched back, rising up and off of her, eyes closed in the final extremity of orgasm.
The black sweat, beads of fury, broke out in Julianne's skin again. She spoke a word, an old word she could not remember hearing before.
Clark's face was red, streaked with sweat. He smiled down at her, then frowned at her expression. He opened his mouth to speak. There was a little pop of air from his pursed lips, all that remained of the word.
In that second of silence, Julianne heard the black heart beating, waiting. Almost free.
Clark screamed. He slapped his hand to his forehead in an almost comical gesture, his face twisting, eyes wide. He hitched in a breath and expelled it all in one rising siren-shriek of agony.
Julianne covered her ears, but she didn't close her eyes. She wanted to see. She wasn't sure what was happening, but she wanted to see.
For a long time there was just the screaming. Then Julianne saw blood seeping between Clark's fingers, dark, thick and rusty, not how she expected blood to look at all.
The blood went from trickle to stream, dripped onto her forehead, her chin, her lips.
There was a low, gritty sound, like sand under heavy boots.
The screaming stopped.
Clark's hand dropped. The rest of his body was frozen, muscles locked, his extended forearm twitching with tension.
His eyes were bleeding, but most of the blood was coming from the hole in his forehead. The hole was small now, but something was pushing through, tenting the skin and the bone beneath, and Julianne could see that the something was going to make the hole much larger.
Clark's head jerked. There was a wet, gristly crunch, a slaughterhouse sound. The skin burst open in a miniature flashflood that showered Julianne's face.
It broke through, hatching from Clark's skull, a textured, pulsing oval slightly smaller than Julianne's fist. It rose up on a short stalk.
It began to change. Julianne saw what it was.
Her mouth dropped open and then she laughed, the high, joyful sound of an eight-year-old on the playground.
Clark was still inside her. Somehow, he was hardening again. His eyes were fixed and lusterless, but the heat was there. Heat. And movement.
The beat of the black engine came up and over the pulse of Julianne's heartbeat. The beats joined and Julianne struggled under them.
The power was so good, it was good again. Now she felt it.
Clark made a final sound - a cracked, ratcheting roar like some old machine. The earth roared with him, water and dirt and whipping, howling trees.
Julianne closed her eyes, trembling, her body quaking, hips bucking. It was happening. It was happening now. It was happening.
Now.
The trees exploded, raining charred, stinging bark. Falling coals, ash-white, burned her skin. Julianne didn't care. She was locked inside this thing, the black wreath, the beat of the black heart within her, the black wave.
She crested, rose over, ears filled with shrieks, fading now, calming, the wave passing over and through her, leaving placid waters behind.
Julianne lay unmoving. Clouds skittered across the sky, flickering kaleidoscope shapes against her closed lids.
She felt sunlight on her face once, twice.
The third time, she opened her eyes.
Clark was there, frozen above her, sculpted. Julianne slid her legs out from around him and reached up to touch his face. The skin there was dry, rough.
Bark.
The branches moved slowly, tracing patterns against the windless blue sky. Lying still, Julianne let the silence seal her in. Julianne, in a womb of silence, private land.
No trespassers.
A remote part of her ancient, changing brain reminded her that she ought to look for the dogs.
But that part of her brain was dying, and moments later there was no memory of the dogs at all.
There was blood on the flagstones. Julianne rolled onto her side, tasted it to make sure it was not her own.
She smiled.
It was blood from the flower, the yellow Iris Pseudacorus that had bloomed bright and perfect from Clark's forehead.
©David L. Duggins
David L. Duggins has published fiction in Fear, Cemetery Dance and horrorfind.com; poetry in the Descending Darkness e-zine; and non-fiction in horror-wood.com and Loud Fast Rules! music magazine. He has served almost twenty years in the Air Force and plans to retire in 2007. His website is here.