Posted on September 7, 2011 by Jenna
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Now squat sits the facility upon Elm Hill, like some great and bulbous beast, and wrapped around it its tangled fences have the look of chains, and its windows of great sad eyes, and when the sun sinks down behind the facility at Elm Hill the children of the neighborhoods beneath imagine it whimpering and muttering to itself, bound down onto the earth, and resentful of humanity that can roam free—
Not that those children, tucked down for the night, bound by their quilts and their blankets and their parents’ rules, were free.
But the wicked ones, well—
If they were wicked children, why, they could loose themselves from their bindings and creep out from their beds. They could walk on their bootied feet to the darkened windows, and there to stare out at the facility and the moon.
Some, like Sam did, like Bird did, could grow up later and go in.
Others were to live and die and sometimes even live again before they ever dared to test its gates.
[The Frog and the Thorn – CHAPTER TWO]
May 28, 2004
The facility at Elm Hill is not active, not now. It has been years since children screamed there. It has been years since the monster worked there, in the fashion of his kind, and Tina, and the rest.
And to look at the green on the facility’s roof and its lawn all specked up with graves, and the dead black gates and the crooked doors, is to suspect that here was an awful mistake. That this was the monster’s Chernobyl. That here had been his Leipzig and his Agincourt.
Here had nearly ended the monster’s ambitions, at the facility at Elm Hill.
It has gone sick, this facility, root and branch.
It has gone wrong.
There is something organic in it now, something dreadful and alive, and in its basement are pipes, and stagnant water in those pipes; and the walls are lightly overgrown with a strange slick substance that is neither mold nor moss; and a bleak karma dwells within those walls that longs to expunge the suffering that gave it birth and revenge itself on those who within its boundaries do harm.
It is a bad house.
It is an evil house.
But as horrid as the facility can be, it is kinder to innocents than to monsters.
The sands dripped through the hourglass
And the hour of the wolf closed in at last
And life is sweet and the sun is high
But the flesh and the fire are born to die
It is May 28, 2004 and the grangler is dead.
As for Liril, she’s down in the room where they used to keep her. She’s touching the place where she’d once scratched LIRIL on the wall.
“I don’t know,” she says.
It’s too big for her.
She’s trying to wrap her mind around it but she can’t. It’s not the letters, even though they’re capitalized and the part of her name after the L usually isn’t. It’s everything.
It’s just too big.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Do you?”
Tainted John is somewhere. She’s not sure where. Micah’s on his way upstairs. He’s hoping to find out what happened to a great dead bird; that, or to fall down, to rest, because some sleep would be OK.
The thing that’s behind her in the room isn’t one of Liril’s gods.
It’s the last remnant of the grangler.
Now Liril is young but Liril is wise and she knows that the grangler must be dead—for no living grangler could have gotten to her, not past Micah and Tainted John. And she knows that it must long for nothing less than to seize her and never let her go—to have one last thing of its holding before it is given over to the grave.
There was a time when it had held her in its claws. There was a Halloween when it had lunged out of nowhere amidst the screaming of the goblins and the ghouls and seized her up—
It hadn’t liked to let her go.
And Liril does not know whether, by this token, it will drag her down from the halls of life into the Underworld, there to be its prisoner in death, or simply cling to her ankle and succumb there, a new and permanent attachment until decay consumes its flesh.
But still she says, “C’mon, then.”
It comes over by her. It hunches down. It shakes its head.
“Oh?”
And she is crying a little, and she doesn’t really know why, except that she can. It’s all bound up with Melanie. Crying in front of it shouldn’t be allowed.
Except, she can.
So she hugs it first. She cries, and she holds the grangler before it can hold her, and she says, “You’re a grangler, grangler. You’ve gotta.”
It’s still shaking its head.
She doesn’t even see how that can be. She’s been held by ghosts before—not just the grangler, but the monster’s too—and she knows them.
The grangler is a god of hanging on.
It’s just the tiniest bit of broken and lingering soul, at this point, but that part doesn’t change.
But it doesn’t hang on to her. It’s not there to hang on to her. She can feel its ichor where she hugged it and the slime of it is on her and in the openness of her soul and after the very long seconds of her confusion she manages to understand.
Of course it won’t grab her. Of course.
It’s been touched by a growing god.
Her eyes untangle the grangler now. She is alive and fierce with an alien interest now. She sees along the knots and cords of karma—of one thing, which leads to another, which is continued to the next—in search of the pattern that has brought it here.
She sees how to save it. She sees how to bind it. She sees how to reunite its soul. She moves a hand—
Gravity fails. She is disoriented. Everything is white, then black.
There is a scream.
She has lost her connection to the land.
She is flying and the ringing that is Liril smashing into metal pipes is like a shout; is like a horn; is like a great trembling, rumbling, shaking cry dividing the Heavens from the Earth.
There’s a girl in the sun
And there’s girls in the sea
And in Elm Hill’s cages
There’s a girl like me.
Where is Liril?
Liril is against a wall.
Is the monster there?
The monster is not there.
Good.
The monster is not there.
Where is Liril?
Liril is in her room. No. It is not Liril’s room. It is the old room. It is not her room. It is not her room not any more.
Where is Liril’s hand?
Liril cannot find her hand.
Wait.
No.
It is there. It is on the end of her arm. How silly!
She opens her mouth. Her tongue is thick.
What is Liril going to say?
“Is she—is Melanie OK?”
Is that what volition sounds like? Is that the kind of question that a person, who has volition, and a will, would ask?
Liril is not sure.
She closes her eyes.
Her world is going black.
Liril’s world is going black.
She thinks she saw the strangest thing, the strangest thing was written on the wall.
It’s like the grangler has unraveled, but before it died, it scrawled an X upon the wall. Like it had marked a spot—
Is that Liril’s thought?
Or. No.
Like it hadn’t known its name. Hadn’t remembered it, couldn’t write it, or maybe had never known it—
How very strange, someone thinks. It is probably Liril. How very strange.
Doesn’t a person have to have a name?
