The Surly Sullen Bell;: Ten Stories and Sketches, Uncanny or Uncomfortable, With a Note on the Ghostly Tale by Russell Kirk

Author:Russell Kirk
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror & Ghost Stories, Gothic, weird fiction
Publisher: Fleet Publishing Corporation
Published: 1962-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

SKYBERIA

SKYBERIA

On that cold autumn day—the sun hidden since early morning—two men were lost in Skyberia.

Whatever new ragged ridge they sighted resembled every other; each conical sinkhole they struggled through seemed familiar yet menacingly unique. Their compass could not help them, for Clements and Robertson did not know what direction they ought to take; now and then the sky emitted a contemptuous sprinkle of snow, otherwise preserving its gray mask of a celestial caducity; and though several times they fired their rifles, they heard no other report in all those illimitable second-growth woods. Even the deer they were hunting never broke cover, so that Clements and Robertson told each other they were fools for leaving the pit-blind they had dug, to look for deer instead of shivering in their hole.

As afternoon wore on, they heard a dog howling, howling far away through the jack pines and tamaracks and cedars.

Skyberia, which has no precise frontiers, is a resurrected forest, in part the domain of the state by virtue of delinquent tax confiscations, in part a patchwork of abandoned or moribund farms over which the scrub creeps slowly back. A wood that has inched back from its grave has the look of Lazarus upon it. Clements and Robertson, who knew nothing of wild country, thought a beeline the quickest route and therefore repeatedly left the ridges and fought across the sinkholes, sometimes slipping ankle-deep in ooze and getting thoroughly scared.

And the sky watched them from behind the gray and drooped lids of its eyes. Blue or gray or black, the sky watched whatever living things ventured into Skyberia. Smokeless and empty, forever popping unexpectedly from behind a pine-veiled ridge, the sky lords it over Skyberia: in few other corners of the world is the sky so tyrannical. An ironic old man in Bear City, who knew these woods as well as anyone did, had clapped the “Skyberia” to them, and the name stuck. Under this sneeringly vigilant sky, Clements and Robertson stood bewildered, listening to the distant dog howl.

Clements sold cars in Cleveland; Robertson held a sinecure in the highway department. Either, in his secret heart, would have preferred watching football over his television set to this wet and chill plodding through shadow-land. Yet a compulsion to show their manliness impelled them every autumn into the northern woods, where the bucks as regularly eluded them. They wore high-laced engineers’ boots, exhausting for long tramps; their shoulders ached under the weight of their mackinaws; they would have liked to throw their guns into the swamp. The dog howled on; and after conferring, Clements and Robertson resumed their beeline course toward the howl. For all the cold, they were sweating when they found the dog.

An oasis in Skyberia, fifteen or twenty cleared acres, formed a gulf in the woods. Down to the far side of this pasture ran a mud track, and rusty barbed wire, strung eccentrically to uprooted stumps, had kept the deer out more or less, and the cattle in. But now there was no need for a fence.

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