Outer Dark

by Cormac McCarthy

carillon

When the tinker came rattling his cart in drunken charivari through the clearing he was there with wild arms like one fending back a curse.

anneloid

immiscible

baleful

Long and long after he should have reached the river he was careering through the woods with his hands outstretched before him against whatever the dark might hold.

He spat. His saliva bloomed palely on the water and wheeled and slid inexplicably upstream, back the way he had come.

he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.

He followed them into a small clearing and here they ceased. He looked about him. It appeared to be the same place in which the tracks coming up the near side had vanished. As if their maker had met in this forest some dark other self in chemistry with whom he had been fused traceless from the earth.

meniscal

androgyne

Even a snake ain’t all bad. They’s put here for some purpose. I believe they’s purpose to everthing. Don’t you believe thataway?

The more I study a thing the more I get it backards. Study long and ye study wrong.

I wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink.

consubstantial

took a piece of the blackened meat from the pan and bit into it. It had the consistency of whang,

Shitepoke,

even the one with the rifle that had appeared to be sleeping had now opened his eyes without moving at all and was regarding him with malign imbecility.

The man was listening closely but what he said next: I wouldn’t name him because if you cain’t name somethin you cain’t claim it. You cain’t talk about it even. You cain’t say what it is. I got Harmon to look after him if they do fight. I keep studyin him. He’s close, but I keep at it. Holme stared at him.

truculent

You know, I would think them there big boots would chafe on a feller’s heels, the man said. They all right, Holme said. I don’t believe they are, the man said. Are what? All right. I don’t believe they are. Well, it don’t make no difference.

When I believe somethin it makes a difference.

The fire had died some and he could see him better, sitting beyond it and the scene compressed into a kind of depthlessness so that the black woods beyond them hung across his eyes oppressively and the man seemed to be seated in the fire itself, cradling the flames to his body as if there were something there beyond all warming.

They Lord honey I ain’t been over there in six or eight months. Are you from over thataway?

The tinker traversed the room with gnomelike stealth, still bowed in his posture of drayage.

The tinker swung down the lamp and their shadows wheeled wildly from each other and froze on opposite walls.

She had begun to keen softly into her hands.

went

squire

poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.

They Lord,

I’ve run with hogs since I was just a shirttail and I ain’t never come to no real understandin of em.

And don’t be fooled by one that ain’t got nary clove foot cause he’s devilish too.

Says he goin to get him some poontang when we get sold but I told him he’d be long done partialed to shehogs. The drover turned and bared his orangecolored teeth at Holme in a grimace of lecherous idiocy.

Holme saw two of them pitch screaming in stifflegged pirouettes a hundred feet into the river. He moved down the slope toward the bluff and the road that went along it. Drovers were racing brokenly across the milling hogs with staves aloft, stumbling and falling among them, making for the outer perimeter to head them from the cliff. This swept a new wave of panic among the hogs like wind through grass until a whole echelon of them careering up the outer flank forsook the land and faired into space with torn cries. Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now up-reared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineherds but disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom.

two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer,

HOLME