In the Barren Ground

by Loreth Anne White

For each new reader brings to the Story afresh his own unique set of past experiences, giving him a peculiar lens through which to conjure different emotions out of the very same words . . .

Marcie also told of a cadaverous creature of the cold—a hateful shape-shifter that lived in the tundra winds and snows, a wolflike thing whose hunger for human meat and whose rage could never be sated. She had a name for this thing that meant “the spirit of lonely places.”

Marcie Della’s words slithered through her brain . . . They are shape-shifters, part wind, part wolf, part man . . . merciless with hearts of ice. They come on the breath of winter . . . fly at you like a sudden, screeching storm . . .

Charlie Nakehk’o was a Twin Rivers elder—a spiritual leader with a brown face like a shriveled apple doll.

This place seemed to possess a sentience, a maleficence, that was conspiring against her efforts to belong. Perhaps it sensed the badness, the shame, in her, and she had yet to prove her worth before she could be redeemed for the big-ass mistakes that had driven her north into the Barrens, to the very edge of civilization.

“Lived long enough in central Africa, some very deep and dark places, to know that there is sometimes more than meets the eye. On those edges of civilization, the Congo, sometimes . . . boundaries are crossed that you don’t understand.”

“This is set locally,” he said with surprise. “It is, and it’s set in the past. A horror novel written right in this lodge, by one of my first and subsequently most regular guests. He comes each winter now, to polish his final draft-of-the-year.” Crash glanced at the name on the spine. “Drakon Sinovski?” “Pseudonym. His real name is Henry Spatt. Not so romantic—or horrible—as Drakon, eh?” He took another suck on his joint. “Just seeing him in the flesh, you’d never guess he had this dark shit in his brain. Then again, you never can tell a killer just by looking in his eyes.”

Nothing but the way of the wild.”

This was said before. Hmmmmm

“It’s no wonder we are all drawn to murder in so many ways,” said Spatt. “It throws under a spotlight the pathologies of our communities. It forces us to examine elements of our society, and in ourselves, that we try to ignore: deviance, violence, anger, hatred, frustration, malevolence, greed, mental illness, cruelty. It’s why we write about it, I think. We create fictional monsters, so that we can examine these abhorrences as something quite apart from ourselves. Because if we didn’t have this outlet, we’d be forced to look into the mirror, and see the eyes of a beast looking back.”

“Why a wendigo creature in your book?” Crash said suddenly. “Hah!” said Spatt. “Because it cuts to the true ‘heart of darkness’ trope—the idea that if a traveler ventures into wilderness, and if he goes too deep, too dark, for too long, he will be touched by that which is uncivilized, untamable. And he will return a profoundly changed man with some of the wild inside him. He has, in effect, become ‘The Beast’ himself. It’s a common enough metaphor that is retold in many ways. You even see echoes of it in vampire lore. The creature bites you, and you become a vampire. The zombie infects you, and you become a zombie. It’s essentially a trip down into the wild Jungian basement of the human soul, for down there is where the dark jungle really thrives, and where your own monsters are buried.”

She thought about second chances, and how everyone, everything, deserved them. No matter how broken they seemed, there was always hope.