Descent to the Smiling Rock

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Descent to the Smiling Rock

After what The Narrator could only assume was a raucous display of benign revelry befitting the end credits of a low-budget children’s cartoon, all to the tune of Steve Miller’s The Joker, Colt drew the goons to the edge of the bridge which overlooked the smiling rock.

One goon climbed over the rail backwards and held it while another climbed down its back to grab its ankles, then another did the same until there were six goons stretched down to the ground, hanging from the rail to make a ladder.

Colt clambered over the side first, then pointed at Siris.

“I gotta climb down?” Siris asked. Colt nodded and began its descent. Siris followed. “I sure hope these fellas know what they’re doing,” he sighed.

“Probably best for me not to attempt this, with my limp and all,” Sam said, and held up the rifle, “but if he tries anything funny, I got a bead on him. You’ll have Colt down there with you too. Be careful.”

“Will do, Sam,” Ella said, and swung over the side to climb down the goon ladder.

Using the shoulders and pelvic bones of the goons to descend, she marveled that the bones were not brittle. But this was magic. All of it. Weird magic with no rhyme or reason.

Did it matter if she understood how it worked? The situation was absurd and incredible. Yet it was happening.

At the bottom she stood before the smiling rock. Siris stood on the other side of it, shaking, and when he spoke, he wretched each syllable out like a sob: “It’s angry.”

“At you?” Ella asked.

“At me. At you. At God. At the world. At itself. Part of what makes it so hard for me to say no to the smiling rock is that its voice reminds me of my ma.”

“What do you mean, Siris?”

“Ma used to always say if she hadn’t had us kids, if she hadn’t shacked up with pa, she could have been this or that or the other. I always felt bad, like it was my fault, and I loved my ma so much I never stopped making it up to her, even though all she ever did was blame me and call me names. But now she’s gone, and I ain’t got no one to tell me what to do, and I don’t know what to do with myself, so I suppose I was just letting the rock tell me what to do. Because it was angry.”

Siris stared at the rock as he spoke, eyes wide, as if waiting for his dead mother to emerge, vigilant against her attack but knowing he would never be able to run, but only do her bidding. “I suppose,” he went on, “that I let the rock tell me what to do, the way I used to wait on Ma all the time, cuz it was comfortable. Not safe. Not good. But comfortable, ya know?”

“Yeah,” Ella replied. “I think I do understand. I also feel the anger from the rock.” It boiled off the thing like a humid summer heat in a mosquito-infested swamp. It stung her psyche and left welts, took something from her, bloated her with its venom and drained her.

From a distance, the red smiley face seemed sprayed on, but up close it was obviously smeared, and Ella didn’t think it was paint.

Ella reached out to touch the rock, but Colt grabbed her wrist. The EYEGOONS rumbled in her pocket. Colt let go and nodded.

The hackles on the back of her neck were quivering with the malignant energy of the rock as she raised the screen of the EYEGOONS.

A man sat strumming an acoustic bass before a small crowd of people, but he wasn’t talking to them. He was talking to her. “Hey, there, Ella. Folks call me Doose the Ghost. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, though I know about you. I know what’s going on here, and I’m gonna fill you in as time goes on. It’ll be easier to show you than tell you, but I thought I’d try to ease you in with this little preamble. What you’re about to see is highly disturbing, but it explains what happened at the smiling rock. Brace yourself.”

With that, the intimate coffee-house scene faded to black, and what emerged from the darkness cut and left scars.

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