Short Story- FOUL TASTE

“Alton Colfax.”

He spun around, his heels crunching sleet and frozen dirt. His eyes flitted through the trees, seeing only darkness and the rhythmic shaking of dead branches. He held his breath to listen. The heaviness of the winter had settled in, smothering the life out of the world. No insects buzzed by his nose like they did in the heat of summer. No nightbirds called longingly for the sun to rise. He heard nothing but the faint shuff of the twigs scraping each other as the cold wind stumbled ceaselessly through the treetops. His heartbeat rose in his ears like thrum of a river: fast, steady, and threatening.

The weight of the silence forced his thoughts into focus, despite the whiskey that spun his mind like taffy. The wind was not enough to cause such a profound audible hallucination. It was faint and distant, cold and harmless. Like the threats of a beggar after being denied pittance. Even a powerful sudden gust would not conjure up such a direct and sharp sound as he had heard.

Had he heard it? He could smell the whiskey on his own breath. Rank and cheap. The kind that burned before his tongue had the chance to taste it, and then burned again instead of tasting. The kind that burned its way down his throat and reminded him that this was the only type of swill he could afford now. Acrid and smoky beyond any hope of pleasantness. Vengeful the next day like a god who saw all his sins.

He swirled the bottle slightly as he stared into the trees. His gloveless fingers couldn’t feel the bottle-- the dark blue of his skin told him that he might never feel it again-- but he felt its weight hanging from the end of his arm, and the muscles of his hand knew where to go. It was the lack of sensation and yet the presence of something that told him the bottle was still there. Touch was gone, but tactile functionality remained. A strange sensation, feeling without feeling.

He sniffed his breath again. The forest was quiet. No names being whispered. Not a sound.

It must have been the lousy whiskey.

He turned back to walk through the forest, his boots penetrating the silence with heavy crunching. Alton Colfax, he thought. It had been years since he’d used that name. Decades, even. How deep the whiskey must have dug in his mind to pull that up. Alton Colfax was a dead man, as far as he was concerned. Long dead, and no one missed him.

He sensed the treacherous weight of the whiskey bottle in his hand, knowing it was there without feeling it. What was in this damned pisswater that could summon up the name Alton Colfax? He drank to forget that man, not to be drearily reminded of him in the dark of winter.

He felt a fire sparking in his gut, coalescing into a searing spider of rage that clutched onto his spine and crawled its way up to his mind. There it directed his eyes to the bottle in his blue fingers, demanding justice be served to this betraying liquid. Cheap, labelless stuff. Sold to him by a Dutchman who wouldn’t know fine booze from paint thinner. The spider ran its burning legs across the folds of his brain, plucking at his strings and commanding him to hurl the deceitful poison into a tree. He lifted the bottle in compliance, once again experiencing that strange sensation of feeling the weight shift in his hand without the nerves of his fingers telling him it was there.

The bottle was still half full.

His eyes stared into the dark liquid, the faint light of the moon reflecting its dirty brown color. Wicked stuff, doing him no favors.

Just throw it and be done with it.

The spider began to shrink, pulling back its hairy red legs and retreating into his stomach. It called up its brother, a blue thing that reminded him of how cold he was, and how warm the whiskey in his belly felt. Half full. How much had he spent on this bottle? How much did he have left?

And he was no longer Alton Colfax, in any case. No one was. No reason to be angry at the name. Alton Colfax was dead, and the world was better for it.

He was suddenly aware that the wind in the trees had stopped. Dead silence penetrated his thoughts and brought the unwanted specter of focus back to the front of his mind.

He kept his eyes on the trees, barely breathing. He tried to recall why he had walked so deep into the woods, but his thoughts dodged left and right, making the trees sway ominously. He knew why other men had come here, in the past. They wandered here to be forgotten, to flee and get lost. They wandered here to die. Cowards and mourners came here to abandon the world. Their motivations were clear, but his were not. He could not fathom what he was thinking in coming out into the woods. It was the whiskey, no doubt. Damned stuff.

His wet boots began to bite at his toes, angry with him for keeping his feet in the snow for so long.

“Alton Colfax,” came the voice from the woods.

His eyes shot around. He was sure he’d heard it that time.

He stopped his breath entirely as something moved through the trees. No, not through the trees. It was the trees. A black, indefinable shape lurching amongst the shadows all around him. His eyes couldn’t make out any particular thing, but all the same he saw it. It groped through the canopy as the branches fluttered without wind, and at the same time it crawled beneath the bushes and slithered around the trunks. It was without form, and simultaneously everywhere around him.

“Why have you come to me?”

He would have dropped the bottle, if the cold hadn’t frozen his hand into a vice around its neck.

“Who’s there?” he said.

The branches shook and slowly bent towards him.

“You’ve found me, Alton Colfax. Why do you come? What do you seek?”

His mind screamed at his feet to run, but they knew better. He could feel the thing’s presence everywhere around him. Circling him, stalking him, surrounding him. But for some reason it did not fill the spot where he stood. It waited in the darkness just beyond his reach. This presence was hungry and ravenous. He knew that if he were to move, to step into this thing, that he would die.

“Who’ve I found?”

“What are you trying to find?”

Myths race around his skull. Stories of witches and ghosts and pagan demons rose and fell, frantically vying for the position of most logical explanation in his mind. But above all that, two names kept appearing before him. The first was his own, or the one he had once called his own in another life. And the other was the name that had forced him to abandon Alton Colfax all together.

“Johnny?” he said quietly.

The trees shook and hummed.

He swallowed. “Johnny Agincourt? Is… is that you?”

“No,” came the voice.

Again he felt the closeness of the thing all around him. It tasted him, he could feel it. He couldn’t explain how, but deep in his subconscious he knew that the thing was waiting to feed. To feed on him. But what was it waiting for?

“What are you?” he asked.

“Curious,” it said. “Who is this Johnny Agincourt?”

The whiskey came up in his throat. In stark contrast to Alton Colfax, Johnny Agincourt was a name that he thought of every single day. It was why he drank. Why he ran. Why did this thing care about Johnny Agincourt?

“No one,” he said.

“Not no one, I think. Is he why you came here?”

Was he? He couldn’t remember. He had come into the woods for something, and if the whiskey led him here then it was probably about Johnny. Johnny. Even thinking his name made his guts turn and forced his eyes closed. It had been ten years since he’d last seen the boy. He saw Johnny’s face, streaked with terror the night he died. The last look that anyone ever saw on him. And the terror? Its source? Why, it was Alton Colfax, of course. Alton Colfax with the gun in his hand.

But no. He was not Alton Colfax anymore. He hadn’t been for a long, long time.

And yet the thing was right. He had come here a reason, to this forest where men go to die. And if not for Johnny, then for what?

“Justice,” he said. “Met upon me.”

“I do not deliver justice. Tell me, why do you think you need justice?”

“Does it matter? It’s what I’ve come here for, isn’t it? Why I’ve come to find my death in this damned forest? Just be done with it.”

“I’ve found you all come here for different reasons,” the voice said. It stirred, and the trees stirred with it. “It amuses me to learn of them. What have you done, Alton Colfax, that makes you want to die?”

“How do you know my name?”

“I know much, but not everything. Now please, sate my curiosity. Why do you wish to die?”

He felt the bottle in his grasp, and a distant part of his mind remembered that it was still half full. Distant, but very real. His eyes scanned the trees, and still he found nothing but that black malevolence that existed within and around them.

“I’ve done terrible things,” he said. “Monstrous things that hurt a lot of people who I cared a lot about.” The memories, so long repressed, welled up and seeped into the cracks of his mind. He ground his teeth. “I took a good man’s life out of greed. I deserve punishment.”

“I don’t deal in punishment. I can promise no absolution. Only annihilation.”

“It’s what I deserve.”

“I must tell you that Johnny Agincourt will not be recompensed, no matter what happens to you. There will be nothing as primitive as justice met in the afterlife, because there is no such thing. Your actions are not righteous, nor are they wicked. You will be neither rewarded nor punished. Do you still wish to die, Alton Colfax?”

He thought of the gun, of the bullet as it entered Johnny’s neck and obliterated his spine, of the paltry sum that he did it all for. He thought of the rivers of whiskey that he’d drank in the time since, all the while hoping that some relief would be found in its foul taste.

It never came. It never would come.

“Yes,” he said.

“Very good.”

He felt the darkness closing in around his ankles, and the feeling left his feet entirely. It crawled up his legs and enveloped his knees. They went numb, but he didn’t buckle. He was kept upright by the unseen thing as it slowly moved up his body, sucking the life from his flesh.

“What are you?” he asked as his arms lost all sensation and shriveled into blackened twigs. “A demon?”

“I’ve been called many things, very few of them accurate. To call me a demon implies many other things that simply are not true.”

The strange loss of feeling reached his neck. He felt his lungs giving up, his heart slowing down beat by beat. It wasn’t painful, not like he had expected death to be. It was merely a cessation, like being turned off. Certainly less terrible than a bullet to the neck.

“What do you call yourself?” he asked.

“I do not. However, there is one name that your kind has called me that I’ve grown fond of.”

“What is that?” he asked as his jaw and tongue went numb.

“God.”

Then Alton Colfax was devoured by the darkness, bottle in hand, and the forest returned to its winter silence.