stop thinking of Nat, and of Ash. We disturbed something that day, I’m sure of it. The Red Man had rested at peace in that sacred ground, among the relics of ancient belief and forgotten myths. Had we left him there, perhaps my friends would still be alive.
He came again last night. He touches my dreams, and in them he lives. He speaks my name, and with it he owns me.
I think I am beginning to understand… if not fully, then at least in part. What we unearthed should have been left buried. The days are at their longest now, just past the mouth of the equinox, with Lughnasadh fast approaching. There will be bonfires again. There are still believers, though their ways are not the old ways. They echo what has gone before, yet they do not truly capture it, because the past is an ever-flowing ribbon. No bridge may ever be stood upon twice, and yet The Red Man brings to me a bridge of years that he tells me I must cross.
He crawls to the side of my bed in the night, his chicken-bone hands and legs oddly bent and attenuated, like a spider half-crushed or a twig blown in the breeze and—for a strange, ethereal moment—given life. His ochre skin glows deepest red, his dead lips part around a mouth of cavernous, repellent horror, and his eyelids graunch open to reveal rotted, empty sockets of blackened, worm-eaten decay. His smell is heavy with death, with the soot of the bonfires and the sweetness of the earth, and he tells me that they could not kill him. Every wound they inflicted—those who sought to guard their people from the evil he had done—is healing. Every part of him they bound, that he should bring harm no more in this world or the next, he is unbinding. He has awoken, and I know that by the time the blazing white moon rises once more into a sky filled with flames, my blood will bathe it as surely as the firelight does.
The Red Man has awoken, and he walks among us.
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About the Author
Anna Reith lives behind a keyboard in the wilds of southwest England. She is the author of several novels, novellas, and short stories, under a variety of pen names. Her artistic and written works have been featured in mixed media exhibitions, festivals, and on radio, and she writes across a range of genres. When she is not frantically scribbling, Anna enjoys long, muddy walks with her dogs, dabbling in her herb garden, and falling off horses… but not all at the same time.
Find more at
www.annareith.co.uk
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