The Dark Trench

Cold air sat atop my blankets and nipped at my nose. I ripped off my quilts, sat up, and scooted to the edge of my basket bed. I stretched my wings and rubbed the itch from my eyes. Dad’s exhausted face and droopy ears took shape in the dark.

“Get ready to go,” he said.

I slid off the edge of my bed and hobbled across the frosty stone floor. I grabbed the icy handle and pumped water into the basin. The pipes groaned. My teeth chattered as I splashed my face and chest with the rust-sour water and toweled off. I pulled on my sweater, blew hot breath into my hands, and hugged myself with my wings. Mom sent my sweater through the post years ago. It proved that she was real–that she existed outside of Sleeping Locus. People called it the realm of dreams. You didn’t need a ship to go there, but I knew it had to be real.

“Eat something,” Dad said.

Dad hopped onto the stool and drank water from his bowl. I pulled out the bench and sat across from him. I struck a match and lit the candle. The frost-coated stone walls glittered in the light.

“Dad?” I said.

“What?”

“It’s freezing in here. Can’t we light a fire? Just a small one?”

“I told you we don’t have the silver to waste on such comforts.”

Irritation stabbed my mind like the cold stabbing my feet.

“I’m sick of being cold all the time! I’m sick of living in this dungeon!”

“Stop it! Inns are nothing like dungeons. You should be thankful for what you have.”

Dad always said that but how could anybody be happy in a place like this? I pulled the loaf out of the breadbox and sliced a thick piece. I tried spreading butter and preserves, but they were frozen, and the bread was a mashed-up pile in my hand by the time I ate it. I washed it down with some milk from a clay mug.

“Take off that dirty, old sweater,” Dad said. “You look like a stray with that thing on.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

I pulled off my sweater and tossed it onto the bed. Something scratched at our door. We froze. I felt my heart stop. Dad’s fur stood up.

“Good morning,” the mechanism chimed outside. “This is your wake-up call.”

My heart started again, and Dad relaxed.

“Come in,” Dad said.

The locks snapped, and the door screeched open. An icy gust shot through the room, blowing out our candle and stirring our blankets. The mechanism stepped out of the dark hallway. He had metal skin and black eyes sunken into his square head.

“Reset for tomorrow,” Dad grumbled.

“Sure thing,” the mechanism said. “You have an alarm set for–”

“Yes, Yes!” Dad barked. “I’ve got it!”

The mechanism walked over to the cupboard. He unjammed the bottom drawer and pulled out our jackets and collars. He handed me mine, then helped Dad into his.

“Respectable canids wear collars,” Dad said. “Put it on.”

I hated wearing a collar, but it was no use arguing, so I strapped it around my neck and snapped it closed.

“Button up tight,” Dad said. “The trench is cold this morning.”

“The trench is always cold,” I grumbled. “Even in the summertime.”

“Have a lovely day,” the mechanism said.

Dad and me walked into the dark hallway and the door banged shut. Someone stole the hallway lamps, so we had to smell our way to the garbage chute. The chute was the only way out because the stairwell was destroyed in an armada raid. The steel hatch whined as I pushed it open and looked down. The light from the vents above revealed the iron footings hammered into the shaft. We took care not to slip on bits of trash, and braced ourselves against the wall when animal carcasses and blackwater fell through. The boiler cooked the moldy heap at the bottom. We hopped over puddles of bilge and ducked under little red-eyed critters that rifled through the pile and crawled on the ceiling. They would bite when they fell onto your head, mistaking your fur for a nesting place.

We lived at the bottom of an impossibly deep trench. Its walls reached far beyond the looming darkness, forever and ever, so high that nobody to had ever gotten out that way. Walking onto the trench floor brought no relief from the smell. Or the cold. A new round of shivering rattled my bones. The Whyborn Inn, same as all the towers in the Loyal Trench, was scratched into the wall. No light shone from the windows on its face. I saw it for what it was–a miserable thing left to die in the darkest recess of an ancient fissure.

“Come,” Dad said.

A river of refuse snaked through the trench. The river made everything wet, maddening the chill and giving life to mold, the only thing that thrived down there. Smoke hung like a fog you could cut with your hand. Broken glass and rubble were everywhere. A league-long line of mangy things waited for magicians to slop chow into their bowls. Canid packs and pirates huddled around fires, leering through masks with mean faces. A stray without a collar relieved himself nearby.

“Look at that bastard,” a group of them laughed.

I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me feel like I was naked on a stage. I wished Dad would growl or bite one of them, but some were dangerous. You never knew what they had under their cloaks. They’d mug you if they thought you had anything worth stealing, and the armada never patrolled the dark side of the trench anymore.

We passed nymph with shapely legs and sea-foam skin. She wore a mask with an innocent face. She smelled like moldy bread.

“Hey,” she said, walking up to Dad. “You wanna friend?”

“Come!” Dad barked. “Keep up!”

“Ok!” I said. “I’m coming!”

Canids were natural runners. I tried my best to keep up without gagging on the smog, but I was a flier like my Mom. My run was little more than an awkward skip. Dad would look back at me with anger in his eyes when I fell behind.

The smoke cleared a bit once we moved out of the dark side. You could see the tiny lights of ships floating down the skyway. Imagination took me, and I found myself in the warm cabin of a ship with a sterling silver mechanism serving me hot drinks.

“We need to get a ride,” Dad said, ripping me away from the fantasy. “We’re running late.”

We started to hear the clip-clop of dented, blast-marked carriages, carts, and wagons brimming over with junk. One wagon, made from an old wooden barrel, was towed by a yellow equine wearing a mask with a stressed out face.

“Burgeon, get two coins out of my pocket,” Dad said as we approached the carriage.

I pulled two silver out of Dad’s pocket and rubbed them together, flashing the mechanism sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Where would you like to go?” the driver said.

“Can we get a ride to the temple?” Dad said.

“We charge three silver for that trip.”

“Two silver is all we have.”

“You’ll have to ask my master.”

The yellow equine looked back at us.

“Three silver for you and your pup,” the equine neighed.

“Two silver,” Dad said. “There are recastorms forecast for later. The whole trench is going into hiding. We’re the only business you’ll get all day.”

The equine trilled and scuffed his hoof.

“I didn’t hear nothing about no recastorms,” he said.

“You will. The smell is in the air.”

The equine grumbled to himself.

“Two silver then,” he said. “Pay the driver and get in.”

I held up the coins and the mechanism bent down to take them. He pulled a lever, and the hatch on the side of the carriage slid open. Dad and I climbed inside and hopped onto the cracked leather bench. The door slammed shut, and the carriage sped off, rocking and creaking.

“I don’t smell a recastorm,” I said.

“Shoush,” Dad said, giving me a wink. “There’s more than one way to save a coin.”

The equine galloped lively, weaving around pedestrians and other carriages. I watched out my window as the smoke cleared, and the pedestrians wore more respectable collars, jackets, cloaks, and masks. We hit morning traffic, and the carriage came to a stop.

“Cur!” I heard someone shout outside my window.

I saw an unspotted, black canid in a white jacket berating another with gray fur.

“Down!” shouted the black canid as he swatted at the other’s snout. “Down, I say!”

“Dad?”

“What?”

“Why do the pure-breeds hate us?”

“They hate themselves more.”

I took a moment to think about that.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Neither do I, son.”

The traffic cleared, and the carriage sped forward. The lamplight shining through windows made the tench walls look like vertical starry skies on either side of us. All sorts of masked creatures made their way through the trench. I was too inexperienced to discern all their smells, but some of them had wings. Some were swimmers who hopped and waddled around on their fins. Some slithered. Some crept. Some had many sets of arms. There were bipeds, tripeds, quadrupeds, hexapeds, and octapeds. Some had several heads, some bulbous eyes, or many eyes in some cases. Some were scaly, some were furry, and some had various skin types, feathers, leaves, or hair. Some had paws, some had tentacles, some had claws, and some had hands, feet, or hoofs. Some were no larger than your finger, scurrying between your feet, and some shook the ground when they walked, standing ten, twenty, or even three-hundred-cubits-tall. Some were dull in color, and some were as colorful as the rainbows I’d read about. One thing they all had in common, they all wore masks, which meant they were not from the Loyal Trench.

I could hear splashing under the carriage as we avoided the toll bridge and crossed the river to the green gardens surrounding the temple. Our temple was a pyramid with stained-glass windows on its four sides. The word SANCTUARY was carved over the arched doorway, which was tall enough for a titan to pass through without ducking his head.

The carriage rumbled to a stop. The door slid open and we got out. A magician in green robes and a white mask was milling around, merrily feeding fluttering critters. Critters came and went as they pleased, free to reap the spoils of the temple, but never had to go inside if they didn’t want to. I wanted so badly to fly away with them, but my underdeveloped wings would take me nowhere anytime soon.

* * *

L.B. McGrimm needs your help. He's been kicked off almost every social media platform for sharing posts like this one. Consider commenting and sharing this post with someone you think will like it too, as this is pivotal to the blog's survival.

Odd Creature Stories

Indianapolis Indiana

The Dark Trench/The Awful Odyssey, Copyright © 2019, 

L.B. McGrimm

oddcreaturestories.com

All rights reserved. No part of this novel can be copied or reproduced in any way without permission from the author and publisher, except for quotations from reviewers, critics, and scholars.