A raven’s call startled him awake. Confusingly, he stared up at cold, open sky. It wasn’t until he tried to sit up that he realized he was in a box. His bare feet bumped its thin wooden sides as he climbed out, and landed in chilled, wet grass.
As he stretched out his unusually stiff limbs, he looked around. A single trail on a flat plain stretched out to the horizon on both sides of him. He couldn’t remember anything—why he had fallen asleep here, where he had been going, or most importantly, where his shoes were.
The raven cawed again, and he jumped. He looked around for a moment before he found the source—a sleek, black bird with cobalt undertones in its iridescent feathers. It hopped close enough to latch onto the side of the box and tilted its head to stare at him with one dark eye. Suddenly unnerved, the man felt inclined to walk in the opposite direction. He started down the path, hoping to find civilization somewhere close. The raven’s raspy call echoed after him.
No matter how many steps he took, how many hours passed as he walked, the sun never rose. The sky only darkened from day, to dusk, to twilight.
Then, at last, dawn broke, and for a moment the cloudy sky cleared. The path ended at the edge of a broad white lake. A village sprawled out on the other side in the distance. Houses dotted the shoreline and a single black canoe drifted over the lake’s mirror-like surface.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Hey! Excuse me!”
No answer.
“Is anyone there?”
Nobody seemed to hear him. Irate, he walked about, fidgeting with his hands. He could skirt the lake, but it would take hours, and he was impatient to know where he was and what he was doing there. He knew if he could get there, he could get help.
A raven’s call interrupted him again. He looked behind him and saw the raven from before approaching from the distance. It cried out as it flew past him, so low he felt the wind from its wings ruffle his hair. He watched as it soared over the lake towards the distant village. Blinking, he also realized at once that the black canoe had drifted much closer to him. He waded out into the clear water, knee-deep, to grab hold of it.
He climbed in. The morning sun disappeared behind low clouds.
The raven circled high above him as he made his way across the lake. As he drew closer, he realized something: not a single person could be seen there.
When he arrived to the other shore, the silence was deafening. He found footprints in the marshy loam near the water near where he had seen the canoe upon arriving, like someone had been pacing the shore and pushed the boat out onto the water for him. Walking through the village, he saw storefronts and homes. One house had a wood stump in its yard with a pile of chopped wood in a pile on one side, and unchopped on the other. An axe laid flat on the stump, like someone had abandoned the project halfway through.
“Hello?” he called out. There was no answer, but for a moment, there was a sound like rustling whispers.
He began to look inside windows and found more and more evidence of people, but no evidence of where they had gone. Eventually, he came to a long, cafeteria-like building with the doors standing open. Inside, a variety of food lined every table, fresh and steaming: salmon and halibut, wild berries, goat cheese, seal, and venison, all seasoned with every spice imaginable. He couldn’t imagine such a feast would be abandoned by the entire village.
This would be a good place to wait, he decided. After all, nobody would notice if he took just a few bites. Curiously, he hadn’t been hungry, but the food looked so good he couldn’t resist tasting it.
As he ate, the whispers grew louder. His senses sharpened. He tasted notes of warmness and bitterness in the spices he hadn’t noticed before. He smelled wood and the murky fog of haze hanging from the clouds overhead. He heard the bustle return—dogs barking, the dull hum of conversation outside, footsteps scraping against grass and stone paths. Most of all, he began to see things. Vague shapes and outlines moving around him. He kept eating until they became ghostly shades of humans inside the cabin, whispering to themselves and to him.
“You’ve returned.”
“Does he know? Does he see us?”
He slowed and stopped eating. They must have noticed him looking around at them. One woman approached around his age. She seemed so familiar, but he couldn’t place why. The raven perched on her shoulder, its tail feathers twitching with its rapid heartbeat.
“Do you remember me?” she asked.
“Remember you? I don’t understand. Who are you? What is this village?”
She was visibly upset for a moment, her brows drawing in and mouth pursing as though she wanted to say something, but couldn’t. “This is the Village of the Dead. Your home.”
He recoiled from the woman’s shade, bracing his arms against the table. “This isn’t my home! I have no memory of this place!”
“Every night, you venture out into the Ghost Lands. Every day, you return with your memory lost. Please,” she pleaded, “won’t you just stay this time?”
She reached a ghostly hand out to him, but he pulled back. Looking down at himself, he realized he, too, was becoming a shade.
“What are you saying? That I’m dead?” he said, his voice rising.
“You’re a spirit, like the rest of us. When you died, your spirit came to rest here, in the village.”
“No, that’s impossible. I’m not dead.”
“You are! I saw it happen—we died together! Why can’t you accept that? Why won’t you stay?” Angry tears collected in the woman’s eyes. The raven cawed and flapped its feathers at him.
He shook his head. He couldn’t believe it—not without proof. “Then where is my body?”
She sighed and smoothed down the raven’s feathers, collecting herself and squaring her shoulders in resignation. “It’s in the coffin box on the side of the trail.”
“I have to go see it. I need to know for sure.”
“You do this every time,” she said. “You leave and you forget and you return, because this is the only place you have to return to. And then you refuse to believe, so you leave again.”
He pushed through the spectral crowd to the door, speeding away.
The woman looked at the raven on her shoulder. “When he wakes up, lead him back again.”
It took off after him with a cry.
She sighed, wiping her eyes. “Maybe this will be the last time.”
Author's note:
This story is somewhat of a re-imagining of the Tlingit story “The Ghost Land” with some inspiration also taken from “The Land of the Dead.” I was pleasantly surprised to find what we would probably refer to as ghost stories in this collection, and I immediately knew I wanted to rewrite one of them.
In “The Ghost Land,” the main character sets out to find the village of spirits because he is grieving over his recently deceased wife. Walking on the "Death Trail," he eventually comes to a lake and calls to the village on the other side. He finds his wife there, who warns him not to eat any food the villagers there give him. She returns with him to their home village, but that night, when the husband goes to sleep, he passes away too, and they return to the ghost land together. In “The Land of the Dead,” the story begins with a woman dying and being put into a “grave box,” but she is then woken up by her deceased grandfather, who tells her she is not dead. I combined the two ideas to write a story about a man who is wandering with no memory of why he is there, and doesn’t realize he’s dead.
The biggest appeal of these two stories is that they are about a place. When I wrote this piece, I left out all reference of time, so it could be set in any era. Because, of course, places don’t evaporate with time. I also added the raven in reference to the other stories in the collection, for Raven, a trickster god common in Alaskan myth.
Sources:
The Ghost Land, from Myths and Legends of Alaska, edited by Katharine Berry Judson
The Land of the Dead, from Myths and Legends of Alaska, edited by Katharine Berry Judson
First Americans: Tlingit Food
Image:
Raven on Pixabay
