With my free hand I reach into my pack and pull out my shameful memento from that savage night. I hold up the jawbone and fasten it under the temporal plate, completing the skull. A full set of teeth smile at me, black-hole eyes not giving away if the grin is one of madness or mirth, or murder. None of this feels like Shakespeare, and none of the world is a stage, because the actors don’t die in a play.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For all of it.”
The skull says nothing, and I’m glad it doesn’t.
I emerge from the tiny catacomb, bring up my pack and the bag full of bones. The sun is beating down brightly now, the early clouds chased off to the horizon. I squint up into the sky, then look down at the boonie hat in my hand. It’s empty, all of its teeth gone. I tent it open with my fist, then put it on my head, the brim shading my eyes. It barely fits over my hair, but it fits.
I look down the hillside toward the path, where I’d left Chapel and the elephants, but all of them are gone. I knew this would be the case, even though I was hoping I’d be wrong. I wanted to talk to him a little more, if he was willing, about this and a lot of things. All those things I wish I’d asked and said, but he’s just a ghost now like the rest of them, and was heading back home.
I work my way down from atop the boulders and stand on the hillside, overlooking the valley and the river that once burned, ringed by the ridgeline that burned even hotter, soaked with the blood of that terrible night of horrors. The river would be set ablaze again soon, when the season was right, from now until the very end of things. Each flame a tribute to a wandering soul that wasn’t forgotten by those left behind. Hopefully there would be less this year, and less the year after. With any luck, there’d be one less flame on some other river further to the east very soon. Or as soon as I could find a place to properly bury what was I was carrying.
The bones in the bag rattle as they shift. I hold them up, hoping they’ll tell me something. A direction. An acceptance of my apology. But they don’t. Bones don’t speak. They’re only spoken for.
I lower the bag and look across the valley, toward the twin mountains. On the far end, just outside the tree line, Black Shuck rests on its haunches, watching me.
We regard each other, the valley stretching out between us, the river flowing silently down below.
Black Shuck stands, turns and begins to walk, its corded muscles gently rolling with powerful ease, shining in the sunlight. It stops after a few yards and turns its massive head back to me, tongue lolling over its long teeth, just like a dog. Not a hound. But a dog.
I shoulder my pack and collect my bag, contents clinking together with a peculiar music like marimba keys, and walk around the rim of the valley, heading toward the dog.
Black Shuck turns and walks again, slowly enough for two human legs to keep up. It’s heading east, the sun tells me. It’s heading to Vietnam—the bones tell me, mute no more—to where it was born, to where he was born, and where both of them need to return, to rest, and to die.
The dog is heading in the direction of the River, and so am I, traveling to where the water drains into the Great Nothing that waits for everything that escaped but eventually finds its way home.
Our steps find the rhythm of the other, four legs and two and two more in the bag, and we walk together, not side by side, but moving in the same direction, just like always. But this time, neither of us runs. We let the current take us.
About the Author
T.E. Grau is the author of the books They Don’t Come Home Anymore, Triptych: Three Cosmic Tales, The Lost Aklo Stories, The Mission, and The Nameless Dark (nominated for a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection), whose work has been published in various platforms around the world, translated into Spanish, Italian, German, and Japanese. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter, and is currently working on his second collection and second novel.
Advance Praise for I Am The River
“A sense of being hunted, and haunted, hits you right from the start of I Am The River. That mood only grows in intensity as the scope of this novel’s nightmare takes shape. It’s supernatural and geopolitical and an unforgettable time.”
“Grau’s poetic prose and stunning evocation of time and place… from the killing fields of Vietnam to the haunted alleyways of Bangkok, form a fever dream of copious bloodshed and many shades of gray.”
“I Am The River is the kind of thing that might happen if Algernon Blackwood had been brought in to do a rewrite of Apocalypse Now. A man barely holding onto his sanity in Bangkok remains haunted, stalked by a huge hound and undone by his own addiction. His only way out is through revisiting his past in the Vietnam War and the secret PSY-OPS mission he was involved in–and which he’s been running from ever since. A haunting meditation on war, death, addiction, and responsibility, with mind-blowing forays into the weird.”
“With echoes of Apocalypse Now and Peter Straub’s Koko, T.E. Grau’s blazing, immersive novel takes us on the hell-ride of the Vietnam War’s last days as its raging waters also carry us through the first of our last days. I Am The River is a hallucinatory tour de force.”
“An intelligent accumulation of inner and outer darkness.”
“A lush green nightmarish journey into the dark, reminiscent of the late, great Lucius Shepard.”
“I Am The River is a horror novel, yes, and it never skimps on its mission to unsettle us. It is also a book that finds horror not only in blood and shadows, but in the very real abysses that separate us: race, culture, and the manipulations of people by governments and by war. It moves quickly and intelligently from its first page to its last, evoking its nightmares in gorgeous, evocative, disturbing prose. A must-read!”
“I Am The River moves with fluid grace, flowing between times, places, and perspectives as it carries us through its protagonist’s surreal experience of the Vietnam War and his part in a covert mission which refuses to loose its grip on him. Located at the hot, humid intersection of O’Brien’s classic Going After Cacciato and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, this novel plunges us into war at its most extreme and insane, when the methods employed for defeating the enemy leave reason behind for terror and myth.”
“A disorienting and devasting evocation of the horrors of war and PTSD. T.E. Grau has written infused the War Novel with dark mythic imagery that sears like napalm.”