The torchlight was barely sufficient in this wind. He buckled against the torch as close as he dared, only trying to prevent being burned. He was desperately trying to shield the pekid glow of torchlight that rattled against the snow with the bulk of his body. The snow was driving sideways and it pelted the right side of his face. Must be a westward squall. He felt the chill of the air down into the core of his bones. He was long past having cold feet and hands, they had been numb for what seemed like hours. Step after step he crunched through the pathless snow, with only a glimmer of hope in his heart for finding reprieve from the cold and dark.
It was as if someone answered him when he could see a small flicker of light on the horizon amidst the leafless winter trees and the impending dark of the middle of the night. He quickened his footsteps, fueling his exhausted legs with the weak and sickly combustion of hope that he allowed to creep into his psyche. With his quickened pace, the flicker in the distance slowly grew and brightened. It wasn’t so large as to be misconstrued as a bonfire, but it was large enough to know that it was real. He could see the dance of the flame, swaying in defiance of the harsh environment that it found itself inhabiting.
A dark shape began to materialize in the shortened horizon of his evening fire-lit wandering. The slanted roof and steep-pitched walls became more apparent the closer he got to the hulking silhouette. Maybe it was the hours of seeing nothing but the shadowed white of the snow under his feet, but it made his heart quicken as he set forward with even more intention. He had a craving for warmth and shelter, and he immediately felt an appreciable sense of urgency. Until now he was resigned to misery and a lack of motivation, but with thoughts of warming his hands and feet, he tapped into a new source of energy to carry him forward through the darkened blizzard.
Approaching the structure, the wind began to still. His torchlight steadied and the glow that it cast went from meager and sickly to steady and sure. What it illuminated before him felt like something he had seen before, but it had to have been simply a dream or his imagination. Maybe he was recalling a picture from a book that he had seen before, but there it stood, a sculpture of grandeur to his weary and near-frozen eyes. It was a post-and-beam construction house that looked as if it could have come out of a fairy tale in a German novel. The brown wooden beams were surrounded by the typical white mud and plaster. It had arched windows and an arched front door and a circus tent-style peaked roof that was clad in what he would have guessed were slate shingles. Inside of the most prominent in size of the arched front windows was a single glowing candle. His beacon in the fog and frozen landscape led him to stand on this doorstep. There was nothing else illuminated about the house, but from the arc of his torchlight, he could see that the house was built against the wall of a massive rock mountain that towered into the darkness above him, well above the tops of the cedars and pines that dotted the landscape around the cottage.
Having no sense of shame but a heavy desire for warmth, he approached the front door. As he got within 3 strides of the threshold, the arched oak door swung open silently on its hinges revealing an ink-black interior. The promise of solace from the frozen forest that he found himself becoming a part of through the last hours beckoned him inside without hesitation, so he walked through the doorway, his eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness within. He could hear his boots thump against the wooden floors under his feet, and when he turned around to look at the door in which he just walked through, he found it to be shut tight against the winds that bellowed outside.
The torchlight flickered spastically in the interior of the home, and in a short amount of time extinguished itself in an unceremonious fizzle. He could smell the remnants of the kerosene as it wafted from the once-lit torch head. He stood there in silence and darkness, hearing nothing but the quickness of his breath and the thud of his heartbeat in his chest. Feeling off balance without a source of light, he could feel his body sway in the pitch-black interior of the house as it tried to adjust its equilibrium. He noted that he was warm for the first time in longer than his memory allowed him to recall, so though it was dark here and without vision, his skin pricked against his skin in retort to its newfound source of heat.
He slowly waved his hands around him in a cautious sweeping motion, hoping to find something solid to help steady and orient himself in the sightless gloom of the interior of the house. He dared not to take a step for fear of where that action might find his feet, but he was running out of choices as he quickened the sweeping motion of his outstretched and probing hands. He slowed his breath and focused on his hearing, hoping for some sort of telling sound to give him an indication of what was going on around him.
As if s response to a question that he was silently asking himself such as “Now what do I do”, a flash of light filled his vision. He clenched his eyes against the sudden onslaught of light around him and allowed his eyelids to slowly open back up to give them time to adjust to the harsh change of illumination. What he saw next was not what he expected.
He was staring at a line of torches that reached into the darkness further than the edges of his vision into a pitch-black dot at the end of a tunnel that seemed like it was over a mile away. There was a stone staircase going downward into the torch-lit gloom through a tunnel that had to have been carved through the belly of the stone mountain. The air here was warm and inviting, but the descending staircase was long and ominous. He inhaled deeply of the air and a slight odor of iron greeted his senses upon their probing. He instinctively and reflexively bellowed a single word: “Hello-o-o-o-o-o” but the only reply was his own echo as it traveled into the belly of the mountain. Looking behind him he could see the oaken door still standing sentinel against the frozen and howling wind that was surely still bombarding it from its exterior. Still, though, he thought he should try to open it to secure an egress. The wood was smooth with hand-forged iron hinges at his edges but no door handle. He probed around the heavy door with his fingers finding nothing, which quickened his motions into a reactionary frustration in trying to find a way to open the door, but there was none.
Feeling defeated and backed into a proverbial corner, he turned back toward the staircase, and with no other choice and a multitude of reservations, he stepped forward taking the first step down. It was the first of many that would follow as the tunnel seemed to stretch on forever. There was a sense that graced his thoughts as he descended. It was one part fear but two parts curiosity with an underlying foundation of thankfulness for the warmth that he still found here. The torches sizzled happily in their iron sconces. There was no smoke produced, and they beckoned him onward into the unknown. It felt as if his destiny had led him to this point. The cold was uninhabitable and refuge was paramount, but this was far beyond what he imagined that refuge would be when he was freezing in the billowing snow and raging winds.
Eventually, after he had lost count of the distance he had traveled as he was lost in his thoughts and uncertainty, he came to the end of the descending corridor of stairs. There was a simple stone archway, with nothing but an inky black beyond that moaned beyond its threshold. Thinking of being cast into darkness once again, he relieved the last torch in the innumerable line of them from its sconce on the wall and stood for a few moments before the archway beckoned him onward. He walked through the doorway, his torchlight reluctantly piercing into the darkness that it contained. He was in a rough-hewn tunnel, its walls damp with condensation and moisture that caught the torchlight and sent it dancing into a makeshift and wonton display of twinkling stars on the walls around him. The tunnel curved to the right and he continued onward.
He could feel the weight of the stone around and above him as he penetrated the bowels of the mountain and the sensation was one of deep awe and a stark sense of scale. He was a tiny creature within a giant. The tunnel twisted and turned several times as he wandered further into the interior of the mysterious space that lay ahead of him. The ground was damp but solid stone, providing grip to the soles of his boots and giving security to his momentum. HE carried onward cautiously as he still felt as if the things ahead of him would somehow trump the mysteries behind him. The air was still warm, but the cool heart of stone seemed to breathe as he passed through what he instinctively started to consider one of its arteries. Where there are arteries, there is a heart, and he felt as if he was slowly clambering to the heart of the giant.
After innumerable turns and twists, he perceived the tunnel widening and growing taller as the walls slowly moved away from him and the echoes of his footsteps started to reverberate with a longer echo in the silence of the stone. His torchlight eventually lost its grasp on the ceiling the further he embarked into the unknown. Soon the walls were mere shadows in the distance and the echoes between footsteps grew from three seconds apart, then to ten, and then none at all. The feeling that he felt to his core was that of vastness and grandeur if only he could see. Occasionally he came across a tooth of stone, taller than he was jutting alone or with like company from the floor of what he now felt was a cave. He could hear the tinkling trickle of water and occasional plops as a droplet found its mark in an unseen puddle. His torchlight flickered in an unseen underground breeze. The feeling of the air here had cooled and it reminded him of an entity of unknown size breathing ever so slowly. The belly of a stone beast was a recurring thought.
Just as a pang of worry shuddered through his heart, he caught a dim glow in the far distance. It emanated with an eerie blue hue, a ghostly pallor in the gloom. The source was directly in front of him, though was many paces in the distance. Following an unknown light had led him here in the first place in those moments of frozen despair in the outside forest, and now he seemed to be chasing another far-flung light in the darkness as a foreboding theme became apparent to him in his onward travels. He hadn’t much choice but to continue onward in hopes of relief in lieu of peril. His now thawed legs ached from his travels, and the fatigue in his muscles sang a dull song to him with each footstep. He couldn’t stay here in the darkness, his only companion an acquiescent flame in hand, he must reach the destination of his travels, no matter the dread he continually had to keep at bay.
The azure glow grew stronger the further he ventured, and it struck him as beautiful against the palette of the now familiar cold gray stone and darkness. Now that he was closer he could see that it was emanating around a bend in the vast cavern that was abutted by an immense and sheer wall that jutted upward into the mysterious canopy of the cavern. He turned toward the light and saw that the cavern opened up into a gargantuan circular room. It wasn’t man-made, but the cavern was nearly spherical and although massive, nothing in comparison to the near-endless emptiness that he had just ventured through. The walls were rough and twinkled with dewy drops of condensate that clung to the naturally rough walls. The source of the light was finally found.
Through a hole in the ceiling of the chamber, many stories above the floor of the globe-shaped room streamed a course of what could only be sunlight. Had the storm passed? Had night turned to day? His questions only grew when he followed the beam of light he saw a pedestal. Not the stalagmite that he had come to think of as common, but one that was perfectly cylindrical and stood out as smooth against the otherwise coarse interior of his newfound chamber. He was too far away to tell what it displayed in its bath of what he assumed could only be sunlight, but he felt compelled to examine it closer. There seemed to be no other way out of the room aside from the way in which he arrived there, so he took a step forward followed by another as he approached the mysterious display.
As he got closer, he could make out a dark shape on the round surface of the pedestal. Closer still and it appeared to be a book. When he finally stepped up to the edge of the pulpit he found that his predictions were right. There in the center, bathed in glorious sunlight stood a tome. It was unlike anything that he had ever encountered before. He was used to gilded leather on fancy volumes or a cheaper thick paper on the lower quality versions of books, but here, woven in only a way that a natural medium would produce was what appeared to be an intricately hatched wicker tome. He ran his fingers over the rough but carefully constructed volume and felt warmth emanating off of it. That was impossible for such an object, but he allowed his hand to linger, and he internally corroborated with himself that it felt as if it had been basking in the sun on a summer’s day. He opined that it must be a condition of the sunlight, but found it strange that his hand now occupied a place within the beam of light but felt no warmth from it on his skin.
The edges were bound neatly with the same woody ivy, and the ivory page edges beckoned him to gaze upon them as they peeked between the borders of the front and back covers. He had reservations, but they were not outweighed by his curiosity toward the mystery of its contents. He let his finger find the edge of the woven wicker cover and he opened the book to the first page. Written on it in a language that he didn’t speak, but somehow understood it simply read “From here forward, the mystery is your prey, and you are its hunter. “The challenge was accepted before you knew it was offered to you. Henceforth you shall tell the tale. Your destiny is your own, and the path is laid. Travel well and bounteous spoils to your heart’s larder”.
He turned to the next page and the light of the room engulfed him and its entire interior with a light as bright as the sun. He instinctively raised his hand as a shield for his eyes and the warmth flowed over his body that was exuded from within him rather than from around him. He could hear the whip of wind and the song of birds. There too was the sound of a thunderstorm and the break of waves on a beach. He smelled woodsmoke and roses, petrichor, and salt breeze. His heart was full, and he accepted it all as a surmountable challenge that he could no more ignore than his need to breathe. His purpose was clear and his life was changed, though it was instinct rather than fact that told him so. The man became the teller of unknown tales to hungry ears and his heart was full for the first time in his life.
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The story above is true, as I believe that truth is found in dreams. That is where this one came from and it is the origin of The Wicker Tome. I have since imagined that dream when sleep alludes me, and the post-and-beam house has beckoned me into solace when my heart needs it most. I use the images that this dream has provided to give me serenity in times of trouble and it wasn’t until recently that I really began to understand what it meant to me. I wrote “The Wicker Tome” inside of a notebook that I have carried with me everywhere for over a decade knowing that it was important, but not exactly knowing why, but now I do. I have always had the heart of a writer, and I try to apply poetry to the mundane because, well, is anything really mundane when you pay attention to it? My stories commonly find roots that begin with my mother and my grandmother. Being from the Deep South and the southern parts of Appalachia, what are known as “wives’ tales” abound. You have probably heard some of them yourself. “Throw salt over your shoulder when you spill it to ward off bad luck”. “Hang a broom on your front door to ward off the witches and the evil and keep them from entering your home”. “When you see a cardinal in the yard, it is the ghost of a loved one coming to visit and let you know that they are okay and to bring you peace”. I could talk about these for more hours than I have spare, but they are there and they’re a part of the mortar and stone that my life is built on. I have often written about the things that bother me or the challenges that my heart places on my mind. It has been a refuge from the things that life tends to throw at you in its infinity of complications. Words help me to make sense of things. I imagine how so many others have stood in the rain or shouted into a cave and wondered who was the last to do that before them and really appreciate the moment of being in that exact place at that exact time. I have pondered the beauty of a praying mantis snapping water bugs from the surface of a stream and thought how beautiful it was. I can almost draw a line between my heart and a blooming flower, or see the hue of my skin in an autumn leaf, and I’ll probably never stop trying to complete those mysteries. I feel like there are others out there who feel the same way, and they have ears that perhaps would enjoy hearing the stories that I weave to make sense of not only my past but my future. I am a dreamer and a ball of anxious energy who has found peace in knowing that I can tell my tales to listening ears, and that’s why I am here with all of you over these airwaves and speakers and headphones. I hope that by speaking the truths of MY past and my imaginings of how this great mystery of life works on a mechanical level in harmony with my spirit that I can reach a resonant pitch within some of you. The Wicker Tome was my roadmap drawn from the ether of a dream. It is as real as I am sitting here speaking to you, and it has become a strand in the grain of my soul. We all face challenges, we are human. But we all share something even if we can’t define it. We were meant to impact the lives around us, and I thank you for searching the corners of the cobwebbed room that is my mind as I lead you on a tour of the things that give me goosebumps, nostalgic heartache, or even a sense of belonging when for so long I didn’t know which puzzle my piece fit. Now that I do I hope that you find the end of the line that I draw from my core outward into the darkness and we can connect into a map, no matter how badly drawn or meandering it may be, so that we can find one another in the end. My name is Kiley Owen. I am a hopeless dreamer. With The Wicker Tome, I invite you to join me. See all of you in the Darkness and the Shadows.