Eyes in the Clouds

[Content warning: fantasy violence, horror, mentions of suicide]

The local folk of the Phantom Stretch had always whispered of eyes in the clouds, but some kinds of terror must be suffered before they can be understood. Foolhardy wanderers paid little mind to what they called the idle chattering of superstitious forest dwellers. The gunslinger had burned the discovered corpses of a few such ignorant outsiders in her time. She’d burned friends, as well, and lost more of those than she’d burned. Some had left border towns destined for the wastes and simply vanished without a trace. 

She’d never dared to walk the Stretch alone, in the light of a sun that offered little warmth. Even the locals never left the protection of their forest during the day. The gunslinger marked their grim expressions as they watched her load up her mule in the twilight of morning. None here knew her name, and she recognized few faces. 

Their eyes held a long-suffering grief, a vague sadness that the Phantom Stretch would claim the life of another stranger and they would be the last to lay eyes on her. She felt a pang of gratitude that these meek nocturnal folk had awoken to witness her departure. Surely the oldest of them must have long ago grown weary of bidding farewell to doom-driven outsiders. 

None dared try to stop her, of course. The same eyes that pronounced her a dead woman widened at the cargo loaded on the back of her mule. Local and outsider alike recognized the worth of a raptor cape. She’d skinned the beast only minutes ago, after days of tracking through the dense winter woods. 

The cape was worth its weight in gold unless she failed to cross the Stretch and reach a border town before sunset. Raptors spent their nights buried in the dirt and only walked the world under sunlight, vulnerable as they were to the gloom of nighttime. The rising moon would make dust out of the cape.  

She’d seen other specimens in the collections of wealthy townsfolk, carefully preserved underground. If the gunslinger could get the cape under an inn’s sturdy roof before nightfall, then she’d be able to seek out an interested buyer. After years of living on scraps and hunting meager bounties to get by, she’d be able to build something of a life for herself. 

All that stood in her way was the Phantom Stretch. Eyes in the clouds, whispered the locals. Ghosts of the sunlight. In the border towns, people laughed at such stories. Backwards superstition. An invented tale, to hide the bitter truth that older villagers sometimes walked out into the cold with nothing but the clothes on their backs so that their families would not starve. Better to say they had been snatched up by ghosts that none had ever seen. 

The gunslinger knew better. Had any soul ever brought back tales of what it felt like to fall off the sky-straddling cliffs of Otro Gaves? Did a condemned man pen recollections of the executioner’s axe passing through his neck? That no one had ever seen these ghosts and lived spoke only to the dangers of her quest.

The village elder peeled off from the watching crowd, his walking stick making perfect little circles in the snow. The gunslinger was strapping her gear onto her mule when he tapped her ammo belt with the end of his stick. 

“How many left?” 

“Three,” the gunslinger answered. Most of her bullets were deeper in the forest, left inside the corpses of the wicked weasel-wolves that often harried hunters. She’d shot the last one down just before its teeth would have socketed into her calf. “Will three be enough?” 

“You believe in the cloud ghosts?” 

“I know that you people believe in them. I know you’ve lived generations walking the Stretch, but never during the day. Has to be a reason. Why not ghosts from the sky?” 

“If you believe, then you’ll wait until dark.” There was a pleading note in his voice. The gunslinger couldn’t meet his eyes, couldn’t suffer the despair in their watery depths. “You want to be the wise outsider? The one that heeded our warnings, the one that lived? Then accept our hospitality, gladly offered. Weather out the daylight in the safety of our home. Let that cape meet the moonrise and crumble into nothing.” 

She knelt to attach snowshoes to her mule’s hooves. The snow would be deep out there in the wastes. Too deep for riding horses, or else she might have ridden across in a fraction of the time. 

The elder turned away. “Then let the Stretch claim yet another fool. We wash our hands of you.” 

The gunslinger didn’t look at the grim-faced villagers again until she had her mule’s reins in hand. She tucked her graying hair into a high bun on the back of her head and covered it with her wide-brimmed hat. With her thick fur coat pulled tight around her shoulders, she felt almost warm in the heady light of dawn. Almost. 

“The ghosts cannot abide darkness,” called out the elder, desperation in his tone. He stood among his people like a beating heart. “Seek the dark if you must, outsider. Save your final shot.” 

She nodded and turned her back to the village. The gunslinger led her mule through the last patch of forest with the elder’s dire warnings echoing through her head. It didn’t bode well that he recommended death by her revolver over whatever fate the ghosts had in store for her. 

How many others had he offered the same warning? It wasn’t unusual for night-time parties crossing the Stretch to find lone corpses bereft of their mounts, clutching the frozen pistols they’d used to administer their own swift ends. If what the villagers whispered was true, then perhaps these poor souls had been the lucky ones. 

The gunslinger broke through the timberline with her mule and its bounty to behold the Phantom Stretch glowing under cursed daylight. Tales and poems had been written of its eerie blankness, as if the gods had made this part of the world first. A failed prototype, a discarded first draft. There were no features to distinguish the landscape, no copses of evergreens or jagged glaciers; only the rising snow-covered land, only a steady cold climb with no cover. 

The elder had been mad to speak of hiding in the darkness. This was a place without shade, where the clouds cast no shadows, where there was no escaping the gaze of the yearning sky. She felt eyes crawling on her as soon as she stepped out of the last tree’s shadow. 

In the forest she’d been a hunter, a predator; even the foul spirits of those weasel-wolves had been forced to acknowledge her superiority. Now, trudging through the snows of the Phantom Stretch, the gunslinger could not escape the sensation of being hunted. The attention of some unworldly entity crept across her snow-dusted hat, passed over the scarf covering her lower face, and seemed to pass straight into her skull. 

Was it her imagination, or did spectral fingers stretch down from the clouds to reach inside her head? A more frightening question soon dawned on her. If you’ve never felt your mind and soul violated by malevolence, then how do you recognize the sensation? 

Her mule whimpered and halted. When the gunslinger turned to comfort it, she froze. 

A pale face hovered in the air above, wearing the features of an old hunter who’d disappeared months ago. In her memories the long-bearded man was smiling over a steaming mug and relating some story of the wastes. 

Now his face was twisted into an expression of gruesome agony. She knew without thinking that he’d died with this expression, that she was seeing his final seconds frozen in time. 

The face made a groaning sound without moving its mouth. Writhing tendrils that resembled gutworms tethered the dead man’s face to the clouds above. A rope that was not a rope, falling from the sky like a fisherman’s line. She made the mistake of meeting the face’s eyes just as she realized it was much too big to fit on any human neck. 

It moved without sound, faster than her eyes could follow. 

Rubbery lips closed around her forehead and something like a tongue slithered around the brim of her hat, trying to find a way in. The gunslinger drew her revolver and fired twice. 

She barely heard her mule scream over the ringing in her ears. Her back hit the packed snow and she scrambled away, deaf from the gun’s discharge and half-blind with panic. 

Her mule screamed again, this time in torment. The gunslinger’s eyes found the quivering cloud tether and followed it down. Her trembling mule stood on its hind legs like some horrid facsimile of a man, its head swallowed entirely by the dead-faced creature. The mule’s hooves kicked dumbly, sending up little clouds of snow. 

Her shots hadn’t even hurt the thing. The mule’s panic had drawn it away. 

The cloud tether throbbed and pulsated. Something was drawn from the mule up into the sky. She rubbed her eyes twice before believing them: her mule’s silhouette was growing less distinct by the second, as if it was fading from the world. 

In less than a minute she was able to see distant trees through the mule’s flank. The raptor’s cape slipped from its back–no, damn it all, through its back–into the snow. A few seconds later, her other packs joined it. In another minute, she realized with a terrible dread, the mule would be gone. 

There would be no reaching the forest in time. The gunslinger wrapped her trembling fingers around her revolver and pulled back the hammer, readying her final shot. 

She’d be lucky to die here. Her body would probably be found, unless it snowed. The few people who knew her name would have some closure. Maybe the village elder would take comfort in her easy death. He’d spoken wisely with his final words. Compared to what was happening to her mule, to what had happened to the old hunter, this bullet would be a mercy. 

The glorious sensations of life swelled as if to give her one last taste of all she was about to lose. The freezing snow against her back, the sunlight on her stiff face, even the ache in her knees from falling; all of it seemed as bright and wonderful as ambrosia on her lips. But then she looked to the still cloud where the old hunter’s face had come from, where her mule’s terror-stricken head was likely taking shape. 

One shuddered to imagine the stolen souls in the sky, trapped between life and death. She took a deep breath and pressed the revolver’s barrel against her chin. Cold, bracing steel on her skin. A comfort. A mercy. She looked towards the horror again. 

The ghost squirmed over her mule, gulping down its soul. Her poor mount was a mere outline against the snow, now. Save your last shot, the elder had said. The ghosts cannot abide darkness. He’d meant the darkness of death, surely, the darkness that was just one gunshot away. What other darkness was to be found out here, in the wide open waste of the Phantom Stretch? 

Her finger lifted from the trigger, and her eyes found the fallen raptor’s cape. The mule vanished with a whimper. 

If her mule’s terror had lured the creature away before, then her surge of confidence must have stunned it now. Only that could explain how she was able to rush across the snow to the cape and throw it over her head before the face could lunge. At the last second, it twisted towards her with something indescribable dripping from its beard.  

The gunslinger’s nose filled with the scent of blood and that gamey aroma unique to raptors. She went still underneath her created darkness, not even daring to adjust the cape to better cloak her shoulders. 

Snow shifted at her feet. The gunslinger looked down. 

The old hunter’s too-large face peered up at her. It had churned through the snow to pass under the Raptor’s cape. As the shadow fell on it, that expression of final death finally unfroze.

Pale flesh quickened with blood. Spectral hairs shifted from blue to gray, and an abominable self-awareness dawned in its eyes. Rubbery lips moved with a purpose other than dumb consumption. The gunslinger aimed her revolver.

“Please,” croaked the face of her old friend, blood bubbling in his mouth. “Ophelia, please–”

The gunslinger fired. 

***

The cape was ruined. Such things tended to happen when the sky rained blood over a curiously specific area of the Phantom Stretch. One less cloud in the sky–and who knows how many souls the gunslinger had set free when her bullet split the old hunter’s stolen face? Her poor mule was at peace, and so was the man she’d once known. 

“Not a ghost,” she told the elder, after staggering back to the treeline under the protection of her bloody cape. The entire village had come out to watch the cloud-tether writhe and scream and bleed on the snow. Dozens of round faces paled in fear and awe. Little wonder the creature took so long to die, with all the lives it had sucked away. “Something worse.”

“Something worse,” he echoed, looking stricken. His hand trembled on his walking stick.

She steadied herself on a tree and followed his gaze. The other villagers were watching the wicked thing die, but the elder looked to the other clouds above the Phantom Stretch; the other hungry shapes that cast no shadows, that watched living souls hide in the meager protection of darkness. Yes, something worse.