The Alehouse at the End of the World Read online

  Advance Praise for

  The Alehouse at the End of the World

  “This island of the dead is more active than a lot of retirement communities. Richly conceived, enjoyable, and a treat for readers of myths and legends.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The talented and erudite Stevan Allred is a natural storyteller, weaving together in The Alehouse at the End of the World various threads of Eastern and Western myth, fable, and legend, into an inviting, raucous romp through the lands of the dead, where a lonely fisherman, accompanied by an entertaining cast of avian co-conspirators, wanders in search of his long-lost beloved. You will frequently gasp, occasionally wring your hands, and always delight at Mr. Allred’s sharp ear for dialogue, unerring instinct for suspense, and magisterial command of the fanciful world that may await us all in our next life.”

  —Michael Shou-Yung Shum, author of Queen of Spades

  “The Alehouse at the End of the World will take you on a fast-moving ride through sixteenth-century farce with a present-tense echo effect. Bard-like in its constellation of bird-gods and rough hewn characters tossed around like breadcrumbs, the epic voyage catches you between laughter and a tear forming at the edge of your eye. Like life does.”

  —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

  “Like the best ales, The Alehouse at the End of the World grows more flavorful and complex with each page as Allred pours you a well-balanced, fantastical story of love, adventure, and deceit. This brewer enjoyed it to the last drop!”

  —Lisa Allen, Head Brewer at Heater Allen Brewing

  “A book rich in love and life and death and language and magic. You wonder where a tale of a crow and a blue-skinned fisherman could lead, and it turns out to be a wild journey of masterly storytelling, sneaky humor, bracing sensuality, and deliciously tricksy words.”

  —Shawn Levy, author of Dolce Vita Confidential

  and Paul Newman: A Life

  “Allred’s imagination staggers the imagination.”

  —Jan Baross, author of José Builds a Woman

  “The Alehouse at the End of the World will swallow you whole. You’ll land on the Isle of the Dead and walk with the fisherman who longs for his beloved. The crow will repel you with his solipsistic drama, and the goddess will seduce you as part of her plan. Stevan Allred’s luscious language drives the novel, and his playful remix of lyrics and religious systems satisfies deep questions about the afterlife and the soul, which he describes as “a vibration so quiet it can scarcely be heard . . . the thing that gives self-awareness.” Reading this novel delights like a fine ale.”

  —Kate Gray, author of Carry the Sky

  “Stevan Allred, armed with an abiding love of narrative, and an arsenal of sentence-by-sentence wit and tumble, draws us into an epic battle for the soul of the afterworld, and we are led ever on by language dangerously funny. The creatures that illuminate this journey with their eternal ponderings and arguments are not necessarily human except in their search for reason and love, driven as they are by power, sex, and the beautiful mystery of death.”

  —Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange

  “Crows and fishermen, gods and goddesses, love and deceit, boats full of the dead, clams that are much more than clams, an island inside the belly of the beast, and batches and batches of ale. The Alehouse at the End of the World is a comic epic that made me feel like us messy mortals can actually make a difference.”

  —Yuvi Zalkow, author of A Brilliant Novel in the Works

  “Stevan Allred has spun an original myth with its own vocabulary and weather system. The imagery alone has impressed new memories upon my psyche. Peculiar and inventive yet true to the human condition, The Alehouse at the End of the World holds familiar tyrants and temptations, confronted in the most unexpected ways by an unforgettable cast. The experience I found in these pages is the reason I read—to reach inconceivable places, to be touched, to be changed. By canoe, winged goddess, or whale, I would follow Allred anywhere.”

  —Renee Macalino Rutledge, author of The Hour of Daydreams

  “The Alehouse at the End of the World mines our primal desire to go through the looking glass or the back of the wardrobe. Stevan Allred is an ingenius guide. His Isle of the Dead is a dark place that crackles with life, full of shapeshifting, bed-switching heros fighting for the fate of the living world. An epic tale from a master storyteller.”

  —Scott Sparling, author of Wire to Wire

  “Alehouse echoes ancient myths of creation and undoings in the practice of love with a blend of Shakespearean comedy and Melvillian language on a classic odyssey to the end of the world and beyond. Trust me, people. This is the wildly inventive and lovingly hilarious work of a master craftsman.”

  —Robin Cody, author of Ricochet River

  “There’s all manner of craziness in The Alehouse at the End of the World: a giant beast who’s swallowed the spirit world, a hairless blue fisherman, a trio of shape-shifting god-birds, a self-aggrandizing (Trumpian?) crow, the Isle of the Dead, a feathered goddess, and a dead woman who’s . . . well, you’ll see. Yet underneath these fantastical guises lie the same hearts that can be found in all of us; some are kind, some are driven, some are evil, some are insatiable, and in spite of their nonhuman forms, they are all so very human. In this magical world, the net of a dark fate tightens around the existence of this motley crew, and an apocalypse brews on the horizon.”

  —Dianah Hughley, bookseller, Powell’s City of Books

  §

  Praise for A Simplified Map of

  the Real World (Forest Ave, 2013)

  “Funny, sensual, piercing, honest, witty, and a braided woven webbed stitch of stories and people unlike anything I ever read. It catches something deep and true about the brave and nutty shaggy defiant grace of this place. Fun to read and funner to recommend.”

  —Brian Doyle, author of Mink River

  “Beautifully crafted and marked by incisive wit.”

  —Kristine Morris, reviewer, Foreword Reviews

  “Stevan Allred’s stunner of a debut novel is a complex portrait of small-town life.”

  —Maria Anderson, reviewer, Necessary Fiction

  “A Simplified Map of the Real World is a highly-skilled collection of interwoven stories, surprising in its various styles and voices. But the real surprise is how close Stevan Allred gets to the beating heart of what it means to be human. Petty, profane, sacred, scared, hilarious. We’re all in this book. And that’s quite a triumph.”

  —Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

  “The most skillfully-woven collection of linked short stories I’ve read to date.”

  —Stefanie Freele, reviewer, Late Night Library

  “Stevan Allred’s characters are delightfully wrong-headed. They make questionable choices—sometimes terrible ones—and get themselves into all kinds of trouble. But the worse their mistakes, the more I care for them, because beyond their difficulties what Allred gives them is the essential dignity of longing. No matter how misguided, all strive toward some ideal, and no matter what mess they make of their circumstances, they end up more alive for having given themselves over to desire. To read their stories is to journey through passions that transcend the confinements of small town life—and it’s a journey that’s by turns funny, surprising, and heartbreaking.”

  —Scott Nadelson, author of The Next Scott Nadelson

  “For years I’ve been teaching Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty in my Literature of the South class and didn’t think there was a short story writer who held up next to these two. Well, finishing A Simplified Map, I put Stevan Allred with them.”


  —Michael Strelow, author of The Greening of Ben Brown

  “From one story to another, through the years, these every day people may be villains and then victims, painted with the same brush but viewed from different angles, in different light.”

  —Brian Juenemann, The Register-Guard

  Table of Contents

  Advance Praise

  BOOK ONE: The Rise of King Crow

  BOOK TWO: The Congress of Crows

  BOOK THREE: The Kiamah Awakes

  About the Illustrator

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Questions

  Some Notes from the Author

  Also by Stevan Allred

  More Fiction Titles from Forest Avenue Press

  The

  Alehouse

  at the

  End

  of the

  World

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance these characters have to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  © 2018 by Stevan Allred

  Illustrations © 2018 by Reid Psaltis

  All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, with the exception of reviewers quoting short passages, without the written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 9781942436379

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Printed in the United States of America

  Forest Avenue Press LLC

  P.O. Box 80134

  Portland, OR 97280

  forestavenuepress.com

  for Nikki

  who is my beloved

  This is an old story, a story of a tyrant and a rebellion, of monsters and humans, of love and death. Know this: there are creatures who travel back and forth from the spirit world to the land of the living. There are moments when things both sacred and mundane slip the bounds of time and pass through from one side of the mortal veil to the other—a breath of song, an ancient incantation, a blade, a bucket, a silver chain. Fate demands that it be so and plays an endless game of gods and goddesses, of regents and rebels, of lovers and fools. The coin is tossed, spinning life and death through the air, and here, as the fire burns low and the hour grows late, the telling begins.

  BOOK ONE:

  THE RISE OF KING CROW

  The fisherman lived alone at the edge of the sea, in a shack beneath the shade of the tallest shore pine for leagues, on a bluff above a shallow cove. All his days he had worked the sea, as a sailor, and a carpenter, on ships both great and small, and as a fisherman, gillnetting for the fishmongers in the portside markets, or trailing a line from his skiff to feed only himself. He had sailed all the seven seas, and sailed seven more seas beyond those, and he had seen many things. Tattooed on his arms were the names of ships he had sailed, and of sailors with whom he had weathered storms, and escaped from monsters of the deep. On his chest he bore the likeness of his beloved, her face covered over now with curls of gray hair.

  He stood watching the waves. In his hands were a letter and a silver chain. The sea was calm that day, and light glanced in swift patches as the waves rose and broke. A thing of beauty indeed, but the fisherman had no eyes for beauty just then. The sea in front of him was thick with fish, and for that he should be thankful, but the letter in his hands had taken from him all sense of what was good about his simple life.

  The letter had appeared on the sand in front of his shack that morning, with no footprints leading to it, nor from it, as if it had fallen from the sky. The words were the words of his beloved, as told to her eldest son from her deathbed, and before she died, she had taken the silver chain from round her neck. Send it to him, she’d said, and tell him I waited. Tell him he is my one true love. Tell him I forgave him long ago, and that I will wait for him on the Isle of the Dead.

  He had been marooned here on this empty stretch of beach some several years, and he had given up all hope of making the arduous journey back to his beloved. It was here he would live out his meager life. Or so had he thought.

  He put the silver chain round his neck. Fate was calling to him, telling him to find his way back to the woman he loved. He spread his arms, and he trembled in the whole of his body as tears fell from his eyes, and he turned his face to the heavens.

  “I surrender,” he shouted. “Do with me as you will.”

  In answer the waves kept breaking, lapping one over the other on the wet sand at his feet. The gulls cried their shrill cries as they rode the sea breezes above him, scouting for fish. The wind blew across his bare chest and ruffled the wisps of hair on his head. To be a fisherman was to be patient, and if he had learned one thing in his years on the earth, it was to know how to wait for the answer without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. He felt the rise and fall of his chest. He hoped to hear the voice of his beloved call to him from out of the wind, but he heard only the shush of the waves breaking on the sand. Tiny crabs scuttled back and forth with the lap of the waves. The wind died down.

  A squadron of pelicans gathered down the beach from him, milling about, clucking and croaking to one another, gradually working their way closer, until some were less than an oar length away. The one closest regarded him with its yellow eye, tilting its head from side to side. It bore a pine twig in its bill, freshly torn from one of the shore pines. A drop of pitch glistened on the torn end of the twig.

  Ah. Thus came the message. If he were to go to the Isle of the Dead, he would need something to light his way. He must prepare himself.

  One by one the pelicans turned to face the waves, until the whole squadron stood together, pointing at the sea with their bills striped red and blue. He heard the sound of human speech in their avian voices.

  “This way,” they croaked. “This way.”

  §

  The frigate bird had watched from his perch in the shore pine since before dawn, and when the fisherman went to weed the meager patch of maize behind his shack, the frigate bird swooped down low and dropped the letter, with the silver chain folded within it, in front of the fisherman’s door. Then he flew back to his perch to bide his time while events played themselves out, for he did not wish to be seen. Not just yet. A great deal, he suspected, depended on what the fisherman did next.

  If the fisherman took the bait, he had only to oversee the beginning of the fisherman’s voyage, and for this, he had prepared well. The loom was dressed, as it were, the warp in place, and ready to receive the weft. When he was done he would return to the shore and find a celebratory mug of ale. There was a chicheria in Chancay, some sixty leagues north, where a passable ale was served alongside the local chicha, but if memory served, there was a true alehouse in the port city of Chimbote, some seventy leagues farther on. He’d fallen in with a pirate there once who’d bought him several mugs of ale and then tried to slit his throat so he could gut him for dinner. Men were always thinking that a bird of his size would make a tasty roast. He’d left the man clawed and bloodied, his cheek marked for life with a four-toed scrawl, and he’d stolen his purse of doubloons for good measure.

  He was, as he freely admitted to himself, a piratical bird. As he had brought the letter from the Spice Islands to the fisherman, nothing had given him more pleasure than the several times he’d stopped a thief bent on robbing him. Beings such as himself still walked the earth, but they were rare, and a six-foot-tall frigate bird who strode into an alehouse with a spyglass and a pistola stuck into his belt, and who said “Avast there, ye blackguards, best not snatch that letter tucked into me belt or I’ll put a ball from me pistola right between your beady little eyes”—well, that was a bird who put a fright into a whoreson’s heart the likes of which he had never felt before.

  The Turropsi{1} had given the frigate bird a long life, and during it he’d killed men when he had to, though mostly in his own defense. He had stolen what h
e needed when he needed it, and while he preferred to steal from those who were themselves greedy and had too much, this was no hard and fast rule, and he was not above doing whatever his own survival required. He had cheated fools, for there were many who could be cheated upon in the land of the living, with no one ever the wiser until it was too late.

  But he had never cheated the Turropsi. He was their servant, and always had been. He did what was asked of him, for the Turropsi had mothered him into being, and they had given him special license to be the brigand he was. Ages went by when they asked nothing of him, and when they did ask for his services, he was given his tasks only one or two at a time, lest his own foreknowledge interfere with the weaving of their pattern.

  Now the fisherman came back from weeding his maize, and found the letter. He searched the sand for footprints, which made the frigate bird chuckle, as there were none. Then the fisherman opened the letter, and out poured the silver chain, so finely made that it flowed like water into his hand. He put the chain round his neck, and the frigate bird’s eyes were keen enough that he could see the fisherman’s tears welling up. The fisherman looked up at the sky, his arms spread, and then out to sea.

  Ha! thought the frigate bird, the letter has done its work. He waited the rest of the day on his perch, enjoying a well-earned rest from all the flying he had done to get there. The fisherman made preparations for a sea voyage, honing his knife, checking the sail and the oars for his skiff, and gathering pitch to make pitch balls, which he then threaded on the silver chain. The frigate bird watched the sunset, which ended with a green flash of light as the last bit of the sun set below the horizon. A sign, he thought, of good fortune ahead.