Salish Horror (Draft I)

A man born under mysterious circumstances. A stigma between races. A legend gone but not forgotten.

Chief Miakoda the Salish Horror (Draft I)

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” - Howard Philips Lovecraft.

The following legend is widely unknown and was passed down through a peaceful group of people known in their time as the Salish and the Kalispel. Their legends of vague mysticism might come off as superstition but one must keep this in mind -- the universe is infinite and the forces within it are unknown. Many phenomena have been rationalized by science, and religion attempts to solve phenomena in a similar way that legends do. However, there are phenomena that cannot be explained by either and are simply not the workings of chemical reaction, God’s divinity, Poseidon’s might, or in this case, the Raven’s supernatural power. This legend is the best explanation that the tribesmen of the Salish could give based on their understandings of the world unabashed by other cultures. A phenomena. Perhaps inexplainable cosmic interference. Within an infinite loop of universe, it would be highly improbable that humans are the only forms of intelligent life. The spectrum and understanding in which humans view the universe is remarkably narrow as it is limited to Earth; a mere spec floating silently in an ocean shared with other specs, currents, and perhaps giants. So narrow, in fact, that the inability to conceive the unknown thereby causes humans to suffer from subtle to severe cases of anxiety, which leads to fear. Humans are supernatural in regards to the rest of the creatures of Earth because they possess the ability to reason beyond other organisms that they know of. Heightened ability to reason is not a tool to solve the universe. That cannot be achieved by humans or by their invented creations. It must be shown to them. But to show humans the power and the answer of the universe would also either destroy humans or save them. The sequel to Prometheus will be the end of the next evolution of Human kind. While humans remain in a state of both simultaneous life and death, they cannot succeed as natural beings while they are trapped in a box unseen. They rebel against their place in the universe as of present. The following legend is a legend of anxiety, fear, and phenomena (like many) that could only be explained if the universe spoke in a voice which Man could decipher. 

-The Northwest- 

Desert; clad in endless sage spread across swollen and bulbous hills that roll strangely, and valleys; trapped in time away from the oceans and fault lines but not so far to reap bounty of their power. This sacred place is fed by the rich and teeming waters of the Columbia River and protected by the wise and stern mountains surrounding. Scorching hot and arid summers contrasted equally by brisk and gripping winters. The desert lands of what are now Eastern Oregon, Washington, and Southern Idaho border a wide and trailing river; let free from an enormous and ancient prehistoric glacier in the North where it so freely and with unyielding force carved out what is known now as the Columbia River Gorge. The river spread further still into several tributaries that tangle and twist wildly like giant watery roots through immense woodlands that eternally gaze out on the Channeled Scablands to the West. A land once claimed by the Kalispel and the Salish people between the regions of Kootenai to the North and of Coeur d’Alene to the South forms the setting of the following legend. A rail road separated the land as yet another solution to Manifest Destiny.

The rail road.

It cut like a crude bone saw through the land. Locomotives tore through the land day in and day out mocking the Salish tribesmen. The Red men of the Kalispel and the Salish watched with patient and hungry eyes from their remaining lands; like starving beasts kept in cages.

It is said that on one black night, a tribesman called Cocheta delivered a boy during an earthquake. The moon was wet that night and seemed to drip with horrifying fury a fiery liquid down to Earth making it shudder. The baby boy was called Miakoda. Miakoda grew far slower than his kin. When he was at the age of 5, he had not appeared to change but only got larger in size while retaining the same new born features though they were distorted from the intense growth. Miakoda’s head was flattest of and most prominent within his people. This was because of his astounding long lived infancy that allowed his bound head to continue to be altered. By the age of 10 he resembled more like a toddler. He began to suffer from tortuous ailments. He twitched often and had almost constant head aches and cride so frequently that his voice began to turn from like the soft dew-kissed grass into the driest chunks of clay. Time wore on and his features and ailments became oddities to the surrounding tribes. They began to believe that Miakoda was the cause of their people’s anger and hostility toward the White man. The Salish felt that Miakoda was a gift from the spirit world brought by the Raven through the gateway of the moon to punish the White man. They believed that Miakoda was a tool of destruction. A dark engineer of malevolence. 

The Salish and surrounding tribes feared him though they tried not to show it. Miakoda’s senses were the same as those around him, however. He was stronger and had more wisdom than any man or woman around. His bitterness and hatred for the White man brewed long and hard and the embodiment and physical manifestation of this obscene and perverse rage was focussed on the railway. He stirred nearly every night at the sound of the trains. Their bells and whistles and other contraptions that made harsh and threatening roars through the natural scene-scape drove him into obsession. He knew he must take it away and make it his own. His own mechanical tool. Miakoda continued slowly to grow and watched those around him die until he became chief.

One night, he went down to the tracks alone whilst the other tribesmen were sleeping and observed their seemingly complex makeup and began to deconstruct it within his mind so that he might learn through observation how it operated. Just then, a vibration sound down the way and the train began to approach him screaming maniacally. He followed it to a station a few miles off. He wanted more than anything to climb aboard and see the rest of the alien machine. But he could not. He spotted nearby on a separate track, a lone engine and train car. No one stirred and he climbed aboard.

He returned to the lone engine several nights until he learned the mechanics through dis and re-mantling parts of it. He shared his knowledge with the tribesmen and drew pictures of the parts to them and made them understand its simple workings using White man cast metals and such blasphemies. 

One quiet and queer night, all of the tribesmen climbed down the hills and followed Miakod’s disfigured formation that sufferlessly hobbled with strong vigor toward his obsession. They waited at the train station out of sight. After a long and anticipated wait, a train approached. When it stopped, Chief Miakoda gave the signal and his tribesmen raided the train full of passengers and made brutal massacre of all of them leaving none alive. Their bodies were strung high and low inside the cares of the train. Sinews of muscle and internal organs were strung like decor. Bones were removed and attached to the outside fixings. Their battle cries were deafening and insane. Women, children, and men were all slaughtered in the name of Miakoda and his will. Miakoda operated the train with two other trained men as engineer, driver, and boilerman.

They drove the train down a mining track that was seldom used for passenger trains and began reworking the engine to their own needs. They removed the bells and whistles. They dimmed the headlights with blood. And finally, they took down all the bodies and used them as fuel for the train.

The next night the Salish tribe undr Miakoda drove the engine and cars as if it were a regular scheduled train having learned the logs and schedules from a journal kept from the butchered engineer in precession. Upon stopping, the watched the horrified faces of the White men as they came to a slow stop. The engine hissed and the smell of burning flesh and diesel fuel filled the air with a dark and noxious fume. The potential passengers were eagerly greeted by battle cried and almost inhumane shrieks that echoes into their very being and rattled their minds into instant trauma. Again, none were left alive.

Day after day the train traversed across from station to station as long as the track ran continually murdering dozens of people at a time until Miakoda had vanished. The tribesmen scattered unknowing where he had gone. They thought that his goal must have been reached and his presence no longer needed. As for the engine, it too was dismantled by the tribesmen after Miakoda’s disappearance. They found it suiting to bury it near the old train station where their massacres started.

Later, mitnesses out at night (sometimes children or young adults seeking mischief, drunken accounts, and occasional strangers and passer by’s) told stories about an irregular and guttural chanting heard in a bass voice in chaotic harmony with a droning hum and a locomotive chug in the distance beyond view at the station. They are always frightened or curious, these witnesses. The train gradually gets louder though they see nothing. Then. They see it. The dim reddish glow of the moon and of a headlight beyond the bend in the trees and the foul and abominable stench of diesel and burning bodies as the train begins to near. A ghastly phantom train charging at unholy speeds smashing through the station and through the onlooker as an ear-splitting sound echoes through them and the morbidly disfigured visage of Chief Miakoda bursts into their mind when they close their eyes driving some (it has been said) to throw themselves upon the tracks in a maddened attempt to free themselves from the horror.

Author's Note

This is a draft; not finished