Tag Archives: Laur A. Freymiller

content warnings: oblique reference to sexual assault, some mild gore

What does hair smell like? Like sweat and amino acids? Like fingernails? Like death? 

The house exudes the scent of hair – animal, musky, erotic. It sits at the center of the dark and twisted woods. 

At a distance, one might believe the house is gilded, dipped in caramel, thatched with gold until a wind breaks through the branches, and the house twitches, shudders, flutters before settling back into uneasy sleep.

Inside the house, the sleeper dreams. She dreams of falling and falling with never the release of the ground. There is nothing to catch her in the endless shroud of her hair. 

Enter the traveler. They have been traveling their whole life, always sliding between and through things, always moving to or from. Now, after all their years of wandering, they are lost. The traveler stepped from the path a while back, captivated by a wink of gold. Sunlight on the river or the flash of a finch’s wing. Too late, too late, they are stumbling and lost and there is no one to find them. 

The traveler carries a backpack. Its worn frame holds them tight. Its straps bite into their shoulders. The traveler believes – perhaps rightly – that if they were to remove the pack they would float away, break through the ionosphere and drift off into space. Floating, floating, floating. 

They shiver and walk further into the forest. The sun is setting, and the light is falling thick as honey. The traveler’s shadow falls before them. They do not know that there is only one direction, towards the house and the sleeper and the dreams.  

The traveler smells the house before they see it, and when they see it, they stop. 

The traveler has seen many things in their life: caverns full of pale creatures; deserts spattered with night-blooming flowers; cathedrals of frozen waves; thunderstorms over great rivers. The traveler has seen many things but nothing like this. 

The house is enveloped in hair. Hair pushes like ivy through the log walls and into the moss-covered shingles. It trails along the second-floor balcony and creeps up the steeply-angled roof before dropping to the ground in loops and tangles.

The hair webs and weaves. It colonizes, invading spiders’ nests and birds’ nests and swallowing twigs and whole branches into its braided bowels. 

The hair has tendrils – slender and curled as pea plants. The hair has tentacles thick as a Kraken’s wrapped around the wooden pillars. The hair is auric and awe-filled. It holds the house in its many-armed embrace. 

The traveler is drawn closer and closer, pulled by an irresistible thread. They reach out and run their hand through the gently breathing strands. Something trembles when they make contact, and the traveler can’t tell if it is their hand or the house. Despite many years exposed to the elements, the hair is soft and supple, and its scent is intoxicating. Before they know what is happening, the traveler buries their face in the hair’s shimmering golden net.

As if on cue, a curtain of hair pulls back revealing a wooden door without a knob or latch for nothing is kept out of this house. The traveler steps forward and gives the door a gentle push. At their touch, the door sweeps open. 

Come in, the house croons, come in.

Above the head of the unwitting traveler, the sleeper turns in her bed. Her movement sends shockwaves down the length of her hair and sets the house shivering. 

The sleeper is dreaming of her father. 

Hair holds memory. It weaves histories like tapestries with its endless codons and its blinking code of A’s and G’s and T’s and C’s. 

Here is the story the hair tells:

There was once a man who lived in a heath house in the middle of the Black Forest. He was a wealthy man and a twisted, horrid man. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the man inflicted himself upon a local woman who gave birth to a daughter. When the mother died of pestilence, the man’s mind, already rotted and putrefied, decayed further into perversion. 

This girl is of my flesh, the man thought. Should not my own beget my own? 

And so, he turned upon his daughter with lust-filled eyes, and the girl suffered. Before long, the girl was down by the river ready to drown herself. 

Kneeling on the riverbank, the girl’s hair fell past her face and brushed against the surface of the water. As soon as hair met water, a voice spoke. 

Don’t let the bastard get away with this, the voice said. Kill that fucker rather than yourself. 

How? the girl asked. He’s got an axe. I can’t rely on my anger alone. 

I can do it, said the voice. I can take care of him for you. But first I’ll need to put you to sleep. 

Why asleep? asked the girl. 

For your own protection, said the voice. Some things are too painful to experience awake. But have no fear. I will wake you again when the danger is passed.  

The girl paused but only for a moment. 

All right, said the girl. Kill the fucker.

So, the man died and the girl slept and the hair grew and now the traveler is in the central hall. 

It is dim inside the house, the only light coming from a narrow skylight. As the traveler’s eyes begin to adjust, they hear a slithering, rustling, a susurrus, as of a great serpent swallowing its own tail. The hair is rolling back to grant them entrance. 

The hair pulls back far enough so they can make out the shape of the room. On the right, a grand staircase climbs to the second floor. High above, an enormous wooden chandelier sways on an unfelt breeze. And everywhere the hair glides and gilds and embellishes. It veins up columns and adds rococo cornices. The hair festoons round the balustrades. It cascades down the stairs. The hair filigrees the walls and drapes gracefully from the chandelier. The air is golden and suffocating as the inside of a hay silo. 

The traveler looks down to steady themself. Their feet are set on oak boards. The wood has expanded and contracted with the years, and now rivulets of hair have seeped between the floorboards so that even the floor is laced with gold. 

The hair pulls back to reveal a doorway on the traveler’s far left. The traveler moves as directed. At their approach the door swings open pushed by hirsute fingers. 

Inside the room is a grand library with shelves that reach from floor to ceiling. Ladders on wheels now hang crookedly from their tracks. Broken-spined books, loose-leafed, have fallen from the shelves, their pages delicate as spun glass. The hair has bookmarked its favorite passages, tomes open to faded illuminations. 

But now the hair pulls gently at the traveler’s feet, rubbing against their ankles like a cat waiting to be pet. They coax the traveler out of the room and back into the hall. The hair swings up to reveal another door, another room. 

This one is a dining hall dominated by a long table standing on clawed legs. Above the table hover the dark shapes of taxidermied animals, stuffed elk heads hanging above the mantelpiece. When the traveler has looked their fill, the hair nudges them back into the hall. 

So much to see and such little time. 

The hair reveals a third room, and as it lifts up, the traveler is assaulted by another scent. This one sharper, pungent, vile. Now hesitant, the traveler moves towards this third door. Closer and closer and the odor strengthening with every step. 

The hair opens before them and closes in behind them, creating a halcyon ever-moving tunnel. It leads them through the rib cage of the house and to the kitchen. 

The traveler pushes open the door to the kitchen and now the smell is stronger. They hold their hand against their nose. Their eyes roam around the room until they settle at last on the fireplace where the hair holds the body. 

The hair has twisted itself into the flesh, pushed through the nostrils and out through the eye sockets. What little is left of the eyeballs dangles from useless optic nerves. The hair has replaced the intestines, stomach, gallbladder, useless folds of tissue taking up too much space. The hair is nestled now in the body cavity, and the evicted organs loll black and shriveled against the corpse’s femurs. 

The hair pulls taut at the traveler’s entrance, clacking the bones like castanets, dancing its mummified marionette across the room. The skeleton trips along, grinning and bowing. 

Welcome, welcome, says the corpse with braided vocal cords. May I have this dance?

The traveler stumbles backwards, falling out the door, pushing back through the waves of hair into the great hall. They collapse to their knees, retching. Their bile mixes with the web of hair between their fingers. The hair pushes frizzy and matted against their face, and the traveler gags again. 

Out, out, out – get out, but now there is a barrier between the traveler and the door, thick gilt tresses woven together, impenetrable as any wall. The way to the staircase has been left clear, so the traveler crawls – hand grasping for the next step, and the next and one more. Their knees are shaking, knocking against each hard stair. 

The hair is slithering down from the ceiling, cascading around the traveler, growing heavier and heavier until they can hardly move. With serpentine grace, the hair begins to creep along the traveler’s skin. Searching for a way in where it might spread up the veins and grasp hold of the traveler’s thundering heart. 

The traveler is on the second floor now and the world is shrinking around them. Strands of hair are slicing at their wrists and ankles. The hair catches hold of their backpack and the traveler struggles out of its straps. They leave their pack in the hair’s grasp, hanging from thick, auric ropes, and now they are without protection. 

The traveler remembers seeing windows from the outside. They throw themself against the first door they find. It opens begrudgingly and then with a bang, and the traveler falls into the room. 

A second corpse is swaying from a noose of hair. More recent this one, the flesh is sloughing like wax from a candle. In the corner, a mass of flies lifts up at the disturbance revealing another blackened decaying body. The flies are safe here in the web of a spider that hunts larger prey. 

Down the hall, the sleeper lets out a whimper and raises a hand to brush away the nightmare.

Safe, the hair thought after killing the father those many years ago. But for how long?

And so, it left the sleeper to her rest. In the darkness of the forest, it waited for the appearance of a new protector. A human who might take over the endless task of safety. 

How many had appeared over the decades? Seven? Ten? One hundred? One thousand?

Men from distant lands, countries that have ceased to exist. Men with swords and axes and pistols and knives. All drawn to the house, guided by the spell of the woods. But all these men sought only to penetrate, to pierce through the golden womb. None willing to yield, to become flexible and pliant, none seeking to connect or protect. So, the hair grew fat on their flesh.

Years passed, and still they came. Bodies and still more bodies. Meat for strength. Strength for protection. 

But each new victim added pain and endless pain to the tangled mass. The memories swept together in a tormented blur and the hair expands. It is driven by pain to devour more pain. And when it reaches the utmost limits of the universe, all suffering consumed and contained within itself, will it finally rest?

The traveler is enmeshed, hair twisted around their ankles, up to their knees. The hair opens door after door, bringing forth a parade of capering corpses. Shin bones clack against skulls, and rib cages swoop and dive like kites. Some would-be-knights are still fresh enough to keep their eyes, and the hair lifts and closes the eyelids coquettishly. 

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance? 

Down the hallway the traveler is moving but too slowly. The hair is holding so tight to their arms and legs that it burns, the friction of rope against skin. The traveler tries to move faster. The door at the end of the hallway is the only one that remains closed. The traveler lashes out at the vines that hold them and wades down the hall. They shove against that final door, hammering at it with their body. 

Inside the sleeper moves. Her eyelids flutter. 

The traveler flings their body again and again at the door, fighting for another moment, another moment, another moment. They see a slender gap between door and doorframe and twist to fit themself through this fragile space. 

For the first time, the hair hesitates, taken aback. No man has ever made it this far. Not with their weapons and their straightforward, predictable violence. But this human, stripped of everything but their urgent will to live, this human slips through and between things. They are neither of this world or the other, and the hair is unsure how to proceed.

In this moment of hesitation, this brief window of uncertainty, the traveler slides through the crack and falls into the sleeper’s chamber.

At the sound of the intrusion, the sleeper’s eyes snap open. She has not seen anything for hundreds of years and the world is blurry and unfocused. She turns her head and as she does, she pulls the hair at its roots. The sudden pain in her scalp is unbearable and the sleeper screams, her vocal cords crack from long disuse. The scream sends tremors down the length of her hair and the whole house shakes. 

The hair is frantic, writhing, worrying itself into knots. It feels fear, unfamiliar and disturbing. 

The traveler is on their knees, uncertain which direction is up. They see the sleeper, hear her screams, crawl to the bed where she is lying. 

The traveler reaches out their hand and presses it against the sleeper’s. It is the first human contact the sleeper has felt in centuries.

You’re here, the sleeper says, as if she’s known the traveler all her life. 

I’m here, the traveler says, as if they’ve been known.

The hair is whipping around them now, a cyclone. The sleeper’s head is pulled upright by its force, tugged into a sitting position. She cries out in pain. 

Safe safe safe, the hair hisses. 

It brings forward its army of skeletons, they dance and swing, diving at the traveler. Their dance becomes a whirling attack, the corpses smashing against walls, the bed frame, raining shards of bone and chunks of flesh down on the traveler. 

The traveler feels something sharp tearing into their calf. They look down to see a broken femur has sliced the back of their leg. The hair uses bones like arrows or spears, ferocious now as a cornered animal.

Gritting their teeth, the traveler grabs hold of the serrated femur and wrenches it out of their leg. They turn back to the sleeper held helpless by her hair. Using the femur as a saw, the traveler begins to cut through the hair.

The hair wheels faster, it moans with the sound of wind across tortured strings. The traveler has cut through half of the hair that holds the sleeper, and the sleeper pulls forward, breaking strands, straining neck muscles, desperate to be loosed. 

The hair screams and shakes. It wraps around the traveler’s throat, tightening and tightening, it tugs feverishly at the traveler’s arms. But the traveler continues to cut without breath, without thought. 

And now and now and now! The femur snaps through the last of the hair, the sleeper is freed. Shorn and weary she slumps forward. The traveler drops the bone and moves to catch her.

With that final cut, the hair shrieks and begins to singe. Starting nearest the roots the hair scorches along its length, electrons zipping along an electric wire. The hair bubbles and pops. It passes from to gold to white-hot to blue to red and then gray. 

With each burning inch, the pain begins to fade. The hair begins to forget. The suffering, the suffering. Agony cycling to agony. All the lost souls the hair consumed are released now, burnt and black, into the ether. 

The searing spreads down the hair out into the hallway, along the bannister. Where the flame touches, the hair evaporates, flashing through the great hall, snapping along the strands until the chandelier falls with a crash. In the kitchen, the father’s bones are consumed once and for all.

With a whoosh the fire is outside and crawling up the walls. Oxygen-fed, it bursts open. 

Then as soon as it starts, the burning stops. The hair has spun itself from flax to ash. It falls from the sky with a singed and bitter smell. 

The traveler and the sleeper remain where they were. Huddled together in the center of the storm, they remain untouched. The snow of burnt hair lands on them, covering them in its soft, white blanket until they bear a downy covering, the lanugo of unborn babies. 

They hold each other against the bare world. 

photo by Adrian “Rosco” Stef (via unsplash)