Read Mythworld: Invisible Moon Online
Authors: James A. Owen
He stood stock-still—in shock, Meredith thought—then smiled the smile she knew well, and sat down at the table, motioning for her to sit opposite him. He again took her hands in his, then leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.
“I am sorry, Meredith. Please forgive me.”
“Of course I’ll forgive you,” she said, hugging him. “After all, you’re going to be the only father I have left.”
It only then registered with him what she’d said about Shingo proposing to her, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise. Meredith couldn’t read his face, but after a few seconds he again leaned forward and kissed her. “I am happy to take you into my house as my daughter,” he said delicately, his eyes once more brimming with tears, “and perhaps together, we may honor the memory of what Shingo’s mother was, and not what she …”
He stopped speaking, and began to choke back silent sobs of grief. She held him in her arms, and let him cry.
They sat for a long time.
O O O
“I think I know what’s happening to all the people, Reedy.”
Herald was excitedly shuffling through some papers spread over one of the tables when June and Meredith reemerged from the library. Everyone else having gone home, Glen and Delna were busying themselves with a food storage project, on the theory that the current state of the world was not going to change anytime soon; and Mr. Janes, all cleaned up and looking a great deal more like his old self, was nursing a cup of cocoa by the fire. June moved off to speak with Glen, and Meredith pulled out a chair to sit next to Herald.
“What are you thinking?”
“Well, it’s like this—basically, the missing people can be sorted into four groups. First, the ones who just left. There aren’t too many of them; some gone on boats, some just wandered away. The second group is people whom we can confirm were eaten by the cars or other beasts …”
“Like the band.”
“Yeah. And anyone stupid enough to leave their houses through their garages. The third group is people who have simply disappeared, and I think I know what might have happened. As a matter of fact, I don’t think they disappeared at all—I think they’re still here, in Silvertown.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. If you want to take a stroll, I’ll show you.”
O O O
Clucking her tongue at their foolishness for going out in the cold as night was falling, Delna bundled them up in wool-lined parkas and gloves. “Now, you ducks take care out there,” she worried, clucking. “It’s not as if you don’t have a good thick fur like Glen over there.”
“You mean as if they do have fur, don’t you sweetums?” said Glen.
“Oh, that’s right,” said Delna. “My mistake. Well, perhaps you’ll grow fur, like Glen and I did.”
Herald looked closely at her, squinting. “So, you didn’t just grow this fur all at once, then?”
Delna giggled. “Oh, no, you silly boy,” she replied, walking over to put her arm around her husband. “It took us hundreds and hundreds of years.”
“Mmm,” said Herald. “Thanks anyway—for the parkas, I mean.”
Outside, Meredith asked him what he’d been driving at with the Beecrofts.
“Well,” he began, “it ties in to my theory about where everyone’s gone. I started thinking about it after I saw the librarian had grown fur. I mean, he never had fur before, did he?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Okay—but he grew it, and pretty quickly, too. Then there’s Glen and Delna …”
“You asked me once before if I noticed anything strange about them, I remember. I’m still not sure that I see what you’re seeing, but then again, I don’t think my hair was this gray last week, either.”
“It wasn’t. You were a dark brunette.”
“Really?”
“Mmm hmm. And think about it—when was the last time you saw Glen get all the way to the docks without even touching the ground?”
“Oh, that’s, I mean … Ah, you know, I just assumed he always swung around in the trees …”
“He didn’t. And how long has Delna had a beard?”
“I get your point. Okay then—if changes are taking place, we may not be catching onto all of them. Are you saying that we just can’t see the people who have disappeared?”
“Yes. No. Maybe. I’m not sure, Reedy.” He took her hand and led her towards a split rail fence near the southern edge of town, explaining as they went.
“I’ve been in the library reading up on transformation myths,” said Herald, “and there are a lot that fit the current state of things pretty well. Did you know that in a lot of barbarian cultures all it took to be considered a non-human was committing a crime?”
“Hm,” said Meredith. “Really?”
“Yup. Although for little crimes, you’d mostly just be thought of as a jerk. It was for worse crimes, such as oath-breaking—which the Norse and Germanic peoples considered worse than wrongful death or theft of property—and crimes like rape, treason, and deliberate murder that the criminal was no longer considered to be human.”
At this, Meredith could not suppress a shudder, but thankfully, Herald didn’t notice.
“He was made a ‘warg’—a term which means both wolf and outlaw—and became an out-dweller, living away from other humans since, by his crime, he had set himself apart from them. For example, in the
Volsungasaga
, both Fafnir and Reginn become ‘wargs’ after they murder their father for the Rhinegold.”
“Fafnir the dragon?”
“Yeah—Fafnir eventually transforms himself into a dragon with the use of the Tarnhelm, but before that, he was a warg. With Sigimund and his son Sfinjolti, the term takes on a stronger interpretation—they live as wargs in the woods, but can actually shape-change into wolves and then prey on passers-by and knights of their enemy, Sigigaiar, who was the husband of Sigimund’s sister Sieglinde.”
Meredith saw the direction he was going. “Shape-changing—like Bristol, or the Beecrofts.”
“More like Bristol, in this case, considering we’re dealing with villains here, and no one who makes hot lemonade as good as Delna could be a bad guy.”
“Agreed,” said Meredith. “What else did you find?”
“Well, among the Celts, the perpetrator of a foul or horrible crime had to actually
become
whatever it was that they most feared.”
“So Bristol committed a terrible crime, and apparently was deathly afraid of becoming a sheep-molesting werewolf?”
Herald shrugged. “Hey, I just do the research. Whatever kind of craziness was going on in his head was none of my business.”
“Okay. That still doesn’t explain the transformations of the non-villainous sort.”
“I was getting to those,” Herald said. “In the Welsh-Irish legend of Lir’s children, their stepmother, out of sheer jealousy, curses them by turning them into swans. For her crime, the god Lugh forces her to reveal that which she most fears, which is a ‘Spirit of the Air’, or what they called a Bain Sidhe …”
“Banshee,” Meredith interjected. “Michael was into Irish lore in a big way. What happened to her?”
“As soon as she reveals the fear, she is immediately transformed into a Banshee and goes shrieking off into the night, never to be seen again.”
“So you think our neighbors all became wargs and Banshees?”
Herald shrugged again. “Much of what I found is just legend and allegory, but it does show the concept of the warg over and over again—the out-dweller; one who by their actions, has trespassed beyond the boundaries of humanity and cannot return. But in the case of the swans or the Banshees, it was more of a deliberate inducing of the condition by an outside force—sound familiar?”
Meredith smiled wryly and looked up into the cobalt sky just in time to see a Piper Cub fly past, leathery wings flapping mightily against the snow. “Pretty much.”
“Actually,” Herald went on, “greater crimes among the Celts were atoned for by the laying of a ‘geas’, or the performance of a duty, that the criminal had to complete in order to clear his or her name.”
“Geas?”
“Gradually, the term ‘geas’ came to mean ‘curse’, and passed down into myth the idea that a curse required enduring great trials before it could be lifted. In the case of the swans, efforts were made. In the case of most wargs, though, I think they were pretty happy to stay the way they were.”
They had reached the fence, and Herald stopped her and pointed at the ground.
“There. Look and tell me what you see.”
“Looks like paw prints. Oly’s, maybe.”
“Nope. Oly’s only got three legs, remember? And whatever made those tracks is a far sight larger than Oly.”
“What do you think made them?”
He leaned on the fence, and looked out into the darkness past the town’s edge. “Wolves, Reedy. I think its wolves.”
Meredith had been in St. Lawrence County long enough to know that there
had
been wolves living there—around 1820. When the shipping lanes started up in earnest, and the communities began springing up along the river, the wolves migrated, or just died out. As far as she knew, there hadn’t been a sighting of a wolf anywhere near Silvertown since World War One.
Meredith looked up at Herald, asking the question which she knew was the stupider one, but asking anyway because she feared she knew what his answer and the reason behind it would be. “You don’t think that the locals are being killed by wolves, do you?”
“No,” he said placidly, “I think the locals are
becoming
the wolves.”
Meredith chewed on that one a bit as they walked along the fence, further from the muted glow of the town. Every few feet, Herald would stop and look at the tracks, which were slowly increasing in number. There now appeared to be at least a dozen of the beasts—and whatever they were, they were big.
Maybe big enough to be almost the size of a human.
“So what made you think to look for wolf tracks?” Meredith asked. “The warg references in the Volsungasaga?”
“That was the start of it, sure,” answered Herald, “but it was that prick of a librarian that really got me wondering. Classic signs of Lycanthropy—except for the business with the sheep. That was a new twist, for sure.”
They both laughed at that, then stopped in shock. There, on the ground in front of them, the tracks abruptly ended in a massacre of blood and dirt and snow and cloth and bone. The wolves, or whatever they were, hadn’t just been running—they’d been tracking.
Herald stood observing the carnage before reaching out to take a scrap of cloth from the fence. It was pale blue, and bore a silver cufflink with the initials SM on it.
“SM—Stephen Moore,” said Herald.
“The pinball guy? The one from the plane?”
“Yeah,” said Herald. “He must’ve been trying to get back to Brendan’s Ferry for some reason, and just got caught out in the open.”
“Pretty lousy luck,” Meredith said, grimacing at the gore in the snow.
“Uh huh,” said Herald. “He’d have gone broke in the Philippines.”
Just then, a deep, resonant howl boomed out in the air around them. Instantly they froze, listening, eyes scanning the darkness. Then Herald grabbed Meredith’s sleeve and pointed to a spot on a rise just ahead.
Above them, along the ridge, eyes, glowing deep and red, began to appear—one pair after another, and a searching, snuffling sound filled the night air.
Wolves
.
Watching silently, they waited for Herald and Meredith to make up their minds as to what to do. At the edges of her vision, Meredith could see shadows shifting, the restlessness of the younger members of the pack, eager to pursue their prey.
A fierce howling suddenly split the sky, and the wolves all joined in until the terrifying sound echoed throughout the valley; Meredith and Herald’s eyes met—their time was up. The wolves had made the decision for them.
Turning, Herald and Meredith began to run.
***
Chapter Six
Saturn’s Day
It’s strange, how after the initial hullabaloo, the pursuit of two-legged prey by the four-legged hunters was eerily silent; the crunching of the snow under their boots as they ran through the crusted over snow, the ragged sound of their own breathing in their ears, the blood pounding—these all but completely masked the swift padding of the gray killing machines which had the fleeing humans in their sights, and were closing. It was in Herald and Meredith’s favor that the wind had picked up and the snow had drifted throughout the evening; the wolves had a more difficult time making speed.
Side by side, Herald and Meredith skidded down an embankment onto the tarmac of the all-but-abandoned airport near the southern edge of Silvertown. They hoped that there might be an open building or two that they could take shelter in, but it was a facility run on Murphy’s Law—the more derelict the building, the more impenetrable the locks and chains are protecting it. Worse, in the time they spent checking doors, the wolves had reached the pavement and were beginning to close the all-too-small lead they had managed to gain.
“Reedy, we’ve got to split up. If I can get them to follow me, then we can meet back at Soame’s.”
“Herald, you idiot—you can’t mess around here! These things will kill you!”
“Don’t worry, Reedy,” he said, giving her that infuriatingly smug smile, “I know how to handle wolves.”
There was no time to get a better explanation—the pack had spread throughout the airport and in moments would close off their escape. Herald grabbed Meredith by the shoulder, then, impulsively, kissed her hard on the cheek.
“Always wanted to do that,” he said with a wink. “Now go!” he shouted, giving her a shove.
She rolled down a steep rise to an access road, then ran across to the tree line. Nestled in the brush were a few scattered buildings owned by Smith Trucking; when the airport closed, the trucking company followed suit, though she’d heard that the buildings were still being used for storage. Meredith prayed someone in town still subscribed to enough of a small-town ethic to leave a door unlocked, and tried one of the handles.
It clicked, and opened.
Slipping inside, Meredith locked it behind her, then ran to one of the walls lined with windows where she could look out for Herald, and began praying fervently that what he’d said to her was true, and not just something he’d spit out to reassure her.
O O O
Running hard, Herald really wished that what he’d said to Meredith about knowing how to handle wolves was true, and not merely something he’d made up to reassure her. By his count, at least a dozen wolves were hot behind him, and since he’d led them away from the only industrial buildings in the area, it was either back into residential streets, or …
The cornfield.
Every year, a consortium of farmers planted fifty acres in the L-shaped plot which wrapped around the south and west ends of the cemetery, and every year, they saw the same result—fifty acres of corn which was mostly suitable for bundling into decorations for Halloween. The richness of the soil was mitigated by a climate that was not hospitable to the growing season for corn, and so the plants which resulted were tall, thin, and bore sickly fruit. For the better part of fifteen years, the consortium lost money, even when George Daves proposed selling the corn as cattle feed instead of to the produce buyers for the grocery stores. That set off the losses for a few years, but not enough. It wasn’t until Jeff Lewis, an engineer who hung out at Soame’s and played chess with June, suggested that if all the corn was good for was bundling for Halloween displays, then they should bundle it and sell it for Halloween displays, then the consortium broke even.
As it was, the corn was still in rows and only semi-dry, which as he reached the field Herald vowed he would pray thanks for, to whatever God ended up ruling the world when all of this was done.
Herald vaulted over the ragged wire fence and vanished among the corn, trying to zig-zag as much as possible to avoid leaving too discernible a trail, and away from the breeze, so his scent would be harder to catch. If he was lucky, these wolves
were
townspeople transformed, and as such would be too new at the job to be any good.
About two acres in, he heard the sounds of the wolves entering the corn behind him, then tried to hold back a giggle when a yelping revealed one of them had been tangled up in the wire fence.
Picking up his pace, he angled sharply north and cut across to the cemetery. The pines would help mask his scent, and more, he had an idea. Checking his bag, he found the rope he hoped he had, and headed east through the cemetery and towards Old Lady Watkiss’ place. If he could get there, to the strong trees with the low branches, then perhaps he could show these wolves a thing or two about how people in Silvertown take care of business.
As he passed, Herald reached out and patted Vasily’s mound for luck. Ropes or no, he would need it.
O O O
The detour through the cornfield worked—the wolves had lost enough of his scent to lag behind long enough for him to prepare a little surprise in Old Lady Watkiss’ front yard. If he could lure them into the narrow street, then between the house and guest bungalow behind, then he was pretty sure the wolves would be out of his hair for the rest of the night. If he couldn’t, the wolves would probably overwhelm him, and he’d probably be dead, so it wouldn’t matter anyway—although should that happen, Herald thought he ought to leave a note for the old woman, so she didn’t get a nasty surprise when she came out her front door the next morning. After all, there was no telling when, if ever, someone would be along to cut her down.
More importantly, he wanted to survive the night, because he hadn’t gotten to tell Meredith everything he’d discovered, particularly things about the page from the
Prime Edda
.
He hadn’t gotten to tell her about the
palimpsest
—about what he had managed to translate from its faint traces; information which could change the nature of their beliefs about Ragnarok.
And if nothing else, he wanted to tell her that he and Shingo had found other papers which had belonged to Michael. She hated to admit it, but Herald knew from the way she looked when his name was mentioned, or an article by him surfaced in their research, that Meredith had indeed loved her stepfather. People didn’t faint when they heard people they hated had died—not anyone Herald knew, anyway.
He checked his contraption one more time, then decided when he heard the howling that a note for Old Lady Watkiss might not be such a bad idea.
Herald was in the middle of the third draft of his note when he heard the growling.
As he’d hoped, the wolves had followed his scent to the small side street; as he hadn’t anticipated, they had gone to both sides of the street, and he was cut off from any avenue of escape.
“Crap,” Herald muttered under his breath. “Sometimes I really wish my theories weren’t so dead on,” he said as the wolves began to advance, “because I’m getting tired of being chased by things in fur.”
In response, the lead wolf, a large gray-splattered brown, lowered his head and emitted a rumbling growl.
“Oh, bite me,” said Herald.
O O O
Herald had told Meredith how once, when he was a child, he’d innocently approached a wild dog, hand outstretched, and nearly lost his thumb for the trouble. He still had the scar, which is how she recognized the hand as his when the wolf ran past, chewing.
Whether it was through plan or design, dumb luck, or just that they’d not caught her scent, the wolves completely ignored Meredith in favor of pursuing Herald. Herald had pushed on past the trucking company’s buildings nearer the northern part of the runway, then disappeared into the brush, the pack at his heels. A few minutes later, she risked a peek, and saw the wolf running past with its prize. Meredith threw up, then headed for Soame’s.
O O O
Glen was working at the counter, a dust rag in each hand, and one in his left foot. He smiled happily when she entered, waving. “Hi, Meredith. How’s it going?”
“Okay, enough, Glen, except for the fact that the town seems about to be overrun with wolves.”
“Oh, we noticed,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at Delna, who was stirring a huge cauldron at the pink marble fireplace. “We figure we’ll get six months of stew out’ve ’em, if we can catch any more.”
It was only then Meredith noticed the several gray and brown pelts hanging from the scaffolding under June’s paintings. They were very large, and one or two seemed to have oddly shaped feet; elongated toes, hairless, almost like …
“You know, Herald was floating a theory that the wolves are actually the townspeople, changed.”
“Really?” said Delna. “So it’s possible that some of the wolves we put into the stew are actually …”
“Uh huh. They might be some of your customers.”
“That changes everything,” said Glen. “We won’t be able to use any of that stew now, doggone it.”
“Oh, sweetums,” said Delna. “Can’t we fix it, somehow?”
“Fix it?” Meredith said, incredulous. “How can you fix it? They’re already dead.”
“Well, that goes without saying,” said Glen. “Some of ’em put up a grand fight, too. Delna there even lost an ear.”
“Really?”
“Yup,” said Delna more cheerfully than Meredith would’ve thought, having just lost an ear, “But it’ll grow back. Always does.”
“Y’see,” Glen continued, “If these were people, then that changes the whole mix. Wolf stew is good, hearty stuff, but it’s pungent; y’know, real ginger and garlic stuff. But people—they’re primates, basically, and there’s no making a decent stew of primates without nutmeg.”
“No making,” echoed Delna.
“Do you have any nutmeg?”
“We sure do,” said Glen. “Ought to be enough to salvage the stew, anyway.”
“Good,” said Delna. “That way, we don’t waste anything.”
Meredith nodded. She could understand that.
O O O
After loading Meredith up on coffee and bandaging her few scrapes (which Glen helpfully licked clean), they told her that June had come by earlier and was looking for her. As it was after midnight, they figured she’d gone home or was with Shingo, though when they mentioned his son, Glen said June had looked at them oddly then left without another word.
Meredith wrapped a scarf tighter around her neck and began crunching her way around the block to where her house was, avoiding her usual straightforward route because of the griffins that had edged out of their garages and were playfully batting a moped around in the middle of the street.
It was small and had reddish fur, and was making small mewling noises as the huge beasts swiped at it. True to form, it had plenty of avenues of escape from the bigger creatures, which were lazy and slow, but it was just too timid to power up and take advantage.
If it’d been warmer, Meredith would’ve stayed around to watch them finish it off—she had had a moped at Oxford, and she hated that sucker.
O O O
All of the lamps Meredith had left burning at the house had gone out—she’d been gone longer than planned. In the dim light of her small hand lamp, she could see a disturbance on the porch—someone had been there, and had stomped off their boots before entering. A conscientious visitor. Heart quickening, Meredith realized that it might be Shingo—with all the commotion of the evening she had forgotten that he may still not even realize that his mother was dead. Meredith quickly opened the door and walked in, straining to see by the dim light.
Ahead of her, darker than the shadows, she saw a silhouette in the front room of the house. Even before the recent growth, the form was smaller than Shingo’s would have been. Moving closer, Meredith decided to chance speaking. “Hello? Can I help you?”
A voice she knew well responded, speaking calmly, and oddly, not necessarily to her, or so it seemed.
“I came over to speak to you about Shingo. I knew you would be worried, as I was, so after the funeral I went to seek him out. I was concerned, as many of us are these days, that he had been killed, or eaten, or had been changed. I searched all around the town, but to no avail. It was only after I had spoken with you that I thought to look again for him—I thought perhaps he had gone somewhere outside Silvertown. It was as I was heading to Brendan’s Ferry that it occurred to me that he might have gone to yet another place; this assumption was correct—I found him in the spot where his mother had died, weeping.
“He had changed, as I feared, though in exactly what way I was not certain. He seemed bigger, somehow—and it seems I also do not remember his having so many appendages. Nevertheless he was my son, and he was mourning his mother in his own way.
“The night before she died, Shingo came to us, excited by something he had found in the library—you remember—something that had not yet been catalogued from the discard piles. He wanted to tell you about it right away, and though he would not tell us why, said that it gave him the opportunity to ask for your hand in marriage. Then, he left.
“For some reason, the announcement that he wished to marry you left Fujiko stricken; I cannot say why. I know she loved you as if you were her own. I pleaded with her to speak to me, but she would not. In frustration, I went to the dome to paint, and stayed there through the night.
“You know what happened after, this morning.
“I think she went to the woods to commit seppuku, which was why she took the short sword; why she left the long blade, I don’t know. Both are traditionally used to …”
He paused, voice cracking.
“Perhaps that is why she did not kill herself, but instead merely sat and let the elements do their work. She had only one sword, and no second swordsman to finish the act.
“When Shingo realized that I was there, he would not meet my eyes, but only spoke one utterance under his breath, then stood and ran off through the trees.”
“What did he say, Junichi?”
“He said, ‘
She is dead because of you
.’ My son blames me for the death of his mother, and I fear I cannot say he is wrong.