But that first blood was the only blood they drew. I had forgotten what my father taught me about Kryil, maybe, but I had not forgotten that I was a fighting man of the Grondahr. Together I fought them, one against the two, and though the battle was as hard as any I have fought since, I beat first one and then the other, and didn’t even look up to your grandmother until I had put my flint through the second one’s throat.
And there I was, oathbound to my greatest love from among my greatest enemies. Why, I hadn’t even told her yet that she was mine! But that oath is unbreakable, so I brought her back among the Grondahr and here she has been with me ever since.
Now. I will leave your bedding down to your parents, as that is one of the great freedoms of being a grandfather, and—eh? Speak up now, what? Here, can someone tell me what he said? He lisps so.
Oh, you ask, now that I had taken your grandmother to wife, if I have found my father to be wrong? So you池e asking if I ever learned that I can trust a Kryil? Ha ha! Certainly not. I loved your grandmother, and I took her as mine, but I did not trust her. At least, not until I had cut off her hands and feet, gouged out her eyes and torn out her tongue.
Special Guest Stars
The beer dripped slowly now from the tipped can, leaving only a small remnant of Budweiser within. It had run down the arm of the easy chair into an alcoholic puddle collecting near his sneakered feet.
Beer, Sebastian thought. Bleeding from the can, like blood from a wound.
The glare of the television in the darkened room, reflected upside-down in the puddle of warming beer, gave him a double image of the dancing lights and glowing figures.
He felt his side. Wet. Like beer.
On the screen, the host with the perfect hair and perfect teeth (I wonder if he ever had braces) congratulated the Tibetan in front of a cheering audience; neon lights behind the host blinked out huge letters. Sebastian’s eyes were slowing down; the glowing letters seemed to jump from shape to shape, dancing too quickly for him to catch their meaning.
The Tibetan looked like a refugee from a Fu Manchu movie. His stringy mustache hung limply past his pointed chin. His slit eyes roved from the smiling host to the audience and back. There was something strangely serene in his watchfulness.
Warm and wet. My side is warm and wet. Now my hand is warm and wet. And sticky. Maybe I should have watched channel 7.
As the host gestured, the Tibetan opened his flowery paisley robe (at least, it looks like paisley) and displayed the small red spot on the left side of his lean, tan abdomen. A tiny trickle of red rolled slothfully down to the waistband of his baggy burlap pants (at least, it looks like burlap). The crowd cheered harder.
Damn. What did I do wrong? I definitely should have watched PBS instead.
Camera number three pulled the smiling host into a close-up. “There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the Lama Bu Gahhabi Do has just impaled himself with a steak knife—”
Big deal. Anyone can do that.
“—and is showing no ill effects.”
Okay, that’s the hard part.
Sebastian held up his hand in front of the screen. His skin was pale powder blue in the television’s glow. The palm of his hand, the part that had been warm, wet and sticky (and which was now not quite so warm or wet, but still sticky) looked black. He focused past his fingers at the screen, where the host was flashing his perfect teeth at the home audience again.
“We warn you not to attempt this trick at home.”
Sure. Sebastian tried to sit up straighter, as he was sliding down in the chair, but found that he couldn’t quite summon the energy to heave himself upright.
Sure. NOW you tell me.
The Night Children
It was like something from one of the stories Mother used to tell me at bedtime, but in reverse. My mother stayed alive; it was my father, a hunter and mushroom gatherer, who coughed until blood trickled down his chin. Not long after we buried him, Mother welcomed Mr. Perce to our home on the edge of the forest and to her bed. I did not blame her for marrying again, because a woman alone is a fragile thing; instead I blamed Mr. Perce for pressing his case so energetically in her time of weakness. He may have filled an emptiness in our life and our little house, but he filled it with a stinking cancer that smelled of dead fish.
My older sister Lydia had an escape; when she saw that Mr. Perce was a cruel serpent of a man, she half-corralled Jim Olandt into marrying her just so she could escape the shadow which now filled our home on the edge of the wood. I would have liked to escape with her, but the tiny new house Jim made for her had no room in it for me, and anyway, Mr. Perce wouldn’t have let me go. He liked having gotten a son old enough to do chores without waiting through the years of squalling infancy, even though I was barely big enough to wrestle the bucket back from the well. In that chore, as in all others, he waited for me to make any mistake he could punish me for; a slop of water just inside the doorjamb was enough for him to remove his belt with relish. After the first time, when Mother got her own black eye for getting in the way, she never tried to defend me again.
Mr. Perce was a fisherman. He left every morning before the sun rose and was back stinking of fish before supper, or sometimes of fish and liquor after supper. Every time I saw a dark cloud on the ocean horizon at daybreak, I prayed that this would be the one that swept him overboard and sent him to his darling fishes. At first I confessed the sin of such dark thoughts regularly, until I realized that I couldn’t repent to the priest of prayers I which made in all sincerity and which I had no intention of ceasing. So instead I stopped confessing them.
I had thought myself too old for bedtime stories until Father died, but afterward, with Mother and myself stuck alone in that home which now reeked of the invader, I longed for them. Of course, solely because they were a comfort to me, Mr. Perce forbade them. But sometimes, when he decided that the lure of strong drink was worth more than the lure of my mother’s bed until late at night, there was time for her to sit on the edge of my pallet and tell me tales as she had told years before. I never asked her to change the wicked stepmothers in the stories into stepfathers, but maybe she knew I was silently making that substitution.
My favorite stories were of the Night Children, because Father had said that he had seen them once, having misjudged the time and lost his way in the dark in the great forest that abutted our house. In the old stories they were like plump infants, cherubs of golden hair and bright eyes and (in some stories) miniature wings who came out and danced in the forest after the fall of night, and who waylaid errant travelers not out of wickedness but out of thoughtless mischievousness. Father’s story of seeing the Night Children was not polished by long years of telling as Mother’s stories were, and he was a man of halting speech, but his recounted glimpses of them—a glint of bright hair, a whisper of irrepressible laughter—lent new magic to all of Mother’s tales of long ago and far away, because the magic was that much more real.
Then the fishing season ended, and Mr. Perce stayed always at home, except when the public house called to him. I fantasized about building my own room onto the side of Lydia’s house so I would have somewhere to run away to. I dreamt that it was summer again, the season for accidents at sea, and woke in disappointment to find autumn barely beginning. I spent far too much of my time daydreaming about how and when to escape Mr. Perce. And yet, it was he that finally separated us, not I.
Late one evening when he had not vacated the house for the inn and was thus in a sober, terrible mood, he instructed me to stir up the fire and throw some logs on to keep the house warm for the night. I was about to go to bed myself, and so I set about the task in haste—too much haste, for as I stirred the ashes, a hot ember popped and leapt from the fireplace and landed on Mr. Perce’s bare foot.
He cursed with words that any God-fearing man would be ashamed to say in front of his wife, and aimed a blow at my head. And I committed the cardinal sin in Mr. Perce’s eyes: I ducked and stepped away.
Both his eyes and his face turned red, and spittle flew from his lips as he promised that my days in that house were over. I tried to scamper around him to get away, but he caught my shoulders, and with the strength of a man who spends his days throwing sodden nets to and from the deck, he bore me to the door, heaved me out, and locked the door behind me before I even landed on my shoulder.
I sat up, too stunned to cry. All was silent inside the house, save for something that I took to be my mother’s soft sobs in the corner, still afraid or unwilling to cross her husband. This was not how I had fantasized my escape, here in the cold of the night with nothing except the clothes I wore, without even shoes or socks on my feet, and a bruise growing on my shoulder. I picked myself up, straightened my torn-aside shirt, and was about to retreat to the warmth of the small stable where our workhorse and cats lived, when Mr. Perce’s voice came booming through the door: “And let me not catch ye in the stable, for I’ll come out a’ midnight, and if I catch ye I’ll skin ye!”
I stopped and considered my options in despair. Our house was far from town and close to the woods, and trekking to any friendly neighbor—if there were any whom Mr. Perce had not already thrust away—would mean stumbling through the moonless night with no shoes. The sky was chill above me, as if the stars were sucking out the warmth left in the earth by the sun, and the dew was already settling. If I headed under the trees, at least, I would have some protection from the dew and any wind that might spring up, and surely it could scarcely be darker under the trees than under the sky. I therefore set my shoulders as bravely as I could and took the close path into the woods, the first time I had ventured thus at night.
It seemed an eternity of stubbed toes and scratched forearms later, but it was probably less than two hundred yards, when I finally collapsed in the welled roots of some enormous tree. I had nowhere to go, at least until morning; I had no need to go farther into the forest, nor was I certain that I would know my directions out in the morning if I did. The space around the roots was thick and soft with many years’ worth of spongy moss, at least as soft as my straw pallet at home had ever been. I tore up some of the moss, curled into the depression thus made, and covered myself as well as I could with the moss I had pulled out, making a crude quilt of what the forest provided. I had thought I would stay awake for hours, listening to the forest breathe and dwelling on the injustice that had suddenly made me as good as an orphan, but now that the night air had cooled my shock and anger, I went to sleep without expecting it.
When I awoke hours later, the moon had risen and was peeking through a break in the forest canopy, its rays practically at my feet. Everything in this little corner of forest was outlined with silvery moonlight. And I scarcely had time to wonder what had brought me awake when I saw the Night Children.
They, too, were glazed in silver from the moon. They crept through the forest with the natural stealth that all forest animals have, and a twittering sound, almost like laughter, passed from one to another. There were two I could see clearly, though there may well have been others outside the small pool of reflected light. I didn’t dare breathe and felt the incredible volume of my pounding heart as I looked without blinking on a bedtime story come to life.
They were as they had been described by Mother, and yet unlike. Their hair was not of golden tresses; it was pale and colorless, and stood out in shocks. They were not plump like cherubim, but pudgy and bloated with yet a hardness underneath, like a wallowing hog. Their noses were like a hog’s too, upturned and wide, and they cocked their heads with brittle motions as first one, then another, tittered in a voice more like a mockingbird’s than a delighted child’s.
The one in front wagged his head back and forth toward where I was concealed, and as he stepped into the moonlight I saw that his eyes were small and completely white. He was blind! They all were. Their keen noses, and their wide ears that I saw now beneath their hair, wide and swept back like bats’ wings, compensated for their blindness, and they could roam the forest as well as any hunting owl.
The lead one sniffed again, and I realized that he had scented me. It did me no good to cower under a covering of moss, for the darkness could not hide me. I stood, dumping the mossy clumps to the ground.
He came forward, this bold one, until he stood an arm’s length from me. He was perhaps my height, though he seemed shorter because his legs were bent in a perpetual crouch as if ready to spring away at any time. He sniffed, and sniffed again, and cocked his head as if confused.
And somehow I knew that covering myself in moss had disguised my human scent, at least enough to bewilder his senses. I smelled alien, yet I also smelled of the forest.
He reached out a hand toward me, the fingers long and slender, the ends thin and calloused into points as strong as any blunt talon. Not knowing what else to do, I did likewise until my fingertips touched his. He grasped and felt my hand, then turned his head toward his shoulder and made their giggling call back toward his companions, and I saw for the first time the thicket of pointed teeth that crowded his mouth. Then he drew me forward, not as a captive, but as a companion, and together we joined the others. There were now three other Night Children, and as they tittered to each other, I joined in, giggling in honest relief. They meant me no malice; they had accepted me as one of them.
We stayed the night in the forest, running and darting between the trees and bracken, them navigating by their hearing and smell and touch, I darting between patches of isolated moonlight. They stripped the hard skin from a reedy plant that grew by a marshy stream and sucked the marrow-like core; I did as well, finding the taste bland but wild. They led me to a wild crabapple tree, and I chewed the sour fruit until my jaw was sore before it was pulped enough to swallow. This was how they survived in the forest at night, and they were teaching me how to live like one of them.
There was one spot in the forest where they reared back and gave a wide berth to something almost buried in leaves. They circled it, sniffing and baring their teeth, and one or two of them hissed at it in something like a show of bravery. I stared at it until the filtered moonlight showed me enough detail to identify it: a worn leather glove, lost in the forest who knows how many months or years before. It might even have belonged to my father.
I saw them once all go quiet together, and then leap as one on something in the bushes. Their quarry might have been a squirrel or some other rodent; I didn’t see it until eight hands had grasped it and torn it apart, red flesh in their fingers that went immediately into their mouths.
Toward dawn, they led me to a lair hollowed into the bole of an enormous fallen tree. They packed themselves and me in there together like mice in their nest and settled to sleep as the lightening sky showed through the canopy overhead. I was tired to my bones, but I lay awake as they slept, the head of the nearest one nestled on my shoulder.
Were they my new family? Surely they would recognize eventually that I was not one of them; would their acceptance of me have become unbreakable by the time my otherness, my humanity, became apparent to them? Even with the scent of the moss still lingering on me, they had to know, cooped tightly in this burrow, that I was not like them.
I thought of their night jaunt—full of playful activity it seemed, and yet almost all their activities centered around finding food, and that was a fairly meager harvest; the crabapples on that one tree wouldn’t last forever. Were their bloated bellies the natural consequence of fattening up for the lean winter ahead? I had precious little fat on my body; I couldn’t live on what was to be found in the forest in winter, even if I could survive without freezing to death.
I thought of the little cottage on the edge of the forest, where the coals of the fire still glowed sleepily, waiting for someone to stir them to blazing life again. I thought of the larder, stocked with plain but substantial food for the winter.
I wondered how hungry the Night Children would get for meat, once the squirrels had all hidden themselves away until spring.
I wondered i
f they would have an appetite for human meat that smelled like fish.
On the Demise of Rory Calloran
July 9th, 1863
The good Father Kettrick has supplied me with this foolscap and pencil, and further agreed to forebear the redemption of my soul and instead to give me solitude for my final hour. I think that this evidence of my literacy has shocked the poor clergyman into acquiescence. I shall therefore attempt to explain for the benefit of those still baffled by the mystery leading to my conviction the circumstances, largely of my own doing, which lead me to this, the very shadow of the gallows. I shall present it in the form of a story, so that those who have not already heard my whispered and unbelievable claims will not be hopelessly confused at the outset.
Rory Calloran was born into a family of means, and discovered as he matured both the blessings of his station and the limits of material blessings. He was a quick and studious boy, but only a few years into his primary school education he discovered that his body was not the equal of his mind. By the time he was twelve years old, he was forced to walk with a cane. Prior to his matriculation into university, the cane had become two crutches. His diploma, with honors, was received when his strength had degenerated to the point where the crutches were at times supplanted by a wheeled chair in the hands of one of his household staff. His parents had used both money and influence to secure the advice and attentions of those in the top echelon of medical achievement, but this congenital wasting was not something they could halt or even concretely diagnose; it was, in the words of one practitioner, a “defect in the germ,” and as such could not be corrected without supplanting God Himself. He would never be a husband and father, nor would he ever inherit from his own father the management of the family estate and holdings. At most, young Rory could be made comfortable, and the household could anticipate the needs of his impending helplessness in all personal matters within the next decade.
Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories Page 7