by Beth Wirth
Terry sighed again and pulled himself out of bed. In the kitchen he made himself a sandwich from some leftovers, and pulled together some food to bring to his creature. Unsure as to what a forest spirit would eat, he mostly just took a bit of everything, and made his way out to the barn.
He found his father sitting in the room staring at the spirit. He stopped short. "Hey, Dad." He paused. "What are you doing here?"
Terrence laughed easily. "Just checking on our own personal family trophy. I've gotta tell you Terry, I sure am impressed. I'll be bragging about this for years!" He laughed again and there was an ebullient quality to the sound that made Terry smile as well, until he noticed his prize.
The spirit creature was plastered against the wall, as far as his manacles would let him get from Terry's father. Terry frowned. "Great, Dad. I was hoping for some time alone with it." He emphasized alone, and his dad laughed again.
"Sure, sure, son." He stood and went to the door. "I'll head back up to the house. I need to call Martin, make sure his sons gave him the news." He chuckled, and it occurred to Terry, not for the first time, that his relationship with his own brother was far healthier than that between his father and his uncle.
Terry didn't move until he heard his father walk all the way down the barn. The spirit was looking at him, its eyes wide as they had been in the forest last night. Terry could see now that the iris was brown, dark and rich. The creature's hair was red and orange, mixed with brown shades, the antlers rooted in it emphasizing the season of autumn. Its skin was also brown, flecked in different shades and paler along the throat, stomach and groin. As he looked the creature over, Terry deliberately noticed the ways the spirit resembled the deer that it was named for, because noticing how it was nothing like a deer was making him uncomfortable. It was decidedly male, sac and flaccid cock visible in the thick nest of curls between its legs, its body overall lean and toned in a way that made a pulsing heat rise in Terry. He tried to shrug the feeling away and remember that the spirit wasn't human, but a part of him didn't care.
During his observations, the spirit had been watching him warily. Terry moved toward it and the bound spirit turned away from him, curling protectively around its vulnerable stomach as best it could. He frowned. Moving even closer, he released the spirit from the manacles that held it bound to the wall.
"There, that's better," he said soothingly, almost as he would to a dog, but the creature's eyes caught him at the last moment, holding his gaze, and he added, "I'm not going to hurt you."
As soon as it was free of the restraint, the spirit slipped away from him, scurrying to the farthest corner of the stall where it crouched and rubbed at its wrists. It continued to eye him guardedly as it moved around the edges of the stall toward the door. It placed a hand against the open portal, but some invisible force had the creature placing that hand against air that was firm and impenetrable. It grunted in frustration and circled back to the far corner, eyeing Terry the whole while.
Terry went and opened the window. He saw that not only was the window frame made entirely of iron, the shutters were inlaid with iron strips as well. The walls were stone and twelve feet high. The roof was simple straw, to the naked eye, but Terry wouldn't put it past his father, and his other ancestors, to have hidden some repellent there as well in order to keep their prey good and trapped.
He reached toward the center of the stall and placed the bowl of food he'd brought on the straw-covered floor. "Wasn't sure what you liked," he said softly. "But I brought some food. If you don't like any of it, I guess I'll try again." He deliberately didn't watch the bowl, instead looking out the window, but he heard the small sound of ceramic rasping against straw and grinned.
He counted to 100 slowly, then turned around and looked at the bowl. The creature had eaten some of the vegetables and all of the raw fruit, but had left most of the food. Terry shrugged. "Fair enough. I'll try again." He took the bowl and left the stall.
*~*~*
He filled the bowl with more raw fruit from the collection of slightly overripe items they set aside for the horses, threw in some broccoli from a bowl in the refrigerator, and added a few handfuls of grass and some leaves as he crossed the yard from the house back to the barn. He left the bowl in the middle of the floor of the stall. Sunlight streamed bright through the open window but he didn't see the spirit at first. He knew the creature was there—for some reason he could feel it—but even when he turned to leave he didn't see it.
He gathered his brother Alex and got ready to take a trip into town to visit Robert. Thomas's brother had his own house apart from their family's farm. He worked for the railroad, and had for almost as long as Terry could remember, but the house was relatively new.
"It wasn't long ago that he moved into town," Alex said, his eyes bright with the excitement of the trip, when Terry asked him about Robert. "About seven years ago. It was the summer Thomas's daughter was born. Robert moved off the farm and into town with his wife." Alex didn't get out much and Terry had taken his brother with him because he knew Alex loved to visit people. Alex adjusted his position in the front seat of the truck as it rumbled down the road. The shocks were shit and the safety belts had long since frayed to dust, but Alex was able to keep his seat by shifting his body weight and using his hands and arms to brace himself, maneuvering with the ease of long practice.
Terry nodded. "You always remember stuff like that better than me." He grinned to take any bite out of the words, because Alex was a nosy bastard when it came to their neighbors, though the truth was that Alex had good reason to remember the events of that particular summer.
His little brother smiled, not paying any attention to, or not noticing, the awkward pause that Terry had been unable to fully suppress. "I've never been to his house, this'll be fun!" Terry had to smile in response; Alex's indomitable spirit was infectious.
But there was another reason he'd wanted to spend some more time alone with Alex. "What else do you remember," he quizzed his brother, "about the hunt of the Cold Moon?"
Alex's eyes were bright. "In the old books, the ones I found in the back part of the attic when we were kids, it's called the Solstice Hunt. They hold the hunt twice a year officially, on the Cold Moon and the Strawberry Moon, though even now some people think it's about the full moon and go out every month. There have been sightings every couple of years, but only once every nineteen years have the hunters managed to run something and capture it." His eyes were bright with eagerness to share his knowledge. "It's only when the full moon falls exactly on the solstice, you know that right? I figured that out." He didn't sound proud of his achievement, but rather as if he were just stating fact.
"You figured that out?" Even if Alex wasn't proud, Terry was proud of him. "You know more than Dad ever told me," he admitted. "I thought you weren't supposed to have that much information about the hunt unless you were part of it?"
"Well, somebody should have told that to our ancestor who wrote it all down and left it for me to find when Mom was cleaning out the house. You know, I almost went once," Alex confessed. It wasn't much of a confession, since practically everyone Terry knew in town had been hunting under one Moon or another, but Alex had always been a gentle spirit, even before, and the fact that he'd been interested in going at all was the surprising for Terry. "I just wanted to see, you know? It was the Strawberry Moon hunt, that summer before middle school. But," he stopped. He didn't need to go on; Terry knew full well why his brother hadn't gone on that summer's hunt. That would have been the same summer, seven years ago. Awkward silence hung in the air for a moment but Alex's mind had already moved on. "Of course the summer hunt is never as much fun as the winter. There's only so much you can do in a night that short. But the Cold Moon ..." His eyes sparked with anticipation. Terry wasn't sure what his brother was anticipating, given that the fullest span of the moon had been last night, but as he turned his own eyes back to the road, Alex continued. "The true full moon only lasts for a minute, you know. Some of th
e hunters insist on going out every night when it looks mostly full, just in case, but it's only on the night when the moon is truly full that there are sightings. And it's only when the full moon coincides with the solstice—in that moment of the moon and the sun being precisely opposite—only on that night, every nineteen years, can the hunters actually succeed. The 'magic,' if you will, traps the usdi in the form we recognize, slowing it down long enough for the hunters to catch up with it.
"That wasn't in the books," he confided to Terry after a moment.
Terry guided the truck to a standstill and shifted it into park before turning to regard his passenger with wonder. "Little brother, how on earth do you know all that?"
Alex grinned, already popping his door open and shifting his weight toward the opening. "You're not the only genius in the family," he taunted, adding in conciliation, "Those textbooks you brought me last summer helped a bit." He motioned impatiently. "Now hurry up and get my chair, and let's go!"
Terry swung down from the driver's seat, letting the heavy door slam shut behind him as he jogged around to the bed of the truck and hauled out Alex's wheelchair. Honestly, Alex hardly needed help transferring from truck to chair, only using Terry as a human load-bearing post for a few seconds. Alex was hardly a bother, and Terry wondered why his father never took the younger boy with him when he went out visiting his neighbors and friends about town.
The shocked and pitying glance from Robert's wife as she met them at the door was enough to tell Terry why. He grit his teeth but Alex deliberately overlooked it. "Hello Mrs. Riley! My brother just came to see Robert. I'm sure you heard about last night's hunt?" She murmured a negative and scurried away to get them some coffee. There was no ramp and Terry had to work to get the wheelchair over the lip of the single step leading up to the house's kitchen.
His brother waved off his help once inside, and, grinning, Terry left Alex to Samantha Riley's tender mercies. Though it would probably be more in keeping to rescue her from Alex's forceful personality. Robert's wife was a ghost of a woman, which was fitting since Terry'd always found Robert Riley to be a man incapable of showing feeling for anything flesh and blood.
He found Robert in the library, as he had suspected for a Saturday afternoon, sitting behind a huge antique oak desk writing something in the flowing, old-fashioned script Robert preferred. Terrence was always complaining about Robert's obsession with old things.
Robert looked up with surprise when he noticed his visitor. "Hello Terry. It's been awhile." He stood and shook Terry's hand with the easiness of rote.
Terry smiled politely. "Yes sir, it has." He cleared his throat. "You may not have heard yet, but I ... I caught the quarry last night." Robert was looking at him mechanically, as if waiting for him to come to a point, and Terry elaborated. "The Cold Moon hunt, sir. I—"
He stopped there, choking off the rest of his words because Robert's face had gone deathly pale. It was more emotion than he had ever seen from the man. "Ah," Robert said after the silence had stretched out long enough that Terry wondered if he should just get up and leave. "I see." Robert cleared his throat and shifted in his seat behind the desk. "And you've come for advice, I suspect." That was not a question, and Terry merely stared back at the older man, watching in fascination as emotions played across Robert's face. His color was returning, slowly, but his expression was still tragic, at times drifting toward wistful. Terry didn't speak, and it was awhile longer before Robert said anything more.
"You would do better to talk to Bill, I suspect," was what he finally said. Terry flushed slightly. It was one thing from his father, whom he had told, but apparently the whole town knew about his inclinations. "I did," Robert confessed. "Mostly because at the time he was the only one to talk to."
Terry nodded. Technically, there would have been Martin as well, but ... Crazy Bill might be this town's bastion of nonconformity, but, as Terry well knew, his Uncle Martin was an entirely different breed of crazy, and one that was not approached lightly, if at all.
"It was ... a heady experience," Robert continued, and Terry knew he wasn't talking about Bill anymore. "There's a ... power—a power in you—when you hold something like that captive, and a power in it that you know you'll never understand, or be able to touch." His eyes were haunted as they locked onto Terry's, as if some emotion fought there, trying to get out, but he closed it off and the struggle and its participants fell behind his usual calm facade. "If you want my advice, you'll go back right now and put a bullet in its head," he finished, his voice flat and cold. And he was finished; he turned back to the document under his hand as if Terry wasn't there.
Terry nodded, stood, and left. He wasn't sure what he thought he'd gained from the conversation, but it was something to add to the information that he had gathered about his surprising new acquisition. He went back to the kitchen just in time to save a desperate looking Samantha from Alex's incessantly moving tongue, and the brothers gave their farewells and departed the house.
"Well?" Alex demanded once they were out of the house.
Terry shrugged, and even though he was standing behind his brother he knew Alex would be able to read the gesture. "Nothing much. He told me to shoot it."
"No!" Alex cried in involuntary horror. "It's too beautiful and rare of a thing to do that." His hands clenched the armrests of his chair as Terry guided it through the Riley's front yard and back to the easier going of the road. Neither brother said anything, but Terry was certain that Alex was thinking about Uncle Martin. Terry certainly was, and even though his father had only just told him the details of Martin's hunt he was sure Alex, who seemed to know everything, had known them long before. "You can't do that," Alex said again after a moment. "It's too beautiful Terry; you can't." He frowned, ducking his head. "I've never actually seen one, but there are drawings of course, in the old books." He was quiet a moment before he continued. "The creature is a connection, to the old days, to the people who lived here before, all the way back before there were people at all—a connection to the land itself. If you murder it, you're just ..." He fell silent, because that's what Martin had done and he was the same blood as them. Did they think they were better than Martin, than all the ones who came before?
"It's about individuals," Alex said softly, his hands holding his wheels still as he looked up at Terry. "You choose to respond. It's your choice." He fell silent and took over maneuvering the wheelchair on the smoother ground as Terry moved up to walk beside him.
"You're right; it is beautiful," Terry admitted. "And don't worry, I'm not going to shoot it." Alex nodded decisively, and that seemed to close that conversation.
"I wanted to stop in and see Crazy Bill too." Terry tried to say it nonchalantly, but Alex's sudden knowing grin ended his hopes for that. He slapped his brother upside the head.
Alex chuckled as he maneuvered out of reach. "Great! Let's not take the truck. It's not that far." Terry nodded amiably. Bill Sventon lived on the other side of town, but if Alex wanted to get some air Terry was that last person to tell him no.
They talked about stupid, unimportant things as they walked the quiet streets of the town, and it was almost as if Terry were able to forget the last seven years and just chat with one of his high school friends again. There was no hostility between him and his brother, not even the simmering disquiet that lingered between Terry and his father, but they had never been particularly close. Theirs was a family that didn't do close especially well. By the time Terry reached an age when having a little brother who followed him around everywhere was less embarrassing, the accident had effectively isolated Alex, and then Terry's relationship with their father had soured to the point where every waking moment he wasn't working and saving money he was looking for a way out of town. When he'd finally left town, just over three years ago now, he hadn't known his brother any better than he'd known the tag-along kid who had trailed in his shadow. When unexpected homesickness had driven him to write home almost a year ago now, he'd found that not only w
as Alex an excellent correspondent, but also they had a lot more in common than Terry would have suspected. He was teasing Alex now about a girl Alex had graduated with whose older sister had been in the grade below Terry's when they arrived at the Sventon house.
It wasn't particularly inviting, which only added to Crazy Bill's persona. Terry paused; maybe they should have announced they were planning on coming, called ahead? He didn't want to interrupt the man, particularly if it involved cleaning firearms or knife throwing practice. But Alex just pushed past him, rolled right up the convenient ramp, went to the door, and knocked. Terry sighed and joined him.
The door pulled open to reveal an elderly gentleman—thin as a rake and hard as a snake as their mother would have said—and it occurred to Terry that he didn't think he'd ever actually looked at Crazy Bill before this, only caught sight of him in snatches before he looked away in embarrassment. He wasn't bad looking; rather, Terry thought he must have been quite handsome when he'd been younger. Bill looked them over carefully, but his expression was more asocial than the wariness Terry had expected. "What do you boys want?" Bill asked.
"We wanted to ask you about the hunt of the Cold Moon, sir," Alex replied, looking directly into the old man's eyes.