Mythworld: Invisible Moon

by James A. Owen

  Unless it ran by water, air, or muscle, mechanical devices were dead, and not just in Silvertown. Runners from Brendan’s Ferry, coming to ask the very questions they were asking, informed the town elders that they were facing the same situation. A boat coming across the river from Ontario revealed that the occurrence had no respect for national borders—Canada was blacked out and shut down as well.

  Their first proof of the suspicions that the problem was potentially greater than that came when the British jumbo jet en-route from New York to Chicago fell screaming from the sky, shrouded in flames, and in a horrific nightmarish explosion, virtually eliminated Brendan’s Ferry from the earth.

  “Shoot,” said Hjerald. “We’re never gonna get those travel vouchers, now.”

  O O O

  As the town assembled all along the high parts of the valley, the better to watch their neighbors to the southwest burn to cinder and ash, June and Glen began organizing the men of Silvertown in the main hall of Soame’s, to trek over to Brendan’s Ferry to see if anything was to be done—or, worst case, to bury the people they found who were already beyond help.

  Shingo sidled over to Meredith and put his arm around her, hesitated, then gave her a shy, one-armed hug. After a moment, he finally said what had been on his mind all evening.

  “What was in the letters? What was so bad that you never again spoke to the man who’d raised you?”

  Meredith mulled over her response options, before deciding that of anyone there (with the possible exception of June), Shingo deserved and could understand the truth. She leaned into him, still watching the glow on the horizon.

  “The letters were love letters, Shingo, and I think he might have even known that they’d never get to my mother; that’s because the earliest ones, letters written when he was still in Vienna, were unopened, and in them, they mentioned Michael Langbein by name.”

  Shingo turned her to face him, his eyes narrowing in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? But I thought your mother didn’t meet Langbein until several months after your father’d been gone.”

  “That’s what I thought—and what she’d always led me to believe. I always wanted to talk to her about it, but it seemed too painful a subject for her. Then, when she died last year, I thought that Father would finally be truthful with me, that if we could only get together …”

  “I’m sure he would have, if he could. My parents cared for him a great deal,” Shingo said gently.

  “I know.”

  “Have you ever discussed this with your stepfather?”

  “Never,” said Meredith, shaking her head. “Bad enough that mother had an affair with him, and drove my father away in pain and shame, but to act like my father for so long …”

  “Meredith, he was your father …”

  “He was not my father! For all I know, he killed Vasily, and my mother, too.”

  “Your mother died of pneumonia—you know that.”

  “Yes—but if you drain a person’s soul long enough, then they die inside, and may as well die altogether. And some just do.”

  That seemed a conversation stopper. Meredith and Shingo just stood for a while, looking, then …

  “Why would anyone kill him, Shingo? What was the reason for it?” Meredith asked suddenly.

  “Vengeance, maybe. That sort of personal betrayal can be a shattering thing. It can ruin lives. And when that kind of cost is incurred, then there is usually a price to be paid.”

  “I was talking about my father, Shingo.”

  He looked at her, considering. “I meant Langbein. Perhaps someone felt even more strongly about his choices than you did, and wished to avenge your mother.”

  “My mother?” Meredith replied, surprised. “She was a part of it—it was my father who suffered, and I’m the one who paid the price.”

  “She was never a part of it, Meredith. It was always him. Always!” Upset, Shingo got hold of himself, and then smiled a transparent smile. “I’m sorry. I guess I just get defensive where people I love are concerned.”

  “That’s all right,” said Meredith. “I understand.”

  “I’m going to go see if Pop needs any help. See you later, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  He kissed her long on the lips, then trotted off. It’s true, Meredith thought—she did understand his defensiveness, and his reasons—she just would’ve understood more if she’d really believed he had been talking about her.

  O O O

  “Hey, Reedy,” said Hjerald, wandering over with a candle and a couple of sandwiches. “In this light, your hair looks like it’s going gray.”

  “Thanks a lot, Hjerald,” said Meredith.

  “Hey, I was only sayin’ …”

  “Never mind. Walk me home?” Meredith said, offering her arm.

  “Sure.”

  With an armful of candles, and against Fuji’s protests that she ought to stay the night at Soame’s, Meredith maintained that what she really needed was a good night’s rest in her own bed, and she and Hjerald stepped out into the darkness of the town.

  There were a few lights flickering in windows here and there, and every so often someone carrying a lantern would pass. They would usually cross to the other side of the street when they saw Hjerald and Meredith approaching, as if in fear—which, given the nature of the events which were occurring in greater and greater frequency, Meredith couldn’t hold against them.

  They were only a few blocks from Meredith’s house when the rumbling began. Hjerald felt it first, and stopped her with an insistent tug on her arm.

  “What is it?”

  “Listen, Reedy—can you hear it?”

  Then, after a moment, she could—the train from Ogdensburg, on its way to Watertown, was coming through almost seven hours late.

  Meredith shrugged and hugged her anorak closer. “So? It’s the train. It’s running a little late, but …”

  It suddenly dawned on her why Hjerald was bothered. They could hear the train clearly now, which was the problem—nothing else mechanical was working; no cars, no electric boats, no nada. The train shouldn’t have been late—it shouldn’t have been running at all.

  “Come on, Reedy,” said Hjerald, tugging. “Let’s see if we can get to the tracks before it passes.”

  Dropping the candles at the corner, Meredith and Hjerald jogged over to Tumbleweed Lane and over to Kartchner Place where the water tank sat above the tracks. The tank was empty, since all of the engines had been switched to diesel long ago, but it was a good place for necking, throwing water balloons at the adjacent ballpark, and getting a good look at trains that shouldn’t have been chugging their way through Silvertown.

  As it was, they’d heard the rumbling too late; by the time they reached the tank, the last of the cars was speeding by. All they managed was a glimpse, but it was enough to confirm that whatever voodoo was allowing the train to run, it was still not enough to shelter the train completely—all of the cars were dark. No running lights, no engine light beaming ahead, and no lights in any of the passenger cars.

  “Whoa,” said Hjerald. “A dead train.”

  “Could you hear the engine?” Meredith asked. “It was running—that train wasn’t just coasting past.”

  “Yeah,” Hjerald agreed, “but it was still a dead train.”

  In the distance, past the cemetery at the edge of town, the train whistle pierced the night air in defiance of their assessment.

  Meredith saw Hjerald shudder, and felt the tremors of one herself. The whistle had sounded just like a scream.

  Turning, they again linked arms and retraced their steps into town.

  O O O

  As she headed home, Meredith realized that outside of a few pockets of madness, Silvertown was bearing up under a crisis pretty well; no panicking, lots of neighborly goodwill. Reassuring, especially when she had personal crises to deal with as well. Meredith stopped off at her house and lit up several candles, then, feeling a little hungry (a lot had happened since dinner), sh
e eased her way through one of the windows at the Jensen’s house down the street and managed to get their little girl, Megan, home without waking her. Everyone thought she was a sweet kid, that Megan.

  Sweet, nothing, thought Meredith—she was delicious.

  ***

  Chapter Three

  Woden’s Day

  Since Meredith had no real memories of her father other than those gleaned through his letters and the things her grandparents spoke of, her images of him came mostly through dreams. In one dream that recurred often, she found herself wandering the halls of Valhalla, the place of fallen heroes, looking for him. It is said that in Valhalla, there are more than six hundred and forty doors; in Meredith’s dreams, she knocked at all of them, but found nothing.

  She told Michael about these dreams—he laughed, and quoted from one of the Eddas:

  “At every door

  before you enter

  look around with care;

  you never know

  what enemies

  aren’t waiting for you there.”

  Meredith didn’t tell him about her dreams after that.

  O O O

  Meredith had only been to the place where her father was killed once, with June, right after she had come to Silvertown. It was a pretty stand of elm and maple trees, with a few oaks scattered around for substance. Since everyone in town was still preoccupied with the events of the night before—nothing was working, yet, and no reason had been established for the extraordinary circumstance—Meredith suddenly felt compelled to revisit the site. Perhaps it was because of Michael’s death; not that she would admit to any overt sentimentality where he was concerned, but he had raised Meredith as his own, and loved her in his way. She had, in a manner of speaking, lost a father on three separate occasions: first, when Vasily left Vienna, and again when he was killed, here; and then Monday, when Michael was slain by Hagen-something-Gunnar-something.

  Meredith’s grandparents held a strong grudge against her father for leaving. Granted, it had been their daughter who had had the affair, but like her own people, the Gypsies, they believed that a man should defend what is his, and guard his honor. Meredith’s grandmother believed he left because he couldn’t deal with the betrayal; her grandfather, however, believed that Meredith’s father left because protecting his honor would have meant killing his wife as well as her lover—and that would have left a child who would one day learn her father had killed her mother. Rather than force both of them to endure that, he simply left.

  What was unforgivable to Meredith’s grandparents was that he gave his blessing for her mother to marry Michael. Whether this made him a romantic or a coward, she never examined too closely.

  The spot where he’d been killed was bare of grass; the plants scuffed away by the police chief’s investigations. Nothing had ever turned up; nothing substantial enough to use, anyway. There were no marks on the body, no sign of a struggle. If it wasn’t for the fact his head was missing, one might have suspected he’d simply wandered down and fallen asleep beneath the trees.

  Suddenly, Meredith realized something had changed—there was a pile of brush beneath the tree that did not belong. Looking closer, she realized the dried up fragments tied in a bundle had been flowers—cut flowers. Someone had been to this spot fairly recently, and had left flowers where her father had died. But who? Other than the Kawaminami’s, Meredith’s father had no close friends in Silvertown, or anywhere else, for that matter. He had worked as a day laborer for the shipping companies that came through the Seaway, and had companions he drank with, but no one she’d met in the months she’d been here was the kind of associate who’d leave flowers.

  I must think on this, Meredith resolved.

  Troubled, she looked around a final time, then headed back into town.

  O O O

  As morning came, the extent and scope of what they were grappling with began to be clear; smoke filled the sky horizon to horizon. The tragedy of Brendan’s Ferry was not a solitary one. Once or twice more, planes were glimpsed, though no more crashed or even came near the town. The mood of the townspeople was not great, as the pollution bursting into the air had blackened the sun, leaving only a dull light to filter through.

  Around ten, everyone got quite a shock; the contingent of men who had gone to inspect the catastrophe at Brendan’s Ferry returned to Silvertown with a survivor—not someone from the town, many of whom had escaped injury—but an actual passenger of the plane that had crashed.

  He was bundled in blankets and pressure cuffs to keep his temperature and blood pressure up, and Lloyd Willis, who was one of the volunteer paramedics, had inserted a heparin lock to the man’s wrist to administer painkillers and saline.

  The hapless fellow, whose name was Stephen Moore, had been on his way to Chicago to sign a deal to distribute three thousand pinball machines to mom-and-pop restaurants in the Philippines. Apparently, about twenty minutes into the flight the oxygen masks dropped down for no reason. Then, about fifteen minutes after that, the windows all filmed over with some sort of viscous, oily substance, which first became opaque, then hardened. And then …

  … The windows blinked.

  After that, there was a lot of screaming, and running around; prayers were said. No one got food service. The pilots were in a lather just trying to manage some sort of controlled descent—difficult, particularly when the windshield dissolved, and the cockpit became what was, for all practical purposes, nostrils.

  Moore, for his part, was a passenger of the slightly paranoid variety, and so had at the first sign of weirdness locked himself in the restroom at the rear of the plane (having once read in a comic book that that was the safest place to be in an air catastrophe); as it turned out, this was a good call—as the transformations continued, he became securely (if unwillingly) encased in what could charitably be described as a rectum, but not before catching a glimpse of the only thing odder than a jetliner-turned-dragon at thirty-thousand feet—a second jetliner-turned-dragon, with better developed lungs and an attitude.

  The rest was flames, and falling, and oblivion.

  “Man,” said Hjerald. “I hope you ask for a refund.”

  Moore looked up and sighed. “I can’t,” he said, sighing again. “Nonrefundable tickets.”

  “Aw, dude,” said Hjerald.

  O O O

  It was at about the same time that the men brought back the news from Brendan’s Ferry that Blaine and Helen McMillan quit canvassing the neighborhood searching for Kevin. They had begun by asking door to door (an uncomfortable situation, particularly when Helen asked Meredith to let them know if she saw any sign of him—truth to tell, there were signs of him all over her house, but they were all either being used, or were being saved for later, and so she had to nod in sympathy and turn them away); that was two days ago. After the events of yesterday, everyone else had been distracted, and the only people who could or would relate to their particular dilemma and fears were the Jensens, the Howards, and the Burtons, who were all out searching for missing children of their own.

  Meredith decided Blaine gave up searching because he snapped; it had already been a red-letter week, and they were only on Wednesday. Helen stopped looking because the rusty Model A Ford Blaine and Kevin had been restoring turned into a griffin and ate her.

  You know, thinking on it, Meredith considered, it might have been the sight of his wife’s eviscerated remains strewn across the lawn and roof of the house that did Blaine in. It certainly wouldn’t have helped. But then, these are the sort of things you risk when you buy an American car.

  O O O

  As much literally as figuratively, Soame’s had become the most conspicuous gathering place in town; outside of the school which, oddly enough, had been colonized overnight by bats (at least, everyone in town fervently hoped they were bats), and the various churches, which were filled with people wailing, and confessing, and asking for forgiveness from whichever God they believed was about to rain hellfire and brimstone
down on their bad selves; which, if appearances were to be believed, was either Cecil B. DeMille or George Lucas on a bad day.

  Mythologically speaking, if this were indeed the End Of The World, or the Apocalypse, or whatever, the archetypes that everything seemed to be changing into indicated that the people who had the best grasp of what powers existed in the universe that were greater than man, were both medieval and Scandinavian. This also meant that of those who may or may not claim the gift of prophecy, the guy who nonetheless had the best track record was Hjerald.

  “Cool beans,” said Hjerald.

  While the town elders commandeered the main hall of Soame’s for meetings to decide what they ought to discuss first (not even the Apocalypse can stem the tides of bureaucracy), which kept Glen and Delna hopping, June, Fuji, Shingo, Hjerald (who had to be dragged, having discovered that a bunch of local Goth teens had heard about his story and begun a Church of Holy Hjerald, total congregation: eleven) and Meredith decided that the only way to possibly discover any answers (short of leaving on a boat, as several men in town had done) would be to follow their original plan—scour the Kawaminami’s library for anything that might provide a clue to the chaos erupting all around them.

  None of them needed to mention that their suspicions had become a conviction—all of this was in some way related to the events that had taken place in Germany. Candles and lamps in hand, they opened the broad hardwood doors that led to the wrought iron stairway, and descended into the library.

  O O O

  If he was anything, Rod Bristol was serious about his job. As the personal librarian to the Kawaminamis, he was responsible for not only the open resources and materials on display, but also for the closed stacks, which were valued in the tens of millions. He greeted his visitors—employers included—with a mixture of mistrust and disdain.