Mythworld: Invisible Moon

by James A. Owen

  It suddenly seemed as if the snow outside had ceased to fall, until Meredith realized that it was merely the eternity between instants she was sharing with June.

  “But why? Why would she possibly want to? And how could she? Vasily was a huge man—there’s no way a woman as small as …”

  June stopped her, a horribly loving smile on his face. “Fuji is the one who taught the art of the sword, the way of the Samurai, to me,” he said tearfully. “The sword was her birthright, not mine—and now, it is Shingo’s.”

  Meredith thought about that a moment, the image of that tiny woman and the immenseness of her father, sparring. It still seemed too impossible.

  “June, tell me this—why, even if she could, would Fuji kill my father?”

  He shook his head and turned away, standing half in shadow. “I do not know. There is also this,” he said, offering her a crumpled paper with a trembling hand. It was the paper that had been found in Fuji’s hand. Meredith opened it and read the few simple lines written on it:

  For June, and my Shingo, I am sorry to die—

  For Vasily, it is only right—

  My life for his

  “What if you are wrong?” Meredith exclaimed. “What if she didn’t …”

  June turned, his eyes flicking to the rust-colored staining on the blade, then rising to meet hers. Meredith swallowed, hard; they both knew that it was blood, and that it was neither fresh, nor extremely old. Probably less than a year. Probably about as old as the week of her father’s death.

  June stepped back over to the table and again took up the sword, offering it to her. “It is my responsibility, Meredith. Please, help me to restore the honor of my house.”

  “But why? Whatever Fuji did was her choice, not yours. If she killed my father, it was her sin. Are you …” Meredith paused, another fear creeping into her thoughts. “Are you trying to tell me that you killed her?”

  “No—her decision to end her life was her own. But the shame is as great as if I had struck the blow myself.” He bowed deeply again, and stretched forth the sword.

  Meredith took it from him, and threw it across the room.

  Startled, June stood up, a look of confusion and pain on his face. He looked at her for an explanation.

  “I’m not going to kill you, June! Have you looked outside, lately?” Meredith strode to the window and yanked back the drapes. “It’s still snowing. We just lynched your librarian, yesterday, and half the town has gone missing. In Canada, buses are eating people. Airplanes are turning into dragons. The cars in town have eaten most of the band, and I think Glen and Delna are turning into trolls. My father, who isn’t really my father, is dead; my stepfather, who’s really my father, has also been killed. One of my close friends kills herself, and you want me to kill you because you feel bad about her killing herself and someone else? And what about Shingo? We could be in the middle of the end of the world, here, and he just lost his mother less than a day after he decided he wanted to marry me—and you want me to go back out there and tell him that not only are you—his father—dead too, but that I’m the one who killed you? Render unto me a freaking break, Junichi.”

  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 t
wo 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.