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 th
e 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.
“Not knowing what else to do, I came here, to tell you of these things, and when I realized you were not home, I sat down to wait. And then,” he finished, voice wavering slightly, “I found this.”
Meredith lit a candle, so as to better see what he was talking about. It flickered to life, throwing a warm if smallish glow around the room.
June was sitting in the wicker chair, waiting. In his hands, he held a skull, one of the several sitting adjacent the chair. He looked at Meredith, and she saw his eyes were dry, and his hands were steady. Then, voice even, he spoke again.
“Who?”
He tipped his hands, indicating that he was asking about the skull.
Meredith shrugged, and sat down on the divan a few feet away. “I’m not sure. That one’s got broader ridges along the brow, so it’s probably a boy; and the bits of flesh have all dried off, so I’m guessing it was one of the first few children—Kevin McMillan, most likely.”
June absorbed the response, unblinking.
“You killed them here?”
She nodded. “Yes. There were a few I had to damage a bit in transit, just to keep them quiet, but that was more a courtesy to the parents than anything else.”
June choked. “A courtesy?”
“Yes. You have a son, June—can you tell me that there’s anything worse than losing a child?”
“No.”
“Well, I can. It’s knowing it’s happening while you lose them. No one really believes it, that the oblivion, the not knowing can’t be as bad as it gets, but trust me—it can be much, much worse. That’s what I try to spare the families—the pain of real knowledge.”
“You can’t believe that, Meredith. You can’t, because you don’t know. You don’t have a child.”
“Point taken. But tell me—if Shingo was dying, right this moment, and there was nothing you could do to prevent it, would you really want to see? To be there, watching, as the light goes out of his eyes?”
“Yes.”
That was a bit of a surprise. “Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“Because I want him to know that I loved him, even up to the end. I want him to see that in my eyes.”
“And you want to actually see the pain he would suffer?”
“Yes.”
“But why? Why would you want to go through that?”
“Because that is one of the things a father does, Meredith. You didn’t die, but why do you think Vasily wrote to a child he might never again see, who was the daughter of a woman he would never again love, and the husband who took them both?”
Meredith didn’t really have a counter to that.
“Because,” said June over her silence, “that is what a father does.”
Neither one of them said anything for a few minutes after that. Meredith searched for something, anything to say, to mend the rift that was between them. She understood only a little of what seemed to be upsetting him—perhaps mitigating that in some way would help.
“June, please believe me—I had no idea. If it’d ever occurred to me that the parents of the children I took would suffer so, I’d have killed them first.”
He suddenly bolted upright and for an instant it seemed as if he would hurl the skull across the room. Catching himself, he gently set it down on the carpet, then looked up at her, a mixture of confusion and pleading in his eyes.
“Meredith, I don’t understand … What is it that has made you into … into this? What is it that has made you waste so many human lives?”
An immense feeling of relief flooded through her, and she leaned back with a grateful smile. “June, oh dear June—you don’t understand, not at all.”
“Then please explain, Meredith. I cannot bear this.”
She stood and hugged him, tightly. He stiffened, and then hugged her back.
“Of course I’ll explain. Forgive me—I didn’t think how you might respond. To be honest, I hadn’t mentioned this to anyone, what with everything that’s gone on over the last week. I was afraid that it’d be misunderstood, but I never thought you … Oh, June, please, please forgive me.”
“What do you need to tell me, Meredith?”
“June, none of the children were wasted—I used all of them.”
June sat slowly back, removing his arm from around her, and a distant, dead look came into his eyes. “What do you mean you used them?”
“Mostly, they were just for food—but when all of the changes began, I realized that that just wasn’t good enough; not respectful enough. Too much of them—bones, skin, and the like—was just being thrown out. Believe me, I agonized over those first few neighbor kids. If my head had been clearer, I don’t really think I’d’ve thrown out quite so much material.”
“Wh-what do you do with the material you don’t throw out?”
“Why, what I’ve always done, June. I used it to decorate the house.”
Meredith was walking around the room, now, and June merely sat, listening. The room was sufficiently coated in shadow that she couldn’t see his expression, but she felt pretty good to be sharing all of this with someone. Meredith hoped he could feel it, too.
“Of course, I couldn’t really rebuild the fence outside with the bones and skulls, not with all of the other hysteria going on, but I thought that I could at least remodel the interior until the town got back to normal. Then, when I tackle the exterior, I can get Shingo to lend a hand. I hope you don’t mind,” she finished, sweeping one arm to indicate the whole of the house.
“How long have you …
Have you been decorating?”
“You mean overall, or just this place?”
June choked out a response—“O-overall.”
“Well, it’s got to be going on a thousand years or so, now—but don’t tell Shingo. He thinks I’m still young—in my hundreds is what I’ll admit to.”
June sat more stiffly now, and he seemed to be more alert. He looked around, then gestured into the room. “The children? The ones you used to … decorate? Are they … are they … here?”
“Yes.”
He looked nervously about, the scattered shadows odd angles and weighted depths taking on a new and fearful meaning.
“May I see them?”
“Sure.”
Meredith lit the oil lamp in the corner and turned the light on the room.
Junichi screamed.
O O O
The entire way over to Soame’s, June didn’t speak a word. With a look, Meredith communicated to Glen and Delna that this was serious, and that he probably needed rest more than anything else. Glen pulled the stainless steel coffeepot out of the coals where it had been simmering, and together, he and Delna took June back to his private rooms.
Exhausted, Meredith collapsed into a seat near the fire and unbundled herself. A movement in the corner alerted her to the fact that she was not alone … it was Mr. Janes, her editor from The Daily Sun.
Meredith cautiously approached him, and he looked up when she moved into the light around his table. “Mr. Janes? May I sit?”
Mythworld: Invisible Moon Page 13