“Can you read exactly what people are thinking?” I asked, belatedly cautious.
He considered it. “I can hear your mind better than most. Perhaps it is the solitude of the woods, with no other minds nearby, but I think it is more.”
I nodded. I figured that whatever made me able to talk to the dead, and have other equally irritating experiences, had probably upped the broadcast signal of my thought waves. I didn’t consider it a blessing.
“But although I hear you … I do not often hear the single thoughts of one of your kind. Your minds are too small for me to see within, and you live for such a little time. But sometimes when a great many minds are all wishing for the same thing, their thoughts become strong enough to reach me.”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t appreciate that remark about little minds, but I decided to let it go. “Did the first people here wish for anything in particular?”
“Long ago they feared monsters in their land, and as a gift to the people I killed them all.”
I had a pretty good idea of what those monsters would have been: saber-toothed tigers, American lions, mastodons—and with all my heart I wish he had left them alone, but it was about ten thousand years too late to quibble about it now. I tried to keep my voice steady. “Did they ever wish for anything else?”
He nodded. “Strange new people came into their land. Not so many at first … Just enough to build a fort out of dead trees and clear some land by the great river to grow crops. The forest people knew that if all went well with these people, many more would come. They wished them gone.”
I only remembered it because it had happened in Shawnee territory, which is a particular interest of mine. In 1775, just before the American Revolution got going, George Washington himself had sent a group of settlers out to colonize some land he owned at the very end of what was then Virginia. The future president bought up some land grants from veterans of the French and Indian War until he had accumulated about thirty-five thousand acres out there, right on the Kanawha River, in addition to all the other territory he owned farther east. He personally selected that land, and planted some oak trees there, so I reckon he liked the look of it, but somebody should have told him that the Shawnee name for the Kanawha River is Keninsheka, the River of Evil Spirits.
I took a long look at my visitor sitting on the log there in front of my cabin. I guess the Shawnee were acquainted with him, all right.
Washington figured on setting up his own little colony out there in the back of beyond, so he sent James Cleveland and William Stevens out there leading a collection of families into the wilderness to start a settlement, and, sure enough, they built houses, and cleared enough land for fields and orchards, and things seemed to be going along pretty well. But then the Revolutionary War broke out, and nobody had time to worry about a little group of settlers on the other side of the mountains. George Washington got busy. You know how it is.
So from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, everybody just went on with the war, and left those colonists out on the Kanawha to fend for themselves, and the next time anybody had any spare time to check on them, they discovered that the entire settlement had vanished. I mean: gone. No skeletons in the tall grass around the derelict cabins; no forwarding address carved on a nearby tree—nothing.
People have always blamed the Shawnee for the disappearance of Washington’s West Virginia colony, and I thought that still might be the case, but I was beginning to think that they didn’t do it in the usual way: attacking the fort and killing the inhabitants and burning the village. No … I think the Shawnee just … wished them gone.
The garuda was nodding. Apparently, he had been tuning in to my thoughts again, which saved a lot of backstory and chitchat, and made him a tolerable companion, except that I thought he might be a dangerous friend to have. At least when you say things out loud, you can be sure that people heard what you intended to say. Or maybe not, what with semantics and all. (Tourists think that people who live in the woods are ignorant, but you have a lot more time to read if you don’t have to commute.)
“The Shawnee wished the colonists would leave, didn’t they? All of them wished that, as hard as they could, all at once?”
“This is so. And they made offerings to me and sent up prayers. I liked that. I thought perhaps these beings in their wooden walls were nagas in another form, and so I saved my forest people from them. I made them gone.”
I wondered where he had spit the bones that time.
“And then you took a nap for a hundred and ninety years or so?”
“A short sleep, yes, but when I awoke again my lands had changed. There were still forests and mountains, but now there were many minds, and many wooden walls. Great cities.”
“Did you like the new people?”
“They loved the land. Because of that, they belonged. They had forgotten me, though. So I appeared once or twice to remind them who guarded their land.”
“Yeah. They noticed.” I thought about the terrified young couple in Mason County, West Virginia, who had reported seeing a huge birdlike creature chasing their car down a country road. Or the ones who lived near the abandoned army facility who had caught him on the porch, peeking in the windows. I’m sure that prayers and offerings to the creature were the last things on their minds.
“They did not understand my presence. I thought to do a great deed for them so that they would know who I was.”
“So you looked around for some nagas, I bet?” I had begun to see that garudas were really very limited in the miracle-working department. They couldn’t—or wouldn’t—make you rich, or improve your health, or clean up the polluted air. All they were good for was killing. As guardians go, West Virginia could do better, but it did make me thankful that the garuda hadn’t picked Washington, D.C., to call home. The wishes of the folks there would make your hair curl.
“Okay, tell me about the bridge,” I said. That’s almost all anybody remembers about Mothman: that in December 1967 he was seen in the vicinity of the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, and that a short time later, the bridge collapsed, killing forty-six unfortunate people whose cars had been crossing over it at the time.
“It was a small gesture,” said Mothman.
Well, I guess it was, compared to wiping out dinosaurs and sending the Ice Age mammals into extinction, but I was still wondering why he’d pick on a bridge.
He heard my question in his head. “Because … that bridge led to a land of nagas.”
Oh. Right. Sure, it did. Ohio.
He nodded. “I felt the same thing in the minds of these people that I had known in the old ones of the forest: the wishing away of an enemy.”
I expect he did hear a lot of exasperation in there. West Virginians get pretty tired of the sneering jokes Ohioans tell about them, and they highly resent their overlooking the physicists and the millionaires, and thinking that the place is composed of rustic poor people. The worst, though, is when those well-meaning, fluff-brained do-gooders in Ohio load up all their old clothes in a van and go barging across the river into West Virginia to inflict charity on people who mostly don’t want or need it. I think I’d rather live across the Kanawha from nagas, myself.
Mothman was nodding. “Just so,” he said. “But my new children were helpless to destroy that enemy, and so I did a small thing for them. I did not destroy all of their tormentors, because these new people did not show the proper respect for me. But I let them see my power.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
After a long pause, the garuda said, “They turned away from me. I will not help them again. Or perhaps I will give the creatures in this land one last chance. Is there some enemy that threatens my people here? I could remind them again who guards this land.”
I thought about it, and to be honest, I was spoiled for choice. Who would I like to see attacked by Mothman? The mountaintop removal people? The retired snowbirds holed up in their new gated communities, gentrifying the mountains with million-dollar “l
og cabins”? The oxycodone pushers who prey on the poor in spirit?
I was tempted, but I didn’t want quite that much havoc on my karma, and I reckon garudas are all about karma. So I leaned in real close to the red-eyed creature, and said, “Over in the next holler, there’s a feller making a movie about monsters.
“I think you should audition.”
BIG MAN
by David Moody
IT WAS LIKE SOMETHING out of one of those black-and-white 1950s B movies he used to avidly watch when he was a kid: the army spread out in a wide arc across the land to defend the city, lying in wait for “it” to attack. Major Hawkins used to love those movies. Although the reality looked almost the same and the last few days certainly seemed to have followed a similar script, it felt completely different. This, he reminded himself, was real. This was war.
This wasn’t the Cold War U.S. of the movies; it was midwinter, and he was positioned southwest of a rain-soaked Birmingham, almost slap bang in the center of the United Kingdom. But the differences didn’t end there. He wasn’t an actor playing the part of a square-jawed hero, he was a trained soldier who had a job to do. He was no rank-and-file trooper, either. Today he was the highest-ranking officer out in the field, or, to put it another way, the highest-ranking officer whose neck was on the line. His superiors were a safe distance away, watching the situation unfold on TV screens from the safety of bunker-bound leather chairs.
Roger Corman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, and the others had actually got a lot right in their quaint old movies. The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman—their monsters’ stories always followed a familiar path: an unexpected and unintentional genesis, the wanton death and destruction that inevitably followed, the brief and fruitless search for a solution … but there was another facet to this story, one the movies always glossed over. Many people had died, crushed by the beast or dismembered in a fit of unstoppable rage. Property had been destroyed, millions of pounds’ worth of damage caused already, maybe even billions. And they weren’t standing here waiting to face a stop-motion puppet or a stuntman in a rubber suit now; this was a genuine, bona fide creature: a foul aberration that had once been human but was now anything but; a hideous, deformed monstrosity that, unless it could be stopped, would just keep growing and keep killing. The pressure on Hawkins’s shoulders was intense. The implications were terrifying.
Glen Chambers—the poor bastard at the very center of this unbelievable chain of events—had, until a few days ago, been a faceless nobody: a father of one, known only to his family, a handful of friends, and his work colleagues. Hawkins could have passed him in the street a hundred times and not given him a second glance. But now he had to force himself to forget that this monster had once been a man, and instead focus on the carnage and unspeakably evil acts the creature was responsible for. No one could be expected to remain sane under the torturous circumstances Chambers had endured, and it could even be argued that he was as innocent as any of his victims, but the undisputable fact remained: Regardless of intent or blame, the aberration had to be stopped.
Major Hawkins had first become involved after the initial attack at the clinic. The people there had done all they could to help Chambers, keeping him sedated and under observation while they searched for a way to reverse the effects of the accident and stop his body growing and distorting. And how had he repaid their kindness and concern? By killing more than thirty innocent people in a wild frenzy and reducing the entire facility to rubble, that was how. Then the cowardly bastard had gone into hiding until there were no longer any buildings big enough for him to hide inside.
The attack on Shrewsbury had ratcheted up the seriousness of the situation to another level, the sheer amount of damage and the number of needless deaths making it clear that destroying the aberration quickly was of the utmost importance. This was a threat the likes of which had never been experienced before. Men, women, and children were needlessly massacred, their bodies crushed or torn limb from limb. The streets were filled with rubble and blood.
The Chambers creature had attacked the picturesque town without provocation, decimating its historic buildings and killing hundreds of innocent bystanders. Even then, when it had had its fill of carnage there, it moved on and the bloodshed continued unabated. They’d tracked the beast halfway across the country, following the trail of devastation it left in its wake. The foul monstrosity had spared nothing and no one. Even livestock grazing in farmers’ fields hadn’t escaped the monster’s reach. Hundreds of dismembered animal corpses lay scattered for miles around.
But what was it doing now?
The creature, for all its incredible (and still increasing) size, had temporarily managed to evade detection. They knew it was close, but its exact location remained a mystery. There was no need to hunt it out; Hawkins was certain it would run out of places to hide and would have no option but to reveal itself eventually, and when it did his troops would be ready. They’d be resorting to Corman/Arkoff tactics to try to kill the creature: Hit it with everything you’ve got, and keep firing until either you’ve run out of ammo or the monster has been blown to hell and back. And then, if the dust settles and the hideous thing still manages to crawl out of the smoke and haze unscathed, you call in the big boys. A nuclear strike was an absolute last resort, but Hawkins knew the powers-that-be would sanction it if they had to (after all, it was less of a big deal from where they were sitting in their bunkers). Tens of thousands would die, maybe hundreds of thousands, but if the creature couldn’t be stopped, what would happen then? No one would be safe anywhere. In the space of less than a week Glen Chambers had gone from being a faceless nobody to the greatest single threat to the survival of the human race. An indiscriminate, remorseless butcher.
Major Hawkins tried to distract himself from worst-case-scenario thoughts of uncomfortably close nuclear explosions by recalling B movie clichés and trying to find an alternative solution to the crisis. He almost laughed out loud when he considered the ridiculous and yet faintly possible notion that this thing might do a King Kong on him and head for higher ground. Imagine that, he thought, his mind swapping biplanes and the Empire State Building for a squadron of Harrier jet fighters and the Blackpool Tower …
“Sir!”
“What is it, Rayner?” Hawkins asked quickly, doing all he could to hide the fact that he’d been daydreaming from the young officer.
“We’ve found it.”
The aberration that was Glen Chambers crouched in the shadows of the cave, shivering with cold, sobbing to himself and hiding from the rest of the world. He hurt, every stretched nerve and elongated muscle in his body aching. He’d squashed his huge, still-growing bulk into a space that was becoming tighter by the hour, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to move. It was inevitable, but he wanted to stay in here for as long as he was able. There had been helicopters flying around just now. They probably already knew where he was.
Earlier, just before he’d found this cave, he’d stopped to drink from a lake and had caught sight of his reflection in the water. What he’d seen staring back at him had been both heartbreaking and terrifying. In the movies, enormous monsters like this were just perfectly scaled-up versions of normal people, but not him. Since the accident he’d continued to grow, every part of his body constantly increasing in mass, but at wildly different rates. His skull was swollen and heavy now, almost the size of a small car, one eye twice the size of the other, as big as a dinner plate. Clumps of hair had fallen out while other strands had grown lank and long and tough as wire. Glen had punched the water to make his image disappear, and then held his fist up and stared at it in disbelief; a distended, tumorous mass with a thumb twice the length of any of his fingers. And his skin! He hated more than anything what was happening to his skin. Its pigmentation remained, but it had become thick and coarse, almost elephantine, and the bulges of his massive body were now covered in sweat-filled folds and creases of flesh. The only thing, to
his chagrin, that still seemed to function as it always had was his brain. It was ironic: Physically he’d become something else entirely—something unspeakably horrific—but inside he was still Glen Chambers. Grotesquely deformed and impossibly sized, he now bore only the faintest physical similarity to the person he’d been just a few short days ago. But emotionally, very little had changed. Same memories. Same attachments. Same pain.
Glen’s vast stomach howled with hunger. He ate almost continually, but such was the speed of his rapid growth that his hunger was never completely satisfied. He reached down and picked up the body of a sheep with one hand, then bit it in half and forced himself to chew down, gagging on the bone and blood and wool in his mouth.
His arched back was beginning to press against the roof of the cave. Time to go before he became trapped. He crawled out into the afternoon rain and crouched still. I don’t want to move, he thought, because when I move, people die. None of this is my fault, but I’m the one they’ll blame.
If there is a god, please let him bring an end to this nightmare.
Glen strode through the darkness, feeling neither the cold nor the rain as he pushed on through the fields around the Malvern Hills. He’d spent a lot of time here before, good times before the bad with Della and her father, and being here again was unexpectedly painful. His stomach screamed for food again and he caught a bolting horse between his hands, snapping its neck with a flick of the wrist before biting down and taking a chunk out of its muscled body. He hated the destruction he caused with each footstep, but what else could he do? It would only get worse as he continued to grow. The effort of lifting his bulk and keeping moving was increasing, and for a while he stopped and sat on the ground and rested against the side of British Camp, the largest of the hills, relieved that, for a short time at least, he wasn’t the largest thing visible. The size of the hill allowed him to feel temporarily small and insignificant again.
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