“Men tend to make friends pretty quick when bullets are whizzing by their heads, and that was how it was with me and Howie. Being the way that I was, why I’d left New York in the first place, I didn’t have many friends in the regiment. I kept to myself mostly, even when the fighting got heavy.
“Howie ended up with us after his own boys were wiped while he’d been laid up with what the docs first thought was the flu. It turned out to be just a head cold, so the brass wasn’t about to send him home short of his commitment.
“Anyway, he didn’t know anyone else, and we happened to be bunked next to each other, so we ended up talking. Small talk at first, mindless conversation. What I noticed right away, though, was that it wasn’t the same shit everyone else talked about. In a trench, in the mud and the trenches, when you know that every day might be your last, all anyone wants to tell you about is his sweetheart back in East-wherever-the-fuck. Or maybe the smell of the prairie grass in South Dakota or something. With all the new guys coming in from regiments outside New York, I’d heard it all by that time.
“Not from Howie, though. He talked about all the places he’d seen, all the things he’d done. And he’d been everywhere, and done almost everything. At least it sounded that way to me, a little punk from Hell’s Kitchen who had never left the city, much less the country, until Uncle Sam came calling.
“When I couldn’t sleep one night because of the noise from the Kraut shelling, he told me I’d get used to it, just like he had in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and in South Africa during the Boer War. I didn’t know a damn thing about either one at the time, so I just acted like I knew what he was talking about.
“I remember once a bunch of guys in the unit got real severe gangrene, since we never had dry socks and it rained all the time. Howie said it was like Korea, all the mud, that is, only it was a lot colder there.
“Then, and even I knew this one was a little weird, we started taking heavy casualties trying to take a German machinegun nest over a hill. He said it reminded him of Fredericksburg. Said he could still see the horror of Irish volunteers just like us charging toward him behind a stone wall. Cut down in the grisliest piece of human carnage he’d ever laid eyes on. Human blood mixed with pieces of men and scraps of blue uniforms on a great big, cold field. That’s what he said, anyway.
“I really didn’t want to hear any more about that under the circumstances.
“When I finally did ask him how many places he’d been to, though, he just laughed and rattled off a list of cities I’d mostly never heard of. Milan, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, Moscow, Tokyo. You name it. He’d seen it.
“Seems he had no family to speak of, no wife, no special someone waiting at home, not even a home to go back to. As far as I could tell, he’d spent most of his life just wandering around from place to place, staying a while and then moving on.
“I thought that sounded terrific. But almost anything sounds terrific compared to stale rations, French mud, and German bullets. He didn’t seem to think so, though. That was what struck me about him. He’d been all over the world, over a time span I later figured out would’ve made him something like eighty years old by the time we shared a tiny corner of hell in the summer of 1918—even though he didn’t look a day over twenty-five. But all it left him with was a bunch of stories. That, and the saddest set of eyes you’d ever want to see.
“Looking back, I think I know why he latched on to me the way he did.”
“He knew you were both of the same sort?” Charybdis asked, not quite following Sean’s logic, if that’s what it was.
“No, not yet. At least I don’t think he did. He was just alone, and he wanted someone to talk to. It was only the dumbest of luck that we ended up having so much more in common than either of us suspected.”
“So how did you find out about his … secret?” Maggie questioned.
“It was July 1918. We were fighting at a place called Champagne, if you can believe that. We were starting to pick up steam. Our guys were pushing the Hun back day after day. There were a lot more ground assaults then. We spent more time running around from trench to trench than sitting and waiting.
“Things didn’t go our way forever. One night our squad was doing a reconnaissance sweep over some cottages. We were hit by a German ambush. The crossfire downed most of us right off the bat. Only a few, including me and Howie, managed to find cover.
“We ducked into a hole, just barely. Howie was hit bad by the time we settled in. The previous residents were still there, two German gunners, but they weren’t much more than rotting corpses. As it turned out, we ended up stuck there for a while, because the Germans who’d hit us were the leading edge of a counterattack. Their fire kept us pinned down for two days.
“It ended up being Howie’s last two days.
“I knew he was dying, as soon as I set him down in a puddle of blood and muck, tracers constantly buzzing overhead. There wasn’t much I could do for him, but that was just about the least of my concerns, because by the end of the first day things had already gotten so weird that I was scared out of my mind.
“First he got all pale, which is not so strange when you’re shot. But then other things started happening, things I never could have imagined.”
Maggie stopped fiddling with her hair. She fell still as Sean’s voice got lower, and quieter.
“His eyes got all white, like a snake, and he quivered. The bullets had shred his coat and his shirt underneath had fallen away from his body when I set him down. I tried to move him, not that I thought it would help, but I didn’t have any idea what else to do. That was when I first saw it.
“It looked like his skin was petrified, like those trees in Nevada or Arizona, all purple and hard like he was turning to stone. I thought the blood might have congealed and dried on his back, and that he must’ve been wounded worse that I’d thought. But there was no blood. Not a drop. With all the smoke there wasn’t much light, and it was hard to make out what was going on, but the closer I looked the weirder it got.
“He was cocooning, preparing to die,” Charybdis stated.
“Right, but I had never seen that before,” Sean agreed. “After a while his whole body got like that, his chest, his arms and his legs, even his face froze up and hardened like a statue.
“At this point I was ready to ditch the foxhole and take my chances with the Germans. Howie was a good guy, but the shit that was happening to him scared the hell out of me.
“I stayed, though. I watched him lay there, entombed in his own skin, or whatever it was, for a whole day. By the next morning, something had happened. The shell cracked. Just a little at first, but by the evening it was breaking, and I could see something pushing from inside, trying to get out.
“I don’t know what kept me there. What I was watching was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen. For some reason, I didn’t mind looking at it. As he lay there, hatching like a big, ugly slug, I knew that we were more connected than two lost soldiers. I knew I had to stay.
“Once the shell had broken away, I could see what was left of him. Howie, the Howie I knew, anyway, was just a memory.
“Instead of skin, he had this grayish, gelatinous covering. I was afraid to touch it for a while. When I finally did I kind of shuddered. It had the consistency of something soft, almost unformed, the way you’d imagine the skin underneath your fingernails to feel if you peeled them away.
“It’s okay to touch, he managed to say. I won’t bite. No teeth anymore.
“I think he started laughing then, but it wasn’t like a regular laugh, and that’s something I don’t think anyone could describe.
“In a few minutes his entire cocoon had broken off him. What lay there in front of me was truly a sight. They say that nothing can really prepare you for the horrors you encounter in war. Well, this was way beyond any of that. He didn’t even look human anymore, more like a slug drowning in its own slime.
“He didn’t seem to have much time left,
and he motioned with what used to be his left arm—it was by then more like a flipper or a tentacle—I knew he wanted me to lift up his head.
“That mop of blond hair had almost all fallen out, but some of it lingered, suspended in the slimy film that covered what had once been his cranium. His eyes weren’t white, but they weren’t even really eyes anymore. More like dark holes where eyes had been. The mottled yellow-gray skin of his head was writhing, moving around like there was some dirty liquid sloshing underneath, pushing the surface up in one place and sagging down in another.
“I could see he was fading. I’m not sure if that was why I did it, or if it was something else. Empathy for a friend? I still don’t know, but that’s when it happened.”
“When what happened?” Maggie asked.
“I let myself change.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Maybe it was a macabre camaraderie, a bizarre attempt to comfort a dying fellow, I don’t really know. I tore off my own coat and shirt so that the skin of my torso was visible, and I concentrated. I hadn’t let it happen over my entire body before, only little pieces and only for short times, but I think I probably expected to die right there too, so that sort of apprehension didn’t hold the same weight as it once had.
“Soon enough, as my dying friend watched, my own skin hardened, turned purple and then cracked and fell away. Just like his had, only much, much faster. When it did, what was left underneath was the same grayish-yellow ooze and vague features that he had.
“Dionysus is what I think he muttered through his sagging mouth. I don’t know how I missed it. You’re one of them. I’ve heard stories, but I’ve never seen one before.
”One what? I asked him. In the moment the irony of him being shocked by me was lost to the circumstances. A trickster. You are one, aren’t you? You change whenever you wish, not like the rest of us poor, sad souls.
“I don’t know what you mean. What rest of you? I asked him.
“Rest of us, he corrected me.
“I think I just stared at him, and I let my human form retake my body.
“Oh…you don’t know yet, do you? he said, almost laughing. It was one of the last things he said to me.
“Howie died a short while later. He managed to tell me one last thing, which I didn’t really understand at the time.”
“What was that?” Maggie asked.
“That I should go to Russia. That I should follow the call, and find the Keeper.”
“Russia? Why?”
“He didn’t have time to say. But somehow, and I can’t really say why, I knew I had to go. I felt something pulling me there.
“So I deserted the Army. I spent the next several months trying to get across Eastern Europe, not an easy task in those days, maybe even harder than it is now. Several times I thought about giving up, but I knew I couldn’t. If not for Howie, then for something else. He’d sent me on the path, but somehow I think I would have found it on my own eventually. The pull was too strong. I had no choice.”
“None of us did, none of us ever do. Her power is too strong,” Charybdis echoed.
“St. Petersburg was where I ended up, it’s Leningrad now, but it was still Sankt Petersborg in 1918. The city in those days was a magnificent place, but it was dangerous too.”
“Indeed,” Charybdis said. “Many years later, I heard a man much more eloquent than I compare Peter’s city in those times to a rare gem seized inside a workman’s vice. Though its facade gleamed with a sparkle hardly rivaled anywhere else under the sky, he said, the cracks within the jewel were growing, and the pressure was not soon to relent.”
“Very true,” Sean agreed. “To anyone who looked long enough, the signs of collapse were clear enough. But nobody was looking in those days. Not the deposed Romanovs or their foppish retainers, not the seething generals and their dying charges, and certainly not the peasants and their Bolshevik rousers. That, I think, may have been why we were all drawn there, and why the Morrigan chose that place for the most surreal episode of what has surely never been the world’s most grounded affair.”
“Morrigan. There’s that name again. Who, or what, is that?” Maggie demanded.
Charybdis was about to reply, but Sean stopped her with a wave. She wasn’t ready for that, not yet.
“In time,” he counseled. “First I need to explain why we were all gathered there. It was for the high festival of our people.”
“Ah, the St. Petersburg feast,” Charybdis mused. “Now that was a time. Days and nights of feasting and ritual. The time truest to the roots of our tradition in centuries.”
“I can’t really comment on that, since it was the only one of those grand events that I’ve yet been privy to, but I do know this. For all our depravity and excess, and all of our, peculiar affectations, from what I can tell, the locals didn’t even notice us,” Sean continued. “What an initiation, I can tell you. I still recall the sounds of the city, the chaos. Cannons from the Peter and Paul Fortress booming across the Neva. Gunfire echoing through the Hermitage pavilion, and the cries of starving men and women clamoring for help in the cold. Help that would never come.
“I was drawn to a palace south of Nevsky Prospekt, along a canal that ran near St. Isaac’s. Whose abode it was I do not know, but it was fantastic, and it was ours.”
“A noble of Tatar descent, or so I was told,” Charybdis answered. “The Morrigan inhabited his form. She used his position to provide safety for us all, to seclude us from the revolution outside within his giant palace.”
“The actual festivities were held beneath the palace, and that’s what I remember most,” Sean said. “When I entered, it was dark, and poorly lit. Steam was rushing from old, broken pipes. There were hundreds of figures, gathering in rows upon a wide floor. Some wore shrouds that covered most of their forms, leaving only grotesque faces of every shape and sort imaginable; as well as some not even dreamt of in the nightmares of the mad.
“Those who were not cloaked paraded about naked, although it was an uncommon nudity, for though most walked on two legs, few bore any more resemblance to ordinary folk than that. Some were formless, their skin no more than a shifting sea of pus and ooze. Others had very distinct features, some bestial, the bastard offspring of reptilian and mammalian parents.
“Then there were others, who stood out boldly among the deviant throng, though no one paid them any more mind than the scores of stranger celebrants. These were the few who looked entirely and completely human. They were, almost without exception, both young and beautiful.
“Then someone stepped to the fore, it looked like a man at first, but I know now how silly that seems. A weirdly glittering robe was all about her, and very little of her actual body was visible beneath it.
“I think I stared at the shroud for the longest time before I even noticed anything else. The colors of it had a way of mesmerizing you when you watched it, because it seemed like it moved on its own, as though it was alive too. I remember that especially, since there was no wind at all in the place, damp and dank like a sewer or a subway tunnel during a rainstorm. And every time a fold or a flap lifted or bent, the shade of the cloth shifted. Pale blue became jade green, and then black and then red.
“Who knows how long I stood there just watching the colors change? But I know that I finally looked up, and I know that because I have never been as frightened in all my life as I was at that very moment. Never before, and never since.”
“What was it?” Maggie asked.
Another long silence followed that simplest of queries, but it didn’t appear that Sean was thinking as he sat quietly there, or even that he was preparing any response at all. He merely sat still, as though he couldn’t speak any more.
Eventually, though, he cleared his throat, and he began talking again, not quite where he had left off some moments before.
“A reading from the Book of Nestor,” the … person’s voice said from the dais.
“I had no idea what that meant
, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, and the words weren’t really all that important to me anyway. I do recall them, oddly enough, all these years later. I suppose that might have something to do with it being my first time. You always remember your first time, even if it really wasn’t that memorable when it happened.
“Column seven of the Nineteenth Scroll.”
As Sean recited the passage from memory, Charybdis joined in with him. She knew every word by heart as well.
“Long had he dwelt there, among the ice and the clouds atop the citadel Asgard, when there came to the place of the Changeling King Loki a pilgrim of the lower race. It was in the form of a hawk that he met the visitor, a man with one eye who entered the great hall under a promise of brotherhood.”
“All of those gathered around me then began chanting, and I think I joined them, somewhat, even though I didn’t really know what they were saying,” Sean continued. “Truth is, even if I’d known the words, most of what was being said would still have been incomprehensible. Even among our own kind, the true voice of many of us only barely resembles anything human. That’s how it was that night. Mostly it sounded like a herd of livestock with their throats being slit all at once. That, or a thousand starving children screaming for a morsel of food.”
“Actually, I’d say it was something like a cross between those two things. Really very hard to put your finger on, to be perfectly honest, and I’ve never tried to describe it to someone who hadn’t experienced it personally before,” Charybdis explained.
Maggie was aghast now, unsure if their macabre words were true, only certain from Sean’s demeanor that he at least believed them. That may have been chilling enough.
“Is that what frightened you so? What you spoke of a few minutes ago?”
“No.”
“Well then, what was it? What was so terrible, so much more horrible than what you’ve just told me? Was it a voice? A face?” Maggie questioned.
“She didn’t have a face. Not one like you or … or other people have.”
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