by Steve Vernon
She lay there upon me for a very long time before rising and closing her open wound as easily as a traveler might close their walking coat.
“Wrap him in deer skin,” she told the dwarves. “And crown him with horns of witch elm.”
The deer skin closed about me like a cocoon. I lay there helpless as they hauled me up into the apple tree to dangle. I felt the witch elm sprouting in my skull like a pair of stag antlers. Hungry tree thoughts prowled in my memory like fat blind worms.
“Sleep,” Snow White told me. “Sleep and hang a while, my sweet Prince Charming. Sleep, my Herne and dream of lonely wedding songs.”
But as I closed my eyes I could hear nothing more than my lover’s laughter and the dirge of the wind blowing through the surrounding woods.
The Other Side Of The Moon is a Lonely Midnight Shadow
There is a time of the year when the glacial lights of the Aurora Borealis sweep and crawl and crackle across the skyline like the flames of a campfire. Colors beyond naming echo with brilliance that would blind a hawk in flight.
These colors rise up and cry out for a story or two to be told.
Abel shivered over his campfire.
The moon rose high over the murk of the North Canadian forest, fat and full and torn with a spectral knife of mist shot straight through the heart of it. To Abel’s fanciful imagination the mist looked like a streak of decay sliced through the middle of a round rotten pumpkin.
A wolf howled in the darkness of the forest. There was something in the note that caught Abel’s ear.
Something sad?
Maybe hungry?
No, that wasn’t it.
The wolf howled, long and drawn out and Abel found the sensation that he had been searching for.
Lonely.
That was it.
The wolf’s howl sounded absolutely and terrifyingly lonely.
Abel put his bow to his fiddle and tried to catch the note. The resin sang over the catgut, his expert hands coaxing out the bones of a weird sort of song. It was good and close to the mark but still only a pallorous imitation.
Abel shrugged.
All art was only imitation. The artist exists on the infringed borderland of a lonely mime-existence telling tales and singing songs of what wasn’t but might have been. The High Creator doubtless had feelings that were similar, looking down from his heavenly loft high above the red clouds of moon-set.
Abel looked over at the Northern Express steam coach. There was nothing imitation in that piece of equipment. It was hard with reality, poured solid with the stuff of mechanical logic. The sturdy iron pistons, the leather air sacs, the pincered leg-wheels. Even squatting there, still and cold, the heavy metal beast of an engine seemed to scream for motion as if sitting too long on the tracks would court the unwanted gifts of rust and inertia.
Abel lowered the tone of the bow stroke and caught the steam coach whistle’s haunting goodbye call. The bow’s note echoed outwards, touching both forest and railroad track in a perfect impartial balance.
The fiddle note also caught the Conductor’s notice. He looked over in Abel’s direction, his head swiveling as if the long lean man was calmly training a musket at Abel’s skull. Abel could see the Conductor’s bright blue button eyes, even in the twilight darkness.
The Conductor’s disapproval was unmistakable.
Abel shivered in response and dutifully muted the fiddle.
The Conductor was easy to spot, even in the cloying shroud of twilight. You could spot the man through his tall and dignified silhouette; that hollow moon of a face haunting above the precise square angles of his shoulder blades, the twice-forked coattail trailing behind. There was something of the bayonet and rifle barrel in the bone work of this strange man, something of the owl and the wolf in his eyes. He was built with a Spartan parsimonious economy, built for a single purpose unfathomable to the common eye.
Abel was a little frightened of the Conductor. He wasn’t afraid to admit that to himself. There was something about the tall man’s towering form that made Abel’s heart run like a rabbit chased by a wild dog.
The Conductor returned his attention to the work at hand. The baggage car gaped open like the mouth of a dozing imbecile. Six large lumber-men, heavy and thick and menacing, toted large crates from the hold of the baggage car onto a heavy wooden wagon. There was a quick, almost insect-like haste to their movements as if they too were frightened of the steam coach and the forest and what ever lay out there in the realm of shadow. Abel half wondered what might be in those crates. They seemed to sit so strangely upon the lumber-men’s shoulders.
“You have played a fine tune,” a voice broke the darkness behind Abel’s back. “Would you care for a story to play it with?”
Abel turned his attention to the man crouching across the campfire. He’d been sitting there listening to Abel play, although Abel hadn’t heard his approach. He was a heavy sort of man, long of leg with a flat cliff-like face. He stared out of a pair of dark eyes that gleamed in the reflected flame, like a cat or a dog hiding in the shadows. His arms hung long by his side as if he was unused to using them and he leaned his chin against a long walking staff.
“My name is Wilfred Donnigle. It seems that we are travelling together, at least for a short time.”
Wilfred had the look of a fencer, Abel thought. The long capable arms and the flat keen eyes that looked so much like long-buried moons. He could easily envision Wilfred playing with his quarry before thrusting a sharp saber home. A hunter, Abel’s artistic fancy instinctively pounced upon the thought.
This man is a hunter.
“To pass the time while we wait for the Conductor to complete his business.” Wilfred spat into the campfire as if the mere mention of the Conductor was enough to disgust him. “We unload wooden crates in a forest where some of the world’s oldest trees stand hungry in the darkness. I wonder what those crates might carry.”
Abel shivered at the uncanny echoing of his own thoughts. The wolf howled again. Wilfred smiled at the sound.
“Listen to that music, musician. I heard you trying to capture it. You might as well try and capture her,” Wilfred stabbed a finger up towards the moon. “Remember this, fiddler. The word wolf begins with wind, as does the words world and woman. Such creatures are not made for cages of any kind.”
Abel could not resist the unspoken challenge. He slid his bowstring softly across the fiddle, catching the wolf’s tones perfectly and then bleeding them out into the soft sweet whisper of the winter wind.
The wolf howled back.
Wilfred clapped twice.
“You have clever hands, musician. You play a fiddle like you were taught by the devil himself.”
Abel shrugged.
He would keep his own secrets.
The wolf howled again.
“Listen to him,” Wilfred said. “How hungry he sounds.”
“I thought he sounded lonely,” Abel said.
Wilfred’s mouth formed itself into a marionette’s smile. “Clever ears and a clever tongue as well. That is a pretty combination.”
Wilfred dug at his chest with the fierce rough manner of a man who had grown used to his own company. “Of course the wolf is lonely. He misses the moon when she goes away.”
Abel looked on, waiting for the man to explain.
“The old ones tell a story,” Wilfred said. “Of how a hungry wolf once tried to catch the moon in its mouth. Every time he bit a little chunk out of her she turned away from the pain. Then, once the wolf had bitten her down to nothing she came back.”
“How did she come back?” Abel had to ask.
“There is magic on the other side of the moon. She keeps it hidden from the wolves and the men who cower below.” Wilfred held up a single silver coin. It looked very old, not a coin of any realm that Abel was familiar with.
“Here, see this? Look closely,” Wilfred said. “For this is the beginning of a story.”
And then he began to tell his tale.
“There on
ce was a king,” Wilfred said, turning the coin over heads up and holding it out towards Abel. “He looked much like this image.”
Abel stared at the face on the coin; its high patrician forehead and softly rounded chin. The face was lined with worry and needless fret. It looked to Abel like a very weak face but then again most kings did. Wilfred balanced the coin on the tip of his finger and set it spinning around and round.
“The king made a bet with his noblemen that he could find the secret of true happiness long before they could. He set out into the wilderness, imagining that he might be able to hunt for his answer as if it were a rabbit. Only he was not the mighty hunter he imagined himself to be. He became lost in the woods. The trees moved around his tracks and hid his trail.”
“They seemed to move,” Abel corrected. “Isn’t that what you mean?”
“I said they moved. I mean what I say and I say what I mean. How many nights have you slept under the mourning pines, musician?” Wilfred asked. “These woods are old and hungry. It is not good to tarry too long beneath their shadow.”
Wilfred tapped the tree behind him with his staff. The bark seemed to writhe beneath the blow but Abel only blamed the movement on the flickering trickery of the campfire.
Wilfred calmly went on with his tale.
“It was not long before the King came upon a peasant who lived in the woods. The peasant was a lean man, all raw angles, like the gods had broken him from out of his mold with a very sharp chisel. He was working a field too large for one man to successfully tend and yet he was happily whistling as he worked.”
Wilfred whistled, low and eerie like the kind of sound the wind makes as it blows through the tombstones of an untended graveyard. It was a sound that Abel did not want to even attempt to capture on his fiddle.
“Surely, the King thought, a man who whistles in a worthless field must know something of happiness. So the King asked him what the secret to happiness was.”
“And what did he say then?” Abel asked.
“Your majesty, the old man said, I can tell you this easily enough. The secret of true happiness is to work like two men, eat like one, and sleep like a baby. Nothing more is necessary.”
Wilfred kept on talking, and Abel fell into the flow of the story as a man might fall into a river. He was carried by the current of the story, in and under until his body and mind felt like nothing more than a part of the storied river itself. He could see the king staring at the old man, trying to imagine the best use he could make out of the simple peasant. He could see the King thinking about what the old man had said and decided that it was true.
“You are truly a wise man,” the King said. “Let me properly reward your obvious wisdom.”
And with those words the King threw the old man a single silver coin, which truthfully was a lot to give a starving peasant, but in equal truthfulness it was not much at all to give to a man who had just won you a bag of gold.
“I have made a bet with my noblemen and you have given me exactly what I needed to win my wager, which will win me a bag full of gold. Still, it would not serve my purpose if you were to tell any of my noblemen your secret.”
The King fiddled significantly with the hilt of his sword. It was clear what he was telling the old man. Stay quiet or taste the freely bequeathed silence of royal steel.
“Your majesty,” the old man said. “There is no need to bloody your steel on my ignoble flesh. I swear you will not hear of me again until I have seen your face five hundred more times.”
As the old man spoke these words the King was astonished to see a gray bristling fur creeping across the old man’s features. The old man’s limbs seemed to lengthen and stretch, his face pushed outwards displaying teeth, as long and keen as bayonets. Claws, sharp as meat hooks. The old man was a werewolf, a shape changer doomed by the cycle of the moon to turn from man into wolf.
And while the old man was changing he kept looking at the King’s face on the coin, turning it over and over and looking at it each time and all the while counting out loud, “One, two, three, four...”
As the old man counted his face and form continued to change until he was more wolf than man. The King began to run. Behind him he heard the old man counting, louder and louder, now barking the numbers as his voice thickened into a deep hungry growl.
“One hundred twenty-eight, one hundred twenty-nine, one hundred thirty...”
The woods grew closer.
The trees moved.
A screech owl shrieked.
The King continued to run, the old man’s voice growing louder and louder.
“Four hundred ninety seven, four hundred ninety-eight, four hundred ninety-nine...”
The King burst back into the clearing where he’d first met the peasant, He saw the old man, now standing a good head taller than the king and burly with gnarled muscle and a wolf’s gray fur, looked straight down into the king’s pale and bloodless face as he growled out the final words, “Five hundred!”
*
Abel started, snapped from the spell of the story like a branch broken from a dead tree. Wilfred looked up from his tale weaving and grinned fiercely. He had large sharp teeth. Abel hadn’t noticed these before, and trembled.
“Try and play that, musician. Try and play that fine edge of fear and see if your tune can touch the heart of the moon.”
“It was a good story,” Abel shakingly admitted. “It shivered my blood nicely.”
Abel looked over at the steam coach. It was still and dead and cold and the Conductor didn’t seem to be in that much of a hurry. The moon hung high overhead, like a lonely lantern, beckoning and demanding and haunting.
“Tell me another,” Abel barked.
The truth was Abel didn’t really want to hear anything more, but he was afraid of what might grow to fill the silence if he allowed it to linger. The story would buy him time, and perhaps the steam coach would chuff into life, and he could scramble back into the comforting shelter of his cabin.
Wilfred continued to tell his tales.
“There was a merchant in old Austria who fell into bad times. Rather, he jumped into them as a man might jump into the current of a river. He fell in with a gambling house and lost most of his goods and stock. He was cheated, of course, but cheating a fool is never quite that strong a dishonesty.”
Wilfred poked the fire with a stick. The coals winked knowingly in the cool forest darkness.
“So his daughter was forced to ride out and seek employment. He did not have any sons, and his wife was too ill to see to the household, so being a good girl she swore she would do whatever she could. There are many ways a young woman can find silver in the darkness of the night.”
Wilfred grinned in a nasty hungry fashion.
“Her name was Luna, and she had hair as long and soft as faded moonbeams. Her eyes were rich and dark and nearly black. She had the strange gift of seeing in the darkness and her face was as pale as a clutch of funeral lilies.”
Abel looked up into the darkness. He could almost see her face washed over the pale shining surface of the moon.
“One night she was out riding for the city. She had to pass through a far darker forest than this. The night was alive and crawling. The trees were tall and shaded in ancient evil. Dark things whispered through the leaves and the mist and Luna knew fear.”
“Everything was scarier back then, was it not?” Abel said, half in jest.
“Old trees cast long shadows,” Wilfred growled enigmatically. “Now may I tell my story?”
Abel nodded meekly.
“She was riding through the forest when a wolf pack caught up to her. Now back then the wolves were larger than the puny whipped puppies that howl beneath the memory of the First Wolf’s shadow. They were large enough that a single wolf could easily take down a stallion, much less the rickety nag the girl was forced to ride upon.”
Wilfred stood up, using his walking staff as a hobby horse, his legs bent and flexed at the knees, pantomiming a rider on
a galloping horse. He looked so funny that Abel had to stifle a laugh. Something told him that it would not be good to laugh at such a man as Wilfred.
“She rode as hard as she could; thinking that if she could make the bridge she could lose them in the city lights. There would be guards at the gate who would be more than happy to help a young woman in distress. She rode on but it was no good. The wolves cut her off before she could reach the bridge. She stole her fingers down to the sheath at her hip where she kept a small silver knife with a cross precisely carved into the hilt. She pulled the knife out from the sheath at her belt, wondering if she should use the blade on the wolves, the horse, or quite possibly herself.”
“Suddenly the wind held its breath. The moon winked shut. All of time seemed to freeze into stillness. From out of the dark frozen shadows strode a tall strange man. He was gaunt of aspect, with a long dark cape that seemed to shift in the shadows, and a slouch hat pulled down nearly to his brow. From under his cape he drew a long silver sword that glinted in the night like it had been crafted from starlight and ice.”
Wilfred brandished his walking stick like a long sword, parrying and thrusting expertly.
“Ha! Ha! He ran into that pack of wolves like a hurricane, striking to his left and right. Ha! Ha! He gutted the largest of the wolves with a single well placed slash, then cut to the left and blinded a second. He stood before the girl, facing the wolves, daring them to advance. Finally they decided that it would be easier to feed upon their dead and wounded.”
Wilfred looked darkly down at Abel, pointing the tip of the staff at Abel’s throat. Abel swallowed something that tasted like a sinking stone.
“Even wolves are prone to the art of the practical and pragmatic,” Wilfred warned.
Abel casually looked away, pretending to be interested in what the Conductor was up to.
Wilfred continued his tale.
“Luna looked down at the man standing before her. A part of her feared him even more than the wolves. He was lean, in a way that spoke of rope and leather and patience. His face was as long as dying man’s final sigh. His eyes burned like blue coals. His face was corded and scarred and pitiless.”