by Steve Vernon
“Thank you sir,” Luna said. “May I have your name?”
“My name is Lykos,” The lean man said. “It is too dark a night for a beauty such as you to be about.”
“Even beauty has a price, sir.” she said, looking away, feeling slightly ashamed at what grim circumstance had brought her to. “I may be had for those who can pay.”
The last few words were a guilty whisper.
“You are no mere strumpet to be bought and bartered for, girl. What has brought you to this act of desperation?”
“Life, sir. Life and the face of pragmatic reality. My father has lost his holdings to a house of gamblers. I must do what I can to keep our family name clean.”
Lykos snorted.
“You would roll in the muck with pigs to keep your name clean? An interesting strategy, I am sure. Listen girl, I have silver aplenty, and you need not do anything more for it but to allow me to accompany you back to your home.”
Luna didn’t believe his words until he handed her a bag of silver coins large enough to choke a full grown wolf. Over the next few months Lykos came to see Luna whenever he could. And yet strangely he could only come on the nights of a full moon.
“My work keeps me very busy,” he said. “I can only find time for pleasures like this a few days out of every month.”
He did not try to explain why these few days happened to always fall on the nights when the moon was as fat and full as a silver coin in the sky, but Luna was not stupid. She knew that there was more to her Lykos than met the eye.
Yet she didn’t care. He was kind and generous and certainly brave. She was coming to care for him, at first in the way that one might care for an older gentleman, a little kindness mixed with a little pity. But as the weeks turned into months and he continued to shower her with the fanciest of silver jewelry, charms, and cutlery, she grew to love him. Not merely because of the silver, but more because he never seemed to expect anything in return for his generosity.
Then one night he did.
“Will you be my wife, sweet Luna? I know that I am older than you and doubtless you could have any man of your choosing, so beautiful are you.”
She blushed charmingly.
“Oh sir,” she protested. “I am very much afraid that my previous dealings have so tarnished my reputation that no decent man would care to have me.”
Lykos snorted in that heavy animalistic fashion of his.
“How decent must a man be to judge his wife by her past deeds. I did not know the woman you were when I met you and I am none the wiser now. I prefer to know only the woman you have become. You have always been kind and honest and polite to me. You are everything I would wish for in a wife. Will you be mine?”
She looked away, tears glinting in her eyes.
“I cannot leave my father,” she said. “I am all that he has to protect him from his own past.”
“And should a daughter raise her father?”
She continued to look away.
“Very well,” Lykos said. “If I can save your father’s fortunes will you marry me?”
Luna looked at him in perfect frankness.
“You have my word, but how can you save him? If you pay his debts off the gamblers are the type of men who will only want more.”
Lykos smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. He touched a tear from her dark eye.
“Look at this tear,” he said. “Do you know that it is said you can see the future in a tear? I look into this tear and I see myself asking those gamblers to leave your father be and look -- I see those gamblers willingly yielding.”
“Oh my Lykos, if it were just a matter of asking I would have asked them a long time ago.”
His smile grew even icier.
“Perhaps you’ve never asked them in the right way before.”
And then Lykos did a very strange thing. He gave Luna a spherical silver charm on a bright silver chain.
“It is a full moon charm,” he said. “It will bring you luck when you don’t have any, and protect you when the wrong kind of luck comes to call.”
“It looks like a musket ball to me,” Luna said, not wanting to anger her lover.
“Both can kill,” Lykos said.
Several nights later the gambling house was ravaged by wolves. The windows were smashed through, and the walls painted with men’s blood. Hearts were torn open and throats slashed and not a soul remained to breathe the tale.
The villagers, fearing the evil of the loup-garou, the men who turn into wolves on the nights of the full moon, buried the corpses of the gamblers at the crossroads after hacking their heads off and stuffing their mouths with bunches of asphodel.
“Superstitious fools,” Lykos said. “They know so much and so very little.”
“Why did they do it?” Luna asked.
“Because they fear that the men killed by the wolves might become werewolves.” Lykos shook his head slowly. “That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works at all.”
“Why asphodel?”
“The ancients believed the plant to be the food of the dead. They also believed that if you keep the dead well fed, it keeps them quiet. Ha, what do they know? Asphodel is as bland and tasteless as library paste. Steeped in schnapps, however, it makes a fine stomach tonic.”
She looked at him straight in his pale blue eyes.
“Did you do this?” she asked. “Was this for my father?”
“He is free,” Lykos said. “There is no debt to hold him.”
“Then there is nothing to hold me, save you,” Luna said.
She embraced him and a wolf howled in the distance and the moon looked away for a soft quiet spell.
In a month’s time the wedding plans were made and in a month following that the two of them stood before a small frightened priest in the heart of the dark brooding forest.
“The forest has always been a home to me,” Lykos said. “And it is all the chapel I will ever need.”
Luna had begun to wonder to herself about her husband’s mysterious disappearances, but she owed him her father’s life and vowed to look away from any troubling questions.
In the morning Luna awoke to find a wolf sleeping in her bed, entangled in her husband’s bedclothes. She screamed and the wolf fled out through the mouth of her open window. She chased him outside and then vomited her fear and disgust upon the thirsty forest bed. That sickness terrified her far more than the knowledge that her husband was certainly a werewolf.
She knew of only one reason why a woman might sick up her stomach before she had even tasted her breakfast. She tried to clear her throat. Something was catching at her tongue. She reached between her lips and dragged a wolf’s long gray hair from out of her mouth.
Then she lay her head down and wept out a river of lonely hopeless tears.
Later on she told the villagers that her husband had been dragged from the house by a wolf. Twenty eight days later she sat by her window with her husband’s musket, loaded with her silver full moon amulet. It turned out to be the exact size of a musket ball.
She waited for her husband to come home.
As the full moon climbed high into the heavens, she saw him walking from out of the forest. Tall and lean and straight as she’d ever know him. Her love caught hold of her heart, but fear bade her speak.
“Don’t move,” she said, brandishing her musket.
He halted.
“It has come to this, so soon?” her husband asked. “Will you shoot your own husband?”
“What else should I do?”
Lykos nodded in the moonlight. “It is why I gave you the amulet. I knew that you would have to use it.”
“Why go to all of this bother, then? Why not get a hunter to shoot you?”
“When I saw you in the woodlands, I was as good as shot. You struck me squarely in my heart. I had hoped things might turn differently and that you would never think to use the amulet but I had to give you the choice. My heart would not let me do otherwise.”
&
nbsp; “What werewolf has a heart?”
He smiled.
“My wife, I was not always this way. A werewolf came into my pack and slew my mate and cubs. I tore his throat out but I was wounded in the battle. I became as you know me. Most nights I walk the woods as a wolf but every full moon I must walk upright as a man and as a man I met and fell in love with you.”
He stepped closer.
She waved her musket. “Not one step more, Lykos.”
He spoke again, his voice thickened in pain. “Wolves mate for life, Luna.”
He opened up his hands and stretched his arms straight out, making a cross of himself. She could see the wolf in him now, for he was both wolf and man at the same time. He leaned his head back and howled at the uncaring moon. Then Luna shot him, straight through the heart. She crouched by her window all night long, cradling the empty musket.
In the morning, when she looked for him he was gone.
She was sick to her stomach again and every morning that followed that.
Three months later she felt the nipping birth pangs.
The pains were coming fast.
She rode into town one last time and purchased a coachmen’s shotgun. She loaded the shotgun with all of the silver jewelry and coins she could manage to cram into the barrel.
She leaned the barrel against her abdomen and whispered a prayer to the saint of hunters before squeezing the trigger.
Wilfred looked up from his tale.
“That is the last time that I saw her.”
He drew his shirt away from his chest. Abel saw an ancient wound that looked to have burned itself into Wilfred’s flesh.
“I cheated,” he said with a lonely midnight smile. “My heart was not pure, and neither was the musket ball. Silver is a costly gift and even wolves are sadly practical.”
The steam coach huffed itself into life and Abel turned to look at it. When he looked back Wilfred had vanished. Onto the steam coach or into the night, Abel could not tell.
The steam coach whistle blew again. A wolf screamed its sorrow at the moon in the lonely forest darkness as Abel hurried back onto the steam coach not daring to look behind him.
The night wind blew out of the Arctic sorrow and fiddled a tune with the evening forest branches. The moon smiled sadly down and winked a light to shine on his path but Abel never noticed as the train sped away into the long and lonely darkness.
The Bridge
It was one hell of a long hot day.
The scribbled map showed a city somewhere between here and the ocean only it didn’t say just how far he had to ride to get there.
Harley hoped the old bike had enough in it to get him there.
“Fuck it,” he said. “I will get there or I won’t.”
He decided that it was time for a smoke.
Problems always seemed to grow smaller once you’d given them a couple of fingers or two of good home-grown tobacco.
He carefully dug his makings for a cigarette out of the man-skin pouch. He sniffed the tobacco suspiciously. The barter-man had sworn that it was tobacco but odds are it wasn’t.
Tobacco was hard to find.
“Probably nothing but dried horse shit,” he said.
He lit up, leaned back and inhaled. He let the smoke drift out slowly, savoring the taste. Then he spat into the dust.
“Horse shit, damn it,” he said.
He finished the cigarette anyways. It wasn’t bad, for horseshit, and smoke was awfully hard to come by in these late grim days.
After the smoke he dug out some dried fruit and grain from another suck. He crammed it into his mouth and washed it down with a swallowed gulp of hard drink. He watched a lazy black feathered street-cleaner circling high above him.
For a moment he thought about taking a shot at the bird but then he changed his mind.
“Waste of ammo,” he decided.
He cursed it instead.
“Fly the fuck away from here, bird,” he said, speaking softly because his throat was too dry to waste on yelling. “There’s no meat for you today.”
He stepped to the side of the road, loosened his pants and squatted and had a crap. Then he buried that crap with the remains of the smoke and rose with a satisfied fart.
He walked over to his bike.
It was a good bike.
It had belonged to his old man who had pieced it together from a half a dozen wrecks found in the city. After building it the old man had left the city to ride the wild roads. He traded for a woman from a barter-man, got a son from her and then got himself killed.
Young Harley could still remember kneeling by his old man’s broken body. The bike had fallen in the sand. Even then, Young Harley had been old enough to stand the bike back up and determine that it could be fixed and ridden.
Unfortunately his old man had fallen on the rocks and could not be fixed.
“Damn machine finally got me,” his old man had told him.
“What’s a machine?” Young Harley had asked.
“That bike is a machine,” his old man had said. “The city I found it in was a machine, too. A great big machine that didn’t like men who did not have any kind of magic.”
“What’s magic?” Young Harley had asked.
The old man showed Young Harley his good luck charm – the one that he always wore around his neck for as long as Young Harley could remember.
“This is magic,” the old man said. “Not much magic, maybe. Just the kind of magic that is only good for making crossings.”
The son wanted to ask what a crossing was but the old man started choking and hacking gobs of blood and spittle with every hock he spewed.
“I ain’t got much time,” the old man rattled. “Just stay away from the machines is all I have to tell you.”
“Why?”
The old man cursed.
“Machines are what run things now,” the old man explained. “They are like men only they don’t think so much.”
The light in the old man’s eyes grew hazy, like the sky when the sun was going down.
“When I was a boy,” the old man went on. “Men ran things but then men let the machines take over. It was for the good of all, was what they said.”
He choked again.
More blood.
More spittle.
He couldn’t have all that much left, Harley thought.
“Maybe men don’t think too good either,” the old man said, his voice weakening like the squeaking of the desert crawlers the old woman made into stew.
“Anyway,” the old man went on. “The machines have figured out how to use shooters. How to kill. How to make us die.”
The old man spit.
“If the city is so tough,” Harley asked. “If the machines are so big and tough how come you got away?”
So many damn questions.
Harley had never dreamed that a question could be so damned important but now he had more of them then the night twinklers in a moonless sky.
The old man had never stayed still for so very long until tonight.
Now he was dying.
There was no more time for questions.
There was no time left.
“Machines are big but dumb,” the old man said, waving the charm, a round metal disc with strange markings on both sides. “Magic built them and they still think that they need magic to work. If you give them enough magic they will not hurt you.”
More choking.
More blood.
Then the old man closed his eyes and stopped breathing and Harley twisted the charm from the old man’s grasp. He tossed the body over his bike and he wheeled the two of them back to the woman.
It was a long walk and a hard carry but there was just no sense leaving so much fresh meat for the road-cleaners.
Harley fixed the bike
He strapped a couple of fast shooters onto the bridge of the bike’s handlebars, tucked a sharp hunting blade into his right boot and he became a rider.
The woman was h
is by right.
He traded her to a barter man for supplies and he took the map that the old man had shown him – the map to the city.
He guessed that he was going home.
He wasn’t sure what it would like or how he would feel when he got there but he was certain sure that he was going home.
It was time to ride.
He swung his leg over the bike and rubbed his good luck charm twice and fired the big bike into a roar. He turned the bike into the wind and gave it its head. The air that burned through his nostrils stank of death, somewhere farther down the road.
The road cleaner was still following him, flapping its great dirty wings in the hot desert breeze.
Maybe the bird knew something that the rider didn’t.
He saw a hill ahead.
He rolled to the top and then killed the engine.
He needed the time to sit and think.
He saw a river.
Good.
He could use the water.
He saw a bridge.
Good.
He could use the bridge to cross the river.
He saw a house, on the bridge.
“What the fuck?”
Who in hell would live on a bridge?
Whoever was living in that little house would want whatever the rider carried.
He checked his fast shooters carefully and made sure that his hunting was loose in his boot.
He rolled the bike down the hill, slow and easy. The death stink was reeking from out of the river water. Damn it. He couldn’t drink that stuff. He probably wouldn’t even want to swim in it.
The little house looked hard like it was made out of some kind of stone. He could see no windows – just a little basket in front.
A barter man’s wagon lay in front of the little building. It lay all over in front of the building, lying on its side and its back and its belly – shot to pieces by the look of it. The barter wagon was covered with big shooter marks.
Great big ones.
The barter man lay beside his shot up wagon. The road cleaners had already picked at his meat. It didn’t look like any of the barter goods were touched. He could see go juice and hard drink and dry food. No women, though. He must have been a poor barter man or else maybe the road cleaners had carried her off.