“Come on in and get some,” I said. “You’ll thank me for it later.”
* * *
The greenish light of dawn gave way to a harsher, whiter, more ordinary looking world (except, of course, for the new body of water) as we finished up the griddle cakes and bacon that Mrs. Denslow had been good enough to make. Well, I say we, but I didn’t eat much. I never do.
“A long time ago,” I began, “Mrs. Denslow’s grandfather, Noah James Lyman, came from England and settled here in Medicine Dance. He was a bit of a scientist, as rich men sometimes were back in the old country, and he chose this part of Arizona because of things he had heard about it—stories the local Indians told—and some curious artifacts found by the earliest pioneers. The very name of the place, Brujado Valley, meant ‘enchanted,’ or even ‘cursed.’ Over the years, Doctor Lyman became more and more convinced that the place was special and began a series of experiments that he expected would prove just how special it was.”
“Special how? And what sort of experiments would those be?” Ned sounded a bit skeptical. I was glad, because I’d seen how he kept looking at Catherine, and I would have hated to think a serious admirer of hers could turn out to be stupid.
“I don’t have the scientific knowledge to explain,” I said, “except that Doctor Lyman believed that this area… Well, his way of saying it was that Medicine Dance ‘sat very lightly in time.’ Those were his words. And Noah Lyman was a very, very smart man. He thought he could figure out a way to understand what was special about the place and… harness it, I suppose you’d say. Like the way you’d fasten the tow-rope of a river barge to an ox-bow, then let the ox do the work of pulling the boat.”
“So he was going to use the town to pull a barge?”
“Ned, hush now,” said Catherine. “You’re just making fun, but you certainly can’t explain all that water out there. Let Mr. Custos speak.” I was glad to see that she didn’t put up with any nonsense from him, either.
“Not exactly,” I replied to Billinger’s question. “More like he was going to try to find what it was that made the place special and then redirect a little of it. Like digging a channel off a big, fast-moving river to get some of the water to flow somewhere else and turn a water wheel.”
A dog was barking outside, loud and getting louder. I cocked an ear.
“I apologize, then,” Billinger said, “but I’m afraid you’ve lost me, sir.”
“Doctor Lyman built a machine that he thought could find the frequency of this place, which is a bit like the way a string or a bell makes music, a pattern of vibration. When he finally discovered that frequency, he tried to duplicate it artificially. But it didn’t quite work.”
The dog was still barking loudly, with a frightened edge to it now. Catherine stood up to look out the window.
“Whatever are you doing, Catherine?” Mrs. Denslow said. “And what’s got into that dog? I confess it’s fretting me.”
“It’s… I’m not sure, Grammy. There’s something on the fence down at the far end and it’s bothering poor Gally to distraction. I think it’s a hawk, but it’s awful big.”
“Don’t say ‘awful,’ say ‘awfully.’ We call that an adverb, dear.”
Billinger was up now, looking out the same window. “It may be an adverb, as you say, ma’am, but it ain’t no hawk. Crane, maybe. I’ve seen a few of those down in Sulphur Springs…”
I climbed to my feet. “That’s no crane. Fact is, that’s no bird at all. And there’s a lot of them.”
Now everyone crowded the window to watch the things wheeling through the sky. Most of the winged creatures were spinning lazily along the edge of the new ocean, but a few were right above us.
“Oh!” said Catherine as the one on the fence launched itself across the yard. It glided past the window before banking on its leathery wings and heading toward the water. “It’s… it’s horrid! What is it, Mr. Custos?”
“I’m not certain,” I told her. “The wings look like a bat’s, but…” The creature had a long beak, but not a feather to be seen. “Some kind of… reptile?”
I didn’t have long to wonder. Only a few moments later, another of the nightmare creatures glided down from the sky on leathery wings that must have spanned close to a dozen feet. It landed not twenty yards from our window, and the barking of Mrs. Denslow’s watch dog suddenly jumped to an entirely different level of frenzy. The reptile-bird seemed offended: it opened its long beak and hissed, then leaped up into the air, flapping its huge wings, and glided toward the side of the house where the dog was tied up, just out of our sight. The barking became a yelp of panic.
“Galahad!” cried Catherine. “Oh, no! That thing is hurting him!” She dashed toward the door, but I reached out and caught her as gently as I could.
“Don’t go out there,” I said. “Not until I’ve—”
“I’ll save your dog, Miss Catherine!” shouted Billinger, who was beyond my reach. Before I could do anything, he unholstered his pistol and ran out the front door, which he left open behind him. I heard the young man shouting, then I heard him fire his gun—I prayed he was shooting into the air. But even as I headed for the door, his cries turned from anger into alarm, then into shouts of pain.
As I rounded the edge of the house, I could see Billinger and the flying creature engaged in the most fantastic battle the world had perhaps ever seen, although it was nothing compared to what was to come later that day. The monster had apparently tried to seize the dog like a hawk takes a hare, and had partially succeeded, snapping the animal’s tether, but either Galahad was too heavy or young Billinger’s arrival had prevented it from escaping with its prey. The creature had one of its talons caught in the dog’s collar, but Billinger was holding the collar too. As the shrieking reptile-bird struggled to rise, wings flapping with a noise like someone beating wet clothes on a flat rock, the poor dog dangled by its neck, whining piteously.
“My gun!” Billinger shouted when he saw me. “I dropped it! Over there!”
I had a gun of my own, but didn’t intend to use that either if I could avoid it, in part because of the danger to the young man and the innocent hound. Instead, I swung a broom which I had grabbed on my way out and hit the creature hard enough to startle it, but it didn’t let go of the dog’s collar, so I waded in, shoving and swatting with the broom to keep the thing distracted. When I got close enough, I dropped the broom and pulled my buck knife to cut the dog’s collar. Poor Galahad fell to the ground, then ran back toward the house with his tail firmly clenched between his legs and crawled back under the porch. The reptile-bird, free now, flapped up to the edge of the Denslows’ roof and crouched there, squawking at us like a giant crow. Billinger retrieved his gun and began firing, though I shouted for him to stop. A moment later, the hideous, beaked corpse lay half off the roof, drizzling blood.
I meant to retrieve the creature’s body, but was distracted by Catherine running out the door. When she found out her dog was under the house, apparently whole and safe, the girl threw her arms around both of us in gratitude. “Oh, you are true heroes! But what was that horrible thing?”
“A creature from another age,” I said. “One of Mr. Owen’s ‘dinosaurs,’ I believe, if you read the popular newspapers. I think our flying monster is something from Earth’s distant past.”
“Then how has it survived so long?” said Catherine, eyes wide.
“It’s not the dinosaur that’s out of its time, Miss,” I said. “I’m afraid it’s the rest of us.” I looked to her grandmother. “Doesn’t she know?”
The old woman shook her head. “Like everyone in the town, she knows that strange things happen at Midsummer—but that’s all.”
“Here now, what is all this?” said Billinger. “Stop talking in riddles, will you?”
“Tell them,” said Mrs. Denslow. “They need to know.”
“It’s Medicine Dance,” I said. “It’s the town itself. Thanks to Mrs. Denslow’s grandfather, Noah Lyman—your great-great-gra
ndfather, Miss—and the experiment I already mentioned, once a year on Midsummer’s Day the entire town becomes unstuck from one dawn to the next and wanders in time. How it feels to us is that the town stays the same, but the surroundings change, a little or a lot depending on how far it moves through time. That’s how it was explained to me, anyway.
“Most years Medicine Dance doesn’t wander far at Midsummer—sometimes I’m sure the change is scarcely noticed. But every thirty-nine years, the movement is more… violent. Last time, as Mrs. Denslow can tell you, the townsfolk here woke up to find themselves in an icy age full of strange creatures, some of them quite dangerous—”
“Do you mean the June Blizzard?” Billinger was staring at me intently. “I know of that. It was a freak storm that happened when my parents were courting…”
“It was no storm. It was the town itself that slipped through time to an era many thousands of years ago, when ice and snow covered all this territory.”
“That seems a long claim,” said the young man.
“Then tell me what you just fought in the front of the house?” I asked. “A parrot, do you think? Ask Mrs. Denslow what she once saw out there, where today an entire inland sea lies in front of you…? What did you see in the snow that day thirty-nine years ago, Marie?”
It shocked the old woman a bit, me using her first name in front of the others. “An… an elephant,” she said at last. “It was covered in long, shaggy hair. It was huge! I saw it right there, plain as the nose on your face.”
Young Catherine looked quite overwhelmed, but Billinger was frowning. “I don’t like to call any lady a liar, Mrs. Denslow—” he began.
“Then you’d better stop right there, Edward Billinger,” she said, but before she could make clear exactly what the penalty would be if he didn’t, we heard more noise from the front yard. This time it was shouting.
“That sounds like young Tim Winkens,” said Catherine. “What’s he doing?”
“Running,” said young Billinger as he looked out the window. “Looks pretty het up, too.”
I headed for the door. On a thirty-ninth Midsummer, nobody was likely to be running around just for exercise.
“Help!” the boy shouted as he scrambled over a gate he could have unlatched in a second or two. He was perhaps twelve years old, all elbows and knees. “Come help! The Dahlers’ house is on fire! Some big animal knocked it over! Hurry!”
“Oh! You’re not really going… out there, are you?” Catherine said, frightened. “Not out with those dreadful creatures?”
“We must,” I told her. “At least I must. It’s why I’m here. But perhaps Mr. Billinger could remain to watch over the house…”
The young man drew himself up straight. “Do you mean to insult me, sir?” he asked. “My neighbors need my help—how can I remain here?” I decided I liked him pretty well, although I would have preferred that he stay with the women.
We left the ladies locked in, armed with two of my smaller pistols and a cavalry saber of Noah Lyman’s that had hung on the parlor wall. I took two more pistols for myself out of my chest, and also the big Springfield Trapdoor rifle. At Mrs. Denslow’s suggestion, we grabbed buckets and shovels as well. When we opened the front door, the dog Galahad quickly emerged from beneath the porch and traded his hiding-hole there for one inside the house.
Tim Winkens had only stopped to catch his breath and was already trotting toward a cloud of black smoke rising over the northern end of town, but he had run a long way already and we quickly caught up with him.
“You said something about a big animal,” I said.
“Huge! Bigger than any circus elephant! Karl Dahler told me it was Leviathan, right out of the Holy Bible!”
I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I should have brought the dynamite, too, but decided that it might not be the best thing to carry to a fire.
We reached the Dahler property in just a few short minutes, along with several other people from the town. The house, which had once sat beside Angel’s Creek, now stood at the edge of a marshy estuary bordering the new ocean. We could see many strange creatures in the trees and in the water, but no sign of Karl Dahler’s Leviathan. There was, however, a track that had been made by feet and a dragging tail. The footprints were each more than a yard across, and the creature had also left a pile of dung as big as a wheelbarrow, now being swarmed by beetles as big as dinner plates. It was easy to see how the Leviathan’s massive tail might have knocked down the side of the barn, almost crushing the farmer in the process as he sat on his milking stool, and tipping over the lamp to cause the fire, which had already caught one wall and the barn roof.
The air, while still summer hot, was so much thicker and damper than normal that I could see some of the men were having trouble with it, coughing and spitting as if they had contracted a chill. Despite the moisture, though, the flames seemed to burn even hotter than usual; there wasn’t much we could do to save the barn, but we did what we could to keep the fire from spreading. While some formed a bucket brigade to bring water from the swamp, Billinger and I helped others to dig a firebreak, then knocked out the walls that still stood so as to collapse the ruined barn and make it easier to fight the flames. When we had saved the other buildings, Karl Dahler went from group to group, thanking everyone and trying to describe the thing he’d seen, which he said had been straight out of scripture.
“He had a neck like a giant snake!” Dahler said, then pointed at the wide, muddy track the creature had left behind. “Look, just like it says in Job—‘His undersides are jagged potsherds, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing-sledge.’ And it’s true!”
* * *
As Midsummer’s Day wore on, we were called onward from the Dahlers’ place to one emergency after another. Smaller reptiles no bigger than cats, creatures that went on their hind legs, got into barns and cellars all over town, causing havoc, but the upset they caused was as nothing to the terror inspired by the winged sky-creatures and the (fortunately peaceful) long-necked giants. There was talk of fiercer creatures attacking livestock.
Noon came and went without food or rest as Ned Billinger and I went where we were needed.
Late in the afternoon, as we tramped back through the heart of town for what must have been the fifth or sixth time, the church bells on Spring Road began chiming over and over, as though some ill-behaved child was swinging on the bell rope. Half the people in town seemed to have gathered in front of the clapboard church. The ringing stopped as the preacher climbed down from the little belfry and walked out to stand on the front porch like a politician addressing his constituents. I didn’t know the man, and didn’t know what exactly he was going to say, but I felt pretty sure it wouldn’t be much different than what I’d heard thirty-nine years ago from another minister. That had been mostly outraged fulminations against the ungodliness of Medicine Dance and the bizarre weather God had punished the town with, but this time the central feature was the unholy ocean which had seen fit to suddenly spread itself along the town’s flank without so much as a by-your-leave from the preacher, the mayor, or the town council. The preacher felt this was clear evidence of some kind of punishment on the town for sinfulness.
I quickly grew impatient. God might very well have caused all this—I wasn’t equipped to say one way or the other—but even if He had, it didn’t help solve it. Also, I was beginning to worry about what might be going on back at the Denslow place, even though it was on the opposite side of town from most of the strange creatures we had encountered. I told Billinger I thought it was time to get back to Catherine and her grandmother.
We left the rest of the citizens arguing about why exactly the Devil had brought the sea to Medicine Dance and made our way back along the shore on the edge of town, reptile-birds wheeling and croaking high above us.
We paused for a moment to watch a bunch of boys—Clay Hopyard’s sons, Billinger told me—who had made themselves a raft out of stripped saplings and were wading it out into the water.
The young sailors were being watched by a half dozen men taking some rest, who said they’d been chasing the springy little lizards out of nearby houses for the last hour, but I was concerned. I shouted to the boys to come in, but we were still too far away for them to hear. As they listened to me, the men watching seemed to realize that this new ocean might contain things bigger than the fish they were used to pulling from the local streams, but before they could do more than look thoughtful, a long neck suddenly came coiling up out of the water near the children, silver in color and as long as a horseshoe pitch. The boys screamed when they saw it, and all of them ran to one end of their raft, which promptly capsized.
This time I did take out my guns, pulling both pistols and firing them in the air as I ran down toward the edge of the water. Those of the other men who had guns did the same. We must have seemed like a low-lying thunderhead full of lightning as we hurried down the slope toward the splashing and screeching.
It was a stroke of luck that the raft had capsized in relatively shallow water, so that after only a few strokes most of the boys could get their feet beneath them again. A couple of them were already dashing up the bank toward us, screaming that a monster snake was attacking their friends. I could see the creature’s huge body just beneath the surface, an expanse of hide as long and wide as a whale’s carcass, but I didn’t bother to tell them this beast was no mere serpent. Instead, I began firing in a more concentrated way as the creature tried to get at the last two boys where they cowered in the water behind the overturned raft. The raft was not going to stay afloat much longer—already the thing was beginning to come apart under the hammering of the creature’s fierce, fanged head.
It was not my intention to kill when I didn’t need to—the old man had taught me that these creatures were no more at fault than the people were—but neither was I going to stand idly by and watch two children eaten, one of them no more than six or seven years old. I had left my rifle lying back on the shore, but I needed to make an accurate shot, so when I had waded out into the water past my thighs, still a good twenty yards away from the splintering raft, I holstered one of my pistols and aimed the other one as carefully as I could, resting my gun-hand on my other wrist. I waited until the water-monster lifted its head high above the boys, poised to strike, then I pulled the trigger.
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