Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  He kept right on laughing.

  As he brought his knee up into the sheriff’s groin…

  And then Conway wasn’t slapping him anymore.

  25.

  There was a woman crying, there, in the dark, although he didn’t know if it was dark where she was crying. All he knew was that it was dark where he was hearing her cry.

  Because of that sound, but even more so, because of that darkness, Robert Norris suddenly felt a strange surge of order come muscling its way into his thoughts, through the jumbled mess of impressions he had been bombarded with since first seeing Woodie’s body in that motel room, and for the first time in hours, he actually tried to understand what had been happening to him.

  That process of thinking settled him silent.

  “What in the righteous hell is going on here?” he thought, in the dark,

  He was in the woods, for Christ’s sake! Cooper had tried to stop him with an explanation, but he had ignored the attempt and had gone sauntering into the woods to…

  What?

  Find Woodie’s girl?

  Find Woodie’s killer?

  Find…

  “Come to the trees, Robert Norris,” the thing in the motel window had said. “You know the way. Come to the trees, and find yourself.”

  Find…yourself?

  If he had had eyes, he’d have blinked. But he didn’t have eyes. He couldn’t have. If he had had eyes, he would have seen more than this blackness. Even with his eyes closed—if he had had eyes to close—he would have seen more than this blackness. This blackness was total, complete, and suffocating. It filled him, and surrounded him, and gave him only one thing…

  The sound of a woman crying.

  He knew he was standing in the woods, not more than a half mile down the south side of the Retreat overlooking the Killibrook Valley. He was holding a hunting rifle in one hand and his younger brother’s glass eye in the other. He was wearing his park ranger’s uniform: light tan pants with a forest green stripe down the side of each leg, big hiking boots, and a forest-green jacket. And he knew he was holding Woodie’s eye up to the light again—although he didn’t know why. But he was doing it…

  Out there.

  Somewhere.

  But that “out there” was in a different place, somehow. Because, in here, wherever “here” was, whatever “here” was, there was only darkness, and a woman’s sobs.

  And then a voice.

  Muffled.

  He couldn’t make out what it said.

  Mummmbla-mummmmbla-mummmmm.

  What was it?

  Listen.

  Listen hard.

  God!

  Suddenly it was as if the darkness had changed its very nature from black to absolute white. It made him want to scream and slink back, cringing away from the light in terror and pain. It blinded him and…

  Blinded?!

  He could see!

  But what did he have to see with?

  Darkness.

  Then light.

  Darkness.

  Light.

  Fuzzy images swimming in a blurred liquid gold of radiant glow and bulbous swollen shadow.

  Darkness.

  Images…less fuzzy…a shape…like a man’s…head.

  A face!

  Darkness…

  Blink.

  The face…a stranger’s face, and yet, Norris had seen it before.

  Watching now, looking hard, seeing…who was it?

  The man was old…ancient almost. He had longish white hair and skin of an ashen grey, overrun with a shattered pattern of a million wrinkles. His beard was thick and seemed to mask his mouth entirely. He was leaning in close. Norris could see the way his shoulders turned into arms, which approached, only to get lost in distortion when they got too close for him to focus…

  Point of view…

  Perspective!

  It was like looking out a hole…

  No.

  A window!

  It was like looking out a window from inside a dark room. He couldn’t see any of the room around him, all he could do was sense it, sense its darkness. It had been so dark in here before the man with the beard—God, he looked so familiar—opened the window and let the light in…

  No, that wasn’t quite right.

  It had been so dark in here before the man with the beard took the bandages off and allowed the eye to open!

  Norris felt his entire being pucker with the thought of it…the revelation. It washed through him in a cold wave that iced over his most minute impressions and silenced him, so that, while the woman went on crying in the background, he watched without further comment as the man unwound a long rope of terry-cloth bandage from around someone’s head…

  From around Woodie’s head, he finally allowed himself to think.

  It’s Mr. Green, and he’s taking bandages off my brother’s head.

  I’m inside my brother’s head.

  I’m my brother’s eye.

  But my brother’s dead.

  So I must be dead.

  How can I be my brother’s eye?

  The sound of a woman’s grief went right on, even as Mr. Green’s head moved to one side and the face of the woman Norris had seen on the rampart of that spectral house in the woods became visible behind him. Her hair was long and golden. Her eyes were blue. Her face was young, sweet, and so painfully innocent that it made him ache just seeing it so close.

  She was sad, but she wasn’t crying.

  Her grief was all inside Woodie’s head as a thought, or a memory, or maybe even a wishful dream. Soundlessly she watched what went on with solemn attention, her entire posture revealing just how badly she wanted whatever was happening to work. She wanted that very, very much. Norris thought that her own need might have frightened her a little. And he knew that it definitely frightened him.

  Mr. Green, the bandages looped over his big hands and his eyes steady, leaned back in his chair, smiled, and asked, “Can you?”

  The room bounced up and down as Woodie nodded his head, slowly at first, and then more rapidly.

  Mr. Green’s smile turned into a grin, and behind him the blond woman burst into tears.

  “Well, my boy,” Mr. Green said, lifting the bandages up higher as if displaying them. “How’s it feel to see with an ‘artificial’ eye?”

  Woodie said nothing.

  Mr. Green leaned in close, whispering, “And you said that there was no such thing as magic.”

  Then he laughed, making something snap inside Robert Norris. Suddenly, he wanted more than anything to be out of this body, out of this mind, out…

  Because he remembered Mr. Green…

  And his magic.

  He remembered Mr. Green…

  Almost.

  Magic…or madness?

  Intellectually, Norris supposed that they were probably one and the same but he couldn’t afford the time to ponder it fully because Mr. Green’s face was wrecking his ability to concentrate. That face called out to him from what seemed a time tunnel of memory, teasing at his deepest fears and revealing itself only in a simple, one-dimensional invocation of emotion: this face had been with him in his dreams. It was the possessor of the eyes that watched him from the sky, and it was the master of his nightmare world. But what it had done specifically, and to whom it belonged, though significant, he knew, were beyond his ability to name. He knew this man, but he didn’t know him.

  Magic.

  Or madness.

  What was the difference?

  Suddenly, the distinction seemed so extremely important that it could potentially be the difference between…

  Magic or madness.

  Weren’t they both simply an acknowledgment that, under the proper circumstances, the impossible could occur? Didn’t they each describe a state in which reality was suspended and the line separating the mundane from the remarkable was blurred? Wasn’t just saying one or the other often enough to explain away the most profoundly off-center event?


  As in:

  “Oh, I don’t understand it because it’s magic.”

  Or…

  “Oh, I can’t understand it because it’s madness.”

  And weren’t they both equally true in those cases?

  Didn’t they, by not explaining a thing, each serve to explain the universe to anyone willing to accept “not knowing” as a form of knowledge?

  Didn’t they make anything possible?

  “No!” Robert Norris screamed, hearing his own voice echoing somewhere far away in the dark.

  “This isn’t happening!

  “This can’t be happening!

  “I don’t believe in magic…

  “So then, I must be mad.”

  That silenced the screaming in the dark, and for a very quiet moment he made no sound, allowed himself no thought, and didn’t try, not even a little bit, to understand anything. He just watched as Mr. Green reached out his hand and led him… Woodie… him… them… through what looked like a darkened hallway and into a room full of people who were all huddled in a bunch, dressed in some kind of weird, baggy robes.

  As they moved, details came clear in the gloom. The building they were in was shabby, dirty, and at least judging by the condition of the concrete-block walls, very old. They started out in a small room with a lot of pipes and valves which he assumed ran to a couple of hot water tanks, and ended up in a very big room that was easily the size of a small theater. The entire place was lit with the flickering glow of at least a hundred candles, and on the walls were hung leaf-covered branches. In the unsure light, it was difficult to tell if the branches were real or plastic, but the leaves all looked so fresh that he assumed that they had to be artificial. But something made him sense that he was wrong. He didn’t know what it was, but he had the distinct feeling that someone had cut the branches off a bunch of oaks and evergreens and stuck them on these walls, where they had just continued growing in the dark.

  The strangest sensation of touch tingled…something. He couldn’t quite get a grip on whether he had a physical body or not, but ghostlike shivers ran through his consciousness that hinted at some kind of contact with something—maybe not firm, but developing.

  Trying to ignore the people in the robes, he concentrated on those shivers and found that they were coming from all directions, up, down, back, front, and they were brief, but distinct: a hand brushed against skin and was warm, wood-smoke stung a watery eye, someone’s lips touched…

  What?

  Woodie moved his head and Norris saw that the woman who had been standing behind Mr. Green in the small room had moved around to the front of him, knelt down, and while all the hooded people in the big, woodsy room watched, was kissing his hand.

  Woodie looked up, and Norris thought, Oh, Woodie, you fucking basket case, what the hell did you get yourself involved in? Is this that Institute of yours? Is this what you were doing all this time I thought you were sitting around and getting stoned while the Stooges were on the late late late show like you did in school?

  A sliver of sound crept in and then retreated, only to come back more boldly.

  Singing.

  Pieces of a song.

  And then a voice….

  Mr. Green.

  “…of you,” it said, somewhere close, and Norris strained to hear. “Won’t be long. Soon the stone will be so much a part of your body that it will feel as if you had been born with it.”

  Stone? Norris thought as Woodie took stock of the room. What stone?

  They looked up…

  And that’s when he saw it.

  His first reaction was a stunned silence. His second, was fear. And his third, anger. He moved through each swiftly, without much thought. The thing didn’t require a lot of pondering, and it wasn’t designed to motivate it. It was designed to elicit an emotional response, and in the end, that’s just what it did.

  “Jesus!” he thought, studying it for as long as Woodie gave him. When Woodie decided to look away, Norris tried to make him keep his eyes aimed up, and in so doing discovered an important fact about his condition: he was strictly a passenger here. An observer. He could see through Woodie’s eyes—eye—but he could do nothing to influence his brother’s actions. So while he had the chance, he looked, and what he saw explained a lot.

  Someone had painted a figure on the ceiling, and it was as big as the available space would allow. Done in such a way as to hint that it was actually larger than even its rendering would suggest, the figure seemed to command all perspective with its sheer size. The night sky had been depicted in black and purple, with a smattering of white stars reflecting the constellations as they would have been seen near the end of November—Norris was a woodsman after all, so picking out the Big Dipper was no great trick.

  And the moon was full.

  It was that full moon that was the focus of the entire arrangement because it served as the eye of the creature hovering in the sky.

  Its figure was cast as little more than a shape of a darker darkness than even the night. It looked down into the room, which, given the leaves on the walls, suddenly felt like a clearing in some distant forest, its head roundish, dark, and sullen, its thick neck, pointed ears, wild hair and horns silhouetted against the sky.

  And then Woodie looked away.

  But Norris had seen enough.

  Satan.

  Woodie was a fucking devil worshiper!

  “If I had arms, I’d kick your ass!” Norris roared in the dark. “Can you hear me? You little shithead son of a bitch!”

  But Woodie couldn’t hear because he, like everyone in the room, was listening to Mr. Green.

  “Hearken unto me,” the man suddenly announced, and all eyes turned his way. “For on this night it is done. The moon’s final phase has begun, and the stone has come home to its place. The Blood Prince is balanced at the precipice of his rise!

  “Behold!”

  And with this, the man moved a lever on the wall and a grinding sound drew Woodie’s attention back to the ceiling where he found that the moon in the painting had disappeared. A cool draft descended from the opening where the moon had been, flickering the candles and swirling smoke.

  A window, Norris thought. Or a skylight in the roof.

  “The stone draws its own,” Mr. Green said in a tone more powerful than this frail demeanor would have seemed to permit.

  And a light rolled above.

  It started as a sliver of silver, disappeared, and then gained strength. It was brighter the second time, and lasted longer, eliciting a collective gasp of anticipation from the group. Its third appearance flared like a match and stretched into a perfect silver beam that wavered not an inch as it slid down and dazzled Norris’ sight.

  His first reaction was to cry out. But he didn’t because, this time, the light didn’t hurt as it had when Woodie had first opened his new eye and unwittingly blinded his brother. This time it was warm and luscious, and he could feel it caressing him and spreading out, filling the inside of Woodie’s head so that things became known to him…Woodie, to him…Robert, to him…them…

  They.

  “Jesus!” a voice pronounced an instant before an immense hand loomed up and blocked the light. “Oh, Christ!”

  A voice?

  Whose?

  Inside his cell, Robert Norris was reeling with it. As Woodie removed his hand, the room blurred into focus before him and he wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t, because this wasn’t his head, wasn’t his life. He had to look, had to see, had to watch as his brother pulled his hand away, lifted his head, and made them both see, for the first time in either of their lives. Made them see like neither of them had ever imagined they could, beyond the physical and into the balance, the truth, the reality of what was before them.

  Over everything a glittering miasma of sparkling silver pinpoints drained like falling sparks, but Norris assumed that this was simply an afterimage produced by tingling nerves in Woodie’s head. The show lasted for about ten seconds befo
re its glow diminished sufficiently for shapes to come into focus. And, as if he too where inside Woodie’s skull, and had chosen that exact instant when sight began to return, Mr. Green said, “Call out their names, for you know them now!”

  And a figure stepped forward, lifted its hands, and pulled back its hood.

  It was dark inside Woodie’s head again, so Norris saw only the man’s face when the hood fell. But in the next instant, a murmur began far below where he seemed to hover before the window that was the eye socket of his brother’s skull, and suddenly he felt as if he were suspended on a scaffold about a hundred feet over an immense crowd that stretched forever in every direction below him. That crowd had apparently begun mumbling to itself because a sea of rolling sounds swelled twice before a single note of agreement came rushing up toward where he hung, gained momentum, and finally exploded past him into the outside air as “Galltar?”

  It was Woodie’s voice, and it reverberated as if filling a valley, making the man who had just removed his hood grin and throw back his head in a harsh and boisterous belly laugh that nearly drowned out the rest of Woodie’s statement.

  “Your pack once ran in the north lands, where the snow is deep, and the night falls hard,” he went on, raising his voice to be heard over the man’s enthusiastic bellows. “Your fathers were few, but hungry. And in some villages where the past is not so long ago, their names are still sung in hushed tones of fear and respect.”

  The laugh from the man in the hood had finished, and his deep, black eyes glistened moistly at the last of Woodie’s statement. His features, so rough and primitive—all jaw, tooth, and muscle—softened into a reverent frown, and he knelt to one knee and said, in a deep, growling voice, “Hail.”

  And the next figure stepped forward, showing itself to be a woman.

  The crowd below murmured again, but for not nearly so long before another meteor of sound rushed past Norris in his place and Woodie said, “Zonoria,” making the woman smile dangerously.

  “Your pack was fierce, and the blood it spilled on the steppe of the Black Sea turned the soil to red clay. Your fathers were many, and were among the first. They spread across Russia before it was called that. And when the Romans were new, you were already old.”