Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

Ruefully, it seemed, the woman knelt and said, “Hail!”

  And the next figure took one step.

  It went on like this for nearly an hour. Each and every person in that room, twenty-three in all, removed his or her hood and listened as Woodie said their names and told them of the history of the family from which they sprang. They each were the last of their line, Norris realized as the parade marched on, and many were hearing about their lineage for the first time. Each had come from somewhere far away, having been summoned by some force that had been using the Institute of Metaphysical Research as its disguise. They came from Europe, China, Africa, and Canada, South America, India, England, and places that Norris had never even heard of. But despite the distances involved, they all resembled one another to a startling degree. Their features bordered on the brutish, and even in the women, there gleamed an implied strength and a savage intelligence that was silently intimidating.

  Finally, when the last hood had dropped, Woodie turned from the group and looked Mr. Green in the eye.

  “You killed my father,” he said, and the old man studied him carefully. “I thank you, O great one, for he had forgotten the trees and, had he lived, I would never have found myself.”

  And this time it was Woodie’s turn to kneel.

  “Hail,” said Mr. Green, reaching down and taking Woodie’s hands.

  When Woodie looked up, Norris saw something happening that, even after all the rest, he could not accept: Mr. Green became younger. Just a couple of minutes before, the man looked so frail that it appeared as if it were difficult for him to even speak, and yet, here he was, not young, but definitely younger. As Norris watched, wisps of his white hair crawled over his forehead, moving independently, like his beard, which was fuller, longer, whiter…

  “No!” the man said, quickly, raising one finger in front of Woodie’s face in warning, but maintaining his good-natured grin. “Not yet. Look not upon me in that way. Use not the stone for me, or your bride; for you have culled but the surface of the memory that is your birthright. What is yet to come will prepare you. But for now, be content, and let only your human mind see when you look upon me, and her.”

  It was then that Mr. Green presented the girl to Woodie. He’d been seeing her at the periphery of the night since his new eye opened, but now she became the focus, as he had wanted her to be all along.

  Woodie was in love with the girl, but before this moment, she had not responded.

  “He did this for her!” Norris said in the dark. “She caused it. Whatever this is all about, it was her idea, and he did it to please her because…”

  She was positively ravishing, and something else…

  She was a part of that which was now a part of him.

  The references were complicated and, Norris realized, spinning around him so quickly that he really wasn’t following what was happening because he had only bits and pieces of what he needed. Unless he got some of his brother’s memories straight in his own mind, he would grope along as things happened around him and miss their significance. So, as hard as it was to do, he pulled his attention away from the window that was Woodie’s eye, and aimed the essence of his being into the darkness that he had no other way of describing other than being “behind” him.

  At first, nothing happened.

  There was darkness there, impenetrable and deep, but positively livid with a feeling of terrific size and teeming life.

  There were voices and lights behind him now, and it was all he could do to resist the urge to turn back around and see what was happening to his brother…and to him. But resist he did, and finally he was rewarded with a tingling sensation of something soft caressing…something soft.

  He felt suddenly as if he were lying on a bed, in the dark, while millions and millions of spiders crawled over his naked body, searching for a way inside.

  Revulsion was instant and instinctive.

  This wasn’t right…not the way it was supposed to be. No one man was ever intended to share the mind of another in this way, and in so doing, Norris was ignoring the very balance of nature that he had dedicated his life to preserving.

  And yet…

  It was his brother. They shared the same parents, the same genes. Didn’t that count for something?

  It came in tiny, almost imperceptible flickers at first. Just the briefest glimpse of a face here, a hand there…off to one side in the dark, so that Norris jerked one way and then another as…

  “Mom?” he asked.

  “Dad?”

  The darkness wasn’t nearly so thick now, he realized, and all around him he sensed the undulating, slithering tangle of a pressing mass of dark, wet flesh. Suddenly, he felt as if he had been submerged in an immense bowl of worms, and was seeing light filtered between a hundred feet of their surging bodies. Between those bodies, in the shadows that formed and then disappeared, there were images, locked and fleeting, that, when taken individually meant nothing, but that, when allowed just to come and go, left distinct impressions on his consciousness.

  It was suddenly relaxing, seeing things this way. It was suddenly so easy just not to think.

  Giving himself over to the dark, he allowed a frightening thing to happen: his sense of self suddenly drifted away, floating apart from where he now hung…back there, somewhere.

  He was back there…

  And yet.

  He let himself go.

  And then there was the girl. But this time he wasn’t seeing her through the window of Woodie’s eye. He was seeing her in the eye of Woodie’s mind. And she was sick.

  And…

  * * *

  He’d been coming to the Institute regularly for about eight weeks. At first it had only been for the Sunday lectures, and after the first he hadn’t been so sure that the Institute of Metaphysical Research was his bag. Mr. Green, the man who operated the place, was fascinating, that was true, if not a little weird—he looked like death dropped by for an ice-cream cone, his skin was so white and his eyes so sunken. And the topics they discussed were kind of neat: the first time it had been Atlantis, and the second, telekinesis. But the audience made him a little nervous. Mostly there were just housewife types, and squirrelly little people who probably spent most of their time reading science fiction paperbacks and watching reruns of The Twilight Zone, over and over again. But scattered through the crowd there were the foreigners, the dark-skinned, dark-haired, quiet types who smelled funny and who sat so silently at every lecture Woodie attended—the same ones every time, plus one or two new ones on any given Sunday—and they seemed to color the mood of the place a sinister grey. They added a seediness to the proceedings that tasted so bad in his already paranoid mind that he had pretty much decided that every meeting he attended would be his last.

  But that was before he spotted the girl.

  Once he saw her, he knew he’d keep coming back for as long as she was around because he fell in love with her instantly, and every additional sighting just fueled that fire. So instead of just Sundays, he ended up knocking on that gnarled old door on Friday nights too, paid his forty-dollar membership fee, and became a card-carrying psychic researcher. But no matter what he did, his lady love ignored him, and he soon realized that she was going to remain beyond his reach as long as he stayed on the “plane of consciousness” he presently inhabited…

  Because that was how they talked on Friday nights.

  At first, he giggled listening to people use terms like “collective unconscious,” “alternative evolutionary theory,” and “distinction of psychic species,” but after a while—and a good deal of the peyote floating around the room, free for the taking on silver serving trays—he started picking up on things. Pretty soon, he was having a good time, and those foreign members who had given him the creeps before turned out to be really nice people, if still a little on the quiet side, especially about the girl.

  She didn’t have a name, it seemed. Or at least none that anyone would reveal. But somehow that didn’t seem so important
anymore. All that was important was that she was there, in the flesh, and he could admire and love her from afar in ever-increasing heights of private passion as he got more and more stoned, more and more comfortable, more and more accustomed to the vocabulary and logic of the Institute and its members.

  During the meetings he watched her hovering near Mr. Green—never more than a few steps from him—her golden hair hanging down to partially obscure her face, and her frayed white gowns looking shabby and uncomfortable. She hardly ever lifted her eyes from the floor, and once or twice she even had a length of rope tied into a hangman’s knot dangling from her neck, marking her as separate, special, and a witch, if he understood the symbology correctly.

  “Weird,” he thought. But weird seemed to be the thing on Friday nights, and besides, who was he to judge? So he just mingled, helped himself to more peyote, and stole glances at her from across crowded, smoky rooms.

  Then, one night in the “big room,” which was the Institute’s auditorium—it had been a bar area when the building was known as the “Ride ‘Em Cowboy Lounge: Go-Go Girls to Go-Go”—Mr. Green took the stage and announced that “the girl” was deathly ill and needed a special kind of “healing” that only one specific Friday night member of the group could provide. Her soul was wilting and would soon die if that one did not come forward to make contact with her body’s “life essence.”

  Well…Woodie certainly wouldn’t have minded a little life essence contact, although this “soul sickness” stuff made him a little nervous. But the girl just looked thin, and a little too wasted most of the time, so he figured it wasn’t anything a good meal and a couple of weeks off the drugs wouldn’t fix—AIDS or cancer never so much as entered his mind—so he stood up and said, “I’d like to do whatever I can, if she’ll have me.”

  And the room fell cold.

  A few weeks before, Mr. Green had gone out and gathered up a bunch of tree branches someplace and arranged them on the walls of the auditorium where they had hung ever since, without losing a single leaf. Woodie noticed that things—like bugs, maybe—seemed to be moving among those leaves that should have died but hadn’t, creating a rustling sound that should have been ominous, but wasn’t.

  Mr. Green was up there on the stage where the go-go girls used to go-go, and the girl stood behind him, the rope around her neck again, and her face still pointed to the floor.

  “Are you sure, brother Norris?” he asked.

  And Woodie nodded.

  And that’s when Mr. Green brought out the “stone.”

  He produced it from a fold in his own white robe and held it in his fist over his head.

  “The magic required is powerful, and will change you,” he said.

  Woodie smiled and said, “Okay.”

  “Come forward.”

  And Woodie did.

  When he got to the stage, Mr. Green explained.

  “I am not who I seem to be, and the girl is a part of me. By helping her, you will be helping me, and by helping me, you will be helping yourself because you are but one of the fingers on my hand. Do you understand?”

  “Not at all.” Woodie smiled, still looking at the girl, who refused to return his gaze.

  “I have always been, and I will always be. Your father knew me, but denied my right to his children,” Mr. Green continued, and the reference to his father made Woodie turn his head.

  “This is for thee.”

  And the next thing he knew, Woodie was looking at a perfectly formed glass eye lying on Mr. Green’s open palm.

  He swallowed.

  “We knew your love for her would bring you forward, for loving her has been your way for a million years,” Mr. Green said, softly, and everyone in the room seemed to inhale. “You are the vessel of the moonstone, the wolfstone, the bloodstone power that has secured your family its place at my right hand since the stone was warm from its fiery fall down from the heavens. She is your vessel. The stone will be in you…and you will be in her.”

  Woodie was listening, but he really wasn’t. He heard pieces of what Mr. Green was saying, but it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense.

  “The iris in that eye is exactly the color of the one I’m wearing,” he said. “How did you know? Who made it?”

  “When you take the stone into yourself, you will see through it more clearly than you have ever seen before,” Mr. Green said, lifting the stone up close to Woodie’s face. “It will be the first time in three thousand years that a Nurrenvelt has seen through the stone, and it will set the world free.”

  Woodie swallowed. His head was swimming…but that was the peyote…wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it? It couldn’t have anything to do with the musky, almost furry smell Mr. Green seemed to exude, or the warmth radiating from the girl’s body. She was standing a good twelve feet away, so it was impossible for him to feel the vibration of her flesh or the power of her heart, beating invisibly in his head.

  “Without nourishment, she’ll die,” Mr. Green added, indicating the girl. “She is not of this earth, and only you can give her the bread that will save her life.”

  “Why me?” Woodie asked, dryly.

  “Because it was your blood that called her up that first time, so long ago.”

  “And what bread can I give her that she needs?”

  “First the stone.”

  “And then?”

  “The stone.”

  * * *

  Robert Norris turned back to the light shining through the hole in his brother’s skull and let the memory go because he could guess the rest. The moonstone—or whatever Mr. Green had called it—really was magic. He’d put it in Woodie’s head, and now both he and Woodie were actually using it to see. Robert Norris, whose body was standing in the middle of a snow-covered glade, was seeing things that his now-dead brother had seen, first person, from inside that dead brother’s skull.

  Magic lantern show, he thought, for no reason.

  But the analogy felt right.

  Magic!

  * * *

  He was back in the auditorium, but Woodie was on the stage. Before him the rest of the room was still lit with candles, and all the people—the foreigners who had come so far to gather here—had put their hoods back up so that their brutish faces were obscured by peaked shadows. Mr. Green was leading him by the hand, and the girl, looking far less frail then she had when the bandages were first removed, was waiting, her head still hung down, and the rope again adorning her neck.

  There were branches on the walls and ceiling in the little alcove holding the stage, forming an artificial tunnel, like a clearing in a thick wood overhung with foliage.

  There was grass on the ground.

  And there was a bed.

  “From the eye of the sky comes the Lover of Man’s Blood, reunited with the Lady of the Night,” Mr. Green was saying, but Norris’ attention was on the girl. “Behold their union, all ye last of the First. The Wild have not died! This brave gathering shall mark the end of the exile of those whose fathers once ruled the forests as Masters of the Hunt. The Blood Prince comes, and with him, the new Dark Times.”

  A roar erupted that nearly deafened Norris in the dark.

  “Behold the Demon Lover!”

  And the girl looked up for the first time.

  Somehow, lost in the anticipation of what he felt could only turn out to be an example of his brother’s drug-induced exhibitionism, Norris found himself looking forward to the girl and the bed. It was crazy, but so was everything else, and for a split second he had unconsciously allowed himself to savor the sight of her soft flesh and luxurious, flowing hair. Seeing her—just her—almost explained Woodie’s actions, almost justified the lengths to which he had apparently gone to secure his chance to love her.

  But when she lifted her face and met his eyes with her own, it all blew away, and in that instant he understood the truth behind what she, and Mr. Green, and every person in that room represented. Suddenly he felt trapped, kidnapped, and alone; suddenly he exp
loded with a rage so terrible that it felt as if he would burst into a single flame of anger and go rushing through Woodie’s mouth and eyes as licks of surging fire. He hurled his attention around in the dark, found no way out, and no way to act, trembled with frustration, and folded himself in on himself as, in a final desperate expression of his helplessness, he screamed out an inarticulate cry that shook the blackness inside his mad brother’s skull, but did nothing to stop him from taking that first, inevitable step toward the bed.

  After that, all Norris could do was watch.

  When she lifted her face, he saw her eyes first, and, despite the panic electrifying the darkness—panic that he realized was both his and his brother’s, intermingled so intimately as to be practically indistinguishable—they reached down and touched a part of his being that he had never felt stimulated before. The distance from the surface of his fearful thoughts to the soul of his murky desires seemed great, but for one, timeless instant, a haunting call echoed through the mist of what could only have been centuries, speaking in a language that the earliest and most primitive pieces of his personality understood. He felt a stirring, there in the dark—a deep, subterranean rumble that felt as if something old and big were awakening from an unfathomable slumber in some hidden chamber of his heart. He felt a maneuvering in his consciousness of things long denied, shadowy bits of hunger suppressed by instinct since…

  When?

  He paused, his attention fixated on the girl’s eyes, which were a deep, vein-mapped yellow, bisected by vertical black slits that swelled and narrowed like a cat’s—or, more accurately, like something vaguely reptilian gazing up through the eons from the beginning of a feline’s ancestral chain.

  Woodie’s hands worked their way over the robe he was wearing, searching for some fastener or hook, found none, and began tearing fabric as if his body were impervious to the convolutions of his mind. His breathing was labored and quick, producing a thick, gurgling rattle that served as a counterpoint to the thunder of his racing heart. And his thoughts, thrilled through with terror for his own safety, were suddenly laced with a very different kind of thrill that seemed to find its source in his own surging blood.