by Gene Lazuta
Frozen air…
Stars in space…
Sandy smooth dunes beneath lifeless dark.
His head swam with it, and he imagined/remembered astronauts bouncing comically away from a landing craft to position a stiff American flag on a stick.
Placing one hand on the ground for balance, he let himself see how the burial grounds must have looked from above: the perfectly white circle of snow surrounded by the darkness of the forest…and he realized that, from this perspective, the area would resemble…
A full moon.
“Why?” Detective Cooper suddenly asked.
And when Conway looked down, he noticed that the man was staring at the remains of the sheriff’s gnarled right hand.
“Why just me?” he asked, gripping the wound on his stomach with a grimace. “It bit you too. So why’s it just me that’s changing?”
Conway didn’t answer. But in his head his grandmother’s voice said, “Everybody’s got some o’ the evil in ‘em…and everybody’s got some o’ the good. Only the saints are all one way, and only the Vyrmin are all the other.”
“Saints?” he thought.
And then the detective screamed, and the sheriff’s whole body went tense.
“Goooooood!” the man howled, and Conway couldn’t tell if he meant “Good!” or “God!” But it didn’t matter either way because the tone of his voice could only have meant one thing: the change was coming.
He was on his feet and standing over the writhing man in an instant. Though he knew it would do no good—“Not the way of the Wild”—he aimed down and shot the man twice, directly in the left eye. The sound of his shots cracked in the night and echoed sharply over the Valley. To his surprise, blood flew and the bullets slammed into Cooper’s skull, gouging out great dark holes that sent a black spray over the glowing white snow and tore his eyes and chunks of bone into pulp.
Encouraged, the sheriff placed his right boot on Cooper’s throat and held him still as he pressed the barrel of the gun into the bleeding hole in the side of the detective’s face and fired again, sending the bullet toward the base of the man’s spine.
His body stiffed and then went still.
But the sheriff was cautious. While more dark forms joined those that already encircled the burial grounds, he remained poised, gun at the ready, boot still on the dead man’s throat, studying the bloody mess he had made of a face he’d come to know so well.
In the air he could smell gun smoke, blood, and urine. His own sweat tinged his lips, seeping into the corners of his mouth and making him taste salt without so much as moving his tongue. The stump of his right pinky throbbed in time to his heart, producing no actual pain but a steady series of ghostly twinges in a finger he knew he no longer had. Because of those twinges, he involuntarily imagined the face of the beast that had bitten him again, and wondered where the poison from the creature’s teeth had gone. He could almost see his arm mapped with veins that were progressively turning black as the hateful venom moved toward his heart.
And then Cooper’s head jerked…
And Conway leapt back two feet.
“Jesus Christ!” he whispered, amazed, and yet not really surprised. He’d almost expected it. He had been too late to stop it, but it had been worth a try.
“I’m sorry,” he added, speaking to the Mike Cooper he had known before he’d been bitten by Cheryl Lockner in that alley. That Mike Cooper was gone now, and all that was left of him was…
Growling and writhing on the ground in a puddle of churned-up mud and bloody snow.
As the sheriff watched, amazed, and yet resigned at the same time, the man squirmed so hard that his arms and legs looked as if they would break apart at the joints as they dragged his shattered head around like a wet paper bag. The broken jaw was moving, emitting gargled, half-human groans as a black form emerged like a membranous bubble from between the man’s jutting teeth.
Conway took another step back, but could not take his eyes from the man’s face.
The body arched up on the ground at that moment. All motion ceased and the throat went hard. With his spine locked, Cooper fell silent for nearly twenty seconds. Then the flesh around his mouth began peeling back over the remains of his skull, and the sound of bones crackling filled the air.
Conway felt his stomach locking and unlocking under his heart, and his left hand went up before his face, as if trying to ward off a blow.
It looked as if the man were simply turned inside out. As if a person might reach his hand into a sock, and pull its toe through its end so that the inside would suddenly become the outside, the man’s flesh rolled back and great gobs of wet hair and bristling bone glistened, moved, and rearranged themselves into the shape of…something…lying on its side in the snow. It seemed to go on for hours, but in fact it took less than a minute. When it was through, the thing that remained lay panting for a time, as if exhausted after its exertion, its tongue lolling from its mouth and its eyes starting as…
Conway staggered back another step.
Which he shouldn’t have done.
Because the thing lifted its head in response to the motion, and in that second, for the first time in three centuries, a member of the Flock, Sheriff Conway, locked eyes with a fully formed Vyrmin wolf—a former homicide detective named Michael Cooper who the sheriff had only knew for a few hours—and shattering the silence of civilization, the sound of a wolf’s panting breath recalled the most primitive of all emotions in the sheriff’s heart…and…
Seeing the Hunter, the Hunted was afraid.
For most of his life, the woodcut image of Jean Grenier, that old French werewolf who was forever heading back into the woods with that bundle of rags that so upset the stick-waving crowd at his heels, had haunted Sheriff Conway. It had been his own personal bogeyman, his own personification of the dark side. He’d first seen it when he was probably four years old, and as will happen to people who are deeply impressed with something at so tender an age, he had carried it with him ever since. It had become a part of his psyche, his soul. It had been real to him in a way that other “realities”—like love or marriage—had never been; and it was specific.
The beast that was lifting itself from the ground now was in every way just as specific as that old woodcut image. In truth, it could almost have been that woodcut, pulling itself from a pool of grainy, age-yellowed paper and taking substance from the air.
Its humanity was gone.
It was a wolf.
It stood nearly five feet high at the shoulders and had a thick coat of shining fur that looked black in the night light. Its angles were sharp—in what Conway had taken to be the German style from Grenier’s picture—and its eyes flashed as bright as cigarette coals in the dark. Silver spit dripped from jaws that seemed to grin as the beast panted out its frozen fog. And its teeth were just immense.
But even seeing it so close was not nearly so shocking as the sound of it speaking. When it did that, Conway’s whole brain turned over in his skull.
“Hail!” the thing said, and when it did, the muscles in its throat knotted, and its tongue danced in its mouth, as if the effort of speech approached the very limits of its audible capacity.
“Hail!” it barked again…
And then it moved.
Conway didn’t mean to do it, but he screamed when the thing came at him. His hands went up before his face, and despite his courage and his resolution to die in the defense of the world and the balance he had known, he cried out in terror as his mind filled with pictures of teeth and ribbons of bloody flesh, all peeled from his own throat.
But the thing didn’t touch him.
Instead, it simply ran past him, across the field and right up to where the big figures of things that looked very much like people, but that obviously weren’t, were waiting…
When it arrived, another wolf, slightly smaller than the first, bounded into sight, and together the pair ran in great, snowy circles, jumping and barking and nipping at one ano
ther as the sheriff numbly turned to watch.
Cheryl, he thought, vaguely. She’s come for the mate she made for herself when she bit him.
And then Conway saw the glow in the trees: the pulsating bluish-white haze of twilight illumination that was moving down from the hill beyond where Cooper and Cheryl Lockner were frolicking in his sight. Seeing that light, he knew that the Blood Prince had finally come.
And overhead, the darkness parted as a glowing circle, like an eye opening in a face as wide as the heavens themselves, flickered out the first tentative sparkle of the new full moon.
32.
With every step, Robert Norris saw things more clearly, until he was practically running—as if his pounding boots could settle his screaming mind.
With the memory of Dr. Green came a sense of perspective and order that he had never had before. He suddenly understood why he craved solitude in the woods: God was there. God wasn’t to be found in the buildings of mankind, in his choking cities of concrete and pollution. God didn’t reside in the gilded cages called churches by pompous humans, camouflaged by false piety and fully prepared to destroy everything around them because this world didn’t matter. To them, the heaven they imagined they’d find after death was much more important…
But they had it wrong.
Because this world did matter.
Maybe not to them so much, but they were not the only creatures on it. The perfect balance of the system, its unique symmetry and indomitable, self-contained harmony, was an instrument in the concert of the universe. It was one piece of the whole that was being. By simply following its course, it was contributing its own part to the song of the planets, the “music of the spheres,” the melody that, taken together, was what humans had christened “God.”
So it damned well did matter.
It mattered a lot—to the system, to the animals, to the stars.
And humans had no right to ruin it.
They had no right!
The thought stopped him dead in his tracks.
“It’s not theirs; who told them that it was theirs?” he said, breathlessly, staring down at the rifle he held. “The world belongs to us all…it belongs to the stars. They have no right to kill it.”
He pitched the rifle to the ground, aiming it away from his body and feeling a shudder of sudden revulsion moisten his gut.
In his pocket the moonstone was warm, and he pulled it out. When he did, its glow filled the trees around him and made everything he saw beautiful.
“Think,” he said.
But that didn’t seem to work.
“Then just feel,” he whispered.
And that was the key.
Raising his eyes to the heavens, he let the vibrations of the forest slide into his body, let all the visions he’d seen seep gently away, and watched as the first flicker of the moon glanced down at him from above. Surprisingly, he wasn’t afraid…not really. He wasn’t even startled by the moon’s apparent willingness to shine just for him. The moon had been following him wherever he went all his life…he just hadn’t realized it before. He just hadn’t known.
The Man in the Woods was out there somewhere, and he wished he could speak with him. She was out there somewhere as well, probably keeping Woodie company, keeping him calm. Woodie had always been so excitable. They had all been excitable…Galltar, Zonaoria, Lozella, Slett…
He blinked, and almost made the mistake of thinking. But he fought it, preferring instead to just let things be.
The original “tribe” of the Wild had not been Neanderthal any more than the original modern human on the planet had been any one specific species that had survived all the rest. Mankind was a mix of a series of primates that ultimately produced the hairless, big-brained being that so dominated the planet now. At the time the moonstone fell there were at least twenty different species of man wandering the plains of earth.
Norris smiled, remembering how that wilderness had looked: the lushness of the greens, the abundance of life and its smells.
There were two energies in the world: the light and the dark. Properly balanced, they were the only energies anyone could ever need. But humans had chosen the light to the exclusion of everything else. They had turned their back on the dark side of themselves, and after generations of denial, had changed themselves from one thing, which was a natural member of the earth’s system, to another, which was an adversary to anything not like themselves.
Norris remembered what it had been like when he first found the stone…
He trembled, but he kept his peaceful expression pointed at the moon.
When he—not Woodie, not some faceless ancestor, but he, the man who stood beneath the moon now as much as any man anywhere—when he found the stone, he was so lonely. He had been driven from the company of the tribe for the crime of acting like an animal. They were better than that. They didn’t want him around. They knew everything.
Arrogant fucks!
But the stone gave him the power. The stone gave him sight. The stone brought them together—the last on the planet—the only creatures to ever walk the earth that were completely in balance between the light and the dark: they were animals, who could really think.
They were the First.
They were the Wild!
And they were out there now, waiting for their Prince.
He wanted to go to them, to establish a new dominion and start the Dark Times again…to take revenge for the indignities the Wild had suffered over the centuries. He knew that was why the Man in the Woods had brought them back together. After three hundred years during which he had faded nearly to nothing and had almost disappeared, the Man in the Woods had given it one last shot.
And this night was it.
There might not have even been this night if the Apollo team hadn’t brought those moon rocks back in the seventies. They weren’t as powerful as the one that had been burnished by the flames caused when it plunged through the earth’s atmosphere, leaving it purged of impurities and as solid as glass, but they emitted enough low-level energy to keep him going. So he hung on until the stars were lined up right, and Robert Norris was of an age where his feelings and mind were balanced.
And then he had risked it all.
But Norris knew that he could never do what the Man in the Woods wanted…that poor old spirit. He was a throwback to a different time, a period of magic and spells and the rack. A time of creaking wooden wheels and rusted hooks when hot irons sizzled the flesh of “witches” and “vampires” and the Church doomed everyone to the madness of its “reason.”
Alas…the old spook’s day had passed.
But the night had come. And with it the moon’s light. The moon took the energy of the sun’s heat and reflected it down…changed the way the world saw it, the same way the moonstone changed the way Norris saw the world. In that reflected light, he understood his dilemma: ignore his ancestry and save the species known as man from the horrors of the werewolf—which it had already experienced for longer than anyone alive could realize because most of the real carnage had occurred before people recorded history in writing—or he could ignore the Wild and let mankind kill the earth, which is exactly what the species would do, given time and free rein.
Norris was a man…but he was also a man who loved the wilderness, who lived for the trees…
“Come to the trees…and find yourself,” the beast that was Ernie Cray had said.
Find yourself…
And doom a generation.
He saw Woodie dismember a boy named Raymond again, and cringed when he realized that the sight didn’t bother him anymore. He remembered the blood, and the grave, and the woman on the chain, and wondered why it had all been necessary. Why did they have to eat human flesh to make the change from human to animal? Why did they need Woodie to bring the stone before they could move his father’s bones? And why did they want to move them in the first place?
It all had something to do with the way you saw things…it was all involve
d in perspective.
It was all…
And then he understood…and the ground actually shook.
33.
Conway felt the ground tremble an instant before he sensed the approach of something powerful from the trees. Whatever it was, the force of it felt as if a tornado were pushing a wall of air out from the distance to churn everything it touched.
As the line of figures at the edge of the burial grounds turned to watch, the black trees on the horizon swayed, and dead leaves swirled. The hair on Conway’s head rippled, though his skin registered no wind. And the snow around his feet ran in skimming eyelets that skipped into tiny, sandstorm funnels. Cooper and Cheryl Lockner stopped their prancing and stood frozen on the snow, their long, pointed snouts lifted high in silhouette as if to catch some scent. And the stump of Conway’s lost finger sang with tremulous sensations that were not pain…but that were by no means pleasant.
This must be what animals feel right before the coming of a tidal wave or the eruption of a volcano, the sheriff decided, more with his body than with his mind. It was like the occurrence of some great natural event, and it instilled in him the same sense of awe and fear that every human in history had felt in the face of any similar, unknown force.
It was that feeling that made Conway understand.
This was old, he thought, forcing down the persistent screams of terror from his spinning guts. This was something eternal, a demonstration of a power that had existed forever. And mankind had faced it before—and had won.
The key was to think! To reason it out and not let the mindless, merciless waves of nature wash you away. Man had logic and imagination. That’s what separated him from the animals. He could control his environment and determine his own destiny. He had done it before…and right now, Conway would have to do it again.
If he could.
Because, right now, only he could.