Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  He was the Flock’s Dog.

  And the Wolf was coming.

  Pound for pound, a dog can’t beat a wolf in a fair fight. But who said a fight had to be fair? When an animal risks losing an eye, or its life, it fights any way it can, and uses every tooth and nail at its disposal along the way.

  At that instant, the sheriff was sorry that he had killed the deputy. He’d done it as an act of mercy. Knowing that the chances of either of them ever seeing the sunrise was nearly zero, he had acquiesced to the man’s pitiful pleas and ended his life in a swift and painless way: a bullet to the head. Far better, he had reasoned, than the horrible finale of being eaten by so perfect a predator as that thing he had seen Detective Cooper become.

  But now he wished that he would have stayed his shot. If only so that he might have a set of human ears to hear his own final screams. It would be awful, dying alone with only the beast that was killing you for company.

  Again, the ground shook, and Conway’s attention snapped back to the tree line. The glowing light was closer, brighter, and moving steadily now. The creatures near the rim of the burial grounds were drawing back to either side of the field, and Cooper and Cheryl Lockner were motionless near the trees. Overhead, something seemed to move—something vague and dark, swirling in the unmarred night sky to concentrate itself around the moon. Cooper glanced up, and the movement seemed to stop…perhaps it hadn’t really been there at all. But when he looked back at the trees, the sky went right on changing.

  And then the trees parted, and a man stepped into view.

  At his appearance, a peal of thunder rocked the Valley, echoing powerfully so that by the time the last of the rumble faded, it had bounced over the trees so many times that it sounded like ten thunderclaps instead of just one. From the spot where the man stood, a ripple, like a wave, ran in a crescent shape, out across the snow, frosting the sheriff’s skin as it passed him, and filling his eyes for a moment so that, when he looked, everything seemed to come back to him from a blurry mess of watery dark.

  The big shapes near the tree line were kneeling.

  The wolves that were Detective Cooper and Cheryl Lockner dropped their heads, pulled their tails up between their legs, and tentatively approached the figure from the woods, who was…

  Encased in light.

  The glow was silver, strong, and steady. It rose thirty feet over him in a dome and illuminated the area around him for an equal distance, making him look like a man-shaped spot of black at its center. From what Conway could see, he was unremarkable—at least when compared to the hulking beasts that were now kneeling before him—and he was holding one arm up over his head. That arm ended in a bright blur where his hand should have been, and the sheriff realized that the silver glow that was now bleeding down to travel across the snow of the burial grounds, making it pulsate as if electrified, had, as its source, something in the man’s invisible hand.

  The man stopped, and Cooper and Cheryl Lockner inched their way toward him, paused, and stood waiting. The man looked down at them briefly before reaching out his free hand and petting first one and then the other on the head.

  Conway’s first, reflexive reaction at this point was to say, “No! Watch yourself! They’re killers!” But he didn’t move and he couldn’t speak because, when the man’s hand touched the first wolf, he saw the beast encircled with a hazy, silver glow that erased its wolf shape and left inside it an image of a naked man resting on his hands and knees and allowing someone to rub his head. When the dark man removed his hand and placed it on the second wolf, the first resumed its canine shape and the second glowed inside its own cocoon of light as it assumed the shape of a naked woman.

  Conway blinked.

  And more wolves slunk silently from the blackness of the forest as if they had been waiting there to see what would happen before showing themselves.

  The greeting went on for a long time. At first, there were just the first two wolves to touch, but those two soon gave way to what looked like an endless line. Every time the man’s hand came down, Conway saw the animal’s human appearance, and over the course of the next few minutes he recognized Ernie Cray, two of his own deputies, and a number of people from town who he had not even known were missing, including the wife of the young sexton who had been murdered at the graveyard. In her wolf shape she held a bundle in her jaws that reminded Conway of Jean Grenier’s woodcut image to a sickening degree. And reverently she laid this offering—her own human baby, which made the sheriff remember that she was a mother twice and wonder what had happened to her second child—at the feet of the dark man, who patted her three times, as if in reward.

  By the time it was over, the dark man had touched twelve wolves…

  Twelve? Conway thought. There were twelve people, living in our little town, who were so bad inside that they just changed as soon as the bones were moved? Out of the tiny town of Harpersville, there were twelve people who dreamed of killing, and who were cruel enough to run to the woods the first chance they got? Twelve Vyrmin in my little Flock?

  It was amazing—awesome, in fact. If that ratio of Vyrmin to human held true over the whole state, or country, or world, then soon—if nothing was done to stop it—there would be no place to run, nowhere to hide. There’d be wolves everywhere, in every crack and under every rock. It would be a virtual war, a hell like in the old days when the fairy tales had been written. There’d be killings every night and executions every day. There’d be people trying to hide and inquisitors asking questions. Everyone would suspect everyone else, and no one would be safe.

  It would be like the descent of a plague.

  It would be like the Dark Ages.

  It would be…

  “A new Dark Time,” he whispered, and just the feel of the words on his tongue…

  Made him grimace.

  Just the feel of the words on his tongue…

  Made him move.

  As the dark shapes of the creatures kneeling rose to approach the man from the trees, Conway was already stepping forward. As he watched the figures converge before him, he realized that he had been right: whatever those twenty or so things actually were, they were huge, because as soon as they were arranged near the dark man, they towered over him by a good four feet.

  “Think!” he was saying to himself as he approached. “Work it out! Don’t’ fight fair!”

  He hadn’t gone ten feet when the dark man looked his way, freezing the sheriff with the simple force of his glance. Suddenly there were twelve sets of fire-red eyes fixed firmly on Conway’s face. Twelve sets of jaws worked themselves into twelve dripping grins. And a line of wolves all crouched, as if ready to spring.

  Conway’s flesh crawled.

  The dark man raised his hand, and the wolves lifted their heads in response.

  Conway lifted his gun.

  And the dark man stepped into the snow of the burial grounds.

  When his foot came down, a whole string of things happened, and Conway’s head reeled trying to sort them out.

  First, a flash of light shot across the snow and blasted up, creating a bright circle that was exactly as large as the burial grounds, but that ended in a dome-shaped roof overhead. It was as if the grounds had suddenly been covered by a glass bowl, with the dark, night sky above.

  In that sky, the undulating form that the sheriff had sensed but had not seen before darkened and took the same shape as the one that had briefly appeared over the jail when the Man in the Woods had disappeared after Emil Lockner’s death: that immense, half-human silhouette of an unimaginable being with the moon in its eye. Its shoulders dropped down below the horizon. Its substance was a darkness just this side of complete, which appeared solid when compared to the lighter dark of the natural sky. And its silent attention was focused on this one bright spot in which the sheriff realized he was suddenly trapped.

  As if guarding the glowing burial grounds, the surrounding woods seemed to press in close, animated and moving in the windless night. The t
rees and bushes, tangled briars and leafless brambles, all huddled into a squat, forming, in each place the sheriff looked, the yawning, dark impressions of watching faces. It wasn’t one single face anymore, not one specific being. The Man in the Woods had split into a thousand identical beings…had apparently become the woods, because in every shadowy, ominous expression, Conway saw that exact same face of the bearded man who had said, “He’s their dog,” to a thing that…

  Now fluttered overhead.

  Conway almost broke his neck jerking his head up when he noticed the demon above him. It circled twice in its bat-like shape after emerging from the night sky as if taking flesh from the dark air itself. When its reconnaissance was through, it settled itself like a vulture, resting on the surface of the light-dome that encased them all, as if the light were solid—which, at least in this creature’s estimation, it apparently was. And peering down, not at the sheriff, but at the dark man whose presence had altered things so profoundly, it folded its wings and curled its tail up over its shoulder.

  There were other things that happened when the man’s foot touched the snow…

  Animal screams shrilled from the forest.

  Dogs barked in the distance.

  The stars blinked and then became brighter, moving in the sky until their patterns were familiar, but different.

  But these were all peripheral when compared to the depth of Conway’s emotion at seeing the dark man’s face for the first time.

  “Bobby Norris,” he said to himself…to the man…to the goddamn night itself. “I knew it was you, but I wouldn’t let myself believe.”

  Norris stopped about ten yards from the sheriff, with his entourage of hulking, hairy followers spread out behind him on either side. The twelve wolves from the village positioned themselves in a circle, back, about sixty feet, grinning and dangling their tongues. And the demon sitting on the light moved herself over to get a better view of the proceedings.

  The gun in the sheriff’s hand felt suddenly very heavy, while at the same time, very small, like a lead ball-bearing.

  Norris’s eyes were gentle and his face pleasant as he said, “Hello, Sheriff Conway. It’s been a long time.”

  Conway opened and closed his mouth three times before he was able to sort out, “Hello, Bobby,” from the rest of what was in his head. “So what happens now?” he added, sounding like a robot.

  On the other side of Norris, the huge, hairy creatures that looked so much like gorillas, while also looking like men, hung their faces, side by side.

  “Well…” Norris began with an almost imperceptible shrug. “I was thinking about that on my way out here tonight.” He paused and, as if a thought had just occurred to him, asked, “Do you know where we are?”

  Conway shook his head, slowly.

  “It’s one of the dead places,” Norris said with an easy smile. “You should know that. Because of irregularities in the mineral content of this area’s bedrock, and a concentration of certain metals in one, circular spot, the earth’s magnetic field is disrupted in such a way as to make this location a kind of fish-eyed lightening rod, particularly conducive to the moon’s energy. That’s why my great-grandfather chose this spot when he was running from his home in Germany. It drew him here—drew him to itself. It has that power. It’s been drawing people here for a long time. Centuries, in fact. And I just found out about it.

  “There are only a few places like this on the whole planet, and we’ve had one right here in Harpersville all these years and nobody ever realized it—probably because Ohio’s perceived by the rest of the country as being such a boring place. I mean, how could anything interesting possibly be in Ohio? In reality, it’s actually quite a big deal. And I just found out about it myself. I found out a lot of things in the past few hours. And they’ve changed me, Sheriff. They really have. And whether you know it or not, they’ve changed you too.”

  “Me?” the sheriff mouthed, silently.

  Norris nodded.

  “I know that you don’t understand, so I’ll explain it to you,” he said, in a tone of voice that hinted at a cold rationality that frightened Sheriff Conway as much as the implied irrationality of the monsters standing around him. “Most of this has been a load of shit anyway, so we may as well dispose of it now.

  “You see, you’re responsible for most of the silliness that’s been happening in town—you, personally, and your kind, your species, in general. You’ll deny it, of course, but you are. And you didn’t even realize it. And don’t think that I don’t know what’s been going on, because I do. I’m a Sender, as it turns out; that means that, when I sleep, my spirit travels to others of the Wild and I see what’s happening to them and what they’re doing. It’s all been so brutal, so incredibly human. It’s got to stop.”

  At the word “stop,” Conway’s heart skipped, and for a second he allowed himself a brief stab of hope.

  “It’s all in how you see things,” Norris continued carefully. “I mentioned perception before—how people see Ohio in such and such a way. But the interesting thing is that because of the perception of others, many people in Ohio see themselves in a like manner. They make their lives, and the place they live, conform to the expectations or the perceptions of others. They make a thought, a reality.”

  “And that’s my whole point: perception’s everything. You’ve got to believe that, Sheriff Conway, or you’ll never understand. It sounds like philosophical bullshit, but it’s true. Our senses are our only link to the world outside our bodies. If you change perception, you essentially change reality. That’s why the Wild have been moving bones, and the Vyrmin have been boiling dog heads, and you have been cooking wolfsbane tea. You’ve all been acting on assumptions that are based on outdated perceptions.”

  “I saved your life,” Conway said, he didn’t know why.

  Norris nodded his head.

  “That’s a perfect example,” he said. “You saved the life of a small, human child by pulling him from a burning car. Or, more accurately, you saved the life of the young innocent you perceived that child to be. If you had known then what you know now about me, you would have let me burn.”

  “That’s not true,” Conway said, with little conviction.

  “That’s an interesting statement, coming from a man who just shot a deputy in cold blood.”

  “I was trying to save him from a lot of pain.”

  “Your motivations don’t change the facts: you shot him.”

  “He asked me to.”

  “You see, Sheriff? Your human mind insists on trying to manipulate reality be altering the way you perceive things. I didn’t make any judgments about your act. I merely made the observation that you did it. And, after having seen you do it, I get the feeling that, given your personality, you wouldn’t flinch from killing someone if you thought that that person was a danger to you or others.”

  “That’s self-defense,” the sheriff cut in.

  “Killing is killing,” Norris countered. “That’s the difference between the Flock and the Wild: we don’t explain it, we just do it.”

  “So you’re on their side, then?”

  “You gathered everything you know about dealing with werewolves from old European stories and legends,” Norris continued, ignoring the question. “The Wild gathered here today got their information about being werewolves from the Man in the Woods. And he’s literally as old as the hills. His information came from the perceptions of a primitive, unsophisticated barbarian who just happened to have the luck of finding the moonstone before any else did. And who also happened to be my original great-grandfather.”

  “What’s the moonstone?” Conway asked.

  “This,” Norris said proudly, holding up the stone between his thumb and index finger. “It makes thoughts come to life.”

  Conway said nothing.

  “I don’t blame you for being skeptical,” Norris said. “But believe it, because it’s true.

  “But back to the original question. What’s suppose
d to happen next is that I should announce the resurrection of the Hunt and make these creatures gathered here very happy. They’d tear you apart and offer a piece of your meat to me to eat, and the blood would set my Wild side free…which is perception creeping in again: all these violent acts of mutilation and eating of raw flesh, they’ve all been designed to shock the participant’s perceptions into a new arrangement. They’re horrendous because the alteration of the person’s point of view is so significant that only a really incredible experience could achieve it.”

  “Like cutting a horse in half?” Conway asked.

  Norris nodded

  “Or hanging an innocent girl on a chain,” he added, glumly.

  “Anyway, after I ate a piece of you without vomiting it back up, I’d turn into a creature just like my companions here…only better. Then we’d all go off into the hills again and start ripping out the throats of unlucky travelers…like good little werewolves have been doing for centuries. We’d start up the packs again, recruit Vyrmin from the Flock, and spend a great deal of time howling at the moon. At least that’s what’s supposed to happen.”

  Norris paused, and his eyes narrowed.

  “But I’ve got other ideas. As disappointed as my friends might be tonight, instead of being the first installment in what everyone probably hoped would be a nightly blood feast, just like in the old days, and all the rest of that shit, tonight, we’re going to see the last evening in which the Wild will allow archaic perceptions and nonsense rules to dictate our behavior. We have work to do, Sheriff Conway. Important work. This world is on the brink, and I intend to bring it back.

  “So…” he said, stepping forward. “There will be no more mindless slaughter. No more random acts of terror for the fun of it. The day of the slavering beast is past, and the day of the thinking killer has come. It’s been happening anyway. All those serial murderers and psychopaths that are so popular nowadays. All those tin pot despots and corporate assholes…they’re all just Vyrmin who haven’t discovered their true natures yet. But their methods are right on target. And we’re going to improve them.”