Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  And the sheriff knew that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

  The bullet had hit the moonstone. That was what Conway had been imagining it doing when he pulled the trigger. Somehow, all that energy in the circle had climbed through his body and made it possible for him to shoot so straight that he had hit something that small with one shot. When the bullet hit, it shattered the stone, sending pieces flying. One of them had struck Norris in the eye…

  A piece of the moonstone had put out his left eye…

  And now, as he looked up, it was changing his face.

  “Oh my God!” Conway whispered, staggering back until his knees gave out beneath him. “Oh Jesus! What have I done?!”

  The ground itself swelled and buckled as Norris raised himself to his full height—six feet, seven, nine, twelve. The powdery snow went hard and then was overrun with cracks that emanated out from where the Blood Prince stood, and, from between those cracks, the power of the earth responded to its sister moon and bled light up in sharp rays. But unlike the moonstone rays, the light coming up from the ground was not silver—it was golden, bright and hot. It punched holes in the clouds of blowing snow around Norris’ body and continued up, through the moonstone’s dome of light, shattering it and washing everything in a dazzling, radiant color.

  Conway tried to hang on to his balance, but it was impossible, and with a cry and a futile flurry of his hands, he fell backward and rolled as the burial grounds went from being a depression in the earth to a mound one hundred yards across, rising higher and higher, as the new Blood Prince, clothed in spectacular glory, climbed his way to the top.

  When he reached the summit, Norris threw out his arms and howled. From where Conway lay, his back against the stump of a tree and his face lifted to the shining night, he saw the man—or thing, for now he was huge—silhouetted against the blazing moon. His arms were as long as his entire height had been just moments before, covered with long, flowing hair that rippled with invisible wind. The mane around his head was magnificent, thick, and billowing to a tapered point that would have easily reached to the pit of his back, had it not been standing straight out from his head behind him. His teeth gleamed, his throat strained, and a billowing plume of steam rose from his stretching mouth as his voice filled the sky, shook the trees, and reached deep into Conway’s soul to touch something that was so old that every thought he was having simply shriveled and fell away from his mind like scabs. Lying there in the snow, hearing the Blood Prince singing the Song of the Wild as only the Blood Prince could, the sheriff understood what it must have been like a thousand years ago, or a million, when the flickering glow of a campfire was the only thing that created any distance between a man’s mortality and the wilderness, with all its power. He understood the Hunt, and how natural it was…

  And he understood where the Wild came from…

  He saw his own soul.

  And he was afraid.

  He was so….so afraid!

  Thunder rocked the Valley when the Blood Prince concluded his song. Scrambling around on the mound that served as the Prince’s throne, the others of the Wild and their new Vyrmin servants, tried to approach their leader, but simply fell to their knees and averted their eyes as the sky convulsed and Norris began singing again.

  More thunder pealed, ripped, and then pounded down from above as the thing that had the moon in its eye…

  Moved!

  Conway saw it, and his skin prickled over with icy beads of sweat. His bladder let go, and warmth ran over his crotch and soaked his legs, but he didn’t care. It couldn’t have mattered less to him at that moment. All that mattered was what he was seeing in the sky…

  The form around the moon was moving, turning, swelling itself up as if it were inhaling the universe into its lungs and was about to blow it out into a jumbled roar that would rearrange reality in some new and totally random way.

  “Noooooo!” Conway screamed, lifting his mangled hand before his face.

  He didn’t hear it, but his voice had joined a chorus of insistent denials created by the screams of every human near the burial grounds. Every villager, and by this time there were a lot of them amid the trees, lifted his or her head up, saw, if not the same thing that the sheriff did, then something very much like it, and screamed out their own “No!” as if the collective force of their voices might have some impact on that which had chosen to act.

  And then, with an explosion of rolling sound that deafened all present, the figure around the moon expanded, first out, blotting all light from the sky and blinding everyone and everything with a blanket of absolute darkness that swallowed the stars and the moon, and then it focused itself into a single bolt of pitch-black power that shot down and hit the Blood Prince where he stood howling on the hill, erasing him from sight and leaving a smoking hole in the snow where he had been.

  All was silence then.

  All was pressure.

  All was anticipation because there was more, and everyone—the new Vyrmin wolves, the Wild, the humans, and the Flock’s Dog, Sheriff H.W. Conway, who was wet with his own piss and crying full tears now—knew that what they were witnessing was not yet over…

  It was not an end.

  It was a beginning.

  Not a whisper marred the perfect, held-breath stillness of the moment before the Dark Times returned. Not a stirring touched the anticipatory tension of that time-before.

  Everyone waited…and watched the top of the hill as, from the blackened ground, an arm emerged and was clear beneath the new full moon.

  In the sky the awesome figure of the creature in the heavens had disappeared. The stars were arranged in their old, familiar pattern, and clouds were boiling up from the horizon, as if a vacuum so powerful that it had drawn them from the other side of the world had been created when the black lightning bolt touched the earth.

  The arm wavered and then pulled itself into a shoulder. Mud crumpled and rolled. Soft earth squishing sounds were loud in the silence. And more of the creature came into view.

  The Indians used to bury their dead here, Conway thought, his mouth hanging limply from his skull. They’d float them out in canoes when the grounds were flooded and they would dump them. And when the waters went away, the bodies would be gone.

  More earth crumbled, and a head emerged from the ground.

  Where did those bodies go?

  The thing was on its knees.

  They were the bodies of the mad!

  It was on its feet.

  They were all mad…now.

  It was turning its face from one side to another, scanning the trees as if drinking in its domain.

  When it settled its attention on the sheriff, his fear melted into a kind of resolved despair—he was lost…dead…doomed… damned. So he got to his wobbling feet, threw out his chest, balled both hands into the best fists he could make, and stared right back at the thing on the hill. Looking up, jutting out his jaw, working the muscles under his ears, he stood defiant…and prayed that his death wouldn’t hurt too badly.

  The thing regarded him coolly as the sheriff’s eyes adjusted to the available light. There were no more glowing rays from the earth or silver beams from the moonstone. There were no more dazzling explosions of power emanating from magic sources. There was just the moon, and it was shining its own brand of magic light—cold, cool, and natural.

  The creature’s face was unclear in the moon-glow. It looked insubstantial somehow. As if it weren’t real at all, but instead was a hole in the air. It moved, and breathed, but there didn’t seem to be anything detailed about it. It was empty.

  At least it was until it opened its eye…

  Its left eye.

  The eye that had received the moonstone chip.

  When it opened that eye, a split second of light gleamed therein, and then the creature’s silhouetted shape—with its tangled hair and horns—disappeared, and was replaced by the naked, shimmering figure of Robert Norris.

  “Thank you,” Norri
s said, looking down at the place where Conway stood. “Thou hast done what no other could do. It is as it has never been.”

  There was a strange, reverberating hollowness to the man’s voice that was haunting and empty. It seemed to be echoing up from a great depth, and when the words faded, they didn’t so much seem to die as they did to move on, farther away, like television beams disappearing into space.

  “Take your life as payment for my own,” the Blood Prince continued. And Conway saw the glint of the horns growing back up from his forehead. “We shall meet again, when the world is mine.”

  From behind Norris’ back, wings spread up, as if growing from his hips and climbing into the air over his shoulders. They were huge, moist-looking things, with veiny, taut skin stretched between weirdly pliable ribs that reminded Conway of the stinging whip-barbs on a catfish. For an instant the sheriff was certain he could see something snake-like flick around the man’s legs from behind, like a spatula-tipped tail, but he blinked and it was gone. With a great rustle, Norris’ wings flapped twice, as if he were testing their integrity, and then again, harder, and then in a rhythm that lifted his feet from the ground.

  Conway lifted his gun, but his hand was empty. He just couldn’t’ bring himself to take his eyes from Norris to look for the tiny weapon, and in the back of his spinning mind, he knew a bullet would have been useless now anyway.

  From somewhere, appeared another flapping object in the sky. And as Norris rose higher and higher, the demon woman circled him playfully, as if unable to contain her excitement at having another of her kind for company. Together, the pair increased their altitude until Norris’ figure was no larger than an inch long in Conway’s view before it stopped, and hung, flapping still in one spot. A glint sparkled up there in the nightmare sky that the sheriff knew was Norris’ hazy silver eye, and for a moment, he imagined the immense figure that had used the moon for its own eye, feeling giddy when, in his imagination, that figure shrank to exactly Norris’ size in one, liquid motion.

  The figure hesitated, and then a voice filled the air and said, “Let it begin.”

  And then the sky was empty.

  35.

  Conway swallowed twice before he could pull his eyes from where he had last seen Bobby Norris’ body. He blinked, and blinked again. Before him, on the hillside, the Wild still stood in their ancient, hairy forms, and the Vyrmin cowered as wolves. From deep inside him welled a loathing sense of disgust that nearly paralyzed his thoughts, and tugged at some tiny bell inside his mind that finally peeled into a specific, pronounceable word…

  “KILL!” he suddenly heard himself shouting, as if he were an observer to the event.

  “KILL!” he screamed again, and the feeling of it became more right.

  “KILL THE VYRMIN!

  “KILL THE PEST!

  “KILL THE EVIL AND SAVE THE FLOCK!”

  In response to his call there came a second’s hesitant quiet, and then a roar as the people surrounding the hill with their torches shouted out their anger and moved to obey.

  SEVEN

  36.

  The change in atmosphere was almost physical in its impact, and every creature on the hill seemed to feel it at once.

  As soon as Conway stopped yelling and the aggressive roar of the villagers in the woods filled the air, the monsters each did something different. Some of them, in apparent shock or outrage, reared up, showing their teeth and plunging to the attack. Others apparently deemed it appropriate to dig in and defend themselves at the top of the hill. Still others just ran, without any obvious destination. And the Vyrmin wolves, to a creature, seemed thrilled by the opportunity to kill.

  Conway was filled with an overpowering sense of dislocation. Watching the progression of the villagers with their torches and wavering weapons, he saw, briefly in his mind, the woodcut prints of his childhood: the angry villagers of fourteenth-century France and Germany chasing beings that were depicted as precisely the ones he was seeing in the flesh at this instant. It was unsettling, and shoved his already spinning seed of self totally off balance, so that he could feel in his heart, the emergence of some new facet of his personality that he had not known existed before.

  He was filled with a sudden sense of purpose and power.

  Shoving his way past the crowd that had washed over him in its enthusiasm to obey his command to kill, he wrested an ax from a man whose face he never saw. Around him came the first sounds of the battle: screaming men, screaming women, howling wolves, and the vigorous, bloodcurdling snarls of the Wild. The din was incredible…growing louder and louder until, with his head filled with it and his eyes filled with the sights of flying blood, Conway thought it could get no worse. But it did. It was like a drug that made him spin. It was like a blast of pure oxygen chasing the vessels in his brain. It was like stepping into a dark room, only to find bright lights and a full-length mirror in which your reflection has been awaiting your arrival.

  To his left, an immense beast lifted a man off the ground and tore his chest wide open with a sweep of one clawed hand as another man, looking only about half as tall as the creature before him, brought as ax whistling down into the monster’s knee.

  There was a horrible scream.

  To his right, a wolf was chewing the stump of a woman’s neck as blood bathed its jaws.

  Ahead, a towering creature toppled over under the weight of ten men, all clutching its fur and pulling as others stood in a ring with knives.

  And Conway worked his way through.

  The ax felt deadly in his hands, and his heart was bursting with pride for the people around him.

  “Fight!” he screamed, as if to spur them on.

  But they ignored him.

  “This is our chance!” he encouraged, more for himself than anyone else.

  And this was their chance, he knew in his heart. The Flock had to fight, had learned to fight over the centuries, and had gotten good at it. If it hadn’t, then there would have been no need for the Blood Prince to try and change the progress of the Hunt. There would have been no reason for the Man in the Woods to follow him from childhood, through his life, and to this night, when the Hunt was to begin again. They could have let things go. But the Flock had grown strong.

  “WITNESS THE END OF THE WILD!!!” he screamed.

  Who am I? Conway thought as he stalked through the echoing crash of conflict. Where have I been all my life? Have I lived this before? If so, how many times? What the hell is happening to me?

  But all questions left him when he spotted the thing for which he had been searching.

  Hefting his ax up in both hands, he ran at the creature, howling out his intent and charging with all speed and recklessness. The wolf was busy with two other men, one of whom he had grabbed by the groin and was shaking, while the other crawled on the ground, blindly searching with pulpy, blood-running eyes, for his lower jaw. It didn’t react to the sheriff’s charge in time, perhaps because it was occupied, or perhaps because it mistook his shouts for just so much more noise in the crowd. But for whatever reason, it didn’t drop the man it was shaking until Conway had already delivered his first blow.

  The ax struck with a sickening thud, and the force of the blow staggered the sheriff and jarred his bones. But the silver coating, despite what Norris had said about there being no magic in silver, apparently did have some special value when dealing with these creatures because, instead of just slashing out a hunk of flesh, or gouging into bone, the ax head seemed possessed with its own sense of purpose and, to the sheriff’s amazement, continued on through the wolf’s shoulder and into the ground beyond it.

  With a terrible scream the animal pivoted, stumbled, and plunged into a pool of its own blood as its right front leg fell away from its body and turned into a severed human arm on the ground. Madly, its neck twisted as its back legs pumped.

  Without hesitating, his face speckled with running droplets of blood and his mouth pulled into an awful grin, Conway heaved the ax up and struck again.
The wolf tried to avoid the blow, but the sheriff’s arms seemed as if they were being guided by some invisible force that made his aim unerringly lethal, and the bloody ax blade bit into the screaming creature’s left shoulder and severed its other front leg before it could roll its body up and bring its teeth to bear.

  The wolf, minus its two front legs, writhed on the ground in a growing puddle of muddy blood, splashing itself dark as it pushed with its back legs and tried to snap its jaws at Conway’s feet. Flickering changes were happening to it, eyes transforming from one color and size to another and back in milliseconds that registered more on the sheriff’s nerves than his mind, alterations in the size and shape of the thing that could have been optical tricks, had Conway not understood what was happening.

  As three men came up behind, holding torches for him to see by, the sheriff calmly stepped around the struggling beast and brought the ax down again. But his blow was intended to maim, not to kill, and at the knee, the creature’s back right leg was lost.

  And then his left.

  And then the wolf wasn’t a wolf anymore.

  It was Detective Michael Cooper, lying on the ground, helpless, staring numbly through debilitating waves of pain, bleeding to death.

  Conway sensed the eyes on him in the sky. He knew he was being watched. It wasn’t the moon this time, as it had been before. It wasn’t anything that unfathomably big that he could not hope to defeat it. This time it was a man-sized observer. A thing with wings, and a tail, and a lover that changed its shape and could tear a man’s mind and body apart. But it was man-sized, and it had two names.

  Blood Prince was one.

  Robert Norris was the other.

  Conway could intellectualize that. He could crystallize it in his mind and hold onto the image in his heart. He could reach out and touch a name like “Bobby Norris.” He could point to it and say, “That! Right there! That’s what we have to do. That’s what we have to kill! It’s right there, and if we try, we can take it!”