by J L Aarne
“Even knowing that they’re real? That they’re out there?” he asked.
“Yeah, even then,” she said.
“I’m not a warrior,” Wyatt admitted. “I always got my ass kicked in fights at school and I’ve been scared of everything for so long, I don’t even know if I can change. But I don’t know if it’s okay to walk away and do nothing when I can see them, and I know what they’re doing and there’s no one else. It just… It doesn’t seem right.”
“Maybe not. I’m not the one to convince you either way,” she said. “I’m not at all ashamed to say that I’m a coward, through and through.”
“You’re not,” Wyatt said.
“Oh, yes, I am,” Tallie said. “Your biggest problem right now is that you don’t know what to do; go back home and pretend to be a normal guy, knowing what you know now, or pick up the sword—in a manner of speaking—and use what you know to defend people you’ve never met because there’s a slim chance that it might be your duty to do so. I never had that problem. It isn’t my responsibility. It isn’t my fight.”
Humbled and oddly touched by what she said, Wyatt didn’t speak for a while. He sipped his whiskey and looked out the window at the fruit trees in the back yard. There was a white cat draped over a branch in the apple tree closest to the house and it watched him back. Then it yawned and looked away, dismissing him.
“What do you know about snakes?” he asked.
Tallie rolled her eyes, but she got up from the table and said, “Come on. All the books are in the other room.”
In the study, the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She walked along the one on the right-hand wall and ran her fingers over the bindings. She opened a book, skimmed through it, and put it back.
“Your friend Silas is right, there are serpents all over the world. All through time, actually,” she said. “He sounds like a smart man.”
“I guess. He knows about the monsters anyway,” Wyatt said.
“The Midgard Serpent isn’t a real monster though,” Tallie said. “It can’t be.”
“Why not?” Wyatt asked. “Thorn said the black-eyed things serve the Midgard Serpent. Silas said something similar about the fleshgaits when we found that one in the park, only he said they’re drawn to power. But if the Midgard Serpent is real, it has godlike power, he said that too. What does that mean if it’s not real?”
She opened another book and stood looking down at it as she spoke. “Well, if I were to say that… that Adolf Hitler served the devil, what would you think?”
“I’d think you were probably right,” Wyatt said.
She smiled. “Yes, but in what way?”
“Well… not the actual devil, I guess. I mean, there’s no such thing,” Wyatt said. “So, because he was evil.”
“Right,” Tallie said. “You would understand it to be a metaphor. An expression of the depth of his evil. The devil is the greatest evil, by serving the devil, you serve the greatest evil. Your Midgard Serpent is the same. To serve the Midgard Serpent is to serve the ultimate manifestation of destruction and chaos. Darkness and evil. You see what I’m saying?”
“I get it, but how do you know that’s what Thorn meant?” Wyatt asked.
“Obviously, I don’t,” Tallie said. “But night people like us have existed as long as there have been people. People of a similar kind—of a similar race or creed—have a similar language. They develop a culture with symbols and turns of phrase and beliefs specific to them. Night people are no different. The Midgard Serpent, from everything I’ve read, seems to me to be like a devil. Satan; the great adversary.”
She made a pleased sound in her throat at something in the book she had opened and began to read: “There is a snake wrapped up and hidden in the deepest, oldest, most primitive part of our brain. And even if, fantastically, you have never seen one, you recognize it. Your soul remembers the serpent, knows it, fears it; teacher, father, mother, lover, betrayer. Scales slide along that cerebral way, awakening as if from a dream. Fanning open to the sun. Paying worship. Lost in a desert where reptiles have never lived, asleep in their eggs, waiting for you to look at them and let them be born.”
A shiver ran down the back of Wyatt’s neck and he rolled his shoulder up against the sensation. “That’s…”
“Beautiful,” Tallie said. “It’s translated from a tablet from about 150 BC. Most interpretations compare it to the serpent in the bible.”
“It’s not though,” Wyatt said. “Or it’s… more.”
“No,” she agreed. “It’s older.
“Silas said something that I wonder about, too. He said that it’s sleeping and if it wakes up it’ll end the world. Not on purpose, but just to escape.”
“Like a snake inside an egg?” Tallie asked with a little smile.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Aunt Tallie?”
“Yes?”
“What if it’s not a metaphor?”
“You mean, what if there’s a real serpent big enough to encircle the world living inside the earth getting ready to hatch?”
“I know that sounds stupid, but it all sounds pretty stupid when you look at it the way day people do. We’re not day people though. So, what if it’s not just a story?”
“Then God help you, sweetheart.”
Wyatt nodded. Fair enough.
She closed the book she was holding and put it away. “Stay for dinner,” she said. “You don’t have to decide anything yet. Think about it, relax a little, and stay for dinner.”
He almost said that he couldn’t. It was a reflex. Dinner with other people outside of his own home after dark was still something he was getting used to. “All right,” he said. “That sounds nice.”
He spent the day with Tallie and it was a longer visit than he had had with her since before he quit college and she moved away. They talked about her work. She was writing a book about animal bridegrooms, a common motif in many fairy tales, which she had to explain to him because Wyatt had never heard the term before. Her book was about how the concept crossed cultures and may have had its beginnings in ancient, dead religions. Religions like those of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, which had many examples of human-animal hybrids and humans mating with animals. Even the Midgard Serpent was supposed to be the child of the trickster god, Loki, and a giantess, and one of its siblings was an enormous wolf.
Wyatt asked her to send him a copy when the book was published.
Tallie asked him how he was doing since finding out the truth. He told her it was hard to know sometimes, and it was. If he had learned the truth about himself as a child, it would have been easier to adjust to his new reality, but he had grown into a man believing he was so mentally unstable that he hallucinated monsters hiding inside every shadow.
“Are you sorry you found out?” she asked.
“No, I’m not sorry,” he said. “It’s just… It’s strange to be happy about something like that. It’s like, I found out I’m not insane after all, I’m special or something, but that doesn’t mean I get to ride the Hogwarts Express, it means every bad thing I’ve ever had nightmares about is real, and some of them want to kill me. And because I’m me, not a ninja or a secret spy or a magician or anything cool like that, I’m not really equipped to deal with shit like this. But I’m still glad I know.”
“Good,” she said. “You know, all the first fairy tales were horror stories, but you know what else?”
“What?” Wyatt asked, not sure her analogy applied to him and his situation.
“The little guy always wins at the end.”
Dinner was Chinese takeout. Tallie was a brilliant woman, but she was not a good cook and she wasn’t about to eat her own abysmal cuisine. It was one of the few things, she told Wyatt, she had not been able to learn from books.
The white cat’s name was Arnold Palmer, named after the drink, not the golfer. Tallie called him Arnie. He sat like a dog beside the table while they ate and talked, and occasionally Tallie would drop a piece of chicken or a shr
imp for him. Through dinner, they talked about less gloomy things. Tallie, predictably, wanted to know about her brother, and Wyatt told her that he was doing better and that she should go see him herself.
He thought better of it after saying so because the last thing he wanted to do was drag her into anything that had to do with the fleshgaits. She would not thank him for it.
Tallie said she couldn’t right away, at least not until spring break when she wouldn’t have classes to prepare for. It relieved her to hear that he was going to be okay though because she had felt guilty for not visiting him in the hospital. She said that she had been too busy to get away and maybe it was true, but Lorrie and Tallie didn’t like each other much, and without Aaron to give them a reason to get along, such a hospital visit would have been tense and very brief.
“It’s ironic, you know,” Tallie said as she was putting the leftovers away. “Your mother thought I encouraged you. Your delusions, she called them. Quite aside from thinking that I put on airs by getting myself overeducated, I think the real reason I never could do anything right was that every time you came to visit me you got a little worse.” She shrugged. “I may never have told you about me or explained to you that it was all real, but I never told you that it wasn’t, did I? Maybe I should have.”
“I loved it though,” Wyatt said. “I sort of felt normal. I know that’s weird, but…”
He wasn’t angry at her anymore. It was hard to stay angry when it wasn’t her fault. She could have told him the truth, but he had been a child and he would only have taken the information home with him where his parents would have despaired and put him through more therapy. As an adult, he never would have believed her; it had been hard enough for him to believe Silas with the truth right there trying to tear his head off.
He forgave her.
“I’m glad you were there. I wouldn’t change any of it,” he said. “And Aunt Tallie?”
“Yes, honey?” She stopped scraping scraps into the trash and turned to look at him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Just… thank you. And I’m sorry.”
She wiped her hands off on a small towel and walked over to him. “For what?”
“For being so mad at you,” he said. “I was rude. I’m sorry.”
Tallie hugged him. “Don’t you be sorry,” she said. “You had every right to be mad. I would have been furious if it was me.”
Feeling a little like he was about to cry, Wyatt pulled back and said, “I’m still sorry.”
“Well, all right then,” Tallie said. She let him go with a pat on the shoulder.
“I should start heading home,” he said.
“It is getting late,” Tallie agreed. “But before you leave, I want to show you something. Come with me back to the study.”
Wyatt went with her, eager to see whatever she was about to pass on to him. Silas had left a sword in his living room, but Silas wasn’t a professor or a doctor, so maybe Tallie had something better. She wasn’t a fighter, but she was a survivor and she had spent her entire life studying night people and monsters from a uniquely logical, historical point of view. What might she have found along the way when she didn’t have to battle with constant skepticism and disbelief like her colleagues?
Whatever he expected, it was not the old, ordinary looking little book she took down from one of the shelves and put into his hands. He tried not to look disappointed but knew immediately that he had failed when Tallie laughed at him.
“What? Did you think I had a magic wand for you?” she asked.
“I… maybe,” he said, embarrassed.
He turned the book over in his hands and frowned. It didn’t look special. It was about the same size as a pocket paperback novel. The cloth cover was worn and faded from red to pink, the paper was brittle and yellow, and the binding was coming apart.
She ignored the doubtful look on his face. “Yes, I know, it’s a book,” she said. “Fleshgaits, you called those monsters, wasn’t it? In there, he calls them skin-walkers, but they’re the same thing. Skin-walkers in the traditional sense are witches, but this is different.”
“How do you mean?” Wyatt asked.
“Witches are people,” she said.
“What is this?” he asked, looking at the book with more interest.
“It’s a journal from 1610 belonging to a man who… well, saw some things,” she said. “He lived in the colony of Jamestown and arrived shortly after what we call the ‘starving time’ in the winter of 1609. That winter, the population of Jamestown dropped from five hundred people to only sixty, who survived by turning to cannibalism. Twenty years earlier, more than a hundred people disappeared from Roanoke. He talks about it all in there. The more relevant stuff happened to him though. Him and people around him. Read it, it’ll interest you a great deal, I think.”
“This book talks about fleshgaits?” Wyatt asked.
While the history of Jamestown was interesting and sounded very much like there had been other things at work than what they wrote about in the history books, that wasn’t the part that had caught his attention. He knew that Tallie knew things about night people and the dark creatures that he could only guess at, but he was stunned to discover that there was much more than stories passed around through time, distorted through years and by word-of-mouth. Legends, myths, fairy tales; he had expected that. He hadn’t expected there to be evidence. He was holding a book in his hands that contained first-hand personal accounts of the things he had been seeing in the dark his entire life. Evidence that he was not crazy, that there were others like him in the world, that they had existed before.
“This is a book about night people?” Wyatt asked. “How? How can there be a book about us and I’ve never heard of it?”
“First of all, it wasn’t published as a book until over a hundred and sixty years later,” Tallie said. “A limited printing, very limited, and at the time, it was outsold by everything from Robinson Crusoe to Fanny Hill. The 18th century wasn’t a popular time in America for science fiction, what with the Revolution on the rise and people being both highly religious and highly superstitious.”
“What do you mean, science fiction?” Wyatt asked. “You said this was a journal.”
“It is, but try to see it as others would, Wyatt,” she said. “John Bledsoe—that’s his name—talks about things that kill a person, strip their skin off and put it on like a new set of clothes and in no time become that person. He talks about dragons, wendigos, men who can see monsters in the same darkness that appears empty to others. To any rational mind—even today—that book is fiction.”
“I still don’t understand why I’ve never heard of it,” Wyatt said. “Are there other books? Other ones that talk about us?”
“Yes, there are, and they have been dismissed throughout history as fantasy,” Tallie said. “Lucky for us, I think. Imagine what would happen to people like us in more superstitious times. What did happen sometimes, I’m sure. That book was first printed in Massachusetts in 1770, then not again until 1910. I believe I read somewhere that a copy was found in the wreckage of the Titanic in 1987. It’s been printed a few times since, but it has never been popular, though I’m sure somewhere out there it has a cult following. You would not have heard of it because it’s a rare book, only important to people like us, who do not discuss such things lightly.”
“Is that why you waited to give it to me until after dinner?” Wyatt asked, amused, trying to lighten the mood. Tallie wasn’t mad, but she was tense and appeared to already be regretting her decision to give him the book. “Not sure if you can trust me?”
“Sweetheart, I trust you,” she said. “It’s everyone else I worry about.”
Wyatt said goodbye shortly after that and drove home in the dark with the book in the passenger seat. He saw things along the way (a black horse with legs twice as long as they should have been and eyes that glowed gas flame blue, a woman in a white flowing gown whose feet hung half a foot off the ground, shadows that moved in
the beams of his headlights, independent of any living thing to cast them) but he could look at them now as he drove by and not panic. He had changed at some point; Silas’s company and friendship had changed him, but his leaving had changed him too. He still wasn’t brave, but he wasn’t the same. He didn’t feel the need for a flashlight and a headlamp every time he went outside after dark anymore.
He hadn’t yet decided if the change was good or bad. He didn’t want to scream and cry every time the lights went out, but fear existed because it helped people to survive. Without it, was he any safer? Just as the snake existed, as a deity and devil, all over the world, so too did fear of the dark. It wasn’t such an irrational fear when you knew what lived in it, but people had told themselves it was irrational for such a long time that the fear had evolved out of them as a species and was now found only in children. Yet, people still sometimes disappeared in the dark and were never seen again. Occasionally there was something watching you from the shadows, and sometimes it got you because you told yourself that there wasn’t.
The book in the seat beside him kept drawing Wyatt’s attention back to it all the way home. There were answers within its pages, maybe even some answers about him. He was both excited to open it and terrified. The terrified part was so familiar to him that it was almost comforting.
Chapter 12
From the Journal of John B. Bledsoe, 1610
June 11, 1610
We arrived day before yesterday just in time to intercept ships carrying colonists away from James Fort. They were terrified, emaciated in appearance and in very poor health. I knew them to be human only because it was day and men who I knew very well could not see in the dark saw them quite clearly. Lord Thomas West ordered them to return to the colony. There was great protest at this decision, but the unfortunate people were in no health to fight against the lord’s men, and ultimately the ships returned with us.