by J L Aarne
“So, get another cat,” Silas said.
“I… don’t know,” Wyatt said. “Anyway, thanks. I should go.”
“All right. I’ll see you later,” Silas said. He took the towel from Wyatt and dropped it into a hamper on his way back to his office. “Come back tomorrow and we’ll play with the sticks some more.”
Wyatt looked up at the wood swords and sighed. He had said that he would train with Silas and do what he wanted, and he knew that he needed to or he would end up like Silas’s friend, like Teddy’s wife; dead with no one to cry for him because there wasn’t time.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” Wyatt agreed.
“And bring that journal you were talking about. I’d like to see it.”
“Sure.”
Wyatt left and, as he was driving home, he thought about Silas. About the journal. He wondered why Silas had looked so funny when he said John Bledsoe’s name. John Bledsoe had been dead for four hundred years, but Silas hadn’t been affected by the idea that what was happening now had also been happening four hundred years earlier, he had gone white and still at John Bledsoe’s name.
Chapter 18
From the Journal of John B. Bledsoe, 1610
September 24, 1610
I have come to believe that there is something very wrong about Mr. Warwick since he returned from the hunt. Perhaps it is the fever that changed him, but I think it to be something more. I have not been to see him since before my Verity passed. I have agreed to see almost no one since that awful day. Still, I have watched him, and he is strange and different from any other man I’ve known. I find it hard to explain the ways in which he is so strange, but it is true nonetheless.
The men around him enjoy his company more than they did before. This was the first thing I noticed, and I inquired about it. Their answers no longer satisfy me as they did. How can a man with Mr. Warwick’s experience not know how to butcher a hog? He holds the knife like a boy who has never used one before. There is no fever in God’s creation that should be capable of stripping a vanguard’s knowledge of the blade from their brain. I have seen them in action and it seems something more that they are born to, which is as natural as breathing, than a thing they have committed to memory by learning. A man cannot forget to suck in air or to tell his heart to go on beating.
Something terrible happened on that hunt, I am convinced of it. More terrible than Mr. Kingsley’s death. I have my suspicions and if what I am thinking should prove true, it were better that Mr. Warwick had died in the forest as well.
I am afraid to confront him. It feels so odd to be afraid. With my beloved gone, what is there left to fear? I suppose such fear is instinctual. The fear of pain and death, which even the lowest lifeforms experience. That is the fear that grips me as I consider presenting my suspicions to Mr. Warwick, for if he is not, in fact, Mr. Warwick, as I have come to believe he is not, I expect I shall die.
September 28, 1610
I have taken some time to consider and I know what I should do. I should take the others like myself from Mr. Warwick’s hunting party into my confidence and explain to them what I suspect, but this is not what I will do. Mr. Warwick, or whoever he is now, was not wrong when he explained to me about the fear of men. Fearful men do stupid things. Fearful men deny the truth if it is too terrible to bear. Fearful men lash out at anything to make the fear stop. I cannot trust anyone with what I have come to suspect about Mr. Warwick. They will believe that I am deluded or influenced by evil if I speak my fears aloud because it is easier than believing that they have been tricked and their leader is possessed by a monster.
I cannot trust anyone. Verity would have believed me. We would have discussed what is to be done about it and decided together. She may have disagreed with me and with her beside me I would not have been so reluctant to trust the other men. I am alone now, and though I have not cared whether I live or die since she passed, I do not want to be burned alive, hung or shot for speaking the truth. I am not a courageous man, I understand that now, but it would be a useless, ignoble end. I am vain enough to desire that my death, if I should die for these people, should bear some meaning.
Oh, God, I wish you were here, my love.
I am afraid that what I desire will not matter in the end. I will die anyway, and it will be for nothing. I will go tonight to confront Mr. Warwick. I pray that I am wrong, even that I am delusional. They say my grief has addled my mind. Perhaps they are right. I pray that it was the fever all along that so changed Mr. Warwick’s personality. I would give anything I have to be wrong about this, but I am not wrong.
This may well be my final entry in this journal. I write now merely to gather my thoughts and what little courage I have.
September 30, 1610
I am amazed to still be drawing breath.
He admitted it to me. He is not Richard Warwick. He has not been for some time.
When I was at school, I had a night seeing professor named Lefebvre who was a medical man. I remember one lesson with a cadaver where he dissected the corpse as he spoke of the anatomy and explained the illness which had killed the man on the table. It was an interesting lesson and I didn’t see anything abnormal in it until he cracked open the ribcage and inside of the cadaver there was a small, thin body where I should have observed organs; heart, lungs, intestines, etcetera. Its flesh was grey in color, slightly blue, probably because it, like the man it had attached itself to, was dead. I remember flinching in surprise at the sight, which was most unexpected as Professor Lefebvre had explained to us the details of the man’s illness as a severe case of dysentery. I looked around at my fellow students and saw them taking notes and paying close attention, but none of them appeared shocked by the sight as I was. The professor had paused in his lecture and his eyes were fixed upon me. He had noticed my reaction. No one else seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary at all.
Later, when the class concluded, Professor Lefebvre asked me to stay. He asked me if I had enjoyed the lesson, found it informative. I said that I had, that it was very informative, yes. He seemed ready to let me leave, possibly thinking that he had mistaken my shock for disgust or merely shock at the exposed cadaver’s organs. I hesitated, but then I told him what I had observed. He smiled and asked me if I knew what it was, the thing, which he called a parasite, inside the body. I had to admit that I did not. He called it a skin-walker.
Mr. Warwick is possessed by a skin-walker.
When he confessed this to me, I demanded to know if he had killed my wife. I am ashamed to say it was the first thing that came into my mind upon knowing he was not human. Not the fate of the colony, not the fate of the world; my wife. He denies it and, despite myself, I believe him. He pointed out to me that he had no reason to kill Verity, it would have served him no purpose, and he seems to be a creature with a purpose, whatever else he may be.
He has a plan, he says, to stop the evil that is destroying the world. I do not know if he is only a charismatic beast and I have been fooled by it, or if he tells the truth, but I see no options before me. I believe him, and I go back to his home tomorrow to hear more of his plan.
The wyrm is real, I know that much now. It is rising, and it will tear the world apart as it ascends. We must stop it. I have joined forces with a murderous monster for the greater good because it must be stopped.
October 2, 1610
There was another earthquake yesterday. It was much worse than the one before. Thus far, three people are counted among the dead, one a child born this year. The church that young Mr. Elbert and I helped build is in ruins. The town may soon flood as the waters are rising and the ocean is dark and angry. It crashes as though the great monster from my dreams lies beneath it, thrashing in its chains to be free.
I hear its voice now in my brain the way Verity used to say she heard it. It is attractive to me, though I detest it. I recognize in myself what she felt in the last quake; a longing to do as it bids me.
If I possess any strength or courage at
all, I will refuse and oppose it until I die. Which, as it happens, may not be too far off if Mr. Warwick’s plan to stop it comes to nothing.
October 5, 1610
I can hardly believe the things Mr. Warwick has told me this day. It seems a clever ruse to convince me to end my own life, though if he wanted me dead, he has had many opportunities to end it himself. I do believe him, may it be my downfall.
Somewhere there is a lock on a door as old as time that keeps this great wyrm trapped and sleeping inside its eternal prison. Sometimes it wakes. When it wakes, it fights against the lock on its prison door. After many hundreds of years, the lock weakens. It is now on the verge of breaking. That can never be allowed to happen.
The blood is the key and the lock.
I can be the key or the lock.
This is what my Verity died for. Mr. Warwick has not said so, he is reluctant to mention my own personal pain. I understand; the emotional torment of others can be quite humiliating. I have surmised as much on my own. One of the great wyrm’s many servants came to my home and because I was not there, it killed my beloved wife.
No one need say it aloud. I know it. I feel it in my heart.
I have loved the world and I have loved being in it more than I can ever express on these pages. I do not want to die, but for this world I will, if that is what is asked of me. I feel privileged to have walked upon it as long as the Lord has allowed, and I am sorry to leave it so soon.
Tomorrow, Mr. Warwick will accompany me to the water’s edge. There I will become the lock.
This will be my final entry in this journal. To whomever discovers it after I am gone, I ask only that you do not burn it. While the things I have written these past months will read as blasphemous, I am sure, they are true. As they are true, they must be told, otherwise I fear that my sacrifices will have been for nothing. Though it might take two or three hundred years, it will happen again, I swear it.
Chapter 19
On Monday, less than a week after the first “light” quake, an earthquake in Europe caused parts of the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway, Spain, France and Italy to evacuate to areas inland. It was a much stronger earthquake than the little one Wyatt and Silas had sat through. It was classified as “major” with a magnitude of 7.2, which meant that there was footage on the news every night for the rest of the week of buildings collapsing and they were still finding bodies and taking count of the dead. Venice, because it was an impossible city which had been slowly sinking for hundreds of years, was particularly vulnerable to flooding and tides had risen to alarming levels so that buildings that never flooded in the average flood season were filling up with water. The quakes were causing tsunamis to hit coastal cities and islands, which were also evacuating in some of the more threatened areas.
Wyatt saw it on the news at night before he went to work and heard it on the radio at the diner early in the morning. Even the truckers who came in late at night talked about it. Scientists were being asked to explain the abnormal seismic activity, but they seemed at a loss. They tried to explain it, but they didn’t know what Wyatt knew, so they couldn’t. All they could do was hypothesize and predict, but they were missing a key piece of information, so their predictions were wrong, and they couldn’t explain that either.
It’s happening again, Wyatt thought. He thought it so often in the days after he finished reading John Bledsoe’s journal that he sometimes felt like he was talking to the man. It’s happening again, just like you said it would. What do I do?
Of course, the journal did not say what had happened to John Bledsoe because he wasn’t there to write about it afterward. The most obvious conclusion to draw based on his final journal entry was that he had died, a sacrifice in some way to keep the door locked and the serpent trapped for another four hundred years. Wyatt wasn’t ready to die, so he hoped that he was wrong, and that John Bledsoe had lived to a ripe old age, but he didn’t think so.
He hadn’t given the journal to Silas yet either. He couldn’t say exactly why he was reluctant to share it with him, but he was. Every day he walked over to the Blue Crane Dojo and trained with Silas and every day before he left Silas asked about the book. He tried to sound casual about it, like it wasn’t that important, but he wasn’t fooling Wyatt. There was something about that book that made Silas nervous. Wyatt came close a few times to asking him why, but he was nervous too. It was a book; what could be so bad about a book that would make Silas so anxious?
He had asked Wyatt once, after their first training lesson with the swords, if he had finished reading it. He had gotten that weird, careful look on his face again when Wyatt said that he had.
I have come to believe that there is something very wrong about Mr. Warwick…
Wyatt knew the feeling. He had begun to suspect there was something going on with Silas. Because he had a pretty vivid imagination, a new possible something occurred to him nearly every day because he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It bothered him like a sore on the roof of his mouth and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t stop poking it with his tongue. The more he poked at it, the more inflamed it became until even the craziest ideas didn’t seem out of the question.
So, just ask him, he told himself. It’s Silas, just ask him. He almost took his own advice a few times, but in the end, he chickened out.
He thought about giving him the journal, but he chickened out there too. There was always an excuse for why he didn’t bring it with him. He had forgotten it was the most popular one. He had used it at least half of the time when Silas asked, and he was always sorry, and Silas always said it was no big deal.
They were playing a weird game, Wyatt realized one evening as he was showering after getting his ass soundly kicked. Silas had asked him again about the book. The game was, Silas pretended that it didn’t matter very much, that journal, and Wyatt pretended to believe that it didn’t matter very much, just as Silas pretended to believe that he forgot the book at home every day. The truth was, it did matter, and Wyatt knew that it mattered, but he wanted to know why, and Silas clearly didn’t want to tell him. One of them was bound to crack eventually, Wyatt only hoped it wasn’t him and that it happened before Italy, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan or New Zealand fell into the sea.
Wyatt now worked the night shift five days a week. Becca had been happy to switch with him full-time because, she told him more than once while thanking him, she had a son and she wasn’t really a night person anyway. Before work, Wyatt went to the dojo and trained with Silas. He was getting stronger because of the wood sword and he was quicker on his feet, though it didn’t keep him from being knocked down at least ten times an hour with Silas training him. He was never going to be an expert swordsman or a master of Krav Maga, but he might live a little longer. That was something Silas liked to say, usually with a smirk on his face while gazing down at Wyatt lying flat on the mat.
One night a couple of weeks after he killed the shadow snake in his bedroom, Wyatt got up the nerve to call Tallie and tell her about Benson and Hedges. They had been her cats and she had left them with him when she moved out of the apartment because that was their home and they weren’t suited to being outside pets. He hadn’t wanted to tell her about them because it felt like he was confessing to her that he had failed to take care of them and keep them safe. He was afraid she was going to be disappointed in him.
“I’m sorry to hear that, sweetie. Are you okay?” Tallie asked when he had finished his rambling explanation of how they had died.
“I… Am I? I’m fine,” Wyatt said, surprised at how normal she sounded. “Aunt Tallie, did you hear what I said? They’re both dead. That thing killed them.”
“I heard you, dear, and I’m very sorry. They were sweet little things, weren’t they?” she said. “But they weren’t really mine. They were yours.”
“I…” Wyatt didn’t know what to say to that. It was true. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“I’m glad to hear that you’re all right, that�
�s all I want to know,” Tallie said. “You can always get another cat. A demon killed them though? How… exciting. I’ve never seen a demon—or maybe I have, and it looked like just another monster in the dark.”
“Thorn called it a demon,” Wyatt said.
“The monster who lives under your bed?” Tallie asked.
Wyatt felt a smile on his lips and said, “Yeah.”
They talked for half an hour and the conversation did make him feel better. It was new for him to have someone to talk to about the strange things in his life who wouldn’t dismiss it all as nonsense. Now, he had two of them.
“Aunt Tallie, can I ask you something?” Wyatt asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“It’s about the serpent. I know you won’t know—I don’t think anyone can really know for sure—but I wanted to know what you think,” Wyatt said. “I keep hearing that the serpent is asleep. That it’s stirring or something. That seems to be everyone’s opinion. Everyone who knows enough to have an opinion. I don’t understand how it can be sleeping when I’m having these dreams about it. Dreams that don’t feel like dreams most of the time.”
She made a thoughtful “Hmm” sound. Then she said, “Maybe you’re not dreaming. Maybe it is dreaming about you, ever think of that?”
“No,” Wyatt said. And he didn’t see how it helped or made any difference one way or another.
Just before they hung up, Tallie said, “Wyatt, be careful of that man, Silas. He isn’t what he seems.”
“He said you knew each other when I was a kid,” Wyatt said. “I kinda got the impression you were together for a while.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” Tallie said. “Now, I have to go. I’ll talk to you again soon. Kiss, kiss and all that.”
The first week of training with Silas was the hardest. Wyatt was weak and out of shape, slow and unmotivated to learn. He showed up to work with a black eye and a welt across his cheek and Jimmy whistled through his teeth and shook his head. Jimmy was missing one of his front teeth, so the whistle came out airy, but it conveyed his dismay at the sight of Wyatt’s bruises all the same