Arcadia Falls

by Kai Meyer

  For several long seconds, everyone was dazzled.

  RUINS

  THE HUNGRY MAN THREW back his head. Not even the noise from the helicopter could drown the wolf’s howl that came from his throat.

  The Arcadians scattered to escape the pitiless light. A cameraman sat in the open side door of the helicopter, taking pictures of the crowd. The chopper was hovering only a few yards away from the parapet, a little way above the road. The searchlights were attached to the fuselage of the helicopter, a whole battery of high-performance lamps flooding the asphalt with light over a large area.

  This far out on the dam, there was nowhere to hide. Only the van in which Rosa and Alessandro had been transported offered any protection from the eyes of the cameras. A handful of men and women hurried toward it, many with their arms raised to their faces in a helpless attempt not to be recognized. By midday tomorrow at the latest, these pictures and their names would be on YouTube for anyone to see.

  An army unit couldn’t have spread such panic among them. Arrests were made every day, and highly paid attorneys had their clients freed pending trial within a few hours. Once, TV reports had been as fleeting as those arrests, but now they ran on the internet for all eternity. Live pictures exposed even the most powerful, destroying their reputations. It wasn’t the prospect of arrest that deterred a capo—the warrant was hardly worth the paper it was written on—but no other Mafioso would ever work with someone who let himself be filmed at secret meetings.

  This evening, however, far more was at stake. Fundling had undertaken to reveal something more sensational than the criminal machinations of wealthy businessmen. The cameramen and journalists would have been satisfied with that alone; what they now saw, however, must have far exceeded their expectations.

  When the Hungry Man let out his howl, and the first Arcadians fled to the van, Danai and the Arachnida were in the beam of the searchlights. As their capo told her to keep calm, the stormy wind of the rotor blades blew under her wide-skirted dress. Its hem rose in the air, and the telephoto lens zoomed in on something more spectacular than criminals in flight from bad publicity.

  The hybrid’s insect legs shimmered in the searchlights, segmented monstrosities roused from their rigidity to frantic life. Danai scurried left, scurried right, but the camera followed her. The hybrid howled, not as much of an animal howl as the Hungry Man’s, but the desperate weeping of a young woman who saw no way out of her predicament. She tried in panic to smooth the skirt down over her scorpion legs with her slender white hands, but the wind kept lifting it again.

  The men guarding Rosa and Alessandro were not sure how to deal with the new situation. The Hungry Man was about to throw himself on Fundling and was taking no notice of his prisoners. The guards, however, were capi like everyone else here, and neither of them was ready to run any risks. They hesitated, exchanging glances. And Alessandro acted.

  Moving with the speed of a cat, he rammed one of them in the larynx with his elbow. A shot rang out as the Mafioso collapsed, but it missed its mark. Alessandro hammered his bound fists into the man’s side. His second guard came storming up from behind, as well as one of the two who had been guarding Rosa. Alessandro raced for the parapet, as if he were going to swing himself over it. His real goal, however, was to distract the men from Rosa.

  Her last guard swung his pistol around to aim at Alessandro. That gave her a chance to hit him on the nape of his neck with her bound hands. The blow made him stumble forward, groaning. One of his legs gave way as if he were about to curtsey, and Rosa used the moment to kick him as hard as she could right between the shoulder blades. He slumped to the ground, tried to turn over, but she was there with him, stamping her heels down on his wrist with all her might. This time his bones broke and the gun skittered away from him. Rosa leaped out of his reach, grabbed the pistol, and aimed it, in one swift movement, at one of the two men trying to seize Alessandro.

  Her bullet hit the man’s shoulder, flung him against the parapet, and set off his metamorphosis at the same time. He must have been related to Alessandro, for in the next moment he was a lion, stumbling because of his injury, getting entangled in the remains of his clothes, and hesitating just a split second too long. Rosa’s second shot killed him.

  Her other guard was also about to draw his gun, but Alessandro leaped at him as if he were in panther and not human form, flinging him against the rail of the parapet with all his weight. The man’s eyes widened as he saw his fate coming, then he tipped over the rail and backward at an almost leisurely pace. As he fell, he became something else, but Rosa saw only his human outline dissolving as he disappeared over the edge.

  Alessandro ran to her, past his fellow Panthera, who was now a human corpse lying on the asphalt. There was utter chaos all around them.

  Danai was still running around frantically, but she could not elude the light and the camera lens; both followed her pitilessly. The other Arachnida had hurried to the parapet, and now Rosa realized what they were planning to do.

  While the cameraman in the helicopter concentrated on Danai, all four became gigantic spiders. Scraps of fabric stretched between their long legs and tore as they started moving. Some were hairy while others had smooth, armored bodies. Even in animal form the old man was gray and dry—a huge daddy longlegs.

  The four came racing toward Rosa and Alessandro, but they didn’t attack. Instead, they stalked past them and climbed over the rail of the parapet with the spindly movements of large stick puppets. Rosa went to the parapet, both repelled and fascinated, and saw the Arachnida find footholds on the steep concrete wall below. They let themselves run nimbly down the old dam to the depths.

  Danai screamed again, furious and deeply insulted to be left behind by her new family. She, too, stormed past Rosa and Alessandro on her scorpion limbs, climbed clumsily over the wire netting between the struts, and felt with her front pairs of legs for irregularities in the concrete. Blind with panic and her injured feelings, she decided to risk it. She hauled herself over the parapet to follow her brothers and sisters.

  Rosa held her breath as she watched, and for a few seconds it really did look as if Danai could make it. But then her legs lost contact with the wall, a screeching wail came from her lips, and she fell and hit the ground somewhere in the dark.

  While all this was going on, Fundling had retreated. The convoy of press vehicles was approaching fast behind him. The Hungry Man looked from him to his own followers in flight, and the few of them who had stayed at his side. He still had not drawn his gun, probably knowing what would happen if the capo dei capi, so recently released from prison, was seen with a pistol in his hand on TV news. Not even his allies in Rome would be able to save him again.

  At the same time, it must be clear to him that his plan had failed. Once again he turned his attention to Fundling. From under his coat he took the knife with which Rosa had been supposed to kill Alessandro.

  Suddenly there was a small revolver in Fundling’s hand. He must have had it on him the whole time. He aimed at the Hungry Man, who howled with rage again, stood there undecided for a moment, and then abruptly swung around.

  He saw Rosa and Alessandro coming from his right. To his left, the cameraman was hovering toward him over the dam.

  Then there was no human being standing there, but a black and silver wolf instead. With two or three bounds, the creature raced toward the parapet and the helicopter. If the cameraman saw what was sweeping toward him, over the parapet rail and the abyss below, and straight through the open door in the side of the chopper, he had no time to react.

  Rosa, Alessandro, Fundling, and the remaining Arcadians saw the gigantic wolf come down on the cameraman, fling him inside the helicopter, and fall on him. The man screeched as the wolf’s jaws bit down, and Rosa saw his legs kick out and then go limp. At the same time, the helicopter flew in a narrow curve and went into a spin.

  The chopper turned on its own axis above the road, tipped to one side, righted itself, and narrowly
missed the opposite parapet. In the glare of several flashlights and car headlights, it tipped again, its rotor almost passing over the concrete, and went on circling around itself.

  Rosa and Alessandro, running to the parapet, saw the helicopter rotate and then sink toward the valley floor and the ruins of Giuliana.

  Fundling limped up on his crutches, propped himself on the railing beside them, and cut through the cord binding Rosa’s hands with the knife. She pressed a kiss on his stubbly cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said, knowing it was far too weak an expression for all that she felt. Then she took the blade from him and freed Alessandro.

  The helicopter was still whirring through the night like an intoxicated insect, falling to the rocky ground and the abandoned houses. Many reporters and cameramen were leaning over the parapet rail, some way from the three of them, while the last Arcadians took the opportunity to get away.

  Alessandro didn’t wait for the impact. He bent down to pick up a gun that had belonged to one of their guards, and put it in the waistband of his jeans. He thanked Fundling with a firm hug, grabbed Rosa’s hand, and then the two of them ran.

  All the cameras were trained on the inevitable crash down below as they sprinted past the van and reached the square concrete structure at the side of the road. Graffiti had been sprayed clumsily across a metal door and the gray wall.

  It didn’t surprise Rosa to find that the entrance to the path down the dam showed signs of chiseling—the Hungry Man’s followers would have checked the inside of this concrete block before the assembly began.

  They hastily slipped in. When Alessandro touched a switch, neon tubes flickered on under the ceiling and lit up an ash-gray stairwell. Rosa slammed the door and wedged the knife under it.

  Before they started down the stairs, she drew him to her and looked into his eyes. “You may now kiss the bride.”

  His lips were firm and dry. She would never have enough of them.

  Outside, there was the sound of a muffled crash. At the same time, the sound of the rotor died away.

  LYCAON

  THE STAIRWELL HAD NO windows, and went on and on. Occasionally, they passed doors to the interior of the structure, but Rosa and Alessandro raced on down without stopping to open any of them. They were breathing faster, and their joints hurt from all the times they had jumped down several steps at once. Rosa had lost all sense of time. The structure of the dam, if it had been a building, would have been about fifty floors high, but the levels were not numbered. After every bend in the stairs came the next, and then another and yet another.

  After an eternity they reached the bottom, dizzy and drained of strength. They both had to lean against the wall until the ground under them seemed to have stopped swaying, and they could go on without finding that their feet were searching for the next stair after every step they took.

  At the bottom there was only one door, a rectangular one with a metal wheel in the middle of it. Beyond lay an airlock with another steel door at the end of it. The wheel on this one stuck, but between them they managed to move it; the absence of water pressure must have set off its automatic lock days ago. With a grinding sound, the steel door could be pushed open.

  Before them lay a concrete platform half covered with sand and pebbles. Beyond it they saw the bed of the former lake formed by the dam.

  They walked out into the darkness. The moon was behind them on the far side of the dam, and a broad strip at the foot of the high concrete wall lay in deep shadow. They would have had to search, half-blind, for the ruins of the village if it hadn’t been for the burning helicopter. The outlines of the houses stood out in front of the blazing fire.

  More than fifteen minutes had passed since their last injection, but both stayed in human form. Alessandro handed Rosa the pistol. “In case I have to shift shape in a hurry,” he said.

  She had an objection on the tip of her tongue, but then she took the gun in silence and carried it the rest of the way. Together, they left the platform and set off toward the flames. It was still unclear whether the helicopter had come down in the middle of the village or beyond it.

  Once she looked up at the titanic dam wall. The structure seemed to loom over her. Only an optical illusion, but it made her feel more uneasy than ever, and gave her a sense of something staring at her out of the darkness, invisible in deep shadow. Maybe it was the wall itself, a new monument to the first and genuine Hungry Man.

  It wasn’t far to the village. The part of it that had been too close to the dam and was in the way of the construction had been demolished, but fifteen or twenty houses were still standing. There were no boundaries left between the plots of land, and the roads, too, had disappeared under a layer of dried silt. The mud came up to the lower windows on many facades, like black snowdrifts.

  A derelict agricultural machine stood between two ruined houses, a hunched silhouette. Rosa walked faster to leave the large, rusty thing behind. She felt as if the searchlights might come on again at any moment to catch them in their pale beams.

  The helicopter had crashed into one of the farmhouses on the way out of the village. It was burning fiercely, but the explosion hadn’t been strong enough to bring the last remains of the ruined walls down. The cockpit was in flames; parts of the shattered rotors were scattered around in a circle. There was nothing to be done for the pilot and the cameraman; their bodies were burning in the blaze inside the steel skeleton.

  How long before a rescue team arrived? It would take at least an hour to drive here from the nearest hospital, along the winding mountain roads. Even a paramedic in a helicopter would take some time getting to this remote region.

  She was watching the flames from a safe distance when Alessandro stiffened, bending slightly forward, eyes narrowed, nose raised.

  “He’s not in there anymore,” he said grimly.

  Narrowing her own eyes, Rosa looked at the wreck. “How can you see?”

  “I can’t, but I can smell him.”

  She shivered in spite of the heat. All she noticed was burning fuel and melting plastic.

  She raised the pistol and looked around. “Which way?”

  He waited a moment, picking up the scent, and then pointed past the flames. “Over there. He’s bleeding.”

  When he cast her an inquiring glance, she nodded. He quickly stripped off his shirt and jeans. Black panther fur meandered over his body, enclosing his limbs even as their shape changed, and he dropped to the ground on all fours. When he set off, his movements were elegant and fluid, and his silky coat shone in the firelight.

  She stayed human in order to keep the pistol with them. It was really high time for her to trust her own abilities more, but all the same there was something reassuring about the weight of the weapon. If necessary she could still shift to her snake form quickly.

  As she went along she picked up the discarded clothes and took them with her. Alessandro, in panther form, ran ahead, but not too fast for her to stay close to him. In that way they skirted the burning wreck, keeping a good distance from it, and left the ghost village in the direction of the mountain slopes.

  They had not gone far, less than a hundred yards, when the panther stopped. He turned to her and nudged her with his nose. It was a signal that she should wait here.

  “Forget it,” she said, and walked firmly on again. She almost thought she heard him sigh as he caught up with her and then went on ahead again. The firelight hardly reached as far as this, but they had left the shadows of the dam wall behind and were now in the silver light of the moon.

  The huge wolf lay on his side in a hollow. Smoke still rose from the places where his fur had burned, one flank and his back. His tail was charred and lay between his hind legs. Splintered bone stuck out of an open break on one forepaw. Blood was running from his muzzle, gleaming as it trickled into the dark dust. He was dying and probably knew that as well as they did.

  Rosa stopped three yards from him, raising the pistol. Alessandro prowled around him, getti
ng a hoarse rattle from the wolf’s throat by way of response, and returned to Rosa’s side. He sat there motionless and watched the wolf on the ground.

  “Now what?” she asked quietly.

  The panther still did not move, only sat there like a statue. Was he waiting for her to make a decision? She couldn’t bring herself to fire the pistol, not while the Hungry Man lay in front of her in the shape of a helpless animal.

  Perhaps he guessed that as a wolf he aroused her pity, and that was why he didn’t change back. Or perhaps he was simply too weak.

  “I can’t do it,” she whispered to Alessandro, while they watched the singed flank of the wolf rising and falling. She might have said: I don’t want to do it. But that wasn’t exactly right. She couldn’t believe that she was feeling sorry for him, of all people. Fuck.

  Up on the dam wall, there was a movement in the ranks of the journalists. They had been standing in rows beside the parapet, a chain of lights along its rail. Now Rosa saw a pair of car headlights making its way down the mountain, probably along the old road that used to lead to Giuliana.

  “Do you think there are any more of them around?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the wolf or lowering the pistol. She still felt as if she were being observed.

  The panther sketched a movement that might have been a shake of his head.

  She herself didn’t seriously think that any more Arcadians were close to them. Many had probably escaped from the scene in their cars, others on foot. They had a long walk ahead of them, whether in human or animal form. The first to get away were probably already planning their exile abroad.

  The wolf raised his head and tried to look at them. A fresh surge of blood flowed out of his huge jaws, which were stained dark red. Then his head slumped back on the ground.

  The headlights were coming closer. Other cars were beginning to move up on the dam wall, but it would be some time before they, too, arrived. Rosa could guess who was driving the car that was just now reaching the valley floor.