“Wazwrongwiyou?!”
“I have an asshole brother,” came the flat response.
“You’d starve without me!”
Sarn had already disappeared around the door facing, but his hand came back into view, middle finger extended. “I salute you.”
Garret grabbed his dishes and took them to the sink. I’ll get him back for that. I have all day to think of something. Little brothers do NOT one up big brothers.
Sarn wasn’t in their bedroom when Garret reentered it to finish dressing.
“You know, I might just settle for beating you up a little bit,” he muttered, assuming Sarn was hiding in the closet or under one of the beds. Garret pulled a pair of pants out of the dresser and pulled them on.
“Enjoy it while you can, skinny,” came the reply from elsewhere in the house. “I’m gonna be a lot bigger than you, and I’m keeping score.”
Garret fumed and snapped his suspenders into place. He sneaked quietly to the front door, keeping an eye around corners for a blonde head to grab. But his brother, who was infinitely practical, had vanished.
At the front door, Garret grabbed his boots and cap. “Think about it today. When I get home, I’m going to do the worst thing to you that you can imagine. Think about it alllll day.”
“Oh no,” came the flat reply from somewhere else. “You wouldn’t kiss me. Say it ain’t so.”
Garret jammed one foot into a boot, then the other. It felt like he’d jammed his foot into pudding. It wasn’t pudding of course, but the slimy mouthful of cobbler he’d been chewing earlier.
“Aaaaaaargh!” Garret stomped into the kitchen as Sarn went out the back door. Garret was right behind him.
“Brother, you’re going to be late to the shop!” Sarn said over his shoulder. Then he ran for everything he was worth.
* * *
Garret had sauntered halfway to town before the sun broke over the horizon, lightening the cold greyness in the trees. He meandered down the rutted road, hands in his pockets, feeling pretty good about the morning so far. Sarn wasn’t quite as fast as he thought he was, and Garret had brought him down by the apple tree. Garret sighed wistfully; there had been so many rotten apples on the ground, and so little time. Sarn wouldn’t have time to wash because he was going to be late to the mill as well, so the stinking skoosh of rotten apple would be in Sarn’s hair for the rest of the day. Yes, Sarn had smeared some down Garret’s back too, but great victory always required some sacrifice.
A whiff of something even more disgusting caught Garret’s nose. Wrinkling his nose, he meandered to the edge of the road and surveyed for a dead carcass. There it lay, a little further on and a few yards deeper into the forest. It was a deer, or what was left of one.
Dead animals were a common enough sight in a farming community, but this one brought Garret to a stop. It had been a large buck, deep of chest and broad of shoulder, with a spreading rack of fourteen points. The wilderness around him was still ruled by bears and cougars, and they left carcasses behind, but this was a mess like Garret hadn’t seen before.
Garret was already late and his Pa would chastise him for it, but he swung off the road anyway. Flies buzzed over the carcass. Garret frowned and sniffed. The carcass wasn’t more than a day or so old. Garret sat on his haunches and stared at the mess. Like most teenage boys, he had a fascination with disgusting things, but he didn’t know what to make of the mess in front of him.
The deer had been disemboweled. Bears often ate that way, but there didn’t seem to be much missing. Its intestines had been strung out full length, the other organs ripped loose and slung aside. The buck’s chest had also been ripped open and emptied, but in a methodical fashion. Intrigued and a bit sick at his stomach, Garret inventoried the organs spread through the leaves. He’d gutted enough deer in his day to know what was supposed to be there.
Garret scratched his head. The bear had eaten nothing. No, wait. Garret stood and looked around. The heart. The deer’s heart was missing. He turned, surveying the sticky mess. He frowned. The gooey guts looked like they’d been arranged. The intestines had been laid out in a smooth curve, circumscribing the deer’s body as if framing it. The other organs appeared random at first, but as Garret stared, he got a vague inkling of a pattern.
Garret stared, trying to make heads or tails of it. A cold wind kicked up, raking its fingers through the leaves. This wasn’t fun anymore. It was making him feel uncomfortable. Unclean. It tickled his memory, stirring something he did not want stirred.
“Huh. Weird.” Garret shrugged, hopped back onto the road and whistled his way to town. Within ten steps, he’d put it behind him and was hoping he would get to see Molly at lunch.
Germany, 1589
A mouse darted from the cover of one leaf to another and wiggled away under the forest litter, headed for a warm hole. The youngblood wolf smelled the eddies from its passing, heard its tail whisper against a leaf, but he didn’t bother with the mouse. The night was starless and moonless, a thick sky that felt close and watchful of the trees and the living things beneath them. The youngblood wolf huffed the mouse smell out of his nose and continued his prowl.
This was one of the rare nights when he wasn’t hungry, so one meaty mouthful wasn’t worth a sidetrack from an interesting trail. The younger members of the pack were with the youngblood, spread through the nearby woods. The pack had devoured a buck not long since, and a full stomach was a happy stomach, so youthful wolf curiosity could be in charge for a while. For the youngblood, at least. The senior pack members had returned to the den to sleep off their full stomachs.
The youngblood had been born barely three Time of White Ground’s past. He’d left his mother’s den under a high sun when the leaves had just began to drift and crinkle under one’s paws, and from the first moment he saw the sun and heard a brook splash, he was driven to explore, to smell and hear, and to run.
So he prowled his low-to-the-ground world, and it wrapped him in sound and scent until even his own hot pungency became a moving part of the richness of earth. He was one with the leaves decaying into soil, and the roots weaving over it, and the wriggling things and crawling things burrowing through it.
The youngblood caught another scent. He halted in his tracks. He inhaled it again, cringed, shrank to his haunches. He looked around, craning his ears for his pack. They were still close, but towards the sun’s night home. He was alone with the scent.
The deadwalker had returned to the forest. The youngblood had never seen the deadwalker, nor been close enough to hear it, but this was the sixth time he had smelled where it had passed. The rankness of the deadwalker’s steps clung to the ground in an olfactory film that made him sneeze.
The deadwalker’s smell wasn’t right. It was different, but not in the interesting ways normal forest scents differed from each other. The deadwalker’s scent differed in the way that playing differed from fighting. Unlike the smells of pine bark and green leaves and water, the deadwalker’s scent did not tickle his mind with half-told tales of life. It did not have the sweet under-fragrance shared by all living things.
The deadwalker’s scent moved aright, as if the scent itself was aware of youngblood, as if it was a hunter, wanting to rake youngblood’s nose, wanting to tease or threaten him. Its wrongness wasn’t simply “danger,” or the smell of something that could kill, but the smell of something that itself was dead, but kept walking, and grew stronger because of it.
Every warm walker, be they mice or wolves, had to meet death, but youngblood did not feel death was a thing to be afraid of. It was the next trail to follow, one that all wolves walked when their time came, after they had searched out all of the earth-smells that their hearts desired. Then the moon called them onward, and they met death in peace.
But not like this. Not like the deadwalker. The youngblood had smelled the death of his mother and two cousins, and their deaths were peaceful, in the end. They were not slippery, stinking, or walking.
The youngblood t
ilted his head this way and that. Normally, he would howl to draw the pack to himself, but the deadwalker’s scent kept him quiet. If he howled, he was afraid the scent would know. Should he cross the deadwalker’s trail and continue on his own path? Perhaps he should, and quickly. The youngblood never knew where his path would lead each night, but he trusted it. All wolves trusted the moon above and the earth below to lead them where they should go.
He flitted across the deadwalker’s trail, but as he did, he unintentionally placed a foot where the deadwalker had stepped. His paw went cold. The youngblood was a wolf, and wolves sometimes know things which are to come.
The youngblood began to run, hoping to flee the feeling which had pounced on him, but it did not fade with distance. If anything, it grew stronger. He did not know where his path would lead, but as surely as he felt the wind in his fur, he also felt himself being drawn into the deadwalker’s circle. He was connected to its path. Panting, youngblood halted and sniffed for traces of his family. A whine escaped his lips. He knew now that he would face the monster, and he knew he would do it alone.
Chapter 6
The Appalachian Mountains, November 1912
Garret’s morning passed with the swift, warm efficiency known only to those who are fortunate enough to work with their hands. The fog burned off early, leaving a clear fall day to bring the sounds of the street into the shop: hooves thumping in the mud and wagon axles rattling by, the properly enunciated speech of the town’s women on the boardwalk. From further up in the hills came the yells of log skid drivers cursing their mule teams.
Starting from the center of the glowing weld, Garret walked his hammer blows out both ways, squeezing the liquid flux out from between the broken halves of the fence stave as he pounded them back together. Holding it with a heavy set of tongs, he sighted down the length, then applied three more strategic blows to straighten it.
The shop door opened, pouring light between his and Pa’s anvil stands. Father Bendetti entered and swung the door closed behind himself. Garret quenched the stave in a water trough designed for longer items, and tossed the mended iron rod on the work table.
“Mornin’ Father,” he drawled, since Pa was pulling on the forge bellows, swelling the fire to brighter excitement. Garret leaned on his anvil, hammer still in hand. “How’s Joseph doin’?”
“He’s doing quite well, thank you for asking,” Bendetti replied.
Garret liked Father Bendetti. The older man was always gracious, though he seemed to billow around in his robes as if he wasn’t touching the ground. He also had an odd way of wiggling his fingers at people when he was talking to them, as if he was dusting them with holiness or something else equally boring. But Garret liked him.
“Joseph was studying when I left this morning,” Bendetti continued, “And he mentioned needing to talk to you about something he had discovered.” Bendetti raised his eyebrows and nodded conspiratorially. Garret didn’t know what he was talking about, but it looked funny, so he raised his eyebrows and bobbed his head the same way.
The door flew open again, this time rebounding off the wall. “Mr. Garrett!” It was Cletus Ormsby, the local do-nothing. He had a fat, annoyed looking blacksnake wrapped around his arms. The snake probably would have gone six feet if stretched out. Which it undoubtedly had been when Cletus snatched it out of whatever warm place it had found to lay. He also always referred to Pa by his first name. Due to the fact that Pa was taller and stronger than Garret, his name also had an extra ‘t’ on the end.
“The spawn of Satan,” Bendetti muttered.
“That’s a nice looking black snake,” Pa said. “Where did you find him?”
Garret turned a flat expression on his Pa. You know damn well where he—
“Do you like him?” Cletus asked, excited.
Pa nodded with maddening patience. Pa, Garrett Vilner Sr., was tall and distinguished, with handsome features and silvering hair. Everybody loved Pa, including Garret, of course, but Pa was nice enough to get on Garret’s nerves. Pa knew exactly where Cletus had gotten the snake. He’d dragged it out from under their shop, again, and if he didn’t stop pestering the thing it was liable to leave and they’d be overrun with mice inside of a week.
Cletus was grinning ear to ear. “I thought I’d take ‘em out for some air and I thought you’d want to see him again. So I—”
Pa nodded sagely, smiling like a saint.
Garret hissed through his nose. If Pa fancied having the workbench, the anvil, and every other flat surface in sight covered with mouse shit, and every piece of cloth in the place chewed to ribbons (admittedly there wasn’t much cloth in a blacksmith shop, but it was the principle of the thing), then Garret was going to say something. But Mr. Orem, the hairy grocer from next door, beat him to it.
Orem’s big fuzzy form filled the doorway. “Is that my blacksnake?”
Cletus wilted. “He’s not just your snake, Mr. Orem. Mr. Garrett’s got rights to ‘im too.”
Orem was wiping his hands on his apron. It was hard to tell whether his hands were dirtying the apron or vice versa. The man was always filthy. Grime seemed to leach out of his pores.
“I’ve told you, he keeps the mice outta my dry goods,” Orem grated.
Cletus started to whine an excuse, but Pa stepped in with hands raised and “peacemaker” written all over his face. Garret grunted and turned back to the priest.
“Sorry Father, what can I help you with?”
Bendetti tried to turn to face him, but didn’t want to turn his back on the snake so he ended up standing catty-corner to Garret’s anvil as if talking to a third person who wasn’t there.
Garret leaned on his hammer and pursed his lips to keep from smiling. “Yes,” Bendetti said. “The vestibule doors. The hinges are in need of replacement.”
“You can eat them you know!” The round voice of Mr. Fix the barber boomed through the open doorway, followed by the big man himself. “Good backstraps on ‘em,” Fix said from behind his walrus moustache. “Skin ‘em out right there.” He ran a thick finger down the snake’s spine. Garret sighed. This is our shop, not Town Hall.
Mr. Fix’s pinstriped shirt and bow tie were as loud as he was, and when his eyes moved from the snake to the person holding it, he broke out in a rolling laugh. “How’d you find it, Cletus,” Fix boomed in the small shop, rattling the tools on the tables. Garret’s head was starting to ring.
Cletus hesitated. “Well I just found it under the boardwalk.”
“The vestibule doors?” Garret prompted the priest. Bendetti opened his mouth, but Fix drowned him out.
“How many times did you fall down, Cletus?” Fix was grinning ear to ear under his bushy moustache.
Cletus flushed red as a beet. “It ain’t like that, Mr. Fix!”
“Sure it ain’t. I hear Mrs. Calvert’s started carrying a two pound hammer head in her purse.”
Without thinking, Cletus rubbed the back of his head. Garret didn’t need to see the knot to know it was there. Only one thing could overcome Bendetti’s fear of snakes—his fear for the soul of one of his flock—so he stepped forward. “Mr. Fix, I don’t follow your meaning.”
Mr. Fix’s grin widened. “Well, young mister Cletus isn’t married you see, and every time he trips and falls, it seems to be right next to the hem of a lady’s skirt…”
Cletus butted in, gesturing with the snake as if it was a document to prove his innocence.
“It ain’t my fault Mrs. Calvert don’t wear no underwear.”
Fix and Orem laughed. Bendetti, who had smashed himself against the wall to stay away from the snake, was edging towards the door. As he squeezed around the facing, he shot a stern look at Cletus. “I’ll see you at confession, son.”
The snake stuck out its tongue to say goodbye.
“Now Cletus,” Pa intervened, saintly graciousness on his face. “Do you think it was the best thing for you to do? Think about the way it made Mrs. Calvert feel.”
Garret rolled his eyes
. Fix roared with laughter. Orem lumbered out of the shop shaking his head. Cletus rubbed his knot.
* * *
“I’ll be back in an hour,” Pa said, pulling the door behind him. He was headed to the Red Stallion for lunch. It was the only time of day when he walked with a bounce in his step. Garret watched his Pa go, and he felt sad for him, but only for a moment. With Pa gone, he could work on Molly’s present for a while.
Garret skirted the work table and the coal bin to get to the back of the shop. There, by the round stock in the corner, was the shelving Pa never bothered to use. Garret felt around atop it until he found the gift. It was small, just over a foot long. He rarely had the opportunity to work with delicate detail. It was taking forever, and he was enjoying every second of it. Garret turned the gift in his fingers, checking for any flaws. He found none. To his eye, every detail was perfect, but his smile fell. It wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. He so wanted Molly to like it, but it was just a piece of iron. As he held it, he became unsure of himself, which began to sink towards the old depression.
After returning it to the shelf, he stepped out of the shop for a little sun. The warmth felt good, and after a minute of soaking it up, it uplifted him. Across the dirt street, Mrs. Kyle was walking quickly away from her husband. Her nose was in the air, and his face was red with anger and embarrassment. Unintentionally, Garret stared. Such a blatant display of marital strife was well beyond taboo. It was like watching somebody strip naked in the middle of Main Street. If this was the first time Garret had seen this in years, it would have been odd enough, but he’d seen something like this around town three times in as many days. It made him wonder where his Ma was at the moment. He frowned at the dirt and became angry in a flash, but it was directed more at his push-over father than at his unfaithful mother.
Mrs. Kyle swept regally around the corner. Mr. Kyle crossed the road, head down, and entered the Red Stallion. Garret stared after him, curious. A few drinks would loosen Mr. Kyle’s tongue. When Pa got back from lunch, Garret would pry a little bit and see what Mr. Kyle had said. Garret sat on the edge of the boardwalk and closed his eyes, letting the warm sun and cool breeze take turns on his face.
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