by J L Aarne
“We just want to come inside,” the girl said.
“Please let us come inside,” the boy said.
“No,” Wyatt said.
He started to close the door, but Silas’s truck pulled into the parking lot in front of the building and he paused with the door half closed.
The kids continued to stare at Wyatt creepily for a minute, but when they realized he wasn’t paying attention to them anymore, they turned in unison to see what had distracted him. They stood on Wyatt’s stoop and watched Silas and Amarok emerge from the truck. They didn’t show any fear or alarm; the most Wyatt could credit them with was mild curiosity.
Silas reached back into the truck and brought out his sword, which he turned in one hand to adjust his grip as he stepped up onto the curb. Amarok lowered his head and growled as he walked beside Silas up the walkway toward Wyatt’s front door.
The children watched them approach and cocked their heads.
“You should go now,” Wyatt told them.
The boy looked at him over his shoulder. “But we need to come inside,” he said. “We can’t leave. We have to call our mom.”
Wyatt watched Silas pick up his pace and, in his mind, he counted to three. “Okay, have it your way,” he said.
Silas reached the steps, took all three of them in one jump and brought the sword down on the black-eyed boy’s neck. Wyatt ducked back behind the door and watched through a little crack in it to keep from being soaked in blood and spats of monster kid flesh. The boy’s head didn’t just fall of his body, it leapt off his neck, hit the side of the building and bounced into the grass beneath the kitchen window.
The girl’s eyes widened and she stared at the body of her companion, shocked. She didn’t flinch, she wasn’t afraid of the blood, her reaction was one of amazement. It was like she had never seen one of her own kind die before. Like she had never witnessed a human fight back so violently. The boy’s blood sprayed back onto her from his severed arteries and she just blinked and turned her attention away from him as his body collapsed beside her.
Maybe she hadn’t seen anything like it before. Silas had said the sword was special.
Please don’t let there be any neighbors watching, Wyatt prayed.
Amarok lunged at the girl and something finally clicked; some instinct for survival switched into the on position. She turned and ran. She jumped off the side of the stoop and ran through the grass toward the eastern side of the parking lot, her braided pigtails flying behind her.
She was heading for the road, but she was never going to make it.
Amarok moved faster than almost anything Wyatt had ever seen. The girl was pretty quick for something with the short legs of a five-year-old, but Amarok was faster. She screamed as the big black wolf jumped on her back and took her to the ground and Wyatt felt cold and sick all over. Not because she wore the mask of a little girl so well and he thought for a moment the huge wolf was killing a child; she did not scream wordlessly.
She screamed to be let inside. She screamed that she needed to call her mother. She screamed that she was lost and cold and afraid.
The wolf ripped her throat out.
“Oh, my god,” Wyatt said.
Silas wiped the blood off the blade of his sword, watching Amarok make short work of the black-eyed girl. “What?”
“Silas, someone’s going to hear her,” Wyatt said. “Someone is going to hear that. This. They’re… There’s a dead boy on my porch and a dead girl on my lawn, how the hell are we going to explain that? I mean in a way that doesn’t get us lethal injection?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Silas said.
“I am worried about it,” Wyatt said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Silas said. He glanced up at Wyatt, noted his complete lack of clothing and raised an eyebrow. “You usually answer the door in the middle of the night like that?”
Wyatt looked down at himself, felt his face flush, but told himself that he didn’t care. He did not care that he was naked in front of Silas. Or that he might still have a little parfait around his mouth and smeared on his chin.
“How are you going to take care of it? What does that even mean?” he demanded.
Silas gestured toward where Amarok was standing over the body of the girl, tearing one of her arms off. He was eating her. “He’s taking care of that one right now.”
“But… But what about the other one?” Wyatt said faintly. “You’re not going to eat it, are you?”
“Are you kidding?” Silas asked. “Of course not. I’d just get sick. Amarok though, he’s got the stomach of a shark.”
As if to drive this point home, Amarok finished eating the girl’s arm, bones and all, and started on her torso. The horrible cracking sounds of bones breaking reached Wyatt and a wave of nausea rolled over him.
“But what if someone—?”
“No one is going to see it. No one will know,” Silas said. He pointed back into the apartment. “Go inside and go to bed. We’ll clean it up.”
Wyatt started to close the door but paused and opened it again when he remembered that he still wanted to know what the black-eyed kids had wanted. “Silas? Are you going to tell me what happens? You know, if I had let them inside, what would have happened?”
“I don’t know,” Silas said.
“Well when are you going to know?” Wyatt asked. “Because you storm into my life telling me all these things, but never really telling me everything. Never really answering all my questions. Never—”
“I don’t know what would have happened,” Silas said. “I don’t know what happens. The people are never seen again, and the black-eyed people aren’t talking. Well, they talk, but they don’t say much.”
“That’s… unsettling,” Wyatt said.
“Yeah. Look, go put your pants on and go to bed,” Silas said. “We can talk about it tomorrow if you still want to.”
“I think we should,” Wyatt said.
“It’s probably time we did,” Silas agreed.
He went to retrieve the dead boy’s head and when he returned he leaned down to put it back where it should have been attached to the neck. Then he sat down beside the corpse and lit a cigarette while he watched Amarok eat.
“Go to bed, Wyatt,” he said. “You’re drunk, I can smell it. It’s not the right time for a conversation like that.”
“I don’t think there is a right time for that kind of conversation, but okay,” Wyatt said. But only because he was a little embarrassed and it really was chilly outside. He wasn’t quite as embarrassed about being naked, drunk and covered in parfait in front of Silas as he knew he would be in the morning either.
Was it weird that he was taking the whole giant wolf eating a little girl in pigtails (pigtails and all) on his front lawn a bit too well? He thought so, but he also thought that after a point, a person could get used to damn near anything. They could overload on weird until it wasn’t that weird anymore.
Just ask Satan the horse, he thought. You have to figure the first few times were pretty weird for the animal.
“But Jared persisted,” Wyatt muttered to himself.
“This is what I’m talking about,” Silas said, gesturing at him with his cigarette. “You’re drunk, you’re naked, you’re probably in shock, you’re talking to yourself—”
“I always do that,” Wyatt said.
“Which part?”
“Talk to myself.”
“And you get naked?”
“Not much.”
“Go to bed, Wyatt. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
Wyatt closed the door. Then he opened it again and peeked out. “Silas?”
“Yeah?”
“If you want to stay on the couch, you can.”
“I might pack Amarok back in the truck and head home once we get the mess taken care of.”
“But… Silas?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you please stay on the couch? I don’t want to be alone.”
>
“Oh.” Silas considered it. He flicked ash off the end of his cigarette and shrugged. “All right then.”
“Really?”
“Sure. It’s not a bad couch.”
Wyatt smiled, so relieved and grateful he could have hugged him. He didn’t because he was naked, but he could have. “Thanks.”
He went inside to bed then, but he didn’t go to sleep. He lay there thinking, wondering what Silas meant when he said they needed to talk; that it was time. They had talked, and Silas had told him everything. Or had he? What other earth-shattering revelations might he still have for him? How many times could Wyatt have his earth shattered before he lost it? He thought he was handling it all rather well, but he often had the impression when Silas was around that he was frustrated with him and disappointed. Was Wyatt supposed to do something more with this knowledge? Was that what Silas really expected? For Wyatt to go out there and battle the monsters like he did?
He couldn’t imagine doing such a thing. It was not who he was. Knowing what he knew did not change that. He knew that he wasn’t insane, that he wasn’t hallucinating or imagining things, but he still wasn’t a fighter, he wasn’t a hero, he wasn’t the kind of guy who went out into the darkness in search of the monsters. For one thing, even if he had wanted to be that guy, he wouldn’t know the first thing about how to be that guy.
Even if he knew how, why should he? No one had ever believed him. No one, not a single person, had tried to understand. It was beyond their comprehension, which was fine, and he understood that, but then why should he go out there and risk everything to protect them from the things they called him crazy for seeing?
“Fuck them,” Wyatt muttered, rolling onto his side.
“I don’t like them, either,” Thorn said from beneath the bed.
“Who?” Wyatt asked.
“The ones with the black eyes,” Thorn said. “Or the ones who wear human skins. They’re… bad.”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Wait, when did you see them?”
“A long, long time ago,” Thorn said. “But I sense them again now. They’re close. It’s been a long time since they were so close. Three hundred years at least. Longer, I think. Time is funny that way, especially in the shadows. You’ve seen them, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. They’re… bad,” Wyatt said.
“Yes. They serve the Midgard Serpent. How could they be otherwise?”
Wyatt sat up. “They what?” he asked. “They serve the what?”
But Thorn did not answer him or speak again. Eventually, still drunk and with no reply from Thorn no matter how Wyatt pestered him, Wyatt drifted off to sleep.
He dreamed that night of dark, slippery-skinned creatures like emaciated, hairless monkey men dancing excitedly around the burning edge of a pit so deep and dark it seemed to suck the sky down into it and black out the stars. He dreamed of an eye as big as the sun opening in that darkness and that eye saw him looking and marked him.
Chapter 10
When Wyatt woke up the next morning, he had a wretched hangover and Silas was gone. There was evidence of his overnight stay on the sofa, but he had left early, probably before sunrise. Wyatt fed Benson and Hedges, showered and made coffee with Thorn’s words from the night before playing on a loop in his head.
They serve the Midgard Serpent.
What did that mean? He only had a vague idea of what the Midgard Serpent was, and the image stuck in his mind was a confusing combination of a bunch of Vikings wearing helmets with horns on them and the creepy carnival from the animated movie of The Last Unicorn. The serpent in the movie had been nothing more than a garter snake with an illusion cast upon it. Whatever Thorn had been talking about was something else.
Thorn was a creature of the shadows, and though Wyatt was tempted to dismiss him as nothing more than the monster under his bed, he reminded himself that that was just the child’s nightmare version of the truth and Thorn might be a lot more than that. It was his world and he had lived in it god only knew how long; Wyatt was a tourist. He had been able to see into that world as long as he could remember, but that didn’t make him part of it. In fact, he had spent most of his life running away from it.
He went looking for his cell phone and used it to pull up Google. He typed in “midgard serpent” and scrolled through the results. It did lead him to Norse mythology and little else, but that information was not entirely useless. The Midgard, or World Serpent, also called Jörmungandr, meaning “enormous monster”, had been tossed into the great ocean surrounding the world by Odin and grown there to such a huge size that it could cover the earth and grasp its own tail in its mouth. Ragnarök, the end of the world, would begin when the great serpent let go of its tail. If Wyatt considered that the most detailed information yielded by his search came from Wikipedia, and regarded the story as metaphorical rather than literal, he had some idea of what kind of creature it might be. It was a monster; a very big, very strong, very evil monster with the power to end the world.
Great. Just what he needed to start his day worrying about.
He decided to ask Silas about it and get some clarification on the reality of the thing beneath the bullshit and mythology. Since Silas had said they needed to talk, that would be the perfect time to bring it up.
Heather was on time to work that day, which would have been nice, except she was in a foul mood because she’d broken up with her girlfriend the night before. The girlfriend wanted a baby; Heather did not like children. It seemed a natural and inevitable parting of the ways to Wyatt, but Heather ranted about it half the day. The other half, she scowled at everyone and everything, silently hating the world, which Wyatt honestly found to be preferable.
He had met Heather’s girlfriend only once, her name was Emma, and he had thought she was much too sweet for Heather. He was sure she would be a lot happier without her, though he was wise enough to keep his opinion to himself.
Silas showed up at the diner a little after one and it had slowed down enough that Wyatt could take his break and have his lunch with him. Silas ordered the clam chowder and Wyatt ate a ham and cheese sandwich he’d brought from home.
“Can I ask you something?” Wyatt said.
“Yeah,” Silas said.
“What’s the Midgard Serpent? And what does it have to do with the black-eyed kids and the fleshgaits?”
Silas stopped with his spoon halfway to his mouth. Then he blew on it and put it in his mouth before he said anything. “Where did you hear about that?”
Wyatt’s eyes narrowed, not liking his utterly calm demeanor one bit. It seemed, for the first time he could remember, to be an affectation. “What difference does that make?”
“You didn’t hear it from me, so who?” Silas insisted.
“None of your business. Just answer the question,” Wyatt said.
Silas let is spoon clatter into the bowl of his soup and stared at Wyatt quietly. Finally, he said, “Here I was thinking I was the only one you knew. That you had no idea. Now you ask me questions you shouldn’t even know enough to ask me and it’s none of my business?”
Underneath his calm there was a lot of anger and Wyatt went very still as Silas stared at him across the table. “A friend mentioned it,” he confessed at last. “I didn’t know what it meant, so I looked it up. All I found was a lot of Viking mythology crap, but I don’t think… I know that’s not what he meant. But you know, don’t you? Don’t get pissed at me for asking, you should be telling me what’s really going on.”
“A friend,” Silas said. “What friend?”
“I’m not telling you that. You might decide to go kill him with your giant sword or something,” Wyatt said. Silas’s anger made him nervous, but he was also getting a little angry himself because he was starting to feel like Silas was toying with him. “Look, I like you. A lot. I do. And you’ve saved my ass I don’t know how many times since we’ve met, but you’re obviously not telling me some stuff I think I should probably know since these things like to show
up and try to kill me kinda… well, often.”
Silas sat back, glaring at him and looking thoughtful. After a minute, he said, “You’re not ready to know some things, that’s why I don’t tell you everything. You’ve barely scratched the surface of what you are, and you spend most of your time in denial about it, so how can I expect you to understand and accept the big stuff? You’ve spent so much of your life believing you’re crazy that you’ve driven yourself crazy. How am I supposed to know what you can handle and what you can’t?”
“Fine, don’t tell me everything then,” Wyatt said.
He could accept that what Silas said was not without some truth. He had been going back and forth with himself ever since meeting the man about whether anything that had been happening was real. Part of him still wondered from time to time if he wasn’t in the middle of a complete breakdown. So, he could understand where Silas was coming from, but he also could see where Silas trying to protect him might end up getting him killed.
“Don’t tell me everything but tell me this because this seems like it might be important,” Wyatt said. “Like… I might need to know this.”
“At this point, knowing this will not help you,” Silas said. He sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “Fine. The Midgard Serpent is a dark creature that, according to legend, has been around since the formation of the earth. Some say it was born in the fire and gases of the earth’s creation. The serpent calls to a primitive part of the human mind and it appears in a position of power in cultures and religions all over the world. Some of us believe the Midgard Serpent is this serpent, every serpent. There are serpents and dragons worshipped as gods, as protectors and villains, all the way back to the beginning of human civilization.”
“Okay,” Wyatt said, thinking. Then again, “Okay. But that’s not really an answer to my question. I could find all of that out on the internet. Anyone could. What is it to you? Or to me? To people, you know… like us?”
“To most of us, it’s also a myth, though it has its basis in truth,” Silas said. His soup was going cold, but he ignored it.
