by Dan Dillard
Chapter 18
The prior evening weighed heavy on Jason's mind. He saw visions of the attack, of Blue killing and eating the innocent baby, the mother uttering her curse-more hatred on her face than he thought possible. Then he saw the moon, the wind, pulling him into the air as it swirled around him. He saw the trees close in, gripping his wolf flesh and tearing it free from the body, revealing a human underneath.
That woke him and he didn't sleep well that night. The pain in his jaws and in his shoulders and knees was relentless, even with medication. How he hated the swollen gibbous moon, it was the most excruciating time when he could still feel the changes happening. The days where he changed internally. The final, external changes were obscured by a more unimaginable pain. By then, he would be unconscious, and for that, he was grateful.
When he did doze, flashes of James' face twisting from animal to man and back woke him again. He was sure he had yelped that last time. Aggravated, he got out of bed and went outside. The sun was struggling to climb over the horizon and it cast a pink haze over the tree line at the back of the property. He sniffed the air and found it pleasant, almost intoxicating. The stillness of the world just before dawn was always calming to him.
He walked into the night, away from the rising sun and into the trees. He listened to the sound of crunching leaves beneath his feet, natural mulch built over centuries. He felt the cool damp moss and mud under his toes. At that moment, the distinction between beast and man was blurred, and it didn't really matter. He walked for an hour, ever deeper into the woods, until the sun warmed his back as it filtered through the trees. Until he smelled the wet, mineral-rich soil, and heard the trickle of water as it rushed along the stream bed, eroding a scar into an ever changing landscape.
"No way," Jason said.
His leisurely pace became a jog, then a full run. Right up until he was standing in the stream, maybe four feet wide and a few inches deep at that point. The stones in the bottom were rounded from abuse over time. He knelt and splashed two handfuls on his face and immediately he was back in the dream, only it was real.
He was haunted by the laughter of an infant child and by the cooing of the lovely bronze-skinned woman who cared for it. His mind spun and his eyes went in and out of focus for a moment. When they cleared up, he was staring at a clearing some fifty yards away. The trees that surrounded the place were huge, old, and appeared to guard something important.
He rushed to the opening and stared up at them, spinning slowly in place. His breathing quickened, his pulse raced. The branches on those deciduous monsters leaned in on him, warning him to mind his manners. They ensured him of the power of that place.
He looked in every direction. He was unquestionably there, in the spot he had dreamt of so often. It had grown up around him, like he had frozen in time somehow. His inner gray wolf, still at its prime. It was the world which had grown old.
He looked to the ground. A gathering of rocks lay in the middle, moss and grasses grown up around and between them. Two stones, each about the size of a cantaloupe and one the size of a baseball were surrounded by hundreds of tiny pebbles. The formation was circular, and outside of it stood a ring of scotch bonnet mushrooms. He collapsed to the ground, overwhelmed by feelings which seemed forced upon him. Sadness like he had never experienced.
"Tears," he heard.
Jason snapped his line of sight in the direction of the voice.
James stood with a solemn look on his pale face.
"You're still following me," Jason said.
"As I told you before, I've followed you and your lady friend for many years. I knew you would find your home. You always do. You've been avoiding it for so long. Once you were this close, it was only a matter of time."
"What did you mean by tears?"
James approached, but didn't step inside the circle. He crouched into a sitting position. Then he picked a handful of grass and tossed it in the air.
"The pebbles there. Those are tears."
"I don't understand," said Jason.
"You know what the other rocks represent?"
Jason looked again at the pile and he did understand.
"Mother and baby. The other large stone is the father."
"Yes. And the little ones are tears," James said.
"Whose tears?"
James stood again and walked slowly around the ring of fungus in a counterclockwise direction. Jason tracked his every move.
"Some belong to the father who was away, trying to provide for a family he loved very much. He cried upon his return to so much death. Some are from the mother as she lay dying, mourning her child. Some are from the crying child as it screamed from my painful bites. And some are mine."
"Yours?"
James stopped for a beat, then continued his circular path. Jason was taken by the statement. "Yes. After that night, I was a man, trying to understand guilt. I was a wolf confused by new feelings and trying to survive. I was not an animal feeding, but a murderer learning remorse for something I had no fault in. Emotions are deadly, Jason. That is why the beasts have evolved without them."
"No fault? You killed them."
"Ah, but remember that I was a wolf. Not this confused thing that I am now, but an animal. An instinctual hunter. I was a natural apex predator doing what was intended of me. There is no guilt in that. Murder is only when the rational decide to remove life from the rational. The definition doesn't apply in our world."
Jason looked away, trying to absorb it all. The words made sense to his brain, but his heart felt sick. Jason shifted his position to keep his eye on the man who was still pacing the edge of the mushroom circle.
"Is that when you started looking for us?"
"No."
"No?"
"No. I cried on those bodies for three days. I was paralyzed by my guilt. I arranged the rocks for the mother and the baby. Then when the father returned, I watched from the woods as he discovered his family, mutilated and then eaten away by insects and scavengers. I watched his emotions change from shock to wailing tears to rage and back to tears again."
"You didn't try to help?"
James frowned.
"What could I do? I spoke no language. I was clumsy with hands and struggling on two legs. I was frightened for the first time in my life."
"So what happened?"
"I have no idea what set that man apart from the rest of his tribe, why he was alone with his family in the middle of these woods, but he regretted his decision. I saw it in his face, heard it in his prayers and mourning songs. It was a mistake to best all other mistakes. He sat on that very spot, where those rocks are, and prayed. He chanted and sang day and night. He prayed until he couldn't hold his own body upright. When that last night came, and the light from the moon shone down on that place, the tears in his eyes turned solid and tumbled to the ground as stones. Then the leaves swirled and the whole sky lit up and the moon goddess took him to be with his family."
"You saw this?"
"I see it every day," he said.
James changed his tone to anger tinged with jealousy.
"I ran into that beam of light and knelt. Tears streamed from my eyes, they also turned to rock. I knew nothing of language, nothing of prayer. I howled as I had always done. Inside, I was pleading for the goddess to take me as well."
Jason looked around again at the thousands of pebbles, at the three rocks which lay in the circle, a natural monument to an unnatural occurrence. A reminder of the struggle between good and evil and the balance in nature. He looked at James with newfound concern.
"So what do you intend to do now that you've found us?"
James took a deep breath.
"I intend to rest. You owe me that."
"I owe you?"
"Yes. You and that bitch owe me."
Jason recoiled at the change in demeanor. He steeled himself, prepared for anything. James continued.
"Your love for that family, your strange attraction is what aler
ted the goddess. Your howl is what alerted that woman."
"You can't be serious?"
"I've had a long time to think about this, Jason. I have no more remorse left. I was robbed of my nature. Robbed of myself. Given a self I never wanted."
Jason stood, watching the man pace. James head dropped a bit with each new sentence. His feet switched directions and he looked more wolf than human. His teeth grew long and his muscles rippled in his thin arms. Fingers coiled into and out of fists as the nails broke their beds and became bleeding yellow claws. It happened in seconds, not days as Jason was used to. His jaw dropped open.
"Yes, four centuries has practiced me well," James said.
Jason turned to match his opponent much as he had seen in the dreams. He held his hands out like a wrestler looking for an opening. James snarled, licking his pointed teeth and shaking his head. Each twist of his neck seemed to lengthen his jaw line. The teeth clicked together in grotesque fashion. Jason's stomach churned. It was a process he'd lived through, but never watched. He had no idea how the thing in front of him endured the pain.
Suddenly James, or the black wolf, lunged toward Jason. He sprung in the air, landing just inches from his intended target. His black, rubbery lips curled in a snarl as the air seemed to disappear from within the circle. Blue's tail tucked between his legs and a swirl of wind startled them both. A crack of lightning separated the two, sending each reeling backwards and proving the presence of the goddess.
Jason landed on his back, pedaling his feet and elbows to back away from the blast point. James scurried to his four paws and ran the opposite direction full speed. As Jason watched, his four-legged canine sprint turned to a bipedal run on human legs before he disappeared.
Jason exhaled as if he'd been holding his breath for the entire conversation. The wind continued to swirl, blowing the dried leaves off the ground and howling through the living branches. He found he was outside the circle, and that he had destroyed several of the mushrooms that made the ring. Their stalks bled red fluid as if made of human skin and cut by knives. He cringed, but as the breeze slowed and the debris settled, new ones pushed through the soil and filled the gap.
Only one thought existed in his head at that point. He needed to find Rocky.
