The wolfs victory cry delights your ears, riding sharp and crisp through the wind. You are a pair, in unison, like lovers, or father and son, master and slave. Two warriors, unstoppable.
You raise a hand to the sky and lightning follows where you point, splitting a birch down the middle. You are a warlord now, as you were vivode throughout your existence. One deemed so fierce—mad even—that your countrymen fear you still. They learned to respect and fear you in the past, when you drove the
Ottomans buck from your boundaries, back over the Carpathian Mountains, back to the land where they belonged. They respected and feared you for preserving the law, for enforcing Christian values. Did you not punish the dishonest, those who would steal and lie and cheat for personal gain? And even as much as those you ruled respected and feared you, they loved you. Then, and now. Your reputation survived, even as has your body in this supple, corporeal form you continue. You are a hero to your countrymen. The British who have colonized so much of the world are simply modern Ottomans. You defeated the turbaned ones, you will erode from within this society that wears the high hat symbolizing the pinnacle of civilization.
You are Ruler of Transylvania, King of Terrors, Lord of the Undead. You are invincible. That truth causes your lips to split apart and a long hiss to escape your throat, swirling through the air like a current that will crush everything in its wake, mingling with Berserker’s mad howls. The wind whips the soul of every soon-to-be corpse in this park. It slices through to the subconscious Freud postulates. But humanity’s creative inventors and astute thinkers cannot save them!
You have read that Kierkegaard preached an acceptance of fate, which includes suffering. That philosophy is repugnant to you. It is Nietzsche who speaks your creed. You and you alone are of paramount importance. The prattle of Marx and Engels will dissolve in the vapors of time—there is little strength in a collective without a strong leader. Machiavelli, your contemporary, knew this. He spoke from your era, where politics sired all.
Berserker’s instincts are aligned with your own. He understands all too well the rules of power and control as crucial for survival. He cannot cower at your just fury because he shares this reaction. You cannot bear to see him entrapped this way. It is not sentiment which inspires you but a sense of reestablishing order. These mortals will pay for their insolence! Let them gloat for now. Their telegraphs and telephones and phonographs. Their printing presses and cameras. Their refinement of pistols and rifles and gunpowder. None of it will help them! All will incinerate in the blaze of a power greater than their own. All of their knowledge will crumble to dust.
Your knowledge has been gleaned over many lifetimes, knowledge that covers the spectrum of life, that totals the grains of sand on all of the beaches of the world! Mortal philosophy is correct in one thing—they will taste divine suffering through their servitude to you, their master. Your violent kiss will bequeath this destiny to them. They will languish in the knowledge that they will be like you but never be your equal.
With the strength of ten men, you direct the forces of nature. Your hand sprouts talons that claw the lock on the cage. Instantly, sparks shoot through you. In the deluge, the metal sizzles and melts. You grasp it in your hand, snap the lock, and pull open the door of the prison.
Berserker does not hesitate. In one leap, he is on the ground, before his master. “Go!” you tell him, mentally directing his instincts toward Whitby and Hillingham. Toward the glass that separates you from Lucy, as if such tangible reality can stand in your way!
Berserker swivels his head to stare in the direction of the keeper. “When you have served me and my work is done,” you remind him, “then and only then will you will reap your reward!”
He hesitates but a moment. Then, swiftly, he sprints over the drowning grass and into the trees. Free. Alive. As lucid as can be.
Curtain Call
Gary A. Braunbeck
(From the unpublished papers of Charles Fort)
I have been, for most of my life, a collector of notes on subjects of great diversity—such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, to the great creature Melanicus and the super-bat upon whose wings it broods over the affairs of Man, as well as stationary meteor-radiants, the reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy, the appearance of purple Englishmen, instances of amphibians and blood raining down from the heavens, apparitions, phantoms, the damned, the excluded, wild talents, new lands, and “Did the girl swallow the octopus?”
But my liveliest interest is not so much in things as in the relations of things. I find now, in the twilight of my life, as I pour over the endless data that I have assembled throughout my days, that I think more and more about the alleged pseudo-relations we call “coincidences.” What if these events, rather than being happenstance, are the final result of great, secret, dark machinations of the Universe interacting with the subconscious to produce an event or events which guide humanity down certain roads its members were destined to take?
I am writing now of a brief period I spent in London when I was thirty-six, in the early months of 1912 (nearly ten years before I decided to move there), and of a most singularly peculiar bookshop, its even more peculiar proprietor, and a bit of London Theatre history which none before me has ever recorded.
I was staying at a very comfortable rooming house in Bedford Place, just around the corner from the British Museum in Great Russell Street (since my visit to London was solely to search through the museum’s vast archives of manuscripts, the location of my rooms could not have been more advantageous for my purposes). On this particular day—kept from my research at the museum by a cryptic note delivered to my room early that morning—I was exploring the narrower, less-often traveled streets of the vicinity, in search of an address which seemed more and more to me a flight of fancy in the mind of whomever had composed the note, when the heavens opened wide and within moments the rain was pounding down violently. I was in Little Russell Street, just behind the church that fronts on Bloomsbury Way, and there was no way for me to find immediate shelter from the storm. The address written on the note was obviously someone’s idea of a joke, for I had been up and down this street no less than three times.
So why had I not noticed the little bookshop before?
It seemed that as soon as the sun was obscured by the rain clouds, the tiny edifice simply appeared out of the rain, set between a baker’s and a haberdashery where before there had been only, I am certain, a cramped alleyway.
I shall state here that, despite the path of research my life has been dedicated to, I am not a man who is given to either hallucination or flights of fancy. I neither believe nor disbelieve anything. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdom of ages, as well as the so-called great teachers of all time; I close the front door to Christ and Einstein and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to rains of frogs and lands hidden above the clouds and the paths of lost spirits. “Come this way, let’s see if you can explain yourselves,” I say unto these phenomena, always taking care to look upon them with a cold clinician’s eye. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for belief systems. I neither saw nor did not see a bookshop hidden away on this street. It simply was, at that moment, where the moment before it was not.