“Come on out and take a swing at me if you think you’re so tough. I’ve smacked the shit out of bigger things, and I’ll smack it out of you.”
The coal-black eyes squinted, and tendrils of pitch-colored smoke oozed from the sockets. You fear the water.
“You fear the land,” he countered.
I fear nothing.
“Then why do you watch the trees?”
It scowled and dipped, its joints creaking and bowing, as it adjusted itself in the water. The smoke that poured from its blank, deep eyes likewise spilled from the corners of its mouth when it spoke. I fear no trees.
“And I ain’t afraid of the dark, but I know what’s in it.”
Kilgore checked his distance from the water’s edge: a good thirty feet. Far enough that even with a lunge, the creature probably couldn’t grab him. Even so, to be on the safe side … he sidled back another yard or two, never taking his eyes off the two smoking craters in the creature’s shriveled-apple face.
His notebook slipped, but he caught it. He held it up to the light of his headlamp and began to read.
“By the standing stone and twisted tree, thee we invoke—where gather thy own.” He cleared his throat, and ignored the splash and hiss from the creature that still stood in the water. “Mighty Lord of the woods and animals, hunter and hunted, I call to you.”
None shall answer! There is no life here!
“Hear me, and come once more to this, your sacred home. Keeper of the mighty gates of winter, watcher of the living land,” he breathed, and it might’ve been his imagination that something flickered in the trees beyond the edge of his headlamp’s glare.
None remain to hear you!
“You’d best fucking pray that’s the case,” Kilgore growled. “In the name of Jesus, of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit …”
Hear yourself, you coward, the creature spit. Singing to the crucified king and calling the old gods with the same breath.
He shook his head. He’d heard it before, from holier things and people by far. “God of Creation, send Your angels. Send them in a shape this motherfucker will know, and lend them Your Almighty power.”
Your God has no angels for the likes of me. No swords. No choirs.
There, back toward the Eldorado, he saw it this time for certain: moving between the gnarled greenery like a stream flowing past rocks, one moment slow, one moment lightning-fast, shifting in some strange spot between the worlds. “And He shall give His angels charge over thee.” He repeated his favorite bit from the red-bound book. “To keep thee in all thy ways.”
Nowhere did it specify what those angels would look like or how they’d do any of the promised keeping.
You cannot have it both ways. Old ways and new gods.
“One God,” he corrected. “Just the one—old, new, and always. But He’s got a very diverse workforce.”
And one thing was certain, sometimes things took the names they were called by. They assumed the shapes that were best believed. He didn’t know how it worked, or why. He didn’t understand the mechanisms of the Law, but he suspected that no one on earth ever had—or ever could. All he knew was that God was on his side. He believed it harder than he believed his own name.
Your Christ has no power here!
“You’re wrong about that and everything else,” he said—and he might’ve said more but a vivid white light sparked, quivered, and blasted out from the tree line. It all but blinded Kilgore, who still had the good sense to keep one watering eye on the creature, though he backed away farther. One arm up, shielding himself from the sudden illumination.
The supernova cast shadows of trunks sharper than prison bars, flinging the shapes across the crater lake and around the hole where a mine once worked, and up the ridge around it—past the miners’ cage that split the light into lace, and all along the determined sprouts that clung to the piss-poor dirt, red as the face of Mars.
“There is life here yet!” he gasped, his breath sucked out of him by that divine, demanding illumination.
Between his fingers, around the edges of the fierce brilliance that was colder than November, he saw a four-legged shape, each limb as narrow as a sapling; there stood a barrel-chested trunk and a proud head capped with a crown as wide as Kilgore’s outstretched arms. Or not a crown at all—antlers, then, if that’s what they were.
This thing had names as well as antlers, though Kilgore could not bring himself to call any of the common ones. Not for prayer or entreaty, for it was too close to blasphemy. Even if he knew what his own God called this thing, it wouldn’t be a word for lips like his to pronounce.
He inhaled, exhaled. Forced himself to breathe through the rapture of this piercing light that cut through the copper basin and everything in it.
“Tubal-cain,” was the best he could muster in salutation. A name for the horned guardian from the mighty red book. He gagged on a small laugh, remembering a tidbit of lore he’d almost forgotten. “You were a metalsmith, praise Jesus! I see Your patterns, Lord. I see You turn the wheel …”
The great stag shifted. Its shape wavered between wafer-thin projection and flesh and blood, but it held and it glared down at the creature in the lake—which cringed against the light.
The creature struggled in place, a fly in molasses. It fumed and reared, lunging backward and going nowhere … no, going forward, toward the shining thing in the trees. Dragged up, kicking and fighting from the water until it was free and suspended, angry and dripping and swearing in a tongue no living man has ever understood. Shrinking and withering like the grass once withered and the trees once wilted where they stood.
“Take him away!” he gasped, not quite laughing anymore, too winded to do anything but wheeze. And as the miner-shaped creature rose up, wriggling and dying, sailing reluctantly toward the woods, Kilgore felt a pressure in his chest like a hand squeezing. The pressure crushed hard, and he wiped at his eyes but saw only the searing afterburn of the light from the trees … and then he saw stars.
And then he saw nothing, not even the ever-present light.
Not anymore.
Not until it crept back, a flicker here and there. A pixel at a time, that charred patchwork of vision, gleaming around the edges from all the cones and rods adjusting to the light that wasn’t there.
The stars came back, but this time they were above him. He blinked. Real stars. Not the ones that snowed across his vision when the light went away.
He was lying on his back, and a sharp jabbing sensation in his side suggested that someone was poking him with a stick.
“Ow …” he mumbled, then swiped at the stick.
The stick was held by Ammaw Pete, who also hefted an oversized flashlight with a big 9-volt battery exposed on its underside. To her credit, she didn’t aim it at his face. She aimed it at the ground beside him, illuminating his headlamp—which had fallen off and ceased to function.
“Wake up, big man. You’re done here.”
“Done … here? I didn’t …” He rose slowly, ratcheting himself up with his elbows. “I didn’t do anything.”
The frown on her face suggested she might argue, but she only said, “Whatever. Get yourself together. I found your car up the hill there, but your battery’ll need a jump. There’s more than one kind of life, you know, and I’ll want a ride home.”