She looked up at me very seriously, as if what she had read had great and obvious importance.
I nodded solemnly, thinking all the while, what the hell does that mean?
“How many dogs do we have?” she asked me.
I let slip my confusion. “Um, none here, I expect.”‘
“People tend to try to save them, don’t they?”
“Yes, well, the things…” I trailed off. “Not many survived, I guess.”
“Try none,” she said somewhat smugly. “When was the last time you heard one bark, or howl at night?”
I shook my head, it had been weeks.
She nodded and opened the book again to a new passage.
Knee-deep she waded in the pool-
The Banshee robed in green-
Singing her song the whole night long,
She washed the linen clean;
The linen that must wrap the dead
She beetled on a stone;
She washed with dripping hands, blood-red,
Low singing all alone:
The Banshee I with second sight,
Singing in the cold starlight;
I wash the death-clothes pure and white,
For Fergus More must die to-night
She gazed at me bemusedly for a bit and closed the book. “You still don’t get it, do you?” she asked. “I had thought that you would, out of all of them.”
This statement irked me just a bit. “Okay, you are saying that these old legends are like what is happening now, I get that.”
“More than that. I think things have turned again, back-back to the old days when superstition ruled the minds of men. But what we didn’t know was that it ruled for a reason. It ruled because those fantastic creatures and stories were all real, or at least most of them. The thing you saw at the lake, it would have been called a Banshee, or a Hag, or Mermaid perhaps in years gone by, depending on where and when you were, but everyone everywhere was familiar with that type of creature.
“This time, I think however, is very different,” she continued, paging through her book. “This time I think it is worse. It’s like the Ice Ages, I believe, these magical times, they come and go. Usually, it is small waves of magic that don’t warp history much, like the little Ice Age that just ended a few centuries ago. Between the year 1550 and 1850, the world was much cooler than it is now. I think the Magical Ages are like that, these ages of the supernatural. They come and they go and are forgotten until the next time.
“But this is a bad one, this time. Like the Ice Age ten millennia ago that froze those mammoths in Siberia so fast that they still had grass and flowers in their mouths. They were flash-frozen. In a few years, the glaciers grew dramatically and cataclysmically. The world froze over and thousands of species died out forever. Most of the big mammals died out. And now this age, with its increase in the supernatural, is like that time. Cataclysmic.”
“Okay, so then why are there no fossils of things like these monsters we’ve been encountering?”
“Good! Good point,” she said, rising. For the first time, she seemed animated. She got up and paced. I noticed as she walked that she had a slight limp, but decided now was not the time to interrupt. Mostly, I was glad to see some distance between her and that pistol.
“I suppose I could flippantly ask in return what you think a tyrannosaurus or a giant sloth really was, if not a monster, but the real answer is, of course, that I don’t know. But perhaps, just perhaps, these warped creatures don’t leave remains because when the effect fades, it changes the creatures-including their bones or what-not-back into their original form.”
I made an appreciative face. “Like you say, we have no idea, but that’s as good as any.”
“Do you know what percentage of the cultures of Earth over the last thousand years has had tales of supernatural creatures and occurrences?”
“All of them?”
“Exactly. Not all of them are identical, mind you, although certain themes tend to come up again and again.”
“So, Doc,” I said, “what should we do?”
It was the wrong thing to say. She sagged down again into her chair. “I think it’s the end. We will descend into barbarism at best, become extinct at worst. This time, the supernatural is so powerful, life is not just more interesting, it’s like a nightmare. I’ve yet to find any way we can survive it, and I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.”
I nodded, but took one thing to heart. “Well, even if we all survive as just changelings of some sort or another, eventually, our descendants will go back to what they once were.”
She frowned deeply at that. “Provided some survive.”
“Of course.”
She nodded, taking to the idea. “You are right. Quite right, I hadn’t extrapolated far enough.”
She smiled then, looking fully at me for the first time. “You’ve given me peace of mind in the form of a tiny ray of hope. Thank you, Gannon. You are a natural leader, you know. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got one more duty this day.”
I stood up and put my hand on my saber. “Give me the gun and I’ll be on my way,” I told her.
She moved her hand near the pistol slowly. I took a step toward her. She looked at my hand on the hilt of my saber and laughed.
“Going to cut me if I kill myself, eh? Ironic, don’t you think boy? If ever there was a time and place where suicide was easier for a person, I don’t know it. All I have to do is take a walk in the woods and it will all be over shortly.”
“That would be a brave death.”
She frowned again. “So I’m a coward? You don’t see what I do, Gannon, you don’t see the future clearly.”
She took up the pistol and toyed with it. I saw it was a cheap-looking.32 caliber semi-automatic. She put it down on a pile of maps she had been working on with a clunk and I snatched it up. I tucked it into my pocket and walked out. As I did so, I found the flat stone I had picked up on the lakeshore. It was still there, and it still felt warm, although that could have been from my body heat.
I pulled the stone out and flashed it at Wilton. She recoiled slightly. “Why are you afraid of this thing?”
“It’s enchanted, I think,” she said.
“What can you do with an enchanted rock?”
She shrugged. “Try throwing it at one of them, or if it is rough enough, use it to sharpen up that pig-sticker of yours. I don’t care.”
I hefted it and nodded. “Why don’t you go check on Holly again?” I suggested.
She nodded and got up. She looked old and bent, but not broken anymore. She limped away to the examination rooms. I opened my mouth to ask about her limp, but shut it again. I’d asked enough.
Sixteen
I went back to my empty cot and closed the door. I didn’t want anyone to see this.
I pulled the stone out of my pocket again and here, in the darkness, it glimmered plainly. I took out my saber and ran the stone along the edge. It was indeed rough enough to use as a grinding stone. Usually, one would have used a softer stone like soapstone, but it worked quite well. After scraping each side perhaps twenty times, I thought to see the faintest blue glimmer along my blade. I chewed my lip and breathed harder, feeling like I was doing something evil, but fun, like finding dad’s playboys as a kid. I scratched at the blade more, and the faint glimmer turned into a glow.
I put the stone back into my pocket, sheathed my weapon and went to check on things at the front entrance. The fog outside looked even thicker, if anything. It looked like someone had pressed a gauzy blanket against the glass. Only a few feet of gray concrete walkway was visible outside now. Erik Foti was in the lobby peering out dubiously at nothing. He gripped and re-gripped his shotgun nervously. He glanced at me as I walked up.