Kingfisher(57)



The wolf opened its jaws, howled.

Carrie sat up in bed, knowing even before she opened her eyes that the wolf was at the door. She stumbled through the farmhouse, flung the door open, and saw the lovely, silvery lines of streams growing dark, lifeless, as the stars blanked out, one by one, and the darkness swirling over them reached out toward the moon.

She opened her mouth, heard herself howl with the wolf as the moon began to disappear.

She woke and heard the wolf at the door.

This time she rolled out of Zed’s bed and tripped over the brick under the broken stove leg, so she knew that she was finally awake. She heard Zed moving behind her, muttering drowsily until he tripped over the same brick and cursed.

Carrie threw open the door and saw moonlight drenching everything in a misty glow, burning the tidal strands running through the grasses, the dark and bright mystery of living water flowing out of the hidden source within the trees, the silent, glowing hills.

The moon’s ancient, beautiful face, her spangled fingers of light, the streams milky with her reflection, the glittering air all but transparent over the distant, luminous source stunned Carrie. As she stood on the threshold of the night, she heard the song of the wolf within the eerie light transform itself in her ears.

It was not the language of fear, she realized, but the language of love.

And then she saw her father, in the meadow under the soft touch of moonlight, changing into shape after shape in an intricate dance of power, or the constant folding and refolding of life in all its variations. Man became wolf became deer became hare became bear became cougar became porcupine became salmon leaping out of the water, became white heron became owl, soundless in the transfixed eye of the moon. Then owl became man, hair and long beard of moonlight, tall, hale, and older than time. Then man became Merle, her father, the shape she knew.

She swallowed fire; she was shaking; she tasted tears catching in her smile. Zed put an arm around her, held her tightly.

The man became raven, followed the path of the moon into night.





17


On the narrow coast road beyond the ancient forest, a mountain face covered with trees on one side, and a long craggy drop to the sea on the other, the limo rounded a curve and drove straight into a blinding wall of fog.

It was so thick, the world vanished. Pierce could not see so much as a weed in a ditch beside the road. He could not, he realized, see the road. Even the little wyvern ornamenting the long hood of the limo wavered in and out of the sluggishly drifting fog. The driver slowed to a sudden caterpillar crawl, causing Val to pull out his earbuds, and Leith to blink the abrupt nothingness out of his eyes and channel the intercom.

“This is not good.”

Pierce stared incredulously at the nothing and waited for the strike from behind, the beginning of the pileup along the steep, two-lane highway.

“Shall I try to back up, sir?”

“Mist,” Val observed with seemingly pointless interest, as though it were a hitherto mythical sea creature.

“No,” Leith said tersely. “Don’t back up.”

“I think you should get out, sirs. I’ll keep inching along. I think now, sirs, would be a good time for you to get out.”

“So do I,” Val said, and promptly opened a door. It scraped against something invisible, but left room for him to slither out. Leith motioned for Pierce to follow; Pierce hesitated.

“You’re coming, too,” he said.

“Yes. In a moment. Go,” he added, and Pierce moved finally, reluctantly, out of the car and into the cloud. It was annoyingly damp and chilly, oddly silent as well, he noticed, then realized why.

“I can’t hear the waves,” he said to the fraying figure of his brother, whose red hair was the most visible thing left of him.

“No,” Val agreed. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“It’s fog,” Pierce protested. “It’s blinding, it’s dangerous, it is not fascinating. And where’s our father? Did he get out of the limo? Where is the limo?”

“Mist,” Val said again, a point of argument so pointless that Pierce ignored it.

He turned restively, trying to spot Leith, trying to see the car, listening for the inevitable collision of traffic, tires screaming, metal accordion-pleating against the rear end of the limo. He heard nothing, not even the cry of a gull. He took a few steps, one hand out to feel the trees he could not see: a steep slope full of them, tall, thick pillars of red whose green boughs stretched out endlessly, greedily, to gather up the cloying, obscuring wet.

They were all apparently receding from him as he moved. The ground that should have been running sharply uphill was simply lying there, no matter which way he turned, flat and vaguely rocky underfoot. He heard something finally: his own heartbeat, uncomfortably loud, as if the fog had pushed powerful, invisible hands against his ears.

“Val?” he said, suddenly without much hope of an answer. He had wandered out of the world he recognized, leaving even Val and their father behind, along with his sight, his hearing, and, once again, any kind of a weapon.

He heard an inhuman snort, an answer to his call, as though he had awakened something within the fog. He froze, hoping it would go back to sleep. A stone skittered across the ground. Something enormous yawned, sucking in mist; it swirled, ebbed toward the indrawn breath for a long time, it seemed, before fog blew back out again, accompanied by an odd smell of charred, damp wood.

Patricia A. McKillip's Books