Stories: All-New Tales

For a moment they held their position, two overcoats and a mad poet in a dark triangle under the single streetlight. Then they moved—the guys with that slick, fluid motion I’d seen before, Moony with a lurch and a yell and a flash from his fingertips. He’d cast Týr—a powerful rune—and I saw it flicker through the dark air like a shard of steel, hurtling towards the two not-quite-men. They dodged—no pas de deux could have had more grace—parting, then coming together again as the missile passed, moving in a tight axe-head formation towards the old god.

But throwing Týr had thrown Moony. It takes strength to cast the runes of the Elder Script, and most of his glam was already gone. He opened his mouth—to speak a cantrip, I thought—but before he could, the overcoats moved in with that spooky superhuman speed and I could smell their rankness once more, but so much stronger, like the inside of a badger’s sett. They closed in, unbuttoning their coats as they ran—but were they running? Instead they seemed to glide, like boats, unfurling their long coats like sails to hide and envelop the beleaguered moongod.

He began to chant—the mead of poetry, you know—and for a second the drunken voice cracked and changed, becoming that of Mani in his full Aspect. A sudden radiance shone forth—the predators gave a single growl, baring their teeth—and for a moment I heard the chariot chant of the mad moongod, in a language you could never learn, but of which a single word could drive a mortal crazy with rapture, bring down the stars, strike a man dead—or raise him back to life again.

He chanted, and for a beat the hunters paused—and was that a single trace of a tear gleaming in the shadow of a black fedora?—and Mani sang a glamour of love and death, and of the beauty that is desolation and of the brief firefly that lights up the darkness—for a wing’s beat, for a breath—before it gutters, burns and dies.

But the chant did not halt them for more than a second. Tears or not, these guys were hungry. They glided forward, hands outstretched, and now I could see inside their unbuttoned coats, and for a moment I was sure there was no body beneath their clothes, no fur or scale, no flesh or bone. There was just the shadow; the blackness of Chaos; a blackness beyond colour or even its absence; a hole in the world, all-devouring, all-hungry.

Brendan took a single step, and I caught him by the arm and held him back. It was too late anyway; old Moony was already done for. He went down—not with a crash, but with an eerie sigh, as if he’d been punctured—and the creatures that now no longer even looked like men were on him like hyenas, fangs gleaming, static hissing in the folds of their garments.

There was nothing human in the way they moved. Nothing superfluous. They Hoovered him up from blood to brain—every glamour, every spark, every piece of kith and kindling—and what they left looked less like a man than a cardboard cutout of a man left lying in the dirt of the alleyway.

Then they were gone, buttoning up their overcoats over the terrible absence beneath.

A silence. Brendan was crying. He always was the sensitive one. I wiped something (sweat, I think) from my face and waited for my breathing to return to normal.

“That was nasty,” I said at last. “Haven’t seen anything quite like that since the End of the World.”

“Did you hear him?” said Brendan.

“I heard. Who would have thought the old man had so much glam in him?”

My brother said nothing, but hid his eyes.

I suddenly realized I was hungry, and thought for a moment of suggesting a pizza, but decided against it. Bren was so touchy nowadays, he might have taken offence.

“Well, I’ll see you later, I guess,” and sloped off rather unsteadily, wondering why brothers are always so damned hard, and wishing I’d been able to ask him home.

I wasn’t to know, but I wish I had—I’d never see that Aspect of him again.

I SLEPT TILL LATE the next day. Awoke with a headache and a familiar post-cocktail nauseous feeling, then remembered—the way you remember doing something to your back when you were in the gym, but didn’t realize how bad it was going to be until you’d slept on it—and sat bolt upright.

The guys, I thought. Those two guys.

I must have been drunker than I’d thought last night, because this morning the memory of them froze me to the core. Delayed shock; I know it well, and to combat its elects I called room service and ordered the works. Over coffee, bacon, pancakes and rivers of maple syrup, I worked on my recovery, and though I did pretty well, given the circumstances, I found I couldn’t quite get the death of old Moony out of my mind, or the slick way the two overcoats had crawled over him, gobbling up his glam before buttoning up and back to business. Poetry in motion.