Mythworld: Invisible Moon (5 page)

Chapter Three

Woden’s Day

Since Meredith had no real memories of her father other than those gleaned through his letters and the things her grandparents spoke of, her images of him came mostly through dreams. In one dream that recurred often, she found herself wandering the halls of Valhalla, the place of fallen heroes, looking for him. It is said that in Valhalla, there are more than six hundred and forty doors; in Meredith’s dreams, she knocked at all of them, but found nothing.

She told Michael about these dreams—he laughed, and quoted from one of the
Eddas
:

“At every door

before you enter

look around with care;

you never know

what enemies

aren’t waiting for you there.”

Meredith didn’t tell him about her dreams after that.

O O O

Meredith had only been to the place where her father was killed once, with June, right after she had come to Silvertown. It was a pretty stand of elm and maple trees, with a few oaks scattered around for substance. Since everyone in town was still preoccupied with the events of the night before—nothing was working, yet, and no reason had been established for the extraordinary circumstance—Meredith suddenly felt compelled to revisit the site. Perhaps it was because of Michael’s death; not that she would admit to any overt sentimentality where he was concerned, but he had raised Meredith as his own, and loved her in his way. She had, in a manner of speaking, lost a father on three separate occasions: first, when Vasily left Vienna, and again when he was killed, here; and then Monday, when Michael was slain by Hagen-something-Gunnar-something.

Meredith’s grandparents held a strong grudge against her father for leaving. Granted, it had been their daughter who had had the affair, but like her own people, the Gypsies, they believed that a man should defend what is his, and guard his honor. Meredith’s grandmother believed he left because he couldn’t deal with the betrayal; her grandfather, however, believed that Meredith’s father left because protecting his honor would have meant killing his wife as well as her lover—and that would have left a child who would one day learn her father had killed her mother. Rather than force both of them to endure that, he simply left.

What was unforgivable to Meredith’s grandparents was that he gave his blessing for her mother to marry Michael. Whether this made him a romantic or a coward, she never examined too closely.

The spot where he’d been killed was bare of grass; the plants scuffed away by the police chief’s investigations. Nothing had ever turned up; nothing substantial enough to use, anyway. There were no marks on the body, no sign of a struggle. If it wasn’t for the fact his head was missing, one might have suspected he’d simply wandered down and fallen asleep beneath the trees.

Suddenly, Meredith realized something had changed—there was a pile of brush beneath the tree that did not belong. Looking closer, she realized the dried up fragments tied in a bundle had been flowers—cut flowers. Someone had been to this spot fairly recently, and had left flowers where her father had died. But who? Other than the Kawaminami’s, Meredith’s father had no close friends in Silvertown, or anywhere else, for that matter. He had worked as a day laborer for the shipping companies that came through the Seaway, and had companions he drank with, but no one she’d met in the months she’d been here was the kind of associate who’d leave flowers.

I must think on this
, Meredith resolved.

Troubled, she looked around a final time, then headed back into town.

O O O

As morning came, the extent and scope of what they were grappling with began to be clear; smoke filled the sky horizon to horizon. The tragedy of Brendan’s Ferry was not a solitary one. Once or twice more, planes were glimpsed, though no more crashed or even came near the town. The mood of the townspeople was not great, as the pollution bursting into the air had blackened the sun, leaving only a dull light to filter through.

Around ten, everyone got quite a shock; the contingent of men who had gone to inspect the catastrophe at Brendan’s Ferry returned to Silvertown with a survivor—not someone from the town, many of whom had escaped injury—but an actual passenger of the plane that had crashed.

He was bundled in blankets and pressure cuffs to keep his temperature and blood pressure up, and Lloyd Willis, who was one of the volunteer paramedics, had inserted a heparin lock to the man’s wrist to administer painkillers and saline.

The hapless fellow, whose name was Stephen Moore, had been on his way to Chicago to sign a deal to distribute three thousand pinball machines to mom-and-pop restaurants in the Philippines. Apparently, about twenty minutes into the flight the oxygen masks dropped down for no reason. Then, about fifteen minutes after that, the windows all filmed over with some sort of viscous, oily substance, which first became opaque, then hardened. And then …

… The windows
blinked
.

After that, there was a lot of screaming, and running around; prayers were said. No one got food service. The pilots were in a lather just trying to manage some sort of controlled descent—difficult, particularly when the windshield dissolved, and the cockpit became what was, for all practical purposes, nostrils.

Moore, for his part, was a passenger of the slightly paranoid variety, and so had at the first sign of weirdness locked himself in the restroom at the rear of the plane (having once read in a comic book that that was the safest place to be in an air catastrophe); as it turned out, this was a good call—as the transformations continued, he became securely (if unwillingly) encased in what could charitably be described as a rectum, but not before catching a glimpse of the only thing odder than a jetliner-turned-dragon at thirty-thousand feet—a second jetliner-turned-dragon, with better developed lungs and an attitude.

The rest was flames, and falling, and oblivion.

“Man,” said Hjerald. “I hope you ask for a refund.”

Moore looked up and sighed. “I can’t,” he said, sighing again. “Nonrefundable tickets.”

“Aw, dude,” said Hjerald.

O O O

It was at about the same time that the men brought back the news from Brendan’s Ferry that Blaine and Helen McMillan quit canvassing the neighborhood searching for Kevin. They had begun by asking door to door (an uncomfortable situation, particularly when Helen asked Meredith to let them know if she saw any sign of him—truth to tell, there were signs of him all over her house, but they were all either being used, or were being saved for later, and so she had to nod in sympathy and turn them away); that was two days ago. After the events of yesterday, everyone else had been distracted, and the only people who could or would relate to their particular dilemma and fears were the Jensens, the Howards, and the Burtons, who were all out searching for missing children of their own.

Meredith decided Blaine gave up searching because he snapped; it had already been a red-letter week, and they were only on Wednesday. Helen stopped looking because the rusty Model A Ford Blaine and Kevin had been restoring turned into a griffin and ate her.

You know, thinking on it,
Meredith considered,
it might have been the sight of his wife’s eviscerated remains strewn across the lawn and roof of the house that did Blaine in. It certainly wouldn’t have helped. But then, these are the sort of things you risk when you buy an American car
.

O O O

As much literally as figuratively, Soame’s had become the most conspicuous gathering place in town; outside of the school which, oddly enough, had been colonized overnight by bats (at least, everyone in town fervently hoped they were bats), and the various churches, which were filled with people wailing, and confessing, and asking for forgiveness from whichever God they believed was about to rain hellfire and brimstone down on their bad selves; which, if appearances were to be believed, was either Cecil B. DeMille or George Lucas on a bad day.

Mythologically speaking, if this were indeed the End Of The World, or the Apocalypse, or whatever, the archetypes that everything seemed to be changing into indicated that the people who had the best grasp of what powers existed in the universe that were greater than man, were both medieval and Scandinavian. This also meant that of those who may or may not claim the gift of prophecy, the guy who nonetheless had the best track record was Hjerald.

“Cool beans,” said Hjerald.

While the town elders commandeered the main hall of Soame’s for meetings to decide what they ought to discuss first (not even the Apocalypse can stem the tides of bureaucracy), which kept Glen and Delna hopping, June, Fuji, Shingo, Hjerald (who had to be dragged, having discovered that a bunch of local Goth teens had heard about his story and begun a Church of Holy Hjerald, total congregation: eleven) and Meredith decided that the only way to possibly discover any answers (short of leaving on a boat, as several men in town had done) would be to follow their original plan—scour the Kawaminami’s library for anything that might provide a clue to the chaos erupting all around them.

None of them needed to mention that their suspicions had become a conviction—all of this was in some way related to the events that had taken place in Germany. Candles and lamps in hand, they opened the broad hardwood doors that led to the wrought iron stairway, and descended into the library.

O O O

If he was anything, Rod Bristol was serious about his job. As the personal librarian to the Kawaminamis, he was responsible for not only the open resources and materials on display, but also for the closed stacks, which were valued in the tens of millions. He greeted his visitors—employers included—with a mixture of mistrust and disdain.

“Well. I suppose if you have a legitimate reason for using the library,” he began, mustache twitching, “I’ll have to allow it. But,” he finished, a note of stern authority entering his voice, “the candles must remain outside—only lamps will be permitted near the books.”

Hjerald coughed. “Ahhuhuhuwhataprickhuhuh.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” said Hjerald.

Obediently, they left the candles at the desk, then attacked the card catalogue, then spread out among the stacks looking for anything even remotely related to the madness outside. After an hour, the small research group gathered their finds at the broad mahogany table in the center of the room.

“We’ve got to be out of our
minds
,” said Shingo, “to even consider that any of this stuff has anything to do with what’s been going on.”

Meredith had to admit, looking at the pile of books, she felt a little stupid herself. It was a fine selection, and would have been the basis for a good syllabus in one of Michael’s courses, or at the least, several weeks of interesting reading.

Fuji’s pile was the one with the most treasure; it was her library, after all. She found early bound copies of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as the Icelandic
Volsungasaga
and several copies of both
Eddas
in editions ranging from recent paperbacks, all the way back to illuminated texts which predated Columbus.

June had amassed a similar pile, having located scholarly and critical texts relating to the
Eddas
in both Swedish and English, also in volumes produced over the course of centuries.

Shingo took a more generalized tack, digging out copies of
Hamilton’s Mythology
, as well as about twenty books by and about Joseph Campbell, who specialized in myth and archetype regardless of cultural basis, and was probably the closest contemporary example of the kind of scholar Snorri Sturluson was.

Meredith screened through the periodical database, locating contemporary scholarly writings on the
Eddas
, the
Nibelung
, and Norse mythology. Several times, she came across a reference to or work by Michael, and tried not to wince.

Hjerald found several books which featured children’s versions of
The Ring
and general Icelandic and Scandinavian myths, a hardcover copy in German of several issues from the comic book series
Thor
, and a copy of Walt Disney’s version of
Peter and the Wolf
.

“
Peter and the Wolf
?” asked Fuji.

“Hey,” said Hjerald. “I
loved
that movie.”

“Give me a break,” said Shingo.

“Earl,” said June admonishingly, “it is often in the children’s stories that the germs of truth may be preserved, for they still care about them, telling and retelling and passing them on, when the adults have moved on to other things.”

“Sorry, Pop. Sorry,” he said, turning to Hjerald. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you in front of the adults.”

“That’s okay,” said Hjerald. “Hey, wait a minute …”

Meredith looked around the room, and suddenly realized that they were there in support of her as much as to look up mythological references—not to mention that it gave them all something productive to do. “Well, where do we start?”

“Hagen,” said June. “Hagen and Siegfried.”

“I’ve got that,” said Fuji, reaching for a 19th-century British textbook on the
Nibelung
titled ‘
Song of the Nibelungs: A New Study.
’ “It’s somewhat dry, but it has a few concise summations of the story.

“The Nibelung itself is a treasure possessed by the hero, Siegfried, and is actually rather incidental to the narrative. The only significant involvement it has is in that it’s stolen from Siegfried by Hagen, who dumps it into the Rhine to hide it. Of course, Hagen’s plan is to eventually recover the treasure—but before he can do that …”

“He’s killed, just because he’s an evil sonnuva bitch,” said Hjerald.

“That’s right,” said Fuji. “How did you know?”

“That’s how all the good stories go,” retorted Hjerald. “That’s just how things work.”

“Ah, Weird Harold,” said June, “you have a good heart.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“The reason he was killed,” Fuji continued, nodding to Hjerald, “was for his evil deeds—particularly the murder of Siegfried.”