Chapter 12 The Cost of Our Principles #2
The sky above the stable shifted from deep blue to black. A screech owl screamed, imploring the dusk it so loved to linger awhile longer. Green and Valentina found a secluded spot high on the slope above the paddock and settled in to watch.
“You’re awfully practical about death,” Green said. “You aren’t afraid of death?”
“I am not. Why should I be?”
“I don’t know. The unknown? An ending?”
Valentina smiled.
“The unknown is my business and even the very young learn that we must make friends with endings. I am far from young.”
“Are you, I don’t know how to put it, religious? Spiritual?”
“Perhaps, but not in the way I think you mean.”
“I guess I’m asking if you believe in an afterlife.”
“I would say that cryptonaturalists rarely rule out possibilities without data, but no, I do not believe we go on as we are. I do not think we retain our personalities or memories. I do not draw distinctions between mind and brain, and brains are natural things shaped by millennia of evolution to look after our bodies. It does not strike me as likely that our thoughts would suddenly split from all physicality and continue beyond the death of the body. Thinking is a function of the body. The one invites the other.”
Green watched a yellow porch light flick on in front of the little white house and he wondered what sort of people lived there.
“That seems bleak. The loss of knowledge, of self.”
“Take a deep breath and look around you.”
Pale stars were fading into view. A soft susurrus of evergreen brought to mind the sea. The new night smelled of pine and cut grass.
“Would you call this forest in which we sit a human place, Mr. Green? A function of human thought and meaning?”
“No. I guess I wouldn’t.”
“And does that make it alien and forbidding? Is it bleak?”
“Well, no. Not at all.”
Valentina squeezed Green’s shoulder.
“Death may be a loss of humanness, of the ways of knowing to which you are accustomed. But I feel certain that human ways of knowing are not the only ways. And nothing, not death nor loss of mind nor memory, can remove us from nature.”
She placed a hand against a nearby pine and looked up at the sky.
“Drink in the stars. Feel the familiar pull of gravity on your bones. Smell the living trees. Nature is a thing of unity and renewal, change and cycles. You were a part of that before you were born and will remain a part of it eons after your death. And if ever these ideas become too distant or abstract, just pause and look around. You know what nature is and you know that it feels like home. When you feel that instinctual love of nature, your senses are trying to tell you something. They are telling you that human existence is not the only worthy kind of existence.”
Green sat silent for a moment.
“Does that mean you welcome death?”
Valentina hmphed.
“Certainly not. I, as I am now, am too in love with this world. Survival instinct is nature too. And, in any case, I am too curious to depart this mind yet. But I do not lose sight of the fact that when my time comes, I will be unfinished. We will always be unfinished because we are not meant to culminate in any fixed state or final achievement. I do not believe life is a thing that gets completed, just concluded. Truly, it would be tragic for it to be otherwise.”
“Speaking of survival instincts, you haven’t really explained what exactly we plan to do if the horned wolf or the glass fawn arrives here.”
“It’s quite simple, Mr. Green. You see, I have an immortal apprentice with a magic acorn.”
Green laughed.
“Really though, what do we do?”
Valentina pulled her backpack in front of her and produced a cartoonish-looking nubby orange pistol and the same rotten log she brought to Kinkaid Cabins.
“I brought a flare gun. The fawn appears to dislike light and attention. And I brought my spore-log again.”
She grimaced as she mentioned the log. Green recalled her wearing it on a strap over her shoulder while they investigated the area where the college kids had died. She had called it one of her contingency plans.
“The log again? What does that thing do, anyway?”
“It’s full of a potent cryptofungus called Lethe’s doorstep.
A gift from the network administrator, produced by their cousin.
If I crack it open, spores will spread over several square miles rendering everything, and I do mean everything, unconscious.
For reasons we do not fully understand, the effect tends to have a much shorter duration for humans than most cryptids.
It is a reset of consciousness that favors our physiology. ”
“Tends to? Most?”
“It isn’t a pleasant contingency, but it has saved me in the past. The discomfort upon waking from the spores is poetically distasteful.”
“I don’t think I want to know what that means.”
“Good. I don’t want to describe it.”
Valentina retrieved a chocolate brown tarp from her pack and spread it on the ground. The distant whinny of a horse seemed to mark the exact moment dusk surrendered fully to night.
She handed him a small radio.
“What’s this for?”
“We’re going to do periodic patrols, each going a different direction and meeting back here.”
“But isn’t this the best vantage point?”
“It is, unless the fawn comes from the woods behind the house or approaches from beyond the barn. We have too many blind spots.”
“Alright. Fine. So, if we split up, what is my protection from the wolf—and the fawn?”
“Your wits. Your focus. And, I would add, the unique protection of the events of the last few weeks of your life.”
“Seriously? You want me to wander these woods that have claimed, what, six human lives, completely unarmed?”
Valentina gave him a flat look.
“Yes, I do, Mr. Green. Again, you didn’t have to accompany me this evening.”
“That seems awfully reckless.”
“What is it you think we do?”
“Study nature. Not sure why that means we need to make overly risky decisions with our lives.”
“We study a very particular kind of nature.”
“Yeah. I know. The kind I’m not allowed to call monsters.”
Valentina narrowed her eyes. In the dark, she looked more than ever like a storybook witch.
“I have calmly extracted myself from the jaws of a shark made from ice and water vapor. I have studied snakes that call lightning and forests that punish trespassers. I have bargained with insects that fold distance like paper and I have a name in the private language of the Corvid Court. None of these things were monsters, no more than an African elephant or a Portuguese man o’ war.
Center yourself, Mr. Green. Caution is not the keystone virtue of your new profession. Curiosity is.”
“Uh-huh, but can I take the flare gun?”
Valentina sighed and offered the gun.
“Fine. You check the woods behind that house, preferably without terrifying its residents. I will explore the other side of the fields. Radio if you spot anything. We meet back here within the hour.”
She slung the spore-log over her shoulder.
“Stealth, for a human, is about looking where your feet are going. Do not overcomplicate it. Do not crack branches. Press the ground, do not stamp it. Do not drag your feet. Move them up and down. Stay on the balls of your feet when you can. When you cannot, step on the outside edges of each foot, then roll your weight inward as you press down. My old teacher used to say, ‘Snuff the flame of your body and kindle the fires of your senses.’ ”
Green stroked his beard, feeling a tingle of adrenaline as Valentina turned and moved quiet as a cloud shadow through the trees. Two breaths later, he was alone on the edge of the pinewoods.
He looked at the flare gun, realized that the trigger was the only moving part he recognized, and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
He had zero clue how to use the radio. The house was a distant gray smudge with bright windows.
He made for it, thinking of Valentina’s stealth advice and feeling overly conscious of his size.
He stayed on the balls of his feet for about thirty steps before his calves were burning. He had no idea how you did anything precise with your feet while wearing new hiking boots in the dark woods. So, he clomped. He clomped as gently as he could.
At the rear of the white house, Green found a large propane tank. It looked like a giant Tylenol. He crept up behind it and studied the home. No movement. Flower-print curtains soaked with buttery light.
He scanned the woods, but saw nothing. In the distance, he heard the furtive sounds of something foraging, but he felt confident that the creatures he sought would make no noise at all. Conventional animal sound was a comfort.
He walked on toward the road, glancing left and right in slow rhythm in time with his steps.
The moon crested the trees and Green was shocked by the amount of light it provided. There were shadows in the moonlight. Moon shadows. A thing he didn’t know existed.
Across the road, a silver spark drew his eye. Something had caught the moonlight, but instead of going dark again, it held the ghostly glow, kindling it to white fire.
It was the glass fawn, walking directly toward Wildwood Stable.
He froze.
At that distance, it was such a tiny thing. A strange little deer pulled from an animated film walking in the real world, a trick of light and angle.
His stomach fluttered, recalling the first time he saw that deer.
Recalling what followed it.
He pulled the flare gun from his pocket and turned in a slow circle.
The hunted had arrived. Where was the hunter?
Green knew that the horned wolf would not come with a moonlight glow to announce its presence in the darkness. It wouldn’t walk across the road with delicate care, the way the fawn was doing. It would be invisible and then it would be exactly where it wanted to be.
The fawn walked forward.
Adrenaline ran a current through his limbs.