Gwydion

The faun was dying. Even from 300 yards away, the man could see the blood oozing down its side. He lowered the gun and its scope and shook his head. He had been born a hunter. Many families in the area depended on the odd stag, salted and cured, to wait out the worst of the winter months. But only at their most desperate would they shoot a faun (better to let it fat until early fall) and no one with his respect would ever leave a kill to wander, injured and dying. He put his gun back to his shoulder and took careful aim.

An explosion knocked the man onto his back in the grass and sent his shot wild in the air. His ears rang. He rolled onto his knees, clutching his hands to his hand, his ears ringing, his eyes squinted shut with pain. When he tried to stand, the blood rushed from his head and he passed out. Hours later when he finally woke, the sun was setting into the clouds with fire and blood. For as far as he could see, the grass had flattened away from the spot where the faun had stood. The man rolled painfully to his knees, then, using the gun as a crutch, managed to get to his feet. He limped back to his truck and drove away.

The Changeling

“Mommy, where’s Prudence?”

“Go back to sleep honey?”

“But I can’t find Prudence!”

“Prudence is fine, honey, go back to sleep.”

“But what if he’s hurt?”

Alicia glanced at her son in the rear-view mirror. “If he were hurt, he’d let us know. I’m sure she’s just found somewhere cozy to take a nap.” Rustling from behind her now. Another glance showed Terry moving luggage in a quest for the missing cat. The noise went on for a few minutes, then silence, the bed she had carefully made for Terry out of luggage now turned into a forbidding landscape of hills and mountains. She looked briefly for her son’s shape in the mess, before turning her attention back to the road. It seemed that Terry, too, had found somewhere cozy to take a nap.

An hour later, she follower her husband into the parking lot of a McDonalds, got out of the car, stretched.

“How’s Terry doing?”

She turned to her husband and melted into him. “Sleeping, mostly.” She breathed in the smell of him. Nearly a thousand miles from anything she’d ever known, and she was suddenly at home.

“I’ll get him.”

She held him for a moment longer, before letting him go and sitting back against the hood of the van. He opened trunk of their van then, quietly, “Terry?”

“Terry?”

Alicia moved around to join him soaking into the warmth of his chest. “Come on, Terry, dinner.”

“Terry?”

As one, they moved forward and began to rearrange luggage.

“Terry! Come on buddy, can we skip this?" Their search began to grow frantic.

It was Jack who saw it first. Behind his old school pack, a shimmer. He moved the pack and then stopped, staring, his wife joining him a moment later. There, in the middle of a pile of their luggage, was a disc. It was a perfect circle, though the edges were jagged and uneven. The surface was a dark green and seemed to shimmer.

Jack slowly reached out his hand and the disc bulged out toward him. Jack yanked his hand back.

“Terry!”

Their hands found each-other as Jack reached toward the disc again. This time it nearly leapt at him, engulfing his hand and traveling up his arm. Alicia felt a jerk and he was gone, leaving her sobbing. She broke down for a minute leaning against the frame of the car before, hysterically, reaching for the strange disc that had taken her son and husband. When her hand reached it, it exploded out with sudden violence and she was thrown back across the parking lot, losing consciousness with a jolt as her head hit the pavement. Her husband lay crumpled into a ball a few feet away, bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts.

The local police toyed with the notion of charging Alicia with the death of her husband and son, but relented after receiving a copy of the coroner’s report. There was simply no way that a single person could have inflicted that many wounds before the man died. When the cat was found with similar wounds, the incident was laid at the feet of “Satanists” and grudgingly put to rest. A special ran on the local news.

Terry’s body was never found.

Beauty and the Beast

Years ago, when the accords still held, we would have killed him on sight. Instead we begged with her to accept him into her service. And she agreed. Pale and trembling, she stood over him and accepted his oaths of fealty. Later, the moment would be memorialized in countless paintings each one showing a strong, erect, confident woman exerting haughty control over a cowed and shrunken beast.

The reality was more like some nightmarish dance. She flinched at his every move and her every flinch struck him like a blow. She was small and terrified. When he lay prostrate on the floor before her, it only served to heighten our sense of just how much larger than life he was.

As soon as the oaths had been bound, we rushed them to battle. I watched them the first time, from a distance. She rode in a carriage, curtains draw, and he ran at an easy lope beside. When they came within sight of the enemy encampment, she stepped out of the carriage. She was shivering. There was a long moment, and then her arm slowly came out. I blinked, or I think I did, and he was gone. Sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, he rushed the enemy’s walls. My lord blinked in surprise, grabbed the horn from his belt, sounding his captains to the attack. They shared in the glory of that victory, without spilling one drop of blood.

In the following months, the war began to turn in our favor. The Beauty and the Beast, they were called, after the old tale. They traveled up and down the front, she in her carriage, he on foot, seeking out the deadliest fights, the most desperate battles. Time and again she sent him to die and time and again he went. They were both disappointed.

The Voices

The voices, Nuriel decided, were not going to stop. They had been mumbling on, barely audible, for three straight days. Occasionally approaching coherence, but always slipping back into senile whimsy. Last night, the voices had counted ducks for two hours, pausing periodically to argue about the count.

It had taken Nuriel the first six hours to discover that the voices did not have a source. She had searched from noon until sunset trying to find a source, before giving up and trying to sleep. The voices would have none of it. Their chatter seemed to swell whenever she was about to drift off. The worst part, she thought, was that their chorus hovered just slightly below a b-flat, so that Nuriel found herself humming the true note in an effort to correct them.

She did not sleep that night. The next day she realized that her horse was completely unfazed by the commotion, if it even heard it. She resolved to put in as many miles as possible, and simply leave the voices behind. After a hard days riding, with no slackening of the incessant chatter, Nuriel tried once more to sleep. And once more failed. That had been over a day ago, and still no sleep.

Nuriel had ridden her horse to exhaustion (and almost to death) before she once more tried to rest. This time she managed to drift off. Only to wake, seconds later, to find that the voices had stopped chattering and begun to scream. Their was no mistaking it now, the noise came from inside her head (and still just below a b-flat).

The next morning dawned to find Nuriel a shadow of her former self. Their were deep gouges on her ears and cheeks from trying to stop the noise and the blood had caked in her hair, forming gruesome dreadlocks. Her eyes were blood shot and moved constantly. She was muttering incoherently to herself, in a perfect b-flat.

When the horse sought her out for its breakfast, she did not notice him until he bit her shoulder gently, then she leaped on his back, startling into trying to buck her off. She rode him hard for most of the morning.

Then, around noon, she crossed a mountain stream, and the voices stopped as though cut off by a knife. Nuriel was so startled that she fell of her horse and into the freezing water. When she had caught her horse again, she pulled out her map and circled a large section of the forest. Inside the circle, in large letters, she wrote one word: no.

She was still chuckling to herself at this little witticism when she fell asleep. Chuckling just a little below a b-flat.

"Come out!" the figure cried from the hill. "Come out and face your doom, for I will accept no other recompense."

The king shuddered in his hall and sent forth his champion to do battle.

"Come out!" the figure cried again, "Your fate cannot be passed to another."

The king sent out his picked men, next, and they went happily. They had never known defeat at his orders, and if his temper had brought him to (and past) the edge of brutality, they were richer men for it.

"Come out!" the figure cried. "No army will save you, no other will come to your aid."

The king remembered his youth, and his hand felt strong as it grasped the hilt on the wall. But his arm felt week when he lifted.

The figure was no longer on the hill, but there were screams outside. Then the gate flew open, and a shadow filled the hall.

Spiders

As a rule, Mark was not afraid of spiders. Sure, they made him nervous (and he killed them whenever he could) but some people have a genuine terror of ocotopods that Mark simply did not share.

The spider that he found in the hall closet, one morning, was a stark exception. He had gone to get the bleach, and there it was: at least a foot across, huge and hairy. Later, all he could remember of it were its fangs, or pincers, or whatever you wanted to call the things that stuck out from its mouth. They were at least an inch long, barbed and jagged. They looked wet and if you watched them, you could see them slowly closing and opening.

Mark jerked when he first saw it, then froze, tense. He tried to convince himself that it was a joke, that he was being taped, until it started to come forward in a series of staccato bursts, its movement punctuated by the clicking on the floor. Mark grabbed for the broom and swung it. The spider skipped to the side and started to climb up the broom. Mark jumped back (dropping the broom) then recovered his dignity and backed slowly into the kitchen, reaching for the phone. Then the spider was gone. He looked around the room, poked his head into the hallway while he dialed 911. No spider. He looked up.

On the hall ceiling, the spider crouched and glared down at Mark. The pincers, stilling moving in and out, dripped once onto the rug floor.

Mark backed into the kitchen, again. The spider followed him, skittering back and forth across the kitchen ceiling. Never moving in a predictable direction, but always closer to Mark. Then it paused and moved to the corner.

It began to weave a web. Mark couldn't believe the intricacy and speed with which it worked. The strands were large and the web was bigger than Mark's torso. It was round and perfect and materialized with a mechanical speed.

Mark broke out of his stupor and dialed 911. He was transferred to animal control where a woman explained to him in a condescending tone that he was panicking. There were no spiders of that size in this area. He was probably, she explained with poorly pretended patience, seeing a wolf spider. They were not dangerous and he should not worry.

Mark looked again at the spider. He convinced the woman to send out an Animal Control agent, then climbed out the kitchen window.

When the Animal Control agent arrived, Mark followed him inside. The spider was gone. The agent, not even bothering to hide a snear, repeated the woman's spiel about wolf spiders and then drove away while Mark watched, dazed, from his porch.

He considered getting a hotel for the night, but the back of his mind wouldn't let him accept the blow to his pride. He stood, undecided, on the porch for a full half-hour, before he heard a kind of shriek from inside the house.

When Mark reached the kitchen, the neighbor's cat was lashing inside a second web on the kitchen counter. The spider circled, throwing out more webbing. Mark jumped forward, grabbed the cat, and fled the house. He returned the neighbors cat and went to get a hotel.

He called a real estate agent.

The Prayer

Long ago, a man decided to remove himself from the world of men in order to dedicate himself wholly to the worship of his God. He traveled to the farthest countries across the widest seas and built himself a cottage atop the highest mountain. Then, he settled himself for prayer.

He had only just settled his mind to worship, when he heard a scratching at his door. At first he was annoyed, thinking that someone had followed him to his mountain refuge, but when he opened the door, he found only a small lynx whose leg had been crushed by a rock.

"Well," the man said to himself, "there is plenty of time for prayer. I will not turn away anyone seeking my help." He carefully tended the lynx, washing the cuts and scrapes and setting the leg. For a whole month he tended to the lynx's every need while its leg healed. Then one day, the cast came off and the lynx ran off down the side of the mountain.

The man sighed happily and settled himself for prayer. He had not been at it for five minutes when he heard a noise at his window. He ignored it for several minutes, but when it continued he strode purposefully to the window and flung it open. There on the sill was a little wren with a broken wing.

"Well," the man said to himself, "there is plenty of time for prayer. I will not turn away anyone seeking my help." Just like the lynx, the man brought the wren inside, cared for its wounds, saw to its health, and set it free.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the man lived on top of his mountain, but each time he would begin to pray another injured animal would find its way to his door. Each time, he would welcome the animal into his home and into his heart.

The man grew old, as man will, and eventually died. So much of his time had been spent caring for the animals, that in all of his years living on top of the mountain, only a few precious hours had been spent in prayer. Upon dying, the man found himself outside of a great palace. Through the window he could see a figure that was somehow both terrifyingly unknowable and comfortingly familiar.

The figure was concentrating deeply on something, but the man could not understand the words and symbols that the figure wrote. This work, the man knew, was of supreme importance. This work mattered more than anything that had ever been done or would ever be done. Deciding not to bother this great figure from its great work, the man looked around for some other shelter to protect him from the elements.

The figure paused and looked at the man, then strode to the great gate of the palace. "Come in," the figure said "I will not turn away anyone seeking my help."