Old Dark Things

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

  Ravens, like most birds, love to fly. A large part of a raven's brain is dedicated to enjoying the swoop and the dive, the wheel and the powerful beating of wings. Ravens dream about flying, just like people, only when a raven wakes up, it keeps dreaming.

  And Gnissa loved to fly for one further reason. He took unending pleasure in soaring above the two-legged earth-bound folk in order to mock them with his command of the skies, to remind them, whenever he could, what they were missing out on. He would dive at the children who watched the fields, and then joyfully dodge their clumsy sling-stones. He would cry out in jeering, raucous croaks at men on lumbering wagons pulled by dull oxen. He would turn on his wings as they watched him with envy.

  Gnissa was a firm believer that it is the small things in life that brought joy.

  Sweeping through the rich red air of a very fine twilight, Gnissa burst out of the forest of the Veld and wheeled upwards. A climb that set him on a line for Snoro's house in the hills.

  Orange firelight bloomed about the entrance of the cave. The door was open, so that only a curtain of rank hide stood against the night. As soon as Gnissa hopped under the hide he felt hot air press him like a pair of clammy hands.

  "You are letting the chill in." Snoro was hunched over his stone-cut desk at the far end of the cave, pondering his one great treasure: The Book. The cave had once, long ago, been just that, a cave. Muddy, and uneven, narrow, damp and generally miserable. But like all his folk, Snoro had a knack for chipping away at stone to make a place more pleasant, and the small cavern was now a den of comfort. Heavy rugs and furs of the best and plushest sorts strewed the floor. The walls were cut straight and smooth, and hung with tapestries to trap the warmth. By the massive desk, itself cut from the bedrock, Snoro had constructed a comfortable cot. Food, tools and the necessities of life were locked up in the lean-to outside the cave.

  "You should bar your cave, Snoro, with that heavy oak door of yours. One of these days the folk of the village will grow tired of you, or less afraid, and you'll wake up with a slit throat and warm blood all over your chest."

  "But how would you come and go and bother me as you please if I shut the door?" Snoro twisted about on his stool and the firelight danced in his glistening eyes as he showed a sharp, toothy smile. "Then, again maybe I should? Keep the pests out."

  "Nasty creature. Got anything to eat?"

  With a wave of long fingers Snoro resumed his studies and said, "By the fire. I left you a plate of scraps."

  On the earthenware plate was a pile of bones, some fat and gristle, a strip of meat. Gnissa gulped down a piece of fat with three uncomfortable throws of the head, "I meant to ask you, has the bodyless hunter undone your little curse. I expect he's nutted out a countercharm by now."

  "Yes. I felt it tatter apart this morning."

  Gnissa pecked at a grisly joint. "Not in a stamping, beard-pulling rage, then? Not thumping your feet and dancing an angry gig? You're getting old, Snoro. Maybe you'll die before me after all. Just so you know, I'll be sure to peck your bones clean. It is a great honour among ravens, you know."

  "And if you die first I'll have you stuffed and mounted for my desk. A great honour, you know."

  "Thank you." Gnissa stretched his wings and beat them. "Are you going to go down and meet the bodyless one? He's probably looking forward to it." A croak of a yawn. Snoro just nodded and hummed under his breath. "You know, it's rude to keep a creature like that one waiting. And dangerous."

  "Perhaps." Snoro shrugged and made a note with a scratch of his quill. Gnissa tried stripping the feathery tatters of flesh and sinew from a bone but soon gave up and hopped nearer the fire, where he began smoothing and grooming his feathers.

  "You know, Snoro?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't understand you. Perhaps it is not for a bird to understand your sort."

  "Well, I am very mystical."

  "Hmph. You remind me of the story of the crow and phoenix feather."

  Snoro turned a page, stirring up a soft creak of vellum, but said nothing.

  "It's a little old tale my grandmamma told me. You see there was once this crow."

  "What was his name?"

  "It doesn't matter. It is not that sort of story. It is... what is the word?"

  "Nonsense?"

  "No. Allegory."

  "Of course."

  "So the crow, yes, the crow he was out flying about one day doing what crows do, which is to say mostly grubbing for carcasses, and cawing from tree tops, and he sees this brilliant shimmering thing down on the ground. Swooping down he finds that it is a feather: fiery all over and gold down one side and the colour of starlight down the other." Gnissa narrowed his eyes and lowered his harsh voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "He knows at once that it must have fallen from the tail of the lord of birds, a phoenix. Now, this crow thinks to himself, I can be just as regal as a phoenix, so he takes the feather and sticks it in his rump. So off he flies at once, back to his flock, and he struts about and calls himself a phoenix and won't talk to anyone. Growing tired of mere crows for company he flaps off to the mountains of the east-most south, where phoenixes live. But, when he flies up to them, all roosting in their glowing, sun-like beauty they all laugh at him. “Why, you are nothing more than a silly crow with a bright feather in your tail,” they say. And as cruel as kings, they rip the feather from his tail. So, miserable, he flies back to his flock. But after all that strutting about and mocking, the crows won't have him either. He had to go off by himself, and live by himself, and die by himself. Least, that is how my old grandmamma told it when I was just an egg."

  The pine popped on the hearth and Snoro turned another page. Breathing a sigh, he closed the book with a heavy hand, got up, stretched his curved back and scratched the line of hairy belly that protruded between his jerkin and belt. "Reminds me more of you," he said.

  "The crow? How?"

  Snoro fossicked through a heap of clothing on the floor. Finding a cloak, he fastened it around his shoulders and said, "When was the last time you spent some time with your feathered friends? When was the last time you even spoke to another raven?"

  Shifting from foot to foot Gnissa said, "I haven't see a raven for a while, and I won't go talking to rooks or magpies. Charmless creatures."

  "Bah," spat Snoro, "The woods are full of ravens. You'd rather spend time talking to me."

  "I would not."

  "Suit yourself," said Snoro with a shrug. His lips curled into a leering grin and he licked his uneven teeth. "I think that I shall wander down to the pool tonight after all. It's high time that I met this interloper, this bodyless freak, so that I may take stock of him myself. I may as well get there early and have some fun. Make yourself at home."

  Gnissa watched with unblinking eyes as Snoro shambled into the night. "Fool," hissed Gnissa. "What does a Nibelung know about ravens anyway?" He ruffled his feathers unhappily, hoped over the plate and pecked a few more half-hearted times at the marrowbones before flapping up onto a bookshelf to wait for sleep.

  -oOo-

  Snoro knew the path from his cave to the pool well; over a ferny heath, through forest and gorse the colour of rotten bronze, then down to the banks of the forest stream.

  The ruins of a long-dead priesthood still littered the forest here and there. Snoro knew of a field where very old bones were often turned up by the plough, still charred from the bonfires, ox and horse and dog and sometimes human. There were certain rituals that demanded the bones of a sacrifice. Snoro paid a copper coin a bone and kept a sack of them in case of needful times. The bones of the sacrificial still held a little of the sacred magic.

  He passed some standing stones that had been chiselled into lumpish men with hollow eyes. The boulders that overhung the stream were cut with intricate, knotted serpents too. All part of the dead religion, its god dead and forgotten, long passed to dream and dust. Snoro did not know the exact meaning of any of the river markings, but he could hazard a reasonable guess
. Danger. Trouble. Beware. Turn back.

  Groping for handholds, Snoro climbed up on top of one carved rock and swore as he scraped his left knee. He stood, winced at the dull pain and hobbled to the edge of the rock. From here he could stare down into a deep pool where the stream lingered for a while before tumbling down a little waterfall and going on its way. Stars shone feebly through rags of clouds and the moon had not yet risen. The only light was the dance of the year's last fireflies among the rushes, mirrored in the waters.

  Limping along the edge of the rock, Snoro made for an old willow that clung to the overhang with desperate roots. Leaning against the willow, he sat down and let his shoulders relax. He watched and he waited.

  Snoro did not know their individual names. In truth he did not care. But, he knew their habits. He licked his lips in anticipation as beneath the waters the first dim spark grew into a sheet of dead light. At first, no brighter than the fireflies above, the light swelled until the fireflies whirred away in fright. Soon the whole glade was shot from below with the light.

  The first of them rose from the pond like a beautiful wraith. As she stretched her slender arms, water in luminous drops rolled over skin that was naked and pearly. Others emerged from the waters too, their wet hair shining, their green eyes glistening. Though their eyes were filled with bewildering power, Snoro always thought they had a perfect sort of loneliness in them too.

  He did feel some sadness as he watched them. He couldn't help it. But the sadness sort gave way to hungry, leering thoughts. His lips curled into eager curl and he wetted them with the tip of his tongue. "Hello, my pretties, my lovely, lovely pretties. Has your king left you alone tonight? Has he gone off chasing some other pretty thing? Well Snoro does not forget. Snoro remembers. Dance for Snoro, pretties, dance."

  There were six of them now, each with skin as white as the feathers of a swan, with bodies perfect in every curve. As soon as he spoke, they saw him and stretched to their full height, reaching for him with delicate fingers. But they caught only air. Snoro always made sure to sit in a place that was out of reach. He knew full well that the young ladies in the water could not leave the water. "Now, now," he said, "none of that, look but never touch. Dance for me, dance and Snoro will watch, and Snoro will make himself happy. Snoro does not want to wet himself in your pool. He does not like to be dragged down to drown. Dance for Snoro." And as he relaxed against the tree he began running his long, hairy knuckles between his legs.

  Snoro had barely started to enjoy himself, when the women stopped abruptly. They all dove together, like ducks, almost comically, and vanished beneath the black waters. Their light though faded more gradually, the way a candle does when it is slowly suffocated under glass. Something dark and huge crept up to the far shore of the pool. It made Snoro squirm in his gut to look at it too closely. He grit his teeth into a grin and pretended not to be afraid. "By Grim's hairy breeches," said Snoro, "you could have waited a bit longer. Now you've gone and scared them away."

  "Why not splash in the water with them?" The voice was deep and had a weight to it. "Or are you afraid of the cold?"

  "You jest, shadow-thing. Unless you are mad or foolish or a god."

  "Mad? Perhaps. Foolish, almost certainly. I've never been called a god before. A demon on occasion, but never a god. No. What are they then, your water spirits? They smell like ghosts and dead bones buried in the snow, but they're something else, I think. They're not alive, but they're not really dead either. Smells something like faer tricks to me."

  Snoro let out a snort. "Undine, river woman, rusalky," he said. "Call them whatever name you will. Cold spirits. The forest king made them out of mortal souls. They are not dead, not quite, but nothing that touches them will live. It's his way, you know... his way to make sure they keep their fingers and lips for him."

  The shadow crept along the water's edge. It looked into the pool, and sniffed. It tasted the water with a pink tongue and the darkness rippled.

  Snoro laughed, he couldn't help it. "Not only do you step into their reach, but you taste their water and they do nothing? They must be terrified of you, to hide so deep. And you act like a madman. No one has drunk water from this pool for a thousand years or more.” He looked at the shadow-thing more carefully, tried to pick out its details. “You've never met water women?"

  "Rumours. Only ever rumours. I thought they were all gone perhaps to wilder places. Or the deathly magics needed to make them were all forgotten."

  "There are very few left, I suppose. And in Spring and Summer you'd never know you'd seen one at all. In those months the undine wander the woods. If you did see one of the river woman in summer, you'd think it was some woodland faer lady, at least for the last few seconds you had alive." A considering pause. "But, in winter they cannot leave the water. Alraun keeps them here. So, for a time each year we are safe to taunt them and tease them and enjoy their beauty."

  The shadow moved as swift as the stars still rippling on the pool's surface. Snoro yelped as it leapt towards him, clearing the pool and landing silently nearby. Two eyes, cold and shimmering, fixed on him, and that voice, that unnerving voice, spoke again. "I have been told you are very likely the hexmonger who has recently put a curse upon the Eorl of Vaunt."

  He kept his voice level. "I am."

  "Honest."

  Snoro made a show of examining his clawed fingernails. "I take some pride in my work. Now a little bird has told me that there is a great wolf in the woods. A terrible creature that runs bloody-mawed through the Veld."

  "That one has followed me a long, long passing of years."

  "The bird? How odd. He never mentioned it."

  "No," the shadow-thing seemed puzzled, and then irritated. "The she-wolf."

  Snoro leaned forward and grinned, "Dishonest." He grinned. "Dishonest with me, dishonest with yourself, I think." A growl like the rumble of a wounded thunderstorm came out of the thing's throat. "Ah," said Snoro, "Don't get yourself all twisted up. It's been a long, long time since I set eyes on one of the ulfhednar. The wolf-souled folk. Why, I thought your kind were reduced to stories long ago." Snoro forced his grin to slacken into what he hoped was a casual smile. He hoped the thing could not smell the cold sweat that was gathering under his armpits and down his back. "Let us chat. We are brothers. Creatures of an age gone by. We linger on in this weary world with its goddesses, bright and shadowy, and their new ways. Let us speak freely to one another as equals."

  "You ask for moot?"

  "I do."

  "Granted." It was difficult to read those cold eyes, but after a few moments of silence--in which Snoro became aware of his rapidly beating heart--the shadow-thing spoke again, "So then, tell me Nibelungr, who paid you to murder the Eorl?"

  "Now that would be tattle-telling on a faithful employer. Professional confidentiality, you understand. I couldn't say and thing. And what do you care. He's not exactly a golden lord. What is that saying? “A man shows what he is when he does what he wants." Or is it put differently? You show your true self when you can do what you please." The shadow creature was sitting down now, resting on its haunches and listening. "I've heard stories, you see. Dark stories. That man made more than a few enemies for himself in the act of fulfilling his pleasures. Let him suffer. Let him die. It's better than what he's done to some."

  "I haven't heard anything of the sort."

  "Of course you haven't". But, as they spoke, Snoro was forming an idea. He looked at the shadow and glanced casually at the tree above him. "Oh," he said, waving a dismissive hand. "It's all a matter of who you talk to."

  "Is that so?"

  "Yes. I can tell you some names. But," said Snoro, "I have a question. You seemed quite interested in the undine. Now why is that? What are they to you?" He glanced around, and looked at the next highest willow branch, appraising it, and deciding whether or not it would be easy to climb.

  "What are they to me? Bones under the leaves, Nibelungr. No more, no less."

  Snoro spoke without all
owing himself a moment to think. The shadow-thing was so close, temptingly close. He reached down from where he sat above the creature, snatched out his claw-nailed hands and then jolted back.

  Swift and black, it sprang straight for him. He barely scrambled out of the way as the snapping jaws almost had his foot.

  Snoro leapt, then heaved himself upwards. The rough bark of the willow cut his palms, and he fought desperately to get into the thinner, high branches. Once he was safely perched, his head poking out above the leaves and below the stars, he hissed and spat at the shadow-thing. It was prowling and growling, circling the base of the tree.

  "Ugly, savage, monster," said Snoro, "Hex-begotten of Lady Night's children, you loathsome worm-bedder. You limp-cocked, misbegotten muck-swine. You want Snoro's hide? You want my blood? Well how is this?" And in one claw-tight hand he waved a fistful of black fur. "I tore it from you... you... you... slathering, child-eating devil. You rustygutted, old shark-toothed night-hound. Come near me and I'll use this tuft o' fur to lay a curse so thick you'll wake up in the morning just as you are now. How would you like that? No more human body at all. Just one big, evil wolf. Forever and ever. Until the world ends, or you are finally dragged off to the icy halls of Old Lady Night by your tail. I hope she cooks your balls on a rock and eats them for dinner."

  The shadow-thing jumped up at Snoro and nearly reached him. The jagged teeth bit the air and the creature fell heavily and badly back to earth. It snarled. "I'll tear out your innards."

  "Wolfy, wolfy, can't get me! Wolfy wolfy can't climb my tree!"

  "I am no wolf."

  "Wolf," snarled Snoro.

  The shadow leapt and tried to scramble into the branches. Snoro hocked saliva up in his throat again, taking some care, he rolled the wad around in his mouth and spat. The wolf stepped aside.

  "Be off with you, ulfhednar. And never, ever dare to threaten Snoro. Snoro the Great, Snoro the Bewitcher, Snoro the Dark Heart of the Woods. He commands it. Obey or be cursed."

  A deep rumbling growl of discontent stretched long and thin. Eventually the sound submerged into a shallow whisper. The man whose soul was a wolf, the wolf who walked as a man, leapt easily to the far bank again. He paused and looking once at Snoro, seemingly caught a moment in indecision. “Oath-breaker,” said Kveldulf, “Moot-betrayer. Don't think this is the end.” With that he vanished into the dark night.

  Snoro relaxed a little and scratched his nose. His heart was thudding against his ribcage. "Stupid ulfhednar." He brought the tuft of hair up to his nose and sniffed it, squinting his eyes, and scrunching his nose. It smelled like lavender and rosemary and certain eastern spices.

  With a shrug he stuffed the fur into his satchel and sat patiently, watching the surface of the pool below. He would have to wait until dawn before he could be certain that the shadow-thing was gone. There were all manner of magics in the world that allowed a person to change into other forms. There were skinlingers who changed, wholly and physically into wolves or bears, boars or otters. There were hobs who knew how to turn into huge owls. But the ulfhednar were something else again. Their mortal self never shifted. The spirit came out of them at night, and only at night. Which meant that the dawn would signal safety. Snoro would have to just wait patiently for the sun. Beneath the surface of the water the luminous figures of the river woman began to swim again, their bodies as sinuous as eels.

  As Snoro's heart eased, beating a little calmer. If they were coming back to the surface, then the wolf-shade maybe had just run off. He grinned at his own cleverness.

  -oOo-

  The night was cold and suffocating in the forest. The demonlike claws of birches crowded the glade, waving to and fro in the breeze. Their bark was the colour of old bone.

  A small, red squirrel went scurrying through the canopy, from trunk to trunk. He was only a year old, and rather rash. Having boasted to his brothers that he would go and look at the thing-of-shadow that was sitting in the glade, he was now living up to his bragging. All the more sensible creatures, the owls and nightjars, field mice, badgers and foxes, had fled, and only the one squirrel moved in the trees. He ran along the branches, and, clinging tenuously to an impossibly thin branch, he crawled forward.

  In the glade, silvered by the starry sky, sat the massive wolf, seemingly cut out of a heap of shadows. It was, to the squirrel's thinking, no normal wolf, for normal wolves smell of urine, and fleas, dead rabbits or chewed up grasshoppers or snails, and the rancid fat of deer. Wolves eat anything, after all, even squirrels. But this wolf had an intoxicating, heady smell. It smelled of fresh springs and old summers. This was a god of wolves. A god who sat in pain, occasionally shivering, in the darkness.

  Absorbed by curiosity the squirrel barely noticed the shape that blotted out the stars above. It was only the rush of air that warned him in time. In a frantic scurry, the squirrel jumped out of the way of the snapping beak of a large raven, and bolted away.

  Gnissa snickered to himself as he alighted on a branch above the wolf. As the branch bobbed with his weight, he crooked his head and with a golden eye, he fixed the wolf in his view.

  "I was trying to sleep," he said, "but your howling and raging woke me. If I were you, and I am not saying that to be a wolf is better than to be a raven, for everyone knows that is simply ridiculous, but if I were you I would forget about it. Just leave this place behind you and head off to wherever you were going. This valley is bad for your sort. It drags you in and tries to keep you. There's a lot of strange things wandering around these forests, and not all of them can leave. Something odd about the land keeps your kind here. It collects you. I'd leave now, if I were you."

  At that the wolf trembled, and raising his head he opened two eyes of ash flecked with fire, and said, "Raven?"

  "Oh, no, we are on first name terms now. Call me Gnissa."

  "I am not a wolf."

  Gnissa clucked his tongue several times and turned his head looking at the wolf with one eye, and then the other.

  "Yes you are. I look with my right eye. I see a wolf. I look with my left. I see a wolf. Or at least I see shadows shaped into a wolf. So perhaps I see the soul of a wolf trapped in a man's body and able to assume its rightful form only at night. Or perhaps I see a wolfish demon who takes the form of a man by day. Or perhaps you're an old wolf god some ancient tribe made out of the bones of sacrificed slaves and an old wolf skull." Gnissa flapped his wings lazily. "Don't know. Snoro will know the deeper truth of it. But me? I'm just a bird."

  "I am not a wolf."

  "That so? Then what are you, Lord Not-wolf?"

  At that the shadow-thing paused, and closed its glimmering eyes tight, perhaps thinking about the answer, perhaps dwelling on what he felt in his body of darkness. The cool night whispered around them both.

  "I am... how can I explain it? I am like a dream... only not a dream. I am more real than that, but I am not a wolf. How can I be a wolf? I am a man. I was born a man and shall always be a man. I am at this moment asleep in my bed. I can feel the prickling straw. I shall die a man. One day" He shook his head and shook the thoughts from his skull. "It is true that I am haunted and shadowed by a wolf. A great she-wolf who will not leave me alone. She has followed me through the years, followed me as the decades rolled into centuries... but I am not a wolf. She is the wolf."

  "Men do not live for centuries."

  "Nor do wolves."

  "Men don't walk about at night as dreams. Men do not leave their bodies to hunt the wild woods. Perhaps you were a man once, but now? Now, I am not so sure what you are. And this other wolf? This wolf that you claim follows you?"

  "I hear of her wherever I go. From frightened widows and tearful farmers. A great evil beast, she murders babes, and slaughters dogs and tears the throats from horses. And she very nearly killed me long ago. She murdered my family. Everyone I loved. She has followed me ever since."

  Gnissa narrowed his eyes in thought, and as he looked up at the stars that sparkled beyond the beards of cloud
he said, "Now a bird doesn't know much more than the chattering of finches, and the wisdom of foxes, but, it occurs to me that I have not heard rumours of two strange wolves in the Veld. Either this other wolf is very crafty, or there is no other wolf. Just you. Do you remember everything you dream each night?"

  Somewhere deep in the throat of darkness a low growl arose and deepened. "I am not a wolf." The voice made Gnissa shiver.

  "Very well then. Perhaps I shall call you unwolf, as that is what you seem to have named yourself. So, unwolf," said Gnissa with a hoarse snicker, "why don't you go off and hunt this other wolf? This she-wolf who follows you?"

  "Do you not think I have tried? I have followed her tracks and been led in circles. I have set snares during the dusk and found them empty every morning. I have followed her scent in the dreaming. And to no avail. She is like a ghost. Unhuntable. Unsnareable. Unkillable. There are no other wolves. Just her. And if in a hundred years I cannot kill that one? What hope have I ever?"

  Gnissa coughed a raven-laugh. "Those who chase their tails are prone to falling down, unwolf."

  The creature hung its head and shuddered with each breath it drew and exhaled. Gnissa thought he could hear the beast's strange, primeval voice whispering and repeating something over and over. But soon, he grew bored by this self-pitying, self-denying creature. As he spread his wings, he said, "I will bid goodnight to you, unwolf. I will go back to my place above the fire and sleep. Properly this time. Please don't go off howling again." He was quiet for a moment. "Though I am hungry now too. A midnight snack would be nice. Hm. There is a cellar in the village full of drying sausages and guarded by a bolt I know how to slide free. I've a mind to go raid it," and he took to the air, climbing lazily. "Goodnight, unwolf. I wish you luck."

  -oOo-

  Kveldulf listened to the heavy beat of the raven's wings until they dissolved away. He sat alone in the hollow long enough for the moon to rise above the autumn canopy and cast shafts of wraithlike light across him.

  And as he sat, he forgot. The blessing of the dream was that, like all dreams, it allowed the dreamer to turn over thoughts, pick this one to keep, and this one to drop into oblivion's waters. The dream let him sift away unwanted memories, including the dream itself. By dawn, he would remember only a little of the night, and then only vaguely. He would remember the Nibelungr and his threats, the pearl-skinned, nymphet river women, the raven perhaps. But, that the Nibelungr and the raven alike had called him a wolf? That he decided to forget. He let the memories fall away, let them uncoil into the dream and felt them wash away, and crumble, until eventually each stinging thought fell into blackness and was gone.

  Whenever the forgetfulness consumed him, his thoughts ran to other things. Something had to fill up the space left in his mind. He thought about the night, the wind and the open air. His thoughts turned to hunting among the knotted roots of trees and splashing through cold streams. To wolfish things.

  And in that moment he was more wolf than man, and the wolf with a body of shadow and eyes like burning green candlelights stood, stretched his long powerful limbs, and licked his sharp teeth. The hunt called him, and he could resist the call no longer.

  He bounded away.

  He was too self-absorbed to notice that something else had been watching all of this for some time now. Something subtle and tall and elfin. A shadow among the shadows, with stars for eyes and a crown made of autumn.

  As the wolf-thing leapt off into the forest the king of the hereabouts Faer Folk watched him go, and turned over in his thoughts what he had just observed.

  -oOo-

  Deep in the forest, hidden behind a stand fir and pine, birch, oak and stony-skinned beech, there stood a farmstead.

  An old woman lived in the farmstead with her youngest son, Gunther. He was much like the farm: simple, and pleasant, and not a little rustic. He was out early most mornings, before the sun had even got up, to see to the few goats and fewer sheep he and his mother owned. Being alone in the wooded fields, he had the habit of talking to whatever was at hand that might listen, be it a curious jay or a crow or his good-for-nothing rabbiting dog.

  "Hello," said Gunther, resting his shepherd's stave over one shoulder and putting one thumb inside his cord belt. One of the older goats, Crookhorn was missing from the herd and Gunther had been trudging around searching the gullies and fields for about an hour. He hummed to himself before stopping, listening and saying to a nearby blackbird, "What's that then?" Gunther listened for the sound again. From somewhere in the grey of the predawn there was an anxious bleating and then the goat-bell. "Gone and got her horns caught in the blackberries again, I reckon," said Gunther to a tree that looked vaguely like an old man. He trudged up the slope towards a line of tall, black beeches. But as he reached the trees he stopped in his tracks. There was a crash of something large and heavy moved in the forest, not close, but not very far away either. Gunther searched the dim grey scene, and took a firmer hold of his stave.

  And then, everything was silent. The air turned heavy with it. No bleats. No clangs. He held the stave out like a spear and began whispering a prayer to the Goddess. Was that something moving in the shadows? There, by that rotten stump. Or had the stump itself moved?

  Gunther turned and ran. He could hear it now, running through the underbrush close behind. Beating the earth with his feet, Gunther threw the stave aside, ducked, wove and stumbled. Leaves blinded him, thorns tore at his arms and legs, and gasping for breath he tripped as he ran out into a turnip field that was just filling with the first light of the sun. He rolled onto his back, sweating and winded, and looked at the woods, expecting Old Alraun himself, King of Ghaists and Fears, to come screaming out. But there was nothing.

  "The wind." He said. "Nothing but the wind chasing me through the woods." He let out a shudder of nervous laughter. "Given meself a fright, I did."

  But even so, he decided he could go back for his stave and the missing goat after the sun was peaking a little higher in the sky. Though he searched the whole afternoon, and for two days afterwards too, and though his old mother browbeat him for it, he never did find any trace of Crookhorn or what might have happened to her.