The wolf opened its jaws, howled.
Carrie sat up in bed, knowing even before she opened her eyes that the wolf
was at the door. She stumbled through the farmhouse, flung the door open, and
saw the lovely, silvery lines of streams growing dark, lifeless, as the stars
blanked out, one by one, and the darkness swirling over them reached out
toward the moon.
She opened her mouth, heard herself howl with the wolf as the moon began to
disappear.
She woke and heard the wolf at the door.
This time she rolled out of Zed’s bed and tripped over the brick under the
broken stove leg, so she knew that she was finally awake. She heard Zed moving
behind her, muttering drowsily until he tripped over the same brick and
cursed.
Carrie threw open the door and saw moonlight drenching everything in a misty
glow, burning the tidal strands running through the grasses, the dark and
bright mystery of living water flowing out of the hidden source within the
trees, the silent, glowing hills.
The moon’s ancient, beautiful face, her spangled fingers of light, the
streams milky with her reflection, the glittering air all but transparent over
the distant, luminous source stunned Carrie. As she stood on the threshold of
the night, she heard the song of the wolf within the eerie light transform
itself in her ears.
It was not the language of fear, she realized, but the language of love.
And then she saw her father, in the meadow under the soft touch of moonlight,
changing into shape after shape in an intricate dance of power, or the
constant folding and refolding of life in all its variations. Man became wolf
became deer became hare became bear became cougar became porcupine became
salmon leaping out of the water, became white heron became owl, soundless in
the transfixed eye of the moon. Then owl became man, hair and long beard of
moonlight, tall, hale, and older than time. Then man became Merle, her father,
the shape she knew.
She swallowed fire; she was shaking; she tasted tears catching in her smile.
Zed put an arm around her, held her tightly.
The man became raven, followed the path of the moon into night.
17
On the narrow coast road beyond the ancient forest, a mountain face covered
with trees on one side, and a long craggy drop to the sea on the other, the
limo rounded a curve and drove straight into a blinding wall of fog.
It was so thick, the world vanished. Pierce could not see so much as a weed in
a ditch beside the road. He could not, he realized, see the road. Even the
little wyvern ornamenting the long hood of the limo wavered in and out of the
sluggishly drifting fog. The driver slowed to a sudden caterpillar crawl,
causing Val to pull out his earbuds, and Leith to blink the abrupt nothingness
out of his eyes and channel the intercom.
“This is not good.”
Pierce stared incredulously at the nothing and waited for the strike from
behind, the beginning of the pileup along the steep, two-lane highway.
“Shall I try to back up, sir?”
“Mist,” Val observed with seemingly pointless interest, as though it were a
hitherto mythical sea creature.
“No,” Leith said tersely. “Don’t back up.”
“I think you should get out, sirs. I’ll keep inching along. I think now,
sirs, would be a good time for you to get out.”
“So do I,” Val said, and promptly opened a door. It scraped against
something invisible, but left room for him to slither out. Leith motioned for
Pierce to follow; Pierce hesitated.
“You’re coming, too,” he said.
“Yes. In a moment. Go,” he added, and Pierce moved finally, reluctantly, out
of the car and into the cloud. It was annoyingly damp and chilly, oddly silent
as well, he noticed, then realized why.
“I can’t hear the waves,” he said to the fraying figure of his brother,
whose red hair was the most visible thing left of him.
“No,” Val agreed. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”
“It’s fog,” Pierce protested. “It’s blinding, it’s dangerous, it is not
fascinating. And where’s our father? Did he get out of the limo? Where is the
limo?”
“Mist,” Val said again, a point of argument so pointless that Pierce ignored
it.
He turned restively, trying to spot Leith, trying to see the car, listening
for the inevitable collision of traffic, tires screaming, metal accordion-
pleating against the rear end of the limo. He heard nothing, not even the cry
of a gull. He took a few steps, one hand out to feel the trees he could not
see: a steep slope full of them, tall, thick pillars of red whose green boughs
stretched out endlessly, greedily, to gather up the cloying, obscuring wet.