Here we go. The second part, and the actual ending. Which, sadly, leaves a couple of loose ends and doesn't have room for a few things that I had meant to include… but that's life for you, I guess.
For the first time, in this story I'm including a very brief POV from the monster-of-the-week character. Hopefully that doesn't rob the story of too much of the I-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-is-going-on feel of Hunter.
The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18:
For some reason, I just can't stop thinking about what I wrote last time.
Yes, people who make the effort of putting some thought into life tend to love forests and hate cities. But why is that? Why is that really, if we for a moment abstain from cranky, cynical comments about how stupid everyone else is?
Well, for starters, I suppose, forests are alive. Everything you see around you, pretty much, is a fellow living creature. Perhaps more importantly, too, a fellow feeling creature. Everything you do in a forest will be registered, noticed, experienced. Cities ignore you, but forests see you.
Okay, so I think that if that's all you want, then you might as well just put up video cameras on every house wall, but never mind, no one listens to good advice these days…
---
Catherine felt cold and tired and wanted to sit down somewhere and have a good long cry. Seeing as she didn't have time for that, and was in no hurry to humiliate herself in front of the bozos she was stuck with, she wanted to do the next best thing and snap at someone.
Sadly, no one was saying anything irrevocably stupid at the moment. In fact, no one was saying much at all. Harold and Rick exchanged the odd couple of words about which way they ought to go, but otherwise, the party was silent.
Rick was probably the one who were handling this best, as far as Catherine could see. He had gone into his super-practical mode. That was his way of handling a crisis; he just shut down all unnecessary emotion and did whatever was reasonable to do. That was a good thing – the last thing she wanted was for Rick to break down because he was right in the middle of exactly the kind of bad craziness that he was so desperate to avoid.
Harold was looking cranky and self-pitying. Catherine could faintly make out muffled curses from him whenever she came close, and his pudgy face was covered by a petulant pout more often than not. His little adventure had gone wrong, after all; it wasn't just a predictable victory over a monster anymore. Now there was real danger, and for all that he fancied himself the champion of mankind he hadn't signed up for that. Catherine felt contempt towards him, but also a bit of guilt; it was after all true, he hadn't signed up for this, and everything would have worked out just as smoothly as every previous year if she hadn't butted in.
Deborah was looking pale and somehow unmade, like the insane situation she was in had robbed her of some basic coherence. Her face was grey and flabby like unbaked dough, and she walked with jerky motions, like her body was no longer entirely under her control.
Mel, for his part, was disturbing Catherine. She couldn't help wondering if the strain had cracked his tiny, fragile, womanising mind. He kept looking around, giggling to himself, muttering beneath his breath and shaking his head in what seemed like amused disbelief. Perhaps it was too much to ask that he might just be dealing with the situation in his own way. Hoping that he wouldn't suddenly go nuts and start trying to kill people might be a more plausible bet.
And me? Let's put the good doctor under the microscope, shall we? How am I dealing with this?
Not especially well, to be honest. But for her, it wasn't the situation in itself. She had suffered stranger… well, she had suffered more intense ones, at least. No, what got her all turned around inside was the environment. When something strange happened in the city, she could observe it with accuracy, because she could easily tell normal from abnormal in the city. The city had a pulse, a feel, an air to it that she was very aware of, and against it the Anomalous events showed up in stark relief. Out here, she had no idea what was what. What was a forest supposed to feel like? What was the song of the forest, that she was supposed to detect disharmony in? For all she knew, everything around her could be tainted, or everything around her could be completely normal and they were just ordinarily lost by now, outside of the Anomaly's influence.
Or maybe a forest is always tainted, all the time. Maybe sanity and normality ends at the city limits…
But that was probably less a piece of astute observation of the true nature of things, and more a display of personal bias. Probably.
"Are we getting anywhere?" she said as Harold and Rick stopped to confer yet another time. "If you're going to walk in circles anyway, can I sit down and wait for you to come around again? It'd go easier on my feet."
"No, no, we can't be going in circles," Rick said. "I brought a compass. See?" He displayed the little glass box. "We're heading pretty straight towards east-north-east. I'm not exactly sure where we'll end up, but we'll definitely leave the woods at some point."
"That'd be nice," Catherine grumbled. "Either way, could we take a break? My back hurts."
"I guess that can't hurt." Rick shrugged. "Let's take ten, people." He grinned. "Smoke if you've got'em."
"Anyone want a cookie?" Deborah said with frail cheer. "I brought them as a treat for tonight, but we might as well."
Catherine sat down on her pack a dozen steps away from the others, watching in awe as Harold and Rick accepted cookies.
Look at them, she thought. Lost in the woods, the path magically disappeared, something big and nasty on the loose, and what's on their mind? Biscuits. Of course, that's on purpose, I suppose. They want to think of anything except just how bizarre the situation is.
How come I can't do that? I just keep obsessing about whatever it is that's bothering me at the moment.
Except right now, she wasn't, she realised. It wasn't that she was trying not to think about their predicament, or that something else was distracting her. It was that when her mind tried to reason its way through the problem, it just didn't get anywhere. There were no loose ends to grab hold of, no leads to follow, nothing. Just a lot of random weirdness.
It would seem that she was lost in more ways than one.
Mel sat down next to her, thereby proving the truism that nothing was ever so bad it couldn't deteriorate further.
"Go away," Catherine said. "Go have a cookie. Or something. Just leave me alone. I'm brooding."
"Not really a cookie person," Mel said with a nervous little chuckle. "Too sweet."
"I notice you're not going away," Catherine said.
Mel didn't answer for a while, which was at least something.
"This is all my fault, isn't it?" he then said.
"Doubtful," Catherine said. It was partly her fault, partly Harold's fault, mostly the damn Anomaly's fault. For all that she would have loved to blame Mel for everything imaginable up to and including the Vandal sack of Rome, he seemed to be an innocent bystander here.
"No, I'm serious," he said. "This is some kind of divine punishment, isn't it?" He laughed shrilly. "Geez, I didn't mean to get all of you dragged into it with me. I just didn't know that could happen. Well, technically I guess I didn't know there really was such a thing as divine punishment, but…"
"Are you rambling hysterically?" Catherine said with mild interest. "Am I supposed to slap you? Because I think slapping you would really cheer me up right now."
"No, no, I'm just… okay, yeah, I'm a little hysterical, I guess." Mel smiled weakly. "But all of this… See, when I was growing up, my mom always used to tell me that if I was bad, the devil was going to drag me off to Hell."
"Mine told me that if I was bad – by which she meant refusing to do my chores and not being nice to my brother, mostly – I wouldn't learn the things I'd need in order to catch myself a man when I grew up," Catherine said. "I guess different mothers have different ideas about what the absolute worst thing is that can happen."
"Yeah, well…" Mel shrugged. "The thing was, it never seemed to happen. I'd cheat on tests, and steal pennies from her purse, and peek at the girls in their locker room – stuff like that. And sometimes I was caught, sure, but other times I got clean away with it, and the devil just didn't seem to notice."
"Must have been asleep on the job," Catherine said. "Shameful."
"This has to be it, though," Mel said. "Doesn't it? That's the only thing that makes sense. The devil's come for me."
"How bad can you possibly have been?" Catherine said. "I've done things that would have made your hair curl, and I haven't heard anything from the devil."
Not unless the Imbuing was some kind of twisted version of poetic justice, at least. Catherine supposed it'd make some kind of sense. If you had lots of mildly sinful people running around up there, why not use them to send the truly evil creatures of the world down to Hell? That would keep them out of trouble, and had the added benefit that sooner or later some vampire or whatnot would kill them, and they'd join their victims in the infernal regions.
But while certain of the nuttier Hunters would have appreciated that theory, Catherine found it somewhat unlikely.
"I'm not a good person," Mel admitted. "Or, well, I am. Sort of. I'm not a child molester or anything. But I have this slight tendency to take the easy way out. And I can't seem to turn down the chance for a good time…" He gave her a shaky smile. "It never seemed like such a bad thing, just trying to have a good time."
Catherine grimaced. She had a reasonably good idea what he meant, and it didn't really raise her opinions of him.
"Men usually don't think so," she said. "And hey, God's a guy. He'll probably understand." She winced. "I mean, obviously he doesn't care very much about women suffering, or he wouldn't have created fungus infections…"
"You're not taking a word I say seriously, are you?" Mel said.
"Not ever," Catherine said flatly.
That made him recover his usual obnoxious cheer a bit. He gave her what was almost a real smirk this time.
"Okay, so what do you think is happening, Doctor Smartass?"
"Mass hypnosis?" Catherine suggested. "The path was there, we just didn't register it?"
"Mass hypnosis? Caused by what?"
"Still working on that part."
Mel glanced at her.
"When you came back to camp this morning, you said that there was something big and scary loose in the woods," he said. "What was that all about?"
"You wouldn't believe me," Catherine said.
"I just told you I believe that this is a punishment from on high."
"Yes," Catherine said. "And I, having just heard that, tell you that you wouldn't believe me. That's how unbelievable it is." She frowned. "Why are you talking to me, anyway? If you need to lighten your heart, shouldn't you be talking to, you know, your actual friends?"
Mel grinned at her. This time it was his usual grin, insolent, cheery and annoying.
"Nah. If I'm going to tell someone that I got us into this mess by being evil and sinful, it's going to be someone who already hates me."
"There is some kind of unethical logic in that." Catherine sighed. "Come on, I think our ten is up…"
She got up from her pack, lifted it back onto her back, and walked over to the others.
---
The grass was still flattened from the pack when the five of them returned to the spot they had rested, about an hour later.
"No… no, this just isn't happening," Rick groaned. "I was checking so carefully…"
"If anyone needs me, I'm going to be lying down here and dying," Catherine said. She threw herself down on her stomach, pressing her face against the ground. "This is a nightmare! It's the forest that never ends! Who needs monsters? We've got endless trees!"
"Cathy, you're not improving morale," Rick said in a suffering tone.
Catherine had to admit that she really wasn't. But she had let herself be fooled, hadn't she? She had gotten caught up in the let's-pretend-nothing-strange-is-happening-and-then-maybe-it-won't-be attitude of the others. This was a forest, and if you walked far enough in a straight line in a forest, you got out of it. You couldn't argue with that reasoning. Those were the rules.
Of course, with an Anomaly around, the rules weren't applying. Hence the name, come to think of it.
So that leaves me stuck in the woods for an indefinite period of time. What the heck are we supposed to do when we run out of supplies? She mustered some wry humour. I suppose I could survive for a little while longer by eating Deborah. She's got a lot of meat on her.
"Oh, it's obvious what's going on," Harold snapped. "Rick, your compass is busted."
"I suppose so." Rick studied the compass morosely. "Though I don't understand why it should break down just when I need it…"
"Murphy's Law," Mel said sagely.
Catherine grinded her teeth. She had a pretty good idea why, and sheer bad luck didn't enter into it – not any more than usual, at least. There were Anomalies that could sabotage modern equipment, making guns click, cars stall and radios fill with static. Now, that was a disturbing fact, not just because it reduced the whole business to fists against claws, but because an Anomaly that could sabotage one tool could sabotage another. That sort of hinted that all products of modern science had some common denominator which it did not share with, say, the interplay of muscles and sinews. But either way, presumably such Anomalies could also make compasses point every which way.
"So why don't we just go back to the camp site and follow the brook out of the forest?" Deborah said. "I mean, that's what you're supposed to do, isn't it?"
"Assuming the brook hasn't disappeared," Catherine mumbled.
"Come again?" Rick said.
"Nothing. Nothing." Catherine rolled her eyes. "No, I definitely think we should all assume that the usual rules have not stopped applying and that the sane order of the universe can still be counted upon. That doesn't strike me as a risky assumption at all."
"Oh, just ignore her," Harold said with disgust. "She's been nothing but trouble since we came here."
"Hey," Rick said dangerously. "Watch it, Harry. That's my sister you're talking about."
"No, no, it's okay." Catherine got to her feet. The last thing she needed was a fight breaking out because Rick wanted to defend her honour. "Camp site. Brook. I'm all over it."
The party started moving again.
---
The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18 (continued):
They say that we are genetically indistinguishable from our ancestors 100.000 years back.
Can that have something to do with it, too? Are the images of looming trees and clinging bushes and bug-filled swamps engraved in our brains, regardless of whether we have ever seen any ourselves?
Is there a little voice in our heads saying "I should dress in animal skins. I should live in a mud hut. I should eat nothing but nuts and berries and mammoth meat. I should be a proper human being"? Because if there were, that would account for so much.
Do I have a voice like that?
If it turns out I do, I think I'm going to have to hunt it down and gag it immediately…
---
Catherine was getting tired of slogging along at the tail of the group. Her feet hurt, her back ached, her fur skirt was chafing at her waist and the berry basket she was carrying was pricking the naked skin of her side…
Woah. Stop. Halt. Run through that again, and pay especial attention to 'fur skirt.'
Catherine looked down. She was indeed wearing the skin of some shaggy animal or another around her waist so that it covered her down to her knees, along with some kind of leather strap that crossed her chest and seemed to hold something heavy in place on her back. Other than that, and the clumsily made container she was carrying, she wasn't wearing anything at all.
I'm pretty sure I was wearing something else a moment ago, she thought. This is definitely not right. I just can't remember what I'm supposed to be wearing…
"Uhm… hold on a moment," Mel said. He stopped in his tracks, his small, ratty eyes glancing out nervously through the mass of shaggy hair that covered his head. "Something's wrong."
"Is something following us?" Rick said. He took his great club from its resting place on his shoulder and gripped it in two hands. "Wolves?"
"No, it's just…" Mel scratched his head with his left hand, the one that wasn't holding the spear. "Did something just change? Like, was everything different a moment ago?"
"The wind seems to be the same." Deborah sniffed at the air. "And I don't smell anything odd. And the birds are still singing…"
Catherine made a mighty effort to keep her gaze firmly at Deborah's face. She wasn't sure why. All right, so the sight of Deborah's big, slack breasts wasn't one you treasured, but why should it make her uncomfortable? It was just stupid to wear on perfectly good skins by covering more of yourself than necessary when it was warm enough that you didn't need it…
She realised that she had crossed her arms strategically over her own emancipated bosom. She lowered her arms angrily. What was wrong with her? No, scratch that, what was wrong with everything? Why couldn't she think…?
"Oh, enough of this!" Harold snapped. "It's just your imagination, Mel. Let's get back to the camp already!"
No, Catherine thought, with increased confidence. No, I most certainly do not live in a camp. I don't know about the rest, but I don't live in anything as stupid as a camp. Every fibre of my being wouldn't object to that idea if I was.
Unless I'm going insane. There's that, I suppose.
No, Mel feels it too. We can't both be insane. You don't get epidemics of madness, after all…
The tribe started trudging along in silence again. Catherine tried to figure out what was wrong and remember how things were supposed to be when they were right, and ate a couple of berries from her basket just because she had a feeling she shouldn't. They tasted sour enough to make her mouth curdle.
The camp did look familiar, a clearing situated near a brook (well, that made sense; fresh water didn't grow on trees). Catherine didn't exactly recognise the hide tents, though, despite the fact that they looked pretty settled in. And lived in, for that matter. They smelled.
Harold heaved the young gazelle he had shot down beside the cold camp fire, then with obvious relish sat down beside it. He sighed with content to be off his feet.
"No, no, no," Catherine groaned. "This just can't be right. We're in a damn forest. You don't get gazelles in a forest, that doesn't make any sense…"
"What?" Harold said absently. He produced a flint knife and started marking out where to make his first cut on the deer carcass beside him.
"Uhm…" Catherine blinked. She had seen… hadn't she? Her vague recollection of what Harold had been carrying on the way here had trouble maintaining itself against the very tangible fact of what was actually lying there right in front of her eyes. "Nothing, I guess…"
Deborah had set to work with getting the fire started. Her means of doing so, Catherine noted, was the old rub-two-sticks-together method, which she was sure was very primitive and even ludicrous in its regressive stupidity, and she would have laughed scornfully at it if she could just have remembered any other ways of doing it…
Okay, but let's take a look at that, she thought. Primitive, eh? What do I mean by that? What's primitive?
Well, it's doing things one way when there's a more…
… effective/simple/refined/intelligent/work-saving…
… way of doing it. Like, uh…
She struggled.
… like killing a prey by throwing rocks in it instead of using a bow and arrow. Yes, that's it. Throwing rocks at things is primitive…
That thought gave her an enormous amount of satisfaction. It divided the world into the primitive people, who threw rocks, and non-primitive people, who shot arrows, and placed Catherine herself firmly into the right category.
A further inspection of her own ingrained attitude revealed that Rick, Deborah, Harold and Mel were all primitive. She couldn't exactly explain why that was so, but she knew in her heart that they had to be primitive, or else they would never have dragged her…
… somewhere…
… away from, er, somewhere else that was nicer…
… aw, fuck.
Catherine scowled. There was no context to anything! Maybe she really had gone mad.
"So I figure once we've eaten, we'll do a ritual to Gull'shush," Harold said. "We've put it off way too long, he's going to get ticked off soon."
"Gull'shush?" Mel was sitting outside of a tent, massaging his bare feet. "Who's that again?"
Harold gave him an annoyed glance.
"Gull'shush?" he said. "You know, our god? Whom we worship? We sacrifice to him, he hands us plenty of prey and good weather?"
"He's really been very patient with us lately," Deborah said. "It must have been a turn of the moon since we sacrificed anything to him, but look at the nice caribou he sent us."
Catherine looked at the animal Harold was skinning.
"It was a deer two minutes ago!" she howled. "Am I crazy, or is it the whole world?"
As a response, there was a long, high-pitched wail that seemed to originate somewhere right behind her… as in, from the heavy load on her back.
Catherine did the math. She couldn't exactly remember what math was, but she did it anyway.
"Oh shit," she said very quietly.
"Now you've woken the baby," Deborah said with gentle rebuke.
With wide-eyed horror, Catherine took the pack from her back. It was a sort of wicker basket, like the one she had been carrying. Only instead of berries, it contained a red-faced, screaming, naked infant.
Mine? Catherine thought dumbly. The kid did have blue eyes, like hers, but a lot of people had blue eyes. The brat could have been anyone's… except the situation did sort of strongly imply that she was Catherine's.
"No, no, no," Catherine groaned. "This isn't right, if I had a kid this age, my breasts should be all swollen and… aoch."
The sudden pain wasn't that bad, really. It wasn't the kind that made you scream and whimper. It was the kind that added yet another hassle to your everyday life, the kind you forgot about for long periods of time and just noticed when you thought about it. Catherine looked down. And had to admit she didn't exactly mind what she saw.
Hey, I bet I could fill out a bikini right now. Cool.
She shook her head. No, wait, stop, think this through. Who was the father supposed to be, for one thing? Harold and Deborah were an item, Rick was her brother, which left…
She looked with horror at Mel, who was scratched his head and mumbling to himself.
"No," she said. "Just… no."
"Well, hand him over," Deborah said and held out her hands. She had gotten a fire started, and Rick was sitting down to feed more twigs to it to keep it going. "It was sweet of you to carry him, dear, my back gets so tired sometimes…"
Catherine handed over the child with some relief. Right, so the kid was Deborah's and Harold's, and Catherine had been carrying her as a favour to Deborah, and she had just imagined that she was lactating – yes, a look revealed that the girls were back to being slight bumps on her chest; oh, well, easy come, easy go – and things were generally as they were supposed to be.
Except they weren't. And she hadn't imagined a thing. This was all wrong. It was stupid. It was wrong.
"It's like my life's written by some hack writer who can't keep things straight in his head and isn't allowed to go back and change his mistakes once he's made them," she said out loud.
"What's a writer?" Rick said.
Catherine groaned and covered her face in her hands. She wished she knew.
---
The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18 (continued):
While Hunters don't usually live long enough to breed, a lot of them have small children at the time of their Imbuing. I wonder if there's any hunter-net articles entitled, say, "How to balance raising children and saving the world"? Probably.
Still, it raises a significant (though not entirely original, I admit) question. If the Heralds wanted soldiers, monster-slayers extraordinaire, wouldn't they just Imbue marines and SWAT officers and so forth – preferably ones with no real attachments that could interfere with their Imbued duties? Okay, so the Heralds obviously don't want only monster-killers – even the Hunters who claim that the only right thing to do is wipe out every Anomaly in existence admit that a great many Edges seem custom-made to provide other benefits than outright killing – but even so, the Imbuing doesn't just come to people who are in a good situation to meet its demands. It seems to come to anyone, without playing favourites in any way.
The Heralds seem to be completely non-judgemental as far as lifestyles go, even to the point of sacrificing efficiency. There seems to be absolutely no one who's not a candidate for being Imbued, no matter their personality, life situation or abilities. It's like the Heralds are in favour of people, and believe that there is inherent nobility in every single living person – as long as he's not been tainted by the Anomalies in some way.
That's all very enlightened and all, but sometimes I must question their wisdom in selecting…
---
Catherine sat staring listlessly into the eddies of the brook. No one seemed to want anything from her at the moment, which suited her fine. She kept feeling like there was something escaping her, something just out of her grasp.
Maybe this is a dream, she thought. That idea was probably the most sensible one she had come up with so far. It'd make sense. In dreams, you often can't remember something very important, so you just walk around feeling generally uncomfortable about it. In dreams, things change into other things at the drop of a hat, and you're the only one who doesn't treat it as perfectly normal.
She dipped a toe in the water. It was freezing cold and sent shivers up her leg. And that didn't fit. You could feel things, in dreams, but they generally weren't as intense as all that. And in addition to things turning into other things, time itself usually kept on slipping. You never sat around being bored in dreams. You just fast-forwarded to the next interesting thing that happened.
Right now, she was confused, miserable, and, yes, bored. In fact, she could feel herself dozing off. Falling asleep in a dream? At the very least that ought to send her into a more interesting one…
With heavy eyelids, she noted sleepily that the whirls and eddies in the brook were curving in weird ways. That one over there formed almost a full circle, like an O… and there right next to it was an even stranger one, like a P… in fact, the brook was spelling out words, and it struck Catherine as very strange that she had never before realised that brooks had writing on them…
OPEN YOUR EYES.
Catherine flinched and snapped wide awake. The eddies were just eddies again, and very unlike letters.
The Heralds!
Catherine felt herself quiver in her whole body. She had forgotten the Heralds, just like everything else. She still couldn't exactly remember where and how she had learned about them, only that they sent her visions about…
Anomalies, a voice deep inside her whispered, but she didn't know the meaning of the word.
… about bad things. Whatever madness she had fallen into, they had reached into it and told her, in no uncertain terms, to snap out of it. The only problem was, she didn't know how.
Help me! she thought. Give me some real instructions for a change! I know this is all wrong, but I don't know how to get out of it!
But the Heralds never did any such thing. Maybe they couldn't. If all they were were voices from Catherine's own overheated subconscious, then cryptic remarks were all they were capable of – heck, it was remarkable enough that the vague, suppressed feelings could be turned into verbal prophesies in the first place. But either way, the Heralds were… trustworthy… as far as they went.
"You can tell, too, can't you?" Mel said, coming up behind her.
"That this is all messed up?" Catherine said, not turning her head. "Yes, I can tell. No, I have no idea why or how."
"The others haven't noticed a thing." Mel crouched down by her side. "I've tried pointing out a few things to them that doesn't make sense, but…"
"But the moment you point them out, they change so that they do make sense, at least as far as you can tell, and once they've changed they've been that way all the time, at least as far as anyone else is concerned?" Catherine said.
"Yeah," Mel said. "Like that."
"Mmm." Catherine sighed. "That technically means that if we can point out why none of this makes any sense, it'll all go away and we'll go back to reality… whatever that is."
"Yeah, but the world keeps adapting itself so that it gets rid of things that obviously doesn't make sense and replaces them with things that you feel in your gut doesn't make sense, but which you can't actually prove are impossible," Mel said.
"Kind of like arguing with a Christian," Catherine said.
"What's a Christian?"
"Beats me. Someone who's very good at not making sense, I guess."
"Hey, that's…" Mel blinked.
"What?"
"Nothing, I just…" Mel shrugged uncomfortably. "I thought I remembered something for a moment there." He shook his head. "Anyway, the reason I came over here was to tell you that Harold is ready for his big ritual thing."
"Oh, woop-dee-do." Catherine winced. "And do we know who this Gull'shush person is yet?"
"Nope," Mel said. "Except that he runs the universe, apparently. Or at least the local neighbourhood."
"Making him the one who's doing this to us, right?" Catherine said.
"I guess." Mel rose back up. "Think if we ask him nicely he'll let us go?"
"We might have more luck smacking him," Catherine grumbled, but got to her feet as well.
Harold was holding court in the camp, having decked himself up in a mouldy mountain lion pelt and painted his face and flabby torso with some red substance – caribou blood, Catherine supposed. He was prancing around in front of Deborah and Rick, making sweeping gestures and chanting what Catherine was fairly sure was completely nonsense.
The sun went down, sending the forest into utter blackness, broken only by the light of the campfire.
Hey, wait… you don't usually go from day to night in two seconds flat…
"He comes!" Harold intoned. "He comes! He comes! The great Gull'shush comes!"
Deborah gave off the kind of self-conscious scream given off by people who approach life by fussing over it until every problem disintegrated with exhaustion, when encountering something big and scary and unpleasant. It was a scream that said that the screamer was very sorry to be making all this commotion, but golly, wasn't this dreadful? Catherine's absolute disgust for Deborah was raised another notch.
"He comes!" Harold cried. "Oh mighty Gull'shush, accept our meagre offering!"
"Wait." Catherine looked around to see if any sacrificial gifts were in evidence. They were not. "What are we sacrificing, exactly?"
"Why, ourselves, silly." Deborah smiled shakily. "We give of our own number, and the great Gull'shush gifts the tribe with his infinite grace."
"I knew it'd be something like that!" Catherine growled. She took a step forward. "Harold, shut your mouth this minute or I'll ram a spear in your gut!"
"No…" Mel shook his head. "This isn't how it works… You're supposed to be ready to die for the lord, yes, but he never actually…"
"Deborah," Harold said, beckoning his wife closer. The air had suddenly grown very cold, and the wind was wailing through the trees.
"No!" Catherine grabbed Deborah's thick wrist. "Stop this!"
"It's all right, dear," Deborah said. The smile she gave Catherine looked like a skull's grin. "It's all part of womanhood. We give of ourselves, so that our boys may life."
"Like hell!" Catherine screamed. The wind was picking up. Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of roots being torn free of soil, of great trees plummeting to the ground.
"This isn't the way it goes!" Mel screamed. "This is never the way it goes!"
"It's no use!" Harold snapped. "He's here!"
And he was.
He appeared out of the darkness, a huge, thick-limped, four-legged being as black as the forest night. His eyes shone with pain and misery and tired righteous anger. He moved in an unsteady lumbering, like a tremendously strong creature that was nevertheless on the verge of being overcome with fatigue or wounds.
"Accept this sacrifice, mighty Gull'shush!" Harold cried. "And forgive us our negligence towards you, the giver of all things!"
Deborah was tugging at Catherine's grip, but Catherine resisted with every muscle in her skinny body. It was an uneven struggle – Deborah was heavier, and despite her portly form, she had some muscles under there. Catherine, who never carried anything heavier than a notebook, felt her grip slipping.
"No… please… you don't understand, I really do have to…" Deborah insisted.
"This…" Mel was gasping like he had run a mile. "This – is – not – the…"
A thundering voice suddenly boomed over the wind. While it was loud, it didn't simply overpower all the other noises. It was more like their volume had been lowered to a fragment of its usual self for the duration of the voice's words.
ON THAT OTHER MAY LIVE!
A fierce white light erupted from Mel, competing with the red, flickering glow of the fire. There was nothing very comforting about the light. It was sharp and bright and unpleasant to the eye, but it chased the darkness away with an offhanded ease that resembled disgust.
"No, you damn well don't!" Mel roared and threw himself at Gull'shush. He grappled with the gargantuan creature, and though it seemed like he should have been crushed like a bug, he lifted the monster in his grip and slammed it into the ground.
"No! You can't!" Harold wailed. "My monster! My fight! My god! You're not supposed to touch what's mine!"
Catherine hit him over the head with a spear. Harold dropped to his knees with a surprised holler.
Gull'shush tried to get back on its paws, but Mel, still shining with that merciless light, met it with a two-handed punch that struck into its monstrous face and made it recoil down towards the dirt again.
Then the light intensified until it seemed to Catherine that it must be shining straight through her, filling her with its furious radiance – and then the light was everything, and she was in the light, and the entire world was forgotten for a time.
---
The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18 (concluded):
Let's rap this up, before I really get lost in my own rhetoric.
Why do people like forests? Beats me. What is there to like? About the only possible reason that I can really relate to is that forests don't have a lot of people in them, and people frequently get really, really sick of one another. But forests, in their way, makes as many demands, as many assumptions, as many infringements on your right to be yourself, as other people do.
We built cities to get away from nature, and then promptly started yearning to go back. Where's the sense in that?
Why do we feel guilty about polluting nature? Not just guilty in the style of 'I cheated on my diet,' which is to say, guilty that we have done something that feels good in the short term but which will come back to haunt us in the long term. Actually guilty in the style of 'I have committed murder.' How can you have a moral duty to something that is utterly devoid of moral? What shame is there in screwing something that would happily screw you given half a chance?
This shame in doing something that should be morally neutral, this longing for something we have no sensible reason to long for… is it ours? Or has someone inflicted it on us?
---
Catherine was awakened by birds singing. She was lying in her tent, feeling remarkably rested despite the lumpy ground beneath her sleeping bag. Most of her body ached, though. She groaned to herself as she remembered yesterday. Just typical of that ass Harold to suggest a short cut that got them nowhere so that they had to spent all day finding their way back here again…
No. Stop. That's your mind trying to rewrite your memories into something that makes sense. But you're a Hunter. You don't have to take that. Remember it as it actually was.
She groaned again, louder this time. This Anomaly had really messed her up, hadn't it? It had thrown her back into the Stone Age, robbed her of everything she needed to fight it. She had never been made that helpless before, never faced an Anomaly that could unmake her with a wave of its paw.
But – woop dee do! – she was wearing jeans and a blouse again, and the tent she was lying in was made of cloth, not hide. She was back. She was safe… okay, maybe that was going too far, but still…
Mel. Mel saved us. He fought the Anomaly. She marvelled at the recollection. Mel's a Hunter…
She crawled out of the tent. The others were all accounted for. Rick, Harold and Deborah were breaking camp. Mel, in some kind of imitation of herself yesterday, was sitting by the shore and staring down into the brook. Catherine mumbled a half-hearted 'good morning' to the others and went to sit down next to him.
His eyes were staring blindly into the distance, and his mouth hung down in slack disbelief. Catherine found his overwhelmed state a lot more appealing than his usual easy-going sleaziness, but she could sort of sympathise, too. She knew the feeling.
"They can't remember a thing, can they?" Catherine said.
"Doesn't seem like it," Mel said distantly. "I mean, I don't think I can just go up to them and say, 'hey, fellas, do you by any chance remember how we were all cavemen yesterday?'"
"Welcome to life as a Hunter," Catherine said.
"It's not usually like this, honest," Mel said with a measure of wryness.
There was a moment of silence.
"That was supposed to be a cryptic statement prompting you to ask what I meant, so I could explain," Catherine said accusingly. "Doesn't anyone understand a queue anymore?"
"What?" Mel blinked. "You just said something about hunting trips."
"No, I said…" Catherine sighed. "Damn unimaginative labels. I said Hunter, with a capital H. Also known as chosen one, champion, slayer of evil, and all sorts of things like that, depending on who's doing the talking."
"You mean there are others?" Mel stared at Catherine. "I mean, yes, I suppose there'd have to be. I, I, I wouldn't presume…" His eyes widened. "You…"
"Me." Catherine grinned mirthlessly.
"You have had…" He shook his head. "I'm still trying to figure out what happened yesterday. It was some kind of black magic, wasn't it? And God stepped in and gave one of us the power to fight back." He paused. "Me," he said, amazed. "He chose as his instrument. Why? I'm a sinner. I'm not worthy."
He went silent for a second, then threw his head back and laughed hysterically.
"You know, that's such a cliché," he said. "But when something like this actually happens to you, it really is the first thing that comes to mind, isn't it?"
"Wasn't for me," Catherine said. "And be careful with the 'God' thing. Everyone's got their own theory. We refer to that… presence… that talks to us and gives us power as 'the Heralds,' just to avoid stepping on each other's toes."
"But it fits!" Mel insisted. "See the Devil try to snare the innocents… well, the semi-innocents, at least. See God step in and kick the Devil's infernal ass. And that voice – tell me it didn't sound to you like the word of God!"
"Dunno. Never heard the word of God," Catherine said. "That was the Heralds. And before you get all worked up about how wonderful it all is, here's some information for you. You've just joined an exclusive club of suicidal do-gooders. We fight this war in a thousand different ways, for a thousand different reasons, but one thing is the same for all of us. We die, Mel. We make it a couple of months, or maybe a year or two, but sooner or later, our luck runs out, and we die. And then the Heralds Imbue someone else to take our place, and the world moves on without us."
"I don't care," Mel said earnestly. "I've done so much wrong in my life. From now on, I'll do what's right, even if I have to die a thousand times over."
Catherine gaped. Something had just clicked into place.
"Son of a bitch…" she whispered.
"Sorry? I just meant…"
"Not you." Catherine got up with a jerk. "The effing Anomaly who's been harassing us all this time! I know what it's doing! It won last night! You kicked its ass, beat it to a bloody pulp, sent it off with its tail between its legs, and it won!"
---
Idiot, moron, numbskull, fool, buffoon, simpleton, twit, bonehead…
Catherine rummaged through her pack. She was aware of the others staring at her, but she didn't care. She was furious with herself for being so stupid, and she was even more furious with the Anomaly for putting one over her the way it had.
Oh yes, you did fine, you bastard. You got me walking around thinking I didn't have a clue. I was on your turf, wasn't I? I had to let idiots like my brother and his friends guide me, lead the way even though I knew that they weren't equipped to get us out of this. You got me to stop thinking, you asshole! You made me feel so intimidated and out of my element that I just drifted along, let you set up the rules…
She pulled her long, black coat out of the pack, unfolded it with relish. Then she shrugged out of her bright orange jacket and threw it as far into the forest as her strength allowed. She put the coat on, letting it unfurl around her like a pair of black wings. It felt wonderful. It felt like becoming herself again.
Well, let me tell you something, Gull'shush, or whatever the hell you're name is. I'm Catherine Marianne Faller MD, and I'm never out of my element! You can take me out of the city, but you can't take the city out of me, and guess what, pal? The city's coming for your ass!
"Mel, you're coming with me," she said. "The rest of you, stay put. Rick, don't let any of them leave." She glared at Harold. "Especially don't let him leave."
"Cathy, what…?" Rick said helplessly.
"What's going on?" Deborah said shrilly. "I don't understand."
Catherine gave her a contemptuous glance.
"No," she said, "you don't. You're the only one here who doesn't know even part of the truth, you poor bitch. Our only real innocent. But you're an effing moron for all that, and I despise you from the bottom of my unfeminine heart. Mel, come on."
She strode off into the woods. She thought she could recall the way well enough; it had been reasonably light out when she and Harold had walked back to camp last morning.
"So I don't suppose this is all some pretext to get me alone so you can molest me?" Mel said with nervous cheer as he tagged along after her.
"Lose the rifle," Catherine said tonelessly. "It won't help. In fact, it'll probably hurt."
Mel carefully took the bullets out of the rifle and put it down on a rock.
"You've got a plan, right?" he said.
"No," Catherine said. "But I know what's going on. That's going to give me a chance to improvise, at least."
"And if that doesn't work?"
"We get brutally massacred and our corpses are eaten by crows."
"Oh," Mel said.
"So how are you enjoying being a Hunter so far?"
It only took them half an hour or so to reach the clearing where Harold had fought the Anomaly. A huge creature was lying still in the middle of it, its neck clearly broken. It looked like a great, black bear – rare, but in no way supernatural, except to Catherine. Her every nerve screamed about how wrong the dead beast was.
"I killed it," Mel said. "Though I don't know how it got all the way here before…"
"Don't be fooled," Catherine said. "I doubt this thing can die." She kicked the black, furry back. "Hey! Rise and shine, oh mighty Gull'shush. Your devoted worshippers are here to praise you."
Huge black eyes opened. A head that was suddenly no longer balanced on a broken neck turned to regard her.
"I still don't know what you are," Catherine said. "But I think I know what your game is. Harold was right, wasn't he? Kind of right. A yearly battle, the champion of civilisation against the champion of the wild… except the stakes weren't what he thought, were they? If he ever lost, civilisation wouldn't have crumbled to dust. You'd have gnawed on his bones, perhaps, but other than that, things would have gone on the same way as always. But that could never happen anyway. You were the one who picked him to represent humanity – an overweight accountant who likes to get out here once a year and play Davey Crocket. That says something about how you see us, doesn't it?"
The Anomaly watched her passively.
"You took a dive, every time," Catherine said. "For what, though? I guess you're not going to tell me, but this looks kind of deep and metaphorical to me. And you have 'martyr' written all over you. You're supposed to represent noble nature, being victimised by the mean, evil human, aren't you? And when you lose… does it set off some kind of telepathic shock wave? Force the idea of 'nature pristine and tormented, man decadent and abusive' into the minds of every human being in the state? In the country? Stop me if I get it right?"
The Anomaly made no attempt to stop her.
"But this time I interfered," Catherine went on. "Made the big fight stop in a draw. No fuel for your little mind-whammy that way. So you went a bit more extreme. Put us in some kind of shared hallucination – a scenario that would end in Harold sacrificing his wife to you. I guess that works as a metaphor too. Callous Man, city-builder and self-proclaimed shaman, sacrificing selfless Woman, nurturer and bringer of life, for his own petty ends. And both Harold and Deborah were really easy to get to play their parts, weren't they?"
The Anomaly showed its teeth, snarling soundlessly.
"That didn't work out," Catherine said, "but the Heralds interfered and handed our boy here the power to push you back. Except that was okay too, wasn't it? The Heralds are bastards sometimes, but they're very pro-human. So you got your fight, human against nature, and you got your mind-whammy fuel. It all worked out for you in the end."
Though the snarl didn't change, to Catherine it started looking more and more like a smug little sneer.
"Well, you win this round," she said. "But next year, I'll be watching Harold like a hawk. I won't let him come to your big match. And if you try to find some other champion of the human race, I'll find him and stop him too. I don't think I could do that now, but in one year, there's no telling what I'll be able to do. My powers keep growing. Yours, I think, are static. That's the way your kind likes the world, isn't it? Static? Always the same." She smirked. "Humans rule the world because we're not. Suck on that for a year, you old bastard. Your fun is officially over. And won't it be interesting to see what happens once your emissions stop coming? How that change the way people think?"
Without a moment's warning, the Anomaly threw itself at her, but Catherine was prepared.
"No!" she snapped, pushing her voice into the Anomaly's alien brain, stopping it in its tracks.
Mel ran at the Anomaly, ready to wrestle it like last time – not surprisingly, he hadn't understood a word she had said – but she threw up an arm in his path, holding him back.
The Anomaly struck again and again, huge jaws and mighty clawed paws lunging for her. Again and again Catherine Denied the attack, made the Anomaly turn away at the last moment. Again. And again.
---
They could have remained that way forever, the woman and the beast, endlessly attacking and endlessly being held off, but ancient creature – which had indeed been called Gull'shush, the Sufferer of All Ills, as well as a thousand other names in a hundred other tongues throughout its long, strange life – was only as strong as the energy it managed to raise through its yearly ritual, through the rite it thought of as the Singing of All Crimes, and this year, it had weakened itself mightily. It no longer had hundred of shamans praising its name; they had gone out of time and mind, along with the world to which the creature had been born. It was no longer a simple task for it to conjure up worlds of dream for its enemies to lose themselves in.
The woman, however, this persistent and endlessly interfering woman, was drawing her power from a well that was nigh on infinite. If she hadn't been so hopelessly inapt at wielding it, if her tiny human mind had been capable of grasping the simplest mechanism of the powers granted to her, she could have dissolved the Sufferer of All Ills, eradicated it from existence. As it was, her tiny fragment of understanding and control was sufficient to allow her to go on using it until the end of days; of rebuffing any number of assaults and still remain standing there, filled with that hateful, merciless light.
So in the end, the Sufferer of All Ills was, for the second time during this unsettling couple of days, forced to do something that had once been unthinkable. It turned and fled.
---
When the Anomaly had disappeared among the trees, Catherine finally allowed herself to sink to her knees, trembling. Once or twice, she had felt her control slipping, had felt the Denial almost failing to keep the creature's claws from tearing off her face.
"And now what?" Mel said. "Do we hunt it down?"
Catherine shook her head.
"We can't kill it," she said. "Killing it just makes it stronger. Being killed by humans is what that thing is all about, don't you understand?"
"Nope," Mel said.
"Didn't think you did," Catherine grumbled.
"So what do we do?" Mel said, apparently unaffected by the tired sarcasm.
"We go home." Catherine got back to her feet. She felt tired, emotionally drained, but also strangely confident. The flesh might be weak, but her intellect and her Edges were in fine condition.
"But then… what was this all about?" Mel said. "Why did you want to go here and fight it?"
"To shake it up." Catherine sighed and started walking back towards the camp. "To show it that it won't always be able to catch people in that double bind it's so fond of – 'if I win, I win; if you win, I die, and then I win anyway.' To show it that sometimes, people will find a third solution."
"It was all for a philosophical victory?" Mel said incredulously, following her.
"Yes… but if I was right, it was a philosophical entity," Catherine said. "Maybe that sort of thing means something, in that case. Or not. I don't know."
"Huh… well, what about everything you said about being back next year?" Mel said. "Didn't you say that Hunters don't usually last that long?"
"It didn't know that," Catherine said. "Besides, I'm stubborn. Maybe I'll actually be alive a year from now." She winced. "Unlikely as it seems."
"There's that." Mel suddenly grinned. "Hey, if we're on borrowed time anyway, shouldn't we be making the most of the time we…"
"I have a knife up my sleeve," Catherine said flatly. "Do you want to live your borrowed time as a eunuch?"
Mel considered that.
"I'll be good," he said humbly.