Bestiary

The creature struck the city forty-five minutes before rush hour, in full daylight, whilst everyone toiled at work and dreamed of the beers they’d soon be imbibing.  The streets were plenty crowded; not everyone works till five.  And all those buildings that fell, they’d been full of hard-working, unsuspecting Americans.  And, as it turns out, citizens of another forty-one countries–at last count.

The creature descended from the sky with the sun directly behind it, as if it sailed the solar winds themselves.  Bright and reflective, at first it was hard to tell if there was something there.  Sunlight shifted and darkened and danced.  But when the thing spread its wings, it eclipsed the sun, albeit incompletely, and brought darkness to day.

Its talons tore through steel towers, shattered glass, smashed concrete, collapsed stairs, and snapped elevator cables; do I really need to tell you what it did to human flesh?  Its teeth were razors ten feet long, its tail half a mile of crushing granite muscle.

Eleven buildings, some forty thousand presumed dead or injured, before the creature settled atop the suspension bridge.  There, it shook out its gigantic flowing mane and roared.  A few miles distant, it sounded like a lion.  Up close, it sounded like death.  Ears bled.  Windows evaporated.  Concrete cracked, and bits of untouched buildings suddenly sloughed off in immense avalanches.

By day’s end, the expected death toll broke one million.  The creature sits there still, on the bridge, sometimes shaking its long hair or flexing its powerful wings or sweeping its tail through the river.  It broke the subways.  It paralyzed a world.  Billions watched the live camera feeds, those that still served, and what the satellites could see.  Unlike the Great Wall, you really could see this thing from space.  Awe, fatalistic and fantastic–there’s no other way to describe the numbness, the horror, the despair.

Yet, in a basement in upstate New York, two boys watch the TV with a great deal of interest.  There’s a book between them, opened to a page on which is drawn a great flying beast with the head of a lion and a long lizard tail.  It’s described as being the size of a mountain, which is only a small exaggeration.

The book’s contents are old, older than them, older than this country into which they were born, older than most of modern civilization.  Its pages are faded, so you can’t really read the names.  You can only barely make out the inscription on its leather cover, though it’s something older than Latin and therefore pointless to consider.

This particular version of the book, however, was transcribed by monks in the fourteenth century under the direction of the Mad Abbot in a small town some hours southwest of Prague, in a mountain keep that remains hidden from modern eye.  That any book escaped its library is amazing.  Despite failing eyesight, despite lackluster candles, despite the gloom of Carpathian winter, the monks whose hands touched this book rendered a perfect duplication of the illustrations, of which there were many, and the unusual phraseology within.  They may have been unable to translate the text, but they knew where to put a line and where to put an arc.

That these two boys found the book in a tunnel on the side of one of the smaller Catskills is nearly impossible to believe, especially considering the book was dry and protected, excellently preserved, surrounded by no other treasure or icon.

They had managed to read the name of this creature, and to summon it, and now they watched the television with wide eyes and mischievous minds.

One of the boys muted the sound and flipped through the book.  He did so carelessly, leaving deposits of oil and dirt from his fingers that would soon eat through the delicate pages.  It didn’t really matter if he ripped a page, there were more.  He found the picture of a snake-like thing with a half dozen heads and huge red eyes and eight long, spider-like limbs.

The other asked, “Do you think it will work again?”

“Let’s find out.”

In the hour before dawn thousands of miles away, in another city with high towers and millions of people, the creature emerged.  It dug straight up from the center of the earth.  It was like a snake, or a worm, with a mighty mouth that swallowed entire fire stations and city halls.  It wrapped its serpentine body around buildings, using its long, thin legs to climb the sides and get a good grip, and squeezed.  It might have been trying to snap matchsticks.  Rubble rained from the towers, shattering smaller structures.  It moved faster than it had any right to move.  When the military came to meet it, they thought the legs might be a weakness, but they were wrong.  Once stripped of its limbs, the creature sidewinded, like a rattlesnake, crashing into anything it could.  Its full length, if straight, was estimated to be no longer than the first creature’s tail.  Still, it leveled the city before rush hour would have started.