Cerberus the arg (“arag”? Old Norse “argr”?)
and all the wargs (wolves? outlaws? corpse-worriers?)
who follow him.
It was strange that he had seen that Old English word “warg,” derived from the German, only last night—in both his handwriting and Clare’s—in the margins of his Norton’s Anthology’s Beowulf. His hands were shaking slightly as he turned back to the keyboard:
>Enough. Who the hell are you? How do you know me? And what, exactly, have we lost?
He walked back to the kitchen and waited, but no AOL voice summoned him back. Several times he returned to the study, saw the lines on the screen but nothing new, and then walked out of the room, pacing through the dining room with its coffinlike learning machines, standing in the living room looking out at the gray rain, even going down into the basement awhile. No voice. No new message.
Finally Dale went back to the study and loaded Windows 98. He clicked on the AOL icon and tapped in his access code. The modem in the ThinkPad clicked, but the message came up,“No dial tone.” Angry now, Dale went out to the Land Cruiser and dragged in his cell phone. He hooked the phone to the modem and tried again. Now the modem found a dial tone, but the legend came up, “Unable to connect to AOL number.” On the phone itself, the display continued to readNO SERVICE. He exited Windows to DOS. The screen was empty after the C prompt. He loaded Windows and AOL again, but could not get on-line.
After twenty minutes of messing with it all, Dale ripped the phone out, exited AOL, and shut off the goddamned computer. He looked at the notes on his legal pad again. “Cerberus the arg and all the wargs who follow him.” He knew Cerberus, of course—the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the underworld, the infernal regions, the land of the dead—but he had no clue as to what the quote meant.
Whoever this asshole hacker was, he was clever and literate, but he was still an asshole.
Too agitated to try to write, Dale grabbed his parka—returning to the study for the baseball bat—and went outside for a walk. The rain had stopped and the air had actually become warmer, but a fog had rolled in. Dale guessed that he could see less than fifty feet. The black, contorted silhouette of the first dead crabapple tree along the driveway was visible, but the barn and outbuildings had disappeared. His white Land Cruiser, beaded with moisture, looked only semisolid in the weak light and creeping fog. The eaves dripped.
From somewhere in the direction of the invisible chicken coop, a dog howled. It howled again.
Dale actually grinned. After hefting the baseball bat and slapping it against his palm a couple of times, he tugged the hood of his parka up and went hunting for the hound.
The fog changed the straightforward little Illinois farm into a foreign country. The dog had ceased howling the instant that Dale had stepped off the side porch, and he could not be certain of directions, since the shifting walls of fog both muffled and distorted sounds. He walked toward the chicken coop. The house and his truck disappeared in rolling gray behind him.
We must find what we have lost.Aloud, speaking in a Jay Silverheels voice, Dale said into the fog, “Who’s this ‘we,’ white man?”
His voice sounded strange and lost in the gray blankness.
We must find what we have lost.
“Here, doggy, doggy, doggy,” called Dale, swinging the bat in one hand. He had no intention of hitting the pooch—he’d never hurt an animal, or a human being, for that matter—but he was tired of being spooked by the thing. Anne had done a lot of research on dogs before they bought Hasso, their little terrier, and she had explained how they were still pack animals—obeying a pack hierarchy, demonstrating either dominance or submission. For instance, they had never cured Hasso of licking—a classic submissive behavior most people confuse with affection. A submissive dog in the wild licks the pack leader or those hounds above it in pack hierarchy in order to receive food in return. This black dog probably hadn’t worked out its dominance/submission issues with Dale yet. He decided that he’d help it along.
We must find what we have lost.Setting aside the royal “we” for a moment, Dale pondered that phrase. He had come here to Duane’s old farm because he felt that he had lost everything—Anne and the girls, Clare, his job, the respect of his peers, his self-respect, and his ability to write—but down deep, Dale knew that this attitude was all self-pity and mummery. He still had some money in the bank; the ranch could be his again in ten months after the renters’ lease was up; he might not truly be on sabbatical, but odds favored him returning to teach at the University of Montana again next year if he so chose. He had a $50,000 sport utility vehicle parked in the farmhouse’s muddy turnaround, and it was fully paid for. He was sixty-some pages into a new novel and he had a publisher who hadn’t given up on him yet. No, he hadn’t lost everything—far from it.
We must find what we have lost.Perhaps it was a case of “what we have lost.” Not just him, but everyone in this new century. His generation, at least. Writing about the eleven-year-old kids in the summer of 1960 made Dale’s chest ache every time he sat down at the computer—not just because of the nostalgia of that half-lost summer of so long ago, but because of some indefinable sense of loss that made him want to weep.
“Yoo-hoo, dog,” called Dale, opening the door to the chicken coop. He wished that he had brought a flashlight. He stepped into the darkness and then froze as a powerful smell struck him.
Not the smell of decay, thought Dale. Stronger. Coppery. Fresh. He blinked in the dim light, raising the baseball bat like a club.
The smell of blood.
He almost left then, but he had to see. In a minute or two his eyes adapted well enough for him to make out the long, low room of empty roosts and matted straw and splattered walls.
The walls and floor had been splattered with ancient, dried blood the first time he had looked in here. They were splattered with blood now, but even in the dim light he could see that it was fresh blood—wet, dripping, some of it actually running down the rough boards as he watched.
Time to go, thought Dale. He backed out of the chicken coop, setting his back to the wall and raising the bat again. The fog had closed in tighter. The light had failed even more. Dale felt his heart pounding and his ears straining to make out any sound—the soft squelch of mud under boots, the movement of four-legged things. Water dripped from the eaves of the coop. From somewhere to the north there came a loud, strangely familiar rasp of wood on metal. The big barn doors being slid open?
Time to go. Not just back to the farmhouse, but out of here—away from Illinois and its penny-dreadful little mysteries. Back to Montana, or farther east to New Hampshire or Maine. Somewhere else.
No. Here is where we can find what we have lost.The thought made him stop, not just because it had come unbidden and out of context, but because it seemed to have been stated in a mental voice other than his own.
Dale was striding quickly now, trying to keep his boots from being swallowed in the mud, listening hard for something moving behind or ahead of him.