THE VISITORS,
by Todd Scott Moffett
has "3485" words.
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They came out of the forest, two of them, a
small man and a small woman, and as bold as you please walked down the lane
between the houses. They held hands and frowned at each door, ignoring the
stares we all threw at them, until they came to Weaver's house and climbed the
steps and knocked. Weaver's wife opened and raised her eyebrows at them. The
small man said something, then Weaver's wife said something, and then she let
them into the house and shut the door.
All of us working outside glanced at each other. No one ever came out of the forest. There was just the forest, and the village, and we villagers, and nothing had changed since time out of mind. Now everyone's eyes found me. I was the mayor, and Weaver's closest neighbor. If anyone was to find out what was happening, the chore fell to me.
So I clenched my hammer and lidded my forge and strode to the door myself and knocked. Expecting either Weaver or his wife, I was taken aback when the door opened to a complete stranger, a man, as tall as I but not as hefty.
I raised my hammer to my chest. "Who are you?"
"I live here," he said.
"No, you don't," I said. "Where's Weaver? Where is his wife?"
"I'm Weaver," he said.
I stared at the man, took in his clothes, the woolen vest, cotton shirt, and leather breeches exactly the same as those worn by the little man who had walked to the house only a moment ago. Fear folded my heart.
"No," I said. I shoved the impertinent fellow aside and strode into the living room I knew so well, the many weavings and hangings on the walls, the rods stacked with spooled yarn and thread, the heaps of wool and cotton ready to be spun. A woman sitting at the wheel gasped and leaped to her feet at the sight of me--she, too a stranger; she dressed in the kirtle and bodice I had seen the small woman wear.
I shouted for Weaver and strode from room to room, thrusting each door open against the wall, but finding nothing more than Weaver's cloths and tools, his loom and his housewares and belongings. No sign of the friend and neighbor I had known all these years. Out the back door I marched, but there, too, no one at the dying vats, no sign of them in the wheat and cotton fields hunched against the forest.
I strode back into the main room, the strange man and woman standing side by side.
"Where are they?" I yelled. "What have you done to them?"
"They're gone," said the man, his face hard. "Everyone goes, sooner or later."
His words were incomprehensible to me. Just as no one ever came from the forest, no one ever left the village, either. There was only one rule among us: tend your work and mind your way, and all would be well at the end of the day. So we had done our work, and we had grown vegetables and herbs in the empty lots of the village, and we had helped Farmer in the fields and Shepherd with the sheep and cattle in the nearby meadow, and our days had passed until our memories of the front end of them had vanished behind a haze of calm regularity.
"I'll be back," I said to the pair, and out I walked into the lane.
The other neighbors gathered toward me, their eyes alight with questions. I nodded them toward my house and led them inside, to the kitchen table. As they thumped and scraped into chairs, my wife emerged from her back room, hands slick with water and clay. When their questions finally sprouted in chatter, I raised my hands.
"Weaver's gone," I said. And to the following gasps, "and his wife."
"Well, what of these strangers?" said Tanner. "What did they do to them?"
"We're going to find out," I said. "Some of us need to search the forest behind their house, and some need to go back to the house with me."
We entered the lane again, split apart, some calling to others to help. My wife came with me, wiping her hands on her apron, and Tanner, and Cooper, the other close neighbors to Weaver and his wife. And so I came to the door, not knocking this time but barging my way in. This time we startled the both of them, the man carrying an armful of spools back to the loom, the woman again at her wheel. The man dropped his spools and strode for us.
"You're not welcome here," he said.
"Neither are you," I said, raising my hammer again. "Once we figure what happened to Weaver and his wife, you'll be going."
My wife and my neighbors stepped out from behind me, toward the other rooms, the strange woman reaching out toward them as if she could restrain all of them at once. But I stood my ground before the man, he as smooth skinned and blond haired as the Weaver had once been.
"Don't try to force us," he said. "Don't try to hang on."
"You've got nerve for a stranger," I said, "telling us to move on. There's only one rule here, and Weaver wasn't breaking it."
"No one lives forever," he said, raising his voice.
At that moment, a scream rang from outside--one of the women. I bolted out to the lane. Baker's wife, flour dusting her red face and hair, stumbled toward me, more villagers gathering behind her.
"There's more of them," she shouted, pointing, not down the lane where the first two strangers had come but the other way. And sure enough, six more of the small strangers stepped out of the forest. Not threatening--their faces held open-eyed looks of fear and disorientation. Nevertheless, they walked forward as if sure of their destinations. Three walked to houses, but three walked up to men and women in the lane, to Cooper and Tanner and Fletcher's wife, and looked at them as if about to plead for a meal. Far from growing angry or turning them away, the three stared back at the small strangers with wondering looks and turned and led them to their houses.
"Wait," I said, striding after them, "wait, wait."
But I could not chase down all of them at once, and before I could even cross the lane, the villagers and the small strangers had gone inside.
I reached Tanner's house only a moment after the door closed and pounded on it.
"Let me in," I cried, but I forced myself in, nearly crushing the latch in my hand. The bitter smell of tannin, carried into the house by Tanner's skin and clothes for so many years, settled over me. And bending over the hearth, one hanging a caldron, the other chopping sparks from steel and flint, were a woman and a man I didn't know. Their faces turned to me, surprised, fearful. Tanner and his wife, like Weaver and his, had vanished.
Heart ripening, I retreated to the lane and turned toward Cooper's house. But other villagers were already falling back from their doorstep, their faces stretched as long as mine. We drew near in the lane, huddled together as if for warmth. My wife stepped sideways through them, came next to me, and found my hand with hers.
"What's happening?" Tailor bustled down the street toward us, his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, threaded needles sticking to the lip of his breast pocket. "What is this talk of strangers?"
"People are disappearing," I said.
"Weaver, Tanner, Cooper, and Fletcher," said Baker's wife.
"But good workers, all" said Tailor. "I don't understand."
"We need to keep these strangers from coming into the village," said Chandler. "We need to find them out in the forest and stop them."
"They're smaller than we are," said Beamon. "We can handle them."
"Are any more coming now?" said Carpenter.
We all turned and darted our eyes this way and that down the lane. Long sunlight was stretching shadows through the forest, but no more of the strangers had appeared. I studied all my old friends, the flecks of gray in their hair, the streaks and lines and wrinkles of their faces deepened by worry and the growing darkness, and I wondered how we had changed so much--how fresh in comparison the strangers. What had happened to us? Why were my own arm and back so sore after a day at the forge, and why did the soreness linger into the next day's work? Why did I have to squint to tie my shoes, and press my belly so hard against my knee?
"What about the ones who are already here?" said Chandler. "We still outnumber them."
"They aren't small any more," said Carpenter.
"They grew up so fast," my wife muttered.
"You mean we should beat them?" said Baker, coming to stand next to his wife.
"Kill them?" said Miller. "Like we do the deer?"
"Whatever it takes," said Chandler.
His hard voice silenced us, added shadows to the shadows. But it unnerved me even more that our peace of only fifteen minutes before had suddenly bent to such talk.
"We'll keep watch in the forest," I said, "for now. We'll keep watch all night. We'll take ropes so we can tie them to trees and question them."
I myself took the first watch, with Hunter and Forester. My words with them, two men who had much business in the woods, only confirmed my own memories, that no one had ever come out of the forest before.
"But they're not animals," Hunter said.
"No," I said. "They look like us, and talk like us. The woman stranger in Weaver's house was even starting to spin thread like Weaver's wife used to. It isn't as though they don't want to work. They almost could be us, just different versions of us."
"But they're not us," said Forester. "If they came in, and Weaver and the others disappeared, they're here to take our places. And we don't want to be replaced. That would be the same as saying we didn't want to work."
"But if there is only the forest out there, as we thought," said Hunter, "where did they come from?"
"Where do the animals come from?" I said. "You come back with a deer or a rabbit for stew, but there are always more animals out there. Shepherd comes back from the meadow with a cow or a sheep, but their numbers never change. And Forester, you chop down a tree to bring us wood, but the trees plant seeds or acorns and grow back. How do the cotton and the corn grow back after we harvest and replant each fall?"
"Then where did we come from?" said Hunter.
For that, Forester and I had no answer, but the question did not die in my thoughts, and for the rest of my time on watch, staring into the darkness, I pondered it. Where did we come from, and our village, and the forest? If we had always been here, then surely my memories would stretch back clearly through all those times. But no, there was that haze at the far end every time I had tried to think back. At some point, then--the thought alarmed me--there had been a time before my time. But what of the village and the forest? Had we all come into being at the same moment, or had they been here before? At first, I did not think that possible. Without my memories of them, without my fellow villagers' memories of them, without our interaction with them, surely they would not have existed. Unless they had interacted with someone else before us.
My heart weighed troubled in my breast when my watch in the forest ended and I trudged home. I had thought my wife would be sleeping, late as it was, when I returned. But she sat at the kitchen table, a single candle before her, and as I entered, she went to the fire and ladled soup into a bowl for me. I ate, and the broth warmed my flesh, though it could not warm my spirit.
"Any sign?" said my wife.
I shook my head.
"This is a great mystery," I said. "The man in Weaver's house said 'no one lives forever.' What if he's right? What if things are coming to an end for us? But if he's right, if things do come to an end, then how do they even start?"
My wife shook her head.
I said, "And did you see how Tanner and the others acted when the strangers walked up to them? It was as if they had been put under a spell. It was as if they couldn't help themselves. What sort of strangers could do that to a person?"
She stared at the candle, and for a moment I did not think she had heard me, her eyes wide and unseeing.
"Childer," she whispered.
Her word sparked images in my head, images that streamed out of the haze: small strangers walking through a forest, coming to a village of much larger people, stepping out of cold and darkness into warmth and firelight. Childer. The strangers were called Childer. And they had come before, just as they had come this time, unannounced, unanticipated. But the haze dispersed no further than this; no more vision or knowledge came from it.
"But if they came before," I said. "What became of them?"
"Why did Weaver and the others disappear when this lot came?" she said.
My heart pounded. "Are you--are you saying that we were Childer once?"
"We came," she said, "and those before us vanished."
"But that can't be," I said. "Why wouldn't we remember that? If we were Childer once, why don't we remember where we came from? Do you remember?"
She shook her head again. "But maybe one of them does."
Fresh from the forest, they would not have the haze of time on their thoughts as we did on ours. Now, despite my fear, despite my shock at what had happened to my dear friends, I saw that I had missed my first chance to ask.
I took my bowl to the sink, ready to cross to Tanner's--to speak to those Childer first, since I had antagonized those at Weaver's. But then came a pounding at the door, and Hunter's muffled shouts.
"They're here," he shouted to me, eyes wide, when I opened the door. "There's too many of them."
Over his shoulder, the whole village was astir, lanterns and lamps and candles bobbing in dozens of hands. Among the villagers streamed more of the small Childer, dodging the watchers from the forest, ducking under grasping hands, struggling in ropes. The larger Childer from Weaver's house, and Tanner's, and Cooper's, pushed among them, pulling the smaller from clutches, untying them from bonds. Hard words were flying, voices raised in anger and fear. At the center of the mob, Chandler thrust himself at the Childer from Weaver's house, their faces grimacing.
"Stop us from coming," the Weaver's Childer said, "and your village dies."
"I've done my work," said Chandler. "I've minded my way. I'm not vanishing."
I strode out of my house, my wife following. I fully intended to break Chandler and the Weaver's Childer apart; I fully intended to talk to the Childer and perhaps get this all sorted. But a cry rose from the direction of the forest. Forester was backing away from another small Childer, who stared at Forester as if at his future. The Childer even resembled Forester, the same strong forehead, the same shock of hair, as black as Forester's had once been. But Forester's face was set in wide-eyed terror, and he raised a club between them, and he smote the Childer on the head.
The Childer crumpled to the ground, soundless, eyes closing.
An instant of silence, and then the cries and shouts around me redoubled. Villagers swung anything they had at the Childer, fists, lamps, household wares and tools they just happened to be holding. The smaller Childer shrieked and scrambled away, but only some broke free of the mob and could run for the forest. Many more fell under the blows and remained unmoving on the lane. The larger Childer, Tanner and Weaver and Cooper and Fletcher, fought back, blow for blow, and held back the villagers who fought alongside Chandler.
Too little, my efforts, and too useless. I pulled at shoulders and forearms and fingers but could not separate the fighters fast enough. All I earned were blows to my own head from villagers too filled with fear to see who I was, or bites on the hand from the Childer who thought I was coming after them.
Then, it ended. Silence dropped, and all fell motionless. Less than half of us remained, and only four of the Childer, Weaver and his woman, and Tanner with his. Many villagers clutched wounds or stanched bleeding. I looked about expecting to see body after body lying in the lane. But I saw none. I looked for Chandler, but he had vanished. I looked for Forester. The Childer he had clubbed had vanished--and Forester had, too. It was like that all around me. The Childer that had been beaten senseless had all disappeared, and along with them, the villagers who had beaten them. I sensed a pattern--those villagers whom the Childer had come to replace had vanished if the Childer had fallen. Somehow it was all true. Somehow, the Childer had been meant to take our places.
"You self-serving fools," Weaver's Childer shouted at us all. He pressed both hands to a knife wound bleeding in his side. "What did you think would happen if you didn't let us thrive, if you didn't let us grow? Now the village is diminished. Now, perhaps, we will all perish. And you have no one to blame but yourselves."
He limped back to Weaver's house, his woman supporting him, and Tanner's Childer and his woman went back to Tanner's.
The rest of the village turned their shocked, angry, fearful faces to me.
"I have no answers," I told them, raising my voice. I turned to look for my wife--but, shock and horror--she had vanished. Someone among my old friends had killed her Childer, thus killing her, too. Now the full weight of our actions fell on me.
Through the knot growing in my throat, I said, "Go home, all of you."
But even as I said the words, the houses of the fallen dissolved into a mist that drifted into the night sky, leaving barren earth in their wake. Voices gasped and groaned, fingers pointed. All I could do was gape, so numb, so uncomprehending, at this final sign, that I turned all thoughts away from my old friends and drifted back to my own house.
I nudged the door shut behind me, and then I cried as I had never cried before. A feeling such as I had never felt overcame me, and it took me untold agonized minutes to realize that I was feeling the sense of loss. I cannot conceive of a worse feeling. It was so deep and powerful and heart-rending that I pleaded for the forest to send me my own Childer so that the pain of it would end.
But it didn't end. It only slackened enough for me to take stock of the house, which stretched empty and dark around me. I sat at the table, and sat, burning candle after candle until dawn finally came, and I felt my insides had been hollowed out. Only with the light could I piece together what was happening to me. I had lost my wife, lost my village, and soon, I would lose myself. All I could do now was wonder why it had to happen to me at all. Why live under one rule if there was another waiting, hovering about us, to step in at any time, without warning? Why test me with this loss if I did not know the reason or the cause of it? If I did not understand the way of the world, the world I thought I had known perfectly, then what was the point of how I had lived my life?
There was no point. Only my actions had given it a point. The universe would go its way, and I would go mine, in our parallel courses, and the only knowledge I could take from how things stood was that I had lived a good life, my life, and that was all I had.
All of us working outside glanced at each other. No one ever came out of the forest. There was just the forest, and the village, and we villagers, and nothing had changed since time out of mind. Now everyone's eyes found me. I was the mayor, and Weaver's closest neighbor. If anyone was to find out what was happening, the chore fell to me.
So I clenched my hammer and lidded my forge and strode to the door myself and knocked. Expecting either Weaver or his wife, I was taken aback when the door opened to a complete stranger, a man, as tall as I but not as hefty.
I raised my hammer to my chest. "Who are you?"
"I live here," he said.
"No, you don't," I said. "Where's Weaver? Where is his wife?"
"I'm Weaver," he said.
I stared at the man, took in his clothes, the woolen vest, cotton shirt, and leather breeches exactly the same as those worn by the little man who had walked to the house only a moment ago. Fear folded my heart.
"No," I said. I shoved the impertinent fellow aside and strode into the living room I knew so well, the many weavings and hangings on the walls, the rods stacked with spooled yarn and thread, the heaps of wool and cotton ready to be spun. A woman sitting at the wheel gasped and leaped to her feet at the sight of me--she, too a stranger; she dressed in the kirtle and bodice I had seen the small woman wear.
I shouted for Weaver and strode from room to room, thrusting each door open against the wall, but finding nothing more than Weaver's cloths and tools, his loom and his housewares and belongings. No sign of the friend and neighbor I had known all these years. Out the back door I marched, but there, too, no one at the dying vats, no sign of them in the wheat and cotton fields hunched against the forest.
I strode back into the main room, the strange man and woman standing side by side.
"Where are they?" I yelled. "What have you done to them?"
"They're gone," said the man, his face hard. "Everyone goes, sooner or later."
His words were incomprehensible to me. Just as no one ever came from the forest, no one ever left the village, either. There was only one rule among us: tend your work and mind your way, and all would be well at the end of the day. So we had done our work, and we had grown vegetables and herbs in the empty lots of the village, and we had helped Farmer in the fields and Shepherd with the sheep and cattle in the nearby meadow, and our days had passed until our memories of the front end of them had vanished behind a haze of calm regularity.
"I'll be back," I said to the pair, and out I walked into the lane.
The other neighbors gathered toward me, their eyes alight with questions. I nodded them toward my house and led them inside, to the kitchen table. As they thumped and scraped into chairs, my wife emerged from her back room, hands slick with water and clay. When their questions finally sprouted in chatter, I raised my hands.
"Weaver's gone," I said. And to the following gasps, "and his wife."
"Well, what of these strangers?" said Tanner. "What did they do to them?"
"We're going to find out," I said. "Some of us need to search the forest behind their house, and some need to go back to the house with me."
We entered the lane again, split apart, some calling to others to help. My wife came with me, wiping her hands on her apron, and Tanner, and Cooper, the other close neighbors to Weaver and his wife. And so I came to the door, not knocking this time but barging my way in. This time we startled the both of them, the man carrying an armful of spools back to the loom, the woman again at her wheel. The man dropped his spools and strode for us.
"You're not welcome here," he said.
"Neither are you," I said, raising my hammer again. "Once we figure what happened to Weaver and his wife, you'll be going."
My wife and my neighbors stepped out from behind me, toward the other rooms, the strange woman reaching out toward them as if she could restrain all of them at once. But I stood my ground before the man, he as smooth skinned and blond haired as the Weaver had once been.
"Don't try to force us," he said. "Don't try to hang on."
"You've got nerve for a stranger," I said, "telling us to move on. There's only one rule here, and Weaver wasn't breaking it."
"No one lives forever," he said, raising his voice.
At that moment, a scream rang from outside--one of the women. I bolted out to the lane. Baker's wife, flour dusting her red face and hair, stumbled toward me, more villagers gathering behind her.
"There's more of them," she shouted, pointing, not down the lane where the first two strangers had come but the other way. And sure enough, six more of the small strangers stepped out of the forest. Not threatening--their faces held open-eyed looks of fear and disorientation. Nevertheless, they walked forward as if sure of their destinations. Three walked to houses, but three walked up to men and women in the lane, to Cooper and Tanner and Fletcher's wife, and looked at them as if about to plead for a meal. Far from growing angry or turning them away, the three stared back at the small strangers with wondering looks and turned and led them to their houses.
"Wait," I said, striding after them, "wait, wait."
But I could not chase down all of them at once, and before I could even cross the lane, the villagers and the small strangers had gone inside.
I reached Tanner's house only a moment after the door closed and pounded on it.
"Let me in," I cried, but I forced myself in, nearly crushing the latch in my hand. The bitter smell of tannin, carried into the house by Tanner's skin and clothes for so many years, settled over me. And bending over the hearth, one hanging a caldron, the other chopping sparks from steel and flint, were a woman and a man I didn't know. Their faces turned to me, surprised, fearful. Tanner and his wife, like Weaver and his, had vanished.
Heart ripening, I retreated to the lane and turned toward Cooper's house. But other villagers were already falling back from their doorstep, their faces stretched as long as mine. We drew near in the lane, huddled together as if for warmth. My wife stepped sideways through them, came next to me, and found my hand with hers.
"What's happening?" Tailor bustled down the street toward us, his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, threaded needles sticking to the lip of his breast pocket. "What is this talk of strangers?"
"People are disappearing," I said.
"Weaver, Tanner, Cooper, and Fletcher," said Baker's wife.
"But good workers, all" said Tailor. "I don't understand."
"We need to keep these strangers from coming into the village," said Chandler. "We need to find them out in the forest and stop them."
"They're smaller than we are," said Beamon. "We can handle them."
"Are any more coming now?" said Carpenter.
We all turned and darted our eyes this way and that down the lane. Long sunlight was stretching shadows through the forest, but no more of the strangers had appeared. I studied all my old friends, the flecks of gray in their hair, the streaks and lines and wrinkles of their faces deepened by worry and the growing darkness, and I wondered how we had changed so much--how fresh in comparison the strangers. What had happened to us? Why were my own arm and back so sore after a day at the forge, and why did the soreness linger into the next day's work? Why did I have to squint to tie my shoes, and press my belly so hard against my knee?
"What about the ones who are already here?" said Chandler. "We still outnumber them."
"They aren't small any more," said Carpenter.
"They grew up so fast," my wife muttered.
"You mean we should beat them?" said Baker, coming to stand next to his wife.
"Kill them?" said Miller. "Like we do the deer?"
"Whatever it takes," said Chandler.
His hard voice silenced us, added shadows to the shadows. But it unnerved me even more that our peace of only fifteen minutes before had suddenly bent to such talk.
"We'll keep watch in the forest," I said, "for now. We'll keep watch all night. We'll take ropes so we can tie them to trees and question them."
I myself took the first watch, with Hunter and Forester. My words with them, two men who had much business in the woods, only confirmed my own memories, that no one had ever come out of the forest before.
"But they're not animals," Hunter said.
"No," I said. "They look like us, and talk like us. The woman stranger in Weaver's house was even starting to spin thread like Weaver's wife used to. It isn't as though they don't want to work. They almost could be us, just different versions of us."
"But they're not us," said Forester. "If they came in, and Weaver and the others disappeared, they're here to take our places. And we don't want to be replaced. That would be the same as saying we didn't want to work."
"But if there is only the forest out there, as we thought," said Hunter, "where did they come from?"
"Where do the animals come from?" I said. "You come back with a deer or a rabbit for stew, but there are always more animals out there. Shepherd comes back from the meadow with a cow or a sheep, but their numbers never change. And Forester, you chop down a tree to bring us wood, but the trees plant seeds or acorns and grow back. How do the cotton and the corn grow back after we harvest and replant each fall?"
"Then where did we come from?" said Hunter.
For that, Forester and I had no answer, but the question did not die in my thoughts, and for the rest of my time on watch, staring into the darkness, I pondered it. Where did we come from, and our village, and the forest? If we had always been here, then surely my memories would stretch back clearly through all those times. But no, there was that haze at the far end every time I had tried to think back. At some point, then--the thought alarmed me--there had been a time before my time. But what of the village and the forest? Had we all come into being at the same moment, or had they been here before? At first, I did not think that possible. Without my memories of them, without my fellow villagers' memories of them, without our interaction with them, surely they would not have existed. Unless they had interacted with someone else before us.
My heart weighed troubled in my breast when my watch in the forest ended and I trudged home. I had thought my wife would be sleeping, late as it was, when I returned. But she sat at the kitchen table, a single candle before her, and as I entered, she went to the fire and ladled soup into a bowl for me. I ate, and the broth warmed my flesh, though it could not warm my spirit.
"Any sign?" said my wife.
I shook my head.
"This is a great mystery," I said. "The man in Weaver's house said 'no one lives forever.' What if he's right? What if things are coming to an end for us? But if he's right, if things do come to an end, then how do they even start?"
My wife shook her head.
I said, "And did you see how Tanner and the others acted when the strangers walked up to them? It was as if they had been put under a spell. It was as if they couldn't help themselves. What sort of strangers could do that to a person?"
She stared at the candle, and for a moment I did not think she had heard me, her eyes wide and unseeing.
"Childer," she whispered.
Her word sparked images in my head, images that streamed out of the haze: small strangers walking through a forest, coming to a village of much larger people, stepping out of cold and darkness into warmth and firelight. Childer. The strangers were called Childer. And they had come before, just as they had come this time, unannounced, unanticipated. But the haze dispersed no further than this; no more vision or knowledge came from it.
"But if they came before," I said. "What became of them?"
"Why did Weaver and the others disappear when this lot came?" she said.
My heart pounded. "Are you--are you saying that we were Childer once?"
"We came," she said, "and those before us vanished."
"But that can't be," I said. "Why wouldn't we remember that? If we were Childer once, why don't we remember where we came from? Do you remember?"
She shook her head again. "But maybe one of them does."
Fresh from the forest, they would not have the haze of time on their thoughts as we did on ours. Now, despite my fear, despite my shock at what had happened to my dear friends, I saw that I had missed my first chance to ask.
I took my bowl to the sink, ready to cross to Tanner's--to speak to those Childer first, since I had antagonized those at Weaver's. But then came a pounding at the door, and Hunter's muffled shouts.
"They're here," he shouted to me, eyes wide, when I opened the door. "There's too many of them."
Over his shoulder, the whole village was astir, lanterns and lamps and candles bobbing in dozens of hands. Among the villagers streamed more of the small Childer, dodging the watchers from the forest, ducking under grasping hands, struggling in ropes. The larger Childer from Weaver's house, and Tanner's, and Cooper's, pushed among them, pulling the smaller from clutches, untying them from bonds. Hard words were flying, voices raised in anger and fear. At the center of the mob, Chandler thrust himself at the Childer from Weaver's house, their faces grimacing.
"Stop us from coming," the Weaver's Childer said, "and your village dies."
"I've done my work," said Chandler. "I've minded my way. I'm not vanishing."
I strode out of my house, my wife following. I fully intended to break Chandler and the Weaver's Childer apart; I fully intended to talk to the Childer and perhaps get this all sorted. But a cry rose from the direction of the forest. Forester was backing away from another small Childer, who stared at Forester as if at his future. The Childer even resembled Forester, the same strong forehead, the same shock of hair, as black as Forester's had once been. But Forester's face was set in wide-eyed terror, and he raised a club between them, and he smote the Childer on the head.
The Childer crumpled to the ground, soundless, eyes closing.
An instant of silence, and then the cries and shouts around me redoubled. Villagers swung anything they had at the Childer, fists, lamps, household wares and tools they just happened to be holding. The smaller Childer shrieked and scrambled away, but only some broke free of the mob and could run for the forest. Many more fell under the blows and remained unmoving on the lane. The larger Childer, Tanner and Weaver and Cooper and Fletcher, fought back, blow for blow, and held back the villagers who fought alongside Chandler.
Too little, my efforts, and too useless. I pulled at shoulders and forearms and fingers but could not separate the fighters fast enough. All I earned were blows to my own head from villagers too filled with fear to see who I was, or bites on the hand from the Childer who thought I was coming after them.
Then, it ended. Silence dropped, and all fell motionless. Less than half of us remained, and only four of the Childer, Weaver and his woman, and Tanner with his. Many villagers clutched wounds or stanched bleeding. I looked about expecting to see body after body lying in the lane. But I saw none. I looked for Chandler, but he had vanished. I looked for Forester. The Childer he had clubbed had vanished--and Forester had, too. It was like that all around me. The Childer that had been beaten senseless had all disappeared, and along with them, the villagers who had beaten them. I sensed a pattern--those villagers whom the Childer had come to replace had vanished if the Childer had fallen. Somehow it was all true. Somehow, the Childer had been meant to take our places.
"You self-serving fools," Weaver's Childer shouted at us all. He pressed both hands to a knife wound bleeding in his side. "What did you think would happen if you didn't let us thrive, if you didn't let us grow? Now the village is diminished. Now, perhaps, we will all perish. And you have no one to blame but yourselves."
He limped back to Weaver's house, his woman supporting him, and Tanner's Childer and his woman went back to Tanner's.
The rest of the village turned their shocked, angry, fearful faces to me.
"I have no answers," I told them, raising my voice. I turned to look for my wife--but, shock and horror--she had vanished. Someone among my old friends had killed her Childer, thus killing her, too. Now the full weight of our actions fell on me.
Through the knot growing in my throat, I said, "Go home, all of you."
But even as I said the words, the houses of the fallen dissolved into a mist that drifted into the night sky, leaving barren earth in their wake. Voices gasped and groaned, fingers pointed. All I could do was gape, so numb, so uncomprehending, at this final sign, that I turned all thoughts away from my old friends and drifted back to my own house.
I nudged the door shut behind me, and then I cried as I had never cried before. A feeling such as I had never felt overcame me, and it took me untold agonized minutes to realize that I was feeling the sense of loss. I cannot conceive of a worse feeling. It was so deep and powerful and heart-rending that I pleaded for the forest to send me my own Childer so that the pain of it would end.
But it didn't end. It only slackened enough for me to take stock of the house, which stretched empty and dark around me. I sat at the table, and sat, burning candle after candle until dawn finally came, and I felt my insides had been hollowed out. Only with the light could I piece together what was happening to me. I had lost my wife, lost my village, and soon, I would lose myself. All I could do now was wonder why it had to happen to me at all. Why live under one rule if there was another waiting, hovering about us, to step in at any time, without warning? Why test me with this loss if I did not know the reason or the cause of it? If I did not understand the way of the world, the world I thought I had known perfectly, then what was the point of how I had lived my life?
There was no point. Only my actions had given it a point. The universe would go its way, and I would go mine, in our parallel courses, and the only knowledge I could take from how things stood was that I had lived a good life, my life, and that was all I had.
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About the Author: Todd Scott Moffett is the author of the fantasy novel The Flight of the White Horse and (along with Tina D. Eliopulos) The Everything Writing Poetry Book. He came into this world in the usual way, and he apologizes to the generations that follow if he hangs on a little bit longer. He lives with his family in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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