Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time (37 page)

Around them, the revelers danced. They began to sing:

Take the flame inside you.

IV.

Vaenev heard a footstep in the darkness.

He ran to his door, fumbled with the latch, and groped his way out into the corridor. He came first to his sister’s room. He pounded softly on the door.

“Mora, please. Let me in. I’m afraid.”

His voice echoed in the dark, empty house.

He went to Aerin’s door, whimpering. He crouched down and scratched at the wood.

“Help me, Aerin. Help me.”

Floorboards creaked at the end of the corridor. He looked up.

“Is that you?”

V.

The parents returned in the morning to find only Mora, naked on her bed, bleeding from long gashes in her back. She was feverish, and lay near death for many days, while her father and mother nursed her. Sometimes she screamed in the night. Later, when she seemed to come back to herself, she brooded for long hours and would say nothing of what had happened to her.

A priest was called, but she would not tell him anything either, although it was lawful for her to do so. After examining her, the priest said to her parents, “These are holy things which have come to pass, and by their holiness they are made even more terrible. When the divine touches each of us, we know it by our terror. Do not seek an explanation. There is none. With the Goddess dead, holiness is directionless in our age. We may only hope that these random miracles are like fortune sticks, randomly cast, from which meaning may be drawn. We may hope for a revelation, that we may know the day when our epoch is to end, and a new god or goddess will be born. You, especially, may hope that this will have been the final sign, that there will be no more destruction of innocents. Take comfort in that. Do not despair.”

But the priest saw that the parents would not be comforted. There was little he could do. He hung a charm over the girl’s bed and went away.

Within a few weeks, it was evident that Mora was with child. By the end of the first month, the child began to speak within her womb. The priest returned, with many attendants this time, and they bore her away in a litter.

Aerin, the parents later learned, had been discovered in the very throne room of the Guardian, marvelously transfigured, filled with a kind of fire that did not burn. He spoke much, and shouted and sang and wept. He had many voices, some those of people dead for thousands of years. His parents could not get in to see him. The sentry at the gate of the inner city shook his head sadly and said only that there was a ward in the palace where such people were kept, so that clerks might write down their every utterance, and the priests might study the transcripts and interpret any prophecies that might be found.

Vaenev eventually turned up stuffed in a rain barrel with his throat cut.

* * * *

The parents could not be comforted, even after a year had passed. Often they wept together, or just sat in the darkness at night, listening to the emptiness of their house. It was to them that the Revelation came, not to the priests.

Once, when they sat thus, a voice spoke out of the air, “Mother, Father, do not grieve for me.”

The mother let out a cry. The father said, “Who is there?”

Suddenly the room was lit, as if with a thousand flickering candles, and Aerin appeared to them, floating in the air, transfigured with light. His mother fell from her chair to the floor and covered her face, sobbing. She thought him a ghost.

“Grieve for Vaenev, who saw nothing and understood nothing, and perhaps for Mora, through whom strangeness will enter the world, but not or me. Mother, Father, I shall return to you. The memory of the Goddess is in me now, and I see what she saw. She could look into the past, and into the future a ways, as far as her power was to extend, but not beyond. She could not see the new age. Mother, Father, I see no future at all, as if my face were up against a dark curtain. The new age is upon us. When the divine rises anew, the spirit of the old Goddess shall pass from me, and I will return to you. Mother, get up. Dry your face.”

His mother stood up, and reached out to touch him, but he vanished.

On that night the clerk assigned to him reported that Aerin said nothing, and slept peacefully for the first time.

* * * *

These were the last miracles. The time of the death of the Goddess ended shortly thereafter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darrell Schweitzer admits that he is considerably older today than he was when he wrote the stories in this book, or the novel
The Shattered Goddess
(1982) to which this volume forms a loose prequel. His others novels are
The White Isle
(serialized 1980, book 1990) and
The Mask of the Sorcerer
(1995).
Living with the Dead
(2008) is a story cycle published as a short book.
We Are All Legends
(1981) is also a story cycle. He is the author of nearly 300 published short stories, which have appeared in many anthologies and magazines. He has been nominated four times for the World Fantasy Award, once for best novella, twice for best collection, and he won it (with George Scithers) as editor of the legendary
Weird Tales
, a position he held for nineteen years. He has also edited anthologies, including
Cthulhu’s Reign
,
The Secret History of Vampires
,
Full Moon City
(with Martin H. Greenberg), and
That Is Not Dead.
He is a critic and scholar of note, and has published books about H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, the writer Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, and the requisite number of literary cats.