Moonweavers (20 page)

“
Links told them where to meet up with them, right?” asked one of the men in the back.

The professor thought the man was a captain, but he wasn
’t sure.  “Yea, they got that all worked out.  The moon is in one of its last phases and this means that the transformation is so much slower.” The professor announces this to the others as they stop to look.  “When the moon was fresh, new and closer, the change would be in minutes but now that it is weaker, it is hours and more painful being so stretched out in time.”

“
I feel for the beast,” the big Indian said.  “Nothing should have to suffer so.”

“
From what I understand,” the professor replies, “ it’s better to have a painful life than no life at all up there on that moon.  So for Scott, even his pain is pleasurable to a certain extent.  At least it is real.”
“Arr, that’s easy for you to say,”  the pirate says.  “He is one huge growing pain right now.  That’s worse than anything I have ever done to my scurvies.  Even being skinned by the sea hag of Peru would be more enjoyable, if you ask me, matey, than to go through that.”

“
Is that how you died, captain?”

“
Actually, the English caught me, shot me in the leg, hung me and fed me to the dogs.  Those were different times though.”
“Scott, are you going to be okay?”  Tab asks in a nice, calm and gentle voice.

The wolf growls trying to respond to Tab.  Within the growling noise, they can hear
‘Goooooo.  I’ll be fiiiine.’  More definite now and deeper.  ‘’ill.  Find Link.” The wolfs cut off before he could say ‘Links’ with a howl uncontrollably as he stares straight up into the ceiling.  The hair gets thicker more pronounced along his mane.  His ears are a lot higher than they were before, along with his jaw and snout.  Almost completely changed.  He growls, barks and howls again, as the bones in his back, leg and neck snap into new positions.  Longer and more exaggerated in its appearance.  The others don’t know if the growls and howls are from the pain or maybe just the beast within, but they leave that wolf just the same. 

“
Good luck, Scott,” the professor says as he shuts the door and enters the truck with the others.  All the ghosts knew that you couldn’t use energy for too long to be in the physical world.  It drains you and then it would kill you, so they left a couple prisoners behind that they used for just these tasks to drive the trucks and move the equipment.  The two that were in the Bronco committed horrifying murders back in the 80’s as kids, but the police didn’t have enough evidence to hold them and just let them go.  So that’s when the guardians took the law into their own hands and made these people zombies, in a way, thanks to Jades manipulating powers to control the minds of humans.  So they use these two filthy individuals for their labor.  If anything it kept them busy enough to not kill any more people.  Safer for everybody really.  Without their vicious, evil thoughts, they wont be able to hurt anyone.  It was unanimous in agreement throughout the whole guard and deeply needed or else they would all extinguish each other just by moving stuff around, which is something that no one could afford or wanted to do.  Would you really want to kill yourself to rake leaves in the yard?  No.  And the ghosts feel the same way.  They know how much a life is valued, so they are not going to waste their second chance with limitations.  They learn to adapt.  The ones that they borrowed for the mission to go on top of the hill, they were well confident in knowing that Jade would change them and never think about a thing of what they did and they would go back to their happy little lives after everything was done with no one the wiser, just a little bit later to their destinations.  She will worm it into their head that they were just caught in traffic.  She has done it plenty times before and probably will do it again if they need more man power.  Its just the way things have to be.  They were just happy that these two scum buckets wouldn’t hurt anyone anymore and become useful for one day in their lives, at least.  And boy, were they.  They would mow the lawns, rake the leaves, drive the cars, move equipment, shine and clean the windows and the house and they wouldn’t have to be paid and the small cabin looks immaculate. 

The pain subsides with Scott in full wolf form.  He hurries out the door.  In a flash, he has gone after Links and the others scent up the mountain.  Using his power of speed, he catches up quickly to the others, even though they left hours before.  He sees them climbing the ridge above where the trucks parked at the bottom of the mountain.  He quickly ascends the mountain and wait
’s at the top for them.  Links could have been up there just as quick, but he wanted to make sure there would be no problems with the water container.  He knew it would be utterly useless if it would happen to spring a leak.  It would have to be air tight.  The two men carried it ever so gently up the hill like it was a priceless painting that they would have to pay for if they dropped .  At the very peak of the mountain, they all stand and Links shows them the entrance into the cave.  He moves the giant rock boulder that is wedged shut over the entrance.  As he rolls it slowly over, the hole appears from underneath.  He jumps down into the hole and the others follow.  It’s a small jump, maybe fifteen feet down, but it leads to a bigger room that goes down and down farther into the center of the cave of the mountain.  It was Links most sacred place in all of the county.  There are cave drawings all along the walls of the entrance with symbols from just about every written language ever created telling people to stop where they are at for if they go any farther they are doomed to be cursed of releasing the biggest evil ever put to man.  When they walk into the bigger room, they see seven clay pots  that are completely sealed.  Links said that in those pots were  the other black matter that was caught throughout the years were trapped.  He also said that throughout the three hundred year period, there was a clay pot for every year that he was there.  There was clay pot for every three hundred year evil release to man through the mooners shift to earth.  He also explained why he had to have a bigger capsule for this one, because it took him this much longer to find it.   He knew he would have to have a bigger capsule for it.  It only made sense to at least Links, if the others didn’t quite understand.  Now Links walks to the very end of the cave to a wall where there is a big boulder and he moves that one too and behind it is another passage, but he doesn’t quite open it all the way.  He opens it just enough to set the gap from the water tanks cap into that hole and sits down after its positioned perfectly. 

Scott asks,
“Why bring the humans?”  He knew that Links could have carried that up by himself.  He didn’t need them. 

Links replies,
“Bait.  If anything is going to drag that black matter out of that hole, it’s going to be human bait.  We just put them on the other side and wait.  That’s the way it was always done.  The dark matter is very predictable.  It likes to hide away from the sunlight and when it hides in this mountain, this is one of the ventilation shafts that leads throughout the cave.  It will be drawn toward the humans and into the water tank.  It will get stuck and then we close it up forever and leave it with those other great pots right there.  That works every time.”  The big wolf growls.  “Yea, but the mooners are always a big distraction.  Just the last three hundred years, it wasn’t wolves that we had to deal with.”

“
What was it?”  asks Scott.

“
You name it, .  It was vampires last time.  Before that, it was some god awful sea creature.  Came right out of the river.  Other times, there are fleas that get on rats and cause plagues or viruses that don’t have nothing better to do than to destroy the immune system.  You just never know what the hell is going to be coming down, but its pretty predictable in its three hundred years of terror.  Sometimes they stick around.  Other times we catch them beforehand.  Its why I am so calm all the time.  It is hard to surprise somebody who come to expect anything.  It is part of immortality.  Antiques don’t seem so old.  You don’t want to get immune to people getting hurt or killed, but it happens, after seeing so much death.”

“
How old are you?” Scott asks.

“
Oh, I stopped counting a long time ago, my dear friend.”

The two younger humans stand next to the water container, patiently waiting for something to come out of the hole and fill the giant plastic capsule. 

“All these sacred clay pots without any lids you see, Scott, these are old pots.  They were made from the Indians that lived in this area hundreds of years ago.  Thousands of years for that matter.  They were all kind tribes that lived around here then.  It was a simpler age.  They were hunters and gatherers.  Now they are all long gone, except for Bear Claw and a handful of others.  They have moved on, not from just their lives, but from their ghost lives too.  They had respect for the land too.  Not like these settlers that came in and ran them off their lands and just destroyed things.  Now don’t get me wrong, Scott, I am not against humanity.  I am just thinking that we ought to share a little wealth with the earth, instead of taking from it.  It would just be greedy to take it all, don’t you think?”

“
I suppose it would,”  Scott replied in a growl.

“
See, I knew you would understand.  That is why I am going to teach you these things.  They really need to be known.”
“Know what?”  asks Scott, curious now.

“
Know that if you fuck with mother nature, well, lets just put it this way.  Every major civilization that was ever put on earth, was doomed to collapse.  If not by human hands, by the earth itself.  Just like you and me.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
Just look at where you come from.”

“
You mean the moon?”

“
Well of course, .  Oh my God, you don’t know a thing, do you?  What were you told all those years that you lived on the moon, Scott?”
“That we took everything from the surface of our planet, the moon and it took revenge and it ate us.”
“Well, that is partly true in a way, but I was there.  You guys just kind of guessed at life after we left.  You poor mooners are clueless as to what happened up there.”
“How so?”

“
Just look at it.  We weren’t drawn in.  We lived in the moon.  It didn’t swallow nothing.  We were there to begin with.  All we were was just a drilling operation, for Pete’s sake.  Turned out what our little planet, the moon rock, was really made of was a energy that could supply the spaceships that flew from other planets.  It was like a giant gas station.”

“
Well, what happened?  Why didn’t they come and save us from within the moon?”

“
I will tell you what happened.  They left us there.  Turns out, new technologies came and they used other types of engines that used other types of fuel.”

“
What kind of fuel?” Scott asks.

“
The very same thing we are going to capture tonight, Scott.  Black matter.”
“Say what?”

“
Black matter is the energy that they use in outer space.  Its infinite and everywhere.  They don’t have to stop  now.  They just pull it right out of space.  With their new engines, they have an endless supply now.  Its like running everything off air.”

“
And they just left us there to die?”

“
We were charging them an arm and a leg for everything they ran.  Once they had the new energy source, we became obsolete.  We should have thought about it a little more and made more advances, but we didn’t and we stayed.  Things just got uglier after that.  That moon up there is an entity just like this earth is and its alive.  It captured those that let it and uses them for its own energy.  Revenge?  Maybe.  But after extracting that much rock from the inner core of that moon there, I think it was the only thing it could do to survive.  It was so weak.  It used any energy that it had to its advantage which was the last thing left.  Us.”

“
So my whole life is a lie?”

“
Its not your fault, Scott.  Your ancestors did this to you.  You didn’t.  You were just born into it.  You could blame us.  We were the ones that were there first.  It’s partly our fault.  But we could never return to the moon and it wouldn’t do any good if we did.  Their entrapped in it.  What are we supposed to do about that?  We can beam down here, but we can’t exactly beam back.  Not after taking an organic form  anyway at least.  You’re not a spirit of the light anymore, Scott.  Get used to it.  You are stuck here.  But you know what I miss most of all?  I miss the traveling through space.  We were just kids then going through space, looking for our next million.  We went to a lot of planets to find energy that would run our ships.  The moon rock was the best though.  It made us a ton of money at the time but we just wasted it.  Sure, we had nice technology, but no one to share it with.  No way to grow.  Then the moon took us back.  It swallowed us whole.  We were in mineshafts, mining out rocks and then one day we were just food.  We were coming up to our three hundredth year when we finally escaped to this planet.  It was the closest place to beam down to where the light would hit just enough to escape.  What we left behind was our isolated little tombs that bred out new generations of a whole new species, which became you, my friend.  Not everything that comes down is good and pure.  Like this black matter isn’t good and pure.  But you are, Scott.  You were given the best gift of all.  A conscience.  Not like those other wolves.  They are dead in the head.  They will never feel love like you and I would and that’s why they have to be stopped.  They are a menace and the black matter is a menace.  It has no conscience at all either.  That’s your biggest threat here on this planet.  It doesn’t care if we live or die.  It don’t care how much blood it has to absorb or splatter against anything.  It just exists for carnage.  So, being my son in a way, you are my ancestor, Scott.  You must help us against any of the wickedness that comes down on to our new home.  Are you in agreement with this or not?”