Grendel's Time

Excerpt from Chapter One 'A Chance Meeting'

I'm a sophomore in high school. By the standards of the society of my school I'm not very well-adjusted, but I compensate for it by being anonymous. If you met me on the street, you wouldn't even take a second look. Tall, skinny, glasses, plagued by an occasional outbreak of pimples. You know the type.

Those things are enough all by themselves to make me a pariah. But when you add to them the fact that I don't get along very well with most of my peers and that I read a lot -- almost constantly, in fact -- then you're forced to the inescapable conclusion that this boy is a square bowling ball in the alleys of high school life.

To top it all off, I live in the country six miles from the nearest town. There are kids who live nearby; one only lives a mile away. But I'm alone much of the time. Which is the way I like it.

My mom works, so she's never home when I get there after school, and that's when I do a lot of my homework. My dad died of a rare type of lung cancer when I was just two, so I don't remember him at all; but Mom is alive and well and in her mid-thirties. She's a secretary for a large manufacturer in Aldendale, the town where I go to school.

Aldendale High is an ancient two story beacon of higher education made of lots of brick, windows that crank out, restrooms that stink. It has some good teachers, some bad; and teenagers who do the things that teenagers have done since time immemorial, most of them disgusting.

Believe it or not, I like Aldendale High. It's where I fired up my first bunsen burner, worked on my first assigned algebra problem, parsed my first verb in Latin. Julia goes there as well. She sits next to me on the bus sometimes and makes my heart skip.

One day, I was standing on the cracked and buckled sidewalk with about a hundred other teenagers, watching Fred Comber and Allen Crossman duke it out, when the bus pulled up. Unlike teenagers in some cities, our small town kids still settle things with fists. No guns or knives allowed, thank you please.

Fred seemed to be winning, which wasn't surprising, since he was supposed to be the toughest kid in school. I was a little glad that he was fighting with Allen, because that meant he had to leave me alone for awhile. I crept on the bus while no one was looking and slunk to the back where I hid as well as I could while still being able to watch the fight...

Excerpt from Chapter Two 'Him'

It was late enough in the Fall that the days were a lot shorter. The field corn had just been picked and the pumpkins were still growing on the edges of some of the fields. I turned down Brookfield Road toward the 'Woods' as the shadows were growing longer and the air was getting crisp.

A hundred yards from the Woods, I noticed a man sitting by the road on the large stump of the old apple tree that somebody cut down probably fifty years ago. Since that was a favorite sitting and thinking place of mine, I was curious.

As I approached, he looked up. He had medium-long brown hair bound up with some kind of headband, and blue eyes. His face was craggy and strong, his cheekbones high. He had strong white teeth that almost sparkled as he smiled. Not knowing what else to say, I said, 'Hello.'

He struggled with the word, his lips working to form it. 'Hullo,' he said finally in an accent so thick you couldn't cut it with any kind of knife. 'Who art thou?'

Surprised, I stopped in my tracks. He was dressed in what looked like a brown woolen cloak that hung all the way to the ground. I knew I should have hurried past him, but I sensed no hostility coming from him; nothing but a kind of lostness.

'Who art thou?' I almost asked, but caught myself. 'Who are you?'

He looked puzzled, then a huge forefinger attached to a hand like a Virginia ham emerged from the cloak and reached up to tap on his chest. 'Bay Wolf.'

I hadn't understood clearly, so I asked, 'Say again?'

His eyes widened and I knew he didn't understand me. I wondered if he was a foreigner. I pointed to him again. 'What's your name?'

He tapped himself once more. 'Bay-oh-wolf.'

The pronunciation was very precise and I felt my blood turn cold. It had nothing to do with the outside temperature, either.

I repeated the name. 'Beowulf.'

He nodded eagerly, smiling. 'Tell me, friend,' he asked. 'Where ist this place wherein I findest myself, and who art thou?' His accent was almost too thick for me to understand him.

I fought the urge to run. Ory must have put him up to this. Knowing how I always had my nose in a book, he must have dreamed this up. He was full of practical jokes, that Ory.

'Me Tarzan,' I said with a perfectly straight face.

If the joke made any impression on him at all, the stranger didn't show it. 'Hast thou seen him, Tarzan? I canst not find his tracks.'

The way he spoke was perfectly natural, but for some reason it sent chills up my spine. Again, I had the urge to run for it. Then he stood up, and boy did I run!...

Excerpt from Chapter Four 'Grendel Comes'

There was a faint, shimmering spot in the air; kind of a large, cameoshaped hole barely revealed by the moonlight. Except that it wasn't a hole and didn't seem real, exactly. Still, it shimmered and hung there, just above the field next to the swamp.

Something moved and began to emerge from the hole. With a sudden lurch, it dropped out of the spot and fell to the ground like a horse's foal. It crouched there, waiting, watching.

The being was huge; its eyes glowed yellow in the darkness. A snarl revealed large, yellowish fangs. The skin was a cross between fur and scales, with the fur growing out between the silvery plates. It was manlike but not man. Bigger than a man, it moved with a sinewy suppleness that a man couldn't duplicate. It had only one arm and its strong, gnarled fingers held onto a large, wooden chest bound with iron. At the creature's other shoulder was a healed place covered with scaly skin.

It sniffed the air and a groan escaped through hideous lips. 'So, thou art here before me, mine enemy!'

The voice was a hissing caricature of a human voice and the wolflike, manlike face contorted as the words came out. Then the monster was moving away, across the field, to the stump where the man who called himself Beowulf had sat. The scaly thing sniffed the stump and growled, then began following the trail of the man and boy to where it led through the Woods.

At the Woods the awful thing sniffed the air again with a kind of delight and licked its lips. Then it was off with the wooden chest on its shoulder, no longer following the tracks, but another scent that had touched its nostrils...