In fact, the disk didn’t come up over the slope to the left until the dial showed 5:41. By then the changes were well advanced.

Afterward, Johnson guessed no one else had noticed much what happened inside the BMW. It was the Age of Solipsism. You cared only for yourself and what was yours. The agony of another, unless presented on celluloid, was missed.

But Johnson saw.

He saw the flurry and then the frenzy, planes of half light and deep darkness fighting with each other like two vultures over a corpse. And he heard the screams.

And when the creature-and by then this was all one could call it-burst out, straight out the side of the BMW, none of them could ignore that they might have to deal with it.

Jason had become his true self. He-it-was about seven feet tall and solidly built, but as fluid in movement as an eel. The head and face, chest and back and arms were heavily hairy, covered in a sort of pelt through which two pale, fishlike eyes and a row of icy teeth glared and flamed. The genital area was also sheathed in fur, but under that the legs were scaled like those of a giant snake or fish. When the huge clawed hands rose up, they, too, had scales, very pallid in the blaze of headlights. It snarled, and it stank, rank, stale, fishy. This anomalous thing, with the face of a dog and the eyes of a cod, sprang directly against the crowd.

Johnson, cool, calculating, lonely Johnson (to whom every human was a type of study animal), had deemed casualties inevitable, and certainly there were a few. But then, as he, student of humanity, had predicted, they turned.

Subsequent news broadcasts spared no one who heard, saw, or read them the account of how a mob of already outraged people had ripped the monstrous beast apart. Questioned later they had been nauseous, shivering, crying, but at the hour, Johnson himself had seen what they did, and how they stood there after, looking down at the mess smeared and trampled on the roadway. Jason of course, given half a chance, would have and had done the same to them. And contrary to the myth, he did not alter back in death to human form, to lie there, defenseless and accusing. No, he, it, had retained the metamorphosis, to puzzle everyone for months, perhaps years, to come. Naturally, too, it hadn’t needed a silver bullet, either. Silver bullets were the product of legends where the only strong metal, church candlesticks, was melted down to make suitable ammunition. If Johnson had had any doubt, Jason’s own silvery eyes would have removed it.

That night, when the howling tumult and the flying sprays of blood had ceased, Johnson had stood there under the trees. He had felt quite collected. Self-aware, he was thinking of Mark Cruikshank, who had stabbed him, and that finally he, Johnson, for once in his bleak and manacled life, had got his own back on this bloody and insane world of aliens-werewolves, human beings.

Country Mothers’ Sons by Holly Phillips

Now we live on the edge of the bombed quarter of the Parish of St. Quatain in the City of Mondevalcón. The buildings are crooked here, tall tenements shoved awry by the bomb blasts and scorched by the fires. At home in our valleys we whitewashed the houses every spring, even the poorest of us, brightening away the winter’s soot. Here, for all the rent we pay, the landlords say they are too poor to paint, and we live in a dark gray, soot-streaked world, leaning away from the wind and the dirty rain. Spring comes as weeds sprouting in the empty lots where no one has yet begun to build. Build what? We are outside the rumors, we who only moved here after the war. My village was only a hundred miles away, but I am a foreigner here. Stubbornly, like most of us, I am still in my heart a native of my village; I only happen to live in this alien place.

Elena Markassa lives high at the top of a creaking staircase, in her “tower,” she says, where she can look far out and down. They are bright rooms, though cold and restless with the wind that sneaks in through the broken and never-mended panes. But the rest of us live lower down, out of the reach of the sun, so we often gather there, wrapped in our sweaters and shawls. Lydia Santovar huffs and puffs after the climb, but Agnola Shovetz and I are mountain women and too proud, even carrying a sack of potatoes between us. Elena Markassa never leaves her flat; she’s an antiquated princess in her gloomy tower, waiting for her perennially absent son to come home.

We all have absent sons.

“These boys!” Agnola Shovetz says with a toss of her hands and a note of humor in her voice, but Elena Markassa’s broad face is heavy as she brings the flour tin from the pantry. We are making peroshki today, a long and fussy chore demanding company.

“They need work,” Lydia Santovar says.

“My boy works,” Agnola Shovetz says, ready for a mild quarrel.

“I don’t mean that kind of work. Waiting tables! I can’t blame my boy, even grown men take what they can find these days, but what kind of work is that for a man? And all for a pocketful of small bills. I hardly saw a coin from one end of the month to the other, back home. Who needed it? We worked the land, and it gave us what we needed. The apple trees and the barley fields and the cows: there was always something that needed doing at home. That was work, all of us together, building up the farm. That was where the wealth was, and you always knew where the boys were…”

At home. Is this all we talk about? Home. The war took it away from us, or took us away from it. The land we all thought eternal was ruined or lost, simply lost, as if the mountains had closed in, folding the valleys away out of reach. It’s true, the word conjures our small house with the walls of plaster over stone, and the icon of St. Terlouz growing dark as an eclipsed sun over the hearth. But it’s also true that when I hear that word I think of Georgi out on the mountain slopes, running through the streams of moonlight that splash through the spruce boughs and shine off the patchy remnants of snow. How he could run! Not a handsome man, my Georgi, and with a shy, hostile look with strangers, as if he were poised between a snarl and a fast retreat, but oh, to see him moving across the steep meadows, dancing from rock to rock above the backs of the scurrying sheep. Our son moves a little like that, so that it hurts sometimes to see him hemmed in by all these stony walls. Mountains, buildings, my boy says to me, it’s all rock, Mama. Either way, it’s only rock.

It isn’t the buildings, his father would have said. It’s the walls.

Lydia makes a well in the mound of flour on the table and I start cracking eggs while Elena fills the big kettle at the tap.

“This morning,” Elena says, pitching her voice over the rush of the water, “I had to hear from my neighbor across the hall on the other side, she looks over the roofs going down to the harbor. She says all last night she heard the boys out on the roof, drinking, fighting, God knows what they get up to-”

“My boy’s not a fighter,” Agnola says.

“Whatever they do,” Elena says, “this morning the roofs were covered with dead birds. Feathers like a ruined bed, that’s what my neighbor said, and the birds all lying there like a fox went through the henhouse, dead.”

“They keep hens on the roof over there?” Lydia says. Her strong arm is pumping as she beats the eggs into a yellow froth.

“Not hens,” Elena says. “Pigeons, seagulls. Should I know? City birds. Nobody keeps hens here.”

“People keep doves,” Agnola says. She has a worried look, always on the verge of hunger.

“Not for eating,” Elena says authoritatively. Perhaps living in her tower has made her an expert on the city’s heights. “They’re racing pigeons, for sport.”