A Wolfen's Requiem
An Appalachian Moon Witch Chronicles short story
Wickham is a wolfen—one of the ancient, near-immortal creatures at the heart of my Appalachian Moon Witch Chronicles. He is also, I confess, one of my favorite characters to inhabit, precisely because he resists inhabiting. He catalogs. He categorizes. He files things away under matters requiring patience and goes back to the mountains. He is seven hundred years old and has the emotional vocabulary of someone who’s earned every year, and learned very early that feelings, like everything else, could be endured rather than experienced.
And then Mozart gets into his head and ruins everything.
This story is his. Three moments across a century, connected by a single piece of music and what it costs him, each time, to listen.
I. Shenandoah Valley, 1923
The Hargrove family had been living at the foot of Nightvale Mountain for four generations, which in Wickham’s estimation made them nearly local, for whatever that was worth.
He’d watched them build the place—a solid farmhouse with decent bones and a porch that faced the mountain like it was expecting something in return. He approved of the porch. He did not approve of the dog they’d kept in the second generation, a mean-spirited bluetick hound named Mercy, of all things. She’d tracked him for three days before Wickham lost his patience and had a word with her. The dog had retired from tracking after that. They’d gotten a beagle next—Clovis—which had the good sense to mind its own business.
The phonograph had arrived that spring on the back of a wagon from Harrisonburg, wrapped in feed sacks and handled with a reverence usually reserved for the dead. Wickham had watched from the tree line as Bo, the Hargroves’ son—a third generation going soft around the middle—carried it inside like it was holy.
