A pretty ordinary weekend.
Last night, I watched North by Northwest, and then today Pacific Rim. I liked both movies, although I think the latter I would have loved if I’d come to it with any great fondness for monsters and giant robots, of the sort of movies that director Guillermo del Toro is referencing with the film. I heard a recent interview with him, where his enthusiasm for the subject is both clear and infectious. But this isn’t something that speaks as loudly to my inner eight-year-old as it does to his. Nevertheless, some of it’s remarkable, and in general it’s pretty good.
I mean, it’s no Sharknado, but then, what is?
I also had my writing group again today, and came up with this in the forty minutes of free-writing:
We call them lycans, for lack of a better word, but it’s always sounded false and pretentious.
“Just call them werewolves,†says Baxter. “That’s what they are.â€
But not all of them; lycanthropes are the commonest breed, giving rise to the name of the entire clan, but there have been shapeshifters of all other sorts for as long as the dark arts that create them have existed. Bear-men, wendigo… Only a month earlier I’d been cornered in an alley, a steel blade pressed to my throat from behind, by what turned out to be more salamander than human. (Why the old witch had ever cast such a spell — or what she had done to piss off whoever threw the were-lizard curse upon her — I never learned. I left her in that alley, still alive but only barely, the blade stained black with her own blood and scales.)
But Baxter is right, as he all too frequently is about this kind of thing: most of them are wolves, either by tradition or because they think it looks cool — the were-lizard certainly didn’t — and so we call them lycans or werewolves out of simple convenience. They’re only a third of the threat, and a dumb, lumbering part of it at that, so it’s hardly worth my time arguing over the name.
The real danger, as anyone entrusted with the guild’s ancient secrets knows, are the vampires. You’ll see some people spell that with a “y,†or even of all things a “ph,†which has always seemed to me like the very height of pretentiousness. They’re bloodsuckers, plain and simple, too cunning by half and wily, loathsome but skilled at their own survival, but throwing around Latin phrases or old-world spellings just plays into the inflated image they have of themselves. It makes them cocky, even reckless, which is something you can’t afford when there are civilian lives to consider. Better just to recognize them for what they are and drive a stake through the heart of every last one of them.
It’s the third threat, that last half of the triad, that worries any good guild assassin worth her salt. The one you don’t know, can’t recognize or name because all its names have been carefully erased from our books. The guild’s history is long, longer even than the dark arts we exist to patrol, keep off, destroy. This is our responsibility, whatever its cost. But part of that cost, perhaps, is not knowing even the name of the enemy dedicated to inflicting the damage. The nameless foe that shepherds others into the lycan and vampire clans, that’s worked for centuries in the shadows while were-lizards do their dirty work in dark alleys.
And that, more or less, was my weekend.
