Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Finch’s dad always said a book could neither plow the earth nor feed a mare, so Finch wasn’t surprised when his secret bestiary turned out to be alive. He inherited it upon his father’s death in the summer of Finch’s fifteenth year. After burying his father in the meadow near his favorite horse’s grave, Finch read the handwritten will that wouldn’t have withstood the rigors of Law, but was good enough for them.

Before he was halfway through, he rushed to the cellar and found the black velvet bag in a drum of moldy pig feed. Finch stepped outside and untied the drawstring, and a dragon came out and filled the gloaming with its smoldering might. It was black and white and unlike anything Finch had ever seen, a creature torn from a twelfth-century monk’s manuscript. It was a poor man’s bestiary, no color to bring its images to life, but then again, this one didn’t seem to need any paint. It was breathing just the same. The strokes of a feather pen were visible in the lines that contained the dragon. Its flames looked like paper stars curled on a scissors’ edge, but they scorched the unmown bluegrass as if they were real fire.

Finch fell on his butt and cried out as the dragon roared, scaring half of the cows, goats, and horses over and through the poorly maintained fences. The dragon ate the rest.

• • • •

Finch had grown up on a North Carolina farm, the Blue Ridge Mountains darkening the horizon like a coming dream. The maze of laurel hells surrounding the farm mostly prevented that dream from arriving, as did the endless upkeep of the farm and the demands of school. Finch learned what he could from his father. Whether the consensus said America was doing good or bad, they were always poor. They couldn’t afford anything except the essentials, and in bad years they couldn’t afford those. Somehow, they managed.

When the dragon finished its meal, it curled up and went to sleep in the pasture, one white eye left open watching Finch. A few minutes later, it turned into a merman, and now Finch was watching him sleep in the bathtub. Finch blushed. He was shocked to find himself aroused at the closeness of the merman’s delicate, naked form, his body covered in shapes like the scales of a white pinecone. He hadn’t given much thought to those sorts of things yet, but he was beginning to. He dared not touch. Embarrassed, he stood up to leave, but as soon as he turned his back on the claw-footed tub, he heard it explode in splashes.

Finch ran.

The griffon was faster. It grabbed him in its talons and rushed out of the dark house, dropping Finch on the lawn and taking flight, looping around the perimeter of the farm.

Finch was stunned. The dragon had killed or driven off his livelihood. Only the old tomcat remained. He had no known relatives and few neighbors, none of them friendly. He had a monster that wouldn’t stand still and a garden being eaten by unseen pests. Cow blood dripped and clotted from the spike of a bull thistle as the griffon wheeled overhead.

The next morning, it bedded down in what used to be the cow barn and laid an egg as big and as real as a watermelon. Finch thought it tasted just as good as, if not better than, a chicken’s.

• • • •

The bestiary provided. Finch milked a leucrota and made reeking wheels of delicious green cheese. A hippogriff shed feathers plated in gold. He made beautiful jewelry from a manticore’s barbs and took prismatic scales from a siren though her tail ended in a smudge, the ink smeared as if by a drowsy monk’s thumb. And although it looked more like a goat than the horse he expected, the unicorn filled a mother-shaped hole in Finch’s heart he hadn’t known needed filling.

Perhaps this bestiary was the beating heart of all myth and monster, responsible for every sighting, every folktale, every dragon on the moors as it shapeshifted across ages. Finch’s father had never mentioned it and, having no knowledge of his ancestors or even his grandparents, Finch had no idea how it had ended up on a dirt farm in western North Carolina. It must be from England, he thought, or maybe Germany. Or maybe it was a secret of the Vatican. His father had never trusted Christians, though he believed in God Almighty. Maybe this was the reason.

Finch didn’t have names for half of the beasts he saw. And like an early field guide, the bestiary also contained familiar animals, though Finch hardly recognized some of them. They were like echoes of their earthly cousins—bat, wild goat, stag, amphisbaena, owl—only with strange dimensions and added or missing features. He recognized the bear, though not how it sculpted the raw material of its cub with its tongue. No matter how twisted the pen strokes or monstrous the beasts, however, Finch felt safe, safer even than when his father was alive.

But he soon became a sensation at the farmer’s market and the subject of speculation in the nearby town of Green’s Cross. He began to feel self-conscious. Anxiety rang him like a cowbell.

One evening, his closest neighbors came calling. Charlie was on foot and his pregnant wife Maryann sat on their little black nag. It was said they had sent one son away during a drought a few years ago and lost another before his eyes ever saw the glory of creation.

Charlie carried a mattock.

Something told Finch not to invite them inside. He didn’t even open the gate.

“Grief’s made him awful rude,” Maryann said.

“No,” Charlie said. “Not grief. Power. Fortune.”

“Is it your momma’s witch treasure? Your daddy leave you a pile of gold?”

Charlie took a step toward Finch. “Have you been under the mountain?”

“Go home,” Finch said, fighting fear and tears and trying to sound bigger than he was, but he could see they had no intention of listening to an orphaned boy.

Finch blinked, and then they were stone. The nag buckled under the weight of a petrified Maryann, tossed her to the ground, breaking off her hand, and galloped away. Finch turned around, and the basilisk had already hidden its reptilian face in the carefully drawn feathers of its wings. Finch thought they looked a bit like the leaves of an artichoke.

• • • •

Finch’s neighbors coveted his newfound wealth, but the citizens of Green’s Cross feared the power that provided it. Rumors of devils flying over roofs during the witching hour roused them. One widow reported strange footprints that led to her bedroom window. They were a God-fearing people without the grace to think He might be clever enough to separate the good from the evil on his own, even if they lived only a few miles apart. Guilty by association. They no longer felt safe.

They came one humid night in August, a silent mob. Big red-haired Stanley twisted his ankle in front of Finch’s gate and when he lit a match and saw Charlie’s petrified face staring back he nearly howled and spoiled the ambush. They found Maryann next and that was that: they would burn the farm without a fuss. Finch’s dark power had claimed an unborn baby’s soul. Finch was still sleeping inside when they emptied two drums of gasoline onto the porch and struck a match.

The house burned in the blue night and moths mistook the blaze for the moon and flew in circles above the flames until they too were burned. Finch awoke in terror. He inhaled a plume of dark smoke and collapsed as something big wrapped its black and white form around him like a slug. It held a white spear and wore a crown of black flames like calligraphy.

The beast pulled the smoke from Finch’s lungs and ate it like candy floss. He would let the boy sleep until the first light of morning struck the mountains. Meanwhile, the King of Salamanders stretched and relaxed into his kingdom of fire.

Some books just won’t burn.