By David B. Ramirez
The shadows of the forest lay behind Ren Dela Cruz and a narrow road curved away in front of him.
He was starting to remember why everyone knew not to be at Santa Odetta’s border after sunset.
He had forgotten over the thirty years since his parents took him back from Gramma. High school in the city, college and work across the ocean, the return, marriage, and his parents’ funerals were bricks in a wall from someone else’s childhood.
That dam had cracked with the first phone call from Gram’s friends that she was gone. A crack that had grown in the days since.
The tail-lights of the bus he took to reach here faded into the mist rolling down the mountainside. There was only the last lonely streetlamp to his right.
The air was cold and damp and clinging. No night birds called, no bats or frogs or crickets sang. With each flicker of the yellow light, his thoughts alternated from being forty to being a child at Gram’s knee, hearing tales of the people that vanished into stories when they weren’t paying attention.
Spooking himself. He yanked his mp3 player out of his pocket. The gleaming surfaces calmed him. Post-millennial talisman. He slipped the earbuds on and started it on random, and for a time was back to his rational norm.
He peered at the screen of his phone. The adult thing would be to finally read Marie’s messages. To reply.
They would fight again, and he was tired of fighting.
The phone’s battery warning beeped and the screen darkened.
The mp3 player in his pocket died too. Preoccupied, forgot to charge them. Maybe it just worked out that way, using them on all the buses it had taken to get to where he was, one hour out from Gram’s hometown.
He put his devices away. At least the decision whether to read his wife’s texts was out of his hands.
Only then did he hear the sounds. Out of the forest’s edge, he heard shuffling feet. Heavy, shffff, shffffff, shoes dragging in the dirt, and a wheezing nothing of a breath, then a thud. And again, a three-step cycle.
Probably just an old man. The thud was surely a cane. Ren ought to turn and see if he needed help.
But he was a kid again. Worse than being a kid, he was in a forty-year-old body that was overweight and out of breath. The younger him could have run and screamed for an hour.
It was nothing, he insisted. Yet he could not turn. The ghastly smell of rotting bananas penetrated his nose, pressurized his skull. It was a hot, festering odor, but the sweat dripping down his neck, down his back, down the backs of his knees, was frost.
Reeeeeeennnn.
He saw a shadow cutting into the pool of light he stood in. It reached for him. Slowly.
Reeeeeennn.
An ancient engine roared and gurgled nearby. Headlights flared through the mist, pushing the shadow back. Big tires thumped through the potholes.
Reeeennn. Doooon’t gooooo.
It was close enough to touch when the rumbling shape of salvation stopped in front of him and the door opened.
Ren flew up the bus steps.
#
It was fine at first. A return to normalcy. Bright lights, lots of people sitting on the benches, a solid-looking little man with a hat at the wheel.
The door closed behind him and the bus driver took his ticket and smiled at Ren.
Between ruddy lips, the teeth of an enormous mouth wriggled in the gums. White worms, wiggling.
#
He came to in one of the seats. His ass felt pinched by the wooden slats screwed into the iron frames. There was a girl in a long coat shaking his shoulder. Red-cheeked and lovely, but when he glanced down, he saw that under the jacket, she had no legs. She merely... floated.
“You okay, mister?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Mr. Worm was worried about you. The closest hospital’s the last stop. You don’t look like you need it anymore though.”
“No, I was just. I just fainted, I guess.”
The monster was friendly and seemed awfully young. He would ask if she were twelve or fourteen, but then, he wouldn’t know how old monsters look anyhow.
He locked down his impending freakout. His childhood lived again in his thoughts, though it was incomplete. The wall was broken, and he was not as afraid as a man of the city would have been, cold plastic and steel and LEDs and LCDs and wireless.
This was not the first time, he recalled.
This time, there’s no Gram to rescue me.... He remembered her, fearless, in her frock with a gun in her hands and great big cowboy boots.
“What’s your name, mister?”
“Ren.”
Those long lashes fluttered, and the pouty lips thinned. When she frowned, her eyes changed color, the warm brown turning red.
“You shouldn’t give out your name like that if you’re He, mister.”
What had he done the last time this happened to him?
The bus groaned and struggled now, as the climb became steep. They crested the worst of it and the bus almost sighed. He saw through his window that the mists had parted and the Mirror Santa Odetta lay below, a trailing cluster of gaslights by a sea lit in shimmering lavender phosphorescence.
When the wheels began to make the distinct sound indicating the transition of asphalt to cobblestones, they were almost there. The plaza that was at the heart of Santa Odetta. Right stop, wrong reality.
It was the town of his lost youth. Except, the people looked strange. Some were inhumanly tall. Some had animal heads. Circus sideshow and beyond. All wore elegant clothes, some of modern cut and style, many from times long gone: corsets, waistcoats and monocles, tall hats, and of course the stiff Maria Clara types and barongs of fine fabrics.
Was he going mad? Perhaps everything was normal and Ren was hallucinating.
“Deranged,” Ren tasted the word. “Mentally divergent.”
In this land, the flagstones of what was still the unimaginatively named Plaza Sentral shone glittering black, cut from obsidian rather than red clay. The fountain in the center had fat cherubs clambering about, only they had bat’s wings and horns. The squat stone Church was the same in substance and structure, though it was topped with a platinum construct of many crosses superimposed in dizzying geometries.
The only hotel in the town seemed the same as its sun-side counterpart. The Oddette’s Od, a converted Spanish colonial that took up the whole block east of the plaza.
He marched to its double doors with desperate speed.
#
The woman behind the counter, smartly attired in gleaming business black, would have been beautiful. On that porcelain face, her eyelids and mouth were sewn shut. She held her left palm out to him, and the eyes upon it blinked, and the mouth beneath the eyes spoke in the soft, singsong dialect he had once known, but had forgotten.
She switched when it was apparent he was only catching one word in ten.
“Mister RDC,” she said, “reservation for two nights. Single room, non-smoking.”
“Yes,” he said, not sure if he should be looking at her hand or her face.
“You seem unwell, Mr. RDC.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“I’m sure.” She passed him a form to fill out, then a heavy bronze key. She did everything with her right hand, while keeping the left up to see things. “You’re in room 202. Up the stairs and it will be on your left. Mister Brod will take your bag, if you please.”
“Don’t you need my card or something? For the deposit?”
The eyes blinked.
“Mister RDC. Ren. You have an unlimited line with us. I daresay none of the shops here will charge you a centavo.”
To the snap of her fingers, a man half Ren’s height but twice as wide took his backpack. The uniform was scarlet, darker by gaslight than it would have been by fluorescents.
Too tired to process anymore, Ren stumbled after that red shape. He saw the bed with its white linens, collapsed and closed his eyes. Mister Brod’s parting words, something about not inviting the wrong sort in, warnings about the hot water, other matters, faded as the lights dimmed.
#
Ren woke with the dawn. When he opened his eyes, was utterly confused.
What were gaslights were now electric. The beautiful hardwood floors were hidden by a somewhat grimy carpet. There was a phone next to the bed. The card next to it indicated the availability of free wifi, and the login and password. A light on the phone was blinking.
He had messages. 5 messages from a Marie Dela Cruz, press # and 9 to hear them now.
He put the phone down. His fingers twitched. Where that antique key with the square teeth had lain, there was a keycard with a magnetic strip.
#
“He isn’t disturbed, Missus Dela Cruz. He’s just imaginative. He’ll grow out of it.”
“Doctor, there are these things—” she had stopped when he had looked their way. They had gone into another room then.
Ren, eleven years old, had just kept on flipping through the comic book in his hands.
#
He could have been more. Experiences that never had been slipped into his hands and fingers and out onto paper and canvass or piano keys or guitar strings. Effortless talents.
Had he really forgotten the pills? Adjusting his brain chemistry up, down, sideways, tilting and rotating it some number of degrees until he was more like everyone else. They had changed his reading materials, his toys and games. No more storybooks or comics, only nonfiction, and his TV time was carefully monitored.
Few friends, in high school, so tightly tied in knots. A hollow version of himself.
As time had gone by, they had weaned him off on steadily lower doses, and the change had taken.
Here he was, seeing things again. If Marie was upset with him before, what would she do if he needed a shrink and personality-altering drugs?
By the scratchmarks of their nails, they were holding onto their life together.
The phone rang, sudden and loud, almost driving Ren off the opposite side of the bed.
“Get a grip, Ren.”
He would tell Marie everything. Even if such heartfelt confessions and releases had done little before.
“Oh. Attorney Bastian. Yes. Yes, I can meet with you today. The lobby in two hours.”
He got through showering and dressing without vomiting. It was close. Perhaps having nothing in his guts kept the heaves from pushing anything up. He felt weak and empty and thirsty, and drank from the tap, drank until he was bursting. The fear chemicals of the previous evening still lingered, refused to unbind from stubborn receptor sites.
He looked in the mirror, and said, “You don’t look like a madman, Mister Ren.” Dark pants, white shirt, dark tie. No barong for him, he did not like any of the usual materials. Texture and translucence. He had one more shirt and one more tie packed.
“Oh, Ren. You’re not planning to wear a black shirt, black tie, black pants, black shoes to your grandmother’s funeral,” Marie had said.
He was. He would.
The walls were still adobe. If he had gotten mixed up with a different Santa Odetta the night before, he was in the correct one now.
Down in the lobby, a good-looking lady stood behind the counter. Her eyes were brown, her lips were full, eye-catchingly sexy, and most normal. They could have been twins, this woman and the Other.
Even the voice. “Mister RDC? You have a free daily breakfast. The café is down the hall if you want it.”
The scent of eggs and sausage and garlic fried rice and tapa and fish wafted from down the hall. Beneath the food perfume, the sulfur–sweet, pants-pissing fear of oblivion and decay. Unnoticed until he could not help noticing.
His stomach clenched.
“I don’t think so, today. But if someone could bring me coffee while I wait here, that would be great.”
“Of course, Mr. RDC.”
He drank it too fast, ignored how it scalded his tongue.
Though Ren had never met him, never seen a picture, the attorney was instantly recognizable when he arrived. His leather briefcase was bulged out the sides. His too-tight barong was damp under the armpits. His crystalline-glossy shoes reminded Ren of the obsidian flagstones of the Other town’s plaza. For a moment, the rotting-fruit odor intensified.
Then they shook hands and Ren was overwhelmed by the cologne. Axe, a lot of it.
“Mister Dela Cruz.”
“Attorney.”
The man was tall but his hand was tiny.
“My car’s air-conditioning died on the way up, and since I got here it’s been hotter each day. Shall we? The food in this hotel’s restaurant is famous.”
Ren tried not to cringe.
“That’s fine, I’ve eaten. It’s down the hall. Where are you staying? I thought this was the only hotel in town.”
“I’m a guest of the Mayores’ family. You know how it is. They paid my way through law school, and now when I visit, I have to stay at the compound or the Old Man takes offense.”
The tables in the restaurant had wrought-iron frames topped in gleaming Italian marble. Huge windows that went almost from floor to ceiling looked out onto a garden. Orchids of lurid shades were wired onto driftwood pillars standing in a field of white sand, raked in decorative patterns.
They sat next to the air-conditioner, and the attorney sighed loudly as the climate-controlled breeze blasted them.
Bastian rapped the white surface. “Lovely tables. They’re a hundred years old and each one is worth more than my car. During the War, everything precious in town was hidden by the Mayores family in the tunnels of the mine. The Japanese loved the Mayores’ mansion and the Od.”
He laid out folders and documents across half of his side of the table with one hand, while sometimes glancing at the menu open under the other.
Ren thought of the Other Od’s concierge. It had to be inconvenient to be blind any time one needed both hands.
Bastian went on, “there is a lot of hidden history in these small towns. You know, your grandmother was a fireball when she was young. Just a teenager back then. She hoarded supplies, hid some American GIs who’d gotten away in the forests. They say she killed some of the Japanese herself! Even crossed swords with an officer!”
Ren murmured, “She was a crack shot.” Disjointed images, heart pounding, jumping over tree roots, while black shapes darted around and Gram in her big boots shoved him onward up the trail with one hand and every once in a while stopped to fire into the darkness. She only needed to line up a shot once.
“Yes, she was! Killer left hook too. Even the Mayores boys didn’t mess with her, and she was said to be the prettiest girl in the province. Oh, and when she was older, she started a fencing and arnis school. She gave it up when you were born.”
Gram: wartime lady of blade and bullet. Ren could see her in his head, middle-aged when he had been a kid but still ramrod-straight and square-shouldered, quick and strong, light of eye and brightly laughing.
Was it the drugs that had kept him from growing to love his parents as much as Gram? Or their fear of the things he could do, that which he could have become?
What was it that he had done that made them drug the hell out of him?
Flash. Two places. They had seen him in two places at once. Him telling them about things that hadn’t happened yet. More. Cripes, had all that really happened? What was going on with him? How could he have forgotten so much? Was his mind making these things up?
Bastian ordered sausage, poached eggs, fried rice, a basket of bread, jam, butter, and a pot of coffee.
“She was organized, your grandmother. The taxes are taken care of, the paperwork. Your, uh. Parents—I mean.”
“You can say it. My parents are dead, I have no siblings, so there are no other heirs.”
“Well,” he cleared his throat. “That’s the thing, Mister Dela Cruz. Another heir has surfaced.”
#
Space-time-tripping. It got away from Ren for who could say how many minutes. When he came back to himself, Bastian’s order had not yet arrived.
Gram, straight and proper, who shot even straighter, having some affair and a hidden child?
Unimaginable.
“That child grew up, and had one child herself.”
“I have a cousin.”
The attorney slid a letter across the table to Ren.
Eyes skimming the legalese. “He, or she. Is buying my share from me?”
“The whole thing. The house, the antiques, the guns and swords, everything. The offer is quite generous.”
Bastian’s pen flicked out, serpent-quick, encircled a number that had not registered in Ren’s mind.
He had thought to take some time before actually selling anything. Touch his grandmother’s things, maybe stay in her home a while to get his bearings, figure out what to do with himself. With Marie.
“Can I meet this person?”
“This is not... desirable to the other party. Mister Dela Cruz, you said last week you would probably want to sell the house, and that you have no room for the collections. You must realize it’s a valuation that’s at the high end of what’s possible.”
He had to think, but his thoughts kept drifting to stupid things like playing with tops in the street.
The platters of food arrived and Bastian tore into them in between moments of explaining the other documents: two different appraisals for the land and another appraisal by an art historian for the artifacts, a certified true copy of the title, and finally, the check with its long line of zeroes.
The attorney did not eat so much as ravage his plate. The look of Bastian’s glasses was savage, the way the steam from the food condensed on the lenses, little droplets reflecting and refracting, micro-lenses, micro-worlds.
The smell.
Ren flipped through the listings, the prices for items that he had not seen in so very long.
Marie would say he was being a sentimental dolt. No. That wasn’t fair. That is what he thought she would say, but one could know another person better than anyone else and still be mystified by her choices, her moods, her thoughts.
He ought to call. He wanted her advice.
An enormous wad, all at once! To fix this, pay for that. It would wipe out the debt and let them start over, clean.
Maybe stop the arguments.
“Can I see the house? After the funeral, tomorrow. Then I’ll sign, you’ll turn over the check, and I’ll be gone with the afternoon bus. Would that be acceptable to the other party?”
“Certainly! I was only instructed that you had to sign while you were in town on this trip.”
Bastian took a few gulps of water. Smacked his lips in appreciation. Lipstick of fat and grease marked the glass.
“Are you sure you won’t have anything? These sausages can’t be beat, and let me tell you, clients have treated me to lots of fancy breakfasts in lots of fancy places.”
The undercurrent of rot still came and went. It must have all been in Ren’s head, but imagined or not, it was overpowering enough to drag him to the edge of fainting, to bring forth visions of a thing he could not see, except for a shadow reaching across the light.
He could not eat to that stench. The psychotic break diet. He would have to tell Marie about it. Lose your mind and lose weight too.
“I’ll pass. So, I’ll see you at the funeral?”
Bastian nodded.
“I think I’ll be going now. Haven’t been here in forever.”
“Out to explore the town? Enjoy! You know, some of these houses are almost three hundred years old. Cultural treasures, and nobody in the big city knows they’re here. There are stories about every street here! The Japanese executing one family in the plaza, stuff like that. One of the Spanish Governor Generals stayed at the Mayores home, you know! History in every stone.”
Unbearable. Ren’s eyes stung. He choked his farewells, fled through the street exit.
Outside, the breeze from the sea was strong, and that and the warmth of the morning sun burned the rot down to a dull echo in his nostrils, rather than a thick, choking sludge boiling over in his cranium.
“Crazy brain,” he muttered, looking around the plaza, and up at the sky, and breathing deep of the air.
If not for his neurochemistry misreporting this awful odor nobody else seemed to smell, he’d be dancing on his toes, ordering flowers for Marie using the hotel’s free wifi, whooping it up and laughing at the blessing from nowhere that was this mysterious cousin’s money.
Money wasn’t happiness, but not having it certainly caused misery.
There was still the underlying thing that he and Marie had stopped talking about, that tension as the years had gone by and they had pretended to be happy.
At least they would keep their home. Life could stay normal, and maybe after dealing with the immediate impending disasters, there might be money left for breathing space. Time to figure things out. He could bring her here, to where his childhood had been happiest.
Ren swayed, walking down the main street.
He missed Marie. Even if most of what they were now was conflict and disruption.
Deeper than the shadows under her eyes, behind the crow’s feet and the lines from frowns and smiles, he still saw the girl sitting beside the lagoon, reading Pale Fire and listening to Twisted Sister on a battered Walkman. Subversive, yet proper with her clipped speech, with her elaborate black dresses with frills and petticoats when she was not in ripped jeans and punk T-shirts. Standing behind her as she’d filled a water jug at a fountain, drawn forward, magnetic, the first time he’d touched her hair.
Twenty years in the blink of an eye, gone by.
What had happened?
Regret! An ordinary life, pretty much. No tragedies, just regular drama. Medium, not large.
The air was cleanest coming from the sea, so that’s the direction he chose. Maybe the barbecue stand would still be there. Except the stall would be manned by Mang Gordo’s son.
The urge struck, a senseless desire to refuse the deal. Instead, to work out some payment plan and—what? Buy out this mysterious cousin? Then he and Marie could move to this place, live out the rest of their lives in idyllic quiet?
Total fantasy. Even here, life was not perfect.
Most of the townsfolk were old, except for the swarms of the very young running about, playing under an endless Saturday sky. Teens and young adults went off to the city for school and work just like Ren had. There were few jobs and opportunities here. And not even an hour’s drive away, there were insurgents hiding out in the mountains!
This was not paradise.
Here, though, a scrawny kid in shorts and sando and slippers was running past him, poking a narrow wooden wheel on ahead of himself with a stick. Everything in sight was a postcard, a photo waiting to be uploaded to Facebook.
The same places lined the path down to the beach. One store had those tiny, curvy glass bottles of Coca-Cola. Boxes of buko pie and espasol. There was the chess club. No air-conditioning in there and so in the alley beside it, where there was shade, the sharp-eyed men with leathery faces battled while their friends made bets on the outcomes. To his left, he passed the bar for the fishermen. The nets hanging from the sign were new; the wood of the sign was cracked and faded. Only the bookstore was gone, instead it sold sculptures and furniture carved from the same trees up on the mountain.
Where the cobblestones became sand, Ren took off his shoes and socks. He smelled pork grilling on charcoal, closed his eyes and listened to the waves breaking on the shore.
Gordo’s shack was still there, bamboo stakes and hollow blocks and a corrugated stainless steel roof.
Ren bought a paper bag of half a dozen sticks of spicy-sweet meat and a plastic bag heavy with three beers. Gordo Junior looked just like Senior, and all was right with the world.
The sand was fine but it had countless fragments of shell and coral that were harsh on soft feet. A familiar sensation. He walked closer to the water and sat on the biggest limestone boulder on the beach and laid the shoes on his left and the beers on his right. He ate and drank and was content. He had spent Saturdays just like this as a kid. Well, he would not have been drinking beer....
Yesterday never happened. He had just slipped. Mentally.
He threw the trash into a waste bin next to Gordo’s, returned the empty bottles to Junior, and walked back to lay flat on that broad white rock. He undid his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and watched the clouds, pleasantly empty.
#
“Mister, you can’t sleep there.”
Small hands, shaking him. Ren groaned when he opened his eyes. Familiar face, round and small, bright red lips, proud nose, predator eyes. She wore a yellow tanktop with sunflowers, and above those bare shoulders, black wings twitched.
“Mister, get up! You’ll be fine if you’re awake, but if you’re asleep, they’ll eat you.”
He sat up. A dozen women in white glided across the tops of the waves. He could see through them to the lights of a ship in the distance. Under their feet, the sea, and under the sea, neon violet streaks, the Other side’s plankton. Deeper in the water, darker shapes swam, half-men, dancing with the ladies above. The water was so clear, he could see the shadows of a sunken ship even deeper, where the coral was.
So, here he was again. This night, he wasn’t afraid. And he wondered why.
He stood and stretched, back popping, firecrackers along his spine.
“Thanks.” Ren glanced down, stared. “You’ve got legs tonight.” Denim shorts stopped at her knees.
She smiled and did a pirouette, cheating, flapping her wings to aid the spin and to balance. Her toes barely touched the ground. “I like the feel of walking, sometimes,” she said.
In another life, he and Marie would have chosen differently. They would have had a child, and that child could have been like this girl.
“Mister, you should see a Doctor. You keep passing out and whatnot.”
“I didn’t faint this time. I.... took a nap on the beach and it was longer than I meant for it to be.”
“If you say so. Just saying. I mean, they’re not mean,” she waved to the dancing figures too, “but if you leave food in front of the hungry, some bites are sure to be taken.”
Ren considered. “Listen, you know who I am. You know more about me on this side than I do.”
She rolled her eyes. He supposed teenagers were the same everywhere. “Of course! With that name and the charms put into your skin, pretty obvious. What your grandmother did—come on! She got you out of the Mayores’ dungeon, burned down half the town, killed their thugs.... Folks here tell their kids stories of the Iron Queen’s Ride to scare ‘em straight!”
The Iron Queen. If Gram had known, she would have loved it. Hang on now.
“The Mayores?”
“They were the kings here. She cast them down for taking you. I’m starting to worry about you, Ren. You got amnesia or something?”
On his side of things, the Mayores were the perfectly ordinary filthy rich clan that controlled Santa Odetta and the five towns around it. They had held this area since before the Spaniards came, though they had changed their names and sworn allegiance when they had seen what gunpowder could do. Politically-connected and financially-savvy, they had survived wars and imperialism and conflicts and changes in politics, power intact, for centuries. Gram’s tales kept sliding up, surprising him.
The girl talked about the changes after the Mayores’ power was broken on this side.
“Most of the folks are y’know. Grateful. Things weren’t exactly cool under those goons. But your gran, she was terrifying powerful, she had charms of all kinds, proof against fire and water, stone and steel. She knew weird Names for Power, different from the Names we use. They say she or her mother must have learned from folk in other lands, because we’d never seen her kind of Art. If people knew who you were. Could be kinda tense.”
Gram had been some kind of warrior-witch!
The images came to him as she spoke.
More than just moments of running in the forest.
He saw Gram holding a blazing star in her hand. He saw her mouth move and could not hear the word, but he felt a ripple in the air and saw beasts of scales and fangs and wings, giants and tiny things and many-shaped things and shapeless things and ghostly things all smashed into the ground. Cyclops and spirits and goblins. They fell to Gram’s bullets and words and blade.
“You don’t say.”
Gram had said that their ancestors had been scholars for generations, back in Europe. Some scholarship!
“The civilized types around the town proper might treat you nice, but idiots in the mountains might challenge you, see if you’ve got the stuff. Stuff I can plainly see you don’t got.”
“That bad?”
She shrugged. “I think so. On the other hand, even though we all felt it when your gran passed, nobody’s been stupid enough to mess with her house up in the forest.”
Ren did up the buttons on his shirt. It was a warm evening. He did it to keep his hands from twitching in his pockets.
“She had a house? On this side?”
“Duh! She’s from here! She grew up on this side. A lazy, fun-loving girl, then there was trouble with the Mayores’ boys and her mother got MAD and took her away. Guess she learned her studies seriously from then on, because boy, when you got taken and she came back, she was the Wrath of the Deep Sky; she broke the Powers of the mountain and the forest and the sea.”
The girl’s eyes were lit up the whole time she talked about Gram. She relished thoughts of what Gram could do, Ren realized. Gram was this girl’s hero. That made her a little bit like himself.
“After the whole thing, she’d visit sometimes. Said she felt sorry for us, and so she helped rebuild. I think she just came back to make sure folks behaved. Made sure no more kids from your town went missing, no more pranks with mutilated animals and lost travelers, that kind of stuff.”
What he ought to do was stay on the beach where the monsters were friendly, maybe get some more beers, and chill until dawn. He was pretty sure he would end up back on the sun-side, safe and sound.
“Listen. Uh, what’s your name?”
“Leylin. But you call me Double-El, or LL. Only Pop calls me Leylin.”
“LL, would you happen to know anyone who could guide me out to the Iron Queen’s home?”
Her nose twitched and she shook her head. Then she grinned, and her eyelashes did this little flutter, like she was going to be sly but letting him know that she knew he knew. “Everybody’s too scared to go there. Well, I mean, I’m not scared, but I’d need some persuasion!”
He did not even know if his money was worth anything here.
“What kind of persuasion would work for you, LL?”
She took a breath. Her wings flapped, and her feet came an inch off the ground.
In a small voice, she said, “If you could get me a copy of that last Harry Potter book, that would be sufficient. What? Don’t laugh. There’s not a lot of traders that work both sides. The stores always run out!”
She stamped her foot hard. Then her torso came free of her legs.
“Ack! Look what you made me do!”
He couldn’t help himself, and kept laughing as she pulled her legs back on, like a loose pair of pants.
#
So it was that Ren Dela Cruz, ex-businessman, schoolteacher, forty years old, found himself following a young, winged, bipedal-optional girl up a steep, winding trail.
He could not see in the dark as well as Leylin, and often stumbled. He fell and cut his hand on a rock, and when a shaft of moonlight came through a break in the trees and set her fangs shining he could see her nostrils flare and eyes go red. Yes, she was not just a precocious teen from a small town. She could eat him alive. She would have, if she had not grown up in a time after Gram had laid waste to the countryside.
The smell of the rot was back.
His sanguine state of mind eroded. The forest was alive, awake with noise. Leaves rustled, branches creaked, and there were the drums that LL said were hags’ drums, and howling she said was just some dog-types running, pretending to hunt.
“Don’t worry about those brats. They’re just kids. They wouldn’t know how to bring down a rabbit. It’s the ones you can’t hear who are dangerous.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
Was he walking up a trail in an alternate land, hoping to find something of his grandmother’s? A kind of gunslinger-sorceress? Or was he completely nuts, following a hallucination?
“Don’t fall behind!” Leylin’s wings flapped when she was agitated, lifting her even when she meant to stay on the ground.
Hour after hour. When he rested, breathing harsh and loathing the extra pounds, she waited.
After Ren had received a dozen mosquito bites and three more cuts from falling and getting whipped in the face by branches he didn’t see, she stopped and said, “We’re here.”
The trees leaning in over them opened up into a clearing.
“Fantastic,” he said, panting. Bent over, hands on his knees.
“Uh. There’s someone waiting for you though.”
Yes. He had known it, expected it. The smell had been growing thicker. Foul as Ren thought a mouthful of maggots might be. He remembered weeks spent growing houseflies in jars with a mash of rotting bananas for a science project. It’s why the smell was so intimately familiar.
Reeeeeeen.
“Hello, cousin.”
Youuu rmmembrrrrr.
They had met once before, in a dungeon cell. Ren on the dark, cold, wet side of the bars. His cousin on the other.
A Mayores cousin. A son born from a daughter born from what Gram had never spoken of, but Ren now suspected was either rape, or a highly inappropriate relationship between a young girl, and Araya, a privileged Mayores scion.
If Ren looked worse these days, balding and pudgy, Danilo was a corpse that just didn’t care about that state of being. The blackened flesh was putrid and crawling with beetles and other wriggling life. The sockets were empty.
Ren sensed, somehow, that his cousin only saw through the bugs crawling in him, only spoke through their coordinated buzz.
“You didn’t need to do that. Back then.”
Nooot faaair. Frooom heeer blood, gooot enough gifffft to liiive for a whiiile. Nooot enough tooo liiive weeeell. You haaad so muuuch mooore, and dooon’t eeeven uuuse iiiit.
Danilo, the Mayores boy everyone had heard about. A rare case of cancer. He was supposed to have died, but didn’t. They had taken Ren, to bleed Giftedness out of him, to make the other well.
Leylin’s wings snapped shockingly wide, ten feet from tip to tip. She exclaimed, “What? This shrimp’s got barely a drop left to him! No offense, Ren.”
Sheee let hiiis fuuucking pareeents poiiison iiiit. Should haaave let meeee haaave iiiit. Ooined evthiiing. Dstoooyed famly heeere. Evnn ooon oooth siiide, fmleee issss weeeeaak, loooosing mneee, nooo mooore Powr.
Distraught, Danilo’s speech became more garbled.
“If you had asked instead of trying to steal, she might have helped you. But that’s not your family’s way.”
When it laughed, clots and masses of horror spewed from its jaws.
It’s youuur faaamiiily tooo.
It reached forth and the shadows came to life, slimy darkness and foulness, writhing masses like Danilo. Black except for the coals that were their eyes, sizzling at the edges where they met maggotflesh. All that was left of those slain during the Iron Queen’s Ride.
Leylin hissed. Her torso came away from her legs, her talons unfolded and as she flew above and between Ren and those things, she loomed huge, dangerous.
Leeeaaave, liiiitle ooone. Youuu ooowe hiiim nooothing. Ouur fleeesh is deeeeath tooo a suuucker like youuu.
“Why do you want her house?”
Hrrrr speeeells. Booook. Chaaaarms. Ennoooough power to fiiix meee. Oooownrshiiip will leeet me iiin.
Leylin rose higher into the air, said, “That’s fucking stupid! She couldn’t have done that at the height of her powers when she broke the mountain! Death is Death, even for us!”
They lurched toward Ren.
“It’s okay, LL. You can go.”
She shook her head, ripped a branch free from the trees. “They’ll sludgify you. You will know suffering and never feel a moment without pain. Ever.”
“That’s real sweet of you to worry about me. But I remember enough now. Don’t worry.”
“I can’t run anyway, stupid. My legs are down there, and if that half dies, all of me does. The fuck are you gonna do, Ren? You didn’t know what a spell was yesterday!”
It wasn’t in the mood to talk anymore. Slow and steady and unstoppable, they were moving. Ren supposed that if he died now, the house would pass to his cousin, so this way, with him suffering too, would be far better than him just signing it away for paper. In every world, the Mayores were opportunistic types.
They were twenty feet away, positioned all around him. He saw the pools they left with each step spreading, linking them in an unbroken circle that was shrinking.
“I still don’t know a single spell. Or how to shoot a gun, or swing a sword.”
He took out a Swiss army knife and opened up the biggest blade. All of two inches long.
“Oh, that’s real scary, Ren.”
He slashed his palms. Not deep enough to cut the tendons, but deep enough to bleed freely. He flailed his hands at them, and sent droplets of blood through the night. It was dark enough that he should not have been able to see much, but he realized that the closer he had come to Gram’s place, the easier things had been.
To his eyes, those crimson droplets had golden letters inside them.
They landed on the black creatures, and they screamed. The sound was of all terrible, broken things, children, rabbits, cats, crying out in agony. His cousin too. They hunched over on the ground, and the black receded.
The slime boiled away, the scent of rot replaced by fire.
Underneath, they were translucent and white... but they had the shape of men. They stared at themselves, and were quiet when they faded away. Except Danilo, who never stopped shrieking as his spirit scattered on the wind.
All was silent again, except for the trees and the distant sounds of drums and dogs.
“Holy freakin’ shit! Am I glad I did not try to snack on you!”
“It wouldn’t do anything to you. Having said that, please continue to refrain from snacking on me.” He tore his shirt sleeves, wrapped his bloody hands. Turned back to the path down the mountain.
She flew back down, put her legs back on. “So, what now?”
“Now, I’m going back to the hotel.”
“You’re not even going in the house?”
He looked over his shoulder at the house. It was just a simple cabin made of wood. There wasn’t the slightest bit of power in it. He could picture Gram there, in a rocking chair on the porch, shotgun across her knees, watching over the town below.
“It’s just a house.”
The whole walk back, Leylin demanded answers. Ren could barely explain what he had done on instinct. “She put just one spell in, before she let me go. She said, ‘When you feel most lost, Ren, all you have to do is Remember.’”
“From that you got dead-burning blood?”
“That’s not what it does. All it does is... All she wanted was for me not to forget myself. The whole time I’ve been here, it’s grown stronger, undoing all this stuff my parents did.”
“What? That’s what happened to those goons? They remembered what they used to be, and that which changed them was undone?”
He nodded.
Her eyes were red the whole way back. He supposed the smell of his blood was the reason.
“I think, when I tell my pals what I’ve been up to tonight, I’m going to say you remembered some kickass voodoo she taught you when you were eight. That okay with you?”
She was so young. Of course she didn’t understand yet how much just remembering could hurt. And for creatures whose memories were dominated by regret and anguish, there was little that could hurt more.
“Go for it.”
“And you still owe me a copy of Deathly Hallows.”
If he did not think it would cause her to snap and take his hand off at the wrist, Ren would have patted the top of her head.
“I wouldn’t dream of welching on it. I’ll be back in a few months, and I will have your copy. Other books too.”
“Cool.”
She hovered next to him when they reached the town’s edge, her face level with his, legs dangling, swinging back and forth.
“I can make it the rest of the way.”
“Well. Don’t you forget about the books. I’ll be waiting for them. If you don’t bring them by next year, I’m coming after you. You don’t want to see me tapping on your window! I’ll freak out your wife like nobody’s business.”
“Bye, Leylin. And thank you.”
“Eh, I was bored anyway. You’re no Iron Queen, Ren, but you’re not totally uncool. Try not to look like such a miserable dope all the time. See how much worse your life could have sucked? See you.”
#
Ren got an hour’s sleep. Then it was time.
The graveyard behind the Church.
Everyone had something nice to say. The oldest, her contemporaries, wept when she was lowered into the earth. They had so many stories, of the war, of school, of games and gangs and fights in the street, of singing and dancing at fiestas and how she put a beating on anyone who was too fresh with the other girls in the town. After shaking his hand, with her magic in his skin, they could not help themselves. Every moment was new again. The older they were, the more intense the difference was. There were kids too, the ones Gram had given gifts to over the years, notebooks and pens and calculators for school.
They said their goodbyes.
Ren did not sign the contract. “Attorney Bastian, I think you will find that circumstances have changed.”
He was not sure what had happened to the sun-side half of Danilo, but Ren suspected he was now the sole remaining heir. “I can’t let go of the place. When you’ve checked with my cousin, we can discuss how things will go. I’ll be coming back here regularly.”
Every memory was fixed in crystal. It wouldn’t be forever. He would forget things again like normal people as the years went by.
For now, the dreams of his youth were renewed, passion and drive. He had a feeling that he would be a lot better at certain things.
On the bus, he took the last row.
He picked up the phone and called the first entry in his contact list.
“Marie? I had the most vivid dream while I was here. You wouldn’t believe it. Lots of different kinds of people. And I dreamed of that day we got married. We’re going to be okay.”
Ren trailed off. He ended the voicemail with, “I remembered how much I love you is all, Marie.”