My grandfather looked as unhappy as the Wolfman with a case of dandruff.
Just to be sure, I said, “When you say Tia LaMontagne, you mean that lady monster Teelamun, right?”
“Precisely,” said Mrs. McSweeney, “though I didn’t know that back then. At least, not at first.”
“I didn’t know until today,” said Grampa bitterly.
Mrs. McSweeney nodded and actually looked sympathetic. “It wasn’t something I could tell you, Abraham.”
Grampa glared at her.
“I don’t understand!” I said. “How can Teelamun be a monster? She’s beautiful!”
Mrs. McSweeney smiled. “Well, dear, if you’ll remember, the Poets believe Always October is the place created to hold human fears so they don’t overwhelm us. There is little humankind finds more frightening than a beautiful woman.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Jake. “People love beautiful women!”
“Indeed they do. But love can be dangerous, as almost everyone discovers sooner or later. Men know that a beautiful woman has power over them. And women fear that someone beautiful can steal their man. The French have a phrase, femme fatale. It means ‘deadly woman.’ Stories about the woman whose beauty leads a man to his doom stretch back as far as ancient Greece.” She paused, then said, “Thing is, that kind of woman doesn’t even have to intend harm. Some women just hit a man’s heart so hard, it’s never the same afterward.”
She glanced toward my grandfather. His face was set and grim.
Turning back to Jake and me, she said, “Tia showed up when Jacob’s granddaddy was about thirty. He hadn’t married yet, though he certainly had plenty of chances.”
“He was a stuck-up snob,” muttered my own grandfather.
Mrs. McSweeney sighed. “Perhaps you had better tell this part, Abraham.”
Grampa’s nostrils flared and his lip twitched, but after a moment he nodded. “I was workin’ in the cemetery when it all started. My own grandfather—that would be your great-great-grandfather, Lily—had been runnin’ the place, but he was getting kinda old, so he hired me to help out. I had just graduated from high school and was trying to save some money so I could go to the community college.”
“Which you should have done,” said Mrs. McSweeney. “You certainly had the brains for it.”
“Well, that’s all past now, ain’t it, Eloise? And it’s not part of this story, so just hush up.” Turning back to Jacob and me, he said, “One afternoon I’m diggin’ a grave when I hear this little cry from behind me. Turning around, I see …”
His voice broke off and his eyes misted up.
“Tia LaMontagne?” I asked softly.
He nodded. “She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, Lily. Even so, there was something strange about her. For one thing, she was so pale, she looked as if she were carved out of white marble, like one of those tombstone angels come to life.” Grampa paused, and I could tell it was hard for him to go on. At last he said, “When I asked her if she was all right, she reached a hand toward me, then gave a little cry and collapsed.”
Grampa went silent. I was itching to know what came next, but we had come to an upward slope that was covered with loose stones, and it took all our attention to climb it without slipping. When we finally reached the top, I said, “So what happened after she collapsed?”
“I picked her up and carried her to the house—same place we live now—and we sent for Doc Dillon. Docs still visited back in those days. Doc said there was nothin’ wrong with her, she just needed rest.”
He turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to say more. After a bit of silence Mrs. McSweeney picked up the tale. “Well, no one thought it was fit for that woman to stay in the house with two men, of course. And since Abraham and I were cousins, he brought her to me. He used to bring me all his problems back then, me being five years older and considerably wiser.”
“Which is why you had four husbands, you being so smart and all,” said Grampa with a snort.
“Only one bad marriage in the lot,” replied Mrs. McSweeney serenely. “I simply outlived them all, and you know it.” She turned back to Jacob and me. “As I was saying, they brought the mystery woman to me. It didn’t take too long for her to recover, and I found her fascinating … partly because she wouldn’t say word one about where she was from or how she got here. The only thing she wanted was to meet Arthur Doolittle! I might have been jealous if I hadn’t found a good man of my own by that time. Well, set that aside. Arthur wasn’t that famous yet, so he was delighted to meet a fan, especially one who was quite beautiful. As it turned out, she was more than a fan … she was also a brilliant painter. Even better, from Arthur’s point of view, she liked painting scenes from his stories. Six months after they met, Tia and Arthur were married.”
I glanced at my grandfather. He was staring at the ground.
“Well, a bit of time went on and the two of them seemed truly happy together. Tia never really fit in, of course. Not easy to get accepted in a small town under the best of circumstances, and Tia was just odd enough to make it even harder.”
“I know what that’s all about,” I muttered.
“Then one day she just … vanished. It was quite a scandal. From what Arthur testified, the last time he saw Tia, she was in her studio, finishing up a painting. He was up in the tower, working on his new book, not knowing it was the one that was going to make him famous. Lunchtime rolled around and he went down to get her and … she was gone.
“Now, some folks wanted to believe he had killed her. But there was no sign of blood and no one ever found a body. Other folks thought she just got tired of living with such a peculiar man. Some thought something stranger had happened, though no one could ever say exactly what it was. All anyone really knew was that she had just vanished.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that!”
I saw Jacob shiver.
“Eventually Arthur remarried and had a son. That would be your dad, Jacob. And Abraham here, he recovered too—”
“Did not,” muttered Grampa.
“Well, whether you recovered or not, you got married, which is how come Lily is here.” Turning to Jacob, she said, “About the time your daddy was ten, your Grampa Arthur disappeared. Not as mysteriously as Tia, since he left a note, though the note itself was pretty mysterious.” She closed her eyes, as if searching her memory, then quoted: “‘The mystery calls. Though it breaks my heart to go, I can stay no longer. Forgive me, wife. Forgive me, son. I have done the best I could. With love and regret, Arthur.’”
I shivered as I recognized the message we had found in Jacob’s father’s notebook.
“My dad never told me that,” said Jacob, his voice bitter.
Mrs. McSweeney nodded. “No surprise there. Your daddy didn’t like to talk about it.”
“But why did Tia come to our side of the Tapestry to begin with?” I asked. “And why did she leave?”
“As Keegel Farzym told you, monsters occasionally visit Humana, just as some few humans, like me, sometimes visit Always October. One of their … well, scouts, I guess you could call them … brought back some of Arthur’s early stories, the ones where he was trying to create a world of monsters to write about. Tia liked the stories, but he was getting a lot wrong, and it annoyed her. She came to Humana to set him straight and ended up falling in love. She was, in the truest sense, his muse. A World Made of Midnight and all the other Always October stories never would have been written without her.”
“That doesn’t answer the question of why she left,” said Jacob. “Especially if she loved him.”
Mrs. McSweeney glanced at Grampa, then said, “Tia left because she was going to have a baby, and she felt it would be safer for it to be born in Always October.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” I asked.
Mrs. McSweeney smiled. “A woman alone in a strange new world needs a friend to confide in, Lily. Tia chose me to be that friend. It’s how I learned about Always October and found my way into the magical world.”
“It’s also how she got me,” put in Luna, who was trotting along at her feet.
“And a great blessin’ to me you’ve been, darlin’.”
About that time we reached a tunnel that sloped upward and brought us back to the surface. Even above ground it was still night, though I couldn’t tell if that was because we had slept so long or just because it stayed that way in Always October most of the time. At least the moon was full … and fully visible, since the forest where we now stood was sparse, the trees small and twisted.
We could hear the River Doom before we saw it.
“Getting close!” said half of Sploot Fah.
“Sploot Fah good guide!” said the other with obvious self-delight.
We emerged from the forest onto a stretch of bare rock about fifty feet wide. In the light of the full moon I could see that the rock ended at the lip of a chasm. I couldn’t tell how deep the chasm was. I could, however, see that it was hundreds of feet to the other side.
Stretching across that gap was the strangest bridge I had ever seen.
Also the most frightening.
It was a good thing I was carrying the baby at that point, because if I thought the bridge was frightening, then I was pretty sure Jacob was about to …