12

 

He Is Fey
and
Fated to Die

 

I

 

“Had a dopey look on his face,” grumbled Peter. “Dopier than usual, I mean. Something’s weird.”

Emily was at the window. “He’s driving off in our car!” Her voice was angry.

Emily turned in time to see Peter with that expression on his face she’d seen a thousand times before. It was an expression that said, this is too good an opportunity to miss. Peter loved backing out in the middle of an argument.

Peter wheeled his way to the door and did not bother to answer when she shouted after him, “Where do you think you’re going? You always leave before finishing any discussion! Duty calls, is that it? And just what do you think you can do? You can’t run after him, can you?” And she said some other things as well.

Then he was outside. It was pathetic to watch him through the window, to see how slowly and awkwardly he manipulated the special fork lift mechanism to maneuver his wheelchair into the back of the van. Peter had to stand, leaning with a cane in either hand, while this was done. And by that time, Wil was so long gone that there was utterly no point for Peter to continue.

And so, of course, he did. This time was no different than any other. Emily let the drape fall, blocking the view through the window. She didn’t want to see the same sad scene again, of Peter thinking he could overcome his handicap by stupid dogged persistence.

The drape swung, and she caught a momentary glimpse of the van’s taillights, two red dots, vanishing in the distance down the driveway.

Emily shivered, hugging herself, wondering why she felt so angry and afraid.

A moment later, she heard a hoarse cry from down the hall. She went from a fast walk into a trot. Galen’s bedroom door was hanging open, and his bed was empty, but the noise had come from further down the hall, from the master bedroom.

In that bedroom, a phone had spilled from the nightstand and lay in a tangle of cords on the carpet. Galen was kneeling across the room, fingers pointed toward the phone, face tense with fear. He held his hands in a strange gesture, middle fingers curled, pinkies and forefingers outthrust.

From the receiver came a mechanical voice: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.” And then a persistent warbling tone sang out, and Galen stiffened with fear.

Emily walked over, picked up the phone, hung it up. Slowly she turned, her thoughts not showing on her face.

“Galen, are you feeling okay?” she asked gently. “Would you like to lie down?”

The young man stood, visibly shaken. “The voice was made by nothing alive. Even vampires sound in my ear more human; they once were living! I could hear no soul! No soul! No soul!”

“Galen. . .?”

He seemed to regain his self-possession; his face grew calm. “Mother, I need to make a telephone messenger carry a message to a man.”

“Galen. . . ? You forgot how to use the telephone?” Gingerly, she extended the phone toward him.

“Mother, really, it was nothing.”

She wiggled the phone toward him. “No, go ahead. What number did you want?”

Galen blinked. “Number?” (Azrael thought he had discovered the secret of the mechanism. It was, after all, shaped like a magic square. He had carefully, letter by letter, spelled out the name.)

“If you don’t know it, ask the operator.” There was an edge of fear in Emily’s voice, and she was looking warily at Galen. “What city is he in?”

“It is the capital of this country. I have forgotten the name. There is an obelisk overlooking a pool, and, in another place, a pentagon of defense wards the nation from all assault.”

Emily raised the receiver, dialed a number, asked for operator assistance in Washington, D.C. Then she handed the receiver slowly to Galen. “Tell the lady who you want to talk to.”

Galen put the phone to his ear, then pulled it away again. He gave a slow, incredulous laugh. Putting his hand to his face, he stared at the receiver, first through his forefinger and thumb, then forefinger and index finger, index finger and ring finger, and so on, as if the gaps between his fingers were some sort of microscope. There was a strange look of joy and triumph in his eyes. “There is a lodestone hidden in this mechanism, is there not?”

Emily backed up. “You’re not Galen, are you?”

The young stranger who looked like her son raised his dark and gleaming eyes to hers, a sinister smile on his lips. “There is, within this, iron which points at the North Star, is there not, madam?”

“All speakers have magnets in them. Who the hell are you? How the hell did you get to look like my son? Where is he?”

“All? All? They are commonplace here, then?” When he pulled at the mouthpiece, it came off into his hand, and a metal disk fell out into his palm.

He straightened, holding the tiny metal membrane on high, and he laughed. “The most powerful of magical adjuncts! Most wondrous and rare! And they are commonplace? The influence in the lodestone reaches from my hand to the North Star. Anything within that reach is in my reach! No more hunting for dropped bits of hair or waiting to stab a shadow in a mirror! I have now a sword which reaches the ambit of heaven!”

Emily turned and fled, running down the hall. The young stranger’s mocking voice said lightly, “Madam, do you think to outrun Polaris’ reach as lightly as you outran your conscience and wedding vows? Somnus! Bind the limbs of Emily with vapor!”

She reached the main room when numbness made her arms and legs grow heavy. She knelt, she fell. It was a nightmare sensation, strangely familiar, knowing she was awake but unable to move.

The young man came into the room, carrying a broomstick he had gotten from the hall closet, stepping over her as if she were so much baggage. The broomstick wiggled in his hand and pointed to the kitchen phone.

He came back, holding the phone on its extension cord, and he took up a handful of long matches from the tall box on the mantelpiece of the fireplace.

He knelt down near her and lit a match, staring in fascination at its little flame. With his eyes on the flame, not on her, he spoke. “Somnus grant you power of speech. Phantasmos suspend your judgment. As in a dream shall all things seem, not strange, but familiar, and you shall answer my questions. You will assist me in the ritual. There are many men who have sworn fealty to me in dream, men of power and substance, kings and barons. Now we shall see if they will bend knee loyally to me, now that their dreams come true. We will summon their voices into the room, and the flame shall tell me if they speak the truth. Will you help me call their voices here?”

“Where is my son?” She thought her voice was too weak to be heard, as if she had only imagined, not spoken, the words. But he answered.

“He is on the dark side of the moon, within the Hermitage of Anguish, where the Blind Ones offer up the pain of others as offering to hideous outer gods, Phaleg, Bethor, and Aratron. Do not despair, for I soon intend to be cased within my own flesh again; and I know the fairy-queen sends dreams (secretly, she deems, though I have discovered them) to summon your son’s rescuer. Ah! But do you not believe me?” And he smiled, and lit another long match, and began to bring the flame down closer to her eyes. “See?”

 

II

 

The road was narrow and wound up through thickly wooded hills. Naked branches, jagged with crowds of twigs, stood up in webbed silhouettes against the winter stars. Every now and again, the blackness of the scenery was broken by the faint porch light of a distant neighbor, or the glitter of moonlight off the rushing river-water below.

Peter was hunched over the wheel of the van, watching the circles of light fleeing before him down the road, pushing heavy darkness ahead. He had seen Wil turn left out of the driveway; Wil had not headed toward the main road. No, in this direction, there were no turn offs before the reservoir.

Rounding a turn where the road for a moment looked out across the river canyon, Peter caught a glimpse of headlights above him in the distance. Someone had parked on the dam near the pump house.

Peter floored the accelerator, and the van wobbled around the narrow curve and hopped, groaning, across sudden rises and drops in the road. The trees here were thick, untended, and twigs scraped the roof and sides.

Then the trees fell back to either side, and Peter’s view opened. Before him was the road that crossed the dam. To his right, the reservoir extended, cool and black beneath the stars. To his left, a sluice gate let a stream of rushing water plunge down the dam’s steep side into the river far below, making a noise like continuous thunder.

Where the dam met the cliffside was a small copse of trees and brush. The ground here was at an alarming angle, before it plunged down in a sheer drop. Wil was leaning out over the drop, one hand flung up behind him, holding the bending branch end of a tree, gazing down raptly.

Peter knew there was nothing underfoot here but a long fall into rock and shallow water.

Peter drove closer, slowing, not wanting to startle Wil. The road let him get within several yards of Wil, no closer.

A nursery rhyme his father had taught him kept going through Peter’s mind, over and over:

 

He dreams, despite that it is day;

He seems awake: it is a lie;

The wizard took his wits away,

For he is fey and fated to die.

 

The van crushed some smaller shrubs out of the way, but then there were trees, and Peter could get no closer. He opened the door and called out:

“Hey, Wil, what you up to?” Peter fished under the passenger’s seat for his knee braces.

Wil turned and waved with his free hand, a glassy stare and vacant grin on his face. “I was going to take a jump off a cliff side or tall steeple. You know, to clear my head. I’ve discovered my body is stronger than iron. It won’t hurt me. I’ve done it lots of times.” Then his witless smile turned into a frown of exaggerated worry: “Hey—you won’t tell Emily, will you?”

Peter was clawing under the passenger seat for his second knee brace but could not find it. He called back: “ ‘Course not. But one thing first. Can you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?” One of Wil’s feet was on the ground, the other was in midair, and the branch was swaying gently under Wil’s weight.

Peter leaned out, put both canes on the ground, fell forward, catching himself with the strength of his powerful shoulders. He grunted. “Hey— you can see my license plate from there, can’t you?”

Wil looked reluctantly back up from the drop. “Huh? Sure, I can see it plain as day.”

Peter’s shoulder’s surged, and he took a step forward, dragging his useless legs through the dirt and brush behind him. “Read it!”

“What?”

Another step. The slope was beginning to angle downward dangerously. “Read the God damn letters on my license plate.”

“Uh. . .”

Another step. There was a thicket of branches before him, a short drop, then Wil. Then a long drop. Peter was on precarious ground already.

“Isn’t that funny, you forgot how to read?” Peter shouted at him. “Why is that, do you suppose? Think about it, man!”

Hanging by one hand from the tree branch, one foot on the slope, Wil stared blankly at the license plate. A look of concentration began to come into his features. Then he turned his head up and stared at the moon, his face attentive, as if listening to inaudible voices. Then, slowly, his head began to droop, as if his gaze were being pulled down toward the gulf below.

Peter, his eyes squinted into slits, his mouth a grimace, surged forward with a thrust of his shoulders. His canes had no purchase on the slope. Tree branches lashed at him as he fell. There was a chaotic moment of pain and dizziness as he tumbled and rolled. Then a blow: he had struck up against a tree. One of his canes was spinning out into the gulf of air, spinning and falling in slow silence.

There were twinges of pain in his hips and spine, and he bit back his groans with clenched teeth.

Wil’s voice came from nearby: “Are you hurt? Falls never hurt me, you know. My body is as hard as iron, so I can jump from cliffsides and tall steeples . . .”

Peter, lying on his stomach in the fallen needles and wiry grass, was staring at the handful of dry leaves he held in one fist. His face was screwed up in a look of terrible concentration, and his lips moved, as if he were trying to recall some long-forgotten word or phrase.

Dimly, he was thinking of something his father, very long ago, had forced him to memorize. Something stupid; some dumb nursery rhyme; something he had long put out of mind.

Then his face cleared; his eyes brightened.

Peter shouted: “That tree you’ve got! Look at it! Look at the damn thing! Do you deny that it is a laurel tree?” It was actually a maple tree, but Peter was hoping Wil wouldn’t say that.

And, sure enough, Wil said back: “Huh? I don’t know anything about trees, except that I can jump so far, so far . . .”

“Spirits of the world! He has not denied he holds the Laurel! Hey, Wil listen! There’s a song about laurel trees my Pa taught me! Don’t you want to listen, God damn you?”

“I’ll talk to you after I climb back up. Bye, now . . .”

Peter chanted:

 

Daphne! Fairest of the dryad race

Draw Daylight down to your embrace!

Night comes not where once was woo’d

The lady whom ļight too bold pursued

 

Dream’s deceits flee Daylight’s darts,

Chained by his harpstring, charmed by his arts;

No man masters madness, save only he

Crowned by the leaf of the laurel tree.

 

Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day!

Moon’s madness you harness, Night’s dragons you slay!

 

And Wil suddenly clung to the branch with both hands, shrieking in panic.

While Wil climbed up the slope back toward safety, Peter lay in the tangled brush, pounding his fist into the dirt, grimacing, tears in his eyes, and growling: “Jesus fucking Christ, it worked. God damn that old man, it worked. God damn that old house, it worked. It all works. It’s all true. God damn them!”

It was a long time before he found the strength to drag himself back up.