II

Lammas-Lug hn as a d Thursday and Friday, August 1 - 2 Saturday, August 3 - Monday, August 26, 1991

Thomas

IT WAS THE FESTIVAL OF THE HARVEST, AND THOMAS was to be the harvester.

He stood by the priestess, the cauldron bubbling in front of them, fire licking the black iron, their eyes reflecting the flames, their naked bodies shining with sweat. It was almost as if the priestess had no eyes—only a yellow burning. Between the priestess and Thomas and the cauldron was the altar, a wide, flat cairn of stones, covered with a black cloth. Spread-eagled and blindfolded on the altar was a naked young man. On the young man’s chest was a pentagram, with points at his throat, to the left and right of his nipples and to the left and right of his navel. The pentagram had been drawn in thin, red lines. Thomas and the priestess each held an athame, the blades of the white-handled knives even whiter in the firelight. The auras of all present—the priestess, Thomas, the young man, and the coven silently surrounding them—glowed and crackled, a net of multicolored light weaving itself in and out of their bodies.

The hot August night air also crackled and sparked, as the auras shifted, dissolved, reformed. It was as if everyone was inside an electrical storm that was low and close to the ground. Thomas looked up at the sudden light in the night sky: they were inside, or rather beneath, an electrical storm. The light in the sky echoed the light on the ground; and every time the auric lights moved, Thomas felt them pass through his flesh. His body vibrated; the hardness in his groin ached. He flicked the fingers of his free hand: lightning sparked.

Thomas had never felt so alive or so strong. And more strength and more power were coming. The priestess nodded at him and the coven, and in answer, the drumming began, accompanied by the oscillating tune of the singing bowl.

“To harvest life, to consume, to drink life,” Thomas began and felt the coven, as one organism, take a step closer to him, the priestess, the cauldron, the altar, and the young man.

Ancient Ones, Feared Ones,
Princes of Darkness, Shadow Lords,
I am ready.
I am ready to harvest this beating heart,
To feel the unquenchable fire,
To give the living blood to the night.
To you, Great Ones, Dark Ones,
Belong this heart, the fire in this flesh ...

Thomas stepped to the altar, the priestess one step behind. The circle took a step closer. Thomas held up his athame, letting the moonlight and firelight bathe the shining blade, as the coven hummed in time with the drums and the singing bowls. The auras now were like great snakes of red light, twisting, turning, passing in and out of all the bodies. The young man’s flesh was suffused with the darker red light of his glowing blood. Thomas lowered his arms and then, carefully, carefully, applying only enough pressure to break the skin, re-traced the pentagram on the man’s chest. Bright red oozed behind the blade. The man groaned.

Make us one flesh in the shadows.
Make us one mind in the darkness.
Make us one spirit in the night.
Let us never forget
The festival of the Horned One, the Goddess,
Let us welcome those who come, who bring the Change.
Open the way, open our eyes.
Set free the endless fire.
I take life to fill my life,
All our lives.
Fill me, fill us.
Hear us, Dark Lords.
Answer us, in the wind.
Answer us, in the fire.
Answer us, in the darkness.
Answer us, in the warm blood ...

Thomas looked around him. After this, there would be no return, no going back, no restoration of the Thomas John Ruggles, bank data entry clerk, night NCSU graduate student in computer science and business, son of Jack Ruggles, twenty-four-year-old man whom no one gave a second glance to. To go back would be a long, long journey. This would make that journey forever impossible, and seal Thomas into what he was becoming, what he had become: witch, practitioner of the Left-Hand Path, necromancer, servant of the Princes of Darkness. The priestess looked at him, her eyes now two fires burning in black pools. He could feel the multiple eyes of the coven on his skin. Thomas shuddered and then, in one deep stroke, cut through the young man’s aura, his flesh, his bone, down to his heart. For a brief moment, Thomas could see the man’s heart still beating.

“Now,” the priestess said, and cut the man’s throat.

Thomas grabbed the heart with both hands, felt the young man’s strength, the priestess’s strength, the coven’s strength pouring into him, and then tore the heart out and lifted it, dripping.

“The harvest!” Thomas cried.

“The harvest,” the priestess said, and dipping her own athame into the young man’s warm blood as if it were an inkwell, drew pentagrams on Thomas: in the center of his forehead, both cheeks, the hollows of his neck, over his heart, his stomach, his groin, his thighs, and feet. Each time the priestess dipped her knife into the man’s chest for more blood, his red aura followed the blade up and out, like long streamers. When she was done, a web of red light enveloped Thomas and the young man.

“All, partake of the harvest,” Thomas said, shuddering as the red streamers poured out from the young man and into his own body, oozing through his skin wherever the priestess had marked him.

He tore one bite out of the heart and then gave it to the priestess. She took the next bite and then threw the heart into the coven’s grasping hands.

Malachi, Ben, and Jack

“Dad? Dad? I don’t feel too good. I’m leaking light.”

Ben rolled over and sat up. Squinting from the sudden brightness, he reached out his left hand and turned on the lamp by his bed. According to the clock, it was just past midnight, August 2.

“Malachi?” Ben asked. “What? What did you say? What’s the matter, son?”

His son stood just inside Ben’s bedroom, leaning on the wall by the light switch. The boy was pale and weak; there were dark circles under his eyes. Malachi held his stomach, light leaking out between his fingers. Blobs of light oozed from his ears and his nose. Thin strings of light leaked from a cut on Malachi’s forehead. Glowing, marble-sized tears ran down his face. The light-tears bounced when they hit the floor and rolled away, leaving faintly glowing trails behind them. Tears littered the floor around Malachi’s feet. Bigger globs, from the boy’s nose and ears fell too, dropping like pebbles and stones on the floor. The light-strings, tiny, tiny snakes.

“Dad. Make it stop. Please make it stop. It hurts. Ohhhh, I’m going to be sick.” Malachi ran from the room, scattering the light-balls every which way. The ones he stepped on broke into smaller balls that skidded across the floor, out in the hall, under the bed.

Ben jumped out of bed, jerked on his gym shorts and T-shirt, and ran after Malachi, stopping first to try and scoop up the little balls of light littering the hallway. Maybe I can push them back inside, get him to swallow them, I mean, aren’t they supposed to be inside him? But the little balls wouldn’t stay in his hands. Most he just couldn’t hold: they slipped and oozed between his fingers. Others exploded on his touch into even smaller balls, a few more just winked out. Swearing, Ben gave up and ran into the bathroom. The boy was on the floor, hugging the toilet.

“Dad, the vomit’s glowing, too.”

“Jesus, son, you’re burning up,” Ben said, as he wiped Malachi’s face with a wet washcloth. “Here, rinse your mouth out with some water.” Ben handed Malachi a cup and then glanced at the washcloth before wetting it again. Malachi’s sweat had left glowing streaks on the cloth.

Malachi threw up again, gagging. Then he fell to the floor, as if hugging the toilet took too much energy. Ben wiped Malachi’s face again and then pressed the cloth on the boy’s hot, wet forehead.

“Just lie still for a minute; don’t move, okay? Don’t move,” Ben whispered, trying to fight down the fear that was rising up and filling his throat. What do I do? What in God’s name do I do? This isn’t some twenty-four-hour stomach flu; he’s fairy-sick. What do I do?

“That cloth feels good, Dad,” Malachi said so softly Ben could barely hear him. “But, my stomach—it feels all hot and funny—ohhh—”

Ben held Malachi as the boy threw up a third time. Little came out, but what did glowed. Then, things started to move. The toilet paper roll started spinning as if pushed by impatient, invisible hands. The paper spilled out on the floor, piling up in great droopy loops. The toothpaste tube shot out from the sink and landed in the tub with a thud. A bar of soap started drifting through the air, followed by a towel and a washcloth. A toothbrush shot straight up and broke against the ceiling. Ben realized that the electric lights in the bathroom weren’t on, and that all the light was coming from Malachi or the toilet. The room was filled with light, a light that moved as if it were a liquid in the air, bouncing off the ceiling, the wall, the floor, in and around Ben’s body, Malachi’s body, a body that was transparent, like a human lantern. Ben could see his son’s heart beating, the veins and arteries coursing with blood, his lungs, rising, falling.

“Oh, my God, what is going on? What in the hell is happening to my son?” Ben said, still whispering, staring around the room.

Then the wind started, moving as the light moved—no, the wind was the light, the light was the wind. At first, Ben felt a slight breeze, soft, yet insistent on his face, his chest. He could see the light pushing against his skin, dividing and separating around his body. There were little tornadoes, tiny vortexes, scattered about the floor, whirling out into the hall.

“Dad, I can’t make it stop; I don’t know how. Make it stop, Dad, please make it stop.”

Malachi began shaking. Ben picked up his son—would this new transparent body break like glass? No, he felt flesh, even though he couldn’t see it. As quickly as he could, Ben got the boy in the tub. Then he turned on the cold water, then the shower. Ben held Malachi’s head and kept washing his face as the water beat against both of them, until finally the shaking stopped and the soap and the washcloth had dropped to the floor.

“Mal, how do you feel, buddy? You don’t feel quite so hot—a little warm? How’s your stomach?” As quickly as it had come, the transparency was gone. But the wind-light kept moving, spinning off the little tornadoes. Ben had to shout.

Malachi just groaned.

“Let’s go lie down. Maybe you can sleep it off. Here, let’s get these wet things off. Yeah, there. Can you dry yourself? Okay, I’ll do it. All right, son.” Ben wrapped the towel around the boy, picked him up (He’s so light. When did he lose weight? God, is all this going to kill him?), and stepped out into the hall, dodging the tornadoes, which danced around his feet like mad tops. As Ben made his way through the tornadoes, they began to slow down, spinning slower and slower.

The light began oozing again after Ben had gotten Malachi more or less dry and into bed. Ben could, with his hand on Malachi’s forehead, feel the heat rising again—and he could see it, a faint, red glow just below the surface of his son’s skin. Bigger globs of light came out of the boy’s ears, eyes, and nose. The globs coalesced into spheres the size of baseballs and started bouncing around the room, hitting the wall, the curtain, the ceiling, Ben, the furniture.

And at the peripheries of his son’s body, Ben could see a faint edging of clearness, as if the color of Malachi’s flesh had been slightly erased.

The hallway filled with little tornadoes again.

Ben put Malachi back in the tub, turned on the shower, and called Jack.

“Hilda, I know it’s the middle of the night, but please wake up Jack. It’s an emergency. No, no, no, don’t call the rescue squad. I can’t explain now, but I need Jack. I know it’s three o’clock in the morning. Tell him Malachi’s sick. No, no—don’t call the rescue squad,” Ben pleaded. He couldn’t see his knuckles gripping the receiver, but he was sure if he could they would be white. He felt if he kept squeezing the receiver would snap in half.

“Ben? Whassmatter Malachi?”

“He’s fairy-sick.”

“I’ll be right over.”

Ben hung up the phone and put his head down on the kitchen counter. He wondered what questions Hilda was asking. He had wanted to tell her about Malachi but Jack had said to wait, let her get used to being married and get to know Ben and Malachi better. He’ll have to tell her something now. You don’t get phone calls at three in the morning for nothing.

Realizing he was dripping and soaking wet, Ben peeled off his wet clothes and was putting on a bathrobe when Jack knocked at the front door.

“What’s wrong with Mal? What happened?” Jack said as he came in. He was barefoot and had on only a bathrobe. Jack’s hair stood up all over his head in his usual little horns.

“He’s in the bathroom—he’s burning up—I think the water helps. He’s throwing up light, bleeding light—his body turned transparent, turned back, there are little tornadoes—never mind, let me just show you.”

Light poured out of the bathroom, an intangible flood. Inside, balls of light bounced off walls, the floor, the ceiling. When a ball hit a counter or the shower water, they exploded into tiny stars that dissolved like snowflakes as they hit the floor. Camera-like flashes erupted, bloomed, and died. Snakes of light writhed and twisted in the air, looping themselves around each man’s arms and legs, and slithering across their chests. The tornadoes whirled madly in the hall and out into the dining room, the kitchen, the living room, picking up dust, scraps of paper, paper clips, lost coins.

Ben had sat Malachi down in the shower this time, propped up with old pillows. The water was up to the boy’s middle. The light leaking from his nose and eyes rolled down Malachi’s chest into the water. Now there were two toothbrushes, a drinking cup, and the toothpaste on the ceiling.

“It just started, oh, I don’t know, half-an-hour, forty-five minutes ago. He came into my bedroom and said he felt sick and that he was leaking light. Then he threw up, and this poltergeist stuff started. He got a little better and I put him in his bed and it started all over again. I don’t know what else to do, Jack. The water helps, but he can’t stay in the tub forever. What am I going to do? What in God’s name am I going to do?”

Jack spoke slowly, shaking his head. “I don’t know—maybe—do you have anything from Faerie? Didn’t you say Valeria left a charm, like a crib mobile—maybe it has magic to protect him?”

“The star. I’ll be back—here, keep washing his face.” Ben ran to his bedroom, trying to remember where he had hidden the star. He dumped out his sock drawer, his shirts, underwear. No star. In the closet? No, his trunk, where he kept all his sweaters—and there, in the bottom, was a lumpy leather pouch. Ben pulled the drawstrings and dumped out the silver-grey twelve-pointed star Valeria had left swinging over Malachi’s crib. It felt heavy and cool in his hand.

Clinching his fist around the talisman, Ben ran back to the bathroom, dodging tornadoes, shoving through a tangle of light-snakes and kicking aside light balls the size of soccer balls on the floor. Jack looked up and then stepped back, knotting the washcloth in his hands. Very gently Ben slid the star’s silver chain over Malachi’s head. For a moment, nothing changed. The star lay flat on Malachi’s wet chest. Then, one by one, each of the star’s twelve points started to glow and shine, as if the silver were polished metal and not wood. Ben could have sworn he heard a faint humming-Jack? No, it was the star. Then the entire star shone and the humming grew louder and louder. The toothbrushes fell to the floor. Then, the drinking cup and the toothpaste. The light balls stopped bouncing and then, in ones, then twos, then threes and fours, started winking out. The snakes faded, like smoke. The tornadoes stopped whirling as if they had suddenly lost power, and winked out. At last the humming stopped and it was quiet, except for the sound of the shower. Malachi was solid, his body was opaque.

Ben turned off the water and touched Malachi’s forehead and cheeks with the back of his hand. “He’s not hot anymore. It worked, Jack,” he whispered

“Let’s get him out of the water,” Jack whispered in return. “Towels out here in the hall closet?”

“Yeah.”

Ben picked Malachi up and wrapped the boy in the thick towels Jack handed him. He feels so light, so light. Too light. He carried Malachi across the hall and sat down in a rocking chair by the boy’s bed. Jack sat down on the bed, yawning as he held his head with his hands.

“You know, Ben,” Jack said, looking up as Ben slowly rocked, “Malachi’s ears are pointed now. Valeria’s were, weren’t they?”

Ben nodded as he rocked his son back and forth.

“Have you told him everything?”

Ben got up from the rocker and laid Malachi in bed. He pulled the sheet over the boy and smoothed his son’s hair. Fairy-knots, Ben thought.

“Yeah, I have. You know, he doesn’t have to tell me when he’s been flying. There’s something extra in his eyes, they shine. Just like his mother. But knowing hasn’t, won’t, stop him from getting sick like this. And Jack, I think I’ve started seeing them again.”

“Them?”

“C’mon in the living room. I don’t want to wake him up,” Ben said.

“Them?” Jack repeated when they were both sitting on the living room couch. The front door was open. A faint breeze came through the screen; the lawn was half in shadow and half in moonlight. “The Fomorii. Just out of the corners of my eyes stuff. Like a sudden shadow. I look and there’s nothing there. I’m at the reference desk and I look up and see someone across the room with red eyes. I blink and they’re gone. I smell that hot, wet smell. I feel how I felt when I woke up the night they first tried to kill Valeria. If they aren’t back, they are on their way.”

“He just turned ten—didn’t she tell you something about puberty for fairy-children?”

“All she said was that he would manifest his feyness at puberty. And that he would have to learn to control what comes naturally to Daoine Sidhe children.”

“He’s a little early for a human, but I’d say puberty’s here, Ben. You’re going to have to take him to Faerie. We can’t teach him how to be a fairy. And if the Fomorii are coming back, geez, man,” Jack said softly.

“I know. Even if he hadn’t gotten sick, I would have to. We have to find the nearest gate. God knows how we are going to do that.”

 

After Jack left, Ben went down the hall to check on Malachi. He laid his hand on the boy’s forehead: still cool. He sighed and sat down in the rocker. I am so tired, but I don’t think I can go to sleep just yet.

“Dad?”

“Mal? How do you feel?”

Malachi looked up at his father, his eyes half-open, his voice low and weak. “It wasn’t a dream, was it? What happened, I mean. I feel really sore and achy and really tired. What’s this on my chest?” He held up the twelve-pointed star.

“No, it wasn’t a dream. That was your mother’s. She left it to protect you. It sure did tonight. Why don’t you go on back to sleep, Mal. We can talk in the morning.

“Tell me the story again. How you and my mother met, okay?”

“... Just to be on the safe side,” Jack had said, looking at me over his glasses. Tufts of his brown hair stuck up like little horns all over his head. “Fairies are known to be, well, mischievous.” I think the clerk at the hardware store had all his suspicions about loony bookworms confirmed when I asked for just five nails.

“Small project at the library, Mr. Tyson?” he asked as he handed me the nails in a little paper bag. I smiled weakly, knowing I would think of a snappy comeback at three o’clock in the morning. My next stop was Food Lion, to buy an Angel Food cake and a bottle of white wine. Emma would have been proud of me, I thought as I walked home, even if the wine was on sale half-price at $4.59. Buying the cake and the wine was what she would have done the day after Vale-ria moved in. Then, with me grumbling, Emma would have gone over to Valeria’s and knocked on her door. She wouldn’t have waited three-and-a-half weeks, like I had. Emma would also have taken some of her kitchen herbs from the pots scattered all over the house: basil, savory, thyme, and rosemary, her favorite. She probably would have invited Valeria over for coffee. I would have stood behind her, grinning like some hopeless hebephrenic.

I grabbed the first Angel Food cake I saw. I didn’t have any rosemary. Two nights after the funeral I had gotten good and drunk. Staggering drunk. Yelling-at-the-moon drunk. Pouring-wine-on-my-head drunk. Finally crying drunk and then I smashed every rosemary pot on the back stoop.

It was a three-minute walk from the Food Lion to Beichler Road and the little gateway into Sunset Hills, my development. From the Sunset Hills sign to 1411 was half-a-block, one more minute. I stood for what seemed like an hour in the street, rehearsing the lines Jack had suggested, trying to make them seem as casual as if they were really my own. Finally I walked up the blue flagstone path to the door. Feeling silly, I reached down in my pocket one more time and touched the nails. Then I knocked. I knew she had to be home; all the lights were on.

“Who is it?” a voice called from inside.

“Ben, from next door, 1413. Huh, I thought I’d drop by, say hello, be neighborly—if you aren’t busy or anything.” Unfortunately these weren’t Jack’s smooth opening lines.

Valeria opened the door and bright light washed out from the house.

“Like my light?” Malachi said, his eyes barely open, his words soft, slow, close together.

“Yes, just like yours,” Ben said. Malachi was asleep, his breathing slow, regular. No light except from the lamp, which Ben turned off. He sat for a very long time in the dark, on the side of the bed, listening to Malachi breathe, watching him sleep.

Hazel

Hazel put her ear to Alexander’s side as she carried him up the stairs to her bedroom. His motor was definitely running. She knew if she could see his face that the cat’s bright blue eyes would be half-closed in complete bliss. Every day he waited for her by the dinner table until Hazel was finished and her grandparents said she could go. Or, more often, she would just push away her chair and leave. Her grandparents, engrossed in conversation, or both reading, wouldn’t notice until they cleared the table, if then. Then Hazel would scoop up the grey-and-white part Siamese and the two of them went on their walk around the house, Alexander’s purr getting deeper and more satisfied the longer the walk. The walk was another thing her grandparents rarely, if ever, noticed, even if Hazel went through the dining room and the kitchen two or three times.

The walk ended in Hazel’s bedroom with Alexander curled up at the edge of Hazel’s bed and Hazel sitting in front of her computer, cracking her knuckles and waiting for the date and time prompts to appear.

“08-01-91,” Hazel said to herself as she typed. Three more weeks of summer vacation, then fifth grade. Next she keyed in 19:45, and then Hazel\Worldmaker. After a few beeps and chirps, the Worldmaker logo appeared: a map of the world growing one section at a time, as if an invisible hand was putting down puzzle pieces. When the map was complete, the screen faded to grey and then, slowly, as if they were emerging out of mist and smoke, a picture of a group of medieval men and women in a forest of white-barked trees. The Alexzelians. Hazel-Guinevere was their leader, with Alexander the Lion by her side. Hazel, without looking, reached over to rub the cat’s head. In response, Alexander stood, stretched, and then climbed into Hazel’s lap. He snuggled into the crook of Hazel’s arm and closed his eyes. Hazel stroked Alexander’s back as she thought.

“Not bad,” she said to the cat. “What do you think? Should I add more trees? I think the forest needs to be thicker—”

Hazel stopped talking. The screen was growing, expanding. Hazel tried to press escape but she couldn’t. The keyboard had disappeared. There was no chair or desk or bedroom or house. She was standing on the edge of the monitor, wavering, holding tight to Alexander, who was wide-awake and yowling in her arms. The Alexzelians were gone. The trees—Hazel could hear the wind murmuring in, no, to the trees. The trees murmured in return. She could feel the same wind on her face. Hazel took a step backward, reaching for where the edge of the monitor screen had been. Dry leaves crunched beneath her feet. Instead of the familiar metal of the monitor Hazel felt bark. She was touching one of her trees. The bark glowed. She set Alexander down and rubbed her hands over the smooth bark. Some of the bark’s luminosity lingered on her palms, pale, ghostly streaks.

Hazel and Alexander stood at the edge of the forest. Facing Hazel was a meadow of tall grasses and in the center of the meadow was a dark lake. She took a step forward and felt something heavy and warm pushing against her leg. Hazel looked down to see Alexander, who while not a lion, was three times his normal size. He looked back up at her and held her gaze.

“Can you talk now, Alex?”

Alexander didn’t reply except to push against her again, nudging her out into the meadow.

“Hey, boy, want me to go out there?” she asked and knelt down to hug him and scratch his head. Alexander licked her and nudged her again toward the meadow. “Out there, huh?” She paused before following the cat and looked back over her shoulder. Just trees, no metal window looking into her bedroom. Alexander nudged her a third time and Hazel let the cat lead her out into the meadow, into the tall grasses and the wild flowers. The flowers nearest her were white, like paperwhite narcissus. To her surprise she was barefoot—her shoes had disappeared along with the monitor, computer, and everything else.

The meadow greeted her.

Hazel felt a pressure against her feet. It was as if the earth was an enormous cat gently bumping her feet. Hazel rubbed the ground with one foot and felt the pressure again, still gentle, but insistent. She kept rubbing the ground and it vibrated in return.

“Hello ground, hello meadow,” Hazel said. She wasn’t surprised the vibrating grew louder in response. She had spoken to the meadow at the right moment ...

 

Hazel shook her head and yawned. The cursor was blinking at her beneath a zero in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. The word Print was in the upper left-hand corner, and below was a list of commands, the first being Full Document. The printer’s document tray was full. Hazel gathered up the pages and started to read. It was her dream: falling through the monitor, the glowing trees, the purring ground, and Alexander getting bigger. Hazel quickly looked at her cat. He didn’t look any different—did he?

... Hazel and Alexander found themselves at the edge of a meadow filled with white and yellow flowers. Tall, white-barked trees encircled the meadow, making the sky into a blue oval. The sun was high in the sky and bright, so bright, that the white of the trees and the flowers was almost too much to look at. The yellow flowers seemed to be on fire. There was a breeze blowing, a sweet breeze that seemed to be playing tag with the leaves.

Hazel and Alexander were all alone, or so Hazel thought.

There was a pool in the meadow. The water in the pool was dark and still. As she walked toward the pool, the flowers began to change their color. The white became tinged with a line of dull bronze-yellow at first. The dull yellow made Hazel think of the Mexican coins she kept in a glass jar on her desk. Her grandfather said her parents had brought them home from a trip before Hazel was born. The Mexican coin-yellow grew brighter and brighter the closer she came to the pool, until the flowers growing at the water’s edge were fire-yellow.

Hazel had no idea how long she and Alexander stood by the pool before the dragon flew out of the sky and landed on the other side of the water. She wasn’t even surprised. to see the creature in the air. A flying dragon was no stranger than the glowing colors or the breeze that seemed to be almost speaking with the trees. In fact, she was more surprised. that she wasn’t surprised. For such a large creature the dragon was graceful and light in the air, as if it were a huge, light bird, riding the thermals. When the dragon landed, its huge wings beating down the flowers around it, its long green neck stretching, Hazel thought it was one of the most beautiful creatures she had ever seen.

“Next to you, of course,” she said to Alexander, who was butting her on the leg.

Then the dragon spoke to Hazel in a low, rumbling, gravelly voice, calling for her to come to it and not be afraid.

“Stay with me,” she whispered to Alexander, who answered by rubbing the length of his body against her legs. “I think it’s a nice dragon, but just the same,” Hazel said, thinking of all the stories of dragons burning down cities and gobbling up princesses and knights. “Come on, let’s go see what it wants.”

The dragon said nothing as Hazel made her way around the pool, pushing aside the grasses and flowers. It only watched her with its brilliantly colored iridescent eyes; like green agates, Hazel thought. When she was close enough, it lowered its head so that Hazel could touch it. The dragon’s head felt warm and smooth.

Then the dragon began speaking. It told Hazel she was needed here, in the world of the meadow and the white trees and the flowers. She was needed and was called to come home. Hazel told the dragon her home was somewhere else, back there, where she had been born, where her grandparents were. The dragon told her yes, she had been born there, but here, this place, was also hers.

“I don’t get it,” Hazel said. “Back home—” and she looked behind her to see the white trees and above her to see a sky whose blue she now could see was different, darker and deeper. “I live there, in a house, with my grandparents, and Alex, and I go to school. This is a dream. You’re not real; dragons are fairy tales.”

“It was your machine,” the dragon said, “and your game. The machine knocked at the door and the game opened the door to this place; the machine answered a call from this place. It can talk to other machines, yes? Create invisible links of energy, of electricity? Such a link was made to here, which is beyond dreams (and you do not remember it, yet, but you have already been here in your dreams). We all travel when we sleep, although we forget quickly where we have been and what we have done. It is better so; there are some dream places that would haunt the waking too much.”

“Nightmares?” Hazel asked.

“Sometimes. Sometimes it is just the opposite. Dreams show us places in our minds that when we are awake are disguised or obscured. Dreams remove masks and let us see the faces beneath. But this dream-which-is-not-a-dream you will remember and I am wearing no mask and neither are you. Your cat is larger than he was; you just can’t see it yet,” the dragon said. Smoke curled and twisted from the dragon’s nostrils as it talked, surrounding its huge head in a small cloud. Its great tail twitched back and forth.

Then Hazel woke up. She was sitting in front of her computer. Her cat was asleep on her bed.

Hazel felt around the monitor and the hard drive and knocked on each one. Solid. She tested each connection. Nothing was loose. Every light in the room was on and the clock on her desk said it was past midnight, 12:51. If there had been a power failure, it would be blinking 12:00 over and over and over.

Had she been sleeping at her computer for over four hours? Dreaming? But—the story she had in her hand—had she written it in her sleep? Had her grandfather found her asleep and—that had to be it. Yes, her grandfather came in, found her asleep, wrote the story, and set things up so she would see the print screen and find the story in the printer.

Her grandfather had never written a story in his life. Somehow Hazel was sure of that

She did the only thing she knew to do: she went to bed. Alexander curled up beside her, his back pressed against her leg.

Russell

Russell woke suddenly in the middle of the hot August night. Someone had been calling his name, someone he knew.

“Mama?” he whispered into the darkness. Then, with some hesitation, “Daddy?” But even as Russell repeated both words he knew the voice was neither his mother nor his father. It couldn’t be. His mother was in Arizona, or at least she had been two years ago. His father was nearer—down the hall—but he wouldn’t be calling for Russell in the middle of the night.

Russell.

Miss McNeil. How could it be his first grade teacher? She was six years and half-a-continent away, in Lawton County, Oklahoma. How would she know where to find him in Raleigh? This trailer in Neuse Woods, out on Poole Road, was the fourth place Russell had lived since Lawton County—how could she possibly find him? Why would she come now, when there had been so many times before when Russell had wished for her, prayed for her? And it was in the middle of the night—would his first grade teacher be outside his window calling his name? Yeah, right.

Russell got up to look out the window anyway. Just maybe. Of course the Whites’ backyard was empty: a broken swing set, a slide, a tire hanging from a tree. It was bright and clear and warm. The fan facing his bed rattled. The stars were tiny, white fires; the moon was a white crescent. The trailer next door shone as if it were silver.

“It sure sounded like Miz McNeil calling me,” Russell said. Just the way she would call his name when she called the roll, or asked him to read or clean the erasers. Daddy? Jeanie? Miz McNeil is in the backyard and she wants to talk to me. His father’s answer would be a quick backhand. Jeanie would just start whining about how hard she tried to be a good mother or some other crap. The way she had at supper when her parents had been over.

Today had been Jeanie’s birthday and her folks had stayed after they brought him back from yard work to help celebrate. He supposed they had to come; she was their daughter, after all, but after working a good chunk of the summer as their yard boy he didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. The yard work had been Jeanie’s idea. Get the boy out of the house, give him something to do, he’s too big to lie around all summer watching TV. And if he had been working for anybody else, it would have been okay. Russell found he liked working with plants, the digging, the cutting, moving, setting out, watering.

Jeanie’s folks were another matter. The old lady never shut up. If Russell didn’t mend his ways, he was going to wind up in jail, or worse. Look what had happened to his mama—where was she? Apples don’t fall far from the tree; he’d better watch his step. Don’t you go smart-mouthing me, I’ll jerk a knot in you so fast it’ll make your head swim. And she preached. Was Russell right with God? He’d better get right, not like his mama, she worshipped idols, did he know that? Cathlicks prayed to statues and it says right here in the Bible that’s a sin. She followed behind Russell, fussing about how he did one thing or another, didn’t he have any sense? Russell wanted to kill her. The old man would have been all right if the old lady hadn’t been around. Once or twice the old man had even said something halfway nice, but the old lady would snap at him not to get soft with the boy, and that would be the end of it.

The only way Russell had gotten through the summer without blowing up or telling the old lady to go to hell was when he remembered what he called his special dreams. They had started in May and he had them every two or three nights. Sometimes a week would pass, but that had been in the beginning. He would think about them while he worked and the old lady talked: the silvery-white trees, the sky with the two moons, the talking wind, and running, just running through the tall grasses and the glowing flowers. Standing in the meadow, watching and waiting as the flying horse flew down to talk to him, nuzzle his face with its warm breath.

The well-being, the secret happiness, of the dreams would linger most of the next day, enclosing Russell in a safe and close cloud that muffled the old lady’s words and kept them from hurting quite so much. Today had been like that so that even when he knew the old lady and the old man were going to stay for dinner after they brought him it had been okay. The dream-feelings got him through what seemed like an interminable dinner; Russell was amazed at just how much mashed potatoes and fried chicken two old people could eat and still claim they had room for the big, white cake Jeanie brought out. Jeanie had picked it up that afternoon at the Food Lion where she worked. She had also set up a pink artificial Christmas tree.

“Mama and Daddy put up a tree on everybody’s birthday, ever since I was a little girl,” she had explained to Russell the first time she hauled the tree out, for his father’s birthday last year. Russell had stared dumbfounded at Jeanie when she started putting the artificial tree together on the kitchen table. “This way,” Jeanie had said, “we’ll have Christmas three or four times a year—or at least a tree, anyway. Get me those little, white lights out of the Christmas box in the closet.”

Having a Christmas tree up in August or March or May was, in Russell’s opinion, stupid. Having Jeanie’s parents over made it worse. But at least this time the old folks were only going to be around for a few hours, not the entire day the way they had been on the real Christmas. If he could just keep remembering his dreams, he’d could get through it and not get in trouble.

He had thought when he opened up the old folks’ present for him at Christmas that maybe they had changed their mind about him. He had pulled bright, shiny fishing lures out of a box. The lures sparkled in the light from the tree lights and the sun coming through the picture window, as he held them up, turning them this way and that. Maybe Daddy will go with me this spring, Russell thought, if he asked the right way, at the right time, if his daddy wasn’t on a job, if he hadn’t had too many beers ... Then the old lady had noticed Russell’s Nativity under the tree. Russell winced, remembering. Why did he have to remember the bad things, too? He had made sure for this August Christmas tree his Nativity scene was in his room, safe and sound. The Nativity was the only thing he had left from Mama, the only person he was sure would listen to his dreams. If he told her, Russell knew what she would say: Silver-white trees, with golden leaves? I used to dream about them, too, honey. They reminded me a little of the church I went to when I was a little girl. Not the way the church looked so much as how it felt. You know, Russ-honey, quiet, peaceful, safe. There was a little corner of the church where candles burned all the time in little, blue glasses. She told him her dreams as bedtime stories, her voice soft and low, the window open to the hot, still Oklahoma night. Her eyes, he remembered now, had glowed green in the darkness, just like a cat’s. Just the way he had thought his own eyes had been glowing.

“Well, Jeanie, I’m glad you didn’t let the boy put out that Cathlick thing under your tree, the way he done at Christmas. Thou shalt not make graven images, that thy days may be long in the land of the Lord. And everybody knows there weren’t no fox at the manger,” Jeanie’s mother had said, interrupting Russell’s reverie. The white cake was cut and the presents were opened. Crumpled pieces of bright-colored wrapping paper lay on the floor like bits and pieces of a magpie’s nest.

Russell looked hard at her and, for the first time, he could see colors all around the old lady: angry dark reds, oranges, purples flickering and flashing. There were lights around the old man, his daddy, and Jeanie—she had little silvery stars, sparkling and twinkling around her. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and the lights were gone. And the lady was still going on about Cathlicks being little better than idol-worshippers, it was right in the Bible—

“My Catholic thing isn’t under the tree because I don’t want you near it, you hear me, old lady? Don’t you ever touch any of my stuff and stop talking about Mama. You’re just a mean, old lady. Mean, mean, mean. All summer long I’ve been working in your damn garden and your damn yard and you’ve not said one nice word to me, not a damn one. Making me eat on the back porch. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” Russell yelled in the old lady’s face. He hadn’t meant to yell; the words had just come out. He hadn’t meant to say anything. Remember the dreams, smile, eat cake, nod at the right times. That had been his plan.

The plan hadn’t worked.

“Jeanie! Do you hear the way this boy is talking to me? Cursing me, in my own daughter’s house! You are one sorry good-for-nothing boy. Here we are trying to have a birthday party and you go and ruin it. I’m only trying to save you from that Cathlick idol worshipping. Your mama was a heathen, if not worse—to go off and leave her family like that. Of course I wouldn’t have you in my house. I told Jeanie to make your daddy ship you off to your mama when they got married, I could tell the minute I laid eyes on you that you were trouble, but nobody knows where that worthless mama of yours is—”

“Now, Lillian, the boy has worked hard all summer long and he’s not been any real trouble, you have to admit that now,” the old man interrupted.

“Shut up, you old fool, the boy is nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble.”

“You shut up, you old hag, just shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“Russell!”

“Boy, when you are going to learn to keep your fool mouth shut? Jeanie, goddamit, I thought you quit smoking—the damn trashcan is on fire,” his daddy yelled and backhanded Russell so hard he jerked back against his chair. Dark smoke rolled out of the kitchen trashcan. His daddy seemed to almost be on fire as well, with dark red, black-edged lights—and so did everybody else, for that matter. In the midst of the blood, the fire, the smoke, and the yelling, Russell ran to his room, cursing himself for letting the old lady get to him, jerk his mouth open, and drag out those stupid, stupid words. God, he was stupid, just like they all said. He scooped up the little Nativity scene from his dresser and quickly hid it in the back of his closet. He heard his daddy cursing about the fire and now the whole damn kitchen was going to smell of smoke and it was a good thing he saw it before the trailer went up. Jeanie was cursing back—it wasn’t her fault, she had quit smoking, months ago. And the old lady yelling: they could have burned up, they could have just burned up.

When the Nativity was safe, Russell made himself sit on his bed. He knew what was coming next. When all the excitement about the fire was over, somebody would remember Russell and then his daddy would slam the door open and backhand him again or make him drop his pants and wallop him with a belt. And then drag him out to say he was sorry.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

 

After the whipping and the apology, his daddy made Russell spend the rest of the evening in the living room with Jeanie and her parents. Need to learn how to be civilized, boy. No birthday cake. And listening to the old lady, with her lights now more a dark yellow than red, tell Jeanie she ought to call the law on him: “I don’t know how you put up with this young ’un, Jeanie. I really don’t. He’s not even yours. When your babies come, you’ll see the difference; it’ll be like night and day. I know some folks at church called the law on one of theirs. Sheriff came and hauled him off. He wasn’t the same after a night in Stony Lonesome, I’ll tell you what. Couldn’t hurt. Cut me another piece of cake, honey; it’s pretty good for store-bought. I never bake cakes anymore myself. Why bother messing up all them bowls, you just have to wash when you can run down to the grocery store and pick up one. Larry, it sure is a good thing you saw that fire, I wonder how it started, since nobody smokes ...”

Russell had almost bit off his tongue then. He wanted to tell her he’d get all the cake he wanted after she left; he didn’t care if Jeanie had thrown his piece out the back door. He took a deep breath and made himself think of his dreams.

 

All that had been just a few hours ago. He could only imagine what Jeanie’s mama would say if he told her he was hearing voices in the middle of the night. Might as well go to the bathroom, he thought. Maybe somebody was in there, whispering his name. Of course the room was empty. Feeling foolish, he checked behind the shower curtain and inside the clothes hamper and the medicine cabinet. When he closed the cabinet door, he found himself staring into his own face: a thin, red-haired boy, with hazel eyes, tufts of hair sticking up like little red feathers. And Russell saw his own lights: a dark flickering red, edged with black, and was that a touch of green? He rubbed his eyes, flicked the overhead light on and off—and the colored lights were gone.

Russell went back to bed, shaking his head. Colored lights. Special dreams. Voices. What the hell was going on? Was he crazy—he didn’t feel crazy. But could someone who was really crazy know they were? Never mind, he thought, tomorrow would be better. No more gardening for Jeanie’s folks.

“Need you at home, boy, packing and stuff,” his daddy said. The Whites were moving in a few weeks, before school started and before Jeanie’s babies were due. His daddy had said they would still be living on Poole Road, but closer to town. Russell would be in a new school for the fifth grade.

Maybe the new school next fall would be different. Ha. Maybe if he went back to sleep again, he would hear Miz McNeil and he would be able to hear more than his name. Maybe he would hear the voice tell him what it wanted him to do.

 

The night before the Whites moved out of Neuse Woods, Russell had gone to bed early. He knew his father would have them up at dawn to load the truck and the car. Jim Beam, Old Crow, and Johnny Walker boxes were stacked around his bed. Russell’s closet and his chest of drawers were empty. Only the clothes he was going to wear tomorrow were out. He stood before a tall, white house in the country, surrounded by taller trees and a patchy rough yard. Behind the house were more and more trees, a forest, thick and dark and green. The house was calling to Russell, telling him to come in, to come home. He followed the voice up the front steps and eased open the front door and shouted hello. The word echoed and bounced, like a tossed ball, in and out of empty rooms, until the house’s silence caught it and gobbled it up.

Russell, come further up.

Russell stepped into what looked like a short hallway. To his left was what looked like a living room. On the far side of the living room he could see what had to be the dining room, as there was an empty table in the middle, surrounded by chairs. Beyond the dining room he could see what looked like a kitchen; the white tiles shone in the light.

This is a big, big house.

Russell.

He followed the voice upstairs, to another hallway, lined with doors. The first door was a bedroom, the second a closet, the third a bathroom. But the voice was calling from the last door, at the hall’s end. The door opened by itself, slowly opening and revealing an attic, long and narrow, with a slanting roof and cedar wood floors. The attic ran the front length of the house, and two windows punctuated its slanted roof Each window had wide sills, wide enough for someone to sit in and stretch out their legs.

This is my room. This place is meant for me.

Outside the window Russell didn’t see the tall trees and lawn and the woods he had seen outside the house. There were the trees, silver-white, with golden leaves, from his other dreams. Russell unlatched the window and crawled out on the roof The sky was black. The white trees swayed back and forth in a wind that was pulling at Russell, wrapping invisible hands around his legs. Russell let the wind slowly pull him to the roofs edge, and, then, as if it were something he had done all his life, Russell dove out into the wind and flew.

“Get up, boy. Time’s a-wasting.”

Russell looked up, dazed, from the floor at his daddy, who had just flipped over Russell’s bed. “Get yer clothes on and then put this bed in the truck. Get moving,” his daddy said and then clicked on the light. “Go on, now.”

Russell covered his face against the bare light bulb in the ceiling and stood. Outside it was still dark. He could still see a few stars in the sky and the fading moon. Why’d they have to get up so early? Sometimes his daddy did stuff just for meanness’ sake.

“Everything is already on the trucks,” Russell muttered. He could see his father’s pickup, his father’s best friend’s pickup, and his stepmother’s station wagon. There was just enough room in the back of the station wagon for Russell to squeeze in. Russell’s bed was to be tied to the top of one of the pickups.

Russell sighed and pulled a T-shirt over his head and then felt around on the floor for his pants. He had slept in his underwear. He could hear his father and stepmother yelling at each other about hurrying up and getting something to eat at Hardee’s. I bet the only reason we are moving like this is so we can be gone before the landlord comes to collect the late rent. This new house must be awfully cheap. As he was pulling his shoes on, Jeanie started yelling for Russell to hurry the hell up and had he stripped the bed yet? Rolled up the mattress? Got his own personal box, put it in the car? Was he asleep or what?

An hour later, after packing up the last few things and biscuits at Hardee’s, they were at the new house. Russell couldn’t see it until his father opened up the back of the station wagon and let him climb out, holding tight to his Old Crow box. The box was filled with Russell’s things: the Nativity scene, his mother’s picture, the red fox Miz McNeil had given him.

It was a white, two-story frame house, with two roof windows. It was the house in Russell’s dream. Beneath the slanting roof he knew he would find his attic bedroom. The woods he had seen behind the house were where they were supposed to be, even though the trees were ordinary oaks, sweetgums, pines, poplars, maples. No silver trees with golden leaves. The yard, to Russell’s surprise, was bigger than he had dreamed. Lush, thick greenness spread out around the house: tall, thick grass, Queen Anne’s lace, patches of red clay—red clay islands and continents in a wild sea. Russell imagined running and running over that green ocean and then falling to roll, over and over and over, until he would lie still, his head spinning, staring up at the sky. The house stood alone. Its nearest neighbors were about a half-mile down the road, Greenwood Estates. Russell had seen the sign when they had driven past it. He had caught just a glimpse of Greenwood: brick houses, mostly, trimmed yards, bicycles, shiny cars.

“Get a move on, Russell. Grab some boxes and take them inside. I don’t want you running off until everything is in the house. Your daddy tells me there’s a creek back in the woods. I don’t want you going near it until I get the clothesline up and the washer hooked up. I do hope Larry remembered to call CP&L; I don’t want to sit in the dark and sweat,” Jeanie said.

A creek? I wonder if it’s deep enough to swim in and has fish. Nobody mentioned a creek.

 

Russell went to bed early that night, in the attic bedroom. He lay motionless on his bed in the darkness, listening. The night-sounds were different from the trailer. A floor fan pushed air over him and outside, through the two open attic windows, Russell could hear, faintly, wilder noises than he had ever heard.

Learning the night-sounds was something Russell had done in every place he had ever lived in: the trailer, and the string of houses in Oklahoma and Kansas. For the first three or four nights Russell focused on knowing all the night-sounds before falling asleep. He had to learn the new words of the wind and the trees and if the house said anything in reply. Though muted, he could hear, right under his bed, the dull sound of a chair being dragged across some floor downstairs, probably the living room. The phone trilled like some distant bird.

Russell picked up a flashlight from the floor and clicked it on to read again the names he had found scrawled in magic marker and blue and black ink and pencil on the attic roof beams. Robert, 7-17-75; Donnie was here, 8-13-89; Sam, April 4, 1987. Tomorrow Russell would write his own name, below Donnie’s. Russell wrote the letters of his name in the air with his flashlight. Then he turned it off and wrote his name again, using his fingers.

He was able to see, very faintly, the letters in what looked like blue skywriting, above his head.

Jeff

The day before the beginning of the new school year, Mrs. Clark took Jeff into Nottingham Heights Elementary. To meet Mrs. Bondurant, the guidance counselor there, she said. His social worker had requested it. What for, he had wondered. What could he possibly tell this woman that he hadn’t told somebody else, that wasn’t already written down in some folder somewhere.

“I’m going to talk with your teacher and then look around the library,” Mrs. Clark said when she came out of Mrs. Bondurant’s office. She had gone in first and Jeff had poked around the computer lab. The counselor’s office was at the back of the lab. “This is Mrs. Bondurant.”

Jeff eyed the woman warily as she got up from her desk to shake his hand. Mrs. Bondurant looked too young, with long, dark brown hair pulled back with a bright blue scarf. Dark brown eyes, a turtleneck, jeans.

“Thanks for coming in, Mrs. Clark. Jeff and I won’t be long, maybe half-an-hour, forty-five minutes? Come in, Jeff, sit down for a minute, while I make some notes in this file, then we’ll visit some.”

She smiled a lot, Jeff thought, as he sat down stiffly in a chair by her desk, watching her as she wrote. Ever since he had come to live with the Clarks, everybody seemed to be writing something down all the time in little folders or notebooks and they wouldn’t let him see any of it. They—the social workers, the police, the doctors, now this guidance counselor—were writing about what had happened and what he had said and hadn’t said and what his saying or not saying meant. It means I don’t want to talk about it all the time.

They all wanted him to talk, to express himself, tell them how he felt, what he was dreaming. This young Mrs. Bondurant with her long hair and smiles was going to want the same thing, he thought. Maybe.

Jeff looked around the room as Mrs. Bondurant wrote—boy, she was writing a lot. No, now she was reading something. Now she was frowning. Mrs. Clark must have told her everything.

 

Camille Bondurant was starting her fourth year as a school guidance counselor, a year that was to be split between Nottingham Heights Elementary and Marlborough Road Elementary. Mondays and Tuesdays and every other Friday at Nottingham; Wednesdays and Thursdays and the other Friday at Marlborough. But even with two schools and a heavy caseload, Camille had never been not ready to talk with a new student. Until today. The principal at Marlborough, a singularly boring man, with sandy blond hair cropped close to his head, had gone on and on and on. She had just started skimming the Gates boy’s file, her blue-green mug steeping a bag of Constant Comment, when his foster mother had knocked on the door. She knew a little about Jeff from a phone conversation with his DSS social worker—dinosaurs—but she needed to put him in context. Why he was seeing her, when, how, and what did he know about what had happened to him.

Gates, Jeffrey Arthur, age 10 ... aggravated and protracted sexual abuse . . .

Now the boy was sitting three feet away and it was obvious he thought she was just one more person he had to tell his story to. About the right size for a ten-year-old, black hair that fell over his hazel eyes, slight body. Bored and detached? Yes, that was it, not quite present.

... father Perpetrator . . . abuse began when Jeffrey was six years old, with mother’s tacit consent . . . mother deserted family, has had no contact with Jeffrey for a year and seven months ...

Detachment made perfect sense—how else would Jeff had gotten through four years of—what had the father said? Servicing his sexual needs. God. And the mother—the father blamed her, of course, after throwing him out of her bedroom. All her fault. In the next bedroom for three years, knowing what her husband was doing to their son. She had left a year ago, without warning. Fixed the boy’s breakfast, got him ready for school, then drove away. No contact with the boy since. Camille felt like throwing her pencil across the room, followed by her stapler, coffee cup, and whatever else was within reach. She never got used to it—each time, each new case, she hurt all over. Now she wanted to take this little boy in her lap and rock him, tell him to cry, it wasn’t his fault. Camille closed the file. Jeff had been told, she was sure, over and over and over, that it wasn’t his fault, that he had done nothing wrong. Now she had to make him believe it. Those eyes—in a certain light, Jeffs eyes almost seem to be glowing, like two green fires.

 

Mrs. Bondurant’s office was like most of the rooms Jeff had been in with adults who wrote things down and read folders and nodded and tapped their pencils. This one was a little different: there was an open chest in one corner and blocks, stuffed animals, plastic dinosaurs, and Transformers spilled out onto the floor, in an untidy heap. The floor was covered with a bright patchwork of carpet squares, reds, greens, yellows, blues, browns, whites.

“I hear you collect dinosaurs. See anything over there you like?” the woman asked, between sips of her tea. The tea bag label dangled out of her mug.

Jeff jumped, startled. The woman laughed. “Go on. Go on over and poke through the toys. They’re for the kids who come here. Let me show you some of my favorites,” she said and to add to Jeffs surprise, got up and walked over to the toy chest and started poking around herself. “Here, have you seen this one before?” she asked and held up a large, blue one with three horns.

“That’s a triceratops. Everybody knows what they are,” Jeff said. For a minute, he had thought she actually knew something about dinosaurs. But she was like all the others who had tried the same tricks to get him to talk.

The woman looked at him and laughed. “Yeah, you’re right. I did know that. I bet you’ve had a whole bunch of people talk to you about dinosaurs, haven’t you? And probably not a one knew a whole lot, did they? All right, I won’t ask you about dinosaurs. You probably know more about them than I do, even if I did go to the library last night. Let’s talk about something else.”

Jeff nodded. He had to be careful. This woman was different.

“Mrs. Clark said you had a bad dream last night. Do you want to talk about it?” she asked and sat down on an old couch that was between the toy chest and her desk.

Jeff shook his hand. Not that dream, when he was trapped and it was dark and he couldn’t move and there was nowhere to go. He had woken himself screaming and there, standing half in the yellow light of his lamp and half in shadow, had been a strange woman, her dark hair trailing down her back. Behind her was a man, hurriedly tying a knot in his white bathrobe. Jeff could see the man’s hairy chest, a dark V between the white. Who were they and where was he? The wide bed wasn’t his, nor were the sheets, decorated with Snoopy and Woodstock. His sheets were plain white. The dresser wasn’t his. And what was in the strange darkness that he couldn’t see? He was breathing hard, panting, his fists gripping the sheets. He had pushed away from the strangers, back against the wall—

“Jeff? What’s the matter? Bad dream?”

Jeff looked at her, still breathing hard, pulling the sheet up to his neck. “You aren’t my mother. You aren’t my father,” he had added to the man who was yawning as he sat down in a chair by the door.

The dark-haired woman had sat down very carefully and slowly in another chair by the strange bed. Jeff pressed back even harder against the wall, although he knew it wouldn’t do any good. No matter how hard he had tried to get away, to push himself through the wall, it had never been enough. And sometimes he hadn’t tried to escape through the wall. Sometimes he has just moved over and let his father slip into his bed. Sometimes Jeff would reach over and touch his father first. Things would hurt less, and would be over sooner.

That meant I wanted him to do it, doesn’t it, he had once said to one of the adults with the pencils and the folders. Doesn’t it?

No, no, no. You were just surviving, coping . . . That’s what they all said.

“No, I’m not your mother and Fred isn’t your father. Count to ten, think. Take a deep breath. I’m Ellen, and Fred, and this is our house. You live here now, remember?”

Jeff had nodded his head, slowly, his breathing slowing down. He had remembered everything.

Not that dream, he thought, and looked back at Mrs. Bondurant. He shook his head again. “Not that dream—that’s the bad one.”

“Well, do you have any dreams you can tell me about?”

“Well,” Jeff said slowly, “I have been having other dreams, about another place.”

“Tell me,” Mrs. Bondurant said and leaned back on the couch, the triceratops still in her hand.

“Sometimes I dream about the same boys and the same girl. One boy has red hair and the other’s hair is blond. The girl’s hair is brown. And when I see them, I always see a blue fire around them. Sometimes I dream my dinosaurs, the ones at Mrs. Clark’s house, are flying and leaving trails in the air, like a jet does, except blue. Last night I dreamed about the sea again.”

He had stood alone on a sand dune, with a huge cliff at his back. Two moons shone in a starry sky. Someone, something, had called his name, and he had ran toward the voice, which came from the water.

“It was a dolphin calling my name. I woke up before I could get out to him.”

“You’ve had this dream before—have you ever gotten to the dolphin?”

“Not yet.”

“What do you think he wants? To play in the water?”

“Well,” Jeff said, “I think he wants me. He wants me to come and be where he is, to his place.”

 

As Jeff told me his sea-dream, his eyes seemed to become even greener and brighter. Alone, safe, the sea, the womb, the dolphin an animal guide, a protector—not too sure about the twin moons and the cliff And the other dream—a reenactment of the abuse, no doubt, a return to the dark where he was hurt. But in his sea dream the dark is safe and wonderful and inviting and he isn’t alone, the dolphin is there to help him, be his friend. Jeff also dreams of flying. The escape motif is dominant, couplet with the desire for safety . . . Funny, when he left, I would have sworn I smelled the ocean ...

Benjamin Paul Tyson’s journal, Monday night, August 26, 1991

The ceiling fan is beating down over my head. Outside I hear crickets and cicadas, cranking, cranking, cranking, their screeches reaching a crescendo, then gone. And again, and ebb and flow of noise. It’s hot. Even with the fan on, I am sweating. I guess the computer generates more heat than I thought. At least the window units in the bedrooms are cranking right along with the insects.

Maybe I’ll give in tomorrow and call the local AC boys and order central air. I can certainly afford it. Well, not tomorrow, since tomorrow is the first day of school and I am afraid for my son. He hasn’t been fairy-sick since the first of the month, since Lughnasad, but I am certain there will be other bouts. What happens if he gets sick at school? Will his teacher whack out or call 911 or Dorothea Dix and have him taken away in a straitjacket?

I have been to Nottingham Heights, talked with the principal, a Miss Hallie Bigelow. A bit rough around the edges, but she cares passionately for her school, the children, education—a good woman. His teacher, Charlotte Collins, seemed a bit cold, but all right. Probably distracted, the first day and all.

Maybe I should put him in a private school. Ravenscroft is supposed to be one of the best. I can certainly afford that, too—I have barely touched the money Emma left me in her will. New cars every few years, yes. But mostly I have spent it on Malachi. To arrange for his forged birth certificate, immunization records, doctor’s records, fake physicals.

And all the books and art prints. His mother loved art museums.

But Malachi is different enough. Putting him in a private school would mark him as even more set apart from the rest. No thanks.

Besides, it’s not the school I am worried about so much. Notting - ham Heights feels like a good place. No, it’s not the school—it’s everything else. People are talking and whispering—not about Malachi—but it’s like the very air has become charged, or the atmo - spheric energy has changed its voltage, AC to DC. The list of strangenesses gets longer and longer. Since Lughnasad, in Wake County alone, I have noted the following:

1. Man found in tree in Pullen Park, swears he spontaneously levi - tated, placed under observation at Wake County Medical.
2. Sixteen sightings of UFOs: mostly balls of green and blue light. Three people claim they saw a dragon in flight; five, a winged horse.
3. Ghosts sighted at almost every graveyard in the county.
4. St. Raphael’s Catholic Church petitions Archbishop for an exorcism; claims education wing is infested with poltergeists.
5. As for poltergeists: incidents in bars, schools, playgrounds, offices, malls. One afternoon at Crabtree Valley Mall, the store security gates kept rising and falling, every five minutes, for two hours.
6. Librarians at Cameron Village arrive to find every book off the shelf, stacked in neat piles all over the library. A handful, like birds released from a cage, were flying about the room, hitting against doors as if trying to escape. Two librarians were placed on medical leave.
7. Power shortages, blackouts, appliances, cars going dead—repairmen and mechanics swamped with calls.
8. In the past two weeks, fifteen people have called in unicorn sightings, in gardens, backyards, front yards, highways.

And I have seen the Fomorii—or rather their ghosts or shadows or Projections. I’ve felt them: that sense of dread, of evil, of badness. Last week I’d swear one came in the library, looking for Malachi, a dark, scaly creature, those red eyes. Mal was sitting in the children’s section, reading, and the thing was going straight toward him. I ran across the library, yelling.

Of course there was nothing there. Mrs. Carmichael thinks I need to see a doctor. I don’t know—maybe Jack is right. He thinks I am protecting my own fears, conjuring up my own shadows. Regardless, I won’t let Malachi take off the twelve-pointed star, even to bathe.

His mother could have blasted the thing with a fireball or something. I don’t know if Malachi could have or not. He is still just a ten-year-old boy, who is half-human as well as half-fairy.

Malachi continues to change, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. His eyes are golden now, and sometimes they glow in the dark. His ears are as pointed as his mother’s, and like hers, nobody but me and Jack notice they are. He seems to have instinctively hidden them with fairy glamour. He can fly. He is psychokinetic and he can manipulate light and he is beginning to see auras. But Malachi can’t count on any of his fairy-powers—his age? His human heritage? And while we have had no more crazy nights with wild lights, I know he doesn’t feel well a lot of the time. He tires easily and his appetite is off; he’s losing weight.

 

You know, there must be a lot of fairy DNA in the human genome. There have always been clairvoyants, witches, fortune-tellers, mediums, psychokinetic, levitators and bilocators, telepaths—the paranormal list goes on. Yes, a goodly number of these paranormals were and are fakes, but now, I believe the rest were and are real. All the changeling stories, the incubi and succubae, the pregnancies that “just happened”—they’re true, or a lot are. But, doesn’t this fly in the face of all we know about biology? How can two species, Homo magicus, and Homo sapiens, from two different rooms in the House of Creation, interbreed? Perhaps all we know are the operative words here, but even given that, I think there must be another explanation. I think the answer might be in another old story, one I don’t know that well, and actually haven’t read, but have only heard about. Adam was supposed to have had a first wife, Lilith, according to Jewish folklore. And Lilith, in other Semitic myths, was a demon, or had extraordinary powers. I remember in the Narnia stories Lilith was supposed to be a jinn, and the ancestress of the White Witch. Perhaps God originally had thought to give humankind magic, the paranormal, ESP, as a manifest part of our being. Did He change his mind? Did Lilith succumb to some sort of temptation, as Adam and Eve did? Or did God intend for Homo magicus and Homo sapiens to be separate all along and yet related and connected, cousin species, like dogs and wolves? Lilith left Adam or did he cast her out? I wish I knew the story. What-ever happened, I bet she left pregnant. And she just went next door, so to speak, through a door that has been, apparently, easy to open.

Now, Malachi thinks there is a difference in witches and fairies. Witches do magic, fairies are magic. Valeria never mentioned witches in Faerie—but then, did we talk about everything? Are witches something peculiar to our universe? Did Lilith leave a few of her children here?

I don’t know.

Malachi is telepathic now, too. It started a week after Lughnasad. We were going to Jack and Hilda’s for dinner. I was in my bedroom, changing clothes and worrying about Hilda, about what Jack had told her, if he had told her, and how she would behave around Malachi. Some serious fretting.

Malachi came down the hall. “Dad, Hilda’s okay. Jack hasn’t told her about me yet, but she will be okay. Don’t worry; it will be okay.”

I stood there half-dressed, in my underwear and a Carolina T-shirt, and stared at him. “How did you know I was worrying about her?”

“I heard you.”

“Mal, I wasn’t talking out loud. I was thinking—you heard my thoughts.” I sat down hard on the bed, with my head in my hands. Malachi came and sat down beside me on the bed.

Dad?

I looked up. “And you can—what mind-talk, too? Farspeak?”

“Dad, don’t be mad at me; I didn’t know; I didn’t mean to listen in—”

He started crying and I hugged him. And we talked. About how people’s thoughts—even his father’s—are private and farspeaking is one thing, but listening in was no better than eavesdropping, and would he want everybody to hear his thoughts?

 

Like all his new fairy-senses or abilities, Malachi can’t rely on his telepathy. But he’s learning how to screen out other people—sort of like a background radio or TV, he said—and can really only pick up the thoughts of people really close to him. Mine, Jack’s, mostly. Not Thomas, which surprised me at first, but then Thomas Ruggles is part of the strangeness, too. I don’t want him near my son. Thomas is more than a little creepy and he smells wrong—not BO, really, but like a really old book or corners in deserted houses, an obscure spice. Thomas smells dark. And his eyes: they have become opaque and hard, like cold stones set in his head.

Thomas and Jack aren’t talking.

Anyway.

I have to take him to Faerie; I know that, but I don’t know how. I watch him—he’s not well and he’s not getting well. Being here, being half-fairy and having no real control over his feyness—if I don’t get Malachi to Faerie, he’s going to die.

I have stacks of books in my office on fairy lore, magic, Wicca, the occult, and I am going through them, painstakingly, looking for clues. In Ireland, there are fairy mounds and fairy rings. And the Cherokee have stories about gates between here and the Otherworld, which are behind waterfalls and under cliffs and beneath dark pools. To pass through into what sounds like Faerie—a world of little people, giants, humans with super powers, strange animals—one had to fast, bathe, and have a magical guide.

Which doesn’t help me. Valeria was going to take a taxi to her gate, so it is near Garner and Raleigh. The next day the gates can be opened is Halloween or Samhain. I have two months to find her gate and take my son down the Straight Road to Faerie and save his life. In all the books, so far nothing, except the Cherokee stories, says North Carolina, let alone the eastern Piedmont.

Two months.

I lit a candle in church yesterday, after mass at St. Mary’s. One of the tall, two-dollar ones. A new priest, fresh from seminary, Father Jamey Applewhite, gave the homily, on the Catholic perspective of the world as sacramental, as being imbued with the presence of God, and God as an ultimately unknowable mystery expressed in Creation. Accept the mystery, he said. There is no reason to be afraid of what we cannot hope to ever fully understand, at least in this world. The Celts accepted the mystery. They lived in a sacral world, numinous with spirits in trees, lakes, fountains, springs. Like Faerie.

I am afraid for my son, that his mystery will not be accepted, by the people around him, by the very earth itself.

Malachi keeps asking me to tell the story about his mother, over and over. Every detail again and again, about her, about Faerie. So I tell him the story over and over and over again ...

The Chamber of the Dodecagon, The Library Tower, The White City, Faerie

After the rite and the feast were over, the Second remained behind to clean up and put everything in its proper place. Out of habit she repeated the healing words said to close the rite and seal the call to the changelings. She carefully gathered the salt from around the burning, white candles and took the bowl of water and rue off the table and after saying the appropriate words, emptied the bowl out the window. The White City could stand healing as well. Then she put the bowl back on the shelf by the window.

“This candle is the earth that is sorely wounded. By the power of the Light Beyond The Light, we abjure the wounds and call home those who were sent out, that their strength will strengthen the earth,” the Second said and extinguished the north candle. The white shadows that played around her grew smaller and less distinct.

“This candle is the fire that heals as it burns, refines, and changes. By the power of The Light Beyond The Light, we dissolve the scars of the hurting flame and call home those who were sent out, that their souls will enkindle the flames of light and healing that are flickering,” the Second said and extinguished the south candle.

“This candle is the wind that clears and sooths the mind, the heart, and the soul. By the power of The Light Beyond The Light, we ask for the wind of light, warmth, and sweetness; we call home those who were sent out, that their minds will make the very air clear and sharp and strong.” She extinguished the east candle. The room grew smaller as the third white flame was put out.

“This last candle is the water that cleanses and nourishes away the dark. By the power of The Light Beyond The Light, we call for the water of life as we call home those were sent out, that they may bring new life.”

When the west candle was out, the only light in the room, coming through the north and east windows, was that of White Moon, a silvery white outlining the tables and the chairs and candles and the shelves in sharp silhouette. The bowls on the shelves glowed. The Second stood at the north window for a long time, watching the moon and smelling the sea before she finally left, carefully leaving the door slightly ajar behind her.