Boondocks Fantasy

Author of the acclaimed multi-volume novel The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe has won almost every major award available for science fiction and fantasy writing. He has won multiple Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; the Rhysling Award for poetry; The Illinois Arts Council Award; World Fantasy Award; Locus Award; British Science Fiction Award; British Fantasy Award; John W. Campbell Memorial Award; and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in Illinois with his lovely wife Rosemary and their charming dog Bobby.

The little shop with petrol pumps in front had no Players, so the writer of children’s books purchased Pall Malls. He rarely smoked these days, but it seemed prudent to purchase something before quizzing the shopkeeper.

It was all the opening the writer of children’s books needed. “Just visiting,” he said. “The old fieldstone place up on the hill. They’re putting us up for a few days. Perhaps you know them?” It was always best to end with a question.

“Joe an’ Martha? Sure I do. Known ’em all my life. Nice folks.” The shopkeeper sighed. “Never had no sons, them two. I know Joe wanted ’em, an’ not knowin’ for sure I’d still say Martha did, too. Wasn’t never no boys, though. Five girls. I remember one time Martha told me they was goin’ to stop at four. She was carryin’ at the time an’ didn’t want to do it no more. Only they was born early, three, mebbe four months after, an’ they was twins. Mighty pretty, all them girls was. Gone now, though. Scattered all over hell, those girls is.”

“Ada’s teaching school down south, I heard. Barbra’s doin’ somethin’ in Philly. Dress designin’ is what they say. Cathy’s married to some doctor in Boston. Cathy was always my favorite. Jest a ray of sunshine, that girl was. Then the twins is split up ’bout as far as they could go. Dale’s in California doin’ somethin’ in TV, an’ Dottie’s way the hell over in England. London’s what I’ve heard, only I’ve heard different, too.”

“Don’t just sound that way, they are. That Dottie, well, she’s a real nice girl an’ all that, but a mite touched. Or that’s how it seems like. Oughtn’t to let her drive a car is how most of us felt, only they did. She’s gone now. Lives where the queen does.” The shopkeeper chuckled. “’Cept I reckon Dottie’s house ain’t as big.”

“Always goin’ off in the woods by herself, Dottie was. That’s what they said. Smokin’ corn silk. Grass, too, when she got older. I never knowed you could. Why—”

“I’d like to go into the woods, too, today—I need to stretch my legs. I was wondering whether there were nature trails or something of the sort. Beautiful, eh? Very, now that the trees are robed for autumn. Could you direct me?”

“Screw off, you know, only sometimes they’re pretty tight.” The shopkeeper opened both bottles and set one on the counter. “You want a nice walk?”

“All right, I’ll tell you what you do. You head out of town on County H. Go ’bout a mile, and there’s a little bit of a side road on your left. You take that, oh, might be half a mile. Go slow, and you’ll come to a real big old tree. First real big tree you’ll see, and a maple. Should be mighty pretty just now. Off to one side is a path.”

“All right, then. You follow that path ’til you come to a big black rock higher ’n a man. The path you want goes off to the left. West that is. It’s easy to see and easy to follow, too. Don’t go up or down much. There’s a footbridge over Medicine River, but don’t you worry ‘’bout it. I’ve seen four, five men on it at once. Ain’t goin’ to break with one. Wouldn’t be much of a drop if it did.”

“See some nice scenery there, without no cars or phone wires or anythin’ like that. Only by an’ by you’ll come to a road. A dirt road it’ll be, only it’s the same one you parked on by the big tree. You turn left again and follow that road across the bridge and over the hill. Right about there you oughta be able to see the big tree. Mebbe your car, too.”

“Thank you.” The writer of children’s books took another token swallow from his Coke. “I’d better be going now. I’d like to get back in time for supper.”

He turned to leave, and the shopkeeper cleared his throat. “Mebbe I ought not to say this. Only I’d best. You remember ’bout the black rock?”

The shopkeeper nodded. “That’s it. You go like that. Might be another ’un off to the right. There is sometimes, is what I hear, and sometimes there ain’t. Used to be a village up that way, they say, only everybody’s gone now.”

“Somethin’ like that. Don’t nobody go there. Don’t you go there neither. That Dottie—you recollect what I told you ’bout her?”

“She went up there one time is what they say. After that, well now, she was always lookin’ out for angels or somethin’. Little people is what one lady said. Jest a mite touched. Know what I mean?”

“I should,” the writer of children’s books murmured. “She’s my collaborator. My intended, as well. We’ve come to visit her parents.”

He had worried about the maple because there were many maples, most not much taller than a man. But when he saw it, it was unmistakable, a tower of gold and flame. He parked beneath its spreading limbs, got out, and locked the Avis Ford he and Dottie had rented at the airport. The path was there, not three feet from his rear bumper. He followed it, whistling, through a cool and colorful wood and up a hill. There a fallen log invited him, and he sat looking out through the trees for a time. There had been farms here not so long ago, or so Dottie had said. They were gone, their stony fields and short growing seasons returned to the trees.

Native Americans had hunted this land before the farmers came, he reminded himself. They had shot deer with arrows and had planted little patches of maize and beans. He searched the pockets of his Norfolk jacket for his pipe, found it, and tore open a Pall Mall to supply tobacco. Native Americans had blown smoke from their mouths, so that it might bear their prayers skyward to the Great Spirit. The white man had stolen their sacrament and made it a vice.

Another pocket yielded a folder of matches. He struck one, lit his pipe, and blew out the match. Smoking, done properly, might let a man see the spirit world . . .

There might be a book in that. The boy would use a bubble pipe, of course, and meet the rabbit spirit and the bear spirit in the bright bubbles.

The path felt holy when he resumed his hike. Who had made it, and why had its maker sent it wandering down the hill? One thing seemed certain: it had not been made by or for the boots of white men.

And here was the black rock, somewhat larger than he had expected and unmistakable. He would follow the path on the right, of course. Follow it to the lost village, then turn back. Tell Dottie and her parents at supper where he had gone, and listen to her recount childhood adventures.

Smiling, he snapped a picture of the black rock, one that showed both paths clearly. The one to the right was narrow, and in places faint, but he followed it without much difficulty.

A rabbit darted in front of him and disappeared into a clump of bushes. For a moment it seemed to the writer of children’s books that he heard the small, sweet notes of a tiny bell.

Ahead ... this seemed strange. On a limb not far above the ground someone had placed a plastic owl like the one in Martha’s garden. They would frighten away the rabbits or something like that. You could buy them, Martha had said, at the feed store.

He advanced, looking for the speaker. This owl’s head was turned slightly to its right. Martha’s owl had stared straight ahead.

Another half hour’s leisurely walking brought the sound of water, and the writer of children’s books hurried ahead, recalling that the shopkeeper had mentioned a footbridge.

On this side stood a tall and narrow wooden building wholly innocent of paint. From it protruded, motionless, a great wooden wheel. Water from the stream filled it and flowed noisily over it, creating the sound he had heard. He took pictures, shifting his location left and right, zooming in and out.

Two windows, windows on what was surely the uppermost floor of the narrow structure, seemed to watch him like eyes—the dark and empty eyes of a skull. A moment later he retracted the thought. Someone or something small had passed behind one of those windows.

The door of the mill was not quite latched. He pushed it wide and went in, wary of the broad, warped, splintering floorboards, although they felt sturdy beneath the soles of his boots. Someone, he felt, (perhaps many someones) was waiting inside, hushed.

Children, he decided. This would be a fine place for children to play, and children from nearby farms must be taking advantage of it.

He began inspecting the machinery. The shaft of the water wheel would no doubt enter the first floor above. Its rotation would be transmitted, presumably by angle gears, to the big vertical shaft here on the ground floor. That would drive this big gear with the strange teeth-

A small, dark face appeared through the doorway at the top of the steps. The writer of children’s books looked up, but the small face vanished. He trotted up the rough stair.

The room he entered at the top seemed crowded with machinery and empty of children. He peered around shafts and peeped through the spokes of more strange gear wheels; there were no small faces, and yet there was a feeling ... Quite loudly he exclaimed, “Now that’s odd! There’s no one here!”

“If there were someone somewhere, I would catch him by the scruff of his dirty neck. Just like this!” The writer of children’s books caught the collar of his Norfolk jacket behind his head and pulled it up. “Then I’d march him all around the room. Like this!”

Laughter grew louder as he made the circuit of the first floor, and louder still as he passed one dark corner. As quickly as he could, he released his collar and thrust both hands into the darkness, where one grasped a small arm.

The boy (if it was a boy) pulled into the light was dark brown, with a broad, humorous face. He wore a soiled cap bearing the words “Red Sox” in white, and nothing else.

“Ah ha!” exclaimed the writer of children’s books, “You’ve been spying on me, have you? I ought to spank your bottom until the potatoes sail home across the wide seas.”

“Now then!” He spun the boy (if it was a boy) around. “You face up to me and talk like a proper gentleman, or—or I’ll take your picture.”

The small brown figure stood very straight. “I’ll tell you anything you wants to hear ’bout, squire. Not no lies neither . . .”

“No, siree! We wasn’t fixin’ to do nothin’ like that to you, squire. Nor ride your horse nor nothing. We shy, we is, an’ that’s the whack-bang finish of it.”

“Saves time, squire.” The small brown face tried hard to look angelic. “Saves work too, it do. If I answers you’fore you asks me, we goes ever so quick.”

“Lets us live here, the giant do. Can’t eat us ’cause we’re inside here, an’ won’t eat us ’cause we’re company.”

“Why it’s both together, squire. ’Spose it was the other way, see? Can eat us ’cause we’re here and would eat us ’cause we’re company. He’d have ter eat us twice. You see that, don’t you, squire? Swaller us, like, and cough us up right off ter swaller agin.”

A new voice, rather timid, said, “He couldn’t, ’cause we’re inside him already. We’re his worms, like. If you was to swaller sump’en that’s inside you already, it turns you inside out.”

The writer of children’s books looked around and saw a girl (if it was a girl) much smaller than the boy he held. She wore a little scarlet cape whose pattern suggested that until quite recently it had been a big bandanna, and nothing else.

“Right you are, squire!” It was the boy in the Red Sox cap, and he pulled a sleeve of the Norfolk jacket. “This is him, an’ we’re swallered.”

“You don’ look chewed nor swallered, squire,” the boy (if it was a boy) told the writer of children’s books. “’Sides the giant’s been a-sleepin’ these hun’ered years. We knows how ter wake him tho.”

“’Tis main hard, squire.” The boy (if it was a boy) waved toward a stout stick, polished dark by time and many hands, protruding from the ceiling. “That pole there works the brake wheel. Pull ’er like ter what she’s pulled now, and the water wheel won’t turn. Know the water wheel, do ’e, squire?”

“Aye! That ’un. Well, squire, do we put the stick t’other way, why, he wakes.” The boy (if it was a boy) turned to the girl (if it was a girl). “Wake ’im a bit, Posy. Let the squire see ’im.”

“Oh, ’e can do that, squire,” the boy (if it was a boy) said. “’E can do that, or else a ship, like, or a mountains wot breathes fire an’ flame. ’E’s done them, too. Or a tree, a big ol’ bear, or else a spinnin’ wind.”

Trembling, the girl (if it was a girl) grasped the lever and appeared to pull it with all her strength. It did not move, not even slightly.

Piggy was not quite as large as the boy (if it was a boy), but there was something worse than porcine about his face, and two tusks rose from his lower jaw almost to the height of his eyes. His red cap proved, upon closer inspection, to be a bloodstained rag wound about his head.

“Well . . .” The writer of children’s books looked about him for a place to sit, and decided upon the windowsill. “Well, it’s seemed to me for some years that life is an enormous novel God is writing, and that I’m a character in that novel, along with everyone I know.”

“Yes. Exactly. Now if one thinks much about books, as I do, one soon sees that certain characters belong in certain books, but”—here he paused impressively—“do NOT belong in some others. Fancy Mary Poppins popped down in Treasure Island. Would that work, I ask you?”

“Indeed. And this is a bit of a stretch for me.” The writer of children’s books rose, having reached another decision. “I mean to retrace my steps and thus, as I hope, return to the book in which I belong.”

“In that case you will go,” the writer of children’s books told her, “in two senses, for I intend to take your pictures, all three of you, so that I may look at them when I get back into the book in which I belong. Form a group, will you? Tallest in the middle, ’eh?”

“Wait!” said a new, cracked voice. An old man (if it was an old man) stepped out of another shadowy corner. His back was bent, his red cap woven of roses. “There be paths one must nae tread and words that must nae be said.”

A moment more, and he had seized the right arm of the writer of children’s books. At the next moment, the writer of children’s books had pushed him violently away, his left hand in the old man’s face.

“Where did he go?” The writer of children’s books looked from the boy (if it was a boy) to Posy, and from Posy to Piggy, but none of them answered him. Something warm and wet was running down his wrist. He stared at his left hand, saw blood seeping from his palm, and wrapped his hand in his handkerchief.

The writer of children’s books had already raised his camera. In a moment more he had the boy (if it was a boy) in his viewfinder, a full-length shot. He pressed the shutter release, and the built-in flash flashed.

He looked himself first. The thing standing beside the huge, toothed gearwheel was black and shaggy and almost shapeless. One eye glared above two ragged rows of fangs. He stared at it, mesmerized.

A gear tooth caught the Norfolk jacket worn by the writer of children’s books, and he saw, in his final moments of life, that the gear wheel’s great, coarse, squarish teeth were actual teeth, yellowed and sharp.