Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

by Diane Duane

  His Mam got home first, looking dead tired and fairly damp around the edges. “Oh when will this stop,” she said, shaking off her coat in the front hall and splattering water in all directions. “When do we get some sun? Isn’t it supposed to be spring?”

  Ronan had heard her car pull in and had gone to meet her with some vague idea of finding out whether she noticed anything different about him. He felt so marked-out, so utterly changed by the afternoon’s events, that it astonished him when she breezed right past him down the hall and into the kitchen. “How was your day, Ro? You have anything to eat?”

  He left the first question strictly alone. “No,” he said, “thought I’d wait till dinner.”

  “Okay,” she said, completely missing the omission—partly because this was apparently still Normal World (as opposed to the abnormal one he’d spent the afternoon in) and partly because in any conversation of his Mam’s where food and other issues bumped up against each other, food inevitably won. “Pasta maybe?”

  “Sounds good,” Ronan said, wandering back that way to give her another chance to notice something different about him.

  “Da’s running late,” she said, putting the kettle on and dumping the last of the morning’s old tea out of the teapot and rinsing it. “Some meeting at work, he won’t be home till seven maybe, with the traffic…”

  She rattled on for a bit about work up at the hotel and things that had happened there, ridiculous guests and long-suffering staff, while Ronan stood in the doorway for a bit and then sat down at the kitchen table. He was astounded that something so ordinary and normal as this conversation could still be happening in a world where he’d had the kind of afternoon he’d had. The kettle boiled and his mam chucked the teabags into the pot and poured the water into it from a foot and a half above the pot, as usual—she was one of those “force and violence” tea-makers who believed that maximum pouring height got the best out of the tea. Then she went rummaging in one of the cupboards for some biscuits, and Ronan watched this with the detached bemusement of someone observing behavior on some alien planet.

  When she flopped herself down at the table a few minutes later with a plate and some biscuits and a mug full of the new brew, Ronan realized she was looking at him a touch strangely. That was when the panic ran down his spine. “You okay, chuck?” she said. “You look a bit, I don’t know… vague.”

  This was the chance, Ronan thought. Not to say anything about the wizardry—that was a decision he was going to wait a good while on: because who knows if it’ll work, if it’ll last—but about school, the suspension, the letter…

  Ronan found that he really didn’t want to lie to her. “Well,” he said. “Got caught in the rain on the way home…” Because that was true. It was possibly the truest thing he’d ever said, on about six different levels.

  “Oh jayzus, lovey,” his Mam said, and patted his face, “sure you don’t want to catch cold now, spring colds are the worst ones, did you take some vitamin C?”

  He wanted to laugh. That was Ronan’s Mam’s response to everything that ailed you, and today in particular—when he instantly realized (without even having to look for them in his head) that he knew the eighty-three names for the seventy-two major variants of cold viruses and could talk any one of them out of troubling him—it struck him as particularly comical. “I didn’t,” he said. “Didn’t think to…” Which was beyond the truth. Ronan had almost no idea of what he had been thinking: it was a wonder he’d made it home without being run over in the road.

  “Well here,” his Mam said, and jumped up and got all busy getting one of the fizzy orange vitamin C tablets going in a glass for him, and scolding him in a low-key though affectionate way about how he didn’t take care of himself. Ronan sat there and made the kind of sarcastic-but-secretly-contrite noises he knew she was expecting, and drank the vitamin C. Then he accepted a mug of tea and let her start one of her long mild complaints about all the things wrong with her boss at the hotel.

  For the next hour or so Ronan sat there and let it all roll over him, finding the boring familiarity of the scene strangely soothing after what he’d been through that day. When his Da got home, he too was in a sort of tired, nothing-new-happening-here mood that on a more normal sort of day might have set Ronan’s nerves on edge, as just more confirmation that nothing interesting was ever going to happen in his life.

  But now he’d learned otherwise. And slowly that realization began crowding out the normality, which just couldn’t compete, wasn’t anywhere near strong enough. The vast landscape of a profound arch-reality he’d never suspected of existing was having no trouble with beating the more commonplace stage set of “normality” flat into the ground. All the time, the whisper of words and words and words kept going on, getting little by little louder every half hour, every quarter hour… never deafening as the original downpour had been, but insistent in the kind of way that rain had when people said about it “It’s settled in for the day...” Ronan started feeling as if with every breath the old Normal World and the new Abnormal World were rubbing against each other like bits of a broken bone, and he was never sure when one or the other bit was going to shock him with a surprise as acute as pain.

  After they’d had their dinner and went into the front lounge to see what was on the satellite, Ronan found himself having trouble dealing with the way that the TV kept trying to show him things he couldn’t possibly be seeing, just based on the way his mind was wandering as his Da channelsurfed. Words in English kept echoing themselves in his head as similar or associated words in the Speech, dredged up from the floods of Speech-words that were still sloshing around in there. And the TV—apparently capable of feats of bandwidth he hadn’t ever imagined—kept showing Ronan alien scenes that nobody but he could see.

  This started to cause problems. Once he laughed out loud in the middle of an episode of EastEnders that had nothing funny in it at all—another of their gloom-and-doom storylines, he he couldn’t tell one from another these days—and his Mam stared at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “Um,” Ronan said, and made some lame excuse about needing to do some kind of homework, and went up to his room. There was no way he could begin to explain the jokes the thing with all the legs that he’d seen had been telling; they’d been funny without Ronan even having to figure them out. There were all kinds of differences he’d thought having magic might make in his life, but improving his sense of humor had never been one of them.

  Then after a while spent on his bed and finding the (non-)quiet (full of words, more words, more words) no more calming than the noise of the TV had been, he went off to the loo—and got the shock of his life when he turned on the faucet to get a glass of water first, and the stream from the cold water faucet immediately started shouting Water water water cold hard wiggly tubes pressure (Navier-Stokes equations) exciting wheee!

  Ronan jumped so hard that he banged his head into the side wall of the loo and nearly knocked down his Mam’s favorite little framed antique postcard picture of the Seafront Promenade. He had to stand there rubbing his head for a few moments and recovering himself as the water ran. Probably just as well I didn’t use the toilet first… he thought.

  Meanwhile the water from the tap was having itself a little party. Apparently it thought of the household pipes as some kind of thrill ride. And how am I even hearing it do this! Ronan thought. But then the water had been in the rain, and the rain had been in the town’s treatment center, and who knew, it might have had time to get down the pipes into the water mains between when he’d been up on Bray Head and now … Or maybe there was something weirder going on.

  He braced himself and used the toilet (which mercifully seemed much more pragmatic about the joys of fluid dynamics, or maybe it was just that the water in its tank had had time to settle) and went back to his room, intending to settle in and read. But the air was still full of whispering, words and still more words and ever more words, hundreds of them, thousands of them, tens of thousands. I’
m going to have to learn all these? Ronan wondered. And how to use them? Put them together into—not sentences: spells? Oh God.

  Yet something in the back of his head, something that had been bored until now and finally saw a way never to be bored again, said Yes! at the prospect and pumped a fist in the air. No question, the prospect spreading itself out before him inspired something like the anticipation of a platform game that would take forever to figure out and really give you your money’s worth. But right now it all just felt like too much to deal with. Too much had happened today, and he was exhausted.

  Finally Ronan gave up, undressed, got into bed and turned off the light, hoping sleep would come for him quickly. It was a fruitless hope. The best he managed was a kind of vague directionless drift between sleep and waking, with occasional detours into dreams that made no sense, because they would start in the Speech and then segue into English or Irish, and then back into the Speech again. And memory was no better than the dreaming, in those times when he tried to hold his brain still and make sense of what had happened to him.

  He took turns veering between delight and terror as he slid from having no words for what had happened to him, to having all the words, too many words, every word in existence. Those moments started to get longer as the night went interminably on. Endless vocabulary poured itself in and out of his head, as if he was a beach and the tide was coming in and going out, again and again, every time rearranging what it found a little bit, depositing another layer of the whispering freight it bore, and never once consulting him.

  Once, just once, the thought Did I have some kind of nervous breakdown up there, am I crazy? inserted itself. But the words themselves seemed to laugh at that. And eventually Ronan felt he had to agree with them. He could imagine all kinds of crazy, but none of them included the jokes that that thing with the legs had been telling. As he understood it, crazy had to at least look like it had some relationship to things that might happen in your own head, and there was no way he could have invented something that weird.

  Confusing and terrifying (and fascinating and, face it, occasionally delightful) as he was finding all this, though, the night wore on and Ronan realized what was coming for him. Sooner or later it was going to be morning. Sooner or later, that letter was going to arrive… and his life was going to turn into hell.

  But wait. I have wizardry. What if… that letter just didn’t come?

  Willingly enough the Speech itself started to describe to him the problems he was going to have with that. One first had to learn the letter’s location. One had to be able to describe its position in spacetime, the materials of which it was made. And then one had to try to convince it to be somewhere else… not that easy a task, because once sent a letter had a powerful urge to get where it was going. The problems just kept mounting and mounting up, to the point where Ronan wanted to yell Come on, this is magic, how hard can this be?—and the Speech itself said something rather pointed and annoyed that boiled down to This isn’t magic, this is wizardry. Things don’t just happen because you want them to. You have to work for it.

  “Oh great,” Ronan muttered into the predawn darkness. “Just like real life.”

  Of course, the Speech said. It is real life. What else would it be?

  He flopped himself over face first into his pillow and tried to hide himself from everything there. It worked, seemingly, for about five minutes… and then he was blinking gummy-eyed at the light through his window, and his usual alarm went off. Seven o’clock. Morning had come.

  There was nothing to do but get on with it. So Ronan got up and showered, and got dressed exactly as if he was going to school as usual, and went downstairs. Then everybody sat down to breakfast, and Ronan simply sat there nursing his tea and keeping his face a mask, because his insides were sick with worry, terrified of the sound of the mail flap going.

  And then it went, and the sound of it was like a tinny little bear trap closing on his gut. He started to get up and go for the post, but his Da waved him down into his chair again (he’d already finished his breakfast, despite Ronan willing him to for feck’s sake eat slower so today would go like yesterday… And then what? he’d thought. Gonna vanish the letter?

  Because he knew he could. The letter was here now. He could reach out with the senses that had spent the night (he now knew) waking themselves up and starting to bed down in his body and his brain. He could feel the letter if it was anything to do with him and make it go somewhere else: up to his room, into the recycle bin outside, anyplace he knew for which he could provide coordinates—

  But it didn’t seem right somehow.

  His Da was on his feet and nearly to the kitchen door. You could do it, Ronan’s mind said to him, or part of it did. Go on, hurry up!

  Wouldn’t be a great start, would it?

  But he’ll never know! Neither of them has to know. Himself as much as said he was going to make it all go away if you did better this term. So you’ll do better and it won’t matter whether they ever see a letter or not—

  His Da was halfway down the hall and the commotion in Ronan’s head was getting ridiculous.

  You could do it.

  But should you?

  Why are you wasting time trying to figure it out now, figure it out later—

  Later’s not the issue here. Now is. Now’s where choice happens—

  Ronan was starting to feel like one of those characters in a cartoon who’s got an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil on the other and they’re fighting with each other. Not knowing what else to do, he stared into his tea and thought as loudly as he could, Could everybody please shut the feck up in here so I can get a thought in edgewise?

  Everyone, or everything, shut up.

  Ronan squeezed his eyes shut and just tried to get a grip. It was harder than usual. And now he couldn’t get rid of the image of the cartoon angel and devil fighting over him, which was ridiculous. …Though this angel was unusually combative and the devil was unusually agreeable and reasonable. In fact the angel sounded a bit like his Mam and the devil a bit like his Da, which was unfair, as his Da always seemed to come down on the winning side of any argument they had, simply by making Ronan sound unreasonable and stubborn.

  Oh jeez what do I do. I’ve got to do something or it’ll be too late.

  He heard his Da picking the letters up from the mat.

  But it, I don’t know, it still doesn’t feel right—

  His Da was walking down the hall toward the kitchen again, starting to rustle through the pieces of post as he came. “Ronan L, Ronan L… Mary…”

  Too late. Too late now. He’ll feel it if I make it go away. And anyway I can’t feel it, it’s like there’s nothing there for me, what if—

  “Ronan L, Ronan L,” his Da said, coming into the kitchen again, “Ronan D—” And he frowned at the envelope. “Who the feck is ‘Ronan D?’”

  Ronan and his mam both stared. Ronan’s middle name was Harris. “Who’s it from?” his mam said.

  “I have no idea.” Ronan’s Da stood there by the table and turned the letter over in his hands, and Ronan tried not to stare at it as if it mattered at all. Just a plain white envelope. Ronan swallowed as his Da ripped it open, and hoped the gulp of terror didn’t show. Plain white envelope, that could be very good or very bad—

  “What’s the postmark say?”

  “Um. Half a sec—” His da paused, turned the letter over and squinted at it. “Bray.”

  —Oh god oh god. What if the school got it wrong somehow, remember the time they had you mixed up with that other Nolan who was there, the one in third year, what was his name, Riordan, maybe his middle name is—

  “Solar paneling,” his Da said.

  “What?” said his mam.

  “What?” Ronan said, meaning to sound indignant but sort of squeaking the word instead. He took a hasty gulp of his tea to cover.

  “These things used to just come addressed ‘To the householder,’” his da was saying, sounding vague
ly annoyed as he unfolded a brightly colored brochure that said SAVE NOW — GOVERNMENT GRANTS AVAILABLE! “Now they’re actually posting them to real addresses instead of just getting them delivered in bulk?”

  “Wonder which of the credit card companies sold you onto some bloody mailing list,” Ronan’s mam said. “See, this is what happens when you change banks...”

  And his Da dropped the little pile of post on the table and they were off on that subject now, which had been a source of vague annoyance between his Mam and his Da for nearly a year. Ronan meanwhile just closed his eyes over his tea again and breathed out in terrified relief. The letter he was fearing wasn’t there. It wasn’t there.

  There’d been a miracle. Or maybe An Post is just running slow. What a surprise.

  Either way: Oh sweet Jesus thank you, reprieve!

  …For a day. For one day. Twenty four hours. In fact, sort of twenty-three and a bit now. Fate was coming for him, no matter what he did.

  Not a bad take on the situation, the cartoon angel remarked.

  Ronan scowled. Oh God this is all gonna be to do again tomorrow. Is being a wizard going to be worth this? I’m not so sure. But the thrill that ran down his nerves at the concept of being a wizard made it plain that most of Ronan’s mind thought he was talking shite.

  All he could think of, after that, was escape. So he kissed his Mam goodbye and waved to his Da, and got out of the house to pretend to go to school.

  ***

  Wait. Did you just interfere with the mail?

  More like one of your tactics, I’d have thought.

  Aha, but you’re not denying it!

  If we get started on one of these accept-or-deny things nobody’s ever going to get anything done. Don’t you have, I don’t know, something important to interfere with somewhere?