by Pat Murphy
The beast—a giant lizard of a sort—hesitated, its belly on the ground, its legs bent at an awkward angle. “Thigh bones should be shorter,” Mac muttered.
The glowing bones shifted and the beast held its head higher. “Larger feet,” he said, and the bones that formed toes stretched and flexed. The beast twitched its tail impatiently. “The back’s too long,” Lucy said, and shortened a few vertebrae. The beast shook its heavy head, and glared up at them with its empty eyes. “I wish it didn’t have so many teeth,” she said.
“Leave the teeth,” Mac said. “It needs teeth.”
The beast gathered its legs beneath itself, still staring at them. It lifted its head further up and its mouth gaped wider. “I don’t like the teeth,” Lucy said. And the glow began to fade from the pit. The beast lay down to sleep, as if it had never lived.
Mac and Lucy sat side by side on the edge of the pit.
“Why does it need teeth?” she asked.
He shrugged. “The world requires them.”
“Not that many,” she said. “Not always.”
“Just that many,” he said. “Always.”
Only the faintest glimmer remained on the bones. Still, they sat on the edge, holding hands.
There are things that happen between men and women—even those of the fire and the shadow. Some have names: friendship and love and lust and hatred. Some have no names—being complex mixtures of the named ones with additions of other elements, like curiosity and happiness and wine and darkness and need.
This was one of the second kind of thing. But who knows which and at the time it did not seem to matter. Don’t worry too much about the particulars—as I said before, who are you to know how and when and why?
But understand that Lucy, the firecatcher on the Starlight Run, woke up on a hard bench in the phantom subway station.
Hadn’t there been a softer surface the night before with a hint of sheets and pillows and warmth? Maybe. The memory was blurred and she could not say. She was puzzled, for she had not often gone to bed with warmth and awakened in darkness.
It was all very sudden; it was all very odd—and I suppose that’s where the story really begins. With sudden chill and darkness. Lucy lifted a hand and tossed a fireball into the empty station. The white cat watched from a tunnel that led to the Outside. “Odd.” Lucy said. “Very odd.”
Best not get into her thoughts at this point, for her thoughts were neither as coherent nor as polite as “Odd.”
Best that I let Lucy retain some of her mystery and simply say that she wandered through the tunnel to the Outside and that her feet left glowing prints on the tile floor and her hand left bright marks on the wall where she touched it.
She blinked in the light of the Outside. (Surely you didn’t think I’d tell you of the secret ways beneath the city, did you? You were wrong.)
Business people—men and women in neat suits—hurried past her with averted eyes. They saw only a bag lady in a disheveled dress. People do not see all that is there.
People do not see much.
Now, Lucy was a mean and stubborn woman. Folks who knew her well did not cross her because they knew that she didn’t let go of an idea or a discontent. She would take it and shake it and worry it—usually to no avail, but that didn’t stop her. She did not like dangling ends and she would tie herself in knots to get rid of them.
Johnson, who always knew where to be, lounged in a nearby doorway. Lucy looked at him and he shook his head before she could even speak.
“Very odd,” Lucy said again, though I know that was not what she was thinking. She glanced back at the tunnel behind her and she frowned.
Johnson fell into step beside her as she headed for the East Side. “You’re heading for trouble,” he said.
“Why should today be different from any other day?” she asked and kept on walking.
“So he stole your heart, eh?” Johnson said after a moment. “The shadowborn can be—”
“You know better than that,” Lucy interrupted. “I’m just puzzled. I know we were friends and it doesn’t seem …”
“Very friendly,” Johnson completed the trailing sentence.
“Hey, he’s a shadowborn. He’s different.”
“Yeah?” Lucy shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand and they don’t understand. It always amounts to a lack of understanding.” He walked beside her for a while, then said, “So you’re going to try to track down an explanation?”
“I am.”
“Don’t be disappointed if he doesn’t have one,” Johnson warned her.
“He must know where he went and who he is,” Lucy grumbled.
“Maybe not. But good luck,” he said, and he stopped walking.
Lucy continued through the city alone. The day was overcast; Johnson had kept his word and there would be no starshine that night…
In the tunnels on the East Side, Lucy found Mac directing the placement of fossils by several shadowy figures. One skeleton had a lizardlike head with too many teeth. “Hey, I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I—”
“I thought you might want to,” he said. “It’s simple really.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I thought we should maybe just be friends.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s all right, but …” she began, but he was gone. Directing the positioning of a complex skeleton with legs all out of proportion to its body. Then he was back.
“Yeah, friends. Things get too complicated otherwise,” he said. He looked at her, but she could not see his eyes in the shadows.
“Well, it seems to me that things don’t need to be complicated ….” But he was gone again, grumbling at the workman who was laying down the creature’s neck, explaining with words and gestures that the neck had to be placed as if the animal had fallen naturally, not as if some hamhanded workman had laid …
Lucy left quietly.
There was a tension in the city that afternoon, a current, a flow of power. It was the kind of day when the small hairs on the backs of your hands stand on end for no reason.
Lucy wandered the city and visited friends. “People don’t act like that,” she told her friend Maggie. “Not without a good reason.”
Maggie shrugged. Maggie specialized in sidewalks and streets that went where no one expected them to go.
“Maybe he has a reason.” Her voice was soft, like the hiss of tires on pavement, going nowhere. “Maybe he prefers the company of his own kind. Or maybe he prefers no company at all. Or maybe he was never there at all. You can see things in the shadows sometimes.”
“He really was there,” Lucy said to her friend Brian.
She met him in the park in the late afternoon. He was putting away his torches and Indian clubs after a long day of juggling. Brian juggled the lightning on rainy nights.
“Maybe he just wants to be friends,” Brian suggested.
“Well, cheer up. I’ll teach you to juggle.”
But the round balls always tumbled to the ground and Lucy could not laugh as she had laughed every other time that Brian had tried to teach her.
“So what is it about him?” Brian asked at last, sitting down in the grass.
“It’s not him,” Lucy said, sitting down beside him. “It’s people. People shouldn’t act that way.”
“They do.”
“Not us,” she said. “They do.” She gestured at the people strolling through the park. A girl sat on a bench nearby and the sun was shining on her hair. A man with sky blue eyes walked past the young woman and for a moment their eyes met. Lucy saw it and Brian saw it. But the man walked on past and the sunlight faded from the woman’s golden hair. “They’re like that,” Lucy said. “They don’t see past the surface. But this shadowborn … he’s one of us.”
“Maybe not,” Brian said. He reached for her hand and she started when he touched her—just a small shiver.
Then she took his hand and they watched the sunlight fade and the sha
dows stretch away across the park. But she left when darkness came.
There was a thunderstorm over the city that night and great flashing streaks of lightning split the overcast sky. Rumbles of thunder shook the buildings and made bums and bag ladies seek the cover of doorways and bus shelters.
But Lucy was a mean and stubborn woman. She walked through the storm and did all the things that should bring luck and power.
She threw three copper coins in a certain fountain at midnight.
She put seven pennies, standing on edge, between the bricks of a certain wall.
She turned her jacket inside out, like a woman who has been led astray by pixies and means to break the spell.
She found a four-leaf clover in the wet grass of the park and tucked it behind her left ear.
At dawn, Johnson found her sitting in the park in the wet grass. “Do me a favor?” she asked without looking up.
“Can you make it rain tonight?”
He shook his head slowly. His face was set in a frown and his hands were deep in his pockets. “It won’t do you any good,” he said. She did not look up at him. “You can’t just stay and look and wait.” He waited a moment, but she did not speak. “You really are upset, aren’t you?”
She plucked another daisy from the grass beside her.
“He was a friend. I didn’t think I could lose a friend so easily.”
“Tomorrow night, the stars must shine,” he said unhappily.
“It’s a long and lonely run,” she said slowly. And at last she looked up at him. He could not read her expression.
“But I have until twilight.”
“It’s no good, Lucy. You’re looking for an explanation and—”
“I’m looking for trouble,” she said with a touch of her old tone. “I’ll find it.”
And the sun rose over the city and began to burn away the fog. Lucy went back to the tunnels on the East Side.
(Trust me: you couldn’t follow the directions there if I gave them.) Her footsteps echoed in the darkness. The construction site was empty and the corridors were dark and silent. She went looking for trouble and she did not find it.
She ended up back at the phantom subway station, alone and unhappy. But she was a firecatcher and a lady of some power. Even tired and hurt, she had some power.
She traced a figure in the air, outlined it with light. A cap like a ragpicker, boots like a rancher, a shirt with undiscussable holes. Face in shadow, of course.
“You know, I don’t understand,” she said to the figure.
“And I don’t think you do either.” A train rumbled through the station and the figure disappeared for a moment in the brighter glow of the headlight. Lucy did not move. A slight tremor went through the glowing shape; like a ripple in a reflection, starting at the battered boots and ending at the stained cap. “I’m confused, and I don’t like being confused.” She glared at the figure for a moment. It did not move, did not speak.
She walked away, leaving a trail of glowing footprints. At the entry to the tunnel (Still want to know where the tunnels are, don’t you? Ha! You’ll never find out now.), she looked up at the night sky, toward the Little Bear, her articular constellation.
She walked across town to the library, where she knew Johnson would be. “I came to say good-bye,” she said.
“You’re leaving on the Run?”
She nodded. “It’s a tricky run,” she said and her voice was young and soft. “I may not be back.”
Johnson tried to take her hand but she stepped back and laid a hand on the head of one of the lions. “It’s all right,” she said. “I just need a different point of view for a while. I’ll be fine. I might be back later.”
Johnson shook his head. “Hey, if I see that shadowborn, what do you want me to—”
“Don’t say a word,” she said. “Don’t explain a thing.”
She stood with one hand on the head of the lion and she looked up toward the Little Bear, a constellation that had always seemed to be missing a star. And she began to fade—her hair changing from the color of steel to the color of twilight, her face losing its craggy reality, her body losing its harsh line. And in a moment, she was gone and away on the Starlight Run.
She hasn’t come back yet. That’s why you can’t see many stars in the city—they’re short a firecatcher still. She became a star herself, sitting up in the far-off, throwing gobs of light down at the world. (And if you want to know how she became the North Star, ask the man who lives by the lions. He may tell you, if you have the right look about you. Or he may not.)
What do you mean—the North Star was always there? Haven’t you been listening? The world is not as it seems. Ask any poet. Ask any bag lady. Ask anyone who sees in the twilight and knows of the fireborn and the shadows.
Down in the tunnels and secret ways of the city, the white cat mated with a black tom and produced litters of kittens who pounce and play with paper scraps that dance and flutter but never live. A faintly glowing figure still waits in the phantom subway station for a train that will never stop.
And Mac? You want to know what happened to the shadowborn? It’s possible that he never was at all. But if he was, then probably he still is and probably he is happy and probably he has never found the light sculpture that leans against the dark wall of the phantom subway station. Probably.
So that’s the story and you can draw your own conclusions.
But one warning: If you have a streak of the shadow in you, don’t follow the North Star. She may lead you astray. Lucy can be like that—she can hold a grudge.
And if you do have the shadow in you, don’t worry. I made the whole thing up. There—feel better? All right?
All right.
In the Abode of the Snows
IN A HOSPITAL ROOM with white walls, Xavier Clark held the hand of his dying mother. The chill breeze from the air-conditioner made him think of the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas: Annapurna, Machhapuchhare, Dhaulagiri, Nilgiri. Places he had never been. His mother’s shallow breathing could have been the whispering of snow crystals, blown by mountain breezes across a patch of ice. The veins beneath her pale skin were faintly blue, the color of glacial ice.
His mother’s eyes were closed, and he knew she was dying. With each passing year, she had grown more frail, becoming as brittle as the delicate teacups that she kept locked in the china cabinet. Her hair had grown paler, becoming so ethereal that her scalp showed through no matter how carefully she combed and arranged the white wisps.
His mother’s breathing stopped, and he listened, for a moment, to the quick light sound of his own breathing and the pounding of his own heart. Closing his eyes, he clung to his mother’s hand and savored a faint uneasy feeling of release, as if his last tie to earth had been cut and he could soar like a balloon, leaving the ordinary world behind, Xavier returned from the hospital to his mother’s house.
Though he had lived in the house for all of his forty years, he still thought of it as his mother’s house. Even when his father had been alive, the house had been his mother’s. His father had always seemed like a visitor, stopping at the house to rest and write between expeditions to Nepal.
When Xavier was five, his father had died in a snowslide on the eastern slope of Dhaulagiri. When Xavier tried to remember his father, he could picture only the broadshouldered man that he had seen in out-of-focus book-jacket photos, a lifeless black-and-white image.
More clearly than Xavier remembered his father, he remembered his father’s possessions: an elaborately carved prayer wheel that reeked of incense, a small rug on which two dragons curled about one another in an intricate pattern, a brass bowl that sang when struck with a wooden rod, wooden masks with great empty eyes and grimacing mouths, round brass bells the size of his fist attached to a strip of brightly colored tapestry. Upon receiving word of his father’s death, Xavier’s mother had taken all these exotic treasures, wrapped them in newspaper, and packed them in a steamer trunk that she pushed into a corner of
the attic. As a child, Xavier had yearned to look at his father’s belongings, but the steamer trunk was locked and he had known better than to ask his mother for the key.
His mother had never talked of his father after his death. She never remarried, raising Xavier herself, living frugally on the proceeds of his father’s insurance policies and on royalties from his books.
As a teenager, Xavier bought copies of his father’s three books: Adventures on the Roof of the World, Land of Yak and Yeti, and The Magic of Nepal. He hid the books from his mother and read them in his room when he was supposed to be doing his homework. On the map in the flyleaf of one book, he traced his father’s journeys in red pen. In his sleep, he muttered the names of mountains: Machhapuchhare, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Nilgiri. He remembered the names of Himalayan rivers fed by monsoon rains and melting snows. He knew the names of his father’s porters—the Sherpas who accompanied the mountaineering expeditions—better than he knew the names of his own schoolmates.
He was a shy teenager with few friends. After graduating from high school, he attended the local college and majored in biology. He had planned to base his thesis on observations of mountain sheep in the Rockies, but just before he was due to leave, his mother had taken ill. He canceled his trip and spent the summer observing waterfowl in a local pond, writing a thesis on the behavior of coots in an urban environment.
At college graduation, he was offered a job as wildlife biologist in the Idaho National Forest. Upon receiving the good news, his mother suffered the first in a series of heart attacks. He accepted a position as biology teacher at the local high school and stayed home to nurse her.
Living in his mother’s house with the silent memories of his father’s glorious past, he had become a secretive and solitary man. His clothes hung loosely on his body, like the skin of a reptile preparing to molt. His students joked about him, saying that he looked like one of the thin dry lizards that he kept in the classroom’s terrarium. He had grown prematurely old, never leaving town because his mother was never well enough to travel and never well enough to be left alone.
