by Rick Shelley
Son of the Hero
( Varayan memoir - 1 )
Rick Shelley
Rick Shelley
Son of the Hero
1 – The Cellar Room
I wasn't sure that I had enough cash to pay for the cab ride. I'd never expected to need a taxi. My folks had planned to meet me at the airport, the way they normally did when I came home from college. This time, I was coming home for my last spring vacation. In another six weeks I would have my B.S. in computer science. I was also coming home to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. Dad had promised something unusual for my "coming of age"-not my eighteenth birthday when I could vote and all, but number twenty-one. Dad wouldn't say what he had in mind, just that he wasn't being old-fashioned about twenty-one being "of age." I was a little edgy about the surprise. The one he'd hit me with when I turned eighteen was unusual enough. He dumped me in the Colorado Rockies with a light backpack and a few essentials and told me that I had three days to cover fifty miles of rough mountainous forest. He would meet me on the other side. But then, Dad was always a little strange. For years I worried that he was completely loony. Some of his habits were hard to accept as rational. And Mom wasn't a whole lot better. But it was a fun kind of crazy, and I guess I had a better childhood than most kids I knew. Even being dumped out in the wilderness wasn't that rough. Dad and I had done a lot of camping, and I knew how to take care of myself. Dad called it a test. I passed without much trouble, even enjoyed it.
"Here you are, kid," the cabbie said when we pulled up to the curb in front of the house. "That'll be twenty-fifty."
Searching for the money and worrying that I might not have that much on me kept me from getting too upset at being called a "kid." I even had to give him the ten quarters I had left from the video arcade at O'Hare. There was nothing left for a tip-but then, I wouldn't have tipped anyone who called me "kid" on my twenty-first birthday anyway. I got my suitcase and overnight bag out and shut the door. The cabbie screeched away to let me know how he felt about not getting a tip.
I stood out front and looked at the only home I had ever known. It looked old-fashioned and was. Even when the house was new it must have looked out of place, out of time-limestone blocks in a development of brick, wood, and aluminum; two stories with high-peaked roof and gables among ranchers; nearly hidden behind a stone wall and thick bushes instead of neat white picket or chain-link fencing with sparse, carefully manicured landscaping. Dad had designed the place. He liked to say that it was sometimes worth being different just to be different. From the street, the house was almost hidden. Twelve-foot privet hedges surrounded it. Windows peeped out. Thick ivy clung to the walls. The walk curved back and forth through two decades of transplanted Christmas trees. Lilacs bloomed everywhere, giving the place an overwhelming sweetness for a few weeks every spring. -Home.
I carried my bags toward the front door slowly, savoring the lilacs and the feeling of being home. The house sits 120 feet from the road, and the ground rises five feet from curb to porch. Ten acres of land-most of it looks wild, though there was reason, rationale, behind the layout… at least Dad claimed there was.
No one came out to greet me, but I didn't start to worry until I saw three newspapers on the porch. Three days' papers. Both locks on the front door were locked. When I opened the door, I had to push a stack of mail out of the way.
"Mom? Dad?" I didn't get any answer. I brought the papers in, set them and the mail on the little table in the entryway. I headed for the kitchen then, my mother's private kingdom. There were no dirty dishes piled up. There was also no birthday cake waiting. The milk in the fridge smelled sour. A package of hamburger had turned a peculiar gray color. A quick tour told me that there was no one in the house but me. The search was a frenzied formality. After seeing what was in the fridge, I knew that no one else was home. But both cars were in the garage.
It was time to start worrying.
I went through the house again, more slowly, more carefully, looking for notes. There was nothing in the living room, dining room, or kitchen-places Mom was likely to leave word. Nor was there anything in Dad's office or in any of the bedrooms or bathrooms upstairs. I even unraveled a couple of feet off every roll of toilet paper looking for a message. I know that sounds crazy, but in my family, it's not enough to merely be logical.
That left the garage, basement, and yard. I checked the garage first. I looked through Dad's Citroen and Mom's Dodge van, and then under them. Nothing. The yard-all ten acres-would need hours to search thoroughly; it's not as though we just had grass and a few tame trees-it's a jungle out there. So I headed for the basement.
The cellar was always taboo for me while I was growing up. The door leading down from the kitchen was always locked. On the few occasions when I was allowed down there, it was to get something out of the larger of the two cellar rooms. The smaller room was Dad's private preserve, and I was never allowed into it. Well, when I was very young, before I started school, there may have been a few times when I went in there with Mom and Dad, but those memories were impossibly vague, connected somehow to memories of visits to relatives.
The door leading from the kitchen down to the cellar was unlocked. I turned on the lights and went down the steps-slowly. My stomach started to churn. I hesitated and wondered if I should call the police. I decided to wait until I finished my search. There were some other calls I could make too-back to the dorm to see if a letter had come for me, to Dad's agent and a couple of people my folks sometimes did things with. I didn't think that the calls would do any good, though, not with both cars in the garage, rotten food in the fridge, no note, and the pile of papers and mail. My folks were much too organized for that.
The main part of the basement-furnace, central air, water heater, an old sofa and chair that had been exiled when I was ten, three bicycles (my "wheels" from ages seven to fifteen), and other odds and ends you might find in any cellar-was as I remembered it. Back in the farthest corner, the door to my father's sanctum sanctorum was propped open with the snow shovel. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and stared at that open door, reluctant to cross the cellar and look inside that room. I was afraid of what I might find. That door was always secured by two combination locks and a heavy deadbolt.
I held my breath and listened to silence for a couple of minutes, crazy fears racing through my mind. Had someone broken in and killed them? Had they run off on my twenty-first birthday? Murder-suicide? Was the old man really as crazy as I sometimes thought he was?
After a long hesitation, I walked slowly toward the open door, wishing I had a weapon. I stopped at the door and reached inside for the light switch. It took a bit of fumbling. The switch was set farther from the door than the rest of the switches in the house.
Bright light. Nothing jumped out. I looked in, then stepped inside… maybe with my jaw hanging open.
The Room. There were swords, knives, maces, shields, pennants, and other medieval goodies hanging on the walls. A suit of chain mail was arranged on a dummy in one corner. There was a huge rolltop desk and a work-table in the center of the room. I saw a pile of stuff on the table with several sheets of my mother's lilac-colored-and-scented stationery on top, but I didn't run right for that. I was, momentarily, flabbergasted at what else the room held-seven extra doors spaced around the four walls. Two doors flanked the door I had entered through, on the wall between Dad's room and the rest of the basement, doors that weren't there on the other side. I shook my head, almost forgetting the search that had brought me to the room. The weaponry was no surprise. There was more of that all over the house. But those doors! Then I went to the table and picked up mother's stationery.
One mystery at a time. I told myself.
Mother's statione
ry was an off-size, six inches by twelve, made of heavy paper that felt like parchment. She had written the note. Her ornate script and the royal-blue ink were quite distinctive. The note was dated Wednesday, three days back.
"Dear Gilbert," it started. Mom never called me "son" or Gil,-well, almost never, certainly not in writing-and I never admitted to Gilbert.
"Your father is overdue from a trip. I'm going after him. I fear he may be in trouble. This is certainly an awkward time. I hope we get home before you arrive-of course, if we do, you won't see this note-but if your father has gotten himself into a sticky situation, it might not be possible for us to get home before you do.
"Awkward. We intended to have a long talk with you while you were home this time, to tell you about our family history and to initiate you into some of our-shall we say-family mysteries. Your heritage."
Mother has never been able to write a short note. Once, while I was in high school, I came home one afternoon and found a note that boiled down to "Ride down to the grocery store and get a loaf of bread." It was 130 words long. I counted.
I took a moment to look through the rest of the stuff piled on the table, hoping it would help me understand what the hell she was getting at. My sword was there. Yes, my sword, one of them. Fencing was one of Dad's obsessions. I started taking fencing lessons when I was six-not to mention judo, karate, savate, boxing, and a half-dozen other varieties of martial mayhem. The shooting lessons, guns and bows, didn't start until I was eight. My favorite sword was there on the table-heavy, double-edged blade, simple cross-hilt-plus a twelve-inch stiletto, weapon belt, camouflage fatigues (I had refused to continue wearing a Robin Hood costume when I was fourteen), compound bow, quiver of razor-headed hunting arrows, small pack, full canteen, and about thirty pounds of other Sherwood Forest-type equipment. Okay, I was looking at some kind of trip again, apparently wilder than my survival trek of three years before. There was also a small leather-bound book-four by six, and three inches thick-held closed by a cracked leather strap. I went back to the note.
"I certainly don't have time to tell you everything you need to know right now. If I tried, I would still be writing when you got home and I don't dare wait that long to go after your father. Three days are too many if he is in trouble. Some of it I might even get wrong, and that would be worse than leaving you ignorant of certain possibilities. Knight-errantry is your father's area anyway, not mine. But I have to give you what help I can. Among the gear I've left for you is my grandmother's Tower Chapbook. It's filled with odds and ends of lore and whatnot, things she wrote down during the years she was imprisoned. You may find it useful if you have time to consult it at need. The short index is one I added when I was a young girl. It's not complete. I fear that I grew bored long before it was finished."
I didn't even know that I had a great-grandmother who had been imprisoned for years. I opened the book and flipped through some of the pages. The script was even more convoluted than Mother's, and I couldn't read a single word of it. The language didn't look the least bit familiar, though it seemed to use our alphabet. Back to the letter.
"The best advice I can offer if you have to come looking for us is to be as paranoid as you can about everything and everyone." I shook my head. Dear old Mother was starting to sound as wacky as father, and she'd always seemed more sensible. Of course, her relatives, the few I had met, all seemed peculiar. Maybe it was a family thing, like in Arsenic and Old Lace.
"Looking back over this," the note continued, "I see that I really haven't told you anything that you need to know. Your father went off to answer a call for help from my Uncle Parthet (not Parker, dear, that's just the name he uses in this world). Your father should have been home by last weekend at the very latest. It is hard to pin this kind of thing down to a rigid timetable because you never know precisely what sort of trouble a Hero will run into along the way, but last weekend by the latest. He still hasn't shown, so I fear he may have run into something too big for him to handle. Maybe I won't be in time to help, maybe my help won't be enough if I do, but I have to make the attempt.
"You'll have to go to Uncle Parthet for details, and yes, I know you've never gone calling on him, that you don't know exactly where he lives. That's one of the things your father and I could never explain, part of what you would have learned on this vacation.
"Really, it is quite simple. You just have to know which door to use and where to go after you step through." I stopped and looked around at the batch of doors again. It didn't make sense yet, but I don't know that anything would have made sense just then.
"Oh dear, the doors! You've never operated them, have you?"
"No, Mother," I said. "I didn't even know about them. I still don't." Too bad she couldn't hear and answer. I looked back to her note.
"You just need the rings. I hope they fit. If your fingers haven't swollen up since last summer, they ought to. The rings are in a small box in one of the side pockets of your pack. Always wear the eagle on your left hand and the signet on the right. You touch the rings to the silver tracing on each side of the doors to operate them. A sword in your right hand will serve in place of the signet, though, as long as you're wearing both rings."
I glanced at the nearest door but didn't see anything that looked like silver tracing, so I went to the door and pulled it open. The tracing was inside, all the way around the jamb, but there was a concrete wall behind the door. Time to read on.
"The door to Parthet's place is the one with the green trout on it (a private joke; your father says that Parthet drinks like a fish). On the other side of the door, you just follow the path. Bear left at the fork and you'll come to Parthet's cottage.
"I don't even know for sure what to warn you about. Once you go through the door, almost anything could happen. I mean that in the most literal way possible. You've led such a sheltered life in such a civilized world. Not all places are so tame or predictable. If you can imagine something, it's probably possible somewhere, and many things you could never imagine.
"If you have to come after us, expect the worst at every turn. Even then, what you find may be worse than the worst you can expect. I don't suppose that makes much sense now. It will, I fear, if you come through the door. Deadly danger. Always. That's why I have so few living relatives.
"Eat hearty before you leave. Never miss a chance for a safe meal-if there is such a thing beyond the door.
"If I can get to your father and make it straight back, we'll be home sometime Saturday afternoon. If we're not there by sunset, we probably both need help."
The note was signed, "Love, Mother," as if I might not know who wrote it. I folded the papers and put them in my hip pocket. I did another slow spin to look at the doors. Then I made the circuit and opened every one of them. They all opened on concrete blocks except the door I had come in through, and that door didn't have the silver tracing.
Back at the table, I dug the two rings out of the pack. I had seen the rings before, or their mates. My parents each wore a set. "A custom," they called it. I slipped them on the way the note said, eagle on the left, signet on the right. The signet was a simplified version of our coat of arms. That was all over the house-on tapestries, on a shield in the living room, carved into the front and back doors, even stamped into the silverware and embossed on the dishes, the good service that only came out on special occasions. The design was quartered, diagonal lines in the upper-left and lower-right quadrants, a bird that looked something like a penguin in the other two sections.
I went back to the door with the green trout and touched the rings to the silver tracing on either side… and almost browned out. The blank concrete wall disappeared and showed me what looked like the interior of a cave, dim, with a hint of distant light off to the left. I jumped back and the wall returned. I tried again and jumped back just as quickly.
"Holy shit!" I shouted. I went out through the regular door and up to the kitchen. I had spotted a six-pack of Michelob in the fridge. I opened two and start
ed drinking one with each hand-much too quickly. But the bottles were half empty before I could make myself stop.
"The whole family's crazy," I said, looking at the bottles. "I'm as loony as the rest." But that explanation didn't sit well. I went back down to the basement room with one way in and eight ways out. Crossing the main part of the cellar, I picked up a baseball-teenage memorabilia. I took the ball to the door with the green trout and put my rings against the silver tracing. The cave was still there. I dropped the baseball, bounced it off my knee, and watched it bounce twice on the floor of the cave, then roll away. When I pulled my hands away from the silver tracing, the wall returned and there was no hint of the baseball.
I stared at the door, at the bare concrete wall, for several minutes before I worked up the nerve to open the passage again. I took away just my right hand. The portal remained open. When I took the other hand away, the wall returned. I started over, reversing the order. Same result. Opening the way needed both rings on the tracing, but one hand would hold it open.
"If this is crazy," I started, but I didn't know how to finish. I went back to the table and looked through the pack-two changes of clothing (including one of those silly Robin Hood outfits), cigarette lighter and matches (and I don't smoke), water-purification tablets, aspirin, fishing lines and hooks, six freeze-dried meals (just add water and heat). It looked like an assortment Dad would prepare.
"Dad, if this is a joke, you're sure going to hear about it," I said. An answer would have been comforting, but there was none.
According to my watch, sunset was about an hour off. I didn't figure on hopping through that doorway any sooner than that, if then. But I really didn't want to do my waiting in that screwy room, so I went back upstairs. After a futile search for something decent to eat, I settled on a peanut butter sandwich. The bread was stale but didn't show any mold. It was passable, since I washed it down with the rest of the beer in my two open bottles. Then I went through the entire house, room by room, looking at all of the doors. The door to Dad's office had silver tracing. Looking in from the hallway, I put the rings against the silver, but nothing happened. I went into the office and tried from that side. Looking out, the hallway changed. It was still a hall, but the walls were made of large stones. There was a torch burning smokily in a bracket on the other side. The door between the master bedroom and its bath had the silver. Looking into the bathroom and touching the tracing, I saw what seemed to be a closet full of rough brooms and mops. Looking out from the bathroom, I saw a different bedroom with a huge canopied bed, torch brackets on stone walls, and a tatty-looking forest tapestry with unicorns and dragons. Two closet doors were also gimmicked.
