We pass what's clearly a hoard of gold and bronze buried in just a skip's worth of dirt. Little lizards in there too. My stoat self is inclined to dig, and again, I deny myself. This is an inconveniently appetite-driven body.
Nimue rams the point of Excalibur into a wall and stops our descent. We are in a cathedral-sized hole. I see several flights of stairs, with startled workers on them, trying to convince themselves they aren't seeing us. A tremendous passage yawns below us, and within it is that draconic drill they've named in questionable honour for the queen. Tunnel walls are being girded with steel. I glance up at the witch.
“You plan to stay stoat, then?” she says. Even a bit demagicked, still, I realise I don't have to. I chant to shift myself into something new. Nimue gives me a look that says my new form is not appropriate. I prod the wall of the tunnel with my antlers.
Nimue waves her fingers and changes me into a lovely maiden, which is fair play, and a palpable hit. Those years were worse than the ones in which I was a prophetic stag, which was at least a form respected by other wizards. Being a lovely maiden and thus assumed to be intellectless was, as Nimue knew it would be, perfectly maddening.
Adam jolts, trying to keep his footing.
“Old Man,” he asks, his voice shaking. “You still in there? You're pretty as a lady. What're we at, mate? What's going on?” He shifts sadly. “I've still got a tail,” he whispers. “It's bunched up in my arse.”
What might I transform him into. A mouse? My subtleties feel coarse. All this magic newly returned to me, and I should be readying magics for Arthur, but I fear I do not remember what to do. I have been preparing myself for failure.
“Can you swing a sword?” Nimue asks Adam. “They may wake spoiling for a fight.”
“I've played rugby,” he says, bigging himself up. I doubt he's done any such.
“That'll do,” says Nimue.
She leaps, and takes us thistledown light onto the drill itself, while the drillers gawp. Nimue sniffs the air and takes off, running as fast as a river off a cliff. She's a water witch, and I'm a lady in waiting, chasing after her. Adam stumbles after us both. I feel Elizabeth spinning beneath my feet, and I feel the desire for magic, forgetting then remembering that I have it.
I'm horribly confused after all this time. Still not sure what I can do, I transform back into my Merlin self, with capes and celestial robes and all that, with the lovely pointed hat she always mocked. Adam snickers and I don't care.
I go horizontal and fly.
Halfway down the tunnel, I realise Adam's hanging from my ankle.
“Old Man!” he cries.
“Release me!” I shout.
I can barely see Nimue. She's springing ahead, lit by the flicking glow of Excalibur, soundtracked by the grinding of the drill.
“I'll stay a stoat, if I'm only her stoat,” Adam wails. “Swear down!”
“Bigger fish!” I shout furiously. Then I, fellow-sufferer, relent, and allow him onto my back as though I'm a fucking broomstick.
God help us, I can smell the apples of Avalon, as the tip of Elizabeth pierces the wall of the cave where the king of England sleeps. I hear Nimue bursting through the rock and magic, into the orchard where Arthur and his court wait.
“What're we doing?” howls Adam.
“We have to stop King Arthur waking!” I shout in what I realise is terror. “He's there to protect us all, and with his waking comes Albion's happy ending!”
I keep flying.
“That,” says Adam carefully after a moment, “doesn't sound so bad?”
Poor Adam. Perhaps someone told him stories, once. Perhaps he reads and loves stories still. Perhaps it takes someone from inside a story to explain to someone from without them, that even a happy ending is an apocalypse.
I burst through the rock behind Nimue. She stands before the point of the encroaching drill, Excalibur raised high, confronting the Crossrail.
Behind her I can definitely see Arthur in his own crystal cave. He's twitching, stirring, coming out of his rest, roots all around him, apple cores covering the ground. I can see Guinevere and Lancelot, one on either side of him, each holding his hands. And yes, Arthur's crown still gleams, as the story lurches towards a finish.
“BEND!” shouts Nimue, sword trembling, magic surging from her fingertips. “BEND, ELIZABETH!”
The drill considers. It decides to shrug off magic, and whirrs forward at Nimue.
Adam rolls off my back, and charges the drill. He flings himself between Nimue and Elizabeth, his pale chest bared to the diamond-tipped point, offering his heart to be impaled by progress.
I fumble for my own magic, patting the pockets I have again with the habits of magicless centuries, and find my letter opener instead.
I pull it from my robes, sliding it out as smoothly as it was once, under my guidance, pulled from a stone.
“FLEA!” I shout, waving my own sword.
I never lost everything I had; I knew I'd find use for that neglected sword. Never as flashy as Excalibur, no, but that long marinading in the stone didn't leave it entirely useless, you might say. I wave the nameless — and, I might add, sensibly unglowing — sword my ward tugged out of the rock. It was always the poor relation — I felt sorry for it, is the truth, when Nimue's own blingy Excalibur turned up and turned heads. It was a bugger to find: no one ever seemed quite sure where they'd left it. So when I finally found it, I made sure to keep it close, discreetly. Now at last I can let it stretch. I imagine that old iron must be luxuriating. It is not without power.
“Flee! Flea!” My magic is a bit of a mess and I'm not sure if I'm trying to transmogrify the drill into an insect or to send it packing. Not without power notwithstanding, and either way, nothing happens.
All, apparently, is lost. Or won. Same thing.
Nimue calmly picks up an Avalonian apple, and tosses it into the path of the drill.
The apple slams Adam aside and is split in two, cored by a tunnel never to be.
I wave King Arthur's original sword again, this time in conjunction with Nimue and Excalibur, and the startled drill seems to hesitate, and waits in time stretched out — until at last and with a pneumatic sigh it surrenders to these ancient obstacles, shying away in a mechanical motion that could be displacement by magic, or could be a sensibly altered route. I swear you can't tell.
It sends sad surveys back to its operators.
You always have to take account of such archaeological finds. Elizabeth adjusts her course and tilts away from Avalon.
Behind Nimue, Arthur rolls on his rock, and takes Guinevere in his arms, and Lancelot holds Arthur in their cosy napping threesome. All the court of the King beneath the hill settles down again and gets back to dreaming.
I turn to my witch. She's eating one half of the apple. She offers me the other. As I take the fruit, sweet as the future, sour as the past, filled with old, dirty magic, I look at her, the Lady of the Lake. I drop my sword, a letter opener again, back in my pocket.
“Would you like to go skinnydipping?” says Nimue. “There's an underground lake somewhere down here as I recall.”
“Roman baths too,” I say.
“That pine,” she says, and glitters at me.
“That shining tower,” I say.
“Old Man,” Adam says. He stumbles to his feet and looks groggy. “Is this Camelot?”
Mr. Doornail
“Mr. Doornail has eaten my heart!” the old man cried in the village one morning, noticing belatedly the horror that had been done him. Shortly thereafter, he took off his spotless white fedora, threw it into the air, and sidestepped casually into the path of an automobile.
Mind, no one had wanted the old man alive for at least ten years. He went in and out the front door, dressed in his pressed suit, his beard trimmed, but he spoke to no one in the house, and perhaps to no one in the world. Even dogs disliked him. Terriers sometimes sensed the thing he lacked and chased him through the town.
Had
the old man not been defended by goats, he would've wandered into the dark long before he did. Goats would keep company with anything. They didn't mind an empty tin. They'd kick it along, bring it back home when it was tired, and follow it up the stairs. The old man had been for ten years blessed by this bevy of goats, who slept in his bookshelves and on the headboard of his bed, all around the room like furry bricks, a small herd of side-eyeing sympathizers.
The car that ran the old man over was swiftly mobbed by his companions, spry hooves onto the roof, horns in the windows, bleats and contempt for the driver who gave up, got out, and went to the bar. It was too bad, but what could he do? The old man had leapt in front of him, and the car was moving at full speed. Besides which, the old man was a known scourge of goatiness, a cloud of fur and bells; a woeful, slow-going weirdness, moving through town and blocking traffic.
The old man was very dead. His hat landed atop a light post and was colonized, first by doves, and then by bats, who'd been hunting any house at all.
Who among us has not tried to bar winged things from the house? A hundred bats can hang inside a hat. A thousand sparrows can nest atop a four-poster, looking down into the bedclothes. A hundred thousand moths can hide in the wallpaper, flattening until they seem as though they're only part of the pattern, not hungry creatures seeking wool. Winged things find a way in.
Bernardine, the newly widowed mistress of the house, wafted over the polished floors, vibrating with triumph. Oh, she was delighted. The servants knew it. Everyone knew it.
No marriage of forty-three years was without its revulsions, but particularly not a marriage in which one party had sold a piece of the other without the other's permission. Sharing a house with a man whose heart you've fed to a monster was nothing nice.
It was only a small ritual, the theft of the heart, taken one night with a sharp knife and a spell made of wax and twine, the heart wrapped in cotton and bundled into a copper pot, boiled with saffron, and delivered to Mr. Doornail. Unfortunately, the old man roused partway through it and in half sleep, bespelled and bemused, he told Bernardine that he'd never forgive her, and that this was the end of their marital conversation.
Those were the last words she heard him speak, but he stayed alive out of perversity.
Whenever she looked at him, she was reminded of her crime, and whenever he looked at her, he was reminded of something he couldn't remember. That was how it had gone for a decade and more, and a very unpleasant decade it was. He occasionally walked past, looked at her woefully, and she in turn looked at the sky until he departed. His woe was like pox.
She'd slept in a separate room with a lock on the door for years, and he'd slept surrounded by goats and bits of hay, his daily doings unmonitored, his household run by the seven women of his family, and eleven women of the servants, who wearied of him more each day.
The old man's feelings were mute and moot, but Bernardine's were not. She had a wringer, and through it she ran his shirts, crank by crank, managing her rage through wringing, though the servants did the rest of the laundry.
At long last, the old man was laid out in the formal dining room. He was flat and smooth as could be, as though his body itself was made of boiled wool. He'd been brought back home on a cart.
Bernardine donned her blackest dress and her darkest veil. She looked out from behind it, and smiled. The old man had lived for an appallingly long time after his heart had been eaten by Mr. Doornail.
There was a tall door behind the table that held the old man's body. It was three stories high and made of mahogany, stretching from the grand entryway to the attic. It was never opened. There were iron locks all the way up, and bars that slid across the wood, and chains that secured those bars to their fastenings.
From behind the door, the monster groaned in anticipation of its next meal.
If one did not know Mr. Doornail was there, one might have mistaken the groan for the sound of wind whistling. Those in the house knew better. The servants were in charge of polishing the dark door with furniture polish, and shining the locks. Sometimes one of the servant girls peeped through a keyhole, to see if Mr. Doornail was visible, but there was only a blurry redness, like the sun seen through an eyelid. All that was ever visible of Mr. Doornail was the liquid that welled from beneath the door.
A servant marched importantly into the room with a mop. The ooze to be removed was dark and thick, a bloody drink of seawater, drowned desperation.
Who among us has not tried to clean something ghastly from a floor? Who among us has not tried to banish the memory of the ghastliness with bleach and lemons? The ghastliness always remains, bait to cats, intriguing to dogs, no matter what one does. The world is soaked in wrongful substances, that's the truth, and every bit of the earth has been touched by terrible things.
The servants in the old man's villa were grateful. The old man had been filth forever. No one could bear the way he tracked mud over carpets, and often worse than mud. It was about time Mr. Doornail took him.
The carpets might be whitened again now, and the floorboards sanded, the windows soaped, and the linens starched. There would be no more goats allowed into bedchambers, no more goats bleating evilly in the kitchens. Who could be bothered with goats who stood on the roof warbling the devil's hymn? No one had ever liked the goats, no one but the old man, and if he was gone, the goats would be ignored or roasted in pits.
Now there were almond cakes to bake and sausages to fry. The mourning could not be minor; there were standards to uphold. The town would come to the funeral reception, and the daughters of the house were to hold court from the hardest sofa. Rituals of regret.
The servants had been running the villa for decades, through two mistresses who thought themselves queens, both Bernardine and her mother. The servants had no patience for the follies of the rich. They came from the country, where no one wore corsets they had to be tugged into, and no daughters stood at the top of the staircase lamenting the fit of their frills. In the country, goats were not allowed indoors. The rich had different ideas. Ten years of difficulty since the old man had gone bad, and now chickens came into the house to roost on the tops of the curio cabinet and curtain rods. Eggs dropped from high places and cracked on the floor. Who could be bothered to fight with chickens? At the end of each day there was an angry mop.
It was the first day of the mourning, and in the street outside the villa the funeral band commenced to play, banging pots and pans, and singing, and occasionally a man played a trill on a flute, and another took up a fiddle while the rest stamped their feet and played their horns.
The servants sighed as one. The band was dirty too, and they would no doubt trample through the villa in their mourning, dirty feet, dirty songs.
Who among us has not heard the dreadful song of the funeral band, and tried to keep it out? It cannot be kept out with cotton, and neither may it be kept out with wine. The only way to keep a funeral band out is to ban death from the house. Who among us hasn't tried those spells? They've never worked.
It had always been Bernardine's job to provide for herself and all five daughters, and she'd done what she had to do. The old man was a gambler. Without a heart, no man could play cards. That was well known. After his heart was gone, the old man stood at the corner of the table, bewildered, while all his former conspirators shuffled, bet, and ate sardines. Heartless, the old man was reduced to a diet of bland porridge. Nothing tasted good, and nothing felt good. He shuffled from square to square.
Bernardine, on the other hand, had become a productive and powerful witch with the sale of her husband's heart. She ran a business killing people's enemies. People came to her for awful things to put inside smoke bombs, potions that would drift out into the air, turning everyone who inhaled them pale green. They came to her for flowers that might be pinned into the bosoms of the wives of generals, suffocating them as they danced.
Her powers came from the monster to whom she'd sold the old man's heart. Mr. Doornail had power to spare, and n
o cares for the future.
Oh, Mr. Doornail was terrible. The monster behind the door had tentacles, perhaps a hundred of them, perhaps a thousand, and the tentacles touched the doorframe, tenderly petting the wet warp of the wood. Each tentacle had the face of one of Bernardine's daughters, or, when Mr. Doornail was in another mood, the face of everyone in the town. The tentacles could play like puppets, the monster moving its own arms around in the space behind the door, making a show for itself.
The funeral band played in the street, and Bernardine's fingers moved in her gloves. The band would keep any ghosts from settling. Ghosts hated this sort of music, this clang and clamor. She'd commissioned the band to play for six weeks, day and night. They'd be fed on chickpeas and egg pancake, and every day she'd allotted them seven bottles of wine from the cellar. She wasn't stingy in matters of mourning.
Bernardine danced for a moment, all alone, and through one of the keyholes, Mr. Doornail watched her.
Who among us has not tried to keep a monster in the house, under lock and key? Monsters do not belong in houses, but even so, as many as a hundred monsters can hang inside a closet, or wedge themselves in layers beneath a bedroom floor. A tremendous monster can dwell inside a central courtyard, accessible only by flying things. The truth of monsters, however, is that they will always find a way to freedom.
The funeral band was not a dancing band. They were a death band: thin, bird faced, some of them with mustaches and some not. Their black clothing ran in the rain.
There were twenty-one men in the town, and they all knew better than to marry any of Bernardine's dreadful daughters. Mr. Doornail, while not known by name, was known by reputation. No man among them wanted to lose his heart. It was best to be in the funeral band instead. There'd been an emergency meeting. Most of the musicians had no skill at all at instruments. There was a quick handing out of tin cans and boiling pots, metal spoons and wineglasses, and those without kitchens were left to whoop and howl in mourning for a man no one knew.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 53
