Door Into Faerie

by Edward Willett

  …and just like that, they were back in their bodies, bursting to the surface of dark water beneath a star-spangled sky. Wally gasped air, found mud beneath his feet on which to stand, and rose dripping to turn toward Ariane…

  …only to see her fall backwards into the water with an enormous splash, unconscious.

  Or dead.

  Chapter Six

  Home Sweet Home

  Ariane came awake bit by bit, as though the pieces of her consciousness were Lego blocks being locked together by a not-very-bright child. First, she realized she was lying on something far harder than her bed at Barringer Farm. Then she realized that she was cold. Then she realized that she was wet…and then she remembered that she was never wet anymore, unless she chose to be.

  Then she realized that only part of her was cold, that in fact her back was warm, and then she realized that someone was lying curled up with her, arms around her chest, and then she realized who that had to be, and then, suddenly, she was fully awake.

  She opened her eyes. Grey pre-dawn light filtered through a screen of branches. Beyond the foliage, grass sloped down to grey water, lapping at the shore. She looked farther out over the water, and saw an island, just visible in morning mist. There was something very familiar about it…

  …and now she knew exactly where she was.

  She was lying under the bushes on the shore of Wascana Lake in Regina, not a hundred metres from where the Lady of the Lake had first appeared to her and Wally, and Wally was lying with her, embracing her from behind.

  But how had she…they…gotten there?

  Her mind felt fuzzy and unfocussed, as if she’d been sick. She remembered Scotland. She and Wally had sneaked up to the castle…Wally had gone inside…

  Flish. She’d grabbed Flish. But she hadn’t been able to move her the way they’d intended, hadn’t been able to spirit her away. And then Rex Major had shown up. He’d…shot her?

  No…there’d been no gunshot…

  But she remembered pain in her neck, whirling sickness, slipping down into darkness even as she dissolved into the magical watery realm through which they travelled, even as she pulled Wally with her…

  He drugged me, she realized. Merlin drugged me!

  The shards still pressed to her size blazed with the fury she felt. Wally stirred uneasily, and then suddenly his arms tightened. “Ariane?” he whispered. “Are you awake?”

  She put one of her hands on his, and squeezed. “Yes,” she whispered back. “We’re in Regina.”

  “I know.” His arms tightened even more, so tight she found it hard to breathe. “I thought…Ariane, I thought you were dead. Or dying. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Merlin shot me, didn’t he?” she said. Her neck still hurt, a sharp, localized pain. She kept whispering, even though no one could possibly hear them. It was still very early in the morning. “Drugged me somehow?”

  “Tranquilizer dart,” Wally said. “Just as we were leaving. It was…Ariane, I thought you were going to fade away…disappear…and take me with you. I could feel you slipping into nothingness, I could feel myself dissolving. It was…terrifying. The most terrifying thing I’ve ever gone through.”

  Ariane felt sick. Every time she used the power, she felt the seductive pull of the water, its constant urging to let herself go, to let herself become one with the rain and mist and streams and lakes, to abandon her individuality, her mind, her soul, her body. She’d learned to shut out that siren call, but it took a conscious effort every single time, and if she’d lost consciousness just as she dissolved…

  She shuddered involuntarily, and Wally hugged her even tighter.

  “Can’t…breathe…” she gasped out.

  “Sorry!” he said, and loosened his grip. But he didn’t stop hugging her, and for that she was deeply grateful.

  “How…how did we survive?” Ariane said. “I know it wasn’t anything I did.”

  “I could feel the shards,” Wally said. “Just like you’ve always said, they won’t let themselves be destroyed that way. They gave me something to hang on to. And then I reached out for you.”

  “Reached out how?” Ariane said, but she suddenly realized she already knew, that she could feel the truth inside her, within the Lady’s power – a link to Wally that hadn’t been there before, a link like the one she shared with her mother. She could never again lose her mom, could always go to her in an instant, and now she had that same connection to Wally, and her throat constricted and her heart speeded even before she heard his answer.

  “Love,” Wally whispered. “I couldn’t let you go. I couldn’t let you vanish into nothingness. And so…I didn’t.”

  Ariane squeezed his hand on her chest as tightly as he had hugged her a moment before.

  “Ow,” he said, but not as if he meant it.

  It was several seconds before Ariane was able to speak around the lump in her throat. “But…how did we end up in Regina?” she finally managed. “I wasn’t alert. I couldn’t have brought us here consciously.”

  “You definitely didn’t,” Wally said. “You keeled over the moment you were solid again. You still had that damned dart in your neck. I pulled it out and threw it away and then I had to drag you out of the water. At first I thought…” His voice broke, just a little; he cleared his throat and tried again. “At first I thought you were dead. But you were breathing. I thought about trying to get an ambulance, but then I realized I couldn’t, unless it was absolutely necessary. They’d identify you, and enter you into the computer, and in the hospital you’d be a sitting duck for Merlin. And after what he just did to you…” Ariane felt anger flowing from the shards, but not to her. “He tried to kill you.”

  “I doubt that,” Ariane said. “He doesn’t dare. He was probably just trying to knock me out. He tried once before, or his men did, in Gravenhurst, with chloroform, remember? He knows if I’m unconscious, I can’t use my powers.”

  “Why are you defending him?” Wally said, almost angrily.

  “I’m not!” Ariane said, and heard the snap in her own voice. The shards, she thought. “I’m not,” she repeated, this time working hard to keep her voice soft. “I’m just trying to understand him. He wants the shards. If I had…vanished…he couldn’t be sure he’d ever find them.”

  “Maybe,” Wally said. “Or maybe he expects they’ll just drop out of the sky and he can scoop them up at his leisure. With two shards in your possession and him out of the way, don’t you figure you could find the rest pretty easily?”

  Ariane hadn’t thought of that – and she should have. The tranquilizer clearly wasn’t entirely out of her system.

  “I don’t think I can take us anywhere,” she said. “After what happened. I have to make sure this stuff has completely worn off. And I don’t think it has.”

  “Can you at least get us dry?’ Wally said. “My front is warm enough, thanks to you, but my rear is freezing.”

  “Funny, I have the opposite problem,” Ariane said. “I’ll try.”

  She concentrated, and reached for the power…and the world whirled and spots danced in front of her eyes and she thought for a moment she was going to throw up. “Urgh,” she said. “No. Not yet.”

  “Well, we can’t lie here,” Wally said. “Some fitness freak out for an early-morning jog is likely to find us and then our reputations will be shot.”

  Ariane laughed. “Somehow, I doubt our reputations matter anymore.”

  “All the same, can you walk?”

  “I don’t know,” Ariane said. “Maybe. If you’ll help me.”

  “Gee, I don’t know…” Wally said, as though uncertain, then chuckled and gave her another quick squeeze. “Of course I’ll help.”

  “But where will we go?”

  “Home, sweet home,” Wally said. “I still have a key. And it’s only a few blocks away.”

  Wally’s house was on Harrington Mews, a cul-de-sac just the other side of the Albert Street Bridge, only a bit over half a kilometre away. W
ally climbed out from under the bush first, then held out his hand to Ariane. She sat up, and had to wait for the world to stop whirling; stood up, and promptly sagged against Wally. When they finally started walking, she had such a hard time moving in a straight line she knew anyone who saw them would be sure she was drunk. There’s another blow to my tottering reputation, she thought, and snorted.

  But no one saw them except a lone jogger – one of Wally’s “fitness freaks” – and he paid no attention at all, lost in his own world of exercise and whatever tunes he was mainlining through his ear buds.

  When they got to Harrington Mews, Wally led her around to the back fence of the house, right up against the dike bordering Wascana Creek, and through a gate, locked with a combination lock he made short work of. The back yard had been neatly cleaned of the usual winter detritus; though the Knights might not be using their family home, clearly they were still having someone look after it. Ariane wondered briefly if it might be Mrs. Carson, the housekeeper who had always favoured Flish over Wally, but she had a hard time picturing Mrs. Carson raking up decaying leaves.

  “Hope they haven’t changed the locks,” Wally muttered as they made their way up onto the big deck. He looked around, confusion on his face. “Where are the deck furniture and the barbecue?”

  “Probably moved into storage for the winter,” Ariane said. “Can we get in, please? I’m c-cold.” She didn’t like not being able to wish herself dry, and even though it was spring, Regina mornings were chilly, and she didn’t have Wally cuddled up close for warmth anymore.

  “Sorry,” Wally said, and unlocked the door.

  He stepped inside…and stopped so suddenly Ariane ran into him.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered.

  Ariane looked past him, and saw what he had seen…nothing.

  The house was empty, not just of people, but of everything.

  Wally Knight’s family had moved out, and nobody had told Wally.

  Chapter Seven

  Family History

  For the second time in just a few hours, Wally’s world dissolved into whirling chaos – but this chaos was in the physical world, not in the magical realm of the Lady of the Lake.

  Ariane all but forgotten, he moved down the short hall. The house echoed weirdly. The kitchen was empty except for the appliances, the sugar and flour containers that had stood under the cabinet for his entire life gone, the dish rack gone, everything gone.

  The living room was a sea of empty carpet, round depressions marking where furniture had rested for years, the walls bare except for a few discoloured patches and nail holes where pictures had hung.

  He raced up the stairs, even though he knew what he would find.

  The door to his room stood open.

  There was nothing inside it.

  His computer, his books, his clothes, his posters, his bed – everything had vanished as though it had never been.

  Flish’s room was just as empty, and his parents’, and the bathroom. He trudged back down the stairs. Ariane sat on the third step from the bottom, there being nowhere else to sit. He felt guilty for having abandoned her.

  But then, there was a lot of that going around. “It’s all gone,” he said. He knew she already knew it, but he still felt he had to say it out loud, as if saying it out loud would somehow help it seem more real. “All my stuff. All our stuff. It’s not our house anymore.”

  He suddenly thought of something, and crossed the bare carpet to the living room window. He peered out through the blinds and saw what he would have seen right away if they’d come in the front – a FOR SALE sign, bearing the name and phone number of a prominent Regina realtor.

  He let the blinds close again then walked back to Ariane, sitting down beside her on the steps. She put her hand on his knee. “Wally, I’m so sorry.”

  “I always thought that old joke was funny,” Wally muttered.

  Ariane gave him a bemused look. “What old joke?”

  “About the parents writing the kid at university, telling him, ‘You won’t recognize the house when you come home – we’ve moved.’ I guess I never really thought about it from the kid’s perspective. It’s not funny at all.”

  “You haven’t been in touch with them,” Ariane said softly. “You couldn’t be in touch with them. They had no way to let you know. They didn’t do it to hurt you.”

  “But they managed to all the same,” Wally said glumly. “Well, at least it’s warm and dry in here and nobody can see us. But there’s another reason this is bad news.”

  Ariane’s eyebrow lifted. “Worse than your family being scattered all over the world and the house you grew up in having been emptied and sold?”

  Wally sighed. “Yeah. Grandma Knight’s book is gone.”

  Ariane blinked. “I didn’t know your grandmother was – is? – a writer.”

  “Was,” Wally said. “She died five years ago. And she wasn’t. A writer, I mean. Except for one book. She decided she wanted to collect all the family stories she could for her little boy – my dad.”

  “He was an only child?” Ariane asked. “Like me?” She sounded a little wistful, like she’d always wanted a sibling.

  You want a sibling? Wally thought. I’d gladly give you mine. But out loud he said, “Yep. And her husband, my Grandpa Knight, was also an only child, whereas she had three brothers and a sister, so mostly the book was filled with stories from her side of the family, the Brays – tales of growing up on the prairies during the Depression.”

  Ariane laughed. “A very popular Saskatchewan-type book. I think one of my great aunts – one of my mom’s aunts – wrote something like that.”

  “Fortunately, she also got a few stories from Grandpa Knight and his parents, my Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma Knight. Apparently she got on really well with Great-Grandpa Knight; according to her, he doted on her because he’d always wanted a daughter as well as a son, and a daughter-in-law was almost as good.”

  “So did you read this book by your grandma?”

  Wally nodded. “A long time ago. And only once. It was interesting, but not exactly Harry Potter. Grandma was a better cook than she was a writer.” That was an understatement. Grandma’s writing was so plodding a broken-down plough horse could have run circles around it.

  “So why are you sorry it’s not here now?” Ariane said. “Your parents won’t have thrown it away. It will be in storage somewhere.”

  Wally shook his head. “It’s worse than that. Finding it here was always a bit of a long shot, because I think there’s a darn good chance Mom has it.”

  “In Scotland? Why?”

  Wally hesitated. His hunch seemed far-fetched now – and yet, what did they have to go on, except for far-fetched hunches? “Do you remember that night at Aunt Phyllis’s, back when all this started, when I mentioned my great-grandfather Knight had been one of the infamous ‘bachelors’ at Cannington Manor?”

  Ariane looked blank. “Um…no? And also…bachelors?”

  “It was the night we saw the newspaper headline that made us realize Rex Major was going to Thunderhill Diamond Mine in the Northwest Territories.”

  Ariane laughed. “Well, I remember that, but not anything about your great-grandfather being a bachelor. Presumably he didn’t stay one since he ended up being your great-grandfather.”

  “Great-grandfather Knight immigrated to Cannington Manor just before the turn of the century,” Wally said. “A lot of the young single men who came to Cannington Manor were sent over from Britain because they didn’t have any inheritance at home. The locals called them ‘the bachelors.’ Supposedly, they were there to learn to farm. Of course, being young and single and away from home, they weren’t very interested in farming. They were mostly interested in partying.”

  Ariane sighed. “In other words, boys haven’t changed in more than a century.”

  Wally laughed. “Grandma’s book had a couple of stories Great-Grandpa Knight told her about the shenanigans the bachelors got up to, but I doubt h
e told her the half of it.”

  Ariane gave him a look. “Shenanigans?”

  Wally laughed again. “Grandma’s word, not mine. Anyway, never mind that. He also told her a very different kind of story. She asked him why he came to Canada, and he told her it wasn’t for any of the usual reasons. He was very mysterious about it, but he claimed he had brought along some kind of family treasure he had to keep safe.”

  “Family treasure?” Ariane said dubiously. “What kind of treasure?”

  “Great-Grandpa never told Grandma that. But Ariane, listen…” He told her what his mom had told him, in the Great Hall of Castle MacPhaiden, about how strange their family history was, with the Knights and MacPhaidens intermarrying over and over, down through the ages. “If Flish and I are heirs of Arthur – what if it comes from both sides of our family? What if the same magic that made sure you and I were in the same place at the same time when the Lady of the Lake popped up in Wascana Lake made sure those two families stayed tightly connected, century after century?” He leaned closer to her. “And what if they passed along something else – a treasure that had nothing to do with gold or silver, but a treasure given to them for safekeeping by a certain Lady of our acquaintance?”

  Ariane’s eyes widened. “You think this ‘treasure’ might be the hilt of Excalibur?”

  “Yes,” Wally said. “What else could it be? It certainly isn’t the Holy Grail, which is what Mom’s thinking. But she doesn’t know anything about me and Flish being heirs of Arthur, or the Lady of the Lake or Merlin being going concerns in the twenty-first century.”

  Ariane’s expression slipped back to skepticism. “I don’t know, Wally. It seems like a long shot. The Lady said she scattered the shards all over the world. She didn’t say anything about giving one piece of it to Arthur’s heirs.”

  “So? Giving one of the shards to someone else to keep hidden down through the centuries still counts as ‘scattering,’ doesn’t it? She had the whole sword in her hand after Arthur died. If the legends are true, it was hurled into a lake, and a hand came up, grabbed it, and drew it down into the water again. After that, she broke it apart. She took the four pieces of the blade to the hiding places we’ve already found – the Northwest Territories, southern France, New Zealand, the Caribbean. But what better way to hide the fifth piece than to make sure it was always on the move, always being taken to new hiding places by the people entrusted with it?”