Higher Mythology

by Jody Lynn Nye

  It was a dismissal. Keith had no choice but to accede. He stood up, feeling awkward to be taller than the professor. Parker didn’t appear to notice. “Uh, I’ll tell him.”

  Keith took another glance at the glass case. The small clay figure continued its insistent psychic wail, so insistent that it made him wonder if he could use the elves’ invisibility-avoidance technique to divert everyone’s attention away while he took it out, but with another glance at the curator, Keith saw that his chances of staying in that room would only have been increased if he was in another glass case, preferably stuffed and mounted.

  “Um, could I stay and hear the lecture?” he asked, hopefully.

  ***

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The same security guard who’d been following him around was summoned to escort Keith out of the building. Keith thought that the guard was enjoying himself just a little too much, hustling him by the back of the neck and one arm through the echoingly empty chambers to the front door. With a thrust reminiscent of a garbage collector shooting a barrelful of trash into the back of his truck, the guard shoved Keith out into the warm autumn night.

  Keith stumbled on the uneven threshold and rolled down a handful of stairs before he came to a halt on a landing. He rose to his feet and brushed himself off as the heavy bronze doors boomed shut above him.

  At least, Keith consoled his bruised dignity, the comb was safe. He spent the walk to his car and the long drive home thinking up one plot after another for getting the little clay charm out of the museum without being detected. He had to let the Little Folk know that the original treasure was okay, and that the distress call they must have sensed was coming from something entirely new.

  Although it was very late when he telephoned the farm, the other end was picked up on the first ring.

  “Hello?” Catra’s voice said, anxiously hollow.

  “Hi, it’s Keith. Mission accomplished. The mystery is solved. You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said, and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell her about the little female clay figurine when she interrupted him.

  “Wonderful! Then you mean she’s with you? Oh, I’m so glad, you cannot imagine. How did she get there? Why didn’t you call us at once when she turned up?”

  “You knew about it? Yeah, Parker had it himself,” Keith said, remembering his embarrassment at blundering into the austere classroom in the museum basement. “He was using it for a lecture. I interrupted his presentation to the other researchers at the museum. He says ‘hi’ to the Master. If he wants to come up and see the exhibit, I can take him up this weekend. I’m free.” Catra’s words suddenly penetrated his consciousness, and he paused to let the outpouring of relief, unusual for the coolheaded Archivist, catch up with him. He blinked. “Who?” he demanded. “Which she? Who’s supposed to have turned up?”

  “Dola,” Catra said pleadingly. “She’s gone missing, and Holl’s babe with her.”

  “What?” Keith yelped. Jeff and Keith’s youngest sister turned their heads away from the television to stare at him. He lowered his voice at once. “When did it happen? And how?”

  Catra sounded ready to burst into tears. The words poured out in a tumult. “Dola was caring for the babe until dinner time. She didn’t turn up to do her chores, and she wasn’t in the cottage when Maura went back looking for them. Holl and Maura are half mad with fear,” Catra said, finally getting the sense that she and Keith had been talking at cross-purposes but were on the same wavelength at last. She explained what had happened, and what action the Folk had taken so far. “Tay’s ready to call up the Wild Hunt!”

  Keith was horrified. “Oh, my God, no! Did you call Ludmilla?”

  “The first thing we thought of,” Catra said, “and we’ve called upon Diane, who telephoned all the other Big Folk. With the evening’s delay while we were waiting to hear from you, there would have been plenty of time for Dola to reach the Midwestern campus.…” Her voice trailed off, leaving the phrase “if she was able,” unspoken but understood between them. “All know the way to Ludmilla’s apartment.”

  “I’m sure sorry I didn’t understand,” Keith said. “I should have waited until your line was clear to find out what your message meant, ‘look on the front page of the newspaper.’”

  “No harm done, Keith Doyle,” Catra said. “No further harm done, that is. It’s my fault. I was so upset I forgot you’d be looking at another paper. Our local had a story about a kidnapped child.”

  “Look, I’ll get down there right away—No, I can’t,” he said, tearing at his hair despairingly. “I’ve got to go to work. What can I do?”

  “Stay there, for now. You must not toss aside your responsibilities. There are plenty of us here. Tell us what to do.”

  “Why do you think she’s been kidnapped?” he asked.

  Catra explained quickly about the Big Folk footprints, and the marks of truck tires.

  “Okay,” Keith said, thinking quickly. “If someone grabbed her, there’ll be a ransom demand. That’ll mean a call or a note. They’ll probably tell you they don’t want interference from the cops, but you can’t call the police anyway.” The idea passed through his mind of all the pictures of lost kids on the back of milk cartons, and the horrible things he had heard that sometimes happened to them. He’d seen too many true-life crime programs on television. Not to his little pet, Dola, and Holl’s baby—it just couldn’t happen.

  Catra had a practical nature, and she read more newspapers than most of her Folk. She must have guessed what was going through his mind. “Aye,” she agreed, speaking carefully. He knew then that there were people in the room around her. “We’ll have a watch put on the telephone to wait for a call and trace its source when it comes.”

  “Good,” Keith said. “Gather up all the clues you can as to who might have taken her away. You want all the, er, forensic evidence you can find. The Farm is pretty well sheltered. Whoever did it was there on purpose.”

  “I’d thought of that,” Catra said grimly. “And we’re not certain as to why. In the meantime, should we search?”

  “You bet,” Keith said. “If you can do it without being observed.”

  “It’s what we’re best at, Keith Doyle, going unobserved. We’ll do anything not to endanger the children.”

  “Let me know what’s going on,” he said. Keith hung up and sat staring at the phone. For once, he was at a loss for what to do, and realized there was nothing immediate he could do. The real world had no business impinging on his friends. For a moment, he wished he’d never discovered them underneath the college library. It was better for them when they were safely mythological. He felt helpless, and he hated feeling helpless.

  He picked up the receiver and dialed Diane’s number. If he couldn’t be there in person, he could at least help coordinate the search.

  Mona Gilbreth glared at her employees. Pilton looked, as usual, slightly bemused. He was concentrating hard on keeping his eyes fixed on hers, as if enlightenment could be found through direct eye contact. Jake studied the floor. He seemed embarrassed. Mona didn’t care about his feelings. She was so angry she didn’t know what to yell about first.

  “You two have really dumped me in it this time. Why did you bring those kids back here? What do I want with two little kids? I told you to dump that truck and get back here for the next load. Now their folks will be on the lookout for us. You’ve involved this company in a felony, and for what?”

  “She was watching us dump the tank load in that sump-hole,” Williamson said defensively. “We couldn’t tell what she’d seen, or how much she understood. She ran away, and we ran after her, and it just snowballed.”

  “Let me tell you about snowballs,” Mona said angrily, poking a finger close to his eye. His gaze shifted nervously back and forth between her sharp red nail and her face. “What do you think this is going to do to my political career? Can you see the headline? ‘Local business owner kidnaps two local children in waste dumping scandal’? How can we retur
n them, just like that, and tell the parents, oh, it was just a mistake?”

  “I dunno, Ma’am.”

  “This girl’s uncanny,” Pilton said, drawing his two superiors’ attention away from their quarrel. “There’s something strange about her. I think she’s a fairy or something like that.”

  “She ain’t no fairy,” Williamson said, rolling his eyes. “Got no wings, Grant.”

  “Well, she’s real small, and what about them ears?” Pilton wanted to know.

  Williamson tried to explain. “It’s a mutation, like those people in Spain who have ten fingers.”

  Pilton checked. “I got ten fingers.”

  “On each hand!”

  Pilton was fascinated and delighted. “Weird!”

  “If we’ve finished with the natural history lesson?” Mona asked, with heavy sarcasm. “You keep an eye on her while I think what to do. Where are they?”

  “I shut them in one of the offices in the back. It’s only got a grille vent for a window. She can’t get out that way.”

  Dola stared as the door slammed shut behind them. There was only one source of air and light in the room, and it was high and small. If she’d had only herself to think of, she’d have been through the frame and out, running for the nearest patch of green no matter how much skin it cost her. Beyond the room’s edge, though, she could sense nothing but a sort of organic horror. The miasma tainted the intangible world as well as the purely physical. If her mind could wrinkle its nose, it would have. The comfortable sense of her family and people was hidden far behind the awful curtain. She was in the midst of an industrial complex of huge metal cylinders and bolted-together pipes all emitting hollow and sinister noises.

  Asrai whimpered softly in the cold room. It had been a hard time and a frightening ride for the infant for all the child had ridden in a car once before. She was hungry. Dola knew that she had reached the end of her minute patience, and would be giving forth with a fierce and terrible yell at any time. Mother was nowhere nearby, and she doubted these two big men would let them go merely to fulfill the needs of a three-month old infant.

  As she had feared, the storm soon broke. Asrai started sobbing, catching her breath in short gasps. When Dola picked her up over her shoulder, Asrai let out with one of her famous banshee yells and began to shriek. Dola jogged her gently, talking in a smooth murmur, and hoped that one day her ear would cease ringing.

  “Come on, then, it isn’t so bad,” Dola crooned. “You’ll dine soon, I promise you, if I have to cut my own veins for you. Calm, little one, please.” She noticed an edge of panic in her own voice, and sought to calm herself. “Easy, Asrai. I love you. None will hurt you.”

  The door opened.

  “Well, and not before time,” Dola said. She glared at the men who regarded her from the doorway. They glanced impassively back. She held the baby up. “Her mother will be worried about her. We must go back.”

  Disturbed, Asrai’s mournful mutterings grew louder. Her small face and the tips of her ears began to redden. The two men looked at each other and exchanged regretful glances, but when they turned back to her, had once more lost all expression. Dola’s temper flared.

  “Can’t you see she’s frightened and hungry?” she asked them. “Take us home! She’s got to be fed. A mite like this has little time.”

  That worried them. They must never have thought a baby could starve to death in the arms of someone caring for her. Skinny looked uncomfortable.

  “We can’t,” he said. “The boss lady said we have to keep you here.”

  Dola stood up and stamped her foot. The movement startled the baby, who whimpered louder. To those who knew Asrai, it was a warning signal.

  “Then get her food, if you won’t let her back to her mother!”

  As if on cue, Asrai let out another siren wail. Both of the men jumped, just as if they were some of the Folk who had no children of their own. In unison, they turned and fled into the echoing hallway, but maintaining enough presence of mind, Dola regretted, to shut and lock the door behind them.

  The wait for milk was endless. Dola had to use every trick she had ever learned to distract Asrai from the growing void in her small stomach. Her throat was dry from singing endless nursery rhymes and chanting the nonsense verses that babies didn’t understand but loved because of the cadences. She joggled Asrai on her shoulder, and walked around the room, trying to amuse her by showing her Big Person things: the huge, oversized desk, the filing cabinet, the tall locker with its handle as high off the ground as Dola’s head, the small washroom with toilet and sink and mirror. All those things were made with a great deal of metal in or about them, and served to make them both more uncomfortable. Dola winced as Asrai continued to shriek. The noise gathered itself in the tons of cold steel around them, and made it sing a high, frightening note that only made things worse.

  She boosted herself up into the room’s only chair, a petal-shaped extrusion of orange plastic with four tall spindly legs too high to let her feet touch the floor. Its cup-shaped bottom made it difficult to get leverage to rock the baby, but she managed a back and forth motion that soothed Asrai from her screaming rage into unhappy hiccups. By the time the Big Folk arrived with feeding supplies, Dola felt completely worn out, but at least Asrai was quiet.

  Jake watched her from the door. She glanced at him distrustfully. The thin man came closer, and handed her a tall can, a plastic bottle, and rubber nipples which would have been good for feeding the cow. Dola held up the can to him.

  “What is this?”

  He seemed surprised she asked. “Formula. It’s a substitute for mother’s milk.”

  Dola tested the temperature of the can against her cheek. “I can’t feed her this. It’s cold.”

  The two men conferred and the skinny one left. He came back with a device Dola recognized as a coffee maker. There had been one in the staff room in the Library.

  She watched closely as Skinny poured water into the screened top, and waited for it to dribble out into the glass carafe. Skinny broke open the top of the can with an attachment on his pocket knife, and filled the bottle partway, then put it in the steaming jug of water. While it was heating, Dola dealt with the delivery system. The bottle’s capacity would have fed the child for days, but the nipple simply wouldn’t fit into her small mouth. It would have to be adjusted.

  Dola, shaking her head at the thoughtlessness of Big Folk, began to think about the lessons she’d been learning lately with others of her age group: how to enhance and move with the substance of what one sought to alter. She measured it. The broad end needed to remain intact so that it would fit between the plastic collar and the bottle top. In her hand she squeezed the rubber bulb, willing it smaller and smaller. Skinny shook his head when he realized what she was doing.

  “Hey, that won’t help. When you let go it’ll just bounce back to its normal shape.”

  “No, it won’t,” Dola said. She opened her hand, and the altered nipple lay there, elongated to the shape of a stubby pencil.

  “You must be strong,” the man said, impressed.

  “A trick my father taught me,” Dola said, offhand. Let the Big Person think it was strength. He already suspected something of the truth about her. The less he knew for certain the better. The other man didn’t believe what he saw, and that was all to the good. She did not want them thinking there was something uncanny about Hollow Tree Farm that bore closer investigation.

  A dab of formula on the wrist, and she knew that it was drinking temperature. Fishing the bottle out of the coffeepot, she assembled the bottle and offered it to the weeping child. Asrai refused it. She looked at the men and at Dola and sobbed weakly. Dola was furious.

  “Well, you’re scaring her!” she said fiercely. “Go off, then. I’m not going anywhere. Do you think we can sneak through keyholes?”

  They went. Dola had figured out what was wrong, and wanted privacy in which to resolve the problem. This was the first meal of her life Asrai was not to rece
ive from her mother.

  Glancing over her shoulder at the door to make certain the men weren’t peeking in, Dola took the old gauze square out of her pocket and put it over her head. Willing it with her strongest thoughts, she caused Maura’s face to superimpose over hers. Illusions were easy. The next part was hard. She used the enhancement to make her voice like Maura’s as well.

  “Hush, now, little love,” she whispered. The baby stopped crying, alert, and looked up at Dola’s face in surprise. “Well, are you hungry?” She put her arm behind Asrai’s back and helped her reach for the artificial nipple. She held the bottle close to her chest to simulate the placement of Maura’s breast. Asrai latched onto it eagerly and began to suck. She made a little face and put out her tongue, rejecting it.

  “Oh, come,” Dola/Maura forced a chuckle, though she was worried that the unnatural mock-milk might do the child harm. “That’s no way to act. Feed, little one, then you shall sleep.”

  Mollified, the baby began to suckle, desperately at first, then slowing down. She drank half the bottle of formula, an incredible amount. Dola was relieved to watch the heavy-lidded eyes droop halfway, then close entirely.

  “Oh, a blessing, a blessing,” Dola whispered, wiping the milky lips and kissing the child on the head through her veil.

  The door opened behind her. Dola had just enough time to snatch the translucent cloth from her face before her captors could see.

  “You’re good with her,” Skinny said in a very quiet, respectful tone.

  Dola straightened her shoulders with some pride. “And so I should be, having helped with her care since her birth.”

  “I’ve got two kids of my own,” Skinny offered.

  “And what would you think, if someone carried one of them off as you have done,” Dola said, her eyes filling with tears. She was too proud to let them hear her voice quaver, but she was a child too.

  “I brung you something else,” Skinny said. The boxes he set down on the desk next to her were decorated with pictures of a plump, golden haired baby, and were marked “disposable diapers.”