“Hop in,” Frank said, peering at him through his flight goggles. “Didn’t think you were going to make it.”
With the help of Murphy and the other ground crew, Keith clambered over the leather-bound edge of the basket and dropped in. The Iris curtseyed a little. Acknowledging Frank’s hand signal to stay out of the way, he sat on the floor and watched while the pilot reached for the burner controls. The flames shot high into the balloon. Smoothly, the Skyship Iris rose into the air.
He was so busy moping over the lip of the gondola, the balloon had risen above the trees before he’d even noticed it. Frank nudged him in the back with a foot.
“What’s wrong?” the pilot shouted over the roar of the burner. They rose further into the sky and caught an eastbound breeze.
Keith strained to stare out over the northern horizon toward where Hollow Tree Farm lay unseen in the distance. “Some of my friends are in trouble.”
“What?”
“Some of my friends are in trouble!”
“Sorry,” Frank said, in his telegraph-like style. “Beautiful day. Hang on, cheer up.”
The suggestion began to take effect. It was not in Keith Emerson Doyle to remain depressed for long. The day was beautiful and warm. There was less than an hour of daylight left, and the shadows were growing dramatically long over the landscape, adding depth to its beauty. Keith felt the taut worry in his chest unlock and unfold until he breathed normally again. He let go a tremendous sigh.
Then he started worrying again. What if the children were in serious danger? He thought of Dola as he had last seen her, cute as a button, trying hard to be a grownup but still full of childish spunk. He stared at the ground far below. Dola could be in anyone of those houses or among the crops in the fields that stretched endlessly out into the distance. He wished that he could just call out to her, wherever she was, so she would know that they were looking for her, and not to despair. Clumsily aping Holl’s magical radar, his mind reached out, sought, touched nothing and kept going, leaving him feeling lost. He wondered if he had missed sensing Dola, and went over and over the same angle. No wonder Holl was pooped. Poor Dola, poor little pet! He remembered seeing her from far above, how she looked with her golden hair reflecting the morning sun as she bent over the baby in her lap.
Keith shook his head to clear it. He was imagining things. Dola had never been outside in the meadow when he’d arrived by balloon.
“Uh, Keith,” Frank said, nudging him again. “Co—co—uh …” He seemed unable to finish his sentence.
“Hmmm?” Keith inquired, glancing up, and froze.
“Company,” Frank choked out at last.
Keith found himself gazing into a pair of round, sky blue eyes, but they weren’t Frank’s. In fact, the body they were attached to was hovering under its own power outside of the basket. Keith’s own eyes widened until he thought they might pop out.
The creature floating beside the Iris was about a foot high, the cloudy blue-white of shadows in glacial snow. Below the translucent torso its substance thinned down to pale, insubstantial streamers barely solid enough to see. It had delicate, attenuated wings like a great bird, and its face was like that of an owl, but where Keith would have expected to see a beak there was nothing at all, a blank plane, as if the artist had neglected to finish roughing in the rest of a watercolor portrait done in blue-whites and pearl grays. Thin, filmy arms ended in two long, delicate feathers instead of fingers. It tilted its inverted-wedge of a head at Keith. The image of Dola in his mind looked upward and smiled. The being nodded, waving its long fingers.
“So it was your memory I was seeing,” Keith said, awed. “What are you?”
The light creature recoiled from his outrush of breath. He repeated his question, more quietly, and was rewarded when the being swam closer to him, bobbing in the eddies of the wind.
A vision intruded itself into his sight, an enforced daydream. Keith saw the same creature, with dozens more like it in all sizes from tiny to elephantine, swirling around and playing in the wind high above the face of the earth.
“I’m a jerk,” he laughed. “You’re yourselves. I’d call you air sprites. Is that all right?”
The vision filled with warm, rosy light. “I guess that means yes, huh?” Keith asked, delighted.
Frank must have been seeing the same visions, because he gulped and clutched the hot air release of the balloon with both hands. He stared, unable to take his eyes off the strange visitor.
“Keith, we ought to go down,” the pilot said, carefully so as not to offend, but awed and frightened.
“We don’t have to,” the young man said in a quiet, caressing voice. It pleased his companion more than his first attempts had, and calmed the pilot a little. “It’s harmless. Aren’t you?” he asked the floating creature. “Say hello to Frank.”
The huge blue eyes turned toward the balloonist, and the vision of a sunrise appeared in their minds.
“Uh … sunrise to you,” Frank said, waving a feeble hand.
Keith ‘translated’ by thinking as hard as he could about sunrises. His un-muffled broadcast was so forceful that the air sprite was propelled backward again. It bobbed up, its large eyes reproachful.
“Sorry,” Keith said sheepishly. “I’ll try to think softly. This is new to me.”
The intelligent eyes focused on him. They were so clear he could see individual rings of muscle constricting within the irises. He was aware of an expression of humor that fleetingly changed to one of sympathy.
Keith had a vision of a small girl sitting washed in sunlight on top of a green hill.
“That’s Dola,” he said, and the vision faded. “We’re trying to find her. You mean you think you’ve seen her?”
Images of many little girls flicked before Keith’s mind’s eye: large, small, black, white, Hispanic, Oriental, alone, or with other humans or animals, on hillsides, beaches, in fields, jungle clearings, in the backyards of houses.
“No, you were right the first time, the first one you were thinking at me. She’s the one.” Keith tried to picture her.
The sprite picked up on his efforts right away. The image of Dola reappeared and limned in more details, so that Keith could see the scuffed shoes, her bare knees stained with grass, the hammock-like shoulder harness in which she carried Asrai. “That’s her. You really have seen her! Yahoo!” he shouted. Alarmed, the sprite dropped away and beneath the edge of the basket, its tail whipping out of sight. Keith leaned over the edge, careless of his own safety. Frank dove forward to catch the back of his belt. “Where? Where is she?” Keith demanded.
The sprite returned to its former altitude, and the pilot yanked Keith firmly back into the gondola. Stumbling backward, he bumped against the control panel. The sprite circled around until it was hovering beside his head. Keith concentrated on the newest sending.
I will ask the others, it sent, showing itself flitting from one to another of the many like itself. Each cocked its head, filling the air with more images that overlapped, as if they shared their thoughts freely. The sun appeared at the edge of the dream and traveled rapidly across the sky, and the sprite fixed its eyes on Keith’s.
“It could take time, I know,” Keith said, “but it’s important. She was kidnapped, and that baby with her.”
“That’s the trouble they’re in?” Frank asked, his mouth agape. “Man, say so! I’d help.”
“We can use all the help we can get,” Keith said, and thought rapidly. “I think we’re on to something with our new friend here. It says it’ll go looking for her. If it finds anything, I’ll need you to bring me up to talk with it again. Maybe when the others remember where they’ve seen her last they can lead us to her.” He tried to imagine the sprite hovering in front of the balloon, looking over its wing joint at them as it flew along. The sprite’s visions took on the rosy hue again. Keith smiled. “Great!”
“Any day the wind’s not too strong,” Frank promised, somewhat distracted. He was still staring at
the sprite.
“Thanks,” Keith said sincerely. He turned to the sprite. “Listen, well, look,” he amended, noting the creature’s lack of visible ears, “let me know when you’ve located her, okay? Or the closest to when your people remember seeing her last under the sky.”
The sprite sent a vision of Dola in her green tunic with the baby on her lap, then of itself. I recall seeing her last before the bad smell came, and I rose out and away from it.
“The bad smell?” Keith asked, puzzled.
In the image, the air turned the sickly green he had always associated with tornado weather. The sprite blinked its eyes at him, and the vision changed again to the crowd of sprites. I will ask the others.
Frank checked the gauge on the tanks and tapped Keith on the shoulder. “We’re going down now,” the pilot said. He leaned over the side, looking for a good place to land. When he spotted an open field nearby, he started landing procedures, cell phone on one shoulder to tell the chase crew where to find them.
The sprite circled, staying beside them as the balloon made its way toward the ground, exchanging visions with Keith, but the further down they went, the little creature began to be horribly compressed and distorted. The hands blunted into crablike claws, and the wings stretched out into infinity then shrank to the size of a cherub’s. It blinked regretful eyes at Keith.
I cannot go into the heavy air, it sent woefully.
“Go!” Keith exclaimed. “The last thing in the world I want is for you to get hurt. I’ll see you up here the next time I can.”
The filmy being shot upward with alacrity, vanishing among the streaks of cloud in the evening sky. Keith had a faint vision, the visual equivalent of shouting from a long distance away, of a sunset. He exchanged a quick glance with Frank.
“Their way of saying goodbye, I guess,” he said with a grin. The pilot looked shaken. “What’s the matter?”
“That … that thing was real!”
“The sky’s a big place,” Keith said, shrugging. “I bet the beings you’re sure exist are out there, too.”
“That’s what worries me. Never thought I’d run into any in person,” Frank said, the whites of his eyes showing all around his irises, magnified by his thick glasses. “All supernatural beings can’t be so friendly.”
“Nope, they’re not,” Keith assured him, running a tongue around the fillings in his back teeth, “but the nasty ones usually like to be left alone.”
As soon as he got back to Midwestern, Keith ran to the nearest phone to tell Holl about the air sprites. He was full of plans.
“It made pictures in my mind,” he raved, waving one arm up and down. The woman waiting in line to use the phone booth stared dumbfounded at him, then walked hastily away to find another booth. “It’s seen Dola and Asrai. It promised to help us find them.”
“And how do you know that?” Holl asked. “Is the language of the air English, too?
“No, they talk through telepathy. It made pictures in my mind, and it understood what I thought at it. It’ll help us. As soon as it finds them it’ll contact me.”
“One of your pipe dreams, is it?” Holl asked drearily.
“Uh-uh! Frank saw it, too.”
“I know you want to help, Keith Doyle, but mythical sprites seeing all is a little too much for me when my troubles are all too real. Forgive me. You’ve been a great help to us, and I’m not ungrateful. I’m merely tired. I’d best clear the line, to be ready in case the kidnappers call again. We’ll await you on Saturday.”
Keith was disappointed, but he reasoned, as he hung up the phone, that Holl hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen. He’d prove it, as soon as the sprites came through. If it didn’t, they were no worse off than before. It was funny, he thought, that his excitement in finding out about Dola almost made him forget that he had achieved his aim of finding the air sprites. It was a great, important discovery.
In spite of his concern for the missing children, he couldn’t help strutting a little as he walked across the campus back to his car. He was probably the first human being to make contact with the ethereal creatures. As soon as this terrible business was cleared up, he vowed to find out everything he could about this new race of hitherto mythological creatures. Doyle’s Compendium of Magical Species began to write itself in his mind.
“Okay,” the hoarse voice said over the phone when Catra picked it up, “We’ve got three demands.”
Catra put her hand over the receiver and relayed the message to Holl. “What shall we do?” she asked.
Holl steeled himself. “Keith Doyle said never to give in to a kidnapper, but we can’t risk annoying them. Hear his requirements, but promise nothing.”
“Go ahead,” Catra said into the receiver. Her hands trembled.
“Here’s what we want: money, immunity from prosecution, and one other condition we’ll let you know about later, when we deliver the children.”
“We have very little. How much money do you want?” she asked.
“Twenty thousand dollars in small bills. Unmarked. No explosives, no dye packets.”
“Aye,” Catra said, noting the specifics down on a piece of paper. Her companions crowded around to read what she was writing. “Now,” she said boldly, “we’ve a condition of our own. We want to hear the children’s voices. Hello?” She turned a frightened face to the others. “He hung up.”
***
CHAPTER TEN
Meier cleared his throat and rustled his pages of notes. Keith gave him a brief glance and turned from staring out the window to staring at his fingertips then back out the window as if he was looking for something hovering just outside the twentieth floor.
“Today,” Meier said, “I’m going to show you a few products that are so new that they haven’t even got names yet. The client wants a snappy presentation for her product, and we’ve got diddly on ’em as yet. I’m showing you these raw, so you see what we have to start with. It’s not pretty.” The others chuckled.
Meier threw onto the table five small clear packets. “There you go. Becky Sarter grows and dries organic fruits. Dried apricots, dried sultanas, dried berries and cherries, mixed dried fruit. No added sugar or preservatives. Cellophane packaging. Upscale. No name. Demographics of her target market are male and female ages 25 to 45, income level upwards of thirty grand a year, college educated or better. Go for it.”
Three of the four interns picked up the packets, turned them over in their hands, searching for inspiration.
“What’s a sultana?” Sean asked, feeling the substance of a dried apricot through the wrapper. It was flabby and flexible, like a fleshy orange ear. He wrinkled his nose.
“One of the names for golden raisins,” Dorothy said, holding up that package. “Doesn’t it sound more elegant?”
“Paul, how about Oh, Gee Snacks?” Brendan suggested, then he spelled it. “Stands for the OG abbreviation of ‘organic’?”
“Maybe,” Paul Meier said. “It’s kind of cutesy. Run with it. Gimme some thoughts on a campaign.” But Brendan had shot his bolt. He grinned and shrugged.
“Ug-ly,” Sean said. “You weren’t kidding about not pretty. How about ‘Ugly fruit, beautiful vitamins’?”
“I approve of the product,” Dorothy said. “Environmentally sound packaging, no pesticides. You can compost cellophane, you know. Becky Sarter? How’s ‘Sarter your day with good nutrition’?”
Everyone groaned.
“Nothing there to hang onto, really, Dorothy. Half a pun is NOT better than none. But you have a lot of basic knowledge there about the product. That’s good. But we need a name. How about you, Keith?” Meier asked. “Keith? Earth to Keith.” He rapped on Keith’s notebook with his knuckles.
Keith came back from his musings with a start. “Uh, sorry. What?”
“Let’s hear it. What can you do with Sarter organic dried fruits?”
“Would the client get all bent up about changing the spelling of his name?”
“Her name, and I don’
t know. Why?”
“You can’t ask a client to change his name!” Brendan exclaimed.
“Why not? They’ve done it themselves. I read that Chef Boy-ar-dee is really a man named Boiardi.” Keith spelled it.
“So what have you got in mind?”
“How about spelling it Sartre, like the philosopher?” Keith asked, mentally thanking the Elf Master for the intensive course in philosophy the last semester of his junior year. “He’s the one who said, I think, therefore I am. I think.”
“Descartes said that,” Brendan said in disgust.
“Okay, so what?” Keith snatched up a pen and drew a bag, splaying the letters out across the top. Sartre Sultanas. The Raisin d’Etre.
“It means, the reason for being—I mean, the raisin for being.”
“Not another pun!” Brendan exclaimed.
Meier stared at it for a second, a tiny grin growing in the corner of his mouth.
“That’s funny. It’s sly. Not bad for someone who’s been staring out the window all day. It might appeal to the environmentally conscious intellectuals who buy organic stuff.” He picked up Keith’s caricature, drummed on it with the cap end of his pen.
“Hey, we’re not supposed to be pandering to intellectuals,” Brendan protested.
Meier raised an eyebrow. “We pander, as you call it, to the people most likely to buy the product. The readers who don’t get it will buy the product because it’s something they perceive a need for. Those who get it will like it more because it’s an in-joke aimed at them. That’s not all bad, because although the market is small, the availability of the product is limited, too. Says here in the research that there’s less than ten thousand pounds of organic dried raspberries available each of the last four years. Even if it increases drastically, that’s still nowhere near the amount of good old-fashioned, non-organic black raisins being sold every day.”
“You could have pictures in the ads of famous philosophers eating the product,” Dorothy suggested.
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