Higher Mythology

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Outside of the window behind Dorothy’s head, a knot of air sprites whisked and hovered. One of them flew forward, showing that the memory belonged to it. Insistent, the image replayed itself in his head. Dola and the baby, being escorted from a big tank truck into a brick and paneled building by two men, roughly sketched out in twilight. He struggled to continue the conversation, but knew immediately he was mouthing gibberish. Dorothy gave him a strange look. He smiled and asked her a question about art, but he wasn’t sure exactly what. The sprites flew in irregular patterns, aping his agitation and excitement. They’d found her! They knew where the children were!

  “Something wrong?” Dorothy asked. His face had gone pasty, then reddened until it was nearly the color of his hair.

  “I just remembered something,” Keith said, pushing back his chair and standing up. He grabbed the check. He hoped Dorothy wouldn’t turn around and see what he had been staring at. “I’d better get out of here. I’m sorry. I just remembered something. See you Monday!”

  With his jacket flung over his arm, he dashed out of the restaurant, stopping only to slap down the bill with some money at the register. Bemused, Dorothy picked up her fork and went back to her meal, neglected since the two of them started building castles in the air. She shrugged. At least he’d been a gentleman about it. Since he had to run off, he had treated, but she was still puzzled why he’d left in such a hurry.

  “Well, was it my breath?” she asked herself. The skyline was pretty tonight. When she finished eating, she was going to make a sketch of it.

  Outside the window, four air sprites streaked away from the building and parted, taking off in four different directions, their filmy tails fluttering farewell, their thoughts full of sunsets.

  ***

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I ain’t happy about this, and I don’t care who knows it,” Pilton said moodily. He sat in the orange chair, elbows propped on his knees, and stared at the ground. “I’m not supposed to have to work Saturdays. I ain’t on this shift.”

  “Nor do I want to be here,” Dola said, without looking up. “If we weren’t you wouldn’t have to.” She was diapering Asrai, who had decided to throw a fit of the wiggles. The infant would not stay in the middle of the clean pad, but as soon as her small bottom touched the cold desktop she let out a wail of protest. Dola took Asrai’s ankles between her fingers and plumped her firmly down, and fastened the tapes before she could move again.

  “I know.” Pilton sighed. “But Boss-lady won’t let you go yet.”

  “Why?” Dola demanded. With a flourish, she swaddled the baby in her blanket and sat down on the floor on her borrowed sleeping bag. Asrai was now willing to take formula from the bottle without the subterfuge of illusionary disguise, for which Dola was grateful. She took the warmed bottle out of the coffeemaker carafe, tested it, and offered the nipple to Asrai, who accepted it avidly.

  “Dunno. Don’t ask me anymore. I can’t tell you.”

  “You’ll be here Sunday as well,” Dola said warningly.

  “Dammit to hell,” Pilton swore, throwing up his hands. “Well, I can’t do anything about it now. Hey, I brought you some egg salad sandwiches for lunch. Got some carrot sticks, and a slice of cake.”

  Dola nodded. She hunched over Asrai. The baby suckled, making happy noises deep in her throat. “I’m bored!” Dola announced. “At home I’d have games and toys, and tasks to do, and there’d be all my friends.”

  Pilton sat up. “Well, what do you want to do?”

  The elf girl could stand it no longer. The imprisonment, the discomfort, the annoyance of not being able to wash her clothes nor having any clean ones to change into, the lumpy sleeping bag that smelled as if it had been wet in a hundred times and washed in orange juice—the stupidity of her jailers. She burst into tears. “I want to go home.”

  Pilton dropped to his knees next to her. “Oh, come on, little girl, don’t cry. Please. I’ll do just about anything to keep you from feeling sad.”

  “She wants what?” Mona Gilbreth demanded. “Craft supplies? No. Simply no. I’m not running a nursery. Tell her if she doesn’t knock it off I’m shutting both of them in an empty tank.”

  “I can’t do that, ma’am,” Pilton said, shocked. “What would her folks say?”

  Mona went white. H. Doyle again. “All right. But don’t get too elaborate. I’m getting rid of her as soon as I can.” She opened her desk drawer and took out the petty cash box. Resenting every last penny, she counted out ten dollars.

  “Any more than this is on you,” she said. “I didn’t want them here, and I don’t want to subsidize their entertainment.”

  Accepting the money happily, Pilton went off to find embroidery floss and the fixings that went with it for the little girl. He was evolving a kind of superstition in his own mind that he’d have good luck if he could make the fairy child happy. In spite of what Ms. Gilbreth and Jake said, he knew she was magical. He’d seen. If he won her good will and got her to put a blessing on him, he’d be a lucky man for the rest of his life. Maybe she would invite him back to the land of fairies.

  When he thought of it, it seemed strange that there were fairies right here in Illinois, when this had been Indian country for ten thousand years much less the last two hundred. Never mind. That wasn’t the kind of question you asked fairy people if you wanted to stay on their good side.

  Tay eyed the Skyship Iris with clear distaste. It was only with an effort he brought himself to get out of the car with Holl and Keith to walk towards the seven-story ovoid.

  “It isn’t natural,” he complained to Keith. “I don’t feel safe about this floating around with a big silk handkerchief over my head. It’ll spring a hole and run off with us, and we’ll be shooting around the sky helpless while it deflates. Are you sure there’s no other way?”

  “Not if you want to be with us for the search,” Keith said patiently. “The sprites can’t come down to our level, so if we want their help we have to go up where they are. C’mon, it’ll be fun.” At his particular request the Iris’s crew had helped set up the balloon, then backed off, accepting his explanation that he wanted to do some complicated photography, and needed the field clear of all other bodies. All it would take to launch the balloon was hitting the release on a series of clamps holding the ropes through steel pegged loops hammered into the ground. The crew waved from the cab of the chase truck. Keith signaled back, holding up his camera. The engine of the truck revved and the headlamps flashed, showing that Murphy and the others were ready to follow when the balloon lifted. Tay hung back. “You want to stay behind, that’s okay. We’ll go.”

  “No! I’d best come.” Tay folded his arms firmly and tried not to look nervous.

  “These your friends?” Frank asked, smiling down widely at Keith’s diminutive companions. “Hi, kids,” he said, then did a double-take. He stared full-faced at the two elves with a kind of fascinated horror. “What are they?” he demanded of Keith. “Those ears!” The blond male he might have been able to explain away as a kid playing masquerade, but the silvery-haired fellow wore a beard that had to be his own.

  Keith blinked at the pilot innocently. “Didn’t I tell you the air sprites weren’t the first supernatural beings I’ve met?”

  “Supernatural?” Frank’s voice squeaked on the last few syllables. Keith grinned.

  “Pay no attention to this big fool. We’re no more supernatural than he,” Holl said, with an exasperated glance at Keith. He stepped forward and offered the shaken pilot his hand. “My name is Holl. This is Tay. It’s our children you’re helping us to find, and I promise you we appreciate it greatly.”

  Frank closed his own large hand around Holl’s small fingers with the delicacy of someone handling breakable china. “How’d you do, uh … shouldn’t the Air Force or whoever’s in charge of extraterrestrials know about them?” he asked Keith over Holl’s head. The two elves looked alarmed, and Keith spoke quickly.

  “Hey, they’re not extraterrest
rials, and it’s their lives if they want to stay out of sight, Frank,” Keith said. “I know you can keep a secret so they said I could tell you. If they don’t want anyone else to know about them, wouldn’t you say that was their choice?”

  “Uh, you’re right. Sorry,” he said, glancing down at Holl, apology and wonder mixed on his face.

  “No harm done,” Holl said with a smile. “Shall we go?” Keith helped the two elves climb over the edge and into the basket. The Iris, tugging against a light wind, was eager to be off. When Frank nodded, Keith hit the release for the cables, and just to add verisimilitude for the chase truck, started snapping pictures.

  The ascent was effortless, the finest Keith had yet experienced. The only sensation was the slight vibration the burners caused in the framework attached to the basket. Fascinated, Holl and Tay watched the ground fall away.

  “Like watching a scene on the television,” Tay said with interest. “Zooming back to show the distance … uh, is that a house?” He pointed at the red roof of a distant barn. “A real house?”

  “Yup,” Keith said, following his finger. “We’re about six hundred feet up already. Good cruising altitude.”

  “Six hundred feet!” Tay squeaked, staggering away from the edge. “I thought we’d be lifting thirty or forty feet to clear the trees!” He sat down in the bottom of the basket with his head between his knees and began to moan. Holl made a wry face.

  “Leave him be,” he suggested. “We live close to the ground,” he explained to Frank, who was looking concerned. “We barely so much as climb trees.”

  Keith kept an eye on the altimeter as the balloon continued to rise. The Iris swept into a northeast wind and began to sail in the direction Holl said the girls’ trace lay. He peered into the distance, hoping to spot landmarks.

  “Well, where are they?” Frank asked, when they reached five thousand feet. He glanced around eagerly. “In this temperature I can go to fifteen thousand if need be.”

  “Please don’t,” Tay begged from the floor of the basket.

  Keith grinned at the pilot. “I thought you didn’t want to meet any more supernatural beings,” he teased.

  Frank squared his skinny shoulders. “Guess if they’re up here, I ought to know.”

  “If it wasn’t all your imagination in the first place,” Holl said to Keith.

  “Both of us saw it, right, Frank?” Keith said. The pilot nodded. “They’ll be here, honest.”

  “I don’t care if flying dragons appear,” Tay said, miserably hunched among their feet, “so long as they’re willing to help me find my daughter.”

  The dream vision of a sunrise interrupted the conversation. Holl stared at Keith. “What’s wrong with my mind?” he asked.

  “It’s them,” Keith said, and began looking around for his new acquaintance. The blue-white tails of the sprite looped swiftly past them around the balloon basket, until the delicate figure was level with them beyond the sheet cables.

  “There it is!” Keith said, pointing. “Holl, Tay, look.”

  Tay glanced up briefly at the milk-colored creature, who blinked amiably at him, and went back to groaning with his head held in his hands. “Such things belong up here,” Tay said. “All I wish is to get down to the ground where I belong.”

  Holl held his breath. He and the sprite stared at one another for a moment, and the young elf broke the silence with a sigh. He cocked his head at Keith. “Well, I owe you an apology, widdy. If anyone could find an imaginary being in the stratosphere, it would have to be you.”

  The sprite, detecting that Keith was being teased, retaliated on his behalf with a clear image of Maura pushing Holl into the stream. In the vision, the elf landed on his rump in the mossy water. Keith laughed, and Holl shook his head.

  “Oh, very well, then, friend, I submit,” Hall said, good-naturedly. “You know all and see all. It really is too bad that your amazing discovery must take second place in importance to the rescue of our children, Keith Doyle, but you have my humble admiration.”

  “Thanks,” Keith grinned. “I’ll spare you the ‘I told you so,’ and we can hold the scientific discussion later.” He brought up his camera and showed it to the sprite. “Can I take your picture?” he asked. “I’d sure like to show some other people that I met you.”

  Take? Please do not take from our substance. The mental picture of a diminished sprite, looking woeful, appeared.

  “Um, it doesn’t actually take anything from your substance,” Keith explained hurriedly. “It’s only a reflection of you in my camera lens which hits a kind of light-reactive paper. Harmless. I promise.”

  Timidly, the airborne creature inspected the camera, and its mental vista turned rose-colored. All right. It backed up, whipping its tail like a rudder.

  “It’ll make a noise,” Keith warned, focusing the lens.

  All right. The sprite held itself still, but showed its agitation in the way its extremities flapped as if caught in a light breeze. Keith pushed the shutter release, refocused, and took a second exposure. That didn’t hurt at all, the sprite sent to him in surprise.

  As if its approval was a signal, another and another winged being joined them, until the air was filled with sprites all signaling their image of sunrise to greet their fellows and the party in the balloon. Keith was busy taking pictures, asking the sprites to pose in groups, or to fly alongside one of the Folk to give him a scale of measure. Few were the same size as Keith’s original acquaintance. Some were tiny enough to fly up his camera lens if it had been hollow. One, of which they could see only a wing joint or an eye in the shimmering, cloudlike mass, was nearly the size of the balloon. It looked like a friendly hurricane coming close to take a look. Most of the winged beings ranged in size somewhere in between. Frank goggled, but he kept control of his craft through sheer will power. Holl looked around and around him in wonder.

  “The Master will be glad of those snapshots,” he said with a sigh. “I hope we’ll get to know these good folk better later on. How shall we begin this search, then? Will one guide us the way?”

  There was a hasty conference among the air sprites from which Keith got the fallout of images changing and shifting. Most of the diaphanous beings swept away with a swift daydream of sunsets left behind as farewell. The party was left with Keith’s friend, a larger one who pushed itself forward importantly, and a few of the smaller creatures.

  Following the sprite’s direction, Frank steered the Iris into a northward current.

  “Full tanks, nice day, cool weather, last a long time,” the pilot said, nodding.

  “Then we will begin,” Holl said.

  Keith felt on the edge of his mind when the two elves pooled together their strength and began the search for the children. Their sense spread out like a sensitive layer on the sky that could feel all the topography of the land below it, except that it sought mental touches, not physical. He connected with it a little, but couldn’t follow it far. That kind of command of talent took years of practice, and a lot more magical oomph than he had. After a while Tay rubbed his eyes.

  “It’s the same trouble as before,” Holl said. “There is something in the way that lifts and lowers between us like a heavy curtain. I sense them only part of the time, but this wispy friend of yours is indeed going toward the scent.” He smiled at the hovering sprite, who made a rosy glow at him. The little ones danced around it like fireflies. The larger apparition narrowed its large pupils and twisted in the wind to point forward.

  “Make sure you tell me when you want to land,” Frank said. “No second chances here. No box wind. Can’t turn around.”

  “If we can,” Holl said. “It depends greatly on what our friends tell us.”

  The large sprite stayed ahead of the balloon, glancing over its shoulder to make eye contact with Keith or Frank. The gesture was for their benefit: Keith could tell it was able to see them in its mind’s eye. When the winds wouldn’t go where it led, the sprite hovered patiently, waiting for the shift in dire
ction it wanted. It always knew, and made the image of a weather vane turning for Frank, so the pilot would be ready. The original sprite stayed back with the balloon, hovering companionably near Frank.

  He showed his big teeth. “My new best friends,” he said, manipulating the cords to raise or lower the balloon. “You’ll stay around?”

  The sprite, its eyes alight, showed the Iris surrounded by itself and many others. Holl grabbed for Keith’s arm.

  “The trace is very strong ahead,” Holl said. “No, I’ve lost it. I can’t believe it winked out just like that.” He looked at Tay hopefully, but the silver-haired elf shook his head.

  “The interference is like clouds rolling in between us,” Tay said.

  “Or smoke?” suggested Keith.

  Beneath them, the green crop fields had given way to a huge industrial center. Bare earth stained by greasy overflow supported corrugated tanks and pipelines. Trucks ran among them, and minute workers in khaki coveralls hooked up pipelines to the tank trailers. In the midst of the factory campus was a broad, flat group of buildings: warehouses and the office center. At the same time the sprite broadcast the yellow-green sky image of warning, the occupants of the balloon were hit by a wave of stench that surrounded and stifled them.

  “Ugh, horrors!” exclaimed Tay.

  “That’s Gilbreth Fertilizer down there,” Keith said, coughing. “Look at all that leakage from the tanks. I bet there’s half a dozen health violations right there. I didn’t see those when I was there. I think the owner steered me away on purpose.” He leaned over the edge and started taking pictures.

  “What a smell!” Tay complained. “The very stink makes you itch.”

  “I know,” Keith replied from behind his viewfinder. “I kept sneezing the whole time.”

  Holl’s expression changed from revulsion to enlightenment. “They’re down there,” he cried, grabbing Frank’s elbow.