Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  He and I had gone bow-hunting together for a week the summer I turned fifteen. That was when I learned how hard it was to judge distance and shot angles in the woods. At Foster’s suggestion, we marked trees with surveyor's tape at different yardages from the blind. The tape doesn’t spook the deer if you don’t touch it with bare hands and leave your scent behind. First time out, I only took broadside or quartering away shots, and missed everything. He shot a 3 year old, about 160 pounds, 9 pointer with a clean broadside shot at 50 feet. The arrow went clean through the animal’s heart. I know how much the buck weighed because I helped him carry it back to camp, and, all the next week, helped him eat the venison steaks.

  We were in the same scout troop and patrol, Troop 2, Bobcat patrol. Foster always wished he had been born an American Indian. He knew more about the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, their history and lore, than anyone I ever met. That was why he was interested in bows and arrows, I guess. He was the inventor of Bobcat Hash, a barely edible food substance that defies description, and this made him world-famous among the eight other members of our patrol. He kept half a log in back of his house near a creek that formed the border with the Snyder farm, and every now and again he would build a small fire in it and chop at the burnt insides with an ax, trying to hollow it out and make an honest-Injun dugout canoe.

  Foster had seen photos of the world-famous sailor girl behind the wheel of her yacht, smiling for the cameras, falcon on her wrist, in her bathing suit, and therefore had a crush on Penelope Dreadful.

  I told him it was absurd to get a crush on a girl you’d only ever seen in the papers, so he and I looked up video footage of her on my phone.

  We started taking hikes with our bows in hand, like we were hunting or something, and would by non-coincidence stray near the coast around the lighthouse, but we never really ever got up the nerve to approach the Haunted Museum itself. We just wanted to see if moving vans had arrived, or if someone had mowed the grass or turned on the power or committed another murder-suicide by hanging. You know. Idle curiosity.

  One hot, hot, summer day when all the insects were chirruping, there was no breath of wind at all but plenty of little midges and mites everywhere, Foster and I came out from the brush near the foot of the hill, and he stopped short.

  “There she is,” he said. His voice was husky from the dryness of the air, and the heat, but I bet it would have sounded that way anyway.

  I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked up. Sure enough, looking just like in her photos, except (maybe it was my imagination) she was even curvier. Girls on television look that way, but not real girls, not that often.

  She was wearing a bright yellow dress that came to her knees with straps that go over the shoulder. I don’t know what that kind of dress is called. A sun dress? A peasant skirt? A pony skirt? Listen: I know the difference between a magazine and a clip, and I have seen newspapers get that one wrong. If you want to know the difference between dresses, ask a guy with sisters, or whose dad is a tailor or something.

  In her hand was a large, round straw hat bigger than a dinner plate, with two ribbons dangling from it. She waved it at us, beckoning us to come up.

  I blinked, sure my eyes were playing a trick. “She just beckoned at me. Us. She wants us to come up.”

  Foster said, “Naw. You’re crazy.”

  “Look! There again! She’s waving hello.”

  “Maybe she is signaling to her pet killer hawk who tears out the eyes of guys who just remembered they were supposed to mow the lawn today. It’s circling overhead.”

  “That was a wave. I am going up to say hello. You coming?”

  Foster said, “She is not looking at us. Famous people don’t look at guys like us. I am all covered with sweat and bugbites, and you look like you escaped from Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

  “You mean the gorilla or the guys with no faces who worship an A-bomb?”

  “Gorilla.”

  “General Ursus is sexy, and chicks dig him. I’m going up. If you stay here and don’t talk to this gorgeous hot babe who sailed halfway around the world with a falcon on her arm, you will sit and regret it until you are eighty-nine and a half years old, and then you will kill yourself by jumping out of your flying car, which we will all have by then. Well? She probably just wants to ask if we are carrying a cell phone or something, or help her open a pickle jar. I don’t even know anyone who owns a falcon.”

  He shook his head, looking panicky. “What if she has a bodyguard? Famous people have bodyguards. She is older than I am!”

  I walked up that hill, and the long grass slapped at my knees and released a swarm of midges with every step.

  When I was about halfway up, she suddenly stopped waving her hat at me, and looked down at me, standing quite still. Because of the angle of the sunlight, her glasses were two opaque disks of sun, too bright to look at, and I was not sure what her expression was.

  I realized then that she had not been beckoning me to come up. She probably had not seen me at all. She had been fanning herself with her big straw hat to keep the bugs off, scooping air toward herself.

  3. The Girl and Her Hobby

  My insides felt like they were turning into dry seaweed. It was a mistake.

  As of this second, if I kept going, I would be what Aunt Iaga called a Masher, and what Alexei called a Stalker. To this day, I am not sure what the difference is between a Masher and a Stalker, but I think you can play them as character classes in an MMO-RPG.

  The girl put her hat on her head, and now her face was in shadow, and I could not see her features at all. The shadow of her hat fell across her breasts, making the yellow fabric stand out sharply in a rounded contour rather like the shape of the famous McDonald’s golden arches.

  If I did not keep going, I would not be as bold as a girl who sailed halfway around the world twice. On the other hand, I had a compound bow and a quiver of arrows strapped to my back, and girls are usually nervous around armed men.

  I looked over my shoulder. Foster was not in sight. I don’t know if he bugged out on me, or what. Just when I needed the support of someone who would mock me if I dared back out, he had pulled his long-practiced Last-of-the-Mohicans vanishing trick.

  So I walked up to her.

  Penelope Dreadful was shorter than she was in her videos, and very pretty, and very female in her yellow dress that clung very closely to her. If you are a guy, you must know that women sometimes have this smell that you can barely smell that is the best thing in the world. If you are a girl, you must know about this smelling thing, because you support a zillion-dollar-a-year perfume industry. But she was not wearing any perfume. Or makeup. I thought that was a good sign. My mother never thought women should wear makeup.

  So I walked up and …

  I could not think of anything to say. I opened my mouth and then my mouth was open and I was standing and covered with sweat and bugbites and really itching and I still could not think of anything to say to her.

  “Hot,” I said.

  “Beg pardon?” She tilted up her chin and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear with a graceful little motion of her hand, and tilted her head, which I thought was really sexy. There is no gesture in the world more attractive than a girl tucking her hair behind her ear that way.

  “Day,” I said. My mouth was really dry.

  She made that noise which some artists represent in comic books by a word balloon with just a question mark in it. A nasal hum on a rising note.

  “Hot day. It’s a hot day,” I croaked.

  “And you walked … all this way… to tell me so?” She raised both eyebrows.

  She had a faint accent I could not place, and she pronounced every word carefully, like a well-bred Englishwoman. Andyu whawked … awl theis whey? Like that.

  “I must remember to thank you,” she said, “Usually the weatherman says his report over the television, and leaves it at that.” She pronounced it tel-i-VIZH-ey-ehn not TEL-e-vizh-un.

  Her
voice was aloof, and her eyes, now that I was close enough to see them, twinkled.

  She looked at me for a moment, as if waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, she continued, “I would introduce myself, but most people who come and gawk at me know who I am, or else they would not be gawking.”

  Penelope waited again. I said nothing again, having lost the gift of speech.

  She spoke up in a bright and chatty tone: “Why, yes! I do mean to explore the world again, except next time I am thinking of flying to the North Pole. I do so love flying, as it is the next best thing to swimming. No, I am not paying one dime to the French government, because all boats and planes are legally required to rescue sailors lost at sea without cost. I am sorry I was in a spot halfway between Madagascar and Australia and Antarctica when I was struck by a wave, but, you know, I did not pick the spot myself; Mother Nature, she did that. Yes, the people of Desolation Island were very nice. Next question? Oh, there are about fifty people, mostly scientists, there, and about a hundred penguins I got to know very well. Dear friends of mine. Quite lovely. I should like to go back and visit them someday. If you have brought a copy of my book, I can sign it for you. I’d be honored.”

  And I still could not think of anything to say. I was afraid to smile, because I have big teeth, and I hate the look in the mirror when I smile.

  “Welcome to Tillamook, Penny Dreadful,” I said. “Uh. The Land of Cheese.” That was lame. I winced.

  “I am delighted to be here.” She favored me with a smile. Her teeth are really white and really straight, and her mouth was a Cupid’s bow. Usually women have to paint their lips to make them look like this: the mouth of a healthy young woman in full bloom. “I promise you my father will not blow your fair township entirely off the map with one of his absurdly dangerous experiments. And don’t call me Penny Dreadful. It sounds ridiculous.”

  She turned and put both her pinky fingers in her mouth. I noticed how slender and fine her hands were. They were beautiful. She emitted a high, shrill whistle of three notes, low then high then low again, much louder than I would have thought a girl her size could make. Maybe the extra mammary gland size gave her lungs more power. (Don’t tell her I thought that, please.)

  She spoke up in the air, “You can come down now! He is harmless!”

  I said, “Wow. I never learned how to whistle like that.”

  She dropped her eyelids to halfmast, and rolled one shoulder slightly, and her voice dropped to a husky, throaty whisper, “You just put your lips together — and blow.”

  Just for the record, so that you will indeed know that I am the stupidest kid in Oregon, and in the North American Continent, and in the Western Hemisphere, here is my recollection of exactly what I thought at that moment:

  Oh. My. God! She is so coming on to me! Or, no, no, wait a minute. That’s impossible! Her voice is different. Her face changed! She is possessed! By a ghost! The Museum really is haunted!

  She straightened up and looked at me like I was an idiot. “You don’t watch black and white movies, do you? You get movies, here in Tillamook, do you not? The Old Rerun Channel?”

  It was a line from a flick or something. She was imitating someone’s voice. In the great World Series of Being Stupid, I was batting a thousand. “Ah—I don’t watch that much TV. Who were you whistling for? Who—?”

  And when I turned my head, a bird of prey was diving toward my eyes, narrow wings spread, and I jumped out of the way, hit the dirt, trying to roll with one shoulder and come up again like I did every day for an hour in practice, and got my bow sort of tangled around my neck instead and the arrows fell out of my quiver. But I got to my feet. I could not find my knife so I was holding an arrow in my hand.

  Penelope Dreadful was looking at me like she did not know whether to laugh or go for whatever eyeball-melting pepper-spray she might have hidden on her person.

  “You have quite good reflexes,” she said. I really could not tell if she were kidding, or if she meant it. “Like a crazed berserker ninja. You are not planning on throwing that arrow with just your fingers, are you?”

  “I thought that bird was attacking me!”

  She answered dryly, “So I assume, or otherwise you would not have attempted an Immelmann without your biplane. You dropped your sword.”

  She used her chin to indicate the ground near me. My heavy dagger lay on the grass, having fallen out of my boot, scabbard and all. It has a twenty-inch blade, straight, comes to a point, so it can be used both for lacerating ne’er-do-wells or puncturing them. It is also balanced for throwing, so you can get them in the back when they flee. I use it to open letters and whittle willow flutes.

  “That's not a sword,” I said, “It’s my Arkansas Toothpick.”

  “Your —what? — Your toothpick? My! You must have great big teeth!”

  Since my teeth are a bit oversized, I failed to see the humor in it.

  “Your habit is to travel armed? You are perhaps expecting an assault?”

  “Some of us don’t have crazed berserker chickens on hand to throw at people’s faces,” I said, standing back up.

  “Oh, do you like my bird?” Penny smiled brightly at the creature, affection and pride shining in her eyes.

  A fierce little gray-winged falcon clutched her wrist. She did not have her big heavy glove on, but there was a leather bracer, stained with sweat, on her wrist, and the bird was careful to keep its claws there.

  She extended her arm, sort of thrusting the mean little bird of prey back toward an in-my-face sort of position. Girls’ arms have more play in the elbow than boys’ do. They almost seem to bend backward, graceful as the sway of a willow branch. (Yes, also sexy. Me am guy.) But I did not like her pet’s cruelly hooked beak so near my soft and precious eyeball.

  “That is your merlin. I read it in the news.” Now I backed up.

  A look of disgust came over her features. “It is my hobby. Don’t trust the newspapers.”

  “You hobby is falconing?”

  “No, my falcon is Hypotriorchis.”

  “Uh. Nice name.”

  “I will pass your compliment on to Mr. Linnaeus if I see him.”

  “Who is that?”

  “That man who named my bird.”

  “You did not name it yourself?”

  The bird cocked its head at her, she looked at it, and she laughed. “I just named the one, not all of them. Wild Eyes. Named after my personal heroine’s boat whose route I was following.”

  “When you were talking to him to tell him I was harmless — or is it her? Is that a boy falcon or a girl falcon?”

  “Her. All falcons are girl falcons. Boys are tercels.”

  “I thought that was an Italian car. When you were talking to her—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well — it really sounded like you were talking to her.”

  “You are asking whether I was talking while I was talking? Isn’t that what they call a tautology? Or is that an oxymoron? I get the two confused, I fear.”

  I swear she batted her eyelashes at me. I had never seen a real girl do that. I don’t even think I had ever seen it on TV. It was a complex process that involved her dropping her gaze, drawing in a breath halfway, tilting her head to one side, lowering her chin slightly in what might have been a pout or a smile, and then looking up at me through the side of her glance, which made her eyes look doubly big, surrounded as they were by her lenses.

  Was she flirting with me? Or was she just mocking me? Not for the first time, I wished girls would come with instruction manuals.

  I said, “It sounded like you were talking talk, not just talking at.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “Wild Eyes never talks back when there are people around. It is one of those Bewitched, or I Dream of Jeannie type deals.”

  I squinted at her. “You’re not kidding,” I said slowly. “I mean, you say that like you want me to think you’re kidding, but — from the way you said it —”

  That got her atte
ntion. She looked startled, and looked at me, I mean, looked at me like I was a person and not an autograph hound or something, for the first time.

  “There are breeds that can be taught a few words, like a magpie,” Penny said stiffly, “Not as many as a parrot. That is probably what you heard…” And she looked at me with the look that you have on your face when you’re waiting to see if someone buys what you’re saying.

  I stared at the bird, who looked back at me fiercely, and lowered her narrow head and hunched up her wings, as if preparing to launch at my face. Just in case, I held up my arrow in my bare hand, as if it would do any good.

  I had not heard anything, but she obviously thought I had, and decided I needed to hear an utterly unconvincing fib. On the one hand, no falcon can mimic human speech like a parrot. On the other hand, if one could, it would probably show up at the Haunted Museum.

  Penny ran her finger over the head of the hot-eyed little falcon, and the bird seemed to calm down. Wild Eyes went from DEFCON 1 back to DEFCON 2 or something, but she was still tense and ready to fly at me.

  Penny sighed and tucked another stray strand of hair behind her ear and said, “Oh! That must be my father calling. I had better hurry in, before he melts you with a meltification ray. He doesn’t like me talking to boys. Well, it’s been, ah, unreal, sort of … talking to you … watching you roll on the ground … and so on …”

  “My name is Ilya. Ilya Muromets.”

  But I was talking to her receding bottom, which was a remarkably fine thing to watch receding, swaying and bouncing with an athletic motion of her hips. She turned her head, and caught me staring at her butt, and the flash of sharp annoyance in her eyes with their beautiful long lashes told me I was both a Masher and a Stalker or worse, and she threw the bird screaming upward from her wrist. The most famous and prettiest girl in town lifted her nose in disdain and stepped in the door, banging it loudly behind her.