The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  The sun burst out of its cloud cover and a shaft of light fell on the butterfly, making it radiant. As if startled from slumber it took flight, turning for a moment toward the girl, who stared at it while reaching out a tentative finger.

  The butterfly brushed the finger with one wing, and fell to the ground motionless.

  The girl looked at it for a moment and then closed her eyes and let the afternoon wash over her.

  She met the other little girl quite by accident. Sometimes she got in the black Lincoln and rode, just to get out of the rectory and away from Mr. and Mrs. Finch, the minder humans, and sometimes just to vex Samhain. She liked to do that. Though lately he seemed more distant, less his old self, less prone to jest. Sometimes she wondered about that.

  The car was spacious in the back, all windows clouded by tinted glass, and it went where she willed it to. She had taken jaunts into Boston, to see what a city was like up close; but it was noisy and crowded and filled with too much ant-like activity and mindless motion. And, they had gotten lost in the maze of one-way streets, until Anna had willed, Just go home. That had been close to exhausting, and she hadn’t tried it again — though it did provoke an amusing tirade of invective from Samhain, along the lines of “What if—”

  “But it didn’t happen, Samhain. We didn’t get stranded, or run into a parked car, or stopped by a policeman, or set upon by hooligans.”

  “But what if—!” Samhain had persisted, and then Anna had laughed in his face and told him to stop.

  Which made her almost sorry for him, because he had gone into one of his funks, then, all the spunk gone from him.

  So the car trips had become more localized — to a shopping mall parking lot, to watch the humans frantically purchase; to the county jail, to watch the faces going in and coming out, and playing a guessing game of who was judge, who was lawyer, who was prisoner; to the park, to watch the humans at play.

  Which was where, on a warm autumn day, she saw the other little girl.

  The town park was a huge flat square plot of land, with a baseball diamond at one end, a soccer field at the other, basketball courts in the middle to one side, and the other left to no sport save leisure. This was the area closest to the parking lot. There were picnic benches, and metal barbecue grills permanently mounted next to them; and an abundance of trees which reminded Anna of the rectory backyard. She was tempted to leave the Lincoln, but decided to heed Samhain’s warnings about interacting with humans — until she saw something that almost startled her. A little girl, nearly her mirror image, was sitting under an oak tree alone, acting in the most curious way. She would sit quietly for a few moments, then suddenly push herself off the ground and run this way or that, then throw herself on the ground. Then she would slowly rise and quietly return to her original spot.

  This was too much of a temptation, and Anna ordered the car, “Open the back door,” and got out.

  She approached the other girl cautiously, and was also aware of everything else that went on around her. If the girl had a parent, it was nowhere near. There were no other children close by — the closest were a group playing basketball in the caged court forty yards away.

  As Anna approached she saw that the girl wasn’t as much like her as she had originally thought — she was taller, and probably older, and her hair was ash blonde and not nearly white like Anna’s. Still they were dressed similarly, in blue dresses and white blouses, though the other girl’s blouse had a red bow tied neatly at her neck.

  Anna stopped short of the tree — the girl had risen abruptly and was running to the far edge of the shaded area. She bent down, looking back and forth, and then dived onto the ground.

  “What are you doing?” Anna asked.

  Startled, the girl got up, dusted a knee with her left hand and said, “Oh!”

  “What’s the matter?” Anna asked dispassionately.

  “I thought I was alone!” It didn’t sound like a lie — the girl’s face showed no fear or revulsion or any other emotion that would have sent Anna scurrying back to the Lincoln.

  Silence stretched between them, and then the other girl held up her cupped right hand. She opened the palm to reveal what was hidden there.

  “I’m playing acorn,” she announced.

  “What’s that? Aren’t acorns just seeds?”

  The girl walked past Anna and sat down with her back against the bole of the oak tree. Now Anna saw that there was a pile of acorns next to her on the ground. She added the new one to the pile.

  “Acorns is a game. You sit quietly, and concentrate very hard, and when you hear the tree drop an acorn you get up and run very fast and retrieve it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a game!” the other girl replied in explanation.

  The other girl closed her eyes and waited — and then Anna suddenly heard a tiny thump off to the right. In an instant the girl was on her feet and running to the spot. She bent down and retrieved the acorn, and returned, adding it to the growing pile.

  She looked at Anna. “It’s you against the tree, you see,” she said. “That’s the game.” The end of her sentence was punctuated by another faint thump, and again the girl ran to the spot and retrieved it.

  While she was returning there was another thump very close by, and Anna looked down to see a fresh acorn, green and with a light brown crinkly cap, lying at her feet.

  She bent quickly down and scooped it up, and looked up to see the other girl standing close by, with an excited look on her face.

  “Now you’re playing, too!”

  Anna stared at the acorn in her hand, and then followed the other girl back to the bole of the tree.

  “Make your own pile! I’ll start you with half of mine!” She cut her acorn pile in half with her palm, and moved it off to one side. “That’ll be yours! Whoever has the most at the end wins!”

  Anna looked once more at the acorn in her hand, then dropped it onto the new pile.

  There was a thump! followed by another thump! and before she knew it Anna was running this way and that, and adding to her pile.

  The afternoon grew late, and suddenly the other girl stood and said, “I have to go.”

  She began to walk away, and Anna said, looking at the two huge piles of acorns, “We haven’t seen who won.”

  “Who cares? You can have them all — you won!” She laughed, and turned to keep walking. “My name’s Beatrice, I’ll be here tomorrow afternoon if you want to play again!”

  And then she was gone, running, across the parking lot, out of the park and across the street into the human neighborhood beyond.

  Anna stood for a long time, first looking in the direction Beatrice had gone, the maze of two-family houses almost on top of one another, of red and white with dark roofs, the jumble of telephone and electrical wires hither and yon making them look like they were caught in a web. The sun was dropping to the west, which meant it was at least five o’clock, probably later. Samhain would be beside himself.

  Then Anna stared for a few long moments at the two piles of acorns. She noted that her own pile was wider and higher than Beatrice’s.

  With only a moment’s hesitation she kicked the two piles, scattering the oak seeds, and walked to the black Lincoln.

  She was back the next day, but Beatrice was nowhere to be found. She waited for an hour at the oak tree alone. An anger swelled in her, and she wanted to rip the oak tree from the ground by its roots and destroy it and its seeds. She waited another twenty minutes and then went home.

  “What is it that makes these humans what they are?” she asked Samhain that night. She was sitting in a comfortable chair in the blind priest’s office — the most comfortable chair in the rectory.

  “Why do you ask?” Samhain replied slowly; there was caution in his voice.

  “Answer me, Samhain,” she said, hating her little girl voice, even when she modulated it to its deepest. It was another of the prices she paid to be human in this world.

  “I have
been telling you for a long time that they are interesting creatures,” Samhain began.

  “They are creatures, first and foremost,” Anna interrupted. “No better than any other life on this miserable planet. Beast, bug,” she hesitated before adding, “butterfly.”

  “They are creatures, true,” Samhain said. “But I’ve developed a certain interest in them, as you know. They show sparks of nobility, and selflessness, and kindness, that are totally alien to their base nature.”

  “I don’t understand them,” Anna said, simply.

  “Do you have to?”

  “No.”

  Anna rose abruptly from the chair and marched to the hallway and up the stairs, saying nothing more. Samhain, floating like a black wraith, the bottom of his cape moving in the breezeless room, watched after, and heard the door slam to her room.

  Beatrice was at the park two days later.

  “Where were you?” Anna demanded.

  Beatrice laughed; today she had on a green blouse, which nearly matched the color of an acorn. There were newly fallen acorns around the shaded perimeter of the tree.

  “My mother kept me in — I was being punished.” She laughed again.

  “For what?”

  “Are you always so serious? How old are you — three?”

  “I’m five,” Anna responded.

  “Well I’m almost seven, and I don’t like to do homework. Mrs. Greene sent home a note, and I was punished.” She smiled. “But here I am!”

  Beatrice noted the scattered acorns at the base of the tree. “We’ll have to start with a new tree — if you want to play acorns again.”

  “I do.”

  Beatrice sighed. “Well I don’t. It’s too much work. Why don’t we just sit and tell stories?”

  Anna stood still, and watched as Beatrice sat herself down with her back against the tree, brushing acorns out of her way.

  “Well?” she said, looking at Anna. “Has anyone ever told you you’re funny looking?”

  Beatrice laughed, and Anna walked purposefully to the tree and stood above her. She squatted on her haunches and touched the other girl.

  Touch, look.

  She stared into Beatrice’s eyes, and Beatrice gave a little gasping sigh. Her head fell to one side and she sat motionless, staring into nothing.

  Anna stared at her for a few moments, before straightening and walking to the black car.

  “Take me home,” she said.

  Samhain was as close to livid as he ever became. “You must understand,” he said, “how important it is for silence. The police were here, because of the car. Someone saw it leave the park. The priest did a good job of explaining, but this cannot happen again.”

  Anna said nothing.

  “Do you understand?” Samhain almost screeched.

  “Of course.”

  “The sixth Halloween is almost here. Detective Grant has found us, and we must leave. I have made arrangements. Mr. and Mrs. Finch—”

  “I will attend to them.”

  Samhain grew calmer, but his voice was now filled with something like curiosity. “I must ask you: why, exactly, did you kill the little girl?”

  But Anna was already on the stairs, and did not answer.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The biggest bender of his life.

  Grant had no idea how long it had been, though by the length of his beard stubble and the chill now in the air outside the open window, he knew it must have been at least a week. Maybe more. It had started innocently enough, staring at the wall or at the piece of paper Samhain had left for him in Massachusetts. DON’T FOLLOW it had said, but of course Grant had come back to Orangefield and tried to find Samhain in every corner of the town. He had waited for a rash of what the locals called Sam Sightings, when the Lord of Death was supposedly (and sometimes for real) sighted by locals, in the woods, by certain trees, sometimes in town itself. There had always been Sam Sightings this time of year, ever since Grant had come to Orangefield as a young cop a lifetime ago.

  But this year there had been none.

  Grant had spent whole afternoons sitting in the lawn chair at Riley Gates’ farm, facing the fallow pumpkin ruts and waiting for Samhain to appear. The Lord of Death had done so before. But all he had gained was a stiff back, and all he had witnessed was, amid the bang and buzz and whirr of machinery, and the distant shouts of workers, the near-completion of Halloweenland next door. The Ferris wheel was done; Grant had watched as they tested it, the giant metal orb turning at a stately pace. He saw the main tent through a yawning burned-out gap in Riley’s house — it was a lurid shade of orange, with white piping.

  One day before going back to the hotel he had driven to the front gate and stopped to see two more rides erected — a giant hollow can with straps on the inside to hold passengers in place while it spun and tilted, and a magnificent carousel, which must have been trucked in whole, and which now dominated the area just behind the ticket booth and just to the right of the nearly completed midway.

  And there, one moist palm on the flank of a painted horse whose head was thrown back in a permanent open-mouthed scream, was Dickens, staring out at him calmly.

  The flipper of a hand raised in mock salute as Grant gunned the engine and turned around, leaving dust in his wake.

  And that day, the last before the bender began, was when?

  Grant shook his head, and went to the room’s sink and turned on the cold water. He lifted handfuls up, shocking his face until his eyes focused. He toweled himself vigorously dry and looked out the window. It was either dawn or dusk, the sky purpled.

  He beheld the room, the perpetually-on computer screen glowing like a rectangular ghost, the litter of liquor bottles and beer cans and take-out food cartons and pizza boxes, a scatter of dropped clothing.

  And nothing else.

  No answers, not from the bottles, not from the cryptic note in his pocket, not in the streets or woods of Orangefield.

  I’VE GONE HOME.

  DON’T FOLLOW ME.

  “I did, and you aren’t here. I know it. I know it in my gut.”

  LONG TIME NO SEE.

  That was the puzzler: why would Samhain even bother to taunt him? He had the girl, had hidden her for five years. Why give Grant any hint at all of where he was?

  One thing Grant had come to know after all these years was that there was always a reason for what Samhain did.

  Grant looked around for a partially full scotch bottle, but there wasn’t one. He went to the window and stared out at what he now realized was the rising sun in the east. So it was dawn.

  DON’T FOLLOW ME.

  I’M GOING HOME.

  And, suddenly, Grant knew where Samhain was.

  HOME.

  He searched in the wreckage of his hotel room for his cell phone, and dialed a number, and made an airline reservation.

  Part Three

  Ireland

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It was raining in Dublin when Aer Lingus Flight 332 landed. It was four thirty in the morning, Irish time, and the rain streaked the window next to Grant’s head. Everything looked surreal outside: rain, blue dark night going toward morning, the sharp pinpricks of airport lights, Grant could feel jet lag trying to grab him already — it was just around the time he would be going to sleep back in Orangefield. But, between driving and the overhead airline television sets’ glaring and just plain anticipation, and the fact that it wasn’t time to sleep yet, he hadn’t slept a wink.

  Grant had been amazed: as soon as the Airbus 310 had hit the clouds over JFK Airport, the stewardesses and stewards had hit the aisles, selling merchandise. And they did a brisk business in the packed plane: cigarettes and booze, at duty free prices, and there was even a catalog they distributed with all kinds of Gaelic goods for sale: crystal and woolen shawls, even a Bodhran, a goatskin Irish drum. And then the televisions had flickered on overhead, showing American shows like the animated The Simpsons, as well as some insipid laugh-tracked BBC programs,
and Grant had known he was in for a long flight. No old John Wayne movies for him tonight. Already he wanted one of those cigarettes they were selling, but of course smoking on the plane was prohibited.

  And here he was now, snaking his way through customs with his passport clutched in his hand, towing his wheeled luggage like every other visitor to the ancestral homeland, and already wondering if he had made a mistake.

  No — in his gut he knew he had done the right thing.

  He was sure of it.

  For the first time in days, weeks, Grant allowed himself to feel something like hope.

  This was what Samhain had meant by HOME.

  Samhain was in Ireland.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Bill Grant, you old bastard!”

  Weary as he was, Grant had to smile at the sight of Tom Malone’s face. It had hardly changed in the ten years since Grant had last seen him, in this same airport but in a different world.

  Malone took him by the shoulders and then gave him a bear hug. They stood in the nearly empty Dublin Airport terminal as the sun began to rise on the streets outside. Grant saw through the big glass doors that it was still raining.

  Malone held him at arm’s length, studying him closely. “My God, man, what’s happened to you? You look a hundred years old.”

  “And you don’t,” Grant growled, trying to smile but failing.

  “You’ll tell me all about it, yes?”

  Grant nodded. “I can’t thank you enough for taking my call, and coming to get me, and everything else.”

  “Bah,” Malone said, and Grant was amused by the faint brogue the former New York City cop had picked up in Ireland. “Anything for an old friend. But then again, you’re still in the game, right?”

  Grant shook his head. “Not anymore. Threw the badge on the desk a few weeks ago.”

  “That bastard Farrow. I should have strangled him when he was a rookie in Queens. I’m sorry I ever sent him upstate to bother you. I should have stopped after I sent Riley Gates to Orangefield.”