by Tom Deitz
The Ranger stared crookedly at the drifting smoke that rose from the hookah, at the lambs’-eyes-in-honey in silver bowls upon the table. At the plaza below that was already clogged with gawkers come to point and stare at what might have been a young American.
“Nobody can forget killin’ a man,” he spat, sounding stone-cold sober.
“I can make you forget,” the other gave back, voice more like a woman by the second.
“Nobody c’n do that,” said the soldier. “Nobody c’n cut a memory outta your mind.”
“No one…human…
“Ooops,” sighed the soldier. “I forget.”
“I know!” the other laughed—and drew him away from the balcony and the noise and the oddly inept search—and thence to an inner room, where she removed her androgynous outer robes.
“My angel,” said the man, when she was naked. “My mortal lover,” the woman replied, and reached for him.
And when she turned to face the man who in a hashish haze had casually slain David Thomas Sullivan, David Kevin Sullivan likewise saw her. And shouted where he dreamed on that stony mountainside.
Angel, the drugged-out man had called her. And so one so fair might seem to such as he. But it was no angel the younger David had seen; no sirree. He had seen that face before, though, far too many times; and he now knew who’d been first cause of his hero-uncle’s death. Not an angel, but one of the Sidhe: the flame-haired battle goddess called the Morrigu, some-time advisor to Lugh Samildinach, High King in Tir-Nan-Og, whom David almost called friend. Occasional companion as well to Nuada Airgetlam, whom David did consider one.
Well, she was bloody well no friend to him! And if those others also knew what she had instigated…well, that was downright betrayal!
“You goddamned bitch,” David whispered.
And with that last word he blinked into the harsh light of midday.
And for an instant thought he was still in the Middle East. His heart was thumping like mad, and he was hyperventilating, as he briefly lodged between two Worlds. Blue sky there; blue sky here. Stone pavement; stony ground. A fountain tinkling in a foreign land; a waterfall murmuring by his shoulder.
For a moment, he expected to hear the cries of people rushing to see what had exploded. Instead, when his vision clarified, he saw Alec twitch in his sleep, then rouse abruptly, a troubled scowl furrowing his brow.
“Welcome back,” David yawned. “Jeez, but that rock of yours caught me off guard.”
“It just added to what was already there,” Alec replied carefully, as Aikin likewise stirred. “We were already sleepy from gettin’ up early, and tired from hiking and lugging the deer. Probably we were too tired to attempt as much magic as we did.”
“Yeah,” David agreed darkly. “I hope.”
Alec studied him. “You dream?”
A shrug. “Nothin’ I recall.” Which was a lie. Yet the truth was so fresh—and he knew it was the truth—he dared not face it.
“Same here,” Alec admitted, not quite meeting his gaze.
“Same here too,” came Aikin’s soft, smooth murmur, as one eye slitted open.
“’Time is it?” Alec wondered.
“Time to get Bambi’s mom off this mountain,” David told him.
Time to think about some things, he added to himself. I wonder how you avenge yourself on an immortal?
Interlude II: Freedom of Information
(Sullivan Cove, Georgia—Sunday, October 25—early afternoon)
“You guys work it out, and call me back,” David growled into his folks’ new portable phone, as he paced around the empty kitchen of the slightly run-down farmhouse he’d called home for most of twenty years. “I don’t care where I pick y’all up, but it just makes more sense to make one stop.”
“Yeah, well, Alec’s gone picky-pissy cubed,” Aikin retorted. “He’s definitely got a rat up his ass about something.”
“And you don’t?” David shot back irritably, too preoccupied by a certain rodent of his own to be polite. “First you were Mr. Curiosity yesterday mornin’, then you start actin’ like we’d shot off your tongue ’stead of that doe.”
“So?”
“So I don’t trust you when you stop askin’ questions. Not about that stuff, anyway.”
“And I don’t trust you when you pick at fresh back-strap.”
“I was tired.”
“Bullshit!”
David merely grunted. “Look, you call McLean, and one of you call me. I’ve gotta do some stuff ’fore we leave.”
And with that he broke the connection.
The sudden silence enclosed him like a breath of winter wind. In spite of the midday warmth, he shivered where he stood. Muffled voices floating down the hall from the front porch carried his pa’s ill-formed opinions, his ma’s indignant protests, and his little brother’s careless laughter. Footsteps came with them: slow, calm, and careful; the familiar tread of a man still vigorous in his seventies.
Uncle Dale Sullivan paused in the doorway that cut the kitchen off from the rest of the house. Thin and tall he was, and aged like a locust fence rail, with white hair tied back in a scandalous ponytail scarcely shorter than David’s own. He was David’s favorite kinsman, his grandpa’s oldest brother—and someone who’d seen his share of magic in his time. The old man stared at him a moment, then reached to a back pocket and slid out a hip flask, which he extended wordlessly. David accepted it with a solemn nod, unscrewed it, and drank a long draught of the moonshine it contained. And didn’t cough, though its heat flowed through him like a brushfire.
“Wanta talk about it?” Dale asked, not moving. David took another sip and shrugged. His gaze drifted down to the worn tile floor.
“I won’t laugh, I won’t yell, and I won’t cry,” Dale prompted softly.
David did not look up. “I might, though.”
“Which?”
“Yell,” David muttered at last. “Cry— Fuck, I don’t know!”
“I got a hanky.”
Silence, then, finally a long sigh, and, very softly: “How did David-the-Elder die?”
“Shoulda known that was it,” Dale sighed in turn. “Yesterday was the day wasn’t it? I guess I forgot…or wanted to.”
David met his gaze. “But how—?”
“You know all this, boy!”
“Tell me anyway.”
“He was blown up by a hand grenade in that town I never can remember the name of.”
“Any more?”
“What more is there? Details won’t bring him back. The city, the street; who found him, who investigated—that won’t change nothin’. And you don’t wanta know the rest.”
“Wrong!”
“You wanta see the autopsy report?” Dale flared sharply. “You wanta know how many pieces he was in? How they identified him? I wanted to know that too, one time! I never told nobody, but I did. I used the Freedom of Information Act and got the fatality report, and it didn’t say nothin’—’cept that they thought the grenade was one of ours. Somebody stole it, they claimed.”
“They claimed!” David snapped. “You never told me any of this—and I asked—lots of times. For years!”
“You were just a kid, Davy. You were tryin’ to hang on. If there’d been anything in there that would have helped you, I’d have told you. I saw you in the graveyard, boy: shootin’ that rifle he gave you them twenty-one times. I knew you were hurtin’. But there wasn’t nothing I could do! I wanted you to remember a good-lookin’ boy, not—”
“Chunks of meat,” David finished. “That’s about it, isn’t it?”
“Feel any better?”
“‘Least I’ve been honest!”
“I tried to be.”
“More’n the rest of ’em, anyway,” David snorted. He slumped against the doorjamb and folded his arms across his chest. “You still got it?”
Dale looked startled. “What?”
“The report. Whatever else there is. I’d just like to see it; see if I can figure o
ut anything ’bout…how it really was.”
“I’m not sure that’d be good, boy.”
Another shrug. “I need to know.”
Dale scratched his bewhiskered chin. “I’d have to dig ’em out. It’d take a while.”
“Yeah, well, no big hurry.”
Dale smiled sadly. “If it’ll help kill whatever’s eatin’ on you, I’ll do ’er.”
“’Preciate it.”
Dale turned to leave.
“Did he have any…buddies?” David asked abruptly. “Somebody who was there? Who might know something that wasn’t in the paperwork?”
The old man twisted around where he stood. “Don’t reckon,” he mused through a frown. “Oh, everybody liked him, don’t get me wrong; but he hadn’t been with that unit long. Oh, but wait: he did write some ’bout meetin’ this guy who’d been a Ranger and got out. Said he was a ‘stranger in a strange land just like he was, and as fey.’”
David’s eyes narrowed. “Fey? He said fey?”
Dale nodded. “I had to look it up.”
“You remember this guy’s name?”
“John Devlin.”
“Devlin…” David repeated. And then realization struck him. “Oh my God! You don’t mean the poet, do you? I went to one of his readings down at Georgia!”
“Could be,” Dale replied. “There was a poem in with one of the letters.”
“Oh jeez,” David breathed. “Oh jeez. So what—?” But at that moment the phone rang.
“If I’m gonna find that stuff ’fore you leave,” Dale said in parting, “I’d best be at it. If I don’t find it today, I’ll send it when I do.”
David smiled wanly. “’Preciate it.” And spent the next quarter hour fussing with Alec about rides.
Chapter V: Into the Woods
(Athens, Georgia—Tuesday, October 27—afternoon)
Aikin felt like Moses—and looked rather like him too.
Though he had not been found among the bullrushes by Pharaoh’s Daughter, long days in the sun of a seemingly endless summer had tanned his compact frame as dark as any Egyptian. He already had black hair and dark eyes (hazel, however, not genuine Nile valley-brown), and at the moment—barefoot, and with the sleeves of the white gauze shirt he’d worn to class knotted around his waist above frayed khaki shorts, and a towel draped across his head beneath his University of Georgia Foresters cap for no better reason than funkiness—he even looked the part.
Of course he had no beard to speak of, and certainly not a phony waxed one. And he doubted Moses had sported a black nylon backpack bulged near to bursting with hooks, or a boombox blaring Tori Amos’s latest. But he had known something about magic, which was what those books concerned (Ms. Amos, too, he suspected). And the prophet had likewise, by good report, often toted a staff—which Aikin also did: a near-twin to the rune-inscribed, copper-shod hiking items Dave and Alec lugged around. Dave had made all three, in fact; his had been a Christmas present five years back and still showed no sign of wear, though he used it constantly.
He stared at it for a moment and tried to evoke the scene from The Ten Commandments in which his hoary analogue had parted the Red Sea. He had no such ambitious body of water, of course—was about five thousand miles too far west, for one thing. But he did have the Middle Oconee. In fact, he was standing in the middle of it—but not in water up to his neck, or with uncanny cliffs of it towering to either side like so much Jell-O.
Rather, he had the dam.
Forty yards of decaying concrete, it was, and a yard wide at the top: easy enough to walk across if one kept one’s balance, and his was very good. Before and behind, water rushed, shushed, and occasionally rumbled through Whitehall Forest, a sprawl of preserved woodland belonging to the University of Georgia School of Forest Resources a few miles south of Athens proper. Deer lived there—and squirrels, coons, ’possums, and chipmunks—as though sixty-odd thousand beings higher up the food chain didn’t call the same county home. Yet two miles of ill-paved road to the north put you at the key-card gate behind the brick Victorian jumble of Whitehall Mansion; and just beyond that, you hit Whitehall Road, that a touch of sleight of hand involving road signs transformed into Milledge Avenue—Athens’s fraternity row—a few fields and a bypass farther on.
But eschewing a single pull-tab gleaming in the sun, there was no sign of frat folks here. Only the roof of the newish cabin he shared with three other majors up the slope to the left, and beside it, the longer shape of Flinchum’s Phoenix, Forestry’s assembly-and-banquet hall, hinted at civilization.
And—again—the dam.
Water swirled through at least three breaches in its upstream face, but none actually reached the summit-slab, though the tangle of flood wrack at those places made another kind of barrier. A tumble of blocks, steps, and arches at the north end showed where a mill had been abandoned. The ruins were bloody evocative, too; and more than once Runnerman’s sister, Myra, had posed some member of the Gang there, in whatever odd (and usually skimpy—or absent) costume struck her fancy, often as not engaged in mock combat, all as grist for her fantasy paintings.
Aikin’s fantasy, however, lay not in any evocation of the parted Red Sea (with the bondage of academia in hot pursuit, more cruel than Pharaoh’s legions), but in the Promised Land on the farther shore. For there, the dam terminated in a coarse-sanded beach below a wooded ridge, beyond which lay more forest. Of course, it wasn’t that far to a brace of suburban backyards; but here, at least, the illusion was preserved.
He wondered, though, how long he’d have to wander in the wilderness before he found what he sought. And whether he would receive commandments or confront the golden—well, what he sought was gold, but it definitely wasn’t no calf.
Three days had passed since the hunting expedition…since the dream. One he’d spent back in the mountains, hanging out with his folks through supper before stuffing himself into Dave’s old Mustang for a harrowing ride back here. Rain had caught them halfway down: just above Gainesville. It had not let up until that morning.
Which meant he’d had no chance to scout out the place the ulunsuti had shown him.
Nor did he really have time now; he was cutting botany as it was. But he did have to submit a plant collection in that class; and there were plants in the target zone. And if he just happened to find that place the ulunsuti had revealed, so much the better.
And if he didn’t…well, empty woods were a hell of a place to read.
And since he’d spent most of yesterday’s deluge haunting the library in quest of what Dave (and Mr. Poe) would have called “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore,” he had God’s plenty of that to occupy him.
So he stared at the banks a moment longer, and the river between them a touch longer than that, quieted Tori with a tap of a finger, raised his staff on high—and, in the style of Charlton Heston, yelled, “Behold!”
No one heard—he hoped. The Oconee drank most of his voice and carried it away toward Lexington. And trees wrapped the rest in colored leaves and would not let go.
And with that, Aikin strode across the dam and into the woods.
*
He found it sooner than expected and could’ve kicked himself for not exploring such a landmark more thoroughly. But there it was: an ancient white oak that had been zapped decades ago by lightning, reducing it to a twist of knobby trunk and gnarled and broken limbs, from which the bark was still sloughing like a bad case of leprosy. Beside it, Siamese-twin maples made a V that framed the westering sun—but they only served to confirm what he already knew. This was it: the place from his dream by which a Straight Track lay.
He’d been here before, too. But he’d been so busy gawking at the tree itself, he’d not noticed the surrounding terrain.
Had he deigned to look lower, however, he’d surely have seen the signs Dave had reluctantly described on the jaunt down from Enotah County. Like the way nothing actually grew on a yard-wide stretch of ground, and leaves seemed undisturbed the
re—and oddly un-moldered; how ants and beetles turned aside as they approached it, and spiders spun no webs across its path. Briars grew along it too: not so thick as to draw notice, but enough to dissuade the unwary.
Aikin smiled as he crouched beside it. Tracks went everywhere, Dave had said; but in this World, at least, were unseen; nor did they follow its exact contours. He could not, for instance, pace this screwy trail for mile on mile unending. Rather, it would simply disappear at some point, as it passed through another World Wall. As far as he knew, which was as much as Dave had told him, the Track that ran through the Sullivans’ river bottom and thence up the mountain behind their house was the longest stretch in North America where Tir-Nan-Og and the Lands of Men precisely coincided. This was shorter—had to be—and to prove it, Aikin shucked his pack, fumbled out a map, and noted how the Track’s route, if extended, would carry it through a subdivision one way and into the concrete tangle of the bypass—with all its attendant steel—the other.
But here it lingered. Here it waited, all unknown. The Promised Land indeed. The road to wonder.
And then he could wait no longer.
A briar snagged his elbow as he eased his arm through that almost-invisible barrier of blackberry thorns and over the Track itself. Slowly he lowered his palm, tensing as it neared the surface as if he feared a shock, though Dave had said nothing would happen unless the Track were activated, which no mortal could accomplish. Or unless, as had been the case with one of Dave’s grandsires, certain obscure natural conditions pertained, which Dave could not more specifically define.
…closer, and he found himself straining his eyes in quest of what he could not see, had never seen—and might not get to see, if Dave had told him true. “A glimmer of gold on the ground, yet above it and within it,” Dave had said. “That’s what a Track looks like when it’s activated. It’s kinda like dust in a shaft of sunlight,” he’d added. “And seems like it gets thicker the more…magical the place you’re near. Otherwise…watch for long strips of barren ground—and briars.”
