All the King's Horses

by Laura C Stevenson

  ‘I can see you’re not making it up,’ said Mr Crewes. ‘But probability can act very strangely sometimes.’

  ‘Not that strangely,’ said Colin. ‘At least, not without help. But I guess …’ He swallowed hard. ‘I guess They only mess around with it for people They know.’

  Mr Crewes leaned back. ‘Sometimes scientists have to believe things they can’t prove are true, at least in the initial stages of their research. So I’m willing to listen to your hypothesis that your grandfather is a changeling, if you can tell me why you think so.’

  ‘Well,’ Colin began slowly, ‘we … I mean, he … I mean …’ All of a sudden he began to cry. ‘He doesn’t even know who I am, sometimes!’ he sobbed. ‘It almost happened tonight, before we took him upstairs! That only makes three times he’s done it, I know – but our real Grandpa would always know who I was, and he wouldn’t keep getting worse and worse, and I just can’t stand it, and you’ve got to help us, or we’ll never get him back!’

  Mr Crewes slid over on the sofa and put his arm around Colin’s shoulders. For quite a while, he didn’t say anything at all, and I began to think maybe I should go away, but then he said, ‘Sometimes, when terrible things happen it helps to understand why they happen.’

  ‘Not with this,’ sniffed Colin. ‘There’s no reason it should happen. They could make changelings out of a thousand usual people, and nobody would even miss them, but Grandpa’s famous, like a king of riders, and he knows stories and songs and poetry, or at least, he did … it just isn’t fair!’

  Mr Crewes looked across the room very sadly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to imply it was fair.’

  There was an awful silence, and I had no idea how to break it. Fortunately, Mom came back with a pot of coffee, and Colin wiggled out from under Mr Crewes’s arm. ‘Have a cookie,’ he said, picking up the cookie plate and passing it politely to Mr Crewes.

  Mr Crewes gave Mom a funny look, but he took a cookie and started talking about Wheelock school, and I sat there, feeling bad for Colin and not really listening, until Colin gave me a ‘wake up!’ kick and I realized Mr Crewes and Mom had started talking about brain research.

  ‘They say that by the end of the 1960s, we’ll understand a lot more about connections within the brain than we do now,’ Mr Crewes was saying. ‘And even now, there’s good research being done on the problem of recognition.’ He looked at Colin. ‘In the meantime, the important thing is to remember that even when he seems not to know you, somewhere in his mind, your grandfather still remembers you, and he still loves you. It’s just that a loose connection in his brain keeps him from recognizing you consistently.’

  ‘A lot of good that does,’ muttered Colin.

  Mom made a little noise, but Mr Crewes put up a hand. ‘It does do good,’ he said. ‘It reminds you that the person you’re dealing with is exactly what you said he was: a changeling.’

  ‘A changeling!’ said Mom. ‘Colin, you should know better than—’

  ‘– No, no,’ interrupted Mr Crewes gently. ‘It’s a good metaphor. Changelings look just like the person who has been taken, and so do patients with diseases of the brain. The difference is on the inside, where nobody can see it.’ He looked from Mom to Colin. ‘That’s what I meant earlier. Nobody can explain why your grandfather should lose his memory. But if you can understand how the brain works and what goes wrong with it, it at least gives you a way of dealing with what’s happening. If you want, that’s where we could start in science. I have some books about the brain. They’re pretty technical, but I think if we did some groundwork first, you could handle them. Would you like to do that?’

  Colin looked down at the floor. ‘Sure.’

  Mr Crewes nodded, and that was sort of it. He thanked Mom for coffee, and she thanked him for coming; then he left, and Mom hurried us off to bed.

  Colin looked at me as we brushed our teeth. ‘Boy, I really blew it! Now he thinks we just made up the changeling thing to make ourselves feel better, and we’ll never be able to convince him that it’s real.’ He spat into the sink. ‘I’m sorry. I should have let you do it.’

  All my life I had been wanting him to say something like that, but the funny thing was, it made me feel just awful. ‘It probably wouldn’t have made any difference,’ I said. ‘If I’d told him what happened, he might have thought we were seeing things, and we’d be even worse off than we are now.’ I stuck my toothbrush back in the rack. ‘We’ll just have take matters in our own hands again. Maybe if we go to the Ring, we can—’

  ‘Shh!’ he said, looking over his shoulder as Mom and Grandpa passed the bathroom door. When they were gone, he nodded. ‘OK.’

  So that’s what we did. But it didn’t work. We tried everything: circles on the ground, spells we remembered from Grandpa’s stories, and even the Lord’s prayer backwards (I spent all my time in Mass on Sunday writing it out, and Mom was so busy keeping Grandpa quiet that she didn’t even notice). But nothing happened, and the only person we saw was Jenny, picking through the garbage next to the entrance ramp.

  It rained on Monday, and it was so windy that our umbrella didn’t do us any good while we waited for the bus. Colin turned up his collar and stuffed his hands into his pockets. ‘This is it!’ he grumbled. ‘We spend the whole weekend freezing to death, and now—’

  Suddenly, a giant puff of wind picked up a whole lot of oak leaves from between the warehouses and spun them all around us, slapping them in our faces. The umbrella jerked in my hand, and my glasses fell off. Colin grabbed them just in time, but the umbrella was a goner.

  ‘Geez!’ I said, rubbing my eyes. ‘What was that?’

  ‘A miniature tornado,’ said Colin, rubbing his. ‘With lots of grit in it.’ He inspected the inside-out umbrella. ‘Looks dead, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Sure does,’ I said. ‘Mom isn’t going to be happy. Umbrellas cost money, and the other day she said we didn’t have a nickel to spare.’

  ‘That was for riding lessons, and we should’ve known not to ask.’ He picked up his stuff as the bus turned the corner. ‘Leave it here, or everybody will laugh at us when we get on.’

  I put the umbrella corpse down, followed Colin up the bus stairs – and crashed into him, because he’d turned around. ‘Get off!’ he whispered, pushing me. ‘Quick! It’s the wrong bus!’

  His face told me he was really scared, so even though I couldn’t see beyond him, I turned around. But the door flopped shut in front of me, and the bus started moving. Colin pushed past me and yanked on the handle that said ‘pull in emergencies’. He staggered as the door swung open, but then he gathered himself to jump. In the seats behind us, everybody was shouting, and in the back, two or three voices called ‘Go, go, go!’

  The bus screeched to a stop, and the driver leaped up and grabbed us. ‘What the heck do you think you’re doing?’ he yelled.

  I started to explain – then I realized why Colin was so scared. The bus driver wasn’t our driver. He was a ghoul. ‘You listen to me,’ he said, shaking Colin (who was still struggling). ‘Nobody opens that door when the bus is moving! Do I have to tell you why?’

  He was so big and angry, neither of us pointed out that it wouldn’t have been dangerous to jump, because we hadn’t been going very fast, and there were no cars on our street.

  ‘You two are in real trouble,’ he said. ‘But for right now, you sit right here.’ He picked us up and plonked us down on the first seat behind his. ‘Not a single move, you hear?’

  We nodded, and I guess he saw we’d do what we were told, because he slammed the door shut and started off again. For a while, everybody on the bus was buzzing and whispering, but pretty soon they were just talking again. If you didn’t look, it sounded like a regular school bus, but if you did, it was very strange. Outside the windows, familiar things flashed past, but none of them were in their usual places. It was like we were driving through a wooden play village, and somebody had moved stuff around. Sometimes a house looked just the way
it always did, but then there would be a block of stores that belonged a couple of streets down, then a gas station that should have been a few blocks back. I tried my best to keep track of where we were so we could get home again, but after a couple of minutes, I was so lost I realized I’d have to look for clues about what was up inside the bus.

  That turned out not to be any better. It was obviously some kind of school bus, because everybody was a kid except the driver. But there was something wrong with all of them. The boy sitting behind Colin had a monkey’s face, except saggy, as if it were made out of silly putty. The girl sitting across the aisle had a mask around her eyes – not a Halloween mask, but more like a raccoon. The girl across the aisle two rows in back of me had teeth that looked like a beaver’s, and the girl she was giggling with had a cat’s nose and whiskers. It was like looking at the strange creatures we’d seen dancing around the fire outside the Seer’s cave.

  Suddenly I went cold all over. Maybe they were the creatures. Everybody knew faeries spirited kids into the Otherworld, but since the kids never came back, nobody knew what happened to them when they got there. Maybe part of being spirited was turning into creatures, and what we were seeing was the change-over. I looked anxiously at Colin. He seemed OK – just scared, like me – but who knew how long the changes took?

  When you got down to it, who knew what kind of journeys Cathbad had meant when he said we’d make them? If this was one of them, what would happen to us when we got to the Otherworld? Would the ghoul listen if we told him we were under Protection, and that made us different from the others? Or would he change us into dancing creatures without telling Cathbad or Mongan? Or … I went even colder. Maybe Cathbad and Mongan had given the ghoul instructions to turn us into creatures. Cathbad was a stickler for the Rules, and the Rules said he had to help us. But all we’d asked was to be taken where Grandpa was. That meant They could do what their precious Rules required – and if we couldn’t get back because Grandpa didn’t recognize us inside the dancing creatures we’d become, well, that was our faults. Come to think of it, Mongan had hinted that Grandpa might not know who we were – but even though we’d heard hundreds of stories about stupid mortals who didn’t make their wishes carefully enough, we hadn’t realized what he’d meant. How dumb we’d been! And now … I looked out the window at the scrambled houses, and somewhere in my head I heard Mongan say: the way home’s the problem, surely. He’d told us! And we hadn’t listened.

  I nudged Colin. ‘Would we get creamed if we jumped out now?’ I whispered.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to figure,’ he whispered back. ‘I’ve forgotten the equation for how hard you fall at thirty miles an hour, but I don’t think we could count on landing on our feet.’

  Trust Colin to think in equations when he was being abducted by faeries. ‘I meant the traffic.’

  He looked at me scornfully. ‘The traffic’s why we need to land on our feet.’

  The driver ghoul looked over his shoulder at us. ‘All right, you two. That’s enough. And when we get there, you sit tight, you hear? We’re getting out last.’ His huge hands crossed over each other as he turned the bus to the left, but we could see he was watching us in the mirror over his seat. I thought of Mom, looking and looking for us, the way she looked for Grandpa, calling the police … the tears that prickled my eyes joined up with some of the grit from the mini-tornado, and they really stung.

  I was still wiping them with a kleenex when the bus pulled up next to a fortress with an asphalt moat, and all the funny-looking kids began to pile out. I’d expected a lot of faeries would be there to tell them which way to go, but they seemed to know. A little boy with yellow and purple bat’s wings where his ears should be scuffled with a bunch of boys with gopher faces as they scuttled towards a side door. A group of girls with striped tails and shining black and white feet went that way, too. The cat girl and her friend walked straight to the front door, giggling and pointing back at us. A bunch of big boys with pig faces purposely pushed Colin as they went past, and laughed when he knocked his head against mine. At the end, a girl with a horse’s mane and ears tried to stop next to us, but the ghoul waved her on.

  ‘They’re coming in with me,’ he said. ‘You hurry, now.’

  She looked back over her shoulder as she trotted towards the front door, but the ghoul wouldn’t let us out until she was all the way inside. Then he walked down the steps first (which was smart of him, because we would have run for it if he hadn’t), and as we followed him out, he reached for our hands. For a second I thought there was hope, but nothing happened when his hands touched ours. He just held them tightly and hurried us in the main door, across a big entry hall, and into a big room with desks and file cabinets in it. At the back of it was a prison cell, guarded by two woman ghouls. As we came in, a jailer looked out the door of the cell. Not a faerie jailer. He was bald, which I couldn’t imagine a faerie being, and the top of his head was painted luminous orange, to match his ears. It looked pretty funny with his purple beard and green uniform, but neither of us felt like laughing.

  ‘Causing trouble already, are you?’ he said.

  Colin folded his hands across his chest. ‘We’re not causing trouble; we’re in trouble!’

  The jailer’s purple eyebrows went way up. ‘You sure as heck are – and being fresh won’t get you out of it.’ He stepped to the side of his door. ‘Go in there and sit down. I’ll be in as soon as I’ve heard what you’ve done.’

  The bus driver gave us a little push, and the jailer shut the door behind us after we went in. There was a window on the far side of the cell; Colin raced to it and began to examine its bars. ‘Think it’s worth a try?’

  ‘That will not be necessary,’ said a voice behind us.

  We both spun around. At first we didn’t see anything but a wall, but it looked sort of wavy, as if we’d been looking at it through water; then Cathbad was standing in front it, huge and solemn in his robe. ‘I have come to release you, Children of Lugh,’ he said.

  ‘Release us!’ I said. ‘Then you didn’t … you hadn’t …’

  ‘I had not planned your journey to go exactly as it did,’ he said, looking at me in a way that told me he knew what I’d been thinking. ‘It performed its purpose, but the minions I sent to accompany you decided to amuse themselves along the way. The result is beyond their powers to repair.’

  ‘Amuse themselves!’ I said. ‘You mean that after we’d asked to go to the Otherworld all weekend, you finally sent minions to take us – and they brought us here?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘“Here” was the appointed end of your journey. It was the change along the way that caused problems. The minions rubbed glamour in your eyes, so all that you saw looked new and strange. They were supposed to make you invisible, so your reactions to what you saw would not affect the people around you, but they could not resist the temptation to cause trouble. Playing upon mortal confusion is an old trick, I fear, but it provides a steady source of fun to those of vulgar wit.’

  ‘Come on!’ said Colin. ‘You can’t tell us what happened out there didn’t happen!’

  ‘No,’ said Cathbad. ‘It all happened. But what you saw as a bus of unrecognizable beings in a strange landscape, the others saw as your school bus, filled with its customary occupants and travelling its customary route. And unfortunately, they saw you.’

  ‘You mean we were mixed up, not the kids or the bus route?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘As you will see when I remove the glamour.’

  Before either of us could say anything, he cupped his hands over our eyes. When he took them away, the cell with the barred window was gone. We were standing in Mr Beeker’s office.

  ‘Holy cow!’ I said. And suddenly it dawned on me. ‘The jailer who was sore about our being in trouble – was that Mr Beeker?’

  Cathbad nodded.

  ‘Oh no!’ gasped Colin. ‘Yesterday, I promised him I wouldn’t be any more trouble if I could be in Mr Crewes’s
class – and now everything’s messed up! How could you?’

  Cathbad gave him a long look. ‘I thought I had explained.’

  ‘Oh, you explained, all right!’ said Colin bitterly. ‘The minions decided to make our whole “little trip” a joke. Wonderful. What if we’d lost our heads and jumped off the bus and gotten hurt?’

  ‘Then the minions would have been even more amused than they are now.’

  ‘That’s awful!’ I said. ‘I mean, it was really dangerous!’

  ‘It is a great mistake to judge the Otherworld by the standards of your own,’ said Cathbad. ‘Faeries have little concern with the welfare of mortals – and of course, you are not in Our good graces. If it had been in your power, you would have told the man who came to your house last Friday about Us. That’s against the Rules.’

  ‘Nobody told us that,’ I said.

  ‘No, but you knew that common mortals are not allowed to see the workings of Faerie,’ he said. ‘Did you not?’

  We looked at each other; neither of us could deny it.

  ‘So far as danger goes,’ he continued, ‘you were warned from the first that it existed. As your adventure this morning should have made it clear, the danger lies not only in the situations We lead you into, but in your reactions to them. Had you jumped from the bus into traffic, our Protection could not have saved you. In your trips towards your grandfather, you share his risks.’ He looked at us, his eyes steely grey. ‘That is why I have told you that you may discontinue your mission at any time.’

  ‘Discontinue, phooey!’ said Colin, before I could say anything. ‘Of course we won’t give up! What we want is action! Where is Grandpa? You know, and you won’t tell us!’

  ‘Sh!’ I hissed, putting my finger on my lips, but he went right on.

  ‘You promised!’ he said, his voice getting louder and louder. ‘You said you had to help us find him, and you would! And all we get is these crummy little trips that don’t get any—’

  ‘Colin!’ I whispered, grabbing his elbow. ‘Hush!’