by Russell Moon
I seize her by the hair. I point in the direction in which they all just took off.
“Tell you what. Bring me your mother, and then we can talk.”
She looks down.
“Haven’t got one,” she says sadly.
“That’s a shame,” I say.
“If you’ll just ever listen…,” Marthe says, and I am stunned by a new realization.
“Hey,” I shout. “What the hell is that?”
“What?”
I am pointing at her mouth, down her throat, actually. “That,” I say. “That accent. That Irish crap.”
“It’s no crap, Marcus. It’s what I am. It’s what we all are, our coven. It was the other that was the act. I’m telling you, you are a long way from home now. But we are not. You are in trouble.”
All of a sudden I go all twitchy, looking over my shoulder for the aforementioned trouble, then straight back to Marthe again.
“’Twas your father brought everything over the ocean, Marcus. Yet again one of his great mistakes. We’re bringing an obair home again where it belongs.”
If I could, I would be melting her here with my eyes, I am so fixed on her face. She notices, pauses, but goes on. “And you won’t find your trees to be hiding in here. Your forest is far away, your center is far away. We have adapted beyond the forests of our origins. All that is far away and—”
“And,” I say, carried along by growing rage, helping her along to where she was not going to go, “my dog is far away? Is that what you mean? And my father is far away?”
She pauses, out of respect for Chuck, perhaps.
“Your father is not far away.”
I swallow, hard. I feel my look of surprise and hope and fight it down.
“But—”
“What?” I demand, my jaw clenching, unclenching.
“He’ll be of little use to you now, I’m afraid.”
I clutch at her. I have had enough.
“You’re afraid?” I spit. “Are you really, Marthe?”
“That’s not what I meant, Marcus. But yes, as a matter of fact, I am afraid. Now I am.”
She is looking into my eyes with a new-blossomed fear and is backing away from me, toward the far side of the bridge and the knot of old narrow streets.
“That’s good,” I say. “That’s a start.”
“Leave me be, Marcus. Please. I have been trying to help you. I didn’t have to stay behind. I could have gone on with the rest, but I wanted one more chance. I know it is hard for you to believe at this point, but it is possible for someone like me to have real feelings. I have real feelings for you.”
The words of friendship and concern make me madder than anything now. My hand flies up and seizes Marthe’s hair. I pull upward. She screams. I continue, until she is high up on her toes.
“Where is my mother?” I ask evenly.
“I can’t tell you, Marcus.”
I lift her, with one hand, off her feet.
“Where is my father?”
“Don’t begin a war you won’t finish, Marcus.” She is crying now. “Your father…If you wind up alone in this place, you’ll be destroyed. You’ll be quite out in the open here. There’ll be nowhere to hide. And there will be everywhere to hide for them. You’ll never catch them unless they want to be caught, and when they want to be caught you certainly don’t want to catch them. Please think again about joining together with us instead…for everyone’s sake.”
I sling her, head over heels, over the side of the bridge. She hits the stone siding with a thump, hangs there, crying.
I can almost see bolts of electric rage flying off my skin. I can do this. I can do this. One by one, they will fall, and it will be good for me. I will feed on the evil sons of bitches, take them into myself until I am—
To hell with it. No more. No more caring. About anyone. About anything. Me and mine. It is a very small circle, a very select group. Me and mine. That’s as far as trust or care will ever go again.
She is looking up at me as I am looking down at her, the river running past like the ground under a speeding bus.
I am sure I can do this. I am sure I can. She has earned it, they have all earned it. At some point there are no rules. At some point everybody deserves what they get and it is no shame on whoever gives it to them.
She is not fighting now. Not struggling or squirming or screaming. She just looks up at me, eyes growing wider, focusing fully on mine.
“Goddammit,” I breathe. I brace myself and haul her back up onto the bridge.
I don’t want to destroy Marthe. I’m disgusted that I have come so close.
I’m also disgusted I can’t go further.
I stomp away from her.
Unbelievably, she rushes to catch up with me. She grabs my arm. I can feel her shaking through the sleeve of my jacket. She hesitates as I meet her gaze. Looks indecisive for a moment. Then, slowly, with one weak hand, she points off in the distance, to the opposite rough, rocky, steep bank of the river.
And there, lying, sitting, perched, staring straight at me, is a seal. It is waiting, like a sleek black limousine parked at a watery curb.
I look back at Marthe.
“And what is that?” I say.
“She is here for you.”
“I don’t remember ordering a seal.”
“She will take you to your father,” Marthe says with some sadness.
I do a double take, looking back and forth between them, disbelieving on so many levels.
“How do you know that?” I demand.
She pauses, sighs. “Because that is why I was left behind. I am supposed to be keeping you from going with her.” She nudges me. “Go with her.”
This has always been the damnable thing about Marthe. You could almost swear there is a human in there.
“So why, Marthe…?”
“Because. I still think you should be with us. I still desperately wish you could be with us…. But you will never be with us, will you, Marcus?”
I shake my head emphatically.
“And if you are not with us, then…I guess I just don’t want to see you here alone. Your father is too weakened to come to you. If you do not go to him now…I am afraid you will soon be alone.”
I realize all at once what she is doing for me. Damn Marthe. Damn damnable Marthe. After I have just been holding her by the hair over a rushing river.
“Thanks,” I say, and start backing away.
Her face takes on a fractured look, while she smiles a small smile. Then she vanishes.
I walk down to the riverbank, the rain pounding down on me now like needles from an angry sky. I reach the spot on the rocks. The seal has jumped into the river now but hovers there, bobbing on the water as she fights the powerful current.
She waits. Blinks.
I hear it then. I smell it, feel it prickling my skin. An obair all around me and inside me, like a pervasive vapor. Telling me to push on ahead.
I look into those huge eyes. Those huge, soft, understanding, sad eyes.
She begins to let herself drift along with the current, but slower and hanging close to the shore.
I walk along the bank behind her.
CHAPTER 4
What the seal leads me to minutes later is not my father but a boat. It’s sitting there at the edge of the city, at the point where the river becomes the sea, untethered and bobbing but staying put. It is an odd, low, red-sailed vessel made, it seems, from some kind of canvas stretched tight over a wood frame. The sails, burnt red like leather, flap and snap loudly in the wind.
She sits there for a moment, the seal does, waiting. I am disappointed, but I take the hint well enough and get down in the water, stumbling and splashing over the rocks until I can flop onto the boat. I sit up on the small bit of a bench seat as the seal slowly casts off once again and the boat does likewise, all of its own accord. She floats on her back, keeping an eye on the boat as we sail off into the bay.
A flotilla of swans catches my eye,
iridescent against the light gray of the fading night and the oil-dark, rain-battered sea. I get a sudden shock, because I’d thought it was late in the evening, or close to it. I don’t know if the time has gone fuzzy or if I have, if I have lost my bearings.
I am not, however unfortunately, losing my feeling for cold. I am bone-rattling, I am shivering so much from the wind and wet. My ineffectual denim jacket is the perfect symbol, I think, of how unprepared I am to be here doing this.
Doing what?
“Hey,” I shout at the seal, futile as I know it probably is. “Where are we going, seal?”
She ignores me. She flips over onto her belly, disappears under the water, then reappears, breaking the surface as smoothly as the sun breaking the sky. Above us the sky is lightening as the night gives way.
I am freezing. My god, it is cold. The sea begins to rise and fall a little in small swells, just enough to shake the boat. The wind blows. But the rain stops, at least. Good.
Damn. The rain starts again. And now something hard bounces off my forehead. Large chunks of something are landing everywhere as I watch, mouth agape. Hailstones.
The hail stops now, and I am about to believe that the strange weather has subsided when the break is followed immediately—immediately—by the rising of the sun. It is beautiful. It is warm, not summer warm but warm enough to be paradise compared to what came before. I don’t care how it has happened, I just soak it in. I feel my clothes drying, my bone chill easing.
And then I see it subsiding again. No.
“No,” I call in vain. The sun sets as quickly as it came, and my spirit goes down with it. I brace for more.
And it happens again. Maybe five minutes later. Maybe twelve hours later. I am still wet when the sun returns, still chilled. I am warming again.
It is gone again.
This—the strangeness and unpredictability of it all—eventually stops having the effect it should have. I am down in the boat now, on my back, facing the sky, as every wrinkle in my clothes, every hollowed-out bit of my shattered body, fills and unfills with pools of rain and seawater.
Until somewhere between day and night, following who knows how many minutes or hours or days, the boat comes banging to a halt.
I crash and stumble and flail, completely upended, as I try and get a look at where I am.
We have come ashore on a beach, a bare and desolate beach settled in at the foot, I see, of a sheer, five-hundred-foot cliff. It is an island in the middle of a vast, vast expanse of nothing else but sea and sky.
The boat is still banging around and shaking me, trying to eject me as the incoming tide insists we get out and onto the island. I climb out and pull the boat behind me as I make my way up the beach, hauling it onto the dry rocks. I am shivering with cold and dread; I turn back toward the seal, waiting for her to lead me. But she is no longer in sight.
I am still standing there, absorbing the absence of the seal and wondering what I am supposed to do, when it comes. The biggest, biggest mother of a wolf-beast that ever walked is headed toward me across the beach. Instinctively, I lift my hands to warn him off, palms down and fingers facing forward. He keeps walking. Occasionally he snuffles the ground, scenting something. Casual. Like I cannot worry him in the least.
He comes to a full stop directly in front of me, only two feet away. His head hangs slightly lower than his shoulders, and, unbelievably, it is almost even with mine. His eyes are yellow but intelligent, somehow. I can smell his breath as it wafts toward me and warms my chest and drifts upward—carrying the distinct odor of fresh meat.
If it is true that every familiar is somehow an extension of its owner—as seems to be the case—this mighty thing belongs to a leader, king, lord, whatever…of a great magical people.
This is my father’s familiar.
The great creature opens his mouth and leans toward me. I am petrified stone.
He opens his jaws around my right hand, closing them just exactly enough for the teeth to dig but not break the skin. He tugs, then lets go.
I blink, because I am almost crying with relief. He is not going to maul me.
He just turns and walks and I follow…as if I had a choice.
What we do, me and the boss, is walk counterclockwise around the front face of the apparently deserted island. The sand under our feet is a blanket of minuscule seashells and coral bits. The sound it makes when the tide comes in and withdraws is just like milk over Rice Krispies.
We turn the big sweep of a corner of rocky outcropping, and suddenly it is like I’m slammed in the chest. An obair thuds in my head and my lungs and my legs. Both of us, the wolf and I, pick up the pace.
The tide on this side is almost completely up to the base of the cliff, up far enough that the beach disappears entirely, and we are scrabbling over higher and higher rocks. My feet and calves are slapped by a wave, and I lose my footing, gain it again. And when I do, I see it.
The mouth of the cave opens out to the sea, practically inviting it inside. The wolf stops, and I do too for a moment. But now he turns his yellow eyes on me, and I take the hint, making my way past him at a crawl.
The cave is, first of all, stunningly warm. It is wet but not uncomfortable. There is light coming obliquely from cracks in the walls here and there, though it is impossible to tell the source. I follow as the cave twists deeper into the cliff, into what I imagine is the heart of the island.
I follow and follow until the light increases and the tunnel narrows, then opens wide and sudden.
And there, I see, he is.
He is lying flat out on a raised platform of stone lined with animal furs and blankets and pillows of goose down. It looks very much like a funeral.
I go slowly to him. I step up the one small step to his side. I may well be sick.
He is as dead as dead can be without being truly gone. There is almost no flesh to speak of on his face. You can see his cheekbones, the striated muscle of his jaw. The pits at his temples are as deep as egg cups. His eyes are closed, but the circular rim of space around each eye is so well defined you cannot see how the eyes could actually still be connected to the man.
I put my hand on my father’s chest, and there is barely a chest there. He is completely covered in blankets, maybe to keep in whatever heat and life he’s got. If so, it is working, because when I put two fingers to his neck I get both the pulse that I am looking for and a surprising wave of heat.
There is also a dripping sound. I look around, then follow the sound to the rock floor just below me. More accurately, just below him. I lift the overflow of blanket right in front of me and look below to where drops of blood are hitting the stone floor.
Blood still seeping from the wound that happened…was it days ago? The hole he tore out of himself in giving me the ring—as a gift, as proof. The hole that proved to be a pipeline down into his very center.
“How can this be?” I say, pulling my face down close to his face. I feel his breath on me, and it is almost comforting. “How can you still be bleeding?”
I don’t get a response, as I don’t expect one.
I get up. I put good distance between us—like I want to put distance between me and grief, me and thoughts of Eleanor and how hopeless this could be without him—and I pace. But I never take my eyes off him.
“You probably deserve it, you know,” I say to him. “God knows what you’ve done over time. What I do know I don’t like very much, so what I don’t know is probably awful, so probably, you know, you deserve it. You left me. You left Eleanor. You caused this war. You are probably capable of all manner of serious crap.”
I pause. I look away, back toward the cave entrance, with the chilling feeling that something is coming. But I see nothing.
“You know what,” I say, more forcefully. “You know what? I don’t even care much. That’s not why I’m here. I just want my mother. She matters, not you.”
I get the chill for sure now, and I rush to the entrance of the cave-room. Nothing. Still noth
ing.
“Do you hear me?” I say, swinging back to him with yet more vigor but maybe less conviction. Because I feel it more surely, minute-by-minute, tick-by-tick…something. It’s not something coming, though, after all. It is something getting away from me.
No. I grab at my face with my hands, raking my nails across my cheeks. And I know it now—I cannot not know it. My father is not in control. He is in fact far less effective than I am now. I have been wasting time, hoping for a grand plan, for someone or something to take over, but it is not going to happen. I am alone.
I feel it. I feel I’m a speck on the universe. And my father is dying. And I hate him for it.
I rush back up to him. “Did you hear me?” I say.
And then I flinch and stare. Tears, like thick, jellied slugs, are crawling out of his rotted, closed eyes, one after one after one, out and down the sides of his corroded old head.
I feel his breath a little quicker, warmer.
Then I feel, in a rush, the pain of searing heat in my ring fingers, as if the two rings are somehow being held to fire and then applied to my flesh. I am throbbing with it. I look at my hands. An obair is ringing, singing, stinging in my ears.
I look from my hands to the man, to my hands again. This is all I can do. What he once did for me.
I pull his withered wasting hand up to me, and the pumping blood comes over me, over my hand, my wrist. The heat from the rings increases, increases as they near each other, as they near him. I hold his dying right hand in my left, and I take my right, extend my index finger, point.
I touch lightly the surface of his bottomless hurt, his missing ring finger.
It feels like nothing is there. Like jelly but nothing more.
His body twitches slightly.
I push my finger a little further in.
He twitches. Goes rigid. I see his eyes under thin lids bulge and shift.
I breathe deeply, bite my lip hard.
And shove my finger into the wound, hard, all the way in to the hilt.
His body shudders and bucks like he’s been zapped with defibrillator paddles. I scream with the pain that seems to be shooting straight out of him and up into me. It burns, it sears, it shocks with bolts of electricity working up and through my entire body.
