Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds

by Fiction River

  ***

  During that month, Dog Boy’s mother wept, fussed, petted and spoiled him outrageously, thought about running off with him, hiding out somewhere.

  “Just the two of us,” she’d whisper before the tears pooled again in her eyes. “Anywhere.” But she couldn’t think of a single place that would be safe. Red Cap could come and go to anywhere on earth, seemingly at will. He’d told her so when they’d first met, and she believed him. His fists had made her into a believer.

  Red Cap was the only name she had for him. He said it was the only name he had. She’d tried calling him Red once, and he hit her so hard, she lost consciousness and never tried again. Even her father had never hit her so hard. But after that, she had trouble calling him anything and spent stuttering moments whenever she had to address him directly. She thought if she could only call him by his right name, he’d forgive her, but the words never seemed to come out right.

  He wore that disgusting cap everywhere, even in bed. The only time she’d ever seen him take it off was when they were first seeing one another. It was a pearly evening, and they’d come upon a dying squirrel run over in the park, it’s insides squashed onto the pavement, made even more horrible by the moon overhead and the shadows it cast. She’d started to turn away from the sight. But when Red Cap took off his hat and dipped it into the squirrel’s blood, she’d been mesmerized and couldn’t stop watching. For a moment, the hat had seemed to glisten and glow, red as a sunset, though she knew that couldn’t really have happened. Then the squirrel’s eyes glazed over; so, in a way, had the hat.

  After the moment in the park, she shrank away from him, which seemed to make him even more ardent. He showered her with money. Especially when he found out she was pregnant. He didn’t ask her to marry him, but by then marriage was the last thing on her mind. Escape was foremost. That and getting rid of the child in her womb. But Red Cap stayed with her, imprisoned her really, in that little house in Brooklyn, with its view of the backside of another building. Threatened her. Hit her a couple of times a week just to remind her he could. He knew how to draw blood and how to bring bruises. He did not mistake them. It was as if he knew her body better than she did. And her soul.

  He stayed just long enough for the child to be born. Childbirth tore her up so badly inside, the doctor warned she’d never have another child, though she didn’t want another. Certainly not with Red Cap.

  When she was well enough to take care of the child on her own, he showed her what to do, and then left, warning her not to run away.

  “I can find you wherever you go,” he’d said. “I’ll be back when he is walking.” She believed him.

  The money he paid her with—it came in brown envelopes stuffed under the door—was generous and arrived mysteriously after she was asleep. But it had to be given to a bank first thing in the morning because by midnight it turned into leaves or ashes or bits of colored paper. So he’d warned her, and she knew that to be true because once she’d kept an envelope a second night, first checking that it was full of the promised money. When she opened the envelope the next morning, it was filled with red and gold autumn leaves instead. And so she’d nothing for almost a month and had to go back to tricking to keep the baby and herself alive.

  Predictably, Red Cap had beaten her when he returned. Somehow he’d known what she’d done without having to ask.

  “It’s written on your stupid cow face,” he told her and flung another envelope at her. He never asked about the child.

  After that, she went early to the bank, the baby bound up tightly to her breast so that he didn’t smell anything but her and the milk, just as Red Cap had demanded. Of course, every few months she had to change banks, but since Red Cap continued his generosity that made it only a small burden.

  Of course she grew to love the child who looked nothing like either one of them but had a dark feral beauty and a brilliant smile. He seemed content being in the little apartment, entranced by the television Red Cap’s money had purchased, and absolutely stunned by the music he heard there. She bought him a little pipe that he tootled on incessantly, and soon was able to mimic bird songs, and so she named him Robin after her favorite bird. His father refused to use that name, continuing to call him Dog Boy, which she hated.

  One time she shorted herself on food and bought Robin a small tape CD player along with a variety of CDs: Battlefield Band, Janis Ian, Steeleye Span, the Silly Sisters—all favorites of hers. None of this new stuff. Except for Amanda Palmer and the Dixie Chicks. He begged then for a fiddle, and she went on short rations for several months till she had enough to buy it for him, a quarter-size fiddle that he taught himself to play.

  And she talked to the child constantly. Well, she had to, didn’t she? There was no one else to talk to except when they went quickly to the bank or to the local bodega at the end of the road. She kept herself busy during the day with the boy—playing with him, singing to him, washing his clothes, teaching him numbers, nursery rhymes, dreaming of escape.

  But Red Cap came back as she knew he would. As he’d warned he would.

  He put a stupid strap around the boy’s shoulders and chest. Then off they went, her little boy trotting along in that new, funny, rolling sailor walk behind him and Red Cap yanking on the leash as if Robin had been a dog and not a human boy.

  ***

  Of course Robin was a disappointment to his father. So he worked harder at trying to please him. He learned the smells of the city as if they were his ABCs. Graduating from milk and mother to finger foods and distinguishing ginko from maple. Learned the difference between sandals, shoes, and sneakers. Then the differences between Nikes, Pumas, Reeboks; between Birkinstocks, Kurt Giegers, and Crocs; between Doc Martin’s, Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahnik, Mephisto, and Birkenstocks. Though it would be years before he had names for the shoes, just the smells.

  By the time he was four, he was able to follow a woman down a street an hour after she’d walked by without ever seeing her, simply by the smell of her Jimmy Choos and the waft of perfume.

  By the time he was six, he could track two men at the same time, and when they parted, he could find one, mark that territory with his own personal scent (a piece of chewing gum, a wipe of his hand over his hair which was now long and shaggy as a dog’s, or even by peeing around the spot if no one was watching). Then he’d go back to the place of parting, and track the second.

  The praise he got from his father was little enough.

  It felt enormous.

  ***

  “It’s time,” Red Cap told the boy on his tenth birthday.

  Dog Boy knew what he meant without having to be told. He was well-trained. He was old enough. He’d long been off the leash. This day he would be in at a kill. A blooding, his father called it. He couldn’t wait.

  His father handed him a small child’s cap. It was a school cap, blue with an insignia, a red pine tree and the numbers 1907. He sniffed it. He would know that scent anywhere.

  They walked to a small park, a kind of grove. It was filled with lovely smells that made Dog Boy shiver with delight. The sharp, new growing things, both white-rooted and green. Little mealy-smelling worms. The deep musk of the old oak’s serpentine roots that lay halfway above ground.

  There were many sneaker smells, too, mostly the rubbery scent that made his nose itch. But there was a familiar odor, faint but clear enough for him to follow.

  He lifted his right hand and pointed at a place where the path forked. Eager to be off, he was stopped by his father’s rough grasp on his shirt collar.

  “Now is when we must take care,” Red Cap told him. “Be subtle. Act like everyday humankind. An ordinary father and his ordinary son on an outing. Not a hunter and his dog.” Though there was nothing ordinary about the pair.

  Dog Boy nodded, he could scarcely contain his excitement. His father had spoken quietly, not in his usual sharp trainer’s voice, nor in his dangerous growl. Dog Boy liked this new, quiet, unexpected sound. It soothed him. It calm
ed him down.

  “Steady, steady now, show me the way.” Red Cap took his son’s hand. This was so unusual, Dog Boy almost stopped to say something, then thought better of it and went on.

  They walked along, almost companionably, and any onlooker would have no reason to think they were not a happy pair out for a Sunday stroll. When they reached the fork, the smell drew Dog Boy to the left. And then another left. And because his father still had hold of his hand, he was drawn along as well. They came into a small, hidden, grassy place where dark trees bent nearly double.

  A boy, younger than Dog Boy, was standing, his back to them. By the way he stood, Dog Boy knew he’d come into this out-of-the-way place to pee.

  “Let him finish,” whispered his father. “We have time.” As an afterthought, almost as if laughing at the child, he added, “Though he does not.”

  Dog Boy wondered: Time for what? But deep inside he knew, had always known, had tried to keep himself from knowing. For him, it was the seeking, the finding that mattered. But not for his father. Never for his father. He shuddered.

  They moved closer to the boy who, turning, looked a bit alarmed, then relieved, then frightened, then terrified.

  Then silent.

  Dog Boy couldn’t stop staring. There was blood everywhere. The sharp iron tang got up his nose as if it had painted itself there. He wondered if he would ever smell anything else.

  Watching his father dip the red cap in the boy’s blood, he tried to weep. He tried to turn away. He could do neither.

  ***

  They walked in silence back to the house. A tall black boy his age ran by, his legs scissoring. A smaller kid, maybe a brother, cried after him, “Chim, Chim, wait for me.”

  The bigger boy stopped, turned, caught the little one up in his arms, swung him onto his shoulders. “Hold tight!” he said. “Don’t want you to fall.” Then off he trotted, the little one’s legs wrapped around his arms, his small hands in his brother’s afro. Their gales of laughter floated back to Dog Boy who shrugged himself further into his own shoulders, as if he might disappear there. Had he ever laughed that way? Maybe with his mother, once or twice, certainly never with his father. He pictured himself swinging a small child up on his shoulders, the weight of the child, the laughter. He imagined trotting along the park path, the wind blowing the scent of lilac and azalea, the smell sweet, not cloying. Both child and laughter were light in his reverie.

  At that moment, Dog Boy had forgotten what his father looked like dipping his cap in the slaughtered boy’s blood. How his face had changed into some sort of. . . creature. An orc, maybe. Or a troll, he’d thought at the time, pulling monsters from his reading. A smiling monster. But in the wake of the two laughing boys, he couldn’t retain the horror of the child’s blood. The memory of Chim and his brother—Dog Boy was suddenly sure it was a brother—that memory was even stronger than the memory of the dead child. He couldn’t think why.

  ***

  Once home, the image of the murdered boy returned to him, as well as the smell of it so he went immediately into the bathroom where he washed his face and hands obsessively for what seemed like hours though in fact it was just ten minutes. Then he took out the NettiPot his father made him use whenever they were about to go out on a practice run. The warm water through his nose and nasal passages flushed away the lingering blood scent and the last of the memory of the dead boy. He would remember the day as the one where he saw the black boys and their joy with one another.

  When he joined his father in the living room, Red Cap was standing awkwardly, staring at the sofa where Dog Boy’s mother sprawled. Neither one of them was moving.

  Something in the room was strange. It smelled off. Muted. Cold.

  Dog Boy ran over to the sofa and looked down at his mother’s face. All the lines in it had been oddly smoothed out. She looked almost happy. She smelled. . . For a moment he had no name for it. And then he had it.

  Peaceful.

  Then realizing what that meant, he threw himself across her body and began to weep.

  When the weeping was over and he had no more tears to cry, he picked her up in his arms as if she were a child, and the bottle of pills she’d been clutching in one hand shook loose.

  He turned to look up at his father, to ask him what had happened. Why it had happened.

  Red Cap was smiling. It was—Dog Boy thought—the same smile he’d stretched across his mouth when sopping up the murdered child’s blood.

  “Now I can take you to the Greenwood,” Red Cap said. “Nothing holds you here any more.”

  Dog Boy opened his mouth. For a minute no sound came out. Finally, as if it was a truth that needed telling, he said quietly, “She holds me here.”

  “She is dead,” Red Cap said as if the boy hadn’t the sense to realize it on his own. “And not even blood for the dipping.”

  That was when Dog Boy first understood how much he hated his father. How much he hated being his father’s dog. He set his mother’s body down on the couch again, carefully, as if afraid he might bring her back from her final escape. Taking the small crocheted quilt that hung on the sofa’s arm, he covered her with it. She looked tiny, small, and—suddenly—safe.

  “I’m staying.”

  “You cannot.”

  Dog Boy made his hands into fists. More tears began to roll down his face. He expected to be beaten. It would not be the first time. Probably not the last. He was prepared for it.

  What he was not prepared for, though, was his father reaching into a pocket and taking out the leash which Dog Boy hadn’t seen in years. Quickly Red Cap bound him as easily and as tightly as he’d ever done when Dog Boy had been a child.

  For the first time Dog Boy could actually feel the leash’s power. Perhaps he felt it because he didn’t want to go where it willed him, where his father willed him. Always before he’d been eager to go outside, to smell the city scents, to do what his father would have him do. When he’d been little, he thought that the leash was only to keep him safe. He’d been proud the day he was old enough to go outside with Red Cap leashless. He believed he and his father had forged a team; two hunters, leaning on one another. He had the nose, his father kept him safe. Equals. He’d reveled in that.

  But now he understood the truth. The leash was not just a piece of leather to keep him getting lost, to keep him out of harm’s way. There was something else about it. Something that glimmered on the inside. Something fierce. Something old that he was powerless to resist.

  Red Cap pulled on the leash and it drew Dog Boy relentlessly toward the door.

  “I want my fiddle and pipe.” His voice was high, but not pleading. He would not make his mother’s mistake. Pleading just gave his father some kind of strange pleasure.

  “You’ll not need it where we’re going.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Under the Hill.”

  For a moment he thought his father meant underground. It was something he’d watched on a TV show: a family on the run from the mafia had to go underground to escape certain death. His father had killed someone, maybe the child of a mafia chieftain, maybe the child of a policeman. Or the FBI.

  Underground. They’d be on the run. Together.

  But then he remembered the smile, the dipped hat, the blood, the obvious pleasure that his father had taken in the stalking, the killing of an innocent child. And he remembered something else. His father—for all that he was a bloodthirsty, vicious murderer—never lied. They were going Under the Hill, whatever that meant.

  Looking back at his mother’s body on the sofa wrapped in the red and green coverlet, at the silver pipe on the table, at the fiddle in its case resting against the wall, Dog Boy told himself: Some day I will kill him for this. Once more the murdered boy was all but forgotten. By this he meant his mother’s suicide.

  When I am old enough and big enough and strong enough, he will pay for this. Then I will take the red cap and dip it in his blood.

  He wondered if this was just
a boy’s wish or whether it was a promise.

  “A pledge,” he whispered.

  Like his father, he did not lie.

  Introduction to “Barbarians”

  New York Times bestseller David Farland keeps busy. In addition to his bestselling Runelords series, Dave produces a daily newsletter on writing and acts as coordinating judge for the Writers of the Future contest. He has published more than fifty books that range from picture books to novels to anthologies. He holds the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest book signing. He’s also won a lot of awards for his short fiction.

  About “Barbarians,” he writes, “For several years, I have thought about writing a prequel to my bestselling Runelords fantasy series. I’m currently finishing the last book in the series, and so I thought I might write a little tale set a thousand years earlier than the current series. As I began it, this tale just came tumbling out pretty quickly. I guess that happens when you’ve thought about writing something for ten years.”

  Barbarians

  David Farland

  The smell of dust and guts and horseflesh told the tale: running steeds at dusk, a tight corner on a narrow mountain road, a carriage rolling over the cliff.

  Dval stepped to the margin of the rutted dirt road and stood beneath a sprawling live oak. In the gloaming darkness he spotted wreckage a hundred yards downslope: a fine black carriage rested on its side without a door, so that it opened like the nest of a weaver bird. The carriage was of barbaric make—Mystarrian. They were a clever people, but did not understand the ways of true humans.