The Elf Master, arm around his granddaughter, waved them out of the room. “Go. Sleep veIl, Meester Doyle.”
* * *
Maura returned in a few moments, shutting the kitchen door quietly behind her.
“Abed already,” she said. “He took a moment to telephone to Diane, but he couldn’t do much more before he dropped off. I hated to do that to him.”
“He needed rest,” the Master said. “A simple charm of restfulness does him no harm. And ve haf not yet handled the situvation at hand so as to escape explanation. There are things he has no need to face. They are our business.”
“Keva in a pet is one of them,” Holl agreed. A disaster had struck at the heart of his formidable sister’s pride. Keva’s bread had fallen. Every loaf of the day’s baking had come out of the oven flat. Candlepat, with commendable tact for one who was usually focused upon herself, had tried to make things better by bringing in recipes for serving focaccia. Others gave their best efforts, too, but nothing had salved the old female’s feelings. She had never, never had a batch of bread fail in all her long life. The shame of it had driven her to their clan’s room, where she had spent the rest of the day, refusing dinner and any attempt to lure her out. Anyone who had approached her had returned looking half-chewed from the scolding. Keith was a favorite of hers, but even he’d be unlikely to escape a tongue-lashing.
“Surely she’ll be herself in a day or two,” Curran said, lowering his wiry white eyebrows. “The lass’s had her dignity wrung out. All have been under a strain that’d strangle a dragon, so it would. Whate’er wee beastie is muckin’ about around here bids fair to tear us apart.”
“We don’t know there’s anything here, Curran,” Holl said wearily. He’d hoped the old one wouldn’t bring up the subject again. “It could just be a run of bad luck. A trend can feed on itself when all are under a strain, as you say.”
The eyebrows climbed high on Curran’s forehead. “Bad luck, you say? And wasn’t it just you who told me yersel’ that the bad luck comes in bursts? Nor have these auld eyes missed that they come coincidently alongside breaks in our barrier charm. That smacks of intelligence, do you not say so?”
“I would,” Holl said, “but I can’t prove it. It only seems intelligent because of the coincidences. It is possible that there’s a mindless force underneath this place, or that we’ve brought something into the house that’s causing the problem. I hardly know where to start.”
“Research it,” the Elf Master suggested. “Vhere experience fails, see vhat other observers have written in the past. Vhat you say is true: there are many possibilities. Explore them. You may type a message this efening to the Old Vuns to ask for their advice vhen ve activate the computer later on. I recall that there are many records of interest that may be of assistance.”
Holl glanced at the clock. Still a few hours to go before the new tradition of gathering before the computer screen as though around a cozy hearth, to share messages with their distant relations. He doubted they had much to say about troublesome spirits in the New World, but it would do him good to ask. Suddenly, his sensitive hearing picked up the sound of feet stomping up the cellar stairs. He identified Marm’s pace before he burst into the room. The plump brewer’s face was dark red with fury.
“There you all are!” he snapped. “I want justice! Some fool’s been meddling with the mead meant for New Year! A quarter of the barrel gone so far!”
“No one would take half-fermented mead,” Holl said.
“I marked the barrel,” Marm announced. “Two fingers lower in the wood, the level is, than the last time I complained to you. That’s quarts gone, much more than the Wee Ones’ share. It’d be the young ones again, causing their mischief. Why wouldn’t they want a sugary drink? We’ve got to pay for soda. The bees’ bounty is free, but it comes only once a year.”
“There’s more honey,” Curran said, with a dismissive wave. “The hives are fair drippin’ with it. Start a new batch.”
“I can’t rob the hives now,” Marm explained. “They’re filling up for their wintering over. I’ll not treat the bees so badly!”
“Well, ye should ha’ kept a closer eye on yer barrels, then, if we canna do without.”
“Do you accuse me of neglect?” Marm demanded, his usual placid manner gone.
“Friends, please,” the Master said. Maura picked up Asrai and withdrew with her to a corner, out of the way. The little girl was wide-eyed with alarm.
“I’ll not have everyone in your clan attacking me. What if I demanded that each family brew for itself?”
“And bake for itsel’, too?” Curran asked. “Ye’ll do without bread if I’ve aye to say about it!”
“Oh, we will, eh? It’d be better than the flat cakes we had for breakfast!”
Holl winced, hoping that Keva couldn’t hear the insult. “Let’s calm down,” he said. “You’ll wake the house.”
“Calm down?” both Curran and Marm bellowed, rounding on Holl.
A tremendous crash interrupted them. They knew at once it came from the cellar.
“My mead!” Marm shouted, running for the stairs. Holl came right behind him. Others, alarmed by the noise, spilled out of the bedrooms, the sitting room, the garden, and piled down the stairs to see what was the trouble.
As soon as Holl reached the bottom of the stairs he smelled it. Not the sweet, yeasty aroma of liquor, but concentrated sweetness. His heart sinking, he yanked open the door to the canning room. Sure enough, the floor was littered with shattered crocks and jars. Their contents glistened with jewel colors in the fitful light from the lanterns carried by the other Folk just behind him.
“Marm!” Shelogh shrieked. “What have you done!”
“I have touched nothing,” Marm snapped, rounding on the older female.
Rose and Olanda pushed past the crowd into the room. Olanda looked as though she wanted to cry. Rose, more stoic, pressed her lips together, but her face was pale.
“All of the raspberry preserves,” the younger female groaned. “Half the apricot and half the apple butter from last summer. And the pickles! The crocks are split!”
“It is terrible,” Rose said. “Ve can ill afford to do vitout for the vinter.”
“What in the world were you doing bumbling around down there?” Bracey asked Marm.
“He’s always down here,” Tay said.
“Enough!” the Master announced. “Marm vas upstairs vit us vhen the noise came.”
“Maybe the shelf supports came loose,” Enoch suggested. He and Marcy stood on the stairs looking down over everyone else’s shoulders.
Vardin, a red haired male about his own age, looked up at him, his eyes narrowed. “Don’t you impugn my work. I secured those braces with good bolts and a charm beside. Maybe there were too many jars on them.”
“Never,” Rose said emphatically.
“What’ll we do?” Olanda asked, as the others helped her to her feet and began sweeping up glass and goo. “This would have fed us through the winter.” The Folk grunted agreement, looking at the ruin of a summer’s work.
“It’s not as bad as that,” Holl said, trying to soothe them. “We can buy more preserves. With the cash from the fancy goods we sell, we can have all the preserves and honey we wish.”
Almost as one, the crowd turned on him. “Bought jams?” Curran sputtered. “Oh, so you want to turn into one of the Big Ones, do ye? Eatin’ that filthy muck. Ye … Progressive, you!”
Holl flinched. “I only meant that it isn’t the tragedy it was once. We won’t starve. We’re no longer entirely reliant upon what we make and what we can put by.”
“You have to admit to our prosperity,” Enoch said.
Curran shook his fist at the Master’s son. “Ye can say that becayse ye’re well out o’ reach, young pup. Well, if it’s not this clumsy lout, then who is responsible?”
“It is not me!” Marm insisted. “I’ve been telling you that someone has been down there. No one’s paid me any at
tention.”
“No one’s been down there that shouldn’t be! It’s a curse!”
“Nothing’s down there,” Enoch said wearily. “Feel it. The charm’s not broken, not even tried. How could anything get in to harm us?”
“We must have let it! Who is meddling with the protections?”
Everyone began shouting. The Master raised his hands for silence. They ignored him.
“Hush,” he said, having to raise his voice until it could be heard above the din. “Vriends … please … QVIET! May I remind you that Keith Doyle is asleep in the barn. Howefer inferior his hearing may be to ours, he cannot fail to hear you if you all yell.”
Every mouth snapped shut.
“If you vill all go back about your business, ve vill try to determine the reason the pantry shelfs haf collapsed. Now, who vill clean up?”
Several of the Folk came forward to assist Olanda and Rose in mopping up the fragrant mass of goo.
The Master gave Holl a quick glance. “As I haf said, Keith Doyle is asleep in the barn.”
“I don’t need it spelled out for me,” Holl said, a little testily. “I have promised. I will say nothing about it.”
“I know. But now you must find out what it is. Observation is the best means to enlightenment. By the vay,” the Master said as he climbed the stairs after the others, “it is true. The others must learn to lif vit the inconveniences of their own prosperity.” His eyes glinted. He left Holl to supervise the mopping up.
The Folk all worked in silence. Everyone had his or her thoughts about what was occurring, and no one had the energy to start an argument. Once the broken crockery had been disposed of, and the old flagstone floor scrubbed to primeval newness, the others went up the stairs, blowing out most of the lanterns as they went, leaving Holl on his own in the cellar with a single light drawing a pool of gold around his feet.
Holl propped himself up against the wall and stared at the ceiling. He had no idea what he was waiting for, but it had seemed the right thing to stay. Above, he heard the hum and urgent static of the computer connecting to the Internet, meaning that the others were gathering together for the nightly reading of messages. He felt lonely sitting by himself. Maura had gone out to their small cottage to put Asrai to bed. He wished she or Enoch would come back and keep him company. Or Tay or Marm. They were good friends of his, and of each other, when they weren’t under such extraordinary strain. Most of all, he wished Keith was sitting with him. The Big student had a gift for accepting that which he could not understand.
Holl’s keen ears picked up his elder sister’s high voice reading aloud from the screen. Not that anyone needed to be read to, but it had come to be a tradition. A sympathetic note from Aine, one of the Old Ones, regarding a letter that Shelogh had sent about Big Folk snooping around outside the farm.
“‘Well, and if they’re attracted to something, you must get rid of it at once,’” Keva announced. “‘Big Folk are like ants. When one finds a tasty spill, it attracts others, like bad luck begetting bad luck.’ And there you are,” she said. “She thinks it’s bad luck afflicting us.”
“Ah,” some of the listeners, mostly Conservatives, intoned in agreement.
Holl fell into a kind of trance; his only active sense his hearing. He wished he could be up there with his friends and neighbors, voicing his own opinion. He could hear them, but they might as well have been on the moon as at the top of the stairs. An uncomfortable feeling of unbelonging dogged him, making him seem an alien imprisoned within hearing, but not sight, of his own kind. The isolation reminded him of the latest Joseph Campbell book he’d been reading, about vision quests and the search for a protective totem. The Folk could certainly use one. Aine was right. Sooner or later one of those meddling Big Folk was going to wander onto the land and into the house, and their secret would be out for once and all.
He heard a light plunk! and lowered his gaze to focus on the barrels. Was Marm right that one of the youths had been meddling with them? Holl unhooked one of the small lanterns off the wall and went to inspect them. The lids of the barrels fit snugly but were easy to lift off. Holl opened the first cask at the end of a row and took a deep sniff. The rich, appealingly heady scent of fermenting liquor rose up to meet him. That might tempt a young one to try it, but one sip of immature beer was usually enough to dissuade one from seeking a second. True to his word, the brewer had marked each cask on the inside. One or two did show a succession of dropping levels.
The fifth one he opened smelled sweeter than the others. This must be the mead. As Marm had said, over a quarter of the barrel was empty. Poor fellow. He never hurt a soul. All he sought to accomplish in life was making the best beer in the world—which he bid fair to do—and someone had gone fiddling with it. Holl thought he’d better see how many more of the casks had been tampered with, then he could go up and have a word with the Master.
He pried open the next barrel of mead.
A force knocked him flying. Holl banged into the wall and lay staring, half-stunned, as a gout of red and yellow flame erupted from the barrel and caromed off the ceiling like a billiard ball. It rebounded off the floor and bounced around the room, zooming so close to his ear he could hear it sizzle. Before he could scramble to his feet, it smacked into the far wall and seeped into it like a drop of water soaking into a dry sponge. Holl ran to investigate. The wall was hot, but there wasn’t a mark upon it. This was nothing he’d ever seen before, especially not from a barrel of beer.
“Look out!” he cried, dashing up the stairs. “There’s a fireball on the loose!”
“Vhat is this?” the Master asked, rising from his seat beside Catra, who sat at the computer keyboard. The others rose from their places around the computer screen.
“I think I’ve seen what broke the jars,” Holl explained. “Some kind of stray emanation. It was hot. It went into the cellar wall.”
“What was it?” Enoch asked.
Holl shook his head, trying to get a clear picture in his mind. “I don’t know. Some force.”
“In the walls?” asked Aylmer. “Vhere did it go?”
As he said that, the computer screen went dark. Dola and Borget hurried over to see what was wrong.
“The electricity is gone,” the boy said, looking up with concern. He grabbed a lantern and crawled underneath the table. “The wire is intact, but there is no power.”
Holl saw a ring of orange hiss along the cable. He jumped forward, grabbing the children by any part he could reach, and yanked them free just before the ball of flame poured out of the server.
The Master recovered his wits sooner than the others. He clapped his hands over the sides of the white box. Fire flew out from it, zipping away along the many wires. Bracey threw his arms around the monitor and CPU as his brother Aylmer flung himself across the keyboard to protect it. The flames doubled back upon themselves like a snake in a tunnel. Finding that they could not go back the way they’d come, they boiled up into the air, collecting into a roiling, crackling, red-yellow mass.
Several of the Folk who were talented with controlling fire converged on it, hands outstretched. It bounded up toward the ceiling, ricocheted, and flew towards the fuse box. Borget was nearest. Determination steeled his young face. He put himself in between the box and the ball of fire.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Holl cried, concentrating on the charm for snuffing out flame. Just before the fireball reached the boy, Holl flung himself in front of it. It struck him full in the chest. Holl staggered backwards, gasping, heat scorching the front of his torso and the cold of the steel fuse box burning his back. The floor slapped him in the backside. He’d slid down the wall without ever feeling his legs collapse.
“Uncle!” Borget cried, crawling to his side.
“Help him!” Rose cried, running over.
Holl waved her away, getting to his feet on his own. “I’m all right,” he said.
“I’ll get Maura,” Marcy said, starting toward the door.
�
��No!” Holl pleaded. “There’s no need to disturb her. I am fine. Is the computer all right?”
Borget scrambled to his feet. He and Dola went over to the cabinet and searched the cables and components inch by inch.
Rose gestured for someone to bring her a lamp. “Let me see,” she insisted, holding Holl by the shoulder. She bent to inspect the front of his shirt. “It feels a trifle crisp, but not burned. You did vell vith the dampening charm.”
“I didn’t use it,” Holl said. “It didn’t burn me.”
“What was it?” Curran demanded.
“I thought I saw eyes in the midst of the flame,” Olanda insisted.
“It acted with intelligence,” Enoch said.
“I perceived only a potential instinct for survival,” his father disagreed. “I vould be pressed to insist upon intelligence.” The two of them faced one another, looking profoundly alike in spite of the differences in hair color and age.
Dola piped up. “Where did it go?”
“Not into this boy,” Rose said, standing up and slapping Holl on the shoulder. “It just disappeared.”
“It’s in the house,” Candlepat said, shivering as she looked around the ceiling.
“We must root it out and prefent anything like it from happening again,” Aylmer said. “Ve vill increase the protections around the house. This proofs ve haf not adequate safeguards.”
“This could be kickback from the spell we already have around this place,” Holl said. “Keith Doyle remarked upon it himself. We are pouring so much energy into this area that it is almost certain to rebound upon us. I think we may have created our own monster.”
But no one listened to him. They were already arguing about the best way to reinforce the charm of protection. Enoch glanced at him over the crowd and shook his head. Holl gave up trying to get their attention. His chest hurt. It felt as though someone had struck him with a battering ram. Maura had a draught that would help him sleep. He pushed open the kitchen door.
“Got it!” Borget crowed triumphantly. Behind Holl, the computer sang to life. He stepped out into the night.
Advanced Mythology Page 12
