Terri Windling - [Bordertown 02] - Borderland

by Mark Alan Arnold (epub)

  Scooter woke up feeling awful. He had slept poorly. His neck was stiff; his legs throbbed; his back felt branded.

  He got out of the tree by the simple expedient of losing his grip and falling. He lay on the grass where he landed, feeling and flexing to see if anything was broken. He was almost disappointed to find that nothing was; it meant he could get up and walk.

  He did, albeit slowly.

  He remembered a line of Peter Gabriel’s as his muscles gradually loosened into the task of walking again. We get so strange across the border. Yeah, that fit—though he didn’t feel strange at all. What he felt was thirsty, hungry, sore, dirty, smelly, and emotionally numb. The only relief he got was when he emptied his bladder beside a tree.

  It was the Borderlands that got stranger as he went. Stranger and then more normal, in a sense: by day he saw that he was in woodlands, surrounded by high conifers and hardwoods. His calves parted long strands of yellow-green grass with faint hissing sounds as he walked. A cloud of butterflies rose ahead of him, fluttering yellow and black-edged wings that looked like back-to-back capital Bs.

  Scooter turned around, squinted, and raised a shielding hand to his forehead. All he could see of what had been city was a faint patch at the foot of the hills, a slim line of gray that graded, toward him into green. He had covered a lot of ground last night.

  Hell, he had walked to another world.

  After a mile or so he smelled something—something unidentifiable yet fresh, a cool something. . . .

  He realized it was moisture in the air—he smelled water.

  After a little searching he found it—a narrow stream loosely paralleling the path, zigzagging like the medical chart of a recovering patient. He knelt at the bank and sniffed, reflected sunlight leaving electric afterimages that followed his gaze.

  The water smelled all right—not that he would have the faintest notion what “bad” water smelled like—but had a reddish tinge. He thought about typhoid fever. Were there mosquitoes around here?

  Rhythmic lapping caught his attention. A hundred yards ahead, a deer had lowered its head and was drinking. Its dark brown eye looked to be watching him, but he couldn’t tell.

  He put both hands in. The water was cool. He scrubbed left hand with right, right with left, brought them out, wrung them, cupped, lowered his head, and began ladling water into his mouth.

  He had never known that water tasted so damn good.

  At his splashings the doe had darted off. Scooter didn’t even notice. He could feel the cool water tunneling its way into his stomach and cautioned himself not to drink so much or so fast that he got sick.

  He splashed his face, and it felt so good he decided hell with it, he’d take a frigging bath. The water was clear and shallow; the stream wasn’t very wide, and it didn’t seem likely that there were any local versions of piranha waiting to turn him into shredded beef. He scrubbed himself with torn-off clumps of grass, hissing as he washed his scabbed knee. The wound did not look infected, and that was something, anyhow.

  Feeling about seven hundred times better, Scooter emerged from the stream and squeegeed himself with the blade of his hand. He hung his clothes across his left shoulder, tied his shoelaces together, and draped his basketball shoes around his neck, then basked in the feel of sunlight drying his body, of soft grasses sliding beneath the soles of his feet.

  A boy stood by a tree, watching him.

  Scooter froze, realizing that the boy had been watching him for a while now. He was thin, with long hair the color of wet ashes. His eyes were large and arctic blue. He was barefoot and unclothed, young enough that pubic hair had not yet grown around his genitals. His penis was uncircumcised.

  For all of that, Scooter could not really tell if he was human.

  He made himself smile.

  The boy blinked.

  Scooter extended a hand, fingers spread.

  The boy shifted his hip, weight on back leg, front foot poised, as though ready to spring away at any moment. Scooter was reminded of the doe.

  “Hey,” he said.

  The boy darted away.

  Scooter blinked rapidly. He didn’t think a human being could move that fast.

  Maybe they couldn’t.

  He waited, but the boy did not return. Finally he shrugged and continued his southward journey.

  In the morning it lifted from the air mattress, went to the black curtains—Scooter had left them open and sunlight muted the thing’s dim glow—drifted across the room and into the bathroom, and hovered there for a few minutes.

  Seething browns and reds reflected in the bathroom mirror. It drifted into the book room, through the doorway into the studio (left and right portions of it passing through the wall itself), and finally through the front glass and out into daylight.

  It glided slowly east on Derrida. This time no one saw it pass.

  Along the way it fed on a dog and a wild cat.

  At Crescent Canyon it turned right, heading up into the hills.

  Scooter was aware of being shadowed. He couldn’t have said how he knew this, for no untoward sounds came from the woods, and he had not glimpsed the boy or anything else other than insects, birds, and another deer. But he was being stalked, and he felt it.

  He had debated following the stream, figuring there was a good chance that sooner or later he would come across a community built near it. But he had decided to follow the path, since it was a path—it probably led somewhere.

  After a few miles he could stand it no longer. He stopped walking and turned to face the row of trees. The wind blew through them with a waterfall sound. “All right,” he said. “Why don’t you just come out?”

  He waited.

  “Look, I know you’re following me. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  He listened hard, scanning the trees for signs of movement.

  “Fine,” he said. “Have it your way.” He turned to resume walking.

  The boy stood on the path in front of him, ten feet away. Scooter hadn’t heard a sound. The boy watched him warily, still looking as if he would bolt at any sudden or suspicious movement.

  Scooter kept still. “I'm looking for your people,” he said. “Do you understand me?”

  The boy cocked his head to one side. On the path, in the direct light, his eyes were an amazing blue.

  “Do you understand me?” Scooter repeated. “I’m looking for your people. I need help.” He searched his memory for the old man’s name. Noo-nee something? A “w” in it somewhere, near the end. .. . “Aune’wah!” he said suddenly. “Aune’wah—understand? I’m looking for the old one, Aune’wah. Grim. Do you understand Grim?”

  The boy frowned.

  Aune’wah’s son, the boy he had seen the other day on Monaghie. What was his name? Grim had mentioned it. A lot of “a” sounds in it, and strange stops. A “k” . . . Arkin? No, no—and he said it as he remembered it: “Aarka’an.” He stumbled over the glottal stop separating the last two syllables, then said it again more accurately: “Aarka’an. Aune’wah. Can you take me to them?”

  “Aarka’an,” said the boy.

  “Yeah, yeah—Aarka’an! Can you take me to him? Can you help me?”

  “Inee Aarka’an kevesh’t omaay. Oomani Aarka’an?”

  Scooter shook his head, a finger going to his ear. “I don’t understand.”

  The boy pointed into the woods, toward where the stream ran. “Aarka’an,” he said. He pointed at Scooter, then into the woods. “Aarka’an oomani.”

  Scooter nodded eagerly. He gestured for the boy to lead on, and the boy, skin so pale and milky in the sunlight, turned and walked into the woods. He moved much faster than Scooter could, and he didn’t make a sound.

  Scooter followed.

  At the knoll on Monaghie it tasted the flavors of electric colors, felt the traces of the scathing sheets of sound and keening notes that had so recently been given form here. It brushed by the husk of the coyote it had fed on yesterday—so drained that not even flies buzzed
around it—and tasted the traces of the rage that had created it. This was the birthing place, the place where rage and loss and need had formed music and given it shape.

  It sped down the road, hurtled past the empty houses, and wound quickly along the curves.

  It enveloped the smashed form of a Porsche by the side of the road, and there tasted the dark-shifting oranges that were the traces of pain. A few minutes later it lifted, continued to the intersection of Monaghie and Crescent Canyon, waited where Scooter had waited, as if reading the signs itself.

  HAUNTED FOREST!

  It turned right, heading deeper into the Borderlands. Forces were different in this place, and it drew energy from the fabric of reality around it now. The further into the Borderlands it went, the stronger it felt.

  There was a trace here, too, of what it sought.

  The need strengthened, the hunger grew.

  There were no buildings, no streets, no structures of any kind that he could see—but it was a community. It was populated by more of the boy’s kind—-a tall, thin, white-skinned people with long, tapering, sensitive ears and large, almond-shaped eyes.

  The boy led Scooter past a group of adults sitting in a circle on the grass. They were chanting in low voices. To Scooter’s ear it sounded arrhythmic and dissonant. The chant was disturbing, belied by the smiling faces of the chanters. Most of them were nude; some wore clothes; some of these were blue jeans and T-shirts.

  They stopped chanting and stared as Scooter walked by.

  Sitting with his back against the smooth gray bole of a tree the size of a sequoia was an old man faced by a semicircle of children. He seemed to be teaching them how to weave baskets out of some material that glittered in places. Scooter did a double take when he saw that the old man was using no fibers or strands or straws to make the basket; he merely weaved with his pale, thin, big-jointed hands, and the basket took shape from his fingers as though woven from the air itself.

  He stopped his weaving and stared with bright, hooded eyes as Scooter passed by.

  Human clothing seemed much more prevalent among the young.

  Two girls with cotton-white hair stood high on the thick branch of a tree, stick fighting with the thigh bones of a large animal.

  A woman wearing a loincloth pointed her finger at a gray rabbit standing on its rear paws near a clump of thorny bushes. The rabbit stood still while she approached, knelt before it, and passed a hand over its head to put it to sleep. The woman turned the rabbit onto its back and began skinning it with a Gerber hunting knife.

  Wider and deeper here, the stream cut through this part of the woods. Two men—one of them fat, one of them skeletal, one of them brilliantly whiteheaded, the other dull gray, both with hair reaching near their buttocks—reclined by the bank, conversing in their vowel-rich language. Two cane poles were thrust into the bank ahead of them. One of the lines began swinging slightly in the water, then was tugged sharply, curling the tip of the pole. The thin man glanced at it, made a casual, beckoning gesture, and the pole flung itself back to land a small bass on the bank beside them, flopping in mercurial flashes beside the still forms of other fish.

  Despite his incredulousness, Scooter’s stomach growled.

  Near a huge tree Scooter’s guide stopped and pointed. Ahead, a group of adolescents was clustered around the trunk. They held wood chisels against it and pounded them with Black and Decker hammers. They seemed to be carving a figure into the tree.

  “Aarka’an,” said Scooter’s guide. And ran away like a gazelle.

  Without the boy, Scooter felt awkward, panicky, alien. This was their world, not his, and he didn’t understand half of what he saw.

  He walked nearer to the young men and women shaping the tree trunk and cleared his throat. They stopped and turned to stare at him.

  One of them was perhaps seventeen years old. The tips of her ears poked up past hair colored copper that fell to a waist aimost thin enough to span with both hands, a waist that flared around hips to frame a white tuft at her genitals. She was milky-skinned, strong-jawed, pale eyed, and the most beautiful woman Scooter had ever seen. She stared back at him unblinkingly, frankly, and Scooter felt his face grow hot.

  He looked away at a voice, and it was a moment before he realized that it had spoken English. “You are the guitar player.”

  Crow-colored hair, bristly on one side, lenghtening to touch the pronounced collarbone on the other, blue jeans, long-toed bare feet, hammer in slim, long-nailed hand, he regarded Scooter with eyes like balls of black glass.

  “Yeah . ..”

  For no reason he could account for, Scooter found the group frightening.

  Over Aarka’an’s shoulder Scooter glimpsed a carved patch of trunk. It looked like ... a hand?

  “You are looking for the woman, I think,” said the boy. “Arrux’ayann? She got here yesterday.”

  “No, I came to find your—” He stopped. Arrux’ayann? His pulse quickened. “Roxanne?” he asked. “Roxanne; she’s here? She came here?”

  (Don’t try to find me, she had written. Because you won’t.) “Yesterday. You can’t see her, though. She asked sanctuary.”

  “Why not?” asked Scooter. “I have to—”

  “I told you. She asked sanctuary.” Pale lids lowered on eyes so black that Scooter could not distinguish pupils. “She has many skills to offer us.”

  “Your—your father,” said Scooter. “He came to me, he came across the Borderlands to find me. To warn me about something. I have to see him. Can I talk to him?”

  “He told you about your music,” said Aarka’an.

  “Yeah, he—”

  “I know what he said.” There was no mistaking the contempt in his tone. “He is both right and wrong.”

  “Something’s happened,” said Scooter. “I—I played my guitar in the hills, where you saw me the other day. I ... I made something, something I think is looking for Roxanne. I think it’ll keep looking until it finds her. I think it will kill her when it does. It’ll come here.”

  The black eyes regarded him. Scooter could not read the boy’s expression.

  “Please,” he said. “I need help.”

  They were all looking at him blankly. Finally Aarka’an handed his hammer and chisel to the boy next to him. “I’ll take you to him,” he said.

  Scooter felt something unknot in his chest. “Thank you,” he said.

  Aarka’an stepped away from the tree, and Scooter stared.

  Carved into the bole was a face, a contorted face with open mouth and clenched eyes, with lines of agony drawn in at the cheeks and the corners of the eyes. Fingers curled outward; lines of palm seemed to be emerging. It looked like a man embedded in a tree, frozen in the midst of trying to claw his way out.

  It was horrible.

  “What . . . ?” asked Scooter, then stopped. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  But Aarka’an had read the question, and he smiled. “That?” he asked. He looked at his friends, and they returned his smile. He looked back at Scooter. “A joke,” he said. “A prank.”

  And they laughed.

  It paused at the upturned bicycle in the road, enveloped it, tasted the magenta of frustration. The forces around it affected it the way fresh air affected a man emerging from a smoke-filled room. It drank it in, was sustained, invigorated, replenished.

  It left the bike and continued along the road that turned to grass lined by telephone poles that turned to trees and cars that became clumps of bush, heading toward the fusion of bank building and Yggdrasill tree.

  Aarka’an paused beside a huge, willowlike tree with fronds so dense that Scooter could not see the trunk within. He glanced at Scooter, clapped his hands once, and let out a high, wavering note, then held a section of willow frond aside and gestured for Scooter to enter.

  The old man sat inside, coyote eyes and brushed-aluminum hair faintly luminous in the dimness. The dense, drooping fronds formed a dome about them, cool with shade.

  The old
man sat in a natural chair formed by a curve of root emerging from the earth near the trunk of the great tree. His hands were held ahead and to either side of his face, arched with tension. Something flickered between them, some thin strand of luminescence that his eyes reflected.

  He looked up when Aarka’an entered behind Scooter and moved the section of frond back to curtain the sunlight. He brought his hands together, turned palm against palm, and made a casting-away motion. When he separated his hands again, there was nothing between them, nothing held in them.

  He said something in a low voice. He did not seem surprised to see Scooter.

  Scooter looked questioningly at Aarka’an. The boy nodded at his father—whom he looked nothing like, whom he looked, in fact, with his jet-black hair and eyes, the opposite of—and translated. “ ‘What you make belongs to you,’ ” he said. “ ‘What have you made?’ ” “You know,” said Scooter, ignoring Aarka’an as he translated. “Yeah, all right, I ... I don’t understand it, but I made something on Monaghie. It’s dangerous. I think it wants to kill someone . .. someone I love. I just found out she’s here, with you people.” He brushed hair out of his eyes. “I want to know if I can fight this thing, how I can fight it.”

  He waited for Aarka’an to finish.

  The old man nodded and rubbed his smooth chin— they didn’t seem to grow facial hair—with a long-nailed, long-fingered hand. He spoke.

  “ ‘When you made your music,’ ” translated Aarka’an, “ 'what were you thinking? What did you feel?’ ” Scooter took in a deep breath and held it, remembering, then let it out. “My girlfriend left me. I—I didn’t know it was coming, you know? I was hurt, but I was mad.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not strong enough. I wanted to tear things up, to break things. Oh, man, I wanted to scream until my lungs ripped open. I wanted to hit her, but at the same time all I wanted was for her to come back. I wanted to understand why she left me.” He shrugged. “There’s lots more, but I don’t know how to put it into words.”

  Aune’wah asked a question of his son and nodded at the lengthy reply. He leaned back in his root chair, staring at a space above Scooter’s head. Scooter shot a questioning look at Aarka’an, but the boy put a warning finger to his lips and shook his head.