He had thought to take some time before actually selling anything. Touch his grandmother’s things, maybe stay in her home a while to get his bearings, figure out what to do with himself. With Marie.
“Can I meet this person?”
“This is not... desirable to the other party. Mister Dela Cruz, you said last week you would probably want to sell the house, and that you have no room for the collections. You must realize it’s a valuation that’s at the high end of what’s possible.”
He had to think, but his thoughts kept drifting to stupid things like playing with tops in the street.
The platters of food arrived and Bastian tore into them in between moments of explaining the other documents: two different appraisals for the land and another appraisal by an art historian for the artifacts, a certified true copy of the title, and finally, the check with its long line of zeroes.
The attorney did not eat so much as ravage his plate. The look of Bastian’s glasses was savage, the way the steam from the food condensed on the lenses, little droplets reflecting and refracting, micro-lenses, micro-worlds.
The smell.
Ren flipped through the listings, the prices for items that he had not seen in so very long.
Marie would say he was being a sentimental dolt. No. That wasn’t fair. That is what he thought she would say, but one could know another person better than anyone else and still be mystified by her choices, her moods, her thoughts.
He ought to call. He wanted her advice.
An enormous wad, all at once! To fix this, pay for that. It would wipe out the debt and let them start over, clean.
Maybe stop the arguments.
“Can I see the house? After the funeral, tomorrow. Then I’ll sign, you’ll turn over the check, and I’ll be gone with the afternoon bus. Would that be acceptable to the other party?”
“Certainly! I was only instructed that you had to sign while you were in town on this trip.”
Bastian took a few gulps of water. Smacked his lips in appreciation. Lipstick of fat and grease marked the glass.
“Are you sure you won’t have anything? These sausages can’t be beat, and let me tell you, clients have treated me to lots of fancy breakfasts in lots of fancy places.”
The undercurrent of rot still came and went. It must have all been in Ren’s head, but imagined or not, it was overpowering enough to drag him to the edge of fainting, to bring forth visions of a thing he could not see, except for a shadow reaching across the light.
He could not eat to that stench. The psychotic break diet. He would have to tell Marie about it. Lose your mind and lose weight too.
“I’ll pass. So, I’ll see you at the funeral?”
Bastian nodded.
“I think I’ll be going now. Haven’t been here in forever.”
“Out to explore the town? Enjoy! You know, some of these houses are almost three hundred years old. Cultural treasures, and nobody in the big city knows they’re here. There are stories about every street here! The Japanese executing one family in the plaza, stuff like that. One of the Spanish Governor Generals stayed at the Mayores home, you know! History in every stone.”
Unbearable. Ren’s eyes stung. He choked his farewells, fled through the street exit.
Outside, the breeze from the sea was strong, and that and the warmth of the morning sun burned the rot down to a dull echo in his nostrils, rather than a thick, choking sludge boiling over in his cranium.
“Crazy brain,” he muttered, looking around the plaza, and up at the sky, and breathing deep of the air.
If not for his neurochemistry misreporting this awful odor nobody else seemed to smell, he’d be dancing on his toes, ordering flowers for Marie using the hotel’s free wifi, whooping it up and laughing at the blessing from nowhere that was this mysterious cousin’s money.
Money wasn’t happiness, but not having it certainly caused misery.
There was still the underlying thing that he and Marie had stopped talking about, that tension as the years had gone by and they had pretended to be happy.
At least they would keep their home. Life could stay normal, and maybe after dealing with the immediate impending disasters, there might be money left for breathing space. Time to figure things out. He could bring her here, to where his childhood had been happiest.
Ren swayed, walking down the main street.
He missed Marie. Even if most of what they were now was conflict and disruption.
Deeper than the shadows under her eyes, behind the crow’s feet and the lines from frowns and smiles, he still saw the girl sitting beside the lagoon, reading Pale Fire and listening to Twisted Sister on a battered Walkman. Subversive, yet proper with her clipped speech, with her elaborate black dresses with frills and petticoats when she was not in ripped jeans and punk T-shirts. Standing behind her as she’d filled a water jug at a fountain, drawn forward, magnetic, the first time he’d touched her hair.
Twenty years in the blink of an eye, gone by.
What had happened?
Regret! An ordinary life, pretty much. No tragedies, just regular drama. Medium, not large.
The air was cleanest coming from the sea, so that’s the direction he chose. Maybe the barbecue stand would still be there. Except the stall would be manned by Mang Gordo’s son.
The urge struck, a senseless desire to refuse the deal. Instead, to work out some payment plan and—what? Buy out this mysterious cousin? Then he and Marie could move to this place, live out the rest of their lives in idyllic quiet?
Total fantasy. Even here, life was not perfect.
Most of the townsfolk were old, except for the swarms of the very young running about, playing under an endless Saturday sky. Teens and young adults went off to the city for school and work just like Ren had. There were few jobs and opportunities here. And not even an hour’s drive away, there were insurgents hiding out in the mountains!
This was not paradise.
Here, though, a scrawny kid in shorts and sando and slippers was running past him, poking a narrow wooden wheel on ahead of himself with a stick. Everything in sight was a postcard, a photo waiting to be uploaded to Facebook.
The same places lined the path down to the beach. One store had those tiny, curvy glass bottles of Coca-Cola. Boxes of buko pie and espasol. There was the chess club. No air-conditioning in there and so in the alley beside it, where there was shade, the sharp-eyed men with leathery faces battled while their friends made bets on the outcomes. To his left, he passed the bar for the fishermen. The nets hanging from the sign were new; the wood of the sign was cracked and faded. Only the bookstore was gone, instead it sold sculptures and furniture carved from the same trees up on the mountain.
Where the cobblestones became sand, Ren took off his shoes and socks. He smelled pork grilling on charcoal, closed his eyes and listened to the waves breaking on the shore.
Gordo’s shack was still there, bamboo stakes and hollow blocks and a corrugated stainless steel roof.
Ren bought a paper bag of half a dozen sticks of spicy-sweet meat and a plastic bag heavy with three beers. Gordo Junior looked just like Senior, and all was right with the world.
The sand was fine but it had countless fragments of shell and coral that were harsh on soft feet. A familiar sensation. He walked closer to the water and sat on the biggest limestone boulder on the beach and laid the shoes on his left and the beers on his right. He ate and drank and was content. He had spent Saturdays just like this as a kid. Well, he would not have been drinking beer....
Yesterday never happened. He had just slipped. Mentally.
He threw the trash into a waste bin next to Gordo’s, returned the empty bottles to Junior, and walked back to lay flat on that broad white rock. He undid his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and watched the clouds, pleasantly empty.
#
“Mister, you can’t sleep there.”
Small hands, shaking him. Ren groaned when he opened his eyes. Familiar face, round and small, bright red
lips, proud nose, predator eyes. She wore a yellow tanktop with sunflowers, and above those bare shoulders, black wings twitched.
“Mister, get up! You’ll be fine if you’re awake, but if you’re asleep, they’ll eat you.”
He sat up. A dozen women in white glided across the tops of the waves. He could see through them to the lights of a ship in the distance. Under their feet, the sea, and under the sea, neon violet streaks, the Other side’s plankton. Deeper in the water, darker shapes swam, half-men, dancing with the ladies above. The water was so clear, he could see the shadows of a sunken ship even deeper, where the coral was.
So, here he was again. This night, he wasn’t afraid. And he wondered why.
He stood and stretched, back popping, firecrackers along his spine.
“Thanks.” Ren glanced down, stared. “You’ve got legs tonight.” Denim shorts stopped at her knees.
She smiled and did a pirouette, cheating, flapping her wings to aid the spin and to balance. Her toes barely touched the ground. “I like the feel of walking, sometimes,” she said.
In another life, he and Marie would have chosen differently. They would have had a child, and that child could have been like this girl.
“Mister, you should see a Doctor. You keep passing out and whatnot.”
“I didn’t faint this time. I.... took a nap on the beach and it was longer than I meant for it to be.”
“If you say so. Just saying. I mean, they’re not mean,” she waved to the dancing figures too, “but if you leave food in front of the hungry, some bites are sure to be taken.”
Ren considered. “Listen, you know who I am. You know more about me on this side than I do.”
She rolled her eyes. He supposed teenagers were the same everywhere. “Of course! With that name and the charms put into your skin, pretty obvious. What your grandmother did—come on! She got you out of the Mayores’ dungeon, burned down half the town, killed their thugs.... Folks here tell their kids stories of the Iron Queen’s Ride to scare ‘em straight!”
The Iron Queen. If Gram had known, she would have loved it. Hang on now.
“The Mayores?”
“They were the kings here. She cast them down for taking you. I’m starting to worry about you, Ren. You got amnesia or something?”
On his side of things, the Mayores were the perfectly ordinary filthy rich clan that controlled Santa Odetta and the five towns around it. They had held this area since before the Spaniards came, though they had changed their names and sworn allegiance when they had seen what gunpowder could do. Politically-connected and financially-savvy, they had survived wars and imperialism and conflicts and changes in politics, power intact, for centuries. Gram’s tales kept sliding up, surprising him.
The girl talked about the changes after the Mayores’ power was broken on this side.
“Most of the folks are y’know. Grateful. Things weren’t exactly cool under those goons. But your gran, she was terrifying powerful, she had charms of all kinds, proof against fire and water, stone and steel. She knew weird Names for Power, different from the Names we use. They say she or her mother must have learned from folk in other lands, because we’d never seen her kind of Art. If people knew who you were. Could be kinda tense.”
Gram had been some kind of warrior-witch!
The images came to him as she spoke.
More than just moments of running in the forest.
He saw Gram holding a blazing star in her hand. He saw her mouth move and could not hear the word, but he felt a ripple in the air and saw beasts of scales and fangs and wings, giants and tiny things and many-shaped things and shapeless things and ghostly things all smashed into the ground. Cyclops and spirits and goblins. They fell to Gram’s bullets and words and blade.
“You don’t say.”
Gram had said that their ancestors had been scholars for generations, back in Europe. Some scholarship!
“The civilized types around the town proper might treat you nice, but idiots in the mountains might challenge you, see if you’ve got the stuff. Stuff I can plainly see you don’t got.”
“That bad?”
She shrugged. “I think so. On the other hand, even though we all felt it when your gran passed, nobody’s been stupid enough to mess with her house up in the forest.”
Ren did up the buttons on his shirt. It was a warm evening. He did it to keep his hands from twitching in his pockets.
“She had a house? On this side?”
“Duh! She’s from here! She grew up on this side. A lazy, fun-loving girl, then there was trouble with the Mayores’ boys and her mother got MAD and took her away. Guess she learned her studies seriously from then on, because boy, when you got taken and she came back, she was the Wrath of the Deep Sky; she broke the Powers of the mountain and the forest and the sea.”
The girl’s eyes were lit up the whole time she talked about Gram. She relished thoughts of what Gram could do, Ren realized. Gram was this girl’s hero. That made her a little bit like himself.
“After the whole thing, she’d visit sometimes. Said she felt sorry for us, and so she helped rebuild. I think she just came back to make sure folks behaved. Made sure no more kids from your town went missing, no more pranks with mutilated animals and lost travelers, that kind of stuff.”
What he ought to do was stay on the beach where the monsters were friendly, maybe get some more beers, and chill until dawn. He was pretty sure he would end up back on the sun-side, safe and sound.
“Listen. Uh, what’s your name?”
“Leylin. But you call me Double-El, or LL. Only Pop calls me Leylin.”
“LL, would you happen to know anyone who could guide me out to the Iron Queen’s home?”
Her nose twitched and she shook her head. Then she grinned, and her eyelashes did this little flutter, like she was going to be sly but letting him know that she knew he knew. “Everybody’s too scared to go there. Well, I mean, I’m not scared, but I’d need some persuasion!”
He did not even know if his money was worth anything here.
“What kind of persuasion would work for you, LL?”
She took a breath. Her wings flapped, and her feet came an inch off the ground.
In a small voice, she said, “If you could get me a copy of that last Harry Potter book, that would be sufficient. What? Don’t laugh. There’s not a lot of traders that work both sides. The stores always run out!”
She stamped her foot hard. Then her torso came free of her legs.
“Ack! Look what you made me do!”
He couldn’t help himself, and kept laughing as she pulled her legs back on, like a loose pair of pants.
#
So it was that Ren Dela Cruz, ex-businessman, schoolteacher, forty years old, found himself following a young, winged, bipedal-optional girl up a steep, winding trail.
He could not see in the dark as well as Leylin, and often stumbled. He fell and cut his hand on a rock, and when a shaft of moonlight came through a break in the trees and set her fangs shining he could see her nostrils flare and eyes go red. Yes, she was not just a precocious teen from a small town. She could eat him alive. She would have, if she had not grown up in a time after Gram had laid waste to the countryside.
The smell of the rot was back.
His sanguine state of mind eroded. The forest was alive, awake with noise. Leaves rustled, branches creaked, and there were the drums that LL said were hags’ drums, and howling she said was just some dog-types running, pretending to hunt.
“Don’t worry about those brats. They’re just kids. They wouldn’t know how to bring down a rabbit. It’s the ones you can’t hear who are dangerous.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
Was he walking up a trail in an alternate land, hoping to find something of his grandmother’s? A kind of gunslinger-sorceress? Or was he completely nuts, following a hallucination?
“Don’t fall behind!” Leylin’s wings flapped when she was agitated, lifting her e
ven when she meant to stay on the ground.
Hour after hour. When he rested, breathing harsh and loathing the extra pounds, she waited.
After Ren had received a dozen mosquito bites and three more cuts from falling and getting whipped in the face by branches he didn’t see, she stopped and said, “We’re here.”
The trees leaning in over them opened up into a clearing.
“Fantastic,” he said, panting. Bent over, hands on his knees.
“Uh. There’s someone waiting for you though.”
Yes. He had known it, expected it. The smell had been growing thicker. Foul as Ren thought a mouthful of maggots might be. He remembered weeks spent growing houseflies in jars with a mash of rotting bananas for a science project. It’s why the smell was so intimately familiar.
Reeeeeeen.
“Hello, cousin.”
Youuu rmmembrrrrr.
They had met once before, in a dungeon cell. Ren on the dark, cold, wet side of the bars. His cousin on the other.
A Mayores cousin. A son born from a daughter born from what Gram had never spoken of, but Ren now suspected was either rape, or a highly inappropriate relationship between a young girl, and Araya, a privileged Mayores scion.
If Ren looked worse these days, balding and pudgy, Danilo was a corpse that just didn’t care about that state of being. The blackened flesh was putrid and crawling with beetles and other wriggling life. The sockets were empty.
Ren sensed, somehow, that his cousin only saw through the bugs crawling in him, only spoke through their coordinated buzz.
“You didn’t need to do that. Back then.”
Nooot faaair. Frooom heeer blood, gooot enough gifffft to liiive for a whiiile. Nooot enough tooo liiive weeeell. You haaad so muuuch mooore, and dooon’t eeeven uuuse iiiit.
Danilo, the Mayores boy everyone had heard about. A rare case of cancer. He was supposed to have died, but didn’t. They had taken Ren, to bleed Giftedness out of him, to make the other well.
Leylin’s wings snapped shockingly wide, ten feet from tip to tip. She exclaimed, “What? This shrimp’s got barely a drop left to him! No offense, Ren.”
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 29
