“Don’t be so sure.”
One of her arms was going round me next. And then she was helping me back to my feet. Something seemed to be wrong with the way my legs were working. So Cass propped me firmly up, then guided me inside. It’s a tribute to her strength and determination that we made it the whole way to my office without even pausing.
I was starting to calm down by the time we got there. All the same, she put me in the only unbroken chair and then brought me a glass of water. She was gazing at me closely, real concern apparent in every pore.
I described to her, once my breathing had steadied, my entire encounter with Saruak.
“And you think he’s for real?” she asked.
“From what I saw, yes.”
And Woodard Raine already believed he was a genuine threat.
She examined that notion carefully. “If he was capable of taking this town over, surely he’d have already done it?”
Which was a good point. What was stopping him?
“I said it last night, Cassie. He seems to be testing us.”
She stuck out her lower lip. “Which means he doesn’t fully know …?”
“What the people here are capable of. The adepts in particular.”
“He’ll keep on coming at us, then.”
I nodded. “Till he knows our limits. And is confident that he can win.”
There was an unfazed glint in Cassie’s eyes. Faced with anything that posed a threat, she tried to find the positive side.
“If we have weaknesses, he’s got to have some too.”
I’d already figured that one out.
“Any clue what they might be?”
“I don’t have the first idea,” I told her. “But I know someone who might.”
Which only made her look unhappy again. Worse than she had when I’d consulted with Woody.
It was time for me to go and see the Little Girl.
I drove off from the square and headed west, passing along streets that were only moderately busy. And then, when I left the center, not busy at all. More reminders of the impending ceremony were visible around me as I cruised along the empty avenues. Posters were displayed in storefronts, had been stuck to trees along the roadside. When I passed a schoolyard, too, another large banner had been draped up there.
Between Garnerstown and Sycamore Hill – not physically, you understand, but in terms of status – lies a district known simply by the name of its main street, Marshall Drive. Not as low-rent as Cray’s Lane, nor as high-toned as the mansions, it’s a part of town that can be summed up with the one word ‘comfortable.’ It had no pretensions of being anything else. A classier version of my own neighborhood, in other words. The cars sitting on the driveways were all new and brightly polished. The flowers in the front yards were expensive, cultivated ones. I even caught a glimpse of an occasional pool out back. A contented place then, maybe even a little smug around the edges. But the last place in the world you would expect to come across a strange phenomenon like the one I was about to visit.
My gut was still flipping gently. And the backs of my eyeballs felt raw, like what I’d seen had actually seared them. Every time I blinked, I got another flash of that last image. Saruak in his true form, all fumes and fangs and heavily-scaled tentacles. So I tried to stop blinking as much as I could.
This was a low lying part of town. Beyond its furthest rooftops, the beginnings of the forest could be seen. That was where the Landing ended. A couple of hawks were circling out there, reminding me uncomfortably there was another world beyond our own.
I went by a young mother pushing a stroller. She had auburn hair, but was slim and reminded me a little of Alicia. Most attractive women did. I drove quietly down Bethany Street until I finally came to a halt outside the house that I was looking for. Number 51.
Just stared at it silently, at first. I always do. There was a Chrysler parked in front of the garage. Neat drapes at the windows, and the lawn was trimmed – by who? There were strands of ivy on the walls, but not too much of it. Nothing in the tiniest, in fact, to differentiate this place from all the others on the street. What it contained within its walls, though … there was nothing normal there.
The front door was hanging slightly ajar, with no lights on beyond it. I wondered if it was always this way, or if it just came open for my benefit. Then I pushed it gently back and paused a moment on the threshold.
I could see the hallway and part of the living room from here. Nothing remarkable about them in the slightest. Maplewood furniture, framed prints of classic paintings, and a vase of artificial flowers on a cabinet. Exactly what you’d reckon on seeing in a home like this.
But whose had it been? Who’d originally lived here?
I’d searched the whole place several times, and turned up nothing. Not a checkbook or a document, a credit card, a bill. Nothing with a name on it. But surely someone had to own this place.
Right now, there wasn’t time for any idle speculation. I went quickly up the stairs, then headed for the nursery.
It was at the rear of the house, overlooking the large, neatly tended backyard. I found myself looking at another door set slightly at a gap. An electric blue glow was spilling out across one wall. It was a steady one. Light cast by the most powerful magic almost never flickers.
Oh yes, the Little Girl was home.
She never seemed to leave.
She’d known that I was on my way, of course. How could she not? She sees more than the rest of the Landing’s inhabitants combined, including Woodard Raine. And as I stepped into her room – becoming suddenly immersed in that blue glow – I felt the skin across my entire body tingle. Felt the hair lift on my scalp a touch. My clothing clung to my body more tightly than before. There was a strange energy in here, all deriving from one source.
Oddly, it was a pretty normal nursery apart from that. Pretty much what you’d expect for a child of her age. There were dolls scattered everywhere, houses to put them in. There were fluffy toy ducks and rabbits and a rather battered teddy. A My Little Pony duvet lay across the bed. A mobile dangled from the ceiling, silver moons and leaping moo-cows.
The wallpaper was fancy, a cartoonish depiction of the sky, with billowing white clouds, songbirds, and a rainbow.
But the curtains – in the same design – were firmly closed. And had been ever since I’d started coming here.
The room’s occupant, you see, did not need anything so mundane as a window.
At the direct center of the nursery, floating some four feet off the thick pile shag, was the Little Girl herself.
As usual, she was rotating placidly, with her eyes firmly closed. You wanted to ask her, ‘Hey, what are you doing up there?’
Apart from the two noticeable facts that she was airborne and emitting colored light, she was just a child of first grade age, fair-skinned and with pale blond hair that hung down past her shoulders. She was clad in a blue gingham dress, white socks, and buckled-up white shoes.
Her arms hung limply by her sides. Her expression was smooth and calm, as if she might be sleeping, although I knew that she was not. Her long, fine lashes quivered almost constantly. And beneath her lids, her eyeballs were moving the entire time.
Her lips twitched. Her expression tautened slightly. Maybe she’d been thinking about something else, and had only just remembered I was there.
“Hello, Mr. Ross.” It was her usual greeting.
Her voice always startled me slightly. It had an echoing quality to it, as though the words were being spoken several times and layered across each other. And it sounded far more distant than it really was. A sound like someone calling to you from the far depths of a cave.
She kept on turning, turning. Her small face disappeared from view a moment, and then swiveled back again.
“There’s no need for the ‘Mr.’”
I had told her that before.
But her brow only furrowed. “No. That wouldn’t be polite.”
Okay then, I thou
ght, have it your way. I already knew that she could hear that, exactly as clearly as if I had said the words. It’s not the most pleasant of sensations, realizing there’s someone rooting around in your mind the whole time you are in their presence. But I’d gotten used to it.
I could only stare up at her, wondering precisely what she was. When we had first come across her, Cass and I had canvassed every house in this whole neighborhood. And nobody – just no one – had the slightest memory of any family at this address. We had gone to the Town Hall as well and scoured the records. There were none for this place. Not so much as a passing reference to 51 Bethany Street.
It seemed she had simply popped out of thin air one day. Where were her parents, if she even had any? And how had she become this way? I was still no closer to uncovering any answers. But there was one thing I knew for sure.
The Little Girl could help me in ways few other people could.
“You’ve come about the bad things?” she asked me suddenly.
And I nodded. “Yes.”
“What happened last night.” Her face puckered up a moment. “It … it made me very sad.”
“You saw it?”
“I saw the start of it. Then I got upset and looked away. But I could still feel it happening.”
That was the weirdest thing about her. She seemed to possess enormous power, but she only ever remained in her room and watched. She never went outside or intervened. I had often wondered … was she trapped here?
“Do you know why it happened?” I asked her.
“I suspect you’re right. Our vulnerabilities are being probed.”
“He wants to see if anyone here can fight back?”
“Yes.” Her lips twisted into a brief, rather bitter smile. “He was surprised when Miss Cassie managed to hurt his Dralleg.”
“Not too badly, though.”
The Girl considered that and nodded. Her expression became blank again.
“Is he capable of worse?” I asked.
“Certainly, he comes from a race of massive power.”
“From the spirit world.”
“Yes. He is a tree spirit, and an extremely ancient one, born out of a poison oak and the start of the first forests. The Iroquois knew all about him and were very cautious of him. Rightly so.”
“And?”
“He respected them, as much as he was able. But us?” And she frowned. Did she regard herself as part of humankind? “He regards us as interlopers, and despises us. Loves to trample us like ants. He’s spent the last few centuries traveling across the nation, visiting communities and bringing death down on them. He does it for sport.”
Which all sounded bad enough. But he wasn’t merely visiting, in this case. He had told me he was planning to stay. Which brought us to the million dollar question.
“And can he be stopped?”
She turned that over carefully, her brow becoming tense. The creases made her look far older than she seemed to be. Shadows overtook her face. Her body seemed to blur for a moment, its outlines going indistinct.
Then she became simply a little child again.
“His power must be fed, if he is going to perform great feats of magic,” she told me.
What exactly did that mean?
“He draws it from us, in large part.”
I was still waiting for a proper explanation. The Girl seemed to understand that. Her hands suddenly twitched and lifted a few inches, and her head tipped slightly back. And I could almost sense her peering outward, despite the fact her eyelids were still shut.
“It is … a matter of belief.”
Uh-huh?
“A matter of perception. The more that we allow Saruak to dominate our actions and our thoughts, the stronger he’ll become. Bending us all to his will, even though we do not know it – that’s what truly nourishes him. The larger he swells in our consciousness, the more powerful he’ll grow.”
I swallowed. “Could you be a little more specific?”
“Have you ever had a mildly bad dream?”
I remembered what the Penobscot had called him. That was where he liked to dance.
“Yes, plenty.”
Since none of my dreams were mild these days, that was not quite the truth. I should have had more sense. The Girl looked agitated for a few long seconds, like she might be on the verge of reprimanding me. But then she calmed down and continued.
“They barely bother you. A seriously bad dream, however? It makes you sweat and thrash about, and then wake up and even scream. It affects you, you see. Has power over your whole body. Saruak is the same way – an expanding and engulfing nightmare.”
I still wasn’t sure that I entirely understood her. But there was no mistaking just how definite she looked.
“Why bring that nightmare here? Why us?”
“It’s our own magic, Mr. Ross. That’s what drew him to Raine’s Landing in the first place.”
She stopped rotating for a while and simply hung there, facing me.
“This place, unlike the normal world, is far more like the dimension he came from in the first place. Magic fuels more magic, see? Spells lead on to stronger ones. The Landing is like rich dark soil in which he’s planted his first roots. And when we use our magic, Saruak drinks deeper.”
But I never used it at all. Maybe that was what had drawn him to me. Maybe there was something about me … that was puzzling him.
Another thought occurred.
“Then why send his creature after me, if he’s so all-fired powerful? Why didn’t he snuff me out himself?”
“I said that he came from a race of great power. But he has been on the road a long time since his last stop, and has barely fed at all.”
At last I – and the whole town – were being thrown a lifeline. Now I could see what she was driving at.
“So it’s all potential?”
The Girl nodded, then began slowly rotating on the air once more.
“He needs time for his strength to gather?”
Her smile was gentler, this time. “Yes.”
I should have let Cassie shoot him from the window, I could see. Taking that on board, I almost kicked myself. But maybe it wasn’t too late. If I could get to him again, before he fed …
“Where is he?” I asked urgently.
My chest was thumping with the prospect of it. Might we have another chance?
But one glance up put paid to all of that. It’s hard to look unhappy with your eyelids closed, but the Little Girl still managed it.
“He is an expert at concealment, I’m afraid,” she told me apologetically.
I felt stunned and abandoned. Apparently, not even she could see him.
“He’s had centuries to practice it. I’m sorry, Mr. Ross.”
I could see it on her features. She was conscious that she’d let me down. And was taking it badly, exactly the way a girl of her age might.
There she hung, revolving on the blue-tinged air. Apparently nothing but a child. And … what was she even called? Where had she come from?
We’d simply found her one evening, drawn to her by the strange blue glow behind her drapes.
There didn’t seem to be anything more that she could tell me. So, trying to make her feel better, I thanked her for the help that she had given.
“You’re welcome,” she murmured back, all softly and politely.
She’d given us some degree of hope, at least. Given us some kind of fighting chance. And that was worth more than all the riches on the Hill.
I shot one last glance back at her as I went out through the door. She was still rotating at the same languorous speed, and seemed to have forgotten I was even there. Her expression was blank again. And her eyes remained tightly shut.
You want to know what I think?
Well, despite the fact that she has simply watched events unfold so far, I’d guess that she has other gifts. Enormous power of her own, maybe. I think that one day – who knows when? – her eyes will finally open, something
new will be unleashed here in the Landing. Although whether for good or bad is anybody’s guess.
There are times I even play with the idea that she’s not genuinely a Little Girl at all.
In which case … what is she?
ELEVEN
I found myself going past a public library on my way back. So I parked by the curb beyond it, headed back on foot into its mildew scented dimness. The amber light was low in here and there were green-shaded lamps switched on. There were a load of little grade-school kids reading up on some class project about the town’s history, and so the noise level was slightly buzzier than it should have been. I went past them to the section on mythology, prized out a tome on Iroquois folklore, and learnt what more I could about Manitous.
They were as old as the continent itself, born out of its lakes and rivers and its woodlands. Were secretive, mysterious beings, masters of concealment. They ranged, in nature, from the mischievous to the downright malevolent. And the worst of them were pretty damned powerful things.
They could not only do tricks like changing their appearance. They could call up lightning and storms. Get into people’s minds and play with them in bizarre ways. And possess a human body, controlling it as if it was some living marionette.
They could even shift the very borders of reality, and re-create the rules.
One odd thing began to strike at me, after a while. In every reference that I came across, the same thing was repeated. They had just one serious limitation. Because they had been born from natural elements, they were tied to the area where they had first come into being. That was a pretty big one, when it came to the New England woods. And Saruak hailed from these parts, for sure.
But the Little Girl had told me – and he had implied – that he’d been wandering the entire nation, these past centuries. And I started to wonder how he’d managed that.
Nothing else that I read lifted my mood even slightly. Nothing gave me any better cause for optimism. We were up against a Big Bad Something, without any doubt.
Study – so I’ve always heard – is good for the mind. But mine didn’t feel any better, by the time that I went out of there.
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