999

by Al Sarrantonio

  “It’s the beast,” she whispered. “It’s found us.”

  “We’d better get back on our horses,” I said.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” She put a hand on my mount’s bridle. “Now that we’re here do you still believe the best choice is to run?”

  “What else is there to do?” I said. “Will your arrows stop it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “That uncertainty doesn’t make for good odds.”

  “What have odds to do with it?” All at once she seemed saddened. “Do you think Vav considered the odds when she took you down the Parisian alley?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Then you’re right,” she said, abruptly letting go of the bridle. She sounded as if at any moment she would break into tears. “We’d better try to flee before it’s too late.”

  But it was already too late. As I put one boot into the stirrup, the underbrush parted and a dark and ungainly shape rushed us from the shadows. The black mare reared up, snorting, her nostrils flared, and Gimel nocked an arrow to her bowstring. She drew back the string and let fly. Maybe it was a trick of the last of the evening’s cobalt light, but the arrow seemed to disappear an instant before it would have pierced the beast’s chest. With a soft cry, she hurled herself directly into the beast’s path.

  . “No!” I shouted as the thing swung an enormous paw at her. It was immensely powerful. Even from that distance I could hear her neck crack. She was lifted off her feet by the terrific force of the blow, spun around so that I saw all the light had gone out of her eyes. She fell to the forest floor, her head at an unnatural angle.

  My stomach turned over and I tried to get to her. But I also felt compelled to get a better look at this beast than I had at the gargoyle. And yet I could only take it in with brief, furtive flicks of my eyes. It had the same hideous face I’d glimpsed out of the corner of my eye in the Parisian alley, but this time its body was definitely more animal than human. Just as it had before, it hesitated, but this time I thought I heard something, a far-off crack as if a rifle shot. Wasting no time, I gathered Gimel to me and dragged her into the mass of oaks. I picked her up amid the dense tangle of underbrush; she was as light as an infant. It was as if there was no substance to her, as if all that she had been had vanished the moment the beast had broken her neck.

  Still I could not bear to let her go. She had sacrificed herself, throwing herself between me and the beast. But there was no time to lose. Behind me, the beast was crashing through the forest toward me. I turned and ran, stumbling over villages of roots and vines, colonies of pale toadstools. Once, I went down on my knees, but I never let go of Gimel. I could not imagine leaving her there for the beast to find and perhaps maul over. That would have been an inhuman act.

  I have already said that her body was quite light, nevertheless it was an impediment amid the forest’s tenacious undergrowth. As a consequence, I was rapidly losing ground to the beast, whose hellacious panting was like the roar of an immense vehicle about to run me down.

  Without warning I emerged from the forest and went skidding dangerously down the brown bank to a rather wide stream. Quickly, I looked to left and right. There was no help for it but to go forward into the water. It was cold as ice, and far deeper than it had appeared from shore. I was already up to my waist and I wasn’t yet at the deepest part. Behind me, the beast burst from the forest. Its momentum took it to the very edge of the water, where it reared back, bellowing in rage. Possibly it was afraid of water. My spirits rose as I kept going. Halfway across the stream, the water had risen as high as my breastbone. Light as she was, it was still an effort to keep Gimel’s body in the air.

  I looked back over my shoulder and gave an involuntary cry of terror. The beast was metamorphosing into a gigantic reptile. Scales popped out along its back, and a thick, wickedly spiked tail emerged from between its hind legs. Slithering on its pale belly, it entered the water and, with appalling speed, shot toward me.

  All at once, I was seven years old, back in the Mexican swamps. The hot sun fell like a yoke around my shoulders and the back of my neck. The insects swarmed, feasting on my bare flesh. I had become separated from my father by a stand of liana-draped trees. He had been dozing, his back against the bole of a tree, and I, bored and restless, had wandered away. Now I no longer knew my way back through the maze of emerald foliage and muddy water to where he was no doubt already looking for me. And to make matters worse, I had stumbled upon a crocodile lazing in the shallows. It was gray-white and huge, its prehistoric ridged back, armor plate and mammoth hinged jaws making it seem as if it was a lethal weapon on four squat legs.

  Christ, it was quick! The beast took off after me as if it had been expelled from a rocket launcher. Its maw was already open and I could see the double rows of razor-sharp teeth. The thing actually looked as if it was grinning at me. I screamed as I stumbled. I saw the thing racing toward me. Then a shot rang out, the croc leapt up, thrashing. Another shot, and its heavily muscled body whipsawed around, almost burying me. When it fell back into the brackish water it was so close to me I was drenched. The last flip of its tail cut my forearm. Then my father and Adolfo, our Mexican guide, had gathered me up. Adolfo wanted to rush me back to the jeep that had brought us here, but my father shook his head and handed me his thick hardwood walking stick. I took it and slammed it down onto the croc’s flat armored cranium. I did this again and again, grunting with the effort and the rage inside me, while Adolfo murmured like a prayer: “Es muy malo.” It’s very bad. I ignored him and didn’t stop until I had broken through the bone, until in my mind I had hurt the beast quite as much as he had frightened me.

  Like a dream, all this replayed in my head within the space of an eye-blink. The sense of déjà vu ended here, however, because I knew there was no Adolfo combing the area for me, ready to kill this beast before it got to me.

  The thrashing drove waves against me. So this was it. It was my fate to die here; the beast was going to get a second chance to do what in another reality it might have done to me when I was seven. I could feel it in the night. No! I could not let it happen. Saying a quick prayer, I dropped Gimel’s body and whirled to face it. Its jaws hinged open and, curling my hand into a fist, I jammed my upper arm vertically into the cavernous maw. Teeth ripped through skin and flesh, making me scream, but I would not budge. I’d used my arm like a stick to keep its jaws opened wide, for I’d learned very young that if you jammed a stick into a croc’s mouth it couldn’t snap it shut.

  So there we were, locked together, me bleeding, the beast thrashing, trying to get its powerful tail on me. Sheer terror fought my growing fatigue to a standstill, but the beast’s tail was coming closer and closer, thwapping the water viciously. The force of its attack was driving me backward downriver, and now I could feel the current quickening, swirling around me, sucking at me like a leviathan’s mouth. It grew in strength until, all of a sudden, my feet were swept out from under me. I was whirled away with such force that even the beast’s reflexes weren’t fast enough to catch my arm. I was underwater, fully in the grip of the roaring current. I struggled to regain my balance; when that failed, I tried simply to get my head above the surface. Pain blossomed as I hit an underwater rock. I bounced off, spinning. A flash of pain snaked up my side. I gasped for air and began to choke on water. I no longer knew which direction was up or down. Then I struck something. Not another rock; this was soft and cylindrical. It was a body—Gimel’s body. I encircled it with my arms and held on, riding out the current as my head rose into sweet air before I was plunged under again. But with my second gulp of air, I could feel the current lessening, and at last I was able to strike out for shore.

  I pulled Gimel’s white corpse up onto the sludgy bank and I lay there next to her, more dead than alive it seemed to me, for I felt a curious kinship with her. She had saved me from the beast as Vav had done in Paris. Her withered left leg now seemed as natural and necessary a part of her as her heart-shaped face
. I felt her arm like a lifeline across my chest and I closed my eyes, wondering whether I was at last safe.

  A moment more and it didn’t matter, as I was cast into unconsciousness.

  I awoke with rain in my face. It was still dark. I could have been out for an hour or twenty-four hours, there was no way of knowing. Thunder rumbled and, as I rose onto one elbow, a flash of lightning illuminated an utterly unfamiliar landscape. I lay in a swale at the edge of a forest; the stream that had carried me here was gone. Clearly, I was no longer in the Charnwood Forest. By the look of the thick stands of pines and American sugar maples I wasn’t even in England anymore. And Gimel had vanished along with the stream. I rolled over onto the spot she had occupied and wondered at the deep sense of loss inside me.

  At length, I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. The arm I’d jammed into the beast’s mouth was as good as new. No blood at all. Naturally. The air was decidedly colder, and I shivered inside my damp clothes. I knew I had to get to some kind of shelter quickly or face the threat of hypothermia. I wondered where my next guide was, for this had been the pattern in my previous two realities. Sensing no one about, I rose and, choosing a direction at random, set off in that direction. I decided it was just as well that the pattern had been broken, since my two previous guides had ended up dead.

  Because my father was a furniture restorer and coppersmith, I was born and raised in Hadley, Massachusetts, where he enjoyed an excellent reputation. This terrain, identical to the densely wooded hillsides of my childhood, put me immediately in mind of the one and only time I had consented to go on a family outing with Lily. I was used to those woods; I was twelve at the time this outing took place, and already I’d been out hunting plenty of times with my father. He loved to hunt the way most men his age loved to play golf. He was not a violent man, at least not with his family. But, once, I had seen him take apart a bully twice his size who had cut us off in heavy traffic. I had stood beside our car, staring openmouthed as he pummeled this giant senseless. Possibly he had aggression issues which were dealt with in our hunting. On the other hand, hunting required guile, cunning and a good degree of patience, none of which can exist for long within an aggressive individual.

  Still, he did not do well with Lily, and though both he and my mother strenuously denied it, so far as I could tell his leaving could not have originated from any other source. I can’t speak for my brother, but I did not do well with his departure. Of course I blamed Lily; I couldn’t blame him or my mother, could I? Lily was such a convenient target, like that croc whose skull I stove in after Adolfo had shot it to death; by then it couldn’t harm me, but it had sure as hell scared the living piss out of me.

  Possibly Lily did, as well.

  In any event, in the first few months after my father left, my mother was desperate for the rest of the family, so far as it was possible, to do everything together. I imagine it was her way of reassuring us that our world hadn’t fallen apart. Years later, it occurred to me that she must have been reassuring herself, as well. Toward that end, she engineered this outing. Because I was the eldest sibling, it was my responsibility to collapse and unfold Lily’s wheelchair, as well as to push her around while she screamed, barked, howled and generally sent chills up and down my spine.

  It was a beautiful spring day in late May. The birds were twittering busily and the insects were droning. For some reason, the air was filled with butterflies, as if they all had broken out of their golden chrysalises at the same time. You can imagine how beautiful they were, but something about them—perhaps their erratic, skittish flight—seemed to terrify Lily. She rose up out of her wheelchair, screaming and clutching the air with her spastic fingers. When I made the mistake of coming around to try to calm her, she clawed at me with such ferocity she actually drew blood.

  That’s when I hit her. It was just a smack on her cheek with my open hand, and it startled me just as much as it must have startled her. Her eyes rolled in her head, her face filled with blood, but she was eerily silent for long minutes. Then she erupted into tears. She wept and moaned, rocking and shaking as if with a high fever.

  My mother hurried over and boxed me hard on the ear before shoving me away. Then she knelt beside Lily and began the long and repugnant ritual of calming her down. While she tenderly stroked her forearms and murmured to her, while Lily wept and pulled at her hair, hateful Herman looked at me with the full-blown contempt of an adult. Not that he did anything to help Lily—I don’t believe she ever liked him, and he knew it. But now he could lord it over me. He could say that he’d never lifted a hand to his sister.

  “Billy, how could you,” my mother said sometime later.

  “Mom, look what she did to me. She drew blood, for God’s sake.”

  “She couldn’t help herself. She’d never intentionally hurt you. You know how much Lily cares for you.”

  “Mom, I don’t know anything of the sort,” I said defensively. “And to be brutally honest, neither do you. Can you tell if a mushroom likes you? No, ‘cause a mushroom can’t think.”

  Then she did something she had never done before or after. She grabbed me by my shirtfront and shook me like a rag doll. “Now you’re talking like your father, young man, and I won’t have it. Do you understand me?” She was mad as hell. “This is your sister you’re talking about. Lily is a human being just like you or Herman.”

  “Nobody is like Herman.”

  “Billy, I’m serious. What does it take to get through to you these days?” All at once she let me go and all the fire went out of her. She appeared defeated, not just by me, but by life. The lens through which the world appeared to her was so distorted by her own past that she could not help but define us by the same severely restricted limits she used for herself. She turned back to Lily, but a moment before she did I could see the look of bitter sorrow that passed like a shroud across her face.

  The memory of that bright, bloody afternoon faded as I reached the edge of the pines. I found myself beside a packed-dirt road. It was no more than a country lane, really. I looked in both directions, could see nothing, and went to my left. Given a choice, I always go left. The wind had picked up and so had the rain. Without the protection of the forest I began to shiver. I picked up my pace and within twenty minutes I could see lights burning in a house across a dark field of bare, furrowed rows. I hurried across its open expanse, the bitter wind making my sopping clothes adhere to my skin. I passed an old, rusted tractor that had about it a forlorn air, as if its owner had abandoned it suddenly and without much thought.

  The house was old, in the Victorian style, complete with ornamental gingerbread, a wide covered porch and those turreted rooms that look like a witch’s conical hat. The place looked gloomy. The fact that it was painted a battleship gray didn’t help, but truthfully I never much cared for the Victorian style—too ornate to no good purpose to suit me.

  In any event, I climbed the wide plank stairs onto the porch and out of the rain. I shook myself off like a dog before I rang the bell. A chime sounded deep inside the house, setting up peculiar vibrations that set my teeth on edge. When no one answered on my second ring, I tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

  Inside, I found myself in a magisterial vestibule that was oval in shape. Its main feature was a spiral staircase that grandly rose to the second floor. There was a living room to the right and a study to the left.

  “Hello?” I called. “Anybody home?”

  There was no reply. Save for the stertorous ticking of a grandfather clock, lacquered black with an etched white porcelain oval affixed just above its face. Had it been a human being I would have figured it was ill.

  The study was lit by a wood fire in a massive stone fireplace so encrusted with charcoal it looked as if it had been used for centuries. As you can imagine, the crack and spark of the aromatic logs, as well as the heat itself, were very welcome. I placed myself beside the hearth and relaxed into the delicious heat. Within moments, I could feel my clothes drying out.
While they did, I looked around the study. It was paneled in tiger-oak bookshelves. A chair rail ran around the room, and the molding and cornices were of a design and manufacture long out of date. A circular Aubusson rug covered the floor and an ornate ormolu chandelier hung unlit like a great spider waiting to be awakened.

  When I was sufficiently warmed and my clothes no longer stuck to me like wet papier-mâché I made my way through the ground floor rooms without finding a living soul. Curiously, the place seemed well-lived-in. For instance, I discovered a plate of orange cheddar cheese and salt biscuits on the kitchen table, and on the massive gas stove a teakettle blackened now because someone had left the flame on while all the water had evaporated. I turned off the burner and almost seared my palm lifting the kettle to a cool spot.

  I cursed just as I heard someone scream. Snatching up a large carving knife, I rushed out into the vestibule just as the scream came again, foreshortened this time by an odd and frightening liquid gurgle. It was a female voice and it had come from the second floor. I took the stairs three at a time.

  “Hello?” I called at the top of the stairs. “Are you all right?”

  I heard only a tiny whimper in reply.

  Racing down the hall to my left, I kicked open the door to each room I passed. I was met with only darkness and the peculiar smell of disuse. Then I saw light seeping from under the door at the end of the hallway. I ran to the door and without hesitation threw it open.

  I found myself in a huge bedroom, possibly the master suite. An enormous canopy bed occupied the right half of the room, while an uncomfortable-looking divan-and-chairs set in the baroque Louis Quatorze style stood guard on the other half. Between them, a woman lay curled on her left side. I heard her whimper again and rushed to her, kneeling down beside her. She opened her eyes, saw the carving knife and recoiled.