Lessek_s Key e-2

by Rob Scott

  ‘It came again today when you stepped through the far portal with the key in your pocket,’ Mark continued. ‘It was just like the other times – and it’s happening right now as I sit here, touching Lessek’s key: It’s as though I’m there – as if part of my mind is there – reliving that day on the beach with my family.’

  ‘So he’s trying to tell you something. If you’d come up Seer’s Peak, he would have visited you there.’

  ‘Maybe, but if I’m right, he has already visited me, dropping a warm blanket on me that night in Estrad. He didn’t need to see me at Seer’s Peak: he needs me to figure out what the hell he meant by hauling me all the way back to Long Island twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘Well?’ Steven could barely contain his excitement.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, you’ve played it over and over again in your mind. You have the key right now. Talk it out. What looks strange? What are you not seeing that you’re supposed to see?’

  ‘If we ever get through this, Steven, please remind me to beat the shit out of you,’ Mark said, amused.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t you think I’ve done that? Don’t you think I’m doing that now?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Christ. Don’t start that again.’ Now he was getting irritated.

  ‘Tell me what you see.’

  Mark closed his eyes and began to speak.

  ‘Have you ever been to my parents’ house?’

  The question surprised Steven. He drew a blank for a moment, then said, ‘Um – yeah – that night after the Mets game at Shea, remember? We decided not to fight the traffic back into the city.’

  ‘You know that hallway that leads down to my sister’s bedroom, across from my parents’ room?’

  Steven cast his thoughts back in time and visualised the house. ‘Okay, right. What about it?’

  ‘Things begin there-’ Mark shook his head in frustration, ‘no, that’s not right. I guess I should say these visions, memories – they begin there.’

  ‘In the hall?’

  ‘Yep.’ Mark reached out with one hand and gestured into the air above the fire. ‘My dad comes down that hall. He has on that old madras bathing suit and a T-shirt from a deli in Amityville, something he got for playing softball one weekend, I think. Anyway, he doesn’t come out of his room, and he’s not coming out of Kim’s room. He’s just there, in the hallway until he turns and moves towards me.’

  ‘What happens then?’

  ‘Then we’re outside. I’m helping him load everything into the back of the old station wagon.’ Mark grinned and opened his eyes for a moment. ‘I can’t believe my mother ever drove around in that monster. I know time tends to exaggerate our recollection of things, but that old car must have been forty feet long; it was a beached whale. She couldn’t have been getting more than three or four hundred feet to a gallon.’

  Steven laughed. ‘Well, gas was cheaper back then! But go on, what’s significant about loading up the car?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s what’s so damned frustrating. I can’t think of anything. From the house, we’d go out onto route 27, take that west to the Meadowbrook Parkway, and from there, it was just a few miles out to Jones Beach.’

  ‘Think about more of the details,’ Steven urged. ‘Slow things down. Take your time. What does it smell like, look like?’

  Mark leaned back against the fallen log and closed his eyes. Just when Steven thought he would have to prod him awake, Mark said, ‘The pavement was always hot, but I would leave my shoes in the car. My mom invariably yelled at me about it; she didn’t want me cutting my feet on broken glass or getting splinters from the plank walkway.’

  He looked at Steven. ‘Jones Beach has this scrubby pine forest that runs along the north edge of the sand. I suppose, thinking about it now, it’s a curious juxtaposition, pines and sand that way, but growing up out there, I never thought about it.’ He closed his eyes again, took a sip from his beer and went on, ‘I hated getting sand in my shoes and socks, so I’d leave them in the back of the whale, make the dash across the macadam – that was like running across molten rock – and leap for the relative safety of the plank walkway. By the time we went home, late afternoon, it never bothered me to walk back to the car.’

  ‘This is better. Keep going like this,’ Steven said encouragingly. ‘What did your parents do? Were they fighting about anything? Disagreeing? How do you remember them?’

  ‘Mom was always dealing with Kim and the food. Dad dealt with the umbrella and his chair. After that, I’m not sure they ever had much to say to each other at all – I remember them holding hands sometimes, even hugging out in the surf, but I don’t remember them chatting on and on all day. Mom played with me and Kim – trying to keep us occupied underneath the umbrella, I guess. Dad always sat and watched the planes taking off and landing at Kennedy.’ Mark hesitated. ‘I guess that’s something strange.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He faced west.’

  ‘Doesn’t the beach run west to east?’

  ‘Right, but the water is straight south. Who goes to the beach and doesn’t face the ocean?’

  ‘Maybe your dad wanted to get the most from the sun.’ Steven tossed a log onto the fire, then looked for Garec; the Ronan was taking a long time to collect firewood. He noticed Gilmour and realised the old man had been listening. Catching Steven’s eye, Gilmour twirled one hand, as if to say keep him talking. Steven nodded almost imperceptibly and turned back to Mark, who hadn’t noticed the little byplay. ‘Was your dad a sun guy? Did he like to lie around in the sun?’

  ‘Dad?’ Mark grimaced. ‘Never. He hated the heat. It was all we could do to get him to the beach in the first place. Mom had to promise him he could bring a cooler full of cold beer just to get him there, and we always made at least one trip up the sand for ice cream. No, Dad wasn’t much for the sun.’

  Mark pursed his lips, picturing his father sitting in a folding beach-chair, his long legs stretched out before him, an incongruous image among the hundreds and thousands who turned their full attention to the sea. ‘He’d sit all day like that, except for when he was in the water or playing with Kim and me.’ Mark closed his eyes tighter in an effort to clarify the image, to bring his memory into sharper focus. ‘He always sat that way. It crossed my mind once or twice when we were coming out of the Blackstones, after I dreamed about it in the underground cavern; I thought there had to be some connection between my arrival in Eldarn, half drunk on beer arriving at the beach, and those days out at Jones Beach when I was a kid, my dad drinking beer and-’

  ‘And facing west towards Jersey,’ Steven finished Mark’s thought.

  ‘Or further,’ Mark whispered.

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Further.’ Mark sat up.

  Steven felt the connection begin to form in his mind and he raced to keep up with it before it dissipated in the nebulous fringes of his consciousness, the nether region where so many great dreams and ideas disappeared before he could get a firm handle on them. He stood up and started piecing the fragments together. ‘The hallway. I remember that hallway.’

  ‘Right. It runs from my parents’ living room down to the bedrooms at the back of the house.’

  ‘And there are pictures, right?’

  ‘Yup. A whole family gallery. My father calls it the Jenkins Family British Museum, a complete photo-history of our lives.’ Mark was standing now as well, and Gilmour moved through the shallows towards them.

  Steven made several leaps in his mind, hoping to move two or three large pieces into place; he would form the outer edges of the puzzle later. It was time to connect the guts of the thing now. ‘I remember those pictures. There are lots of pictures of that trip he’s always talking about.’

  ‘Sure: it was just about the defining moment of his adult life. He had planned for months, every place he wanted to see, all the parks, all the cities. He
had never really been out of New York since he had started working full-time, or since Kim and I had been born.’

  ‘There were all kinds of shots from out west,’ Steven said, ‘the hills, the Loop Railroad. Didn’t you go to Pikes Peak, too?’

  ‘We were supposed to be there for a few days and we ended up staying nearly two weeks. Dad absolutely loved the place. We hiked in the national forest, we went rafting. He hauled us down to Royal Gorge. It was as though he felt the need to see the whole state, to experience it all at once, as if he thought he would never get back.’ Mark slowed.

  ‘Or that he ought to have been there all along,’ Steven said. ‘When you think about it, it’s odd that of all the photos in that hallway – and there have to be two hundred shots up there – why are so many of them…’ As Steven hesitated, Gilmour appeared suddenly at his side.

  Mark said, ‘He must have taken twenty-five rolls of film in those two weeks. Everything was worthy of a picture: streams, pine trees, rock formations, Kim and me, in all manner of poses – standing astride the Continental Divide, balancing on the USGS mile high marker – there were so many, and he took them all with that old Instamatic. When he blew them up-’ Mark stopped, seeing confusion in Gilmour’s face, and added tangentially, ‘Most photographs are three-by-five or four-by-six inches – in other words, small’

  ‘Ah – and your father enlarged a number of these photo pictures?’

  Mark nodded.

  ‘Was he unhappy with them small?’

  ‘No, they were his favourites, the most cherished photos he had ever taken; that’s why he blew them up to display them.’

  Gilmour nodded, understanding, and gestured at Mark to continue.

  ‘They were in the living room at first, but then my mother wanted to redecorate. Dad didn’t want them moved, but they finally agreed on a compromise: they would stay hanging on display, but he had to move them to the hallway.’

  ‘He loved this place, your home, Colorado?’

  ‘He did, Gilmour,’ Mark said, ‘more than I have ever known him to love any place else.’

  ‘Why did he not live there?’

  ‘Work. Family commitments. My mom is from the island, so he wanted her to be near her family – a whole barrel of reasons, I suppose.’ Mark looked more like the young man who had arrived in Eldarn; Gilmour was glad he had found a moment’s peace.

  ‘Did he ever return?’ Gilmour asked, carefully.

  ‘I went to school there.’

  Ah-’ Gilmour nearly leaped across the fire-pit, ‘why? Tell me why you chose that place.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ Mark said, surprised. ‘I was eighteen; I wanted to get away from New York. I thought Colorado sounded rustic, provincial, wild – a long list of things Long Island is not. But maybe it was those photos.’ Mark screwed up his face, trying to come up with a completely honest answer. ‘Maybe looking at them day after day, year after year, influenced me.’

  Steven said, ‘So you might you have chosen Colorado State because he wanted you to?’

  Mark, never one for arm-chair psychology, shrugged. ‘Sure. I guess. Who knows why eighteen-year-olds decide anything? But I do know that I have felt more at home in Colorado than I ever did in New York.’

  Gilmour asked, ‘Did it take long for those feelings to emerge?’

  ‘About twenty minutes, Gilmour. I think it was twenty minutes.’

  Garec dropped an armload of wood at their feet, interrupting the conversation. ‘Twenty minutes? I know that one; it’s the four rune. The four, right? The four means twenty minutes on this absurd machine.’ He held up Steven’s watch. ‘Why you don’t just put a twenty on there, I have yet to understand.’

  Mark, close to understanding at last, didn’t speak, but wrapped an arm around Garec’s shoulders and handed him a silver beer can. Garec pondered it briefly, then looked confused.

  Tilting his own can for Garec’s inspection, Steven said, ‘Just pull the tab.’

  Mark went on, ‘So if my father faced west in moments of quiet – like the beach, when he wasn’t working, when he had time to rest, to think and perhaps even to-’

  ‘To be drawn,’ Steven said, not certain he had chosen the right word.

  ‘To be drawn,’ Mark echoed, ‘back to where he had been so-’

  ‘Back home,’ Gilmour said.

  ‘But my father never lived in Colorado,’ Mark cried. ‘That trip, and all the memories he had over the years, all the pictures and all the stories – they were just his way of – I don’t know.’

  ‘They were his way of feeling that blanket,’ Gilmour said. ‘If Lessek has truly communicated these memories to you, now we must figure out why. What significance does Colorado have for your father? And for you, as your true home? And, most difficult to work out, what significance does your relationship with your father have to Nerak and our struggle here in Eldarn?’

  Mark’s reply was cut off by a rustling sound in the woods behind them: footsteps, stealthy at first and then closing at a run. Shadows painted the forest black, and it was impossible to see how many assailants there were, but in the instant before turning to flee, Mark saw at least two large figures armed with branches. Steven dived for the hickory staff, grabbing it as he rolled over and sprang to his feet. Garec stood frozen, unwilling to pick up his bow and quivers. His eyes flashed in the firelight as he peered back and forth at Steven and the men coming for them through the woods.

  Gilmour shouted ‘Seron!’ and raised his hands, muttering; their small campfire exploded into a towering ball of flame, so hot that Garec fell backwards across the pile of firewood he had collected. He watched as three Seron, armoured in leather vests and chain-mail, charged, barking and grunting, between the trees. In the muted glow of Gilmour’s explosion, the hardwood trunks looked like upright bones. The Seron moved as if through the half-buried ribcage of a decomposing god.

  The last thing Mark saw before rushing into the night was Steven standing firm and twirling the hickory staff. His flight was a knee-jerk reaction to buy a few seconds to think how they would turn back what might be an entire platoon, hell, a whole frigging brigade of the soulless monsters. He hadn’t expected the attack; he wasn’t ready. That wouldn’t happen again.

  Mark risked a look over his shoulder. Gilmour had used magic to turn their sputtering campfire into a raging inferno and by its light it was clear that there were only a few Seron, possibly scouts for a larger force. He turned and began hustling back into the fray, certain Steven and Gilmour possessed enough power to dispatch the Seron even if they had been taken by surprise attack.

  He watched as Gilmour held one Seron still; the old man’s hand was pressed flat against the creature’s chest, and though growling and spitting at the former Larion Senator, it was immobile, clutched in the grip of Gilmour’s hastily woven spell.

  Steven engaged the second of their attackers, nearly as large as Lahp, in a hand-to-hand fight that reminded Mark of an old Bruce Lee movie. Steven, trying to preserve life no matter how monstrous his assailant, used a fraction of the staff’s power, just enough to sting the half-human nastily with each touch – first the soldier’s knee, then a shoulder, thigh, collar bone, wrist, a series of neat blows that didn’t appear solid enough to hurt a child… but Mark could see pale greenish-yellow energy crossing from the staff to the Seron’s body with each impact. The Seron barked, an inhuman yelp, each time Steven landed a blow and within moments the big Malakasian had collapsed to his knees, then toppled over.

  Two down.

  Their third attacker had somehow escaped the net of Gilmour’s immobility spell, diving and rolling at precisely the right moment. Now, still gripping his makeshift cudgel, the Seron scrambled to regain his feet. Mark followed the Seron’s line of sight to where Garec had fallen. With his companions bested, the creature would have only one opportunity to kill Garec. Mark would have to act quickly; this one would be his.

  ‘Hey, you!’ he shouted – he wasn’t sure if he spoke in Ronan or
English; he was too furious to care.

  The Seron, so intent on reaching Garec, ignored him at first, but as Mark started shouting obscenities at him he finally turned.

  ‘Come get me, you ugly motherhumper!’ Mark cried, his feet ankle-deep in the fjord. ‘I’m not armed – look!’ He discarded Howard’s Gore-tex coat and peeled his old red sweater over his head, leaving himself bare-chested, with a thin coat of perspiration despite the cold. ‘C’mon, ugly rutter!’ he shouted again, jumping up and down on the balls of his feet. ‘I’m right here waiting, you frigging bastard!’

  The Seron remained low the ground, crouched, his eyes fixed on the raving man only a few paces away.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re so tough,’ Mark growled. ‘Come get me, you pussy. Stop stalking around like my sister’s cat and get down here.’ Mark flexed his arms, not entirely convinced he had made the right decision, but too far down this path to change his mind now. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he shouted, an instant before the Seron pounced.

  For a fraction of a second, Mark considered standing his ground. His rage was so overwhelming that he was certain he could beat the soulless half-human in a straight fight, but something echoed in his mind, that same voice he had imagined speaking to him in the Blackstones when he had nearly frozen to death, the voice that had awakened him when he had fallen asleep at the wheel on the Long Island Expressway. ‘You can’t win,’ it said, and with just a hair’s width separating them, Mark ducked beneath the Seron’s grasp and dived into the black water.

  He ignored the cold and kicked hard towards the bottom, thankful the water was deep right up to the shoreline, then, once he was thirty or forty feet out, he surfaced long enough to catch his breath. The Seron was paddling diligently after him.

  ‘I’m over here,’ he shouted, splashing a handful of dark water in the Seron’s direction. ‘You almost had me there. I was worried, I tell you.’ He let the Seron get within an arm’s length before slipping beneath the surface again. This time, on his way to the bottom, Mark reversed and gripped the warrior’s ankles. He gave a firm tug, not enough to drown the creature, but sufficient to pull the Seron’s head beneath the surface for a moment; it sent a powerful message. Mark knew he would have to surface and tempt the soldier again, or it might make the decision to turn and flee back towards shore.