by Tad Williams
She had no idea who “he” was, but she nodded her head. The big man set her down as if she weighed no more than a coffee cup. For a moment, overwhelmed by the strangeness of the night, the succession of shocks and surprises, she almost ran away despite her promise, but something inside held her back.
No one’s hurt me. Ragnar wouldn’t do anything to me. Strongest of all, though, to her surprise, was that she wanted to know. For once she wanted nothing more than to get answers to the questions that were swarming in her head like startled bees.
A moment later a shape came springing down the hillside. There was just enough firelight to show its odd, jerky movements. It was dancing , she realized, leaping and capering with arms stretched high as if to clutch at the stars. From the waist up it had the shape of a naked man, slender and muscled, but below that were the haunches and narrow, hooved feet of a deer or goat.
The head dipped down for an instant into the firelight and Lucinda almost screamed. The face was Mr. Walkwell’s.
The animal-man leaped up again, then whirled around and was gone, bounding up the slope with tremendous speed and agility, disappearing over the crest of the hill. Lucinda, her knees suddenly too weak to hold her weight, sank down to the ground beside the discarded boots, the paper that had spilled from them crunching beneath her.
“He’s a… Mr. Walkwell’s a… ” She shook her head, shocked. “What is he?”
Ragnar laughed. “He is one of the Old Ones, child. I do not know the right name for his kind, but the Graekers worshipped them as little short of gods. The Greeks, I mean. Sometimes I still do say the wrong words, despite all my years here.”
Lucinda picked up Mr. Walkwell’s boot. The whole night felt like a dream, but she knew it wasn’t. “The poor man. He has to walk in these-no wonder he goes so slow. Always having to hide what he is.”
“Not always.” Ragnar helped her up and led her across the clearing toward the stone circle in which the fire burned. When she knelt to warm her hands he crouched beside her. “The nights are his-like this one.”
“Is he from… does Mr. Walkwell come from the same place as the dragons and the unicorns?”
Ragnar poked the fire with a long branch. A few sparks drifted up and winked out. “I do not know all of Simos’s story, because he was here long before the rest of us came… but in a way that is true. He is from the same place as the dragons. We all are. But place is not the right word. It is hard to explain.”
“Maybe somebody should try,” she said, but without anger. She had lost it back in the trees. “No one ever tells me or Tyler anything until we find it out for ourselves.” A sudden thought made her heart race. “Tyler! He’s out exploring-I have to find him!”
“He will be well,” the bearded man said. “Nobody will come onto the farm and hurt him when Simos is on guard.”
It wasn’t people getting in from outside she was worried about, but people who were already here-one person, anyway. “Sarah and the others-they said that Mrs. Needle is a witch.”
Ragnar frowned and took a moment before answering. “It is true that where she came from that is what they called her. They would have killed her for it too. But your great-uncle trusts her, and she has helped him, there is no doubt of that. After the fire took his laboratory and all his things I thought he would waste away in sorrow, but since then she has helped him find new life-new purpose.”
Lucinda’s mind was still whirling with questions, but before she could ask anything else Ragnar stiffened and rose. A knife that she had not even seen was suddenly in his hand, glinting in the firelight. A moment later a bizarre, lumpy shape came swinging down the hillside, sometimes upright, sometimes going on all fours. Before she could do more than take a frightened breath, the weird thing came to a sudden halt at the edge of the clearing and split into two pieces, one of which fell to the ground.
Mr. Walkwell straightened and prodded with his hoof at the bundle he had just dumped. He rolled it over, revealing a pale face and slack, open mouth. He looked up from the motionless man at his feet and cocked an eyebrow at Lucinda, who had shrunk back into Ragnar’s shadow.
“What is the child doing here?” He seemed more irritated than embarrassed to be standing in front of her naked, although he was so shaggy he might as well have been wearing trousers. Lucinda could not help staring. Even trousers would not have hidden the fact he had hooves instead of feet, and it was almost stranger to see him without his hat than without pants. Where his hair had blown back from his forehead in matted, sweaty curls she could see pale, circular marks-the place where his goat horns grew, she realized, although he had cut them off or filed them down. With his scraggly beard and the fire reflecting red in his eyes, he looked like the devil himself. Lucinda should have been terrified, but the face was still Mr. Walkwell’s, the man who hated cars and carved wooden toys for children.
“Don’t blame Ragnar. It’s… it’s my fault,” she said. “I was out looking for Tyler. I got lost, and then… I saw the fire… ”
Ragnar crouched beside the man Mr. Walkwell had dumped on the ground. The stranger was wearing dark clothes and a dark stocking cap. “Where did you find him?” Ragnar asked.
“Beside the Junction Road fence,” said Mr. Walkwell. “He only got a few steps past it. I came down on him from behind. He did not have time to see me.”
The old man had just run out to Junction Road, then run back carrying a large man on his back, all in a quarter of an hour or less, Lucinda realized. Here was another thing Tyler had been right about all along-Mr. Walkwell wasn’t just inhumanly strong, he wasn’t human at all.
“Is… is he dead?” Lucinda asked.
Ragnar shook his head. “Simos has only stunned him. We want these people to know they are not welcome, and for that they must live to tell those who have hired them.” He had finished going through the man’s pockets. “Empty, of course. But I will wager that if you find his car, you may also find a telephone with the number for that greedy man, Stillman.” Ragnar sighed heavily. “He is digging to see what he can find, or perhaps just reminding us he is out there. This is a problem that is not going away.”
“I don’t understand,” Lucinda asked. “Who is Stillman?”
“A bad man. A rich man too. He is a descendant of the Tinker family and he wants this farm. Anything else, Gideon will have to tell you himself.”
“If I find the telephone, I will bring it back. I do not understand those things and I do not want to,” Mr. Walkwell said. He looked sternly at Lucinda, as though she might have been about to peddle him a cell phone herself. “It makes my head itch even listening to people talking into one.”
“They hardly work here, anyhow,” Ragnar said. He had pulled off the unconscious man’s clothes, leaving him in only his underpants, socks, and undershirt. He didn’t look very dangerous now. “He is ready, Simos.”
Mr. Walkwell leaned down and scooped the man up like a bag of groceries, then slung him across his shoulder. “I will take him back. He and his master will have something to think about when he wakes up.”
A moment later he had bounded off, so quickly that Lucinda had completely missed the point between going and gone. She could smell him, though, a tang that was not unpleasant, but still made her nostrils twitch.
“As for you, we take you back to the house,” Ragnar said. “You have had enough questions answered for one night, yes?”
Lucinda nodded. Tyler would be safe. How could anything bad happen to him with a magical creature like Mr. Walkwell guarding the farm?
Chapter 20
Last One
T yler wasn’t falling anymore. Now he seemed to be floating in darkness, but floating didn’t come close to describing how uncomfortable he was. He was so dizzy that ordinarily he would have felt sick to his stomach-but he couldn’t find his stomach. It didn’t even seem like he had a body. It seemed as though he was only a brain floating in some jar of dark liquid, eyeless, voiceless, helpless.
But he was still cold
-shockingly, shiveringly cold. No body, but still freezing-how unfair could things get?
Tyler tried to move and found he could feel his body a little, but it seemed impossibly distant, as though his head was a kite and the rest of him was a mile below him holding the string. He began to wonder if something really bad had happened to him. Was he unconscious? Crippled? Worse, was he dead?
A kind of angry strength surged through him at the thought. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t just going to accept it. Tyler Jenkins didn’t just let things happen to him-he made things happen. He exerted all the strength of his thoughts to push the darkness away, to go somewhere, to wake up, to do something.
Nothing happened.
He tried again and again. He thought of heroic things. He thought of terrible things and then told himself only he could stop them from happening. He thought of the people he loved-his mom, his dad, even Lucinda (yes, he supposed he really did love her, as much of a pain as she was sometimes)-but none of these thoughts did anything to change the terrible facts. There was nothing to push against. There was nothing to get away from. He was lost in complete emptiness, floating in unending black like a bubble in a tar pit.
Tyler cried, then, or at least he thought he did. It was hard to tell.
He didn’t know how long he’d been drifting helplessly when he realized for the first time that although he still could not tell up from down or left from right, the blackness no longer seemed like a single uniform thing. He could feel little differences that, if he had been in water, would have been changes in pressure, or colder or warmer currents. Some bits of the darkness seemed to be flowing over him, others to be flowing away. Some seemed more inviting, some less. But did it mean anything?
When he felt that warmer current again (he could just as accurately have called it “clearer” or “gentler” or even just “safer”) he first tried to follow it, but after considering for a moment he changed his direction, doing his best to reach out in the direction from which this new feeling came-better to be moving toward whatever caused that feeling of greater safety, he thought, than away from it. To his relief, he thought he could actually feel himself beginning to move, although not in any normal way.
Things were changing. He felt it-he was certain. As the currents of black washed over and through him, the different sensations began to seem so strong that he almost felt he could name them, although the words that floated up in his thoughts were obviously nonsense, things like greenward and whenwise, and once he even heard a voice in his head saying, “A half-turn toward yes, but on the nextward-facing side.” Still, he didn’t have to understand how it worked to use it-it was a bit like typing class. After you got the hang of how to do it, you didn’t even have to look down at your fingers on the keyboard anymore, you just watched the words appear on the screen in front of you. He was learning-that was what he was doing. He just didn’t know what exactly was being learned.
After a timeless time, Tyler began to see the changes he had at first only felt. Light was growing around him-not a single glow, but streaks and sparks, as though reality itself was starting up again, like a video game that had been stuck. Something drew him toward one of the smears of light, then a moment later the glare was all around him-and then he fell through.
Cold, was his first thought. He could feel ground under his feet, hear wind in his ears. But it’s still so cold!
His second thought was, Christmas. Because everything around him was white, white, white-the whole world was covered in snow. Trees, rocks, the side of a hill, all banked and drowned in white. A winter wilderness. The bitter wind even brought snow swirling up from the drifts on the ground, like puffs of smoke. Tyler wasn’t wearing anything but his ordinary clothes, nothing warmer than a sweatshirt to keep out this icy chill. His lost flashlight was lying in the snow beside him, as out of place as he was. He bent and picked it up. Already he was trembling so hard he could barely stand.
Where am I? How’d I get here? Oh, man-I’m gonna freeze to death!
A moment later two brown shapes tumbled out of the hill in front of him. One of them was huge, but both of them were covered in fur. A cave, Tyler abruptly realized-they had come out of a cave, the big one attacking and the small one falling backward. Now the big shape was up on its hind legs, claws and teeth flashing. It was some kind of bear, and the small, huddled, doomed creature on the ground was a person in fur clothing, lying unmoving in the icy flakes.
Whoever the poor guy was, he was going to die, that was obvious. The bear was bigger than anything Tyler had ever seen, taller than a polar bear but dark. It had dropped down onto four legs now and was closing the distance between itself and the still figure. The bear had started out cautiously but had clearly decided its downed enemy posed no danger.
Freezing, shivering, a hundred yards away, Tyler suddenly realized he was about to watch a human being die. He scrabbled in the snow with numb hands, trying to find a rock, but the snow was too deep. He began taking hopping steps down the deep snow of the hillside, waving his arms and shouting.
“H-Hey! No! L-L-Leave him alone! H-H-Hey!”
The bear stopped. Tyler took another couple of awkward steps before he realized what he’d just done.
“Oh, c-crap,” he said.
With a fresh new meal in sight, this one with its fur already removed, the bear reared up and waved its claws. It ducked its head, opened its huge, fanged muzzle, and roared, a sound so loud and deep that it shook snow from some of the trees. It was at least twice Tyler’s height and looked as impossibly large and deadly as a T. rex.
I’m gonna die, he thought. And I don’t even know how this happened
…
There was a flurry of movement at the bear’s feet as the small shape there rolled over and bent, then for a moment actually seemed to be trying to tackle the monstrous animal. The bear took a step back and doubled over, its growl rising to a bizarre coughing snarl as it nipped at its own belly where the long handle of a spear was now wagging, the head sunk deep in the bear’s guts. The monster took a step toward the fur-covered figure in front of it, still snarling, and swiped with its massive paws, but the human threw himself to the side and the strike narrowly missed. The bear hesitated for a moment but blood was already spattering the snow beneath it. It dropped to all fours and lurched away unsteadily down the hillside toward the trees, staining the snow with its blood as it went. As soon as it disappeared from sight, the fur-clad warrior got to his feet again and looked to Tyler, who was standing knee-deep in the snow, dumbfounded, shivering even harder as he realized how close he had come to getting eaten.
“The Great One would have killed me,” the spear wielder said in a tone of dull wonder, his voice surprisingly high-pitched, as if he was no more than Tyler’s own age. What showed of his face in the crude fur hood was bloody. “Where do you come from?”
Tyler tried to say something, although he had a feeling that the words California and Standard Valley wouldn’t mean much here, but his teeth were chattering so hard he couldn’t talk. He wasn’t cold any longer, though, he suddenly realized. In fact, he felt surprisingly warm. He took a step forward and then decided that he must have walked into a sudden blizzard, because suddenly everything was white and his mouth was full of snow.
He only dimly felt it as the hooded stranger pulled his face out of the snow and began to drag him back toward the cave.
Tyler was lying on the floor beside the tiniest, most pathetic fire he had ever seen, three skinny sticks and a wad of damp grass. He was cold again, miserably so, his body racked by shivers so strong he thought they might break his bones. The man he had saved was crouched nearby, wiping blood from his face with a handful of snow. The features that began to appear from beneath the smears of red were smaller and younger than Tyler had expected, although it was still hard to tell because of the remaining mud and blood.
The stranger looked at him with a mixture of mistrust and pity. “Who are you? Why did you risk your life for me? Why do yo
u wear such strange skins? Are you from the Ghost Lands?”
That sounded vaguely familiar, but Tyler was too busy shaking himself to pieces to try to answer any of it. The caveman, if that was what he was, watched him for a moment, then pulled Tyler into a sitting position, tugged him back against his own chest, then untied the rawhide laces of the rough jacket or poncho he was wearing. When he had it undone and opened, he cradled Tyler against his body like a child and then closed the thick hide garment around them both.
After a few moments Tyler began to warm up, just enough so that he could feel the sting of returning feeling down his spine. He pulled his hands up and tucked them into his armpits to get warm. They began to tingle and smart too. After a few more moments Tyler realized from contours of the bare skin he could feel pressing against his back that it was not a caveman in whose lifesaving embrace he was being warmed and who had just stabbed a stone-headed spear into the biggest bear Tyler could ever imagine. It was a cave woman. A girl, even.
“Do you have a name?” Tyler asked her. Now that he didn’t feel quite so much like he was going to die, the weirdness of the whole adventure had begun to overwhelm him. How had he ended up here? Where was he, anyway? Somewhere on present-day Earth, or back in time, like in a movie? And why could he understand this girl’s speech? He could hear the harsh, unfamiliar words she spoke even as the meaning of what she said bloomed in his head.
“Nothing as strange as ‘Ty-ler,’ ” she told him. “They called me Last One because I was the youngest, but they are all dead now. I suppose I am Last One for real.” From the sadness of what she said he would have expected at least a tear, but although claw marks on her forehead and cheeks still dribbled blood, she had the hard, secretive face Tyler had seen on some of the men waiting at the Veteran’s Hospital bus stop back home, the mark of a difficult and frightening life.
Back home. How was he going to get home?
