The Green Man

by Michael Bedard

  “I will ask my young assistant to prove to you that this oyster is cooked,” he said as he handed it to her. The shell was hot. On his instructions, she scooped the meat from the oyster and ate it. It burned her throat a little as she swallowed.

  The magician performed several more feats with the burning coals. “And now,” he said, “we will bestow this same power on our young assistant here – the power to master fire. Come along, young lady, don’t be shy.”

  But she didn’t want to go to him. She could feel the heat of the fire against her face as she stood beside the flaming brazier.

  “Come, come, my child. There’s nothing to fear.” His voice was soft and soothing, but hidden beneath it was another voice as fierce as fire.

  Come to me, girl. I said, come.

  He held his hand over the flaming coals as he extended it to her. It glowed red in the flames, yet remained miraculously unharmed. As she moved irresistibly toward him, she stumbled and looked down.

  The floor was strewn with books. A shard of memory cut through the scene like a knife through a painted screen. She remembered an unbearable pain in her chest, remembered falling, books tumbling about her.

  And then it was gone, and there was only the hushed room, the beckoning voice, the bottomless eyes. As she reached her hand out slowly to him, the sight of it sent a shock through her – for it was the thin, speckled hand of an old woman. For a moment, some shocking truth seemed about to dawn –

  Then his flaming hand closed over hers and all thought fled. Like a tissue tossed in a fire, the room and everything in it hovered for an instant in space, then flared up and was gone. And there were only the two of them.

  Flames enfolded every part of him. His clothes were woven flame, his hair a flaming torch, his flesh tongued with fire. He was Fire. The sweet hiss and crackle of his voice sounded in her head.

  Come to me. We are one, you and I. There is no pain, nothing to fear.

  He fixed her with his eyes; she could feel them searing into every part of her. He drew her slowly to him and enfolded her in his flaming arms. Such sweet pain pulsed through her that she thought she must die from it.

  His breath was like the smell of roses on a summer night, but below lay the acrid smell of smoke and singeing hair, of smoldering cloth and wool.

  Just a little sleep. A little sleep.

  She felt herself spiraling helplessly down into the dark.

  37

  The sun hung red on the horizon as O came round to the back of the house. As she was climbing the porch stairs, she caught sight of a figure huddled by the door. She jumped back, and then realized it was just a pile of debris. Stepping past it, she pounded on the door. The sound died into the deep hush of the house.

  Suddenly she smelled fire. She looked down and saw smoke drifting out lazily under the door. Cupping her hand to the window, she looked in. The dim room inside opened onto a long hall. The far end of the hall was lit by flames. For a moment she thought she saw two figures standing in their midst. But then there was only one.

  “Emily!” she screamed as the figure slumped to the floor.

  She plucked a loose brick from the pile of debris and smashed the glass in the door. Smoke streamed out into the night. She reached her arm through the ragged hole and groped for the handle. Her hand closed over what felt like a small chill hand, balled into a fist. She gave it a twist, and the door opened.

  Dashing into the house, she ran for the hall. The smoke ran to meet her. It wrapped its arms around her, filling her lungs with its searing breath and blinding her eyes. She yanked her shirt up over her mouth and groped her way along the hall.

  She hadn’t gone far before dizziness and nausea overwhelmed her. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She no longer knew the way forward or the way back. In some impossibly calm corner of her, she thought, This is the part where you die. A dark hole seemed to open under her, and she tumbled in.

  She found herself back at the Green Man, standing high on the shaky ladder outside the shop, staring into that ageless, knowing face. But the cracks had vanished, the flaking paint had fallen away, and life pulsed within the pale green flesh.

  He swayed in the wind, and she swayed with him. She looked into his eyes, and he looked back. Instead of creaks, words came. He called her by name. And the vines that were his arms reached out and wrapped themselves around her. She was enfolded in them, lifted lightly up and carried.

  Fresh air filled her burning lungs. She breathed in the rich dark smell of soil and leaf mold, felt the cool green dampness of the ravine against her skin as she was gently laid down.

  And then there was nothing.…

  When she woke, she was lying in the long grass in the backyard of the Linton house. A sickle moon shone down from a sky strewn with stars. Emily lay on the grass beside her, her face streaked with soot, her eyes shut. She looked ghostly pale in the moonlight, and for one terrifying moment, O thought she was dead. But then she saw the faint rise and fall of her chest.

  How on earth did we get out of the house? she wondered dully, as she tried to piece together what had happened. The wail of sirens sounded in the distance.

  The sirens grew steadily louder. Soon there were lights flashing and firefighters running about, smashing windows, training hoses on the burning house. A pair of ambulance attendants came hurrying into the yard with a stretcher. They lifted Emily onto it and wheeled her off to a waiting ambulance.

  O turned and saw Rimbaud, striding from the shadows where the yard fell away into the ravine. He knelt beside her and took her hand in his. She tried to speak, but the effort brought on a fit of coughing.

  “Shhh. Don’t try to talk now,” he said as he knelt by her side and assured her everything would be all right. She closed her eyes.

  The attendants returned for her. As they were lifting her onto the stretcher, she asked, “Can he ride with me?” A strange look passed between them. When she turned to where Rimbaud had been, she found that he had vanished silently back into the shadows.

  The firefighters were still training their hoses on the smoking building, when the attendants wheeled her around to the front of the house and lifted her into the back of the ambulance. One of them slipped an oxygen mask onto her face.

  As she felt herself drifting off, she glanced out the ambulance window and imagined she saw Rimbaud standing there, as she had first seen him standing at the window of the Green Man.

  38

  They sat together in the car for a long while without saying a word, each lost in her own thoughts. Emily’s bandaged arms rested on the steering wheel. Her fingers tapped out the beat of a slow tune by Bill Evans playing on the car stereo. Beside her, O sat looking out the window at the Linton house. She’d tried to talk Emily out of coming back here, but her aunt had insisted. She said something about needing to lay the ghost.

  Two weeks had passed since the night of the fire. It had been a time of endless questions and few answers. The police had questioned them in the recovery room at the hospital on the night of the fire. What had Emily been doing at the house that night? How had the fire started? How had O managed to get her aunt out?

  Emily insisted she’d been invited to the house by the owner, Lenora Linton, to buy a collection of books. They told her that was impossible. When she continued to insist, they passed her along to the hospital psychiatrist, who explained to her that the house had sat vacant for over a year – since the death of Lenora Linton. In the end, they put the entire matter down to a case of mild dementia and released her.

  O had her own questions. She had been praised for rescuing her aunt from the fire that night. She didn’t bother telling them she wasn’t the one who had done the rescuing at all, but a mysterious third party no one else seemed to have seen – a boy without a name, who lived in a hut in a ravine. She figured it was enough for them to think just one of them was crazy.

  The trouble was, she wasn’t entirely convinced she wasn’t crazy. After all, she, too, had seen this board
ed-up shell of a house lived in and whole. She had sat sweating with Emily in front of the fire and spoken with Lenora Linton face-to-face. On the night of the fire, she had seen two figures standing in the flames at the end of the hall. Had she simply imagined it all? And had the smoke and flames so disoriented her that she only imagined Rimbaud there?

  She hadn’t told Emily anything about her trip to the ravine earlier that day, the discovery of the hut, her encounter with him there. Since the night of the fire, he had utterly vanished. And she wasn’t about to go down into the ravine again, looking for him. She was afraid of what she might find.

  She looked out the window of the car at the empty lot where the house that neighbored the Linton house had stood. With it gone, she could see the canopy of trees in the ravine that ran behind it. She was convinced it was the same ravine, snaking its way through Caledon, edging ever closer to the Linton house through the years, until finally it threatened to draw it down.

  Emily opened the car door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going in there.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Absolutely.” And she stepped out of the car.

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  Emily leaned in through the window. “No, you’re not, young lady. You’re going to wait right here. This is something I have to do alone.”

  Despite the damage, the house was as remote and forbidding as ever. The front door had been scarred by ax blows. The heavy brass knocker dangled by a screw. Yellow police tape had been strung across the doorway like a web. Emily gave the door a push, and it edged open. She stooped under the tape and stepped inside.

  The hall walls were blackened from the blaze. The acrid smell of charred wood and damp cinders hung in the air. But the floor seemed sound and the walls solid. She sensed no danger.

  She stopped partway down the hall and pushed open the door on the left, into the large round room with the fireplace set against the far wall. The room was in ruins, the walls charred and broken, the lathing gaping through like bone. But she knew that, if she simply imagined hard enough, she could fill it in an instant with a makeshift stage, a group of excited children, the flickering glow of gas jets, and a magician with a deep melodious voice and eyes that burned into one’s very soul.

  Many years ago, when Lawrence Linton had lived in the house, another fire had occurred in this very room. Isaac Steiner had unearthed the story while looking into the Linton family’s history. He had been by to visit them since the night of the accident and had shown them articles and photos from the newspapers of the time.

  Apart from his work as an architect, Lawrence Linton had a fascination for the magical arts and took pride in being something of an amateur magician himself. Over time, he amassed a valuable collection of books on the subject.

  He happened to meet a traveling magician who was passing through Caledon. In celebration of his niece’s twelfth birthday, Linton arranged for the magician to give a special show to a group of children at the Linton house on the night of August 8.

  During the show, something went terribly wrong. One of the illusions called for a brazier of burning coals. Somehow, it was overturned, and some of the stage trappings caught fire. Within minutes, the fire was out of control. In the general panic that followed, one child was left behind.

  Linton never forgave himself. After that night, he was a changed man, plagued with guilt for the part he believed he had played in the tragedy. As time went by, he grew increasingly reclusive. He developed a peculiar obsession, which he committed to the pages of his private journal. He became convinced that the magician was more than mortal, and that the fire had been no accident. He confided to the journal that during the height of the blaze, when he ran back into the house in an attempt to rescue the child, he had seen the magician standing in the midst of the flames unharmed. After the fire, no trace of him was found, apart from a charred jacket draped over what seemed to be the blackened remains of a large rosebush.

  Much of the latter part of Linton’s journal was given over to his vain attempts to track down a traveling magician by name of Professor Mephisto. The name echoed eerily through the empty house now as Emily turned from the room and continued along the hall. She sensed that the magician was somehow still here, as present as the smell of smoke and cinders in the air.

  She thought of O sitting in the car and of their conversation the night before. “If Lenora Linton died a year ago, who was it that called the shop, that showed us the collection, that was there with you on the night of the fire?”

  “It was the magician. He is a master of illusion. He took that shape to serve his end.”

  And everything they had seen in the house had been an elaborate illusion, an intricate web spun by the spider to ensnare the fly. He had come for her this time, and had it not been for O, he would have succeeded.

  She felt a chill run through her. For a moment, the house seemed to flicker like a flame. It slept now, but she felt the life pulsing through it still and knew it could transform in an instant. Her every instinct told her to flee the place – now – but she forced her feet to keep moving along the hall.

  She paused at the foot of the winding stair, where O had seen her collapse on the night of the fire. The carved dragon coiled atop the newel post slept beneath a shroud of soot, unharmed. She had the feeling that the whole house might have burned down and it would still have survived. Sifting through the charred refuse on the floor with the toe of her shoe, she searched for some evidence of the books she had been carrying down the stairs that night. Something to prove she was not simply mad, as most everyone seemed inclined to believe.

  But any books that might have spilled to the foot of the stairs had been consumed by the fire. She stood looking into the shadows of the upper floor, knowing she had to go up there, but wishing she were anywhere else in the world but here. The stairs had been badly damaged in the blaze, but when she put her weight on the charred boards, they seemed sound. She kept close to the side and started up.

  Though the fire had not reached the second floor, the pervasive smell of smoke and cinders hung in the air. She moved cautiously along the hall, edging open one door after another, apprehension knotting her stomach into a tight ball.

  Each room presented the same sad face. Desolation – the floors thick with dust, the walls bare, a few abandoned sticks of furniture scattered about. Sad remnants of the lives once lived here. There were signs of intruders as well – a ragged mattress in the corner of a room, empty beer and wine bottles, graffiti scrawled on the walls. All of it irrefutable proof that the place had sat empty for some time.

  It should perhaps have given her some comfort, but it didn’t. Instead, it gave her a dreadful sense of the creature’s power. That all the elaborate trappings she had seen had been spun from – what? Imagination, desire, dream?

  She remembered the uncanny sense she had when she first saw the inside of the house – that everything was just as she had imagined it would be. Somehow, it was the very strength of her own imagining that had helped bring the illusion to birth. And someone else would have conjured something else, after their own image.

  It was desire that had brought her here, then as now. Then, it had been the desire to possess the impossible. Now, it was the desire to convince herself it was over, finished, done.

  Yet was it ever really over? Three times in her life, the dark had come to her – in adolescence, in middle age, and now in old age. And each time, the collision with it had sent her careening off in a different direction. It had wounded her, yes, but at the same time it had deepened her resolve to survive, to create. Without it, she was convinced she would never have written a word. She would be someone else, living some other life. Would she be happy? Perhaps. But she would not be herself. She would not be Emily.

  And now it would be up to another to watch and wait for the show’s return.

  She moved along the hal
l as if in a dream. At the foot of the stairs leading to the turret room, she stopped. Outdoors, it was midday, but here the shadows hung as if it were their home. She had pursued the nightmare through the house. There was no choice now but to follow it up these narrow stairs.

  She went up slowly, pausing an eternity on each step. At last she stood in the dark at the top of the stairs. She put her ear to the door and listened, then turned the handle and stepped into the room.

  She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Perhaps, in some secret part of her, she’d harbored the hope that the treasure she’d come so close to possessing would still be here, sublimely spared. What she found instead was the broken shell of a room. Several of the windows had been shattered. Broken glass splintered underfoot as she edged cautiously across the floor.

  Pigeons had gained entrance through the broken windows and built their nests on the empty shelves. The floor beneath was spattered with droppings. Some of the nests were empty, but others still held birds. Agitated at the entrance of an intruder, they fluttered their wings and paced nervously up and down the shelves, eyeing her with their sideways gaze. With a loud beating of wings, several took flight and made their escape through the broken windows.

  So these were the shelves where she had pored over the priceless volumes from the Linton collection. And this fireplace, choked with rubbish and dead leaves, was where she had dozed and dreamt in front of the fire.

  She knew that if she curled up on the cold floor in front of it now and fell asleep, she would waken to the crackle of flames and the creak of Miss Linton’s footsteps on the stairs. And the books would grace the shelves again and be spread in all their glory across the table. She was not mad. She had not simply imagined it. It had been here.