[Abhorsen 03a] - Across the Wall

by Garth Nix

  “I guess you can’t,” said Bert. “So you might as well sit down and listen while I tell you a few things.”

  “I’m listening,” said Roger. Rowan could hear him moving about, settling down on one of the ledges.

  “First, no one’s selling the Hill,” said Bert. “Not while I’m alive, and not after it, either. I had a team of fancy lawyers work out how to make sure of that more than ten years ago. The family will be trustees, no more. If you’d bothered to ask, I would have told you.

  “Second, I reckon your temper is getting out of hand. I’ve got a bit of money put by. Not three million, but a tidy sum. I’m going to leave it all to Rowan. If he feels like it, he might give you some. So if it’s money you’re after, you’d better learn to talk to your son instead of throwing your weight around. You’ll live longer too. Bad for the heart, getting angry.”

  There was a really long silence after Bert stopped talking.

  Rowan looked at the stars, unable to believe what he was hearing. The Hill not to be sold. His father having to talk to him instead of hitting him.

  After a few more minutes when Roger still didn’t say anything, Bert went back across the log bridge, his old arms outstretched for balance. Rowan walked behind him, quite close, so he could steady him if necessary.

  “Where are you going?” asked Roger. There was a hint of panic in his voice.

  “Thought we’d leave you to think about things for a while,” said Bert. “We’ve got a visitor coming up. It’s New Year’s Eve, remember?”

  “What about me?”

  “We’ll be back next century,” said Bert. “Course, you still have to agree to behave yourself.”

  He chuckled a bit then, and started up the hill.

  “Wait!” called Roger. “I agree! I agree!”

  Bert kept walking. Rowan looked at him, then back at the Narrow. His father was calling him now, desperation in his voice. In the distance, he could hear a car approaching. It had to be Jake in the taxi, back a bit early.

  “Come on,” said Bert. “We’ll go meet Jake. We can come back for Roger later.”

  “But,” said Rowan, “what about Dad?”

  “We won’t leave him too long,” said Bert. “Just long enough for him to work out what he can do.”

  “Like what?” asked Rowan nervously.

  “Like nothing,” said Bert. “That’s what I want him to work out.”

  “So everything’s going to be all right?” asked Rowan.

  Bert shrugged. Then he shakily held out his arms, as wide as they would go, taking in Rowan, the Hill, the night, and the stars.

  “You can never guess what a new year will bring, even when you’ve seen more than a hundred of them,” he said.

  “Sometimes you see what’s coming and can’t do a thing about it. Sometimes you can.”

  He paused and took a deep breath of the eucalyptus-scented air, closed his arms around his great-great-grandson, and added, “Out here, right now, I reckon maybe everything will be as close to all right as it can possibly get.”

  INTRODUCTION TO LIGHTNING BRINGER

  I always enjoy watching electrical storms, though I prefer to do so from inside a house, behind a nice glass window. The undesirability of becoming more closely acquainted with lightning was brought home to me once, when lightning struck a drainpipe a few yards away from me. I’m not exactly sure what happened, because I found myself sitting on the very wet mat outside the back door, with spots dancing before my eyes and my ears ringing. My friend inside told me that the whole house had shaken and the thunderclap had made everything rattle; she thought I must have been killed when she ran through the kitchen and saw me slumped against the door.

  Despite this near miss, I remained fascinated by lightning, as anyone who has read even one or two of my books can probably tell. A few weeks before I wrote this story, I was held spellbound by a television documentary on lightning. In this documentary, they had amazing film that showed the “streamers” that flow up from anything vertical. These streamers actually make the connection with the lightning leaders coming down from the thunderclouds. I saw ghostly streamers rising up from trees and buildings, from weathercocks, and, most importantly, from people.

  The taller and stronger the streamer, the more likely that it will connect with the storm. When it does, there is an electrical discharge down from storm to ground, through the conductor. If the conductor is a metal lightning rod, that’s okay. But people are not so well equipped to deal with bolts of energy that at their core are as hot as the surface of the sun.

  I vaguely knew how lightning worked, but it wasn’t until I saw these strange, luminous streamers rising up out of vertical structures that it really made sense. At the same time, I was struck with the way the streamers varied, even between people of the same height. Some people just had stronger streamers.

  I also knew that there were people who tended to get struck by lightning quite a lot, but who still survived. I had a dim memory of a man who was struck by lightning seven times over quite a few years. He was apparently going to the post office to mail the proof of his many lightning strikes to the Guinness Book of World Records when he was hit by an eighth lightning bolt. He survived that as well, though his clothes were burned off and some of his papers singed.

  Put together, all this gave me an idea about people who could see the streamers and who could manipulate electrical energy in various ways. Small, secret ways, like changing the electrical energies in people’s minds, or big, flashy ways, like calling down lightning. That was the central idea. Then I had to find a story to use that idea.

  At the time my most pressing need was for something to submit to the anthology Love & Sex, edited by Michael Cart, so I was also trying to work out a story that would concern sex. Mixing up my ideas about controlling minds and lightning with sex and love seemed like it might produce an interesting story. “Lightning Bringer” is the result.

  LIGHTNING BRINGER

  it was six years ago when I first met the Lightning Bringer, on a cloudy day just a few weeks past my tenth birthday.

  That’s when I invented the name, though I never spoke it, and no one else ever used it. Most of the townsfolk called him “Mister” Jackson. They didn’t know why they called him mister, even though he looked pretty much like any other hard-faced drifter. Not normally the sort they’d talk to at all, except maybe to order off their property—once they were sure the police had arrived.

  I knew he was different the first second I saw him. It’s like a photograph stuck in my personal album, that memory. I walked out the school gate, and there he was, leaning against his motorcycle. His jet-black motorcycle that looked like a Harley-Davidson but wasn’t. It didn’t have any brand name or anything on it. He was leaning against it, because he was tall, two feet taller than me, easily six foot three or four. Muscles tight under the black T-shirt, the twin blue lightning tattoos down his forearms. Long hair somewhere between blond and red, tied back under a red-and-white-spotted bandanna.

  But what I really noticed was his aura. Most people have dim, fuzzy sorts of colors that flicker around them in a pathetic kind of way. His aura was all blue sparks, jumping around like they were just waiting to electrocute anyone who went near.

  The guy looked like trouble. Then he smiled, and if you couldn’t see the aura, that smile would somehow make you think that he was all right, the biker with the heart of gold, the drifter who went around helping out old folk or whatever.

  But I saw part of the energy go out of his aura and into the smile, flickering out like a hundred snakes’ tongues to touch and spark against the dull colors of the people around him.

  He charmed them, that’s what. I saw it happening, saw the tongues coming out and lighting up the older kids’ gray days. And then I saw all the electric currents come together to caress one student in particular: Carol, the best-looking girl in the whole school.

  Of course I was only ten back then, so I didn’t really appreciate everythi
ng Carol had going for her. I mean, I knew that she had movie-star looks, with the jet-black hair and the big brown eyes, and breasts that went out exactly the right amount and a waist that went in exactly as it should and legs that could have been borrowed from a Barbie doll. But it was sort of secondhand appreciation at that stage. I knew everyone thought she looked good, but I didn’t really know why myself. Now I can get really excited thinking about the way she looked when she was playing basketball, with that tight top and the pleated skirt…at least till I remember what happened to her….

  She was looking especially good that day. With hind-sight, I reckon she’d found out that she was really attractive to men, picking up a certain confidence. That air of the cat that’s worked out it’s the kind of cat that’s always going to get the cream.

  When the Lightning Bringer’s smile reached out for her, her eyes went all cloudy and she kind of sleepwalked over to him, as if nothing else even existed. They talked for a while; then she walked on. But she looked back—twice—and that electricity kept flowing out of the drifter, crackling around her like fingers just aching to undo the big white buttons on the front of her school dress.

  Then she was around the corner, and I realized everyone else had gone. There was just me and the man, leaning against his bike. Watching me, not smiling, the blue-white tendrils pulling back into the glowing shell around him. Then he laughed, his head pulled back, the laughter sending a stream of blue-white energy up into the sky.

  That laugh scared the hell out of me, and I suddenly felt just like a rabbit that realizes it’s been staring into the head-lights of an oncoming truck.

  Like a lot of rabbits, I realized this too late. I’d hardly got one foot up, ready to run, when he was suddenly looming over me, fingers digging into my shoulders like old tree roots boring into the ground. Like maybe he’d never let go till his fingers plunged through the flesh, squishing me like a rotten apple.

  I started to scream, but he shook me so hard, I just stopped.

  “Listen, kid,” he said, and his voice was scraped and raw, like maybe he’d drunk a bottle of whiskey the night before, on top of a cold. “I’m not going to hurt you. You can see , can’t you?

  I knew he wasn’t talking about normal eyesight. I nodded, and he eased off his grip.

  “I’ll tell you something for free,” he said, real serious. He bent down on one knee and looked me right in the eye, except I ducked my head, so I had only about a second of that fierce, yellow-eyed gaze burning into my brain.

  “One day you can be like me,” he whispered, voice crawling with little lightnings, power licking away at my head.

  “You saw how that girl looked at me? I’m going to have her tonight. I can get any woman I like—or any man, if I was that way inclined. No one can touch me either. I do what I want. You know why? Because I was born with the Power. Power over things seen and unseen, Power over folk and field, Power over wind and water. You’ve got it too, boy, but you don’t know what it can do yet. It can go away again if you don’t look after it right. You’ve got to keep it charged up. You’ve got to use it, boy. That’s the truth. You have to feed the Power!”

  Then he kissed me right on the forehead, fire flaming through my skull, and I could smell my hair burning like a hot iron, and I was screaming and screaming and then the world spun around and around and I wanted to throw up but instead I lay down and everything went black.

  When I came to, the Darly twins were turning my pockets inside out, looking for money. I was still pretty dizzy, but I punched one while I was still on the ground, and he fell back into the other one, so I got up and kicked them both down the street.

  That made me feel better, and I thought maybe the worst of the day had happened and it could only get better from there.

  But I was wrong.

  I was real restless that night. Everybody was. The air was hot and sticky, with thunderheads hanging off on the horizon, black and grumbling but not doing anything about moving in to break the heat. There was nothing on television either, and we all sat there flicking between channels and complaining, till Mom lost her temper and tried to send everyone to bed. Including Dad, but he lost his temper too and they had a shouting fight, which was rare enough to send us shocked to bed.

  I remember thinking that I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, but I did. For a while, anyway. I had this awful dream about the Lightning Bringer, how he was creeping through the house and up the stairs, blue sparks jumping around the bent-back toes of his boots. Then just as those lightning-tattooed arms were reaching down, fingers spreading around my neck, there was this incredibly loud burst of thunder, and I woke up screaming.

  The thunder was real, drowning my scream and bringing a cold wind that rattled the shutters in counterpoint to the bright flashes of lightning behind them. But the rest was just a dream. There was no one there except my brother, Thomas, and he was asleep.

  Still, it shook me up pretty bad. I can’t think why else I would’ve gone to the window and looked outside. I mean, if you have a nightmare, normally that’s the last thing you do, just in case you see something.

  Well, I saw something. I saw the Lightning Bringer on his motorcycle, parked out in our street, looking right up at the window. He had Carol with him; her arms tightly wrapped around his well-built, leather-clad chest. She had a bright-red jacket on and jeans, and a red woolen hat instead of a helmet. She looked like the sort of helper Santa Claus might choose if Santa read Penthouse a lot.

  The Lightning Bringer smiled at me and waved. Then he mouthed some words, words I understood without hearing, words that seemed to enter my brain directly, punctuated by the distant lightning.

  “I can have anything I want, boy. And you can be just like me.”

  Then he revved up the bike and they were gone, heading up the road to the mountain, the lightning following on behind.

  I never saw Carol again, and neither did anyone else. They found her a few days later, burned and blackened, her fabled beauty gone, life snuffed out.

  “Struck by lightning,” said the coroner. “Accidental death.”

  No one except me had seen her with the Lightning Bringer. No one except me thought it was anything but a tragic accident. She’d been foolish to go out walking in the thunderstorm, stupid to be out that late at night anyway. Some people even said she was lucky it was the lightning that got her.

  I was the only one who knew she didn’t have a choice, and it wasn’t any ordinary lightning that killed her. But I didn’t tell anyone. Who could I tell?

  I’d like to say that I never thought of the Lightning Bringer after that day—and what he’d said—but I’d be lying. I thought about him every day for the next six years. After I got interested in girls, I think I thought about him every five minutes. I tried not to, but I just couldn’t shake the memory of how Carol had looked at him. I wanted a girl like Carol to look at me like that, and do a whole lot more besides.

  I used to think about the Lightning Bringer before school dances when I just couldn’t get a date. Which, to be honest, was all the school dances up until about two months ago. Then I met Anya. Okay, she didn’t look at me like Carol had looked at the Lightning Bringer, and she didn’t look like Carol. But she was pretty, with sort of an interesting face and clever eyes, and she used to know what I was thinking without me saying anything. Like when I’d want to undo the back of her bra strap and just slide my hand around, and she’d shift just enough so I couldn’t reach—before I even started to do anything.

  Which was frustrating, but I still really liked her. She had an interesting aura, too, a bit like apricot jam. I mean apricot jam–colored, and quite thick, not like most of the fuzzy, thin auras I saw. I often wondered if she could see auras too and what mine looked like, but I was too embarrassed to ask her. Which was a bit of a problem, because I was too embarrassed to talk about sex with her either, and I knew that this was probably half the reason why she kept shifting around when I tried to put my hands places that seemed q
uite normal to go. And why she never let me kiss her for more than a minute at a time.

  I mean, I think she would have if I’d talked to her about it. Maybe. Once I ignored her trying to pull away and I just kept kissing, sticking my tongue in even harder and putting my hands down the back of her jeans. Then she started jiggling about, and I thought it meant she was getting excited, till I realized it was sort of panic and she was just trying to get loose of me. I let go and said sorry straight away because I could see in her aura she was really frightened, and I’d gotten sort of scared as well. Anyway, she was mad at me for a week and wouldn’t let me even hold her hand for two weeks after that.

  It was only a few days after we had gotten back to the holding-hands stage that the Lightning Bringer showed up again. Outside the school, on his black motorcycle, just like he’d done six years before. I felt my heart stop when I saw him, as if something from a nightmare had just walked out into the sun. An awful fear suddenly becoming real.

  Which it was, because this time he was smiling at Anya. My Anya! And all those electric tendrils were reaching out for her, blue-spark octopus tentacles, wrapping around and caressing her like I wanted to do but didn’t know how.

  I tried to hold her back, but she ignored me, and I felt these shivers going through her, like when a dog’s fur ripples when you scratch in exactly the right place. Then she pulled her hand out of mine and pushed me away, and I saw her looking at the Lightning Bringer just like Carol had six years before, with her mouth slightly open and her tongue just whisking around to leave her lips wet and her chest pushed forward so the buttons went tight….

  I screamed and charged at the man, but he just laughed, and the blue energy came gushing out with his laughter, smacking into me like a fist, and I went down, winded. He laughed again, beating me with Power, so all I could do was crawl away and vomit by the bushes next to the gate. Vomit till there was nothing to come up except black bile that choked and burned till it felt like it was taking the skin off the inside of my mouth and nose.