*
Next day: in the kitchen I stuffed the last of what food I could take into the green, magnesium-framed backpack my parents had given me one Christmas. I closed the flaps, secured the cords with tight knots, and put my arms through the shoulder straps. I fastened the waistband and walked into the living room, looking around grimly once more before going out the front door for the last time in my life. A cloud of flies buzzed away when I stepped over Snoopy. I walked down the driveway and onto the first of many long roads I would take from then on.
*
I stopped at the canal a half-mile away. The water was crystal clear. The weeds, or whatever the hell you call them, swayed languidly on the bottom. I set my pack down and sat on the edge of the bridge, looking into the water for a long time.
That canal used to be filthy. Neighborhood kids swam in it; I never understood how they could stand it. The water had been brown, the edges of the bank lined with dark green scum. Now it was clear. No scum, no floating beer cans. No rusted shopping cart, pushed in by Jeff Simmons a year ago. I shook my head, not understanding, and shouldered my pack. I turned to go and stopped cold.
Something stood on the road ahead of me. It was the size of a mobile home. I’d never seen anything like it, not outside a theater or an H.P. Lovecraft story. Superficially it looked like a lion; at least, it had a lion’s body. It was shaggy and the hair was darker and much coarser than a lion’s, almost like a Brillo pad. It had a disturbingly human face. The features were almost caricatured: practically no lip, a large, wide nose, bushy eyebrows, and smoldering red eyes. The face was framed by a thick, brown mane. On its rear end, where a lion’s tail should have been, was the tail of a scorpion. It was long and segmented, and poised with the contained power of a cobra’s neck. It ended in a needle-like stinger a foot long. The tail waved back and forth in the air.
It was motionless and silent, regarding me with hot, red eyes.
(A year later I would be in a library, leafing through a text on mythological animals, and I would stop when I came across a picture resembling this creature. I would remember the name underneath: manticore.)
It headed for me, slowly at first, but gradually gathering speed. There was nowhere to run, no way on earth to get away from this thing. It left the road, ran a short space on the grass by the canal bank, and jumped when it reached the bridge. It sailed over my head and landed on the other side of the canal. The force of its landing vibrated through the soles of my shoes. I almost wet my pants. The thing didn’t even look at me as it hit; it just began running at terrific speed down the road. I watched until it disappeared in the distance down the long, straight road, and then for a long time watched the space where it had vanished.
Somehow the world had changed. Just looking at that space where this impossible thing had been a few minutes before, I knew that. There’d been a Change, and the world would never again be the same.
I never found my mother or my brother. I left behind me the house I’d grown up in, empty except for the stiffening corpse that had been Grace.
Eight
God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of the unicorn.
—Numbers, 23: 22
I opened my eyes.
I was flat on my back in a bed, staring at a ceiling. It was covered with centerfolds, pictures of nude women in an amazing array of poses. I followed them with my eyes, across the ceiling, down a wall—Ariel stood by the door, looking at me unblinkingly with those dark eyes. “Hi, there,” I said.
“You’re back,” she said.
“Back? I never … .” And then I remembered. I looked down at my stomach. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and could see the scar tissue where the bolt had come through. “Yeah,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “I’m back.”
She nodded and turned away, walking silently out the door. A minute later Malachi Lee entered, wearing baggy black pants and a white T-shirt. On the front was a picture of two vultures sitting on a fence. One of them was saying, “Patience, my ass—I wanna kill something!” Malachi’s sword was slung at his side. I wondered if he ever let it out of arm’s reach. “It even stays at the head of my bed when I sleep,” he said, watching me look at it. I smiled.
“You certainly look better,” he said as he came to the head of the bed. “How do you feel?”
“Like shit. How long did it take you to collect enough magazines to wallpaper this room?”
“Not long. I went to an adult bookstore downtown and brought them back in a wheelbarrow.”
“Christ.” I looked around the walls. “Don’t you think this stuff is degrading?”
He shrugged. “It was something to do. You haven’t seen the bathroom walls—one-dollar bills.”
“Toilet paper, too?”
“Show some respect. Toilet paper is large denominations only, preferably with at least two zeroes. There’s a healthy stack beside the chamber pot in case you need some.”
I looked away from him. “How long was I out?”
“A long time. Four days.”
Four days! “Did I eat anything? I ought to be starving but I’m not.”
He nodded. “Last night you came out of it long enough for us to get some food and water into you. I don’t think you knew where you were; you had a fever for three days. The sheets were soaked from your sweating. It broke last night.”
I looked again at the pink mass of scar on my stomach. “It couldn’t have been too bad; I’m almost healed. I thought I was dead when it happened.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “It was pretty bad.”
“Oh, I’m sure I was probably a mess. I know the bolt came through here—” I patted my stomach “—but I must have lucked out and it didn’t hit any vital organs—or did it? Come on, you can tell me. Did you have to do any backwoods surgery on me? I can take it, doc, long as I can play the piano again. What’d you have to use? Sewing needles and brandy? X-acto knives?”
“We were too late for surgery. You were dead by the time I got to you.”
His face yielded nothing. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “That’s why you’re telling me about it now.”
He shrugged. “Have it your way. Do you want anything to eat?”
“How about just a glass of water?”
He nodded and left. I looked at the nude women on the ceiling. Dead? No, how could I have been? I was here now. But I remembered that darkness I’d felt, and I shivered. It must have been a dream, a fever dream—one of the strange, eidetic dreams a person can have while sleeping a recuperative sleep. Or maybe in some way I had been aware of my comatose state. Hell, I didn’t know.
Malachi returned with a glass of water. Ariel followed him in. I thanked him and he left. I drank. The water was warm; nobody had a way to keep water cold in the summer anymore.
“How are you feeling, Pete?” asked Ariel.
I set the glass on the nightstand to my right. “Fine.” I avoided her gaze and after a minute she began looking around at the walls. “This room is odd. So many pictures of naked women.”
I said nothing.
“What are they for?”
“They’re … pornography. Pictures intended to … to elicit an erotic response.”
“Oh,” she said, as if that explained everything. I knew it didn’t; she’d stopped inquiring because she could tell I was uncomfortable.
She inclined her horn toward my stomach. “You’re healing well.”
I nodded.
“Talk to me, Pete. Please.”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“Your feelings are still hurt.”
I hesitated. Why bullshit? “Yes.”
“You feel I betrayed a trust between us, right? And look what I’ve caused you—a stab in the back. Is that it?”
Tears welled in my eyes and I didn’t respond.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.” She turned and left. The room was silent and still with the feeling that she’d never really been
there at all; she could have been a dream I had had while I was feverish.
I thought about getting out of bed to see if I could move around a bit, or at least stand up on my own. I thought about it until I went to sleep.
*
Three days dragged by. Malachi Lee came in to feed me each day and we talked. I saw nothing of Ariel. When I asked about her, Malachi shrugged and said, “I don’t know. The other day, the day you came out of it, she asked if she could borrow Faust for a week or two and they both left.”
“She say where she was going, or when she’d be back?”
“No.” He handed me another sandwich—Spam spread on biscuit. “You ought to get your head straight about her.”
I shifted uncomfortably on the bed. Ever since I’d come out of my coma I’d figured I was strong enough to walk around, but Malachi would have none of it. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You’re closing her out.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You have something most people would give up everything for, and you’re taking it for granted.” He stood. “You’re a spoiled child.”
“What the fuck do you expect me to do? Come out of it and say, ‘Hey, Ariel, you almost got me killed and cost me my soul, but no sweat’?”
“She tried to explain it to you. She was immature, even if it was only a year ago. She didn’t understand what it meant.”
“She was using me to test her abilities, dammit.”
He cracked his knuckles absently. “Little kids play with matches, but they’re not trying to burn down the house.” He sat down. His sword clinked against the folding chair beside the bed. “I saw her those four days you were out of it. You didn’t. You were too busy being dead.”
I snorted.
“Yes, dead.” He leaned forward. “Perhaps you blame Ariel for your carelessness in getting a crossbow bolt through your back. But you better realize something—she brought you back.” He sat back, folded his arms, and crossed his legs. “Russ and I watched her do it. It took her all that night. For a few hours she just looked at you, never taking her eyes from your face. There was no doubt you were dead, Pete—rigor mortis had begun to set in, and so had dependent lividity, when gravity makes the blood seep to the lowest points in the body because the heart’s stopped pumping. Your pupils were dilated. Your bladder and sphincter muscles—”
“Stop!”
“Sorry. But you can’t deny what I saw—I was there and you weren’t.”
“You don’t have to be so graphic about it.”
The hint of a smile returned. “We’d removed the bolt, and after a while Ariel touched the wound with her horn. It started to glow. It was dim, like a flashlight with near-dead batteries, to use an anachronism. She stayed that way a few minutes and your whole body twitched. Your lips moved as though you were talking, but nothing came out—you weren’t breathing yet. Then you started going through convulsions. Ariel told you that was good and for you to help her.” He cleared his throat. “You vomited. It was bad; there was a lot of blood in it. Ariel said you were getting closer. You kept mouthing words at her until she started singing to you. She told you to always remember that she loved you, and her horn got so bright Russ and I couldn’t look at it. It was like a nova. It died down and she lifted her horn from you and walked past us. Russ stayed with you and I followed Ariel into the living room. She damn near collapsed onto the floor. She was crying.” He paused. “You know what it’s like to see her cry.”
“Yeah.”
“She was completely drained; all the energy had been taken out of her. She said she thought you’d be all right. I could barely hear her voice.” He shrugged. “That’s most of it. You’d started breathing when her horn went bright, and after a while Russ had to leave. Your fever started and Ariel and I took turns keeping a watch on you. You didn’t even move until the fourth day, when we managed to get some food into you. You know the rest.”
I felt stupid. What was I supposed to say? “I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t. But don’t shut her out. It’s obvious she loves you. You don’t need me to tell you she’s more than just a horse with a horn, more than a unicorn, even.”
*
I learned enough about Malachi Lee in those three days to be fascinated by him. We swapped “Where were you the day of the Change?” stories. It had become a way to get to know someone, a conversational ice-breaker, the same way many things in the past had been. Where were you when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor? When John Kennedy was shot? When Apollo whatever-it-was landed on the Moon?
His story was simple. He’d been reading a novel in the living room of the house I was in now. About five o’clock he’d looked up from the book. Something didn’t seem right; it was too quiet. After doing what just about everyone else seemed to have done—discovered the power out, the phone dead—he went outside and saw it was the same everywhere, and not just for things a power failure would account for. His mind made one big leap: he marked his place in the novel, fed Faust, took his sword from its stand, and sat on the front porch, petting Faust and waiting for looters—though he didn’t get his first fence decoration until a week later, when a marine sergeant-type tried to rob him with a shotgun. “No doubt he didn’t realize he’d have been better off with a baseball bat,” he said, remembering, “as a shotgun isn’t even well-suited as a club. But a sword—” He patted the black lacquered sheath at his hip. “A sword always works.”
*
On the fourth day after I regained consciousness Malachi caught me wandering around the house and ordered me back to bed.
“I’m okay,” I insisted. “Watch.” I bent down, touched my toes with my palms, straightened up, and bent partway backward. “No fuss, no muss. I raised my shirt. “See—nice, pink, healed scar.”
“It’s your funeral.”
At least he stopped harassing me about staying in bed and let me have the run of the house, allowing me to work my body back into shape. He showed me a few stretching exercises to help out, but mostly left me to my own devices. I was bored silly.
Three days after I’d got out of bed he caught me thumbing through his copy of A Book of Five Rings and asked if I wanted to learn to use a sword. Enthusiastic in my ignorance, I said yes.
*
The next two weeks were a nightmare. He worked on building stamina in my arm muscles, on honing my reflexes, and on my leg and arm flexibility, which was almost nonexistent. The training served a triple purpose: not only did I want to learn, I’d lost a lot of weight during those four black days and felt I needed to get back into shape. It also helped keep my mind off Ariel. I had trouble sleeping because I was worried about her.
“The first thing you have to learn,” Malachi said, “is how to control a blade.” He handed me a long piece of wood, like a baseball bat but thicker, heavier, and squared rather than rounded, and made me pick an imaginary spot three feet in front of my head. He told me to swing at it with all my strength, but to stop the bat right on the mark and not let it go past. I went past it by a good eighteen inches my first try.
“Again,” he said.
I kept it up for about fifty tries and then he made me reverse direction and do the same thing. My arms ached and my hands were numb against the wood by the time I finished. I asked for a break.
“Sure,” he said.
I sighed with relief, took a long drink of water, and spread out in a big X on the grass.
“Break’s over,” he said.
He made me swing the bat overhead and down fifty times, stopping it at chest level. I hit the ground the first three tries.
I was given a wooden sword and told to carry it at all times, never letting it out of reach. Once he rushed into my room in the middle of the night, screaming like a lunatic. I barely had time to get my hands on the wooden sword handle before his blade was at my throat.
“You’re a snail,” he said mildly. “You have the right idea but you’re slow.” He sheathed his bl
ade without looking at it. “How can you teach swordplay to someone with no instinct for self-preservation?”
He tried to teach me accuracy by hanging sheets of notebook paper on string from the ceiling. There’d be a blur as he drew his sword and returned it to the sheath, and a neat, one-inch strip of paper would waft its way to the floor. Before it hit he’d draw again, so fast I couldn’t see the blade move, and another one-inch strip would join the first.
“You try,” he said, and handed me his sword.
I tried. Sometimes I even managed to hit the paper.
“Hopeless,” he said. “It’s hopeless.”
By the end of a week’s time we were dressing up in armor left over from his days in the Society for Creative Anachronism and going at it full-out with the wooden swords called bokkens. Our battles consisted mostly of him blocking everything I threw at him and knocking me on my ass with well-placed slashes and thrusts every time I did something stupid. I did something stupid a lot.
He taught me about breathing and how it must be controlled: in through the nose, out through the mouth, gradually slowing it down, using the diaphragm to expand the lungs’ capacity for oxygen.
A week is time to learn a lot of things, too short a time to master any of them. Malachi even told me, “Right now you know just about enough to get yourself killed, because you have technique without expertise. You’ll have to work on it on your own—it takes a long time.”
“How long have you been doing it?”
“I’m thirty-three. I’ve been ‘doing it,’ as you say, ever since I began studying martial arts, which was when I was sixteen.”
“Oh.”
I learned about the sword itself—how a samurai considered it the embodiment of his soul because it kept him alive and represented his way of life. I learned never to touch a blade because oil from the skin mars it, causing rust and showing carelessness and disrespect. I found the twined handle was superior because it absorbed sweat and provided a firmer grip, and that the long, curved blade was meant more for wicked slashes than straight thrusts.
Ariel Page 7
