by Russell Moon
And then, there is, around my leg—
“That’s a good sign,” Arj says, chuckling. “Eartha’s snake doesn’t like a lot of people, but she seems to have taken a real shine to you.”
I cannot even look down at it. My flesh feels like it is rolling off me the way you would remove surgical gloves.
“Get it off,” I say stiffly.
“No way,” he says. “You think I want fang marks all up and down my arm?”
“Don’t play, Arj,” I say. The snake is pulling tighter and tighter. The leg is going dead.
“I’m not playing. She’s wicked. And she pretty much hates guys.”
Still without looking, I reach down and try.
“Sheez.” She has done it once more. I raise my hand to see the now familiar neat little holes between my thumb and index finger.
Now I do look down at the snake. I stare at it. I don’t know what I am going to do, but something has to happen. I am either going to die of fright or lose my leg.
But of course I don’t do anything but stare. Even after she appears to become more interested in my face or neck than my leg. Even when she stretches up, opens those gaping hateful jaws wide, I stare.
Until she just quits. As suddenly and unpredictably as she began. She closes her mouth, uncoils, and slides back down my leg like it’s a fireman’s pole.
“Really,” Arj says. “She really likes you.”
“Kind of love/hate, I think.”
“Right. So, your friend here, or what?”
“Chuck,” I call. He looks over his shoulder at me and makes a new face: I’m busy right now, Dad. “Chuck,” I call, and still get no response.
“You should just leave him partying. It’s a cool room, huh? Pretty much everybody here is like that, doesn’t like to go out without their special little beasts.” He smiles. “Seem familiar?”
I don’t want to be in this room now. I feel like they are all watching me, the monitor, the frog that the monitor should be eating, the cats and rats and all the others are all looking at me at the same time.
“Let’s go,” I say.
I follow Arj out of the room, expecting to find the stairs I originally climbed to get here. Instead, this door leads into another room. A plush private bar.
Eartha is sitting there, as are Winston and Marthe. They are drinking ice-blue liquid out of highball glasses. They raise their glasses, saying “Cheers” in my direction.
I keep my distance and attempt to keep my cool.
“So are you this boss then?” I look at Eartha. She shakes her head.
I know it’s not her. I know what they want to say. Have for a while. But I want them not to say it. I want to not know what they want to say.
“Is it you? Is it you?”
Winston says no. Marthe says no.
“You?” I say to Arj, who is now coming out from around the back of the bar with two more of those big blue specials.
“I already told you, it’s not me,” he says amiably.
I sigh, slumping onto a tall barstool.
Arj tries to hand me my drink. I push it away. He puts it on the bar in front of me. I notice Eartha, Marthe, and Winston chewing something, then Eartha slides a candy dish my way, filled with what look like bay leaves.
I push it back. “Whatever it is, no.”
“You should, Marcus,” Marthe says. “We’re not going to get anywhere until you relax and open yourself up.”
“To what?” I say. I feel like a guy who is lying with his hands tied behind his back and his neck on the block, asking, “So, what’s next?”
“To everything,” Eartha says, coming to me. “To all things. It is all yours. It is your kingdom.” Once more, she kisses me; then I feel her hands running down my face, my neck, my sides, and my hips. I pull away.
“What kingdom, you psychopaths? You people are so lost. What do you think, you’re special or something? Well you’re not. You drink and chew some drug leaves or whatever…you learn a bunch of magic tricks, and throw big creepy parties with Daddy’s money and you think that makes you chosen or whatever. Well guess what? Every high school in America has pods of you freaks, and they don’t amount to crap. And I don’t know why you decided to pick on me…probably you do this to every kid who shows up all weak and alone and new to the town…that’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s who you prey on, isn’t it? Well you can just screw yourselves this time, all right, ’cause I ain’t playing.”
I pick up my drink from the bar, not to drink, but for emphasis. I slam it down, creating a small geyser, a rainbow riot of God knows whatever liquids came together in that glass and are now splitting off, into red and yellow and green droplet showers.
I march over to the door and nobody has the guts to try to stop me. I open the door I came in through, stomp out, slam it behind me.
And walk right into the room I just left.
“This really will go better if you have a drink,” Arj says.
“Could it possibly go any worse?” I ask.
“Yes,” they all say as a chorus.
I walk to the bar, pull up my chair, and slouch in among them. I can’t yet get into the intense, eyeball-to-eyeball encounters these folks thrive on, so I look straight ahead, at the long, pink, marble-framed mirror that runs behind the bar. One by one, the members of the Council do the same, until we are all facing each other, or rather, all facing nobody but seeing everybody. Arj, me, Eartha, Marthe, Winston.
I take a gulp of my drink. It is like taking a hard, quick blast on a canister of compressed frozen air. With eucalyptus.
“Is it Mr. Sedaris?” I ask.
Arj shakes his head. “He’s just our adviser.”
“Is it Baron? Jesus, I hope it’s not Baron.”
“It’s not Baron.”
I take a long drink. Eartha’s hand is on my back, rubbing. Arj’s hand is on my shoulder. It’s as if they are telling me I have some vile, incurable disease. Actually, that would be preferable. That would at least have an end in sight.
“Take another sip, Chief,” Winston says.
“Don’t call me that.” I take the sip, though.
“And maybe,” says a new voice at the end of the bar, “you might want to chew one of those leaves.” I look up to see Mr. Sedaris’s face next to Arj’s. I decide then that he is right. I might want to chew one of those leaves. Or all of them.
“Hey,” he says when I succumb, “don’t bogart those leaves.” I pass them down.
I hear low, warm, thumping music. I see heads bobbing in the mirror behind me.
I turn around, and they are all here. Rather, I am there. We are all in the great ballroom I first saw through the keyhole downstairs. And they are all looking at me, all raising tall blue glasses to me. All the familiar animals are weaving among the crowd. Chuck is doing very well with the sheep.
“Prince,” they say, as if they have been rehearsing this. “Thank you, Prince.”
I have to laugh. Just when it is supposed to start making sense to me, they say the most ludicrous thing yet.
“Prince,” I scoff, to Arj. “Prince of what?”
“Don’t scoff,” Arj says solemnly. “We are no longer great, but we are not nothing.”
“We as in what?” I demand.
“We, your people, last of your line. Brink of extinction. We, the last of the line of Cernunnos, god of Celtic forests.”
Without my noticing, the entire room has pulled in close around me. This, to me, is a forest. I feel I cannot breathe.
“We have been waiting a long time for you,” somebody from the crowd says.
“No, not for me. I don’t know who you’ve been waiting for but it’s not me. I’m no Celtic anything. I’m American, and that’s all I am. And I’m pretty sure I’m not related to any gods.”
“We almost lost faith,” another adds.
“We never lost faith,” Winston says.
“You’ve apparently lost your hearing,” I say.
“We waited, and now we are rewar
ded,” Arj says.
Rewarded. They are rewarded with me. I feel very sorry for their faith. But I cannot help them.
“I can’t,” I say, and start shoving my way through the crowd. “Chuck,” I call, and whistle. He comes trotting between the legs of the people.
Once more, nobody tries to stop me, and I almost let myself believe I am home free.
Until, of course, I get down the hall.
Mr. Sedaris greets me at the front door.
“What?” I snap.
“You can’t,” he says.
“Yes, I can.”
“No, you can’t. You can’t let a people die, just because you are a coward.”
“To hell with the whole bunch of you. I’m not letting anything die, except maybe one Key Club full of deranged drama queens.”
“Yes, you are. That room contains every remaining Cern of this generation in this part of the world. There are pods about this same size, scattered through the British Isles, Galicia in Spain, Brittany in France, and Nova Scotia. That is it.”
“Fine,” I say. If any small piece of it is true, then they have my sympathy. But they do not have my services. “Let one of those people take care of it, then.”
He is shaking his head at me. “They are all looking here. You are the one. The line of princes, descended from the seed of Cernunnos himself, leads back several centuries B.C. to the forests of Gaul and beyond—and forward, to modern Western Europe, Port Caledonia, Blackwater…and you, Marcus Aurelius. Every Cern in the world knows about you and has been greatly anticipating your emergence. You are our one and only.”
“I am not. This is your heritage, maybe, but it means nothing to me.”
“Marcus, you need to go back and get a better look at your roots. Somebody’s not been telling you the truth.”
“I think everybody’s not been telling me the truth.”
“We need you, Marcus. You are all we have, or we are no more.”
I look at him, trying to detect the joke, the playacting, the mean-spirited trick. I detect nothing. I look at Chuck, who refuses to light the tunnel for me.
“I guess you are no more, then,” I say, brushing past him.
I am out the door.
I am in the woods.
The Port Caledonia woods. I look all around, and there is no Chuck. I am alone again.
But not. Straight ahead, about thirty feet away and walking steadily toward me, is the man. The man with the mismatched eyes.
I jump, or rather move myself back inside. Mr. Sedaris is waiting.
I am screaming at him as I point at the door behind me. “All I want to know is, am I hallucinating? Are you freaks in here now?” I am pointing, as though I’m holding a gun, suicidally, at my temple.
He is again shaking his head. “Whatever you saw was real, not imagined. That is the thing, Marcus. You have no idea yet, what you can generate, or what you will attract.”
I stand, all but at his mercy. I hold my hands out at my sides, begging, “Why me?”
“Because,” he whispers, “you are The Progeny. The Son.”
“The son of who?”
“The Progeny of the Betrayer Prince.”
I am pointing now, right in his face. He blanches, as if in real fear. “You’re as whacked as the rest of them, aren’t you, you old pervert. Why don’t you—”
“Your father was Our Father, Marcus. He was the heir to Cernunnos. He was the Prince of our people, and then he betrayed us, he broke us. You are now rightly the Prince. You were sent to us for this purpose. You were sent to make good. You have a destiny. The line of our god runs directly through you.”
“I never knew your god, and I never knew my father. And neither did any of you.”
“Not personally, no. But I have seen him.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“So tell me, why you are a witch?”
“I never said I was—”
“Are you going to look me in the eyes and say you know of nothing unusual about yourself?”
I would like to, that’s for damn sure.
“I…all right, I can’t say that, no.”
“Right. And where do you think you got those powers? Is your mother a witch?”
“Certainly not,” I say curtly.
“Right,” he says. “And tell me this: how do you feel when you enter the forest?”
It is so unfair, that they know so much about me.
“None of your business, that’s how I feel.”
“Do you feel power and contentment when you are in the forest? Yes, you do. Do you feel special, unique? Do you feel like a lord, when you are in the forest? Yes…you…do.”
Even as he says it, I am feeling it. My chest is expanding, pounding, my stomach is a cavern of beating wings—hawks, not butterflies.
Yes…I…do.
“That is because, Marcus, in the forest, you are Lord.”
He has tapped something in me, Sedaris has. Some part of me has stopped fighting, and this is no good, no good. I was doing badly enough fighting with my whole being.
I don’t want this, though. I don’t want to want it.
“That doesn’t mean I have to listen to any of this,” I say. “Make somebody else Prince. I don’t have the stomach for it, and I don’t owe anybody anything.”
“Yes, you do,” Arj snaps, slamming the ballroom door behind him. “His sins are your sins.”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t have to believe that.”
“You have to, Marcus. We, our people, are one, you understand, just like I told you from the start. We are a single entity—that is how we have survived through the centuries. And as a single entity, we cannot survive without our head, any more than that dog of yours can survive without his.”
I am starting to get the creepy, ominous feeling again.
“Chuck?” I call uncertainly.
“When your father left us, he left us bereft. He left us with the pathetic strands of power you see around here. We do not make proper Obair, we do not reproduce ourselves, we do not, ultimately, survive.”
I am weighing my options: none of them very promising. What they call pathetic strands of power are still way more than I can comprehend. Going through doors doesn’t seem to get me anywhere. Life as I understand it doesn’t even seem to exist anymore.
But I don’t want any part of this. I’m sorry, but I don’t.
“I’m sorry,” I start to tell him. “I wish I could help you people, but I’m just not the—”
“I told you,” Baron says, appearing on the stairs.
“Shut up,” Arj yells.
“I told you he wasn’t it. Why don’t you just go on and leave, Marcus. You’re no good to anybody. Go on. Screw you.” He continues his descent, appearing almost to float his way down.
“Quiet,” Mr. Sedaris says.
“No. We’ll do fine without this faker. We deserve extinction if you’re the best we can do.”
I don’t care. In fact, I’m happy to have somebody, anybody, helping me get out of here.
“You’re right, Baron,” I say. I open the door to the ballroom to retrieve my dog and leave through that front door, no matter what I find on the other side.
“That’s right,” Baron adds, laughing. “Run along home. Any Prince who crawled out of that drunk-ass mother of yours can’t do anything but pollute us into oblivion anyhow.”
There is a sound in my ears like two jets shooting through the room. I turn away from the door and see both Mr. Sedaris and Arj backing away from me. I am doing that thing again, with my arms extending in Baron’s direction. He is saying something to me, but I cannot hear him because of the screaming in my ears.
I am so hot it is unbearable. I can actually see my pulse beating in the corners of my eyes. Sweat is pouring down over my brow, down my face and neck. My shirtfront is soaked.
Baron is backing up the stairs. I am seeing him, then I am seeing flashes of somebody else. It is that man again, that face. Then he is go
ne, and Baron is trying me with the half smile, the outstretched hands. He is pleading, but I am not hearing.
I don’t want to move. The man flashes in my head again, and I have a vision of the sweat now turning to blood as it runs down over my face. Something is going to happen, and I do not want it to. I need to be gone. Right here, right now, I know that some part of me is capable of large and brutal, unpredictable, powerful things, and I dread it.
I shut my eyes, only to see the face, the man, the blood…Eleanor.
I open my eyes, enraged. I stay planted. This will pass. I don’t have to go up there. If I thought I could just hit him, then I could do it. It is beyond me, though, beyond what I control. Beyond what I can even understand, so I cannot predict, cannot allow…
Baron backs up and up and up, almost to the top….
Where I appear. Not me myself, as I am still here at the bottom, but me nonetheless.
Baron spins, sees, nearly falls down the stairs until I, or whatever part of me is up there, reach out and catch him.
By his rotten evil tongue.
Baron freezes. There is a pause. The me up there starts down the stairs, dragging Baron down behind him. Baron flails, struggles for balance, tries desperately to keep up, while screaming the whole way like a madman.
When he gets to the bottom of the stairs, the other me comes straight to me. I, like everyone else around, am petrified. His face is cold, unmoved, looking into my eyes while Baron continues shrieking.
I stand, stand, stand, sweating, waiting.
He is impassive, waiting, waiting.
Until finally I feel it. I sense it.
I am to make a decision.
On a life.
“No,” I say, desperately. “Jesus, no!”
His expression never changes, the other me. He looks for another instant into me, then adds one last nasty jerking motion as he releases Baron, who falls, crashing like a sack of soup bones, onto the marble floor.
The other me disappears in silence, back up the stairs, back into his blackness.
I back up against the wall as Arj and Mr. Sedaris rush over to Baron. There is a fair bit of blood spilling over his bottom teeth and lip.
“Can you fix it?” Arj asks Mr. Sedaris. Baron keeps screaming and spurting blood.
“I can do something with it. I’m not sure how much,” Mr. Sedaris says.
