by Russell Moon
“She does,” Eleanor says, reflecting that same smile. “And she says Doone has been asking for you too. Who is Doone? Marcus? Marcus, what is it? Come back here—”
“I have to lie down,” I call to her.
CHAPTER 9
I spend the balance of the day on the couch. Running Jules’s phone number through my head. 522-1396…522-1396…522-1396…
But the numbers don’t leave my head, as my body doesn’t leave the couch. The call never gets made. Fear wins again.
“Call her, will you?” Eleanor says during one of her few forays downstairs. She has been preparing for her evening. With Spence. She looks good; long slim skirt, silk blouse. Too, too good.
“What are you up to, really?” I ask.
“Getting a life, Marcus,” she says.
I snort.
“Don’t snort. Life is good. You should remember that. Call her, for godsake.”
“It’s…complicated, Eleanor.”
“Try me.”
“Don’t think so, no.”
“Come on, Marcus, I’ve got some experience with these things, you know. I’m sure I can be helpful.”
Not likely, I’m thinking, considering that at worst I’m a murderer or at least certifiably insane, and at best, I am my mother’s darkest fear come to life. Come back to life. But I know she’s not going to just let go.
“Fine,” I say, “I’ll cough it up if you do. Tell me all about him.”
She pauses, walks through the room, into the kitchen, clinks around some silverware, glasses, ice. Comes back.
“Him?”
She knows.
“My dad. The whole gory story, Eleanor. You tell, I tell.”
She regards me, one hand on hip, the other to her lips.
“Fair enough,” she says. “Keep your secret.”
Chuck and I see her to the door.
“You’re really going,” I say. “On a date. With Dr. Spence.”
“I’m really going, yes, Marcus. But I wouldn’t call it a date, exactly.” She giggles nervously at that.
I fail to see the humor.
Dr. Spence pulls up in his plum-colored vintage Mercedes, waves at me, and gives the horn a little toot. It sounds slowed down and warped, like the bleating of a wounded goat.
Eleanor gives me a kiss on the cheek and tells me, “Don’t wait up.”
“The hell I won’t,” I say.
She is kidding. I am not.
As I stand in the doorway watching them drive off, Chuck bumps up hard against my leg. I look down to find him looking uneasy and soupy-eyed, not unlike the way he does during a thunderstorm, just before he bolts for the bathtub. But the skies are clear, and the breeze is soothing.
I ignore his look and head out to the porch to watch the stream flow. It has become, more than anything else, my refuge. I know that it isn’t bringing me the bad stuff. It doesn’t stop for me, is the thing I appreciate most. It moves right on past, without challenging me or spooking me, without acknowledging or even noticing me at all. Just like the whole rest of the world used to do.
The stream moves downriver. Ceaselessly. Like a stream is supposed to do.
If everybody and everything would just do that, do what they were supposed to do instead of funky flying and speaking and materializing and spooking in ways that I don’t understand…well, that is about all I would ask out of life.
I sit for maybe a half hour, appreciating the water’s fairness. I close my eyes, and the babbling makes the only sense I know. Sweet babble.
522-1396.
I open my eyes.
522-1396.
It’s in my head.
That’s right. It is in your head.
But that is not my inner voice.
No, young Prince, it isn’t.
I stand up, and start pacing, pacing the porch. I try to refocus on the cool babbling of the water.
It grows fainter.
You were supposed to watch out for Eleanor. You were supposed to watch out for Eleanor. What did you do?
“Chuck?” I call. “Chuck?”
Why didn’t you call her back, Marcus Aurelius?
“What was I supposed to do? She doesn’t do what I tell her to do…Chuck?”
It is as if the water has stopped moving. The stream is dark, but I still should be able to see the glints of baby whitewater. There is none, and the stone silence is oppressive.
You are supposed to be the Prince, assuming the throne—
“I don’t want any goddamn throne. Get out of my goddamn head.”
Why did you let her go with him, Marcus? He is not a good man. Why did you let her go with a bad man? You are supposed to be taking control.
“How do I know? How do I know anything? Maybe he’s the good man. Maybe you are the bad man.”
I am squeezing my own temples now, as if to squeeze out the voice and whatever is attached to it.
“Get the hell out of my head!” I scream. “Coward. Sneaky, shadowy spook.”
Silence.
The stream flows, my dog returns, the breeze strokes my face, and all is like it was.
Silence.
I can no longer trust it.
522-1396.
This time it is, as far as I can tell, my own inner voice.
Leave me alone anyway, inner voice.
522-1396.
I don’t want to call. I don’t want to hear Jules’s mother tell me how I mauled her daughter and destroyed everybody’s life. I don’t want to hear Jules herself tell me that no such thing ever happened, and that she is sad to hear that I have lost my mind. I don’t want to hear that the police want to talk to me.
522-1396.
I go to the phone. Sweating, my own heartbeat now drowning out the rushing water and everything else, I punch five and two and two and onethreeninesix.
Rings. Rings again and again and again and no way am I leaving any message on this machine and so, come on, machine, pick up, pick up, pick up—
“Hello?”
I couldn’t speak if I wanted to. I don’t want to.
“Hello? Hello?”
It is Jules.
Jules’s voice. I dialed Jules’s number, and Jules answered.
I stand there briefly, stunned into paralysis. I have to stop this. I have to stop being so surprised by everything.
By anything.
Jules is alive. In Port Caledonia.
So what the hell happened in the first place?
Everything I’ve felt up until this point—fear, guilt, fear, loneliness, confusion, and fear—is swept away now on a wave of rage as everything that has happened from Doone’s party onward flashes before me. I drop the receiver back onto its hook.
“Who the hell is responsible?” I scream into the empty house.
“Chuck!” I call. I whistle. No answer.
I tear around the house. I go to the second-floor bedrooms. I go to the bathroom.
“I can’t have you chicken on me now, Chuck,” I say as I drag him out of the bathtub. “We’re hitting the road. We’re going home, boy.”
I dash to my room, throw a few things into my gym bag, then go to Eleanor’s room, grab the keys to the truck, and scrawl a note on one of her hundreds of little yellow sticky note pads.
Don’t worry. I’ll call you.
I stick the note to her computer screen and leave.
I am running as I bang through the screen door. I throw my bag in the back and my dog in the front. I slam the door and gun the engine.
I wait before putting the truck in gear. When I do that, this will become for real, and I will see it through.
I close my eyes, rest my forehead on the steering wheel, and listen to the engine strain.
Chuck licks my hand.
“Nice ring,” she says.
I open my eyes slowly and regard her. It is Eartha, standing next to the driver’s-side window. Of course it is Eartha. I am not even surprised, and I congratulate myself for it.
“Yeah,” I s
ay, looking the ring over from all angles. It looks whiter and feels heavier than before. More like live bone than old carved antler. I don’t even remember taking it away from the kitchen table.
And it fits me better than it did. It’s hugging my finger like a vine.
“What brings you here?” I say, sighing.
“Ah, well, with your mom and my dad getting all heavy over there—”
I hold up my hands to stop her.
“Sorry,” she says. “So, going for a little trip?”
“I am.”
“Want some company?”
I lean toward her and speak through gritted teeth. “It hardly matters what I want, does it?”
“On the contrary, Marcus, all that matters is what you want.”
I take a deep breath, count to ten…almost.
“Get away from my truck,” I snap.
“Okay,” Eartha says brightly. She steps back.
And becomes even more Jules in the half-light of the street.
“See, we only want what you want. When you calm down, you will realize that. But listen to me, Marcus. When you meet up with him…”
I turn quickly away from her, and grip the wheel as if I have to pay close attention to the road ahead.
“When you meet up with him, be very careful. And keep your wits. Don’t believe everything you hear. Legend has it the Prince of the forest can be very shady—”
“Funny, I seem to be hearing a lot lately, about not believing everything I hear.”
She backs a couple of steps away from the car. “Right. Believe yourself, is all you can do.”
I let out a hard, nasty laugh and jam the truck into gear. “If I could do that, you all wouldn’t be able to screw with me like you do.”
“Just remember,” she says, as I start rolling out, “that he left us…but he also left you, and he left your mother—”
I send rocks and dirt flying as I peel out.
Fury propels me the first couple of hours of the trip. It is only after we have driven that long that I realize how tired I am, and that getting mad and fired up has made me more sluggish than before.
I find myself blinking a lot. Then I find the blinks getting more lengthy, to the point where I have to force my eyelids open and shake my head madly to stay alert.
“Talk to me, will you, Chuck?” I say, which is fairly chancy, the way things have been going. If he does talk to me, I might ask him to take over the driving.
He doesn’t talk.
My eyes close.
Jules appears. It is as if I am seeing her on a television screen in close-up. She is addressing the camera as if it is a person, like a soap opera love scene.
She smiles at me, that Jules smile, and I am melted. I am hers. I have to say that even if I do find her at the heart of this whole cruel horrible scheme, I don’t know if I can turn on her, the way I should.
I will turn on somebody, that much is sure.
Jules’s face disappears.
I snap to consciousness. I am driving with two wheels in the breakdown lane and two bumping along on the soft shoulder until I jerk the wheel and the truck back onto the road.
I have never been so enraged. I put the pedal down and bear down on Port Caledonia so hard I will shoot through it like a rocket when I get there.
Chuck is whimpering.
“Shut up,” I say. “I’ll tell you this, Chuck, if I have any of the powers these people tell me I have, then somebody is going to pay big-time for this. Somebody is gonna pay.”
Chuck whimpers more loudly.
“Stop it,” I say.
I fixate on the ring on my finger on the wheel.
I can see the lights of Port Caledonia.
I am near tears, but I am nowhere near an explanation for them. Fifty thousand thoughts slalom the slopes of my mind, and none of them give me any comfort. I am unsettled and unsorted, and I am going to get my hands around the neck of this monster and squeeze until there is not a scintilla of life left.
I am going ninety-five miles per hour when I hit the bridge.
And the misty morning fog.
I can’t see ten feet in front of the hood. Then suddenly, burning through like a foglight, there is the image. Of Doone Howe. In the middle of my lane, staring straight and cold into me. Chuck is howling, and I am kicking the brake pedal over and over as I swerve madly. I see the lights and hear the foghorn of an oncoming truck and try to swerve back again.
I spin, once, twice. It is like being on the tilt-a-whirl at the carnival, only blind. I grit my teeth, scream, wait for the thump of the bridge abutment.
But it doesn’t come. Next thing I see is open milky sky, then the water rushing up toward me. I am weightless, and now I’m choking back vomit.
We hit the water with the force and the noise of a jet engine.
And then, the silence.
We are sinking down, down into the water. My head is pounding so hard I feel like I have been hit with a tire iron. I look over at Chuck, who lies on the floor of the cab, curled in a tight ball as if he’s just lying in front of the fire.
We land on the bottom with a thump.
I am panicking. I try to move and am trapped by the belt. I undo it and start pounding the door. I can’t open it, and the truck is already filling with water coming in through Chuck’s open window.
Chuck has floated up, and is now sort of lying, grotesquely, on the top of the water, at my shoulder’s height.
I grab him, shake him. His eyes are open, but he is not really responding.
I grab him mightily by the balls, and hear him yowl, then I shove him out the window and up.
I climb out right behind him.
But I don’t make it. My foot is caught. I yank and yank, but it won’t come free until I turn and unhook the seat-belt buckle from my boot.
I am just making my way out of the cab, when I bump.
Into Jules.
I hear myself scream under the water, then scream again, as I try to swim backward. She is hideously bloated, blue-green and goggle-eyed, floating there twenty feet from the bottom, dressed in the flowing skirt and blouse that she wore at Doone’s party.
I can feel myself beginning to suffocate, as I scream out of control, swallow water, thrash around in every direction other than the surface. My chest is cracking with pain, about to collapse on me totally.
I fade completely into black.
“You are a lucky guy,” I hear.
I am listening, but I can’t yet open my eyes. I can smell, though, and this is definitely a hospital.
“Cabdriver arrived just as your dog was hauling you up on the bank. That’s an exceptional animal you have there.”
I know this voice.
I open my eyes slowly. It takes a few seconds to focus on him even though he is right there, sitting on the side of the bed.
But focus I do. I also know the face. By now, I should know this face and these mismatched eyes.
“Where is my dog?” I ask, trying not to sound too alarmed.
“He’s fine,” the man says. “One of the nurses took him home for the time being, so he’s well cared for.”
I stare at the man. He has the white coat, the stethoscope, the clipboard. But no way. No, no way.
He is holding my hand. He is fingering the ring.
“How are you, Marcus?” he says gently.
I don’t answer.
He starts feeling my bones, my hands, my arms, my face, my skull.
“She really is dead, isn’t she,” I say. I have the sensation again, same as when I approached the bridge. I feel like crying, but I can’t quite manage it.
It is as if he hasn’t heard me. “I think you are okay. You have some bruises, some shock, a little water in your lungs…but yes, you are okay.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not.”
His turn to stare.
But his stare is another thing entirely.
As if his beacon eyes have a lunar pull, his glare draws from my eyes the
tears that would not otherwise come.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, Marcus Aurelius?” he asks.
I think about it all. I think about watery Jules. I think about riding my bike in circles and circles six hundred times and all the falls and all the get-back-ups by myself. I think about Eleanor and wine. I think about Jules’s blood and hair in my fingers and snakes and moving things, and phone calls and nightmares and forests and tongues and lonely lonely lonely.
I think it all, while he draws the last bits of tears out of me with his lunar eyes.
“No,” I say. “Nothing.”
He holds me with that stare, waiting, extracting more.
“You aren’t a doctor.”
“No. But I am here to take care of you. Do you know why you are here?” he asks.
“I’m here because I crashed the truck.”
He shakes his head, and rubs my arm softly. I let him.
“No, son,” he says sadly, as if this is a terrible sad bedside confession that we both have to bear.
“You’re here to kill me, son.”
About the Author
The Witch Boy trilogy is Russell Moon’s first contribution to the world of young adult fantasy literature. He lives in Britain and has a deep interest in Celtic magic and mythology.
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Credits
Cover © 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Cover illustration by Greg Spalenka
Cover design by Jennifer Blanc
Copyright
WITCH BOY. Copyright © 2002 by 17th Street Productions, an Alloy, Inc. company, and Russell Moon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
