Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  His rude bed was rendered still more uncomfortable by the fact that the room in which he lay did not stay still like a normal room, but pitched, shuddered, and creaked. From time to time it was gripped by a horrific metallic scrape that stood his hair on end and rattled the fillings in his teeth. But the worst of it was that he had absolutely no idea of where he was, or why he had been kidnapped, or what it was that his captors wanted from him. Every time that Padfoot came in with drink (which he said was melted snow) and food (which he claimed was sliced caribou ham) for Mr. Feld, Mr. Feld questioned him. He questioned Padfoot angrily, and he questioned him pleadingly, and he questioned him in a tone of resignation. He reminded Padfoot that he had a son, young and motherless, who could not be left alone to fend for himself. He tried to trick Padfoot into making a slip or revealing some little corner of his true intentions. But Padfoot, snickering his withered little husk of a laugh, just kept on repeating the same set of outrageous lies:

  1) Mr. Feld was being held in the cargo hold of a "steam-driven freight sledge."

  2) The sledge was part of a large armada of snow vehicles and dogsleds embarked on a mission of conquest.

  3) The vehicles and other machines were powered by the electricity of a thousand thunderstorms, "a herd of thunder buffalo," traveling along in the wake of the armada.

  4) The object of the mission was to capture a city, called Outlandishton, from some "shaggurts" or "frost giants."

  5) In a lonely patch of green at the outskirts of this city of Oudandishton there was a well, called Murmury. Its waters fed "a infinite big fat tree" from which the universe as he knew it dangled like a plum.

  6) The leader of this army, a person who called himself Coyote, planned to poison the waters of Murmury and bring down this cosmic tree, for purposes that not even Padfoot himself, as he admitted, quite understood.

  7) With 6) accomplished, all existence, life as we know it, would come crashing to an end.

  "Please," Mr. Feld said, "I'm begging you. I don't know who you are or why you're doing this to me. If I've done something to hurt or offend you, Mr. Padfoot, then I'm very, truly sorry, and I hope you'll give me the opportunity to make it up to you."

  "You're a big fat skeptic, Mr. Feld, heh-heh, it's a sad fact," Padfoot said, sounding exasperated. His voice was rougher, somehow, than it had been back at the ball field that day, his grammar poorer than Mr. Feld remembered it. But there was no mistaking the dusty little laugh, like somebody crumbling a dead leaf in his hand. "What's it gonna take to get you to believe all this, heh-heh, guaranteed one-hundred-percent truth I'm handin' you?"

  "Well, what you're telling me is pretty far-fetched, Mr. Padfoot," Mr. Feld said, flexing his hands at the wrist. He had long since given up trying to wriggle out of his bonds, but he had learned that if he didn't keep things moving down there his fingers would soon grow too numb to feel. "I guess I would have to see it with my own eyes, for starters. But even then I'm not sure I would believe you."

  "Oh, I doubt that," Padfoot said. Mr. Feld could hear him come scraping across the floor of the room. It sounded like a leather sole against something gritty and hard. "I ain't never yet run into the reuben that was able to deny the witness of his own meat body."

  "I'm an engineer. I do it all the time. Take centrifugal force—"

  There was a sharp jerk at the back of Mr. Feld's head, and then his eyes swam with bands of golden light and blotches of dark shadow. Something loomed over him, gathering itself around what looked very much, as Mr. Feld's eyes adjusted to the dim light, like a great grin filled with crooked, pointed teeth. A gray smile, in the middle of a pug-nosed face, fur-jowled, the red-rimmed eyes weak and blinking but alight with a hungry expression. Mr. Feld cried out, and scrambled up from the mat onto his haunches, hands raised to protect himself. The thing blinking down at him was at once hulking and small, not much bigger than a boy of eleven or twelve, but thick across the chest and with a great sinewy neck like a horse's. Its arms were muscular and long, crooked at the elbows and dangling to its knees, and it was thatched over all of its body with a luxurious growth of pale blond fur. It wore no clothing but a pair of leather boots, high and reddish-brown, and a small purse on a leather belt around its waist. There was no visible trace of the ponytailed investor in alternative and emerging dirigible technologies who had approached him at the ball field on Clam Island.

  "Well?" the creature said. "Feast your eyes on the handsome mug of pale Robin Padfoot." He licked the palm of one crooked hand with his broad tongue and smoothed a wayward tuft of fur at the back of his head. "What do you say?"

  "I—I—" As unlikely as it seemed that this could possibly be the same Rob Padfoot, the alternatives were so much more unlikely—literally unthinkable by Mr. Feld's cautious mind—that he felt a certain pressure to concede the point. "Hmm."

  "Am I real, Mr. Feld?" Once more they were joined, in the dim cell, by the gray pointed grin.

  "Show me the machines," Mr. Feld said. "These steam sledges you were telling me about. The thunder buffalo. Then I'll know."

  This suggestion seemed to make Padfoot uneasy. Aha, thought Mr. Feld. It is all a hoax of some kind. There were no steam sledges, no dangling plum of the universe.

  "I dunno," Padfoot said. "Much as I'd like to mop the last nasty spatter of reuben thinkin' from your pointy reuben skull…Nobody said nothin', heh-heh, about lettin' you—What—?"

  Mr. Feld had sat up, and was leaning in very close to Padfoot, peering at the thick, matted chest hair through the lenses of his eyeglasses. Now he twisted his body to bring his pinioned hands around, grabbed hold of a fistful of fur, and yanked, hard.

  "Yeowch!" Padfoot slapped with the back of a paw at Mr. Feld's hands. "What are you doin', you hairless son of a bald monkey?"

  "Really," Mr. Feld said, unable to conceal his admiration. "The costume is remarkably plausible."

  "That does it," snapped Padfoot. He grabbed Mr. Feld by the back of his collar and dragged him to his feet, dangling him by means of one powerful brutish arm, so that Mr. Feld's toes barely grazed the floor. "Mr. Bruce Feld, prepare to lose yourself the remainder of your marbles."

  Still holding Mr. Feld at arm's length, like a man carrying a baby who needed very badly to be changed, Padfoot stole out of the room. It was an iron room, Mr. Feld noticed now, floor, ceiling and walls, and the door they passed through was a kind of iron portal, oval in shape. They began to move along a low, narrow passageway formed, like everything else, of sheets of gun-gray iron held together with fat gray rivets. It was like the interior of a Navy submarine in some old World War II movie. Padfoot was not especially careful of Mr. Feld's head and Ethan's father received a number of painful bumps as they went along. The air was close in the corridor, and had a burnt smell of spent matches. But as they climbed a steep spiral of iron stairs—Mr. Feld's poor head smacked the underside of every step as they went up—it seemed to grow at once thinner and fresher, and brutally cold. They emerged at the top of the steps in a low round chamber of iron and rivets. The walls were a bristling mass of gauges, levers, leather-clad handles, and indicators whose functions were not clear to Mr. Feld but which he would very much have liked to examine. Around, among, and in and out of the brass-and-steel tangle, teemed some grayish animals that Mr. Feld at first took for large rodents, some kind of strange nutria or opossum. He just had time to form a disturbing impression that these busy little rodents were talking to each other in a jabbering version of English—that their movements seemed to have a purpose, that they seemed to be going about their business with an unmistakable air of devotion to the work—when Padfoot returned him, with a jolt, to his feet. The next moment Mr. Feld was enveloped in a sudden darkness that was soft and heavy and stank like a goat.

  "There, best put that on," Padfoot said. "It's, heh-heh, wicked cold up top."

  There was something about that laugh that made it sound like Padfoot was still pulling Mr. Feld's leg. It was a vast robe of rank brown fur, hooded, belted at the wa
ist, trailing to the iron surface of the floor. It had been slashed up the back almost to the waistband, and there were straps to bind the long flaps around each leg, making a pair of furry chaps. Mr. Feld watched as Padfoot tied his own robe.

  "Well?" Padfoot said, seeing that Mr. Feld was not getting dressed.

  "My hands," said Mr. Feld.

  And so Padfoot, fingers nimbly dancing amid the difficult knots, untied Mr. Feld's hands and helped him into his foul-smelling robe. There were thick fur gloves to go with it.

  "What is this stuff?" Mr. Feld said, wrinkling his nose as he held one glove up to his face.

  "Mastodon, natcherly," said Padfoot, as if this were an idiotic question.

  Then, in spite of everything—in spite, above all, of his absolute refusal to believe that any of this was really happening to him—Mr. Feld felt something wriggling inside him, fizzing like a plume of bubbles in a glass of beer. It was a feeling that, as an engineer with a strong background in physics, he knew very well. In another moment, a window that opened onto the ceaseless mechanism of the universe was going to be thrown open, and he, Bruce Feld of Philadelphia, was going to get a chance to peek through it.

  "Come on, then, reuben," Padfoot said. "Monkey on up that ladder before you get my fur-lined hiney in trouble with the Boss."

  The ladder in question was a column of narrow rungs, clamped at its bottom to the floor and reaching up toward a small hatch at the center of the circular roof. It was not easy to scale in the cumbersome robes, and Mr. Feld had no idea how it was supposed to open. But when at last he reached the top of the ladder there was a metallic groan, a soft hiss, and the hatch spun open like the aperture of a camera. He cried out, and shrank back as a giant wall of cold and sunlight fell on top of him. But something was pressing him, shoving, really, from behind—it was Padfoot, of course—and in the next moment he was tumbling forward out of the hatch, into the dazzling cold. From all around him came a deafening iron grumble, under or over which he could just hear what sounded like the yipping and yapping of dogs. And every so often there would be the tooth-shattering iron scrape that had so tormented his hours in the cell.

  "Help," he said. "Can't—I can't see—"

  "Here," Padfoot growled. "Slap these on. I used to have me some good ones but I lost them back on that moldy old island of yours."

  Mr. Feld felt around until his gloved fingers encountered something at once flexible and hard that turned out to be a pair of heavy goggles. They were constructed of canvas and hide. The lenses, when Mr. Feld got them down over his eyes, cut down considerably on the painful glare, though they gave a pronounced yellowish tinge to everything. He saw that was sprawled on a kind of crow's nest or observation platform, with Padfoot beside him. Padfoot was standing up, clutching with his gloved paws a low brass rail that enclosed the platform. Mr. Feld grabbed hold of the rail and slowly pulled himself up. It was a good thing there was a railing, as he quickly realized, because they were moving across bumpy ground at high speed, and the footing was unsteady. As they rumbled along the ground, Mr. Feld noticed that it was gleaming, with a light that was yellowy through the lenses of his goggles, but hard and bright as the glint on a china cup.

  "It looks like ice," he observed. Even as the remark left his mouth it sounded sort of embarrassingly obvious.

  "Of course it's ice. These is the Ice burns we're scooting across, down deep into the Winterlands. What else would it be?"

  And so the last of Mr. Feld's doubts was plowed through and swept aside. He could not deny the vehicle in which he was riding—a remarkable machine, part snowmobile, part Sherman tank, painted black. He could not deny the deep piston chunk-kachunk of the machine's engines, nor the collective drumming rumble of the dozens and dozens of other steam sledges all around them, sliding and scraping over the hard shiny bones of the ice. There was no getting around the untold numbers of dogsleds lurching and streaking amid the steam sledges, driven by little creatures wrapped in fur and pulled by what had to be—what could only be—straining, yelping teams of werewolves. They loped along on their strong hind legs while by means of heavy tow-straps with their great furred paws they dragged the sleds behind them. And there was nothing at all that the cool, sensible part of Mr. Feld's mind could do about the great sparking thunder clouds, roiling and steaming and boiling with red lightning. They trailed in a ten-mile train thundering train, a herd of thunderheads blackening the sky.

  "Ah," Mr. Feld said. He could not seem to think of anything else to add, and so he just said, "Ah," again.

  "When Coyote wants to see you, heh-heh," Padfoot said. "Then Coyote will come to you"

  Just then, as if Padfoot's words had been the cue, the drumbeat of their steam sledge's engines abated somewhat, and they began to slow. All the sledges around them slowed, as well, and the werewolves dropped their towlines. The sled drivers climbed down from the sleds. They threw back their fur hoods, revealing pinched and leering faces furnished with long black beards.

  "Mushgoblins," Padfoot said. "The wolfboys don't listen to nobody else."

  The mushgoblins tore open heavy sacks and, grinning, spilled their startling contents onto the ice. Big frozen chunks of blood-red meat went skittering in all directions. A frenzied yipping went up from the werewolves, horribly reminiscent of human laughter, and then they fell on the meat, while the mushgoblins cracked their long black whips and sang a tuneless tune. The meat disappeared in under a minute. The werewolves began to roll around on the ice, shoving, playing leapfrog and biting at each other's throats with savage glee. Somebody broke out an ancient football and they got up a great bruising scrimmage, tearing across the ice.

  Overhead, the thundering black buffalo of storm caught up to them, and the shadow of the great herd fell upon a wide stretch of ice. Wherever it fell, the ice began to creep and writhe like something that was alive. After a moment Mr. Feld realized that it was not the ice moving at all, but tiny creatures, a million tiny white mice.

  This sight really cracked up Robin Padfoot. "They think it's nighttime! Poor little ice mice of the Iceburns! They've never seen a shadow before!"

  The werewolves broke off their game of football and fell in among the mice, scooping up big pawfuls of them, tossing them back like salted nuts.

  A thought—nothing too fancy—that been struggling to make its way out of Mr. Feld's brain finally arrived, somewhat the worse for wear, at his mouth.

  "Where are we?" he said.

  "We're at a crossroads. A big one. It's called Betty's Bonepit. This looks good for you, heh-heh! Mr. C. loves crossroads, you know, rube. And this is one of his, heh, absolute favorites!" Padfoot seemed quite excited at the prospect of seeing his boss again.

  Mr. Feld blinked his eyes, squinting through the yellow stain of his lenses. He hadn't realized before that they were actually traveling a road. It was a gigantic road, wide enough for an entire town of humans to march abreast. In the sunshine it sparkled like a road of diamonds. In the shadow of the thunder herd it glowed like a pearl. Just ahead, where the lead sledges had stopped, it ran into six other roads, some as wide, some narrower, forming a crooked, misshapen star of seven rays. Like all crossroads in the Winterlands this was a desolate spot; treeless and unmarked; a place where mortal adventurers came to grief. At the very center of the ragged star lay a hole, roughly circular, and filled, as Mr. Feld could not help but see from atop the steam sledge, with bones. Bones of every description, wind bitten and gray. Skulls, too—antlers, jagged nasal cavities, wicked curving jawbones studded with sharp teeth. One look at this pit and somehow you sensed that it went very, very deep. Someone or something had been eating an awful lot of animals for a very long time.

  "Angry Betty was a hungry lady," Padfoot said. "She, heh-heh, nearly ate my dad, back when he was just a puckling."

  As the steam sledges drew to a halt, one by one, they sputtered, groaned, and then, with a sigh of their engines, fell silent. Their hatches were cranked open from inside. Great gray clouds of vapor came po
uring out, followed in short order by the little grayling crews. They spattered the ice like handfuls of pebbles tossed into a snowbank. As they ran toward the crossroads they were joined by the mushgoblins, and by a bewildering variety of other smallish, yowling creatures, who leapt from beneath the fur tarps that covered the dogsleds and lurched and tottered across the ice. Some of them brought out bagpipes and tambourines. Others beat on iron shields with little black swords. They set up a terrible racket. In the house in Philadelphia where Mr. Feld had grown up, the old iron radiator grilles rang, banged, pounded, and screeched all night long. The sound disturbed your dreams and then when you woke with your heart pounding in the quiet of the night you could hear the radiators, all nine of them, going at once, all over the house. That was how the Rade sounded to Mr. Feld, iron and ugly and joyful.

  "What are they all so happy about?" he said.

  But there was no answer from Robin Padfoot. The shaggy demon (there was nothing else he could be) was already halfway over the side of the observation platform. As Mr. Feld watched, Padfoot lowered himself to the ice and loped toward the vast crossroads, tossing graylings and mushgoblins and who-knew-whats out of his way as he went. His animal style of getting along was unnerving to watch.

  "Padfoot!" said Mr. Feld. "Where are you going? What's happening?"

  "It's a crossroads," said a small, droll voice at his elbow.

  Mr. Feld turned. On the brass rail, its feathers stirred and ruffled by the bitter wind, sat a raven. Its eyes were ink, its beak lead, and its scaly legs and talons a rusty red like cedar shavings. It had the deadpan, crafty look common to its species, as if it were trying to conceal its thoughts. "That's where you'll always find Coyote."

  "Is he here?" Mr. Feld said, turning back to watch Robin Padfoot go shambling across the mirror-bright surface of the Iceburns, deciding not to care, finally, that he was conversing with a bird. He wiped the frost from his goggles, trying to see through the swarms of graylings and goblins that were flooding the crossroads at Betty's Bonepit. "Can I speak to him?" He turned back to the raven, which had its head tucked under one wing and appeared to be searching its feathers for something to eat. "Do you know where he is?"