by Russell Moon
“Are you going to tell me, Marcus?”
“Don’t tell her, Marcus,” he says in my head. “You cannot tell her.”
“Shit,” I say.
“What?” she says, looking incredulous.
“She cannot know of my presence,” he says, the voice growing louder until I fear it is going to leak out my ears and she will hear. I block my ears with my hands. “If you tell her, there will be chaos. No, Marcus.”
Chuck hops up with his front legs on my lap, his eyes staring straight into mine. I swear I see him, ever so slightly, shaking his head no.
Eleanor stands and sweeps Chuck off my lap.
“What is it?” she says, an appropriate air of desperation beginning to creep back into her voice. She pulls my hands down from my ears.
“She cannot know I am here,” he says, louder still. “She will ruin everything.”
This, I think, is where everything finally turns, irrevocably. Ruin everything, I repeat in my head. “Ruin everything?” I repeat out loud.
Then, in fullest view of my mother’s rapidly building fear turning to horror, I start to laugh out loud.
She grabs me by the shoulders. Shakes me. Stares into me.
I bury my face in her shoulder, hug her as hard as I can.
She hugs me even harder.
CHAPTER
3
Eleanor has mostly left me alone since I went mental last night. But that doesn’t mean the issue is closed or that she has accepted mentalness as a proper excuse for all the unexplained goings-on, or that she has in any way benefited from my words or actions of recent times. As was already the case before, everything I do just unsettles her more.
As far as I can tell, she has not slept. She exhibits this in the way most people do: taking middle-of-the-night strolls around the house, going to the bathroom a lot, peeking in at me while I pretend to sleep. But more than anything, she makes her sleeplessness known by banging away at the keys of her computer so hard she could just as well be installing built-in bookshelves or taking down an unnecessary wall.
“Hi,” I say when I find her at work in her room.
“Hi,” she says, as routinely as possible.
“I’m not insane,” I say.
“I don’t think you’re insane,” she says. “Neither am I. Now that that’s settled, what do you want to do with the rest of the day?”
“Well, I was kind of thinking I was supposed to go to school.”
“Right,” she says, leaning back and making her swivel desk chair recline. “Do you want to go to school?”
“Frankly, no.”
“Well frankly, I’m glad. Because frankly, I don’t think you’re quite ready yet.”
“So, I can just stick around?”
“You have had quite a trauma, Marcus. You’re in pain, and I can see it. I don’t want to make things worse by sending you out there before you’re completely ready.”
I don’t know if I’m ever going to be ready for out there. But I don’t think that would be a helpful thing to say.
“Thanks,” I say instead.
“You’re welcome. My concern is just that you get better.”
I am down the hall, on the lip of the stairs before her words hit me fully. Get better?
I have my mouth open, about to ask for clarification, when she elaborates.
“That’s why I thought it would be a good idea for you to see somebody later today.”
See somebody?
I hurry back to her room. “See somebody?”
“Talk to somebody. A professional.”
“You said you believed I wasn’t insane.”
“I don’t think you’re insane. I just think you should talk to somebody. Somebody who could help you through this.”
Help me through what I have? I don’t think so.
“I made a call, to see if Dr. Spence knew of anyone—”
“What? Eleanor, no. You didn’t.”
“Stop, Marcus, calm down. It’s perfectly all right. Dr. Spence understands completely. He is very professional and would never dream of—”
“I’m not ‘seeing somebody,’ Eleanor,” I say, sidetracked, for the moment, by the Dr. Spence issue. “There’s no need for that. I’ll just go to school instead.”
“You’ll do no such thing. This is serious, Marcus. I want you to at least meet the man. You’ll talk to him for a little while, he’ll listen, he’ll be nonjudgmental, maybe he’ll have some helpful things to say. You’ll feel better, I’ll feel better….”
“No one will feel better,” the familiar foreign voice in my head says. “Do not go.”
“Well, I don’t want to go,” I respond.
“Well, you need to go,” Eleanor says.
How am I supposed to do this, argue this, with both of them?
I march to my room and throw on my clothes. In a few minutes I am down the stairs, I have my dog by the ear, and I am out the door, with Eleanor calling behind me.
In the woods, at the clearing, by the tree. My new Blackwater woods, my new clearing, my new tree.
“I’m going to tell her,” I say out loud.
No response.
“I see,” I say. “You only talk to me when I don’t want you to.”
Still no sign but one. Chuck. First he goes all bird-dog, sniffing the air, looking in every direction. Then looking as if he has caught the scent of something, but it’s moving. Really fast.
Chuck spins. And spins and spins and spins in a mad circle, like he’s chasing his tail, until he practically drills himself right into the ground and topples over. He lies there, panting, disoriented.
“You can’t do that,” the voice says.
I follow the voice, find him up in my tree. I take a long, hard look at him. He has, illogically, made himself look smaller. Illogical, if he thinks he is trying to look impressive. In fact, he is getting smaller in other ways, the more he shows himself. It is as if he is revealing himself to me through familiarity, and familiarity is breeding reduction.
He seems less of a horror up close, over time. More needy and human and slightly ridiculous.
“You’re in my tree again,” I say.
A broad grin slices across his lips.
“So I am,” he says. His voice indicates he is amused, maybe proud. Definitely unthreatened.
I don’t care who he is or who he thinks he is. I cannot keep taking all the crap that is dished out to me. He’s in my tree again. The only place I feel any kind of control or real power, and now he has replaced me in it.
“Tell me something,” I say, while thinking what a next move might be. “If you’re so all-powerful, then how come you have to keep disappearing whenever Eleanor shows up?”
“You call your mother by her first name? I do not approve. Show some respect.”
“Jesus, you are a piece of work. Nobody cares if you approve. Please answer my question.”
“I never claimed to be all-powerful.”
“Right, well, whatever you are, you seem to lose your balls whenever Eleanor’s around. What’s the deal? She your kryptonite, or what? Is that why you don’t want me to tell her?”
He is staring down at me now with obvious disapproval.
“You need a great deal of work,” he says. “More than I had suspected.”
“Get out of my tree,” I say.
“Respect might have to be your first lesson.”
“Get out of my tree.”
“This is not your tree. You do not have a tree. You do not have anything that I do not say you have.”
If he is trying to bait me, he’s doing a damn good job of it. I can feel my blood percolating.
“If you’re trying to bait me,” I say, “you’re doing a lousy job of it.”
He is not fooled. He is smiling again.
“Hello, Chuck, old boy,” he says.
Chuck whimpers, wags his tail, and cowers, all at the same time.
I’m not familiar with the controls yet, but I am going to do
something to that man.
I concentrate, focus, funnel my rage into an infrared stare aimed directly at his throat.
“Oh,” he says sarcastically, “I believe it’s getting a bit warm.” His hand goes up to his neck, and he rubs.
I keep it up, and as I do his discomfort grows obvious.
“You hate me,” he suggests.
“Yup,” I say, without breaking concentration. I will not fall for his tricks.
He has both hands to his throat now, covering up, rubbing, shielding.
“Are you coming out of my tree?”
“Hey,” he says, “then we’ll be a pair, because you’re already out of your tree. Just ask your mother.”
I will knock him down now. I will knock him out of my tree, knock him out cold, knock him out of my life if I can. I will do this.
“You will not,” he says, removing one hand from his throat in a backhand motion as if returning a tennis serve.
It is as if a fireball has come shooting out of a burning building and blasted me in the chest. I fly backward, screaming as I do, the heat of the thing crippling me even before I slam back-first into a gnarly oak and crumple to the forest floor.
As I lie there, Chuck comes to me. He licks my face, breathes on my neck lightly.
“Good old Chuck,” my father says, still perched up in my tree.
Like I’m launched from a catapult, I shoot up from my prone position.
And seize my dog by the throat.
There is whimpering so loud it could bring animal protection people from three states. But it is coming from me. Chuck is silent; I feel things crackling in his neck as I press my thumbs in front, my fingers in back. He looks at me with sad, watery, understanding eyes, but he does not struggle one bit. He is giving in to me, or to one of me.
I am fairly sobbing with regret at what I see my own hands doing, while at the same time I can feel hatred, bloodlust, power madness. Stop. God, stop, I am thinking. But my body does not obey.
“What are you doing?” my father screams right in my ear as I see his small, ungodly powerful hands struggling to tear my hands off of Chuck’s neck.
Chuck closes his eyes. God, stop. Still I press and squeeze while the bastard fights me.
He is too strong—or thankfully, strong enough. I watch both hands, all hands, working around Chuck’s neck, all those monstrous staghorn rings, his and mine, welded to those evil fingers, as finally he removes my hands completely from Chuck, who falls forward and down, while we two fall backward and down.
We lie there, panting, the three of us, Chuck choking but okay, spluttering, recovering, looking around him as the blood and oxygen return to his brain.
I am sobbing now. I stand up immediately and stare at my purple, trembling hands.
The bastard is lying on the ground still, now sitting up, looking up at me dispassionately.
“What did I do?” I ask, going to Chuck and kneeling down beside him, stroking him, getting my eyes as close as possible to his eyes to apologize with the deepest inside of me to the deepest inside of him.
“You did what you are built to do. You went for the jugular.”
“I am not built to do that.”
“You are, Marcus Aurelius. How can you still deny it?”
“But this is Chuck. This is my Chuck.” As I say it, I become overwhelmed with the thought of it, and I take him in my arms and squeeze him so hard that this time he really does whimper.
“True. But when you ran out of ways to hurt me, you also realized he was my Chuck.”
“No way,” I say.
He doesn’t even hesitate.
“Chuck,” he calls.
Chuck bolts right out of my arms and rushes to him, jumps up to him and paws at him just like he would me, if he hadn’t seen me in years.
He controls Chuck. I am deflated, defeated.
Alone.
“Still,” I say, without much enthusiasm, “I am not capable….”
The bastard releases Chuck, who comes bounding back to me, bumping me, nuzzling me, then finally taking his seat directly in front of me like a stone lion guarding a palace.
“It is time,” he says slowly. Then, also slowly, he spits a long mouthful of blood like tobacco juice onto the ground in front of him. “It is time you stopped saying that. This”—he points at the small pool of blood—“is your doing. Your fire that burned the inside of my throat, your own fireball that knocked you out. And that”—he makes a circular, choking motion with his hands—“was you. There are two of you now, Marcus. One of them is capable—and I am choosing my words particularly carefully now—of absolutely anything.”
Before the chill manages to run completely through me, I feel it run through Chuck’s body, up his backbone from tail to top, and top to tail again. He looks at me from the most impossible angle, tipping his head straight back over his spine to see me upside down. I rub the underside of his chin.
I start walking a nervous circle around the periphery of the clearing at the center of the woods, at the center of my magic, bullshit world. I walk around once, twice, three times, picking up speed a bit every time, picking up Chuck the fourth time, circling the bastard, who takes on an air of patience, of low, benign, evil cool.
“Stop all this circle business, Marcus. You want people to think you’re a Wiccan?”
I keep pacing. Chuck stays right with me. I love Chuck more than ever.
“I believe.”
I say it for one elemental reason: he knows goddamn well what is going on inside me, with the two Marcuses, and we both know I am not up to the job of sorting it out myself. The other me—the new one, the magic one, the dark one—is the stronger one. If I don’t get help, I will go under. I believe, because I have to believe something.
“Good,” he says.
“That doesn’t mean I am sure exactly what I believe.”
“I know.”
“I need time.”
“Fair enough.”
“I need to work some things out for myself.”
“Of course you do. But don’t take too long.”
“What about Eleanor?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“You leave your mother out of it.”
“She thinks I’m crazy.”
“Stop acting crazy, then.”
“I have to tell her.”
“If you tell her about me, there is no turning back. If she becomes aware that I am having anything to do with you, then she will do whatever it takes to destroy me. She promised me as much when I left.”
I stop my pacing at the farthest point away from him in my well-worn circle. There is a clearly cut path now, of draggy footprints disrupting the thick padding of leaves and pine needles.
“Can she do that?” I ask, because I really, really want to know.
“It is not out of the realm of possibility,” he says.
What is anymore?
“Maybe I want that,” I say defiantly.
“You don’t,” he says. “But perhaps you do. What you definitely do not want is to force her into a choosing of sides. You do not want to set her on me, Marcus.”
“And why not?”
It is dead hot, steamy, humid, and thick, and has been practically all the time I have been in Blackwater. But when he speaks now, you could scrape frost off the trees.
“Because you do not want to set me on her,” he says, so low I can barely hear him.
I know my face betrays my terror of his power. So I look down and resume my maniacal pacing.
“She remains neutral—she remains safe,” he says. “At least from me. This war is not her fight, so do not bring her into it. I do not wish to see anything happen to your mother. Others may not be so generous. Be aware, Marcus. Make no mistakes.”
I keep pacing and pacing and looking at the ground and looking at Chuck’s tail and feeling such equal measures of raging fury and utter terror that I could conduct a war right here, within and without mysel
f.
“Go,” he says. His expression is now one of resignation. “Go and find out. See for yourself, judge for yourself who is who. I trust your perception. Then it will be time for you to be taught everything you need. I am the one and only to teach you how to use your powers.
“So in the end, even if it is me you wish to destroy, it is I who will give you the means to do it.”
This is all swirling in my head faster than I am spinning through the vortex of this entire magic storm. I have worked up a brand-new sweat, and I’m treading so fast, I’m wearing a tiny moat around the bastard.
“And I will need you to call me Father,” he says.
“And I will need to let you know,” I say.
There may be another confrontation due here, but it will have to wait. Off in the distance, Eleanor has tracked me down, into the woods where she has never followed me. She hates the woods as if the trees were raining acid.
“Marcus!” she calls, then, “Marcus!” a little bit closer.
I look up and into the center of my circle to see what he is going to do. But he has already done it. He is gone.
Still, his voice remains.
“Swear to me you will not tell her about me.”
It does not feel as though I have a choice. He seems deadly certain, and deadly worried, about the Eleanor factor.
“I swear.”
By the time she reaches me, she looks totally haunted.
“I hate it here,” she says, looking all around as if something is going to jump out of a tree and bite her, or worse.
“So why did you come?” I ask.
“Because you had me—have me—worried to distraction.”
“There is nothing to worry about,” I say, taking her by the arm and leading her away from my area. Suddenly, now that she is here, I don’t like it. I don’t feel like I want her here. I feel dirty, dishonest.
She follows willingly. I feel, momentarily, the stronger.
“Don’t make me see a shrink, Eleanor,” I say. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing but a lot of stress, from what happened back in Port Cal. Nothing that time won’t take care of. Time to think. Time to cool for a bit.”
“Hmm,” she says.
“Is that an agreement, hmm, or some other kind of hmm?”
