by Terry Madden
He smelled the coming rain that moved down from the mountains, and with it, Death.
Wake up, the boy cried from the harp strings.
“Not yet,” Nechtan whispered.
One of the horsemen openly leered at Lyl from across the room. The tanner eyed Nechtan, his face going white. He whispered to the man beside him and they both got up from the table.
“You don’t like our company?” Nechtan asked.
“I—I’ve work to tend to… sir,” the man said.
Nechtan’s look told Lyl that the tanner knew, and it would be moments before the others knew as well.
The innkeeper sloshed two tankards of ale before them. “I’ll see about the meat,” he said.
“Go to Elowen,” Nechtan told Lyl. “Tell her to come along now. You two must be gone. I’ll find you.”
Lyleth got up and slipped between the dancers to the girl. She reached out to put a hand on Elowen’s shoulder, but one of Fiach’s horsemen took her by the wrist and pulled her onto his lap. He thrust his hips beneath her and laughed.
Elowen’s eyes met Nechtan’s. He got up and edged around the room toward the warriors’ table.
The young piper took up Elowen’s tune, The Bride of Darkmyre.
Lyl cozened the horseman, cooing to him and dandling his ears, moving his hands away from her breasts and his eyes away from Nechtan, who had almost reached them.
She tried to stand, but the man caught her wrist again and held it flat on the table, her mark exposed.
“Looka what I found,” he crowed. “The dead king’s solás. I hear the she-king pays a nice price for ye, she does.”
Nechtan edged closer, alehorn in hand. The man who had hold of Lyl wore a red beard, his moustache braided with blue threads. The one beside him was too young to grow a beard and the third was an aging warrior. All three wore rusted mail hauberks and carried long-hafted riding axes on their backs. Nechtan barely had a shirt.
He stepped up behind the old warrior. When the young one met his eyes, Nechtan lifted his alehorn to him in a toast.
“Nechtan’s solás, ya say? And I took her for a whore! But she’s still mine.” Nechtan wagged his fingers to hand her over.
The three men snorted yeasty laughs. “Four fifties in gold feathers and she’s yours, beggar.”
Elowen’s eyes met Nechtan’s once again and he thought he saw her smile. She got up from her barrel and took Lyl’s hand and that of the redbeard and tried to pull them to their feet saying, “‘Tis a dance tune. Come, come.”
But redbeard tossed her to the floor and drew his axe.
Nechtan threw the tankard of ale in the young man’s face. Before the old warrior could turn on the bench, Nechtan drew his shortsword and brought it down on the man’s bare neck. The blade was dull, but cut deep enough.
Two axes came at Nechtan, but he upset the table between them. Redbeard tossed it aside and closed in on Nechtan, wielding the axe with some deftness, but a crowded room was no place for a long axe. Nechtan danced away and caught the axe haft with his sword, taking a splintered chunk from it.
The beardless boy raised his axe to attack from the other side, but Lyleth snatched his hair and drove the point of her dirk through his throat.
Redbeard tried to hook Nechtan’s blade, catching it with the horn of his axehead and twisting. But Nechtan went with the motion and slid free. Redbeard only needed to land one blow to open Nechtan’s chest. This must be over quickly.
Nechtan worked the warrior back, protecting his chest with his blade until redbeard’s back was pressed against the hearth. It was then, in the firelight, the man’s look said he knew it was Nechtan.
Redbeard saw a ghost and Nechtan saw his chance.
He hacked fast and short and the warrior’s foot met the coals of the fire. He upset a pot of soup that rolled and splattered across the floor. Slipping in spilled soup, redbeard lunged desperately at Nechtan, who caught his arm in a downward slice that nearly severed his arm at the elbow.
Fiach’s man fell to his knees, his eyes turned up to Nechtan.
“By stars and stone,” the man muttered.
His axe arm dangled from shredded tendons. Nechtan raised the shortsword with both hands and drove the blade point down just above the collar of the man’s mail hauberk.
Elowen stood just behind him, a meathook in her hands, ready to finish him if Nechtan failed.
In the far corner, the innkeeper stood frozen, the old warrior crawling toward him, and the beardless boy heaped on the floor at his feet.
The boy with the small pipes dropped his instrument. His jaw hung open and he muttered, “My lord king.”
Nechtan’s arms and chest were covered in blood. His breath came fast and he felt nothing but shame for the sweet pulse of life in his veins. Never in his last life had he shed the blood of his own. He crossed the room and finished the old horseman, then dropped the sword beside the dead man.
“I’ve opened a door that cannot be shut,” he said to Lyleth. All he had left in this world stood before him, a bloody dirk in her trembling hand. He said softly, “So be it.”
Chapter 15
Bronwyn’s budget rental reeked of fake new car smell.
Merryn had sunk so low in the passenger seat that Connor could barely see the top of her head. He slid to the center of the back seat to find Bronwyn’s eye in the rearview mirror. That eye looked so much like Dish’s… and Connor could read it just as plainly. It told him Bronwyn was not too happy about taking her ninety-year-old aunt for a stroll on Malibu Beach.
The car spiraled down the hospital parking structure and Connor pointed the way to Ocean Drive. Bronwyn was explaining Dish’s prognosis, clearly hiding the worst of it from Aunt Merryn. If Connor could see through Bronwyn’s optimistic speech, he was sure Merryn could as well. The crux of it was that Dish’s chance of coming out of the coma decreased exponentially by the day. Connor found himself hoping Merryn couldn’t figure that part out. He needed to change the subject.
“This well Dish was looking for,” Connor said, “what’s so special about it?”
“The ancient Celts believed certain wells, life wells, were portals to the Otherworld,” Aunt Merryn said. “When one dies in this world, the soul travels through a life well to be born again in the ‘Land of Truth and Beauty.’”
“Why would Dish want to go to the land of the dead?”
“You misunderstand, lad.” Merryn attempted to turn in the bucket seat, to meet his eyes. Connor helped her by leaning between the front seats, his arms around the headrest.
“The well Hugh was looking for wasn’t a life well,” Merryn said, with a furtive glance at Bronwyn, “but a door through which an entire people crossed from that world to this one.”
Bronwyn gave a mocking laugh. “Connor doesn’t want to hear about this nonsense, auntie.” Her tone was a shade away from a threat, meant for Connor, not Merryn, which made the questions in Connor bubble to the surface all the faster.
“Could a person go through one of these wells if he wasn’t dead? Theoretically, I mean.”
“There have been stories,” Merryn said, “but—”
“But they’re fairy tales,” Bronwyn stated. “Nothing more.”
“Yes, tales.” Merryn gave her bony hands a flutter, as if to shoo away Bronwyn’s stale reality. “Tales that disguise truth.” Her bright eyes turned back to Connor. “Hugh studied these tales at Oxford, did you know?”
“No,” Connor said.
“Ancient Irish and Welsh mythology. He compared them, looking for common elements that survived from pre-Christian times—”
“But it is possible,” Connor said, “for a non-dead person to fall into a well and end up on the other side?”
“Not fall,” Merryn said pointedly. “A person must be taken across.”
“Taken? By who? What?”
The discussion was over as the parking lot appeared on the left. Connor instructed Bronwyn to find the closest spot, and once parked, followe
d her to the trunk of the car to retrieve Merryn’s walker.
“Let’s be done with this,” Bronwyn said, struggling with the contraption until Connor helped. “You’ve excited Merryn and she’s in a fragile state as it is. She loves Hugh very much and this wild conjecturing is more than she can take.”
She was right. Once they got to the well, Connor would show them. But he hadn’t quite figured out how to get Merryn into the cave yet.
“It’s not far,” he said.
But the walker proved slower than Connor expected. The little wheels dug into the sand and he had to hold onto Merryn to prevent her from taking a header, and since he had only one good arm, it was a challenge. Bronwyn took the other side, and together, they steadied Merryn.
With every step, Bronwyn launched eye-daggers at him.
It seemed like hours passed before they approached the sandstone cliff. During frequent stops to catch her breath, Merryn talked about well guardians who prevented lookie-loos from taking a peek at fairy land. Dish had said something about a guardian that day on the beach.
With a determined stride, Merryn plowed forward.
The cliff loomed before them. But as they drew near, Connor saw no sunlight reflecting on water, just sand. He left Merryn and ran ahead. The cliff was exactly as he remembered, even the crack that ran up out of sight. This was the place. But the pool of water was gone. The sand had come in and covered the well like it had never been there.
He ran his hand over the warm stone as the two women crept closer.
“It was right here. Right where I’m standing. I swear I was behind this cliff with Dish.” He slapped the smooth stone till his hands stung.
“Dish swam under this cliff!” he said, frantically scooping wet sand with his one good arm. “I swam under it.”
Water welled and filled the hole faster than he could dig, until the sand fell in and filled it. “No. No, this can’t be. I swear it was—it doesn’t make sense.”
“Shall we go?” Bronwyn’s voice was stern, demanding. “I have an appointment with the neurologist in an hour.”
“It’s got to be here!” He dug faster.
Aunt Merryn appeared beside him. She took Connor’s hand between her gnarled ones and whispered, “It’s moved, lad. ‘Tis all.”
Bronwyn barely slowed down when she pulled into the circular drive of St. Thom’s, reminding Connor the insurance investigator would call soon. He had just opened his mouth to thank Aunt Merryn when Bronwyn sped off.
He had so many questions for Merryn. But it all made some weird sense now. Merryn had said it wasn’t unusual for a well to dry up and be found miles away. The well on the beach had moved. To Ned’s. And Connor could think of nothing else but going back there.
School hadn’t let out yet, and Connor would be back before Brother Mike knew he was gone. He fell into an easy jog, past Ziegler’s and up to the fire road.
Merryn said Dish had been looking for a well that led to some magical land. He must have had some kind of clue. You don’t just go wandering the moors, or whatever they’re called in England, looking for the door to the land of the dead. He must have uncovered something in all his studying of ancient stuff at Oxford. Connor must really be going crazy.
With no sign of the bees that had attacked the day before, he eased through the cactus and chain-link without injury. But when he stepped onto the deck, he took in the sight of the well, now nothing but a fishpond filled with rain water. It stank of rotting leaves and algae.
“That’s impossible.”
He took off his shoes and waded across; mud and goo squished up between his toes. He jumped up and down, got out, jumped back in, took a running start and nearly broke his ankles when they hit the concrete bottom. You have to be taken across. But who the hell had taken him? And who took Dish?
“Take me, damn it!”
He sat on the bottom, motionless. Water walkers left dimples on the surface.
Maybe the guardian, whatever that was, sensed Connor’s hesitation. Did he really want to follow Dish to the Land of Truth and Beauty? Didn’t the Greek gods get so bored with eternal perfection they started meddling in the dirty business of humans? You can only drink so much ambrosia, after all. But Connor remembered his brief glimpse of that Otherworld clearly. It was so… different. The sound, and the colors, and fire that sang…
He finally crawled out of the stinky water and followed an overgrown path to the veranda. The windows were all boarded up, so he tested each one in turn to find one that slid open like the lid of a secret box. Inside, the walls of what might have been the living room were covered with graffiti. Stubs of candles sat waxed to boards and upturned tin cans. The remains of a campfire occupied the middle of the tile floor, right there with all the broken glass, empty cans and faded rags. “Ned?”
His voice echoed just like it had in the cave. Maybe Ned was no more real than the well.
“Hey, Ned!”
“He’s not here, asshole.” The deep, Johnny Cash voice came from the belly of a dark hallway, and the sound of footsteps in broken glass said whoever it was, was coming this way. Connor decided not to find out if the guy was a zombie.
He was almost to the movie producer’s house that marked the trailhead before he looked back to be sure no one followed.
Connor lifted the toilet lid, threw the pills in, and flushed. Twice a day. What a joke. He wished Brother Mike would just give him the whole bottle, but no, he might overdose. School policy. So, Bro Mike doled them out two at a time.
Being back in therapy with Dr. Adelman was like having weekly tea with Big Bird. The psychiatrist had reached a predictable conclusion—Connor was having a break with reality brought on by stress. Hence, the drugs. Connor wondered what it would be like to die of an antipsychotic drug overdose. Death by reality?
He had done his homework on the subject of wells and it looked like he wasn’t the only one suffering a break with reality. He had searched websites that described everything from fairy wells to puck wells, goblin wells, and clootie wells where people left rags tied to trees, messages, “clooties,” that carried their deepest desires to the old gods. At some wells, people tossed in models of body parts they wanted healed, and in ancient times, actual severed heads were thrown in for unknown reasons. Whole cities had been seen under the surface of several wells. There were wells that turned things to stone and wells that turned stones into people, wells where dragons slept, wells that hid magical cups or jewels or swords, wells that blessed, wells that cursed, wells that granted wishes and wells that granted visions. But no well opened, even on rare occasion, to allow a chosen doofus to cross over to the Fair Lands. One had to be taken, just as Merryn had said.
Connor had been flushing his meds for three days when Bronwyn called to arrange a meeting with the insurance investigator, Mr. Kline. Brother Mike thought it best for him to be there too, so they gathered in the dorm office. He called Connor’s parents in for the inquisition, but only his mom showed up—twenty minutes late.
Mr. Kline asked a series of questions that all circled back to: “How fast were you travelling at the time of the accident?”
Connor’s mother repeated the police report findings for the third time.
“Connor was driving his own car and the police on the scene found no indication of mechanical failure or negligence.” She delivered her lines like she was on the witness stand or something. “Their report said he was travelling within the speed limit, which may have been too fast for the road conditions, but was within the law, and considering his inexperience, he couldn’t be held liable. I think that covers it.”
Kline turned to Connor and cleared his throat. “Were drugs or alcohol involved?”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the lab report from the hospital,” Connor said. “No.”
“And where were you and Mr. Cavendish headed at the time?”
Now there was a question Connor hadn’t considered before. Where were they going?
“I don’t kno
w. He had an errand to run.”
“And a teacher would take a student with him? Ask him to drive even, to run this errand?”
Oh God, Kline thought Dish was molesting him or something.
“His car battery was dead,” Connor said, making clear eye contact with Kline. “And yeah, I was on probation. Dish was my jailer, so to speak, so I was required to stick with him.”
“But you don’t know where you were going?”
“No.” It wasn’t until that moment that he realized how weird this sounded.
“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?” Mr. Kline jotted furiously on his legal pad.
Connor looked at Bronwyn. He wanted to give her what she came for and Kline’s question was like an open door. Connor stepped through.
“When the accident happened, we were arguing,” he said.
Kline leaned on the table, making a steeple out of his fingers. “Arguing about what?”
Connor’s heart doubled its pace. “About my brother.”
“Your brother?” Kline asked.
His mom was out of her chair, her hands kneading his shoulders. “This really isn’t something you need to share with Mr. Kline.”
“Yes. It is. My brother died of an overdose a year ago. I knew he was doing drugs. I knew, and I could have done something—”
“This has nothing to do with the accident, honey.” Mom’s face was too close, her eyes brimming with tears. “Don’t,” she whispered.
Connor rolled his chair back and stood up, clearing his view of Bronwyn.
“Dish thought he could fix me.” He looked right into Bronwyn’s eyes and willed all his regret to fall like rain on her heart. “I stepped on the gas…”
At their next meeting, Connor told Dr. Adelman the whole story of the well on the beach, how he fell through something that, at first, was a dirty fish pond but later became a hot tub, how he saw Dish, or a man he knew was Dish. Alive. Awake.
Connor walked out of Adelman’s office with more pills.
