The shoes his mother came up with were more like bags with drawstrings than like ordinary shoes, but they worked reasonably well.
Jason was incredibly nervous as he walked to school—obviously, he couldn’t ride the bus. The first day of junior high, and here he was, half human, half horse—as if starting at a new school wasn’t bad enough!
He collected a crowd as he walked, and by the time he reached the school fifty or sixty people were following him, chattering in amazement.
The principal was standing by the front door, greeting the students as they arrived. When Jason trotted up he stared, then shouted, “Hey! You can’t come in here!”
“But I’m a student,” Jason protested. “I’m registered! Look, I’m in Ms. Hecate’s homeroom!” He pointed to the class list posted by the door. “And I’m wearing a shirt and shoes.”
The principal hesitated, glanced at the class list, looked back at Jason, then smiled.
“Ms. Hecate?” he said.
Jason nodded.
“All right, then,” the principal said. “But try not to cause any trouble.”
“Yes, sir.” Jason clopped past—the bottoms were wearing out of his shoes already, and his hooves were loud on the tile floor.
He wondered whether Susannah was right, and the teachers were geeks. He wondered how this Ms. Hecate would react to having a centaur in her class.
He was tired of being a centaur; he really wished he hadn’t mouthed off to that witch.
If he ever found her and got turned back, he promised himself, he wouldn’t horse around like that again.
He made his way down the school corridor, jostling through the crowd of students, until he reached Room 8. He ducked his head, stepped inside—and froze.
There at the teacher’s desk stood a woman—Ms. Hecate, presumably.
She was dressed in a ratty floor-length black gown that would need cleaning to qualify as “filthy.” Her greasy, waist-length black hair was unbelievably tangled, and her pointed black hat was absurdly tall. Her nose was spectacularly long and crooked.
She smiled at him. “You must be Jason,” she said. “I believe we’ve met before.”
Jason swallowed. “Yes, ma’am,” he squeaked. He wondered what she was going to do—was she still mad at him about the insults? Was she going to finish the job of turning him into a horse?
She considered him thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “For today, I’d like you to just stand at the back, if you don’t mind.”
Jason nodded.
Then Ms. Hecate added, “But tomorrow, bring a pair of pants, and your shoes, and we’ll get you into a regular seat.”
Jason smiled with relief. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
Well, he thought, at least one teacher wasn’t a geek. It was going to be an interesting year.
SPIRIT DUMP
“There’s this place I know,” he said, perching himself on the corner of the desk, “Out past the Bannersburg landfill, near where the sheriff dumped all the confiscated booze from those moonshiners last year, that I visit when I need cheering up.”
She looked up him, startled, and then grimaced. “It’s that obvious?”
“Yup.” He smiled.
She sighed.
His smile vanished. “Or if you’d rather just talk about it…”
She shook her head. “No,” she said, “I tried that, with Angie—you know her, my apartment-mate, don’t you? Well, anyway, I talked to her, and it didn’t do any good.”
“So what is it that’s bothering you, anyway, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“That’s the thing—maybe that’s why talking didn’t work. I don’t know what it is. I just feel like my life… I don’t know, like it’s not going anywhere, or maybe it’s… Oh, hell.”
He nodded. “Well, this place I mentioned is a lot cheaper than a shrink, and it’s safer than drugs; care to give it a shot?”
“Where did you say?”
“Near Bannersburg. It’s about half a mile past the landfill.”
“What, is it a great view, or something? That’s getting up in the hills, right?”
“Kind of. The view—well, there’s a view, but it’s not just that. It’s hard to explain; it just seems like a place where you can dump your problems and worries and forget them.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “And I suppose you were figuring you could drive me up there, to this place in the middle of nowhere, just the two of us for a look at this romantic scenery?”
He put a hand on his chest, fingers spread. “Me?” he said, “Would I try something like that?”
“Yes.” She nodded emphatically.
He laughed. “True—and if that’s what would cheer you up, Suze, I’d be glad to oblige. But honestly, it wasn’t what I had in mind. Look, I can give you directions and you can drive up by yourself, or we can bring along a chaperone, or make a party of it.”
“Really?” She studied his face, and saw nothing hidden there, no trace of sarcasm or spite or even lechery.
“Why are you telling me this, Paul?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Just trying to help out a fellow human being.”
“That’s it?”
He smiled crookedly. “Well, maybe I do have an ulterior motive—but I’m not going to tell you what it is until after you’ve seen the place.”
She stared up at him for a moment, then said, “All right, you’re on. But we’ll bring Angie.”
* * * *
Angie looked out the car window and pronounced, “Yuck.”
Paul laughed. “That’s the landfill,” he said.
“That’s a dump,” Angie said. “I don’t care what they call it, it’s a dump. They were dumps when I was a kid, and changing the name doesn’t change the fact that they’re still dumps.”
“They plow ’em under now, though,” Paul pointed out. “It’s more sanitary. The stuff doesn’t just sit there collecting vermin.”
“Whatever, it’s still a dump, and it’s ugly.”
“Never said it wasn’t.” He glanced at Suze, and his expression dimmed; she wasn’t laughing. She was staring dully out the window on the other side, watching the passing trees.
“There’s nothing wrong with dumps,” he said. “Gotta put all the trash somewhere, don’t you?”
Angie snorted. “Dumps make me sick,” she said. “When I was a kid, my uncle Bert used to hang around the town dump—he’d shoot rats there, they paid him a bounty, maybe a quarter each, which was hardly worth the bullet. He thought it was fun, though, and he’d pick through all the stuff and sometimes he’d bring home some of it. Old magazines, and sometimes books, and machinery parts—he used to fix my mother’s washing machine, and I don’t think he ever in his life paid for parts. And people throw away the damnedest things.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Paul said.
“Yeah, it was—everything he brought in stank. He stank. And he was filthy, always. I can still see him standing there, holding up a bunch of mangled rats by their tails…”
“Well, there probably aren’t any rats in the landfill back there, anyway,” Paul said. “That’s why they bury it all now, so rats won’t get in there.”
“’Course, that means nobody can pick through it, either,” Angie pointed out. “Uncle Bert would lose out both ways—if he hadn’t drunk himself to death ten years ago.”
Paul shrugged. “I guess he would,” he agreed. He shook his head. “And people throw away the damnedest things.
A moment later they turned off the main road—which wasn’t exactly a highway to begin with—onto a narrow strip of dirt. Angie started away from the window as they passed within inches of the tree branches on either side.
“Shit,” she said. “You sure you know where you’re going?”
“I’m sure,” Paul told her.<
br />
About a quarter mile from the road the car suddenly emerged into sunlight; Paul brought it to a stop and killed the engine. “Everybody out,” he announced, “We’re here.”
Angie leapt out and looked around; Suze didn’t move until Paul came around the car and opened her door.
She looked up at him, then reluctantly climbed out.
The three of them stood in a strip of grassy meadow atop a small ridge. Behind them were the woods, all secondary growth and brambly underbrush; ahead of them the land dropped off abruptly, a steep slope of bare earth and tuffets, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet high. Grass and wildflowers filled the gap between trees and drop, which varied from about a dozen feet in width to as much as forty.
At the foot of the slope the scrub forest gradually resumed, starting with grass and weeds, graduating through thorns and briars to bushes, a few browning evergreens, and finally to crowded, unhealthy maple and ash.
Suze looked around, appalled.
“This is your great scenic spot?” she demanded.
Angie said, “Looks more like Uncle Bert’s old hang-out, only without the trash. They’d throw it all down the slope and let it pile up at the bottom.”
“Hey, I said it wasn’t the view that mattered—though I’d like to point out that you can see Sugarloaf if you look over that way.” He pointed to the distant mountain, a blue lump on the horizon.
“So what is it, then?” Suze asked.
“Come here, and I’ll show you,” Paul told her, marching up to the very brink and beckoning her forward.
Slowly, reluctantly, she approached.
“Come on,” he said, “I’m not going to push you over or anything.”
Both women came up to stand beside him.
“Now,” he said, “Look down the slope and tell me what you see.”
Obediently, the two peered over the edge.
“Nuthin’,” Angie told him.
Suze blinked.
“Not even a beer can, right?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know,” Suze said. “It’s… I don’t see anything, but it feels like there’s something down there.”
Paul nodded.
“Okay, Suze,” he said, “I want you to take all that anger and depression and whatever it is that’s got your spirit so weighed down lately, and I want you to gather it all up into a big lump and throw it down there.”
She turned to stare at him. “What?”
“Like a visualization exercise,” he said. “Like in meditation, or biofeedback, or something. Just concentrate on it, think of it as if it were a real, tangible thing, and throw it down there.”
Suze hesitated.
“Oh, go ahead,” Angie said. “Can’t hurt to try.”
“All right.”
She concentrated. She thought of the gloom as a big grey something that had hung down over her, and suddenly she could see it, she could see this dark, foul thing, half cloud, half slime, that was covering her, and she reached up with both hands and heaved it up, revolted by the feel of it, heaved it up and flung it out over the brink. It fell, streaming grayish gunk that settled after it in a noisome, clinging cloud.
And suddenly she felt better than she had in weeks.
She blinked, and realized that the day was warm and sunny, that even though the trees down there were thin, their leaves were green and bright, the sunlight golden on the ground. The wildflowers on the ridgetop were cheerful, like a scattering of children’s drawings. A monarch butterfly was vividly orange as it fluttered from one blossom to the next.
“Wow,” she said.
Angie looked at her, startled.
Paul grinned. “Worked, huh?”
“How did you do that?” Suze demanded—but she wasn’t angry; she felt too good to be angry. She was just curious.
“I didn’t do anything,” Paul told her. “You did.”
“Come on,” Suze insisted, grinning.
“No, really! Or really, it’s this place that did it. Take a look over the side, there—carefully.”
A bit doubtful, Suze approached the edge as closely as she dared and looked down.
“What am I supposed to see?” she asked.
Angie, beside her, said, “I don’t see a damn thing but rocks and dirt.”
“Suze,” Paul said, “try to see that bad mood you threw down there.”
“I won’t get it back, will I?” she asked, with just the faintest trace of apprehension.
“No, no, of course not!”
She glanced at him, then stared back down the slope, trying to recall what that gray squirming mess had looked like…
And there it was.
And there was a great deal more.
She saw, faintly but definitely, gray and black and sick brown and bilious green and hot red, and gray and more gray. The slope was covered with the stuff, with oozing blobs and barbed chunks and a hundred other hazy, intangible shapes.
“Oh my god,” she breathed.
“People throw away the damnedest things, don’t they?” Paul asked her, grinning.
“What?” Angie shouted. “What is it? What’s down there?”
“What is all that stuff, Paul?” Suze asked.
“Well,” he said, pointing, “that spiky reddish thing is that bout of bad temper I had last summer and just couldn’t get rid of. The dark oily thing there is from when my mother was thinking about suicide—I brought her out here. But most of them I don’t know; they were here before I ever saw the place.”
Angie was staring at him, he realized. She probably thought it was a joke, he told himself.
“I learned about it from my grandfather,” Paul explained. “And he claimed to have heard about it from an old Indian who said this was the place where men could come and leave whatever evil spirits were troubling them. Granddad called it the spirit dump.”
“I never believed in any of that stuff,” Suze said, still staring down the slope.
Paul shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s evil spirits, or if it’s something in the air here, or magnetic fields, or maybe it’s all hallucinations; I just knew that it worked for me, and that it seemed to work for my mother, and Granddad said it worked for him. And I wanted to see if it would work for everybody, or if maybe it was just my family—or just my imagination. And when you’d been in a funk for the past week I figured it was a chance to find out.”
“What are you looking at, Suze?” Angie demanded. “Ain’t nothin’ down there!”
Suze shuddered. “All that stuff…” she murmured. She stepped back from the edge.
“Let’s get back in the car,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
* * * *
Paul sat at his desk, tapping a pencil on the blotter as he watched Suze talking brightly to Roger and Amy. He frowned.
He hadn’t told her to keep the spirit dump secret; he hadn’t thought it was necessary. He didn’t suppose it could really hurt if more people found out about it; after all, from the amount of stuff accumulated there already, plenty of people had known about it over the years.
Still, it bothered him. Suze was practically advertising the place, like a missionary seeking converts. Roger and Amy were just the latest in a long series.
But then, why shouldn’t she proselytize? What could happen? Was he afraid that the magic would get used up somehow?
Maybe that was it.
Or maybe he was just being selfish; he had this wonderful cure-all, and he was being asked to share it, and he wanted it all for himself.
Maybe that was it. He tapped harder.
When the pencil broke he went back to his paperwork.
* * * *
By the end of the second week his agitation had reached such a level that it was interfering with his work, with his driving, with everything.
Obviously, the thing to do was to drive out to the spirit dump and chuck his worry over the cliff. That would prove that the place still worked, for one thing.
So, Saturday morning, he headed out past the Bannersburg landfill.
There were fresh tire tracks at the turn-off, several of them. He realized he had a headache.
Along the narrow access road a tree-branch snapped off against his window, the broken end dragging across the side of his car, and his head began pounding.
And when he reached the strip of meadow and found a Chrysler mini-van half-blocking his path, so that he had to steer carefully between its rear bumper and the trees in order to get out into the clearing, the headache was unbearable. Enraged, he climbed out and shouted.
Faces turned toward him, half a dozen faces—people he didn’t even know. He marched out toward them.
“Hey, Paul,” someone called.
Paul followed the voice and spotted Roger. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Roger grinned at him and shrugged. “Suze told us about this place,” he said, “so we thought we’d check it out.”
Paul stared at him for a moment, then stamped on up to the edge of the cliff and peered over, forcing himself to not just look, but to see.
The mass of spiritual debris lay upon the barren slope, stretching a hundred yards in either direction, but with the largest concentration directly below him. And there were dozens of new additions since his last visit—most of them small, most of them thin and gray and relatively harmless-looking, but still, dozens. More, he thought, than had been added in all the years he had
been coming here.
“What have you been throwing down there?” he bellowed.
“Nothing much,” someone answered.
“A hangover,” someone else said, evoking laughter from two or three others. Paul saw that it was one of the strangers, a big, overweight man with ragged black hair. He was holding an open can of beer.
“A hangover? For Christ’s sake, a hangover goes away by itself!”
“Yeah, well, I’d rather have it doing it down there than in me,” the fat man retorted.
“And how do you know it will? Maybe it’ll just sit down there and fester!” Paul shouted.
The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy Page 23