“She smiled and said, ‘Ask me another question.’
“I said, ‘I have no more.’
“ ‘I do not mind telling you, I am going to kill you and all your friends in any case. I can make it gentle and slow, you feel more warm and heavy, and you fade away to night; or I can start by scooping one eyeball from your face.’
“At that moment, a black vulture, of which, yes, I know, there are none in England, and yes, I know, they do not fly at night, landed on the window behind her.
“I said, ‘We are protected, me and mine. Mavors will avenge us. Look! His bird sits yonder, watching you!’
“ ‘I scoff at him,’ she said. ‘His mother killed my children, one and all. I cried until my eyes dried up like raisins and fell out. My hate keeps me alive. Are you a child? It is given to me to kill children. Under the law, I am allowed.’
“I said, ‘You are not a Bacchant. You do not work for Dionysus. Who do you work for…?’And I bit my tongue, because that was another question.
“She said, ‘I serve one who will rejoice when Chaos sweeps the established Earth away, and pulls the broken arch of Heaven down into the poisoned seas lit up with flame. My death will be small price to pay, if, by my acts, I make all things pass away. My last question is this: Are you a child, or a man? If man, I cannot kill you; but if child, I can.’
“She pressed my neck with her hand and drew a palmful of blood to her lips.
“I said, ‘You did not answer my question perfectly.’
“She spat my blood out again. ‘The answer I tasted was ambiguous. You yourself do not know. But a man can sleep with a woman. A child has not that power, though.’
“She parted her robes, and I saw she was not wearing any underwear.
“ ‘Pleasure me, young pup, young baby boy,’ she said, smiling with her teeth all red, ‘and you survive. But if your manhood remains flaccid, soft, and weak, I will know it is a boy, and not a man, to whom I speak.’
“Well, I am sure Colin would have found it perfectly acceptable to have a drunk, naked, grown-up woman kneeling on top of you, with your own blood dripping down her chin, with the smell of wine and urine and foul chemicals still hanging in the air. He would have performed. God, he would have found it a turn-on.
“But I can’t even imagine anything worse. Being killed is bad enough, being killed in a disgusting way, by a disgusting person, and just being humiliated and embarrassed, and… ugh. I wanted to cry. I wanted my mommy. I sure did not feel like a man in any sense of the word.
“Well, I didn’t cry. She sort of rubbed up and down against my body for a long time, while I lay there, waiting for it to be over, and hoping she would kill me rather than continue.
“I tried to think of something to do or say.
“She climbed off me and, well, she laughed at my dick. She pointed and laughed. I mean, what way is that to treat a child? I would be embarrassed even to talk about it, I would not be talking about it now, even to you, except I think my capacity to be embarrassed is completely burned out of me, and gone forever.
“She said, ‘You are a child, then, aren’t you?’ And she took another hair ornament out of her hair, and it opened into a scalpel.
“It was the last moment, the last second of my life.
“And I had an odd thought.
“How am I going to act, this second? How should I behave…?
“Normally, we do things, we are polite, or we obey laws, because we want to get something out of the situation. We want to win applause and esteem, or escape punishment, or better ourselves, or something. All that went blank in my head. At this point, there was no such thing as better off or worse off. There was no advantage or disadvantage to anything I did.
“So I did what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was scare her. I mean, I could not hurt her in any other way, so I said, ‘Lamia, I know you. I call you by your true name. I deliver now to you my curse. Hear me! Unlawfully you have drunk my blood and taken it inside you. That blood I call upon now to curse and unmake you. It has the poisons placed in it by Dr. Fell, the poison that will erase your mind. He told me the minute and second that his poisons would begin to act. You told me that my powers and spells are helpless before his powers. But your powers are the same as mine, Lamia, and are bound by the same rules. You believe that Dr. Fell’s little molecular engines are beginning to dissolve your brain, don’t you? You are helpless.’
“She screamed and raised the scalpel, ‘Weep and shriek! Weep and shriek! It is what children do when they are about to die!’
“I laughed in her face. ‘Then part this shell of flesh that encumbers me, Mother of Vampires! The mortal part of me I always knew would die! Strike!’
“The knife came down toward my face, and it… jumped… out of her fingers, hung in the air before her face, unsupported, hovering.
“Then it moved and stabbed her in her eye.
“She flung herself backward, with blood and vitreous humor gushing from her ruined face.
“She screamed again, this time in anger, and started running toward the door, pulling hair ornaments out of her hair with both hands, and flipping them open into little throwing knives and hooks. She was running to the attack.
“I turned my head and saw what she was running at.
“Headmaster Boggin stood in the doorway, with Dr. Fell half a step behind him.
“Boggin had his hands clutching the doorframe, and his face was dark with wrath. His black robes started to billow around him, and his hair flew up out of its ponytail, came entirely unraveled, and started whipping around his face. His mortarboard went flying off. He braced his legs, and his chest swelled up to twice its size. Then (as his shirt was ripped into shreds) three times its size. Then he trembled and swelled up to four times his size.
“Dr. Fell, looking slightly bored, opens his third eye, and the little knives and sharp hair ornaments halt in midair, hang there a moment, and jump up to embed themselves in the ceiling boards, out of reach.
“And the Headmaster blows. Don’t imagine the puff-cheeks and pursed-up lips of a man whistling. Imagine a man opening his mouth as wide as possible, in a scream of utmost rage which is tearing out his lungs and guts and bowels. Now imagine a wind tunnel, one of those big ones that they use to test supersonic jets, with all its air compressed down and forced through an opening the size of the man’s mouth. Also imagine the temperature dropping to below zero in one second.
“That’s what happened. A hurricane exploded out of Boggin’s mouth, one of those tornado things that can pick up a piece of straw and impale it through a solid wood fence. The Lamia was picked up and thrown through the bank of windows on the far side of Dr. Fell’s office, knocking out concrete bricks as she went. Everything else in the room went flying up, too, including the table I was strapped onto, except Fell pointed his finger at the table and the metal bars bent out and grabbed onto the ceiling, and hung there while the hurricane blasted past.
“There’s not that much more to tell. Fell says, ‘Headmaster, that blow won’t kill her, not if that was Lamia.’
“Boggin says, ‘It was Lamia. Our Mr. Nemo would not be mistaken about such a thing. Get him down from there and untie him at once. We will have to organize a search for her. I don’t care if it takes all night; we must find her.’
“ ‘Are you worried that she knows what we are teaching our charges, here?’
“ ‘I take it you did not hear Mr. Nemo’s brilliant analysis of the situation. She’s not going to remember.’
“ ‘Then why worry?’
“ ‘Never mind what I am worried about, my dear Ananias. Just do as I say, there’s a good lad.’
“ ‘Do you think to keep this hidden? Everyone heard the sonic boom.’
“ ‘Not if they are using ears that hear sounds carried by the air. Only my brother, Corus, would hear it. Go! And use your molecular engines to rebuild this wall, while you are at it. As soon as Grendel’s hound finds a scent, I’ll come out and help look
. I can see this is going to be a late night.’
“Here’s the epilogue to my story. Headmaster Boggin got me off of that damn gurney, and brought me to the kitchen, and woke up the Cook. He sent Cook out with the search parties, and stood there at the stove in his ripped clothes (even his pants were ripped; he had to borrow some jeans from Cook), and made me some chicken soup himself.
“I started crying in earnest then. And he put his arm around me, and told me what a good boy I was. He said not to worry about what she had done, because trying to humiliate a man’s pride is simply another form of attack, as much as stabbing someone. Unlike a knife wound, this cuts only as deep as you let it.
“And he said he was proud of me, proud of how bravely I had stood up to Lamia, and he only regretted that I would forget all this in the morning. He sat there and comforted me while I cried on his shoulder and ate soup.”
15
The Silvery Ship
1.
As we continued to hike, my duffel bag got heavier and heavier with every step. The little white clouds of breath hanging before my lips began to turn into puffs. I asked for a break.
Victor called a halt for lunch. We sat in a circle on a patch of dry ground beneath an overhanging rock erected by some ancient peoples. We rummaged through our bags, trying to find the most perishable things to eat first. Unfortunately, the things every housewife knows, none of us knew, so we just sort of guessed that maybe the peaches should be eaten first, as well as some of the hors d’oeuvres, fish paté and caviar, and little spicy hot dog things.
“The most elegant escape ever,” commented Colin, passing me a cracker with caviar on it.
I bit into it. “Bleh. This might have gone bad already.”
“No, it’s supposed to taste that way,” Colin asserted.
Vanity said to Quentin, “So is Headmaster Boggin an enemy, or is he trying to help us, or what?”
Victor answered her: “He’s an enemy. An enemy who is nice and polite is a nice, polite enemy, not a friend. We have a tool to blackmail him, though: we can tell the other factions that Boggin intended to use us in the war against them.”
I said to Quentin: “What is your name?”
He smiled back at me. “Quentin Nemo.”
“No, I mean, you said Dr. Fell told you what your real name is.”
“If you promise not to tell anyone my real name, I’ll tell you. You all must promise.”
Four voices spoke at once: “Sure, I promise.” “I’ll do whatever you say, Quentin.” “I’ll never talk, Big Q. Bring on the naked torture girls!” “Not knowing what information is useful to the enemy, it is only logical to tell them nothing.”
Quentin said, “I was born Eidotheia, son of Proteus.”
Four faces stared at him blankly. Colin shrugged. “Are we supposed to recognize that name? Is it one of the women Zeus ravished or something? I lost track in class after the bull, the swan, and the shower of gold.”
“Proteus is a man. The Old Man of the Sea. The greatest of seers and magicians who ever lived. He could take any shape as pleased him, and his wisdom is as deep as the ocean.”
Vanity said, “Who is your mother?”
“Dr. Fell said I had three mothers. Do not ask me the biological arrangements, Dr. Fell did not go into details. Their names are Enyo, Deino, and Pemphredo.”
Colin said, “You are not honestly expecting us to recognize those names, are you?”
I said, “Isn’t Enyo a singer? I love her music.”
Colin said, “Yeah, and Dino is the dog on the Flintstones.”
Quentin looked a little miffed. We were talking about his mothers, after all. “We read about them in Hesiod’s Shield of Hercules and in the Pythian Odes of Pindar. You did those assignments, right? They were the Graeae, the three women, gray-haired from birth, the sisters to the Gorgons. Don’t you remember the Perseus myth? The three Gray Sisters had but one eye and one tooth to share between them, and they passed it back and forth between them to see and to chew. Perseus stole the eye until they told him the secret way to the cave of the Medusa, whom he slew.” He looked back and forth between us.
We returned blank stares.
“Well,” he muttered, “there is a constellation named after him, and one for Andromeda. We’re not exactly talking about the most obscure of Greek myths here. It’s in Hyginus, the Poetica Astronomica.”
I said, “We didn’t have to do the Hyginus. Mrs. Wren let us translate Sappho instead.”
“Well, I did that one on my own.”
Colin said, “And what myth is Proton from? I thought that was the name of a molecule or something.”
“Proteus is mentioned in the Odyssey of Homer. Menelaus tells Telemachos how he found his way home from the Trojan Wars. Menelaus hid under a seal skin, and when Proteus came by, Manelaus leapt from hiding. Proteus turned into a lion, a bull, running water, raging flame, but Menelaus kept hold of him, and he had to answer his questions. It was said Proteus knew the past and future, and all things.”
Colin asked in a lofty tone, “All things except the fact that there was this guy sitting under this seal skin waiting to jump out on him. I don’t remember that part of Homer at all. Was it before the Cyclops thing?”
Said Quentin, “The first part of the story where Telemachos is looking for his father, Odysseus. I think you skipped that part and went on to the sea adventure stuff in the middle. You paid me in honey bread to do your first four books of translation for you, remember? It was the thing we did right after the Iliad.”
“My first and worst don rag. I still have nightmares,” reported Colin. “What was I doing while you did my homework?”
“You were writing love letters to actresses in—Hey! Did I tell you? Those Hollywood girls wrote back. Virginia Madsen and whoever else you wrote to. Boggin intercepted them.”
“Well, well!” said Colin, looking as pleased as I ever have seen him, folding his arms behind his head with a look of infinite satisfaction. “I really do have psychic powers after all.”
Vanity said, “And a photographic memory like Victor! Hey, dodo, you don’t have to worry about grades ever again. It doesn’t matter what is on our permanent records. We’re all princesses and sons of kings from other dimensions or beyond the edge of space and time. No more lessons! No more books! No more Grendel’s dirty looks!”
We all sat in our circle on the ground, looking smug and well pleased.
I said, “You know, there is one thing that worries me.”
Colin said, “Oh, don’t spoil it. Britney! Tiffany! Natalie! Did they all write me back?”
I said, “However our home dimensions are run, they cannot be Democracies. There’s no point in holding the daughter of a Prime Minister hostage.”
Colin said, “Look, who cares how they run things? If our families have psychic powers, they’d end up running things. And now it’s clear we all have powers.”
Victor stood up. “I am not sure we do. Watch this.”
He stood up and dropped a fork on the snow.
Then he stooped, picked up the fork again, and dropped it again.
Colin said, “This is supposed to mean something to us, for what reason, again?”
“It didn’t float,” said Victor.
Colin said, “Forks don’t.”
Quentin put his hand out to where his walking stick lay on the ground, frowning. He didn’t touch the stick; he just frowned at it.
Victor said, “Powers off. We must be too far from the school boundaries. Amelia, did you say your bag was getting heavier?”
2.
Quentin was looking more and more pensive as we walked on, staring left and right across the snowy tree scape, as if searching for something. Colin trudged along, scowling and answering any comments with curt sarcasm. Vanity was happily depicting her future life in London as a model or actress. I was daydreaming about the new Age of Discovery that would follow once I told the men on Earth that there were other dimensions to be found and name
d and mapped, and other worlds in them. Victor marched without pause and without fatigue, slightly ahead of us, expressionless.
Vanity commented to Colin, “There’s no need to be so bleak! Everyone else on Earth gets by without magic powers. We can live our whole lives as normal people, free, doing whatever we want!”
“Great,” Colin muttered back, “there’s a zenith for you. I can climb the adverse cliffs and after fateful struggle find what’s shining at the utmost peak: the triumph of being ‘normal.’ Write that down in the history books. They’ll name cars after me.”
Vanity said, “Well, for you, getting to the level of ‘normal’ will involve a climb.”
“Sure. And your dream for your new life is what again? To be a clerk in a shop, or wait tables, and haunt bars after hours to find a lonely butcher or an investment broker to marry?”
Vanity snapped back: “It will be better than your new life as an inmate in the psychiatric hospital for the criminally stupid.”
I said, “Actually, we do not know if we are interfertile with human beings. Or, for that matter, with each other. We’re not the same species.”
Colin said, “If we must test it, we must. I’ll make the sacrifice for Science. Do you girls want me to do you both at once, or one after another, or…”
Quentin said suddenly: “It doesn’t make sense.”
Colin said, “I’ll say it doesn’t. What does ‘species’ mean to shape-changers? We should be able to alter our sperm and sexual organs to be able to…”
Quentin said quietly, “Why didn’t they build the school here?”
Colin said, “What? In the woods?”
“In a spot where our powers didn’t work. Why raise us on the estate grounds, if our powers worked there? Why not raise us five miles East or West? Or in Timbuktu?”
I said, “I can think of several reasons. One: We might have needed our powers to keep us healthy when we were babies; Boggin said something to that effect. Two: Our powers might have arisen back so slowly, that they don’t even know we have them yet, and the original estate was wide enough to keep the boundaries out of range. Three: Boggin actually wanted us to develop our powers, because he wants to use us on his side of the war. Four: Our powers only work when there are Greek gods around, and, no matter where we were raised, Boggin had no choice but to be nearby himself to…”
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