by M. E. Eadie
Chapter Seventeen: Confrontation
Colin explained to Spike that this was something he had to do on his own, and Spike understood. He knew he was going to get into trouble by ducking out on Maestro’s early morning lesson, and by missing practice with Frederick, but right now, he couldn’t face any of them, not until he confronted Silverberry; after all, she was his mother.Pansy Patch looked much like it had always looked: carefully manicured grass, tall stately trees, the small bridge arching over the tiny brook on one side, and the small run of rapids on the other side. As he walked over the bridge and across the grass, he couldn’t help but feel a bit homesick for the tents they had lived in for much of his life. A feeling of futility flooded into him, but what drew him on was the sound of the running water around Pansy Patch Park getting closer and closer.
There seemed to be voices in that water, the voices of two sisters arguing. He thought of the last moments of his mother’s life, slipping under the water, drowning, and then, strangely enough, he thought about his aunt living beside the place where she had pushed her sister in. The guilt must have been enormous, must still be enormous. Maybe that’s why Grandfather Thunder altered her memories, to help her forget.
He stopped at the edge of the small river and examined the opposite shore, looking for any sign of Silverberry.
“You’re not going to find her, you know,” said the rough voice behind him.
Colin knew he would come, knew he wouldn’t be able to keep himself away. He didn’t have to turn around to know that Sergeant Peary was there. Colin continued to stare at the far bank. He didn’t want anyone to see that he was crying. He felt the silvery image of the ghost crouch down beside him, smelled the rank odor of burning peat mixed with cow dung issuing from the stubby end of his eternally smoldering cigar.
“She’s gone you know. I’m sorry.”
“I thought she might be,” answered Colin a bit listlessly. “I just hoped that I might see her one more time. Union rules?”
“Ah … yes,” answered Peary apologetically. “As soon as she divulged who she was, she had to leave.”
“But why? Why was she waiting around here all these years? Why couldn’t she just tell me?” said Colin trying to hide the emotional quiver in his voice.
“Look, I never knew my sister had kids, twin girls, but somehow, I felt the connection. Now, I’m not too big on family, but if you were to ask me why she was hanging around here, I think it was so she could keep an eye on you, if that’s any consolation.”
“Why don’t you have to disappear? I mean, you now know that I’m your grandnephew, right?”
“Right, well, I sort of have too. Don’t worry; those goons at the party will never catch me. If Jerry couldn’t get me …,(Peary suddenly remembered that he had indeed been gotten)… well, so far I’ve managed to avoid them on this side. Listen, kid,” Colin felt the gentle, feathery pressure of a hand on his shoulder and he turned to face the ghost, “I’m not going anywhere until this thing with the Old Man is sorted out and you’re no longer in danger. How could I do less for such a great nephew?”
Colin looked behind himself for the great nephew, and turned back to Peary trying not to crack a smile. “Thanks, Sar -- Great Uncle Peary.”
Colin crouched down close to the ground and pulled a long piece of dried grass from the bluff overlooking the river. Fiddling with it, he asked, “So, what’s next?” For a second, he felt the urge to tell the ghost about the conversation he had had with himself in the broken tower, but a whispering voice slipped into his head and told him not to.
“Well,” the muscles around Peary’s square chin tightened as they did when the soldier thought, “I think, you need to get back to the house and confront Frederick. The one big mistake between my dad and me is that we never had it out. I never told him what I thought of him--not that it would’ve changed anything, but maybe it would’ve helped somewhat.”
“How do you know about my Dad? I just found out.”
Sergeant Peary pointed to his head. “Not much stuff up stairs, but I can walk through walls and my hearing is quite good.”
Colin took in a deep breath and shoved himself upward from the crouch he was in. He realized that the ghost was right. He had known intuitively that his mother was gone, that by coming down here all he was doing was avoiding Frederick.
Suddenly he noticed that Sergeant Peary had grown tense, aware of some other supernatural presence in the area. No sooner had the soldier disappeared than the two tall ghosts with long coats and stovepipe hats appeared. They glowered down at Colin, their accusing black eyes boring into him. Without saying a word they almost wrested the conversation and the mental image of Sergeant Peary from his mind. Colin felt his true guardian spirit surging up inside him and inadvertently he opened his mouth to let a little slip out. The wind came, bent the trees over and blew the two ghosts away like two tiny fragile flames. Before the wind took them, Colin had let slip the image of Sergeant Peary on holiday across the ocean, sipping on a cool drink beneath the Eiffel tower. He hoped he had bought his friend some time.
Colin felt a small surge of victory, but that emotion was soon dampened as he trudged back up the hill, toward the house and to the inevitable meeting with his father.
By the time he got back, things at The Circus of the Moon had heated up. Holdfast and Magenta had wheeled out a gigantic cannon and were in the process of stuffing a helmeted Spike into it. Rhea stood behind the cannon, a smoldering fuse in her hand. Frederick was in the process of explaining something, but it was Holdfast that caught Colin’s eye first, discreetly shaking his head in the negative.
He didn’t know, thought Colin, and his heart leapt up into his mouth, causing all the fearful disappointment and feelings of rejection that had been building in him to disappear. Frederick noticed the slight motion and turned to confront Colin, a disapproving scowl on his face.
“You and I need to talk, young man, now,” he said abandoning the cannon and marching Colin off to where they couldn’t be seen.
The other performers were practicing on ropes they had suspended from a large metal superstructure that had been erected on the grounds. They looked like spiders climbing the ropes, winding the ropes about themselves and then twirling to the ground like yo-yos.
“You ever hear the saying, give someone enough rope and they just might hang themselves?” asked Frederick in a direct tone. “Why did you skip practice? You know how little time we have left.”
Colin stared at his father, not knowing what to say. Just the fact that this was his father kept his mouth shut. He shrugged. The image of his aunt being hung jerked into his head.
Frederick must have interpreted the shrug as indifference because the action seemed to irritate him further. “Skipping out on Maestro is bad enough, but not showing up for practice as well….” He shook his head. “You’ve disappointed me. We only have a few days left and we still don’t have the plan worked out!”
With this, all the puff and bluster seemed to go out of Frederick and he sagged. Colin realized that he wasn’t all that upset with him. It was more the pressure of not having the subplot nailed down that was getting to him. Colin had no idea how to bring up the father/son thing, so he didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” said Colin. “I just had some important things to take care of-–family business, if you know what I mean.”
Frederick waved his hand in acknowledgment and nodded. “I know what you’re talking about. Being Clown Master is like being the father of everyone here. It gets pretty weighty sometimes. Do me a favor? In the future, just tell me when you’re going to skip out. It’ll save me from worrying. Although it didn’t bother Maestro much, I was ready to send the entire troop scouring the town for you.”
“I promise.”
“Great!” he said jumping to his feet and rubbing his hands together, “but that still doesn’t solve our present predicament. What are we going to do?” he said mor
e to himself than anyone.
The voice in Colin’s head, sounding distinctly like the one in the mirror, whispered: “A coronation, a coronation.”
“A coronation?” repeated Colin.
“A coronation?” said Frederick who took a moment to mull it over. His eyes grew brighter and brighter as the idea sunk in. “It’s perfect! He won’t be able to refuse a coronation, and it’ll fit perfectly into Maestro’s greater plot!” Frederick beamed at him with visible pride. “A coronation! How did you come up with such a clever idea?”
“It popped into my head,” offered Colin.
“Right, excellent, now, off to work. We’d better get back there before someone gets hurt.”
Just then a large ‘BANG’ vibrated through the air followed by a half-fearful, half-sublime shout. They looked up to see Spike sailing over their heads. He overshot the netting set up to catch him and crashed into the boughs of an ancient spruce tree. He looked like a rag doll as he fell through the branches and made a dull thud as he hit the ground where he lay motionless.
Frederick and Colin ran over to him, but they weren’t the first ones to reach him. Descending out of the air, Ofelia and Melissa lighted next to Spike. They were dressed in startling white robes. His face twisted in pain as he regained consciousness. His right arm was turned in an impossible angle.
“Any other place than the arm?” asked Ofelia, her hands hovering over his body.
In short, painful gasps, he said, “The….ribs!”
“Sssh,” said Ofelia. “Don’t talk. Just tell me with your thoughts.” She turned to Melissa and nodded.
Melissa bent over her brother, holding out her hands just over the broken arm. A strange mellifluous sound filled the space around them, a harmonious chorus of voices. In fact, Colin could see the airwaves fluctuating around Spike’s wound, like ripples on the surface of the water. The expression of pain left his face and inexplicably the arm became straight again. Melissa then moved her hands over his ribcage, undoubtedly healing his broken ribs.
Colin was just about to use his sight to get a closer look, find out how they were fixing Spike, when Frederick put his hand on his shoulder. “That’s not a good idea. It would be like looking into the sun--not too good for the eyes.”
Colin was seized with delight to know that he shared this gift with his father.
Then the music was gone, and Spike was sitting up flexing his arm, testing it. He smiled. “It’s gone, the pain I mean. How did you do it?”
Melissa just smiled mystically and floated off into the air followed by a grinning Ofelia.
“Rescue workers,” said Frederick knowingly, pulling Spike up to his feet, “if you’ve got a breath left in your body, they can fix you. If you’re just-dead, then we have to get Maestro to bring you back.”
“Maestro can bring people back from the dead?” asked Colin.
“Not the long-dead, not even the medium-dead, only the just-dead,” said Frederick.
Holdfast, Magenta and Rhea rushed up to them, concern on their faces. “I’m so sorry!” said the big man, “I must’ve got the powder-to-mass ratio wrong. Oh well, no great harm, eh? Ready for another go?” he said hopefully.
Spike looked at the big man as though he was mad.
“Put the canon gun away, Holdfast. No need to be flailing about like the lost! I’ve just been given a perfect idea by my young friend here!”
Colin felt the Clown Master’s arm around his shoulders and in that moment couldn’t remember anything feeling so assuring.
“What are we going to do?” asked Magenta, her pink lips pursing in worry.
“A coronation! We’re going to have a coronation!”
Excitedly, his hands gesturing in the air, Frederick started to put the performance together. It was like someone stringing a necklace of different colored beads together. The thread, itself, was the theme of the coronation, but the beads were humorous events or sketches that got them from one point to another. All this would take place in the greater context of the main plot, everything hanging together, the main plot and subplot, by the hinge of Zuhayer Horwood.
At first Colin thought it was going to be rather patchy, but as they practiced the individual parts, the seams, which joined the pieces, began to disappear, replaced by a continuous smoothness. After this, it was back to lessons.
During a break, Rhea sat down beside Colin and they watched Magenta and Holdfast do the “dog routine.” Magenta had her little poodle, while Holdfast had Spike, who was pretending to be a dog. It was an interesting bit, because Frederick was flipping the normal perception of things, so that eventually the audience would see that it was not the owners taking the dogs for a walk, but the dogs that were walking their owners. Colin saw the humor in it, but couldn’t stop thinking about his father and how he was going to tell him he was his son.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Rhea. “Spike told me. What are you going to do now?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe nothing.”
“You’ve got to tell him. He has a right to know,” said Rhea forcefully.
“I don’t have to tell him anything,” said Colin tersely. “Listen, just a while ago, I thought my parents were dead. If I tell him, things might change. Maybe I like things the way they are,” lied Colin.
They didn’t hear Maestro coming up behind them, until he spoke. His quiet, rich, voice seemed to not only fill the air around them but resonated in their heads as well.
“It appears Frederick has solved his puzzle. Rhea, do you mind if I have a chat with our truant student?”
Rhea got to her feet, excused herself, and left.
Colin watched her go, wishing she would stay. Maestro was the last person he wanted to talk to right now.
“I’m sorry for missing class this morning. I just had some things to work out,” explained Colin, hoping that he could shorten the conversation. Every time Maestro talked to him, it felt as though he was searching for something. After his encounter with the mirror, suspicions about Maestro had grown.
“Not, to worry. We were just working on the concept of levitation, just the theory, and not the practice. It’s nothing that you can’t catch up on.”
Maestro was now sitting by his side, and thankfully, his hood was covering his face. The poodle and Spike were getting Magenta and Holdfast to jump through hoops, which they managed with incredible dexterity.
“I’ve talked to Frederick,” began Maestro. “He has told me about the coronation idea.”
This startled Colin because at no time since returning to the camp had he seen Frederick with Maestro; then he remembered how Grizzelda had called Marcus when she wanted to see the house.
“Can you read my mind?” asked Colin, his mouth going dry.
Maestro chuckled, “No, not unless you let me. It’s like this ….”
Colin felt the sensation of someone knocking at a door, but the door was inside his head. He thought the word ‘yes’ and Maestro’s voice flooded into his head.
“Don’t worry, I won’t look into any rooms that I shouldn’t go into.”
Colin felt a cold fear slide into his body. Did he know about his encounter in the broken tower? “Rooms?”
“Yes, the mind is divided into a number of compartments--a number of locked compartments. Within each one there are different thoughts, different experiences, different potentials. It’s like Zuhayer’s broken tower.” Maestro paused. “Now, I was wondering if I could ask you a question. When I was young, I learned that there were no such things as coincidences, that everything happens for a purpose. I would just like to know why you suggested the theme of a coronation to Frederick?”
Colin shrugged. This was a perfect time to answer a question with a question. “Where is Faerie?”
Maestro paused discerningly, knowing he wasn’t going to get an answer from Colin. “Faerie is what is beyond Inbetween.”