by Celia Jerome
Yes, Virginia, there really are decent men out there. Arlen would have looked away from Susan and kept his distance, as if she were contagious.
After they left, I made coffee and Agent Grant and I sat in the living area, me on the couch, Grant on the old leather chair that I’d covered with a quilt from a flea market.
I didn’t know where to start, so I sipped my coffee and just watched him. He made for nice scenery, except he was watching me.
Finally he said, “Peculiar goings-on, hm?”
I laughed. “You can say that again!”
He did not laugh back. I realized he seldom smiled, unlike Van, who flashed his dimples often, and to good effect.
“And far too coincidental,” Grant went on, eliminating any urge I had to chuckle, “that you’ve been at each of the troublesome events. One of the first rules they teach in detective school is there are no such things as coincidences. Look for the common threads, find a pattern, locate a common denominator.”
“Me?” I squeaked.
“We’re not sure.”
I did not like the way the conversation was going. “Who is this ‘we’ anyway? You never said what agency you actually work for.”
“It’s called DUE. Department of Unexplained Events. There’s a much longer, technical name for it, but that’s the one we prefer. DUE is less troubling to the average citizen.”
Good grief, he was talking UFOs, X-Files, Men in Black. “You think this is something extraterrestrial? That I am an alien?”
“Oh, no. We know where you were born, what doctor delivered you, where you have that charming birthmark. You are no alien.”
The birthmark was on my ass, for heaven’s sake! “I cannot believe this!”
“Do you believe in trolls, then?”
I choked on a swallow of coffee.
While I sputtered and dabbed at the droplets on my nice shirt, he said, “I know what you have been working on.”
Ohmygod. “How? How could you know? Only my cousin and my boss know. Maybe Van, too, by now.”
“I am sorry, but we’ve had to establish access to everything. Your computer, your apartment’s video camera, your phone lines. I swear no one listened to or recorded anything not pertinent to our investigation.”
Suddenly he was not the cherry on top. He was the worm in the apple. My conversations, my ideas, my life? “How dare you! I insist you stop right now. I’ll get a lawyer, a court order. A . . . a new cell phone.”
“We have a warrant, not that it’s any consolation knowing that your privacy has been breached. We intruded as little as possible, and then only because of the grave threat to the security of the entire world as we know it.”
“You think I am a danger to the entire world?” He was crazier than I was. And I was alone with him. With my luck, he did have a gun. And who cared if he was married or not?
He crossed his right leg over his left knee, getting more comfortable, while I felt like I was suffocating. “More coffee?” I asked, thinking I could leave via the fire escape.
“No, thank you. But let’s start over again, shall we, with the facts, as we know them. Maybe you will understand better, and forgive us. And me.”
He described the street scene. “A trolley. On your block.”
The falling crane. “A train, a troop of teenagers. Outside your publisher’s window. And today, at the hospital, a bowl. A trolley, a train, a bowl. What’s the thread? What do they have in common?”
“They were red?”
He nodded, as if congratulating a really slow first grader. “What else?”
“Me?”
“That too, but a trolley, a train, a bowl. As if people were trying not to say what they really saw.”
I gave up. “A troll. No, wait. There’s another common denominator. A man named Lou was at all those places, also. Why aren’t you talking to him?”
“I did. He’s one of us.”
“One of you? You who?”
“Lou is DUE, too.”
I just had to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. Trolls, silly acronyms, threats to the universe, 007 sitting on a threadbare quilt accusing me of being a WMD. What was next, He Who Shall Not Be Named?
This time Grant laughed, too. A nice deep laugh. “I know, I know. It’s pure nonsense. Utter drivel. Folderol. But you’ve seen the damage, and you understand this is no laughing matter.”
“You are wrong. I do not understand any of it.”
He came to sit beside me on the couch, and took my hand. He held it between both of his, and I forgot the anger, the distress, and the confusion. He looked me in the eyes, with that gorgeous blue gaze and said, “Let me help. Trust me.”
The last man who’d said that stole my credit cards. I took my hand back.
Grant stayed beside me on the couch. “Very well, let me tell you a story, a fairy tale, if you will.”
I reached over for the quilt to throw over my lap after I folded my legs under me, in the sofa corner farthest away from him. “Very well, I am ready for a bedtime story.” I realized what I’d said, and added, “Not that I am going to bed, or suggesting anything.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Of course not, although . . . ”
“Although . . . ?” He’d be interested? He’d run in the other direction?
He did not answer those questions, either, but I thought I saw a certain gleam in his eye. He cleared his throat and began with: “Once upon a time.” But I could tell what he was going to relate meant more to him. He believed it.
According to Agent Grant, the world, our world, Earth, was once populated by all kinds of magical creatures. Fairies, centaurs, mermaids, leprechauns, selkies, all the enchanted beings of folklore and myth.
“Vampires?”
“They are not real. Please do not interrupt.”
I hid my smile. Vampires weren’t real, but fairies were? “Go on.”
According to him, all the various factions got along, more or less, with little in conflict and enough space between them. Then Man started to intrude. Perhaps to compensate for not having magic at their fingertips, or for not being as long-lived as the others, humans could reproduce much more quickly and prolifically. The humans also had ambition and dreams, unlike most of the other folk, who lived more in the moment. Since they couldn’t conjure up a meal out of air, or change the weather to keep warm and dry, men needed to hunt, which upset the forest creatures, and farm, clearing land from the woodland dwellers, and build houses, permanent dwellings that interfered with the Earth’s lines of power. And they claimed territories that had once been shared by all. Worse, they started to destroy the land with their inventions, their cities, their need for metals and fuels.
“Ah, a story with a green message. How politically correct. I bet pollution and fouled waters are next.”
“Hush.”
The very worst came when the men started to fight among themselves. No amount of wizardry could get them to stop, or listen to reason. Instead they started trying to kill everyone with magical powers that could be used against men. Finally it was decided by all the long-lived ones to separate themselves from the world of men. Not move, not disappear from existence or go extinct, just shift.
Grant picked up a pen lying on the end table and twisted the barrel so the two halves were not quite aligned, but they were still connected.
“Parallel universes, if you will. They called it the Day of Unity, because it required every single being, every bit of power to shift the worlds. While we cannot to this day cooperate to end famine, disease, war.” He shook his head and went on.
One world held the humans, one held the eldritch, and they were never to mingle again except in ancient memory. Hence all the tales of pixies and sea serpents and sorcerers. If, by some chance, humans caught a glimpse of the magical realm, they would not recognize what they saw.
“They’d see trains and trolleys and flying bowls instead.”
“Exactly.”
I frowned. “That
’s mind control. Mass hypnosis.”
“It’s better than mass hysteria, isn’t it? Think of witch burnings.”
All right, his story might explain some of what happened. “But then how come the line got crossed?”
“Not everyone obeys the rules, do they? But there’s more.”
Before the split, he explained, as if giving a history lesson, not a theory of high fantasy, there was some inbreeding, experiments if you will, an effort to assimilate the poor weak humans into the magical world. The mixed breeds were not successful. Some could not reproduce; others were pitied by the glamour folk, feared by the clannish humans. Some of them got to stay in Unity as halflings, some stayed with the humans.
“Most of what we consider psychic powers comes from those mongrel ancestors. Some of those who trespass now and again are remnants of the mixes. They come from curiosity. Or worse.”
My creation was a hero, not a plunderer of lesser universes. I knew it in my heart. “Fafhrd is not evil.”
“Trolls seldom are. You do not want to mess with ogres. And fairies can be impossible to deal with, their minds flitting as fast as their wings. Trolls are not usually curious creatures. either.”
“So how did Fafhrd get here, and why?”
“We think an EG called him up. An Evil Genius from this side, a descendant of the interbreeding, someone with enough talent and understanding, and ambition. There’s great power in the Unity world, great wealth, too.”
“You do not think I am the Evil Genius?”
“No, you are the Visualizer. Somewhere there is the Verbalizer. But there’s a villain, too, taking your talents and combining them with his as an Enhancer. Maybe he is not acting intentionally, and maybe he is just experimenting. We have no way of knowing.”
“Wait a minute. I do have talents. I win awards and get paid for them. I can draw and tell stories, a better one than this bullshit. Fafhrd is my creation.”
“Ah, but your ancestors were some of those half-breeds. Many settled in England and Ireland. A large group eventually came to the colonies. They preferred living together, to avoid those witch hunts and the like. A branch of a famously psychic English family emigrated to Long Island.”
I knew what he was going to say, so I said it for him. “To Paumanok Harbor.”
“Exactly.”
That would explain my crazy grandmother Bess who talked to spirits, and my mother’s mother with her herbs and predictions, and my own mother’s uncanny dog-whispering. Then there was Mrs. Terwilliger at the library who always knew what book I wanted before I asked. And Susan, who knew if I’d gotten into mischief. Mrs. Ralston could guess the sex of an unborn baby, and the harbormaster warned boats of coming storms long before they showed on radar. And it never, ever rained on the Fourth of July parade.
Yeah,Agent Grant’s fable explained a lot. Or it would if I believed half the manure he was shoveling.
CHAPTER 9
I WASN’T BUYING IT. Grant told a pretty story, and God knew he had a pretty face to go with it. As my grandmother Eve—who was not a witch—always said, handsome is as handsome does, and this one had crossed the line when he or his ridiculous agency had put spyware on my computer. He expected me to swallow hogwash about an Evil Genius? That was straight out of one of my books, no, out of a lot of them. I often used that title as a placeholder until I constructed the perfect bad guy. This charlatan was using my notes, using me—but for what purpose? To get a plate of Mrs. Abbottini’s lasagna?
I was glad when I heard Susan’s key in the lock, but she just popped her head in to say they’d heard Mrs. Abbottini’s TV from the hall, so she and Van were going to bring the flowers over. She handed me two other bouquets, one of roses, one of orchids, to put in water.
“The orchids are for you,” Grant said. “The rarer beauty.”
How could you throw out a guy who said things like that? And he was looking at me with such compassion and understanding, longing for me to believe his tall tale. I sat down again once I’d fussed with the flowers, but this time on the leather chair, away from him.
“No matter how odd my family and friends are, they are not witches and warlocks and creatures out of Tolkien. They are normal, everyday loonies, trying to raise families, make a living, and find a measure of satisfaction and happiness doing it. No one is out to destroy the world. They are just like everyone else.”
“Except they are not.” He brushed a dark curl off his forehead. “The world may think so, and they try to behave as if it were so. Some of them”—he nodded in my direction—“might not even realize how special they are. But you and your neighbors are far different from the average citizen.”
“No, they are just small-town eccentrics making wild guesses, playing the odds, counting on coincidence. I do not believe in any psychic hocus-pocus. My own father’s warnings and portents never made any sense.”
“Tell me, have you ever heard of the Royce Institute in England?”
“Of course I have. Everyone in Paumanok Harbor has. The Royce people adopted the Harbor as a kind of sister city. The mayors visit back and forth, and there are always a few Brits teaching at the local schools. They offer free college to any graduate from the high school; free prep school if a junior high kid passes the tests. Room, board, travel expenses, tutoring, the works.”
I ought to know. My parents met there. My grandmother pushed for me to go, but I insisted on art school. Besides, it sounded like one big matchmaking operation. Nearly everyone who went got engaged or married. Grandma Eve swore the tea leaves said I’d never find my soul mate except through the institute, never be a complete person. So far she was right, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t wrong in the long run. We fought over it a lot before and after college. I guess she is still disappointed in me, but we don’t speak much.
I did not want to talk about some fancy foreign university, but Grant was determined. “Well, here is another story, more a history lesson, but this one is easily proved. You can check online.”
As if everything on the Web was true. Hell, the Easter Bunny could have a MySpace page.
“The institute’s full name,” Grant began as if I were eager for a lecture, “is not generally made public. The university is open to everyone; the Royce-Harmon Institute for Psionic Research is known to a large but select group. It was founded by a family of British noble-men and their offspring, the males of the family all possessing a unique trait: they could tell if someone spoke the truth or lies.”
Kind of like Susan, I thought, but did not say. She’d gone to England the summer after high school. I never asked what she did there.
He went on: “Some of the daughters developed the family gift also, so it was carried through the female line as well, not just the heirs to the earldom or their male cousins. One Earl Royce had an illegitimate son, the Harmon in Royce-Harmon, who married a Gypsy woman. She came from a family of fortune-tellers and horse-tamers, and possessed what was called ‘the sight.’ The Rom were definitely descendants of the Unity world. Close breeding among their narrow circles kept the magic in their clans. The same with the Royces, the Harmons, and the other connected families who married second or third cousins, or in-laws to relatives by marriage. They bred well and often, widening the gene pool.”
Grant continued, and I was interested despite myself to hear that, with vast wealth, the Royce tribe started a foundation to keep track of their heritage. They knew little of genetics, at first, of course, but they did everything they could to nurture the “gift.” The institute was a way to foster the shards of magic wherever they found it, according to Grant, while keeping their members safe from harm. Which meant secret. They taught the students how to control their talents, and how to assimilate themselves in society.
“That’s why they wished every child from your home-town, which their descendants had settled, to come to them for training, for shelter, and for testing, to keep the records straight and complete. A different form of your No Child Left Behind program. Yes,
they do encourage selective breeding, to wed power to power and widen the gene pool. No one is ever forced or coerced, but psychics seem drawn to others like them. At Royce proximity takes over, matches are made; new talents are given birth to. You are the result of one such union.”
“Which was wretched for both of my parents.”
“Love matches the world over end in divorce. No one promised happily ever after, only similar understandings and possibly exceptional children, like you.”
“I do not see where I am anything special. And I do not believe I was preordained to be a . . . whatever you called me. I think the students at the school are brain-washed, that’s all.”
“But the institute does much more than study genetics of the original families. Students from around the world come, anyone who appears able to foretell the future, read minds, control the weather, cure by touch. Swamis, shamans, witch doctors, fakirs, dowsers, you name it. Some of them would be hated in their own milieus, the way the half-breeds were despised and feared before the worlds split. People tend to distrust what they cannot understand.”
Like I did not trust him, not at all. But I listened.
“Psychics, though, can accept one another and work together. Great things have come from the institute’s laboratories. We haven’t lost a ship to the Bermuda Triangle in decades. The Loch Ness monster has been shrunk to manageable size for photo ops. Two asteroids have been moved before they posed danger to the planet. The lines between our world and the other have been kept impenetrable. Except now the labs have sensed a disturbance, centering around you.”
“All I did was write a story about a troll!”
“You visualized him. Perhaps from reversion memory. Perhaps he called to your subconscious mind. You never went to the village school and you never came to England to have your potential assessed. The deans are not certain what you can do. They have strict codes about not interfering unless the subject is a danger to him or herself, or the group, or the world.”
Just what I needed, someone else telling me I was not living up to expectations. Once again, Grant was insinuating I was a loose cannon, a single-handed wrecking ball. Well, screw him. Not literally, of course.