Running With the Demon

by Terry Brooks

  He pointed, and John Ross looked in spite of himself, peering through a glaze of sunlight across the jumble of rocks to where the falls fell in a dazzling silver sweep. Bits of light danced atop the surface of the water, and behind the shimmering curtain shadows seemed to move …

  Ross turned back suddenly to the man, anxious to know more. But the man was gone. Ross stared for a moment in disbelief, then glanced hurriedly from one bank to the other, from one place to the next. He searched the shadows and the sunny patches with equal care, but the man was nowhere to be found.

  Shaken, he left the glen and walked back up the dirt and gravel lane to the blacktop, and from there back to the village. That night he pondered what he had seen, hunched over his dinner in an alehouse close to his lodgings, nursing a pint of Welsh beer and trying to make sense of it all. There was no way the fisherman could have disappeared so swiftly, so utterly. There was no place for him to go. But if he hadn’t disappeared, then he wasn’t there in the first place, and Ross wasn’t prepared to deal with that.

  For several days he refused to return to the glen, even though he wanted to. He thought about going at night, as the fisherman had urged, but he was afraid. Something was waiting for him, he believed. What if it was something he was not prepared to face?

  Finally, three days later, he went back during the day. It was gray and overcast, the clouds threatening more of the rain that had already fallen intermittently since dawn. Again, the parking lot was deserted as he made his way off the blacktop and down the rutted lane. Cows looked at him from the pasture on his left, placid, disinterested, and remote. He tightened his rain slicker against the damp and chill, passed through the opening in the fence, and started down the trail. He was thinking that it was a mistake to do this. He was thinking that it was something he would come to regret.

  He continued on anyway, stubbornly committed. Almost immediately he saw the fisherman. It was the same man; there was no mistaking him. He wore his broad-brimmed hat and greatcoat and was fishing with the same pole and line. He sat somewhat farther away from the falls than he had the previous day, as if thinking to find better fishing farther downstream. Ross walked carefully across the rocks to reach him, keeping close watch as he approached, making sure that what he was seeing was real.

  The fisherman looked up. “Here you are again. Good day to you. Have you done as I suggested? Have you come at night?”

  Ross stopped a dozen yards away from him. The man was sitting on a flat rock on the opposite bank, and there was no place close at hand to cross over. “No, not yet.”

  “Well, you should, you know. I can see in your eyes that you want to. The fairies mean something to you, something beyond what they might mean to an average man. Can you feel that about yourself?”

  Ross nodded, surprised to find that he could. “I just …” He stopped, not knowing where to go. “I find it hard …”

  “To believe,” the other finished softly.

  “Yes.”

  “But you believe in God, don’t you?”

  Ross felt a drop of rain nick the tip of his nose. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  The man adjusted the pole and line slightly. “Hard to believe in fairies if you don’t believe in God. Do you see?”

  Ross didn’t, but he shook his head yes. Overhead, the clouds were darkening, closing in, screening out the light. “Who are you?” he asked impulsively.

  The man didn’t move. “Owain. And you?”

  “John Ross. I’m, uh, traveling about, seeing a little of the world. I was in graduate studies for a number of years, English and Ancient Civilizations, but I, uh … I needed …”

  “To come here,” the man said quickly. “To come to the Fairy Glen. To see if the fairies were real. That was what you needed. Still need, for that matter. So will you come, then? As I suggested? Come at night and see them for yourself?”

  Ross stared at him, groping for an answer. “Yes,” he said finally, the word spoken before he could think better of it.

  The man nodded. “Come in two nights, when the moon is new. Then’s the best time for catching them at play; there’s only the starlight to reveal them and they are less wary.” His face lifted slightly, just enough so that Ross could catch a glimpse of his rough, square features. “It will be a clear night for viewing. A clear night for seeing truths and making choices.”

  Rain was spattering on the rocks and earth, on the surface of the stream. Shadows were deepening within the glen, and there was a rumble of thunder. “Better take shelter now,” the man said to John Ross.

  Then the skies opened and the rain poured down. Instinctively Ross lowered his head and pulled up the hood to his slicker, covering himself. When he looked back again, the fisherman was gone.

  The rain continued all the rest of that day and into the next. John Ross was paralyzed with indecision. He told himself that he would not go back to the Fairy Glen, that he would not put himself at such obvious risk, that what was at stake was not simply his life but possibly his soul. It felt that way to him. He stayed within his rooms reading, trying not to think, and when thinking became inescapable, he went to the pubs and drank until he slept. He would have run if there had been any place left to run to, but he had exhausted his possibilities for running long ago. He knew that he had come as far as he could go that way, and that all that was left to him was to stand. But did standing entail going to the glen or staying clear? He drifted in increasingly smaller circles as the hours passed and the time of his summoning drew closer, and he despaired of his life. What had he done to bring himself to this end, to a strange and unfamiliar land, to a ghost who drew him as a flame did a moth, to a fairy glen in which magic might be possible, to the brink of madness?

  After a time, he came to believe that whatever waited in the Fairy Glen was inextricably bound to him, a fate that could not be avoided and therefore must be embraced. With acceptance of this came a sort of peace, and he found himself wondering on the day of his appointed summoning if what had drawn him here and made him feel that self-discovery was at hand was linked in some way to what would happen that night in the glen.

  When it was dark and he had eaten his dinner, he put on his warm clothing, his hiking boots, and his slicker, pocketed a flashlight, and went out the door of his cottage. He hitched a ride for part of the distance, then walked the rest. It was nearing midnight when he turned up the dirt and gravel lane past the sign that read FAIRY GLEN. The night was still and empty-feeling, but the skies were clear of clouds and filled with stars, just as the fisherman had foreseen. Ross breathed in the night air and tried to stay calm. His eyes adjusted to the darkness as he moved along the road, through the fence, and down the trail into the glen.

  It was darker here, the starlight failing to penetrate much beyond the overhanging branches of the trees. The glen was a world apart, a rush of tumbling water and a jumble of broken rocks. Ross made his way over the massive boulders and along the stream banks to where he had twice seen the fisherman. There was no sign of him now. Within the moss and vine-grown walls of the glen, there was no movement. Belatedly, Ross thought of his failure to advise anyone of his plans. If he should disappear, no one would know where to look for him. No one would know where he might be found.

  He reached an open space on the near bank between two huge boulders, a place where the starlit sky was clearly visible overhead. He glanced back at the falls, but he could not see them, could only hear the sound of the water spilling off the rocks. He stood there waiting, not knowing what he should look for, not certain yet if he should stay or run.

  The minutes slipped past. He glanced about expectantly, emboldened by the fact that nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing was going to happen. Perhaps the fisherman had played a joke on him, on a gullible American, leading him on about magic and fairies …

  “John Ross.”

  The sound of his name was a silvery whisper in the silence, spoken so softly that it might have come from inside him. He stood perfectly stil
l, afraid even to breathe.

  “John Ross, I am here.”

  He turned then, and he saw her standing at the water’s edge across from him, not quite in the stream and not quite out of it either. She seemed to be balanced between water and earth, on the brink of falling either way. She was young and beautiful and so ethereal in the bright starlight that she was almost not there. He stared at her, at her long hair, at her gown, at her slender arms raised toward him.

  “John Ross, I have need of you,” she said.

  She moved slightly, and the light shifted about her. He saw then that she was not real, not solid, but made of the starlight and the shadows, made of the night. She was the ghost he had thought the fisherman to be—still thought he might be now. He swallowed hard against the tightness in his throat and could not speak.

  “You were summoned to me by Owain Glyndwr, my brave Owain, as he in his time was summoned by another in my service. I am the Lady. I am the Light. I am the voice of the Word. I have need of you. Will you embrace me?”

  Her voice whispered in the deep night silence, low and compelling, vast and unalterable, the sum of all that could ever be. He knew her for what she was instantly, knew her for her power and her purpose. He went to his knees before her on the crushed rock bed of the glen’s damp floor, his eyes fixed on her, his arms clutching his body in despair. Behind her, where the waterfall tumbled away in the darkness, lights began to twinkle and shimmer against the black. One by one they blinked on, then soared outward on the cool air, on gossamer wings that glimmered faintly with color, like fireflies. He knew they were the fairies he had come to find, and tears sprang to his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered finally. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe.”

  “You do not believe yet,” the Lady sang, as if the words were cotton and the air a net in which they were to be caught and held up for admiration. “You lack reason to believe, John Ross. But that will change when you enter into my service. All will change. Your life and your soul will be transformed. You will become for me, as Owain Glyndwr once was, as others have been, a Knight of the Word. Stand now.”

  He rose and tried to gather up his scattered thoughts. Owain Glyndwr. The fisherman? Was he that Owain Glyndwr, the Welsh patriot and warrior? He had read of him. Owain Glyndwr had fought the English Bolingbroke, Henry IV, in the early 1400s. For a time he had prevailed over Henry, and the Welsh were made free again. No one could stand against him, not even the vaunted Prince of Wales, who in time would be Henry V, and the Welsh armies under Glyndwr’s command marched into England itself. Then he simply disappeared—vanished so completely that there was no record of what had become of him. And the English marched back into Wales once more.

  “It is so,” said the Lady, who, though he had not given voice to his thoughts, seemed to have heard them anyway.

  “He was in your service?” John Ross whispered. “Owain Glyndwr?”

  “For many years.” The Lady shimmered with movement as she passed to another point, closer to where the fairies spilled down off the waterfall in a shower of light. “He chose service to me over service to his country, a new life and commitment in exchange for an old. My need for him was greater. He understood that. He understood that only he would do. He sacrificed himself. He was valiant and strong in the face of terrible danger. He was one of the brave. And more. Look closely on his face, John Ross.”

  One arm gestured, and the fisherman reappeared, standing close beside her. His cloak and broad-brimmed hat were gone, replaced by chain mail and armor plate. His fishing pole was gone as well, and he held instead a broadsword. He looked on John Ross, his face fully revealed by the starlight, and in that face Ross saw himself.

  “You carry his blood in your veins.” The Lady’s voice floated on a whisper of night breeze. “That is why you are summoned to me. What was best in him six hundred years ago reflects anew in you, born of the time and the need, by my will and my command.”

  The Fairy Glen echoed with her words, the sounds reverberating off the rush of the water, off the shimmer of the light from stars and fairies. John Ross was frozen with fear and disbelief, so petrified he could not move. A part of him thought to run, a part to stand, and a part to scream, to give voice to what roiled within. This was all wrong; it was madness. Why him? Why, even if he was Owain Glyndwr’s kin? He was no warrior, no fighter, no leader, no man of courage or strength. He was a failed scholar and a drifter with no purpose or conviction. He might have thought to find himself by coming here, but not in this way, and surely not in whatever cause it was the Lady championed.

  “I cannot be like him,” he blurted out in despair. “Look at me!”

  “Watch,” she whispered in reply, and brushed at the air before him with a feathery touch.

  What he witnessed next was unspeakable. A black hole opened, and suddenly he stood in a world of such bleak landscape and dark despair that he knew instinctively it lacked even the faintest semblance of hope. What moved through it was unrecognizable—things that looked vaguely human, but walked on all fours, creatures dark and scaled, shadows with blunted, scarred features and eyes that reflected with a flat, harsh light. They moved through the debris of a ruined civilization, through remnants of buildings and roads, the consequences of a catastrophe of monumental proportions. The creatures seemed part of that landscape, wedded to it in the way that ash is to fire, and were one with the shadows that cloaked everything.

  The setting shifted. John Ross stood within the camps in which the survivors of the holocaust were penned, imprisoned to live out their lives in servitude to those who had been like them, but had embraced the madness that had destroyed their world. Both showed themselves, victors and victims, born of the same flesh and blood; both had been transformed into something barely recognizable and impossibly sad.

  There was more, scene after scene of the destruction, of its aftermath, of the madness that had consumed everything. Ross felt something shift inside him, a lurching recognition, and even before she spoke the words that came next, he knew what they would be.

  “It is the future,” she said softly, her words as delicate as flower petals. “It approaches.”

  The vision disappeared. The black hole closed. Ross stood again before her, surrounded by the fairies and the night. Once more, he found his voice. “No,” he said. “No, it will never be like that. We would never allow ourselves to become like that. Never.”

  She floated on the surface of the stream now, balanced on the night air. “Would you change the future, John Ross? Would you be one of those who would forbid it? Then do as Owain Glyndwr once did, as all the others did who entered into my service. Embrace me.”

  She approached him slowly, a wraith in the starlight, advancing without apparent motion. “This is what is required of you. You must become one of my champions, my paladins, my knights-errant. You must go forth into the world and do battle with those who champion the Void. The war between us is as old as time and as endless. You know of it, for it is revealed by every tongue and written in every language. It is the confrontation between good and evil, between creation and destruction, between life and death. There are warriors that serve each of us, but only a handful like you. You have long sought after yourself, John Ross, searching for the way that you were meant to travel in your life. You have come to me for that reason. Your way lies through me. I am the road that you must take.”

  Ross shook his head anew. “I can’t do this. I haven’t the … I’m not strong enough, not …”

  “Give me your hand.”

  She held forth her own, shimmering like quicksilver in the starlight. Ross flinched away, unwilling to do as she asked. His eyes lowered, and he tried to hide. The Lady waited, her hand held forth, her body still. She had approached to within a yard of him now, so close that he could feel the heat of her, an invisible fire that burned somewhere deep within. Although he tried not to, he could not help himself. He looked at her.

  “Oh, my God, my God,” he whispered in a
we and fear.

  “Give me your hand,” she repeated.

  He did so then, compelled by the force of her voice and the recognition that he could not escape what was about to happen. He placed his hand of flesh and blood within her own of heat and light, and the shock of the contact dropped him instantly to his knees. He threw back his head and tried to scream what he was feeling, but no sound would come from his mouth. He closed his eyes and waited to die, but found instead that it was not death that had come to claim him, but life. Strength filled him, drawn from the well of his heart. Visions flooded his mind, and he saw himself as he could be, as he must be, a man become new again, a man reborn. He saw his future in the Lady’s service, saw the roads he would travel down and the journeys he would make, saw the people whose lives he would change and those he might save. In the mix of passion and heat that twisted and built within the core of his being, he found the belief the Lady had foreseen.

  She released him then, and he sagged forward, gasping for air, feeling the cool dampness of the earth against his knees and palms, feeling the power of her touch rush through him.

  “Rise,” she whispered, and he did, surprised to find that he could do so, that there was within him, sparking like flint on stone, the promise that he could do anything.

  “Embrace me,” she whispered, and he did that as well, without hesitation or deliberation, casting off his doubt and fear and taking on the mantle of his newfound certainty and belief, reaching for her, committing himself irrevocably and forever to her service.

  CHAPTER 15

  With twilight deepening to night and the park emptying of its last visitors, John Ross walked Nest Freemark home again. He had finished his tale, or as much of it as he wished to confide in her, and they were speaking now of what had brought him to Hopewell. Pick had joined them, come out of nowhere to sit all fidgety and wide-eyed on the girl’s shoulder, trying his best not to appear awestruck in the presence of a vaunted Knight of the Word, but failing miserably. Pick knew of the Word’s champions—knew as well what having one come to Hopewell meant. It was vindication, of a sort, for his frequently expressed suspicions.