Tourmaline

by Paul Park

  "You are a soft-hearted girl," it said. "I'll give you anything you want. So have a care!"

  Miranda didn't need to think. But when she opened her mouth to say she wanted to go home to her own house in Berkshire County, she saw the bird wink once, and she couldn't make a sound. And when she thought of the two friends she hadn't seen in a long time, she saw the little bird wink two times with its emerald eye, and for the second time she could say nothing.

  Furious and impatient, she tried to ask for humbler things, a meat sandwich and a ginger ale. Even this was too much for the bird, who winked at her. Miranda shook her fist, picked up a stone, and only then did she find her mouth unsealed. Only then could she stammer out a wish. "Tell me what to do."

  Then the bird said, "For the sake of your kindness I will grant your wish. You must go straight on through this wood, not turning to the right or left. In the evening you'll find what you are looking for."

  Even from the inside, Miranda could recognize the language of fairy stories. Stanley had read her fairy stories, and Rachel, too. Naturally, when she looked around, the three-walled cabin was no longer there. The woods had darkened into evening already. The animals had fled away. Because this was a dream and not real life, everything was different in a moment. The trees had lost their leaves. Nor was there a mulch of fallen leaves and needles, but just the hard gray ground. The trees were rootless, angular, and dead—dry sticks pressed into dirt. The air was cold. Miranda looked at her hands and saw they were chapped and red.

  And because this was a dream, she had no choice where she went, but found herself walking in the direction the bird had indicated before it flew away. There was a gap in the trees that way. Miranda walked over the level ground and soon noticed a gray expanse of gravel underfoot. In the failing light she came to a small town, a double row of tiny clapboard houses, and she walked between them on a duckboard made of gray planks.

  The houses were identical small cubes with high-pitched roofs. No doors were visible. But there was a four-paned window in the narrow wall of each, set so that Miranda could see into each interior. Stripes of colored light shone from the windows, merged on the surface of the duckboard.

  There were eight houses on Miranda's left hand, eight on her right. Ahead of her was some kind of broken, indeterminate structure, different from this orderly double row. Standing on the rough planks, Miranda chose the second house on the left. She stepped down onto the gravel and walked over to the windowsill, following a path of amber light. She put her hands on the painted wood, noticing as she did so that there was no glass in the mullioned window. And inside the house, in a single, light-filled room, someone was sitting at a wooden table, it and the chair the only pieces of furniture. The table and she took up most of the space, so the room was like a cage. There was no ceiling above her, but just the open roof where the light was shining. All lines and contours were lost. She seemed to sit under the open sky.

  The woman had brown hair streaked with gray. Her hands were clenched into fists on the surface of the table. Her hands and face were molded out of the same chalky substance. Miranda recognized her by her sweater and jeans and hair—her American mother. "Rachel," she said or tried to say.

  IN THAT AIRLESS, STERILE PLACE, no sound came out of her. But in the little cottage where Ludu Rat-tooth sat with the Chevalier de Graz, she was able to blurt out a groan, and she rolled onto her side. She was lying in a nest of quilts.

  The Gypsy girl, Ludu Rat-tooth, was by the fire, heating a basin of water. Once again she was describing to Pieter how she'd found Miranda in the woods above the cavern of Mary Magdalene. Maybe she'd climbed up through one of the small fissures in the rock. The strain had been too much for her. She hadn't regained consciousness. Then the ape women had carried her into the village under the cliff where the soldiers had come.

  "Hush," said Pieter, raising his bandaged hand.

  Night was drawing in. The fire burned on a low stone hearth, shedding more comfort than warmth. Already the air was hot and stagnant. But the fire was the source of light in the little room.

  Ludu Rat-tooth sat beside it, stirring it with an iron poker, making the sparks crackle and dance. She had a spotted, lumpy face. But she was skillful with her hands and careful with Miranda. She was the one who'd bandaged Pieter's gunshot wound, although it wasn't much. The ball had passed through the center of his palm, and he could bend each finger. But it was sore, infected, he guessed, and she had put some stuff on it and bound it up, for which he was grateful.

  Now she looked up, and he could see her narrow eyes. She didn't like the forest people—who could blame her? But once again she told him how she had found this place and fixed it up, and the forest woman had led him there—why was she talking about this over and over? It was because she had to talk to cover her anxiety. She knew Radu Luckacz would come after them again. "Quiet," he said, more urgently, and she was quiet. The sparks crackled in the chimney and on the hearth.

  Pieter had heard a noise, a breaking stick. He stood up and took the poker from her. It was time to fight again, and he squeezed the iron bar in his right hand, feeling the protest of the infected flesh. Then he slipped out through the window into the dark.

  The cottage was an old wooden structure, long abandoned. Parts of the roof, parts of the wall had fallen in. The forest had grown up around it. Thickets and brambles grew against the outer walls. Crouching underneath their leaves and tangled branches, Pieter moved among the stems, quiet as he could through the dead mulch. The ground was damp.

  Below the house there was a small crease in the land, a tiny brook. There was a clearing, too, in a small dell. Some saplings had been cut down. As quietly as he could manage, Pieter circled round until he crossed the stream. There in the mud he found the heavy hoofprints of the horse, the bootprints of the man.

  That old fox Dysart was hampered, Pieter guessed, because he needed to bring Miranda out alive. The notice board had specified that she be brought to justice. The reward was offered for her person, not her corpse. He'd have no scruples about the Gypsy, but he didn't want to share a thousand marks with a lot of policemen. He wanted to bring out the white tyger by himself.

  And so he'd leave the horse in a clearing out of earshot from the cottage on the hill. Pieter found it there, a beautiful black gelding, standing absolutely quiet in the dark.

  For a few moments Pieter kept to the shelter of the large trees. He wanted to lead the gelding away to a different place so Dysart would have to look for it. He must move quickly for Ludu Rat-tooth's sake. Although he didn't think Dysart would shoot her through the window as she sat beside the hearth—he'd want to question her, to find out where the man had gone. Doubtless Luckacz had told him about Peter Gross.

  He watched the horse let its head sink down. It was absolutely calm, although it must have known Pieter was there. He squeezed the poker, feeling the hot flesh of his wounded hand under the bandage, and then stepped into the clearing—a mistake. Dysart was there waiting.

  "Stop," he said in English. Pieter stopped.

  "Put it down," he said, and Pieter let the poker drop.

  "Come here," he said, and stepped out from behind a tree. In the half-moon light, in the clearing, Pieter saw a small, bow-legged man with long white hair and a broad-brimmed hat. He was dressed in pale pants and a white shirt. He had a pistol in his left hand.

  "Come here," he said again, but Pieter didn't move. He thought if Dysart were going to shoot him, he would shoot him. So he stepped backward toward the horse, who raised its head.

  Dysart came toward him. In the moonlight, now, his features became clearer, his seamed, scarred face, his single eye, his white moustache. He had been wounded at Havsa, Pieter had heard. His right eye had been cut out from his head. No trace of it remained.

  Past fifty, he was stylishly, even foppishly dressed, Pieter saw when the man paused to light a small cigar. With his right hand he had drawn it from an inside pocket and placed it between his lips. Then from another pock
et he had taken his lighter and flicked it open, and had lit the cigar without ever taking his eye from Pieter's face. Nor did the gun in his hand move a millimeter. It was a revolver, and in the small flame Pieter recognized the inlaid metalwork. Once it had belonged to Frederick Schenck von Schenck.

  One step, Pieter knew, was all he was allowed. Now he stood still and let the man come closer. Dysart kept the cigar in the corner of his mouth away from his good eye, so the smoke wouldn't bother it. He kept his lighter in his right hand, the gun in his left. Pieter smelled the burning tobacco as he came close.

  And as he stepped forward over the uneven ground, the horse grew restive and unquiet. It jerked sideways suddenly and laid its ears back. The reins, which had been looped around a broken branch, came free.

  At two meters' distance, Dysart paused again. He held up the lighter, flicked the flame alive. I'm a dead man, thought Pieter, and he wondered what his old friend Sasha Prochenko might have accomplished at that moment, what words he'd have spoken, because this was the time for words.

  But he said nothing. If Dysart was surprised to see him, he gave no sign. "The Chevalier de Graz," he said. "Still at his post."

  Doubtless some words could be spoken. They were old comrades, after all. At that moment it was a liability. Prochenko would have said something. I'm a dead man, Pieter thought again.

  When Dysart fired the gun, Pieter leaped backward and to the right, away from the man's good eye. He tripped and sprawled over the ground. His head fell back, and he felt rather than saw what happened next, the horse surge forward into the line of the second shot, blocking the way. Then without thinking Peter struggled backward, scuttling like a crab through the sapling stumps until he flopped over in the tall weeds and scrambled up the slope. Behind him there were shots and the horse screaming. When Pieter looked back through the trees, he saw the horse was down, kicking and screaming—a terrible sound that Pieter suddenly remembered in his guts, from Nova Zagora and many other places long ago. A circle of furious movement in the high weeds—he hoped Dysart had the decency to put the beast out of its pain. The man stood below him with his feet apart, and a shot rattled through the trees near Pieter's head.

  IN THE SECRET WORLD MIRANDA heard the crack of the gun. She thought a branch had snapped in the sterile wood behind her.

  She didn't turn around. She stood on the duckboard between the rows of little houses, peering in again at Rachel's image. The creature inside the house

  was lifeless, motionless, grotesque, yet even so Miranda felt a surge of nostalgic yearning that was like nausea. Was this her private, hidden world, populated with cold, chalk-white figures from her vanished life? Or else some kind of obstacle or test, a scrim she had to tear through to proceed? Or were these warehouse sheds, where Aunt Aegypta kept her broken puppets? She'd come back here after glancing into each small house. Each had contained a frozen figure from Miranda's life—teachers, people she had known; she couldn't stand it. Turning away, she hurried down the long duckboard, desperate to see a living creature.

  At the end, she paused. The trees were broken around a strange, ruined structure that seemed to have been excavated from the stony ground—an archeological dig, perhaps. More lifeless ruins: She put her fist against her chest, against her beating heart. But then with a spasm of relief she saw her horse, her own horse, Telemonian Ajax, whom she'd ridden to Braila and across the plain. He pricked his ears forward as he came toward her out of the wood, moving with a smooth, silky gait that was not like him. He made no noise in the undergrowth among those cold trees. But he was happy to see her, she could tell, although he didn't neigh or nicker. He reached out his big head as he walked toward her, and she ran to meet him and put her arms around his neck. "Good boy," she said, "Good boy," and wished there was something to give him, some piece of sugar or an apple in this terrible place. In the real world, she wondered, who was caring for him now? Who was currying him down and combing out his tail? Not that pig Dysart or the man with the black moustache. She had left Ajax in a stable by the Brancoveanu Palace, his first night in a stall.

  She burrowed her face into his black coat, hoping to liberate some smell, some rough stink of sweat, but there was nothing. Nor did he make a sound. Miranda knew there was something wrong, knew that the real horse was elsewhere. But even so she took a comfort from his black cold mass, and he was moving forward, urging her forward, so she swung herself up bareback, holding onto his mane. His steps were smooth and noiseless as he carried her up out of that place, and up a long hill in the blue, strange twilight. And she felt she was ascending out of the low, stale air into a more rarefied place: Surely this was the glass hill from the fairy tale. Without the black horse she would never have been able to climb so high. She would have slid down over and over. Surely sparks rang from his hooves.

  And at the top stood the castle of the princess in the fairy tale. It was the little town in Massachusetts where the princess had once lived, and she rode silently down Main Street under a black, summer sky. And she saw no one, and there were no lights in the windows until she reached the castle walls, and dismounted in the front yard of her old house near the college green, with gray clapboards and high dormers and bright windows and red shutters, or "raspberry," as her mother had called them. She slid down off the horse, walked forward a few steps, and when she turned around Ajax was gone. He had moved away under the trees. Miranda climbed up the porch steps, and the door was open.

  "Rachel," she cried out. "Stanley!" Every light was on, but no one was home. And the house was a terrible mess, she saw as she moved from room to room downstairs. More than any other single thing this was upsetting, because Rachel had always been so fastidious a housekeeper. But maybe no one had lived here for many years; the rugs were stiff with muddy footprints, the upholstery streaked with grime. Windows were broken. And there were vermin in the house, fleas hopping on the cushions, roaches burrowing in the breakfast cereal that was spilled over the kitchen floor. In every corner there were corpses of dead roaches and ladybugs—Rachel always had had a peculiar horror of roaches, which were rare in Berkshire County.

  Rats and squirrels scuttled in the walls. Everywhere there were the droppings of small animals. Mice had chewed the old newspapers into shreds. All the kitchen cabinets were open. The cleaning cabinet was open, and Miranda seized one of the brooms. "Rachel," she cried. "Stanley!" No one was home.

  Overcome with tears, she started to sweep all the spilled food into the center of the kitchen floor. If Rachel could see me, she thought. But where could she start? Pursued by a sudden loneliness, she ran up the stairs to the third floor, to her room, which was completely trashed. Never had it ever looked like this, Miranda thought, standing on the threshold, even when she had been trying to piss Rachel off. All her clothes were pulled out, flung around. The bed was ripped down to the springs. The books were pulled out of their shelves. They lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. Miranda bent down to pick up one broken-backed volume, The Essential History. Some of the pages were ripped out.

  But how was it that the book still existed? Kevin Markasev had destroyed it in a fire on Christmas Hill, had burned it up and brought her into the real world, her and Peter and Andromeda. The book had contained a whole false life, and now here it was again, or some version of it. Still, it cheered her to hold it in her hand.

  She slid it into her pants pocket. Then with the broom held like a weapon, she descended the stairs again, because she'd heard some movement in the dining room. And on the middle of the table on a filthy doily sat a cat, a big, ripped-up, orange marmalade. Furious suddenly, because she remembered the campaigns Rachel had conducted against her own kitten, Frosty, before she was hit by a car, Miranda struck out with the broom. But the cat raised up its paw to show its claws. It bared its teeth. One incisor had been broken off.

  Angry beyond reason, Miranda grabbed the creature up with her bare hands. Its coat was greasy and matted, and it was hard for her to keep her grip because it twisted and scratc
hed and bit. But Miranda had it by the ribs, and she took it to the front door and threw it down the steps. Then she went back to the cleaning cabinet to find some hydrogen peroxide to wash out her cuts; her hands were all scratched up. But when she disturbed the bottles and spray cans at the back of the cabinet, the roaches crawled out and she had to back away.

  There, next to the peroxide was a silver canister. Once they'd rented out their house one summer and gone to Colorado. When they returned, they found the place infested with fleas, and Rachel had set off some bombs, one in each room on the first floor. That had done the trick.

  Now there was one left at least. Miranda pulled it out and set it upright on the linoleum. The spray nozzle was still intact.

  IN HER GARRET IN THE People's Palace, the Baroness Ceausescu was brushing her hair. She was humming softly to herself. For the moment there was nothing to be done. Radu Luckacz would bring the girl to her. He would bring her Miranda Popescu. She glanced into her handheld mirror, frowned, made a face, and put it down. She put down the brush and comb and climbed onto her iron bed where she lay looking up at the ceiling, arms stretched to each side.

  SHE TURNED OVER AND was instantly asleep. In Ratisbon the elector was sitting by the window, rubbing at an itch in his sore and swollen throat. He sat looking out over his garden where policemen were digging by torchlight in the rhododendron bed.

  He had almost choked to death. But the poisoned nut in his throat had come dislodged when he fell. Or else pounding on his back, Lieutenant-Major Lubomyr had managed to dislodge it. Since yesterday they had been searching for his body.

  Soon they would find it, the elector had no doubt. In the meantime there was no reason to be impolite. With him were two detectives from the military police. He had served them coffee with his own hands, and talked to them about political developments as they unfolded. That day the government had suffered losses, preparatory to the general election. There was talk of a vote of no confidence, as several smaller parties were abandoning the coalition. Worst of all, three ministries had been compromised. The foreign secretary had been struck by an automobile while he was crossing the street, and was thought unlikely to recover. The minister for war had shot himself while cleaning his own gun, after a public accusation of corruption—all on the same night. Worst of all, General von Stoessel's body had been discovered in a homosexual brothel in Kaunas, five hundred kilometers from the front line.