Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Oh, we were so foolish,” Lady Neville said to herself. “We were so foolish.” But she said nothing aloud; she merely clasped her hands and stared at the young girl, thinking vaguely that if she had had a daughter she would have been greatly pleased if she resembled the lady Death.

  “The Contessa della Candini,” said Death thoughtfully, and that woman gave a little squeak of terror because she could not draw her breath for a scream. But Death laughed and said, “No, that would be silly.” She said nothing more, but for a long time after that the Contessa burned with humiliation at not having been chosen to be Death.

  “Not Captain Compson,” murmured Death, “because he is too kind to become Death, and because it would be too cruel to him. He wants to die so badly.” The expression on the Captain’s face did not change, but his hands began to tremble.

  “Not Lorimond,” the girl continued, “because he knows so little about life, and because I like him.” The poet flushed, and turned white, and then turned pink again. He made as if to kneel clumsily on one knee, but instead he pulled himself erect and stood as much like Captain Compson as he could.

  “Not the Torrances,” said Death, “never Lord and Lady Torrance, for both of them care too much about another person to take any pride in being Death.” But she hesitated over Lady Torrance for a while, staring at her out of her dark and curious eyes. “I was your age when I became Death,” she said at last. “I wonder what it will be like to be your age again. I have been Death for so long.” Lady Torrance shivered and did not speak.

  And at last Death said quietly, “Lady Neville.”

  “I am here,” Lady Neville answered.

  “I think you are the only one,” said Death. “I choose you, Lady Neville.”

  Again Lady Neville heard every guest sigh softly, and although her back was to them all she knew that they were sighing in relief that neither themselves nor anyone dear to themselves had been chosen. Lady Torrance gave a little cry of protest, but Lady Neville knew that she would have cried out at whatever choice Death made. She heard herself say calmly, “I am honored. But was there no one more worthy than I?”

  “Not one,” said Death. “There is no one quite so weary of being human, no one who knows better how meaningless it is to be alive. And there is no one else here with the power to treat life”—and she smiled sweetly and cruelly—“the life of your hairdresser’s child, for instance, as the meaningless thing it is. Death has a heart, but it is forever an empty heart, and I think, Lady Neville, that your heart is like a dry riverbed, like a seashell. You will be very content as Death, more so than I, for I was very young when I became Death.”

  She came toward Lady Neville, light and swaying, her deep eyes wide and full of the light of the red morning sun that was beginning to rise. The guests at the ball moved back from her, although she did not look at them, but Lady Neville clenched her hands tightly and watched Death come toward her with little dancing steps. “We must kiss each other,” Death said. “That is the way I became Death.” She shook her head delightedly, so that her soft hair swirled about her shoulders. “Quickly, quickly,” she said. “Oh, I cannot wait to be human again.”

  “You may not like it,” Lady Neville said. She felt very calm, though she could hear her old heart pounding in her chest and feel it in the tips of her fingers. “You may not like it after a while,” she said.

  “Perhaps not.” Death’s smile was very close to her now. “I will not be as beautiful as I am, and perhaps people will not love me as much as they do now. But I will be human for a while, and at last I will die. I have done my penance.”

  “What penance?” the old woman asked the beautiful girl. “What was it you did? Why did you become Death?”

  “I don’t remember,” said the lady Death. “And you too will forget in time.” She was smaller than Lady Neville, and so much younger. In her white dress she might have been the daughter that Lady Neville had never had, who would have been with her always and held her mother’s head lightly in the crook of her arm when she felt old and sad. Now she lifted her head to kiss Lady Neville’s cheek, and as she did so she whispered in her hear, “You will still be beautiful when I am ugly. Be kind to me then.”

  Behind Lady Neville the handsome gentlemen and ladies murmured and sighed, fluttering like moths in their evening dress, in their elegant gowns. “I promise,” she said, and then she pursed her dry lips to kiss the soft, sweet-smelling cheek of the young Lady Death.

  EL REGALO

  “You can’t kill him,” Mr. Luke said. “Your mother wouldn’t like it.” After some consideration, he added, “I’d be rather annoyed myself.”

  “But wait,” Angie said, in the dramatic tones of a television commercial for some miraculous mop. “There’s more. I didn’t tell you about the brandied cupcakes—”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “And about him telling Jennifer Williams what I got her for her birthday, and she pitched a fit, because she had two of them already—”

  “He meant well,” her father said cautiously. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “And then when he finked to Mom about me and Orlando Cruz, and we weren’t doing anything—”

  “Nevertheless. No killing.”

  Angie brushed sweaty mouse-brown hair off her forehead and regrouped. “Can I at least maim him a little? Trust me, he’s earned it.”

  “I don’t doubt you,” Mr. Luke agreed. “But you’re twelve, and Marvyn’s eight. Eight and a half. You’re bigger than he is, so beating him up isn’t fair. When you’re… oh, say, twenty, and he’s sixteen and a half—okay, you can try it then. Not until.”

  Angie’s wordless grunt might or might not have been assent. She started out of the room, but her father called her back, holding out his right hand. “Pinky-swear, kid.” Angie eyed him warily, but hooked her little finger around his without hesitation, which was a mistake. “You did that much too easily,” her father said, frowning. “Swear by Buffy.”

  “What? You can’t swear by a television show!”

  “Where is that written? Repeat after me—‘I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer—’”

  “You really don’t trust me!”

  “‘I swear by Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I will keep my hands off my baby brother—’”

  “My baby brother, the monster! He’s gotten worse since he started sticking that y in his name—”

  “‘—and I will stop calling him Ex-Lax—’”

  “Come on, I only do that when he makes me really mad—”

  “‘—until he shall have attained the age of sixteen years and six months, after which time—’”

  “After which time I get to pound him into marmalade. Deal. I can wait.” She grinned; then turned self-conscious, making a performance of pulling down her upper lip to cover the shiny new braces. At the door, she looked over her shoulder and said lightly, “You are way too smart to be a father.”

  From behind his book, Mr. Luke answered, “I’ve often thought so myself.”

  Angie spent the rest of the evening in her room, doing homework on the phone with Melissa Feldman, her best friend. Finished, feeling virtuously entitled to some low-fat chocolate reward, she wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, passing her brother’s room on the way. Looking in—not because of any special interest, but because Marvyn invariably hung around her own doorway, gazing in aimless fascination at whatever she was doing, until shooed away—she saw him on the floor, playing with Milady, the gray, ancient family cat. Nothing unusual about that: Marvyn and Milady had been an item since he was old enough to realize that the cat wasn’t something to eat. What halted Angie as though she had walked into a wall was that they were playing Monopoly, and that Milady appeared to be winning.

  Angie leaned in the doorway, entranced and alarmed at the same time. Marvyn had to throw the dice for both Milady and himself, and the old cat was too riddled with arthritis to handle the pastel Monopoly money easily. But she waited her turn, and moved her piece—she
had the silver top hat—very carefully, as though considering possible options. And she already had a hotel on Park Place.

  Marvyn jumped up and slammed the door as soon as he noticed his sister watching the game, and Angie went on to liberate a larger-than-planned remnant of sorbet. Somewhere near the bottom of the container she finally managed to stuff what she’d just glimpsed deep in the part of her mind she called her “forgettery.” As she’d once said to her friend Melissa, “There’s such a thing as too much information, and it is not going to get me. I am never going to know more than I want to know about stuff. Look at the President.”

  For the next week or so Marvyn made a point of staying out of Angie’s way, which was all by itself enough to put her mildly on edge. If she knew one thing about her brother, it was that the time to worry was when you didn’t see him. All the same, on the surface things were peaceful enough, and continued so until the evening when Marvyn went dancing with the garbage.

  The next day being pickup day, Mrs. Luke had handed him two big green plastic bags of trash for the rolling bins down the driveway. Marvyn had made enough of a fuss about the task that Angie stayed by the open front window to make sure that he didn’t simply drop the bags in the grass, and vanish into one of his mysterious hideouts. Mrs. Luke was back in the living room with the news on, but Angie was still at the window when Marvyn looked around quickly, mumbled a few words she couldn’t catch, and then did a thing with his left hand, so fast she saw no more than a blurry twitch. And the two garbage bags went dancing.

  Angie’s buckling knees dropped her to the couch under the window, though she never noticed it. Marvyn let go of the bags altogether, and they rocked alongside him—backwards, forwards, sideways, in perfect timing, with perfect steps, turning with him as though he were the star and they his backup singers. To Angie’s astonishment, he was snapping his fingers and moonwalking, as she had never imagined he could do—and the bags were pushing out green arms and legs as the three of them danced down the driveway. When they reached the cans, Marvyn’s partners promptly went limp and were nothing but plastic garbage bags again. Marvyn plopped them in, dusted his hands, and turned to walk back to the house.

  When he saw Angie watching, neither of them spoke. Angie beckoned. They met at the door and stared at each other. Angie said only, “My room.”

  Marvyn dragged in behind her, looking everywhere and nowhere at once, and definitely not at his sister. Angie sat down on the bed and studied him: chubby and messy-looking, with an unmanageable sprawl of rusty-brown hair and an eyepatch meant to tame a wandering left eye. She said, “Talk to me.”

  “About what?” Marvyn had a deep, foggy voice for eight and a half—Mr. Luke always insisted that it had changed before Marvyn was born. “I didn’t break your CD case.”

  “Yes, you did,” Angie said. “But forget that. Let’s talk about garbage bags. Let’s talk about Monopoly.”

  Marvyn was utterly businesslike about lies: in a crisis he always told the truth, until he thought of something better. He said, “I’m warning you right now, you won’t believe me.”

  “I never do. Make it a good one.”

  “Okay,” Marvyn said. “I’m a witch.”

  When Angie could speak, she said the first thing that came into her head, which embarrassed her forever after. “You can’t be a witch. You’re a wizard, or a warlock or something.” Like we’re having a sane conversation, she thought.

  Marvyn shook his head so hard that his eyepatch almost came loose. “Uh-uh! That’s all books and movies and stuff. You’re a man witch or you’re a woman witch, that’s it. I’m a man witch.”

  “You’ll be a dead witch if you don’t quit shitting me,” Angie told him. But her brother knew he had her, and he grinned like a pirate (at home he often tied a bandanna around his head, and he was constantly after Mrs. Luke to buy him a parrot). He said, “You can ask Lidia. She was the one who knew.”

  Lidia del Carmen de Madero y Gomez had been the Lukes’ housekeeper since well before Angie’s birth. She was from Ciego de Avila in Cuba, and claimed to have changed Fidel Castro’s diapers as a girl working for his family. For all her years—no one seemed to know her age; certainly not the Lukes—Lidia’s eyes remained as clear as a child’s, and Angie had on occasion nearly wept with envy of her beautiful wrinkled deep-dark skin. For her part, Lidia got on well with Angie, spoke Spanish with her mother, and was teaching Mr. Luke to cook Cuban food. But Marvyn had been hers since his infancy, beyond question or interference. They went to Spanish-language movies on Saturdays, and shopped together in the Bowen Street barrio.

  “The one who knew,” Angie said. “Knew what? Is Lidia a witch too?”

  Marvyn’s look suggested that he was wondering where their parents had actually found their daughter. “No, of course she’s not a witch. She’s a santera.”

  Angie stared. She knew as much about Santería as anyone growing up in a big city with a growing population of Africans and South Americans—which wasn’t much. Newspaper articles and television specials had informed her that santeros sacrificed chickens and goats and did… things with the blood. She tried to imagine Marvyn with a chicken, doing things, and couldn’t. Not even Marvyn.

  “So Lidia got you into it?” she finally asked. “Now you’re a santero too?”

  “Nah, I’m a witch, I told you.” Marvyn’s disgusted impatience was approaching critical mass.

  Angie said, “Wicca? You’re into the Goddess thing? There’s a girl in my home room, Devlin Margulies, and she’s a Wiccan, and that’s all she talks about. Sabbats and esbats, and drawing down the moon, and the rest of it. She’s got skin like a cheese-grater.”

  Marvyn blinked at her. “What’s a Wiccan?” He sprawled suddenly on her bed, grabbing Milady as she hobbled in and pooting loudly on her furry stomach. “I already knew I could sort of mess with things—you remember the rubber duck, and that time at the baseball game?” Angie remembered. Especially the rubber duck. “Anyway, Lidia took me to meet this real old lady, in the farmers’ market, she’s even older than her, her name’s Yemaya, something like that, she smokes this funny little pipe all the time. Anyway, she took hold of me, my face, and she looked in my eyes, and then she closed her eyes, and she just sat like that for so long!” He giggled. “I thought she’d fallen asleep, and I started to pull away, but Lidia wouldn’t let me. So she sat like that, and she sat, and then she opened her eyes and she told me I was a witch, a brujo. And Lidia bought me a two-scoop ice-cream cone. Coffee and chocolate, with M&Ms.”

  “You won’t have a tooth in your head by the time you’re fifteen.” Angie didn’t know what to say, what questions to ask. “So that’s it? The old lady, she gives you witch lessons or something?”

  “Nah—I told you, she’s a big santera, that’s different. I only saw her that one time. She kept telling Lidia that I had el regalo—I think that means the gift, she said that a lot—and I should keep practicing. Like you with the clarinet.”

  Angie winced. Her hands were small and stubby-fingered, and music slipped through them like rain. Her parents, sympathizing, had offered to cancel the clarinet lessons, but Angie refused. As she confessed to her friend Melissa, she had no skill at accepting defeat.

  Now she asked, “So how do you practice? Boogieing with garbage bags?”

  Marvyn shook his head. “That’s getting old—so’s playing board games with Milady. I was thinking maybe I could make the dishes wash themselves, like in Beauty and the Beast. I bet I could do that.”

  “You could enchant my homework,” Angie suggested. “My algebra, for starters.”

  Her brother snorted. “Hey, I’m just a kid, I’ve got my limits! I mean, your homework?”

  “Right,” Angie said. “Right. Look, what about laying a major spell on Tim Hubley, the next time he’s over here with Melissa? Like making his feet go flat so he can’t play basketball—that’s the only reason she likes him, anyway. Or—” her voice became slower and more hesitant “—what about g
etting Jake Petrakis to fall madly, wildly, totally in love with me? That’d be… funny.”

  Marvyn was occupied with Milady. “Girl stuff, who cares about all that? I want to be so good at soccer everybody’ll want to be on my team—I want fat Josh Wilson to have patches over both eyes, so he’ll leave me alone. I want Mom to order thin-crust pepperoni pizza every night, and I want Dad to—”

  “No spells on Mom and Dad, not ever!” Angie was on her feet, leaning menacingly over him. “You got that, Ex-Lax? You mess with them even once, believe me, you’d better be one hella witch to keep me from strangling you. Understood?”

  Marvyn nodded. Angie said, “Okay, I tell you what. How about practicing on Aunt Caroline when she comes next weekend?”

  Marvyn’s pudgy pirate face lit up at the suggestion. Aunt Caroline was their mother’s older sister, celebrated in the Luke family for knowing everything about everything. A pleasant, perfectly decent person, her perpetual air of placid expertise would have turned a saint into a serial killer. Name a country, and Aunt Caroline had spent enough time there to know more about the place than a native; bring up a newspaper story, and without fail Aunt Caroline could tell you something about it that hadn’t been in the paper; catch a cold, and Aunt Caroline could recite the maiden name of the top medical researcher in rhinoviruses’ mother. (Mr. Luke said often that Aunt Caroline’s motto was, “Say something, and I’ll bet you’re wrong.”)

  “Nothing dangerous,” Angie commanded, “nothing scary. And nothing embarrassing or anything.”

  Marvyn looked sulky. “It’s not going to be any fun that way.”

  “If it’s too gross, they’ll know you did it,” his sister pointed out. “I would.” Marvyn, who loved secrets and hidden identities, yielded.

  During the week before Aunt Caroline’s arrival, Marvyn kept so quietly to himself that Mrs. Luke worried about his health. Angie kept as close an eye on him as possible, but couldn’t be at all sure what he might be planning—no more than he, she suspected. Once she caught him changing the TV channels without the remote; and once, left alone in the kitchen to peel potatoes and carrots for a stew, he had the peeler do it while he read the Sunday funnies. The apparent smallness of his ambitions relieved Angie’s vague unease, lulling her into complacency about the big family dinner that was traditional on the first night of a visit from Aunt Caroline.