Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  Not until she opened her eyes in a different darkness to the crowing of a rooster and a familiar heavy aroma did she realize that she was walking down the hallway leading from the Santería shop to… wherever she had really been—and where Marvyn still must be, for he plainly had not followed her. She promptly turned and started back toward last Thursday, but halted at the deep, slightly grating chuckle behind her. She did not turn again, but stood very still.

  El Viejo walked a slow full circle around her before he faced her, grinning down at her like the man in the moon. The dark glasses were off, and the twin scars on his cheeks were blazing up as though they had been slashed into him a moment before. He said, “I know. Before even I see you, I know.”

  Angie hit him in the stomach as hard as she could. It was like punching a frozen slab of beef, and she gasped in pain, instantly certain that she had broken her hand. But she hit him again, and again, screaming at the top of her voice, “Bring my brother back! If you don’t bring him right back here, right now, I’ll kill you! I will!”

  El Viejo caught her hands, surprisingly gently, still laughing to himself. “Little girl, listen, listen now. Niñita, nobody else—nobody—ever do what you do. You understand? Nobody but me ever walk that road back from where I leave you, understand?” The big white half-circles under his eyes were stretching and curling like live things.

  Angie pulled away from him with all her strength, as she had hit him. She said, “No. That’s Marvyn. Marvyn’s the witch, the brujo—don’t go telling people it’s me. Marvyn’s the one with the power.”

  “Him?” Angie had never heard such monumental scorn packed into one syllable. El Viejo said, “Your brother nothing, nobody, we no bother with him. Forget him—you the one got the regalo, you just don’t know.” The big white teeth filled her vision; she saw nothing else. “I show you—me, El Viejo. I show you what you are.”

  It was beyond praise, beyond flattery. For all her dread and dislike of El Viejo, to have someone of his wicked wisdom tell her that she was like him in some awful, splendid way made Angie shiver in her heart. She wanted to turn away more than she had ever wanted anything—even Jake Petrakis—but the long walk home to Sunday was easier than breaking the clench of the white-haired man’s malevolent presence would have been. Having often felt (and almost as often dismissed the notion) that Marvyn was special in the family by virtue of being the baby, and a boy—and now a potent witch—she let herself revel in the thought that the real gift was hers, not his, and that if she chose she had only to stretch out her hand to have her command settle home in it. It was at once the most frightening and the most purely, completely gratifying feeling she had ever known.

  But it was not tempting. Angie knew the difference.

  “Forget it,” she said. “Forget it, buster. You’ve got nothing to show me.”

  El Viejo did not answer her. The old, old eyes that were all pupil continued slipping over her like hands, and Angie went on glaring back with the blue eyes she despaired of because they could never be as deep-set and deep green as her mother’s eyes. They stood so—for how long, she never knew—until El Viejo turned and opened his mouth as though to speak to the silent old lady whose own stone eyes seemed not to have blinked since Angie had first entered the Santería shop, a childhood ago. Whatever he meant to say, he never got the words out, because Marvyn came back then.

  He came down the dark hall from a long way off, as El Viejo had done the first time she saw him—as she herself had trudged forever, only moments ago. But Marvyn had come a further journey: Angie could see that beyond doubt in the way he stumbled along, looking like a shadow casting a person. He was struggling to carry something in his arms, but she could not make out what it was. As long as she watched him approaching, he seemed hardly to draw any nearer.

  Whatever he held looked too heavy for a small boy: it threatened constantly to slip from his hands, and he kept shifting it from one shoulder to the other, and back again. Before Angie could see it clearly, El Viejo screamed, and she knew on the instant that she would never hear a more terrible sound in her life. He might have been being skinned alive, or having his soul torn out of his body—she never even tried to tell herself what it was like, because there were no words. Nor did she tell anyone that she fell down at the sound, fell flat down on her hands and knees, and rocked and whimpered until the scream stopped. It went on for a long time.

  When it finally stopped, El Viejo was gone, and Marvyn was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. It was black and immediately endearing, with big, bright, strikingly watchful eyes. Angie looked into them once, and looked quickly away.

  Marvyn looked worn and exhausted. His eyepatch was gone, and the left eye that Angie had not seen for months was as bloodshot as though he had just come off a three-day drunk—though she noticed that it was not wandering at all. He said in a small, dazed voice, “I had to go back a really long way, Angie. Really long.”

  Angie wanted to hold him, but she was afraid of the baby. Marvyn looked toward the old woman in the corner and sighed; then hitched up his burden one more time and clumped over to her. He said, “Ma’am, I think this is yours?” Adults always commented on Marvyn’s excellent manners.

  The old woman moved then, for the first time. She moved like a wave, Angie thought: a wave seen from a cliff or an airplane, crawling along so slowly that it seemed impossible for it ever to break, ever to reach the shore. But the sea was in that motion, all of it caught up in that one wave; and when she set down her pipe, took the baby from Marvyn and smiled, that was the wave too. She looked down at the baby, and said one word, which Angie did not catch. Then Angie had her brother by the arm, and they were out of the shop. Marvyn never looked back, but Angie did, in time to see the old woman baring blue gums in soundless laughter.

  All the way home in a taxi, Angie prayed silently that her parents hadn’t returned yet. Lidia was waiting, and together they whisked Marvyn into bed without any serious protest. Lidia washed his face with a rough cloth, and then slapped him and shouted at him in Spanish—Angie learned a few words she couldn’t wait to use—and then she kissed him and left, and Angie brought him a pitcher of orange juice and a whole plate of gingersnaps, and sat on the bed and said, “What happened?”

  Marvyn was already working on the cookies as though he hadn’t eaten in days—which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked, with his mouth full, “What’s malcriado mean?”

  “What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought up—troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn’t call you. Why?”

  “Well, that’s what that lady called… him. The baby.”

  “Right,” Angie said. “Leave me a couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with Milady?”

  “Uh-huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back, like I told you.” Marvyn’s voice took on the faraway sound it had had in the Santería shop. “Angie, he’s so old.”

  Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper, “I couldn’t follow you, Angie. I was scared.”

  “Forget it,” she answered. She had meant to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. “If you just hadn’t had to show off, if you’d gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way—” Her entire chest froze solid at the word. “The letter! We forgot all about my stupid letter!” She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away from Marvyn. “Did you forget? You forgot, didn’t you?” She was shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her. “Oh, God, after all that!”

  But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a very long while. “Calm down, be cool—I’ve got it here.” He dug her letter to Jake Petrakis—more than a little grimy by now—out of his back pocket and held it out to Angie. “There. Don’t say I never did nuttin’ for you.” It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show, and most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or folded his clothes. “Take it, open it up,” he said now. “Make sure it’s the right one.”
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  “I don’t need to,” Angie protested irritably. “It’s my letter—believe me, I know it when I see it.” But she opened the envelope anyway and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper, which she glanced at… then stared at, in absolute disbelief.

  She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on both sides.

  “Well, you did your job all right,” she said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack-jawed brother. “No question about that. I’m just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole incredible hooha for a blank sheet of paper.”

  Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.

  “I didn’t do it, Angie! I swear!” Marvyn scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though to ward her off in case she attacked him. “I just grabbed it out of your backpack—I never even looked at it.”

  “And what, I wrote the whole thing in grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or something? Come on, it doesn’t matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow and sit down.”

  Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little while before he said, “You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not written so much, it just wasn’t. That’s what happened.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Me being the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn’t matter”

  “It matters.” She had grown so unused to seeing a two-eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to her just then. He said, quite quietly, “You are the dynamite witch, Angie. He was after you, not me.”

  This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said, “I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets—okay, and I make ugly dolls walk around. What’s he care about that? But he knew you’d come after me, so he held me there—back there in Thursday—until he could grab you. Only he didn’t figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells or anything. I know that’s how it happened, Angie! That’s how I know you’re the real witch.”

  “No,” she said, raising her voice now. “No, I was just pissed-off, that’s different. Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off woman, O Mighty One. But you… you went all the way back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You’re going to be way stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he’d get rid of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El Viejo.”

  Marvyn’s chubby face turned gray. “But I’m not like him! I don’t want to be like him!” Both eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not done since his return. “It was horrible, Angie, it was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone, and I didn’t know what to do, only I had to do something. And I remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn’t letting me come forward I’d go the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked in the dark, until I….” He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly make the words out. “I don’t want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don’t want to! And I don’t want you being a witch either….”

  Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all over the bed. “It’s all right,” she told him, with one ear listening for their parents’ car pulling into the garage. “Shh, shh, it’s all right, it’s over, we’re safe, it’s okay, shh. It’s okay, we’re not going to be witches, neither one of us.” She laid him down and pulled the covers back over him. “You go to sleep now.”

  Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards’ wall beyond her shoulder. “I might take some of those down,” he mumbled. “Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian team’s really good.” He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when suddenly he sat up again and said, “Angie? The baby?”

  “What about the baby? I thought he made a beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable.”

  “It was bigger when we left,” Marvyn said. Angie stared at him. “I looked back at it in that lady’s lap, and it was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He’s starting over, Angie, like Milady.”

  “Better him than me,” Angie said. “I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he’s got it coming.” She heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, “Go to sleep, don’t worry about it. After what we’ve been through, we can handle anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is—no witch stuff.”

  Marvyn smiled drowsily. “Unless we really, really need it.” Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, “Ick! Blow your nose!”

  But Marvyn was asleep.

  JULIE'S UNICORN

  The note came with the entree, tucked neatly under the zucchini slices but carefully out of range of the seafood crepes. It said, in the unmistakable handwriting that any graphologist would have ascribed to a serial killer, “Tanikawa, ditch the dork and get in here.” Julie took her time over the crepes and the spinach salad, finished her wine, sampled a second glass, and then excused herself to her dinner partner, who smiled and propped his chin on his fingertips, prepared to wait graciously, as assistant professors know how to do. She turned right at the telephones, instead of left, looked back once, and walked through a pair of swinging half-doors into the restaurant kitchen.

  The heat thumped like a fist between her shoulder blades, and her glasses fogged up immediately. She took them off, put them in her purse and focused on a slender, graying man standing with his back to her as he instructed an earnest young woman about shiitake mushroom stew. Julie said loudly, “Make it quick, Farrell. The dork thinks I’m in the can.”

  The slender man said to the young woman, “Gracie, tell Luis the basil’s losing its marbles, he can put in more oregano if he wants. Tell him to use his own judgment about the lemongrass—I like it myself.” Then he turned, held out his arms and said, “Jewel. Think you strung it out long enough?”

  “My dessert’s melting,” Julie said into his apron. The arms around her felt as comfortably usual as an old sofa, and she lifted her head quickly to demand, “God damn it, where have you been? I have had very strange phone conversations with some very strange people in the last five years, trying to track you down. What the hell happened to you, Farrell?”

  “What happened to me? Two addresses and a fax number I gave you, and nothing. Not a letter, not so much as a postcard from East Tarpit-on-the-Orinoco, hi, marrying tribal chieftain tomorrow, wish you were here. But just as glad you’re not. The story of this relationship.”

  Julie stepped back, her round, long-eyed face gone as pale as it ever got. Almost in a whisper, she asked, “How did you know? Farrell, how did you know?” The young cook was staring at them both in fascination bordering on religious rapture.

  “What?” Farrell said, and now he was gaping like the cook, his own voice snagging in his throat. “You did? You got married?”

  “It didn’t last. Eight months. He’s in Boston.”

  “That explains it.” Farrell’s sudden bark of laughter made Gracie the cook jump slightly. “By God, that explains it.”

  “Boston? Boston explains what?”

  “You didn’t want me to know,” Farrell said. “You really didn’t want me to know. Tanikawa, I’m ashamed of you. I am.”

  Julie started to answer him, then nodded toward the entranced young cook. Farrell said, “Gracie, about the curried peas. Tell Suzanne absolutely not to add the mango pickle until just before the peas are done, she always puts it in too early. If she’s busy, you do it—go, go.” Gracie, enchanted even more by the notion of getting her hands into actual food, fled, and Farrell turned back to face Julie. “Eight months. I’ve known you to take longer over a lithograph.”

  “He’s a very nice man,” she answered him. “No, damn it, that sounds terrible, insulting. But he is.”

  Farrell nodded. “I believe it. You always
did have this deadly weakness for nice men. I was an aberration.”

  “No, you’re my friend,” Julie said. “You’re my friend, and I’m sorry, I should have told you I was getting married.” A waiter’s loaded tray caught her between the shoulder blades just as a busboy stepped on her foot, and she was properly furious this time. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d do exactly what you’re doing now, which is look at me like that and imply that you know me better than anyone else ever possibly could, which is not true, Farrell. There are all kinds of people you don’t even know who know things about me you’ll never know, so just knock it off.” She ran out of breath and anger more or less simultaneously. She said, “But somehow you’ve gotten to be my oldest friend, just by goddamn attrition. I missed you, Joe.”

  Farrell put his arms around her again. “I missed you. I worried about you. A whole lot. The rest can wait.” There came a crash and a mad bellow from the steamy depths of the kitchen, and Farrell said, “Your dork’s probably missing you too. That was the Table Fourteen dessert, sure as hell. Where can I call you? Are you actually back in Avicenna?”

  “For now. It’s always for now in this town.” She wrote the address and telephone number on the back of the Tonight’s Specials menu, kissed him hurriedly and left the kitchen. Behind her she heard another bellow, and then Farrell’s grimly placid voice saying, “Stay cool, stay cool, big Luis, it’s not the end of the world. Change your apron, we’ll just add some more brandy. All is well.”

  It took more time than they were used to, even after more than twenty years of picking up, letting go and picking up again. The period of edginess and uncertainty about what questions to ask, what to leave alone, what might or might not be safe to assume, lasted until the autumn afternoon they went to the museum. It was Farrell’s day off, and he drove Madame Schumann-Heink, his prehistoric Volkswagen van, over the hill from the bald suburb where he was condo-sitting for a friend and parked under a sycamore across from Julie’s studio apartment. The building was a converted Victorian, miraculously spared from becoming a nest of suites for accountants and attorneys and allowed to decay in a decently tropical fashion, held together by jasmine and wisteria. He said to Julie, “You find trees, every time, shady places with big old trees. I’ve never figured how you manage it.”