Fellowship Fantastic

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  For an instant the cloud was illuminated by so much internal lightning that its mere presence shorted out both the TV and the refrigerator in the kitchen. Eric held the limp form of Jessica tightly to him and closed his eyes. For a split second, the smell of ozone was in the air once again. There was a flash of light as bright as the sun and thunder shook the room, shaking books from their shelves and loosening plaster from the ceiling. A violent blast of hurricane-force wind rattled the house and blew out the picture window that dominated the back of the den.

  Trailing thunderstorm-force winds in its wake like the cry of some long-extinct animal, the cloud swept out through the shattered window and was gone.

  A trembling Eric crouched on the floor, still holding Jessica in his arms. It was the smoke that finally roused him. The last bolt of lightning had passed over their heads and set his old easy chair on fire. Letting Jessica down easy he stumbled into the kitchen, dragged out the fire extinguisher he kept stored in the cabinet beside the dishwasher, and returned to snuff out the flames before they could get a purchase on another piece of furniture or part of the house. By the time he was certain the fire was out, Jessica had begun to moan. It was the most wonderful sound he had heard in his life.

  When the paramedics arrived, a dazed Eric managed to invent a disjointed but credible story about an arc springing unexpectedly from the TV to catch the chair on fire. The fact that the den and kitchen were soaking wet he explained by saying that the fire had caused the house’s automatic sprinkler system to come on. Preoccupied as they were with the stunned but still alive Jessica, neither of the paramedics took the time to check the system to see if it actually had been activated.

  Jessica recovered. When necessary, makeup covered the thin, jagged scar that now ran down the right side of her chest. She would not see him or speak to him for a long time. Then one day there came a phone call—hesitant, conciliatory if not exactly inviting. They met. Conversation resumed, then meetings. A love that had never entirely been blasted away by the lightning in Eric’s den was rekindled, though when speaking of it both of them were careful not to employ any metaphors that involved mention of fire.

  Gradually, the memory faded until the reality that it had once been passed into the realm of dream. They got along too well to leave their personal lives in stasis at the expense of a nightmare. Marriage brought closure, success at work brought peace, and in the manner of things, time brought first a boy, then a girl. Eric had to enlarge the house.

  Years passed. The joy of living in a beautiful part of the world brought rewards that could not be counted in dollars. The Sound remained the Sound, a uniquely beautiful part of the planet. Rainier continued to brood over its domain and sustain its long, peaceful sleep. The Olympic Mountains still thrust snow-streaked spires into oceans of white cloud and cerulean blue.

  They were on a family hike in those mountains one day when, slowly but unmistakably, one many clouds showed signs of descending.

  “The car.” A grim-faced Eric stood his ground, facing the lowering mass of bulging whiteness. “Get the kids to the car.” He knew how hopeless the suggestion was even as he said it. The car was miles away, downslope at the head of the trail. Eyes wider than they had been in many years, Jessica drew Andrew and Cissy to her.

  The children were not frightened: they were fascinated. Cissy raised a hand and pointed. “Daddy, mommy, look! The cloud is coming to say hello!”

  “Wow,” was all the older Andrew could think to say. “I didn’t know clouds could drop down like that.”

  Only certain clouds, an increasingly tense Eric knew. Only one cloud.

  As it dropped steadily lower, he took care to keep himself positioned between the descending cumulus and his family. “Get back into the trees, Jessica. Take the kids into the forest.” It was a good quarter mile sprint off the ridgeline trail to the nearest firs and spruces, but it was the only chance they had. If he could keep himself between the cloud and them . . .

  The cloud was almost on him now. Behind him, Jessica and the children had hesitated, had failed to make a run for it when they’d had the time. Now it was too late. A finger of cloud, a cold front in miniature, extended itself toward him. From within its depths came a first faint rumbling. The cloud touched him.

  Caressed him.

  No words were spoken. No words had ever been spoken between them. Like the tentacles of some ghostly cephalopod, wreaths of soft cloud wrapped themselves around him, stroking his hair, his face, his upper body. Unaware of the antecedents, the children looked on in fascination as their mother held them close. Then it rose to drift over and past him, heading for his family.

  “Eric,” Jessica began, unable to suppress the quaver in her voice.

  “Mom, you’re hurting me.” Her arm was tight, tight, across Andrew’s neck.

  Eric started to move to intercept the cloud. What could he do if he got in its way? You couldn’t fight air. But there had been something about the way it had touched him, caressed him. A familiar touch, from many years gone by. He was anthropomorphizing again, he knew. But unlike the first time, history gave him reason to do so without questioning his sanity.

  “Jessica, relax. I think . . .” He gazed at the slowly drifting cloud mass, “I think it’s going to be okay.”

  As it had when facing him, fingers of cloud emerged from the main mass. Reached out toward Jessica, and touched. Touched and stroked. Eric relaxed, then he smiled. Time, he reflected.

  Tentative at first, Jessica reached out too, inserting a hand into part of the cloud. It drew back, then paused, finally returning to envelop her up to the shoulder. She smiled.

  “It tickles,” his wife told him. “She tickles.” Having been released from their mother’s grasp, her children were laughing and giggling, jumping up and down as they, too, tried to touch the cloud.

  It was all right now, Eric knew. Even the weather changes with time. Advancing, he put an arm around Jessica. The cloud did not object. Instead, it ascended slightly. As they moved off, resuming their hike and continuing on down the trail, the cloud moved with them, flattening out and spreading sideways to shield them from the glare of the midday sun.

  Andrew and Cissy followed in their parents’ wake. Occasionally they would pause to inspect this flower or that bug, sometimes smiling, sometimes fussing, occasionaly pushing gently at one another.

  Above each of them, a very small but bright cloud paced their progress.

  FRIENDS OF THE HIGH HILLS

  Brenda Cooper

  Lisa glanced at her mother, hunched in twin shafts of light pouring through the trailer window, rearranging bright blue, green, and fuchsia chips of tile in mosaic patterns. She winced at her mom’s scraggly gray ponytail and ragged pajamas. If only her mom paid half as much attention to her hair and clothes, or even the dishes, as she paid to her tile creations.

  Lisa’s own golden hair shone, and her jeans and T-shirt were at least clean if not exactly new. She tip-toed to the door, pushing the squeaky screen open as quietly as possible. A mumbled, “Have fun,” crept absently from her mother’s mouth, but the older woman didn’t even turn to acknowledge her daughter’s daily escape.

  Lisa closed the door behind her, walked about ten steps, then skipped twice before heading down the hill. Early morning washed a gold aura onto two huge white adobe and red-roofed houses with wrought-iron gates. The only thing the mega-mansions shared with her mom’s old silver trailer was a great view of the eucalyptus-laden hills rising in waves from Laguna Canyon.

  At the main road, Lisa turned left, toward town, and the Sawdust Festival. She began passing early visitors jostling for parking places and local artists who had walked or come in by bus from studios in town. Unwilling to wait for the festival to open in a half hour, Lisa lined up behind two artists and snuck in the open door at the side. Checking on mosaics her mom had consigned made Lisa enough of a regular that no one stopped her. Sawdust-strewn paths muffled her footsteps as she streaked through the hubbub of preparati
on for the festival’s last day without speaking to anyone.

  The waterfall above the food booths was already on, the water singing to her on its fall down the solid rock surface into the small pool in front of it. She walked across the wooden boardwalk in front of the fountain, stepped into the pool, and into the waterfall. The cool wet soaked her hair and clothes, her feet squished, her skin tingled, and the rock accepted her, fading to mist.

  For short seconds, two worlds pulled at her. She chose.

  In the High Hills, the first stars were beginning to fade as blue tinged the sky. She let out a long sigh of pleasure and twisted her fingers through her hair. She was always dry once she made it through, but the waterfall still wreaked havoc with her hair. Like it mattered. But she kept caring, stubborn about it, even though no one else did.

  The waterfall door to the High Hills and the festival would disappear tomorrow. The knowledge rushed her feet toward her best friend in either world. Daylight thickened as Lisa forded the stream, wetting her shoes for real, and she finally reached the small town. She threaded through a copse of old California oaks with thick, twisted low branches and stopped at the last one before the trees opened into the common area. She looked up.

  Brandy’s bright face and green-gold eyes flashed a welcoming smile. She kicked a lithe bare calf back and twisted down to land on a lower branch, the stones and shells braided into her long gold hair flapping against her cheeks. “About time! I’m going to do it.”

  “What about your grandmother?”

  Brandy frowned, then shrugged. “She always says no. I don’t care anymore—I’m thirteen, and that’s old enough for a day over there.”

  Lisa bit back a protest. She’d wanted to spend the day on this side, with the magic and the great, ripe blackberries and the open space. “What if Grandma Nelson follows you?”

  Brandy plucked a maroon backpack from a low-hanging stub of a branch and shouldered it. “Then we’ll just have to lose her at the festival.”

  Lisa resigned herself to losing her last day. After all, it was Brandy’s, too. The last day she’d see her friend until next summer. And Brandy’d never been on Lisa’s side of the waterfall door.

  Brandy bounced up and down on her feet, excitement tightening her cheeks. “Besides, remember when I told you my mom got lost over there? When I was three? I want to find her.” She tugged at Lisa’s sleeve. “We need to go now. Before grandma beats me there.”

  Lisa nodded, grabbed her friend’s hand, and started back the way they came. Brandy pushed the pace, and Lisa’s breath came hard by the time they reached the back side of the door. The two girls stood panting, looking back.

  A small, slightly bent figure swathed in bright purple and red was just crossing the stream behind them, barely two hundred feet away. “Damm it,” Brandy breathed out hard. “I told you she knows everything.”

  “And I never doubted you.” Although she had, at first. But Grandma Nelson did seem to be able to look anywhere in the High Hills and see what was happening. Once the two girls had upset a whole swarm of bees, and before they got halfway back, bitten and swollen, the old woman had met them with salves and a lecture. “But doesn’t that mean she knows where your mom is?”

  “I think Mom left the High Hills to get away from Grandma. I bet she isn’t quite as magic over there.”

  “She’s probably not magic in Laguna Beach at all. It’s not a magic place.” Grandma Nelson was close enough for Lisa to see she held her long gray hair in place with a twist of berry-bush. Lisa had trouble tearing her eyes away from the brightly clothed figure.

  Brandy whispered in her ear. “We have to go. Now.”

  Lisa turned. “Okay. Follow me.” She stepped through the stone, emerging on the other side, water pouring down her face. As always, none of the mothers or children or artists noticed her appear as if from nowhere.

  But she was alone.

  She stepped backward, wet to dry, to find her friend staring at the rock like a rabbit in front of a coyote. Lisa laughed. “It’s easy.” She grabbed Brandy’s arm and yanked, but once more she emerged alone.

  Back again, dizzy from the repeated trips, Lisa eyed Brandy’s scraped knuckles. Lisa shook her gently. “You have to believe.”

  Brandy started to turn her head back toward her inexorably approaching grandmother, but Lisa fisted her palms and demanded, “Now. Before you can’t. You have to choose to go.” Grandma Nelson’s pecan-brown eyes glittered, and if she’d had one, she could’ve hit the girls with a rock. Even Lisa would endure a lecture if they got caught. “Now!” she hissed, turned, and stepped through, her skin tingling like all the trips she’d ever made rolled into one.

  Still no Brandy. Then her friend popped out of the water, suddenly whole.

  So that’s what it looked like for people who could see.

  Brandy gasped, standing and staring as if she were a fish in a bowl. Lisa grabbed Brandy’s hand. “Follow me.” The two wet girls plunged into the crowd, Lisa leading firmly, stopping behind a busy leathergoods booth with a good view of the waterfall. “What do you want to do?” Lisa asked.

  “We can watch for her here.”

  But there was so much to show Brandy! “Why don’t we just run away? She can’t possibly catch us.”

  “Don’t bet anything on that. She’ll follow me.” And then Brandy’s eyes (big as dollar coins at all of the new sights) narrowed to normal and the gold in them seemed to twinkle even here in the land of no magic. “Besides, I brought some ways to discourage her. She has to see how much I mean to do this, or I’ll just be running from her the whole time.” Brandy dug into her pocket and produced three stiff spiders with stone bodies and wire legs.

  Lisa shook her head. “I told you the magic doesn’t work here.” She pointed. “And here she is.”

  Sure enough, Brandy’s grandmother was stepping from the fountain to the boardwalk, shaking her wet shoes slowly and deliberately.

  “But they always come alive for me,” Brandy said, tossing the spiders gently in her palm. Her eyes didn’t have any doubt at all. Brandy pulled a gold scarf shimmering with green and gray highlights from her backpack and draped it over the edge of the booth. She giggled, grabbed a black leather hat from the outside of the booth, and tucked her hair and all of its decorations up inside it. She cocked an eyebrow at Lisa. “Come on!”

  Lisa swallowed a protest and followed. She was always almost-protesting around Brandy. Maybe that was why she liked her. She used a conversational voice to keep from drawing attention. “You can’t just steal a hat.”

  Brandy didn’t turn around. “I didn’t. I traded.”

  Ignoring the unease feathering her spine with hollow spots, Lisa stayed beside her friend as Brandy crept up behind her grandmother, who predictably turned around just as Brandy dropped the spiders on the outside of her cloak. Brandy eeled away, leaving Lisa gaping as the spiders’ metal legs softened and the stone bodies furred out, all three running up the red cloak. Grandma Nelson’s eyes narrowed and her lips pursed tight as persimmons. She started hopping, swiping at the spiders. Instinctively, Lisa leaned in and brushed the closest one to the ground. It fell with a stone clink, its metal legs frozen in mid-scurry.

  Grandma Nelson kept jumping until Lisa knocked all three of the spiders back to stone. Lisa knelt down and retrieved one, looking up into the Grandma Nelson’s thoroughly disgusted visage. At least the old woman barked out, “Thank you.”

  “But—”

  Grandma Nelson interrupted her. “Some gifts pass through the wall, at least between us born on the other side.”

  As if Lisa could help it that she was born here. She pulled away from a sharp tug on her arm until she recognized Brandy’s long fingers. Shoving the rescued spider in her pocket, she turned and raced after her friend. Grandma Nelson could probably take care of herself, but Brandy’d never been on this side. She could get in big trouble.

  As soon as their racing feet took them around a bend, Lisa leaned in toward Brandy. “
So what were the spiders for? To scare her away?”

  “She’s not scared of spiders. They were messages, and she’s scared of knowing how much I want to be here.”

  “What were they supposed to say?”

  “They were supposed to tell her how bad I want,” she glanced at Lisa, “to see my mom. And how bad I want her to leave me alone.”

  Lisa looked around. There was no sign of Grandma Nelson. “She didn’t get the message.” She opened her hand, which still held the one cold hard spider she’d retrieved. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” Brandy said simply. “How could you? You aren’t one of us.”

  Lisa flinched. “But I can go through the door. Most people can’t even do that.”

  “Shhhhh,” Brandy held a hand to her lips. “I know. I have other stuff, too. But I don’t want to talk about it out loud, not here. Besides, we’re like sisters, right?”

  Lisa breathed out. Maybe. She wanted that more than anything. “How are you going to find your momma anyway?”

  Brandy shook her head. “I’ll have to feel for her. She can’t be dead. Grandma’s never said so. I think they just got in a fight. And Grandma’s too stubborn to ever forget, or lose.”

  Lisa stepped aside for a double stroller full of fat twin babies with matching yellow clothes. She searched the crowd for any sign of Grandma Nelson. “Are they fighting about you?”

  Brandy pushed the oversized hat up and arched an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Momma wanted to live here. I was only three. I just remember they screamed at each other for days. And I know what Grandma says now.”

  A flash of purple. “She’s going to say it to you.”

  Brandy craned her neck, using the two inches of height she had on Lisa to look around. “Nope. That’s not her. She went to get tea.”

  Lisa swallowed hard. Didn’t Brandy see she was a younger version of her grandmother? Magic and stubborn and smart. Even though she was older than Lisa, she seemed to know less, as if the High Hills let her grow up slower, even though she was brave. What if she lost her friend? What if Brandy just needed someone to teach her to cross? “So do we follow her or do we try to find your mom?”