"But they that have power to hurt and will do none; they rightly do inherit heaven’s graces." " Touché." The king bowed before Lily.
"I must away: far distant lies a rose unsmelled, nearby ogres await the unwary. What king of fairy can leave matters so?"
Without further word the court began to climb back on the train. The dwarf engineers, on the other hand, were quite vociferous in an under-the-breath sort of way about their truncated break. Nevertheless, they set about laying the track with a will.
Up until now I had been happy to be ignored by his fairy majesty. But—it must have been the tension—I must admit there was something about being harangued by the king that I found face- breakingly funny. Despite all my efforts, a smile forced its way on to my lips as the king turned to leave. And, for my bad luck, he saw it.
"Sirrah, stranger and visitor to our realm, do you live in the days of Spenser and Shakespeare?" I shook my head.
" Tis pity, or I would have thee take word to Edmund: forget not the lord in thy zeal for the lady. But I see from thy raiment that another age claims thee."
I nodded.
"Allow me to practice the demotic." The king cleared his throat. "Wotcha fink of me manor. Wicked, innit?"
There is, I discovered at this point, a peculiar and unique quality to the rictus that freezes one’s face when trying not to laugh in the face of a slightly mad fairy king with the power to switch off the sun.
Theo, on the other hand, was not so infected.
Behind the king every member of his court immediately froze. The dwarves stopped laying track. Everything and everyone was still, and silent, apart from my son. His laughter continued to ring out, then gradually died away into uncertainty. Theo tugged my hand.
"Dad, what’s wrong? Wasn’t it funny?" The king looked at me.
"Well? Was it?"
What do you think, dear reader? Did I, at this point, draw myself up like Horatio at the bridge or Samson among the Philistines, and answer truly though the heavens fall. Or did I freeze like a frightened rabbit?
"What’s up, doc?" said the king, as the silence stretched into tomorrow and I contemplated the fall of civilization and the end of my career, not necessarily in that order.
"Cat got your tongue." As the king said that, his pupils turned in to feline slits. "Dad?" Theo squeezed my hand.
I had to say something. But I couldn’t speak. "It was funny."
Lily blushed before the sudden convergence of so many gazes but she did not quail. "You sounded like the queen trying to talk common."
"Yes," Theo chimed in, somewhat unnecessarily I thought, "it was really funny."
The king began to laugh, with all the unexpectedness of a market collapse, and a moment later his courtiers joined in. The dwarves went back to desultory track laying.
Wiping tears from his eyes, the king squatted down in front of Theo.
"Ages have passed since I knew such mirth," he said and ruffled Theo’s hair. Again. "Hey," said Theo, trying to unruffle it.
"The doors lie open to you. Return when you will." "Can I bring my trains."
"Certainly. But be quick; winter has been but delayed, it will not be denied. Come, we must depart."
The fairy king limped back to his train and climbed up to the driver’s cab. Steam billowed around the locomotive, the whistle sounded, and with the slow wumph of pistons it rolled away.
The engine safely out of sight, and the plains and hills again quiet, I turned to Lily. "I think we’d better go."
Lily stopped me at the front door. "Thank you," she said.
"What for?"
"For visiting the home of an ugly crone. Oh, and saving the world." "Yes, well. My pleasure."
"What did he mean," Theo butted in. "About the doors being open?" Lily smiled down at my son.
"For you, the gates to the other world will unlock." "Cool," said Theo.
"But you have to find them, and that is, I’m afraid, all but impossible to do without a guide." "That’s all right, we can always come back here."
I suspect it was the slightly strangled noise emanating from me that caused Lily to look in my direction.
"I think you should ask your father first. Besides ..." and here she bent down and took Theo’s hands in her own. "You might not be able to return."
"But we know where you live," said Theo.
"Once you leave, the way is lost. Try to return and you will find yourself walking down unfamiliar roads."
Theo’s face crumpled like a screwed-up tissue and Lily took him in her arms. "I’ll still see you at the model railway fairs," she said.
Theo sniffed and wiped the tears away. "You promise?"
"Yes," said Lily, "I promise."
I drew Theo out of her arms. "Come on, son. It’s time to go."
We waved to Lily from the gate. Theo’s crying had ended as suddenly as the king’s laughter had begun. And as we walked down those suburban streets back to the model railway fair he skipped happily along.
"Well, that was quite an adventure," I said as the church hall hove in to sight. "I can’t wait to go back," said Theo.
"It might be difficult to find the way." Already the route was blurring in memory into random roads and blind turnings.
"I don’t think so." Theo smiled up at me. "You must have a better memory than me."
"I have," said Theo. "And I also have a better mobile." He waved it up at me. "GPS. We can go back whenever we want."
"Oh," I said. "Great."
The Cloak
Douglas Kolacki
"Angels do not actually wear cloaks. They wear windows into the heaven of unapproachable light wrapped around themselves, and perhaps it is this that emblazons them with such glory. Perhaps Paul witnessed this when he glimpsed heaven, and thought about it when he penned ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ.’ Who could ever know?"
—Heavenly Speculations, Article IX Verse 2
The phone jarred me out of sleep. I shook my head, peered at the green glowing numerals—1:32—answered it.
"Doug!"
I held the receiver away from my face as the voice sizzled on. "Doug, are you there?"
A few more "Doug’s" went by before I fully recognized the voice. "Randy?
No, I thought. This was a panicked voice flecked with despair. No, Randy did not get panicky, not since our high school days when he captained the track team. And despair—the only hint of despair he’d ever shown was once in the eleventh grade, but that’s another story.
"Randy. What happened?" The sudden death of a mother, the stroke of a father, news of an accident all flashed across my mind.
Silence.
Then he whispered, "Doug, I’m scared."
"Is someone breaking in?" Randy house-sat for his parents while they wintered in Florida; their place was out in the country, surrounded by woods. "What’s going on?"
"Can you come over?"
"Now?"
"Doug. Doug." Now his voice really shook. "You know how your phone’s been ringing lately, at night?"
That startled me. Three, maybe four calls in the week since I’d last seen him. I’d answered them, only to be hung up on. "That was you?"
Another silence. I waited. Finally he said, "It’s about what we found...on the mountain." It took me a minute to process these words. "All right," I finally said.
"Thanks. And, Doug?" "Yes?"
"The next time you pray," he said, "Could you mention me?"
~
My old Renault hatchback wouldn’t start. I coaxed, pleaded with it; it answered only with rrr-rrr’s and pulsing glimmers of light on the dash. Finally I called a cab. I kicked myself and checked my watch again: 2:32. Then I looked in my wallet and thought about payday, still a long week away. I stared past my open billfold, not really seeing it or feeling it in my hands, nor hearing the steady hum of the cab’s engine.
Why? I asked myself. Why did I ever let him get hold of it? Why didn’t I take it?
The cab wound up the road betw
een the rows of shadowy trees and the white moon over- head, obscured every few minutes by passing clouds. I put my hand to my face and thought of the sheer irony of it all. It had taken me weeks of steady proddings to get Randy to skip the parties and the bars for just one Saturday and join me for a hike.
If I had just left him alone, he never would have seen it at all.
No. It’s good. God works all things out well for his people, right? And how he’d handed me a chance to get it back.
Yes. Thank you, Lord.
~
On the mountain there are no neon lights, nothing flashy or glitzy, no loud jukeboxes. The synthesized dance tunes were Randy’s music, the chirping of birds was mine. Randy had the dance floor lights when he strutted his stuff; I had the sunshine and, once, a shimmering rainbow.
It had been that way since our school days before his father’s telecommunications business took off. Randy didn’t need to go to parties; he was a party unto himself.
Maybe I just wanted to show him what it was like for me.
We had been hiking all morning up one of my favorite paths, a steep one that wound between trees and crossed jagged rocks. Randy, puffing along behind me, kept gasping about stopping. I snickered. What’s the matter, buddy? I thought you pumped iron! Nimbly I stepped, glorying in my ease, keeping him just close enough behind to hear his wheezing. Then I stopped, seeing something up ahead.
"Thank God!" Randy staggered up beside me.
We stood at the foot of a grassy ridge near the summit. I was looking at something like the first light breaking over a mountaintop, though it was around noon.
"Doug?" Randy squinted, panting and holding his chest.
I slunk up the ridge. The light, closer now, streamed upward like a row of searchlights behind the rise.
"What is it?" Randy whispered.
It was a radiance whiter than anything, the white of lightning. Around it, the clear day seemed to darken; the sky, the leaves and the distant green ranges of other mountains grew drab, colorless. Even the sun itself seemed dim, as I became aware of a sense of dirtiness in everything, and the imperfections of the surrounding world grew almost painful.
I hissed, "I think we should get out of here."
Randy said nothing. I turned to see a face strangely free of agitation. His eyes were wide like mine, but not in fear. He actually smiled—there was joy in that face, and I was squirming. "Doug, my man," he said, "You only live once."
And with that, he scrambled to the top of the ridge.
~
The glimpse of what came next always seemed to elude me, for all my constant attempts to enshrine it in my mind. Randy had clambered up the ridge until he stood silhouetted in the brightness. After a couple of false starts I followed him, and in a moment we peered over the edge, beholding it, just before we both collapsed on our faces.
It was well after dark when our minds and our emotions recovered enough for us to move and, finally, to stand again.
I can recall only one thing clearly: she had shone.
Looking the sun full in the face might come somewhere near it; but neither did this light hurt the eyes, for it was not so much the eyes that responded to it, but the part of the psyche touched by beauty and stirred by the fantastic. She knelt on a cloak spread over the ground. At least I think she was kneeling—I can never be sure. She wore a flowing robe like you see in pictures, but there were no wings. In the flash of time before the sight overwhelmed us, she vanished into the sky.
When we lifted our eyes we saw the cloak still spread on the ground, still shining with the same clean brilliance. Not so strong as to knock us out, but stirring our hearts and moving us, yes, to tears, to such a depth and purity I had never thought a person capable of.
We lay there in another world until dusk and beyond while the radiance moved our hearts, like tuning forks, with every tender pitch and vibration. Finally we struggled to our feet and inched around it, staring. Randy approached it several times—I kept hanging back—reaching out with trembling fingers, finally brushed the cloak with his fingertips.
I didn’t think he would really touch it. In his face I saw something like reverence, though at the time I was sure it was just the reflection of the heavenly light.
"Doug," he said. It surprised me, the way he said my name—not flung out with his usual let’s- party whoop, but more like someone in prayer. Very carefully, as if handling a newborn, Randy drew the cloak to his chest so that his whole body glowed. "Oh, Doug," he whispered, and tears broke out anew, actually streaming down each cheek.
"Randy? What if...?" I looked above his head, where moths fluttered about in the aura.
He obliged me by half-opening his eyes. "She comes back for it? I don’t know. Funny— doesn’t even seem to worry me." He drew our find tighter around him. "Maybe it’s like a gift. A gift from God, like you talk about sometimes."
I bristled. A gift from God. Yes.
Now day was returning, or what passed for day, over the mountain ranges to the east, and with it the sense of dirtiness in everything that the darkness no longer covered. I realized that I had moved closer to the light without knowing it. Randy still sat cross-legged with our find wrapped around him, radiating like the transfigured Christ. Somehow I never got my turn.
I’d put my mind to work during the night, once I could get my thoughts together. Visions of angels and all the Biblical accounts of heavenly sightings had spun through my head, and I almost felt as if I was in the Bible myself, now that I knew what Isaiah and Mary had seen. I remembered the ill woman instantly healed by touching Christ’s garments.
"What would this do for, say, a cancer patient? Nothing, maybe, but—who knows? Or AIDS, or any kind of disease. Or what if someone’s just down in the dumps, depressed—wouldn’t this be so much better than dope or whatever? Randy, this is actually something from heaven. There’s no limit to what it could do!"
Randy cut in. He talked, dreamily, pulling the cloak tighter, delighting himself in it. "No hurry," he said, and started in with one of his pitches usually reserved for girls with bust lines of thirty-four or better.
"Now, Doug. We can’t go rushing into this." The garment had done nothing to cure that slippery speech of his. "First, we’ll need a place to keep it. Why not my folks’ house? The nearest neighbor lives three miles away. How would we get it into your apartment without everyone seeing it?"
Every kind of protest sprang to mind. But the only thing that dribbled out my mouth was, "But—well—ah ..." What I didn’t want to say was that I hated the idea of this glory in his kind of surroundings—empty beer cans, blowhard drinking buddies, tongue-wagging pin-ups.
But of course it did end up with Randy. He carried it inside, and I tagged after him like his pet puppy. He patted me on the arm, gave me his winning smile, showered me with thanks and assurances, all the while steering me to the door. He almost slammed it after me and I stood there, staring blankly at the brass gargoyle knocker, my stomach sinking.
~
The cab wheeled around the last bend, and the house came into view.
For a moment I just stared.
Usually every window was thrown wide and Randy’s stereo blasting. Now, dead silence, and every window shut up tight; and glimmering around the edges of one of the second floor windows was a familiar, yet different, glow.
"It’s okay," I said. "I’ll walk from here."
The driver grabbed my last twenty, gunned the engine and was gone.
I stood alone with crickets chirping around me and looked up at the house, feeling my pulse speed up and my body grow cold.
For this was a strange glow. It shone not white, but a sick yellow. It seemed to ooze through the cracks and foul the night air like sewage seeping into a reservoir.
I took a step toward the house. Then another. Finally I shut my eyes and tried to think of my friend inside, how he needed my help, and that somehow got me up to the door where I found myself again staring at the knocker. It, too had changed, b
ut in a curious way; the gargoyle seemed comical—maybe everything around it crawled with such evil that the brass thing appeared ridiculous in comparison, like a paper-mache movie monster.
I thumped the door. "Randy?"
Muffled footsteps. After a fumbled clicking of the latch, the door swung wide. I stared. "Randy?"
"Hello, Doug." A sad grin. "I’m glad you’re here. Probably won’t make any difference...but
I’m glad to see you, all the same. Come on in."
The parlor looked like a light shop. There were lamps on the end tables and the coffee table and all around the floor, shades all removed, bare white bulbs glaring. The chandelier was a blinding crystal sun. The TV and the massive black stereo sat lifeless, unplugged; every outlet went to the lamps, yet the whole room burned yellow, especially at the top of the stairs where it blazed red-hot.
Randy sprawled on the couch. Stubble matted his face and his white tee shirt was stained at the armpits.
"Welcome to my private paradise," he said. I stared at him. "Randy, what did you do?"
He just laughed, a feeble, sarcastic laugh, and shook his head. "Man oh man. If you only knew."
"Never mind. Where are your car keys? You can fill me in on the way to the hospital."
He muttered something like, "No good, no good." He rose shakily to his feet. "Okay. The keys are..." he pointed, slowly, with a trembling finger. "Upstairs. In the bedroom." He dropped his hand. "A hundred times, you know, I started to take it out back to burn it—"
"Burn it?"
"But it won’t let you go. The need for it...you have no idea. And each time, it takes longer to soak it all up." He hung his head, shuddered. "My job’s gone, did I tell you? People kept saying I looked like a wreck, my boss asked what was going on, but how could I tell him? I’m dead, man. There’s nothing anymore but ..."
He doubled over with a wild cackle, shuffled toward the steps."I want to show you something." I grabbed his shirt. He shook me off and, suddenly coming to life, bounded up the stairs and out of sight.
The sense of evil—real evil—grew like the sting of heat when you near an open furnace. I shook my head and, keeping my eyes shut, felt my way up along the banister and groped along a warm, almost slimy wall. "Randy!" I shouted.
Midnight Diner 3 Page 21