by Tom Deitz
“Foxes—which is what this gal mostly looks like—walk on their toes. Half of what we call leg is actually foot; their heels are inches above the ground. This one’s…not like that. Oh, and by the way, can I borrow your Warner Brothers video again? I wanta check some stuff on my costume.”
Caught off guard by the non sequitur, David blinked. “The one of which you refused to speak last week?” he managed finally. “Or is this week’s secret different?”
“Yes and no.” Aikin had not stopped examining the enfield.
David could think of nothing useful to say. It had been an…eventful ten minutes.
Aikin rose with deliberate care. “Hold on to that a sec,” he commanded, pointing to the beast. “No! Stay!” when it made to follow him. “I wanta get some pictures.”
“You what?” David screeched.
Aikin regarded him calmly. “I want to take its picture, preferably several. I’d really like to take her back to Whitehall with me, in fact; but that’s probably out of the question—without Alec’s leg goin’ along, at any rate, which I doubt he’s too keen on. But since I may never get another chance to observe a mythical beast this close…well, basically, you guys owe me.”
David eyed him narrowly. “Only if you let Liz do the developing.”
“I’ll consider it,” Aikin replied noncommittally—and stalked toward the door. He paused half-in, half-out. “Got a yardstick?”
Before anyone could reply, a rusty blur leapt from the floor where it had been lolling and streaked down the hall. And before even Aikin’s reflexes could close the screen, the enfield had slipped between his legs and zipped outside. He spun around instantly, but already it had vanished. “Shit,” he spat bitterly. “Damn.”
David pushed past him onto the porch and frantically scanned the bushy lawn and the avenue of pines that paralleled the road. The enfield was nowhere to be seen. His friends joined him as he jogged to the highway and looked up and down, then made a quick tour of the perimeter of the small wooded lot.
Nothing.
Enfields were forest creatures, so his Faery friend Fionchadd had told him. And the unimproved acreage adjoining Casa McLean Sullivan to the east was thoroughly wooded. A cow pasture lay beyond the fence at the edge of the backyard, and behind it were yet more trees.
“Feel like doin’ some trackin’?” David asked Aikin between panting breaths, as he slowed by the tumbledown shed that passed for a garage.
Aikin’s face was tight with disappointment. “Cammie’s havin’ me to dinner, and she’ll have a shit-fit if I’m not dead on time. Plus, I’ve got a killer test tomorrow and have absolutely gotta study. ’Sides,” he added, “I figured you’d be glad to see it go.”
“I am—sort of,” David admitted. “The trouble starts if anyone else sees it.”
Aikin raised an eyebrow. “You ever stop to think how, out of all the houses on this road, it chose the only folks who wouldn’t go ballistic?”
“We don’t know that,” Alec shot back. “It could’ve scratched at every door for miles.”
“I don’t think so,” David countered slowly. “I think it knew exactly where to come.”
“How so?” From Liz.
“They’re mondo-good trackers, for one thing,” David replied, “So Nuada says, anyway—which is why Lugh keeps so many of ’em around. But they’re also psychic as hell—can track by scent, or residual body-heat—or by thought patterns, especially strong emotions, like, for instance, the desire to escape, or not be caught or found. Therefore, assuming this gal blundered here by accident, we’re probably the only folks for miles who would have anything even vaguely familiar in our brain patterns: namely, our awareness of Faerie. I mean I know it’s a stretch, but…”
“What’s their range?” Liz broke in, pragmatically. David shrugged. “No idea.”
“So why’d it boogie off like that?”
Another shrug. “Maybe it didn’t like Aikin’s vibes, or something. I mean, would you like being poked and measured and prodded by Mr. Ranger, Sir-in-training?”
Aikin looked as though he were about to explode—from a variety of possible causes. “God, I hate this,” he growled. “I mean, this is the neatest thing that’s happened for…years—and for once, I really cannot hang around. I really do have to grab that video and fly.”
Alec rummaged through the neatly ranked boxes in the bookcase beside the TV and produced the appropriate box. “Kill the wabbit,” he said deadpan.
Aikin snatched it. “Magic helmet,” he cried, with what sounded suspiciously like forced glee—and leapt off the porch.
“Carry on,” David called, as his friend jogged toward the black Chevy S-10 that had replaced his Nova at high school graduation. “And if you see the critter again, hang on to it.”
“Oh yes,” Aikin nodded, as he climbed into the cab. “You can bet on that!”
Chapter VII: House Guest
(Athens, Georgia—Thursday, October 29—late afternoon)
“The first ninety percent of a project takes the first ninety percent of the time,” Aikin had read in the science library men’s room. “The remaining ten percent takes the other ninety.”
He was stuck in the second batch. Midterms were long since over, he still hadn’t finished his plant collection—and now trees were shedding their leaves right and left, less-handy stock was wilting in earnest, and he was supposed to submit green specimens. What I get for taking botany fall quarter, he grumbled silently, as he squatted on a nature trail below the beherbed bank that loomed above the wooded floodplain between the Phoenix and the river. The building’s roof was barely visible from where he crouched, so he pointedly didn’t look. Better to pretend this was virgin forest—like that he’d glimpsed in his dream of Faerie.
Faerie…
No! He’d gnawed that bone too long already—since Dave had started sporting a certain odd ring four summers back, in fact. Of course, it had been no big deal—at first. But then silence had piled atop weirdness, and cryptic reference on puzzling act, until what had begun as confused frustration had ended in outright rage. Not that his friends had actually liked excluding him, Dave had hastened to add, no more than he’d liked being on the receiving end. Nor, in all honesty, would he have acted any different had he been in their Reeboks. Still, it had hurt—a lot.
But his long drought of deprivation seemed to be ending in a monsoon. First the white deer, then Dave’s increased willingness to talk about other Worlds, followed by the aborted scrying and the dream. Never mind the Track less than half a mile from his cabin, which was as close to his base as the one at the Sullivans’ farm was to Dave’s. And then yesterday’s business with the enfield.
Trouble was, he could live without Faerie when it was remote. But when it was suddenly all over the place—that was different. Ignorance had given way to knowledge, finally. But what he wanted, to put him on a par with his friends, was experience. He did not, however, need the annoyance of trying to achieve it now!
Not with the demon academia starting to demand more than lip service sacrifice.
So here he was in the soggy woods (at least it was warm, though more rain was in the forecast) trying very hard to scare up the several genera he had no examples of yet, when it was the last thing he really wanted to do. Idly, he sifted the leaves beside the trail. Nothing new. Then again, why should there be? And why bother with dead leaves anyway? What he needed was live growth: specifically, jack-in-the-pulpit and Sagittarius. Which were more likely to grow close to water than on a shaded bank eighty yards inshore.
He had just straightened with the intent of acting on that brilliant insight, when the telltale rattle-rustle of leaves atop the bank signaled the presence of four-legged company. Squirrel, probably, perhaps a chipmunk, though it was early in the afternoon for either to be really active, the hours after dawn and preceding sunset being best—if one were hunting. Hunting squirrels, that is; nobody bothered with chippies.
Rustle, rattle, rustle…
He cocked his hea
d, victim, as usual, of surfeit of curiosity. Too big for a squirrel. He craned his neck, searching the tangled greenery. Rabbit…?
More rustling.
Wrong rhythm for a bunny, and likely bigger yet. Which narrowed the options to cat, dog (domestic type, one each), ’coon, or an atypically diurnal ’possum.
A shrug, and he turned away. Only there it was again, louder and closer, both. He spun back around, backed up a pace to survey the bank, saw nothing, and had started to beat feet again, when he caught a flash of movement: rat-sized, but tan with black stripes.
It had been a chipmunk.
Losin’ it, Daniels. Sounded bigger.
At which point the chipmunk erupted from whatever shelter had proved untenable, and launched itself down the slope, across the trail, and into the knee-high grass between the bank and the river—followed, to his amazement, by a rust-toned blur that could only be a fox, bushy tail and black-tipped ears barely visible as it flashed less than three yards from his feet. “Son of a bitch!” he cried—and dashed after.
Though foxes were fairly common in Georgia, he’d never encountered one so close to the Phoenix, so in that alone it bore scrutiny. It was a fast little sucker, too, by the way the grass rippled in its wake—which ended abruptly in a muddled swirl of motion through which rose the thrash/grunt-swish/grunt-growl of an unequal struggle, punctuated by the strangled chirp of a chipmunk in extremis.
And since he was in excellent shape (mostly from jogging, though he also pumped iron now and then), Aikin was not even slightly winded when, ten feet from the patch of gyrating grass, he shifted his noisy plunge to silent stealth.
Nothing yet, though the grass still swayed and shifted in a way that wasn’t natural, and he could hear a grinding sound and—he thought—the crunch-snap of tiny bones breaking. He winced, then caught himself and scowled. What were chipmunks for, in the grand, cold scheme of things, but to be eaten by predators? And people gave hunters grief? Ha! Better to be shot dead unexpectedly in your prime, than be slowly chomped alive, or succumb to hunger and disease in old age.
Disease…God, suppose the fox had rabies? Many wild carnivores in Georgia did. And this one was behaving a tad oddly simply by being about in the middle of the day. On the other hand, there was a climbable tree two yards to the right…
Another step, and by craning his neck he finally glimpsed his quarry—sitting calmly on its haunches with its jaws working vigorously as it choked down its kill. It was facing away from him, but he glimpsed a striped tail and one leg dangling from its jaws. And when it raised a forepaw to scratch its chin, Aikin’s mouth dropped open.
Not a paw! A talon! This was no fox; it was a bloody enfield! In fact, now he looked at it, it could very well be the same impossible beast he’d examined yesterday at Dave’s.
It had run off, after all. And Dave had said something about Faerie exerting a draw on anything from there that entered another World. And where was the nearest way back home? The Track that ran through the woods across the river!
So what did he do now? He hadn’t brought his camera—again—but he was damned if he was gonna let the critter escape without investigation. Well, he could check for tracks, for one thing, and maybe get some plaster casts. Possibly there’d be scat, too, from which he could gain a sense of diet. And, of course, he could simply observe: see how an alien predator adapted to a (presumably) new environment.
Only…the alien predator had also noticed him, indeed had swiveled gracefully around and was ambling his way, utterly nonchalant, utterly unconcerned—and very unalien and un-predator-like indeed. In fact, it was acting a great deal like a country-reared house cat: wanting to be petted one moment, hunting live game in the woods the next.
It had approached to within two yards now, and he eased down before it, extending a hand as he had yesterday, trying not to think about scientific investigation. “Hey, girl,” he whispered. “What’s happenin’—’sides hunting? So, are you tame, or what? You some Faery boy’s pet? Some AWOL heraldic toy?”
The enfield blinked and crept closer yet, its body slung low above the ground as though it were stalking—then lunged straight at him, veering aside at the last possible instant to dart onto the trail, where it promptly stopped again and looked around imploringly.
He followed. Could not resist—first because the critter was interesting in its own right; second, because he might never see one again if he didn’t keep an eye on it. And finally, because it was from Faerie, and every moment he was exposed to any aspect of that place was bliss.
Ten feet away, and it was moving again—dammit! He followed doggedly as the enfield calmly pranced along the trail, toward the cabin, and, not incidentally, the dam. So which way would it turn there, if at all? Right, which would bring it between the cabin and the Phoenix? Or left, across the river, to the Track?
It chose the latter, and Aikin had to hustle to keep up, as his quarry leapt atop broken chunks of mill foundations he was forced to climb over or go around. By the time he’d conquered the confusion of concrete blocks (they’d always reminded him of that scene in Highlander where Sean Connery and Clancy Brown destroyed a pele-tower with swordplay), the beast was licking its talons in the center of the span.
Strangest thing for a thousand miles, and there you sit like a knot on a log. God, I hope my roomies aren’t watchin’!
Ten feet to his furry goal, and the enfield rose and trotted ahead, exactly like Aikin’s old sheltie, Maybeline, did when she wanted him to follow.
He did. Nor was he surprised when, upon hopping off the barrier’s end, the creature took the straightest route to the lightning-blasted oak and the bifurcated maple—which was directly through a laurel hell. Aikin lost sight of her there, and briefly feared she had vanished into Faerie without permitting that final glimpse he so desperately desired. Shoot, even if he caught her in the act of vanishing, that’d be cool enough: the proof he needed that she truly was from another World.
But when he finally made it around the troublesome clump of shrubbery, there she was: calmly combing her tail through her claws right beside the strip of suspect ground. She looked up at him curiously, blinked the dark eyes that flanked her sharp, black-tipped nose, trill-whistled once—and stepped onto the Track.
“Shit!” Aikin spat, before he could stop himself—or contrive a more appropriate exclamation of wonder. He hopped back reflexively—which brought him up solid against the oak. And stared wide-eyed, as what seconds before had been merely a stretch of ground carpeted with dead leaves on which nothing grew, suddenly began to glow, as though a layer of dust suspended just above its surface had caught fire and was burning to golden embers. And even as he watched, that light spread from the enfield’s feet several yards either way along the Track.
The animal trilled coyly.
“Tryin’ to lead me astray, huh?” Aikin muttered, as he recovered enough to ease closer, aware at some level that maybe the beast did have an agenda, and perhaps he ought to beware.
On the other hand, if they were as psychic as Dave had said, maybe it had simply picked up on his own desire and was acting accordingly. In which case…
Another trill.
Closer yet, and the briars scraped against his jeans—whereupon he closed his eyes and took the fateful step.
And this time, even through rubber soles, he felt something—not unpleasant, as he had feared; merely a subtle tingle, like a low-level electric shock without the pain. In fact, now he analyzed it, a soothing flow of energy was creeping up his legs, easing every tired muscle and strained sinew in its wake.
The enfield trilled again, and trotted off—west. Aikin hesitated but an instant, then took a deep breath and followed. Only ten paces, he told himself. More than that…you shouldn’t.
Two paces, and nothing had changed, save that it was like walking on springy turf barefoot; it was that invigorating. Oh, and there was an indefinable sweetness in the air: a draught of spring on the eve of winter. Two more steps, and that breeze g
rew stronger—and didn’t that hickory over to his right show more leaves than it ought, and greener? Five more paces, and the trees were in full leaf; some were species he’d never seen before; and the briars, which had been thin and wilted as an old man’s hair, were suddenly grown much thicker, in diameter and number both, and were starting to loop about themselves like living Celtic knotwork.
And then he saw the green-and-orange bird that lit upon a particularly heavy whorl of briar to nip at a small bright fruit that was patently not a blackberry—and shivered, though with delight or fear was unclear. He recognized that bird! Carolina parakeet, it was, extinct in his World a hundred years!
He had to get his camera.
Fortunately, the enfield seemed disinclined to continue, had in fact flopped down in the middle of the Track four yards farther on, and was sniffing at turf that showed green grass, where ten paces east it had sported only dead leaves.
“Don’t move!” he told the bird, as he turned and strode back down the Track—and felt a jolt of genuine fear when he didn’t immediately spot the blasted oak. Four paces brought it into view, however (he wasn’t sure exactly how, as the trees right next to it had worn leaves an instant before), and five more put him beside it.
On dead leaves, flanked by halfhearted briars.
Yet the Track still glowed beneath his sneakers. And seemed to glow more brightly when a scrabbling among the leaves proved to be the enfield returning.
“Can’t live without me, huh?” he told it—and stepped back into his own World. The beast angled across to follow—which pleased him mightily. But just as it ducked beneath a spray of intervening briars, a stray sprig snared its ear.
It yipped in startlement and thrashed its head—which drove the briar deeper.
Aikin needed no further prompting. Before intellect had time to argue reflexes out of so impulsive a decision, he leapt the short distance between himself and the Track, and in one smooth, firm move, seized the creature’s shoulders, fully expecting an armful of teeth for his pains. Instead, it whimpered.