by Tom Deitz
“It’s okay, girl,” he told it, resecuring his hold with one hand while the other gently disentangled the briar from the long, black-tufted ear. It growled and flinched—which tore the briar free and produced a thin smear of blood barely visible amid its fur. It did not try to escape, however, and Aikin did not release it. “You really must belong to somebody,” he murmured, stroking its back. “Or else Faery critters are decorative but dumb.”
It licked his hand.
Impulsively, he picked it up, tucking it into the cradle of his arms like the oversize cat it felt like (courtesy of looser joints than those of the fox it more closely resembled), and rose. The Track dimmed to nothing behind him. A moment later, he was marching across the dam, and shortly after that, had found the trail that wound up the bluff above the nature trail to his cabin.
“Roomies oughta be in class,” he informed it. And would be leaving on a weekend field trip midday tomorrow, he added to himself. So the question was, could he hide his odd charge from prying eyes for the next eighteen hours?
At which point he found himself confronting the foundation of his home-away-from-home. The cabin—one of several built as housing for Forestry majors, this most recently—was set on a steep slope in such a way that the front was level with a skimpy yard-cum-parking area barely big enough to accommodate four vehicles; while the rear, which sported a porch, soared out into the open air on posts that screened a sort of service patio beneath. A concrete retaining wall backed it, and, on one end, a ten-foot-square basement, outside which a previous occupant had conveniently stored a number of white fiberglass cages of the type one used to take Fluffy or FooFoo to the vet.
“Well, you ain’t Fluffy or FooFoo,” Aikin told the complacent enfield. “But I bet one of these’ll do.”
He found a beagle-sized one, popped the latch on the metal door, and made to thrust the beast inside.
As it neared the chrome steel bars, however, Aikin felt it stiffen within his grip, then start to struggle. It began to hiss and cry. He caught the faintest hint of the stench of burning hair.
“Oops, cold iron,” he sighed. “Well, forget that! But I tell you what: I’ll give you something better—but you’ll have to be quiet, okay?”
The enfield licked his chin.
“Why do I think you understand me? And not just my thoughts either!”
Another lick.
It was all predicated on no one being upstairs, of course—as he eased from under the porch to peer up the slope to the east. The coast was clear: no vehicles lurked before the cabin save his own. Other than the small risk of someone arriving just at the wrong time, or seeing him from one of the other cabins, he was home free. Taking a deep breath, he scrambled up the slope, turned left at the top, and (after trying the knob, which would mean someone was home), unlocked the door—which required some creative juggling of hands, keys, and critter.
Fortunately, the basement key hung on a nail just inside the entrance, and he was able to retrieve it without going in. An instant later, he assailed the basement door. The lock resisted briefly, and he feared someone had changed it. But then it clicked and the door swung open. The room beyond had a concrete floor, cinder block walls, and shelves along two sides on which an odd lot of outdoorsy gear was piled. Aikin closed the door behind him, strode to the middle of the room, and slowly eased the enfield down. It rubbed against his leg. “You oughta be okay in here,” he told it. “Just stay away from anything that feels like iron or steel. I’m gonna go see what I can find to feed you, but don’t you say a word! No way in hell I could explain something like you!”
And with that, he backed toward the door. The enfield took a tentative step in his wake, then elected not to follow.
“Take care, kid,” he called softly. “Dinner’s on the way, and then I’m gonna get my camera and my tape measure and my yardstick, and we are gonna party!”
Chapter VIII: Spirits in the Night
(Athens, Georgia—Friday, October 30—sunset)
“Could’ve been worse,” Alec smirked, bent kissing-close to David’s ear to make himself heard above the thunder of rock and roll that was well-nigh deafening even two blocks from ground zero and inside the cab of Liz’s Ranger. “It could’ve been Keebler.”
David rolled his eyes, then squinted through the windshield at their black-clad designated driver, who had just disembarked and was surveying Hancock Street like a townie-girl grim reaper searching for lab-lackeys to scythe. He sighed dramatically, checked the rearview mirror to confirm that his pointed rubber ears were on straight, and adjusted the fake-fur vest that accented his bare torso. “I don’t know about this…”
Alec paused with his hand on the door handle and grinned at him through white pancake around black-ringed eyes beneath a silver-shot wig akin to Liz’s: Dream, from Sandman; brother to Liz’s Death from the same graphic novel. A lull in the music made speaking viable. “How so?”
“Well, it makes us a mixed visual metaphor, for one thing.”
“What you get for trusting women.”
“Just ’cause you’re tall and slim…”
“Just ’cause you’re short, blond, snub-nosed, and muscular—and have no chest hair to speak of.”
“Nobody’ll know who I am.”
“’Course they will! Folks read Elfquest ’round here. Aik says they sell lots of ’em over at Comics and Music.”
Liz gestured like manic semaphore, then mouthed an impatient, “You coming?”
Alec hit the street.
David followed. The late-day breeze flowed cool across his skin—more skin than he preferred to display in public, as a point of fact; Liz wasn’t the only one flashing cleavage, though his was mostly evident when he sat. “That’s how they’re drawn,” she’d explained. “But I guess cloth doesn’t stretch the same as leather.”
Still, all things considered, she’d done a bang-up job.
The fur vest, she’d cut down from a tawny thrift store coat; the flared leather pants that hung perilously low across his hipbones and lower yet fore and aft, she’d faked from painter’s canvas and Masada thongs. The peacock feather on the quasi sporran-codpiece had come from his landlord’s flock, and the pointy-toed boots were courtesy of Myra’s chums in the Society for Creative Anachronism. The short curved sword was plywood and foamcore, per a new city ordinance that forbade public display of weapons that could be taken for real; but the thick white-blond hair, part of which was bound up in a topknot, was his own. All in all, he really did look the part of Cutter, the chief of the Wolf-riders from Elfquest.
“I just hope we can get in!” Alec grumbled, as they joined Liz on the sidewalk.
“That’s the point of comin’ early,” David countered cheerfully. “And see and be seen, of course. Speakin’ of which,” he added to Liz, “any sign of Hunterman?”
“S’posed to meet us here at sunset.”
David scanned the slit of sky visible between the Athens Post Office and Franklin Financial. The sun was conveniently revealed there, so close to the horizon, he expected to see rooftops smolder.
“I’d give him five minutes,” Alec opined.
“Three.” From Liz.
David was glad he’d left his watch at home. He was in the mood for some serious living for the moment. Some major-league kick-ass partying-down.
And for forgetting.
It’d been a bitch-kitty couple of days. A bitch-kitty week, in fact, what with the ongoing grief of classes, plus Alec’s whining, plus trying to thread a romance with Liz through her duties as a resident assistant in Reed Hall—never mind that song and dance with the enfield back on Wednesday and the blowup with Aikin the Saturday before.
And absolutely never mind his most persistent demon: that troubling revelation about David-the-Elder, which was a freshly tined pitchfork prodding his psyche. Just when you think you can trust folks, he told himself, for the millionth time that week, they show you their asshole side.
The sun tapped the horizon. Shadows w
ent as sharp-edged and ominous as David’s frustration had lately been. As if to voice that tension, the air awoke with the strident opening fanfare from “Ride of the Valkyries.”
David jumped about a foot straight up. Dream’s mouth dropped open; Death’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. The music was blaring from the waist-high azalea hedge that separated City Hall from the sidewalk, just below the infamous double-barreled cannon.
Louder, that music shrieked, and at the precise moment the first busty soprano should have begun bellowing, an unlikely figure leapt from behind the bushes and mounted the landmark’s muzzle. David’s fast call was of a shortish male cased from thigh to chin in a tube of duct-taped and silver-sprayed cardboard that was surely supposed to be armor but in fact resembled a garbage can; an outsize horned helmet silhouetted against a lavender sky; and a stubby cross-hilted sword swung aloft. Whereupon the figure struck a martial pose and yelled, at the top of its lungs, “Kill the wabbit!”
And vaulted down to join them, pausing in transit to reach into the hedge and switch off the boombox stashed there.
“Magic helmet!” David laughed, thwacking the headgear with his sword. “Jesus, man; that’s wonderful.”
Aikin raised his own bogus weapon in warning. “Watch it!” he warned, with a fiendish grin—and swung.
David blocked reflexively, and for a moment Elmer Fudd’s Wagnerian hero from “What’s Opera, Doc?” faced off against an elf-chief from an alternative comic book. Blows were struck. Thrusts were met and parried. And then Elmer got past Cutter’s guard and stabbed (none too gently, for a wooden sword) his stomach, just as Cutter smacked Elmer’s inverted-wok-with-cow-horns chime-ringing hard.
“Stir-fried brains,” Alec-Dream observed, deadpan, as both toppled.
“More work for me,” Liz-Death sighed. “I wonder who I should carry off first.”
“The elf,” Aikin volunteered instantly, between throes. “That way I can groove on the music longer.”
Alec checked his watch and motioned downhill, toward the ten-block heart of downtown Athens. “C’mon, folks,” he cried, flinging his black cape out dramatically. “Sandman says it’s time to party!”
*
“Where’d Liz go?” Alec yelled five minutes later, from where he and David jostled with a couple hundred fellow revelers on College Avenue, from which traffic had been barred for the night. Voices rumbled and roared and rose now and then to a primal shriek. The music was louder still.
“Must’ve seen a soul she wanted to collect in Barnett’s,” David shouted back. His gaze drifted from the brightly lit window wall to his right, back to the street—where a possibly female Garfield was dancing with a probably white Don King, while a gleeful Lorena Bobbitt (complete with plastic butcher knife and appropriate, if oversize, severed appendage) tried to break in—all to the music of Shaken, Not Stirred’s third frantically incomprehensible number exploding from the portable bandstand at the juncture of College and Broad.
Yep, he thought, Halloween was definitely cooking with gas. Actually, it was Halloween Eve, but since the thirty-first abutted a Sunday, and bars closed early then (never mind the pagan overtones of this most ancient of holidays, which were best kept safely distanced, the Religious Right insisted), the downtown merchants and club owners had designated Friday for the “official” observance, and had most of the neighboring streets plugged with bandstands to prove it. Of course there’d be celebrating on Saturday too; no proper Athenian ever missed a chance to party. But the big ones with prizes were all tonight.
Like the Cartoon-and-Comics bash at the 40 Watt. “Who’s playing, anyway?” Alec wondered. “I forgot.”
“Mrs. Atkins and The Woggles,” David shot back.
Aikin, intent on Shaken, was oblivious.
“Who’s opening?”
“Who knows?”
“Best we be at it, then,” Alec said. “Here comes Ms. Death.”
“Treat?” Liz prompted, tossing each of them a Hershey bar.
“More like tricks, in that garb,” Alec giggled. He snared Elmer by an ear, and the mismatched foursome got moving.
“Cammie couldn’t come?” Liz asked Aikin offhand, as they careened around the corner onto Clayton Street.
Aikin scowled minutely and muttered a terse, “Moving,” but David caught a trace of relief in his expression—which didn’t quite fit. In fact, now he thought of it, Aik had been acting odd all day: breathlessly impatient on the phone when they’d worked out the evening’s logistics, as though he’d been interrupted in the middle of something both strenuous and important—like sex (though if Mr. Forestry and his study wench had started pollinating, it was news to him)—then almost giddily up when he’d surprised them a few minutes back; and then antsy as an echidna on speed while they’d waited for Liz just now. None of which were like calm, quiet, terminally secretive Mighty Hunter Daniels. But maybe Aik had his own demons.
“Watch it!” someone slurred from behind, forcing David to skip sideways or be collected by a staggering fat man dressed, coincidentally, as Satan.
“Ego to exoreiso…” David called back promptly.
“Nice buns, elf!” someone else—female—hooted approvingly, as he recovered.
Liz growled.
Alec and Aikin grinned.
“You know,” David told them, “I could get into this. Maybe I’ll wear these to class.”
Liz slapped the pertinent location. “Don’t you dare!”
David tickled her.
And the four of them moved on—but not in silence.
By resisting the snares of the tempting blues thudding up from D.T.’s Downunder, and the half-priced costumes at The Junkman’s Daughter’s Brother, they won through to Lumpkin Street. Another band was blaring from Frijoleros halfway down, all at odds with the upscale quasi pub subtlety of the Globe on the nearer corner, which had contented itself with artfully carved jack-o’-lanterns in each of its deep-set windows.
They angled across Lumpkin and Clayton on the fly (avoiding Jeff-from-Barnett’s dressed as Elvis, a hooker in corset and fishnet hose, and the third generic flasher they’d been underwhelmed by in a block), to pause for breath beneath the Georgia Theater’s marquee, where the classic horror film Freaks had been playing nonstop all day, accompanied by hourly beer specials. An overpriced parking lot came next. And then they saw the line down Washington Street to the 40 Watt. All block and a half of it.
Aikin groaned resoundingly.
“Oh cheer up, Fuddsy,” Alec chided. “It’ll be three blocks in ten minutes.”
“Kill the wabbit,” Aikin snarled, with feeling.
David barely heard him; he was staring across the street at a tall young man in mime makeup and terrorist fatigues, juggling bright plastic hand grenades.
*
“Two Low-brows an’ a Coke,” Alec announced three hours later, as he squeezed between David and Liz. He whisked his cloak aside to reveal a cola and a pair of draft beers—which would’ve raised eyebrows back home, not the least because all three of the partakers were underage. Still, even well-brought-up mountain kids could access fake IDs—especially when two of them studio-sat for a well-known graphic artist, and the other was a world-class hacker.
Like Liz, the fourth member of their tribe was not partaking; first because he didn’t drink in public, and second, because he was dancing like a fool. David watched him from where they were scrunched up at a table beside the dance floor. Mighty Hunter Fudd’s feet had gone manic one beat back, and were now well-nigh invisible, as the band segued into something that allowed him to jig. Actually, one could jig to lots of stuff, David knew. And buckdance too. Too bad the Madonna wannabe who partnered him kept stopping to adjust her cones.
As if playing to Aikin alone, the Woggles were giving it their best shot as well. Red-haired Manfred “Professor” Jones was screaming like a happy banshee; Tim “Timmy Tom-Tom” Terelli pounded the drums like a shaman at a puberty rite; while Martin “Zorko” Brooks and Patrick “Buzz Bomb�
�� O’Connor swapped riffs on guitar and bass. The piece was called “Mad Dog 22.” Though “Mad Man” might have been more appropriate, if one took their cues from Aik.
The music grew louder and faster yet. Feeling reckless, David chugged his beer and dragged Liz onto the floor. Alec downed his too, and joined them.
Five more songs, another brew apiece—and a very sweaty David Sullivan had to admit he was both bushed and buzzed.
“Where’s Fuddsy?” he gasped, as he flopped against the wall beside Liz, who, having stood this one out because she didn’t like the song, was comparing costume notes with one of the girls on her hall. A very pretty girl, David couldn’t help but notice, in well-done Prince Valiant drag that showed a shocking amount of ample bosom. She regarded him frankly, if a tad glass-eyed; her gaze sagging from his face, past his chest, to his belly, and lower—where it lingered. “Nice…feather,” she giggled.
David grinned.
The girl leered back.
Liz glowered. “I’ll lend you the pattern,” she snapped, and turned to David. “What?” she demanded, brows lifted pointedly.
“I said, ‘where’s Aikin?’ More to the point, where’s Alec? Aik can take care of himself. Mr. Sandman’s had a few.”
“So’ve you.”
David managed a crooked smile. “It happens.”
“McLean’s walkin’ his lizard,” someone offered helpfully from David’s left. A glance that way put him eye to beak with Scrooge McDuck, though Goofy would’ve been a better choice, as the guy was over six feet tall. David squinted at him, trying to place the voice behind the fake-fur and plastic. “Gil?” he ventured.
“Possibly,” McDuck quacked cryptically, and waddled away. David stood on tiptoes (cursing yet again that he was only five-seven—Aikin alone of his buds was shorter), and surveyed the thick-packed crowd.
The Woggles had proclaimed a break, and canned music was the order of the night (the obligatory REM), which meant it was time to refill drinks, attend to bodily functions, reconnect with strayed companions, and toss one’s cookies at need.