“Wait now,” Rudy said. “Maybe you’re not ‘The Provider’ at all. Maybe you’re ‘The Preparer of the Basement’ or ‘The Gun Collector’ or ‘The Digger of Tunnels,’ someone subordinate to this character with such a dark future.”
She reached for the bottom of her shirt and hauled up a bit so he’d get a good view. And there, on her hip, was what appeared to be a tattoo. It was a squiggly line with two dots over it. Rudy didn’t bother testing it by moving up and behind her to see if the dots would still appear on the new upside, but after a few seconds, as advertised, the dots seemed to disappear from view altogether.
“This was raised up on my skin right before the trees started falling, Rudy. I am your Provider. I just have to face the fact that my time may be short, and pray that I’m the right girl for the job when push comes to shove.” She got up. “Speaking of which, and I hope you’ll excuse this poor segue, we didn’t shove this couch over for nothing. Help me pull open this trapdoor. It’s made of six inches of concrete and I don’t have Mother to help with the up-n-over anymore.”
She turned the bolts on three sides of the square cover, and even though their hasps were anchored with what looked like contractor’s wedge bolts, Rudy seriously wondered how difficult it would be to break in from the underside. He dismissed this, however, writing it off to the theory that all this was built on the idea of illusion, passing glances failing to register the truth in the architecture both upstairs and out at the bank of the river.
They both took hold of the iron ring and pulled. The door came up, hinges squealing, and they let it fall to the floor with a thump.
There was a noise then.
From down in the hole. They both peered over the edge, and there were eyes down there looking back up at them. Slanted yellow eyes.
Hundreds of them.
The tunnel was packed with dogs, and Caroline was already squatting back at the trapdoor, digging her fingers under to throw it back over. Rudy put out his hand.
“No, wait!”
She paused, and he gave her a half-look, ear cocked.
“Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Exactly.” He peered back down the hole, and the eyes stared back, waiting. He went down to a knee for a better angle and looked over the rim of his glasses. Yep. They were a throng that went all the way back as far as the eye could see. And no nipping or barking, no jumping, no growling. He pushed up and put his hands on his hips.
“I have a feeling about this,” he said. “A strong one.” He pointed to the floor by his feet and said, “Come! Now!”
The dogs trotted up the ramp single file, quickly, efficiently, a flood of them filling up the basement floor space: collies, Rottweilers, bulldogs, Labradors, greyhounds, pit bulls, Newfoundlands, and Siberian huskies. There were wild dogs and dogs with collars, an English mastiff with one eye and a limp, and a Great Dane standing four and a half feet high. And then came the wolves, gray and black. Foxes too, the lot of them jockeying for position, the biggest canines in the rear, the smaller nose-nudged to the front with a few of the very largest spot-positioned up there like sentries. When the room was filled the parade stopped abruptly, the remaining animals waiting patiently down in the tunnel, one last dog trying to be included up in the light—a tiny Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy scampering up the ramp, hind legs low to the ground in anticipation, tail wagging furiously. An Old English sheepdog with an especially sad-looking expression bared its teeth and growled, and the spaniel went flat on his stomach, ears back in terror. Caroline bent to pick him up immediately.
“There, there,” she said, trying to cradle him. The puppy kept kicking his soft paws to find purchase on her chest, licking her face, shaking with it.
Rudy turned to the pack.
“Sit,” he said, and in militaristic synchronicity they all did. So did the remaining animals in the tunnel.
“What on earth is this?” Caroline said.
“I suppose,” Rudy answered, “that it’s one of the ‘powers’ that I was destined to gain after the trees fell.”
“But it wasn’t in the book.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s in our collective psyche. And your ‘book’ could have been a copy of a copy of a copy fifty times over, this one small part lost through the translations. In terms of the last few days, think about the players who have surfaced, all of them classic figures that represent ‘the horrific,’ those who were actually foreshadowings of a new world order. There’s the witch, the warlock, and now the ‘werewolf’ or the king of dogs. And the prisoners coming out of their ground-holes in a temporary trancelike state are the zombies. These iconic characters were passed down to us first in verbal story-code. Of course, we made them into caricatures over time because it is in our nature to euphemize, but now is the time for perspective. It makes more than perfect sense that my army is canine.”
The cavalier spaniel was in Caroline’s ear now, licking and nudging with its tiny black nose.
“Shh,” she was saying, trying to control him. Finally, she let him down to the floor gently. He had a wild moment where he hunched and gave darting, frightened glances all around, tail wagging madly. The sheepdog gave a quick bark, and the spaniel went over, turned, and backed in between the bigger dog’s feet, quieted now in his little safe haven.
“I’m not an expert with pop culture and Gothic,” Caroline said, still smiling about the little one, “but aren’t we forgetting the Vampire?”
“Your mother,” Rudy said. “She needs my blood.”
“Hmm,” she said. Her smile had vanished, but Rudy didn’t think she was offended, not quite. Maybe she was thinking what he was, that it was possible Mother-Dearest had more to do with this than gaining a few disease-free bonus years. Still, it didn’t warrant further discussion, not at the moment. There were priorities.
“Get your video camera,” Rudy said. “I have a message to send out, and I want the dogs in the background. They make for a powerful visual presentation, and we should capture it on tape, or whatever you’d call it nowadays, before they start having to go outside to piss and poop in shifts.”
“You hope,” she said, moving through them nervously, the lot making a path for her. “If they make in here, I’m just letting you know, Rudy, I am not cleaning it up.” She opened one of the storage units and reached inside. “I’m still a bit pissed that they breached my river entrance. I mean, it’s just camouflaged tarp with a slit down the middle, but it’s good camouflage. I walked past it hundreds of times when it went up, and you literally couldn’t distinguish it from the background.”
“Old icons and images, Caroline. And triggers. They’ve had that dressed-up river doorway in their collective consciousness for as long as we have been erecting these cartoonish archetypes with their Halloween storylines.”
Caroline came back through the mass with her palmcorder.
“I wish I could have taken one of your classes,” she said.
“I never taught Gothic.”
She tilted her head slightly.
“I’m not talking about content, Rudy. It’s the delivery I’m starting to like.”
She was looking at him. It was awkward and electric, and neither of them budged.
A dog growled, another barked to shut the first one up, and a third chimed in to let the second one know he or she was just as guilty as the former for the interruption. Or that’s the way it seemed.
“So,” Rudy said.
“So.” She had a rueful grin, but it was warm, saying for all intents and purposes, “Another time, maybe . . .”
Yes. Another time: Rudy’s theme song.
“You know how to work that thing?” he said flatly.
“Sure do,” she replied, “but you’ll still need to hide your face, unless you want every witch who’s stolen a laptop to die for it. Hold this.” She handed over the camera and moved through to the stairway. Its underside was cloaked by a white gauzy material, and she ripped it down, next reaching un
der to pull out an old groundcloth that looked as if it had seen its best days in the 70s. She came back through the hoard, and the dogs didn’t seem to mind that she dragged the things over their heads. In fact, Rudy could have sworn they felt privileged by the touch of them, smelling up at them, licking their chops after they passed over.
She paused at the couch and nodded toward her hat.
“Put it on backward the way a catcher does,” she said.
Rudy did it, and Caroline tossed the gauze back into the crowd of dogs, giving the command, “Eyes, nose, mouth!” as she did it. The dogs dove to it, and when it resurfaced, they had bitten holes in the fabric. Caroline draped it over Rudy’s head with the holes coming over his face in the proper places. She then proceeded to put the old dirty canvas over his head in a hood rather than simply across his back like a cloak. The last piece was a hank of rope she took off the top of the dryer and tied around Rudy’s neck.
She backed off a step.
“Well?” Rudy said. It smelled like mothballs and old camp gear, and he imagined he looked like some cartoon Western bandito who couldn’t afford pantyhose to go over his face. Caroline shivered.
“You’re the faceless man in my old book who frightened me as a child,” she said. She brought up the camera and shot for a second, next hitting rewind, then play. She touched the pause button and showed him the screen.
The man Rudy saw was a monster. The lack of aesthetics didn’t matter; in fact, they made it worse. The get-up was makeshift, childish, his black-rimmed glasses beneath the mask finalizing the low-end bargain-basement feel to this thing, and then in absolute contradiction, the eyes looking through the glasses and ragged holes had a lunatic’s certainty. Not the effect Rudy had been trying for, but he was pretty sure people would stop, watch, and listen for a second.
“Film me,” he said. “One take. Off the cuff.”
She switched places with him so the dogs would be in the shot, adjusted her view screen, and nodded.
Rudy spoke.
“Fellow citizens, there are many changes that have taken place today, grave changes, and you are certainly owed an explanation. I do have answers, but you are not necessarily going to like them. I can identify causes for you, but I admit there is no reason for you to believe me. Still, before you write off what I am to tell you as the ravings of some madman, I ask you to honestly assess what you have seen this morning. Logic and scientific rationales don’t work anymore, and I would ask you to suspend old disbeliefs for the sake of new ethics. Take a leap of faith and trust me, at least until the end of this recording.
“First, you must know that every tree in the world has been uprooted; there are no exceptions. Moreover, I am sure that after your recovery from ‘The Great Fall’ you noticed an emergence from the ground cavities. Please note that the beings coming out of the dirt are not, repeat not, monsters or aliens. They are the original inhabitants of this planet, the first of our women, punished for unjust cause and entrapped by a spell, yes a spell that held them beneath the prison-root for centuries. I am asking you, no, I am begging you not to harm them. The newly liberated that I speak of are shape-shifters with the ability to transform according to the preferred vision of their given beholders. It is no illusion. And please do not consider this to be any type of sorcery. It is an old reality, what was quite natural for these women back in their original time period, and we should welcome them, celebrating their emancipation.
“And to the newly liberated females flooding our properties, fields, and streets, I have a message for you as well. I am aware that you were incarcerated unlawfully . . . that what you endured was excruciating, that what you are owed in retribution for your pain is more than this modern world has in its coffers. Still, I would plead with you to abstain utterly from thoughts of revenge. Your jailers are long dead, and would be considered irrelevant in terms of any position of defense you might argue following rash actions in this time and place.
“Please know that I am ‘The Father,’ who was faced with the bitterest of choices. I could have helped engineer your wave of dark justice and destruction, but I decided to employ the alternative: your freedom for the mass acquittal of these descendants of sinners. As a result, it would harm you to look me in the face at this point, and hence I wear this cheap disguise, this mask of gauze, this dirty hood. I am not God, nor would ever claim to be. But I now believe in miracles, and I have faith that from the ashes of today’s many disasters we can start afresh from a platform of love. Is that not what all our old religions would have had us do if we broke down all their customs and rituals to their foundations? This recognition, this awareness is our miracle, and the chance to unite is upon us.
“Do not raise your hands in violence! I chose the liberation of prisoners at great expense, and you were not the only ones to lose those held dear to you. This morning, I sacrificed my own son, a half-breed, born of a cavity-dweller and filled with the golden blood burst forth from his skin like a hundred rivers, fulfilling the prophecy of freedom for his sisters entombed. Celebrate his passing by ending the bloodshed of the red. History is now, and we can author this new age together, rewriting the way all this was really meant to play out. Join me.”
He had his hands held out to the camera, and Caroline hit the stop button.
“That was beautiful,” she said. For a bald moment, Rudy thought she might have been chastising him for the melodrama, but her face told a different story. He looked at the floor.
“We should . . . ah . . . discuss it sometime.”
“Promise?”
He pulled up his head and nodded curtly. There was chemistry here, but like the first pass when she’d complimented his vocal delivery, the timing was out of joint, and maybe that was the sum-total of his personal tragedy, his destiny to surround himself with new messages of love and togetherness, yet walk through it all utterly alone. He undid the rope and removed the disguise. Even with the hat protecting his hair, the get-up had felt filthy on him and he was sweating.
“I don’t feel too pretty,” he said.
“Eye of the beholder.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Not really.” She walked up to him and took the material from him. “But you’re right, Rudy. There are times and places for everything, and right about now you owe your son a viewing. Let’s see it. For your speech to work, the warlock’s visual has to be absolutely devastating.”
Rudy got out his cell.
They replayed it, looked at it, heads together.
And Rudy wept.
For awhile Rudy didn’t speak for all but a few grunts and mutterings as he stood over Caroline’s dented red toolbox, looking for stuff. He next busied himself over at the gun cabinets, digging deep into the holster bins, cutting straps and adjusting them, repositioning buckles, crimping clasps, piercing new prong slots. When he was finished, he had a pile of leather six feet high and ten or so wide. Caroline had positioned herself on the sofa to work at splicing the two tapes together and uploading them on YouTube with multiple tags, the spaniel puppy up on her shoulder like a cat, the sheepdog watching it all warily. She had taken a number of breaks to organize the dogs in groups to go outside and do their business, and both she and Rudy had avoided conversation up until now.
“So what are you doing?” she said finally. The spaniel, named “Killian” according to his nametag, was in her lap now, flicking his long tail into his own face and acting surprised by it. Rudy stood straight.
“I’m making new holsters from the old ones,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“No.”
They shared a fresh silence. Rudy had been stunned by the visual representation of his son’s sacrifice, so much so that the dread of it still hung around him like fog. Caroline wasn’t pressing too hard, but Rudy knew he had to recover. There were things going on outside the sanctuary of this basement that needed attending, and his grief had to be put aside.
“The holsters are for the dogs,” he admitted.
“Really.”
“Yes.” He came over flexing his hands, reddened by the close work of the last hour or so. He felt he’d never be able to look a pair of pliers or a utility blade in the face ever again, and he sat next to Caroline with a tired sigh. Killian waddled over, tail going mad, ears back. He nipped playfully at his master’s earlobes, and Rudy couldn’t help but forfeit a grin.
“Geez,” he said.
“He likes you.”
“He likes everybody.” Rudy pushed him off gently. “Reality check; there are going to be a lot of people out there who will scoff at that taped speech.”
“Yes. The old ‘Have you heard the word of God today?’ on the bus syndrome. A real aisle clearer.”
He ran his palm over his scalp absently.
“And some who do see it will violently oppose.”
“No rest for the messenger.”
“Right.”
She scratched Killian behind the ears, and the dog closed his eyes in pleasure. She had her lips pursed and was making “goo-goo” sounds. Then she said in the “baby voice,” “So the holsters are for the dogs, hmm? Is the King of Canines so clever he can train them to shoot?”
Rudy laughed for the first time in what felt a long while.
“No, my dear. I’m just being practical. When I take them out for a stroll, I don’t really know what kind of a world I’m going to find out there. I have a feeling the non-believers are going to outnumber the faithful at first, and you don’t walk into a gunfight with a penknife, as they say. I figure I can only load up my body with so much reloading ammo, so it made sense to pack all the dogs with heat. With a hundred of them at two firearms apiece, I go into the outdoor arena with more than twelve hundred rounds available to me. Not too shabby, huh?”
“Indeed.” She let Killian down, and he went to the sheepdog, who curled him in and nipped motheringly at his flank. Caroline put both palms into the small of her back and stretched.
“Well, before you go for your stroll,” she said, “I need for you to give me the healing blood for my mother’s first dose.”
The Witch of the Wood Page 16