All the King's Horses

by Laura C Stevenson

  ‘Maybe we should call,’ I said. ‘He might stop.’

  ‘Fat chance of that.’

  ‘Yeah, but what else can we do? Come on – one, two, three – GRANDPA!’

  We called three times, but when we listened, all we heard was the trucks.

  ‘Criminy,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do? If he gets up on the highway, they won’t be able to see …’

  Colin climbed onto a dead car. ‘There he is!’

  I scrambled onto the car, and there he was, across the entrance ramp, standing in … well, the only thing I can think of calling it is a clearing in the fog. That is, all around us, it was just as thick as it could be. But where he was, there wasn’t any fog. Just Grandpa and two other people about Colin’s height. They weren’t kids, though; they were the wrong shape.

  ‘Brother,’ muttered Colin. His voice told me he was scared, but of course he slid off the car when I did. Together, we crossed the ramp, climbing over the guard rails. The short people had turned away; they seemed to be upset about something, judging from the way their hands were moving as they talked. We both hurried forward, hoping they were going to go on their way, wherever that was, but all of a sudden there was a little zing, like you feel if you run into an electric fence. It didn’t hurt; at least, it didn’t hurt us. But it seemed to have given the short people a real jolt – they both leapt about a foot into the air and came down facing us. We stopped, staring at them. They were like nobody we had ever seen; their ears were pointed, and their eyelashes flickered with something that glowed murky orange. Behind the glow, their eyes were huge and dark and dangerous.

  ‘Grandpa!’ I gasped. Then I remembered we had to help him, not the other way around. I walked slowly towards him, carefully looking just at his confused face. ‘Grandpa,’ I said in the voice he’d taught us to use with young or frightened horses. ‘Grandpa, come on home, now.’

  Behind me, I heard Colin step forward too. ‘Yeah, Grandpa,’ he said soothingly. ‘You’ll get cold out here without a jacket.’

  ‘Ha!’ said one of the little men. ‘Somebody’s trained them well.’

  ‘There’s training and training,’ said the other, with a laugh that made me shiver. He strode through a pile of milkshake cups and stood in front of us. ‘Do you see me?’ he asked.

  I reached for Colin’s hand, and I found it sooner than I expected to, because he’d grabbed for mine. That meant he’d remembered the story Grandpa had told us when we were really little. It was so awful, Mom had told him never to tell it to us again, but neither of us had forgotten it.

  Once upon a time, long ago, there was a midwife who was so skilful that her fame spread through all of Ireland. One dark night, a strange man knocked at her door and asked if she would deliver a baby at his cottage. She didn’t like the looks of the man, but he said his wife had been in labour for hours and was in great pain, so she agreed to go. He set her on his horse (a great black horse it was, bigger than any she had ever seen), and they rode like the wind to a cottage she had never seen before. There was his wife, just as he had said, in great pain. But the midwife knew what to do, and in an hour she had delivered a fine boy. After the baby was born, the man’s wife gave her a flask of oil and asked her to rub it into the baby’s skin. As she rubbed, her right eye began to itch, and without so much as a thought, she gave it a rub and went on with her business. But when she looked up, her right eye saw not a cottage but a palace bedroom, and not a poor couple but a lord and lady. She was frightened, to be sure, so she said nothing about it – not then, and not later, after the man had galloped her back to her own cottage on the great black horse. A week or so later, when she was at the market, she saw the man whose cottage she had visited walking between the stalls. She stopped when she came to him and asked how his wife and baby were doing.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But tell me, which eye can you see me with?’

  ‘This one,’ she said, pointing at it.

  ‘The right eye, is it?’ he said, drawing his dagger. And before she could say another word, he stepped forward and put out her eye.

  Colin and I held hands very tightly, and neither of us looked at the little man. ‘Grandpa,’ I whispered, ‘Grandpa, you’ll get hurt out here all by yourself. Come home with us.’

  The little man took a couple of steps closer. ‘Supposing I were to tell you that he is ours, and he can’t come?’

  I started to argue, but Colin squeezed my hand just in time. ‘Grandpa,’ he said, and I could hear the tears in his voice. ‘Grandpa, please, please come away. You can have some pancakes with us. You always liked pancakes.’

  The second little man tapped the first one on the shoulder. ‘This is beyond us,’ he said. ‘Especially with the Old One. As for the young ’uns—’

  ‘—There’ll be trouble,’ said the first one. ‘They’ll say we let them in, and They’ll be right! More than our lives are worth, if They find out.’

  ‘They’ve already found out,’ said the second man glumly. ‘A jolt like that, and They’ll be here any second. Best thing for us to do …’ he glanced at us, then pulled the first man behind a doorless refrigerator.

  I gave Colin a poke. ‘Quick,’ I whispered. ‘Before whoever it is gets here.’

  We ran through the pile of milkshake cups, and I grabbed Grandpa’s good hand. ‘Come on, now,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  His eyes looked from us to the little men as if he couldn’t tell us from them.

  Colin tugged at Grandpa’s sleeve. ‘C’mon, Grandpa,’ he said. ‘We’ll make you a whole batch of pancakes of your own. And a cup of tea too, if you want.’

  Grandpa smiled. He’d always had a beautiful smile, and now it was even more beautiful in a funny sort of way. Usually, I felt sad when he smiled like that, but not this time. It meant he was listening, and he’d go with us.

  As we helped him over the guard rails, I looked back to see if there were more little people coming, but there was nobody there. At least, I didn’t see anybody – it might have just been the fog. Anyway, they didn’t follow us. We guided Grandpa across the entrance ramp and up the rise, steadying him when he tripped over the junk. It felt like it took for ever, but it must not have, because when we finally got back into the house and went to the kitchen, the pancake I had flipped was still warm.

  Colin and I didn’t really feel like pancakes now, but that was all right. Grandpa ate all of them.

  Notes

  1 Pronounced Shee.

  2 Pronounced Finn Mak Cool

  DINNER WAS AWFUL – not the food, I mean, but everything else. Mom had got meat for the first time since we’d moved, and I guess Grandpa had forgotten how to cut things, because he couldn’t handle his piece. It had always been tricky for him to cut meat, because his right arm ended in a hook, not a hand, but he had always managed before – and you can bet nobody had ever dared to help him. None of us dared to help him this time, either, because we could see how frustrated he was, and we knew he’d get really upset if he thought we’d noticed. I quickly cut up my meat, and I tried to signal Colin to distract Grandpa, but Colin was too upset to notice. Finally, Mom saw what I was doing, and she jumped up and rushed to the window. It worked like a charm; Grandpa got up, too – and when he and Mom came back, there was a heap of cut-up meat on his plate and a whole piece on mine.

  That took care of that, but it didn’t take care of Colin; he was watching Grandpa carefully, and thinking so hard that Mom had to ask him to pass the salt three times before he heard her. When she finally got the salt, she shook her head and smiled. ‘Your mind’s in Fairyland again, Colin.’

  ‘No, no!’ said Colin, sitting up straight. ‘No faeries at all!’

  Mom looked puzzled; ever since Grandpa had made up the expression, we’d all used it to describe the way Colin drifted off into his ideas, and usually he just looked sheepish when we said it. ‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked.

  I swallowed a bite of potato too fast, and I coughed for what seemed like for eve
r. When I finally got my breath back, I said, ‘Of course nothing’s wrong!’ Then I realized the coughing had made it too late to say that, and my face got so hot my glasses fogged up.

  Mom looked from Colin to me. ‘You two didn’t have trouble with Grandpa while I was gone, did you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said, getting a grip on myself. ‘We’re just a little down about not being able to go trick-or-treating. It used to be so much fun planning the costumes.’

  Mom stopped looking suspicious and looked sad instead. ‘Oh, is it Samhain? I guess it is … well, you’re getting a little old for trick-or-treating costumes anyway. Pretty soon you’ll have new friends, and we can make costumes for a real play. That place in the attic where the tower comes to a point would make a wonderful stage.’ Then she glanced at Grandpa, and she looked even sadder, so we both knew she’d noticed we’d stopped having friends over, even on Maple Street.

  After that, nobody said much. I was feeling bad for Mom; Grandpa was fussing with his food; Mom was trying to act as if everything were fine; and Colin – well, if his mind wasn’t in Fairyland, it was somewhere close.

  With all that thinking, I was sure he’d come right into my room after we’d finished dishes, but he didn’t. I was almost through with my homework by the time he turned up, and even then, he didn’t say anything – just stood behind me, watching me finish my math. I hate that.

  ‘You goofed up number seven,’ he said as I folded the paper down the centre. ‘When you divide fractions, you have to stand the second one on its head, remember?’

  I sighed and slid the paper out of the book. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

  ‘Wanted to see if you had the sense to look them over.’

  Remarks like that don’t deserve attention, so I just erased number seven, waiting for him to spill what was really on his mind. It didn’t take long.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We have to tell Mom what happened this afternoon.’

  I dropped my pencil into the pile of eraser bits. ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘Would I kid about this? It explains what’s wrong with Grandpa.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘It does, I tell you!’ Colin sat down on my bed, which is strictly against the rules of my room, but I let him. ‘Think of what that man said: supposing I were to tell you he is ours.’

  ‘Yeah, but he was only—’

  ‘No, listen! If Grandpa belongs to them, the person who lives with us isn’t really Grandpa, but somebody else. And that makes sense of everything that’s gone wrong.’

  ‘Doesn’t either.’

  ‘It would make perfect sense if you screwed your head on right!’ said Colin. ‘Remember the stories Grandpa used to tell us about changelings – the leftover faeries the Little People put in cradles after they’d stolen people’s babies? Well, it wasn’t just babies the Little People stole. It was grown-up women, and men, too, I bet, only nobody tells stories about men who aren’t princes or heroes. Why couldn’t the Little People steal an old man like Grandpa and leave some faerie that looks just like him here with us?’

  ‘Because it’s 1957, for Pete’s sake! The only Little People left are in stories.’

  ‘Who says? Not Grandpa, that’s for sure. I asked him once if faeries were real, and he said “Of course. Who do you think tips over the water buckets?” I thought he was just kidding – you know how he was – but suppose he wasn’t? When you think about it, there’s no more reason not to believe in faeries than there is not to believe in Relativity.’

  ‘There is too! There are equations and things proving that Relativity … happens. You’re just making up a story, like Grandpa.’

  ‘Yeah? Then what did we see this afternoon?’

  ‘Well, um …’

  ‘Come on, say it! They were Little People, right? They couldn’t have been anything else, with that weird stuff around their eyes. We both saw them. If that’s not evidence, what is?’

  ‘OK, it’s evidence,’ I said. ‘But what’s it evidence of? Seeing things doesn’t make them real. If it did, what we see in our dreams would be true, and you know that isn’t so. Maybe we sort of accidentally saw the things Grandpa sees when he dreams off.’

  Colin shook his head. ‘You can’t believe what we saw was really there, but you can believe that we got inside Grandpa’s mind and saw what he sees?’

  The trouble with arguing with Colin is that you always lose, even when you know he’s wrong. ‘All right. Maybe we really saw them. What then?’

  ‘Then we should tell Mom. Think how happy she’d be to know it’s not really Grandpa who’s giving us all this trouble.’

  ‘Baloney. Think how upset she’d be to think we’d gone crazy. And there’d be no way to prove we aren’t. Nobody saw them but Grandpa and us.’

  For a moment, I thought I had him, but then he shook his head. ‘There’s just got to be some way we can prove it.’

  ‘Name one.’

  ‘I will, if you just give me a minute to think.’

  I went back to work with my eraser; and as I brushed the pile onto the floor, I heard Mom and Grandpa in the hall.

  ‘My thing,’ said Grandpa. ‘My brown thing.’

  ‘What thing, Dad? You have a lot of brown things.’

  If they went on that way, they’d be there all night. ‘Think quick,’ I said to Colin. ‘What brown thing would Grandpa be looking for?’

  Colin shrugged. ‘His comb, probably.’

  I opened the door and looked out. ‘Is it your comb you’re looking for, Grandpa?’

  ‘Comb,’ he said, smiling and holding out his hand.

  ‘I saw it downstairs. Let’s go find it.’

  He followed me down the big staircase, past the stained-glass window – and I noticed for the first time that there were faeries mixed in with the trees and flowers that made the border of the window pattern. They weren’t at all like the Little People we’d seen that afternoon; they were tall and graceful and wearing beautiful clothes, and when you looked at them carefully, they almost seemed to be going somewhere, not just around the edges of the window.

  The comb was sitting on the telephone table, right where he’d put it, probably. When I gave it to him, he ran it through his hair, which was long for a man and really thick. ‘Comb?’ he said, looking at me anxiously.

  ‘Right – comb,’ I said, and I gave him a hug. He felt just like Grandpa always did, and as I went back upstairs, I began to wonder if we’d really seen what we thought we had. I mean, it had been awfully foggy. ‘Colin …’ I began as I came into my room.

  ‘Listen!’ he interrupted. ‘Here’s the plan. Tomorrow, we’ll let Grandpa get out again, and we’ll follow him. He’ll probably go to the cloverleaf and meet up with the faeries.’

  ‘Colin, you’ve gone—’

  ‘—No, I haven’t. Think of what they said: This is beyond us. Especially the Old One. Now, doesn’t that sound like they were going to give a changeling back, but they couldn’t?’

  ‘Nope. Who ever heard of faeries wanting to give a changeling back? You’ve got to make them do that: throw the changeling into the fire, or pour holy water on it, or—’

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s not what he meant. But suppose we let Grandpa out. And suppose he goes where he went today, and we follow him. And suppose he meets the Little People.’

  ‘Yeah, and—?’

  ‘And suppose we say to each other (not to them, of course) that we know Grandpa has been stolen and the one with us is a fake – which is like the holy water, sort of, because it lets them know we know what’s happened. So. If we do that, isn’t it possible that they’d have to switch what we have now with the real Grandpa, and we could bring him home to Mom?’

  I don’t know why what he said made me feel so sad, but it did. I looked down at problem seven so he wouldn’t call me a cry-baby. ‘Things don’t work out in real life the way they work out in stories,’ I said. ‘Even Grandpa said so.’

  ‘I know that!�
� He ran his fingers through his cowlicky hair. ‘But we saw those people! And we’ve been doing just what the people in stories do: going to doctors and books and everything we can think of, and Grandpa still isn’t Grandpa. If we were in a story, wouldn’t you be waiting for us to see the obvious solution?’

  ‘Colin …’ I couldn’t go on, because Grandpa came in, without knocking, as usual.

  ‘What name?’ he said, holding out his comb.

  ‘Comb,’ I said.

  ‘Comb,’ repeated Grandpa, smiling his beautiful smile. He stepped out into the hall, but when he got to the top of the stairs, his footsteps turned around. In a minute he was standing in my door again. ‘What name?’ he said, holding out the comb.

  ‘Comb,’ I said, sighing.

  ‘See?’ said Colin as the door closed. ‘He isn’t our Grandpa – he just can’t be.’ His voice was chokey, and when I turned to look at him, I saw two big tears slide down his cheeks.

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘When we get home from school tomorrow, I’ll leave the door unlocked, and we’ll see what happens.’

  School always takes forever to be over, but some forevers are longer than others, and the next day was one of them. That was because I’d forgotten my books. Not school books – real books. At Wheelock School, which is where we’d transferred after we moved to Ferry Road, the sixth grade was doing stuff I’d done at the end of fourth in my advanced class at Maple Street School, so I could do the work in five minutes without listening to the teacher. That left time each day to read one whole book and most of another, if I remembered to bring them. But that day, like I said, I’d forgotten them, so I sat there with nothing to do but wish I hadn’t let Colin talk me into letting Grandpa out. By the time we’d gotten to reading comprehension, the Grandpa in my mind had run up the entrance ramp a thousand times, and each time, he’d been hit by a different kind of truck.