The old trailer’s windows glowed from inside, warm and bright. Ana Sofia could smell something cooking, and her stomach growled and twisted. She was so hungry, so tired, so frightened and miserable, that at first, she did not recognize where she was. And then, as she realized that she stood before the home of Old Nonna, Ana Sofia trembled.
The door to the old trailer opened, and a bent old woman with a large nose came to the door. She wore a cheap, stained housecoat with a dirty apron tied over it, and her hair was tied up in a cloth. Heavy knee-high stockings sagged down her bony legs, wrinkling above her ugly black shoes. Her dark eyes scanned the night, and as Ana Sofia shivered in the shadows, Old Nonna raised her head like a cur and sniffed the air.
“Come closer, my child,” the hag murmured. “I know you’re out there. I smell your sweat and your fear—and your blood. Come to me, and I will hide you where no one will ever find you.”
Ana Sofia had heard the stories, and she wondered if Old Nonna’s ‘hiding place’ was a shallow grave deep in the woods. But if she went back, if la Migra took her and sent her away, her father had warned her that she was likely to end up with the dead hijas of Juarez, violated and forgotten beneath the desert dirt. And there were stories—just a few—that sometimes Old Nonna took pity.
Hunger and desperation made Ana Sofia bold. She crossed herself, and then limped into the dim light cast by the open doorway. “I’m here, abuela.”
Old Nonna sniffed the air again, and turned her dark eyes toward Ana Sofia. “Come closer,” she repeated.
Ana Sofia raised one hand to clutch the crucifix on the necklace at her throat, but she obeyed. She took one stumbling step, then another, leaving drops of blood on the ground. She stopped in front of the old woman, who stood at the top of three rickety steps, framed in the warm light. Old Nonna sniffed once more, peering at Ana Sofia.
“Who hunts you, child?”
Ana Sofia took a deep breath to steady her voice. “La Migra, abuela. They took my family. I can’t go home. I have no one, nowhere to go.”
“Come inside,” Old Nonna said. “Eat.”
Ana Sofia desperately hoped that she would be the one doing the eating, but she mustered her courage and limped up the steps. Inside, the trailer was filled with old furniture. Kerosene lamps lit the cramped space. A wood stove served for warmth and cooking, and on it simmered a pot of stew. A loaf of bread sat on a worn kitchen table.
Old Nonna set a chipped bowl full of stew in front of Ana Sofia and a thick slab of bread with butter. “Eat,” she said. “And tell me your story.”
Ana Sofia was so hungry that she wanted to wolf down the food, but she remembered her manners.“Thank you, abuela,” she said. Old Nonna watched her as she ate, sitting silently, one bony leg crossed over the other. When Ana Sofia was finished, she wiped her mouth and thanked her host again, then told her story. Her voice shook, but she kept herself from weeping, though her eyes filled with tears.
“Why did you come here, child?” Old Nonna asked.
“I was lost,” Ana Sofia replied. “It was an accident.”
Old Nonna chuckled. “There are no accidents,” she replied. “The forest found you, and brought you here.” She paused. “Where would you go?”
Ana Sofia shook her head. “I have nowhere to go, no one to help. I can’t go back. They’ll send me away. If they send me away, I’ll die.”
Old Nonna regarded her for a moment, then nodded. “I can hide you,” she said. “In the back of the holler. You’ll be safe there.”
“Will I die?” The words were out of Ana Sofia’s mouth before she could stop herself.
Old Nonna chuckled, a wheezing, dry sound. “Everything dies, sooner or later. But no, not now. Change...yes. Not die.”
“And if la Migra comes for me? What then?”
“If they come, I will deal with them,” Old Nonna said. “You won’t have to fear them anymore.”
“What will it cost me?” Ana Sofia had heard the old tales. She knew that witches wanted something in return.
“Loyalty,” Old Nonna replied. “There are others like you who have come to me for safety, others I’ve hidden. I protect them, and they protect me. You won’t be alone.”
There was no turning back. There hadn’t been, not after Ana Sofia fled into the night. If she went back, even if she found her way, la Migra would take her, send her across the border, to the dying place. Ana Sofia had heard her parents whispering about what happened to the daughters of Juarez. Nothing could be worse than that.
“I accept.” Ana Sofia lifted her chin, tried to summon all her courage.
“Come with me.”
Old Nonna led Ana Sofia into the night. They walked a little ways past the back of the old mobile home on its metal chicken legs, to a round saucer-like boat tied up by the side of the creek. Its wide brim and shallow bowl reminded Ana Sofia of her mother’s mortar and pestle, the tools she used to grind herbs and avocados.
“Step in, child. I’ll take you to the safe place.”
Old Nonna stepped into the boat sure footedly, despite her bony legs. She waited until Ana Sofia crouched in the saucer, then loosed the boat from its mooring and poled them along with her willow oar. The night flew past them, filled with strange noises. Old Nonna did not carry a lantern. She knew the creek, and the creek knew the way. The forest was thick here. Old growth, not often seen in these parts, where loggers and their axes had stripped everything of value long ago. But not in Old Nonna’s holler.
Moonlight filtered down through the branches. Now and again, Ana Sofia saw the glow of eyes watching from the brush. An owl hooted. Another seemed to answer, far away. Fireflies glowed, or perhaps, Ana Sofia thought, it was fairies dancing. Anything was possible. She shivered, remembering that fairies were not always nice.
The stream swept them deeper into the holler, and the moonlight did not follow. Huge old trees hunched over the stream, forming a tunnel so dark that Ana Sofia could not even see Old Nonna in the boat beside her. Without sight, her hearing grew sharper. She heard animals padding along the creek side, and night birds on the wing. Crickets chirped and insects buzzed. The world smelled of wet dirt and green leaves, loam and flowers.
When the boat emerged from the tunnel of branches, Ana Sofia blinked. Even the dim moonlight seemed bright to her eyes. A small number of men and women clad in deerskin were waiting along the bank of the creek. Ana Sofia squinted to see them more clearly. Something was different about them.
“We’re here,” Old Nonna said, and poled them to the shore.
Ana Sofia hung back, shy and fearful. Old Nonna reached out a wrinkled arm and took Ana Sofia by the hand. Old Nonna’s hand was bony, but very strong, and she pulled Ana Sofia along.
“I have brought you a sister,” Old Nonna said. “Men took her family away. She has nowhere to go.”
One of the group, a dark-haired woman just a little younger than Ana Sofia’s mother, stepped forward. She had a kind smile, but something about her eyes made Ana Sofia pause. “She’ll be safe here. We’ll care for her. Help her make the adjustment.”
Ana Sofia turned to Old Nonna, suspicions rising in her mind. “You said I would change. How?”
One large wolf, and then another and another, padded from the bushes as if they understood her question. Ana Sofia drew back in fear, expecting them to leap for her throat, expecting to die. Instead, the wolves walked up to Old Nonna and sat down around her. More wolves stirred in the woods, until a pack of nearly twenty wolves and five people stood on the bank of the creeks.
The wolves were large and beautiful. Some were gray, others reddish brown, some charcoal-colored. Their amber eyes gazed on her and she glimpsed the human souls within. They did not rush her like wild beasts, or nuzzle her like dogs. Instead, they kept a respectful distance, studying her and allowing her to study them.
“These are my children,”
Old Nonna said. “They have the run of the back of the holler, the mountains, and the caves. No one dares to bother them here. Deer are plentiful, and the caves are warm in the winter.”
“Does it hurt, to become a wolf?” Ana Sofia asked. She could not look away from the magnificent creatures.
“Only the first time, child.” The woman who had greeted them answered her. “We will help you make the change.”
“Are you a wolf, too?”
The woman nodded. “A few of us keep our human shape most of the time, to help Old Nonna when she needs it. We’re the newest changed. The old ones come to like the fur-bodies. When we wear the wolf, we are fast, silent, powerful. We own the forest, and we never go cold or hungry.”
She smiled. “The time will come when new ones will take our place, and we will take the fur forever. But for now, we will stand watch with you. We will be your pack, and you will be our family.”
“Thank you,” Ana Sofia said quietly. She was still afraid, and she was certain the wolves could smell her fear, but part of her longed to know what it was to be one of los lobos. Desire won over fear, and she raised her head to look from the woman back to Old Nonna. “Gracias. Thank you.”
“I must go.” Without a backward glance, Old Nonna walked back to the round boat and climbed aboard, hiking her skirts around her bony legs. She poled her way into the swift current of the creek, and vanished into the darkness of the forest.
A short time later, Old Nonna poled to the side of the creek behind her trailer. She tied up her boat, and scrambled out onto the bank, then put the pole back in place. For the next time.
Old Nonna stopped and sniffed the air. Her wandering eye Saw strangers crashing through the brush, blundering their way through the forest. Men with boots, trampling down the plants, breaking their way among the branches, frightening off the animals with their big, bright flashlights. The dogs had deserted their masters, understanding the danger, but the men came anyway, sure that they were the masters of the land.
Old Nonna smiled a terrible smile.
Letters to Logroth
Jason Corner
To his most bloated putrescence, the regrettable Logroth:
Sire, Twin, Enemy, and Wretch, I greet you with the heartiest of hates, and with my pledge to see you soon—as a wraith, writhing at my feet as I stamp you until your soul oozes out, seeking escape from your doomed body like the starved rat it is, only to be impaled at the tip of my finger and devoured at a swallow.
Of course, I admit these pleasantries have their place, but this is more than a social letter. The time is coming soon when I shall leave this tower and spread myself across the sky like an eclipse. I don’t mean that as the usual threat, but as real information.
You may not know this, but before we were so frustratingly separated from both normal passage through the world and from each other (my hands at your throat, Your Vileness), I anticipated certain problems and planted a problem-solver or two. One’s a treasure map, leading to a power site where it won’t take much by way of digging to activate an old rune that should introduce enough dark-magic charge into the atmosphere to pull me in, even over a pretty strong barrier. (It should immolate anyone in a one-mile radius of the site, but that’s hardly a bug.) I planted a few copies in various tombs and towers, and surrounded them with enough crude mechanical traps and killer skeletons to make them seem like they were worth hiding. Well, Logroth, three fortune-hunters have found one.
I don’t know their names, since I see them only through a remote-seeing gem that one of them picked up, but these types are more or less the same as they were in our day, and the fact that I can’t hear their dialogue is no doubt a blessing. The first one, whom I call the Big Idiot, is in excess of six feet, and looks like he must be part horse, with his big chest and his big mane of hair and his all-around big idiocy. He stomped around the tomb’s treasure room with an axe, smashing up the skeletons with big-armed swings, and the dull light of an illiterate born in a jungle glowed in his eyes.
The Big Idiot has a buddy, whom I shall call (for symmetry’s sake) the Little Idiot. He’s more of an urban sewer rat than a jungle dog, and I’d guess he’s found his niche hiding behind the Big Idiot and reading things for him. A dark little snipe with a serrated dagger, his distinguishing characteristic is this complicated belt he wears, lined with little leather pouches. I note the belt because just as soon as I got a good look at him, he was checking a plinth in the wall with what looked like a cross between a protractor and a wind-up toy; at odd moments, he takes different gadgets out of his belt and tinkers with them. He managed to defuse the various acid spouts I’d planted, which deprived me of some real pleasure but will probably work out for the best in the long run.
The third one—do you remember, Your Unpulchritude, the city of Eos? Where pale, thin-blooded sorcerer-kings ruled over a century-long succession of mystic rites and slave-torture orgies? Where the needle-spires rose miles high in the sky, focusing the energies of the sun and the moons to grant immortality to the fastidious princes and coldhearted princesses who were carried about on the backs of slaves whose sides had been stitched together to make them human divans? Yes, well, I assume you’ll remember that a few of their experiments seemed to us to be getting a little too close to some key discoveries in the science of astral projection and demonology (back in the days when you presumed to command me, before I realized what a senile old dodderer you are), so we sent them an earthquake whose maw was grafted to a hole to one of the nastier pocket dimensions. And Eos—three-thousand-year-old Eos, with its towering hubris and incomprehensible decadence—went from empire to memory in a night.
I mention these good old times not to warm us all by the hearth of nostalgia but to note that the third one, whom I call the Brooder, is clearly a survivor of old Eos. You see it in his pale skin, his ironic smile, the taper of his fingers. He works his sword well enough and made plenty of rib salad on the floor, but one senses what I assume he would describe as his eternal aloneness, his dark destiny, his sense of restlessness in this world, et cetera. No doubt the ladies go for it.
Speaking of which—there is a fourth victim, the one who picked up the gem and thus do I see through her and not see her. I call her the Girl, although I haven’t actually seen her, but there is something in the exaggerated deference the other three show her, keeping her out of danger and so forth, that signals the way a pair of breasts need but show up to poison the mind.
She watched the three of them battle the skeletons down to a pile of bones, find all the traps, and uncover the map, during which she kept herself more or less out of the fight, letting the others take all the nicks and cuts. It made her very likable to me, though she, too, will die in flames when I rise and spread my glory over this world like a funeral shroud. And then...ah, then, Logroth, you and I will have our meeting.
Yours in eternal Malevolence,
Lord Tortulon
***
To his bloated, worm-infested, filthy moronitude Logroth:
You wonder that I take the trouble to write these friendly missives in the form of actual letters. Well, I wonder too. After all, you are not reading them, but receiving their import in the form of dreams, no doubt distorted as they wend their way through the astral and the ether, and are then interpreted in whatever form—I can’t guess—by your unconscious, only to be partially remembered as you stir in your extradimensional prison. Nevertheless, I find that sitting at my writing-desk and composing them on vellum by the light of the dream-sender is the best way for me to really focus my thoughts. By putting them in form, I am able to make clear and appreciate my hatred for you, and my anticipation of glory as I am released from my prison, to steal from you what is mine by right and use my new power to trample the world to smithereens.
Moreover, it gives me an opportunity to use my handmade pen. Have you ever seen it? It’s a quill-tip sticking out of the end of a
unicorn horn. I wrenched it from the unicorn head myself while (this is the neat trick) leaving the unicorn alive, but in perpetual pain and unable to sense a virgin even if her hymen were in the beast’s face. You know they live a long time, so one always knows that, somewhere, that crippled half-beast may be wandering the world in agony and blindness. It’s really a warm feeling, a holiday feeling, knowing that you’ve made your mark in whatever small way.
Well, the four of them made their way to a town, and naturally proceeded straight to the nearest tavern. That sort of thing seems to be the Big Idiot’s natural environment, since he went straight for a tankard of some swill and sidled up to a pair of women, neither of whom I believe to have been nuns. The other three sat down and started working through the map. The Little Idiot got some combination protractor and opera-glasses out of that crowded belt of his and went over it, drawing some of the more obscure runes larger so The Brooder could translate them. All of them tempted by the promise of gold, licking their lips at it.
I mean, I presume The Girl was licking her lips. I can’t see them at all. I’ll say one thing for her, though—she likes to watch. She kept her eyes on The Brooder the whole time, for example, and she knows that he sneaks off every so often to drink some yellow liquid out of a pack of vials he keeps in his knapsack. Is he an addict? Is he sick? Hard to say. The inbred children of Eos doubtless have all kinds of little problems; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he drinks that stuff to keep his conjoined twin’s head asleep under his shirt.
The Big Bad II Page 6