Traveller

by Abigail Drake

  “We really should go out sometime,” he said one morning as we sat sipping tea. He made good company; open, friendly, and uncomplicated. He was also extremely sexy, but I couldn’t get Michael out of my mind.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  It wasn’t fair to date Leo when I couldn’t stop thinking about Michael, but I had to wonder if I’d waited too long to have sex. Maybe my virginal state was turning me into a lust crazed maniac or a psychopath. I didn’t share these thoughts with Leo.

  He turned his golden eye stare on me, making me feel like the only person in the whole wide world who mattered. It was extremely hot and a bit intoxicating.

  “Do you have a beau, Emerson?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  Leo should have been the perfect boyfriend. He was my age, and he didn’t run away from me. A huge plus these days. The fact that he looked like the cover model for an erotic novel didn’t hurt either, but I couldn’t do it.

  Leo leaned forward in his seat, taking my hands in his. “Just think about it.”

  I did think about it. The problem was a certain tall, pierced and extremely antisocial person kept interrupting those thoughts. As soon as Leo left, I used my journal to vent.

  I wish I could forget about Michael and go out with Leo, but I can’t. It would be settling, and I am not a quitter.

  My free time was spent searching in vain for Michael Nightingale. I walked through The Shambles every day, hoping to catch another glimpse of him, and also trying to convince myself he hadn’t disappeared into thin air.

  Once or twice, I thought I spied him, but each time he was gone before I could be certain. He’d basically disappeared off the face of the earth.

  I came to the conclusion he had a girlfriend, a dark-haired gypsy with flashing eyes and big gold hoop earrings. She probably carried a knife strapped to her thigh and wouldn’t hesitate to use it on the likes of me. I should have considered myself lucky.

  I tromped home after another unsuccessful day hunting Michael Nightingale, and Lucinda greeted me in a red bra with curlers in her hair. She flew around the sitting room, tidying up and swearing a blue streak.

  “Emerson. Thank God you’re home. You need to leave.”

  I dropped my backpack with a thunk and sank into a chair. “Hello, Lucinda. How was your day? Mine was fine, thank you kindly.”

  Lucinda winced. “Sorry, love. Very bad of me. It’s just…you won’t believe this…”

  “What happened?”

  Lucinda knelt in front of me, her hands on my knees. Her boobs almost burst out of her push up bra, and she had a wild, frantic look in her eyes.

  “I found Antarctica.”

  “No way.”

  “He’s actually Swedish, but he works there at a research station. He’s only here for a few weeks. I finally did it, Em. My seventh continent.”

  We both squealed and bounced around the room. I was so happy for Lucinda it made me nearly forgot how depressed I was about Michael. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me. I stopped bouncing.

  “Why do I have to leave?”

  Lucinda took a deep breath. “He’s…shy. I have to approach this one gently, and it may take some time. I thought I’d bring him here for dinner.” She looked at her watch and started swearing again, pulling curlers out of her hair as she ran to her bedroom.

  I looked around the kitchen. Lucinda was not a cook. “What are you going to feed him?”

  Lucinda ran back into the kitchen, her eyes huge in her face. “Oh, bloody hell.”

  I giggled and took a peek in the fridge and in the cupboards. “How about pasta primavera? I bought a bunch of nice veggies this morning,”

  Lucinda gave me a big kiss on the cheek. “You are a jewel. A lifesaver.”

  “And I can cook.” I shooed her out of the kitchen and began preparing the meal. By the time Lucinda dressed in a very tiny black dress, her hair a mass of curls, I’d made the pasta and a simple salad, and thrown some brownies in the oven for dessert.

  I shoveled down a bowl of pasta. As Lucinda put the finishing touches on the table, I slipped my journal into my backpack and got ready to leave. “I’ll go to the library. Poppy will be there, and I need to study.”

  “Just a few hours, Em. That’s all I ask.”

  I kissed her cheek. “No problem.”

  The library was only a couple of blocks away from our apartment. It was getting dark, but the streets were well lit, and lots of people still milled about.

  I took a deep breath, enjoying the setting sun, the cool air, and the smell and feel of this place. My mother had been born in a town called Whitby on the North Sea coast, but she’d come to York for school. I wondered if she’d liked it here as much as I did.

  She’d been an only child, like me, and her parents died long before I was born. I hoped to find cousins or someone who remembered her, but so far I’d come up with nothing. I was almost ready to give up, but didn’t want to go home empty handed. I decided this weekend I would start looking again. Time to forget all about Michael Nightingale and focus on why I’d come here in the first place.

  The library, a big stone building with leaded glass windows and high ceilings, felt like traveling back in time and studying in a castle. I walked around until I found Poppy, and then settled down to work. Poppy’s boyfriend, Nigel soon joined us.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” he said, giving Poppy a kiss. Tall, blond, and a horrible dresser, he was a physics major. They had nothing in common, but adored each other.

  I sighed, and Poppy heard the sadness in it. “Are you thinking about Michael?”

  “Who’s Michael?” asked Nigel, and Poppy glared at him. “Oh, I remember now. Dark, brooding stranger. Sorry, Em.”

  “It’s okay, Nigel. I don’t expect you to follow my love life, especially when it exists only in my imagination.”

  Nigel frowned. “How is that possible? You are adorable.”

  Poppy kissed him and gave me a grin. “See why I love him so much?”

  We told him all about the teashop and how Michael had run away. Nigel rubbed his chin. It was a bit stubbly, which just added to his charmingly disheveled appearance.

  “I don’t know, but he sounds like a real wanker,” he said.

  “A wanker.” Poppy nodded in agreement.

  “Or he might be afraid of something,” said Nigel. “I know you don’t seem terribly scary, but fear can be an irrational thing. Perhaps he had a traumatic episode with a curly-headed American beauty queen as a child. That could scar a person for life. It happened to me with clowns.”

  He winked at me, and I gave him a dirty look. “Bullocks,” I said, just a little too loudly. We laughed so hard that a girl at a nearby table asked us to be quiet.

  An hour later, Poppy yawned. “I have to go, Em.” She was bleary eyed, her fingers smudged with ink from the drawings she’d been working on. Nigel got up and started shoving things into his bag.

  I glanced at my watch, not wanting to catch Lucinda mid-coitus on the living room sofa. “I’ll stay a bit longer.”

  They tried to protest, but I reassured them. I had my cell phone and was only a few blocks from home. As soon as they left, I pulled out my laptop and punched in Travellers. It wasn’t the first time I’d researched the subject, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I wanted answers. Immediately, piles of information popped onto the screen. I clicked on The History of Irish Travellers and began to read.

  The origins of Travellers were very unclear, probably due to the fact they were a nomadic people and barely able to read and write. They had horrible attendance records in school, a high infant mortality rate, and a life span about twenty-five years shorter than average.

  I pulled out my journal, jotted down notes, and then sat back in my chair. It sounded pretty bleak. Different sorts of Travellers went by different names. Gypsies, Pavees, Tinkers, Knackers, and derogatory ones like Pikey or Gypo. They operated on the fringes of society, shunned by respectable people. A cruel and harsh exist
ence.

  I thought about Michael, with his nose in an organic chemistry book, and swallowed hard. Most Travellers didn’t get past the eighth grade, but he was studying at university. I remembered the look on his face as he watched me in the window and could finally describe his expression.

  Longing. I wrote that down in my journal because it felt important. He looked at me with longing.

  Maybe this connected to what Nigel said, although his beauty queen idea seemed ludicrous. According to the article, Travellers kept to themselves. Mingling with non-Travellers was definitely frowned upon. Perhaps Michael couldn’t date non-Travellers. Maybe it was taboo.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked at my watch. It was almost midnight, and the library would close soon. Surely, Lucinda would be done by now. I stood up and stretched, looking out the window at a patch of sidewalk illuminated by a street lamp. It was very dark, and looked like it might rain again. I reached for my coat and saw him outside, walking with his head down and completely oblivious to the fact I watched him. Michael Nightingale.

  Chapter Four

  Well, butter my bum and call me a biscuit.

  ~Grandma Sugar

  I threw on my coat and tossed my backpack over my shoulders. As I ran out of the library, I pulled up my hood. My hair made me easily recognizable, and I didn’t want to advertise my identity at the moment.

  Instead of my usual skirt, I wore yoga pants, allowing me to follow Michael more easily this time. Seeing his face in the glow of a streetlight made my silly old heart squeeze in my chest. I’d missed him.

  Once again, he led me through The Shambles. Twice he answered his phone, and although his words were unclear, something in his voice sounded a whole lot like fear. Maybe Nigel was right about Michael being afraid of something, but at least this time it definitely wasn’t me.

  The Shambles looked very different after dark. There were still people about, but they seemed seedier and more dangerous, and the smell of beer and vomit permeated the air. I ignored catcalls from the occasional drunk, kept my head down, and focused only on Michael’s back. I didn’t want to lose him. Not again.

  Soon we reached a part of York I’d never seen before, darker and poorer than the area where I lived. Garbage bins lined the streets, and lights were few and far between. I hung back as far as I dared. There weren’t as many people here, making it harder to blend in. I couldn’t risk being seen, or Michael would most certainly disappear again.

  He turned down a dark alley, and I followed, sticking close to the buildings and moving slowly. Three young men stood in the middle of the alley, right under a streetlight, staring down at what looked like a body on the ground. I came as close as I dared and hid in a doorway.

  “What happened?” Michael’s voice sounded clipped, rough. He knelt down next to the object on the street. Definitely a body, and one wearing black high-top tennis shoes.

  One of the boys standing next to him shifted nervously. They all had close-cropped hair like Michael, and similar taste in clothing. They looked like a motorcycle gang. I wondered if this was standard Traveller garb.

  “Tad never goes out alone. He knows the rules, Mikey.”

  “Then what the hell happened?” Michael’s voice was quiet, but filled with anger and sadness.

  A noise from somewhere on the rooftops made Michael leap to his feet, his eyes scanning the buildings. The four of them turned in unison, backs to each other, protecting the body.

  “Defensive positioning,” I murmured to myself.

  Being a military history professor, my father had introduced me to more than The Art of War. I’d been fed a steady diet of books like Mao Tse-tung’s On Guerilla Warfare and General Carl von Clausewitz’s On War my whole life. I loved On War so much I’d brought it to preschool for show and tell. My teacher had not been amused.

  My father was a scholar, not a fighter, but because of him I knew about enough about soldiers to realize these boys weren’t part of any motorcycle gang. They had military training.

  Michael pulled something out of his jacket. It shone in the light of the streetlamp, a bright flash of silver.

  “A sai,” I said under my breath, feeling a little jealous.

  Oriental weapons were my passion, right after books and chocolate. The one Michael held in his hands was a thing of beauty. Shaped like a fork with one long middle blade, it was rather ineffective as an offensive weapon, but nearly perfect for defense. They were primarily used in pairs, but Michael only had one. His other hand was balled into a tight fist.

  The other boys pulled out weapons, too. One held a short sword, a classic weapon dating back to Roman times. Another had a katana, recognizable because of its elegant curve and blood groove, the indentation on the sides of the blade that released suction and allowed the blade to slip out of the body easily. The third boy held a bearded axe, a Norse weapon designed for hacking, so powerful it could split a metal helmet in half. All combined, a pretty impressive show of weaponry for a street fight.

  Something large and dark swooped down from one of the buildings. It stood a foot taller than Michael’s six-foot frame, and as soon as its feet hit the ground, it lifted its face to the sky and roared. I sank deeper into the shadows. That thing wasn’t human, and unlike any animal I’d ever seen. It stood almost like a man, but had several rows of teeth and cruel, yellow eyes. It smelled, too, like something left outside and rotting.

  The creature had dark gray saggy skin that hung loose on its body. Long claws protruded from its front and back paws. It had a long snout and the pointy ears of a wolf, but I’d never seen a hairless wolf walking upright. And it was definitely a boy monster. Other than the obvious male appendage, it was a living, breathing gargoyle.

  The beast moved toward the body. Michael blocked it very effectively with his sai, and then used his fist to slam the monster in the snout.

  I stood watching in horrified silence as the four men fought the monster, never leaving their protective stance, working like a well-orchestrated unit. The monster seemed oblivious to their punches and the jabs of their weapons, only interested in the dead body on the ground. Wounds covered its body, gleaming with blood, but the creature didn’t care. As it lunged once again, Michael, in a blur of flashing silver, shoved his sai deep into the beast’s abdomen.

  The beast clawed at him, howling, but Michael ignored the scratches on his arms and the blood dripping from his hands. With one sudden movement, he thrust his sai upward into the beast’s chest cavity. The creature’s entire body jerked in a giant spasm, and then fell limp into Michael’s arms. He pulled out his sai, wiped it on his jeans, and shoved the carcass aside.

  “That was for our Tad,” he said, kicking it with his combat boots.

  I stood there, trying to give my mind a chance to catch up, but it wasn’t working. Michael had just performed a sort of angry evisceration on what looked like Wolfman Jack from the Friday Night Frights show I’d grown up watching on TV back home in Bowling Green. That show had scared the crap out of me on a weekly basis, but nothing had ever scared me quite as badly as what I’d just witnessed. I shook from head to toe.

  I’d been playing with fire. Michael really was dangerous, and in ways I never expected. As soon as Michael and his friends left, I planned to run as fast as possible in the other direction and never seek him out again.

  I heard a small, shuffling sound and smelled something putrid and rotting just before an iron-strong arm wrapped around my chest. One of those creatures had me, and held me so tightly I could barely breathe as it pulled me into the light of the streetlight. Michael and his friends turned with their weapons at the ready.

  “Emerson,” Michael whispered, his eyes full of fear. No doubt about what had scared him this time, and it wasn’t clowns or beauty queens. I’d fallen into a whole heap of trouble, and knew it.

  The creature pulled down my hood and pushed my hair out of the way. I heard a noise from deep in its chest that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle, and tried not to gag as it ra
n its nose up and down the side of my neck. Michael took a step forward and it squeezed me even harder, making me gasp.

  “You want this, Traveller?” The monster’s voice was a low, terrible hiss.

  Michael nodded, swallowing hard.

  “Throw down your weapon.”

  He tossed the sai to the ground, and his friends did the same. The rattling of their weapons as they hit the damp cobblestone street pierced the quiet of the dark alley with a sharpness that made me flinch.

  “Very good, Traveller. I will enjoy this.”

  The creature stuck out its tongue and licked my neck. His tongue had the same sandpapery texture as Grandma Sugar’s old cat Miss Sally. I wanted to close my eyes and pretend Miss Sally licked my neck instead of some nasty wolf-monster-thing, but I couldn’t. I was firmly trapped in this present nightmare situation.

  A muscle worked in Michael’s jaw. Apparently, this was a little hard for him to watch. I kept my eyes fixed on his, trying to find my center of calm and strength. I knew what to do, but needed the courage to act. I took a deep breath, let my body relax, and slumped in the creature’s arms like an old rag doll.

  This took the creature by surprise, exactly what I’d hoped for. A basic move from Self Defense 101, a class I’d taught at the senior center for Grandma Sugar and her friends, it proved very effective against both muggers and monsters, apparently.

  As soon as my body went limp, the monster released his hold on me just enough that I could swing my head forward and back, slamming him right in the face. His head flew backwards from the impact, but he still gripped my arms, his claws digging into my skin. I kicked him in the knee with everything I had, happy to hear a cracking noise and a little yelp of pain. I swung around, preparing to shove my palm into his nose so hard it would smash right into his nasty little brain, but as soon as I saw him, I paused, frowning. He didn’t have a nose. He had a snout. That hadn’t been part of the equation.

  I stopped the momentum of my attack and lost my advantage. The monster grinned, something knowing and evil in its glowing, yellow eyes. It reached over and yanked out a few strands of my hair with its clawed, hairy hands. Michael shouted, and the creature let out a howl, pushing me away so hard I stumbled and fell onto my bottom on the wet stones of the street. It limped away, and even with an injured knee it moved with the speed and agility of a monkey climbing a tree in the jungle as it scaled the building next to me and disappeared.