by Tom Deitz
“And what’re you doing way out here?” Alec demanded. “I like to never have found you.”
“Huh?” David finally grunted, sitting full up and shaking his wild-haired head, as his fingers adjusted the waistband of the skimpy red Speedo he wore in place of his accustomed cut-offs. It had been a birthday present from Liz—as much birthday suit as bathing suit, she’d giggled when he’d opened it back on January 16. Today’s pre-graduation cookout was its official unveiling. Too bad she’d not been here to witness it. Too damn bad.
“Sleep,” Alec supplied patiently, “as in ‘sleep your life away.’”
“Huh?” David mumbled again. And then the dream slammed into him and he shivered as if someone had flicked ice water across his chest. He blinked, saw the waters of B.A. Cove ten feet beyond his rock begin to chop slightly as the afternoon wind picked up. “Feels like rain,” he managed. “’Course it always feels like rain these days.”
Alec grimaced, squatted on the next slab down, and commenced toweling his still-damp hair. He smelled of sand and lake water. A pair of blue gym shorts were plastered to his slender body. “I think that was an evasion, David. Is something wrong?”
“Damned straight, if it rains tonight!”
“No, I mean worse than that.”
Quick blue eyes darted left, seeking across an acre of broomsedge to where the rest of the MacTyrie Gang—Runnerman Buchanan, M.H. (for Mighty Hunter) Aikin Daniels, and G-Man Gary Hudson—were clustered beside Apocalypse Now, Darrell’s VW van, busy assembling a mid-afternoon barbecue, while their respective ladies: Sheila Groves, Janie Spenser, and a very pregnant Tracy Jensen—and Darrell’s older sister, Myra, who had invited herself along to sketch—looked on with vast amusement. This party was the official opening of summer: the first sunny day after school let out; tonight’s larger bash at Gary’s would be a one-timer and a sort of prequel to his wedding the following weekend. If David survived graduation. He inventoried the scantily clad bodies once more and sighed. The most important one was still missing.
“Liz isn’t here.” It was part statement, part accusation.
Alec snapped the towel against David’s shoulder. “She’ll be here, man; don’t worry. She can’t help it if they gotta make up all those snow days they missed last winter, but no way she’d miss your graduation—Mr. Valedictorian!”
David shrugged. “No big deal, that. Not in a class of fifty.”
“Nobody else even came close.”
“Barbara Justus did; so did you.”
“Except for English.”
“Self-sabotage, that,” David chuckled, thinking of Alec’s English-teacher father’s consternation at his son’s apparent inability to deal with the arcana of his chosen profession. Give Alec a program to construct or a formula to memorize or an experiment to run, he was fine. Give him a sentence to diagram or a verb to conjugate or a poem to explicate, and he went to pieces. His spoken and written language was fine, it was the theory that was somehow beyond his comprehension.
A comb replaced the towel in Alec’s hand; in an instant his short brown locks were neat as normal. “As I was saying: something wrong?”
David reached over and mussed him up again, noting absently that his sorry attempt at a mustache was missing—victim, no doubt, of a pre-commencement parental order. “Why do you ask?”
“Shoot, man,” Alec snorted, nonplussed by the attack, “when I found you here every muscle on you was so tight I thought you were gonna explode, and your face was scrunched up like…”
“Like what?”
“Oh never mind the effing image. It’s the fact I’m concerned about.” A pause; then, “More dreams?”
David nodded reluctantly. “’Fraid so.”
“Fourth time this week I make it.”
“Fifth: had one last night—woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep. That’s what put me out now.”
“Faery stuff again?”
Once more David nodded. “I thought it was over,” he said at last.
“Lugh warned you, though,” Alec noted. “He said that war didn’t keep borders. He said we’d feel it…what were his words? ‘When the skies turn dark and rains fall heavy and you dream of death and murder, remember that perhaps they are reflections of darker things in Faerie’?”
“Something to that effect.” David studied his feet, staring absently at the golden hair dusting his legs and toes.
“Bad one this time?”
David nodded mutely, swallowed. “There were…two,” he said hesitantly, “one was in some kind of grubby enclosed place like a prison, and a feeling of fear and pain and of someone wanting help, and that’s all I can remember.” He closed his eyes, shook his head again. “It was real confusing, just feelings mostly. But the second was more vivid. I…I was standin’ on a tower or something, looking out over a forest dark under thunderclouds, and then there was this terrible feeling of dread, of something awful begun. And then somebody turned into a raven, and I felt something…I don’t know…something tickle my soul. Something kinda like that other dream.” He shuddered suddenly. “I think you’re right, Alec; I think it’s like Lugh predicted. I think there’s war in Faerie. The other dreams were just snatches: towers and warriors and a sense of unease. This was much more concrete.”
“But how?”
Another shrug. “Who knows? Maybe things are so bad even the World Walls can’t contain it all. Maybe their emotions are so keyed up over there they’re startin’ to seep through.”
Alec shuddered in turn, and David knew he was thinking of their earlier encounters with that Otherworid that overlay their own. He’d never come totally to terms with the multitudinous contradictions implicit in that. But then, he’d never come totally to terms with most of Faerie. Alec was a rationalist at heart, and Faerie either defied logic, or forced a redefinition.
Alec took a deep breath. “There’s another explanation, you know. Something a lot more reasonable.”
David cocked an eyebrow inquiringly.
“Guilt, David: plain old-fashioned guilt. God knows I’ve felt it myself. Still do.”
David shook his head. “I’ve considered that a lot, but I think there’s more to it than that. If it was only me havin’ ’em, I might believe it. But ma’s had ’em, Little Billy’s had ’em, Uncle Dale’s had ’em. Shoot, even poor old Minniebelle Coker’s had ’em, and I think they’re gettin’ worse.”
Alec frowned. “A pattern there: all members of your family—’cept for Minniebelle.”
“I think it’s more the place, Alec. There was a fight at the church across from my house last Sunday that you could hear clear across the hollow.”
“And you really do think it’s slop-over from Tir-Nan-Og?”
David slapped his hands on his legs. “What else could it be?”
“Search me. But just think a minute, oh Mad One. Tir-Nan-Og overlaps here, that’s true—but it overlaps this whole part of the country, so there ought to be contention all over too.”
“Are you blind, or what?” David snapped. “News has been full of stuff about domestic violence and hospitals runnin’ over and that kinda thing. Crime rate’s way up in Atlanta and Chattanooga and Knoxville.”
“Coincidence. Full moon or planetary alignment or something. All the blessed rain, maybe. Besides, I haven’t felt anything.”
“Yeah, but haven’t you noticed how wired everyone is at school lately? Who knows who else is havin’ dreams and not sayin’ anything because they’re just too strange?”
“Just end-of-the-year apprehension.”
“You think!”
“More than you, apparently.”
David fell silent, staring once more at the group at the van, knowing he needed to rejoin them, but feeling no desire to be social. “There’s one way to find out for sure, you know,” he said, meeting Alec’s gray-eyed gaze meaningfully. “You could use the ulunsuti.”
Alec looked away. “Uh-uh, no way, man!”
David took him by t
he shoulder. “Not even once, bro? Not even for me?”
Alec shook his head. “Not even for you.”
“But Uki gave it to you to use. He didn’t give it to me, or to Calvin, he gave it to you and he told you to study it.”
“I didn’t deserve it, though. He gave it to me out of some misguided sense of honor.”
David glared at him. “Are you sure about that? He’s a…a demi-god, after all. I think he knew what he was doin’.”
“Maybe—but he didn’t ask me.”
“But still—”
“Look, David,” Alec flared suddenly. “I’ve got the damned thing, and I do what I have to do to keep it from going crazy. But no way am I gonna spend my time fooling around with a magical jewel out of the forehead of a goddam monster!”
“Where’s your scientific curiosity?”
“In my other pants!”
David regarded him seriously. “You realize what just happened, don’t you? We got contentious—more than we should have, and faster. No warnin’, just slam-bam, thank-you-ma’am.”
“So you really think it’s something to do with the dreams?”
“No, I think the dreams are something to do with it.”
Alec took a deep breath. “These dreams, Davy—has there been any sign of—?” He broke off, his eyes misting.
“Of Eva?” David finished, remembering the Faery woman who had used Alec to betray Fionchadd the previous fall and whose last-minute change of heart had saved them both when the uktena David had become had overwhelmed him. “No.”
A sigh. “Never hurts to ask.”
David laid a hand on his shoulder. “Just hurts, period; right, man?”
Alec nodded sadly. “Jesus, David. I loved her…I thought; and then she… But then she said she really did love me there at the end. I wonder if she still does.”
“Do you? That’s the important thing, the part you can control.”
“I shouldn’t, that’s for certain…but— Oh Christ, man, I don’t know! If I saw her again I don’t know if I’d kiss her or kill her.”
“You need a woman, guy; a real woman. A year’s long enough to do without.”
“Almost a year,” Alec corrected. “And don’t forget that a year ago we were both celibate—and had been forever.”
David grinned and stood up, suddenly finding it necessary to distract himself from what he was thinking and the effect it was having on him, which would be all-too-evident in the Speedo—not that he cared around Alec, but the others… A year since the first time…Lord! And almost two weeks since the last…
Alec eyed him wryly, missing nothing. “I think a cold dip’s called for.”
“Yeah, and then a cold brew.”
“And a loose shirt with a very long tail.”
David grabbed a handful of pine straw from the detritus around him and poured it over Alec’s head. It stuck in the damp spikes, making him look like one of the wild men he’d seen in a book on medieval art.
Alec reached down to grab a retaliatory handful, but by the time he rose once more, David was already dashing into the shallow water.
“Lo! The dead has risen,” somebody called from beside the van.
“If they only knew!” Alec chuckled, as he followed David in.
They swam for perhaps five minutes in unseasonably cool water that was red from washed-in clay; and then David emerged and toweled down, finally wrapping the gold-and-purple terrycloth around his waist Egyptian style. By the time he rejoined the group, however, his “affliction” was threatening to return. He deliberately walked barefoot across the roughest turf. The distraction helped, but not enough. An oversized white shirt made him feel considerably safer.
“What’s up?” Gary asked wickedly, handing him a beer and a burger.
“Funny you should ask,” David giggled, staring meaningfully past Gary’s brawny figure to the obviously bulging tummy of his girlfriend. “You in particular, I mean.”
Tracy raised a dark brow delicately into even darker hair, wordlessly daring David to go further. “It’ll be a gorgeous kid, anyway,” he managed lamely.
Gary laid a hand on his lady’s tummy. “I can already feel the little guy doing push-ups.”
“Long as he doesn’t do side-straddle-hops when we’re at the altar,” Tracy laughed, planting a wet one on her sweetie’s cheek. “Always assuming it is a guy,” she added pointedly.
“There but for the grace of God,” Alec began, before David elbowed him in the ribs.
“Huh?” asked lanky blond Darrell Buchanan, a dollar short and a day late as usual. Then, “Oh, you mean—”
Sheila Groves, the shapely blonde girl Darrell hung out with—mostly, David suspected, because she looked like him—tugged Darrell’s track-team ponytail sharply. “Don’t say another word, Runnerman. You’re absolutely certain to be sorry.”
“He’s already sorry,” M.H. Daniels chuckled before his own lady, the considerably taller Janie Spenser, shushed him by shoving a hotdog in his mouth.
“So am I,” David agreed, stifling a guffaw, “sorry you didn’t do that sooner. I—”
He stopped in mid-sentence as a drop of rain needled his shoulder, and glared up into a rapidly darkening sky.
*
Fifteen minutes later the sudden shower had abated, having briefly forced all nine of them to take shelter inside the van and to drag the grill under the overhanging awning. The others had gone back to the lake for one final dip, and David, who was still moody about Liz’s absence and bothered by his dream, found himself alone with Myra. He’d never been around Darrell’s older sis much, since she’d been away at college most of the time he’d known the big D (who’d arrived from Atlanta in time to join the tenth grade and the MacTyrie gang at the same time). Nor had he noticed how pretty she was, even now when she was utterly without makeup. She was slim and blonde, to start with (her hair bound atop her head like a furry fountain), had great cheekbones, and her eyes were marvelous. Her brows were too pale though, and ditto her lashes. Darrell’s, by contrast, were darker, but where the family looks made Myra pretty, they merely made Darrell foolish. Myra picked up a pad and began sketching. “Something wrong?” she asked to break the silence.
David shrugged noncommitally. “Not really,” he lied, wishing people would stop asking that question. The hand paused in mid-stroke. “You miss your lady, right?”
David focused on her rapidly moving fingers. “Yeah, partly.” It was true too, in spades. But he had other things on his mind as well.
“Well, think of it this way; she’s not here now, but there’ll be no more separations. Darrell’s told me how she’s been going to school in Gainesville the last two years, and how you’ve been about to go crazy in the meantime. But you’re together now; and I for one am glad to see it.”
“That helps a lot,” David said sullenly.
“What I’m saying, guy, is that in the context of the rest of your life, a couple of hours now won’t matter.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Harder than you think. I’m here with a bunch of neat folks, and with some great landscape to draw, but what am I doing? Thinking about my boyfriend, Scott, down in south Georgia digging up shark teeth.”
David froze. Shark teeth reminded him of the uktena scale he had stuffed in his back pack, which he had first thought a shark’s tooth. It was one of several mementoes he had of last summer’s adventure in Galunlati. But worse, it was a reminder of what that scale could do—like turn him into a monster. A chill actually made his teeth chatter.
Myra put down the pad. “Something is wrong, isn’t it; and not just missing your lady? Yeah, I know, I’ve noticed it: all this rain, all the wind, it’s like a war going on in the sky. And it’s not just a physical war; it’s like a war in your head, a roaring in your soul. It’s like the tension you feel before a thunderstorm, only it never ends, just gets tighter and tighter. I’ve sensed it ever since I got up here. And Darrell says it’s been going on for days.”
“I’ve felt something similar once,” Myra continued darkly. “At a Renaissance fair down in Athens. The weather was freaky there too.”
“I heard about that,” David replied. “Did a lot of damage and all.”
“Real freaky,” Myra repeated; then, more lightly: “Hey, how ’bout holding that pose for a while!”
“Sure,” David said, looking a little puzzled. He froze where he was: leaning against the van with one of the awning poles in his hand. Myra applied herself to her drawing. A moment later she was finished, and handed him the pad for perusal.
Goosebumps prickled over him. It was him, all right, but Myra had changed his shirt to a coat of ring mail, his bandanna to a cap of iron, and the pole to a wildly barbed spear. But what gave him pause was the background she had sketched in: a desolate, wind-swept shore covered with shattered trees. The sun was unnaturally huge and fiery and directly above his head, its entire many-rayed disc shadowed by the outstretched wings of an eagle. David had seen them both before: for the sun was twin to that which was emblazoned on the surcotes of Lugh’s warriors, and the eagle was the sign of the royal house of Erenn: that of Finvarra.
“Nice,” David said, “but where’d you get this symbol?”
Myra would not meet his eyes. “I…I don’t know, it…it just came to me.”
Thunder sounded then, and the rains returned. His friends pounded up from the beach.
“Can I have this?” David asked.
Myra nodded. “I’d like to draw you again, sometime, too. You’ve got a real nice body.”
David blushed and looked away.
Gary was the first one to the van, having beaten his running rival, Darrell. “Christ, is this rain never gonna stop?”