IGMS Issue 44

by IGMS

  The phone on the table beside me flashed faint and blue. I reached for it, afraid of this moment, afraid of what was happening, fumbled to flip it open, and heard a tinny voice report that I had missed one call and had as many voice mails. I stabbed the menu and heard Carla's recorded message.

  Mab was fading, though my sheets were still damp and cold. There was a mirror over my bureau and in that mirror another window into the backyard. It was through that second, reflected window that Mab left.

  I lay shaking for a time, listening to Carla's message over and over.

  The next day was cold. The storm the night before had succeeded in scrubbing autumn's crispness from the sky. The trees were getting bare.

  I rode my bike up the gravel path that lay over an old railroad bed. The grade was good. It would have been quicker to drive out to the state park but in no way better. The undergrowth was bare. I rode through a child's scrawled pencil drawing, under graphite loops of brambles.

  I thought about Carla's message. It had said nothing of real interest, just an outline of potential plans for the evening -- dinner at Dan's place, a movie afterward -- and an invitation to come along.

  It was Platonic. It had always been Platonic.

  The trail climbed a bluff over a bend in the river. There was a circle of elm and ash at its summit, surrounding a cottage. A man with painted hands was splitting wood at its corner.

  "You had a guide," he said without turning . "You never would have found me if you hadn't."

  It was true. Hamilton had flown ahead.

  "You're the Red Hand."

  "More of an ochre, really. I'm only Grandson of Grandson of Red Hand." He held up the hand that did not grip his wood-splitting ax. The paint was actually hundreds of tiny spots, like the mottling on a turtle's back, in intricate patterns. There was a large spiral on his palm and a small one on the tip of each finger. "What do you want?"

  "Mab sent me to collect the pieces of her museum," I said, and then added for some reason, "The important pieces."

  He snorted.

  We talked in the scratchy shade of narrow trees. The river arched cold below. When he was done splitting wood he went into the shack and got earthen mugs and a jug of some clear liquid.

  "You've got to use your head," he said. "Think this through. You've got it backwards." He sat erect on the crate he used for a chair. "You think she means like a museum you see today? Those are mausoleums, cemeteries to dead history with someone's found trinkets for headstones. You think that's what she wants, what her museum was like when the French were a rumor on the horizon?"

  I thought of Carla moving among the display tables in the Stone Barn.

  "I guess I hadn't thought of it." You don't think of the surreal. You watch it go by or -- in my case -- get pulled along with it.

  "She wants us back out and roaming. That was what she had then -- some stones in the woods and some hills where the old wonders clustered a bit thicker."

  I took a drink and coughed.

  "She said it was like Dresden. Or her crow told me that. Things in the museum had been disassembled and taken away to be hidden."

  I imagined paintings dissolving like sugar in water, melting away until they were invisible because there were tiny pieces of them everywhere.

  Red Hand nodded slowly, his face rising and falling like a piece of granite teetering at the top of a mountain somewhere.

  "Will you come if she calls you back?"

  He kept nodding. "We called her Old Woman of the Wood. If she's decided it's time to come forward again, there's no arguing."

  I saw Thirteen Shades keeping pace with me as I pedaled back into town. He flickered in and out of view behind the trees and at times behind the clouds as well.

  When I got back I headed to campus, taking a route that avoided Carla's filling station. I wasn't interested in seeing whether Dan's truck was there.

  Back in the lab -- which was again empty, since it was Saturday -- Hamilton brought a silver bowl. At least it looked silver. It might have been stainless steel. The cuvettes of solution looked like liquid pewter. I popped open the dozen or so plastic rectangular containers and poured them into the bowl. They shimmered at the bottom like quicksilver but did nothing of interest beyond that.

  "All of the gripe water?" Hamilton asked from my shoulder.

  "No," I said. "Not all of it."

  I hung my head over the bowl and willed myself to think about Carla and what an idiot I was. It took a while, but a handful of tears came. They were as grey as the rest of the liquid, and when they fell I felt emptier and lighter.

  "We don't have to."

  I looked up.

  Hamilton hopped down from the window. "We don't have to." He looked like he was wrestling with the words. "I could stop talking. You could go back to whatever you were doing before."

  I shook my head. "There's no reason for her not to get what she wants. That's why no one argues with her. Red Hand was right. It's like arguing with a forest."

  "People do that all the time." He cocked his head. "Bulldozers and subdivisions. Development."

  "They're wrong."

  I felt like we had shifted sides. He was the bird after all. But I had never known the forest to have a voice before, or a form that blew in my window at night. I had never met a wood that wanted to be haunted again.

  There was a bonfire that night at Dan's folks' farm, and Carla wanted me to come along, said that Dan wanted me there too. When I hesitated, she offered to pick me up in her yellow Fiat 600 -- the one she had restored herself -- and I couldn't argue with that.

  She was like Mab. There just didn't seem any point.

  There were faces around the fire I didn't recognize and some that I did. Dan told stories about the woods around the farm that were supposed to be haunted, about the times that he and his older brothers were absolutely positive the trees were moving at night, how they had tried to mark the forest with bits of rope and scraps of paper to determine whether the trees really walked, and how in the morning their markers were always moved.

  He told stories well.

  I left at one point to use the bathroom in the barn, and when I got out, Carla was waiting for me.

  "They don't normally stick around," she told me. "The lions wandered off into the woods. The birds flew away. Your cow creamer I let out the back door, and it got larger every step, until it was a regular milk cow wandering off down the alley and out toward the fields."

  I wasn't sure why she was telling me this.

  "Before, it had only ever been animals. But one day there was an art market, and an artist had done all these figurines of wood. And you were there, reading under a tree with your knees up and this resolutely bewildered expression on your face. And I couldn't just leave you there, frozen."

  I felt the rough wood of the barn behind me and realized I had been backing away. She took a step closer. It was hard to see her face this far from the fire.

  "I didn't even buy it, just touched it and then watched you stumble off into the crowd. But you didn't wander far. And eventually you found a place to live, found a job at the college, and found me again."

  For a moment I couldn't breath.

  "That's not true." I felt like Hamilton, trying to will my unwieldy tongue to form words. "I have memories. I remember moving here. I remember growing up. If you woke up a statue, it wasn't me." I forced myself to laugh. "In a sense you're right, Carla. You did bring me to life, but only in the normal way."

  She didn't answer.

  "I'll walk home."

  I did, heading up the long dirt driveway. It was a stupid thing to do. It would probably take me a good forty-five minutes just to get back into town. But you can't have conversations like that and then go back to the fire, and you certainly can't have conversations like that and then meekly wait for a ride home.

  Mab found me when I had nearly reached the highway.

  "I don't want a story tonight, Mab." Her eyes were two stars low on the horizon, but
I could feel her breath on my neck.

  She flowed along the road from shadow to shadow, filling them with her presence and then moving on. It was hard not to watch her progress, sometimes a dance, sometimes a wavelike roll, sometimes a run, but it was also hard to see her clearly.

  "Wants to comfort you," Hamilton mumbled. "Doesn't know how."

  "Tell her to leave me alone, Hamilton." I thought about what Carla had said. "Tell her I'm not real."

  He left my shoulder. I didn't realize what I had asked.

  Lights stabbed up behind me, and Dan's pickup pulled alongside.

  "Carla asked me to give you a lift."

  The worst thing about Dan was that you couldn't hate him. I climbed in, and he asked about Hamilton.

  "He just sort of found me. Things do."

  Dan spoke easily. When it was clear I didn't have much to say, he filled the silence. He talked about the rig he had been on. Apparently you give them names, and apparently they're usually female, but Dan said this one had been called Christopher for some reason. He talked all around Carla. She was there, sitting in the center of the conversation like a hole.

  Time must have passed, because my lab faded to my house and back again, and the world in between them had gone as grey as the gripe water. Hamilton disappeared. He only said one thing before he left, though I didn't realize he was leaving for good. It was something I didn't understand at the time.

  "I spoke it," he said. "She will leave you alone now. Thanks for the raisins."

  I hoped he found his family or whatever it was that crows had. No strange things pressed in at the seams any more.

  But that wasn't quite true. Shapes began to appear in the rain. I could tell that they were Mab's people, drawn back to the curio of wonders she was reassembling. They looked in at the windows with long, drawn faces that blurred and ran with the rain. I tried to ignore them.

  I did not see Carla again.

  I started running in the evenings, and I got the cable hooked up again so I could have human voices tell me nothing whenever I wanted. Classes started at the university. I tutored in the chemistry lab.

  Carla and Dan got married. I found a semi-legitimate reason to be out of state on the day of the wedding.

  It kept raining, and the fringes of the world stayed grey. I started to believe it was normal. Then one day Red Hand came running into the lab.

  "Take it." He pointed at the gripe water and tossed me a silver canteen. "Let's go."

  There were a few students hunched over one of the lab benches. They stared at him with wide eyes. He was wearing jeans and a dusty leather jacket, but he still looked like he had wandered out of yesterday's basement. And there was a hatchet stuck in his belt.

  The gripe water had waited, nearly forgotten, in its silver bowl on a shelf most of the semester. It tossed crystal reflections on the ceiling now. There was too much of it to fit in the canteen, but it pulled itself together and flowed into it anyway. I followed Red Hand into the corridor.

  "This is Janie Wringer."

  I had seen her before, in local artists' shops. She looked as old as Red Hand looked ageless, but she matched us stride for stride down the hallway.

  "The gripe water's been calling all winter. Didn't you hear it?"

  I shook my head and then thought of the rain.

  "Is that why it's been so grey?"

  Red Hand shook his head. "It's grey because Mab is gone."

  I followed them until we were standing outside the science building in the half-overgrown quad between clock tower and parking lot.

  "Someone used a word of power," Janie whispered.

  "It was your bird," Red Hand grunted. "The crows were said to have had one. Mab may have forgotten. Or imagined they had. Or not cared. What did you tell him?"

  "Who?"

  "Your bird. He spoke it on your behalf."

  "I don't remember." I paused. "I think I told him I wanted my life back, that I wanted to be left alone."

  Red Hand looked at me like I was a child who had disappointed him.

  "What do you care?" I glanced past the two of them, both almost wholly ciphers, to where there were solid, unyielding cars in the parking lot. Beyond that was a road clustered with lights and advertisements. "Why should I? I did whatever it was she wanted me to do. You're back, and apparently the others won't be far behind. You guys go do the things that old wonders do when they get back together."

  The canteen sloshed against my thigh.

  "We're Mab's hand." Red Hand held up his own. "The first five she named. What's a house of mirrors without light?"

  I gritted my teeth. "You're not making sense. You said yourself that I had it backward."

  Something huge shuddered into view over the horizon, and I had the impression of the uppermost reaches of a ship's rigging rising out of a cloudbank.

  "Christopher 57," Janie explained. "It took him longest. He woke up in the South Sea, and he said someone had built a city on top of him whilst he slept."

  "You need to bring her back."

  "Why me?" I fought the urge to sit in the grass and refuse to move. "I was supposed to bring you back."

  "She's like a child. And you spurned her."

  "I don't know what Hamilton said to her. Maybe that we both just wanted to be left alone."

  The shape swung into view again between the trees, impossibly large, with flanks of thunderheads.

  "No one is alone," it rumbled. I felt the voice in my teeth. "To request solitude is to provoke exile."

  How could you ask the storm and the light to leave you alone? Where would it go if you did?

  "Okay."

  I forced myself to look upward at its impossible bulk.

  "Follow me."

  My garage had not changed. For the past few months I had been reluctant to go into it. Thirteen Shades joined us on the walk home, and the thing they were calling Christopher 57 waited above like a minor planet. I pushed the door ajar and looked around.

  The god of the garage was waiting on top of an aluminum ladder.

  "I wondered when you'd be back."

  "I need to get back into the Blur," I told him.

  "You were never really there, remember?" He winked at me, or at least one of the old beer bottle caps caught the light. "You never kissed her."

  "She was the wrong one."

  "Was she?" I always felt like he should have had a pumpkin head, but he never did. This time it was a plastic watering jug. "I'm never quite sure which way these stories will go. I thought maybe that was your exit."

  "It wasn't. Can you get us there?"

  He motioned to a door in the wall that had never been there. "I couldn't do this before, but what with all the old wonders out and about again." He shrugged. "Only room for one though."

  "Yeah."

  It had begun to storm.

  It was a long time before I found her, out there at the edge of the Blur where the legends get raggedy and start bleeding off the map. She seemed faded in those winds, and I had to yell for a long time before she turned.

  "They're all here," I told her. There were clouds where her eyes should have been. "They've all come back."

  I held up my hand. It was impossible to tell how many fingers there were.

  "They were just names," she said sadly. "Invented things."

  "Right. Your old wonders. They found me, like you said they would."

  There were things that rode the wind. A fleet of them passed near us now, trailing tiny beads of lightning.

  "There was a girl who wakened forms."

  I nodded. "Carla."

  "What did she tell you?"

  I thought about the night beside the barn. "That it was Platonic. That I was an unfrozen form. Is it true?"

  "We are as true as all false and solid things can be. Only those things which do not end are real. In a thousand years she may be me. She may try to gather all the things she has stirred to life."

  "You need to come back," I said helplessly. "Return and do
. . . whatever it is a fairy queen is supposed to do."

  She was turning away again. Her face was revolving like a star, like something huge and heavy that would take a million years to circle, a million years for her eyes to swing back into view.

  "Mab, I'm sorry." I wasn't sure what for, but I said it. Then I said it again.

  The wind ripped the words away as soon as they were past the safety of my lips, and they fled toward the horizon. Her form was receding now as well. The clouds kept coming down from the sky and breaking between us.

  I yelled again.

  I had no hold on her. I had nothing to offer. I hadn't even brought her museum back together. It was like she had said, they had all found me. I wasn't an actor here. I wasn't an agent.

  What did I have to give?

  "Once there was a man," I began randomly. "A man who . . . was in charge of lighting all the stars every evening. They were lanterns, hanging from a boat that had been turned upside down. That had crashed a long time ago. But no one remembered, and he had to light the lanterns every night."

  She paused, her bare shoulders white as distant mountains.

  "And he did this for as long as he could remember. Alone each night, climbing the hull of the wrecked ship, kindling each wick with a long taper. Every morning the wicks would burn low and the Sun would rise again, and every evening he would climb the long, cold planks of the ship to light them."

  The wind was moving her back toward me, but not in a straight line. She curved off to one side, or I was curving around her. Straight lines were impossible in the Blur.

  "And one night when the Moon was high," I continued, grabbing at words that kept trying to scatter. It had been easier when she was turned away, but now her eyes were bright and locked on mine. "One night he noticed something he had never seen before. In the moonlight he saw that the old, wrecked ship held a figurehead. A statue, carved up at the front of the ship. The, uh . . . the prow."