Billy: Messenger of Powers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  “Nothing?” yelled Billy back at her. “This crazy woman just said she’s going to kill me!” This sent him into a new frenzy, trying to get himself loose though he already knew that he could not escape from the plants.

  “Let me explain!” she said, moving near him. She looked at Ivy, who watched with obvious concern on her face. “Ease up a bit, Ivy,” snapped Mrs. Russet.

  Ivy nodded, and though the vines didn’t loosen at all, they became softer somehow, as though made of steel wire wrapped in soft cotton. Billy’s struggles slowed a bit, though he still jerked spasmodically, his body refusing to just give up.

  “It’s okay, kid,” whispered Vester. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” The young man smiled reassuringly. “What would I say to your dad if I did?”

  Billy was not reassured. “Oh, well, since you put it that way. I’m sure that my dying would be real embarrassing for you. That would really put my death in perspective. Thanks a heap.”

  “Be silent, Mr. Jones!” snapped Mrs. Russet, in her most no-nonsense you-are-walking-on-thin-ice-and-if-you-don’t-behave-yourself-right-now-you-are-looking-at-extra-homework voice. Billy, trained to perfection by two months of exposure to that tone of voice, instantly stopped yelling and went stock still. Mrs. Russet nodded. “I will explain what’s going to happen. Whether you want to or not, it is going to happen, but you won’t have to worry about being killed.” She glanced around the room. “Almost everybody here has been killed at least once, for one reason or another, and you don’t see us any the worse for wear.”

  Billy said the best and brightest thing he could think to: “Huh?”

  “Remember how I said that confusion causes some people to Glimmer?” Billy nodded. “Well,” Mrs. Russet continued, “that’s nothing to what happens when they die. When you die, all kinds of things happen in your brain. And those things trigger the Glimmer in anyone who has any potential at all to be a Power.”

  “Not just a Glimmer,” interjected Tempus, the jolly fat man still looking like he was thinking of a particularly good joke and was just waiting for the right moment to share it. “More like a Great Big Blaze.”

  Mrs. Russet nodded. “You’ve heard of out of body experiences? Where someone’s heart stops or they die on an operating table but are resuscitated?” Billy nodded. “What generally happens to them?”

  “Something about a light,” he answered.

  Mrs. Russet nodded. “Right. Some people think the light is God or angels. Other people think that it’s just random electrical charges in the dying person’s brain. But what it really is—though I’m not saying that God or angels aren’t involved in the process—is that person’s inner potential breaking out. It’s the grand-daddy of all Glimmers.”

  She looked at Billy. “Do you want to hear more? Can Ivy let you up, or does she need to keep you wrapped up in weeds?”

  “They’re not weeds, they’re—” began Ivy, but silenced herself when Mrs. Russet glanced angrily at her. “Never mind,” she said.

  “Well?” asked Mrs. Russet.

  Billy thought for a moment. On the one hand, he wanted very much to bolt off the table and run like a frightened horse. On the other hand, he was now terribly curious.

  And besides, he was in the middle of a big basket hanging from the Earthtree. Where was he going to go if he did manage to get off the table?

  “I’ll listen,” he said.

  “Good.” Mrs. Russet nodded at Ivy, and immediately the vines unwrapped themselves from Billy’s quivering frame, disappearing back into the leafy floor below the table.

  “We need to find out if you Glimmer, Billy,” said Mrs. Russet. “And the only sure-fire way to do that, is to be there when you die. Unfortunately, we don’t know when that will happen naturally, so we have to…help the process.”

  Billy stifled the urge to jump up and try to run again.

  “How do you do that?” he asked in a small, frightened voice.

  “Easy, buddy,” whispered Vester. His kind eyes looked softly at Billy, that deep spark glinting from within them, touching Billy with a feeling of warmth. “We won’t let anything bad happen. I’ll watch out for you.”

  “Just so,” said Tempus with a smile. The old man’s smile was so infectious that Billy couldn’t help but crack a bit of a smile himself.

  “So what’s going to happen?” asked Billy.

  Mrs. Russet looked around her at the other Powers in the room. “Eva is a Black. She bends Death. She is going to stop your heart. Just for a second!” she added hurriedly, clearly seeing Billy poised to jump again. “The instant she does it, we’ll have our answer, and these other four,” she gestured to Ivy, Vester, Wade, and Tempus, “will make sure you come right back. Vester is a Power of Fire. He’ll make sure your heart starts beating, he’ll conjure the spark that we all need to live. Wade will bend the Water in and around you to insure that your blood flows and your tissue lives. Tempus will breathe the Wind of life into you. And Ivy, as a Power who is intimately tied to Life itself, will guide and direct them.” Mrs. Russet looked deep into Billy’s eyes. “You will come back, Billy Jones. I promise you.”

  The logical part of Billy’s mind wanted to scream out. To holler “Forget it, lady!” and then kick and punch and scratch and bite anything that came near him until he somehow escaped this crazy place. But the logical part of his mind was no longer in charge. In fact, it hadn’t been in charge since Billy had seen the blue dragon. Only his instincts remained, and, somehow, they whispered to him that Mrs. Russet was telling the truth. That she could be trusted. That he would be safe.

  “All right,” he whispered. He lay back on the table, shivering involuntarily. The shiver turned into a shudder as Eva Black moved close to him. She licked her lips as though savoring a favorite memory, then reached down, and touched his chest. At the same time, Vester put one hand into the open candle flame at the head of the table, and lay his other hand on the crown of Billy’s head. Wade, at the bottom of the table, put one hand in the bowl of water and lay his other hand on Billy’s leg.

  As they did this, Ivy and Tempus closed their eyes. The entire room shuddered, and seemed to pulse with barely-contained life.

  Billy looked at Mrs. Russet. “I’m scared,” he whispered, so quietly that he wasn’t even sure she would be able to hear it.

  “I know,” she whispered back. She reached out and took his hand. “I know, young man.”

  “Touching,” said Eva Black mockingly. Then her eyes flicked to Billy’s. They were already brown, but as he watched, they turned a deep, dark black. Billy was reminded of the eyes of a shark: soulless and empty, driven by a search for one thing, and one thing only. Blood.

  Then there was a sharp prickling at his fingers. It felt like a nest of ants walking across them. The feeling moved to his arms, then swarmed into his legs and feet, circling his chest. Then, at last, the sensation crawled into his chest, and burrowed into his heart.

  Billy took a great, shuddering breath. Then breathed out.

  He felt his eyes close, and then knew no more.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  In Which Billy Lives, and becomes the Object of Prophecy…

  Flashes.

  Images.

  He heard a scream.

  Darkness.

  Then another scream, a hoarse whisper: “He is coming! He is returning!”

  Darkness.

  Flashes.

  At last, Billy’s eyes fluttered, then slowly opened. His eyelids felt like they each had a small piano strapped to them. He couldn’t hold them open long enough to focus on anything, so they crashed shut again.

  He tried to sit up, but couldn’t.

  Gradually, he became aware of a cacophony of voices, as though a thousand people were all talking at the same time.

  He tried again to open his eyes. This time it worked better: the pianos had been replaced with small sacks of lead. It was still hard to keep his eyes open, but Billy managed.

  What happened? he th
ought. Then: Oh, yes. I died.

  He still couldn’t see anything but fuzzy shapes, still couldn’t make out any individual sounds in the angry symphony sounding around him.

  Am I still dead? he wondered.

  But no, he didn’t think so. Billy wasn’t exactly sure what staying dead would feel like, but he was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be so loud and blurry.

  Gradually, his eyes managed to focus.

  He wasn’t in the Earthtree anymore. Or at least, he certainly wasn’t in the part of it that he had been in before dying. The beautifully woven room was gone. Billy now found himself curled up in the corner of what looked like a tiny cave. He didn’t know where it was, but could feel the weight of the earth above him and somehow intuited that, wherever he was, it was somewhere deep and unknown.

  The sounds Billy had been hearing started to sort themselves out, gradually, as Billy looked around. The cave had no light bulbs or anything like that, but there was light. Billy looked closely at the wall nearest him and saw that there was some kind of moss-like plant coating the stone. The plant glowed dimly, casting a pale blue incandescence around the cave that allowed Billy to make out what was happening nearby.

  Mrs. Russet, Ivy, and Vester stood in another part of the cave, looking down on something. Billy couldn’t see what it was, at first, but then made out an arm cloaked in a swirl of air, and knew it must be Tempus. The four “Dawnwalkers” were here with him. Billy felt relieved at that.

  Wade—the Power of Water—and the cruelly grinning Mrs. Eva Black were nowhere to be seen. Billy felt even more relieved about that.

  Billy oozed slowly to his feet. His whole body felt as though someone had set him on fire, rolled him in dirt to put out the fire, and then set him on fire again. He ached with every miniscule movement of his mangled muscles. A small groan escaped him as he hobbled toward the small group in the middle of the cave.

  The three Powers huddled around Tempus looked up for a moment, but only a moment, then leaned back over the prostrate old man. Billy, afraid to say anything, tiptoed closer to the group until he was standing right behind Mrs. Russet, and could see what they were all looking at.

  It was Tempus, Billy knew. But the jovial fellow barely looked like himself. Gone was the jolly grin and the amused and playful eyes. Now, the old man was crumpled in a withered pile, his arms and legs twitching as though he had put his finger in a light socket while taking a bath. Tempus also looked gray, not the living grayness of the storm he had first emerged from, but a cracked, bleached gray that seemed to bespeak of coming death. The old man looked used up.

  Tempus’s mouth was moving, a frantic whisper coming from his lips. “He is coming, he is returning, he is returning, he is here…,” he whispered, the words coming over and over from him.

  Billy barely knew Tempus, so was surprised at how concerned he was. Even though Billy guessed he had himself been dead very recently, and even though he felt like he should be concerned about that—he imagined that dying, even for a little while, might have some sort of long-term effect on a person—Billy found himself forgetting what had happened to him and only worrying about the stricken old Power who lay in a huddle in the middle of the cave.

  “He is coming, he is returning, he is coming…,” Tempus kept whispering. The sound was haunted, fragmented. It sounded less like Tempus than like someone speaking through Tempus. As though a ghost had inhabited the man’s body and was forcing him to speak. And hurting him terribly in the process.

  “What happened?” asked Billy.

  Vester glanced at him. “We were going to ask you that, kid.”

  “What do you mean?” Billy’s confusion rose again. But he didn’t have a chance to ask anything else because at that moment, Tempus cried out in a loud voice.

  “HE IS HERE!”

  The old man’s body convulsed, every muscle contracting at once, then just as suddenly his body went limp. Tempus’s eyes closed, and as they did the swirling wind that had surrounded him dissipated.

  Billy was surprised to see that underneath that wind Tempus had been wearing a pair of long shorts and a disturbingly bright Hawaiian shirt. Not the kind of thing you would expect a Power of the Wind to be wearing.

  But then, Billy didn’t know what he would expect a Power of the Wind to wear, either. Then he realized that the shirt’s Hawaiian landscape was shifting as he watched. The green trees were waving in the wind, the ocean behind them was lapping in and out. It was like watching a Tempus-shaped television where someone had adjusted the colors to look like a Piñata had just collided with a field of brightly-colored flowers.

  Billy pried his eyes from the moving vista of Tempus’s shirt, looking back to the Gray Power’s face. For a second, Billy was sure that the old man was dead. But then Tempus’s eyes blinked open, tears running down his cheeks as though he had been staring too long at the sun. “What happened?” he croaked. “Last thing I remember was Eva stopping the boy’s heart….” His words drifted off. “Where are we?”

  “In a mountain, or under one.” answered Mrs. Russet. She paused a moment, then added, “I think.”

  “Huh?” asked Tempus. Billy was surprised at how good it felt to have someone else not know what was going on for a change. Tempus clambered awkwardly to his feet, Vester steadying the old man’s arm as he did so. “We’re in a mountain?”

  Ivy nodded. “When Billy died, the Earthtree just…just….”

  “It ejected us,” said Mrs. Russet. Tempus looked like he still didn’t understand, so Mrs. Russet elaborated. “The tree put us down, and then did its best to squash us.”

  “Bah!” Tempus replied. “Poppycock. Tummyrot. No green thing would try to harm us with Ivy in our midst. She wouldn’t let it happen.”

  With that, Ivy let out a strangled cry, hiding her face in her hands as though ashamed. “It’s true!” she wailed. “The branches were falling everywhere, all over the place. Vester had to…to….” She couldn’t even finish the thought.

  “I had to burn the branches before they hit us,” finished Vester. He touched Ivy’s arm softly. “You know I didn’t want to, Ivy.”

  The young/old woman nodded, but didn’t take her hands from her face.

  Tempus harrumphed as though unsure what to say next. He looked around. “And where are the Darksiders?”

  “Gone,” said Vester flatly. “Eva had her hand on that nasty beetle broach of hers before we even touched the ground. It must have been Imbued. She grabbed Wade, and they had Transported away before you could say, ‘help,’ or ‘take us with you.’”

  “Not a great surprise there,” said Tempus. “Eva always has been most interested in her own personal safety and comfort.” No one disagreed with him. “Well,” he finally said. “At least we saved Billy.” He managed a wink at Billy. “Told you we wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” Then he looked around at the cave. “And I see that Lumilla had us swallowed in Earth to protect us from whatever it was that was happening up there, and,” he pointed at the glowing moss in the cave, “Ivy has taken care to give us light.” He bowed that old-fashioned courtly bow of his, wobbling only a little at the end. “My thanks for your consideration, ladies.”

  Mrs. Russet and Vester shared a glance. Billy could see that Tempus noticed. “What?” asked the Gray Power. “Did I say something funny? I certainly hope so. Could use a laugh right now.”

  Vester and Mrs. Russet finally looked back at him. “No, nothing funny,” said Mrs. Russet. “But you were wrong on all counts. I’m not the one who made the ground swallow us up. And Ivy didn’t make the Glowmoss grow.

  “And as for Billy,” Mrs. Russet looked at Billy with an expression that he couldn’t really make out. It was as though she were looking at someone she didn’t know…and perhaps didn’t want to know. “We didn’t save him.”

  “But…but he’s here,” protested Tempus.

  “We know, Windwalker,” said Vester. Billy noted that the fireman didn’t do much talking. But when he did, everyone li
stened. Billy knew that some people talked to hear themselves speak, others talked to fill the silence that seemed to frighten them, and still others only spoke when they had something to say that would actually communicate or accomplish something. It seemed Vester was one of the last group, which was unusual for someone as young as the fireman was. Billy liked that, and it made him appreciate Vester even more. “But none of us,” he nodded around the room, “saved Billy. Eva stopped his heart, and that was the very instant where everything happened. The world seemed to go crazy, the tree started shuddering. We were all spewed out of the Gleaning room, and you were knocked out on the way down. Then the tree tried to crush us—sorry, Ivy,” he interjected as the statement brought a new round of wails from the Green Power’, “and I did my best to protect us. But we were going to be killed, when all of a sudden….”

  “What?” asked Tempus. “When all of a sudden what?”

  “We ended up here,” finished Vester.

  “But how?” demanded Tempus. “How did we end up here?”

  “None of us can quite figure that out,” said Mrs. Russet. “And we didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, since you started screaming right about then.”

  “And Billy? Who saved him? If Eva stopped his heart, and none of us were able to do our jobs, then he should be….”

  Mrs. Russet shrugged as Vester moved to hug Ivy. She had stopped actively crying, but her eyes were still damp. She pulled a soft leaf off of the greenery that still covered her and used it to dab at her eyes.

  “We don’t know how Billy was saved, either,” said Mrs. Russet. “We suddenly found ourselves in this place, and Billy was with us, unconscious but alive.”

  “Then Eva must have made some mistake. She must have killed him wrong,” said Tempus.

  Vester shook his head. “No, she did her job all right. I felt the spark leave him right as everything fell apart.” He looked at Billy. “The kid was a goner.”

  Billy felt his knees buckle. It was one thing to have agreed to be killed, but he found that having people talk about it as actually having occurred was a whole different experience. Mrs. Russet managed to catch him before he fell over.