Landslayer's Law

by Tom Deitz

  Another sip of wine found David staring dully at the shining tarmac, listening to the pattering susurration of the rain—hovering on the ragged fringe of slumber. Almost he returned to bed, for the breeze had taken a colder tack that made him shiver, as though someone had opened a door on the arctic north and admitted a blast of December.

  He did shiver when he thought of that, for sometimes that actually happened—almost literally. Sometimes doors did open to other places, other worlds—Worlds, rather—that overlay his own. He’d seen them. Been there. Walked their meads and meadows with a fair number of his friends, and made friends of a sort there as well. Tomorrow was Midsummer’s Day, too; a day born in part to celebrate those other folk.

  But a door to there shouldn’t have opened now. Not here, not in downtown Athens. Not if all was right with the World Walls. The last time that had occurred was two autumns back, when he, Alec, and Aikin were engaged in their annual ritual hunt. That had precipitated yet another in a seemingly endless series of adventures among those other Worlds.

  This was Athens. Downtown Athens. Athens of concrete and steel. An Athens which, if anything, should be burning holes into that other place.

  The breeze grew colder, and with it came a spicy scent, as of exotic flowers. But with it also came a too familiar, too ominous burning in his eyes. He stiffened abruptly, combing the striated shadows with his gaze, seeking…what? Movement, probably, or mass where there had been none. And then he saw. A figure—young, by its slightness; male, by the width of the shoulders—emerging from the recessed doorway next to Barnett’s. A figure inhumanly pale, clad in a preposterously dagged cloak the color of a stormy night. The figure glanced around furtively, then froze as though startled and lifted his head to stare straight across the street to where David sat sag-mouthed at an open window. Teeth flashed in a scornful smile, and then the youth raised one hand in a mocking salute, turned, and was gone: a swirl of darkness in a deeper gloom.

  David simply gaped, too stunned to react more overtly. And was still sitting there seconds—or minutes—later, when that same darkness that had received the figure suddenly fractured again, to spit out a small, pale shape who stumbled a half-dozen paces before coming to a shivering stop on the empty, sodden walk.

  Boy, David guessed tentatively, from the clothes: jeans, sneakers, T-shirt, and baseball cap worn backward. Eight or nine, by the size.

  And dry, he realized an instant later, shuddering all over again, the more so because the boy was simply standing there, shaking and getting soaked. Obviously the kid was in shock.

  David’s first impulse was to call someone—but that would disturb Liz, nevermind the quizzing he might have to endure. His second was to go down himself, retrieve the kid, and try to get someone in the Grill to take charge.

  He was spared either action by an Athens Police cruiser, which eased around the corner from Clayton to turn down College. Fortunately (or maybe not, depending on what it portended), the boy didn’t run, even when the Crown Vic angled toward him. Nor did he react when the car stopped, a uniformed woman got out, spoke briefly (and apparently inconclusively) to the lad, then whisked him into the back seat and drove away.

  David exhaled his anxiety in one long hiss, and drank the remainder of the wine to the dregs. One crisis averted—he hoped. If he was lucky, it might not even have been a crisis, not of the sort he’d dreaded. Optimally, he’d read about it in the Banner Herald the following afternoon. No way, though, any article could reveal more than a shadow of the truth; no way it would—or could—say that the nameless figure who had left that very human child standing shocked and shivering on a city sidewalk was not what most folks would have called human.

  Another half-glass of wine killed the bottle, and that plus fatigue and the ungodliness of the hour made him sleepy all over again. Liz’s body warm against his back, he drifted off, pondering how he’d spend the next few days distrusting shadows.

 

  Chapter IV: Rude Awakening

  (Athens, Georgia—Friday, June 20—early morning)

  Something was gnawing Scott’s nose.

  Something with very sharp teeth, a musky odor, and which, though it weighed almost nothing at all, still managed to muster sufficient mass to be annoying when that mass pressed untrimmed claws into the bare skin of his hairless belly. He batted at it drowsily, provoking a scratchy arc of pain across his chest. Another swat—which connected more firmly—prompted those teeth to snare a nostril and dig in.

  “Goddamn, Marsh! What the fuck is with you?” he grumbled, as he brought both hands to bear on the normally placid ferret that had elected to play surrogate alarm clock. One hand lifted the aft end of the persistent creature, the other pried ever so gently at the offended orifice.

  Oh well, he thought grimly, as the critter proved tenacious, maybe it’s time to get a nose ring.

  A final squeeze, and Marsh let go. Scott resisted the urge to instruct the critter on teleportation, and dumped him on the floor instead—which maneuver caused the remaining cover to slide off his legs. Somewhere in the chaos near his head, the for-real alarm clock produced a steady, piercing chime. He fumbled at it—just as the backup arrived with the cavalry, in the form of very loud radio: something especially raucous by Pearl Jam, if his ears were still functioning right. A well-aimed swat silenced the first. A trip across the cluttered bedroom in the Toombs Avenue apartment would likewise have negated the latter, had his feet not become ensnarled in an unlikely combination of rumpled sheets and irate, leg-climbing mustelid and sprawled him lengthwise on the floor. The Pearl Jam succumbed to an incredibly irritating local Mitsubishi commercial, and that did it.

  Regaining his feet by the expedient of climbing up the front of a bookcase, Scott finally found the radio, thwacked the OFF button hard enough to rattle the dishes in the adjoining kitchen, and managed to secure the ferret just before it invaded the no-man’s-land inside the more occupied leg of his purple satin boxer shorts.

  Scott paused for a moment, winded from the fall and subsequent exertions, and no more than one-third awake in spite of all that, raised the ferret scruffwise to eye level, and regarded it speculatively. “I have a garbage disposal,” he hissed through fine white teeth. “And a flush toilet. Hear my words, O beast, and amend thy ways!”

  The ferret twitched its nose; then, as if bored, yawned and closed its eyes.

  “Beast!” Scott growled again in disgust, and set it on the bed, then stumbled through the crockery chaos of the kitchen into the bath.

  Fifteen minutes later he was clean if not quite dry, and fifteen after that, was bageled once, coffeed twice, but still unshod.

  At exactly eight o’clock, he slouched out the front door of the old blue-and-white house, half the upstairs of which he rented, and climbed into the black Mercury Monarch his one-time roommate, Jay Madison, had entrusted to him on that same roommate’s wedding day. Where Jay was now, he had no idea, save that it was clearly not Athens and he almost certainly wasn’t having to endure either nose-piercing alarm clocks or pernickety major professors.

  The Monarch, alas, failed to start, and though Scott had a backup ten-speed, he feared for the second time that day, that he was doomed.

  Doomed, because, though he’d worked a good chunk of the night on the latest batch of Landsats, and had actual hard copy as proof, he had not, in fact, completed all he’d promised, courtesy of that distractingly screwy anomaly in Sullivan Cove.

  And though slighting Rabun County had seemed a viable option at somewhere between one and two AM, the reason for that omission did not seem as workable in the brighter light of day. Even worse, he’d crashed (around three—having stopped at Jittery Joe’s for a cappuccino) intending to arise early, finish Rabun before anyone else arrived, and leave the results on Green’s desk before the Great Man sailed in. That way, they wouldn’t have to actually meet. That way, too, Green would neither be in a position to chide him about his unfinished dissertation, nor present him with more time-consuming t
asks.

  Trouble was, he’d forgotten to reset the alarms—and had just lost another crucial fifteen minutes fiddling with the stupid car.

  Which in no way got him off the hook with Dr. Green, who always showed up spot-on at 8:30.

  His only hope now, was to reach the lab ASAP, avoid observation if possible, unearth last night’s efforts, and drape his head and arms atop them, as though feigning sleep. If he was lucky—luckier than he’d been so far today—Green himself would find him there when he didn’t show for his scheduled audience, and he could pretend to have just awakened. That way he could appear to be super-conscientious, while still having an excuse for botching the assignment.

  Of course it still meant he’d have to deal with Green, but that was unavoidable.

  “Bloody hell!” he spat, as he turned the bike down College Avenue, aiming toward East Broad. And then, as though awakened by that sincere, if ineffective, curse, another phrase popped into his mind.

  A name rather: one he’d heard Myra toss around now and then, and most of the so-called MacTyrie Gang as well.

  Bloody Bald.

  That mountain which showed on some Landsats but not others, and on no geological chart whatever, was called Bloody Bald. Which meant that the locals, at least, knew it existed; otherwise, it would still be unnamed.

  Well, maybe. Sasquatches had names—terms, at any rate—as did unicorns and yetis, but he hadn’t seen George Page expounding on either on Nature.

  All of which, in spite of a temperature already in the low eighties, gave him a chill.

  At which point a pouty-looking brunette in a white BMW convertible changed lanes right in front of him, and the resulting adrenaline surge and subsequent shout of anger washed all other concerns clean away—

  —Until five minutes later, when he found himself confronting the gray, magnolia-fronted slab of the GGS Building.

  Please God, I will go to church for the rest of the year if You will make me invisible for fifteen seconds now, he prayed, as he dashed up the granite steps.

  And I promise to be nice to every Jehovah’s Witness who ventures by, he added, as he achieved the lower foyer still unmarked.

  If his sudden change of luck (or divine intervention) persisted, he might even make it up the central stairs, around the globe at the top, and down to the lab as planned.

  Holding his breath and trying to look neither furtive nor five years older than the surrounding underclass crew, he ascended to Foyer, Level Two. Miraculously, the coast was still clear: no one in sight with even vaguely gray hair, never mind as much as Green sported.

  Around the globe now, and right down the hall (ducking below window level of Green’s office in transit), and he’d attain the Promised Land.

  “Thank you again, Lord,” he breathed, as, beyond hope, he scored the door to the lab, already fishing in his pocket for his key. The lights were on. He wondered if he’d left them that way.

  “Ah, Mr. Gresham!” a voice drawled as he eased in. “I was wondering when you’d happen by. How would you like to join me for breakfast?”

  “Uh…uh, sure…sir,” Scott mumbled helplessly, as his major professor unfolded all six-plus feet of his lanky, Texas-bred frame from the lab stool on which he’d been sitting, and ushered his white-faced acolyte out the door.

  Chapter V: Reunion

  (Athens, Georgia—Friday, June 20—early morning)

  “God, I hate makin’ decisions,” David mumbled from beneath the pillow he’d moments before crammed over his eyes to shut out the morning light. He punctuated the complaint with a yawn and a languid stretch, then mashed the floppy mass deeper into his sockets with one hand, while the other roamed down between the sheet and his own bare skin to scratch an itch that had awakened along his side.

  Another hand met his there: softer and smaller-boned. It twined with his for a moment, then reached lower still. His breath caught as it found a certain something. “And what decision might that be, lad, that you’d be havin’ to make?” Liz murmured in a bogus, but very…arousing brogue.

  “Whether to drag my butt off to study or pass the mornin’ in more pleasant pursuits.”

  “Acing our finals is all we’d better pursue right now, growing boy!” And with that the hand withdrew, to linger at pouncing distance on his thigh.

  “It’s not the pursuit I’m concerned about, it’s the arrival.”

  At which point memory overtook reality and David recalled that he had, in fact, witnessed something fairly disturbing during the wee hours, which demanded further investigation; and that said experience was, by implication, downright sobering. He was trying to school his smug, sleepy grin into a scowl (having his balls stalked by a creeping hand didn’t help), when he noticed two things together.

  First, it was daylight, and more to the point, bright daylight of the kind that proclaimed cloudless heavens—a notion he confirmed by a squinting glance toward the skylight.

  Second, someone had just rapped sufficiently hard on the door to rattle the stained glass pane.

  “Shit!” he spat, as he his brain filled with visions of uniformed men come to grill him about shell-shocked kids who appeared from nowhere in the middle of the night. Then, as his gaze sought frantically for his clothes: “Who is it?”

  Nothing.

  Nothing….

  Another round of knocks, followed by—no other way to describe it—a sort of raspy moan.

  “Somebody looking for Myra,” Liz yawned. “Go see.”

  “Land shark,” David muttered back, and rose—to discover to his dismay that Liz had claimed squatter’s rights on the sheet, the coverlet had gone AWOL entirely, the towel on the helm was soaked, and that both his skivvies and his jeans (which had wound up under the armored armature) had played sponge to the ensuing puddle.

  Another knock—raspier than before—and a muffled thump.

  “Great! David grumbled. “Just great!” He grabbed a fringed silk scarf from the back of a cut-velvet chair and whipped it around his hips sarongwise as he stumbled toward the door. Unfortunately, it didn’t meet, and he had to hold the gap closed with one hand. “Who is it?” he demanded.

  No reply. But he could certainly hear breathing. Odd breathing, actually. He considered retrieving a sword from the remarkable stash of edged weapons stuffed into a nail keg by the entrance, and greeting the persistent visitor armed. Only that would either require three hands or abandoning his sketchy modesty. He settled for visually marking the likeliest candidate, then shooting the dead bolt and cracking the door just enough to peer around, while lurking discreetly behind it.

  He came face to face with an alligator.

  An honest-to-god Alligator mississipiensis standing clumsily erect on its little hind legs to stare him (at foot-long nose length) straight in the eye.

  Not stuffed, plastic, cardboard, nor papier mache.

  A for real and true, living, breathing alligator!

  Which had just sort of…leered at him.

  It was difficult to say which happened first. He screeched in a most unmanly manner and tried to slam the door. Liz (who had line of sight to observe both him and portal) screamed with unrestrained enthusiasm. His hands went numb. The scarf dropped—and the ’gator slumped forward against the door.

  Since the critter was at least as tall as David and had physics (and hinges that flexed inward) on its side, the door flew open. David staggered back. Liz clutched the sheet to her chin and whimpered. And the ’gator (now supine on the antique prayer rug before the door) rolled onto its back, kicked its legs in the air—and appeared to be trying to giggle.

  David—stark naked again, courtesy of his own clumsiness—stared at it aghast from behind the cut-velvet chair where he had taken shelter. And then he noticed something glittering in one half-closed paw, and his eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  The ’gator regarded him with one slit-pupiled yellow eye—and winked.

  David frowned. A surge of anger pulsed through him—and not at being awakened—ev
en as a certain doubt fought it down. “You perhaps think this is funny?” he growled, eyeing the supine reptile.

  The reptile winked again.

  David emerged from behind the chair, drew himself up to his full height, and fumbled one of the swords from the nail keg, with which he prodded the unwelcome visitor in its leathery solar plexus. “Shall we try for crocodile tears?”

  The alligator suddenly looked very contrite, then closed its eyes. The paw-with-shiny-object slowly curled closed.

  Abruptly, the tail retracted. The limbs lengthened, the snout grew stubbier, the skin smoothed. Black hair sprouted on the skull and groin as the beast acquired shoulders, hips, and a waist. And then everything seemed to twist upon itself, and David suddenly found himself confronting a handsome young Native American exactly as bare-assed as he, save that he was standing, and the visitor sitting neatly (and modestly) at his feet.

  “Fargo, you asshole!” he roared.

  “White ’Possum, ditto!” the other snickered through what was possibly the silliest grin David had ever seen. David found the scarf, rewrapped it, and sank down on the arm of the chair. The visitor smirked. David smirked too. Then giggled. Then guffawed. A pillow sailed in his direction from the bed. Then another. A glance that way showed Liz, still sheet-clad, fishing around on the floor for the T-shirt they had so happily abandoned the previous night. She found his instead (it was larger anyway), pulled it on, located her panties, and thus arrayed joined them by the door, pausing only to retrieve something from the landing outside. A pile of clothing, a backpack, and a drum case as it evolved, the former of which she deposited atop the visitor’s feet imperiously. “Nekkid savages are only slightly more welcome than nekkid crocodilians.”