by S G Dunster
Her voice was unusual. High, musical. There was a slight accent. Melodic, fluty with the consonants. Something Scandinavian, I thought.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“The same place as you. And pulled here the same way you were. By people who claim to love us. What a lovely gift, yes? What gifts they give us, bringing us to be broken and kept alive.”
I stared at her. “What do you— “
“Logan,” Lil’s voice carried across the meadow.
Jenny’s eyes narrowed, her mouth hardened, and she darted back into the shadows, fading completely.
I turned. Lil was running through the grass. “What the holy Hannah?” She knelt by me, by my poor muddy father. “Why, Logan? Seriously?”
Strange. I had forgotten about him. Here he was. My dad, or a strange thing that looked like my dad.
“I don’t know. I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t . . . make it . . . him, go away.”
“You have to think of something else in his place. I told you. You can’t un-imagine something. It’s too fixed in your mind now. You’ll keep thinking of it, of him there, if you’re trying not to think of him there. You have to think of something else in his place. Something that will take your mind off . . . that will engage you so much that you don’t think of him anymore.”
I glared at her.
She shrugged.
I put my hand on his head. It was warm, and the hair was thin on top. Fragile. My heart was stuck, like something thick surrounded it, making the beats painful. “What would I replace my dad with?” I retorted.
“I don’t know, a junior bacon cheeseburger?” Lil shrugged again. “That’s not really your dad. Your dad’s still in Homestead on Yellowstone and Bridge. You just made a copy of him—a different him, because you were thinking about him too much.” She snorted. “That’s stupid; two of your Dad. Better to have two bacon cheeseburgers. At least that’s useful, and something you like.”
She was right. It didn’t make me happy, having him close, a catatonic father lying in my lap. I didn’t really want him here if it was real, and if it was a delusion, it was just making me more scared. More ill.
Think of something in his place, I told myself. Something I want here. Not something I don’t want here.
I closed my eyes again and thought hard.
Safe. More than anything else, I wanted to feel safe right now. What would make me feel the safest?
I’d been studying about William the Conqueror lately, playing around with ideas for a story. I’d looked at so many diagrams, so many cutaways, read so many descriptions of medieval castles, it didn’t take much. Something covered my dad. Square granite boulders, set without mortar.
The weight in my lap lifted, and the ground hardened under me.
Stone.
I stood. The floor spread, great cold slabs of it, in a huge circle around us. Walls rose up high, high, far beyond the swaying treetops. And around us, the trees changed, shifting, reforming into a spiky forest full of pines.
The roof grew over us, blocking out the sight of trees, surrounding us in stone.
“This’ll attract attention,” Lil muttered, peering around at the circular stone space, towering fifty feet above us. Stone steps led up along the inside curve of wall in a spiral, leading to the stories above—platforms that stretched partway across the walls, leaving space to see the flat, circular ceiling fifty feet up. Banners streamed down the free wall like bright ribbons in my favorite colors, green and blue. The floor was strewn with straw and herbs. There was a long wooden table lined with chairs, and a stone fireplace that could fit two cows, roasted whole, blazing with a fire taller than me.
It was, in every particular, exactly as I’d imagined: a combination of all the images I’d pictured while reading about castles, or thinking about stories I’d like to write about castles. Stories I did write.
I stood there, feeling about as significant as a flea, and at the same time, overwhelmed completely by the fact that this thing . . .
It came from me.
I started walking around, touching things: the stone wall, slimy and cold and spotted with lichen in places, just as I’d always thought the insides of these old keeps must have been; the smooth worn wood of the table; the straw piled on the ground releasing the sharp scent of rosemary as I stepped through.
“No people?” Lil said, finally. “You’re always about the characters. That’s your thing.”
“I . . .” I hesitated, as more images grew in my mind.
A great, tangle-haired bull of a man wearing a sharp-pronged metal helmet, forearms and face red as sausages, pounding a table overflowing with carcasses and hard-crusted bread and just-churned butter, his breath winey enough to curl my nose hairs.
Men and women all seated at the table, wearing rough-woven wool, bright dyed and stained with grease and blood. Women with fat breasts heaping up from their low-cut, over-tight tops, blond and rosy and drunk; the men dandling them on their laps, laughing and roaring and ripping meat with their teeth, flinging bones under the table for a snarling pack of dogs to fight over. Ratty-haired children with cloth bands around their foreheads, nibbling at bread, watching, wide-eyed, as their father—
Yes, their father. There at the head of the table. Aelfur, the father of my Saxon kingdom. Robust, loud, determined, sturdy. Not like my own father at all.
No. I didn’t want to go back to that. I forced the thought of Dad away and dwelt on the loud, smelly, colorful crowd in front of me.
“That’s more like it.” Lil wrinkled her nose. “Come on. You’ve got to be hungry.”
I sat down near the end of the table opposite Aelfur, just as he yelled to a woman serving him from a large clay pitcher. “Upperthetop!”
Dark red fluid splashed into his goblet, chunks of fermented fruit plopping into it as it poured. He took it, sucked it down and gave a huge guttural sigh of satisfaction. “And who’re ye?” he demanded suddenly, thrusting a meaty finger in my direction. “Yer’ve no stomach inye. Eat up. Nobody goes hungry’o the huse’a Aelfur the Hairy.”
Aelfur the Hairy.
That was the jokey name I’d given him. He was meant to be funny. Well, I made him funny in my stories—cliché to the point of clowning—mostly because I was ashamed of the fact that I wanted to write such clichéd stories about lusty Saxons. Hunts. Ravished maidens who begged for more ravishing. Bloody, roaring wars with puny, down-mustached, hollow-eyed Norman lords.
Back in the real world, in my dim, musty little room, I’d written epics of Aelfur the Hairy. Dialogue, plots that were more tangles of self-congratulatory description than stories. There were dozens of pictures and sketches, some I did, some done by Lil. It was easy to make him real. I didn’t have to choose details anymore. I didn’t have to shape his character or think about what he’d do. He just was. He flowed onto my page, his distinct, hairy, ebullient, murderous personality fully formed.
And like Athena leapt from the head of Zeus, he was right here in front of me.
It had happened. The dream any storyteller desires. This friend I knew intimately. The thing I’d created. Here he was, breathing of his own free will. Here he was, seemingly separate and apart from me. As real outside of me as he’d been inside of me.
“Deep breath.” Lil jabbed me with her elbow. “You’re staring like a groupie. Better answer him. If I know Aelfur, he’s likely to chuck an ax at your head for not answering.”
“Y-yes,” I stuttered, raising my voice so I could be heard all the way from my end of the table. My voice echoed, puny and feeble, off the stone walls. “Yes. Pass me a leg-o-mutton, me laird. I’m f—” seeing Lil’s expression I stopped talking and choked back the laugh that wanted to burst out.
“Aye, ye’ve ben a’th’drink already,” Aelfur observed, lifting a hairy red eyebrow. “You’ll b’needin a bed for t’night. Take th’attic.” He gave me a conspiratorial grin, and a slight nod at the busty raven-haired woman sitting at his side, “An’ anthin’ olse
y’like. We’re like t’beset’ b’t Longshanks’ere soon, and I’ll no’ sae no t’another man’a m’shield wall.”
Night? I glanced at Lil, then out the thin, slit-like line of windows in the wall above. Sure enough, the sky was darkening again. Didn’t it rise only a little while ago?
Lil followed my gaze, and her mouth went slack.
Fear.
Odd. Chilling, actually, seeing it on her face. “What?” I asked.
She shook her head, shrugged. “They’re messing with the sky. Someone is. Someone real. Maybe it’s him. The Grey Man.”
“Why would the Grey Man mess with us? Isn’t he supposed to be coming to help us? If he knows where we are, why isn’t he here already?”
Lil gave me a long withering stare and gingerly picked a piece of breast from the half-denuded chicken skeleton sweating on the baked-earth platter closest to us. A lady (I use that term loosely, from the expression on her face) was staring at my bare chest as she gnawed a piece of gristle from the knobby end of a turkey leg. Quickly I made myself a shirt. It ended up being more hairy-tunic than shirt and chafed uncomfortably against my skin.
Lil, in her bright yellow, seemed unconcerned about the way my lairds leered at her. One inched a meaty hand close to her arm. Calmly, she speared it with her elbow. I winced, knowing exactly how painful that pointy bit of bone could be. The laird choked on his mouthful of chicken, spraying it across the table.
“Gross,” Lil muttered, deftly managing her fork. She had scrambled eggs, I noticed.
I decided to eat with the Saxons. I’d made it, after all. The noise was almost unbearable, echoing as it did off the tall stone space. I ate greasy, slightly-spoiled things, pieces of flesh of every sort of animal, drank “wine,” which I’d actually never tasted, so it was more like sparkling, chunky, sour fruit juice on my tongue with a hint of cinnamon and cloves—just what I imagined, and nothing else. The room swayed and got fuzzy around the edges.
“Music,” Aelfur boomed, sitting back in his two-pronged oak-hewn chair. He gave a long resonant belch and grinned gappily, slipping his helmet off his head, letting the octopus-like matts of his hair pour out over his shoulders. He gestured up toward the half-story above us. There were musicians: a woman playing a harp and a man playing some kind of flute. Hollow, mellow noises that had strange chords and medieval-sounding progressions.
“Lil,” I said lazily, “I didn’t know you knew about medieval music.”
She frowned. “I don’t. That’s your thing.”
“But you brought them in here.”
“I didn’t. It’s your castle, Logan.”
I looked up again and froze. The one who was playing the harp. I recognized her.
It was Aspen. Aspen Winters from school. She wore a long white robe that trailed on the floor behind her and fell open over her forearms, bright blue cords banding her slim waist. Her hair fell down over her shoulders in perfect gleaming dark waves, and her pale skin glowed in the shadowy space, sliced through only by slits of light from the window chinks. The curve of her breasts was almost entirely displayed, a few inches of velvet covering the rose of her aureoles, which, help me, I’d imagined. A lot.
Heat crept into my face as Lil raised her eyebrow at me. “Really? Her?”
Had I accidentally made her? I didn’t remember making her . . . . No. I didn’t make her.
“No,” I said.
“Why’d you have to bring her here? I get enough of her in fourth period P.E.”
“I didn’t bring her.”
“She made fun of my legs because I don’t shave them.”
“You should shave them. Mom keeps telling you.”
“She said I should wear training bras. Like she knows.” Lil glared up at the figure. “Look at those little lemon boobs. Whatever.”
“Lil.” I grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a good shake. “I don’t want to talk about Aspen Winters’ boobs. And I didn’t bring her here. Do you think she maybe . . . somehow . . . ?”
It was a strange moment. A stepping into, or in-between, beliefs.
She’d noticed us now, too. Looking up at her. Staring up at her. It was impossible she wouldn’t notice. And now she smiled slowly and walked toward the flight of stairs that curved down the wall toward us.
Lil’s eyes, narrowed to slits, found mine. And then went wide, her mouth opening slightly. “You didn’t bring her here.” There was a hint of anxiety in her voice, very un-Lil-like. “You didn’t make her?”
“No.”
Lil grabbed my arm. “Logan. When they talked to you, when they talked to you on the surface, the wolf, the rook—that day in class, when you hurt Mrs. Sanders—did you tell them about her? Did they see her?”
“What are you talking about?”
She stood, pulling me up with her. “Mrs. Sander’s class. When he—when they—took over Mrs. Sanders. Did you tell them about Aspen?”
“She’s in that class,” I said. “With me. Who took over Mrs. Sanders?” The vision of my teacher’s shifting, changing face filled my thoughts.
Lil swore and flew out of her chair. “Okay. We need to think fast. Think of something . . . big. Something . . . something that’ll— “
“Psst,” A voice hissed from far above.
I tore my gaze away from Aspen, gliding toward us down the stairs and looked up.
It was the girl again. Jenny. She was peering in through one of the narrow window slots that lined the keep walls.
“Don’t let it touch you,” Jenny whispered. “Don’t let it. It’ll suck you hollow.” The music still played, lilting and strange, now.
“Why?” Unlike her, I shouted, because it seemed that, across that distance, she shouldn’t hear me without shouting. How was I hearing her whispers?
“Who are you talking to?” Lil demanded.
I didn’t know what to be more afraid of. I froze, looking from one to the other—Aspen, smooth, wearing the small, self-satisfied smile I’d observed a hundred times in English class and this haggard, grasping thing peering through my window, eyes wide with urgency, watching Aspen come toward me.
Everything pulled me. And now Lil was tugging at my arm. “Just talk to her,” she was saying. “We need to know. I don’t know. Ask— “
I grabbed Lil by the arms and ran backward, away from it—Aspen, and the others, advancing on us in a tide of . . . something.
Dark. Fierce. Rotten.
“Come, boy.” The voice came from Not-Aspen, distorting her mouth, spreading it wide, taking over her face—her face, a black hole. Sucking. Drawing in everything. Bending the room to it. The strange music stole over the room, suddenly overwhelming, suddenly filled with a dozen sizzling overtones and undertones, swelling loud and brassy. I looked around wildly. Who was playing trumpets? There weren’t any trumpets. Not in this keep. Not in Saxon times.
“There aren’t any trumpets,” I stuttered at her, taking several quick steps back, shoving Lil back, too.
“Yoouuuuuu aaaare ssssooo riiiiiiight,” the dark tide answered, the words so distorted I could barely understand them. “Fiiiiiix us, Logan. Puuuuuuut yourself into us. Fiiiiiiix ussssss . . . .”
“No,” I said. Shouted, maybe. “No. Leave. You aren’t a part of this!”
I thought, hard, of a tumble of stone and wood, of a clash of brass and bronze, of a warping of reality, a trap, to suck in all that darkness.
I was shocked when the world twisted in on itself, sucking itself into a dark, throbbing mass, and then went out like a bad light, scattering rays of smoke everywhere. There was a wailing noise, a hundred voices all at once, and things scattered—wisps of darkness, in every direction. I felt one go over me, bringing wind to the hair on my head.
I ducked and held Lil tight.
She didn’t protest, even though I must have been bruising her, holding her so fiercely. There was a great clash, like the sound of symbols, or maybe like one of those oriental gongs, and the walls shook, wavered.
And diss
olved.
“It’s them,” Lil rasped. “It’s them.”
“Who? Them… the Wolf and the— “
“Rook and Wolf,” Lil said. “Rook and Wolf. They’ve found us. They’re trying to take us. Before we get to him. To the Grey Man.”
Things were moving around us still. Mists, shapes. Darkness, a sea of shadows trailing behind Aspen. Her face was now too dark to make out. Her hair, her dress, formed a puddle of black around her as she seeped toward us.
“No. We can’t let them take it. We’ll be done.” Lil’s voice, hissing in my ear, raised the hair on the back of my neck. I could feel her, even if I couldn’t see her, feel her grip on my arm, feel the nails digging into my flesh. “Logan, bring the keep back. Now.”
Something was crashing around us. It sounded like waves, the sea against cliffs.
“Don’t let them tell it!” Lil was shouting now. “Lo, bring your keep back. We can’t . . . we’ve got to hold them off a little longer. Just a little while longer!”
“The keep,” I said, and immediately it began coming back, the idea of that tall building, which was . . .
The haze was making my mind fuzzy.
The shadows whorled around us, flowing across the ground like growing vines, like streams of dark water.
“This,” Lil shouted again, and the circular room grew sharper. As I saw it, I fixed on it: stone walls, curved. Stairs spiraling up the walls. Long table, half-stories. Aelfur and . . .
And Aspen Winters.
And it collected around me, sharpening, wood and stone and earth solidifying. Next to me, Lil, still gripping my arm, had her eyes closed tight and her jaw clenched like she was pushing something heavy.
The noise trickled back to my ears--the laughter. The roars.
The snarling dogs.
The strange, lilting music.
I am truly going mad, I thought. Brain. Let me go.
Please.
Aspen was only a step away now. Watching me with eyes that weren’t hers. Dark, malevolent eyes. I’d seen those before, staring at me from Mrs. Sanders’ face.
Witch, I thought, as her hair swirled, and the face split in an awful smile. She looks like a witch.