“Your uncle said it’s like an ancient love song. I do not have any words of love carved into my soul.”
“Perhaps to the left of your soul?”
He knew from her tone she was smirking beneath that helm of hers.
“Try your heart,” she said.
He turned away from her. But she had made him think. And see things differently. He whipped back toward her. “What if it’s part of your heart? What if you know some of these words better than I?”
“If we’re speaking of love, I am mute,” she assured him.
He groaned, stretched as much as the ropes allowed, and faced forward once more.
“There is a reason you must connect the Pieces of Eight. Otherwise, anyone might do it. But a boy born when you were… in the region you were… this must come from you.”
The boat slowed and men shouted as an island came into view. On that island, a huge tree sat atop a strangely bulbous hill.
Cyrelle motioned with her snout. “The time has come, Garendell.”
“Marnum,” he corrected. “I never knew myself as Garendell. I’m just Marnum, a simple man.”
He had two couplets—four lines, but a song needed a rhythm and tune. He thought of the rhythms he’d encountered on his journey, the beat of the horse’s hooves as he had clung to the belly of the wagon, the spurt of the beast’s blood as it had died, the pace of his own feet on the road. His fingers tapped against his thigh, and he began to hum.
Cyrelle looked away, torn.
The crew was divided, some lighting two cannons chained to the deck and aiming for the tree, some scurrying into the shallow water to attack the huge and twisted thing on foot.
If it was what the legends claimed—the source of both dream and nightmare—destroying it completely would cause irrevocable harm. But if Marnum could shake it, free it of the poison… He sifted words and tunes and rhythms in his head, testing each on his tongue. He thought of love and he thought of the people he’d met along his way. “Bridge the distance and heed her call, magic once more will beckon all.”
Cyrelle looked at him, and the Wolf’s head bobbed up and down in a nod. “Keep going. You’re onto something. I can feel it.”
When the sailors began to scream, Marnum focused on the giant tree once more. Broad branches as nimble as arms swept out, stretching and lengthening impossibly, a hundred twiggy fingers grabbing men and hurling them against the shore or into the depths of the lake to drown.
On the hill a fire was lit, flames licking at the tree’s thick trunk.
The tree reached down and smothered the blaze with its leafy branches, and the hill at its base writhed, beasts bursting from between its roots and wanting nothing more than to rend and destroy the river rats, to protect the poisoned tree that wished murder and mayhem beneath a stoically peaceful sky.
“Hurry,” Cyrelle urged. “You need another couplet.” She called to the few remaining men on board. “Set us free—arm us! We will fight beside you!”
She earned only a quick glance before a branch swept out and tossed a man overboard. She tried once more. “Set us loose on it!”
And Marnum found his missing lines at her side.
“A nightmare inside of a dream, Wicked and lovely, though, it seems.”
“String it together,” Cyrelle urged.
“Infinite ways to test your fate,
O’er the mountains and hills, she waits.
Wise is he, so clever and strong,
He fell from grace, all for a song.
Bridge the distance and heed her call,
Magic once more, will beckon all.
A nightmare inside of a dream,
Wicked and lovely, though, it seems.”
The tree shivered, recognizing the song’s strain, but in a moment, recovered, and struck out even more cruelly.
“Set us free to fight—there is no honor dying like a pig trussed for dinner!” Cyrelle shouted.
A man raced forward, his cheeks red with exertion, and he looked at them both between frightened glances over his shoulder. “You,” he said of Cyrelle. “I will set you free to fight—you look able to brandish a weapon.” He slid a doubtful glance at Marnum as he cut through Cyrelle’s ropes.
Marnum sang still, twisting the tune.
The sailor handed Cyrelle a blade and swung back around to rejoin the fight.
Shedding her ropes like a snakeskin, Cyrelle grabbed the knot at Marnum’s hands and slipped her blade beneath.
“You said you’d fight beside them…”
“I will—as soon as I free you.”
A branch whipped out and swept the front of the deck clear of men.
Cyrelle sawed at the knot faster, the last threads of rope snapping apart as the branch returned and grabbed her, pulling her into the air.
Singing, Marnum shook free of his ropes.
The tree trembled at the song and the power of his newly found voice.
It held Cyrelle high, preparing to fling her into the shimmering depths, and Marnum’s voice cracked.
“It’s wrong!” Cyrelle shouted. “Not the words—the words are true. Not the tune—the tune is sound.” She wrapped her arms around the tree’s branch, determined not to be flung into the deep blue. “What said the soothsayer?” she screamed as the tree’s branch toyed with her, swinging her from side to side.
“Find the arrangement to reorder your world…” he whispered. “The order of the lines…”
The branch pulled back, as if weighing Cyrelle, and Marnum reworked the song and sang it with all that his voice and heart and soul could muster:
“Infinite ways to test your fate,
O’er the mountains and hills, she waits.
Wise is he, so clever and strong,
Fell from grace, all for a song.
A nightmare inside of a dream,
Wicked and lovely, though, it seems.
Bridge the distance and heed her call,
And magic once more, will beckon all.”
The tree screamed, shivered, and shook—wood tearing with a sound like thunder cracking as the branches pulled back toward the Dreamland Tree’s base, taking Cyrelle to the hill with them. The rioting beasts fell silent and faded to nothing but sand and dust, scattering. The waters around the little island bubbled, and there was a boom far louder than thunder, and then the waters settled, leaving nothing but a silence so heavy it rang in Marnum’s ears.
Marnum’s song ended in a scream when the tree dropped her, and then he was running—across the deck, leaping over the rail and into the water, and bolting up the brief beach to the foot of the hill.
Where Cyrelle lay.
Unmoving.
He stopped beside her, sand and dirt spraying up from his boots as he carefully undid the buckles and snaps at the base of her helm, his fingers fumbling. He tugged the wolf mask free and pushed the stray strands of hair away from her eyes.
She winced and blinked up at him. “Look,” she whispered, her eyes focusing on the tree. “It’s happening…”
The gnarled and twisted branches had shrunk into healthy looking shapes—nearly normal except for their gigantic scale. Something quivered in the tree’s trunk, the bark pulsing and undulating. And then, it opened like a knothole had been there all along, and had chosen now to unroll. Something emerged, glittering in the rising moon’s light.
“The stone…”
The bark split, tugged back, and revealed the more tender part of the tree. A noise like fabric ripping sounded, and wood peeled from the trunk, twisting and turning and becoming something new and strange and separate. Something hollow and sleek, with a long, straight neck and a curving body. Vines snaked out of the hill’s base to line the instrument’s neck, and the thing slid down the hill to stop at Marnum’s feet.
Cyrelle sat up. “You’re being granted a gift. It seems you have a new mission, Marnum. Go. Pick it up. It’s…”
“A guitar?” Marnum asked, taking it into his hands. The god’s discarded worr
y stone shimmered in its head, like a singular eye. Marnum’s fingers found their place with an equal sense of wonder and something like instinct, and he ran his fingers down the strings, marveling at the natural tone, until—
Cyrelle winced at the sound of one string. “That didn’t sound quite right.”
“I just saved the world. Must you be so critical?”
– The End –
Wee Willie Winkie
Leigh Fallon
Wee Willie Winkie
Runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs
In his nightgown.
Rapping at the windows,
Crying through the lock,
Are the children all in bed?
For it’s now eight o’clock.
– Mother Goose
THE smell of their breath was the worst part of working in The Nook. The hot acidic tang, thick and potent, made me gag, but it was part of the job.
“Suck it up and smile,” is what Seanie had said when I started here last week. “Remember, the key to good tips is big smiles and short skirts.”
Swallowing down the bile that crept up my throat, I slapped on pink, crooked lips masquerading as genuine friendliness.
“Another pint of Guinness and a Harp and lime then, John?”
John, one of The Nook’s regulars, nodded his head and glanced at his wife, who was busy inspecting the dregs of her warm beer. His sad eyes brightened for a moment as he winked back at me and wheezed, “Ah sure, another won’t kill us.”
“I wouldn’t be quite so sure about that,” I mumbled under my breath as I returned to the bar. Feeling John’s eyes following me, I tugged down the back of the short black skirt that Seanie insisted I wear.
I stood on the tarnished brass footrest that snaked its way around the dark wood of the ancient bar, and leaned over the counter. “Seanie, the same again for the auld codgers.”
Seanie clicked his tongue and winked at me. Something he did to impress the “girls.” Well, he called them girls, but really they were forty-somethings, desperate to relive their youth, heaving their saggy boobs onto the bar counter and squeezing their elbows together for maximum impact. “A pint and a half coming up.” He flicked the glass in his hands like he was picturing himself as Tom Cruise in Cocktail and not the thick-waisted, balding owner of a gritty old man’s bar whose patrons were an aging mish-mash of odd balls from a town left behind during the economic boom of the nineties.
I hated working in the rundown old pub, but jobs were practically nonexistent, and most were taken by all the oldies trying to supplement their crappy, failing pensions. The lounge girl slash waitress position was probably the only one left in the town that the locals didn’t mind me taking. Seanie had been gasping to employ the only person in a four mile radius under the age of thirty.
The whole town oozed the stench of age and decay; it didn’t even have a school. I had to bus it into the next town over to attend the sparsely populated St. Frances’s school for girls, and my parents had to lie about my age to get me into that hellhole. Apparently, the school didn’t cater to the under sixteens (whatever that meant). But I was turning sixteen in two weeks, so my parents—desperate to put their financial woes in Dublin behind them—felt justified in a little white lie.
Despite the boredom and funky smells of my evening job, I was happy to have it. It gave me some much needed cash that my parents couldn’t give me, and it meant I could spend more time out of the tomb they called a house. Two weeks, that’s all it took me, to realize they’d moved me to the deadest, most un-happening town imaginable. Killinamartyle—mecca to the old and lonely and, like my parents, victims of an ailing economy. I dropped off the two drinks to John and Bridie, the only couple in the bar that night.
Bridie acknowledged the drinks with a little smile. “Thank you, Maureen.”
Startled by the words from the usually silent Bridie, I corrected her. “Actually, my name’s Marie.”
John gave the confused Bridie a reassuring smile and covered her quivering hand with his. “Bridie, pet, you know that’s not Maureen. This is the new girl, Marie. I told you about her, remember?”
Bridie’s face seemed to crumple in confusion. She started nodding her head and dropped her gaze to the table once more.
The only other patron was Smelly Eugene, and his presence was hardly acknowledged. He was like part of the furniture, hunched over his warm pint of ale. His only movements were his hand wiping his constantly running nose, a nod of his chin when he wanted a refill, and the trembling of his lips as he jabbered under his breath about Irene, whoever she was.
I let out a soft sigh. It was going to be a long evening.
***
I stood at the bar, gazing beyond the sea of spirit bottles to the dusty, mottled, mirrored wall. It reflected back the same depressing scene I’d turned my back on. I closed my eyes to block it out, wishing I was back in Dublin. I missed my gorgeous house in the city, surrounded by excitement, life, and my friends. I could feel myself aging as I listened to the sounds of John’s wheezing and Smelly Eugene’s grunts, constant snorting, and warbling mumbles.
A slight change in the atmosphere made my eyes flick open. The cold, damp evening air flickered by my nose, dulling the smell of stale beer for just long enough to signal the arrival of another customer. Seanie watched as a guy made his way in, shaking off his wet coat before making himself comfortable in the small nook by the window. Seanie’s face paled and he stepped back, tripping over a case of Coke on the floor.
Excited by the prospect of a conversation with someone not drawing a pension, I picked up my tray. “I’ll go get his order.”
“No!” Seanie said, righting himself. “The ladies’ needs seeing to.”
“But I just clea—”
Seanie continued to stare at the guy. “Go!’ he muttered, picking up a towel and twisting it in his hands.
I dropped the tray to the counter with a clatter, biting back the urge to tell Seanie he could stick his job up his arse. I stomped off to the bathrooms as Seanie made his way in the opposite direction, to the nook where the young man had sat down.
“It’s been a while, William. What are you doing in these parts?” Seanie said with a slight crack in his voice.
I’d never heard Seanie nervous before. My curiosity got the better of me. As the door closed on me, I put my foot out, leaving it a fraction open, and strained to hear what the two men were saying. I pressed my eye to the narrow gap in the door, wishing Seanie would get out of the way so I could see this William guy. He sounded young, soft-spoken, nothing like anyone I’d met in this festering town.
William’s soft, melodic voice rippled through the air in my direction. “There’s been no reason for me to be around, Seanie… until now.” He leaned forward. His dark eyes looked around Seanie’s hulking figure and glared in my direction.
I gasped when I caught sight of William. His ashen white skin was set off by the palest of blond hair. But his most striking feature was his youth; he didn’t look much older than me.
“No, William, you’ve got it wrong.”
“I never get it wrong.”
“She’s already sixteen. I swear.”
Oh crap! I ducked back, allowing the door to close. Shit. I’d told Seanie I was sixteen so I could get the job in the bar. Someone must have found out. I stamped my foot. Crap, that was my job gone. My heart thumped in my chest. I couldn’t let Seanie get in trouble with the authorities. It was my fault. I’d have to come clean. Swallowing down my nerves, I pulled the door open to find Seanie gazing at William’s recently vacated seat.
Red heat climbed my face as I approached him slowly. “Seanie, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to lie, it’s just that… well, I’m sixteen in a couple of weeks, so it didn’t seem to matter so much, you know?”
Seanie stayed staring at the seat with his fingers clasping and unclasping his thinning hair. “You stupid child. You shouldn’t have lied.” His glare swept to the door.
“I’m sorry. Are you going to get in much trouble?”
He spun around and grabbed my wrists. I tried to pull away, not sure what his intentions were. He pulled my hand to his face and glanced at my watch, then dropped my arm. “It’s only seven thirty. You still have time. You have to go.” He spun me around and started pushing me toward the door.
I struggled for words. “What? Go! You mean I’m fired? I’ll be sixteen in two weeks. Can I come back then?”
Smelly Eugene shuffled up behind me. He wiped his nose with the back of his coat, then held out his hand to me. “I’ll take her.”
“Take me where? I’m not going anywhere with you!”
Seanie ignored me. “Yes, Eugene. Take her, quick. I’ll lock up here.”
“Look, if I’m fired, I’ll go myself. I don’t need to be escorted. I live just five minutes down the road.”
John and a suddenly alert-looking Bridie abandoned their drinks and stood on either side of me.
Bridie leaned in toward my ear. “You should never lie about yer age round these parts, lovie. We best get ye home, and fast.” She looked up at Smelly Eugene. “We’ll take her to her house and see she gets in safely. Eugene, you stay close behind, ye hear?”
Eugene grumbled. “I hear ya woman, I don’t need telling.”
Seanie pulled the curtains. “Enough of the talking and more of the doing. Get her home now.” He grabbed my coat and shoved it at me as he manhandled me to the door. “I haven’t been touched. I want no part of this. Do yourself a favor, Marie. Make sure you’re home in bed by eight o’clock round these parts, for the next two weeks, anyhow. Do you hear me? Get yourself to bed by eight.”
I struggled to turn around, wiggling my way out of his grip to stare at the four sets of eyes looking back at me. “You’re scaring me!”
Bridie hooked her arm through mine as we stepped out into the mild, damp evening. “And so ye should be, young ‘un. And so ye should be.” She looked up and down the road. “John, get her other side.” John, suddenly spritely for someone in his seventies, grabbed my other arm. I was half-walked, half-dragged toward my house. I glanced back. There, a few paces behind me, was Smelly Eugene, frantically wiping his nose as The Nook fell into darkness.
Two and Twenty Dark Tales Page 9