Last Plane to Heaven (39 page)

“Whose grandfather?” Now the voice was gentle.

Why was this question important?
She'd fallen into some modern version of the riddle game, like talking to her therapist but with such different, unknowable stakes. Addison stalled by walking around the verge of the doors. There was certainly no way she was going to set foot
on
them.

The other girl was patient. Addison got the impression the stranger would have waited a decade for her to round the corner and walk face-to-face to answer the question.

“My grandfather. Grandfather Locke.”

“
Morfar
or
farfar
?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your mother's father or your father's father?”

“Oh. Mother's. Daddy was a Keyes.”

Something stirred in the girl's vest pocket. She glanced down in apparent surprise, looking into a dark place that seemed much deeper than the ragged woolen vest could contain. “Lock and key,” mused the girl.

“I'm Addison Keyes.”

The pocket shifted again. Was she carrying an animal in there?

The girl just stared back.

Eventually Addison filled the silence. “And you are…?”

The answer was prompt if unhelpful. “Waiting.”

“For what?”

She patted the copper doors. “Locks and keys.”

Something shifted in Addison's head, half-forgotten words of Grandfather Locke's. Another verse.

Until you are truly lost

You will never be there

Always climb higher

And never ask where

He really had been a bit strange …

“I can take the hint,” Addison said. “Nominate determinism is just silly, but if you want me to be, I am both a Locke and a Keyes.”

“If you think names do not count, then you have learned nothing.” This close, the girl touched Addison's hair, then sniffed. A spark passed between them, like petting a cat during thunderstorm weather. Addison didn't jump, but was surprised at the tingle inside her breasts and groin. “You were raised by a mabkin.”

“What?”

“Your
morfar
. Locke? He is a mabkin. I can smell him on you.”

“He passed away last summer.”

“Really?” She smiled sweetly at Addison, though there was nothing but menace in those pearly teeth for a moment. Addison wondered if she, too, were almost-fanged. “Did you see the body?”

“N-no. He died in the hospital, and the funeral was closed casket.”

The smile was positively evil. “If you dug it up, you'd find a dead wolf and a few stone of rags and feathers. He hasn't come home yet, but he will.
I
would know.”

“And
I
would know if he was alive!” Addison shouted, suddenly enraged. “He never was going to come home, damn you. That's why he told me all the stories, and bought me a plane ticket before he died, and spent all his time filling me with ideas about wearing my clothes inside out and carrying pebbles in my pockets! He was crazy and I love him.”

“You're not wearing your clothes inside out,” the girl pointed out quite reasonably, ignoring Addison's anger.

“And the only rocks I have are inside my head, I swear.” Addison huffed, trying to settle down. She had not come this far to fight with some imaginary twin. “He's dead, girl-whoever-you-are-in-waiting. I watched him slip away. Colon cancer, and they took it out of him three times until he was shitting in a plastic bag and eating nothing but oatmeal. Whatever a mabkin is, no one noticed on the operating table. Or in the CAT scans.”

“The crab disease.” This was the first time the girl seemed taken aback. “A mabkin, in the presence of a grimalkin, was struck down by the crab disease…”

Grimalkin? An old cat. The CAT scan?
Riddles, and more stupid wordplay. Addison stuck to the point, for fear of talking in mystic circles. “What, you people don't get cancer here?”

“We die of nothing but grief or the sword. Sometimes at the same moment.”

“Grandfather Locke died on the sword of cancer, then. But I held his hand when he was done. I don't think he grieved.”

“Did he call for Mother?” the girl asked gently.

“Yes,” said Addison, and burst into tears.

*   *   *

Later they sat close in front of the primus stove while Addison boiled water for ginger tea. The girl, who would answer to “Door” but called herself nothing that Addison could determine, had been delighted with a white chocolate macadamia Clif Bar. Their shadows lengthened eastward, and Addison kept wondering if she would camp up here. She wanted to see where Door would go at nightfall, because experience had already taught her about the rapid descent of frost on these hills.

Door seemed unconcerned about the passage of time, or really, anything else other than Addison's camping gear.

“You carry fire with you in a little bottle. This is so much more clever than wooden sticks.”

“I have matches, too,” Addison admitted.

“Surely. Monkeys are clever.”

“I am not a monkey.”

“Not you.” That almost-fanged smile. “But you were raised among them, and you have brought back their clever ways.”

“I've brought back something else, too,” Addison admitted. She touched her chest, just below the right clavicle.

“Yourself, of course.” The later the day grew, the more feral Door seemed to become. At noon she'd been almost reserved. Now she was tricksy.

Ignoring the chilly air, Addison slipped out of her fleece vest, unbuttoned her wool shirt, and dropped the shoulder on her thermal top, tugging the sports bra's band with it. “See this,” she asked, pointing at a red-lipped seam on her neck and another on her chest.

“I could do much better.” A copper blade shaped like a rhododendron leaf appeared as if from nowhere in Door's hand.

“Stop it,” Addison said, slapping the girl's wrist.
Feral, feral.

The touch caused another spark to leap between them.

With that, the blade vanished. Door cocked her head, looking for all the world like a curious robin. “What, then?”

“It's a chest port. I start chemotherapy next week back at home.”

Door looked puzzled.

“Cancer. The crab disease.” Addison sighed. “What killed Grandfather Locke. It's trying to kill me.” She wasn't supposed to think of it that way, her therapist had been very insistent.

Now Door seemed completely taken aback. Addison wondered if the other girl's preternatural confidence faded with the light. “You have come to the Doors bearing the crab disease?”

“Well … yes?”

“Some come here seeking life eternal. Some come here seeking the true death of the soul, for fear of the same thing. Some come seeking riches. Or a lost love. What do you hope for here?”

Whatever Grandfather Locke set me to find,
Addison thought, but did not say. Her fingers brushed her chest where the port implant ached. “He … He always told me I would discover where I belonged.”

“You belong wherever you are,” Door said simply. For the first time, Addison thought she heard compassion in the other girl's voice, but when she looked up, all she saw was the gleam of the Primus flame in Door's eyes. It was like staring into a tiny, liquid hell.

“I don't want to die,” Addison whispered.

“Ah, life eternal.” The smile flashed, even more fanged in the encroaching gloam. “We don't have that here. Chronos is long since fallen. We merely abide endlessly without the benefit of time.”

“Cancer is a disease of time.”

“
Life
is a disease of time.”

Another touch, their third, and on this occasion the spark was like summer lightning. Door drew Addison into a close embrace. Like hugging herself, but not. Like masturbating, but not. Like a mirror so close one could step into it.

“Would you go Below?” Door whispered in her ear. Inside Addison's head.

“Would I come back?”

“You would carry the disease of time into the Quiet Lands. Is that what you want?”

More of Grandfather Locke's words came to her then.

Be my sword, little girl

Carry over the ocean my will

To the Mother of us all

So that she may someday lie still

Had she only ever been his pawn as well? Was even the cancer her morfar's gift to her? “I would not wish this on my worst enemy if I had one,” Addison whispered to herself.

“Time is everyone's worst enemy,” Door whispered back from within. “The sword of ruin. That is why it does not pass beneath these hollow hills.”

“Cancer is the sword of ruin, thrust through the body.” Addison thought back on Door's words. “Both grief and the sword.” The disease of time, indeed.

“Your story will sweep open the doors,” Door replied. “They may never shut again.”

Did she want to? Who were the people under the hill to her? Mabkin, her grandfather Locke's folk, but he'd never spoken of them. Just filled her head with stories, filled her heart with his death, and filled her hand with a ticket to elsewhere.

Addison wasn't certain what choice she was making. To go home and slowly poison herself, while poisoning the cancer a little faster. Or to pass beneath these copper doors and come to face her great-grandmother, who lived outside time.

Sooner pass between the pages of a book.

You always did want to pass between the pages of a book, girl,
her grandfather Locke said.
And someone must break the chains under the hill, someday.

Though Door's fingers barely touched the copper, the slabs swung upward as if pressed forward by hands the size of houses. They smashed into the ground on each side with an echo that Addison felt deep in her bones. The inner faces of the doors were decorated just as ornately as the outside, though in the last of the twilight, the carvings seemed alive, fields of men fighting flowers while winged archers sailed overhead laughing.

A stairwell descended into darkness. The steps themselves were carved from the stone of the hill, each one bowed and worn with generations of passage. There was no light at all below, but the air smelled of roses and grave dust and meat.

It was an invitation.

A vector of change now, aimed at the deathless heart of the unchanging, Addison touched her woolen vest, fingered the seam of her denim skirt, and set off into the darkness below with an ache in her chest and her grandfather's memory in her heart.

*   *   *

Mother will learn patience now. If the monkeys know anything we do not, it is that death is the greatest teacher life can set before us. I am not one of the mabkin, but I have sat at the borders of Mother's realm so long I might as well be one.

That a monkey came for me is one of those blessings which can only be the world playing with its own sense of humor. Her stove burned me a little, but I got the hot tea off and into my belly. It will be strange, eating their food, but I have a ticket that will take me somewhere else.

Change is coming Below, where change has never been welcome. I wonder who set the Locke and the Keyes on their course, or if that is just another of the world's little jokes upon itself.

Leaving the flame behind to light the night, I follow Addison Keyes's scent back down from the high hills. As Above, so Below. Mother's fingers may be like whips, but they will never tear at me now. Mother's eyes may be like razors, but they will never cut at me now.

I thank my sister, I thank myself, and I sing a song of crabs and cats as the bracken whips at my hiking boots and my monkey pants and I bounce down into the wider world armed with bright teeth and a copper knife.

I am coming. I might even become a Mother myself someday, in Addison's high Wyoming hills.

Are you afraid? Or are you laughing?

 

Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes

This is the only story I ever wrote in which my daughter appears directly, as herself, though under another name. I always thought I could do more with the character, but she grew up too fast, and every time I thought I understood her, she had become a different young woman.

In a basement that smelled of mold and old cleansers, Danny Knifepoint Wielder prayed down the rain. The house wasn't any older than the Portland neighborhood around it. Most driveways were populated with minivans, children's bicycles, heaps of bark dust and gravel accumulated for yard projects postponed through the dark months of winter. None of Danny's neighbors knew the role he played in their lives. They would have been horrified if they had.

Not making it to church on time carried scarcely a ripple of consequence compared to what would happen if Danny didn't pray the world forward. Lawn sprinklers chittering, children screeching at their play—these were the liturgical music of his rite.

“Heed me, Sky.”

Danny circled the altar in his basement.

“Hear my pleas, freely given from a free soul.”

Green shag carpeting was no decent replacement for the unbending grass of the plains on which the Corn Kings had once vomited out their lives to ensure the harvest.

“I have bowed to the four winds and the eight points of the rose.”

Woodgrain paneling echoed memories of the sanctifying rituals that had first blessed this workroom.

“Heed me now, that your blessing may fall upon the fields and farms.” With a burst of innate honesty he added: “… and gardens and patios and window boxes of this land.”

“Daniel Pierpont Wilder!” his mother yelled down the stairs. “Are you talking to a girl down there?”

“Mooooom,” Danny wailed. “I'm buuuusy!”

“Well, come be busy at the table. I'm not keeping your lunch warm so you can play World of Warships.”