Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (20 page)

“Listen, mister, I’m
sorry,”
Barry said uneasily, “I don’t mean to wake you up, honest, but I’ve
got
to get that lady to come out, or my ass’ll really be grass!”

“Your
Arse,
say you?” the snail-horned man snarled. “Marry, since you would have it so, why, by Lugh, I’ll do it, straight!” He made a curious gesture, roared out a word that seemed to be all consonants, and then slammed the shutter closed.

Again, there was a
popping
noise in Barry’s ears, and a change of pressure that he could feel throughout his sinuses.
Another
spell had been cast on him.

Sure enough, there was a strange, prickly sensation at the base of his spine. “Oh, no!” he whispered. He didn’t really want to look—but at last he forced himself to. He groaned. He had sprouted a long green tail. It looked and smelled suspiciously like grass.

“Ha! Ha!” Barry muttered savagely to himself. “Very funny!
Great
sense of humor these little winged people’ve got!”

In a sudden spasm of rage, he began to rip out handfuls of grass, trying to
tear
the loathsome thing from his body. The grass ripped out easily, and he felt no pain, but it grew back many times faster than he could tear it free—so that by the time he decided that he was getting nowhere, the tail trailed out six or seven feet behind him.

What was he going to do
now?

He stared up at the glowering house for a long, silent moment, but he couldn’t think of any plan of action that wouldn’t just get him in
more
trouble with
someone.

Gloomily, he gathered up his sample cases, and trudged off down the street, his nose banging into his upper lip at every step, his tail dragging forlornly behind him in the dust. Be damned if this wasn’t even worse than cold-selling in
Newark.
He wouldn’t have believed it. But
there
he had only been mugged and had his car’s tires slashed.
Here
he had been hideously disfigured, maybe for life, and he wasn’t even making any
sales.

He came to an intricately carved stone fountain, and sat wearily down on its lip. Nixies and water nymphs laughed and cavorted within the leaping waters of the fountain, swimming just as easily up the spout as down. They cupped their pretty little green breasts and called invitingly to him, and then mischievously spouted water at his tail when he didn’t answer, but Barry was in no mood for them, and resolutely ignored their blandishments. After a while they went back to their games and left him alone.

Barry sighed, and tried to put his head in his hands, but his enormous new nose kept getting in the way. His stomach was churning. He reached into his pocket and worried out a metal-foil packet of antacid tablets. He tore the packet open, and then found—to his disgust—that he had to lift his sagging nose out of the way with one hand in order to reach his mouth. While he chewed on the chalky-tasting pills, he stared glumly at the twin leatherette bags that held his demonstrator models. He was beaten. Finished. Destroyed.
Ruined.
Down and out in Faerie, at the ultimate rock bottom of his career. What a bummer! What a fiasco!

And he had had such high hopes for this expedition, too . . .

Barry never really understood why Titania, the Fairy Queen, spent so much of her time hanging out in a sleazy little roadside bar on the outskirts of a jerkwater South Jersey town—perhaps
that
was the kind of place that seemed exotic to
her.
Perhaps she liked the rotgut hooch, or the greasy hamburgers—just as likely to be “venison-burgers,” really, depending on whether somebody’s uncle or backwoods cousin had been out jacking deer with a flashlight and a 30.30 lately—or the footstomping honky-tonk music on the juke box. Perhaps she just had an odd sense of humor. Who knew?
Not
Barry.

Nor did Barry ever really understand what
he
was doing there—it wasn’t really his sort of place, but he’d been on the road with a long way to go to the next town, and a sudden whim had made him stop in for a drink.
Nor
did he understand why, having stopped in in the first place, he had then gone
along
with the gag when the beat-up old barfly on his left had leaned over to him, breathing out poisonous fumes, and confided,
“I’m
really the Queen of the Fairies, you know.” Ordinarily, he would have laughed, or ignored her, or said something like, “And
I’m
the Queen of the May, sleazeball.” But he had done none of these things. Instead, he had nodded gravely and courteously, and asked her if he could have the honor of lighting the cigarette that was wobbling about in loopy circles in her shaking hand.

Why
did he do this? Certainly it hadn’t been from even the
remotest
desire to get into the Queen’s grease-stained pants—in her earthly incarnation, the Queen was a grimy, grey-haired, broken-down rummy, with a horse’s face, a dragon’s breath, cloudy agate eyes, and a bright-red rumblossom nose. No, there had been no ulterior motives. But he had been in an odd mood, restless, bored, and stale. So he had played up to her, on a spur-of-the-moment whim, going along with the gag, buying her drinks and lighting cigarettes for her, and listening to her endless stream of half-coherent talk, all the while solemnly calling her “Your Majesty” and “Highness,” getting a kind of role-playing let’s pretend kick out of it that he hadn’t known since he was a kid and he and his sister used to play “grown-up dress-up” with the trunk of castoff clothes in the attic.

So that when midnight came, and all the other patrons of the bar froze into freeze-frame rigidity, paralyzed in the middle of drinking or shouting or scratching or shoving, and Titania manifested herself in the radiant glory of her
true
form, nobody could have been more surprised than
Barry.

“My God!” he’d cried. “You really
are—
”

“The Queen of the Fairies,” Titania said smugly. “You bet your buns, sweetie. I
told
you so, didn’t I?” She smiled radiantly, and then gave a ladylike hiccup. The Queen in her new form was so dazzlingly beautiful as to almost hurt the eye, but there was still a trace of rotgut whiskey on her breath. “And because
you’ve
been a most true and courteous knight to one from whom you thought to see no earthly gain, I’m going to grant you a
wish.
How about
that,
kiddo?” She beamed at him, then hiccuped again; whatever catabolic effect her transformation had had on her blood-alcohol level, she was obviously still slightly tipsy.

Barry was flabbergasted. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “I come into a bar, on impulse, just by
chance,
and the very first person I sit down next to turns out to be—”

Titania shrugged. “That’s the way it goes, sweetheart. It’s the Hidden Hand of Oberon, what you mortals call ‘synchronicity.’ Who knows what’ll eventually come of this meeting—tragedy or comedy, events of little moment or of world-shaking weight and worth? Maybe even
Oberon
doesn’t know, the silly old fart. Now, about that
wish—
”

Barry thought about it. What
did
he want? Well, he was a
salesman,
wasn’t he? New worlds to conquer . . .

Even Titania had been startled. She looked at him in surprise and then said, “Honey, I’ve been dealing with mortals for a lot of years now, but nobody ever asked for
that
before . . .”

Now he sat on cold stone in the heart of the Faerie town, and groaned, and cursed himself bitterly. If only he hadn’t been so ambitious! If only he’d asked for something
safe,
like a swimming pool or a Ferrari . . .

Afterward, Barry was never sure how long he sat there on the lip of the fountain in a daze of despair—perhaps literally for weeks; it
felt
that long. Slowly, the smoky bronze disk of the Fairyland sun sank beneath the horizon, and it became night, a warm and velvety night whose very darkness seemed somehow luminous. The nixies had long since departed, leaving him alone in the little square with the night and the plashing waters of the fountain. The strange stars of Faerie swam into the sky, witchfire crystals so thick against the velvet blackness of the night that they looked like phosphorescent plankton sparkling in some midnight tropic sea. Barry watched the night sky for a long time, but he could find none of the familiar constellations he knew, and he shivered to think how far away from home he must be. The stars
moved
much more rapidly here than they did in the sky of Earth, crawling perceptibly across the black bowl of the night even as you watched, swinging in stately procession across the sky, wheeling and reforming with a kind of solemn awful grandeur, eddying and whirling, swirling into strange patterns and shapes and forms, spiral pinwheels of light. Pastel lanterns appeared among the houses on the hillsides as the night deepened, seeming to reflect the wheeling, blazing stars above.

At last, urged by some restless tropism, he got slowly to his feet, instinctively picked up his sample cases, and set off aimlessly through the mysterious night streets of the Faerie town. Where was he going? Who knew? Did it matter anymore? He kept walking. Once or twice he heard faint, far snatches of fairy music—wild, sad, yearning melodies that pierced him like a knife, leaving him shaken and melancholy and strangely elated all at once—and saw lines of pastel lights bobbing away down the hillsides, but he stayed away from those streets, and did his best not to listen; he had been warned about the bewitching nature of fairy music, and had no desire to spend the next hundred or so years dancing in helpless enchantment within a fairy ring. Away from the street and squares filled with dancing pastel lights and ghostly will-o’-the-‘wisps—which he avoided—the town seemed dark and silent. Occasionally, winged shapes swooped and flittered overhead, silhouetted against the huge mellow silver moon of Faerie, sometimes seeming to fly behind it for several wingbeats before flashing into sight again. Once he met a fellow pedestrian, a monstrous one-legged creature with an underslung jaw full of snaggle teeth and one baleful eye in the middle of its forehead that blazed like a warning beacon, and stood unnoticed in the shadows, shivering, until the fearsome apparition had hopped by. Not paying any attention to where he was going, Barry wandered blindly downhill. He couldn’t think at all—it was as if his brain had turned to ash. His feet stumbled over the cobblestones, and only by bone-deep instinct did he keep hold of the sample cases. The street ended in a long curving set of wooden stairs. Mechanically, dazedly, he followed them down. At the bottom of the stairs, a narrow path led under the footing of one of the gossamer bridges that looped like slender grey cobwebs between the fairy hills. It was cool and dark here, and almost peaceful . . . “AAAARRRRGGHHHHH!”

Something
enormous
leaped out from the gloom, and enveloped him in a single, scaly green hand. The fingers were a good three feet long each, and their grip was as cold and hard as iron. The hand lifted him easily into the air, while he squirmed and kicked futilely.

Barry stared up into the creature’s face. “Yop!” he said. A double row of yellowing fangs lined a frog-mouth large enough to swallow him up in one gulp. The blazing eyes bulged ferociously, and the nose was a flat smear. The head was topped off by a fringe of hair like red worms, and a curving pair of ram’s horns.

“Pay
up
for the use a my bridge,” the creature roared, “or by Oberon’s dirty socks, I’ll crunch you whole!”

It never ends,
Barry thought. Aloud, he demanded in frustration. “What bridge?”

“A wise guy!” the, monster sneered.
“That
bridge, whadda ya
think?”
He gestured upward scornfully. “The bridge
over
us, dummy! The Bridge a Morrig the Fearsome!
My
bridge. I got a royal commission says I gotta right to collect toll from
every
creature that sets foot on it, and you better believe that means
you,
buddy. I got you dead to rights. So cough up!” He shook Barry until the salesman’s teeth rattled. “Or
else!”

“But I
haven’t
set foot on it!” Barry wailed. “I just walked
under
it!”

“Oh,” the monster said. He looked blank for a moment, scratching his knobby head with his free hand, and then his face sagged. “Oh,” he said again, disappointedly. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Crap.” Morrig the Fearsome sighed, a vast noisome displacement of air. Then he released the salesman. “Jeez, buddy, I’m sorry,” Morrig said, crestfallen. “I shouldn’t’a’oughta have jerked ya around like that. I guess I got overanxious or sumpthin. Jeez, mac, you know how it is. Tryin’ to make a buck. The old grind. It gets me down.”

Morrig sat down, discouraged, and wrapped his immensely long and muscular arms around his knobby green knees. He brooded for a moment, then jerked his thumb up at the bridge. “That bridge’s my only source a income, see?” He sighed gloomily. “When I come down from Utgard and set up this scam, I think I’m gonna get
rich.
Got the royal commission, all nice an’ legal, everybody gotta
pay
me, right? Gonna clean
up,
right?” He shook his head glumly.
“Wrong.
I ain’t making a lousy
dime.
All the locals got
wings.
Don’t use the bridge at
all.”
He spat noisily. “They’re cheap little snots, these fairyfolk are.”

“Amen,
brother,” Barry said, with feeling. “I know
just
what you mean.”

“Hey!” Morrig said, brightening: “You care for a snort? I got a jug a hooch right here.”

“Well, actually . . .” Barry said reluctantly. But the troll had already reached into the gloom with one long, triple-jointed arm, and pulled out a stone crock. He pried off the top and took a long swig. Several gallons of liquid gurgled down his throat. “Ahhhh!” He wiped his thin lips. “That hits the spot, all right.” He thrust the crock into Barry’s lap. “Have a belt.”

When Barry hesitated, the troll rumbled, “Ah, go ahead, pal. Good for what ails ya. You got troubles too, aintcha, just like me—I can tell. It’s the lot a the workin’ man, brother. Drink up. Put hair on your
chest
even if you ain’t got no dough in your
pocket.”
While Barry drank, Morrig studied him cannily. “You’re a mortal, aintcha, bud?”