The Green Man (21 page)

The boy ran the blade of the sword across the apple, and it passed through it with the ease of a warm knife through butter. The twin pieces fell to the floor. A murmur ran through the crowd as the upturned halves wobbled to rest and the blade of the sword gleamed in the gaslight
.

“Now, Carl,” said the magician, taking the sword from the boy, “I want you to step inside this basket here and lie down.”

Without the slightest hesitation, the boy lay down inside the long narrow basket, disappearing from view
.

“You remember, Carl, that I asked for a volunteer of unusual courage. Are you that one?”

“Yes,” came the voice from the basket
.

“And you are not afraid of the dark?”

“No,” said the voice
.

“Very well, then,” said the magician, and he closed the lid and secured it with a length of cord. A hush fell over the room
.

The magician went over to the table and picked up the sword. He fixed the audience with his eyes. Then, without a word, he walked to the basket and thrust the blade of the sword through it, so that the point pierced the other side
.

Several children shrieked in terror as the blade emerged red with blood. Twice more he ran the basket through with the sword. A terrible silence had fallen over the room. All eyes were on the basket, sitting deathly still on the stage
.

The magician wiped the blade clean as he contemplated the crowd, then set the sword down on the table. “Life and death,” he said as he began to untie the cord that secured the basket. “What are they? Is death no more than a dream from which we soon awake?”

The cord fell slack, and the magician tipped the basket over on its side so that the lid fell open with a dull slap against the floor of the stage
.

There was no boy, no blood, only an empty basket that had once been the storehouse for countless props and, for one impossible moment, a site of terror
.

“Reality or illusion?” said the magician with a smile. “Which is which?”

There was a faint rustling in the shadows behind the stage, and out into the light strode the boy, as sound and healthy as ever. But he moved now with a new authority. As he took the little book from the magician’s hand and made his way offstage, he looked directly into the faces of those who had formerly been his tormentors. They looked back with awe and moved aside to allow him to pass as he returned to his place
.

The show continued
.

I
n the dream O was at another poetry reading, but this time Rimbaud read. It seemed every word was meant for her alone. She was so overcome with emotion that, when he sat back down beside her, she leaned over and kissed him. But instead of the full warm lips she imagined, those that met hers were as cold and lifeless as glass. She woke from the dream with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was Saturday, August 8.

Whatever terror it held for her, she knew she had to return to the ravine. Emily had said the magician was a master of disguise. But whatever shape he might assume, O knew one thing for certain: he would not come with fangs and claws. He would have the allure of mystery about him, the fascination of the unknown. He would appear as if from nowhere, without warning and without history, and he would mesmerize with his words. He could be young or old, male or female; for he could change age and sex as easily as one changes a suit of clothes.

Despite everything O’s heart told her about Rimbaud, Emily had planted a seed of doubt. Where had he appeared from so suddenly? Where did he live? Why did she have the constant feeling he was with her even when he was nowhere near?

Maybe Emily’s madness was not so mad at all. Perhaps, with Rimbaud, she was in the presence of someone not wholly human. Perhaps he had simply stepped into this world for a time, taken this shape to suit his purpose. When he had accomplished that, he would step back again and vanish without a trace. Maybe that was what the line in his poem meant: “In dark of night, I spin this dream of flesh.”

She knew he had noticed a change in her. She felt utterly transparent around him, as if he could pick through her thoughts with the same ease that he plucked books from the shelves of the Green Man. Now that she’d decided what she must do, she had to keep her distance from him or he would instantly know her intentions.

After breakfast, she busied herself around the shop. It bothered her to keep Emily in the dark, but she would never have agreed to what O had in mind. Recently, Rimbaud had taken to dropping by in the early afternoon to see if there was anything that needed doing around the shop.

A little after noon, O told Emily she had to go downtown for a while. If Rimbaud came by while she was out,
there were boxes on the back porch to be flattened and bundled and a bag of books to be taken down to the Sally Ann. That would keep him busy.

She went up to her room, put on jeans, a long-sleeved tee shirt, and a pair of running shoes, then slipped out the window and down the fire escape. Soon, the shop was far behind her. She followed the route by memory, threading her way through the maze of streets traced indelibly in her mind since the day she followed Rimbaud to the ravine.

Finally, she turned down the silent dead-end street. Climbing the low wooden fence, she tramped through the stand of goldenrod and burdock that bordered the ravine and stood at the edge, looking down into the green dark.

The voice in her head – the reasonable, daylight voice – was doing its best to talk her into turning around and heading straight back home. What did she hope to prove in the end? What did she expect to find? Some sign that Rimbaud was living here? Some proof he was not who he said he was, but a shape the magician had assumed? The whole idea was madness, said the voice. She had strayed too close to Emily’s erratic orbit and been pulled in herself, and now she, too, was caught up in this crazy fantasy her aunt had spun.

The sunlight was warm on her face. Behind her stood the quiet houses, secure in their calm. The reasonable
part of her was very convincing. Its arguments made perfect sense. She listened to the voice and was tempted to turn back to the world of light.

But then she looked down into the shadows of the ravine. And wound in with the chatter of squirrels, the song of birds, and the rustle of leaves in the wind, she could hear Emily, telling her incredible tale. It was the other side of her that heard that voice – the side that did something so unreasonable as write poems, that peopled the shadows of the Green Man with presences when she was alone in the shop, that lay fearfully in bed and imagined footsteps on the deck in the dark, that dreamt the unimaginable and woke to find it real.

Her heart was pounding in her chest. She said farewell to all the shuttered houses on the shuttered street and started down.

The way seemed less perilous than before. Her runners were not as slick as her flats had been. Roots seemed to hunch up from the ground to give her footholds. Branches bent down for her to latch on to. She passed silently through the green portal and entered the twilight world of the ravine.

Halfway down she heard a voice – a voice composed of furtive scurryings, the distant babble of water, the insistent whispering of the wind in the trees.

Welcome!
She felt as if she had entered a room lit by gaslight, and a chalk-white face had leaned out over the skirt of the stage and spoken to her. At a sound of scurrying in the undergrowth, she spun around, expecting a tall stranger dressed in black to be standing there, smiling at her. And the words that spilled from his mouth would branch and leaf and launch themselves up into the low limbs of the trees and curl and wind there, until it seemed the whole of this green world had sprung from his melodious mouth.

A squirrel, darting across the carpet of leaves, raced up the trunk of a tree and chattered down at her. Good Lord, girl, get a grip, she told herself. She breathed slowly, trying to calm herself. The last thing she needed was to panic. Panic and she would be in the power of whatever it was that made its home here.

The steep pitch began to smooth out as she neared the base of the hill. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and she moved with ease. She turned and looked back up the hillside, piecing out the path she had taken. She was afraid that if she were to come up in some other place, she would be unable to get out. She knew there was a way out here, so it was here she would go back up. She decided to mark the spot.

The moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree lay half-hidden among spindly saplings and wildflowers by the bank of the stream that ran through the ravine. She stooped to
pick up a branch and scraped a crude arrow shape in the damp ground, pointing to the place where she’d come down. She plunged the sharp end of the branch into the soft soil, then moved a few yards off and looked back, wondering if she would see it.

She noticed a plastic bag snagged on a fallen branch, bobbing in the water of the stream. She reached down and freed it, dumped out the slimy water inside, and tied the bag by the handles to the top of her marker. A breeze caught it and it ballooned out from the side of the stick. She was sure to see it now.

She took a quick glance at her watch. It was going on three. The sun sifted down through the canopy of leaves that enclosed the ravine. She would just look around a little and then head back, while there was still plenty of light. The thought of being down here as night fell filled her with terror.

She began walking along the bank of the stream. Her plan was to follow it as far as she could go. She had no idea where it ended, but if she stayed close to the water, she would keep her bearings; and if she wandered off for any reason, she need only find her way back to it and she would know instantly that upstream lay her marker and a safe way out.

Caledon was scored with an intricate network of ravines. Over the years many had been filled in, their
streams buried, homes and businesses built over them. But where the ravines were too wide or deep, they were left untouched, remnants of the wilderness that had once covered the land.

Yet, even here, civilization had left its mark. Bits of trash littered the stream and lined the bank. Here, a bicycle frame, rusting in the water; there, a car tire lying among the weeds. A battered shopping cart, a broken chair, bundles of discarded flyers swelling around the plastic ties that held them together – unwanted things that had found their way here.

At one spot, it looked as if someone had backed a pickup to the edge of the ravine and dumped its contents down the hillside – drifts of crumbling drywall, scrap lumber, bags full of garbage. The green world accepted it all without complaint and slowly covered it over.

She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she was sure she would know it when she found it. Some sign of him, some habitation hidden among the bushes – something. As she picked her way along the muddy bank, the sound of traffic from the upper world drifted down like a faded memory, and she suddenly remembered her dream on the train.

The stream meandered along the floor of the ravine. She saw the shell of an old stove half-hidden in the underbrush at the base of the hill, a tire swing secured to the
branch of a willow bending over the stream. Creatures of the ground and air scattered at her approach. She stepped carefully over slick boulders and fallen branches, scanning the dense green on either side, whirling at the slightest noise, her nerves all on edge.

There were signs of people everywhere, but she felt utterly alone. An hour fled by, and she had found nothing. She was just about to abandon the search and head home – when she turned and saw it.

At first it seemed no more than a darker shadow etched against the shadows, a deeper green against the green. She stopped – and there was a hush all around. She listened – and it was as though every living thing that called this place home listened along.

The thick green canopy closed down on the ravine like a lid on an emerald box, and in the vast silence, she could hear the hammering of her heart.

O
stood staring at the spot, as the form among the leaves slowly took shape. It stood about five feet high, rising slightly at the center. At first she took it for a crude fort some boys had built among the trees. But as she drew nearer, she saw how skillfully it had been made.

It was as if a spell had been spoken and the supple green saplings that grew everywhere had been charmed to lean into one another, twisting and weaving to form the walls of a green dome. On the side that faced the stream, she noticed a panel of woven branches that must surely be a door.

“Hello,” she called. “Is anyone there?”

In this place full of signs of human presence, here was something different. The hillside and the banks of the stream were littered with castoffs. This was no castoff; it was a creation. As she marveled at it, her fear edged aside a little.

She stepped forward, took hold of the door, and shifted it to one side. It teetered a moment, then toppled softly
onto the carpet of leaves – the strange fan-shaped leaves Rimbaud used for marking his place in the books he borrowed. She crept closer and stooped to peer inside. Growing bolder, she poked her head through the doorway.

A low table, made from an old cupboard door resting on four paint cans, stood in the center of the hut. Stub ends of candles were stationed at the corners, rooted in pools of hardened wax. On the surface was a box of wooden matches, a plastic water bottle, a pad of pale blue paper, several pencils sharpened by hand, a chipped cup and plate, a clock with a cracked face. Bits of broken glass anchored in wax were ranged around the edge.

She hesitated for a moment in the doorway, then ventured in. It was too low inside to stand, too uncomfortable to stoop. The smooth hump of a log lay along one side. She sat down on it and took in her surroundings.

A knife blade was plunged into a piece of wood by the table, the floor around it littered with shavings. A carved face was worked in the wood – unfinished, still seeking form. From the inner wall of the hut, more carved faces looked down at her. Leaves and branches poked through their open mouths.