The Third Magic (17 page)

LONESOME ROADS

E
mily began to choke
on her chicken salad as soon as she saw the old man on television.

It was the same one, she was sure of it, the strange old man with the phony name.

She stood up, still hacking, and gestured toward the TV set. The waitress behind the counter paid no attention to her.

Taliesin,
Emily thought as she strode across the restaurant, her napkin pressed to her lips. Yes, that was it, Taliesin. The name Merlin the Magician was supposed to have called himself in the legend of King Arthur. She had picked up on that as soon as she had met the old coot. Englishmen always assumed Americans were illiterate.

He had told her that he was a curator of the British Museum. Naturally, when she had called, her inquiry had been met with some amusement. Taliesin, you say? No, madam, I'm afraid there's no one here by that name.

What shame she had felt at being taken by such a blatant hoax! But by then, of course, it had been too late. Arthur had already gone.

The television, still nearly silent, showed the old man frowning as a reporter spoke. Emily reached up and turned the volume up to full.

"Four years ago a boy named Arthur Blessing was kidnapped off the streets of New York by a gang of motorcyclists..." the reporter was blaring.

"For heaven's sake, it was nothing of the kind," the old man answered. Then he gave the newsman an exasperated look and stormed away into the crowd. The reporter tried to follow him, but apparently lost his quarry.

He disappeared. Emily thought.

She had seen him do it before. Vanish, right before her eyes. He had done that just before Arthur went off with Hal.

"The motorcyclists, who are apparently from England; would not reveal the whereabouts of the boy whose mesmerizing appearance on a news telecast covering a sinkhole in midtown Manhattan four years ago caused a nationwide uproar. Some who heard young Arthur Blessing speak believe that he is mentally ill and has been abducted. Others are convinced that the entire performance was a hoax. And yet others have speculated that the boy is some sort of Messiah, after stunned viewers witnessed one of the most remarkable ..."

"People are trying to eat here, you know," the counter waitress said. Casting Emily the dirtiest of looks, she set down a macaroni and cheese platter and then turned down the volume on the television to zero. The picture switched to footage of a fourteen-year-old boy standing amid the rubble of a collapsed building.

At that moment Gwen Ranier entered the diner. The sketchbook in her hands fell out of her hands to the floor. "Ms. B," she said, her voice quavering.

"What is it?" Emily asked irritably.

"Him," Gwen said, pointing at the television. "That's him. The one I dreamed about."

"Yes, I know," Emily said.

"Is ... is he in some kind of trouble?" Gwen asked.

Emily swallowed. "I don't know," she said, and walked past her out the door.

The girl followed her. "Where are you going?"

"I'm going to get him back," she said.

She called the
Christian Science Monitor,
a publication which she felt would not seek to exploit her and Arthur, and promised an exclusive interview with herself in exchange for one favor: a reporter was to get a message to Hal Woczniak as quickly as possible. The message said only:

Come immediately to Dawning Falls.

 Bring Arthur. Emily.

 

The rest of the message, which was that Emily had been searching for her nephew for eight years and that she would make sure that Hal was arrested and sent to jail on a more or less permanent basis unless he complied with her request, was tacit.

"He's... he's coming here?" Gwen asked. She had been sitting across from Emily as she conducted her business with the newspaper.

"I hope so," Emily said. She looked at the girl. "What did he say to you?" she asked.

"What?"

"In your dream. The one in which you saw his face."

Gwen turned the pages of her sketchbook carefully. "I had more than one dream," she said. There were at least ten drawings of Arthur, as a small boy, a teenager, and as a man older than Arthur Blessing was now. In all of them he wore odd clothing and his shaggy hair looked as if it had been cut with a knife. "I've seen him again and again," she said softly, looking at the portraits. "But each time he says the same thing."

"What's that?"

"That he's coming back for me," Gwen said simply. "He's coming back."

B
y the time they
reached Buffalo County, South Dakota, Hal and the knights thought they had lost the last of the diehard news people. It was important that they be able to pick up Arthur and return to the farm unnoticed, unless they were prepared to pull up stakes yet again. If necessary, they would have ridden in circles for the next week; but the media had given up after less than fifty miles.

For the past several hours, the only vehicle that had shared the road with them had been a U-Haul with a baby carriage tied to its roof. Finally, a few miles west of Fort Thompson, they stopped at a diner so that the knights could eat and Hal could assess the damage done to his wound by the rigors of the road. His bandage was sodden with blood. Although he said nothing to the others about it, Hal was feeling every mile they had traveled since Rapid City.

He was sitting alone at the counter when the reporter from the
Christian Science Monitor
approached him.

"Oh, hell, it's the guy in the U-Haul," he moaned.

"I've brought you a message," the man said, handing over the note he had copied, word for word, from his editor, who had copied it word for word from Emily Blessing.

Hal read it without expression.

"Is there a response?" the reporter asked eagerly.

Hal read it again.
Come immediately to Dawning Falls.

She was alive. His heart was pounding. Emily had made it out of the burning hotel, after all.

He licked his cracked lips. "You going to print this?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. That's the deal. If I get it to you, we get to print it."

Then everyone and his brother would know where Arthur was. Who he was. Hal wondered if Emily knew what she was letting herself in for.

But then, he told himself, it wasn't as if she didn't have the right. She was Arthur's legal guardian, whose nephew had been taken away by a virtual stranger. It was a testament to Emily Blessing's good sense that she had not instituted a full-scale manhunt years ago. If she had, all three of them would have been dead by now.

Her timing was good. Better than good. Arthur was finally safe from the men who had been after him. What he wasn't safe from was publicity. In that, Emily might be able to help him more than Hal could. The knights were a target that could not bear much scrutiny.

And, like it or not, Hal's place was with the knights. They could not survive without him. Arthur could. Arthur would, in fact, be far better off if he were away from Taliesin's schemes and the knights' uneducable barbarism. With Emily, Arthur would one day be able to reclaim his life. And it would not be the vague and grandiose future the old man was so certain lay in wait for Arthur, but the normal future of a normal American, with a wife, a job, and the opportunity to think for himself. Arthur had never wanted more. He had certainly never wanted to be the reincarnation of a legend.

"There's another thing," the reporter said. "Miss Blessing said to tell you about her..." He looked down, embarrassed. "Her face. She thought you might not know."

"Her face?" Hal asked. "What about her face?"

The reporter swallowed hard. "I... um, well, I think she was in a fire or something. She's pretty badly scarred."

Hal felt himself go cold. She had burned. Burned, and he hadn't been there with so much as a kind word. How long had she been in the hospital? How often had she wondered, while she waited for the skin on her face to grow back, if Arthur was alive?

"Are you okay?" the reporter asked.

Hal looked up, startled. "Yeah," he said. "When's the story going to run?"

"Tomorrow. It won't be front page, though."

It wouldn't have to be, Hal knew. By the time they arrived. Dawning Falls would be a circus.

"Consider it your fifteen minutes of fame," the reporter said in an attempt at jocularity. "Now, if I might have a few words with you about—"

"Just get out of here," Hal said. "Please." Lugh, Dry Lips, and Agravaine stood up at once, brushing the crumbs from their mouths.

"Sure," the reporter said, moving swiftly toward the exit.

"W
e've got a new
destination," Hal announced. He told the knights that they would be traveling eastward to deliver Arthur to his aunt in New York State.

"But the boy belongs with us," Kay objected.

"He belongs where he'll be safe," Hal snapped. "We can't do that for him anymore."

As he signaled for them to leave, he felt a curious sensation, something he had not felt in years. Not since he sat next to a woman in a yellow dress and tried to tell her that he loved her.

He wondered if Emily still had the yellow dress. He wondered if she had any recollection of that day, when there was so much possibility that Hal had truly believed that he might finally be, for the first time in his life, in the right place at the right time.

Who was he kidding, he told himself. From the cold tone of her message, Hal knew that Emily still regarded him not only as the kidnapper of her nephew, but also as the man who had betrayed her love.

Because he had. Their love was one of the things that had to be sacrificed to save the boy.

He touched the bandage beneath his shirt. A thin film of blood came off on his palm. The trip would be hard, but not impossible. They would arrive in Dawning Falls, hand over the boy, and say good-bye to them both.

That would be the impossible part.

Yet that, too, he would manage, he thought. He was doing this for Arthur. Because it was the boy's time now, not his own. Hal's time was long past.

A
rthur trekked desultorily through
the butterscotch-scented wilderness of ponderosa pines that made up the otherworldly forest of the Black Hills. Using the sun as a compass, he tried to maintain an easterly direction. Although it made no difference where he went, he wanted to avoid traveling in a circle.

Hal was no longer in danger, of that he was certain. The old man had helped; he always did. Had he heard Arthur's call? He probably had not needed it, anyway: Taliesin knew everything.

Arthur Blessing doesn't exist, he had said. According to the old man, Arthur had only been born to finish out the life of a king who had died sixteen centuries before. He would have no life of his own, no destiny other than what waited for that vanished, moldering king. Whatever Arthur did, Taliesin had informed him, that destiny would catch up with him.

But if that were true, Arthur thought, if his life was no more than a construct created by the old man in order to continue someone else's life, then why would he even want to find himself? He would be happy living as King Arthur Pendragon, wouldn't he? He moved on. Taliesin was wrong. He had to be. However Arthur had come into being, he was alive now, and he belonged to no one but himself. He repeated that over and over, trying to make himself believe it. But he knew that was not quite true.

Because the incident in New York was not the only time he had acted without quite knowing what he was doing. It was just the only time others had been aware of it. Several times during his life Arthur had seen people who had turned out not to be present at all, or had held conversations with people who had not existed outside of his imagination. On one occasion, he had even believed that he had communicated with the dead.

It had been a part-time farmhand who had died suddenly from a bee sting. The doctor in the emergency room said that the man, a Vietnamese refugee named Tran, had died of anaphylactic shock even before the ambulance arrived. It had been a terrible situation made worse by the fact that Tran had had no ID on him at the time of his death. No one knew where the man lived or who would claim his body.

Because the knights could not be trusted to exercise any sort of sensitivity in the matter, Hal had enlisted Arthur's help in making a street-by-street search of Murdo, the biggest town in Jones County, for someone who knew Tran. It had been the first time Arthur had been permitted off the farm since their arrival, and he had hoped to justify his new freedom with some success in the search, but neither he nor Hal had turned up anything.

Then, nearly three weeks after the death, long after Tran's body had been buried in the county graveyard, Arthur had a dream in which the deceased Mr. Tran told him that his family lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the Sterling Apartments on Hudson Avenue, and that he would require what he called a "prayer doll" in addition to the pay that was owed him.

Among Tran's personal effects were several items that were out of the ordinary, including a minuscule fan trailing pieces of folded colored paper and a tiny pouch made of gold cloth, but nothing resembling a doll. Arthur even looked inside the pouch to see if a doll might be inside, but found nothing except a mat of goat hair.

To say he had his doubts about this vision would have been an understatement. For one thing. Tran had spoken to Arthur in perfect English—a feat the living Tran, who knew only a few hundred words in his new language, could never have managed. Nevertheless, Arthur took Hal's truck in the middle of the night and drove 217 miles to the Sterling Apartments in Minneapolis, where he found a Vietnamese family named Tran living on the basement level. The nine residents of the apartment included Tran's mother, Minn, who worked in a candle factory within walking distance and spoke a little English.

Arthur had tried to communicate the news of Tran's death to her in simple but compassionate terms. He told her that her son's body had been decently buried and that his grave had been decorated with flowers in the American way.