The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (27 page)

Besides, he contemplated as the world outside the window spiraled down out of sight, there was no way to get into Destin without the door under the church, and somehow, the Sileni had closed it off from the other side.

And that meant Ross would be safe here on Earth.

To pat himself on the back, Maxwell had enjoyed the couple days of vacation he’d given himself in Chattanooga before heading home, visiting the aquarium and treating himself to some top-shelf Thai cuisine. He’d been through Chattanooga a thousand times, but he’d never gone to see the Tennessee Aquarium. What a shame.

The Sileni hadn’t needed to talk him into covering up the murder. The prospect of being richer than his wildest dreams had been enough to goad him into talking the kids out of following Ed into that other world, as well as abandoning the
Fiddle and the Fire
franchise for good.

He reclined the seat, toed his loafers off of his feet, stretched his cramping legs, and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, the plane was at cruising altitude, somewhere over the Midwest. He’d been awakened by the silvery burning in his bladder that told him he had to piss, and he had to do it soon or face the consequences. He unbuckled his belt and shuffled sideways down the aisle to the lavatory, where he found that it was occupied.

He sighed and leaned against the wall.

A flight attendant sidled past him toward coach. “Excuse me, sir, but we’re about to serve refreshments. I just thought I would let you know in case you end up waiting a while.”

“Thank you,” he said. He followed her pert little ass with his gaze, and accidentally locked eyes with a woman that had been watching a movie, earning an angry glare. Embarrassed in spite of himself, Max Bayard turned his head the other way, and that’s when he saw something that validated every last one of his fears.

He forgot about waiting for the toilet and traveled back across the business class section to the cockpit door, glancing back at the people sitting there. He noticed a powerfully-built man in a cheap suit giving him a look that would wither cabbage.

“Can I help you, sir?” said the air marshal.

Maxwell smiled, though it felt like more of a wince. “I’m just waiting for the lavatory where I won’t be in the way of the drinks cart.”

“Your seat is closer.”

“Yes, well—” Max was about to say something about having to tie his shoes, but he wasn’t wearing any.

“Sit down, sir,” said the air marshal.

Maxwell was in no position to argue, but the passengers and the marshal couldn’t see the little horned man standing by the cockpit door, whispering to the pilot on the other side, his moving lips an inch from the panel’s surface.

If Max pointed it out, that wouldn’t have helped the situation in the least. The Silen was invisible, and the only person on the plane that could see him was the literary agent, even if he only materialized as a pale, ethereal shadow, his face the last truly solid part of him.

He’d had a lot of practice over the years.

Thinking fast, Max grabbed one of the creature’s goat-horns and marched back to his seat, pulling it along. His heart jumped when he realized that to the air marshal, it looked like he was holding something behind his back.

He took his cellphone out of his jacket pocket and sat back down, putting the phone to his ear. “Hello?” he said, the earpiece silent. The phone was still turned off.

“What are you doing, you little shit?”
he whispered to the Silen.

“Trust is earned,” it hissed in some dead language, calmly standing there as Max pretended to talk on the phone. For some reason, you could always understand what they were saying, regardless of it whether it was plain English or what the Mesopotamians spoke to each other two millenia ago. “It is done. Our plans are in motion. You cannot stop it.”

“Stop what?” asked Maxwell.

The Silen did nothing but grin with those horrible, pointy little Bat-Boy teeth. Max couldn’t kill an immortal, but he could sure as hell hurt one. He put the phone down, took an ink pen out of his jacket pocket and bit off the cap, then stuck the point in the corner of the Silen’s eye.

It jerked at the pressure, but didn’t retaliate. Max wasn’t worried about that. They couldn’t be killed
or
kill anyone else. That was part of their curse—they lived forever, but there were conditions, and one of them was that they could not end the life of another by their own hand—their own life, or anyone else’s.

“The writer’s son is in the other-world,” it said.

A lady sitting across the aisle gave him a strange look, so Max scooted backward until he was against the wall. His seat was next to two empty ones. He applied more force with the pen, and the Silen scrunched that side of his face, trying to back away. Max held him tight.

“What did you do?” asked Max, and the plane began to decelerate. He could hear exclamations of surprise and fear from coach. “You mused the pilot, didn’t you?”

“Now you cannot stop us,” said the Silen. “The Rhetor has won. The boy will be ours in the other-world, and now—you will die in this one.”

The engines, all four of them, started slowing. Soon, they would be still, and the plane and all six hundred people on board would slam into Kansas at terminal velocity.

The Silen began to fade, his shape narrowing until all he could see of it was its staring, liquid-gold reptilian eyes and that huge, hideous puppy-teeth grin. It blinked out of existence with a slap of displaced air, leaving Max with handfuls of nothing.

Vero Nihil Verius

I
AWAKENED TO A FIERCE
light, snapping to consciousness as soon as the edge of the sunrise knifed through the window and slit open my eyelids. Gosse Read was asleep in a chair at the end of my bed, his feet kicked up and crossed on my footboard. I sat up and his luminous emerald eyes flicked open.

“Bout time you woke up,” he said. “Your friends are in the bath-house washing up.”

“Were you watching me sleep?”

“Yeah, you real pretty, boy. Get up and go wash, we’re gonna go to the bazaar.”

“Why?” I asked, confused. I slid to the edge of the bed and shuffled into my trousers, shrugged into my shirt. I was putting on my shoes as Read said, “Because I’ve been contemplating what you said yesterday, and something occurred to me.”

“What would that be?”

“That maybe the Old Ways were right.”

The morning was a beautiful beast that romped and shined with a vital spirit, and the very air was like fresh wine, unsullied and intoxicating. The sky was an infinite miracle of deep blue.

I could not hide my astonishment at how good I felt in this other-world after a good night’s sleep and a hot meal. My face was locked in a half-grin that refused to leave. Leaving the Vespertine, I crossed the path of a woman carrying a swaddled infant and couldn’t help but greet her, which only earned me a confused smile.

The bath-house turned out to be the large cabin I’d seen the day before and mistaken for some sort of a barn, or a warehouse. It was a central feature of the bazaar itself, and I discovered that it served as a social locus for Salt Point. Mornings here were like blackbirds on a power-line, a multitude of bathers milling in and out of the front entrances and lingering in conversation.

I almost had a crisis when I approached, because I couldn’t read the signs that indicated which side of the bath-house was for a certain gender. My fears were allayed when I simply chose to enter through the door from which I saw men coming out.

What a peculiar experience: an illiterate writer.

When I walked in, however, I quickly realized that I’d had no reason to be confused after all, because both doors led into the same central bathing chambers. It resembled an Olympic-style lap pool, except it was only waist-deep.

The sides of it were rimmed with a bench where men and women sat talking and sipping pungent coffee out of vase-like ceramic mugs. There was also a square island in the middle with seating. Dark green foliage curled out of a planter inside of it.

The entire floor, pool and all, was tiled in pearlescent green, and the enormous windows were painted over with white, which caught the golden sunrise and translated it into a clean, rich glow. This was in turn captured by the steam and made into a glowing mass of vapor that hung over the bath like a star-cloud and smelled of lemons and mint. Indistinct shapes lurked inside of it, talking and laughing.

The second thing I noticed was that no one was wearing any clothes, only a sort of colorless loincloth, a single rectangle of linen that one pulled across their straddle like a diaper, wrapped a piece of twine around the waist to affix it, and let the ends dangle from the butt and crotch.

I was mortified to realize that I was by far the palest, flabbiest man in the room. Nearly all of the locals were like fashion models back home, slender, dark, and chiseled by a life spent digging up a living.

I stared myself down in the floor-length mirror in the changing room (which, it seemed, had been indicated by the signs out front: “Changing-Room” on the left and “Coffee” on the right). Between my muffin top, and my darkening shaved head and week-old beard, I looked like I’d grown up in a cave deep underground, in a war with cave-dwelling coelacanths, subsisting on Doritos and a tincture of colloidal silver and flat Sprite.

I went into the coffee room wearing the loincloth, realized that no one else inside was wearing one, and walked right back out with the urge to shoot myself.

I escaped to the pool and stepped straight in, hoping I could use the milky-hot water to camouflage my flab, and had to restrain myself from whooping out loud as the heat shocked me. My skin was immediately spank-pink.

Sawyer and Noreen were in one corner. I duck-walked in their direction and sat next to them. They had both turned as red as lobsters and were drinking coffee out of the flat-bottomed decanters. I was immediately envious, because even though Sawyer was as pale as myself, at least he was thin. Noreen’s arms were folded, and she was holding her breasts with her hands.

“This is the weirdest thing I have ever done,” said Sawyer in a deadpan tone. “I’m wearing a diaper, I can see at least seven pairs of breasts, and I am drinking coffee out of an urn with the milk of an animal that I’ve never actually seen.”

I agreed. “It’s weird, but I think swimming out of an elevator ranked pretty high on my Weird List. How you feeling, Reen?”

She gave me a grateful half-smile and coughed hard, several times. It sounded productive. “I feel a lot better, actually, between the steam and the medicine I’m doing pretty good. You know, Ross, I had no clue that you were such a hairy-ass man.”

I looked down at the whorls of dark hair on my chest. “I’m part muskrat.”

“Is that so?”

I was about to retort when someone came up to me carrying a decanter of coffee. It was one of the people with peculiar blue-tinted skin and large heads, dressed in one of the loincloths. I noticed that there was a line of large pores along his collarbone that flared intermittently.

I looked into his eyes and
I could see his retina through his pupils.
It was like reading a map through a pair of keyholes.

“Here you are, sera,” he said in a breathy voice. The container was too hot to hold by the base, but I found that holding it by its narrow neck kept me from getting burned. It was made of some satiny metal in reds and greens. Feathery designs and rings had been carved into it. “I just wanted to let you know that bathers are not allowed into the kitchen. Wolf protect you.”

When I finally looked away from the blue guy (waiter? manservant?), my friends were giving me funny looks.

Noreen arched an eyebrow. “You’re not supposed to go in there. Did you go in there in your towel-thing?”

“Uhh....”

“I bet you forgot something to clean with too. Here, you can use mine,” said Sawyer, handing me a bar of gritty soap and a long-handled wooden brush. I smelled the soap and realized that was where the lemons-and-mint smell was coming from. I lathered up with it and scrubbed myself all over with the brush, which turned out to be very soft.

I decided to finally sample my beaker-vase of coffee now that it was cool enough to drink, and I was astonished at the fact that it was some of the best coffee I’d ever had in my life. A little bitter, and the milk made it frothy-thick, but it had that perfect smoky tang and an added mellow fruitiness besides. It was like drinking an overheated Starbucks mocha out of a hollowed coconut.