The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (40 page)

“You catch on quick. Edward must have been very proud of you. I’m glad you have not forgotten his face.”

When I looked away from him, the Mariner, in the corner of my eye, was not Ed. He was something wholly outside of
familiar,
it was the visage of something unimaginably ancient and scarred. Looking at him was like looking at a pterodactyl and seeing only a sparrow.

“I didn’t see him much. I don’t really know how he felt about me.”

“A broken family...story as old as time.”

“You said
she
. Who is She?”

“She has many names in many lands, on many worlds, as I once did, but in Destin she is called the Wolf.”

“Oramoz,” I said. “The Wolf, who cut the Dragon in two and rendered Behest into the twin worlds Zam and Destin.”

“An allegory for the truth. It is different in every world, in every culture. Turtles all the way down!” the Mariner laughed, and then he squinted at me.

“You are different. You have passed through here before. Most of your kind coming from Destin are the young men and women that come here of their own volition, seeking the truth that will enlighten them so that they can go home as warriors, not drained of fear, and no longer possessed by it, but armed with it.”

“I’m here from Zam,” I said. “Believe me, I am not here of my own free will. I was force-fed a hallucinogen.”

“Is that so?” chortled the Mariner. “Have you considered the fact that you may have been given a key?”

“A key?”

“It takes many forms in many worlds. In Destin, it is the Acolouthis, the Sacrament, used by both the Grievers and the Kingsmen as a rite of passage. The origin is always different, but the destination is always the same. Those who are here, are here to seek something. Not all of them survive the seeking. Not all seekings happen by accident.”

“What am I here to find?” I asked.

“Don’t ask me,” said the Mariner, in his friendly Ed-voice, so much like a Jimmy Buffett version of Santa Claus that I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had stepped into a theatrical showing of
Miracle on 34th Street
with the reel spliced into
The Endless Summer.
I’d forgotten how charismatic my father could be. Or was that the Duke of the Field? “I am merely the horse that brought you here. It is you that must drink.”

I wanted to tell him that his cryptic magic-surfer bullshit was beginning to stir my ire, but the sight of him at the periphery of my vision was prohibitively startling. Whatever he was and whatever he looked like, the mariner Ink, the Duke of the Field, was not my father.

“You said that what the shadow took from you was of importance,” I said.

“It was,” said the Mariner. “I wasted it. All of it. He takes away everything extraneous about you. He strips you away, strips you of your strength, your identity, your love, your hate, until there is nothing left but the core of you, and then—when he’s got the last bit of you over a barrel, when there’s nothing left of you but your will—he’ll crush it. A fate I narrowly avoided myself. If you do not treasure it, he will take it. He is the ultimate thief, the thief of hubris.”

I took his words and pondered them. I noticed a thin sheaf of paper on the fold-up card table. There was also a chair, tucked neatly up under it, a wooden one with a wicker seat and slat back. It seemed very brittle as I pulled it out, and creaked when I sat on it.

“He took my friends,” I said. “Does that mean I didn’t treasure my friends?”

Ink-Ed stood silently by the glass, staring out at the meadow. When I’d sat down, I’d noticed a rigid object in my pocket. I pulled it out and discovered the fountain pen from the satchel. Digging in my pocket made my shoulder hurt like hell. “Hey, is there any way I can patch up my arm? It’s killing me.”

He spoke without turning. “The bathroom.”

I found the bathroom down the hall, just where I expected it to be. There was no curtain in the shower. I ran the tap over my wound, wincing until the cold water and the dopamine dulled the pain. When I opened the medicine cabinet, there was a roll of gauze inside, some clean cloth, and a bottle of alcohol so old the label was flaking off.

I steeled myself and poured the alcohol over my shoulder. I could hear it hissing, but then the pain rumbled in, so powerful I swore, and had to lash out and kick the clawfoot bathtub with a bellish
bonnnnnng.

When I returned to the study in my new dressings, the Mariner gave me a sidelong glance. “Sounded like it hurt.”

“Yeah, you could say that. So what am I supposed to be doing here?”

“The voo-doo that you-do so well.”

“Voo-doo?”

“You do.”

“Do what?”

“Remind me of the
babe
....”

I sat down at the card table again. “I can’t believe you just made a
Labyrinth
and a
Blazing Saddles
joke.”

“You’d be surprised what an old pair of TV rabbit-ears can catch here.”

“After the week I’ve had,” I said, picking up the pen, “There’s not a lot that surprises me lately.”

I contemplated the joke, taking into consideration the sheaf of paper on the table in front of me. I was so hungry I had reached that gnawing, hollow stage where your mouth runs over with saliva at every thought of food. The food poisoning had worked itself out of my system, but I knew there was nothing in the fridge downstairs. What did Ink eat?

Voo-doo,
I thought.
Concentrate on the task at hand. You’re here to do your voo-doo. What is my voo-doo? What is the voo-doo that I do so well?

“He’s here,” said Ed-Ink.

I meant to get up, but he waved me back into the chair. Somewhere he had procured a glass tumbler of some milky liquid and was drinking it. A droplet of condensation slid off of the tumbler and landed on the toe of one of his roper boots with a tap.

“What is that?” I asked.

“What is what?”

He knew very well what I was referring to. “The glass in your hand.”

The Mariner smacked his lips and held the drink up to the morning light. “I think it’s Swarovski.”

“Where the hell would you get—” I began, getting up to join him at the window.

The Mariner wheeled on me. “I thought I told you to stay put. You need to focus. The fear will come soon enough.”

The sky was a panoply of storm-iron, darkening at the horizon and rising to a dusky rust color overhead, making it feel as if we were inside of a giant spool of brown yarn. It scrolled by at a blistering pace like the walls of a hurricane.

There was someone standing in the wind-swept grass of the meadow, so far away that I could only determine that he was dressed in a pale yellow overcoat and Stetson. From here he looked like the Marlboro Man as imagined by Stephen Gammell. The wind tugged at the tail of the man’s jacket like a little boy trying to get his mother’s attention.

He took something out of his vest with a bone-white hand and examined it.

I was going to ask Ink about his mention of fear, but I had no need anymore.

“Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind,” he recited, “—be sober, and hope to the end.”

I went back to the table and sat down. I was supposed to be doing something, but what? Writing? I had paper and pen. Drawing? As I thought about it, the Mariner took a sip and gestured to me with his glass. The tinkle-crackle of his ice settling punctuated his question.

“What was the first thing Sawyer Winton ever said directly to you?”

(
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Sawyer, and his eyes were like scalpel blades. “I’ve read some of your stuff, man. You’re not as bad as you think you are.”
)

“Think about it.”

I sighed and picked up the fountain pen, and put it on the page. A blot of ink seeped into the paper. I lifted it again and looked at the nib in the light. A droplet of black hung on the point of it like a drop of blood on the end of a hypodermic needle.

“Writing is voo-doo,” I said dreamily.

“And what does voo-doo do, class? Come on, don’t make me spoon-feed you. You’re too smart for this crap. Use your noodle, here.”

“Voo-doo brings back the dead.”

The doorbell rang like a game-show bell.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

I dove to the fray, and started writing.

As the boy and the gunslinger sat on the battlement watching the guards stroll back and forth, the sun settled on the horizon like a great golden egg. It glinted through the cords of great rusted-out ruins, a labyrinth of tumbledown spindles assembled to the east. The last vestige of the Etudaen.

Pack hoped he’d never have to go back out into that alien wilderness ever again, but he knew one day he’d have to. He couldn’t stay here forever.

The old man sitting by his side looked up from the culipihha he was peeling. “No one ever accomplished anything by dreaming, ulpisuci,” he said, handing him a piece of the sickly-sweet fruit. Pack looked down at it. It was an aging windfall, barely edible. Harwell was the master of his own kind of ruin, he thought, and slipped the browning sliver into his mouth. It didn’t even crunch.

Harwell squinted into the sunrise. “One day you got to wake up and go get that dream.”

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 2 “The Cape and the Castle”

The Prosaic Rope

N
OREEN AWAKENS IN A COLD
black place and hears the clattering of falling water, muffled and remote, as if through a wall. She sits up, guarding her face with her hands, expecting to bang her head on some unseen rock or pipe, but nothing presents itself.

She remains, listening carefully to the splashing, and once the shock of her circumstance has worn off, she picks herself up off the concrete floor and begins to feel about in the suffocating wet-velvet darkness.

She finds a wall, tiled in sweaty porcelain, and follows it around to a corner, and that to a large aluminum mop-basin. The sink is full of cold, cloudy water and stinks of age and stagnation.

Clots of matter float in it, like dishwater. She moves on.

Further on she discovers a light switch. She flicks it several times, and after her patience has begun to wear thin, a wan glow flashes overhead, illuminating the room for a second, and then it returns, revealing her environment. She is in a large, filthy room several meters to an end, strewn with all manner of disgusting debris and matter.

It looks like a long-disused industrial kitchen of the sort one would see in a prison, or a school. Long, wavy ribbons of some silken black fiber are arrayed across the floor like electrical cables, entangled in corroded rebar and waterlogged bits of plaster.

The fiber looks very much like hair.

“Sawyer?” she calls. “Are you here?”

Her voice is thin and weak, but it carries, if only to echo back at her from the cavelike walls, flat and metallic, the whisper of a lifeless robot.

The water in the sink gurgles.

I paused, lifted the pen, and set the sheet of paper aside. The ink had bled through a bit, but it was nothing serious. The paper was a rich, sturdy texture, almost like cardstock.

Was this dark place real? The words flowing from the pen came unbidden, a stream of consciousness more than mere inspiration, and less than the manipulation of the muses. I wanted to marvel over it, the first real writing I’d done in years, but I was too tired, too hungry, too afraid. I honestly don’t know how I could find the strength.

“Do not pause,” said the Mariner.

I heard a low, muffled, bass-string voice that seemed to come from right next to me. I gasped, jerked away from where I perceived it to be.

This is a fool’s errand, child,
it said.
No one comes back from the abyss. Let me in.

“Do not listen to him. He knows what you’re trying to do, and he means to stop you,” said the Mariner, staring intensely at me, drilling into me with Ed’s piercing eyes. “Don’t even listen to me. We’re both distracting you. You’re pulling these words from a deep place. The Sileni feed you stories, but you don’t need them now. You are with me, at the shores of the Vur Ukasha.”