The Witch of the Wood (16 page)

Only someone pathetically weak or utterly insane could possibly let this continue, as father, as citizen. It was no longer some abstract, intellectual concept, a nosy neighbor here, a shop teacher there. It was going to go global fast, and once Wolfie was lost inside the prison system, there was no stopping this grisly, loathsome machine.

Witches underground?

It was a sin, certainly.

Did he believe it?

Every word.

And now the kicker. Would he try to put a stop to this horrific and unacceptable vision of revenge while there was still time?

Rudy Barnes tossed and turned out on the sofa all night, trying to fend off the heaviness that lay on his heart whenever he thought of any kind of harm coming to this beautiful and dangerous boy. Then he questioned the heaviness itself and fought to stay rational about it.

Yes, Wolfie was his son, his blood, but where did this “love” really come from? Was not this emotion something you developed over time, learned to trust, nurtured, built layer by layer?

He’d known the boy for barely more than a weekend. If this was fiction he wouldn’t believe it was worthy of the page, so why trust it here in real life?

He stared at the ceiling in the semi-darkness. Wolfie was a warlock. He cast spells of love, so this feeling was not real. It was imposed. It was rape. And the idea that this state of mind lay on his emotions like some terminal cancer gave a perspective, at least intellectually.

He knew that in the end he needed to be true to himself. Rudy hadn’t asked to be king of the universe, but he’d gone and signed on when it was offered to him, yes he had, and the blood of two men stained his hands.

Time to undo this mistake.

The question was how. The question was whether Wolfie could actually be defeated.

And also, Rudy wondered whether there would be anything left of his own heart when the spell was ripped clean? Cancer had this clinging ability that made it a tough trick to split it from the tissue.

Rudy had until 7:00 A.M. to figure all this out.

But at 7:10 the next morning Rudy hadn’t figured it out. What he had done was wake his boy with a snuggle and a muffling of his hair. He’d made him his iodine shake and sat at the table across from him.

This was going code red, and he couldn’t do one thing to stop it. It was easy to picture heroics on the sofa in the dark, but in the pale light of the kitchen those things seemed like dreams and mist.

Wolfie put his glass down hard and gave a little burp.

“Amen!” he said, and something clicked in Rudy’s mind. Something tangible, something insightful, it was that sudden, like waking up with a cold shock of water straight in the face.

Amen.

Religiosity.

Perspective.

It was all about riddles, about looking at things from different angles, and Rudy sat at that kitchen table fighting to retain his outer “calm” while on the inside he worked desperately now, point by point, facet by facet, blowing smoke and dust away from the forms and lines that made up an alternate interpretation of Wolfie’s “Coming of Dreams.”

Rudy had never quite bought into the nova theory. It was not that he hadn’t understood the terminology (and he hadn’t), but there was something about it that seemed off-kilter. Scientists had formed a way to put the witches under the dirt, but release-codes, propaganda, and prophecies were typically architected by politicians, those who wouldn’t know the first thing about life pods, or R. H. rotations, or new reproductive dualities.

Politicians were more like Rudy. They were wordsmiths.

What was the first thing people tended to flock toward during social crisis or change?

The clergy, or something similar depending on the culture.

Rudy’s heart pounded in his chest as it all came together. Beautiful and horrific. Holy and violent. The paradox was that the freedom of the witches was not synonymous with the death of all men, and the protective clause was win-win, lose-lose on both sides.

Wolfie’s dreams were actually connected.

The number three was a traditional religious reference.

The “Riddle of the Wood” with its flowing golden rivers was a play on words, and the black widow was the most venomous in the shadow of her lair.

“Wolfie,” Rudy said smoothly. “I think that before your . . .
event
with Duffey, you should pay a last visit to Patricia. You never quite made it over to the house, and it will be a long time before the two of you will have a chance for reunion.”

He’d tried to make it sound like it had been a tough decision he’d really fought over within himself. Overcome with emotion, Wolfie stood and almost stumbled on his way around the table. He took his father’s hands in his.

“Finally, Dad,” he managed. “You see her beauty. There’s hope for the new race of man after all.”

He bent to kiss his father, and Rudy stopped him by gently placing his palms on both sides of the boy’s head.

“I’m the one who needs to kiss you, Wolfie. Take it with you where you go. Remember it.”

He pressed his lips to his son’s warm cheek, amazed at his amazement at how much it hurt inside to do so.

In the car, they did not speak. Wolfie was evidently preoccupied with what he was going to do with Duffey, and Rudy’s face was a mask. Beneath the surface he was terrified. Sitting beside him was a demon, loyal only by birth-tie, trusting him solely because of the brief history of subservience Rudy had worn about himself like a soaked poncho.

Wolfie could read biographies. That was exactly
like
reading minds, except if he made the mistake of thinking the last one he analyzed had remained stagnant, hadn’t been updated so to speak. Wolfie had “read” his father on first meeting and had no idea things had changed. Rudy hoped beyond hope it would stay that way, at least for the next five minutes or so.

They rounded the corner of Hamstead and Elm, and Rudy was flooded with memories, some bitter, some pleasant. He and Pat had “grown up together” here and then grown apart, married at twenty-seven, divorced in their forties. They had put all their dreams in this place, a Queen Anne Victorian with its wrap-around porch and asymmetrical roofs, the external basement entrance out back adorned by a slanted wooden “Dorothy” door and a yard leading down to Patricia’s “craft” area at the rear of the property where a black iron gate separated her work shed from a stand of thick and rather tangled woods. As Rudy had settled himself indoors through the years, making his dens into offices and eventually overtaking the upstairs where he’d demanded silence while he worked, Pat had gone eccentric with all her “projects” outside, erecting her many sculptures soon to be abandoned, her gardens that wound up bug-eaten and wilted, her paintings that eventually got moved and re-moved to the far corner of the basement, dirt-spotted with their edges curling down.

Ironically (considering all the new information Rudy had about the world and its underground inhabitants), they’d initially bought the place for the foliage. The collection of regal elms that stood sentry along the west side of the place and two humongous weeping willows at the other edge of the sloping back yard had given them a perfect sort of privacy.

Rudy guessed she was back there now doting over her little “inventions.” Or maybe she was inside making that foofoo specialty coffee he’d always secretly despised along with one of those “healthy” fruit salads she fooled herself with, soon followed by eggs, and toast, and the Special K she refilled the bowl with at least three or four times. When he’d married her, Patricia was barely one hundred and seventeen pounds, hourglass waist, round breasts, and those cute two front teeth turn-buckled together. But then she’d let herself go through the years, fattening up to a whopping two hundred and twenty-five pounds impossible to cloak. She’d gone red in the face and fat in the ankles.

Physically at least, she was the most masculine female he knew.

Wolfie got out of the car and walked up to the door. It was ungodly warm, but there was a breeze, making the porch swing sway just a bit. There were tubular wind chimes hanging from the eaves, softly bonging together; that was new. Wolfie rang the bell. He pushed his hair across his forehead, waited, turned, shrugged. Rudy lowered the window.

“Get her on the cell,” he called innocently. “She’s here somewhere.”

Wolfie smiled, evidently tickled that his father would think of using technology even a little bit. He dialed and put the phone to his ear, one arm folded across his stomach. Then he was turned slightly away, talking, schmoozing. He held the phone away from his head and said, “She’s out back. She wants to show me something. I’ll be back in a second!”

Rudy waved casually, dismissively. Wolfie stayed on the line with Patricia so he could talk to her on his approach, soaking up every possible moment they could connect before the planned departure he thought she was unaware of.

The second Wolfie rounded the corner of the house, Rudy got out of the car and followed, trying not to run and make noise, struggling out his own cell phone, half looking at it to find the recording button on the side.

At the border of the back yard, Wolfie pushed through two butterfly bushes that had grown across the pathway, shedding a litter of yellow petals to the ground in his wake, and Rudy prayed his own feet would take him the rest of the way on their own without obstruction. He’d been back here thousands of times, the landscape memorized like an old song. He palmed the cell phone in his left hand, leaving the thumb out as if he were hitchhiking. With his right hand he grabbed the digit.

Now he was twenty feet ahead of where he’d just been, inside Wolfie’s head, Pat’s voice in his ear.

“Keep coming, Wolfie,” she was saying. “I have a new project that I simply
must
show you . . . something I’ve been working on for months, something special, something so . . .
me!”

“And Mum, you are beautiful!” Wolfie said back. “I cannot wait to share this with you!”

There was a garden of what looked like particularly thorny roses poking through a tangle of chicken wire, and Wolfie turned the corner. Down a short hill, maybe sixty feet away, was an old gray tool shed, a wheelbarrow filled with old mulch, a rain barrel, and a scatter of wood scraps. Kneeling with her back turned was Patricia. Next to her was a sawhorse set up with a piece of plywood on top, slightly bowed in the middle. And behind her was a scattered array of dollhouses on stands, some with flat roofs, some with pitched roofs, some with fake windows, others with shutters. There must have been thirty of them, all so pretty, some darkened with woodstain, others painted up in basic block colors, some no more than a foot long and a foot high and others as large as bathtubs or bureaus.

Rudy was at the crest of the rise and almost took a header as the ground sloped. He stopped where he was and figured he had enough of a view for what was necessary. From beneath the vision he shared with his boy, Wolfie’s voice said, “Mum! These are awesome! You made these yourself?”

She started to turn, and Rudy almost betrayed himself, calling out a last warning to the only son he’d ever known.

For the number three was a universal trinity, in this case adding up to the Father, the Son, and the Stepmother. And “The Riddle of the Wood” was no more than a sentence with a homophone, and it was fortunate that Wolfie hadn’t picked up the possibility of this in Rudy’s biography. For the same rudimentary word-twist had been used in one of Rudy’s favorite old
Star Trek
episodes, titled “Bread and Circuses.”

The current riddle stated,

Rudy had simply replaced “sun” with “son,” and considering the fact that Wolfie’s main source of nutrition was iodine, he was betting the farm on the possibility that Wolfie was not going to bleed red.

The Dark Guardian turned and Wolfie gasped, realizing that yesterday he’d done nothing more than kill an innocent shop teacher. For Patricia was wearing headgear and protective goggles with a plastic nose and mouth guard. And she had on her favorite hat, a black baseball cap with a huge plastic sunflower on the forehead, one that in silhouette would look like a strange headlamp with ridges as it had in the “Coming of Dreams.”

“These are my birdhouses,” Patricia said. “Aren’t they just lovely?” Then she pulled a cord, fishing line connected in a spider web effect to all the doors.

They all snapped open and from the wooden compartments erupted a black swarm, all flapping madly and chirping and chittering in a collective, continuous screeching. Patricia stood, spread her arms, and smiled beneath the plastic face guard now misting a bit with her quickening breaths, the storm of birds rising behind her like a massive black cloak, the February sun stabbing through the spaces. Rudy disengaged and thumbed for the record button on his cell.

Wolfie ran and the birds followed in waves. He tried the “blink,” but there were too many adversaries guessing right, and within a matter of seconds he was covered, a dark scarecrow utterly overcome and infested, the multiple wings snapping and beating madly like old rags in the wind.

He hopped around as if he were on fire, swatted, swiped, rubbed, tried to stop-drop-and-roll.

Wherever he went, they were on him, like a moving second skin, even on the ground where he tried to cross his hands before his face. They shrieked, they wriggled and burrowed, squirming forward, tail feathers up, working the creases and filling the spaces so the boy just couldn’t lay still.

By the time he’d regained his feet an eye was gone. He gave a last brisk hard-palming to the face and they came off in a wavelet, exposing the multiple punctures and the bursting golden runners, forked and streaming down to his neckline.

Like bees to a hive they were on him again, and his head was a black, fluttering skull; and when a particularly fat black and gray barn swallow pecked in, Wolfie’s second eye popped in a stringy burst. He cried out, but it was muffled by wing and rump and feather and mantle.