Tigerheart (4 page)

Chapter 4

The Crooked Old Lady with the Hooked Nose

I
f any of you are sitting snug in your homes and wondering where The Boy might be at this point in the narrative—whether he’s actually Paul, now living a normal life as a youngster struggling to find his way back; or perhaps residing in some world existing only in the shadow realm of mirrors, not unlike that blond-haired girl in another tale; or perhaps he was just strutting around the Anyplace and far too taken with whatever had lately caught his fancy to concern himself about anything else—take heart that several of his most devoted followers were wondering much the exact same thing. And since their particular situation was far more dire than yours, you can be cheered that a small bit of impatient frustration is a pale thing compared to worrying that you are going to die with The Boy not there to aid you.

The foremost of his followers was a young lady who served a peculiar function in The Boy’s life. She was a petite British girl named Gwenny, an occasional visitor to the Anyplace rather than a permanent resident. There are some very curious aspects to Gwenny, beyond some of the more head-scratching aspects—such as that sometimes The Boy saw her as his mother and other times as his wife, arbitrarily addressing her sometimes as “Mother” and other times as “tut-tut, my dear” (which is what he thought husbands called wives). But this part is about Gwenny, not The Boy’s peculiarities.

So: the curious aspects of Gwenny. Once upon a time, Gwenny and her brothers would sleep peacefully in their nursery and dream of the Anyplace, playing upon its colorful shores and hobnobbing with its varied and sundry residents. They would see lions and wolves, savages and gnomes and a strange old lady with a hooked nose, and princes with six brothers, and just about everything that they could imagine and you could imagine. The Anyplace was about all these marvels and more besides. And every night their mother would sort through their minds, as mothers always do, so as to make them all nice and orderly for the morning’s activities, and she would find bits and pieces of the Anyplace strewn about. It was in this manner that she first learned about The Boy, setting into motion an entire sequence of events that no one could have foreseen.

Gwenny and her brothers made their initial flight to the Anyplace when they were of a certain youthful age. There they had many great adventures, including notable and epic confrontations with Captain Hack, who eventually went to his end in the jaws of a beastly serpent. They then returned home, Vagabonds in tow (“Vagabonds” being the group name for The Boy’s followers—parentless young boys gathered by The Boy to return to the Anyplace and accompany him in an endless reverie of unending childhood). The Vagabonds were adopted by Gwenny’s parents and put on the path to the inevitable destruction that is called maturity.

A year later, The Boy returned and brought Gwenny and her brothers back to the Anyplace for spring cleaning, just as he had promised…although it should be emphasized that time moves very differently in the Anyplace than it does in our own world, and The Boy easily crammed a lifetime’s worth of adventures into the same period that Gwenny was cramming fractions, history, and astronomy.

The positive aspect of this was that The Boy’s existence was one of constant challenge. The negative aspect was that, since Gwenny and her brothers were far less ambitious in their experiences, they were able to retain the knowledge of the things they learned; whereas events unfolded so quickly upon The Boy, and in such number, that they pushed one another out of his head. Gwenny was dumbfounded to learn, for instance—upon her eventual return to the Anyplace—that The Boy had no recollection of Captain Hack. The Boy didn’t consider this remotely unusual, explaining that he tended to forget people after he killed them.

Even more shocking was that he had no recollection of Fiddlefix, the glowing pixie sprite who had been his constant companion. When Gwenny did all she could to stir his memory on the subject, he opined that she was probably dead, since pixies tended not to live for all that long.

It was odd that this should have left Gwenny unhappy. Fiddle (as she was called) had done nothing to hide her disdain and dislike for Gwenny, and had even tried to engineer her demise on more than one occasion. To Gwenny, though, pixies were amazing creatures, and Fiddlefix was no less amazing than others of her sort. It had been almost touching how much she had wanted Fiddle to like her; and the fact that she would never be able to accomplish that aim weighed sadly upon her.

That first spring cleaning visit was gloriously active otherwise; and, although The Boy’s forgetting about Hack and Fiddlefix distressed Gwenny, the Anyplace is such that sad memories tend not to linger. So Gwenny and her brothers were able to enjoy their share of experiences without too much concern about those missing from said experiences, both friend and foe.

After that occasion and their return home, The Boy did not come back for her for several years, and when he did, he was unaware that he had missed all that intervening time. Gwenny’s brothers were absent, off on a school holiday, when The Boy came for Gwenny; but that did not daunt him, since he didn’t recall her brothers either. Indeed, it was miraculous and a measure of the depth of feeling he had for Gwenny that he remembered her. So he can be forgiven for overlooking that Gwenny was wearing a new frock, one that hid—as best as possible—the fact that she was on the cusp of becoming a young woman.

The danger signs were there for anyone who chose to see them. Since The Boy chose not to, however, naturally he was oblivious to them. He did not know that the ravages of time were not about to let up upon Gwenny and her brothers any more than they passed over any other children…except, of course, for him.

But that was a tragedy for another time. Currently we are dwelling upon the tragedy unfolding before us now.

When Gwenny had first voyaged to the Anyplace, the Vagabonds and The Boy had resided underground. She had not been enamored of that living situation, asserting that young boys needed to be surrounded by fresh air and sunshine rather than dirt. So The Boy and the Vagabonds had obediently constructed a house secured high in a tree. They had all moved in there and, even after Gwenny and the original Vagabonds had departed (the former to return to her parents, the latter to be adopted and destroyed), The Boy had continued to reside there as he went about his business gathering new Vagabonds. Upon her return, Gwenny found herself once again the mother of children who needed one more desperately than any other children in existence.

The circumstances were markedly different, though, due to the total absence of The Boy and more than half the Vagabonds.

Gwenny, having arrived in the Anyplace after a dizzying and dazzling flight that fairly took her breath away, met a half dozen new Vagabonds that The Boy had acquired from various points around the world. They were a scruffy lot, and there was something in the eyes of many of them that Gwenny found a bit disturbing. This was due partly to the fact that Gwenny was no longer the young, wide-eyed girl that she had been when she had first come to the Anyplace at The Boy’s behest. The adult eye that resided deep within her head was opening wider and wider, and causing her to look down upon the youngsters that she had formerly looked at directly. Where once they had been lacking merely a mother—a role that Gwenny was more than happy to fill—now she saw they were lacking other things. Compassion. Joy. The sheer thrill of childhood. This new crop of Vagabonds was…

…sinister.

Not all of them. Two of them evoked memories of the gentle, credulous enthusiasm that she had seen in all the Vagabonds of days past. One was a young, skinny, slightly twitchy fellow who took great pride in knowing his name, since it had been on a tag on the shirt he’d been found in: “Irregular.”

The other was very different from Irregular in that he was broad shouldered, even stocky, with an open and eager expression that made him appear so eager to be liked, it was impossible not to like him. He was French, and he was called Porthos. He tended to dress like an oversized dog, with a headdress of floppy fur ears; and he was remarkably strong but was one of those who was easy to bully because he didn’t know his own strength.

Within a day of Gwenny’s arriving, The Boy was gone, and he had taken most of their “sons” with him, leaving behind only Porthos and Irregular.

This action, in and of itself, did not alarm Gwenny. The Anyplace was a place of vast and endless adventure. Many had been the times when The Boy had hustled off on some exploit or another, sometimes gone a day, even two. He would invariably return and strut about, pumping his arms and crowing over his varied and courageous deeds. Gwenny and the family would ooh and aah; and if they did not do so with sufficient enthusiasm, Gwenny would say firmly, “Now, show proper respect to your father, children.” Whereupon they would sustain their oohs and aahs for far longer, allowing The Boy more time to puff and strut.

That was when The Boy was being the father and Gwenny the mother. There were other times when The Boy wanted to be treated as a child as well, although Gwenny confusingly remained in her role as mother in those instances. In his inability to decide whether he wanted the most significant female in his life to be his mother or his life mate—and perpetually alternating between the two—The Boy was closer to the attitude of adult men than in any other aspect of his nature.

When The Boy departed with the balance of the Vagabonds that first day which would mark a major tragedy in their lives, Gwenny went about the usual routine of spring cleaning. Naturally she had no true idea how much time or how many springs might have passed in her absence, but she dealt with the considerable mess with her usual aplomb. The day slid easily into night, and Gwenny told her two young charges stories and settled them in bed, while assuring them that their father would be back by the morning.

The morning came and went and brought no sign of The Boy. The evening followed as had the previous, and by the time of the third morning, Gwenny’s assurances that all was well rang hollow in her own ears.

Time passed, and passed some more. In The Boy’s prolonged absence, the Vagabonds were responsible for food gathering, and they did an adequate if not spectacular job. They would come home with armloads of plants mostly, but tell great stories of how the vegetation had put up a mighty fight. Gwenny would ooh and aah, but her efforts to do so were halfhearted as her concern grew.

Gwenny lost track of how long The Boy was gone. That wasn’t all that difficult to do, for the Anyplace was adept at draining one’s awareness of times past or present, encouraging its residents to live only in the now. But every so often her mind, or the thoughts of the Vagabonds, would return to their missing father and siblings, and the concern would grow once more. Eventually it took such deep root that no amount of the Anyplace’s influence could distract them from their anxiety over their father’s prolonged absence.

“What if he’s dead?” Irregular whispered to Gwenny, thinking that he was the only one who was doing so when in fact so was Porthos.

“He’s not dead,” Gwenny said firmly. “He is far too wonderful to die, and he would be the first to tell you, if given the opportunity.”

“Then I hope he has that opportunity soon.”

Then one day, Gwenny woke up with the distinct feeling that this day was going to be significantly different from those that had gone before. She didn’t know why she thought it, but it was an ill-at-ease that she could not escape. She continued to try to put up a brave front for the others, but they picked up on her worry, and it permeated the entirety of their day.

Day once more rolled into night, and Gwenny let out a deep sigh of relief that her premonition appeared groundless. But the sigh caught in her throat when Porthos suddenly tugged at her arm, pointed, and said, “Who is that?”

Gwenny didn’t initially see at what he was pointing, but then she did. From her vantage point in the tree house, she spotted an elderly lady, crooked and bent, standing some distance away.

“Are you going to invite her up?” Irregular said, never praying more that the answer was going to be no.

Gwenny obliged him. “Stay here,” she said, and vaulted off the edge of the house.

With The Boy having been gone for so long, and no ready supply of pixie dust to supplement them, flight was problematic. In some measure, it was The Boy’s own belief in their ability to fly that enabled them to do so, and with The Boy gone, flying—like every other Anyplace activity—became far more difficult. But Gwenny was still able to float a bit when needed, and she did so now, drifting like a feather to the ground. She was extremely worried and nervous, for she had no idea who this lady might be or if she presented any sort of danger. Gwenny told herself that she could handle anything, especially if it involved a threat to her children, whom she would defend like a tigress.

She landed gently on the ground, making sure to keep her hands upon her thighs so that her frock didn’t billow up and around her. Gwenny was all too aware of the eyes of the lads upon her from above, watching and listening to every move. She tilted her head slightly and said as properly as she could, “May I help you?”