Among the fallen, p.21
Among the Fallen, page 21
A woman stood in the shade of the porch, as if she had been waiting for Abigail’s arrival. A moment passed before Abigail recognized her as the same soul who had led her through the wood. As Abigail crossed the yard, the woman stepped down to meet her and held out a hand. “Welcome, to my home,” she said, her eyes reflecting all the lights in her guardian tree. “Come in, Sister. We have some time now to talk about why you are here.”
Inside the cabin was as bright as out. A single window opened into the shade of the yard. Centering the room, a small table with an irregularly shaped top, apparently sliced from a tree trunk, polished to a satin sheen. The woman set two sky-hued yunomi on the table, gestured for Abigail to sit in one of two cushioned chairs fashioned from sections of twisted rhododendron and vines.
Abigail settled. The woman filled their cups with a dark tea from a bronze teapot. Then she sat, drinking from her little cup, gazing at Abigail with merry green eyes.
Abigail sipped her tea. The taste was none she knew but pleasant, earthy, rich. “None of this is real, is it?” she ventured into the silence.
The woman’s voice came musical, almost singing, “Life is as real as we allow it to be, Abigail. We are the dreams that stuff is made of. If we remembered our dreams when we wake, they would change our world beyond recognition. We shouldn’t fear that, but we do. That is why we forget, to protect our precious illusions.”
“How do you know my name?” Abigail hoped a simple question might draw a simple answer.
The woman smiled, took another sip of her tea before she answered, “You’ve been reading my book.”
“That book talked to me,” Abigail murmured, remembering from the world she’d left.
“And it talked to me of you,” said the woman. “That book, any book is a window, a door between author and reader. While we are in the book, both of us experience the same time, the same place. A book is a miracle, a joining, a drawing in and a release into other worlds. That book is why you are here now.”
“Something hit me,” Abigail said.
“Something did,” responded the woman, “and loosed you from your world, but the way of the book was still open within you, and brought you to me.”
“You wrote Forest Soul?” queried Abigail. “You’re Millicent McTeer?”
“I’m Millicent,” the woman said lightly, brinking laughter, “McTeer no longer. In this Stream, they call me Flyer.”
Abigail remembered her tea, expected it to be cold, but the cup was warm and full when she picked it up. Steam rose from it as she sipped, tickling her nose. “Why here?” she said, “Why am I here?”
“Passing the little while before our Mentor calls you back to your own Stream,” Millicent answered, looking more serious now, “and also to receive a gift I’m to share with you.”
“Mentor?” Abgail questioned, “Like a teacher?”
“Like the púca,” the Flyer laughed, “Like Wendl VonTrier.”
“Him,” Abigail exclaimed. “I should have known. Everything changed when he showed up.”
“It always does,” the Flyer said, “Our time’s about up. There’s something I must give you before you go. Come with me.”
The Flyer lead Abigail back out onto the porch where a branch of the jeweled tree by the house extended within reach. “Take a leaf, Abigail. She won’t mind.”
Abigail reached up and plucked a leaf, that changed color when she touched it. The leaf felt cool and hard, but came away readily in her hand, kept shifting color as she held it, wondering.
“Eat it,” the Flyer said.
“What?”
“Down the hatch, girl,” the Flyer laughed, gesturing toward her mouth.
Tentatively, Abagail tucked it between her lips, laid it gently on her tongue where it instantly melted away to a sweet and spicy infusion, warm, full of voices, whisperings, tiny bells ringing. The Flyer smiled at Abigail through a green haze as the world faded to black.
Thirty-Four
Big Brian Tompkins and his partners in malicious mischief, Red Johnson and Tater Campbell, slipped furtively inside the back door of the Restoration Crusade offices in Drovers Gap. Their faltering jeep had run out of gas before they were out of town. Although nobody was looking for them yet, having not found a witness to their bottling of Abigail Trammell, they were already fugitive from their guilt, and convinced the combined assets of Drovers Gap law enforcement were hot on their heels. Orville Hawk and Wilbur Corvid intercepted them just inside the door.
“We thought you boys might be in another state by now,” said Orville.
“Reverend Barbara will not be pleased to see you here,” added Wilbur.
“Damned old crate quit on us,” mumbled Big Brian. “You’ve got to hide us.”
“We need some money to make it go,” offered Red.
Tater just inspected his shoes in silence, as if looking helpless and miserable might inspire someone to deliver him from his mess.
“We don’t have to do anything,” said Orville.
“You three just need to disappear,” added Wilbur
Before the truant trio could summon a reply, Barbara Battle herself came down the hall, like a frigate steaming into battle. “And so they shall,” she cheerfully assured all concerned parties. She thrust a fat manila envelope into Big Brian’s hands, startling him so that he nearly dropped it.
“There’s ten thousand dollars in there, little ones. You’ve been a great embarrassment to me and I want you to go as far and as fast as that will take you. Your faces will not be seen anywhere near Drover’s Gap again.”
“We won’t get far in that old jeep of Brian’s,” mumbled Tater, finally finding his voice.
Barbara looked at Wilbur, “Give them the keys to the van.” Wilbur looked surprised, then nodded, smiled, and surrendered the keys.
“I promise, we won’t come back until everything’s died down,” assured Red.
“As I said,” Barbara repeated with exaggerated patience, “you will not be seen again in this town. We will remember you fondly.”
“Can we keep the van, then?” Brian asked, his hope in his voice.
“To the very end, I promise,” Barbara said. “Now go.”
The miscreants fled, as if there were a prize for whoever cleared the door first.
Barbara and her henchmen watched as the van coughed to life and lurched away down the alley. “Now, she said, “One of you go visit our good friend Omar Longshadow and inform the constabulary that three of our part-time construction workers have robbed our safe and absconded with our van. The other can have some flowers sent to the hospital for Abigail Trammell, bless her apostate heart. Meanwhile, I will see our departed ne’er-do-wells on their way and ensure their disappearance is permanent.”
Brian drove, Red sat beside him, and Tater, on his knees behind them, draped his arms over the seat backs. “Sit down back there,” Brian barked, “Quit breathing your wet on me like a sick puppy.”
Tater obeyed reluctantly. “I can’t see back here,” he protested.
“You don’t need to see, Tatertot.” Brian said. “You don’t know where we’re going.”
“Where are we going, Big Brian?” Red ventured.
“Someplace we can spend this money in peace,” Brian replied.
“You don’t know where we’re going,” accused Tater, rolling among bundles of Restoration Crusade newsletters as the van rounded a sharp curve.
“I’m going away from Drovers Gap and the law with a bundle of cash in my pocket. If youns don’t like that direction, I’ll stop and you can walk off to wherever you want to go.” After that, Brian concentrated on his driving and his passengers hung on grimly and silent as Quakers in meeting.
A mile outside Drovers Gap the highway began to writhe like a snake, twisting and dropping a thousand feet over the next five miles. On one side of the unshouldered pavement, the mountain loomed steep as a castle wall, and on the other dropped away to a raging, pent-up river. Brian kept glancing in the rear-view mirror, expecting to see the Drover’s Gap police cruiser rounding the bend behind them. This morning, the road remained peculiarly devoid of traffic. The only vehicle they met was a Gray Eagle bus that honked as the van crowded the centerline on a curve.
Half-way down the grade, a shadow passed over the road, too close and dark for a cloud. The fugitives paid no attention until a moment later the shadow eclipsed them again.
“What’s that?” Brian asked, taking a curve too fast, the van leaning like a ship in a gale.
Red craned his face against the glass and squinted up into the sun. “I see wings. Biguns,” he said quietly, as if in church.
“Plane? Helicopter?” said Brian. Behind them Tater scrambled to gain a view.
“I told you to sit down, Tater,” Brian yelled again.
“Lord, it’s huge,” Red said, rolling down his window and putting his head outside, “It ain’t no helicopter. It’s . . .”
Something banged hard against the side of the van, almost wresting the wheel from Brian’s hands. Red slumped back into his seat. A sickly odor filled the van, reminded Brian of when he worked at the slaughterhouse in Macedonia. Tater was screaming in his ear. He looked over at Red. Red didn’t say a word. He had no head.
Brian looked back to his road just in time to see a steel guardrail arcing around another curve. The van shuddered with the impact, screamed against the metal barrier until Brian managed to pull away. Too hard, over-compensating as the van lurched across the pavement to carom off the sheer rockface bordering the opposite side of the road. Something came loose and went rattling on the road behind as the van swerved right again. This time, there was no barrier ahead and an instant later, no ground beneath.
Everything that happened next happened very quickly over what seemed to Brian a long time. The nose of the van went down, he saw treetops, the river below coming up fast. More rocks and trees growing upside down, then sky, blue as his mother’s eyes, a blur of something with wings like a bat, much too big to be a bat. What was left of Red went flying toward the back of the van and Tater screaming like a banshee. Treetops again and Red smashing into the windshield. Awful noise, like the end of the world, just for an instant, until nothing at all.
After a while that might have been minutes or hours or years, Brian slowly came alive to mind-shredding pain. Something in his eyes made it hard to see. His right arm wouldn’t work. He wiped his face with his left hand which slowly shifted into focus as he looked at it. He wondered where all the blood came from. He couldn’t see Tater but at least the boy was quiet. The van rested at an unaccustomed angle. Red was hanging halfway out the passenger window. All Brian could see of him was feet and legs. There was something peculiar about Red that he couldn’t quite remember.
More than anything in the world, Brian wanted to get out of that van. It was going to be difficult because he couldn’t find his legs. They were hidden from view beneath the crumpled dash. The steering wheel was bent into his belly, which he supposed was why he hurt so much. He wondered if his legs were gone like, yes, he remembered now, like Red’s head.
Brian would have called for help, but his mouth was full of something. He could feel it drooling warm down his front beneath his vest. Through the windshield he saw a tangle of pine limbs and branches. The driver’s-side window was missing its glass. When Brian turned to look out he could feel a cool breeze and hear the river tumbling somewhere a lot closer than he had meant for it to be today. He could see trees and boulders and Barbara Battle standing a few feet away, looking very pleased with herself.
“Help me,” he tried to say, a sputtering mutter that didn’t sound at all like words.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be quick,” Barbara said, stepping close, reaching in, patting him gently on the chest. She took the envelope from his vest pocket and stepped back again. “Goodbye, Big Brian,” she said sweetly.
He watched like in a dream as Barbara Battle’s face grew long and scaley like a lizard’s and she opened her mouth and there was fire everywhere. Brian felt the down of his vest melting into his ribs as his eyes went blind from the heat and light. He drew a breath to scream and inhaled flames.
Willie Graham stepped out of the shower and looked at the stranger in his bathroom mirror. He hadn’t shaved in three days. He wondered if it might be easier just to grow a beard. Brian had a beard. Betty must like it. Maybe if Willie grew a beard, she might . . . No. Enough of that. Willie didn’t need his mother to tell him that Betty was only interested in the gold in that buried train. He figured that as soon as they thought him sufficiently dead, she and Brian would be back there to get it.
Willie laughed at his own foolishness and his growing delight at being still alive. Heaven looks after fools and children, his mother used to say. Evelyn hadn’t been to visit since his night in the dragon’s lair. He should have known. Every treasure hidden in a cave, or in this case, a tunnel, has a dragon to guard it. This one, as far as Willie was concerned, was welcome to keep his gold.
Willie plugged in his razor and commenced to mow his face. He didn’t need to hide behind his hair. Willie thought he was done with hiding now. He was a special case. He guessed not many people had seen a dragon face to face. He figured even fewer had come home to tell about it. Not that Willie would be telling anybody. That was one of the conditions the dragon had insisted on when it lifted Willie out of that deep dark hole. Simon Ryder was on a mission and Willie, in gratitude for not being dismembered and devoured, would be Simon’s spy and accomplice among the Fallen. That’s what Willie had promised, being in no position at the time to argue terms, and now he intended to do no less. Unlike some he could name in Drovers Gap, Willie was a man of his word.
He still wondered how much of what had happened down in the ground was a dream. He was fairly certain the dragon had picked him up and flown him through the dark to deposit him at his own house. He didn’t think he could have walked the distance in his condition and was sure nobody would have offered such a filthy specimen a ride.
“You’re a dragon-rider now, Willie,” Simon said while Willie sat on his front steps gathering his wits and strength to climb up to his door.
“What’s a dragon-rider?” Willie asked.
Simon, answering question for question, “Don’t you read fantasy novels?”
Willie confessed, “I don’t read fiction.”
“You live in a small world, then,” the dragon said before he flew away, a darkness into darkness.
Clean and dressed, looking like a real realtor again, Willie tucked his wallet into his jacket pocket and prepared to treat himself to breakfast at Home Ground. Betty and Brian would be mighty surprised to see him if they met. On the other hand, if they went back to retrieve the gold without him, an even bigger surprise awaited. He was still trying to decide if he ought to tell Chief Longshadow about the whole business and let justice prevail. But that would involve telling about the dragon, which Willie had vowed not to do, not that any sane and reasonable policeman would believe him. First things first. Maybe coffee and some bacon and eggs and a couple of Doug’s good biscuits would inspire him with a plan.
Willie pocketed his keys and was on his way to the front door when he heard the knock. He stopped. Held his breath. He was still trying to decide whether to answer or pretend he was elsewhere when, “Willie? You in there?”
He recognized the voice, opened the door to a distraught and mud-splattered Betty. “Oh, Willie,” she gasped, and hugged him like a long-lost lover.
“Hello Betty,” he said. “Where’s Brian?” He wanted mightily to hug her back.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning her tear-streaked face up at him. “Brian’s fallen in with that Crusade bunch and we broke up again. He said he’d kill me if I told anybody about the gold or what we done to you, so I went up there to get you out of that hole. That man who lives up around there, I think he said his name was Simon, told me he got you out already and brought you home. I got the Miata stuck on that road and here I am. You may not want to see me but I am purely glad to see you, Willie.”
She said all this in one breath without a pause. Willie was impressed with the performance. “You saw Simon?” he queried.
“Yes, he helped me get the Miata unstuck. He’s one strong man.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Betty,” Willie said. “You want to have breakfast with me?”
“I’m a mess,” she said, looking down at her muddy legs.
“Does that keep you from being hungry?” Willie said, laughing until Betty smiled back at him.
Thirty-Five
Constable Jolene Bear had already made a dozen stops along Main Street, questioning shopkeepers, the old men who manned the benches on the sidewalk in front of Dolf’s grocery, any passerby recognizably local who might have witnessed the assault on Abigail Trammell. It was a fool’s errand, she figured. Anyone not part of the Crusade coven would have come forward immediately. Not everybody in town was gullible enough to swallow Barbara Battle’s vitriol against all associated with Vintage Reads bookstore. Abigail was not the devil’s disciple, but a kind and generous citizen of the community, whose only sins were a somewhat pricky disposition, and a bed-and-breakfast inhabited by souls not from around here, which was typical of any of the several boarding houses in town. Battle needed to give her followers an enemy, an accessible target for their war against imaginary evil, and Wendl VonTrier and Abigail Trammell were the most likely candidates she could come up with in Drovers Gap.
Jolene almost passed by Walt Goodwin, his head and arms hidden in a trash bin, a bucket half-full of aluminum drink cans sitting at his feet. Walt was the town’s self-appointed watcher. He was on the street at all hours in all weathers. Walt protested that he wasn’t homeless, but she had been called to pick him up on several occasions when the altar guild ladies at Saint John in the Wilderness had been startled to find him fast asleep on a pew. A couple of times complaints had come in when Walt was caught watching interactions that were not intended to be public knowledge. Walt, in short, knew most of the untold secrets in Drovers Gap. He just might have seen something, if he could be persuaded to tell it.
