Fool on the Hill (33 page)

HOBART VISITS THE BONEYARD

I.

The hangar doors slid open silently, moved by a set of rollers and counterweights finer than anything human hands could have designed. Snow whipped into the hangar as if seeking targets, yet Hobart stood right at the opening, enduring the cold, looking down from the very pinnacle of the Tower. Outside chaos reigned: with the setting of the sun visibility had dropped almost to zero, and now the air currents goaded each other to greater feats of abandon. Foolish to tempt Fate by venturing out on such a night, but out he must go. Hobart’s nightmares had gotten progressively worse, and he could no longer suppress the feeling that something terrible had happened in The Boneyard.

He walked back to the rear of the hangar where the gossamer glider waited and climbed into the sling-seat. His pinsword was in his belt, but he did not bother arming himself with a crossbow, for if he ran into trouble he doubted it would be much use to him. Instead he had gone to a secret place in the lower part of the Tower and obtained a tiny sackful of a very special dust. The dust was silver, a special alloy also beyond the ability of human craft; precious and rare, it might prove his only salvation in a true emergency.

Hobart gave the command, and the glider arose and hurled itself out into the storm. Once past the hangar doors, Hobart’s trip took on a decidedly different character than Zephyr’s months-ago chase after George: far from a smooth glide, the first turbulence threatened to break the aircraft in two, and at one point it seemed to actually be bouncing up and down rather than moving forward. Hobart petitioned the wind to be gentler, after which it eased off some—but a human being would still have compared the glide down the Slope to a roller coaster ride, without the usual reassurance of a safe stop at the end of the trip.

Hobart was frightened by the violence of the storm, yet he hoped very shortly to be made even more afraid. He would pass perilously low over The
Boneyard, to check whether a particular ring of seven white stones was still intact—a ring specially enchanted to discourage overly curious animals and sprites from disturbing what lay beneath it. He could not possibly hope to see the stones what with all the snow, but if they were there he would feel it, feel the dread and desire to flee that they would project into him. And if, in flying over the old burial site, Hobart felt no fear except that which he brought with him . . . well, in that case, fear itself would hardly be enough.

II.

The glider made an almost reluctant dip as it passed over the chain-link fence that enclosed the upper ‘Yard. Where up to this point a scattering of streetlamps like lesser stars had cast a feeble glow over the sprite’s route, darkness now conspired with the snow to obscure even the most obvious landmarks. Hobart was forced to fly by instinct alone, instinct augmented by memory.

Memory proved a surprisingly sharp ally, and a bitter one as well. Though frost and night covered all, the hidden earth seemed to cry out to him, speaking of another fearsome eve when rain had crashed down in a deluge to hamper the advance of a sprite army traveling on foot rather than in the air.
Here Rosencrantz and three others slipped into a mud runnel and drowned
Memory whispered beneath the howl of the wind.
The great unseen mass just ahead is the tree where Rasferret the Grub’s troops waited in ambush. Directly
below lies the tombstone beside which Miranda and Ariel were slaughtered, fighting
back to back against an unrelenting enemy.

He thought of the story he had told at the Halloween party, the death story that Laertes had been so anxious to hear:
Hecate led the larger of two contingents on an assault against The Boneyard. A second, smaller group, led by Eldest Julius, would sneak in and attempt to kill Rasferret
. . .
of that second group, I alone survive to tell the tale .
. . .

There was another story, an extremely ancient folktale in the sprite canon, that concerned a certain Robin Goodfellow, a rascal and Lothario of very much the same timber as Zephyr’s love-errant Puck. Robin Goodfellow actually figured in a number of folktales, but the most popular by far told of his battle with the great Wildebeest of Rangoon. The Wildebeest, a ravenous monster with horribly sharp teeth, could not be killed because of a strong enchantment laid upon it. Despite this, Robin managed to defeat it through trickery, making it catch its head inside a stout earthen pot; unable to bite, it was thus rendered harmless, but did not die. Hobart recited the story of Robin Goodfellow and the Wildebeest more often than any other talc. He seemed truly fascinated by it.

You killed him, then?

Of course we killed him, Laertes.

Memory whispered to him once more as he neared the burial site, whispered of the death of a dear friend done in by a weapon that had come to life in his own hands:
Hobart, your crossbow!

Was it a tear or merely a snowflake that caused Hobart’s eyes to sting? He swiped at them with the back of his hand, briefly letting go of one of the glider’s guide-threads. The wind allowed the nose of the craft to make another unexpected dip, and this saved Hobart’s life.

The frost-feathered Messenger, roused by Hobart’s intrusion into The Boneyard, shot past like an airborne scythe, talons extended to rip and tear . . . but it had not counted on this last second’s maneuvering. Just the tip of a single claw drew a slit in the gossamer of the glider, which was not immediately disastrous; more damaging, a batting wing of ice twisted the frame of the craft and sent it spiraling downward.

Caught in a plummeting spin, Hobart didn’t know what had hit him, only that he was in trouble. The wind helped level him out before he struck a snowbank—the glider would likely have buried itself to a depth of several feet—but luck must have lent a hand too, to keep him from smashing up against some obstacle as he hurtled through the darkness barely a breath’s height from the ground.

Straining his ears for a telltale sound, Hobart began coaxing the glider back up to a safer altitude. A subtle shift in the shrieking of the wind warned him of the Messenger’s second attack as the ice bird swooped in behind him. With no time to think, he raced his craft up toward the creaking tangleweb that was the upper branch-lattice of a dead maple. Straight for it he flew, at the final instant jerking the nose of the glider still higher, pointing at the crown of the sky. Once again the Messenger, with too much momentum for its own good, barely missed the target, passing just beneath to punch a splintering, jattering path through the maple branches.

“I’m
leaving
,”
Hobart announced, as if to appease his foe, but in the cold dark the Messenger was already wheeling around for yet another run. Banking above the level of the trees now, the sprite set a course for the all-too-distant lights of West Campus and the Slope. He freed one hand from the guide-threads and clutched at the pouch hanging from his belt.

The Messenger, seeing with magical eyes what would have been invisible to most natural creatures, homed in on the glider and readied itself for a final strike. As it drew closer in the glider’s wake, it prepared to counter any further evasive action: it would dive if Hobart dived, climb if he climbed, chase him in circles if necessary. He would not escape.

Hobart tugged at the pouch. Against an ordinary predator—a hungry winter owl, say—it would have been useless, but the sprite had already guessed that his pursuer was anything but ordinary. Indeed, Hobart had
guessed a great many things in the past few moments, and he had no response to these guesses, save one.

The pouch did not want to leave his belt. It hung there, the leather cord which held it unwilling to loosen in the midst of the rush and the storm. Desperate, Hobart jammed a finger into the neck of the bag, forcing it open. Directly behind him, ready for the kill, the Messenger let out a screech; Hobart jerked about and the bag came loose from his belt all at once, falling out of his grasp. The wind caught it, held it open, turned it inside out,and silver dust shot out and back like seed from a rainmaker’s airplane.

It was only dust, but magical, and to the Messenger it was like a brick wall, an invisible fist swinging from nowhere. The bird stopped dead in midair, wings flailing, talons splayed. Then, paralyzed, it was thrown down from the sky; it fell and did not rise again that night. But it did not die, either, for evil things are difficult to kill.

Hobart, delivered only barely from his own death, retreated in a near panic back up The Hill,
the winds that bore him no more gentle than those which had carried him down. The tear in the gossamer began to widen, the glider frame warped drastically, and only an extra whim of good fortune permitted a safe landing back in the Tower pinnacle.

He disembarked from the damaged glider, closed the hangar doors, then hurried down the secret staircase, through the open and wind-swept belfry, into the shelter of the drop-shaft where liquor waited. Some time later, deep in stupor, Hobart found himself looking once again into the face of the departed Julius.

“Why?” Hobart asked him. “Why twice in one lifetime? What could we have done to deserve it?”

“Justice is a funny thing, old friend,” Julius replied. “It isn’t always a matter of what you deserve, just what they decide to give you.”

“I’m afraid.”

Julius raised an eyebrow

“You ought to be,” he said. “You ought to be.”

NORTHERN LIGHTS

I.

Two days it took them to drive to Wisconsin, two days, both a long and a short time. An outstretched arm of the “queen bitch of snowstorms” (meteorologists used a slightly less colorful phrase) delayed their progress, though at George’s polite request the tempest quickly slacked off and fell behind them.

Both nights of the journey they spent in roadside motels, lying together in a double bed, Luther curled up contentedly at the foot. They did not make love on these nights; in fact, despite their earlier intimacy in the Garden of Lothlórien and whatever may or may not have happened on Thanksgiving, they hardly thought to touch each other. Instead they talked, and talked; in a novel you would say they “poured out their souls to one another,” although the words they spoke did not pour or gush, they wafted. In calm but earnest tones George escorted Aurora through the vast library he had built up in his mind, shelf upon shelf of unwritten volumes, an army of stories waiting their turn to be told. His greatest fear was that in death he would take some of the best of these stories with him, never having had the time to commit them all to paper; yet this was also his greatest joy, for he knew his work would never be finished, knew the well would not run dry even if he outlived Methuselah. And Aurora—she had no library to reveal, but her dreams, like finely crafted antiques, would have more than filled the rooms of a tall mansion. Long past midnight she whispered to him—as she had never whispered to anyone—of knights and sorcerers, boisterous but cunning dragons, obsidian roads like frozen black rivers. Slowly George came to understand that her desire was not just to think or read about such things, but that she honestly desired to
experience
a fairy tale.

This was both more courageous and more difficult an ambition than simple storytelling: yet not so difficult, George realized, as he might once have believed.

By the time they crossed the Wisconsin border George had fulfilled Aurora’s prediction and fallen as deeply in love with her as she had with him. Somehow the span of two days seemed hardly enough for this to have happened, and afterwards George thought that here he had glimpsed the essence of magic: changes that should take eons, changes that should never happen at all, coming about with a startling suddenness. Back in Ithaca he had first recognized opportunity in Aurora, yet Ached for Calliope; now the Hurt was lost somewhere behind him on the road, and Aurora had eclipsed his recollection of Calliope almost completely. For again, as predicted, the more George loved Aurora the more perfect she became in his sight, and when he tried to think back to that other perfect woman he saw only fair hair and pale skin. All that remained of the dark-eyed Asian was a wrinkle in the memory of his heart, which one day yet might find its way into a story . . . maybe, if he had the time.

At the moment he was fully occupied getting to know this new perfect woman sitting beside him in the car, beside him in the bed. And her parents, especially her father. It turned out that Walter Smith took an instant liking to George, and why shouldn’t he? George was, after all, the answer to a desperate prayer.

II.

They arrived late afternoon on the twenty-third. Walter was waiting out on the front porch as the car drove up. He had a big smile on his face, and it wasn’t just from what he’d been smoking.

“Hi, Daddy,” Aurora waved, bringing them around and parking. Walter Smith waved back, looking not the least bit surprised at the appearance of the rental car or at George. In fact as they stepped out, it was the dog that Walter most seemed to raise an eyebrow about.

“Hello there,” Walter said as Luther ran up and barked at him. “This is George, Daddy.” Aurora made a nervous introduction. She was unsure how her father would react to her bringing home a total stranger, although actually she hadn’t.

“Stephen Titus George,” Walter Smith said, nodding. “I’ve just finished reading your books. Good stuff.”

“I’m in love with your daughter,” George blurted out.

Walter nodded again. “Good stuff,” he repeated. “We’ll have something to talk about after dinner.” He turned to Aurora. “Your mother won’t be home till tomorrow. She had to rush down to Madison; seems your Uncle Bryce backed his Chevy into a pine tree. Totaled the car, then broke his leg trying to climb out the window when the door wouldn’t open.”

“That’s awful.”

Walter shrugged. “At least he won’t be such a bother to his wife while he’s in traction. She might even have a nice Christmas.”

“
Daddy!
"

“Well it’s true. He’s always been a trial to her. Oh, by the way, Brian Garroway came by a few days ago.”

“He did?” Aurora grew apprehensive. “What did he want?”

“To drive me deaf with all his talking. Told me you’d lost your mind and been abducted by Satanists, that sort of thing. I let him ramble on for a piece about how we had to save you, then sent him home.”

“Oh my . . .”

“He’ll get over it,” Walter added quickly, fighting back a grin. “Trust me. So what do you say we eat before you folks unpack?”

They did just that.

Dinner was a wonderfully inappropriate combination of roast beef, cucumber sandwiches, and warm white wine. The roast was blood red and attracted the immediate attention of Luther, who leaped up onto the dinner table. Rather than shoo him off, Walter Smith set out an extra plate for the dog. “Don’t tell your mother about this,” he cautioned Aurora.

They talked a great deal over dinner, and during the course of the conversation it was revealed that Brian Garroway had somehow fingered George as the reason for his sudden loss of girlfriend (Aurora had told him nothing; at the moment of the breakup Brian had become so self-righteously angry that she had not even bothered trying to explain the why behind her decision).

“He said he only suspected,” Walter told them, “but he said it was a strong suspicion, and terrible if it turned out to be true. Made you out to be a real corrupt character, George, a no-account purveyer of filth trying to destroy the morals of every literate soul in America. Just like that James Joyce. Of course after an introduction like that I couldn’t wait to read your books. Town library didn’t have them, and neither did the five and dime, so I took a drive down to Milwaukee.”

“Milwaukee?” said George. “But that must be fifty miles south of here.”

“Fifty-three,” Walter corrected. “And worth every minute of the trip. Marvelous writing . . . I haven’t been so entertained since I discovered Bel Kaufman back in seventy-five.”

George was deeply flattered by this, though he hadn’t the slightest idea who Bel Kaufman was or what she had written. Aurora, wondering what precisely had gotten into her father, fell silent and gobbled down an abundance of cucumber sandwiches, which gave rise to a loud burping fit during dessert. She excused herself and rushed off to the bathroom.

No sooner had Aurora departed than Walter also got up from the table.

“Come on,” he said to George, gesturing.

“Come on?”

“Get your coat,” said Walter. “We’ll go out for a walk. There are a few things I want to talk over with you.”

“All right.” Leaving his dessert unfinished, George stood and followed Walter outside. Left unsupervised, Luther set about methodically devouring every remaining morsel on the table.

The two men walked parallel to the sunset, coming eventually to the great cow pasture that bordered the Smiths’ property. Snow lay only sparsely on the ground, but it made a pleasant crunch beneath their feet, adding a cadence to the conversation.

“I’m going to use an old-fashioned expression,” Walter warned, and then did: “You consider yourself a suitor for my daughter’s hand?”

“Do I plan to marry her, you mean?” asked George. He thought this over a moment and laughed. “Talking marriage already, man oh man . . . well hell, who knows, I suppose that might be in the cards.”

“Never mind supposes and never mind the cards, son. You’ve got a will of your own, don’t you? Do you want to marry her, or not marry her, or some other option?”

“I love your daughter,” George said earnestly, “and for all that it’s come out of nowhere I have a feeling I’m going to stay in love with her, which means, to my way of thinking, that we’ll eventually get married unless her feeling for me changes. But . . . I want you to understand that I consider myself a strong-willed person. Mr. Smith, but Fate doesn’t always listen to will, and lately I’ve gotten especially nervous about Fate. Even if I did decide to marry your daughter, you never know, a flash flood might come sweeping through tomorrow morning and carry her off someplace where I can’t find her, or an earthquake . . .”

“We’ll put you down as a tentative suitor,” Walter decided. “And as a concerned potential father-in-law, of course, I get to ask you some personal questions to make sure you’re the right sort of fellow. I expect total honesty, now—I got sharp eyes, I’ll know if you’re lying to me.” He began to rattle off a long list of queries, which Ceorge answered as best he could: “Are you in any way peculiar?”

“Yes sir, I guess I am.”

“Praise the Lord. Ever been convicted of a felony?”

“No sir.”

“Ever commit a felony and not get caught?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Ever want to commit a felony?”

“Like what, Mr. Smith?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . . something interesting like train robbery or vandalizing a national monument.”

“I could think about it if you’d like me to.”

“Fine—I’m going to hold you to that. Ever been a member of a subversive organization?”

“The Writers’ Guild of America.”

“Not good enough.”

“I went on a Unitarian Church picnic once.”

“You’re my man. Have any homosexual tendencies?”

“Not unless they’re lesbian tendencies.”

“Pity. You a drinking man, George?”

“Occasionally. I’ve toned it down since my undergrad days.”

“Better for your liver that way. Take any drugs?”

“Well . . . it’s more or less traditional to experiment in college, you know, and at Cornell—”

“Smoke any pot?”

George nodded, tentatively. “Been known to. But not often—I can’t write worth shit with a buzz on.”

“You write every day, do you?”

“I ought to. Sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.”

“I know how that is. Plan on doing any writing tonight?”

“Tonight? No, this is my vacation time.”

“Well then.” Abruptly, and with a suddenness that belied his years, Walter Smith turned and vaulted the fence in a single bound. Once on the far side he spun himself around several times, laughing like a schoolboy.

“Mr. Smith?” George inquired, fearing a brain tumor.

“George,” Walter replied, stopping his spin. “George, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve decided to give my full blessing to you and Aurora, whatever you may want to do with each other. Now how about we say screw formality and go get stoned over by that tree stump yonder?”

There are some offers which a wise man does not even consider rejecting. In any case, the sight of this senior citizen producing a joint from his breast pocket—and not just an ordinary joint, either, but a six-inch Bob Marley Memorial—so stunned George that he could not help but comply. Nodding, he too vaulted the fence and followed Walter down to the old tree stump, where they talked about their respective unorthodoxies for as long as conversation was still possible.

A long time they were out there, smoking by the stump; the sun finished setting, the stars flickered into life, and a cold breeze blew, bothering them not at all. They only went back to the house when Aurora came and got them—her eyes wide at the sight of the two men capering beneath the moon like mad priests—and long before that they were visited by the original aurora borealis, the glimmering Northern Lights. Caught up by that unearthly glow, a spectacle sent from a higher place, Walter Smith at last found peace, for now he knew, whether it ended well or poorly, his daughter’s life would not be average. George, never at peace—for storytellers and saints are not afforded such a luxury in this world—nevertheless appreciated the Lights as much as Walter did, for in that glow he could sense the soul of creation itself, and creation always made him smile.