IGMS Issue 44 (16 page)

Mab was fading, though my sheets were still damp and cold. There was a mirror over my bureau and in that mirror another window into the backyard. It was through that second, reflected window that Mab left.

I lay shaking for a time, listening to Carla's message over and over.

The next day was cold. The storm the night before had succeeded in scrubbing autumn's crispness from the sky. The trees were getting bare.

I rode my bike up the gravel path that lay over an old railroad bed. The grade was good. It would have been quicker to drive out to the state park but in no way better. The undergrowth was bare. I rode through a child's scrawled pencil drawing, under graphite loops of brambles.

I thought about Carla's message. It had said nothing of real interest, just an outline of potential plans for the evening -- dinner at Dan's place, a movie afterward -- and an invitation to come along.

It was Platonic. It had always been Platonic.

The trail climbed a bluff over a bend in the river. There was a circle of elm and ash at its summit, surrounding a cottage. A man with painted hands was splitting wood at its corner.

"You had a guide," he said without turning . "You never would have found me if you hadn't."

It was true. Hamilton had flown ahead.

"You're the Red Hand."

"More of an ochre, really. I'm only Grandson of Grandson of Red Hand." He held up the hand that did not grip his wood-splitting ax. The paint was actually hundreds of tiny spots, like the mottling on a turtle's back, in intricate patterns. There was a large spiral on his palm and a small one on the tip of each finger. "What do you want?"

"Mab sent me to collect the pieces of her museum," I said, and then added for some reason, "The important pieces."

He snorted.

We talked in the scratchy shade of narrow trees. The river arched cold below. When he was done splitting wood he went into the shack and got earthen mugs and a jug of some clear liquid.

"You've got to use your head," he said. "Think this through. You've got it backwards." He sat erect on the crate he used for a chair. "You think she means like a museum you see today? Those are mausoleums, cemeteries to dead history with someone's found trinkets for headstones. You think that's what she wants, what her museum was like when the French were a rumor on the horizon?"

I thought of Carla moving among the display tables in the Stone Barn.

"I guess I hadn't thought of it." You don't think of the surreal. You watch it go by or -- in my case -- get pulled along with it.

"She wants us back out and roaming. That was what she had then -- some stones in the woods and some hills where the old wonders clustered a bit thicker."

I took a drink and coughed.

"She said it was like Dresden. Or her crow told me that. Things in the museum had been disassembled and taken away to be hidden."

I imagined paintings dissolving like sugar in water, melting away until they were invisible because there were tiny pieces of them everywhere.

Red Hand nodded slowly, his face rising and falling like a piece of granite teetering at the top of a mountain somewhere.

"Will you come if she calls you back?"

He kept nodding. "We called her Old Woman of the Wood. If she's decided it's time to come forward again, there's no arguing."

I saw Thirteen Shades keeping pace with me as I pedaled back into town. He flickered in and out of view behind the trees and at times behind the clouds as well.

When I got back I headed to campus, taking a route that avoided Carla's filling station. I wasn't interested in seeing whether Dan's truck was there.

Back in the lab -- which was again empty, since it was Saturday -- Hamilton brought a silver bowl. At least it looked silver. It might have been stainless steel. The cuvettes of solution looked like liquid pewter. I popped open the dozen or so plastic rectangular containers and poured them into the bowl. They shimmered at the bottom like quicksilver but did nothing of interest beyond that.

"All of the gripe water?" Hamilton asked from my shoulder.

"No," I said. "Not all of it."

I hung my head over the bowl and willed myself to think about Carla and what an idiot I was. It took a while, but a handful of tears came. They were as grey as the rest of the liquid, and when they fell I felt emptier and lighter.

"We don't have to."

I looked up.

Hamilton hopped down from the window. "We don't have to." He looked like he was wrestling with the words. "I could stop talking. You could go back to whatever you were doing before."

I shook my head. "There's no reason for her not to get what she wants. That's why no one argues with her. Red Hand was right. It's like arguing with a forest."

"People do that all the time." He cocked his head. "Bulldozers and subdivisions. Development."

"They're wrong."

I felt like we had shifted sides. He was the bird after all. But I had never known the forest to have a voice before, or a form that blew in my window at night. I had never met a wood that wanted to be haunted again.

There was a bonfire that night at Dan's folks' farm, and Carla wanted me to come along, said that Dan wanted me there too. When I hesitated, she offered to pick me up in her yellow Fiat 600 -- the one she had restored herself -- and I couldn't argue with that.

She was like Mab. There just didn't seem any point.

There were faces around the fire I didn't recognize and some that I did. Dan told stories about the woods around the farm that were supposed to be haunted, about the times that he and his older brothers were absolutely positive the trees were moving at night, how they had tried to mark the forest with bits of rope and scraps of paper to determine whether the trees really walked, and how in the morning their markers were always moved.

He told stories well.

I left at one point to use the bathroom in the barn, and when I got out, Carla was waiting for me.

"They don't normally stick around," she told me. "The lions wandered off into the woods. The birds flew away. Your cow creamer I let out the back door, and it got larger every step, until it was a regular milk cow wandering off down the alley and out toward the fields."

I wasn't sure why she was telling me this.

"Before, it had only ever been animals. But one day there was an art market, and an artist had done all these figurines of wood. And you were there, reading under a tree with your knees up and this resolutely bewildered expression on your face. And I couldn't just leave you there, frozen."

I felt the rough wood of the barn behind me and realized I had been backing away. She took a step closer. It was hard to see her face this far from the fire.

"I didn't even buy it, just touched it and then watched you stumble off into the crowd. But you didn't wander far. And eventually you found a place to live, found a job at the college, and found me again."

For a moment I couldn't breath.

"That's not true." I felt like Hamilton, trying to will my unwieldy tongue to form words. "I have memories. I remember moving here. I remember growing up. If you woke up a statue, it wasn't me." I forced myself to laugh. "In a sense you're right, Carla. You did bring me to life, but only in the normal way."

She didn't answer.

"I'll walk home."

I did, heading up the long dirt driveway. It was a stupid thing to do. It would probably take me a good forty-five minutes just to get back into town. But you can't have conversations like that and then go back to the fire, and you certainly can't have conversations like that and then meekly wait for a ride home.

Mab found me when I had nearly reached the highway.

"I don't want a story tonight, Mab." Her eyes were two stars low on the horizon, but I could feel her breath on my neck.

She flowed along the road from shadow to shadow, filling them with her presence and then moving on. It was hard not to watch her progress, sometimes a dance, sometimes a wavelike roll, sometimes a run, but it was also hard to see her clearly.

"Wants to comfort you," Hamilton mumbled. "Doesn't know how."

"Tell her to leave me alone, Hamilton." I thought about what Carla had said. "Tell her I'm not real."

He left my shoulder. I didn't realize what I had asked.

Lights stabbed up behind me, and Dan's pickup pulled alongside.

"Carla asked me to give you a lift."

The worst thing about Dan was that you couldn't hate him. I climbed in, and he asked about Hamilton.

"He just sort of found me. Things do."

Dan spoke easily. When it was clear I didn't have much to say, he filled the silence. He talked about the rig he had been on. Apparently you give them names, and apparently they're usually female, but Dan said this one had been called Christopher for some reason. He talked all around Carla. She was there, sitting in the center of the conversation like a hole.

Time must have passed, because my lab faded to my house and back again, and the world in between them had gone as grey as the gripe water. Hamilton disappeared. He only said one thing before he left, though I didn't realize he was leaving for good. It was something I didn't understand at the time.

"I spoke it," he said. "She will leave you alone now. Thanks for the raisins."

I hoped he found his family or whatever it was that crows had. No strange things pressed in at the seams any more.

But that wasn't quite true. Shapes began to appear in the rain. I could tell that they were Mab's people, drawn back to the curio of wonders she was reassembling. They looked in at the windows with long, drawn faces that blurred and ran with the rain. I tried to ignore them.

I did not see Carla again.

I started running in the evenings, and I got the cable hooked up again so I could have human voices tell me nothing whenever I wanted. Classes started at the university. I tutored in the chemistry lab.

Carla and Dan got married. I found a semi-legitimate reason to be out of state on the day of the wedding.