Son of the Hero (2 page)

I didn’t even know that I
had
a great-grandmother who had been imprisoned for years. I opened the book and flipped through some of the pages. The script was even more convoluted than Mother’s, and I couldn’t read a single word of it. The language didn’t look the least bit familiar, though it seemed to use our alphabet. Back to the letter.

“The best advice I can offer if you have to come looking for us is to be as paranoid as you can about
everything
and
everyone
.” I shook my head. Dear old Mother was starting to sound as wacky as father, and she’d always seemed more sensible. Of course, her relatives, the few I had met, all seemed peculiar. Maybe it was a family thing, like in
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

“Looking back over this,” the note continued, “I see that I really haven’t told you anything that you need to know. Your father went off to answer a call for help from my Uncle Parthet (not
Parker
, dear, that’s just the name he uses in this world). Your father should have been home by last weekend at the very latest. It is hard to pin this kind of thing down to a rigid timetable because you never know precisely what sort of trouble a Hero will run into along the way, but last weekend by the latest. He still hasn’t shown, so I fear he may have run into something too big for him to handle. Maybe I won’t be in time to help, maybe my help won’t be enough if I do, but I have to make the attempt.

“You’ll have to go to Uncle Parthet for details, and yes, I know you’ve never gone calling on him, that you don’t know exactly where he lives. That’s one of the things your father and I could never explain, part of what you would have learned on this vacation.

“Really, it is quite simple. You just have to know which door to use and where to go after you step through.” I stopped and looked around at the batch of doors again. It didn’t make sense yet, but I don’t know that
anything
would have made sense just then.

“Oh dear, the
doors!
You’ve never operated them, have you?”

“No, Mother,” I said. “I didn’t even know about them. I still don’t.” Too bad she couldn’t hear and answer. I looked back to her note.

“You just need the rings. I hope they fit. If your fingers haven’t swollen up since last summer, they ought to. The rings are in a small box in one of the side pockets of your pack. Always wear the eagle on your left hand and the signet on the right. You touch the rings to the silver tracing on each side of the doors to operate them. A sword in your right hand will serve in place of the signet, though, as long as you’re wearing both rings.”

I glanced at the nearest door but didn’t see anything that looked like silver tracing, so I went to the door and pulled it open. The tracing was inside, all the way around the jamb, but there was a concrete wall behind the door. Time to read on.

“The door to Parthet’s place is the one with the green trout on it (a private joke; your father says that Parthet drinks like a fish). On the other side of the door, you just follow the path. Bear left at the fork and you’ll come to Parthet’s cottage.

“I don’t even know for sure what to warn you about. Once you go through the door, almost anything
could
happen. I mean that in the most literal way possible. You’ve led such a sheltered life in such a civilized world. Not all places are so tame or predictable. If you can imagine something, it’s probably possible somewhere, and many things you could
never
imagine.

“If you have to come after us, expect the worst at every turn. Even then, what you find may be worse than the worst you can expect. I don’t suppose that makes much sense now. It will, I fear, if you come through the door. Deadly danger.
Always
. That’s why I have so few living relatives.

“Eat hearty before you leave. Never miss a chance for a safe meal—if there is such a thing beyond the door.

“If I can get to your father and make it straight back, we’ll be home sometime Saturday afternoon. If we’re not there by sunset, we probably both need help.”

The note was signed, “Love, Mother,” as if I might not know who wrote it. I folded the papers and put them in my hip pocket. I did another slow spin to look at the doors. Then I made the circuit and opened every one of them. They all opened on concrete blocks except the door I had come in through, and
that
door didn’t have the silver tracing.

Back at the table, I dug the two rings out of the pack. I had seen the rings before, or their mates. My parents each wore a set. “A custom,” they called it. I slipped them on the way the note said, eagle on the left, signet on the right. The signet was a simplified version of our coat of arms. That was all over the house—on tapestries, on a shield in the living room, carved into the front and back doors, even stamped into the silverware and embossed on the dishes, the good service that only came out on special occasions. The design was quartered, diagonal lines in the upper-left and lower-right quadrants, a bird that looked something like a penguin in the other two sections.

I went back to the door with the green trout and touched the rings to the silver tracing on either side … and almost browned out. The blank concrete wall disappeared and showed me what looked like the interior of a cave, dim, with a hint of distant light off to the left. I jumped back and the wall returned. I tried again and jumped back just as quickly.

“Holy shit!” I shouted. I went out through the regular door and up to the kitchen. I had spotted a six-pack of Michelob in the fridge. I opened two and started drinking one with each hand—much too quickly. But the bottles were half empty before I could make myself stop.

“The whole family’s crazy,” I said, looking at the bottles. “I’m as loony as the rest.” But that explanation didn’t sit well. I went back down to the basement room with one way in and eight ways out. Crossing the main part of the cellar, I picked up a baseball—teenage memorabilia. I took the ball to the door with the green trout and put my rings against the silver tracing. The cave was still there. I dropped the baseball, bounced it off my knee, and watched it bounce twice on the floor of the cave, then roll away. When I pulled my hands away from the silver tracing, the wall returned and there was no hint of the baseball.

I stared at the door, at the bare concrete wall, for several minutes before I worked up the nerve to open the passage again. I took away just my right hand. The portal remained open. When I took the other hand away, the wall returned. I started over, reversing the order. Same result. Opening the way needed both rings on the tracing, but one hand would hold it open.

“If this is crazy,” I started, but I didn’t know how to finish. I went back to the table and looked through the pack—two changes of clothing (including one of those silly Robin Hood outfits), cigarette lighter and matches (and I don’t smoke), water-purification tablets, aspirin, fishing lines and hooks, six freeze-dried meals (just add water and heat). It looked like an assortment Dad would prepare.

“Dad, if this is a joke, you’re sure going to hear about it,” I said. An answer would have been comforting, but there was none.

According to my watch, sunset was about an hour off. I didn’t figure on hopping through that doorway any sooner than that, if then. But I really didn’t want to do my waiting in that screwy room, so I went back upstairs. After a futile search for something decent to eat, I settled on a peanut butter sandwich. The bread was stale but didn’t show any mold. It was passable, since I washed it down with the rest of the beer in my two open bottles. Then I went through the entire house, room by room, looking at all of the doors. The door to Dad’s office had silver tracing. Looking in from the hallway, I put the rings against the silver, but nothing happened. I went into the office and tried from that side. Looking out, the hallway changed. It was still a hall, but the walls were made of large stones. There was a torch burning smokily in a bracket on the other side. The door between the master bedroom and its bath had the silver. Looking into the bathroom and touching the tracing, I saw what seemed to be a closet full of rough brooms and mops. Looking out from the bathroom, I saw a different bedroom with a huge canopied bed, torch brackets on stone walls, and a tatty-looking forest tapestry with unicorns and dragons. Two closet doors were also gimmicked.

After I finished my look-around, I went to the living room and turned on the TV to try to find something normal. I flipped through the channels—German soccer, American golf, baseball, a newly colorized Errol Flynn movie, a crafts show, news, news,
Andy Griffith, Leave It to Beaver
. Some things hadn’t changed.

After twenty-one years of living with my parents, I shouldn’t have been surprised by
anything
, but those doors in the basement weren’t just against the rules, they weren’t even within the range of cheating. It was as if somebody had added a phony
CHANCE
card to the Monopoly set.
“You have been abducted by aliens from another planet. Go straight to Arcturus III.”

I turned off the TV. It wasn’t doing the job. “Allen Funt, where are you when I need you?” I asked. Nobody answered. A second peanut butter sandwich didn’t do anything but convince me that beer and peanut butter don’t mix.

As the day’s light started to fade, I locked the front door and went back to the basement. I put on the fatigues and combat boots, strapped on the belt with my sword, knife, and quiver, slipped on the backpack, and picked up my bow. There was no hat with the outfit, at least none I would wear. Mother had provided only a long green thing with a feather, part of the Robin Hood costume. So I went upstairs for one of my Chicago Cubs caps. That was in my room on the second floor. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror on my closet door.

“You look like a jackass, Gil Tyner,” I said. I felt like one too.

“There’s only one thing missing.” I nodded at my reflection. “No, besides your sanity. A gun. If you’re going into trouble, a gun might do more good than the rest of this garbage.”

Mom didn’t like guns—though she had nothing against swords, spears, battle-axes, halberds, bows, or similar pointed and edged weapons. For Dad, weapons were weapons—tools. He made me practice with all of them. The gun cabinet was in Dad’s office. The cabinet was locked, but I knew the combination to his safe, and the keys to the gun cabinet were kept in there. Two guns were missing from the collection, an HK-91 assault rifle and a Smith & Wesson automatic pistol. Dad’s sword was missing from its pegs on the wall as well.

“He did expect trouble,” I said. Somewhere along the line, I guess I had decided that it
might
not all be an elaborate and strange put-on.

I took the other Smith & Wesson 9mm automatic with the double-column clip, filled two fourteen-shot magazines, stuck one in the gun and the other in a pouch on my belt. I also packed a full box of ammo. The pistol went under my shirt in a clip-on holster. I decided against taking a rifle on practical grounds. I already had enough weight to carry.

Sunset was gone. I shut off lights on my way to the basement; I grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen cabinet, checked the batteries, and stuck it in my pack. There wasn’t much room left, but I managed to cram in the last four bottles of beer. I thought I might need them before the night was over.

Down to the basement—nothing had changed there. The green-trout door was still open. I looked through Mom’s note again: “… just follow the path. Bear left at the fork and you’ll come to Parthet’s cottage.” A hint about how far I had to follow the path might have been nice. I shoved the note into my shirt pocket and buttoned it. I left the room light on when I went to the open door with the green trout on it.

“Time for your grand entrance, fool,” I mumbled. No more hesitating. I slipped my bow over my shoulder, then put my hands up so the rings touched the silver tracing. There was still a little light in the cave beyond, not much. I took a deep breath, and stepped forward …

2
Parthet

… and fell flat on my face in the damp cave.

I didn’t try to get to my feet right away. That wasn’t because I felt foolish or anything like that—at least, not entirely. One of Dad’s early lessons for me was to
not
jump right up after a fall but to stay down and take stock first to make sure that I wasn’t badly hurt—unless staying down risked greater injury, as in a fight. I wasn’t hurt, except maybe in the ego. My fall just knocked the air out of me. There was a difference in level between the basement and the cave, or the doorway was placed above the ground in the cave. I hadn’t noticed. Banging my head on the rock floor of the cave didn’t help. It wasn’t the most auspicious start to my rescue mission.

After a moment the cave stopped spinning and I could breathe again. I became aware of a sore spot on my head and noticed the sound of water dripping nearby.

Then I heard something else, sort of a soft scraping sound. The first time, it came and went so quickly that it might have been my imagination. But it certainly got my attention.

“What the hell’s going on?” I mumbled as I stood. I looked around quickly while I dug out my flashlight. My heart seemed to be thumping around a little crazily. It didn’t help at all to see that I was certainly in a cave, not just in some part of the basement I had never known about. I could see a faint light—still off to my left—and guessed that it was coming from the mouth of the cave.

Then I got the flashlight turned on and discovered that I wasn’t alone in the cave. The flashlight started shaking as if I had a bad case of coffee nerves, like after pulling an all-nighter to get ready for finals. Deeper in the cave—on the side away from the faint glow—maybe twenty feet from me, beyond a small pool of water, there was a lizard staring at me. Some lizard. It was seven feet from nose to tail, two feet high, as close as I could make out under the circumstances—the circumstances being that I was scared a lot worse than I like to admit. A long forked tongue flicked in my direction. The eyes blinked once. It was no Komodo dragon, and I couldn’t think of any other lizards that could be so big.