Son of the Hero (3 page)

I thought it looked hungry, but that might easily have been my imagination.

For a long moment I stood frozen in place, not daring to move an inch, though that didn’t stop the beam of my flashlight from continuing to wobble all over the place. I wondered how much time I would have to react if the lizard decided to charge. I had both hands full, bow and flashlight. I couldn’t use the bow one-handed, and I couldn’t do much of anything without the flashlight. I ruled out running for the cave’s exit. First of all, I didn’t know if I would be able to outrun the lizard. Secondly, I wanted to make sure that I could find the doorway back to the basement before I moved too far from where I was. I didn’t know any other route home, and it looked all too certain that I was going to want to find my way back, maybe pretty damn fast.

Drop the bow, switch the flashlight to the left hand, pull the pistol, and shoot the damn thing, I told myself. Then I realized that I hadn’t jacked a cartridge into the chamber.

“You’re not scoring points for being prepared,” I told myself as softly as I could.

The lizard’s tongue kept flicking in and out. It blinked again. I glanced at the wall but didn’t see any trace of the doorway at first, and that pumped another load of adrenaline through my system. When I finally caught a glimpse of badly tarnished silver, I breathed a little easier.

Pop back through the basement, get the gun ready, and shoot the damn thing from the doorway.

That sounded like an excellent plan. I could even run upstairs and get more firepower to bolster my courage.

That’s the ticket, I decided. I counted three in my head and made my move. But the second I started to move, the lizard moved too—in my direction. It didn’t move fast, but I wasn’t waiting to find out for sure if it had “hostile intent.” I threw my bow to the ground, more or less in the direction of the lizard, and started fumbling to get my pistol out and ready.

I was slow—
way
too slow. If that lizard had really been determined, I’d have been supper before I got a shell jacked into the chamber. But when my bow clattered on the stone, the lizard turned and scuttled off deeper into the cave. I could hear it moving farther off even after I lost sight of it.

I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. A deep breath helped, but for a bit all I could do was stand there. That lizard didn’t have any business being there—or anywhere.

Finally, I realized that I wasn’t accomplishing anything and that the damn lizard might come back. I took another deep breath and then took a long, close look at the wall until I could follow enough of the silver tracing to locate the door mentally. When I touched the silver with my rings, I could see into the basement room, and that reassured me.

I stepped right through then, just to assure myself that I could. Back in that strange-but-familiar basement room, I took my hand away from the door and breathed deeply, several times. There was a crazy jumble of thoughts bouncing around in my head, and “crazy” was still the operative word. I dearly wanted to dig out the rest of those beers and polish them off … but I remembered why I was in the cave in the first place.

“You’re going to have to go back through there,” I told myself. I may even have nodded. But after my encounter with that damn lizard, I had to make a quick trip upstairs. Somehow, my bladder managed to avoid letting go when I saw the lizard, but it was clamoring for attention—and it gave me an excuse to put off my return for a few more minutes.

Then, reluctantly, I stepped back through into the cave and let the doorway close behind me. This time, I had the pistol in my hand, cocked, with the safety off. At least I knew that if I could get back to the cave, I could get home.

If I could get by the lizard again.

I picked up my bow and started toward the mouth of the cave, counting my steps going out so I would know how far I had to come in to reach the door tracing.

Although I didn’t waste a lot of thought on it (I had enough on my mind without that), the cave didn’t look altogether natural. Dad and I had done a little spelunking. There wasn’t much that we hadn’t sampled over the years. Dad was gone so often on his “business trips” that he always wanted to spend a lot of time with me when he was home. For Dad, that meant
doing
things like hiking, camping, and exploring caves, not just watching ballgames or parades—though we did that too. This cave had been altered. Low spots in the ceiling had been hacked out. The floor was flat and met the walls almost at right angles. Most of the passage was room-high and eight feet wide.

Twenty paces from the tracing I didn’t need the flashlight any longer. A few steps beyond that, the cave widened into a chamber about twenty feet square. In the center of the chamber, an altar—a large cube of rock with arcane symbols chiseled into its surfaces—had been erected. The cave walls around it were painted with exaggerated nudes, fat-bottomed women with huge breasts, like the fertility goddesses of the ancient Mideast.

Beyond that chamber, the cave narrowed down again, but the mouth wasn’t far off. The last few steps I had to take hunched over. I stayed inside the mouth of the cave long enough to let my eyes adjust to the outside light. I had had one surprise too many already.

It seemed to be about mid-afternoon, not thirty minutes past dark—wherever I was. It had to be afternoon (rather than morning) because there had been light visible in the cave when I first looked through the green-trout door. I saw a lot of green outside the cave, even wilder and more disorganized than our backyard. The hillside around me was covered with something like Scottish heather, except for a few large bushes and trees. The cave mouth was some feet above the path. I could see it running off into the forest. The path didn’t come directly to the cave but went around the base of the hill to my right. It was a well-defined track, wide enough for a subcompact car, but rough enough that I’d want four-wheel drive to try it. In the ten minutes that I watched, I didn’t see any traffic.

“None of this is real,” I told myself. “It can’t be.” There was no tract of land like this anywhere near our house. It wasn’t in our yard, and that cave hadn’t been long enough to get me clear of our subdivision.

I wasn’t too crazy about continuing, but I also wasn’t quite ready to go back and risk facing that lizard again. Well, I
knew
what was behind me, and I
didn’t
know what was in front of me. That may have made the difference. I moved out of the cave, put the safety on my pistol and holstered it, then stretched. The hill rose two hundred feet behind me. I considered climbing to get a better look at the land, but that scratchy heather wasn’t very inviting. It was knee-deep, stiff and prickly. It smelled vaguely like lilacs.

Mother’s note didn’t say which way to follow the path, just to bear left at the fork. I didn’t see the fork. I assumed—initial hypothesis—that I wanted to head toward the forest. The temperature was comfortable, the breeze perfect. “Nice day for a hike,” I mumbled as I started. Sometimes I can’t help being sarcastic even when I’m my only audience.

I don’t know what I expected. After the lizard, I don’t think anything would have surprised me. I felt relieved that the forest looked so normal when I got into it. The bottom twenty or thirty feet of the trees were bare trunk, giving it the air of a pillared hall with a thick canopy. Firs, some oaks, other types I didn’t recognize. From the new green, I assumed it was spring there too. Birds sang somewhere. I didn’t recognize the calls, but I only know about half-dozen. A flaw in my education as an outdoorsman. The only birds I’ve ever been interested in watching are beyond singing—usually brown and steaming, on their backs on a platter on the dining-room table … or in one of the Colonel’s boxes or buckets.

There was a heavy earth smell of recent rain in the air. The path was soft, spongy but not muddy. Part of the time, I moved slowly, observing, checking out the scenery. The rest of the time, I stepped out smartly, trying to cover ground fast since I didn’t know how far I had to go—and I might have to backtrack to try the path in the other direction.

It was a pleasant place to walk. It gave my nerves a chance to unwind a little, gave me time to start breathing normally. I might almost have been down in the Land Between the Lakes, or any of a dozen other places where Dad and I had gone hiking and camping over the years.

I had walked about a quarter of a mile before I saw any animal life on the ground in the forest—another one of the damn lizards. It disappeared too quickly for me to be positive, but with the better light, the lizard appeared to have rudimentary wings folded back along its sides. Crazy—there’s that word again, but it’s hard to avoid. I stopped and listened, not nearly as nervous as I had been when I stumbled on the lizard in the cave. I was out in the open and this one was farther off than the first had been. The beast wasn’t very quiet. I drew my pistol again and kept it ready until I was long past where the animal crossed the path. I’ve never liked reptiles.

The fork in the path was about three-quarters of a mile from the cave. The track to the left was the less well traveled, no more than a footpath. There were thick brambles, knotty vines, along both sides for quite a distance. The trees seemed shorter, meaner. Low branches needed ducking under. Uncle Parker—Parthet—evidently didn’t get a lot of company.

The farther I went, the more disorganized the forest became. It made me think of a PBS show a long time back that showed the crazy webs spun by spiders on drugs. Smaller, twisted trees forced the path to detour back and forth. The underbrush got thicker, thornier. Stickers reached out to poke me. I was glad I was wearing good fatigues. Those thorns would have shredded the leggings of a Robin Hood costume.

I almost missed the cottage. It was concealed better than our house, almost invisible among the trees and brambles. The cottage was small (well, cottages are
supposed
to be small, aren’t they?) and had a thatched roof with new greenery growing out of it. I was surprised that Dad hadn’t tried for that effect at home. It would have been the crowning touch. The two windows I saw had no glass. Warped wooden shutters stuck out and creaked in the light breeze.

“Uncle Parker?” I called. “Uncle Parker?”

“Is that you, Carl? Are you back? Did Avedell find you?” The questions tripped over each other before the door opened and Uncle Parker—Parthet—came out. Carl was my father, Avedell my mother.

“It’s me, Gil,” I said. Parthet squinted up at me. He was barely five feet tall and had acquired a stoop since I last saw him.

“Gil?” He came closer and squinted so tightly that his eyes seemed to be closed. “How’d you get here?”

“Mother left a note. What’s going on?”

“What’s going on?
What’s going on?”
He snorted and shook his head. “Come in, lad, and I’ll try to explain.”

The cottage was even bleaker on the inside than it was from out front. Everything was wood, gray with age. The planks in a small table were all warped differently. Some of the wall planks were missing completely. The floor was dirt. A fireplace at one end of the room provided the only contrast to the ash gray—soot black. A single door led to another room—a bedroom, I guessed, since there didn’t seem to be much chance that the cottage had indoor plumbing. Parthet sat me on a bench at the table. I found a splinter immediately, the hard way.

“Young Gil, is it?” He sat across the table from me and leaned across it—as far as he reached.

“It’s me, Uncle Parker. Mom left a note that said Dad was overdue and she was going after him, and she told me how to find you.”

“Ah, yes, she would.” Parthet nodded. “And what do you propose to do?”

Good question. I’d been asking myself the same thing. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” I said. “I don’t even know where I am.”

“You’re in my home, not that I use it all that much. This is the Forest of Precarra in the Kingdom of Varay.”

That didn’t help much.

“I didn’t think it was Kentucky. Nobody gave me a script to this madness. Those doors in our basement. All this nonsense. What the hell is it all about?” I may have started sputtering. It was so insane that I wasn’t even sure what questions to ask.

“Your father was going to tell you soon,” Parthet said.

“All I know is what was in Mom’s note.” I dug it out of my pocket and handed it to him. Parthet looked at the paper, sniffed at it, turned it over, then handed it back to me.

“Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced my spectacles and I haven’t been able to find them,” he said.

“Don’t you have a spare set?”

“I have trouble enough keeping track of one pair, let alone two.”

I read the note to him, with some difficulty. There wasn’t much light in the place. Parthet listened and nodded a lot. The nodding continued after I finished.

“It’s so hard to know where to begin,” he said.

“Well, let’s not go back all the way to Adam and Eve.” It was meant to be a joke, but it didn’t sound that way, even to me. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Uncle Parker.” I couldn’t call him Parthet yet. He had always been Uncle Parker, and the habit was hard to break.

“That’s all right, lad,” he said. “I was never much of a storyteller. I could never remember which bits go where.” He shrugged, a peculiar gesture the way he was stooped. “I was never even that much of a wizard.”

“Hold it! Time out! What do you mean, wizard?”

“Well, yes, I think that’s still the word.” He paused a moment, then said, “Conjuring, spells, potions, the odd bit of magic. That sort of lot.”

And I’m the King of Siam, I thought. Okay, the whole family
was
crazy. That was the obvious explanation. And I just happened to pick my twenty-first birthday to join the club.

“My eyesight’s always been bad, and getting worse all the time,” Parthet continued. “Weak eyes are a terrible handicap to a wizard. So much of the craft depends on being able to see what you’re doing. A wizard who can’t see the end of his nose isn’t worth much.” He sighed, rather theatrically, I thought. “I was so glad when spectacles were invented. It gave me the chance to do a spot of business now and again.”