Summerland (54 page)

"Well, we failed," Cinquefoil said, stepping out onto the grass. He looked up. The sky was heavy with the herd of storm buffalo. "Coyote got here first. He laid waste ta Outlandishton, what no one has ever been able ta do afore. And he beat us ta the Well."

"No!" Ethan said. Tears stung to his eyes. "He didn't. He
didn't!
"

He looked at his watch. The little gray screen was blank. He pushed the tiny buttons of the keyboard, delicately at first, then squeezing down hard. Nothing happened. He ripped the watch from his wrist and threw it into the grass.

Jennifer T. sat down heavily. She hung her head, and covered her face in her hands.

"I hate this place," she said.

"So we're too late," Spider-Rose said. Her arm fell, and Nubakaduba dangled beside her. "I knew it. We may just as well sit down and wait for it all to come crashing down or whatever it's going to do."

"Mebbe," said Grim the Giant, "we ought to get back under cover of the trees. Otherwise it's not going to be very long before they notice us."

There was a high, maniacal yipping sound, then, like the coyotes that Ethan used to hear sometimes in the hills around Colorado Springs.

"I think they already notice us, dude," Buendía said. "Here they come."

A low, ragged line of brown figures came bobbing and clambering toward them across the grass. Ethan turned, and grabbed hold of Jennifer X, and tried to pull her toward the trees on the hill in Applelawn behind them, but he could not move his feet. It was as if the soles of his shoes had been staked to the ground. He looked around and saw that Thor and Buendíia and Cinquefoil and the others were all doing the same absurd dance, working their hips and flexing their knees, like people sunk to the ankles in mud. And getting nowhere at all. The yipping grew louder, and more joyous, and Ethan saw that the creatures had the shapes of men, and the heads of wolves, and the next moment he could smell their coats, rancid and sweet, a smell like the inside of your lunch box at the end of a warm afternoon. He raised Splinter over his head, and as he did so felt something that he could not see grab hold of its barrel and give a sharp yank. He yanked back, and gripped the handle tightly in both hands. Just before some kind of immense soft hammer came down and engulfed his head in endless silky yards of iron blackness, he caught a glimpse of a man, walking along behind the gang of werewolves, a man in a long black coat, his red hair crackling around his head like fire.

AMID THE CRIMSON TENTS, BETWEEN THE BLUE POOL AND THE
stumps of fallen trees, there was a patch of trampled earth. It was here, hours or minutes later, that Ethan awoke from the grammer that had been worked on him and his companions. In a panic, he reached for Splinter, and found to his relief that he was still clutching the bat in his left hand, so tightly, in fact, that his fingers had stiffened into a kind of claw around the handle of the bat, paralyzed and aching. And that same invisible something was still tugging, firm and steady, at the other end. The Knot was wearing a raw spot into the palm of his hand.

He sat up. The man with the red hair was standing at the edge of Murmury Well, arms folded across his chest, a gentle smile on his lips and a sharp expression in his bright eye. Ethan felt, very much to his surprise, that he liked Coyote from the first moment he saw him.

"Come on, little guy," Coyote said to Ethan. "It's time to let go."

The bat gave a sudden leap in Ethan's fingers, and he redoubled his grip on it, crying out at the sharp pain that racked his hand.

"Don't let him get it," Cinquefoil said. "He can't take it from ya if ya don't let go."

Ethan thought about the other time that he had been separated from Splinter, at Dandelion Hill. While that separation had not been voluntary, it was more in the nature of a burglary—he hadn't been holding the bat at the time it was taken from him. The ferisher had simply plucked it from the backseat of the car.

"What do you want it for?" he asked Coyote.

"What
for
? Well, because I have already
have
everything else," Coyote said, stepping across the trampled grass toward Ethan. "Thanks to the admirable efforts of a very good friend of yours, I've acquired a small but highly concentrated jar of
very
powerful weed killer."

In the instant before the hodag's egg appeared in Coyote's hands, the thought flapped, black and blind, into Ethan's head:
Taffy
.

"Yes," Coyote said. "Taffy. Noble creature, really. Sad story. When I sent that old pill La Llorona to her with my offer, part of me was almost hoping that she would refuse. You know, I really do think that, in her poor Sasquatch mind, you reuben children had very nearly come to fill the hole in her. Very nearly."

At that moment the wind picked up, and with a bulky rustle of canvas one of the crimson tents came unmoored from the ground and took off into the sky, flapping like a big red bird. In its place, like a white dove revealed by a conjuror's hand, Ethan saw a tall, iron cage that strongly resembled the one from the stone lodge of Mooseknuckle John. For all he knew it
was
the same weird-iron cage. And there, in a soft black heap, just as they had first seen her, lay Taffy the Sasquatch. Her arms were thrown over her face, as if in shame. Standing beside the cage was a hideously bent figure, covered in colorless fur, with a thick neck and bandy legs. He was poking at Taffy, jabbing her with a long stick.

"But in the end she couldn't resist, could you, Taffy, dear?"

Coyote turned toward the cage, and it surprised Ethan to hear that there was tenderness in his tone, and that the tenderness sounded real. "I offered, you see, to return her children to her. I brought death into the Worlds, after all, as you know, little Feld. I suppose it did not sound all that far-fetched that I might be able to send it away again, at least in the case of two Sasquatches. Even if they have been dead for over nine hundred years."

There was low, whimpering moan from inside the cage. The horrible white creature poked her again.

"But—heh-heh—he lied," said the matted white thing, in a voice that was oddly familiar to Ethan.

"Don't I always?" Coyote held up the hodag's egg, balancing it on the palm of one hand, his long elegant fingers splayed. "And thanks, little Feld, to your old dad, who's really quite a
brilliant
person, isn't he, I am now the proud owner of an
extremely
clever toxin-pump system, constructed entirely of a truly revolutionary semirigid picofiber composite. To deliver this fabulous weed killer where it's really needed. Deep, deep down at the very roots of it all."

He raised a hand, and there was an iron clang. Ethan looked toward the ice of the Winterlands, and saw the door of one of the armored snow-truck things bang open. A crew of graylings tumbled out. There was a mechanical whine from inside the truck, and as the graylings found their footing Ethan saw them begin to tug a long shining string into the light, tipped in a darker silver. The hose played out in silken ripples from the some great spool, and snaked along behind them as they ran. When they reached the edge of the pool the graylings hooked clusters of round black weights to the nozzle of the hose, and then tossed it into the water. It fell with an eerie, soft splash. At once the hose began to slither, hissing, down into the pool.

"If your father's calculations are correct, that ought to reach right down to the very bottom of the Well, where it feeds the roots of the Tree."

"Mr. Feld would never help you," Jennifer T. said. "You're a big liar."

"Oh, the biggest," the Coyote said pleasantly. "But not, hard as it may be for you to believe, in this case. Mr. Feld?"

Somehow, then, Ethan's father was there. Ethan couldn't think how he had missed him before. But there he was, standing beside Coyote, in his old jeans and a clean white T-shirt, his beard tangled and his hair unkempt, his eyes behind their glasses calm and intent. Ethan leapt to his feet, to run to his father, but then he hesitated. Mr. Feld did not quite seem to be looking at Ethan, or rather did not appear to be
seeing
him. It was hard to explain. Ethan took an experimental step toward Mr. Feld. The grammer that had prevented him from walking before seemed to have been unworked. So then he ran, his arms outspread, and waited for his father to bend down, laughing, and catch him up, and lift him into the air, and swing him around and around. But Mr. Feld just stood there, looking at him without seeing him, his hands in his pockets, a grave little smile on his lips. Ethan stopped. It was as if a cold wind blew in from that smile, finding all the chinks in Ethan's heart.

"That will be all, Bruce," Coyote said. "Thank you."

Mr. Feld turned to walk away, and as he did so Ethan saw that—there was no other way to put it—his father had been emptied out. His head, his torso, and his legs had no back. There were no organs, no muscles or bones. Instead there was just a hideous grayish-white
lining
, glossy as fresh paint. It was like looking at the reverse side of a mask, a full-body mask, with indentations for the nose and mouth, for the nipples and penis, for the shoulder sockets and knee caps and the toes of the feet. The worst thing of all was the eyes—they were just openings, through which you could plainly see the white expanse of snow and the blue sky beyond. Ethan watched in horror as the husk of his father climbed up into the armored truck and disappeared.

"He didn't
want
to help me, you can be sure of that," Coyote said. "Though the problem interested him
extremely
. You can see what it did to him. He's become a Flat Man. Same thing happened to a lot of those A-bomb fellows, you know, back when I was putting that little fiesta together."

Ethan was standing only a few feet from him now, and the pull on the bat was suddenly enormously strong. Ethan fought it with everything he had, and the ache in his hand grew sharper.

"Come on, now, Ethan," Coyote said. "Help me out, here. I've got everything else I need. The venom of Nazuma—that's the right name for the Bottom-Cat, did you know that? It's not ordinary poison, you see. In fact, it's not really
venom
at all."

"What is it?" Thor said.

"Such a
curious
boy. In every sense of the word. Well, Thor the Changeling, I'll tell you. Back when Old Woodenhead was making the Worlds, separating out all the Something from the Nothing, he found himself with quite bit of Nothing left over. Some of it, as you know, he used to fill in the spaces between the leaves and branches of the poor old Tree. But the rest of it, well, you know how these things are done. Corporations in the Middling do it all the time. He just sort of
buried
it, all that Nothing, where he thought no one would look. Way, way down at the Bottom of it all, lower even than the roots of the Lodgepole. And he set Nazuma to dwell at the Bottom, and hold the Lodgepole up, keep an eye on the Nothing. And then, I suppose, Nazuma found a bit of Nothing that had leaked out, through a hole in the Bottom of it all. And being a gluttonous fellow, he tasted it. And he liked the taste of Nothing quite a bit. Been snacking on the stuff ever since. Holding it in these little pockets at the back of his throat, which, were we to dissect the Bottom-Cat and take a look at them, would likely turn out to be made of the very same kind of organic picofibrous tissue as this hodag's egg, here. It will not merely kill the Tree, this Nothing." He gave the egg a shake. "It will
dissolve
it. Everything will return to the admittedly rather drab gray fog from which it all began. A trackless gray sea in which I will bob, as you did not so long ago in the waters of the Big River, clinging to my little Splinter of the Tree. And then, when you and they and all of it have fizzed and foamed and subsided, I will take my little Splinter, and have something to which I can stake my fabulous
new
creation. And then, as the case really ought to have been all along, the Changer will be the Maker. And you can be absolutely certain I won't make the same mistakes Old Woodenhead made when he was starting out. So come on. Let go."