Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (24 page)
Read Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) Online
Authors: Adam Rex
“Is this another one of your rules?” asked Scott. “Like having to be good to get your glamour back? Seems like magic shouldn’t
have
rules.”
“Magic is all abou’ rules. If we didn’t have rules we’d be gods. Even back when I had my glamour I couldn’t just do whatever I wanted. But I got what I deserved. Lemme tell yeh a story.”
Scott sighed, and settled against the front door.
“This is back in the Old Days, in the Old World,” said Mick, “an’ a hermit catches one o’ the Good Folk in his radish patch an’ demands him some fairy treasure. So the old elf shows the hermit exactly which plant hides the gold. Why does he do this? ’Cause he has to, don’t he? That’s the arrangement; them’s the rules. Now, the hermit doesn’t have a shovel, so he ties a red garter around the radish greens an’ heads back to his cave t’ fetch one. An’ when he comes back, what does he find?”
“That the elf has taken off the garter,” said Scott.
“No! He comes back to find that
every
radish plant’s got a garter now. Every last radish, an’ a few thistles besides.”
“And
this
elf was you?”
“No. He was a friend o’ a friend. The point is, that elf
couldn’t just remove the garter. The hermit had caught him fair an’ square. But he could be tricky. We were
made
to be tricky.”
“I alwayth thought your Bugth Bunny mutht be a pooka,” said Harvey quietly. “He jutht wantth to live hith life. He’th a thimple thort. But when thomeone mithtreatth him, he can do impothible thingth. Tie a shotgun in a bow, drop an anvil out of the thky. Pull dynamite out of nowhere—he can do anything, if he hath a good enough reathon.”
Mick smiled at the rabbit-man. “How’d yeh escape, Harv?”
“It wath Thamhain,” Harvey answered. “I did one of the guardth a favor.”
“Thowin?” said Scott. He didn’t know that word. And he wouldn’t have recognized it even if he’d seen it—Samhain was an Irish word, and like so many Irish words, it didn’t sound (SOW-in) anything like it looked.
“
Sam
hain. November Day,” Mick said. “The first o’ the month.”
“We pooka get a little more glamourouth on Thamhain. And thometimeth we give true anthwers, if people athk the right quethtionth. Don’t know how thome Goodco guard knew about that.”
“Wikipedia,” suggested Erno.
“He wanted to know if hith girl would marry him. I thaid yeth.”
“Was it true?” asked Scott.
“Gueth tho, or he wouldn’t have let me out. Lucky me it wath a fifty-fifty quethtion.”
Biggs was still cradling Emily, and possibly singing something atonally.
“How do we get down again?” asked Scott.
Erno grinned. “Rope.”
Scott lowered them down, and he and Mick walked vaguely back toward the bus stop. It was dark, and Scott wondered what to say at home. That he’d changed his mind about the sleepover? That he and Erno had had a fight? He supposed he could tell John that Emily had one of her spells.
Spells
. It was almost funny except that it wasn’t.
“Told you,” said Mick. “Things comin’ together. We set off lookin’ for the Utz kids an’ find a tree full o’ everybody. That’s magic, too.”
“It’s like a story.”
“Same thing. The universe don’t like plot. Story is magic’s way o’ telling the universe to sod off.”
“That’s good then, right?” said Scott. After this episode with Emily, he was ready for some optimism. “Magic wants us all to live happily ever after.”
“Not necessarily,” Mick answered. “Magic likes a good tragedy, too.”
“Can people see you now?” Scott asked Mick as they sat on a bench, waiting for the bus. “Because of the glamour Harvey gave you, I mean?”
“Nah. That was only good for the children. Or the lad, at any rate.”
“Why didn’t it work on Emily? Could you smell magic on her like Harvey could?”
Mick shook his head. “Harvey’s got a considerable nose. An’ Emily’s something I’ve never seen before. If she’s full o’ magic like Harv says, she’s keeping it way down in her root cellar where I can’t see it at all.”
“Maybe she’s a changeling,” Scott muttered. “It’s … it’s not like she and Erno exactly look like brother and sister.”
“Meant t’ ask you about that. One o’ them adopted?”
“No. I mean … they’re supposed to be twins,” said
Scott, and Mick huffed. “I’ve tried to bring it up with Erno, but I’ve never gotten very far.”
“Well, if she was just a changeling, she’d be able to see me an’ Harvey an’ all the other things that don’t belong in this world.”
Down the street a windowless white van was pulling into the parking lot next to the Park Authority Building. Scott was on alert for white vans, for all the good it did. Now that he was paying attention it seemed like they were
everywhere
. So far they’d only meant plumbers or flower deliveries. This one had a long ladder hitched to the side.
“Okay,” he said to Mick. “Well, if you don’t belong in this world, then where?”
“Maybe nowhere. Listen, I’ll tell yeh a story.”
Another story. Mick was getting nothing if not more talkative.
“This was abou’ a thousand years ago,” the old elf began. “I don’t remember much before it happened, an’ sure an’ I don’t remember everything since. But I remember this: one day, a thousand years ago, the sun rose twice.”
I
n the lands of King Anguish of Ireland, the sun lingered just beyond horizon’s door as though smitten with all creation, and reluctant to say good night. This was the twilight time, and the favorite time of the Fay. The old elf-man Fergus Ór (for
if he had always existed, then he had always been old) emerged from his mound, clean as a turnip. He stood and whistled, and before long the firebird, Finchbriton, joined him. Then Fergus packed his pipe, and Finchbriton took his perch, and each smoked a while in his own way.
“Quiet this evening,” Fergus said, and the little bird trilled in response. “Well, I ween it’s because so many good Christian men an’ boys are off helpin’ our friend Arthur,” Fergus explained.
Finchbriton warbled humbly.
“No cause to be embarrassed; yeh weren’t to know. I only mean Arthur. He’s King o’ the Britons, he is,” said Fergus. “But I amn’t much of a Briton meself, an’ you’re a bit of a bird, if yeh don’t mind me sayin’ so.”
“Who’s a bit of a bird?” asked a passing beansidhe, who stopped and watched Fergus from a thicket of dead trees. She was pallid and clothed in diaphanous tatters; and Fergus thought she could be beautiful if only she fixed her hair, or at least combed the worms out of it.
“Just my friend here,” said Fergus, and he pointed to Finchbriton with the stem of his pipe. “Only don’t tell him; he thinks he’s a dragon.”
“You and that bird,” the bean-sidhe sneered.
“Me an’ this bird,” Fergus agreed. “That’s it exactly.
What brings you by, Mona? Not business, I hope.”
“Not business,” said the bean-sidhe with notable regret. “I should be in the east, at Camlann. A great battle rages.”
“Still? It’s not Arthur an’ Nimue’s boy again, is it?”
“Arthur and Lancelot are again of one accord. Today they fight Mordred, Arthur’s bastard son.”
“Well, aren’t you the gossip.”
And then a strange sun rose in the east. To begin with, there was only a glow, like the first light of morning.
“Well now,” whispered Fergus, as much to himself as to the bird or the bean-sidhe. “What do yeh make o’ that?”
The bean-sidhe turned to the east and clutched at the trees. Her hair writhed.
“A sign! A new day begins, and Arthur hath prevailed! Or died!”
This strange sun breached the hills, looking jagged and broken through the trees. It grew larger, closer, not a sun but a dome, or else a great sphere of light that was half above the ground, half below. Finchbriton flew to Fergus’s shoulder and whistled low.
It came at them, this curved radiant wall, and passed on through. Then they were inside the light, and the light was magic. Pure magic, like neither elf nor bird had experienced before. The trees held their branches still, while every blade of grass quivered and the stars fell like cherry blossoms all around. Fergus burst out laughing: round peals of laughter like church bells. Finchbriton sang out loud and clear and set the tops of trees ablaze, while the bean-sidhe keened and wailed and fell to her knees.
Everything blurred, and it occurred to Fergus through his tears that he was seeing double. Then perhaps his brain guttered a bit, and he dropped to the earth.
“Seein’ double,” Mick repeated. “That’s what really stayed with me after I woke up again.”
“Finchbriton?” asked Scott. “You said that elf wasn’t you.”
“Yeah. I lied.”
The buses didn’t run much at night. Scott breathed on his hands to warm them and watched another white van pull up and park next to the first. Mick played with the zipper on his jacket and slumped back against the bench, which was papered with an ad for Aspercreme. Then he took another little drink from his flask.
“What is that stuff, anyway?” asked Scott.
“Perfume.”
“Perfume?”
“It’s fine for fairies,” said Mick, sounding defensive. “You shouldn’t drink it, though—very bad for boys an’ such.”
“Were you just giving me the ‘not until you’re older’ speech?”
“Heh. Yeah. Not till you’re twenty-one hundred.”
“So what was it? The big sphere of light? What happened?”
“Didn’t know what it was then, still don’t. Suddenly there’s no sun or moon anymore, but it’s always twilight, so that’s all right. ’Ceptin’ the air still seemed to crackle with magic. Too much glamour, an’ unfamiliar glamour, too. Like the magics o’ the whole world had come to roost in Britain an’ Ireland. Then word got around that France wasn’t there anymore, either.”
“Not there?”
“Most of it, anyway. Gone. Iceland too, and Saxony. An’ all other points north, south, east, an’ west. All gone, except for Britain an’ Ireland, Ireland an’ Britain. Let’s call the two o’ them Pretannica—the Greeks did.”
“Pretannica,” Scott repeated. The magical world. Sounded like one of those thick fantasy books with a lot of complicated maps inside.
“Pretannica’s there; everythin’ else’s missin’. Yeh travel too far an’ you’d find an ever-thickening fog o’ enchantment
that could not be crossed. Which drove the humans nutty as conkers. Suddenly a farmer who’d never been so much as ten miles from home pined to see all the riches o’ Araby. They tried to get through the fog, they never came back.”
“That’s scary.”
“Sure. Can’t say I thought of it much at first, though. Ireland was my home, an’ I’d never really believed the rest o’ the world existed, anyway. I’d always lived in a bubble. It was maybe a hundred years before anyone realized the bubble was closing in.”
“You mean getting smaller?” asked Scott. He imagined his desk globe, and half a Ping Pong ball covering the British Isles.
“Right. The bubble was contracting. Slowly, but still. Now the Good Folk take notice. We figure it’s all the humans’ fault somehow. We remember the Battle o’ Camlann, even if they mostly don’t. Father an’ son killed one another on the battlefield, an unnatural act. Maybe this was punishment. People believed in things like that back then.”
“You said Arthur retired. He died in battle?”
“Well, some said he died; some said he was only badly wounded an’ taken to Avalon to rest up an’ return. I wasn’t there.”
There were three white vans now, though thus far Scott hadn’t noticed anyone get out. He realized they must be
Park Authority vans, the way they were lining up in front of the building like that.
“So how did you fairies fix things? Make the world as it was before?”
“We didn’t. The Good Folk aren’t much for makin’ plans. We’re a flighty bunch.” Mick sat up. “Rumors start spreadin’, though, abou’ the Fay disappearin.’ The superstitious fairies (an’ we’re all a little superstitious) revive all the old stories abou’ elves going to hell to pay a tithe to the devil, but truth is, it’s not just the Fay disappearin’. It’s all manner o’ magical creatures. They’re slippin’ away, three or four a year. Then one morning it happens to me, an’ I’m in New Jersey.”