Nod (24 page)

Then, simultaneously, we looked up.

The sun was high in the sky, and all around us were children. How many? Dozens. Silent and observing, just like their sister, Zoe. Soft shadows mottled their heads, and I saw how thin they were. Somehow I’d come to assume that these kids were otherworldly apparitions, phantoms untethered from the trials of Nod. But now I saw it wasn’t true: they were as human and hungry as any child from a World Visions appeal, with eyes as large and round as those of children from velvet paintings. What had they been subsisting on for the last couple of weeks? I stretched my mind across the park. Maybe the contents of a couple of plundered refreshment stands and some muddy creek water. Blackberries and huckleberries. Not much.

The children turned as one and began to walk. My erstwhile companion hopped up and joined them, so I did too. Deeper and deeper into the woods I went, pulled along in their wake as they spread out and then ran with an amazing lightness and sureness of foot. I could barely hear a thing besides my own black bear thump as I blundered along behind them, but I saw some wonderful things.

The trees grew taller and taller while the curled ferns and spindly huckleberry bushes became greener and greener. So many different shades of green—I’d no idea. Giant cedars flung their arms out in exclamations of frozen motion. Fat mushrooms seemed to bop, mad with excitement, though safely tethered to the ground. All around us the world was doing a toddler’s pee dance.

The entire afternoon was a kind of benign swarming: the children would disperse, then gather around some object of interest—a tiger lily or even a candy wrapper some jogger had dropped a month ago. They—we—would examine it then move on in a constant focussing and dilating flow. Occasionally we’d stray into a patch of berries and the children would pick and share them, hand to hand, then gulp them down, Seattle-dust and all.

As evening approached and the light began to wane, we slowed our pace. And as things slowed, a sound grew: the Ragnarok, of course.

There was a shrill new edge in its engine’s upper register, a high-pitched whine that frightened me. The sound affected me like a baby’s cry: an irresistible demand. And so I came back into myself, back into narrative and a sense of urgent mission.

I shook off my pack, unzipped it, and reached for the flare gun Tyler had given me. Then I grabbed the hand of the nearest child, a girl of about six, and began to march toward the sound. As though connected to one another by invisible threads, the rest of the children trailed after us.

Soon I could see the bridge tower through the trees. Its white electric lights were cold and static, but the fires raging on its deck looked warm and alive. Our path emerged onto the seawall within a couple of hundred meters from the ship’s prow. The crowd’s attention was focussed on the flames on the deck, and for the moment, no one saw us.

The children gathered around me, watching and blinking while I raised the gun in the air and fired. The flare arched up into the sky and exploded above us, lighting and freezing the scene. I felt thousands of eyes swivel in their sockets, could almost hear the moist sound of that movement in the same way a million silent raindrops become a deafening torrent. I prayed that Tyler was up there in his bridge keeping an eye out for my signal. I wasn’t going to be able to introduce Zoe to him in time, so if anything was going to touch his heart, it was going to have to be this tableau.

On the beach, a blur of shapes began moving toward us, the nearer ones taking on human form as they spilled out of the dusk. The children did nothing, just stared at me while I stared at the horde, a football field—no, a parking lot—away.

Time for us to go. I turned and ran. The children first followed then floated past me like leaves driven by a storm, disappearing in dozens of different directions.

Eventually I stopped, exhausted and unable to hear anything over the frenzied tomtom of my heart. Then as my heart slowed I became aware of an almost total silence, but it took me a few moments to realize what that silence meant: the Ragnarok’s engines had shut down. In my mind’s eye, I saw Tyler loading up one last syringe, then shuffling below deck to lie down on a clean white bed for the final time.

Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word ‘coney’ (sometimes spelled conny), meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame.

I spent the rest of that night stumbling through the forest while a light rain fell, evading the disturbed hive of the Awakened but unable to make much headway toward the Yellow School and Zoe. The people scouring the woods that night weren’t Charles’ people, but rather the damp damned random lost souls determined to catch themselves a Sleeper. With their exhausted, shambling gaits, they were eminently avoidable as they tripped over drunken tree roots or stood, bereft of purpose, in moonlit forest clearings staring up at the invisible clouds. And so my night was a Denny’s place mat—a maze game designed for bored, not-too-bright kids, traced by crayon intent. Or, to put it another way, the hunters were all blundering Elmer Fudds, and I was a bemused Bugs Bunny, munching on my metaphorical carrot as I crouched behind ferns and slid along muddy unused trails.

Eventually, though, bemusement mouldered—inevitably—into pity. I watched as an old man wrapped his arms around a tree and sobbed. I saw a young woman staggering around in circles, calling out random diminutives in the sweetest voice she could muster. Now that they were so far gone, it was somehow easier to remember that these malformed shapes had very recently been just like me.

We’d been similar like squirrels—all of us scouting out nuts for winter. Some of those nuts had been called ‘money’ while others had been called ‘wisdom’ or ‘fame’ or ‘love’, but the distinctions didn’t seem important any more. The businessman scurrying around after his millions and the poetic youth looking for a warm place in the gaze of some girl or boy—I could hardly tell the difference. Like the old Eskimos and their reputed fifty words for snow, we’d had thousands of way to describe the same desperate scramble for security.

The rain stopped, the sky cleared and stars wheeled in the sky as the planet spun beneath my feet, taking me along for the ride. Together, the Earth and I turned our backs on night and were rewarded by yet another visit from the sun—a foggy, mausoleum dawn that cloaked the tops of the cedars and made everything around me appear draped in gauze.

The wanderers I encountered that morning posed no threat: their minds were as befogged as the forest itself. Just like we mistake barren trees for hostile strangers in the moonlight, so in that drowsy dawn the disoriented Awakened became trees, and I easily evaded them as they emerged then faded away into the mist, one after the other. I had the general sense that I was headed toward Lost Lagoon and the West End, or at least I thought I did. The Rabbit Hunt would be starting soon, and I had to get back to the school and free Zoe.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Coming around a bend in the trail I was following, I found myself on the edge of a small, grassy clearing. And suddenly there was no need for me to seek out Zoe.

Zoe had come to me.

* * *

Standing in the centre of a misty clearing, hands behind her back, she’d been cleaned up and dressed in a freshly-laundered white frock and sandals. Spying me, Zoe’s eyes lit up with recognition and she smiled, but remained put. My first impulse was to go to her, but something held me back. Perhaps it was the sheer impossibility of the scene. Or perhaps it was a sound I thought I heard, something so seashell quiet as to teeter on the edge of audibility. Whispering? Maybe.

In any event, I backed up, then crept silently into the underbrush. Concealing myself behind one of the old moss-covered stumps that littered the park, I watched and waited.

Having lost sight of me, Zoe showed no signs of concern. Instead, she looked blandly around. A barely discernible brightness above us indicated the presence of clear skies somewhere beyond the top of the canopy, but for now the park remained wrapped in its fallen cloud.

After a few minutes there was a rustling in the bush to my left and one of the children I’d run with earlier, a tall boy of about twelve, entered the clearing. Zoe’s face lit up once more at the sight of him. Smiling, he began to move toward her. As he did so, another figure emerged from the fog behind Zoe. It was Gytrash, the old woman I’d left in the bookroom when I’d rescued Brandon. She was wrapped in a long navy blue cloak, wicker basket under her arm—a sight straight out of a fairy tale, back when fairy tales were fairy tales, if you know what I mean. Not Disneyfied pandering, but rather eerie cautionary tales for the young—don’t-go-into-the-woods-or-a-wolf-will-shred-and-devour-you fairy tales. She was from one of those.

When the old get exhausted, you can begin to see through the surface of their translucent skin, right down to the liquid workings below. Gytrash looked as though her face had been dragged a few miles down a country lane tied to the back of a pickup truck then stapled back onto her skull. Worst of all, though, was her smile—a crude mimicry of care and grandma-welcome. The mouth that framed that ghastly smile was a black hole of greeting, stretched open so wide that her eyes were reduced to glittering pinpricks. She was a witch, just as surely as the creatures on the beach a few nights earlier had been scorpions and crows.

But the boy didn’t notice any of this. Catching sight of the crone, he paused in his advance toward Zoe but didn’t turn and run. Rather he froze just as a deer does when coming across a human being—as a prelude to flight. For her part, Gytrash slowly removed the basket from her arm, then awkwardly knelt and laid it on the damp grass.

Nodding encouragingly, mouth still open wide, she began removing a selection of goodies from the basket—cookies, juice boxes, a couple of bruised apples—and laying them down on the ground in a neat line, without ever taking her eyes off the boy.

She held up an apple, nodding encouragement. The boy didn’t move, but his eyes flickered back and forth between Zoe and the food and you could see he was famished. His instincts said no, but Zoe’s proximity to the old woman said yes. Noticing this, Gytrash reached back into the basket and pulled out, of all things, the stuffed grizzly. She made a point of handing it to Zoe, who glowed at the sight. Taking the bear into her arms, she held it to her chest and rocked it slowly.

The boy smiled, and this tilted the scales. He began to advance toward the proffered apple.

‘That’s right, that’s right…’ Gytrash said.

When he was about three feet from the basket, all hell broke loose. Three men, their faces painted bright yellow, leapt from the underbrush and threw themselves at the boy. Zoe turned and tried to run, but fell to the ground. That was when I saw the rope around her right ankle. She was tethered to a stake driven into the ground.

As the yellow-faced men threw the boy down, Gytrash staggered to her feet and began to dance around them, shrieking, ‘Tie him! Tie him!’

The men did just that, binding the child’s hands and feet then standing back, panting, to regard their work.

‘Got him!’ a balding man with long stringy hair cried joyously. The yellow paint that caked his face had also covered his hair, slicking it back into a plastic mane. ‘Tell the Admiral we got another one!’

‘Shhh,’ another hissed. ‘No loud noises!’

The man who’d yelled dropped his chin down onto his chest as two other yellow-painted men emerged from the fog carrying the sort of staves I’d seen being assembled in the basement.

‘Look at the freak.’ One of the new arrivals sneered, stabbing the point of his weapon into the boy’s side. Blood began to flow freely from the wound, and the boy screamed silently, terror roiling across his agonized features. The silence made it worse: suffering without the catharsis of sound is a terrible thing to behold.

Gytrash, meanwhile, crept forward and dipped her fingers into the blood flowing from the wound. Then she lifted her fingers toward her mouth, tongue flicking, only to have her hand knocked away by the balding man’s stave.

‘No demon blood for the Awakened! You don’t want that shit in you.’

She glared at him furiously, but wiped her fingers on the grass and shuffled away.

‘Take him and put him with the others,’ the man said, and he and his compatriots dragged the writhing boy off into the fog while the old woman repacked her basket and followed them.

Zoe was alone again, and it was like nothing had happened. She picked herself up off the ground and stood in roughly the same spot as before, her face devoid of expression, the grizzly hanging limp from her hand. She looked toward the trail where she’d seen me disappear and stared for a long while. Then she turned away.

The Rabbit Hunt had begun.

* * *

My only thought now was how to free Zoe. The obvious option was to walk into the clearing and try to bullshit my way into having the yellow men set Zoe free, but I was pretty sure that my currency as Charles’ pet prophet had collapsed completely during the last twenty four hours and that such a move would be tantamount to suicide. Beyond that, all I had was the pack that Tyler had given me back on the Ragnarok.