Summerland (55 page)

"No," Ethan said. The pain of the Knot was searing. "It's mine. I hate you. You're crazy."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," the Changer said. He waved his right hand, waggling the fingers, and the pressure on the end of the bat abruptly dwindled and passed. "All right, look, I can wait. You're bound to let your guard down at some point, and if you don't, despair will change your mind."

WEREWOLVES CARRIED ETHAN AND JENNIFER T. OVER TO ONE OF
the red tents and shoved them in. They were fed some kind of thin but tasty broth, with crusts of flat, sour bread. Then they were left alone to their thoughts, and to the creeping onset of despair.

"What do you think is going to happen?" Ethan said.

"Some more bad things, I guess," said Jennifer T. "Ethan, it's so awful. Your
dad
."

"I don't know what that Flat Man thing was," Ethan said. He shuddered at the memory. "But it wasn't my dad."

"And poor Taffy."

"I can't believe she fell for his stupid lie," Ethan said, uncharitably.

"That's what people do, Ethan," Jennifer T. said. "They fall for his lies."

There was not much more to say. After a while they fell asleep, and in his dreams Ethan saw his father and mother, and they had no backs, and the sky shone through their eye sockets, and they were smiling down at him, and telling him that they loved him, and tugging mercilessly at his hands.

He woke up. Something was pulling on his hands—not on the bat, which he still gripped tightly—but on his hands themselves, at the wrists. Something cool and flexible, and tipped with tiny barbs. A pair of cool little claws.

"Come on, now, piglet," said a voice out of some long-ago, distant dream. "We got to get our ownselves out of here."

CUTBELLY LED THEM THROUGH THE SHADOWS TOWARD THE VAST
dark bramble of enormous thorns that Ethan had seen along the first-base side of Diamond Green, when they came down the hill from the Summerlands. This place, he explained, was called the Briarpatch. It was a hostile waste that had grown up to fill the borders between the Middling and Diamond Green, as the old ways and roads of adventure were neglected, and travelers and heroes from the Middling ceased to seek the refuge of the Lodges of the Blessed. The thick briarwood had grown so huge and high that it was not difficult for them to find a path through it, ducking under the shaggy vines when they could, and scrambling over them when they could not duck under. The thorns themselves, six and seven feet long and as thick at their base as the trunk of a tree, were almost too large to be really dangerous, as the thorn of a rose poses no great hazard to the aphid.

Our three aphids kept silence for a long time, until they arrived at a place where the Briarpatch thinned somewhat. A slender, horned moon cast a faint light on the clearing in the bramble. Far in the distance there was a steady, low pulse of air, a kind of inanimate breathing, which sounded to Ethan very much like the whiz of traffic along a freeway. Cutbelly had led them to the very edge of the Middling.

They sank to the ground with their backs against a tree, and for the first time Ethan realized that he was exhausted. They had been walking all day, since the Old Cat had deposited them on the far shore of the river. He had no idea how long it had been since his last sleep. Days? Weeks? He felt as if he could close his eyes and fall instantly asleep; his head seemed to fill rapidly with a fine sand, cool and dark. But then he saw again the emptied shell, the glistening hollow, the Flat Man that had taken the place of his father, and his eyes snapped open, and he cried out, and tried to brush the vision away, slapping at his face.

"It's okay," said Jennifer T., taking his hand. "Take it easy."

"Sleep, piglet," Cutbelly said. "And in the morning we'll see things more clearly, and sniff a way out of our troubles if we can."

"I don't think we can," Ethan said.

"Nor do I, not really," said the werefox. "But nonetheless we have to try. We have the Splinter, and that's something. You were strong to hold on to it as you did, piglet. In particular in the face of…of what you saw. We must do what we can to keep that strength up."

"Cutbelly," Ethan said. "That Flat Man. Is that really him? Is that really my father?"

The werefox sank to the ground, now, too. He took his bone pipe from its pouch, and struck a match, and exhaled a foul cloud of smoke.

"I'm afraid so," he said. "I did what I could to stop it, for he was—he is a good man, your father. He took pity on me when I was in a pickle, and did what he could to make things easier for me. But when a mind like your father's falls into the grip of one of Coyote's deep puzzles, there's not much a rude creature such as my ownself can do. He stopped eating. He stopped talking. Then one day he just turned around and I saw." He lowered the pipe, and shook his head. "What you saw."

"I don't want to wait until morning," Jennifer T. said, standing up again. "I want to do something
now
."

"I know you do," Cutbelly said. "I can feel it coming off you like the heat of a fever."

"There's no point in just waiting here. He
knows
where we are. He can just come get us."

"He may not try. Coyote wants everything, but he wants it very carelessly, and in no particular order. It's not inconceivable that he could forget about us for hours while he's occupied with the lowering of that hose of his."

"I know about Coyote," Jennifer T. said, sounding almost angry in her knowledge. "And I'll tell you what I know. The things he does, sometimes they come around and bite him on the butt."

"True enough," Cutbelly said. "But in the dark, and as few and weary as we are…"

"Sometimes the way to beat Coyote," Jennifer T. said slowly, and Ethan could almost hear the idea as it came together in her mind. "Is at his own game. Huh. Okay."

"What?" Ethan said. "Jennifer T.?"

"Piglet!"

There was a snap of branches and an urgent whispering as the thighs of her jeans rubbed together, and then only the distant rumble of some highway in the Middling. In the dim light of the slender moon she was soon lost amid the shadows of the Briarpatch.

"Why is she going back?" Ethan said. "What's she doing?

"I'll go after her. You stay here. Lie low, stay quiet. And remember, piglet. Two thirds of all the shadows you see are not real shadows at all."

And with that he scampered off after Jennifer T., to the place where the armies of Coyote were encamped.

ETHAN FOUGHT SLEEP FOR AS LONG AS HE COULD, AIDED IN THIS
battle by the occasional suspicious rustle of a shadow in the trees overhead, and by the recurring image, in his memory, of the thing his father had become. But at last he could fight it no more. His head sank to his chest, and he thought to himself, No, no, little E, don't fall asleep. Yet once again his head began to fill with fine black sand. And then he heard it—the low sound that at first you took for the call of some lonely bird, far out on the waters, or flapping stark against the moon. The wild call, so husky and harsh it almost sounded like laughter, of La Llorona.

She was very near. His arms prickled with some strange emotion between longing and fear, and he rose to his feet, so naturally and inevitably that a part of him wondered—and was never afterward certain—if he were not asleep and dreaming.

He started to walk, neither toward the Middling, nor back to Diamond Green, but keeping instead to the jagged land that lay between them, ducking and weaving among the blades and needles of the Briarpatch. And then a surprising thing happened. As he drew nearer, and the weeping grew ever more sorrowful and wild, all his fatigue and fear and hunger left him. Instead, he felt his heart aflood with pity for this lost and wandering woman, doomed to stalk the ragged borders of the world.

He came into another clearing in the giant bramble, a muddy place, cut in two by a stream that lay glinting in the moonlight. She was standing there, by the mocking laughter of the water, in her tattered white dress. He recognized her at once, and ran to her, and she folded him in her cool soft embrace.

"My boy," said La Llorona. "My own and only boy."

"Mom," Ethan said. "Oh, Mom."

Her sobbing ceased, then, though its ghost or echo shook her frail body from time to time. He could feel the bones through her skin, just as he had when she lay dying in the hospital in Colorado Springs, those hollow angel bones of hers. The sweetness of that bitter memory, of her embrace, of holding her again and hearing her voice, filled his heart so full that all the old healed places in it were broken all over again. And in that moment he felt—for the first time that optimistic and cheerful boy allowed himself to feel—how badly made life was, how flawed. No matter how richly furnished you made it, with all the noise and variety of Something, Nothing always found a way in, seeped through the cracks and patches. Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time. Coyote was right to want to wipe it out, to call the whole sad thing on account of darkness.

"I'm only a little kid," he said, to himself, or to his mother, or to the world that had snatched her from him.

"Let go, my boy," said the Weeping Woman. "My only boy. Let go."

As she stroked his hair, gently she took hold of the bat with her other hand. The ache subsided, and the rigid claw in which he had grasped it for so long finally relaxed. He felt the bat slip through his fingers at last with a rush of gratitude.

"Okay," Ethan said. "I'll let go."

That was when the strangest thing of all happened: La Llorona, the screaming Banshee of the Far Territories, the ragged Queen of Sorrows, smiled.

At that moment, Ethan felt a sharp pain in the palm of his hand. It was the Knot, that little stubborn morsel of something impossible to remove or forget or work around. As he surrendered the bat to La Llorona, the Knot chanced to rub against the swollen blister that it had long since raised on the skin of Ethan's hand. The blister was unbelievably tender and raw, and Ethan yelled. As he yelled, it was just as if—as they say in old stories—
the scales fell from his eyes
. He blinked, once, and found himself in the cold embrace of a ghost, in a smell of dust and rotten cloth. La Llorona's face was a pinched pale mask, a translucent white veil with the bones of her skull showing through. Ethan grabbed at the bat, and just managed to wrench it, at the last possible instant, away from her. As he did so La Llorona shrieked, and snatched at his hair with a ravenous skeleton hand.

"No!" Ethan cried. "No, you aren't her!"

The grief of his mother's death was returned to him, then; it resumed its right and familiar place: a part of life, a part of the story of Ethan Feld, a part of the world that was, after all, a world of stories, tragic and delightful, and, on the whole, very much the better for it. The memory of Dr. Victoria Jean Kummerman Feld was Something, unalterably Something, a hodag's egg that no amount of Nothing could ever hope to touch or dissolve.

"Get off me!" he cried, brandishing the bat. "Or I'll bust you open like an old piñata."

La Llorona's face was blank with sorrow, and she made no sound at all, as though all her tears were finally shed. She stood, floating a few inches above the ground, gazing down at him. For one last second, Ethan thought he saw the face of his mother, projected like a flickering image on the blank screen of La Llorona's face. Her expression was one of infinite reproach, and Ethan was crushed by the knowledge that he had lost her, forever, all over again. Then she backed away from him, into the trees, and was gone.

JENNIFER T. RAN A LONG WAY, BUT AS SHE DREW NEARER TO
Diamond Green she had to slow down. The night was filled with iron airs, a music of hammers and shovels, bike chains and manhole covers. There were campfires burning in the Briarpatch, and she carefully picked her away among them. The laughter of the Rade at its campfires was like the barking of dogs straining against choke collars, like the yapping of seagulls. She walked, toe to heel, keeping her breathing low and steady, and managed to slip past the campfires, and out onto Diamond Green. In the moonlight, she could see the great machines that littered the Winterlands side of the Green, trampling the thick grass around Murmury Well. There was the steady
ronf-ronf-ronf
of the spool that was sending Mr. Feld's marvelous hose and nozzle down to the bottom of the universe itself. Up on the hillsides of the Summerlands, more fires burned, and she could hear the angular chiming of their music. The looming puppet-shadows of dancing graylings and other creatures flickered against the leaves of the trees. She wondered briefly why even that nasty bunch of skanky little creatures would want to help Coyote bring about their own destruction. If Coyote did get ahold of Splinter, and the world dissolved in a great sea of Nothing, there would only be room on that skinny little raft for
one
. Then she remembered that the graylings were, or had once been, ferishers, and the skrikers were some kind of strange hybrid of goblin and machine—contrivances of the Changer. Maybe they were dancing, now, not out of the general happiness of evil at all, but rather from joy at the impending end of their miserable little lives.