Summerland (59 page)

The werebeasts, Cutbelly and Pettipaw, whose eyes were sharper than anyone's, were the first to notice what they afterward described as a window opening in the sky. They cried out, and pointed at a spot high in the blue expanse beyond the outfield. Ethan strained his eyes, but saw nothing—and then all at once it was there, a small patch of darker blue, roughly rectangular, in the midst of which lay the jagged hole that his home run shot had made. Though darker than the sky around it the rectangle was rimmed at its edges with a paler light, and as they watched faint shadows became apparent within in it, flickering and gray.

The shuddering of the ground grew more intense, and Ethan was knocked off his feet. When he looked up at the sky again the blue window had grown larger, and the pale blue light was pouring freely from it now, in all directions, reaching long solid shafts of blue to touch every corner of the world. Then a huge shadow passed in front of the source of the blue light from the sky, and it seemed to Ethan that this shadow had the form of a man. No, it was not a shadow at all. It was dark, but somehow it shone.

"No!
No!
"

It was the voice of Coyote. Ethan tried to look that way, but the force of gravity seemed to have grown abruptly stronger. He could not turn his head, or raise his body. He could only look at the great brilliant gap his home run had broken open in the sky-blue seal on the Gleaming.

"No!" Coyote yelled. He was dipping down to snatch baseballs from a canvas bag at his feet, and hurling blazing fastballs at the sky. "Get back in there! Go away, you big one-eyed bully! I'm not done! I'm not
done
!"

Just before the weight of Ragged Rock drew a curtain down over him, Ethan thought he saw the light around the face in the window shift and gather itself. It seemed to have formed itself into the shape of an immense arm, long, rippled with veins of lightning and a musculature of clouds. The arm reached down out of the sky, fingers spreading like the rays of a star, to grab at something that was flickering on the shore of Murmury Well, to snuff a dancing red flame.

HOME

EPILOGUE

Life, the World, and Baseball,
in the Days After the Flood

NOT SO LONG AGO,
here in the Middling, there was an hour —it may have been a period as long as sixty-three minutes—during which a number of unusual phenomena occurred. A battered old Mercedes van pulled into the courtyard of a small orphanage outside of Cuzco, Peru, and when the nine children who lived in the orphanage ran out to greet it, they found that it contained their parents, all of whom had been lost in a catastrophic mudslide three years before. In the Jura Mountains of France, a modest hydro-electric dam project, whose completion would submerge an ancient, peaceful, and attractive village, and uproot its residents, vanished overnight. Off the southern tip of Thailand, the next morning, a magnificent coral reef that had been dying for ten years was found by divers to be mad and dazzling with life. Nine thousand terminal cases around the world were informed that their cancers had gone into remission. Tens of thousands of quarreling lovers reconciled, and hundreds of runaway children found themselves with money enough to return to a home that suddenly welcomed them.

Not all of the incidents were so dramatic. As you went farther along the branches of the Middling from Diamond Green, the effects of the unsealing of the Gleaming were less pronounced. People found beloved neckties, photographs, and lucky charms they had long given up for gone. Lifelong losers hit modest jackpots, the leaves of neglected houseplants uncurled and turned green again, and Chihuahuas whose yapping ability had been surgically removed found themselves suddenly able to bark again, and loudly repaid their owners for their cruelty. Much of the world was asleep during this enchanted hour, and on awaking the next morning many reported light and refreshing dreams in which the beloved dead returned to them, or in which, though hitherto they had never displayed any musical aptitude, they composed symphonies of genius.

It really is a shame that through our sad neglect of wonder, hopefulness, and trust we allowed so much clutter and debris to build up in the space that once connected us to Diamond Green. Nearly all the force of the Unsealing, of the great healing flood of pent-up Spirit that flowed out of the hole broken open by Ethan's home run, was dissipated in the effort of clearing through the vast thorny tangle of the Briarpatch. In the end, most of us here received only a trickle, a gleaming droplet, of that mighty flood. In the playground that is all that remains of the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey, for example, the sole evidence of what happened at Diamond Green was the appearance, under the swings, of a yellowed Spalding baseball mysteriously signed
Van Lingle Mungo
. Later that day some boys and girls came out and tossed it around.

The good news, however, is that most of the Briarpatch
was
cleared away, and that the road into the land of perpetual summer, of apple blossoms and green grass, lies open to you, for the time being, at least—if you know where to look for it.

For those who were standing directly in the path of the flood, the effects were dramatic indeed. When Ethan came to himself again, he felt a dry, cool palm on his forehead that he recognized at once as belonging to his father. He sat up, and found himself under the worried scrutiny of a pair of moist brown eyes.

"Hi, Dad," he said. It was almost a question.

"Hi, son."

The Feld men stared at each other, and long weeks of separation and strangeness and horror filled the silence.

"Anything, uh, missing?" Ethan said at last, still a little uncertain.

"Yeah, actually," said Mr. Feld. "My glasses. But, oddly, I don't seem to need them anymore. I can see your beautiful face just fine without."

That was when Ethan finally found himself back in his father's arms, and all the strangeness and horror was washed away.

"I found you," Ethan said. "Dad, I said I would find you, and I found you."

"I heard all about it," said Mr. Feld. "And I'm very proud of you."

Ethan looked around and saw his knapsack lying in the grass, not far away. He went over to it and took out his father's wallet.

"Here," he said. "You left home without this."

His father took the wallet with a puzzled expression.

"That isn't like me," he said.

"You had a little bit of a hard time, Dad," Ethan told him. "I'll explain it later."

"Okay," Mr. Feld said.

"It wasn't easy, Dad," Ethan said. "Finding you. I don't want you to ever go away again."

"I won't," his father said.

It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day. Ethan knew that better now than he had ever known it before. But he was glad to have the promise nevertheless.

They stopped talking for a long time, and just lay there, shoulder to shoulder, in the sunshine on the grass.

"What's that sound?" Ethan said, at last, sitting up. "It sounds like a
baby
crying."

"It's a baby crying," Mr. Feld said. "One of your, uh, little friends, seems to have come across a very small baby."

He helped Ethan to his feet, and they walked across toward Murmury Well. There, by the cool deep wintry waters, they found Spider-Rose, holding her squalling brother in her arms, and kissing his little feet, each no bigger than a butter bean. Like all ferisher babies he was sort of rubbery and scrawny, with an elderly expression on his face, and his hair was still a hank of coarse black yarn, but there was certainly nothing unkissable about his little kicking feet.

"It
worked
!" Spider-Rose exulted. "I
knew
it would work. Didn't I always say?"

There were a dozen ferishers hanging around the edge of the well, lounging in the grass, laughing and mugging at the baby, and it took Ethan a moment, looking at the silly grin on Cinquefoil's face, to realize who they must be: members of the Boar Tooth mob who had been taken during the attack on the Birchwood. It was they who had formed the grayling ground crew that tended to the Diamond Green chalk lines. The pump, hose, and iron black truck had vanished; the sledge wagon had been smashed, as if by a giant fist, to splinters.

"Hey," said Jennifer T. She and Thor came over. They stood for a moment, three points of a triangle, then fell together and hugged. As he was holding Thor, Ethan realized that something was off, something that he thought, at first, might be his friend's smell. It was a
greener
smell, somehow, like that of pine needles or eucalyptus. He took a step back at looked at Thor.

"You're smaller," he said.

Thor nodded. "Shrinking," he said. "And look." He held up his forearm, to show Ethan some scratches below his elbow. The bloody streaks were paler than they ought to be, tinged with reddish gold.

"What is it?" Ethan said. "What's happening? Where's Coyote?"

"Gone," Mr. Feld said. He shook his head. "They came and took him."

He pointed toward right field, and Ethan saw that the expanse of sky over the Gleaming, formerly a vast blue blank, was now rich with clouds, mountainous and tinged purple with thunder. All along right field there now ran a giant wall, a hundred feet high, of high golden posts woven through with slats of silver. It would take a mighty swing indeed to clear those fences. At the end of the wall, right in straightaway center, there was an immense wooden gate, closed, and barred. Over the gate hung a silver banner engraved simply: