Harvest of Changelings Page 14

  Each step up the stairs made the bickering grow fainter and when Russell closed his own door, it was like stepping into a cocoon of silence. First he went over to his dresser and checked to be sure everything was still there in his Nativity. He moved the red fox a little closer to the sheep and then, after some thought, moved a camel closer to the Baby’s head. Then he picked up The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and opened it to the first page. Here, he thought, was proof, confirmation, that his magic dreams were real: somebody else had had the same dreams years ago and had written them down as stories. Just like the centaur had said he would find in the library.

  Russell read slowly out loud. Chapter One. Lucy Looks Into a Wardrobe. Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air raids ...

  Hazel

  Hazel wondered how somebody knew if they were going crazy or not. It was almost six o’clock and in a minute, either her grandfather or her grandmother was going to call her down for dinner. When she had sat down at her computer to play Worldmaker, she had just gotten home from school—a little after three-thirty.

  Two-and-a-half hours ago.

  “Alexander, do you think we are both going crazy? I mean, you were there, too, with the dragon and everything,” Hazel asked her cat who only looked back at her through half-open eyes.

  “Don’t look at me like that. And you know, I think you are bigger. Hmm, I can test that out,” Hazel said. She went over to her desk and hunted out a piece of white paper and an ink pad. Her grandmother had given her a name stamp for a stocking stuffer at Christmas. Hazel smoothed the paper out on her desk and opened the ink pad. Then she scooped up the cat (he seemed to feel heavier) and took him over to the desk and carefully made a paw print. She put the protesting Alexander down and then dated the print 9-5-91.

  “Tomorrow we’ll do it again,” she told the cat. “And I can do one more experiment.” She took a Polaroid camera out from a desk drawer. After focusing and carefully balancing the camera on her shoulder in front of the closet mirror, she snapped her picture. “Tomorrow we’ll see if my eyes are more grey than blue.”

  Should she tell her grandparents about the dreams and the changes? About what the Worldmaker game had turned into? What would her grandparents do—send her to a doctor? Hazel shook her head. That would depend on her getting them to focus on her. Hazel sighed. Doing that sometimes required too much effort.

  “Hazel! Dinner’s ready, come down,” her grandfather yelled.

  “Coming!” Hazel ran from the room. Downstairs, she knew, at the dinner table, with her grandparents chattering, the food being passed back and forth, glasses and silverware clinking, it would be safe and normal. Upstairs would be a dream.

  Hazel took the stairs two at a time.

  Jeff

  Jeff looked at the Resource teacher, Miss Findlay. She wanted him to write about his dreams. She wanted him to write a story about his dreams and make a book. Everybody in the school was supposed to write a book for Young Writers. The whole school was part of the Young Writers Project and they were all going to write a story and illustrate it and make a cover and everything.

  It was going to be fun.

  Jeff sighed. Which dream should he write about? The ones with the centaur and the dragon and the swimmers? Or the other ones—the ones the doctor Mrs. Clark took him to see twice a week kept asking about? Jeff so far had told the doctor nothing. He wanted to forget what happened; why couldn’t they figure that out?

  The doctor wants me to say it, to tell the secret. But I already have—twice before, and look what happened. Dad’s gone; Mom’s gone; I’m not at home. Why doesn’t the doctor just tell me he already knows the secret? I told before and everything went crazy. I didn’t have these magic dreams before I told. If I told again ...

  He sharpened his pencil and started writing. I met a—

  “Miss Findlay, how do you spell centaur?”

  “Centaur. First time anyone’s ever asked me how to spell that. Let me look it up.” She pulled the dictionary into her lap and flipped through the pages. “C-E-N-T-A-U-R. Centaur. Do you know what one is? Where did you learn that word?”

  “I met one,” Jeff said and kept writing.

  Malachi

  There was a note on the medicine cabinet mirror from his father when Malachi got home Friday afternoon. Meet me and Uncle Jack at the Kuntry Kitchen, six, dinner. Okay, Malachi thought, and tossed the paper into the waste basket. He looked back into the mirror, something, he realized, he had been doing a lot lately. Were his eyes any more different than yesterday? More golden, more bronze-colored? Malachi had noticed they were changing early in May, just around the edges, as if a stain was slowly spreading through his irises.

  He snapped his fingers and there was a quick flash of white light and a sudden rush of air, and the balled up note floated up to rest in his open palm.

  And now, today, something new, something different, and a little scary. Malachi was glad his father was still at the library; this way he had an hour-and-a-half to think and try and figure things out. Today he had felt the thoughts of the other new kids. He had figured out how to tune out other people’s thoughts weeks ago. Now, just these three. Not very clearly, more like when he and his dad were in the car listening to the radio and they were leaving a station’s range. The sound would pop and skip, static replaced words. But still, he had felt Russell’s anger, Hazel’s bewilderment and fear, and the very dark fear of Jeff, the boy across the hall, in Mrs. Markham’s room. Then there was the other thing. He had dreamed of these three kids. They were all in his dreams of the magical place, with all the strange creatures, the place where his mother was from, Faerie. He had seen Jeff on the beach and Russell and Hazel, in the meadow in Faerie.

  Malachi shook his head. Now he felt hot and flushed and his hands hurt from making the hot flash and the air rush. His hands really hurt. This pain was new, too, as if with each change, he had to pay a price. He sat down on the tub, suddenly feeling very, very tired. Carefully he pulled out of his shirt the charm his dad had given him in August.

  “Your mother wanted you to have it when you reached a certain age. I am thinking you are that age now, son. Puberty. A little earlier than most kids, but maybe fairies mature faster,” his dad had said when he had finished telling Malachi about the night of and the day after his birth. “I don’t want you to ever take it off—not even to take a bath. Promise me.”

  “I promise, Dad. Do you think the Fomorii are going to come back?”

  “Yes.”

  Malachi turned the charm over in his hand. It felt heavier—at least he thought it did. And it tingled, sort of, when he moved it. Or had it? He shook his head. The twelve-pointed star was more than just a charm, but what else, he wasn’t quite sure.

  God, he was tired. Maybe Uncle Jack was home—they could walk over to the Kuntry Kitchen together. Malachi slowly got up and went down to his dad’s study, to look out the window and see if Uncle Jack’s car was in the driveway. No, just Uncle Jack’s new wife’s car. Hilda. She wanted him to call her Aunt Hilda, but he couldn’t quite it do it, and Mrs. Ruggles sounded too formal. She was all right, Malachi thought, although Thomas hated her. But then Thomas hated everybody these days.

  He could walk over to the Kuntry Kitchen with her and Uncle Jack—he’d be home from State in—all of sudden, a high tide of fatigue rushed in. It was as if between one moment and the next, Malachi had done some incredible exercise, like run the track fifty times or pick up a car. It was all he could to get from the window sill to his dad’s desk chair and sit down. It had been doing the magic, what else could it have been? But it was such a little amount; it didn’t seem fair.

  In about fifteen minutes Uncle Jack would come home and he and Hilda would walk over to the restaurant. In fifteen minutes his dad would go out the back door of the library and stroll across the open field betwee
n the library and the shopping center. They would all think he was with the other, until they all sat down at the Kuntry Kitchen. Malachi gave his dad about five minutes after that before he would rush home.

  Twenty minutes.

  That wasn’t so long to wait and the phone was so far away—he wasn’t sure he could even make it into the kitchen in twenty minutes. I’ll just sit here, put my head on the desk—

  Ohhh, now he was sick. Could he make to the bathroom before puking—not quite so far as the phone?

  Malachi stood slowly, pushing himself up against the desk and then, holding first to the chair, then the bookcase, the wall, Malachi made it to the study door.

  The pain pushed him down to the floor. The wind began to rise then, a low moaning in the hallway. Behind him loose papers on his dad’s desk began to scatter. The bathroom door was ten feet down the hall, past his father’s bedroom, across from his.

  The other three—the kids he had first seen in his dreams, and now at school—they would be four together. Just like the dreams said: earth, air, water, and fire. In the dreams they had all been together, linked, the four quarters making the whole. Would he be as sick if they were altogether?

  Eight feet to go. The wind was moaning now, and flowing up and down the hall, a quick warm air river.

  It’s because I’m half-fairy, he thought. That’s why this is happening. A whole fairy would know how to handle magic. But the others—he was sure they didn’t have fairy mothers-Stop thinking. Get to the bathroom. Five feet. Push against the wind. No, just be still, let the wind go, let the light ooze out of his nose, his eyes, his ears. His dad would be home soon. He lay flat on the floor, waiting for his dad’s footsteps on Beichler Road, hurried, quick. Then he would feel his dad’s fear, the fear that his dad would be riding like a great dark horse. The door would open and his dad’s aura, his dad’s arms, would reach out and take him in.

  Thomas

  Thomas looked up from his computer, a bank-account application form in his hand. From the center, where Thomas was, he could see the entire room, all twenty-five other workstations, most busily doing what he was doing. One man was taking a coffee break, his cup in both hands, as he stared off into space. Two women, also on break, were laughing over something one of them had found in the News and Observer. Right beside him was another woman, frowning at the form in her hand. Thomas tried to remember her name. Amy? Andrea, no—Angela, Angela Hughes. She had just started at the bank last week. Dark red hair, darker hazel eyes. She was, he thought, as good a person as any to experiment with—just another of the masses, the expendable ones, as the high priestess called them. Pick one, or another, the high priestess had told him, practice the magic, the power that is yours, second-degree witch, Wicca Initiate, practitioner of the Old Religion.

  “The more you use magic, Thomas,” the high priestess had said, “the easier it will be to keep using and the more you will want to. Think of it as a stain permeating every cell. The heart and aura you ate—a catalyst to make the stain penetrate deeper . . .”

  Thomas touched the amulet around his neck, pressing it hard against his bare skin, the coldness of the metal a welcome sensation. He pressed it again, hard enough for the amulet to cut his skin. Just a drop of his own blood on the metal was enough to jolt him, give him a taste of magic: bitter, pungent, strong. He looked at Angela again and now, like a blush around her body, Thomas could see her aura, a pale, pale yellow. Thomas lifted his finger and, as if it were cigarette smoke in a bar, a tendril of the yellow drifted up and curled through the air. He let it wrap itself around his finger.

  Look up, say yes.

  “Yes? Is something the matter?” she said, looking puzzled.

  After that it was easy.

  Lunch, dinner, a movie, then coffee. And Angela was in Thomas’s living room, lying against him, her head on his shoulder. Thomas undid her hair, loosing the long braid crowning her head, into a dark red fall. Each touch was like another nibble on the yellow, another taste. He reached down and pulled off her shoes, then her stockings, stopping to stroke all that bare flesh. Then, the blouse, one button at a time, one shoulder, then the next, and a quick bite, just a nip. Her body with his touches, her yeses part of each movement. He unhooked her bra and her breasts fell into his hands, her nipples hard as he licked and sucked each, drinking in the yellow. Then the skirt, her panties, and her entire body glowed.

  Now me.

  She started with his shoes and socks, and then his shirt, sliding it up his chest, and then over his head, and then back to his chest. When she sucked and licked his erect nipples, Thomas felt his skin sucking in return, taking in still more of the yellow. She paused at the amulet, and then kissed each one of the star’s five points. Thomas groaned, a low guttural cry, and his entire body quivered. Angela moved down to his pants and undid his belt, unzipped, and peeled down his pants and shorts. She ran her fingers over his penis, lightly, her nails like the claws of a small bird. Then her mouth, wet, warm. Then up his chest, to his mouth, and they were together and off the couch and she opened and he entered.

  At Mabon Thomas would take her heart. And the Dark Ones would be plain and visible, no longer creatures of the periphery of his vision, at the edges of his dreams.

  Russell

  Russell started Resource on September 9, the Monday of the third week of school. Miss Findlay came to get him personally. He was a little scared of her when she walked in the room and asked for him. Russell could tell this tall, thin black woman wouldn’t take any mess off anybody.

  “Russell. Go with Miss Findlay. You can correct your test when you get back. You’ll be going to her trailer every day at about this time,” Mrs. Collins said from where she sat in reading group. “You’ll have reading with her; take your book with you.”

  Russell had done exactly as she had said, not wanting Miss Findlay to wait a minute more than she had to. She stood in the classroom door, arms folded across her chest, watching, as he hurriedly got his things together.

  “Ready? Let’s go. You’re late starting Resource here—paperwork and all that mess,” she said as she closed the classroom door behind them. Russell felt drab beside her. Miss Findlay had a bright, multicolored scarf around her head, and her dress flowed and swirled about her, looking at first red, then pink, then orange. “Let me fill you in on what the class project is: we are, each one of us, making a book. In fact, everybody in school is or will be for the Young Writers Conference. I’m just getting a head start . . .”

  Resource at Nottingham Heights was in a narrow, rusty trailer parked between three or four pine trees and some pyracantha bushes on one side and the faculty parking lot on the other. Inside the trailer was something like an obstacle course, with file cabinets jutting out at odd angles, crammed book cases overflowing on the floor. Russell followed Miss Findlay into the trailer to a seat near her desk. She kept talking the whole time about this book she wanted him and the rest of the kids to write. There were five other boys and two girls already writing, their desks all in a row, their backs to the windows. Half were from Mrs. Collins’s class. Russell guessed the others were Mrs. Markham’s kids.

  “We are writing stories from dreams. Here is a list of dreams the class came up with—if you can’t remember any of your own. Now the rest of the class got started last week so I want you to work hard today to catch up. Try and get something on paper today before you leave. Are you with me, Russell? We’ll do reading in a while. Russell?” Miss Findlay said as she sat down, pulling her swirling dress in.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Russell said. Writing about a dream would be easy. He took out a piece of paper, and started writing: One night I had a dream. I was standing in a big, grassy meadow in the middle of the night. The sky was filled with stars and there were two moons in the sky ...

  “Russell, I do believe you wrote enough today to have caught up with the others,” Miss Findlay said when Resource was over. “I bet you will be able to have your first draft done by Friday. Good work. Now, cl
ass . . .”

  Russell was surprised at how easy the story came that week. For the first time ever the words just came and he could trust them to be right and true. They didn’t twist and distort themselves on the paper. The story began with the flying horse and ended with the centaurs, just as he planned, just as he had dreamed. His hands even seemed to be working smoothly—his pencil didn’t snap and fly across the room or jab and tear the paper. There were lots of misspelled words, Russell was sure of that, but they weren’t scrawled all over the paper or smeared from being erased and rewritten over and over. When Friday came he handed in the story with the rest of the Resource class, sure he had done a good job and his hands hadn’t betrayed him. It was a good story.

  The next Monday morning when Russell walked into Mrs. Collins’s room, she told him to go see Miss Findlay immediately. Hey, maybe she’s read my story and she loved it. She wants to get it published and let everybody read it. I’ll get to read it over the intercom—

  Miss Findlay glared at Russell when he stepped into the trailer. She was tapping her long fingernails on the desk.

  What have I done now? I just got off the bus and I went straight down the hall and then I came straight here. I haven’t done anything. She won’t believe me whatever it is. She’s like all the rest—why did I think she would be different? Boy, I was sure dumb. And the feeling was the same: bitter, angry, and hard, all tied together with overwhelming sadness. No matter how many times he promised himself he would never let himself like a teacher, let alone trust one, he did. Over and over and over.

  “Russell. Let me get straight to the point. I read your story last night and I wanted to talk to you first before I do anything else.” She opened his folder on her desk and motioned for Russell to come and sit beside her.