“What?”
“Your morfar. Locke? He is a mabkin. I can smell him on you.”
“He passed away last summer.”
“Really?” She smiled sweetly at Addison, though there was nothing but menace in those pearly teeth for a moment. Addison wondered if she, too, were almost-fanged. “Did you see the body?”
“N-no. He died in the hospital, and the funeral was closed casket.”
The smile was positively evil. “If you dug it up, you’d find a dead wolf and a few stone of rags and feathers. He hasn’t come home yet, but he will. I would know.”
“And I would know if he was alive!” Addison shouted, suddenly enraged. “He never was going to come home, damn you. That’s why he told me all the stories, and bought me a plane ticket before he died, and spent all his time filling me with ideas about wearing my clothes inside out and carrying pebbles in my pockets! He was crazy and I love him.”
“You’re not wearing your clothes inside out,” the girl pointed out quite reasonably, ignoring Addison’s anger.
“And the only rocks I have are inside my head, I swear.” Addison huffed, trying to settle down. She had not come this far to fight with some imaginary twin. “He’s dead, girl-whoever-you-are-in-waiting. I watched him slip away. Colon cancer, and they took it out of him three times until he was shitting in a plastic bag and eating nothing but oatmeal. Whatever a mabkin is, no one noticed on the operating table. Or in the CAT scans.”
“The crab disease.” This was the first time the girl seemed taken aback. “A mabkin, in the presence of a grimalkin, was struck down by the crab disease…”
Grimalkin? An old cat. The CAT scan? Riddles, and more stupid wordplay. Addison stuck to the point, for fear of talking in mystic circles. “What, you people don’t get cancer here?”
“We die of nothing but grief or the sword. Sometimes at the same moment.”
“Grandfather Locke died on the sword of cancer, then. But I held his hand when he was done. I don’t think he grieved.”
“Did he call for Mother?” the girl asked gently.
“Yes,” said Addison, and burst into tears.
* * *
Later they sat close in front of the primus stove while Addison boiled water for ginger tea. The girl, who would answer to “Door” but called herself nothing that Addison could determine, had been delighted with a white chocolate macadamia Clif Bar. Their shadows lengthened eastward, and Addison kept wondering if she would camp up here. She wanted to see where Door would go at nightfall, because experience had already taught her about the rapid descent of frost on these hills.
Door seemed unconcerned about the passage of time, or really, anything else other than Addison’s camping gear.
“You carry fire with you in a little bottle. This is so much more clever than wooden sticks.”
“I have matches, too,” Addison admitted.
“Surely. Monkeys are clever.”
“I am not a monkey.”
“Not you.” That almost-fanged smile. “But you were raised among them, and you have brought back their clever ways.”
“I’ve brought back something else, too,” Addison admitted. She touched her chest, just below the right clavicle.
“Yourself, of course.” The later the day grew, the more feral Door seemed to become. At noon she’d been almost reserved. Now she was tricksy.
Ignoring the chilly air, Addison slipped out of her fleece vest, unbuttoned her wool shirt, and dropped the shoulder on her thermal top, tugging the sports bra’s band with it. “See this,” she asked, pointing at a red-lipped seam on her neck and another on her chest.
“I could do much better.” A copper blade shaped like a rhododendron leaf appeared as if from nowhere in Door’s hand.
“Stop it,” Addison said, slapping the girl’s wrist. Feral, feral.
The touch caused another spark to leap between them.
With that, the blade vanished. Door cocked her head, looking for all the world like a curious robin. “What, then?”
“It’s a chest port. I start chemotherapy next week back at home.”
Door looked puzzled.
“Cancer. The crab disease.” Addison sighed. “What killed Grandfather Locke. It’s trying to kill me.” She wasn’t supposed to think of it that way, her therapist had been very insistent.
Now Door seemed completely taken aback. Addison wondered if the other girl’s preternatural confidence faded with the light. “You have come to the Doors bearing the crab disease?”
“Well … yes?”
“Some come here seeking life eternal. Some come here seeking the true death of the soul, for fear of the same thing. Some come seeking riches. Or a lost love. What do you hope for here?”
Whatever Grandfather Locke set me to find, Addison thought, but did not say. Her fingers brushed her chest where the port implant ached. “He … He always told me I would discover where I belonged.”
“You belong wherever you are,” Door said simply. For the first time, Addison thought she heard compassion in the other girl’s voice, but when she looked up, all she saw was the gleam of the Primus flame in Door’s eyes. It was like staring into a tiny, liquid hell.
“I don’t want to die,” Addison whispered.
“Ah, life eternal.” The smile flashed, even more fanged in the encroaching gloam. “We don’t have that here. Chronos is long since fallen. We merely abide endlessly without the benefit of time.”
“Cancer is a disease of time.”
“Life is a disease of time.”
Another touch, their third, and on this occasion the spark was like summer lightning. Door drew Addison into a close embrace. Like hugging herself, but not. Like masturbating, but not. Like a mirror so close one could step into it.
“Would you go Below?” Door whispered in her ear. Inside Addison’s head.
“Would I come back?”
“You would carry the disease of time into the Quiet Lands. Is that what you want?”
More of Grandfather Locke’s words came to her then.
Be my sword, little girl
Carry over the ocean my will
To the Mother of us all
So that she may someday lie still
Had she only ever been his pawn as well? Was even the cancer her morfar’s gift to her? “I would not wish this on my worst enemy if I had one,” Addison whispered to herself.
“Time is everyone’s worst enemy,” Door whispered back from within. “The sword of ruin. That is why it does not pass beneath these hollow hills.”
“Cancer is the sword of ruin, thrust through the body.” Addison thought back on Door’s words. “Both grief and the sword.” The disease of time, indeed.
“Your story will sweep open the doors,” Door replied. “They may never shut again.”
Did she want to? Who were the people under the hill to her? Mabkin, her grandfather Locke’s folk, but he’d never spoken of them. Just filled her head with stories, filled her heart with his death, and filled her hand with a ticket to elsewhere.
Addison wasn’t certain what choice she was making. To go home and slowly poison herself, while poisoning the cancer a little faster. Or to pass beneath these copper doors and come to face her great-grandmother, who lived outside time.
Sooner pass between the pages of a book.
You always did want to pass between the pages of a book, girl, her grandfather Locke said. And someone must break the chains under the hill, someday.
Though Door’s fingers barely touched the copper, the slabs swung upward as if pressed forward by hands the size of houses. They smashed into the ground on each side with an echo that Addison felt deep in her bones. The inner faces of the doors were decorated just as ornately as the outside, though in the last of the twilight, the carvings seemed alive, fields of men fighting flowers while winged archers sailed overhead laughing.
A stairwell descended into darkness. The steps themselves were carved from the stone of the hill, each one bow
ed and worn with generations of passage. There was no light at all below, but the air smelled of roses and grave dust and meat.
It was an invitation.
A vector of change now, aimed at the deathless heart of the unchanging, Addison touched her woolen vest, fingered the seam of her denim skirt, and set off into the darkness below with an ache in her chest and her grandfather’s memory in her heart.
* * *
Mother will learn patience now. If the monkeys know anything we do not, it is that death is the greatest teacher life can set before us. I am not one of the mabkin, but I have sat at the borders of Mother’s realm so long I might as well be one.
That a monkey came for me is one of those blessings which can only be the world playing with its own sense of humor. Her stove burned me a little, but I got the hot tea off and into my belly. It will be strange, eating their food, but I have a ticket that will take me somewhere else.
Change is coming Below, where change has never been welcome. I wonder who set the Locke and the Keyes on their course, or if that is just another of the world’s little jokes upon itself.
Leaving the flame behind to light the night, I follow Addison Keyes’s scent back down from the high hills. As Above, so Below. Mother’s fingers may be like whips, but they will never tear at me now. Mother’s eyes may be like razors, but they will never cut at me now.
I thank my sister, I thank myself, and I sing a song of crabs and cats as the bracken whips at my hiking boots and my monkey pants and I bounce down into the wider world armed with bright teeth and a copper knife.
I am coming. I might even become a Mother myself someday, in Addison’s high Wyoming hills.
Are you afraid? Or are you laughing?
Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes
* * *
This is the only story I ever wrote in which my daughter appears directly, as herself, though under another name. I always thought I could do more with the character, but she grew up too fast, and every time I thought I understood her, she had become a different young woman.
* * *
In a basement that smelled of mold and old cleansers, Danny Knifepoint Wielder prayed down the rain. The house wasn’t any older than the Portland neighborhood around it. Most driveways were populated with minivans, children’s bicycles, heaps of bark dust and gravel accumulated for yard projects postponed through the dark months of winter. None of Danny’s neighbors knew the role he played in their lives. They would have been horrified if they had.
Not making it to church on time carried scarcely a ripple of consequence compared to what would happen if Danny didn’t pray the world forward. Lawn sprinklers chittering, children screeching at their play—these were the liturgical music of his rite.
“Heed me, Sky.”
Danny circled the altar in his basement.
“Hear my pleas, freely given from a free soul.”
Green shag carpeting was no decent replacement for the unbending grass of the plains on which the Corn Kings had once vomited out their lives to ensure the harvest.
“I have bowed to the four winds and the eight points of the rose.”
Woodgrain paneling echoed memories of the sanctifying rituals that had first blessed this workroom.
“Heed me now, that your blessing may fall upon the fields and farms.” With a burst of innate honesty he added: “… and gardens and patios and window boxes of this land.”
“Daniel Pierpont Wilder!” his mother yelled down the stairs. “Are you talking to a girl down there?”
“Mooooom,” Danny wailed. “I’m buuuusy!”
“Well, come be busy at the table. I’m not keeping your lunch warm so you can play World of Warships.”
“Warcraft, Mom,” he muttered under his breath. But he put away his knife, then raced up the steps two at a time.
Behind him, on the altar, his wilting holly rustled as if a breeze tossed the crown of an ancient oak tree deep within an untouched forest. Oil smoldered and rippled within the beaten brass bowl. Rain, wherever it had gotten to, did not fall.
* * *
That night Danny climbed up the Japanese maple in the side yard and scooted onto the roof. He’d been doing that since he was a little kid. Mom said he was still a kid, and always would be, but at twenty-two Danny had long been big enough to have to mind the branches carefully. If he waited until after Mom went to her room to watch TiVoed soap operas through the bottom of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, she didn’t seem to notice. The roofing composite was gritty and oddly slick, still warm with the trapped heat of the day, and smelled faintly of tar and mold.
The gutters, as always, were a mess. Something was nesting in the chimney again. The streetlight he’d shot out with his BB gun remained dark, meaning that the rooftop stayed in much deeper shadow than otherwise.
Sister Moon rising in the east was neither new, nor old, but halfway in between. Untrustworthy, that was, Danny knew. If Sister Moon couldn’t make up her mind, how was Sky to know which way to pass, let alone the world as a whole to understand how to turn? This was the most dangerous time in the circle of days.
He had his emergency kit with him. Danny spent a lot of time on his emergency kit, making and remaking lists.
— Nalgene bottle of boiled tap water
— The Old Farmer’s Almanac
— Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes
— Silver stainless steel knife
— Paper clips
— Sisal twine
— Spare retainer
— Bic lighter (currently a lime green one)
— Beeswax candles (black and white)
That last was what he spent most of his allowance on. Beeswax candles, and sometimes the right herbs or incense. That and new copies of the Almanac every year. The Booke of Dayes he’d found at a church rummage sale—it was one of those big square paperback books, like his The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Magic, with a cover that pretended to look like some old-timey tome or grimoire. The entire kit fit into a Transformers knapsack so dorky looking he wasn’t in any danger of losing it on the bus or having it taken from him, except maybe by some really methed-out homeless guy or something.
Danny had figured out a long time ago that he’d get farther in life if he didn’t spend time worrying about being embarrassed about stuff.
This night he lay back on the roof, one foot braced on the plumbing vent stack in case he fell asleep and rolled off again. The black eye he’d gotten that time had taken some real explaining.
It hadn’t rained in Portland for sixty days now, which was very weird for the Pacific Northwest, and even the news was talking about the weather a lot more. Danny knew it was his fault, that he’d messed up the Divination of Irrigon specified in the Booke of Dayes to shelter the summer growing season from Father Sun’s baleful eye. That had been back in June, and he’d gotten widdershins and deosil mixed up, then snapped the Rod of Seasons by stepping on it, which was really just a dowel from Lowe’s painted with the Testor’s model paints he’d found at a rummage sale.
You could never tell which compromises the gods would understand about, for the sake of a good effort, and which ones brought down their wrath. Kind of like back in school, with his counselors and his tutors, before he’d quit because it was stupid and hard and too easy all at the same time.
Anyway, he’d gone the wrong way around the altar, then broken the Rod, and the rain had dried up to where Mom’s tomatoes were coming in nicely but everything else in the yard was in trouble.
Since then, Danny had been studying the almanac and the Booke of Dayes, trying to find a way to repair his error. He was considering the Pennyroyal Rite, but hadn’t yet figured out where to find the herb. The guy at the Lowe’s garden center claimed he’d never heard of it.
He’d finally realized that having offended Sky, he would have to ask Sky how best to apologize. And so the rooftop at night. Sky during the day was single-minded, the bright servant of Father Sun. Sky in darkness served as a couch for Sister Moo
n, but also the tiny voices of the Ten Thousand Stars sang in their sparkling choir. Sometimes a star broke loose and wrote its name across heaven in a long, swift stroke that Danny had tried again and again to master in his own shaky penmanship.
Tonight, as every night for the past week, he hoped for the stars to tell him how to make things right.
A siren wailed nearby. Fire engine, Danny thought, and wondered if the flames had been sanctified, or were a vengeance. More likely someone had simply dropped a pan of bacon, but you could never tell what was of mystic import. Mother Urban was very clear on that, in her Booke of Dayes. Even the way the last few squares of toilet paper were stuck to the roll could tell you much about the hours to come. Or at least the state of your tummy.
He listened to the trains rumble on the Union Pacific mainline a few blocks away. Something peeped as it flew overhead in the darkness. The air smelled dry, and almost tired, with a mix of lawn and car and cooking odors. The night was peaceful. If not for the scratchiness of the roof under his back, he might have relaxed.
A star hissed across the sky, drawing its name in a pulsing white line. Danny sat up suddenly, startled and thrilled, but his foot slipped off the vent pipe, so that he slid down the roof and right over the edge, catching his right wrist painfully on the gutter before crashing into the rhododendron.
He sat up gasping in pain, left hand clutching the wound.
“That was not so well done,” said a girl.
Danny’s breath stopped, leaving his mouth to gape and pop. He tried to talk, but only managed to squeak out an “I—”
Then his Transformers knapsack dropped off the roof and landed on his head. The girl—for surely she was a girl—leaned over and grabbed it before Danny could sort out what had just happened.
“Nice pack,” she said dryly. He was mortified. Then she opened it and began pulling his emergency kit out, piece by piece.
Miserable, Danny sat in the rhododendron where he had fallen and looked at his tormentor. She was skinny and small, maybe five feet tall. Hard to tell in the dark, but she looked Asian. Korean? Though sometimes Mexicans looked Asian to him, which Danny knew was stupid. She wore scuff-kneed jeans and a knit top with ragged sleeves.