He sat up. The man with the red hair was standing at the edge of Murmury Well, arms folded across his chest, a gentle smile on his lips and a sharp expression in his bright eye. Ethan felt, very much to his surprise, that he liked Coyote from the first moment he saw him.
"Come on, little guy," Coyote said to Ethan. "It's time to let go."
The bat gave a sudden leap in Ethan's fingers, and he redoubled his grip on it, crying out at the sharp pain that racked his hand.
"Don't let him get it," Cinquefoil said. "He can't take it from ya if ya don't let go."
Ethan thought about the other time that he had been separated from Splinter, at Dandelion Hill. While that separation had not been voluntary, it was more in the nature of a burglary—he hadn't been holding the bat at the time it was taken from him. The ferisher had simply plucked it from the backseat of the car.
"What do you want it for?" he asked Coyote.
"What for? Well, because I have already have everything else," Coyote said, stepping across the trampled grass toward Ethan. "Thanks to the admirable efforts of a very good friend of yours, I've acquired a small but highly concentrated jar of very powerful weed killer."
In the instant before the hodag's egg appeared in Coyote's hands, the thought flapped, black and blind, into Ethan's head: Taffy.
"Yes," Coyote said. "Taffy. Noble creature, really. Sad story. When I sent that old pill La Llorona to her with my offer, part of me was almost hoping that she would refuse. You know, I really do think that, in her poor Sasquatch mind, you reuben children had very nearly come to fill the hole in her. Very nearly."
At that moment the wind picked up, and with a bulky rustle of canvas one of the crimson tents came unmoored from the ground and took off into the sky, flapping like a big red bird. In its place, like a white dove revealed by a conjuror's hand, Ethan saw a tall, iron cage that strongly resembled the one from the stone lodge of Mooseknuckle John. For all he knew it was the same weird-iron cage. And there, in a soft black heap, just as they had first seen her, lay Taffy the Sasquatch. Her arms were thrown over her face, as if in shame. Standing beside the cage was a hideously bent figure, covered in colorless fur, with a thick neck and bandy legs. He was poking at Taffy, jabbing her with a long stick.
"But in the end she couldn't resist, could you, Taffy, dear?"
Coyote turned toward the cage, and it surprised Ethan to hear that there was tenderness in his tone, and that the tenderness sounded real. "I offered, you see, to return her children to her. I brought death into the Worlds, after all, as you know, little Feld. I suppose it did not sound all that far-fetched that I might be able to send it away again, at least in the case of two Sasquatches. Even if they have been dead for over nine hundred years."
There was low, whimpering moan from inside the cage. The horrible white creature poked her again.
"But—heh-heh—he lied," said the matted white thing, in a voice that was oddly familiar to Ethan.
"Don't I always?" Coyote held up the hodag's egg, balancing it on the palm of one hand, his long elegant fingers splayed. "And thanks, little Feld, to your old dad, who's really quite a brilliant person, isn't he, I am now the proud owner of an extremely clever toxin-pump system, constructed entirely of a truly revolutionary semirigid picofiber composite. To deliver this fabulous weed killer where it's really needed. Deep, deep down at the very roots of it all."
He raised a hand, and there was an iron clang. Ethan looked toward the ice of the Winterlands, and saw the door of one of the armored snow-truck things bang open. A crew of graylings tumbled out. There was a mechanical whine from inside the truck, and as the graylings found their footing Ethan saw them begin to tug a long shining string into the light, tipped in a darker silver. The hose played out in silken ripples from the some great spool, and snaked along behind them as they ran. When they reached the edge of the pool the graylings hooked clusters of round black weights to the nozzle of the hose, and then tossed it into the water. It fell with an eerie, soft splash. At once the hose began to slither, hissing, down into the pool.
"If your father's calculations are correct, that ought to reach right down to the very bottom of the Well, where it feeds the roots of the Tree."
"Mr. Feld would never help you," Jennifer T. said. "You're a big liar."
"Oh, the biggest," the Coyote said pleasantly. "But not, hard as it may be for you to believe, in this case. Mr. Feld?"
Somehow, then, Ethan's father was there. Ethan couldn't think how he had missed him before. But there he was, standing beside Coyote, in his old jeans and a clean white T-shirt, his beard tangled and his hair unkempt, his eyes behind their glasses calm and intent. Ethan leapt to his feet, to run to his father, but then he hesitated. Mr. Feld did not quite seem to be looking at Ethan, or rather did not appear to be seeing him. It was hard to explain. Ethan took an experimental step toward Mr. Feld. The grammer that had prevented him from walking before seemed to have been unworked. So then he ran, his arms outspread, and waited for his father to bend down, laughing, and catch him up, and lift him into the air, and swing him around and around. But Mr. Feld just stood there, looking at him without seeing him, his hands in his pockets, a grave little smile on his lips. Ethan stopped. It was as if a cold wind blew in from that smile, finding all the chinks in Ethan's heart.
"That will be all, Bruce," Coyote said. "Thank you."
Mr. Feld turned to walk away, and as he did so Ethan saw that—there was no other way to put it—his father had been emptied out. His head, his torso, and his legs had no back. There were no organs, no muscles or bones. Instead there was just a hideous grayish-white lining, glossy as fresh paint. It was like looking at the reverse side of a mask, a full-body mask, with indentations for the nose and mouth, for the nipples and penis, for the shoulder sockets and knee caps and the toes of the feet. The worst thing of all was the eyes—they were just openings, through which you could plainly see the white expanse of snow and the blue sky beyond. Ethan watched in horror as the husk of his father climbed up into the armored truck and disappeared.
"He didn't want to help me, you can be sure of that," Coyote said. "Though the problem interested him extremely. You can see what it did to him. He's become a Flat Man. Same thing happened to a lot of those A-bomb fellows, you know, back when I was putting that little fiesta together."
Ethan was standing only a few feet from him now, and the pull on the bat was suddenly enormously strong. Ethan fought it with everything he had, and the ache in his hand grew sharper.
"Come on, now, Ethan," Coyote said. "Help me out, here. I've got everything else I need. The venom of Nazuma—that's the right name for the Bottom-Cat, did you know that? It's not ordinary poison, you see. In fact, it's not really venom at all."
"What is it?" Thor said.
"Such a curious boy. In every sense of the word. Well, Thor the Changeling, I'll tell you. Back when Old Woodenhead was making the Worlds, separating out all the Something from the Nothing, he found himself with quite bit of Nothing left over. Some of it, as you know, he used to fill in the spaces between the leaves and branches of the poor old Tree. But the rest of it, well, you know how these things are done. Corporations in the Middling do it all the time. He just sort of buried it, all that Nothing, where he thought no one would look. Way, way down at the Bottom of it all, lower even than the roots of the Lodgepole. And he set Nazuma to dwell at the Bottom, and hold the Lodgepole up, keep an eye on the Nothing. And then, I suppose, Nazuma found a bit of Nothing that had leaked out, through a hole in the Bottom of it all. And being a gluttonous fellow, he tasted it. And he liked the taste of Nothing quite a bit. Been snacking on the stuff ever since. Holding it in these little pockets at the back of his throat, which, were we to dissect the Bottom-Cat and take a look at them, would likely turn out to be made of the very same kind of organic picofibrous tissue as this hodag's egg, here. It will not merely kill the Tree, this Nothing." He gave the egg a shake. "It will dissolve it. Everything will return to the admittedly rat
her drab gray fog from which it all began. A trackless gray sea in which I will bob, as you did not so long ago in the waters of the Big River, clinging to my little Splinter of the Tree. And then, when you and they and all of it have fizzed and foamed and subsided, I will take my little Splinter, and have something to which I can stake my fabulous new creation. And then, as the case really ought to have been all along, the Changer will be the Maker. And you can be absolutely certain I won't make the same mistakes Old Woodenhead made when he was starting out. So come on. Let go."
"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 afloo
d 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.