“I’ll get the doctor,” the nurse said, biting her lip. She stepped away, leaving Addy alone with her new responsibility.
Addy eyed Leven coldly. She sniffed again and looked away. When she looked back he was still there. She lifted up one of his legs and looked at it. She touched Leven’s head. She scowled. She put her hand on the baby’s arm and gingerly lifted it as if it might be diseased.
She dropped the tiny arm, screaming.
A huge, hairy, gray ball scurried out from under Leven, circled over his stomach, and rolled back under him.
Addy screamed hysterically as she pushed back and away, knocking over an empty cart and sending diapers and baby shampoo everywhere. The shampoo bottles exploded all over the floor, causing Addy to lose her footing and fall hard onto her rear. Her rump seemed to pop as a loud rush of air escaped her screaming, lipless mouth. A small team of nurses and a couple of doctors rushed through the door wondering what could possibly be going on to generate so much noise.
Addy just sat there, screaming and pointing. The nurse, who had had the pleasure of talking with her just moments before, filled a cup with water and happily threw it in Addy’s face.
Sputtering, Addy said, “A rat. There’s a giant rat on that child.”
The medical staff all looked at the baby. No rat. Leven was simply lying there with his eyes wide open and a serious look on his face.
“That’s impossible,” one of the doctors said. “There are no rats here. Besides, it wouldn’t be able to climb into the cart.”
“Maybe it fell from the ceiling,” Addy offered.
Everyone looked at the ceiling. It looked okay, no holes or possible way for a rat to fall from it.
Two nurses tried to help Addy to her feet, but thanks to the soapy floor, they lost their footing and also went down. Their flailing limbs knocked the legs out from under one of the doctors, and he fell, taking two more nurses with him. Everyone scrambled across the slippery floor, reaching for something to pull themselves to their feet with. It took a number of tries, but eventually everyone was standing again.
Once up they all carefully worked their way over to the baby. One of the nurses picked him up and inspected him.
“I don’t see a rat,” she said.
“It’s there,” Addy cried. “I saw it with my own two eyes. He was huge.”
One of the doctors loosened the diaper and made sure the supposed rat had not hidden in there.
“No rat,” he declared. “I’ve worked here for twenty years, and I have never seen a rat.”
“Well, I’ve been here for a little over twenty minutes and already I’ve seen one,” Addy said meanly. “Give me the child so I can take him somewhere safe.”
“There are a few papers we need you to fill out,” the doctor informed her. “And we have some questions and information for you.”
“Fine, just hurry. I have a long drive back.”
Everyone left the room except for one nurse who was on her hands and knees trying to clean up the soapy mess while the baby slept. Neither she nor Leven noticed Clover as he once again slipped up over him and scurried back underneath. Smiling.
Chapter Two
A Cold Wind Blows In
The Arrival of Winter
Amelia sat silently across the hall from the delivery room. She looked down at the baby in her arms, held her finger to the infant’s thin lips, and softly quieted her. Amelia’s meshing cloak hid them both from view and helped them blend nicely into the wall of vending machines on the fourth floor of the hospital. To anyone passing by, Amelia’s head would have looked like a bag of chips, her body an assortment of candy bars and sodas. Amelia smiled at the baby in her arms.
“You’re going to do great,” Amelia whispered. “Remember, this is for Foo.”
The child’s green eyes widened at the mention of Foo as Amelia shifted and stood just a bit so as to have a better look into the delivery room. It appeared for a moment as though the vending machine were stretching. Amelia could clearly see everything in the birthing room.
Unfortunately, things didn’t look wonderful. As far as births go it looked rather sad. No father around—he had left months ago—and the mother of the impending child was not terribly happy about what she had gotten herself into. Amelia could see her embittered face.
Janet Frore was a square woman with an oval mouth and thick, wild eyebrows. Thanks to the research she had recently completed, Amelia knew the whole history of Janet’s pathetic life. She knew Janet was a bitter person who saw nothing good in the world around her. It had been documented that Janet had smiled only twice in her life and certainly today’s events would not elicit a third. Normally a stern and quiet person, Janet was at present ranting and screaming as a small army of masked doctors and nurses scurried around, performing their duties and trying to act calm.
“Push,” Amelia heard the doctor order. “Push!”
Two pushes later, Janet’s own screaming was drowned out by the wailing of a brand new voice ushered into this very old world.
The new child screeched as if it had been sent to earth to do just that. It put her mother’s hollering to shame. Lights rattled and windows shuddered in the face of the unworldly wailing.
The new mother pinched up her cheeks and squinted as sweat cascaded down her face. The doctor tried to hand her baby to her, but Janet was plugging her own ears. Nurses scurried about acting busy, none of them wanting to be handed the wailing infant.
Amelia watched the doctor through the open door. He was begging the mother to hold her own child.
“I’m not holding her,” Janet said, pushing back and waving the child away. “I don’t want to hold her.”
“Mrs. Frore,” the doctor pleaded, “this is your daughter.”
Janet looked at the small helpless child, her eyebrows wild. She twitched and rubbed her own forehead. “Maybe so, but I’m in no frame of mind to hold her. Take her away,” she ordered.
Amelia tsked, she and the blond baby hidden beneath her cloak still blending in with the vending machines. Amelia could see the frustrated doctor wipe his brow. She figured he was probably wondering why someone had not helped him think through the decision to become an obstetrician.
Dr. Scott handed the child to a fat, happy-looking nurse named Pipa, who was the only nongrimacing person in the room. Nurse Pipa gently placed the child on a rolling table with high plastic sides. She clucked her tongue in disgust loudly enough to be heard and walked out of the room and down the hallway right past Amelia and the infant she was holding.
Amelia followed Pipa, the meshing cloak she was under making it look as though the wall was rolling in a wave behind the fat nurse. She slipped into the nursery after Pipa and moved into a far corner to wait.
Pipa bathed the newborn, gave her a couple of shots, and left the infant lying naked under the heat lamp. When she waddled out of the room, Amelia glided over to the newborn. She pulled back the meshing cloak to reveal her own face and the blond child she was holding in her arms. The cloak made the back half of her look like medical cabinets and a sink, while her exposed face had a lumpy nose. She wore thick glasses that made her piercing eyes look huge. She glanced over her thin shoulders and around the room. She was not a pretty woman, but her countenance was bright, and she had a strong, determined look about her, like a mother protecting her child from bullies. Amelia leaned forward, put the blond child under the heat lamp, and picked up the baby Janet Frore had just given birth to.
“Come, child,” she whispered to the Frore baby. “You’ll be much better off where I’m taking you.”
Amelia turned from the baby she held and looked down at the one she had placed. “Good luck, and remember,” she whispered ominously, “don’t touch him.”
She glanced at the blond child one last time, pulled the cloak back over her face, and stepped out of the nursery— unseen, with the once-screaming newborn resting calmly in her arms.
Nurse Pipa returned and stared curiously at the little blo
nd baby who was now lying there.
“I don’t remember wrapping you up like that,” she muttered. “I’ve got to stop working two shifts in a row,” she said, shaking her head. She moved to the adjoining room to attend to her other duties.
The child lay there in the still room. She was a cute baby, with thick, white-blond hair, a pink face, and brilliant evergreen-colored eyes. She smiled and laughed softly as the clock on the wall ticked. She rocked her body, flexed, and sat straight up on her hind end. She wriggled out of the tightly wrapped baby blanket and touched the sides of her cradle. She looked about the room and smiled. Sure, she wouldn’t exactly be loved in the home where she’d be living, and yes, what she needed to accomplish in her life would take many long years. But none of that mattered at the moment. She was here, and the journey for her had begun. She took in the room. She couldn’t believe how differently things looked here. The realm she had just left seemed like a dream. The fighting and the desperation she had escaped in Foo felt more like a story she had heard than a situation she had lived through. The thought of Sabine’s eyes and his hatred for her burned in her mind, but even now she could feel the memories dissolving and fading away. She knew her knowledge of where she had just come from would soon be gone. Somehow that didn’t frighten her. What she was here to accomplish made any risk worth taking. She lay back down and gazed up at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.
Nurse Pipa stepped into the nursery with a skinny nurse named Elizabeth. They stood together and let their eyes rest on the unwrapped child. The baby looked back at them, her green eyes seeming to focus on their faces.
“How’d you unwrap yourself?” Pipa questioned. “That’s odd.” She picked the child up, rewrapped her, and laid her back down.
“Oh, look at the smile on her,” Elizabeth said with wonder. “That’s sort of unsettling—she looks all grown up.”
“All grown up,” Pipa gently scolded, “don’t be silly. She’s got a little gas, that’s all.” Pipa rubbed the baby’s belly and told her she was beautiful, gas and all.
“Look at those eyes,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve never seen such a color. And they look so…knowing.”
Pipa touched the baby’s cheek and noted, “She feels a bit cold.” The fat nurse turned up the heat lamp above the baby.
The baby frowned. In a few hours she would no longer know anything about her former self, and she was hot. She frowned again, the reality of who she really was beginning to slip farther away. “Pity she’s stuck with such an awful mother,” Pipa whispered to Elizabeth as they continued to look at her. “I have never seen such a bitter person.”
“The woman just had a baby,” Elizabeth defended. “Maybe she’ll mellow a bit.”
“Let’s hope so.” Pipa touched the baby’s nose and smiled. “Will you be okay?” she asked in a soft voice.
“I’ll be fine,” the newborn answered.
Both nurses’ jaws fell. Elizabeth dropped the towels and rolls of bandages she was holding.
“Did you hear that?” Pipa whispered in awe.
“I think I did,” Elizabeth squeaked. “Ask her again.”
Pipa touched the baby’s nose again and with more interest than last time asked, “Will you be okay?”
The baby smiled, closed her green eyes, and slept.
Chapter Three
Where Monsters Live
The Rolling Greens Deluxe Mobile Home Park was situated on fifty-five acres of Burnt Culvert’s finest burnt soil. The town, once named Tin Culvert, had rebuilt itself following a devastating fire that had burned most of it down a few years earlier. No one really wanted to build over the actual charred parts, but Mr. Hornbackle, an Irishman with a bad knee and a soft heart, bought fifty-five acres of blackened land. He put in a couple of wells, laid out a few roads, and called it Rolling Greens Deluxe Mobile Home Park. Now it housed over one hundred and twenty mobile homes. Thirty-two of them were double-wides, and all the rest were singles, except for two RVs that had been allotted the tiniest of space to reside near the north end of the park, by the east leech field.
As soon as the park opened people began to move in and either upgrade or downgrade the area. Some residents planted trees. Some put in lawns. A few built sheds or outbuildings. Some paved tiny slabs of concrete so as to have somewhere to put a picnic table and a barbecue. Others added awnings and outdoor carpeting.
Some, of course, did nothing.
Despite what residents did and didn’t do, almost the entire park had sold out. Folks in the area were happy to live somewhere cheap. They were willing to put up with the surrounding scorched earth and the constant smell of smoke in the air. They didn’t even mind that after a rainstorm their streets would run with what looked like tar. If a person could make his mortgage payment and still have money for food and entertainment, that was all that seemed to matter. To heck with the condition of the soil your home rested on if you could still afford to go to the movies every once in a while.
Strangely though, one lot in the Rolling Greens Deluxe Mobile Home Park had never sold. Near the far back at the edge where the park skirted up against a shallow creek bed there sat empty a single plot of land, and as hard as Mr. Hornbackle had tried to sell it, nobody wanted to buy it. That was somewhat surprising, seeing how it was situated in a relatively quiet area and had the only mature tree in the park growing on it.
People were interested, but something always came up to squelch the sale. For instance, while walking around the lot, potential buyers would stumble into deep sinkholes that peppered the ground. Or they would be put off by an odd smell that wasn’t evident just one space over. Unusual weeds also grew on the land—weeds with sharp ends that seemed to have angry or defensive spirits. There had been a number of people poked or stabbed by the wild growth that spot of soil produced.
A ladies’ auxiliary group that focused on community beautification had come and spent a day trying to clean up the area. One of the women ended up in the hospital with serious, weed-related injuries. The foliage was so fearsome that no one had since attempted to yank anything up.
It was simply bad land.
Mr. Hornbackle had lowered the price of the lot until it was almost free, but land that comes with a foul smell, hundreds of sink holes, and weeds with an attitude is not all that desirable, even at a cut-rate price. So the lot had remained unoccupied, watched over by the lone tree, which grew quite well despite the seemingly poor earth in which it was planted. The tree produced huge leaves in the summer, and in the winter its thick gray bark was striking. It had hundreds of gnarled limbs that lifted and twisted in the most unusual manner and directions. It had come a long way from the seed it once was.
A true thing about seeds is that they don’t always stay seeds. In addition, most seeds grow up to be something. Some become plants or trees that then go about producing more seeds. Some seeds get popped and eaten and…well, you probably have a pretty good idea of what happens to things after they get eaten.
Some seeds are dried, some are pressed for oil, and some simply end up in bean bags or as the rattle in a baby’s toy. It’s probably fair to say that the life and times of a seed isn’t necessarily the most exciting thing in the world, but what the seed lacks in excitement, it makes up for in miracles.
It’s a miracle that a tiny seed can change from a dot in your palm into a towering tree whose wood can be made into the home you live in or the paper books are printed on.
But the seed that Antsel had slipped from his robe and deposited in the rich soil all those years before was not an ordinary seed. It was a transplant from the realm of Foo, a fantrum seed that contained the exiled soul of a great lithen named Geth.
The plot of ground in which Geth was planted might very well have remained unsold forever if it had not been for Addy and Terry Graph. They drifted into town like an unpleasant odor. She was loud and self-righteous, with a head full of perpetually bad hair. He was loud and usually soused. When they inquired about buying a lot at the Rolling Gree
ns Deluxe Mobile Home Park, they were told by Mr. Hornbackle that the place was full up.
“Full up?” Terry snapped, obviously used to people finding or making excuses to keep him out of their neighborhood.
“No vacancies,” Mr. Hornbackle insisted. “Except…”
“Except?” Terry questioned, suspiciously.
“There is one open lot, but I’m not sure it would suit you and your lovely family.” Mr. Hornbackle looked at Addy Graph as she held an almost two-year-old Leven on her lap.
“That’s not my family,” Terry insisted. “I’m married to the woman, but the kid belongs to my wife’s half sister who died. He doesn’t even have our last name.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mr. Hornbackle said sincerely.
“We’ve been tried heavier than most folks,” Terry offered. “Now where’s this lot?”
“It’s unlivable,” Mr. Hornbackle insisted.
“We’ll see about that,” Terry snorted, his lumpy nose and forehead growing red.
Mr. Hornbackle instructed the Graphs and their young burden to get into the cab of his pickup truck. He then drove them to the one open spot he had never been able to sell.
“It’s not perfect,” Mr. Hornbackle primed them as he drove. “The ground’s not very good, and it’s a bit overgrown with weeds.”
“Oh, great,” Terry whined, turning his bloodshot eyes to Addy. “I’m not spending my days pulling weeds someone else let grow.”
“There’s also a tree,” Mr. Hornbackle pointed out.
“A tree,” Addy sniffed sarcastically. “Did you hear that, Terry, a tree?” She rolled her puffy eyes.
Terry laughed, making an annoying gurgle in his throat as he did so. “Are there any other mobile home parks around here?” he asked. “My wife’s employment is just up the street.”
“I’m afraid not,” Mr. Hornbackle said sadly, wishing he had never met these two. “The town is slowly rebuilding from a huge fire that came through here a few years ago. There are a couple of mobile home parks about fifty miles west.”