Blue just nodded, then said, “If you’re going to go out on patrol, I’d rather you carried one.”
So she’d taken it, never saying anything about Ohn not having to lug one of the ugly things around. She just hoped she didn’t have to use it.
Her partner as she patrolled the second floor was Willie. He looked like a bit of a space cadet, she’d thought at first. He was wearing one of those collarless Indian cotton shirts and baggy cotton pants, with a couple of strands of beads and a little leather pouch that had who knew what inside dangling from his neck. His hair was almost as long as Blue’s but he didn’t tie it back, and he had one of those goatees that drove Judy nuts. They always made her think of B-movie villains.
But if he looked a bit spacey, he didn’t act it. And he carried his shotgun with an easy familiarity that made Judy feel a bit more confident than she would have if all of their protection had relied solely upon her.
They were on their way back to the Postman’s Room, when they heard the dull boom of a firearm being fired almost directly below them. She turned from the doorway that they’d been about to enter and looked nervously down the hall to where she could see a set of stairs leading down.
“What the hell do you think that was?” she asked, her hands getting sweaty where they gripped the rifle.
Willie had gone ahead into the room. When he replied, it wasn’t to answer her question.
“Look at this,” he said. His voice sounded strained.
She backed up to the doorway until she could look in but still see down the hall just by turning her head.
“Look at what... ?” she began, but then she saw what he was talking about and her throat got suddenly dry and just closed up on her.
The window to the room stood open; the room itself was full of owls. They perched on the backs of chairs and on lamp stands, on dressers, the headboard of the bed, the windowsill and the window itself. The latter swung back and forth with two of the wide-eyed creatures sitting on it, their heads swiveling so that while their bodies moved back and forth, their gazes remained fixed on her and Willie.
“Suh,” Judy said. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Sara said something about owls....”
One rose suddenly and flew straight for them. Willie ducked and Judy backpedaled out of the way as the bird swooped past them, then sailed off down the hallway. In moments the rest of the birds were in flight. The air was filled with the sound of their wings as they rose one by one from their perches and flew into the hall. There they split up, some going down the hallway in one direction, some the other.
“This is too freaky,” Judy said.
She leaned weakly against the wall, the gun clutched against her chest. She wasn’t even aware that she was still holding it.
“We’d better tell Blue,” Willie said.
“I think they’re going to get to him before we can,” Judy said.
She pushed away from the wall and went into the room. Laying her rifle on the bed, she walked to the window and gingerly looked out. In the darkness she could just vaguely make out the looming presence of the forest. Shivering, she shut the window and bolted it.
“Maybe we should leave it open,” Willie said. At Judy’s raised eyebrows, he added, “So they’ll have a way to get out.”
“And then something else’ll have a way in.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
Judy picked up the rifle. “Let’s just get back.”
Willie stared at the closed window, then nodded. Side by side, starting at each natural creak and groan the House made, they followed the owls back to the east side of the House.
John Haven stood at the window, rifle held in one hand, its muzzle pointed at the floor, and looked out into the night. He was a slender, almost effeminate-looking man in his late twenties. His hair was fine, short on the top, longer in the back where it was gathered into a short ponytail. When he was beside him, Blue felt like some hulking football player towering over a little kid.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” John said softly, turning from the window. “All that forest out there.”
Blue nodded. “You’re handling this better than your friend... uh...”
“Richard,” John supplied. “Richard Fagan.”
“Yeah, him,” Blue said.
Fagan had started to freak again, just before the first patrols set out. Julianne and John had tried to talk him down, but eventually all they could do was give him a couple of Valium from somebody’s prescription and just hope that he’d get it together.
“Richard’s not a strong person... physically, I mean,” John said.
“But you’re doing okay.”
John smiled. “You just can’t see the way I’m shaking inside.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Or maybe it’s because I’ve got some Romany blood,” John added, “so I can handle the weirdness better.” At Blue’s raised eyebrows, John went on, “It’s on my father’s side. My grandmother was a Gypsy; she quit her clan—or whatever it is that they call them—to marry my granddad. That made her ’unclean’ to her people.”
“I’ve heard about that stuff,” Blue said. “I used to know a couple of Gypsies—back in the days when I rode with the Devil’s Dragon. They live by all kinds of taboos—or at least the older ones do.”
“They’ve got some strange ideas, all right,” John agreed, “but then I guess every cultural group looks a little odd to those who aren’t a part of it. Anyway, the reason I brought that up is that she used to talk about things...”
His voice trailed off for a moment and he looked back out the window. Blue wasn’t sure what John was seeing, he just knew that it wasn’t whatever lay outside the window.
“What kinds of things?” he asked.
John looked back at him and shrugged. “Magic things,” he said with a bit of an embarrassed smile. “We used to laugh at her stories—my sister and I—but now...”
“Now you believe?”
“No. I mean, of course I do. But I wonder why I couldn’t accept what she was telling me back then. I loved her; I trusted her. Why couldn’t I at least allow her the dignity of her beliefs without making fun of them?”
“It’s a hard call,” Blue said. “If it seems impossible—”
John cut him off. “I know all of that. The point is, I should have had more of an open mind, but I didn’t. I put her in a box labeled ’grandmother with weird ideas,’ but never stopped to think of how we all get put into boxes. I’m a poet and I’m not all that rugged, so people think I’m twee or gay, but I’m neither. I’ve got a sweet side to my thinking and a bitter side. What I am—what any of us are—can’t fit into one convenient box or label.”
“It’s worth remembering,” Blue said. “Sometimes it’s hard, but you’ve got to work at it.”
John nodded. His gaze returned to the darkness beyond the window.
“She’s dead now,” he said. “My grandmother. I just wish...”
He didn’t finish, but then he didn’t have to. Blue knew what was going through his mind. He wished he could roll back time to tell his grandmother that he believed her, or maybe just that he believed in her. He wished, like everybody who took the time to think about it did, that he could just stop stereotyping people.
“We’d better get a move on,” Blue said.
John turned from the window. “Life goes on,” he said.
Blue nodded, but the muffled sound of a gunshot rose up from the ground floor before he could speak. John stepped quickly from the window to join Blue, who had already moved out into the hall. Blue pumped a shell into the firing chamber of his Remington.
“Maybe somebody just got nervous,” John said.
“Yeah, maybe.”
But Blue didn’t think so. He started off down the hall to nearest stairway leading down, pausing at the head of the stairs. He held a finger to his lips as John was about to speak, then pointed down. John moved quietly to his side.
“What
are they?” he whispered as he looked down to the foot of the stairs.
Blue shrugged. He’d never seen anything like them before himself except as pen-and-ink illustrations in books on prehistory. They stood like men—the tallest couldn’t be more than five feet tall—but they were covered with fur and had faces like apes. Yet they weren’t apes either, because they carried spears and wore leather headbands or armbands from which dangled bunches of feathers and strung shells. And they seemed to be conversing among themselves.
They hadn’t looked up to where he and John were standing, so he touched John’s arm and drew back out of sight. John followed, stepping carefully so that the floor wouldn’t creak underfoot.
“They look like primitive men,” John said quietly.
Blue nodded. “Like the drawings you see of the Java man.”
“That gunshot we heard earlier... ?”
“I don’t think it had anything to do with them,” Blue said. “They didn’t look agitated enough to have been shot at. Seems to me that they’re just scoping out the building, but I don’t like the fact that they’re in here. That means the House isn’t secure anymore.”
“Who was patrolling downstairs?”
“Ohn and Sean took the north side, Judy and Will had the south.”
“Somebody fired a shot down there,” John said.
Blue hadn’t forgotten. He looked at his watch.
“Let’s get back to the ballroom,” he said. “It’s about the time we said we’d be getting back anyway. We can do a head count then and move everybody upstairs who isn’t already there.”
“And then?”
“Let’s just take it one step at a time,” Blue said.
He glanced back at the stairway, but he was thinking of the glass wall of the ballroom where they’d left those who hadn’t been given a specific assignment.
They should have stayed together, he thought, never mind that it made good sense to get a handle on their provisions and set patrols.
“I just hope the ballroom’s still secure,” he added as he set off down the hall at trot.
Julianne had already organized the exodus from the ballroom. It started with Richard Fagan screeching—only this time he wasn’t suffering from another of his shock-induced hallucinations. The three green-skinned children who had their faces pressed up against the glass were enough to give anybody a start. She didn’t find them alarming herself—her fright was reserved for when the bodachs fled and the bear came looming out of the shadow-thick garden, moving into the light thrown by the ballroom’s windows.
“Everybody out!” she cried.
She hauled Richard to his feet and half-dragged, half-carried him to the big oak doors that led out of the ballroom into the rest of the House.
For a long moment those gathered in the room were frozen in place; then they made a general rush for the doors. Julianne passed Richard to the first pair of them to go through, then stood aside, hurrying people on while keeping an eye on the bear, which had come up short against the window.
What were you supposed to do when you ran into a bear in the woods? she asked herself frantically.
Then it came to her: avoid eye contact and retreat in a non-threatening manner. Right. Like she or her companions were threatening.
The only firsthand knowledge she had of bears was from seeing them in the zoo—and once in a circus. She’d left the latter halfway through the performance, disgusted with how the animals lost all their dignity as they were put through their paces by their trainers. Those bears—black and brown, and the grizzly in the zoo—were diminutive compared to the size of the one outside. It was huge, an enormous cousin to the ones she’d seen—more like some exaggerated cartoon of a creature than a real bear. But it was real—a giant, primitive ancestor to the bears that presently inhabited the world.
The world, she thought. She wasn’t in any world she knew. Not anymore.
“Don’t panic,” she told people as they crowded the doors. “Take it easy. Help each other.”
The bear seemed to be staring directly at her. It laid a paw against the glass, then rose to its full height of almost eleven feet.
Please, she thought. Just go away. There’s nothing for you in here.
Except there was food scattered all about the room. That would be enough to draw it here, wouldn’t it?
But the bear didn’t seem interested in the food. Just in her. And its anger... She tried to avoid eye contact with it, but couldn’t tear her gaze away. The rage in its eyes struck her almost like a physical blow.
The last of the people were through the door now. Julianne hesitated in the doorway, her own gaze still locked on the fury that burned in the bear’s eyes. Then it drew back a paw and batted the window. The pane broke under the blow, glass falling to shatter against the tiled floor.
Julianne didn’t stay any longer. She darted through the doorway and shut the two massive doors. She called to one of the stragglers and had him come back to help her drag a heavy walnut sideboard over from the wall and push it up against the doors. Leaning on the sideboard, her breath coming in ragged gasps, she listened for sounds from within the ballroom. She heard the sound of more glass breaking and window frames snapping as the bear forced its way inside. And then she was aware of another sound—a swishing sound that seemed abnormally loud because of the adrenaline that was racing through her, forcing all of her senses to operate at their peak.
She turned to see an enormous owl sailing down the hallway toward them. She and her companion ducked as the bird flew by, the air filled with the soft whispering of its wings. More owls followed the first—a half-dozen or so, all told.
“Oh man, oh man, oh man,” her companion was mumbling, his face pressed up against the sideboard.
The doors suddenly shook as the bear threw itself against them. The sideboard shifted an inch or so. Julianne pushed it back against the doors, but the bear’s next impact moved it back again. It clawed at the door, then hit it once more with the full weight of its body. Julianne could actually feel the floor shiver under the impact.
How long would the doors hold? She wasn’t going to wait around to see.
She grabbed her companion’s hand and helped him stand; then the two of them fled for the stairs where the others had gone. Behind them the bear continued to attack the door.
2
Esmeralda wasn’t lost. Unlike Jamie, she knew how to navigate the bewildering array of times and places that made up the Otherworld. For her it was a matter of viewing it not as it was—infinite worlds and times layered one upon the other, separated often by no more than the flimsiest of gauzes—but as she imagined it to be: a beehive of worlds and their various timelines, sectioned and partitioned from each other in orderly honeycombs. With the skill of a honochen’o’keh, or the winds that were her cousins, she stepped through the various worlds with her eyes closed, viewing her progress solely through the sight of her own inner vision.
The path she followed was a spiraling corkscrew that started with the spark of familiarity that had leapt into her mind from the flickering Weirdin images on Memoria’s screen in the Postman’s Room and took her from oak forest to redwood, from jungle to arctic tundra, from lowland fen to desert, from mountain ranges to seashores. She kept track of each world she passed through and was always aware of the road that would lead her back to the origin of her journey.
She wasn’t lost; but Jamie was.
He was everywhere, he was nowhere. Every world and time she touched seemed to have the taste of him in its air, but no sooner did she arrive than the winds of that place told her it was only the echo of his presence that they carried, not his presence itself. She lost count of the worlds she walked before she finally found one thread of him stronger than any other.
She followed its unraveling to its source, to a part of a world that was like the highlands of the Andes Mountains of her homeworld. There, where the howling winds lent her their strength, she found not her Jamie, but Emma’s:
He was a coyote-headed man, sitting on a stone outcrop. The cliff side fell away behind him for a half-mile. He was perched at his ease, careless of the drop so close at hand, dressed in scuffed cowboy boots and jeans. He wore a blue flannel shirt tucked into his jeans with a leather vest overtop that was decorated with bead- and quill-work. His eyes were mismatched—one blue and one brown. On his head was a flat-brimmed black hat; holes had been cut in the brim to allow his ears to poke through. Two long braids, tied with leather thongs at their ends and decorated with feathers, hung to either side of his face. She couldn’t tell if the braids were really his, or just attached to the inside of the hat.
It didn’t really matter, she supposed, for she had recognized him as soon as she saw him. He could look however he wanted, be anybody he wanted to be. That was part of his magic.
She sighed, then walked over to where he was sitting and settled on another stone nearby.
“The jeans and boots aren’t that Native,” she said. “Come to think of it, neither are the shirt and hat.”
“I didn’t say I was trying to look Native.”
“Then why the vest and braids?”
His only reply was a wide grin.
So that was the way it was going to be. She concentrated for a moment, then reached into her pocket, taking out a pouch of tobacco and a package of papers that hadn’t been there when she’d started her journey. Not looking at him, she rolled a cigarette. She licked the paper, pinched off the ends. Stowing the tobacco and papers away, she started to concentrate on matches, but before she could reach into her pocket, he was offering her a light from a burning twig.
“Cute,” she said, but accepted the light.
She took a long drag on the cigarette, drawing the smoke deep inside, and concentrated on not coughing, no matter how much the smoke burned her lungs. She held it in for a moment, then exhaled. Blowing the ash from the end of the cigarette, she casually offered it to him.
He grinned, knowing just as she did that he could never resist a smoke, knowing as well what sharing it implied. She didn’t say anything until he’d taken a couple of drags and handed it back to her. She shook her head.