"Let go, my boy," said the Weeping Woman. "My only boy. Let go."
As she stroked his hair, gently she took hold of the bat with her other hand. The ache subsided, and the rigid claw in which he had grasped it for so long finally relaxed. He felt the bat slip through his fingers at last with a rush of gratitude.
"Okay," Ethan said. "I'll let go."
That was when the strangest thing of all happened: La Llorona, the screaming Banshee of the Far Territories, the ragged Queen of Sorrows, smiled.
At that moment, Ethan felt a sharp pain in the palm of his hand. It was the Knot, that little stubborn morsel of something impossible to remove or forget or work around. As he surrendered the bat to La Llorona, the Knot chanced to rub against the swollen blister that it had long since raised on the skin of Ethan's hand. The blister was unbelievably tender and raw, and Ethan yelled. As he yelled, it was just as if—as they say in old stories—the scales fell from his eyes. He blinked, once, and found himself in the cold embrace of a ghost, in a smell of dust and rotten cloth. La Llorona's face was a pinched pale mask, a translucent white veil with the bones of her skull showing through. Ethan grabbed at the bat, and just managed to wrench it, at the last possible instant, away from her. As he did so La Llorona shrieked, and snatched at his hair with a ravenous skeleton hand.
"No!" Ethan cried. "No, you aren't her!"
The grief of his mother's death was returned to him, then; it resumed its right and familiar place: a part of life, a part of the story of Ethan Feld, a part of the world that was, after all, a world of stories, tragic and delightful, and, on the whole, very much the better for it. The memory of Dr. Victoria Jean Kummerman Feld was Something, unalterably Something, a hodag's egg that no amount of Nothing could ever hope to touch or dissolve.
"Get off me!" he cried, brandishing the bat. "Or I'll bust you open like an old piñata."
La Llorona's face was blank with sorrow, and she made no sound at all, as though all her tears were finally shed. She stood, floating a few inches above the ground, gazing down at him. For one last second, Ethan thought he saw the face of his mother, projected like a flickering image on the blank screen of La Llorona's face. Her expression was one of infinite reproach, and Ethan was crushed by the knowledge that he had lost her, forever, all over again. Then she backed away from him, into the trees, and was gone.
JENNIFER T. RAN A LONG WAY, BUT AS SHE DREW NEARER TO Diamond Green she had to slow down. The night was filled with iron airs, a music of hammers and shovels, bike chains and manhole covers. There were campfires burning in the Briarpatch, and she carefully picked her away among them. The laughter of the Rade at its campfires was like the barking of dogs straining against choke collars, like the yapping of seagulls. She walked, toe to heel, keeping her breathing low and steady, and managed to slip past the campfires, and out onto Diamond Green. In the moonlight, she could see the great machines that littered the Winterlands side of the Green, trampling the thick grass around Murmury Well. There was the steady ronf-ronf-ronf of the spool that was sending Mr. Feld's marvelous hose and nozzle down to the bottom of the universe itself. Up on the hillsides of the Summerlands, more fires burned, and she could hear the angular chiming of their music. The looming puppet-shadows of dancing graylings and other creatures flickered against the leaves of the trees. She wondered briefly why even that nasty bunch of skanky little creatures would want to help Coyote bring about their own destruction. If Coyote did get ahold of Splinter, and the world dissolved in a great sea of Nothing, there would only be room on that skinny little raft for one. Then she remembered that the graylings were, or had once been, ferishers, and the skrikers were some kind of strange hybrid of goblin and machine—contrivances of the Changer. Maybe they were dancing, now, not out of the general happiness of evil at all, but rather from joy at the impending end of their miserable little lives.
On the fourth side of the Green, beyond right field, there was a profound darkness, broken here and there by the smudged light of fires that were, she realized, only the reflections of the fires burning in the Summerlands across the way. The Gleaming, sealed forever by some kind of trick of Coyote's that he was unable, or afraid, to undo. Or maybe, since everything was about to come to an end anyway, he just didn't see any point to bothering.
It was hard to imagine someone as powerful and tricky as Coyote being afraid of anything, but standing there in the middle of Diamond Green she got the unmistakable feeling that he was. He had laid waste to the orchards of Applelawn, trampled the Greenmelt around Murmury, and violated the waters of the Well itself. And he had allowed his followers to pitch their red tents in the dark thorny bramble of the Middling. But Diamond Green itself, where she now stood, lay untouched, stretching smooth and unsullied in every direction, the grass dark in the moonlight and glinting with dew. Even with the Gleaming sealed up, it was as if there was a power in the world, on this great grassy diamond, that Coyote still feared.
There was a rustle, just behind her, like a flag in a stiff breeze. She whirled, remembering the shadows that had pursued them into the Middling, back on Clam Island. A black shape, with a smell like the smell of smoke in your hair the day after a barbecue, churned the air beside her. It was a huge black bird—a raven. Jennifer's heart lurched in her chest, but she stood her ground as it dived toward her. Covering her face with one arm, she swatted at it with the other, knocking it away, wary of its sharp beak and claws.
"Take it easy!" croaked the raven. "I'm just looking for a place to sit down."
Once she had heard it talk, she could no longer seem to move her hands to shoo it away. She stood stock still, her heart pounding so hard now that she could hear it as a soft iron clanging in her ears, and allowed the raven to light on her shoulder.
"Now who's afraid?" the raven said, and the voice, though raucous, was familiar to her. "Coyote doesn't fear the power of this field. Coyote is the power here. This is his ground, the Great Crossroads of the Four Worlds. It was here, oh, ages ago, that he fell asleep, and dreamed a Coyote game of paths and chances. The game you love so much, little girl. So don't go thinking such nasty thoughts about Coyote."
"You don't fool me," Jennifer T. said. "You're him."
He was standing beside her then, in the moonlight, regarding her, his head cocked curiously to one side in a way that really did remind her of a cunning and curious old coyote.
"You are a spark plug, all right," he said. "If I weren't about to disband my team, I'd be tempted to sign you to a contract."
"Where's my team?" Jennifer T. "Cinquefoil and Rodrigo and Spider-Rose. Where are they?"
"I have them," he said. "As I now have you."
"You don't have me yet," she said. "So shut up."
He smiled. She could see that he really seemed to like her. For some reason that made her even angrier than before.
"You know why I'm here, right?" she said. "You can read my thoughts."
"I can, in fact. And I do." He reached into the pocket of his long coat and withdrew a long tobacco pipe. It was pale gray in the moonlight, but she guessed that, like Cutbelly's, it was carved from bone. He wiggled two fingers and a little gold fish of fire flopped in the air above the pipe and then plunged, with a hiss, into the bowl. "You want to play ball."
"That's right. My guys against your guys. Nine on nine. Right here, on Diamond Green. If we win, you get that hose out of there and pack everything up and, you know. Basically, lose. If you win, then…" She hesitated before saying it. It was not as if she had asked Ethan for his permission; he might not agree. "Then we give you Splinter. The bat. The piece of wood you need."
"Interesting proposition. You know Coyote pretty well, for a gum-chewing half-breed child of television. And I just love the idea of the fate of the entire universe coming down to the bottom of the ninth. Love it. But you're neglecting one thing. I have all the power here, and you have none. I hold all the cards, except one, the bat, but as to that, look around you. I have ten thousand of my freakish little buddie
s scattered in their tents and trailers all around this field. That's versus nine of you, of whom at the moment all but two are in my immediate control. I have positioned my fellas in a ring in this immediate vicinity, all around Applelawn, the Greenmelt, and the Briarpatch, armed not just with weapons but with powerful grammers to dampen the talents of Shadowtails. You can't get away, and you can't send for help. All I need to do is be patient, and keep your friend Ethan away from food for a week or two. And that stick of his will be mine."
Jennifer T. had used up her entire store of boldness in stealing through the Briarpatch, coming here, and standing up to Coyote as she had. Now she fell silent, and allowed the weight of defeat to hang her head.
"What do you have to fight me with?" Coyote said. "What do you know? Your father's father's people knew me, once; and got the better of me many times. But that lore is not yours, little girl. What lore do you have?"
When Coyote said lore—that was when Jennifer T. thought of the book her uncle Mo had given her. The Threefold Lore, they called it. All that's nonsense. She took it from her back pocket and held it up to him.
"I have this," she said. "The Lore of the Wa-He-Ta Tribe."
"What is that?" He peered through the darkness at the book's cover, with its three costumed little white boys sitting by a fire while a big Indian in a corny headdress taught them how to tie trout lures or do lanyard. "That?" He grinned. "That book was written by a little old man named Irving Posner, in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1921. There's no lore in that book. There's nothing in there that can save you."
"The Threefold Lore," she said, without much faith in what she was saying—Irving Posner?—but taking refuge, as so often in her life, in her own deep stubbornness. "Wonder. And Hopefulness. And Trust."
Coyote laughed so hard that he blew his pipe out; a little comet of burning tobacco shot into the air. He bent over, laughing. He stood up, and smoothed his hair, and dabbed at an eye. And then the pipe fell out of his mouth, and he looked surprised as only Coyote—whose talent has always been that of ridiculous failure as much as of wild success—can look surprised. Jennifer T. turned. At first she thought that it was a mist, rising from the grass, but then she saw that it was clearly stealing in through the Briarpatch itself, from the Middling. It was some kind of silk, milkweed spores or the floats of balloonist spiders, thousands of them, drifting in the moonlight, blowing in from the Briarpatch on a breeze she could not feel.
"They're ghosts, you idiot," Coyote said, with a twisted grin of dismay.
The wisps of silky fog settled on the field like smoke curling inside a bottle. Then each wisp seemed to bloom, instantly, into a small shape, oddly spiky up on top. As she stood there with Coyote, holding the The Wa-He-Ta Brave's Official Tribe Handbook, the field of Green Diamond filled with an army of ghostly boys. The ghost-boys were gotten up like little "Indians," in buckskins and warpaint, each of them wearing a dopey-looking feathered headdress on his head. The boys filled in—developed like photographs—as they settled and spread across the field. Their features grew more distinct. They even took on a certain amount of pale coloring. They reminded her of old photographs of her grandmother and great-aunts on the breakfront in the house on Clam Island: black and white, or brown and white, but tinted with delicate pale Eastery colors. Some of the boys were bigger than she, and others smaller, but none of them seemed to be older, as far as she could tell, or as far as you could ascribe an age to a ghost.
"Who are you guys?" she asked the nearest ghost, a snub-nosed kid with wide-set dark eyes and pale cheeks, tinted candy pink.
"We are the braves of Wa-He-Ta," he said. "And we are true-blue to the end."
"That's right," said a second boy, thin and spotty. "Even if you is a girl."
Jennifer T. opened the Handbook to its title page and held it out to Coyote. Under the crossed-tomahawk-and-peace-pipe symbol of the Wa-He-Ta braves there was a motto in big slanty letters. She guessed that Coyote's eyes would be sharp enough to read the motto, even by the light of a three-quarter moon.
"Says so right here," said Jennifer T. " 'True-Blue to the End.' "
"Your uncle Mo wishes he could be here with us," said the pink-cheeked boy. She could see clear through his body to the name tag sewed into the collar of his uniform shirt. It said COOTER SIMMS. "But he isn't dead yet, so he can't."
"He's the last of the Wa-He-Tas," said another ghost boy.
"We doesn't need him," said a third. "We is skitterish as squirrels and toothy as garfish and scrappy as a mess of rat terriers." There was a general excited murmur of agreement among the ghost boys at this declaration, a number of them piping up with feisty similes of their own. "An' they's one of us for every one of them little critters and graylings and whatnots you got doing your dirty work 'round here. An' mister," the boy finished, pushing up his sleeves, "we aim to see that they doesn't do you one lick of good."
"So now it's a fair fight," said Cooter Simms. "Ten thousand against ten thousand."
Coyote spun around where he stood, watching as the billowing ghost-boys fogged up his view of the fires of his troops. Their soft rustling presence seemed even to dampen the sound of the Rade's iron music. The infernal pounding of the unwinding picofiber hose on its clattering spool faded and died. Coyote opened his mouth, and as he did so his lip curled in an ugly way, and Jennifer T. thought she caught a glimpse of a row of snaggled, ugly canine teeth. Then he closed his mouth, and smiled his beautiful smile. He reloaded his pipe, and sent another firefish diving into its bowl. He puffed merrily for a moment, looking around at the ghostly army of boys. Then he looked at Jennifer T., and his eyes blazed with a fire so old and deep that the cockiness she had been feeling over the past few minutes vanished like a drop of water on a hot skillet.
"All right, then," Coyote said. "I'll release your teammates, and return your gear. And we'll meet on this green at noon tomorrow. But don't count on winning. My Hobbledehoys are tough, Jennifer T. Rideout. They're spikes-out, swill-spitting dirt players who'll steal your signs and brush back your hitters and load up the ball with Vaseline. They're the original Gashouse Gang, and they play by Coyote rules. And their pitcher, let me tell you…" He sucked on his pipe and it flared up and lit his face from underneath, the way you do with a flashlight when you are telling a ghost story and want to spook your friends. "He has the nastiest stuff you've ever seen." He chuckled. "A real fireballer."
Then he turned, and walked off the field.
CHAPTER 25
A Game of Worlds
THE GHOST BOYS conveyed Jennifer T. through the briars to the place where Ethan lay, huddled by a stream, cheeks silvered with tears.
"E?" she knelt beside him. "You all right?"
He shook his head.
"What happened?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Ethan said. "Is that all right?"
"Sure," said Jennifer T. She held out her hand to him and he took it, and she dragged him to his feet. He looked around at the flickering army of dead boys she had brought along with her into the Briarpatch.
"Who are all these…guys?"
"We're the braves of Wa-He-Ta," said the ghost of Cooter Smith. "And we don't much hold with a boy what cries."
"Oh, like you never cried in your whole life," Jennifer T. said. "I'm sure. I'll bet you could have earned yourself a Feather in Straight-up Old-fashioned Indian-style Bawling if they gave one out."
Cooter Smith's ghost glared at her, and the delicate pink tinge of his ghostly gray cheek seemed to deepen. There was a murmur of delighted appreciation among the other Wa-He-Tas.
"Come on," Jennifer T. said. "Let's go find Cutbelly."
They found the werefox scrambling madly amid the hooks and tangles of the Briarpatch, calling out their names. When he saw the boyish ghosts of all the men who had never forgotten their years of service in the ranks of the true-blue Wa-He-Tas, he was alarmed, but when Jennifer T. told him how they had intimidated Coyote, he broke into a foxy little grin.
"So, it's to be a game of baseball, then," he said. "And what did you promise him, should we lose?"
Jennifer T. looked at Ethan, then down at the bat in his hand. It shone softly in the pale light of the horned moon.
"Splinter?" Ethan said. "You promised him my bat?"
"It's the only thing he wants, Ethan. What else could I offer him?"
Ethan raised the bat, and hefted it, and then winced. He opened his left hand and she saw the fiery welt on his palm, raw and glistening.
"I guess it doesn't matter if I lose it," he said. "I can't even swing the darn thing."
"Ya want ta spit on that there blister," offered one of the Wa-He-Tas.
"Spit on it, then rub it with some sourgrass," suggested another.
"Spit and lemonade," suggested another. "And then lay a nice hairy cobweb acrost it."
Jennifer T. winked at Ethan. "I guess we know how they died," she said.
They spent the remainder of the night sleeping in a 1977 Ford Citation that had been abandoned in an impromptu junkyard, down a steep embankment from Route 179, outside of Sedona, Arizona. The air was cool and flavored with the dusty smell of sage. The sky in the distance glowed like the dial of a luminescent clock. They were not sure what had become of the ghost boys—they were not sure, in the tender pink glow of a desert morning in the Middling, if there really had been any ghost boys at all—until Cutbelly crossed them back to Diamond Green, and they saw the ruination of the Rade.
The red tents were struck; the great armored vehicles had rolled out of sight; even the fleet of storm birds had passed away, leaving behind only the endless blue heaven of Diamond Green. Jennifer T. thought that the braves of the Wa-He-Ta must have driven the Rade away, but Cutbelly said that it was Coyote himself who had sent them packing, now that he could no longer avail himself of them.
"They drive him mad, you know, the Rade," he said. "All that yelling and banging and yammering. Every thousand years or so he just goes off and eats them all."