He was debating this with himself when he turned onto the bike path, and there, squatting over the remains of a rabbit, as if it had just been snacking or having dessert, was one of the aliens.
The gray one.
This time Brandon didn’t look at it from the corner of his eye or through a rhododendron bush. He looked at it full on.
It really was gross.
Well, gross didn’t half explain it. The alien had shiny, slick dark gray skin, as if it were constantly wet. Its head—if that was a head—was bulbous, like a giant onion, and it bulged in funny, awkward places. Its eyes were twin black shrouds without pupils. It had slimy tentacles that flopped about. In fact, Brandon suddenly knew exactly what the alien looked like.
“A big gray jellyfish!” he said aloud. Right—a jellyfish with a shark’s skin.
The alien didn’t seem to notice him. It kept slurping up the rabbit.
Until, that is, Brandon dropped his hockey stick and the stick kind of shimmied on the pavement, making a lot of noise.
Then the gray alien noticed him big-time!
It seemed to hunch down on itself, then lifted up with a kind of long sucking sound—a sort of sssssssssssluuuumirppppp. It landed on the hockey stick and stayed there for a moment before deciding that the stick was inedible. Then it turned its black-shroud eyes on Brandon.
Brandon was so frightened he couldn’t move. Which probably saved him for the moment. Clearly the alien only ate living things. And living things moved. Brandon wasn’t moving. He was too scared to.
Suddenly there was a sound behind him and a little voice called out, “Brandon, where are you?”
He turned his head slowly, cautiously, and looked through the mask’s slit.
That was when Kathy’s bike came into view.
The alien turned its head, too. Then it turned its body and, as if swimming through both air and time, it focused on her.
“Oh,” Kathy said in a voice that was little and frightened. “Oh.”
“Don’t move!” Brandon cried out. “Don’t move a muscle, Kathy.” But his voice was straining through the mask and Kathy was clearly too far gone with fright to hear him anyway. She braked the bike and tried to turn to go back the way she had come. But the bike wobbled left, then right, then fell over with Kathy still on it. At that, the alien hunched down on itself and then began to lift up.
That’s when Brandon lost it. No one—alien or not—messed with his little sister. He got off the bike, reached down, picked up the hockey stick, straightened up, and charged.
Of course it was a bit awkward, because he was wearing skates and there wasn’t any ice around, it being the middle of August. He was sweating like stink from fear and from the heat. Perspiration ran down his face, making him almost blind behind the mask. And he was still holding his bike. Whatever heroics he had planned turned at that moment into pure disaster. He tripped over something in the bike path and fell onto the alien, hockey stick flailing.
“Oof,” he said. And “Jeeze.” And “Unh-unh.” His hockey coach would have benched him for that kind of move.
The alien completely forgot about Kathy, though. It raised up a bit, made its slurping noise, which—dose up—sounded like the whirring of a giant Mixmaster, only worse. There was a sudden sharp spray, like soapy water, that further obscured Brandon’s vision, and then the alien landed on him, sliding down him like a kid on a banister, from his head to his feet, totally encasing him in a wet dark that smelled a little like second-day underwear, more like the boys’ locker room after a game, and a lot like a whole pot of burnt eggs.
For a moment Brandon was totally without feeling or thought. And then he realized that he was about to die. About to die—and there was nothing he could do to change things. Or to say good-bye. It was going to be messy, ugly, and embarrassing. He was dosed up inside the alien—an alien that had already devoured birds, squirrels, raccoons, dogs, cats, even horses and cows.
Then the alien’s entire body shuddered, convulsed, and ... lifted off, flopping away from him. Brandon realized that he was alive and out in the summer sun again, smelling like throw-up and feeling worse.
He couldn’t see much, for the mask had slipped a bit sideways and he was covered with a variety of substances, none of which he wanted to put a name to. But someone—Kathy?—was shouting his name.
He turned. He tried to listen. Then he remembered.
"Kathy!” he cried. “Get away. Go home. The alien...”
He heard a lot of other sounds then. Someone took his mask off. Someone wiped his face. When he opened his eyes to the summer sun, there were his mom and his dad and the fire chief and Captain Covey and Brandon’s science teacher. And the CNN reporter was standing on the side, his microphone at the ready, looking happy.
On the ground was the gray alien, covered with a soapy foam and looking very very dead.
“I don’t ... get it..." Brandon started to say, when the reporter moved in.
“What does it feel like, being the brother of a hero?” the reporter asked, shoving the mike under his nose.
The two words didn’t connect: brother... hero.
“He feels fine,” his mom said.
“We all feel fine,” his dad said.
Kathy was crying. “I had to come,” she was blubbing, “because I left Mom a note that I had seen the aliens on the bike path and was going there.” She snuffled loudly. “ ’Cause I promised I wouldn’t say you were going, and besides, she’d never have believed you. And she must have told Dad. And he called the police and...”
And then Brandon noticed what Kathy was holding in her hand: a fire extinguisher. The one from behind the kitchen door. The yellow one that Dad had had them practice with. There was something still dribbling out of the nozzle. Foam. He looked down at his feet, where his skates were covered in the same foam. And covered with something else as well. He didn’t want to know what the something else was.
The sheriff lured the CNN reporter away from Brandon by talking into his microphone. “Like when my mama used to wash my mouth out with soap for saying naughty words,” he told forty million viewers. “That alien didn’t like it any more than I did all those years ago. Ptooie!” He laughed. He had his arm around the reporter, who was looking around for help. “We’ll do the same with them other two. Wash their mouths out with soap.”
“More like an enema,” Brandon’s mom said.
“Myrna!” his dad said, but he was laughing.
Which is how Brandon knew there was nothing more to worry about. Not even ruining his hockey gear, which cost $398 new. Nothing at all.
Except—he suddenly thought with growing horror as the TV cameras continued to roll—all the kids at school who would laugh and laugh at him because he’d been rescued by an eight-year-old. He knew then, with absolute certainty, that it would have been better if he had been eaten by an alien, the gray or the green or the red.
Much better. All things considered.
Winter's King
HE WAS NOT BORN a king but the child of wandering players, slipping out ice-blue in the deepest part of winter, when the wind howled outside the little green caravan. The midwife pronounced him dead, her voice smoothly hiding her satisfaction. She had not wanted to be called to a birth on such a night.
But the father, who sang for pennies and smiles from strangers, grabbed the child from her and plunged him into a basin of lukewarm water, all the while singing a strange fierce song in a tongue he did not really know.
Slowly the child turned pink in the water, as if breath were lent him by both the water and the song. He coughed once and spit up a bit of rosy blood, then wailed a note that was a minor third higher than his father’s last surprised tone.
Without taking time to swaddle the child, the father laid him dripping wet and kicking next to bis wife on the caravan bed. As she lifted the babe to her breast, the woman smiled at her husband, a look that included both the man and the child but cut the midwife cold.
The old
woman muttered something that was part curse, part fear, then more loudly said, ‘‘No good will come of this dead cold child. He shall thrive in winter but never in the warm and he shall think little of this world. I have heard of such before. They are called Winter’s Kin.”
The mother sat up in bed, careful not to disturb the child at her side. ‘‘Then he shall be a Winter King, more than any of his kin or kind,” she said. “But worry not, old woman, you shall be paid for the live child, as well as the dead.” She nodded to her husband, who paid the midwife twice over from his meager pocket, six copper coins.
The midwife made the sign of horns over the money, but still she kept it and, wrapping her cloak tightly around her stout body and a scarf around her head, she walked out into the storm. Not twenty steps from the caravan, the wind tore the cloak from her and pulled tight the scarf about her neck. An icy branch broke from a tree and smashed in the side of her head. In the morning when she was found, she was frozen solid. The money she had dutched in her hand was gone.
The player was hanged for the murder and his wife left to mourn, even as she nursed the child. Then she married quickly, for the shelter and the food. Her new man never liked the winter babe.
“He is a cold one,” the husband said. “He hears voices in the wind,” though it was he who was cold and who, when filled with drink, heard the dark counsel of unnamed gods who told him to beat his wife and abuse her son. The woman never complained, for she feared for her child. Yet strangely the child did not seem to care. He paid more attention to the sounds of the wind than the shouts of his stepfather, lending his own voice to the cries he alone could hear, though always a minor third above.
As the midwife had prophesied, in winter he was an active child, his eyes bright and quick to laugh. But once spring came, the buds in his cheeks faded, even as the ones on the boughs grew big. In the summer and well into the fall, he was animated only when his mother told him tales of Winter’s Kin, and though she made up the tales as only a player can, he knew the stories all to be true.
When the winter child was ten, his mother died of her brutal estate and the boy left into the howl of a storm, without either cloak or hat between him and the cold. Drunk, his ten-year father did not see him go. The boy did not go to escape the man’s beatings; he went to his kin, who called him from the wind. Barefooted and bareheaded, he crossed the snows trying to catch up with the riders in the storm. He saw them dearly. They were dad in great white capes, the hoods lined with ermine; and when they turned to look at him, their eyes were wind blue and the bones of their faces were thin and fine.
Long, long he trailed behind them, his tears turned to ice. He wept not for his dead mother, for it was she who had tied him to the world. He wept for himself and his feet, which were too small to follow after the fast-riding Winter’s Kin.
A woodcutter found him that night and dragged him home, plunging him into a bath of lukewarm water and speaking in a strange tongue that even he, in all his wanderings, had never heard.
The boy turned pink in the water, as if life had been returned to him by both the bathing and the prayer, but he did not thank the old man when he woke. Instead he turned his face to the window and wept, this time like any child, the tears falling like soft rain down his cheeks.
“Why do you weep?” the old man asked.
“For my mother and for the wind,” the boy said. "And for what I cannot have.”
The winter child stayed five years with the old woodcutter, going out each day with him to haul the kindling home. They always went into the woods to the south, a scraggly, ungraceful copse of second-growth trees, but never to the woods to the north.
“That is the great Ban Forest,” the old man said. “All that lies therein belongs to the king.”
“The king,” the boy said, remembering his mother’s tales. “And so I am.”
“And so are we all in God’s heaven,” the old man said. “But here on earth I am a woodcutter and you are a foundling boy. The wood to the south be ours.”
Though the boy paid attention to what the old man said in the spring and summer and fall, once winter arrived he heard only the voices in the wind. Often the old man would find him standing nearly naked by the door and have to lead him back to the fire, where the boy would sink down in a stupor and say nothing at all.
The old man tried to make light of such times, and would tell the boy tales while he wanned at the hearth. He told him of Mother Holle and her feather bed, of Godfather Death, and of the Singing Bone. He told him of the Flail of Heaven and the priest whose rod sprouted flowers because the Water Nix had a soul. But the boy had ears only for the voices in the wind, and what stories he heard there, he did not tell.
The old man died at the tag end of their fifth winter, and the boy left without even folding the hands of the corpse. He walked into the southern copse, for that was the way his feet knew. But the Winter Kin were not about.
The winds were gentle here, and spring had already softened the bitter brown branches to a muted rose. A yellow-green haze haloed the air and underfoot the muddy soil smelled moist and green and new.
The boy slumped to the ground and wept, not for the death of the woodcutter, nor for his mother’s death, but for the loss once more of his kin. He knew it would be a long time till winter came again.
And then, from far away, he heard a final wild burst of music. A stray strand of cold wind snapped under his nose, as strong as a smelling bottle. His eyes opened wide and, without thinking, he stood.
Following the trail of song, as clear to him as cobbles on a city street, he moved toward the great Ban Forest, where the heavy trees still shadowed over winter storms. Crossing the fresh new furze between the woods, he entered the old dark forest and wound around the tall, black trees, in and out of shadows, going as true north as a needle in a water-filled bowl. The path grew cold and the once-muddy ground gave way to frost.
At first all he saw was a mist, as white as if the hooves of horses had struck up dust from sheer ice. But when he blinked once and then twice, he saw coming toward him a great company of fair folk, some on steeds the color of clouds and some on steeds the color of snow. And he realized all at once that it was no mist he had seen, but the breath of those great white stallions.
“My people,” he cried at last. “My kin. My kind.” And he tore off first his boots, then his trousers, and at last his shirt, until he was free of the world and its possessions and could run toward the Winter Kin naked and unafraid.
On the first horse was a woman of unearthly beauty. Her hair was plaited in a hundred white braids and on her head was a crown of diamonds and moonstones. Her eyes were wind blue and there was frost in her breath. Slowly she dismounted and commanded the stallion to be still. Then she took an ermine cape from across the saddle, holding it open to receive the boy.
“My king,” she sang, “my own true love,” and swaddled him in the cloud white cloak.
He answered her, his voice a minor third lower than hers. “My queen, my own true love. I am come home.”
When the king’s foresters caught up to him, the feathered arrow was fast in his breast, but there was, surprisingly, no blood. He was lying, arms outstretched, like an angel in the snow.
“He was just a wild boy, just that lackwit, the one who brought home kindling with the old man,” said one.
“Nevertheless, he was in the king’s forest,” said the other. “He knew better than that.”
"Naked as a newborn,” said the first. “But look!”
In the boy’s left hand were three copper coins, three more in his right.
“Twice the number needed for the birthing of a babe,” said the first forester.
“Just enough,” said his companion, “to buy a wooden casket and a man to dig the grave.”
And they carried the cold body out of the wood, heeding neither the music nor the voices singing wild and strange hosannas in the wind.
Lost Girls
IT ISN’T FAIR!” Darla
complained to her mom for the third time during their bedtime reading. She meant it wasn’t fair that Wendy only did the housework in Neverland and that Peter Pan and the boys got to fight Captain Hook.
“Well, I can’t change it,” Mom said in her even, lawyer voice. “That’s just the way it is in the book. Your argument is with Mr. Barrie, the author, and he’s long dead. Should I go on?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know,” Darla said, coming down on both sides of the question, as she often did.
Mom shrugged and closed the book, and that was the end of the night’s reading.
Darla watched impassively as her mom got up and left the room, snapping off the bedside lamp as she went. When she closed the door there was just a rim of light from the hall showing around three sides of the door, making it look like something out of a science fiction movie. Darla pulled the covers up over her nose. Her breath made the space feel like a little oven.
"Not fair at all,” Darla said to the dark, and she didn’t just mean the book. She wasn’t the least bit sleepy.
But the house made its comfortable night-settling noises around her: the breathy whispers of the hot air through the vents, the ticking of the grandfather dock in the hall, the sound of the maple branch scritch-scratching against the clapboard siding. They were a familiar lullaby, comforting and soothing. Darla didn’t mean to go to sleep, but she did.
Either that or she stepped out of her bed and walked through the dosed door into Neverland.
Take your pick.
It didn’t fed at all like a dream to Darla. The details were too exact. And she could smell things. She’d never smelled anything in a dream before. So Darla had no reason to believe that what happened to her next was anything but real.
One minute she had gotten up out of bed, heading for the bathroom, and the very next she was sliding down the trunk of a very large, smooth tree. The trunk was unlike any of the maples in her yard, being a kind of yellowish color. It felt almost slippery under her hands and smelled like bananas gone slightly bad. Her nightgown made a sound like whooosh as she slid along.