Moonlight and Vines

  It’s weird, I think, sliding into the driver’s seat. He seemed so normal when I first picked him up in Huxley’s, but then he turned out to be loopier than anyone I’ve ever met on this side of the Zebrowski Institute’s doors. It just goes to show you. No wonder Nina wanted to leave him.

  I stop at that thought, the car still in neutral. Except that wasn’t why she said she wanted to leave him. I look up at the darkened apartment again, this time through my windshield. Though now that I think about it, if I were in her position, I probably wouldn’t want to tell the truth about why I was leaving my husband either.

  I shake my head. What a mess. Putting the car into gear, I drive myself home. I have a column due for the Monday paper and I don’t know what it’s going to be about yet. Still, I know this much—it won’t be about swords.

  6

  Nina really was out of town, so Lucy couldn’t call her. “I don’t want to lie to him,” she’d told Lucy. “That’d make me just as bad as he is.” What about Nina’s lying to her? Lucy wondered, but she knew she was willing to give Nina the benefit of the doubt, seeing how nuts her husband was. Besides, even if Nina wasn’t out of town, the only number Lucy had for her was the same as Martin’s—she’d looked his up as she was making herself a coffee on Sunday morning.

  She’d left the sword where she’d dropped it last night—wrapped in its blanket on the floor in her hallway, right beside the front door—and hadn’t looked at it since. Didn’t want to look at it. It wasn’t that she believed any of Martin’s very weird story about the sword and Nina, so much as that something about the weapon gave her the creeps. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was more that thinking about it made her feel odd—as though the air had grown thicker, or the hardwood floor had gone slightly spongy underfoot. Better not to think of it.

  Saturday, she did some grocery shopping, but she stayed in with a video on Saturday night. Sunday afternoon, she went in to the office and worked on Monday’s column—deciding to do a piece on cheap sources for fashion accessories. She finished it quickly and then spent a couple of hours trying to straighten out the mess on her desk without making any real noticeable progress. It was the story of her life. Sunday night, Nina called.

  As soon as she recognized Nina’s voice, Lucy looked down the hall to where the sword still lay and thought of what Martin had told her.

  “I’ve got the sword,” she said without any preamble. “It’s here at my place. Do you want to come by to pick it up?”

  “And take it where?” Nina asked. “Back to Martin’s and my apartment?”

  “Oh. I never thought of that. I guess you need to find a place to live first.”

  She hesitated a moment, but before she could offer her own couch as a temporary measure, Nina was talking again.

  “I can’t believe he just gave it to you,” she said. “Did he give you a hard time? Was . . . seducing him . . . was it horrible?”

  “It didn’t go that far.”

  “But still,” Nina said. “It couldn’t have been pleasant.”

  “More like strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  Was there a new note in Nina’s voice? Lucy wondered. A hint of—what? Tension?

  “Well, he hit on me just like you said he would,” she said. “He picked me up at Huxley’s after work, took me out for dinner and then back to—” she almost said “his” “—your place.”

  “I guess I’m not surprised.”

  “Anyway, as soon as we got to the apartment, almost the first thing he asked me was when I’d met you. Nina, he told me you guys were never married. He told me all kinds of weird things.”

  There was a moment’s silence on the line, then Nina asked, “Did you believe him?”

  “The stuff he was telling me was so crazy that I don’t know what to believe,” Lucy said. “But I want to believe you.”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” Nina said. “But not now. I’ve just got a few things to do and then I’ll come see you.”

  Lucy could tell that Nina was about to hang up.

  “What sort of things?” she asked, just to keep Nina on the line.

  Nina laughed. “Oh you know. I just have to straighten my affairs, say goodbye to Martin, that kind of thing.”

  Lucy found herself remembering Martin’s fear. Crazy as he was, the fear had been real. Why he should be scared of Nina, Lucy couldn’t begin to imagine, but he had been afraid.

  “Listen,” she said, “you’re not going to—”

  “I have to run,” Nina broke in. “I’ll call you soon.”

  “—do anything crazy,” Lucy finished.

  But she was talking to a dead line.

  Lucy stared at the phone for a long moment before she finally cradled the receiver. A nervous prickle crept up her spine and the air seemed to thicken. She turned to look at the sword again. It was still where she’d left it, wrapped in Martin’s blanket, lying on the floor.

  There’s no such thing as an enchanted sword, she told herself. She knew that. But ever since leaving Martin’s place last night there’d been a niggling little doubt in the back of her mind, a kind of “What if?” that she hadn’t been able to completely ignore or refute with logic. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to happen and whatever it was was connected to the sword and Martin. And to Nina.

  She stood up quickly and fetched her car keys from the coffee table. Maybe it was stupid, worrying the way she was, but she had to know. Had to be sure that the boundaries of what could be and what could not still existed as they always had. She left so quickly, she was still buttoning up her jacket when she reached the street.

  It took her fifteen minutes to get to the apartment where Nina and Martin lived. She parked at the curb across from the building and studied their place on the third floor. The windows were all dark. There was no one on the street except for a man at the far end of the block who was poking through a garbage can with a stick.

  Lucy sat there for five minutes before she reluctantly pulled away. She cruised slowly through the neighborhood, looking for Nina’s familiar trim figure. Eventually the only thing left to do was drive back to her own apartment and wait for Nina to call. She sat up in bed with the telephone on the quilt beside her leg, trying to read because she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. After a while she phoned Traci, nervous the whole time that Nina was trying to get through while she was tying up the line. She told Traci everything, but it made no more sense to Traci than it did to her.

  “Weird,” Traci said at last.

  “Am I blowing this way out of proportion?” Lucy wanted to know.

  She could almost feel Traci’s smile across the telephone line.

  “Well, it is a bit much,” Traci said. “All this business with the sword and Nina. But I’ve always been one to trust my intuition. If you feel there’s something weird going on, then I’m willing to bet that there is—something on a more logical level than curses and hauntings, mind you.”

  “So what do I do?”

  Traci sighed. “Just what you’re doing: wait. What else can you do?”

  “I know. It’s just . . .”

  “You want some company?” Traci asked.

  What Lucy wanted was Nina. She wanted to know that Martin had nothing to fear from her, that Nina wasn’t about to do something that was going to get her into serious trouble. But Traci couldn’t help her with any of that.

  “No,” she told her friend. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Call me tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  Finally she drifted off with the lights on, sitting up against the headboard, the book still open on her lap. She dreamed that the sword lay on the other side of the bed, talking to her in a low murmuring voice that could have belonged to anybody. When she woke, she couldn’t remember what it had told her.

  7

  By nine o’clock, Monday morning, I’m a mess. Punchy from the weird dreams and getting so little sleep. Sick with worry. Nina still hasn
’t called and I’m thinking the worst. It kind of surprises me that the worst I imagine isn’t that she’s done something to Martin, but that she doesn’t want to see me anymore.

  I’m already late for work. I consider phoning in sick, but I know I can’t stay at home—I’m already bouncing off the walls—so I go in to the office. I know I can check my machine for messages from there and at least I’ll be able to find something to keep me busy.

  I have this habit of going over the police reports file when I first get in. It’s kind of a gruesome practice, reading the list of break-ins, robberies, rapes, and the like that occurred the night before, but I can’t seem to shake it. It’s not even my beat; I usually get assigned the soft stories. I think maybe the reason I do it is that it’s a way of validating that, okay, so the city’s going down the tubes, but I’m still safe. I’m safe. The people I know and love are safe. This kind of horrible thing goes on, but it doesn’t really touch me. It’s fueled by the same impulse that makes us all slow down at accidents and follow the news. Sometimes I think we don’t so much want to be informed as have our own security validated.

  This morning there’s a report of an apparent suicide on a street that sounds familiar. They don’t give the victim’s name, but the street’s all I need. Shit. It’s Martin. It says, Caucasian male did a jump from his third-story apartment window, but I know it’s Martin. The coroner’s still waiting for the autopsy report; the cops are pretty much ruling out foul play. But I know better, don’t I? Martin himself told me what’d happen if he got rid of the sword and he looked so terrified when I left his place Friday night.

  But I still can’t believe it of Nina. I can’t believe all this crap he told me about her and the sword.

  I’ve only been away from home for thirty-five minutes, but I immediately close the file and phone my apartment to check for messages. Nothing. Same as ten minutes ago—I called when I first got here.

  There’s nothing all day.

  I try to stick it out, but in the end I have to leave work early. I start for home, but wind up driving by the apartment—looking for Nina, I tell myself, but of course she wouldn’t be there, hanging around on the pavement where Martin hit. I know why I’m really doing this. Morbid curiosity. I look up at the windows, third floor. One of them’s been boarded up.

  I go home. Shower. Change. Then I hit the bars on Gracie Street, looking for Nina. The North Star. Neon Sister. Girljock. Skirts. No sign of her. I start to check out the hardcore places, the jack-and-jill-off scenes and clubs where the rougher trade hangs out. Still nothing. The last place I go into this blonde leatherette in a black push-up bra and hot pants smiles at me. I start to smile back, but then she makes a V with her fingers and flicks her tongue through them. I escape back up the stairs that let me into the place. I’m not sure what I am anymore—gay, straight, what—but one thing I know is I’m still not into casual sex.

  Once outside, I lean against the front of the building, feeling just as lost as I did the night Traci took me under her wing. I don’t know what to do anymore, where to turn. I start to look for a pay phone—I figure I can at least check my answering machine again—when someone grabs me by the arm. I yelp and pull free, but when I turn around, it’s Nina I find standing beside me—not the blonde from the club I just left.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to make you jump like that.”

  She’s smiling, but I can see she really means it. She leans forward and gives me a kiss on the lips. I don’t know what to do, what to think. I’m so glad to see her, but so scared she had something to do with Martin’s death. Not magic mumbo-jumbo, nothing like that. Just plain she couldn’t take the shit from him anymore and it all got out of hand.

  “Martin’s dead,” I say.

  “I know. I was there.”

  My breath catches in my throat. “You . . . you didn’t . . . ?”

  I can’t get it out, but she knows what I’m asking. She shakes her head. Taking my arm, she leads me off down the street.

  “I think we have to talk,” she tells me.

  She leads me to my car, but I don’t feel like I’m in any condition to drive. I start to go to the passenger’s side.

  “I can’t drive,” Nina tells me.

  Right. So we sit there in my car, parked just off Gracie Street, looking out the windshield, not saying anything, not touching each other, just sitting there.

  “What did he tell you about me?” Nina asks finally.

  I look at her. Her face isn’t much more than a silhouette in the illumination thrown by the streetlights outside. After a few moments, I clear my throat and start to talk, finishing with, “Is it true?”

  “Mostly.”

  I don’t know what to say. I want to think she’s crazy but there’s nothing about her that I associate with craziness.

  “Where did you go after you called me?” I ask instead.

  Nina hesitates, then says, “To the lake. To talk to my sister.”

  “Your sister?”

  I hadn’t stopped to think of it before, but of course she’d have family. We all do. But then Nina pulls that piece of normal all out of shape as well.

  “She’s one of the Ladies of the Lake,” she says. “Bound to her sword, just like me. Just like all of us.”

  It’s my turn to hesitate. Do I really want to feed this fantasy? But then I ask, “How many are you?”

  “Seven of us—for seven swords. My oldest sister is bound to the one you’d know best: Excalibur.”

  I really have to struggle with what I’m hearing. I’d laugh, except Nina’s so damn serious.

  “But,” I say. “When you’re talking about a Lady of the Lake . . . you mean like in Tennyson? King Arthur and all that stuff?”

  Nina nods. “The stories are pretty close, but they miss a lot.”

  I take a deep breath. “Okay. But that’s in England. What would your sister be doing here? What are you doing here?”

  “All lakes are aspects of the First Lake,” Nina says. “Just as all forests remember the First Forest.”

  I can only look blankly at her.

  Nina sighs. “As all men and women remember First Man and First Woman. And the fall from grace.”

  “You mean in Eden?”

  Nina shakes her head. “Grace is what gives this world its worth, but there are always those who would steal it away, for the simple act of doing so. Grace shames a graceless people, so they strike out at it. Remember Martin told you about the scabbards that once protected our swords?”

  “I guess. . . .”

  “They had healing properties and when men realized that, they took the scabbards and broke them up, eliminating a little more of their grace and healing properties with each piece they took. That’s why I’m in my present predicament. Of the seven of us, only two still have their swords, kept safe in their scabbards. Three more still retain ownership of their swords. Ailine—my sister—and I don’t have even that. With our swords unsheathed, we’ve lost most of our freedom. We’re bound into the metal for longer and longer periods of time. A time will come, I suppose, when we’ll be trapped in the metal forever.”

  She studies me for a long moment, then sighs again. “You don’t believe any of this, do you?”

  I’m honest with her. “It’s hard.”

  “Of course. It’s easy to forget marvels when your whole life you’re taught to ignore them.”

  “It’s just—”

  “Lucy,” Nina says. “I’ll make the same bargain with you that I made with Martin. I’ll stay with you for a year, but then you must hold up your side.”

  I shake my head. I don’t even have to think about it.

  “But you wanted to sleep with me,” Nina says. “You wanted my love.”

  “But not like this. Not bargaining for it like it’s some kind of commodity. That’s not love.”

  Nina looks away. “I see,” she says, her gaze locked on something I can’t see.

  “Tell me what you’d want me to do,?
?? I say.

  Nina’s attention returns to me. “There’s no point. You don’t believe.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “You must take the sword inside yourself. You must do it willingly. And you must believe that by doing so, you are freeing me.”

  “I just stick it into myself?”

  “Something like that,” Nina says. “It would be clearer if you believed.”

  “And what would happen to me?” I ask. “Would I die?”

  “We all die, sooner or later.”

  “I know that,” I say, impatiently. “But would I die from doing this?”

  Nina shakes her head. “No. But you’d be changed.”

  “Changed how?”

  “I don’t know. It’s—” She hesitates, then plunges quickly on. “I’ve never heard of it being done before.”

  “Oh.”

  We look some more out the windshield. The street we’re on is pretty empty, cars parked, but not much traffic, vehicular or pedestrian. Over on Gracie we can see the nightlife’s still going strong. I want to ask her, Why didn’t you tell me the truth before? but I already know. I don’t believe her now so what difference would having heard it a few days earlier have made?

  “Did you love Martin?” I ask instead. “I mean, at first.”

  “I’m not sure what love is.”

  I guess nobody really does, I think. Is what I’m feeling for Nina love? This feeling that’s still swelling inside me, under the confusion and jumpiness—is it love? People die for love. It happens. But surely they know when they make the sacrifice?

  “I really didn’t kill him,” she tells me. “I went to the apartment—I’m not sure why or what I meant to do—and let myself in. When he saw me, he went crazy. He looked terrified. When I took a step closer, he threw himself out the window—straight through the glass and all. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t give me a chance to speak either.”

  “He told me he was scared.”

  Nina nods. “But I don’t know why. He had no reason to be scared of me. If I hadn’t harmed him in the two years since he failed to keep his side of our bargain, why should he think that I’d hurt him now?”