Greenmantle

  A brief smile touched Frankie’s lips. “I won’t, Mother.”

  “You’d better go,” Ali said, “or you’ll be late.”

  Frankie nodded and hurried to the car.

  * * *

  An hour of studying biology was about all that Ali could take. It was one of her favorite subjects, but some days simply weren’t meant for studying. She was tired of trying to decipher the handwriting in her notebook, the textbook was written in a style that was about as interesting as having the flu, the house was too quiet, and she just felt too cooped up.

  It was time to go outside and see photosynthesis at work, firsthand. Time to look at some insects instead of photographs of microscopic spores. Time to collect leaf samples, bark samples—in short, it was time for some fieldwork.

  The first thing she did was turn the earth in the vegetable plot that she and her mother had marked out earlier in the day. Tony had given her all kinds of seeds and she was excited about having her very first garden. She saved the sod she’d dug up to put in around the front of the house where it was needed, but by the time she was finished digging in the garden, she was too hot and sweaty to do anything with them. Tomorrow would be soon enough, she hoped. What she wanted now was a shower.

  Once inside, she hurried upstairs to get undressed. She pulled off her T-shirt, standing in front of the window, and looked out, thinking how nice it was to be able to change in front of an open window and not have to worry about anyone staring in at you.

  She tossed her T-shirt into a corner of her room and started to take off her shorts when she paused, thinking she saw something move in the trees beyond their backyard. She backed away quickly and put her T-shirt on again. Maybe it’s the stag, she thought and brought her binoculars to the window. But when she had them focused and had brought the object of her interest up close, she saw that it wasn’t the stag. It looked like a person. Ali frowned as she studied what she could see of the figure in the glasses, remembering the other morning when she’d thought she’d seen someone spying on the house.

  It didn’t look like an adult, she decided, but it was hard to tell if it was even a boy or girl with that floppy hat on. The long hair didn’t tell her anything. Then she saw what the figure was fooling around with. It was her Walkman.

  The nerve of that kid! First stealing her Walkman, and then sitting out there, practically in her backyard, mucking around with it. Tossing the binoculars onto her bed, Ali raced downstairs and out the front door.

  She circled around to the back by way of the road that went up to Tony’s, keeping to the ditch and using what cover she could. Here’s where all those late night Westerns came in handy, she thought. She was Ali Wayne, sneaking up on the outlaws. Clint Treasure, closing in on her bounty.

  Moving as quietly as she could, she crept nearer. When she finally spotted her target, she realized that she could probably have driven a trail bike in and barely been noticed. The girl—thank God she wasn’t some muscle-bound farm boy—had the earphones on and was listening to the tape that Ali had last played in the machine. From the expression on the girl’s face, Ali couldn’t tell if she liked Flashdance or not. She looked like she’d never heard that kind of music before in her life.

  Living out here, she probably never had, Ali thought cattily as she moved in closer still, taking care to keep out of the girl’s line of vision.

  Ali was just a few feet behind the girl when either the tape ended or some sixth sense made the girl turn around. Before she could take off with the Walkman, Ali ran forward and jumped at her. She bore the girl to the ground, straddling her. The body under her was hard with muscles and moved quick as a cat. A hand leaped up to rake Ali’s face with its long nails, then paused, inches from her eyes. The two girls stared at each other—Ali trying to hide her fear, the other girl wary as a wild animal.

  Slowly Ali got up from her and backed a step away. “Th-that’s mine,” she said, pointing to the Walkman. “You stole it from me.” She hoped that her trembling wasn’t too noticeable.

  “I didn’t steal it,” the girl said. She straightened her hat as she spoke. The earphones, which she’d been wearing upside down so they’d hung like a loose chin guard, had fallen to her lap. “I found it.”

  “You found it in my room!” Ali cried, her anger getting the better of her fear again.

  The girl shrugged. “I just borrowed it. I was going to bring it back.”

  “Who are you anyway?” Ali demanded. “You’ve been spying on us, and now you’ve stolen something. I should just call the cops.”

  The girl handed the Walkman back to Ali. “My name’s Meggan,” she said. “Mally Meggan. And I wasn’t spying on you—I was just watching your house.”

  “That’s the same as spying.”

  Mally shrugged. “I’ve watched that house since the dark man first built it.”

  “The dark man? Who’s that? My grandfather?”

  “I don’t know his name. He was just a dark man.”

  “He was a black man?”

  Mally shook her head. “He was black in here,” she said, touching her heart with a small hand. “He’s the one who unravelled the music, and nothing’s been the same since. People have moved away and nobody new comes. It was all his doing.”

  “Is that you playing the music?” Ali asked. “The piping I hear at night sometimes?” She sat down, fiddling with the Walkman in her hand.

  “No. That’s Tommy. I’m not any part of that.” She grinned suddenly. “But I am apart from it all.”

  Ali shook her head, not getting the joke. None of this was making sense. “Do you live around here?” she tried again.

  “Back there,” Mally said with a wave of her hand. The motion was wide, taking in a great deal of land.

  “With Tommy?”

  “No. He lives with the others. I live by myself.”

  “But where do you live?” Ali asked.

  “In the forest.”

  “By yourself?”

  Mally nodded.

  “I guess you’ve got a cabin or something.”

  “No. In the forest. I’m a secret, you see.”

  Ali shook her head and sighed. This was getting much too weird for her. “If you’re a secret,” she said, “how come you’ve shown yourself to me?”

  “But I didn’t—you caught me.”

  “But you’re telling me all these things….”

  “Listen,” Mally said. “You hear the music, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Well, I’ve heard it once or twice.”

  “And the stag came to you, didn’t he?”

  Ali nodded.

  “The music wakes something inside those who hear it. In you, it woke a light. In some, it wakes something not so fine.”

  “Like your dark man?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But…”

  Mally stood up abruptly, a quicksilver movement that startled Ali. “The stag is one of the world’s mysteries,” Mally said. “I’m just a secret. The way your name is just a part of mine. So when we met each other, we already knew each other, in part. Isn’t that true?”

  Ali shook her head. “I don’t quite follow that,” she began, but Mally cut her off.

  “Not now, perhaps,” she said. “But you will. Or you might. It all depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On who you learn to be.”

  Before Ali could ask her what she meant, Mally doffed her hat and gave a little bow. Ali stared at the two small horns that curled up from the tangle of her hair.

  “Y-you…have…”

  “Many things,” Mally said, “but no longer a machine that mimicks Tommy’s pipes. Good-bye, Ali.”

  She began to back away, a smile touching her fox-thin features.

  “No!” Ali cried. “Wait a sec…”

  Her voice trailed off as the wild girl turned and bolted into the forest. Ali watched her go, stunned at her speed, at her quick feline grace. She seemed to flow between the trees, like the stag, or more
like a cat, and in moments was gone.

  Ali looked down at the Walkman in her hands, then away to where Mally had disappeared. I’m going crazy, she thought. This didn’t happen. I didn’t meet some girl with horns, her clothes all tattery and covered with burrs, her hair a thicket, her eyes… She got shakily to her feet, half determined to follow after the wild girl, then slowly turned and made her way home.

  When she was inside, she laid her Walkman down on the kitchen table and sat down in a hardback chair, feeling completely drained. This was the kind of thing that didn’t happen in real life, she tried to tell herself. Only in stories. Kids ran across magical beings in Alan Garner books, or something written by Caitlin Midhir, not in the here and now.

  But…She sighed, trying to put it in a more rational perspective. Except for the horns, it had just been a strange encounter, hadn’t it? An odd meeting, that was all. Except for the horns. Maybe they were fake. Maybe Mally had just pretended they were real to mess around with her head. Except the wild girl had moved so fast. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was—

  The phone jangled suddenly and Ali just about leapt off her seat. With a trembling hand, she snagged the receiver and spoke into it.

  “H-hello?”

  “Hey, Ali. I thought you were coming up for dinner.”

  It was Tony. She glanced at the clock on the stove. Ten past six. Oh God, it was late!

  “Jeez, Tony. I, uh, forgot about the time.”

  “So are you coming, or what?”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Hey, are you okay, kid? You sound a little funny.”

  “No. I’m fine. I’m just going to take a shower and then I’ll be up.”

  “Okay. But don’t take too long. It’s going to be dark in an hour and a half and I’ll bet your momma doesn’t want you walking the road in the dark.”

  Ali thought about horned girls and stags, about the music that came at dusk if it were going to come at all, and shivered. Never mind her mother, she didn’t want to be out there in the dark.

  “I’ll hurry,” she said.

  12

  On Sunday afternoon, Earl and Howie snatched a Toyota in Nepean and left Ottawa by way of the Queensway. The sun was westering and low, shining in their eyes as they followed Highway 7 through Carleton Place to the turnoff at Highway 10 that would take them into Lanark. By the time they reached Lanark, it was going on seven-fifteen and the sun was an orange ball above the horizon.

  “It’s starting to come back to me,” Earl said as they took Highway 1 out of the village.

  Howie glanced up from the rough map that they’d gotten from Bob Goldman. “What is?”

  “This place we’re going to.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Fuck, no.” Earl shot him a quick glance and grinned. “But Frankie talked about it a few times, about how weird her old man was and this place he lived in. You had to get her pretty high first. I just never connected it until Bobby-boy spilled his guts.”

  “So he wasn’t shitting us?”

  Earl grinned. “The only shitting he was doing was the load he dropped in his pants. No, this feels right, Howie, m’man.”

  “The turn’s coming up,” Howie said as they passed a sign for Brightside.

  Earl grunted an acknowledgment as the turn approached.

  “How do you think it’s gonna go?” Howie asked.

  “Sweet and easy. Frankie’s always been good at running away from problems, but when it comes to facing up to something, she just folds.”

  “What about the kid?”

  “The kid’s gonna do what she’s told or she’s shit outta luck. Christ, they call this a road?”

  “Sunday drive,” Howie said.

  “Guess they got some real influential taxpayers living out this way.”

  Howie laughed. They passed a turnoff to the right. “Better slow down,” he said. “We’ve got another mile or so and then we’re there.”

  Earl slowed the car down a few moments later when a house came into view.

  “That’s gotta be it,” Howie said.

  Earl nodded, taking in the construction debris that littered the front yard. He cruised on by until a curve in the road took them out of sight of the house and then pulled over to the side.

  “What time you got?” he asked.

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  Earl turned the car in the narrow road, happy now that they’d picked something as small as the Toyota. He’d wanted a two-door so that the kid’d be easier to keep an eye on. They drove back toward the house and took the first left after it, pulling over to the side of the road again. Stands of cedar and pine screened them from the house.

  “Well, Howie, m’man,” he said as he killed the engine. “Looks like it’s time to go.”

  Howie nodded. They got out of the car together and walked back down the road.

  Earl slapped at his neck. “Fucking mosquitos.”

  Howie waved them from his own face. He watched Earl play with the butt of his gun sticking out of the top of his belt. He hoped things were going to go a little cleaner than they had last night.

  * * *

  Ali saw the Toyota go slowly by the house as she was locking the front door and didn’t think twice about it. By the time it returned, she was in the kitchen, looking for a bag to carry her Tom Brown Jr. field guides in as she went up to Tony’s place. She found a plastic grocery bag from the Perth IGA, dumped the books into it and hurried out the back door.

  She was already running late, but the moment she stepped outside, she paused, testing the air for sound, studying the edge of the woods. There could be anything out there, from Mally with her horns to who knew what? The sun was almost down behind the trees. Shadows were growing long.

  Get a move on, she told herself. Bad enough she was late. She didn’t want to arrive at Tony’s all out of breath from obviously having run the whole way. He’d think she was more of a kid than he probably already did—scared of the dark, or of meeting boogiemen in the woods. Boogiewomen? Do you know how to boogie, Mally?

  She shook her head, angry at herself, and started across the lawn, pausing again when she heard car doors slam on the road leading up to Tony’s place. She moved quickly across the backyard, then through the weeds in the field between their property and the road, raising a cloud of mosquitos that whined around her face. There, a little ways down the road, was the car. A Toyota. And she was just in time to see a couple of men down at the corner where Tony’s road met the dirt one that ran by her own house.

  This is weird, she thought. Are they going to our place? But that couldn’t be—or at least it didn’t make any sense. Why would they park there?

  A pinprick of worry started up her spine as she headed back toward the house, staying hidden in the trees that bordered Tony’s road. The two men were coming up their driveway, but what made her stop again, what made new shivers of fear go catpawing up her spine, was not the men, but the eerie sound of distant piping that floated from the forest northwest of where she was hiding.

  That’s Tommy, she thought, remembering what the wild girl had told her. Tommy playing reed pipes. Whoever Tommy was…

  * * *

  “Here’s one for you,” Earl said as the house came into view.

  “What’s that?”

  “The one thing we didn’t think of: What if nobody’s home?”

  Howie glanced at him, then at the house. No car, he noted first off. Living out in the sticks like this, everybody’d have a car.

  “So what do we do?” he asked.

  “Check it out. Wait around a bit.”

  But not too long, Howie hoped, because that was just asking for trouble. Only try telling Earl that. Howie sighed. He wished they were back in T.O. right now, or even in New York, being wined and dined by Broadway Joe. The showgirl that Joe had provided Howie with had been everything that Tandy Hots with her act in the strip club had promised to be. Young. Built. T
here just to please him. The way she’d wrapped her legs around his—

  A sudden uneasiness touched him, killing the memory. He cocked his head, listening.

  “You hear that, Earl?” he asked softly.

  Earl nodded and turned toward him, his features no longer clearly defined as the night crept in around them. “Yeah,” he said. “Some kinda…I don’t know…”

  “Music.”

  “Yeah. But it’s not just that. It’s like we’ve been made, you know?”

  Howie looked nervously around. “We’re being watched?”

  Earl nodded. He faced the cedars where Ali was crouched, hugging her knees to keep from trembling.

  “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” Earl said, “but I know you’re in there. If you’ve got any smarts, you’re gonna step out here where we can get a nice long look at you, because you don’t want to know what’ll happen to you if I gotta go in there to get you.”

  Ali stumbled out onto the lawn and stared at the strangers.

  “Well, well, well,” Earl said. “Look what we got here. How’s your old lady, kid? Better yet, where’s your old lady?”

  “Wh-who are you?”

  Earl gave Howie a pained look that was mostly lost in the twilight and shook his head. “Fucking kid doesn’t even recognize her own old man,” he said. “Doesn’t that take the cake?”

  Howie brushed bugs away from his neck. “Maybe she’s waiting to see what kind of present you brought her.”

  Earl chuckled.

  “N-no.” she mumbled.

  “Oh, yeah,” Earl said. “No matter what that whore of a mother’s told you about me, you’re still stuck with me as your old man. Now you see, I figure it’s about time I took custody of—”

  “No!” Ali cried, swinging her bag at him. Her shrill voice startled the men. The books struck Earl’s chest, knocking him off balance. Before he could recover or Howie could react, Ali had turned and bolted back the way she’d come.

  She ran to the rhythm of the distant music that was calling to her, speeding across the lawn, sleek and fast like a stag, through the field, then up the road to Tony’s place.