Day once more rolled into night, and Gwenny let out a deep sigh of relief that her premonition appeared groundless. But the sigh caught in her throat when Porthos suddenly tugged at her arm, pointed, and said, “Who is that?”
Gwenny didn’t initially see at what he was pointing, but then she did. From her vantage point in the tree house, she spotted an elderly lady, crooked and bent, standing some distance away.
“Are you going to invite her up?” Irregular said, never praying more that the answer was going to be no.
Gwenny obliged him. “Stay here,” she said, and vaulted off the edge of the house.
With The Boy having been gone for so long, and no ready supply of pixie dust to supplement them, flight was problematic. In some measure, it was The Boy’s own belief in their ability to fly that enabled them to do so, and with The Boy gone, flying—like every other Anyplace activity—became far more difficult. But Gwenny was still able to float a bit when needed, and she did so now, drifting like a feather to the ground. She was extremely worried and nervous, for she had no idea who this lady might be or if she presented any sort of danger. Gwenny told herself that she could handle anything, especially if it involved a threat to her children, whom she would defend like a tigress.
She landed gently on the ground, making sure to keep her hands upon her thighs so that her frock didn’t billow up and around her. Gwenny was all too aware of the eyes of the lads upon her from above, watching and listening to every move. She tilted her head slightly and said as properly as she could, “May I help you?”
The crooked lady with the hooked nose took a step forward, moving from the shadow of the tree to a sliver of moonlight that fell upon the ground before her. Gwenny was taken aback. The lady had a smile fixed upon her face that came nowhere near her eyes. Eyes that burned with a hatred that was cold and hot all at the same time and seemed to illuminate what features of her face Gwenny could make out. Her black cloak and gray garments hung loosely around her, making her body look like a formless mass. Her most prominent feature, her nose, was long and distended. It not only hooked in general, but the tip of it extended a bit longer and farther down, curving back and pointing ever so slightly at her mouth. A few wisps of hair, gray streaked with black, stuck out from beneath her hood.
“Are you the Gwenny?” said the old lady.
“I am, yes. And who are you?”
“My name is unimportant,” said the lady. “I am here merely to send you word from The Boy.”
“The Boy!” Gwenny said, and she heard the collective breaths of her boys being drawn above her. She took two steps forward and then, her caution gainsaying her, took one step back. “Is he all right? Where is he?”
“He will not be coming back.”
Gwenny didn’t take in the words at first. “I beg your pardon?”
“He has left you.” The lady cackled, then cleared her throat. “He has decided that he no longer desires to be father to your brood or play your husband. It is a game that no longer suits him.”
“But…he can’t!”
“You are young,” the crone said, “and not knowing of many things. But one thing even you should know is that there is nothing The Boy cannot do if he puts his mind to it.”
“He has responsibilities!” Gwenny said. “To me! To our children! He cannot forsake them and us. What are our children supposed to do without their father?”
“Well,” the old lady counseled her, “my suggestion would be that they grow up as quickly as possible.”
“But no child should have growing up thrust upon him, simply because one of his parents has wandered off.”
“I wouldn’t dispute that, actually,” said the old lady. “But no one asked me. I am merely conveying the message.”
The boys, upon hearing this, let out a distressed moan and cries of “We don’t want to have to grow up! It’s not fair!”
“I would agree,” the crone commiserated. “Your father has many fine qualities, but unselfishness is not among them. What’s fair is what’s fair for him, and the rest must simply live with what is.” She turned to Gwenny and said, “That, child, is the way of things.”
The old lady, however, was not dealing with the child Gwenny. This was Gwenny on the cusp of adulthood, and she was not easily cowed or condescended to. “You have not answered my question,” she said sharply. “Who are you? What are you to The Boy? What influence do you have over him?”
“I have told you. I am merely a messenger—”
“That is what you are but not who. You,” said Gwenny, pointing an accusing finger, “are a villain. Admit it, and give up your villainy immediately.”
Gwenny advanced upon her, and something suddenly cut through the air. Gwenny stumbled back, looking down at her arm in surprise at the thin ribbon of blood that was now upon it. Her sleeve had been neatly sliced open, and Gwenny clutched at it in shock. The wound was not wide nor deep, but it stung and certainly got her attention. She looked up at the crone in astonishment.
The crone had her left arm raised, and her sleeve had fallen away to reveal her left wrist. At first glance, Gwenny thought the crone was holding a sword. She was not. Instead the sword was actually affixed directly to a metal cuff upon her wrist. Despite her age, she nevertheless whipped the glistening blade back and forth warningly with a vigor that belied her advanced years.
“You dare!” screeched the crone, her voice becoming higher and higher. She was trembling with indignation, and her face was turning purple. “You dare speak so to me! The gall! The sheer presumption! In all my years, I have never known anyone to—to—to—!”
Then she stopped, just…stopped. She closed her eyes and drew in several deep breaths. Gwenny could not be sure, but she thought that just for a moment there was a hint of fear in the old lady’s face, as if the notion of completely losing her temper in the way that she almost had could have extremely unfortunate consequences. Perhaps, Gwenny reasoned, she had a weak heart or some such and needed to moderate her attitude. Eventually the crone calmed herself, restoring her breathing to its natural rhythm. When she opened her eyes and spoke again, she sounded almost maternal.
“There are no heroes or villains in these matters, child,” said the old lady, “just victims.” She brought the flat of the sword up and touched it lightly to her forehead in a mocking salute, and then stepped back into the forest, allowing the shadows to swallow her as if they’d just become reacquainted with an old friend.
Chapter 5
How the Pot Became Repaired
Any number of times in the past, Paul’s mother had asked “Where have you been?” when he came in the door. In the days when he had entered at his father’s side, it was a musical, inviting question, asking him to share with her whatever adventures he had undertaken that particular afternoon. On those occasions when he had been out playing on his own and come back a little later than he really should have, the question was fraught with cautious concern.
Nowadays, however, it was an inquiry delivered with the same sort of weary frustration that she might have used upon, say, errant keys that had caused her to be delayed on her rounds.
Paul stood in the doorway, his hand still resting on the knob. “To the marketplace.”
“The marketplace?” Her eyes narrowed and Paul could sense her picking through bits of his mind, trying to determine what he had been up to with the sort of deep suspicion that she approached everything having to do with him these days. “Why did you go there?”
“No reason,” said Paul, which was probably the best thing. Understand that we do not believe in lying to one’s mother. It is, in fact, a most unfortunate pastime and beneath even the very lowest of the low. Yet children do so whether we approve or not. And they will do it for the most self-serving of motivation: to hide some great misdeed in vain hope of not being caught out. Yet when the truth comes out, as it always does, the children are forgiven sooner or later, usually sooner. Paul’s motivation, on the other hand, was purely to make his mot
her’s life better. There was no selfishness in him. So if miscreants can receive absolution, certainly we would be rotters to withhold similar dispensation from Paul.
So it is that he earns no loss of esteem in our eyes when he lies to his mother about having no reason for his trip to the market and for his withholding from her his encounters with unemployed pirates, and the small dried-out figure he had in his pocket. Likewise we extend forgiveness to him when he goes on to reassure his mother that his days of conversing with animals, pixies, and such were continuing to be long gone.
She eyed him thoughtfully, but said no more of it as she went off to prepare dinner for them. Paul, meantime, hied himself upstairs, where he removed the precious cargo and set it upon his small desk. Then he rested his chin upon his hands and stared at it levelly, waiting for it to blink, to move, to something. “I do believe in pixies,” he said. “I do. I talk to them all the time. I do believe.” But no response came. He tried clapping a few times, and then even more emphatically, and he kept saying over and over, “I do believe. I do believe in pixies. I do, I do believe,” and clapped harder and harder.
Suddenly a shadow cast itself upon his wall, and he turned, crying out “The Boy?” but it was not. It was as far from The Boy as it could be. It was instead his mother, standing there in the doorway, stirring the contents of a pot. She could have ceased her stirring when she’d heard the commotion that Paul was making upstairs and gone to check, but it was one of those recipes where to stop stirring, even for an instant, would bring disaster upon that meal and possibly all future meals for several generations.
“What are you doing!” thundered his mother, and she tried to reach out for the diminutive figure on Paul’s desk. But in so doing she ran out of hands and the pot fell from her grasp. It clattered to the floor, spilling its contents all over, and incurring a sizable dent and bent handle besides. “Now look what you did!” said his mother, who had done it herself. “You lied to me! You promised me! Enough of this foolishness, and give that here!”
Paul scooped up the tiny figure and held it close to his breast. “It’s mine,” he said sullenly.
“It is perfectly hideous! You will give it here this instant, Paul, and we will return to the doctor and get you even stronger medicine, and we will drive these fantasies from your mind once and for all!”
And Paul grew up.
Not for long. Only for an instant. Just enough to summon the anger and energy that he would possess as an adult and blend it with the innocent outrage that only a child can command. For if his mother felt betrayed, it was as nothing compared to what Paul was feeling, and he bellowed, “No! It is mine! It is more mine than you are mine, for you are not my mother, or not what my mother was! You are all darkness and stormy seas and a crooked shadow of what you were, and the only thing that makes you happy is making me unhappy, and you’re punishing me because I stayed while Bonnie left, and I believe in pixies because I don’t believe in you anymore! You are a villain and I hate you!”
Paul’s mother remained exactly and precisely where she was, frozen and as unmoving as the figure Paul clutched close to him. There were many things tumbling through her mind at the moment, and we could examine them here for you. But we have explored this poor lady’s pain so thoroughly that it is probably far more decent to leave her to her private thoughts and focus instead on her actions.
With nary a word, she walked down the hallway out of sight. Paul, never easing his grasp on the tiny figure, held his breath as he heard water running at the far end in the loo. Some moments later she returned with the pot now clean and empty. She placed it down carefully on the floor. It looked rather pathetic, dented and bent as it was. Were Paul of an older and more literary mind, he might have seen some resemblance between that battered pot and himself, but he wasn’t and therefore didn’t. Instead he remained silent, huddled in the far corner, watching, as his mother used several towels to sop up the spilled mixture. As she did so she was shaking her head slightly the entire time. Having finally cleaned up to her satisfaction, she rolled the towels one into the other so that the sopping sides would be inward.
There were so many things Paul desperately needed her to say at that moment. Unfortunately not a single one of them was what she did say.
“Good night.”
She reached up, extinguished the light. Darkness settled into the room, and once she closed the door, the darkness was complete.
Paul did not realize until that very moment how terribly angry and lonely he had been since his mother’s strange transformation. There, in the darkness, it all came crashing home to him. He held the figure tighter than ever, held it so hard against his chest that his heart was practically thudding around it. His face became unaccountably wet.
There, in the strange, dark, forbidding territory that his room had become, where he could not believe in his father, for he was gone, and his mother, because she had been swallowed in gloom, he reiterated with new fervency the one thing in which he did believe as his tears flowed freely upon the mummified figure in his hands. “I do believe in pixies, I do, I do believe in them—”
He lost track of how many times he repeated it. Perhaps it was some number with potent magic meaning, such as three or seven or thirteen or eighteen or eleventy-twelve or forty-nine and a half. Perhaps it was part of some grand design that everything happened just so in a unique set of happenings; or perhaps it was just a purely random happenstance in a purely random universe, where things occurred—good or ill—for no reason at all, no matter what other people might have you believe.
All he knew was that suddenly he was able to see better than he’d been able to moments earlier, and the reason for it was that light was seeping through his fingers. He lowered his hands and gazed in wonderment at the figure he’d been clutching. The moisture from his burning-hot tears, which had practically seared his face on the way down, were infusing the figure with—what? life? energy? the endless potency of unbridled want? We cannot say—not because we do not know, but because we’re afraid that, as with most gloriously wonderful things, if you speak of them out loud, you will inadvertently attract the attention of the sort of people who would be overjoyed to take them away from you at the first opportunity. And since we have no desire—nor do you, we’d wager—to deprive Paul of this small miracle, we will not question it or comment on it beyond to say that, lo, it transpired thus:
Paul fell back, his hands dropping away from the glowing light that was hovering directly in front of his face. He had seen pixies and such in Kensington Gardens, but this was very much something else. Pixies who resided in the city were quite civilized things, posh and polished. They were not pixies of the wild, and bore as much resemblance to the creature confronting Paul as a finely trimmed poodle did to a timber wolf, even though they nominally had the same ancestors.
This pixie was the dehydrated figure brought to throbbing, pulsing life, stretching her arms and yawning as if awakening from a long slumber. She was low to the ground, for her wings were not moving very quickly at first, but then they began to speed up as she stretched them, sending her higher and higher until she thudded her tiny head against the ceiling. This prompted a stream of surprisingly raw invective from her. It struck Paul as tremendously funny to hear such common language spewing from the mouth of something so ethereal; and he laughed in response.
The laughter seemed to reinvigorate her in some manner, and she darted down toward Paul so quickly that he thought she was about to slam into his face. He flinched as she halted her dive mere inches from his nose. She checked her reflection in his eyes, primping slightly so that she was just so. When she spoke again, it sounded like the chiming of a series of small bells, very different from the pixies in the Gardens. Yet Paul, whose great gift continued to be his ability to converse with just about everything under the sun or moon that mere mortals should, by all rights, not have been able to comprehend, cut through the rapid-fire language with no problem and found, at its core, pure emotion. The
pixie spoke the language of the heart in all its varied and conflicting tonalities.
“Boy?” she said. “Is it really you, Boy?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” said Paul. “Perhaps you can answer at last. Am I him? Am I The Boy?”
She stared at him long and hard, examining him this way and that. He forgot to breathe, so intent was he upon hearing her response.
“I thought you were,” she said at last, “but there’s no resemblance.”
“Others have said around the eyes, there is. Well, one said. Another said the nose.”
“Not at all. Well,” she said, “perhaps around the mouth a bit. Yes, very much around the mouth. That same confident pucker, that cocky smirk. No other place in you looks like him, but most definitely the mouth. What is your name?”
“Paul.”
“Where is he, Paul?” There was the slightest edge of danger to the pixie’s voice, but Paul didn’t quite discern it. That was unfortunate, because if he had, he would have told her what she wanted to hear, even if it was a bald-faced lie. Instead he had a serious mental lapse and told the truth.
“I don’t know.”
That was clearly not the answer she wanted or expected, and it only angered her. She reached up and grabbed him by the front lock of his hair and pulled sharply, again demanding, “Where is he? Where are you keeping him?”
Yelping in pain, Paul brought his hand around and swatted the pixie in the way one would swing at an irritating mosquito. “Stop that!” he said, sending the pixie tumbling end over end, skidding across the floor in a little ball of rolling illumination. Instantly he felt contrite, for one was not supposed to hit girls, even teeny, tiny ones yanking one’s hair.