I turned to go back through the arch. It was right there, odd-looking among the ruins: sturdy red brick with white salt deposits where decades of rain had soaked it, set in a standing fragment of gray stone wall. Rainwater dripped out of a little pipe set low on one wall near the entrance to drain the earth behind the brickwork. Wherever we were, the arch was still its plain, Central Park self, which I found very reassuring.
“You can’t go back that way,” Kevin said, not deigning to acknowledge my judgment of his character. “It’s one time through each gateway for everybody, only one time between worlds. You just used the Willowdell. We need another arch to get you home.”
Getting wobbly again with panic, I squinted through the arch. On the other side I saw not Central Park but more ruins, convincing ruins. I believed him.
“Willowdell,” I said, stalling. I did not want to leave that familiar arch. “It has a name?”
“Most of them have names,” Kevin said. “It was the names that grabbed me first, on a map of the park that I saw one time: Willowdell, Greyshot, Riftstone—”
The scowl that had seemed to be his main expression relaxed as he said the names. His whole face changed, taking on an open, far-off look that made me think: Amy, you do not know this person. Maybe you did once, a little, but he’s a stranger now.
This was unnerving, but intriguing, too. What kind of stranger? Still, it would be insane to stick around any longer than I had to to find out.
“What’s the closest arch besides this one?” I asked, playing along.
He looked around nervously. “We’ll walk over to the Denesmouth Arch. It’s not far.”
I started to object, but gave it up. I didn’t seem to have a lot of options.
*What I heard was “fair far,” but I learned later that Kevin used his version of ancient-type spelling for the name of his magic kingdom, the Fayre Farre.—Amy
Two
Corner Kid
THE MOSAIC SLABS OF THE PATHWAY looked manageable even in socks. I tied the laces together, slung the skates around my neck and followed Kevin. Once we got started walking, I felt sort of relieved. I didn’t really want to go right back to listening to my mother saying over and over that she couldn’t believe it about Shelly, who was her cousin really and only second cousin to me, and my aunts grabbing me in these tearful hugs all the time as if that could change anything.
Soon would be soon enough. Meanwhile maybe I was ready for all hell to break loose, which could happen, in Kevin’s company. He had never been dull to be around. And I realized I was very curious, even excited, about the Fayre Farre itself; I was glad I hadn’t tried to go back through the Willowdell Arch, but had trusted Kevin’s word that it wouldn’t take me home. Home could wait.
“What is this place, Kevin?” I asked.
He said expansively, “I told you—my country. It’s a real place, Amy. It’s got history and everything, just like America or England or any place on the other side of the arches. Take these ruins, here—that’s what’s left of a great castle. There was a lot of battles and things fought here in the time of the First Kings.”
As we hurried along, he talked. I do not remember a word. It was all fake history anyway, the kind you can find by the yard in any sword-and-sorcery novel, especially along about Volume Two or Three: kings, nobles, great warriors or adventurers messing around with magic, princes squabbling over this or that kingdom or girl or spell or enchanted weapon.
I began to expect a gaggle of wizards to shuffle by spouting spells and smoke through their beards. They always have beards and they all smoke pipes, ever since Tolkien’s Gandalf set the style.
But how would Kevin even know about things like that? He was not the kind of person I associated with reading literature. Kevin had been one of about ten kids in a family down at the end of the block where I’d lived then, in the West Eighties. We’d had a cramped but sunny apartment in a fourteen-floor building halfway between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Kevin had lived in one of a row of what were then brownstone tenements down near Columbus.
Every time Mom or Dad sent me to a store on Columbus to get something, inevitably there would be a gang of what all the children in my building used to call “Corner Kids” hanging out on the brownstone stoops. They mugged us, for fun and profit.
Kevin, their ringleader, was skinny and fast and loud, with the dirtiest neck you ever saw. He had specialized in ambushing me in particular, and taking my stuff—money, bubble gum, my rhinestone pin.
Finally my mom had gone to have a talk with his mother, which had left me absolutely terrified that the whole Malone family would come wreak terrible vengeance on me. But I didn’t see Kevin at all after that. The next thing I heard was that he had run away from home.
Then my father got his first screenwriting job in California, and though we stayed in New York—Mom didn’t want to leave her job in the textile business—we did change neighborhoods. Living on the East Side, going to a new school, I forgot all about Kevin Malone.
This was really Kevin, wasn’t it? Who else would have my old pin? On the other hand, for the old Kevin to give something back instead of taking something away was a reversal of the laws of nature on the order of dirt raining up into the sky. So maybe he had changed.
Everything else sure had. People had bought the West Side brownstones and fixed them up. Burglar bars leaking philodendron stems guarded all the windows of Kevin’s building now. Last time I’d walked by there, I’d seen a huge Akita looking out of one of the bow windows. I think they’re ugly dogs, but buying an Akita costs about as much as adopting a baby. The people living in Kevin’s building now were definitely not Corner-Kid types.
But what type was it, exactly, who could drag me into a made-up place where I walked on real stone slabs with real grass between, among real ruins?
Take it easy, Amy, I told myself. Just because you are having a psychotic episode brought on by the shock of Cousin Shell’s completely unexpected and unfair death, that doesn’t mean you are crazy forever. It will pass. That’s what Shelly used to say, shaking her head and making her earrings jingle: “Whatever it is, Amy, it will pass.”
What would Shelly have thought of Kevin, I wondered. She’d been a social worker; she must have known a lot of Corner Kids.
I studied Kevin covertly as we hurried along, which was a lot more interesting than listening to what he was saying. The last time I’d seen him he’d been about three inches shorter than me, with dirty black hair chopped off at ear-level, missing front teeth, and a piercing voice.
His voice was broken now, his teeth white and even, and he had filled out with muscle. He was taller than I was, and looked especially big, because he stuck his elbows out to take up extra room when he walked with the swagger that I remembered, not fondly, from our shared youth.
He also had a shadow of a mustache, dark like his hair, and frowning eyebrows over light gray eyes. His skin was very white and clear, with what looked like a permanent flush in the form of a red strip down each cheek.
Talk about unfair; bad Kevin had become good-looking.
“Shit,” he said, stopping so suddenly that I almost walked into him. Good-looking, and dirty-mouthed as ever.
At the foot of a long, gently sloping meadow bisected by our paved pathway I saw a huge wall of gray stone blocking the gap between two hillsides. A black-painted grillwork gate filled the arch.
“We’re too late!” he said. “The Denesmouth is locked up for the night.”
Nevertheless, he hurried down the valley. Feeling like Alice pursuing a juvenile-delinquent rabbit through a very creepy Wonderland, I trotted after him. My stockinged feet were a little sore by now, and I had to clutch the skates under my arms to avoid having them thump me to death as I ran.
I caught up with Kevin right under the high, grim wall, which was faced with sizable blocks of gray stone. He shook the bars of the locked gate. Not surprisingly, they didn’t budge.
Inside, the arch was high and wide
, with deep dirt verges on either side of the surfaced walkway through the middle. I could make out big barrels lined up in rows on either hand. Beyond, there was another stretch of path, gloomy green foliage, and then the stone face of another arch farther on.
“What’s in there?” I asked. I realized that I’d been hoping to meet somebody besides Kevin in what was beginning to seem like an awfully empty landscape.
He stepped back, staring upward and rubbing his palms on his sweats. “The Prison City,” he said.
I looked up too, expecting to see rolls of razor wire and guards with Uzis. “You made all this,” I said, “and you put in a Prison City?”
“Every country has prisons,” Kevin said in a hard, superior tone. “On your side it’s the Central Park Zoo in there behind the double arches of the Denesmouth. Here, it’s prison.”
It fit, in a gloomy way: a home for caged animals was turned, in his fantasy, into a town of caged people, which was what I assumed Kevin meant by “Prison City.” It was not what you’d call an ambiguous phrase.
“So we were going to do what?” I asked. “Drop in here at this prison, which was somehow supposed to get me home?”
“Something like that,” he said. “But we can’t get in, and there’s guys around here who’d lock me up if they could and keep me for the White One. Let’s go.”
The image of something fat and pale like a large slug popped into my head. Somehow I did not want to pursue the subject of the White One.
“Lock you up?” I said. “In your own country?”
“I made this place for adventure,” he said, sort of throwing out his chest and looking around possessively. “The whole thing, the people, the plot of the story, everything. ‘Plot’ means things happen, so there’s enemies around, you know? Danger. Scared?”
“Nervous,” I said. “Because you don’t seem to know your way around your own private country.”
“I know every inch of this place,” he said loftily. “Every ritual, everything! So relax, Amy. There’s another way back nearby, if it’s where it belongs. And if not, it’ll just take a little longer to find an arch you can use, that’s all. Sooner or later the Battle Path will take us where we need to go.”
I stood where I was, clutching the roller skates for security. “What do you mean, ‘if it’s where it belongs?’ ”
“Oh, things sort of move around,” Kevin said. “Not the arches, they stay put, but other stuff kind of migrates. There’s magic currents in the earth that shunt things around, like.”
Oh boy, I thought. “You invented a magical land where you can never know where anything is for sure?”
He gave me a charming grin. “Magic is full of surprises. That’s half the fun.”
He led the way down a steep path through a tunnel of huge old trees. Far below I thought I saw . . . was it possible? Was that why the air had such a tang to it? Where Fifth Avenue was supposed to be, marking the eastern boundary of Central Park—was that blue band on the horizon the sea?
I could not make my dazed mind come up with a sensible-sounding way to ask about this. The best I could do was, “So where are we going now, Kevin?” Which sounded whiney and stupid, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth I wished I hadn’t said them. Luckily, he didn’t seem to have heard me.
Suddenly the trees thinned out around an outcrop of black granite. From there Kevin pointed down at a shingled rooftop in a clearing below.
“See?” he said triumphantly. “I knew it was here someplace.”
I saw two sharp-spined roofs parallel to each other, one on a stone-walled building and the other just a wooden porch running along the stone house’s front. The main roof was straddled in the center by a spindly little steeple with a clock in it.
“The Dairy!” I said. “What’s it doing down there?”
The Dairy really was a dairy once, where people bought ice cream. These days it’s used for photo exhibits and to sell books and pamphlets about the park. No way could it be located somewhere east of the zoo; but then Fifth Avenue couldn’t be an ocean, either.
Things moved around, all right.
“In the Fayre Farre,” Kevin said, “that’s an inn. We’ll have some ale, or, um, juice or something, and I’ll tell you why I’ve been trying to get you into the Fayre Farre, Amy. I think you’ve got a very important part to play here. Heroic, even.”
“Oh,” I said. “Great.” We’d been doing Greek myths in English this term. Heroes go through hell. I eyed the Dairy without enthusiasm.
I knew that your average sword-and-sorcery story had to have a scene at the inn, which was always full of spies, drunken peasants, lusty-busty serving wenches, and our traveling company of heroes. I only hoped that everybody here wouldn’t talk some kind of fake Middle English.
Kevin started down a dirt path that skirted the stone outcrop. Sock-footed and still hugging Rachel’s skates, I picked my way gingerly after him. It’s all a hallucination, I thought. I’ve fallen on my head on the skating pavement and I’m dreaming.
Then I heard Kevin swear in a choked voice, and I looked up from my feet. He was running toward the gateway to the innyard, where a raggedy man was dragging himself over the ground toward us. The stranger couldn’t walk because his ankles were fastened rigidly apart at the ends of a bar that looked like it was made of peeled sticks.
Socks or no socks, I ran, too.
Kevin plumped down on his knees beside the man, who could barely lift his head to look at us. I’ve never seen anyone so thin. He had on torn green pants and a dirty shirt that had once been bright with multicolored patches, and his hair was long, blond, and filthy.
“Kavian Prince!” he croaked, staring up with huge, red-rimmed eyes. He looked maybe a couple of years older than Kevin. “I found the prophecy.” He blinked at me. “She’s in it, your lady here.”
Kevin glanced at me grimly.
The hurt man squeezed his eyes shut and moaned. “Past that, I can’t remember. I knew the whole prophecy, every word, but then the Bone Men—”
“Later, Sebbian, tell me later,” Kevin said, feverishly struggling to unfasten the strange manacle on the man’s feet. It wasn’t made of wood but of two long bones twisted between the stranger’s ankles and lashed tight together at the outer ends with hard leather strings.
“Wet rawhide,” Kevin muttered between set teeth. “It dries rock-hard.”
No way were those shrunken knots going to give. Up close, I could see that the man’s bare feet were swollen so that the bone fetters had cut into his flesh, which was horribly inflamed. Now I noticed a sickly smell about him that made my throat close up.
He had somehow rubbed or chewed through the sinews holding a smaller bone manacle closed on his wrists and had gotten one hand loose. But he couldn’t free his feet with his bare hands any more than Kevin could.
“Can’t you cut him loose?” I asked.
Kevin slapped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “I am sworn to use no edged weapon until the Farsword comes to my hand. I’ll get this off him somehow, though. Sebbian, what happened?”
Sebbian, his cheek resting on one outstretched arm, murmured, “Bone Men got me. Got away, crawled here, but inn-folk had fled—nothing left, no food, no water—hiding here for days, waiting for you to come.” He shut his eyes. “Beware, Prince!”
Kevin looked at me, his face white. “Amy, do you have anything sharp on you? You could cut these cords!”
“I don’t carry a knife, Kevin,” I said. It sounded awful, under the circumstances, all prissy and superior, although I certainly hadn’t meant it that way.
“Dying anyway,” Sebbian said. Tears leaked out under his bruised-looking eyelids. “Bone crown squeezed out all the music and the words from my poor head, except seeing your lady here, I know she’s in it, she’s in the prophecy. The rest is lost. Useless, should have died already—”
I felt nauseous. My wobbly gaze fell on something odd-shaped lying under the open gate, trampled in the m
ud—a small harp that you could hold up in your arms to play. The strings, cut or broken, curled every which way.
“Run, Lady Amy,” the dying man whispered, and I saw his eyes gleaming as he twisted his neck to stare up at me. “And take Prince Kavian with you. They’re coming, don’t you hear them? Ah, let me not fall into their terrible white hands again!”
And then I heard a grinding, shifting sound and I felt vibrations in the earth under my feet. Pale as paper, Kevin looked back up the hill behind me and swallowed so that his Adam’s apple jumped. I turned.
The flat, inlaid stones of the walkway we had come along were shifting slowly apart, and from under them drifted shimmery funnels of gray powder that wavered and solidified into figures—frights from Halloween, men made of bones and rusted metal, skeletons, armored and moving.
“What?” I gulped. “Kevin, what?”
“It’s the Bone Men,” he cried, pounding the ground with his clenched fist. “The Angry Ones that Dravud Bloodhand killed with the Hurling-Stones!”
I guess I should have listened to all that fake history.
Kevin leaped up and rushed with me through the gate, across the yard, and into the inn building itself. The stink of the place went off in my head like a hand grenade—old sweat, stale food and liquor, rotten garbage.
“But what about Sebbian?” I gasped.
“He’s dead,” Kevin said.
Dead, I though with a lurch. Another death.
Kevin heaved the gaping front door shut and slammed a thick timber down into the iron brackets on either side. Then he ran to the single window and banged the shutters closed—there weren’t any windowpanes—and barred them, too. The place got amazingly dark.