Geordie drove Christy’s old Dodge wagon around the Cineplex at the south end of the mall to the shipping bays in the back. He pulled into a parking spot by the eight-foot retaining wall that had been constructed to keep the still-untouched farmlands at bay. When he turned off the engine, they all got out. The banging of the car doors when they were closed seemed loud and to echo forever.
“This is creepy,” Holly said. “I’ve never liked shopping centres at night. There’s just something about these huge empty parking lots that doesn’t seem right.”
Geordie nodded. “I used to have a friend that lived on one of the farms that’s now somewhere under all this concrete. I think it was over there, by the grocery store.”
“And that’s another thing,” Holly said. “All those old farms gone— plus the roost.”
“Yeah, the crow girls were really ticked off about that. Someone told me that, after it happened, they stole one of those huge cement mixer trucks, drove it to the home of one of the developers, and dumped the whole load of wet cement in his living room. But I don’t know. There was never anything in the news about it.”
He turned to Dick, who was standing close to the car. The hob’s already large eyes seemed bigger than ever as he stared at the folding metal doors of the closest shipping bay. New as the mall was, the door was already covered with graffiti.
“Where do we go?” Geordie asked him.
The hob pointed to the doors. “In there.”
“Okay. So what do we do? Just go up and knock on them or something?”
“Or something,” Dick said.
Squaring his little shoulders, he set off across the parking lot, the leather soles of his shoes clicking softly on the pavement. Holly and Geordie exchanged glances, then followed the hob.
Holly wasn’t sure what she expected when they reached the metal doors. She had little enough experience with magic or fairies, for all that she had a hob for a partner in the bookstore. It wasn’t as though Dick’s friends came by for a visit—at least they never came around when she was there— and Dick never did anything more magical than his bit where he sat so still he became invisible. So when the hob laid his hand on a part of spray-painted spiral, opening a portal like the one that had opened in her basement, she let out a gasp.
“Is … is that the otherworld?” she asked.
Dick shook his head. “It’s just a bodach door to take us inside the mall.”
“Right. Andabodachis?”
“Like me, a hob. Or like a brownie.”
Geordie was still looking at the big metal door.
“Doesn’t the iron in the metal bother you?” he asked.
“No, Master Geordie. I’ve lived among men too long for it to trouble me the way it would my country cousins.” He started to step through, then paused, looking at them. “Are you coming?”
“Right, um, behind you,” Holly said.
She closed her eyes as she stepped into what her mind still told her was a great big solid metal door, but her hands met no obstruction and then she was inside, Geordie behind her. When she opened her eyes, she saw that they were in a receiving facility of some sort. It must be for one of the department stores, she decided, because all around them were stacks and stacks of cardboard boxes holding everything from kettles to lawnmowers.
Dick took her hand.
“Come on, Mistress Holly,” he said. “Mother Crone is supposed to hold court in the main courtyard. Where the swans fly.”
It took Holly a moment to understand what he was talking about. Then she remembered the sculptures of the great white birds hanging from the big domed ceiling by the mall’s central doors, their long necks stretched out, metal wings outspread, as they appeared to soar across the vault of the dome. She couldn’t recall how many there were—a fairy-tale seven?
Dick led them to the far side of the warehouse and out into a hallway that eventually took them into the mall itself. Holly had always thought that it might be fun to have the run of one of these places at night, but right now it felt as creepy as the empty parking lot outside. Plus all the individual stores were locked up, so it wasn’t like you could go rummaging around in them or anything.
“Do you hear something?” she asked as they walked down the cavernous hallway toward the central court.
They walked by shuttered carts, wooden benches, waste dispensers and small temporary kiosks, locked up for the night. Their reflections, caught in the windows of the dark stores, kept pace on the other side. Holly glanced behind her, looking for her shadow. Because the light came from above, it was pooled around her feet. But still there.
“It’s music,” Geordie said. “Something with a hip-hop beat.”
Holly nodded. At first she’d thought it might be coming from the mall’s sound system. She supposed there was no reason for them to turn the Muzak off at night. But then she realized it came from further up the hallway, growing steadily louder as they approached the courtyard.
“It’s revel music,” Dick said.
Holly was about to ask what he meant, but then she could see them ahead of her, figures of all shapes and sizes dancing to the music, and from their enthusiasm, the word “revel” became pretty much self-explanatory. It was only when they got right to where the hallway spilled into the court-yard that she saw that the source of the music was a prosaic boombox. Considering the dancers, she would have expected it to be far more exotic: some sort of outlandish elfin creatures creating the music live, rather than having it come from a simple recording.
But the dancers made up for the mundane source of the music.
There were little people half Dick’s size that seemed to be made of twigs and moss and grass, although here and there she spied a few similar creatures that looked to be made of wiring, with sparkplug noses and circuitry board torsos.
There were tall men and women with pointed ears, dressed in stately gowns and Victorian waistcoats and suits. Others the same size in rough fabrics with vests and cloaks that were as much leaves and moss and feathers as they were cloth. Others still, in skateboarders’ baggy cargo pants and T-shirts.
There were beings that seemed as much animal as human. Gangly monkey creatures with bird-like features. Tubby pumpkin bodies topped with the faces of raccoons and badgers. Straw-thin beings with lizard and snake faces.
There were creatures that Holly recognized from the illustrations of fairy-tale picture books. Goblins and brownies and pixies, and even what seemed like a small trow dressed in rustic browns and greens, with a nose too big and legs too squat and short.
There was, in short, every sort of fairy that Holly had ever imagined, and many she couldn’t have begun to. But one thing they had in common: they were all light-footed and graceful—even the stiffest looking of them, which was a creature that appeared to be nothing so much as an ambulatory log with spindly arms and legs and a face that pushed out of the bark at the top. And they were quiet on their feet.
Holly spied soft-soled slippers and running shoes and bare feet, which might have explained the quiet to some degree, but surely there should have been some sound. Whispers and scuffles, the slap of a bare foot on tile or even the faint pad of paws. But the soft-stepping fairy revelers made no sound at all when they moved. There was only the music, the infectious groove of a hip-hop beat that seemed to allow for any kind of dancing, from ballroom to break, all of which were evident.
The revelers completely ignored them until Dick cleared his throat. Then the music continued, but all the dancers stopped and turned to look in their direction. Finally a little twig and leaf girl standing close to the boom-box, her vine-like hair pulled back into a thick Rasta ponytail, reached over and turned off the music. Utter silence fell over the courtyard and they were looking into the dozens of fairy gazes turned in their direction.
At that moment Holly felt very exposed and not a little afraid. There was something about the eyes of the fairies that woke a shiver at the base of her spine, that had the hairs standing up on her
arms and at the nape of her neck. There was nothing threatening about them—not yet, at least—but nothing human either. They were cat eyes and hare eyes and bird eyes. They were the eyes of wild things, but a sharp, knowing intelligence burned in them as they did in no ordinary animal.
“Well,” someone said, breaking the tableau. “I’ve been expecting you.”
She came walking through the crowd, a tall woman with her dark hair hanging halfway to her waist in a dozen or so thick braids. Holly couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t noticed her among the dancers earlier, she was such a striking woman, with her piercing gaze and fine-boned, narrow features. She wore black cargo pants, platform sneakers, and a tank top that was sized so small it lay like paint against her skin and bared her midriff.
“You … have?” Holly managed to get out. “But how could you know we’d be coming?”
“She’s Mother Crone, Mistress Holly,” Dick said.
“You’re Mother Crone? But you don’t look at all …”
Holly let her voice trail off.
“Cronish?” the woman said.
Standing in front of her, the woman towered over Holly.
“I guess,” Holly said. “I was going to say ‘old.’ “
Mother Crone smiled. “It’s only a name. You’re not made of holly, are you?”
“Well, no …”
Though right at this moment, Holly wouldn’t have been surprised to find that she was, in fact.
“Why were you expecting us?” she asked.
“I’m a seer.”
“Oh, right,” Holly said. “Of course.”
Mother Crone laughed. “But that said, I’ll admit that I only knew someone was coming. Not who, or what you might want from me.”
She lowered herself so that she was sitting cross-legged on the floor—a quick, graceful movement that made it appear as though she’d simply floated down. Holly hesitated a moment, then took a seat on the floor herself, although she didn’t feel nearly so graceful doing it. Geordie and Dick sat down on either side of her.
“So tell me how I can help,” Mother Crone said.
The fairy woman seemed so friendly that Holly had to wonder why Dick had been nervous about coming here. Then she remembered how he’d been around Meran, who he thought was a princess of some fairy wood.
“Don’t be shy now,” Mother Crone added.
Holly started, realizing that she let her thoughts drift. She gave Dick a quick glance, but he seemed to be content to leave everything in her hands. Great. And then she remembered something else he’d said about Mother Crone. Better get that out of the way first.
Holly cleared her throat. “Urn, could you tell me what the price will be?”
“I need to know the problem first.”
“Oh, right. Well, it’s a little complicated.”
“By the time a problem comes to me, it usually is,” Mother Crone said. “It’s best to start at the beginning.”
So Holly did—but not right at the beginning, all the way back to when pixies had first come stepping out of her computer monitor. Instead, she started with Aaran Goldstein getting his friend Jackson to send a virus to the Wordwood, backtracking a little to explain her own connection to the Web site, then outlining the high points of all that had befallen since.
Mother Crone listened well, asking few questions, and then only to clarify something that Holly hadn’t properly explained. But when Holly was done, she cocked her head and gave Holly a puzzled look.
“I understand the problem now,” she said, “and it certainly is a messy one. What I don’t understand is why you’ve come to me for help.”
“Well, it’s just that Dick …”
Holly gave the hob a glance and saw a look she knew well; it was the one where the last thing in the world he wanted was to have what he considered some higher class of fairy pay any sort of attention to him.
“I thought you might give us some advice,” Holly finished. “You know, as to what we can do to help.”
“Hmm.”
Mother Crone glanced over her shoulder and singled out one of the little circuit and wire men.
“Edgan,” she said “Do you know this place that our guest is talking about?”
The little man nodded. He scurried off, opening a bodach door in a nearby computer store. He returned with a laptop under his arm and set it down on the floor. While he got it up and running, the fairy with the Rasta ponytail who had been operating the boombox approached Mother Crone, handing her a wooden bowl and a plastic bottle of water.
“Thank you, Hazel,” Mother Crone said.
Holly watched in fascination as Edgan pulled a credit card-sized circuit from out of the tangle of wiring and circuitry that was his chest. He stuck it in the PCMCIA slot of the laptop and pulled a little aerial out of the card. His narrow wire fingers danced on the laptop’s keyboard, then he looked up.
“Here it is,” he said.
Holly leaned forward so that she could see what was on the screen. All that was visible was the “This page cannot be displayed,” message that they’d been getting ever since the virus had taken the site down, but Mother Crone gave a thoughtful nod.
“Better disconnect it,” she said.
The little man hit a key, then removed the PCMCIA card from the slot and inserted it back into his chest. Holly blinked—that was just so weird— and turned her attention back to Mother Crone. The seer set the wooden bowl on the floor between Holly and herself. Untwisting the top from the water bottle, she poured the contents of the bottle into her bowl.
“Did … did you see something?” Holly asked. “On the computer screen?”
“Not exactly. Just enough to know that there’s something very wrong there. I’m not much good at scrying with technology. But now that I have a touchstone to that place, I can use this—” She indicated the bowl of water. “—to look in on it through more traditional means.”
Holly was beyond surprise by this point. “Will you be able to see our friends?” she asked. “Can you tell us how they are?”
“I can try,” Mother Crone replied, which promised nothing.
She moved a hand over the water and a ripple in the water followed the motion, back and forth across the surface. Lifting her hand, she studied the water as it stilled.
“Hmm,” she said.
Holly leaned forward as well but saw nothing, only water in a bowl.
“What do you see?” Holly asked.
The seer made no response. She pursed her lips, all of her attention on whatever invisible drama was being enacted on the surface of the water in her bowl. When she finally looked up, her gaze was troubled.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Holly’s chest went tight. “Why? What is it?”
“There is …” She looked away, her gaze going inward. “I’m not sure how to explain,” she went on when she focused on Holly once more. “Do you know much about the otherworld, how it isn’t one place so much as many places—a patchwork of worlds, some large some small, but all connected like some enormous quilt?”
“Vaguely…”
“And that this Internet site has become one of those worlds?”
Holly nodded. “That’s what—I can’t remember who. I think it was Christy who figured that out.”
Mother Crone gave a slow nod. “This Wordwood is closed from the rest of the otherworld at the moment and it’s a good thing. There is something in it—I can’t say exactly what. I just know that it’s old, and it’s dying. And as it’s dying, it’s taking the Wordwood with it. Or perhaps it’s the Wordwood itself that is dying, taking everything inside it along with it. All I know for sure is that it’s too late to do anything about it now.”
“But our friends…?”
“What’s this thing inside?” Geordie asked.
Mother Crone turned to him. “I don’t know. Something ancient. Something I’ve never met or seen before, though there are stories about its kind.”
“And it’s evil?”
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She shook her head. “It’s neither good nor evil on its own. But it’s very powerful.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Geordie said, “whether it’s the Wordwood or this spirit that’s dying. We just have to get hold of the others and get them out of there. …”
His voice trailed off as Mother Crone shook her head.
“You won’t help us?” he said. “Just tell me the price.”
“It’s not a matter of price.”
“That’s my brother in there. Our friends.”
Mother Crone sighed. “I know. I understand. But to open any gate into that world at this time means allowing whatever’s happening inside loose into the rest of the otherworld. I won’t be responsible for that.”
“But—”
“Would your friends … would your brother want to live at the cost of the death of the millions that would die in the otherworld if whatever this thing is gets loose? And that’s saying you could even do anything at this point.” She pointed at her scrying bowl. “All I sense in that world is the ancient one. We don’t even know if there’s anybody else even alive in there at the moment.”
“But we can’t just abandon them all.”
Holly saw the pain in Mother Crone’s eyes. “Yes, I know. Hundreds have been lost. But unless we leave the struggle contained as it is, it could truly be millions. It might even spread into this world.”
Holly thought she was going to be sick. Geordie stood up beside her. For a moment she thought he was going to hit someone, but instead he stalked off to the glass windows that overlooked the mall’s parking lot. He stood there, looking out into the night, his fists clenched at his side.
“I’m so sorry,” Mother Crone said.
Holly gave a slow nod. “I… I understand. Not what’s going on. But why you can’t—why we can’t do anything. But it’s hard to just stand by …”