Chapel of Ease (23 page)

“Sure,” C.C. said. He made another hand gesture.

She kept looking at me, waiting for my response.

“I don't know your little finger-wiggles,” I said. “And not to be rude, miss, but I'm not sure exactly why this is any business of yours.”

“You see a little girl, don't you?”

“Well … yeah.”

“I understand. It's what I see in the mirror, too. But it's not all I am. I don't have time to make you a believer, but I do need you to accept that I have deserved authority. Can you go along with that?”

“Uh … sure, I guess.”

“Then please, give me your word that you won't go bother the Durants any more until you hear back from me.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you.”

She nodded to the rest of us, then went out the front door. When the screen slammed, I jumped, and the spell was broken. “Okay,
who
was that?” I asked, probably more urgently than I needed to.

“I'll explain later,” C.C. said. He stood up and said, “Gerald, you reckon you can walk to the couch, or do you need me to carry you?”

“To the
couch
?” I exclaimed, alarmed at how high my voice went. “We should put him to bed. He needs a doctor. And we need the police. Somebody just tried to
kill
him.”

“Calm down, sweetie,” Ladonna said in her kind and warm way. “I know this may seem stranger than a bull with an udder, but I promise, we know what we're doing. Them Durants, they got their own ways up there. No police would ever find them. And there's no police in Cloud County, anyway.” She said the last bit with a
What can you do?
shrug.

“You don't have cops,” I repeated.

“Don't need 'em,” Gerald said as C.C. helped him sit up. A white bandage covered his shoulder, and Bliss cut away the rest of his blood-soaked shirt. Then she fastened a sling to hold his arm in place. “Mandalay will handle it. That's her job.”

“She's a
kid
!” I exclaimed, astounded that such an obvious thing needed to be pointed out.

Thorn almost giggled. I glared at her. “So this is funny to you?”

“No, not at all,” she said, still trying not to laugh. “It's just that when you know about us, it'll—”

The accumulated fear, frustration, and annoyance finally burst out. “Know
what
? What is this great secret that everybody keeps hinting at? I see a man with a bullet hole in his shoulder who bled red just like anyone else, and you're telling me just singing a song at him is as good as taking him to the hospital?”

They all stared at me now, even Gerald. I felt my face burn. Then Thorn slipped my arm through hers. “Matt, there's some things you need to know. Come with me.”

“No,” C.C. said. “I'll tell him.”

“Okay,” Thorn said. To me she added, “Just wait until he explains things, honey. It'll all make sense then. Maybe not good sense, but sense.”

As Gerald—a man who, minutes before, had been about to die of a gunshot wound—settled onto the couch and demanded the remote control, I remained standing, transfixed by all this apparent insanity. What bizarre parallel universe had I wandered into? And what if C.C.'s “explanation” was the permanent kind that resulted in me keeping company with Ray Parrish, wherever he was these days?

 

19

I went onto the front porch and pulled out my phone. I needed contact with my world—you know, the normal, rational one where singing didn't immediately heal gunshot wounds and people didn't listen to little girls in life-or-death situations. I've never wanted to see bars on my cell phone more than I did then, but it still resolutely said,
NO SERVICE
. And there was no way I was having this conversation in the Parrishes' living room.

Frustrated, I looked around. It was late afternoon, and the sun had turned amber. There was no sign of any vehicle Bliss used to get here, no fresh tire marks in the yard or disturbed dust on the drive. The girl Mandalay had vanished into thin air as well. The only living things were the dogs, Ace and Tom, sprawled flat in the shade beneath C.C.'s truck.

A crow cawed in the distance. Did they always sound like they were making fun of you, or was this crow just amused by me in particular?

I sat on the front porch swing, rocking vehemently (yes, it can be done) until C.C. came out and leaned against one of the supports.

“So is Gerald over being shot yet?” I asked, the sarcasm so heavy, it made even me scowl. “I mean, that usually sets you back a whole fifteen or twenty minutes, doesn't it?”

“I know what it looked like,” C.C. said. “But you saw it: he
was
shot, and it will take him a while to recover. We're not superhuman or anything.”

“‘We'? So if I shot you, you'd be back on the couch watching TV a half hour later, too?”

“I don't know. If Bliss got here in time, and there was someone to sing the right song … then, yeah, maybe.”

“So it was all about the song?” I said, ratcheting up the sarcasm even more.

He looked at me seriously and said, “Yes.”

I stopped pushing against the porch, and my momentum gradually slowed. He
meant it.
C.C. truly believed that if I hadn't been there, to sing that particular song at that particular moment, Gerald might be dead now.

It hit me like a thunderbolt. C.C. was
nuts.

“You don't believe me, 'cause it don't make sense anywhere else but here,” he said.

“On the porch?”

“In Cloud County. Where the Tufa have been for thousands of years.”

“Thousands?”

“Thousands.”

“And how is that possible, since the country's only a couple of hundred years old? Are you saying you're Indians?”

“No. They got here about seventeen thousand years ago. We were already here.”

There was no levity, no sense of teasing in his words, despite their obvious ludicrousness. He looked at me with the steady, even gaze of someone absolutely secure in his delusions. I said, “So … you're descended from Vikings?”

He smiled a little. “They got here
after
the Native Americans.”

“And you know that because you were here.”

“No, I was born later. But … you've met people who were here then.”

“Who were here thousands of years ago?”

“Yes.” He paused. “I'll prove it to you as soon as it gets dark.”

I stood up and blurted out, “I think I should go. Can you give me a ride to the airport, or somewhere where I can call a taxi?”

He put his hands on my shoulders. An hour ago, I might've melted right there from his touch, but now I wanted nothing but to be away from all these insane people. It occurred to me that I'd never seen the inside of the barn, and wondered how many bodies might hang there, souvenirs of these (I was sure now) cannibalistic hill-dwellers.

Still, I didn't pull away, and he didn't hold me the way you did someone you were about to kill. In return, I didn't punch him in the throat and run screaming down the road. He said, “I'm going to tell you something, and then I'm going to show you. You won't believe either, but I'm hoping that taken together, you'll see I'm telling the truth. Okay?”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“Do you know the term, ‘Tylwyth Teg'?”

“No.”

“How about ‘Yvwi Tsvdi'?”

“That's not even a word. How do you spell that?”

He laughed. “I'm not sure. I've never seen it written down. What about ‘Tuatha de Danaan'?”

“Aren't they a Celtic band? Thorn told me about them.”

“That's Tuatha Dea.”

“Oh. Then no.”

“Then how about … ‘the Good Folk'?”

I was about to say no to this one as well, but something clicked. I'd heard that term in college, in an English class. “That's what they called fairies in folklore, right? I mean, fairies with wings, not fairies … like us. So they wouldn't get mad at you.”

He nodded, and the indiscreet “us” didn't seem to bother him. “That's right. I have a lot of … Good Folk … in me. So do the Parrishes. So does Bliss. Mandalay, the girl you met? She's entirely Good Folk.”

My brain turned this around, looking for the hole where I could insert the logic key. I didn't find it. “Wait, so you're telling me you—”

“All the Tufa,” he corrected. “It's what we are. Some of us have more of it in us, some less. But we all have some.”

“You're saying you're
fairies.
”

“That's not the word we use.”

“But it's what you're saying.”

He shrugged and nodded, all one gesture. “And I was right—you don't believe me, do you?”

I gestured around me at the run-down house, the yard with its dogs and old cars, the trees and sky and mountains, all normal, tangible, real. “You have to admit, this isn't exactly Never Never Land.”

I shut up as Thorn joined us on the porch. She stood beside C.C. and also looked at me dead seriously. “Y'all done told him?”

“Yes,” C.C. said.

“That explains the look on his face.”

“You believe this, too?” I asked her.

She snort-laughed. “I better. It's the truth.”

“So … where are your wings?”

C.C. and Thorn looked at each other. I couldn't tell what passed between them, but then C.C. said, “Take a walk with us?”

“Is it the same ‘walk' all the other Yankees who've disappeared took?”

“What other Yankees?” Thorn asked.

“He's being sarcastic,” C.C. said. “We won't hurt you. I promise. If you don't trust me…”

He let it trail off. I looked into his eyes, the same ones I'd gazed into after that smoldering kiss up at the chapel, and saw—or at least hoped I saw—no guile, no danger. I couldn't read Thorn's expression, but since C.C. trusted her, I decided I had to go along with it, too. So I nodded.

“Mom!” Thorn yelled back into the house. “We're taking Matt out for a walk. Might be back late.”

“All right,” Ladonna called back.

“Y'all quit yelling, I'm trying to watch the game!” Gerald complained.

This resembled no fairy-tale household I'd ever read about. “Wait, I have to ask: Are you absolutely sure he doesn't need a doctor? He was shot, with a bullet. I saw it come out. He was spitting up blood.”

“He'll be fine,” C.C. said.

“I'm fine,” Gerald said, although it must've been to Ladonna, since there was no way he could have overheard me.

“See?” Thorn said.

There was no convincing them, and for Gerald's sake, I truly hoped they were right. So I gestured for them to lead on.

We crossed the side yard and entered the woods along a narrow trail. C.C. took my hand, and if Thorn, trailing behind us, thought anything of it, she kept quiet. The trees overhead grew taller and thicker as we walked, blocking out the light from the setting sun. Animal noises I didn't recognize filled the air. The trail rose gradually, until at last it was so steep that C.C. released me so that we could all use our hands to climb the slope. Luckily roots and low branches provided convenient holds.

I didn't think we'd been hiking so long, but when we finally emerged onto the flat, treeless top of a hill, it was totally dark. I looked back, and even from this height saw no lights from the town or any of the other farms, no cars traveling on roads or any sign of civilization. There was just mile after mile of treetops in the silvery moonlight.

“Wow,” I said. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere special,” C.C. said. The wind blew then, not harsh but enough to make its presence known. It felt great on my sweaty face after the climb.

“So … what happens now?”

C.C. and Thorn held hands and walked out into the open space. The shadows from the moonlight hid their eyes from me. Then they began to undress.

If they'd jumped up and down shouting dirty limericks, it would not have startled me more. Thorn, wearing only a sundress and a pair of cowboy boots, finished first, and stood unashamed, waiting for C.C. He finally also stood naked beside her, their bodies like ivory in the light. The sight was simultaneously innocent and erotic, and I felt myself caught between those two responses, half turned-on and half delighted.

“Close your eyes, Matt,” Thorn said. Her voice was musical, and the wind seemed to follow its cadences. “Don't open them until we tell you.”

I did so. The wind continued to sigh around me, and I seemed to hear distant voices singing melodies I couldn't quite catch. Then over them rose a voice I did recognize: Thorn, singing.

Oh, time makes men grow sad

And rivers change their ways

But the night wind and her riders

Will ever stay the same.…

Past the song, past the wind, past the other voices, I also heard something that sounded for all the world like gigantic wings flapping. Not bird wings, and not the leathery snap of bats; instead, these were graceful sweeps, swooshes that I realized might have been generating the very wind that blew around me. But still, mesmerized by Thorn's voice, I kept my eyes shut.

“Open your eyes, Matt,” C.C. said.

I did.

Thorn and C.C. were where they'd been moments before. Except … they weren't. Where two people had been, now stood two magnificent, magical beings with enormous, diaphanous wings, like those of some gigantic butterfly. The wings sparkled in the moonlight, and through them I saw the hazy silhouettes of the trees on the opposite side of the clearing.

Then my logical brain kicked in. These had to be fakes, appliances of some kind, even though the two were naked and there was no sign of any straps holding them on. I walked toward them slowly, and the wings moved, flexing with their breath.