Dreamseeker's Road (13 page)

The enfield trilled again, and trotted off—west. Aikin hesitated but an instant, then took a deep breath and followed.
Only ten paces,
he told himself.
More
than that…you shouldn't.

Two paces, and nothing had changed, save that it was like walking on springy turf barefoot; it was that invigorating. Oh, and there was an indefinable sweetness in the air: a draught of spring on the eve of winter. Two more steps, and that breeze grew stronger—and didn't that hickory over to his right show more leaves than it ought, and greener? Five more paces, and the trees were in full leaf; some were species he'd never seen before; and the briars, which had been thin and wilted as an old man's hair, were suddenly grown
much
thicker, in diameter and number both, and were starting to loop about themselves like living Celtic knotwork.

And then he saw the green-and-orange bird that lit upon a particularly heavy whorl of briar to nip at a small bright fruit that was patently
not
a blackberry—and shivered, though with delight or fear was unclear. He
recognized
that bird! Carolina parakeet, it was, extinct in
his
World a hundred years!

He
had
to get his camera.

Fortunately, the enfield seemed disinclined to continue, had in fact flopped down in the middle of the Track four yards farther on, and was sniffing at turf that showed green grass, where ten paces east it had sported only dead leaves.

“Don't move!” he told the bird, as he turned and strode back down the Track—and felt a jolt of genuine fear when he didn't immediately spot the blasted oak. Four paces brought it into view, however (he wasn't sure exactly how, as the trees right next to it had worn leaves an instant before), and five more put him beside it.

On dead leaves, flanked by halfhearted briars.

Yet the Track still glowed beneath his sneakers. And seemed to glow more brightly when a scrabbling among the leaves proved to be the enfield returning.

“Can't live without me, huh?” he told it—and stepped back into his own World. The beast angled across to follow—which pleased him mightily. But just as it ducked beneath a spray of intervening briars, a stray sprig snared its ear.

It yipped in startlement and thrashed its head—which drove the briar deeper.

Aikin needed no further prompting. Before intellect had time to argue reflexes out of so impulsive a decision, he leapt the short distance between himself and the Track, and in one smooth, firm move, seized the creature's shoulders, fully expecting an armful of teeth for his pains. Instead, it whimpered.

“It's okay, girl,” he told it, resecuring his hold with one hand while the other gently disentangled the briar from the long, black-tufted ear. It growled and flinched—which tore the briar free and produced a thin smear of blood barely visible amid its fur. It did not try to escape, however, and Aikin did not release it. “You really
must
belong to somebody,” he murmured, stroking its back. “Or else Faery critters are decorative but dumb.”

It licked his hand.

Impulsively, he picked it up, tucking it into the cradle of his arms like the oversize cat it felt like (courtesy of looser joints than those of the fox it more closely resembled), and rose. The Track dimmed to nothing behind him. A moment later, he was marching across the dam, and shortly after that, had found the trail that wound up the bluff above the nature trail to his cabin.

“Roomies oughta be in class,” he informed it. And would be leaving on a weekend field trip midday tomorrow, he added to himself. So the question was, could he hide his odd charge from prying eyes for the next eighteen hours?

At which point he found himself confronting the foundation of his home-away-from-home. The cabin—one of several built as housing for Forestry majors, this most recently—was set on a steep slope in such a way that the front was level with a skimpy yard-cum-parking area barely big enough to accommodate four vehicles; while the rear, which sported a porch, soared out into the open air on posts that screened a sort of service patio beneath. A concrete retaining wall backed it,
and,
on one end, a ten-foot-square basement, outside which a previous occupant had conveniently stored a number of white fiberglass cages of the type one used to take Fluffy or FooFoo to the vet.

“Well, you ain't Fluffy or FooFoo,” Aikin told the complacent enfield. “But I bet one of these'll do.”

He found a beagle-sized one, popped the latch on the metal door, and made to thrust the beast inside.

As it neared the chrome steel bars, however, Aikin felt it stiffen within his grip, then start to struggle. It began to hiss and cry. He caught the faintest hint of the stench of burning hair.

“Oops, cold iron,” he sighed. “Well, forget
that
!
But I tell you what: I'll give you something better—but you'll have to be quiet, okay?”

The enfield licked his chin.

“Why do I think you understand me? And not just my thoughts either!”

Another lick.

It was all predicated on no one being upstairs, of course—as he eased from under the porch to peer up the slope to the east. The coast was clear: no vehicles lurked before the cabin save his own. Other than the small risk of someone arriving just at the wrong time, or seeing him from one of the other cabins, he was home free. Taking a deep breath, he scrambled up the slope, turned left at the top, and (after trying the knob, which would mean someone was home), unlocked the door—which required some creative juggling of hands, keys, and critter.

Fortunately, the basement key hung on a nail just inside the entrance, and he was able to retrieve it without going in. An instant later, he assailed the basement door. The lock resisted briefly, and he feared someone had changed it. But then it clicked and the door swung open. The room beyond had a concrete floor, cinder block walls, and shelves along two sides on which an odd lot of outdoorsy gear was piled. Aikin closed the door behind him, strode to the middle of the room, and slowly eased the enfield down. It rubbed against his leg. “You oughta be okay in here,” he told it. “Just stay away from anything that feels like iron or steel. I'm gonna go see what I can find to feed you, but don't you say a word! No way in hell I could explain something like you!”

And with that, he backed toward the door. The enfield took a tentative step in his wake, then elected not to follow.

“Take care, kid,” he called softly. “Dinner's on the way, and then I'm gonna get my camera and my tape measure and my yardstick, and we are gonna party!”

Chapter VIII: Spirits in the Night

(Athens, Georgia—Friday, October 30—sunset)

“Could've been worse,” Alec smirked, bent kissing-close to David's ear to make himself heard above the thunder of rock and roll that was well-nigh deafening even two blocks from ground zero and
inside
the cab of Liz's Ranger. “It
could've
been Keebler.”

David rolled his eyes, then squinted through the windshield at their black-clad designated driver, who had just disembarked and was surveying Hancock Street like a townie-girl grim reaper searching for lab-lackeys to scythe. He sighed dramatically, checked the rearview mirror to confirm that his pointed rubber ears were on straight, and adjusted the fake-fur vest that accented his bare torso. “I don't know about this…”

Alec paused with his hand on the door handle and grinned at him through white pancake around black-ringed eyes beneath a silver-shot wig akin to Liz's: Dream, from
Sandman;
brother to Liz's Death from the same graphic novel. A lull in the music made speaking viable. “How so?”

“Well, it makes us a mixed visual metaphor, for one thing.”

“What you get for trusting women.”

“Just 'cause
you're
tall and slim…”

“Just 'cause
you're
short, blond, snub-nosed, and muscular—and have no chest hair to speak of.”

“Nobody'll know who I am.”

“'Course they will! Folks read
Elfquest
'round here. Aik says they sell
lots
of 'em over at Comics and Music.”

Liz gestured like manic semaphore, then mouthed an impatient, “You coming?”

Alec hit the street.

David followed. The late-day breeze flowed cool across his skin—more skin than he preferred to display in public, as a point of fact; Liz wasn't the only one flashing cleavage, though his was mostly evident when he sat. “That's how they're drawn,” she'd explained. “But I guess cloth doesn't stretch the same as leather.”

Still, all things considered, she'd done a bang-up job.

The fur vest, she'd cut down from a tawny thrift store coat; the flared leather pants that hung perilously low across his hipbones and lower yet fore and aft, she'd faked from painter's canvas and Masada thongs. The peacock feather on the quasi sporran-codpiece had come from his landlord's flock, and the pointy-toed boots were courtesy of Myra's chums in the Society for Creative Anachronism. The short curved sword was plywood and foamcore, per a new city ordinance that forbade public display of weapons that could be taken for real; but the thick white-blond hair, part of which was bound up in a topknot, was his own. All in all, he really did look the part of Cutter, the chief of the Wolf-riders from
Elfquest.

“I just hope we can get in!” Alec grumbled, as they joined Liz on the sidewalk.

“That's the point of comin' early,” David countered cheerfully. “And see and be seen, of course. Speakin' of which,” he added to Liz, “any sign of Hunterman?”

“S'posed to meet us here at sunset.”

David scanned the slit of sky visible between the Athens Post Office and Franklin Financial. The sun was conveniently revealed there, so close to the horizon, he expected to see rooftops smolder.

“I'd give him five minutes,” Alec opined.

“Three.” From Liz.

David was glad he'd left his watch at home.
He
was in the mood for some serious living for the moment. Some major-league kick-ass partying-down.

And for forgetting.

It'd been a bitch-kitty couple of days. A bitch-kitty week, in fact, what with the ongoing grief of classes, plus Alec's whining, plus trying to thread a romance with Liz through her duties as a resident assistant in Reed Hall—never mind that song and dance with the enfield back on Wednesday and the blowup with Aikin the Saturday before.

And absolutely never mind his most persistent demon: that troubling revelation about David-the-Elder, which was a freshly tined pitchfork prodding his psyche.
Just when you think you can trust folks,
he told himself, for the millionth time that week,
they show you their asshole side.

The sun tapped the horizon. Shadows went as sharp-edged and ominous as David's frustration had lately been. As if to voice that tension, the air awoke with the strident opening fanfare from “Ride of the Valkyries.”

David jumped about a foot straight up. Dream's mouth dropped open; Death's eyes narrowed suspiciously. The music was blaring from the waist-high azalea hedge that separated City Hall from the sidewalk, just below the infamous double-barreled cannon.

Louder, that music shrieked, and at the precise moment the first busty soprano should have begun bellowing, an unlikely figure leapt from behind the bushes and mounted the landmark's muzzle. David's fast call was of a shortish male cased from thigh to chin in a tube of duct-taped and silver-sprayed cardboard that was surely supposed to be armor but in fact resembled a garbage can; an outsize horned helmet silhouetted against a lavender sky; and a stubby cross-hilted sword swung aloft. Whereupon the figure struck a martial pose and yelled, at the top of its lungs, “Kill the wabbit!”

And vaulted down to join them, pausing in transit to reach into the hedge and switch off the boombox stashed there.

“Magic helmet!” David laughed, thwacking the headgear with his sword. “Jesus, man; that's
wonderful
.”

Aikin raised his own bogus weapon in warning. “Watch it!” he warned, with a fiendish grin—and swung.

David blocked reflexively, and for a moment Elmer Fudd's Wagnerian hero from “What's Opera, Doc?” faced off against an elf-chief from an alternative comic book. Blows were struck. Thrusts were met and parried. And then Elmer got past Cutter's guard and stabbed (none too gently, for a wooden sword) his stomach, just as Cutter smacked Elmer's inverted-wok-with-cow-horns chime-ringing hard.

“Stir-fried brains,” Alec-Dream observed, deadpan, as both toppled.

“More work for me,” Liz-Death sighed. “I wonder who I should carry off first.”

“The elf,” Aikin volunteered instantly, between throes. “That way I can groove on the music longer.”

Alec checked his watch and motioned downhill, toward the ten-block heart of downtown Athens. “C'mon, folks,” he cried, flinging his black cape out dramatically. “Sandman says it's time to party!”

*

“Where'd Liz go?” Alec yelled five minutes later, from where he and David jostled with a couple hundred fellow revelers on College Avenue, from which traffic had been barred for the night. Voices rumbled and roared and rose now and then to a primal shriek. The music was louder still.

“Must've seen a soul she wanted to collect in Barnett's,” David shouted back. His gaze drifted from the brightly lit window wall to his right, back to the street—where a possibly female Garfield was dancing with a probably white Don King, while a gleeful Lorena Bobbitt (complete with plastic butcher knife and appropriate, if oversize, severed appendage) tried to break in—all to the music of Shaken, Not Stirred's third frantically incomprehensible number exploding from the portable bandstand at the juncture of College and Broad.

Yep, he thought, Halloween was definitely cooking with gas. Actually, it was Halloween
Eve,
but since the thirty-first abutted a Sunday, and bars closed early then (never mind the pagan overtones of this most ancient of holidays, which were best kept safely distanced, the Religious Right insisted), the downtown merchants and club owners had designated Friday for the “official” observance, and had most of the neighboring streets plugged with bandstands to prove it. Of course there'd be celebrating on Saturday too; no proper Athenian ever missed a chance to party. But the big ones with prizes were all tonight.