Greenmantle (47 page)

“G-go away, Earl. I don’t trust you.”

“Okay, Frankie. I hear you.” He lowered the rifle. “See? I don’t wanna hurt you. But you better think of Tony. Looks to me like he needs help and he needs it quick. Promise me the bread right now—throw away that gun—and I’ll help you get to some place where we can call an ambulance for him. Is it a deal?”

Frankie was having trouble keeping the gun trained on her ex and trying to see how Tony was doing at the same time. She knew he was hurt, but she didn’t know how bad. He did need help. If she could only trust Earl. He could have everything she owned, but she knew he wouldn’t do what he said. He never had—why should he change now?

“Look,” Earl said. “I’m showing my good faith by putting this down.” He laid the rifle on the grass and held both hands up to her. “See? I got nothing now and you’ve got the gun. So let me help you with him.”

Laying the rifle down brought him a step closer. Now as he spoke, his hands held casually in front of him, he managed a few more steps until only Valenti was between them.

“I’m not such a shit, you know,” he said soothingly. “I mean, we had some bad times and you had to split—I can see that now. But we had some good times, too. So let’s do this deal for those good times. I give you your man—you give me the bread.”

He could see that she wanted to believe him. Her face was strained in the flickering light thrown off by the burning house. She still kept the gun on him, but it was drooping slightly. Earl knew he had to do something. That fire was gonna bring whatever fire department they had out here in the sticks and the cops wouldn’t be far behind.

“Come on, Frankie. Put the gun down.”

It drooped a little lower, wavered and she brought it up, dropped again. Earl pretended to look at Valenti. “Christ, would ya look at the hole in him!” he said.

Frankie’s gaze went to Valenti and Earl lunged across the stricken man. He kicked the gun out of her hand. When she started to rise, he backhanded her across the face, then knelt down on top of her, pinning her arms and torso to the ground with his knees and the weight of his body. As she struggled against him he hit her again. Sliding off her, he grabbed her by her hair and hauled her to her feet. She threw a punch at him, but there was no strength behind the blow.

“You never learn, do you?” he said. “Look at yourself, fercrissakes. I could beat the shit out of you with one hand, so what’re you struggling for?” He slapped her again, then grabbed her roughly by the arm and started to haul her across the lawn.

“Tony!” she wailed.

“Fuck Tony. Where’s your bankbook, Frankie? Tomorrow morning, you and me’ve got an appointment at the bank, but until then we’re gonna disappear.”

“No!”

Frankie let herself go limp and sank to the ground. When Earl cursed and bent to lift her, she punched him in the groin with all her strength. He doubled over, still trying to grab at her, so she hit him again.

“You…you’re…you’re dead,” he gasped.

She scrambled out of his way as he stumbled to his knees. Everything she’d been through coalesced into a burning need to strike back. She was
not
going to be the victim again. Tony was depending on her. On her hands and knees she covered the few feet separating Valenti from her, tugging at his UZI when she reached him. The gun came free. She turned with the weapon in hand to see Earl on his feet, still hurting, but drawing a handgun from his belt.

“Goddamn you!” she cried and pulled the trigger, only the trigger wouldn’t move. Nothing happened. Moaning, she did the only thing she could think of and threw the useless gun at Earl’s face.

8

It took him a while—Lewis was feeling his age tonight—but he finally reached the summit of Wold Hill. He stood there, catching his breath, and stared at the bonfire. It reminded him of his boyhood. New Wolding was all new then—another steading carved out of the wilderness, differing only from a hundred other such places in Eastern Ontario by the beliefs of its people. Their beliefs and their insularity.

There had been bonfires then, down by the old stone. Once a year they offered a ram or a bull up to the spirit that spoke through Tommy Duffin’s pipes.

Things had been simpler then. But the village lost its solidarity as the young ones began to move away and the old ones died off. And Lewis had changed. Mally had given him the dark man’s books and he’d come to question as much as those who’d left had questioned, only he had stayed, searching for answers at the source of the riddle, rather than out in the world beyond.

He couldn’t remember just when they had stopped the offerings or the bonfires. Green grass grew where once the charred circle had been black in the glade, where the red blood had flowed. Had there been a pack then? Lewis couldn’t remember. If Perkin’s hounds had been around at the time, they hadn’t been quite so bold.

He wondered what Mally and Ali had been up to tonight. Neither of them was here now. He hadn’t quite understood what Mally meant about Ali being gone.
Stolen like smoke
, the wild girl had said. By the Hunt. By Perkin’s hounds. They might even be my hounds now, Lewis thought uneasily.

He moved closer to the bonfire and spotted Ali’s walking stick lying where she’d dropped it. He bent down slowly and picked it up, hefting it in his hands.

There was something about this hilltop tonight, he thought. Something different. He could feel something in the air—a gathering of…intention, he supposed. He didn’t feel alone. There was a charge like static electricity in the air, a heaviness like the forewarning approach of a storm.

He turned from the fire and looked out over the darkened forest. The sky was clear, the stars sharp and bright against the black sky. The smell of smoke mixed with the pungent odor of cedar and pine. If there was a storm coming, he thought, it wasn’t a physical one. What had the girls been doing here? Calling the mystery—that was what. To set him free. That was enough to cause a storm, Lewis thought.

The dull boom of Louie Fucceri’s explosion reached the summit where Lewis was standing and he looked skyward, thinking it was thunder. The sky was still clear. But then he made out the glow, far off in the woods where he knew Valenti’s house to be. He heard the chatter of gunfire. He could
feel
the anger that was unleashed when men took weapons to hand.

Lewis had always been open to the flow of the woods, to the mystery’s presence in the forest, to the way Tommy’s pipes called the mystery and the way the mystery answered. So he felt the emotions coming from Valenti’s house, but he felt stronger ones very close at hand. There was anger here, too. Fear as well.

He turned slowly, but he was still alone on the summit. When his gaze reached the old pine tree, he shivered, but he didn’t know why. He took a step toward the tree, then paused as he heard the sharp clatter of hooves on rock. He looked for the mystery, sensing his closeness, but couldn’t find him—not as a stag, not as a Green Man.

Mally, he thought. What have you woken here? And where are you now?

* * *

Mally had reached the slow-moving waters of Black Creek and was just starting to cross it by the stepping stones when she realized she was no longer alone. Something was out in the night with her. She paused on the New Wolding side of the creek and looked back the way she’d come, trying to pierce the gloom.

“Hornie?” she tried.

The willows rustled and the shadowy bulk of a boar stepped free of the slender trees, his tusks gleaming, his bristled hide swallowing the starlight where it touched him. Mally glided from the stones and knelt beside him, running her nails along his hide. The image of a burning fire slipped from his mind into hers and Mally nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Ali was calling you. But something’s taken her and I think it was the Hunt. Will you help me find her?”

The tusker shook his head. Two images blossomed in Mally’s mind, one following the other in quick succession. The first showed the boar returning toward the fire of bones, the other Mally going on across the stream.

“Oh, no,” Mally told him. “I have to come with you.”

She looked the solemn beast in the eye, surprised at how much he had communicated with her already. The mystery didn’t concern himself overly much with the workings of the world. He simply went where he went, did what he did, amoral as a wind that is neither good nor evil, but simply is. And like a wind, the mystery could be channelled. By Tommy’s pipes. By the chasing of the Hunt. By a fire of bones. By the moonlight. By a thousand and one things.

Mally was afraid that if she left him to himself, the mystery would simply wander off after a time, forgetting Ali—not because he wasn’t intelligent, but because he had never given Mally any reason to suspect that he had much of a memory. Did the sun remember what it passed over during the day? Did the wind remember all its journeys?

She laid her hand on the boar’s shoulder, then stepped hastily back as he began to change. The bristled hide became a cloak of leaves. The boar’s head, a man’s head with ram’s horns tonight, rather than antlers.

He had a thousand and one shapes, Mally thought.

The mystery regarded her steadily and new images leapt from his mind to hers. She saw the fire of bones again, but it became two separate fires. In one she saw just Ali’s face, frightened and desperate. In the other was a view of Tony Valenti lying still on the grass, his life’s blood draining from his body. Ali’s mother stood over Valenti, confronting a man that Mally vaguely recognized from a few nights ago. This was the companion of the man she’d killed last night.

“What are you trying to tell me?” she asked the man in his cloak of leaves.

“Who needs you more?” the mystery replied. “The lost or the dying?”

Mally took a few quick steps back, stunned at the sound of his voice. She’d never heard him speak before. The voice was resonant and low and sent shivers up her spine.

“You…you can talk?” she said.

She suddenly understood the wonder that Ali must have felt the first time she’d seen Mally’s horns, the first time the stag had come to her, the first time her life had changed. Mally might have been less surprised if a tree had turned and spoken to her.

“No…no one needs me,” she said when she realized that the mystery wasn’t going to answer her.

“Every living thing needs a secret,” he said. “You must choose whose you will be tonight. I will go to the other.”

“I…”

Mally looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers. They were good for hitting and grabbing and “finding” and the like, but healing…? She had heard the explosion that had come from the lame man’s house. Right now, he lay hurt, dying. The mystery had shown her that. What could she do for him? Besides, she was responsible for Ali. But if Ali
had
been stolen away by the hounds, Mally knew she wasn’t strong enough herself to deal with them. She could run, oh, very quick, and was good with tricks and such, but to rescue Ali that wouldn’t be enough. Perhaps she
should
go to the lame man.

“Choose,” the mystery said.

“I don’t
know
!” Mally cried. “I’m just a secret—the riddle, not the answer. I’m not wise like you.”

The mystery looked at her for a long moment, then turned and disappeared among the willows.

“You can’t go!” Mally shouted after him. “I haven’t chosen yet!”

But she already had, she realized. The mystery had taken it from her mind, knowing her choice before she did herself.

“If I’d
truly
been wise,” she muttered, “I’d never have set any of tonight into motion.”

She thought about what the mystery had shown her. She’d just have to trust him to rescue Ali while she tried to help the other. Turning, she bolted across the stream, taking the stepping stones two at a time. There’d be time enough to wonder about it all—the mystery talking, wisdoms and those which weren’t so wise, who was free and who was not…. She’d puzzle it all out later. Now was a time for doing.

* * *

In the glade on the side of Wold Hill, watched over by the old stone, a man in a mantle of green leaves stepped from between the trees and out onto the grass. Gaffa whined and crawled forward on his belly, sniffing at the man’s feet, puzzled at the lack of a scent. For a moment the man studied the stone, his ram’s horns gleaming in the starlight, then he stepped toward it and disappeared inside.

Behind him, Tommy Duffin awoke to find himself standing with his face pressed against the cold rock, leaning there, his pipes half-held in a limp hand. All around him were green leaves, as fresh as though they’d just been pulled from their tree. They were thick around his feet and made a pillow of sorts for him as he sank slowly to the ground and sat in them.

Gaffa laid his head on Tommy’s knee and Tommy began to stroke his pet, wondering all the while at the strange dream he’d just had. He knew he hadn’t left the glade, but he felt as though he’d been walking, as though some part of him had come an immense distance and still had a long journey to complete before the sun rose.

Shaking his head slowly, he lifted his pipes to his lips and blew softly across them. Against his back, the old stone seemed to shiver in response.