King's Justice: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 2 (2 page)

  "You sure it's all right to be here?" Gary asked in an almost awe-struck whisper. "We didn't bring any clothes to swim in. Or towels."

  "Damn, fool. You know momma wouldn't let us go swimming," Rath said.

  "Just swim in your underwear. It'll dry out on the way home," Gavain reassured him with a smile.

  That was all the encouragement the boys needed, shucking their clothes over near the tree roots and running to the water's edge. Warm gusts of wind blew towards them; tiny, lazy waves sloshed against the shoreline. The alcove lay around the bend from the main beach, like a forgotten part of the park, fenced off (or fenced in) to keep people from wandering off. With the occasional boat horn belching in the distance, he knew they weren't alone. On such a beautiful picnicking day, the beach proper had to be crowded and all the shelters full.

  However, nary a sound drifted into their alcove.

  A strong breeze rushed off the water. It was downright frigid in the shadows where Gavain watched the boys play. They wobbled on slick rocks, their arms flailing to steady their balance as they acted out kung fu movies. Gavain already regretted letting them watch
The Five Deadly Venoms
. Discarded in their frolic, the branches piled at the dock. He feared that he'd have to confiscate their improvised weapons, especially if it occurred to them to battle any unsuspecting underwater enemies. The last thing he wanted was some sort of lightsaber duel in the water. Their private hideaway did its job, enchanting the boys. It wasn't often that they played near anything that wasn't concrete or plastic. They had some relatives that owned a farm or something down in Jeffersonville, but they were their father's side of the family. Momma never quite fit in with the family.

  The innocuous chattering of the boys strained Gavain's nerves, but only in a bemused-by-the-familiar sort of way. The boys beamed, amusing themselves, and that gave him time to read. He pulled a tattered copy of
Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine
from his back pocket, surprised by how much he enjoyed the ludicrous series. There was a quaintness to them that he liked.

  Then something at the back of his mind nagged him, an unscratched itch. He searched for a word to describe the feeling. The water mesmerized him. Breathing in the loamy smell of leaves, the stiffness of the breeze, he realized what the feeling was that he couldn't shake. The weight of eyes followed his every movement. Someone watched him, exactly the way the little Korean beauty salon owners watched him when he bought stuff for momma. Someone on a rock down the beach, barely within sight: a body, light as bleached bark, nearly white in the furtive sun and slight of build, a woman perhaps, watched them.

  
Making sure those children didn't cause any trouble
, he thought. He'd been on alert for indignant park rangers, full of their authority, coming to scare them off. The possibility of a chase gave him a thrill to look forward to. Not that he expected anyone else to be here: it kind of ruined his illusion that only he knew about the place. The woman stole away into the trees.

"Hey, did you see her?" Gavain asked.

  "See who?" The boys answered in unison. Sand somehow managed to dust both of their fresh faces though neither was even up to his knees in the water.

  "The woman over by the trees. She was staring at us."

  "Probably a park ranger." Gary turned from Rath as if the two of them had to caucus before deciding the proper response.

  "Then why didn't she come chase us?" Gavain asked.

  "Probably one of those sun bathers then."

  "Was she naked?" Rath finally chimed in.

  "Don't listen to him. There probably wasn't no woman. He just trying to scare us again." Gary's eyes widened in a tacit plea to not taunt them anymore.

  "I wasn't, but that does remind me of a story." Gavain squatted over an overturned log, drawing in the sand with a twig, waiting for the boys to come over to him. They did, they always did. "You remember that nursery rhyme you were singing earlier, Gary? Do you know what it's about?"

  "No." Gary searched for his own twig and began to draw in the sand.

  "There was this old witch without a name but folks called the Lady of the Lake."

  "I don't believe in witches," Gary said, not quite looking into Gavain's eyes.

  "Do you want to hear this story or what? Anyway, you see there was a woman who lived by a lake much like this one. One day she goes out for a swim, but the water…" Gavain trailed off, making his voice sound haunted, for good effect, especially if he wanted to frighten the boys into caution around the water. "Water can be a powerful thing, scary, but they don't make movies about it. It's not something that puts on a mask and chases you through an old house. It's deep. Strong. Mysterious. And things live in it. Things that scientists don't know about or can't explain. Maybe the Lady of the Lake got caught by one of those things. Maybe she became one of them. Maybe she was the mother of all of those creatures. All folks say is that she drowned, but every seven years, she comes back to claim a life, a life that should've been hers. Sort of a guilt offering. She comes for those who wander too close to the water's edge, grabbing their ankles with those long arms of hers, and pulls them to her, draws them to her underwater kingdom. And you don't want to see her in the water. Her skin is slightly blue and puffy from being drowned and all. She has long hair, greenish like it's wrapped in seaweed or somethin'. And she greets them with a kiss, a kiss full of her long sharp teeth. She stares at you with those big dead eyes of hers. She couldn't help herself. It was in her nature. They're the last thing that you see before you take your last breath.

  "BOO!" Gavain yelled and jumped suddenly.

  The boys reared back and screamed before hitting each other and laughing.

  "Bitch done wet hisself," Rath said.

  "Boy, I ain't gonna tell you again." Gavain tossed his stick at him. "Watch your mouth."

  The boys scrabbled off, unfazed, splashing into the water.

  "You comin' in?" Gary turned and asked. Gary had a way of asking for things that sounded not only like a command, but as if his whole life depended on you giving into him.

  "Yeah, in a minute," Gavain lied. "Hey, if you can't stand up and be above the water, you need to come back closer." He didn't want to have to get wet if he could help it. His brothers might have bought the idea of their clothes drying out on the walk home, but the idea of wet, bunched-up underwear rubbing against him for an hour didn't appeal nearly as much to him as it did them. Visions of having to swim after one of the knuckleheads caused his fear of deep water to rear itself again. He wanted to spend more time in the water, but the shore was as close to the water's edge as he dared go. He shielded his eyes with his hand to better study the deceptive calm of the flat surface. Gary jumped into the water. Not used to the acoustics of the woods, Gavain thought he heard a second splash a little further away. It might've just been an echo. He scanned the periphery anyway.

  The water exercised a strange fascination over him. He lost track of time, idling his minutes away, not really reading his book but only holding it in front of him while he studied the water. The splashes of his brothers grew faint. The book fell from his limp grasp. The lolling waves lapped against the sheltering embankment. The swishing susurrus made it easy to ignore the rising uneasiness that washed over him. The sobering shimmer of light, the dispassionate gaze of the deep, the sibilant call of the waves, held him in a spell that reached to an ancient, yet familiar part of his soul. The seaweed, like trees helplessly caught in a strong wind, unfurled, forming a chain that pointed toward the deeper part of the lake. The brown murkiness of kicked-up lake bottom swooshed about, as if something stirred to life. The water. A war waged within the waves, breaking the smoothness of the water.

  That was when he noticed that Gary was in trouble.

  Gary slapped at the surface, his head cocked up at an odd angle, as he fought the water rather than swam in it, spitting out mistakenly inhaled gulps of water. Rath was nowhere to be seen. Gavain clambered down the embankment, each bob of Gary's head an eternity whenever it ducked under the waves. The drooping branches whipped at Gavain. He stumbled over an exposed tree root and fell face down into the wet sand. Lines of smallish footprints criss-crossed the dark sand. They could've been the boys' footprints, but there were so many. Gavain stumbled to his feet and waded frantically into the water. Not a strong swimmer; he swam well enough to get where he wanted to go, but had no technique beyond his floundering variation of the dog paddle. His lungs burned as he took in gulps of water. He splashed about in near panic and tried to reach Gary who seemed only a few yards away from him. Frustrated tears stung his eyes. The water flowed thick and heavy, the painful rush of it towed against him like bottled-up rage. He strained against the water, but made little progress. The tide, too strong, swept them further out into the lake. Gavain thought that he glimpsed someone. A woman.

  "Help them! Help them! They're drowning!" he cried out.

  Gavain swam across the sucking, parallel to the shore; it was all he knew to do, desperately fighting against the watery vacuum that threatened to yank him under. He scanned for any sign of his brothers. Gavain stretched out his arm, almost within reach of Gary's hand. Gary's face turned toward him, blanched and exhausted, like a boy who'd seen a ghost, but was too tired to run.

  "Gary." Gavain dug his arms into the water, his measured strokes like swimming through quicksand. He reached out toward him, spotting Gary's terrified eyes, his body seized in some invisible, powerful grip. The water climbed higher along Gavain's chest. The tug gnawed at him. He shivered, suddenly aware of how cold the water was; too cold for such a day. The water seemed so dark, murky. A cloud covered the sun and created deeper pockets of shadows beneath the waves. No, this shadow was small, heading towards him just out of reach.

  Rath. Eyes bulged out, his face frozen in a rictus of panic.

  Something scraped against Gavain with the bite of coral, like the sharp, thick nails of a large hand. The splashing ceased. Gavain searched for any sign, any shade, that could've been Gary. Nothing. The waves, its anger spent, subsided. Gavain imagined how his brothers spent their last moments. Their arms outstretched, fighting for air, their minds wondering where he was. Where was their big brother? He was supposed to look after them, protect them from bad things. Bad people. That was when he knew.

  She had come for them, with her yellowed sinews, black blood pulsing through her veins. The Lady of the Lake, her belly bloated with the rage of the sea; head lolling from side to side, caught in its own current. He remembered something like hands brush against him. Like hands, but not hands.

  He never forgot the hands.

 
 
 

 

King James White had spent his entire life on the west side of Indianapolis. Despite being funneled through Child Protective Services, in and out of homes – more out that in by his teenage years – he'd attended schools 109, and 107 (transferred to be a part of their advance placement curriculum because his high intelligence was noted despite his efforts) for his elementary years, 108 for Junior High School, and then Northwest High School for the couple years he could stand being in high school.

  The rhythms of this side of town were as familiar as the constellation of razor bumps along his neck. Exiting on the 38th Street ramp from I-465 – the highway loop that circled Indianapolis proper – he expected the same rotating cast of panhandlers. The homeless vets who couldn't quite pinpoint what war they were veterans of. The folks who needed money in order to get home, who turned down rides to said home. They swapped time with a woman whose sign told the tale of her being pregnant and homeless. The weather-faded backpack and mottled teddy bear wrapped in a blanket were nice touches, but she'd been "pregnant" for over two years now. When off shift, she or the vet or the lost couple were picked up by a van. Begging was just another way of life in the hustle.

  Turning east off the ramp took one to the corner of 38th and High School Road. Three of the corners of the intersection had gas stations on them. The fourth – the north-west corner – was a collection of store fronts. The Great Wok of China's kitchen caught on fire a few months back, the timing of which worked out well for the lingerie and marital aids store next door. The owner had been embezzling money and the new ownership was in place and was planning on relaunching the store with basically the same name with the letters jumbled, familiar yet different. The adjoining Karma record store would be down for a month or so. Folks would have to get their drug paraphernalia somewhere else for a time. The lot behind the store fronts was a deserted concrete slab built on a hill nicknamed Agned for reasons no one any longer remembered, enclosed by a Dairy Queen and a Shrimp Hut, thus free from casual prying eyes, especially so early on a Sunday morning.

  Though it was still Saturday night as far as Caul was concerned.

  In a North Carolina Tar Heels jacket, Caul stood a bulky seven foot five, towering over both King and his best friend, Lott Carey. Under a thicket of dirty hair, his eyes gleamed red in feral madness. A jagged keloid ran down his left cheek. His thick lips drew back to reveal teeth painted black within his wide mouth. Curiously, he had neatly trimmed fingers, except for the nail on his pinky which jutted out an inch and a half.

  "It's over, Caul." King cold-eyed the giant. Tall, though still easily a half-foot shorter than Caul, King wasn't overly muscled like one of those swollen brothers just out of prison. The sides of King's head were shaved clean. The top of his head in short twists, almost reminiscent of a crown. King let the wind catch his leather coat, allowing the handle of his golden Caliburn to be seen. A portrait of Marcus Garvey peeked from his black T-shirt. Skin the complexion of burnt cocoa. His eyes burned with a stern glint, both decisive and sure. His lips pursed, locked in a mission, as he focused on the task at hand. He stepped defiant and sure, confident without issuing a challenge. Though prepared to meet one if need be.