Shadows Burned In (6 page)

So for the longest time, David and every other child in
Hampshire had skirted around her property. Occasionally someone would start a
dare, and kids would walk up and knock on the door, only to run away again with
sweat running down their backs. Now that he thought about it, David wondered
how she ever kept from killing somebody if for no other reason than it might
keep the rest of the little fuckers away from her front porch. Or at least kept
from
maiming
someone. He thought about walking up to the house

(you’re older now, there’s nothing to be afraid of)

but looking first at the house and its broken windows

(how many rocks did you throw through them when Old Suzie
was alive?)

and then at the sun as it was sinking farther west

(and how badly did you piss her off that night in her
house?)

he decided it was too late. Susan and Elizabeth would be
expecting him at home. So, with one last look at the old place, and a brief
remembrance of that Halloween thirty years before

(wonder where Theron is these days, if he’s even still alive)

David got back into his car and drove the remaining two
blocks home.

As she heard the car pull into the garage, Susan tried to
set herself in a positive frame of mind to receive her husband. When they’d
first gotten married, she’d thought herself the luckiest woman in the world.
She’d found a man she could honestly spend the rest of her life with. He was
easygoing, didn’t drink really, didn’t smoke, didn’t seem the cheating type,
and had a bright future ahead of him as an attorney. They’d met in college in a
literature class, arguing over whether or not the White Whale was truly evil.

They’d lived together for more than a year before getting
married. In those days David had a sharp sense of humor, making others laugh at
everything around them, and Susan loved him more than she ever thought it
possible to love another human being. After graduating from law school, he’d
thrown himself into his career, determined to make a mint before he was thirty,
and they’d settled into the familiar patterns of a young married couple.

Then Elizabeth had come along and David had seemed to change
slowly. His sense of humor, like abused vocal chords, had become scratchy and
pained at first, then silent. His need to make more money quickly became an
obsession. Still, he’d been a good father to the baby, changing diapers and
taking his turn at the early morning feedings. Then Elizabeth had begun to grow
up and David had become even more distant, as if he no longer knew how to deal
with her once she was no longer a helpless baby. Now, if they weren’t talking
about school or a 3V program, they hardly spoke at all. And Susan, for all her
wish to do so, didn’t seem able to bridge the gap between them.

“I hear
Web Report
was really positive today,” she
said as David came through the door. She hoped to strike up a conversation
right away on something that would interest him, maybe erase last night’s bout.

“Hmmm?” he said, seeming distracted. “Oh, that’s good.” He
walked on into the hallway, probably intent on changing out of his office
clothes and relaxing in front of
Web Report
for a while. Susan let him
go, glad for the fact that nothing more volatile had erupted from him.
Must’ve
been a good day
, she thought.

David walked into the bedroom, changed into his sweat suit,
then settled into his chair in the living room. “3V on,” he said, then, “
Web
Report
.” Up came the screen with the commentators at their desk, their
voices muted when David gave the command. “Portfolio activity,” he said, and up
came the dozen or so stocks he’d invested in.

Again today MerChrysler was doing poorly.
This is a bad
sign
, David thought.
New models just came out, and the stock’s going
down
?
Down by 2¼, which represented about a $10,000 loss to him for the day. He
pursed his lips and quickly reviewed their other holdings. Microsoft-GlobalNet
was up 1½. MGN would usually go up even when the rest of the market went down,
even if only slightly.
At $1,150 per share, they ought to be dependable
,
David thought. And Webmarket, the online matchmaker that brought consumers and
vendors together, was up 3¼ on the news that, after years of debate regarding
economic openness, China was finally drafting its own version of the Internet
Commerce Act.
Some good news at last
,
David thought. The good
news ended when he looked at the oil stocks. BP was down again because oil was
so damned plentiful.
Thanks a lot, peace in the Middle East
. World-Mart
was up slightly, only ½, but at least it was
up
, and like MGN, you could
always depend on World-Mart for that. Blue chips were expensive but still the
least risky over time.

Still, in the balance he was down today, and though he was reasonably
sure he’d make it back and more tomorrow, losing money never sat well with
David Jackson. Nothing crawled under his skin and itched like the fear of
financial failure. He’d tried to exorcise that demon for years, with no luck.
When the market adjusted every few years, he would drink a little, rant a
little, pull his hair out a little, and finally the line graph would start to
ascend again and he’d pull the money he’d put in one market and invest in
another. He wasn’t a millionaire, but he hadn’t lost his shirt either, and the
promise of wealth tempted him every time.

But on days like today, the old fear of failure reared its
ugly head, like a demon creeping up behind him, tapping him on the shoulder

(too greedy, David, if you’d just gotten out a few hours
ago, just given up a little sooner)

and taunting him with his own failure. And no matter how
many times the market came back or his holdings increased in overall value, the
little demon with the sharp fingernail tapped him on the shoulder every time.

The portfolio auto-calculated his oil earnings, and he ran a
heavy hand through his thinning hair at the apparent loss resulting from the
oil glut. Where was a good jihad when you needed one?

“Daddy?”

David turned away from the bar graphs and his ruminations on
ruin. “
What
?”

Elizabeth started at his tone, thought,
Oh great, I
picked a great time
. “Um—”

“What
is
it Elizabeth? You see I’m reviewing the
stocks, don’t you? You know you’re not supposed to disturb me when I’m doing
that. Don’t you?”

“Um . . . yes, Daddy,” she said, her eyes focused on the
floor.

“Well, now that you’ve done it,
what
?”

“Um . . . I, uh, I just wanted to tell you that the school
monitor—”

“Did he call again? Am I going to find a message from him
telling me that you’re holding up the class again?”

Elizabeth closed her mouth as her heart sank. She had been
so excited to tell him, so full of certainty that he’d call her over to him and
give her a big hug and tell her how proud he was of her and how he’d known all
along she could do it and that if she tried, she could do anything she set her
mind to. That’s how fathers talked to daughters in the 3V stories she’d
experienced. But now she kicked herself inside for picking the wrong time, for
not reading him better or talking to Mom first and finding out his mood. It was
all wasted, all her effort for the day, and the words from the monitor that
would never come again in a million years would fall on deaf, angry ears now. All
because she was an idiot and had chosen the absolute
wrong
time to tell
him.

Stupid, stupid, stupidstupidstupidstupid—

“Well?”

“I-I . . .”

“And now you’re making it worse because you’re paralyzed,
you big baby,”
said her 3V voice, imitating Michael.
“Now he’s mad, and
you’re gonna get it!”

Elizabeth’s eyes began to well up.

“Spit it out, girl!”

“David!” Susan stood in the kitchen doorway. “Elizabeth, go
to your room,” she said evenly, trying not to sound too harsh to her daughter,
but hoping her tone would short-circuit any more fury from her husband. “Go on.
I’ll bring you dinner in a little while.”

Elizabeth turned around quickly and ran back down the
hallway and into her room, sobbing her frustration.

David sighed. “Jesus, Sue, am I going to find another
message from the monitor? Am I going to have to take more drastic steps by
cutting off her—”

“You know, David, if you’d listen instead of talking all the
time, you might find life more pleasant,” said Susan, her voice rising as she
spoke. She didn’t want it to happen, but her emotions took over, and she
slipped into the rut that communication between them had become. “I know
we
would!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Susan walked into the living room as she spoke and it
spilled out of her, a snowball picking up speed as it rolled. “Her monitor
called today all right, but not to tell us how
bad
she was doing. He
called to tell us how much she had improved since yesterday. ‘She must’ve spent
all evening studying yesterday,’ he said. But you didn’t let her get that out,
did you? You assumed she was having trouble again, and when she came to get a
little
encouragement from you, you squashed it! Jesus, David, you’re such a
self-centered bastard!”

She turned back and walked into the kitchen to finish
dinner, leaving her husband to wonder why he was such an ogre for wanting his
daughter to be successful in life.

And that made
him
angry.

“Now wait a minute, don’t you walk away from me . . .”

The evening’s match had begun.

Chapter 6

She’d thrown herself face down on her bed, burying her tears
in the comforting softness. She clenched the pillows in her fists, hurt and
defeated. Elizabeth had tried so hard to please the monitor, and when she’d
achieved the unachievable, she’d just known her father would smile at her for a
change, open his arms to her, tell her how proud he was of her, not yell at
her. How hard was that? How much was that to expect?

Her frustration gave way to anger as she thought about how
hard she’d worked, how long it had taken her to memorize the formulas and apply
them under the monitor’s strict and exhausting makeup exam. He seemed to
conspire against her, to set her up to fail, as if he and her father had an
agreement that the monitor would do everything in his power to obstruct her.
And her mother! What did she do to help? Occasionally Mom would take up her
cause with Dad, try to explain to him what Elizabeth was feeling and how hard
the move had been for all of them, but then she’d knuckle under. Elizabeth knew
the whole thing by heart now.

Often when her mother took up for her to her father, it
inevitably led to a “discussion,” as Mom liked to call it, about how hard it
had been on Elizabeth to leave Houston. Elizabeth labeled that as Stage One.
Stage Two began as her mother’s railings became a lament on how hard it had
been on Susan to move, and how she’d had to give up her job, and how life in
this Podunk town was so boring, and why had she ever let this happen?

Stage Three included Dad’s standard argument about the
security of the smaller town and how much less stressful it was living here (
Ha!
Elizabeth always thought when she heard that). Elizabeth would adjust, he’d
say for the umpteenth time, and if her mom didn’t like it, she could waddle
right out the front door and don’t let it bounce off her fat ass on the way
out. This was when Mom would start crying, which Dad had learned to ignore
while he gathered the latest information from
Web Report
.

The fourth and final stage usually began around nine o’clock
when Susan would rap on Elizabeth’s door with a sandwich or something,
apologizing for not having made a better dinner, and Elizabeth would say,
“That’s okay, Mom,” or anything, really, to get her to leave her alone.
Sometimes after an especially difficult argument, Susan felt the need to stay
and comfort Elizabeth, which only added to her daughter’s disgust at the whole
situation. More and more Elizabeth was finding that the less direct contact she
had with her parents, the better she liked it. Occasionally Elizabeth feigned
sleep so that her mother left the sandwich on her bureau and retreated from the
room without waking her. Then Elizabeth would place a towel along the bottom of
her bedroom door to hide any light escaping from the room into the hallway and
fire up the 3V network, losing herself in the games she loved to play alone.

She started giggling at the absurdity of it all and wiped her
nose and eyes on the pillowcase. Cocking her ear at the closed door, she heard
Stage Two beginning. Elizabeth thought the whole scripted thing even funnier
now that she was laughing—the predictability of it all, history repeating
itself, over and over again. Now she was laughing and crying at the same time at
how stupid her parents were. They read the same old lines from the same old
scene over and over again, and neither’s acting got any better! She buried her
face in the pillow again, this time to keep her parents from hearing her
laughter.

But her amusement quickly tapered off when she heard her
father’s raging voice. How she hated to hear their fighting! It ripped her
apart inside to hear the only two people she really loved being so cruel to one
another.

When they began their bickering, as routine as it was, it
twisted Elizabeth’s stomach into knots. She felt certain she was the cause of
it all and had that suspicion confirmed when the whole thing started over again
as the result of something she’d done. Like today.
Maybe if they just got
divorced
, she had thought a hundred-million times, but no, that thought
filled her with a greater fear and loathing than any argument ever had, and she
felt trapped between what she hated most and what she was most frightened of.

Now Elizabeth was crying again, and she wasn’t sure if it
was from laughter or frustration, because she couldn’t tell the difference
anymore. Her insides fluttered with the giddiness of it, the mixture of heavy
pain and shaking laughter that made her want to throw up. She had found only
one remedy to this, one thing that kept her insides from exploding and the
heartache from bursting open her chest, and that was to put her interactive suit
on, climb in her 3V tank, and lose herself. It was a race now as she jammed her
arms and legs into the Lycra bodysuit and opened the top to the 3V tank. The
suit covered her from head to toe, leaving only her face bare.

The sensory deprivation tank had become popular in the last
decade as a way for the stressed-out to relieve their tense backs. Users
climbed in and lost themselves in the coffin-womb, shutting out their troubles
and floating on a sea of gravity-free endorphins. The tanks soon merged with
interactive gaming, and now they drew people into entirely new realities. After
stepping into the tank and sealing themselves away, they could float away to
Victorian Britain, Ancient Rome, or worlds that had never even existed. The
electrolytic fluid was thick enough to buoy the person up and actually helped
conduct sensory input into the suit. Suspended in the tank, Elizabeth could
experience the sights, smells, sounds, and tactile sensations of 3V space. The
salty wind on the deck of a sailing ship. The peaty odor of horses in a stable.
The cold feel of stone in an old English castle.

But at that sweetest of moments before she entered 3V space,
she could still hear her parents’ voices. Elizabeth climbed into the tank and
lay on her back in the thick but yielding liquid that had the power to
transport her to her favorite fantasy.

(five)

“C-close and connect,” she half whispered to the 3V
controls. Her insides were rolling, but her queasiness was soon soothed by the
familiar feel of the tank’s electrolytic solution. The doors to the outside
world began to close.

(four)

“Where would you like to go today?” asked the too-placating
voice of the Web.

(three)

“What did I ever do to deserve this?” came her mom’s shrill
voice from the living room.

(two)

“G-game Central,” Elizabeth said, more loudly now, knowing
she couldn’t risk a misinterpretation by the Web. If she didn’t get in-game,
and soon, hearing her parents’ voices arguing might just cause her insides to
explode all over her room.

(one)

“. . . and don’t let the goddamned door hit you on the way .
. .”

click

The quiet sound of the overhead doors latching gave her
permission to breathe again. The screen above her flickered to life with a set
of controls. She was now floating in an egg of electronica. Her entire body
began to relax.

“Welcome to Game Central, Elizabeth Jackson. Begin game
where previously ended?”

“God, yes,” said Elizabeth as the soundtrack flooded her
ears from the cocoon around her. Here, in the world of 3V, Elizabeth could give
complete control to her 3V self. Here Elizabeth became another person, reveling
in the freedom of the universe she’d created, forgetting everything outside it.
When she put on the thin, electrode-laced bodysuit that interacted with the Web
through the electrolytic fluid, she entered a reality of her own creation, a
fantasy world she loved more dearly than real life.

The 3-D projectors inside the tank flickered into life,
opening up a green landscape before her—hilly plains slowly rolling to meet the
nearly cloudless blue sky of the horizon. A cool breeze touched her face and
she smiled, smelling the scent of spring grass and the familiar, reassuring
presence of nearby horses.

“Elsbyth!” shouted a man’s voice. He emphasized the first
syllable of the name so it came out
ELZ-bith
.

She turned toward the man, noting the new weight of the
heavy helm on her head.
The suit doesn’t miss a trick
, she thought for
the thousandth time. Whenever her character felt weight, like the helm,
Elizabeth experienced it through the pressurized response of the sensors
embedded in her Lycra suit. As the suit brought the game to life, she shed her
old name like an old skin, becoming Elsbyth, Warrior-Queen of the Kingdom of
Rheanna, who took up sword and shield in defense of her kingdom.

She reined her horse, Caomos, around to find the man. She
settled down into the saddle, feeling the firm leather and wood beneath her,
the broad back of the stallion working between her thighs as he followed her
lead. The shield with the seal of Rheanna emblazoned upon it rested heavily on
her left arm, and her sword and scabbard bob-bobbed at her side as she faced
the captain of the guard riding his own horse toward her, up the slight rise of
a green hill. While Elsbyth waited, she adjusted to the weight of her armor and
the sudden but delightful giddiness of sitting six feet off the ground.

She looked past the approaching captain to the open plain
beneath her, the Land of Rheanna. The hill swept down from her position into
the open valley below, with nary a shrub to see till the gray trees of the Stone
Forest to the northwest. But here the deep green valley of her home, the
Kingdom of Rheanna, stretched from rolling hill to rolling hill. To the east flowed
the River Adruwyn, the life’s blood of the land running north and south. To the
west lay the smaller River Faud, a tributary of Adruwyn that fed the trees of
the Stone Forest and split the Kingdom of Rheanna in two. It was in the
Y
of the cradle formed by these
rivers that she hoped to stop the overwhelming evil flooding from the dreaded
kingdom to the south.

“My Queen!” said the captain as he reined his horse in. “The
enemy comes! The Dark Army has secured Caer Adwaer, moved through Higher
Plains, and is crossing in force over the Faud.”

“Then our plan has worked perfectly,” said Elsbyth, smiling
at her captain.

For his part, Captain Moralir looked dubious. A force of
50,000 Orcs and Goblins, with their war machines and evil magicks, bore down
upon them to plow the way for the coming of the Dark King himself, the timeless
Mallus. And all that stood to oppose them—and on an open plain, no less, with
no battlements to shelter them—were 10,000 Horse Companions of Rheanna under
their determined Warrior-Queen, Elsbyth.

Though in a previous chapter of this adventure she had once
renounced the ways of the warrior, when Mallus slew her beloved, the mighty
Ulaemeth, Elsbyth had picked up his sword from the funeral barge before it
floated down the Adruwyn and pledged to cleave the head from the shoulders of
his murderer. Elsbyth had defeated Mallus’s forces once before when she had
rallied her countrymen after Ulaemeth’s defeat at Caer Adwaer, where he had
died in a valiant defense of the old keep against the Dark King’s swarm. Now Elsbyth,
longing for revenge upon the enemy, would lead the Horse Companions of Rheanna
against Mallus’s army once again.

And her plan had led them all to this moment. She hoped that
the open plain would give her cavalry the advantage over the slower-moving Orcs
and Goblins, who were on foot. Once they completely crossed over the river, she
hoped to trap them against the arms of the Adruwyn and Faud and ride them down,
defeating Mallus once and for all. Yet still the Dark King practiced his Black
Arts. All the Companions of Rheanna had was courage and—

“Elsbyth,” said the captain more urgently now, “they
come
!
See their advanced scouts? They will be here in force within half a league!”

Elsbyth turned to the captain and drew her beloved’s sword.
“Then that is where we shall meet them. Hah!” She kicked her heels into her
horse’s flanks and rode toward her 10,000 riders, made up of both men and
women. Though the King’s Council, now answering to their widowed queen, had at
first balked at the idea, Elsbyth had recruited the women of Rheanna to ride
beside their men. Else a mere 4,000 horse would be here to meet the enemy
today. She looked now upon those who would follow her to death or victory and
saw the courage in their eyes, how they sat upon their steeds with pride, and
how each would perish before yielding another inch of Rheanna to Mallus. As she
rode in and out of their ranks, her captain of horse struggled to keep up,
raising cheers in her name in the memory of all the Warrior-Kings of Rheanna.
Elsbyth panted with the glory of the moment, all thoughts of parents and
failure and fear gone, forced out by the honor and bravery of her Horse
Companions and the nobility of their cause. As she returned to the low hill
that looked over the plain where they would fight their final battle against
the Dark King, she wheeled her mount around. Caomos reared up.

With Ulaemeth’s sword in the air and the cheers of her
Companions in her ears, Elsbyth
knew
this day would be hers. Mallus
would be swept from the land, never to inject its lush, thriving life with his
disease ever again. With this battle, Elsbyth, the Warrior-Queen of Rheanna and
Widow of Ulaemeth the King, would bulwark the tide of evil that cancered its
way across Rheanna, ensuring the tranquility of future generations, who would
never know the cold loneliness of oppression.

The wind alerted them to the enemy before they showed
themselves. It carried the rancid, flea-infested smell of sweat from days on
the running march. The first of the creatures came over a low hill two slopes
to the south. Running at a loping pace, the lead Orcs spotted her and howled to
alert their fellows the enemy was near. But for the moment all they could see
was Elsbyth and her captain.