Strangewood (42 page)

"He's Our Boy's son. And Thomas may have left us all
behind, but that doesn't mean he stopped loving us, Feather. It just means that
he had to live. He had to be what he was meant to be, had to be this boy's
father. I've seen more of the world out there than you have. It isn't easy. Thomas
didn't turn his back on us because he wanted to. It's just life, that's all. And
for that, we're going to kill his only child?"

Feathertop's hooves clacked hollowly on the stone as he
shifted from side to side. He looked down at Nathan, whose eyes suddenly
fluttered open. The boy was sickly, and he stank of illness and worse. But he
was just a boy.

"Feathertop?" Nathan asked.

"Thomas could make this place paradise if he
wanted," Feathertop said, sounding suddenly unsure.

Grumbler let his arms relax a little. The barrels of his
weapons lowered a bit. He tilted his head to one side and gazed imploringly
into the pony's eyes.

"It's already paradise, you idiot," he said
lovingly. "Or it was until old Jack started burning and killing."

"Things were dying, changing, already. And that was
just neglect on Our Boy's part," Feathertop said angrily, though he would
not look at Nathan any longer. Not even when the boy said his name again,
weakly.

"Things die," Grumbler said. "Things change. That
was the way it always was until Thomas came and started to dream us all, to
wish us all. If it happens again, that can't be his fault.

"I don't want to die, Feather," said the dwarf. "But
I can't let Nathan die. I can't let the Lantern have him."

"It's the only way," Feathertop said. "The
only way to control Thomas. If you want to stop me from taking him, you'll have
to kill me."

Feathertop charged. Grumbler was shocked for a heartbeat,
and then his face was contorted with sorrow. He whipped the Colts up to where they
were level with Feathertop's chest.

Then he fired.

The pony died. Grumbler wept over his corpse. Nathan was
crying as well, and it was his coughing, his sniffing and wailing, that got
Grumbler moving again.

He put the guns away and had just bent to pick up the boy
when he heard the voice.

"I do value loyalty you know, dwarf," growled the
Jackal Lantern.

Grumbler's head snapped up and he stared in fear at the
approaching beast. In the shadow of his fortress, the Jackal Lantern looked
especially haunting, candlelight illuminating the inside of his pumpkin skull. Grumbler
could see through one eye and right out the back.

He could see through that hole that the remaining Forest
Rangers were coming round the back of the castle and moving toward them. And
beneath their branches, in the shade they provided, the Peanut Butter General
ran, knees pumping, sword waving in his hand.

"Strangely," old Jack whispered. "I also
value disloyalty. There's a lesson in it, don't you think? A lesson to the one
who has been betrayed, and later, a lesson to others who might betray him. At
least, if the traitor is dealt with right away. I'm going to make an example of
you, traitor," said the Lantern as he closed in on Grumbler.

The dwarf stood in front of the boy. In the distance, the
General was closing in. Grumbler reached under his arms and drew his guns just
as the Lantern leaped toward him. He managed to get one clear of its holster
and to fire, but the bullet only creased the pumpkin head, and then the Lantern
was on him. Together they tumbled to the ground. Grumbler hit his head, hard,
and was momentarily disoriented.

Old Jack slashed at his face, and Grumbler began to bleed.

Bleeding pissed Grumbler off to no end.

He brought a knee up into the Jackal Lantern's groin, with every
ounce of strength he could muster. Old Jack let out a gasp of air and Grumbler
threw him off. The Lantern rolled on the ground, not far from the gun Grumbler
had been able to draw and then lost his grip on.

The other was still in its holster, and he drew it now. He
fired, just once, and missed. The Jackal Lantern was still moving, keeping his
distance now, afraid of the gun.

By its weight, Grumbler knew it was empty. And at the moment
of recognition, he saw the light blaze in old Jack's eyes. For the Lantern had
seen that realization in the dwarf's face.

"Shoot me," old Jack said happily.

He began once more to close in. To stalk them.

Empty gun trained on the Lantern, Grumbler stooped to grab
Nathan. With one powerful effort, he lifted the boy up onto his shoulder again
and felt the scratches in his face pull, opening even deeper.

"Shoot me," the Lantern said again. "Or I'll
have to kill both of you."

Then the pumpkin eyes went wide, and they both could hear
the rumbling of the approaching trees.

Grumbler smiled.

The Jackal Lantern laughed. "Honestly," he said. "You
think those aging Rangers are going to get here in time to be of any help to
you."

"They're not alone," said the dwarf.

For a moment, the Jackal Lantern hesitated. Then he turned
toward the sound of the charging Rangers to see the Peanut Butter General
bearing down on him, sword raised high.

The moment old Jack's back was turned, Grumbler bolted
toward the Up-River.

With a snarl, the Jackal Lantern leaped at Thomas. Peanut
butter pulled back from the sword like a sheath as he brought the blade to
bear. One of the Lantern's claws raked his shoulder, but Thomas lopped the
other off halfway up the leg. Blood spurted and old Jack wailed as he tumbled
to the ground.

He whimpered, climbing first to three legs, then getting up
on his haunches to walk on two once more. He held the truncated limb close to
his torso, and he glared at Thomas, growling. Inside his pumpkin head, the
candlelight flickered.

"There's no place for you here now," Thomas told
him, his voice sticky with the peanut butter that coated the inside of his
throat.

With a pained snort of amusement, the Lantern winced, a half
smile on his horrid face. "You've destroyed it for me," he said. "You
gave it rules. Good will triumph and evil must fail. That isn't life. That's
mythology."

The candle in the Lantern's head flickered again and began
to burn down. It grew dim inside his head now, in the shadow cast by his great
fortress.

Wax leaked from his eyes and mouth.

"It's all a story, Jack," Thomas said coldly. "Mine.
Yours. It doesn't matter. There's only one rule, that it comes from the heart. You
never understood that."

Wax dribbling down his chin, the Lantern mumbled,
"you're King of the Wood now."

"No," Thomas said, "that title belongs to another."

Heart heavy with sorrow, Thomas Randall, the Peanut Butter
General, brought his sword down quickly, splitting old Jack's pumpkin head
right in half, cleaving the candle in two, extinguishing the flame.

The two sides of the rotten pumpkin dropped away, and the
headless jackal's corpse crumbled to the ground.

As the Forest Rangers finally reached him, Thomas turned his
back on them. He stared across the rocky plateau toward the Up-River. He caught
sight of Grumbler, Nathan held in his arms, just before the dwarf jumped into
the rushing water.

"Grumbler wait!" he cried.

He began to run in a diagonal course, trying to keep up with
the flow of the river. At the edge of the Up-River, he picked up speed. Thomas
called his son's name over and over again. Finally, Grumbler's head bobbed up
and his eyes locked on Thomas's.

Grumbler waved. And then, holding Nathan in his arms, the
dwarf went over the falls. Thomas stopped abruptly at the cliff, and stared
down into the water tumbling off into the Misty Nothing below.

They will be all right, he knew. Beyond that mist, whatever
part of Nathan had been trapped here in Strangewood would find its way home. It
was only that Thomas had wanted to say good-bye.

He stared down into the mist and wept.

* * * * *

Emily was crying silently as she stroked Nathan's hair. His
father had just died — the orderlies had carted his body out on a gurney
— and Nathan didn't even know. Couldn't know.

There was a numb place in her heart where grief was
beginning, for she had always loved Thomas, no matter what had happened between
them.

But the grief would have to wait. It was overshadowed by the
fear that what happened to Thomas would happen to Nathan. Her ex-husband had
experienced massive heart failure, and the doctors had no explanation. None. No
reason.

So she sat and she stroked her son's hair and his beautiful
face and she whispered to him that he should come back to her.

And then he did.

Nathan Randall began to murmur to himself. His hands moved
slowly to his eyes and pulled away the tape that had been used to keep them
closed.

"Oh, God, Nathan!" Emily cried, loud enough for
the nurse at the station out in the corridor to hear.

Her baby boy opened those ice-blue Paul Newman eyes and
looked at her with grave concern.

"Mommy, why are you crying?" Nathan asked
innocently.

Emily could not answer. She could only hold him, rock him
back and forth, and whisper countless thanks to whomever had answered her
prayers.

One morning, several weeks after Thomas Randall's funeral,
Nathan woke up very happy. It was the day his mother was going to sign the
contract for
Adventures in Strangewood
to become a live-action film. But
Nathan wasn't quite six years old yet, and he didn't know that. It was a happy
day, of sorts, a bittersweet day for the family. But he didn't know that,
either.

Still, he was smiling quite broadly when he came into the
kitchen in his Batman pajamas and gave his mother as tight a hug as he could
manage. He was still getting his strength back, but Emily smiled at the fervor
in that embrace.

"How you doing, buddy?" she asked Nathan. "How'd
you sleep?"

"Great," Nathan replied, sitting down in his usual
chair as Emily poured him a bowl of Apple Jacks.

Then he said, "I had a dream about Daddy."

Emily blinked. Ice began to form on her heart. She put her
hand on the back of Nathan's head and crouched beside him.

"You miss him, don't you, baby?" she asked. "It's
okay. Mommy misses him too. But he'll be watching out for us. I know he
will."

"Sure he will," Nathan said happily, through a
mouthful of milk-moistened cereal. "He said he would."

Emily's hand stopped its slow movement across Nathan's head.

"What else did he say?" she asked.

"He said that I could dream him any time I wanted to. That
I could come to Strangewood, and I could help him make it better," Nathan
said happily. "And he told me that, maybe when I was bigger, and he was
stronger, he'd come to see us if he could."

A chill ran through her, and Emily pulled Nathan into
another tight embrace. She was annoying him with her attention and he tried to
squirm away, to get back to the business of breakfast. She wouldn't let him go.

She didn't completely believe it. She didn't understand it
at all. And it frightened her, even though it had made her son so happy. It
gave him back his father, in a way she could only begin to imagine.

It existed.

There was such a thing as magic.

Outside the Randall house, a dwarf in a pinstriped suit took
one last look, smiled to himself, and began walking down the road, heading for
Broadway.

He'd hitch a ride, if he could, or he'd end up walking all
the way down to Manhattan. He knew a store in Greenwich Village where he could
buy a felt fedora in the perfect shade of green.

###

Dark Fantasy is a term that gets bandied about far too
frequently these days. Every writer afraid of being stigmatized by association
with the dreaded word “horror,” every hack genre editor with literary
pretensions and delusions of grandeur, every reviewer searching for another
synonym for supernatural fiction seems to trot out that overused phrase and
shove it in our faces.

But Christopher Golden really
does
write Dark
Fantasy, and
Strangewood
is a prime example of how well he does it.

At a time when religious wackos are up in arms about the
magic in Harry Potter books (what’s next? Will they want to ban
The Wizard
of Oz
because it features a Good Witch of the North? Or
Cinderella
because there’s a fairy godmother?),
Strangewood
is a breath of fresh
air, a terrific novel about a not-so-benign fantasy world that is far more real
than anyone suspects.

As Pablo Picasso proved early in his career, you have to
know the rules of art in order to break them, and Golden has not only mastered
the form and substance of the adult fantasy novel, is not merely conversant
with the rather rigid tropes of that particular genre, but also, and more
impressively, he understands the specific dynamics and requirements of the
children’s story.

He’s not afraid to throw a little horror into the mix as
well.

It’s an exhilarating literary amalgam, made all the more so
by the skill with which these elements are tied together. Golden is not merely
a good
horror
writer or a good
fantasy
writer. He’s a good writer
period. And in
Strangewood
, he utilizes the well-known conventions of
different genres to concoct a tale that is unique, exciting, scary, and
surprisingly moving.

The novel alternates between our reality and the fantastic
Strangewood, and while the real world scenes have the potential to bog down
with the redundancy of endless hospital vigils, they never do, primarily
because Golden has crafted characters who, even in static situations, have an
emotional complexity that keeps us interested and carries us through. The
intrusion of this fantasy realm mirrors the problems in the lives of the
protagonists, reflecting their inner turmoil, and Golden knows how to utilize
the metaphoric possibilities of the situation without turning the story into an
academic exercise.