Terrarium (29 page)

They rode the current in silence. By and by a small stream entered the Willamette from the east. That would be the Clackamas. The snow-scarred peak of Mt. Hood reared up farther to the east. Sunlight dazzled on its frozen slopes. She had seen the mountain often on repair missions, yet each time it seemed to loom up fresh from the underworld, uncannily majestic and remote.

Mind the snags, Teeg thought. She gave her attention back to the river. Noticing Phoenix's profile, she realized that he had been turned sideways in the raft for an hour or more, contemplating Mt. Hood, with the worshipful look he had shown when contemplating Zuni on her sickbed.

He startled her by speaking. “What do you suppose that noise is?”

At first she heard nothing unusual. Then gradually she distinguished above the river sounds a harsh croaking, like the gasping of some enormous beast. She remembered the deer, with its ears pricked forward, listening. What waited?

Whatever
was groaning apparently did not feel much need of breathing. Phoenix calculated it was likelier to be a machine than a beast, for what beast could bellow so mournfully without pausing to inhale? Still, in the wilds you could never be sure. Mutants cropped up all the time. Who knew what roomy lungs some of them might have? Maybe he should put on his antlers and go frighten the thing into silence. Nothing like a fierce pair of horns to stiffen the old backbone.

“It's getting louder,” he observed, twisting round to glance at Teeg. Her haggard look unsettled him. What if it
was
a beast? “Maybe we should pull over?”

“It's probably just a drone they put in to scare people off the river.”

“What people?”

“Anybody. Us, for example.”

“Well,” he admitted, “I think it's done a pretty good job on me.” His playfulness did not erase the pinched look from her face.

According to the map that lay crumpled over his knees, they were passing through the suburbs of Portland now. But there was nothing remarkable on the shore, except some queer mounds of brush and saplings. Did they cover the ruins of buildings? Where the first bridge was supposed to be, crumbling cement piers thrust up from the river. Grass and brush had rooted on the crowns, where electric shuttles used to run. How odd, to have lived in a city that was open to the sky, with plants actually growing in the yards.

The groaning swelled louder, breathless, a voice brimming over with anguish. Merely a contrivance to scare us, he reassured himself. Meanwhile on both shores appeared the fractured skeletons of what must have been wooden houses. Beams and cross-members, some joining at right angles and some tilting dizzily, formed a latticework through which ivy curled. Ferns rooted on every flat perch of wood. Moss furred the rotting timbers in green. These house jungles were interrupted occasionally by areas of stony desolation, heaps of slag where no hint of green showed.

“This is pretty close to downtown,” Teeg said. She had to raise her voice, because of the interminable moaning.

With a nudge on the tiller she guided the raft to the left of two islands. These must have been dumps, for they were cratered and barren. Chunks of what might have been pavement, maybe a river promenade, were visible through weeds on the western bank. Beyond, the shells of a few brick buildings stood roofless, disintegrating. Vines and ferns spilled forth at every window opening. Farther west the ground of the city rose over a series of knobby hills toward a heavily forested ridge. Phoenix imagined he caught a flash of light from there, a fiery wink. What? Probably sun on newly cloven rock.

“What's up there?” he asked Teeg, pointing at the ridge.

He had to ask the question a second time to get her attention, and even then she spoke haltingly. “Used to be Washington Park. Rose gardens … disney … observatory …
Japanese gardens. All the bluebloods and moneybags lived there.”

With another sway of the tiller she guided the raft into a side-channel. Immediately the groaning sounded closer.

“You have any plans for what happens when we—you know—meet this thing?” asked Phoenix.

“What?”

“I said, the better I hear this thing, the worse I like it.”

She seemed to find it hard to focus on him. “Oh,” she said absently, “didn't I tell you it must be some kind of wooden gears?”

“No, you didn't mention that.” He had lost her attention again. Her eyes searched the banks, yet they seemed not quite to fix on anything outwardly.

Wooden gears? A piece of tree could sound so much like a beast in pain? Suddenly he noticed a gigantic thrashing movement on the western bank—a humpbacked creature—and Teeg aimed the raft straight for it, and the beast swelled up enormously and Phoenix was just deciding which point of the raft to dive from when the huge back curved neatly round into a wheel, a wooden paddle-wheel, spinning lazily in the current.

“You see, it's a water mill,” Teeg announced.

Phoenix examined it with heart thumping. The great wooden wheel, perhaps twice as high as a man, stood upright, its lower paddles in the water, pivoting on an axle that jutted from a shed. The shed was also wooden, bleached and paintless, in excellent repair. It had been neatly carpentered from boards of varying grain and thickness. The nerve-grating howls issued from inside.

Kneeling on her rucksack, with arms braced against the sides to balance the raft, Teeg studied the shore intently. Her hair was drawn back tightly and knotted behind, a splash of red, making her face seem more naked, vulnerable. It was the face of a sleepwalker. Only the eyes moved.

The raft's blue lip soon bumped the shore just upstream from the mill. While Phoenix tied the lead rope, Teeg leapt
ashore and hastened toward the groaning shed. He clambered after, staggering in the tipsy raft, then landing, to his astonishment, on a brick terrace. He stared down in amazement at the meticulous patterns, spirals in the middle with zigzags and stars worked in round the edges. Each brick was outlined brilliantly in moss.

Meanwhile, at the far end of the terrace, Teeg had flung open the door of the shed, and there she stood in the black rectangular opening. “Anyone here?” she yelled above the croaking of the mill. She vanished inside, swallowed whole.

Phoenix ran, but by the time he reached the doorway she had already emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. “A few bins full of grain, shovels, a broom,” she hollered. “Nothing else.”

Through the open door he could see wooden cogs meshing, axles spinning, two great round slabs of stone grinding against one another. The noise was deafening. “Who … how'd it get here?”

Without answering she prowled away over the bricks. He trotted after. “I mean, it couldn't have lasted all this time!” he shouted. She kept on toward the green mass of vegetation that crowded to the edge of the terrace. He caught up with her and jogged alongside, trying to discover what she had in mind. Just when it seemed they were about to run smack into the tangled thicket, a walkway opened, paved in bricks, broad enough for two people to march abreast. Phoenix drew up short but Teeg darted into the opening and in a moment was gone.

“Teeg! Teeg, wait!” He took a few hesitant steps forward. “The raft! The gear!” Dense bushes pressed in from each side, forming walls higher than his head. He advanced a few more paces. Still no sign of her. “You don't even know where this thing leads!” In places the thicket arched completely over the path. He faltered to a stop. The pressure of vegetation was too much.

He backed onto the terrace and sat gloomily down. She
was always scooting off somewhere, no explanation, just a cloud of dust and come-if-you-dare, Phoenix! Well, he wasn't crawling into that jungle for anything, brick walk or no brick walk. He would just stay here and wait. Camp alone if he had to.

Thinking that, he crossed over to the raft and lugged the rucksacks onto the terrace. The mill groaned on and on, setting his teeth on edge. First he sat with his back toward the chaotic forest, trying to put himself in a contemplative mood by gazing across the river at Mt. Hood. But he kept reflecting that some beast might slouch toward him from the rear and he would never be able to hear it above the infernal din of the water wheel. So he spun around and faced the vegetation. But then who knew what slimy beast might fling a tentacle out of the river?

After more than an hour of facing first one way then the other, and still no sign of Teeg, he decided this was ridiculous. Do something. He managed to deflate the raft and squeeze it into its bag without once getting entangled. Now what? The wooden gears shrieked monotonously.

Better the jungle, for the sake of Teeg and quiet, than all night beside this screeching mill. Shouldering his own rucksack, Phoenix wrapped his arms around Teeg's pack and hugged the weight against his chest. He staggered a few paces along the path, and then, discovering his balance, plodded heavily onward between the walls of vegetation. Padded front and rear with rucksacks, he felt less vulnerable. Whatever tried to make a sandwich of him would have to open its jaws very wide.

Someone evidently kept the path open, for the bushes on each side were trimmed evenly, and where the branches arched overhead they were pruned into a smooth vault. He supposed that was reassuring, a token of human control, although he would have appreciated knowing who the pruner was.

Following the twists and turns of the brick path, occasionally sitting down to rest, he soon lost all sense of
direction. Where was the river? The sun was obscured by clouds, so it was no help. His legs told him the trail had been climbing steadily. As he pressed onward, arms aching from the weight of Teeg's pack, the shrieking of the mill-gears dwindled beyond hearing. In the stillness, the jungle seemed less threatening—less, in fact, like a jungle and more like a garden. He noticed that some of the bushes were hung with pinkish, bell-shaped blossoms, lovely. Here and there above the canopy of shrubs he spied the brick shells of what might once have been offices or stores, and then as the path kept rising he spied the moss-covered bones of houses.

Eventually the thickets gave out and he found himself on the edge of a meadow. Dazzled by the open space he dropped Teeg's rucksack and stood there panting. The grass beside the brick path was cropped short, and he quickly spied the reason—sheep. They were grazing on a hillock not thirty paces away from him. Sheep were harmless, weren't they? Was it the wolf in sheep's clothing or sheep in wolf's clothing you were supposed to avoid? He seemed to remember his father once calling a cowardly person sheepish. Or was it chickenish? Goatish? He felt certain they were timid beasts, yet he edged by them sideways along the path, taking no chances. They did not pause in their snuffling and munching to so much as glance at him.

The walk rollercoastered over the pasture, following the contours of the land, rising steadily. When he topped the first hillock he turned back around to get his bearings. Far below, the river dragged its dark length through the forest, past the desolate islands of downtown Portland. Much farther away to the east rose the snowy cone of Mt. Hood. Phoenix calculated he must be standing on the ridge where he had glimpsed a flash of light, the place Teeg called Washington Park.

Where the devil
was
she? He crept along, under the combined weight of the rucksacks. The walkway dipped again, skirted a heap of gray rectangular stones, then climbed another hillock. From there he could see the
pasture's farthest edge, where the land seemed to fold steeply upward, and on the highest point, looking tiny against the sky, was a house.

Even from this distance he could tell it was unlike anything he had ever seen before outside a history park. Smoke trickled from a chimney. As he drew nearer, hurrying now, he could see a banistered porch encircling the ground floor. On top of that squatted two more floors, like layers on a cake, each one encrusted with windows and balconies, and atop it all was a pointy-roofed tower resembling the lookouts on ancient ships.

Was it a monument? A museum? A bit of pre-Enclosure gimcrackery preserved for showing schoolchildren the foolishness of old ways? He had never heard of such a thing. But then, since meeting Teeg, he had stumbled onto a good many things he would never have dreamed of beforehand.

The brick walk led him beyond the pasture, through a labyrinth of hedges, the house disappearing at each turn and then reappearing again, larger and less probable. The path crossed a stream over a high-arching wooden bridge, wound through some thorny bushes that bore fragrant blossoms of red and pink and white. Were these the roses Teeg had spoken of? Suddenly he emerged from the labyrinth of flowering bushes and there was the house. He leaned back to get a full view of the bizarre structure. Like the shed down by the river, it had been neatly carpentered of bleached wood, yet the materials for it seemed to have come from a dozen different houses. No two windows were the same size, the spindles in the banisters differed wildly in shape, the roofing tiles came in all shades of yellow and red. It was the sort of house an inventive child who owned too many construction sets might have built.

There were no signs anywhere to explain this apparition. No loudspeakers. He crept forward, peeking around the edges of Teeg's rucksack, afraid to call out. He was nearly to the steps when he noticed two figures sitting motionless
in the shadows of the porch. One of them stood up, silvery, and the familiar voice filled him with joy.

“So you've come,” Teeg said listlessly. Her face seemed blank and her voice was drained of all feeling, as if she were in shock. What was the matter? “Mother, this is Phoenix Marshall,” she said, and then, waving her arm toward the seated figure, “Phoenix, this is my mother, Judith Passio.”

The other woman rose, swaybacked and gaunt, her face hooded beneath a bonnet, a somber dress cloaking her from neck to ankles. In his confusion, Phoenix dropped Teeg's rucksack. As the spectral woman stepped to the edge of the porch the rocking chair she had abandoned continued its motion. Even shadowed by the bonnet, her face revealed a great effort of restraint. Obeying the ancient rule of politeness which Teeg had taught him, Phoenix bowed slightly and reached one hand clumsily toward her. The woman pulled back, thrust both hands behind her, and announced with an unplaceable accent, “Don't touch me with your city filth.”