Wonders of the Invisible World (13 page)

“It’s all we know of them,” Wilding said. “All we can ever know. Emma is gone.”

“Emma—”

There was a sudden roil in the placid surface of the lake in front of them. Water streamed upward, splashed everywhere. Some said later they glimpsed in the bright jets raining back into the lake, a mane as white as spume, a spindrift tail, hooves like opalescent shell, eyes blacker than the nothing between stars. All anyone saw for certain as the strange eddy calmed, was someone swimming away from it toward the shore.

Ned, waist deep in the water, knew then that a heart could break with joy as well as grief, and twice in the same day.

He dove into the water and swam to meet her.

Later, they curled together under blankets on a sofa beside the great hearth, their wet heads close, their hands clasped. The group had sat around them mutely listening to Emma tell her tale. Then, in the face of such intimacy, the gathering broke up to marvel with one another, to eat and drink, to wander off and stare at the surface of the quiet lake, or up the hillside to gaze at the ancient stones. Then they strayed back to marvel again at Emma and ask for the tale again.

Adrian finally asked the obvious. “Are you planning to marry my sister, Mr. Bonham, or merely trifle with her affections?” They laughed at him. He reached out, his eyes widening with remembered pain and wonder, and lightly touched Emma’s drying hair. “No one,” he breathed, “will believe this. I still don’t.”

“No,” Emma said. “They won’t. But now I have a use for Mr. Wilding.”

Wilding, who had been hovering at the door, unable to come in or go away, asked her hesitantly, “What is that?”

She gestured to him; he came to the fire, held out his hands to it. He hadn’t changed his clothes, Ned saw; water moss and mud and bits of lake grass clung to his damp suit. Emma regarded him thoughtfully, without a trace of trouble in her eyes.

“I have bargained for my life with the king of the lake and won. Surely I can do the same with you.”

“You don’t have to,” he answered painfully. “I won’t ask you to pose again.”

“But I will,” she said. “And in return, I want you to pose for me.”

He was silent, not in protest, Ned saw, but perplexed. He inclined his head. “Yes, of course. Anything. But—as what? A very great fool?”

“No. As the king of the lake. He looked exactly like you,” she sighed. “It wasn’t funny,” she told Adrian, who had loosed a bark of laughter. “It was, in fact, extremely annoying to think that Mr. Wilding’s might be the last face I saw in my life.”

“I’m sure it was,” Wilding said ruefully.

“And I’ll paint the kelpie beside you: that’s another face I’ll never forget for as long as I live. I intend to hang you, Mr. Wilding, in the women’s exhibit.” She turned to Ned then, as though she felt his pang of uncertainty, his resignation: never the hero, always the squire, the spear-bearer. She took his hands, held them very tightly. “You will be in it, too,” she told him softly. “The man on the lake shore waiting beyond hope. The one to whom I will always find my way back.”

He smiled, stroking her damp mermaid’s hair, and wondered briefly how many worlds she might chance into, how often he might have to wait in terror and wonder at the edge of the unknown. But it would not matter, he decided. As long as she wanted, he would be there waiting.

H
unter’s
M
oon

They were lost. There was no other word for it. Dawn, trudging glumly through the interminable trees, tried to think of a word that wasn’t so definite, that might have an out. Ewan had been quiet for some time. He had stopped kicking over rocks to find creepy-crawlies and shaking hard little apples out of gnarly branches onto his head and yelling at her to comelookathis! Now he just walked, his head ducked between his shoulders, both hands stuffed into his pockets. He was trying not to reach for her hand, Dawn knew, trying not to admit he was afraid.

Lost. Misplaced. Missing. Gone astray. They were in that peculiar place where lost things went, the one people meant when they said, “Where in the world did I put that?” She was stuck with her baby brother in that world. It was gray with twilight, hilly and full of trees, and they seemed to be the only people in it. The leaves had begun to fall. Ewan had stopped doing that, too: shuffling through piles of them, throwing up crackling clouds of red and gold and brown. Dawn huffed a sigh, knowing that he expected her to rescue them. She hadn’t wanted to take him with her in the first place. She had followed him aimlessly through the afternoon while he ran from one excitement to the next, splashing across streams and chasing squirrels. Now he was tired and dirty and hungry, and it was up to her to find their way home.

Trouble was, home wasn’t even home. Here in these strange mountains, which weren’t green, but high, rounded mounds of orange and yellow and silver, where rutted dirt roads ran everywhere and never seemed to get anywhere, and nobody seemed to use them anyway, she didn’t know how to explain where Uncle Ridley’s cabin was even if they did stumble across anyone to ask. It wasn’t like this in the city. In the city there were street signs and phones and people everywhere. And lights everywhere, too: in the city not even night was dark.

A bramble came out of nowhere, hooked her jeans. She pulled free irritably. Something fell on her head, a sharp little thump, as though a tree had thrown a pebble at her.

“Ow!” She rubbed her head violently. Ewan looked at her and then at the ground. He took one hand out of his pocket and picked a small round thing out of the leaves.

“It’s a nut.” He looked up at her hopefully. “I’m starving.”

She took it hastily. “Don’t you dare.”

“Why not? Eating nuts never hurt me.”

“That’s because you never ate the poisoned ones.”

She threw it as hard as she could into some bushes. The bushes shook suddenly, flurried and thrumming with some kind of bizarre inner life. Dawn froze. A bird shot up out of the leaves, battering at the air with stubby wings. It was large and gray, with long, ungainly legs. It fell back to the ground and stalked nervously away, the weirdest bird that Dawn had ever seen.

“What is that?” Ewan whispered. He was tugging at her sweater, trying to crawl under it to hide.

“I don’t know.” Then she knew: she had seen that same bird on one of Uncle Ridley’s bottles. “It’s a turkey,” she said, wonderingly. “Wild turkey.”

“Where’s its tail?” Ewan asked suspiciously; he was still young enough to color paper turkeys at school for window decorations at Thanksgiving.

“I guess the Pilgrims ate all the ones with tails.” She twitched away from him. “Stop pulling at me. You’re such a baby.”

He let go of her, shoved his hands back into his pockets, walking beside her again in dignified silence. She sighed again, noiselessly. She was older by six years. She had held him on her lap and fed him, and helped him learn to read, and reamed into bullies with her backpack when they had him cornered in the schoolyard. But now that she had grown up, he still kept following her, wanting to be with her, though even he could see that she was too old, she didn’t want her baby brother hanging around her reminding her that once she too had been small, noisy, helpless, and boring. She kicked idly at a fallen log; bark crumbled and fell. She had wanted a walk in the woods to get out of the cabin, away from Uncle Ridley’s endless fish stories and her father trying to tie those little feathery things with hooks that looked like anything but flies. But she couldn’t just be by herself, walking down a road to see where it went. Ewan had to come with her, filling the afternoon with his chattering, and leading them both astray.

“I’m so hungry,” Ewan muttered, the first words he had spoken in some time. “I could eat Bambi.”

“Bambi” was what their mother said their father had come to the mountains to hunt with his brother, who had run away from civilization to grow a bush on his chin and live like a wild man. Uncle Ridley had racks of guns on his cabin walls, and a stuffed moose head he had shot “up north.” Painted wooden ducks swam across the stone mantelpiece above his fireplace. The room Ewan and their father shared was cluttered with tackle boxes, fishing poles, feathered hooks, reels, knives, handmade bows and arrows. Dawn slept on the couch in the front room underneath the weary, distant stare of the moose. Once, when she had watched the fire burn down late at night, an exploding ember had sparked a reflection of flame in the deep eyes, as though the animal had suddenly remembered life before Uncle Ridley had crossed his path.

A root tripped her; she came down hard on a step, caught her balance.

She stopped a moment, looking desperately around for something familiar. There was a farmhouse on the slope of the next hill, a tiny white cube at the edge of a stamp-sized green field. Bright trees at the edges of the field were blurring together, their colors fading in the dusk. The world was beginning to disappear. Dawn’s nose was cold; so were her hands. She wore only jeans and her pale blue beaded sweater. The jeans were too tight to slide her fingers into her pockets, and her mother had been right about the sweater. Ridiculous, she had said, in the country, where there was no one to see her in it, and useless against the autumn chill.

“I think we’re close,” she told Ewan, who was old enough to know when she was lying, but sometimes young enough to believe her anyway.

“It’s getting dark.”

“Your point being?”

“Things come out in the dark, don’t they? In the forests? Things with teeth? They get hungry, too.”

“Only in movies,” she answered recklessly. “If you see it in a movie, it isn’t real.”

He wasn’t young enough to buy that. “What about elephants?” he demanded. “Elephants are real.”

“How do you know?”

“And orcas—I saw one in the aquarium. And bats—”

“Oh, stop arguing,” she snapped crossly. “Nothing in these woods is going to come out in the dark and eat you, so—”

He grabbed for her at the same time she grabbed for him at the sudden, high-pitched scream of terror that came from the depth of the wood. They clung together a moment, babbling.

“What was that?”

“What was that?”

“Somebody’s getting eaten. I told you they come out now, I told you—”

“Who comes out?”

“Werewolves and vampires and witches—” Ewan dived against her with a gasp as something big crunched across the leaves toward them. Dawn, her hands icy, hugged him close and searched wildly around her for witches.

Someone said, “Owl.”

She couldn’t see him. She spun, dragging Ewan with her. A tree must have spoken. Or that bush with all the little berries on it. She turned again frantically. Maybe he was up a tree—

No. He was just there, standing at the edge of shadow under an immense tree with a tangle of branches and one leaf left to fall. He seemed to hover under the safety of the tree like the deer they had seen earlier: curious but wary, motionless, tensed to run, their alien eyes wide, liquid dark. So were his, under a lank flop of hair like the blazing end of a match. He didn’t say anything else. He just looked at them until Dawn, staring back, remembered that he was the only human they had seen all afternoon and he might vanish like the deer if she startled him.

“Who,” she said, her breath still ragged. “I thought owls said who.”

“Screech owl,” he answered and seemed to think that explained matters. His voice was gentle, unexpectedly deep, though he didn’t look too much older than she.

Ewan was peeking out from under Dawn’s elbow, sizing up the stranger. He pulled back from her a little, recovering dignity.

“We’re lost,” he admitted, now that they had been found. “We walked up a road after lunch, and then we saw some deer in the trees, and we tried to get closer to them but they ran, and we followed, and then we saw a stream with some rocks that you could walk across, and then after we crossed it, there were giant mushrooms everywhere, pink and gray and yellow, and that’s where we saw the black and white squirrel.”

The stranger’s face changed in a way that fascinated Dawn. Its stillness remained, but something shifted beneath the surface to smile. His thoughts, maybe. Or his bones.

He let fall another word. “Skunk.”

“I told you so,” Dawn breathed.

“And then we followed—”