Wonders of the Invisible World (15 page)

“I’m sorry,” Ewan kept bellowing. “I’m sorry.”

“We didn’t see you,” Uncle Ridley gasped. “That buck leaped and there you were behind it—thought my heart was going to jump out of me after it.”

“What are you talking about?” she whispered, pleading, completely bewildered. “What are you saying?”

“How could you get so close to it? How could it have let you come that close? And didn’t you think how dangerous that might be in hunting season?”

“It was Oak—” she said, still trembling, feeling a tear as cold as ice slide down her cheek. But how could it have been? Things tumbled in her head, then, bright images like windblown autumn leaves: Oakley under the tree, the deer watching at the edge of the wood, the great, silent gathering of Hunters under the full moon, Hunters who loved animals, who hated to see them suffer, who understood the language of trees. She saw Uncle Ridley among them, on foot with his gun, smiling cheerfully at all the Hunters around him, just another one of them, he would have thought. Until they began to hunt. “It was a Hunter,” she said, shivering like a tree, tears dropping out of her like leaves.

They weren’t listening to her; they were talking all at once, Ewan still shouting into her sweater, until she raised her voice finally, feeling on firmer ground now, though she could still feel the other wood, the otherworld, just beneath her feet. “I’m okay,” she managed to make them hear. “I’m okay. Just tell me,” she added in sudden fear, “which one of you shot at the deer?”

“It was standing there so quietly,” Uncle Ridley explained. “Young buck, didn’t hear us coming. Gave us a perfect shot at it. I couldn’t take it; I’ve got my limit for the season. We all had it in our sights, but we let Ewan take the shot. Figured he’d miss, but your dad was ready to fire after that. So Ewan shot and missed and the deer jumped and we saw you.”

Her father dropped his face in one hand, shook his head. “I came within an inch of shooting you. Your mother is going to kill me.”

“So no one—so you won’t go hunting again. Not this season. Uncle Ridley?”

“Not this season,” he answered. “And not until I stop seeing you standing there behind anything I take aim at.”

“Then it will be all right, I think,” she said shakily, peeling Ewan’s arms from around her. “Then I think you’ll all be safe. Ewan. Stop crying. You didn’t hurt me. You didn’t even hurt—You didn’t hurt anything.” He raised his red, contorted, snail-tracked face. You rescued us, she thought, and took his hand, holding it tightly, as though she might lose her way again if she let go, and who knew in what ageless realm of gold and fire, of terror and beauty she might have found herself, among that gathering under the full moon?

Some day, she promised the invisible Hunter, I will come back and find out.

Still holding her brother’s hand, she led them out of the wood.

O
ak
H
ill

Maris wrote in her book:

“Dear Book, You are my record and my witness of the magic I learn in Bordertown. I have chosen you because you are silver and green, which seem to me magic colors, though I don’t know why. Anyway, as soon as I learn some spells I will write them in you. As soon as I find Bordertown.” Squatting on the dusty road, the blank book on her knee, she looked up at a distant growl of gears. She stuck her thumb out, hopefully. A woman in a pickup with a front seat full of what looked like the brawling body parts of fourteen children, all under six, gave Maris a haggard look and left her in a cloud of gold. Maris blinked dust out of her eyes, and picked up her pen again, which was also silver, with a green plume. “I hope to get there soon. That woman did not look as though she knew the way, nor does this road look like it knows the way to anything but worn-out farms and diners. But. You never know. That, I believe, is the first rule of magic.”

She stopped there, pleased, and put the book and pen into her backpack.

Much later, after an endless ride in a slow truck towing a full hay-wagon that kept wanting to ramble off by itself into the fields, she sat in a diner at a truck stop just off the interstate and alternately chewed French fries and the end of her pen as she wrote. It was quite late; the nearest city, she guessed from the newspapers in the racks, seemed to be Oak Hill. From the size of the newspaper, there was a lot of it. “Bordertown could be there. It could be anywhere,” she wrote. “Which is just as well, since I have no idea where I am. Did I cross a state line in that hay-wagon? Anyway, it gives me some place to go toward. Oak Hill. It sounds magical, a great city within an ancient forest of oak overlooking the world.” She paused, seeing it instead of the lights flashing in the dark along the interstate, instead of trucks grinding and snorting their way to the ranks of fuel pumps beside the diner. “But possibly it has no more to do with oaks than Los Angeles has to do with angels. Expect the unexpected. Which is another rule of magic. Except in this case, I think the expected is more—”

“You want something besides fries, hon?” the waitress asked her. The waitress was tall and big-boned, with a heavy, placid face and skin as clear and smooth as silk. Yes, Maris said silently, intensely, I want your skin. Your beautiful milky skin. I will give you anything for that.

“No,” she said aloud. “Just another coke, please.”

The waitress hovered. “It’s kind of late, isn’t it? For you to be out here by yourself?”

“My parents are over at the motel,” Maris said glibly, “watching TV.”

“Oh.”

“I got hungry.”

“Oh.” She shifted weight, her expression unchanging. “Good thing you brought your backpack with you, to keep it safe. Never know about parents.”

“It has my secrets in it,” Maris explained. “I’m going to learn magic.” That, she learned early, always made people fidget, forget to ask questions, find something interesting in the stuffed deer head, or the clock across the room. Another thing was her face, which made them uncomfortable, especially when she painted stars over the chronic mega-zits that built up like cinder cones over a smoldering beneath the surface. Her eyes were too close together, and a watery gray; her nose had grown a roller-coaster bump in the middle of it; her long hair, once white-blonde, had changed the past year or so into a murky, indeterminate shade between ash and mud. She had taken to dressing out of thrift shops to distract attention from her hopeless face: worn velvets, big hats with fake pearl necklaces looped along the brim, sequined tops that made her glitter like tinfoil on a bright day, long, tattered skirts of rich, warm colors that made her look mysterious, a gypsy, a fortune-teller, a woman who knew secrets she might part with for the right gift. Her mother said she looked like an explosion at a Halloween party. “People like you for yourself,” her mother said. “Not what you look like. I mean—You know what I mean. Anyway. I love you.”

The waitress seemed unfazed by magic; the word glanced off her benign expression without a ripple, as if it were something kids did, like dyeing their hair green, and then grew out of. “Well,” she said. “I guess they’ll know where to find you when they miss you.”

“Nobody knows where to find me,” Maris wrote a day or three days or a year later, her back against a cement wall, as if she had been driven there by the overwhelming noise of the city. Her fingers holding the pen were cold; she had been cold since she got to the city, though people slept outside without blankets, and the thin light passed through a windless shimmering of heat and dust. It made writing difficult, but at least the fear stayed in her fingers; so far it hadn’t gone to her head. She paused to stare at a group of people on the other side of the street. They had just come out of a club; they wore black leather, black beads, black feathers in their long, pale, rippling hair. Their sunshades were tinted silver; they stared back at Maris out of insect eyes, and then began to laugh. She pushed back against the wall, as if she could make herself invisible. “Oak Hill has no oaks. Oak Hill has no trees. The truck driver said he knew where I should go, and he stopped in the middle of all this and said this is it. This is what? I asked. He said, This is the end of the line. I got out and he kept going. If this is the end of the line, then why did he keep going? You don’t understand, I said. I am going to Bordertown to learn magic. This isn’t Bordertown. This isn’t where I want to go. And he said, Take a look at that. All I saw were some white-haired kids on fancy bikes. He said, Keep out of their way, and find a place to stay with your own kind; that’s all I can tell you. Then I got out and he kept going.” She paused again, watched a pair of bikers shouting at one another, both with one thigh-high leather boot dropped for balance in four inches of water pooling over a clogged drain, as they argued about who had splashed who. She returned her attention to her book. “This is not at all what I expected the unexpected to be like.”

A shadow fell over her. She looked up into the most beautiful face she had ever seen.

Later, when she had time to think again, she wondered which she had seen first: the beauty that transfixed her and changed the way she thought about the word, so that it stretched itself, in an instant, to embrace even the noisy, unfeeling, vain and swaggering opposite sex; or, as her eyes rose instinctively to see her own reflection in his expression, the terrifying malevolence in his eyes.

She jumped, a faint squeak escaping her; she felt her shoulder blades hit the wall. “You,” he said explosively.

She made another strangled noise.

“Get out of here. Find your own kind. If you have one. There must be some place for small, white mice to scutter together in this town. You are taking up space in my eyes that I require for other purposes, such as reading the graffiti on the wall behind you.”

She stared at him, stunned by hatred, as if he had walked across the chaotic street just to slap her for existing. She recognized him then, by his thigh-high boots: one of the bikers who had been arguing in the puddle. His satin shirt, the same silvery-gray as his eyes, had a tide-line of water and dirt on the front. She wondered if he had eaten the other biker, or just froze him to death with his eyes.

She caught her breath suddenly, dizzily. I am here, she thought. This is the place. “You,” she said, scarcely hearing herself. “You are not human.”

He spat, just missing her shoe. “Why am I still seeing you?” he wondered.

“I came here because of you.”

He was seeing her then, where before he had seen only what he was not. His eyes narrowed dangerously. “You are not worth the chase, ugly little mouse,” he said softly. “You are not worth breath. But I will give you ten. Five breaths of terror, and five of flight, before I summon a pack of ferrets to catch the mouse. They like to play with mice, and there are very few places here to hide. One.”

“I came here to learn magic.”

He blinked, perhaps hoping she would disappear. “Two.”

“I have a book to write the spells in.” She showed him. “And a pen.” She was babbling, she knew, wasting breath, but if he was all the magic she met in Bordertown, then he was all she had. “I’m not running away from anything, or anyone, and you’re right, I am ugly, but that’s not why I want to learn—”

“Three.”

“So since you can’t stand the sight of me, maybe there’s someone you know who is blind, maybe, or doesn’t care—And it’s not even for me,” she added desperately.

“Four.”

“I mean, it’s not so I can turn myself beautiful or something, at least I don’t think it is, it’s just that—”

“Five.”

“It’s what I want. How can I say what I want when I don’t even know what magic is? The word for it is all I know, and you know all the rest. Teach me.”

He was so still she didn’t hear him breathe. Then he said very softly, “Run.”

For a moment, they both wondered if she would. Then she heard the word itself, clear and simple, as if he had handed her a pebble. He had given her five more breaths; he had given her more than that; maybe the danger was not from him. Maybe he was teaching her the first step: How to listen. Or maybe, she thought as she hugged book and backpack to herself and scrambled to her feet, it was a word of advice, something to do with the sudden roar of bikes around the corner. She whirled, then turned back to look at him. “Thank you,” she said, and saw his look of utter astonishment. Then she ran down the street, smelling the clogged drain, oil spills, exhaust, hearing laughter around her, burning like the hazy light. Dragons bellowed at her heels, followed her around corners, down alleys where rats and startled cats scurried for safety. She risked a single glance backward, out of curiosity, and found more of him, though younger, lithe and feral, their wild hair white as dandelion seed, their faces, like his, doors that opened and slammed at once, so that she could only glimpse something they would never let her enter. Their hatred was unambiguous and relentless. They would not let her go; they followed her through crowds and up steps, into abandoned buildings and out again, whooping and calling, barking like dogs, crying a name now and then, until they finally tired of playing, and on a busy street, where pedestrians, laughing and cursing, leaped out of their way, one shot forward among the crush to ride beside her.