Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

A stairwell descended into darkness. The steps themselves were carved from the stone of the hill, each one bowed and worn with generations of passage. There was no light at all below, but the air smelled of roses and grave dust and meat.

It was an invitation.

A vector of change now, aimed at the deathless heart of the unchanging, Addison touched her woolen vest, fingered the seam of her denim skirt, and set off into the darkness below with an ache in her chest and her grandfather’s memory in her heart.

Mother will learn patience now. If the monkeys know anything we do not, it is that death is the greatest teacher life can set before us. I am not one of the mabkin, but I have sat at the borders of Mother’s realm so long I might as well be one.

That a monkey came for me is one of those blessings which can only be the world playing with its own sense of humor. Her stove burned me a little, but I got the hot tea off and into my belly. It will be strange, eating their food, but I have a ticket that will take me somewhere else.

Change is coming Below, where change has never been welcome. I wonder who set the Locke and the Keyes on their course, or if that is just another of the world’s little jokes upon itself.

Leaving the flame behind to light the night, I follow Addison Keyes’s scent back down from the high hills. As Above, so Below. Mother’s fingers may be like whips, but they will never tear at me now. Mother’s eyes may be like razors, but they will never cut at me now.

I thank my sister, I thank myself, and I sing a song of crabs and cats as the bracken whips at my hiking boots and my monkey pants and I bounce down into the wider world armed with bright teeth and a copper knife.

I am coming. I might even become a Mother myself someday, in Addison’s high Wyoming hills.

Are you afraid? Or are you laughing?

In a basement that smelled of mold and old cleansers, Danny Knifepoint Wielder prayed down the rain. The house wasn’t any older than the Portland neighborhood around it. Most driveways were populated with minivans, children’s bicycles, heaps of bark dust and gravel accumulated for yard projects postponed through the dark months of winter. None of Danny’s neighbors knew the role he played in their lives. They would have been horrified if they had.

Not making it to church on time carried scarcely a ripple of consequence compared to what would happen if Danny didn’t pray the world forward. Lawn sprinklers chittering, children screeching at their play—these were the liturgical music of his rite.

“Heed me, Sky.”

Danny circled the altar in his basement.

“Hear my pleas, freely given from a free soul.”

Green shag carpeting was no decent replacement for the unbending grass of the plains on which the Corn Kings had once vomited out their lives to ensure the harvest.

“I have bowed to the four winds and the eight points of the rose.”

Woodgrain paneling echoed memories of the sanctifying rituals that had first blessed this workroom.

“Heed me now, that your blessing may fall upon the fields and farms.” With a burst of innate honesty he added: “… and gardens and patios and window boxes of this land.”

“Daniel Pierpont Wilder!” his mother yelled down the stairs. “Are you talking to a girl down there?”

“Mooooom,” Danny wailed. “I’m buuuusy!”

“Well, come be busy at the table. I’m not keeping your lunch warm so you can play World of Warships.”

“War craft, Mom,” he muttered under his breath. But he put away his knife, then raced up the steps two at a time.

Behind him, on the altar, his wilting holly rustled as if a breeze tossed the crown of an ancient oak tree deep within an untouched forest. Oil smoldered and rippled within the beaten brass bowl. Rain, wherever it had gotten to, did not fall.

That night Danny climbed up the Japanese maple in the side yard and scooted onto the roof. He’d been doing that since he was a little kid. Mom said he was still a kid, and always would be, but at twenty-two Danny had long been big enough to have to mind the branches carefully. If he waited until after Mom went to her room to watch TiVoed soap operas through the bottom of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, she didn’t seem to notice. The roofing composite was gritty and oddly slick, still warm with the trapped heat of the day, and smelled faintly of tar and mold.

The gutters, as always, were a mess. Something was nesting in the chimney again. The streetlight he’d shot out with his BB gun remained dark, meaning that the rooftop stayed in much deeper shadow than otherwise.

Sister Moon rising in the east was neither new, nor old, but halfway in between. Untrustworthy, that was, Danny knew. If Sister Moon couldn’t make up her mind, how was Sky to know which way to pass, let alone the world as a whole to understand how to turn? This was the most dangerous time in the circle of days.

He had his emergency kit with him. Danny spent a lot of time on his emergency kit, making and remaking lists.

— Nalgene bottle of boiled tap water

— The Old Farmer’s Almanac

— Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes

— } Silver{ stainless steel knife

— Paper clips

— Sisal twine

— Spare retainer

— Bic lighter (currently a lime green one)

— Beeswax candles (black and white)

That last was what he spent most of his allowance on. Beeswax candles, and sometimes the right herbs or incense. That and new copies of the Almanac every year. The Booke of Dayes he’d found at a church rummage sale—it was one of those big square paperback books, like his The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Magic, with a cover that pretended to look like some old-timey tome or grimoire. The entire kit fit into a Transformers knapsack so dorky looking he wasn’t in any danger of losing it on the bus or having it taken from him, except maybe by some really methed-out homeless guy or something.

Danny had figured out a long time ago that he’d get farther in life if he didn’t spend time worrying about being embarrassed about stuff.

This night he lay back on the roof, one foot braced on the plumbing vent stack in case he fell asleep and rolled off again. The black eye he’d gotten that time had taken some real explaining.

It hadn’t rained in Portland for sixty days now, which was very weird for the Pacific Northwest, and even the news was talking about the weather a lot more. Danny knew it was his fault, that he’d messed up the Divination of Irrigon specified in the Booke of Dayes to shelter the summer growing season from Father Sun’s baleful eye. That had been back in June, and he’d gotten widdershins and deosil mixed up, then snapped the Rod of Seasons by stepping on it, which was really just a dowel from Lowe’s painted with the Testor’s model paints he’d found at a rummage sale.

You could never tell which compromises the gods would understand about, for the sake of a good effort, and which ones brought down their wrath. Kind of like back in school, with his counselors and his tutors, before he’d quit because it was stupid and hard and too easy all at the same time.

Anyway, he’d gone the wrong way around the altar, then broken the Rod, and the rain had dried up to where Mom’s tomatoes were coming in nicely but everything else in the yard was in trouble.