Christopher Golden - Lost Ones

“Magic,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Sara turned to her father. Adjusting the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder, she stared into his eyes. “What is this? Where does it go?”

“Not ‘it.’ They. Every one of these doors opens into a different part of the world, some ordinary and some legendary. We can go anywhere in the merged world, see everything with our own eyes, or through the lens of that camera.”

She stared at him, shaking her head, speechless.

The Dustman shrugged. “You’ve got no plans for the next couple of months, until you open your new studio. You said so yourself.”

He reached out for his daughter’s hand. “So, where do you want to go first?”

Sara laughed, stared down that long corridor at all of those doors, fighting disbelief. But there was no room in the world now for disbelief.

She took his hand.

“Surprise me.”

On a cold, crisp night during the first week of December, Oliver Bascombe sat in the familiar chair in his mother’s parlor and stared into the fireplace. The logs roared and crackled with flames. He’d built himself up quite a blaze and sat, now, reading Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. The book brought him comfort. Since childhood, he’d read it many times, always in this room, in this chair. In his imagination, he had sailed aboard The Ghost with Wolf Larsen, traveling into danger and adventure.

Oliver slipped a finger into the book and reached up to rub at his eyes. The fire flickered ghostly orange on the walls. He might be getting tired, but he thought, perhaps, something else troubled him beyond the heat of the fire getting to his eyes.

The Sea Wolf had lost some of its magic. Danger and adventure no longer had the allure for him that they had when he’d been a boy.

A gentle knock came at the door, and then it swung open. Unbidden, Friedle entered the room carrying a small tray, upon which sat a steaming mug of the thick cocoa the man had been making for him ever since his mother had died. Oliver knew memory could play tricks, but it seemed to him that Friedle always got the cocoa exactly right. Nobody else had ever been able to duplicate it.

“Good evening, Oliver,” said the fussy little man.

Oliver smiled. “Friedle, your timing is incredible. You have no idea how much I needed this right now.”

But of course he did. Friedle had been watching out for Oliver and Collette for years, keeping them out of too much trouble. He seemed always to know what they needed, and to be there when it mattered most.

“Thank you,” Oliver said, taking the tray from him and setting it on the coffee table.

“You’re very welcome.”

Oliver took a sip from his cup. A smile creased his lips. Perhaps Jack London’s stories were no longer enough to transport him back to his childhood, but here in this room-which he would forever think of as his mother’s parlor-with the fire burning and the taste of that cocoa on his lips, he remembered what magic felt like.

Not the magic in his hands, or that which had returned to the world…the magic that only existed on the inside.

Friedle started to withdraw. Oliver glanced at him. They knew, now, that Friedle had never been his real name. The goblin who had served the legendary Melisande-his mother-was called Robiquet. But from the moment they had returned to the house on that high, craggy bluff overlooking the ocean, Oliver and Collette had persisted in calling him Friedle. For his part, the fussy man seemed to prefer it. Friedle behaved as if nothing had changed, save for the absence of his former employer, Max Bascombe.

“I miss him,” Oliver said.

“Pardon?”

“My father. It’s strange, don’t you think? I spent so many years wishing for the courage to get out from under his shadow, and now that he’s gone, I want him back.”

Friedle nodded. “We all miss them, when they’re gone. He wasn’t a bad man, your father. He was just afraid for you.”

Oliver took another sip. “I never thought of him as afraid of anything.”

“For himself, of course not. The only thing that frightened Max Bascombe was the idea of something happening to one of his children.”

The cocoa tasted sweet as ever, thick on his tongue. In his entire life, he had never invited his father to join him in the parlor on one of those long nights when he would retreat here. The old man would have declined, he was sure. Still, Oliver wondered.

“Thank you, Friedle.”

“I’m quite looking forward to tomorrow,” the old goblin said. “Good night, Oliver.”

“Night.”

After Friedle had gone, he sat with his finger still holding the page in The Sea Wolf and sipped his cocoa until only traces were left at the bottom of the cup. Only then did he consider the book again, but after a moment he put it aside, not bothering to mark his place.

“Hello, little brother.”

Startled, he looked up. Collette stood in the doorway in blue flannel pajamas covered with monkeys. She looked adorable as hell, but he wouldn’t mention it, knowing she would hit him.

“I thought you’d gone to bed.”

As he spoke, Julianna appeared in the hallway behind Collette in a burgundy terry cloth robe that usually hung on the back of Oliver’s bedroom door but was rarely worn.

“We couldn’t sleep,” Julianna said.

Mischief sparkled in her eyes and her smile lightened his heart.

“Excited about tomorrow, or nervous?” he asked.

Collette came in and sat on the sofa beside his chair. “What about you, Ollie? You’re not nervous?” She picked up his cup and peeked inside, disappointed to find it empty, though Oliver felt sure that Friedle had brought the two women their own cocoa tray before retiring for the night.

Oliver held out his hand to Julianna. “Not at all.”

She wrapped her fingers around his and he pulled her onto his lap on the chair. A stranger would not have seen the tiny wince at the corners of her eyes, but Oliver felt what she felt. The scar on her abdomen ought to have been the only reminder of the dagger Ovid Tsing had stabbed her with. But, all these months later, it still pained her sometimes when the weather was damp and cold. He suspected it always would.

“Are you sure?” Julianna asked, touching the smoothness of his face. The scraggly beard he’d grown during their time across the Veil had been gone since June.

He kissed her, pressed his forehead against hers, and watched the reflection of the firelight glowing in her eyes. “Completely.”

“It’s going to be a pretty extraordinary day,” Collette said.

Oliver and Julianna broke their trance and looked at her, content in one another, but never to the point of excluding her. They were a family now, the three of them. Always.

“A year late, but here we are,” Oliver replied. He ran his hand across Julianna’s back, thinking about their guest list. There would be many of the same guests who had been supposed to attend last December, but others had been added. Sheriff Norris. Ted and Sara Halliwell. The legendary and the ordinary alike had been invited. King Hunyadi himself had promised to attend.

“I wonder if Frost will come,” Julianna said.

Oliver smiled. “We’ll know by dawn, I think.”

Collette looked at him oddly, then cocked her head. “I’ve been wondering if we’ll see Smith.”

“I doubt it.”

His sister gave a small shrug. “Maybe not. But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him. Not forever.”

Julianna lay her head against Oliver’s chest. “Everything has changed. The whole world.”

Oliver stroked her hair and bent to kiss her again. “Not everything. The important things haven’t changed at all. The things that matter.”

Collette jumped up. “Speaking of which, it’s almost midnight and you two crazy kids are getting married tomorrow. You know it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride on her wedding day before the ceremony.”