Rick Shelley: Son of the Hero

One mystery at a time. I told myself.

Mother's stationery was an off-size, six inches by twelve, made of heavy paper that felt like parchment. She had written the note. Her ornate script and the royal-blue ink were quite distinctive. The note was dated Wednesday, three days back.

"Dear Gilbert," it started. Mom never called me "son" or Gil,-well, almost never, certainly not in writing-and I never admitted to Gilbert.

"Your father is overdue from a trip. I'm going after him. I fear he may be in trouble. This is certainly an awkward time. I hope we get home before you arrive-of course, if we do, you won't see this note-but if your father has gotten himself into a sticky situation, it might not be possible for us to get home before you do.

"Awkward. We intended to have a long talk with you while you were home this time, to tell you about our family history and to initiate you into some of our-shall we say-family mysteries. Your heritage."

Mother has never been able to write a short note. Once, while I was in high school, I came home one afternoon and found a note that boiled down to "Ride down to the grocery store and get a loaf of bread." It was 130 words long. I counted.

I took a moment to look through the rest of the stuff piled on the table, hoping it would help me understand what the hell she was getting at. My sword was there. Yes, my sword, one of them. Fencing was one of Dad's obsessions. I started taking fencing lessons when I was six-not to mention judo, karate, savate, boxing, and a half-dozen other varieties of martial mayhem. The shooting lessons, guns and bows, didn't start until I was eight. My favorite sword was there on the table-heavy, double-edged blade, simple cross-hilt-plus a twelve-inch stiletto, weapon belt, camouflage fatigues (I had refused to continue wearing a Robin Hood costume when I was fourteen), compound bow, quiver of razor-headed hunting arrows, small pack, full canteen, and about thirty pounds of other Sherwood Forest-type equipment. Okay, I was looking at some kind of trip again, apparently wilder than my survival trek of three years before. There was also a small leather-bound book-four by six, and three inches thick-held closed by a cracked leather strap. I went back to the note.

"I certainly don't have time to tell you everything you need to know right now. If I tried, I would still be writing when you got home and I don't dare wait that long to go after your father. Three days are too many if he is in trouble. Some of it I might even get wrong, and that would be worse than leaving you ignorant of certain possibilities. Knight-errantry is your father's area anyway, not mine. But I have to give you what help I can. Among the gear I've left for you is my grandmother's Tower Chapbook. It's filled with odds and ends of lore and whatnot, things she wrote down during the years she was imprisoned. You may find it useful if you have time to consult it at need. The short index is one I added when I was a young girl. It's not complete. I fear that I grew bored long before it was finished."

I didn't even know that I had a great-grandmother who had been imprisoned for years. I opened the book and flipped through some of the pages. The script was even more convoluted than Mother's, and I couldn't read a single word of it. The language didn't look the least bit familiar, though it seemed to use our alphabet. Back to the letter.

"The best advice I can offer if you have to come looking for us is to be as paranoid as you can about everything and everyone." I shook my head. Dear old Mother was starting to sound as wacky as father, and she'd always seemed more sensible. Of course, her relatives, the few I had met, all seemed peculiar. Maybe it was a family thing, like in Arsenic and Old Lace.

"Looking back over this," the note continued, "I see that I really haven't told you anything that you need to know. Your father went off to answer a call for help from my Uncle Parthet (not Parker, dear, that's just the name he uses in this world). Your father should have been home by last weekend at the very latest. It is hard to pin this kind of thing down to a rigid timetable because you never know precisely what sort of trouble a Hero will run into along the way, but last weekend by the latest. He still hasn't shown, so I fear he may have run into something too big for him to handle. Maybe I won't be in time to help, maybe my help won't be enough if I do, but I have to make the attempt.

"You'll have to go to Uncle Parthet for details, and yes, I know you've never gone calling on him, that you don't know exactly where he lives. That's one of the things your father and I could never explain, part of what you would have learned on this vacation.

"Really, it is quite simple. You just have to know which door to use and where to go after you step through." I stopped and looked around at the batch of doors again. It didn't make sense yet, but I don't know that anything would have made sense just then.

"Oh dear, the doors! You've never operated them, have you?"

"No, Mother," I said. "I didn't even know about them. I still don't." Too bad she couldn't hear and answer. I looked back to her note.

"You just need the rings. I hope they fit. If your fingers haven't swollen up since last summer, they ought to. The rings are in a small box in one of the side pockets of your pack. Always wear the eagle on your left hand and the signet on the right. You touch the rings to the silver tracing on each side of the doors to operate them. A sword in your right hand will serve in place of the signet, though, as long as you're wearing both rings."

I glanced at the nearest door but didn't see anything that looked like silver tracing, so I went to the door and pulled it open. The tracing was inside, all the way around the jamb, but there was a concrete wall behind the door. Time to read on.

"The door to Parthet's place is the one with the green trout on it (a private joke; your father says that Parthet drinks like a fish). On the other side of the door, you just follow the path. Bear left at the fork and you'll come to Parthet's cottage.

"I don't even know for sure what to warn you about. Once you go through the door, almost anything could happen. I mean that in the most literal way possible. You've led such a sheltered life in such a civilized world. Not all places are so tame or predictable. If you can imagine something, it's probably possible somewhere, and many things you could never imagine.

"If you have to come after us, expect the worst at every turn. Even then, what you find may be worse than the worst you can expect. I don't suppose that makes much sense now. It will, I fear, if you come through the door. Deadly danger. Always. That's why I have so few living relatives.

"Eat hearty before you leave. Never miss a chance for a safe meal-if there is such a thing beyond the door.

"If I can get to your father and make it straight back, we'll be home sometime Saturday afternoon. If we're not there by sunset, we probably both need help."

The note was signed, "Love, Mother," as if I might not know who wrote it. I folded the papers and put them in my hip pocket. I did another slow spin to look at the doors. Then I made the circuit and opened every one of them. They all opened on concrete blocks except the door I had come in through, and that door didn't have the silver tracing.

Back at the table, I dug the two rings out of the pack. I had seen the rings before, or their mates. My parents each wore a set. "A custom," they called it. I slipped them on the way the note said, eagle on the left, signet on the right. The signet was a simplified version of our coat of arms. That was all over the house-on tapestries, on a shield in the living room, carved into the front and back doors, even stamped into the silverware and embossed on the dishes, the good service that only came out on special occasions. The design was quartered, diagonal lines in the upper-left and lower-right quadrants, a bird that looked something like a penguin in the other two sections.