Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

“We found him in the park,” Aiffe said. “Right up by the merry-go-round, you know, the playground. He was climbing around on things and yelling.” Farrell looked up at her as he wiped Ben’s mouth with his handkerchief. She stood directly under the porch light, thumbs hooked into her jeans pockets, all her weight canted onto one flat hip, and a warily mocking grin stuttering across her face like a lit fuse. She was wearing sneakers, a denim vest, and a pale green T-shirt with the legend WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, HUG YOUR TEDDY. “I think it’s a blood sugar thing,” she offered. “They’re finding out now that a whole lot of people get really weird when their blood sugar drops.”

Farrell said, “You know it’s got nothing to do with his damn sugar content. What did you do, mug him? What did you do to him?”

The grin fizzed a moment longer, then exploded into a fireball of defiant delight. “You can’t talk to me like that anymore. Nobody can.” She took a step toward him, shaking with the violence of her exaltation. “I’m Aiffe, and I can say whatever I want, because I can do whatever I want. And you can’t, so you don’t talk to me like I’m nothing, a baby, a nothing. You just watch your tone, and you just try really, really hard to make friends with me. Because it makes a difference if I’m your friend or not.” Her smile burned more trimphantly with each word, but Farrell saw tears in her eyes.

Behind him Sia said, “Joe, take Ben inside.” Her voice was the small stone voice that Farrell remembered from the afternoon when McManus came drunk to the house. He put his arms clumsily under Ben and half dragged, half rolled him through the doorway. Glancing sideways, he saw Sia’s stumpy legs move past to halt on the threshold, spreading to brace themselves so squarely and precisely that her house slippers did not protrude even an inch over the sill. She spoke again in the language that sounded like wind in the rigging; and from the delicate spring night, Nicholas Bonner’s sweet, sweet laughter answered her.

“Speak English, cookie,” he advised her, shrugging himself out of the porch shadows as he strolled forward. Dressed like Aiffe in jeans and a T-shirt—his was black, with a silversparkling face of Willie Nelson—he looked younger and more vulnerable than she, almost shy. He said thoughtfully, “Now why should I be so quick with any new human tongue, when you can’t ever learn to speak even one quite properly? Why should that be, after all?” There was no mockery in his voice, but a strangely companionable wonder.

Ben stirred and whispered in Farrell’s arms, his whole body abruptly dank with sweat. Sia said, “You learn. I make. I have created languages that were dust in the mouths of skulls before you were born. Have you forgotten? The gift you have was an apology, because you have nothing of your own. Have you forgotten, then?”

“I forget nothing,” Nicholas Bonner said mildly. “I don’t think I can.” He kept his eyes down, letting the thick bronze lashes hide them. Aiffe draped herself against him, preening on his shoulder with the air of a movie gangster’s showgirl mistress. “Nick’s staying at my house,” she announced. “Private tutor, hey, hey.”

Neither Sia nor Nicholas Bonner seemed to have heard her. Sia made a sound in her throat like hard snow underfoot. She said, “In Augsburg. I thought that was the last time.”

“Well, you always did underestimate me, admit it.” His speech had lost every trace of another time or place; only the hungry humor remained, so cold that it glowed and danced like little deep-sea fish.

Ben was blinking and coughing now, trying to sit up, as Sia answered, “No, never you. Human stupidity, human longing, human madness, I have underestimated those forever.” The last word was a flinty whisper, all but inaudible.

Aiffe said, “He’s just here because of me. I brought him here, he’s staying at my house.” Pettishly playful, she tugged lightly at Nicholas Bonner’s arm with both hands.

Farrell said loudly, “I’ll get Ben on upstairs.”

Sia never turned. Nicholas Bonner and she stood together in a shifting circle of light, and Farrell knew, as he knew nothing else in that moment, that past the circle’s edge nothing existed—not himself, not whining Aiffe, not even a hurt, half-conscious Ben, muttering her name over and over like a penance. If he stops doing that, what happens? Don’t stop, don’t let her forget about us .

The boy’s golden head lifted, and the transparent, insatiable, monstrously despairing eyes of Nicholas Bonner came to bear on Sia across the bright circle. “I always return where you are,” he said. “Every time. Have you ever noticed that?” She did not answer, and Nicholas Bonner smiled. “And each time you’re that much weaker, that much more imaginary. I could walk into your house now, if I wanted to.”

Astonishingly Sia laughed then, no shotgun snort, but a rich, singing chuckle of seductive contempt. “You? Idiot wizards, drunken priests, any tinker woman with a grudge can banish you from this world; any spiteful child can call you back again. The yo-yo of the universe!” Farrell, struggling to keep Ben on his feet, almost dropped him at that comment. Sia said, “In my house, you? To walk through my shadow would destroy you.” She added something in the wind-language, and Farrell wondered if she were calling Nicholas Bonner by his real name.

Aiffe, who had been gaping in growing resentment from one to the other of them, suddenly pushed past Nicholas Bonner into the light. Or at least she tried to; it seemed to Farrell that the circle’s edge withdrew from her, slipping just far enough out of her reach to make her lurch clumsily after it, like that circus clown who used to keep trying to sweep up the spotlight . Even standing directly between Sia and Nicholas Bonner, thin face reddening, shoulders twisted, she was somehow further outside their concern than before, not merely nonexistent but impossible. She said to Sia, “Wait a damn minute, okay? Now. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

She blocked Farrell’s view of Nicholas Bonner, but he felt the hot smile spreading on his skin. The boy said straight through her, gently, humbly, “Well, then you’ll have to come out to me. Come out of your house and talk to me, old love.”

For a moment Farrell thought that she would actually do it. The thick figure tautened, the grizzled hair flared in its silver ring like a cobra’s hood, and Farrell found that he was sagging marrowless against Ben as the fire in the living room coughed and went out and an inhalation all around him set every door in the house slamming. Very far away, Sia lifted a bunny-slippered foot from the threshold and Aiffe shuddered to her knees; but Nicholas Bonner stood still, the slight body thrumming only a little, like a knife struck into a tabletop. When Sia put her foot down again, not a fraction further into the night than before, Nicholas Bonner winked at her, and the wink made a clicking, toothy sound, although Farrell knew that it couldn’t. Too empty even to fall, he heard Ben whispering, “Sia. Sia. Sia. Sia. Sia.”

Almost as softly, Nicholas Bonner said, “But you can’t, can you? My poor friend, you’re trapped in there. All your beautiful names, all those journeys, those glorious dwellings, all your empire, and just see what it’s come to.” And he clucked his tongue in perfect parody of sorrowful human relish. “Here you are, ruling over your last two lovers and a dog in a house like a stork’s nest, and your power stops at your front door.” He stretched his arms wide, wriggling his fingers elaborately, making Willie Nelson grin sequins. He said, “But I wonder if I do.”

Ben said clearly, “Prester John, she knows,” pointed more or less at Aiffe, and fell down with the effort. Aiffe moved to Nicholas Bonner’s side, visibly trembling and so pale that her eyes had gone entirely green, the bright, shallow applegreen of a hurricane sky. Nicholas Bonner put his arm around her without looking at her. He took a slow step toward Sia and then another, bringing the girl with him.