Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

The old woman in the doorway said, “If you come any closer, I will not exile you again. Instead, I will change you.”

Nicholas Bonner stopped where he was. His laughter broke over her, smoky-cold as the fumes of dry ice. “What I am doesn’t change. Who should know that better than you?” He cocked his head, brazenly quizzical, but there was something surprisingly like wariness in the melting voice, something that remembered pain. “You saw to it yourself. I cannot be changed.”

“Not for the better,” she said. “That was always beyond me, from the first. But I can make you worse than you are.” She did not raise her own voice, but the hair stirred along Farrell’s forearms. Sia said, “Try, then.”

The boy did not move. “Try it, try it, put ‘em up,” he mimicked her. “Old love, even at your best, even when you were really somebody, the most you could ever do to me was to push me off the sidewalk for a little while. What do you think you matter now, when you don’t dare stick a toe out of your burrow? A traffic light has more power over me than you do, in this world.”

“Yes?” The single flat syllable cracked and sparked with derision like static electricity. “Well, you might be right. I am certainly less than I was, no hiding that. But if you stick a toe into my house, I will think about you in a certain way, and you will never be able to wear beauty again, whatever form you may take. And who would pay the least heed to you then, or believe that you have any power at all, in this world?”

For a moment Nicholas Bonner’s face became as pitilessly lonely as his eyes. He gripped Aiffe’s shoulders until she yelped and swung her in front of him, saying in a light, careful voice, “Do it the way I showed you. Do it now.”

Aiffe wriggled under his arm, refusing to look straight at Sia. “Nick, let’s go, I need some more practice, okay?” Her acne patches were boiling up like stigmata.

“Focus,” the boy said. “You can do it, it’s just focusing. Just like in the park, exactly the same, now.” He turned her body between his hands with a raging precision, aiming her. She neither resisted nor cooperated, but kept whimpering, “Nick, I want to go, let’s go home.” Nicholas Bonner took hold of her limp arm, holding it out, making her point at Sia.

Farrell gave up trying to lift Ben and began hauling him away from the door. He heard Sia’s voice, full of a terrifying pity, “Child, no,” and the boy saying, “ Now ,” as the air suddenly smelled violently of lightning and the vast inhalation happened a second time. Farrell scrambled toward the stairs, feeling the old house lunging and aching in the ground, while the walls curtsied slowly to each other and the chess table, the chairs, and the fire tongs hurtled into his legs. He held fast to Ben, pulling against a power like the disemboweling undertow of a sinking ship. The floor seemed to be slanting steeply under him, and he knew that he heard the girl cry out in bitter shock and pain, a chattering moan that laid Farrell’s spine bare. But it was Nicholas Bonner’s voice, not hers; and with that, chaos came to an end almost as confounding as itself. In the tumbled, freezing house, the only sound was Sia’s rasping sigh. Ben had finally stopped saying her name.

“You see,” she said without triumph. “You cannot come in. Not even with her to make the way.”

Aiffe was almost doubled over Nicholas Bonner’s supporting arms, her mouth wrenched up at one corner like a hooked fish. Farrell half expected to see the boy drop her; but the dreadfully perfect face had already smoothed itself back into a bright mask of pleasure, and Nicholas Bonner held Aiffe most gently, stroking her shoulders, drawing his fingers down the back of her neck. He was murmuring to her, so quietly that Farrell could not hear the sound of the words.

“She is not harmed,” Sia said. “Take her home. And if there is any mercy in you, any—” She struggled briefly to say something that could not even be thought in English, then used a phrase in the wind-language. “—then leave her there, leave her alone. She can never do what you want; she has not that kind of power. You have made a mistake about her. Let her go.”

Ben was sitting up with Farrell’s aid, speaking calmly and rather cheerfully in Old Norse. The lights of a passing car swam over the porch, and Farrell saw Nicholas Bonner carefully lift Aiffe and turn her toward him to lean her head on his chest. He smiled at her with something so much like tenderness that it chilled Farrell’s heart twice over: once because in that moment the boy looked like someone who had always loved Aiffe deeply; and again because Farrell had no doubt that that particular smile was Nicholas Bonner’s top-of-the-line model, the very best he could ever do. A dark splotch was spreading slowly on the girl’s jeans, and Farrell realized that she had wet herself.

Nicholas Bonner raised his clear eyes to Sia. He said, “But it’s what she wants. She called me here, she asked for my guidance—demanded it, really—and if I left her now, she’d come right after me, she’d come looking.” He chuckled fondly, caressing Aiffe’s matted hair. “Oh, and you would find me, too,” he praised her, slipping into a baby-talk singsong. “Oh, yes, yes, she would, of course you would.” He might have been crooning to a wriggly puppy.

Aiffe was still plainly too dazed to stand, and abruptly he picked her up in his arms, holding her easily as he confronted Sia. The Sunday-best smile withered to a cicatrice on the soft golden face. Nicholas Bonner whispered, “She has no idea how close she came. You and I know.” Sia did not move or reply. The boy said, “That kind of power. She almost broke you. Ignorant, unpracticed, frightened out of her few wits, she almost walked over you. You aren’t quite senile enough not to know.”

Ben began to chant very loudly, thumping the time on Farrell’s knee: “ Hygg, visi, at—Vel soemir pat—Hve ek pylja fet—Ef ek pogn of get .” The tune was dull, but it had a fine swing.

Nicholas Bonner said politely, “Till next time. Or the time after that.” He turned and walked away, carrying Aiffe as if she were his partner in one of the old court dances. On the porch steps, he stopped and set her on her feet, keeping an arm firmly around her. Aiffe staggered once, clutching at him. They moved slowly off down Scotia Street, leaning their heads together like dreaming lovers.

Sia said, “Joe.” Farrell propped Ben against a newel post and went to her. She made no room for him in the doorway, and he felt uneasy about squeezing in beside her, so he stood cautiously at her shoulder, watching her watch the street.

Behind them, Ben droned, “ Flestr maor of fra—Hvat fylkir va ,” and outside, the Avicenna night flowed past Sia’s house, bearing someone’s barbecue guffaw and the crackling bustle of a baseball game approaching on a portable stereo. Farrell caught a twinkle that he thought might be Nicholas Bonner’s T-shirt vanishing behind a camper truck. His right knee ached where the fire tongs had bruised it.

“I cannot control what you will remember of this,” she said. “I don’t think I can.” She turned to face him for the first time since Briseis had begun her dreadful crying, and he saw that the challenging gray eyes were alarmingly vague and streaked, and that her dark-honey skin had gone the color of scar tissue, all tone and resilience used up. The smell of her exhaustion filled his mouth, rancid, gritty, and clinging as the smoke of a garbage fire.

“Perhaps I won’t even try to make you forget.” Her voice, at least, was regaining some life, becoming almost comfortingly acerbic. “You work these things out very well with yourself, you will turn all this—” She gestured around them at the porch, at Ben, at spilled books and scattered furniture. “By morning it will have been some distant foolishness between strangers, maybe a little earthquake thrown in. You are doing it now, I can see you.” Farrell began to protest angrily, but she walked away from him, saying, “It’s not important, do what you want. I have to get Ben into bed.”