Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

Julie was soaked, dazed, and furious, but unharmed, swearing in Japanese, as Farrell had never heard her do, while Ben and he carried her back to the bus and dried everyone off with bedrolls and oil rags. “Black ice,” she kept snarling, “black ice in fucking September, and both forks bent to hell. Okay, now the bitch dies.” There was no talk of salvaging the motorcycle; they left it to bleach in the desert and lunged along, while hailstones the size of gumballs flayed the remaining paint off Madame Schumann-Heink. Two side windows blew out, but the windshield held, though Farrell worried more about the engine vibrations as he felt them through the frame. He had driven the ancient VW by the seat of his pants for too long not to know when his seat felt wrong.

The back road followed the eastern frontier of the university, flirted momentarily with a freeway, considered a serious career as a link between Avicenna and the incorporated shopping malls beyond the hills, then shrugged and looped down toward drowsily flowering Scotia Street. The hail was slacking off, but the wind still came clawing out of a sky the color of phlegm. Ben said heavily, “I thought maybe she wouldn’t be watching for us on this road. I’ve never seen her do anything with weather, I didn’t think.” The last words trailed away into hopeless exhaustion, and Julie took his hands between her own.

There was an explosion behind them, and then another, and Farrell said, “She’s good with engines, too. We just blew two pistons.” He cut the motor, sighed very deeply, and let Madame Schumann-Heink drift the last three blocks to Sia’s house, braking to a stop at the ragged rosemary hedge and the redwood flags leading like invading footprints straight to the place where the front door had been. The carving that Sia had been working on that morning was propped on the back of the living-room sofa. Farrell sat at the curb and looked at it through the hole in the house.

Farrell never knew why he brought the lute with him; he was not even aware of it until the three of them were creeping up the stairs. Except for the door, nothing was obviously missing or damaged, but every room seemed shrunken, smelling palely of damp dust, as a house smells that has stood closed for years. Farrell heard no sounds beyond the scrape of their shoes and the soft thump of the lute on his shoulder, and even those were strangely smothered, as if there were no air to bear them up. Everything is in that room with her, everything—not just her son and his witch, but all the light and soul and energy there ever was in this house. We can’t really see the rest of it, because it doesn’t quite exist without her attention. And all her attention is far away now, in a little low-rent place that I probably can’t find again. East of the sun, west of the moon, with an unlisted phone number .

He had counted on Briseis leading them to Sia, as she had done before, but the dog was as gone as the front door. So, for that matter, was the linen closet, leaving no least suggestion that it had ever been there. This time it was Farrell’s turn to rage helplessly; but Ben said, “There are so many ways,” and took them downstairs again, around the back of the house, in through one of the uncountable windows, and up an evasive stair which dissolved into a dim flurry of passages fading off in every direction. Farrell and Julie filed after him along corridors they could not see, around certain doubtful corners that had to be caught up with before they could be turned, and through high, transparent outlines, the color of abandoned spiderwebs, cold to make the blood ache. I know what these are—the ghosts of rooms she forgot about, just let go when she didn’t need to imagine them anymore . Within those almost-walls, his sense of balance abandoned him utterly, leaving him nauseous and heartsick, holding onto Julie. How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you’re just a room. How could you love something that can do that anytime ?

In the end, he sometimes thought, they never did find that last room at the top of the house. It found them. The open doorway seemed to come roaring up to them, visibly slowing down and stopping where they stood. No country hotel parlor waited beyond, but fat, lumbering vines, crowding the frame, beckoning and warning with the same green greed. They had to put their heads down and plow blindly onward, tearing the vines aside and trampling flowers like unpleasant human faces underfoot, until they broke out into a clearing that had nothing in it but sandy earth and stones and Aiffe dancing. Farrell never found another word for what she was doing, but he always knew there was one.

Her movements were nothing like the way she had danced with him or like any galliard or almaine he had ever seen her perform at the League’s affairs. On that ground, she was all swirling, filigreed insult; here, dancing alone, she was almost two-dimensional, rigid and thin as a razor blade. Back and forth she went, keeping to a small space, always traveling in a straight line, each razor-quick turn and glide at right angles to the one before, her body gradually writing a precise shape into the air, as if on a darkly gleaming floor inlaid with fiery stars and pentagrams. If she sensed her watchers’ presence—and Farrell thought she did—she paid no heed at all, but only danced.

No one, including Aiffe, saw Sia appear. Suddenly there was never a moment when she had not been there, trudging forever across the clearing toward the girl who was calling her out of hiding. She was wearing the disquietingly fluid garment that Farrell remembered, but it murmured over a body that he did not know, one grown impossibly stooped and withered since just that morning. Her shoulders all but hid her emaciated chest. Under the gown, her belly and thighs seemed to have run like candle wax into pitiful drizzles of skin. The gray eyes had gone suet-colored in her shrunken face, and when she mumbled to herself as she slumped along, Farrell saw that her teeth were rotting like cheese. Turning, he saw the silent tears sliding down Julie’s face and realized that he was crying, too.

Aiffe’s dance never faltered, nor did she speak a word to the wretched old woman standing before her. It was Nicholas Bonner’s angelic laughter that caressed her as he strolled out of the wet, jungly air. Where are we now, really? In what ghost-garden of her dreams ? “Has it all caught up with you at once, great mother? What, all that majesty tumbled downstairs, all that thunder and lightning shriveled to a sneeze? Did such serene wisdom ever foresee that it must come to this?” He stood beside Aiffe, hands on hips—a child in tights with a Halloween face and a voice that was casting off its assumed humanity, like a tiger bursting from cover. Even his language was melting into a barely comprehensible croon of tiger joy. “How beautiful, how beautiful you are now, what a wonder to see you so. My treasure, my heart, my prize, my mother, how beautiful you are.” He reached out a hand to tilt Sia’s ruined face toward him; but at the last moment, he drew it back.

Aiffe had begun to move slowly around Sia, not in circles, but in hexagons, octagons, dodecahedrons, weaving straightline patterns that glazed the air, dimming Sia to Farrell’s sight. Nicholas Bonner sang, “But now you must go where I will never go again, to lie down howling in that place you made, that place where you have sent me time and time, and you must wait for someone to call you back to light and warmth and pity, and no one ever will, not you, never. And this is nothing but the least bare justice of the gods, and you know that better than anyone except your son.” The old woman shuffled from foot to foot, never looking at him.