Terry Brooks: Running With The Demon

Her grandmother took a deep drag on her cigarette. A cloud of smoke enveloped her. "I'll have a talk with Mildred Walker. She's involved with the social–services people. Maybe one of them will drop by for a chat with Enid. That woman checks her brains at the door every time a man walks in. She's a sorry excuse for a mother, but those kids are stuck with her."

"Bennett's scared of George Paulsen, too. Next thing, he'll be living there."

Her grandmother nodded. "Well, George is good at showing up where there's a free ride." Her eyes shifted to find Nest's, and her small body bent forward over the table. "Sit with me a moment. Bring your toast."

Nest gathered up her toast and juice and sat down. She lathered on some raspberry spread and took a bite. "Good."

"What are you going to tell your grandfather when he asks you what you were doing in the park?"

Nest shrugged, tossing back her dark hair. "Same as always. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, so I decided to go for a run. I tucked the pillows under the covers so he wouldn't worry."

Her grandmother nodded. "Good enough, I expect. I told him to leave you alone. But he worries about you. He can't stop thinking about your mother. He thinks you'll end up the same way."

They stared at each other in silence. They had been over this ground before, many times. Caitlin Freemark, Nest's mother, had fallen from the cliffs three months after Nest was born. She had been walking in the park at night. Her state of mind had been uncertain for some time; she had been

a very fragile and mercurial young woman. Nest's birth and the disappearance of the father had left her deeply troubled. There was speculation that she might have committed suicide. No one had ever been able to determine if she had, but the rumors persisted.

"I'm not my mother," Nest said quietly.

"No, you're not," her grandmother agreed. There was a distant, haunted look in her sharp, old bird's eyes, as if she had suddenly remembered something best left forgotten. Her hands fluttered about her drink.

"Grandpa doesn't understand, does he?"

"He doesn't try."

"Do you still talk to him about the feeders, Gran?"

"He thinks I'm seeing things. He thinks it's the liquor talking. He thinks I'm an old drunk."

"Oh, Gran."

"Its been like that for some time, Nest." Her grandmother shook her head. "It's as much my fault as it is his. I've made it difficult for him, too." She paused, not wanting to go too far down that road. "But I can't get him even to listen to me. Like I said, he doesn't see. Not the feeders, not any of the forest creatures living in the park. He never could see any part of that world, not even when Caitlin was alive. She tried to tell him, your mother. But he thought it was all make–believe, just a young girl's imagination. He played along with her, pretended he understood. But he would talk to me about it when we were alone, tell me how worried he was about her nonsense. I told him that maybe she wasn't making it up. I told him maybe he should listen to her. But he just couldn't ever make himself do that."

She smiled sadly. "He's never understood our connection with the park, Nest. I doubt that he ever will."

Nest ate the last bite of toast, chewing thoughtfully. Six generations of the women of her family had been in service to the land that made up the park. They were the ones who had worked with Pick to keep the magic in balance over the years. They were the ones who had been born to magic themselves.

Gwendolyn Wills, Caroline Glynn, Opal Anders, Gran, her mother, and now her. The Freemark women, Nest called them, though the designation was less than accurate. Their pictures hung in a grouping in the entry, framed against the wooded backdrop of the park. Gran always said that the partnering worked best with the women of the family, because the women stayed while the men too often moved on.

"Grandpa never talks about the park with me," Nest remarked quietly.

"No, I think he's afraid to." Her grandmother swallowed down the vodka and orange juice. Her eyes looked vague and watery. "And I don't ever want you talking about it with him."

Nest looked down at her plate. "I know."

The old woman reached across the table and took hold of her granddaughter's wrist. "Not with him, not with anyone. Not ever. There's good reason for this, Nest. You understand that, don't you?"

Nest nodded. "Yep, I do." She looked up at her grandmother. "But I don't like it much. I don't like being the only one."

Her grandmother squeezed her wrist tightly. "There's me. You can always talk to me." She released her grip and sat back. "Maybe one day your grandfather will be able to talk with you about it, too. But it's hard for him. People don't want to believe in magic. It's all they can do to make themselves believe in God. You can't see something, Nest, if you don't believe in it. Sometimes I think he just can't let himself believe, that believing just doesn't fit in with his view of things."

Nest was silent a moment, thinking. "Mom believed, though, didn't she?"

Her grandmother nodded wordlessly.

"What about my dad? Do you think he believed, too?"

The old woman reached for her cigarettes. "He believed."

Nest studied her grandmother, watched the way her fingers shook as she worked the lighter. "Do you think he will ever come back?"

"Your father? No."

"Maybe he'll want to see how I've turned out. Maybe he'll come back for that."

"Don't hold your breath."

Nest worried her lip. "I wonder sometimes who he is, Gran. I wonder what he looks like." She paused. "Do you ever wonder?"

Her grandmother drew in on the cigarette, her eyes hard and fixed on a point in space somewhere to Nest's left. "No. What would be the point?"

"He's not a forest creature, is he?"

She didn't know what made her ask such a question. She startled herself by even speaking the words. And the way her grandmother looked at her made her wish she had held her tongue.

"Why would you ever think that?" Evelyn Freemark snapped, her voice brittle and sharp, her eyes bright with anger.

Nest swallowed her surprise and shrugged. "I don't know. I just wondered, I guess."

Her grandmother looked at her for a long moment without blinking, then turned away. "Go make your bed. Then go out and play with your friends. Cass Minter has called you twice already. Lunch will be here if you want it. Dinner's at six. Go on."

Nest rose and carried her dishes to the sink. No one had ever told her anything about her father. No one seemed to know any thing–about him. But that didn't stop her from wondering. She had been told that her mother never revealed his identity, not even to her grandparents. But Nest suspected that Gran knew something about him anyway. It was in the way she avoided the subject–or became angry when he was mentioned. Why did she do that? What did she know that made her so uncomfortable? Maybe that was why Nest persisted in her questions about him, even silly ones like the one she had just asked. Her father couldn't be a forest creature. If he was, Nest would be a forest creature as well, wouldn't she?

"See you later, Gran," she said as she left the room. She went down the hall to her room to shower and dress. There were all different kinds of forest creatures, Pick had told her once. Even if he hadn't told her exactly what they were. So did that mean there were some made of flesh and blood? Did it mean some were human, like her?

She stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror looking at herself for a long time before she got into the shower.

Old Bob backed his weathered Ford pickup out of the garage, drove up the lane through the wide–boughed hardwoods, and turned onto Sinnissippi Road. In spite of the heat he had the windows rolled down and the air conditioner turned off because he liked to smell the woods. In his opinion, Sinnissippi Park was the most beautiful woods for miles- always had been, always would be. It was green and rolling where the cliffs rose above the Rock River, and the thick stands of shagbark hickory, white oak, red elm, and maple predated the coming of the white man into Indian territory. Nestled down within the spaces permitted by a thinning of the larger trees were walnut, cherry, birch, and a scattering of pine and blue spruce. There were wildflowers that bloomed in the spring and leaves that turned color in the fall that could make your heart ache. In Illinois, spring and fall were the seasons you waited for. Summer was just a bridge between the two, a three–to–four–month yearly preview of where you would end up if you were turned away from Heaven's gates, a ruinous time when Mother Nature cranked up the heat as high as it would go on the local thermostat and a million insects came out to feed. It wasn't like that every summer, and it wasn't like that every day of every summer, but it was like that enough that you didn't notice much of anything else. This summer was worse than usual, and today looked to be typical. The heat was intense already, even here in the woods, though not so bad beneath the canopy of the trees as it would be downtown. So Old Bob breathed in the scents of leaves and grasses and flowers and enjoyed the coolness of the shade as he drove the old truck toward the highway, reminding himself of what was good about his hometown on his way to his regular morning discussion of what wasn't.