The Rafters Annex

Sonnet: Mary of Egypt

2011-04-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

This one first appeared in Epiphany Journal in 1995, and is reprinted in my chapbook, The Geography of Prayer.

Mary of Egypt

The work on board was such as suited me,

For every novelty I had sucked out

Of Alexandria's dessicated streets;

The lolling deck and hammocks left no drought

Of new and wicked fun. I loved the boys

The best of all, if love it were -- at least,

To me their virgin selves were more than toys,

They were my heady wine, my constant feast.

I drained their innocence yet could not slake

The thirst that parched my soul. I disembarked

Still craving what I knew I could not take

Nor buy nor beg from paramours. The well

I found in desert land, the Love I sought,

Who stilled at last my thirsting with Himself.

On Sighting Jupiter on the Eve of Lent

2011-03-21T17:12:00.001-07:00

My files are in disarray. I think this one may have been published somewhere before, but I'm not really sure where. And it's a little late, being a pre-Lenten poem-- but here it is anyway! --DF

On Sighting Jupiter on the Eve of Lent

Under the dark of the moon,
Lent came creeping one spring.
The sun unseen at night yet shone
Reflected by a pilgrim in the sky,
An errant knight, a wanderer lost
In wilderness travelling on
To morning's promised land.

Such prodigals are we, and strangers
Exiled in foreign lands;
And if at last we would come home,
The journey we must dare while dawn
Is yet a midnight dream.

--Donna Farley

The Storyteller's Children

2010-04-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

This poem has been living on my main blog. With the changes to Blogger, I am revamping all my blogs, and making a point of transferring previously published stuff over here to the Annex, which is my archive of previously published things. So, this is the first new piece I've put up here in a long time. --DF

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This poem was supposedly accepted at a little magazine some years ago, but the publication seems never to have actually gotten into print, as sometimes happens with small literary endeavours.

"The Storyteller's Children" embodies my general philosophy of writing, which I teach about in my half-day workshop for Christian writers, "The Christian Writer's Pilgrimage". That is offered every couple of years through Surrey Continuing Education, with a companion workshop on marketing for Christian writers. I won't be doing it this academic year, however; instead I am slated to give a six-session course on short SF, fantasy and horror this fall. More about that closer to the course date.

so, here's that poem-- formatting bugs still not worked out.

The Storyteller's Children

"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."

"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of." --C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms." --Muriel Rukeyser

What is that howling out in the night?

The bigger one asked.

And when is Father coming home?

The little one wanted to know.

And Eve began to tell them a story.

She had done it before, many times,

Before they were even born.

Lying alone and great with child

While her husband hunted for food,

She told them to herself.

First, the tale of regret:

The apple, the serpent, the flaming sword.

Then the tale of hope:

A Child.

Where does the river go?

Who made the stars?

And why am I afraid?

For every question, not a mere answer

But a Once upon a time.

She told them for comfort.

She told them for joy.

She told them for laughter and tears,

For wisdom and folly and love and hate,

But most of all for the future.

To teach the children to be heroes.

And in due time they told her tales over

Adding stories of their own

As they took their part in unfolding Creation.

Their children's children piled tale upon tale

And yet the universe never

Collapsed beneath its own weight.

Mother, will it be all right?

Yes, child, hush. Because

We are all inside a Story.

A multi-published poem....

2008-09-15T21:36:00.001-07:00

Two covers, two publications, just one poem, “February 4th, Farmer’s Almanac Entry"…..which also won the Burnaby Writers’ Society Millenium poetry contest in 2000. Oh I love getting a lot of mileage out of one piece of work! Mythic Delirium bought the poem (and put my name on the cover, a first for me); then it was nominated for the Rhysling Award for best SF,Fantasy & Horror Poetry of 2001. It remained a runner-up, but was published along with the other nominated works in this little anthology produced by the SF Poetry Association.

here it is:

February 4th, Farmer’s Almanac Entry

An auspicious day for marriage, they say,

and for the repair of ships.

Some smiling conjunction of stars, I suppose,

occasions this pronouncement.

Yesterday is set as a fossil,

a fractured dinosaur bone encased

in a smoky acrylic block.

We fondle it, turn and observe from all angles

then set it back on the coffee table

unchanged.

Tomorrow is only the blueprint of air,

whose molecules stir and dissipate,

or metamorphose as we crack the door

—like Schrodinger’s cat, neither dead nor alive

without our observation.

Today is the day for the fusion of lives.

Today is the day for re-sealing hulls

against the elements.

The New Curiosity Shoppe

2007-09-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

This little time-travel tale turned out to be my first straight-to-web publication, in an unusal e-zine called Would that it Were. WTIW featured "historical SF"-- time travel, alternate history, fantasy in historical settings. It is now defunct, alas.

This story grew out of my fondness for Hans Christian Andersen's tales and a fascination with his often painful but creative life.

The New Curiosity Shoppe

by
Donna Farley

The New Curiosity Shoppe. That was what it called itself on the shingle, newly painted in red and gold, that was banging about in the wind and driving rain. Andersen threw open the shop door and, ducking his tall frame under the lintel, tumbled inward with relief. A bell tethered to the door jangled to announce the arrival of the weatherbeaten customer.
Andersen cleared his throat and swept off his tall hat, conscious of his dignity. For some hours now, grudging to spend cab fare, he had wandered the rainy summer streets of London in despair, quite unable to find his way back to Dickens's city house, and thus far unsuccessful at communicating his problem to the passersby in his still-awkward English.
"Good day," he said to the man at the counter, but scarcely glanced at him, for his eyes were instantly taken captive by the shop's wares, stacked high in the warmly-lit shop: O happy coincidence, he had stumbled upon a book shop!
"Good afternoon, Mr. Andersen," the proprietor said.
Andersen started. Not just because he had been recognized; although he had been having a relatively quiet visit with the Dickens family this time, on his first visit to England he had been the toast of London society. But this London shopkeeper had spoken to him in perfect Danish!
"Are you a fellow countryman of mine, sir?" Andersen asked him, quite excited and forgetting his streaming garments now. "You will have read in the newspapers, I suppose, how I have been lionized here in England--"
"I have read of it, though not in the newspapers," said the fellow, a sly glint in his eye. "And no, I am not a Dane, merely a man of--shall we say-- unusual accomplishments. I have been looking for you for some time, Mr. Andersen. Please do come in and peruse the shelves; perhaps by the time I have the tea prepared, something will have taken your fancy. I'll be in the parlor in back," he said, and then left the polished mahogany counter to retreat down the center aisle.
Andersen stared after the man. "Wait!" he called, and the shopkeeper turned around, an obliging smile and raised brows on his lean, clean-shaven face. He was a rarity, a man as tall as Andersen himself, of indeterminate age, mature yet not aged. Every dark hair was in place, and his well-proportioned figure dressed in a suit of dark striped trousers, checked waistcoat and frock coat, unremarkable except for its crisp newness.
"Perhaps you have something in mind already?" said the man.
"Have you any Shakespeare?" asked Andersen. "A fine new edition of the sonnets would make a splendid memento of my sojourn in England--"
The shopkeeper strode back toward him. "Ah, no. Forgive me, Mr. Andersen, I have neglected to introduce myself properly." He put a hand into his breast pocket and pulled out an engraved card, which he proffered with impeccably manicured fingers.
Andersen set his hat on the gleaming counter, then drew off his damp gloves and laid them beside it. Then he took the card and read:
The New Curiosity Shoppe
Jas. B. Forward , Prop.
Purveyor of Exclusive Books
for Discriminating Clients

"I deal only in new books, Mr. Andersen."
Andersen was taken aback. "Are there no recent editions of the great Bard, here in his native land?"
"Not in my shop, no."
Suppressing his disappointment, Andersen turned to survey the shelves. The heady smell of new leather hovered round him, he noticed now, and the neatly arranged volumes fairly sparkled with newness; their spines, some embossed with gold letters, gleamed ebony, crimson, rich toffee, velvety indigo and forest green in the glow of the gas lamps that punctuated the banks of shelving along the walls.
"The rebindings are my own," Forward explained. "Some of the originals were, well-- not appropriate."
The New Curiosity Shoppe. But of course-- "Then surely you have the works of my good friend Charles Dickens, Mr. Forward?"
Forward smiled and tapped the card still in Andersen's hand. "Exclusive books, Mr. Andersen. Mr. Dickens's books are quite easily obtainable in many shops. My wares are available nowhere else. Nowhere."
Curiosity Shoppe indeed! Forward withdrew to his parlor, leaving Andersen among the beckoning volumes. Pocketing the card, he began a slow stroll along one wall, his focus playing over the titles that met his gaze at eye level. There were no divisions by subject, and there seemed no arrangement beyond the alphabetical; it was not so odd, then, that the very first author's name that sparked his attention was in fact his own.
His mouth fell open, and the back of his neck prickled. Hans Christian Andersen, the spine of the red book proclaimed, by Elias Bredsdorff.
Surely not one of those Bredsdorffs related to the Collins, who were his own adoptive family? But how dare the man publish a book about him without his knowledge and consent?
With a furious yank, Andersen extracted the book from its niche on the shelf and opened the stiff cover to the title page. The publisher was Scribners, in America. For all the flash of the bright red cover, the good quality of the paper and its faultless trimming-- from the look of the edges, there was not even the need of a paper-knife to separate the leaves--for all that fine manufacturing, the printer had made an idiotic error, giving the publication date as 1975, instead of 1857, if indeed it was newly published this year.
He made to turn the first page, then to riffle the leaves of the book, and discovered the entire volume defective: the pages were sealed tight.
Andersen sniffed in annoyance; he was going to have words with this bookseller and self-declared re-binder. But then he looked again at the title page, and palpitations began to assault his chest as he sounded out the English subtitle beneath his name: The Story of His Life and Work, 1805-75.
Andersen turned smartly on his heel and stalked along the aisle to the open door of the little back parlor.
"What is the meaning of this?" he cried, nearly knocking down a coat rack as he brandished the offending volume at the shopkeeper.
Forward finished pouring boiling water into the china pot on a little table, and set the kettle back on the hob before replying. "Please, Mr. Andersen, do take off your coat and be seated."
"This is a monstrous farce--to dare predict the date of a man's death!" Andersen found his breath coming short, and his head was filled with a vision of Dickens's Scrooge, gazing in horror as the dread Third Spirit pointed its bony finger at the headstone bearing Scrooge's own name.
Forward took the book from his now-limp fingers and glanced at the title page. He bit his lip. "Oh, I see. Do forgive me, I really hadn't considered what a shock that would be to you. Please, you must sit down and calm your nerves."
With trembling hands, Andersen drew off his greatcoat and hung it on the rack. As he sat down, the straight-backed chair creaked alarmingly under his tall frame. He licked his lips. "Do you intend to extort payment from me, Mr. Forward, to see that this mockery of a book is not really and truly published? I tell you, you must surely have been misinformed as to the size of my fortune!"
Forward's face registered astonishment. "Good heavens, no!"
"Then what can it mean!" Andersen pleaded. "These dates--"
"Note the publication date, Mr. Andersen. This is a book that will not be written for more than a century."
Andersen sat thunderstruck. He wondered if he were actually lying abed with a fever, and if when he awoke this incident would become one of his new stories. He sat staring in silence a few moments, one hand on top of the book as it lay on the table, and when Forward poured tea into his cup, he lifted it to his lips with the other hand, noting distantly that it had barely steeped long enough to taste.
"All my books are like this, you see," Forward put in, his brow wrinkling with worry. "I have a licence to sell them under certain conditions, but this trip is particularly special, Mr. Andersen."
"But it doesn't even open!" Andersen cried, setting the tea cup down a little too firmly, so that the tea sloshed over the lip of the cup into the saucer.
Forward gently drew the Bredsdorff volume out from under Andersen's other hand. "Oh, it can be made to open. Once we have sealed our bargain. But really, Mr. Andersen, I hadn't particularly intended this one for you. I have thousands of volumes here-- but of course, you will have no idea how best to choose a book from amongst these as yet unwritten masterpieces. Tell me, how would you like to read a detailed and factual account of the first men to visit the moon?"
"The moon!" Andersen leapt to his feet. "You, sir, are certainly nothing more than a mountebank. Good day to you!" he said, and hooked his coat off the rack.
His host stood as well. "Mr. Andersen, you astonish and disappoint me. When I chose you as the subject of my little experiment, it was because you of all writers in the Nineteenth century had--have-- the most fruitful imagination! An imagination which has attained immortality! From the viewpoint of many centuries hence, the name of Andersen is still one of the most illustrious in all of human literature! The world cannot get enough of Andersen!"
Andersen paused, the coat collar still in his hand. This seemingly sincere flattery tempted him severely, but he felt a ball of ice forming in the pit of his stomach. "And to what infernal agency do you owe your powers of prognostication, Mr. Forward?"
Forward laughed. "Oh my, no. I am no prophet. Don't you understand, Mr. Andersen? I am a time traveler. My clients are people who are never content with the books they can find in their own era, and I bring them books newer than new-- books unwritten as yet, but freely available where I come from."
It took Andersen's breath away. He glanced again at the biography, his own biography, written, if he could believe this peculiar bookseller, by a man not yet born.
"Surely this is all impossible," he muttered, looking round the seemingly ordinary little parlor at the framed prints, the clock and china shepherdess on the mantel. He got one arm into his coat, then turned an accusatory stare on Forward. "Surely you can't be telling me the truth!"
"My dear Mr. Andersen, your savage Viking ancestors would have thought your steam boats quite impossible too. But you have traveled on them yourself many times."
That did it. Moving like a sleepwalker, Andersen hung his coat over the rack once more, seated himself at the table again, and took a slow deliberate draught of the insipid tea. His mind boiled like a whirlpool, churning up the myriad possibilities of the future.
Men on the moon! Time travel! And who knew what else? Journeys to the miniature world he had once seen in a drop of water under a microscope, and written a story about? Understanding the speech of animals, perhaps?
The bookseller smiled. "Now to our bargain. Please don't trouble yourself, my friend," he said, putting up a reassuring hand, "I don't want money--your Nineteenth Century currency would be of little use where I come from."
Andersen felt uneasy again. "Mr. Forward, I am not certain I want that book," he said, nodding at the biography on the table. 1875. Dear God, am I really to die…he could not say so soon, he could scarcely complain, it would be a longer life than many had…
"No man should be troubled with the knowledge of his own future," the bookseller agreed.
"But what is it you want of me?"
"Ah, now we come to it. I did not exaggerate when I said the world could not get enough of Andersen. Can you imagine, Mr. Andersen, what you would give to see--for instance-- a new play by Shakespeare?"
"Dear Heaven!" said Andersen. "Why, Mr. Forward, do you mean to say you have one in your shop? Name your price, my good man!" Dear God, forgive me, he thought, but if Forward is the devil after all, how sore tempted I am to sell my soul!
The bookseller smiled indulgently. "No, I have no new works by Shakespeare. Which is a pity, because his works, like your own, are immortal. In fact they have had quite a revival in my own century, thanks to the wonderful science which enables us to learn languages almost instantly, as I learned your Danish for this trip. Audiences can now appreciate Shakespeare in the original, without the need to struggle with 16th century English--"
"Dickens," Andersen interrupted. His head spun with the view of the limitless of world of the future that was opening before him. "Is Dickens immortal too?"
"Oh my, yes."
"Who else? Bulwer Lytton?"
Forward cleared his throat and poured more tea.
"Pray allow me to come back to my point, my friend. I have no new works by Shakespeare--yet. Now, I am not entirely an altruist-- I do make a tidy living at my business. Several centuries after yours, but quite a few before my own, I have a number of very wealthy clients who pay handsomely to read books written after their lifetimes. This keeps the business going--time travel is rather expensive, after all.
"But in my own century, you see, there is a fascination with the past-- and those who are deeply devoted to their favorite authors would love nothing better than a new work from one of those authors. Thus my little experiment, Mr. Andersen. I have come to see whether you will write a new story, which you will promise never to publish in your lifetime, and of which you will give me the only manuscript copy. I will take that story to the waiting world of the future, Mr. Andersen, and it will be received with unprecedented adulation by billions of readers, on a dozen planets."
"Billions!" Andersen felt faint. "Planets?"
"Not a word of exaggeration, my friend. In return, I will be glad to offer you your choice of the volumes in my shop--"
"Shakespeare," Andersen whispered. "Is it possible?" He caught the bookseller's eye. "For a new Shakespeare, I would not hesitate a moment!"
"Ah." Forward nodded. "But you don't know what you would be missing! Irene Tallyman in the 24th Century, Chojun Funakoshi in the 26th--" he broke off, looking at Andersen's face, then sighed. "But of course, there are many even in my era who still count the Bard first among the literary lions. I can guarantee nothing, Mr. Andersen. But if we do succeed with your story, and if indeed I can procure a new Shakespeare as well, then I promise, yes, you shall have a copy."
"Then it is settled!" Andersen rose and wrung Forward's hand. He swept his coat off the rack once more and flung it round his shoulders. "I will return next Tuesday, when I will once again be coming up from the country with the Dickens family. Good afternoon, sir!"
In the street, the fog had finally lifted; Andersen found he was at the corner of Paternoster Row and Match Street. He hailed a cab and rode back to Dickens's city house, his brain seething with ideas. It was no distress to him to return next day to Kent with Dickens's sister-in-law and the children, while their parents tended to some business. Andersen had already begun to feel the sister-in-law and children did not care for him, but now he was too preoccupied to care, and retired early.
He woke before dawn feeling cold, so cold, although the weather had turned mild after the rain, from a terrible dream of Death and Fate. It was quite as horrific as Scrooge and the Spirit of Christmas to Come; indeed Andersen thought he might outdo Dickens with this tale, for the feared being that loomed over the hapless heroes of his dream was a woman, that exalted creature that should evoke the tenderest feelings of romantic love or of filial devotion, transformed instead into a figure of icy terror. Andersen threw off the coverlet, lit his candle with a bit of twisted paper set aflame by stirring it amid the coals of the banked fire, and began to write at once.
He did not go to the barber for his customary shave, nor would he come down to the family till the tale was finished. He then found himself growing increasingly impatient with them and sorry for himself until at last the day came to go up to London again. He bundled up his pages in brown paper and tied them with a string, carrying them under his arm and not entrusting them to the luggage.
Dickens and Mrs. Dickens were not at home in the London house, and so he was spared wasting time in greeting them. He left his luggage at the house, muttered some excuse to the sister-in-law, and hailed a cab to take him back to Mr. Forward's shop. He discovered then that the card bore no address, but he remembered the nearby cross streets and gave those names to the driver. Only then, while he watched the varied citizenry thronging the streets of this city of cities, did he feel the enormous weight of the thing he was about to do.
It would be like burying his story, never to be dug up till many centuries had passed! To be sure, this way there was no chance of it perishing--and what a triumphant welcome it would have upon emerging into the new day of the far future! As the cab rolled past a park, he saw some little boys at play with a hoop and stick, and looking on at them a pretty young girl dressed in frills, clutching to her heart a fluffy pup with a blue ribbon about its neck. They had no idea, those children, that the famous Andersen was passing within a stone's throw of them, he whose stories had thrilled them as bed-time reading by their mothers or governesses.
The park fell behind as Andersen thought, not one of them shall ever read this tale. Though in truth it was perhaps a bit too strong for small children…And then the cab passed by a church, a festive party on its steps, a wedding it looked like-- a fresh-faced young lady in a crepe bonnet and lace shawl, on the arm of a dashing fellow who tipped his silk stovepipe hat to the friends crowding round them with smiles and laughter. None of them would know this story either.
Andersen's heart began to pound, and the streets became a kaleidoscope of figures he could not touch: costermongers crying their wares; whistle-blowing policemen; young ladies in skirts buoyed up by crinolines, bearing parasols against the sun, taking the air with their chaperones; dark-suited men of business in a hurry; rag-clad orphan children like he himself had once been--none of them would ever read the words now bundled under Andersen's arm.
The cab came to a halt, and Andersen stepped down half in a daze. Perhaps he would not be able to find the shop after all.
But he did. He stood looking at the spotlessly-painted door for long moments, his fingers curling and uncurling around the edges of his package. Billions, Forward had said. Planets, he had said. But how many centuries away was his home? How many people, between now and then, would be deprived of this one little story of Andersen's-- all so that it might be a greater sensation when it appeared at last?
But he must go in; he had agreed to come. He opened the door and entered once again with the jangle of the bell, coming this time from bright sun into interior gloom.
"Ah, welcome back, Mr. Andersen! Do let me take your hat!"
Andersen handed it over in silence, and Forward laid it on the counter. Andersen followed his eager step to the back parlor. In the warmth today he had worn only his frock coat, and he sat immediately on the offered chair. He did not remove his gloves, and shook his head at the offer of tea.
Forward's brows drew together, but then he fixed his attention on the manuscript. "So you have done it."
"Mr. Forward, I am having the most dreadful pangs of conscience!" Andersen said, and proceeded to tell the bookseller about his misgivings, fearful every moment of an angry outburst from the man.
But Forward listened carefully and gave him a calm reply. "Let me set your mind at rest, my friend. The story you hold in your hands cannot be one that is fated for publication in your own life time. I came here precisely to commission an entirely new story from you, one that has never been known before. We have the complete list of your works, believe me. Will you not show it to me, at least?"
Andersen's head swam. With reluctant fingers he released the package into the bookseller's hands. Forward unwrapped it, while both of them held their breath. Then as Forward's eyes fell upon the title, his jaw slackened and the color drained from his face. Andersen's palms sweated inside his gloves as Forward read the first page rapidly, then began shuffling the subsequent leaves.
"Oh dear!" Forward let go the paper, and buried his face in his hands, wracked with helpless, unjovial laughter. "Oh my, but the joke's on me!"
Andersen sat stunned. "A joke, sir? This is a most serious tale-- a dreadful tale! It deprived me of much sleep, and haunts me still with its ultimate horror and despair!"
Forward breathed deep to regain his composure. "Just so. The Ice Maiden. But it is not in fact one of your very best or most famous stories, Mr. Andersen--perhaps because of that very grimness. The point is, it is not a new story. It is one which you will
publish a few years from now." Forward boxed the edges of the manuscript leaves, folded them in half, and stood up with an air of decision. "No, I'm afraid this won't do, Mr. Andersen. My little experiment, alas, is a failure. And furthermore," he concluded, "this is quite an inferior, rough draft."
In one swift step, Forward moved to the fire and laid the story atop the coals. With a cry Andersen lunged from his seat, but Forward barred his way, holding him off till the leaves caught.
"Please, my friend. Trust me when I say that the version you eventually publish will be far superior. For one thing, you must set it in Switzerland, when you travel there a few years from now."
Andersen dropped into the chair again, and stared at the manuscript as the leaves turned brown, then black and shriveled, like the little ballet dancer in his tale of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier".
Forward broke the silence at last. "I am so sorry, Mr. Andersen. It seems there will be no more new stories from yourself, or Shakespeare, or anyone else. But I do very much wish to repay you for your trouble. I did promise you one of my books. I will warn you before you take it, it is so made that you will not be able to speak or write of it in any way whatsoever. And when you have finished reading it, after you turn the last page and close the cover, it will dissolve into dust as if it never was. If you are still interested, I will be delighted to help you select a volume."
After a long time, Andersen sighed. "I so had my heart set on the new Shakespeare, Mr. Forward. But unless you have a better recommendation, I cannot imagine anything more delightful than the account of the first men to visit the moon."
Forward returned Andersen's wan smile. "It is an excellent choice, my friend."
Andersen followed him out to the bookshop and accepted a green-bound volume, after Forward passed a little silver device over its cover to unseal the pages. Then Andersen collected his hat and gloves and shook hands with the time-traveler.
"It has been a privilege, Mr. Andersen. I wish you pleasure of the book."
"And I wish you pleasure of your travels," said Andersen, touching the brim of his hat.
He opened the door, ringing the bell once again, then hesitated before stepping out into the noisy London street. His hand still on the handle of the open door, he turned once more to Forward. "Tell me, Mr. Forward, have you made any plans to visit the days of Queen Elizabeth?"
Forward's brows shot up. "One never knows…"
"Then if it would not be inconvenient-- perhaps you might take my greetings to Mr. Shakespeare. I should dearly love for him to read some of my fairy tales."
Forward broke into a broad grin. "It would be my pleasure, Mr. Andersen."

---THE END----

The Snow-White Soul

2007-07-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

in concert with my post about Fairy Tales on Refreshment of Spirit, here's a poem that appears in my chapbook, The Geography of Prayer.

The Snow-White Soul

They say Mary Magdalene had seven devils.
I wonder what their names were --
The expected deadly giants? Or
Perhaps they were no more than fleas,
Invisible to the naked eye,
Yet brimming with the same Black
Death as the great ones.

Did they flood in upon her at birth,
Like the gifts of some Evil
Fairy Godmother? Or did she crack
The door of her soul, year after
Year, to each of them in turn,
These houseguests determined
To outstay their welcome?

How long did they rave
And dance and wreck all
The rooms of her interior life,
Littering the corners
With their refuse,swinging
From the hanging lamps and laughing,
Always laughing?

Can you imagine the scene that
Day, in the midst of their dark
Raucous party, how, when the door
Crashed wide, they paused --
O horror! It was no mere
Policeman Who stood there with light
Blazing in upon them from His eyes.

Like seven wicked little dwarfs
At the word OUT they whisked
Up the chimney and left her
Snow-White soul to wake
In a cottage swept clean,
Illumined by the presence
Of the Prince.

IN REAL LIFE

2007-06-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

this story appered in the Spring 1999 issue of Romance & Beyond, a small press niche magazine featuring speculative romance. This one was strictly for fun.....

In Real Life

by
Donna Farley

Gillian Redfern sat with hands poised over the typewriter keyboard, like a virtuoso about to give a piano recital. But her fingers never reached the keys; the doorbell rang, its cheery tones a sudden violation of the brooding, moss-and-mahogany gloom of the upstairs room.

Gillian ripped the blank sheet out of the typewriter with a curse. "Just when I finally get a crumb of an idea," she grumbled. She took another chocolate cherry from the nearly-empty box labelled "Godiva" that sat on her desk, and popped it into her mouth.

There was a delightfully rabid thunderstorm working itself up in the night outside, and the wind made insinuating whistles through the crack in the window of what Gillian called the "gothic room" of her isolated country mansion. Nothing like a good thunderstorm to get the old creative juices flowing again. It had been three weeks, now, since an unprecedented case of writer's block suddenly hauled her up by the scruff of the neck, the moment she typed the final word of the hero's character sketch for her new novel.
Gillian tossed away the blank sheet and picked up the typed one that lay so innocently on the desk, reading it for the thousandth time:
"Lawyer James Farrington, age thirty-six, five-foot-eleven and one hundred and seventy pounds, is jogging down a country road in the grey light of dawn, dressed in cords, shirt, and a peat-colored Shetland sweater. At his side runs his Irish setter, Beau. Farrington's sandy blond hair is stirred by the slight morning breeze, and beneath his soberly trimmed mustache is a rather boyish smile. The smile is due to the success of his latest court case, one of many in which he feels that he has done his part in the long battle of good versus evil.

"Suddenly he sees another opportunity to serve the cause of justice: behind the gate of his neighbor's white picket fence is a pristine, inviting cobblestone walk. The neighbor herself, a stunning bitch, is nowhere in sight. Yesterday Farrington watched her drive her Mercedes carelessly through the petunia bed of the old gentleman next door. Farrington's smile broadens. Flipping up the latch, he nudges open the gate. "In you go, lad," he says, in his pleasant tenor voice, with just the ghost of a Scottish burr, and leans whistling on the fence while the dog sees justice done in the form of a little memento for the neighbor."

Beneath the vignette, Gillian had listed a lot of data about James Farrington's character: penchant for blunt honesty, idealistic, etc. And typed in caps at the bottom: HATES BEAUTIFUL WOMEN.
Silly, that, Gillian thought. But of course the novel's heroine would change that -- if Gillian could only find the girl! If she didn't do so this very night, Gillian had decided, she would have to put James Farrington into her "inactive" file and start all over.

The bell chimed again, and Gillian frowned, glancing at her slightly pudgy but feminine hand as she chipped another flake of red polish off the ring finger with her thumbnail. Each evening she would put on a fresh coat before starting work; by dawn the nails were nearly as naked as the typing paper.

She squinted, trying to recall the inkling of an idea she had gotten, just before the bell first rang. Oh, yes, she was going to give Farrington a little scar in the palm of his hand....

The doorbell plucked at her attention again. "Grrr! Then again, James, maybe I'll just fold you into a paper airplane and toss you out the window," she said to the chocolate-smudged paper. "You're just lucky I don't want to open the window to do it."

Again the door chimed. Of course, she didn't want to open the door either. Just letting the cleaning lady and the grocery boy in every couple of weeks was enough of a trial.... She set the character sketch back on the desk.

"All right, I'm coming," she said to the insistent bell as she made her way downstairs to the entry hall. But her steps began to drag as she approached the door. She paused to glance in the hall mirror, and gave a fluff to her short blonde curls. They framed a face that was nice enough, if nothing like the ones on the covers of her novels with their full, sensuous lips and high cheekbones. But unfortunately, thanks to the chocolate cherries that took the place of productive writing, it was certainly a somewhat rounder face than it had been a few weeks ago.

As the bell rang yet again, she pushed the intercom button. "Who is it?"
"It's James Farrington, Miss Redfern."

Gillian's throat suddenly closed up. "Wh-who did you say?" she managed to croak.

"James. Farrington."

A pleasant tenor voice. With just the ghost of a Scottish burr.

"Who are you, really?" she said sharply.

The man on the other side of the door chuckled. "You know who I am, Miss Redfern. In fact you might say you're the only one in the whole world who knows who I am."

Gillian swallowed. This is no time to be a coward, she told herself. Do what one of your heroines would do. Open the door, Gillian....
She turned the handle and swung it open. The man standing there smiled, and Gillian did what at least some of her heroines would have done -- she fainted.

Gillian woke to find herself on the Chesterfield settee in her living room, looking up into James Farrington's blue-grey eyes. Try as she might, she could see no detail that clashed with what she had written in the character sketch. Even the dog was sitting on the floor beside him.

"You were heavier than I expected," Farrington said with a slight grimace. "Hope I didn't strain my back carrying you in here."

Gillian leapt up, cheeks burning. "How dare you--!"
"Hey now!" He held up a hand. "I'm James Farrington, remember? I have a "penchant for blunt honesty.""

Gillian bit her lip, then said quite firmly, "You aren't real," and squinted her eyes closed. But when she opened them again he was still there. "Are you? Where do you come from?"

He laughed. "You should know that better than I do, Miss Redfern."

Gillian's spine prickled. Suddenly she snatched for his left hand and turned it palm up. "Ha! James Farrington is supposed to have a small scar, there."

He stared at his open palm. "But y' haven't written that yet."

Gillian's mouth opened, then closed again. "All right," she said, "we'll just see about that. Come on!" She sprang up and was halfway up the stairs before he followed, calling out, "Stay!" to the dog over his shoulder.
She flung open the door to the gothic room and ushered him into its shadows.

"Stuffy place," he remarked, his mustache twitching.

Gillian went around the massive, velvet-hung canopy bed to the typing desk, where she sat down and rolled the character sketch into the machine, flexing her fingers. Farrington stood leaning against the door frame.

""He has a small, star-shaped scar in the palm of his left hand,"" she typed, then tore the sheet out of the roller and thrust it at him. He hesitated a moment, then stepped forward.

He took the paper with his right hand, and held up the left in an Indian salute. The white points of the star-shaped scar caught the light, the shiny skin blazing in the midst of the surrounding shadow of his darker palm.
Gillian drew in her breath. She put out one finger and gingerly traced the outline, feeling the raised smoothness of the scar emblazoned on his palm.
He gave the paper back to her.

"How did you get the scar?" she whispered.

He laughed. "I told you, you have to write it down."

She looked once more at his too-familiar face. "Why are you here?"

"Miss Rrredfern," the Scots accent suddenly vibrated more intensely as he leaned closer, "I've come because I want t'live."

"Live? What do you mean? You are alive, aren't you? I mean, here I thought you were strictly imaginary, but-- but you've walked right in my front door!"

"Oh, I'm alive for now, right enough," he said, and pulled a paperback from the bedside bookcase. A blonde siren and a muscled pirate sprawled sensuously across the cover. "But I don't want to end up like these two."

Gillian frowned. "Terrance and Viola-- The High Winds of Love, my first book. But why didn't those two show up when I was writing about them?"

"But y'see, you were writing about them. Me you've left sitting in a bloody character sketch for the last three weeks, and I don't like it!"

He looked so perturbed that Gillian couldn't help giggling, which in turn caused him to look even more offended. She patted his shoulder and continued to laugh.

"Oh, I think I do need a drink!" she said giddily, and, tossing the paper on the typewriter desk, she pushed past the imaginary man and out of the gothic room, skipping down the stairs to the living room, where she poured herself a rather large brandy and dropped unceremoniously onto the Chesterfield settee. As she raised the snifter, she found herself looking into the soulful doggy eyes of the Irish setter.

A sound from the hallway caught her attention, and she looked up to see Farrington in the doorway. His brilliant smile was quite gone, buried behind a face that would make an iceberg look amiable. He strode over and pried the glass from her hand, setting it firmly on the tripod table by the settee, then grabbed her shoulders, pulling her to her feet.

"How rrreal does a man have t'be, Miss Rrredfern," he asked, "t'do this?"
He swept her quite literally off her feet. But it was a mistake; Gillian kicked, hard.

With a banshee yell he dropped her and fell back, doubled over and trying to make a fig leaf with his arms. In the same instant the dog leapt barking towards Gillian, only to halt almost mid-air when its master gasped, "Down, Beau!" The big red dog stood bristling and snarling at her, but made no further move.

"I see--" Farrington puffed, "that doesn't -- work any better on you-- than it does on Gothic heroines."

"You swine!" Gillian spat. Then she flushed. She sounded like one of her own heroines.

James Farrington smiled weakly and shifted himself gingerly to a perch on the edge of a petit-point covered chair. "Miss Redfern. You would like this to be a dream, but you know it isn't so. I truly exist, right here in real life."

Gillian felt cold. "Go away," she whispered. "I don't want you to exist, not really."

His face was more pained than when she kicked him. "Y'can't mean it. Not when you've kept me alive all these weeks. D'you think I don't know the sacrifices you've made for me?"

The grey of his eyes drew her in against her will. Gillian, you idiot, she thought, you were the one who gave him the sincere grey eyes.
But then again-- if you can't trust a man you've invented yourself, who can you trust? Gillian sat down, pulling her sweater closer. The storm-driven trees beat against the living room casement as if they wanted to be let in.

"I'm very grateful to you for not giving up on me, Miss Redfern. But now we must unblock you writer's block."

"And then you'll go?"

"I suppose so. I'll have a book to look after, won't I?" He smiled broadly. "You see, it's the reading that makes people in books live. I'm only here because you've read that character sketch over and over again. Thank God you didn't just slip me into a file folder somewhere." He shuddered. "I couldn't have borne that-- worse than poor Terrance and Viola."

"But they aren't like you-- they're just characters in a book. What am I saying -- you're imaginary!" Gillian rolled her eyes.

He laughed, wincing a little still at his injury. "Those two are hardly even imaginary any more-- they're practically dead. I'm alive because you've breathed life into me day after day by poring so intently over that one-page character sketch, but those two--" He gave Gillian a hard look. "You've let them go out of print."

Gillian blinked. "But--"

"I've been thinking, you know," he went on, "maybe I should organize them into a union. They may want to sue you."

"Sue me! They can't sue me! They're imaginary-- and so are you!"

"On the other hand, you could do a promotional tour."

"I don't do tours any more," she said shortly.

His eyes went cold. "Miss Redfern, have you ever considered how much all your novel characters have done for you? Terrance and Viola, and the characters in your subsequent books, made you the money for this house. But what have they got in return? Out of print!" He spat the words out. "And now you're frittering away their royalties on Godiva chocolates you could well do without."

Gillian was white with rage. "You know-- I could do away with you just by crumpling up that piece of paper!"

"I don't believe you would do that," he said quietly. "But even if you would-- I'm James Farrington, idealistic young lawyer, champion of the oppressed and all. It wouldn't be in character for me to think of my own skin when there are others who need my help, would it now?"

Gillian glared at his smiling face. "What about my writer's block, then?"

Farrington stood and hobbled over to a bookcase, where he took out a paperback whose lurid cover showed a woman in lace and red velvet falling into the arms of a virile hero. "Maybe we can find some ideas here." He pulled out a second book, which showed a doctor leering over a blonde nurse's shoulder. "Perhaps we could create a composite?"

Gillian snorted. "Could James Farrington love a composite woman?"

He gave her a boyish grin. "Could Gillian Redfern love an imaginary man?"
"Me?" She flushed, then recovered herself. "Very funny. Just remember who gave you that clever sense of humour."

"The trouble with all these women is that they're beautiful," he remarked as he set the books down. "I hate beautiful women."

"All heroines are beautiful," said Gillian.

"Not mine," he said, leaning toward her.

Gillian snatched up the paperbacks and shoved them at him. "Start looking!"

In the Gothic room, the wind nattered away at the shutters, and the candle Gillian had lit flickered in the draft from the window. When their search through the living room bookcase had failed, she suggested they try the shelves in here. But now she set aside her fifteenth paperback with a sigh.
Farrington shifted uneasily in his chair by the door, where he had sat while she looked at the books; he had seemed reluctant to come far into the room and had not tried very hard to find anything himself.

Suddenly Gillian snapped her fingers and yanked open the bottom drawer of the typing desk to pull out her "inactive" file. She began rifling through the sheets. "Here's a dowager type-- and a couple of adolescents-- drat, no heroines. Oh, look, here's my old friend Josef the gypsy."

"Let me see." James, his eyes sparking with curiosity, left his chair and took the paper; it was nearly as dog-eared and smudgy as the one that bore his own name. He began to read aloud. "Travelling the countryside in his traditionally-painted wagon, Josef is the last survivor of his gypsy band. That is how he thinks of himself: Josef the Survivor. He has survived a great deal, and will do anything-- anything --to go on surviving.
"Tonight he has built an enormous fire by the wagon, and his snow-white teeth gleam in the firelight as he smiles at his plan to steal back the horse he sold to a farmer this afternoon. His marble-like eyes narrow as he toys with the gypsy weapons he has thrust through his silver belt: an ivory-handled knife with a blade as slender as the space between a man's ribs, and a small vial of powerful explosive he has just prepared according to an old gypsy formula. A cold laugh slips out between his predatory teeth as he thinks of how he will sneak into the farmyard, cowing all the dogs with his evil eye. Then, after freeing his horse, he will toss the explosive into the barn...."

James broke off and read silently for a moment. "This man is a snake!" he said. "He likes to torture animals and scare people!"

Gillian laughed. "I fussed over him nearly as long as I have over you, before I filed him away. I take him out every now and then, but I never have found the right place for him. Ah, well, we should get back to your heroine."

"Make me one that isn't beautiful," he said, handing the sheet back.

"Can't be done. Stop insisting, or I'll put you in the file with Josef, here."
She lifted Farrington's sketch and playfully slid it into the folder, but before she could close the cover, his hand lashed out and snatched the paper from the jaws of the file, spilling Josef's sheet and several others on the floor.

"Don't you remember that I have claustrophobia?" Sweat covered his brow like trickles of water on a melting ice sculpture.

"What?" Gillian was baffled. "I never gave you claustrophobia!"

"But I have it," he said, clutching the paper close to his sweater. "Imagine-- imagine being trapped between two cardboard pages, where you can't breathe...." Suddenly he turned and bolted from the room.

"James-- wait!"

But he raced on down the stairs, leaving Gillian with the other papers about her feet like fallen leaves. She heard the dog's bark greet him as his footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. Then the wind's howl came surging in the front door. As Gillian listened, she began to chip away at the nail she'd left untouched since James Farrington made his appearance.

"James?" she called. But the voice that answered her was the storm's, rain hissing through the open door.... Gillian glanced at the lonely last chocolate cherry, but it didn't seem appealing somehow. She bit her lip and sidled out onto the landing. From the top of the stairs she saw the door, creaking on its hinges as the air pressure drew it slightly outward. It tugged back, as if reluctant to reseal the doorway. The parquet floor was awash.

Gillian took a deep breath and started down the stairs. One step. Where had James Farrington gone? Two. Did he still exist, not just in her mind, but in real life, somewhere....out there?

Gillian shuddered, hesitating at step three, and suddenly sat down on the stair, feeling queasy. "Admit it, Gillian," she muttered, "You haven't been mentally healthy for a long time. Normal people aren't afraid to leave their houses."

She looked at the open door again, then slowly stood up. Four. How can he have claustrophobia, she wondered, when I never gave it to him? Five. I'm imaginging he has claustrophobia. Six. After all, he's an imaginary man. Seven. I can't stand this-- eight, nine ten eleven twelvethirteen run to the door and slam it!

As she leaned panting, back against the door, something hit the other side of it with a thud like Death knocking. Gillian bounced away from the door with a shriek, slipped on the rain-slicked floor and was flat on her face before she heard the dog's whimper and a blunt scrabbling of claws on the door.

Dry-mouthed, Gillian scrambled to her feet, reaching out to press the intercom button. "James?"

The dog began to howl like some pitiful siren, the sound punctuated by the staccato of the rain on the door. Gillian stood with her back to the door for a long time, until a good scattering of nail polish flakes lay on the wet floor, red and shiny.

I will not go out, Gillian decided at last. But I could let the dog in.
She turned quickly and opened the door, peering round the edge. The setter, its red coat gleaming slick in the porch light, gazed expectantly up at her. It gave a quick little bark, leapt up and danced along the path to the driveway, turning to beckon her with a pleading whimper. A gust of wind slapped Gillian's face with rainy fingers. She held onto the door with white knuckles and forced herself to search the driveway with her eyes.

"James?" she called into the swirling darkness.

And then, far across the grass, beyond the driveway, she saw something that could not be there: a great bonfire, glowing steadily and brightly, untouched by the wind and rain. A man's voice like fire itself, with an exotic accent, shot across the night at her.

"Put the dog in the house and walk slowly toward the fire, Miss Redfern, or you will never see James Farrington again."

The dog yelped as if the man's voice hurt it and dashed to the porch and in through the door.

"Do not delay, Miss Redfern! I have it in my power to kill him now!"

Gillian slipped onto the rain-buffeted porch, easing the door to behind her. She heard it click shut and felt as if someone had just written "The End". She walked shakily toward the firelight. She stumbled against the garbage can, but recovered and went on, like a sleepwalker.

Somwhere on the far side of the driveway the rain stopped as if it were a mere curtain. The great crackling blaze blocked her view of the man, but her stomach knotted as she recognized the gypsy wagon behind him, painted all over with bright mysterious star-shaped designs that seemed to move in the firelight.

"Come around the fire," he said. "Slowly."

She edged forward, and for the first time caught sight of his face with its dark elegant beard and moustache. He wore a red satin shirt, the sleeves in ruffled layers, with black vest and pants. In one hand a shiny blade hung dangerously above the exposed throat of James Farrington, who lay apparently unconscious at his feet.

"Josef," Gillian breathed. He beckoned with one finger, and she went like a robot until she stood in arms' reach.

"Yes, it is Josef." Suddenly he thundered at her, "I should be grateful you even gave me a name, heh?" He waved the knife in the air, his silver belt jingling. Gillian's eyes went to the little vial of explosive tucked in beside the knife sheath.

"Tell me, Miss Redfern," he said as he reached out to snatch her by the collar, jerking her forward and blasting her face with his hot breath, "by what right do you do for him what you did not for me?" He gestured at James with the blade. "Three weeks you spend loving your pretty boy into existence, while I have willed myself into reality the hard way, over the long years, trapped in that part of your mind that even you do not look at. Oh, yes, it is you who have made me real-- but against your will. You created me too strong a man to accept entombment in a file drawer. But who is it you love into reality?"

He spat at James, who lay motionless still. "This pale milksop lawyer, who must have everything right and proper, he knows nothing of the wild gyspy ways, the freedom, the passion--"

Suddenly Farrington roused from his torpor, lunging to catch the gypsy's wrist. But Josef lashed out with his boot. Gillian shrieked as she heard bone crack; blood spurted on James's cheek, and the dark man wrenched the knife hand deftly away. Then in a blink he was behind Gillian, the blade at her throat.

"Keep your place, Farrington, or our fickle little author dies."

James got slowly to his knees, wiping blood from his mouth on his sleeve.
The gypsy laughed in Gillian's ear. "It is I who have made your house a prison all these years. It was a pleasing game, while there was hope that you would rescue me from the file. But you have betrayed me, teasing me so often with the possibility of reality, only to give it to him!"

James edged slowly to his feet, and Gillian felt the gypsy tighten his grip on her. But James held out his palms in a pacific gesture. "Josef. I'm a lawyer. Perhaps we can work out an agreement. It seems to me that you've been given a pretty raw deal."

"I beg your pardon?" Gillian croaked. "James Farrington, you're supposed to be the champion of the oppressed!"

"Well, that's just it, Gillian," said the lawyer. "The question here is, just who is the oppressed?"

"I have been plenty oppressed," the gypsy asserted.

"Quite. What have you got to say to that, Gillian?"

"But-- but he's using terrorist tactics! That's illegal! And immoral!"

"Hmmmm." Farrington's eyes played over her figure.

Gillian gasped. "Don't you dare say it, you--"

"She has you there, Josef," Farrington said hastily.

"When a man is denied proper channels for justice, he must use what he can," said Josef.

"You see, Gillian. If you would treat your characters properly, this kind of thing would never happen," Farrington chided her.

Gillian swallowed her rage, vowing silently that once she got out of this scrape she would give up writing gothic romances and start turning out utopian feminist novels in which men knew their place-- under a woman's feet! "All right. What do you want, Josef?"

He laughed in her ear. "But it is you I want, my lovely author. I could never be satisfied with a life between paperback covers." He pushed her toward the wagon. "Get in," he told her, and she scrambled up onto the box as the gypsy pulled a sheet of paper from his vest. "Your life, Farrington. It goes in the fire if you cross me." He stuffed the paper back into his vest and sprang up behind Gillian, shoving her into the wagon's purple-curtained interior. The low ceiling seemed to crawl with golden dragons and serpents.

"Ow!" Gillian batted aside the swinging oil lamp on which she had banged her head as Josef crawled in behind her.

"Josef!" Farrington appeared in the entry.

"Come in, lawyer-man," said the gypsy. "Come into my tiny, stuffy, cramped little wagon. Come in and feel the walls and ceiling closing in on you like the pages of a file folder, never to be reopened, heh heh."

James crouched at the opening, his face pale in the lamplight.

Josef smiled wickedly. "What use is this hero of yours, Miss Redfern, who cannot rescue a lady from her fear? How wrong you were to give life to this weakling instead of to me. He knows he will perish if ever the file is closed on him."

Farrington was visibly shaking. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and, to Gillian's shock and indignation, bolted away from the door.

"James Farrington, you come back here! You're supposed to be a hero!" she screamed.

Josef, laughing, jerked her toward him and breathed ponderously in her ear. But Gillian had had enough.

"Oh, cut it out!" she said, waving him away as if he were a mosquito. "I know bloody well you won't kill me, because if I die, you die, and you will do anything, absolutely anything to stay alive-- won't you, Josef?"

For a moment he looked as if she had thrown a bucket of cold water over him. Then he lifted his blade once more. "I may not kill you, my lovely, but I might hurt you very, very badly."

Gillian swallowed.

"Josef!" James's voice came from without, and Gillian's heart skipped a beat. "I have your character sheet! Let Gillian go, or I toss it in the fire!"

Josef's face shone with sweat as he stared at Gillian. "So," he said. "Maybe I should just take you and Farrington with me, heh? One knife thrust to your soft throat and we are finished, all three."

"Josef," said Gillian. "James is-- is trustworthy. If you let me go, I know he'll give you back your paper."

Again he lowered the knife, eyeing her. "All right. But I am close behind you-- any treachery, and the blade ends all." He gestured at the doorway, and she went slowly and carefully out, feeling his breath on her neck.

James stood by the fire, dangling a grubby paper over the flames. "Let her go. And put down the knife."

Over her shoulder, Gillian saw the gypsy's eyes narrow.

"So," he said, "I am to trust you, but you will not trust me?"

James's eyes were like granite. "Come get it then," he said, and dropped the paper.

Josef gave a scream like a wounded animal's. Dropping the knife, he leapt toward the fire. James caught haold of the satin sleeve, but the gypsy slithered eel-like from his grasp and plunged into the flames after the paper. His gaudy gypsy clothing caught fire, and he went up like a month-old Christmas tree, screaming gypsy curses more bitter than the crackling of the flames.

"Blast," the lawyer mumbled, and tried to find a way to reach in and yank the other man out, but Gillian pulled him frantically back.

"James, no, he's carrying an explo-"

A sound like a dry thunderstorm flew out from the flames, and James and Gillian stumbled back, brushing sparks from their clothing.
Josef's figure toppled from the fire, charred and bloody, and hit the ground. Gillian hauled off her sweater and began beating out the flames that still burned on his vest. She pulled open the vest, but inside, the more flammable satin shirt had burned completely away. A thin blackened leaf of paper remained, completely unidentifiable, and it crumbled at her touch.

Fearfully she raised her face to James. He bent over, looking at the gypsy's monstrously burnt features.

"Bloody fool. I didn't even have his real sketch. I was still too claustrophobic to go back in the house, so I pulled some scrap out of your garbage can for a bluff."

Gillian stared at him, then reached up to touch his injured cheek. He winced slightly and straightened.

"Claustrophobic. Some hero," she said. "How could you possibly get claustrophobia?"

James looked rather shamefaced. "I suppose it was something I needed for incentive to stay alive."

Gillian bit her lip thoughtfully. "I think I see-- I didn't give you what I gave Josef. I made him willing to do anything to stay alive."

"And he resorted to terrorizing you. You were right Gillian, I had no business defending him-- I suppose I got carried away with my legal sense."

"But James, don't you see? You've made yourself real! Claustrophobia was something you did yourself, without my writing it for you. That's why you're still here, in spite of this," she said, and gingerly lifted a handful of the ashes from Josef's vest.

James's eyes widened. "My paper!" He looked down into his palms, then back at Gillian, but showed no signs of dissolving into thin air.

"We've been up all night. Hungry?" she asked.

He chuckled. "Very. What about poor old Josef here?"

"We'll cremate him-- burn the real paper, I mean. Come on, we'd better find something for that cheek." She got to her feet and started away from the fire, but James caught her arm and drew her back.

"Am I really that bad a hero?" His smile, thanks to his injured face, was a little crooked.

Gillian pulled away and put her hands on her hips. "Yes, you are. A real hero would have conquered his phobia and jumped the villain. He would never, never have deseted the heroine in her hour of need."

"Oh." His face fell.

"Never mind," she said, patting his shoulder. "In real life even heroes sometimes screw up."

"By the way," he said, as they crossed the driveway, "did I tell you I don't consider you a beautiful woman?"

She gave him a cool look. "You said I was fat. Only now that I'm not afraid to go out of the house, I'm going to get out and jog. If losing weight makes me beautiful, you will just have to live with it."

"But it isn't my fault I hate beautiful women. What can I do about it?" he asked innocently.

"I'll send you to a shrink."

"Think he can find out where I got my scar?"

"She will probably tell you it was put there by a beautiful woman."

"No it wasn't. It was put there by you."

They bickered comfortably all through breakfast. Meanwhile, the Irish setter was upstairs, executing his own brand of justice on Josef's character sketch-- and, incidentally, eating the last of the hand-dipped, brandy-laced Godiva chocolate cherries.

--END--

The Iron-Bound Heart

2007-04-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

At last, the long promised next entry of Deja Pubd stories!

The following story of mine originally appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Horizons SF, the publication of the UBC Science Fiction Society.

This is a re-told fairy tale you may recognize. The fleshing out of characters is mine, but the basic story line is a variant of the well-known "Frog Prince." The Brothers Grimm published "The Frog King; or, Iron Henry" as the very first tale in their famous and seminal work Housemarchen.

Unlike the version you may be familiar with, the Grimm's tale includes an odd, seemingly unrelated episode about a servant with iron bonds about his heart

according toSur La Lune:(where you can buy items like T-shirts featuring the Arthur Rackham illustration above)

Faithful (or Iron) Henry is often included in the title of the story. The sound of the breaking of the bands around his heart "externalizes the sense of liberation felt by all the characters" (Tatar 2002).

Bettelheim ignores Faithful Henry in his analysis because he does not consider the character to be a material addition to the story. He explains that Faithful Henry's "extreme loyalty is added at the story's end like an afterthought made to compare his faithfulness to the original disloyalty of the princess" (Bettelheim 1975).

It was this element of the tale that intrigued me upon reading it back in the early nineties. I wondered, what explanation for this character and his iron bonds could I work into a fantasy tale based on the Grimm's narrative? The result was The Iron-Bound Heart.

(n.b. there is some adult content in this story)

THE IRON-BOUND HEART

Donna Farley

The golden ball's magical glow faded, and the sorceress placed it in her sleeve. Smiling, she turned away from the well and fixed her single eye upon the cowering young squire. Above them, the trees that surrounded the clearing whispered to each other, perhaps only with the wind, perhaps with enchantment.

"So, boy," said the hag, "Useless as you are to your master, you are too much trouble for me to slay, so count yourself the luckiest lad in the Norland, and hie yourself away from here at once!"

Hal stumbled backward toward the trees, his natural clumsiness magnified by his terror. The sword he had been bearing, too late, to his master, pricked the rump of his master's charger. The horse reared and turned, snorting at him. Dropping the sword, Hal barely avoided the horse's wrath, and found himself again facing the witch.

His heart beat like a wild animal hurling itself against the cage of his ribs, in a frenzy to escape.

If only he let them, his feet would gladly carry him away from this glade of evil of themselves. Instead, he bent his knees, fumbling on the ground for the sword without taking his gaze from the witch's one gleaming eye.

"Get you gone, stripling," she rasped.

Hal shook as he hefted the sword in both hands. "No. While my heart beats, I will not leave my prince!" He took a step towards her, for behind her stood the well where his lord, Prince Jonathan of Fellmoor, was now prisoned by sorcery.

The witch straightened her bony form, her cloak flapping in the wind that gusted suddenly and perversely into the deep forest clearing. "Do not dare to challenge me for what I have claimed as my own!" The last word was a shriek, segueing into what could only be curses in the arcane tongue of her profession.

Invisible fingers with nails of steel seemed to plunge themselves into Hal's chest, and with a wordless scream he dropped the sword again. He felt the invisible fingers working their black artifice in his breast, building a second cage within that of his ribs, to prison the determined beating of his heart. One, two, three sorcery-forged bonds, he could feel their heat branding stripes on his heart as they closed about it.

"If you would live, young fool, away from the well!" the witch said. "Every step nearer your master draws the iron bonds tighter about your heart. Touch him and they will crush it!"

Blessed Mother, the pain was beyond belief! It fired Hal with rage and hatred, and he lunged at the sorceress, knocking her to the ground in front of the well. His hands went to her skinny neck, and the tighter the iron bonds squeezed his heart, the tighter his fingers clutched her throat.

The screaming in his ears must be his own, he thought, for the witch could not possibly be making any sound with her tongue stuck out like that. But even when her face turned purple, still he stayed there, screaming and clutching and suffering from the constriction of the iron bonds until suddenly the witch's body dissolved into dust, leaving her robe lying empty as a snakeskin on the ground. His hands closed on air, he stopped his mouth, and in the silence his heart thundered in agony against its cage.

Shaking and dry-mouthed, he began to crawl away from the well. As he went, the golden ball rolled from the empty sleeve of the sorceress's gown. He picked it up, sobbing, and held it to his pain-wracked breast. For this he and Jonathan had come to the witch's home in the forest. King Grammiel's daughter would have the bride-price her father had named, but the man she had promised to wed for it was trapped in the well by witchery.

Slowly the bonds round Hal's heart loosened, and by the time he reached his palfrey the pain had faded to a dull ache. He pulled himself to his feet and, putting the ball into the saddlebag, struggled to the saddle. Then he collapsed on the horse's neck and let it carry him away from the witch's glade.

After a time the iron bonds no longer crowded his heart. Except for the heaviness in his breast, he could almost forget them. Dismounting, he tethered the horse on a low-hanging pine branch and sat down to refresh himself with bread and cheese and a sip of the cheap wine King Grammiel had supplied for their saddlebags.

A pox on Grammiel! Hal had known him for a tight-fist the moment he saw the way the man carried himself--not, like Jonathan, with shoulders thrown back and hands open to the world, but with his arms drawn close to his body. As if he had no love from any other person in the world to warm him, not even from the lively daughter Jonathan had cast his eye upon.

Oh, Jonathan. Hal's heart constricted, not with the sorcerous bond this time, but only with love for his lord. Three years ago Hal had come to Fellmoor Castle as a snub-nosed lad with a thatch of unruly sandy hair and outsized hands and feet, the son of a minor lord to whom King Darien owed a favour. The king had agreed to make Hal Jonathan's squire, and train him towards his own future knighthood; but it was painfully evident from the first day that Hal was no more suited to wear armour than the barnyard cock, and he had less horse sense than the chambermaids. But Prince Jonathan had taken Hal under his wing.

Flashing the smile that made men under his command in battle want to die for him, Jonathan would say, "You will grow used to the horses, Hal, and grow out of the awkwardness too, I promise."

But Hal had not grown out of his awkwardness soon enough, and when Jonathan needed his sword, Hal had failed to get it to him.

He sat a long time under the brooding trees, his heart leaden with sorrow as much as from the enchantment.

Then presently he began to make use of what Jonathan had always told him were his best qualities--his mind and his heart. He went over their adventure from the beginning, looking for a clue to some way to rescue Jonathan from the well.

They had left Fellmoor's clean, windswept hills and come south to this damp kingdom of Kryewood, where the trees were forever whispering about sorcery. Grammiel, with rather scant courtesy for his daughter's marriage prospect, received them at Castle Krye, a sorry, brokendown place with moss growing on half the battlements and a ragged collection of fields and peasant huts huddled reluctantly about the skirts of Castle Hill.

"What do you want with this place?" Hal had complained to Jonathan when they retired from Grammiel's board (sumptuous with game from the forest, even Hal had to admit, but the bread from the ratty fields was coarse and the wine sour.)

"It was not always so poor," said Jonathan. "It was prosperous in Grammiel's sire's time, I hear. And he does have that halfway pleasant manor up on the border towards Fellmoor--the perfect lands to give his new son-in-law, eh? Besides," he said, his eyes softening like grey mist, "I like Celia. By'r lady, a princess who not only laughs at my jokes, but makes me laugh at hers as well!"

Hal groaned. There was nothing more dangerous or troublesome than a prince in love.

Next day they had gone off on the quest Grammiel had set his daughter's suitor. The witch place was only a few hours' ride into the trees, very convenient to the castle--too convenient, Hal began to think now. The sorceress waited by the well as if she knew of their coming.

Jonathan dismounted and greeted her courteously, stating his business as forthrightly as was his habit. He had told Hal on the way that he fully expected the witch to have some dangerous journey or task for him to accomplish, which would win him the golden ball Grammiel had demanded.

Hal was having trouble with his horse, as usual. Though Jonathan had found the gentlest palfrey possible for him, the creature knew Hal was not in command of it.

"The ball is in the well," the one-eyed crone had cackled. "You have but to fetch it."

Without waiting for Hal to quiet his horse and join him, Jonathan cranked the bucket-rope down till it splashed. Then, testing if it had the strength to hold his weight, he gripped the rope and lowered himself in.

Cursing, Hal managed to dismount only in time to see Jonathan's head reappearing from the stone well, his dark hair plastered wetly against his head. Holding up the dripping, gleaming ball, he gave a triumphant laugh. All in a moment Hal saw the witch's covetous look, and the reach of her bony hand.

"Saints!" Hal reached for the two-handed sword slung over Jonathan's saddle, but it was stuck fast; he pulled, and sent himself sprawling. When he lifted his head, it was already too late. The golden ball was in her hand.

She lifted it high, and witchfire flashed from its golden surface. The blue and green lightning leapt to the well, covering the stones and cupola with a sickly glowing net of magic that drew itself tight, making a cage of the well. Jonathan screamed, and fell.

Hal leaned back against the pine tree, hating its cloying scent, and took another pull on the wineskin. Jonathan must at least be still alive, or the witch would not have thrown the net of sorcery over the well to trap him. Hal took the ball from his saddlebag to examine it. It was perfectly smooth and shiny, though too light to really be gold. Perhaps it was only a shell of gold, with sorcerous power locked inside--out of Hal's reach, unless he found someone who knew how to open it.

And who would know but King Grammiel, who had lusted after it?

The more Hal thought, the less he believed he could trust the king. But Princess Celia, perhaps? Hal had seen her looking at Jonathan. Hal, though clumsy with horse and armour, was seldom mistaken about people.

He put the golden ball into his pouch, then turned his face back to the witch's glade. He would leave his horse here while he fetched Jonathan's charger.

He walked slowly, and the pressure of the iron bands began almost imperceptibly. By the time he could see the warhorse cropping grass beside the well, his heart was aching dully. He quickened his pace; if he must suffer, best to have it over. Then he paused and made a soft whickering noise to the horse. Against his hope it perked its ears, saw him, and took a few slow steps toward him.

"Come on," he said softly, and when he had coaxed it near enough, he caught hold of its bridle, mounting quickly.

He looked to the well. "Jonathan! Can you hear me?"

The reply came without words, in a voice not human.

Hal's iron-bound heart nearly stopped. He had heard something like this sound, once, from a storyteller describing the call of the great olyphants in far Eastern lands. But this was deeper, more a bellow than a scream, like the sound of the marsh bullfrogs in Landsea, only deeper and louder.

The charger reared; Hal reined in tightly, making the horse, much to their mutual surprise, do as Hal willed. "Jonathan! Are you there?"

Again the terrible call echoed from the well. The horse sidled and gave a terrified whinny; this time Hal gave it its head and rode it thundering away from the well, not reining in again until they reached the spot where his palfrey waited.

Arriving at the edge of the woods after dark, he tethered both horses there. He strode in across the drawbridge, finding no guards in sight but the sounds of gambling and singing coming from the guard tower. So little was there to steal in Grammmiel's poor castle, it seemed, their laxity made no great difference. Within minutes Hal was outside Princess Celia's very chamber, whispering through the keyhole that he brought a word from Jonathan.

When she opened, he pushed her in, and was soon gagging her with one of her own veils, tying her hands behind her back with another. The gag he managed quite well, but she kept struggling and freeing her hands, till he had to draw his dagger and brandish it at her. Then she came quietly with him down through the corridors and out across the drawbridge.

He brought her to where the horses stood under the moon-shadowed branches and fought with his own knots till first the wrist-tie and then the gag came loose.

Celia shook her bright, loose curls. Even in the cool moonlight her eyes blazed like tapers. But before she could give voice to her outrage, Hal held out the golden ball for her to see. To Hal's relief, she did not put forth her hand for the ball, but looked from it to his face and then all around her. "Where is he?" she asked at last.

Feeling sure of her now, Hal put the ball into her hands.

"This is what you wished for your bride-price, is it not? What do you know of it?"

Even in the moonlight he could tell her cheeks were colouring slightly. "Come, squire. You know well it is my father's choice and not mine own." She looked away. "If I asked any lesser price, he would only refuse Prince Jonathan's suit. He said the witch would be sure to give the golden ball to Jonathan if he would help her with something or other. He said he could use the magic to--to repair the castle."

"And you think he lied." Hal knew it from her manner.

Celia looked away. "Sooth, my father has enough gold to make such repairs. But he hoards it like a squirrel saving nuts against the longest winter since the Nativity of Our Lord."

Then, as Hal recounted their adventure, Celia listened, her brow wrinkling beneath her pale curls. At last she bit her lip and said, "Take me to him, squire."

Hal made a stirrup of his hands for her, and she mounted Jonathan's horse. Celia was off into the woods before he could mount his own horse. Hal sighed. Even going sidesaddle, the princess was a better rider than he.

When they reached the glade, Hal was sagging so with weariness that the bonds about his heart seemed only the worst of many pains. Even so, he reined in his horse and did not enter the clearing itself.

"You must think me a coward," he said to Celia.

"No. I understand," she said. Hal watched her ride the charger toward the well. They had agreed she was to keep the horse by the bridle, in case she needed to escape the monster that guarded Jonathan in the well...

"Jonathan?" she called.

Hal heard a faint answering tap--once, twice, thrice--a signal! Hope rose in his sore heart as he watched Celia dismount by the well.

"The rope is burned away," she reported, then called down the well again. "Jonathan, can you answer my questions, one tap for yes, two for no?"

One tap.

"Are you guarded by a monster?"

Two taps. No.

"Something was there before, Princess," said Hal.

"Hush, squire. Jonathan, if we get a rope, can you climb out?"

Tap tap.

"Are you held there by magic, then?"

Tap.

"Can the golden ball help you escape?"

Tap!

"Aye, but how?" Hal said glumly.

"Must we speak magic words?" Celia called down the well.

Tap tap. No.

"Must we pass it through fire?"

Tap tap.

"Princess, we could riddle thus for years and not find out!" said Hal.

She ignored him. "Shall I throw it down the well then, Prince Jonathan?"

TAP!

She hesitated a moment, then flung the golden ball in. Hal heard it plop into the water, and then a golden fountain burst from the mouth of the well. He saw again the web of light that magically warded the well, saw it this time coming unravelled and dissipating like an ice sculpture set in a summer garden. Then it was gone, and there was silence.

"Jonathan?" Celia called again.

Dazzled by magic-light, Hal blinked, trying to will his eyes to adjust again to the pale moonlight. Suddenly a dark figure burst from the mouth of the well and crouched on its edge, holding the ball out to the princess. She stood frozen for a moment, hands before her mouth, then screamed. She scrambled somehow to the charger's back and smacked it on the rump, but it needed no encouragement to gallop away from the strange thing on the rim of the well.

They came past Hal and his nervous mount like a wind off the mountains in Fellmoor. How he kept his saddle he never knew, but he could not take his eyes from the monster at the well. Its form, at a distance, was manlike enough, but when it jumped from the well it moved with a peculiar half-slouching, half-jumping gait.

Horror rose in his throat, and the iron bonds cut into his heart as it came toward him. Was it a troll? A demon? Its large unblinking eyes, set almost atop its head, shone in the moonlight. Hal gave his terrified horse free rein.

When he reached the edge of the forest, his clothing soaked with sweat and the palfrey foam-mouthed, he found Celia waiting there.

The moon hung low in the west, casting giant shadows as they crossed the drawbridge. There Hal bribed the sleepy sentry to say nothing of Her Highness's nighttime sortie, and spirited her up to her chamber. Neither of them knew what to do next, and they said goodnight with a nod of the head. Hal slipped out of the castle again, ignored by the guards.

Returning once more to the trees, Hal decided to keep the warhorse in the wood. He slept on the ground till morning, then rode his palfrey up to the castle and announced himself, giving out that the witch had sent Jonathan on a solitary quest to some far Southern land.

The king raised one of his dark brows at this news, but said nothing.

That evening, in the torchlit hall, Grammiel sat at the high table, with Celia at his right, Hal at his left. Only some off-duty men-at-arms and some household servants were seated below the salt at the lower tables. The place was dingy with old smoke and depressingly quiet. Even the dogs gnawed the bones tossed to them with little enthusiasm.

Hal had slight appetite for either food or talk. His mind stewed with indecision. Should he return to Fellmoor for help? Look for another witch to defeat the monster that guarded the well?

He had nearly decided to take another bite of the roasted quail before him, when a shouting and scuffling arose outside the hall. Hal, with most of the others, started to his feet.

The great arched doorway at the far end of the hall opened onto a wide landing, from which a broad staircase descended to the ground level of the castle. Up those stairs they now heard a single set of footsteps coming, slow and ponderous, not ringing as booted feet would do, but flapping soft and dull against the stone.

Hal had a moment to notice that the low throb of his heart against its prison had begun again, and then there came a head, shoulders, and body up the stairs, onto the landing, and into the torchlight of the hall.

The servants screamed and ran from the hall through the side door that led to the kitchen; the men-at-arms cast about for their weapons. One, more alert than his fellows, got his sword drawn and leapt over the table to menace the thing that stood at the entrance to the king's feast hall.

"Stop!" The king's voice boomed from his high seat. "Fools! It bears the golden ball. It is a messenger from the witch, do you not see?"

The man-at-arms stared at the monster's face, then backed away as it took a shambling step forward, and let it pass between the long tables and on toward the high table. Hal's breast ached more painfully now, but he did not at once realize why. He glanced quickly at Celia. She was pale, but did not scream.

The well-troll, or demon, or whatever the beast was, continued on its slow way toward them, cradling the golden ball to its hollow chest. In the torchlight Hal saw the thing more clearly than he had in the glade--a nauseating parody of a man, walking on two feet like a man, but its naked skin a sicklier green than the moss that clung to Grammiel's castle. Earless, bulge-eyed and wide-mouthed, its head was that of a monstrous frog, and it brought with it an odour of putrid water.

It stopped and stood before the high table, regarding them with its globular dark eyes, and Hal could no longer ignore the bonds closing about his fast-beating heart like a fist. "God's mercy!" he whispered, clutching at his chest, and knew that the frog-demon was none but his own lord, Prince Jonathan of Fellmoor.

The king cleared his throat and put out his hand for the ball. "You may thank your mistress for me--" he began, but the monster turned its head toward Celia.

With a sudden prodigious leap that made the hall gasp, it was over the table and at her side, pressing the ball into her hands. The princess trembled, but held onto the ball, her gaze fixed on the horrible face. And then the frog-creature put one arm about her slender shoulders, making her sit down with him, and began to eat ravenously from her plate.

Hal's heart could take no more of the relentless pressure. Gasping and supporting himself on the table, he made his way along to its far edge and stumbled away against the wall, clutching his heart.

"Cowardly churl!" the king spat at him. But the Princess Celia's eyes, meeting Hal's, went wide. She looked from him to the frog-beast and back, still clasping the golden ball to her breast.

"Daughter, let me take the ball for you," said Grammiel.

The frog-monster looked suddenly up from his meal. He very deliberately set down the rack of the fowl he was feeding on and placed the long webbed fingers of both his hands over Celia's, pressing the ball closer to her.

"I believe he wishes me to keep it, Father," said the princess, and Hal, despite his own pain and horror, could not help but admire her steady voice.

The creature stood then, offering his hand to Celia.

She looked truly frightened now, but she stood, still holding the ball tightly with one hand and giving the other to the monster.

There were gasps from the men-at-arms, whose ribald minds surely had no doubt of what the thing meant to do with her.

For the first time since he had entered the hall, a sound came from the frog-troll's throat, a deep, chill warning. Drawing the princess close to him with his sinewy arms, he led her away from her father, out into the side corridor that led, by and by, to her chamber.

The crushing pressure on Hal's heart eased gradually, as the sound of the flapping bare frog's feet and the princess's small tapping steps faded down the corridor. The king clapped his hands; one of his men scrambled to bring his sword from the wall where it hung.

"You, and you," the king picked two men, "whilst the monster is occupied with the maid, I will snatch the golden ball. When I have it, do you two set upon him."

Hal found his voice. "Give me a sword!"

The king looked at him, sneering. "Found your courage, squire? Very well, give him a sword."

Hal glowered at the King's back, but took the sword offered him and joined the expedition down the corridor.

They stopped before Celia's chamber door, listening intently. No sound came from behind it, but Hal's heart-pain told him Jonathan was within. Grammiel turned and motioned them on down the corridor, to a chamber two doors further on. Inside, the king went straight to the right-hand wall and pushed. A narrow slab of the wall spun on a central axis, giving glimpses of a dark space beyond, and Hal's eyes went wide with a new respect for Castle Krye.

"This passage goes behind the next chamber, with a second revolving door giving entrance to the princess's room," said Grammiel. "The opening, both here and at the other end, will admit but one at a time. Remember, now, leave the golden ball to me, and set upon the monster."

The king entered the passage first, then one of his men. Hal quietly drew his sword as the secret door swung shut for the second time. The second man-at-arms reached for the wall, but before he could push the stone inward, Hal raised his sword, bringing the heavy pommel down on the back of the man's skull. The soldier fell unconscious without a cry, and Hal blessed the saints for his luck. He pushed at the revolving stone, and joined the other two in the secret passage.

Only a long floor-to-ceiling crack, which was the door to the princess's room being held slightly open by Grammiel, pierced the darkness.

Hal reached back with his sword and spun the other door once more, as if with a fourth man's entrance. As he hoped, Grammiel and the other man kept their attention on the princess's chamber. Now Hal could feel the iron bands closing inexorably about his heart, but it was the scene through the door-crack that sent shudders through his innards.

In the golden taper-light, Hal saw the princess's

profile. Seated on the bed with face upturned, she spoke

with trembling lips to the frog-man, who leaned over her,

his webbed, long-fingered hands resting on her shoulders.

"Please, I am trying to trust you, but--" she faltered.

The monster took her right hand in his and laid the side of his head against it, bowing chivalrously low.

Hal heard the king curse under his breath, for with her left hand Celia still clutched the golden ball to her breast.

Hal swallowed. If his heart were not already so pained from sorcery, it would surely ache now to see his lord in this hideous, pitiable situation. The princess, brave though she had been till now, shrank from Jonathan's inhuman touch towards the head of the bed, and so passed out of Hal's narrow field of view. The frog-man followed her, a sad and terrible moan escaping his throat.

Grammiel, closer to the crack and so with a better view, stood watching in silence for tense minutes. Hal's heart throbbed; he sweated in the close tunnel; and Celia's quiet weeping pricked at his ears. No screams, no hopeless cries for help, only small, muted sobs. Not the first nor the last maiden to be brought reluctantly to bed, but still it was too much to ask of her to rejoice at the touch of a well-troll's hands. And worse than the pain in his heart now was Hal's fear for Jonathan's soul. Ever the purest of men and most gentle, had he now become within as monstrous as he seemed without, that he would do this thing to Celia?

But then the king muttered, "Damn his bloody soul." He closed the crack of the door and whispered to them in the darkness. "The monster--I don't know what he's about, he must have no balls, the way he stands there holding her hand and gazing into her eyes,innocent as a choirboy! And the other hand on the golden ball all the while. We must have at him any way we can. Follow me right quick, now!"

Hal gripped his sword, two-handed, and raised it as the king edged open the door and slipped out. The door swung closed.

Instantly Hal brought the hilt down on the man-at-arms' head, and pushed him forward, leaning hard. The man's body fell against the door, opening it again. Hal shoved him all the way down and walked over him out into the chamber, where the king stood raising his sword against Jonathan's unsuspecting back. The princess now had one slender hand on the frog-beast's shoulder, and he bent his head with its, wide, lipless mouth to receive her hesitant kiss. A golden aura bathed them both with magical light.

"Jonathan! 'Ware your back!" Hal hefted the sword, scarcely able to breathe for the pressure in his chest, and against all the chivalric rules he had been learning for his own future knighthood, swung the blade at the king's back.

But Grammiel turned from his quarry, and Hal's sword snagged in the king's cloak. His heart screaming with each beat now, Hal prayed he could only stretch the sword fight long enough for the golden ball to finish whatever magic it had begun to work.

Celia cried out. Grammiel's eyes raked the scene, taking in the significance of his fallen man, and latching finally onto Hal's face.

"Bastard squire! See how Grammiel of Kryewood deals with cowardly traitors!" He made a cut at Hal's head. The squire parried clumsily, and the flat of the king's blade slid off his own to catch Hal a numbing blow on the shoulder.

Grammiel jumped away from Hal to return to his original prey. Hal, his heart begging for release, dropped the heavy sword and jumped after the king, knocking him to the floor before his blade could reach Jonathan.

They grappled on the floor, inches from the embracing couple, Hal with the advantage of being on top, but Grammiel still armed. A sudden flash of light above their heads brought their struggle to an end.

"The ball!" cried Grammiel.

The monster was gone, melted into nothingness, and in its place stood Jonathan of Fellmoor, arrayed in dazzling jewelled armour and in one hand bearing a flashing sword, like the angel at the gate of Eden. In the other hand he held aloft the golden ball, which gave off a radiance like the very sun.

Hal rocked back on his heels, and found himself flat on his back, the iron bonds weighing him down like an anchor.

Grammiel scrambled to his feet and brandished his sword. "Give my daughter her bride-price, then."

Jonathan's voice echoed coldly, as Hal had never heard it do before. "Surrender and do obeisance to me, Grammiel, and I may find it possible to let you live. You sold me to that sorceress for this talisman, and in payment for my suffering I claim both your daughter and your kingdom."

Grammiel gave him the look of a man who has seen the world turned upside-down. Suddenly he stepped backward, and standing over the supine Hal placed the tip of his sword at the squire's throat. "I claim the golden ball. Or I claim your squire's life. Choose."

The sharp point pricked a bead of blood from Hal's throat, and he could not speak to tell Jonathan to ignore the threat.

"Father," he heard Celia say, "Let the boy go."

"Take the ball for me, princess," said Jonathan, and stepped toward the king. "If you want it, Grammiel, fight me for it."

Grammiel answered the challenge with a blow. Jonathan caught it, ringing, on his own sword.

The repeated clang of steel on steel seemed to echo the pounding of Hal's heart against its iron cage, now easing as Jonathan moved away from him, now growing more painful as he drew nearer again. Hal tried to drag himself out of the way of the duel, propping himself against the wall, where he sat clutching at his heart.

And then, as Jonathan backed away from Grammiel's rain of blows, Hal saw it happening, as in the slow motion of a dream. Behind Jonathan, the man-at-arms revived, and reached to pull back both the prince's arms, laying his throat open to the plunge of Grammiel's sword.

Hal was off the floor at once, and between Jonathan and his enemy as the sword jabbed at him. Its point rammed into Hal's chest, shattered a rib, and clanged against the iron cage round his heart.

Hal fell to the floor, the blade lodged in his chest, as Grammiel yelled and let go of the sword, his hand numbed by the impact. Jonathan broke from the man-at-arms' grip, downing him again with a backward kick, and leaned over Hal to swing his sword wide. The king's head flew off and crashed bloodily against a wall, and his body fell to the floor, flooding the rushes with a red stream.

Hal lay motionless, clutching at the sword in his chest. But even the wound was not half so painful as the squeezing of his heart when Jonathan stepped near again.

"I beg you lord, do not touch me!"

"I know what it is I do, Hal," Jonathan said, and drew out Grammiel's sword, leaving Hal gasping. "Up on your knees."

Princess Celia handed the golden ball to Jonathan and, crouching behind Hal, managed to prop him into a kneeling position. Jonathan held up the golden ball with his left hand, and with the sword in his right he touched Hal on the shoulder with the flat of the blade.

With a mighty creak, one of the bonds about his heart sprang open. Jonathan lifted the sword to the other shoulder and a second bar in the heart-cage cracked. Then he returned the blade to the first shoulder, and the final iron bond broke asunder, with a joyous ringing sound. Hal could feel the dread sorcery draining away out of his chest with the blood that flowed from the wound. Jonathan held the golden ball in front of Hal's breast, and before his eyes the wound healed itself, the broken rib knit, the blood ceased to flow.

"Rise, Sir Hal," said Jonathan, and his squire stood up, whole and free of pain, to embrace his lord Prince.

Before long, Jonathan had claimed, and received, the willing fealty of all Grammiel's former vassals. A day was set for the coronation, and his wedding to Celia. He opened the treasury, and with Grammiel's hoarded gold worked a transformation on Castle Krye. Banners and pennons flew like jewel-plumed birds from the heights; masons came from afar to repair her walls; and the servants scrubbed and polished the halls and corridors and bedecked them with tapestries until they rivalled the legends of Outremer.

On the eve of the great day, Jonathan rode out with Hal into the dusk. All indeed would be well in Hal's heart, if he had not felt there was a change in Jonathan. The prince's eyes, once grey as the skies of Fellmoor, seemed sometimes to have strange depths in them.

Hal followed Jonathan's lead, not quite alarmed, but still uneasy when he saw that his lord meant to ride into the darkened wood. But he said nothing, bending to the challenge of mastering the spirited new mount Jonathan had given him for his knighthood, along with the fief and manor some days' ride northward in the hilly, open country that bordered on Fellmoor.

They came at last to the well and dismounted. It did not surprise Hal when Jonathan brought the golden ball out of his saddlebag. It glowed softly, its light more golden than the pale moonlight in the forest. Hal felt a peculiar and frightening prickling in his heart, as if of the ghost of his vanished bonds.

"Grammiel meant to possess it, you see," Jonathan said softly, "but in time it possesses the possessor. That is why the hag had put it down the well--out of her own reach as well as others'. But the temptation of it was too much for her when I brought it up."

Jonathan leaned on the edge of the well, peering into the depths that had been his prison. "It was terrible in there, Hal," he whispered. "A place without time lies at the bottom. It was as if what lies at the bottom of the well were not water, but knowledge, and I floated in it, drinking it in for what seemed like years. The witch intended that I become her slave, and guardian of the ball, and chose that hideous form to clothe me in. Grammiel had offered me to her, in exchange for, he said, the use of the ball, just long enough to repair his kingdom a little." "Hellspawn," Hal said, shaking his head.

Jonathan turned the golden ball over in his hands. "Every night since I killed Grammiel, I have taken it out and looked at it, thinking of what I could make of his rundown kingdom with it. But always I put it away again." Then he smiled. "It has cost a great deal to repair Castle Krye without it, and I must needs replenish the coffers the hard way, by taxing my vassals!"

"Myself included," Hal said, grinning back at him. "What a hard lord you are, King Jonathan!"

They both laughed, but Jonathan sobered quickly, again focussing on the ball. "It can do nearly anything, Hal. But it takes its toll. It freed me from my enchantment, but at what cost I fear to guess."

He looked up at his erstwhile squire again. "And you, Hal. How is your heart now?"

Hal opened his mouth. That tingling--it was real!

Jonathan was nodding. "It has left you with a sensitivity to magic. I only pray it will bless you and not curse you. I learned in the well, Hal, that magic has a mind of its own. Best, then, that it stay where it can do no harm." He took one final look at the golden ball, and threw it into the depths.

It made a tiny splash, and gave no further sign, in the forest silence, of its sorcerous powers except for the fading of the tingling in Hal's heart. The two young men stood in the moonlight for a few moments, listening to the night wind rustling the trees.

At last Jonathan laid an arm round Hal's shoulder. "Let us depart, my squire of the iron-bound heart. Tomorrow I am king, and you will sit, as loyalty deserves, at my right hand."

"Yes, my lord," said Hal.

--END--

The Death of Leviathan

2007-02-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

Serendipitously (providentially?) Abigail Fernandes posted on her blog her fantastic illustration of Jonah & the whale, which also happens to be the subject of the newest Deja Pubd story, "The Death of Leviathan." Curiously, a commenter on Abigail's blog asked if the whale in her illustration was a she-fish; as it happens, in my story I decided to make the fish (ketos in the Greek, meaning a sea creature-- perhaps a whale, or something else....) a female, from whose point of view the story of the reluctant prophet's adventure is told.

This is another of my stories which originally appeared in Dreams and Visions, this time in issue #7.

The Death of Leviathan

Donna Farley

I remember the Naming Time. No other creature, of Land or of Sea, can say that any more. The last who could was my mate, and he is the backbone of a coral reef far off in the Southern Sea, where I would not go unless I too were ready for death. I shudder, for I have seen more deaths than any other creature, while I alone remember the time before Death.

But now is not my Death-time. Something in the tide draws me in a different direction, north and east, to a land-place I remember seeing from time to time, but where I have never made any close approach. It is a great rock of an island, square-cut and barren, alien to sea-eyes that know the colours and rippled textures of tropic worlds. It stands like a marker, a warning to the things of the Ocean: here begins the Land's dominion! Yet I know my squat little kinfolk swim in the land-wreathed sea beyond the rock, frolicking like silvery legless dogs in full sight of the Namer's children. They are not serpentine and huge like me; even the first of my young was much smaller and weaker than my mate and myself, and our many-times-great-grandchildren, even those that dwarf the dolphins, still approach me in nothing.

For that I blame the Namer, for that and all the other ills that devil the sea, for the red tooth and claw, for the poisoned fin spine, for the mad mating drive that kills a rival, for Death. The Namer ate the thing he was not permitted, and brought the Dread Time. Now his descendants, true to his habit of treachery, take their wooden shells out onto the water to catch the little fish in their nets, to eat them. Worse yet, the poison of his evil spread to the whole world, even my own descendants, some of whom even prey on their own, smaller relatives. In the Dread Time, something began to happen to them, and now their very bodies are addicted to feeding on Death.

Can I know that the Dread Time did not change me, too? Even though I live on plankton, in dreams I consume the Namer, entombing him in my belly before he can do the thing that brought the Dread Time, and Death. But when I awake I recall that the Namer himself is now long dead, and I alone remember the Naming Time.

I drift now towards the sea beyond the rock, the little Sea in the Middle of the Land, where the houses of the Namer's descendants cling to the shores in clumps like barnacles. When I get near enough to the little floating wooden shells they call boats, I wonder, will I still recognize the Namer in their faces? Or are they as different from him as my descendants are from me?

I scoop up plankton as I row my pectorals and pump my tail, moving the long coils of my serpentine body up and down along the surface, going forward with the current. It carries me towards the rocky sentry island that guards the Middleland Sea, and I think, that too is different from its ancestor, from the First Land. The First Land, like all the First Things, was pungent with a glory that exists now only in the most minuscule way, in the palest reflection of it, like a sea mirage that winks out with the slightest change in the angle of the sunlight.

I pause and bob awhile in the silent open sea. This is how I love it, free and endless, with no blemish of Land on the horizon. And yet...the First Land, the Land of Four Rivers, it makes me hunger for it. Beside its memory--the great trees of piercing green, the flowers of red and purple, brighter than any coral reef-- the stony island I am making for is as unappealing as sea-bottom gravel to a whale that hankers for plankton.

Land. Earth. Dust. This was the name of the Namer, who named all but himself. His name was Adam, given to him by the One Who Alone Names Himself, the One Who decreed that Dry Land should rule instead of Sea. The One Who Alone Names Himself might have named me, might have named us all. Instead He named only the Dust-man, and gave him charge over the rest of us, to name us.

I remember that glittering morning. All of us were called--I do not remember how, but we were impelled, urged toward the Land of Four Rivers, even as I am now drawn to the Middleland Sea. The Namer came swimming up to me--he did not at all fear the water, as all but a few of his descendants do. He touched my forehead and said, "You are a wreath, an adornment, as the Sea itself wreaths the Land."

I whipped my whole body round in pleasure; dove till I skimmed the shallow bottom, rose again into the air and coiled my length into the circle of a wreath, gripping my tail in my teeth as I tumbled joyously into the waves. The Namer and my mate and all the others applauded, slapping the water's surface with hands or flukes or paws. My name--Leviathan, wreathed creature.

The Namer and his mate made wreaths with flowers, and wore them as crowns to celebrate the Naming. But after the Dread Time, they wore wreaths of leaves about their bodies to cover their shame, and a wreath became a thing of funerals, a thing of Death. And my name was no longer beautiful.

And because I was long and sinuous, the Namer's children took me for a child of the Serpent, never knowing I was, rather, the Mother of dolphins. And at last I abandoned the shallows, lest the dust people come and vent their hatred of the Serpent on me.

The sky is turning grey as I sight the Rock at the gate of the Middleland Sea. The little shells they call boats flock about like gulls floating on the water, and I dive, preparing to await the night before I press ahead on my voyage. It is the One Who Alone Names Himself drawing me here, I cannot doubt.

He rules as the Namer has never ruled. The Namer is many, his children spread over the Land as plankton spreads over the Sea, and thinks that because he is many, he is therefore ruler. But the One Who Alone Names Himself is One, and He commands both Land and Sea, and they are compelled to obey. So am I compelled.

The Namer alone is not compelled by the One, and this is the one mystery I cannot solve. I think now of the Flood Time, that once toppled the dust-people from their proud perch on the Land. The Heavens opened wide, the fountains of the Deep broke forth, and I thought we Seafolk would be offered the Namer's place in the world.

But no. A few turnings of the Moon, and once again the Land thrust its head above the surface of the Sea. The great waters had washed it clean of the dustfolk, but the gulls brought me news from the Land: the One Who Alone Names Himself had sealed some of the Namer's children up in a little wooden shell before the flood, and brought them safe to a mountain top, where they made a fire and burned dead Land creatures to please Him.

Then it was that my dreams began of swallowing the Namer. And now I wonder if the time has come to make the dreams real.

I surface under the stars and think, Why not? Few of the Land creatures dare often to prey upon the dustfolk, because they are many, and will band together to hunt down any creature that attacks them.

But who can hunt me in the Sea? All the wide ocean is my den, and I can never be cornered. My great wreath of a body could coil itself about one of their little boats and crack it like a clamshell. No word of its fate would ever come back to the Land.

And so under the yellow light of the rising moon I slice through the waters of the strait by the great Rock, rippling my coils with a fierce pleasure in my body's power.

For days I swim, fasting, and use up all the food stored in my crop, for I plan a feast such as I have never had before. The clouds build like mountains, and the Wind drives me farther and farther into the Middleland Sea. Then at last I see the purple-striped sail of the boat that seems to say to me, "Here! Here is the feast that will satisfy your hungry hatred!"

The Wind screams with glee. The waters themselves heave more vigorously than my coils, and I make a wreath of Death in the water encircling the ship. The dust people do not see me yet; they are only terrified of the storm, and shouting prayers to the One Who Alone Names Himself--utter fools, they are calling Him by names they have dared to concoct themselves, thinking this will give them some claim on His mercy.

They throw their cargo overboard. Some of the barrels and jars hit me, and though this does not harm me, I break my circle to investigate these items. But none of them is of interest, until suddenly the dust folk throw one of their own number in.

I know it at once, by the scent--dusty, dry, earthy. I also know it will be no good to eat. But I do not care. I open my maw, as I have done so often in dreams, and draw him in.

Though I am hungry, I have dreamt of this feast too long to have it over in an instant, and so I put him first into my crop. There he cries and screams in terror, and the sound of it echoes all through my bones to my skull. I dive far below the pounding waves, but long before the time I think to resurface, I feel the storm above subside as if it had never been. The storm in my crop, though, is just beginning. It is some time before I realize what the dust-creature is about as he pummels and kicks at my innards.

He is calling on the One Who Alone Names Himself--not, as the others did, with an invented name, but humbly, as a created thing ought to do, naming Him Lord, Sovereign of All That Is. But he is complaining that he is not dead! He claws and bangs at the storage sac that holds him, in an effort to escape into the Sea, and to Death!

In my dream, I swallowed the Namer before he could do the thing that made the Dread Time, and brought Death to the world. But this strange child of the Namer, he turns my dream topsy-turvy, seeking Death from within me. The first new thing I have seen in an aeon, this--a creature that wants Death.

And so I cannot eat him--I am too curious. I hold him there, safe, though he does not know it. Soon it comes out, as I overhear his prayers: he confesses he has been fleeing the One Who Alone Names Himself, refusing to go where He has called him to go.

I am aghast. I am here because I cannot disobey the One Who Alone Names Himself. But this child of the Namer, like his forefather, is able to disobey. And suddenly I see that my obedience is making up for this dust-man's disobedience. He will go where he was commanded--but not until he chooses to go. Inside me, like one of the dead dust folk inside his tomb, he must stay until he wills to be expelled, like an infant from its mother's womb, onto the dry Land that is life for him, and not into the Sea which is Death.

I turn my coils to the east, where I am bidden, and swim, flicking my tail at the astonished dust-folk in their ragged little boat.

For a full day he makes complaint and begs for Death. Then the second day he comes to his senses and cries fearfully for mercy. The third day he praises the One Who Alone Names Himself, confident of deliverance.

I see the sandy eastern shore, the line of dawn breaking fiery behind the hills. The dustman sleeps in my belly, and suddenly with great urgency I redouble my strokes. He breathes lightly, and his heartbeat echoes very slow and faint within the chambers of my self. He will be Dead, after all, for he cannot swim to shore!

I circle in the water. I am over the ledge, now, the foot that the Land juts out into the Sea. The waves roll over me, willing to carry me all the way to shore with them. And I realize that I too can choose, now that I have done what I was commanded. I can spit out the dust man now, and perhaps the water will revive him. Perhaps a seal or some other shore creature will be sent to take him in. Perhaps a boat will come round the point. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Or I can carry him to shore myself.

And I choose.

Round and round in a wreath I go, chasing my tail like a youngster, building speed till a vortex opens into the Sea amid my coil. Then suddenly I straighten like a rod and shoot like one of the dust folk's arrows toward the Land, driving my huge bulk up onto the beach. Muscles ripple, and I heave him out of my mouth onto the sand.

We both lie there for a long time, I bound for Death, he returning from it. At last he wakes, and struggles to his feet, only to fall on his face again, worshipping the One Who Alone Names Himself.

I watch him out of one eye, my head lolling on the sand as I pant. He is not afraid of me, and comes to place his hand on my forehead, just as the Namer once did.

I close my eyes. I will die slowly, hungering and thirsting, unless the dustfolk come with their spears to draw my blood.

The child of the Namer takes his hand away, and I open my eyes again to watch him leave the beach. He walks obediently into the blazing disc of the sun as it tops the hills, on his way to the place where he is called to go.

And so I will die, the last one who remembers the Naming Time, the Time before Death. Will my name be remembered?

--END--

Light One Candle

2007-01-31T16:05:00.000-08:00

Edit March 2008: Of course, this story is also related to a holiday in April, the 23rd-- St. George's Day.

It's Groundhog Day, and the Spec the Halls Contest is over for 2006-2007. That means I can post another story here above my contest story, "Cold Hands, Warm Heart", which was among the "recommended submissions". It was an interesting concept for a contest, and I enjoyed a number of the entries. But it's done, and now it seems appropriate to post a story related to the next holiday-- not Groundhog Day, but the feast of the Meeting of Our Lord, known in the West as Candlemas, which falls on the same day, February 2nd. This cover is by Lynne Fahnestalk Taylor from the Fall 1992 issue of On Spec, where the story first appeared.

LIGHT ONE CANDLE

(This story originally appeared in the Fall 1992 Issue of ON SPEC, the Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing. I've been archiving it on my old website, which my old ISP for some reason still has up, so I thought I'd move it over here before Rogers figures they should shut that site down.)

There was just too little comfort to be had in the world, John Williamson thought as he swung his last kettle of tallow onto the fire. Sweat rolled off his brow, as God had promised Adam in the beginning. God had said nothing, however, about good Englishmen like John's father leaving a wife and twelve-year-old son, and the foundations of a promising new trade, to go off on the crusade led by a French king.
That was what his father had done, though, more than eight years ago now. For the last year, since his mother died, the chandlery had become nearly too much for John. Straining his back lifting the kettles while he boiled up mutton suet, spinning wicks like a woman because he was too poor to get himself a wife, contending with the lazy mule to get the candles to market--if he had wanted a life of ascetic labour, he could easily have chosen it for himself, and become a monk like his mother's brother. It rankled most of all that his misery was none of his own, but all his father's fault.
Now, checking the wicks draped over their rods between two chairs, he swore at his latest adversity, the death of the mule just yesterday, which left him no transport for his wares. And it was at this moment that the crusader knight came to the door with the packet that was to change John's fortunes.
"You be John Chandler?" the dishevelled man asked.
John saw the chainmail armour and cowl, and the cross sewn on his surcoat, and knew he must be one of King Edward's knights, home from crusading in the Holy Land. "I am the son of William Chandler, sir, just minding shop--"
"Not any more," said the knight, and tossed John a large leather wallet. "There's your inheritance, as he begged me to bring you. Died of a fever in Acre, he did."
And that was all the knight had to say. He was gone before John could speak a word. These beastly, self-important gentry, thought John, they are all the same!
John left the tallow kettle to bubble on the fire, the undipped wicks waiting on the rods, and took the wallet to the table. Though he cavilled at the knight's thoughtless manner, John did not bother to weep for his father -- dying in the desert was no more than he deserved for his monstrous desertion.
He looked at the leather wallet a moment before opening it. Could he dare hope his father's war wages would be enough to replace the mule?
But they were not. Inside the wallet he found one silver coin, three coppers, and a dozen candles. John regarded his meagre inheritance with dismay and a mounting anger. Then he spat on the floor and said, "That for honouring my father!"
The impulse welled up in him to throw the candles into the fire, but John stayed his hand. He was too poor to indulge in such a fit of rage.
Then one candle among the rest caught his eye; it was wrapped about with a small piece of vellum and tied with a string. Curious, he slipped it off and found writing on one side. Laboriously he dredged up the minim of schooling acquired in his childhood to sound out the words.
"Thisse candel beareth a grete blessinge, for that its wicke hath twined into it an haire which is an holy relicke of Sainte George. Keep the candel withinne its wallet, and thereby thou shalt find the wallet never empty of candelles."
"Saint George in sooth!" John exclaimed. John's grandfather had once told him that he had it from his father that hardly a body in England so much as heard of Saint George until King Richard came back from a crusade and began having chapels built in his name. Slew a dragon somewhere in Outremer, did Saint George, but he had plainly done no good for William Chandler, to leave him dead of fever in Acre.
John returned the candle to the wallet. "Never empty of candles indeed! Of course it will never be empty if I leave this one candle in here! What a credulous horse's ass my father was!"
He examined the other candles; they were of fine yellow beeswax, not tallow, and might bring some good coin. He took the 'miraculous' candle out again for a second look; it was distinguished from the others by bearing embedded in the side a cross of palm leaves. He might do even better by that, but not likely as much as his father paid for the thing. John sighed and put the candle away again. He would do better, he suspected, to keep it as a monument to his father's folly.

But next day the miracle happened. John bundled up the eleven beeswax candles, which he had left on the table all night, and went to put them in the wallet with the other. But the wallet was already full of candles.
He emptied the wallet onto the table. Eleven more candles, plus the one that incorporated Saint George's hair, if he were to believe it. "By'r lady!" he exclaimed softly.
Three days later he was on the road in search of customers, the Saint George candle in its wallet and fifty others in a sack. He stopped in each of the neighboring parishes (where no-one would wonder where he got the wax to make his wares), sold a few candles to each local priest, and in less than a week had a plump purse jingling at his belt.
Each morning he transferred eleven more candles from the wallet to the sack. He could have sold more than the miracle produced, but at this he did not grumble; John was not greedy of gain, only of a measure of comfort. He was well pleased, indeed, to contemplate purchasing a new mule before long, to lighten the load presently on his back, and after that, well, what was to stop him from wooing any girl he liked? A girl to take away the spinning chores that made his hands raw, and to cook him pleasant and filling meals. A life of just enough comfort to avoid jealous attention from his neighbours, and he might even be able to forget the wicked desertion of his father.
So he went whistling down the road, eventually finding himself in the next shire, where he had never been before. He sold three mornings' worth of candles to a large abbey, and came away with plenty of coin. John congratulated himself on his cleverness in avoiding competition with local chandlers and waxmakers by his speedy travel, and planned his route to make a circle west and south to the coast, where he heard there were two more abbeys, and at last back to his shop in Winchester.
But before he had found himself a suitable mule, the dog days came on with the suddenness of the Last Judgment. The sun pounded on John's head, laying his sandy locks against his forehead, lank and sweaty, and his gay mood turned to distress. The candles--they would melt into one another!
"Must take to the shade," he muttered. There was a wood ahead, but it did not overhang the road--he would be forced to retreat from the route that led toward the abbey of Beaulieu, and hole up in the shade of oak and beech until the evening brought cooler air.
The shiver that ran down his spine was from more than the cooling shade as he made his way in under the canopy of the wood. He knew well from last night's drinking acquaintances that all the land hereabout was royal forest.
"But really," he told himself, "I am not intending to poach, and have nothing more than a dagger on me. If I should meet one of the king's verderers, all I need do is show him my stock of candles to explain and excuse my presence here."
John very carefully did not think about highway robbers or outlaws, for that would not have been conducive to comfort, and without comfort, it would have been difficult to sleep. Perhaps he should have thought about such things; but by the time he was kicked awake from his noonday doze, it was rather too late to do anything about it.
A big, hefty fellow with a bushy black beard laughed at John as he sat up in alarm. The robber had cut the purse from John's belt with a well-honed knife that now glinted in a shaft of sunlight falling through the beech-leaves above.
"'Ere, Bob," he said to one of the two companions who were inspecting the candle-sack. "Why, this 'ere purse is fat as a cow's udder before the morning milking!"
John felt his heart fluttering against the wallet that held the Saint George candle inside his shirt.
"Purse that 'eavy, 'e might 'ave someone as would pay ransom for 'im," one of the others suggested as he heaved the candle sack over his shoulder.
"Nar," said the other, "Too risky. Look, we ought to 'ave cut 'is throat while 'e were still asleep."
John felt faint. He had an impulse to cross himself, something he had resisted ever since his father went off on crusade, but he held back, fearing the robbers.
"Hold, villeins!" cried a voice. John twisted to look over his shoulder, and there, a stone's throw distant, saw a mounted knight, resplendent in glittering mail and a white surcoat emblazoned with a blood-red cross. Through the slit of his visor the knight's eyes blazed like twin candles in a lantern -- a trick of the light through the branches, surely? thought John.
"Scatter!" yelled the burly robber, and ran. His henchmen obeyed. The knight drew his sword and spurred his mount, thundering after the ringleader.
In a few moments John found himself alone. But the robber did not get far through the wide-spread trees; John could hear the horse's pounding hooves off to his right, then the robber's pleas for mercy.
"Churl!" came the knight's powerful voice, "If I grant you your life, what will you do with it but waylay some other unfortunate?"
The robber went on begging, and at last the knight had mercy, having extracted a promise of penance and reformation. Whether or not this could be depended upon at all, the knight soon sent the villain off and came trotting his horse back through the wood to John.
"Your purse," said the knight, and handed it to him.
John stammered out his thanks, bowing awkwardly.
"A pity the other two have escaped with your goods. And you with no victuals, I'll warrant."
"No, my lord," John said.
"Then follow me," said the knight, and wheeled his charger round, starting into an easy walk.
He was headed into the forest, not out to the road. But John dared not disobey him.
At first he had little difficulty tagging along at the horse's heels, but the time wore on and on. He no longer had his sack of candles to worry about, and the Saint George candle seemed safe enough in its wallet. Yet as they passed through the wood, the trees seemed to draw closer together, and instead of only the grey-barked holly, ferns and brambles gathered in attendance on the great old oaks. Branches arched together overhead, shutting out the fiery summer sun.
John found himself trying to pick his path through the thorny undergrowth, and yet the knight's charger marched on like a steed of iron. John stopped, cursing, to pull his coat away from a prickly bush. "Wait, I pray, sir knight!"
The knight reined in the horse, turning in the saddle to watch as John extricated himself from the tangle and caught up to him again. Then he extended a gauntleted hand to the young chandler.
John took the hand, bracing one foot in the stirrup the knight left open for him, and his free hand on the saddle. But he had scarcely any effort to boost himself; the knight hauled him up effortlessly, like a fisherman with a catch of small fry. John settled himself behind his benefactor, astonished at his manifest strength.
The knight was a local lord, John supposed, and knew a shortcut to his own manor across the royal forest here. No doubt he would leave John to spend the night at the cottage of one of his vassals. John could take his morning's candles up to the manor house as a gift of gratitude to his deliverer. It was certainly the first time any noble had ever done John Chandler a favour.
But no manor house appeared. At every bend the wood grew darker and more maze-like. John began to fear that the knight, with the typical overconfidence of the high-born, had lost his way. John dared make no such remark, but at last he was so sore and weary that he could not keep silent longer.
"My lord, of your mercy, will you not tell me where you are taking me?'
The knight was silent a moment. Then he said, "I am taking you inward. Coming out again, that depends on you."
John swallowed, his grip on the knight's belt tightening. He had been a fool not to see it sooner -- his benefactor was a madman, or a fiend! But how could he escape now, out of this trackless forest? Could he slip away when the knight slept, perhaps, and find his way out of the wood along the banks of a stream somewhere?
After a time the knight said, "If you hunger, fear not. Soon we will come to our night's shelter, and there you may be fed."
John was not able to put much hope in this promise, and he grew more and more apprehensive as the filtered light melted into the forest gloom. But to his surprise, just as he thought night had really fallen on them, a clearing opened ahead, where stood a tiny stone church like an unexpected island in the vast sea of trees. Heaven smiled upon it from above, the branches seemingly forbidden to block the sky here. The day had all but faded from the sky, and at the very moment John alighted from the horse's back he looked up and saw the first star of the night wink at him.
"Into the chapel, at once!" barked the knight.
John turned, startled at the urgency in his voice, and stared wide-eyed at the knight's face. He had not imagined it before -- there was real fire in the eyes behind the visor!
Terror took hold of him all at once, but his feet stayed rooted to the ground. The knight stood before him, holding the horse's bridle, waiting for obedience. John's racing heart urged him to flee into the woods; the woods themselves seemed to beckon him -- wild animals, robbers, anything was better than what awaited him in that chapel!
He tore himself from the spot, made a dash for the trees. But the knight lunged after him, catching him by the arm. John gasped and squirmed, trying to free himself.
"Look at me!" said the knight.
John looked. The eyes were still fiery, but the fire struck him once more as it had when the knight first appeared -- like candle flames, steady and quiet, a light in a window to lead the traveller home on a dark night. Not, as he had thought for a moment, the unquenchable flame of hell.
Then the knight let go his arm. "You have been a fool all your life. Do not be a fool now."
Out around the clearing, a rustling ran in a wide circle through the undergrowth, as if the wood had taken a deep breath.
The knight glanced into the trees. "It comes," he said in a low voice. "Only in the chapel will you be safe."
He drew his sword, but it was not John he brandished it at. The woods fell silent again. Every bone shaking, John picked up his feet and ran. He ducked through the open doorway, half-blind with fear, and threw himself on the stone floor before the altar.
A moment later the knight came in, leading his horse by the bridle. He shut the door and dropped a heavy bolt across it. John's blood pounded in his ears, and his breathing slowed only gradually to something like normal.
The first thing he noticed about the chapel was that there was light. It came from a single small lamp suspended before a statue off to the left in front of the altar. Another lamp hung above the altar itself, but it was dark, and the two candlesticks upon the altar stood empty. The rest of the chapel was empty too, as if unused for countless years.
The knight stepped toward the light, and tested the weight of the bowl with his hand. "I would judge the oil sufficient to last until midnight. After that, well, we must see what provision God will vouchsafe us."
John supposed they would have no need for any light after midnight, both being soundly asleep, but he said nothing.
And then the knight revealed for the first time something, other than his voice, of the man beneath the armour. He drew off his gauntlets, laying them on the floor, and then lifted off his helm. John's gaze went at once to his eyes; but surely, the light he saw there was nothing but the reflection of the little votive flame?

Next the knight pulled off the ring-mail cowl, placing it with the helmet and gauntlets. A striking mane of gold hair tumbled round his shoulders, and John thought of the tale of Achilles and Troy once told him by his mother's brother, who had studied it as part of his monastic education. The 'golden-haired Achaeans', the heroes were called. This knight could have been one of their company. A well-trimmed beard, somewhat darker than the hair, adorned a face that was youthful, yet with the lines of suffering upon it. But even those did not destroy the serenity of the features.
"Here is the refreshment I promised you," said the knight, and sat down cross-legged on the stone floor beside John.
John blinked. Where it had come from he had not seen, but the knight was holding out a little tray with a cup and a loaf upon it. It reminded John at once of the wayfarers' dole, the bread and ale provided to travellers by the Hospitallers of Saint Cross in his own Winchester. But when he tried the drink, it proved no ale, but the sweetest wine he had ever had the fortune to taste.
They shared the simple meal, and though there was not much of it, John sat back when he had done, satisfied, to listen to the silence in the chapel. Even the horse made no sound, nor so much as switched its tail. Its master had left it, strangely enough, still saddled and bridled, as if it might be needed at any moment.
John felt the ache ease out of his weary muscles, and almost thought he might sleep, hard though the stone floor was. But then the knight said, "Now." And though his voice was mild as milk, John suddenly went on his guard again.
"We have until midnight. Do you want to tell me your tale?"
It was not possible to say no. What the knight could want with a chandler's tale John had no inkling, but he began dutifully to recount his misfortunes. It occurred to him as he spoke that no-one had ever asked to listen to his troubles before -- not even the inkeep down the road from his shop, much less a knight.
"--and as for my father, if he spends eternity in Hell, I will not shed even one tear!" As the words came out, John realized they might well offend the knight's too-obvious piety. Still, he had said nothing when John poured out his rancorous account of his father's departure on crusade. When John ran out of words -- he said nothing about the miraculous candle that was his inheritance -- the knight stood and began to pace. He stopped before one of the small side windows and stood with his arms folded, peering out into the darkness.
"Fathers are but men," he said, "and share the fault of our first father, Adam. Yet they, like Adam, are formed in the image of the Heavenly Father."
"Mine left me," John said sharply. His heart beat uneasily against the candle in his shirt. He did not like the knight to excuse his father, and now he recalled that the knight had called him a fool as well, and he did not like that either. A fool was something John Chandler had never been -- on the contrary, he was the very picture of prudence. Had he not forborne to throw the candles in the fire, despite his burning wrath?
Outside, something like a winter wind suddenly seemed to wrap itself around the chapel. The hair on the back of John's neck rose, and he wound his arms around himself against the sudden chill.
The knight turned slowly from the window, the reflected oil-lamp flame shining in his eyes again. "It comes," he said, and took his cowl once more from where it lay and drew it on over his head.
John started to his feet. "What comes? You said we were safe in the chapel!"
The knight gave a little toss of his head as he settled his helm on over the cowl, a gesture that led John's eyes to the lamp. "As long as we have light. Without light, there is little hope."
John went to the lamp, tested its weight as the knight had done earlier. His breath caught as the little flame wavered at his gentle movement of the bowl. He released it again, trembling, but it did not go out. Yet how long could it last?
Then the thing in the night outside took on form and weight. John could feel it out there, coiling round the chapel and drawing tight like a rope round a post. His mouth went dry.
For the first time he looked at the little statue illuminated by the lamp, preparing to dip into the depths of his memory in search of long-disused prayers. To his surprise, the image was not, as he had expected, of the Virgin, but of a military saint, his helm surmounted by a gilded halo. He held a long, thin lance in one raised hand, its point down and threatening the tiny dragon that lay cowering under the crush of his booted foot.
Saint George. John's hand went to his breast, where the candle still lay in its wallet.
"I will do what I can to help you," said the knight, standing at John's shoulder as he put on his gauntlets. "But to make light for you without any means is beyond me."
John avoided the fiery eyes. A stubborn vision of his comfortable, carefree future, made possible by the daily appearance of the candles, kept his hands from the wallet, and his lips sealed. He held his gaze on the statue, and remarked, "Where's the great feat in slaying a dragon that size?"
He could feel the knight's eyes on him, and knew what a foolish thing it was to say. Something gave a violent rattle to the door of the chapel, and John's heart leapt into his mouth. The horse whinnied.
"Do you think," said the knight, "that the dragon was so small at the beginning of the battle?"
He turned and went clinking across the stone floor in his mail. The horse greeted him eagerly as he leapt into the saddle.
The thing outside battered the door again, as resoundingly as any ram ever did a besieged castle. The knight crossed himself and drew his sword.
As the charger took up its position before the door, John cowered by the statue of Saint George. "Surely -- surely," he choked, "no wicked thing can come in here, this is a holy place!"
The knight glanced at John over his shoulder, but gave no answer.
Again the night creature pounded against the door, this time setting up a shudder that ran through every stone of the chapel. The tiny flame in the oil lamp flickered alarmingly. John reached inside his shirt and drew out the leather wallet, but hesitated to bring the candle itself out of hiding. To do so would mean something irrevocable, he knew, though he was not sure what, nor whether it would be something worse than the thing that was battering the door. His thoughts, indeed, were so clouded that when the door at last flew inward before the force of the thing's attack, he still stood gazing at the lamp like a snake-charmed mouse.
The charger reared, neighing loudly, and the knight lifted high his sword, crying, "Halt! While I guard him, you shall not approach!"
In through the doorway the beast thrust its gigantic, obscene head. The oil flame grew smaller, but John could see well enough. His innards heaved, and his shaking hand dropped the wallet. "Merciful God!" he whispered.
Tall as the door, with bloody eyes and a gaping mouth full of teeth like Saracen blades, yet John recognized it at once. It was his father's face.
The nightmare creature slid into the chapel, snaking its huge coiled body past the mounted knight who stood in its way. The knight turned the horse quickly, and stood once more between John and the beast. "No!" His voice shook the roof-beams. "He will not face you until he is ready!"
John fell to the floor, fumbling with the wallet. The oil lamp flickered. With sweaty hands he took the candle out and leapt toward the lamp.
"John!" the monster called. Its voice was like thunder, and the icy tone of it stabbed him to the bone. He stood frozen before the lamp, unable to lift the candle and place its wick in the flame.
"John." It was the knight who spoke now, his voice urgent yet firm. "I can do no more for you. This is your dragon, not mine. Light the candle, John."
John tore his eyes from the thing with his father's face and dipped the candlewick into the dying flame. Not a moment too soon. Even as he lifted it upright, shining brightly, the oil lamp sputtered and went dark.
John clutched the candle before his breast, but his relief was short-lived. The knight lowered his sword and made the horse sidle away, allowing the thing with his father's face to advance toward John. Grinning, it reared backward and lunged toward him.
"No!" he screamed, and lifted the candle high. The monster fell back, whimpering. Encouraged, John jumped forward, thrusting the candle in the creature's face.
The candle flame surged suddenly, and again a horror of recognition washed over John. How could he have thought this was his father's face? It was not. It was his own.
It was a bland, soft face, the face of a worm and not of a man. And it had shrunk as he held the light upon it. A pitiful, complaining moan issued from its throat, and John, startled, drew back the hand that held the candle.
"Steady!" said the knight, and John held the light out toward the thing again.
The face that was and was not his own grew puffy, the lips pouting in protest against the injustice done to it. The vast, quivering body dwindled and melted like a lump of suet in the kettle, until it was no larger than John himself.
"John," said the knight, and John turned to see him offering his sword.
John looked from the thing to the knight and back again. "But surely it's harmless now!" he said.
The thing turned its head in a pleading fashion, as if to demonstrate the truth of John's words.
"Perhaps," said the knight. "But when the candle is burnt out, will you be able to stop it from growing again?"
John swallowed. But, oh, to thrust a blade into his twin! Perhaps he could have done it cheerfully enough if the face had remained that of his father...
But what a face it was. The more he looked at it the sorrier he was ever to have seen it. It was undeniably his own face, and written in every lump of the flesh were cowardice, selfishness, pettiness. Feeling sick, he shifted the candle to his left hand and accepted the offered hilt from the knight with his right.
The small nightmare was crying like a kitten now, begging him without words for mercy. But John held the candle above it while it squirmed, and watched it shrink to the size of a cat. Then he set his left foot firmly upon its back, drew back his sword arm and plunged the blade into its soft flesh with all his strength.
Whimpering, it went stiff and rolled over. Its maggoty flesh melted, pooling on the floor, and then with a hiss like an extinguished candle evaporated into wisps of smoke.
With a sob of relief, John dropped to his knees before the altar, and there he stayed, the knight at his side, until dawn, when the candle breathed its last.
The knight helped him to his feet, and led him out into the morning. A spring bubbled in front of the chapel, and John drank from it gratefully.
"My lord --" John began, but the knight shook his head.
"I am not your lord. A fellow warrior, only."
John could not look at him, thinking, That thing in the night, that was how he saw me all along. "I -- I do not know what to do now. Perhaps -- perhaps I should go on the crusade, as my father did." It was with wondering relief that he realized the thought of his father no longer burned his soul like spilt hot tallow.
"Not by my advice," said the knight. "The crusading days are nigh done, and there was ever more evil than good in them. Still, there has been many a soul saved along the way to them. Perhaps your father was among them."
Then the knight mounted his horse and brought John out of the wood by a short route. When John jumped down he found himself under the eaves of a beech hanger, looking downhill over a vineyard that nestled up against a stately abbey. Black-robed brothers stooped amongst the vines, singing as they worked, and the sun washed the whole valley with its blessing.
He turned to look up at the knight. "Please do not forget me."
The knight smiled. Behind his visor, his eyes shone brightly.
John made his way down the hill, turning at the bottom to wave. The knight raised his arm in reply, and then he was gone.
John strode into the vineyard, and hailed one of the monks. "Greetings, brother! I beg you, take me to a priest, so that I may make my confession. And then, I think I should like to speak to your novice master."
The monk, an old man with the leathery skin and keen eyes of lifelong asceticism looked up from his labour. Sweat streamed down a brow furrowed with skeptical lines. "If you hope to escape the ills of the world within our walls, young man, let me warn you, the only comfort you'll find here will be the spiritual sort."
John smiled. "Comfort! The truest comfort is the light of one candle on a dark night. Yes, that sort will be enough for me."
--END--

Cold Hands, Warm Heart

2006-11-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

Thank you Christie G. for the amazing photo of Jack Frost.....

This story was a part of the 2006 Spec the Halls contest for speculative winter holiday-themed fiction, artwork, and poetry. You may find descriptions of and links to this year's entries at http://www.aswiebe.com/specthehalls.html

This story was first published in Horizons SF in the 1990's-- I'm afraid I can't locate my copy of the zine right now.

Visit my other blog to read what Madeleine L'Engle wrote to me about this story.

Cold Hands, Warm Heart

Donna Farley

I can see some of you Summerfolk have come here because you've heard that Jack Frost is planning to jump ship. It isn't true, but I want you to hear why. No, please, hear me out first. I know what you're thinking: a Hierarch of my stature coming over from the Winterfolk could make all the difference. But I'm here to tell you-- ultimately, this is out of the hands of the Ecopantheon, Summerfolk and Winterfolk alike. Yes, I'm including Her Ladyship in that statement, and I don't care who thinks it's blasphemous! It's time we admitted it -- this nuclear winter wasn't the Old Man's doing, however pleased he is about it. The mortals did it, and though both we and they believed it couldn't actually bring in a New Ice Age, I don't have to tell you it's already gone on several years longer than we anticipated.

I can see you flower fays and leaf elves all looking doubtful. But some of you harvest sprites know me well enough to trust me. Please, I only want to tell you my story. And my plans.

I won't hold anything back, so if you're shocked to hear things you never imagined about Jack Frost, so be it. I'll begin by telling you about a day when my heart was unusually warm.

You know, it always did develop a certain smoldering glow in the last climactic days of the annual autumn colour display. And though I was always careful to hide it from the other Winterfolk, there was many a Christmas Eve that fanned the glow to a veritable candle flame, as I painted the windows of filled churches and fireplace-lit living rooms. But this particular day, as I stood before my Overlord in the cheerless gloom of his glacial cavern, it was not the joy of my art that sparked in my chest, but rage.

"Scintilla had no authority to move without consulting me!" I said, and puckered my silvered brows into a furious whitecap.

Winter grunted, fingering his beard of enormous icicles so that they jangled like ominous giant sleigh-bells. "The fault is your own, Frost. I have warned you often, but still you leave your sprites to their own devices."

Well, Winter was no-one to talk on that count. Because of the Earth's 23 degree tilt, he confined himself largely to the Northern hemisphere, leaving the "lesser" work in the South to his delegate, the Snow Queen, in her Antarctic headquarters. But I let him finish his piece.

"How can it surprise you when they take matters into their own hands?" he continued. "I for one am most pleased with this sprite's handiwork."

It was an old argument between us. I clenched my icy teeth, and drew my lanky blue body up to its full height. "I am an artist," I said, slowly and deliberately. Heedless of the ridicule Winter had heaped on me for millenia, I still clung stubbornly to my vision of myself and my work -- which meant giving my full and passionate attention to the autumn colours, not breathing down the necks of my underlings. I steeled myself for the Hierarch's customary reply, my frosty leggings asparkle and the painted leaves in my cap all quivering with my anger.

"You are a spineless son of a flower fay!" Winter roared, with a blast of breath so icy it made even me shiver. "I should oust you from your position in the Hierarchy of the Winterfolk, put Scintilla in your place, and send you to serve the May Queen! Then you could spend all your time painting posies," he sneered, "and we Winterfolk might get some real work done in Autumn!"

"Our revered Mother would not allow that," I said smugly. "My designs are the greatest of all her many glories."

Winter ground his teeth, making a sound like the warning of an impending avalanche. "Boreas!" he thundered, and a moment later the North Wind came to escort me unceremoniously from the polar ice cavern.

When the Wind was gone, I picked myself up and dusted the snow from my jacket, sighing. I looked up to see a being in scarlet robes and a long white beard smiling at me.

"In trouble again, my boy?" The old man's eyes sparkled.

"Hello, Nicholas." I smiled back. "It really is unwise for me to be seen talking to you."

As you know, Winter deeply resents Nicholas and his friends, and even her Ladyship considers him an alien, an intruder in her Dominion. She doesn't like to be reminded that there is any authority in the cosmos above her own, and I suppose it adds insult to injury that Nicholas, like some others of his ilk, was once a mortal. Myself, I've always liked his sense of fun.

Nicholas threw back his head and laughed. Leaning over, he pulled my arm to bend me down from my towering height and whispered in my ear, "You've never really been one of them."

I was startled and disturbed. "Not one of whom? The Winterfolk? Or the whole Ecopantheon?"

"The ones on the Dark Side. The light shone in darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it." He slapped me on the back, and laughed as if this cryptic remark were the biggest joke in the world. "Now tell me, Frost, what makes you so glum?"

I seated myself on a boulder of ice, drawing my gangly knees up and draping my forearms across them with a sigh. Nicholas squinted one bright eye closed, peering at me with the other. "It's something serious."

I squirmed at his perceptiveness; none of the Winterfolk was certain of the limit of Nicholas' powers. At last I said, "I wonder you haven't heard about it, Nicholas." My white knuckles were clenched into icy fists, and suddenly there were ice crystals forming on my eyelashes. I turned away, but it was too late; Nicholas, the ex-mortal, had already seen the unheard-of shame of an immortal in tears.

I stood and paced about on the glacial surface. "One of my sprites...killed...the entire crew of one of the mortals' space craft."

Nicholas was silent for a moment. "My friend," he said at last, "I had heard it was a matter of faulty workmanship or some such..."

"She knew perfectly well the stress caused by her cold and moisture would be fatal!" I exploded. The heat of anger in my chest was painful. "When the taking of human life is involved, I am supposed to be called in!"

Nicholas scratched his head. "Would you not have done the same? Frost has been a killer before this."

"It was needless!" The flame of rage was spreading; unless I got control of the wildfire in my heart quickly, I was going to find the ice in my veins melting. I took a deep breath of arctic air to calm myself. "Striking the crops so the mortals starve, or freezing people foolish enough to get caught out in a blizzard, is all part of the balance. But this -- this was in a sub-tropical zone, and it was done from pure malice! And Winter, may the Sun sizzle his beard, approved!"

I sank back to the ice-boulder. My bones felt like jelly, not the steel-hard ice they should have been.

Nicholas stroked his beard thoughtfully. "Tell me, Frost, how long has it been since you murdered anyone with your own two frosty hands?"

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. "You know very well." One Christmas Eve, I had just put an end to some hapless old man when Nicholas appeared on the scene to rescue a child who would have been my next victim.

Nicholas chuckled. "Mere centuries ago. You were rather proud of the job you'd done ..."

"I was not proud of it," I said. "I told you Old Man Winter would have been proud of it. He was not pleased when I allowed you to distract me from the infant by showing me for the first time what I could do with window panes. `Business' should come before art, he thinks!"

Nicholas was grinning at me. I knew he thought I took myself too seriously -- I daresay you and the whole Ecopantheon think the same -- but I couldn't help smiling back at him.

"I've been true to myself, Nicholas. If Winter has any objections, he can take them to the Lady Herself. I am an artist."

"Ah. And what is it, Frost, to be an artist?" Nicholas raised a mischievous brow.

"To tell the truth!" My passion had made me so warm that I was suddenly alarmed to see a steam cloud rising in front of my face from inside my collar. I gulped, and tore open my jacket to bare my blue skin to the arctic chill.

Nicholas fairly roared with laughter.

I turned on him, and with a quick snap of my frosty fingers gave his nose an angry tweak.

His hands went suddenly to his face, his mouth a round red `O' of surprise in the middle of his white beard. "Ouch." Then he chuckled, shaking his head. "Ah, Jack. You're much too good for these dull, grim Winterfolk. That's why I've come to you. Do you know about Winter's latest hopes against the Earth Mother?"

I shrugged. "He's resented her ever since she called a halt to the Ice Age. But no-one cares, Nicholas. Nobody in the Ecopantheon, not even Winter, has as much power as the Lady Herself."

Nicholas raised one white eyebrow. "Perhaps not," he conceded, "but there is an outside factor. Tell me, Jack Frost, do you know the significance of the phrase `nuclear winter'?"

I stood as still as an ice statue for a moment, then began to tremble like a sapling in the path of the North Wind. Nicholas may have been reduced to a comic figure in the popular imagination of mortals for the last few centuries, but his knowledge of them was up-to-the-minute. He was telling me they were a threat to the whole Ecopantheon, and maybe even more. At last I said to him, "What can I do?"

And he told me.

I know all of you must remember that autumn's colour display, the most spectacular I ever created. Her Ladyship preened like a debutante in her new finery, while mortal artists struggled heroically to capture some pale reflection of my colours-- colours like flame and blood and red-hot iron. But it was only a prelude to my winter work.

I laboured day and night, scrawling my message on windowpanes and glass shop doors. I couldn't be too obvious, in case Winter should discover what I was doing: in the crystal plumage of every frost painting, I concealed my terrible and delicate etchings of blossoming mushroom clouds.

"Look at it, blast it!" I screamed through a window at the White House, where the President was pacing with a troubled expression on his face. But mortal ears are not attuned to a demi-god's frequencies, and he turned and walked away from the window without noticing my masterpiece. Instead, he gazed at a newly-hung painting on the wall of his office, the work of a mortal artist named Catherine Williams, according to the signature -- and an imitation of my own autumn colour display, if you please! I clutched at the window's surface with such icy intensity that the molecules shifted, and a crack opened in the pane of glass with a sudden loud ringing sound.

I reeled back from the window, too late aware that my chest was aflame. I gulped the sub-zero air, and threw myself into a chilling snowbank.

For weeks I had practised my art in constant pain, my body wracked with the stress that tore me between frost and fire. Eventually the searing sensation became so ever-present that I would forget it as I worked, only to have it strike me with a vengeance whenever I paused for a moment. But this time I had overextended myself. When the window cracked, so did my resolve.

I lay face down in the snow, wishing I were mortal and capable of fainting. My heart was still burning, but I willed the flame to be quenched. Even if the mortals were to see and understand the messages, would they do anything about them? I felt the blaze in my bosom subside to a quiet smoulder, and I made up my mind to let my heart freeze to such a hardness that the Sun himself would not be able to melt me.

I lay there in a blessed deep-freeze, until suddenly I was jerked to my knees and found myself staring into the sharp, stern eyes of the ex-mortal, Nicholas. He was not laughing anymore.

"Hmmph! Winter was right, you're nothing but a God-damned flower fay!"

When Nicholas says, "God-damned", he means it, but I made no reply. I could feel my heart cooling by the second, and I knelt in the snow, weak and disoriented, till Nicholas slapped my cheeks.

"I know thousands of mere mortals who wouldn't give up so easily. What happened to all that artistic pride, Jack Frost?"

I refused to rise to the bait, concentrating on freezing my heart into imperviousness. "This wasn't my first failure, Nicholas. I got the same results in London, Moscow, Paris. My work makes no difference."

Nicholas snorted. "No difference? Blast you, Frost. Before there was any Yule, much less Christmas, it was only your sparkle that ever put any beauty into the dark days of winter. In the old days, your art gave men hope, Jack--"

"I gave them death, too, in those days!" I spat. "And I will do so again. The mortals are going to have their war, and before the dust settles, Winter will take over, for months or perhaps years. I will be there -- picking off the survivors, like the vultures and coyotes who will be doing the same." I forced myself to my feet, and felt the warmth in my chest fade to an insignificant spark.

"So!" The old man shook his staff. "You admit you are no longer an artist!"

Without answering, I turned to hobble off through the snow. I was not going to allow Nicholas to see me weep a second time.

All of you Summerfolk remember when they did it: on Midsummer's Ever, just when the crops in the Northern Hemisphere were most vulnerable.

We Winterfolk gathered at the Hierarch's ice cavern, far to the north of where the forest fires were ripping a fiery path across Canada to one side and the Soviet Union to the other. In the high arctic, the Sun never sets at that time of year, but that day we knew he would not be seen much anywhere for a long time after. We watched the West Wind hurrying the fires along and casting great black smoke plumes to the sprites of the upper air, who spread them to make a smothering tent between earth and sky. The Aurora Borealis fairly screamed in protest.

"Don't set your hopes too high," Winter warned us. "It may not be the longest Winter ever. But with the things that come after--" He smiled, as broadly as he had the day he murdered the Titanic with an iceberg. "Ozone depletion, famine-- let us see how her Ladyship weathers that."

I could feel the tingle of excitement in the sprites and elves and imps all about me. Soon they would be kept very busy.

"There will be refugees, fleeing northward from the destruction," said Scintilla, her snowflake robes shimmering with her anticipation, "and before they realize the perils of the north and turn back, we will catch them..."

My icy fingers closed on her throat, paralyzing her voice with my frost. "You will be frosting windows, sprite. Taking human life is my responsibility," I hissed, and released her.

She backed away, her eyes round with terror. The whole cavern was suddenly silent. Even Winter made no remark about my change of heart, except to raise his hoary brows.

I am still proud to say I did my work efficiently. I suppose I couldn't help making even killing into an art. My victims had a gentler, swifter death than they would have had from Pestilence and Famine, from whose jaws I often snatched them. I told myself it made no difference to me how much or how little they suffered, but the infinitesimal spark in my heart refused to go out. It was encased in thick ice, as solid as an ancient glacier, but somehow it kept on glowing there, so small that I had forgotten it by the eve of the second Christmas.

Of course we Winterfolk did not call it Christmas, but the fourth day after Winter Solstice. If there was Christmas anywhere on the globe that year, I did not know about it. I no longer painted window panes, leaving that minor necessity to my sprites. If they peeped through the glass and saw yule logs or Christmas trees or turkey dinners in any of the small rural communities that survived the War, they never reported it to me. On my patrols of the roadways I certainly saw no peace, nor any sign of good will. Straggling refugees, making their way from town to town in hope of food and shelter and a place to begin again, were shot on sight by farmers or turned away by paranoid townspeople. I had an appointment with one of those unfortunates that very night, the fourth after Winter Solstice.

I found the place without trouble -- an abandoned church among a half-dozen buildings, the remains of a prairie town that had died when the railway was redirected, long before the coming of the deadly Winter. A tiny building, it was nevertheless crowned with an onion dome that would have gleamed, had the Sun been there to light it.

A sign was painted in Slavic lettering on the wall by the door. Chipped and peeling but still legible, the name of Saint Nicholas wrung from me the first smile my face had known in a long time, and I could hear my frozen cheeks crack.

I quickly sobered. Bursting the lock with a single flip of the wrist, I stepped in.

The interior of the church was swept clean of any accoutrements, leaving only a raised platform where the altar had once stood. The traditional icon screen must have been dismantled and taken away, when the town died, but the ceiling and the walls...had eyes.

I gazed around uncomfortably, for like any other member of the Ecopantheon, I would not by choice enter any mortal edifice, least of all a church. This one was long abandoned, but I could smell a residue of power in the painted images. The eastern wall displayed a Resurrection, the ceiling a stern Pantocrator and a Mother of God with arms outstretched in prayer. The spaces between the plain glass windows, three on each side, were filled by saints, each with distinctive symbols and clothing.

I recognized Nicholas at once, in his red robes and white mane. The large, knowing eyes of the icon were uncannily like those of the real Nicholas.

Then I heard the victim at the door, where my sprites had advised me she would be. They had reported the woman near exhaustion and demoralized, and it was not likely she would be able to rally enough resources to survive the night. Jack Frost had the mandate to end her life.

I stood to the right of the door and breathed a chill down her neck as she entered. She shivered, hugging her arms to her sides. Putting one gloved hand out, she felt ahead in the dark emptiness, and I slipped my arm under her elbow, snaking one finger in at the wrist of her coat sleeve. She was young, and relatively healthy, if underfed, and her clothing was fairly warm. It might take a long time to kill her, but I was patient as well as gentle. I had nothing better to do that Christmas eve, and was prepared to work all night. What I was not prepared for was to be seen by her.

She turned around suddenly, as if she had heard something, and screamed like a trapped animal. I dropped my hands to my side, staring openmouthed at her terrified face.

"Oh, no. No," she said, as she backed away. She was halted abruptly by the wall that bore Nicholas' icon. She huddled there, unaware of the painted figure that towered protectively behind her, her eyes locked on mine as if she were already frozen stiff.

I was no better. At last I said, "It should not be possible for you to see me."

The woman gulped, still rigid with terror. "Oh, God, please..." she whispered. "You look too solid to be a hallucination. Who are you?"

I had never conversed with a mortal before. What was I to tell her?

The truth, hissed the spark of warmth in my icy heart. It suddenly thrust outward into the ball of ice that surrounded it, piercing all the way to the surface like a slender white-hot needle. A spasm of shock and pain nearly doubled me before I took control of myself.

"Are -- are you all right?" she asked.

I nodded grimly. "I am Jack Frost."

She laughed nervously. "That's cute, Jack. I'm Catherine Williams. Nice to meet you." She pulled off one glove and extended her small, elegant hand. Not knowing what else to do, I reached out and clasped it.

"Your hands are like ice!" she gasped and withdrew her hand, blowing on it before replacing the glove. "Oh, well, cold hands, warm heart, right? So, what were you, before the War, with a name like 'Jack Frost'? A rock musician? A mystery writer?"

"An artist," I said. The spark in my heart, laser-like, carved another pinhole through the ice armour, but this time I was steeled for it and revealed no pain to the mortal's eyes.

She let out a startled breath. It hung smokily before her face for a moment, then vanished. "Well. It's still a small world, isn't it, even after the War? I was an artist, too."

"You!" I said. "Catherine Williams! You painted for the American president!"

"Why, yes," she said, still nervous, and I held the flame in my heart carefully in check. It was not her fault the President had missed my message by gazing at her painting, but neither was she immune to the cold just because she was an artist like me. I had a job to do.

I moved closer to her, and she had to crane her neck to look up at me. She drew in a deep shuddering breath. "You aren't...human, are you?"

I shook my head. I exhaled, letting my chill breath drop gently to her upturned face.

Suddenly she bolted, but I snared her with my long icy arms, wrapping them around her. "You can't run from Frost, Catherine Williams."

She stood shivering in my grip. I released one arm only, to run a numbing fingertip across her nose and cheeks.

"You're going to kill me!" she whispered, and steamy tears spilled from her dark, shiny mortal eyes. I jerked my hand away from the heat of the tears, but ignored the flame I felt kindling in my chest. I had never looked in a victim's eyes before, but neither had any of them looked in mine as I did my work. It would be cowardice to turn my gaze squeamishly away, when, through no choice of her own, she saw her death leaning over her.

I placed a frigid, whisper-soft fingerstroke across her chin. Suddenly she pulled the woollen hat from her head, threw down her gloves and ripped open the zipper of her coat, struggling out of the thick sleeves like a snake out of its skin. Faster than I could follow her with my chill touch, she shed her inner layers of clothing as well, until she was as naked as Eve.

"Let's get it over with!" she said. "Go on, kill me! I stopped at a farm before I got here, but they turned me away. Want to know why? Because I was an artist! If I'd been a doctor or a nurse, maybe they would have taken me in, but an artist is just another useless mouth to feed!" She laughed bitterly. "I'll never paint another picture again, and even if I did, who would look at it? So go ahead, kill me!"

The spark in my heart swelled to an intense, angry candle flame. "Do you think I'm a killer by choice? I was an artist! The more the human race found ways to insulate itself against Winter, the freer I was to practice my art. I did all I could to warn them, but they made the War just the same!"

She said nothing, but merely stood there in her courageous nakedness, and both anger and compassion fed the flame in my heart. I knew unless I doused it quickly, I would soon be once again in the tortured state I had suffered in my brief days as a prophet of doom.

I willed the ice to harden, to contain the flame long enough for me to do my work properly, and I said quietly, "I will do it as quickly as I can." I rested one frigid hand on her bare shoulder, feeling her shudders reverberate in my own bones. "Close your eyes, mortal. I don't know how you can see me at all, but you needn't watch me leeching the life from your body."

She clenched her teeth. "Why not? It's an artist's business to see what other people can't. So what could be a more appropriate way for me to die?"

A third burst of white heat stabbed through the ice, and my frosty hand went involuntarily to my chest. The juxtaposed heat and cold threatened to burst the ice-armour as suddenly as my hands had burst the door lock. I swallowed, clenching my fists, struggling for control.

"I am truly sorry, Catherine Williams," I said. "May you go wherever mortal artists wish to go when they die."

I lifted my hands again to place them on her shoulders, but suddenly she was enveloped from head to foot in a vast blanket of crimson. Waves of heat radiated from the fabric, and I drew back, scarcely able to breathe.

"Hello again, my friend," said Nicholas, as he wrapped the scarlet cloak about the mortal woman. "Keep wrapped tight, my child. I have business with our friend Frost here."

"Nicholas! What do you think you're doing?"

The sharp-eyed ex-mortal snapped his fingers under my nose. "You are trespassing on my territory, Jack Frost. And on Christmas eve, too!"

"Blast it, Nicholas. I'm no vampire or werewolf. It takes more than a cross to keep the cold out."

Nicholas laughed as heartily as I had ever heard him do before the War. "Well, you have me there, Frost. I admit you have every right to be in an unheated church in the wintertime. But I won't allow you under that cloak to murder a woman who's taken sanctuary on my property. By the way," he added, grinning slyly, "it was I who gave her the eyes to see and ears to hear you."

I stood flexing my frosty fingers. No-one in the Ecopantheon had ever battled Nicholas head-on before, and I wondered if this was the time to try.

"Jack." Nicholas had that mischievous glint in his eye. "Why don't you paint my windows for me? Something to make the place look Christmassy."

I glanced up at the bare windowpanes and thought, My sprites should have done that, blast them. Then I turned an ice-hard gaze on Nicholas. "It's the same trick you used the first time, Nicholas. Get me busy with the windows, and the victim will survive the night."

This time he didn't laugh, but merely shrugged. We faced each other for a long time, and the voice that finally broke the silence was Catherine Williams'.

"Take a crack at it, Jack. I'd like to see how an immortal artist works."

Nicholas shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid he is no artist now."

That was the last snowflake, the one that starts the avalanche. The icy casing about my heart shattered like a crystal glass on a high note. I flew to the window at the front left side of the church and flashed a coating of frost onto the glass. Then I began to trace a figure with lines of sparkling feathers. Something Christmassy, Nicholas had taunted. My heart beat like a forge-hammer, red-hot and powerful, but my fingers danced over the pane, light as spiderwebs. When I was done, a long-bearded prophet stood there, holding aloft a scroll in proclamation.

I moved to the second window at once, before I could be stricken by the sword-like pain. I painted the Annunciation, a stout-hearted Virgin declaring, 'Be it unto me as you have said,' as steadfastly as Catherine Williams had submitted to her would-be murderer.

The third window became a sunburst of angels, trumpeting the message that would be Winter's death-song.

I crossed the nave, scarcely aware of Nicholas standing in the corner with the mortal woman muffled in the cloak at his feet. Another trio of windows awaited my touch, and I dared not stop to give in to the feverish pain in my bosom. I tore free of my jacket, but Winter's air did little to relieve me as I leapt to the next window and engraved on it a clutch of shepherds, who gazed in awe at the angelic hosts opposite them.

I came to the Nativity itself with dragging feet. My hands were as icy as ever, but my veins were on fire. When I finished it, I -- Jack Frost -- I was sweating. And still one window remained.

"Jack." Nicholas' hand was on my shoulder. "You have proved yourself beyond measure, my friend --"

I shrugged off the hand. I stood, labouring to breathe through scorched lungs, staring at the blank glass. The right design was a simple one. It would take only a brief, if intense, spurt of concentration to complete.

I should stop, I thought, before this pain drives me mad, get them to bring in snow to cool me down. But I had a sudden fear that the design would escape me, unless I outlined it at once. I drew in one more breath, and pressed my palms to the glass.

With trembling fingers I drew the magi at the bottom of the window pane, their eyes raised to the dome of heaven above them. Then I climbed to the window sill, reaching for the top, where I placed the most blazing star that ever lit the night. One after another I drew the glittering frosted rays of the star outward from its points, till they illuminated the wonderstruck faces of the magi below, and at last filled the whole pane from frame to frame.

With outstretched arms, I hung dizzily on to the window frame, balancing on the sill on the balls of my feet. The glory of the star filled my sight; a nova-like blaze filled my bosom. I clung transfixed to the window, while sweat coursed down my brow and shoulders like a spring thaw. The heated ichor was flowing freely in my veins, pouring down through my torso and thighs like lava. It was only when the river of flame reached my hands that I moved again.

It stabbed at my palms like white-hot nails, and a faint tingling began in my fingertips. I let go of the window frame, staring at my hands in horror.

"No! Not my hands!" I screamed, and hurled myself at the window.

The hammering fever-heat in my head blocked out the sound of the breakage, and I landed in the snow amid a thousand pieces of sparkling glass, fragments of the great frosted star. I thrust my hands deep into the snowbank, and clutched handsful of cold white powder, ignoring the cuts where the black ichor oozed out to stain the snow. One tiny, bright splinter of the star was embedded in my eye, and I ignored that too, closing my eyelids as I burrowed deeper into the snowbank. Steam rose around me, until at last I had the strength to sit up, the flame diminished once more to a steady candlelight in my heart.

Leaning over me was Nicholas. The mortal, dressed against the cold again now, stood at his elbow. I drew a shuddering breath of cold air.

"Oh, Jack," the mortal artist said, "Your masterpiece--" And she began to weep.

I have been painting with frost since before her ancestors painted on the walls of caves, and I needed no flattery from a mortal, but the fire in my heart flared suddenly because I saw she had been moved by my Epiphany.

I looked at her, but what drew my eye was the star that, impossibly, seemed to hang above her head. My immortal body was already beginning to heal itself; ichor congealed on the surface of the lacerations, and the cut in my eye had closed smoothly around the star-shaped splinter of glass. It shone there, now, appearing wherever I looked-- at Nicholas, at the mortal, at the cross atop the church dome, like a mischievous eye, winking at me. And I did something I hadn't done since the day I became a prophet of doom -- I laughed.

"Catherine Williams, Jack Frost's works of art have always been the most fleeting. Weep not for me. It is only you mortal artists who need strive so bitterly for permanence in your work."

She smiled. "So you think I should go back to my art."

I smiled back. "And leave it by a window. I'd like to see it."

Nicholas, leaning on his staff, was looking at me with a grave expression. "What now, my friend? Had you let the warmth melt your very hands, you could have joined the Summerfolk."

I stood up slowly, scooping up two handsful of snow. My fingerbones were solid ice again; I let the snow fall and gave Nicholas' nose a playful tweak. The flame in my heart still hurt, but it was dancing now, as merrily as a Christmas carol.

So you see now why I am resolved not to leave the Winterfolk. Yes, it means I'll still have to do some of Winter's dirty work, but as I said before -- what I do is mercy killing. But I will never give up my art again. If I went with you Summerfolk to paint flowers down in the tropics, who would be left to paint the stars on the windows of winter? No, on the contrary, the reason I've told you my tale is to lure some of you warm-hearted folk over to my service. That's right -- for the first time in his eons-long career, Jack Frost, the undisputed first among the artists of the Ecopantheon, will take on students.

You're disappointed? You thought I was going to lead you all in a rebellion against Winter. But don't you see, that's exactly what this work is.

I know, there are really none of you to spare from your work. Summer is under siege in the tropics, and you have to work twice as hard to accomplish half as much. But I'm asking you to wage a war of propaganda and subversion. Bring your talents out behind Winter's line of attack.

It's true my art failed to stop the mortals from pressing the buttons. But it did save one human soul from despair, and also my own.

I have to warn you: I'll drive you nearly as hard as I do myself, and I can't promise you'll ever accomplish even as much as the little I've done. But if even one or two of you would say, Yes, I'll leave my bright floral palette in the tropical sun and dare to join Jack Frost's school of rebels as they etch hope on the mortals' windows -- even one or two of you, ah, now, that would really be something to warm my heart.

--END--

THE FIRST SHALL BE LAST AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST

2006-11-06T20:16:00.000-08:00

welcome to my first Deja Pubd story. This is one of my oldest published short stories, so be kind! It appeared in Dreams & Visions #12 in 1992. A re-read proves the easiest way to date yourself is to write something current. Still, this one may provide you with a few laughs. If you like it, be sure to visit the Skysong Press website, where you can find some of my other work for sale in back issues of Dreams & Visions and the Skysongs Anthologies.

The First Shall be Last, and the Last Shall be First

They made me president of the youth group because I'm tall, I'm sure that's it. Not because my dad is the new pastor, for sure. And not because I can speak or organize or anything like that-- how the heck would anybody know, anyway? It was the very first meeting, I hadn't said more than "Hi," when little Cathy Friesen jumps up and yells, "I nominate Elijah Woodstock!"

Man, I think the little tart just wanted to try out the name "Elijah" on her tongue. Like, I'm sure none of them could quite believe it belonged to a skinny, six-foot-six, seventeen-year-old guy in cutoff jeans. Cutoff jeans are out, I discovered, here in Willow Grove Community Church (I haven't seen any groves of willow around since we moved here, but never mind....)

Baggy pants and neon shirts are in here. Plain ol' medium haircuts like mine are out, too. Guys either have to have a ponytail, or they have to be shaved almost bald up to the top of their ears and then have their bangs falling in their eyes. But neatly. Everything neat and crisp and bought at the mall two hours ago.

So, you get the picture. Elijah Woodstock, late of Cracked Skull Creek, Saskatchebush, is seriously uncool, the last person you would expect should be president. But he can't keep his head down far enough when they look around for a victim, so he gets elected anyway.

So there were all these nicely scrubbed faces looking up to me -- even when I sit on the floor, people are always looking up to me. About eighty faces, I guess, twice as many as we used to see Sunday mornings when my dad was pastor of Cracked Skull Creek Baptist. And I got this feeling. I had it once before when I drove the truck into the ditch off the dirt road between Cracked Skull Creek and the Angry Bear Indian Reserve. It wasn't the landing that was so bad, it was after, when the car just sort of kept right on sinking until the mud was up so far I couldn't open the door, so I had to roll down the window to climb out.

No window to climb out of, here. I was president, and Cathy Friesen was secretary. Shoot. The Bible says to love your enemies, but does it say anywhere that you have to love bimbos? But Cathy wasn't the worst of it, not by a long shot. There was the youth director, Len March.

Len was in third year seminary, where he must've been majoring in cool, because he was twice as cool as any kid there. He wore his shirt with just one button open at the collar. He had one, nice, small, tasteful, solid gold earring (which just about made my dad barf when he first met Len, but Len sort of implied that the previous pastor had heartily approved, so dad said nothing about it.) And he hid behind shades most of the time.

Here's how Len March introduced himself at that first meeting. "Okay people, I can see there's lots of new faces here this year, so I want you to know, this month my name's Len September."

Shrieks of laughter, notably from Cathy Friesen. Obviously a traditional joke, but it was the kind of thing that would only really be funny if somebody else told it.

The main thing I learned at that meeting was that fun is a religious word. In fact it seemed to be a religious obligation. I've got nothing against fun, we had lots of it in Cracked Skull Creek, although we never had more than three people you could consider "youth". We just never talked about having fun so darn much before we did it.

So then, natch, we had to have an executive meeting, after the rest of the kids cut out for parts unknown. I tell you, if the Roman Emperors had really wanted to break down the first martyrs, they should have forgotten the lions and burning at the stake and all and just sent them to Executive meetings.

There were half a dozen of us, and I didn't have to chair the meeting, even though I was president-- Len magnanimously offered to take that chore off my hands. He then proceeded to tell everybody what the schedule was for the next three months, and assign people to fund raising and telephone committees and so on. Then he took off his shades, so I knew something significant was coming. "Willow Grove Community Church. Friday, December twentieth, eight p.m. Balaam's Ass in concert -- be there!"

That's when the screaming started. It was mostly Cathy, but the rest were enthusiastic enough to applaud, at least. I know I must've looked glum-- I have country music in my soul, and any group with a name like Balaam's Ass had to have rap in their repertoire. But nobody noticed me. Cathy flung herself on Len, shrieking, "Oh, you angel! You did it, you got them!" Like, as if it was for her personally.

He didn't try too hard to push her away, I thought. But nobody else there batted an eyelash, so maybe it was just my low mind. I did kind of wonder why he didn't announce it to the whole group earlier, though.

I walked across the parking lot toward the manse later, waving goodbye -- they were friendly enough, the rest of those kids. They all piled into Lynn Vandermeer's mother's station wagon, all except Cathy Friesen. Yep, she got into the front seat of Len's van.

I was so busy looking over my shoulder at the van as it pulled away, I never knew what hit me when I had my first close encounter with the girl next door. I guess I had strolled along the sidewalk past the manse and in front of her house, just as this car came screeching up to the curb. She had just jumped out, apparently, and was swearing at the guy at the wheel. Then she whirled around and slammed full tilt into me. Even though her head only came to about my second rib, you'd better believe hell hath no such fury. I went down on my butt, hard.

She kept swearing, but the tone of voice had changed from furious to mortified. The car also blasted out of there. I must've looked totally dazed, because she started kind of slapping my cheek and saying, "Hello? Are you okay?"

I said yeah, but it was a lie. I was sure my tailbone was cracked. She looked worse than me, though. She had mascara running down her cheeks, and there was a white bow in her hair that looked as if it was supposed to be up top, but had fallen down to the side somehow.

Her name was Laura Whittier. She knew mine, and who I was. But while I kind of brushed myself off, she lost it. She started sniffing and sobbing, and I didn't know what the heck to do about it.

"Good, well," she said, "see you." She ran off to her porch and fumbled through her purse, then sat down on the step.

I went up the walk. "No key?"

She shook her head. Now, if I'd been thinking straight, I guess I would've thought, Aha, she broke up with her boyfriend. Excellent for me, since I like her looks: with a little less makeup, and a smile, that round face would be positively pleasant. Don't ask me why a guy my size has a preference for short, plump girls-- it probably has something to do with bolstering my own self-image. That she was a redhead was a bonus. But anyway, I wasn't thinking that straight. Much less thinking straight enough to think, She's lonely and needs help-- what an opportunity to win a soul for Christ! I should invite her to the concert....

Nope, what I was thinking was, Lord, I bet she's a victim of date rape. See, I have a sort of morbid imagination.

I sat down beside her-- wincing when my injured rear made contact with the concrete-- without the least idea what to do or say. By the time she eventually calmed down, I'd gotten smart enough to dig around in my pockets and find a pack of stale gum. She accepted a piece politely.

"I don't suppose you ever met Sarah?" she said.

"I dunno," I said. "There were a bazillion people at the youth meeting--"

She shook her head. "No, Sarah was -- her dad was pastor before yours. She was my best friend."

"Oh. No, they were all moved out when we got here."

"Yeah, I guess actually it was months ago. Moved away -- far, far away." She sounded bitter. I got the distinct feeling I had come in in the middle of the movie. I did know, though, that the outgoing pastor of this 5000-seater church had left really suddenly, and after three or four months of an empty pulpit, they were glad to get a decent preacher like Dad, even if he did come from a little country church.

"Anyway, don't ask me to come to any of your stupid youth things, okay? And if Cathy Friesen asks about me, you can just tell her to go--" she hesitated.

"Do something with four letters in it," I suggested.

Laura looked at me for a moment, then burst into laughter-- good, hearty guffaws, not infantile squeals like Cathy's. "Master of understatement," she gasped. "You're exactly like Sarah!"

I raised a dubious eyebrow. "Man, I hope not."

I was hot now. She couldn't stop laughing. "No. You're taller," she said, still chuckling.

"You like country music?" I asked, really hopeful now.

"Sorry. Strike one. Sarah and I were always totally devoted to Balaam's Ass, y'know?"

"Oh," I said. "Uh--" How could she possibly say that with a straight face?

"I got all five tapes, if you wanta borrow them."

It was about then her folks pulled up and opened the house. Laura got me a tape and sent me home.

So maybe you'll figure Laura's pretty blue eyes did something weird to my head that made me like music that wasn't country. I don't think so. These guys, with the ridiculous name Balaam's Ass, they weren't just cool, they were good. There were only three of them, right, but one of them was some kind of miracle worker on the electronic keyboards. The other two played guitar, mostly, and sang harmony. The bass guitarist, Jeremiah Davidson (anyone named after a prophet can't be all bad), he wrote the songs. Songs that would turn your heart inside out. He shoulda been a country singer, I tell you. I was green with envy.

I borrowed all the tapes, then got my own copies. I went to Laura's place and listened to her play classical piano, and made her come to my place to listen to me singing Garth Brooks. I went to youth events (and I would be lying if I didn't admit that some of them really were fun), and pretended like there was a reason for me to be president, even though Len March (September, October, November) did everything that needed to be done.

"I'm just a figurehead, like the Queen of England," I said to Laura one day at her place. "I'm the last person anyone ever looks to for anything."

She always got antsy when I said anything remotely related to church. Today she slammed the cover down over the keyboard of the piano, and I was sorry, because I was starting to appreciate Beethoven and Bach as much as Balaam's Ass and Garth Brooks.

"Elijah Woodstock, if you're just hanging out with me to get me to go back to that stupid youth group, you better forget it."

"No," I said. "I hang out with you because I like you better than anyone in the youth group."

She looked at me, biting her tongue. Then she opened up the piano and started playing again.

I didn't bother going for the obvious question and instead went for the important one. I knew her parents didn't go to church; I knew she had gone regularly while Sarah was still here. "Laura," I said. "Are you a Christian?"

She stopped playing, but didn't look at me. "Yep," she said at last, and started playing again.

Yeah, I thought so. Laura had already told me all about the date whose car she got out of that night, and how he'd come pretty close to forcing her. (And incidentally, I hadn't heard a four-letter word from her since.) My wild idea was closer than I'd thought. I figured she'd tell me the story about Sarah as soon as she wanted to.

Only it was getting hard to keep waiting, because I liked her better every time I saw her, and unless she was a Christian, there was no way in this world I would get Dad's permission to date her; plenty of Christian parents don't think that's important any more, but mine do, and I respect them. Laura's saying, "Yep, I'm a Christian" wouldn't be enough to get Dad's okay as long as she refused to come to church.

I hadn't told her yet about the concert. I think I was afraid she would think exactly what she had just been thinking-- that I was just hanging out with her to hook her into church and get her up at an altar call or something. I had already bought a couple of tickets, and I wanted like mad to take her with me, figuring it would be close enough to a date but that Dad wouldn't count it as such. Only then Len got a bunch of us all set up to be ushers and crowd control and stuff. We didn't need tickets, he said, but of course we wouldn't get to sit down either. So then I thought maybe I would just give Laura the tickets, but what if she brought some other guy with her? Even if I just gave her one ticket, maybe she would go buy another to take a date with her.

So I procrastinated about it.

School and stuff went on as usual. I did not give up my country music, but actually got deeper into it. With a little encouragement from Laura, I even started writing my own songs. She drove me nuts, because she would take something I'd written, then arrange it differently so the twang was all gone out of it. I loved the twang. But sometimes I could see her point, too. I loved seeing her.

Yeah, the boy has it bad.

Around the end of November, I was working on a new song over at Laura's "`If you think that your turn just ain't gonna come,'" I sang.

Laura wrinkled her nose. "Ain't?"

"Perfectly okay in country," I said, my hackles rising.

"'If you think that your turn will never arrive--'"

I frowned. "Maybe."

"I like the chorus," she said, hastening to placate me. She sang it, chording on the piano as she went. "'Just remem-ber/ If you're standing in line, unlucky in love and dying of thirst/One day the first will be last, and the last will be first.'"

We played with it till around dinner time, when I packed up my guitar and bundled up against the sleet outside.

"So, 'Lijah," she said from the doorway as I stepped out on the porch. Nobody but Laura drops the "E" from my name like that. I love it. "So, you wanta go somewhere on Friday? A, uh, date?"

I about dropped the guitar. My face wanted to put on a big stupid grin, but I think whatever it really looked like gave her just the wrong idea. I tried to salvage it with a joke. "Hey, I thought you swore off dating!" Swore at it, anyway, that first night.

"Oh, well, that's okay," she said, and closed the door before I could think of anything else to say. I stood there on the porch in the sleet trying to get up the courage to ring the bell for about two minutes. But I couldn't do it. "My life is a country song," I muttered, and went home.

It was worse than I realized. Every time I tried to call her after that, she was busy with something. I finished up my song, and made a tape of it, which I dropped in Laura's mailbox with a note asking her to let me know how she liked it. I waited, but she didn't call.

"Waiting in line," I moaned to myself. "Unlucky in love." Okay, so it was melodramatic. If I didn't wallow in my feelings, pretty soon I was going to realize that I had to do something. I preferred to just feel sorry for myself till the youth group bowling night, when I spotted Laura out with another guy. You like bowling, Laura? Personally, I hate it, but if you would've just come back to church, you could be here with me instead of that guy who looks like a reject from a mutant comic book.

That was what I would like to have said, anyway. Instead, I volunteered for scorekeeper and tried to hide, hunched over at the score table. It didn't work, of course. Cathy Friesen ran into Laura at the candy counter, and shrieked so loud the whole alley turned and looked at them, me included. Laura's eyes met mine for a minute, then she looked away and started talking to Cathy.

That was one long bowling night. When everybody was taking their rented bowling shoes back, Lynn Vandermeer came up to Len and said, "Cathy's throwing up in the ladies' room."

You could never tell what was going down in Len's eyes behind the shades, but he seemed to get real impatient and started talking about how he couldn't hold up a vanload of kids whose parents were waiting for them.

"I'll stay," I said. I was driving Mom's Mazda tonight, room for four passengers, but I'd only ended up taking one.

"Perfect," said Lynn, "She's in there with your girlfriend Laura anyway." She skipped off to the ladies' room with the news, then ran to catch up with the rest of the gang before I could deny the gossip.

I waited, and eyed the guy Laura had come with. He was drinking a soda at the snack bar and probably didn't realize I existed. After a few minutes Laura came out and went over to him. Since he got up and said, "Yeah, sure," and walked away from her without a qualm, I can only conclude that he was either blind or brain dead. She went back to the ladies' room and came out with a very pale, quiet Cathy.

A long drive home with two silent girls is a lot harder to take than any number of chattering girls. Somehow I made it. Cathy looked a little better by the time she got out, thanking me for the lift.

About a block from home I asked, "Did you listen to my tape?"

"Uh-- yeah, 'Lijah. It's really good. I'd like a less...country version of it, though." She grinned.

I pulled the Mazda into the driveway, and she hopped out. "Thanks for the ride."

"Wait!" She was halfway across the lawn to her house before I caught up with her, slushy snow up around our ankles.

"'Lijah, I'm kind of upset tonight, so back off, okay? It's nothing to do with you."

"It isn't?" The next frosty puff of her breath would just about be enough to knock me down after this news.

She bit her lip. "No. It's...I got a letter from Sarah today."

"Well, that's nice. How is she?"

"She's...well, she's okay."

"She didn't want to move away because you guys were so close, I guess," I said.

"That's not exactly it," said Laura. "And I can't tell you about it, okay, 'Lijah? I promised."

"Okay," I said. I was reluctant to let her go, but couldn't think of another thing to say.

"See you, 'Lijah," she said, and turned around and went up the walk.

"When?" I'm sure I sounded like a drowning man asking when she was going to throw me the lifeline, because she turned around with a startled look.

"I dunno-- I've got term finals this week, don't you? Maybe after Christmas."

And that was that. One week to the concert, and things were right back where they were before.

After the Sunday evening service, they changed the signboard outside the church to read, " FRIDAY 8 PM BALAAM'S ASS IN CONCERT!" Monday morning I watched from my living room window as Laura left for school-- wishing, not for the first time, that I could walk to the local high school with her every day instead of catching the bus to the Christian school across town-- and saw her slow to a stop as she approached the signboard.

There was no choice, now. I wrapped the tickets up in a note I'd written-- "Merry Christmas, Love 'Lijah", real simple-- and stuffed them in an envelope, put her name on it and ran over to drop it in her mailbox. She would have them before I got home from school-- would she, maybe, sit and wait for me to get off the bus, run at me like a hurricane, and knock me down in the snow, screaming, "You angel!"

I thought about that all day. And all week. Laura didn't call, she didn't come over, she certainly didn't knock me down in the snow. I worried that somehow she hadn't gotten the tickets, but I was too mad at her for not calling me to go over and find out. Stupid, I know.

Friday came. Life was chaos. Dad had to go pray with some dying old lady at the hospital-- second one this week-- and Mom went with him because it was such a good excuse to stay away from a concert where the volume (Mom claimed) could sterilize frogs from half a mile away. That left me to open the church, because Len man-of-the-month phoned and said he couldn't get there early enough, he didn't say why. The band would arrive at least an hour early to set up.

I kept looking out the window towards Laura's house, but nothing happened. I shrugged on my jacket, and grabbed the church keys, but when I got outside, I found myself walking over to Laura's, not the church. I swear I had no idea what I was going to do until it was all done. I rang the bell, she answered the door.

"Laura," I said, "I'm not allowed to date you. But nobody said I'm not allowed to kiss you, so I'm going to." And I did, which was a little bit of heaven for about three seconds, even though I knew perfectly well I was keeping the letter of the law but violating the spirit. Then over Laura's shoulder in the doorway behind her I catch sight of Cathy Friesen, of all impossible people. She looked as pale as she had the night she was sick, and instead of laughing out loud at me making a fool of myself, she looked positively uninterested, intent on something else that was making her real unhappy. I let go of Laura and hastily backed away, which insured that I fell down the porch steps.

"'Lijah!" Laura bent over me, all concern. "Are you all right?"

"Sure," I said, which was even more of a lie than it had been the night she knocked me over on the sidewalk. I staggered to my feet. "I have to go open the church--"

"'Lijah. Thanks for the tickets."

"Oh. You got them. Good," I said stupidly.

"I'm sorry, I should've called you. I just, well, I had a hard time making up my mind to come over to that church, even to see Balaam's Ass."

"Why is it so hard?" I asked. "I'm there. I'm your friend. And you said you were a Christian, Laura!"

She bit her lip. "Well, I'll come tonight. I'm bringing someone I want you to meet."

That completely sank me. "Okay," I said, and turned around and went off to the church.

If I'd known what the next couple of hours were going to be like, I would've run, not walked, in the opposite direction.

First off, there were fifteen girls about age twelve or thirteen hanging out on the front steps of the church already. I didn't know them; they had come on the bus from some other church across town. Well, I couldn't leave them out in the snow-- it was coming down, but not blowing yet (that came later.) So I let them in, but told them they would have to go line up with their tickets like everybody else after. They ran off to the girls' room, giggling.

I turned on the lights-- the switches were in the foyer, and I didn't actually go into the sanctuary. The men's prayer group had set up tables in the foyer after their meeting last night, for the use of the local Christian bookseller, who was bringing in tapes and posters and other gew-gaws for sale after the concert. I went on down the side hall between the sanctuary and the Christian Ed. wing to open up the rear door, where the band would bring their equipment in.

I had just barely done that when I heard screaming, yeah, screaming coming from the sanctuary. I flung open the nearest side door to the sanctuary and caught a glimpse of the thirteen-year-old girls beating it out of the front sanctuary doors like they were being followed by a heavily armed crowd of JW's.

Nothing really was following them, but they were running away from something in the middle of the wide center aisle; namely, a body. Nicely tucked into a polished oak coffin, mind you, but still very dead.

I must've stood there five minutes before it finally clicked. This was the other dying old lady Dad had prayed with this week. But who the heck put her in the church the same night we were having BALAAM'S ASS IN CONCERT?

Just about then the booksellers arrived. Booksellers, not bookseller. There were two of them, and they were eyeing each other in a way that could not be described as charitable. "I have a nephew who belongs to this church," said the skinny woman with the big "Jesus Saves" button.

"Well, I had a deal with the youth director, Len March," said the tubby man in the business suit, his moustache twitching.

"Len March is my nephew," said the lady.

"Uh, Len isn't here yet," I said. "I'm sure you'll both do a sellout business here tonight, let's just put one of you on each side of the foyer."

They weren't too happy about it, but they didn't have much choice. I looked at my watch. The band was due here any time. I took a peek out the door, and saw that Lynn Vandermeer (she was our vp) and a bunch of the other kids had arrived. What I wasn't prepared for was the crowd of people in the parking lot. They were roughly lined up in front of the doors; the kids who had come to help out had to "excuse me" their way past to get in. The wind had risen to a level where teeth were chattering out there, but I hardened my heart against them.

"Where's Len?" Lynn asked. I don't know if it made me feel better or not to realize she was as shocked at the size and earliness of the turnout as old country bumpkin Elijah.

"He phoned and said he would be late. Lynn, we got a problem here. Get me six big guys, right now."

I guess it just surprised her so much to get an actual order from the figurehead president, she went right ahead and did what I said. Two or three of them about gagged when I got them into the sanctuary and told them we had to move this coffin, but they pitched in. The coffin was on a sort of collapsible trolley-- which is what it did, collapsed, when the guys tried to release the brakes to move it.

I bowed out then. "Take her to the junior Sunday School room," I said, and discovered I liked delegating authority.

Back in the foyer, the booksellers were doing a booming business, although no-one was supposed to be allowed in the doors yet. I had to get the designated ushers and ticket-takers to clear out the customers. The fans protested loudly when I insisted they go to the back of the line, which already snaked halfway round the parking lot. There was of course no reserved seating in the church-- one ticket price, first come, best seats.

The bunch of thirteen-year-olds from before were even more upset, when I found them skulking around the back door and reminded them of our deal. "But we were here first!"

"Don't you know your Bible? 'The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.'" I grinned as I kicked them out into the snow to suffer with the rest of the customers.

I had set a couple of guys to guard the back door; one came and said, "Hey boss, they're here."

They sure were. Jeremiah Davidson was two steps behind my door guard, and a second later he was shaking my hand and asking my name. After a frantic hour of serving as ringmaster to a circus, all of a sudden I got starstruck. "You, uh, have a lot of fans here," I stammered.

He was a short little guy, with a dark, very intense face that looked kind of worried just now. "Man, we've never had a crowd this size. You sure your church only seats five thou?"

I gulped. "We can get in an extra five hundred with chairs." I knew Lynn had a team still selling tickets outside--advance sales had been through the bookstores, but we had kept some back for door sales.

Jeremiah walked over to the window by the door and peered out, then shook his head. "Man, I don't think so. We've never done this before, but-- I think we might have to do a second show."

That was when the fist fight broke out. I dunno what started it, but I was out there like that in the snow, hauling two girls apart. Then somebody started heckling me, like the weather was my fault.

"God sent the snow," I said through my teeth. "Take it up with Him!"

Someone was tugging on my sleeve. I turned around, ready to snap, but it was Lynn Vandermeer. "Tickets are all gone," she said, "But honest, Elijah, there must be a thousand people still wanting one!"

"I'll be back in a minute," I said. I ran back inside, only to find the booksellers in a heated argument. Jeremiah was looking at them like he couldn't quite believe it. I was really embarrassed for our church. And Len March was now quite a bit later even than he said he would be.

That was the moment when one of my door guards led Laura in. "Elijah, she says she's got to see you, I figured it was okay."

She gave me a quick smile, and then made a beeline for Jeremiah Davidson. I could have killed her. She pounced on him with a set of headphones, hooked up to a walkman.

"Two minutes," she begged him. "Just listen, just for two minutes." She shoved a couple of sheets of paper into his hands, and he just looked at them, kind of stunned, while she pushed a button on the walkman. I didn't trust myself even to speak to her, so I waited out the two minutes, which felt like two days.

Jeremiah took off the headphones, shuffled the papers. "Not bad, Elijah," he said. "Too country for us, but I can get it to some other people who might want to buy it."

"What?" I looked from him to Laura and back again, then I finally got it. My tape. My song, "The first shall be last."

"I'm gone now," she said. "Got to get in line-- Sarah's waiting out there."

She was gone again before I could absorb that one.

Jeremiah popped the tape out and handed me the walkman. "I'll take good care of it, okay? I see she's written your address and phone on the sheet music here."

"We haven't got time for this now," I said, seriously disoriented.

"Got anything you can use for tickets?" he asked. "You sell 'em, we'll do the second show."

"Sunday school stickers," I said, suddenly inspired. I called my faithful door guard-- I think his name was James-- and gave him the key for the supply cupboard. Then Jeremiah and I put our heads together for a few minutes. Before long, we'd dug a megaphone out of the sports cupboard, and he was up on my shoulders in front of a parking lot full of screaming teenage girls. A ring of ushers in front of us didn't seem like much protection, but you've got to give credit to Christian kids; they quieted right down when Jeremiah asked them to and listened real hard.

"I guess you're here because you like our songs, huh?" he bellowed into the microphone.

The "YES!" he got back just about knocked me back into the church.

"Or are you here because you love Jesus?"

The next "yes" was even more thunderous. These kids knew the right answers, after all. Besides, at that point, he could've asked them if they were there because they wanted to travel to the moon and they couldn't possibly have said anything but "yes." Oooh, I was getting cynical. I think Jeremiah felt that way a little himself, though.

When he told them the plan for two shows-- the first would be cut a little short, no encores, and the second audience would wait in the Sunday School wing until the auditorium was empty-- there were a few disappointed "awws" from the front of the line, followed by heartfelt applause and whistles from further back. Lynn's team were already back there, selling Sunday School stickers in place of tickets.

I thought Jeremiah was done, but then it was like he got a big, fat, humungous idea. If I could've seen his eyes, I know there would've been a glint in them. Instead, I just felt him kind of tense up, up there on my shoulders.

"Okay," he yelled through the megaphone. "Now, one thing I gotta tell you. Balaam's Ass is a band. We're musicians, we don't preach, we just let the songs speak for themselves. We don't do altar calls, but you want to know anything more about Jesus, you just ask Elijah here and his fine bunch of friends after the concert, right? But meanwhile, being a preacher's kid with a megaphone in my hand and a congregation this size, I can't resist just a little sermon, so bear with me, okay?"

He had them laughing, which was no mean feat in that weather. But he got pretty serious then and said he had seen some behaviour going on here that wasn't very Christian, and it worried him that he might contribute to that. So he was going to ask them all to do something radical, to turn the world upside down like the Christians did in the book of Acts. Were they game for that?

The previous "yeses" were left in the dust by this one. Jeremiah took a big breath. "Well, I hope you all trust me enough to go ahead when you hear what I want you to do."

I never saw so many wide, serious eyes in my life. It was a Holy Moment, honest, as much as anything I ever saw in a prayer service. And Len, excuse me while I swear, March-November-December, chose that moment to make his entrance.

He came into the parking lot beeping his horn and flashing his lights to make people clear away so he could get to his reserved Youth Director's parking spot. Then he jumped out of the van, and came running up to shake Jeremiah's hand. "Welcome to Willow Grove!"

I don't know what Jeremiah's face looked like, but mine, I'm sure, would've soured milk. Len stepped back, like he'd gotten a little too close to the fire.

"Elijah, buddy, thanks for holding the fort. Had to pick up my fiancee at the airport." He gestured over his shoulder at the girl who was getting out of the van.

Fiancee? There's a girl that desperate, somewhere in this world?

"All right, people," said Jeremiah. "Are you ready for radical Christianity? Are you ready to take up your cross and deny yourself?"

"YES!" hollered a parking lot full of teenagers, plus Len March, who had even less of an idea what he was saying yes to than the rest of them.

"Okay. I just listened to a truly awesome song, based on the Bible. Jesus said that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Do you wanna know first hand what that feels like?"

"YES!"

"Amen and good for you, brothers and sisters! Everybody turn around and face the other way!" He lowered the megaphone. "Elijah, take me out to the end of the line. Let's march 'em around the parking lot and back to the door."

It was the craziest thing I ever did in my life. But they followed us. We had to slog through the snow, and that was just too depressing, so I started singing, "Onward Christian Soldiers". Man, let me tell you-- a crowd that size, singing that song, really is a mighty army. We came around the parking lot and back to the front door. Now the first were last, and the last were first. I laughed when I saw the bunch of thirteen-year-olds were in the first ranks, now, grinning at me and waving their tickets.

Len March was not laughing, though. Shades off for once, his eyes were fixed on those front ranks. As Jeremiah clambered down from my shoulders and went to see if things were ready for the concert, I tried to see who Len was looking at. I found Laura, Cathy, and a long-haired girl who must be Sarah, the moved-away pastor's daughter. But there was one more person with them, who had to be the reason Len was sweating so hard in a blizzard. She was in Sarah's arms, and couldn't have been more than a month old.

"Okay, we can start letting them in," said an usher at the door. I moved out of the way and let the rest of the team take tickets. Cathy linked arms with Sarah, and they mounted the steps together. Len took his fiancee's arm to herd her inside, but I was standing in their way. I didn't try to move, and the two of them ended up sandwiched between me and the girls.

"Is this your fiancee?" Cathy cooed. It was the first time I'd ever liked the sound of her simpering voice. "How do you do, I'm his other fiancee. His pregnant fiancee. Oh, and this is my friend Sarah, his other other fiancee. His already-a-mother fiancee."

I wish I had a photo of his face. It would be a good example of the torment of a damned soul. He got back into his car, right then and there, with one very icy and hopefully not-yet-pregnant fiancee.

Laura stepped up behind the other two girls, letting the line go on past them. "Elijah, this is my best friend Sarah. Sarah, this is my other best friend, Elijah."

I smiled. "Hi, Sarah. Come with me, you better get the baby out of the cold."

There was still a lot of wild stuff to come that night-- like the kid who scribbled her boyfriend's initials on the coffin in the Junior Sunday School room. But the main thing was that Laura took me aside for a minute after the first concert.

"I'm back in church the minute Len's gone, you know," she said.

"I figured. I think he's already gone. But if he puts up a fight, is Cathy willing to talk to my dad and the board?"

"Yeah. I can't believe it, Cathy Friesen had the guts to bring it out in the open when Sarah didn't. When Sarah found out about Cathy, you don't know how bad she felt-- if only she and her folks had told, instead of running away, maybe it wouldn't have happened to Cathy too. So I wrote to her, Come down for the weekend and talk to Cathy, decide what to do....and then we heard Len's fiancee was coming in." Laura grinned.

I guess our attitude was not exactly generous. But it did seem as if the Lord had delivered Len into our hands....

I also was amazed that in the middle of all this stuff going down, Laura had taken the trouble to force my tape on Jeremiah Davidson.

"So, anyways, other best friend, will you be allowed to date me now?"

I think my face probably got the big stupid grin that it wanted before.

"Good," she said. "I have to go, Sarah went ahead back to my place."

It was then that somebody came up to report the damage to the coffin; somebody else wanted to tell me they were ready for the second show. The booksellers were still complaining about each other, too.

Laura burst into laughter.

I was startled. "What?"

"The last shall be first. Before, Len was the first person everybody went to, and you were the last. Now it's the other way around!"

Dizzying thought, that. Who knew how many fiancees I might have by the time I was his age?

Naah. One would be enough.

--END--