Harvest of Changelings (29 page)

It was late afternoon, almost twilight. The sky was darkening again, but at least for now, the darkness was not ominous, just the forerunner of night. Nights were another matter. As the changes progressed and the barriers between universes continued to fracture, nights became more and more horrifying and dangerous.
Things
roamed in the darkness. The good weakened, or so it seemed. Good people stayed at home, with their doors locked, windows bolted. Crosses, Stars of David, Amish hex signs hung on doors, along with cloves of garlic, all charms against what might be loose between sunset and sunrise.

But that was night and this is afternoon, Jeff thought and looked at Malachi and Hazel, then at Russell. From below Jeff could hear movement, a TV, cabinet doors opening and closing, pots and pans banging. It was close to dinnertime. Russell's stepmother was home; his father would be soon. When everything was ready, would he come up the stairs and get Russell? What would Larry White do if he found his son in a magical coma, curled up in a tight, little ball, cold to the touch, and his son's best friends sitting around him? Jeff didn't want to find out. Larry White scared him almost as much as his own father did.

“Jeff, it has to be you to go in. He knows and trusts you far more than he does me or Malachi,” Hazel said. She looked tired, Jeff thought, and for the first time her long, brown hair was unbraided; strands kept falling over her face like a shifting veil. Hazel had brought her cat, Alexander, with her. The Siamese, now as big as a Maine Coon cat, had first prowled around the room, sniffing one thing or another. Now he was sniffing Russell and licking his forehead and his hands.

“He loves you, Jeff. He can't say it and I know it's hard for you to say it, too. That means there isn't anybody else he will leave his fear for but you,” Malachi said. Hazel looked tired. Malachi, on the other hand, looked sick and pale and worn out. Dark purple rings made his eyes look sunken and he was whispering, as if he didn't have enough energy to speak louder.

Jeff nodded, watching Alexander as he kneaded the quilt covering Russell and then curled up beside him, pressing his feline bulk against Russell. Hazel swore the cat could mind-speak. Jeff wasn't surprised. He wished Malachi hadn't said that about Russell loving him. His father had told Jeff he loved him. Love hurt.
But I do really like Russell a lot. When does like become love? Does love have to hurt? And he is a boy. Boys don't love other boys, do they?

“Are you ready? We can't leave him there much longer, Jeff. Russ may never be able to come back and that would mean the Fomorii would have won. Our set of four, our tetrad, would be broken, and we won't be able to cross over on Samhain.”

And you'll die, Jeff thought. I'll—I'll have to go back to live with my father. He had been about to tell Russell that when the
shadow had attacked. The Clarks had told him yesterday after dinner.

“His psychiatrist thinks he has made enough progress to handle having you in the home again. His lawyer is petitioning the court and courts tend to favor the natural parents. We're trying to fight it, but it doesn't look good,” Ellen Clark had said.

“Jeff? Hold my hand and Malachi's,” Hazel said.

They completed the circle and closed their eyes. A slow, white flame-aura grew around all three of them, through them, and above them.

Malachi opened his eyes. “He's there.”

“I know,” Hazel said. “I felt him go.”

They both looked at Jeff, whose eyes were still closed, as he sat between them, the light of his aura playing across his face.

Jeff stood outside an elementary school, an enormous one with towering brick walls. It wasn't Nottingham Heights Elementary or Vandora Springs or any school in Raleigh Jeff had ever seen. Yellow dust was everywhere and the trees Jeff knew—pines, poplars, oaks, sweet gums—were replaced by scrub pines and trash oaks. The schoolyard seemed to go on forever, spreading out from the school into endless prairie.

The red of the brick and the yellow of the dust were bright, bright red and yellow, chrome red and yellow. The green of the grass was just as bright, but it was intermixed with splotches and streaks of white. It's a drawing, Jeff thought, colored with Crayolas. He could see where the red and the green and the yellow overlapped, and the sky was a scrawled pale-blue half-sky, marked here and there with purple streaks. A black line marked the edges of the school. In one corner of the half-sky was a yellow circle sun, with radiating orange lines. Below the blue was a pale cream color—manila, Jeff thought, which was what the teachers called that kind of drawing paper. Jeff was sure if he walked far enough he would come to where the manila-and-blue-and-purple sky and earth met. The sky felt close, as if it were a huge window screen someone had just pulled down.

“Russell,” Jeff said out loud, “is inside. I have to go and get him and bring him back.” His voice sounded strange and oddly flat. There were no other sounds: no cars passing, no wind in the prairie grass, no thunder in the sky's purple.

Only one door and a tiny line of windows broke the expanse of
the brick wall. Jeff took a deep breath and walked across the yard and knocked on the door. He waited and knocked again, louder and harder. Finally Jeff pushed down the bar, shoved the door open, and went in.

The inside was even brighter than the outside. Jeff stood in a classroom in which each wall was a different color: red, green, blue, and yellow. The polished linoleum floors was a mosaic, a maze of patterns and shapes—spirals, ellipses, waxing and waning moons, comets with long, long tails—that were only hidden by rag rugs, with even more colors spinning out of the centers. A cheerful fire crackled in the hearth. A deep red couch was against the yellow wall. That part of the classroom was like a living room, with soft arm chairs to either side of the couch, a table, a reading lamp. Behind one armchair was a darker yellow door, slightly ajar. The rest of the classroom was like any other: desks, a blackboard, the teacher's desk, and a wall of windows overlooking a playground filled with jungle gyms, rope swings, and huge climbing mazes. Jeff wondered why the windows and the playground weren't visible from the outside. Each desk was a different color, as if someone had used the 64- or 128-color box: burnt sienna, raw umber, periwinkle, aquamarine, maize, goldenrod, peach, mauve. The color names were neatly printed in black square block letters on each desk. The only other difference was that all the furniture looked just a little too big, as if large-sized children were expected to use the room.

But the classroom had more than wild colors and off-sized furniture: Spices—cinnamon, nutmeg, clove—drifted in the air, rich and fragrant. He could even see spice-trails, shades of red and brown, tiny cloud snakes. And somewhere a woman was singing. Jeff followed the singing slowly across the room, touching each desk, the chairs, as he passed. The red couch smelled of strawberries; the yellow wall felt warm.

Jeff opened the dark-yellow door and stepped into a long, long white hallway. “Hello? Hello? Russell? It's me, Jeff. Where are you?”

Nobody answered. The woman kept singing, a familiar tune, and as Jeff listened, he remembered he had heard it from a babysitter years ago, when he was very small:
Down in the valley, the valley so low. Hang your head over, and hear the wind below
. . .

Jeff followed the singing down the long hall. The off-white walls of the hallway smelled of banana and when he rubbed his fingers on the wood and licked them, Jeff tasted banana. The hall floor was furry. Jeff wanted to take off his shoes and go barefoot. At the end of the hall was a closed purple door, the color of the clouds. The
singing came from behind the purple door; so Jeff didn't knock, he just turned the knob and went in.

Hush, little baby, don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don' sing, Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring
. . .

Jeff stood in a bedroom—Russell's bedroom. There was the wardrobe and the carpet Russell has salvaged from the dumpster. But this carpet was more than the ratty throwaway Russell had back home—Jeff's feet sank into the thickness of this lush, soft warmness that covered almost the entire floor. The carpet stopped by the window, exposing polished cedar planks and there the singer sat, a woman in a rocking chair. Behind her was Russell's manger. The star cast a white light on the Joseph and Mary and the Baby.

Jeff didn't recognize the woman. She didn't look at all like what he remembered of Russell's mother from the photograph on Russell's dresser. This woman was older and heavier. She wore glasses and a pencil stuck in her dark brown, grey-streaked curly hair. A little boy with red fox ears sat in her lap, his face pressed against her. His red fox tail twitched across her legs. At the woman's feet stood a large, long-necked glass jar, filled with a bubbly oily black fluid.

The woman stopped singing and frowned when she saw Jeff.

Jeff gulped and started talking as fast as he could: “Russell. It's time to go, to come back, I mean. We need you. I need you. I don't think I can finish this journey without you. I don't want to. And Malachi and Hazel need you. None of us can finish this journey without you. We're a linked group, a tetrad; Malachi says we all go or none of us go. Russell, c'mon.”

“You must be Jeff,” the woman said in a low, sweet voice. “Russell, my little, red foxy, told me you might be coming and that you would be asking him to go. He doesn't want to. He's afraid, and as long as he is with me, he won't be afraid. And those monsters—why should he have to fight those? They were so mean to him—they wanted him to let his anger out and then they were going to eat him up. I never. Russell can keep his anger in this nice jar where it will be safe and it won't hurt anyone. You run along now, honey,” she said and smiled and started humming to herself, rocking back and forth.

“Who are you?” Jeff asked, wishing he could crawl into her lap, too.

“Why, I'm Miss McNeil, of course. Russell is in my first grade. Today we are learning lullabies. Russell said none of you really need
him, anyway.” She looked away and started rocking and singing:
I gave my love a cherry that had no stone
. . .

Jeff took a step closer. Should he grab Russell and run? Pull him off Miss McNeil's lap? No, that wouldn't work. There had to be another way to get Russell back. How had he gotten through before—and he had, Jeff realized, broken through the tough, bad boy to find the Russell who was his best friend. Talking? Listening? Was it that simple? It couldn't be or Jeff wouldn't be here, inside Russell's terrified imagination, talking to a long-ago memory in a school that Russell hadn't seen since he was six.

He sat down on Russell's bed, facing Miss McNeil and Russell and the rocking chair. Sunlight poured onto the bed, washing the white spreads and gold oak frame clean and bright. Russell didn't have a white spread, Jeff thought, and his bed is cast iron. He almost said nothing, but pointing out differences between reality and this other place probably wouldn't work. This other place didn't have shadows that came alive and tried to eat people. There was nothing in the room that Jeff thought he could use. The manger, with its Red Fox, the picture of Russell's mother, the wardrobe. Where had Jeffs imagination hidden him when he needed to hide? Maybe that was it. Maybe Jeff needed to tell Russell he was afraid and how he was leaving
his
safe place behind. Maybe.

Jeff cleared his throat. “Tell me where we are, Russell.”

“Why, we are right here in Russell's bedroom, Jeff.”

“No, I need to talk to Russell. You aren't real; you're a memory. I'm real and Russell's real and I need to talk to him.”

“Well, I never. If you had been in
my
first grade, you would have learned better manners.”

“Russell,” Jeff said in a louder voice, “Where are we? Where's this bedroom? How do you eat here? Go to the bathroom?”

Still rocking, Miss McNeil looked away from Jeff, shaking her head. She turned to look out the window and started another song:
Rockabye baby in the tree tops, when the wind blows, the cradle will rock
. . .

The little fox-tailed boy said nothing.

“Russell, Red Fox, I know you can hear me, so just listen, okay?”

“Run along home, Jeff,” Miss McNeil said. “Russell doesn't need you. He has me and that is enough.”

“That's not true. Russell, it's the other way around: you don't need her or this place anymore. You don't have to come back here when you're scared. You—we—can take care of ourselves now. We've changed. We're different; we're strong. You don't have to be
afraid of your father anymore. He can't hurt you. It's not just being magic, either; it's more than that. I don't know if I'm saying this right or not, but we've become, we're becoming—wait a minute, let me think—”

“It doesn't matter, Jeff. Russell is staying right here. Run along ” now.

Please let me find the right words.

“Russell, coming back here is saying you aren't strong. It's admitting all the bad things—all the bad names, all the times your dad beat you—are true and right.”

Was it Jeffs imagination, or was Miss McNeil looking a little bit blurry around the edges? Okay, now for the really hard part. One, two, three, just say it all really fast:

“Russ, I was going to tell you something today before the monster came. When I got home from school Mrs. Clark told me my dad was out of jail, on parole for good behavior. His lawyer had made it happen and he wants me back; my dad wants me to come and live with him again. Mrs. Clark told me she didn't want that to happen and it won't, not right away, supervised visits first, but still, it might, eventually. I might have to go back to that house. I got so scared when she told me; I'm still scared. I almost went back to my secret place where I don't have a body and I can't be hurt, even though I can see what's happening, hear my dad telling that lump on the bed that it was all my fault, my mother's fault for leaving, a man has needs, and if I loved him, I'd help him out, and it's okay for fathers to love their little boys like that in the dark. And I'd be floating in the air, in the dark, and it would be all right. But I thought about you, telling you, and Malachi and Hazel, Mr. and Mrs. Clark, and Malachi's dad. I didn't go to my secret place. I came to see you. C'mon, Russ; it's time to go. I don't need my secret place anymore and neither do you.”

Jeff stopped to slow down his breathing, to hold his hand against his chest, to slow down his heart.

“Now, Jeff—” Miss McNeil began, but the little boy in her lap sat up. His foxtail and ears had vanished. The boy climbed down and stood up and he got bigger and bigger until he was normal-sized and Miss McNeil began to fade away, her edges blurred, her features a scrawl, as was everything else around them.

“I guess I'm ready to go back,” Russell said, sighing. “But I sure do like it here.”

Jeff grinned and got up from the bed just as it vanished. Holding hands, they started to walk out of the dissolving bedroom when
Russell stopped and picked the glass jar filled with the black liquid. It was the only thing that remained solid. He looked at Jeff.

“What do I do with it? I've had this forever.”

“Do you still need it?” Jeff asked.

“Well, sort of,” Russell said, looking sheepish, “but not like this, all locked up in this jar, boiling like this.” He unscrewed the top and emptied the jar onto the floor. The black liquid oozed and bubbled, forming little balls, which, as they dissolved, scattered and disappeared. “C'mon, let's get outta here, Jeff,” Russell said and tossed the jar away, into the disappearing wall of the bedroom. “I won't listen to those monsters anymore. I'll try really hard not to, anyway.”

By the time they got to the hallway, it was almost transparent. The hallway was all that was left, except for the blue sky and the purple clouds and the scrawled grass. The manila was fading into what Jeff could only call no color.

“I'm sorry your dad hurt you that way, Jeff. Why didn't you tell me before?” Russell asked as they stood in the schoolyard. Behind them the hallway collapsed, as if it had been plastic at the edge of a fire.

“I was too scared.”

“Well, which way do we go from here?”

“There's only one way, Russ. The way you came in.”

 

Jeff opened his eyes and yawned. The afternoon sunlight had gone; it was almost night. Russell pushed back the quilt and slowly sat up, a small, half-crooked smile on his face. Hazel and Malachi cheered. They could all smell the food downstairs: meatloaf, onions, bread. In a minute, Jeanie would be hollering up the stairs for Russell to come on down.

“I'm really hungry,” Russell said shyly, and looked at the others as if he had been given new eyes.