Harvest of Changelings (6 page)

Dad, you know; I know you know. Why won't you talk to me?

Before leaving the bathroom, Malachi pulled the night-light out of the socket. He had told his dad a hundred times he was too old for a night-light. He very slowly and carefully opened his bedroom door at the end of the hall. The lamps on his night table and his desk were on. His father lay on his back on Malachi's bed, fast asleep and snoring.

 

April
30, 1991
The Technician

“Campus Magic”

Today is Beltaine or May Eve. Walpurgis Night. Uh? Like, so what? Walpurgis Night, the eve of May 1 or May Day, is, according to legend, the night when witches fly. Beltaine is one of the four most sacred days in the Celtic calendar, and at midnight the way between here and the Otherworld is open. And you are still going uh and so what, right?

A lot of your classmates aren't. According to statistics just released from the Campus Ministries Office, there are at least 250 undergraduates and about 70 graduate students who list their religious affiliation as either Wiccan, Druid, Pagan or Neo-Pagan, or the Old Religion. A coven meets regularly at the McKimmon Center, every third Thursday.

 

The next time you take a seat in English 111 or Compsci 101, take a good look at the people around you. They probably look pretty normal to you, don't they? Your typical NCSU students. Engineers, foresters, ag majors, pre-vets, teachers, right? Well, one of those civil engineer-wannabes or one of those pre-vets—anyone of your classmates—could be a real, live practicing witch. That's right, you heard me: a witch, or warlock, a wizard. A practitioner of the occult ...

Russell slowly dried himself with a thick, orange towel. He wanted to stretch out the time in his bathroom sanctuary as long as possible. The steam from his shower had clouded the medicine cabinet mirror, the tiles on the wall, even the window. Russell sighed as he rubbed down his legs. He knew he couldn't stay too long, or his stepmother would start complaining how he was monopolizing the room and didn't he realize other people had to take showers and use the john? Didn't the boy ever think of anybody but hisself? Larry? Can't you make your son behave?

Better not push my luck, he thought, and wrapped the towel around his waist and picked up his clothes from the floor. As Russell turned to go, he stopped and looked back into the mirror. For a very brief moment, his eyes had seemed to be greener and brighter than they had ever been. Russell blinked and looked again. The extra-green brightness was gone—had it really been there? A trick of the early light? He rubbed his eyes and took his T-shirt and wiped the fog off the mirror. Nope, his eyes looked like they always did, a grass green, flecks of brown. Must have been seeing things, and feeling things, the fog on the mirror had been warm, Russell thought, and hurried out of the bathroom. He may have been imagining his eyes were turning greener, but he hadn't imagined the noise he had just heard through the thin trailer wall. Somebody was up in his daddy and stepmama's bedroom, and moving around.

Russell listened at the bedroom door for a second: his daddy was
awake. He could tell by the heavy footsteps and the sounds of drawers being pulled out. Russell hurried even more quickly down the hall and into his bedroom, pulling the door closed behind him. Meeting his daddy early in the morning, being in between the man and the toilet or the shower, were things Russell avoided. Too many fat lips. Getting in Jeanie's way wasn't much better, although she never hit him. Jeanie just yelled or called his daddy, and then he would get hit anyway. Now that she was pregnant, he barely had to look at her before she started calling his daddy.

His real mama would treat him better, Russell thought. He picked up her picture from his dresser and touched her face with the tips of his fingers. He remembered she had cried a lot before she left; she had cried so much she stayed home from work and wouldn't get out of bed. He had tried to cheer her up, make her laugh, tell her dumb jokes, but nothing had worked. This fall would make two years since he had seen her. She had left when they lived in Lawton County, Oklahoma, near his daddy's folks. Russell had been in the second grade. His little brother, Adam, was starting kindergarten. Adam was having a good year; Russell wasn't. They had been in Tulsa the year before and Russell knew nobody in the rural Lawton County elementary school and he couldn't seem to figure out how to please his teacher. It didn't help that Russell had repeated kindergarten and first grade and was two years older and a head taller than the rest of the class. The second week of school the teacher had told him he didn't know how to be anybody's friend.

“You're like some great big, clumsy dog. Knocking people this way and that and then expect everyone to like you and you're surprised when they don't. It doesn't work that way, Russell. To have friends, you have to be a friend.”

Russell had gone up to her desk later to ask her to tell him how to be a friend. He had waited patiently, watching her until she looked up. He wished he could write as pretty as she was doing.

“About how to have friends, I just wanted to ask you to please tell me—”

“Go. Sit. Down.”

Three weeks later, the day before Halloween, Russell had come home to an empty house. No mama, no little brother, no daddy. No note on the refrigerator beneath the teapot magnet. No note on the pad by the phone on the kitchen counter. His daddy finally came home, hours later, to find Russell asleep on the couch, in front of the 6 o'clock local news.

“So that's why she kept the baby home today. Took every dime in
the place. Bet she cleaned out the bank accounts, too,” his daddy had said, after searching the house, Russell trailing behind him, sniffling. “Hell, don't cry, boy. I ain't got time for it. C'mon. Guess I can take that construction job in Texas—get yer things. Going to my daddy's.”

“Daddy, where'd Mama go? Why'd she leave? I didn't do nothing; I didn't get in trouble at schoooool—” Russell started crying louder.

“Go on, Russell, get yer stuff. Stop crying 'fore I give you something to really cry about. She just left, that's all.”

His granddaddy told Russell he thought it was the medicine she'd been taking. Anti-depressants. Made her act funny.

A card came at Christmas, with a Tucson return address on one side, and a yellow cartoon map of Arizona on the other. Merry Christmas from Mama and Adam scrawled beside the return address. Russell's granddaddy helped him write back, but Russell never got a reply and he never saw his mama or his little brother again. He didn't see his daddy again, except for infrequent visits, until the next summer. Larry White showed up one hot July afternoon with a new wife, Lizzie, and a new pickup, and took Russell to Kansas. They only went back to Oklahoma, once, to bury Russell's granddaddy. Lizzie left, in a flurry of overturned chairs and broken lamps, shortly afterward. Jeanie was next and a move to North Carolina to be near her folks and, as his daddy said, one construction job is as good as another.

“Hurry up and get dressed, Russell. You don't wanna miss the bus. Ain't got the time to give you a ride this morning. You hear me, boy? And don't take such long damn showers—hardly any hot water left.” His daddy's voice came through Russell's bedroom door loud and clear.

“Boy?”

“I hear you,” Russell said, frozen by his dresser, his mama's picture in his hands. When he heard his daddy walk off to the bathroom, he set her picture down and got dressed as quickly as he could, jamming his feet into his tennis shoes. He could tie them on the bus. Before he ran to the kitchen, Russell took one last look at his eyes in the mirror. It must be the light in the glass, he thought, and ran out the door. For a second his eyes had seemed to be glowing with a green light.

Behind Russell, one thin curl of smoke drifted up and out of the wastebasket by his dresser.

Ellen Clark looked at the clock on top of the refrigerator. Ten till eight. Twenty minutes to Jeff's school, then another ten or fifteen more in rush hour traffic on the Beltline to work. Where was the boy? Ellen sighed and set her purse down on the kitchen table. She wished Fred were here so she could ask him to get the boy, but he had had to go to work early and Jeff had promised the night before to get up when his alarm went off, get dressed without dawdling, eat, and be ready to go when she was ready. And the boy had gotten up, washed, dressed, and ate with no dawdling, daydreaming, or malingering. Then half-an-hour ago he had disappeared into his bedroom, saying he was only going to be a minute.

This is silly, Ellen thought, glancing again at her watch. I know the boy's had a rough time and that he's only been here a few weeks, I know that. And I also know that getting up and going back to school is just what he needs, to start going on, putting what happened in the past. If only he was going to Nottingham Heights now, instead of Brewer.
There was no good way to get to Brewer without the Beltline and Ellen hated the Beltline. She had tried to convince Jeffs social worker and his therapist to let her enroll the boy at Nottingham Heights, but both women had refused.

“Mrs. Clark, you have had how many foster children? Then you know how temporary placements can be. The boy's father hasn't even been tried yet, and we're still trying to find the mother. We like to avoid any more changes in the boy's life than necessary. If Jeff is still with you this fall, then we'll see about putting him in Nottingham,” the social worker had said, looking over her glasses and past her paper-strewn desk.

Ellen knew the social worker was right. Still, it was a nuisance, and now the boy was late.

“Jeff! Come on, it's time to go. We have to leave right now. Jeff!”

 

Jeff sat in the middle of his bed, surrounded by an apatosaurus, a tyrannosaurus, and a pterodactyl. He sighed. He didn't want to make Mrs. Clark mad, but he didn't want to go back to Brewer Elementary, either. He picked up the pterodactyl and started making dinosaur noises as he swooped it down to attack the tyrannosaurus, who was busily trying to chew on the apatosaurus at the same time. What would he say to the other kids? Did they know? Those looks the teacher had given him. And the counselor: he should never have told her. Never. If Jeff hadn't told her, everything would still be the
same. He'd be in his own house, in his own bedroom, and all of his dinosaurs would be there, instead of only the half he had managed to take with him when the social worker had come for him. His father would never have looked at him that way and called him a bastard son-of-a-bitch, a traitor—instead his father would—Jeff shook his head, shattering that thought into as many pieces as he could manage.

The bedroom door opened and Mrs. Clark stuck her head in.

“It's time to go to school. Come on. It'll be all right, you'll see.”

Jeff swooped the pterodactyl down again, to shoo the rex off the apatosaurus. “You all say that. It'll be all right. What am I supposed to say to everybody? About where I was, about what happened.”

“Jeff, you don't have to say anything. Remember, I told you the social worker and I both talked to your teachers? It really will be all right. Really. Come on,” Mrs. Clark said and walked over to take his hand.

“Okay,” Jeff said and let her lead him out of the room. “Oh, wait a see, I still have the pterodactyl.” He threw it over his shoulder and then followed Mrs. Clark. Neither one of them saw the faint blue trail the pterodactyl left in the air, like the fading contrail of a jet.

Hazel skipped first grade against her kindergarten teacher's wishes.

“Yes, Dr. Richards, Mrs. Richards, your granddaughter is reading on a third-grade level and doing math at a sixth-grade level, but she doesn't play well with the other children. No—she doesn't play much at all with the other children. She isn't socially mature,” Miss Kowalski had said, steepling her hands together over her desk.

“But why should Hazel waste her time in first grade?” Mrs. Richards asked. “Once I learn how to make a certain kind of pot, I don't need to relearn it.”

“She would be bored in first grade, Miss Kowalski. She might even be bored in second grade,” Dr. Richards said.

“There are gifted and talented programs which will compensate, but that's not my point. Hazel will be in GT whatever grade she is in. My point is that Hazel doesn't have any friends. None,” Miss Kowalski said, giving up on her carefully selected ed psych terminology.

Dr. Richards and Mrs. Richards looked at each other. “Well,” Dr. Richards said, after clearing his throat, “we don't think of that as a great handicap. I'm very involved in my research and my teaching
and my wife is involved with her art and her teaching. I have colleagues at NC State and IBM, and my wife has artist colleagues, but we don't see these people socially, not very often anyway. A social life is not something we feel a great need for. When Hazel's parents were alive, they were the same way, busy with their careers and little time for social amenities. We think Hazel should skip first grade, Miss Kowalski. It will be easier for all of us if she does. She will be happier if she is busier in school, and we will be happier.”

Miss Kowalski sighed.

 

Alexander and computers came into Hazel's life not long after Miss Kowalski and the school had given in and agreed to let Hazel skip first grade to second. Her grandfather brought home a computer for Hazel one bright, May afternoon, lugging the boxes up the stairs to her bedroom himself, not trusting the deliverymen not to drop everything. There were already assorted computers, modems, and printers of one kind or another all over the house. Diskettes lay around like old magazines.

Hawthorne Richards talked to Hazel as he slit open the boxes with a Swiss army knife. “If your father was alive, he'd tell you I was never very good with children. Your mother would probably agree. Haze, they'd be right. Your grandmama and I are thinking this computer will make it easier for all of us. And no granddaughter of mine is going to start second grade without a computer. I know you had one in your kindergarten class and there will be one, maybe two or three, in your second grade class, but I want you to have one right here, right on your desk. I want you to be able to use one like you use a pencil. And it will keep you busy. Your father would have told you that neither of us ever had much time for children.”

Hazel had just sat in the middle of the bed and nodded while her grandfather talked and opened boxes. Hazel could barely remember her father and mother. They had been killed in a car wreck when she was two, coming home on I-40 from a reception in Chapel Hill. Her father was the designated driver and had been as sober as a stone. The driver who tried to pass them wasn't. Hazel's memories of her parents were nebulous at best: the smell of cigarette smoke for her father and a white blur with a husky voice for her mother. The two people in the photograph on her grandmother's dresser were strangers.

Hazel's grandmother gave her Alexander the day after the computer arrived. Anne Richards called Hazel down to her basement studio, which next to her bedroom, was Hazel's favorite room in the
house. There was a kiln in one corner and racks and tables were piled with pots, bowls, pitchers, vases, and curious sculptures of animals and people's heads. Sacks of clay and jars of glaze were neatly arranged on shelves facing the finished pottery. Hazel loved to come down early on weekend mornings and watch her grandmother work. The sun would slowly come in through tiny windows at the top of the walls and brush across the pottery, gilding the earthen hues with yellow and white fire.

Her grandmother looked up from where she was sitting on the floor and shushed Hazel with her finger as she came down the stairs.

“Come look in the box,” she whispered and pointed to a small, cardboard box right beside her. Hazel knelt down and peered inside. There was a tiny, grey ball of fur inside, a sleeping grey ball of fur; Hazel could see its back rise and fall.

“The vet said he's a lilac-point—see, he's just a bit darker on his face and his feet and his tail, sort of a blue-grey. Blue eyes. He's just part Siamese, though—see those ghost stripes on his haunches and his tail and how big his paws are? Some alley cat tainted his royal blood. But the vet said a mix would probably have a better personality than a purebred. This is my congratulations-on-skipping-first-grade present and my not-so-good-with-children present. I sometimes wonder how we managed to raise your father,” her grandmother said absently. She carefully scooped up the yawning fur ball and put the kitten in Hazel's hands.

“But never mind that. Your grandfather wanted me to get a puppy, but I like cats better. They don't require as much time or attention as a dog. There was a brown kitten that I thought might match your hair, but there was something about this one. I think his eyes will match yours—see how blue they are?”

At five-going-on-six, Hazel didn't quite understand her grandparents' concerns with their parenting skills. They were her parents. At eight-almost-nine, when Hazel was in the fourth grade, and her grandfather brought home a new computer for her and gave the same speech again, Hazel paid no attention. Background noise, just things they seemed to like to say, she thought as her grandfather unpacked the new computer and explained why he wanted her to have it and that he and her grandmother hoped she would be self sufficient, as her father had been, and not need them so much. Hazel had already learned how to be invisible in the house when either of her grandparents was busy. She could be invisible for days, she thought, as she leafed through the computer manual and the manual for the new software game her grandfather had brought
home with the computer, Worldmaker. Alexander drowsed in an open window and a breeze came in from the warm, late April afternoon. She couldn't wait to play the game.

“You're supposed to take them through their history, up to modern times, without losing them to disease, invasion, a natural disaster, whatever,” her grandfather said as he pushed in the last plug and flicked on the monitor and the hard drive. “Supposed to be for eighth or ninth grade, but I think you can handle it. Should be a lot of fun, Haze. Let's see what happens when we boot the game up. Okay, here's the first menu. You have to set up the valley the tribe will live in first—see, here are your choices for the valley.”

Hazel slid into the chair facing the monitor.
A
long wide valley with a slow, meandering old river? Or a short, narrow valley with a quick, young river cutting a gorge down the middle?
Or ... Hazel looked up. Her grandfather was gone. Alexander had curled up on the edge of the bed, just close enough for her to reach over and pat his head from time to time. The valley needed a name. A blank square blinked on the screen.

“Alexzel, the Valley of Alexzel,” Hazel said, liking the sound made when she blurred her and Alex's names. She typed in the letters and pressed enter. When she did there was a sudden sharp pop and a blue light flashed, as if a camera had gone off right behind Hazel's head. For a brief moment the room seemed bathed in the blue light, a light that was so bright and intense that Hazel covered her face and squeezed her eyes shut. Alexander yowled and jumped off the bed to hide beneath it.

Hazel opened her eyes. The blue light was gone. Everything in the room looked to be just the same. The name Alexzel glowed in the middle of the screen. An electrical charge? Lightning? Hazel had never heard of blue lightning and outside the sky was clear and fair.

“Alex—what do you think we should do?” Hazel asked softly. To her surprise, Alexander came out from under the bed, dust clinging to his whiskers. He shook himself and jumped up into Hazel's chair. He sat up and peered into the screen and then gently tapped the keyboard with his right paw. For another brief moment, his eyes glowed an intense blue.