The Child Eater (2 page)

His mother rolled her eyes. “What's the matter with you? Can't you see? The man's a wizard.”

“A wizard,” Matyas whispered. Then out loud, “Is that what Master means? A wizard?”

“Of course. Be careful, Matyas. If you make him angry, he'll turn all our food into stone and our wine into blood. And he'll turn
you
into a toad.” Matyas shuddered, and yet he could not take his eyes off the staircase long after the wizard, the
Master
, had gone to his room. So softly no one would hear, he whispered to himself, “Matyas, Matyas, Master Matyas.”

After he finished his chores, Matyas went behind the inn to meet Royja, as he did almost every night. She was there, of course, and as soon as he saw her he told her that a wizard had come to the inn.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Jonana came to tell my father.” Jonana worked in the kitchen with Matyas' mother, and liked to visit the blacksmith whenever she could get away.

“Did he ask you to stable his horse?”

“No.” She shook her head, as if Matyas might not have heard her. They decided to look for any signs of how the wizard might have arrived. Near the inn, stopping some twenty yards away, they found the tracks of some large animal, a big dog, or maybe even a wolf. Royja said, “That's how he travels. He uses his wizard magic to summon some giant wolf to carry him. Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful?” Her face got that funny look that came over her sometimes, like she'd jumped into a dream with her eyes open.

“Or maybe he becomes a wolf himself,” Matyas said. “He turns into a wolf so he can run very fast, and hunt if he gets hungry, and then when he gets close to where he wants to go he makes himself a Master—a
man
—again. So no one will notice.”

Royja clapped her hands, softly to make sure no one heard and came out to yell at them. “Oh, I like that,” she said. “That's even better.”

Matyas thought suddenly,
She doesn't understand
. She'd never understand. It was all just stories to her. But if you could turn yourself into a
wolf—or a boy into a toad—maybe you could become a bird. Then he could escape.

“Do you want to walk around?” Royja asked. That was what they called their explorations and their imagined adventures.

“I don't think so. My father might need some help. With the wizard.”

Royja looked so disappointed he almost changed his mind. But all she said was, “All right,” and then ran back to the smithy.

It was late in the evening before Matyas got a chance to go upstairs. His father poured a glass of thick blackberry wine—“Our own special drink,” he would tell their guests, though Matyas noticed most took only a few sips—and ordered Matyas to, “Leave this outside the door. You can knock but very quietly. Never wake a sleeping wizard.” His father laughed, as if he'd made some joke.

Matyas went up the stairs so fast his father yelled at him not to spill the wine, but as he approached the room he slowed down. What if the Master was sleeping, and Matyas couldn't see him? What if he was awake, and Matyas
could
? As he neared the door he saw it was slightly open, enough that a crack of light shone from inside. Had he made the jewel on his staff glow? But when Matyas pushed himself to open the door just a little bit further, he discovered that the great wizard had simply lit the oil lamp, like anyone else. Matyas peered inside.

The room was fancier than the others, or at least it tried to be. The bed, and the table, were larger, the table legs carved, the bed a four-poster with a drooping canopy. The single chair was also larger than usual, with a high back and arms that ended in lion heads. There was even an oval rug on the unpolished wood floor. But it was all rough, the weave in the rug too loose, the chisel strokes on the wood too obvious.

The wizard did not appear to care about these lacks any more than Matyas did. He had laid his staff on the bed, cast his cap on the table—he was mostly bald on top, with little tufts of white hair among the red—and now he sat in the chair, leafing through some loose sheets of paper, a whole stack of them. The pages, which contained pictures rather than words, reminded Matyas of something but he could not remember what. From a dream, he thought vaguely.

“It's no good,” the Master said as he looked at one small sheet after another. “It doesn't fit, there's always something missing.”

Suddenly he stopped. With both hands holding the papers as if they were birds that might fly away, he turned his head from side to side, even
sniffed the air. Then, so fast there was no time for Matyas to set down the wine and run, the wizard jumped up, strode to the door and grabbed Matyas by the wrist, so painfully the boy had to bite his lip not to cry out. The wizard pulled Matyas into the room and slammed the door.

“Please,” Matyas said, “don't turn me into a toad! I just wanted to look.”

“Shut up,” the Master told him. He had dropped Matyas' wrist and set the pictures down on the table, and now he appeared to be examining the air around the frightened boy. Despite his fear, Matyas also looked around. He saw that the lights had come back. Without thinking, he batted at them with his hands, to no effect.

“You won't catch them,” the wizard said.

Matyas dropped his arms, shrugged. “They're just insects,” he said.

The Master set his stack of pictures on the table and sat down heavily on the carved chair. “No,” he said, “they are not insects. How long have they been coming around you?”

Matyas shrugged. “I don't know,” he said. “A few days.”

“Those lights are called the Splendor. Have you ever heard that term?” Matyas shook his head. “No,” the Master said, “of course not. ‘Splendor' is a collective title, like flock of sheep, or murder of crows.” Matyas had no idea what the wizard was talking about. “The full expression is ‘Splendor of Spirits.'”

“Spirits?” Matyas repeated, and looked again at the lights. “You mean like ghosts?”

“No, no. Ghosts are simply leftover images of confused people. They're not even actual remains, just . . . congealed imagoes that
think
they are trapped souls. The Splendor are third-order powers. They touch the world only at rare moments.”

“And that's these little lights?”

“Oh no. The lights are simply markers. Tracks, really, the way prints in the dirt may show you a great lion has passed. If you could truly see them they would fill this room, this house. They would block out the night.”

Matyas looked all around the room, up at the ceiling. He asked, “Can you see them? Truly, like you said?”

“No. No one I know has ever seen them in their true form. Well, perhaps one. But if so, she has never mentioned it, at least not to me.”

She?
Matyas thought. Were there girl wizards?

The Master went on, “The fact is, I have not seen even the tracks for some time. There are men who have studied, fasted, even cut themselves,
for years just to invite the Splendor—those
insects
as you called them—to reveal themselves. I know of a man who drove himself over decades to amass a fortune only so he could give it away in one night, as a gesture to prove himself worthy. And you, an ignorant, filthy—”

“Did it work?”

Startled out of his speech, the Master said, “Did what work?”

“The fortune. Giving it away. Did the lights—the Splendor—show themselves to him?”

The Master laughed. “You know,” he said, “I'm not sure. That is a very old story, and it only ever describes the effort, not the result. Perhaps the tellers thought the outcome, either way, would not be a benefit. Isn't that interesting?”

Matyas didn't think so. “Can you fly?” he asked.

“What? Of course not. No one can fly.”

Matyas felt stupid and hoped his face didn't show it. Why did he ask that? He said, “There's wine. It's our best. My father sent me to give it to you.”

The Master smiled. “Well, if it's your best, I can hardly refuse.” Matyas stepped into the hall and brought in the glass. The wizard sighed and said, “So they're gone.”

Matyas looked all around and saw that the lights had vanished. Anger flashed through him, as if they'd insulted him by leaving. Then he thought maybe he should run back into the hall, in case they'd followed him there and didn't return to the room when he brought in the wine. But he was afraid the wizard might slam the door. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“No doubt. I am sorry, too.”

Matyas set the wine down near the stack of pictures. “What are these?” he asked.

The wizard hesitated before he said, “They're called Tarot cards.”

Matyas thought of the card games some of the travelers played in the inn, but these looked much fancier, more like paintings. He thought about the word. “Ta-row?”

A small smile, as if Matyas had performed some trick just by saying the word. “Their full name is the Tarot of Eternity. Supposedly, if you held the originals in your hands you could change the very structure of the world.”

“What do you mean?”

The smile again. “Have you ever thought about the fact that the Sun comes up every morning, and that spring always follows winter?”

Matyas shrugged. “I guess.”

“What if it didn't? What if the Sun, or the seasons, just did, oh, whatever they wanted?”

Matyas frowned. “I don't understand.”

The wizard shrugged. “No, I suppose not. It doesn't matter.”

Matyas reached out his hand. “Can I—?”

“No!” the Master said, then, “I'm sorry. What little power it holds works best when only one person touches it.”

“But you said you could change the world.”

“Yes, yes, the
original
. If I, if anyone, could ever hold that one—” He shook his head. “This—this is a copy of a copy of a copy. The true Tarot of Eternity has been lost for many hundreds of years. Maybe not lost so much as hidden. To protect us from seeing too much.”

“Uh-huh.” Matyas tried to see the top picture without being too obvious. It showed a rich young man in green and gold clothes, dancing on a mountaintop, or maybe it was the edge of a cliff. His head was tilted back and he looked up at the sky, as if he didn't realize he was about to fall off. His arms were out, so maybe he thought he could fly. As Matyas looked at the picture something twisted inside him, some fearful memory he could not quite bring to the surface. He asked, “What's wrong with him?”

“Wrong?”

“Doesn't he know he could hurt himself?”

“Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he's running away and it doesn't matter what happens to him.”

“Running away from what?” Matyas asked, but the wizard didn't answer.

Matyas wished he could toss the picture aside to see what lay beneath it, and the one beneath that. Instead, he said, “What good are they? If they're just copies of copies.”

“They can reveal certain things. In a limited way. But mostly they represent hope.”

“Hope of what?”

“Hope that the true Tarot will return to the world.” The wizard closed his eyes for a moment, as if reciting a prayer. “It is said, ‘Whosoever touches the Tarot of Eternity, he shall be healed of all his crimes.'”

“That's crazy,” Matyas said. “How can you be healed of a crime?” The Master said nothing. “I'm going to be a wizard. A Master.” The old man laughed. Angry, Matyas said, “The lights—that Splendor—they told me.”

“Really?” Still smiling, the Master took out a rolled-up piece of parchment from his pouch, along with a small tube made of gold. There was a gold cap covering half the tube, and when the man removed it Matyas saw that the tube came to a sharp point, like a quill. Without dipping it into any ink, he inscribed some signs on the parchment, then held up the sheet in front of Matyas. “What does this say?” he asked.

Matyas wanted to hit him. “I don't know.”

“It says, ‘Those who seek wizardry might learn to read before they enter the Academy.'”

Matyas' hands clenched into fists, but before he could do or say anything the Master leaned back against the chair and closed his eyes. “I'm tired now,” he said. “You should go. In the morning I will tell your father of the fine service you gave me.”

Matyas was about to protest when the wizard waved a hand at him and he found himself heading for the door. At the threshold he turned and asked, “Can you really do that? Turn people into toads?”

The Master pointed a finger at him. No lightning or dark cloud emerged, but Matyas' body tightened, his throat became thick, his legs hard. He looked down at his arms. They were turning green. “Stop that,” he managed to say. “Please.” The wizard lowered his arm, and Matyas fell back against the door frame. A moment later he ran downstairs so fast he almost fell over his feet.

The next morning the Master left early, before anyone had woken. By the time Matyas came to the door with a plate of rolls and a pot of tea there was no sign of the man other than a small bag of silver coins. Matyas stared at the coins a long time, then finally grabbed three and hid them in his shoes. He brought the rest to his father.

Once upon a time, in a town that came in fourteenth on a list of the “Fifteen Most Livable Cities,” there lived a man named Jack Wisdom. The name was unfortunate, because neither he nor his family were especially wise. Some unknown ancestor, they joked, must have done something smart, and now all they could do was try to survive having such a difficult name. “We have to be more normal than normal,” his father used to say, almost like a family slogan. Jack would roll his eyes when his father said that, annoyed for no reason he could understand.

Once, when he was a boy in English class, Jack doodled a family coat of arms, with lots of crossed swords and elegant swirls, and a flowering tree. He'd seen this sort of thing in a book once, and now as he looked at it he thought it was pretty good. But then, as if he couldn't help himself, he wrote across the top of the tree “More Normal Than Normal.” Jack stared at it, then crumpled the paper and stuck it in his backpack.

Jack had not always lived in the fourteenth most livable city. He'd only moved there as a grown-up. Jack the boy lived in a housing development outside a town known only for a cough-drop factory and a halfway decent high school basketball team. Jack didn't play basketball. He didn't play any sport, really, though he liked to run and thought of trying out for track. But it was the running itself he liked, not having to make
a competition out of it. Jack was never competitive, maybe because he had no brothers or sisters.

Young Jack was thin and tall, with dark brown hair that would have been curly if he let it grow. He had bony shoulders and long skinny arms and large hands and feet. It was hard to buy clothes for him, his mother complained: either they were too big or the sleeves were too short. Jack hoped he didn't look weird.

Young Jack liked to play in the woods at the edge of the development. He would wander around between the trees, pretending a broken-off branch was a sword, or a fallen tree a fort. Sometimes he would sit very still, pretend he was a small tree or a stone. If he did it right, the animals got over their fear and came out in the open. Woodchucks and raccoons would wobble past him, deer would crash through the branches (it amazed him how noisy deer were), and now and then he'd see a fox or a coyote. People thought coyotes only lived in the desert, but Jack knew this wasn't true.

The only problem was, when he spent time in the woods with the animals he sometimes had bad dreams. They started when he was around eight, right around the time when he began to go into the woods. At first they were just glimpses—a sudden burst of fire, distant screaming, a stone room with rough walls and floors and no door to escape. Over time they became longer, and more detailed. In one dream, wild animals, coyotes and wolves and foxes, hunted down all the humans and locked them in cages underneath the streets. In another, dead people were coming back. Not ghosts or zombies, just themselves, except they didn't know they were dead and wouldn't believe it when anyone told them.

Jack's mother tried all sorts of things—no television after eight o'clock, no comics at all, no scary books. She removed such things as pepper, oregano and bay leaves from all her dishes and made sure Jack drank a full glass of warm milk before he went to bed. The dreams just continued.

Jack's mom suggested that maybe they should see a doctor, but Jack's dad wouldn't hear of it. “We're Wisdoms, remember? Just imagine the jokes Jack would have to hear if people found out a Wisdom was getting his head shrunk.”

“Maybe he just needs a pill or something,” Mom said.

“No. No pills.”

Jack's parents didn't think he could hear them but he could, even though they were in their bedroom with the door closed and he was downstairs with his homework. That night, when his mother brought him his milk he almost said, “Mommy, I don't want any pills,” but instead he just drank silently. His mom looked about to cry and he didn't want to upset her.

That night Jack had one of his scariest dreams. It started out all right. He was walking in the woods, watching some birds fly in and out of the branches. Something large flew overhead, big enough to move a chill shadow across the path. Jack looked up to see if it was an eagle (he would have heard it if it was a plane) and for a moment he thought it was a man. Not hang-gliding or parachuting, but actually flying. But the sun made it hard to see, and then it was gone.

When he looked down again he was standing in front of a clump of gnarled, lifeless trees, their branches so entwined, like thick cables, it was impossible to see between them. When he looked at them a sick fear flooded his body, but he didn't know why. He wanted to run away, to wake up, but instead he kept looking. He could see something, a flash of light.

And then he saw a face, just that, skin all golden, surrounded by tight black curls, the eyes closed, the lashes so long they almost reached down to the tops of the cheekbones. Jack couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman and didn't care, he had never seen anything so perfect.

At first he thought a black tree trunk obscured the body, but then he realized it was a pole, polished ebony. The body wasn't hidden—it didn't exist. That wondrous head slept atop a black column hidden in the trees, had slept so long that dust, like flecks of gold, had gathered on the eyelids.

In his dream, Jack turned his head away for just a moment, but when he looked again the trees and the head had gone and he was standing in a high-ceilinged room, very cold, with a black and white marble floor and some kind of mural on the ceiling. Angels or something, like on the History Channel. He ignored them to look around for the perfect head on its ebony perch.

Now there was not one head but many, all on poles, all in shadows along the walls. Only, they were not beautiful. Their faces were twisted in pain. They were all children, Jack saw, the severed heads of boys and girls the same age as himself. Some were old and dried out—not just
bloodless, but the skin shriveled and cracked. Others still had blood dripping from their necks, like fresh meat behind the butcher counter at the supermarket.

And now they all turned, and Jack realized they could
see
him.
Get out of here
, he told himself, but he couldn't move. “Jack, Jack,” they chanted, “don't go back. Stay and heal the broken crack.”

“I can't,” he said. “I'm not the one.”

“Jack!” they all shouted together. “Help us!”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” he said, “
I don't know how
.”

He woke up screaming, unable to move his body. He strained to free himself before he realized it was just his father's arms around him.

“It's all right,” his dad said. “It's okay.”

“No,” Jack said. “I've got to go back.”

“It was just a dream.”

“But those kids. I've got to—”

“Shh,” his father said, and held Jack so tightly the boy could hardly breathe. “It's just a dream, it doesn't mean anything.”

“But I have to—”

“No. You don't have to do anything but forget it. Just leave it and it'll go away. I had scary dreams too when I was a boy. Everyone in this family has them. They don't mean anything.”

It was Jack's father who first thought it might be the woods. He didn't know about the animals so he just wondered if maybe it was not good for a “normal boy like Jack” to spend so much time alone, in what Dad called “kind of a primitive state.”

Jack didn't want to dream anymore, and he wanted to listen to his father, so he stopped going to the woods, stopped going out much at all after school, only watched TV or played on his hand-held Nintendo. Sometimes his mother would look at him with a pinched face and suggest he go outside, or call up a friend for a play date. Jack just shrugged and said, “I'm okay.”

There was one game he played over and over, though every time he played it he thought how dumb it was, and, well, nerdy, and when he mentioned it to other kids at school they all claimed they'd never heard of it, which made him think no one wanted to admit playing it. The game involved a pair of squirrels, a gray and a red, trying to get out of a maze. You could move them together or separately, though Jack was
pretty sure both had to escape in order to win. The fact is, he never actually did win, the squirrels never got out. Because there was a trick. Every now and then a door in the maze would open and a gray-faced man in a black suit would jump out and bite off the head of one of the squirrels. Dead. Game over. Try again.

Sometimes when Jack lost he would panic, and he would start the game again right away, desperate, for no reason he could understand, to try once more to save the squirrels.

Jack made sure not to tell his parents about the squirrel game, and how much he played it, for fear they might take away his Nintendo. But his parents seemed hardly even to notice how much time he spent playing his games.

One night his mother surprised him with a chocolate layer cake after dinner. A single candle burned in the middle. “Congratulations,” Mom said, while Dad grinned at Jack's confusion. Mom said, “Last night was a whole month without any nightmares.”

“Now that's something to celebrate,” Mr. Wisdom said. He held up his glass of Diet Coke and waited for his wife and son to do the same. “To Jack!” he said as they clinked glasses. “More normal than normal.” Jack wanted to run away, but he didn't want to let down his folks, so he made sure to smile and thank them and say something nice about the cake.

After dinner he was looking out of the window while he dried the dishes, and he noticed a pair of squirrels in the backyard. There was nothing strange about them. The place was full of squirrels, and chipmunks, and occasional deer, but these were a gray and a red, like in the game, and they didn't dart back and forth, they just stood on their hind legs, facing each other, as if they were having a conversation. “I'll be right back,” Jack said, and put down the towel.

Outside he didn't know what to do, so he just stood there and watched them. It startled him when they appeared to watch him back. They turned to stand side by side, and then they looked up at him. Though he knew it was crazy to think these actual squirrels could have anything to do with the game, and almost as crazy to talk to them, he said, “I'm sorry I can't seem to win. To get you out of the maze.” The squirrels looked at him. “I'll keep trying.” Then, feeling really dumb, and ashamed, as if he'd let down his dad in some way, he went back inside and finished drying the dishes.

A few days later, a girl in Jack's class, Tori Atkinson, disappeared. The police came and talked to all the kids, and all the other parents held a meeting to demand that something be done and complain that their kids weren't protected. After the meeting, Jack's mom and dad told him he couldn't go out alone “for a while.” Jack didn't mind. Now that he'd stopped visiting the woods there really wasn't any place he wanted to go. For a couple of weeks a policeman stood guard outside the school all day, but when nothing more happened, they sent him somewhere else.

Jack didn't know Tori very well. The fact is, Jack didn't really know anyone well, but Tori was the kind of kid who stuck to herself, didn't join any groups or say much in class. She was never found, and after six months her parents sold the house and moved away.

One day in gym class, when Jack was ten, he hit a home run. Jack wasn't a disaster as a baseball player—he was never one of the last kids to be picked by the team captains—but nor was he a home-run hitter. It felt so good to hear the cheers, even if they sounded a little shocked. As he rounded second base he heard the pitcher say, “Fuck!” as he hit his fist into his glove. Jack grinned at him and kept going.

That night Jack went back to the schoolyard after dinner. He just wanted to remember what it felt like as he walked around the bases and pretended he could hear the cheers. He was coming around third when he saw a man standing at home plate. The man stood very tall and stiff in a black suit. He was skinny, with bony hands that stuck out from his jacket cuffs, and a pale, drawn face, and gray hair combed straight back from his forehead. He didn't move, simply watched as Jack came to a stop.

For a moment both of them just stood there, facing each other, but then the man began to walk slowly toward third base.
Run
, Jack thought.
Go home.

The man smiled, his teeth bright against his thin lips. He said, in a slow drawl, “Jack, Jack, don't go back. Let's just try to keep on track.”

Jack couldn't move. It was exactly like that dream, the one with the black woods and all the children's heads, when he couldn't even try to move. He just stood there as this strange man came up to him and slowly walked all around him. Jack tried to speak but the gasping sounds that came from his throat weren't even words. Now the bony hands were touching him, only his head, his face, covering his mouth, pressing into
his closed eyes. The hands smelled like something very old and hidden away for years. The skin was so rough it scratched Jack's cheeks, and Jack felt his tears roll over the gray fingers.

And then the man dropped his hands, and smiled, and said, “No, no, you're not the one. You're not ready. You're not ripe enough.” He slapped Jack's face so hard, Jack's head snapped to the side.

Suddenly Jack was able to move. He ran as fast as he could and didn't stop until he got inside the house and slammed the door.

“Jack!” his mother said. “What is it? What's wrong?”

As soon as Jack had told his parents, his father called the police. They spent two hours searching the area, going up and down streets, knocking on doors all around the school. Nothing. Finally they came back and asked Jack if he was sure the “gray man” had really been there, if maybe, just maybe, he'd imagined it. Jack stared at the floor and shook his head.