He rifled through the box some more, finding radio tubes, a pink quartz rock, a pipe, and a cigar box. He pulled from the larger box and fingered the ornate lettering across the lid. “Dunham’s Finest,” it read. Would it still have cigars inside? He could take them down to the pond and try them out.
The lid opened with a paper squeal to reveal another assortment of valueless odds and ends. Hairbrush, fountain pen, belt buckle, more pictures, shaving razor, a silver Jesus medallion, a flute… A flute? Now that was cool…
It was gray wood, rough hewn and heavily veined in white and black lines. Hand-carved, Mark thought, fingering its short length. There were seven holes in its topside, each smudged dark with the wear of many fingers. The wood at the blowhole, on the other hand, was worn almost white from the saliva of past players.
He’d always wanted a harmonica, but a flute might be okay. His fingers sought the grooves of each hole, and lifting the wood to his mouth, Mark blew.
The flute gave a harsh honk. He blew softer and its tone mellowed to a plaintive, sweet whistle. He lifted his pinky finger, and then his fourth and third and index, running a stumbling scale on the tiny instrument. It was heavenly! Almost like the capering tunes he’d once heard at the Renaissance Fair.
The shadows of the attic seemed to lighten, and Mark closed his eyes, listening only to the music he was coaxing from the wood.
As his fingers grew more sure, lightly lifting and returning to their holes, he began to pick up first two at a time and then three, creating an almost classical melody. He squinted his eyes closed; the music seemed to dictate its own movement to him, through him. His fingers moved faster than he could think, trilling and fluttering, scaling and slapping the wood. The sweet tone vibrated through the eaves, through his arms and lips, into his head. He could almost see colors in its notes, smoky blue tones and feisty orange ones. Electric slides of violet and grassy tones of life and love.
He vaguely felt the clenched muscles of his belly and back loosen, and his heart seemed to pound surer. He thought, for the first time in weeks, not of anger, and
why can’ts
and sadness, but of sunlight and warmth and… girls. He held onto a girl’s fleeting smile and concentrated on seeing the rest of her, on seeing her kissing him, on seeing her lead him to…
The flute’s dance grew wilder as he concentrated on the dream and his hands grew hot. She was touching his shoulders, running her hands through his hair, drawing out aches and desires he only barely understood. And she was…
Real!
Mark opened his eyes and dropped the flute as the realization hit him. There were hands on his neck and lips on his head.
She was slim, fair skinned, nude. He drew in a breath of surprise and embarrassment. She was the girl he’d dreamed, and yet not.
This girl fairly shimmered, the glow almost masking her nakedness, yet amplifying it. Her eyes were violet blue and seemed brighter than the dim light of the attic.
She knelt like a hazy dream in front of him, and before he could say a word she leaned in, took him by the shoulders, and pressed her pale lips to his own. His mouth tingled, like he’d tongued a nine-volt battery, but without the unpleasantness. He swam in the electricity of her kiss.
When she drew back, he allowed her to pull him towards her, and down so his head rested on her lap. She was cool, but solid beneath him. Touching a finger to his lips, she began running her hands up and down his temples. The ache in his heart drained with each stroke, and when at last he felt a glimmer of happiness, Mark slipped, unknowing, into sleep.
In his dreams, the glowing girl led him through forest trails, skipping and running, stopping to hug him, then dashing away. He followed, sometimes holding her hand, other times struggling to catch up as she tried to hide behind trunks and in brush. They kissed and rolled in honey-sweet flowers. They swam in a lake and climbed high in an old oak, so high they could look out and see the red and brown roofs of houses miles away. His heart flew; his feet were untiring.
“Mark, wake up and get out of there. It’s time for dinner.”
His eyes popped open from the lush green of the dream to the dusky glow of an old bulb and his mother’s face peering in the doorway.
“What are you doing in here? You’re liable to get bit by a rat or something. Come on.”
He stifled a sharp retort as the peaceful cloud of his heart broke apart. There was no girl and no beautiful forest. There was only the steady patter of November rain and the dour expression of his mother.
His stomach filled with ice again. Dinner sounded like punishment. He picked up the flute from the floor and pulled the drawstring on the light as he followed his mother out of the eaves.
The table was ominously quiet as Mark picked at his roast pork and potatoes.
His grandmother could use a few lessons in seasoning, he thought, while the wet sounds of chewing and the harsh clinking of silverware around the table ate into his head.
He refused to meet their eyes, and they didn’t try to draw him out with conversation. For that he was glad. Usually, the grandparents would do their “smooth it over with small talk” routine, which generally ended up bringing on another fight. Maybe they’d learned their lesson.
In between bites, Mark glanced surreptitiously at the three adults, trying to imagine his grandparents without wrinkles, his mother with long hair.
How do people get like this?
he thought. He couldn’t even grow a whisker, but his grandfather’s face was pitted with dark and white stubble.
Do you just wake up one day old and cranky?
He finished quickly, and excusing himself from the table, went upstairs to do his homework. Sometimes, even homework was better than hanging around his family.
Friday dragged on at school, and the storm of the day before left a chilly dampness behind. Mark avoided his mother Friday night and Saturday morning, but at last the ice broke during the afternoon. Once again he found himself screaming at her.
This time, she screamed back, “If you like your father so much, why don’t you go live with him? Go on. There’s the door. You’re just like him, so you should have no trouble living with him. God knows nobody else could.”
Mark stared at her, steel in his eyes. He hated her so much at this moment, he could reach out and…
“Fine, I will.”
Pushing past her, he yanked open the door, grabbed his coat from the chair and stalked outside. It was another overcast day, and brown leaves puffed and skied along the ground at his feet in the breeze. Pulling on his coat, Mark walked down the wooded hill outside the house, heading for the pond. When he was younger, he’d caught frogs and tadpoles at the pond’s edge while his parents had visited with the grandparents up at the house. These days, he moved along the pond’s edge in distraction. There were no frog croaks to draw out his smile. He no longer practiced moving to the waters’ edge in slow motion, so as not to alert his prey.
Mark sat down on the bank and leaned back against the rough bark of an old elm. All the mosquitoes and dragonflies were dead this time of year, and the cattails on the far side of the small pond were cracked and half-submerged from the wind. Mark reached inside his jacket to his shirt pocket and pulled out the flute. He fingered it gently, tracing the uneven whorls of vein in its grey surface. Turning it over, he saw it was detailed in filigree carvings. They appeared to be letters, but not of any alphabet he knew. Probably had belonged to one of his dead Irish great-greats, he thought.
Shrugging, he turned the flute over and held it to his lips. Would she come again? he wondered, and breathed a silent laugh at himself.
She hadn’t “come” the first time, you idiot,
he thought, shaking his head. Naked glowing girls didn’t turn up because of old flutes. Unless you’re dreaming, they didn’t turn up, period.
Drawing a breath and placing his fingers, Mark began to play. Slowly at first, his fingers stiff with the cold. The wind seemed to pick up as the instrument’s weak hisses turned to solid trills that leapt into the air, almost as if sound and breeze battled each other. Mark blew harder, and gradually, he felt a warmth spread through his hands and into his arms and head. The music grew more sure, his fingers more talented. Again he found himself closing his eyes, letting the flute guide him. Yes. The flute itself seemed to tell him what to play, what finger to pick up, what finger to flutter just so.
His heart screamed its anger into the flute, and into the air as the music danced, howling back at the howl of the wind, freezing out the cold of the day, reveling in the bitterness dredged from the pit of his heart.
He lost himself in the ascending, cascading, staccato melody. Again the insides of his eyelids began to dance with angry musical color.
Suddenly, something yanked him by the hair.
“Should be more careful with yer callin’, boy,” a black voice growled in his ear. Mark opened his eyes wide and stopped playing. He lashed out with a fist at the monster that stood over him, but it only snatched his wrist in midair, crushing it in a painful grip.
The monster’s thick, wrinkled trunk was black as dirt, with scabs of red and green mold trailing from it. Five stumpy arms twitched from its body, in addition to the two which held Mark by his hair and wrist. A single eye glared at him from a warted face. Its breath was worm dung, its touch, clammy mud.
“A toy such as that can get a tasty lad eaten by worse than the likes of me,” the creature grinned, opening a maw as deep and black as a cellar door.
“I like games, boy. Do you?”
“Let me go,” Mark gasped.
He was answered by a club to the head from one of the unused arms. “I said games. How about ‘throw him in the river, see if he can swim, and if the Grogs don’t eat him, throw him back again?’”
Mark’s butt suddenly left the ground and the creature dangled him by his right foot over the still water.
“GRRROOOGGGGS” the creature shouted. The water beneath Mark’s head erupted in a bubbling froth of leaves and mud.
Mark flung his body towards the bank. The creature pushed him away with another arm. Then, inch by inch, it began lowering him into the water. The icy cold of the water bit into the top of his skull and something started pulling handfuls of his hair in all different directions.
As his nose went under Mark screamed, “Noooo!”
And then he was ripped from the pond and tossed in a heap on the bank.
“Yer right,” the troll mused. “Not a good game. Grogs are no fun anyway. Nothing left for me to eat when they’re done. So tell me, boy, what eats your heart so black that you can speak to me? Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but it’s always good to know where a meal’s coming from.”
Mark looked at the towering troll – or whatever it was – and grinned darkly. “You’re not real. This is a dream, and I’m going to wake up with my bitch of a mother telling me it’s time for dinner again, or it’s time to go to that crappy school again, or it’s time to do the dishes again. There are no fairy girls or trolls or grogs or magic flutes.”
The creature showed a mouthful of stained and jagged teeth. “Foolish boy. Are you so blind? The world does not begin and end at your petty life. There are magics in the world you will never see, and creatures that could rip your mind to shreds with ecstasy, or pain. That flute you hold is a faery tool, and one hard to come by for a human.
It’s more valuable than your life or mine, but you’ve used it to enter the hidden world and in yer entrance, broadcast yer pathetic bile to any in earshot. You’re a mosquito, boy, and I’m gonna to slap you. But I always like my mosquitoes to know it before I suck their blood!”
The creature leaned forward and bit Mark’s arm. Hard. Mark felt the skin break, felt the teeth sink into his bone. The pain was excruciating and he screamed once more, not realizing what he cried.
“Maaaaaa.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” the troll laughed, pulling back from his bite. “So you’ll still call to the bitch if you git bit, eh? She can’t hear you here, boy, but let’s git a little more privacy, hmm?”
Yanking Mark by his bleeding arm, the troll strode up the bank, into the trees. Mark struggled, beating on the monster’s arm, but the claws only tightened. It would break his arm in half!
At what Mark had always assumed was a beaver or muskrat hole, the troll stopped, and stepped a foot inside. When it disappeared up to the knee, Mark felt a sudden rush of nausea. The next thing he knew, the forest was gone.
They stood within a huge rocky cavern. Mark couldn’t even see the ceiling, but the distant walls were lit with a greenish yellow moss. It glowed just enough to drape the air in a sickly twilight.
“Table’s over there,” the troll pointed. “If you’ll just go lie down on top of it, I’ll be right over to nibble. Need some seasonings, is what I’ve got to get. Don’t bother trying to escape, you can’t reach the surface without me.”
The troll vanished into the murky shadow. Mark darted in the opposite direction. Reaching a wall, he realized the moss grew in patches. Splotches of cat’s eye green grew irregularly here and there, thicker in some spots than others. He reached out to touch it, and drew back a finger cool and slimy wet. It looked like blood. Wiping it on his jeans, Mark followed the wall to a narrow unlit corridor. Checking behind him to make sure the troll was out of sight, he ducked inside.