Greenmantle (48 page)

9

“This is what you have worshipped, child,” the hooded figure said.

Ali heard his words through her pain, but they didn’t immediately register. He held the crucifix against her brow and a white heat exploded from the contact, spreading through her nervous system like a brush fire. Incongruously, her thoughts went to the folk tales and fantasies she was so fond of reading. Elves feared iron and the symbols of Christianity. Did the hooded man’s crucifix burn her because she was one of them? Earlier she’d been imagining herself as fey. Maybe she really was, and now she was going to burn for it.

In the instant it took for those thoughts to rush through her, the pain faded. She went limp in her bonds, hanging from the tree like a rag doll, while a wave of imagery flooded her mind. The hooded man filled her with what he wanted her to see.

“Look upon its evil,” he said, “and repeat after me: ‘The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer.’”

“N-n-nuh…”

Ali tried to shake her head, but the crucifix kept her pinned against the tree, immobile, while the flood of images went through her.

The goatman strode through her mind, his face twisted with lust, eyes rimmed red, his phallus standing erect between his legs like a tree. He fondled it as he stared at Ali. A long forked tongue slipped from between his lips and moved sinuously to the rhythm of a music that was like the sound of Tommy’s pipes—that same kind of instrument was its source—but it was a discordant sound that came forth, a sound that raised her hackles and sent a shiver of repulsion through her. Her throat worked convulsively and she gagged.

“For
this
creature you forsook the Lord?” the hooded man demanded. “For this monstrosity?”

“N-nuh truh,” Ali managed. She tried to focus on the shadows inside the man’s hood, but the images he projected were too strong.

“Not true?” he shouted. “And what of this—is this not true as well?”

She saw a man in a field with a German shepherd. They were listening to the goatman’s music, and like the goatman, the man began to play with himself. She saw him again, in bed with a woman, entering her from the rear, howling like an animal. She saw him shoot the dog. She saw him attack her own mother, throwing her up against the hood of a car, tearing at her clothes. She saw him place the barrels of the shotgun that he’d used to kill the dog in his own mouth and pull the trigger. And all the while that hellish music sounded, like nails dragging across a blackboard, and the goatman was standing there behind the man, grinning, grinning…

“Nuh-nuh truh!” she cried.

But she knew it was. What the hooded man showed her now—this had all occurred. She could see the goatman laying his pipes aside, dipping his fingers into the man’s blood, the forked tongue licking the red liquid from the fingers with obvious relish….

All true.

“This is what Satan offers,” the hooded man said. “This and nothing else. Torment and hurt. ‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.’ Believe in the Good Book, child. ‘God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.’ No room for such blasphemy against life.”

Now she saw the old stone in its glade, the villagers capering around in a circle to the music that an older version of Tommy Duffin played on his pipes. She recognized Lewis and Lily, both younger than she knew them to be now. A man stood by the stone, holding a long-bladed knife. Two other villagers brought out a bull.

The man cut the bull’s throat open and caught the gush of blood in a large metal bowl that he offered up to the stone, where the mystery stood again, but now he was an antlered man. His eyes still burned red. The nails on the ends of his fingers were long talons as he reached for the bowl. When he drank from it, streams of blood flowed around the edges of the bowl and dripped from his chin on to his cloak of leaves. And all the while the villagers danced and the piper piped his hellish tune.

True.

She saw a couple copulating in the forest, the goatman piping over them as they tore at each other in a frenzy. The lust in their eyes was just a pale glimmer of what she saw in the goatman’s eyes as he ejaculated onto the couple.

True.

“‘Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul,’” the hooded man quoted. “Is this the monster you aspire to, child? Is it your innocent body you would have the creature penetrate with its godless lechery?”

“N-nuh…”

They paraded through her mind, hateful image following hateful image, until Ali choked on them. Repulsion filled her throat with bile. She struggled against the ropes in a sudden frenzy, but there was no escape, either from her bonds or the images that the hooded man poured into her mind by way of his crucifix.

“The scriptures ask, ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ and I answer you, Satan is. You look upon his works, child. Can you still embrace him? You sell your soul when you consort with him. Repeat after me: ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’”

Ali could barely hear him. The discordant music, the hellish images, were driving her further and further from sanity. You lied to me, she cried to the mystery, to Mally, to Lewis, as she plummeted into madness. You lied to me. You said he was good, but you liedliedliedlied….

“Evil is legion,” the hooded man cried. “There is but one Son of God. Child, accept Him as your Savior!”

A maelstrom of violent and lecherous images swirled around Ali as she fell from sanity. She clutched at the hooded man’s words, but when he named Christ by name, the image he gave her was of Jesus hanging on the Calvary Cross, His body wracked with pain, His eyes full of hurt, the crown of thorns piercing His brow.

There was no comfort to be found there. It was all the same. Violence and hurt. If Christ was a Savior and men had done that to Him, given Him so much torment, then what hope was there? They had done this to Him and done, as well, so much evil in His name. They had tortured and raped and killed, all for a man they had hung on a cross, a man they would nail to a cross again if He returned to them now.

Lewis had been right in that, she thought, as she started to let herself go. There was no more point in struggling. Better to just go away, to give up life, if this was all it offered. If behind each smiling facade men had only hate and hurting to give each other. I guess you told me one true thing, Lewis, she thought.

“If you would be saved,” the hooded man told her, “then accept the Lord. He is all that can stand between you and the monster that has you in its clutches. Accept the Lord, child! ‘His enemies shall lick the dust.’ Accept Christ as your Savior and you
will
be saved!”

But Ali wasn’t listening. She had caught hold of a thought and where nothing else had helped her, that thought did.

Lewis.

What Lewis had said about the mystery.

He has always been a reflection of what one brings to him
.

So if you came to him with violence or lust in your heart,
that
was what was reflected back. But if you came to him with goodness, without evil… Nobody was perfect, but if you really tried to be good and approached him, then he’d be good for you, wouldn’t he? She pictured Jesus in her mind, not the hateful image of Him on His cross, but others she had seen, of a gentle man, a kind man…

A light began to blossom inside her, burning away the hooded man’s images. Her tormentor had shown her truths, yes, but not the whole truth.

The light continued to grow inside Ali and the hooded man stumbled over his words. He took a step back, startled, perhaps even frightened, by what he saw in his victim’s face. As the crucifix lifted from Ali’s skin her head cleared. A different fire, her own fire, burned away the confusion, the fear. She saw Christ’s face and smiled when she saw that He had the mystery’s eyes.

It was so simple that she could have wept. The mystery was only what you brought to him.

The light inside her began to flow out of her pores until she was like a fiery statue. The ropes burnt away. Pushing herself away from the tree, Ali staggered toward the monks. Were
they
what you brought to them as well? They had chased her down because she’d carried the scent of the otherworld on her when she’d returned from that place in elsewhere. But when she’d confronted them, had it been her own fears and confusion that had put the words in the hooded man’s throat?”

“I don’t need to be saved,” she said softly.

The light burned from her. Where it struck the hooded figures, they smoked. Their cloaks hung loosely on them now, and then they were a milling pack of hounds, whining with uncertainty, cringing as she stepped toward them, finally fleeing.

That’s
it
? Ali wondered. That was all it took?

“Was it such an easy struggle?” a voice asked from behind her.

Ali turned to find the mystery standing under the pine tree, watching her. Ram’s horns curled from his brow and a mantle of green leaves fell from his shoulders.

“You came very close to not surviving at all,” he added.

Ali looked at him. The awe she’d felt the last time she’d seen him in that other place wasn’t present now. This being that stood so quietly under the tree seemed like an old friend.

“I called you,” she said, “but they came instead.”

He nodded. “They were something you had to confront. I came to help you, but you didn’t need my help after all.”

“But you did help me. I’d given up, until I remembered what Lewis said, that you were what we brought to you. That’s true, isn’t it?”

The horned man nodded.

“Do you want to be free?” Ali asked. “That’s what all this was about, you know. I had to know if you wanted to be free.”

“Whether
I
wanted to be free, or you?”

“I…I don’t know. I want to be free, sure. I just didn’t know that I wasn’t. What about you?”

“I can’t be free until mankind is no more. But I can’t be bound, either.”

“What
are
you?”

“A mystery.” He smiled. “As your friend Mally said, does everything need to be explained?”

“It’d help,” Ali said. “But I suppose that would make things too easy.”

“Just so.”

“Why can’t you help the others?” she asked then. “Like the man with the dog that the hounds showed me. Why do there have to be bad things?”

“I do try to help, but men will be what they must be; they reap what they sow.”

“There’s more than one of you, isn’t there?”

He nodded.

“Is Mally one of you?”

“No. She is of your world. As I come from that otherplace to here to touch your souls, she is of your world itself, from the earth and the forest and the moonlight on them. A little mystery.”

“A secret,” Ali said. “Does she know what she is?”

“Do you know what
you
are?”

A dozen facile answers came to mind, but Ali shook her head. After what she’d learned tonight, she knew there was no easy answer to what she was. To what anyone was.

“I wonder where she went,” Ali said finally. “When I was calling you, she was here with me, but then suddenly she was gone.”

The horned man smiled. “Not she—you. You stepped sideways into another place when the hounds came—a place akin to that otherworld that I bore you to last night, but another elsewhere again. The world and Mally are still where they were.”

“Then how…how do I get back?”

He stepped closer to her, drew off his green cloak and laid it across her shoulders. The leaves rustled and she touched the edge of the cloak with wondering fingers.

“I will send you back,” the horned man said. “Remember me. What I am, what I can be; what you are and what you can be.”

He touched her brow, brushing the skin with his fingers. Ali blinked. She had the feeling that she was in an elevator, a quick lurch in her stomach. Then she was staring at the same tree, but the horned man was gone. She turned slowly to see the fire still burning and a figure beside it.

“Mally…?” she started to say, then realized who it was. “’Lo, Lewis,” she said and smiled. She felt completely at peace, with herself, with the world.

Lewis looked up quickly. He heard Mally’s familiar expression, but another’s voice. “Ali?” he asked.

“It’s me, Lewis.” She fingered the cloak. The leaves were gone, the real ones at least, but by the light of the fire she could see that the cloak now appeared to be made of hundreds of pieces of cloth in the shapes of leaves, all sewn together. “I’ve had such a time,” she said. “I’ve been all the way there and back again—just like Bilbo.”

Lewis didn’t catch the analogy, but he heard the dreamy quality in her voice. “Are you all right, Ali?” he asked.

“I couldn’t be better. What are you doing here, Lewis? Where’s Mally? I’ve such things to tell you, but first I should see my mom and Tony so that they don’t worry about me. Boy, they’re not going to believe what I…”

Her voice trailed off as she caught a look on Lewis’s face in the firelight.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “What happened?”