Little Doors (35 page)

The seated woman, Calla, looked up grimly. “Plenty of time if nothing goes wrong.”

Hazel’s nervous expression deepened. “What could go wrong? Do either of you anticipate something going wrong?”

“You can look at Pike and still wonder what could go wrong? We never anticipated losing him this way.”

Westbrook intervened between the women. “Now, now, ladies. Pike’s condition owes nothing to the drug and everything to his own megalomania, overconfidence and greed. We three should experience no problems, especially considering we’re all two decades wiser than the last time we did this.”

Hazel expressed her dissent with this character analysis by a snort. “Speak for yourself. Some days I feel I know even less than I did at fifteen. I’m less certain about the meaning of it all, that’s for sure.”

Westbrook’s grin resembled a crag Assuring. “But can you really ever be sure about uncertainty?”

Calla stood up. “Enough talk. Let’s go rescue Pike.”

Westbrook also rose to his feet. “Rescue him from himself, you mean.”

“Yes. From himself, from the allure of the Land. And don’t forget the starostas.”

Hazel shivered. “I
hate
the starostas. Almost as much as the lumpkins do. But I suppose we’re committed now.”

With this last remark, Hazel shrugged out of her coat. Naked beneath except for shoes, she appeared at ease with her body on display before these two particular witnesses.

Westbrook bowed appreciatively. “You look as beautiful as you did in your teens, my dear. How I’ve missed seeing you thus.”

“We’re not kids anymore, Westy, going skinny-dipping on a dare. We all have our own lives now. Our own families, our own jobs—our own lovers.”

Westbrook replied, “Too bad, don’t you think? Who knows what would have developed among us four, had the Tetrad retained access to the Land? But such idle speculation is fruitless. As always, Hazel, you cut directly to the chase.” The burly man tossed his suitcoat aside and began loosening his tie.

Calla turned her back to unbutton her shirt. “Shouldn’t Pike be naked too?”

“I doubt it’s necessary. He’s firmly in the Land already. I debated even wasting a dose on him, but in the end I felt such a measure couldn’t hurt.”

As her friends continued to undress, Hazel asked, “This is the real supraliminal stuff, isn’t it? The same as twenty years ago?”

Westbrook pulled his pants down. “But of course. Iatros handed it to me himself.”

“I still don’t understand. Where did he come from after all these years? Why did he cut contact with us back then? How did he find you? Why now?”

Naked knobby spine toward her companions, Calla peeled off her panties, then turned defiantly around. “You’re asking all the same questions we never had the answers to in the first place! Where did Iatros ever come from? Why did he leave us high, dry and hurting? How did he ever find us? Why then?”

“Now, now, ladies. Are you forgetting the Compact of the Winetree Grove?”

Both women appeared humbled. Westbrook nodded approvingly at their contrition, then added, “All I can tell you is that our mysterious friend looked not a day older than when we last saw him. I have no reason to distrust his gift, and I look forward to nothing beyond this one unexpected visit. He might show up again tomorrow—or in another fifty years. Who can say? Now, allow me.”

Westbrook removed a thumb-sized squeeze bottle containing a barely discernible amount of clear liquid from the pocket of his chair-draped coat. He uncapped it to reveal a pinhole outlet. “A different delivery system this time, you’ll notice. Please, take your seats and put Pike in the circuit.”

The women took up stations on either side of the comatose man and each gripped a withered hand beneath the sheets. Westbrook moved to Pike’s nutrient line, where he added a drop from his bottle directly into a feed-valve. Then he hastened to each woman and decanted a drop apiece upon their tongues. He established himself in a chair at the foot of the bed, squirted the final drop into his own mouth, then grabbed the free hands of the two women.

“Cockaigne, our Dreamland—at last we return!”

* * *

The weird adult had been hanging at the fringes of the high school grounds for the past several days. Mornings and afternoons, as the students flowed in and out of the school, he maintained his innocuous yet disturbing stakeout. Sitting in his luxury sedan on a public street under the shade of a sycamore, reading some kind of strange magazine printed in a foreign language, sipping occasionally from a cardboard cup of coffee, the guy made no illicit or innocent overtures to anyone, male or female. But although the magazine seemed to claim his whole attention, his eyes shifted subtly from time to time toward the adolescents.

The principal and the school custodian had gone to talk to the man on the third day, but whatever explanation or identification the guy offered must have satisfied the authorities in charge of student safety, since no higher security procedures were invoked, and the stranger was allowed to maintain his lazy vigil.

Pike was the first member of the inalienable foursome to suggest speaking to the stranger.

Megawatts of energy surging through the thin copper wire of his fifteen-year-old body, the glimmer-eyed Pike often led his three friends down back roads of adventure they might not have otherwise ventured on. Calla, Westbrook and Hazel both appreciated and feared their nominal leader’s wild bravado.

They sat now on the deserted bleachers at the edge of the football field behind the school, the last class of the day half an hour behind them.

“Turn that noise down a minute, Westy,” Pike ordered. “I want to suggest a little game.”

The rough-featured boy bent to the huge Panasonic boom box at his feet and cut the volume, reducing Blondie’s “Call Me” to a background drone.

“I don’t know why you don’t get yourself one of these,” said Pike, displaying a Sony Walkman big as an abridged paperback dictionary.

“I like to share my music. Your gizmo makes it too private.”

“I’m into being private, okay?”

“Sure. And I’m into sharing.”

Pushing her clunky glasses further up her small nose, Calla leaned over to inspect the Walkman. “It’s got two headphone jacks, doesn’t it, Pike? You could still share your music.” Without asking, she popped the tape out. “Devo. I like them.”

Hazel rocked backward and laughed. “I can just picture the two of you walking side by side leashed to the same little box. What happens if you spontaneously go around opposite sides of a telephone pole?”

“Kerchung!” Westbrook mimed a jerky fall.

“That’s a non-issue. I’ve only got one set of headphones.”

Calla sat back disappointedly.

“But I didn’t want to talk about this kind of theoretical crap when I asked Westy to turn his box down. I wanted to propose a little adventure. Let’s have some fun with Chester the Molester.”

Westbrook objected. “The magazine guy out front in his car? I don’t know … He’s really creepy.”

“What did you have in mind?” Hazel asked.

“Let’s try to get him to do something really evil. Then we can turn him in to the cops and be big shots.”

“Why hassle the lousy pervert?” Calla said. “He’s just pitiful. You’re only lowering yourself to his level.”

“I’m bored. And who says I’m living on some level higher than this guy to start with?”

“I’d like to think—” began Calla, but she was interrupted by Pike’s abrupt leap to his feet.

“I’m doing it now! Whether you guys are with me or not.”

Pike gained a lead of a few yards before the others caught up with him. Rounding the building, they saw the stranger apparently slumbering in his car. His seat semi-reclined, he lay back with his glossy magazine covering his face. All the school buses had long departed, and no other kids lingered.

Slowly they approached the car. A yard away, the stranger’s voice — accented, dark and bitter as Aztec chocolate mixed with heart’s blood—halted them dead.

“Children of Cockaigne, I have been waiting for you.”

* * *

They arrived in immortal Cockaigne as always, transitionlessly, startlingly, opening their eyes first and eternally upon Piebush Meadow, near the edge of the Winetree Grove.

Three gods regarded each other joyously, with clear-eyed intimacy. Caparisoned in elaborate greaves, gorgets, and gauntlets, caped and cowled, plumed and prinked, laced and leathered, booted and buckled, the trio—two Junoesque women and a Herculean man—stood tall as the lower limbs of the remote wine-trees, those branches themselves a good ten feet above the licorice- moss carpeting the Meadow.

“Aniatis.”

“Dormender.”

“Yodsess.”

So they named themselves, and broke into roiling laughter at the splendid sound of their own immense plangent voices.

“How marvelous to be home again!” said the man. “I feel as if shackles have been struck from my wrists and ankles!”

“Dormender, you name the sensation exactly!” The woman who had addressed Dormender whipped off her winged casque and released banners of thick red hair. “The eagle of my spirit soars high once again!”

The second woman smiled also, but fatalistically, and did not remove her own shining headgear, keeping all of her corvine tresses captured, save for a stray curl or two. “Yodsess, I too experience delight at the return of the swelling passion and supernal vitality that form our birthright. But I would advise you to redon your armor. Have you forgotten the starostas? Likewise, what of our mission to rescue our lost comrade, Theriagin? There is no telling what foul manifestations in the Land may have arisen from his perverse and overlong tenancy in Castel Djurga.”

Yodsess replaced her helm upon her noble brow, but could not resist twirling around. “Aniatis, as of old, your counsel is wise but over-sober. Let all evil crawlers crawl, all ghastly ghaunts gibber, all starostas shamble! Our function is to exult! Look at the firmament that your earthly eyes have not beheld for much too long! Marbled with sherbert clouds! Smell the odors of the pepper shrubs and squab roots! Let the warm winds arriving from their long journey across the Berryjuice Sea caress your cheek!”

Dormender grinned, as much at Yodsess’s paean as at Aniatis’s obvious attempt to leash her own natural exuberance. “One an inebriate, one a clerk, and only I providing the voice of moderation. Ah, well, the middle path is a fine road for Dormender to travel. Come, ladies, let us leave Piebush Meadow behind, in quest of Castel Djurga.”

So urging, Dormender adjusted the long sword yclept Salvor that was slung across his back and strode off. The women followed, and before they reached the marge of the grove they had all availed themselves of sustenance from the bushes that gave the meadow its name. Once under the trees, meaty gravy running down their chins, they snapped gourds full of heady beverage from the lowest branches and drowned their lunches in tart wine.

“Remember you the Pact made here?” Dormender asked jokingly.

Aniatis and Yodsess blushed at the thought of their old conflicts, and in what pleasant manner they had been resolved. Then the latter answered, “I remember.”

“Yes, I too,” said Aniatis. “I remember everything.”

* * *

Pike could not restrain his elation at the incriminating words spoken by the foreign creep. “You heard him guys, he offered us coke! Man, your ass is grass now, weirdo! C’mon, let’s go call the cops!”

Much to their surprise, the burly man seemed unruffled by the gleeful threats of the children’s leader. He removed the magazine from his face, revealing in profile an olive complexion, chubby cheeks, a splayed, blemish-pitted nose and a goatee. Far from frightening, he most closely resembled an opera impresario in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Out of sight, his hand maneuvered the seat control to power himself upright. He turned to face the four teenagers fully, captivating them with his dark eyes.

“Have you never felt the wrongness of your lives? Do you not all experience the odd sense of being exiled? Isn’t this world deeply unsatisfying somehow, a pale parody of what might truly exist? Yes, people turn to sense-numbing drugs to escape just such a feeling of emptiness. But you misperceived my speech. I named not the crippling white powder cocaine, but the peerless realm of Cockaigne.”

Pike hesitated a moment in the face of the man’s assurance and subject-changing tactics, but recovered enough bravado to insist, “You can’t get out of this with a lot of fancy double-talk, mister. You’re nothing but a lousy drug pusher, and you’re going down.”

“True, I do intend to offer you a drug. But it’s a drug not of this world. Liberating, enlightening, transporting—”

“That’s what all the pushers say! I’ve heard everything I need to hear now.” Pike whirled toward his friends. “Guys, let’s—”

His companions obviously failed to share his certainty. Silent till now, they exchanged timid glances among themselves before Westbrook spoke.

“Pike, admit it—we’ve all felt exactly the feelings he’s describing. None of us truly belongs here. And that name, Cockaigne —it means something to me.”