All the King's Horses (18 page)

We burst onto the shore in a splash of foam and came to a prancing halt. ‘Your way lies there,’ said Manannan, pointing. ‘You will have no trouble finding it.’

He was right: there was a blaze of furry light behind the dunes, which meant somebody had turned on the floodlights at Grandfather’s house. Even if we missed the boardwalk, we could get
back
easily. Yet, for some reason, I was so shivery when he lifted us down onto the sand that I began to wonder if they
had
taken my courage when they cut my hair. I reached out to stroke Enbharr. My hand slid down the sweaty neck – and touched Colin’s.

‘Your people are looking for you,’ said Manannan. ‘We must be off.’

But neither of us could speak; we just stroked Enbharr again and again, wanting him to stay – not only because he was beautiful, but because he was alive and animal and warm.

Manannan looked down in the gathering darkness. ‘The horror of the land to which you journeyed lingers long after one has left it … but your fear will fade, in time.’ A light flashed very near us, and we jumped back as Enbharr reared. Manannan rose with him, lifting one hand to us as he urged him forward. ‘Farewell, loyal Children of Lugh.’

‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

In three long strides they were in the surf; then they plunged into the breakers and disappeared. As we looked after them, a beam of light swept by us, then switched directions and stopped, making huge shadows in front of us on the sand.

‘Colin! Sarah!’

We turned around, half blinded; the light-
beam
dropped, and we saw Grandfather Madison limping towards us with an expression I’d never seen on his face before. We both ran to him, and he put his arms around us as well as he could, holding a flashlight and his cane.

‘I should never have let you come down here at this time of year,’ he said. ‘As soon as I saw the fog over the ocean, I came out, but by the time I got here, it was so thick I could hardly find my way.’ He pulled the perfectly folded handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his suit and wiped Colin’s face; then we started back. It felt like it took us for ever, but eventually, we got to the house, and there was Grandmother, frantic because we hadn’t come back, and Paddy and Jack, frantic because they’d realized Grandfather had gone out alone to look for us. They lit a huge fire, and Maureen and Molly brought in sandwiches and gallons of cocoa with whipped cream and marshmallows, and everything was all right again, except I sort of thought Grandmother should have been worried about Grandfather instead of fussing over the way my new haircut had gotten sand and salt-spray in it. He’d had a lot of trouble walking in the deep sand, and when we’d gotten to the boardwalk, he’d slipped so much because of his street shoes and his cane, he’d had to let go of Colin’s hand.
He
didn’t complain, of course, but he let Jack help him sit down in his big chair, which he usually didn’t, and something about the way he stared into the fire after we’d eaten made me give him a real hug when we were sent up to bed, instead of my usual kiss.

I expected Colin to sneak down to my room, but he didn’t, and I was glad, because I didn’t want to talk. Part of me was still on that beach, between the terrible cliffs and the grey sea, listening to the rocks … keening. That was the word for that terrible lullaby. In the silence of the house, I half-heard it again, rising and falling in long, low moans. I crawled under the covers, shivering. The cocoa and everything made it feel as if everything had come out all right for a while, but now … now I realized that if we’d stayed on that terrible grey beach a little longer, we never would have gotten back, even though Manannan had ridden all that way to save us. If we hadn’t recognized each other …
and we hadn’t, all that time
… or known who he was …
and we hadn’t, not at first …

I shuddered and looked quickly around the room, to be sure I’d really gotten all the way back. I had, of course. I was lying under a pink quilt on my canopied bed, as far from Faerie as I could possibly get. But when I half-closed my
eyes,
the white dresses on the beautiful ladies in Grandmother’s pictures looked like sea-foam on the edges of waves that slithered towards me across grey sand, higher and higher.
The horror of the land to which you journeyed lingers long after one has left it
. I buried my face in my pillow and closed my eyes. It didn’t help; the sea-foam slid away, but I could still see the expression in Manannan’s eyes after he’d glanced at the stones, and in some kind of double image, the hero with the bronze shield, swinging his sword helplessly at the enormous grey waves.

I could never have admitted to Colin that I was afraid to go back to Faerie. But I was.

WE DIDN’T TALK
about it for a long, long time. At first, I thought Colin was waiting until we left Grandfather and Grandmother Madison’s, but he didn’t say anything after we got home, either, so finally I just let it go. Not talking about it made a space between us, but there was a lot else going on, and it was easy to think we could patch things up when there was time. At least, that’s what I thought, and I was pretty sure Colin was thinking the same thing.

Anyway, we got home. And Grandpa didn’t recognize us. For a while, I didn’t think much of it, because nobody else recognized me, either. Mom did this amazing double-take when she first saw me, and it was days before she stopped staring whenever I came into the room. As for
school,
the first time I got on the bus, everyone whistled, and at recess, all the girls clustered around, asking about the cut and the contacts and the sweater. But pretty soon, they saw I hadn’t really changed, so they went back to ignoring me, and things were just like they’d been – except Grandpa never did quite figure out who Colin and I were. Finally, I realized that though Grandmother Madison hadn’t been able to change me, something had changed him.

It kept on changing him. By Valentine’s Day, he’d forgotten how to use a knife and fork; we had to teach him all over again at every meal, and finally it got so hopeless that we just let him eat with his fingers. Sometime around St Patrick’s Day, he started having trouble putting one leg in each side of his pants; Colin and I thought that was pretty funny at first, but one day he got both legs stuck in one pant-leg and hit his head when he fell. After that, Mom helped him dress – and take a bath, because he couldn’t do that by himself any more. Baths were awful; he seemed to think he was going to drown or something, and he yelled and struggled the whole time. Mom tried all sorts of ways of coaxing him, and some of them worked sometimes, but it got so we all dreaded Monday and Thursday nights.

The clincher came the last day of the Easter vacation. Mr Crewes and Mom were at the movies (that happened once a week; I felt funny about it, but it was the only time Mom got out of the house except when she went shopping, so I didn’t dare tell her I wished she wouldn’t go), and Colin and I were home with Grandpa. Colin came running downstairs to show me something he’d read about, but before I could look at it, Grandpa started pacing around, looking very unhappy.

‘What’s wrong, Grandpa?’ I asked.

‘Come
on
,’ said Colin (he’d been really excited about whatever it was). ‘You know he doesn’t know what’s wrong any more. Maybe he’s hungry; I sure am – want a sandwich, Grandpa?’

Grandpa nodded, so we took him into the kitchen, but when I turned to give him his sandwich, he was standing in a puddle. It only took one sniff to tell what kind of puddle it was.

‘Oh, Grandpa!’ I began reproachfully. ‘Why didn’t you …?’ But then I saw how embarrassed he was, and I stopped.

Colin looked at me. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Clean up, I guess,’ I said. ‘I’ll mop if you take him upstairs and—’

‘– change him?’ Colin stared at me. ‘You know how he is about baths.’

‘So don’t give him a bath. Just use a washcloth.’

He gulped. ‘I think you’d better do it.’

‘But Colin …’ I couldn’t finish, but I turned red, and he saw what was bugging me.

‘Oh,’ he said, turning red too. ‘Yeah. Well, come on, Grandpa.’

He took Grandpa’s hand, and they went up the back stairs together. I got out the mop and the disinfectant, and I took care of the puddle and the drips that had followed them upstairs. Colin and Grandpa were in the bathroom; as I started back down with the bucket, Grandpa came out, wearing his pyjama bottoms. Colin has a lot of sense, sometimes.

When Mom got home, she said we’d handled everything beautifully (she was especially happy about the way we’d run Grandpa’s pants through the washing machine, as if that had been the hard part). Still, I was really shaken, and I had a feeling Colin was too. I was right; ten minutes after Mom had kissed us goodnight, my door opened a crack and a light shone in.

‘You awake?’ whispered Colin’s voice.

I sat up. ‘Yeah.’

He made his way slowly across the floor. ‘Geez,’ he muttered, ‘what a pig-sty. OK if I sit on the bed, to avoid contamination?’

I let that pass, partly because he was right; in the last couple of months, my room had started getting messy, and I’d sort of given in to it. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But I’ve been doing research. Look what I found.’ He handed me a book and his flashlight. ‘It’s what I came to show you just before …’

I opened the book to the place he’d put a marker and began to read.
Once upon a time, at the very edge of a village in Ireland, there was a cottage that always stood empty. Every year, it looked more and more forlorn, but nobody would go near it. One day, an old woman hobbled into the village. When the villagers greeted her, she said she had come because she had no place to live, and she had heard that there was a cottage there that nobody wanted
.

‘
That’s true,’ said the villagers, ‘but there is a reason nobody wants the cottage: everybody who has lived in it has disappeared, even the dogs and cats that lay before the fire. It’s death to go in it; do not try
.’

‘
I am very poor,’ said the old woman. ‘And I am so old that if I die today, I will lose only a few months of life. So I will live in the cottage
.’

All the villagers tried to persuade her she shouldn’t, but she just thanked them for their warning, bought a little oatmeal for herself to eat, and moved into the cottage. The first day, nothing unusual happened, so
the
second day, she swept out the cottage and set up house-keeping very comfortably. But the third evening, there came a knock on the door. The old woman opened it and saw a tall, beautiful lady
.

‘
Excuse me,’ said the lady, ‘may I borrow some oatmeal
?’

I looked up at Colin. ‘Criminy!’

He nodded. ‘Keep reading.’

The old woman hurried to her shelf and gave the lady all that was left of the oatmeal she had bought from the villagers. The next morning, there came another knock on her door; it was the lady again, and she was holding a bag of oatmeal
.

‘
I have come to pay my debt,’ she said
.

‘
There’s no need for that,’ said the old woman. ‘The oats have gone to good use, I’m sure, and I am happy I could help you
.’

‘
Thank you,’ said the lady, ‘you have been very kind, and the Faer Folk thank you. Just beyond the back garden of this cottage is a Faery Ring, and we know what harm foolish mortals can do to paths to the Otherworld. But you are a woman to be trusted, and so long as you stay away from the back garden on moonlit nights, you may live here as long as you like
.’

The old woman thanked the faery, and on moonlit nights she was careful to stay in the front of her cottage. True to their word, the faeries never bothered her, and she lived happily in the cottage for the rest of her life
.

I shut the book. ‘Wow. So Jenny … I mean, that
is
what you think you found, right?’

‘Right.’

I shivered. ‘What do you suppose it’s all about? I mean, why would They bother to disguise one of Them as a mortal when the rest of Them hover around the way They do?’

‘So They can make sure Grandpa is OK,’ said Colin. ‘Like that day she went to the Gordons’ with us.’

‘Um, look,’ I said (very carefully; I didn’t want to hurt his feelings), ‘that could only be true if Grandpa’s a changeling. And I don’t … well …’

‘Don’t hum around like that! I’m a scientist, not a baby! The changeling idea was just an early hypothesis – it was way too simple. But that doesn’t invalidate it entirely.’

‘Oh, come on! If you’re wrong, you’re wrong!’

‘Not so. What I’ve learned studying science with Mr Crewes is that you can be wrong, but on the right track. Like that guy who thought giraffes grew long necks because they had to reach up into trees for food. It’s silly, right? But he had the right
idea
about evolution; he just didn’t have enough facts to let him figure out how it worked. Then Darwin came along and—’

‘– Ahem!’ I said. ‘We were talking about changelings.’

‘We weren’t either! We were talking about hypotheses that are wrong but right. Like, our research shows that Grandpa isn’t a changeling, except in the way Mr Crewes said he was—’