All the King's Horses (2 page)

We looked at each other. I thought Colin was going to cry (he’d just turned nine, for Pete’s sake), but he blinked and set his jaw. ‘We’re not licked yet,’ he said. ‘“Irreversible” only means the doctor has run out of ideas. Remember that horse that had “irreversible arthritis” that Grandpa cured? Well, if he can do it, we can.’

But we couldn’t. No matter how hard we tried to help him, he forgot more and more things; by spring, he’d started putting a kettle on for tea and leaving it on the burner until all the water boiled away and it melted down into the stove in stalactites. One day, he started a fire that way; there was black gunk all over the kitchen walls when Colin and I got home from school. The next day, Mom quit her job so she could be home with him all the time. And soon after that, she put our house on Maple Street on the market. It sold in October. That’s when we moved to Ferry Road. Mom said she loved the new place – Victorian houses were so romantic. But I heard the real estate lady telling her the rent was very
low
because of its ‘less desirable location’, so I knew we hadn’t moved because of the romance.

Anyway, Grandpa escaped, and it was our fault. What happened was, after we got home from school, the two of us kept track of Grandpa so Mom could go shopping or visit her friends. It wasn’t too hard, usually. Sometimes we could get him to play Go Fish with us (he taught us to play poker when we were little, and in Pennsylvania we’d played a lot, but he couldn’t remember the rules any more), and sometimes we went for walks. But that day was Samhain (Hallowe’en, if you’re not Irish), and we told Grandpa, hoping he’d remember his Samhain stories. He didn’t, though; he just kept pacing around the living room, the way he often did. We didn’t want him to see how sad that made us, so we decided to make some pancakes and invite him to celebrate by eating them. When we make pancakes, we make a whole stack, and Colin mixes up all sorts of interesting things to spread between them. If you don’t ask what the interesting things are, they’re the best pancakes in the world.

I had just flipped the first pancake, when somebody knocked at the side door – the one that used to be the servants’ entrance from the driveway.
Colin
looked up from his mixture. ‘Listen to that! I
told
Mom nobody would pay attention to the law about not trick-or-treating in this part of town, but she was so freaked that she didn’t buy any candy.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s too early for trick-or-treating – and besides, who would come here? It’s not as if we were on the way to anyplace else.’

Whoever it was knocked again, a little louder this time. Colin started to the door.

‘Hey, come on!’ I said. ‘We’re not supposed to let anybody in when we’re by ourselves.’

‘We’re not by ourselves,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Grandpa’s here. And besides, I’m not going to let anybody in. There’s a chain.’

I turned off the burner and ran down the hall to stop him, but he had already slipped the chain into the socket and opened the door a crack. He took a quick look, then gulped. ‘Um, Sarah …’

I shoved him to the side and peeked out the crack, and I saw why he had looked so funny. It was one of the women from the warehouses – not that I recognized her, but the smell of cigarette smoke, old people cooking, and whatever she’d been drinking couldn’t have come from anywhere else. Her face was a maze of lines, and her hair was so stringy and dirty that it was matted where it touched the collar of her coat.
The
coat had probably come from the bottom of a box at a Salvation Army store, and since it didn’t have any buttons, you could see that she had a ripped skirt and a bunch of different length sweaters on underneath it. As she took a step forward, a little white dog with red ears poked its head out from behind her and growled. She scooped it up and looked at me over it.

‘Hello, honey,’ she said, with a smile that didn’t have any teeth. ‘Your mother at home?’

‘No, she’s out right now,’ said Colin from behind me.

I gave him a back kick. ‘He means she’s at home, but she’s busy. Can we help?’

The woman stroked the quivering little dog. ‘One of the men down the road is sick. I want to make him some gruel, but there isn’t any oatmeal. Do you think your mother would let me borrow some?’

Oatmeal. It seemed a funny thing to ask for, but I couldn’t think of any reason she would be lying. ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘Um … let me go see if we have any.’

I left the door chained and went back to the kitchen. Colin had already gotten the box out of the cupboard; I took it and stared at the smiling Quaker on the side, wondering if he knew where he was going. ‘Do you think we should
do
this? Mom said not to give those people anything.’

‘But one of them’s sick,’ said Colin. ‘And it’s not like she asked for anything expensive.’

‘That’s true. And if Mom notices it’s gone, we can just say we ate it, or something.’ I walked down the hall, shaking the box; there was a lot left. ‘Here you go,’ I began … but it wouldn’t fit through the gap. I had to undo the chain so I could hand it to her.

‘Thank you,’ said the woman. ‘I’ll get some oatmeal at the store first thing tomorrow morning and bring it around.’

Colin poked me, but I already knew what Mom would say about that. ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Don’t bother.’

The woman gave us a funny look. ‘You sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘We’re glad to help.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But listen, honey – if ever you need something, I live at the right-hand warehouse, and my name is Jenny. You got that?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

The woman smiled her toothless smile once more and turned away. It was foggy outside, and by the time she’d taken two steps, she’d disappeared.

I shut the door. ‘She was sort of all right, wasn’t she?’

‘Yeah,’ said Colin. ‘You have to wonder …’

On the other side of the house, a door banged. We took one look at each other and dashed into the living room. It was empty, and the door that led from the front hall into the foyer was open.

I stared at it. ‘Didn’t you lock the front door when we came in?’

He shook his head. ‘I thought you did.’

That couldn’t have been true; he’d stopped in the yard to look at something, and when he’d come in I’d been talking to Mom. But there was no point arguing about it then, and anyway, it was my fault for not checking. ‘Well, we’d better go find him,’ I said.

We grabbed our jackets and ran out onto the porch, but the fog was so thick that we couldn’t even see the big maples at the edge of the yard – which meant, of course, we couldn’t see Grandpa. I started down the front steps. ‘I suppose we’d better head towards the tracks.’

Colin shook his head. ‘I don’t think he went that way.’

‘I don’t see how you can tell,’ I muttered, but I followed him until he started up the hill behind the house. Then I grabbed his sleeve. ‘Don’t be a nerd – he never goes towards the highway!’

‘Shut
up
!’ he said, stopping. We both listened,
but
all I could hear was the roar of trucks on Route 495, which was the other reason our neighbourhood was ‘less desirable’. It wasn’t a regular highway; it was one of those new four-laners, with bridges and exits instead of cross-roads. The exits were called cloverleafs, because that’s what they looked like, and one of them (to the 125 Connector that cut off Ferry Road from town, if you care) was just over the little hill behind our house.

Colin nodded. ‘That’s where he is – we’d better hurry.’

I never argued with Colin when he was absolutely sure about something, so we ran towards the cloverleaf. But after we got over the top of the hill, it got harder to hurry. The Connector dead-ended at 495 (it was going to be replaced by a big four-laner that went north, but they hadn’t gotten around to building that yet), so the entrance ramp of the loop on our side was blocked off. When people figured that out, they started using the area as a free dump, so there were always beer cans, bottles, paper milkshake cups from the new McDonald’s hamburger stand, and even dead cars and old refrigerators lying in the grass on both sides of the ramp. By October, when choke vines had grown over everything and the tall grass had started to fall
over,
it was really slow walking there, and the fog didn’t help.

‘Maybe we should call,’ I said. ‘He might stop.’

‘Fat chance of that.’

‘Yeah, but what else can we do? Come on – one, two, three –
GRANDPA!’

We called three times, but when we listened, all we heard was the trucks.

‘Criminy,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do? If he gets up on the highway, they won’t be able to see …’

Colin climbed onto a dead car. ‘There he is!’

I scrambled onto the car, and there he was, across the entrance ramp, standing in … well, the only thing I can think of calling it is a clearing in the fog. That is, all around us, it was just as thick as it could be. But where he was, there wasn’t any fog. Just Grandpa and two other people about Colin’s height. They weren’t kids, though; they were the wrong shape.

‘Brother,’ muttered Colin. His voice told me he was scared, but of course he slid off the car when I did. Together, we crossed the ramp, climbing over the guard rails. The short people had turned away; they seemed to be upset about something, judging from the way their hands were moving as they talked. We both hurried
forward,
hoping they were going to go on their way, wherever that was, but all of a sudden there was a little zing, like you feel if you run into an electric fence. It didn’t hurt; at least, it didn’t hurt us. But it seemed to have given the short people a real jolt – they both leapt about a foot into the air and came down facing us. We stopped, staring at them. They were like nobody we had ever seen; their ears were pointed, and their eyelashes flickered with something that glowed murky orange. Behind the glow, their eyes were huge and dark and dangerous.

‘Grandpa!’ I gasped. Then I remembered we had to help him, not the other way around. I walked slowly towards him, carefully looking just at his confused face. ‘Grandpa,’ I said in the voice he’d taught us to use with young or frightened horses. ‘Grandpa, come on home, now.’

Behind me, I heard Colin step forward too. ‘Yeah, Grandpa,’ he said soothingly. ‘You’ll get cold out here without a jacket.’

‘Ha!’ said one of the little men. ‘Somebody’s trained them well.’

‘There’s training and training,’ said the other, with a laugh that made me shiver. He strode through a pile of milkshake cups and stood in front of us. ‘Do you see me?’ he asked.

I reached for Colin’s hand, and I found it
sooner
than I expected to, because he’d grabbed for mine. That meant he’d remembered the story Grandpa had told us when we were really little. It was so awful, Mom had told him never to tell it to us again, but neither of us had forgotten it.

Once upon a time, long ago, there was a midwife who was so skilful that her fame spread through all of Ireland. One dark night, a strange man knocked at her door and asked if she would deliver a baby at his cottage. She didn’t like the looks of the man, but he said his wife had been in labour for hours and was in great pain, so she agreed to go. He set her on his horse (a great black horse it was, bigger than any she had ever seen), and they rode like the wind to a cottage she had never seen before. There was his wife, just as he had said, in great pain. But the midwife knew what to do, and in an hour she had delivered a fine boy. After the baby was born, the man’s wife gave her a flask of oil and asked her to rub it into the baby’s skin. As she rubbed, her right eye began to itch, and without so much as a thought, she gave it a rub and went on with her business. But when she looked up, her right eye saw not a cottage but a palace bedroom, and not a poor couple but a lord and lady. She was frightened, to be sure, so she said nothing about it – not then, and not later, after the man had galloped her back to her own cottage on the great black horse. A week or so later, when she was at the market, she saw the man whose cottage she had
visited
walking between the stalls. She stopped when she came to him and asked how his wife and baby were doing
.

‘
Very well,’ he said. ‘But tell me, which eye can you see me with
?’

‘
This one,’ she said, pointing at it
.

‘
The right eye, is it?’ he said, drawing his dagger. And before she could say another word, he stepped forward and put out her eye
.

Colin and I held hands very tightly, and neither of us looked at the little man. ‘Grandpa,’ I whispered, ‘Grandpa, you’ll get hurt out here all by yourself. Come home with us.’

The little man took a couple of steps closer. ‘Supposing I were to tell you that he is ours, and he can’t come?’

I started to argue, but Colin squeezed my hand just in time. ‘Grandpa,’ he said, and I could hear the tears in his voice. ‘Grandpa, please, please come away. You can have some pancakes with us. You always liked pancakes.’

The second little man tapped the first one on the shoulder. ‘This is beyond us,’ he said. ‘Especially with the Old One. As for the young ’uns—’

‘—There’ll be trouble,’ said the first one. ‘They’ll say we let them in, and They’ll be right! More than our lives are worth, if They find out.’

‘They’ve
already
found out,’ said the second man glumly. ‘A jolt like that, and They’ll be here any second. Best thing for us to do …’ he glanced at us, then pulled the first man behind a doorless refrigerator.

I gave Colin a poke. ‘Quick,’ I whispered. ‘Before whoever it is gets here.’

We ran through the pile of milkshake cups, and I grabbed Grandpa’s good hand. ‘Come on, now,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

His eyes looked from us to the little men as if he couldn’t tell us from them.

Colin tugged at Grandpa’s sleeve. ‘C’mon, Grandpa,’ he said. ‘We’ll make you a whole batch of pancakes of your own. And a cup of tea too, if you want.’

Grandpa smiled. He’d always had a beautiful smile, and now it was even more beautiful in a funny sort of way. Usually, I felt sad when he smiled like that, but not this time. It meant he was listening, and he’d go with us.