Campbell Wood (2 page)

There was a flit like an arrow shot from a bow and the sailor staggered back. He threw his hands to his face, dropping his harpoon loudly on the hull.

"Holy God,"
he half screamed, half gasped.

There was another
flit
, and with a dull squishing sound something lodged itself deep in his throat. This one he was able to pull out, and he saw in the weak, fading light a thick sliver of wood about eight inches long, covered with his own blood.

He groaned, dropping to the deck.

There was one more flitting sound, a rattling cry from the sailor, and then silence.

T
aemon
Gaye opened her eyes and shifted her position, moving herself out slightly from the back
of her cubbyhole. A loud sigh came from the bundle, and she rocked it slightly, soothing it.

With another utterance from her thin lips the sailor's harpoon flew up and over her, back into the unreachable parts of the ship's hull. Crates moved about the floor in front of her, covering the body of the dead man and making it impossible for anyone to reach it without clearing the entire hold.

With a few more movements she made a relatively warm and comfortable area, also inaccessible. Splintering open a few crates, she found one filled with tins of shortbread and another with barrels of ale. These would easily last until the end of the voyage. In another she discovered a shipment of blankets.

The bundle in her arms began to whimper.

She peeled back the white linen in which it was swaddled, moving the delicate gold crown from the tiny figure and placing it on the deck. She rearranged the cloth around the baby, rocking gently back and forth. Tiny as a mouse, it looked up at her drowsily, then closed its bead-black eyes once more and slept.

J
ust after dawn there was commotion around the door to the cargo hold. There was shouting, and boots descended.
Taemon
Gaye held the child close to her breast, muffling any cries. The disturbance persisted for a few minutes, then abruptly ceased. The door to the hold was closed again and bolted.

Not too long afterward there was the nearly imperceptible feeling of forward movement.

Taemon
Gaye smiled once more, putting the baby down in a swaddle of blankets. She lay down beside it, reaching out her delicate hand to touch the child's head.

"Sleep tight, my Queen," she whispered, the motion of the ship rocking them both toward slumber. "Sleep tight."

P
hillie
McAllister had to see things burn. He had to see blue-orange flame lick at and then magically consume things. There came an insistent, gnawing itch in his fingers whenever he witnessed fire—the dreamlike blue core of a lit stove burner, the bright head of a struck match in the dark, the colossal hell-heat of a burning house or a log in a bonfire.

He knew that not everyone had this special need, just as he knew that much of what he did with this rare love of his was not acceptable to those around him. Some of it, he knew, was not legal. But when that insistent pulse came into his hands, that twitch, that cold, dull spot that needed warming, there was only one way to make the need go away. There was only one way to bring the warmth to his fingers and mind.

He had to hide this love from everyone, even his friends. He knew what they thought of burning things. He knew there must be others who did it, wanted it,
had
to do it; he had reconciled himself to the fact that it must be one of those things that everybody did but nobody
admitted
.
Once, a year
ago on his twelfth birthday, he had tried to tell one of his few friends about it, in a hesitating, embarrassed sort of way, just to ease the loneliness of living with the need alone. But he had gotten that "You're not supposed to
talk
about it" look. The kid actually went beyond that look, and
Phillie
was deadly afraid for a moment that he would tell somebody about it. But
Phillie
was able to make him forget the whole thing by pretending that he was only joking. He'd never told anyone about it after that.

Phillie
the firebug,
his friend had called him the next day, still thinking it had been a joke. The kid had laughed, and
Phillie
had laughed along with him. But it was no joke.

The itch was in his fingers now.

He stood fingering a pack of store matches. This was the second time he'd ignored the warnings everyone knew, and passed the yellowing No Trespassing signs tacked to the trees by the road and on into the deep woods by the school. He'd never come at night before. The first time, he'll been nervous as hell and ran when he thought he heard someone coming close. But nothing had happened to him.

Phillie
felt his fingers slip the match cover over its lip. He began to stroke the rows of matches.
To see fire in the dark.
His fingertips moved upward, over the tiny rough bulges of the match heads.

His breath came faster.

In his mind, he began to fantasize about a huge flameout—the kind of thing he hardly ever let himself think of outside his dreams. Flames, ruby red, thundered like a close-passing train, pushed four, five, six stories into the air, snapping hungrily at the atmosphere. He saw this almighty fire sucking all of the oxygen right out of the air—building so fierce and tall and frightening that every molecule of 0
²
was eaten alive. He saw everyone he knew—his mother, the men she hung around with all the time, all of the girls in school, his stupid-idiot English teacher,
McGreary
, the cop Ramirez, the ones who warned about the woods—all flopping around on the ground like dry fish, gasping for breath that wasn't there. And he saw himself towering over them all, walking triumphantly through the flames unscathed, at one with the fire, growing as the flames grew, smiling and bending down and whispering,
Screw you all.

"Screw you all," he said out loud, in a sort of gasp. He was sweating now. He wasn't a freak like they said in school (was that kid
really
just kidding when he said "
Phillie
the firebug'?), and he wasn't the weird little monster his mother said he was. He'd heard
her
say that about him, to one of the jerky men that were always coming home with her, one after another, a different one every week or two. They hung around the house like flies. The place was always a mess; she never cleaned up. She spent most of her time at one of the bars, drinking
beer until she couldn't see anymore and then coming home with one of the jackasses she picked up, banging things around when she came in, stumbling and laughing, groping her way to the bedroom while trying to take her coat off. Or her dress off. Sometimes they didn't make it to the bedroom, and he could hear them grunting like pigs on the living room couch. One time he looked in and saw his mother and a bartender on the floor, sweating and pulling at each other. It was after one of these times that he heard his mother, after lighting a cigarette and sucking in a breath, tell one of her bar friends about him. She was still drunk, but her head had cleared. "He's a weird little monster," she'd said, and
Phillie
could have sworn he heard her shiver after she said it.

Screw you all, you can't make me stay away from the woods

He was rubbing at the matches insistently now. Without knowing what he was doing he had peeled up a single match and was pulling at it. He didn't know or care why, but this was better, much better, than the magazines his mother's men left lying around. His mouth was dry. He was fingering the head of the match, feeling its tiny roughness. Suddenly it tore free and he had the matchbook out in the open and was fumbling it closed. In the strong moonlight his eye caught but didn't register the "Learn to Drive!" blurb on the inside flap.

Almost trembling, he pulled the match across the striker and it burst into flame. He tossed it expertly away from him with one smooth motion.

He was transfixed now, like a hypnotized cobra. A small fire instantly sprang up in the dry brush. It crawled and spread and the smell of wood smoke hit
Phillie's
nostrils.

He clapped his hands spontaneously and stepped back.

The flames mounted, licking hungrily up a small pine.

Suddenly the sky above him seemed to darken perceptibly, and the trees around
Phillie
thickened. It was all in one movement, as if someone had thrown a switch. He looked up and couldn't see the moon anymore, or any stars. The sky was now completely covered by tree branches and leaves. There was a soft rustling sound, wind yet not wind, and the fire before
Phillie
suddenly diminished and then snuffed out in a breath of dry smoke before his eyes.

Phillie
spun around and had the unmistakable feeling that someone was now watching him. A whimper escaped his throat. The hairs on the back of his neck and on his arms stood up straight. He thrust the matchbook back into his trouser pocket and began to move away toward the road, peering into the almost complete darkness as he did so. The trees before him were barely outlined in the velvet blackness. This whole thing was like a dream. He expected Ramirez the cop, or his mother, or his English teacher,
McGreary
, or the gym teacher who had caught him with matches in the bathroom and made him do things to keep quiet about it, to suddenly materialize before him. He couldn't shake that feeling of being watched; it was all around him, it was almost something he could reach out and touch.

"I'm sorry!" he blurted out to the trees above him.

Fright seized him and he began to run for the road. He was huffing and puffing, his arms thrown out in front to keep him from hitting anything in the dark. There were too many trees, and it was all he could do to get around them and avoid tripping over giant, above-ground roots.

He was crying now, mumbling apologies. He called out for his mother, promising he wouldn't burn things anymore. She would understand—they would all understand.

"I'm sorry!"

He ran faster, stumbling now; though it was past midnight he could hear the distant wash of light traffic on Route 22 and knew that it wouldn't be long before he reached the safety of the road.

A sudden, horrible vision came to him: the first thing he had ever burned—the butterfly collection his father had left behind when he abandoned them. He remembered the joy the flames eating that wooden case of dead insects had given him.

A huge tree snapped into view out of nowhere.

He couldn't get out of the way, and with a whoosh he ran into it, breaking the impact with his hands.

For a moment he seemed joined to the tree with the force of hitting it, and then there was a loud crack followed by a thwacking sound.
Phillie
found that he could not push himself away from the tree.

Sobbing, he slowly brought his trembling hands down to his middle: finding what he feared most, he began to scream.

Something had impaled him, gone straight through his back into the heart of the tree, hands moved spasmodically around the point of impalement, trying madly to push him away, but they only came up sticky with blood. He writhed, screaming in little jerky yelping cries, until he became too weak with loss of blood to scream anymore. There was no one to help.

As the world faded from him, he looked weakly up to see the sky lightening overhead. The moon peeked down, and by its light he saw with renewed terror that the branches above him were pulling back and away from one another, untwisting sinuously. Stars winked into view. He saw the handle of the Big Dipper trailing off into the treetops.

Someone, a dark figure, moved silently across his vision, jumping nimbly from one tree to another.

Phillie
screamed once more, a loud, unbelieving howl.

The matches, loosened from his torn trouser pocket, fell to the ground. In
Phillie's
fever he saw his father's butterfly collection, the wooden and glass case so big in his small hands, filled with rows and rows of different chalk-colored butterflies. He had been only five, and he remembered the crisp look of each pinned, bright insect as it incandesced into nothingness. . . .

H
alloween was not a good day for moving into a new house.