Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (36 page)

“THIS MAN,” he announced, pointing, “IS
NOT
MY FATHER!”

Everyone on the factory floor was stunned into silence.

Mick sidled up and asked, “Do yeh mean that in a ‘He never remembered my birthday’ kind o’ way, or—”

“No,” said Scott, “I mean he really isn’t my father.” He glared at the impostor and presented his fists.

“Um,” said Erno.

“Kid?” said Merle. “You sure?”

“He’s sure,” Mick answered. “Let’s get ’im.”

The thing that looked like John Doe grinned. “The jig is up,” it said in a spidery voice, then its skin unzipped at the face and fell to the floor.

The John Doe costume, the perfect suit of clothes and hair and skin, lay in sickening folds on the factory floor. The impostor was revealed to be two short creatures, one perched on the other’s shoulders, both still wearing the same terrible smiles.

“Goblins,” growled Mick.

They were each perhaps just a half foot taller than Mick, with milky white bodies but startling red faces. Red as if they’d been dipped to their chins in blood and the stuff had dripped some foreign alphabet all over their necks and collars. From top to bottom they had: bald pates, all the worst features of both toad and bat, little gray wool suit jackets with ties, short pants, and chicken feet. The one hopped off the other’s shoulders, and they both bowed and said,

“Misters Pigg—”

“—and Poke, atcher service. Specializin’ in the ’mpersonation of queens of all stripes.”

“And in creatin’ diversions, Mister Poke—you know you’re quite good at that.”

“No better than you, Mister Pigg.”

Scott turned when he realized what the goblins were getting at, and saw that the commercial crew had managed to surround them. Even the Queens of England. People came at them from all sides, and Scott felt a poke at his neck. When he turned around he saw the goblins’ bodies puff up and scab over like toasted marshmallows. Then the creases smoothed and they were perfect replicas of Scott and Mick, clothes and all. Scott flinched and punched himself in the face. It was a singularly odd thing to have to do.

Behind him Erno and Emily protected each other; Biggs threw crewmen and queens around with gusto, knocking over studio lights and a snack table covered with Danishes. Merle put them to sleep with his Slumbro. One crewman ran to shield the movie camera—he pried it off its stand and ducked beneath the assembly line, then ran off into a darkened wing of the factory.

The goblin-Scott that Scott had punched staggered backward, and Mick head-butted his own doppelgänger in the stomach.

“So what was the plan here, exactly?” sneered Mick. “Didja think I’d get confused an’ accidentally hit myself?”

Then a Queen of England got too close to Emily, and she had a fit. Her eyes rolled back, and the lights went out with a crack, and when they came on again there was a donkey wearing a tiara, and Scott couldn’t tell which Mick was Mick anymore.

“Emily turned a lady into a donkey,” Erno announced.

Emily was shivering on the concrete floor, looking drowsy. Biggs ran to her side. The two or three crewmen and actors who were not already asleep or unconscious ran for an emergency exit.

One Mick pointed directly at the other Mick and sort of vaguely toward both Scotts. “Grab ’em before they get away!” he shouted.

“Why yeh little—” the other Mick grumbled.

The donkey flicked its ears, upsetting its tiara, and wandered over to sniff at a trash bin.

Merle approached. “My Slumbro doesn’t work on Fay. I could wave it at all of you, and we’d find out who the real
Scott
is, anyway.”

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” said both Scotts at roughly the same time.

“I think I might have a solution,” said a female voice.

Everyone turned. Standing amid the factory lines was a beautiful woman with raven black hair in a smoky nightgown—smoky because it was gray, and smoky because it seemed at once to be both there and not there at all. As if
the gown, and the woman who wore it, might only have been a figment of everyone’s imagination.

“YOU!” shouted Merle.

“YOU?” said one of the Micks.

“You!” Erno said out of camaraderie, though he wasn’t really all that surprised. He knew he’d be seeing his doctor again sooner or later.

She clasped her hands in front of her and said, “Merle Phillip Lynn. Scottish Play Doe. Erno Utz. Emily Utz. Brian Macintyre Biggs. Fergus Ór.” A cold flare of light like a slow camera flash tumbled through the room in waves. “There now. I’m afraid you’ll find that not one of you can move.”

One Mick and one Scott shed their skins and were goblins again. They went to stand at either side of the beautiful woman and held her hands like gentlemen when she ducked under the factory rollers to join Scott and his friends. Closer now, you could see that her beauty was a glamour, and perhaps not as glamorous as it used to be. To Erno and Emily, who had seen her most recently, she looked careworn and tired.

“I cannot believe my good luck,” she said. “I’m getting everything I want for Christmas. I’ll admit my magic is not what it once was, but I’ve done some poking around and discovered each of your True Names—does no one learn to keep the old secrets in this world?—and with these I
have barely to lift a finger to keep you all in my thrall.”

Scott, for his part, was confused. He could move, couldn’t he? Sure, he had been frozen with fear there for a second, but the rest of his friends seemed to be genuinely paralyzed. They didn’t even blink. Scott twitched a fingertip just to be sure, and he could move just fine. Then he struggled to compose himself as the woman turned to gaze directly at him.

“Forgive my manners, young man. Everyone else here has at least one good name for me, and perhaps a few less savory ones besides. You may know me as Queen Nimue, the Lady of the Lake.

“Merlin,” she said, turning to the tense and pink-faced accountant. “Wormed your way out of the earth. The worm that dieth not, it would seem—just how old are you now, wizard? No, don’t answer—it was rude of me to ask.

“Fergus—” she said to Mick, and here her face fell, and a little of the glamour came loose, just for a moment. She was an altogether less beautiful but more lovable person in that moment. “I hope by my apples that you’ll live to understand what I’m doing here. These are miserable means, but there’s an honorable end in sight. Not for me perhaps, but for you, and for all our cousins. You’ll see.”

She straightened and surveyed the lot of them. “What a class of apt pupils. Let’s have a history lesson, shall we?”

“Yes, Miss,” said either Pigg or Poke.

“Yes, please,” said the other.

“Hm. The Fay were first forced underground by an invading army, you know. Such is the way of things, I think you’ll soon find. We were the light of the world, hiding under bushels. Cowering beneath toadstools. We lived for so long in our twilight world that I think even some of our own came to see it as our natural place. Not I. I wanted back some of the world we’d lost. Not so much, really—Ireland could be ours, and Somerset. Maybe Orkney. They were doing practically nothing with Orkney, you know.”

“’S a bit unfashionable, Miss.”

“Well, you have to have someplace to put the pixies. So I sought to have dealings with a mortal king, King Arthur. I gave him a great sword of enchanted metal: metal that would get into his blood and turn his heart toward our cause. Because here I thought I saw a king to unite all the human world, for good or for ill. But I also hedged my bets, as I think you say. I made sure Arthur begat a son who would be my cat’s paw, to replace him if necessary. But then the two killed each other at Camlann. So it wasn’t a very good plan, you see.”

“Oh, don’t say it, Miss,” said one of the goblins.

“I will say it. The Fay have always preferred a good story to a well-laid plan. It’s a failing of ours. And then came the Marvel—the Gloria. It took me centuries to
understand it. The humans, bless them, thought it was just more of their God’s punishment on Arthur for consorting with devils and magic. My own people thought it was some black magic conjured forth when father and son murdered each other on the battlefield. I alone knew—it was some trick of yours, wasn’t it, Merlin?”

Tears were streaming down Merle’s face. But then there were tears streaming down each of the prisoners’ faces—they could scarcely blink, could hardly breathe under Nimue’s influence. Scott would have to do something, and he flicked his eyes about for an idea.

“We have always been jealous of each other’s magics. I never discovered the secret behind your gift of foresight. And you, for your part, made a careful study of any and all things enchanted by the Fay: Arthur’s sword, fairy gold—oh yes, I know all about your little experiments on fairy gold. Did you long to be a great alchemist, Merlin? You cared only for the scientific magics with their laws and order, and turned away from sacred chaos and uncertainty. You cast it out of your heart and mind and wished for a world of rules and law, where the human arts were the only arts. You made your wish come
true
, somehow. And you left us to die in a bubble.

“You see, I was haunted by the memory of the Gloria, and the sense I could not shake that the world had been split in two. It was you who put the idea in my head,
Merlin, just before I imprisoned you in that dank cave. You said that Arthur would return, return to a world I couldn’t imagine. Where is our dear Arthur, Merlin? Resting up? Do tell him I asked after him.”

There were a few things around Scott that could conceivably be used as weapons, and he would have liked very much to get any one of them into his hand without somebody noticing. But one of the goblins (Poke, he thought), would not stop looking at him. Did he know? Did he seriously just wink?

“It took all my skills and half my magics,” said Nimue, “but I soon found this new human world through the mists. I was able to part the curtains, just long enough, just wide enough, to make the Crossing. I left a land of feral beauty and wonder and entered New Jersey. It probably goes without saying that I got a bit moody for the next ten or fifteen years.

“But I had a plan. A good one. I would open a door and bring the rest of my people to this world before the bubble burst. I needed power. Influence. I needed more, much more magic than I’d currently had at my disposal if I wanted to open this door. And I knew other Fay had made the Crossing, albeit accidentally, before me. I could… I could take their glamour for my own if I had to. Store it away. So I needed an organization that could scour the Earth for magical creatures. If I could not yet
have the company of my fellow Fay, then I needed a company of men. I grabbed power the only way a woman in the 1830s could: I married well.

“Zachariah Terribull Goode was not a good man. He was an Old World Puritan, and he did not care for women. In fact he’d made a small fortune inventing ways to shame and torture them: painful headdresses, metal wired to teeth and so forth….”

Here she looked sidelong at Emily.

“But his business was in decline. The punishment of shrews and wantons was falling out of favor. It was I who pointed out that the women he tortured had lovely smiles, when they smiled at all. It was I who saw that the devices were straightening their teeth, I who saw that parents would pay good money to have their children tortured for vanity. New devices had to be tested, and I volunteered to do the testing. I obtained a number of orphans, which was of course much easier to do back then. Not that it’s entirely impossible now.”

Again she glanced at Emily, with a smile like a knife.

“An honorable life—such is the way of the Seelie Court.”

“If y’ say so, Miss,” said Pigg.

“Have to take your word for it,” said Poke, and here he most definitely winked at Scott.

“But stealing children has always been our right,”
Nimue continued. “We take them from their parents, leave behind a changeling. The fairy is raised as a human, and becomes more human. The human is raised as one of the Fay, and becomes more Fay. In the end they’re both changelings, in their way.

“I raised my orphans as if they were fairies: I fed them only a bitter stew of flowers and rainwater each morning, taught them about all of the magic creatures, told them that our kind would once again rule the Earth. The symbol of our strength, our great potential, I told them, was the dragon Saxbriton, most powerful of all creatures, whom I had raised myself from an egg. The first of my adopted children. And I filled their mouths with enchanted metal and made little cages for their minds. But in the end too many of them resisted, died, went mad. And I had to admit I had failed, just as I had failed with Arthur. I needed to get my magics
inside
them, to turn them from the inside out.