Long Black Curl (10 page)

“Ah, some relative or other.”

“His head did not seem to be attached to his body. Was that an artistic style at some point, or another of your people's delightful quirks?”

“That was practicality, my Continental employee. Because the winters were so bad around here back before the Civil War, artists spent the cold months painting generic headless portraits, then when they got commissions in the spring, all they had to do was add the heads.”

“This one didn't quite add it all the way.”

“Well, there's good artists and bad artists, Nigel. You should know that by now.”

“That's a cosmic truth,” he agreed. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “So: what now?”

In one motion she stood and peeled off her sweater and blouse, then unhooked her bra and let it fall. She kept her chin high and her eyes locked on his. “If I told you I was older than these mountains around you, what would you say?”

Nigel made no effort not to look her up and down. He placed the luggage at his feet. “I would say … why, Grandma, what lovely breasts you have.”

She smiled. “All the better to silence you with, my dear. Now, get those clothes off and get your ass in bed.”

 

7

The little room was silent except for the wind whistling around the door. Rockhouse ignored it, too traumatized even to consider trying to make a fire. The light around the door gradually faded and finally disappeared altogether.

He sat at his table, his hands before him. He couldn't bring himself to look at his injuries before he lost the light. It surprised him that it had been considerably less painful than getting his throat ripped out, but maybe that was just due to shock.

He couldn't believe what had happened to him. Not long ago, he had been the most powerful man in Cloud County, and now he was
this:
mute, crippled, and isolated. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He knew better than to ponder that question, because the answers always came to him with ease.

It began with that stupid bet with the Queen over his prowess with his axe. As the Feller in the Queen's Forest, he had a position of power and influence over all those who lived outside the royal city. To retain that power, he'd needed only to do his job and shut up. It turned out he could do neither.

When the bet was lost, he could have released his people from their vow of fealty to him. He could've accepted exile alone, and left them to live out their lives in peace among the earth and greenery of home. But he hadn't even seriously considered the idea. If he was going down, he was taking them with him.

And then, over and above the exile, there were the things he'd done to his own family. Seducing his sister with a combination of magic and intimidation so that she'd conceive a child of pure Tufa stock, to counteract the gradual intermingling of his folk, first with the Asians who became the Native Americans, then with the Europeans who eventually followed the Tufa's own route across the ocean. Then he'd seduced the child of that union, his daughter Curnen, in an attempt to intensify the pure bloodline even more.

But before any of his seed took hold in her, her husband—that annoying, smug bastard Brushy Dale—realized what was going on. On the night Rockhouse Hicks should have been enshrined as the newest star of the
Grand Ole Opry,
Brushy accused him before the other musicians, then beat him mercilessly.

Still, he got his revenge as he always did. He cursed Curnen to slow oblivion, and sent Brushy to spend eternity as a stone in the forest. And then he forgot about them both, which proved to be his fatal error.

Of course, none of the Tufa understood why he did those ostensibly terrible things. They had no idea what it was like to carry his burden, no concept of the rage and responsibility that motivated him. His goal was always the same: keep the Tufa together, under his hand, until the day the Queen regretted her actions and allowed them home. Allowed
him
home.

He clung to that single thought as the eons passed, even though he knew that day would never come. In all the timeless years of her existence, the Queen had never, ever changed her mind.

Suddenly something
moved
in the room behind him.

He felt its presence as it took slow, light steps across the floor. It also gave off a faint, foxfirelike glow. The air grew charged with anticipation as it moved, not closer, but simply back and forth. To see it, he'd have to turn.

He didn't want to do that.

But at last, he could resist no longer. Because he knew what he'd see.

He turned, the old chair squeaking as his weight shifted.

The woman wore a long black gown with immense hanging sleeves, all tattered and worn. She radiated the faint pale-blue light. A black veil covered her face, so he could not tell her age. But he knew her purpose.

He looked around for his electrolarynx.

“Don't seek that mechanical voice, Tigh-na-creige,” she said, using the pure form of his name. “It'll do nothing for you now. Nothing you could say will change your fate. That's why I'm here.”

She lifted the veil. Beneath it was a beautiful mature woman of about forty, with dark hair falling around her face in waves.

Rockhouse mouthed her name.
Radella.

“Your day has ended, by your own vile hand,” she said. Her voice had a distant quality, as if miles—or eons—separated them. “I am simply here to make it official.”

She smiled then, a smile so vicious and cold that it made his eyes well with new tears.

She tilted back her head, opened her mouth, and emitted a wailing shriek that filled the little room as if it had a physical force, pushing the air toward the walls and out through the myriad cracks and openings. Rockhouse suddenly couldn't breathe, and he got to his feet to flee. But the abrupt movement, combined with his injuries, made him dizzy and he fell to the floor.

The sound continued, growing, if possible, even louder. It encompassed oceans of pain, sadness, and torment, a cry that had often heralded death among the Celtic peoples. But here it announced more than a simple passing from this world to the next. It told of cessation, nonexistence in a void that never ended and was all encompassing. It announced Rockhouse's doom.

He crawled to the door as the banshee continued to wail, and managed to get it open. Outside, snow trickled lazily down from the darkness like the cold, dry tears of antiquity. He had no time to grab a coat, gloves, or his electrolarynx. He got his feet under him and fled down the trail as fast as his aged, damaged body would allow.

In his former home, the specter of Radella was gone. But the cry continued to echo, merging with the wind to travel great distances and follow Rockhouse long after it should have faded.

*   *   *

Luke Somerville looked across the dinner table at Mandalay. Her face was still splotchy from the cold, and her black hair frizzy from static. Since her own were soaked with melted snow, she wore clothes borrowed from his older sister that were big on her and made her appear weak and helpless. She caught him looking, and her cheeks turned extra red. He quickly looked away.

“I called your mama,” Luke's mother, Claudia, said. She was a big woman, the kind who put on ten permanent pounds with each of her four children. She had Tufa-black hair, but her skin was pale and almost shone in the kitchen's light. She put a big bowl of mashed potatoes down on the table with a loud slam. “She said your daddy'll be along to fetch you in about an hour. That'll give you time to eat, at least.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Mandalay said. She tried to ignore the wonderful aroma rising from the food before her, reminding her with every whiff that she hadn't eaten in seven hours. But the Tufa rules about food and drink made it impossible for her to accept it, and they knew that, too. “But if I don't eat at home, Leshell gets real mad at me.”

“You call your mama Leshell?” asked Luke's baby sister Ida Mae. She sat beside Mandalay, on a homemade booster seat of three Knoxville phone books duct-taped together.

“She's my stepmother,” Mandalay said. “My real mama died.”

“Wow,” the girl said. “I ain't never met nobody whose mama died.”

“Behave,” their father, Elgin, said from the head of the table as he wrote “Insurance Payment” over and over in tiny print on a piece of stationery. “That ain't no way to talk to somebody.”

“But it's the truth,” Ida Mae said.

“It's the truth that you're gonna get an ass-whoopin' if you don't button that lip,” Elgin said. He finished his writing, then folded the paper into smaller and smaller squares. He said to Mandalay, “Luke says he found you wandering in the woods. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir. I was bored and went for a walk, but I got kind of turned around.”

“Went for a walk in a snowstorm? That ain't too bright, is it?” He chuckled as he tied a red string around the folded paper.

“Elgin,” Claudia said warningly. “That ain't polite.”

Mandalay said nothing. When the Tufa had arrived here, they'd been one group, united under the leadership of the one who'd gotten them into this mess in the first place. It didn't take long for that to change, though, and their society quickly became a mirror of the one they'd left: two groups, diametrically opposed in almost every way, with their own leaders.

Luke's family was part of the group that stayed under the Feller. And now they had the leader of the other group, Rockhouse's opposite number, seated at their table. If she ate or drank anything they offered, it might affect the extremely tenuous balance of power even more.

“Well, it's a good thing Luke found you,” Elgin said. He got up and took the string-tied note to the counter, where a pile of medical bills waited. He tucked it beneath them, returned to his seat, then spooned mashed potatoes onto his plate.

Mandalay looked at Luke. “Yeah, it sure was. If I ain't said it yet—thank you.”

“No problem,” Luke said.

One of his sisters, older and with glasses, sat down with an accordion and began to play. The music was infectious, and it took all of Mandalay's self-control not to tap her foot along with it. The sound filled the kitchen, and Luke's older brother patted out a rhythm on the table edge.

Mandalay gripped the edges of her seat as tightly as she could. If there was danger in sharing food or drink, then there was a possible apocalypse for her if she joined in their music. The problem was, music was insidious—you could find yourself humming, or swaying, or head-bobbing along with it before you were aware.

Claudia sang in a high, keening way that blended seamlessly with the accordion:

Well, you look so fine

In that borrowed suede jacket of mine

Now, cozy up behind the wheel

Of an aquamarine automobile

We'll just take it slow

Listening to songs on the AM radio

No particular place to go

Valiant and Fury girls.…

Mandalay felt the music swelling in her, connecting her with the years—millennia—of songs of the Tufa. The song ached with loss, with friendship and love that once flourished and danced among the flowers in the rain, but was now old, and tender, and reaching out for comfort. She wanted to cry, and fought mightily as her vision blurred. To admit this intense an emotional response to their music was to give them a level of power over her that could easily spell her doom.

The family, except for Luke, harmonized on the next verse.

Well, the Valiant finally died

And I sat and said my last good-byes

I saved a hubcap for my walls

Called the garage to make that haul

Well, the tow truck guys were drunk

And they complained it was a piece of junk

Yeah, that junk was my life

Valiant and Fury girls.

Mandalay bit the sides of her cheeks until she tasted blood. The song draped over her like a cerecloth shroud, the weight of its ache as heavy and final as the pressure of that wax-dipped funeral cloth.

Then Luke said, “Mama, y'all stop it.”

Claudia stopped singing, and the accordion choked off with a melodic wheeze.

“Luke, you apologize to your mama or you'll get the whippin' of your life,” his father said.

Luke stood up. His face was red, and his eyes shone with tears of anger. “You can whip me if you want, Daddy, but it still ain't right, what you're doing. Mandalay don't want to sing with us, and that's fine. She's a guest in our house.”

Elgin stood, grabbed the back of Luke's shirt with one hand, and began to unbuckle his belt with the other. “Boy, I'll teach you to disrespect—”

“You will not,” Mandalay said quietly.

Everyone froze and stared at her.

She stood, her fingertips resting on the table. Her voice took on a quality of ancient, unyielding power. “You will not lay a hand on this boy. You will not punish him for standing up for what he thinks is right.” She said these things as simple statements, not orders. It was as if they were an already accomplished fact.

For a long moment, the only sound was the refrigerator's compressor kicking on. Then they all jumped at the sudden knock on the door. It was one lone pounding, and they sat immobile, waiting for more. But it didn't come.

Mandalay saw Claudia and Elgin exchange a look. It wasn't hard to read: Whoever or whatever was out there, it wasn't a guest expected for dinner. And it was far too soon for it to be Mandalay's father.

Elgin picked up a shotgun from the corner and walked to the door. “Who's out there?” he called.

They all listened. Over the wind, they heard what sounded like fingers scraping on the other side of the wood.