Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (15 page)

That was typical enough of Lola. Her life seemed generally to divide into Nice and Not Nice. If she didn’t scale the heights of joy, neither did she plumb the depths of depravity…and she looked at both with considerable suspicion. Indeed, there was not much room for the heights of joy or the depths of depravity in the life of a K-Mart employee. Making ends meet was hard enough. She scraped together all the overtime she could, smiled dutifully at her customers, buttered up her boss as far as she felt was decent. As a result, her customers liked her—she smiled at them more than she really needed to: that was part of being Nice. And there were other occasional benefits—for example, this whole week of vacation that she had managed to scrape together. And it seemed like the world was obliging her, for a change, by being Nice as well. The weather was perfect Friday when she clocked out, waved goodbye to her boss, and went home to get packed and go up to the hills.

Now, as she sat on the shingle of the little stream where it ran down the gully, it all seemed rather anticlimactic. While she was still at home in the suburbs, with traffic howling by outside, this had all seemed like the Promised Land: blue sky, silence, no phones ringing, no intercoms shouting at the K-Mart Shoppers: peace. The trouble was that the great outdoors had its own ideas about what Peace sounded like. They did not involve intercoms, but they did involve a more or less constant rush of wind which was colder than her dreams had made it. Birdsong was so loud that within a day it had turned from the ID tune of bucolic bliss into a serious nuisance, worse than the neighbor’s boom box at two in the morning…for the birds never quite stopped, and eventually the boom box always did. Even the white noise chatter of the stream was starting to become a problem: it sounded like the toilet tank’s outflow valve stuck in the on position, and unlike the toilet tank, you couldn’t fix it by jiggling the handle. And when it did finally get quiet enough so that you could get some sleep, there were the rabbits, the eight million rabbits that lived in the brush around here, and came out to chew on it in the middle of the night. They rattled and rustled and squealed at each other and did their best to sound like muggers hiding in the bushes and waiting to jump on her. They would scrabble at your backpack and try to get into it if it was within reach, and they would eat any food you had left around. All this did her sleep patterns no good at all…

Lola caught herself thinking all these negative things, sighed, and pushed the thoughts away consciously. This was no way to proceed. “Who’s running this mind, anyway?” she said severely to herself. If there was the sound of sniggering somewhere in the background, she ignored it. Positive thinking, only, would produce the result she was looking for.

Whatever that is
, said the voice that sniggered.

“You shut up,” she said severely to that part of her.
Faith is everything
.

…And now the circle was drawn. She stood up inside it, and let out one long breath of—it was embarrassment: there was no way around it. Even before she’d done anything, and had nothing happen. She was afraid to look stupid, even to no one and nothing, just the air. The rush of the water, the deepening blue of the sky, somehow looked at her…and would laugh behind her back. And if a person should come along—She shuddered at the thought. Better to get it over with, she thought. I’ve been getting ready for this for months. I swore I was going to do this. I’m going to do it, and then go home and forget about the whole thing….

The wind fell off a little; with her back to it, the stream suddenly sounded muted. Odd, how the sudden quieting of everything made her gulp. But then she put the reaction aside.
Nerves,
she thought.

Lola reached down, picked up the two small camper’s candle-lanterns she had brought with her, and lit the candles. Then she stood there irresolute, with the match in her hand: thought of throwing it outside—but you were only supposed to do that kind of thing in certain ceremonies, the book had said, and with proper preparation. She dropped the spent match carefully on the stones at her feet—it wasn’t yet fire season, but there was no point in being careless—put the candles down one to each side of the slab of stone she had chosen as her altar, and stooped to pick up the knife. It was black-handled as the book suggested: but around the time she was considering the knife, she had been short of money, and so had decided to use one of her kitchen knives. At least it was a good one, a Henckels three-inch parer
. Can I cook with it again afterwards?
Lola wondered.
Will the God and Goddess get mad if I use it after this to chop onions?….

As if anything was going to happen at all: as if Goddess or God were real… Lola sighed again and got on with it.

She had memorized the invocation to the Elements, the Four Quarters, and the Deities Who managed each of them. Now Lola turned slowly, pointing at the circle with the knife, and spoke the names out of the book, imagining the line of light following the knife until the circle was whole. When that was finished, she assumed the proper pose—arms held out and upward, open-palmed, legs a little spread—and recited the rest of it. She could hardly hear the words for the racket in her head:
dumb, this is intensely stupid, nothing will happen, what a waste of time
—

Nonetheless, she finished the invocation, and, as the book suggested, stood quiet for a few moments, “to let the peace of the place fill her”. Mostly what happened instead was that the wind rose again, chilling her to the bone, and the sound of the water seemed to get much louder as well.
Forget it,
she thought.
This is all useless—

Lola was stubborn. She picked up the bow, and the single arrow which was meant for this business: a white one. “Swift and direct as this Your chosen weapon,” she muttered, almost annoyed now, “let Your presence pass into me, swift and sure—“

She looked up, nocked the arrow, and drew, being careful to do it wide enough to miss her poor bruised left forearm. The point of the arrow glinted faintly in the westering moonlight. Just a little “above” it, “over the Moon”, Lola aimed, and let the arrow fly.

The draw was misjudged. The bowstring hit her forearm again, and knocked the new scab off it. “Ow, ow, ow!” Lola said, but at the same time she couldn’t take her eyes off the arrow. It arched up and out of sight, end-on to her, vanished in a second. The wind dropped off again, and in the brief stillness as she lowered the bow, Lola listened for the clatter of the fallen arrow among the brush or on the rocks.

Nothing.

Still she stood there looking up, while in their lanterns the candle flames bobbled. The sunset was almost all gone, now, and from near-zenith a line of light traced itself, faint, then went out: an escapee from a Spielberg movie, a single shooting star. Lola sighed, shook her head at her own gullibility. A wasted trip. Well, maybe not wasted. She would get some camping done. But—

—and then along the same line, the light abruptly reasserted itself. Brighter, and closer,
much
closer, shedding sparks of light around it as it went.
Pieces coming off it?…
Lola thought: but on second thought, the light around the falling object was more like static electricity, crackling. Through the wind she could even hear the crackle as it rushed overhead, plunged past, shooting off lines and forks of narrow, twisting lightning—

The thing fell out of sight. Lola stood staring at the blue twilight glow over the hill beyond which it had fallen. A moment’s silence: then an odd small boom, after which the silence fall like a physical thing itself, leaden and complete. Even the wind stopped.

Lola stared. The sound, and the thing’s trajectory, made it seem as if it had come down no more than a quarter mile away, just the other side of the hill.

No business of mine,
she thought.

But what if it’s setting a brushfire,
the thought came immediately,
whatever it is. If it does, it’ll be my business real soon now, especially if I just stand here…

She bolted from her circle, completely forgetting to cut her way out. Lola lurched over the pebbles to where her jeans and sneakers and sweatshirt lay, struggled hurriedly into them, and then picked up the bow and a few spare arrows and headed toward the hill-crest.

It was a hard climb, made more annoying by looking easy. Lola tore herself on thorn-bushes, staggered into prickly manzanita, put her feet into invisible holes and nearly strained first one ankle, then another, getting them out again. When she made the top of the hill at last, there was no triumph in her, only annoyance. Her hair was full of pine resin, her arms were scraped and bleeding, and it was almost too dark to see where she was going.

Except on the other side of the hill, where, down in a little gully, the blue thing lay.

It glowed. It was not on fire, though there was a lightningy smell all around, enough to make her choke a little at first. The thing was round as a ball, maybe six feet wide, and the blue glow was brightest inside it, much fainter at the edges. If “edges” was the word she was looking for: the globe had an airbrushed look to it, misty, not entirely there, for all its brightness. The not-there-ness got stronger as Lola watched: the light of the blue globe throbbed paler and less bright as she watched.

And there was something moving down there: a dark shape, silhouetted against the globe. Something small and knobbly, humping along, staggering—at least it looked that way: the motion was oddly distressed, helpless, like a hurt animal.

Lola started down the hillside, herself staggering from tree to tree to keep from falling straight down it, hanging onto the biggest pieces of brush for support as she went. She had little time to spare for looking at the globe, and had to concentrate mostly on her path, and the sound of the back of her mind screaming,
This isn’t something you should be getting involved in! How do you know it’s friendly? What if it wants you for weird alien sex or something? You’re about to become a case in the X-Files—!

Lola came out of the manzanita scrub at the bottom of the slope, gasping, and stood and just looked for a moment.
Not ‘it’,
she thought.
‘Them— ‘

The dark shape she had seen was holding still, possibly looking back. It seemed lighter in color, now, probably because the globe behind it had gone lightless, a pallid grey: and it had a little of the old blue glow of the globe about it, seeming to come from inside, and getting stronger and weaker, stronger and weaker, as if it breathed. The creature had no constant shape of its own: it flowed and changed as she watched, sinking down flat like tired Silly Putty, then humping itself upward again, making a sort of domed top, from which four little dark round eyes looked at her. Lola thought they were eyes, anyway. Behind it, beside it, flattening down and humping up the same way, were four smaller creatures. On the top of their round/flat bodies were more sets of litle dark eyes, all looking at her. The little creatures snuggled close to the big one and stopped moving.

Babies,
Lola thought. She stood there, not knowing what to do, but pretty sure of what she was seeing: the alien version of a breakdown. Nervous as she was, Lola had no inclination to call the Army: what she thought these creatures needed was the galactic version of the Triple-A.

“Uh,” Lola said. “I won’t hurt you—”

The creatures looked at her distrustfully, all of them. The babies got flatter: the big one didn’t move.

There’s never a universal translator around when you need one,
Lola thought. She tried to think how this all must look to them: a strange world, you break down there, and some big wild animal comes out of the woods and starts honking weird noises at you—
But how do I convince them I’m not just an animal?

The first thing, she thought, was to get small. She took a few careful steps forward. The babies went flat as pancakes: the big one, the mom?—sort of flapped herself down flat over them, covering them.

Very slowly and carefully, Lola sat down. Then she pushed the bow out in front of her, and the arrows, and watched the creatures.

They held their position for a few breaths. Then, very slowly, the “mom” pushed herself up into dome-shape again, and her eyes sagged down onto the front of the dome, looking carefully at the bow. After a moment, they seemed to focus on Lola. She had to shiver a little, under that regard. The eyes were like those of sharks on undersea documentaries: blank little pebbles, no light in them, no expression.

The “mom’s” eyes slid back up to the top of her head, then. She humped forward a little, the blue glow from inside her lighting the ground as she came. Now Lola had to physically make herself sit still. She kept an eye on the babies: they had gone flat as little pancakes, and all their eyes had vanished. They still glowed, though, which made the attempt to “hide” more cute than effective.

The mom came right up to the bow, watching Lola all the time. She paused, looking at the bow, and put a little feeler out of the main body of herself, like a small blunt finger, to prod the bow with. Then she put out another one, felt the sharp tip of one of the arrows. It was a hunting point, razor sharp. Lola saw the little “finger” actually slice itself in two against the arrowhead’s edge. She gasped—then gulped and was still again as the finger sealed itself back together, bloodlessly, with never a seam to show where the cut had happened.

Those little black eyes looked at her again. Lola gazed back. This was getting like the staring contests she had with the neighbor’s cat. Well, Muggsy might routinely win those: but this was for higher stakes. Lola didn’t look away, barely even breathed.

The mom-creature made a sound, the first one Lola had heard—a kind of tiny moan. Over by the dark globe, the babies slowly un-pancaked themselves, rounding up to a configuration more like four eggs sunny-side-up, and started humping across the rough ground to their mother.

It might be their dad, really, Lola thought: but then she threw the idea away without a second thought. This was a mom, she knew—though not
how
she knew. The babies came over and “looked” at the bow and the arrows the way their mom had, with ”fingers” they put out and then sucked back in again. There were actually tiny slurping noises when they did it.