Points of Departure (44 page)

“Certainly you would, Dr. Hunter,” Vance said expansively.

“We all would. Why, I care about the lad as if he were my own son. Isn’t that so,
Fields?”

John scowled and shook his head, believing none of it.

“Let’s get on to business,” he said.

The undertaker nodded and spoke softly. “Now; we were discussing the price. Dr. Hunter had offered twenty pounds for the body.”

“Twenty pounds?” Vance scowled, forgetting his love for the giant at the mention of money. “Out of the question.”

“It does seem inadequate for the unusual merchandise
we have to offer,” the undertaker murmured. “It seems to me that ten times that amount would he fair.”

John Hunter looked up from his beer. “You’ll need few takers for such merchandise.”

“Ah, you would be surprised,” said the undertaker. “My conversations with the head surgeon at St. George’s Hospital suggest that there may be a number of takers.”

“Thirty pounds,” John said.

The bargaining
was protracted. Vance spoke of his great affection for the giant so eloquently that his eyes became moist with tears. He was the giant’s friend, perhaps his only friend, and he would never consider the doctor’s offer were it not for his own need for capital. Persuaded by his own eloquence, he felt a brief pang of regret, but dismissed it as John raised the price.

Fields stressed the rarity of
the commodity they offered.

“Unique on the face of the earth,” he said. “An opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime—if you’re lucky.”

John was the least garrulous of the lot, protesting that the two of them had unrealistic notions of their merchandise’s value. But clearly Vance and Fields had the advantage.

Finally, after much gin and talk, John settled at one hundred pounds and
would not budge. They drank to seal the bargain.

The clock was striking eleven when Vance went to check on the giant. The street seemed unnaturally quiet. In the dim light of the tavern’s lantern, Vance could see that the dogs were still waiting. He heard a rustle of feathers above his head. Suddenly, the lark sang, a sweet burst of glory, like a sudden ray of sunshine in a dark place. The largest
of the mongrels tilted back his head and began to howl, and the rest joined in, wailing like banshees.

A man in a nightshirt flung open the window above Vance’s head and shouted at the dogs, but the howling continued. The shouting was followed by a pail of water and then the contents of a chamberpot. Vance quickly ducked for the protection of the tavern doorway. Retreating inside, he said to
Fields and John Hunter, “I suppose he’s dead.”

In the dark of night, with the help of Vance and Fields, John Hunter stripped the corpse of the dead giant, slipped a sack over the body, and loaded the sack into his coach.

In his haste to be off, he overlooked the giant’s staff, which was propped in the corner by the fire.

The pack of mongrels that hung about the door followed the coach for half
a mile or so, but he lost them after that.

At Earl’s Court, the coachman, who had grown used to nocturnal errands, helped him load the body into a barrow and transport it to the basement workshop.

Alone with the cadaver, John hesitated. “So Charlie,” he muttered. “You came to me after all, whether you would or not. I feel half-sorry for you, but I suppose you died happy enough.” He shook his
head, thinking of the giant’s superstition and ignorance. Then he wielded his sharp knife and prepared Charlie’s bones for the boiling pot.

It was nearly dawn when he became aware that the caged lark in the next room was singing its heart out. He cocked his head to listen, wondering what had prompted the bird to sing. In the months that he had kept it in confinement beneath the earth, the lark
had never to his knowledge sung a note.

Putting the last bone in the pot, John went to investigate, but the bird fell silent at his approach and never sang again.

Charlie was gone when Kathleen returned from Covent Garden that night. His room was dark and the fire had burned out. His clothing was scattered about the strawtick mattress, and she guessed at what had happened.

When she found his
staff by the fireside, its blossoms wilted and dry, she knew he was dead. He never would have left without it. She took the staff with her when she left. It had a nice feel in her hand and it reminded her of Charlie.

It was strange, but her hump never ached when she held the staff in her hand. Free of the pain, she drank less gin. After a time, it seemed to her that the hump was beginning to
shrink. And then she was sure of it: the twist in her back grew straighter every day.

Her livelihood shrank with her hump—no one would pay for a fortune from a straight-backed Irishwoman. She lost business to the fortune-teller on the other side of the garden, a dark-skinned man who wore multicolored scarves and stared into a crystal to see the future. Finally, with the last of her earnings,
Kathleen returned to Ireland. There was no reason to stay in London, and the staff in her hand gave her the urge to wander. She went to Ireland and wandered the winding roads, telling stories in return for a bit of food and a place to sleep. Sometimes, she told stories of London. Sometimes, she talked about a giant named Charlie, and in her tales he grew to nearly the size of Bran the Blessed. It
was not a bad life.

A month of wandering and she found herself in County Derry. Enquiring here and there, she found her way to the wild pastureland known as the Giant’s Boneyard.

There she leaned the staff against the largest boulder and stood for a time, looking out over the valley and thinking of Charlie. At last, she decided to walk back to the village and look for a friendly home where she
might sleep—but when she went to pick up the staff she found that it had taken root. White blossoms sprouted from the dry wood, and new green shoots reached for the gray sky. She left it there, where it belonged. She had had it long enough.

Eventually, Kathleen married a farmer. As a farmer’s wife, she took care of the land. It was a hard life, but one for which she was well suited, with her
strong back and willing ways…

John Hunter examined Charlie Bryne’s skeleton carefully, but the doctor died without learning why Charlie had grown so large. More than one hundred years after Hunter’s death, a surgeon named Harvey Williams Cushing examined Charlie’s skull and noticed a deformity in the bone that had covered the pituitary gland. This observation ultimately led to Cushing’s discovery
that the pituitary plays a role in controlling human growth, one more small piece in the great puzzle that John Hunter was trying to solve.

Cushing did not explain why birds often congregated at the window of the room in which the giant’s bones hung.

The sill was thick with their droppings. Sometimes, they would rattle on the glass with their beaks and flap their wings impatiently, as if demanding
to be let in.

Perhaps Cushing did not notice them. Like Hunter, he was preoccupied with understanding what made the human body tick. He had no time for the foolishness of birds, the poetry of cloud formations, the illegible scrawls left by snails crawling across the slate paving stones in the garden.

That’s the truth, as near as I can tell it. Oh, historians may quibble with some events I have
described. I can find no historical documentation detailing the flowers that grew on Charlie’s staff or mentioning the staff at all, for that matter. And perhaps the birds did not really gather at the window to pay court to Charlie’s bones. I can find no records that say they did—but then, I can find no denial of it either. Surely these are minor points. At its heart, the tale is true.

Charlie
Bryne is dead and gone and his bones still hang in London’s Royal College of Surgeons. In the Giant’s Boneyard, songbirds nest in the hawthorn thicket that has grown up near the boulder that old people call the Giant’s Skull. In this lonely spot, there lingers a sense of sadness and loss. Sometimes, a foolish traveler, heading home late at night, will feel a sudden chill as he passes the field.

When the chill touches him, he’ll clutch his coat around him, glance back over his shoulder like a man pursued by ghosts, and hurry home to the safety of electric lighting, content to live in a world where ghosts do not walk and bones rest easy.

W
HEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL
, my mother read
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
, by C. S. Lewis, aloud to me and my brothers. The story fascinated me: these kids walked through a perfectly ordinary wardrobe into a new world. After hearing that story I was convinced, beyond any doubt, that there were other worlds out there, just waiting for me to find them.

When I was old
enough to read for myself, I read other stories about secret places and powerful magic: the Oz books;
Five Children and It
, by E. Nesbit;
The Borrowers
, by Mary Norton; and
The Time Garden, Half Magic
, and numerous other magical books by Edward Eager. When I was a little older, I branched out into science fiction and adventure fiction, reading all the Tarzan and Doc Savage books from my older
brother’s collection. These seemed to me to be extensions of the original impulse: They all dealt with worlds that were more dangerous, more beautiful, and more intriguing than the one in which I lived.

When I wasn’t reading about secret places, I would look for secret places to call my own. I couldn’t find a magic wardrobe, so I had to make do. I cleared a patch of ground in a secluded corner
of the backyard (back behind the big pussy willow bush where no one ever went) and I planted crocuses and Johnny-jump-ups to make a secret garden. I couldn’t go past a hole in a hedge or a cave or a culvert or a dark passageway without peering into the darkness and wondering if this were the one that led to a new world. In best junior scientist fashion, I learned to identify edible wild foods: young
plantain leaves and such. I was, I think, planning to live off the land when something happened. I didn’t know what the event would be or when it would come along, but I knew that something momentous was going to happen.

I might need to be able to recognize edible plants when I found the way through and ended up in Oz or Perelandra or Narnia or wherever it was I would finally end up.

In the
course of growing up, I never really quit looking for the secret door, the hidden passage, the opening to another dimension or another time. But at some point I suppose I realized that the secret way out would not just appear to me. I had to create my own secret ways. And so I started to spin daydreams. Not daydreams like getting a pony or climbing to the top of the mulberry tree in the backyard.
Daydreams that were even more improbable—like saving a princess from a dragon or sailing off with pirates to do piratical things that involved a great deal of swashbuckling swordplay.

Of course, I continued to read like a maniac, devouring the imaginary worlds of science fiction and fantasy writers and using them to fuel my own adventures. In my version of the great twister, Dorothy had a companion
named Pat Murphy on her trip to Oz. And Pat Murphy—a scrawny fourth grader with harlequin glasses and a mighty left hook—was certainly along when Tarzan visited the City of Gold.

Unlike those amazing writers who started putting words on paper when they were barely old enough to clutch the pen, I kept these daydreams to myself. After all, part of the value of secret places is their privacy. If
anyone could get on my pirate ship and sail off to adventure, then everyone would. And the secret would be out. So I kept my heroic fantasies to myself.

Along the way, the characters in my internal stories began to change. Sometimes I didn’t save the day—I just watched as someone else got to be the hero. As the stories evolved, the plots changed too, continuing to entirely new conclusions, new
adventures, new worlds.

When an adventure took a wrong turn, I would go back and fix it, rethink my actions or the actions of my characters in a way that was just not possible in life.

It wasn’t until I was in college that it occurred to me that I might actually write some stories down. Lois Natanson, a wonderful literature teacher, read one of my papers and told me I was an excellent writer.
That was the first time that anyone had ever told me I could write and write well.

And so I began to try to write stories.

Strangely enough, I didn’t initially write about the secret people and places I knew. They were secret, remember?

Instead, I tried to write what I now think of as other people’s stories, stories that didn’t give too much of my own stuff away. I tried to write like authors
I admired like Ursula Le Guin, like Kate Wilhelm, like Margaret Atwood. And then one day I wrote a story about a place that was my own, and it was like coming home, stepping into Narnia, touching down in Oz. And there was no turning back.

Looking back on the stories in this book, written over the last decade or so, I see traces of my childhood reading and daydreaming. Many of my stories deal
with outsiders, people who are trapped in a world where they do not belong. Sam, the Neanderthal who has been yanked from his own time; the nameless alien woman who lingers in Mexico, unable to find her way home; Rachel, the chimp with the mind of a teenage girl—these are characters who have, in a sense, found that secret door I was always looking for. They’ve entered a new world filled with exotic
things and strange people; it just happens to be the world in which we live every day.

Many of my stories take place in foreign countries. I travel as often as I can manage, and I come home with stories about the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras, about Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, about Nepal, places that are strange and alien, as exotic as Oz, as mysterious as Perelandra.

When I was a kid,
I knew that fantastic things were waiting just around the corner, lingering in the shadows, lurking behind the rhododendron bush. Some were nice and some were horrible—like the witches under the bed or the monsters that hid in storm drains. I imagined their lives and they became real. Now that I’m a grownup, I am doing what I wanted to do then: I am opening the secret doorway and letting them
into our world; I am walking through the secret passage and visiting theirs.