Strangewood (41 page)

How many times had he ridden on Feathertop's back?

The pony reared, hooves rising to crack Thomas's skull.

With the sound of trumpets and shattering glass, Fiddlestick
flew into Feathertop's face. A burst of flame jetted from the dragon's mouth,
but the horse reared back even further and it only singed his cheek.

It was all the time Thomas needed to discard sentiment. He
let fly another arrow, and it caught Feathertop in the meat of his shoulder. The
pony neighed loudly, furiously, but when he came down, he backed off a few
paces.

Fiddlestick screamed, "Our Boy!" and then he dove
at Thomas, fire leaking from his nostrils. His orange belly seemed so
vulnerable, so bright for such a dark moment.

Thomas froze, wondering if the dragon had turned against him
as well. But Fiddlestick flew over his head and Thomas heard the crackling whoosh
of fire being expelled from his gut. Once again he turned, withdrawing another
arrow from his quiver, nocking it, drawing back the bowstring, all in one swift
motion.

Bob Longtooth was on fire, howling with agony and fear. He
crumbled to the ground, and it was clear immediately what had happened. The
saber-toothed tiger man had been lunging for Thomas from behind, to rip him
open, to end his life. Fiddlestick the dragon had burned him alive.

Even now, with flames licking up the huge tusklike teeth that
jutted from Bob's bottom jaw, with his fur and skin charring to black, the
tiger tried to get his paws to move forward. Thomas stepped back as Bob made
one final swipe at him. Then Longtooth was dead.

"Fiddlestick . . ." Thomas began.

But the dragon was flying toward a window.

"I'm going back down to help Brownie!" he cried. "I've
done all I can for you."

Thomas's eyes went wide, but he didn't reply. The dragon had
saved his life twice in seconds. What else could he ask for?

In a far corner, the Jackal Lantern waited for an opening
and then swiped his claws at the Peanut Butter General, who dodged quickly and
then brought his sword down again. Neither of them dared get much closer to the
other.

Thomas held his bowstring back, despite the pressure, and
spun to aim the arrow at Feathertop. But the pony was on the move. Injured
though he was, he began to trot toward the door old Jack and Longtooth had come
through. The back stairwell of the fortress.

Thomas frowned. He couldn't imagine that Feathertop would flee.

Then he heard a hacking cough and a whimper coming from the
stairs beyond that arch. And he heard Grumbler whisper harshly to someone to be
quiet.

And he knew.

"Grumbler, you traitorous bastard!" Feathertop
shouted as he ran for the door.

"Nathan!" Thomas cried.

He was about to run for the archway when he heard a grunt
behind him. A shout of pain, and a ripple of dark laughter. The hellish face of
the Jackal Lantern flared brighter, throwing its evil shadows on the walls.

"Boy!" old Jack roared.

Thomas turned, feeling the magnetic pull of his son as the
boy was hustled down the stairs and away from him. He was torn. But when he saw
the Jackal Lantern standing over the still form of the Peanut Butter General,
he could not move.

"Dad?" Thomas asked tentatively.

But his father lay still, his belly laid open. Peanut butter
and flesh and muscle torn away, and his viscera pulled out in a tangle of pink
and red and brown. Above him, standing on his hind legs, was the Jackal
Lantern. There was blood smeared on the mouth of that pumpkin face, and on the
monster's paws as well. But there was other blood, as well. The Lantern's own. He
was bleeding freely from half a dozen wounds where the General's sword had
hacked or sliced or stabbed him. Yet somehow, the Lantern remained steady on
his feet. His low, arrogant, insinuating laughter echoed throughout the
chamber.

Then he lifted his leg and he pissed on the floor, marking
his territory, his urine mixing with the blood of Thomas Randall's father.

Thomas screamed something unintelligible, even to himself. He
let fly the arrow that had been, for those odd, endless moments, resting on his
bow. It stabbed through one of the Jackal Lantern's eyes, then burst through
the back of his pumpkin skull and continued on its path, only to clunk
ineffectually against the wall.

The candlelight in old Jack's head flickered slightly, then
stabilized. Light now glowed sickeningly from the hole in the back of his head,
casting the shadow of the wound on the wall.

"Our Boy," whispered the Lantern. "It was
perfect here, before you came that first time. They knew to fear me. And then
you came and you took all the fear away. You changed it all and made it your
own.

"I'll kill you for that, if nothing else. You won't do
as I wish, then you will die. Strangewood may die with you, but better that
than to live without the fear of these beasts to sustain me. I was here before
you. Perhaps I will still be here when you are gone."

Thomas shook his head. "You're insane. I gave you fear
like you'd never imagined before. I gave you the fear of millions of children. To
them, you were the worst thing their nightmares could conjure. Don't you know
that?"

Old Jack laughed out loud, wincing at his wounds, finally
showing some vulnerability.

"You're a fool, Thomas," said the horrible pumpkin
mouth. "That isn't fear. You made me nothing but a story, a bit of evil
between pages, terror in words alone. A story. There's no true fear in that. Nothing
is safer than a story. Even the most terrified child can still close the book
and put it down."

Thomas blinked. "You're right," he said, and he
reached to draw another arrow from his quiver. "And maybe it's time for
this story to end."

Just as Thomas nocked the arrow, the Jackal Lantern came for
him. It roared, candlelight flashing grotesquely on the walls, and before he
could even draw back the bowstring, old Jack's claws came down on him. He
screamed as needles tore his face and chest.

He went down. Growling with fury, maw dripping hot wax
instead of saliva, the Jackal Lantern began to savage him. Thomas screamed. The
pain was more than his mind could cope with, and he began to shut down. Claws
tore his belly and his groin, the muscles of his legs, and raked across his
exposed ribcage.

The Jackal Lantern bounded away, some fleshy prize in its
jaws. Then it crept back toward him. Whatever bit of self preservation remained
in Thomas turned him over and he began to haul his body across the room. He
barely realized that he was dragging bits of himself behind and beneath him.

Another few inches, and he collapsed, his cheek resting in a
mixture of his father's blood and the Jackal Lantern's piss. He couldn't even
smell it. As the dark shadow began to creep across his consciousness, eclipsing
his mind, he thought of Nathan. Then his mind moved back to here, back to now,
and he thought,
it wasn't supposed to be like this
.

His hand reached out a final time, and his fingertips
touched his dead father's cheek.

The Jackal Lantern growled. The Jackal Lantern laughed.

Then Thomas Randall died.

* * * * *

Emily sat on a wooden chair between the two beds in Nathan's
hospital room, half asleep with the afternoon sun streaming in the window. The
soft rhythm of the twin monitors that kept track of Thomas and Nathan's heart
rates was like a lullaby to her.

Thomas flatlined.

Emily's eyes snapped open.

She began to scream.

* * * * *

As Thomas died, a trill of fear ran through the Jackal
Lantern's body, and he actually shivered. He glanced around at the walls, at
the sunlight coming through the windows. The floor still felt solid beneath his
feet.

The Jackal Lantern laughed again.

Thomas Randall was dead. Our Boy. He was gone, and
Strangewood had survived. Now old Jack would have Strangewood for himself, and
death itself awaited any who stood in his way.

He paused. Grinned. After this battle, there were few
creatures left in the wood who would dare stand in his way. Of all of them,
perhaps only the dragon. And that damned dwarf, Grumbler, who'd turned traitor
and tried to carry the boy, Nathan, to safety. Oh, he'd seen them go down the
stairs all right. Just as he'd seen Feathertop give chase.

Good pony. Old Jack thought that he'd have to give
Feathertop a position of nobility in his new kingdom.

He walked to a window that looked down on the wide plateau
and the Up-River below, his claws scraping stone. At first, he couldn't see
them. The only things moving were the trio of surviving Forest Rangers who
waited at the entrance to the fortress below.

But Grumbler wouldn't have gone out that way. The trees
would have stopped him, not knowing he had again changed sides.

Jack moved to another window, with a slightly more direct
view of the riverbank and the fall into nothing in the distance. And there they
were. The dwarf with the boy over one shoulder, moving across the flat stone
toward the water.

"Grumbler," he snarled. "I'll eat your
heart."

Growling, candle flaring in his head, he spun and headed
toward the door.

Father and son lay dead only inches from one another. The
peanut butter, thick as it was, had begun to slide off of the General's body. Thomas's
blood had begun to flow into his father's, to merge, to pool together. Already,
their blood had started to cool.

Where Thomas's fingertips touched his father's face, they
twitched, marking the peanut butter with the swirling patterns of his
fingerprints. A sudden buzzing filled the room and the peanut butter covering
the general's chest began to heave and bubble with life.

The peanut butter exploded, and the bees swarmed out. They
had been made a part of his body before, helping him to survive. Now they were
free, and frenzied. The swarm hung together, the sound of their rage creating a
deafening din in the room.

The Jackal Lantern paused just at the top of the steps
before descending. He heard the buzzing but ignored it and started down.

The swarm descended upon the corpse of the General, moving
and molding and lifting the peanut butter that had kept him alive for so long,
that was his shell. For what was beneath was not the body he had been born
with. It was a form that had existed only in Strangewood. In his world, he had
been dead before he set foot in the wood.

The bees moved swiftly, almost blindingly fast. Impossibly
fast. And with their urging, the peanut butter began to move as well. It began
to flow, leaping from the General's face to Thomas Randall's fingers. It ran up
Thomas's fingers, wrapping itself around his entire body as the seconds ticked
by. Only moments after the process had begun, the bees settled themselves into
the wounds in Thomas's abdomen, the peanut butter flowed over them.

Thomas opened his eyes. Strings of peanut butter webbed his
eyelids together, but he could still see. He opened his mouth, and his tongue
flicked out, ripping the spiderwebbed peanut butter away from his lips. He
tasted it.

It was life.

Thomas Randall, the Peanut Butter General, climbed to his
feet. He glanced about, saw the corpse of his father on the floor, and hung his
head for a brief moment, offering a prayer for a man who ought to have passed
on to another life decades earlier, if only his son had been willing to let him
go.

Light glinted off the steel of his father's sword where it
lay on the damp, cold stone several feet away. Thomas held out his hand and the
peanut butter whipped tendrils out across the room, twisted around the hilt,
and pulled the sword into his hand.

Then he went after his son.

The river was in sight when Grumbler heard Feathertop's
hooves thundering across the rocky plateau behind him. He didn't stop to think.
He spun, slung the kid down from his shoulder to lay him none too gently on the
hard, windswept ground, and pulled the other Colt.

He held one in either hand, Colt Peacemakers, the favored
weapons of gunfighters in America's old West. He'd found them eons ago in the
Heart of the Wood. Someone had visited. Someone had left them there, along with
a belt loaded with bullets. The only bullets he would ever have.

The sun was behind the fortress now, and it cast a long,
chilling shadow across the windy mountaintop. The Up-River sped by fifty or
sixty yards away, and another hundred yards beyond that, it reached the edge of
the mountaintop, and it fell off into a void of swirling light and mist that
led nowhere. Perhaps everywhere.

Somewhere. Grumbler felt in his heart that he knew where it
went.

Feathertop was bleeding down one leg from a wound in his
chest as he came galloping up, snorting and sweating. The lime green feathers
on top of his head blew about in the breeze.

Grumbler cocked both revolvers and pointed them at the pony
who had once been his best friend.

"Not another goddamn step!" he said loudly.

With a grunt, Feathertop came clattering to a halt, stamping
and snorting twenty feet away.

"Give me the boy," the pony said. "Old Jack
will tear your heart out for this, but if you stop now, I might be able to
convince him to spare you."

The dwarf in the pinstriped suit laughed bitterly and shook
his head.

"You really believe that?" he asked. "He's
insane, Feather. Open your fucking eyes, pally. I mean, if he really meant what
he said at the beginning, if he was really trying to save the wood, to save us
all, that was one thing. But look at him." He gestured with his head for
Feathertop to look at Nathan.

The pony did.

"He wasn't supposed to be hurt," Grumbler said. "He's
dying now. This isn't what you wanted, is it? This kid has been with us since
the day he was born. He's pulled my beard and he's ridden on your back and he's
laughed and he's never been a mewling pain in the ass like some kids can be. He's
a good kid.