July 2002 Archives

I want to thank my sponsors for all their support. You guys are the best.

I want to thank all my readers. You helped me get through this thing, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

This effort, the money we raised for CapCURE, and especially Vayland Rd. are dedicated to my Dad, who's dealing with goblins of his own right now.

You keep swinging, old man; I'll keep handing you the heavy sticks.

We got home with the sun coming up. Time was weird along the Vayland Road I guess; by the clock in the kitchen my part had been only about 24 hours. It seemed longer.

Dad was... well, no, he’s wasn’t alright, but he made it; he wasn’t talking about it much, and I suppose I knew why as well as anyone. It was just the way life worked and you dealt with it even when it got strange.

There weren’t happily ever afters, because it’s never really the end, is it?

One of the real people walked up to him. He was limping, and had a

my

gun in his off-hand. There was a big stick in the other. Steven looked up at his face with its hurt eyes, and frowned. Familiar...

”It’s time to go home, Dad,” the young man said.

”I think that he will stay here.” Churkk’s voice was the same as always.

The other one glared. “His choice, not yours.”

”Or yours.”

The young man shrugged and nodded that he knew. Steven could feel Churkk’s surprise that he

Sean?

understood that much. He --

”Dad?”

Steven looked up.

”I’m here.”

is he?

”Can we go?”

do you dare?

Nothing.

do you dare?

Churkk chuckled into the silence. It sounded like someone with a collapsed lung. “Seems ‘e might stay with me.”

The man glared again. “He can do what he likes, but I’ll still cave your head in.”

"The end result ‘s the same. What d’you think, Steven?”

Churkk was doing more than asking. He could feel the needles pulling.

”You let him --”

”Sean.”

The young man jumped. “Dad? Are you--”

”Give me that stick.” Steven’s head was very heavy.

Silence.

”Give it to me.”

Sean did. One of the others behind him make a noise... not even a word. It was Churkk that finally spoke. “He understands, Sean.” There was a dry rasping sound as it licked its lips. “You’ll understand too, someday. Heh.”

”Damned if I will.” Sean said flatly.

Steven’s head came up.

Damned if I will.

Steven turned and swung, as hard as he could.

Sean almost killed a cow with this damned thing when he was fifteen; s’why he only got to use it around the bulls after that.

Steven only swung once. After that, everything was quiet.

The morning didn’t come the way Steven thought it would. It was much noisier. There were screams and people hollering

dirt-eaterrrrrs!

and sounds like an echoing crack.

I know that sound. Don’t I?

Then his cage shook and one of the camp was leaning against his cage. Their beady eyes were looking straight in at him, but they were cloudy. Blank.

Dead.

It’s knife had fallen just outside the

not my

cage. Much easier than working the ties.

Moving very slowly, so that he wouldn’t have to argue with the other voice, he reached out for the tool and started to cut. The camp got quieter around him. The little explosions stopped

ran out of shells

somewhere in the middle. He got the gate open and pushed. Easy. He dropped the knife on the floor of the cage and crawled out.

A few feet away, three real people stood.

Churkk was right behind him.

They’d had to tie him to the Turning Tree for the whole ritual. The bristlerope had rubbed him to the meat everywhere it had touched him, from the struggle. He’d done it to himself.

How do I know the names of those things?

He was back in the cage

not mine. NOT mine.

now and he knew it was the last time he’d get out until they put him in a sack or he walked

shuffled

out on his own.

Or he could escape. He’d done it once and the burning on his skin wasn’t even as bad as before.

Or you’re getting used to it.

Or he was -- no. It was time to go.

But where will you go? What if --

”NO!”

No one in the camp looked at him. He wasn’t even sure if he’d really shouted. He

Steven. Not 'he'. Steve. Steven. My name is Steven.

Right. Steven.

Steven sat in the cage that wasn’t his and watched the stars, which he still recognized, and repeated his name.

Turned out that Brock was wrong.

The gun worked just fine.

Most people, sitting back on their couches and watching this play out on television, might have wondered why I believed all this from the start. It was a good question; if I’d been writing this as a story, I think my main character would have yelled bullshit right off the bat and spent most of the story being convinced. The problem with that is that sometimes there are things going on that no one knows about.

I saw a goblin shambling along the bottom of a ravine with an old and rusted sword across his back like the yoke of a wagon. I didn't bother mentioning it to my mother; I just assumed I'd imagined it.

Except I hadn’t. Not really. My life had gone on without a hitch, certainly; I wrote my stories and did the right things, but there was always a small dark spot in the back of my mind that watched the ravines and kept an eye on the shadows of alleys that led to the back of old houses -- a part of me that never really believed I’d made it up.

When the goblins boiled out of the thickets around us, that small dark spot in my mind stood up and said ‘fucking KNEW it!’

And the gun worked just fine.

On the other hand, I wasn’t all that great for the first little bit. There’s a hell of a long distance between target practice, hunting for food, hunting for sport, and finally shooting at something that could talk back to you, even if it was running straight at you with a weird little bow-legged gait and swinging a sword straight at your head.

The first one would have killed me, I think, except that Brock was there; he had his axe out (‘of course he has an axe, every dwarf would use an axe if they could I guess’ came the errant thought) and it was a great beautiful thing of which I’d only seen the polished grip, poking over his shoulder -- then there was a cresent flash and like that the goblin-thing was very still on the ground. Brock clapped me on the shoulder and grinned.

”Dirt-eaters,” he drawled, and I noticed for the first time that his eyes were bright, clear blue.

I had to shoot the next one in a hurry, so I didn’t have time to say anything about it right then.

They let the thing that used to be Ted Shafer out of his cage the next morning. The clouds weren’t a complete shroud over the camp, but it didn’t really help the light; the sky was the wrong color to begin with.

There weren’t any helpers to clear away muck and detritus from the body -- it wasn’t necessary anyway -- the last batch of muck (Steven understood that the meant the third batch), was left on until it was absorbed almost completely. The camp then waited to see if the captive lived or died. In Steve’s opinion, Shafer had been unlucky. There weren’t even any needles left to remove.

The tall creature stood before the Shafer creature in the center of the gathering and spoke in its gurgling hiss “You have lived.”

The Shafer-thing wobbled its head.

”You are part of us now. We are part of you. I am Churkk. You are Zef.”

The thing paused, cocking its head as though listening to a distance sound, then nodded. “Zef.” It swayed slightly, and several of the creatures came forward to help it to a hut.

The thing called Churkk turned towards Steven’s cage. “It is the third day.” It gurgle/growled, and its smile returned.

This time, Steven fought.

”What’d you say?”

Brock was suddenly standing at my elbow. Somehow, the smell of him didn’t seem overpowering anymore.

It’s not. Here, it fits in. It doesn’t clash.

I shook my head, partly to clear it. “Nothing. I’m tired. It’s been a long trip.”

He looked at me for a few more seconds. “How’s the pain?”

I started, suddenly sure I’d lost the needle, and felt for it just below my right collarbone. Still there. Still there? I frowned. “There isn’t any pain.” I looked at him. “Not that I mind, but you said the pain would still be there.”

Brock looked at me, then glanced over his shoulder as Bhuto emerged from the gray-green scrub brush where he’d gone scouting and nodded. “I was wrong.”

I started to ask what else he might have be wrong about, but the look on his face (probably the cloud cover) made me think better of it.

I used to write.

I suppose that’s not really much of a surprise, but it seemed an important point when I opened my eyes on a place I’d never seen that was theoretically three miles from my parent’s house.

When I’d decided to drive back to my mom and find out what was really going on, I’d had to give absence notice to my current employer, for whom I wrote technical manuals. It wasn’t exciting; it was, in fact, soul-sucking drudgery that made me stare longingly at help-wanted signs in Blockbuster, but the pay was good and I didn’t have to think.

Writing, real writing, involved a lot of thinking -- dredging up memories and pains and joys and regrets and putting them onto a page for everyone to see and hopefully not recognize. The old rule is write what you know but really, what else is there?

I'd stopped because I didn’t want to remember what I knew anymore. I hadn’t wanted to for ten years. I’d been alone for all that time. Who wanted to think about that?

Before that, though...

Before that, I used to write and had written about the place I saw in front of me right at that moment. It was a homecoming to a place I’d never been. It had a completely familiar feel to it, and that scared the hell out of me.

I stood on the edge of Vayland, looking down into a ravine. Silver pain pulled at a single point in my body, dredging up memories.

When I was a child in the first house my family ever lived it, my room was next to the living room, thus the television. Whenever I heard the television and no conversation, I would slowly open my door, crouching down next to the floor and slip into the room on my belly. My door was right next to the foot of the couch back then, and sat directly between the couch and the T.V., so if I was quiet, I could crawl up against the foot of the couch and watch T.V. while my Dad lay not 3 feet away on the couch.

Some nights, I would fall asleep while watching. What happened next depended on who found me; regardless, I would always wake up in my bed the next morning, like magic. If my mom had found me, I would get a lecture during breakfast about needing my sleep.

Dad never said anything. I suppose he thought that, between the floor and my bed, I’d gotten enough sleep.

He understood; that much was clear.

When I opened my eyes, we weren’t on the road anymore.

Steven saw what Ted Shafer has become. That was when he realized he had to get out.

The cage really wasn’t all that difficult. There weren’t any locks, only tie-downs, which weren’t a problem if you just ignored the burning of the mud that he couldn’t touch. He’d driven seven loads of winter wheat to town with a temperature of a hundred and four, by god; if he really wanted to, he could get the damned cage open.

Eventually, he proved himself right, although the sweat in his eyes burned almost as badly as his skin.

He slipped past the smallest number of huts possible to get to the edge of the camp, not knowing where he was going except away.

Just past the last hut, it got difficult to walk.

Twenty paces later, the needles started to burn him like over-extended muscles. It felt as though he was trying to pull a truck with chains attached to his body.

”Steven,” came the phlegm voice. He was too focused to jump.

”Where are you going, Steven?” The voice was right in his ear, it seemed.

”The hell... away...” Steve didn’t even know if that was an answer or a command.

”What if there’s no one waiting for you?”

The thought went right to the base of his brain and waited for him to give. He wasn’t going to. He knew if he could just get a few more steps, he’d be free.

But what then?

He'd go home.

What if...

When blunt fingers wrapped around his arms, he was already sitting on his knees, looking up at the sky.

I watched them walk over to me, keeping my expression neutral. I barely twitched when Brock moved upwind of me.

”What next?”

Bhuto gestured. “That is something you will tell us, Sean.”

I didn’t like the sound of that and showed it. “How so?”

”Understand, we are here to help you, but we are also here to help your father, and we could not -- can not -- do that without you. You are our link to him.”

I looked up at the stars in the midnight sky (one thing I always forget is how many more you can see) and blew out a breath between my teeth while I thought.

Finally, I said, “how do we do this?” I was looking at Bhuto, but he gestured to Brock.

Brock was holding a silver needle.

Brock advanced toward me as Bhuto sighed. Much to my dismay, he didn’t stop until he was nearly touching me.

”What do you call this road here?”

My eyes were watering. I blinked rapidly and focused on the question. “Ahh. Vayland. Vayland Road.” The problem with people telling you to breath through your mouth when around a stench is that instead of smelling it, you taste it.

He smiled up at me and I was glad for the darkness that largely hid his teeth. “Why is that?”

”Why is what?”

”Why do they call it that?”

”Because...” I thought about it. “I don’t know why.”

His smile broadened and I had to take a step back. “Let me tell you why.” He turned away from me and threw out his arms. “This place is a border between realms. The very first people who lived here and named things called the people on the other side wa`rii we because they didn’t understand. Others came and gave different names. When my people came,” he thumped his chest “they took the names it had already and translated the words and the idea. They called it a fae land.” His eyes glinted as he turned back to me. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

I nodded mutely, not bothering to explain why.

He nodded, not waiting for me. “The border to the fae land was marked by those who knew enough about it, and the name stayed on, changing, after they’d all gone to dust.” He spat on the blacktop. “Then some bugger made a road here, since the markings were there. No one remembered that they were meant to show you where not to go.”

We landed on a curving stretch of blacktop a few miles away. Ravines dove away from the roadside on both sides.

Drops that seemed to go down and down farther than anything in the whole world.

I shook my head. “Why are we here?”

Bhuto looked up at the sky. “This is the only place we could be, Sean. We must reach your father.”

”Oh.” I thought for a second. “You do realize that’s the most pointless, circular answer I’ve ever heard, right? And just for the record, I went to a liberal arts college.”

During the 1930’s, topsoil had lain in ditches through my family’s home county. Part of the process of rebuilding America’s Breadbasket had been planting strips of trees through a country that was not meant for them. The topsoil of the plains was meant to be held down by grass, but grass wasn’t profitable, so instead we had wind-breaks called shelterbelts.

There’s a particular trick to walking through area thick with both trees and tall, tangled, prarie grass undergrowth, especially when you’re carring something heavy that can blow your face off -- my feet seemed to remember the way of it even though my legs protested -- I was thirty-two and had been a city-boy for twelve years. My progress would have involved more cursing except for the presence of Brock and Bhuto, neither of whom seemed to be having any trouble at all. I clamped my mouth tight and kept moving.
When we got to the edge of the trees farthest from the farm, Bhuto extended his hand to me for the second time, doing the same for Brock. I looked askance.

”Explanations come shortly, Sean, but we need to move quickly now, when we are not marked by others. I can assist with that,” Brock said.

I almost refused, until I saw that Brock looked just as unhappy about this development as I did. Misery loves company, or at least someone else to gloat over. I took the ogre’s hand.

I’m not sure what I was expecting... a puff of smoke, a swirling of my perceptions, maybe. When we just shot off the ground and into the sky without a word or gesture, I couldn't help but shout.

Twenty minutes later, I was ready for whatever they were going to tell me and they were looking a doubtful.

“I don’t think those’ll work where we’re going.” Brock gestured with some distaste at the gun over my left shoulder.

I raised and eyebrow. “You ever shot a gun, Brock?”

The dwarf glared at me, finally shaking his head.

”Then how the hell would you know?”

He shrugged. I ignored him. The gun I’d chosen, an open-sight .300 cal Savage, was a family heirloom that my great-grandfather had bought the year of its making. My grandfather, who'd taught me to use my first gun when I was six, had an Alaskan grizzly pelt in his guest bedroom that this gun had taken. The stock was solid hardwood with a stainless steel shoulder plate; the barrel was three and a half feet of blued steel.

Frankly, if the thing didn’t fire ‘where we were going’, I’d could do worse than just hitting things with it.

Bhuto seemed to have a different sort of problem with my other choice. “Do you not have a more... formidable hand-weapon, Sean?”

I readjusted my grib on my old ‘herding stick’, which I’d found in a barrel of similar tools in the machine shed. I’d cut it from an ash tree when I was thirteen and had used the four-foot club whenever I had to push one of our bulls into a new pasture on foot.

I could have explained, but I didn’t really feel as though it was my turn.

I motioned towards the trees behind the house. “Let’s just go.”

“So...” I said, sitting on the back of a tractor in the machine shed and watching my ‘guests’, “your a dwarf from the nordic wastelands who’s been fighting your ancestral enemy--”

“Dirt-eaters,” the one called Brock growled helpfully.

“Whatever.” I turned to his montrous companion. “And you...” I’d somehow managed to miss that Brock's companion was wearing full fifteen-century samurai armor, but in my defense the thing was nine feet tall and did have a damned horn sticking out of it’s forehead. “You’re some kind of genderless ogre wizard --”

“Magi,” it corrected.

“-- Magi who’s been working with that,” I jerked my thumb at Brokk, “for how long?”

The creature made a dismissive gesture and stepped forward. “The duration of my partnership with Brock is not relevant, Sean. What is relevant at the moment is our partnership with you, one which can save your father. Also, please call me Bhuto.”

There was a long pause. I finally found something to say.

“You are directly the fuck out of your mind, aren’t you?”

The larger shadow snorted in amusement. It sounded like a prize bull huffing to scare off predators.

“You father’s missing, yes?”

“My dad, yeah. What do you know about it?”

“We know who did it.”

“Call the cops.” I thought about it. “Or should you just turn yourselves in?”

The air actually got chilly. “You think we did it?”

I shrugged at the open night, wondering if they could even see it.

“You think we’re... dirt-eaters?” There was movement I caught only a bare second before the speaker was holding me by the shirt and pressing me against the side of the house. I looked down into a face a good foot and a half lower than mine, covered in random smears of grease that ran thickly into his hair and beard. The knotted tree-branch of the arm that held me was covered in grease as well, or tatoos, or both. His eyes were bright in the moonlight and I could hear his teeth grind.

“Brock.” The shadow that still stood in the trees spoke softly, but his voice still seemed to vibrate in the ground. “He did not mean anything by it. Let him go. You’re choking him.”

The voice was right; I couldn’t breath, but not because of the hand on my chest -- the stench of sweat and oiled hair surrounded the short bastard in a miasma that made my eyes water.

“Take...” I managed to choke out.

“Whazzat?” He growled in my face. His breath was a whole new color in the bouquet surrounding him.

I shoved sideways on his arm as hard as I could, using whatever leverage advantage that my height gave me, and staggered away from him. “Take a damn bath, you putrid son of a bitch.”

Another pause, this one broken by a deep chuckle from the trees that his partner on the deck eventually joined in on. I was glad the bedrooms were on the other end of the house.

I glared while the chuckling died down. “Yeah, I’m hilarious, I’m sure. What the hell are you?”

"Allies, if perhaps not friends." The shadow took a step out of the trees that carried it into the moonlight and nearly to the edge of the deck.

It held a spear in its left hand and stood at least nine feet tall, but mostly I was focused on the curving horn in the middle of its forehead.

“...it wasn't your imagination. The plains are thick with goblins, especially along those dark gullys and river bottoms where no man has travelled in a thousand years. The natives learned to avoid the areas and the white settlers soon after. There are goblins and ogres all along there. No trolls though, no trolls...”
-- transcipt of a raving madman in Watertown, SD

I don’t know how long I sat on the deck. The moon wasn’t bright, and the lights were off in the house by the time I finally took notice of my surroundings again. I pushed myself to my feet and massaged the small of my, which was complaining about sixteen hours in a car. I hadn’t slept since the night before last.

Somewhere during this musing, I realized I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure what gave me the hint, but when I turned the direction my intuition pointed, there was a shadow where there shouldn’t have been in the treeline next to the house.

“Who’s there?” I said, glancing around the deck for some sort of weapon. Nothing. Would have been nice if there’d been a big meat fork next to the grill at least.

The voice that spoke was gutteral in a way that made me realize I’d never truly understood the word. “We’re not your enemy, Sean.” The large not-supposed-to-be shadow split into two: one shorter than me and one... still much larger. The shorter one spoke again. “We’re after the same things that took your father.”

“Things?”

“Dirt-eaters.” He sounded hungry when he said it. He sounded like he was smiling.

They’d rearranged the ropes so that they had easy access.

That was necessary; the needles weren’t very long, after all.

He’d tried keeping track of how many they’d driven into him but he lost count when they moved past his arms and shoulders and into the area between his collarbone and neck. It had all been very quiet, though; the things seemed to be very serious about what they were going and aside from sucking his breath in past his teeth, he wasn’t making any noise.

Damned if he’d make any noise.

Eventually the sky was dark and they were done with the needles. He couldn’t look down properly but he didn’t think they’d missed too many places. He looked up to see the taller thing standing in front of him. Its eyes were glinting sharply and its lips were pulled back just about to its rear molars in a rictus grin.

“Good. Ver’ good," it murmured almost to itself, then turned away. “MUD!”

The hell?

He had time to puzzle it over. Several of the scrawnier creatures shuffled forward and began to wrestle the foul-smelling cauldron off the fire, dragging it through the dirt towards him.

When they started packing the hot, stinking mess onto his body, using the pins as a sort of anchor to prevent it all from sliding off, Steven still didn’t make a sound.

But it was much harder this time.

It was starting to get dark.

It was starting to get dark and there was still nothing that made sense in any of this.

Everything is so strange. Yeah.

My family were not the sort of people who ended up interviewed on alien abductions in the Daily Sun, next to a picture of Elvis filling up his car in Tupulo, Missouri; yet here I was, sitting on the back deck mulling over... what?

Muddy, barefoot footprints all around the back door. Drag marks out to the shelterbelt behind the house that vanish with no trail. Smears on the windows that look like finger marks but that don’t have any prints. This is the kind of crap I used to think up.

Mom slid open the patio door and stepped into the gloom. “You want anything to eat, bud?”

I shook my head. “Why’d you call me out here, Mom? I mean, I’m glad to be here and help you out, but what...” I let it go and shook my head again, slouching back into the deck chair. It was quiet for several minutes except for the sound of absent-minded bug swatting.

“I thought--” she started, then stopped. “I thought you might be... that you might know something.”

“About this?”

“Something that might help.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Eventually, she went back inside.

He’d tried to get loose when they opened the cage doors but they were strong and there were lots of them. They pulled him to a stunted, leafless tree that stood in the center of the camp and tied him too it. The rope they used was never intended for this purpose; over an inch thick with harsh bristles jutting from the coarse weave like thorns, it chafed his skin even when he didn’t move. They wrapped him in a coil from shoulders to knees, leaving him with his back pressed to the surface of the dead tree. The knots required by the thickness of the rope were twice the size of his fist.

Two of the... things, walked up to him after he was secured. Their noses were about three inches too long, same as the chins, and what skin he could see where mud had flaked away was the same color as the sky. Their eyes were the black of used forty-weight oil.

Not human. Sean would know what to call them, probably; he sure as hell didn’t. He might hope he was dreaming, but he knew himself well enough to know he’d never come up with something like this.

The taller one (a little more than four feet tall, and not quite as bowlegged) spoke, phlegm rattling in the back of his throat like the sound of a kid’s straw that’s hit the bottom of a chocolate malt. “You the man Steven. You ours now.” The second one sniggered, and Steve was sure he saw the first one twitch in annoyance.

“I’m not a damn thing to you. Let me go and I’ll be on my way.”

The rest of the crowd around him murmured when the first one nodded, acting as though he’d expected that answer.

“Good. Fight is good.” He gestured to the second one, who stepped forward and unfolded a cloth on which he laid out the first bright or clean things Steven had seen since he’d woken up.

Steve really didn’t want to wake all the way up, because sometimes you know things aren’t going to be good when you open your eyes.

On the other hand, better to see the trouble coming than get hit by it. He shook his eyes into focus and looked around.

Didn’t make any sense. He shook his head again and squinted. The sky was the color of an old bruise; solid cloud-cover in dusty greys and purples hung overhead from one end of the sky to the other, but that wasn’t really the problem -- in fifty years you can see some pretty odd weather, after all. The sky just make Sam think tornado warning.

No, the problem was that he was looking at the battered sky through the bars of a wooden cage. Worse, the cage was in the middle of some kind of camp. There was a fire burning a few feet away, cooking something that smelled like rotten corn silage, and there were about a dozen little buildings around him that looked like they were made out of sod.

The people walking around, even the two that were looking at him in the cage, were short little wiry bastards with dried mud caked all over their skin.

They didn’t look like right at all.

I’d been lying to myself when I said that nothing ever changed back at home; there were always fewer houses. Farming was a dying profession -- a sucker’s game with all the odds against the players -- every time I drove into familiar territory, the wide open plains seemed wider, flatter... having less and less to do with people.

The road was mostly straight at the moment, rolling over gradual hills in what could often be an infuriating exchange Passing and No Passing zones. It would start to wind soon. I knew this area, still able to recite the mileage between every major and minor landmark for a hundred miles in any given direction, even landmarks that didn’t exist anymore, such as the old country school house that had apparently been torn down since my last visit and whose absence nearly made me miss my turn onto Vayland Road.

After a few miles, the curves began.

The farmland my family owned was on the high side of the county, raised above the lower, eastern half by a ridge of hills that Vayland Road crept along the top of, curling around cuts that were somewhere between narrow valleys and broad ravines, filled with thickets and brush that by local wisdom wouldn’t even let a breeze through without a couple of good scratches. There were barbed-wire fences on both sides of the road, although in twenty years I don’t think I’d once seen any livestock on the other side of them.

I’d grown up riding in cars along this stretch of highway, then driving myself, then driving away. The blacktop led right past the farm’s driveway.

Mom was out on the front step before I got out of the car. No one else was there.

Churkk scowled.

“I like night, Churkk. Don’ like day. Don’ like heat or light or pantin’ or th’ way groud puffs up dust atcha when ya run.”

Churkk’s scowl deepened. He liked the night as well, but it irritated him to agree with the creature skulking alongside him.

“Night is cool. Night is good. Wraps us up and lets us come out of the cracks and up to see things. What I think is the best is --”

“Jek.”

“Yeh?”

“Shut it.”

Jek did, looking suitably cowed. He still walked alongside, however, and Churkk swore even Jak's feet slapped on the ground different than everyone else’s. Everything about Jek was annoying.

The light from a house poked through the trees at them and rather than turning to go around it, Churkk took them in closer without explaining. Slowly, they crept up to the corner of the building, then along a wall to the lit window.

Jek started to whisper a question, but stopped short when Churkk smacked him in the middle of his forehead without even looking back.

Inside, Churkk could see a people-room with things to sit on. The Woman sat on one, but didn’t see his long, mud-caked face at the window or the light glinting off his beady eyes, because she was crying -- great, shaking sobs that shook her bent shoulders and moved her whole chair.

Churkk watched this for some time. Eventually, his companion forgotten, he smiled.

I could hear the city around me as I headed for my car, but the sound was muted thing, something you could relax into while you did your business, not the raucous interuption it’s usually assumed to be by people who don’t know any better. For the last dozen years, it had become the sound that told me life was still going on around me. The sun was going down as I made it onto open highway out of town, the glow of it changing the black of the highway into the faded near-white yellow of an old cotton sundress. I spent an hour squinting into the indirect glare, another squinting through the dusk, and finally started to relax into the zen non-thought of night driving.

My mind wandered, carefully avoiding the tar-pit surrounding the reason for this drive. None of that made any sense, and it wasn’t going to make any more sense with eight hours of poking at a uselessly small pile of information. There were, at any rate, other things I could think about.

In one sense, I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I got home; it had been eighteen months since my last visit and a year had gone by before that. In another sense I knew exactly what to expect because nothing ever seemed to change in a place you’d lived for twenty years -- not the things that you remembered as important at any rate.

The important things that I remembered didn’t involve words like “we can’t find your dad” and “everything’s so strange”. That was the thought that came back to check up on me after every few mile markers.

[a recap of the first bit]

I remember a time when I was very young, riding in a car with green, leathery seats that got very hot when the sun shone on them in the summer. The car was green as well, although a different shade, and it seems to the me of my memories that most of the cars back then were that color. It was a popular trend I suppose, or maybe my child's perception was skewed.

At any rate, there were several undisputed facts; the car was green, the seats were green, it was summer, the sun was hot, and the seats were hotter. We had the windows open to let the air in and my mother was driving us to town on an errand.

The road was a winding black hardtop that looked down into sharp ravines between the hills -- drops that seemed (to me) to go down and down farther than anything in the whole world. I would look down and out from the tiny back windows of the two door and think about what it would be like to go sailing off the road and into the ravines, tumbling over and over and finally exploding at the bottom, like on TV. (We lived a long way from town and when it was only you and a younger sister for a playmate and no one else for five miles, you learned to entertain yourself.)

So, with the sun beating down and my boredom rising, if I saw a goblin shambling along the bottom of a ravine with an old and rusted sword across his back like the yoke of a wagon, I didn't bother mentioning it to my mother. Even at that age, I assumed I'd imagined it.

I believed that for the next 28 years.

--

~ The Call ~

My cell phone rang, the screen showing Out of Area instead of a number. I answered with an abrupt "this is Sean", which usually clears up wrong-numbers in a hurry.

"Hey bud, how’re you doing?" My mother was only person in the world that called me ‘bud’, among other things, a lukewarm leftover from my pre-teen years that she tended to drag out when she was feeling down.

"Hey, I’m good. What’s up? Something wrong?"

"Oh, you know..." Her voice wavered a little bit almost immediately and I knew it was going to be bad. "It’s been a little crazy here for the last couple of days."

"What’s going on?" I didn’t try to keep the frown out of my voice; it wouldn’t make her feel any better if I did.

"Well, we can’t seem to track down your dad."

I glanced around me to see if I was standing in the shadow of a building. "I lost you on that for a second. You can’t seem to track down Dad’s what?"

"No, we can’t find him." I could hear her set something metal down on something solid. She was wandering around her kitchen, fiddling with things. "It’s been two days."

My frown had deepened. "You... I don’t understand what you’re telling me. Is he traveling?"

"No, he’s been home for a couple weeks."

"Did ... what happened? Did you get in a fight or something?" It sounded surreal even while I was saying it.

"No, of course not." She, the happily-married, properly-raised, Midwestern wife, sounded vaguely insulted by the idea. "I went to bed a few nights ago and your dad stayed up watching TV. When I got up the next morning he wasn’t in the house. I thought he’d gotten up and gone out to get some work done before it got hot." Before the sun came up, more likely, I thought. "But he wasn’t out in the machine shed." Her voice started to crack around the edges. "I know it’s a long ways, but can you come home? Everything’s just so strange."

I couldn’t seem to hear her clearly; my ears were ringing and everything around me seemed have had the color washed out of it. So strange? What does that mean, Mom? I shook my head and tried to think. It remained quiet on the other end of the line.

"I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." I made sure not to hesitate in my reply.

"Where should we pick you up?"

"I’m driving out."

"Oh honey, you can’t."

"It’s the only way I can."

"But it’s such a long ways."

"Yeah," I said, "it is." I checked my watch "I’ll call later. Be careful." I finished, and ended the conversation wondering why I’d said it.

Several hours later, filling a single suitcase and leaving messages with various people about an unspecified family emergency, I still didn’t know.

A few days ago, I found Jackie downstairs watching TV. I asked what was on (it was on a commercial break), expecting the standard Trading Spaces answer.

"A special on Kevlar."
"On what?"
"Kevlar. The stuff they use to --"
"I know what it is, why are you watching it?"

She shrugged. I went back upstairs. Today I asked her about it again.

"I just feel like I'm in the dark about body armor compared to everyone else [that we know]."

A telling statement about us and our friends, to be sure.

Susan Lyne, president of ABC Entertainment, told reporters that ABC's spy series Alias will take on a new level of complexity in its upcoming sophomore season. The mind boggles.

This announcement has sparked a small, panicked avalanche of copycats "making something that already is incredibly __________ even more incredibly __________" in arenas outside of television. Sources report that Dick Cheney plans to have small devil's horns in the shape of nuclear warheads surgically attached to his head, George Bush is scheduled for a full frontal lobotomy, and Big Oil and the American Tobacco Growers Association have revealed (in a prepared joint-statement which closely matched the original ABC template) that they plan to "take on a new level of rapacious self-interest in the coming year".

So, went to see Mr. Deeds tonight with a couple free movie passes. I'll provide a short review (sure, you've probably either already seen it or aren't going to, I know... I just feel like talking about it), but let me first frame this up for you:

I don't worship Adam Sandler. Little Nicky was an abomination, for example. That said, I've enjoyed several of his movies (I quote lines from Happy Gilmore under my breath while golfing far too often.) Everyone clear? You know where I stand?

Okay, the review: I think this is probably the best Sandler movie. If you liked The Wedding Singer, you'll like this -- it has the same feel-good vibe with Sandler playing a genuinely nice guy (no dumb voices, no abject stupidity, etc.). It's upbeat, it's funny.

Still not convinced? Okay, here comes the big guns:

John Turturro, whom you might remember as Pete Hogwallop in O Brother, Where Art Thou? ("Do Not... Seek... the Treasure...") plays Emilio, the spanish butler.

He's a genius. There are other reasons that this is now my favorite Sandler movie, but if you removed all the rest of them and left Turturro playing Emilio, it'd still win by a nose. Great stuff.

Just something that's been tickling the back of my brain for awhile.

I remember a time when I was very young, riding in a car with green, leathery seats that got very hot when the sun shone on them in the summer. The car was green as well, although a different shade, and it seems to the me of my memories that most of the cars back then were that color. It was a popular trend I suppose, or maybe my child's perception was skewed.

At any rate, there were several undisputed facts; the car was green, the seats were green, it was summer, the sun was hot, and the seats were hotter. We had the windows open to let the air in and my mother was driving us to town on an errand.

The road was a winding black hardtop that looked down into sharp ravines between the hills -- drops that seemed to go down and down farther than anything in the whole world as far as I was concerned. I would crawl up and look down and out from the tiny back windows of the two door and think about what it would be like to go sailing off the road and into the ravines, tumbling over and over and finally exploding at the bottom, just like on TV. (We lived a long way from town and when it was only you and a younger sister for a playmate and no one else for five miles, you learned to entertain yourself.)

So that day, with the sun beating down and my boredom rising, when I saw a goblin shambling along the bottom of a ravine with an old and rusted sword across his back like the yoke of a wagon, I didn't bother mentioning it to my mother. Even at that age, I assumed I'd imagined it.

I believed that for the next 28 years.

In other news, I watched From Hell last night. Very much like Sleepy Hollow in that Depp was great, the female lead was interesting-looking but not compelling, the cinematography was good, the story was quite predictable and a fine actor was under-used in his role as the bad guy.

I did like how many of the various historical Ripper theories/possible suspects they managed to work into the overall story. That was interesting, as was the secret society stuff that underlit the whole thing -- I've been a sucker for that sort of thing since the first time I saw the fnords.