Chapter Twenty-One #3
Somehow Meredith treating it as a normal conversation allowed David to do the same. He took a deep breath and steeled himself to think of it as nothing more than an adversarial work meeting. “Yes, what is your business, precisely?”
“I’ve no business with you,” said the Erlking, “save that you would deprive me of your tantalizing companion.”
Meredith stared in bewilderment. “Me?”
“You indeed, my dear boy,” said the Erlking with a mirthless grin that bared sharp, inhuman fangs. “In truth, I have had my eye upon you for some time. By all rights, you should have belonged to me ages ago, but you’re stubborn, oh, yes.”
With a crackling of dead leaves underfoot, the Erlking ventured a step nearer.
David took a step back, bumping against the broad mossy trunk of an oak.
“You won’t let me win, won’t allow me inside your mind, so I’ve had to resort to more drastic measures.
Most are easy enough to bend to my will. But you.”
The Erlking came nearer still, his cruel colorless gaze never leaving Meredith’s face as he extended a hand toward him, beckoning.
David, in back of him, could only guess at his expression, but Meredith stood where he was.
“You fascinate me, the way you fight against it. Such a tease, you are, always just out of my reach and carrying all that exquisite despair so deep it’s in your very bones. ”
“Nonsense,” David interjected. Supernatural entity or not, the Erlking hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about.
A person brimming with despair did not go around braiding daisy chains and singing to his dog and cheerfully frescoing the ceilings in the face of all good sense.
Besides which, if it were true, David surely would have noticed.
Ignoring David, the Erlking went on, “Now that your blood has been spilled in my territory, sooner or later your defenses will weaken until you have no choice but to succumb.”
“Blood?” repeated Meredith, mystified. “What are you talking about?”
The Erlking stamped his foot. “Do not insult me with your feeble trickery! You cannot imagine such a thing would truly escape my attention, not when it took place practically upon my altar—or alder, if you will,” he added with a mirthless chuckle.
The thornbush, David realized. That day two weeks ago, Meredith had pricked his finger on a hawthorn bush next to the alder tree—and he had bled.
“I had still thought to bide my time now that I have claim to your blood, but after yesterday—” He broke off with a lascivious shudder that made Meredith recoil.
David rested a hand at Meredith’s waist in what he hoped passed for a comforting gesture. He ought to say something, to voice an objection, but his mind had gone utterly blank.
“Oh, yesterday it was so strong, so tempting. You were practically begging for it—for me to come claim you and all your misery. No longer can I wait to possess you! To taste you!”
“I beg your pardon,” said Meredith. “I won’t be spoken to like that, it’s indecent.”
“You little fool,” said the Erlking. “I desire not your body, but to indulge at last in the rare ambrosia of such singular despair! A particularly fine vintage, if you will. Though I daresay,” he added, casting an appraising glance over Meredith, “you would make a lovely little pet, wouldn’t you?”
“He’s speaking in metaphors, isn’t he?” whispered Meredith over his shoulder. “Can’t you make him talk sense?”
“Make him?” repeated David in astonishment. “Why would you ever think I can make him do anything?”
“But you can.” Meredith turned to him at last with wide imploring eyes. “You can do anything, David, you always make sure things turn out all right.”
That wasn’t true by any stretch of the imagination, and it certainly wasn’t true right now.
“Oh, he’s done plenty, believe you me,” said the Erlking.
“Though I can’t say I’m not a touch disappointed.
Just one more would’ve been enough to break you entirely, blood or no blood, and I could’ve taken you just like that.
” He punctuated the sentence with a snap of the fingers.
“Ah, well, it may be near enough anyway.”
“One more what?” demanded David. Whatever it was, he certainly had no intention of providing any such thing. They needed to leave this place at once, but just as before—just as in his dream—David was paralyzed with fear.
“Why, one more reason, of course! You’d given me nearly enough. I tell you, stand any man before me to face a hundred reasons why nobody wants him around, and it’s guaranteed to drive him irretrievably into despair, without fail!”
“What are you talking about?” Meredith turned to David again, no less imploring, but this time, with an added hint of panic. “David, what does he mean?”
David couldn’t bear to answer, couldn’t bear to meet his eyes, and only shook his head. Impossible as it was, somehow the Erlking had read his private thoughts, and from a distance at that.
“No? You haven’t the nerve to say it to him yourself?
” mocked the Erlking. “You think you’re so clever, so sensible and sophisticated.
Do you think he can’t feel it, the disdain that seeps out in your words, your voice, your little snide remarks?
Do you think he doesn’t see it in your eyes?
” In a grotesque mimicry, he recited: “He’s an irredeemable eccentric.
He flirts with everyone in his path. He clings.
He drives everyone away. He’s impossible to live with.
He talks to mice. He makes the worst coffee in the world. ”
“Oh!” said Meredith in dismay. “Who says all that?”
“Oh, that denial does impart something special to the bouquet.” A smirk holding equal parts malice and triumph flitted across the Erlking’s face, and he pointed one spindly, clawed finger straight at David.
“He does! He’s got it all tallied up in his head, every single little thing he can’t stand about you. ”
That pointing finger was more than an indictment; it might as well have been an execution. Seeing Meredith’s expression of absolute heartbreak was more than David could bear, knowing himself to be the cause of it.
“Oh,” repeated Meredith in a small, crushed voice. He wrapped his arms around himself, eyes downcast. “I s-see.”
David couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even breathe.
There was something obscene in the way the Erlking wet his lips in anticipation, in the eagerness so obvious in those uncanny eyes. “Doesn’t that upset you? Doesn’t it hurt?”
Then Meredith smiled his broken-glass smile.
“Course it does, hearing it like that,” he said, “but it’s like you said, isn’t it?
Did you think I couldn’t already tell? Did you think,” he went on, voice steel-sharp, something dark and previously unseen surfacing in his eyes, “that it doesn’t already hurt all the time, just being me? ”
David was drowning, plunged into a deep black ocean of his own making, unable to break the surface. On sheer instinct, he reached out for Meredith, who jerked away from him.
Undaunted by his failure, the Erlking tried a new angle of attack. “I know who you’ve been pining for, boy, but don’t you know there’s no point? Don’t you know it’s hopeless? He doesn’t love you.”
Meredith went still and closed his eyes. In a flat, unreadable voice, he said, “I know.”
The Erlking slunk nearer. “Nobody does.”
“I know.”
“Nobody could.”
“I know!” shouted Meredith, startling the birds from the nearby trees in a flurry of beating wings. The darkness seemed somehow to thicken around them as the wind howled through the Wood, and tendrils of fog began to creep in at the edges of the clearing.
The thought registered, in a distant, fleeting way, that David ought to intervene, but it was drowned out by the immediate, ironclad certainty that there was nothing he could possibly hope to achieve.
His thoughts were only half his own, only halfway formed before being reshaped by a flat empty hopelessness too strong to resist.
In truth, he had little recourse beyond his standard strategy of intimidation via looming with nothing to back it up, and that was useless here.
Though the Erlking stood just shorter than Meredith, his very presence seemed to tower over them both.
David was small and weak and worthless, and there was nothing he could say or do to stop him.
There was no aid he could offer in Meredith’s quest for this mystery man who did not return his feelings—even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t.
At that realization, David’s heart plummeted even lower.
Not long ago, not far from this very spot, he’d called Meredith selfish, but in reality, he was far more so himself.
David was powerless to fight. They both were. The situation was hopeless.
“That’s right,” coaxed the Erlking. “Go on, give in, just like your so-called friend is doing. It’ll be easier for the both of us.
” Once more he reached out, gnarled fingers stroking the air in a dreadful shadow play of an intimate caress.
“It wouldn’t be so bad, being my plaything.
All you’d have to do is surrender yourself to my every whim, and every so often, I’ll just siphon off a bit of that delicious sorrow. It’ll hardly hurt any worse.”
There was something to that, David thought. It would be a relief, really, to let him take away this crushing hopelessness, this suffocating feeling of self-loathing. It would be so easy to just give in.
Meredith faltered. “I—I don’t think—”
“All that pain, deep down in your heart—wouldn’t you like me to put an end to it? Aren’t you tired?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Meredith, and then, in a whisper tinged with what might have been hope: “Could you really?”
“After a fashion.” The clouds parted again, and the twinkling light of the stars shone on the short sharp points of the Erlking’s antlers, on the jagged leaves of his alder crown. “Why, I’ll even let you bring along your little doggie.”
With that fatal mistake, the thrall was broken.