First Interlude Gwen, Underfoot
First Interlude
Gwen, Underfoot
“I was always good with a knife,” the old man told her one day, his breath stinking, the inside of his mouth white and soft
with thrush. He grinned, and in the dark of his bedroom she could see the yellow of his teeth. He was like the Cheshire Cat
in Alice, Gwen thought, if the cat was rotting from the inside out. “I took naturally to close fighting. I suffered from some debility
of the imagination. I could never take it seriously when someone wanted to kill me. It always felt like we were both playacting,
only pretending we were going to do something bad to each other. It gave me the psychological freedom to bring a certain sense
of play to acts of homicide. Near the end of the fighting in Italy, we surprised a boy hiding in a haystack—he looked about
twelve, although I suppose he was older, the Germans weren’t desperate enough to draft children then—and he went at me with a bayonet. I was trying not to laugh the whole time.”
“You should rest,” Gwen said.
He didn’t seem to hear her.
“Even when I cut his throat,” Llewellyn Wren said. “And he fell flopping into the frozen dirt, his head hanging crooked off his neck. The blade went so deep I half decapitated him. Even then, I was fighting back giggles. I couldn’t take it seriously. Not his life. Not mine.”
2.
It started snowing on Wednesday afternoon and didn’t stop until early on Thursday morning. Her father made a pit stop home
just after 6:00 a.m. to fill his thermos and eat chipped beef on toast, standing up at the kitchen counter. He didn’t take
his knit cap off. He had been out all night plowing the campus.
“You’re on your own for dinner,” Gwen told him. “Momma is cleaning up after the dean’s Christmas party and I’ve got the baby.”
“Mhm. How much is Tana paying you for childcare again?”
“Jett’s got an evil rash on his bottom. You can’t imagine how he cries.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You do it for pleasure. Front walk is shoveled out. Put down some rock salt so your tired mother
don’t snap her neck coming in.”
After he left, Gwen stayed at the kitchen table, drinking her tea and working on the crossword. She finished half and did
no more. She thought of the unfinished bit as Arthur’s half. He was always the answer to the parts of the puzzle she couldn’t
solve. She would see him before the day was out, for the first time in months. A thought that gave her a funny tickle of excitement
in the pit of her stomach.
The basement door was under the stairs and only four and a half feet high.
When Gwen was small, her aunt Ethelyn had promised her that Alamagüslen lived behind little doors like that, a shrunken old man who was as old as rivers, and who liked to suck the sweet flesh off children’s bones.
Gwen hated going through that door into the basement, even now, but the rock salt wasn’t going to bring itself upstairs.
The basement had a soil floor and plastered walls, the plaster falling away in jagged flakes to show the stone behind. She
was two steps from the bottom when King Sorrow reached through the space between steps to grasp her ankle.
She tottered, let go of the rail, fell, and hit the dirt floor on her elbows, then bounced her chin off it. Her teeth clacked.
A darkness lurched up behind her eyes.
The hand still had her ankle. She twisted onto her side and looked at it: four scaly fingers, a delicate black webbing between
them, golden talons curving at their tips. King Sorrow released her and his claws slid away beneath the stairs. A pair of
polluted red eyes with slitted pupils peered out from the darkness.
“When you were small,” he said, “you were scared to come down here, weren’t you? Because, like all children, you secretly
believed there was something hungry and evil waiting for you in the basement. And like all children, you were right.”
Gwen opened her mouth to scream, then thought how pointless that would be. She was alone in the house. The closest neighbor,
Thomas Nadler, was eighty-nine and deaf.
So when she spoke, her voice was level. “Go away.”
“Whatever you say, luv. Just tell me where to go.”
“I don’t care, you old snake. It isn’t up to me.”
“Oh, Gwen,” he said. “It is.”
3.
“Are you all right?” Colin asked. “You look like you ran someone down on the way over here. I hope no one’s dead.”
“Not yet,” Gwen said. “But someone’s going to be. King Sorrow was in my basement this morning. He says it’s that time of year again. He says a deal’s a deal. He says we have to decide who we’re going to kill next.”
Arthur was on a ladder, hanging enormous blue crystals, big as softballs, on the towering pine in a corner of the study. Colin
was on the floor by a box of ornaments, handing the globes up to him. Donna and Van had a tinsel rope and were winding it
around and around Allie. But when Gwen said King Sorrow’s name they all stopped and looked at her as if she had arrived covered
in blood.
“If you’re trying to be funny,” Van said, “then I hope you weren’t planning a career in stand-up. Because your material sucks.”
“Easter,” Gwen told them. “Someone has to die at Easter.”
Allie, still bound by the twinkling loops, said, “Last Easter. The deal was someone had to die last Easter.”
“No. Every Easter. Either we pick someone to die or one of us dies instead. Last year it was up to Arthur who died. This year, he seems
to have decided it’s me.”
Donna said, “He . . . he can’t do that. He can’t make us—it was a one-time deal.”
“That’s not how he sees it. You want to argue with him, Donna? Maybe we could take him to court.” Gwen’s voice was not quite
steady. “We can tell the judge we never agreed to yearly contract killings. Our deal was strictly for two murders, no more.”
Arthur found his way down the ladder and crossed the room. He took her hands in his. There. That was better.
“Are you sure . . .” Arthur began. “Is there any chance . . . shit. Is there any chance you . . . dreamt it?”
His face was so serious it loosened something in her chest and she found she could almost smile. “I’d love that. I’d love
it so much. But tell me, Arthur, do I have a bruise on my chin? Just a little one?”
She lifted her head and let him look.
He nodded. “And a little cut.”
“Then I guess I didn’t dream it, because I did that falling on my face when he grabbed my ankle from under the stairs.”
Colin unfolded his legs and rose from the floor. Something about the way he moved made Gwen think of one of those insects that resemble sticks.
“Maybe we should have a drink,” Colin said.
4.
“King Sorrow’s a bit of a lawyer, isn’t he?” Colin said when she was done telling her story again. “He was very particular
about the wording when we made our deal. ‘Your liege swears his protection and in turn you offer me a sacrifice on Easter
day.’ Isn’t that what he told us?”
“I’ve been reading about them,” Arthur said. “Dragons.”
Of course he had been reading about them. Gwen didn’t know anyone who was so inclined to turn everything into homework. One
of the things she loved about him was his quiet, even dull, devotion to study. He wasn’t brilliant like Colin. He was a born
toiler—someone who dug his way out of problems one shovel load at a time.
“Have you drawn any conclusions from your research?” Colin asked. It was hard to tell if he was teasing or not.
“A few. For starters, it’s a bad idea to make a deal with them. Language is one of their weapons . . . as much as the fire
they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.”
“Thanks for the insight, Sigmund,” Van said. “We could’ve used that pearl of wisdom twelve months ago.”
Arthur ignored him. “Someone tells you, ‘Christmas is in December,’ you understand they mean every December. Not just that December.”
“What a crock of balls. Fuck him. We don’t have to give him shit,” Donna said.
“Yes, we do. We have to give him Gwen,” Colin said. “Unless we nominate someone to die in her place.” He bowed his head and considered in silence. At last he nodded to himself. “Okay. It’s not so bad.”
“What the hell do you mean it’s not so bad?” Gwen asked. “He’s going to kill someone. Again. And force us to be a part of it.”
“There’s a lot of bad fellows in the world. All we have to do is pick one of them. Any of them. Right now our country is gearing
up to send people to die in the sand for us. We could wipe out Saddam Hussein and save everyone a whole lot of trouble.”
“Or the Toolbox Killers,” Donna said, her voice suddenly hushed. “Bittaker and Norris. I can’t remember how many girls they
killed—but I know they raped and tortured their victims first. They should burn alive for what they did, but they’ll probably
live another thirty years, eating Jell-O paid for by the taxpayer and enjoying free health care. Fuckers.”
“What we need is an Enemies List,” Colin said. “A list of people who are absolutely irredeemable and whose continued existence
is toxic. So—in fact—probably not Bittaker or Norris. Because they are in jail and can’t hurt anyone else now. Maybe not even Saddam, since he’s about to get a bunker-busting missile dropped on
his head. We want to deal with the tinpot dictators and serial murderers who have evaded retribution and accountability. People who get away with it. I’ll make a spreadsheet. Best to collect an array of candidates,
and then after Christmas we can discuss the pros and cons of each.”
“Why do we need a spreadsheet? We only need one name,” Arthur said.
“Sure. This year,” Gwen replied.
That shut them up for a bit. It was going to keep going. This Easter. Next Easter. They might still be choosing victims for
King Sorrow when Gwen was sixty.
“We could fight him,” Arthur said softly.
“He bent a lamppost into a question mark. And if you didn’t notice, by the time he comes through into our world, he’s the
size of an attack helicopter,” Van said.
“Sure, he’d tear us apart if we tried to go toe-to-toe with him. But there are other ways to battle dragons.”