Third Interlude Gwen, Under the Shadow #3
hurt to breathe. He held the tube while she sat down on the front and then he pushed it along and as it began to slide under
its own power he leapt on, landing so that her body was between his legs and her head against his chest. They dropped off
the face of the world into the rushing cold darkness, falling faster, then faster still, the tears burning in Gwen’s eyes,
whipping down her cheeks and freezing against her skin. At some point they raised their arms and whooped together, cheering
for the magic of acceleration.
The tire turned halfway around at the bottom, squeaking gently, and came to rest against a tangle of brush caked in ice. She
felt easy and relaxed, her head on his breastbone and his arms around her. They sat in the darkness, their breath misting
around them.
“You need a girl who will do more than go sledding with you. Found one of those yet?” she asked, promising herself she wouldn’t
care about the answer.
“What, and drag her into my horror show?” He laughed. “Or, worse, try and keep the King a secret? She’d be like that woman who married Ted Bundy. Sooner or later she’d find out I was killing people.”
She didn’t correct him, say it was King Sorrow doing the killing. She didn’t want to argue terms and definitions. She wanted
to know if someone else had what she wanted and could never have.
“Has there been anyone?” she asked.
“I fall in love at least once a year. I like to look, you know? I like to hear a girl laugh. I like to be challenged, to argue
the meaning of a story with some well-meaning teaching assistant who gets more and more prettily flushed in the heat of battle.
I like girls in glasses—I like to imagine taking them off. But I don’t need to take them to bed. I enjoy watching a young
woman hunt a man down and ensnare her prey. I cheer them on. I like the chase, but I don’t need to be chased or chase myself.
It’s enough to be a spectator.”
“Humph,” she humphed.
“Did you just say the word humph, like a character in a comic book?”
“Humph. Flushed teaching assistants. I don’t like the sound of that. You’re a father figure to them, you pervert. Try and
have some goddamn respect. I thought you were a feminist.”
He cocked his head to one side and said, “Wherever I might sometimes wander in my imagination, I assure you my hands know
better. I’ve only ever played the letch once, when I skeeved on an eighteen-year-old high school girl, too na?ve to defend
herself from my unwholesome designs.”
Gwen had to laugh at that.
He nodded. “You? There must’ve been someone.”
“No one who hung in there.”
She almost said, I don’t have time, which was true enough, but when she considered it, it seemed that she had made sure she wouldn’t have time for a relationship, that she had constructed a life around fifty-hour workweeks.
What meager spare time remained was reserved to help Jett Nighswander with schoolwork or, in the summer, to coach his Little League team.
She volunteered at the hospice; she looked after her parents.
She had been determined not to be the fourth generation of Underhills caring for Wrens .
. . and yet somehow still took a paycheck to keep The Briars plowed out in the winter and landscaped in the summer.
Her life, she thought, was carefully engineered to avoid having one.
They began the slow struggle up the long incline. Gwen tottered once and reached in the dark and found Arthur’s shoulder and
steadied herself. It felt good, to find him in the gloom, to have him close enough to grab.
“So is Allie with Donna now?” he asked.
Gwen laughed. “Is she—? No! Not like that. They’ll never be together like that, especially now. Even if they both wanted it, it would be a betrayal of Van.”
He cocked one eyebrow. “You say so?”
“I do. He died for Donna. She’s not going to fuck his widow. And Allie will always hate herself for failing Van by not being
sufficiently heterosexual. No, Allie just likes to . . . be close to Donna. To look after her. All she ever really wanted
was to look after Donna.”
“I guess no one gets a happy ending in this story,” Arthur said. “Not Allie. Not Donna. Sure as shit not Van.” He thought
for a while, then added, “Not you and me.”
“Maybe Colin has his happy ending,” Gwen mused.
“Maybe not. Did you see the way he looked when Donna said she wasn’t going to use King Sorrow the way he wanted?”
“Oh,” Gwen said. “You spotted that too?”
“Colin needs his systems and his spreadsheets. That’s how he deals with life. He’s as trapped and desperate as the rest of
us, but he can use data analysis to hold King Sorrow at a distance. It gives him a sense of control. As long as we follow
his carefully worked-out programs, he can pretend it’s all fantasy baseball instead of a sickening nightmare.”
Gwen nodded . . . but was not sure she entirely agreed. Colin didn’t fall into traps. He designed them.
“I’d ask how you deal with it, but I already know,” she said. “I’ve read your essays.”
“And?”
“Not exactly John Grisham, but I can see why everyone thinks you’re such a smart guy.”
“To be fair, I also look damn good in tweeds. You’d be surprised how much of my reputation as a first-rate literary mind rests
on my wardrobe.”
“I don’t believe it.” They paused, catching their breath on the steepest part of the hill. “So. Do you know how to kill him
yet?”
He considered the starless sky. It smelled like snow.
“I met a giant,” he said slowly, “in Wales. After Van and Donna were kidnapped and we all went into hiding. I hunted for eight
weeks before I found him pretending to be a stony hill. Moss right in his ass crack.”
She laughed—then looked again and realized he wasn’t joking.
“A real giant?”
“I thought I should use my time in hiding productively. In one of the stories, the giant in question killed a clutch of baby
dragons by sitting on them, then strangled their mother when she expressed her irritation. I figured he might know something.
It wasn’t easy to talk to him. My Welsh sucks. I’ve always been good at languages, but Welsh is a pisser. I feel like I’m
trying to swallow gravel. Whereas Trig didn’t have any English at all, he—”
“His name was Trig?”
“His old name, his true name, is something in old Welsh that sounds like a dog choking on a bone, and which translates roughly into Big Stone Dick.
But the Royal Geographical Society planted a geodesic plaque on his left shoulder in 1892, a trigonometrical point, which
led him to believe he had been renamed Trig by Queen Victoria.”
She laughed.
“Anyway, conversation was slow. He hadn’t talked to anyone in about sixty years, and as a rule, giants need an hour or so to think a new thought.
I asked him what to do about King Sorrow and he told me I should wait.
He said in another few years, forty or fifty at most, I’d be dead, and then I’d have no more trouble with him.
The fears and regrets of men baffle him.
None of the things we worry about seem of any great importance when you live in geological time.
He admitted that while I seemed a pleasant enough chap, it was his feeling the era of man couldn’t end soon enough.
He took an especially sour view of cell phone towers.
He was afraid one would be planted in his bunghole the next time he took a nap. ”
“Are you fucking with me, Arthur? Is this a real conversation we’re really having? You found a giant and asked him for advice?
If there are giants wandering around Wales, how come people haven’t seen them?”
“They have. The stories are full of them.”
“Old stories. What about now? How come no one has seen them in the modern day?”
Arthur’s hand had slipped into his pocket, and now he took it out and flipped a disc of smooth, clear glass. “Maybe they just
don’t know how to look.”
“What’s that?”
“The Surrealist’s Glass,” Arthur said. “It belonged to Salvador Dalí for a while, but it was already at least four hundred
years old by the time he got his hands on it. I found it at an estate auction and bought it for six pounds. Which is a bit
like finding the Holy Grail in a charity shop or the martyr’s robe in a heap of nightgowns at a yard sale.”
“The martyr’s robe?”
He shrugged. “A sacred garment. Does the usual sacred garment stuff. Keeps one from the flames of hell, hides a person from
the eyes of the wicked.” He considered the lens in his hand. “The martyr’s robe might hide you from evil eyes, but it wouldn’t
hide you from this. The Surrealist’s Glass shows the secret truth of things, sees through enchantments. It’ll show you ghosts,
giants . . . trolls. There’s a troll in the southwest of England who might be more use to us than Trig. If I can find him.
Svangur the Sly. I mentioned him to you once before. Like most trolls, he has a hoard of treasure he’s accumulated over the
centuries. I think he’s got the Sword of Strange Hangings in his possession.”
“Oh, right. I was wondering where that was.”
He smiled at her. “It’s a sword that can cut through dragon mail.
A blade forged from a human soul instead of iron.
The Sword of Strange Hangings is clasped in a sheath of brightest silk and can only be drawn by someone who has rid himself of wicked intentions.
” He gave her a good up-and-down ogling and did a Groucho Marx waggle with his eyebrows.
“Which probably rules me out, schweetheart.”
She laughed again and looked away, felt a pleasant heat in her face.
“Anyway: if I ever come across Svangur, I’ll know him. As long as I see him through this.” Flipping the Surrealist’s Glass
and catching it once again.
“Trolls and giants and magic robes and swords made out of souls. All this fairy tale talk makes my head feel funny.”
“Fairy tales make sense . . . which is more than I can say for everyday life. They’re how I cope. I keep thinking if I study