Interlude 4 Gwen, Under Attack #2
Robin would send a text: Welp, the plane crashed again. If I was getting air miles for all the time I’ve spent flying that plane in my dreams, I could get us round trip tix to Tahiti, doll.
A minute or two later, Allie would write back: Oh, Robin. Are you okay?
And Robin would text: At least I got to see Van again. That part of the dream is all right.
Allie would text back a few hearts. And once she wrote: Sometimes I think that’s 50% of why we dream. To see the people we lost. I see him every few nights, you know. He still has the best smile. I can carry that smile inside me all day long.
If dealing with grief is 50% of why we dream, what’s the other 50%? Robin wanted to know.
So we can have sex with famous people, obvzly.
She used the flashlight on her phone to light the wet blacktop and found her way to the old stone bridge, the Slaughterbridge,
an arch of ancient rock sitting on colossal piers. She had spent the whole drive west talking to herself and shaking her head.
Twice she hit her blinker to take an off-ramp, turn around, go back to London. And twice she had let the exit ramp slide by,
kept driving. There was no reason to believe she would find the derelict from the Vine here in Camelford (the video had, in
fact, been shot at least a mile down the river, the bridge nowhere in sight), and even if she did, he wasn’t Stu Finger, didn’t
look anything like Stu Finger.
Except. Except there was something else tugging at her consciousness, something she had overheard and never forgotten.
The last time she had been to Tintagel, Arthur had asked her to meet him at the King’s Bestiary, the seventeenth-century inn where he had rooms with his friend Colin Wren.
Robin had arrived early and let herself into a handsome, empty lobby with walnut wainscoting and a lot of old scuffed brass.
She heard Arthur in the next room, his voice rising and falling in the pub at the rear of the inn.
She crossed to poke her head through the doorway and wave hi .
. . then slowed and dropped her head, listening intently.
After making a meal of someone’s chubby daughter he probably needs to sleep it off for a while, Arthur said. And he can make do with goat, sheep. Fish. Children are a pleasure, not a necessity. Some of the reading suggests trolls
may even be a bit like cicadas, emerging cyclically, every nine years or so. He shows up, munches on some livestock, goes
back to bed. Maybe every second or third time he’s awake, he’ll devour a boy or a girl as a special treat.
Some tickle of unease had made her withdraw, return to the front door, and enter again, making more noise this time, so Arthur
would be sure to hear her coming. Robin had almost wished that she could unhear what she had heard. It made her think of the
flight again, of Allie and Van’s secrets, and of the thing she had seen in the clouds that had torn two F-16s apart like they
were paper airplanes. That monstrous animal—the dragon—that they had all seen and never discussed. Robin Fellows had swiftly
come to love Allie and Van and to enjoy their friends. She also believed that Allie and Van and the others kept a secret,
that they knew more about the thing that had nearly destroyed BA 238 than they dared admit. The thing that had chased BA 238
through the skies had been pursuing them all for years. The six of them had a way of laughing all together that made her think
of captured soldiers sharing a raunchy last joke before they faced the firing squad. They lived curious, haunted lives, as
close to each other as lovers, and at a slight remove from the rest of the world, communicating in a mix of coded references
that was almost their own language. They talked about pulling a Nighswander, and inviting a Philip to the party, and borrowing Sheldon’s lighter, phrases that they all instantly understood, and seemed to have no interest in explaining.
Not that Robin asked for explanations. She only listened. And remembered.
And what had Arthur told Colin, before he knew she was there? Some of the reading suggests trolls may even be a bit like cicadas, emerging cyclically, every nine years or so. He shows
up, munches on some livestock, goes back to bed.
Nine years. It had been just over nine years since Arthur Oakes had walked under the bridge and out of Robin Fellows’s life
forever. The man in the video didn’t look like Stuart Finger, but he was tromping around in Fingers’s backyard, wearing Fingers’s
shirt, and he had chowed down on some livestock for his elevenses. There was no rational reason to believe the grotesque derelict
from @onepurrfection’s Vine would be found under the Slaughterbridge . . . but there was a kind of dream logic to the idea, which was the only kind of logic creatures of the impossible obeyed. And as Robin began
to edge down the slippery embankment, she heard someone whistling. A tune echoed from the stone vaults beneath the bridge,
cutting through the crackle of rain in the trees and the melodic rumble of the river. She knew it right away—it was the Love Island theme.
She caught herself halfway down the steep slide to the water and peered into the darkness. A homeless man sat under the bridge,
surrounded by Tesco bags full of junk. He had a battered black Sony laptop folded open across his thighs and was watching
a Nigel Farage speech while eating Wotsits.
“Hello?” she called, shuffling sideways. The footing was all slick mud, and she felt at any moment she might go down on her
silly arse.
He didn’t look at her but remained fixated on his screen. “That’s right, mate—England for the English, not the fucking Pakis.
Not the fucking wogs. Getting so there’s parts of this country look more like Islamabad.”
It wasn’t Stu Finger—and it wasn’t the man from the Vine either.
This man was old, a few dark streaks in his long gray hair and scraggy beard, and he wore a pair of square-framed glasses with thick lenses, taped at the bridge of his nose.
She was relieved, she supposed. She hadn’t really wanted to find the man from the Vine here.
She wanted even less to see Finger. Yet her blood seemed to fizz and she was jumpy all the same.
Finger had been under the bridge just so, nine years ago.
“Hello,” she called again, and he glanced her way, without any interest.
“Who’s this?” he called out.
“I’m Robin Fellows,” she said, stopping in the rain, ten feet away.
“You’re a fellow all right,” he said. “Fellow in a dress.” And he roared with laughter and orange bits of Wotsit flew.
She smiled indulgently. She had heard that one before.
“What’d you want then?” he asked. “You want a little suckee-fuckee, you ought to know Glen Schrodinger is straight and Glen
Schrodinger won’t go queer for anything less than twenty pounds.”
“No, that’s all right, but thank you!” she cried. “What about twenty pounds for a little talk?” Reaching into her great beaded
purse and leaving her hand on what she had in there for Glen Schrodinger. “I’m looking for someone.”
She would’ve liked to duck under the bridge, out of the wet, but if she went any closer, she’d be close enough for him to
leap and get her by the wrist, a thought that made her woozy. He set his laptop down, although it continued to light his face
from beneath, giving him a pasty, greenish, corpse-like cast.
“Who’sat?” he asked, sliding toward her on his bottom but staying under cover. And when he rotated toward her, she saw it.
His coat fell open to show the Monty Python shirt beneath, crusted with old stains. ’tis but a scratch. “Glen Schrodinger knows anyone who’s anyone around these parts . . . but better than that, he knows anyone who’s no one, and it’s them who are no one who are hardest to find.”
She was going to say, I’m looking for Stu Finger, but her mouth was suddenly dry, and when she spoke at last, her voice was a low croak.
“I used to have a friend named Arthur Oakes. Gone now. I guess you could say he’s no one now, although he’ll always be someone to me. Ever heard of him, Glen Schrodinger?”
He tapped one dirty finger against his jutting lower lip. “Arthur, Arthur. There was an Arthur got knifed in these parts,
most ’orrible. Died of his wounds very near here, he did. Don’t recall his last name was Oakes, though. Pendragon as I remember
it, and he called ’imself king of these parts. Is that who you might be thinking of, my darling?”
“No,” she said. “This was a Black man. A professor of medieval literature. He came looking for a man named Stu Finger.”
“Stuart Finger! Now there is a name Glen Schrodinger hasn’t heard in years, though once upon a time, we knew him as well as
we know our very own self, heh heh.” He leaned forward as he spoke. The rain was on his face now, running down his cheeks.
Robin didn’t care for the effect. It gave her the dizzying sense that his face was beginning to soften and run. “Did Arthur
Oakes find him? This Stu Finger? Did they run away to claim their happily ever after together?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“There aren’t many tales end happily ever after, you know. Very few are allowed a noble end. The first Arthur impaled his
own son, stuck him through the stomach and watched him die squealing like a piglet. Then he staggered away to die himself,
knowing all he had fought for in his life was laid a-waste. I imagine it was much the same for your Arthur. They both found the one kingdom promised all men: a hole in the ground and eternity to rule it. What did he want
of Stu Finger?”
“Arthur? Arthur was looking for a sword.”
“No doubt he found it.”
“A friend went with him,” Robin said.
“No,” said Glen Schrodinger. “I’m sure not.”
“Yes. He was with a man named Colin Wren.”
“No friend went with Arthur Oakes into the ground,” the derelict said. “He may have gone with this Colin Wren and that Stu Finger, but he still went friendless. Is there a penis under that skirt, my love?”