Chapter 18 Stepping Through #2
The fawn reared back on its hind legs like a ram about to charge, then just stood in defiance of gravity.
A bent, luminous figure full of arrhythmic, pulsing motion.
Within its head, the too-perfect disk awoke between the dark spots that weren’t quite eyes.
The disk shivered and spun, an organ that excreted corruption.
Green felt the oil of the fawn’s thoughts slide from his mind as Catskill began his mental assault.
There was a moment of odd, frozen peace.
He looked at the monstrous wolf standing at his shoulder, the creature who had made his first nights in the mountains a terror, now his brother and his strength.
He looked at the fawn, the first cryptid he had seen at Candle-Fly Camp, the form he thought ghostly and beautiful, an avatar of the ephemeral beauty and mystery of existence.
He looked to Alf and his friends. They were shivering violently, face down among the dirt and cinders. He thought of Mr. Reynard beneath his thin blanket. He thought of the dark, sightless eyes of half-buried songbirds. How long could they have left to live? Seconds?
Beyond the firelight, there was something wrong with the trees. They were slipping. Losing focus. A profound elsewhere was exerting a new kind of gravity on the little clearing. Reality was breaking.
He looked to his teacher. She was on her back, teetering on her pack like an overturned tortoise, but her dark-rimmed eyes were fully awake and focused on Green.
A terrible clarity touched a single cold finger to his brow and he had the urge to scream.
He did not scream.
Words came to him.
A croaking voice that seemed to fall into his thoughts from somewhere in the dark sky.
Make the choice.
He tugged on a crooked smile.
Already ice was crystallizing in his beard, spreading like lichen on stone.
He reached for the acorn, pulling it from his pocket. Bringing it up to eye level, he spoke to the little nut.
“Magic. Because I say so.”
Catskill spoke within his mind. There was pain in the words.
Holding difficult…it is stronger now.
Green nodded to Valentina. She watched him, her face a frozen mask of pain. He held the acorn up in the space between them and repeated the Crow King’s words.
“A beacon. An anchor. A wellspring of courage.”
He spoke the words, his choice, his meaning, into the acorn and did his best to believe his own voice.
Hold slipping…
He walked to his teacher and placed the acorn in her coat pocket.
“Plant it.”
Something drew his eyes down and down beneath his feet, a watchfulness he could feel, something too distant and dark to conjure any images in his head. There were words down there, too, a voice like Catskill’s but different.
Protect my pup, mountain-kin.
Green thought his response down deep into the world.
He turned and walked to the fawn.
There was his teacher’s way.
The math of the situation. Knowledge. Close the hole to remove the threat.
There was Catskill’s way.
Attack the invader bodily. Strength. Let it feel the jaws of the mountain.
There was Green’s way.
A childhood memory surfaced, scooping up a small brown spider in a juice cup. Carrying the tiny creature from the kitchen to his mother’s tomato plants on the back porch. Returning it to a world of leaves and dappled sunlight.
“So. Let’s get you back home.”
He stepped up to the glass fawn.
A nosebleed began tapping a drip-drop rhythm on the front of Green’s jacket.
From so nearby, it was too painful to look directly at the creature, so he focused on the blurring treetops at the edge of the clearing.
Holding his breath, he leaned forward and bundled the fawn into his arms. He lifted. The deer’s substance seeped through his clothing. It stuck to his skin like dry ice and the disk in its head picked at his sinews, trying to untie the knot of his body.
“Hold harder.”
Catskill let out a roar and Green felt his body knitting back together.
One of the fawn’s limbs went boneless and wrapped laterally around his forearm like ivy.
He walked to the Hole in Nothing carrying the fawn.
The hole had grown, swallowing the crossed pines. As he watched, the makeshift barrier tilted and vanished into the hungry nothing. A murmuration of dark birds erupted from the far side of the void with a clap of thunder.
It was impossible.
It was simple.
He walked to the edge of the growing emptiness, turning to look back at the chaos of the clearing.
It began to snow in his thoughts and he knew Catskill was losing his fight.
“What a strange, beautiful world,” he said.
Somewhere, an unlikely cricket chirped in defiance of the cold.
Green shut his eyes, set his intention, and stepped through the Hole in Nothing.
The doorstep was not a place.
Green was falling in every direction at once. Expanding. Losing cohesion. He had no recognizable senses because he had no sense organs. The organizing principles that allowed a body to be a body were back on the other side of the door, the door he had just willed shut.
Yet, somehow, he did have awareness.
Brains were not brains in that liminal gap of fractured, kaleidoscopic potentialities, but he still had thought.
There was pain, but the sensation was like an item listed on a written inventory. Impersonal. Important only in that it was still his to claim.
Within the cacophony of his unbound mind, unrestrained by linear time or finite nerve cells, concepts roiling like a spherical sea hovering in deep space, one idea called loudest for Green’s attention.
I am not alone.
The glass fawn was no longer a fawn. No longer squeezed into shape within the narrow, prescriptive confines of reality, it blossomed into a borderless, fecund meadowland of long, finger-rich hands, into the concepts of grasping and beckoning.
Even in that place with no direction, he knew those fleshy thickets were reaching out from something.
He sent his awareness running down those many-jointed fingers, rivulets of his mind tracing the thing to its source, raindrops seeking for groundwater.
What he found was a vast, lightless disk of emptiness that pricked his understanding by embodying absence while still having teeth to chew.
It hated its own manifested fawn-thing as it hated Green as it hated all diversity of form and perspective. It hated its imprisoning compulsion to exist and to hate.
There was no direction, and still he could feel himself being dragged toward that hungry, grasping thing. He had no body, but it was touching him all the same. Greed and disdain, a galling, violent aversion for all things, bled from the fawn-place like a sustained scream.
Green wanted to resist.
He thought of resistance.
It was like stomping the brakes while the car slid across ice toward oncoming traffic.
Resist with what? Push against what?
The gnawing outsider was like a black hole at the center of a questing galaxy of needful mouths and Green was just a pebble tossed into its gravity well.
Maybe it won’t even hurt. At least not forever.
There was a sound in that place with no sound.
A sound like the distant caw of a crow.
What had the king told him?
Desire may move us as sure as blood and bone…
He called for the memory and it surfaced from the liquid cluster of his experiences like a breaching whale.
Magic and meaning. Desire and choice.
He had made his choice, the choice to save his friends.
I made other choices.
The acorn.
He sent his awareness streaming out in all directions.
Somewhere, away from the thing clutching him, there was a green speck like a shining emerald. His beacon. His anchor. His acorn.
Yet, how could it matter? Green was just Green. The thing that would devour him was a timeless elemental force strong enough to threaten his entire universe.
His mind began speaking with the voices of others, those he carried with him.
The Crow King spoke.
You think it is bigger than you? There is no size where you are. Meaning, old friend. Your meaning is as strong as you choose.
Valentina spoke.
Mr. Green, you are a cryptonaturalist. If you’re quite finished with your observations, there is work to be done.
Catskill spoke.
Crush the unreal thing. You are the mountain’s kin. The mountain calls you home.
Dancer walked out of the dark, took off her hat, scratched her scalp, and looked around.
Huh. Pretty weird, bud. I’m not leaving one of my hats in this place, but I’ll keep one warm for ya.
She tossed him an empty cup.
I’m trusting you to return that.
Even without hands, he caught it. The metal was cool on his fingers. It smelled like sassafras.
He turned toward home.
As he began to slip away from the biting disk, the soundless sensation of the fawn’s scream intensified.
Green tried to will peace into all that endless winter of agonized hunger.
Yet, he knew he couldn’t make that choice for the outsider.
He could choose only for himself.