The Witch of the Wood Read online

  “No, but I can stop you from hurting her. She’s not some defective toy.”

  “She complicates things.”

  “Not really, Dad. She’s as pure and simple as the rain. And she’ll always be beautiful, like all her poor sisters. The withering part is your issue.”

  He reached past Rudy and pulled the half-gallon jug of iodine out of one of the shopping bags on the floor.

  “A generic,” he said, unscrewing the top. “Next time get a name brand, please.”

  He chugged half of it, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a buoy in a storm. No burp at the end either, a true gentleman, just a pair of curving stains yellowed at the corners of his lips giving him a slight case of circus mouth.

  “I’m going to sleep,” he said, “straight through until tomorrow morning. If it makes you uncomfortable, I can position myself in your bed with my head down at the foot end, though the difference of that particular custom really escapes me.”

  Rudy put up his hand.

  “No matter. I have a lot to do today, and by the time I join you neither of us will notice the other.”

  But Rudy was wrong.

  After a day of rearranging the apartment for two, downloading (and filling out) state registration forms, and heading back out twice (once for Wolfie’s preferred body gel called “Axe” and the second time for a book of stamps), he lay down next to his son. The boy was breathing softly, the moonlight and shadow cutting across his face like scripture.

  Two hours later the boy woke up screaming.

  Rudy had been dreaming about shadows. They were pitched from the angles and corners of the bedroom as static lines that slowly began to waver, then swirl to a dark, ghostlike version of April Orr, standing there at the foot of the bed, reaching behind to unzip the back of her dress, slipping a shoulder through, letting the fabric flutter down. She protectively covered her breasts with her forearms and then shivered.

  “I miss you, Rudy,” she said.

  Her skin then flaked and peeled off, exposing the bright white epidermis beneath, and those sparkling eyes bubbled to black. Her lips turned violent red and her face went skeletal.

  “Don’t look at me this way,” she said. “Please. Please?”

  The word echoed, turned to sound waves that pounded and screeched across the room, and she became a white burst, so sheer, so high-pitched that it burned Rudy’s eyes, and he sat up with a jerk into the semi-darkness, and next to him Wolfie was crying out at the top of his lungs, high and sheer, eyes huge, sweat shining along both cheeks. He was sitting upright against the headboard with his knees drawn in to his chest, and he looked at his father as if he didn’t know him.

  Rudy slapped him hard on the jaw. The boy’s head snapped to the side, then came back, his frantic eyes clouding over, then moving to slow realization. Next was weeping and recovery, hands to the face, and his body shook with it. The positioning was awkward, but Rudy pushed over and engulfed the boy in his arms.

  “It’s all right,” he said. He kissed Wolfie’s slick forehead. The boy turned in to his father’s chest and tried to slow his quick, shallow breathing.

  “Daddy,” he said with a hitch.

  “I’ve got you,” Rudy soothed. “I’m here.”

  “I saw him.”

  “Who?”

  “The Dark Guardian.” He pushed away, hair hanging in his face. “I’ve had ‘The Coming of Dreams,’ Dad. It’s part of this.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Wolfie wiped his cheek with his palm, and spoke out front as if the words were ingrained in his very core.

  “‘The Coming of Dreams’ is my birth rite. I knew of it even from the first moment you pulled me from the stump, but only intellectually. I couldn’t predict its intensity.” He looked around the room as if inspecting it for a sudden intruder. Rudy rubbed his shoulder, and Wolfie went on.

  “Since your forefathers imprisoned their witches, they engineered a failsafe into the genetic code, each generation birthing a knight of sorts, a Dark Guardian who waits.”

  “For what?”

  Wolfie laughed softly.

  “Not what, Dad. For ‘whom.’ Your ancestors made sure to balance the scales and protect the world from me.” He drew his knees in. “He is prophesized to be unyielding and heartless. He is mortal as I am, but immune to my ability to disappear. He is the epitome of masculinity in its raw, savage form, and will be emotionally impenetrable. And before all this is done, I will kill him or he will kill me. There is no possible middle ground. The problem is that he is also resistant to my ability to read his biography and will therefore know of me before I know of him. This also cannot be changed, though the difference could wind up being no more than a moment.”

  “And you dreamed of him?”

  “Yes, but his face was masked.” Wolfie curled up into himself even more, chin almost between his knees. “He looked a bit like the lead character in a horror movie whose poster I saw in your history. It was called My Bloody Valentine.”

  Rudy nodded. He’d never seen the movie, but he remembered by the advertisement that the villain was a miner, face hidden by a gas mask with goggles and a forehead lantern. Wolfie shivered.

  “The Dark Guardian wears some sort of headgear, and the lantern light is no lantern at all, but something odd, something circular with ridges. I saw it in silhouette, however, and could not discern its context and identity. And he wears a massive cloak of darkness that somehow shimmers with stabbing light when he moves.

  “The second you see him you have to kill him, you know. There can be no hesitation at all.”

  “Ya think?”

  They both entertained a soft chuckle. Rudy pulled on his earlobe and massaged it for no reason.

  “You said this was a ‘Coming of Dreams,’ plural. Was there another vision?”

  Wolfie went cross-legged and pulled the sheets over his legs.

  “It wasn’t a vision, but more a saying, a riddle. I was born to destroy the men of the earth, but that victory would not shatter the spell your forefathers cast upon the wood. My mother race is still trapped in the dirt, and I was put here to try and release them as well. Whether I am successful in either endeavor is not guaranteed, but it is in my nature to try.”

  “What’s the ‘Riddle of the Wood’? What did you see?”

  Wolfie smiled, and this time it was his reassuring hand on the shoulder of the other.

  “It’s science, Dad. Not your discipline.”

  “Tell me anyway. I’ll try to keep up.”

  “‘The Riddle of the Wood,’ as you call it, has to do with a nova.”

  “Like the sun blowing up?”

  “Yes, and that is why I most need the library visit. I have to make a study of the stars, the moon, astrophysics, astronomy. I dreamed these words in direct reference to freeing the witches from the bondage of the root: ‘The sun must burst forth a hundred golden rivers.’ The phrase was visible, in Gothic print, and there was a number in the background.”

  “What was it?”

  “The digit was partially hidden, but I am certain it was the number three.”

  “That’s it?” Rudy said. “That’s all you have to go on?”

  “Yes. That along with the fact that the saying is a paradox, which in itself sort of causes one, but you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Hmm.”

  “To sleep now, Dad. I will not leave this room until Monday morning, and you can spend your Sunday preparing. Registration papers are one thing, but you will need high school bus schedules, activity sheets, the works. I hope you have ink in your printer.”

  “No problem.”

  “Good.” He slid back under the sheets and pushed up with his knees until the bedding came loose from the bottom. He flipped the affair under his heels.

  “Piggy-blanket,” he said. “Nicer this way.”

  Rudy slid down and did the same on his side. He turned on his elbow and put his arm protectively across his son’s shoulder. Wolfie
slid back and let his father embrace him. Dark Guardians? Novas? Mass murder? It was all too big to imagine.

  One day at a time.

  Of course.

  Banal responsibilities on Sunday; an uneventful trip to the library Monday. Steps. A process.

  But the library trip was anything but uneventful. And Patricia’s phone calls were a constant annoyance.

  Rudy was never really good at planning these “field trips,” and he supposed that was why he’d always avoided teaching the elementary grades. Those kinds of instructors needed mothering skills. It wasn’t really about word walls, picture cues, and the best ways to asses fluency, but more helping Johnny find his inhaler and stopping little Denny from melting crayons on the radiator. It was not in Rudy’s “wheelhouse,” so to speak, to construct paper hats, play the “King of Ing,” and get everyone’s bookbags packed on time for the assembly, and it showed Monday morning. In his mind, the day started once they got to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, not before, not really. He was mostly concerned with stuff like everyone remembering their Widener I.D.s as he’d indicated in the e-mail. Would they keep their cell phones off as he’d specified? Would they stay in a group and have the decency to respect some of the ancient and classic texts they’d have access to? Rudy remembered this particular facility from his days at St. Joseph’s a decade and a half ago when he got his masters in literature, and on their field trip, he’d sat at a table paging carefully through an original folio version of Hamlet. It was an astounding, humbling honor, and he didn’t need some careless freshman spilling his energy drink on Gertrude’s counterfeit presentment of two brothers, thank you very much.

  There was also Wolfie to think about, not only in terms of Rudy’s fear that he’d be an instant attraction to the kids no matter how discreet his disguise, but the fact that the boy’s excursion needed to go further than the first target location. When Rudy initially made the arrangements he had spoken to the head librarian at the Annenberg School for Communications Library, who had given permission for Rudy to take his kids to Rare Books and Manuscripts. It had been so long since he’d been there that Rudy mistakenly remembered the two as being in the same building, different floor. But with his casual Internet search the next day, Rudy found that Penn wasn’t like the smaller universities with a main library and another for law. There were more than eighteen library centers, all with materials of various disciplines, some up to two city blocks away from each other, and Wolfie was insistent that once they made camp at Rare Books, he be given the freedom to go on his own to Math, Physics, and Astronomy. The kid was highly perturbed, to say the least, since his reading of Rudy’s “biography” was only as good as what the man could recall, and now they had to romance some sort of generic gate-pass from the Annenberg librarian instead of merely retaining initial access through one entrance door. Moreover, Rudy could barely convince his students to go to a library within his own subject area, let alone some science think-tank where most of them couldn’t even begin to comprehend the abstracts.

  And of course, during their bickering Sunday night over whether or not a librarian would actually answer a phone call or e-mail on the weekend versus a song and dance live and in person, Rudy had been on the Net trying to find a place for everyone to initially meet up for coffee. He picked the most obvious winner, a Starbucks, even though it was a few blocks off campus at 40th Street.

  Bad mothering. He must have looked in the wrong column for the address, because what should have been a Starbucks turned out to be a still-closed Allegro Pizza, and Monday morning they were waiting for him there, half his class, mostly guys trying to up their grades, and two lacrosse players who happened to room together, Katie Dulaney and Bethany Durst. Many had their arms folded and were stamping the cold off their feet. Rudy came up and gave an awkward greeting, then fumbled through an introduction of his young cousin from Vermont, Drake Barnes. Wolfie gave a slight nod, and no one really paid attention to him. He had on a sweatshirt with the hood up and convenience store sunglasses, looking more the dock worker than some ravishing Prince of Darkness. He was in a sullen mood, carried over from yesterday, that pretty much echoed everyone else’s sentiments when they found they had to walk all the way to 36th and Walnut, through the back end of a shabby neighborhood that had nothing better to look at than rundown fraternity houses and some zoned-off construction areas.

  By the time they got to 38th Street, a couple of the guys were bumping shoulders playfully, then stepping on one another’s feet. One of the girls had to pee.

  “We’re almost there,” Rudy said, keeping it level. This wasn’t high school, where he had to mark his territory and use “teacher voice”; those days were gone. But being out of the college classroom took away a bit of his power and mystique. It was disorienting, and he came close a couple of times to grabbing one of these asshole kids by the back of the neck, walking him away from his friends, and reading him the riot act, finger in the face.

  Then he lost Wolfie.

  They had just passed the parking garage connected to the Wharton Steinberg Center just north of Spruce Street when he noticed his son was missing. Rudy had been lagging in the back of the group watching Ben Alspach text and walk, absently relating it to chewing gum, and he literally felt the vacancy behind him.

  He stopped, then snapped his head all around, looking at everything and nothing all at the same time: A Steak Queen Food truck across the street, a Flex Box, a rather dirty and dented POD storage unit half blocking a maintenance entrance, a Penske Rental truck parked too close to a hydrant.

  No Wolfie.

  Some of the kids had turned and slowed, and Rudy waved them on.

  “Thirty-sixth and Walnut! Go ahead, I’ll catch up in a minute!”

  He walked a few steps in reverse, turned, and started to jog back toward the walking overpass where he thought he’d last registered Wolfie there at his elbow. He got to an alley on the left and gave a glance. It was an alcove where there was an outdoor café, currently closed, its yellow table umbrellas folded in.

  Wolfie was there on the brick walkway, and he was dancing.

  With a bird.

  Rudy stepped forward, mouth slightly ajar. Wolfie had drawn the hood of his sweatshirt tight around his head and almost looked alien-like. Above and around him, a small black bird was gliding and diving, making figure-eights while Wolfie, in perfect rhythm, waltzed along the brick cobblestone. They were beautiful moving shapes, as if held together by some invisible set of cosmic wires, and then Wolfie started doing “the Blink.” The bird followed, darting to where the image had just been erased, then anticipating and sweeping back around within centimeters of where the boy reappeared. There was something classic about it, cutting and clean, almost as if boy and bird were meant to share these lovely, erratic patterns that sketched themselves upon the February breeze.

  Wolfie stopped suddenly, snapped out his hand, and grabbed the bird from mid-air. The thing screeched and one of its feathers popped loose, cutting half-moon arcs to the ground.

  “Fucking tree rat,” Wolfie snarled. Then he clapped his hands together. There was a wet popping sound, and Rudy saw one black eye burst loose, caught on a dark tendril that wrapped under at the base of Wolfie’s thumb. Out of the other end a runner of shit, white with black streaks, had burst from the bird’s anus and squirted down Wolfie’s wrist.

  “What—” Rudy managed. Wolfie tossed the carcass aside and went to one of the tables where some moisture had pooled in a dent. He pressed down his hands and then rubbed vigorously.

  “What?” he said.

  “That was disgusting.”

  “Was it?” He flicked the wetness away and wiped his hands on his pants. “Are you sad for the little worm-eater? The bark-bum? The one who pollutes the sky with the exhaust of his swooping brethren? A bird’s brain is smaller than a fingertip, and the thing camouflages itself behind the fluttering leaves of the prison stalk in absolute cowardice. It feeds on the screams of the inmate of the grain a
nd mimics the sound with its idiot chirping. How do you think the name ‘Mock-ingbird’ came about?”

  “You can’t kill them all,” Rudy said evenly.

  “Why not try? Will it fuck the ecosystem out of seed dispersal and pollination, making it so we can’t pretty up the landscape with the flowers and plants that make the trees look more as if they blend? Will car washes go out of business? Will the men who service horizontal phone cables suddenly starve?”

  He strode over to a decorator tree, still a sapling really, growing through its black protector foot-grate that was of rather intricate Greek design. He toed it with distaste.

  “This here, Daddy-o, is a thornless honeylocust. Isn’t it lovely? Eventually it is going to grow to about fifty feet, but even in its infancy it has a little secret there under its roots that twine beneath the firebrick. Due to her eighteenth shadow-transfer from her original prison thousands of years ago, here lies a beautiful shape-shifter. She has pure white skin, lips of ruby, and her heart is still beating down there. Her name is Belinda. Would it be funnier if it was Sabrina? Or Samantha?”

  “Wolfie.”

  “What, Dad? I’m a teenager and I’m angry. I have certain powers, a ton of advantages, but I’m part human too.”

  Rudy smiled thinly.

  “Well, I don’t buy the ‘I’m just a kid’ excuse. I didn’t when I taught high school, and I won’t now. You need to manage your emotionality, or you’re going to draw attention to yourself.”

  The boy stared for a moment and then the air seemed to go out him. His shoulders drooped.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” He removed his sunglasses and revealed that he’s shed a couple of tears. “It’s just that like the birds . . . I can hear her screaming.”

  Moved, Rudy wanted to reach out for his son, but he didn’t want to be the one to cause more of a scene either. Strange. The kid was sophisticated in certain ways beyond imagination, yet had chinks in the armor, socio-emotive deficits common to his surface age. In terms of mood, he’d retained more mastery as an infant.