Then his mother began to cough. He walked out into a hot mist and stumbled over her. All he could see of her was a white struggle of blurred arms and legs; her brown dress made her one with the earth, and her hair covered her face. She made no more noise when he knelt beside her, but who was that laughing?
Sniffing, he wiped his eyes and looked back at the house. Tad was standing out on the porch steps, his arms open to the sky, head thrown back, his tongue stuck out to catch the last faint falling of mist as if it were snowflakes.
“Stop it, Tad!” he shouted.
The little boy cocked his head toward the woods, tilting it from side to side like a curious dog, then he ran past Jory down the road.
Jory looked at his mother, but she wasn’t moving, and even though he wished he could stay with her, he knew that she would want him to go after the little one. Feeling torn apart inside, he got to his feet.
He couldn’t believe how fast Tad ran. It seemed like it hadn’t been that long ago that he was only learning to walk; now Jory felt like the clumsy one. He kept tripping in the ruts of the road.
The woods were glowing as if a campfire burned in their depths. Against that light, Tad’s shadow practically flew over the road. Then his baby brother turned aside and headed through the trees.
Jory’s lungs burned, and one of his eyes hardly saw at all, but he followed as best he could.
It was harder going between the trees. He lost sight of Tad, and only the light guided him, but when he finally came to the bright place, there was no sign of his brother. The trees were full of clustered purple glare. In the middle of broken trunks and branches, a clearing, the wreckage of the plane lay smoking.
They’re only lightning bugs, Jory told himself.
“Pop?” he called.
The light seemed to vibrate to his cry, and that made him want to keep quiet.
He walked through the broken trees until he came to a twisted wing of the plane. He could see the cockpit, and the top of his father’s head down inside. He climbed onto the wing, hopeful.
“Pop?” he whispered.
His father’s head hung funny. Jory swallowed. Broken neck. He backed down, not wanting to look too long at the wide eyes.
He heard a new sound, like singing, and looked to the edge of the clearing. An arm reached out along the ground from the roots of a toppled tree. The small hand settled to the leaves.
He climbed to the fallen trunk, peered over it, and saw his brother lying naked among the roots and branches, curled on his side. His eyes were wide, and so was his mouth.
“Tad,” Jory said. “Whatever happened to your clothes?”
He jumped over the trunk, but his foot snagged on a bit of broken branch and he half fell sideways. Twigs broke as he caught himself, and there was another, softer crackling. He came up thinking that he had barely missed landing on his brother, but he was wrong.
He screamed and stepped back, tearing Tad to shreds as he tried to get out of his body. The husk, still wet, stuck to his shoes.
Jory cried up at the trees where the light looked almost merciful, except that it lit what lay below.
But in time with his scream, the brilliant forest went black. There were no stars, no moon, nothing to light up the thing that came buzzing and laughing toward him, sounding too big by far to be his baby brother.
“Shuck Brother” copyright 1986 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Night Cry, Winter 1986.
FAUST FORWARD
Old Rotcod’s cottage rose like a tombstone at the edge of the Merry Meadow, casting its gloomy image over the otherwise cheerful face of Glamorspell Pond. When the fairykids came down to frolic in the mud, they always kept to the stretch of shoreline farthest from the sagging gray house—not that they would ever say a word against it. When they saw old Rotcod himself scowling out through a dust-bleared window, they would wave and call for him to strip from his strict black garments and come join them for a naked swim in the crystalline pond. No one was offended when he ignored them, or made a face and pulled the blinds. Only the most radical fairies hinted that it was just as well he kept to himself, that his presence might dim the blue water like a bottle of black ink spilled into a sacred well. And not a fairykid took offense when, coming down to the pool on a hot day with their picnic baskets and water nymphs, they discovered that in the night the pond had been surrounded by a barrier of fairy-proof iron-thorn shrubberies. Instead, they shrugged and giggled at Rotcod’s humor, then wandered away in search of another spot in which to pass the afternoon.
In the dim recesses of his cottage, Rotcod waited until the sounds of merriment had expired in the depths of the forest. It was too much to hope that they had been devoured by carnivores, or snatched by starving fairy-traps, though the thoughts made him chuckle. “Maybe now I can get some work done.”
His ponderous desk was covered with immense volumes whose pages he had stained with his lunches or crumpled in his frustration. He opened one at random, a bright blue tome whose milk-white pages were covered with glittering golden calligraphy that began to incant in angelic tones as his eyes fell upon the first paragraph:
“By the power of Nazacl, the Archimage may easily acquaint himself with all the heavenly vaultings up to and including the sixteenth, which surpasses the common intelligences of invisibility, omniscience, clairvoyance, clairaudience, teleolofaction, levitation, immortal—”
“Oh, shut up!”
He slammed the book silent in mid-syllable. Rising from his hard, creaking chair, he began to shove the books to the floor. Many cried out at his handling, and one in particular—a text of practical magical philosophy, which had often warned him against studying forbidden things—began to weep like a sentimental idiot.
“Oh Rotcod!” it wailed from the floor. “Rotcod, turn back before it is too late. Correct your behavior, 1 beg you. Bend diligently to your astrology, take up your thaumaturge’s tools, call upon the elements and—”
Rotcod stepped squarely on one flickering page of admonitions, then stooped and tore the book in half along the spine. There was a chorus of screams from the other books as he tossed the volume into the squat black furnace he had forged himself from unholy iron, having found no fairy-smith able to do the work without contracting a devilish dermatitis.
“What good is magic?” he demanded of the leaping flames. He swept his stern gaze over the rest of his library, but the surviving books lay timid and sullen now, infected with his ill humor. “I have practiced demonology for thirteen hundred years, with nothing to show for it but a horde of mindless slaves who are powerless to think for themselves. I’ve sucked the juice from all forms and colors of magic—black, white, purple, and plaid. I have a Phoenix that craps molten gold in my hands. Immortality, invisibility, lead into gold into lead again, and it’s all worthless. These are things any man can accomplish. Any man? Hah! Any fairy! Even the lazy fairies live forever.”
He began to stalk around the room, kicking through books, searching for one in particular.
“I know you’re here. You’ve kept silent all these years because of that damned philosophy. It’s gone now, do you hear? It can’t bully you anymore. Speak up. You whispered to me once, I remember. You said there was something more than magic. I was half asleep with boredom from that astral sex manual, but I came wide awake and you fell silent.”