Knight Life
Peter David
Chaptre the First
The apartment was dark, illuminated only by the dim flickering of the twelve-inch, black-and-white Sony that sat atop a scratched coffee table. From the glow of the picture tube one would have seen an apartment allowed to go to waste through lack of attention.
The wallpaper was yellowed and peeling-there were squares and circles imprinted where various paintings or pictures had once hung. The floor was bare, the boards warped and uneven. Off to one side was a small kitchen that had a gas stove last cleaned sometime around the Hoover administration, and a refrigerator stocked with two cracked eggs, half a stale loaf of Wonder Bread, and a flat bottle of club soda. And three six-packs of beer.
The occupant of the apartment was also illuminated in the light.
On the screen an old sitcom was playing. She had seen it before. She had seen all of them before. It did not matter to Morgan. Nothing much mattered anymore.
She smiled slightly at the antics of the castaways on the screen. Somehow Gilligan was always able to make Morgan smile slightly. A buffoon, a simple jester.
Simple. She remembered when her life was simple.
She took a sip of the beer, finishing the contents of the can and tossing it off into the darkness. She thought there might be a trash can there to receive it. She didn't much care.
Morgan Le Fey hauled her corpulent body protestingly to its feet. She was clad in a faded housecoat that had once been purple, and her swollen feet were crammed into large fuzzy slippers. Her hair was still the raven color it had always been, or at least had been for as long as she could recall. She hadn't checked the roots for a few decades now. But the fine lines of her face, her sleek jaw and high cheekbones, were now sliding off into her collarbone. She had given up counting her chins, as another one seemed to spring into existence every decade, like clockwork.
As she waddled into the kitchen, her housecoat tugged at the protesting buttons, threatening to pull them all off their thin moorings.
She squinted at the dazzling (by contrast) brilliance of the refrigerator bulb, reached in and snapped another can of beer out of a half-consumed six-pack. She made her way back across the kitchen, the slippers slapping against the bottom of her feet.
As she sank back into the easy chair, resting her hands in the customary places on the arms, she watched the final credits run on this latest rerun of the adventures of the castaways. Even more than Gilligan, she empathized with the concept of castaways as a whole. She was a castaway too. Drifting, floating, on an island of isolation. That her island existed in the midst of a bustling metropolis was irrelevant.
She flipped the top off her beer can and started to drink. The cold beverage slid down her throat, basking her in a familiar warmth and haze. She patted the can lovingly. Her one friend. Her familiar.
She held up the can in a salute. "To mighty Morgan," she croaked, her voice cracking from disuse. "Here's to eternal life, and to the thrice-damned gods who showed me how to have it."
She choked then, and for the first time in a long time she really thought about what she had become. With a heartrending sob she drew her arm back and hurled the half-empty can square into the TV which sat two yards away. The screen exploded in a shower of glass and sparks, flying out like a swarm of liberated sprites. There was a sizzling sound, and acrid smoke rose from the back of the set.
Her face sank into her hands, and Morgan Le Fey wept loudly. Her sides heaved in and out, her breath rasped in her chest. The rolls of fat that made up her body shook with the rage and frustration she released.
She cried and cursed all the fates that had brought her to this point in her life, and it was then that she resolved to put a stop to it. Existence for the sake of existence alone is no existence at all, she decided. "I am a mushroom," she said out loud. "A fungus. I have lived for far too long, and it's time I rested."
She stood again, but this time with far greater assurance, for her movements now had a purpose to them other than simple self-perpetuation. She lumbered into the kitchen, fumbled through a drawer crammed with plastic spoons from Carvel's ice cream stores and equally harmless knives from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Finally she extracted a steak knife. She blanched at the rust, then realized that rust was hardly a concern.
She sat back down in front of the TV, the knife now cradled serenely in the crook of her arm.
The TV screen had miraculously mended itself. There was a crisscross of hairline fractures across it, but these too would fade in time. Not that this was any concern to Morgan either.
"One last time, old enemy," she said. Her thin, arched eyebrows reached just to the top of her head, even though her eyes were little more than slits beneath painted green lids. She fumbled in the drawer next to her for the remote control, and she started to flick the switch.
Time had lost all meaning to her, and she could not recall how long it had been since she had looked in on Him. Five days? Five months? Years? She was not certain.
Once these long-distance viewings had exacted a great toll from her, physically and spiritually. She had had to use specially prepared mirrors, or magic crystals. With the advent of the diodes and catheters, however, had come a revolution in the art of magic. A one-time ensorcellment of the wires and tubes, and she could look in on Him whenever she wished.
That was why she had never opted for solid-state components -she didn't trust her ability to control something as arcane as microcircuitry.
She clicked her remote to Channel 1, and the smiling face of the news anchor disappeared.
In its place was the exterior of a cave. Erosion and overgrowth had altered the exterior somewhat over time, but not enough to throw her. She knew it. And she would take the knowledge to her grave, providing that someone ever found her bloated body and tossed it into the ground for her.
She held the knife to her wrist. She should really do this in a bathtub, she remembered reading now. But she hated the water. Besides, she wanted to be here, in front of the entombed resting place of her greatest magical opponent.
She stared at the cave entrance on her TV screen. "You'd really enjoy this moment, wouldn't you, you cursed old coot? Morgan Le Fey, driven to this, by you. You knew this would happen someday. This is your doing, you reaching out from beyond the grave." She pressed the blade against the skin of her right wrist. "Damn you, Merlin," she said softly. "You've finally won."
Then she stopped.
She leaned forward, the knife, still against the inside of her wrist, forgotten now. She squinted, rubbed her eyes, and focused again.
Against the mouth of the cave rested a huge stone, covered with moss and vegetation. This stone was far more than just a dead weight. It was held in place through the magic of a woman's wiles, and there is no stronger bond than that. And though the woman, Nineve, was long gone, the magic should hold for all eternity.
The operative word here being should.
For Morgan now saw that the rock had moved. It had rolled ever so slightly to one side, creating an opening. An opening far too small for a man to squeeze through. But still ... it hadn't been there before.
Responding to Morgan's merest thought, the TV screen zoomed in tight on the hole. Yes, definitely new. She had never seen it before, and she could see where the overgrown leaves had been ripped away when the stone was moved___
Moved! But who had moved it?
It was more than she dared hope. The camera panned down, away from the hole which was several feet above the ground.
There were footprints. She could not determine how old. Once she would have known immediately, for once she had looked in on this spot every day. But with passing years had come passing interest, and the occasional look-see had seemed to be sufficient. Seemed to be, but clearly was not.