“Think it over,” said Fergus.
“I will. Indeed I will. Oh, and one other thing. Has there been any trace of Ozzy?”
“Nary a sign.”
“I like that man. I’ve got to try to find him and—”
“If he’s the magician I think he is, he’s staying up there only because he’s decided he likes it.”
“I don’t know. Magic’s tricky. Heavens knows I’ve learned that. I’m going to try to do my damnedest for that fringe-bearded old colleague.”
“Wish you luck. Shall I send in your other guest?”
“Who’s that?”
“Your secretary. Here on business, no doubt.”
Fergus disappeared discreetly as he admitted Emily. She walked over to the bed and took Wolf’s hand. His eyes drank in her quiet, charming simplicity, and his mind wondered what freak of belated adolescence had made him succumb to the blatant glamour of Gloria.
They were silent for a long time. Then at once they both said, “How can I thank you? You saved my life.”
Wolf laughed. “Let’s not argue. Let’s say we saved our life.”
“You mean that?” Emily asked gravely.
Wolf pressed her hand. “Aren’t you tired of being an office wife?”
In the bazaar of Darjeeling, Chulundra Lingasuta stared at his rope in numb amazement. Young Ali had climbed up only five minutes ago, but now as he descended he was a hundred pounds heavier and wore a curious fringe of beard.
14
NALO HOPKINSON is a Caribbean writer of horror, myth, magic, and science fiction, and is equally as good at whatever she chooses to write. Here’s a contemporary story that feels like an old myth.
Gilla swallowed a cherry pit, and now her mouth is full of startling words she’d never normally speak. In the old stories of the saints, trees take root through flesh, but in this one, a gift from a tree transforms into teeth.
“There was a young lady…”
“Geez, who gives a hoot what a…what? What is a laidly worm, anyway?” Gilla muttered. She was curled up on the couch, school library book on her knees.
“Mm?” said her mother, peering at the computer monitor. She made a noise of impatience and hit a key on the keyboard a few times.
“Nothing, Mum. Just I don’t know what this book’s talking about.” Boring old school assignment. Gilla wanted to go and get ready for Patricia’s party, but Mum had said she should finish her reading first.
“Did you say, ‘laidly worm’?” her mother asked. Her fingers were clicking away at the keyboard again now. Gilla wished she could type that quickly. But that would mean practising, and she wasn’t about to do any more of that than she had to.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a type of dragon.”
“So why don’t they just call it that?”
“It’s a special type. It doesn’t have wings, so it just crawls along the ground. Its skin oozes all the time. Guess that protects it when it crawls, like a slug’s slime.”
“Yuck, Mum!”
Gilla’s mother smiled, even as she was writing. “Well, you wanted to know.”
“No, I didn’t. I just have to know, for school.”
“A laidly worm’s always ravenous and it makes a noise like a cow in gastric distress.”
Gilla giggled. Her mother stopped typing and finally looked at her. “You know, I guess you could think of it as a larval dragon. Maybe it eats and eats so it’ll have enough energy to moult into the flying kind. What a cool idea. I’ll have to look into it.” She turned back to her work. “Why do you have to know about it? What’re you reading?”
“This lady in the story? Some guy wanted to marry her, but she didn’t like him, so he put her in his dungeon…”
“…and came after her one night in the form of a laidly worm to eat her,” Gilla’s mother finished. “You’re learning about Margaret of Antioch?”
Gilla boggled at her. “Saint Margaret, yeah. How’d you know?”
“How?” Her mother swivelled the rickety steno chair round to face Gilla and grinned, brushing a tangle of dreadlocks back from her face. “Sweetie, this is your mother, remember? The professor of African and Middle Eastern studies?”
“Oh.” And her point? Gilla could tell that her face had that “huh?” look. Mum probably could see it too, ’cause she said:
“Gilla, Antioch was in ancient Turkey. In the Middle East?”
“Oh yeah, right. Mum, can I get micro-braids?”
Now it was her mum looking like, huh? “What in the world are those, Gilla?”
Well, at least she was interested. It wasn’t a “no” straight off the bat. “These tiny braid extensions, right? Maybe only four or five strands per braid. And they’re straight, not like…Anyway, Kashy says that the hairdressing salon across from school does them. They braid the extensions right into your own hair, any colour you want, as long as you want them to be, and they can style them just like that. Kashy says it only takes a few hours, and you can wear them in for six weeks.”
Her mum came over, put her warm palms gently on either side of Gilla’s face and looked seriously into her eyes. Gilla hated when she did that, like she was still a little kid. “You want to tame your hair,” her mother said. Self-consciously, Gilla pulled away from her mum’s hands, smoothed back the cloudy mass that she’d tied out of the way with a bandanna so that she could do her homework without getting hair in her eyes, in her mouth, up her nose. Her mum continued, “You want hair that lies down and plays dead, and you want to pay a lot of money for it, and you want to do it every six weeks.”
Gilla pulled her face away. The book slid off her knee to the floor. “Mum, why do you always have to make everything sound so horrible?” Some of her hair had slipped out of the bandanna; it always did. Gilla could see three or four black sprigs of it dancing at the edge of her vision, tickling her forehead. She untied the bandanna and furiously retied it, capturing as much of the bushy mess as she could and binding it tightly with the cloth.
Her mother just shook her head at her. “Gilla, stop being such a drama queen. How much do micro-braids cost?”
Gilla was ashamed to tell her now, but she named a figure, a few bucks less than the sign in the salon window had said. Her mother just raised one eyebrow at her.
“That, my girl, is three months of your allowance.”
Well, yeah. She’d been hoping that Mum and Dad would pay for the braids. Guess not.
“Tell you what, Gilla; you save up for it, then you can have them.”
Gilla grinned.
“But,” her mother continued, “you have to continue buying your bus tickets while you’re saving.”
Gilla stopped grinning.
“Don’t look so glum. If you make your own lunch to take every day, it shouldn’t be so bad. Now, finish reading the rest of the story.”
And Mum was back at her computer again, tap-tap-tap. Gilla pouted at her back but didn’t say anything, ’cause really, she was kind of pleased. She was going to get micro-braids! She hated soggy, made-the-night-before sandwiches, but it’d be worth it. She ignored the little voice in her mind that was saying, “every six weeks?” and went back to her reading.
“Euw, gross.”
“Now what?” her mother asked.
“This guy? This, like, laidly worm guy thing? It eats Saint Margaret, and then she’s in his stomach; like, inside him! and she prays to Jesus, and she’s sooo holy that the wooden cross around her neck turns back into a tree, and it puts its roots into the ground through the dragon guy thing, and its branches bust him open and he dies, and out she comes!”
“Presto bingo,” her mum laughs. “Instant patron saint of childbirth!”
“Why?” But Gilla thought about that one a little bit, and she figured she might know why. “Never mind, don’t tell me. So they made her a saint because she killed the dragon guy thing?”