Greenmantle Read online

  Lewis looked for and found the small form of his night visitor in among the bobbing forms, her dance feline as a lynx at play, and no less merry. Martin Tweedy had left his parents’ side to join the dancers, holding hands with both Kate and Holly as they went round and round. A feeling of gladness swelled inside Lewis. An expectancy. A returned vitality. And then the dance music slowed to become a bittersweet air.

  The ghostly shapes faded as the music changed tempo. The dancers returned to sit with the others among the trees—all except for one. Lewis saw her slip catlike into the brush behind the tall standing stone. The breathy sound of the pipes grew more haunting still and a hush settled over them all like a collective sigh.

  All night sounds stilled until the pipes played alone into the vastness of the starry skies overhead. No one moved; no one dared to take a breath. It was into this moment of perfect stillness, with just the thread of a melody reaching up to the stars, that the stag stepped into the meadow.

  He was huge, more the size of a small horse than a buck, a Royal by his antlers, having three tops and all his rights—brow, bay and tray tines. His coat was a ruddy brown like that of the red deer of the Scottish lowlands rather than the native whitetails. By Tommy’s feet, Gaffa regarded the enormous beast quizzically because, like a fawn, the stag had no scent. Moving silently, the stag stepped fully into the meadow, then turned to face the piper. Tommy brought the tune to a close and the two regarded one another in the ensuing quiet.

  That’s where it lives, Lewis thought. Inside the stag. The mystery that called from beyond the music of Tommy’s pipes—the enchantment that men had followed through the forests of prehistory, in Arcadia’s gentle hills, in the black forests of Europe, in England’s tracts of bardic woodland, in the eastern forests of North America. No matter what shape it wore, it was always the same mystery. It was what their ancestors had followed, Lewis realized, when they crossed the Atlantic. The mystery had left the shores of England, moving west, and they had followed.

  The music that Tommy played was only a memory of what this creature was. It was something between wizardry and poetry, between enchantment and music. Its antlers were the branches of the tree of life and in its eyes was the beauty of the world, always seen as though for the first time.

  That was how Lewis saw it—the Royal stag called from Otherwhere by Tommy’s music, by the memories tied into those tunes—Lewis, with his walls of books and the thousands of pages that had passed before his eyes. The others didn’t see it quite the same. To them the stag was a wonder, a gift from Tommy’s music and the night. The play of the muscles under its skin as it slowly circled the perimeter of the meadow was an echo of their dancing. It was Tommy’s music given form for them to see.

  Then, from the distance, a new sound came. A discordant baying of hounds. The stag rose on its hind legs, antlers sweeping the sky. For one moment it seemed to all those watching that a man stood there—a man with antlers lifting from his brow—then the stag dropped to all fours and sprang from the meadow in one long graceful bound, disappearing into the forest without a sound.

  The baying drew nearer until Tommy lifted his pipes to his lips once more and blew a new music—fierce and wild, a trumpeting blare. Before the sound of it had died away, the baying was gone and the usual noises of a nighted forest returned.

  Lewis closed his eyes and shivered. When he glanced at the longstone, he saw that both Tommy and his dog were gone. As was the stag. As the villagers soon would be, for they were already going as they’d come, in small groups, or one by one. Lily remained, a question in her eyes, but Lewis shook his head. Not until he was alone did he turn away from the meadow and its tall standing stone to return to his cabin.

  Unlike the others, he couldn’t simply accept things as they happened. Questions troubled him when others had no need for either the questions or their answers. What brought the stag? What was different on the nights that it came from those nights when it didn’t? Tommy played the same music.

  There was no answer in his books. No answer from anyone he could ask. No answer from Tommy’s music nor the wondrous creature it had called up tonight. He thought of his night visitor, of the gleam he sometimes saw in her slightly slanted green eyes. There was an answer in her, he knew. Only with her, he didn’t know the right question to ask. To her, “Why?” was only “Why not?” That wasn’t enough for Lewis. It never had been.

  He lit the lamp when he got home and sat at the table with the paperback book she’d “found” on his lap, waiting for her scratch at the door and her cheery “’Lo, Lewis.” But when she did come, instead of talking to her about the stag, about Tommy’s music, about who or even what she was, he opened the book and read a few more chapters to her. And then she was gone again, swallowed by the same night that had taken the stag, and he was no closer to unravelling the riddles than he’d ever been.

  6

  There was still a good half hour of daylight left when Valenti closed his front door and started down the road. The black flies were pretty well gone by now, but the mosquitos were more than making up for their absence. He considered going back for some bug-repellent, then decided he couldn’t spare the time. He wanted to be all settled in before it got dark so that he could see who showed up, rather than be seen himself. If whoever was watching the Treasure house was the same person who’d been spying on him when he’d first moved here for good, they’d be coming nightly for at least the first few weeks.

  At first Valenti thought that the fratellanza had caught up with him, but when no one made any moves to take him down, he put that fear aside. What had driven the hidden watcher, he still didn’t know. Curiosity, he supposed. Whoever or whatever it was, it was like a wild animal in some respects. He’d never caught more than shadowy glimpses of it himself, and once he’d made a concerted effort to flush it out, the watcher didn’t come around his place anymore.

  He wondered, not for the first time, if there were some connection between the watcher and the music that came drifting out of the woods from behind his house; wondered as well if he were the only person who heard it. He didn’t know anyone in the area well enough to ask. What he didn’t need was to start people talking about how he was hearing things. There’d been enough talk when he’d come here to stay for good instead of his usual couple of weeks a year. That talk had long since died down and he wasn’t about to put himself into public scrutiny all over again.

  But that music did more than intrigue him. He thought about it often—especially during the winter when it was seldom heard. Spring was the best time—spring and the long evenings of summer. It tapered out again come fall, and after Halloween it was mostly just a memory. Valenti was carrying around too many memories, but thinking of the music always made the others easier to bear.

  Close to Ali’s house, he slipped into the woods to the right of the road and worked his way around to the trees that looked on to the back of the house. He stood there studying the building and its yard. To his right, the hulk of their ruined barn grew dark with shadows. He could see figures move across the windows in the house. Insects hummed in the air. The twilight grew rapidly, throwing the house and lawn into sharp relief before the shadows merged to become one pool of darkness. Over the western trees, the sun lingered for a few moments longer then dropped from sight. The air was filled with a clean, spring night scent.

  Valenti began to move closer to the house, then paused and cocked his head. A whisper of sound… It came shimmering through the darkness, a breathy and low music, achingly beautiful. Valenti gripped the head of his cane with a white-knuckled hand and slowly lowered himself to the ground. There was a different quality to the piping tonight.

  Hear me, it called to him. Find me.

  Leaning his head against the rough-barked trunk of a tree, all he could do was listen.

  * * *

  In her bedroom overlooking the backyard, Ali was busy putting her books in alphabetical order. She’d been sloppy boxing them up before the move and no
w she had to pay for it. Up to the S’s now, she was puzzling over her Thomas Burnett Swann books. Wolfwinter was gone. She’d searched high and low for it but couldn’t find it. It was the only one of Swann’s books that she hadn’t yet read; she’d only just found a copy—in mint condition—in a secondhand book shop before they left Ottawa and had been looking forward to reading it.

  That was the problem with moving, she thought. Every time they’d moved, one or two of her books disappeared—usually the middle book in a trilogy or something really hard to find, like this Swann title. Frustrated, she went to sit by her window and stared through the screen at the darkness beyond. A light cool breeze blew on her cheek.

  She was listening on her Sony Walkman to a cassette of Hungarian violin music by John Owczarek. That was something else her mother worried about—the fact that Ali’s tastes followed her mother’s so much, rather than what was popular for her age group. It was no use trying to tell Frankie different, Ali had realized long ago. Her mother just liked to worry about things.

  The cassette ended and she took off the earphones. Unclipping the Walkman from her belt, she laid it and the earphones on the nightstand by her bed. She was about to go back to organizing her books—incomplete Swann collection and all—when she heard music coming from somewhere.

  It wasn’t the stereo downstairs; her mother was taking a nap and there weren’t any neighbors near enough to be its source, so where was the music coming from? And such music. Distant, quiet, but so immediate you could almost touch it. Something inside her stirred awake as she listened to it.

  She stared out the window until she began to feel confined. Then she got up and made her way downstairs and out the back door. She wanted to hear what the music sounded like from outside.

  * * *

  If Valenti rarely dreamed before moving to Lanark County, Frankie was just the opposite. Her nights were like film festivals, her dreams showing back to back until morning. All that was missing were the credits.

  Her dreams seemed so real that sometimes she carried the memories and emotions evoked by them over into her waking life. She might dream of Ali doing something horrible to her, then she’d wake up and treat the poor kid like shit. Ali, sweetheart that she was, knew enough to stay out of her way on mornings like that, but it didn’t make Frankie feel any less guilty about it.

  She hadn’t meant to fall so deeply asleep after dinner, but the couch seemed to gather her up and take her away. OD-ing on all the fresh air, she thought as her eyelids grew too heavy to keep open and she drifted off. The nap thickened into sleep. She burrowed closer against the back of the couch, her eyes beginning to move rapidly behind her eyelids as she dreamed….

  From a formless place, she found herself standing in the front hallway of the new house. She could hear something moving upstairs, something too heavy to be Ali, but so far as she knew, Ali was up there by herself. There was a heavy clomp, clomp, clomp on the hardwood floors. Biting at her lower lip, Frankie moved slowly toward the stairs.

  She mounted one stair at a time, and all the while she could hear the sound of some huge thing moving around on the second floor. When she reached the landing, there was nothing to see. The sound was coming from Ali’s bedroom. What was she doing? Moving the furniture around?

  She started down the hallway, then caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye. What…? Something that seemed like a little man made of sticks was scrambling up the narrow stairs that led to the attic.

  Frankie stared after the disappearing figure, mouth open in astonishment. A cat, she thought. Or a raccoon. Somehow it got into the house, heard me coming… But it hadn’t looked like an animal. It had been stiff, and manlike in shape, if not size. Like a little monkey made of twigs.

  A crash from Ali’s room brought Frankie’s head sharply around.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” she heard Ali say crossly.

  I’m going mad, Frankie thought. She stepped quickly to the door of Ali’s bedroom, flung it open and found herself standing face to face with an enormous stag.

  * * *

  Just before he heard the door of the back porch creak open, Valenti became aware of the wind. It had been steadily building, stirring the leaves and remnants of dried autumn weeds with a crackling whisper of sound. Years of working the streets had given him an acute sixth sense. As he sat here now, feeling the wind, hearing the fey music that piped low and breathy in the distance, that same intuition began to tickle the nerves along his spine. Then he heard the porch door open and looked across the darkened lawn to see Ali step outside.

  She had her head cocked as though she were listening to something. The music. Valenti realized that she was hearing it, too. He was about to call out to her, but that hunter’s sixth sense stopped him before he did. Something. There was something…

  When he saw the stag step silently from the woods not a half-dozen yards from where he sat, the sheer wonder of its presence—its size, its silence—made his mouth go dry. His pulse began a quick tattoo as the huge beast moved slowly out onto the lawn. Ali was out there. Maybe the stag would just be spooked and take off when it caught her scent, but maybe it would charge her instead. Valenti started to stand, but then a voice called out softly from the tree above him.

  “Don’t move.”

  He looked up. Slanted cat’s eyes reflected the light from Ali’s house.

  “Madonna mia,” he muttered. The words came out in a barely audible rasp.

  But he couldn’t move now if he’d wanted to. Those eyes had done something to him. Sapped the strength from his legs so that he couldn’t stand. Stolen his voice so that he couldn’t call out a warning to Ali. The slanted eyes blinked, then dropped toward him. The owner of those eyes landed catlike beside him. Curly hair spilled from under the brim of a big floppy hat, framing a narrow foxlike face. The eyes were very close to him now, inches from his own.

  It’s just a girl, he thought. Just a kid. But her eyes weren’t a child’s eyes. They were old and worldly-wise.

  “Watch,” she said. Sitting back, she pointed out toward the lawn where the stag was drawing nearer to Ali.

  * * *

  The stag moved out from the trees and onto the lawn. Ali’s breath caught in her lungs and she trembled—first from excitement, then with a touch of fear as she realized just how far from the house she was and that the stag was drawing closer to her with each deliberate step.

  Jeez, what if it charged her? She started to back away, but suddenly the stag was looming right over her and she was too scared to move.

  “N-nice boy,” she said. She swallowed thickly. “Good boy. E-easy now…”

  The stag dipped its head, antlers bobbing with the movement, then it looked up to where the light she’d left on in her bedroom was spilling out the window. Ali didn’t want to take her gaze off the animal, but at last she too shot a quick glance up at that square of light.

  * * *

  Frankie stared at the stag. It was so close, and the light was so bright that she could make out every detail. The broad black nose, the lighter-colored hairs of its muzzle, the ruddy hair on its brow, the liquid eyes, the huge antlers lifting up to almost touch the ceiling of Ali’s bedroom. Ali…

  The stag never moved. From the attic above she heard the scurrying of what sounded like a dozen rats or squirrels crossing the floorboards up there, tiny claws clicking on the wooden surface. Frankie looked upward, then took a step back from the stag in the doorway.

  I’m going crazy, she thought.

  She remembered hearing Ali’s voice in the room. Ali scolding someone. The stag? Oh, please God, this had to be a dream. Let me wake up. The scurrying of whatever was in the attic grew louder, as though the rats or squirrels—if that was what they were, if they weren’t little stick men—were dancing. Panic reared in Frankie, a sheer terror that dwarfed any fear she’d had before. It took shape as a name that rose from deep in her chest and came out as a wail.

  “Alllliiiii!”

&n
bsp; * * *

  When she heard her mother scream Ali’s fear fled. She looked away from the yellow square of her bedroom window back toward the stag, only to find the lawn empty. She was out here by herself. But where…? She heard her mother cry out again and bolted for the house.

  * * *

  Valenti blinked. One moment the creature was there on the lawn, towering over Ali, the next it was gone and Ali was tearing across the lawn back to the house. He turned back to his own unwanted companion only to find that he, too, was now alone.

  The piping had stopped. But he heard something else. It sounded like the baying of hounds. Then he saw that the stag wasn’t quite gone. It was by the corner of the house, moving in long, springing bounds toward the road and the forest beyond it. It wasn’t gone for more than a couple of moments before a half-dozen loping shapes appeared, obviously in pursuit.

  They were dogs—big ones, Valenti thought. Then his eyesight betrayed him again. For an instant he thought he saw, not dogs, but men pursuing the stag, men in the habits of monks, or the robes of priests. He blinked and they were just dogs again, lost to his sight as they disappeared into the forest after the stag.

  Valenti wiped his brow with the sleeve of his jacket. Fercrissakes, he thought. What was going on here? He had to be going crazy. He looked up to where the girl with the slanty eyes had dropped from the lower branches of the tree, then down to where she’d crouched beside him.

  Had there been anyone there at all? The music, the stag, the girl… Slowly, he got to his feet and shook his head. He felt like he’d just broken a long fever. Looking at Ali’s house, he wondered if he should knock at the door to see if they were all right. He seemed to remember a scream….