Wayfarer

EPILOGUE

It was a ruined little place, and she found it almost by accident, wandering aimlessly under black-barked elms. She’d had some vague idea of finding the train station again, but this town turned her around, and the terror inside her head had robbed her of much conscious thought. The sedatives they’d given her at the hospital wore off only slowly, and when she surfaced, weaving unsteadily in another girl’s old, too-small, scuffed maryjanes, silver tinkles breaking free of their straps, she found herself staring at a blasted trellis.

Behind it was a scattered path of bony chips, gleaming in the dark. She plodded up the path, her mouth working slowly, her hair hanging in her face.

There was a dilapidated brownstone shack, more like a two-story shed, queerly melted and sagging as if acid had poured over the bricks. It smelled faintly of sugar and feathers, and she gave it a wide berth. Something in her recognized the danger—some aching space where once there had been a wellspring of color and light.

The well was dry now, drained by—

—Mommy?—

The thought mercifully fled as soon as it arrived, and she found herself crouching on the back step of the shed. This door was blasted off its hinges too, and the rustling inside pulled her forward. There was something not quite . . . right, here, something she might have remembered, if she could remember anything at all with her head a mass of whirling noise and hurt.

Inside the cavernous ruin, a carved bench and leather straps. There was something trapped there, a vaguely human shape rippling and bulging. For a long while the girl stared, her mouth slightly open and some faint color coming back into her cheeks.

It wore a blue velvet coat. She took a step forward.

Another.

The leather split along old chewed seams, and the thing thumped forward. It hit the sagging, rotten, runneled floor with a thud that echoed all through her, and she found herself on her knees beside it as the blue velvet roiled, its tanned breeches twisting and jerking.

She seized its velvet-clad arms and gained her feet in an unsteady rush. Dragging, the heaviness bumping and thudding, somehow trying to push itself along, they spilled through the back door and fell, and as they did the wellspring inside her roared to life. The hot flood hurt as it tore free, and the air was full of high crystal singing for a fleeting instant.

Stalk and sand became flesh. The scarecrow sagged, and his mouth finished its endless yawning scream. Blue eyes flashed, and the girl in his arms struggled. Her cry was swallowed as his own rose, and her thrashing grew more frantic.

“Stop! Stop!” He sucked in a huge breath, living lungs full of air now, and his grip on her tightened. “I am not—I am not her!”

It was the one thing that could have pierced her frantic thrashing. She went limp, boneless, and the damp hot pressure on her forehead was lips, printed over and over again on her sweating skin.

“My life,” he kept repeating. “My life, you have found me.”

The shack behind them folded down with a rumbling splintering sound. Three locked chambers upstairs full of diamond-twinkling dry-drained cocoons crumbled into sand, for the thing that had fed upon them and kept them wrapped in gossamer cerements had lost its last hold upon the physical world.

Sticks melted, and its entire sagging shape released a hot breath, a long, rank, foul exhalation as a black cloud rose from its pit. Tented together like drunks, they reeled to the bottom of the garden between ancient empty beehives, and there her strength failed. She folded down into the grass and he fell beside her. They slept tangled together like children under a tree next to a heap of simmering refuse, where another boy had called over a fence to the girl he loved so desperately. The morning dew coated them, but they did not care, and when they woke on a bright summer morning it was as if they had always been thus, adrift in a world with only each other.

The next morning, he found the ring in the ruins, and held it up. A glittering circle of silver, a sapphire that flashed blue in the sunshine. “At least tell me your name.” He poked at the debris with his foot. “Do you know that? Your name?”

His rescuer, hugging her knees as she crouched on the bottom step, shook her head. “I don’t . . . no. Nothing.”

“The spider here no doubt stole it, as she stole mine.” Long and lanky, his blue eyes squinted against the sun he had not seen in a lifetime, his straw-yellow hair disarranged, the boy knelt. “It matters little. You are not alone.”

A disbelieving smile broke over her thin, pinched face, and the ring flashed once more in benediction. He slid it onto her finger, and when she tipped forward into his arms, the scarecrow boy closed his eyes and held her close.

Rita-no-more, who no longer remembered the mother who had not wanted her or the orphanage’s terror, finally began to weep.

finis