Summerland

4 The Middling

AN UNEXPECTED RESULT of Ethan Feld’s determination to become a catcher was the discovery, by Jennifer T. Rideout, of a native gift for pitching. The two friends met, on the morning after the loss to the Reds, at the ball field behind Clam Island Middle School, which was closer to either of their houses than Jock MacDougal Field. Ethan brought his father’s old mitt and, in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, Peavine’s book on catching. Jennifer T. brought an infielder’s glove that she had turned up someplace, and the baseball that Ringfinger Brown had given her. When Jennifer T. rocked back and let it fly, it came whistling and fizzing towards Ethan’s mitt as if it were powered by steam.

“Ouch!” cried Ethan, the first time the ancient baseball slapped against the heel of his mitt, sending a crackle all the way up his arm to his shoulder. It hurt so much that he did not at first notice that he had held on to the ball. “Hey. You can throw.”

“Huh,” said Jennifer T., looking at her left hand with new interest.

“That was a fastball.”

“Was it?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

She nodded. “Cool.” She waved her glove at him and he half rose, and arced the ball back to her. His throw was a little high but close enough. She caught it, fingered the ball, then concealed it once more inside her glove.

“So, catcher,” she said. “Call the pitch.”

“Can you throw the slider?”

“I’d like to see if I can,” said Jennifer T. “I know how to put my fingers. I saw it on Tom Seaver’s Total Baseball Video.” She checked an imaginary runner on first, then turned back to Ethan. He put two fingers down, extending them in an inverted V towards the ground. He was calling for the slider. Jennifer T. nodded, her black ponytail flickering behind her. Her wide, dark eyes were unblinking, and she narrowed them in concentration. She reared back again, her right leg lifting and flexing in a high jabbing kick, then stepped down onto her right foot, bringing her whole body forwards and lifting her back leg until it stuck straight out behind her and hung there, wavering. Ethan saw the snap of her hand on the hinge of her wrist. Her fingers blossomed outward and the ball flew towards him in a long, straight line. At the very last second it broke abruptly downward, and he just barely got his glove down and under it in time. By the time you got your bat, if you had been the batter, to the spot at which you hoped your bat would meet it, the ball would have long since dropped away.

“Nasty,” Ethan said. He had a sudden protective feeling towards Jennifer T., an urge to encourage and reassure her. This was not because she was a girl, or his friend, or the child of a scattered and troubled family with a father who was in jail yet again, but because he was a catcher, and she was his pitcher, and it was his job to ease her along. “The bottom fell right out of it.”

“You caught it real nice,” said Jennifer T. “And you had your eyes open all the way.”

Ethan felt a flush of warmth fill his chest, but it was short lived, for in the next instant there was a sharp snapping in the blackberry brambles that made the edge of near right field such a terrifying place to find yourself during a game of kickball or softball. Cutbelly appeared, stumbling onto the field. He limped towards Ethan and Jennifer T., dragging a leg behind him. His coat was matted and filthy, and his sharp little face bled from three different cuts around the cheeks and throat. On his snout and on the tips of his ears there lay a dusting of what looked to Ethan like frost. The glint of mockery was all but extinguished from his eyes.

“Ho, piglets,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “I’m very thirsty. Thirsty. Thirsty and cold.” He shivered, and hugged himself, then brushed the powdery ice from his ears. “I scampered here much too quickly.”

Ethan dug a half-empty squeeze bottle out of his knapsack and passed it to the werefox. Then he took off his sweatshirt and draped it over Cutbelly’s furry shoulders. Jennifer T. had not moved from the pitcher’s mound. Her glove dangled by her side. Her mouth hung open. Cutbelly tipped back the squeeze bottle and drained it in a single draught. He wiped his mouth on the back of his bloodied arm.

“Thank you,” he said. “And now, perhaps it may be for the last time, I’m to ask you to hurry along with me. You’re needed.”

“What can I do?” Ethan said. “I can’t fight. I can’t play baseball. I can’t do squat.”

Cutbelly sagged, and sank to the dirt of the infield. He buried his face in his hands. “I know it,” he said, rubbing at his long snout. “I told them as much my own self. But we have something less than a choice. It may be too late already as it is.” He held out a tiny paw to Ethan, who pulled him to his feet. “We must cross over, now. The other piglet, too, it’s unfortunate she saw me, but there’s no helping it now.”

For the first time since Cutbelly’s appearance, Ethan remembered Jennifer T. She was still standing on the pitcher’s mound, a little behind the rubber now, as if to keep something between her and Cutbelly. Her mouth was twisted into a strange half-smile but her eyes were wide and empty. Ethan saw that she was afraid.

“It’s OK,” Ethan said, using his newfound catcher’s voice. “He’s a friend of mine. I tried to tell you yesterday, but—”

“Little people,” Jennifer T. said, in a thick voice.

“—but you didn’t believe me.”

“She believed you,” Cutbelly said. “Come on, girl. See what you’ll see.”

THEY LEAPED ACROSS to the Summerlands through deeper shadows than Ethan remembered, the frost of the crossing streaking their hair and dusting the brims of their caps. The darkness was only partial but thick and deep. It reminded him of the false night that had fallen on Colorado Springs during a solar eclipse, one winter day back when he was in the first grade. Cutbelly hurried along as quickly as he could on his wounded leg, looking all around him as they went, his bright orange eyes darting from left to right. From time to time he would stop, and motion for the children to do the same with a curt gesture, and stand motionless, his long ears quavering, studying the air for a sound they alone could detect. Though Ethan was filled with questions, Cutbelly refused to listen to them, or to reply. He would not say how he had been injured, or what was happening in the Birchwood.

“Two thirds of all the shadows you are seeing around you are not real shadows at all,” was all he would say, in a low whisper. “Try to keep that in mind, piglets.”

They looked around; the shadows twisted like smoke, billowed like curtains, dangled like Spanish moss from the limbs of birch trees; then they looked again and all was still. Jennifer T. bumped up against Ethan and they walked that way for a while, shoulder to shoulder, holding each other up as they lumbered after the werefox through the silent woods. Great slow wheels of crows turned in the grey skies overhead. Rain was falling all around. And then they stepped out of the trees, into the clearing where Ethan had met Cinquefoil and the other Clam Island ferishers, to find that the final lines of the first paragraph of the last chapter in the history of the world had already been written.

“Too late!” Cutbelly cried. “Too late!”

The clearing was filled with grey smoke and hissing jets of steam. The turf was trodden and torn. And the Birchwood itself was gone; all the trees had been cut down and apparently hauled away. All that was left of the great mass of tall white trees were splintered stumps and tall piles of stripped branches. The beautiful little ballpark, made from the bones of a giant, lay in ruins, the towers torn down and scattered, the stands collapsed in on themselves. In the midst of the field that had once surrounded the ballpark, churned up in a muddy tumult of earth, lay an overturned vehicle of some kind, a twisted hulk of black iron with heavy leather treads, cruelly spiked. Here and there around this ruined hulk lay a number of small bodies. They might have been children, or even ferishers, but for their pale grey skin.

In all this expanse of waste and wreckage nothing was moving but the twisting curls of steam. Except—

“Hey,” Ethan said.” What’s that?”

Down on the beach, where the ferishers had gone to consult Johnny Speakwater, one final skirmish was taking place. A ferisher stood on top of the great driftwood log, while around him crowded half a dozen winged creatures that Ethan recognised, even from a distance, as the same one that had grinned at him through his bedroom window.

Cutbelly cried out. “That’s Cinquefoil! The skrikers are on him!”

“Skrikers,” Ethan said. “What are they?”

“Ferishers changed by the Changer,” Cutbelly said. “They hate what they are and even worse what they once were. Help him, piglet!”

“What should I do?” Ethan said. “Just tell me.”

Cutbelly turned to him, his black-tipped snout quivering, his eyes wide and lit with what looked to Ethan like a surprising glimmer of hope.

“Search your heart, piglet!” he said. “You were dug up by old Chiron himself! The wight that scouted up Achilles! Arthur! Toussaint and Crazy Horse! You’ve got to have the stuff in you somewhere, piglet or no!”

Ethan felt something catch inside him at Cutbelly’s words, like the scrape of a match against the rough black stripe of a matchbook. He looked around, something bright and dense and hot kindling inside him. He started, trotting at first, towards the beach.

“Ethan!” Jennifer T. said.

He looked back at her. She was standing behind Cutbelly. Her gaze was as blank and strange as before, but now the crooked half-smile was gone.

“What are you going to do?”

Ethan shrugged.” I guess I’m supposed to save him,” he said. He didn’t really believe that he could do it, in spite of Cutbelly’s words. But he felt he ought to try. After all, it was just a question of saving one ferisher, not a whole tribe. Maybe he could do something to draw them off, and give the ferisher a chance to recoup his strength. He was clearly an excellent fighter, much better than Ethan could ever hope to be.

Ethan ran towards the driftwood log. Cinquefoil leapt and ducked, thrust and slashed, hacking at a swarm of the bat-things with a long, wicked knife. His hair blew back from his head and his knife arm lashed and flailed and held steady. The sight was inspiring. That was a hero. That was how you did it. Ethan ran up, yelling and screaming, hoping to distract the skrikers for a moment. Cinquefoil turned, and smiled faintly, and then three of the skrikers looked Ethan’s way. They grinned yellow grins, and the bridges of their sharp little noses wrinkled with a rank pleasure that snuffed out the little flame of purpose which Cutbelly’s words had kindled in Ethan. They flew at Ethan, scattering themselves around him, their wings jerking and spasming. Ethan saw that the wings were not a part of them but queer machines, affixed to their backs by means of brass-red screws. Ethan ran past them, ducking underneath their spindly legs, and then when he turned they were on him.

He looked around for something to use to defend himself, but all he could see were the spiky stumps of broken limbs that jutted from the driftwood log. Most of them were much too short to be of any use, but there was one that was longer, and nearly perfectly straight. He clambered up onto the log and grabbed hold of the limb, and pulled. It made a dry, cracking sound, but held firm.

“Glad you could make it,” Cinquefoil said, and then there was a muffled explosion, and the ferisher cried out and tumbled from the log. One of the skrikers, Ethan noticed, seemed to have lost its head, and was wheeling crazily around in the air. Cinquefoil must have decapitated it just before he himself fell. The skrikers hovered over his motionless body, now, poking and prodding it with their steel-tipped toes. Ethan threw his weight against the limb, putting his whole shoulder into it. With a great crunching snap it broke loose, and came away free in his hand.

It was about the size and length of a baseball bat, more or less straight, but knotty and weathered grey. He lifted it, and hefted it, and gripped it at one end in both hands. It felt good and solid. He swung it over his shoulder and came after the skrikers that were molesting the dead ferisher. One of them reached up and took hold of its own ears, one in each hand. Its grin grew wider and yellower. Ethan saw that its teeth were made from jagged shards of what looked like quartz. There was a series of ratcheting clicks, a nasty wet sound of ripping. And then the face with the dirty crystal grin was no longer atop the neck at all. It perched on the skriker’s left hand like an old grey mouldy peach. The skriker had removed its own head, and was cackling at him now from this weird vantage. The severed neck was tipped with a black ball that gleamed like a bead of wet ink. Ethan recoiled, and then the bat-thing reared back and tossed its head at him. Without thinking he swung his big stick at the head as it spun towards him.

“Breathe!” he heard Jennifer T. call.

He kept his eyes open, too: and connected. There was a burst of white flame, a whoomp shot through with a crackle, and a sweet, unpleasant smell like burnt cheese. Another head came spinning at him, and he swung, and there was another sharp blazing whoomp. He fought off three more of the head-bombs, swinging wild and hard, and then, it seemed, there was a power failure in Ethan’s head somewhere.

RED AND BLACK. Blood and sky. Jennifer T. was looking down at him, with the heavy sky spread out behind her, a nasty cut on her cheek. Then a gamy, butcher-shop smell: Cutbelly. And finally, something jabbing at his cheek: Cutbelly, again, poking him and poking him with one of his sharp little fingers.

“Wake up, piglet!”

Ethan lay on his back, in the doomed green grass of the Summerlands.

“I’m awake,” he declared, sitting up.

“Come,” Cutbelly said. “The Rade has carried away the Boar Tooth mob. They have felled all the trees on either side of the gall. We have only a short while to leap through or be forced to find another route back. That could take a while. Come! Failed or not, we must get out of here.”

Failed. The word resounded in his mind. He had struck out, swinging. Some kind of marvellous opportunity had been granted to him, and before he could even begin to understand what was happening to him, he had blown his chance. He could already taste the regret of the lost moment, how it would haunt him for the rest of his life.

“Will they—are they all dead?” he said. “What about Cinquefoil?”

“I’m all right,” said a gruff voice behind him. “You get back to the Middling now. No telling what Coyote’s up to there.”

Ethan rolled over and saw the little chief crouching on the ground beside him. He was filthy, and his hair dripped pale streaks down his grimy cheeks. The coat of rough mail he wore over his buckskin had been slashed through and through. It hung in tinkling strips from his shoulders. His tan leggings sagged, his feathered cap sat askew, its savage green feather snapped in two. And his quiver of arrows was empty.

“I’m in yer debt,” the ferisher said, sounding unhappy about it. “Nice work with that stick o’ yers.”

“You were amazing.”

“I weren’t nothing. I done nothing. I saved nothing and no one and all was lost.”

“Did he get your… your family?”

“Those in the mob what aren’t my sister or my brother are my child, my mother, or my aunt,” he said. His voice broke with sorrow. “ And all o’them ta be changed. Twisted inta the things ya saw, them skrikers.”

“Greylings, too,” the werefox pointed out, in a morose tone. That must be the name of those horrible little grey children whose bodies littered the field.

“And greylings.” Cinquefoil shuddered. “And then sent back, no doubt, ta take their revenge on the chief that failed ta keep ’em whole.”

There was that word again: failed.

“I wish I could have done more,” Ethan said. “We were too late.”

“There weren’t nothing ya coulda done. Coyote and the Rade, they grown stronger and swifter in the last one thousand years, as we have grown scattereder and few.”

“Did he get them all? Everyone?”

“I don’t know, but I fear it’s so. Go, g’wan back. I mean to take off after them a ways, see if some got left behind.”

“We’ll come with you,” said Jennifer T. “We’ll help you find them if they’re there.”

But the ferisher shook his head.

“Go,” he said. “Ya heard Cutbelly. There ain’t much time.”

So they said goodbye to the little chief, and he turned and wandered through the charred ruin of the Birchwood off into the green fields beyond. Ethan could see that the fields were rutted with deep muddy tracks, as if some kind of heavy vehicles had passed that way. The farther away he got, the faster his pace became, and he was soon lost to view in the dim green haze of the Summerlands.

“Come on,” Cutbelly said. They turned back towards the ordinary forest of firs and pines through which they had come. Ethan followed after Jennifer T., who followed the scurrying shadowtail. They had not been walking long when Ethan became aware of a low, steady rustling in the trees around them.

“What’s that noise?” Jennifer T. said.

Cutbelly’s earlier warning, about the shadows’ not being shadows, had made little sense to Ethan at the time. Now he understood. The thick shadows that filled the woods with the half-night of an eclipse had detached themselves from the trees and hollows. They were following him and Jennifer T. and Cutbelly. They fluttered in great gauzy sheets, now drifting like a piece of rubbish caught by the wind, now flapping steadily with great vulture wingbeats. They passed through the limbs and trunks of trees, some weird cross between fishnet and smoke. And though Cutbelly was leading them as fast as his short legs could go, scurrying back to the world where such things were not, the false shadows were gaining on them.

They ran for home, so fast that snowdust began to drift and swirl around them in glittering white gusts. Cold burned the inside of Ethan’s nose. The air in his ears tinkled like ice. Ethan saw Jennifer T. trip over a root, and go flying forwards. He stopped and reached down to grab her hand. As he did so he heard a soft flutter of drapery, a curtain parting, and looked up to see one of the false shadows settle down over him and Jennifer T. Burning cold, a smell like rust on a cold iron skillet. Ethan reached up to fight it off and saw that he was still holding his stick. It caught on something inside the shadow, something at once springy and hard, and when he yanked it out there was a sickening wet sound. The shadow faded at once and was gone. Jennifer T. was back on her feet by now. She grabbed Ethan by the elbow and pulled him along the path they had been following. There was no sign of Cutbelly ahead, and Ethan looked back and saw, to his horror, that one of the false shadows had taken, lazily, to the sky. From its shifting silk depths there protruded the white tip of a bushy red tail.

There was silence, and Ethan thought, They got him. Then there was the rumble of an engine in the near distance.

“Harley,” said Jennifer T. “Big one.”

They were standing at the edge of the Clam Island Highway. They were home. The motorcycle roared downhill and then pulled onto the line for the Bellingham ferry.

“How’d we get here?” Jennifer T. said.

There was Zorro’s Mexican restaurant, the ferry dock, and the long green smudge of the mainland. Somehow they had come out of the Summerlands at the southern tip of Clam Island. The Harley-Davidson growled on down the hill to the lanes where you waited for the next ferry. A moment later they heard another engine, and a car appeared, a big, old, finned monster, peppermint white with red roof and trim. It slowed as it passed by Ethan and Jennifer T., then stopped.

Mr. Chiron Brown rolled down his window. He looked surprised but not, Ethan would have said, happy to see the children. He shook his head.

“Well,” he said. His eyes were shining and for a moment Ethan thought he might be about to cry. “Let this be a lesson. Don’t never listen to a crazy old man when the old Coyote be workin’ one of his thangs.” A tear rolled down his cheek. “I let them poor creatures down.”

No, Ethan thought. I let them down. “I struck out,” he said.

“Nah,” Mr. Brown said. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s like you said. You too young. In the old days, not so long ago, we used to be able to afford to bring ’em along a little bit. Season ’em up. Hell, it took U. S. Grant most of his natural life to finally find his stroke.”

“Hey, where are you going?” Jennifer T. said. A pickup truck appeared at the top of Ferrydock Hill and came down towards them, slowing as it neared the white Cadillac. “Are you leaving?”

Ringfinger admitted that he was headed for home.

“Where is your home?” Ethan said.

“Oh, I doesn’t have no fixed abode, not here in the Middlin’. But lately I’ve been livin’ down in Tacoma.”

“What’s the Middling?” Jennifer T. said.

“The Middlin’? You standin’in it. It’s everythin’. All this here local world you livin’ in.”

The pickup had settled in behind Mr. Brown’s car. Its driver tried to be patient for a few seconds, then began irritably to honk. Mr. Brown ignored or seemed not to hear. Another car rolled in from the top of the hill, with a third right behind it.

“So is it… is it all over?” Ethan said.

“Well, I ain’t as up on my mundology as I ought to be, which is a word signifyin’ the study of the Worlds. I ain’t sure how many galls we started out with, back before Coyote’s mischief commenced. And I couldn’t say how many we got left now. But there wasn’t never very many, even in the glory times. And Coyote been hackin’ and choppin’ on ’em for a long, long time now.”

“And so now, what? Now the whole universe is going to come to an end?”

“It always was goin’ to,” Mr. Brown said. “Now it’s just happenin’ a little bit sooner.”

“Ethan? Jennifer T.?” The driver of the second car, behind the pickup truck, had rolled down her window now. “You kids all right?”

“Yeah,” said Ethan and Jennifer T. Ethan saw how they must look to Mrs. Baldwin, one of the secretaries in the office at school, hanging around the southend ferry dock, talking to some weird old guy in a Cadillac.

“Well,” Mr. Brown said, rolling his window up most of the way.” Look like I’m holdin’ things up.” He put the car in gear with a lurch. The big engine coughed and roared. “You kids enjoy the rest of your summer.”