Chapter Four
Michael barely remembered lurching up to the room after dinner, and he had no memory at all of falling asleep. But he awoke at an unknown hour, in complete darkness, to hear the room door open, footsteps, and the clump of something heavy on the mica flooring.
My roommate, he thought. Savarin. He dozed off again with a vague wonder as to what sort of Queequeg the Realm could conjure.
At dawn, his eyes flew open and he stared up at the bulges between the slats on the bunk above. He rolled over beneath the scratchy covers and stared at a trunk over against one wall, beside the washstand. The trunk had been fashioned of the ubiquitous wicker, equipped with heavy cloth straps.
He hadn’t dreamed at all during the night. Sleep had excavated a pit in his life, a time when he might as well have been dead. Nevertheless, he felt rested. He was contemplating getting out of bed when someone knocked on the door. Simultaneously, a bushy-haired head peered over the edge of the top bunk.
“Light’s up,” Risky said behind the door. He heard her go down the hall.
“Good morning,” said Michael’s roommate. He was about forty, with a pronounced nose, graying brown hair, and large bright eyes. His withdrawn chin sat on a thin neck with almost no Adam’s apple.
“Good morning,” Michael said.
“Ah, American?” the man asked.
Michael nodded.
“My name is Henrik Savarin. You’re in my bunk.”
“Michael Perrin. I’m sorry.”
“From?”
“Los Angeles.”
Savarin nimbly stepped down the bunk ladder and landed on the floor with a soft plop. He had slept in his brown pants and loose-fitting shirt, and had wrapped his feet in felt tied with lengths of rope.
“Short blanket on top,” he explained. He untied the knots in the ropes and pulled off the felt, then slipped his feet into canvas shoes without socks. “Musician?”
Michael shook his head. “Student, I suppose.”
“A scholar!” Savarin grinned and slid his palms down his pants legs in a useless attempt to remove wrinkles. “In a land full of those crazy about music, a scholar like myself.” He held out his hand. “Pleased to acquaint with you.”
Michael shook Savarin’s hand. “I’m not really a scholar,” he said.
“They pry, you know.” Savarin pointed his nose at the closed door. “Myself, I regard it as most impolite to pry. So no questions for now. But...” He raised his hand and smiled again. “I’ll tell you. I study the people here, I study the Sidhe and their languages, and I sometimes teach. In my day I taught music, but played a piano only poorly. Still, music caught me. I crossed, as they say.”
Michael dressed quickly and followed Savarin downstairs into the dining room. The morning sun revealed that the brick walls were covered with faded hand-painted flowers, arranged in decorative rows in imitation of wallpaper. The dinner of the night before had been cleared without a trace. Only Savarin, Michael and the old man Wolfer were in the dining room. Wolfer ignored them. He sat at his own small table near a window and slowly ate his porridge, contemplating the indirect morning light with raised eyebrows.
Savarin held his spoon on the table upright in one fist as Risky dropped a starchy sphere of porridge into his bowl, then poured thin milk over it from a clay pitcher. She did the same for Michael. The porridge smelled faintly of horse corral, but it didn’t taste bad.
“Lamia wants you this morning,” she reminded Michael before returning to the kitchen. Her tone was aloof, as if he were no longer a curiosity or an asset to the inn, and therefore no longer counted for much. Savarin grinned at Michael and cocked his head to one side. “You have an acquaintance with the large woman at the Isomage’s house?”
“That’s the way I came here,” he said. Savarin stopped eating.
“I’d heard the rumor,” he said, frowning. “Most unusual. From the house, you mean?”
“From the gate in the back.”
“Most unusual indeed.” Savarin said nothing more until Risky came to take the empty bowls. She removed the half full bowl from under Wolfer’s spoon and carried it away, whistling tunelessly.
“Did you know,” Savarin said, his voice loud for Risky’s benefit, “that the Sidhe feel little affection for humans, one of their many reasons, because we often whistle, as our hostess does this moment?”
Michael shook his head. “Who are the Shee?”
“Alyons and his coursers, among many others. The masters of the Realm. Very sensitive. Whistling irritates them greatly. Any human music. I believe if you had whistled your way across a Faerie path when they lived on Earth, they would just as soon have flattened you with barrow stones as said good night. Angry about the despoiling of their art, you see.”
Michael nodded. “Who is Lamia?”
Savarin shrugged. “You know more than I. A large woman who lives in the Isomage’s house.”
“Who is the Isomage?”
“A sorcerer. He angered the Sidhe far more than someone who simply whistles.” Savarin smiled. Risky returned with a pitcher of water, which she poured into clay mugs, setting one before Wolfer, one before Savarin, and one before Michael. Savarin tsked her and shook a finger. “The tune,” he said. “Bad luck.”
Risky agreed with a nod. “Bad habit,” she said.
“The Shee sound like they—” Michael began, but Savarin interrupted.
“Pronounce it correctly. It’s spelled S-I-D-H-E, from the ancient Gaelic—or the ancients Gaels heard the Faer calling themselves by that name. They pronounce it somewhere between ‘Shee’ and ‘Sthee.’”
“Yes,” Michael said.
“Try it.”
He tried it. “The Shthee—”
“Close. Try again.”
“The Sidhe—”
“That’s it.”
“—sound like they’re pretty cruel.”
“And difficult. But we do, after all, intrude, and I’ve been told they came to the Realm to escape humanity. There’s been enmity between us for a long time.”
“But no one in Euterpe wanted to come here.”
“All the worse, no? Do you speak German?”
“No.”
Savarin smiled valiantly, but it was obvious he was disappointed. “So odd,” he said. “Only one or two German-speakers in the Realm, and yet Germany was so advanced, musically.” He leaned across the table. “So you don’t know much about Lamia?”
Michael shook his head.
“Learn as much as you can. Carefully. I hear she has a temper. And when—if—you come back, tell me.”
“If?”
Savarin waved the word away. “You’ll return. I have a feeling about you...you’re most unusual.”
Michael left the hotel a few minutes later. Brecker followed him into the street and handed him a frayed cloth bag with a piece of bread in it. “I hear Lamia’s larder is empty...usually,” he said. “Good luck.”
Michael went back down the road he had taken the day before, his heart pounding and his hands cold. A small crowd gathered at the village outskirts to watch him leave.
He neither saw nor met any Sidhe riders. He saw nothing moving, in fact; neither animals on the ground nor birds in the air. The sky gleamed pale enameled blue above, and the muddy horizon was relieved by patches of orange, similar to a layer of smog. The sun was warm but not hot, not very bright in fact—he could look at it almost indefinitely without hurting his eyes.
Yard by yard he returned to the house, feeling as if he were enclosed in a transparent bowl that prevented the Realm from reaching in and making itself real to him, and likewise prevented his thoughts from reaching out to encompass what he saw.
Near the path leading to the house, his vision narrowed. He focused on the front door, which hung half open as if he were expected. He walked down the path.
Pausing on the porch, he took a deep breath and felt his chest hitch. The oppressive gleam of the sky-bowl seemed to keep even the air from his lungs. He swallowed at the air again, with little better result.
His room. His books. Saturday afternoon movies on TV. Mother and Father. Golda Waltiri with a tear running down her cheek and more swelling up in her eyes. Michael felt hollow, full of echoes.
He heard horses coming. He turned to look; the door jerked wide and a thick arm reached out to grab him, pulling him inside before he could even yelp. Lamia’s grip was painfully strong. She let him go, then took hold of his coat collar and lifted him level with her head, peering at him intensely through her tiny dough-wrapped eyes. “Into the closet!” she whispered harshly. She half dragged, half carried him across the floor and opened a narrow closet door behind the grand staircase, thrusting him inside. He fell back against soft dusty things and tried to hold back tears, shaking so hard his teeth chattered.
Through the closet door, he heard footsteps. The front door shut with a click, as if just enough energy had been expended to bring it completely closed, and no more.
He heard Sidhe voices again, commanding and melodic, speaking in a haunting, half familiar language. Lamia, her tone softened, subservient, replied in English. “I’ve felt nothing.” Another voice continued at some length, fluid and high-pitched but distinctively masculine.
“No one’s been here, no one’s passed through,” Lamia said. “I tell you, I felt nothing. I don’t care what’s happening in town. They’re all fools, you know that better than I.”
Michael reached out in the darkness to get leverage to stand. His hand touched rough fabric, then something soft and smooth which he couldn’t identify, like leather but thinner and supple as silk.
The Sidhe voices took on a snake-like threatening tone.
“I remain at my station, I watch,” Lamia said. “You force me to stay here, you keep my sister at the gates; we are your slaves. How can we defy you?”
Michael picked out one word in a rider’s response: Clarkham.
“He has not come here,” Lamia said. That ended the conversation. The front door swung open and a sound resembling wind announced the rider’s exit. Michael felt for a doorknob on the inside of the closet door. There was none.
Lamia opened the closet. “Come out,” she said. He blinked and took a step forward, tripping over something soft and tough. Before he could look back in the closet and see what it contained, she whirled him around and slammed the door shut. “They’ll raid the town tonight, looking for somebody. They won’t raid Halftown; they never do. So I’m sending you there. First, though, listen to me and answer some questions.”
Michael shrugged out from under her hand and backed away. “I have questions, too,” he said.
“By what right? You’ve come here, you should know as much as there is to know.”
“But I don’t!” His voice ended in a high wail of frustration. The tears came freely now. “I don’t know anything, not even where I am!”
“In Sidhedark,” Lamia said, turning from him. “In the Faerie Shadow. The Realm,” she continued, more gently. “You are no longer on Earth.”
“I’ve been told that. But what is this place?”
“Not Earth,” Lamia murmured. She walked ahead, her bulk rippling. “Follow me.”
“Can I go home?” he shouted after her, hanging back.
“Not this way. Perhaps not at all.”
Suddenly deflated, Michael followed her down a broad hallway, into the burnt-out wing of the house.