Summerland. Michael Chabon
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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.”
“Wait!” Ethan said, as the drivers, angry now, swerved around Mr. Brown’s car and took off one after the other down the hill. “Isn’t there anything we can do—I can do—to stop it?”
“You doesn’t know magic. You doesn’t know baseball.” Mr. Brown looked at Jennifer T. “You knows a little about both of them, I reckon, but not much besides. “He shook his head. “Plus, you children. Tell me how you going to stop Ragged Rock?”
Ethan and Jennifer T. had no reply to this. Mr. Brown rolled his window all the way and drove off. Ethan and Jennifer T. started the long walk back to her house, which was closer to Southend than Ethan’s. For a long time they didn’t say anything. What can you say, after all, about the end of the world? Ethan was deeply disturbed by the memory of the ruined Birchwood, and by the thought of all those ferishers carted off to be made into horrible little grey bat things. And every time he closed his eyes, he saw the tip of a little red tail, disappearing into a world of shadows. But he could not help being cheered by the fact that when asked, Mr. Brown had not said, There is nothing to be done. Merely that he didn’t think there was anything Ethan and Jennifer T. could do.
Ethan tried to imagine how the conversation would go when he tried to explain to his father about the ferishers, and Ragged Rock. Few things made Mr. Feld truly