Dangerous Playthings Page 2

  *

  Three years vanished. Merkinder did not know where they went, only that he awoke one evening to find them gone. Perhaps the pumpkins ate them. Perhaps the scarecrows chased them away. During that time, he did not go outside other than to feed, and that only twice. At his age, he did not need to drink blood anymore. Instead, he thrived on the perpetually self-renewing animus of Life, whether the essence of the humans or the jackrabbits who came to pilfer the garden, or simply from the Earth herself. That, too, was his nature – ironic when studied too closely. Merkinder the Wicked, king of the damned, now the custodian and guardian of Life – reverencing it more than any mortal ever had or ever could. Life... the pure urban poetry scrawled on the walls of the abyss.

  That thought brought a sharp pain somewhere in the vicinity of his soul. He’d gotten used to playing the role of cold orb that ruled the night. And Willow had threatened to bring him back to life in a way he wasn’t sure he wanted in the least. Who would turn whom? And into what?

  Her question still hung in his ears, three years after the fact.

  If you could be human again... would you?

  “No being in their right mind would choose to be human!” he shouted into the cold, black air, acutely overwhelmed by the avalanche of feeling he had held in check for more centuries than even he could count. What sad, pitiful creatures they were – so lost out there in the darkness while Death stalked them and Pain nipped at their heels. So brave to keep going when all the odds and all the gods were stacked against them. So innocent that they could sing into the night that would eventually consume them and return them to the dust from which they came. How brave they were to love, secretly knowing that love would always end in grief.

  A thorny breath grabbed his chest, caught in his throat, seized him by the shoulders and shook him until – eventually – he realized he was sobbing, not for himself, but for every destitute, terrified, mystified mortal being who had ever lived, whether it walked on two legs or four, or slithered on its belly, or flew through the air on gossamer wings. They were all dying. Already dead. And that was simply that. In the end, it was nothing less than profane.

  “My goodness!” Madness commented from darkness that smelled of still-born shadows and old snow. “You’re carrying on as if this is some great revelation wrapped up for your birthday! Should I get you a tissue?”

  Merkinder wept for three days and three nights, thoughts tumbling through his ravaged mind like evil acrobats.

  And then, abruptly, something long forgotten emerged, buried so deep it must have crawled out the left nostril of some misshapen wormhole. The one and only thing his maker had told him on the night he himself gave up his humanity for a chance to live forever, on a night when he had begged for it and railed against it all in the same instant, when he had thrown himself at the feet of his maker, no longer certain if he were more afraid to die, or more afraid to go on living with the constant fear of Death itself.

  That was what it meant to be human. Willow saw it. His maker had seen it.

  To be human...

  To be driven mad, to live in a constant and gnawing state of fear which eventually consumed the soul and threw the mortal corpse out to rot. No streets paved with gold at the end of the leprechaun’s rainbow. No castrati choirs of caroling angels heralding the birth of any god or goddess. Just the everlasting, unending, tormenting darkness from which the first suffering soul must certainly have sprung at a time before Time got his name and became The Almighty Dick.

  He didn’t remember much about the transformation itself. Only that it was brutal. Without tenderness. Without kindness.

  The screaming as his body was torn away from his soul. The pain like nothing he could have imagined. The journey through death and unimaginable hell and then the climb. The creation of the self from the nothing. The raising of the dead from the mire of slaughtered souls. The gathering of an identity where none had existed before. Spontaneous parthenogenesis. And then... simply...

  I-Am.

  “’Love is not kind or gentle. Love is evolution,’” his maker said, just before he left the room, never to be seen again. “’One day, if the fates are kind, you will remember that and act upon it.”

  Merkinder stopped breathing. Love is evolution.

  “Disappointed?” Madness asked, drawing him back into whatever reality passed for the Now. “Would it be easier if Love were flowers and heart-shaped chocolates and Hallmark sentiments on old parchment? Gag me... where’s my insulin?”

  Ignoring the voice of Madness, Merkinder rolled slowly from the bed which was once a plush mattress, but which now more resembled a pile of rags scattered with leaves that had found their way in through some crack in the everything. The living room remained dark, with only a faint red sunglow from the window facing the sea.

  He should have been surprised to see Willow sitting on the shore, her back to his house, but somehow, he wasn’t surprised in the least.

  Unoffended by being shunned, Madness sidled up next to him, whispering close to his ear. “Did you think you could dangle love and eternity in front of them forever and not have one of them eventually tell you to put up or shut up?”

  The comment was far too lucid, considering the source.

  To escape it, Merkinder flowed through the wall to find himself on the beach – though in hindsight, he had no real recollection of willing the action. It just seemed the right thing to do, leading to where he wanted to be, even if he had no idea what he intended to do.

  Willow looked up, sensing his approach, and as he moved to sit down next to her on the cinder-shore, he realized she was still wearing the jacket he had given her more than three years in the past. Her fingertips had found their way to the ends of the sleeves, the shoulders no longer as all-consuming as they had been the day he had first draped it around her.

  She had grown her bones, filled out her skin.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said, leaning against him as if he were her rightful place.

  “I wasn’t sure I would either,” Merkinder confessed. The warm weight of her was distracting, comforting. A duality. He didn’t move away even though Madness had come out to watch, and was reciting a long list of the sins and the dangers Merkinder was courting.

  “What was the sunrise like?” she asked, taking him momentarily off guard, picking up the conversation where it had left off a very long time ago, when she was still a student and he was her mentor.

  “My kind doesn’t exactly court the dawn,” he reminded her, mildly amused. “But from what I remember, it was warm, golden.”

  “Like honey dripped over the earth by faeries,” Willow commented, her voice distant, contemplative.

  “Yes... I suppose. Something like that.”

  Cocking her dark head, she studied him. “Does it hurt you? The light, I mean.”

  Empathy and compassion. Concern for another. He had seen no indication of it in the humans until that moment. Almost without volition, he put an arm around her back, filled with affection which was largely unwanted, but entirely overwhelming. “No,” he said at last. “The light no longer hurts me.”

  The girl sighed, relieved. A seabird piped. Further away, another answered. From the edge of the forest, a pale dog watched – not with hunger, but curiosity. Small waves lapped at the shore, murmuring secrets.

  Merkinder thought of the mermaid, wondered if she were flapping her tail on the bottom of the ocean, causing the sea to rock, wondering if she had gone deep to wait, just as he himself had waited.

  From high up in the forest, a baby cried. A woman’s voice barked a command. A man was singing.

  “The world is coming back to life,” Merkinder whispered, not realizing he had spoken aloud. The thought was exhilarating, disturbing. The thought was terrifying.

  “She’ll need a mother and a father,” Willow said, never one for being subtle. “At least until the pumpkins know which way to grow and the humans find their D
reaming again.”

  Merkinder wasn’t at all sure he was qualified to father a world. But who was? “And then?”

  Pressed tight against him, Willow shrugged. “Then we’ll get fat and lazy and grow old together in rocking chairs on the porch.”

  Merkinder laughed, mildly surprised that he still could, for what was looming before him was daunting. Where she had learned the lore of rocking chairs and couples growing old together, he did not know. Perhaps, he conceded, it was simply universal., and so he made a mental note to include Woodworking in his teachings.

  “You do realize I’ve never done this before,” he cautioned her, knowing full well that she knew full well what he was talking about. “What if it doesn’t work?”

  Stretching upward, her lips pressed to his ear, the voice of Spirit asked, “What if it does?”

  She had a point. He had been old too long. Dead too long.

  Time to stop holding the world in darkness. Time to absorb the lessons he had taught the children for centuries. Everything begins with a thought. Reality is entirely self-created. You have to be immortal before you can know how to become immortal. The destruction of faith is the beginning of evolution. To allow the impossible is to do the impossible. Love is the reason and the equation.

  Willow had been brought to him as a sacrifice.

  She tasted of pine and promise, cool green moss and morning dew. Silk chalice, opened to shatter the spell, to release the night and summon the dawn. He sank deep, drank deep.

  Love is evolution.