CHAPTER SIX [indica]
“Nell?” Ozzy approached her slowly. “Nell, I’m so sorry.”
She had her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them. He sat down next to her. Her nose was still bleeding, there was a narrow cut on her neck from Meg’s pocketknife, and one of her eyes had a blotchy circle around it.
She bowed her head and scowled.
“I’d say it’s not your fault,” she croaked, “but it is, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t realize they were…” Ozzy trailed off, and swallowed.
“No. You didn’t.”
“I thought they — I thought they were friends.”
“I’m sure you did.”
He wanted to ask her if they were the same people she had seen early that day, in that clearing where they’d found…
They’d found…
Ozzy furrowed his brow. Why couldn’t he remember what they’d seen in that clearing? There’d been a bonfire, he recalled that much… smoke drifting through the air… trees rustling sluggishly in the hot breeze…
A boombox leaning against a tree stump…
He shook his head, and let the words dissipate on his tongue.
Nell shivered. “Those assholes think they have the right.” She pulled her jacket tighter around her. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
“I…” But Ozzy had nothing to say to that.
“They took all of it,” Nell grumbled miserably. “All my Summer Haze.”
It could’ve been worse. “Nell,” Ozzy whispered, so quietly he could barely hear the words himself, “I’ll help you find more of it.”
“It’s not about that.” Nell snorted. “You know how I saw something, back in that clearing we found, and I wouldn’t tell you who it was?”
“Y-yeah.” Jack leaned in closer. “Yeah, I remember that.”
“It was them. Jack and Meg, and their sister. A girl named Summer. And a man named Matt, who I think is their dad–”
Nell broke off, then, because the old crone had started to play her guitar: soft, graceful finger-picking, arpeggiating on a minor chord that ballooned to fill the darkness beneath the sequoia.
Ozzy found himself smiling at the sound of it. He looked at Nell beside him and saw that she, too, was starting to smile, the corners of her lips lifting despite the gravity pulling them down. He shifted closer to her, and together they watched the old crone spin a melodic arras on the guitar — watched as she tipped her head back and crooned a name into the gathering night:
“Myrddin!”
Then the tremulous cry of a flute pierced the night air. Ozzy and Nell wheeled around — and froze. They instantly recognized the man standing before them. Grey beard, purple-and-orange turban. Long pointed elf ears. Hooved goat legs.
He held his silver instrument up to his lips, and closed his eyes as he sieved a fluttering tune through the flute’s air-holes. Then he lowered the flute. Opened his eyes again — glittering feline eyes that glowed in the gloom.
“Tonight we dance the sacred motions of the universe,” Myrddin said. “Tonight we sing the sacred songs of the cosmos.”
He smiled a twisted, lopsided smile, and strode toward the old woman sitting cross-legged at the base of the sequoia, gently coaxing the melody from her guitar. She paused in her playing, and looked up at the impossibly tall man standing before her, with his goat hooves and his billowing silky robes.
Myrddin extended a hand to her, and tenderly helped her to her feet.
“I’ve missed you, Caledonensa,” he purred.
The old woman named Caledonensa lifted her guitar to her chest, and once more began to play.
And without exchanging another word, she and Myrddin set off side-by-side into the trees, his shimmering flute spinning loops and whirls over Caledonensa’s lush, lilting guitar.
“I think we’re supposed to follow them,” said Nell softly.
Ozzy nodded.
They set off in pursuit of the music… and they weren’t the only ones. Shadows gathered in the musical duo’s wake, trailing after them: millennia-old dryads with stilted walks and leering grins scored into their barky complexions. Sneering lycanthropes playing oboes, cackling banshees pounding drums, spindly-legged erlkings crawling through he tree branches above.
And there ere humans, too — one or two here and there, singing drunkenly along with the ever-swelling tide of music. The procession wound through the trees, making its way further north, growing and growing until he forest shook with the sound of it.
Nell grabbed Ozzy’s hand, laced her fingers into his, and held on tight.
“Oz!”
“Byron?” Ozzy could’ve sworn he’d heard his cousin’s voice —
“Oz! It’s me!”
Nell pointed. “There.” Ozzy followed the path of her finger to Byron — there he was, gliding several yards ahead. He was looking back at them over his shoulder, smiling a somber smile.
“Are you both dead, too?” he said, and he made a tsk-tsk sound with his mouth. “I think I am, anyway. Not to be a downer or anything.”
And then the throng swallowed him.
Ozzy tugged on Nell’s hand — “Come on, we gotta find him again!” But at that moment Nell gave a frightened gasp. “No. No!”
It didn’t take long for Ozzy to figure out who she’d seen. There, up ahead in the procession (the still-growing, ever-widening, infinitely loud procession) were Jack and Meg. Their heads flung back as they wailed ecstatically to the heavens.
Ozzy felt Nell’s hand slip out of his, and turned just in time to see her flinging herself away from the crowd — in time to see her vanish.
Nell!
He veered sideways, lunged after her, and realized too late that the procession was making its way along the edge of an overgrown ridge. The ground vanished beneath Ozzy, and he toppled down the hillside, plunging through a mess of branches and marbles and brushwood and roots until he finally came to a rest at the bottom of a shallow ravine.
Nell had landed just a few yards away.
“Nell?” he croaked.
“Oz…”
For a time the two of them just lay there in silence, bloodied and bruised, aching all over, inside and out. Neither one of them able to speak.
Then…
“Come on. Get up. Get up, Nell! We can still catch them!”
Nell shook her head bitterly. “We can’t.”
“Yes we –” But Ozzy broke off. He knew it was hopeless. Even if they’d both been in fit shape to run it would’ve taken a miracle for them to catch up with the procession. And as it was they were covered in cuts and bruises, sore and achy and deeply, deeply tired.
Far above them, the sound of unearthly music faded into the distance. Before long they couldn’t hear it at all.
J. Herrera Kamin 