Author: Doyce

I used to write.
I suppose that’s not really much of a surprise, but it seemed an important point when I opened my eyes on a place I’d never seen that was theoretically three miles from my parent’s house.
When I’d decided to drive back to my mom and find out what was really going on, I’d had to give absence notice to my current employer, for whom I wrote technical manuals. It wasn’t exciting; it was, in fact, soul-sucking drudgery that made me stare longingly at help-wanted signs in Blockbuster, but the pay was good and I didn’t have to think.
Writing, real writing, involved a lot of thinking — dredging up memories and pains and joys and regrets and putting them onto a page for everyone to see and hopefully not recognize. The old rule is write what you know but really, what else is there?
I’d stopped because I didn’t want to remember what I knew anymore. I hadn’t wanted to for ten years. I’d been alone for all that time. Who wanted to think about that?
Before that, though…
Before that, I used to write and had written about the place I saw in front of me right at that moment. It was a homecoming to a place I’d never been. It had a completely familiar feel to it, and that scared the hell out of me.

I stood on the edge of Vayland, looking down into a ravine. Silver pain pulled at a single point in my body, dredging up memories.
When I was a child in the first house my family ever lived it, my room was next to the living room, thus the television. Whenever I heard the television and no conversation, I would slowly open my door, crouching down next to the floor and slip into the room on my belly. My door was right next to the foot of the couch back then, and sat directly between the couch and the T.V., so if I was quiet, I could crawl up against the foot of the couch and watch T.V. while my Dad lay not 3 feet away on the couch.
Some nights, I would fall asleep while watching. What happened next depended on who found me; regardless, I would always wake up in my bed the next morning, like magic. If my mom had found me, I would get a lecture during breakfast about needing my sleep.
Dad never said anything. I suppose he thought that, between the floor and my bed, I’d gotten enough sleep.
He understood; that much was clear.
When I opened my eyes, we weren’t on the road anymore.

Steven saw what Ted Shafer has become. That was when he realized he had to get out.
The cage really wasn’t all that difficult. There weren’t any locks, only tie-downs, which weren’t a problem if you just ignored the burning of the mud that he couldn’t touch. He’d driven seven loads of winter wheat to town with a temperature of a hundred and four, by god; if he really wanted to, he could get the damned cage open.
Eventually, he proved himself right, although the sweat in his eyes burned almost as badly as his skin.
He slipped past the smallest number of huts possible to get to the edge of the camp, not knowing where he was going except away.
Just past the last hut, it got difficult to walk.
Twenty paces later, the needles started to burn him like over-extended muscles. It felt as though he was trying to pull a truck with chains attached to his body.
”Steven,” came the phlegm voice. He was too focused to jump.
”Where are you going, Steven?” The voice was right in his ear, it seemed.
”The hell… away…” Steve didn’t even know if that was an answer or a command.
”What if there’s no one waiting for you?”
The thought went right to the base of his brain and waited for him to give. He wasn’t going to. He knew if he could just get a few more steps, he’d be free.
But what then?
He’d go home.
What if…
When blunt fingers wrapped around his arms, he was already sitting on his knees, looking up at the sky.

I watched them walk over to me, keeping my expression neutral. I barely twitched when Brock moved upwind of me.
”What next?”
Bhuto gestured. “That is something you will tell us, Sean.”
I didn’t like the sound of that and showed it. “How so?”
”Understand, we are here to help you, but we are also here to help your father, and we could not — can not — do that without you. You are our link to him.”
I looked up at the stars in the midnight sky (one thing I always forget is how many more you can see) and blew out a breath between my teeth while I thought.
Finally, I said, “how do we do this?” I was looking at Bhuto, but he gestured to Brock.
Brock was holding a silver needle.

Brock advanced toward me as Bhuto sighed. Much to my dismay, he didn’t stop until he was nearly touching me.
”What do you call this road here?”
My eyes were watering. I blinked rapidly and focused on the question. “Ahh. Vayland. Vayland Road.” The problem with people telling you to breath through your mouth when around a stench is that instead of smelling it, you taste it.
He smiled up at me and I was glad for the darkness that largely hid his teeth. “Why is that?”
”Why is what?”
”Why do they call it that?”
”Because…” I thought about it. “I don’t know why.”
His smile broadened and I had to take a step back. “Let me tell you why.” He turned away from me and threw out his arms. “This place is a border between realms. The very first people who lived here and named things called the people on the other side wa`rii we because they didn’t understand. Others came and gave different names. When my people came,” he thumped his chest “they took the names it had already and translated the words and the idea. They called it a fae land.” His eyes glinted as he turned back to me. “You know what that is, don’t you?”
I nodded mutely, not bothering to explain why.
He nodded, not waiting for me. “The border to the fae land was marked by those who knew enough about it, and the name stayed on, changing, after they’d all gone to dust.” He spat on the blacktop. “Then some bugger made a road here, since the markings were there. No one remembered that they were meant to show you where not to go.”

We landed on a curving stretch of blacktop a few miles away. Ravines dove away from the roadside on both sides.
Drops that seemed to go down and down farther than anything in the whole world.
I shook my head. “Why are we here?”
Bhuto looked up at the sky. “This is the only place we could be, Sean. We must reach your father.”
”Oh.” I thought for a second. “You do realize that’s the most pointless, circular answer I’ve ever heard, right? And just for the record, I went to a liberal arts college.”

During the 1930’s, topsoil had lain in ditches through my family’s home county. Part of the process of rebuilding America’s Breadbasket had been planting strips of trees through a country that was not meant for them. The topsoil of the plains was meant to be held down by grass, but grass wasn’t profitable, so instead we had wind-breaks called shelterbelts.
There’s a particular trick to walking through area thick with both trees and tall, tangled, prarie grass undergrowth, especially when you’re carring something heavy that can blow your face off — my feet seemed to remember the way of it even though my legs protested — I was thirty-two and had been a city-boy for twelve years. My progress would have involved more cursing except for the presence of Brock and Bhuto, neither of whom seemed to be having any trouble at all. I clamped my mouth tight and kept moving.
When we got to the edge of the trees farthest from the farm, Bhuto extended his hand to me for the second time, doing the same for Brock. I looked askance.
”Explanations come shortly, Sean, but we need to move quickly now, when we are not marked by others. I can assist with that,” Brock said.
I almost refused, until I saw that Brock looked just as unhappy about this development as I did. Misery loves company, or at least someone else to gloat over. I took the ogre’s hand.
I’m not sure what I was expecting… a puff of smoke, a swirling of my perceptions, maybe. When we just shot off the ground and into the sky without a word or gesture, I couldn’t help but shout.

Twenty minutes later, I was ready for whatever they were going to tell me and they were looking a doubtful.
“I don’t think those’ll work where we’re going.” Brock gestured with some distaste at the gun over my left shoulder.
I raised and eyebrow. “You ever shot a gun, Brock?”
The dwarf glared at me, finally shaking his head.
”Then how the hell would you know?”
He shrugged. I ignored him. The gun I’d chosen, an open-sight .300 cal Savage, was a family heirloom that my great-grandfather had bought the year of its making. My grandfather, who’d taught me to use my first gun when I was six, had an Alaskan grizzly pelt in his guest bedroom that this gun had taken. The stock was solid hardwood with a stainless steel shoulder plate; the barrel was three and a half feet of blued steel.
Frankly, if the thing didn’t fire ‘where we were going’, I’d could do worse than just hitting things with it.
Bhuto seemed to have a different sort of problem with my other choice. “Do you not have a more… formidable hand-weapon, Sean?”
I readjusted my grib on my old ‘herding stick’, which I’d found in a barrel of similar tools in the machine shed. I’d cut it from an ash tree when I was thirteen and had used the four-foot club whenever I had to push one of our bulls into a new pasture on foot.
I could have explained, but I didn’t really feel as though it was my turn.
I motioned towards the trees behind the house. “Let’s just go.”