Volume One: The Road Out
Chapter Four
Verse One: Why Do They Call it
The Witch Road?
Amy Welcher hated
the past week. The past week had wronged her, and if it were possible
to kick a week or lecture it, she would have already done that. First, her
boyfriend and let 'bros' take priority over her, his girlfriend. It
happened all the time in the novels Amy read and inevitably led to
the guy either turning dudebro evil or strip clubs- which really
amounted to the same thing. Guys always wanted to play around,
Cosmopolitan taught Amy this at a very young age, and she started
dating Harley quite deliberately because he wasn't that sort of guy.
Harley was cute enough- not boy band cute, but certainly college
athlete cute- and so conscientious. If only he didn't constantly
sideline for his man crush.
After man-crush
lost his job- no surprise there- and Harley hadn't done what he was
supposed to do if he'd watched any Romantic Comedies; Amy had decided
to use the tried and true method of making the man punish himself.
The silent treatment, only just enough breaks in the silence to
remind him what we was missing.
And then Harley
stopped answering her texts.
Or, more
accurately, Amy admitted to herself, his phone started bouncing her
texts back as undeliverable. Amy couldn't tell if he was blocking her
number somehow or if he was in an area where there was no service.
Amy had kept herself deliberately ignorant on things where others
could help her, it provided her with power over the people who needed
to impress her and she liked that. But Harley always answered texts.
Reliable was practically his middle name.
And so Amy went
down to the house. She found the door to the basement suite barre
with yellow police tape. She found a white van out front. And when
she approached the door she was stopped by man in a business suit who
introduced himself as Agent White and demanded she come with him.
He had told her she
wasn't under arrest, but hadn't allowed her to leave. He had told her
that she wasn't being interrogated, but wouldn't stop asking pointed
questions. He had told her that she wasn't being charged with
anything, but took her driver's license and recorded everything.
The 'not an
interrogation' had lasted for over twenty-four hours she thought.
During which time she had told them how she met Harley, about Marion
the freak man-crush, about their fight, about their entire
relationship outside the bed room. She had tried demanding a phone
call. She had tried being flirty. She had tried getting angry, even
stomping her feet. She had tried crying, but her secret weapon seemed
wasted in the men in black and white suits who just kept peppering
her with questions. Finally she was left, head down in the
interrogation room, actually crying. The whole process had drained
her, and she was unable to answer any more questions. And as she
tried to answer questions, she instead found herself sobbing into her
shirt sleeve.
At some point they
let her go. She was so exhausted from the lack of sleep and constant
questions that she couldn't remember when they had actually let her
go. She wandered out in to the blinding white light of day, and felt
like she were performing some sort of horrible walk of shame.
Amy put one foot in
front of the other carefully for several blocks before she noticed
that she was heading back towards Harley's house. She tried to think
why. She was exhausted and depressed. She knew her make up must look
awful from all the crying, but hadn't mustered the courage to check
since exiting the building. Had she been in a policy station? She
suddenly couldn't remember, and looking around could find the
building that she had exited from just moments earlier. Silent glass
towers loomed around her on all sides impassively.
What should she do?
The question sat uncomfortably in her skull, an unfamiliar house
guest with unfamiliar demands. Amy knew that the world was evil and
petty from movies and television, from Oprah and Cosmo, from Facebook
and Soap Operas. She had armed herself against that with the best
weapons she could find. The thing she had prized most had been her
boyfriend. He could act out on occasion, but compared with the
boyfriends on display on daytime television, he'd always acted pretty
damned excellent- even counting his stupid best friend fixation.
The men in suits
had accused her boyfriend of some pretty awful things, kidnapping,
fleeing the authorities, potential assaults and murders and she
couldn't remember what else. Amy knew Harley did not match the person
they described. Grudgingly, Amy admitted that neither did Marion. She
didn't think of Marion as evil, just incompetent on one hand and
dangerous competition for her on the other hand. Neither guy had the
capacity to be as evil as the men in black and white suits had
described in Amy's opinion.
Amy felt vaguely
guilty, and she didn't appreciate the feeling. Thinking back, Amy
wasn't sure what she had told the men in the suits. This fact began
to worry Amy. She faced the decision to believe Harley could do the
horrible things they had said, or that the men in the suits had lied
to her. Amy choice to believe that they had lied to her, which meant
anything that she had told them might be used to hurt Harley, her
Harley.
She was still
walking, she noticed, and still heading to Harley's. She wasn't sure
if the tape and the men would still be there. The thought creeped her
out, she wanted to turn and walk in any other direction. But, she
kept walking towards the house. She suddenly realized how much she
missed him, Harley; and not as a weapon against a petty universe
(although she could really use a hug and a snuggle right now). Amy
missed Harley for Harley, and was suddenly very angry at somebody,
she wasn't sure who to blame, for their separation.
But the creepy men
who had practically arrested her without a trial or a phone call or
anything might still be at the house, and she slowed her pace as fear
began to creep in. Besides, why was she going to the house? Harley
wasn't there. And the creepy men in suits would have taken anything
useful that might tell where they went. But she kept walking. Amy
started to notice that she was walking against her better judgement,
like some bimbo in a bad horror movie. She deliberately turned and
faced away from Harley's place and, to her shock and horror, found
herself walking backwards in the same direction as before.
Amy turned back
around to avoid tripping over the fur pom-poms on her shoes and found
herself staring at a grubby looking man with a
grubby looking big
dog, both standing in front of her grinning like fools.
"I don't carry
cash." She said automatically.
The man drew a
familiar object from behind his back and offered it to Amy, "That
without that you don't."
Amy stared, "My
tote bag."
"Useful
summoning anchor too." The man said, "I'm Grub and this is
Mung Bean, my dog and partner in crime. We're wizards and we need
your help finding your lost boy and his partner before the bad guys
in suits do."
Amy listened to the
stream of insanity with growing apprehension, "I will call the
cops." She finally said.
Grub grinned, "And
I will go looking for your boy. Suit yourself."
Amy paused. And
Grub, expanded. Still a dirty grubby man in poorly fitted clothes he
was now bigger and more imposing, and Amy suddenly realized how
slightly the man had been deliberately carrying himself- a mask now
discarded.
"We all wear
masks. I understand that. You wear a mask as armour to protect
yourself, because you think you're in the horrible small petty little
stories that you've been reading all of your life. But you're in
those stories. I'm giving you a chance. You can choose to be the
selfish self-absorbed girlfriend that the story has cast you as so
far, just minor obstacle for the first few chapters. Or, you can
choose to be part of the dark horse ensemble; the team that backs up
the heroes and helps them win the day. This isn't a melodrama, this
is epic fantasy adventure. Choose now, because I don't have all day."
"I could
scream," She said.
"You could,
but you don't need to. I'm going to do anything to you. I'm offering
you a chance to help somebody you care about. And I think beneath
that carefully composed mask, you do care. And I think you know that
given how much you told the bad guys, reaching your boy is time
sensitive matter. We have to hurry. Do you want to help, or you do
want to go back into your bubble?"
"You don't
know a thing about me."
"I know plenty
about you. I just used your little bag there as a focus to summon you
here. I picked all sorts of stuff including who gave you that bag,
which tells me an awful lot about why you're so scared. I'd have
burned the bag myself." He said.
Amy dropped the
bag. Her mouth hung open.
"You can't
know that."
"I do know it.
And now you know that you aren't in the story that you thought you
were in. The old rules don't apply. You have to adapt if you want to
go anywhere from here besides back into your little angry defensive
shell of denial."
Amy was about to
say something angry and terribly clever in response when Grub reached
out and plucked a dandelion seed from the air and gently wrapped his
huge hands around it.
"You don't
have to be a caterpillar in a cocoon, Amy," He said softly, "you
can be a butterfly."
He opened his
hands, and a painted lady butterfly fluttered from his grasp.
Amy suddenly had a
thousand questions, but between Grubs words and his apparent
conjuring of the butterfly, Amy found him hard to question.
"So, you want
my help saving my boyfriend?"
"Little miss,
neither you nor I are big players. We are meddlers, named extras.
Hopefully we are the comic relief, because that boosts our
survivability. Be glad you're the girl friend, that will improve your
chances of survival."
"Unless he
needs some grief to motivate him. I know what happens to love
interests in stories written for boys."
"How do you
know this a boy's story?"
"It's a
quest."
"Yes, it is
and your boy is neck deep in danger right now. I can't get a bead on
him. But he helped me, and I pay my debts. So I'm going to help him."
"What do you
mean he's in danger?"
"Did those
guys in the suits and sunglasses seem like they wanted to give him a
raise?"
"But what does
that or this have to do with anything?"
"It has
everything to do with everything. Your boy is one of the big players
in our story and if we don't keep him safe, things are going to keep
getting worse for everybody. And, I suspect this is more relevant, if
we don't help him he's probably going to die and die slowly and
painfully."
"If goes and
dies," Amy said, "I'm going to kill him."
"Hah!" He
laughed a single loud flat syllable, "We'd best move before the
vulture sees us. I don't much care for quislings." He thumbed
his hand back at Harley's house and Amy spotted the kneeling figure
of Mrs. Critchwood in the front yard with a japanese trowel
doing violence to her lawn and what she must have perceived as weeds.
"Why would
care what Mrs. Critchwood sees? She's just a mean old lady who's easy
to manipulate." Amy asked.
"You're going
to learn that in a story there are very few little characters. We all
get recycled sooner or later to serve the narrative."
They walked briskly
away, and Grub launched into an enthusiastic narrative regarding what
he planned for them to do. he kept referring to 'the story' and Amy
wasn't certain what he meant when he said that, but didn't want to
look foolish by asking obvious questions. The idea seemed to be that
they were living a real version of old fairy tales or legends or
classic quests, or maybe those things were a reflection of whatever
they were doing. But in either case (or possibly something else if
she were way off base), people seemed to fill certain roles in the
story, big roles and little roles, and then enact the story with the
winners getting to dictate how the story looks next time, or
something like that.
Amy still wasn't
sure that Grub wasn't simply a con man who was good enough at slight
of hand and cold reading to pull a convincing job, but something in
her gut told her to trust him, and that didn't happen often-
especially with men. And the other man she trusted seemed to need
help, even if she was still furious with him, and Grub seemed to
honestly want to help. So she kept listening to his insanity.
As far as Amy could
tell, there were two teams fighting for control of the story: a group
that Grub kept referring to as the Tribe, and a group that Grub
called the Hungry Empire. No points for guessing who the bad guys
were, Amy noted to herself.
"No, me and
all Wizards side with the Tribe, because we aren't fools," Grub
said, "But we've been losing this fight for centuries, and
Wizards and Witches have started stealing some of our power from the
empire. Use the master's tools to take down the master's house so to
speak."
"Playing
dirty?" Amy asked.
"Yup. The
heroes play big and dramatic up in the sky. The little guys fight in
the mud. We steal and borrow power from wherever we can get it, our
enemies, our allies, gods and angels, devils and demons and ancient
eldritch abominations, you name it. We're power parasites."
"You're not
selling this to me. That is not sexy."
"It can be.
Think of it like this. If your car breaks down and you have to get it
to the dealership, do you want to push it yourself or call a tow
truck?"
"The tow truck
obviously."
"Our magic is
like calling a cosmic tow truck."
“A tow truck is
sexy?”
“It's sexier than
walking the Witch Road on foot.”
