The winged child, p.1
The Winged Child, page 1
The Winged Child
Henry Mitchell
Copyright © 2021 by Henry Mitchell
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses provided by copyright law.
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ISBN: paperback 978-1-7353926-3-9
Ebook 978-1-956183-91-7
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943021
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Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used factiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.
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Cover Design by Diana TC, triumphcovers.com
Edited by Jean Lowd
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First Printing Edition 2021
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Published by Creative James Media
For Rosemary, who taught me how
Contents
Prologue
I. Time After Time
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
II. Into The Trees
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
III. Though All Be Changed
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
Wendl woke from the dream, heart pounding, chest heaving, gasping for breath. His throat hurt, felt tight, as if a scream were caught in it. He lay still on his cot, allowing his body to settle, inviting his mind to return to him. He thought the dream might slip away into the night, but instead it rose up clear in his mind, every detail as sharp and vivid as if he’d lived it awake.
He dreamed he was walking. He’d been walking for a long time. His lantern flickered out hours before. Crickets rattled the dark around him. Gravel crunched under his sandals. Now and again as he walked, his foot caught against something that sounded like a wooden timber. From far away among unseen trees, a call and response between a pair of owls. If it was night, it was moonless, and when Wendl looked up, he saw no stars. The pervasive unlight narrowed his world down to himself.
It did not occur to Wendl in his dream that he should be afraid. He didn’t even feel lost, alone in his dense dark, although if there had been anyone there to ask, he couldn’t have told them his destination. He held his staff in front of him, like a pendulum, the lower end just a few inches above the ground, and swung it back and forth, like someone blind, for in the pitch blackness, he was precisely that. When the tip rang against something metal to his right, he veered slightly left, and when his stick encountered a similar obstacle on his left, he bore right. Wendl went on this way for some indeterminate time until the ground under him gradually began pulsing, like an echo of his own footfalls. Then he stopped, awaiting revelation.
The vibration swelled and gathered into an audible rumble. The darkness ahead paled into a gray fog, swallowing up the railbed where Wendl stood. The rails either side of him gleamed in the rising light, and the rumble gathered and grew into a deafening roar like the voice of a dragon. Wendl turned to behold the blinding and terrible eye bearing down upon him. He might have taken it for a dragon, but there were no dragons yet among the Fallen. It was only a train, and Wendl was standing in its way.
No time left to scream or run or even pray. Wendl closed his eyes and felt the monstrous steel thing shred his being awake again. It was a dream. He would not say it was only a dream, for Wendl knew the meaning of it. He opened his eyes and stared through the opening that served as window and door to his austere cell. No surprise to see the dense fog beyond, not quite black, but faintly luminescent, whether by its own light or from the moon filtering through from above, he couldn’t tell. But the message was clear. Somewhere on the other side of the Separation, his way had opened.
Wendl dressed as quickly as he could in the cast-off clothes he had retrieved from the Fallen on previous incursions. He slung his bag, already packed and ready, across his shoulder, took his staff from beside the door on his way out. As he walked, the fog closed behind him, swallowing door and wall. As soon as he felt unseen by all eyes within the abbey, Wendl turned on edge, narrowing, flattening, opening a bright hairline crack against the gray, and folded himself into it.
As the fog thinned and lifted, Wendl saw that he was still walking along the railway, just as he had in his dream. The rails, crusted with rust, didn’t gleam as the sun crested the ridge behind him. Ahead, several trees lay fallen across the tracks. Lifeless and leafless, they had obviously blocked the way for seasons past. No train had run these rails in a long time. He walked on, listening to the morning gather into birdsong and rustle. Somewhere out of sight beyond the next bend, a truck toiled, growling and groaning up a mountain highway. Far away, beyond the wooded ridge to his left, a chainsaw snarled and sputtered. Some forestworker needed to sharpen a saw chain, Wendl thought.
The track straightened, leveled as he went. The woods, steep and close upon either side, parted, revealing the village of Drovers Gap, just as he recalled it. A highway ran for a quarter-mile parallel to the railroad before it lifted on a bridge across the tracks and disappeared behind the slope of a ridge. An uneven rank of aging brick buildings straggled along the far side of the highway. Most of the structures seemed in good repair and occupied. Vehicles were parked in front and even early in the day, people wandered in and out. It was a town that had seen better days perhaps, but worse days, too. Not a town sick or dying, but a community down its years repeatedly reinventing itself, accommodating its shifting place in the world.
Wendl tasted the air, drank in the light, happily satisfied that he was arriving more-or-less on the scene and the moment he had intended. All he needed to do now was wait and follow. He stopped, adjusted himself, and when he considered he looked and smelled appropriately disenfranchised, left the abandoned railroad, waited for a break in the light traffic, then crossed the highway to join the Fallen.
I
Time After Time
Here comes the friendly evening dark,
not spark of sun nor shard of moon
can linger long enough to stay it
rising up to claim and cover us,
erasing all mistakes and every blame;
Now we lay us down to sleep,
our souls are not our own to keep,
be our dreaming ill or sweet,
we trust God’s night to hide us
until we’re seen anew by morning light.
Chapter One
Millicent McTeer kept her eyes shut. She felt the sun’s heat on her face but lay still, pretending to herself that she still slept. Bleeding through her closed lids, the red glow of a new day flickered slightly as a breeze danced the curtains in the open bedroom window. The familiar close warmth of pillows and quilts eventually persuaded her that the outer world was still intact and passably safe for habitation. She raised a hand to shade her face and opened her eyes.
Barnaby Bear, missing one button eye, a tuft of his insides protruding through the resultant head wound, lay cradled in her arms. Breakfast smells wafted up from the kitchen on the floor below. The cleaning staff bustled and bumped in the hall outside her door. Millicent tried to recall the dream that woke her, or was it a memory, of flying somewhere. She watched dust motes dancing in the sunlight streaming through her window and pouring thick and gold like new honey across her bed. Through the window, a glimpse of pale green leaves and a snatch of birdsong. It was morning and it was Saturday and it was spring and it was her eighth birthday.
Finally convinced she was real, Millicent sighed, pushed back the covers and climbed out of bed. She stood for a moment rubbing sleep from her eyes, listening to the murmur of all the lives in Hillhaven’s other rooms. She gazed at the child in her mirror and thought it was a fine thing to be eight years old and know how to fly.
Cora would be in any minute now to herd her into her bath. Then she would be dressed in clothes not entirely of her own choosing and sent down to her breakfast. After that, she would have until the afternoon to get ready for her party.
About to go down to her birthday extravaganza that afternoon, she saw several of her friends already gathered at the foot of the stairs, like fans waiting for a television star, it occurred to her. No grownups hovered in sight. She was still full of thoughts of being airborne, convinced in her head that her flight the night before was something beyond a dream. A mad, irresistible impulse seized her like a hawk takes her prey. Millicent beamed down at the upturned expectant faces, answered the chorus of Happy birthday’s with a shouted, “Watch,” and launched herself into the void. Her trajectory was not quite as she planned, and in an instant she discovered that landing is much more precarious an endeavor than flight.
Everything hurt after that. Everything but her right arm, which had gone numb and lay twisted at an unnatural angle from her shoulder and would not respond to her command to straighten. A cloud of faces, configured to varying degrees of curiosity and concern, peered down at her. A little girl was crying somewh ere. Millicent’s mother, Amelia, knelt over her, put her face close and lay a hand lightly on her chest and whispered, “Don’t move, Angel. You’ll be all right.”
From farther away, a woman’s voice, maybe Cora’s, said, “I’ve called EMS.”
Later, in the hospital Emergency Room, when Amelia asked her why she’d done such a thing, Millicent lied, “I don’t know.”
She knew in her heart, though, there had been a time when she had wings. She couldn’t recall exactly when or where, but she could recollect the experience of it, when she had been as real as the air, able to will herself upward and beyond, held to her place in the world by grace rather than gravity. She thought it might have been when she was a baby, before she got weighed down with words and wants. Maybe it had even been before she was born or in a time yet to come. But in her secret mind Millicent determined that what she had done once, she could do again. She would just have to re-learn the skills she forgot as she had grown more and more human and less and less herself.
That night in her bed, tucked beneath her quilts, her cast elevated on a pillow beside her, Millicent chased sleep but could not catch it. Her arm only ached a little, but the air was restless, stirred by spirits she often sensed but never quite saw, until tonight. She felt somebody watching her. A cool benevolent presence, not familiar but not a stranger, either. Millicent opened her eyes to discover, standing beside her bed, her great-grandmother Alice, the first McTeer to know Hillhaven as home. She recognized the old woman immediately from photographs prominent on several walls within the inn.
“Aren’t you dead?” Millicent asked the gentle shade.
I’ve been dead a long time, child, and for a little while, I’ve been as lively as you.
She heard the ancient voice somewhere inside her chest. It made not a ripple in the quiet air, so when Millicent responded, she only thought the words, but that was a long time ago, not now.
Alice, wavery and transparent as a curtain fluttering in a breeze, still managed a smile. Now is where the real is, little one. Real never goes away. Once and forever are the same place.
This didn’t quite make sense to Millicent, but she thought that in time she might understand what the ghost had told her.
Her father took Millicent to have her cast removed. On the way home in their car, which was a year older than herself, she sat staring at her pale limb. “I thought there’d be feathers,” she whispered while they waited for a traffic signal to release them.
Joshua McTeer laughed, reached over and patted her shoulder before the car began moving again. “To preserve your mother’s peace of mind, let’s not talk about flying for a while. Best keep your wings folded out of sight until they’re big enough to carry you.”
“Do you have wings, Dad?”
“Sure I do. Runs in the family.”
“So, why don’t you ever fly?”
Joshua shot her a convincingly wistful glance. “Grownups aren’t allowed to fly in this country, Angel. Otherwise, on special occasions, like birthdays, I just might.”
“That would be showing off,” said Millicent, affecting her mother’s stern expression.
“I suppose it would, but that didn’t stop you trying, did it?”
Millicent couldn’t summon a proper retort, stared intently at the road ahead.
Joshua rescued her from silence. “Anyway, grownups can’t fly, except on airplanes. It’s the law.”
“Then, I don’t want to grow up,” declared Millicent. “Ever.”
“I truly hope you don’t,” said her father, watching the truck in front of them turn without flashing a signal. “I hope that when you become a woman grown and strong, you are still my little girl inside.”
Millicent found no more words to say over the next two blocks until they turned onto McTeer Street. Ahead, she could see Hillhaven, the inn that had been run by their family ever since her great-grandmother Alice inherited it from her employer and life-long friend, who had no family of her own to whom she could pass it on.
“Will you always be my dad?” Millicent asked, gazing up at her father, who kept his eyes on his road.
“I’ll always be your dad, Angel,” he said. “Ever and ever amen.”
That sounded to her like an impossible promise. “Even when you are dead and gone?” she asked, using a phrase she’d overheard from one of the guests at the inn.
“Nobody’s ever dead and gone, Angel,” Joshua said as if he really believed it. “We just change when the time comes. Our wings grow back and we fly away.”
“Like butterflies?”
Joshua nodded. “Oh, lighter than that.”
“But if you fly away, I won’t be able to see you.” Millicent protested, on the verge of tears.
Joshua smiled the sad, sweet smile that had made Amelia Montford his wife. “When you need to see me, you will.”
The teacher, Miss Inez Hester, waxed enthusiastic about President Ronald Horne and his administration’s America for Americans initiatives, a subject not included in their textbooks and not of vital interest to most of her young pupils. “Whose parents have texted Representative Shredders in support of the Extended Term Act?” she asked.
Hands went up in the air all around the room, but Millicent wasn’t listening. Her arm, freed from its cast, still felt not quite like her own, and ached slightly. When she’d mentioned it to her father on the way to school that morning, not complaining, but informing her conscientious parent of her physical status, he reached over and tousled her already unruly locks, a habitual gesture his daughter found mildly endearing and not quite annoying. “That’s because it’s still healing, making itself stronger than it was before,” he said, not taking his eyes from the road.
“Why does it need to be stronger?” Millicent asked.
“Maybe it’s afraid you might decide to throw yourself off some high place again.”
“I won’t do that. I promised Mom I wouldn’t. Not until I’ve learned how to fly.”
“Well,” Joshua said. Millicent could hear the smile he was trying valiantly to swallow, “Practice on the ground until you’re sure you can do it.”
Millicent nodded. Her survival instincts were intact. She’d learned her lesson. She wouldn’t leave the ground again until she was lifted up. She had every confidence that would happen any day now.
“Millicent?” Somebody was calling her name. “Millicent McTeer.” Louder this time. It was Miss Hester. “You didn’t raise your hand. Why should every loyal American citizen support the Extended Term Act?”
“It means that President Horne won’t have to steal elections as often,” Millicent said, repeating what Joshua had told her when she was studying at home the night before.
“Who told you that?” the teacher snapped, her voice sharp and quick as a snake bite.
“My father,” but when she saw Miss Hester’s dark and stormy face, she quickly added, “He was joking.”
“Real Americans don’t joke about our President,” Miss Hester admonished, her voice hard and blunt now, like a hammer. “Joshua McTeer best bridle his humorous impulses before he receives a visit from Neighborhood Watch.”
“Yes, Miss Hester,” Millicent said meekly, waiting inside herself for the day when she would be raised up and fly away.
That evening, over supper, she reported the exchange to her father. He studied his glass of grenache intently for a moment, then looked at his daughter, soft and sad, and dredged up a smile as he said, “In our house, we share our minds freely. Out in the town, we shouldn’t repeat any of it that doesn’t need telling. The world is full of unfriendly ears these days. Some would throw our words back at us like stones to hurt.”
