In seconds, the park was empty again.
Dirk stopped shimmering and turned into a cat again. He gazed after the boys for a minute, then yawned. He began to wash himself.
Willow helped Tony back to his feet. “Are you all right?” she asked him.
He nodded, but there was blood smeared all across his face. “How did the cat … ?” He couldn’t finish.
“Go home, Tony,” she told him, brushing him off, straightening his coat about his shoulders. “Go on.”
Tony stared at her. She did not like what she saw in his eyes. Then he turned and stumbled away into the darkness. She watched after him until he reached the street and disappeared around the corner of a building. He did not look back. She did not think she would see him again.
She turned wearily to Dirk. She felt sick, as if the terrible harshness of Ben’s world had found a way to burrow down inside her soul. “I don’t want to stay here any longer. Can we go now?”
Dirk blinked, emerald eyes glinting. “It was necessary that you come,” he said to her.
“Yes, but are we finished?”
Dirk stood abruptly and moved off. “Such impatience. Very well. The fairy mists are this way.”
She felt a chill pass up her spine. The fairy mists. But she would do what she must. For herself, for Ben, for their child. One last leg to her journey and she would be home again.
Resolved, she set off into the night.
Haze
Three days into their journey through the Labyrinth, the Knight, the Lady, and the Gargoyle came upon a town.
It was late afternoon, the light’s wane barely perceptible, a darkening of a gloom that they now knew never brightened beyond twilight. They had walked steadily through a changeless forest world until suddenly, unexpectedly, the town came into view as they crested a small rise. A cluster of ramshackle wooden buildings and worn dirty streets, it hunkered down in a hollow where the trees had been cleared away so that it looked as if the forest had swept around it like the waters of a river around an island. No roads led into it and none away. There were people; the Knight could see them moving on the streets. There were animals, though they were a shabby lot and had the look of creatures beaten down by life. Lights burned in a few of the windows, and as the three stared down more were lit. They gave off a weak and singularly desperate glow, as if they had fought their battle against the coming night too many times and were tired of the struggle.
Overhead, where the trees opened to the skies, there was nothing to be seen of moon or stars, only an endless layer of impenetrable mist.
“People,” the Gargoyle said, and there was both surprise and distaste in his voice.
The Knight said nothing. He was thinking that he was weary of his trek through this dismal world where everything looked the same and nothing ever changed. The past three days had dragged away in a mind-numbing crawl, filled with silence and darkness and an implacable sense of hopelessness. Twice the Lady had tried to kill him, once with poison in his drink, once with a sharpened stick when she thought he was sleeping. Her efforts had been wasted, for he sensed everything she was about. She seemed to accept this. She went through the motions as if already resigned to her failure, as if the attempt must be made even when the conclusion was foregone. Yet he was damaged nevertheless. It was what he saw in her eyes that wore at him. He was a warrior and could withstand her physical attacks. But the looks of rage and loathing and sadness were less easily dealt with, and he was made sick at heart by their constancy.
Of course, she hated the Gargoyle as well, but her hatred of him was inbred and impersonal and somehow more acceptable.
“Why is there a town here?” he asked them quietly.
For a moment, no one answered. Why, indeed? A town, come out of nowhere, materialized as if from a vision, having no purpose or excuse, existing in a vacuum. Where was the trade that would support it, since there were no roads? Where were the crops that would feed it, since there were no fields? Was this a town of hunters and trappers? If so, to where did they carry their goods and from where did their supplies come? The Knight in three days had seen almost no forest creatures, and what few he had seen had been small and furtive and somehow natural to the gloom, existing because and not in spite of it.