Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(9)

Constance descends the path, crosses the bridge with the dim, egg-shaped lamps, and enters the dark wood. Hush! It’s important to go quietly. There’s the trail of ashes, up ahead. Now for the charm. Constance types:

It mashes, it smashes

And sometimes it gnashes;

The dread tooth of Time

Will turn all to ashes.



But that’s a description, she decides; it’s not a charm. Something more like an incantation is needed:

Norg, Smithert, Zurpash,

Bright Teldarine,

Let light be seen,

Avaunt the evil in this ash.

By the Mauve Blood of …



The phone rings. It’s one of the boys, the one who lives in Paris; or rather, it’s his wife. They’ve seen the ice storm on television, they were concerned about Constance, they wanted to make sure she’s all right.

What time is it there? she asks them. What are they doing up so late? Of course she’s all right! It’s only a little ice! Nothing to get into a twist about. Love to the kids, now you get some sleep. Everything’s fine.

She hangs up as quickly as she can: she resents the interruption. Now she’s forgotten the name of the god whose Mauve Blood is so efficacious. Luckily, on her computer she has a list of all the Alphinland deities and their attributes and oath words, alphabetized for easy reference. There are a lot of deities by now; they’ve accumulated over the years, and she had to make up some extra ones for the animated series of a decade ago, and then even more of them – bigger, scarier, with enhanced violence – for the video game they’re currently putting the final touches on. If she’d foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it’s grown like urban sprawl.

Not only that, she wouldn’t have called it Aphinland. The name sounds too much like Elfinland, when what she’d really had at the back of her mind was Alph the sacred river, out of the Coleridge poem, with its measureless caverns. That, and Alpha, the first letter of the alphabet. A smart-alecky young interviewer had once asked her if her “constructed world” was called Alphinland because it was so full of alpha males. She’d responded with the slightly fey laugh she’d cultivated for defensive purposes once that smarty-pants kind of journalist had decided she was worth an interview. That was around the time all the books they were now lumping together as genre were getting some attention from the press. Or at least the big sellers were.

“Oh no,” she’d said to him. “I don’t think so. Not alpha males. It just sort of happened that way. Maybe … I always loved that breakfast cereal. Alpine?”

She comes across as fatuous in every interview she’s ever given, which is why she no longer gives them. Nor does she attend conventions any more: she’s seen enough kids dressed up like vampires and bunnies and Star Trek, and especially like the nastier villains of Alphinland. She really can’t bear one more inept impersonation of Milzreth of the Red Hand – yet another apple-cheeked innocent in quest of his inner wickedness.

She also declines to engage in social media, despite her publisher’s constant urging. It does no good for them to tell her she’ll increase the sales of Alphinland and extend the reach of its franchise. She doesn’t need any more money, because what would she use it for? Money had not saved Ewan. She’ll leave it all to the boys, as their wives expect her to. And she has no wish to interact with her devoted readers: she knows too much about them already, them and their body piercings and tattoos and dragon fetishes. Above all, she doesn’t wish to disappoint them. They’d be expecting a raven-haired sorceress with a snake bracelet on her upper arm and a stiletto hair ornament, instead of a soft-spoken, paper-thin ex-blonde.

She’s just opening up the Alphinland file folder on her screen to consult the list of gods when Ewan’s voice says, right in her ear and very loudly, “Turn it off!”

She jumps. “What?” she says. “Turn what off?” Has she left the burner on under the kettle again? But she hasn’t made the hot drink!

“Turn it off! Alphinland! Turn it off now!” he says.

He must mean the computer. Shaken, she looks over her shoulder – he was right there! Then she clicks the Shut Down button. Just as the screen darkens, there’s a heavy, dull thud, and the lights go off.

All the lights. The streetlights too. How did he know in advance? Does Ewan have prophetic vision? He never used to.

She gropes her way down the stairs and along the hall to the front door, opens it cautiously: to the right, a block along, there’s a yellow glow. A tree must have fallen across a hydro line and pulled it down. Heaven only knows when they’ll be around to fix it: this outage must be one of thousands.

Where did she leave the flashlight? It’s in her purse, which is in the kitchen. She shuffles and gropes her way along the hall, fumbles in her purse. Not much juice left in the flashlight batteries, but enough so she manages to get the two candles lit.

“Turn the water off at the mains,” says Ewan. “You know where that is, I showed you. Then open the faucet in the kitchen. You need to drain the system, you don’t want the pipes to burst.” This is the longest speech he’s made for a while. It gives her a warm, fuzzy feeling: he’s genuinely worried about her.