Robots vs. Fairies(98)

“Let me off the bus,” I say, and Eron looks at me for a moment.

“You’ve seen my son?” he asks. “You’ve held him?”

“He’s mine,” I manage. “Adopted. I’ve been raising him.”

He gives me a haughty look. “He’s the prince of Adriftica,” Eron says. “And I’m the king.”

“How old are you?”

“Older than I look,” he says, and gazes at me, his long, slender form, the tips of his ears pointed, and his face too handsome for human use.

“Keep the old man,” says Mabel, and I feel lethargy come over me like an allergy to air. My knees are too weak to support me.

“It’s time to come off tour,” the drummer says. “It’s time to start over clean.”

“We can’t leave the queen here,” Eron says.

“She won’t come with us,” says the bassist. “She’s never been anyone’s to command.”

“I won’t leave my son,” Eron says.

“She won’t let us take them,” says the drummer. “Tania’ll come, and she’ll bring the boy.”

They leave me alone to panic, writing reflexively, half-asleep in the dead of night, stuck on a bus with the other father of my child.

In the middle of the night, someone’s playing acoustic guitar, and I wake from a dream of that high school fantasy of being part of the band, two chords and windows down, singing out into the highway. Everyone becomes a music journalist for that dream. This time, though, it’s nothing benign. Akercock is playing a summoning, and I don’t know if I want to be here for it.

I can hear Eron’s voice, singing a call in a language I don’t know.

We’re driving through a city and like that, there are kids all around us, out of nowhere. I see them running at the bus, like they’ve been waiting for us, straight out of the dark. They’re all bright-eyed and looking lost, and most of them are in their pajamas and underwear.

Some kind of mob planned for publicity? The bus pulls over with a lurch. I get my jacket on and get out. The group outside isn’t just girls. It’s teenagers of all sorts, but that’s what Akercock lives to play for, whatever they are, kids from everywhere.

There are kids for miles. No way for them to have just arrived. They’ve either been here, or they’ve run out into the night and come to this spot on the highway, but whatever happened, there are teenagers as far as the eye can see.

“What’s going on?” I ask Mabel, and she looks at me, her eyes glowing.

“Last concert,” she says. “She takes the child; we take the children.”

Eron Chaos wriggles his way out the roof of the van until he’s standing on top of it. Then he’s playing a song just for them.

This isn’t the normal rock song, though it’s got the usual moaning and wailing. This song fills my head with a kind of strange vision. I find myself kneeling on the sidewalk, but my mind is full of marching, of people in bright cloaks and armfuls of flowers, kids not in their T-shirts, but dressed to kill, leather and sequins and electric pants to match Eron’s.

The rift is there behind him again, a bright gold and green place, and it opens out of the night, the stars making way for it.

“Come on, children,” sings Eron Chaos, and his voice is a hymn. His voice is caustic harmonic spite mixed with soul, and he dances on the roof of the van, his fingers opening up and fire hanging from each one. His eyes are gold and his hair is moving without any wind.

I watch the children start to move toward him. I watch them begin to enter the rift, walking one by one into it. I feel like I can’t move, my muscles full of tar and honey. It’s the song. I try to stand, but I can’t get up. Old man, I think. I don’t have any business here, but here I am.

“What’ll happen to them?” I ask Mabel, who is standing on the roof of the van, looking ready to dive and disappear.

She shrugs. “Something,” she says. “What do you care? The world is ending, buddy.”

The band is playing fully now, and I look up and out into the city. I can see children of Earth coming to us, from everywhere, out of their houses for the first time in some of their lives, walking into something that is either fairyland or something else entirely. There are hundreds of them. Thousands.

They’re blank-faced and slack-jawed, and they are going to their doom, maybe, or to salvation, and I can’t tell. The drummer is playing those pipes again, and drumming a beat that can only be made with eight arms. Eron Chaos is shining with a light that’s coming up out of the rift, and on his head I can see a crown.

I know one thing. It’s all I’ve got.

It’s a lullaby. I made it for the son I adopted, the child born of the fairy queen and her husband, the baby I met and loved and chose.

Our son was trouble. He had to be held tightly, night after night, because when he slept, he shifted from a baby into other things. Some of them were beautiful, and some were terrible. Hummingbird, polar bear, burning brand, starfish, electric eel, brick, straw, rat. Once he became a cloud filled with acid rain and poured down onto the sidewalk, and another time he became a lump of coal.

Tania could sing a note that could make me sleep, and a note that could make me wake, but she had no notes that could make our child stop screaming.