The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(38)

He looked at her from across the stream and from behind little gold-rimmed spectacles.

"I come from the God of Tom Gordon," he said. "The one he points up to when he gets the save."

"Yes?" Trisha asked politely. She wasn't sure she trusted this guy. If he'd said he was the God of Tom Gordon, she knew damned well she wouldn't have trusted him. She could believe a lot of things, but not that God looked like her fourth-grade science teacher. "That's... very interesting."

"He can't help you," Bork the Dork said. "There's a lot going on today. There's been an earthquake in Japan, for instance, a bad one. As a rule he doesn't intervene in human affairs, anyway, although I must admit he is a sports fan.

Not necessarily a Red Sox fan, however."

He stepped back and raised his hood. After a moment the other whiterobe, the one on the right, stepped forward...

as Trisha had known he would. These things had a certain form to them, after all - three wishes, three trips up the beanstalk, three sisters, three chances to guess the evil dwarf's name. Not to mention three deer in the woods, eat-ing beechnuts.

Am I dreaming? she asked herself, and reached up to touch the wasp-sting on her left cheekbone. It was there, and although the swelling had gone down some, touching it still hurt. Not a dream. But when the second whiterobe pushed back his hood and she saw a man who looked like her father - not exactly, but as much like Larry McFarland as the first whiterobe had looked like Mr. Bork - she thought it had to be. If so, it was like no other dream she had ever had.

"Don't tell me," Trisha said, "you come from the Sub-audible, right?"

"Actually, I am the Subaudible," the man who looked like her father said apologetically. "I had to take the shape of someone you know in order to appear, because I'm actually quite weak. I can't do anything for you, Trisha. Sorry."

"Are you drunk?" Trisha asked, suddenly angry. "You are, aren't you? I can smell it from here. Boy!"

The Subaudible guy gave her a shamefaced little smile, said nothing, stepped back, raised his hood.

Now the figure in the black robe stepped forward. Trisha felt sudden terror.

"No," she said. "Not you." She tried to get up and still couldn't move. "Not you, go away, give me a break."

But the black-clad arms rose, falling away from yellow-white claws... the claws that had left the marks on the trees, the claws that had torn off the deer's head and then ripped its body apart.

"No," Trisha whispered. "No, don't, please. I don't want to see."

The blackrobe paid no attention. It pushed back its hood.

There was no face there, only a misshapen head made of wasps. They crawled over each other, jostling and buzzing. As they moved Trisha saw disturbing ripples of human feature: an empty eye, a smiling mouth. The head hummed as the flies had hummed on the deer's ragged neck; it hummed as though the creature in the black robe had a motor for a brain.

"I come from the thing in the woods," the blackrobe said in a buzzing, inhuman voice. He sounded to Trisha like that guy on the radio who told you not to smoke, the one who had lost his vocal cords in a cancer operation and had to talk through a gadget he held to his throat. "I come from the God of the Lost. It has been watching you. It has been wait-ing for you. It is your miracle, and you are its."

"Go away!" Trisha tried to yell this, but only a husky whining whisper actually came out.

"The world is a worst-case scenario and I'm afraid all you sense is true," said the buzzing wasp-voice. Its claws raked slowly down the side of its head, goring through its insect flesh and revealing the shining bone beneath. "The skin of the world is woven of stingers, a fact you have now learned for yourself. Beneath there is nothing but bone and the God we share. This is persuasive, do you agree?"

Terrified, crying, Trisha looked away - looked back down the stream. She found that when she wasn't looking at the hideous wasp-priest, she could move a little. She raised her hands to her cheeks, wiped away her tears, then looked back. "I don't believe you! I don't - "

The wasp-priest was gone. All of them were gone. There were only butterflies dancing in the air across the stream, eight or nine now instead of just three, all different colors instead of just white and black. And the light was different; it had begun to take on a gold-orange hue. Two hours had gone by at least, probably more like three. So she had slept.

"It was all a dream," as they said in the stories... but she couldn't remember going to sleep no matter how hard she tried, couldn't remember any break in her chain of con-sciousness at all. And it hadn't felt like a dream.

An idea occurred to Trisha then, one which was simulta-neously frightening and oddly comforting: perhaps the nuts and berries had gotten her high as well as feeding her. She knew there were mushrooms that could get you high, that sometimes kids ate pieces of them to get off, and if mush-rooms could do that, why not checkerberries? "Or the leaves," she said. "Maybe it was the leaves. I bet it was."

Okay, no more of them, zippy or not.

Trisha got up, grimaced as a cramp pulled at her belly, and bent over. She passed gas and felt better. Then she went to the stream, spotted a couple of good-sized rocks sticking out of the water, and used them to hop across. In some ways she felt like a different girl, clear-eyed and full of energy, yet the thought of the wasp-priest haunted her, and she knew her unease would only get worse after the sun went down. If she wasn't careful, she'd have the horrors. But if she could prove to herself it had only been a dream, brought on by eating checkerberry leaves or maybe by drinking water that her system still wasn't entirely used to...