Devoted(36)
In his becoming, he amazes himself, for he has not previously been so decisive in all matters.
He leaves the living room and steps into the hallway and goes to the front stairs. As he ascends, he runs his tongue back and forth over his teeth, back and forth, across the lowers and uppers, not over the molars and the bicuspids, but over the canines and the incisors, the canines and the incisors.
33
Embarrassed—worse than embarrassed, mortified and ashamed that he had nearly revealed himself to the murderers behind the Dark Web site called Tragedy, that he had come close to endangering himself and his mother—Woody Bookman retreated to Castle Wyvern, where he often found solace in solitude and sought to regain confidence in his worst hours.
Castle Wyvern was a structure of his imagination, but in times like these, it seemed more solid and convincing in its details than the so-called real world. The outer curtain wall was fourteen feet wide: parallel two-foot-thick courses of native sandstone, the ten feet between them filled with a rubble of loose rocks and mortar. Ten formidable towers soared into a perpetually stormy sky, including two each at the outer gatehouse and the postern gatehouse. The outer ward was separated from the inner ward by a second and more massive curtain wall with an even more impregnable gatehouse and six larger towers. The wall walks featured merlons with narrow arrow loops and embrasures from which boiling oil and buckets of stones could be poured down on enemies attacking from below. Each gatehouse had to be approached on a twenty-five-foot-high ramp guarded by archers. Each ramp ended at a drawbridge spanning a moat. Every gatehouse featured a heavy timber portcullis plated with iron, which could be lowered to deny entrance, and beyond each portcullis stood a pair of ironbound wooden doors that could be closed in an emergency and reinforced by double drawbars.
The name of the castle had been chosen with care. A wyvern was a particularly ferocious two-legged dragon with a wicked barbed tail. Bad people were likely to be reluctant to try to force their way into a place named Castle Wyvern, Castle Dragon.
In times of deepest mortification and shame, Woody took refuge in his high redoubt, a round chamber at the top of the southwest tower of the inner curtain wall. A timbered ceiling. Narrow windows looking to the four points of the compass. Stone walls, stone floor. He had only a pile of reeds to lie on, because there should be no comforts to reward a boy who had brought shame on himself by his foolishness and stupidity.
When he had paid a sufficient price for his errors, he would receive a sign permitting him to leave the castle and return to Pinehaven in the so-called real world, which was how things worked in stories about castles and high redoubts and lands where dragons roamed. Although the windows of the buildings of the inner ward had glass in their frames, there was none up here in this tower; in bad weather, cold wind blew in and rain slanted through the empty panes to shatter on the stone, depending on what punishment his actions required. And when his sentence had been served, he received a sign in the form of a bluebird or a soft-furred white rat that came in through a glassless window. The former sang his reprieve, or the latter danced amusingly to indicate that he was free.
Now, as he curled upon his bed of reeds, he heard the door of the high redoubt open behind him. If the door opened before he had seen the bluebird or the white rat, the visitor would be his mother who had come to the castle to check on him. He couldn’t leave until he’d done his time, not even if he would please his mother if he rose from the bed and went to her. If he left before he received a sign, the shame that he’d earned would still cling to him, and his mother would see the truth of her son, and she would then share his humiliation that she had given birth to such a child.
She had been here earlier, too, had held him and sung to him. He was surprised that she would return so soon. She always allowed him privacy. Mother didn’t know about Castle Wyvern, but the door to Woody’s high redoubt and the door to his real-world bedroom were, for her, magically connected; she saw the physical Woody on his bed, while the spirit of Woody lay abashed in the castle tower. That was how things worked in the fantasy land to which he could escape from the hard world in which he had been born and in which he so often screwed up.
Behind him, his mother stood in the open door for the longest time. Because it could be no one but her, he thought she intended to come to him again and smooth his hair and sing to him in her pretty voice. When he was withdrawn into the castle’s high redoubt, she had never before visited him more than once. She knew that he could only return according to his own schedule and that by appealing to him, she was only ensuring that he would remain in retreat longer.
Finally she closed the door and went away.
Woody curled tighter on his bed of reeds, drawing his knees toward his chest.
34
The useless boy lies with his back to the door, motionless on his bed, with no deer in attendance, bathed not in moonlight, but in the glow of a nightstand lamp, as the day dies beyond the windows.
The child is easy prey, but the time isn’t right. Shacket trembles with the desire to bite. But the time isn’t right.
He wants Megan first. Wants to slide deep into her and, by taking her, at last pay back Jason Bookman, who had stolen her from him, stolen her and then set Shacket up to take the fall for Dorian Purcell. Megan must be his, as she was always meant to be, and with her he can then father a superior child, which Jason’s damaged seed could not produce.