Piper and the Gren - Part 6

Monday October 23 / Tuesday October 24, 1995

Piper had been having the most wonderful dream about horses when she found herself once again watching a young Medry from the safety of a tree branch. As the boy bounced stones off the forehead of his bound victim, she again clapped with glee as blood ran from a gash above the wounded boy’s eye. She knew, as she had before, that she would attack as soon as the theatrics below bored her.

She slowly crept along a limb until she was directly behind Medry. Gently she pushed aside a leafy branch and crouched forward so the tortured child could see her. Blood raced through her veins as the child’s eyes went wide and his ineffectual struggles against the ropes increased.

“Diable! Il y a un monstre derrière toi!!" spat the boy, a spay of blood flying from his crimson teeth.

Medry laughed and bent to find another rock. Piper struck him in the cheek with a hard flung acorn and dropped to the hard packed forest floor. She bared her teeth and flared her claws as she took a threatening hop toward the young Medry. Her grin spread even wider as he screamed and tripped over his own feet in an attempt at flight. Before the boy could recover his footing, she had leapt onto his chest and had reared back to slash his face.

She stopped.

His eyes had locked onto hers and she felt a wave of panic she knew was not her own. She knew, somehow, that the terror belonged to the cringing child beneath her and rather than fill her with glee, she reeled back with terror of her own. For just a moment, she not only saw the boy on the ground, but simultaneously saw visions of Medry’s father, Henri. She felt the elder Medrier’s belt against her back and twisted as a hot iron was branded against her thigh.

She shook her head clear of the images in time to watch Medry’s victim break free of his bindings and flee up the hill to her right. She didn’t care. She gazed at this boy she crouched upon and somehow understood him. His anger and his sorrow brought welcome empathy. His love of torture and pain, so like her own.

Was this, she thought, what the filthy lutin experienced on a daily basis?

Suddenly, Piper’s dream shifted and she found herself in a clearing. The sun had slipped below the hills to the west and the shadows under the trees had grown darker. She raised her ears to the sound of something thrashing through the forest toward her. She turned in the direction of the sound and relaxed…she knew without sight that it was the boy who called himself Guillaume. As she scampered to the center of the clearing to await his noisy arrival, she noticed the small pinpoints of light dotting the hillside to the east. They bobbed and flickered their way into the forest.

Guillaume burst out of the tree line and stood panting. “You have to run,” he huffed at last.

Piper looked toward the lights again and saw a vision, a memory from Guillaume, of angry men gathering torches and weapons; shouts of revenge and slaughter. She ran her tongue over her pointed teeth and imagined the sensation of ripping flesh beneath her claws. She knew this forest, knew its branches and cliffs. If they wanted to fight, she was eager to oblige.

“No,” interrupted Guillaume. “You don’t understand...they’re serious this time. The prefect will only send more. You have to run.”

A phrase, something Guillaume had overheard from the mob, entered Piper’s mind then, “La Purge des Lutins.” Understanding blossomed cruelly that this was not just an angry group, not just drunken men with inflated courage. A decision had been made in the towns of men. They would not be quickly frightened back to their homes. They would indeed keep coming. As much as it pained her…flight was her best option.

Piper turned to flee but found her path blocked by three sets of glowing orbs that glared back from the darkness of the surrounding brush. As the three goblins crept into the clearing, rage and accusation burning from their over-sized eyes, Piper resisted the urge to call out to Guillaume to run. If the lutin had not seen him yet, he could still be safe. She moved herself directly between the boy and the approaching trio and waited until they were close enough for her to serve as an effective shield. She imagined Guillaume running. She concentrated on the image but was unsure how communication such as this worked. Nothing.

The goblins crouched forward onto their long-fingered claws, displaying the thin line of course hair that ran down their spines. Their leathery ears still pointed up from their bald heads, belying their youth. They were angry and overconfident…an older lutin would have known better than to attack her directly with so small a group. But these youngsters obviously thought that their strength of numbers and sense of outrage would allow them to enact their retribution. Piper grinned; she looked forward to proving them wrong.

Piper could hear the slight rustle of the bushes Guillaume hid behind and knew that he had not retreated. She took a half-step backward to buy the boy more time. Emboldened by what they mistook as fear, the goblins lurched forward. Taking a deep breath, Piper brought to mind a memory of running, fleeing pursuers at top speed.

She smiled with relief as she heard clumsy footsteps behind her. Guillaume created an almost embarrassing amount of noise as he retreated back toward the townsfolk, but the lutin did nothing more than follow him with their yellow eyes.

Two of the creatures bared their fangs and snarled while the third pointed to the approaching line of fires to the East. “Yooouuuu,” it slurred through a wet and unnatural voice that sounded as if it had echoed its way from some dank pit.

Glancing at the oncoming mob in the distance, Piper knew she had time to have some fun. She dug her claws into the soil and prepared to leap. She’d take down the talker first.

The sound of a soft scurrying on her rooftop filled the silence as Piper awoke. She threw off her blankets and rolled to her feet so that she could look out the window. The sky was dark. The sliver of a moon that had shown itself the night before was now completely gone. However, the street light three houses down was bright enough to highlight a small and fluid shadow as it slipped across the street and disappeared into the trees surrounding the caretaker’s cottage. From this distance, it might have been a small dog had it not moved so quickly.

Piper slipped on an old pair of shoes and grabbed a thin jacket on her way out the front door. The air was crisp and damp so her pajama legs were wet with dew by the time she stood at the crooked mailbox labeled Medrier. Her initial burst of adrenaline spent, she suddenly felt very small and unprotected so far away from the quiet buzz of the distant street lamp. Her eyes darted back and forth from the gren’s tree and the tombstones of the Blair cemetery, unsure which was more frightening. Upon waking, she had felt brave, eager to rush out and confront the mystery. But here, with the tree looming ahead in the darkness…she was less confident.

“He’s sorry about everything…he only seems bad,” she mumbled, begging herself to believe Oliver Blair’s assurances. “He’s sorry about everything…he only seems bad.” She lost count of how many times she repeated her mantra before she concluded with, “and he can talk to the dead.”

She walked slowly toward the tree. Her eyes never left the base of the old oak tree as she past the point in the front yard where Toady first lost his nerve. She hesitated only briefly crossing into the side yard, looking for any sign that the gren was upset by her presence. When the tree remained motionless, she proceeded on to the place Toady had fallen. Shallow trenches from the heels of Toady’s shoes were still visible. The soil remembered the child’s terror. She stood silently for a moment, suddenly realizing that somewhere during her approach, she had stopped being afraid. She wondered whether this should concern her but sat down to lean against Old Man Medry’s house none-the-less.

“I think,” she whispered into the stillness, “I understand.” She peered deeper into the hollow, but still saw nothing. For a long moment she was content to sit motionless and listen to the leaves of the old tree whisper. Slowly, however, the comfortable silence turned heavy…expectant. She was an actor blinded by the spotlights who had forgotten her lines. She knew she should say something…anything…but she was didn’t know what.

“I got expelled from school for dealing drugs,” she blurted, breaking the oppressive quiet at last. She wasn’t sure if that was the right line in her play…but the pressure felt lightened; the audience seemed please. “It was…so stupid.” She paused and looked toward the gren’s hole. It waited patiently for the story. She continued.

“My Mom took me to this doctor because my grades were slipping and they decide it’s attention deficit disorder. As if it couldn’t have anything to do with getting dragged to this stupid, little town right after Dad died. No, it must be something…something we can throw pills at. Mom likes that kind of problem.”

She picked a fallen, red leaf to give herself something to focus on. “And here’s the thing, do you know how they figure out if you have ADD? They give you Ritalin and see how you react. Just hand you a pill and if it doesn’t make you bounce off the walls…you must need to take more pills.”

She paused. But if the gren could appreciate the irony in her story, it gave no indication.

“But I didn’t want to take the pills, so I was throwing them away at school. And what’s worse is my grades started going up so Mom was convinced the Ritalin was working. Anyway, Christie VanFleet saw me throwing the pills away one day and asked if she could have them instead. And I figured…I mean…they just gave some to me just to see how I reacted. How dangerous could it be? Doctors just hand it out to kids so I think, why not. She gave me a dollar for it and everybody was happy.”

She peeled the leaf down its center.

“When we finally got caught, I think I’d made maybe thirty bucks selling Ritalin to Christie and her friends. But you’d have thought I was some kind of big time drug dealer by the way everyone reacted. It was in the paper, it was on the local news. The way the story got told, they made it sound like I’d come down from the gang-infested city of Indianapolis just to peddle drugs to their innocent little kids.

“So, now I’m out of school for another month or so and everybody looks at me like I’m evil or something. Even Toady’s parents say he’s not supposed to talk to me.” Piper rubbed her eyes and was surprised to find tears. She wiped her nose and tried to regain her composure. “I mean…I screwed up. But…I’m not a bad person.”

She looked to the tree for confirmation…but nothing stirred.

She waited in the quiet and felt her heart beat against the fieldstones behind her. Long after her eyes had dried, Piper sat comfortably facing the gren’s hollow. The thin sliver of moon drifted slowly through the branches of the twisted oak and Piper may have drifted to sleep at some point…but she couldn’t be sure. There was a peace to the night air that made her troubles seem small, made her month exile from school seem trivial. The crisp Autumn breeze was the same as had meandered through countless family campsites. And though she had no fire in Medry’s yard, she felt warmed as she remembered the way her Dad would create shadow theater on the side of her tent.

She remembered that she had wanted so desperately to ask the gren about her father, but it somehow felt unnecessary now. Her memories were so crystalline in her mind that she dared not interrupt them with speech.

Eventually, Piper’s eyes grew tired and she longed for her own bed. She pushed herself up and nodded toward the tree. “Maybe we can do this again sometime,” she said with a smile and started the trek back through Old Man Medry’s yard.

She paused at the old mailbox to look at her neighborhood. As it slept, the houses looked more welcoming than amidst the activity of the day. Darkened jack-o-lanterns waited on porches and yards lay cluttered with hay bails and scarecrows. Piper felt optimistic for the first time in over a year.

“A month is pretty short,” she thought.

Her gaze swept across the street to the old Blair Cemetery where it froze. She squinted to be sure that she was in fact seeing an eerie light glowing from behind a tombstone. She stood frozen as the faint light pulsed, its soft jade iridescence casting granite angel wings into silhouette.

“Are you doing this?” she whispered over her shoulder.

Silence, as the dim glow continued its rhythm.

“Old Man Medry’s tombstone,” she breathed as she gathered her courage and crossed the small dead end road. Piper made her way into the derelict graveyard and stepped carefully around tombstones…creeping toward the glimmering spot. At the last minute, she lunged around the final tombstone.

There was nothing.

Like a dim star when stared at directly, the light was nowhere to be found now that she stood among the grave markers. Piper sighed. She wasn’t quite sure what she had expected, but felt disappointed none-the-less. She checked the names on the headstones near where the light had been, but found nothing but random Blairs and an occasional Shupe.

She started to leave but again froze as a twig snapped behind her. Piper whipped her head in the direction of the sound but suddenly felt a strong hand clasp over her mouth and pull her to the ground. She couldn’t see who had grabbed her, but behind the smell of the grass smashed against her face, Piper smelled liquor and Doritos.





...Continued in Part 7