Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read online

  He sank to his knees, very belatedly, half expecting the image’s face to move and show him what he was sure the woman’s face would have: just the faintest annoyance, tempered by a mother’s understanding of her children’s tendency to overreact. Well enough he knew the images of this woman which had been sent into the world as hints of what was yet to come—moon-goddesses, goddesses of fruitfulness, dark-faced powers which hinted at present or future rule over the heavens and the earth. Now, though, rather belatedly, he understood the slight amusement at his statement: “I take it you are acting for Another…”

  His companions were slightly surprised by his reaction. He let them be. The next day he went back to France, where the shade whispered rather than rattled, and settled into the routine at the Paris preceptory, where he spent his last days.

  Even there, though, they noticed how old de Burgh never drank from any cup without looking at it for a surprisingly long time, and smiling a slow, strange smile…

  About “Don’t Put That In Your Mouth, You Don’t Know Where It’s Been”

  This next one is a little strange, in that it was written in response to another story—one I’ve never read.

  People familiar with my work will probably know that I’m very fond of C. S. Lewis, and not just for his better-known works like the Narnia books or the Planetary trilogy. He did some short fiction work in the 50’s that is very good, and he was a happy reader of US “pulps” and of periodicals like Amazing and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Somewhere in a conversation / interview he once did with another writer, Lewis mentions a story he read in F&SF that moved him profoundly, and then proceeded to give a short outline of the plot. But he doesn’t mention the story’s title or the name of the author.

  I spent a while trying to track down what story might have been involved, but never managed it. This I found frustrating, because I would have loved to read it. Then the excellent Jody Lynn Nye wound up editing an anthology of SF stories on motherhood, and asked me to contribute. I thought for a while about the plot I’d heard described at second hand by Lewis, and then thought, Well why not? I’ll write my version of that.

  The following is the result. As happens often enough, the story combines elements of the fantastic with places I’ve been or things I’ve done. I solo-hiked the Sespe Condor Reserve in the very early 80’s—another moment from that hike appears in the Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally—and accidentally wound up having a slightly lively night in a place I later discovered my map designated as “Bear Heaven”. Another story for another time…

  Don’t Put That In Your Mouth, You Don’t Know Where It’s Been

  “Mistress and Mother of all things,” Lola said, standing up straight in the rushing wind and stretching her arms to the sky, “Queen and Goddess, send your servant a sign!”

  Nothing happened. It was exactly the same kind of nothing that had been happening for the last three days.

  Lola sat down on her blanket. “Ow, ow, ow, ow!” she said then, getting up fast, and spent the next minute or so shaking the blanket to get rid of the newest fall of pine needles. It took a little more time for her to get the rest of them off her: when she finally sat down again, Lola was still itching. It was all very well, she thought, to talk enthusiastically about “working sky-clad” when the temperature was above 75 degrees. But finding somewhere sufficiently private to do this kind of work meant going up into the mountains, where the wind came howling along through the trees and down into even this sheltered little ravine. The trees then dumped leaves and needles on you, and dust blew in your eyes, and you got cold. The slightly romantic sound of the description “sky-clad” turned very quickly into just plain seriously naked, with goosebumps.

  That’s the problem, of course, Lola thought. Even if I had all the words right, who could concentrate? It’s so cold!

  She sighed and looked at the sky. It was getting on toward sunset. The color of that sky was astounding to her. Living in LA, she looked up at it often enough and rarely saw anything but what Angelenos take for granted, the high, thin haze, a sky not so much sky-blue as the milky blue of a newborn kitten’s eyes. Heat haze, smog, a sky sometimes more brown than blue—but even on the best days, never this hard, clear, dark blue. It made Lola feel even more naked and unshielded looking up at it.

  That blue was now paling down into peach and crimson at the edges, shading up to sapphire and indigo at the zenith. And all around her, nothing but the sound of wind in those trees: no traffic noise. Odd to say that you should miss such a thing until you were away from it. But all the sounds of civilization or what passed for it, human voices, human machinery, the sound of the car everywhere—gone, here.

  She had gone to some trouble to make sure that was the case. She’d left Route 96 some fifteen miles north of Ojai, and with her compass and her USGS map, had carefully hiked into one of the most inaccessible areas of the Sespe Condor Preserve. She wanted privacy for what she was going to do. Even here, some friends had warned her, you couldn’t always be sure. They’d told her to be sure she made no overt sign of where she was: don’t make smoky fires, they said, be careful with lights at night: you might attract someone you don’t want— They wouldn’t say much more than that. Several of them just shook their heads, making it plain that they thought Lola was doing a dumb thing: that it was inherently safer to dance naked on, say, Sunset Boulevard, rather than in the middle of nowhere, where no help could be found.

  But she had been stubborn: had packed her little ultralight pop-tent—a wild extravagance she had picked up on her last birthday, looking forward to this event: had packed her clothes, not many of them—but enough to cope with the cold weather her camping friends warned her could come down without warning. And the ritual equipment—that too had been packed with care. Then she had taken herself off into the trackless wilderness.

  Trackless was the word. She sat on the blanket, rubbing her bruised shins again. Lola had fallen over stones, climbed up banks and slid down them again, skinned substantial proportions of her exposed flesh, and bumped and bruised what wasn’t exposed. She had gotten pine needles and manzanita twigs resin-stuck in her hair, had been stung by yellowjackets, and had seen and been seen by both rattlesnakes and tarantulas. The tarantulas weren’t so much of a bother: those she had seen before on occasion in a friend’s hillside driveway, in great numbers, warming themselves in the evening by the residual heat of the concrete. The rattlesnakes, however, had made Lola think about getting right back up onto 96 and hitching a ride straight home, even though she did have antivenin in her kit. On second thought, she juggled in her mind the dangers of hitchhiking as opposed to the dangers of snakes, and came down in favor of the snakes.

  Lola sat there and watched the night come down. Her time, the books all said it was: the Mother’s. And the Moon was hers. Lola looked up at the young crescent—five, maybe six days old: she was no expert at these things. The Virgin’s moon, the Huntress’s moon.

  Lola had the huntress part down right, anyway. The books said you could be a virgin again with every new moon, if you liked, as long as you did the rededications right, said the right words, thought the right thoughts. Lola sighed. She could say the right words forever. She was uncertain whether she would ever get the thoughts right.

  All the same, she had come up here to be on site for this night of all nights, the shortest night of the year, the heart of summer: and the moon was right. The books said you could do special things at such a time of year: special dedications of yourself, which would call Her into your life. It was to that end that Lola had bought the bow.

  That was another wild extravagance. She couldn’t really afford such things on a cashier’s salary, but she had seen the bow a few weeks back, a beautiful Bear hunter, and had lost her heart. It wasn’t a compound: she had trouble trusting anything that looked so much like two coathangers caught in the act of love. But a proper double recurve bow, fiberglass with a beautiful silver cast to it, like the Moon, like the Moon’s
curve… she hadn’t been able to resist. Sympathetic magic, Lola thought. Silver for the Moon, for the bow. And the book gave some hints on ways to shoot in Her honor.

  Lola wondered how she was going to do at that, thought. The arm-brace didn’t quite fit her, and she had red welts and a good big scab from where the bowstring had scraped her raw several times. Nonetheless, to loose a few arrows into the night air, for the chance, even the barest chance of calling that Power into your life: a sort of spiritual lottery —

  Which you have about as much chance of winning as the State lottery, that sniggering voice commented. Lola snorted and got up.

  It was nearly time to begin, though. The sun was down and had relinquished the sky to the Moon. Now, before the Moon set, while it was still fairly new and full of possibility, early in the shortest night: this was the time.

  She started work. She laid the circle out first. One book rcommended colored chalk for this, another recommended sand: she used both, to be sure—and indeed she had little choice, for this single flat place she had managed to find to work in was all covered with shingle from the stream. She used a rock for the center of the circle, and a string stretched from the rock to give her the diameter: Lola traced around, sand first, then white chalk powder on top. She got out her compass, checked which way was north, and began to lay the central star of the pentagram, with the top of the star pointing northward. Lola scowled a little on finishing the fifth line. The thing was slightly crooked, as usual: but there was no time to do anything about it now. Oh, well, she thought, and started laying into the pentagram the letters and symbols that the book suggested.

  And all the while, as she chalked and sanded characters in Hebrew and words in Coptic, that voice in the back of her head kept saying: What is it you want, exactly? She tried to ignore the voice. A general blessing, the book had suggested: dedicating yourself as a vessel of the God and the Goddess, calling power into your life. But what will you do with it, once you’ve got it? And what if it actually comes?

  Halfway through the symbols in the pentagram’s third point, Lola stood up, panting a little, and realized she had no answer for that. Strictly speaking, her life wasn’t bad. She had a place to live, she dated occasionally, she had enough clothes and enough food, enough leisure time, enough money (just). She watched her finances, but she didn’t suffer.

  But maybe that’s the trouble, she thought. There was enough of all the usual things. Not at all enough of the unusual. No great passions, no great fears. And as she stood there, that voice said to her, But do you want those things? What will happen to you if the great passion does come, or the great fear? You’ll go nuts, that’s what….

  It was likely enough to be true. And yet…Lola had been increasingly unable to get rid of a feeling that something was missing in her life, and that she had to do something about it.

  She had tried all kinds of things, with the good-natured energy of a child with a chemistry set. She had tried crystals, but the cat kept knocking them off the shelf in the kitchen where she kept them to soak up (or give off) warm and friendly vibrations. Generally speaking, tile floors are not friendly to crystals: so that Lola had a big pile of shattered rose quartz and tourmaline and various other semiprecious stones, all shoved in a drawer together. She had then tried looking for auras, but mostly this left her with a squint that took almost a week to go away. She had tried angels—angels were much in the news lately—but despite all the books she had read about them, she was unclear what it took to attract one: and even after following the instructions in one book, the most explicit and helpful, she was still left (first) with the feeling that any angel who would bother being so idiotically invoked wasn’t worth the time: and (second) that any angel who would bother with her anyway probably wasn’t worth cultivating.

  Lola had tried studying ley lines—but where she lived, she was more concerned that she might accidentally stumble across a geological fault, and California had had enough problems with those of late. Better leave well enough alone, she had thought.

  Finally Lola tried magic. She had left it till last because it seemed the most complicated: because the equipment seemed fairly expensive: and because there seemed like an awful lot of reading to do. There was no shortage of books on the subject: alternative magic, nature magic, green magic, blue magic, white magic, magic in more colors than a paint store sold: and of course references to the black. She shied away from those, not so much from conscious choice—more from a vague sense of distaste, a sense that it simply Wasn’t Nice.

  That was typical enough of Lola. Her life seemed generally to divide into Nice and Not Nice. If she didn’t scale the heights of joy, neither did she plumb the depths of depravity…and she looked at both with considerable suspicion. Indeed, there was not much room for the heights of joy or the depths of depravity in the life of a K-Mart employee. Making ends meet was hard enough. She scraped together all the overtime she could, smiled dutifully at her customers, buttered up her boss as far as she felt was decent. As a result, her customers liked her—she smiled at them more than she really needed to: that was part of being Nice. And there were other occasional benefits—for example, this whole week of vacation that she had managed to scrape together. And it seemed like the world was obliging her, for a change, by being Nice as well. The weather was perfect Friday when she clocked out, waved goodbye to her boss, and went home to get packed and go up to the hills.

  Now, as she sat on the shingle of the little stream where it ran down the gully, it all seemed rather anticlimactic. While she was still at home in the suburbs, with traffic howling by outside, this had all seemed like the Promised Land: blue sky, silence, no phones ringing, no intercoms shouting at the K-Mart Shoppers: peace. The trouble was that the great outdoors had its own ideas about what Peace sounded like. They did not involve intercoms, but they did involve a more or less constant rush of wind which was colder than her dreams had made it. Birdsong was so loud that within a day it had turned from the ID tune of bucolic bliss into a serious nuisance, worse than the neighbor’s boom box at two in the morning…for the birds never quite stopped, and eventually the boom box always did. Even the white noise chatter of the stream was starting to become a problem: it sounded like the toilet tank’s outflow valve stuck in the on position, and unlike the toilet tank, you couldn’t fix it by jiggling the handle. And when it did finally get quiet enough so that you could get some sleep, there were the rabbits, the eight million rabbits that lived in the brush around here, and came out to chew on it in the middle of the night. They rattled and rustled and squealed at each other and did their best to sound like muggers hiding in the bushes and waiting to jump on her. They would scrabble at your backpack and try to get into it if it was within reach, and they would eat any food you had left around. All this did her sleep patterns no good at all…

  Lola caught herself thinking all these negative things, sighed, and pushed the thoughts away consciously. This was no way to proceed. “Who’s running this mind, anyway?” she said severely to herself. If there was the sound of sniggering somewhere in the background, she ignored it. Positive thinking, only, would produce the result she was looking for.

  Whatever that is, said the voice that sniggered.

  “You shut up,” she said severely to that part of her. Faith is everything.

  …And now the circle was drawn. She stood up inside it, and let out one long breath of—it was embarrassment: there was no way around it. Even before she’d done anything, and had nothing happen. She was afraid to look stupid, even to no one and nothing, just the air. The rush of the water, the deepening blue of the sky, somehow looked at her…and would laugh behind her back. And if a person should come along—She shuddered at the thought. Better to get it over with, she thought. I’ve been getting ready for this for months. I swore I was going to do this. I’m going to do it, and then go home and forget about the whole thing….

  The wind fell off a little; with her back to it, the stream suddenly sounded muted. Odd,
how the sudden quieting of everything made her gulp. But then she put the reaction aside. Nerves, she thought.

  Lola reached down, picked up the two small camper’s candle-lanterns she had brought with her, and lit the candles. Then she stood there irresolute, with the match in her hand: thought of throwing it outside—but you were only supposed to do that kind of thing in certain ceremonies, the book had said, and with proper preparation. She dropped the spent match carefully on the stones at her feet—it wasn’t yet fire season, but there was no point in being careless—put the candles down one to each side of the slab of stone she had chosen as her altar, and stooped to pick up the knife. It was black-handled as the book suggested: but around the time she was considering the knife, she had been short of money, and so had decided to use one of her kitchen knives. At least it was a good one, a Henckels three-inch parer. Can I cook with it again afterwards? Lola wondered. Will the God and Goddess get mad if I use it after this to chop onions?….

  As if anything was going to happen at all: as if Goddess or God were real… Lola sighed again and got on with it.

  She had memorized the invocation to the Elements, the Four Quarters, and the Deities Who managed each of them. Now Lola turned slowly, pointing at the circle with the knife, and spoke the names out of the book, imagining the line of light following the knife until the circle was whole. When that was finished, she assumed the proper pose—arms held out and upward, open-palmed, legs a little spread—and recited the rest of it. She could hardly hear the words for the racket in her head: dumb, this is intensely stupid, nothing will happen, what a waste of time—

  Nonetheless, she finished the invocation, and, as the book suggested, stood quiet for a few moments, “to let the peace of the place fill her”. Mostly what happened instead was that the wind rose again, chilling her to the bone, and the sound of the water seemed to get much louder as well. Forget it, she thought. This is all useless—