The Start of Something Dark

"You should not go wandering off the path if you are not ready to step out of the world you think you know best. Stay to the path, Birdie. You hear me? Stay to the path."

Birdie began, "The world I think--?"

But the stranger, the friend, the whatever-he-was had begun to shimmer and dissolve before her eyes: opaque, then translucent, then rippling air, then all of him gone for a moment except his smile and eyes hanging suspended before her. Finally the golden-eyed man (Goldeye, she thought, that's his name isn't it?) was gone, and Birdie was alone in the center of the garden.

Stay to the path. But which path? The flagstones, or the lily pads? The known, comfortable, indeed stolid? or wobbling uncertainty?

The first pad seemed to flutter the instant before she set her right foot upon it. By the time she reached the fifth pad, though, her footsteps were more sure. When she reached the tenth she considered how strangely solid these broad leaves felt; she wondered why the water was no longer shimmering around their edges.

But she did not look back.

So it was that she missed the gathering of the dark gray mist, now closing up behind her. She missed the garden's disappearance. She failed to notice that the water was already far below her feet, and that she was ascending ever higher with each confident footstep.

****

In the center of an otherwise darkened warehouse in an ugly part of an ugly city was a pool of light. In that pool of light was a small table, and around that table sat three men and an empty chair. The only sound for a few moments was the snap... snap... of cards being dealt and then laid down, face up.

Finally, one of the men -- the skinny, dark-haired one, known for obvious reasons as Weasel -- broke the silence. He threw his remaining three cards on the table; one skittered across the surface, off the table's edge, and landed face-up in the empty chair. Jack of Hearts.

"Shit," said Weasel. "How much longer we gotta stay here playing cards? I don't even know the goddam rules of this game for crissake. I'm bored. Can't we at least call out for sandwiches---"

"Shut up." This came from the man on Weasel's left, the greaser: Max. "You don't know the rules of the game? Forget the game. you don't know the rules of nothin', pally, and that's why we're here in the first place."

To Weasel's right, the third man, heavyset -- no, fat -- looked up from the cards in his hand. "'Call out for sandwiches,' he says," said the fat man (whose name was Dundee) in a constricted and phlegmy voice. "Don't suppose you actually tried getting a signal in here recently?"

Weasel got up from his chair, walked around the table, retrieved the Jack of Hearts, and sat down right there. Leaning forward, he scooped up all the cards on the table and shoved them into something like an orderly rectangle. He riffled the edge of the deck with his thumb. "Okay," he said, "so we're stuck here, until he gets back and unblocks us. But Jesus do we have to play the same stupid goddam game the whole time?"

Before Max or Dundee could stop him, Weasel held up the deck flexed between thumb and fingers and shot it into the air. Cards whirred crazily in the light, face up and face down and face up and left to right, raining down in a blizzard of white and black and red.

From off in the darkness came a voice: "Untidy. Very untidy. I think someone...

Careful -- or Careless -- Footsteps

"And we have got to close that thing before any of those troublesome not-friends slip through behind us."

The Stranger, Birdie's new "friend" -- if friend he was -- gestured upwards at the hole. Birdie thought she saw a hand reaching through the hole but it suddenly (perhaps sensing what was about to happen) pulled back. Like an iris, the hole winked out, plunging them both temporarily into darkness. Then there was a sound like a grilled-cheese sandwich being bitten into, an odor like that of new mint being crushed underfoot, and a sort of whirring sensation. When the natural light returned, Birdie and The Stranger stood in a garden which Birdie thought she knew, vaguely. Was it from a story...?

But the garden wasn't the main attraction. Nearly all Birdie's attention was drawn to The Stranger -- her savior or her abductor.

He stood well over six feet tall -- it couldn't have been seven, could it? -- and his height was accentuated both by the dark broad-brimmed hat and the... the cloak, she decided (fighting her intuition): it had be a cloak after all. His face was long, his hair ebony, his eyes, yes, warm and kindly.

But his mouth looked warm and kindly not at all. The thin lips bespoke cruelty, and the way one corner turned up and one down seemed to taunt her: whether he turned out friend or foe could, in her mind, well depend upon which way he faced when she decided.

It was time to test his "friendship" with something a little more substantial than a sudden miraculous escape from a subway platform.

"So you're my friend," she said. "And you've 'saved' me. Now that I've been saved from a threat I did not feel or recognize, then as my friend I assume you will let me now go?"

Both ends of that strange mouth twitched. "But of course. There's the path." He gestured, and Birdie saw a line of flagstones leading from the spot where they stood. But then he said, "...and there's another path," gestured again, and there was a pond on the other side of the garden, across the surface of which floated a line of sturdy-looking lily pads.

Birdie looked once more at those eyes. Not good enough, friend, she thought. She turned and set out directly between the flagstones and the pond, straight through a bed of periwinkle, in the direction of what looked like it might be an opening through a hedge around the garden.

Over her shoulder, she heard The Stranger's voice. "You are a very difficult girl." She approached the hedge, pushed the opening apart further. "...or a very foolish one," she heard him add. And then, although she couldn't be sure, as she stepped through the opening she thought she heard him say, "...or perhaps not a girl at all."

But that wouldn't make any sense, of course.

Then she was through the opening, which closed behind her like a drape. Before her...

The First Jump

Without thinking, dazed, Birdie reached for his outstretched hand. Images flashed through her head, unbidden:

A baobab tree, silhouetted against an orange sky... A dinner fork and a sharp knife, crossed, on a russet tablecloth... A cork, bursting from the neck of a champagne bottle... A small rodent of indeterminate species burrowing quickly into a mound of yellowing vegetation... A rainbow, across which passed the shadow of an airplane...

She fought the confusion. "I don't... I don't know you. Of course I want to live but I don't---"

"One chance," said the stranger. "One chance only. Take. My. Hand. Do it. Do it now."

Birdie blinked her eyes once, twice, and when they opened finally there was her hand in his. His palms were icy but his fingers strangely warm.

Most alarming of all: His coat opened behind him -- it was a coat, wasn't it? -- and he suddenly sprang to the roof of the train. Birdie rose effortlessly behind him, still hand-in-hand with him, and her feet touched down on the corrugated steel as though she weighed no more than a feather.

"But wait -- no, my uncle, I have to call my uncle---"

The stranger interrupted her. "No time," he said. "Follow!"