THE HIGHWAY WAS A BLUR as rain came down in jagged sheets. Along the road there was a hiss, a distant rumble, and a pair of headlights rolled into view, growing brighter and brighter. It was a state truck, with WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT printed on the side. Somebody had hit a deer the night before on 256. It happened all the time, and the county usually sent somebody out to clean up the mess. But when sanitation reported seeing an injured bird on the shoulder, it was Wildlife Management to the rescue. Carrie was behind the wheel, and Tim, on the passenger side, scoured the shoulder for any sign of movement. "Slow down," he said, "I think I see it. Looks like an owl."
The truck pulled over. When the bird saw the Humans approaching with a heavy blanket, it let out a screech. "Could have gotten hit by a car," Tim speculated, pulling on his thick welder's gloves. "Owls fly low when it rains."
Carrie glanced up and nodded her head. "Or it could have run into a power line."
"Naah," Tim said, coming in from behind. "If it got a good shock we'd be looking at roasted bird right now."
The owl swiveled its head. Its warning shriek was throaty and full of pain, but strong. Carrie winced. "This one's fierce. Come on, let's make it fast."
The pair flung the blanket over the injured bird and wrapped it into a bundle. The owl thrashed, all tearing beak and raking talons. But Carrie held it close as they hurried to the truck. She placed the bird on a blanket inside a kennel cage. Tim pulled it shut, slammed the door, and slid into the passenger seat. When Carrie climbed behind the wheel, the truck sped away.
Matt rolled over in bed and glanced out the window. Rain. The sky was as dark and heavy as poured concrete. The field that stretched from the house to the forest was slick with mud. The big yellow machines lay like skeletons on the dirt heaps, near flatbeds stacked with cinderblocks, bundles of wire, and sewer pipes. So many days had passed since anything out there had moved, it was starting to look like it had always been that way. There was a Portosan standing in the rain, not far from where the trees began. For a moment Matt imagined someone hiding in there, staring out at him through the mesh screen. Then he remembered the night before, and the little people with the pale skin and the pointed ears. The people who could crawl inside his mind as easily as he crawled under his blankets. He remembered their leader, who could turn herself into an owl and fly away. Matt remembered, but he couldn't quite put it all together. It was like a jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box to guide him.
With a grunt Matt forced himself out of bed and stalked to the bathroom. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he stood in front of the toilet, and it wasn't until he had flushed and turned to the sink that he remembered his foot. Why would there be a reason to remember it? It didn't hurt! Matt sat down on the edge of the tub and lifted his heel. He peeled back the bandage. A thin wisp of purple spread from the wound and disappeared at the side of his foot. Matt gently touched the black spot where the doll heel had gone in, then stood up and rocked his weight back and forth, until he was certain the pain was gone. It felt more numb than normal, but that was okay. Tap tap tap. A knock at the door. "What?"
"Matt, it's Becky," the voice came from the other side. "Are you all right?"
Matt stood up and pulled the door open. "Yeah," he said, "I'm fine. I had some awful dreams, though. Kept me up half the night."
Becky looked confused. "Me too," she confessed, clutching her blanket as she tried to make sense of her memories. "How's your foot?" she asked.
"It feels a lot better. You'd better go wake up Mom and Dad, though. They must have slept through their alarm. I think it's pretty late."
"Oh!" she cried, and bounded down the stairs.
Matt reached into his pocket and felt for the glass bottle. Then he turned back to the bathroom, and locked the door.
Breakfast passed in a blur. Everybody was glad to hear that Matt was feeling better. Oddly, though, the entire family complained of feeling tired and sore. And there were lots of bad dreams to report. Had it been a full moon last night? Too cloudy to tell. Emily was not in the best mood, flinging Cheerios from her high chair and pounding a plastic spoon. Becky didn't mention anything about the shoe or the doll. She just sat tracing her finger along the grain on the wooden table.
Matt spent the morning lying in his bed, reading a book he'd been assigned to complete before school began. He kept his eye on the clock on the bedside table. When the smell of lunch wafted up the stairs, he went back into the bathroom and locked the door. He took the strange glass bottle from his pocket, swirled it around, and twisted out the cork. He held the tough, gnarly thing up high so that he could feel the drops hit his tongue. It was easier to count them that way, and he wanted to make sure he got them all. He flushed the toilet for effect, and left the bathroom just as his mother called, "Kids, time to eat!"
"How are you feeling?" Jill asked as Matt plopped into his seat at the kitchen table.
She spooned a big dollop of macaroni and cheese into a bowl and passed it to him. Becky was already shoveling food into her mouth, and Emily was sliding her sippy cup on the plastic tray of her high chair. Matt glanced through the French doors, then quickly scanned the wooded horizon for any signs of … whatever they were, spying on him. Nothing. His mind wandered back to last night, and the creatures he had seen in his yard. He thought about how stupid it might have been to put something in his body that had been given to him not only by a stranger, but by some kind of weird alien stranger.
"Better," he said.
After the dishes were cleared, Matt told his mom he needed to spend some time on the computer. He explained that he wanted to do some background research on the book he was reading. But when he sat down at the desk in the little side room where the computer was set up, he wasn't really sure where to begin. He needed to do some research, true, but not what he'd told his mom. He needed to look up … what? Fairies? Elves? Dwarves? He clicked on a search engine and typed in fairy first. How stupid is this? he thought. Even the word fairy had different spellings: fairy and faerie. Matt found lots of sites with illustrations of cute little pixies and sprites in skintight long underwear, embroidered on throw pillows and printed on bar signs. Fairy seemed to be a general kind of word that included all of the other make-believe woodland creatures one could think of. He found a lot of stuff about Santa Claus. Funny how nobody ever talked about the fact that Santa is supposed to be an elf!
Matt clicked over to a Web site for people who like to role-play at being elves. The photographs showed grown-ups frolicking in the woods, dressed in tights with pointed rubber ears and flowered headbands. Matt realized that if he ever got depressed and thought he was a loser, he would just have to think of this Web site. What was wrong with people, anyway? Matt found sites about elf comic books, Halloween fairy costumes with wings and antennae, Dungeons & Dragons, and of course, a million things about Tolkien. Hobbits? Hmmm. The things he had seen didn't have those big feet. Elves? Tolkien's elves were human-sized. But then, all of that was fiction.
Matt found a picture, black and white, just a silhouette. It was of a tunnel running beneath a low hill. Tiny figures raced, almost like they were flying, through the passageway. Other small figures with walking sticks trudged along the ground above, beneath a sunlit sky. It was the words printed below that made goosebumps rise on Matt's arms: You take the high road, and I'll take the low road, and I'll get to Scotland before you, for me and my true love will never meet again, on the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. These were the words to that annoying song his dad was always singing around the house!
Matt scrolled down. The text said that the lyrics, hundreds of years old, had to do with soldiers who were fighting in a faraway land. A wounded soldier, dying in his friend's arms, is uttering his final words. He says that when the war is over his friend will return home by marching the high road, the road that the living travel on. But the dead soldier's spirit is going to speed back to the land of his birth through fairy channels that lie below the ground, in hidden passageways that can take a soul anyplace on earth. The low road. Matt shook his head in wonder. Were there hidden tunnels running through the woods? Beneath the construction site, under his own house? Is that how the creatures he had met got from place to place?
There was more to learn. Plenty more. Matt found some sites with scholarly articles about the history of fairies and elves in European countries. Not all of the creatures depicted here were nice and friendly. Some of them were fierce and hostile, some of them drank blood and stole human babies just for fun. Interesting, certainly, but it didn't seem like the ragtag group of little people that Matt had seen the night before. What he had seen looked more like a bunch of medieval peasants, if medieval peasants were two feet high and had big pointed ears. And the business about getting a wish, that was there, too. Because he had touched something of theirs, and because he had agreed to give it back, they were supposed to grant his wish. Even if they didn't want to admit to it. He'd accepted their medicine, but that wasn't his idea, it was theirs. So what was—
"Matt," said his mother, appearing in the doorway. "What is this? I found it in the bathroom upstairs."
Matt turned his head and saw the little glass bottle clutched in her hand. His heart raced; the cork had been pulled out, and he could see his mother's hand through the bottle. The dark color was gone. The bottle was empty. He leapt up, banging his shin on a table leg. His mind raced for possibilities to explain the bottle as he backed toward the door. What a stupid mistake, he thought. Obviously he'd left it on the edge of the sink, instead of hiding it in his pocket. "I — I found it in the dirt, out in the construction site," he lied. "I was going to show it to Dad, but I forgot. It must be an old liquor bottle, or something, maybe perfume, I don't know. It could have been back there in the dirt since pioneer days, who knows?"
"Well I certainly don't know," Jill said. "That's why I poured it down the drain. I rinsed the bottle out, too. Here, you can take it, if you want. But if you find anything else out there, I expect you to show me right away. It was very irresponsible of you to leave that bottle there on the sink, where one of your sisters could have reached it. Who knows what would have happened if Emily or Becky had found it, and drank some of that foul stuff?"
Matt threw up his hands. "Come on, Mom, Becky would never do anything that stupid, and Emily is too little to reach the top of the sink. That bottle was mine. You had no right to dump it out!"
"I had no right?" she said. "I had every right. This is my house, and I don't want you bringing dirty old junk in here. Emily's a toddler, and she can get into a lot of trouble unless we act responsibly. That means you, Matt. Am I making myself clear?"
Matt wondered what he was going to do now that the medicine was gone. Would his symptoms return? How long would it take before the sore on his foot got worse again? He shoved the empty bottle into his pocket. "Very clear," he mumbled, and stormed up the stairs to his bedroom.