THROUGH THE LONG, GRAY afternoon, Charlie McCormack worked the joysticks on the backhoe, and the machine raked its shovel through the mud. The demolition crew had cleared away the trees and shrubs with chain saws so the backhoe could get in, tear up some of the streambed, and build an earthen barricade. While the construction team was doing some plaster work in one of the nearly finished houses, Charlie was carving out a path on the other side of the ridge, digging a trench to receive the flow from the diversion. Soon the water would flow away from the land where the rest of the houses were going to go.
Charlie knew it would have been easier to build the houses around the stream, but that didn't fit his vision of the way the development ought to look. Clean, tidy, and orderly, that was the way he saw Sylvan Estates. Charlie had come up with the name of the development himself. Sylvan meant of the woods, and Charlie thought it sounded pretty and sophisticated, too. The kind of name that would attract buyers. The cab of the backhoe shuddered as Charlie worked the pedals and levers. Sweat ran down his face as the blade shrieked, unearthing roots and chunks of rock. The tires rolled back and forth, compressing the dirt, and every little weed and sapling was ground beneath the machine's crushing weight. The afternoon wore on.
Down in the field at the base of the ridge rested the damaged bulldozer and excavator. The mechanics had told Charlie that the motors were shot. Parts with high resistance to heat were fused together; the metal in the plastic-coated wires had melted and left silver puddles to harden on the ground. The mechanics had to scratch their heads. Bad parts, maybe. Lightning? Doubtful. But it was obvious that negligence wasn't the cause. According to the lease the machinery would be replaced. The only problem was that there weren't any replacements available for a couple of weeks, until machines came back from other jobs. In the meanwhile, there was the stream to divert, land to level, stumps to uproot. And only one piece of equipment to do it.
At the end of the day, Charlie shifted the backhoe into park and switched off the engine. He pulled off his helmet, tossed it onto the seat, and headed down the hill toward home. A hawk circled above, nearly out of sight. But there were no other immediate signs of life among the trees that lay ahead. The animals in this part of the forest had fled the moment they heard the backhoe lumbering up the hill. Mice, groundhogs, birds, squirrels, snakes, and a thousand other timid creatures raced for shelter, heading for a place, any place, free of that earsplitting, earth-shattering sound. The sound that heralded destruction. The lower part of the stream now lay cut off from its source. The water trickled away and disappeared along the edges of the cold muck. Since Charlie had diverted the course of the stream, the mud had began to crust along the edges of something buried in the sediment.
Something had been placed at the bottom of this streambed, thirty years before. Something lay there still; something conscious, something that had seen things no human being had any business seeing. Over the years, silt and rotting leaves and pebbles had collected around the wet flannel of Anna McCormack's coat. It filled in the space between her legs and gathered around her boots. The rushing water carried mud, bits of broken twigs, and all the refuse of the forest, and it all piled up alongside Anna's ghost-white cheek. Mud and debris had settled in her hair, and the tendrils no longer swayed in the cold current.
Tomtar, the Troll who lived in a hollow place by a dogwood tree, was still keeping watch over Anna, as the Mage of Alfheim had requested. For thirty years he had sat by the girl's side without complaint and without anybody to listen to his words. He was reed-thin, his shoulders barely wider than his narrow face, and he had a mop of hair like straw that hung down over his eyes. Tomtar survived on tender shoots, ferns, morels, and berries, and by drinking the cold water that burbled over the rocks. He played his wooden flute and dreamed his life away, as Trolls often do. Otherwise, Tomtar was alone with the butterflies and the crickets, the rush of the wind, and the babble of the stream. If the girl beneath the water had been able to reach out her arm, the Troll was so close that she would have touched him. But the only thing moving in the stream was the constant flowing water. For Tomtar, there were no real dangers, no challenges, no surprises in his life. But change always happens, if one waits long enough. Humans had come to devour the forest, bit by bit. Their machines had severed the stream, and from where Tomtar sat, the watch he had promised to maintain was over. The Mage's spell was meant to last as long as water flowed over Anna's open eyes; no one ever said what was supposed to happen when the water stopped flowing and the stream dried up. Was the girl dead? She appeared to be dead. But then, she had always looked that way. Still. Anna's body did not suffer the ravages of decay, abandoned to decompose in the water. Crayfish did not nibble at the bones of her fingers, worms and centipedes and bacteria did not carry her flesh away. But now the stream was drying up, and the reek of steel and gasoline and the shriek of an engine up over the ridge had let the Troll know that if he did not soon abandon his post, it would be too late to get away. The girl's body was nearly buried in mud. It was scarcely visible anymore, even to Tomtar. But there was no doubt it would be discovered if the tearing, clawing metal monster lumbered down and ripped the life out of the earth where he stood. There was no way around it; trouble might well be on its way, and it could arrive at any time. He had to go and find the Mage.