Bubbles and Troubles Read online

  “Ah, then, she needs more help from us?” the gnome sighed. “She knows she can’t get this one to the spring at the fine castle, and she wants us to show her where we old folk of the wood find the Healing Waters and the Living Earth, does she?”

  Carmen fought the urge to throttle the gnome and forced a gentle smile on her face. “Yes, please,” she answered. “Please show me where you use the Healing Waters and the Living Earth.”

  The gnome woman gave a melodramatic sigh. “She wants us to believe that she will be kind to we old ones of the wood, and she hasn’t even asked our name! How can she properly say thank you to us when she doesn’t know our name?”

  Brock stared silently upward through milky eyes as his breath rattled in his chest.

  Carmen felt that she would chomp her tongue in two if she bit it any harder. “I am so sorry,” she said. “How rude of me to skip our introduction. My name is Carmen. What is your name?”

  The gnome beamed with delight and exposed all six of her long, yellowed teeth. “I’m Mephita,” she said with pride. “It means ‘skunk’.”

  “What a lovely name,” Carmen answered, thinking that it was perfectly fitting as well. She suppressed a wince of disgust as Mephita exhaled another noxious puff of breath.

  “Come on, then, you,” ordered Mephita. “Bring on that bag of bones feller before he turns into dust. No time to waste.”

  Carmen lifted Brock’s limp body, which now weighed less than Dax’s. It was shocking and heartbreaking, but she was grateful that she was easily able to carry him and trail Mephita. Brock moaned in her arms as she followed Mephita down to the bottom of the ravine. Like wind-blown dandelion puffs, the last white wisps of hair floated away from his head and left his bald scalp bare and vulnerable.

  Mephita disappeared around a bend. Carmen hurried to catch her. She jostled Brock with her jogging steps and murmured apologies when he cringed in pain. Carmen found Mephita standing over three loaf-sized rocks placed in the shape of a triangle. The gnome looked like a strange statue herself, outlined in the moon’s glow. Mephita knelt and leaned over the rocks with her eyes closed. She murmured guttural, indecipherable words and bent to kiss the ground in the middle of the triangle.

  At once, a sparkling fountain of water bubbled up from the centre of the three rocks. At each corner, where the three rocks met, wet mud oozed from the ground and spread slowly onto the dry earth.

  Mephita rocked back on her heels and smiled in triumph. “There you have it, Carmen. Healing Water and Living Earth. It’s only good for a few minutes, so best get the feller into it right away. He’s near the end, that one.”

  Carmen settled Brock on the ground next to the fountain and placed his head on one side of the rock-formation. His gaunt skull was held in place by the ropy tendons of his throat, and his opaque eyes continued to stare senselessly up into the tree branches. He no longer looked like he was about to die—he looked like a man who’d been dead for days and days.

  Carmen collected some of the icy-cold water in her hands and dribbled it into Brock’s mouth. His chin moved slightly and the liquid gushed down his neck. “Swallow it, Brock,” Carmen urged. She daubed mud onto his withered hands and forearms. The cool drink seemed to revive him a bit, she thought, but he still looked like he had passed death’s doorway and was hanging his coat in death’s foyer. Carmen poured more water between his lips and wept with relief to see him take a deep swallow. She opened his shirt and plastered Living Earth onto the stark cave of his ribcage and over the scrawny pipe of his throat. Colour slowly began to return to his pale, papery skin.

  Carmen pulled his shoes off and ladled handfuls of Healing Water onto his bony feet, and revisited the bared skin on his chest with fresh applications of wet earth. Brock still looked like a corpse, but at least now he looked like a freshly-deceased one.

  “Thank you,” he rasped. “Thank you, Carmen. I was going to die out here.”

  “You don’t need to thank me,” Carmen answered, busily splashing and rubbing his hands and chest. “I’m still pissed at you,” she admitted, “but you don’t deserve to be cast out by your own family to die all alone.” She scooped a double-handful of gloppy soil on his bare scalp and applied it to his head.

  Brock swallowed and managed a weak grin. “So what do you think of the aged version of me, Carmen? I’m not quite someone you’d invite into your bed right now, am I?”

  Carmen cupped water and worked it into the silty crust on his chest, which was beginning to fill out with musculature and regain a tan colour. She placed one damp palm on his sunken cheek. “You forget what I am now,” she said. A smile played at the corner of her mouth. “I’m now one of the Fair Folk, am I not? Age means nothing to me.”

  Brock chuckled. “Indeed you are, Carmen.”

  Thin grey hair spouted over his scalp through a chalky layer of drying mud. Fascinated, Carmen anointed him with another handful of the precious liquid that bubbled from between the rocks. The ash-grey hair grew and thickened before her eyes like a time lapse video of grass growing from seed.

  Unsteadily, Brock rose to a sitting position next to the gurgling font. He lowered his face to the six-inch fountain and drank deeply, then turned to Carmen with a mischievous glimmer in his sapphire eyes. “Perhaps it’s not so bad,” he asked softly. “Immortality, enhanced senses, the ability to cast glamours…and close proximity to yours truly?” He rubbed more dampened silt over his cheeks and over the darkening skin of his chest.

  “Perhaps not,” Carmen admitted, “but don’t forget the close proximity to your family, either.” Brock bent to take another drink. His hands had lost their skeletal appearance and his shoulders now looked more substantial. “The point is, Brock, that you didn’t ask me first,” she went on. “You don’t get to just make choices about my life for me, especially choices that are irreversible. I have friends, jobs, a house and a community that I love. If I have to say goodbye to them, I want to be the one to do it, even if I get to have immortality and super-senses and glamours.”

  Brock took one of her hands in his. “And me,” he added. “You get to have me, too, Carmen.” Goosebumps prickled down Carmen’s arms as Brock pressed his lips to her fingertips. “I’m not so bad, am I?” He traced the tip of his tongue over her palm, and Carmen shuddered with want. She threw a glance back at Mephita, who watched the exchange with a lewd expression, and yanked her hand away.

  “The point, Brock,” she insisted, “is that you didn’t ask me for my thoughts. This goes way beyond picking me up for a surprise weekend holiday without running it by me beforehand, and even that would bug me a little bit. You can’t just change my life because you think it’s best. I have to choose it.”

  Brock held his hands in the bubbling fountain and studied her face as though he were seeing it for the first time. All traces of his mirth were gone.

  “Yes, I think you’re hot,” Carmen told him, “and yes, immortality is cool, but I can’t have any kind of future with a self-centred pleasure-seeker who makes my choices for me. I’ve lived for forty years, Brock, and I’ve learnt that I’m only happy if I can be in charge of my own destiny. After two hundred years of being a kid prince of the woods, I don’t think it’s even possible for you to grow up.”

  Brock’s bearing visibly cooled, even as his body regained its usual heated virility. He knelt and gulped deep mouthfuls of Healing Water from the spring then washed the traces of Living Earth from his face, scalp, chest and arms. He stood. “You should have something to drink, too, Carmen,” he told her. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  Carmen knelt and drank from the fountain, which was now noticeably shorter in height. The liquid had a sweet, faintly lemony taste. She felt it move down her throat to her stomach, where it seemed to radiate energy throughout her entire body. She took another swallow. Energy from the water sent shivers down her spine that pooled between her legs.

  She rocked back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Brock looked good enough
to eat. His skin glowed a rich caramel colour and his silky ash-grey hair once more stood lushly on end. Her eyes made their way down his wet shirt, now plastered over his rippled abdomen, and over the unmistakable bulge in his trousers. Carmen’s cunt melted in luxurious anticipation. She knew that nothing would be more delicious than to send Mephita on her way, open up the fly of Brock’s pants, and take that thick cock between her lips. She salivated, remembering the sweet, rich tang of his cum in her mouth.

  But no, she thought. Perhaps his choices brought me to this place, but I’m going to assert myself. Otherwise I’ll end up under his control, just as he and his siblings are bossed around by Gavin. Fuck that, she decided. She heard a sputter from the fountain and saw that it was only barely visible above ground. The flow of oozing silt from between the rocks had stopped and begun to crackle and dry. If I’m going to live forever in these woods, I’m going to make my own choices and control my own destiny. The fountain’s flow stopped and the last of the Healing Water seeped into the ground. Or die trying.

  Mephita bounced on the balls of her feet. “All better then?” she chirped.

  “Beat it, gnome,” he mumbled. “Carmen and I have things to do. We’ll call you if we need you again, so listen close.”

  “O-ho, you! I think not!” Mephita retorted. “This one, Carmen, made a promise to me on pain of death. You and the fine folk of your castle will be treating the gnomes different now, feller.” Mephita stood and braced her gnarled hands on her bony hips. “That’s me, and my kin, and all the old ones in the wood.”

  Brock scowled and looked to Carmen for explanation.

  “It’s really not fair for your family to be rude to them,” she told him. “Mephita wants you to allow the gnomes to bathe at the bathing cavern near the castle, and she wants you to address them by name, with no physical roughness, and to say please and thank you when they work.”

  Brock ran one hand through his hair and nodded. “Okay, okay,” he agreed. “I suppose that’s only fair. Anything else?”

  Mephita leant forwards. “Eggsies!” she hissed. “Don’t be forgetting the eggsies, Carmen!”

  “You promised her chicken eggs?” Brock asked. “Seriously?”

  “What’s the problem?” Carmen asked. “The girls are good layers! Although,” she conceded, “I may need to let the flock increase a little bit to keep up with egg demand.”

  Mephita chortled with glee.

  “Right, then.” Brock nodded. “Thank you, Mephita, for your help in saving me. I really appreciate it. Please call me Brock.”

  “You’re welcome, Brock!” hooted Mephita.

  Brock winced and leaned away from the gnome. “The way I see it, Carmen and Mephita,” he continued, “is that we need to save the woods immediately, both in order to keep the peace and to restore our place at Castle Speranza.”

  Carmen nodded and gestured for him to go on. Mephita sat on a rock and listened intently, her bulbous head cocked to one side.

  “We need to convince Old Man Prescott that selling the land is a bad idea. If we can’t remind him of his family’s obligation to protect the woods, then we need to make him believe it’s a bad idea for some other reason. Otherwise, we’ll end up relying on Mephita here for our Healing Waters and our Living Mud, and my family will resort to violence.”

  Mephita tapped one thickened, yellow fingernail on her chin. “You and you should take me along,” she leaned in front of Brock’s face and stated matter-of-factly. “You dersen’t want to risk another day with none of the Healing Waters for yourself, then, do you, Brock?” Brock’s nostrils flared. He squinted and nodded in agreement.

  “Yes, Mephita, we would appreciate your help very much. Summoning the Healing Waters and the Living Earth from the earth are skills that I lack, and they are skills that we need very much right now. I would be grateful if you accompanied us to Prescott Manor.”

  Mephita scampered over the crest of the ridge. “Best we’re going, then!” she urged. “Best we go!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Carmen and Brock worked their way up the loose ground of the ravine and began the long hike towards Prescott Manor with Mephita. Along the way, they found a ring of earthy-sweet mushrooms and a tree with tart pears, but Carmen’s stomach protested noisily nonetheless by the time they reached the edge of the woods. Mephita summoned another gush of Healing Waters so that they could refresh themselves, then they scoped out Prescott Manor.

  Across an expanse of lawn, the great home rose in Georgian grandeur. After hearing about the secluded property for years, Carmen was both pleased and disappointed to see it at last. She was surprised to note that the building itself was the only grand thing about the estate. The lawn was dry and bare in places, the three-tiered fountain was dry, and weeds blended with the landscape around the structure such that it was one unruly mass of greenery. Even under the moon’s soft light, the place was a dump.

  “Does he still live here?” Carmen wondered aloud. “The place is so run-down!”

  “Oh, yes, he’s here all right,” Brock said through gritted teeth. “I see the old traitor through the upstairs window.” Brock pointed to a yellow square of light on the second floor. A man’s form stood at the window facing the woods then moved away out of sight.

  Brock’s hand tightened into a fist. “Damn Prescott and his greed,” he muttered. “Doesn’t he know that everything he has is thanks to us?”

  Carmen placed one cool hand on his shoulder. “Remember, Brock, we’re going to do this your way, with no violence. You’re not your father or Gavin, both of whom are ready to tear apart anything that opposes them. You’re not your bloodthirsty sister, who’s daydreaming about switchblades. You’re also not Korbin, who’s content to let others deal with the problem and hope for the best.” She gave his thick shoulder a squeeze. “We can fix this without harming a hair on Old Man Prescott’s head.”

  Inside, Calvin Prescott eased his bare feet into worn slippers. The manor, with its stone walls and marble floors, was cool even in the summer, but with electricity costs the way they were, using the heater was a luxury reserved for the coldest days of winter. As he shut his bedroom door, a puff of dust blew down from one of the few paintings left in the place. Calvin sneezed mightily and made his way downstairs.

  He leaned against the counter as he waited for the kettle to boil and daydreamed. Once I finalise the sale, he thought lazily, I’ll call in some of those people who buy antiques and such and clear out the rest of this place. Then I’ll put the manor on the market. Even in its current condition, it’s a fine home. His eyes watered and he scrubbed at them with the back of his hand then continued his mental planning. I’ll pocket the earnings and deposit them and head south. I’ll find a nice place near the ocean where it’s always warm. The Florida Keys, perhaps?

  The kettle began to scream and Calvin removed it from the stove. After pouring the steaming water into his teapot to seep, he placed it on a tray with a teacup and a plate of sardines and crackers and walked into his library. There he eased into a threadbare armchair, snapped on the floor lamp next to him, and opened a leather-bound book. J.M. Barrie’s ’Peter Pan’, the story of a magical world in which children never grow up, might have been written for kids, but it was Calvin’s favourite literary indulgence.

  The manor creaked and moaned as it settled in for the evening. Calvin didn’t flinch when the faint pop-and-slide of an opening window issued from a nearby room. “All alone in an old house once more,” he mumbled, “like so many nights before.” He assembled a sardine on a cracker and took a thoughtful bite. “But not,” he added, “for very much longer.”

  Calvin took a sip of his tea and picked up his book. He let one hand dangle over the arm of his chair as he read about a strange shadow in the Darlings’ London home. It took several moments before he realised that a soft furriness grazed against his fingertips. “Huh?” he muttered. “A cat? I don’t have a cat.”

  He looked down at the floor and his eyes widened. Glossy
black fur, long white stripes, thick bushy tail—skunk! Calvin scrambled over the opposite arm of the chair and lurched towards the door. The animal walked towards him slowly, making bird-like squeaks, and waved its tail.

  “Sh-sh-sh-shhh,” Calvin whispered. “Good little skunkie! Everything’s just fine.” The skunk trotted towards him. Calvin made his way to the back door, keeping one eye out for furniture impediments and one eye fixed on the creature before him. He reached the back door and paused with one hand on the knob. The skunk turned its rump towards him and gracefully raised its back legs.

  Calvin’s scream filled the empty house and spilled over into the neglected lawn. He fell through the back door onto his ass and crab-walked away from the house in terror. The skunk followed him out of the door and chased him across the lawn.

  Calvin was running backwards for dear life when he tripped over a prone body and fell to the ground.

  “Now just look at what you’ve done!” a woman shrieked. “Are you trying to kill this poor man?” Beside the woman, a yellow Lab whimpered.

  “The skunk! There’s a skunk!” Calvin protested. He held a shaking hand up and pointed back towards the manor. A black and white tuxedo cat sat where he’d indicated. It lifted one paw and licked it with a casual air.

  “Don’t get out much, do you?” the woman snorted. “Where I’m from, we call that a cat.”

  Calvin shook his head in bafflement.

  “Anyhoodle, I’m Margie McCrory, and this is my associate, David Donaldson.” The woman held out one hand and Calvin shook it in a daze. Her eyes were magnified behind coke-bottle glasses and her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled into a face-stretching bun. “David twisted his ankle in the woods back there”—she indicated Prescott Woods with a jerk of her chin—“and I’m afraid he’s going to need some medical attention. I hope you’ve got good insurance.” She snorted.

  “Excuse me, but I’m Calvin Prescott, and this is my property. The woods and the manor are clearly marked ‘No Trespassing.’ Please explain your presence here before I call the police.” Calvin stood and brushed off his threadbare shirt.