Volume One: The Road Out
Chapter Four
Verse One: Why Do They Call it The Witch Road?
Amy Welcher hated the past week. The past week had wronged her, and if it were possible to kick a week or lecture it, she would have already done that. First, her boyfriend and let 'bros' take priority over her, his girlfriend. It happened all the time in the novels Amy read and inevitably led to the guy either turning dudebro evil or strip clubs- which really amounted to the same thing. Guys always wanted to play around, Cosmopolitan taught Amy this at a very young age, and she started dating Harley quite deliberately because he wasn't that sort of guy. Harley was cute enough- not boy band cute, but certainly college athlete cute- and so conscientious. If only he didn't constantly sideline for his man crush.
After man-crush lost his job- no surprise there- and Harley hadn't done what he was supposed to do if he'd watched any Romantic Comedies; Amy had decided to use the tried and true method of making the man punish himself. The silent treatment, only just enough breaks in the silence to remind him what we was missing.
And then Harley stopped answering her texts.
Or, more accurately, Amy admitted to herself, his phone started bouncing her texts back as undeliverable. Amy couldn't tell if he was blocking her number somehow or if he was in an area where there was no service. Amy had kept herself deliberately ignorant on things where others could help her, it provided her with power over the people who needed to impress her and she liked that. But Harley always answered texts. Reliable was practically his middle name.
And so Amy went down to the house. She found the door to the basement suite barre with yellow police tape. She found a white van out front. And when she approached the door she was stopped by man in a business suit who introduced himself as Agent White and demanded she come with him.
He had told her she wasn't under arrest, but hadn't allowed her to leave. He had told her that she wasn't being interrogated, but wouldn't stop asking pointed questions. He had told her that she wasn't being charged with anything, but took her driver's license and recorded everything.
The 'not an interrogation' had lasted for over twenty-four hours she thought. During which time she had told them how she met Harley, about Marion the freak man-crush, about their fight, about their entire relationship outside the bed room. She had tried demanding a phone call. She had tried being flirty. She had tried getting angry, even stomping her feet. She had tried crying, but her secret weapon seemed wasted in the men in black and white suits who just kept peppering her with questions. Finally she was left, head down in the interrogation room, actually crying. The whole process had drained her, and she was unable to answer any more questions. And as she tried to answer questions, she instead found herself sobbing into her shirt sleeve.
At some point they let her go. She was so exhausted from the lack of sleep and constant questions that she couldn't remember when they had actually let her go. She wandered out in to the blinding white light of day, and felt like she were performing some sort of horrible walk of shame.
Amy put one foot in front of the other carefully for several blocks before she noticed that she was heading back towards Harley's house. She tried to think why. She was exhausted and depressed. She knew her make up must look awful from all the crying, but hadn't mustered the courage to check since exiting the building. Had she been in a policy station? She suddenly couldn't remember, and looking around could find the building that she had exited from just moments earlier. Silent glass towers loomed around her on all sides impassively.
What should she do? The question sat uncomfortably in her skull, an unfamiliar house guest with unfamiliar demands. Amy knew that the world was evil and petty from movies and television, from Oprah and Cosmo, from Facebook and Soap Operas. She had armed herself against that with the best weapons she could find. The thing she had prized most had been her boyfriend. He could act out on occasion, but compared with the boyfriends on display on daytime television, he'd always acted pretty damned excellent- even counting his stupid best friend fixation.
The men in suits had accused her boyfriend of some pretty awful things, kidnapping, fleeing the authorities, potential assaults and murders and she couldn't remember what else. Amy knew Harley did not match the person they described. Grudgingly, Amy admitted that neither did Marion. She didn't think of Marion as evil, just incompetent on one hand and dangerous competition for her on the other hand. Neither guy had the capacity to be as evil as the men in black and white suits had described in Amy's opinion.
Amy felt vaguely guilty, and she didn't appreciate the feeling. Thinking back, Amy wasn't sure what she had told the men in the suits. This fact began to worry Amy. She faced the decision to believe Harley could do the horrible things they had said, or that the men in the suits had lied to her. Amy choice to believe that they had lied to her, which meant anything that she had told them might be used to hurt Harley, her Harley.
She was still walking, she noticed, and still heading to Harley's. She wasn't sure if the tape and the men would still be there. The thought creeped her out, she wanted to turn and walk in any other direction. But, she kept walking towards the house. She suddenly realized how much she missed him, Harley; and not as a weapon against a petty universe (although she could really use a hug and a snuggle right now). Amy missed Harley for Harley, and was suddenly very angry at somebody, she wasn't sure who to blame, for their separation.
But the creepy men who had practically arrested her without a trial or a phone call or anything might still be at the house, and she slowed her pace as fear began to creep in. Besides, why was she going to the house? Harley wasn't there. And the creepy men in suits would have taken anything useful that might tell where they went. But she kept walking. Amy started to notice that she was walking against her better judgement, like some bimbo in a bad horror movie. She deliberately turned and faced away from Harley's place and, to her shock and horror, found herself walking backwards in the same direction as before.
Amy turned back around to avoid tripping over the fur pom-poms on her shoes and found herself staring at a grubby looking man with a
grubby looking big dog, both standing in front of her grinning like fools.
"I don't carry cash." She said automatically.
The man drew a familiar object from behind his back and offered it to Amy, "That without that you don't."
Amy stared, "My tote bag."
"Useful summoning anchor too." The man said, "I'm Grub and this is Mung Bean, my dog and partner in crime. We're wizards and we need your help finding your lost boy and his partner before the bad guys in suits do."
Amy listened to the stream of insanity with growing apprehension, "I will call the cops." She finally said.
Grub grinned, "And I will go looking for your boy. Suit yourself."
Amy paused. And Grub, expanded. Still a dirty grubby man in poorly fitted clothes he was now bigger and more imposing, and Amy suddenly realized how slightly the man had been deliberately carrying himself- a mask now discarded.
"We all wear masks. I understand that. You wear a mask as armour to protect yourself, because you think you're in the horrible small petty little stories that you've been reading all of your life. But you're in those stories. I'm giving you a chance. You can choose to be the selfish self-absorbed girlfriend that the story has cast you as so far, just minor obstacle for the first few chapters. Or, you can choose to be part of the dark horse ensemble; the team that backs up the heroes and helps them win the day. This isn't a melodrama, this is epic fantasy adventure. Choose now, because I don't have all day."
"I could scream," She said.
"You could, but you don't need to. I'm going to do anything to you. I'm offering you a chance to help somebody you care about. And I think beneath that carefully composed mask, you do care. And I think you know that given how much you told the bad guys, reaching your boy is time sensitive matter. We have to hurry. Do you want to help, or you do want to go back into your bubble?"
"You don't know a thing about me."
"I know plenty about you. I just used your little bag there as a focus to summon you here. I picked all sorts of stuff including who gave you that bag, which tells me an awful lot about why you're so scared. I'd have burned the bag myself." He said.
Amy dropped the bag. Her mouth hung open.
"You can't know that."
"I do know it. And now you know that you aren't in the story that you thought you were in. The old rules don't apply. You have to adapt if you want to go anywhere from here besides back into your little angry defensive shell of denial."
Amy was about to say something angry and terribly clever in response when Grub reached out and plucked a dandelion seed from the air and gently wrapped his huge hands around it.
"You don't have to be a caterpillar in a cocoon, Amy," He said softly, "you can be a butterfly."
He opened his hands, and a painted lady butterfly fluttered from his grasp.
Amy suddenly had a thousand questions, but between Grubs words and his apparent conjuring of the butterfly, Amy found him hard to question.
"So, you want my help saving my boyfriend?"
"Little miss, neither you nor I are big players. We are meddlers, named extras. Hopefully we are the comic relief, because that boosts our survivability. Be glad you're the girl friend, that will improve your chances of survival."
"Unless he needs some grief to motivate him. I know what happens to love interests in stories written for boys."
"How do you know this a boy's story?"
"It's a quest."
"Yes, it is and your boy is neck deep in danger right now. I can't get a bead on him. But he helped me, and I pay my debts. So I'm going to help him."
"What do you mean he's in danger?"
"Did those guys in the suits and sunglasses seem like they wanted to give him a raise?"
"But what does that or this have to do with anything?"
"It has everything to do with everything. Your boy is one of the big players in our story and if we don't keep him safe, things are going to keep getting worse for everybody. And, I suspect this is more relevant, if we don't help him he's probably going to die and die slowly and painfully."
"If goes and dies," Amy said, "I'm going to kill him."
"Hah!" He laughed a single loud flat syllable, "We'd best move before the vulture sees us. I don't much care for quislings." He thumbed his hand back at Harley's house and Amy spotted the kneeling figure of Mrs. Critchwood in the front yard with a japanese trowel doing violence to her lawn and what she must have perceived as weeds.
"Why would care what Mrs. Critchwood sees? She's just a mean old lady who's easy to manipulate." Amy asked.
"You're going to learn that in a story there are very few little characters. We all get recycled sooner or later to serve the narrative."
They walked briskly away, and Grub launched into an enthusiastic narrative regarding what he planned for them to do. he kept referring to 'the story' and Amy wasn't certain what he meant when he said that, but didn't want to look foolish by asking obvious questions. The idea seemed to be that they were living a real version of old fairy tales or legends or classic quests, or maybe those things were a reflection of whatever they were doing. But in either case (or possibly something else if she were way off base), people seemed to fill certain roles in the story, big roles and little roles, and then enact the story with the winners getting to dictate how the story looks next time, or something like that.
Amy still wasn't sure that Grub wasn't simply a con man who was good enough at slight of hand and cold reading to pull a convincing job, but something in her gut told her to trust him, and that didn't happen often- especially with men. And the other man she trusted seemed to need help, even if she was still furious with him, and Grub seemed to honestly want to help. So she kept listening to his insanity.
As far as Amy could tell, there were two teams fighting for control of the story: a group that Grub kept referring to as the Tribe, and a group that Grub called the Hungry Empire. No points for guessing who the bad guys were, Amy noted to herself.
"No, me and all Wizards side with the Tribe, because we aren't fools," Grub said, "But we've been losing this fight for centuries, and Wizards and Witches have started stealing some of our power from the empire. Use the master's tools to take down the master's house so to speak."
"Playing dirty?" Amy asked.
"Yup. The heroes play big and dramatic up in the sky. The little guys fight in the mud. We steal and borrow power from wherever we can get it, our enemies, our allies, gods and angels, devils and demons and ancient eldritch abominations, you name it. We're power parasites."
"You're not selling this to me. That is not sexy."
"It can be. Think of it like this. If your car breaks down and you have to get it to the dealership, do you want to push it yourself or call a tow truck?"
"The tow truck obviously."
"Our magic is like calling a cosmic tow truck."
“A tow truck is sexy?”
“It's sexier than walking the Witch Road on foot.”
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