Chapter 9: The Woods Are Lovely Dark And Deep

9

There weren't a lot of trees to look at in Chicago. Not on the hardscrabble Southside streets. The few there that could be found were usually decorative, planter friendly little things scattered along the boulevard, serving to do nothing more than to break up the monotony of constant urbanity.

The sight of the trees, as Bealz and his mother ventured into the woods here in the Incata, took his breath away. He marveled at their natural beauty and majesty. The trees rose up and out of sight, like the big buildings downtown, and he couldn't help but to gape up at their heights like a naively excited tourist.

As they walked on, he grew more at ease. It grew easier to dismiss the impossibilities of the moment. Walking into a cathedral of trees, Bealz thinks nothing of new worlds or the blood, death and fear left behind in the old.

A falling leaf beckons him onward and he darts ahead, laughing and calling back to his mother with such long awaited pleasure in simply losing himself in the excitement of an unexpected journey begun. He had never really been anywhere before, so this was a new feeling. For him, just like most everyone else that he knew, those who lived their entire lives solely within the confines of a couple dozen or so city blocks, the idea of traveling outside of that red-lined, gentrified urban space was just as far fetched as the idea of finding fresh food in a neighborhood store.

“This must be like it is in the country, huh, ma?” Bealz asks his mother loudly, envisioning the endless fields of corn that grew downstate of Chicago. He'd never been surrounded by such an immense area devoid of concrete.

The only thing to even come close had been the photos he'd seen before in textbooks of widely smiling, red faced farmers sitting in the cab or hanging off of the side of some huge green combine. There was usually just the one huge house in the background and it would always be surrounded by a never ending sea of tall, gently swaying stalks of corn.

To every inner city, public school kid, this looked like an unbelievable la-la land that was supposedly only hours away from the grit and the grime and the perpetual misery packed densely around their everyday existence. It was hard for them to imagine waking up to such quiet, uninterrupted space.

“Not quite like you think, baby,” Monie replies distractedly, looking about as if she too were caught up in the euphoria of a dream. But of a different sort. She felt something silken flit across her face. As if they were walking through unseen spider's webs drifting through the air.

Bealz, of course, is unaware of his mother's confused caution as they follow the forest trail demarcated through the trees. He skips along happily beside her when the path allows for it, behind or ahead as his curiosities take him.

Monique slows their pace. She listens to Bealz, barely answering his many questions, keeping him engaged just enough to mask her unease. She knows that she'd lost much since Bealz's grandmother had banished her. She tried to remember what the boy's father had attempted to show her of herself, but he had always spoke with such pretentious confusion.

The dark, ebony skinned men and women in the mountains had been better at it, more patient, if not amused by the idea of instructing such a crude child of Earth. She couldn't recall much from her time with the Moors, high up in their University Cities, attending their uppity Academies, but she could, unfortunately, remember that she had not progressed very far in her studies before she'd been abruptly expelled from the Incata.

She fought desperately to hold on to what she'd learned, but the Queen Mother had no intention of her ever recovering that part of herself. Her mind had been broken and scattered across two worlds. The spell, Monie knew, was intended to leave her lost and completely broken forever.

She also knew that it had been Bealz, not much more than an idea forming inside her, that had kept her from falling over into the abyss altogether.

Still, so much of what she knew, so much of her once confident certainty, had been drained away. She'd lost so much, even from before she'd met Askauri as a nineteen year old dancer determined to take care of herself at all costs, back when she had to rely on no more than sharp instincts and sharper reflexes. Sometimes just to make it home alive.

Even then, though, before the idea of magical black men and different worlds and bitchy mother-in-laws, she had been more than capable. Never anyone's victim, or at least never for long.

She'd had to fall back on those more primitive instincts since this other reality and the ability to access her more powerful, inner self had been torn away. Monique Felani had long been a survivor, though, and growing up around the worst that humanity had to offer had left her equipped to thrive far beyond just the concrete jungle that was the Southside of Chicago.

A sixth sense of sorts had developed, lending itself to a city-bred skittishness. And rightly so. Danger could very well be lurking around every corner. Especially if you were a 19 year old stripper heading home past the witching hour.

Now, peering up ahead through the trees, she can't quite shake the feeling that something was lurking near by. Unseen webs, feathery, seemed to lightly brush across her face. It was like an unwanted touch. An intrusion. It felt to her like the sickly familiar feeling of a festering, malevolent male lust, the dangerous kind that the bouncers would keep a watchful eye on.

She had never needed anyone to walk her home, though. She'd always known that she could handle whatever problem she might happen to meet along the way.

Monique knew that she had, at one time, been fierce. Fearless. She had never been one to cower through the darkened streets. She couldn't allow herself to do so now, here in these woods.

So, for Bealz's sake, for the peals of laughter he'd broken into, she tried not to show her uncertainty, the fear that grew and tingled along her spine. Besides, he had already seen her at her worst, much too often. A disappointment greater than he could possibly understand, given her inherent strength, the truly remarkable story of her very existence and the sheer will to persevere, despite the fantastical odds, calculated in two different worlds, against her.

Gathering her thoughts as best as she could, Monie attempts to shake free of more than ten years worth of confused cobwebs. She struggles hard to focus. Bealz's enthusiasm helps.

She wipes distractedly at her face.

Bealz darts about, looking up at the trees, searching their trunks and the loam for interesting morels and chanterelles, grossing out over the bugs and beetles teeming on the forest floor. Everything was so new to him. A brand new world filled with surprise.

She tried to explain to him what she could, which wasn't much. Just enough to further fuel his curiosity. His wonder is contagious and after a short time, begins to erode away at her tension. It is a joy to watch him. A pleasure more than ten years in the making.

The woods, she recalls from a snippet of poetry, certainly are lovely, dark and deep. Scary is one way to look at them, for sure, but these same woods had so often before, when she'd come here alone, magically worked to calm her chaotic spirit. It had been a healing balm as she strolled through its idyllic scenery.

The air is sweetened as the giant trees slowly exhale. The pastoral sounds of an active biome is peaceful, lilting in its background persistence. Watching Bealz slip around a slight bend in the upcoming path, Monie may be confused about much, but she knows very well why she'd come here before. Why she had brought her son here now. To this lovely, quiet place.

Darting ahead, laughing ridiculously, Bealz disappears momentarily from view. The pure joy that he exuded was enough to finally allow for a silly smile to creep across her face.

Hurrying along, awakened and drawn to the joyful sounds bubbling in his wake, Monie steps around the bend and freezes. Her heart suddenly turns cold and she silently curses herself for dulled senses and intellect.

Bealz stands in the middle of the tiny forest lane looking wonderingly into the eyes of a bent and broken old man.

Still enraptured by the shiny newness all around him, he is excitedly amazed to meet someone walking around in this fairy tale place.

The old man, with a mischievously youthful sparkle in his eyes, claps and clasps his hands together in delight.

“Oh, ho!” he cries. “Well, met on a Monday!”

“But it's not Monday,” Bealz says, laughing at the man's absurdity.

The old man is draped in what appeared to be a mixture of animal pelts, multi colored scarves, buckskin and blue jeans. He pulls behind him a crudely constructed, two-wheeled little wooden cart loaded with an unrecognizable array of brick-a-brac.

The man's cart, it's worn, wooden wheels pegged to a wooden shaft, appears aged, smoothed and hardened. Maybe even petrified.

“What a clever young lad you might turn out to be.”

Fighting against the panic, Monie finds her voice and says, “Bealz, come over here, to me.”

Bealz doesn't seem to hear his mother, lost as he is in his delight.

The old man, maintaining eye contact with Bealz, speaks to Monie. “I heard a tale sometime ago,” he cackles. “Yes, I did indeed. It was all bout a wee little thing and her baby bo!”

“You get the fuck away from him, now!” Monie reacts instinctively, shaking free of her shock, her fires beginning to kindle.

“No, no, no,” the old man says with a tic of his head. “No need for none of that. I'm just a well met stranger in the woods, now, dear. Don't you fear none and I won't neither.”

Monie can feel the heat of her flames begin to stir, “If you don't back off now, old man, I will hurt you.”

“Oh, you'll do no such thing, Daughter of Earth. You'll both be worse for it.”

“See,” the old man says. “The boy already dances. Caught up in my web and ready to tell me a tale or two. Wouldn't want nothing to happen, now, would we?”

Bealz doesn't seem to notice the conversation between his mother and the stranger. His smile stretches painfully across his face and he dances in delight, bouncing up and down and clapping his hands.

“Bealz, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Monie demands. “Get the fuck away from that old creepy ass nigga, now!”

“Oh, t'ain't nothin wrong, young missy. He's just a eager to let me take a peek, you see. Oh, deary, just lookit him. How he shines so,” the old man says, his eyes sparkling impishly. “Now, you're gonna cool down, too. I'd hate for you to see him dance his last.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“Just him, at the moment, dear Earth Child. T'ain't no threat, neither. But it is a good bet. Let's walk a spell, tell an old man a story. Just a bit to step and we'll be right in my back yard.”

Fear and uncertainty sap away at Monie's fury. The flames gutter and dance and die away as she thinks to negotiate. “Look, mister. We ain't try to walk around in your yard. We just didn't know, is all.”

“Oh, yes,” he says. “All in all and none is none. But, whoever you were, my dove, your story's done.”

Perceiving the threat in his whimsical words, Monie sidles slowly towards her son, “Look, man. Just back off OK. Just leave us alone.”

“Tsk, tsk, no need, no need. No need indeed. You've let my thread wrap round so that I can take a look, and now your story too will be in my book.”

Monie's eyes begin to sting and water. She brushes furiously at her face. “What is this?”

“You see, you see?” the old man says, pleased with himself. “And now you will get to hear the story of me and how ol' Pickle-Me-Jack found his lunch while out walking about and following a hunch!”

He gets busy and wraps them both tightly in invisible, silky threads. They somehow fit quite snugly amongst the collection of kitsch in his little wooden cart.