Val Hall, page 28
“I sent it,” The Sandman said. “I gave it to you. You needed to know. You needed to sleep... and you needed to know. So I gathered up what was left of the gift that brought me to this place, and I used it to bring you home, too.”
“Home?” Carrie sounded almost like a lost child, bewildered, uncertain. “I woke – back then – from that dream – with the name in my head. It haunted me. I tried to dismiss it as just, you know, you dream weird things sometimes, but it insisted it was real, that it existed, that it was important, and in the end I looked it up, online, and it was – but that Wikipedia article about Val Hall left me with more questions than answers – what is this place? Why was it so important that I know about it?” She shook her head. “It just wouldn’t let go until I finally decided to come here, myself, to see – but why – why is it important? Why is it so important to me?”
“This is the final port in our journey, for those of us who need it. For people like us. Like you and me. I... was known as The Sandman, and my gift was to bring sleep, and to gift dreams. There are many others here, with different gifts. They may have been a superhero only once in their existence, or they may have followed through on their small and precise gift throughout their lives – but they have it, and this place gathers them when it is spent, and lets them find a place to be safe, to rest. But it can be more than that, and it has been, in the past. It can be a spar to cling to when the storms get too strong. If you need a place to withdraw from facing your demons on whatever the front lines of your battle may be – this place is here. One of our Directors started out as a resident – he came here broken by his gift, and Val Hall healed him, and made him whole again. And then... he could live again. He could begin again. He could give back. He could continue.”
“But I am no superhero,” Carrie began helplessly. “Not even... Third Class. I’m a nurse – I don’t belong here...”
The Sandman shook his head to stop her.
“We can tell,” he said. “I can tell. You are wrong. You do belong to Val Hall. It does belong to you. You’re a Healer, you are one who gives life.”
“I have lost plenty,” Carrie said, and the pain of it was raw in her voice.
“Having a gift – especially one like this – does not mean that you get to win every time,” The Sandman said gently. “It means that it is in you to win. But the game isn’t rigged in your favour, not always, not all the time. We can lose – we can all lose – and we do. But when we win...” His eyes sparkled. “When we win, other people always call it a miracle. We are miracle workers, you and I, in our own way. Val Hall... was here for me, when I needed it. I promised then to make sure that it is there for those who come after me, that those who follow will know it is here for them too. It is the only way to repay what it has given to me – to give back. It may not be your hour to retire here – not yet. I am old now, and it was my time – but you are young still and it is all still to come for you, out there. You’ve a lot of living left to do, I think. But some day you may return here. And in the meantime... if you need a place to rest, when it all becomes too much, you need only call, and they will be here for you, too, like they have been for me. Come, let me show you. You’ll understand.”
They crossed the lawn together, in the cool October sunshine, a line of maples turning to gold against a backdrop of dark green cedars. A raven flew low between them and the house, and then rose up into the autumn sky.
Matthew Dunne, watching from the veranda, saw the bird, and nodded at it.
Okay, then I got it. I think I got it right.
If he closed his eyes, he could see the man who had once been known in this house as Eddie the orderly standing beside him. And Eddie was smiling.
VAL HALL, OCTOBER 2060
The old woman stepping off the ferry, with the help of a cane, paused on the dock and looked around. Someone had carried out her bag, and left it on the bench by the foot of the stairs leading up to where the main house of the Hall was – the stairs that she could see somebody dressed in nursing scrubs hurrying down, waving at her, smiling.
One of her own tribe.
She lifted her free hand, the one not resting on her cane, and waved back.
The maples were gold again, just like she remember them from when she had first come here, so many years ago. Everyone she had met back then would be long gone by now – but Carrie wondered how many new people had come in their stead, what their special gifts were. She found herself anticipating her discovery of those things, now that she was here to stay, with a mounting sense of anticipation, even joy.
It was time to let go. To just be. To let the healing spirit heal itself, after decades of healing so many others, here, at the end of a life’s journey.
The Val Hall nurse stepped off the stairs onto the dock and paused to grab the bag waiting on the bench, hoisting it easily (Oh how easily! Oh, to be young and strong again!) over her shoulder. She turned to the old woman, extending her other hand.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the young nurse said. “It’s just up these stairs and then you can rest, at last. Welcome home, Healer.”
The One About Gone To Flowers (2021)
“What do you think you are doing?”
The tone was modulated, pleasant, the woman’s voice just deep enough to be sexy, but also imperially aggrieved, and Eddie sighed as he turned to face her. In the crowd of protesters he had felt safely anonymous, alone, but of course she had found him without any trouble at all.
She had not been there a moment before, but this was a Goddess and she did what she pleased. She had stepped out from a fold in the air, from a twilight shadow in the waning light between streetlights just beginning to flicker on, to stand there beside him. On the face of it, she didn’t really “fit” the moment, the context, or the people who surrounded her on the street. Her narrow feet were upholstered in an expensive pair of heeled leather pumps, an above-the-knee dove-gray pencil skirt showed off long lean legs, and there was a matching tailored jacket over that which nipped in her waist and silhouetted (in a thoroughly professional manner) a delicate full-bosomed but slender figure. The golden torc of the Brisingamen encircled her neck, and earrings that appeared to be falcon feathers dangled from her ears. The ash-blonde hair was scraped back and coiled neatly into a French twist at the back of her head; above a gray cloth mask that color-matched her suit, her eyes, a disturbing shade of deep green like moss under water, glared regally at Eddie. She was his height, maybe even a tiny bit shorter, but she still managed to give the impression of looking down at him.
“Hello, Freyja,” he said. “So which one ratted me out? Hugin or Munin?”
Freyja snorted elegantly. “Odin’s ravens have better things to do than go flitting back to him tattling on his disobedient children. Did you think he would not know that you were gone?”
Eddie shrugged, then gestured around him, by way of an answer. “This is important.”
“A gathering ground for Odin’s halls?” Freyja asked, raising her eyebrow.
Eddie’s lips thinned. “Whom would he call? The ‘warriors’ yonder dressed in their armor and bearing their cannons?”
“Not necessarily,” Freyja said, her voice oddly gentle. “But I ask, again. What do you think you are doing?”
“There will be someone,” Eddie said. “There will be someone, here. I know it, I can feel it.”
“Someone? Someone here? What are you talking about?”
“Someone for Val Hall,” Eddie said, looking away from her to rake the crowd with his gaze. “There is a superhero waiting in this crowd. Somewhere. I could hear the voice calling me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m here to...”
Freyja tapped him on the shoulder and he glanced back at her. She was holding out a folded piece of paper and he took it reflexively.
“What’s that?” he asked, holding the paper in an awkward finger-and-thumb pincer grip that made it look as though he had picked up something slimy like a garden slug.
“I didn’t know what name you’d be using, so the ink’s still wet,” Freyja said briskly, “but if that is what it takes... That is your subpoena. I am become a lawyer, here, in this world you love so much. Here’s my card.” She handed that over, too, as she spoke. The name on it said Vanadis Hörn; Eddie’s mouth curled into a grin. She was using all of her names. All of her powers.
“My subpoena?”
“Your father wishes you to return to Valhalla,” Freyja said, all business. “As in, right now.”
“But this...” Eddie gestured again, with the hand holding the paper, and the subpoena from Valhalla fluttered at the crowd around him like butterfly wings. Above his own mask, hand-made from a cotton swatch which showed Star Wars characters wielding red and blue light sabers, his eyes sparked with passion, with defiance.
“Just what is it that you think you can accomplish here?” Freyja demanded, a shade truculently. “Really, Odin sent me after you – but do you think I have nothing better to do than chase down an ungrateful bastard son whose mortal blood suddenly sings too loud in his veins? When Odin called you to Valhalla, he honored you. He gave you more than some get, than some deserve – ”
“Freyja,” Eddie interrupted, “peace. I would have returned. But I need to...”
“You don’t understand,” Freyja said implacably. “Your obedience is required. Not your rationalizations.”
“The things I’ve heard about,” Eddie said. “The things I’ve seen. The people I’ve already spoken to, right here, tonight, any of them could be...”
He noticed someone being led to the front of the crowd, a black man wearing a patch over one eye, the other swollen almost shut and dark with bruises – it was clear that his vision was so compromised that he required assistance to move without doing damage to himself. Eddie pointed to the impaired man.
“That one,” Eddie said. “I just spoke to that one, maybe an hour ago. Those eyes? He lost his right eye. Direct hit from a rubber bullet. He should probably still be in a hospital bed, truth be told. But he’s not – he’s here. I don’t know what hit him on the other side; all he can make out right now is light and shadow.” Tiny crow’s-feet lines wrinkled around his eyes, showing that beneath the mask he had smiled. “Offhand... remind you of anyone?”
“You’re not calling him Odin just because he has an eyepatch,” Freyja said, with a touch of asperity.
“No, but when he spoke to me... he said... he might be the one. He told me he would ask them to take him to the front line. Because he thought... he thought he could... Look, Freyja! Look!”
Freyja was about to smack him down again but his sharpening tone made her turn to look in the direction he was urgently pointing in. At first it was just a glance, an annoyed sideways flicker of a look cast under duress, but then she paid closer attention, those moss-green eyes narrowing.
The line of black-armored police standing implacably before the blind man facing them stirred, rippled. People gasped as they saw what was happening: officers dropping batons which were losing their stiffness and falling down in blossoming honeysuckle vines, guns which suddenly sprouted leaves from the stocks and white flowers from the barrels, shields which turned into falling water and then pooled formlessly at their feet, zipties and handcuffs hanging from the officers’ waists uncoiling into long hanks of marsh grass or seaweed which wrapped around their thighs in damp embrace, helmets which turned into wreaths of leaves and flowers. Behind them, one half of an armored car which had been in what would have been direct line of sight of the blind man melted into the bulbous orange shape of a gigantic pumpkin, its rear wheels vanishing into a mess of leaf, stem, and vine. A handful of the National Guard troops stationed behind the first line of the city police, wearing camo, suddenly found themselves furiously brushing off rustic and unraveling straw hats, vestments made of woven plants, soft animal skins draped at angles which offered no protection whatsoever, and streaks of dried mud which crackled and fell off their naked limbs as they backed frantically away from the transformation zone.
“Did you say you were just talking to that guy?” Freyja asked, taken sufficiently off guard to allow herself to show her astonishment. “What were you talking about? Tannhäuser?”
“Not... specifically,” Eddie said. “We did touch on the matter of forgiveness of sins.”
“Did he get the idea that he was the one who was supposed to forgive them?” Freyja asked.
Before them, the lines of the protesters and the police were wavering. The police phalanx which had found itself armed with honeysuckle and water had scrambled to retreat; there had been an attempt at reinforcement but the moment anyone armed with anything resembling lethal force came into the line of sight of the man half-blinded by violence, the same thing happened to them as had happened to the officers they were replacing.
Eddie jumped as the unmistakable sound of a flash bang grenade came from somewhere beyond the faltering barricade. From a sheltered place where clearly the flower power magic didn’t hold sway, someone shot a canister of tear gas at the feet of the crowd. There were screams from the protesters, a recoil, but then they stopped – the cloud of gas rising towards them was now in line-of-sight, and what reached the crowd, scrambling to deploy the open umbrellas they carried to protect themselves as best they could from tear gas and pepper spray, was a mist shading from a bilious poisonous shade of yellow to a hint of lavender and smelling faintly of lilac.
Someone in the crowd laughed, suddenly, and people began to dance.
Eddie was smiling so broadly that his face threatened to split in two.
“Not tonight, ValFreyja, Lady of the Slain,” he said. “For once, not tonight, not here. Not for your field of Fólkvangr, not for my father’s halls. Tonight, no blood. No dead. No maimed bodies dragged off the battlefield.” His hand curled into a fist, crumpling Odin’s subpoena.
“I did not think there was a war here,” Freyja said slowly, thoughtfully, her eyes narrowed at the still writhing greenery which the police officers were frantically trying to scrape off themselves. One or two of the braver – or more foolhardy – protesters had even crossed the divide, grinning broadly, and began to offer assistance in removing the strangling vines.
Eddie barked out a short, sharp, mirthless laugh. “Of course there is. This one is just better concealed than others. I fought in wars, Freyja. In what you would call ‘real’ wars. I wallowed in the mud of the Great War trenches. I marched in the ‘other’ world war, the one that followed the War to End All Wars. You think that you and my father split the dead heroes between you, half to him in Valhalla, half to your own broad field of glory – but that’s been going on for centuries, for thousands of years... Did you stop to watch the world change? Even Odin acknowledges heroism in other guises now. Does anyone ever stop to wonder why they occasionally see children in Valhalla, or women who should not have been fighting in any ‘war’ of the kind you are thinking of?” He gestured again, at the crowd around him, the crowd that appeared to be completely oblivious to the two of them and their exchange. “Freyja... Freyja... they’re fighting invisible wars every day, out there. Some of them have been fighting for a long time. Some have just begun. There are times – like this, right now – when it bubbles over – and it gets noticed, across the Bridge, in the Halls of the Gods – but most of the time you forget to listen to the voices crying out from here below.”
“We hear it,” Freyja whispered. “But your voices haven’t been crying to us, not for centuries now. Sometimes other gods hear the prayers. Sometimes there are ripples in the continuum and things cancel each other out and nothing really gets heard at all and really it’s just easier to let things... coast...”
“Because there isn’t, even, you know, a war on. Not really, right? I mean, you look down on the world, and mostly it just gets on with getting on. But really – they’re never at peace, there’s something they’re fighting, some of the time, most of the time. Sometimes there are actual soldiers on the ground somewhere and you look and you see the things you recognize and understand – live ammo, explosions, fire, ruins, blood. And you know there are people on the way, to you, to Odin, as always, even if some of them don’t know that’s where they’re going. But the rest of the time... you see a single mom trying to raise a kid or three while battling poverty and often disease that she doesn’t have the resources to fight... you see a young man walking the street with his hoodie up around his face and somebody decides he looks dangerous and shoots first and doesn’t wait to ask questions... you see inequality, with very similar infractions bringing very different consequences to different people of different circumstance... when I was down here, living down here, that is what I saw – up close, personal. Those are the people who scrape bottom and then find the strength to rise with wings of fire, with gifts you never expected, never understood, could barely believe.”
“Your people,” Freyja murmured. “Your Superheroes. Third Class.”
“Yes. The humans. The human beings who stand, who cry enough, whose power can no longer be contained. I am a son of Odin. If he can have a hall for heroes... so can I, Freyja. So can I. And I have a responsibility to it.”
“He wants you home,” Freyja said. “At home, with him. He is Odin. He is the First of us. He is your father. When he demands...”
“I was there,” Eddie interrupted. “When he called, I came. And I would have gone back. I would, Freyja. But this – here – I needed to be....” He paused, and glanced back at the man who still stood before the fracturing police barricade, which was getting overgrown with flowers now – at the man who could see none of it with his physical sight, but in whose mind this was all born, the one who saw it first, the one who had the strength to superimpose that vision on the very real dangers that had been facing him.
“He will probably get a handle, that one,” Eddie said. “It’s inevitable. Too many people saw this; a name will follow. You and I called him Tannhäuser, just because you saw a staff burst into flower like the legend says – but that may not be what he will call himself, in the end. But he earned his place in Val Hall, my Val Hall, tonight. And I need to go and tell him. I need to let him know that there is a place that is waiting for him, for when he needs it. I can’t just...”
