The Man Behind the Curtain
“You do realize that you might have become irretrievably lost.”
Guardian extended a leafy limb to assist me to my feet, but I pulled myself up without taking it.
“And for what? A stubborn insistence that I am not to be trusted? When have I failed you, Althea? Tell me one time that I guided you the wrong way.”
For some reason, I was struggling to get my balance and had to lean against the wall.
“Why did you manufacture the woods and the kidnapping of Grent and the Glowing Ones?” I asked. “And then, why did you put me with Anches? I feel like I’m being manipulated.”
“Ah, I see.”
“It feels like I’m fumbling around in the dark. And maybe it’s not you. Maybe you’re being manipulated, too.”
“The reasons behind a manipulation aren’t necessarily bad ones.”
“How would I know? On what basis do I place my trust?”
Guardian looked at me, tilting his head in a very angular way. It felt like he was deciding something.
“You want the one responsible, the one in charge, is that right?” he said, not waiting for me to answer. “And I can bring him to you. But first, I see that you’re barely able to stand and need a good meal. Let’s go to the lovely gardens at the center of the Library, shall we? That way you can refresh yourself and rest. I realize you are eager to figure everything out, but you must know that nothing can be rationally determined when you’re in a weakened state.”
We walked in relative silence. A highly verbal creature, it was impossible for Guardian not to fill the space with random comments about features of the Library or items on the menu for our meal. I listened without responding.
The gardens were as beautiful as I remembered them, yet bittersweet without Anches. I missed his open, positive, simple presence.
Guardian brought food to me and I ate alone. I was so tired that I started falling asleep while eating, a strange kind of exhaustion, so I finished quickly and walked to the same little cabin as before and went to sleep.
In the morning, there was food ready in the garden. Guardian had set places for two. Was it really going to happen as Guardian said? Was the one in charge of everything, the man behind the curtain as we say on Earth, really going to show up?
While eating, I saw something colorful approaching from the distance. The dot of the thing became larger and soon, with joy, I could see that it was a Welchefarbe. It had been so long since I’d seen one. It wasn’t just a Welchefarbe. There was someone on its back. It continued its approach while I nibbled my food and soon I saw who it was.
“Father!”
I ran to him and he slid down from the Welchefarbe and we collided in a hug.
“What are you doing here? How – how are you here?”
“Oh, I’ve never really been very far away from you, Althea.”
“So much has happened!”
“Why don’t you tell me about it.”
And so, we sat at the table in the gardens of the Library and I told my father the entire story from when I dropped from my childhood window and onto the Welchefarbe until Guardian yanked me from what I called the Opposite World and brought me to the gardens to rest.
“Goodness. What adventures you’ve had!”
“Yes! And now, perhaps, it’s time to come home.”
“Where is home?”
“Isn’t it with you and mother in the house with the birds?”
“Is it? What is your purpose there, Althea?”
“Well, I could be your apprentice. I could continue making colored glass stories and sell them in the town and live a quiet, peaceful life.”
“So, that is your calling, Althea?”
This was not fair.
“Where are we in the universe, Father?”
“And here the tough questions come.”
“How far are we from Earth? Can we travel to Earth from here?”
Father shuffled a bit in his seat and fiddled with a napkin. “These questions are not easily answered.”
“Are you the man behind the curtain?”
“The man behind the curtain?”
“Yes. The one responsible for everything that’s going on?”
“Oh. Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose the answer, Althea, well, I guess it’s, well, yes.”
For the first time in my life, I glared at my father.
“Why have you put me through all of this! Why are you manipulating me!”
He was visibly stirred and a bit wounded, which tempered my anger a little. He continued to fiddle with items on the table and even the table itself, as if imagining how he would construct it, as if visually sanding the wood.
“There is so much more at work here that you don’t know. So much, in fact, that it’s impossible to even begin to explain.”
“Try me.”
“It might be upsetting. Too upsetting.”
“What could be more upsetting than all of this uncertainty?”
He continued to pull at the wood of the table with his fingers while thinking about how to proceed. He was trying to decide whether or not to come clean and tell me everything. I could see his mind turning, playing out all the different outcomes like a chess game. And when he finally spoke, it was more of a stalling tactic while he kept thinking.
“Parents want to protect their children. It’s a natural thing, Althea. Why when you were just a tiny girl you wanted to put out feldhafer so that it would bring the Welchefarben. You wanted to see one so badly, but you didn’t know that with the Welchefarben would come their predators, the Korten, creatures of such nightmares that I didn’t want to introduce them to your imagination by telling you about them. So, I had to deter you from setting out the feldhafer somehow while not giving you nightmares. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I did, but I said, “Maybe the nightmares are better than not knowing.”
“You’ve been a parent. Tell me you would have told your children about the Korten.”
I’d never heard of the Korten before. They hadn’t been in any old school stories and I didn’t encounter them in the forest and nothing in any colored glass of the Library, at least that I’d seen, suggested such creatures.
“Prove to me the existence of the Korten.”
“Althea, you don’t want that. They’re quite dangerous.”
“There is no story about them? Surely, they would be recorded somewhere here in the Library?”
Father gave me a look I’d not seen from him before. Our relationship had changed now that I was getting a glimpse behind the curtain. I didn’t blindly trust him anymore and he didn’t like it.
As if on cue, Guardian strode toward us carrying more food and fruity drinks.
“Hello, sir! It’s very good of you to come and I thought you might like some food as well.”
“Guardian, I have a question for you,” Father said. “What can you tell us about the Korten?”
Guardian went birch white. “Oh, sir, you don’t want me to speak about those creatures. Not in such a beautiful place as this. And certainly not so close to a Welchefarbe. He’s likely to bolt.”
“To avoid ruining this beautiful setting is there anything you could show us about them?”
“Ah, yes, yes. We do have them here in the Library as we have all things. I suppose I could take you there.”
Guardian brought us out of the gardens and back into the gray stony trails that led to the tomes of colored glass stories that filled what seemed a twisting infinity of space. It was quite a hike to reach the darkened corner where the Korten were recorded. No one had visited in some time. There was considerable dust and even cobwebs, something I’d thought didn’t exist in my world because I’d only seen them before on Earth.
“There you are,” Guardian announced, pointing a twiggy finger.
They were so black that what popped out of the scenes were their white pointed teeth protruding from long snouted mouths that towered over bear-like bodies. Looking closely, I could see long claws. There was a panel of Korten feasting on a Welchefarbe. I had to turn away.
“Disturbing, isn’t it?” Father said.
It was disturbing. The creatures themselves were disturbing, yes, but even more disturbing was the idea that a thought could create a creature. One minute, I was in a world without Korten, and the next, a single sentence brought them into being.
Next: A Heavy Dose of Reality
This is the twenty-second part in a series of stories. Following are the previous installments starting with the first:
1. The Library
2. Listen, Move, Hide, Repeat
3. A Necessary State of Alarm
4. Anches
5. A Question in Colored Glass
6. How a Lifetime Friendship Began
7. In the World I Created
8. To Make Things Right Again
9. Escape from the Library
10. Pintor’s World
11. Vincente
12. What I Didn’t See Coming
13. First Person Binary
14. Closing the Loop
15. Finding Kali
16. Escape from Smort
17. Lux Earth Wars
18. Tenerife
19. Pintor’s News
20. Taking Control
21. Meeting Fuschia Putty