Knight Life Read online

  She went to the window and stepped up onto the sill, reveling in the force of the wind she had summoned. Above her, clouds congealed, tore apart, and reknit, blackness swarming over them. Far below, pedestrians ran about, pulling their coats tight around them against the unexpected turn of bad weather. A few glanced up at Morgan in the window but went on about their business, jamming their hands down atop their heads to prevent their hats or wigs from blowing away.

  Morgan drank it in, thriving on the chaos of the storm. She screamed over the thunder, “Merlin! Merlin, demon’s son! The mighty had fallen, mage! You had fallen. I had fallen. All was gone, and you were in your hell and I was in mine.” She inhaled deeply, feeling the refreshing, chilled sting of cold air in her lungs. She reveled in the tactile sensation of her housecoat blowing all around her, the wind enveloping her flimsy garment.

  “You’re back now!” she crowed. “But so am I! I have waited these long centuries for you, Merlin. Guarding against the day that you might return, and yet now I glory in it. For I am alive today, Merlin! Do you hear me, old man? Morgan Le Fey lives! And while I live, I hate! Sweet hate I have nurtured all these long decades and centuries. And it’s all for you, Merlin! All for you and your damned Arthur!

  “Wherever you are, Merlin, quake in fear. I am coming for you. Thank you for saving my life, Merlin! And I shall return the favor a thousandfold. I, Morgan Le Fey! I can live again! I can breathe again! I can have my hatred! I can have my revenge! And I can get the hell out of New Jersey!”

  HARRY, WHAT’S GOING on?”

  Harry peered through the curtains at the window of the apartment across the way. “It’s that fat nut again. God, what a slob. I don’t know how people let themselves go like that.”

  His wife, Beverly, eyed his beer belly but wisely refrained from comment.

  “She’s shouting about some damned thing or other,” he muttered as he came to sit next to her on the couch. “Usually she’s just regular drunk. I don’t know what she’s on tonight, but it must be a beaut.”

  “Bet she’s from New York,” mumbled his wife.

  “What?” he asked.

  She repeated it, adding, “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

  “No?” His eyebrows puckered across his open and unimpressive face, thick with lines that had come from worrying that Beverly would learn he was having it off with Mrs. Findelman down the street.

  “No,” affirmed Beverly. “Because New Yorkers are all crazy. They know it. The government knows it. The whole country knows it. In New York everyone acts like that,” and she chucked a thumb across the street in Morgan’s direction. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

  “Yeah,” said Harry, who didn’t mind an element of danger in his life (hence Mrs. Findelman.) “That’s why I like it.”

  “Well, I hate it,” Beverly said firmly, as if she’d just turned down the option to buy Manhattan. “All the crazy people there—they all deserve each other. Why, I hear tell it’s not safe to walk the streets at night there. You never know what weird thing you’ll run into next.”

  CHAPTRE

  THE SECOND

  GWEN WAS NOT having a good day.

  For what seemed the twentieth time during the relatively brief phone conversation, she ran her fingers through her strawberry blonde hair, and when she spoke that Southern twang that she had tried so hard to lose came faintly through. She was wearing the powder blue dress that was her best outfit, her interviewing outfit. The coat she had draped over it was somewhat threadbare, but she couldn’t afford to buy another, so she always made sure to remove it before any job interviewers actually saw the shabby state it was in.

  She was standing at a payphone stall on the corner of Sixtieth Street and Central Park West, trying to hear and make herself be heard over the roaring of the trucks and incessant police car sirens that were fairly typical for the streets of New York. At least it wasn’t raining on her, although the way things were going, she half-expected the cloudless sky to suddenly darken and a downpour to descend upon her. In fact, it would probably center upon her, leaving everyone else unscathed, including the bulky and annoying woman who was standing directly behind her waiting to use the phone. Because of course, God forbid, the woman should think about walking half a block to find a different phone.

  “Helloooo? Is anybody there?” she said in desperation, trying not to let the scowl of the woman behind her get to her. She knew she was on hold; she knew no one was listening. She shouted into the emptiness of the phone wires for the same reason that people push elevator buttons repeatedly: In the vain hope that existence will be acknowledged.

  Miraculously, in this case it seemed to work. The aggravating hold music—a medley of Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes—abruptly cut off and she heard a voice. Unfortunately, it was not the voice she was hoping for. “Lyons and Herzog,” it said briskly.

  “Oh, God, I’m back at the switchboard,” she moaned.

  “Lyons and Herzog,” repeated the voice, sounding slightly irritated.

  “Yeah, I know, I know,” said Gwen urgently. “Look, I’m trying to get through to Mr. Herzog’s office. I’m calling in regards to the job interview for a secretary. I’m running late. The subway broke down, and I was stuck, and I’m trying to—”

  “Hold, please.”

  “No! Not again! Not ag—!”

  The song “Memories” floated through the phone at her. And then, before she could cry out against the injustice of it all, the money fell through and the music was replaced by a recorded voice saying, “Five … cents … please for another minute.”

  Knowing full well that it was a lost cause before she even opened her mouth, she turned to the woman behind her and said, “Do you have a nickel I could borrow? Just one? Please? My life is hanging on this.”

  The woman stared at her in stony silence.

  Gwen didn’t even bother to ask again. Instead, with a sigh laced with tragedy, she hung up the receiver and stepped away from the phone stall. She bowed slightly in mock “chivalry” as she gestured for the woman to step in and take the phone. The woman stepped in, reached into her pockets, and came out with a fistful of coins that she piled in a small, silver heap atop the payphone.

  “I can see why you couldn’t spare one,” Gwen said humorlessly. “You had so many, you didn’t know which one to choose.”

  The woman ignored her, and Gwen turned away and stomped off down the street.

  Shortly she managed to find a well-dressed fellow, sitting on a park bench, speaking on a cell phone, and convinced him to let her make use of it for just five minutes. He watched her in amusement as she dialed. “You should get one of your own, you know,” he suggested.

  “Had one. Didn’t keep the payments up on the service.” She shrugged. “No money. Hopefully, though, this call will help change that.”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  She pushed “Send” and a moment later, the same receptionist said, “Lyons and Herzog.”

  “Yes, Mr. Herzog please. I’ve been trying to get throu—”

  “Hold, please.”

  She moaned again, prepared for another lengthy runa-round, but then to her surprise she heard a female voice say, “Mr. Herzog’s office.”

  “Ohhhh, thank God,” said Gwen. She gave an eager thumbs up to the man from whom she’d borrowed the phone. “I need to speak to Mr. Herzog.”

  “May I tell him what this is in regards to?”

  “The secretary job. You see, I’m running late and I—”

  “The secretary job,” said the woman on the other end. She sounded faintly amused.

  Gwen didn’t like the sound of that tone. “Yeaaaaahhh,” she said slowly.

  “You mean the one I was hired to fill five minutes ago?”

  With a heavy sigh, Gwen said quietly, “Yes. That one.”

  “It’s filled.”

  “I kind of figured that.”

  “If you’d like, we can keep your resume on file. Your name—?”


  “Mud,” said Gwen, and she ended the call and handed the phone back to the well-dressed man.

  “Bad news?” he asked sympathetically.

  “No. No, just typical news.”

  “Well, good luck to you. I have to get back to work,” he said. And he patted her on the shoulder in an avuncular manner before heading off.

  Gwen sat there for a moment, stewing, and then with an effort, brushed it off. Dwelling on what hadn’t worked wasn’t going to do her any good. She had to look forward and just hope. With that in mind, she pulled out the want ads from her bag. The page was covered with so many circles and “X’s” that it looked like a tic-tac-toe tournament gone amuck. She started going over them, making reminders to herself of where she stood on them.

  “Filled … filled ... on vacation … filled … wanted 85 words per minute … wanted steno … wanted to squeeze my ass ...” That last one—she considered the possibility of going to work there and then filing the inevitable sexual harassment case. But somehow it just didn’t seem worth the effort.

  She continued to study the ads, and it was some time before she actually fully noticed the steady clanking that was approaching her. She was so focused on the ads, in fact, that she might never have noticed the clanking at all if it hadn’t been for the shadow that was abruptly cast over her, at which point the clanking stopped. Slowly she turned and looked up.

  “Ohhh, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” she said.

  There, glinting in the sun, was a knight clad in full armor.

  He was covered in armor from head to toe, the plates smooth and curving over his chest, arms, and legs. The armor was excellently made, for hardly a gap had been permitted, and even those were protected, either by small stretches of chain mail or by small upturns in the plates. A full helmet covered his head, and there was a visor with a short blunt point in front of his face. He had a purple plume tapering off the top of his helmet, and the visor was down, obscuring his features. A scabbard hung at his side—it was ornately decorated with dark stones and intertwined lines of design. It was hard to get a feeling for just how tall the actual man was, but he certainly seemed bulky enough. The helmet was tilted slightly, indicating that he was standing slightly askew as he regarded her. At least she assumed it was a he.

  Passersby were looking at the two of them in open amusement, and it was starting to annoy Gwen. Why were they looking strangely at her? It wasn’t as if they were together or she knew the guy. She felt oddly resentful. “Whatever it is,” Gwen said impatiently, “I don’t want any, okay?”

  He didn’t say anything, but instead simply leaned in closer as if to see her better. Gwen was feeling rather unsettled by that point. Immediately she started rummaging in her shoulder bag. “Look ... I don’t know who you are, or what your deal is, or what kind of weirdness this is. But I am so not in the mood, it’s not funny. I’m warning you,” and she pulled out a small aerosol can. “I’ve got mace.”

  He straightened up at that, and for a moment she thought he was intimidated. There were slots in the visor, after all, and the mace would pass through those with no problem. But the knight was reaching around back of his armor, and in silent response to her threat, he produced a two-foot-long club with a flanged metal head on it. A mace.

  “So have I,” said the knight.

  Because of the way his voice echoed from within the helmet, it was impossible to make out his tone of voice—whether he was being amused or polite or threatening. And Gwen quickly decided that, no matter what the case was, she had had enough. She got to her feet just as the knight said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “You got that right,” she shot back and, thrusting the newspaper and mace spray back into her bag, turned and headed at a brisk trot down the street.

  “Wait!” the knight’s voice echoed after her, but Gwen wasn’t stopping to hear it. Instead she picked up her pace, covering distance in a fraction of the time that it took the slow-moving knight to follow her. She looked around desperately, trying to spot a cop, but naturally there were none around. They only existed, she felt, to blast sirens while she was on the phone, but otherwise they obviously saw no reason to remain in her presence.

  She heard him calling again “Wait!” from behind her, but she had no intention of slowing down. A subway station was just up ahead of her, and she could feel the rumbling beneath her feet that told her a train was coming in. She had her pass; if she hurried, she could run ahead, get into the subway and be long gone by the time the metal-clad maniac got anywhere near the tracks. Snagging the railing, she bolted down the steep stairs that led to the platform below and, sure enough, there was the train. She dashed through the turnstiles and ran sideways into the nearest car, dodging between the closing doors. Moments later the train was whisking her away. She didn’t know or care where the subway was going, as long as it was someplace where jobs were plentiful and nuts in armor were scarce.

  The knight, in the meantime, had not yet realized that she was gone. He had arrived at the top of the steps and was, for a moment, daunted, having some doubts about the angle of the stairs and the flexibility of his armored legs. But then, deciding that he had no choice, he started to make his way down the steps to the platform. Unfortunately, he only managed to get down a couple of steps and then he overbalanced himself and toppled forward like a great metal tree. He tried to halt his descent, but he failed utterly, and a moment later he was tumbling down the stairs, sounding like a thousand tin cans falling from heaven all at once. Bam, bam, bam, down he went, hitting one stair and another and rolling off each one before finally grinding mercifully to a halt at the bottom.

  He lay there for a time, moaning. People stepped over him and around him. No one asked him what was wrong or if he needed help. A train came and went and people emerged from it and went up the steps, none of them affording the fallen knight more than a second glance.

  Finally he managed to bring himself to a seated position and slowly he raised the visor. Without the resonance provided by the helmet, his voice sounded surprisingly amiable.

  “This,” said Arthur, King of the Britons, “is not going to work.”

  ARTHUR’S COURT WAS a fashionable men’s clothing store situated near Central Park. And for Sidney Krellman, the manager, each day was nice and simple. He woke up in the morning. Got dressed (nattily, of course). He went into work and acted politely to most clientele, (enthusiastically to a select handful). At the end of the day he and an assistant would check over the day’s receipts, shutter and close up the store, and leave at 7:45 sharp.

  Sidney’s appearance was fastidious, and he was extremely proud of it. His jackets always hung just right, his ties expertly knotted, and his pencil-thin mustache—the only highlight of a narrow, bland face—was precisely and meticulously trimmed. His sartorial and tonsorial appearance helped to make up for the fact that, otherwise, he was a billiard ball sort of fellow, with a combover that gave him some comfort, but otherwise served no function. He felt it incumbent upon himself to put the “right” kind of clientele at their immediate ease, while sending an unspoken message to the “wrong” sort that he was simply not going to tolerate their presence. That just wasn’t the way things were done at Arthur’s Court.

  Sidney Krellman expected nothing different on this particular November day. It did not occur to him that it was exactly one year before the next mayoral elections in New York City. Sidney didn’t care for politics, or elections, or mayors, or much else aside from his daily routine, and he disliked intensely anything that caused a deviation from it.

  That being the case, Sidney was going to dislike, with blinding intensity, what was about to happen. It would disrupt his store-closing routine, throw the end of his day into turmoil, and generally wrinkle the fabric of his well-ordered life.

  At 7:30 precisely, Sidney was issuing instructions to Quigley, his young, gawky assistant manager, about opening the store the following morning (Sidney anticipated being late, having a dental appointme
nt scheduled for the next morning. A small hole in a lower bicuspid demanded, simply demanded attention, and there was nothing else to do but attend to it). Sidney was waving one finger in the air, as was his habit, when there was a rap at the glass front door.

  The rap derailed Sidney’s train of thought, and he turned with an annoyed glance to the door. He froze in mid-sentence, finger still pointed skyward, as if offering directions to a wayward duck. Quigley continued to stare at his superior, waiting for him to continue. When no further instructions were forthcoming, it dawned on Quigley to follow his boss’s gaze toward the front door.

  A knight occupied the full space of the door. His own reflection on the glass door bounced back onto the gleaming armor, so that in essence he was standing there with his own armored form ricocheting through tricks of light.

  The knight stood there for a moment, as if contemplating the two men within the store.

  Sidney and Quigley exchanged quizzical glances, making sure that the other was seeing what each thought they were seeing, lest either one of them speak prematurely and be thought insane by the other. During this time, the knight grew a bit impatient and, raising his gauntleted hand, knocked once more, this time with a bit more force.

  It was the wrong move. The metal-gloved hand went right through the glass. The glass hung there for a moment in midair, as if startled at this rather unexpected turn of events, and then with a resounding crash, shattered into hundreds of pieces.

  Sidney Krellman’s jaw moved up and down and side to side slightly, but that was it. Quigley was not even able to handle quite that much.