The Games of Ganthrea Read online

  He considered telling her what he’d told to other students—a change in diet to a daily quart of prune juice—but she was too smart to fall for it. “Well, my doctor did some tests on me,” he breathed in, the amulet rising and falling underneath his shirt, “and turns out my asthma has gone into remission.”

  “That’s great,” Susan said, looking genuinely happy for him. “But that doesn’t explain how you suddenly got to be the fastest kid in gym class.” They passed under newly budding lilac bushes and she blurted out, “You know steroids can mess you up, right?”

  Brenner groaned. “I’m not taking steroids, okay?”

  “I’ve seen you around our neighborhood since we’ve been kids. You’ve never been close to fast.”

  “Well, I’ve never had lungs that allowed me the chance.”

  “Hmm.” She was quiet for awhile, then asked, “Why do you go to the woods so often?”

  He thought about telling her about the tower…but he’d been so used to being by himself, without noise, without the possibility of being teased… could he tell her about the amulet? No…what if she told others?

  “I just enjoy the views,” he said a little lamely.

  “Uh huh…” she said skeptically. “Ever hear the saying, ‘no man is an island’?”

  Brenner considered her comment, then looked down and said, “Some tropical islands do quite well before people disturb them. I’m at my best when I’m alone.”

  “If you say so,” said Susan.

  Low beats from a stereo system boomed past them, and a red BMW pulled into a driveway three houses ahead. Brenner’s neck-hairs bristled as he noticed the familiar gelled black hair of the driver as he stepped out. He tried walking quicker in order to avoid facing the senior, Stew Guffman.

  Susan picked up her pace, too, but they weren’t quick enough.

  Standing over six feet tall, Guffman had a thick chin and leering dark eyes, and, for as long as Brenner remembered, always got exactly what he wanted. Right now, from the stare Guffman gave her while pacing down his driveway in his navy blue jacket, it was clear he wanted Susan. His pupils were dilated, maybe because of his hatred toward Brenner, or more likely, because of drugs.

  “Hey, Susan,” Guffman crooned, taking her hand by surprise, “Warm day, isn’t it? You should have a drink with me. Ditch this loser, and come join me inside.”

  Susan demurred. “I don’t think I really need any—”

  “Ah come on,” Guffman interrupted. “It’ll be fun.” He started leading her away, his other hand shoving Brenner hard on the chest. “Get lost, little puke. Or do I have to throw something harder at you?”

  Brenner stood mute. He’d learned avoiding a fight left him in much better shape than getting involved. Even if he was a fighter, he didn’t stand a chance against Guffman. At close-range, with no weapon to defend himself, Brenner knew he would be beat—badly. His fear was amplified by a regret that he had chosen to live with an Mp3 player and not a cell phone. He took a step back.

  “Thought so,” Guffman said, continuing up the driveway, putting an arm around Susan’s waist as they passed a crate full of baseballs on the sidewalk.

  Susan protested, trying to pull away, “Uhh, maybe some other time, Stew…”

  “Jenny said you had a crush on me,” Guffman pressed, pulling her to the door, and then added firmly, “Go inside if you know what’s good for you.”

  Anger and fear pulsed through Brenner. The amulet on his chest radiated heat, and something inside of him flipped open. “Let her go!”

  Guffman turned his back to Brenner, grabbed the doorknob, and pushed it open. “Get in,” he said to Susan.

  Brenner made a split decision—going against his usual choice of self-preservation, he charged up the driveway.

  Guffman must’ve heard him; he shoved Susan inside, grinned, and grabbed a baseball from the crate. He turned and whipped it at Brenner’s chest.

  Brenner had an instant to react before he was hit.

  He leaned back hard, twisting his right shoulder out and away—but not fast enough. Thwack! The hard ball pelted against Brenner’s left forearm and stung like fire. He cried out and winced. He turned to see Guffman running at him and lunging forward like a prize-fighter, right arm raised with a punch coming straight at his face.

  This time, he was ready.

  Brenner dipped to the right just as Guffman’s knuckles whistled past his head and his torso arced forward, leaving his backside exposed. Brenner channeled his anger into his fist and, rotating his upper body, turned and slammed it hard into the back of Guffman’s head.

  Wham.

  Like a puppet with slashed strings, Guffman collapsed in a heap on the hard blacktop.

  The only sound coming to Brenner was his pulse, pounding in his head.

  Having never won a fight before, Brenner was speechless, and in quite a bit of shock. Chest heaving, fists still balled, he watching Guffman closely, as if any moment he might spring up from the ground.

  “…Brenner…hey, Brenner…”

  He looked up. Susan had walked over to him. Her hands fidgeted with the straps of her backpack, and she also looked dazed, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she’d seen.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I…think so,” Brenner said. Then the pain in his arm came back into focus. “Except this.” He held up his left arm and saw a large, purplish bruise where the baseball struck him.

  “Ouch,” said Susan, wincing out of sympathy. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s alright. Just a big bruise is all.” As he said it and tried flexing his fingers, his arm smarted with pain. “Are you doing alright?”

  “I’m okay,” Susan said, looking from his arm to his eyes. “Feeling a little better now. Thank you.”

  “Yeah…of course.” There was a moment of silence between them before Brenner added, “Now what?”

  She pulled out a cell phone from her backpack and said, “I’m going to call the police. That’s what.”

  Before long a squad car pulled up. An officer stepped out, and he checked to ensure Guffman was breathing and stable before he asked them questions about the encounter. Mostly Susan talked, and when it came to his part, Brenner showed the officer his bruised arm. Then the officer called both their parents. Albert was less than thrilled to be interrupted at work with news that Brenner was involved with a fight, even if it was a defensive one. Finally, the officer put Guffman in the back of his car, and said they were free to go.

  Brenner went home and took a hot shower. Then he changed and put on a long-sleeved shirt. His parents wouldn’t be home for another hour. He went downstairs, filled a canteen with water, put it and some books in his backpack, and then headed out to his tree-tower to process the day’s events…had he really fought back against Guffman? It seemed so strange, so unlike him. And he’d actually played football and won…something he had also never thought possible. One thing he did know: walking away as the victor felt a lot better than staring at his feet as the loser.

  After hiking through the woods, he approached his Cottonwood and climbed up the worn planks, wincing with each use of his wounded arm. At the ladder’s top, he inserted his key into the lock, clicked it open, and lifted the trapdoor, which swung up and thudded down against the floor. Brenner pressed his palms on opposite sides of the entrance, lifted his body, and swung his legs up through the opening.

  He turned to shut the trap-door, and froze.

  Inside his tower, sitting opposite of him, was a complete stranger.

  Chapter Four

  An Invitation

  Most Strange

  With loose, wolf-brown hair that hung past his eyebrows, a beard bristling like steel wool, and a commanding countenance, the man across from Brenner would, even in a public setting, intimidate most people. But here, sitting in his chair with a gnarled walking stick (easily doubling as a club, Brenner thought), up in his tree tower, and a couple miles away from anyone who could help, this stra
nger unnerved him.

  Goosebumps prickling on his arms, Brenner flew through his options: he could turn and back-pedal down; he could make a jump for his zip line; or he could fight, using his fists against a club, and he had an injured arm. There was no time to clip into the zipline, so he swung his legs back through the entrance and clambered down some steps…but as he looked back a final time, he noticed the stranger hadn’t moved. He met Brenner’s gaze with calm, green-blue eyes, as if this was a routine meeting. Because he was now out of reach, Brenner took a risk and hesitated: he wanted to discover a few things about this man before escaping to safety.

  If he had to guess, he would say the stranger was in his mid-forties, had the build of a football player, and was wearing a peculiar, green…tunic?

  It looked like he’d stolen his shirt off the back of a pirate from the 17th century. Or, more likely, he had just escaped a prison and this was the first thing he had found to wear…

  “What are you doing here?” Brenner asked.

  The man merely smiled, then said, “I came to have a chat with you, Brenner. I see you’ve adapted well to the amulet.”

  Having never laid eyes on him before, Brenner didn’t know what was stranger: that this person had gained entry to his tower, or that he already knew his name and about the amulet. Brenner squinted up at him from the floor entrance. “Who—who are you?”

  The man waved a hand in the air apologetically. “Where are my manners? I’m sorry, my name’s Windelm Crestwood,” he said warmly, and when he leaned forward to the floor entrance, extending his arm for a handshake, Brenner noticed a gleam of silver from a necklace under Windelm’s tunic. Rather than shake Windelm’s hand, Brenner let it hang awkwardly in the air, and moved further down the ladder.

  Taking the hint, Windelm turned the failed handshake into a wave. “Right, we’ll take it slow for starters. Please, call me Windelm…although, in a previous life my name was…” and he paused, searching the air for a faded memory, then, like a fisherman with a sharp tug on the end of his rod, his eyes lit up, “Plint. Yes, Edwin Plint.”

  Brenner had heard that last name somewhere…wasn’t it on his mother’s side of the family? A faint memory swam blurrily into his mind, a conversation with his mother. She had spoken of growing up in the city, but that her grandparents had a far different life…the old Plint farm, that’s right… they worked as crop farmers when her mom, Grandma Laura, and Great Uncle Lester were younger. But she had never spoken of an Edwin.

  Brenner finally spoke: “I don’t know of any Edwin Plint.”

  “Well,” said Windelm, “I’m not too surprised Edwin’s story hasn’t been told much, seeing as how it must’ve looked as though he’d run-away, or been abducted.”

  Brenner’s eyebrows raised…Windelm was talking in third-person, and about abductions, neither of which were good signs…

  Windelm continued nonchalantly, “Thankfully, none of those scenarios occurred. You recall your Grandma Laura, yes?”

  Brenner nodded slowly. He had only a few memories of her, as she had died in a winter car accident when he was five…but the fact that Windelm knew of her without prompting was, Brenner noted, a sign that he might be telling the truth.

  “She was my sister,” said Windelm, “and Lester was my older brother. Before I left, my parents sold their farm and acreage and were moving west to Colorado Springs. Lester was focused on new business opportunities and was glad for the move, and while Laura always had a soft spot for cuddly animals, she, too, was excited for a bigger town.”

  Windelm’s explanation was matching up to what he knew: his great-grandparents had indeed been farmers…and he remembered his Grandma Laura had bought four kittens when her husband passed away…and he knew about Lester, but there was no other boy in that family…and Windelm should have looked at least a little senile if he was their brother, not this forty-something adult who looked like he rock-climbed up fourteeners over the weekends, which made him then wonder why he carried a walking-stick…

  “If you’re my Grandma’s brother, that would make you…” Brenner started.

  “Your great-uncle, yes,” Windelm said, smiling.

  “Pardon me for saying it, but you don’t exactly look like a great-uncle.”

  Windelm laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “The reason I look this way, and why you haven’t heard of me, is simple: for most of my life, I’ve lived in Ganthrea.”

  Brenner felt a little lost. He knew of many cities, countries, and even habitats around the world, but Ganthrea, he was sure, was none of those. “Ganthrea?” He must not have heard correctly. “Where is that?”

  “How to explain,” Windelm paused, then continued with renewed intensity in his eyes, “Ganthrea is at once very real, yet very separate from this world.”

  It was at this point that Brenner lowered a foot on the steps—Windelm was certainly crazy. “I’d better be going,” he said, edging down the planks.

  Windelm held up a hand, “Please, allow me to explain.”

  “That’s okay, I’d rather —”

  “Don’t you want to know what’s inside your amulet?”

  Brenner’s neck hairs stood on end. The amulet on his chest seeped with warmth like a baked potato, as if affirming Windelm’s words. Brenner paused. He did want to know. As long as Windelm didn’t do anything sudden, he decided to hear him out. “Alright.”

  “To understand your amulet, you have to understand Ganthrea,” Windelm said, taking a foreign-looking, golden coin from his pocket. “Imagine that Earth is represented by one side of this coin, and Ganthrea, the other. While they’re quite separate when it’s still,” he showed both sides to Brenner, then flicked the coin into the air with one hand and pointed at it with his walking-stick—it continued spinning in midair, and eerily, didn’t fall. “When it spins, the two use the same space. So, while we share similar landforms, the sea, the soil, the mountains, we live distinctly parallel lives. And,” he stopped pointing at the coin, and it fell into his outstretched hand, “only Ganthrea has retained the deep magic.”

  The floating coin trick was about as bizarre as the last words Windelm had said. Brenner voiced the next question welling up inside, “What exactly do you mean, ‘magic’?”

  “What else did you think was in that amulet of yours?” Windelm said, turning his head to the side with a coy smile. “In Ganthrea, magic collects together into a fluid-like substance called elixir, which can be bottled into amulets, like yours. It’s the lifeblood of spells, and the reason why I look about half as old as I am.”

  The amulet, Brenner knew, had amplified his speed and jumps… and cured his asthma. “Okay,” said Brenner, “I believe you about the amulet …just how did you get it so perfectly on the ledge?”

  “I could have done it multiple ways,” Windelm said, “personal flight, or controlled animal assistance…but this time I chose a simple Movement Spell.” To answer the next question ready to spring from Brenner’s lips, Windelm pointed his stick towards a corner of the tower filled with a stack of Brenner’s books and said casually, “Levitulsus.”

  One of the heavy books twitched, and then leapt up from the stack high into the air, as if gravity was now optional. Then another strange thing happened: like the coin earlier, the book didn’t fall. What’s more, it flew around the chamber, twice, before calmly landing in Windelm’s outstretched hand.

  Brenner’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.

  Windelm watched his flabbergasted expression with the knowing smile of a parent teaching a child how to command a dog to come when called. “Yes, that first encounter shatters your reality, doesn’t it? And that’s just one of the easier spells you can learn in Ganthrea. Which reminds me, hold up your arm.”

  Slowly, Brenner raised his left arm up. Windelm pointed his walking-stick at it. Although Brenner couldn’t see his bruise beneath the bandage, he felt his skin pulling together, and a tingling sensation tickled his arm briefly. He pulled up his sleeve and peeked under the ban
dage—the purple and yellow bruise on his arm had returned to healthy, normal skin.

  “Woah…” Brenner said. Now convinced that Windelm was more than some street performer, he climbed up into the tower and sat on the floor. “So…why did you come back?”

  “Every now and then, I check on Earth. Partly out of nostalgia, and to see how the environment compares to what I left…and also to see if there are others ready to experience the other world. By the way, your escape from that black bear yesterday was carried out quite well.”

  Brenner’s eyebrows arched incredulously, “You saw that?”

  Windelm chuckled. “Oh yes, the jump, the tangle in the tree…and I was there to ensure the bear didn’t do any permanent damage. But what I was most pleased to see was how you used your skills to help someone else, not merely keeping them for yourself.”

  Brenner realized he’d seen the fight with Guffman.

  “She would’ve been hurt,” Brenner said.

  “I’m glad you stopped him,” Windelm said sincerely. “You know, Brenner, you’re not the first I’ve tested with an amulet. But unlike the others, you didn’t use it solely for personal gain.” Windelm’s expression softened, and he continued, “Brenner, I think you are meant to come with me. You have both the cunning and compassion necessary to thrive in Ganthrea.”

  “Come with you…?” Brenner echoed, lost in thought.

  “Indeed.”

  “But…why me?”