The Starlight Medallions: three chapters

Sim Spotswood was supposed to be on his way to get braces the day he found the first of the medallions. But when he turned right at Market Street to get to Dr. McCreedy’s office, he saw Denny Dumont coming out of the sweet shop. Denny was a born bully. His pleasure lay in the misery of others. Sim’s, for example. As is always the case with bullies he had a small following of goons who said things like, “You tell ’em, Denny!” or usually and more simply, “Yeah.” Jack Thorpe and Carl Rudd came out the door after him. Sim quickly retraced his steps and walked down Threadneedle Street, then across the bridge that spanned Lost River as it opened into the cove.
           It wasn’t only Denny and his goons. Sim didn’t want to have his teeth straightened and was glad for an excuse to walk the other way. And it wasn’t only his teeth. He had argued with his mother about other things as well – small things that didn’t need to be argued. And he had this sense of something about to happen. He couldn’t so much as open a door without preparing himself for what might be on the other side.
           Sim stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked up river. It was a sunny September day that held more the memory of summer than the promise of fall. He shifted his eyes to the corrugated steel sheeting just above the town pier. It contained a Viking ship whose ribs had been exposed after a storm years earlier. The steel box had been constructed so that the river water could be pumped out and archaeologists could expose the ship and its contents. There were rumors of treasure and the ghosts of disturbed spirits, but all an observer could view were a few blackened timbers resembling the charred skeleton of a dragon.
           At the end of the bridge Sim walked down to the clam-flats that bordered Lost River. A sea gull was poking in the sand with his bill. Probably after a clam, Sim thought. He had seen a gull fly up twenty or thirty feet and drop a clam to smash on the rocks. The gull looked at him, its head cocked to one side. Something wasn’t the way it should be. There were hundreds of gulls in Lost River Cove. You couldn’t be anywhere near the water without seeing ten or twenty of them. That was it. That’s what was different. If you saw one gull you’d see another and then another. But there was only this one. Looking at him. Hoping for a scrap, Sim thought. Sim walked closer.
           The gull stepped back from the place where it had been digging but he didn’t fly away as gulls usually do.
           Ignoring the bird, Sim walked to the edge of the water. It didn’t take much looking to find a couple flat stones. He skipped one out over the calm river. One, two, three, four, five, six. seven. Seven skips. He was out of practice. He adjusted his posture and skipped the second stone. Twelve. That was more like it. He heard a squawk and turned. The gull looked at him and scratched again at the sand. “Where are your friends?” Sim asked. The gull turned his head and looked back at the bridge. Sim followed his gaze.
           A man walked silently toward town, a boy sat upon his shoulders, soundless, his legs crooked under his father’s arms. They were strangely silent, not even the sound of a footfall, not a word spoken. As Sim watched he felt a familiar sadness, a catch at the back of his throat. He turned back to the gull. “Get lost,” he said. He picked up a stone and tossed in the direction of the bird. He didn’t want to hurt it, but he wasn’t in the mood for weird birds. He wasn’t in the mood for silent fathers and silent sons. And he was in trouble with his mother for missing his appointment.
           The gull ignored the stone and looked at Sim. Sim approached and knelt not two feet away from the strange bird. He dug with his fingers where the gull had scratched. There was something there. He removed what looked like a coin. It was a little bigger and heavier than a silver dollar. He started to scrape away the sand and then dropped it, stepping back. The thing had moved in his hand. No, not moved, hummed, purred. Like the sensation of touching a refrigerator when it was running. He looked at it and then at the gull. The gull cocked his head. Sim picked the coin up again, carefully. Maybe it had been his imagination. No. There it was again. Like it was alive. Or magnetic. Or some special kind of metal. He looked over at the ribs of the Viking ship. Maybe it had come with the Vikings. That must be it. Maybe there were others. He dug again in the sand. Nothing.
           He heard a flutter of wings and looked up. The gull had taken flight. He watched as it flew higher and higher until it disappeared into the afternoon sky. He looked back at the bridge. Empty. The silent man and the silent boy, gone. One moment a person was there and the next he wasn’t.
           Like his own father.
           He walked to the water’s edge to wash the coin. As he looked down he caught his breath. Where the bank should have shelved away there were now bottomless depths of clear water. It was like standing at the edge of a quarry. Gingerly, he stepped back from the impossible edge.
           He picked up a stone and tossed it into the water. It landed as it should have, just beneath the surface. He tossed another. It was as if there were two depths of water: the one that should be and another that seemed to come and go the way trick images did depending on how you focused your eyes. He took off his shoes and, more fascinated than frightened, stepped carefully into the shallows. It was almost October and the water, which never got very warm even in August, was now bone-chilling cold, the kind of cold that makes your feet ache and your skin go numb. And yet it was an oddly pleasant sensation like something he had felt now and then in a dream. He walked out farther, up to his waist, to see what it would be like. “It’s not a bad way to go,” his mother had said once of a winter drowning reported in the Lost River Clarion. Like lying down in the snow, he thought, but his dreamy thought was suddenly interrupted.
           “What are you doing? Are you crazy, Sim?” It was Amanda Pomeroy. She was standing on the shore behind him.
           He turned. “How long have you been there?” he said, a little annoyed at having been seen doing something foolish.
           “I just got here. I saw you from the road. You’re crazy.”
           “It’s great. Come on in,” he said.
            “You are going to get P-neumonia,” she said. That was the way the Pomeroys said it, as if it had to do with taking a leak. It was one of Mr. Pomeroy’s expressions. He had lots of them. He was a fun father to have except when he pretended to know more than he did, which was fairly often.
            Sim walked out of the water. “I can hardly feel my legs,” he said, a little bit pleased with his daring.
            The Pomeroy twins, Alex and Amanda, were two of Sim’s best friends. Their father had never worked a day in his life, but was busier than any man in Lost River Cove. The Archaeological Society was one of Mr. Pomeroy’s causes. The Fisherman’s Museum was another. The library still another. Ponidi, the Pomeroys’ Indonesian caretaker, was a person to whom Sim could talk about anything and know that he was being taken seriously.
            “You are honest-to-god crazy, Amanda said.
            “I’ve got something to show you,” Sim said, putting on his shoes.
            “What?” Amanda asked.
            “Let’s go to Bartlett’s.” he said, and walked back toward the bridge, Amanda following.
            Bartlett’s Restaurant was just on the other side of the bridge. There was a booth at the back with high-backed benches and it was there that Sim and his friends liked to gather because it was so private. And free. Mr. Pomeroy had bought Bartletts two years ago because he had never owned a restaurant. Homer Dunn ran it for him. Homer had run if for the previous owners as well. Homer didn’t like change. He didn’t like the Viking ship being dug up in the harbor and he didn’t like all the out-of-towners it attracted. Sim suspected that he probably didn’t like Mr. Pomeroy either but that was just a guess. Homer wiped down their table with a not very clean cloth and took their order. Two mugs of hot chocolate. When he left, Sim took the coin out of his pocket and laid it on the table. “Feel it, he said”
            Amanda picked it up but showed no surprise as she rubbed her finger over the shiny black surface. “What are the bumps?” she asked.
            “I don’t know,” Sim said. He hadn’t really noticed them before, his mind taken up with the feel of the thing. But now he could see them. Like grains of sand under a shiny black coating. “Can you feel it?” he asked.
            Amanda wrinkled her nose. “The bumps?” she asked.
            “No, the way it tingles. Like its electric or something”
            “No.” She handed it back to Sim. It purred in his hand. What was happening didn’t make any sense. He couldn’t decide what to say. He stared at it and then looked up to meet Amanda’s eyes.
            “What is it, Sim?” she asked.
            “It sort of purrs,” he said, not looking up. “Like Sophonsiba.” Sophonsiba was the Pomeroy’s Siamese cat.
            Amanda reached out and touched it again. He looked at her, almost pleadingly. “It’s magic,” she said matter-of-factly.
            “You can feel it?” he asked, feeling a surge of relief.
            “I’m not supposed to,” she said. “It’s only magic for the person who finds it. Like Aladdin and his lamp.”
            Sim usually smiled to himself when Amanda spoke about magic. He was too old for stuff like that, but it was as much a part of Amanda’s world as homework or macaroni and cheese. Amanda was the only person Sim knew who had actually seen a gnome, or so she claimed. He told her about the seagull and how the water was deep and then not deep. He didn’t mention the man and the boy on the bridge.
            Before she could respond Homer arrived with their hot chocolate. Sim quickly covered the coin with his hand. “Thanks, Homer,” he said. Homer nodded and returned to the soda counter.
            “I looked for you after school,” Amanda said. “Where’d you go?”
            Sim told her about Dr. McCreedy and Denny,”
            Are you getting braces?” she asked. The tone in her voice revealed more than mere curiosity. If Sim was getting braces and had not told her, it would have been a serious breech of their friendship and Sim knew that.
            “No, I’m not. Which is why I didn’t go.”
            “Well, why did you have an appointment?”
            “My mother thought I was going to.”
            “Your mom’s going to be boiled,” Amanda said. “This is not going to be a good afternoon for you, Sim, unless…”
            Sim looked at her hopefully.
            “Unless this is a lucky coin.” She said. “It depends on what kind of magic it’s got.“ She picked up the black disk and looked at it again. “Maybe you’re supposed to make a wish,” she said. “You could wish that everything will be OK with your Mom.” She hesitated, turning the coin over in her hands. “Of course if you get only one wish that wouldn’t be a very big one.”
            Sim knew what his wish would be. The same one he had made on every shooting star he had ever seen, lying at night on the widow’s walk at 413 Fisher Lane. He thought of the man and the boy on the bridge. There one moment and gone the next. “Yeah, I’d better save it,” he said. He put the coin into his wet pocket and realized how cold he was. “I think I better head home,” he said, finishing his cocoa. He suddenly felt guilty about having shown the coin to Amanda. She was one of his three best friends but it had been secret for maybe hundreds of years and now here he was disturbing its rest, showing it around, letting people have theories about it. Sim had a habit of giving thoughts and feelings to things that really couldn’t have them. He was the kind of person who felt sorry for trees after an ice storm and worried about the moon when it couldn’t see through the clouds.
            “Yeah. Me too,” Amanda said. They finished their cocoa, said thanks to Homer and walked out to the street.
            Walter, Sim’s Basset Hound, was waiting outside the restaurant. Usually he met Sim at the corner of Maple and Fisher Lane as Sim walked home from school and Walter finished his afternoon rounds. Walter wasn’t a sit-at-home dog. He had friends to see and business to conduct from one end of town to the other. He’d share a donut with the barber; a piece of beef jerky with the postman, several dog biscuits of various flavors and sizes at selected sites and the vegetarian scraps from Colleen Gardener’s lunch table. Walter was a low-riding kind of dog with very sad eyes and long soft ears. Sim knelt down and gave his ears a rub. “Sorry, Walter,” he said. “I forgot to tell you about my appointment.”
            “OK, well I’m goin’ down the hill, “Amanda said. “I’ll see ya tomorrow.”
            “OK. Oh, about the coin,” Sim said.
            “What?”
            “Don’t mention it to anyone.”
            “OK.”
            “I’m really serious, Amanda. It’s important.”
            Amanda gave the secret sign that sealed a promise, a sign that only she and her brother and Sim knew. Then she turned and walked down the hill toward Pomeroy Hall.

Chapter 2

The man with the crooked face

          Sim turned and started toward home. Walter waddled along beside him.
            “I’m in a little hot water, Walter,” Sim explained as they walked. “I hope Mom is in a really good mood.”
            He turned into the Parrish Church cemetery, which filled an entire block in the middle of the town and had gravestones going back to 1620, the time of the Indian massacre. Some of the inscriptions warned against sin and damnation and were decorated with angels or tormented souls. You couldn’t walk through the cemetery in one breath, but you could breathe very carefully, which seemed to work well enough.
            Sim didn’t want to do things that would upset his mother. She had enough on her mind as it was. She had lost her job three months before, and her savings were getting smaller and smaller. He had been trying to come up with ways to help. Last night before going to sleep he had dreamed up a hot dog stand and a pet-washing business.
            They had not always lived at 413 Fisher Street. Once there had been a trailer in the Sea View Trailer Park that was nowhere near the ocean. An elderly couple had lived at 413 and his mother had looked after them in her days as a practical nurse. When the husband died, his wife moved into a retirement home and rented 413 to Sim and his mother at a price she could afford. But that arrangement wouldn't last much longer. Their son was a tight-fisted Yankee and when he inherited the house he would be quick to up the rent. Then where would Sim and his mother go? It was hard not having a father.
            Linda Spotswood was unpacking groceries when Sim walked into the kitchen. ‘Hi, Mom, I’m home,’ didn’t feel like the right thing to say so he just took off his jacket, walked to the kitchen counter and waited for it to happen.
            “Dr. McCreedy’s office called,” she said. He could tell, even though she said it in a sort of throwaway voice, that she was upset: she put the milk in the cupboard and the canned tomato sauce in the refrigerator.
            “I missed my appointment,” he said. “I forgot about it. Amanda and I went to Bartlett’s and we got talking and then I remembered but..,”
            “But?”
            “It was too late.”
            She looked into the grocery bag as if something that was supposed to be there wasn’t. It was a feeling he often had. His father would have understood about braces. Sailors didn’t get braces. Sailors had gold teeth.
            She crumpled the bag. Sim could almost feel it. “I don’t want braces, Mom,” he said.
            “So you didn’t forget.”
            “Well, not exactly.”
            “Not exactly.”
            Miss Blenden, his teacher, did that too. Repeat what you said. It meant ‘tell me more.’ Sometimes. Now it meant something else.
            “I lied,” he said.
            “That’s much better,” she said.
            There was a rule about lying. “I like my teeth the way they are,” he said, sitting on one of the stools, putting his elbows on the counter. “They’re part of my personality.”
            “I am only thinking of your own good,” she said. “Lord knows we have better things to spend the money on.”
            The fact was that being gap-toothed had its advantages. Sim could whistle louder than any boy at school and, with a following wind, he could shoot a stream of water four feet three inches. Braces threatened to change all of that.
            “Do you know how much braces cost?” she said. “And I’ll have to pay for today’s appointment. Did you consider that?”
            Sim didn’t consider it because he was pretty sure it wasn’t true. He could tell when his mother was adding flourishes. They always ended with, “I’ll bet you never thought of that!” which Sim took as a good clue that she hadn’t either.
            Sim was going to launch a protest but doing that might lead to stage two whose warning words were, “And another thing...” In stage two, depending on the level of his mother’s annoyance, how things had gone looking for a job and other variables, which remained a mystery to Sim, anything could happen. Matters totally unrelated to his most recent bad thing would reappear like old underwear at the back of a closet, to oppress him: chores not done, things left out to be tripped over. He decided to try a different strategy.
            “I think it’s too expensive,” he said. “Think of all the things we need.”
            “Like what?” his mother asked, putting the empty bags with the other re-cycleables and turning, with her hands on her hips and a very firm mouth.
            “Like getting the dent in the car fixed,” he said.
            A hit-and-run shopper at Ben’s Grocery Mart had put a crease along the passenger side door one day while his mother was shopping. His mother took care of the little red Toyota as if it were her other child and she had been devastated by the calamity. Claiming the insurance, she said, was out of the question; her rates would just go up.
            “I think you are a little more important than a car," she said, the edges of her mouth softening slightly.
            “OK,” he said. “But I can wait. Nobody in my class except Flannery Daley has braces and she’s a girl. People don’t get braces in the sixth grade, Mom.”
            “They do if they’ve got a Cumberland Gap like yours,” she said. “It’s going to take four years to get those teeth in the same county.”
            Sim put his head in his hands, looked his mother right in the eyes and said, “They’re too expensive, Mom. And I don’t want to be the only one. Alex and Amanda aren’t getting them until next year. So I’ll make a deal. Fix the car and next year I’ll get braces. I promise.”
            “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you,” she said.
            Sim nodded. Speaking now would have been risky. The little bit of serious concern he saw in his mother’s eyes made the issue of braces even more important than he had realized at 2:30, when he had seen Denny and walked the other way.
            “OK,” she said. “But next year. Same time. Same station. September 27th. That’s the day of your first appointment with Dr. McCreedy.”
            “OK,” he said.
            “Shake on it,” she said. They shook on it. Sim slipped his left hand into his pocket and crossed his fingers. He felt bad about that but who knew what the future might hold? You had to keep your options open. He felt the coin in his pocket. It seemed fuzzy. He wondered what the black stuff really was. And the bumps. It’s just because I’m still cold, he thought. He was cold. His feet were cold. His legs were tingly. He started to take the coin out of his pocket to show her, but something made him stop.
            Then the doorbell rang. It had come with the house. It was the kind of doorbell that only happens in the black and white movies his mother liked to watch. It was jarring. Walter immediately began to howl. But not just howl. He growled and he was not, temperamentally, a growling kind of dog.
            “I’ll get it,” Sim said, glad for a chance to be useful.
            Under most circumstances Sim was a very polite boy. He knew, for example, that it was rude, to stare and that appearances were deceptive. Often people who had the brightest smile and most winning ways turned out to be selfish and cruel. And people who were unpleasant to look at might well have a generous and lovable nature. But all of this knowledge flew right out of his head when he opened the door and for the first time saw the man with the crooked face.

Chapter 3

An ancient forest

            First it was the eyebrows. They exploded above deep set eyes that seemed to peer as if from within a cave. And they didn’t match. Not the eyes or the eyebrows. One nostril was more flared than the other. There was a scar in the center of the stranger’s upper lip and his mouth seemed shaped into a perpetual frown. It was as if one half of the man’s face was lower than the other, as if it had been taken apart and put carelessly back together. Sim realized that he was staring.
            “I’m sorry,” he said, “I was expecting someone else.”
            “People usually are,” the man said in a preoccupied voice, rubbing his hands together slowly. They were a contrast to his face, slender and well tended. On one finger he wore a ring with a large red stone. Sim screwed up his courage and looked up. The man was studying him. It was a penetrating look, which made Sim very uncomfortable. “I deal in antiquarian objects,” the man said, as if he were reciting something learned for class. “Treasures in your attic. Ancestral trunks, old jewelry, knick-knacks, snuff boxes and coins. He emphasized the word “coins,” and, narrowed his eyes.
            “We don’t have any ancestors,” Sim said.
            “Everyone has ancestors,” the man said. Of course Sim knew that. What he had meant to say was that they hadn’t left any trunks behind.
            “I mean we don’t have any ancestors with trunks,” he said. Sim sneaked a glance out to the street. There was no vehicle there; the man had walked from somewhere.
            “Even the change in your pocket can contain treasure,” the man said.
            Sim clutched the coin in his pocket. There was no question about it. The coin felt strange, stranger than it had earlier at Bartlett’s. There was a tickling sensation on his chest and he felt light-headed. The man looked at Sim and smiled. It was a smile of satisfaction. Sim started to speak, but as he did the entire scene before him started to dissolve. In its place he saw a forest of trees larger than any he had ever seen before. The lawn, the street, the town faded to ghostlike shadows in a dense silent forest. The man reached out a bony hand and touched Sim’s shoulder. “It’s you,” he said.
            Sim awoke on the sofa. It must have been no more than a few minutes. His mother was talking to someone on the phone. She hung up and rushed back into the room. The front door was closed.
            “What happened?” Sim asked.
            “You fainted,” she said.
            "The man with the crooked face,” he said.
            “Sim, that’s not the way we talk about people. Think what it must be like for him. And then to have you faint.”
            “Did he say anything to you?” Sim asked.
            “He just apologized. You probably frightened him more than he frightened you. You’re soaking wet. What have you been doing?”
            “I was looking for something in the river,” he said. He reached into his pocket. The coin was still there.
            They went up to his room and he changed into his pajamas, putting the coin under his pillow. Ridley Raccoon, his one-eyed and somewhat threadbare sleeping companion, watched. Ridley had shared Sim’s pillow for as far back as he could remember. Doctor Harvey arrived twenty minutes later and checked him over. Hearing the story of Sim’s dip in the icy waters of Lost River Cove, he diagnosed a case of delayed shock brought on by mild hypothermia.
            It wasn’t that, Sim wanted to say. It was something else. It was seeing things that weren’t there. After Dr Harvey left his mother scolded him. But it was a what-would-I-do-if-ever-anything-happened-to-you scold rather than an angry one.
            “You know those old wharves up past the second bridge?” he asked.
            “The ones across from Miss Gardner’s house?”
            “Yeah. They’re really old aren’t they?”
            “They’d have to be. Before the bridge. When the river was still deep enough for ships.”
            “How old?”
            “Maybe a hundred years old. Maybe older.”
            “And the Viking ship was here even before then.”
            “Long before then.”
            “How long?”
            “I don’t know, Sim. Maybe a thousand years. A long time ago.”
            “Then the river would have been really deep,” he said.
            “Really deep,” his mother responded. She pulled the covers up around Sim’s neck and tucked them in tight.
            “And there wouldn’t have been any town here. No roads, not even any docks. Nothing but….” He hesitated.
            “Trees,” his mother said. “Giant trees of a kind we will never see. Chestnuts. Great groves of chestnuts and beech and king pine. All gone now.”
            “Except in stories,” Sim said.
            “Stories and dreams,” his mother said. Then she kissed him good night and turned out the light, leaving the door open a crack the way he liked it.
            Sim looked for the pattern in the wallpaper opposite his bed. He knew it by heart – clipper ships and flags –but the night was dark and the images were hidden from sight. When there was a moon and a night breeze moving the branches outside his window, the ships would set sail through a sea of shadows. Tonight Sim would have liked there to be a moon. He had never been afraid of the dark, even as a child, but tonight he was. Was there a darkness in the darkness he wondered, as earlier there had been in the cove, depths beneath the depths?
            When Sim was frightened he thought of his father, a man he had never seen, but who stood superhuman in his imagination. He was a sailor. His mother had been called in to look after him. There had been a shipwreck. He had come from another land and spoke a language that no one could understand. Magnus Siglandi was his name. His mother imitated his voice, hitting her breastbone with her fingers. Magnus Siglandi, she said. Magnus Siglandi, she repeated with a far-away look in her eyes.
            “What did he look like?” Sim would ask her.
            “Like a god,” his mother would reply. “Blond with deep blue eyes.”
            “Was he big?” Sim asked.
            “He seemed big, but no. He wasn’t much taller than I.” she said.
            “How old was he?”
            “Maybe 20. Maybe younger.”
            Then she would look at Sim strangely, lost for a moment in her own thoughts and say, “He looked just like you, Sim. He had your eyes. You will be just like him some day.”
            How could you love a father you had never seen, who didn’t even stay long enough for you to be born, who had never come back to see how you had turned out, Sim wondered, as he had often before. How could his mother love a man who had left her alone with a baby? She did. That was the thing.
            The stories his mother told him, he learned quickly, were not stories that he could repeat to friends as he became old enough to have friends and to have his own story. Only to Amanda, whose tireless search for wonder helped Sim enlarge upon his mother’s description of his father being “like a god.” He probably is one, Amanda explained. People in history are always being fathered by gods who don’t stick around. “But do they come back?” Sim wanted to know. Amanda couldn’t say.
            All he had of his father’s was a stone hung on a leather cord, which his mother had found on the bedside table where his father had stayed. It was a little larger than the coin he had found in the sand that afternoon, but thinner. Usually it was a soft grey color, but sometimes it changed colors, especially when he slept on the widow's walk beneath the stars. Then it was like rain sliding down a window in colored sheets. His father had left it on top of a drawing: two stick figures, one inside the other. ‘I didn’t understand until I realized I was carrying you,’ she told him. ‘And I knew he had left it for you.’ ‘Lucky,’ his father had called it. ‘I thought he didn’t speak like we do,’ Sim said when his mother told him the story. ‘He didn’t have many words, but he had that one,’ she said.
            The stone was his most prized possession, his only link to his father and it had kept alive the hope that some day his father would return.
            The feeling of expectation that he had felt earlier remained with him in the dark. Once again he saw the man and the boy so strangely silent on the bridge, the gull as it watched him, and then as it disappeared into the sun. They shared a secret: he and the gull. He couldn’t have said that, but he could think it.
            “It’s you,” the man with the crooked face had said. What had he meant? How could you be somebody you didn’t know you were to someone you had never seen before? Why hadn’t he told his mother? Not even about the coin. It felt strange suddenly to have so many secrets, strange and, in a way that he wasn’t sure he liked, exciting. He reached under his pillow to touch the coin. There was that feeling again, as if it were alive. As if it were purring. He held it and soon, comforted, he was asleep.