Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline, page 14
part #1 of Punked Up Fairy Tales Series
“Whippet,” he grated out. “Whippets! Rescue him. Get him.”
She had no idea what he meant, but his excitement was contagious. He sat up and waved. Dorianya followed his gaze and saw mechanical devices with big rifles mounted on top clanking along at a breakneck pace. They bypassed the shrine. A shower of dirt rose into the air and fell down on the soldier.
“There’s one. Fetch him, mates.”
Dorianya flowed around the rock to stand guard over the soldier as another vehicle with a cross painted on its side drove up. Two men with identical crosses on their helmets jumped down and hurried to the soldier’s side. They didn’t seem aggressive so she let them pass.
“You’re in good hands, me lad. You with the First Canadian Division?”
“Under General Sir Arthur Currie.”
“You with him at Passchendale?”
“Missed the gas attack. I arrived from Halifax a week after. Got an instant promotion, Lieutenant Campbell, Alvin Campbell. That’s me.” He let out a low moan of anguish as an artillery shell rocked the world twenty yards away.
“Bloody awful business, that phosgene. Ought to be outlawed. We have to avoid the Bosch’s artillery right now, and that’ll kill us dead. Ready? Up you go, Lieutenant Campbell.”
The soldier groaned as the two men hoisted him. They started for the vehicle, Campbell bumping along between them. Dorianya shivered as the toes of his boots dragged over her subterranean body. The sensation combined horror and sensuality in a way she failed to understand. She sank lower into the earth, watching as the soldier’s comrades wrestled him into the back of the truck.
“There’s another man, back there in the woods, by the shrine.” Campbell tried to turn and point.
“Sergeant Guthrie checked. He’s a goner, Lieutenant.”
“Guthrie?”
“He’s our driver. He’s a crackerjack man behind the wheel, as crazy as Barney Oldfield.”
Alvin Campbell let out another squawk and almost tumbled from the rear of the ambulance as it shot away, kicking up a spray of mud and stone. Dorianya rose to her full height and reveled in the dirty storm from the ambulance’s tires. The soil felt good splashing against her, and it reminded her of the soldier.
Alvin Campbell. And he was not simply a soldier but a lieutenant. Whatever that meant, it had to be something special.
She sank back into the ground, her thoughts chaotic. Somehow, they had become more ordered when she slipped past an ore deposit and came to where the Earth Mother spread out over an immense portion of land ruptured by the human fighting, doing her best to heal it.
“You are not here to aid me, are you, Daughter?” the Earth Mother confronted Dorianya.
“I have seen nobility unlike others in the above world,” Dorianya said. She expelled a long gout of mud and slid after it. “He needs me. I should go to him.”
“There is more, isn’t there, sister? You have fallen in love with him.”
“That is not… true.” Dorianya considered what that meant, compared what she had experienced with Alvin Campbell and how she anguished with him and rejoiced in his safe escape. “No, that is true. You see clearly, Earth Mother.”
The ground shook as the elder daughter of the earth sighed.
“You are young and have not truly experienced life underground. Your sisters show nobility.”
“Not like Alvin Campbell!”
“Such passion,” the Earth Mother said sadly. “You would join him?”
“I have heard of such a thing. Is it true? Can I become human and… and human?”
“You mean experience love in all its human manifestations?” Again the ground shook with the sigh, this time less of sadness and more of resignation. “It is true, but you must know the penalties.”
“Anything! I helped him once already but I can do so much more for him.”
“You speak of helping him, but there is a selfishness to your wish, isn’t there, Dorianya?”
“What if there is? Can life on the surface be so bad? They can see our sisters in the air and sea, as well as we who are under their feet. And Alvin Campbell…”
“If you turn away from your sisters of the earth, you can never return.”
“I’ll have him.”
“And,” the Earth Mother continued, “your love must be pure.”
“It is!”
“And his for you must be shown.”
“I am sure he will love me as I do him.”
“Youth,” Earth Mother said. “So be it. At the shrine you will be reborn as a woman. You are permitted one wish.”
“To be the most beautiful human woman ever! How can he not love me then?”
“So it will be, but you can never speak of your love for him until he speaks of his for you first. Do so and you will die a terrible death.”
Dorianya agreed. Alvin Campbell would see her love, even without words, and return it a hundredfold. How could he not if she were truly the most beautiful woman in the world?
“There is another condition. If he does not love you—”
“He will, he will! I know it!”
The Earth Mother enfolded her youngest daughter and compressed until Dorianya cried in pain at the transition. Even after she was taken to the surface, to the shrine, and left there naked but for a thick blanket of mud, the pain did not subside.
“But I am human,” Dorianya said, running long, slender fingers over her new body, experiencing thrills of sensation and marveling at all she had missed as an earth elemental. The world flooded her with fierce colors, sounds of distant fighting hammered her ears and the pungent scents of life and death made her nostrils flare. She threw her arms wide and tried to take it all in at once.
Then she looked down and saw the dead soldier, the one her Alvin Campbell had tried to rescue. Kneeling, she rolled him over. The ambulance driver had not been wrong. This unknown soldier had died long since. Humans buried their dead. She had come across many of their cemeteries, more since their war had begun, as she cruised about underground.
Using her fingers to dig out a grave in the sacred shrine proved impossible. Where once she’d burrowed and excavated with ease, this body permitted none of that. Giving up, she lifted the curiously light body, slung it over her shoulder, and began walking back toward the human city where Alvin Campbell’s comrades had assembled for this fight.
Through the night and into the next day she walked, getting to know her body and learning to ignore the constant pain it gave her. At sunset the next day, naked and covered in mud, she was hailed by a sentry for the First Canadian Division.
Lieutenant Alvin Campbell’s unit!
***
“He will be here, won’t he?” Dorianya flicked ash off her cigarette and looked anxiously toward the door. The ballroom was so crowded with revelers that her view often disappeared. She ran her free hand over her curvaceous body. The pale beige dress clung to her every contour, reminding her of the way the earth had once pressed into her elemental body, but this dress gave different sensations, so many different ones! It caressed and flowed, cooled and added to her enjoyment of being among the humans. They all watched her move across the ballroom floor—the men hardly holding their desires in check and the women uniformly hating her. Dorianya reveled in the reactions. Among the elementals, all had been equal physically and clothing such as this gown, the beguiling pearls dangling around her swanlike throat or the flashing diamond earrings in perfect shell-like ears were superfluous.
She half turned when she realized the hand on her posterior belonged to the man edging closer to her by the minute.
In the month since she had become human, she had learned so much. A step as graceful as any ballet dancer moved her away so that the man seeking her attention found his hand groping emptiness rather than her waist. She thrust out her cigarette in such a way that if he approached her again, she would burn a hole in his tuxedo. He got the message. She enjoyed the movement of exotic smoke through her lungs, the surge of energy it gave her, but in this social setting the cigarette served primarily to keep the unwanted at a distance.
“What does Lieutenant Campbell have that I don’t? You haven’t even met him—he only got out of the hospital this morning.” The man’s pleading turned into a whine that displeased her. If she hadn’t been so intent on meeting this gala’s guest of honor again, she would have been wroth. Even that thought amused her. Anger was not an earth elemental emotion.
Nor was love.
“He’s quite dashing,” she said, looking down her nose with a combination of disdain and amused disinterest. “And heroic.”
A murmur passed through the room. She caught her breath when the man she had come to love made a grand entrance. She took in his full height, his strength, the sharp, clean lines of his face only marred here and there with small bandages that reminded her of his battlefield condition— small imperfections that enhanced his appeal.
Her would-be beau moved to block her view of Alvin Campbell. With a fluid move, she sidestepped to keep Lieutenant Campbell in sight as he crossed the ballroom to great deserved acclaim.
“I’ve heard that you are something of a heroine, yourself,” persisted the man she could not brush off. “Something about carrying a body back to his command post.”
She had created quite the sensation as she dropped Corporal Yarrow’s corpse at the sentry’s feet. Realizing the truth would never be believed she had feigned shell shock, something those along the Allied salient understood, and slowly added to her story as she learned what gained her the most approbation. Alvin Campbell had been taken to a better equipped hospital in Paris, and her new heart hammered with emotion when she wheedled her way onto a train going to the capital a few days later.
The train had been a revelation to her. The huge engine stood thirty feet tall, was streamlined gleaming steel and blasted along spewing diesel fumes and shuddering with barely suppressed power. She had wanted to explore it, but it had been crowded with soldiers from a half dozen different countries she had never heard of on their way back to the Allied headquarters.
Instead, she had listened and soon fit in with the men. Her physical beauty was a boon, as much as the constant pain she felt in every joint of her body. The doctors and corpsmen fussed over her because of the honest and obvious agony she experienced, but only the most dedicated remained once it became obvious her pain was nothing they could ease.
The train station was a huge cavern of steel girders, filled with a dozen trains bringing troops back from the front lines. The war was winding down and the time had come to wait for armistice and celebration. In no time the urban swirl caught her up but her notoriety kept her in the public eye. She adapted quickly and within a week might have been mistaken as a Parisienne by birth though more than once she had eyed the gardens and patches of bare earth, yearning for the life she had left behind beneath the paved streets bustling with powerful machines. Then the thought of the man she had rescued on the battlefield rose and convinced her this human life had been the right choice.
Even if her joints threatened to collapse at any moment.
“That’s a jaunty tune,” the man before her said above the party’s din. He reached out, waiting.
Dorianya hesitated, flicked away her cigarette, put the holder in her beaded clutch purse, and then slipped into his arms, her body stiff. They spun about onto the floor in a quick foxtrot. The man was a decent dancer, and she fell into the rhythm, letting it possess her. Music was another thing that the subterranean world lacked. Oh, there were sounds of the earth moving, continents grinding together and sliding apart and the occasional roar as a volcano erupted, but nothing rhythmic like this. Her new body responded well and as she danced with increasing grace and fluidity, the pain wracking her disappeared. Without seeming to do so, she guided them to the center of the floor amid the other couples losing themselves in the music.
“See? I knew you’d—” The man grabbed for her as she seemed to stumble.
Dorianya’s grace was put to the test with her deliberate move. One toe of her slipper touched the heel of the other. Arms windmilling, she twisted around. For a heart stopping moment, she thought her ploy had failed.
Alvin Campbell moved with all the speed she expected. His arms circled her waist and pulled her upright, letting her put her arms around his neck for support. For an instant their faces were inches apart. Dorianya resisted the urge to move closer and kiss him, but oh, how she loved every wrinkle and imperfection of his strong face!
They hung frozen in the moment, then she straightened, unsure if so boldly kissing him would violate the precept of declaring her love for him before he spoke of it to her.
“You are so strong, and I am so clumsy. Pardon me.” She spoke softly. She should have averted her eyes, playing coy as she had seen so many other women do, but taking her eyes off him proved impossible. Not only was he handsome, but she worried he might vanish like a will-o’-the-wisp if she looked away for even an instant.
“I’m glad I had the strength to catch you.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Dorianya moved to block her former dance partner from annoying her with questions about her condition. To forestall any more interruption, she stepped up and pressed against Alvin Campbell’s body, the warmth erasing any return of aches from her condition as a human. A quick whirl and they melted into the crowd of dancers, leaving the lieutenant’s partner with Dorianya’s discarded one.
“I was released from the hospital today,” he said. “I hardly recognized myself when I looked in the mirror.”
She lifted a laced glove to touch the scar on his face. “It makes you look distinguished and distinctive. You’re just not another pretty face.” She saw a tiny smile creeping onto his lips at her words. Humor won his heart!
“You dance divinely,” Alvin Campbell said, spinning Dorianya around as the music begged for a lively two-step. “I apologize about how clumsy I am.”
Dorianya kept from wincing as her joints creaked. She worried they drowned out the music.
“It is easier with a partner so handsome,” she said. Though the other couples tended to dance a sedate hands width apart Dorianya pressed closer. She couldn’t help herself. She had forsaken a life underground for this moment.
“You’re too kind.”
He stopped suddenly and looked at her, as if for the first time.
“I know you!”
Her heart skipped a beat. He remembered who had saved him out in the battlefield.
“And I know you, too.”
“You’re the woman who brought back the corporal’s body. I tried to save him but couldn’t. Then…”
“Then?” she prompted.
“Then someone saved me. I don’t know who, but you succeeded where I failed. They gave me a medal. Did you get one, also?” Alvin Campbell touched the gold medal dangling from the varicolored ribbon on his chest.
“The corporal wasn’t the only one I saved. I—” Before Dorianya said any more, she worried that she would blurt out her love for him which would mean disaster. The Earth Mother had warned her and losing Alvin Campbell now, when he was so close, would devastate her.
“I have been so lucky,” he went on, not hearing her. “I was rescued from the Bosch and found the love of my life.”
Dorianya started to speak, but the words jumbled in her throat. He had spoken of his love for her first. It was now permitted that she speak of it to him. That made the transition from immortality in the underworld to upper world mortality worthwhile.
“There she is.”
“What?” Dorianya blinked in confusion. “What do you mean? I’m right here.”
“My nurse. The one who brought me back to health. Excuse me.” Alvin Campbell bowed slightly. Then Dorianya found herself alone on the dance floor, surrounded by whirling, loving couples as Alvin Campbell nimbly crossed the room to a woman dressed, not in a ball gown or other finery, but a plain nurses’ uniform. He circled her waist with his arm and drew her close for a kiss.
“No,” Dorianya gasped. Tears welled and she dabbed at them.
Alvin Campbell had found his love and it was not her. It was a nurse who had bewitched him. When he had awakened, she must have been hovering over him, an angel of mercy, healing him and giving him what Dorianya could not. Not then.
But she could now. She could win him away from the nurse and get Alvin Campbell to proclaim his love, unleashing the torrential outpouring of emotion she felt for him.
From the way they pressed against each other, Dorianya had no time to waste. She went after Alvin Campbell, but the dancers caused her to bounce about and by the time she reached the far side of the ballroom, Alvin Campbell had climbed atop a chair and held up his hand to get everyone’s attention. The band discordantly slowed and stopped, further focusing the attention on the soldier.
“I have an announcement!”
Cheers went up, cries from many of his comrades about Alvin Campbell’s heroism. That her love was so well thought of by his men warmed Dorianya, but his next words chilled her to her new bones. Her new aching bones. The ones she had accepted because she loved him so.
“I have asked the lovely Bertha Benedict for her hand in marriage and she accepted! Nurse Benedict and I are to be married tomorrow evening!”
A cheer went up. Dorianya’s legs buckled under her, and she sagged into a pile on the floor. Again came the tears. This time she made no effort to stop them. Someone helped her to her feet, and then even he rushed away to congratulate Alvin and Bertha.
Dorianya had never felt so alone.
***
Dorianya knelt in the garden, her knees touching bare earth. After fleeing the soiree and Alvin Campbell’s chilling news, she had wandered aimlessly, her face to the setting sun until she found this small contact with her old life. Soil. Damp and fragrant, though as an elemental she had never thought of it as anything more than a highway for her subterranean movements. How different she saw the world through human senses!
