by Patrick Ness
“You know my aunt Johanna?”
“The one in Rotterdam? The professor?”
Angela nodded. “She wants me to go over there and be in that programme she set up at her university.”
Adam creased his forehead. “Instead of college?”
“Instead of senior year.”
Adam just stared while Angela crossed her arms and waited for it to sink in. This day showed no sign of stopping.
The faun does not see the incantation in time. He had not known she could do it in this form. Perhaps she did not know either, but away from the wreckage of the cabin – which he would not have time to repair, leaving a mystery this world would ponder and solve wrongly, as it always did – she begins patting a slow circle in the grass with her hand, the other held up towards the early afternoon sun.
Though worried, he has kept his distance, only intervening when the cabin nearly collapsed from the fire he also did not know she would be able to start. But he cannot approach too closely. He cannot enter her space or come within the reach of her arm.
She is the Queen. She must stand alone.
She turns faster now, and he can hear her saying something, though he cannot catch the words.
“My lady?” he asks, though he knows she won’t hear him.
This form is cumbersome to him, all forms of the earth are. It is an ancient one, the best he could find in the short time he had. It is too big for this world, too alien, too earthy.
But it is powerful.
She spins faster now, the knee-deep grass around her starting to bend as if under a whirlpool.
Though is she still the Queen? The soul that clings so blindly to her is surprisingly strong, and he knows she will be lost come sundown if he cannot find a way to–
And then he sees it.
And he is running.
Shouting, fruitlessly, “My lady, no!”
But the whirlpool of air rises from the earth, surrounding her in a funnel of dust and grass and the timothy hay that grows wild in these fields–
He is too late. The funnel collapses as he arrives, and she is gone.
She is gone.
She will not have gone far, but in this wilderness, both of trees and houses, even near by is far enough. How will he find her? How will he find her in time?
There is nothing for it, no time to even berate himself for his stupidity. The Queen must be found and, somehow, saved before the sun sets or she will die.
And if she dies, then so does the faun, for she is the boundary, the wall between these worlds.
If she dies, so do they all.
He begins to run towards the forest of houses. He hopes all he will have to do is listen for the screams.
Angela Darlington. The girl born in Seoul with an adoptive mother from the Netherlands and a father with a completely English name. Who all lived on a farm in Frome, Washington, an actual farm, with actual animals, actual sheep that got sold to slaughter – a topic Angela kept quiet about as it wouldn’t have gone down well with the vegetarians at school. They were, in short, about as American as you could be.
But not, of course, the kind of Americans certain other kinds of Americans thought were American.
“She’s Dutch, you say?” Big Brian Thorn would ask occasionally about Angela’s mother, even though he couldn’t possibly have forgotten in the previous decade. “They’re a funny people, the Dutch.” He’d give the newspaper he was reading a disapproving shake. “Liberal about everything. Marijuana. Prostitution.”
“The Darlingtons don’t do any of that,” Adam would answer. “Though I think they probably did vote for all the Clintons.”
“I’m just saying, the tendency is there. Towards a relative look at the world, where you can eventually talk yourself into thinking that pretty much anything at all is okay.”
“Oh, come on, Brian,” his mother said this particular time, filling in a job application on her laptop. “You like Angela.”
“I do like Angela,” his father answered. “I’m just saying it’s hard to deprogramme from that stuff. I don’t know how many times we’ve invited them to church.” He glanced over at Adam. “You could be a real witness to that girl.”
“I don’t even understand what they mean by the verb,” Angela said to him whenever he brought it up. “Wouldn’t I be the witness, watching you tell me about it?”
“It’s more like I’m giving you a witness statement.”
“Like you saw God committing a crime?”
“I’m supposed to be offering my own witness on what Christ has done for me.”
“Made you gay and put you in the best possible family for dealing with that? At least He has a sense of humour.”
“Maybe I’m meant to witness to my family?”
“How’s that working out?”
“We’ve all silently agreed to disagree.”
But Adam’s parents did like her. That was true. They liked her manners around them, liked how hard she worked on her farm and at the pizza place without ever seeming to complain. They liked her enough that Adam was sure they still held out the hope he’d one day just marry her, whatever sexual agreement they had to work out to do it.
They didn’t know Angela was fluid enough to sometimes flow to girls. Particularly girls with kissable lips, the thinness of Angela’s own the sole physical feature she regularly complained about.
“I’ll bet Dutch people have really thin lips,” he said now, in the back room of Pizza Frome Heaven.
And again, she knew him well enough not to even blink at the non sequitur. “Like their really tall bodies?”
“You’d be very short if you went. Shorter.”
“You’re tall, Adam. I know your ways and tempers. I know when to feed you and what your mating calls sound like.”
“It’s all about rolling into a ball when we want to rut.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“What if I need you here to be my guide for the clinically short?”
“You’ll do fine without me.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“No, probably, and I won’t be fine without you.”
“It’ll be like losing a minor limb. A hand or something.”
“An ear.”
“My hair.”
“Oh, you’ll be losing that soon enough. I’ve seen your dad.”
Then she waited, waited to see how he would really take it.
He patted the seat next to him. She came over and sat down. They leaned side by side against each other.
“When do you leave?” he asked. He was so much taller than her he could rest his left cheek all the way across the top of her head.
“Week from Tuesday,” she said, sounding sadder than he wanted.
“Wow. Will you come back for Christmas?”
“I want to, but my mom is already talking about Christmas in Rotterdam.”
“Zwarte Piet,” Adam said.
“Maybe I can start a protest movement or something.”
They didn’t move as Angela’s shift manager came in, a tall black senior called Emery from their school who was essentially raising his younger brothers as their mother slowly died of dementia. “Hey, Adam,” he said.
“Hey, Emery, how’s your mom?”
“Oh, you know. No worse this week at least.”
“Good.”
Emery glanced at Angela. “Lunch rush is coming. I’m going to need you back.”
Angela nodded. “Give me a minute, though.”
Emery shook his head affectionately at her and Adam. “Weirdest couple I know.” He left them, holding up his fingers to say she could have two more minutes.
“You going to miss me?” Angela asked.
“Are you kidding?”
“Yeah. You are.”
“But I know you wouldn’t go if you didn’t want to.”
And even though he couldn’t see her face, he could practically feel her smiling. “Europe, Adam. I’ll be living in Europe. For a whole year.
” She turned to him. “You have to find a way to visit.”
“With what money? I don’t have a job any more.”
“Oho, that story isn’t even close to being finished. You’ll come to Rotterdam with the money you win from the sexual harassment suit against Wade.”
“Because my parents would totally support that public debacle.”
She got up and stood in front of him. They were finally at matching heights and she rested her forehead against his own. “I’ll sure as hell miss you, Adam Thorn.”
“You won’t have a shortage of super-tall Dutch people to remind you of me.”
Her eyes lit up. “And maybe one of them will be straight.”
“Not according to what I’ve heard about the Dutch.”
She play-slapped him. “My mom is Dutch.”
“Do you think we would have dated?”
She leaned down and looked into his eyes, so closely their eyelashes were almost touching. “I think we would have dated and married and made babies of average height. And then divorced when you realized you were gay.”
“I’m always gay?”
“In every universe.”
“That makes sense. Are you always short?”
“Except in the universes where I’m Beyoncé.”
“In some universes, we’re all Beyoncé.”
The town is not large, but even so. The faun repeatedly smells the air, hoping for some scent of her, but only after much frustration does he realize he’s been sniffing for his Queen.
When, of course, at the moment, she is someone else entirely.
He curses his foolishness and pulls his mind back to the body of the dead girl – though calling it a “body” is wrong. It is not exactly a spirit either, not in the way the faun knows spirits. The jealous, capricious spirits of the lake, for example, who sometimes chafe under the rule of the Queen. Would they fight to keep her? the faun wonders. Even if losing her meant their own destruction? An eternity of rule is perhaps an eternity too long for some.
No, surely not. They loved the Queen. And if they did not, they feared her, which is how it should be, how it always had been.
He would not allow her reign to end. He would not.
And the not-quite-spirit that had caught her had her own scent. One of this world, the world she had left. It had been a violent passage out of it, to be sure, but not the first that had been made through the lake, nor the first that had passed near the Queen.
But this spirit had refused. She had not known what or how she was refusing, but she had felt a pearl of blood calling to her – he knew, for he had smelled it, too, the scent of another’s destiny on the day it changed itself – and she had clearly decided to refuse her own. In that moment of refusal, she had turned the Queen’s head–
And the Queen had been caught and today, somehow, made flesh. When that happened, a spirit was only given until sundown to walk this earth one last time. Only until sundown.
He remembers the spirit, remembers her scent at the cabin.
He closes his eyes and inhales deeply again.
There. There she is.
He moves through the town at a speed unseen by its citizens, though not unfelt. There is gooseflesh at his passing, a shiver down the spine, perhaps a shiver that moves all the way to the loins – he is in the form of a faun after all, rude, lusty, recognized (wrongly) as a god, (rightly) as a fertility assist. There will be more than one baby conceived here this afternoon.
But these are only fleeting thoughts as he steps between the moments and seconds of these creatures’ odd and fractious little lives. He can scent her. There is a twist of her on the breeze, braiding itself in a helix too faint for the noses of all but the most attentive hounds and the faun himself.
He can sense she has stopped somewhere. She grows larger in the horizon of his senses. And beyond her–
Beyond her, there is a wall of scents like hers.
She has found her home. She has found her family.
The faun begins to move faster.
She has found her home. The home of this body, the family of it. There is such a pull here, strands of sorrow leaking into the air so dark and malevolent it’s a wonder these creatures can’t see them, see how they poison this house.
“How they will be its death,” she says, aloud.
Then she wonders, Am I that death? Is that how it shall happen?
She stands before a neglected front yard. Grass grows high over a derelict mower in one corner. Abandoned baby toys – whose? what baby’s? does she know? she does not – hide among the browning lawn. A chain-link fence surrounds it, so low she steps over it in one hitched stride, less keeping anything in than simply marking the space as owned. There is evidence of a dog – a chain, a collar – but Victor, the boyfriend before Tony, had taken a dislike to it, a mutt called Karl, and Karl had vanished one night. No proper explanation had been forthcoming from Victor.
“And yet I did not leave,” she says, bothered, unsettled.
She can feel the wound in her heart from Victor, one he kept fresh and bleeding, one in which he had placed a hook that kept her tethered to him. She was terrified of him. She could not leave him.
Until she did.
Oh, the day of it, the day she had left Victor. She had said her unhappiness. She had turned down the drugs he offered to make her stay. She had not blinked at the threats he made. She didn’t know why, that day of all days, but he railed and screamed and threatened and all she had seen was his fear that she was leaving him, leaving him alone with the demon in his veins that would surely kill him as it would surely kill her.
And then he had wept. And she had seen through it. The tears weren’t real. He was manipulating her. Again. And if they weren’t real, nothing else was real, nothing but his fear.
And that gave her the power.
“So I shut the door,” she says. And she had. She had walked Victor to the doorway, an almost kind hand on his back, and she had guided him out the front door – this door, here, the one before her now – and he had turned and said “Katie?” and she had just…
Shut the door.
For a moment, she had been strong. For a moment, she had trembled from that strength. For a moment, anything was possible, a future, a way to make it better, to make it right, to step out of this rut, out of these weights that clung to her like bricks in her pockets. For almost an entire evening, there was possibility.
Then Tony came over. With a baggie. Four months later, he murdered her.
But there had been the moment when she shut that door.
There will always be that moment.
That same door that opens before her now.
The heavy woman behind it looks at her, eyes opening so wide as to seem almost painful. But then those eyes shut and the woman drops to her doorstep, in a faint.
“Mother?” says the Queen.
Adam and Angela had lost their virginities within a month of each other, though not by design. She’d lost hers, after much deliberation, with Kurt Miller, he of the peach fuzz moustache and pimply chin. She liked him but didn’t love him, which she thought was the perfect combination.
“That way I can actually have the experience with a decent guy and see what it might be like.”
“That’s very idealistic,” Adam had said.
“Well,” she replied, “I am young.”
He’d waited up half the night for her call, his phone on silent under the covers. There’d been no lying necessary to cover for her parents. Mrs Darlington knew where Angela was, though wouldn’t know what had happened until it was over with. Adam had spent a surprisingly large portion of the evening wondering what that must be like.
His phone lit up and he answered immediately. “How was it?”
“His penis wasn’t porn ready. At all.”
Adam laughed, as he knew he was intended to, and then he asked, also as he knew he was intended to, “How was it really?”
And he listened to her while she cried. �
��Do I need to kill him?” he said, his voice serious.
“No,” she said, quickly. “Not at all. It was just … so much work for really not very much. And it hurt. I mean, Jesus, Adam, why does no one tell you that? It hurts.”
“I’ve heard it hurts for guys, too.”
“It didn’t hurt Kurt.”
“Not what I meant.”
“Oh. Well, still. It hurt. And it was weird. And his dick looked like a mushroom. Not even a very big one.”
“I know. We have gym together.”
“Well, why didn’t you say?”
“It’s not as if they don’t change shape, Angela.”
“His didn’t. Not very much. Poor Kurt.”
“Poor Angela.”
“I don’t think I could have taken much more size, frankly. Not the first time. Thank God it was so fast.”
“Are you really okay? Are these jokes to cover sadness?”
“Yeah, they are.”
“Need me to sneak out?”
“You can’t sneak out. Your mom has the house alarmed.”
“This is true.”
“I was just… I mean, I didn’t exactly have my expectations high–”
“You did a little.”
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“Yeah. Like the kiss in Brokeback Mountain.”
“It’s not gonna be like that.”
“I know. Are you seriously okay?”
She blew out her breath. “I’m a little sticky.”
“Was Kurt nice?”
“Really nice. I didn’t expect him to be. Lousy kisser, but I knew that going in. I can say this, though, Adam. The touches… The touches are something else. A body next to yours and all that skin, like miles of skin, you never think anyone else would have that much skin and… The way it smells, like a kiss but so much darker. It was awkward and it was kind of horrible and it hurt and I bled and it was short, but there were parts of it…”
“Yeah.”
“It’s gotta get better. Doesn’t it?”
“That’s what people say.”
He heard her cry a little bit more. “I’m really tired,” she said, “and my contacts have gone all dry.”
