by Mark Morris
“You should get a dog,” Steve said, not for the first time. “Keeley needs real friends, not just plastic dinosaurs.”
Vera lifted her hand from the dog’s silky fur and Cosmo immediately pushed closer, demanding more attention. She smiled. “You mean Cosmo needs friends.”
The dog chuffed softly at the sound of his name.
“Well, maybe that too. Everybody’s Cosmo’s friend. Isn’t that right, boy? Who’s a good boy?”
Leaves chattered on the ground at the windstorm created by the golden tail as it wagged madly.
“He may be a good boy, but he’s a rubbish guard dog,” Vera said. “I’d feel safer with a cat.”
Steve laughed. He pulled a battered tennis ball from his coat pocket and threw it far across the park. Cosmo went bounding after it. “Can a cat do that?”
As though the talk of a playmate had conjured her, a little girl with ginger hair emerged from the trees. It was hard to see clearly from this distance, but Vera guessed the newcomer was considerably younger than Keeley. She stood for a while on the fringe of the playground before approaching the sandpit, where she crouched a few feet away from Keeley. In her hands she clutched a lavishly dressed Disney princess – Vera had long since lost track of who was who – and she seemed to be trying to work out how to fit the doll into Keeley’s prehistoric tableau.
Vera felt herself tensing for the girl’s inevitable rejection. Keeley loathed dolls and she wasn’t good at sharing.
But the newcomer smiled shyly and Keeley returned a version of the smile. The ginger girl sat down next to her, gazing wide-eyed at the dunes Keeley was sculpting for Rappy to explore. To Vera’s surprise, the girls were soon engaged in some sort of game. It mostly seemed to involve Rappy chasing the princess, and Vera secretly hoped the raptor would go hungry this time.
Cosmo returned with the ball and dropped it in Steve’s lap. Then he danced on the spot until Steve threw it again.
Something tickled the back of Vera’s neck and she reached behind her, slapping at the skin. But there was nothing there. At Steve’s puzzled look she said, “Mosquitoes, I guess.”
“I haven’t seen any. It’s a bit late in the year for them. Hey, speaking of ‘late’, when are we going to do your passport photo?”
Vera groaned. “Oh god, that’s right. I keep forgetting! Sure, let’s do it before I need glasses and look even older than I feel.”
“What are you talking about?”
Vera rubbed her eyes. “Everything just seems out of focus lately. Fuzzy.”
“I told you – you’re not getting enough sleep. Too much fretting. Too much beating yourself up.”
Vera looked down at her hands and sighed.
“Besides, you’ll look amazing in glasses!”
Cosmo had been waiting patiently for the conversation to end, posing with the ball between his front paws, but he finally picked it up again, dropping it emphatically. It bounced towards Steve, who took the hint and obliged the dog with another impressive throw.
“Why don’t you and Keeley come over this evening? Have dinner with me.”
“Oh, I don’t want to put you out—”
“It’s no trouble, I promise. The food’s in the slow cooker as we speak. I’m doing Boeuf Bourguignon.”
Vera laughed. “Nobody makes Boeuf Bourguignon anymore.”
Cosmo made a triumphant return, this time offering the soggy ball to Vera. Grimacing, she accepted it, but her two-fingered throw did not impress the dog. He was back almost immediately and this time he gave the ball to Steve, who sent it flying into the distance.
“It was my father’s favourite dish,” Steve said.
“You hate your father!”
He shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
In the sandpit, Keeley’s playmate was swiping irritably at the air in front of her. Vera jerked her chin in their direction. “Told you. Mozzies.”
“Guess I’m just lucky they don’t fancy my blood. But look – please come over. We’ll do your passport photo and then I can show you the wedding I shot last weekend.”
“The one in the castle?”
“Yeah, the LARP one. It was brilliant.”
“Oh! Yes, I do want to see that. Okay, it’s a date!”
“Fantastic. And don’t worry – I’ve got chips and ketchup for the less discerning palate.”
Vera smiled and turned back to watch her daughter. The ginger girl was stumbling to her feet, waving her hands madly all around her head. Vera tried to focus. That couldn’t possibly be a whole cloud of bugs surrounding her. Keeley seemed completely unaffected, sitting calmly and watching. When the other girl gave a panicked scream, Vera jumped up and ran towards the sandpit, reaching it in four long strides.
But she wasn’t quick enough to reach the little ginger girl, who was now running at full pelt for the edge of the park. Her cries dwindled as she vanished into the trees. Vera was torn between wanting to go after her and staying to protect her own child. But there was nothing to protect her from.
“What happened, Keeley?” she asked breathlessly. “A bee? A wasp?”
Keeley bounced the raptor a few times, making it scale one of the dunes. She turned the dinosaur’s head when it reached the top. It was looking in the direction the other girl had fled.
“She didn’t like the fairies.”
Vera shook her head, confused. “Fairies?”
“Yeah. And they didn’t like her.”
Something prickled her neck again and Vera waved at the back of her head. Keeley noticed and met her eyes with the same cold gaze as before.
“They don’t like you, either.”
The matter-of-fact tone and Keeley’s dead expression sent a chill through her. It was a few seconds before she found her voice. “Come on,” she said. “We’re having dinner with Steve.” She didn’t like the way her voice cracked as she spoke.
* * *
The passport photo took no time at all, and Vera was pleasantly surprised by the result. She didn’t look as wretched as she felt. But perhaps Steve had secretly worked a bit of magic with an ultra-flattering lens.
Dinner was lavish and delicious, and it took her mind off Keeley’s weirdness for a while, even if it did make her feel a bit guilty. She was mostly a microwave chef, and while Keeley never complained about pizza and Chinese takeaway, it wasn’t ideal.
“I need to expand my repertoire. Maybe you can give me a few tips.”
Steve beamed with pride. “I’d love to.”
Vera noticed with some surprise that Keeley was actually eating the mushrooms. When she discovered them on pizza she picked them off with an exaggerated ‘yuck’ face.
“Wow,” Vera said. “Look at you, eating mushrooms for a change!”
“They’re toadstools,” Keeley corrected. “Where toads sit.”
Vera thought that sounded much less appetising, but she held her tongue.
“Do you like it?” Steve asked.
Keeley nodded without lifting her head from her bowl. She’d eaten the chips first, of course. Then, after some trepidation, she’d tasted the French stew and found it acceptable. Now she was wolfing it down.
“Mummy never makes stuff like this,” she mumbled in between mouthfuls.
Vera blushed and looked down at her own empty bowl. “Yeah, well, Mummy’s had a lot on her mind. She’s trying her best.”
Steve covered her hand with his and offered her a sympathetic smile before turning to Keeley. “Maybe you and your mum could make it together sometime.”
Vera brightened at the suggestion. “Would you like that, sweetie?”
Keeley shrugged, never taking her eyes off her bowl. “I guess.”
It was better than silence. Or veiled threats. “I’ll take that as a resounding yes,” she said, and refused to allow Keeley’s bland stare to da
mpen her mood.
After dinner, Keeley played with Cosmo while Steve took Vera into his office to show her the pictures. He’d been an enthusiastic amateur photographer all his life, but it was only in the past few years that he’d turned his hobby into a job. That was partly thanks to Vera’s encouragement, and she always enjoyed seeing his work.
Steve began scrolling through the images in Photoshop, skipping past what looked like an extravagant wedding.
“Hey, wait. I want to see some of those!”
“Ugh, no you don’t. That was a boring gig. I wanted to get some reportage stuff, you know, candid fun shots where they weren’t aware of the camera all the time. Only Mother of the Bride said she didn’t like ‘that frivolous modern style’, so everything was posed and staged. Nothing real. Nothing authentic. Look at this.” Steve opened a thumbnail to show a group of young women in matching mint green dresses. They surrounded a bride who was feigning excitement over the bouquet she was about to throw. “They’re like terrible actors in some ghastly play. The phone selfies they took are probably a better record of the day than any of my professional shots. Depressing.”
He closed the image and navigated to another folder. “Now this is more like it.”
Here was where he could let his talent shine. Vera felt like she was looking through stills from a fantasy movie. She’d been expecting a tourist trap castle with dusty antique furniture sequestered behind velvet ropes. Instead, it was a ruin. A few crumbling walls and arches were all that remained of the once-majestic structure. Vines and lichen were in the process of reclaiming it, creating a magical fairytale effect. The sky was overcast, but that only made it more atmospheric. Best of all, the wedding party were dressed as knights and mediaeval maidens, like characters straight out of Arthurian legend.
“They do roleplay there on the weekends,” Steve explained, “which is where the couple met. And they were all in character the whole time. I felt like a time traveller.”
“Steve, these are gorgeous!”
He smiled modestly as he continued to page through the pictures. “Yeah, they’re not bad.”
A sudden gasp made them both jump.
“Fairies!”
Keeley had appeared, as if from nowhere. She pointed at the screen, her expression one of sheer delight. Vera’s heart twisted. It seemed like years since she had last seen her daughter smile.
“Where, sweetie?” Steve asked.
And just like that, the moment was gone. Keeley scowled at him before jabbing her finger at the background of the portrait. “There,” she said, her voice flat and cold. “Right there.”
Guinevere stood at the top of a crumbling staircase that led nowhere but into the sky. The dramatic staging transformed the photo into a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Steve and Vera shared a look. Then Steve ventured a smile. “Oh, you mean those coloured blurs?”
Keeley’s eyes narrowed as she peered at the screen. “Blurs?”
“The camera catches everything, even if it’s out of focus – flowers, trees, people. I wanted the bride to be the centre of this picture, so I let everything else get blurred into the background.”
Vera was relieved to know it wasn’t just her eyes.
“But the blurs are pretty too,” Steve continued, “and there’s a special name for that effect. It’s called ‘bokeh’.”
“Bouquet?”
“No, BO-kay. It’s a Japanese word. You’ve got a good eye for spotting it!”
But Keeley still looked unconvinced, as though she were being deceived somehow. “But they’re not blurry. They’re fairies.”
Vera stared as hard as she could, but all she could see were fuzzy coloured circles. Maybe Keeley’s fairies constricted themselves into floating bubbles of light when they weren’t expressing their hostility towards those they didn’t like.
“Oh yeah,” she forced herself to say, as though finally seeing through her daughter’s eyes. “I guess they do look like fairies.”
Keeley snorted derisively. “They are fairies. That’s how they look.”
Vera’s unease was growing. Trust Keeley not to imagine Tinkerbell or butterflies, but some weird amorphous creatures instead, the kind you could mistake for vampiric insects. Vera wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but she couldn’t stop herself asking. “What are they doing?”
“Watching,” Keeley said, her voice matter-of-fact. “Waiting. You’ve seen them and now it’s too late.” She pointed at the base of the steps. Thorny brambles and weeds coiled around the rubble and stretched across the stony path like clutching, skeletal fingers. “The rocks are grinning. They can’t sing yet but they listen. And they dance. The fairies sing to them and bring them offerings. The rocks dance on them and hold them down in the ground and keep them there.”
Offerings. Where the hell was she getting these ideas?
Vera’s skin tingled, as if each single hair on her arms were being tugged by tiny invisible hands. She convulsed in an elaborate shudder, but Keeley didn’t seem to notice.
“Keeley? Is that what happened to your horse?”
“Uh-huh. It was a ceremony. They were showing me how to make people go under the stones. I can’t say the fairy names yet but they let me dance with them.” She paused, glancing up at the ceiling. “But I’m not supposed to talk about it. Not to you.”
Then she hopped down from the chair without another word and wandered back into the living room.
Vera sagged against Steve. “What. The fuck.”
“I told you,” he said, “kids are bloody weird.” But he sounded less certain now that he’d seen Keeley in action. In fact, he sounded quite apprehensive himself.
Tears welled in Vera’s eyes, rendering the bokeh onscreen even blurrier, as if the fairies were now concealing themselves from her. She remembered the little ginger girl at the park, the way she’d frantically waved at her face before running off in terror, the blur Vera had seen swarming around her head. And now she thought she could hear a high-pitched whine just behind her. She flapped a hand at the air, but the noise didn’t stop.
“Can you hear that?”
Steve was listening, but not to Vera. His expression went from concern to alarm and he pushed himself away from the desk. Vera followed him into the other room, calling after him. They both froze, staring in horror. Cosmo stood facing Keeley in the middle of the room, his hackles raised, his tail stiff. He was growling.
Steve gave a cry of dismay. “Cosmo? What’s wrong, boy? Come on, come to me!” To Vera he murmured, “He’s never growled at anyone in his life and he’d never hurt Keeley. Cosmo! Stop it! Come!”
Vera felt horribly uneasy, but not for the obvious reason. Something was very wrong here. Something in the universe had gone askew. And it wasn’t the dog. Keeley didn’t look even the slightest bit frightened or unnerved by the situation. In fact, she stood tall, glaring down at Cosmo like a bully daring its victim to fight back.
Vera swiped at the air. The whine in her ears was louder and she couldn’t keep from pawing and snatching at nothing. She checked her hands again and again, but there was no satisfying smudge of a dead insect. Just the maddening sound and the tiny suggestion of a breeze, like the tickle of moth wings.
Steve was edging towards the dog, crouching low, arms outstretched. “Hey boy, you want a treat? Walkies? Come on, Cosmo!” His voice was all desperation and no authority.
The worst thing of all was the abject terror now in Cosmo’s body language. He was shivering, as though freezing. His tail had gone limp and he was slowly tucking it between his legs, backing away from Keeley as he continued to growl. But now the growling was interspersed with pitiful whimpers. Steve took hold of the dog’s collar and pulled him back, but Cosmo tore free with a yelp and fled, his claws scrabbling on the hardwood floor of the corridor as he escaped.
Vera and Steve turned as one to look at Keel
ey, but she was paying no attention to them.
“I didn’t mean to tell your secrets,” Keeley said, addressing something in the corner of the room.
There was nothing there. Nothing but shadows. And yet Vera sensed movement. She squinted through her tears, trying to see into the darkness, but it was all a blur. In fact, most of the room was. She waved at the air with one hand, wiping her eyes with the other. But everything was out of focus.
“Steve! Can you—”
But he was having the same problem. He was stumbling towards the doorway, flailing his arms madly before him, just like the little girl at the park. “Get away,” he gasped. “Get away!” Before Vera could warn him, he collided with the coffee table and cried out as he fell. There was a sickening crack as he hit the floor.
Vera screamed and tried to make her way to him, towards the moaning shape that was all she could see of him. But the air in front of her face was a kaleidoscope of coloured blurs. They darted back and forth in sharp little jerks like angry wasps. She whirled, searching for Keeley, but all she could see were multi-coloured balls of light, blurry and blinding.
The whining had risen to a piercing screech, drowning out Steve’s cries. She thought she heard Cosmo in the distance, barking frantically, and from somewhere further still came the crash of breaking glass.
“Keeley, where are you?” Vera wailed, adding her voice to the hideous chorus.
The screaming colours and whirling blurs froze for a moment, enough to allow Vera a glimpse of her surroundings. Keeley was on the coffee table, standing over Steve’s prone form, watching calmly as a fuzzy river of black began snaking its way from beneath his head. Then the child laughed in delight and clapped her hands. She began to hop from foot to foot, turning clumsy pirouettes. Dancing.
Vera’s stomach lurched and she fell to her knees. She pressed her fist into her mouth to stop herself screaming. If she screamed, she would lose it entirely.
The smudge that was Keeley flung her arms up into the air, her black hair whipping round her face as she danced and spun in the terrible vortex. And laughed. Vera thought the frenzied laughter was the worst sound she had ever heard. Until the wood and stone of the house itself began to clatter and shriek.
