by T. L. Bodine
“Well, when the fair did come to town, he came inside and started to loosen up. He enjoyed good drink, and got a little drunker than he had planned. He found himself thrilled by the exotic food and music, and even humored one vendor by buying and wearing a very fine gold-embossed mask.
“As the night wore on, the party began to wind down, and the merchant started wandering among the tents of those staying the night on the grounds. He was stinking drunk and stumbling all over himself, and starting to feel maybe a little indignant that the party was ending just when he was starting to have fun — so, when he heard the sounds of two lovers in the bushes, he had to go investigate.
“There, in the bushes, was a tall, handsome faerie lad, young and supple and brown-skinned. And on her back, skirts pushed up around her hips, was a human woman, her face still covered by her mask. She was giggling like a school girl, and the sight of her made the merchant immediately hungry for her, and jealous of the faerie who was between her thighs. It wasn’t the faerie’s place, you see, to be cavorting with human women, and certainly not when the merchant wasn’t getting any at all. So the merchant, who was after all a large and imposing sort of man, stepped forward and grabbed the faerie by the scruff of the neck, picked him up, and tossed him to the side. Then he knelt down in the faerie’s place and picked up where the other had left off.
“Well, this went on for a little while, but as he knelt there with her legs around his hips he started to think that there was something a little familiar about this woman, and the more he heard her moans and screams the more he started to get suspicious. So he tore off her mask and, would you believe it? It was his own wife, piss-drunk on faerie wine and still muttering her faerie lover’s name!
“Well, the merchant was so taken aback that he didn’t know what to do for a minute. Before he could do anything at all, his wife — who was a quick-witted woman, and well aware that the tides had changed — had pushed him off and was halfway to her lover’s side before the merchant could get himself untangled enough from his britches to follow after her. The two lovers took off into the night, and the merchant, too drunk to stand, recognized defeat and collapsed back into the grass, passing out cold.
“As luck would have it, the patch of bushes that had been private the night before weren’t quite so private in the morning, and the merchant woke to find himself sprawled flat on his back, nethers bared for all the world, right in the middle of a whole circle of camp sites. And would you know it, while he was keeping busy with his wife in the dark, the faerie lad had nicked his wallet right out of his pocket?”
Laurel let loose a hearty laugh that was joined by everyone in the room, although Adrian’s laughter was a bit reserved. The alcohol had started to draw him inside his own head, pulling him back into a pensive, quiet mood.
Apparently, Evangeline noticed his expression, because she lifted her head from Laurel’s bosom and smiled. “Oh dear, Laurel, you seem to have offended our guest.”
Adrian shook his head rapidly, eager to protest and defend whatever standing he had among the faeries, but the action made him feel a little dizzy and he ceased immediately. He tried to remember how much he’d had to drink, and how it happened that the jug being passed around was full again.
The fire roared at the grate, and for a while all of them fell silent, basking in its warmth. In the smoke, half-formed images seemed to materialize, shift, and disappear. He watched them for a moment, seeing horses and clouds and flickering, dancing people made of smoke — and then they were gone, as quickly as they had come. Adrian melted down into the floor, cuddling his blanket to his chest. Across from him, Laurel and Evangeline had begun kissing, passionately; he could no longer keep track of whose legs and hands were whose, and both of them seemed to be showing significantly more skin than he had remembered earlier.
“This is nice,” Adrian remarked, sleepily.
Laurel looked up, pulling away from Evangeline, who — undisturbed — lowered her mouth to Laurel’s collarbone; all Adrian could see was the tumbling wave of her curly blue hair. Laurel brushed her fingers through her lover’s hair and smiled, slyly, at Adrian. “It’s your turn.”
“Pardon?” The word felt heavy in his mouth.
“Well, everybody shares something in order to strengthen the fire, don’t they? So — it’s your turn.”
He felt rather hot, and in a way unrelated to the fire. “Why isn’t it her turn?” He asked, gesturing to Evangeline, whose hands were busily engaged in places Adrian felt guilty for looking at. “She hasn’t gone yet.”
“This is her contribution,” Laurel said, dismissively. “This is her favorite form of self-expression.”
Adrian blinked, not sure if she was joking or not, and didn’t say anything.
“…If you’d like, you could join in and…express yourself….” Evangeline offered, looking up to fixate her heavy-lidded eyes on him.
“Or you could tell a story,” Sonia said, quickly, and Adrian found her hand on his shoulder, giving it a protective squeeze.
“I don’t know any stories,” he protested. “Not any good ones.”
“A joke, then,” Laurel said. “Surely you must know at least one joke?”
“I really don’t —” He stopped, realizing that Laurel and Evangeline were looking at him with a decidedly hungry expression, and he looked down, heat rising in his cheeks. “Well, there is one joke,” he said, tentatively. “That I learned at my wedding reception…” He looked up, and realized everyone was staring at him expectantly. He cleared his throat. “Er…”
“Well, go on,” Evangeline said, looking only slightly disappointed at his chosen mode of self-expression. “Let’s hear it, then.”
“Alright. Um. Let’s see.” He looked around, and then, quickly, plunged in. His words seemed to ooze out of him twice as slowly as they should, as though the alcohol has turned his speech into some form of verbal molasses. “So there’s this church — this big cathedral, actually, the kind that has a huge bell tower, that part’s important because the joke doesn’t make any sense if there isn’t a bell tower. Anyway. And the bell ringer dies one day. So the bishop decides to start interviewing for a new guy to ring the bell, right?”
Everyone was watching him now with curious eyes, and he pressed on boldly.
“So the bishop interviews all kinds of guys. There’s this weird hunchback Quasimodo guy, but he can’t get up enough strength to really do it right. There’s this really fat guy who rings the bell once and then he’s sweating and panting so hard he can’t even do it again. And a bunch more. But nobody’s really what the bishop’s looking for, so bell-ringing auditions go on for days.”
Adrian smiled, sitting up straighter, his eyes shining in the light of the fire; he was starting, despite himself, to get into the story-telling mode.
“But finally this guy walks in who’s got no arms. He walks up to the bishop and nods toward the bell — ‘cause it’s not like he can point, right? — and says, ‘I want to be the new bell-ringer’ and the bishop’s like, ‘um…I don’t really see how that’s gonna work’ but he figures he might as well give him a fair shot. So the armless guy walks all the way up the stairs to the bell tower, leans out, and smacks the bell with his face! And the bishop’s listening and he thinks, ‘This is crazy, but that’s the most beautiful bell-ringing I’ve ever heard.’
“Well, anyway, the bishop is just about to offer him the job — but then the guy without any arms leans forward to strike the bell again, slips, and falls to his death at the foot of the bell tower. The bishop runs out and there’s this whole group of people standing around. They’d all heard the bells ring, see, and wanted to come see what it was because it sounded so beautiful. But anyway, somebody comes up to the bishop. ‘Oh no! He’s dead?’ the guy says. ‘That’s terrible. Who is he, anyway?’ and the bishop just shakes his head and shrugs and says, ‘I don’t know — but his face sure rings a bell.’”
Adrian giggled.
The others stared at him.
He raised his hands to silence them (although nobody was laughing) while he tried to stifle his giggles. “Wait — wait — it’s not done yet.” He jammed his hand into his mouth and bit down on it to stop his laughter before it totally consumed him. His head felt like it was attached to someone else’s body. “So the next day, right, this other guy walks in. He looks just like the other dude, except he’s got arms. He comes up to the bishop and he says, ‘my brother applied to work here yesterday. He had no arms, but his whole life’s passion was to be a bell-ringer. I wonder if you’d let me have the job, in his honor?’ and the bishop by this point is starting to think that nobody will possibly ever get hired to do the job, so he says, ‘well, sure, you can try anyway. Go up and give it your best shot. But be careful not to slip.’
“So the guy climbs up the stairs and he rings the bell and it’s beautiful, and the bishop’s about to breathe a sigh of relief that he’s finally found a guy to hire — when the guy clutches his chest, cries out, and keels over dead on the spot.
“There’s this group of people gathered around this time, too — the same people, probably, it’s not that big of a town — but one guy comes up behind the bishop and claps his hand on his back. ‘Such a tragedy,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Who is this young man?’ and the bishop just shook his head and shrugged. ‘I don’t know his name….but he’s a dead-ringer for his brother.’”
Adrian wiped a tear from his eye. His belly ached from trying to contain his laughter.
The faeries blinked at him.
“How do you ring a bell with your face?” Sonia wondered. “They’re so heavy, it must hurt a lot.”
“It’s…see, there’s this expression, for when somebody looks familiar,” he started, trying to explain. “So the joke, it’s like…it’s a shaggy dog story, see…”
“There weren’t any shaggy dogs in it,” Laurel said, reasonably.
Adrian thought perhaps it would be best to quit while he was ahead.
Outside, the earliest gleam of dawn was making itself apparent on the horizon, and Sonia smiled. “Light is coming,” she said, with a glance over her shoulder. “It’s safe to sleep, now. The fire will hold until the Darkness is gone.”
“I’m not sleepy,” Adrian protested, like a child, and betrayed himself with a massive yawn.
“Of course you’re not,” Sonia replied and brushed his hair from his eyes like his mother would, if his mother had ever treated him with that degree of tenderness, and before her touch had left his skin Adrian was snoring.
THE SWAGGERING SPIDER
In the small, square white room with its blank, white walls, a door opened.
The door hadn’t been there earlier. Once it closed, it was gone again, and the walls were the same solid, boring white they had been since Nathaniel got there.
The Nightmare Man had to crouch to walk inside. He was too tall for the small room, and even when crouching his cloaked head brushed the ceiling. He carried a very old, weathered teddy bear in his skeletal hands. The bear was missing fur in places, and stained all over with mud. It looked like it had been sitting outside for a very long time, like a stuffed animal left at a grave.
“I’d like to go home now,” Nathaniel said, wheeling around to face The Nightmare Man. “My mom is going to be really worried.”
The Nightmare Man shook his head. He swept past Nathaniel, and his cloak felt like damp, rotting leaves when it brushed against him. He extended his hand, giving the teddy bear to the little girl. She held it at arm’s length, looking at it appraisingly, before a wide grin spread over her features.
“New bear?” She asked, looking up at The Nightmare Man for confirmation, before hugging the bear to her chest. She petted it between its ears and set it down on top of the castle. It sagged, limply, to one side. Nathaniel noticed that it was missing an eye.
“I need to go home,” Nathaniel repeated, louder. He stepped forward to tug at The Nightmare Man’s cloak. “Please?”
The Nightmare Man pulled away, grabbing Nathaniel’s wrist in his bony hands. His grip was hard and cold, like steel that’s been left out in the snow, and the cold bit into Nathaniel’s skin. The Nightmare Man made a quiet, low hissing noise in the back of his throat. His open mouth worked, as though trying to speak, and his sharp teeth flashed.
“You stay.”
The words formed themselves in Nathaniel’s head without being spoken. He heard them, the same way he heard the words of a book when he read it to himself.
The little girl looked up, holding her moldy bear protectively to her chest. “You don’t go!” she said sharply. “You stay. You be my brother.”
“I don’t want —” Nathaniel started, but The Nightmare Man’s cold fingers dug into the skin of his wrist and his insides went cold.
“You stay.”
* * *
Adrian awoke with only a vague awareness of his body. He felt sluggish, still drunk. Everything seemed distant, muffled, as though he had woken up with his mind on the opposite side of the room as his body. He became aware of the intensity of the sun that streamed through the high windows and of the way his brain seemed to pulsate and throb. The time delay between his thoughts and senses grew shorter, and he struggled to get up. Managing to find his knees, he crouched on the hearth rug for a moment and looked around, getting his bearings.
Evangeline and Laurel were lying together in a tangled heap; he looked at them, tracing them with his eyes, trying to determine where one body ended and another began, and couldn’t quite make sense of the pile. Someone’s hand was in someone else’s skirt. Laurel’s bosom was hidden behind a tangle of curly blue hair.
Between the pile of winged free-love and Adrian, Sonia stretched out like a protective barrier, her head rested on her upper arm. Her eyes were closed, her lashes dark against her pale cheek. She looked small and vulnerable. He wondered if he looked that way to her when she watched him sleep and thought he probably did.
He glanced up at the window. Though he was sure he’d slept for at least a few hours, the sun outside was pale and new, early morning sun of the kind that managed to paint the sky pale gray rather than blue. It was probably around six, he thought. Just the time he’d normally wake up for a morning run. The idea was instantly appealing. He could run all the way up that hard-packed dirt path to the main road, and from there could go wherever he wanted. He glanced back at the sleeping faeries. They wouldn’t even notice he was gone.
Yes. He’d go for a run. He’d make it quick, but it would be nice to blow off some steam before the journey properly got started. Especially if he’d be stuck in another godforsaken carriage, or riding on one of those monster cats. Adrian had never liked long car or airplane rides. And since there wasn’t much chance of getting any Dramamine or Valium out here in faerie-land, tiring himself out seemed like as good an alternative as any.
Quietly, he crept away from the faeries and slid out through the door, closing it carefully shut behind him. Outside, one of the giant cats lay sprawled on its side in a patch of sunlight, its head and forepaws twisted upward and its maw gaping slightly open. Its sides rose and fell with steady, sleeping breath, and it paid no heed to him as he skirted carefully around it and onto the path. Although the cats had been plenty obedient with Evangeline telling them what to do, he wasn’t sure he trusted it when she wasn’t here. The image of being batted down into the turf by one dinner plate-sized paw planted itself firmly in his mind and he hurried onto the road.
He ran for a while, his thoughts a blissfully empty buzz. He counted his steps out of habit, listened to his breathing, focused on the steady rhythm of his footfalls on the packed dirt. The pleasant hum of emptiness folded over his thoughts like a blanket. He was peripherally aware of his surroundings, but he didn’t pay much attention to where he was going. There were no cars to worry about, after all, and with only the single road to follow he was unlikely to get lost.
When he had counted off a mile in footsteps he stopped to catch his brea
th and realized he was in the shadow of the Swaggering Spider. He glanced around, a little guiltily, as though expecting Sonia to creep out of the shadow to chastise him at any moment. But she didn’t, and he cast a furtive glance back at the building.
Last night, it had literally glowed with good cheer. This morning, it seemed not only empty but possibly abandoned, a building that sat back on the road like the discarded shell of a creature grown too big for its skin. Intrigued, Adrian took a tentative step forward, passing through the gate. The path was lined with stones and bordered on either side by grass. A pair of unicorns, one glowing pale blue and the other silvery-white, grazed absently on the far end of the grass. Adrian tried not to think about what they might be grazing on and looked the other way.
The tables he had seen the night before were littered now with all variety of trash: discarded plates and glasses, bottles and jugs (many of them broken), bits and scraps of food, cloth napkins, various articles of clothing, faerie wing-dust and bits of shimmery paper that looked like confetti. The hanging lanterns were all extinguished and drooped sadly over the path as he approached the door.
He hesitated at the door. He cast another nervous glance around, then twisted the knob.
The door opened out into an open room. The whole area was deserted, and in a similar state of disarray as the tables outside. The walls were paneled in dark wood, but rather than make the room seem tight and enclosed, it had the opposite effect: the dark corners of the room seemed to fade into shadow, giving the illusion of the area fading off into infinity. One side of the room was filled with tables. Beyond these, barely visible in the shadowy far wall, was a large fireplace. A set of stairs wound their way up into the dark second floor; the ceiling above had a hole in it, rimmed in wooden railing, so that people upstairs could look down at the ground floor. On the other side of the room was a dark wooden bar, the shelves behind it lined with bottles of various different sizes — some filled with alcohol, others with the swirling colored mist like the kind Sonia had sold to Lorelai.
