The Underwater Ballroom Society

by Y. S. Lee

  The boy takes her in his arms, cradling her head against his broad chest, caressing her face. The corgi crouches on the seat opposite, tongue derping, watching. “Give me a puff of that nasty thing. Ah, so sweet…so sweet…” But if she means the cigarillo, or the guitar, or him, or some far-off memory, he doesn’t know. She closes her eyes, leaning into him, and they sit in comfortable silence for a while; eventually her eyes close and her breathing grows light.

  “I hear horses’ thunder…” she whispers, and he presses his lips to hers, catching one breath, then two, and the final third… But there’s a fourth—this is odd, there should never be a fourth breath—the third breath should be her last. Her hands, now surprisingly strong, have him in a grip that is not letting go. He finds himself dwindling; his corporeal form dissolving until he is nothing but his own pure essence; his kiss is supposed to draw her out, out of her body, into death, but instead, he is being drawn into her. Within seconds he is trapped within her mouth. She bends to the guitar, as though to kiss it, and puffs a writhing ball of violet light into the small void in the guitar’s belly.

  “Well,” says Sylvie to the corgi, “Lady Nimue was right. They are so eager to trap you that they don’t notice when you are trapping them.” She pats the Queen of Life’s swollen belly. “Don’t worry. I shan’t keep you long. And you shall thank me in the end.”

  Back in the case goes the Queen of Life. Sylvie shrugs off the white furs; underneath she drips with green velvet and white lace, her suede boots are the color of dawn. Age still limns her, but all trace of infirmity is gone. She’s as graceful now as she was at twenty, perhaps even more so, because now that grace is seasoned by comfort in her own skin. At twenty, she still wondered who she was. At eighty-two she knows. She says gaily to the corgi: “Off we go then, over the hills and far away, to embrace the gloom…”

  She exits the limo, taking the guitar-case with her, and the corgi, too, tucked under her arm like a furry purse. As soon as she lets the corgi down, it takes off like a shot, down the westerly road, pausing briefly to look back at her, starry-eyed and eager.

  Sylvie pulls her velvet hood up over her hair and, slinging the Queen of Life over her shoulder, follows the corgi down the road.

  The corgi knows the way to Faery, of course; all corgis do. They were bred long ago to serve as faery steeds, back when the faeries kept small and separate from humans, hidden. This is why corgis are so mischievous; their canine good nature has been leavened with the faery love of chaos. Every corgi knows that though the faeries have chosen to walk among humans for now, and have taken their size, they might someday decide to return to their original state and need the corgis’ service again. So, the corgis keep in touch.

  Down the westerly road, the corgi trots, over the hills and far away, and Sylvie follows, through the goblin market at Feetings & Foil and out onto the Benighted Road. They pass through the common towns of Last Week and Next Friday, and punt down the River Wry, through the Mizzle Locks. By then, they have been trekking for many hours and Sylvie is flagging. She’s no spring chicken and the road goes further on and on. At Sleep-Weary on the Wry, they stop for tea with a growly tomte, who the corgi charms with somersaults. They snack on cakes made from spun sugar and plum cheese, sip medlar wine mixed with sour milk. Thus refreshed they forge onward, up the Cragfast Pass, whose stony walls are skith with snow. Then down the rocky Rime Road, clotted with ice, and out onto the Dismal Plain.

  The corgi is a bright blot of cheer in the otherwise cheerless landscape; if the fat little dog will not falter, Sylvie won’t either. Through Nightfast Vale and the Forest of Arden they go, the trees as thick as thieves, and a blank black sky overhead, fingers of foxfire scratching at them from the brush. Sylvie’s feet are dragging now, and the Queen of Life is as heavy as a toddler. She’s so weary and footsore, and the vengeful spirits that had started her out have faded into a misery of exhaustion. The corgi nips her ankles, drives her forward, and though she is sleep-weary and her shoulder burns with the weight of the guitar, she continues on, down the Old Plank Road, across the Mewling Marsh, past Sorrow-in-the-Glen, and the ruins of Moonraker Hall. For a while, she sings as she goes, all the old ballads that she and Robert had once sung together: Honey in the Dell, The Princess & the Pig, Let Me Be Your Salty Dog, The Red Cape. But eventually her voice cracks into silence; her throat tastes of sand. Now Sylvie is so bone-cold exhausted that the landscape fades from her vision. All she sees is the pathway plodding on forever under her feet, and the cheerful wink of the fluffy butt bouncing along before her, and that cheerful bounce is all that keeps her going. But at last, after hours, days, months, years, the indefatigable corgi halts.

  Blinking the crust from her eyes, Sylvie leans the guitar case against her legs, easing her burning shoulder. A gray wind scuds gray clouds through a gray sky. A featureless drear landscape, bereft of buildings, color, foliage, or comfort. For the first time since they set out, Sylvie, despite the warm velvet cape, shivers. Ahead of them the road vanishes into a squishy bog, punctuated with the skeletal fingers of dead reeds and ragged catkins. Spindly trees, distorted by the wind, straggle along the bog’s edge, surround a wattle hut, crude and disintegrating.

  “Home! Home!” the corgi frolics about her feet, and so Sylvie knows that this featureless drear landscape is Faery, for only in Faery can corgis talk.

  “What a horrible place,” Sylvie says. “And I don’t see any faeries, either.”

  The corgi bounces up on Sylvie’s knees, and squeaks: “Put your sunglasses on!” Humans who come to Faery under the usual circumstances are enchanted; they see only the false glories of Faery, the tempting lies, not the bitter truth. Sylvie, of course, is not under enchantment, and so she sees Faery as the forlorn place it truly is. But years ago, a tarot card reader in Towana Canyon sold her sunglasses—golden frames, pink mirror lenses—that the witch swore would allow the wearer to see as though she were glamoured, and when Sylvie puts them on, they work as promised.

  The drear landscape is overlaid by a wide grassy lawn. Above, a coin-like sun sits in a boiled blue sky. The sun in Faery is brilliant but lacks warmth. The air smells stiflingly of flowers; a mélange of roses and lilies too pungent to be agreeable. The colors—celadon grass, emerald trees, azure sky, scarlet flowers—are luscious but lifeless.

  “Come come!” the corgi chides. “Every second here is a year in the Waking World. There’s no time to waste!”

  “My time in the Waking World is up,” Sylvie says. “So that hardly matters to me.”

  “I don’t want to miss the party!” squeaks the corgi, springing at her knees, nipping at her velvet skirts with needle teeth, driving her, laughing, forward. Beyond the grassy lawn is a half-timbered house, sitting by a lake, both surrounded by a dense copse of trees: ash and oak, chestnut and cherry. A pair of swans float upon the lake; their red beaks bright blotches of sangyn against the dull black of their feathers.

  A dash of glittering light coalesces before Sylvie and the corgi, becomes a tall woman, draped in spangled cloth: Mab, the Faery Seneschal. Her lips are red as pomegranates and her hair the silvery purple of stardust. At first glance, she’s beautiful, but a second look shows that beauty is tinged with the grotesque. Her mouth is too wide, her eyes too big, her fingers long and insectile, her skin as brittle and slick as porcelain. She’s dressed all in white, a maggoty shade of white that suggests not purity and renewal, but putrescence. When the faeries try to copy human fashions, despite their magic, they always get the subtle details wrong.

  The corgi waddles towards the faery woman, fluffy butt wiggling in joy, shrieking: “Mab! Mab!”

  Mab scoops the corgi up and allows it to dab at her face with its long tongue. Over its foxy head, she observes Sylvie: “You have grown so old since yesterday.”

  “Yesterday was years ago to me,” Sylvie says.

  “It is a terrible fate to be a human, to be young and fair, and then so quickly to decay.”

  “A terrible fate indeed: to
grow, to learn, to love, to create, to let go. Some say it’s a terrible fate to be a Faery; to stay unchanging and unfeeling for all eternity, to spend one’s time in nothing but frivolity and pleasure-seeking,” Sylvie answers.

  The faery woman answers: “Our pleasures are our own. It is well, then, that we each are satisfied with how we are. Did you bring the guitar they call the Queen of Life?”

  “I did.”

  “Good. He pines, he says he must have it, he sulks for it. They have offered him the most famous guitars in the Waking Worlds: Lucille; Robert Johnson’s 1929 Gibson; Clapton’s Blackie; Page’s double-necked Stratocaster; Brakespeare’s Honeythroat. He wants the Queen of Life—only her. The Lord and Lady have become impatient. Come.”

  Mab turns and walks toward the lake, the tails of her white gown slinking behind her like the segments of a worm. Sylvie and the corgi, who Mab had collapsed from her arms onto the ground, follow. The swans have moved to the edge of the lake now, fishing among the catkins. As Mab approaches, they scatter, trailing thin lines of wake behind them. Mab walks off the grass, out onto this wake, the corgi bouncing along behind her. Sylvie hesitates; and the corgi turns back towards her and yaps “Come on! Come on!”

  So Sylvie follows, out onto the water, wondering if it will hold her—a human woman—as it does a faery woman. And it does; her footfall is as firm as if she walks on solid ground. The water of the lake is rising up around her; she’s sinking as she walks, an unnerving feeling only leavened by the consolation that since the only death in Faery is the Death she has trapped in the Queen of Life, she surely cannot drown. Though the water is rising around them, they are not getting wet; now the surface of the lake is above their heads, and they are walking down a sloping pathway that leads to—

  An immense room, airless and dark, with a ceiling bounded by the lake’s volume, a huge mass of water poised directly above. Thin lances of light pierce the murky water, and darts of gold, black and white—carp easily as big as the fat corgi. Under this watery canopy hundreds of faeries weave and turn among each other, bowing and twirling, pairs coming together, moving apart, in some incomprehensible pattern. They are dancing, Sylvie realizes, their movements jerky, so strangely ungraceful for creatures of such beauty, hopping stiffly, elbows held at strange angles, steps shuffling and awkward. Their headdresses of bone and branch, ash and hawthorn, trailing moss and ivy, bend and sway like a forest in windstorm.

  But the ballroom is completely silent, not even the sound of the dancers’ slippers on the floor can be heard. A stage looms above the dance floor and faeries stand upon its height, making motions with strange objects. One clutches a massive rock in each hand, pounding on the skull of a huge horned animal. Another holds a bone to her mouth; another blows on a large shell. A fifth has strung dry leaves on a long stick and shakes the stick like a tambourine. But these facsimile instruments make no noise, no music, no sound at all, or at least no sound that Sylvie can hear. The light shafting through the water wavers, too weak to provide much illumination, so the dancers, their clothes, their hair, seem, even through the enchanted sunglasses, grey and bland. And there on the dais opposite the stage, dark Oberon, with his moonlight hair and his icy eyes. And proud Titania, her rounded shoulders gauzed in heart’s-ease taffetta, a crown of tangled flowers—honeysuckle and heliotrope, yarrow and bluebells—poised on her head. And, lounging between them, Robert Mynwar, bright as the sun. In the Waking World, he glowed; golden hair, golden skin, sapphire eyes. Here, even in the wan watery light, he fairly blazes. Sylvie’s heart catches; she’d forgotten how breathtakingly gorgeous he is, so young and merry. He does not in any way look as sorrowful as the reports had made him out to be. He looks content, and relaxed, albeit a bit petulant; that last expression oh-so-familiar. A small mandolin nestles in his lap, glossy as a lap-dog.

  “Proud Oberon, Fierce Titania, King and Queen of all who live Under the Hill,” Mab says. “You bid me send for the guitar called The Queen of Life, and I have done so.”

  The corgi makes a sort of bow by settling its stumpy front legs to the floor, wiggles its glorious floof, and Sylvie makes a creaky curtsy. Oberon says: “And you brought a hag, as well, to mar our court, and give us pain to see such ugliness.”

  Robert grins at this; he’s looking right at her, but there’s no glimmer of recognition in his eyes. How could there be? He hasn’t seen her in sixty years. But in his mind, it’s been only days; he remembers her, if at all, falsely.

  Sylvie says, forcing a quaver in her voice, “Lord and Lady of the Hill, I ask you to pardon me. I come only as the servant to the guitar, the Queen of Life; when it is delivered, I shall withdraw.”

  “Oh leave her be, Oberon,” Robert says, “Give me the guitar, granny—” He’s slinking down from the dais now, those supple hips swaying in the way that made all the young kids scream and faint. He thrusts the mandolin at her, takes the guitar-case, clasping it to his chest like a lover, before laying it down on the step.

  “Oh you darling,” Robert says, when he opens the lid. “Oh you gorgeous gorgeous girl.”

  He swivels into a sitting position; props the Queen of Life on his lap, caresses her curves, running his fingers over her frets, up and down her glittering strings. His eyes dance; the smile he bestows upon her almost breaks Sylvie’s heart anew. “Thank you, granny, for bringing her to me. Tell me, do they remember me in the Waking World? Or am I long forgotten?”

  “Oh, no, you are a legend. Legendary. Not just as a rock star, but one who tempted the King of Faery himself. The greatest guitarist who ever lived. No one shall ever forget Robert Mynwar.”

  He grins: “I am glad to hear of it; glad I was right to accept Oberon’s invitation. If I’d stayed in the Waking World I’d be old now—how long has it been?”

  “Seventy-three years,” Sylvie says.

  He shudders. “I’d be as old as you, older even. Decayed, decrepit. No offense, dear lady. Long ago superseded by someone younger, someone maybe not as talented but flashy. Now, I shall live forever.”

  “But here, in Faery. Among the faeries. Where nothing is real.”

  “It seems real enough to me, feels real—and if it feels real what else matters? And much less complicated than the Waking World. No love, no jealousy, no fear—”

  She says: “Those are things that make a musician great, the emotions that generate creation. To live without turmoil, without passion, to live passively—”

  “To live is to grow old, and to grow old is to die, to fade away. Far, far better to burn out, dear lady.”

  “And what about the rest of the band? Sylvanna, Merrick, Tashie?” she asks bitterly. Suddenly she feels a fool. Here she thought she was rescuing him from a faery enchantment and it turns out that enchantment was his heart’s desire. Well, bucko, she thinks to herself. Prepare to be disappointed. The party is over.

  “Oh, I’m sure they profited nicely from my spectacular exit.”

  “And your children?”

  “Sangyn? She was a toddler, I’m sure she didn’t even miss me.”

  This was quite untrue, but no point in saying so now. Sylvie had been five weeks pregnant when he left; he doesn’t even know that he also has a son. There’s no point in mentioning it now. He’s lost interest in the conversation anyway; she knows that eager look in his eyes. He wants to play.

  He says: “Strange, I would expect, after all these years, for the Queen of Life to be out of tune, but she’s not. Richard has taken good care of you, my lovely.”

  Sylvie says nothing, but her heart writhes with rage. She had fired Richard, Robert’s roadie and chief crony, two hours after Robert’s abduction. He spent the following years peddling baroquely viscous gossip about the band before choking on his own vomit after a particularly heavy bender. She’s been the Queen of Life’s caretaker all this time. For the first five years or so, she didn’t touch the guitar; even the thought of doing so was too agonizing. But then, as time went on, the guitar became, instead of a painful reminder, a com
forting companion. She never played it in public, but all her songs were composed upon it. A guitar that isn’t played, Robert Mynwar often said, grows sour, just as does a woman who isn’t touched. Well, that last hadn’t been a problem for her, but she was still sour.

  Titania, bored with this talk, has risen from the divan. She stands over Robert, drops a hand upon his gleaming head.

  “Play,” she says. “Play for us.”

  “As you will, my lady.” He grins, standing, slinging the guitar-strap over his shoulder. He has to adjust it downward; he always played with the Queen of Life hanging around his knees, but Sylvie had shortened the straps. The faeries part the dance floor for him. He climbs the stairs to the stage; the faery musicians have moved aside. A shaft of brilliant sunlight pierces the gloomy water and pins him in place, like a butterfly spiked to a specimen board.

  Sylvie closes her eyes; she can’t bear to watch.

  But in her mind’s eye she sees him, as she’s seen him so many times before, those long years ago: the guitar balanced on the outthrust leg, the hopping strut, the left hand flying up and down the fretboard, fingers moving so fast that the individual chords are a blur. The half-smile hidden by the swinging hair, and the sound, the melody like a racing river, snatching one up into its currents, carrying one away…

  The memory is so vivid in her mind, that it takes her a moment to realize she doesn’t hear any music.

  She opens her eyes.

  And there he is, just as she had remembered him, playing furiously, and yet there is no music. It’s not the lack of amplification; the Queen of Life is a charged instrument, she doesn’t need an outside source of galvanism to play. It’s not the new strings; she’d changed them herself. But he is acting as though he hears the song, and, peering through the murk, the other faeries seem to be listening intently. Then she realizes. She’s in Faery. Only faery glamour works here. No other kind of magic holds sway, not even Robert Mynwar’s magick. The sunglasses show the glamour but they can’t make her hear it.