by Lisa Tuttle
“I was just asking.”
“And I'm just telling. You must never go down there by yourself.”
“Who said I wanted to? Don't worry, I won't. I'm not a baby.”
“It's nothing to do with your age. It's just—I'm sorry, Agnes. I'm not used to having anyone else here. I live by myself, I do things a certain way—I guess I'm set in my ways.”
It was true, she thought drearily. Marjorie hadn't wanted her here, not even for two weeks. Nobody wanted her.
“I'll try to keep out of your way.”
Marjorie brought their drinks to the table. “I knew you would understand. We're going to get along just fine. And you're not going to have such a bad time, you know. In fact, I think you may find yourself feeling very, very glad you came.” Marjorie leaned across the table toward her with a conspiratorial smile. “Let me tell you a secret about this place. This is a place where wishes come true. You can have whatever you want.”
Agnes felt her stomach twist painfully as she remembered the last wish her aunt had granted, the doll she had convinced herself could talk. But she'd been a little kid then. Marjorie ought to know she'd grown up and no longer believed in magic. But when she opened her mouth it was only to take a sip of her lukewarm orange drink. Maybe she didn't believe in magic, but she would like to be proved wrong. She would just wait and see, and sneer out loud later, when nothing happened.
“And here is a candle to light you to bed,” said Marjorie. It was a stubby white thing in a brown pottery holder. Although she wasn't usually afraid of the dark, Agnes found herself reluctant to go alone into her room with only this small light.
“Couldn't I have one of those lamps?” There were two hurricane lamps in the front room, one at each end of the desk. Marjorie shook her head.
“I'm afraid not. Reading and writing by candlelight sounds very romantic, but it's hell on the eyes. I'm going to stay up and work for a while, so I'll need all the light I can get.”
“So how am I supposed to read?”
“You'll just have to do the best you can. I'm sorry. Maybe you should go straight to sleep instead of trying to read—you look awfully tired. Tomorrow—I'll get another lamp for you, all right? So it's just this one night you have the candle. Don't wear such a long face. Pretend you're living a hundred years ago!”
“Playing old-fashioned” had been a favorite game of hers for years. But there was a difference between playing because you wanted to and being told to play. Anyway, she thought grimly as she washed herself in cold water by candlelight, a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, this bathroom didn't exist.
She settled herself in the narrow, lumpy bed, and picked up Agnes Grey, her talismanic book. She had read it so often it shouldn't have mattered that she could not see the words on the page, and yet it did. It could not comfort her tonight. She set it on top of the bookcase beside the bed, next to the candle, and then took off her glasses and folded them carefully on top of the book. The strange shadows cast by the flickering candle combined with her nearsightedness to transform the room into a strange and threatening place, with weird figures crouching in every corner. She knew there was nothing there, but the half-glimpsed movements eroded her confidence. Darkness, without shadows, must be better. She turned her head and extinguished the candle with one puff of breath.
Darkness fell like a blow. She felt it rushing into her mouth, flowing up her nostrils. Closing her eyes made it no better; the darkness was still out there, smothering her. She fell onto her pillow and pressed her face into the itchy smell of old feathers. “I wish I hadn't blown it out,” she whispered.
The feathers made her sneeze. She turned her face away and sneezed again and her eyes popped open briefly. She blinked again. She had seen something. And then her eyes opened wide and she could see the room perfectly well in shadow and in light—in candlelight. The fat little candle in its pottery holder was burning away as if it had never gone out.
“This is a place where wishes come true.” Despite the heat, she held herself tightly, and wished she had something more than one thin sheet to hide beneath. She lay on her back, eyes wide and unblinking, while all around the shadows danced and sneered at her.
She wasn't aware of having closed her eyes, but she must have slept, for all at once she was awake, in darkness left by the burnt-down candle, straining to hear the sound that had woken her.
A murmuring voice from another room, and now a steady, rhythmic creaking—bedsprings? The murmuring stopped and started, but the creaking went on and on. She tried to imagine it: her aunt in the grip of a dream, tossing and turning, turning and tossing. . . . She must have slept again, for the next thing she knew the room was light and it was morning.
They had bowls of cornflakes, slices of bread with apple butter, and orange juice in the kitchen. Agnes was in her nightgown, but Marjorie was already dressed, in the same long skirt with a different top—a plain white one, and obviously no bra underneath. This morning her face looked fuller, with fewer lines, more relaxed. As soon as she had finished eating she lit a cigarette.
“What are your plans for the day?”
Agnes looked as blank as she felt.
“Have you made your wish yet?”
It was ridiculous, and yet—“Last night,” she blurted. “I wished I hadn't blown out the candle, and I hadn't!”
“Don't worry about that. You can have more than one wish.” She waved her hand with the cigarette and smiled.
“Oh, that's lucky,” she said sarcastically. “So I don't have to be careful? I can make as many wishes as I want. Whoopee.”
“You must be very careful. Because what you wish for, you get.”
Agnes finished eating her piece of bread.
Was this for real? Did Marjorie still think she was a baby? She might have imagined about the candle, thought she'd blown it out when it was really just flickering and a breeze had brought it back to life. . . . “So you're saying that I can have whatever I wish for. Like, if I wished for a horse I would get one? A real horse, that I could take back to Houston?”
“That's not up to me.”
“Oh, no? Well, who is it up to?”
“You. Your parents. I don't imagine you could keep it in your backyard, so you'd have to find the money to pay for boarding it somewhere. You can have whatever you wish for, Agnes, but you also have to deal with the consequences of your wishes. It's not a game of make-believe. Something here, something about this place, makes wishes come true.”
“For everybody? Anything?”
“I don't know what the limits are. I haven't found the limits.”
Something in Marjorie's quiet voice made her skin prickle. They both sat, not looking at each other, and then, when her aunt stood up and began to clear the table, she went back to her bedroom and dressed quickly in shorts, shirt and rubber thong sandals. Then, out of a slightly bored curiosity, she wandered into the other bedroom. There was a heavy, sour smell hanging in the warm, still air, and the sackcloth curtains at the windows kept the room dim and airless. Her skin crawled. She crossed the floor quickly and went through the other door.
By contrast, the front room was airy and light. A big, dark wooden desk dominated, seeming to take up twice as much space as it really did because of its reflection in the large, age-spotted mirror hanging on the opposite wall.
The wall behind the desk was the one which drew her attention. This was covered with unframed pictures of various sizes. Some had been clipped from glossy magazines, others from newspapers, still others were colored postcard reproductions of paintings. All were portraits, mostly of men, and although Marjorie said they were all famous, even “geniuses,” most she had never heard of. There were exceptions: D. H. Lawrence, who had written a dirty book, and Robert Frost, whose poems she'd read in school.
One face in particular captured her attention, and her imagination. It was one of the smallest, just at her eye level, a black-and-white newspaper photograph of a young man with large, dreamy eyes and
shaggy, Beatles-style hair. He was young and “mod”-looking, which set him apart from all the others on the wall. His presence seemed as much a mistake as if one of the Rolling Stones had been placed in a lineup of classical musicians. Yet beneath his picture were the words “young poet.”
“Now, Agnes . . .”
“Do you have any of his poems? That I could read?”
“Whose?”
“This poet's.”
“Ah, Graham Storey, the young English poet. He doesn't have a collection out yet. I do have a copy of the poem that was published in the Times Literary Supplement along with that photograph. It struck me particularly. . . .”
“Could I read it?
“Yes, of course. I'll find it for you later. I don't have time to look for it now; I want to get down to work. So run along.”
“Are you kicking me out?” She was joking; Marjorie wasn't.
“Look, I told you, I explained yesterday. This is my workroom; I can't work with someone else here. It's a small house. Of course I don't mind if you want to go into the kitchen for something, or if you have to come in to use the bathroom, but you can't just hang around in here. Go on, now. I'll see you later, lunchtime.”
Agnes felt herself getting hotter and hotter. Her stomach churned. She felt like screaming: If you don't want me, I'll go! But where? Her parents had sent her here, to get her out of their house. She stomped out, slamming doors, raging. It wasn't fair, people were horrible and she had to take it, there was nothing she could do, because she was a child.
“I wish I was grown up,” she muttered as soon as she was alone outside. “I'd show her. If I could just stop being a kid, right now, and be a grown-up . . .”
With a small pang of fear she realized she had just made a wish. The rage burned away and her head was clear. All at once, everything looked different: sharper and unnaturally bright, reminding her of how the world had changed appearance when she'd gotten her first pair of glasses.
She looked down at herself. She hadn't changed, from what she could see. Her chest was as flat as ever, her shorts and flip-flops still fit. She felt a little strange inside, but she could already guess that if she looked in a mirror, nothing would show. If her wish had worked and she had suddenly grown up, it could only be mentally, or spiritually, and she knew nobody else would believe it. And what was the point of being grown up if nobody else knew?
So this was a place where wishes came true?
Oh, yeah, sure. Marjorie would never have tried to convince a grown-up of such a thing.
But just in case—“I meant it,” she said out loud. “I mean it. I wish I was really grown up, so Marjorie would have to see.”
She didn't know if she felt more disappointed or relieved when nothing happened. Suddenly becoming a grown-up could have been a problem. How would she manage if her parents didn't recognize her when she went home?
But there was nothing to worry about, because there was no magic. She had just proved it. She wondered if Marjorie would admit she'd been lying—“teasing” was probably how she would put it—when she told her about the wish that had not come true. But then she realized what her aunt would say, what her excuse would be—she could almost hear her saying, with an almost-invisible smirk, “But you didn't really want that wish to come true, did you? You didn't want it enough.” Or maybe she would say that maturity was a state of mind.
“All right, then,” she said to herself. “I'll wish for something there can't be any arguing about, something that's either there or it's not.” She began to walk, and as she walked she brooded on what she should wish for.
Marjorie had given her the idea, and it was not difficult to make herself want a horse; she'd had enough idle fantasies in the past, usually provoked by something she'd read, daydreams of galloping through forest and field, or along the beach, on the back of a noble, highly bred animal, her loyal companion, with a name like Star or Blaze or Shadow. The fantasy was about speed and effortless movement, as wonderful as flying; it was about being free from the boring restrictions of everyday life, of being somehow, through her connection with the horse, more than human, faster, more powerful, and completely confident in her own body.
She recalled these dreams as she walked through the forest. It was easy to imagine herself riding through these woods, this lonely wilderness where almost anything could happen.
“I wish I had a horse,” she said fervently, clenching her hands into fists at her sides, and speaking to the rhythm of her rubber-sandaled feet as they came down, with a muffled, slapping sound, on the path. “I wish, I wish, I wish.”
She had come as far as the path that led to the pond when she became aware of a flickering movement at the very edges of her vision, like distant flashes of light. She stopped and turned to look: slashes of white appeared, then disappeared again into the shadows. Against the tall dark trunks of the trees it was like something moving in a darkened cage, something like pale flesh. For one terrifying moment she thought a naked man was running toward her, and then she realized that of course it wasn't a person, but a large white horse.
It was trotting, or cantering, or maybe loping—she knew the words, from books, but had no idea which one applied to this gait. The animal came out of the trees now, into the open, and stopped in front of her.
It was huge. She'd only encountered Shetland ponies in the flesh before and had not realized how large a horse would be. So big, and so spooky. There was something uncanny about its coloring, not only the ghostly white coat, but the big rolling bloodshot blue eyes. She had never imagined a blue-eyed horse; she thought all horses had brown eyes. But this one rolled an eye at her which was as blue as her mother's.
It stomped one enormous hoof and she jumped back. It snorted, contemptuous of her fear, the exhalation blowing out its lips and giving her a glimpse of huge, yellow teeth.
Horses did sometimes attack people. They could lash out, kick or bite if they were frightened, or mad. She had even read somewhere about a horse that fed on human flesh.
She backed away slowly, afraid to run, afraid to take her eyes off of the horse who followed her, reducing the distance between them with every step it took.
Advice from something else she'd read floated into her mind: Don't let them see your fear. It was so much bigger and stronger than she was that she hadn't a chance against it. The trees around here were nearly all pines, impossible to climb, and she couldn't outrun it, so her only option was to face it down.
She stopped retreating and the horse stopped, too.
“All right,” she said sharply. “Just stay there a minute. Stand still. What do you want? If you really are my wish . . .”
It arched its great neck and inclined its head slightly toward her, offering itself to be ridden.
“How can I ride you?” she demanded, her voice rising in a whine. “You're too big; I can't even get on your back.”
As soon as she spoke she remembered that they had just passed through an area of recent felling. There had been stumps there of different heights. The horse tossed his head and whickered and she knew he was thinking the same thing. It was like mind reading, or talking, and it made a connection between them. All at once he was a little less scary.
They found a stump and the horse stood still beside it, as still as if made of stone, betraying no impatience. So, finally, after a little hesitation during which she realized she could not mount him as she would have liked—climbing on sideways—she flung herself at him, as if the horse were a tree she was accustomed to climbing, and then she slid into the rider's position. As soon as she was upright and wondering where to hold on, the horse began to move.
“Whoa!” she shouted, but he didn't. She grabbed handfuls of his mane and tugged. “Whoa!” Imagining that pulling a mane was like pulling someone's hair she bit back her squeamishness and tugged harder, as hard as she could. “Whoa, stop, stop!”
This had either no effect at all, or the opposite of what she intended. The horse had been walking, but n
ow increased his gait to a jouncing trot. She was so bounced around that she worried about falling off. There was nothing but the rough, ropy strands of mane to hang on to, nowhere to put her feet, no way of feeling herself secure perched on top of this huge, strange animal without control.
But she didn't fall off. And after a while she began to feel a little more confident. Instead of crouching fearfully over his neck, ready to grab on for dear life if she felt herself slipping, she straightened up.
She would have felt happier with reins in her hands and a horse who responded to her commands, but at least he hadn't thrown her. Would she really want to sit on the back of a horse who only walked, a plodding pony ride for children? Yet this jouncing trot which seemed to bounce her in and out of sunlight had been going on for too long. She was hot and sweaty and feeling queasy, with a strange, throbbing ache low in her stomach.
She imagined there might be relief for her discomfort if the horse began to run. She'd like to feel a breeze on her face which would dry her sweat and lift her hair, to be carried smoothly through the air, like flying in her dreams, not jounced along through dust and sun and shadow.
They came out of the woods then, into an open field. She realized she had no idea which way they had come, or where they were, or how they were going to get home again, and then, in the freedom of the open, the horse broke into a gallop.
The suddenness pitched her forward. The horse's neck was too big to get her arms around, but she clung on as best she could, sliding dangerously to one side. If—when—she fell, would she die? Would the horse trample her? One of her sandals fell off. She closed her eyes and pressed her face tight against the prickly hair, inhaling the dusty, salty, animal smell and sensing, through her terror, something else, something other, a fierce, mindless animal power, animal joy in movement.
After a while they were back in the woods again and walking, the horse forced to a more careful pace by the many close-growing trees. She did not straighten up but remained slumped over his neck. She felt sick. Finally, as he began to trot, she couldn't hold it back any longer, and leaned out a little ways as if over the side of a ship and threw up. Her mother said that throwing up when you were sick made you feel better, but she felt worse. She began to shiver. She wanted so many things which were impossibly distant: ice water, a pillow, a bed, her mother. She felt pains now that made her think of a voodoo doll with pins stuck into its stomach.
