Boondocks Fantasy

by Jean Rabe

  An embedded jpeg depicted a photo of the cottage, but I almost didn’t recognize it for the horde surrounding it. There had been a few dozen elves before; now there were hundreds. And not just elves, either. Giant spiders crouched on tree trunks, and trolls with hides of stretched green fabric skulked in the bushes. Above them soared a huge red-and-gold dragon, with a wing-span of at least ten feet, its limbs suspended from at least three different trees.

  Under the photo, Anton had switched to all caps. “WHAT DO WE DO NOW?”

  “Holy shit,” I muttered, then put my arm around Kate. She wasn’t crying yet, but it might go either way. She spooned up against me, my body cupped around hers. Then we fell asleep curled up together for about half an hour.

  When I woke, I brushed Kate’s hair back from her face.

  “I’ll call in sick,” I said. “They won’t be happy about it, but the hell with them. If we pack fast, we can be there by noon.”

  We got there at eleven-thirty.

  Kate was out of the car as soon as it stopped moving. I had already spotted Helen’s handiwork through the windshield, and it was even crazier than Anton’s e-mail made it look. The elves, trolls, spiders, and whatnot were everywhere. Tree branches drooped with their weight. I couldn’t see an inch of the fence, and only a few patches of the cottage walls. I saw a centaur, a phoenix, and a pair of minotaurs—and, of course, the giant dragon, papier-mâché flames licking from his lips.

  “How the hell does she even know what this stuff is?” I asked. “Does she have a Warcraft account we don’t know about?”

  Kate stood amid the menagerie, her face pale. “I made her read The Hobbit once, when I was thirteen . . . but I didn’t think . . .”

  Her hands came up, and then dropped again. It was such a helpless gesture.

  Anton came out the front door. He looked as anxious as Kate. She went to him, and I nodded “Hi.”

  “It’s no better inside,” Anton said. He ran a hand through his hair. “There’s crap everywhere. Paint, cloth scraps, bits of bark . . . dead birds. She won’t let me touch any of it.”

  “Wasn’t Deb supposed to drop in over the winter?” Kate asked. “Why didn’t she tell us?”

  Anton’s lips pinched together. “You know Deb,” he said. “She probably never even came. She just lied to us to make us happy, like she does.”

  From the look in Kate’s eyes, her cousin Deborah might have just spontaneously burst into flames wherever she was.

  “I’m lost, Kate,” Anton said. “She won’t even come outside, unless it’s to go for a walk, looking for bird wings or to hang up one of these things.” He gestured at the trees. Gremlins with dried-apple heads and birch-bark wings leered down at us. “It used to be kind of charming, but she’s just out of control.”

  No one said anything. That word hung there again, in the air among the three of us. After a moment, a voice drifted out through the screen door. It sounded older, more quavering than I remembered it from a year ago.

  “Katharine? Is that you, dear?”

  Kate blew out a long, slow sigh. “Yes, Gran. It’s me. Erica too.”

  “Oh, good,” Helen replied from the cottage’s depths. “I’m so glad. Come in. There’s some iced tea in the refrigerator.”

  I caught Kate’s eye. She gave me a look that said I’m going to need something way stronger than that.

  If anything, Anton had undersold the cottage’s interior. For one thing, he didn’t mention the smell. There was old garbage in the aroma that hung over Grandma Hels’ house, and the fried-chicken smell of an unwashed body. And what, boiled cabbage? Sulfur? I almost retched, and Kate turned gray.

  The curtains were drawn, and Helen had hung old blankets over the sliding glass doors that led out to the patio. A couple of old lamps glowed in the corners, not casting much in the way of actual light. Dust covered the furniture, so thick that bumping a chair caused huge wads to leap into the air.

  “Christ, Anton,” Kate said. “You’ve been here since what, Saturday? Would it have killed you to clean up a little?”

  “I have,” he replied. “You should have seen the kitchen. There was stuff in the sink that was ready to evolve gills. And I’m not even going to talk about the bathroom. I figured I should take care of the public health hazards before I got to the dusting. Don’t bother opening any curtains—she’ll just close them again when you’re not looking.”

  Something stirred in one of the bedrooms, then Helen emerged out of the darkness. She wasn’t the sharply dressed old lady I’d met less than a year ago. She wore an old track suit that had probably been blue at one point, but was now sort of gray under the food stains. The shawl around her shoulders was so frayed that I couldn’t figure out how it held together at all. Her hair was long and unkempt, a lot more white now than before. She’d gotten thinner, paler. Her eyes gleamed, almost like there were tiny candle flames inside them. But when she saw Kate and me, she smiled.

  She raised her right hand, waving hello, but my eyes stuck to what was in her left. It was a crow’s wing, a knot of exposed bone where it had once connected to the rest of the crow.

  We have to call someone, I thought. Find a home and drive her there right now.

  She bustled over to the dining-room table. It was piled high with all kinds of crap. Dead branches, hanks of reeds, odd-shaped rocks, the skins of small animals. From that mess she pulled up some half-finished monstrosity, a griffin made of fur and leather and feathers. It already had one wing attached to it, from what looked like a completely different bird. Now, rummaging around the table, she picked up a large needle and went to work, sewing the crow’s wing in place.

  Kate stared, her shoulders hitching. “Gran,” she rasped.

  Helen looked up at us, still smiling. And here’s the weird part: she didn’t look the least bit off. There was no vagueness, no confusion, nothing like that. She recognized all of us. Even me. “Hello, Erica,” she said. “How are things at the bank?”

  The woman was still all there. She hadn’t lost it. All those creatures . . . they made sense, in a way. She was still trying to keep the Lake People away, to stop them from luring her out to the water again. A few elves hadn’t done the trick . . . not quite. How about a thousand, and other creatures besides?

  I saw him in my mind—the tall, antlered man in the mist—and shivered.

  “I’m good, Helen,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “That’s nice, dear.” She finished sewing, then sifted through the bits and pieces on the table and unearthed a pair of scissors. She cut the filament and tied it off, then held the griffin up, turning it this way and that. Feathers fluttered down. “Did you get your promotion?”

  I nodded. “Back in January. I’m a full adviser. I get to have my own clients now.”

  “How wonderful!” she said, affixing a long line to the griffin’s back. We watched as she worked away, happy as she could be. “You’ve been so good for Katharine.”

  With that, she rose and walked toward the sliding doors, ramshackle griffin in hand, to find a tree that still had room to hang it from.

  I kept an eye on Helen for most of the afternoon, while Kate and Anton made hushed phone calls to the other cousins. Everyone seemed to be unable or unwilling to take her in, and money made the other options difficult; they had to step outside the cottage often so the shouting didn’t bother poor Grandma Hels.

  Not that she would have noticed. She was in her own world, but not in the way they thought. She had three different creatures on the go, besides the griffin she’d finished that morning: another spider, its shell made from shards of mossy bark; a werewolf with a pelt of stitched-together raccoon fur; and a strange thing that was half beaver, half crocodile, covered with the shed skins of snakes. She called that one an avank, or something like it.

  “Where do you get all this stuff, Helen?” I asked, watching her affix tiny shards of green glass to serve as the spider’s eyes. “I mean, the bark, sure, but what about that wing this mo
rning?”

  She grinned. Her teeth were yellow, and her breath wasn’t great. Oral hygiene had gone fishing, along with most of her other concerns. “I find things, dear,” she said, “out on walks, when I’m paddling on the lake. Don’t worry, I’m not killing birds. Something ate half of that crow and left the rest down by the lake the other day. Maybe a fox, maybe a cat. Why let it go to waste?”

  I nodded, seeing the logic of it, though the fact that the wing would rot in the spring sunshine didn’t elude me either. “And the Lake People?”

  “They still come, with the fog. Nothing can stop that. I hear them singing most nights.” She stuck a couple of bones in place for the spider’s mandibles. “Hold these until the glue sets, would you please?”

  I did as she asked. No harm in it.

  “But they haven’t . . . troubled you lately?” I asked.

  “I haven’t gone chasing them out into the lake again, you mean.”

  I shrugged.

  She patted my hand. “No, dear, don’t worry. My beasties are doing their job.”

  “Why make more, then?”

  “Oh, you can never be too careful. All right—you can let go now.”

  I did. The glue held. The spider was finished, except for the actual hanging. Rather than dangling it from a branch, Helen planned to tack it to a tree trunk, she told me. I watched as she admired the monster, holding it up in the light. There was fear in her face, just below the surface. Her eyes flicked sideways, catching me staring at her.

  “You saw him too,” she whispered. “I know you did.”

  I licked my lips. “Yeah. I saw him.”

  “Then you know I’m not crazy. No matter what—”

  The screen door banged open just then, and Kate and Anton came in. They were arguing, and barely paid us any attention, but Helen fell silent just the same, turning to pretend that she’d been focused solely on her work. The moment was past. By the time it came again, it was too late.

  Anton went home that evening: He was on call at the hospital the next morning, so he had no choice. Frankly, I was glad to see him go. I doubted he gave Helen enough credit. No, strike that—I know he didn’t.

  What hurt was, neither did Kate. I don’t know if it was because she was family, or if Kate couldn’t believe because she hadn’t seen what I had at the lake, but she refused to accept that her gran was still all there. Of course, it didn’t help that Helen was so focused on her creatures that she barely spoke more than ten words to the two of us the rest of the day.

  No grilling that night. No burgers, no strawberries, definitely no wine. Dinner was shitty store-bought sandwiches Kate and I had brought and RC Cola. Helen ate in silence, then went back to her worktable as soon as she was finished. Kate watched her go, eyes shining, and then nodded for me to follow her outside.

  “Look,” I said, after I shut the sliding door. “Maybe if we took her away from the lake for the weekend . . . we could pull out the couch at our place.”

  Kate shook her head. “You think I haven’t offered? Or Anton? Hell, even Deb invited her down to Kings-ton a couple weeks ago. She won’t leave.”

  More unspoken words hung there, so clear that they seemed to glow like fireflies in the twilight.

  Not voluntarily.

  Out across the water, a loon called. The stars popped out overhead, and the first fronds of evening mist brushed the lake. I saw them and shivered.

  “So what, then?”

  Kate sighed and walked to the nearest tree. It was covered with elves and dwarves and hobgoblins. She touched a dangling warrior, which set it spinning. Then her mouth turned hard and she yanked it off the branch. Its companions danced around her as it snapped free.

  I took a step toward her. “Hey, don’t—”

  “Oh, not you, too,” Kate snapped. She held the elf up, shaking it at me. “These goddamn things aren’t magic, Erica, and they’re not art either! They’re just sad.”

  She threw the elf to the ground and walked away, down toward the water. I stared at the broken elf; its sword had snapped off and flown somewhere when Kate grabbed it. I picked it up, brushed the pine needles off, and knotted its fishing-line cord again. Kate was out on the dock now, a dark patch against the sunset-red water. I didn’t go to her, and I hate myself for that now, but I was tired and scared and pissed off. Instead, I hung the elf back up, as close to how he’d been before Kate damaged it. Then I went back inside.

  Kate was still on the dock, staring out at the lake, when I poked my head out at midnight and called that I was turning in. Even Helen had shuffled off to bed, and I was on the verge of passing out. Kate didn’t answer; she just waved me away. I rolled my eyes and glanced out at the water: more fog there, obscuring the lake’s other side. My mouth dry, I went to bed.

  Again, shouting woke me up. This time, though, it was Helen, screaming as if she were in pain. I was in the living room before I was even fully awake, and there she was at the sliding door, standing in her robe, a silhouette against a red-orange glow from outside.

  Red-orange. Like fire.

  “What are you doing?” Grandma Hels shrieked. “Oh God, Katharine, what have you done?”

  It was past three in the morning, and Kate still wasn’t in bed. I knew exactly what I’d see when I looked outside, but my stomach dropped when I sidled around Helen, out onto the deck.

  The fog had rolled in, and it picked up the light of the flames, making a rusty haze that felt like some radio preacher’s cheap version of hell. Down by the lake, on the rocky strand by the water, a bonfire burned, sending dark smoke up into the mist. At its heart were several large dead branches, but the bulk of the fuel was made up of arms and legs, swords and bows, horned heads and spiked tails.

  The trees by the lake were naked. No elves, no monsters; just leaves and lichen and bark. Kate had pulled down all the creatures and burned them. Even now, she stood on a stepladder under a maple, yanking down goblins and spiders and tossing them into the flames.

  I stood there, dumbstruck. I thought about the work it had taken Helen to make her menagerie. To just destroy it all, months of effort gone in one night . . . I wanted to scream at Kate too. I felt a spike of pure hatred.

  “Stop her!” Helen clutched my arm. “Please!”

  I was way ahead of her. I ran down to the shore. Elves curled and blackened in the fire, sheeting into ash. Kate climbed down from the ladder with another armload. I stepped between her and the flames.

  “What the hell?” I asked. I was shaking, I was so mad.

  She stopped, but didn’t look directly at me. “Stay out of this, Erica. These things have to be destroyed. Anton said—”

  “Screw Anton. He isn’t here. This is your idea, or you wouldn’t be doing it.”

  “I said back off!” she shouted, and shoved me.

  It was so violent, so unlike the Kate I knew, that I couldn’t stop her. She caught me off-balance, and I went stumbling down onto my knees in the water. Before I could get up, she dumped the monsters into the flames. A storm of embers whirled into the air. Kate glared at me, her face twisted, grief-stricken, hurt.

  “Those things”—she pointed at the fire—“they’re not healthy, Erica. She’s my grandmother, not yours. Let me do what’s best for her.”

  “Who’s she hurting?”

  “Me. Herself. Everyone who cares about her.”

  “And don’t you think burning them hurts her more than anything?”

  She didn’t have an answer for that, except for the guilt creasing her face. She glanced away, out at the mist-shrouded water—and stiffened, her eyes widening. Even in the fire’s glow, her face seemed to lose all color.

  I didn’t see what she saw, not yet—but I didn’t need to. I could hear the music, the faint melodies of what sounded like a hundred harps and fiddles and whistling pipes, the mad mutter of drums underneath.

  The fog had come in, and the fire had made a hole in the cottage’s defenses. There were no elves to keep the Lake People at bay. And b
ehind me I felt a Presence—or a group of them. The hairs on my arms stood on end. An earthy smell, like peat moss, filled my nose. The air tingled.

  Helen had stopped shouting. Up at the cottage, I saw her gape in awe and terror.

  Shaking, I rose to my feet and turned . . . and there he was, the antlered figure I’d seen before. He was huge, more than seven feet tall, but seemed even bigger because he stood on top of the water. He was naked except for a simple buckskin loincloth, his brick-red skin streaked with yellow war-paint. His hair was pure white, gathered in a ponytail that hung down his back. His eyes were black all the way through, with no white showing at all. And the antlers . . . they were part of him, not a headdress or hood. They grew straight out of his skull, branching out into a dozen sharp prongs, shining in the firelight.

  And he wasn’t alone. Farther back I caught sight of another figure, almost his twin . . . then another, and another. They faded in and out among the ropes of fog, so I had no idea how many there were. I got the feeling that for every one I saw, ten more lurked hidden in the mist.

  My mind went white again. I backed away from the Lake People, tripped over an exposed root, and fell on my ass—on dry ground, at least.

  He walked to the water’s edge, but no farther, and glanced at the bonfire. He bared his teeth in what was either a smile or a snarl. They were pointed, like a wolf’s. He held out a giant hand, its fingers ending in claws.

  COME, said a Voice in my head. He wasn’t talking to me, though. He stared directly at Kate.

  WE WILL DANCE TOGETHER, YOU AND I. WE WILL BE THE MOONLIGHT UPON THE SHAL-LOWS. WE WILL SING IN THE DEPTHS.

  He was old, past any age that had meaning. He was beautiful. He was not the least bit human.

  I looked at Kate, shook my head no. It made no difference. She was drawn to him, and I felt it too. Anyone would have, I think—man or woman, straight or gay.

  “No,” I groaned. “Kate, don’t—”