Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  His hands and his mouth are so gentle and they’re all over me like moth wings brushing my skin. I don’t know how to describe what he’s doing to me. It isn’t anything that other lovers haven’t done to me before, but the way Jeck does it has me glowing, my skin all warm and tingling with this deep, slow burn starting up between my legs and just firing up along every one of my nerve ends.

  I can hear myself making moaning sounds and then he’s inside me, his breathing heavy in my ear. All I can feel and smell is him. My hips are grinding against his and we’re synced into perfect rhythm, and then I wake up in my own bed and I’m all tangled up in the sheets with my hand between my legs, fingertip right on the spot, moving back and forth and back and forth . . .

  7

  Sophie fell silent. “Steamy,” Jilly said after a moment.

  Sophie gave a little bit of an embarrassed laugh. “You’re telling me. I get a little squirmy just thinking about it. And that night—I was still so fired up when I woke that I couldn’t think straight. I just went ahead and finished and then lay there afterward, completely spent. I couldn’t even move.”

  “You know a guy named Jack Crow, don’t you?” Jilly asked.

  “Yeah, he’s the one who’s got that tattoo parlor down on Palm Street. I went out with him a couple of times, but—” Sophie shrugged “—you know. Things just didn’t work out.”

  “That’s right. You told me that all he ever wanted to do was to give you tattoos.”

  Sophie shook her head, remembering. “In private places so only he and I would know they were there. Boy.”

  The cat had fallen asleep, body sprawled out on Sophie’s lap, head pressed tight against her stomach. A deep resonant purr rose up from him. Sophie hoped he didn’t have fleas.

  “But the guy in my dream was nothing like Jack,” she said. “And besides, his name was Jeck.”

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  “A dream name.”

  “So did you see him again—the next night?”

  Sophie shook her head. “Though not from lack of interest on my part.”

  8

  The third night I find myself in this one-room cottage out of a fairy tale. You know, there’s dried herbs hanging everywhere, a big hearth considering the size of the place, with black iron pots and a kettle sitting on the hearthstones, thick hand-woven rugs underfoot, a small tidy little bed in one corner, a cloak hanging by the door, a rough set of a table and two chairs by a shuttered window.

  The old lady is sitting on one of the chairs.

  There you are, she says. I looked for you to come last night, but I couldn’t find you.

  I was with Jeck, I say, and then she frowns, but she doesn’t say anything.

  Do you know him? I ask.

  Too well.

  Is there something wrong with him?

  I’m feeling a little flushed, just talking about him. So far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with him at all. He’s not trustworthy, the old lady finally says.

  I shake my head. He seems to be just as upset about the drowned lady as you are. He told me all about her—how she used to go into Faerie.

  She never went into Faerie.

  Well then, where did she go?

  The old lady shakes her head. Crows talk too much, she says, and I can’t tell if she means the birds or a whole bunch of Jecks. Thinking about the latter gives me goosebumps. I can barely stay clearheaded around Jeck; a whole crowd of him would probably overload my circuits and leave me lying on the floor like a little pool of jelly.

  I don’t tell the old lady any of this. Jeck inspired confidences, as much as sensuality; she does neither.

  Will you help us? she says instead.

  I sit down at the table with her and ask, Help with what?

  The Moon, she says.

  I shake my head. I don’t understand. You mean the drowned lady in the pool?

  Drowned, the old lady says, but not dead. Not yet.

  I start to argue the point, but then realize where I am. It’s a dream and anything can happen, right? It needs you to break the bogles’ spell, the old lady goes on.

  Me? But—

  Tomorrow night, go to sleep with a stone in your mouth and a hazel twig in your hands. Now mayhap, you’ll find yourself back here, mayhap with your crow, but guard you don’t say a word, not one word. Go out into the fen until you find a coffin, and on that coffin a candle, and then look sideways and you’ll see that you’re in the place I showed you yesternight.

  She falls silent.

  And then what am I supposed to do? I ask.

  What needs to be done.

  But—

  I’m tired, she says.

  She waves her hand at me and I’m back in my own bed again.

  9

  “And so?” Jilly asked. “Did you do it?”

  “Would you have?”

  “In a moment,” Jilly said. She sidled closer along the wall until she was right beside Sophie and peered into her friend’s face. “Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t do it. Don’t tell me that’s the whole story.”

  “The whole thing just seemed silly,” Sophie said.

  “Oh, please!”

  “Well, it did. It was all too oblique and riddlish. I know it was just a dream, so that it didn’t have to make sense, but there was so much of a coherence to a lot of it that when it did get incomprehensible, it just didn’t seem . . . oh, I don’t know. Didn’t seem fair, I suppose.”

  “But you did do it?”

  Sophie finally relented.

  “Yes,” she said.

  10

  I go to bed with a small, smooth stone in my mouth and have the hardest time getting to sleep because I’m sure I’m going to swallow it during the night and choke. And I have the hazel twig as well, though I don’t know what help either of them is going to be.

  Hazel twig to ward you from quicks and bogles, I hear Jeck say. And the stone to remind you of your own world, of the difference between waking and dream, else you might find yourself sharing the Moon’s fate.

  We’re standing on a sort of grassy knoll, an island of semisolid ground, but the footing’s still spongy. I start to say hello, but he puts his finger to his lips.

  She’s old, is Granny Weather, he says, and cranky, too, but there’s more magic in one of her toenails than most of us will find in a lifetime.

  I never really thought about his voice before. It’s like velvet, soft and smooth, but not effeminate. It’s too resonant for that.

  He puts his hands on my shoulders and I feel like melting. I close my eyes, lift my face to his, but he turns me around until I’m facing away from him. He cups his hands around my breasts and kisses me on the nape of my neck. I lean back against him, but he lifts his mouth to my ear.

  You must go, he says softly, his breath tickling the inside of my ear. Into the fens.

  I pull free from his embrace and face him. I start to say, Why me? Why do I have to go alone? But before I can get a word out he has his hand across my mouth.

  Trust Granny Weather, he says. And trust me. This is something only you can do. Whether you do it or not is your choice. But if you mean to try tonight, you mustn’t speak. You must go out into the fens and find her. They will tempt you and torment you, but you must ignore them, else they’ll have you drowning too, under the Black Snag.

  I look at him and I know he can see the need I have for him, because in his eyes I can see the same need for me reflected in their violet depths.

  I will wait for you, he says. If I can.

  I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like the sound of any of it, but I tell myself again, it’s just a dream, so I finally nod. I start to turn away, but he catches hold of me for a last moment and kisses me. There’s a hot rush of tongues touching, arms tight around each other, before he finally steps back.

  I love the strength of you, he says.

  I don’t want to go, I want to change the rules of the dream. But I get this feeling tha
t if I do, if I change one thing, everything’ll change, and maybe he won’t even exist in whatever comes along to replace it. So I lift my hand and run it along the side of his face. I take a long last drink of those deep violet eyes that just want to swallow me, then I get brave and turn away again.

  And this time I go into the fens.

  I’m nervous, but I guess that goes without saying. I look back but I can’t see Jeck anymore. I can just feel I’m being watched, and it’s not by him. I clutch my little hazel twig tighter, roll the stone around from one side of my mouth to the other, and keep going.

  It’s not easy. I have to test each step to make sure I’m not just going to sink away forever into the muck. I start thinking of what you hear about dreams, how if you die in a dream, you die for real, that’s why you always wake up just in time. Except for those people who die in their sleep, I guess.

  I don’t know how long I’m slogging through the muck. My arms and legs have dozens of little nicks and cuts—you never think of how sharp the edge of a reed can be until your skin slides across one. It’s like a paper cut, sharp and quick, and it stings like hell. I don’t suppose all the muck’s doing the cuts much good either. The only thing I can be happy about is that there aren’t any bugs.

  Actually, there doesn’t seem to be the sense of anything living at all in the fens, just me, on my own. But I know I’m not alone. It’s like a word sitting on the tip of your tongue. I can’t see or hear or sense anything, but I’m being watched.

  I think of Jeck and Granny Weather, of what they say the darkness hides. Quicks and bogles and haunts.

  After a while I almost forget what I’m doing out here.

  I’m just stumbling along with a feeling of dread hanging over me that won’t go away. Bogbean and water mint leaves feel like cold, wet fingers sliding along my legs. I hear the occasional flutter of wings, and sometimes a deep kind of sighing moan, but I never see anything.

  I’m just about played out when suddenly I come upon this tall rock under the biggest crack willow I’ve seen so far. The tree’s dead, drooping leafless branches into the still water at a slant, the mud’s all black underfoot, the marsh is, if anything, even quieter here, expectant almost, and I get the feeling like something—somethings are closing in all around me.

  I start to walk across the dark mud to the other side of the rock until I hit a certain vantage point. I stop when I can see that it’s shaped like a big strange coffin, and I remember what Granny Weather told me. I look for the candle and see a tiny light flickering at the very top of the black stone, right where it’s pushed up and snagged among the dangling branches of the dead willow. It’s no brighter than a firefly’s glow, but it burns steady.

  I do what Granny Weather told me and look around myself using my peripheral vision. I don’t see anything at first, but as I slowly turn toward the water, I catch just a hint of a glow. I stop and then I wonder what to do. Is it still going to be there if I turn to face it?

  Eventually, I move sideways toward it, always keeping it in the corner of my eye. The closer I get, the brighter it starts to glow, until I’m standing hip deep in the cold water, the mud sucking at my feet, and it’s all around me, this dim eerie glowing. I look down into the water and I see my own face reflected back at me, but then I realize that it’s not me I’m seeing, it’s the drowned woman, the moon, trapped under the stone.

  I stick my hazel twig down the bodice of my blouse and reach into the water. I have to bend down, the dark water licking at my shoulders and chin and smelling something awful, but I finally touch the woman’s shoulder. Her skin’s warm against my fingers, and for some reason that makes me feel braver. I get a grip with one hand on her shoulder, then the other, and give a pull.

  Nothing budges.

  I try some more, moving a little deeper into the water. Finally I plunge my head under and get a really good hold, but she simply won’t move. The rock’s got her pressed down tight, and the willow’s got the rock snagged, and dream or no dream, I’m not some kind of superwoman. I’m only so strong and I have to breathe.

  I come up spluttering and choking on the foul water.

  And then I hear the laughter.

  I look up and there’s these things all around the edge of the pool. Quicks and bogles and small monsters. All eyes and teeth and spindly black limbs and crooked hands with too many joints to the fingers. The tree is full of crows and their cawing adds to the mocking hubbub of sound.

  First got one, now got two, a pair of voices chant. Boil her up in a tiddy stew.

  I’m starting to shiver—not just because I’m scared, which I am, but because the water’s so damn cold. The haunts just keep on laughing and making up these creepy little rhymes that mostly have to do with little stews and barbecues. And then suddenly, they all fall silent and these three figures come swinging down from the willow’s boughs.

  I don’t know where they came from, they’re just there all of a sudden. These aren’t haunts, nor quicks nor bogles. They’re men and they look all too familiar.

  Ask for anything, one of them says, and it will be yours.

  It’s Jeck, I realize. Jeck talking to me, except the voice doesn’t sound right. But it looks just like him. All three look like him.

  I remember Granny Weather telling me that Jeck was untrustworthy, but then Jeck told me to trust her. And to trust him. Looking at these three Jecks, I don’t know what to think anymore. My head starts to hurt and I just wish I could wake up.

  You need only tell us what it is you want, one of the Jecks says, and we will give it to you. There should be no enmity between us. The woman is drowned. She is dead. You have come too late. There is nothing you can do for her now. But you can do something for yourself. Let us gift you with your heart’s desire.

  My heart’s desire, I think.

  I tell myself, again, it’s just a dream, but I can’t help the way I start thinking about what I’d ask for if I could really have anything I wanted, anything at all.

  I look down into the water at the drowned woman and I think about my dad. He never liked to talk about my mother. It’s like she was just a dream, he said once.

  And maybe she was, I find myself thinking as my gaze goes down into the water and I study the features of the drowned woman who looks so much like me. Maybe she was the Moon in this world and she came to ours to rejuvenate, but when it was time for her to go back, she didn’t want to leave because she loved me and dad too much. Except she didn’t have a choice.

  So when she returned, she was weaker, instead of stronger like she was supposed to be, because she was so sad. And that’s how the quicks and the bogles trapped her.

  I laugh then. What I’m making up, as I stand here waist deep in smelly dream water, is the classic abandoned child’s scenario. They always figure that there was just a mix-up, that one day their real parents are going to show up and take them away to some place where everything’s magical and loving and perfect.

  I used to feel real guilty about my mother leaving us—that’s something else that happens when you’re just a kid in that kind of a situation. You just automatically feel guilty when something bad happens, like it’s got to be your fault. But I got older. I learned to deal with it. I learned that I was a good person, that it hadn’t been my fault, that my dad was a good person, too, and it wasn’t his fault either.

  I’d still like to know why my mother left us, but I came to understand that whatever the reasons were for her going, they had to do with her, not with us. Just like I know this is only a dream and the drowned woman might look like me, but that’s just something I’m projecting onto her. I want her to be my mother. I want her having abandoned me and dad not to have been her fault either. I want to come to her rescue and bring us all back together again.

  Except it isn’t going to happen. Pretend and real just don’t mix.

  But it’s tempting all the same. It’s tempting to let it all play out. I know the haunts just want me to talk so that they can trap me as
well, that they wouldn’t follow through on any promise they made, but this is my dream. I can make them keep to their promise. All I have to do is say what I want.

  And then I understand that it’s all real after all. Not real in the sense that I can be physically harmed in this place, but real in that if I make a selfish choice, even if it’s just in a dream, I’ll still have to live with the fact of it when I wake up. It doesn’t matter that I’m dreaming, I’ll still have done it.

  What the bogles are offering is my heart’s desire, if I just leave the Moon to drown. But if I do that, I’m responsible for her death. She might not be real, but it doesn’t change anything at all. It’ll still mean that I’m willing to let someone die, just so I can have my own way.

  I suck on the stone and move it back and forth from one cheek to the other. I reach down into my wet bodice and pluck out the hazel twig from where it got pushed down between my breasts. I lift a hand to my hair and brush it back from my face and then I look at those sham copies of my Jeck Crow and I smile at them.

  My dream, I think. What I say goes.

  I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m fed up with having everyone else decide what happens in my dream. I turn to the stone and I put my hands on it, the hazel twig sticking out between the fingers of my right hand, and I give the stone a shove. There’s this great big outcry among the quicks and bogles and haunts as the stone starts to topple over. I look down at the drowned woman and I see her eyes open, I see her smile, but then there’s too much light and I’m blinded.

  When my vision finally clears, I’m alone by the pool. There’s a big, fat, full moon hanging in the sky, making the fens almost as bright as day. They’ve all fled, the monsters, the quicks and bogles and things. The dead willow’s still full of crows, but as soon as I look up, they lift from the tree in an explosion of dark wings, a circling murder, cawing and crying, until they finally go away. The stone’s lying on its side, half in the water, half out.