Haffling (The Haffling series)

by Caleb James

  Dorothea was at her side, her notebook clutched in one pincer, a quill in the other.

  “A choice must be made…,” May said. “Give me what I want, Alex Nevus, and your family will be safe. That’s quite a bargain. Quite a steal. Give me your name, Alex Nevus, and they will all go free.”

  “No,” Mom hissed.

  I glanced at Cedric. He was mouthing, “No.”

  May’s head swiveled, and she caught him in her gaze.

  He flinched, and Liam ran from his side in terror to hide at the edge of the cottage. “Stupid fairy!” she sneered. “Choose your death, the mist, or me….” She looked over her shoulder at me. “Watch,” she said.

  “Don’t,” Cedric shouted back. He met May’s gaze. “I don’t care,” he said. “Just leave them alone. Leave Liam alone, he did all that you’d asked. You don’t need them.”

  “But I do… at least one of them, and you always knew that. It was our deal. What’s amusing is that you actually fell in love with her… and out of love with me. Still, the thing you did, Cedric. She won’t love you now. It will be impossible. You will be the cause of unbearable sorrow… the death of her babes. The choice that must be made, to kill them all or just take the one I want. Either way, she will go mad in this world as well as that… she will blame you. And she will be right to do so.”

  I knew May would make good on her threats. Sometimes, in battle, there was no choice but to charge against a much greater adversary. You would fail, but it was honorable. “I’ll give you what you want,” I shouted.

  May’s head swiveled, her eyes bright, her smile wide.

  “Well done, let’s have it.”

  I ignored the chorus of my parents, my sister, and newborn seven-year-old brother. Jerod shouted from inside the tunnel, “Run!”

  I had a moment’s panic that he’d leave the safety of the mist and try something stupid… and brave.

  “Don’t do it, Alex,” Cedric warned. “It means your death.”

  That couldn’t have been clearer. Shit! I was out of choices, my life or my family’s. No choice at all. “May, Queen of the Fey. I give you my name, it is Alex Nevus.”

  “Yes!” She clapped her hands three times. Her skirts swished back and forth as she shifted her weight from side to side. An orchestra of frogs and birds started to play. There was a pounding beat with low croaks in the bass. May’s body swayed as crickets layered in harmonies. “I hate to dance,” she said. Her voice sounded distant. Her eyes were hooded and nearly closed.

  For someone who kept saying that, she did a lot of it. The music flooded my head. My body felt weird—like filled with lead. I couldn’t move. I watched May twirl, her dainty feet in red satin slippers kicking out from her gown as her arms drew snaky patterns in the air. She was mad as a bedbug but beautiful and graceful.

  Over the dense rhythms, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Mom. “Alex,” she whispered. “Run. Save yourself.”

  I couldn’t even turn my head. I felt my panic and fear slip away. This wasn’t going to end well, but at least I’d done everything possible to save my family and Jerod. My eyes fixed on May. I thought how the woman touching my shoulder and pleading with me to run away wasn’t my crazy mother Marilyn. She gripped my head in her hands and tried to make me look at her. Our eyes connected. Hers were clear, the lines around her mouth and eyes deeper than I remembered.

  “I can’t leave you here,” I said. “I can’t leave them.” I felt a tension in my neck, like it was a rubber band.

  Mom winced at my words as though I’d struck her. “You are my warrior,” she said, holding my head. “But I never prepared you. Please, Alex… just run.” She looked toward the misty tunnel, its entrance still open, and Jerod, who hadn’t moved, staring back. “Forget us,” she said. “Or remember us, and be sad, but save yourself. Please. What she intends to do… she’s going to kill you.” She was begging.

  Behind her, Alice held Adam’s hand. “You tried,” Alice said. “But Mom’s right. We’ll be okay here. It’s not all bad, and most of the time—” She shrugged. “—you don’t remember stuff.”

  Right, I thought, like losing seven years of your life. I whispered, “Today on Sadly….”

  “Yes.” She smiled, and there were tears in her eyes. “Today on Sadly. Now run!”

  Mom’s hands let go of my head. As she did, it was like I had no muscle control, and it whipped back to face May. Her dance had escalated to wild circling stag leaps around the village clearing. Her hair had whipped free of its stays, and every time her feet touched ground, puffs of glittery dust lingered.

  “Well then!” May screamed over the dense music.

  It stopped. There was silence… not a croak, not a chirp. May put her hands on her hips. She seemed bigger, or filled like a balloon about to pop. She grinned at me. The sides of her mouth were too big, like a snake detaching its jaw to swallow a rat or a cat or… a person. Her mouth opened, and opened and opened. She raised a hand in my direction, and I watched the skin of her fingers, her upper arms, her face begin to bubble and split. A horrible sucking noise came from beneath her gown, like gears grinding and fabric tearing. Her tongue, thick and red and way too long dangled from the corner of her gaping jaw.

  “I choose you,” she slurred.

  “Run!” Mom screamed.

  “Run, Alex.” Alice joined.

  “Run!” Jerod screamed.

  None of them realized I was frozen, not by fear, not by honor, but by magic. The moment I gave her my name was the moment I ceded the battle, possibly the war, and as I now knew… my life.

  Twenty-Seven

  I DIED. I am in hell… possibly purgatory, as not much is happening. No devils poking my flesh, no burning cauldrons, no screaming souls. I’m awake for bits and then I’m not. It’s dark; no light, smells, no sound… just black, like floating. I have no body. Nothing with which to touch or feel. I have memories. I play them repeatedly when I’m awake. Brown eyes, soft lips, dimples. “I love you, Alex.” Who’s Alex? I wonder. The last bit…. May’s jaw unhinging like a python, but not just her jaw… her. Like the mist, she washed over me… over… Alex. She took possession of Alex Nevus… of me. Like a squatter, or maybe I was now the squatter having given up my rights to my apartment… my body… my name. I’m tired. I’m Alex. I sleep.

  Twenty-Eight

  THERE is no time here… wherever here is. I’m aware, and that’s it. Which, if maybe I’m still in my body… and that’s a big if… then the only place I could be is my brain. Unless kidneys have consciousness… although I read somewhere that the Greeks thought the soul resided in the liver, or maybe it was the heart, and I remember something in biology about the stomach having a ton of nerves. No, definitely the liver. I chew on trivia, remembering the myth of Prometheus who stole the fire of Olympus and gave it to man. As a punishment he was chained to a rock, and every day an eagle ate his liver, and every night it grew back. No, not the liver; if I’m still in my body, this has got to be my brain… or a small part of it that May didn’t occupy. Going with that hypothesis, and not wanting to build up hope, I picture a brain and try to remember its basic anatomy. The highest we ever got in biology was the fetal pig… kind of like the human brain, minus the add-ons. I think of Jerod and feel a rush of wonderful… and there’s a clue. From him, I picture Alice, as she was before… before she’d been robbed of most of her teen years. Then my brother, Adam…. I’d always wanted a brother, in that stupid way kids want lots of things. So much I could teach him… unless of course she’d turned him into a middle-aged man. These are clues. You have emotions… and thoughts, so it’s not just a little bit of the brain… if in fact you’re still in the body… your body. My thoughts skitter as I trigger feelings and memories. It’s hard to focus. Okay, think of Jerod’s eyes. Ohhhh. That’s nice. See the flecks of gold. So feeling and emotion… that’s deep brain, lizard brain… she turned me into a gecko. But I can remember his words and his name and how he looked carrying his brother’s skateboard an
d how scared I’d been when he wasn’t breathing. How good it felt when he did breathe, and I’d realized… he was willing to die for me. So not only am I in the deep brain structures but I have access to the outer layers and possibly the forebrain. A flash of light rips through the black. I stop everything. Where did that come from? Direction is meaningless; there’s no up and down, left and right, just space. What was I thinking when the lights almost went on? Outer layers of the brain. I picture the anatomy exhibit at the Museum of Natural History—one of my favorite places. Like a biology textbook, only real. I visualize the brain exhibit… light travels in through the eyes, hits the retina, and then all that information speeds down the optic nerve, which is basically an extension of the brain. Weirdly, it goes all the way to the back of the head where the images get pulled apart, inverted, flipped from side to side, and put back together to create perceptions. As I have these thoughts, something changes. Whatever was allowing me to think and to feel was spreading, and that flash of light, like a search beam, returned. I think of Sifu and of riding the moment in Wing Chung practice. Nothing is forced… the light grows. It’s brilliant, and I feel little tendrils of consciousness. This is my brain, and somehow I’m traveling down synapses, hopping from neuron to neuron, and seeing light. Then color. Okay, none of this makes sense. All chopped-apart bits. I feel rushes of anxiety and fear. Not helpful… but maybe I’m not dead. Hope whisks back the doubt. Where there’s life there’s hope, and then I hear something. After however long in this floating free fall, I just heard… am hearing. Like I’d just touched a wire that hooked up a speaker, someone was singing.

  I hold still, fearing that I’ll disconnect whatever I’d just made happen. It’s a male voice… so beautiful, and not just because I’m thrilled to hear anything at all, but incredibly powerful. A soaring, unaccompanied tenor. I try to focus on the lyrics. It’s too difficult. The stream and flow of notes make me sad, and if I had eyes and tear ducts, I’d be crying. When the music stops, I feel drained… so tired. All the gains I’d made; the light, the colors, and the sound, all goes black. So tired. I sleep.

  Twenty-Nine

  WHEN I woke, I swept past my doubt and fear and reclaimed all that I’d accomplished before. With a surge of enthusiasm, I leapt through my brain, triggering the connections that had given me light and sound. It was fast, and my world filled with color, and I heard a man’s voice. Okay, I kind of knew that voice… it was mine. Only, I wasn’t speaking. But the words coming in were just sound, not the beautiful music… was I singing? I didn’t sing. Never could. But… that was a beautiful voice. The best I’d ever heard. Information flooded in. Too much and too disconnected. I focused on the colors and the lights. Curious thing, as I followed a particular image, letting it take me forward, it took on substance, and suddenly I was looking at a face… a recognizable face. What the? Why was I looking at eighties pop sensation Carly Casswell? She was smiling and saying something I couldn’t make out. I held her image and it grew, like pieces of a jigsaw coming together. No mistaking her streaked-blonde mane, over-collagened lips, and Botox brow. Her smile was bright, and whatever she was saying came with tears. A man’s hand fell on her shoulder. I focused on that, and then to the attached arm. From there to a shoulder and another face, this one black, with a shaved head. Wait a minute… Barry Soulfeld—music producer and ex-guitarist for the R&B group Envy. I knew this… May must have been watching TV…. I knew this show. I let the image drift back from Barry Soulfeld to Carly Casswell, because if I was right—and what else could this be—on the other side of her, Morgan Flood. I let the features of his head and face coalesce, from his surgically enhanced hairline, to his taut skin and ski-slope nose. But his eyes. He was crying and shaking his head. His mouth was twisted as though it were too painful to speak. I fumbled around, trying to remember how I’d gotten the audio before, and sent little tendrils of awareness shooting down cells to my right and left. Noise flooded in, clapping and cheering. And a man’s voice. No, Alex—your voice. Focus!

  The clapping was a solid wall… too much. The man’s… my voice, trying to be heard over it. “Thank you.”

  Oh my God. I could make out words. I was speaking, only it wasn’t me. It was May.

  “Thank you so much,” she repeated.

  And I got the weirdest sensation as I felt her/my head turn. The images shifted fast. She was making eye contact with each of the judges. Holy shit! Carly Casswell’s red-rimmed hazel eyes were staring straight at me. May wasn’t watching TV. She was on it. Holy crap, this was IT! I, or rather May, was on the number-one primetime talent show. First there’d been American Idol, then America’s Got Talent, The X-Factor, The Voice, and last season, the newest and biggest—IT. Where the prize was a starring role in a big-budget movie produced by Morgan Flood, whose credits included four of the ten all-time highest grossing movies.

  Calm down, I told myself, searching for Sifu’s mindless path to being. Just take it in, calm like the surface of a pond. Don’t react. I focused on Carly Casswell’s over-plumped lips, the sounds not making sense. I shot awareness off to my right and to my left, to where the audio parts of the brain got their feed. The sounds were different than the ones when I—or rather, May—spoke, but if I relaxed, they pulled together.

  “Holy mother of God.” Carly’s first discernible statement. “Alex, you….” I watched her swallow back mascara-dripped tears. “I can’t find the words for how moved…. From your first audition, I just knew….” She was sobbing.

  “Thank you, Carly.”

  What the? So now I was on a first name basis with…. Chill, Alex, just be… calm like a pond.

  A man’s voice, with hints of a British accent. “Brilliant,” Morgan Flood gushed. “Just brilliant. I’d love to give you a criticism, I can’t. That was… perfect. The best performance this season. No, the best ever. Of this year’s final three contestants, it’s yours to lose, Alex Nevus. You’ve thrown down the gauntlet and kicked off an amazing show!”

  The audience roared their approval and the images shifted again, and I was looking at… myself. Wow! Someone had given me a makeover. A giant screen focused on my face. How did my hair get that long? I’d never really thought about my looks, I was okay, too tall, too skinny… but the teenager on the screen, vivid-green eyes with long black lashes, blue-black hair framing my face, was I wearing lipstick? Really? His skin, right… my skin, glowing, not a blemish, the nose straight, gleaming white teeth. He… I was smiling, but not big, more like a movie star in a close-up. What are you up to, May? Why this? How long have I been… gone?

  The image shifted, and the show’s logo was superimposed over the audience, which was giving me… her, a standing ovation. The applause was thunderous.

  The screen went blank, and for a moment I thought I’d again lost my ability to see. I fought against the dark. I heard a woman’s voice. “Alex, that was amazing! We need to get you backstage.”

  “Of course.” May speaking through my mouth. “Thanks, nice of you to say.” Her tone was modest.

  “No,” the woman replied. “Nice has nothing to do with it. You’re fucking amazing!” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “We’re not supposed to say shit like this… you’re the odds-on favorite.”

  “Thanks.”

  I listened and caught snippets of rapidly shifting visuals: the young woman May was talking to, all in black, earphones draped around her neck, a small microphone hooked under her chin. It was a struggle making sense of things, particularly the dark bits. Where there was light or faces, things came into focus more readily.

  I heard a door open and then another, and May was being led into a room with couches and a buffet against one wall. It was filled with crew all in black, and a boy and girl close to my age. This was some kind of holding room for the talent. I sifted through my memories of IT. Because Alice was addicted to the show, I had a lot of them. I accessed the rules, hearing them in the voice of the announcer: “Contestants must be between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five,
have no criminal history and be willing… to become IT.”

  As I sifted the data—dramatic readings, song-and-dance routines, on-camera challenges—I tried to make sense of what I was hearing. One young woman telling May/me, “I just hate you.” Her face smiling… she reminded me a lot of Ashley, the girl Jerod was supposed to take to the prom. “I mean, really,” she said, “how can any of us compete with that? It was awesome, Alex. I’m so jealous… but you know, like happy for you too.”

  “Thanks, Jenna, I think you’re great too.”

  That stopped me. If I’d had a jaw to operate, it would have hung open. The fey didn’t lie—admittedly, they twisted things all the way around to where you couldn’t tell your head from your ass, but an out-and-out lie—that was one of their rules. May had just broken it. Somehow, in my ferreting through my neurons, I knew she thought Jenna was a mediocre talent scraping by on charm, blonde flirtiness, and surgically altered breasts. It was the first I’d actually sensed May’s thoughts directly. They hissed like water on hot coals—alien and calculating. She didn’t just think Jenna was a talentless bimbo, she wanted to hurt her… even kill her if she could (a) get away with it, and (b) thought the audience would approve. It was a sick feeling as she played with the options, her/my fingers twitching at the thought of what it might feel like to strangle Jenna.

  I listened as the other contestant—a good-looking guy with a crazy head of corkscrew tawny hair—congratulated May on whatever amazing performance she’d just eked out of my body.

  “Jeremy,” she said to him, “your musical number was so much better than mine.” Yeah, you can sing, her thoughts hissed out, but you come off way too gay, and they’ll never vote for you. But there was more, her cool plans to crush him. I could see her working it out, a young stagehand who had a crush on Jeremy. She’d maneuver the two of them together and have a compromising video leaked to the web. It would go viral in minutes.