by Allyse Near
The last hunter fell into her arms, and in her hidden hand she raised the ivory-white horn.
The Lady and the unicorn foal travelled for days, following the smoke, the acrid smell of searing meat, until eventually they found the forest of metal and glass that old Moon had spoken of. A city, it was called, and there the Lady traded her mane and her horn in a bustling market, knowing they’d both grow back.
After the trade, a hornless lady, the first she’d ever met, led her to a staircase, and under the cover of darkness Lady led Dusk up, up, up, until they came to a room not unlike the cabin of the hunters, except with material like soft moss coating the floor, and waterfalls that pooled into shallow basins at a touched command. She soothed the weary foal, stroking his nose and braiding his mane, and he nuzzled into her lap. Together, they slept on the false-moss floor, the windows thrown open letting in the awful smell but also the wind, the cold moonlight, a sense of home.
Early the next morning, the Lady bedecked the room to look more like their forest. She gathered wildflowers from the square of greenery nearby, and shovelled dirt on the strange spongy floor, and later, while the foal was nibbling on carrots torn up from a stranger’s garden, she mounted her trophies on the walls.
Sixteen hunter’s heads in a row.
Edgar’s Shadow
There he was in the leaf-littered court again, appearing like a mischievous shadow with his pink skateboard. Wind tugged his curls this way and that. The asphalt was rain-slicked. She sat reading under the quickly thinning tree, hiding her grin between the pages, while he pulled nonchalant tricks up the court – before a great clatter and a shout of ‘OW!’ jolted Isola right out of her storybook.
Edgar was sprawled near Boo Radley’s house, the back wheel of his snapped skateboard rolling gleefully away.
‘Edgar! Are you all right?’ She hurried towards him and tried to help him sit up. ‘What is it? What hurts?’ she asked, hovering anxiously.
‘My pride,’ he groaned.
‘Do you need an ambulance?’
He grimaced, shaking his head. ‘Ah, but my board could use a hearse,’ he said, catching site of the broken axle. Wincing in pain, he clutched at his leg where a dark stain was rapidly spreading.
Isola swatted his hand away and rolled up his trouser leg. Midway up his calf was a spectacular gash, bloodied with bits of scrubbed flesh; a meat pizza.
‘Oh, cool,’ said Edgar, peering at the wound.
‘Cool?’
‘Yeah.’ He shifted slightly, and his whole leg began to shake. He said with false bravado through clenched teeth, ‘Doesn’t even hurt.’
‘Wait here,’ she told him. She made to stand, but he grabbed her hand.
‘Wait! Mum’s inside – I can’t let her see!’
‘What?’
‘Just . . . just take me to your place. Please? If Mum sees that I’ve gone and done this –’ The plea loomed large in his eyes.
‘But, Edgar, you’re gonna need stitches,’ she said in confusion. ‘You have to go to the hospital.’
‘No!’ The remaining colour drained from his face and towards his leg; the trickling blood looked suddenly redder. ‘You can stitch it.’
Isola thought involuntarily of Wendy Darling in her nursery, sewing Peter Pan’s wayward shadow back to his muddied feet. She blanched. ‘What? No! Edgar, I can’t!’
‘Please.’ He squeezed her hand between both of his, a fleshy Venus flytrap. ‘Please, Isola.’
Isola shook her head. ‘I can clean it up, but I can’t –’
‘You sew your dresses, right?’
She spluttered. ‘That’s not the same!’
‘But it’s the same principle.’
‘Why won’t you go to the hospital?’ Isola demanded. She had half a mind to leave him in the gutter and fetch Mother Poe herself.
‘I can’t stand hospitals,’ said Edgar, anguish in his voice Isola didn’t think had anything to do with the wound. ‘Besides, my mum – I already told you, she moved us out here because she was afraid of some radiowaves. If she sees this, she’ll move us to the moon.’
Isola bit her lip.
Edgar, grimacing, flicked some gravel out of the gash. ‘I’m sorry, it’s so gross,’ he apologised. ‘Does blood freak you out?’
‘Um, no,’ said Isola truthfully. She had an intimate relationship with blood. Vivien’s Wood was fraught with risks. She’d had a childhood of climbing trees and rolling down hills and wading barefoot into rock pools. Every mark on Isola’s body was accompanied by a strong remembrance of the time and place; the slits, the grazes and splinters, welling or oozing or pin-pricked or sloppy with blood.
She even remembered her first period. A Thursday, high summer, a shock of stickiness between her legs. When she’d got to the bathroom and stripped, she’d found that the bright blood spilling down had spelt out her name in luminous red letters, printed in twin on both thighs like those butterfly paintings she’d made in nursery school.
‘C’mon, Isola. Please.’
‘Well . . .’ She hesitated, but tugged him upright anyway. ‘I guess I wouldn’t want to upset Lotus Blossom.’
Edgar gave a pained smile; his face was almost the same colour as his teeth. ‘You can’t upset a Lotus Blossom. Only uproot it.’
Just then, the hermit emerged from his squalid house, splaying like a spider in his crooked doorway and yelling, ‘Oi! Get away from m’ house! Jezebel’s daughter!’ He pointed a gnarled finger at Isola. ‘Ezekiel thirteen eighteen! “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against your magic charms; I will set free the people that you ensnare like birds!”’
Edgar turned to stare down the hermit, wincing as he put weight on his injured leg. ‘Hey!’ Then he looked confusedly at Isola. ‘Did he just insult you?’
Isola shrugged. ‘With a Bible verse, so I don’t think it counts.’
‘And you, boy!’ Boo Radley shouted at Edgar. ‘Revelation eighteen twenty-three! “The light of a lamp will never shine in you again. The voice of bridegroom and bride will never be heard in you again.”’ His accusatory finger swung back to Isola. ‘“By your magic spell all the nations were led astray!”’
‘C’mon,’ said Isola, ‘he’s not worth arguing with. All the sense went out of him when his wife died.’
They turned and headed towards Number Thirty-six, Edgar limping and Isola supporting him, as Boo Radley yelled down the street after them, ‘“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”’
‘Exodus twenty-two eighteen,’ groaned Isola, already tiring under Edgar’s weight. ‘He’s been giving me that one for years.’
Isola’s Nursery
So this was the way, Edgar thought to himself. In this castle behind the woods, a young suitor’s blood was the only price that could be paid to gain entrance to the princess’s chambers. The hallway to her bedroom was rigged with trick mirrors and family portraits. He only caught blurred glimpses of a family of three.
Her room was just as he’d imagined it: a crucible of strawberry lipglosses and ouija boards, a Hello Kitty acid trip. There were teacups everywhere with the bottoms coated in leaf flakes; flaky images of the future.
Isola lowered him gingerly to the bed and fetched a first-aid kit from the bathroom. It was brimming with the usual (band-aids, gauze, tweezers, eye drops) and the slightly bizarre (compression bandages and splints for snakebites, sanitised eyepatches, a cartoonish pamphlet of instructions for on-the-spot amputations).
‘At least you’re prepared for anything,’ he quipped. ‘Where’s the zombie survival shelter?’
‘Underground,’ she replied, sitting on the floor and swabbing the gash on his leg, ‘with shotguns, liquor and canned brains. So we can try and get used to the taste, you know.’
Her hair was pinned up, a turban of curls; she had purplish autopsy fingernails. She’d recently switched her Lolita fashion for a kind of burnt-out-goddess look: oversized shirts with loud slogans like VAMPIRISM BITES and FREE MARIE ANTOINETTE; ratty boots spr
ay-painted gold and studded with plastic jewels and miniature Union Jack flags; red lip-stain as though she’d just been eating raspberries.
Edgar watched as Isola cleaned the area of gravel flecks and stripped skin, then sanitised and threaded a needle.
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I really hate hospitals.’
‘It’s fine.’
The needle pierced his skin. He stiffened reflexively but kept his mouth firmly closed.
While she diligently stitched, he peered at the smatterings of freckles on her arms, and felt the calluses on her sewing-toughened fingertips. The necklace he’d thought a pumpkin was actually a heavy gold ring on a chain.
Up close, he could tell her eyelashes were blonde, but she disguised them with mascara as thick as paint. He could see the downy fuzz at her hairline and on the nape of her neck, the dark roots growing though her Nordic white-blonde dye, the mole on her left earlobe, the freshly picked scab under her chin.
She was so beautiful. Only the blind would think her invisible, whatever she said otherwise.
She could have been a teenage Wendy in her nursery, gently sewing shadows to the wild boy’s feet. Edgar glanced down just as the thread began to zigzig.
‘You stitch like Frankenstein,’ he complained.
‘Doctor Frankenstein,’ Isola corrected. ‘I’m sure he didn’t go to medical school to be forever associated with a monster.’
‘I was referring to the monster.’
‘And it’s a common mistake for people to refer to the monster as “Frankenstein”. Honestly, Edgar, read the classics or don’t ever reference them.’
Edgar smiled before quickly grimacing as he twisted his face away from Isola’s ministrations. He peered around the room, spotting a photograph of a much -younger Isola with her parents. Isola’s mother was a look-alike in brunette; he still hadn’t seen her. He’d barely glimpsed her father. Number Thirty-six was an oversized dollhouse, all the furniture and lived-in airs for show. Already he noticed the quiet; missing the rambunctiousness of his siblings, the clatter-forever of children in the house.
Isola continued sewing quietly. The wound began to grin at him.
A minute passed before he put the question out like a velvety feeler. ‘So, is that James bloke your boyfriend?’
‘He’s a friend who is a boy, yes,’ said Isola. ‘I’ve known him for years. We’ve been fighting lately, though.’
Edgar tried again to force an admission he didn’t want to hear. ‘Lover’s quarrel?’
‘More like tension between two people who have spent far too much time together and have now memorised one another’s flaws,’ explained Isola. She smiled sweetly, and added, ‘Which of your steady stream of visitors is your beloved?’
Edgar laughed. No-one had come to see him. Aurora Court was adrift from the rest of the world, a patch of semi-suburban wilderness too hard to find, and once inside, too difficult to find your way out of again.
‘I haven’t had a girlfriend. Not since Lenore died, anyway.’ He sighed.
He picked up the book with the golden French title and the English translation beneath from her bedside table. It opened to the last page, to a woman with razor-sharp angles, feathered black hair, feline eyes. The photograph was only loosely secured. Edgar lifted the photo. ‘Hey! There’s something written here –’
‘No!’ Isola slammed her hand over his, crushing the picture flat. ‘I know. I don’t wanna see it!’
‘What? Why?’ Edgar tried to pry a corner of the photograph up.
‘Because I can’t stand to know what it says, okay?’
‘It’s probably just a dedication to whoever owned the book before you, or a bit of graffiti –’
‘Or it’s a note written by Lileo Pardieu!’
‘Shouldn’t that make you want to read it even more? You worship her.’
‘Yes, and that’s precisely the reason!’
Isola wrenched the book from Edgar’s grasp and hugged it to her chest. ‘These books are incredibly rare, even in France. Lileo might have put them together herself. And she died young. There are no more Pardieu stories. And if she wrote that note, then that’s the only Pardieu I’ve never read. Don’t you understand why I want to hold on to that? To keep her last words to me a secret?’
She shoved the book under the bed and resumed her stitching. Edgar made a mental note never to mention Lileo Pardieu again.
A Heathen’s Prayer
More dead birds littered the garden of Number Thirty-six. Not just sparrows now, but tiny finches, ravens, even a bluebird, all broken at the throat, their mellifluous voices sucked out, stamped with moons like a killer’s calling card. A nest of three babies, translucent skin, featherless, harmless.
Isola rooted them out. One had been hidden in a rosebush, stuck through with thorns like a victim of an Iron Maiden, another had bounced into the centre of a sticky spiderweb on the honeysuckle shrub. Ten in total, and Isola buried them coffinless at the roots of the plum tree. The earth was starting to freeze. Her fingernails broke, the edges bleeding cherry into the dirt.
Isola could think of no fitting epigraph, no poem or silver lining. In the stapled photograph, Lileo Pardieu glared out from under her tousled hair, raccoon eyes in black.
Lileo would have to be more than a lucky charm now. She would be the patron saint, like Dymphna hanging over the nunnery-turned-high school.
‘Please, Lileo,’ Isola whispered, her dirty hands clasped in a prayer. ‘Keep them safe from her. The birds, the Poes, and the princes.’
As she said this aloud, an awful thought struck her: These strange incidents and apparitions seemed to increase when she spent time with the boy across the street. Were these wormy birds a warning, perhaps, about Edgar?
Hear the Daisies
Edgar was going away over the Christmas break. He texted Isola to come over the afternoon before he left. It had been raining, and Christobelle’s single red eye winked teasingly at Isola from the puddles in the street.
‘Go away,’ Isola hissed, stamping in a puddle deeper than she’d fathomed. Muddy water flecked the hem of her dress.
‘Look,’ said Edgar, directing her to stand over the busy crater in Number Thirty-seven’s backyard. ‘They’re finally rebuilding, the clever little scamps.’
The rabbit burrow was no longer a catacomb, but a metropolis. The crater remained, but new tunnels had been built; bridges and overpasses, intricate yet fragile. She crouched down to admire their work, their wriggling bobtails visible in the dark.
She reached down to pet one then, remembering the fangs on the black rabbit below the plum tree some time ago, she quickly withdrew her hand.
‘Where are you going for your holiday?’ she asked Edgar.
‘Rome, to see Mum’s relatives. I’ll miss the snow,’ he said, somewhat wistfully.
Isola shuddered, remembering the predicted blizzards. ‘I hate snow.’
He snorted. ‘Then you clearly hate fun.’
‘Snow’s not fun, it’s . . . cold!’
Edgar laughed. ‘So you’d like it if it were warm?’
She shrugged. ‘And if rain was, like, bath-temperature, then yes, winter would be grand.’
‘I’m so glad to finally meet you face to face, Isola,’ said Lotus Blossom, jangling with beads, her hair in a fishtail braid. ‘What with the move and then this –’ she patted her protruding belly ‘– and now packing for this ridiculous trip, I haven’t had a chance – but what a lovely name! Isola . . .’ she repeated, chewing it around her mouth, rubbing the large bump under her blouse. Then, ‘Lovely. Lovely. That’s a nice one, too . . .’
‘When’s the baby due?’ Isola asked Edgar as they started climbing the stairs.
‘Not till April. She always goes for a Shakespeare name in the end. She just agonises over whether or not our middle names are “unique” enough.’ He shook his head.
‘What’s your middle name?’
‘If I tell you, you can’t laugh.’
‘
Promise I won’t.’
‘It’s Laugh.’
Stifling a burst of Edgar’s middle name, Isola pressed her fingers over her mouth and asked, as seriously as she could manage, ‘Where’s Edgar from?’
‘King Lear.’
‘Can’t say I’ve read it.’
‘It’s mental. It’s got a bunch of characters running around, pretending to be completely nuts, and lots of Elizabethan special-effects, big storms and stuff – and a really gross eye-gouging scene.’
Isola thought of a handsome sailor bending over a writhing, terrified Christobelle, of a sparrow plucking a glazed blue eye from a girl strung high in a cage. She shivered.
‘Edgar’s a prince.’
Isola twisted on the stairs to stare at him; Edgar reached out and steadied her, even as she caught the banister and practically gasped, ‘What?’
‘In King Lear,’ he explained, looking up at her, a soft concern in the creases round his eyes. ‘The character I was named after.’
‘Oh. Yes, of course.’
Isola turned around again, and Edgar stepped up beside her to take the remaining stairs in tandem, his hand still hovering over her lower back.
‘Did your parents pick a theme, too? Is your brother called Oscar?’
A sneaky glint of humour pulsed in his pupil. How did Edgar remember what she’d said months ago, through the mask of that fog-and-laser party? She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t make the same mistakes she had with James . . .
‘I don’t actually have a brother,’ said Isola, with as much conviction as she could muster, and it was like saying ‘the earth is flat’ or ‘I hate fairytales’ or ‘I don’t love my mother now that she’s sick’.
‘I thought so,’ Edgar said, and smiled. He didn’t seem mad or surprised at all. ‘Lying about your family, lying about your name – are you really even a teenage girl?’
