by Allyse Near
Isola laughed, but the girl behind her shrieked in fright.
‘What a freak!’ snarled the familiar voice.
Isola ducked into the kitchen before Bridget McKayde could recognise her. Saliva was boiling in her mouth. She felt uneasy. Why would Edgar invite a girl like Bridget to his party? He’d never mentioned knowing her. Isola decided to find Grape, to make sure a scene was avoided.
Edgar had his head in the fridge, searching out a particular nectar amongst the endless rows of glass bottles. Isola tapped him on the shoulder and he bumped his head on a shelf.
‘Ouch – oh, hi!’ Edgar said, rubbing his crown. He smiled, brazenly scooped a few blueberries out of the bottom of her refreshed cocktail glass and popped them in his mouth.
‘Have you seen Grape?’
Edgar pointed to his ears. ‘What?’
‘I said,’ yelled Isola, standing on tiptoes to reach his ear, ‘have you see Grape?’
‘Why?’ he shouted back, ‘are you bored?’
Someone shut the kitchen door and the music was blunted. A guest standing near the sink cracked open a wine bottle; the cork shot towards them and Edgar automatically pulled Isola close. The cork missed her by a whisker, pinging into the fridge and shattering a rack of glasses.
‘How can you be bored,’ Edgar went on, as nonchalantly as possible, ‘when I just saved your life? This party is death-defying stuff.’
Wine was pouring in a waterfall from the fridge; Edgar stepped into the fizzy puddle and slipped. This time, Isola caught him, and as he regained his footing, they bumped heads. They laughed and didn’t pull away. There was paint on Edgar’s braces and his grin glowed in the dark. A mouthful of stars.
‘Who just saved whose life?’
‘I reckon we’re square,’ replied Edgar.
Still they stood, forehead to forehead, breathing one another in. Edgar reached for her hand, hesitated, then plucked the miniature umbrella from her glass instead.
Isola said, after a moment, ‘I’m getting wine in my shoes.’
‘Me too.’
He tucked the paper umbrella behind her ear, the brief brush of his fingers still cold from rummaging through the fridge. And then it didn’t matter that she’d found Bridget but couldn’t find Grape – Isola was with Edgar on his birthday, both of them glowing in the dark, and she hadn’t bought him a present.
The Clock Strikes Midnight
‘Happy eighteenth birthday, Edgar Allan Poe.’
‘Stretch Out and Wait’ by The Smiths had come dulled on the stereo, a song meant for slow-dancing, for lying in lavender fields.
Edgar scoffed. ‘Edgar Allan Poe is like, two hundred years –’
She stoppered his mouth with hers, and it was gloriously unexpected. Her lips were frosted with sugar and faeriedust. Through his transparent eyelids he thought he saw the neon marks on their arms and chest lift right from their bodies and encircle them, revolving like wedding bands, the broken dust satellites after two planets clash, after the centre of gravity shifts.
His pulse throbbed in his throat, a jellyfish sting, and he pulled her closer into the collision kiss. He smelt a dizzying perfume miasma and heard sparks and the buckling of glass – Cinderella’s façade, her ballgown, was cracking at the hem and along her waist, where Edgar’s hand lightly rested. Not a ballgown, he soon realised, but a bell jar – the invisible glass that kept her sealed within and everyone else out.
She jerked away as though she’d been bitten. He looked at her and surreptitiously tongued his teeth, praying she hadn’t scratched herself on his silver braces.
She blushed and murmured, ‘I love this song.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Edgar. He’d heard her playing The Smiths before and promptly downloaded the discography.
Blushing again, she rubbed at her lipsticked mouth with the back of her hand. ‘So, um, have you seen Grape?’
‘She’s probably with Pip,’ he said as the memory resurfaced somewhere in the back of his mind. ‘He said he was forming a wolf pack, or something just as mad, and he led a bunch of idiots off into Viv’s –’
Isola ripped out of his embrace. ‘They WHAT?’
The cocktail glass dropped from her limp fingers, and someone behind her yelled out, ‘Taxi!’
But neither of them laughed. Isola was furious.
No Trail of Breadcrumbs
‘Are you kidding, Edgar? You promised!’ she shrieked, and she shoved her way through the crowd, knocking past a boy who spilled his drink over Bridget, who in turn threw her drink in his poor oblivious face.
Isola didn’t stop. The blur of luminous bodies wove around her. She barrelled past the people in the hallway; a hat stand was knocked over, a lamp smashed.
The cold air bulldozed her as she left Number Thirty-seven, her heels sinking into the lawn as she sprinted into the night.
‘Isola! Hold up!’ Edgar called from the doorway.
‘You promised, Edgar!’ Her voice bounced off the outer trees that formed the great wall between Aurora Court and Vivien’s Wood, between Isola Wilde’s rapidly darkening universe and the claustrophobic, always-getting-smaller world of Everyone Else.
Why had she kissed him? What was she thinking? Because it had been her – she had initiated it, and his mouth had formed a waiting answer against the sudden question of her kiss. And then Morrissey’s voice had warped; the music slowed and the scene turned burnt sepia and flickering, a piece of damaged film, and echoing in the back of her mind, a voice, an awful broken voice issuing from a bloodied mouth . . .
‘He deserves better than a dead girl, Isola Wilde . . .’
Isola had gasped against his teeth and broken away, and now she was crashing through the undergrowth, rabbits and foxes scattering like teenage lovers spotlighted by police. She could see plumes of light ghosting distantly between trees. At first she thought they were faeries, but the lights flickered, and she realised: Pip’s idiot wolf pack had carried flaming branches from the bonfire to light their way.
She ran towards the lights, but they split apart, beacons in all directions – her inner compass was liquor-flooded, and the needle spun. She pressed her hands to a nearby tree and asked it for directions, but it seemed as disorientated as her – in fact, its voice was so quiet, she could barely hear it over the pounding of her own heart.
Maybe Florence was right.
‘Isola! Isola!’
A pink diamond catapulted towards her; Isola tried to explain what had happened, but the stitch in her side seemed to have sewn up her lips, too. She wheezed breathlessly, but Rosekin understood nevertheless.
The faerie’s wings trembled excitedly. Rosekin had always adored a drama. ‘Follow me, princess! I’ll guide the way!’
Isola chased Rosekin instead of the darts of flame. Wicked tree roots went out of their way to snag her ankles and the high hem of her tragic wedding dress – why was the forest acting like this? Were the trees angry with her? Did they think, as Isola sometimes did, that she had provoked the mad girl ghost? Florence was somewhere out here, and while Isola had worried about herself and her neighbours, her six older brothers, she’d never stopped to think what effect a spirit like that could be having on the woods.
She ran on, through the soup of eyes watching, unblinking. The starless night hung indifferent above her, and Rosekin streaked too far ahead, leaving Isola to feel her way through the dark, panic crippling the map in her memory, which threw up roadblocks, misnamed avenues and occasional flickers of flame, at first far away and then seemingly right beside her in the trees.
Isola took her shoes off and ran, alien-bright, through the woods she knew and loved and now feared.
Figures streaked wildly up ahead. Torchlight and burning branches, and glowing splashes on forearms and feet, painted shadow-tribes. Isola felt dizzy.
Then an electric-pink shriek.
‘Go back, Isola! Go back!’
‘What?’ Isola skidded to a stop. ‘Rosekin?’
Up ahead she heard
Grape’s obnoxiously loud laugh, Jella calling someone sweetpea and sugardoll. She heard Pip yelling tipsily, his voice spiralling between the trees, ‘I’ve seen The Blair Witch Project, I know what happens next!’ to clouds of laughter from the others. Ellie Blythe started whistling a melody of horror movie themes. Isola stumbled on.
Rosekin’s pink glow had vanished – only the voices guided her now, and even they were fading again.
‘Through here, through here!’ Rosekin called encouragingly in her bell-voice. ‘I’ve found them – Isola, hurry!’
Exhaling at last, Isola burst through the trees and found it, her quarry – a flaming branch. But it had been abandoned, wedged upright in the earth at the centre of a mushroom ring.
No Grape. No Rosekin. Not even Florence.
Isola stood in the Devil’s Tea Party.
Sinister giggles echoed from outside the circle and Isola spun on the spot. The leaves didn’t crackle beneath her. She lifted her foot.
Feathers.
Glossy-like angel feathers, black and grey and brindle-spotted. The feathers of hundreds of birds plucked bald and abandoned, the inedible remains of a corpse’s dinner.
She held her shoes close to her chest, the sharp heels her only weapon.
‘Rosekin?’ she called, whirling on the spot. She called again, louder, ‘GRAPE? ARE YOU IN HERE? IT’S ISOLA!’
The upright flame munched its insatiable way down the branch. No-one shouted back.
‘GRAPE!’ yelled Isola, cupping her mouth. ‘ROSEKIN!’
The ring of red and white mushrooms cast monstrous shadows behind them in the firelight. Her own shadow elongated, and another . . . a second, oddly-shaped shadow, cast from above . . .
Slowly, she looked up.
Above the Devil’s Tea Party, suspended from the canopy, was a long, twisted chain made from the knotted bodies of dead faeries, tied together by their long sharp limbs, limp and lightless. Coloured faeriedust trickled off them like skin cells.
Hanging suspended at the end of the fae-rope was the missing white birdcage and, inside it, crushed, was Grandpa Furlong’s mandolin, and a faerie-sized daisy-petal dress.
The Seventh Princess: An Instalment
‘The second dragon,’ said Mother, ‘was Treachery.’
‘In the dead of the night, while the others slept, the fifth prince sat and watched the moon climb a ladder of stars, thinking only of his sister and whether the moon she watched was the same. On the wind, the second dragon came to him, and offered a golden claw, whispering in its ancient voice, “Trust me, for I am not like my brothers, and I want to help. I will take you to your sister.”
‘Trustworthiness was the second prince’s greatest virtue, and also his flaw. The prince who kept all his sister’s secrets like charms on a necklace chose to trust the second dragon. Without waking his brothers, he climbed upon the dragon’s back, and never kept a secret again in this world.’
Isola Intensive
The young female patient presented at Avalon Charity Hospital early the next morning, suffering dehydration and some degree of confusion.
She’d spent the night alone in Vivien’s Wood.
Her father had found her. ‘She didn’t come home,’ he’d said, looking confused. ‘I woke up and she wasn’t in her room, and I just knew.’
The nurses tilted her bed and plucked at the tubes that pierced her arms, saying in kind voices, you can tell me, dear, I won’t blame you if you did take something you perhaps shouldn’t have – some kind of pill, maybe? – and you just didn’t want to say so in front of the doctor.
The was a memorial picture of Mama Sinclair on the wall. Isola felt like one of the wan, fey girls in the bloodletting wing from a history book she had once read, pierced through by chainsaw-leech jaws, staring dully at the ceiling as she was devoured alive.
Although there was nothing left in her system, the hospital recorded the incident as a suspected drink-spiking, exacerbated by cold temperatures and dehydration.
Isola was propped up in a bed with an IV drip in her arm. A short, bespectacled Indian man thumbed through the clipboard at the end of the bed.
‘Apparently, Isola,’ said the doctor mildly, not looking up from the notes, ‘you told a nurse that your name was Florence?’
Isola shrugged at him. Dr Aziz. Her mother’s doctor.
‘You also told her you got lost in the woods – despite being a frequenter of the area, according to your father – because you forgot to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind you?’
Isola thought of Jamie’s never-fail excuse. ‘I’ve got a black sense of humour,’ she replied.
Dr Aziz eyed her curiously. ‘I haven’t seen you down at the practice for some time,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’m glad, though – you never want to see a face too often in my line of work. I hope you’re keeping well. But you look pale. How have you been sleeping?’
Dr Aziz was a good doctor. His bedside manner was textbook perfect; he’d always breathed on the stethoscope before ice-bolting it to her back, and he’d promised he’d never broken a needle off in anyone’s skin.
But he had not fixed Mother Wilde.
‘Sleep is for the wicked,’ said Isola automatically. She laughed, and squeezed the tube of the IV drip, hoping to pump the liquid through faster so that she’d be on her way sooner.
‘I’ve been getting a bit less than usual. Home troubles,’ she added meaningfully, hoping he’d attribute her demeanour to the stress of dealing with Mother and not with a haunting. From what she remembered, she’d only been in the Devil’s Tea Party for a few minutes, and had stepped out to find it was dawn, and she was turning blue, with thorns in her skirt-hem and wet bones, and she hadn’t the strength to move until Father had come to rescue her.
When the saline bag had drained, Dr Aziz slid the needle from the puckered vein and told her that Father had returned to work and could be reached on his mobile when she needed to be picked up. He put a cartoonish band-aid over the leaky pinhole in her elbow crook, admonishing her kindly, ‘Drinking and the wilderness never mix, Miss Wilde.’ On his way out he left the card for his private practice on her bedside table. An invitation. An unsaid word of concern.
Officially discharged, Isola went downstairs and made the call she’d been dreading.
A faded red car with a painted moustache on the bonnet rolled into the ambulance zone and double-parked. James kicked the passenger door open – the outer handle was still broken. Isola got in.
The previous summer, James had left CDs on the dash and they’d melted in the scorching sun like Dali’s dripping clocks. He liked the way the mess looked now, a little work of absurdist art on Pepito’s ashtray altar. Isola watched the tiny rainbows reflecting in the window, studiously avoiding James’s gaze.
‘So,’ he finally said, his bitten fingernails tapping his heartbeat out on the steering wheel. The rhythm was a little too fast. ‘Eventful night.’
‘Yeah, you should have come.’
‘Why? To keep you out of trouble?’ said James, firing up at once.
‘No,’ said Isola quietly, leaning her aching head against the window. ‘To get in trouble with me.’
Her party outfit was stained with patches of dirt like money pinned to a Greek bride. Pale paint splatters on her forearms disguised the puncture bites of blood drawn out for testing. The soles of her glittering red heels were now eternally wine-scented.
She propped her feet up on the dash and wondered whether Dorothy ever admired her pale ankles in the same way, sheathed in starry blood, or whether she’d imagined the feet of the dead witch who’d owned the shoes first. Dead witch heels, that’s what she was wearing. Not like Cinderella’s at all. And Glinda was no fairy godmother.
‘Where’d you get those?’ James pointed to her knees. Mirroring bruises ringed them, like age lines in a tree trunk.
‘Dunno.’ Isola tugged at the hem of her dress, placing her hands over her knees. ‘Last night, I guess.’
While James watche
d the road, Isola inspected her legs. She poked the markings, which ached and turned yellow at her touch. Fresh black bruises ran all the way around.
Like a single stripe in a pair of stockings.
Alejandro was beside himself.
‘I lost my sisters!’ he roared. ‘And by the grace of Nimue, I will not lose you too!’
Her face hot with furious tears, Isola stormed outside. She wasn’t even sure who or what she was angry at – Father’s distance or Grape’s irresponsibility or Alejandro’s tone.
She threw Dr Aziz’s business card over the plum tree’s shallow grave.
Text: An Interlude
ISOLA ISOLA ISOLA ISOLA ISOLA ISOLA ISOLA
~
WHERE DID U DISAPPEAR OFF 2 LAST NITE?
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CMON BABE I HAVE FUNNY STORIES 2 TELL U
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I JUST SPOKE TO JAMIE AND HE SAID U WERE IN HOSPITAL???
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ISOLA WHAT HAPPENED???? ☹
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PLEASE ANSWER UR PHONE ☹
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I TRIED U GUYS AT HOME, I GUESS NOBODY’S THERE. PLEASE LET ME KNO UR OK SWEETIE
~
R U OK?
Edgar the Ripper
Father had left a scrawled note, his handwriting closer to a bear’s than a worried parent’s: I am very disappointed in you.
That night Father came home in a towering rage.
She heard a few people knock on the door, but his gruff voice would echo, garbled, up the stairs – clearly, she wasn’t allowed visitors. Isola saw Grape, then Ellie Blythe, Pip and Jella arriving together. Edgar visited too. His mother, Lotus Blossom, brought a covered up casserole dish, which Father accepted, but she too was turned away fairly quickly.
