by Allyse Near
At this, the storyteller stumbled to her feet. Lileo was shaking all over. The blood from her wound had now spilled over her breast and was black – ink, from the stories she’d left behind, and the ones she’d taken with her.
‘I still don’t –’ Rosekin began.
‘Because,’ interrupted Isola, ‘killing Lileo would keep Florence here. Unhealed and angry. Always trying to hurt me in an effort to reach me.’ She turned to Lileo. ‘But Florence was trapping you here, too. Your guilt was following you around, in the shape of your little girl.’
The flames still gobbling the tree filled the silence.
‘Mum,’ said Isola to the wood witch, ‘you killed yourself, but not me. You don’t need to feel guilty anymore, because your guilt has gone.’
‘But I –’
‘And I’m fine,’ Isola reassured her, ‘and I forgive you.’
A potent spell had been spoken. The twig-crown ringing Lileo’s head was blossoming, the dirt was falling in clumps from her skin, her split dress was mending, and her tears were falling thicker than Isola’s. A light was shining through the lines in her palms, the cracks in her glass feet.
‘You do?’
The gold light was now shining from her laugh lines, from the inner corners of her eyes, from under her fingernails. Lileo looked towards the far edge of the woods, to the place where Number Thirty-six stood on Aurora Court. ‘We are connected. If I leave, so will she.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. I don’t know what I’ll do without her.’ Isola’s hands were trembling, and she clutched at Alejandro to disguise it. ‘But I can live without her, because she died without me. You have to stop torturing yourself. I mean, you should feel a little guilty – you fucked up, royally, and now you can’t ever come back. But . . .’ Isola looked sideways at the first prince. He always knew what to say.
‘You should also feel proud,’ said Alejandro solemnly, ‘because you left behind a daughter strong enough to weather it.’
‘And you should feel joyous,’ added Christobelle, ‘because now, she’s not going to fall victim to the same dragon.’
‘Feel loved,’ piped up Rosekin. ‘All this time, she only held on to your good side.’
‘Feel blessed,’ added Grandpa Furlong, removing his hat respectfully. ‘You got ten years with her.’
‘And feel at peace,’ said Ruslana lastly, ‘because she’s ready to let you go. All of you.’
Lileo Pardieu crossed her hands over her heart. ‘I loved you,’ whispered the wood witch, the darkest part of Mother Wilde. ‘And I love you still.’
She breathed deeply, exhaled. The light cracked through her, momentarily blinding. Then Lileo Pardieu began to break apart, a corpse rotting in fast motion, but beautifully; golden pieces of her flaked away, until she had dissolved like Mama Sinclair and Florence before her, her ashes mixing at the roots of the Vigour Mortis tree.
Isola fell to her knees.
And then, at midnight, spring came to Vivien’s Wood.
Everything burst into bloom. Flowerbuds ruptured like little red hearts, leaf buds unravelled, a thick carpet of grass shot up towards the sky. The trees’ lagging limbs bounced upwards, energised again. The Vigour Mortis tree trembled, the fires spontaneously quenching before it too exploded into life; bright green leaves fluttered down like snow and the bells on the red ribbon around the trunk jangled with the force of it.
Dusk trotted up behind her. He licked her hair. Inky blood dribbled down his horn and onto her cheek like a tear. Rabbits and foxes and wolves and all manner of Nim-creatures gathered in a ring around them.
But Isola was alone again – the brothers were gone, vanishing on the breeze of the broken spell. She cried into her hands, while at Number Thirty-six a small, shuddering rabbit-creature slipped from his blankets and vanished into the dark, and with a last smile, a relieved exhale, Mother Wilde’s ghost sank under the bubbles in the tub, and the water stirred no more. The last candle blew itself out.
Lost and Found
Edgar was almost home. It was after midnight, the full moon sploshing light along his path. After seeing James he’d stopped by Pip and Majella’s flat, and they’d both listened with concerned faces while he told them what had happened with his girlfriend, getting teary as he did so.
Jella had offered to drive him home – something was surely melting in his shopping bags – but he’d declined, needing the walk to clear his head and compose himself. He was now exhausted, having taken the longest possible road back – he knew he’d get hopelessly lost if he tried to tackle those woods in the dark, and besides, Isola had made him promise. His stomach lurched at the thought of her face, how terrified she’d been when Grape and the rest of Pip’s wolfpack had vanished into their depths. And even if she didn’t want to see him anymore, he’d hold that promise close.
He’d kept his distance to the gloaming woodland, regardless. As he walked he had heard the most awful animal cries, guttural shrieking of varied nightlife, the creaking branches of a horror-movie soundtrack.
He sighed when the single streetlight of Aurora Court came into view. As he pulled his house key from his jeans pocket he heard a familiar cry.
‘Isola!’
Dropping his groceries, he turned to see Grape and Ellie Blythe Nettle ride up outside Number Thirty-six from the opposite direction, stopping under the streetlight. Ellie Blythe stayed perched on her bike, propped up on her lean, freckly legs, and watched with obvious worry as Grape laid her own bike across the lawn and called up to Isola’s window.
‘Grape?’
She whirled around, then hurried towards him.
He realised her jumper was zipped over her pyjamas and gaped at her. ‘Grape – did you sneak out?’
She waved impatiently. ‘Oh, Eddie, please tell me you’ve seen Isola.’
He nodded, gaze lowering.
‘Oh, good, I was so worried – she ran away from school today, something happened, she –’
Ellie Blythe peddled over to them. ‘Edgar, what’s wrong?’ she asked, observing him keenly. Grape’s eyes widened as she fell silent; there was fear reflected in them, behind her purple-framed glasses.
Thrusting his hands in his pockets, Edgar stared at the ground and muttered, ‘She broke up with me.’
Grape turned to Ellie Blythe. ‘Ellie, listen, I have to – I’ll call you –’
‘It’s all right,’ said Ellie Blythe, leaning in to quickly plant a kiss on Grape’s mouth. ‘Go find your friend. Call me later, let me know you’re okay.’
‘I will.’
Seizing Edgar’s hand, Grape pulled him over to the Wildes’ front door, and started knocking frantically.
‘Something happened at school today,’ she explained tersely, listening for movement inside Number Thirty-six. ‘I rang her all afternoon, but my parents wouldn’t let me leave the house – she’s not acting like herself, and I know she cares about you, so it can’t be a coincidence that today of all days –’ Her eyes narrowed at Edgar’s lack of response, and she started slapping her open palm against the door more urgently.
‘Maybe she was acting strangely because she didn’t know how to break up with me,’ said Edgar morosely. He couldn’t focus on what Grape was saying; he could only think of the sudden ruination of their relationship that he’d never seen coming. ‘And James sort of implied that it’s my fault she’s so unhappy, and I don’t know . . .’ He groaned and gripped his hair. ‘I wasn’t a good boyfriend – I saw a picture of her with James, and I never even read those Pardieu stories like she wanted me to, and I looked in the library but I couldn’t find any –’
Grape paused in her systematic bashing in of the Wilde’s front door to stare at him. ‘Well, of course you couldn’t.’
‘Yeah, she told me it’s rare.’
‘Rare, meaning the only copy,’ she replied.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I said: Isola’s got
the only copy in the world of that book.’ Grape’s brow scrunched up in confusion. He could hear the worry in her voice, its insidious creep down her gullet. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Edgar – what do you know about her mother?’
In his daughter’s bedroom at Number Thirty-six, Father Wilde stood in the red lamplight, staring at the graffitied wall, the scrambled sentences like a cut-up songbook. As he sank onto the bed a book tumbled to the floor from the bedside table and flicked open from a gush of ghostly wind. Its pages fell open on the story Wolverine Queen. Father Wilde picked up the book his daughter had once dropped in the blood-and-bathwater.
His wife’s careful calligraphy had turned harsh and scrabbling on these pages, a story sketched out in haste.
Long, loop-lettered passages of text were completely obscured by great rust stains that cracked the page. Dried blood, Father Wilde realised with a thrill of horror. A few of the pages were crusted together, and he could only interpret fragments of the story’s ending, a nonsensical list of instructions for Isola from beyond the grave, it seemed.
She was woman, she was wildwood, she was whore, witch, wolverine. The gold ring on her finger shackled her to reality, to the world beyond the wilderness – and my Isola, this woman, she loved you so deeply that she wanted to wrap you softly in herself, only to protect you, not realising that those bones of hers would instead form a cage around you.
In her birdcage the daughter sung, until
Don’t ever let anyone silence your voice
Don’t ever stay in the cage
Keep your tread light on the edge of the woods – don’t stray too deep into either territory – that is the only place where Children of Nimue can find happiness
Don’t ever let your father see what’s lurking in your Wilde eyes – he will recognise it as me, and he will give up on you
my little princess
Don’t deny yourself your oddities
But DON’T FOLLOW AFTER ME
Lost and Found – Part Deux
He stopped reading after the rambling first page.
How symbolic, he thought. A tale about a girl whose mother left her caged and half-blind to the whole world –
‘Oh, Lileo.’ Father Wilde heaved, dropping the tome, the bloody relic.
And although he was harsh on his daughter for her reckless behaviour, he knew it wasn’t her fault, not really – he knew that his wife had done it; his love; his queen – had spirited away their daughter to a gloaming, wooded place, and even if he sold the house and packed up in the car and moved far, far, far away, his daughter would remain, in that brain-cage, behind those bone-bars, somewhere she couldn’t be reached.
And he loved his wife, and he hated her – Lileo, who had lain there in the hellish-pink bathtub, in wait, almost, for the child to take the last few stairs, to slosh through the bloodied puddle in her new party shoes and open a door that could never be closed.
He’d once heard that when Pandora finally wrestled closed that wretched Box of hers, only Hope remained inside.
All Father Wilde had was Isola, and he would put locks on the lid if only to keep her safe.
He was dragged from his spiralling thoughts by a pounding on the door. Blinking rapidly, he dropped the book on the bed – not noticing the curiously rabbit-shaped hollow in the crumpled bedsheets – and went downstairs.
‘Mr Wilde!’ said Isola’s friend breathlessly – Grace? – when he opened the door.
‘Is Isola in?’ The boy from across the street said urgently.
‘No,’ said Father Wilde. ‘She’s –’ He racked his brain but came up blank. ‘Not here,’ he finished lamely.
The girl’s eyes widened, and the boy – Edward? Elgar? – closed his briefly, as though something terrible had just been confirmed.
‘Where is she?’ the boy said.
‘We need to see her. Something happened at school, she –’
‘Mr Wilde, it’s really important –’
‘What is?’ said a tired voice.
And on the doorstep the three of them turned, and there was Isola, weariness in every crease of her torn black dress, twigs in her hair and blood trickling from her purple-bandaged right eye.
Beautiful Things
The garden was not quite as beautiful as she’d always thought. The stench of neglect curdled it before her eyes. Even the roses were beginning to rot, grey and crumpled like smoker’s lungs.
After reassuring Grape and Edgar that yes, she was all right, and yes, she’d been acting bizarrely of late, but yes, that was past, and no, she hadn’t meant anything she’d said – Isola gave Edgar a meaningful look upon speaking the latter – Father shooed them off and took her to the hospital.
Overnight they sat together in the uncomfortable plastic seats, waiting to be seen by a doctor. Isola wouldn’t speak about what had happened and Father didn’t press it; he just gripped her hand and talked gruffly about maybe visiting his parents in London sometime, and whether she’d introduce him to her boyfriend anytime soon, and how he’d read in the newspaper about the ecologists the Avalon council had hired to try to save the forest, finally noticing its sickly state.
Awkwardly, Isola leaned her head against his shoulder, and just as slowly, moving as though he might startle her, Father Wilde raised his free hand and gently stroked it through her hair. His fingers found the natural part in her curls, ignoring the matted blood and caked-on dirt, and she realised that even now, while only speaking of mundane things to fill the sterile white void of the hospital lobby, Father Wilde was still telling her a story.
Isola left the hospital at dawn, her eye covered by a white eyepatch while the cut in the egg-orb healed.
Her room was empty of supernatural rabbits, the window slightly open, like the part between freshly kissed lips. She was expecting to find a creature made of stone, but she hoped that this meant their contract was broken, and he had survived and gone to eat the thyme of other girls who needed him more than they knew.
In the attic, she looked at photographs of Mother, which, she realised – she’d known all along – were photographs of Lileo Pardieu, the dead French-born fairytale maven, and her beauty, at least, wasn’t imagined. There was Lileo with a blooming belly, and in a wedding dress, and the portrait they’d placed atop her coffin at the funeral, and Isola was ten, and her mother was Lileo Pardieu, sometimes Lileo Wilde if the letters and bills were addressed incorrectly.
Lileo, born in France to strict Catholics who rejected the magic she lived by, the half-girl half-creature made up of night and stars. She had gone in reverse, from the city of metal and glass to the forest, with her husband whose surname she loved but didn’t take and, with her foal-baby, she had tried to build a new life.
But her old lives had weighed on her, thoughts and memories like anvils, pearls around her neck, dragging her back to the bottom of the sea. Lileo – the curse word, the lover’s word, ancient and untranslatable, the word that summoned bats and north winds when spoken backwards. The magical name of a glittering girl who couldn’t live for her daughter, who couldn’t die for herself.
The photograph at the back of the book of fairytales was merely placed between the pages, an antique flower left for pressing. A picture of Isola’s mother in her gangly punk youth, skinny as Death, clad in cat-burglar black. Mother. Mother upstairs in the bath, Mother spritzing her neck with floral perfume, Mother stretched out in a lavender field, peeling off her cyborg boots, combing her hair, lying dead as Ophelia in her lukewarm stew, handing Isola a bound book of instructions, histories and lies . . .
Isola conjured an image of Mother sun-dappled orange under the plum tree, writing in the back of the book at her tenth birthday party, the chirp of crickets in the grass, a glass of champagne growing warm by her side.
Underneath the author’s photograph were the last written words of Lileo Pardieu – just as Isola had always suspected.
I will always be unhappy and I fea
r that I will poison you with it. I want you always to be as you are in this moment. I see you now, Isola, and you’re laughing, smiling, happy. I see your gorgeous hair trapping sunlight. I see cake on your hands and grass stains on your bare feet. I see such joy in my little girl. A future gold-gilded and safer without me. And what beautiful things I see . . .
The last line the words of St Dominic, patron saint of juvenile delinquents, of petty criminals and teen anarchists and terribly sad people about to commit an unchangeable act.
Isola pushed open the bathroom door – the door from her nightmare – and the curtain was drawn and the chandelier was lit, and all the candles were melted down and the tub was bone dry and Mother was dead.
And now in a secret graveyard a chunk of rock that might have once been a volcano piece or a dinosaur bone had the name LILEO PARDIEU stamped upon it in silver lettering, with dates and a dash and a sad little phrase that somehow held thoughts of candlelight and new dawns and Living Forever. Things that flicker and snuff out. Things like Death that are beautiful because they are so terrible, things like heaven that are so terrible because they are so very far away.
The brother-princes were gone, hadn’t even said goodbye – it must have hurt them, but it hurt her more. Florence was gone, but each brother had proven that there were sleeping dragons inside all of them, that they could never again trust themselves around her. Perhaps now the ghosts had crossed the universe, the Fury was knee-deep in some poor girl’s blood, the mermaid was stormcalling, and the faerie was with Mama Sinclair, sleeping in the honeysuckle.
Mother’s bedroom was empty, the curtains drawn. On the bedside table were long-expired medications, dusty photographs of a small Isola and a tall stack of books, marked to show her place – classic fairytales, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Mother’s own scribblings, Nimue legends, unicorns and dragons and girls otherwise . . .
Hearing Daisies
At the funeral Isola stood in her lace party dress and monochrome striped stockings. She read aloud, in a cracked voice that bled down the aisles, the forest’s broken songbird:
