The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  “Do you think it would draw him out, Adversary, if I set you free?”

  “Oh, most certainly,” Puck said, visibly trembling.

  “Milady!” said Fell.

  “You can’t be thinking of it!” said Lyon.

  “He is my friend,” said Oak, “but you would make him nobody’s friend!”

  “You are not that sad,” said Fell. “No one is that sad!”

  But I am, she thought, standing up and shaking them off. And though she told herself it was a reasoned choice, that freeing this monster would call her husband back more swiftly and certainly than her entreaties of love and remorse ever could, duty to his subjects, and care for all those Puck would threaten being more important to him than her happiness, death was in her heart when she spoke the word. Her courtiers, liegemen first even though they had been her closest companions in the past year, tried to stop her. They leaped upon her with spells and claws and whirling bits of wire-sharp string. Oak came at her bottom first, his rabbit’s tail exuding soporifics strong enough to put an elephant to sleep for a week. But she was their Queen for a reason. She brushed them aside in a moment. It was over so quickly that the rest of the host had barely marked the commotion before she leaned down and spoke the word to Puck.

  “Poodle,” she said, and the chain around Puck’s neck shattered into countless pieces. She said the word very quietly, but it was heard loud as a klaxon all over the hill, and then a little softer all over San Francisco, so husbands turned to wives in countless living rooms and bedrooms and said, “Did you just call me a poodle?” and plays and movies and a single opera were briefly spoiled by the incongruous word, spoken softly but very clearly. Every faerie knew immediately what it signified, and they all ran screaming toward the edge of the hill as soon as they heard it, aiming for Tunisia or Ireland or Samoa, anyplace but here where the monster was. In a few seconds, only Puck and the Queen were left on top of the hill. He was rubbing gently at his neck and looked no different than before, except that he stood much straighter, as if a weight had been lifted from him. She no longer looked sad or droopy but had gathered all her power to herself, ready to fight the Beast she had freed and make a noise that her husband must hear. Her subjects, had any been around to see her, would have been proud. But Puck only bowed to her again.

  “Milady,” he said, “I am in your debt, and so I will eat you last.”

  3

  It took them both a long time to understand that the boy was sick, though she would point out that she was the first to notice he was unhappy, and had sought to remedy his discontent with sweeter treats and more delightful distractions. She thought it was evidence that she loved him more, how she noticed first that something was wrong, and she said as much to her husband, when they were still trying to outdo each other in love for the child, before he became sick enough to demonstrate to them that they both loved him equally and immeasurably.

  Neither of them had any experience with illness. They had each taken many mortal lovers but had cast them off before they could become old or infirm, and all their previous changelings had stayed healthy until they were returned to the mortal world. “There was no way you could have known,” said Dr. Blork, the junior partner in the two-person team that oversaw the boy’s care, on their very first visit with him. “Every parent feels they ought to have caught it earlier, but really it’s the same for everyone, and you couldn’t have done any better than you did. In fact, you did great. You did perfect.” He was trying to make them feel better, to assuage a perceived guilt, but at that point neither Titania nor her husband really knew what guilt was, not ever having felt it in all their long days.

  They were in the hospital, not far from the park on the hill under which they made their home, in the middle of the night—early for them, since they slept all day under the hill and had taught the boy to do the same—but the doctors, Beadle and Blork, were obviously fatigued. The four of them were sitting at a table in a small windowless conference room, the doctors on one side, the parents on the other. The boy was back in his room, drugged with morphine, sleeping peacefully for the first time in days. The doctors were explaining things, earnestly and patiently, but Titania was having trouble following along and found herself distracted by the notion that she should be delighted by the newness of this experience, for she and her husband had always been seekers after novelty, and yet already she did not like this at all.

  “A boy should not be sick,” she said suddenly to Dr. Blork, cutting him off as he was beginning to describe some of the side effects of the treatment they were proposing. “A boy should play … that is his whole purpose.”

  “It’s hard to see him like this,” Dr. Blork said, after a glance at his superior, “and I’m so sorry that your beautiful boy is so sick. It’s going to be a long haul, and he may be sicker before he’s better, but we’ll get him through it.” He started talking again about specifics, the drugs they would use—the names seemed rather demonic to her—and the timing of the treatments, which parts could be done at home and which parts must be done in the hospital. This was suddenly very boring. She waved her hand at them, a gesture practiced over centuries, and even though there was no magic in it, Blork was instantly silent.

  “You will do your mortal thing,” she said sadly. “I know all I need to know.”

  “Pardon me?” said Dr. Blork.

  “Leukemia!” said Oberon, breaking the silence he’d kept all through the meeting. “Leukemia!” he said again, and it sounded as if he were somehow trying out the idea behind the word. He was smiling and crying into his beautiful beard. “Can you cure it?”

  “Yes!” said Dr. Blork. But Dr. Beadle said, “Maybe.”

  She could not remember the quarrel that brought her the boy. A real or perceived dalliance or slight, a transgression on her part or her husband’s—who knew? They had been quarreling for as long as they had been in love. She forgot the quarrels as soon as they were resolved, except for a vague sense, when they fought about something, that they had fought about it before. But the gifts her husband brought her to reconcile—even when she was at fault—she never forgot. The boy was one of those gifts, brought home to the hill, stolen from its crib in the dark of morning and presented to her by dawn. “That is not sufficient to your crime against me,” she remembered saying, and remembered as well that she barely paid the child any mind during her restless sleep, except to push it away from her when it rolled too close. Oberon had rubbed poppies on its eyes to quiet its crying, so it was still sleeping soundly when she woke. For a while she lay on her back, watching the stars come out on the ceiling of her grotto, listening to the little snores. Oberon was snoring more magnificently. She turned on her side to better look at the child, and noticed for the first time how comely it was, how round and smooth were its face and shoulders and belly, how soft-appearing and lustrous was its hair. It made a troubled face as it slept. She put her hand out to touch the child, very lightly. Right away it sighed and lost the troubled look, but then it gave a little moan. She draped her hand over its shoulder, and when it did not quiet she rolled it closer to her. It stopped moaning only when she held it in her arms, and put her nose in its hair, and breathed in its scent—poppies and milk and warm earth. Oberon had woken and was looking at her and smiling, propped on one elbow with a hand against his ear, the other lost under the sheets, but she could hear him scratching himself. “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “I am indifferent to it,” she said, holding the boy closer, and squeezing him, and putting her face in his neck.

  “This place is so ugly,” Titania said. “Can anything be done about that?” She was talking to the oncology social worker, one of a stream of visiting strangers who came to the room, a woman who had described herself as a person to whom one might address problems or questions that no one else could solve or answer. Nonmedical things, she had said. You know—everything else!

  “But you’ve made the room just lovely,” the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexan
dra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping track of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive and actually rather faerie-like. Alice gestured expansively around the room and smiled, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy’s own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him out of the room whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.

  “I don’t mean the room,” Titania said, “I mean everything else. This whole place. And the people, of course … Where did you find them? Look at you, for instance. Are you deliberately homely? And that Dr. Blork—hideous! He is beyond help, but you … I could do you up.”

  Alice cocked her head. She did not hear exactly what Titania was saying. Everything was filtered through the same disguising glamour that hid the light in Titania’s face, that gave her splendid gown the appearance of a track suit, that made the boy appear clothed when they brought him in, when in fact he had been naked. The same spell made it appear that he had a name, though his parents had only ever called him Boy, never having learned his mortal name, because he was the only boy under the hill. The same spell sustained the impression that Titania worked as a hairdresser and that Oberon owned an organic orchard and that their names were Trudy and Bob.

  “You need to take care of yourself,” Alice said, thinking Titania was complaining about feeling ugly. “It might feel a little selfish, but you can’t take care of him if you can’t take care of yourself. Did you know we have a manicurist who comes every Wednesday?”

  “You are so sweet,” Titania said, “even if you are homely. Did you ever wish you had the eyes of a cat?”

  “A hat? You can buy one downstairs. For when his hair falls out, you mean. That’s weeks away, you know. But the baseball caps are awfully cute. But listen, not everybody wants to talk about this at first, and not everybody has to. I’m getting ahead of myself … of ourselves.”

  “Or would you rather be a cat entirely? Yes, I think that would make you lovely.” Titania raised her hands and closed her eyes, seeking for words sufficient to the spell she had in mind. They came to her in an image, words printed on a little girl’s purse she had glimpsed in the waiting room outside the surgical suites downstairs. She started to speak them—Hello, Kitty!—but Oberon walked in before she had the first syllable out.

  “What are you doing to the nurse?” he asked her.

  “She’s the social worker. And we were only talking.” Alice’s head was turned to the side and she was staring at Titania with a mixture of curiosity and devotion. The glamour had slipped as Titania was about to strike, and the woman had seen her true face. “Her name is Alice.”

  “Stop playing,” Oberon said. “He’s almost finished. Don’t you want to be there when he wakes?” The boy was downstairs getting things done to him; a needle in his hip to take the marrow from his bones and another in his neck to give him an IV that would last through the weeks and months of the treatment.

  “I’ll just stay here and wait,” she said, sitting on the bed and idly petting the Beastie when it sidled up to her.

  “He’ll be looking for you,” Oberon said.

  “You’ll be there.”

  “He’ll ask for you.”

  “Tell him I’m waiting here with his Beastie.” She lifted it into her lap, as if to show him the truth of what she was saying but also to demonstrate that she was settling in. Alice, still standing between them, was looking back and forth, catching glimpses of their majesty, as their mounting anger caused them to let it slip, and getting drunker on them.

  “Did I give you your meal tickets yet?” Alice asked them. “The cafeteria is really not so bad, for what it is.”

  “You’d rather laze about than comfort him. Do you love him at all?”

  “More than you do, and more than you’ll ever understand. You like to see him undone and ailing, but I can’t bear to look at him like that.” She had drugged the child herself many times, when he was younger, but now she could not stand to see him in the vulnerable, unnatural sleep the anesthesia brought.

  “Those are very normal feelings,” said Alice. “I validate those feelings. Haven’t I been saying how hard it is to see him like this?” She turned to Oberon. “Haven’t I?”

  “Heartless and cowardly,” Oberon said. “A most unattractive combination.”

  “That’s normal too,” Alice said. “The anger. But don’t you know it’s not her that you’re angry at?”

  “You stupid sour cock,” said Titania, and then they just called each other names, back and forth, getting angrier and angrier at each other while Alice turned back and forth so swiftly it seemed she was spinning.

  “How can I make you understand how totally normal all of this is?” Alice cried aloud at last, just before collapsing in a heap. The Beastie, whose nature was to comfort, tried to go to her, but Titania held it back.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” said her husband.

  At first he was like her own sort of Beastie, a creature who followed her around and was pleasant to cuddle with. It didn’t take long before he stopped his agitated weeping, before he stopped crying for the mortal parents whom he’d hardly known, and then he smiled for everyone, even for Oberon, who barely noticed him for months. He was delightful, and she was fond of him in the way she was always fond of the changelings, and yet she had dresses and shoes of which she was just as fond. She liked to dress him and feed him, and took him to bed every night, even when Oberon complained that he did not like to have pets in the bed. He might get lost under the covers and migrate by morning to some remote corner, and she would half wake in the early afternoon, feel around for him, and not sleep again until she had gathered him up.

  He grew. This was unexpected—she had completely forgotten even this basic fact of human physiology since the last changeling—but quite exciting. He wouldn’t fit anymore in the footed pajamas in which he’d been stolen, and then she kept him naked. Many evenings she would stare at him, hoping to see him get bigger. She liked to feed him, initially just milk and dew and a little honey on her finger, but then she woke one morning to find him attached to her breast, and she wondered why she hadn’t fed any of the other changelings this way. It was easy enough to make food come out of her nipple: not-quite-ordinary milk at first, but then less usual substances: weak wine and chocolate and peanut butter and yogurt.

  It wasn’t long before Oberon regretted his gift and started to hide the child somewhere on the hill, attended by faeries, so he could have his wife to himself. She tolerated that for weeks, but within a few months she couldn’t stand to be apart from the boy, though she couldn’t really say why. Perhaps it was because he smiled at everything she said and never argued with her; for months and months he never even said a word, but only babbled. It was different from talking to her husband, who could turn any conversation into an argument, or from talking to the members of her court, who always seemed to be listening for ways to curry her favor.

  The boy grew, and changed, and became ever more delightful to her, and she imagined that they could go on forever like that, that he would always be her favorite thing. It would have been perfect, and maybe it would have been better if he had stayed her favorite thing—a toy and not a son—because now he would just be a broken toy. She ought to have had the foresight to make him dumb, or Oberon ought to have, since the boy was his terrible gift to her. But one evening the boy ran back to her, and climbed upon her throne, and giggled at the dancing faerie bodies leaping and jumping all around them, and put his face to her breast, and sighed a word at her, molly or moony or middlebury—she still didn’t know what it was exactly. But it was close enough to mommy to ruin ev
erything.

  They poisoned the boy exquisitely. Beadle and Blork had reviewed it all with them, the names and the actions and the toxicities of the variety of agents they were going to use to cure him, but of that whole long conversation only a single phrase of Blork’s had really stuck. “We’ll poison him well again,” he’d said, rather too cheerily, and he had explained that the chemotherapy was harder on the cancer than on the healthy boy parts, but that it was still hard, and that for the next many months he would act like a boy who had been poisoned. “Sometimes we’ll poison him a little,” he said, while Beadle frowned more and more vigorously at him, “and sometimes we’ll poison him a lot.” And indeed in that first week it seemed to Titania that they were poisoning him as vigorously and enthusiastically as anyone ever poisoned anybody, for or against their own good. The chemotherapy came in colors—straw yellow and a red somewhere between the flesh of a watermelon and a cherry—but did not fume or smoke the way some of her own most dramatic poisons had. There was nothing in them she could comprehend, though she peered at the bags and sniffed at the tubes, since there was no magic in them. She was only reluctantly interested in the particulars of the medications, but Oberon wanted to know all about them and talked incessantly about what he learned, parroting what Beadle and Blork said or reading aloud from the packets of information the nurses gave them. He proclaimed that he would taste the red liquid himself, to share the experience with the boy, but in the end he made a much lesser faerie do it, a little brownie named Doorknob, who smacked his lips and proclaimed that it tasted rusty in the same way that blood smelled rusty, and went on to say he thought he liked the taste of it and was about to sample it again when he went suddenly mad, tearing at his hair and clawing at his face and telling everyone his bowels had become wild voles, and perhaps they had, since there was an obvious churning in his hairy little belly. Oberon knocked him over the head with his fist, which brought him sleep if not peace, and though he had previously been one of the meekest spirits over the hill, every day after that he was angry and abrasive, and more than anything else he liked to pick a fight.