Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 29

by Edited by Kelly Link

  “The worried look. I’ve seen it before. More than once, actually.” The girl smiled, and Vinnie noticed that one of her front incisors was chipped. “Would you like to register with the library? Only you can’t take books out without a ticket.”

  Vinnie stood at the admissions counter while Alison Coombes filled out forms and sealed a rectangular slip of cardboard in plastic laminate. As she opened the book to stamp it, Vinnie suddenly found herself asking for her phone number.

  She stayed up most of the night reading. The house remained quiet; the fairies most likely sensed that she was awake. The book was entitled This Land is Their Land: A Secret History of the Menniken People. The author was Siobhan O’Rhiordan, a lecturer in natural philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Vinnie soon learned that the main matter of dispute between the various factions of fairy scholars was not whether fairies existed but how they had got here. Some believed that the menniken, as they called them, had leaked through from a parallel dimension. Others argued that the menniken were earth’s ‘natural’ inhabitants, and that Homo sapiens were just a monstrous genetic aberration. O’Rhiordan discussed these theories in detail over several chapters. Vinnie found her arguments entertaining and even plausible, but the parts of the book she found most relevant were the reported sightings. There was an extended section recounting the experiences of a war widow in Accrington whose life had been made a misery by a troupe of menniken intent on stealing the brass buttons from her deceased husband’s dress uniform.

  They like bright things, the woman said. It’s an obsession with them. It’s like having rats, only worse.

  The disturbances went on for two years. The woman moved house in the end, though O’Rhiordan didn’t say if this cured the problem or if the menniken upped sticks and moved with her. Vinnie found she didn’t care much either way. She wasn’t going to sell Sharps Cottage. Against all her expectations she had begun to form an attachment to the place. She wasn’t going to be chased out by a bunch of fairies.

  O’Rhiordan’s book had a lot to say in the matter of what she was up against, but frustratingly little advice on what she was supposed to do about it. All her sources seemed to agree that if you resorted to poisoning, or trapping, or any other kind of forcible intervention you were liable to end up with a lot more to worry about than noises under the floorboards or a few items of broken crockery.

  The only way, it seemed, was to outwit them. She thought about phoning Alison and asking if she had any ideas, but decided it was too obvious and too soon.

  There were six menniken in all, four adult males, a younger boy, and a teenage girl. They hated electric light, but experiments with candles and an infrared lamp of the kind used by moth collectors had allowed Vinnie to gain some detailed sightings.

  They didn’t have wings; anyone who said they did had no idea what they were talking about. Vinnie thought the wings fallacy had probably grown out of the fact that they moved so quickly. Their feet did touch the ground, but their footsteps formed a single liquid movement, something between a skid and a glide. She couldn’t work out how they did that, only that they seemed less bound by gravity than ordinary people.

  They fought often among themselves, but the fights never lasted for long and seemed quickly forgotten. They had a fondness for practical jokes, and stripped off to copulate with each other on the slightest pretext. In their lewdness and cunning they reminded Vinnie of the street children she had seen once in a TV documentary, salvaging copper wire from a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Sao Paolo.

  The girl was the boldest, shinnying up the leg of the bedside table to gaze longingly into the luminous face of Vinnie’s wristwatch. The night after this first happened, Vinnie took the small grey cardigan and left it lying in full view on the upstairs landing. She heard the menniken briefly before dawn, crashing around in the kitchen after biscuits, but when she got up a couple of hours later the cardigan was still there. It was the same on the following night, and the night after that. Vinnie wondered if her handling of the garment had contaminated it in some way. Perhaps they simply didn’t like the way she smelled.

  As she became accustomed to their presence she came to realise they had a smell of their own: a musky, acrid odour like the sap of dandelions. In the places they frequented most it was strong as cats’ piss. She tried washing down these areas with Dettox, but it didn’t seem to make much difference, or at least not for long.

  She knew they were trying to work out where she had hidden the bracelet. The woman in O’Rhiordan’s book had spent a lot of time touring junk shops and jumble sales, trying to locate an alternative set of buttons that might fool the menniken. Vinnie could see good sense in this. The only problem was that she had no idea where she might get hold of a set of fake fairy skulls.

  A fortnight after her trip to the library she called Alison.

  “They’re still here,” she said. She felt no need to explain what she was talking about.

  “Hey,” Alison said. “Would you like me to come over?”

  She arrived about an hour later with a bottle of wine and a Thai takeaway.

  “An army always thinks better on its stomach,” she said.

  “It’s ‘marches.’ An army always marches on its stomach.”

  “Well, the same goes for thinking, I’m sure.”

  They ate the food and talked. Vinnie discovered that as well as working at the library Alison was studying at Kent University for a degree in anthropology.

  “Is that how you know so much?” Vinnie said. “About them, I mean?”

  Alison giggled. “That would be pushing the envelope a bit, don’t you think. You know what academics are like when faced with original research. What do you reckon they’d say when they saw my thesis?” She toyed with the end of her plait. “Actually you’re quite close to the mark there. What I’m interested in is alternate histories. The anthropology was just a way of making contacts.”

  “And have you? Made contacts?”

  “You’d be surprised.” She took a swig of wine. “What kind of name is Vinnie? Is it short for something?”

  “Lavinia. I totally hate it.”

  “I don’t know, I think it’s rather beautiful.”

  Vinnie felt tipsy and warm and full of Thai food. “None of this helps us though, does it?”

  This time they both laughed. Vinnie showed Alison the grey cardigan, and the cupboard under the stairs. Then she showed her the fairy skulls bracelet. Alison put it on, slipping it over her wrist without opening the catch. She moved her hand from side to side. The fairy skulls knocked together like wooden beads.

  “And you think this is what they are after?”

  “I’m sure it is. My Aunt Jude knew something about it, but she’s dead now.”

  They stared at one another in silence. The unspoken question hung between them, a seventh, invisible skull, dangling from the end of its golden chain.

  “It was cancer,” Vinnie said finally. Alison nodded but would not meet her eye.

  “Well,” she said. “If they’re so crazy to get their hands on it let’s let them have it. Not really,” she added hastily. “We’ll just let them believe that they can.”

  Alison’s idea was simple: they would pretend to leave the bracelet unguarded, and hope to lure the menniken into a trap.

  “You go to bed as normal,” Alison said. “I’ll camp down in the back room. That way we’ve got both floors covered.”

  “But what are you going to do when they come out?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll think of something.”

  Vinnie gave her a blanket and some cushions and went upstairs. She put the radio on in the bedroom as Alison had told her to and then began to undress. She wondered what Alison was doing. The thought of her in the room below made her feel strangely light-headed. She thought she would take a long time going to sleep, or most likely she would not sleep at all, but the wine had dulled her senses and in fact she dozed off almost at once. The sound of breaking china awa
kened her, and she dashed downstairs to the kitchen. Alison was pressed up against the back door. She had something in her hand, one of the gold-rimmed saucers from the Spode tea service Vinnie had been given by her work colleagues as a leaving present. The remains of another lay gleaming in the moonlight on the kitchen floor.

  Somehow they had managed to get the bracelet off the table. Vinnie felt amazed and a little frightened by their bravery; the weight of the gold would have been enough to crush any one of them. As she stood there watching she saw the boy fairy straining in its yoke, hauling it step by step towards the open pantry. His tiny, beechnut face was contorted with effort.

  “I thought you had a plan!” Vinnie said. She took a step forward, almost treading on the broken saucer.

  “Don’t get too close,” cried Alison. “The little monster just tried to go for me.”

  Then I’ll squash him like a bug, Vinnie thought, a line from some movie or other. She laughed, surprised to hear the laugh sounding almost normal. Mostly she was furious. She was damned if they were going to get away with this. She reached out with both her hands, grabbing one of the skulls and trapping it between two fingers. She thought the creature would give up the struggle as soon as it sensed her presence but it braced itself against the floor and began to pull back.

  Vinnie dropped the bracelet in surprise, waving her fingers at the menniken as if trying to ward off a poisonous insect. She made brief and unpleasant contact with its exposed midriff. Its skin was moist and slippery, covered with sweat, she supposed, from the monumental effort of dragging the chain. Recoiling in disgust, she wondered if she would ever get the smell off her. Then it turned in her grasp and bit her. Its teeth sliced into the soft triangle of webbing between her thumb and forefinger, sliding down through the flesh like carpet needles. The pain was gut-churning and intense, as if someone had thrust her fingers into a food mixer. She screamed and tried to pull her hand away but the thing was battened on like a leech. She shook her fingers from side to side, trying to dislodge it and panicky with horror. From somewhere far away she heard Alison, banging two saucepan lids together like cymbals. Then she went out like a light.

  When she came to, Alison was bathing her hand in a bowl of warm water.

  “Thank God you’re back,” she said. “You were away with the fairies there for quite a while.”

  “That’s not funny,” Vinnie said, but then realised it was. Her hand was throbbing, and felt as if it had swollen up to twice its normal size. Alison was using a dishcloth soaked in Dettox to clean the wound. The feel of the cloth against her skin was coarsely abrasive, like the tongue of some great jungle cat. Antiseptic scent unfurled inside her head like a mushroom cloud.

  Vinnie closed her eyes, drawing air in sharply over her teeth. She could taste things in it: the sweet nicotine of pollen grains, the grey reek of dust, the astringent headrush of jet fuel from an airliner passing over on its way to Helsinki.

  She pressed her cheek to the ground. Beneath the floorboards, beetles squabbled, rumbling backwards and forwards like armoured cars. When Alison leaned over to speak to her, Vinnie could sense her concern, spiralling outwards from her throat like a skein of pink silk.

  “It doesn’t look too bad,” she said. “Kind of like a hamster bite.” The feathered end of her plait brushed the side of her neck.

  “I’ll be fine,” Vinnie said. She tried to get up, but the effort felt colossal. We’re like the dinosaurs, she thought. O’Rhiordan had it right all the time. It’s us that are the old ones. We’re a dying breed.

  Knowledge seemed to pour into her mind, filling it to bursting with new secrets. She felt that if she had to absorb one more thing she would burst into flames.

  It’s like that man in Dickens, she thought. Spontaneous human combustion. I wonder if a fairy bit him, too.

  “Perhaps I’ll just sleep for a bit,” she said. She smiled at Alison in what she hoped was a reassuring way and then blacked out. The next thing she knew it was daylight. There was a cushion under her head, and she had been covered with a blanket. Alison was fast asleep at the kitchen table.

  “That should do it,” said Alison. She placed the tin in the hole and began packing earth around it with both hands. Inside the tin the fairy skull bracelet was zipped inside a leather pouch and rolled up in two yards of bubblewrap. The hole, at the base of the willows, was three feet deep.

  Once buried, Vinnie supposed, it would stay buried. The menniken would know where it was, but by Alison’s calculation it would take them years, perhaps decades, to excavate.

  They hoped the task would draw their attention away from the house.

  It was a clear blue day, like so many that summer. The fields and hedgerows around Chilham shouted with insects. All the windows of Sharps Cottage were thrown open, and the smells of paint and new varnish tangled, like cellophane streamers, with the outside air.

  A van was coming for the last of Jude’s furniture at two o’clock. After that they were going into Canterbury to look at bathroom tiles.

  We’re a doomed race, but so what? Vinnie thought. We still need somewhere decent to wash our hands.

  She turned her face towards the sun. It blazed above her, gulping hydrogen. The invisible stars applauded, a crowd transfixed by the fire-eater at a country fair.

  Yaga Dreams of Growing Up

  Eileen Wiedbrauk

  When Yaga grows up, she wants to have a house on chicken legs so it can walk away from solicitors, would-be-thieves, nosy strangers, village raiders, tax collectors, Anya the cartwright’s daughter, and all of Anya’s friends. Yaga wants handsome men to ride by this house, dawn, dusk, noon, and night, one for each marker of the sun’s passage. She wants a talking cat to tidy the house and do the mending. A hound dog to take out the trash. She wants a fence made from the bones of the schoolgirls who tripped her on accident. She wants iron teeth to bite through the hands of those who point and call her names, who make fun of her hand-me-down dresses, or her worn-through shoes, or her calloused hands, or her crazy aunts. Yaga won’t grow up like her aunts: won’t make charms and dance naked beneath the waxing moon, won’t cry over a husband she had to turn into a frog for fooling around. When Yaga lives in the chicken leg house, no one will send boys to knock on the door and smile and lie to Yaga about how pretty she looks. They won’t go back to Anya to laugh and snicker about how pathetic Yaga is, how gullible and homely. Because Yaga will take the head of the next boy who comes and use his skull as her doorknob, the next as a knocker, next a gatepost cap, then a bird bath, a paving stone, a flowerpot, until Anya sends no more or there are no more left to send. Yaga will at last be free. She will never let herself be like Anya, or her aunts, or any of the others, because she is different, better, born to be stronger, born to be something the rest of them aren’t.

  The house on chicken legs will wear shabby with age. The thatch roof will leak. The chimney will let in a draft. The chicken legs will tremble at the knee from arthritis before Yaga can realize it hasn’t been enough, that witches are made not born.

  Dietus Interruptus

  Ian Breen

  Montal held his fork up, watching steam rise from a gray lump of pork piccata. It was his first bite from the second package and he wondered: from whence these pigs? Had the animals sliced neatly inside them known one another? Had they come from the same farm—been brothers, even? Or would they meet for the first time in digestion? He chewed, relishing the crackle of fat between his teeth, and toyed with the idea of writing a monograph on the familial relations between common foodstuffs. As he cut another piece, thinking of books he might consult in the library after dinner, the pantry door burst open and Rondelé sprang out, dressed in a yellow sweat suit with black trim and matching black headband.

  “Waah!” Rondelé bellowed, and threw a water balloon. It caught the edge of the table and tore open, slapping a hand of water across Montal’s plate. He looked down, where flakes of parsley bobbed like survivors fleeing a shipwreck, and then up at his brother.<
br />
  “What’s with the bumblebee suit?”

  “Bruce Lee,” Rondelé said. “Enter the Dragon, remember?” He squatted in an awkward kung fu stance, belly bulging, hands held up like blades. “A victory struck in the name of health,” he intoned. “But no snacks, or I’ll be back.” He sliced the air a few times and dashed away in the direction of the rear parlor.

  Montal stood and scraped the sodden remains of his dinner down the garbage chute, which twisted into darkness below the sink. This diet, like most of the others, had been his idea. He’d read somewhere about the delayed satiety reflex, which causes people to overeat because they don’t realize they’re full yet. The diet’s concept was simple: interrupt someone two thirds of the way through his meal or snack, and by the time he fixed something else he’d realize he wasn’t hungry anymore.

  Previously they had tried the toothpaste diet, which involved constantly brushing so that the clean sensation killed the urge for sweets. It worked for a few days, and then he had developed a taste for toothpaste-flavored chocolates. He’d only been able to kick the habit when the dentist came for a house call and told him he could be at risk of fluoride poisoning. In the winter they had grown thick ‘snacking beards’, which they stocked each morning with crackers, nuggets of granola, raisins, et cetera, but the weight to bushiness ratio proved inadequate and they always ended up going back for more. He had experimented with time locks on the kitchen cabinets that only opened for ten seconds three times a day, but Rondelé simply unscrewed the hinges.

  Now he hesitated before the humming refrigerator. A small dessert couldn’t hurt. Except Rondelé was riding high and might decide to double back and throw another balloon, even in the library. Last night he had been grafting fruit tree hybrids in the greenhouse and Rondelé had snuck in and blown his bowl of cheese crackers off the supply cart with a hose. Besides, damned if he wasn’t feeling full just about now.