Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  “As much as you are,” said Alton, and as the color of truth rushed up the other boy’s cheeks, Alton dashed forward, snatched the precious black and white book, and bolted down the street.

  Alton’s bold tongue bought him enough time to make it halfway down the block before the others realized what he’d said and took off after him. His heart pounded in his chest as he dashed around a corner, a pippin in a barrel of pippins nattering and cackling as he sped by. Someone’s mother called him a wicked name and drivers stood on their horns and brakes as he tore across the street and rounded a corner smoke shop, the composition book clutched to his chest as he searched for sanctuary from the inevitable.

  The trio’s angry threats assaulted his ears, and then they were on him as he made to dart into a confectioner’s shop. Peter took him low and Brenton came in high, slamming him to the walk as they pummeled and kicked and called him a “miserable geek-boy” and “fuggin’ Paddy poof,” and other things that hurt less than their fists. Three on one was a losing fight. Alton protected the book with his body and waited for the worst to be over.

  When an East Indian shopkeep finally chased off the dirty crows, Alton made it to his feet and gave the man a fake name and phone number to ring his parents. He limped off before the ruse was discovered. The memory of the redcaps’ maniac laughter grated like fingers down the chalkboard of Alton’s soul.

  Safe at home, he complained of a sour stomach and went straight to his room. A grig was perched on his windowsill, twiggish and coy, singing to the coming night. Alton made it to the sill in two quick steps and slammed the window shut on the beastie’s eggshell head. He wiped up the mess with a handful of tissues, and hid the refuse at the bottom of his waste can.

  That evening Alton accepted Mama’s offering of broth and toast, but did not stray from under the covers until she was gone. Mama let him stay home from school the rest of the week.

  ○

  For all his devoted scholarship, Alton knew nothing compared to hands-on experience. A book could not adequately detail the care needed to peel away the smooth birch bark of a hamadryad’s face, or how it was best to pinch and give a sharp twist when tearing the wings from a sylph’s back. Alton took prodigious notes.

  Upon completing his year thirteen, the young man collected his award from MaeMa’s meager estate and spent a heady ten months on the continent, seeing the sites and gathering souvenirs. Years later, the tiny gold loom unearthed from a Sardinian domos de janas would stand out as the crowning glory of the trip. The opportunity to crush the moon-pale jana was worth his parents’ censure after they paid the restitution for the charges of malicious mischief.

  He could have hoped the rush of exploration would survive homecoming and the snobbery and intolerance of university, but hope, like nobility, shouldered a heavy burden.

  “I wasn’t stalking her, I was trying to help her,” Alton said as he tromped down the library steps.

  “By followin’ her home from the pub, an’ waitin’ in the bushes for an eyeful through her bedroom window?” Xavier gave back, slightly out of breath as he hurried beside his studymate. “Face it, Alton, you’re not the type o’fella that has a girl sayin’ no an’ meanin’ yes.”

  “What would you know about it, anyway?” The stone lions at the bottom of the stairs ignored them. Peshies lurking in the folds of the granite manes picked their crooked noses and flung crusty gems on the pair as they passed by.

  “A fair turn more than you, it seems. You’re lucky no one pressed charges.”

  Alton scrunched his shoulders. “Yeah.”

  It was a spring day to test the resolve of those dedicated to good grades and the monthly cheque from home. The semester’s cliques lounged in shady fellowship beneath stout oaks and leafy elders while the slow spicy red of Bossa Nova music spilled from an open window like a curtain of thick silk. Alton would have liked to find a bench in the sun where he could catch up on Nandor Pogány’s Magyar Fairytales From Old Hungarian Legends, but the inescapable fae presence curdled the moment and his mood.

  He realized after the fact that Xavier had asked a question. “Come again?”

  “What’s this protecting Megan, anyway? Hey, let’s get a quick nosh before class.”

  “Um… sure, yeah.” Alton allowed varieties of truth to sort themselves out as they opted for curry noodles and a table in the sun. “Have you ever had the feeling you’re being watched?” he said, picking out the shredded carrots.

  Xavier glanced up from his plate. “You mean like watched, or watched watched?”

  Alton sipped at his beer. “The latter, I suppose. Something like that, anyway.”

  “Not really. Why?”

  Alton tipped his glass in the direction of a hamadryad dozing in the comfortable embrace of her oaken self, the people around her none the wiser. “Take a look over there and tell me what you see.”

  “A tree and some people.”

  “What else?”

  “Uh… Nina Dobson’s talking on her cell. There’s someone with a throwing disk. Is this multiple choice?”

  “What about the tree?”

  “What about it? It’s an oak tree: big, woody, got leaves.”

  “Is there anything different about it?” Alton said carefully.

  Xavier took his time answering. “Not that I can tell. It’s a tree, is all.”

  “What if I were to tell you that the tree is… alive?”

  “I wouldn’t call the Times, that’s for certain.”

  “I mean it." Alton leaned across the table. “It’s alive.”

  Xavier eased away from Alton’s insistence. “So, it’s alive. What’s that have to do with being watched?”

  “Because it’s the tree that’s watching, y’see? Something inside the tree. Part of the tree, actually.”

  “You mean like a camera?” Xavier dropped his voice as he cut a look at the crowd once more.

  “No, no, not a camera. The tree has a hamadryad inside, or is a hamadryad depending your school of thought.”

  “A hamawhat?”

  “Hamadryad. It’s… a fae. Of a sort.” Alton sat back. A familiar headache picked at the tender spot between his eyes, a thin, black claw, pick, pick, pick….

  “A fae? Like an elf?”

  “Not an elf. That’s more Nordic, or something Tolkien pulled out of his arse for the masses.”

  “Who said anythin’ about Tolkien?”

  “You’re not listening to what I’m telling you.”

  “You’re mental. You’re not making any sense a’tall. We went from your skulkin’ after Megan, to being watched, to naffin’ faeries.”

  “It all makes sense if you think about it. Hear me out, Xav, I’m not so mental as that.” Alton’s fork kept unconscious time with his words, picking tiny holes in the waxed paper plate, pick, pick, pick…. “I wasn’t stalking Megan, I swear. I thought she was in trouble from a gancanagh.”

  “Never heard of ‘im,” Xavier said and rubbed his teeth with a crumpled napkin.

  “Not a him, not directly. A gancanagh is an it that looks like a him, a fae from Ireland. They’re known for taking a fancy to a woman, having a go with her, and then leaving her so desperate for more that she pines away until she dies.” He looked for a glimmer of understanding in the midst of Xavier’s uneducated skepticism. “I can’t really say how it managed its way to campus, but I knew that if the gancanagh got its leg over with Megan she was as good as dead.” The memory of the slender, foppish gancanagh was as vivid in daylight as the reality had been three nights ago outside Megan Holmes’ flat. Lucky for her, Alton had been nearby to scare the wretched thing away.

  “What was the hamadryad-thingie doin’?”

  “Nothing at all. It wasn’t there.”

  “So, what’s with being watched? You’re saying that this gay fella—”

  “Not gay, fae.”

  “—had an eye for Megan, and that’s why you were following her after
she turned you down?”

  Alton ground his teeth in frustration; he relaxed his jaw to speak. “I wasn’t following her. I saw the gancanagh and wanted to help, that’s all.”

  “What’s this to do with the tree, then?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with the tree, Xav. What I’m saying is that the hamadryad is a different sort of fae than the gancanagh, and that they’re both real.”

  Xavier shook his head as he finished off his curry, scraping at the last sheen of sauce and licking his fork clean. “If you say so, but you sound off your chump and then some.”

  “I am not mental,” Alton said testily, following his former confidant to the waste bin.

  “We’ll see who’s mental the next time Pitch catches you so much as lookin’ cross-eyed at Megan. Tell him about your faeries and see what happens. C’mon, let’s get on to class.”

  Much later, under the righteous cover of darkness, Alton returned to the commons and hammered an iron spike into the hamadryad, pounding the metal head flush with the soft inner-bark. He sat at the nearest table and listened with eyes closed until the screams died away.

  ○

  Alton kept to his own company about the truth after that.

  He redoubled his efforts in Japanese immersion courses, adding Spanish immersion as a second line of study. He transcribed his journals into both Spanish and Japanese as a means of improving on his lessons. Professors lauded his merit; classmates were less flattering.

  Alton welcomed the white collar world after graduation. Work as a translator was plentiful and easy to come by, allowing for numerous opportunities to travel and other benefits sublime.

  One Tokyo summer was a celebration of contract negotiations finessed over katsuo offered o-makase’, and the subtle differences in the deaths of kami and kamui.

  In Mexico City, he walked the half-lit autumn streets with his shirt inside out to confound the chaneques. Their blood reminded him of currant jelly as it splattered the whitewashed walls.

  His home office was in New York City, an endless buffet of potential and variety. Alton drank in the city’s brash charm, leasing a comfortable one-bedroom flat on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where he hung prints of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist and Kandinsky’s Yellow, Red, and Blue. He furnished the rooms with simple lines, hearing his mother whisper with every selection. On occasion, he treated himself to black truffles and scallops at Restaurant Daniel, and fresh hayas and zerbo from the Hungarian bakery at the corner. Except for the want of a decent pub and a touch of culture, The Big Apple might have been London. During the work day Alton ignored the office brownies when others were about, and stepped on them when no one was in sight.

  On the nights when the weather was reasonably fair, he donned a light jacket, pocketed an umbrella, and set off by taxi or bus to search the sly-ways for the city’s odious beasties and bogums. The hunt made for long, lonely nights, but Alton was never happier than when he found what he sought, a pleasure reminiscent of a quilt tucked under the chin. To do the deed, he usually carried a stubby iron dagger that relied more on force than an edge to penetrate, a bundle of plastic Baggies wrapped in a rubber band, and a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  One night when March’s lion paused to catch its breath, Alton cut out the eyes of what he was certain was a mazikeen from the Jewish sensibilities of the Lower East Side. He never discovered why it was alone in Riverside Park. The memory of how it flowed and rippled lingered in his palms for months.

  While waiting for a cab one evening after a dinner of crab and corn chowder with a dark lager to wash it down, Alton realized the iridescent ripple in the direction of the reservoir was not a trick of the rain but a naga-sanniya slithering back to its watery home. He abandoned the street corner and followed the dreadful thing as it undulated sedately along, careful to keep his distance and stay downwind. The next night Alton lured it to the surface with a bottle of wine and the smoke of a clove cigarette. The snake-woman savored the wine, breathed the essence of cloves, and barely made a sound as Alton skinned it alive. He rolled the tender ribbons of the remains into the black water for the honest bottom feeders. The skin was a trophy he sometimes lay beside on the bed, rolling and unrolling it with a slow hand for many nights afterward.

  Being a sensible fellow, he was not completely blind to the discarded gristle of the human condition during those sojourns. After gathering moonlit pixie wings one clear night, Alton ducked into an adult bookstore to avoid a trio of feminists looking for a man to hate. The clerk paid Alton as much attention as he did the men pretending not to fondle the pink folds of used women. Uncomfortable with the thought of duplicitous patronage, Alton purchased a plastic wrapped paperback depicting two women touching lips. He tossed it out the next morning on his way to buy a display case for the wings.

  He would have preferred to avoid people all together, but cities defied reason and people were often inconvenient. He was forced to take a brick to a drunk who refused to surrender a bottle of Thunderbird with a gleefully pickled cuchulain within. The affair left him queasy for days. The unfortunate events with the little Paki girl and the imun living in her pink sneakers left his bowels in nervous misery and kept him home from work for a week. He heard her mother’s screams in his sleep.

  A feverish ache settled into his bones every time innocence suffered for the fickle delinquencies of the gentry. There were days Alton couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed, but war was hell and there was nothing to do but carry on in the name of acceptable losses. In their memory, Alton kept a kettle on the boil and maintained his journals with punctilious measure.

  What is the nature of God when innocents are made to suffer and die? he carefully scribed one cold December evening, the desperation of someone’s daughter and a bloody two-by-four chill and bruised in his memory. Men speak of sin, yet true evil is allowed congress with the unsuspecting. Perhaps God is nothing more than a collection of blind men blaming the fellow next to them every time they lift a cheek on the pew.

  ○

  “What?” The voice was gruff with a distinct Brooklyn twang. “You not happy jerkin’ off like the rest of the kooks?”

  Alton whirled around, knife in hand. The headlamp around the brim of his hat clashed with the intruder’s flashlight, birthing strange shadows in the cold, February rain. The Elder Mother creaked and moaned piteously at his back. “Pardon?” It was the first thing that came to mind, a brittle, sensible word.

  The other took a step back, resting a free hand on a bulge at its waist beneath the red poncho. “What’s say you drop the knife and bring those hands up, ‘kay?”

  That’s when Alton recognized the dark uniform under the poncho and the brim of the patrolman’s hat. His stomach tumbled with a surge of relief and dismay all at once. He realized he probably looked quite the sight, soaked to the bone and covered in splinters and sap. He lowered the knife, but did not drop it. “You startled me, Officer. I didn’t hear—”

  “Yeah, I noticed. I said drop the knife.”

  “No, no. Let me explain, just for a moment. This isn’t—”

  The beat cop’s hand reached under the poncho as he took half a step to the left. “I ain’t gonna tell you again, drop the knife.”

  Fear made Alton’s palms sweat; annoyance tightened his grip on the sticky handle. “You don’t have to take that tone with me. This is no ordinary tree.” He raised both hands to shield his eyes from the golden lance of the flashlight’s beam. “I—”

  The officer pulled his nightstick and stepped into his swing as leaves rustled and whispered overhead. Alton rushed the man, knocking him aside as shadows and branches swayed treacherously near. Alton struck high and sure at the wicked tree, burying his knife in a meaty limb that sagged under the impact. Red flowed slick and wet in the headlamp’s light.

  A too-human scream gouged a jagged hole in Alton’s thoughts as the blade jerked free. Light and rain rushed to fill the void, tearing away Alton’s thoughts
like strips of bloody reason. The Elder Mother behind him shifted and mewled. The red faerie before him snarled something wicked and reached for the signal horn on its shoulder. Fearing what might answer the call, Alton brought the knife up and down with sharp insistence, over and over, until the red faerie slid off the blade to the cold, wet ground, a policeman once more.

  And then Alton’s legs were running, taking him along. He had to get away, far away. He raced across lanes of flashing lights and shrieking horns, trying to find his way in the night as a fire built in his belly, cramping and twisting until he was hunched over and sobbing as he ran.

  The night assaulted him in fits and starts: staggering over a curb; suicidal raindrops cold against his face; the red hand of God flashing on a yellow post, commanding him to STOP; fumbling with the metallic clatter of his keys in the lock; icy porcelain against fevered cheeks.

  For days Alton huddled on the davenport, taken prisoner by his own fevered dreams. He huddled beneath a pile of blankets, sweating through the pain, screaming when there was nothing else he could do. When he could think at all, he wondered what he had done to deserve such hell. It was only a man, another innocent in the war. There was nothing to be done of it. “Stop laughing at me! It’s not my fault!”

  He knocked the phone off the hook when the ringing became too much to bear. The monotone operator was his only friend until she left without saying good-bye. The black claw heard the buzzing of the dead line and came to see what all the fuss was about. It took its time between his eyes… pick, pick, pick….

  He cursed MaeMa in the kitchen, and cried when Mama didn’t give him an extra biscuit with tea — tea, flea, me, tree, whee — until he threw up — threw up, flew up, grew up.

  Alton slept when he could, and poorly, until white-hot pokers thrust through the meat of his legs and hatpins jabbed behind his knees. He drew his legs tight against his body in the darkness. He had a mouth and screamed without sound, trying to think beyond the threshold of pain, and remembering until he forgot again. The nonsense made no sense — sense, hence, fence.