Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois

by Gardner R. Dozois

  She smiled slowly at him sidelong. “I’d liefer more delightsome games,” she said.

  Before he could think of anything to say, a long, long, long green-grey arm came slithering out across the floor from the hidden interior of the house. The arm ended in a knobby hand equipped with six grotesquely long, tapering fingers, now spreading wide as the hand reached out toward the fairy . . .

  Barry opened his mouth to shout a warning, but before he could, the long arm had wrapped bonelessly around her ankle, not once but four times around, and the hand with its scrabbling spider fingers had closed over her thigh. The arm yanked back, and she tumbled forward in the air, laughing.

  “Ah, loveling, can you not wait?” she said with mock severity. The arm tugged at her. She giggled. “Certes, meseems you cannot!”

  As the arm pulled her, still floating, back into the house, the fairy woman seized the door to slam it shut. Her face was flushed and preoccupied now, but she still found a moment to smile at Barry. “Farewell, sweet mortal!” she cried, and winked. “Next time, mayhap?”

  The door shut. There was a muffled burst of giggling within. Then silence.

  The salesman glumly shook his head. This was a goddam tank town, was what it was, he thought. Here there were no knickknacks and bric-a-brac lining the windows, no cast-iron flamingoes and eave-climbing plaster kitty cats, no mailboxes with fake Olde English calligraphy on them—but in spite of that it was still a tank town. Just another goddamn middle-class neighborhood with money a little tight and the people running scared. Place like this, you couldn’t even give the stuff away, much less make a sale. He stepped back out into the street. A fairy knight was coming down the road toward him, dressed in green jade armor cunningly shaped like leaves, and riding an enormous frog. Well, why not? Barry thought. He wasn’t having a lot of luck door-to-door.

  “Excuse me, sir!” Barry cried, stepping into the knight’s way. “May I have a moment of your—”

  The knight glared at him, and pulled back suddenly on his reins. The enormous frog reared up, and leaped straight into the air. Gigantic, leathery, batlike wings spread, caught the thermals, carried mount and rider away.

  Barry sighed and trudged doggedly up the cobblestone road toward the next house. No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to quit until he’d finished the street. That was a compulsion of his . . . and the reason he was one of the top cold-sell agents in the company. He remembered a night when he’d spent five hours knocking on doors without a single sale, or even so much as a kind word, and then suddenly he’d sold $30,000 worth of merchandise in an hour . . . suddenly he’d been golden, and they couldn’t say no to him. Maybe that would happen today, too. Maybe the next house would be the beginning of a run of good luck . . .

  The next house was shaped like a gigantic ogre’s face, its dark wood forming a yawning mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. The face was made up of a host of smaller faces, and each of those contained other, even smaller faces. He looked away dizzily, then resolutely climbed to a glowering, thick-nosed door and knocked right between the eyes—eyes which, he noted uneasily, seemed to be studying him with interest.

  A fairy woman opened the door—below where he was standing. Belatedly, he realized that he had been knocking on a dormer; the top of the door was a foot below him.

  This fairy woman had stubby, ugly wings. She was lumpy and gnarled, and her skin was the texture of old bark. Her hair stood straight out on end all around her head, in a puffy nimbus, like the Bride of Frankenstein. She stared imperiously up at him, somehow managing to seem to be staring down her nose at him at the same time. It was quite a nose, too. It was longer than his hand, and sharply pointed.

  “A great ugly lump of a mortal, an I mistake not!” she snapped. Her eyes were flinty and hard. “What’s toward?”

  “I’m from Newtech Computer Systems,” Barry said, biting back his resentment at her initial slur, “and I’m selling home computers, by special commission of the Queen—”

  “Go to!” she snarled. “Seek you to cozen me? I wot not what abnormous beast that be, but I have no need of mortal kine, nor aught else from your loathly world! Get you gone!” She slammed the door under his feet. Which somehow was every bit as bad as slamming it in his face.

  “Sonofabitch!” Barry raged, making an obscene gesture at the door, losing his temper at last. “You goddamn flying fat pig.”

  He didn’t realize that the fairy woman could hear him until a round crystal window above his head flew open, and she poked her head out of it, nose first, buzzing like a jarful of hornets. “Wittold!” she shrieked. “Caitiff rogue!”

  “Screw off, lady,” Barry snarled. It had been a long, hard day, and he could feel the last shreds of self-control slipping away. “Get back in your goddamn hive, you goddamn pinocchio-nosed mosquito!”

  The fairy woman spluttered incoherently with rage, then became dangerously silent. “So!” she said in cold passion. “Noses, is’t? Would vilify my nose, knave, whilst your own be uncommon squat and vile? A tweak or two will remedy that, I trow, and exchange the better for the worse!”

  So saying, she came buzzing out of her house like an outraged wasp, streaking straight at the salesman.

  Barry flinched back, but she seized hold of his nose with both hands and tweaked it savagely. Barry yelped in pain. She shrieked out a high-pitched syllable in some unknown language and began flying backward, her wings beating furiously, tugging at his nose.

  He felt the pressure in his ears change with a sudden pop, and then, horrifyingly, he felt his face begin to move in a strangely fluid way, flowing like water, swelling out and out and out in front of him.

  The fairy woman released his nose and darted away, cackling gleefully.

  Dismayed, Barry clapped his hands to his face. He hadn’t realized that these little buggers could all cast spells—he’d thought that kind of magic stuff was reserved for the Queen and her court. Like cavorting in hot tubs with naked starlets and handfuls of cocaine, out in Hollywood—a prerogative reserved only for the Elite. But when his hands reached his nose, they almost couldn’t close around it. It was too large. His nose was now nearly two feet long, as big around as a Polish sausage, and covered with bumpy warts.

  He screamed in rage. “Goddammit, lady, come back here and fix this!”

  The fairy woman was perching half-in and half-out of the round window, lazily swinging one leg. She smiled mockingly at him. “There!” she said, with malicious satisfaction. “Art much improved, methinks! Nay, thank me not!” And, laughing joyously, she tumbled back into the house and slammed the crystal window closed behind her.

  “Lady!” Barry shouted. Scrambling down the heavy wooden lips, he pounded wildly on the door. “Hey, look, a joke’s a joke, but I’ve got work to do! Lady! Look, lady, I’m sorry,” he whined. “I’m sorry I swore at you, honest! Just come out here and fix this and I won’t bother you anymore. Lady, please!” He heaved his shoulder experimentally against the door, but it was as solid as rock.

  An eyelid-shaped shutter snapped open above him. He looked up eagerly, but it wasn’t the lady; it was a fat fairy man with snail’s horns growing out of his forehead. The horns were quivering with rage, and the fairy man’s face was mottled red. “Pox take you, boy, and your cursed brabble!” the fairy man shouted. “When I am foredone with weariness, must I be roused from honest slumber by your hurtle-burble?” Barry winced; evidently he had struck the Faerie equivalent of a night-shift worker. The fairy man shook a fist at him. “Out upon you, miscreant! By the Oak of Mughna, I demand SILENCE!” The window snapped shut again.

  Barry looked nervously up at the eyelid-window, but somehow he had to get the lady to come out and fix this goddamn nose. “Lady?” he whispered. “Please, lady?” No answer. This wasn’t working at all. He’d have to change tactics, and take his chances with Snailface in the next apartment.

  “LADY!” he yelled. “OPEN UP! I’M GOING TO STAND HERE AND SHOUT AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS UNTIL YOU COME OUT! YOU WANT
THAT? DO YOU?”

  The eyelid flew open. “This passes bearing!” Snailface ranged. “Now Cernunnos shrivel me, an I chasten not this boisterous dotard!”

  “Listen, mister, I’m sorry,” Barry said uneasily, “I don’t mean to wake you up, honest, but I’ve got to get that lady to come out, or my ass’ll really be grass!”

  “Your Arse, say you?” the snail-horned man snarled. “Marry, since you would have it so, why, by Lugh, I’ll do it, straight!” He made a curious gesture, roared out a word that seemed to be all consonants, and then slammed the shutter closed.

  Again, there was a popping noise in Barry’s ears, and a change of pressure that he could feel throughout his sinuses. Another spell had been cast on him.

  Sure enough, there was a strange, prickly sensation at the base of his spine. “Oh, no!” he whispered. He didn’t really want to look—but at last he forced himself to. He groaned. He had sprouted a long green tail. It looked and smelled suspiciously like grass.

  “Ha! Ha!” Barry muttered savagely to himself. “Very funny! Great sense of humor these little winged people’ve got!”

  In a sudden spasm of rage, he began to rip out handfuls of grass, trying to tear the loathsome thing from his body. The grass ripped out easily, and he felt no pain, but it grew back many times faster than he could tear it free—so that by the time he decided that he was getting nowhere, the tail trailed out six or seven feet behind him.

  What was he going to do now?

  He stared up at the glowering house for a long, silent moment, but he couldn’t think of any plan of action that wouldn’t just get him in more trouble with someone.

  Gloomily, he gathered up his sample cases, and trudged off down the street, his nose banging into his upper lip at every step, his tail dragging forlornly behind him in the dust. Be damned if this wasn’t even worse than cold-selling in Newark. He wouldn’t have believed it. But there he had only been mugged and had his car’s tires slashed. Here he had been hideously disfigured, maybe for life, and he wasn’t even making any sales.

  He came to an intricately carved stone fountain, and sat wearily down on its lip. Nixies and water nymphs laughed and cavorted within the leaping waters of the fountain, swimming just as easily up the spout as down. They cupped their pretty little green breasts and called invitingly to him, and then mischievously spouted water at his tail when he didn’t answer, but Barry was in no mood for them, and resolutely ignored their blandishments. After a while they went back to their games and left him alone.

  Barry sighed, and tried to put his head in his hands, but his enormous new nose kept getting in the way. His stomach was churning. He reached into his pocket and worried out a metal-foil packet of antacid tablets. He tore the packet open, and then found—to his disgust—that he had to lift his sagging nose out of the way with one hand in order to reach his mouth. While he chewed on the chalky-tasting pills, he stared glumly at the twin leatherette bags that held his demonstrator models. He was beaten. Finished. Destroyed. Ruined. Down and out in Faerie, at the ultimate rock bottom of his career. What a bummer! What a fiasco!

  And he had had such high hopes for this expedition, too . . .

  Barry never really understood why Titania, the Fairy Queen, spent so much of her time hanging out in a sleazy little roadside bar on the outskirts of a jerkwater South Jersey town—perhaps that was the kind of place that seemed exotic to her. Perhaps she liked the rotgut hooch, or the greasy hamburgers—just as likely to be “venison-burgers,” really, depending on whether somebody’s uncle or backwoods cousin had been out jacking deer with a flashlight and a 30.30 lately—or the footstomping honky-tonk music on the juke box. Perhaps she just had an odd sense of humor. Who knew? Not Barry.

  Nor did Barry ever really understand what he was doing there—it wasn’t really his sort of place, but he’d been on the road with a long way to go to the next town, and a sudden whim had made him stop in for a drink. Nor did he understand why, having stopped in in the first place, he had then gone along with the gag when the beat-up old barfly on his left had leaned over to him, breathing out poisonous fumes, and confided, “I’m really the Queen of the Fairies, you know.” Ordinarily, he would have laughed, or ignored her, or said something like, “And I’m the Queen of the May, sleazeball.” But he had done none of these things. Instead, he had nodded gravely and courteously, and asked her if he could have the honor of lighting the cigarette that was wobbling about in loopy circles in her shaking hand.

  Why did he do this? Certainly it hadn’t been from even the remotest desire to get into the Queen’s grease-stained pants—in her earthly incarnation, the Queen was a grimy, grey-haired, broken-down rummy, with a horse’s face, a dragon’s breath, cloudy agate eyes, and a bright-red rumblossom nose. No, there had been no ulterior motives. But he had been in an odd mood, restless, bored, and stale. So he had played up to her, on a spur-of-the-moment whim, going along with the gag, buying her drinks and lighting cigarettes for her, and listening to her endless stream of half-coherent talk, all the while solemnly calling her “Your Majesty” and “Highness,” getting a kind of role-playing let’s pretend kick out of it that he hadn’t known since he was a kid and he and his sister used to play “grown-up dress-up” with the trunk of castoff clothes in the attic.

  So that when midnight came, and all the other patrons of the bar froze into freeze-frame rigidity, paralyzed in the middle of drinking or shouting or scratching or shoving, and Titania manifested herself in the radiant glory of her true form, nobody could have been more surprised than Barry.

  “My God!” he’d cried. “You really are—”

  “The Queen of the Fairies,” Titania said smugly. “You bet your buns, sweetie. I told you so, didn’t I?” She smiled radiantly, and then gave a ladylike hiccup. The Queen in her new form was so dazzlingly beautiful as to almost hurt the eye, but there was still a trace of rotgut whiskey on her breath. “And because you’ve been a most true and courteous knight to one from whom you thought to see no earthly gain, I’m going to grant you a wish. How about that, kiddo?” She beamed at him, then hiccuped again; whatever catabolic effect her transformation had had on her blood-alcohol level, she was obviously still slightly tipsy.

  Barry was flabbergasted. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “I come into a bar, on impulse, just by chance, and the very first person I sit down next to turns out to be—”

  Titania shrugged. “That’s the way it goes, sweetheart. It’s the Hidden Hand of Oberon, what you mortals call ‘synchronicity.’ Who knows what’ll eventually come of this meeting—tragedy or comedy, events of little moment or of world-shaking weight and worth? Maybe even Oberon doesn’t know, the silly old fart. Now, about that wish—”

  Barry thought about it. What did he want? Well, he was a salesman, wasn’t he? New worlds to conquer . . .

  Even Titania had been startled. She looked at him in surprise and then said, “Honey, I’ve been dealing with mortals for a lot of years now, but nobody ever asked for that before . . .”

  Now he sat on cold stone in the heart of the Faerie town, and groaned, and cursed himself bitterly. If only he hadn’t been so ambitious! If only he’d asked for something safe, like a swimming pool or a Ferrari . . .

  Afterward, Barry was never sure how long he sat there on the lip of the fountain in a daze of despair—perhaps literally for weeks; it felt that long. Slowly, the smoky bronze disk of the Fairyland sun sank beneath the horizon, and it became night, a warm and velvety night whose very darkness seemed somehow luminous. The nixies had long since departed, leaving him alone in the little square with the night and the plashing waters of the fountain. The strange stars of Faerie swam into the sky, witchfire crystals so thick against the velvet blackness of the night that they looked like phosphorescent plankton sparkling in some midnight tropic sea. Barry watched the night sky for a long time, but he could find none of the familiar constellations he knew, and he shivered to think how far away from home he must be. The stars moved much mor
e rapidly here than they did in the sky of Earth, crawling perceptibly across the black bowl of the night even as you watched, swinging in stately procession across the sky, wheeling and reforming with a kind of solemn awful grandeur, eddying and whirling, swirling into strange patterns and shapes and forms, spiral pinwheels of light. Pastel lanterns appeared among the houses on the hillsides as the night deepened, seeming to reflect the wheeling, blazing stars above.

  At last, urged by some restless tropism, he got slowly to his feet, instinctively picked up his sample cases, and set off aimlessly through the mysterious night streets of the Faerie town. Where was he going? Who knew? Did it matter anymore? He kept walking. Once or twice he heard faint, far snatches of fairy music—wild, sad, yearning melodies that pierced him like a knife, leaving him shaken and melancholy and strangely elated all at once—and saw lines of pastel lights bobbing away down the hillsides, but he stayed away from those streets, and did his best not to listen; he had been warned about the bewitching nature of fairy music, and had no desire to spend the next hundred or so years dancing in helpless enchantment within a fairy ring. Away from the street and squares filled with dancing pastel lights and ghostly will-o’-the-‘wisps—which he avoided—the town seemed dark and silent. Occasionally, winged shapes swooped and flittered overhead, silhouetted against the huge mellow silver moon of Faerie, sometimes seeming to fly behind it for several wingbeats before flashing into sight again. Once he met a fellow pedestrian, a monstrous one-legged creature with an underslung jaw full of snaggle teeth and one baleful eye in the middle of its forehead that blazed like a warning beacon, and stood unnoticed in the shadows, shivering, until the fearsome apparition had hopped by. Not paying any attention to where he was going, Barry wandered blindly downhill. He couldn’t think at all—it was as if his brain had turned to ash. His feet stumbled over the cobblestones, and only by bone-deep instinct did he keep hold of the sample cases. The street ended in a long curving set of wooden stairs. Mechanically, dazedly, he followed them down. At the bottom of the stairs, a narrow path led under the footing of one of the gossamer bridges that looped like slender grey cobwebs between the fairy hills. It was cool and dark here, and almost peaceful . . . “AAAARRRRGGHHHHH!”