by Diana Wagman
I rounded the last bunch of rocks and saw a cluster of little huts made mostly of rocks with some very weathered wood. Their front doors all faced a big pile of empty liquor bottles and rusty beer cans.
“Hello?” I called.
The door to the closest hut opened and a man emerged. He was a fairy, or had been, he had silver hair, pointed ears and blue skin, but he was wearing ugly, dirty, rough clothing that barely covered his enormous unfairylike belly.
“What are you?” He sneered. “Not a fairy. Not a troll either. Some weird creation ‘she’ made.” I knew he meant Madame Gold.
“No. She didn’t make me.”
He whistled and surprisingly the whistle carried through the sodden air. Other doors began to open and others emerged, men and women. Most of them carried a bottle or a can, and my heart sank when I realized they were all drunk. They pulled the bottles from each other’s hands and threw the empties in the pile, cheering at the crash of broken glass. Was this what my father had been like? And my mother had fallen in love with him anyway.
“Hey. Hi. Can you help me? I’m lost.”
“And now you’re found!” One of the men chortled.
“Where am I?”
“This is The Pits,” a woman said.
“I can see that.”
“That’s what it’s called.” She took a long drink of whatever brown liquor was in her bottle.
“Why are you doing this?” I was surprised at my own imperious tone. “You’re fairies. Pull yourselves together.”
They looked chagrined. For a millisecond. And then one of them, a woman who once was stunning and now was missing teeth and hair and had blue skin covered in sores, looked me up and down. “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the half-thing that decided not to be our Queen. You did this to us. You left us to rot in hell.”
The group roared in agreement.
I asked the woman, “Are you the fairies who were digging for mushrooms?”
She nodded. “Some of us.”
“Madame Gold promised me she would let you go.”
The woman shook her head. A man spoke and his words were so slurred I could barely understand him. “Yeah. She let us go. She let us go down here.”
“But—” I tried to remember her exact promise, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t have to keep her promises.
The woman said, “This is all your fault.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
I had tried to save Trevor and Luisa and my dad and only ended up destroying so many others. The fairies came at me. They surrounded me, grabbed me, and began to pull and tug me in all directions at once. I screamed. They would pull me into pieces.
“Enough!” A familiar voice cut through the throng.
The fairies dropped me on the ground and stepped away. I looked up—and into the face of Luisa. She was bruised and had a long red scar down her beautiful cheek, but it was Luisa. And Jed was right behind her. Once again she had showed up at exactly the right time. “Luisa!”
She helped me to my feet. “Stay away,” she told the group.
Battered as she was, they listened to her. She should be Queen, I thought. So much more regal than I. She led me away from the fairies. They muttered and complained, but they let us go. When we got around behind a pile of rocks, she hugged me. “Are you all right?”
And Jed said, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m fine,” I assured them both. “I went though a tunnel and ended up here. By mistake. Why are you here?”
“It was you know who.” Luisa’s soft brown eyes went hard and cold. “She tricked me and Jed, told us she’d send us home and she sent us here.”
“I was trying to find my mom. I have to find her.”
Luisa frowned. She and Jed exchanged a worried look.
“What?” I said. “What? Is she okay?”
Luisa shook her head. “This way.” She led me to a hut set apart from the others.
“She’s here?”
“The slobbers came to the river where she was working. She put up a good fight, but she’s been human too long. They brought her here.” Luisa stopped outside the door. “Be warned, October. She’s not doing well. Jed and I are trying to take care of her, but she’s a troll. We don’t know what she needs.”
Luisa knocked softly and opened the door. The hut was dark with a rock floor, rough splintered wood walls, a small table and a single rickety chair. In the far corner was a cot. It looked empty to me. I looked again. My mother was under the tattered quilt. She had shrunk to almost nothing, her feet and her head made the only bumps in the bed. I ran to her side.
“Mom,” I whispered. Her eyes opened. “It’s me. I’m here.”
Tears slid from the corners of her eyes. She was too weak to lift a hand to wipe them away. I took a corner of the quilt and dried her face. She tried to smile at me.
“Go home,” she said. “This place is The Pits.”
As sick as she was, she had tried to make a joke. “Ha ha ha. Madame Gold’s sense of humor sucks,” I said.
“Don’t say her name. She’ll hear you.”
“Down here in jail?”
Luisa spoke up. “For fairies this is hell. They’re given all the alcohol they want and no sunshine. Not so bad for me.” She smiled and took Jed’s hand. “I have Jed.”
“He’s not a fairy?”
“He’s human. He’s decided to live here with me. Or he decided to live in the Fairy Canopy. Neither of us counted on this place.”
“Doesn’t matter where you are, Babe—that’s where I am.”
He was so devoted to her I almost cried. He was human and had decided to leave our world—his world—behind. I didn’t know that could happen. I turned back to my mom. “Why didn’t she kill you? I’m glad she didn’t, but I thought that was the plan.”
Mom spoke with effort. “She must be part fairy or part troll. We can’t kill. We are physically and mentally incapable. A part of our brain shuts down and we just can’t. But we can hurt each other—badly—so badly that sometimes the victim dies. Like me.”
“I have to get you out of here.” From outside I could hear the rumble of the inebriated fairies’ anger, the occasional shout as they argued—most likely about me.
“Where’s the dude? Walker?” Jed asked.
Hearing his name made me feel better. He’d be looking for me. He would help me save my mom. “He couldn’t come through the portal.”
Luisa nodded. “Her.” She said it like a curse.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. About everything.”
She looked from my mother to me. “You saved my life. It was the one thing she promised that she did—I think just to prove she could. She made me well.” Jeb put his arm around her. “Then she sent us here.”
“And making you a panther?”
“I don’t know how she did that.”
“That Amazon is way, way strong,” Jed said. “All kinds of wicked powers.”
We couldn’t stay there. “How do we get out of here?” I asked.
Luisa sat down heavily on the only chair. “There is no escape. Jed and I have tried everything, traveled in every direction. It goes on forever. No way out. None. And now you’re stuck here too.”
My mother made an odd scratchy rasping noise. She had begun to cry. I was used to her helping me, taking care of me, not the other way around.
“There has to be a way.”
“This is all my fault,” Mom said. Her voice was like an old woman’s.
“Are you crazy?” I was the one who had done everything wrong.
Mom whispered. “I knew that on your eighteenth birthday you would change, your powers would develop.” She shook her head. “I knew that. But you got into college. You were excited like any human. I hoped whatever fairy or troll traits developed would be tiny, unnoticeable, so I never said anything. I waited. I waited too long and when I finally went for help, it was at the worst poss
ible time.”
“What help?”
“That’s why I wasn’t there for your birthday or to help your father. No good. I should have stayed home.”
I kissed her cheek and smoothed back her hair, shaggy now like a troll’s and mostly gray. I didn’t know what to say.
A chant began outside. “Give us the girl. Give us the girl.”
I looked around the dilapidated hut and knew the rotten boards wouldn’t keep the drunks out for long. I wasn’t safe, but neither were my mom or Luisa or Jed as long as they were with me.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’m fast. They won’t be able to catch me. I’ll hide somewhere.”
“No,” Mom said. “No.”
“Absolutely not.” Luisa and Jed were just as adamant.
I looked down at the vine and flowers marking my leg. I touched my thick hair, now sopping wet and heavy on my shoulders. “I can turn off lights with my mind,” I said. “I can communicate long distance. But I just keep hurting everyone I love.”
The chant grew louder. “Give Us The Girl. Give Us The Girl.”
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself,” Luisa said to me. She bent close to my mom. “Ruth, you said you went looking for help. Did you find it?”
“Maybe.” Mom pulled something wrapped in a handkerchief out from under the quilt and handed it to me. “Maybe.”
I opened it carefully. Inside were two mushrooms unlike any I’d ever seen. They glowed as if lit by batteries, one green, and the other red. In the gloom they turned my mother’s face half red and half green.
“Mycena luxaeterna Duo,” Mom said.
“Luxaeterna,” I repeated. “Eternal Light.”
They were awesome. Each ‘shroom had spikes all over its cap and gills underneath in a bright, electric pulsing blue. They had long fragile stems and as I bent over them the red one smelled like… like…
“Roasted marshmallows!” I said. I sniffed the green one and grinned. “Chocolate.” I turned to Luisa and Jed. “You should smell these. Fantastic. They’re like spore s’mores. All I need is a graham cracker.”
Luisa recoiled, covering her nose, totally disgusted.
“Not fairy fare,” Jed said.
That was obvious. Luisa gagged and stumbled away. I remembered seeing another fairy gagging like that—even throwing up—but I couldn’t remember where.
“So this thing, this Glo-stick mushroom,” Jed said. “How’s it going to help?”
Mom gestured at Luisa. “Bad for fairies.”
She was right. I held the mushrooms out on my palm and I watched her break out in red, raised welts. The same kind I got when I was around Madame Gold. I looked at my hands. I had the rash too, but not as bad as usually. Luisa began to cough and I thought she was going to be sick. I wrapped the mushrooms up in the handkerchief and stuffed them under my sweater in the waistband of my skirt. Luisa stopped coughing almost immediately and I remembered where it was I’d seen the fairy being sick. She had been digging in the dirt under the fairy tree. And the answer came to me.
“These are what Madame Gold is looking for. She’s forcing the fairies to dig for them. This is why she’s killing the trees. But why? What for?”
“Power,” Mom managed to say. “Very powerful for trolls.”
All this time the chant from the drunks outside had been growing louder. They began to pound on the door and the walls. They chanted and pounded and the boards were loosening, nails popping out towards us. The hut wouldn’t hold up for long.
Luisa picked up one of Mom’s tin dinner plates and spun it on one finger. She handed Jed a dented saucepan. They faced the door. I picked up the only possible weapon left, a wooden spoon, and stood between Mom and the door.
Jed opened the door.
At least a hundred dirty and intoxicated fairies went silent when they saw us. Their eyes were red and bloodshot. Some were having trouble staying upright.
Luisa began, “This is not October’s fault—”
They heard my name and shouted as one, “GIVE US THE GIRL.”
Before Luisa could say another word the crowd surged toward her. They had no weapons, only their bare hands, but they were terrifying just the same. Luisa sailed her dinner plate like a Frisbee across the front of the crowd pushing them back. Jed used his saucepan as a club and began whacking fairies on the head. One larger, fatter male fairy got past Luisa, lunged at me and lifted me in his arms. I kicked him and stomped on his toes, but it just made him angrier. There was no point in calling for help. Jed and Luisa were surrounded and doing the best they could. The big guy threw me into the crowd as if I had jumped off the stage into a mosh pit. Hand over hand, multi-colored fairies propelled me to the back of the crowd, to where and what I wasn’t sure, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
I tried to use my thoughts and tell them to stop and that we needed to fight together against Madame Gold, but their rage made it impossible to reason with them—even from inside their own minds. I struggled, I fought, but three larger fairies had me and were carrying me toward a lone hut.
I was desperate. I needed more power than I had. I opened the package of mushrooms and put them both in my mouth.
22.
I chewed and swallowed. The taste was delicious and then the taste was disgusting. I choked as a rush of heat coursed through my body. Sweat broke out on my forehead, my temples, my upper lip. I had never been so hot. I was burning up, my fingertips worst of all. I looked at my hand. I gasped. It really was on fire, each finger like a crazy birthday candle. One of the fairies carrying me screamed and all three dropped me hard. The fairies stopped fighting. They stared at me. I stood with my arms outstretched as the flames moved down my arms, circled my chest and belly, and licked down my legs. I was ablaze and I was as shocked as everybody else.
Luisa ran to me. “October!”
“I’m okay.” It was true. I was hot and uncomfortable, but I knew how strong I was becoming. Now I could hear all the fairies’ thoughts—all of them at once, a cacophony of exclamations and alarm. I breathed deeply. Count to ten, I told myself. I concentrated on calming down. The flames emanating from me slowed and quit, but the heat and surge of strength continued. I turned in a slow circle. The piles of rocks were wavering before me. The endless gray sky was streaked with a brilliant blue. I took Luisa’s hand. She winced at my burning touch, but held on.
“Look,” I said. “Look!”
I pointed at a pile of rocks that were dissolving. I could see right through them. We were in a field somewhere under a blue sky. It wasn’t even raining. Rock after rock turned into bushes or nothing. The wet ground became grass. The Pits weren’t real.
They were an illusion.
“Do you see?” I asked Luisa.
I sent what I was seeing into her mind and she gasped. “It’s all a trick.”
I sent the same picture to Jed and all the fairies. There was a collective murmur of awe and then joy. The sun was shining through clouds. The sky and grass were a balm to the poor deprived fairies. They dropped their bottles. They lay down in the grass and let the sunshine and fresh air soothe them.
“That’s how she made me a panther,” Luisa said. “She made us all see me as a panther. Even myself. It was just an illusion. That’s why I couldn’t fight Oberon. The real me can’t fight those teeth.”
“She created The Pits,” Jed said. “What else has she invented?”
I searched for Madame Gold and in my mind’s eye saw her plainly in an industrial-type storehouse with Enoki. Madame Gold was furious with her for letting me drive away with Walker. Enoki was looking at the ground, shaking her head, letting Madame Gold yell at her. Ha ha ha. Most interestingly, as I looked at her in my mind’s eye she seemed to waver and become transparent like the rocks did before they disappeared. Then Madame Gold’s thoughts found mine. I felt her realize how strong I had become and for the first time I could sense a touch of fear. I didn’t want her to know where I was. Ice cream! Ice cream. I ran back to my mother’s hu
t.
Mom was lying motionless in the bed with her breathing rattling in her chest. She didn’t have long. She was going. I had to save her.
“I took them, Mom. I took the mushrooms and I got us out of The Pits.” Even her hut looked better than it had. “How long will they last?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Then I have to go. Now.”
Jed and Luisa were right behind me. “I’m afraid to leave her alone,” I said. “Luisa, if you stay with her, I think you can call me just by thinking of me.” I tried to smile. “Better than a cellphone. Mushroom texting.”
“I’ll keep her safe,” Luisa said. “I have my tin Frisbee.”
Jed said he’d go with me even though I told him to stay. I told him it would be dangerous.
“Tons o’ fun,” Jed said.
I kissed my mom, he kissed Luisa, and we ran out. Jed carried his saucepan. I let my mind go to Madame Gold and I knew exactly where to find her. It was as if she was a beacon I was following. She was like a lighthouse, I thought, but inviting me in to crash and die instead of warning me away from the rocks. Fat chance, I thought. I was strong. I felt unbeatable. We left the fairies behind. They didn’t care about me anymore and I hoped they’d find their way to what was left of their homes. I sent my thoughts to Walker and happily, wonderfully, I could reach him. He and Oberon were struggling through a jungle of roots and plants to get to this world. I knew he would find a way. I was so strong and powerful that I felt confident and sure that Walker really did love me. All my doubt and insecurities had vanished. I was going to wring Madame Gold’s scrawny neck and save my mother, my father, the fairies, and even the trolls. I was.
