by Paula Guran
“I’m sorry if it seems like I’m pushing,” Dr. Valloton says.
“I just don’t see any reason to talk about it again.”
“Then let’s talk about the dreams, Hannah. Let’s talk about the day you saw the fairies.”
9
The dreams, or the day from which the dreams would arise and, half-forgotten, seek always to return. The dreams or the day itself, the one or the other, it makes very little difference. The mind exists only in a moment, always, a single flickering moment, remembered or actual, dreaming or awake or something liminal between the two, the precious, treacherous illusion of Present floundering in the crack between Past and Future.
The dream of the day—or the day itself—and the sun is high and small and white, a dazzling July sun coming down in shafts through the tall trees in the woods behind Hannah’s house. She’s running to catch up with Judith, her sister two years older and her legs grown longer, always leaving Hannah behind. You can’t catch me, slowpoke. You can’t even keep up. Hannah almost trips in a tangle of creeper vines and has to stop long enough to free her left foot.
“Wait up!” she shouts, and Judith doesn’t answer. “I want to see. Wait for me!”
The vines try to pull one of Hannah’s tennis shoes off and leave bright beads of blood on her ankle. But she’s loose again in only a moment, running down the narrow path to catch up, running through the summer sun and the oak-leaf shadows.
“I found something,” Judith said to her that morning after breakfast. The two of them sitting on the back porch steps. “Down in the clearing by the old well,” she said.
“What? What did you find?”
“Oh, I don’t think I should tell you. No, I definitely shouldn’t tell you. You might go and tell Mom and Dad. You might spoil everything.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t tell any one.”
“Yes, you would, big mouth.”
And, finally, she gave Judith half her allowance to tell, half to be shown whatever there was to see. Her sister dug deep down into the pockets of her jeans, and her hand came back up with a shiny black pebble.
“I just gave you a whole dollar to show me a rock?”
“No, stupid. Look at it,” and Judith held out her hand.
The letters scratched deep into the stone—JVDTH—five crooked letters that almost spelled her sister’s name, and Hannah didn’t have to pretend not to be impressed.
“Wait for me!” she shouts again, angry now, her voice echoing around the trunks of the old trees and dead leaves crunching beneath her shoes. Starting to guess that the whole thing is a trick after all, just one of Judith’s stunts, and her sister’s probably watching her from a hiding place right this very second, snickering quietly to herself. Hannah stops running and stands in the center of the path, listening to the murmuring forest sounds around her.
And something faint and lilting that might be music.
“That’s not all,” Judith said. “But you have to swear you won’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“I swear.”
“If you do tell, well, I promise I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.”
“I won’t tell anyone anything.”
“Give it back,” Judith said, and Hannah immediately handed the black stone back to her. “If you do tell—”
“I already said I won’t. How many times do I have to say I won’t tell?”
“Well then,” Judith said and led her around to the back of the little tool shed where their father kept his hedge clippers and bags of fertilizer and the old lawnmowers he liked to take apart and try to put back together again.
“This better be worth a dollar,” Hannah said.
She stands very, very still and listens to the music, growing louder. She thinks it’s coming from the clearing up ahead.
“I’m going back home, Judith!” she shouts, not a bluff because suddenly she doesn’t care whether or not the thing in the jar was real, and the sun doesn’t seem as warm as it did only a moment ago.
And the music keeps getting louder.
And louder.
And Judith took an empty mayonnaise jar out of the empty rabbit hutch behind the tool shed. She held it up to the sun, smiling at whatever was inside.
“Let me see,” Hannah said.
“Maybe I should make you give me another dollar first,” her sister replied, smirking, not looking away from the jar.
“No way,” Hannah said indignantly. “Not a snowball’s chance in Hell,” and she grabbed for the jar, then, but Judith was faster, and her hand closed around nothing at all.
In the woods, Hannah turns and looks back towards home, then turns back towards the clearing again, waiting for her just beyond the trees.
“Judith! This isn’t funny! I’m going home right this second!”
Her heart is almost as loud as the music now. Almost. Not quite, but close enough. Pipes and fiddles, drums and a jingle like tambourines.
Hannah takes another step towards the clearing, because it’s nothing at all but her sister trying to scare her. Which is stupid, because it’s broad daylight, and Hannah knows these woods like the back of her hand.
Judith unscrewed the lid of the mayonnaise jar and held it out so Hannah could see the small, dry thing curled in a lump at the bottom. Tiny mummy husk of a thing, grey and crumbling in the morning light.
“It’s just a damn dead mouse,” Hannah said disgustedly. “I gave you a whole dollar to see a rock and a dead mouse in a jar?”
“It’s not a mouse, stupid. Look closer.”
And so she did, bending close enough that she could see the perfect dragonfly wings on its back, transparent, iridescent wings that glimmer faintly in the sun. Hannah squinted and realized that she could see its face, realized that it had a face.
“Oh,” she said, looking quickly up at her sister, who was grinning triumphantly. “Oh, Judith. Oh my god. What is it?”
“Don’t you know?” Judith asked her. “Do I have to tell you everything?”
Hannah picks her way over the deadfall just before the clearing, the place where the path through the woods disappears beneath a jumble of fallen, rotting logs. There was a house back here, her father said, a long, long time ago. Nothing left but a big pile of rocks where the chimney once stood, and also the well covered over with sheets of rusted corrugated tin. There was a fire, her father said, and everyone in the house died.
On the other side of the deadfall, Hannah takes a deep breath and steps out into the daylight, leaving the tree shadows behind, forfeiting her last chance not to see.
“Isn’t it cool,” Judith said. “Isn’t it the coolest thing you ever seen?”
Someone’s pushed aside the sheets of tin, and the well is so dark that even the sun won’t go there. And then Hannah sees the wide ring of mushrooms, the perfect circle of toadstools and red caps and spongy brown morels growing round the well. The heat shimmers off the tin, dancing mirage shimmer as though the air here is turning to water, and the music is very loud now.
“I found it,” Judith whispered, screwing the top back onto the jar as tightly as she could. “I found it, and I’m going to keep it. And you’ll keep your mouth shut about it, or I’ll never, ever show you anything else again.”
Hannah looks up from the mushrooms, from the open well, and there are a thousand eyes watching her from the edges of the clearing. Eyes like indigo berries and rubies and drops of honey, like gold and silver coins, eyes like fire and ice, eyes like seething dabs of midnight. Eyes filled with hunger beyond imagining, neither good nor evil, neither real nor impossible.
Something the size of a bear, squatting in the shade of a poplar tree, raises its shaggy charcoal head and smiles.
That’s another pretty one,” it growls.
And Hannah turns and runs.
10
“But you know, in your soul, what you must have really seen that day,” Dr. Valloton says and taps the eraser end of her pencil lightly against her fron
t teeth. There’s something almost obscenely earnest in her expression, Hannah thinks, in the steady tap, tap, tap of the pencil against her perfectly spaced, perfectly white incisors. “You saw your sister fall into the well, or you realized that she just had. You may have heard her calling out for help.”
“Maybe I pushed her in,” Hannah whispers.
“Is that what you think happened?”
“No,” Hannah says and rubs at her temples, trying to massage away the first dim throb of an approaching headache. “But, most of the time, I’d rather believe that’s what happened.”
“Because you think it would be easier than what you remember.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t easier to believe she pissed me off that day, and so I shoved her in? That I made up these crazy stories so I’d never have to feel guilty for what I’d done? Maybe that’s what the nightmares are, my conscience trying to fucking force me to come clean.”
“And what are the stones, then?”
“Maybe I put them all there myself. Maybe I scratched those words on them myself and hid them there for me to find, because I knew that would make it easier for me to believe. If there was something that real, that tangible, something solid to remind me of the story, that the story is supposed to be the truth.”
A long moment that’s almost silence, just the clock on the desk ticking and the pencil tapping against the psychologist’s teeth. Hannah rubs harder at her temples, the real pain almost within sight now, waiting for her just a little ways past this moment or the next, vast and absolute, deep purple shot through with veins of red and black. Finally, Dr. Valloton lays her pencil down and takes a deep breath.
“Is this a confession, Hannah?” she asks, and the obscene earnestness is dissolving into something that may be eager anticipation, or simple clinical curiosity, or only dread. “Did you kill your sister?”
And Hannah shakes her head and shuts her eyes tight.
“Judith fell into the well,” she says calmly. “She moved the tin, and got too close to the edge. The sheriff showed my parents where a little bit of the ground had collapsed under her weight. She fell into the well, and she drowned.”
“Who are you trying so hard to convince? Me or yourself?”
“Do you really think it matters?” Hannah replies, matching a question with a question, tit for tat.
“Yes,” Dr. Valloton says. “Yes, I do. You need to know the truth.”
“Which one?” Hannah asks, smiling against the pain swelling behind her eyes, and this time the psychologist doesn’t bother answering, lets her sit silently with her eyes shut until the clock decides her hour’s up.
11
Peter Mulligan picks up a black pawn and moves it ahead two squares; Hannah removes it from the board with a white knight. He isn’t even trying today, and that always annoys her. Peter pretends to be surprised that’s he’s lost another piece, then pretends to frown and think about his next move while he talks.
“In Russian,” he says, “chernobyl is the word for wormwood. Did Kellerman give you a hard time?”
“No,” Hannah says. “No, he didn’t. In fact, he said he’d actually rather do the shoot in the afternoon. So everything’s jake, I guess.”
“Small miracles,” Peter sighs, picking up a rook and setting it back down again. “So you’re doing the anthropologist’s party?”
“Yeah,” she replies. “I’m doing the anthropologist’s party.”
“Monsieur Ordinaire. You think he was born with that name?”
“I think I couldn’t give a damn, as long as his check doesn’t bounce. A thousand dollars to play dress-up for a few hours. I’d be a fool not to do the damned party.”
Peter picks the rook up again and dangles it in the air above the board, teasing her. “Oh, his book,” he says. “I remembered the title the other day. But then I forgot it all over again. Anyway, it was something on shamanism and shapeshifters, werewolves and masks, that sort of thing. It sold a lot of copies in ’68, then vanished from the face of the earth. You could probably find out something about it online.” Peter sets the rook down and starts to take his hand away.
“Don’t,” she says. “That’ll be check mate.”
“You could at least let me lose on my own, dear,” he scowls, pretending to be insulted.
“Yeah, well, I’m not ready to go home yet.” Hannah replies, and Peter Mulligan goes back to dithering over the chessboard and talking about Monsieur Ordinaire’s forgotten book. In a little while, she gets up to refill both their coffee cups, and there’s a single black and grey pigeon perched on the kitchen windowsill, staring in at her with its beady piss-yellow eyes. It almost reminds her of something she doesn’t want to be reminded of, and so she raps on the glass with her knuckles and frightens it away.
12
The old woman named Jackie never comes for her. There’s a young boy, instead, fourteen or fifteen, sixteen at the most, his nails polished poppy red to match his rouged lips, and he’s dressed in peacock feathers and silk. He opens the door and stands there, very still, watching her, waiting wordlessly. Something like awe on his smooth face, and for the first time Hannah doesn’t just feel nude, she feels naked.
“Are they ready for me now?” she asks him, trying to sound no more than half as nervous as she is, and then turns her head to steal a last glance at the green fairy in the tall mahogany mirror. But the mirror is empty. There’s no one there at all, neither her nor the green woman, nothing but the dusty backroom full of antiques, the pretty hard-candy lamps, the peeling cranberry wallpaper.
“My Lady,” the boy says in a voice like broken crystal shards, and then he curtsies. “The Court is waiting to receive you, at your ready.” He steps to one side, to let her pass, and the music from the party grows suddenly very loud, changing tempo, the rhythm assuming a furious speed as a thousand notes and drumbeats tumble and boom and chase one another’s tails.
“The mirror,” Hannah whispers, pointing at it, at the place where her reflection should be, and when she turns back to the boy there’s a young girl standing there, instead, dressed in his feathers and make-up. She could be his twin.
“It’s a small thing, My Lady,” she says with the boy’s sparkling, shattered tongue.
“What’s happening?”
“The Court is assembled,” the girl child says. “They are all waiting. Don’t be afraid, My Lady. I will show you the way.”
The path, the path through the woods to the well. The path down to the well …
“Do you have a name?” Hannah asks, surprised at the calm in her voice; all the embarrassment and unease at standing naked before this child, and the one before, the boy twin, the fear at what she didn’t see gazing back at her in the looking glass, all of that gone now.
“My name? I’m not such a fool as that, My Lady.”
“No, of course not,” Hannah replies. “I’m sorry.”
“I will show you the way,” the child says again. “Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, come our Lady nigh.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Hannah replies. “I was beginning to think that I was lost. But I’m not lost, am I?”
“No, My Lady. You are here.”
“Yes. Yes, I am here, aren’t I?” and the child smiles for her, showing off its sharp crystal teeth. Hannah smiles back, and then she leaves the dusty backroom and the mahogany mirror, following the child down a short hallway; the music has filled in all the vacant corners of her skull, the music and the heavy living-dying smells of wildflowers and fallen leaves, rotting stumps and fresh-turned earth. A riotous hothouse cacophony of odors—spring to fall, summer to winter—and she’s never tasted air so violently sweet.
… the path down the well, and the still black water at the bottom.
Hannah, can you hear me? Hannah?
It’s so cold down here. I can’t see …
At the end of the hall, just past the stairs leading back down to St. Mark’s, there’s a green door, and the girl opens it. Green gets you
out.
And all the things in the wide, wide room—the unlikely room that stretches so far away in every direction that it could never be contained in any building, not in a thousand buildings—the scampering, hopping, dancing, spinning, flying, skulking things, each and every one of them stops and stares at her. And Hannah knows that she ought to be frightened of them, that she should turn and run from this place. But it’s really nothing she hasn’t seen before, a long time ago, and she steps past the child (who is a boy again) as the wings on her back begin to thrum like the frantic, iridescent wings of bumblebees and hummingbirds, red wasps and hungry dragonflies. Her mouth tastes of anise and wormwood, sugar and hyssop and melissa. Sticky verdant light spills from her skin and pools in the grass and moss at her bare feet.
Sink or swim, and so easy to imagine the icy black well water closing thickly over her sister’s face, filling her mouth, slipping up her nostrils, flooding her belly, as clawed hands dragged her down.
And down.
And down.
And sometimes, Dr. Valloton says, sometimes we spend our entire lives just trying to answer one simple question.
The music is a hurricane, swallowing her.
My Lady. Lady of the Bottle. Artemisia absinthium, Chernobyl, apsinthion, Lady of Waking Dreaming, Green Lady of Elation and Melancholy.
I am ruin and sorrow.
My robe is the color of despair.
They bow, all of them, and Hannah finally sees the thing waiting for her on its prickling throne of woven branches and birds’ nests, the hulking antlered thing with blazing eyes, that wolf-jawed hart, the man and the stag, and she bows, in her turn.
New York City takes a lot of protecting. Luckily there are mages, like Matthew Szczegielniak, who are there to take care of the more unusual threats … like a cockatrice, a creature whose looks kill … literally.
