The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

  Incidentally, I disbelieved in the semicolon. Getting adult authors to use semicolons is like pulling teeth. They distrust them. Teenage girls handwriting in journals do not use semicolons. How much of this was Ambrose, and how much of it was really the Green Book? How accurately was he remembering things?

  Then again, it was the… what, Victorian era? I couldn’t remember the exact dates, and without the Internet, I couldn’t look it up. If Ambrose had known the daughter… oh Lord, but she could have died at the age of a hundred and handed him an old diary on her deathbed, and then Cotgrave got it, and if he’d died in his nineties… well, figure he had to have been at least twenty when he met Ambrose… but then again, he could have been sixty. It could have been pre-Victorian. Hell, it could actually have been Regency.

  The math made my head ache. Also my butt was falling asleep. I squirmed in the chair, trying to carry the one, and eventually working out that I had no idea how old the book was, and for all I knew it came from an era when semicolons were routinely scattered about like flower petals.

  And I came to a hill that I never saw before… there were black twisted boughs that tore me as I went through them, and I cried out because I was smarting… may have been stinging or hurting… all over where they tore my frock, and then I went up a long, long way until the thicket stopped and I came out crying on top of a big bare place. There were such ugly grey stones lying on the grass, and here and there a little twisted tree came out from under a stone, like a snake.

  I read that passage, and then I reread it, and then I just stared at it as if it, too, were a snake.

  I came to a hill that I never saw before.… There were ugly grey stones lying on the grass.…

  For some reason all I could think was that the word grey was spelled gray in America and I would have to mark that for changes. Which was a stupid thing to think, but most of my brain was whimpering and blundering around inside my skull like Bongo during a thunderstorm.

  I had climbed up a hill I had never seen before, and I had come to a place with ugly grey (or gray) stones on the grass and there had been the little twisted trees coming out from under the stones, like snakes. Hell even the path I took was suddenly familiar—a dried-up stream, a dismal thicket, a long dark way. If I hadn’t been obsessed with the stupid semicolon, maybe I’d have picked up on it sooner.

  “This was in Wales,” I muttered. “This was in Wales. Or England, anyway. Over there. Cotgrave said they were over there.”

  Except that apparently they were over here, too.

  Was it the same place? Was there was one here and one somewhere in the British Isles? Was there a way through in both places?

  Foxy had said that sometimes the hills were there and sometimes they weren’t and sometimes you could go through and sometimes you couldn’t. Had this girl been to the same hill that I had?

  Had Cotgrave been there?

  I went up to the top a long, long way… description of “big ugly stones” as coming out of the earth or being rolled? Maybe both. I think there was more here, but I can’t remember it. They went on as far as I could see, a long, long way. I looked out from them and saw the country… countryside? Maybe a different word here… but it was strange. It was wintertime, and there were black terrible woods hanging from the hills all round; it was like seeing a room hung with black curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed different from any I had ever seen before. I was afraid, but I repeated to myself the words that Nurse had taught me before she went away and I was brave again. Then beyond the woods there were other hills round in a great ring, but I had never seen any of them before; it all looked black, and everything had a voor over it. It was all so still and sad and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey, like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo.

  I am not certain what a “voor” or a “voorish dome” is, although they are referenced several times in the Green Book. At the time, I thought it was like a mist, but Ambrose thought a “voorish dome” might be the roof of a cave in the hills, where the white people survived. “Deep Dendo” sounds like a place that would have stone, but “had a voor over it” sounds like an atmospheric difference, a haze perhaps.

  I have lately come to think that perhaps a voor is like a glamour, a spell of misdirection, and since the girl was obviously sensitive to such things, she might see the voor over an enchanted place, and thus a wicked voorish dome could be a place with a wicked spell over it.

  This is further confused, however, by the fact that she refers later to the Kingdom of Voor, “where the light goes when it is put out,” but that could as well be referring to a kingdom with many voors, or from which such spells originate.

  I went on into the dreadful rocks. There were hundreds of them. Some were like horrid-grinning men; I could see their faces as if they would jump at me out of the stone, catch hold of me, and drag me with them back into the rock, so that I should always be there with them and anyone who walked this way should see me looking out, and perhaps they might not recognize me then. And there were other rocks that were like animals creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues and licking the grass, and others were like words that I could not say, and others like dead people lying on the grass… Might have been another description here, but I think I remembered them all. I have read this section so many times, parts of it pound in my head and reading it makes the pounding go away. I may have missed a few words, but I think this is mostly right.

  I went among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of the wicked songs that they put into it which I will not write down and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about in the way they did, but I did not and I went on and on a long, long way until at last I liked the rocks, and they didn’t frighten me anymore and they reminded me of secret things that I knew. I sang the songs full of words that must not be spoken or written down. Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones

  I dropped the page.

  I didn’t mean to, but it slipped out of my fingers and fell to the floor the way that nothing other than sheets of paper fall, then slid a little way and wedged one corner under the couch. The litany of the twisted ones was pounding in my head like a song that had gotten stuck.

  “Well,” I said out loud. “Well. Now I know where it comes from.”

  My voice sounded very calm. It sounded like my aunt’s voice more than mine. It sounded like a grown-up’s voice and not at all like someone who was about to cry or scream or curl up in the bathroom and wait to be eaten by monsters.

  I took a sip of my coffee and discovered that it was stone cold.

  I nodded to myself. I picked up the sheet of paper and I put it on the pile of pages and tapped the edges together as if I knew what I was doing, and I went to reheat my coffee.

  12

  It was a criminal act to warm that beautiful coffee up in the microwave, but I did it anyway, because I hadn’t drunk more than an inch worth. I sang something—some stupid song from the eighties; I don’t even remember which one, probably about love or cocaine or driving fast cars or maybe all three and one was a euphemism for another, and then I couldn’t remember the next line and so I sang “Jingle Bells” and then the coffee was hot. I had to grab the handle with my shirt because it was too hot to touch.

  Probably the words that the girl said could not be written down were not about a one-horse open sleigh. It didn’t seem likely.

  I glanced out the window and saw that it was still light. That seemed strange somehow, like when you come out of a movie theater and are startled to see that it’s still daylight. It seemed like it should be much later. It seemed like half the day should have passed and it should be past midnight.

  By the clock, I think it had been about forty-five minutes. Long enough for coffee to go cold, not much longer.

  I walked through the house and turned on every light. I cranked the radio up and then I ran the ice maker, not because I needed ice but because it was loud and I ne
eded it to be loud in the house right then.

  You are going to think I am entirely mad, but I proceeded to fire up my laptop and play three games of solitaire at high speed. I just needed to do something that wasn’t reading, something where black cards went on red cards and nines went on tens and everything made sense. As soon as I got stuck, I restarted. It probably took about five minutes. It wasn’t even long enough for the Pledge Week to break back into the radio program, which was a lengthy discussion of a coup, except that I’d missed what country it was in. I wondered who I was supposed to be rooting for, the military or the government, because both sounded pretty bad.

  When Elaine Rogers came back on, sounding punchy and tired, I closed the laptop. I wondered if poor Elaine slept during Pledge Week. I would have traded places with her. She could have my grandmother’s house and my stepgrandfather Cotgrave and a ring of hills in winter like dark curtains and I twisted myself around like the twisted ones—

  I grabbed the coffee mug. The handle was too hot still and I swore and I drank it anyway and burned the roof of my mouth, and that was fine. A burned mouth was a thing I understood. It had nothing to do with twisted stones and songs that must not be spoken and voorish domes, whatever the hell those were.

  I’m being stupid. I knew that line had to come from the Green Book. He said it did. I should have expected to see it. It just… startled me, that’s all.

  Truth was, the litany of the twisted ones had been growing in my mind since I read it days before. Not that I kept thinking it the way Cotgrave had, but I kept seeing it, or remembering it at odd moments and the idea of it had gone from what is my stepgrandfather smoking, anyway? to poor old fellow was obsessed to… to something else. Something I couldn’t put words around. It was—okay, you remember The Shining? I felt like I was flipping through a stack of papers that said All work and no play… over and over again, but I hadn’t yet turned around to see Jack Nicholson standing there grinning at me.

  The radio blared. Someone was delivering a testimonial about how much community radio meant to them. Rogers told us about how grateful they were for people like the Bolanders, who really understood what a service the station provided. I wondered if the Bolanders got matching hoodies.

  I picked up the page I had dropped. I forced my eyes to finish the line that they’d stopped at.

  Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones, and I went up to one that was grinning, and put my arms round him and hugged him. And so I went on and on through the rocks and it was a long, long way.

  There was a gap in the text here, and it started again on the next page. Cotgrave had thoughtfully labeled each page in the corner in blue ballpoint pen, so I knew I was going in the right order. I felt a pang of sympathy for the old man, who had to stop in nearly the same place that I had.

  Looking back on what I wrote out yesterday, I believe that it is mostly accurate, or at least, as close as I can come. It may be that it is tainted by my own experience of the stones. Or perhaps, since I read the Green Book long before I climbed the hill myself, my experience of the stones was tainted by reading the book. Are hers the same as the ones I saw in Wales? There is no way to tell. I knew enough to turn away, in any event. If I had gone on, perhaps I would have seen what she saw, or perhaps I would not be here to write this.

  In any event, I do not remember the rest of this part so clearly. The girl went to a place in the middle of the hill and climbed a tower or a hill to a high place, I think, and looked down on the stones and saw them all arranged in patterns. She becomes dizzy and the patterns began to spin, and then she climbs down. I danced as I went in the peculiar way the rocks had danced, and I was so glad I could do it quite well, and I danced and danced along, and sang extraordinary songs that came into my head.

  She continues on, possibly through another tunnel, while dancing in this fashion, and describes being stung by nettles and thorns, but they only make her tingle and she does not mind this because of the singing.

  There are many stories, of course, of religious pilgrims scourging themselves and becoming insensitive to pain, swamis walking on hot coals, and so forth, so perhaps it is something like that. I remember when Ambrose and I first spoke, fire-walking was considered a baffling mystical art. And yet I saw a television program on fire-walking last month that explained how it was done with physics.

  Perhaps someday even things like the Green Book will be explained by physics, and there will be no more of Ambrose’s passions of the lonely soul. If fire-walking is in the natural order after all, as it seems, then what more may we yet learn? Perhaps a day will come when all things can be fit somehow in the natural order, and then Ambrose’s definition of sin will be of no more use to us.

  Then again, as isolated as I am now, perhaps we have explained many things already. The fire-walking program may be only one. She thought it was interesting and left it on. I think she was hoping someone would burn themselves, but no one did.

  I snorted out loud at that last bit. It had been a margin note in blue pen. Cotgrave had no more illusions about his wife than any of the rest of us did, apparently.

  Ambrose spoke often of how terrifying it would be if flowers began to sing to us, or a dog to speak, in violation of the natural order. He spoke of such violation as the true form of sin. And yet now there are theme parks where you can go and mechanical flowers will sing, movies where dogs will talk. Have we thus all begun to sin, or have our senses become numbed so that we will no longer recognize true sin when we see it?

  To continue, much of the rest of the “White Day” is an account of travel. There are thickets and valleys and ferns. She drinks from a stream which “gives her a kiss” and believes that there is a Nymph within it. She comes to a wall of moss and believes that it is the end of the world, after which is only the Kingdom of Voor, where the light goes when it is put out, and the water goes when the sun takes it away.

  I wondered how I should get home again, if I could ever find the way, and if my home was there anymore, or if it were turned and everybody in it into grey rocks, as in The Arabian Nights. I sat down on the grass and thought what I should do next. I was tired, and my feet were hot with walking.

  She finds a well nearby, the bottom covered in red sand that is constantly stirring, and puts her feet into it to soak. Climbing the wall, she sees “the queerest country” full of “hills and hollows” and two large mounds like beehives. It was so strange and solemn and lonely, like a hollow temple of dead heathen gods.

  She then recounts a lengthy story told by her nurse, of a hollow that was a “bad place” where people did not dare to go. A poor girl goes in. She claims the hollow is full of grass and stones and flowers and is later seen wearing extravagant jewelry. When asked, she says the emeralds are grass, the rubies and diamonds only stones. She goes to the court of the king and queen, wearing a crown of “pure angel-gold” which she claims is only yellow flowers in her hair. The king’s son marries her, but on his wedding night, there is a tall black man with “a dreadful face” standing outside the door, saying: “Venture not upon your life/This is my own wedded wife.” (May have been “mine own” or some other construction.) The bedroom is full of screaming and shrieking and crying. They cut the door open with hatchets and find only black smoke and the remains of flowers and stones.

  After recounting this story, the girl says a charm that her nurse taught her, to ward off the black man and keep bad things away.

  Still not sure now who or what the nurse was. At first I thought she was one of the white people herself, but now I wonder if she may have been one of their servants, or what my mother used to call “cunning folk.” Or perhaps the nurse was both, or a half-breed of sorts. Ambrose suggested once that the girl may have been a changeling, that perhaps the white people breed with humans and then send their servants to train them until they are old enough to take their place among their elders.

&nb
sp; I rubbed my hands over my face. My eyes were swimming from reading, especially from reading Cotgrave’s cramped margin notes in ballpoint pen.

  Well. The story of the poor girl and the stones was a fairly straightforward pact with the Devil, with a little old-fashioned racism thrown in. By itself it wasn’t proof of anything, except that the nurse had strange ideas about bedtime stories.

  To continue the narrative: She travels on even farther, finding a certain wood, which is too secret to be described, and nobody knows of the passage into it, which I found out in a very curious manner, by seeing some little animal run into the wood. After this there is very little concrete written, only that she sees “the most wonderful sight.” She does not describe it at any point, but runs away back home. She lies in bed attempting to remember this wonderful sight, but cannot see it clearly. It is referred to afterward as “the wonderful secret” which she knows and others do not.

  The girl herself begins to wonder if her nurse was one of the “beautiful white people.”

  After this point the chronology of the Green Book becomes even more jumbled, or perhaps my memory of it is worse than I thought. She refers to several stories told to her by her nurse, which begin “In the time of the fairies.” One is about a young man who chases a white stag until he enters a fairy mound and meets the Queen of Fairies. She gives him wine to drink from a golden cup (shades of Parsifal?) and when he awakens, he will not drink wine or kiss another woman for the rest of his life.

  Ambrose was most interested in a tale “about a hill where people used to meet at night long ago, and they used to play all sorts of strange games and do queer things that Nurse told me of.” I only remember one stretch of it well, but there was a great deal to it, much of it repetitive.

  And the song was in an old, old language that nobody knows now, and the tune was queer. Nurse said her great-grandmother had known someone who remembered a little of it, when she was quite a little girl, and Nurse tried to sing some of it to me, and it was so strange a tune that I turned all cold and my flesh crept as if I had put my hand on something dead. Sometimes it was a man that sang and sometimes it was a woman, and sometimes the one who sang it did it so well that two or three of the people who were there fell to the ground shrieking and tearing… (Can’t remember much more of this. Not tearing their hair, but can’t remember what it was.)