Where the Veil Is Thin

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Where the Veil Is Thin Page 4

by Alana Joli Abbott


  The word “revenge” was the third one used in its place, with “justice” crossed out before it and another, earlier “revenge” in front of that. Every page after that was blank but the next one held an envelope. Thin and unmarked, it was sealed with letter wax over the glued flap, complete with a stamp that read “TL.” It was a classy touch no one did anymore.

  “Boss!” Hilton shouted from the living room. “I found the phone!” She was clanging away at something metallic and hollow like a percussionist gone mad. “It’s between the blades in the radiator.”

  The radiator. Like the lights, the windows, the grills, it came with the place sans the furniture, and there was no stealing or removing it. He remembered seeing it on the way in, black and traditional cast-iron.

  Jack almost tripped springing to his feet. “No, Sergeant! Wait—”

  He heard her yelp out, and something dropped to the floor. She was holding her hand close to her chest.

  “It… it’s burning hot!”

  It landed face up, its screen just lighting up with a call coming in. There was no picture but the name displayed was clear: Ariel. Hilton took a step forward despite her hand and Jack stopped her.

  “Don’t answer it!” he said. “Don’t touch it!”

  “But it’s her assistant, and she might know what’s going on!”

  Jack never learnt to explain it like his grandmother, possibly the reason he never came to understand it, either. But the truth was he never really believed.

  “Don’t touch it!” he kept repeating in case Hilton thought for a moment it was safe. How many ways were there of dropping a phone in the radiator by accident?

  Anderson peered out from the room now, drawn by the commotion. The phone was almost becoming animated by its vibrations, practically bouncing clear off the floor like a Mexican jumping bean in a cartoon. Of the four power bars one was out and another was blinking. Without anyone touching the answer button, a new voice screamed through the speaker:

  “Release me, Tam! End your useless cantrip here and now, do you hear me? Your toy is tiring itself out, you little worm, and my patience wears thin. The Queen will hear of this and you will suffer! The Queen! Where is she? What have you done to her?”

  Pulling herself up, Hilton reached for her weapon.

  “No!” Jack shouted. “No, not that! Not with lead.” It was the first time she ever needed more than a few seconds to understand what he was saying, but he was already running straight to the door.

  He saw the girls still outside with the constable, all three staring at him with eyes wide and mouths open, frozen or entranced. But he wasn’t here for them, or to escape into the city. He grabbed the weapon Hilton had left outside. It took to his hands well and was weighted perfectly, the head made from high grade steel to withstand repeated abuse. Steel. Iron and carbon.

  The phone stopped jumping. It was still lit with the call connected, but had gone still and silent. Jack lifted the axe high over his shoulder.

  “You can smell it, can’t you?” he said. Anderson and Hilton fell back to let him talk. “You can feel it, wherever you are? This is cold, hard iron.”

  For a long while there was no reply. Then just as Jack was about to bring down the edge, the voice of Ariel came again.

  “Where is Tam? Where is he? What has he done to the Queen?”

  “Maeve,” Jack said. “Green Maeve is gone. We don’t know where Thomas is—”

  The scream came with more power than anything the tiny speaker on a phone could possibly contain, stabbing right into the head like a knife and throwing them to their knees. Jack almost dropped his axe.

  “Enough!” He slammed it down just inches from the phone, the blade cutting deep into the wooden flooring. His grip was trembling and his fingers were numb, but the screaming stopped. “That is enough! She is gone. Your queen is gone. If she was the only reason you are here, there is none now. No one has summoned you and no one binds you here.”

  “Where is Tam—”

  “Thomas is safe and he is not going back with you. Not today. Not tomorrow, either. I don’t know the right words to say and I don’t know what names to invoke. I don’t even have any real grievances with you. But I do have an axe in my hands and I can probably bring more men with axes if—” he hesitated, unsure if he should bargain or plead or intimidate, “—if we cannot come to an understanding here.”

  He kept his eyes on the last flashing bar; he needed a decision before it winked out and he wasn’t sure he had the reflexes to make a difference. The others were of no help now in their struggle to deal with what they were witnessing. He yanked the blade free with a grunt.

  Something in the air shivered and, as abruptly as it started, the call ended. The phone went still and dark. All around them the scent of dead flowers faded in a single breath, leaving the dank odour of a concrete cave left empty for years. Still no one moved, until Jack released the axe from his grip.

  “Cheers, m’lady.”

  Hilton slowly straightened up.

  “Tommy,” she whispered. “You lied about Tommy. We don’t even know where he…” She trailed off as Jack slowly shook his head, then her light of comprehension shone through her face. In unison their gaze shifted to the only place Tommy Tam of the Lins could be.

  The mess from everything they dug from the bag lay scattered across the floor but they were not going through Tommy’s possessions anymore. They came to stare at the baby. Hilton began muttering nonsense words to herself before biting down her lip and turning to Jack.

  “No, boss. You don’t get to say it.” She was speaking very slowly the way Jack did himself at home whenever he needed to stop someone’s tantrums carried too far. “No disrespect meant, but I think you’ve gone barmy. Mad. Insane. Off your damned trolley. And… and the only issue I have with that is, so have I.”

  “No disrespect taken, Sergeant, and I would happily agree with you, except, as you can see, Anderson isn’t a white rabbit and I am not wearing a hat.”

  Anderson had slipped in the room with them after regaining much of his composure. His hand was barely trembling when he straightened his glasses. “I don’t have a better explanation, Inspector, and I’m going to sound like a broken record if I keep asking what just happened. But that… what you’re saying… it can’t be real. They can’t be real. What you’re saying they are, they’re… they’re children stories!”

  “I’m not good with stories,” Jack said, wondering how else he could say this, “and I can only tell you what my Nan told me. She used to talk about her childhood and how our family was kept safe during the War. How none of the bombs fell on our town and why the Nazis never crossed the Channel. For that, she always left some milk and bread out after everyone had gone to bed. She told me that’s how neighbours take care of one another. Good neighbours. But they are not the stories we made up about them. They have a darker side, something they’d remind us of every now and then, in case we were getting too comfortable, too familiar. They take from us, as well, children, in particular.”

  “No, wait! Stop. That was a euphemism for the high infant mortality rate during the Middle Ages.”

  Jack nodded, but not in agreement. “Except when you have a straggler find his way back somehow, or brought along in one of their visits. Maybe it was his plan all along, or maybe it only came to him after seeing the place from which he’d been taken as a babe.”

  “You mean murder?” Hilton cut in. “That’s proper mental! They can’t be… that is ridiculous!”

  “More than what we’ve seen?” Jack smiled this time, finally hearing something amusing. “I don’t know how he did it—could be a wager, a trick of gobsmacking proportions, an outright spiking of the drinks—no idea. But I know he used this.” He held the empty bottle up to the light. “My boy Pip was anemic, if you remember. And what’s the worst we get from overdosing iron tablets? Possibly less liver damage than my weekends at the pub.”

  “Even if that works, you are talking about mur
der, first degree. This is something we do, not something that happens in… in the stories.”

  It wasn’t murder. Not to them. They would never understand it as murder any more than they could call what they did ‘kidnapping.’

  “But stories change, Sergeant, even if they don’t. My Nan used to call them the very embodiment of splendour and glamour and brilliance. They are timeless and unchanging. If they were even created at all, they were made to be envied. But look at where we are now, just look outside. See the neon lights and listen to the electric beat coming out our car stereos. The stories aren’t the same anymore.”

  They were all looking at the baby when he woke up, who surprised them by not crying at the sight of the three strangers, instead choosing to study them one at a time with his deep blue eyes. His little mouth curled up in a smile and that shattered something between them, a tension that had locked up a part of their breath. Hilton stooped to touch him and brush a lock of hair from his face.

  “This… can’t be him. You mean his life—his whole life—was a lie?”

  “Glamour,” Jack corrected her, “is more than a lie. But that’s just like the old stories, isn’t it? The house of bread disappears, the hoard of gold vanishes. And twenty years of his life…”

  “But who is… was… he?” she said.

  Jack picked up the envelope and broke the seal. Inside was a single A4 photograph of a gravestone in a cemetery somewhere, taken on a sunny day and blown up in high definition. The years were clearly 1679 to 1680 but the family name was obscured by lichen and moss. Inscribed were the words:

  Our treasure taken too young from us and from the Lord. Would the Good Folk be kind to return him to us.

  “Someone who has spent a long time looking for an answer to that question,” he said. He bent down and picked up the baby in his arms without startling him. His two monsters at home had given him good practice.

  “What are we going to do with him?” asked the Mannequin.

  “I’m just an old Dibbie and not one to judge what he did,” he said. “But I know every little boy needs to start the day with some breakfast.”

  — SEE A FINE LADY —

  by Seanan McGuire

  The issue was not—entirely—the fact that the woman was riding a horse into Target. That was an issue, as the store had a clearly posted, firmly enforced “no pets” policy, and while there were probably some arguments to be made for the horse as a form of service animal, they weren’t really going to hold up well in court.

  No, the real issue was the fact that no one else seemed to notice the woman on the horse.

  It wasn’t a small horse, either. Frankie had never really been a horse girl; while she’d liked them well enough, her family hadn’t been exactly well-off, much less rich, and so riding lessons and stable fees had been outside her reach before she’d even known she might want them. But she’d been an ordinary girl in a school filled with horse girls, and she’d picked up a few facts in self-defense.

  This horse, this horse was probably some sort of draft horse, taller than the average man, with thick, muscular legs that ended in broad hooves that looked like they could dig in and drag a boulder up a mountain. It was snowy white, from the tip of its muzzle to the feathering around its ankles. Its mane and tail were long, lush, and flowing enough to have caused fits of jealous rage in every hair salon in the world. It wasn’t the sort of horse that went unnoticed. It wasn’t the sort of horse that went unremarked. It certainly wasn’t the sort of horse that belonged in Target. Big box stores and glorious white stallions didn’t belong in the same sentence.

  Then the horse turned to look at Frankie, as if it could somehow sense her increasingly jumbled thoughts, and she was forced to amend all her thoughts about the suitability of horses in Target.

  Somehow, “unicorns in Target” didn’t feel any better.

  The woman on the unicorn’s back was thin and dreamy-looking, with a crown of blackberry thorns topping her black curls and a distant look in her dark brown eyes. She was wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt with a faded logo advertising a band whose name had been lost to cheap ink and harsh detergents. She wobbled slightly as the unicorn walked toward the women’s wear section, looking as if she might fall off her mythological steed at any moment. She was not, Frankie noted, wearing shoes.

  Frankie couldn’t decide whether this was better or worse than the part where the woman was riding an actual unicorn. It was definitely more directly against store rules, which didn’t have anything to say about equines that didn’t exist, but was very firm on the idea of “no shirt, no shoes, no service.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The question itself was polite. The tone in which it was asked, well, wasn’t. The tone turned it from a simple inquiry to an implicit threat, dripping with “do I need to speak to your manager?” and “people like you are the reason I can’t support raising the minimum wage.” It was the tone of impending doom, and Frankie’s attention snapped instantly back to the woman on the other side of her register, who was watching her with undisguised disdain.

  “I am so sorry,” said Frankie, and began swiping the woman’s items double-quick across the scanner, hoping to make up the time she had lost.

  The woman didn’t say anything.

  Frankie seized on the escape silence offered her, finishing the transaction with a speed that was equal parts practice and panic. When she read off the total, the woman sniffed and fixed Frankie with a steely eye, clearly waiting for some discount to be offered as apology for the offense of waiting. Frankie smiled blandly back. In this, at least, she was in the right; even if the woman went to Customer Service with her tale of woe, Frankie’s equine distraction hadn’t lasted long enough to take the length of their interaction from “acceptable” into “unacceptable.” Discounts weren’t offered for acceptable service.

  Discounts weren’t offered for much of anything. The corporate bottom line was more important than anything a mere associate might be able to screw up in their brief interaction with a customer.

  The customer, looking disgusted, finally moved on. Frankie looked at her empty line, and at the three customers pushing their red carts toward her as fast as they could without actually running, and clicked the “on” light above her register off. All three customers shot her venomous looks. Pretending not to see them, she turned and walked after the unicorn as casually as she could.

  It wasn’t difficult. The unicorn was, after all, remarkably large, and it didn’t appear to be in any hurry. The fact that no one else seemed to see it probably helped. Why hurry when you were apparently invisible megafauna?

  Frankie had seen a moose once, by the side of the road in upstate Washington. It had been casually munching on a bush, watching the cars go rushing by with a vaguely malicious air, like it knew it could ruin a whole lot of peoples’ days just by stepping into traffic. The unicorn was sort of like that, only potentially meaner.

  Frankie was pretty sure the unicorn could take a moose. Maybe two moose. The lady on the unicorn’s back might look like the kind of airy, dreamy girl who would try to feed a moose carrots because it looked sort of like a horse, maybe, but the unicorn? The unicorn looked mean.

  As Frankie watched, the unicorn lifted its tail and dropped a massive pat of unicorn crap in the middle of the aisle. Unlike the half-joking unicorn-related T-shirts she’d seen in the kid’s department, the unicorn crapped neither rainbows nor glitter. The unicorn crapped, well, crap. Big and brown and wet-looking. Frankie looked from the unicorn to the crap and back again before making an executive decision and fading back into the racks behind her, waiting to see what would happen.

  What happened was a customer, not looking where they were going, driving their cart directly into the giant pile of poop, splashing it over the surrounding linoleum and onto the edge of the carpet that went under the clothing aisles. There was a momentary startled pause before the customer actually screamed, a deep guttural sound of shock and disgust and sheer indignity, li
ke they couldn’t believe this was happening to them while they were out shopping at Target. The scream managed to somehow imply that this was a classy establishment, above random piles of horseshit in the aisles, and a tawdry den of filth where such things should absolutely be expected, at the same time.

  It was very impressive. Frankie was very impressed, even as she faded further back into the shelves, out of view of both the customer who’d suffered the unicorn poop encounter and the uniformed crew members who were now rushing to assist with the unexpected cleanup.

  Technically, this was an emergency, and as she was still on the clock, she should have been hurrying to help mop unicorn poop off the floor, the merchandise, the cart, and the customer. But she had more important things to do, and so she quietly turned and walked away, following the unicorn’s most likely path through the store.

  It was interesting. People couldn’t see the unicorn, or the woman on its back. No one had seemed to see the pile of poop—and it had been a quite considerable pile of poop; Frankie was reasonably sure no one could have overlooked it without really trying, if it had been visible—until someone actually interacted with it. After that, everyone had been able to see the poop. The poop had been, as it were, announced to the world.

  So what would happen if someone interacted with the unicorn? If she were to, say, put her hand on its pearlescent flank, to feel the silky brush of its fur against her palm, would it appear to everyone, or would it continue to be visible to only her? And did she want it to appear to everyone, or did she want it to be her secret, shared only with the dreamy girl on its back, who didn’t seem to appreciate, or care, that she was riding an actual unicorn through a large retail store?

 

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