Big Dark Hole

by Jeffrey Ford

  Since their purpose seemed to be to ascend, I foresaw trouble ahead for them. The next shelf above, which they’d have to somehow flip up onto, held two rows of books, not one, so there was no clear space for them to land. They’d have to flip up and again dig in with their thorns and attach themselves to the spines of books whose bottoms stuck perilously out over the edge of the shelf. When I considered the agility and strength all this took, I shook my head and put my hand over my heart. I wanted to see them succeed, though, and went off on a trail of musing that pitted the reliability of the impossible against the potential chaos of reality. A point came where I wandered from the path of my thoughts and wound up witnessing the smallest of the fairies nearly plummet to his death. I felt his scream in my liver.

  The poor little fellow had lost a hold on his thread line and was hanging out over the abyss, desperately grasping a poorly planted thorn in the spine of Blind Man with a Pistol. His compatriot, whom I just then realized was a woman with long dark hair, shot an arrow into the ceiling of the shelf. Once she had that line affixed to her belt, she swung over to her comrade in danger and put her left arm around him. He let go his thorn spike and swung with her. I was so intent upon watching this rescue that I missed but from the very corner of my eye one of the other tiny adventurers fall. His (for I was just then somehow certain it was a he, and his name was Meeshin) minuscule weight dragged the book he’d attached to off the shelf after him. This was the thing about the fairies; if you could see them, the longer you looked, the deeper you knew them: their names, their motivations, their secrets.

  I only turned in time to see that he’d been crushed by the slim volume of Quiet Days in Clichy. I watched to see if his compatriots from beneath the bookshelf would appear to claim his corpse, but they didn’t. The loneliness of Meeshin’s death affected me more than it should have. It came to me that he was married and had three fairy kids. His art was whittling totem poles full of animals of the imagination out of toothpicks. I’d wondered where all my toothpicks had gone. I pictured his wife, Tibith, in the fairy marketplace telling a friend that all Meeshin’s crazy creatures could be seen, like in a gallery, way in the back of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Last I saw him behind my eyes, it was night and he lay quietly in bed, his arms around his wife.

  Next I caught up with the climbers, the three had gathered to rest on the top edge of a book back in the second row of that dangerous shelf. I shifted my position in the chair and craned my neck a bit to see that the volume in question was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, a book I’d never read and one of those strange additions to my library, the acquisition of which, was a mystery. My favorite essayist, Alberto Manguel, had said that he’d never enter a library that contained a book by Coelho. I thought that on the off chance he might travel to the drop edge of yonder, Ohio, I should get rid of it.

  I knew them all by name now and something about their little lives. The woman with the long dark hair, Aspethia, was the leader of the expedition. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of their journey was, but I knew it had a purpose. It was a mission given to her directly by Magorian, the Fairy Queen. Her remaining companions were the little fellow she rescued, Sopso, and a large fellow, Balthazar, who wore a conical hat with a chin strap like something from a child’s birthday party on his bald head. Aspethia spoke words of encouragement to Sopso, who cowered on his knees for fear of falling. She went into her pack and pulled out another rose thorn for him. “Now, if we don’t hurry, there will be no point in our having come this far,” she said.

  The next shelf up they found easy purchase at the front as there was only one row of books pushed all the way back. It was the shelf with my collection of the Lang fairy books, each volume a different color. That they all stood together was the only bit of authentic order in my library. I watched the fairies pass in front of the various colors—red, violet, green, orange—and wondered if they knew the books were more than merely giant rocks to be climbed. Did they know these boulders they passed held the ancient stories of their species? I pictured the huge boulder, like the egg of a roc, sitting alone amidst the golden grass over at the preserve and daydreamed about the story it might hatch.

  The afternoon pushed on with the slow, steady progress of a fairy climbing thread. They moved up the various shelves of the bookcase, one after the other, with a methodical pace. Even the near falls, the brushes with death, were smooth and timely. There were obstacles, books I’d placed haphazardly atop a row pretending that I intended to someday reshelve them. When the companions were forced to cross my devil tambourine, which had sat there on the fifth level since two Halloweens previously, it made their teensy steps echo in the caverns of the shelves. The big one, Balthazar, skewered, with a broken broom straw, a silverfish atop one of the Smiley novels, and they lit a fairy fire, which only cooked their meal but didn’t burn, thank God. Those three remaining climbers sat in a circle and ate the cooked insect. While they did, Sopso read from a book so infinitesimally small it barely existed.

  I closed my eyes and drifted off into the quiet of the afternoon. The window was open a bit and a breeze snaked in around me. Moments later, I bolted awake, and the first thing I did was search the bookshelf for the expedition. When I found them, a pulse of alarm shot up my back. Balthazar and Aspethia were battling an oni netsuke come miraculously to life. I’d had the thing for years. Lynn bought it for me in a store in Chinatown in Philly across the street from Joe’s Peking Duck House. It was a cheap imitation, made to look like ivory from some kind of resin—a short, stocky demon with a dirty face and horns. He held a mask of his own visage in his right hand and a big bag in his left. He tried to scoop the fairies into it. Sopso was nowhere in sight.

  Seeing an inanimate object come to life made me a little dizzy, and I think I was trembling. The demon growled and spat at them. What was more incredible still was the fact that the companions were able to drive the monster to the edge of the shelf. The fighting was fierce, the fairies drawing blood with long daggers fashioned from the ends of brass safety pins. The demon’s size gave it the advantage, and more than once he’d scooped Balthazar and Aspethia up but they’d managed to wriggle out of the eyeholes of the mask before he could bag them. The little people sang a lilting fairy anthem throughout the battle that I only caught garbled snatches of. They ran as they sang in circles round the giant, poking him in the hairy shins and toes and Achilles tendon with their daggers.

  Oni lost his balance and tipped a jot toward the edge. In a blink, Balthaszar leaped up, put a foot on the demon’s belly, grabbed its beard in his free hand, pulled himself higher, and plunged the dagger into his enemy’s eye. The demon reeled backward, screaming, turning in circles. Aspethia leaped forward and drove her dagger to the hilt in Oni’s left testicle. That elicited a terrible cry, and then the creature tipped over the edge of the shelf. Balthazar tried to leap off to where Aspethia stood, but Oni grabbed his leg and they went all the way down together. Although the fairy’s neck was broken, his party hat remained undamaged.

  Aspethia crawled to the edge of the shelf and peered down the great distance to see the fate of her comrade. If she survived the expedition, she would be the one responsible for telling Balthazar’s wife and children of his death. She sat back away from the edge and took a deep breath. Sopso emerged from a cavern between The Book of Contemplation and Harry Crews’s Childhood. He walked over to where Aspethia knelt and put his hand on her shoulder. She reached up and grabbed it. He helped her to her feet and they made their way uneventfully to the top shelf. As they climbed, I looked back down at the fallen netsuke and saw that it had regained its original form of a lifeless figurine. Had there been a demon in it? How and why did it come to life? The gift of seeing fairies comes wrapped in questions.

  On the top shelf, they headed north toward the back wall of the room, passing a foot-high Ghost Rider plastic figure, the marble Ganesh bookends, a small picture frame containing a block of Jason Van Hollander�
�s Hell Stamps, Flannery O’Connor’s letters, and Our Lady of the Flowers shelved without consciousness of design on my part directly next to Our Lady of Darkness. A copy of the writings of Cotton Mather lay atop the books of that shelf, its upper half forming an overhang beneath which the expedition had to pass. Its cover held a portrait of Mather from his own time and faced down. Eyes peered from above. His brows, his nose, his powdered wig, but not his mouth, bore witness to the fairies passing. For a moment, I was with them in the shadow, staring up at the preacher’s gaze, incredulous as to how the glance of the image was capable of following us.

  Eventually, they came to where the last bookcase in the row butts up against the northern wall. Aspethia and Sopso stroked the barrier as if it had some religious significance. She leaned over and put her arm around Sopso’s shoulder, turned him, and pointed out the framed painting hanging on the northern wall about two feet from the bookcase. He saw it and nodded. The painting in question had been given to me by my friend Barney, who painted it in his studio at Dividing Creek in South Jersey. It’s a knock-off of a Charles Willson Peale painting of the artist ascending a staircase, only Barney’s is done in green, and there’s only one figure—a ghost with the acrimonious face of John Ashcroft, President Bush’s secretary of state, looking back over his shoulder.

  She shot an arrow into the northern wall just above the middle of where the painting hung. She leaned forward and Sopso climbed upon her back. With the line from the arrow tight in her hands, she inched toward the edge of the bookcase. She jumped and they swung toward the painting, Sopso screaming, and crashed into the image where Ashcroft’s ascot met his second chin. Once they’d stopped bouncing against the canvas, she told her passenger to tighten his grip. He did and she began hauling both of them to the top of the picture frame. Her climbing looked like magic.

  For some reason, right here, I recalled the strange sound I’d heard behind the garage the last few nights. A wheezing growl that reverberated through the night. I pictured the devil crouching back there in the shadows, but our neighbor told us it was a fox in heat. It sounded like a cry from another world. My interest in it faded, and in a heartbeat my focus was back on the painting. They had achieved the top of the frame and were resting. I wondered where the expedition was headed next. There was another painting on that wall about four feet away from the ghost on the staircase. It was a painting of Garuda by my younger son. The distance between the paintings was vast in fairy feet. I couldn’t believe they would attempt to cross to it. Aspethia showed it no interest, but instead pointed straight up.

  She took her bow, knocked an arrow with a thread line in place, and aimed it at the ceiling. My glance followed the path of the potential shot, and only then did I notice that her arrow was aimed precisely into a prodigious spider web that stretched from directly above the painting all the way to the corner of the north wall. She released the arrow, and I tried to follow it but caught only a blur. It hit its mark, and that drew my attention to the fact that right next to where it hit, that fly, big as a grape, was trapped in webbing and buzzing to beat the band. I looked along the web to the corner of the ceiling and saw the spider, skinny legs with a fat white pearl of an abdomen. I could see it drooling as it moved forward to finally claim its catch.

  It surprised me when, without hesitation, Sopso alone climbed the line toward the ceiling. He shimmied up at a pace that lapped the spider’s progress, the rose thorn clenched in his teeth. The fly was well-wrapped in spider silk, unable to use its wings, its cries muffled. The pale spider danced along the vibrating strands. Sopso reached the fly and cut away enough web to get his legs around the insect’s back. Too bad he was upside down. The spider advanced while the fairy continued to hack away. I was able to hear every strand he cut—the noise of a spring spung, like an effect from a cartoon. The way Sopso worked, with such courage and cool, completely reversed my estimation of him. Till then, I’d thought of him as a burden to the expedition, but, after all, he had his place.

  I was at the edge of my seat, my neck craned and my head tilted back. My heart was pounding. The spider reared back, poised to strike, and Sopso never flinched but worked methodically in the looming shadow of death. Fangs shut and four piercing sharp leg points struck at nothing. The fairy had cut the last strand and he, legs around the back of the fly, fell upside down toward the floor. At the last second the fly’s wings worked, and they managed to pull out of the death plunge. They shot up past my left ear toward the ceiling. Aspethia, the spider, and I followed their erratic course. They zigzagged with great buzzing all around the room, but when they passed over the bookcase near the window of the west wall, the fairy, afraid the dizzy fly would crash, jumped off and landed safely on a copy of Albahari’s Leeches.

  Sopso was stranded. He and Aspethia waved to each other across the incredible expanse of my office. They might as well have been on different worlds. Each cried out but neither was able to hear the other. Her arrows could not reach him. He had with him no thread bandoliers, nor even a pin-tip knife. Without them, there was no way he could climb down from that height, and by the time Aspethia returned to the fairy village and could mount a rescue party, he would most likely die of starvation. Still, she set out quickly to get back home on the slim chance he might survive long enough. He watched her go, and I could see the sadness come over him. The sight of it left me with a terrible chill.

  What was I to do? My heart went out to the lost climber who gave his life to save an insignificant fly, not to mention brave Aspethia. I thought how easily I could change everything for them. I stood up and stepped over to the bookcase by the window on the west wall. I reached out to gently lift Sopso in order to place him down on the floor across the room near where the expedition had begun. My fingers closed, and for no good reason, he suddenly disappeared. A moment of silence passed, and then I heard a chorus well up from beneath the bookcases, each voice not but a pinprick of laughter.

  Later that evening, as Lynn and I sat on the porch in the last pink glow of sunset, she reached across the glass-topped table that held our wine and said, “Look here.” She was holding something between her thumb and forefinger. Whatever she was showing me was very delicate and what with the failing light I needed to lean in close to see. To my shock it was a cat whisker with a postage stamp affixed to the end, like a tiny flag.

  Her expression made me ask, “How long have you known?”

  She laughed quietly. “Way back,” she said and her words cut away the webbing that had trapped me.

  The Winter Wraith

  (for Kit Reed)

  Henry sensed resignation in the posture of the Christmas tree. It slouched toward the living-room window as if peering out. There was no way he could plug its lights in, cheer it up. The thing was dryer than the Sandman’s mustache, its spine a stick of kindling. The least vibration brought a shower of needles. Ornaments fell of their own accord. Some broke, which he had to sweep and vacuum, initiating the descent of more needles, more ornaments. The cat took some as toys and batted them around the kitchen floor. Glittering evidence in the field indicated Bothwell, the dog, had acquired a taste for tinsel.

  Mero had told him not to take it down. She had a special way she wrapped the ornaments when boxing them and he wasn’t about to argue for doing it by himself. At the end of that first week she was away in China, though, the presence of the tree became an imposition. He described it in his Friday journal as, “A distant cousin, once accused of pyromania, arriving for an indefinite visit.”

  In the middle of his work, in the middle of the grocery store, when walking around the lake with the dog, the spirit of that sagging pine was always waiting by the front window in the living room of his thoughts. Then Mero finally called on FaceTime from Shanghai. Her image was distorted, as if he were seeing her through rippling water. In a heartbeat, the picture froze, but she kept talking. He told her he missed her and she said the same. She said Shanghai was amazing, enormous, an
d that she liked the young woman who was her translator and guide. She asked about Bothwell. Henry spoke about the freezing wind, the snow. She told him to be careful driving, and then he told her about the tree. “It’s shot,” he said. “I gotta take it down.”

  Suddenly the call cut out and he couldn’t get her back. He wanted to tell her he loved her and hear her voice some more, but in a way he understood. It was like dialing another world. The distance between Ohio and Shanghai made him shiver.

  He called Bothwell, and the border collie appeared. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked. The dog’s blue eyes were intense and it cocked its head to the side as if to say, “What do you think?” So Henry put his coat and hat and mittens on, and out they went, over the snow, across the yard, through the orchard, past the garden, into the farmer’s winter fields that surrounded the property. Corn stubble and snow stretched out to the horizon in three directions. It was sundown, orange and pink in the west, a deep royal blue to the east where he spotted the moon.

  They headed toward the windbreak of white oak about a quarter mile into the field. The frozen gusts that blew across the open land sliced right through him, and he struggled to hold closed his jacket with the broken zipper. They entered the thicket of giant old trees. Under the clacking, empty branches, last light turned to mist and shadow. He sat down on a fallen log and looked to the west. Bothwell sniffed around and then sat behind him to escape the gusts that eddied among the trees. Henry had a hell of a time lighting a cigarette. Once he got it going, though, he made an executive decision. The first part was to open a bottle of wine when he got back to the house, the second to dismantle the tree and get rid of it by the following afternoon.