by Ellen Datlow
“My parents are gone, too,” she told him.
He nodded, his eyes shiny.
Lily shot Aunt a look, but Aunt sat in her chair, staring out into the gathering dusk, an unreadable expression in her features. Lily supposed it was one thing to appreciate a fairy tale but quite another to find yourself smack dab in the middle of one.
Lily was taking it the best of either of them. Maybe it was because of that snake bite fever dream she’d had. In the past five years she still woke from dreams in which she’d been a kitten.
“Why did you come back?” she asked Frank.
“I didn’t know I was coming back,” he said. “That world…” He flipped a few pages back to show them reproductions of Johnson’s paintings. “That’s what this other world’s like. You don’t have to imagine everything being more of itself than it seems to be here like Milo’s done in these paintings. Over there it’s really like that. You can’t imagine the colors, the intensity, the rich wash that fills your heart as much as it does your eyes. We haven’t painted at all since we got over there. We didn’t need to.” He laughed. “I know Milo abandoned his paints before we crossed over and to tell you the truth, I don’t even know where mine are.”
“I found Mr. Johnson’s box,” Lily said. “Yesterday—not far from where you came upon me and the dogs.”
He nodded, but she didn’t think he’d heard her.
“I was walking,” he said. “Looking for the Lady. We hadn’t seen Her for a day or so and I wanted to talk to Her again. To ask Her about that place. I remember I came to this grove of sycamore and beech where we’d seen Her a time or two. I stepped in between the trees, out of the sun and into the shade. The next thing I knew I was walking in these hills and I was back here where everything seems … paler. Subdued.”
He looked at them.
“I’ve got to go back,” he said. “There’s no place for me here. Ma’s gone and everybody I knew’ll be dead like her or too changed for me to know them anymore.” He tapped the book. “Just like me, according to what it says here.”
“You don’t want to go rushing into anything,” Aunt said. “Surely you’ve got other kin, and they’ll be wanting to see you.”
“There’s no one. Me and Ma, we were the last of the Spains that I know.”
Aunt nodded in a way that Lily recognized. It was her way of making you think she agreed with you, but she was really just waiting for common sense to take hold of you so that you didn’t go off half-cocked and get yourself in some kind of trouble you didn’t need to get into.
“You’ll want to rest up,” she said. “You can sleep in the barn. Lily will show you where. Come morning, everything’ll make a lot more sense.”
He just looked at her. “How do you make sense out of something like this?”
“You trust me on this,” she said. “A good night’s sleep does a body wonders.”
So he followed her advice—most people did when Aunt had decided what was best for them.
He let Lily take him down to the barn where they made a bed for him in the straw. She wondered if he’d try to kiss her, and how she’d feel if he did, but she never got the chance to find out.
“Thank you,” he said and then he lay down on the blankets.
He was already asleep by the time she was closing the door.
And in the morning he was gone.
That night Lily had one of what she thought of as her storybook dreams. She wasn’t a kitten this time. Instead she was sitting under the Apple Tree Man’s tree and he stepped out of the trunk of his tree just like she remembered him doing five years ago. He looked the same, too, a raggedy man, gnarled and twisty, like the boughs of his tree.
“You,” she only said and looked away.
“That’s a fine welcome for an old friend.”
“You’re not my friend. Friends aren’t magical men who live in a tree and then make you feel like you’re crazy because they never show up in your life again.”
“And yet I helped you when you were a kitten.”
“In the fever dream when I thought I was a kitten.”
He came around and sat on his haunches in front of her, all long gangly limbs and tattered clothes and bird’s nest hair. His face was wrinkled like the dried fruit from his tree.
He sighed. “It was better for you to only remember it as a dream.”
“So it wasn’t a dream?” she asked, unable to keep the eagerness from her voice. “You’re real? You and the Father of Cats and the fairies in the field?”
“Someplace we’re real.”
She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded, disappointment taking the place of her momentary happiness.
“This is just a dream, too, isn’t it?” she said.
“This is. What happened before wasn’t.”
She poked at the dirt with her finger, looking away from him again.
“Why would it be better for me to remember it as a dream?” she asked.
“Our worlds aren’t meant to mix—not anymore. They’ve grown too far apart. When you spend too much time in ours, you become like your painter foundling, forever restless and unhappy in the world where you belong. Instead of living your life, you lose yourself in dreams and fancies.”
“Maybe for some, dreams and fancies are better than what they have here.”
“Maybe,” he said, but she knew he didn’t agree. “Is that true for you?”
“No,” she had to admit. “But I still don’t understand why I was allowed that one night and then no more.”
She looked at him. His dark eyes were warm and kind, but there was a mystery in them, too. Something secret and daunting that she wasn’t sure she could ever understand. That perhaps she shouldn’t want to understand.
“What you do is important,” he said after a long moment, which wasn’t much of an answer at all.
She laughed. “What I do? Whatever do I do that could be so important?”
“Perhaps it’s not what you do now so much as what you will do if you continue with your drawing and painting.”
She shook her head. “I’m not really that good.”
“Do you truly believe that?”
She remembered what Frank Spain had said after looking at her drawings.
These are good. Better than good.
She remembered how the drawings had, if only for a moment, taken him away from the sadness that lay so heavy in his heart.
“But I’m only drawing the woods,” she said. “I’m drawing what I see, not fairies and fancies.”
The Apple Tree Man nodded. “Sometimes people need fairies and fancies to wake them up to what they already have. But sometimes a good drawing of a real thing does it better.”
“So is that why you came to me tonight?” she asked. “To tell me to keep doing something I’m going to go on doing anyway?”
He shook his head.
“Then why did you come?”
“To ask you not to look for that cave,” he said. “To not go in. If you do, you’ll carry the yearning of what you find inside yourself forever.”
What the Apple Tree Man had told her all seemed to make perfect sense in last night’s dream. But when she woke to find Frank gone, what had made sense then didn’t seem to be nearly enough now. Knowing she’d once experienced a real glimpse into a storybook world, she only found herself wanting more.
“Well, it seems like a lot of trouble to go through,” Aunt said when Lily came back from the barn with the news that their guest was gone. “To cadge a meal and a roof over your head for the night, I mean.”
“I don’t think he was lying.”
Aunt shrugged.
“But he looked just like the picture in my book.”
“There was a resemblance,” Aunt said. “But really. The story he told—it’s too hard to believe.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
Aunt thought for a moment, then shook her head.
“Can’t say that I can,” she admitted.
>
“I think he’s gone to look for the cave. He wants to go back.”
“And I suppose you want to go looking for him.”
Lily nodded.
“Are you sweet on him?” Aunt asked.
“I don’t think I am.”
“Can’t say’s I’d blame you. He was a good looking man.”
“I’m just worried about him,” Lily said. “He’s all lost and alone and out of his own time.”
“And say you find him. Say you find the cave. What then?”
The Apple Tree Man’s warning and Aunt’s obvious concern struggled against her own desire to find the cave, to see the magical land that lay beyond it.
“I’d have the chance to say good-bye,” she said.
There. She hadn’t exactly lied. She hadn’t said everything she could have, but she hadn’t lied.
Aunt studied her for a long moment.
“You just be careful,” she said. “See to the cow and chickens, but the garden can wait till you get back.”
Lily grinned. She gave Aunt a quick kiss, then packed herself a lunch. She was almost out the door when she turned back and took Milo Johnson’s painting box out from under her bed.
“Going to try those paints?” Aunt asked.
“I think so.”
And she did, but it wasn’t nearly the success she’d hoped it would be.
The morning started fine, but then walking in these woods of hers was a sure cure for any ailment, especially when it was in your heart or head. The dogs hadn’t come to join her today, but that was all right. She could be just as happy on her own here.
She made her way down to that part of the wood where she’d first found the box, and then later Frank, but he was nowhere about. Either he’d found his way back into fairyland, or he was just ignoring her voice. Finally she gave up and spent a while looking for this cave of his, but there were too many in this part of the forest and none of them looked—no, none of them felt right.
After lunch, she sat down and opened the painting box.
The drawing she did on the back of one of Johnson’s three paintings turned out well, though it was odd using her pencil on a wood panel. But she’d gotten the image she wanted: the sweeping boughs of an old beech tree, smooth-barked and tall, the thick crush of underbrush around it, the forest behind. It was the colors that proved to be a problem. The paints wouldn’t do what she wanted. It was hard enough to get each tube open, they were stuck so tight, but once she had a squirt of the various colors on the palette it all went downhill from there.
The colors were wonderfully bright—pure pigments that had their own inner glow. At least they did until she started messing with them and then everything turned to mud. When she tried to mix them she got either outlandish hues or colors so dull they all might as well have been the same. The harder she tried, the worse it got.
Sighing, she finally wiped off the palette and the panel she’d been working on, then cleaned the brushes, dipping them in the little jar of turpentine, working the paint out of the hairs with a rag. She studied Johnson’s paintings as she worked, trying to figure out how he’d gotten the colors he had. This was his box, after all. These were the same colors he’d used to paint these three amazing paintings. Everything she needed was just lying there in the box, waiting to be used. So why was she so hopeless?
It was because painting was no different than looking for fairies, she supposed. No different than trying to find that cave entrance into some magic elsewhere. Some people just weren’t any good at that sort of thing.
They were both magic, after all. Art as well as fairies. Magic. What else could you call how Johnson was able to bring the forest to life with no more than a few colors on a flat surface?
She could practice, of course. And she would. She hadn’t been any good when she’d first started drawing either. But she wasn’t sure that she’d ever feel as… inspired as Johnson must have felt.
She studied the inside lid of the box. Even this abstract pattern where he’d probably only been testing his color mixes had so much vibrancy and passion. She leaned closer for a better look and found herself thinking about her Newford Naturalists book, about something Milo Johnson was supposed to have said. “It’s not just a matter of painting en plein air as the Impressionists taught us,” the author quoted Johnson. “It’s just as important to simply be in the wilds. Many times the only painting box I take is in my head. You don’t have to be an artist to bring something back from your wilderness experiences. My best paintings don’t hang in galleries. They hang somewhere in between my ears—an endless private showing that I can only attempt to share with others through a more physical medium.”
That must be why he’d abandoned this painting box she’d found. He’d gone into fairyland only bringing the one in his head. She didn’t know if she could ever learn to do that.
She sighed and was about to get up and go when she thought she heard something—an almost-music. It was like listening to ravens in the woods when their rough, deep-throated croaks and cries all but seemed like human language. It wasn’t, of course, but still, you felt so close to understanding it.
She lifted her head to look around. It wasn’t ravens she heard. It wasn’t anything she knew, but it still seemed familiar. Faint, but insistent. Almost like wind chimes or distant bells, but not quite. Almost like birdsong, trills and warbling melodies, but not quite. Almost like an old fiddle tune, played on a pipe or a flute, the rhythm a little ragged, or simply a little out of time like the curious jumps and extra beats in a Kickaha tune. But not quite.
Closing the painting box, she stood. She slung her satchel from her shoulder, picked up the box, and turned in a slow circle. The sound was stronger to the west, away from the creek and deeper into the forest. A ravine cut off to the left and she followed it, pushing her way through the thick shrub layer of rhododendrons and mountain laurel. Hemlocks and tulip trees rose up the slopes on either side with a thick understory of redbud, magnolia, and dogwood.
The almost-music continued to pull her along—distant, near, distant, near, like a radio signal that couldn’t quite hang on to a station. It was only when she broke through into a small clearing, a wall of granite rising above her, that she saw the mouth of the cave.
She knew immediately that this had to be the cave Frank had been looking for, the one into which he and Milo Johnson had stepped and so disappeared from the world for twenty years. The almost-music was clearer than ever here, but it was the bas-relief worked into the stone above the entrance that made her sure. Here was Frank’s Lady, a rough carving of a woman’s face. Her hair was thick with leaves and more leaves came spilling out of her mouth, bearding her chin.
Aunt’s general warnings, as well as the Apple Tree Man’s more specific ones, returned to her as she moved closer. She lifted a hand to trace the contours of the carving. As soon as she touched it, the almost-music stopped.
She dropped her hand, starting back as though she’d put a finger on a hot stove. She looked around herself with quick, nervous glances. Now that the almost-music was gone, she found herself standing in an eerie pocket of silence. The sounds of the forest were muted, as the music had been earlier. She could still hear the insects and birdsong, but they seemed to come from far away.
She turned back to the cave, uneasy now. In the back of her mind she could hear the Apple Tree Man’s voice.
Don’t go in.
I won’t. Not all the way.
But now that she was here, how could she not at least have a look?
She went as far as the entrance, ducking her head because the top of the hole was only as high as her shoulder. It was dark inside, too dark to see in the beginning. But slowly her eyes adjusted to the dimmer lighting.
The first thing she really saw were the paintings.
They were like her own initial attempts at drawing—crude, stick figures and shapes that she’d drawn on scraps of paper and the walls of the barn with the charred ends of sticks. Except, wh
ere hers had been simple because she could do no better, these, she realized as she studied them more closely, were more like stylized abbreviations. Where her drawings had been tentative, these held power. The paint or chalk had been applied with bold, knowing strokes. Nothing wasted. Complex images distilled to their primal essences.
An antlered man. A turtle. A bear with a sun on its chest, radiating squiggles of light. A leaping stag. A bird of some sort with enormous wings. A woman, cloaked in leaves. Trees of every shape and size. Lightning bolts. A toad. A spiral with the face of the woman on the entrance outside in its center. A fox with an enormous striped tail. A hare with drooping ears and small deer horns.
And more. So many more. Some easily recognizable, others only geometric shapes that seemed to hold whole books of stories in their few lines.
Her gaze traveled over the walls, studying the paintings with growing wonder and admiration. The cave was one of the larger ones she’d found—easily three or four times the size of Aunt’s cabin. There were paintings everywhere, many too hard to make out because they were lost in deeper shadows. She wished she had a corn shuck or lantern to throw more light than what came from the opening behind her. She longed to move closer, but still didn’t dare abandon the safety of the entranceway.
She might have left it like that, drunk her fill of the paintings and then gone home, if her gaze hadn’t fallen upon a figure sitting hunched in a corner of the cave, holding what looked like a small bark whistle. She’d made the same kind herself from the straight smooth branches of a chestnut or a sourwood tree.
But the whistle was quiet now. Frank sat so still, enveloped in the shadows, that she might never have noticed him except as she had, by chance.
“Frank…?” she said.
He lifted his head to look at her.
“It’s gone,” he said. “I can’t call it back.”
“The other world?”
He nodded.
“That was you making that… music?”
“It was me doing something,” he said. “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it music.”
Lily hesitated a long moment, then finally stepped through the entrance, into the cave itself. She flinched as she crossed the threshhold, but nothing happened. There were no flaring lights or sudden sounds. No door opened into another world, sucking her in.