The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

“It wasn’t from you; it was O’Barron. Somehow he learned who you are, and he accused me of having brought you over. He threatened to kill me on the spot! I lost my head — I ran —” She was trembling, and she began to weep against my breast.

  I comforted her, picked up her key, and said, “Here, let’s get you inside.”

  Once inside, her tears stopped; she seemed a bit ashamed of herself. We didn’t have a lot of time. I figured tall, red, and ugly would have her address, and I’d killed a goblin back there. “Look, what gives? Is this some kind of test you’re putting me to?”

  She looked away. “I’m sorry. I lied to you in your office.”

  I tried not to be bowled over.

  “O’Barron isn’t just running weapons, he’s one of the revolutionaries, and I’m in his cell. Do you know the Queen and King of Faerie?”

  “I know of them.” I’d never seen any of the upper echelon of Faerie, never mind the royal family, and pictures of them weren’t allowed, as images might be used to cast spells against them. I’d heard they stayed in the remoter reaches, far from human contact.

  “Another century of their rule and all of Faerie will look like the slums of Twilight. I thought O’Barron had betrayed us, and I had to find out. Now I am almost sure of it.” She turned those midnight eyes on me again, passionate and gleaming. “I know you have no desire to be mixed up in elfin politics, but I needed the help of someone strong, someone I could depend on. I needed you.”

  Sure, said the cold voice in the back of my brain. Where do I sign on and get my bandoleer of bullets. I decided to try an end run.

  “Can you get me to Keats?”

  She turned away and took off her cloak. She was still in her stage dress, what little there was of it, and when she threw the cloak over the back of a couch, the gesture accentuated the curve of her breast within the sheer fabric. I supposed that was a kind of answer.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have no idea where he is. I misled you about that, too.” She looked up at me. “There have been messages, meant for you, perhaps. They’ve come back through our network.” She opened a drawer in a table nearby and brought me a slip of paper. “This came some time ago.”

  Keats’s hand again:

  She took me to her elfin grot,

  And there she wept and sighed full sore

  And that was a kind of answer, too. She stood within easy reach, breathing hard with suppressed passion. And suddenly I didn’t care if she were angel, devil, or the King of Elfland’s daughter. I stopped caring about Keats. The cold voice in my brain went quiet; all I heard within myself was a distant, abandoned cry.

  She stepped forward and pressed herself against me, trembling, like some wild thing just taken.

  “Won’t O’Barron be on us soon?” I murmured into the scent of her hair.

  “I’ve protected this place with a series of magic wards — it will be hours before he can get here.”

  Without saying anything else, I bent and kissed her pale blue throat. I wound my fingers in the ends of her shadowy hair, as if I had a thousand things to remember, and all of them made my heart beat faster, my pulse dance. I kissed the corner of her mouth for an instant, daring only so much, then the hollow behind her cheek, her temple, and then, light as a moth in moonlight, her closed eyes.

  Through all that she barely moved. Her fingers and eyelids fluttered, maybe her breast rose and fell more quickly. Then she turned her face upward like a flower seeking rain, brought up her arms in the beginnings of a circle. I entered that circle and bent my face to the upturned blossom of her lips, sweet as honey, moist as dew.

  Later — a long, wild time later — I fell asleep. And I dreamt: young Johnny Keats sitting across from me, pale, with a day’s shadow on his slim face, like the young citizen with the pixie and like him, in a dark suit that looked like it had been slept in. And with the same look of disillusioned sickness, someone who had faced his compulsions without blinking and still gave in to them, knowing they would cost him his life and soul. He was staring at me with a sadness so pure I don’t think it could have been expressed in waking life; it had to be refined, the pure spirit of sorrow, the aquavit of pain.

  Behind him silver foam curled where waves the color of ivory broke against a giant’s jawful of black rocks.

  I woke up, and Maeve was gone. The bed was cold where she’d been, and I felt colder. I dressed, but it didn’t help.

  When she came in, I realized that a glamour had befogged me, because now it was gone. What had Willy said? What fools, what fools! The circlet of gold she wore had become a kind of crown. Nothing else about her was different, and everything was. She was too vivid for life, too intense, as if she had been made into a brilliant artwork of herself. She nearly shone.

  I began to tremble, I tried to swear, but in that place the name I tried to take in vain could not be said. But the cold voice in my head came back. It wished me a year in hell with my back broken.

  “Your name’s not Maeve,” I finally managed to gasp.

  She smiled at me the way the Queen of Cats might smile at a common mouse. “Maeve — Mab —”

  “Titania —”

  “That, too.” Her smile was suave and scornful. “Are you so surprised, mortal?”

  “O’Barron? Oberon?” Goddamn it, I’d been suckered into their legendary war of jealousy. Willy had told me about that, too, back before he’d broken down. He’d said they drew humans into the murky toils of their love life. I couldn’t understand that, if for no other reason than I’d always heard that the royal couple kept to their castles well inside Faerie. Well, they didn’t. They came to Twilight, using their glamour as a disguise.

  She’d used me to make Oberon jealous. I supposed he’d be along any moment. I shivered with anger and shame and, yes, fear. “Why me?” I asked. “I know you needed some poor dupe, but why me?”

  “Because you have never ceased prying into what happened to your fool of a partner. Do you think we did not know of your forays within Twilight? How you pestered and questioned our citizens? Even now a certain tunnel-guarding troll is losing his head in the mouth of one much larger. You, a mortal, spying on the royal business of Faerie! Did you think you could annoy us forever and abuse our citizens with impunity?”

  I thought of the goblin I’d rocked to sleep with a silver lullaby. “Not long ago I sent one of your citizens into the long sleep with a bullet that changed course strangely. I’ve heard your husband’s the only one in Faerie who can ensorcel silver. How much did he care about your citizens?”

  She shrugged, the most human thing I’d ever seen her do — well, almost. But her chin stayed high and regal, her eyes haughty and cold. “Our subjects are ours, to do with as we please.”

  I shook my head. “Is this what happened to Johnny? Did you come to our office? Lure him over?”

  “You accuse me of seeking him out — of luring him? Do you know how often he came to me in his dreams? I would find his spirit gazing on me in the depths of the night. I felt the pull of his longing across the boundary of worlds. So I went to your squalid little ‘agency.’ He did not know me — his waking mind would not allow it. But it didn’t matter. He would have followed me here no matter what.” She smiled scornfully. “He met my need.”

  “So you worked him up to a fever, like you did with me. And then you dropped him, hard.”

  Her eyes flashed. “You know so much, do you, you mortal fool? It wasn’t my coldness that broke his heart. It was that I gave him what he sought.” Her smile took on the glint of needles, and she said with deliberate malice, “Just what I gave to you. And he took it with the same piggish need, though he wept to do so, for despite the glamour, his soul knew me. Then he had no more dreams, poor boy, nothing left to seek for, no more illusions — or so he thought. That broke his heart.”

  “And you did all that with him — with me — on purpose?”

  “I am ensorcelled until my degradation is fulfilled,” she spat at me. “Only then am I freed. Why
do you think you can see my true form now? Do you think I could lower myself to couple with you without a stiff potion of sorcery? You mortal ass!”

  I shook my head. She took up with me to stop me from following up on Keats, but also to make her husband jealous. Oberon found out and bespelled her so that she would give herself to me, to punish and humiliate her for her plot. And then he’d gotten jealous, just as she planned, because she did what he’d forced her to do. How did they hold these motives and acts in their minds all at once? I couldn’t grasp it; I could just wonder at it from a distance, like a shooting star.

  Then the door burst to flinders, and a devil leaped in. I drew the .38 and sent all five slugs in his direction, for all the good they’d do. They slowed like a flight of bees in a strong countering wind, shivered in the air, and just hung there.

  Oberon’s glamour was gone, too; he gleamed like an oiled statue of leather and horn, red and ebon, elegant, ferocious, and seven feet tall, not counting the curved and deadly-looking horns. “Your Majesty,” I said, and dropped a mock bow, but I was trembling. He snarled at me; I suppose I was beneath him. But I’ve heard that mortals can live ten years in Faerie for every word Oberon says to them, and he didn’t want me there.

  He went for her, twisted his hand in her hair, driving her, gasping, to her knees. In her eyes were rage and pain, but I also saw pleasure there. I sickened at that. She saw, and scorned me. “Go thou, too,” she hissed at me, through the pain in her tight face and taut throat. “Go thou, too, to that White Sea, and trouble me no more.”

  Then she couldn’t speak. With me standing there, watching, with the bullets hovering between us, he took her with a ferocity that made me shudder, making her gasp with passion or pain, I don’t know which. As they shuddered and mingled, their colors shifted, his to a deep umber, then brick, then crimson, hers along a range of blue and violet that deepened like a flush and yet nearly incandesced. I was paralyzed, fascinated; but I finally managed to turn away from the throes of that body which, an hour before, I’d held warm and yielding in my arms.

  No, I thought, it’s not just some weird triangle caused by an inhuman way of thinking. It has to be some ungovernable urge built into the mating of the king and queen of this hive called Faerie, perhaps for the very survival of their line. Would this shining, snorting beast let his mate take another if he wasn’t forced to by a need beyond his power to control, a need in their very nature, their nerves and blood?

  They were like magnificent insects from a world where insects were supreme, displaying their bold, gorgeous colors in a ritual too complex to understand and yet instinctual, barbaric. Like watching a god and goddess mating in all their glory, knowing that right after, one would kill and devour the other.

  I thought of all the fairies I’d seen with gossamer dragonfly wings, and I shuddered again.

  As she screamed with lust or pain or God knows what, and he roared, I met her eyes one last time.

  I trembled and backed away from what I saw there. Leave it alone, I told myself. Forget it. There’s nothing you can do. It’s Faerie...it’s Faerie...

  I went away from there.

  If Keats had seen that same display of inhuman passion in the elfin form he’d cherished, that would have been enough to send him looking for the White Sea. I can see him traveling the lonely wastes with her cold scorn in his heart, nursing in memory the screams and roars of rutting beasts in glorious forms, the alienness that excluded him utterly. Hadn’t I seen him there still, pale and grieving by the White Sea’s shore?

  Did he make that final exile, of himself from himself? Did he try to cross the sea, in whatever craft he could find, or did he enter it?

  Despite Mab’s command, I didn’t seek the White Sea. I wasn’t made for deeper Faerie, the shadowy forests and the oblivion beyond.

  I went back home, to Sunset.

  It’s been a few years since then; I can’t go back to Faerie. I work this side of the river now. I go home, eat, read the paper. I drink too much. And sometimes, for two or three days together, I forget.

  Then, under a full moon, I remember pale skin tinted blue, eyes the color of water under a midnight sky, smoky indigo tresses, and I think, I’ll never see her again. And of course, I’m glad of that; I’m glad.

  But then, sometimes, I take out the pouch she gave me, all I have to remember her by. It’s filled with the crumbled dust of leaves. And I think of Keats, lost, looking out into the White Sea, and I know I’ll never go there. Then the bottom of life drops out, and I fall and fall and fall.

  “Landlocked” was one of the shortest pieces published in the magazine, but it packed more wallop than many stories triple its size. Barth has since had two novels published with Bantam, so it’s a nice feeling to know that this was his first short story sale. Jeff Sturgeon contributed the great art for #18, the first Talebones issue to be perfect bound.

  LANDLOCKED

  BARTH ANDERSON

  I’d been reading tide pools over the last three nights of hitchhiking down Highway One, and the portents were strong: three magenta starfish (the number for time-turns-against-you); seven little crabs (the number for completed dreams). So when I saw the beached mermaids, I knew this was what Mother had been warning me about.

  A big fishtail beat against the shell and sand beach. I knew their upper bodies were too weak to pull themselves back into the water, so they struggled against their own weight, like women with legs trapped in quicksand. Six mermaids. Unlucky number. Their fish halves rippled with scales, and their human halves were translucent as mucus. Only one was still alive and she was suffering a slow, hot death. Above, four men were watching the bodies slowly deflate in the sun. As if they were staring at my naked breasts, I felt the urge to cover the mermaids.

  Water surged against my calves and filled my hiking boots. I walked around the last mermaid still writhing in the retreating tide. Her black-as-kelp hair seemed to strangle her, and she looked frightened. Or perhaps I misinterpreted her circular eyes, which were big and wide for deep-sea hunting. The scalloped flesh over her gills snapped open and shut in an awful attempt to breathe. Still submerged in a rock crevice nearby, a bouquet of anemones spread their violet petals to the tide rush.

  I took off my baseball cap, which kept my long black hair out of my eyes, and scooped up water to pour over the mermaid’s face. She opened her mouth gratefully and the water foamed through her gills. The mermaid’s diaphanous skin surged with blood. “You idiot,” I whispered as if the crowd atop the cliff could hear me over the waves. “What were you thinking?”

  Her eyes searched the painful sky for a sign of me. “The stories.” She couldn’t see well, but she deduced who I was. “Your story, Lady.”

  I glanced up at the cliff. Eleven silhouettes stood up there. Sea green kudzu, tinged red, draped itself over the cliff edge as if these fingering vines meant to grasp the Pacific. “You’re stranded now. Just like me,” I said.

  “But you’re enchanted.” A big wave pushed me on top of her, then nearly tugged me back to sea. It didn’t even budge the beached mermaid. After she had sighed a great mouthful of water she said, “You’re the only one. The number of magic. Tell me how you did it.”

  Mother ebbed further away from her with each wave. “I don’t know how.” The day I heeded the myths I almost died ashore too. Air scraped my gills and I gasped at the bright, dry world for hours, praying to feel Mother course through me again. But then a boy came and water slipped through the bowl of his hands and my tail bifurcated, its two halves bending. When I finally breathed, I could smell sage and eucalyptus and I fell in love. “I don’t know.”

  The mermaid made a gurgling noise that would have sounded like sadness underwater. Her eyes were round as sand dollars. “I hate this place.”

  I dribbled water over her face from a draining tide pool. Everything drains away. Far inland, I had dreamed of brine and fish smells and hitchhiked back to the sea, thinking Mother would welcome me back into her dark, rhythmic womb. B
ut a week of tide pools and body surfing told me otherwise. I remained a walking thing.

  Waves no longer washed the dying mermaid, and the anemones had now clenched into pebbled fists, protecting themselves until high tide. I stroked the mermaid’s hair, my right arm tinged red from resting it out car windows. I had to walk further and further to the ocean for baseball caps of water, until on one trip back, I could see she was gone. The others were gone too. The sun had shriveled their bodies into piles of seaweed, fishbones, mussel shells.

  I sat on the sharp, graveled beach and cried for the mermaid. I breathed deep and the air smelled as it did that first day. Sage. Evergreen. Sunscorched hay. I understood how it happened then. On the lifeless border between worlds, I breathed the land scents deeply and sat listening to Mother’s poems. Her waves beat rhythm against the rocks in slow stanzas of seven.

  Catherine’s story “Seepage,” about living with a debilitating fear, was the first of four stories she published in Talebones. It also happened to be the Canadian writer’s first sale...well, in the United States, anyway. After you read this, you might want to go outside for a while. You know, just to get out of the house. Tom Simonton did the winged-man cover art for issue #14.

  SEEPAGE

  CATHERINE MACLEOD

  A noise in the dark. I woke to listen.

  Not mice in the attic or birds in the flue: I know the sound of scurry chittering whoosh.

  At night my house walks, as old houses will. I know all its moans, but sliding whisperslip so was new. I pondered its source and slept long after.

  But it was gone at breakfast, forgotten by noon, banished by coffee and bills and my counselor’s daily decree: “Go.”

  I can’t. An open door is a torment. I want to walk in the sunlight again, but beyond the door is too much and too many, and I can’t go through.