by S. Jae-Jones
A Lorelei.
Brave maiden, she said. Why do you call?
“Please,” I said hoarsely to the girl in the mirrored world. “Please, I must go back.”
The Lorelei tilted her head. Why?
To bring Josef back. To free the Goblin King. To calm the demons in my own head. “To make things right,” I said.
She laughed, showing a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. There is no making things right, maiden. There is only reckoning.
“Then I must reckon with those I have wronged,” I replied.
She lifted her brows. Who have you wronged?
“My brother,” I choked out. “The Goblin King. The old laws. The world.”
The Underground is not a place for forgiveness, she said.
But neither was the world above. “Please,” I said, holding out my empty hands before her. “I beg of you.”
The Lorelei studied me, and if there could be an expression of pity in those flat, affectless eyes, I thought I detected a glimmer of sympathy.
You cannot cross the threshold of your own free will, maiden, she said. You are taken, or you are summoned, as it was with the changeling who returned to us.
Josef.
“Then take me!” I cried.
She shook her head. You claim him as your brother, mortal, but we claim him as kin. He is of our kind. He belongs with us. He is home.
Home. Tears sprang to my eyes, spilling over my cheeks to the aquamarine waters below me.
You love him, the Lorelei said with surprise. I taste your sorrow and your tenderness. She licked her lips. I have not tasted such things in an age.
“Then take them!” I clawed at my cheeks, trying to grab hold of my tears. “Take it all!”
She smiled again. Would you give up your love for your changeling brother if I asked?
I was stunned. Of all the things the Lorelei could have demanded of me, my love for Josef was the one thing I did not think she would claim. Was it even possible to stop loving Sepperl, the gardener of my heart?
“Could you do such a thing?”
She shrugged. We can claim whatever it is you are willing to relinquish. Your youth, your passion, your talent. You gave us something that was as much a part of you as your eyes, your hair, your skin. What is love but another thing you claim as your own?
The image of my brother rose up in my mind, but not as he was the last time I had seen him: tall, slim, lanky-limbed, with golden hair and eyes as blue as the sky. Instead, the memory of a sickly baby crying in his cradle returned to me, an ugly, twisted, homely thing that I had nevertheless taken into my heart as wholeheartedly as I had the rest of my family.
“No,” I said. “No, I will not stop loving Sepp.”
The Lorelei shrugged again. What are you willing to sacrifice, maiden, to return to our realm?
What did I have left to give? I had given my music, I had given that which I had held sacred and most dear. I had even given my body to the old laws, my breath, my heartbeat, and my senses. What was a person but a mind, a body, and a soul?
A mind.
My sanity.
My moods circled me like pikes scenting blood, swirling around like a vortex about a dark, dark abyss. I gripped my head, grasping at the remnants of my reason like a crown. I held my hands before the Lorelei, and cupped in my palms like a precious jewel was the last of my judgment, my sound mind.
The Lorelei smiled. Her hands mirrored my gesture, and as I lowered my sanity to the water, her palms rose up to meet mine. Her fingers wrapped themselves about my wrists, and I fell, down and down and down, until the world turned inside out.
in a house of the Faithful sat a boy and a girl, one dark, one fair. They had traveled long and hard over hill and dale before settling down and finding a home among friends. Since their flight from Vienna, the changeling Bramble had introduced them to an underworld of actors and artists, musicians and misfits, a family bound not by blood, but loyalty. Through opera houses and theater halls, Käthe and François found work and friendship playing the fortepiano for the singers and sewing costumes for the actors.
They had escaped the Hunt.
Bramble had been careful to avoid the places where the barriers between worlds were thin, where there were no sacred spaces, following the poppies that led them to safety. If the audience found it odd that troupe members wore pouches of salt about their neck and iron keys in their pockets, then they chalked it up to the foibles and eccentricities of the creative mind.
Touched in the head, they would cluck and shake their heads. Strange. Queer. Wild.
The troubadours wore the badges with pride.
So did Käthe and François.
They were housed, they were clothed, they were fed, and they were even happy, insofar as they could be happy with constant anxiety gnawing at their bones. Others marveled at their productivity and work ethic, but both François and Käthe knew that the best and most efficient way to keep worry at bay was mindless repetition.
So he practiced his songs while she perfected her seams, all the while pretending not to notice the growing shadow of fear for Liesl and Josef that hovered over them.
“Play it again,” Käthe said. “Play that song for me.”
The girl was tone-deaf, but François knew which piece she wanted to hear. Der Erlkönig, composed by her sister, and performed with such exquisite skill by her brother. Der Erlkönig was the only time François ever heard Josef’s playing sound weighty and down to earth, not ethereal, otherworldly, or transcendent. Performing Liesl’s music was the only time he had ever heard his beloved’s playing sound human.
Sound whole.
At first the members of the theater troupe with whom he and Käthe worked and traveled had been bemused by the piece.
I’ve never heard anything like this, said a troubadour.
Catchy, though, said the impresario. Brings to mind a story.
There was a story, but it was not theirs to tell. Käthe and François both knew it belonged to their sister and beloved, neither of whom could be found, despite the Faithful’s best efforts.
It had been weeks since they had managed to reach out to Liesl through the shadow paths, weeks since they had tried to get her word about the danger she and Josef were in. Every night Käthe lit a candle before the dressing room mirror with a bath of salt water and an iron bell beside, but every morning the reflection remained empty of anything but the world in which they lived: chaotic, frenetic, mundane.
Then one morning, the bell rang.
Rehearsals for the latest play had been a disaster, with the playwright adding new lines every third scene while the composer tore out his hair and drank at having to add more bars of music to accommodate the changes. Bramble and Käthe ran back and forth between the actors, dropping pins and ribbons in their wake as they tried to finish the costumes before opening night, while François feverishly studied the new music as the pages were being rushed to him. In the midst of tumult and disorder of opening night, the ringing of the bell had been lost.
It wasn’t until François returned to the dressing rooms for an older draft of the score the playwright had decided he preferred that he noticed the change in the mirror.
“Käthe!” he called. “Käthe, come quick!”
It was the excitement and astonishment in François’s voice that brought her running more than his shouts.
“What?” she cried. “What is it?”
He pointed to the reflection, which showed not the dressing room, but a chamber of roots and rock. Where mannequins stood half-dressed and haphazard around them, weathered and petrified trees were draped with cobwebby lace and rotten silk. Where tables and benches and chairs sat in the world above, the mirror showed troves of gold, silver, and gemstones, a veritable goblin’s hoard of treasure. The only things to remain the same in the reflection as in reality were the bath of salt water, the bell, and the candle, along with Käthe’s and François’s startled faces.
In the mirror, they watc
hed as the shadow Käthe leaned down and picked up something from the bath and dropped it into her apron pocket. The real Käthe reached into her own apron and withdrew a silver ring.
She gave a sharp gasp. “This is Liesl’s!”
The ring in Käthe’s palm was tarnished with age and wear, wrought into the shape of a running wolf with two mismatched gems for eyes.
“A message from the old laws,” said Bramble from the entryway.
Both turned to face the changeling, who had a soft smile on his homely face.
“What does it mean?” François asked.
“It means, Herr Darkling,” Bramble said, “that all is not as hopeless as we feared.”
“What do I do?” Käthe asked. “How do I help my sister?”
Bramble smiled. “Keep it. Safe, sound, and secret. It was given to your care for a reason. You are her lighthouse in the dark, Fräulein, her bulwark against the tide. Be the anchor that brings her back to herself, for without you, she is adrift.”
The girl and boy met each other’s eyes, as the drumming of spectral horse hooves in the distance faded into the tapping of dancing feet upon the stage, as the audience ooed and ahhed at the poppies sprouting between the boards before them like magic. François placed his hand over Käthe’s, enclosing Liesl’s ring between their fingers, as their lips moved together in a prayer for their sister and their beloved.
Keep them safe. Keep them sound. Keep them secret.
IMMORTAL BELOVED
Oh God—so near! so far! Is it not a real building of heaven, our Love?
— LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
amonster stands on the far shore of a glowing lake, waiting for the barge bearing his bride to return.
He had stood in this very spot before, when he was a man and a king, when he played on his violin the image of a young woman through her music—her thoughts, her passions, her dreams. He had stood in this spot several times before that, greeting each bride as she made that last journey from life to death, but he never played his violin for them.
Never played their thoughts, their passions, or their dreams for them.
The high, thin singing of the Lorelei fills the cavern surrounding the Underground lake as a boat makes its way toward him, leaving a glowing trail in its wake. The multicolored light of the water illuminates the figure in the barge, laid out like a corpse with hands clasped and eyes closed. She is clad only in a chemise, still damp and transparent, her dark hair a rat’s nest of tangles and snarls about her head. Only the shallowest movement of her chest betrays her breathing, and the monster curls and uncurls his twisted hands in anticipation.
He knows he should be good, he knows he should want her far from here and from him, but the goodness within him had been stolen from him by the old laws. Where once he might have felt affection, he now feels cruelty; where he had once felt tenderness, he now feels lust. His queen is not beautiful, but it does not matter. Her flesh is warm all the same.
Yet as the barge draws near, the hollowness within him rings and echoes. Where a heart might have been on a human man, the monster had only emptiness, for he had long ago torn out the remnants of his mortal self and given it away.
To her.
It is only then that the monster begins to fear.
And the man begins to hope.
THE RETURN OF THE GOBLIN QUEEN
sanity was a prison and now I am free, free to be shapeless, free to be formless, free to be nonsense. I wake up with gold in my mouth, fairy lights strung between my teeth like candy floss. I giggle as they light up my insides and dance, wiggling through my body like fireflies through a summer night. I am a summer night. I am heat and humidity and languidity, and I lounge upon my throne like a cat, like a queen, like Cleopatra. My throne is a bed, my receiving chamber a barrow, but I twist the reality in my mind, giving me a room full of wonders and splendors. Furniture of porcelain and glass, a hearth draped in silk and wood, tapestries woven of root and rock. My lashes are moth wings, my crown wrought of crystal and serpent scales. My royal robes are spun of spider webs and darkness, my maquillage the blood of my enemies.
“Mistress?”
I snap to attention, my body alive with the sound of a familiar voice, tickling all the memory parts of me with a feather touch. Two goblin girls sway and tilt before me, one with thistledown for hair, the other with branches upon her head.
“Twig! Thistle!” I cry with delight.
Their faces are strange to me, for suddenly I can read the words of their emotions upon their eyes and lips. They are worried and they are frightened, and I marvel at the humanness of their expressions, and the goblinness of my thoughts.
“Have you come to bring me to the party? You should throw me a ball if there is none. Invite the changelings, invite the old laws, invite the world!”
The last time I came, there was a ball in my honor, where I had danced with the Goblin King and my sister. A goblin ball, a fairy ball, a ball of too much wine and indulgence, tasting of blackberry tongues and sin.
“Der Erlkönig is waiting for you,” says Thistle, and I hear the twinning of her voice with another. My grandmother’s snappish tone harmonizes with the goblin girl’s words, saying things she would rather not have me hear. I care about you. I am frightened for you.
“Of course, Constanze,” I reply, and float to my feet with a smile. “Take me to him!”
The other goblin girl wrings her hands, dripping her nervousness like puddles onto the floor. “He is . . . changed, Your Highness.”
Changed. The man into a monster, the boy to a changeling, the composer to a madwoman. We are butterflies and the Underground is our chrysalis, a place of transformations and magic and miracles.
“I know,” I say. “He is corrupted. A corrupt king for a corrupt queen.”
My goblin girls exchange looks. “You are not safe,” says Thistle. Contempt laces her voice but tastes cold like fear, with the unexpectedly bitter burn of concern lingering on the tongue.
“I know,” I say again. My smile grows wider, my eyes madder. “I know.”
“It is not Der Erlkönig you should fear,” Twig whispers, “but the reckoning he is owed.”
I open my arms wide, my robes of spider-silk and black lace billowing in an unseen wind. I am a top out of control, toppling and wobbling back and forth, back and forth, and the exhilaration and uncertainty excites me, for I do not know where I will go or what I will say.
“I am the Goblin Queen,” I giggle. “I can pay whatever is asked of me.” The words bubble from my lips and pop with little bursts of arrogance before me. I laugh again, feeling the tickle on my tongue.
“Even if it is the changeling boy?” Thistle asks.
My arms fall to my sides, and I fall over, the center thrown from me. Josef. How bothersome that I could not shed my love for him as easily as I gave up my reason. My heart cracks, and the pieces belonging to my brother glow and pulse through the cage of bones. I am a skeleton draped in cobwebs with a candle flame at its core. My sanity was my prison and my armor and without it, the flame flickers this way and that, buffeted by forces beyond my control. I lift my hands to cover my naked heart, but it is not enough to shield it.
“My brother has nothing to do with this,” I say.
“Oh but he has everything to do with this,” Thistle returns. “After all, is he not the reason you came back?”
“Yes, but I won’t give him back!” Petulance forces my lips into a pout. “He’s mine!”
Twig and Thistle’s eyes slide back and forth, from my face to each other. Selfish, selfish, selfish, they seem to say. I want to snatch those beetling eyes and wear them like rings about my fingers, to shut up their unvoiced censure.
“Stop looking at me,” I snap. “Stop judging me.”
My goblin girls look at each other again. “As you wish, Your Highness,” they say. “As you wish.”
* * *
I demanded a ball, but the gathering of goblins and changeli
ngs in the enormous, glittering cavern do not look as though they are enjoying themselves. There is no music, no dancing, no feasting, no flirting. I cast my gaze thither and hither, both disturbed and delighted by the transparency of feelings upon their features. When last I visited the Underground, it was as though I visited a foreign land, the language just familiar enough to be intelligible. But now the world is not just intelligible, it is comprehensible. Comprehended. Commendable.
“I am one of you!” I clap my hands with delight, pinching the cheek of a leather-faced imp wearing a mask of trepidation. “I see you! I hear you! I understand you!”
I survey the room from the top of the carved stone stairs at the entrance to the cavern. Where once I would have seen a sea of identical faces staring back at me, I now saw individuals as clear and distinct as leaves on a tree. How have I not noticed pattern and repetition and shape of them? The veins that define them, the unique marks and branches that form them?
As I descend the steps, the crowd parts before me like the Red Sea before Moses, opening up a path straight from my feet to the figure at the other end of the cavern, sitting on a throne of antlers upon a marble dais. He lounges upon that enormous chair, inky swirls of black staining his skin, a pair of ram’s horns jutting from his brow. His eyes are pale, the blue-white of blizzards and icy death.
Der Erlkönig.
A host of ghostly warriors flank him on either side of the throne, wights and geists and spectral horsemen, dressed in rotting scraps of flesh and fabric, holding spears and shields rusted with age and disuse. The Wild Hunt.
“Mein Herr!” The smile starts at my toes and wriggles up my body, wrapping about my lower belly, my chest, my throat, my face. The cavern rings with my voice, and all those assembled cringe from the force of it.