The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “I need the work, Pete. The last time I sold a piece, I think Lincoln was still President. I’ll never make as much money painting as I do posing for other people’s art.”

  “Poor Hannah,” Peter says. He sets the bishop back down beside his king and lights a cigarette. She almost asks him for one, but he thinks she quit three months ago, and it’s nice having at least that one thing to lord over him; sometimes it’s even useful. “At least you have a fallback,” he mutters and exhales; the smoke lingers above the board like fog on a battlefield.

  “Do you even know who these people are?” she asks and looks impatiently at the clock above his kitchen sink.

  “Not firsthand, no. But then they’re not exactly my sort. Entirely too, well…” and Peter pauses, searching for a word that never comes, so he continues without it. “But the Frenchman who owns the place on St. Mark’s, Mr. Ordinaire—excuse me, Monsieur Ordinaire—I heard he used to be some sort of anthropologist. I think he might have written a book once.”

  “Maybe Kellerman would reschedule for the afternoon,” Hannah says, talking half to herself.

  “You’ve actually never tasted it?” he asks, picking up the bishop again and waving it ominously towards her side of the board.

  “No,” she replies, too busy now wondering if the photographer will rearrange his Tuesday schedule on her behalf to be annoyed at Peter’s cat and mouse with her rook.

  “Dreadful stuff,” he says and makes a face like a kid tasting Brussels sprouts or Pepto-Bismol for the first time. “Might as well have a big glass of black jelly beans and cheap vodka, if you ask me. La Fée Verte my fat ass.”

  “Your ass isn’t fat, you skinny old queen.” Hannah scowls playfully, reaching quickly across the table and snatching the bishop from Peter’s hand. He doesn’t resist. This isn’t the first time she’s grown too tired of waiting for him to move to wait any longer. She removes her white rook off the board and sets the black bishop in its place.

  “That’s suicide, dear,” Peter says, shaking his head and frowning. “You’re aware of that, yes?”

  “You know those animals that bore their prey into submission?”

  “No, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of them before.”

  “Then maybe you should get out more often.”

  “Maybe I should,” he replies, setting the captured rook down with all the other prisoners he’s taken. “So, are you going to do the party? It’s a quick grand, you ask me.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who’ll be getting naked for a bunch of drunken strangers.”

  “A fact for which we should all be forevermore and eternally grateful.”

  “You have his number?” she asks, giving in, because that’s almost a whole month’s rent in one night and, after her last gallery show, beggars can’t be choosers.

  “There’s a smart girl,” Peter says and takes another drag off his cigarette. “The number’s on my desk somewhere. Remind me again before you leave. Your move.”

  3

  “How old were you when that happened, when your sister died?” the psychologist asks, Dr. Edith Valloton and her smartly cut hair so black it always makes Hannah think of fresh tar, or old tar gone deadly soft again beneath a summer sun to lay a trap for unwary, crawling things. Someone she sees when the nightmares get bad, which is whenever the painting isn’t going well or the modeling jobs aren’t coming in or both. Someone she can tell her secrets to who has to keep them secret, someone who listens as long as she pays by the hour, a place to turn when faith runs out and priests are just another bad memory to be confessed.

  “Almost twelve,” Hannah tells her and watches while Edith Valloton scribbles a note on her yellow legal pad.

  “Do you remember if you’d begun menstruating yet?”

  “Yeah. My periods started right after my eleventh birthday.”

  “And these dreams, and the stones. This is something you’ve never told anyone?”

  “I tried to tell my mother once.”

  “She didn’t believe you?”

  Hannah coughs into her hand and tries not to smile, that bitter, wry smile to give away things she didn’t come here to show.

  “She didn’t even hear me,” she says.

  “Did you try more than once to tell her about the fairies?”

  “I don’t think so. Mom was always pretty good at letting us know whenever she didn’t want to hear what was being said. You learned not to waste your breath.”

  “Your sister’s death, you’ve said before that it’s something she was never able to come to terms with.”

  “She never tried. Whenever my father tried, or I tried, she treated us like traitors. Like we were the ones who put Judith in her grave. Or like we were the ones keeping her there.”

  “If she couldn’t face it, Hannah, then I’m sure it did seem that way to her.”

  “So, no,” Hannah says, annoyed that she’s actually paying someone to sympathize with her mother. “No. I guess I never really told anyone about it.”

  “But you think you want to tell me now?” the psychologist asks and sips her bottled water, never taking her eyes off Hannah.

  “You said to talk about all the nightmares, all the things I think are nightmares. It’s the only one that I’m not sure about.”

  “Not sure if it’s a nightmare, or not sure if it’s even a dream?”

  “Well, I always thought I was awake. For years, it never once occurred to me I might have only been dreaming.”

  Edith Valloton watches her silently for a moment, her cat-calm, cat-smirk face unreadable, too well trained to let whatever’s behind those dark eyes slip and show. Too detached to be smug, too concerned to be indifferent. Sometimes, Hannah thinks she might be a dyke, but maybe that’s only because the friend who recommended her is a lesbian.

  “Do you still have the stones?” the psychologist asks, finally, and Hannah shrugs out of habit.

  “Somewhere, probably. I never throw anything away. They might be up at Dad’s place, for all I know. A bunch of my shit’s still up there, stuff from when I was a kid.”

  “But you haven’t tried to find them?”

  “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “When is the last time you saw them, the last time you can remember having seen them?”

  And Hannah has to stop and think, chews intently at a stubby thumbnail and watches the clock on the psychologist’s desk, the second hand traveling round and round and round. Seconds gone for pennies, nickels, dimes.

  Hannah, this is the sort of thing you really ought to try to get straight ahead of time, she thinks in a voice that sounds more like Dr. Valloton’s than her own thought-voice. A waste of money, a waste of time…

  “You can’t remember?” the psychologist asks and leans a little closer to Hannah.

  “I kept them all in an old cigar box. I think my grandfather gave me the box. No, wait. He didn’t. He gave it to Judith, and then I took it after the accident. I didn’t think she’d mind.”

  “I’d like to see them someday, if you ever come across them again. Wouldn’t that help you to know whether it was a dream or not, if the stones are real?”

  “Maybe,” Hannah mumbles around her thumb. “And maybe not.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “A thing like that, words scratched onto a handful of stones, it’d be easy for a kid to fake. I might have made them all myself. Or someone else might have made them, someone playing a trick on me. Anyone could have left them there.”

  “Did people do that often? Play tricks on you?”

  “Not that I can recall. No more than usual.”

  Edith Valloton writes something else on her yellow pad and then checks the clock.

  “You said that there were always stones af
ter the dreams. Never before?”

  “No, never before. Always after. They were always there the next day, always in the same place.”

  “At the old well,” the psychologist says, like Hannah might have forgotten and needs reminding.

  “Yeah, at the old well. Dad was always talking about doing something about it, before the accident, you know. Something besides a couple of sheets of corrugated tin to hide the hole. Afterwards, of course, the county ordered him to have the damned thing filled in.”

  “Did your mother blame him for the accident, because he never did anything about the well?”

  “My mother blamed everyone. She blamed him. She blamed me. She blamed whoever had dug that hole in the first goddamn place. She blamed God for putting water underground so people would dig wells to get at it. Believe me, Mom had blame down to an art.”

  And again, the long pause, the psychologist’s measured consideration, quiet moments she plants like seeds to grow ever deeper revelations.

  “Hannah, I want you to try to remember the word that was on the first stone you found. Can you do that?”

  “That’s easy. It was follow.”

  “And do you also know what was written on the last one, the very last one that you found?”

  And this time she has to think, but only for a moment.

  “Fall,” she says. “The last one said fall.”

  4

  Half a bottle of Mari Mayans borrowed from an unlikely friend of Peter’s, a goth chick who DJs at a club that Hannah’s never been to because Hannah doesn’t go to clubs. Doesn’t dance and has always been more or less indifferent to both music and fashion. The goth chick works days at Trash and Vaudeville on St. Mark’s, selling Doc Martens and blue hair dye only a couple of blocks from the address on the card that Peter gave her. The place where the party is being held. La Fête de la Fée Verte, according to the small white card, the card with the phone number. She’s already made the call, has already agreed to be there, seven o’clock sharp, seven on the dot, and everything that’s expected of her has been explained in detail, twice.

  Hannah’s sitting on the floor beside her bed, a couple of vanilla-scented candles burning because she feels obligated to make at least half a half-hearted effort at atmosphere. Obligatory show of respect for mystique that doesn’t interest her, but she’s gone to the trouble to borrow the bottle of liqueur; the bottle passed to her in a brown paper bag at the boutique, anything but inconspicuous, and the girl glared out at her, cautious from beneath lids so heavy with shades of black and purple that Hannah was amazed the girl could open her eyes.

  “So, you’re supposed to be a friend of Peter’s?” the girl asked suspiciously.

  “Yeah, supposedly,” Hannah replied, accepting the package, feeling vaguely, almost pleasurably illicit. “We’re chess buddies.”

  “A painter,” the girl said.

  “Most of the time.”

  “Peter’s a cool old guy. He made bail for my boyfriend once, couple of years back.”

  “Really? Yeah, he’s wonderful,” and Hannah glanced nervously at the customers browsing the racks of leather handbags and corsets, then at the door and the bright daylight outside.

  “You don’t have to be so jumpy. It’s not illegal to have absinthe. It’s not even illegal to drink it. It’s only illegal to import it, which you didn’t do. So don’t sweat it.”

  Hannah nodded, wondering if the girl was telling the truth, if she knew what she was talking about. “What do I owe you?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” the girl replied. “You’re a friend of Peter’s, and, besides, I get it cheap from someone over in Jersey. Just bring back whatever you don’t drink.”

  And now Hannah twists the cap off the bottle, and the smell of odor is so strong, so immediate, she can smell it before she even raises the bottle to her nose. Black jelly beans, she thinks, just like Peter said, and that’s something else she never cared for. As a little girl, she’d set the black ones aside—and the pink ones, too—saving them for her sister. Her sister had liked the black ones.

  She has a wine glass, one from an incomplete set she bought last Christmas, secondhand, and she has a box of sugar cubes, a decanter filled with filtered tap water, a spoon from her mother’s mismatched antique silverware. She pours the absinthe, letting it drip slowly from the bottle until the fluorescent yellow-green liquid has filled the bottom of the glass. Then Hannah balances the spoon over the mouth of the goblet and places one of the sugar cubes in the tarnished bowl of the spoon. She remembers watching Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder doing this in Dracula, remembers seeing the movie with a boyfriend who eventually left her for another man, and the memory and all its associations are enough to make her stop and sit staring at the glass for a moment.

  “This is so fucking silly,” she says, but part of her, the part that feels guilty for taking jobs that pay the bills, but have nothing to do with painting, the part that’s always busy rationalizing and justifying the way she spends her time, assures her it’s a sort of research. A new experience, horizon-broadening something to expand her mind’s eye, and, for all she knows, it might lead her art somewhere it needs to go.

  “Bullshit,” she whispers, frowning down at the entirely uninviting glass of Spanish absinthe. She’s been reading Absinthe: History in a Bottle and Artists and Absinthe, accounts of Van Gogh and Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde and Paul Marie Verlaine and their various relationships with this foul-smelling liqueur. She’s never had much respect for artists who use this or that drug as a crutch and then call it their muse; heroin, cocaine, pot, booze, what-the-hell-ever, all the same shit as far as she’s concerned. An excuse, an inability in the artist to hold himself accountable for his own art, a lazy cop-out, as useless as the idea of the muse itself. And this drug, this drug in particular, so tied up with art and inspiration there’s even a Renoir painting decorating the Mari Mayans label, or at least it’s something that’s supposed to look like a Renoir.

  But you’ve gone to all this trouble. Hell, you may as well taste it, at least. Just a taste, to satisfy curiosity, to see what all the fuss is about.

  Hannah sets the bottle down and picks up the decanter, pouring water over the spoon, over the sugar cube. The absinthe louches quickly to an opalescent, milky white-green. Then she puts the decanter back on the floor and stirs the half-dissolved sugar into the glass, sets the spoon aside on a china saucer.

  “Enjoy the ride,” the goth girl said as Hannah walked out of the shop. “She’s a blast.”

  Hannah raises the glass to her lips, sniffs at it, wrinkling her nose, and the first, hesitant sip is even sweeter and more piquant than she expected, sugar-soft fire when she swallows, a seventy-proof flower blooming hot in her belly. But the taste is not nearly as disagreeable as she’d thought it would be, the sudden licorice and alcohol sting, a faint bitterness underneath that she guesses might be the wormwood. The second sip is less of a shock, especially since her tongue seems to have gone slightly numb.

  She opens Absinthe: History in a Bottle again, opening the book at random, and there’s a full-page reproduction of Albert Maignan’s The Green Muse. A blonde woman with marble skin, golden hair, wrapped in diaphanous folds of olive, her feet hovering weightless above bare floorboards, her hands caressing the forehead of an intoxicated poet. The man is gaunt and seems lost in some ecstasy or revelry or simple delirium, his right hand clawing at his face, the other hand open in what might have been meant as a feeble attempt to ward off the attentions of his unearthly companion. Or, Hannah thinks, perhaps he’s reaching for something. There’s a shattered green bottle on the floor at his feet, a full glass of absinthe on his writing desk.

  Hannah takes another sip and turns the page.

  A photograph, Verlaine drinking absinthe in the Café Procope.

  Another, bolder swallow, and the taste is becoming fa
miliar now, almost, almost pleasant.

  Another page. Jean Béraud’s Le Boulevard, La Nuit.

  When the glass is empty, and the buzz in her head, behind her eyes is so gentle, buzz like a stinging insect wrapped in spider silk and honey, Hannah takes another sugar cube from the box and pours another glass.

  5

  “Fairies.”

  “Fairy crosses.”

  Harper’s Weekly, 50-715:

  That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses have been found.

  A race of tiny beings.

  They crucified cockroaches.

  Exquisite beings—but the cruelty of the exquisite. In their diminutive way they were human beings. They crucified.

  The “fairy crosses,” we are told in Harper’s Weekly, range in weight from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is said, in the Scientific American, 79-395, that some of them are no larger than the head of a pin.

  They have been found in two other states, but all

  in Virginia are strictly localized on and along Bull Mountain…

  …I suppose they fell there.”

  —Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (1919)

  6

  In the dream, which is never the same thing twice, not precisely, Hannah is twelve years old and standing at her bedroom window watching the backyard. It’s almost dark, the last rays of twilight, and there are chartreuse fireflies dappling the shadows, already a few stars twinkling in the high indigo sky, the call of a whippoorwill from the woods nearby.

  Another whippoorwill answers.

  And the grass is moving. The grass grown so tall because her father never bothers to mow it anymore. It could be wind, only there is no wind; the leaves in the trees are all perfectly, silently still, and no limb swaying, no twig, no leaves rustling in even the stingiest breeze. Only the grass.