The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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

  It’s probably just a cat, she thinks. A cat, or a skunk, or a raccoon.

  The bedroom has grown very dark, and she wants to turn on a lamp, afraid of the restless grass even though she knows it’s only some small animal, awake for the night and hunting, taking a short cut across their backyard. She looks over her shoulder, meaning to ask Judith to please turn on a lamp, but there’s only the dark room, Judith’s empty bunk, and she remembers it all again. It’s always like the very first time she heard, the surprise and disbelief and pain always that fresh, the numbness that follows that absolute.

  “Have you seen your sister?” her mother asks from the open bedroom door. There’s so much night pooled there that she can’t make out anything but her mother’s softly glowing eyes the soothing color of amber beads, two cat-slit pupils swollen wide against the gloom.

  “No, Mom,” Hannah tells her, and there’s a smell in the room then like burning leaves.

  “She shouldn’t be out so late on a school night.”

  “No, Mom, she shouldn’t,” and the eleven-year-old Hannah is amazed at the thirty-five-year-old’s voice coming from her mouth. The thirty-five-year-old Hannah remembers how clear, how unburdened by time and sorrow, the eleven-year-old Hannah’s voice could be.

  “You should look for her,” her mother says.

  “I always do. That comes later.”

  “Hannah, have you seen your sister?”

  Outside, the grass has begun to swirl, rippling round and round upon itself, and there’s the faintest green glow dancing a few inches above the ground.

  The fireflies, she thinks, though she knows it’s not the fireflies, the way she knows it’s not a cat, or a skunk, or a raccoon making the grass move.

  “Your father should have seen to that damned well,” her mother mutters, and the burning leaves smell grows a little stronger. “He should have done something about that years ago.”

  “Yes, Mom, he should have. You should have made him.”

  “No,” her mother replies angrily. “This is not my fault. None of it’s my fault.”

  “No, of course it’s not.”

  “When we bought this place, I told him to see to that well. I told him it was dangerous.”

  “You were right,” Hannah says, watching the grass, the softly pulsing cloud of green light hanging above it. The light is still only about as big as a basketball. Later, it’ll get a lot bigger. She can hear the music now, pipes and drums and fiddles, like a song from one of her father’s albums of folk music.

  “Hannah, have you seen your sister?”

  Hannah turns and stares defiantly back at her mother’s glowing, accusing eyes.

  “That makes three, Mom. Now you have to leave. Sorry, but them’s the rules,” and her mother does leave, that obedient phantom fading slowly away with a sigh, a flicker, a half second when the darkness seems to bend back upon itself, and she takes the burning leaves smell with her.

  The light floating above the backyard grows brighter, reflecting dully off the windowpane, off Hannah’s skin and the room’s white walls. The music rises to meet the light’s challenge.

  Peter’s standing beside her now, and she wants to hold his hand, but doesn’t, because she’s never quite sure if he’s supposed to be in this dream.

  “I am the Green Fairy,” he says, sounding tired and older than he is, sounding sad. “My robe is the color of despair.”

  “No,” she says. “You’re only Peter Mulligan. You write books about places you’ve never been and people who will never be born.”

  “You shouldn’t keep coming here,” he whispers, the light from the backyard shining in his grey eyes, tinting them to moss and ivy.

  “Nobody else does. Nobody else ever could.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  But he stops and stares speechlessly at the backyard.

  “I should try to find Judith,” Hannah says. “She shouldn’t be out so late on a school night.”

  “That painting you did last winter,” Peter mumbles, mumbling like he’s drunk or only half awake. “The pigeons on your windowsill, looking in.”

  “That wasn’t me. You’re thinking of someone else.”

  “I hated that damned painting. I was glad when you sold it.”

  “So was I,” Hannah says. “I should try to find her now, Peter. My sister. It’s almost time for dinner.”

  “I am ruin and sorrow,” he whispers.

  And now the green light is spinning very fast, throwing off gleaming flecks of itself to take up the dance, to swirl about their mother star, little worlds newborn, whole universes, and she could hold them all in the palm of her right hand.

  “What I need,” Peter says, “is blood, red and hot, the palpitating flesh of my victims.”

  “Jesus, Peter, that’s purple even for you,” and Hannah reaches out and lets her fingers brush the glass. It’s warm, like the spring evening, like her mother’s glowing eyes.

  “I didn’t write it,” he says.

  “And I never painted pigeons.”

  She presses her fingers against the glass and isn’t surprised when it shatters, explodes, and the sparkling diamond blast is blown inward, tearing her apart, shredding the dream until it’s only unconscious, fitful sleep.

  7

  “I wasn’t in the mood for this,” Hannah says and sets the paper saucer with three greasy, uneaten cubes of orange cheese and a couple of Ritz crackers down on one corner of a convenient table. The table is crowded with fliers about other shows, other openings at other galleries. She glances at Peter and then at the long white room and the canvases on the walls.

  “I thought it would do you good to get out. You never go anywhere anymore.”

  “I come to see you.”

  “My point exactly, dear.”

  Hannah sips at her plastic cup of warm merlot, wishing she had a beer instead.

  “And you said that you liked Perrault’s work.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m just not sure I’m up for it tonight. I’ve been feeling pretty morbid lately, all on my own.”

  “That’s generally what happens to people who swear off sex.”

  “Peter, I didn’t swear off anything.”

  And she follows him on their first slow circuit around the room, small talk with people that she hardly knows or doesn’t want to know at all, people who know Peter better than they know her, people whose opinions matter and people whom she wishes she’d never met. She smiles and nods her head, sips her wine, and tries not to look too long at any of the huge, dark canvases spaced out like oil and acrylic windows on a train.

  “He’s trying to bring us down, down to the very core of those old stories,” a woman named Rose tells Peter. She owns a gallery somewhere uptown, the sort of place where Hannah’s paintings will never hang. “ ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Snow White,’ ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ all those old fairy tales,” Rose says. “It’s a very post-Freudian approach.”

  “Indeed,” Peter says. As if he agrees, Hannah thinks, as if he even cares, when she knows damn well he doesn’t.

  “How’s the new novel coming along?” Rose asks him.

  “Like a mouthful of salted thumbtacks,” he replies, and she laughs.

  Hannah turns and looks at the nearest painting, because it’s easier than listening to the woman and Peter pretend to enjoy one another’s company. A somber storm of blacks and reds and greys, dappled chaos struggling to resolve itself into images, images stalled at the very edge of perception. She thinks she remembers having seen a photo of this canvas in Artforum.

  A small beige card on the wall to the right of the painting identifies it as Night in the Forest. There isn’t a price, because none of Perrault’s paintings are ever for sale. She’s heard rumors that he’s turned
down millions, tens of millions, but suspects that’s all exaggeration and PR. Urban legends for modern artists, and from the other things that she’s heard he doesn’t need the money, anyway.

  Rose says something about the exploration of possibility and fairy tales and children using them to avoid any real danger, something that Hannah’s pretty sure she’s lifted directly from Bruno Bettelheim.

  “Me, I was always rooting for the wolf,” Peter says, “or the wicked witch or the three bears or whatever. I never much saw the point in rooting for silly girls too thick not to go wandering about alone in the woods.”

  Hannah laughs softly, laughing to herself, and takes a step back from the painting, squinting at it. A moonless sky pressing cruelly down upon a tangled, writhing forest, a path and something waiting in the shadows, stooped shoulders, ribsy, a calculated smudge of scarlet that could be its eyes. There’s no one on the path, but the implication is clear—there will be, soon enough, and the thing crouched beneath the trees is patient.

  “Have you seen the stones yet?” Rose asks and no, Peter replies, no we haven’t.

  “They’re a new direction for him,” she says. “This is only the second time they’ve been exhibited.”

  If I could paint like that, Hannah thinks, I could tell Dr. Valloton to kiss my ass. If I could paint like that, it would be an exorcism.

  And then Rose leads them both to a poorly lit corner of the gallery, to a series of rusted wire cages, and inside each one is a single stone. Large pebbles or small cobbles, stream-worn slate and granite, and each stone has been crudely engraved with a single word.

  The first one reads “follow.”

  “Peter, I need to go now,” Hannah says, unable to look away from the yellow-brown stone, the word tattooed on it, and she doesn’t dare let her eyes wander ahead to the next one.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I need to go, that’s all. I need to go now.”

  “If you’re not feeling well,” the woman named Rose says, trying too hard to be helpful, “there’s a restroom in the back.”

  “No, I’m fine. Really. I just need some air.”

  And Peter puts an arm protectively around her, reciting his hurried, polite good-byes to Rose. But Hannah still can’t look away from the stone, sitting there behind the wire like a small and vicious animal at the zoo.

  “Good luck with the book,” Rose says and smiles, and Hannah’s beginning to think she is going to be sick, that she will have to make a dash for the toilet, after all. There’s a taste like foil in her mouth, and her heart like a mallet on dead and frozen beef, adrenaline, the first eager tug of vertigo.

  “It was good to meet you, Hannah,” the woman says. Hannah manages to smile, manages to nod her head.

  And then Peter leads her quickly back through the crowded gallery, out onto the sidewalk and the warm night spread out along Mercer Street.

  8

  “Would you like to talk about that day at the well?” Dr. Valloton asks, and Hannah bites at her chapped lower lip.

  “No. Not now,” she says. “Not again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve already told you everything I can remember.”

  “If they’d found her body,” the psychologist says, “perhaps you and your mother and father would have been able to move on. There could have at least been some sort of closure. There wouldn’t have been that lingering hope that maybe someone would find her, that maybe she was alive.”

  Hannah sighs loudly, looking at the clock for release, but there’s still almost half an hour to go.

  “Judith fell down the well and drowned,” she says.

  “But they never found the body.”

  “No, but they found enough, enough to be sure. She fell down the well. She drowned. It was very deep.”

  “You said you heard her calling you.”

  “I’m not sure,” Hannah says, interrupting the psychologist before she can say the things she was going to say next, before she can use Hannah’s own words against her. “I’ve never been absolutely sure. I told you that.”

  “I’m sorry if it seems like I’m pushing,” Dr. Valloton says.

  “I just don’t see any reason to talk about it again.”

  “Then let’s talk about the dreams, Hannah. Let’s talk about the day you saw the fairies.”

  9

  The dreams, or the day from which the dreams would arise and, half-forgotten, seek always to return. The dreams or the day itself, the one or the other, it makes very little difference. The mind exists only in a moment, always, a single flickering moment, remembered or actual, dreaming or awake or something liminal between the two, the precious, treacherous illusion of Present floundering in the crack between Past and Future.

  The dream of the day—or the day itself—and the sun is high and small and white, a dazzling July sun coming down in shafts through the tall trees in the woods behind Hannah’s house. She’s running to catch up with Judith, her sister two years older and her legs grown longer, always leaving Hannah behind. You can’t catch me, slowpoke. You can’t even keep up. Hannah almost trips in a tangle of creeper vines and has to stop long enough to free her left foot.

  “Wait up!” she shouts, and Judith doesn’t answer. “I want to see. Wait for me!”

  The vines try to pull one of Hannah’s tennis shoes off and leave bright beads of blood on her ankle. But she’s loose again in only a moment, running down the narrow path to catch up, running through the summer sun and the oak-leaf shadows.

  “I found something,” Judith said to her that morning after breakfast. The two of them sitting on the back porch steps. “Down in the clearing by the old well,” she said.

  “What? What did you find?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I should tell you. No, I definitely shouldn’t tell you. You might go and tell Mom and Dad. You might spoil everything.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Yes, you would, big mouth.”

  And, finally, she gave Judith half her allowance to tell, half to be shown whatever there was to see. Her sister dug deep down into the pockets of her jeans, and her hand came back up with a shiny black pebble.

  “I just gave you a whole dollar to show me a rock?”

  “No, stupid. Look at it,” and Judith held out her hand.

  The letters scratched deep into the stone—JVDTH—five crooked letters that almost spelled her sister’s name, and Hannah didn’t have to pretend not to be impressed.

  “Wait for me!” she shouts again, angry now, her voice echoing around the trunks of the old trees and dead leaves crunching beneath her shoes. Starting to guess that the whole thing is a trick after all, just one of Judith’s stunts, and her sister’s probably watching her from a hiding place right this very second, snickering quietly to herself. Hannah stops running and stands in the center of the path, listening to the murmuring forest sounds around her.

  And something faint and lilting that might be music.

  “That’s not all,” Judith said. “But you have to swear you won’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  “I swear.”

  “If you do tell, well, I promise I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.”

  “I won’t tell anyone anything.”

  “Give it back,” Judith said, and Hannah immediately handed the black stone back to her. “If you do tell—”

  “I already said I won’t. How many times do I have to say I won’t tell?”

  “Well then,” Judith said and led her around to the back of the little tool shed where their father kept his hedge clippers and bags of fertilizer and the old lawn mowers he liked to take apart and try to put back together again.

  “This better be worth a dollar,” Hannah said.

 
She stands very, very still and listens to the music, growing louder. She thinks it’s coming from the clearing up ahead.

  “I’m going back home, Judith!” she shouts, not a bluff because suddenly she doesn’t care whether or not the thing in the jar was real, and the sun doesn’t seem as warm as it did only a moment ago.

  And the music keeps getting louder.

  And louder.

  And Judith took an empty mayonnaise jar out of the empty rabbit hutch behind the tool shed. She held it up to the sun, smiling at whatever was inside.

  “Let me see,” Hannah said.

  “Maybe I should make you give me another dollar first,” her sister replied, smirking, not looking away from the jar.

  “No way,” Hannah said indignantly. “Not a snowball’s chance in Hell,” and she grabbed for the jar, then, but Judith was faster, and her hand closed around nothing at all.

  In the woods, Hannah turns and looks back towards home, then turns back towards the clearing again, waiting for her just beyond the trees.

  “Judith! This isn’t funny! I’m going home right this second!”

  Her heart is almost as loud as the music now. Almost. Not quite, but close enough. Pipes and fiddles, drums and a jingle like tambourines.

  Hannah takes another step towards the clearing, because it’s nothing at all but her sister trying to scare her. Which is stupid, because it’s broad daylight, and Hannah knows these woods like the back of her hand.

  Judith unscrewed the lid of the mayonnaise jar and held it out so Hannah could see the small, dry thing curled in a lump at the bottom. Tiny mummy husk of a thing, gray and crumbling in the morning light.

  “It’s just a damn dead mouse,” Hannah said disgustedly. “I gave you a whole dollar to see a rock and a dead mouse in a jar?”

  “It’s not a mouse, stupid. Look closer.”

  And so she did, bending close enough that she could see the perfect dragonfly wings on its back, transparent, iridescent wings that glimmer faintly in the sun. Hannah squinted and realized that she could see its face, realized that it had a face.