The Fairies of Sadieville

by Alex Bledsoe

  To let go of Justin.

  She carefully put away her cards, turned out the bedside lamp, and lay staring up at the ceiling again.

  Then, in the stark silence that had her thoughts racing, she heard the unmistakable glass-rattle noise of someone opening the refrigerator. She got up, pulled on her jeans, and stuck her head out the door.

  Bronwyn stood illuminated by the light from the open fridge door. Veronica walked quietly down the hall and said in a whisper, “I hope I’m not bothering you.”

  “Nah, not at all,” Bronwyn said. “I just couldn’t sleep, thinking about tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s actually this morning,” Veronica said after a glance at the clock on the microwave.

  “Yeah. You want some yogurt?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Bronwyn grabbed the tub of yogurt, closed the door, and motioned for Veronica to join her at the table. After a few moments of awkward silence, Brownyn asked, “So where are you from?”

  “My family’s Puerto Rican,” she said. “My grandparents on both sides came to Chicago, but I grew up in Mississippi.”

  “Went to Mississippi once when I was in the service. Well, through it, at any rate.”

  “What did you think?”

  “It was at night. I didn’t see much.”

  “That’s about what you’d see during the day.”

  “You go to school at West Tennessee State over in Weakleyville?”

  “Yes. I’m going for my masters in psychology. Justin and I live in…” She trailed off and put a trembling finger to her lip so she could bite it to keep from crying.

  “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  She took a few deep breaths. “No, it’s okay. The worst part is, my mother and both my grandmothers think I’m loca for taking up with a black guy. If he doesn’t come back, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard you use Spanish. You don’t have much of an accent.”

  “No, I speak it, but my field already has a bunch of strikes against it in the credibility department, so I figured I’d better as least sound like I’ve been to school.”

  “Psychology?”

  “Parapsychology.”

  Bronwyn’s eyebrows went up.

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen those same TV shows, too. But there is legitimate science being done, and I want to be part of it.” She paused, then asked, “How did you meet Craig?”

  Bronwyn smiled. “That’s a story, all right.” She told Veronica about meeting Craig after returning from Iraq, and how he’d been so steady and strong when her brother Kell died. It was Craig’s idea that they name their daughter for him.

  “Your daughter is beautiful,” Veronica said. “I saw her yesterday at the cafe.”

  “Thank you.”

  Veronica looked away, mustered courage that was only available in the wee hours of the morning, and said, “I know you’re fairy folk. Is she?”

  “Yes,” Bronwyn said without hesitation.

  Veronica shook her head. “I know what I’ve seen, but it’s still … I mean, here we are in a kitchen. That’s a stove, that’s a refrigerator, this is a table. All those things I know are real. And then there’s you. Just as real as the other things. How did Craig take it when he learned?”

  “Like you. It took him a while to figure out how we fit into his idea of the world.”

  The women were silent. The refrigerator compressor kicked on, making them both jump. They laughed.

  From her bedroom, Kell began to half talk, half cry. “Excuse me,” Bronwyn said. A moment later she returned with her daughter in her arms. The girl rubbed her eyes and pushed sleep-tangled hair out of her face. She snuggled close to her mother and watched Veronica closely.

  “She knows when things are happening,” Bronwyn said as she sat. “She hates to miss anything. Ain’t that right, punkin?” She kissed the top of the girl’s head.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Veronica said. “What if I was totally wrong? What if we just saw another valley, and those were just hippies from a commune or something? What if I’ve been freaking out over nothing, and Justin just ran off because he’s an asshole, not because he was under a … a spell.”

  “Is that what you really think?”

  “Not really. I mean, it would have to be magic to turn him away from me so easily. Wouldn’t it?”

  “Do you believe in magic?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’ll just fall back on that as my go-to answer from now on. ‘I don’t know.’”

  Now Bronwyn looked away into the dark house, thinking hard before saying, “Close your eyes, Veronica.”

  She remembered Tucker’s identical admonition. “Why?”

  “Because you deserve to at least know you’re not out of your mind.”

  Veronica closed her eyes. She heard Bronwyn’s chair scrape back as the other woman stood. Then her voice, somehow musical even though she wasn’t singing, said, “Open your eyes.”

  Veronica did.

  A beautiful dark-haired fairy stood in the kitchen, with wide wings that brushed the walls on either side. She wore a shimmering togalike wrap, and her head almost touched the ceiling. Veronica looked down and saw that the woman’s delicate bare feet hovered above the floor.

  In her arms, the fairy woman held a little girl who also had wings, and looked at Veronica with a wisdom and compassion that seemed to both reach into her heart, and connect her back with the original spiritual source of kindness.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  “No God,” Bronwyn said, and while it was the same voice, it now gave a magical lilt to even these mundane words. “Just people different from you.”

  And then they were gone, and two normal people stood before her: a weary young mother and a sleepy little girl. “So you see, you weren’t imagining things.”

  “Yeats was right,” Veronica said. “He said, ‘The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.’”

  “Who is Yeats?”

  “A famous poet.” She almost giggled. “Who believed in fairies.”

  33

  At sunrise, the group from the Pair-A-Dice stood outside the cave. Bliss, Bronwyn, and Snowy carried backpacks of basic camping gear, including plenty of fresh water; drinking something at the other end of that tunnel, even for the Tufa, might prove disastrous.

  Bronwyn carried her Hoyt Spyder Turbo compound bow. She knew firearms would probably be useless, but at the same time, she wasn’t about to go off without at least one weapon. The quiver held eight arrows, all with fixed blade broadhead points.

  Bliss and Snowy were unarmed. Snowy simply felt uncomfortable carrying a weapon into this situation, while Bliss understood the utter futility of thinking one would make a difference. But she didn’t say so to Bronwyn.

  They’d cleared away the hawthorn trees, and Mandalay now gazed into the cave’s darkness. The music from the day before was gone, and she sensed nothing untoward about it, no sense that glamour lurked unseen to protect it. When they had been exiled, the cave had been hidden from them by the Queen’s magic, but that seemed to be over now. How long, she wondered, had it been waiting to be rediscovered?

  Tucker stood beside Veronica. The girl’s eyes were red and swollen, and she slumped wearily, but she still stepped forward and said to Mandalay, “Please let me go with them. He’ll listen to me.”

  “He didn’t before,” Mandalay said curtly.

  Veronica bit off her reply and turned away. Tucker put a comforting hand on her shoulder. That was mean, he mouthed silently at Mandalay.

  Mandalay ignored him and turned to Bliss. “I doubt you’ll be gone long. Or at least, it won’t seem like it here.” Mandalay stood on tiptoe and kissed the other woman’s cheek. “Be careful. Come back.”

  “I will,” she promised.

  “We will,” Snowy said.

  Bliss had dim, confused memories of the way the cave had first
looked all those eons ago, as she and the other first Tufa stumbled out naked, nameless, and confused, lost in this new world. Where it was once an opening at the foot of an enormous mountain, it now protruded into the side of a rounded hill, all that was left of that ancient peak. Now she stood on its threshold, about to return to a place that, through rivers of time, she still recalled with an ache in her heart.

  “I’m a little nervous,” Bronwyn said quietly just behind her.

  Bliss smiled. “You? You’re a war hero.”

  “Doesn’t take a hero to get shot up, then blown up,” Bronwyn said, distilling her service down to its most dramatic events. “Walking into that cave … that needs real nerve.”

  “So you have it?”

  Bronwyn grinned. “Oh, hell, no. All I have is enough nerve to follow you.”

  Bliss turned to Snowy. “Ready?”

  “No, but why let that stop us?”

  “We’ll be here waiting,” Mandalay said.

  “Good luck,” Tucker added.

  “Please,” Veronica said, “bring him back. He’s a good man, and I love him.”

  “We’ll do our absolute best,” Bliss assured her.

  She stepped up to the threshold. This was it. Closing her eyes, she sang a line from a song by the Old Crow Medicine Show: “I was born to be a fiddler in an old-time string band.” It was, she hoped, an anchor that would draw them back if things got out of hand.

  Then she turned on her flashlight, shone it into the cave, and led the other two down into the darkness.

  * * *

  The passage had taken, Veronica told them, barely a quarter of an hour. But sixty minutes later they were still going, picking their way through narrow passages and carefully checking for sudden drops. It didn’t surprise any of them, especially Bliss: if these rocks were still infused with her magic, they stood a real chance of never seeing daylight again.

  Every few feet, Bliss stopped and reached into a cloth pouch tied to her hip. She pulled out a large iron nut with a strip of white silk tied to it. She tossed it ahead, listening to make sure it landed on something solid.

  It was more than just a way to check for drop-offs, though it did that well enough. Iron was something that fairies disliked, much as vampires retreated from garlic. It didn’t affect the Tufa, who lived in a society laced with iron, but then, they’d existed through the human Iron Age, and had had generations to acclimate. Those who hadn’t, who remained in their homeland, would lack this adaptation, and be unable to interfere with this trail of metallic bread crumbs. Hopefully.

  As she readied another throw, from behind her Snowy said, “Hey, I just realized something.”

  “What’s that?” Bliss said, her eyes locked to the circle of light before her. She watched the white silk ribbon ripple off into the darkness.

  “Turns out I’m a Buddhist.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a Buddhist,” he repeated.

  “How do you figure that?” Bronwyn asked.

  “I’m following my Bliss.”

  The tension had ratcheted them up so much that they all burst out laughing, so hard they had to sit down until the urge passed. The cavern filled with the sound of their amusement, dispelling all thoughts of strange beings lurking in the shadows. Eventually they wound down, until all three were gasping to catch their breath.

  Then a new voice, one they all instantly recognized, said softly, “Well, ain’t this a sight.”

  The laughter choked off at once, their throats locking in mid-breath. Bliss and Snowy froze in place. Bronwyn slipped an arrow from her quiver, ready to use it as a knife.

  Barely moving, Bliss turned on her flashlight and slowly shone it around the floor until it illuminated a pair of legs, in denim pants and old work boots. The circle of light trembled as her hand shook. She didn’t have the nerve to raise it to the figure’s face.

  “What the hell do y’all think you’re doing?” the voice of Rockhouse Hicks, once the Man in the Rock House, once the Six-Fingered Man, demanded in a voice that was simultaneously distant and immediate, like a phone call from another country.

  Since their arrival in this world, up until a cold winter night three years earlier, he had been the final arbiter of the Tufa world. While Mandalay was the latest in a chain of avatars, Rockhouse had never abdicated to a younger man, even one of his own descendants who might have carried his memories. The overwhelming magic in his powerful songs had ensured that his longevity and omnipresence never raised suspicion, and his isolation made him bitter and mean.

  And yet Rockhouse Hicks was dead, full dead, truly dead; he’d had his throat torn out by his incest-born daughter, Bliss’s half-sister Curnen, and his extra fingers cut off by Bo-Kate Wisby as part of her plan to take over the Tufa. He’d finally died of exposure, and been buried only after his blood had been drained and disposed of somewhere else. Songs had been sung, the night winds invoked, all to keep him quiet and gone. Yet it looked as though he still wouldn’t stay in his grave.

  “What’s the matter?” he said in his distinctive smug, taunting way. “Cats got all y’all’s tongues?”

  “I still remember your dying dirge, old man,” Bliss said, hoping her voice didn’t shake. “Go back where you belong.”

  His sharp, hateful laugh echoed around them. “I’m afraid that don’t matter no more, Bliss Overbay.”

  “What do you want?” Snowy demanded.

  “If it ain’t the white-haired freak who took up with that glaistig. Well, you Charlie Rich–looking bastard, I’m here to make sure nobody goes where they ain’t supposed to.”

  “He’s lying,” Bronwyn said. She stood up, brandishing the arrow. “Tell the truth, old man. Tell us that this is the punishment the night winds gave you when you oozed up out of your grave and tried to interfere in the Tufa again. They put you here, stuck between where you came from and where you went to.”

  There was no response, and the shoes in the circle of light didn’t move.

  “We’ve all heard the rumors that you’ve been whispering to Junior Damo,” Bronwyn continued, her voice growing louder, firmer, and drawlier as she spoke. “You do that because it’s all you can do.” She grinned almost hatefully. “This is your own personal hell, old man. Welcome to it, enjoy it, and get the fuck out of our way.” With that, she threw the arrow directly at what should have been the center of his chest.

  The feet stepped out of the light. The arrow struck the rock wall and fell to the ground. When Bliss tried to find him again, there was no sign.

  The three got to their feet. “Was that real?” Snowy asked.

  “Real enough,” Bliss said, and shone the light on her own trembling fingers. “Had me shaking like a leaf on the Widow’s Tree.”

  “He’s gone,” Bronwyn said with certainty. “He was always a bully, and there’s no reason death would make him different.”

  Bliss shone the light around them. “Does anything look different?”

  They followed the light as it traveled over the cave walls and ceiling. “No,” Snowy said. “Why?”

  “I’d just swear this was different,” Bliss said. “Like it changed while we were talking to…” She trailed off, afraid to say his name lest she invoke him again.

  “It’d be just like the old peckerhead,” Bronwyn said. “Distracting us with his bullshit while fucking with us when we weren’t looking.”

  “There’s still only one way forward,” Bliss said, shining the light ahead.

  “Unless we’re actually going back.”

  “‘The awful solemnity of its dismal grandeur,’” Snowy said. When the women looked at him, he added, “Something I read about a cave once. Seemed applicable.”

  “Well, if Rockhouse has flipped us around and we come back out where we started, we just try again. Agreed?”

  “Yes,” Snowy said.

  “You bet,” Bronwyn agreed.

  They headed in the direction they believed was forward, still thoroughly rattled by their encounter.


  34

  Tucker dozed in Veronica’s camp chair outside the cave. He snapped awake as he heard feet crunching through the forest. He sat all the way up as Tain Wisby, Snowy Rainfield’s girlfriend, emerged.

  Tain was sexy even among a people who had the knack of using glamour to appear as all things to all people. Whatever she wore seemed to cling to her in just the right way, and the light always seemed to cast shadows on her that emphasized her curves. Clad as she was now, in high cutoffs and a tight tank top, she could’ve reduced any normal man she met to a blubbering pile of tumescent need. Even Tucker found it difficult to concentrate at first.

  “Hey, Tucker,” Tain said wearily. “Mandalay.” She made a gesture of respect to the girl, who sat with her back to a nearby tree. She turned to Veronica, who paced in front of the cave. “Hi, we haven’t met. I’m Tain.”

  “Veronica Lopez.”

  “It’s your boyfriend that my boyfriend has gone to rescue, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Mandalay said, “What brings you out here?”

  “Sitting around waiting isn’t my best skill. Figured that here, I’d at least have some company.”

  “Well, they haven’t been gone that long, just so you know. Nothing to get worried about yet.”

  Tain peered into the cave. “So that leads home, huh?”

  “It’s the way back,” Mandalay corrected. “Whether it’s still home…”

  Tain sighed and dropped gracefully into a cross-legged position beside the girl. “So we wait?”

  “We wait,” Mandalay agreed. She looked up at the sky, bright blue above the treetops, the sun only now high enough to fully strike the uppermost branches. “Nice weather for it, at least.”

  Tain picked up a stick and dug idly at the dirt with it. It was in her nature to charge forward, making everything happen as quickly as possible; it was one reason why, before Snowy, she had burned through so many men. Why waste time on courtship that was only going to end in fucking? she often said. Let’s just get to the fucking and enjoy it. But she understood that right now, there was nothing else to do, and even fucking someone else wouldn’t make things happen any faster.