In those animal faces, their eyes are disconcertingly human, but not mortal. They are eyes that have seen decades pass as we see years, that have looked upon Eden and Hades. And their voices, at times a brew of dry African veldt whispers and sweet-toned crystal bells, or half-mad, like coyotes and loons, one always rising above the others, looping through the clutter of city sound, echoing and ringing in her mind, heard only from a distance.
They never come near, they simply follow her, watching, figments of post-traumatic stress, she thinks, until they begin to leave their fetish residue in her apartment, in her car, on her pillow. They finally approach her in the graveyard, when the mourners are all gone and she’s alone by Annie’s grave, the mound of raw earth a sharp blade that has already left a deep scar inside her.
They give her no choice, the women. When they touch her, when they make known their voiceless need, she tells them she’s already made the choice, long before they came to her.
All she lacked was the means.
“We will give you the means,” one of them says.
She thinks it’s the one with the wolfs head who spoke. There are so many of them, it’s hard to keep track, all shapes and sizes, first one in sharp focus, then another, but never all at the same time. One like a woodcock shifts nervously from foot to foot. The rabbit woman has a nose that won’t stop twitching. The one like a salmon has gills in her neck that open and close rhythmically as though the air is water.
She must have stepped into a story, she thinks—one of Annie’s stories, where myths mingle with the real world and the characters never quite know which is which. Annie’s stories were always about the people, but the mythic figures weren’t there just to add color. They created the internal resonance of the stories, brought to life on the inner landscapes of the characters.
“It’s a way of putting emotions on stage,” Annie explained to her once. “A way of talking about what’s going on inside us without bogging the story down with all kinds of internal dialogue and long-winded explanations. The anima are so… immediate.”
If she closes her eyes she can picture Annie sitting in the old Morris chair by the bay window, the sunlight coming in through the window, making a pre-Raphaelite halo around the tangle of her long hennaed hair as she leans her chin on a hand and speaks.
“Or maybe it’s just that I like them,” Annie would add, that pixie smile of hers sliding across her lips, her eyes luminous with secrets.
Of course she would, Jaime thinks. She’d like the animal women, too.
Jaime isn’t so sure that she does, but she doesn’t really question the women’s presence—or rather the reality of their presence. Since Annie’s death, nothing is as it was. The surreal seems normal. The women don’t so much make her nervous as cause her to feel unbalanced, as though the world underfoot has changed, reality curling sideways into a skein of dreams.
But if the women are real, if they can help…
“I’ll do it,” she tells them. “I’ll do it for Annie.”
The rat-snake woman sways her head from side to side. Her human eyes have yellow pupils, unblinking in her scaled features.
“This is not about the storyteller,” she says.
“It is for all those who have need of a strong mother,” explains the wild boar, lisping around her tusks.
The ground seems more unbalanced than ever underfoot. Jaime puts out a hand and steadies herself on a nearby headstone. Annie’s neighbor now. The scar inside is still so raw that it’s all Jaime can do to blink back the tears.
“I don’t understand,” she tells them. “If it’s not about Annie, then why have you come to me?”
“Because you are strong,” the raven says.
“Because of your need,” the salmon adds.
The mountain lion bares her fangs in a predatory grin.
“Because you will never forgive them,” she says.
She lays her hand on Jaime’s arm. The rough palm is warm and has the give of a cat’s paw. Something invisible flickers between them—more than the warmth: a glow, a spark, a fire. Jaime’s eyes widen and she takes a sharp breath. The lioness’s gift burns in her chest, in her heart, in her belly, in her mind. It courses through her veins, drums in her temples, sets every nerve end quivering.
One by one, the others approach. They hold her in their soft arms, touch her hands with their callused palms. Fairy godmothers in animal guises, bestowing their gifts.
2
It’s a night in late July and Karl thinks he’s dreaming.
He’s in that private place inside his head where everything is perfect. He doesn’t have to be careful here. He can be as rough as he likes, he can leave a roadmap of bruises and cuts and welts, he can do any damn thing he wants and it doesn’t make a difference because it’s just in his head. He doesn’t have to worry about his wife finding out, about what a neighbor or a teacher might say. Nobody’s going to come around asking awkward questions because it’s just in his head.
Here’s he’s hard forever and children do exactly what he tells them to do or he punishes them. How he punishes them.
Tonight’s scenario has his youngest daughter tied to her bed. He’s just come into the room and he’s shaking his head.
“You’ve been a bad, bad girl, Judy,” he tells her.
When she starts to cry, he brings his hand out from behind his back. He doesn’t own a belt like this anywhere except for in his private place. The leather is thick, so thick the belt can barely bend, and covered with large metal studs.
Karl’s problem is that it’s not his daughter there on the bed tonight. He just doesn’t know it yet.
I only caught the tail end of what really happened in Judy’s bedroom earlier tonight. I heard her crying. I saw him zipping up his pants. I heard him remind her how if she ever told anybody about their special secret that bad people would take her and her sister away and put them in a horrible prison for bad girls. How they’d have to stay there forever and it would break their mother’s heart and she would probably die.
I wanted to kill him right then and there, but I waited. I clung to the side of the tenement’s wall and shivered with anger, but I’ve learned how to be patient. I’ve found a less messy way to deal with the monsters. I don’t do it for them; I do it for those who are left behind. To save them the trauma of waking to find their loving husband/father/boyfriend/uncle disemboweled on the floor.
I wait until he’s asleep, then I come in through his bedroom window. I pad over to the bed where he’s lying beside his sleeping wife and step up, balancing my weight like a cat, so there’s no give in the mattress, no indication at all that I’m crouched over the monster, hands free from their gloves, palms laid against his temples. The contact, skin to skin, makes me feel ill, but it lets me step into his private place.
It’s only there, when he moves towards the bed with the belt, that I make myself known. I break the ropes tying my Judy-body to the bed as though they were tissue paper. When he looks at me he doesn’t see a scared child’s eyes anymore. He sees my eyes, the hot bear-rage, the unblinking snake-disdain, searing his soul.
And then I take him apart.
It’s a tricky process, but I’m getting better at it with practice. The first few times I left a vegetable behind and that’s no good either. Some of these families can barely keep a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs. No way they can afford the chronic hospital care for the empty monster shells I left behind.
So I’ve refined the process, emasculating them, making it impossible for them ever to hurt anybody again, but still functional. Barely. Scared of everything, including their own shadow. But no more likely to regress to their former selves than I am to forgive them.
Karl’s wife never wakes as I leave their bedroom through the window. I make it to the roof and I have to rest. It would be easier just to kill them, but I know this way is better. It leaves me feeling weak, with a tear in my soul as though I’ve lost a piece of myself. I think I leave somethi
ng behind each time—more than that anima residue of dried blood and rose petals, bird bones and wood ash. I leave some part of myself that I’ll never be able to regain. But it’s worth it. I just have to think of the sleeping child and know that, for her, at least, the monster won’t be returning.
I want a shower so bad it hurts, but the night’s young and it’s still full of monsters. That’s what breaks my heart. There are always more monsters.
3
It’s cold for a September night, colder still on the rooftop where I crouch, and the wind can find me so easily, but I don’t feel the chill.
I used to laugh at the comic books Annie would read, all those impossibly proportioned characters running around in their long underwear, but I don’t laugh anymore. The costumes make perfect sense now. My bodysuit has a slick black weave with enough give to let me move freely, but nothing that’ll catch on a cornice or in someone’s grip. The Thinsulate lining keeps me warm, even below zero. Black gloves, lined hood and runners complete the outfit. Makes me look like one of those B-movie ninjas, but I don’t care. It gets the job done.
I draw the line at a cape.
I never read superhero comics when I was a kid—not because they seemed such a guy thing, but because I just couldn’t believe in them. I had the same questions for Superman as I did for God: If he was so powerful, why didn’t he deal with some real problems? Why didn’t he stop wars, feed the starving in Ethiopia, cure cancer? At least God had the Church to do His PR work for Him—if you can buy their reasoning, they have any number of explanations ranging from how the troubles of this life build character to that inarguable catchall, “God’s will.” And the crap in this life sure makes heaven look good.
When I was growing up, the writers and artists of Superman never even tried to deal with the problem. And since they didn’t, I could only see Superman as a monster, not a hero. I couldn’t believe his battles with criminals, superpowered geniuses and the like.
I never believed in God either.
If my business wasn’t so serious, I’d have to laugh to see myself wearing this getup now, climbing walls like a spider, all my senses heightened; faster, stronger, and more agile than a person has any right to be. It’s like—remember the story of Gwion, when he’s stirring Cerridwen’s potion and it bubbles up and scorches him? He licks off those three drops, and suddenly he pan understand the languages of animals and birds, he has all this understanding of the connections that make up the world, and he can change his shape into anything he wants—which proves useful when Cerridwen goes after him.
That’s pretty well the way it is for me, except that I can’t change my shape. What I’ve got are the abilities of the totem-heads the anima wore when they came to me. I just wish my fairy godmothers had made me a little smarter while they were at it. Then I wouldn’t be in this mess.
I think I’ve figured out where they came from. I used to work for The Newford Examiner—I guess that makes me more like Superman than the Bat-guy, isn’t that another laugh? And I guess I just blew any chance of maintaining a secret identity by revealing that much. Not that it matters. I was always pretty much a loner until I met Annie, and then most of our friends were hers. I liked them all well enough, but without our link with Annie, we’ve just kind of drifted apart. As for my family, well, they pretty much disowned me when I came out.
So I was working for The Examiner, and before you ask, it’s true: We make up most of the stories. Our editor starts with a headline like “Please Adopt My Pig-Faced Son” and the writers take it from there. But sometimes we let other people make it up for us. You wouldn’t believe the calls and letters that paper would get.
Anyway, a few months before Annie died, I find myself up in the mountains, interviewing this old hillbilly woman who claims to have a fairy ring on her property—yo.u know, one of those places where the Little People are supposed to gather for dances at night? I’d brought Annie with me because she wouldn’t stay home once I told her where I was going.
The interview goes a little strange—not the strange that’s par for the course whenever I’ve been out in the field interviewing one of our loyal readers with her own take on the wild and the wacky, but strange in how it starts to make sense. Maybe it’s because Annie’s with me and fairy tales are her bread and butter. I don’t know. But the fairy ring is amazing.
It’s deep in the woods behind the old lady’s trailer, this Disneylike glade surrounded by enormous old trees, with grass that’s only growing about an inch high—naturally; I check to see if it’s been cut and it hasn’t—and the mushrooms. They form a perfect circle in the middle of the glade. These big, fat, umbrella-capped toadstools, creamy colored with blood-red spots on them standing anywhere from a foot to a foot-and-a-half high. The grass inside the mushroom ring is a dark, dark green.
I know, from having read up on them before coming out to do the interview, that fairy rings are due to the growth of certain fungi below the surface. The spawn of the fungi radiates out from the center at a similar rate every year, which is how the ring widens. The darker grass is due to the increased nitrogen produced by the fungus.
None of which explains the feeling I get from the place. Or the toadstools. The last time I saw one like that was when I was still in Brownies—you know the one the owl sits on?
“Do you have to believe in the fairies to see them?” Annie asks.
“Land’s sakes, no,” Betsy tells her.
She’s this beautiful old woman, kind of gangly and pretty thin, but still robust and a real free spirit. I can’t believe she’s pushing eighty-two.
“They have to believe in you,” she explains.
Annie nods like she understands, but the two of them have lost me.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
I’m not even remembering to take notes anymore.
“It’s like this,” Betsy says. “You don’t think of them as prissy little creatures with wings. That’s plain wrong. They’re earth spirits—and they don’t really have shapes of their own; they just show up looking the way we expect them to look. Could be you’ll see ‘em as your Tinkerbells, or maybe they’ll come to you looking like those Japanese robot toys that my grandson likes so much.”
“But the fairy ring,” I say. “That’s just like in the stories….”
“I didn’t say the stories were all lies.”
“So….” I pause, trying to put it all together—for myself now, never mind the interview. “What is it that you’re saying? What do these earth spirits do?”
“They don’t do anything. They just are. Mostly they mind their own business, just like we mind ours. But sometimes we catch their attention and that’s when you have to be careful.”
Annie doesn’t say anything.
“Of what?” I ask.
“Of what you’re thinking when you’re around them. They like to give gifts, but when they do hand ‘em out, it’s word for word. Sometimes, what you’re asking for isn’t what you really want.”
At my puzzled look Betsy goes on.
“They give you what you really want,” she says. “And that can hurt, let me tell you.”
I stand there, the jaded reporter, and I can’t help but believe. I find myself wondering what it was that she asked for and what it was that she got.
After a while, Betsy and Annie start back towards the trailer, but I stay behind for a few moments longer, just drinking in the feel of the place. It’s so… so innocent. The way the world was when you were a kid, before it turned all crazy-cruel and confusing. Everybody loses their innocence sooner or later; for me and Annie it was sooner.
Standing there, I feel like I’m in the middle of a fairy tale. I forget about what Betsy has just been telling us. I think about lost innocence and just wish that it doesn’t have to be that way for kids, you know? That they could be kids for as long as possible before the world sweeps them away.
I think that’s why they came to me after Annie died. They mourn that lost innocence, too. Th
ey came to me, because with Annie gone, I have no real ties to the world anymore, nothing to hold me down. I guess they just figured that, with their gifts, I’d head out into the world and do what I could to make things right; that I’d make the perfect fairy crusader.
They weren’t wrong.
The trouble is, when you can do the things I can do now, you get cocky. And in this business, cocky means stupid.
Crouching there on the rooftop, all I can find myself thinking about is another bit of fairy lore.
“The way it works,” Annie told me once, explaining one of her stories that I didn’t get, “is that there’s always a price. Nothing operates in a vacuum: not relationships, not the ecology, and especially not magic. That’s what keeps everything in balance.”
If there’s got to be a price paid tonight, I tell the city skyline, let it be me that pays it.
I don’t get any answer, but then I’m not expecting one. All I know is that it’s time to get this show on the road.
4
It starts to go wrong around the middle of August, when I meet this guy on the East Side.
His name’s Christopher Dennison and he works for Social Services, but I don’t find that out until later. First time I see him, he’s walking through the dark back alleys of the Barrio, talking in this real loud voice, having a conversation, except there’s no one with him. He’s tall, maybe a hundred-and-seventy pounds, and not bad looking. Clean white shirt and jeans, red windbreaker. Nikes. Dressed pretty well for a loser, which is what I figure he must be, going on the way he is.
I dismiss him as one more inner-city soul who’s lost it, until I hear what it is that he’s saying. Then I follow along above him, a shadow ghosting from roof to roof while he makes his way through the refuse and crap that litters the ground below. When he pauses under some graffito that reads PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS, I make my way down a fire escape.
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