“Carol Blamire.”
“Who’s she when she’s at home?”
“He. It’s a ‘he.’”
Overhead something made a drawn-out rattling sound. It rolled right over them, directly above their heads.
“Carol Blamire is a man?”
“That’s what his wife says, and I guess she should know. What’s in a name, dear Charlie-mine?”
“Amen to that,” Charles said.
He could hear the sound of his own munching. But there was something else. Other noises.
Something was moving behind the wall.
They both turned, raising their heads to follow the path of whatever it was.
“Geraldine …” Trudy whispered.
They turned back to the pile of boxes and listened to the sound of flicking papers, things clattering and bouncing and thudding inside the boxes.
“What did you just say?”
Trudy frowned. “What?”
They heard a screeching sound, like nails on a blackboard, coming from the next landing.
“You said something. What was it?”
“I don’t know—”
“‘Is Gerald in?’ you said. Who’s Gerald?”
Something fell onto the landing. It sounded like a side of beef, sloppy and big … and heavy.
Whatever it was started to move.
“Sounds like—” she began.
Charles turned to his wife and saw her frown.
“Sounds like … the kid,” she said, looking bemused.
“The kid?”
“Mmm,” she whispered slowly. “Tommy—”
“Tommy—” Charles repeated.
Something crashed above them. Maybe a glass knocked off a side table.
“Time to go to sleep,” Trudy said.
Charles scrunched up the chocolate wrapper and tossed it into the hearth. When he looked across at his wife, Trudy was already asleep.
He slouched back and stared at the window.
A door was opening upstairs. He couldn’t hear it, but he could sense it.
He closed his eyes and thought again, Gerald? Who’s Gerald?
Someone was coming down the stairs, slowly … Tom, he imagined. Not Gerald. “Who is Ger—” he started to say, but then he simply could not keep his eyes open any longer.
The last thing he heard before the drawing room door creaked open was Trudy’s snore.
VIII: A Late-Night Caller
Half-sitting on the edge of Tom’s bed was a bulbous object that looked like a gigantic Muppet gone wrong. Folds of pasty-looking flesh sat one on top of the other as it held out its wattled arms. The hand at the end of one was firmly clasped around Tom’s ankle.
Behind him, something clacked against the windowpane. Tommy wanted to turn around—he wanted desperately to take his eyes away from the thing in front of him, its belly puckered and creased, one leg gashed down the thigh, the blood congealing. As Tom had turned, the thing had ceased its strange attentions to Tom’s ankle and now appeared to be frozen, like a gigantic ugly rabbit trapped in the headlights of an oncoming car.
In that single instant two things amazed Tom.
The first was that he neither screamed nor yanked his foot away. He just knelt there, hands still on the windowsill and his body twisted around toward the open bedroom door. In the hallway beyond, he was aware of a group of four tiny people, all of them naked. They all had wings. He could see them in the shifting moonlight … could see their pallor and their skeletal faces; could see long genitals (all of them seemed to be male, though he could not help but notice that some of them also had pendulous breasts dangling almost all the way down to filthy feet ending in blackened, cracked toenails).
The second thing—and, God help him, Tom almost laughed—was that the bulbous creature looked almost exactly like Tom himself. It was as though he were looking into a fairground mirror, at the rheumy eyes, puffed-out cheeks, spots and craters, discolored bags under the eyes, jowly neck. He blinked as the things in the hallway backed away from the door. He thought he could hear one of them starting down the stairs.
He felt a sharp stabbing sensation in his ankle, but still he refrained from shouting out. He just had to keep concentrating. He kicked out and felt his foot hit the creature in the chest. As the thing staggered backward, Tom pulled his leg back, grimacing in pain. Something clattered against the window again, but still he did not turn; he did not dare take his eyes away from the bizarre tableau just inside the doorway, a grisly parody of one of Rupert Bear’s adventures on the wilder paths to be found around Nutwood forest.
Two of the winged creatures tried to push the bloated monstrosity forward again, hissing as they did so. The thing lifted arms that looked like a sequence of thick rolls, running from underneath the armpits all the way down to the wrists and gnarled hands with long fingers.
“Oh, God,” Tom gasped. The pain in his ankle was like fire.
The things in the doorway craned their faces forward, mouths pulled perilously wide as though they were greatly amused by the boy’s discomfort. But though they hissed threateningly, still they maintained their ground. In that moment, Tom made what he considered to be a startling discovery: the things—both the winged creatures and the bulbous shape by his bed—appeared to be as wary of him as he was of them.
All of this was a dream anyway, wasn’t it? (Wasn’t it?) So anything—
Clatter …
—so anything he did now had little consequence.
The bulbous thing snarled and straightened up. It shifted its body sideways and knocked the bedroom door against a pile of boxes. That should do it, Tom thought. That should bring Mom and Dad up the stairs, even though this whole thing is some kind of mad dream.
The creature shifted its head and wiggled it, as though trying to relieve the pressure of a too-tight collar. The thing’s features had been slowly taking clearer shape, but since Tom had kicked it in the chest, the head and arms were losing their form.
Tom felt a strange pulling sensation around his stomach, as though something were—
… Clatter …
—tugging at him. As he carefully raised his right arm and pressed the palm against his stomach, he was suddenly aware of reality stretching around him, in front of him … He suspected the same thing was happening behind him, too.
“Gerry,” Tom called. He didn’t want to shout too loud; he didn’t really want his parents to hear and then come upstairs, because that would clinch his suspicion that this was not a dream.
He eased himself into a standing position on his bed and immediately felt vulnerable. The bed was too springy. If he fell down, then that thing—plus the other creatures, the ones with the wings—would be all over him like a rash.
“Ger-ry.” This time he tried to make his voice—
… Clatter …
—be more singsong, not concerned in any way; just matter-of-factly calling out for his sister.
The bulbous creature had now retreated all the way to the bedroom door and joined the four winged things that were huddled half inside Tom’s room and half in the hallway. The quintet pushed their faces forward and snarled loudly, waving filthy hands with fingers frozen into claws.
Tom edged to the side of the bed and—
… Clatter …
—and what the hell was that?
Tom turned toward the window just in time to see something move past him, a few inches above the floor of his room, but when he looked, there was nothing to be seen.
Outside, a pebble clattered against the window.
… Clatter …
Tom spun around quickly and the five creatures suddenly withdrew again, snarling and spitting and clawing.
He turned sideways so that he could check both the room and the window at a glance without too much difficulty. But he had to push himself up onto his tiptoes to see outside onto the gravel driveway.
There was a man standing down there in the wind and rain—it wasn’t torrential, Tom noticed, b
ut it was probably uncomfortable—and he was waving to Tom.
“Can I come in?” the man shouted up through cupped hands.
Something moved past Tom again, this time higher up the wall … scampering. He glanced back at the doorway and the creatures were still there, only now their attention was no longer solely upon him. Perhaps they had noticed the scampering thing too.
“I said—” the man was shouting, but Tom didn’t hear the rest of it. He had seen the scamperer, and so, too, had the things in the doorway. It was not something moving across the wall that he had seen, but rather—
“Can I—?”
—the walls themselves.
Tom could not contain himself. “Mom! Dad!” And, when there was no answer, “Gerry! Somebody … please!”
Tom’s bedroom appeared to have doubled in size several times over, and that ballroom-proportioned space was still stretching and moving. Tiny tornado twisters of masonry and plaster-dust could be seen between the bed and the door, like small fog wraiths swirling and hovering—the very image of steam-ghosts from the manhole covers that lined every New York street on the TV shows.
Tom considered the doorway from his bed, but it was now too far away. He had no idea what he might encounter in between. Instead, he leaned up onto the windowsill and looked down at the man still standing in the drive.
The figure was wearing a waterproof jacket, a dark hat—black, Tom supposed—with earflaps, and he carried a tall staff. But strangest thing of all was that he was flanked by several scarecrows, which seemed to be standing with their arms held almost straight by their sides, like bizarre gunslingers about to draw. The man removed his wet cap and slapped it against his free hand before returning it to his head. “So?” he asked.
“So?” Tom turned quickly to see that his bedroom doorway was empty again … but it was still so very far away. And now he noticed that thick clumps of grass were growing along the walls and out of floorboards which had been partially pried open.
“So can I come in?”
“Come in?” Tom couldn’t hold back the sigh of total relief. “Yes, oh, God, yes. Please. I’ll come down—” He was about to say that he would go downstairs and open the door, but then he realized he didn’t want to walk through the alien darkness.
And then the man was suddenly there, standing in Tom’s room, while alongside the bed, four scarecrows propped themselves against the wall, unmoving.
IX: What Do You Know About Fairies?
“So,” the man said, “that wasn’t too hard, was it?” He smiled. “Tom, isn’t it?”
Tom nodded. “Tom,” he repeated, still wondering how the man had arrived in his room. He closed his eyes and grimaced.
“Are you hurting?”
He nodded again and lifted his leg. His eyes went so wide that he feared for a few seconds that his eyeballs were going to topple out of their sockets. The flesh on the ankle, the one the thing had been holding, was flayed off in strips, exposing cartilage and bone.
“Ah, unfortunate,” the man said. “Tom …” He turned the name over in his mouth, as if testing it, trying to find its taste suitable.
Somewhere outside the bedroom door a growl echoed. It sounded like a huge animal lost in the forest, bemoaning its hunger and loneliness.
“I figured as much from the smell.” The man sniffed loudly.
“Smell?”
The stranger sniffed again, louder this time. “Don’t you get it? Shit and vanilla.”
“Shit and vanilla?”
“Yes, indeed. Fairies. And where fairies have been, there’s always a mess.” He pointed to Tom’s leg. “Right there, for instance.”
“What’s happening to me?” Tom asked. He glanced around the room just in time to see the bulbous thing reaching its pudgy arms out to take hold of the bedsheets while one of the winged creatures—its filthy body was clearly visible in the rain-washed moonlight coming through the window—was crawling up (yes, up!) the wall toward the top of the wardrobe.
“Just a second,” the man said. He looked quickly around the room and spotted an old window-hook on a long wooden pole. He stepped forward, lifted the pole and swung it with all his might into the winged creature’s back, managing to hit the bulbous thing at the same time, knocking it across the room. The winged thing emitted a strangled howl and fell to the floor, whereupon the man kicked it out through the doorway,
“Who are you?” Tom wanted to know. “And what is going on?” Then he opened his eyes wide. “Gerry!” he cried and jumped off the bed. “My sister, Gerry.” Even as he said it, the words felt wrong. Gerry was surely a boy’s name—was he mistaken? In fact … in fact, was he absolutely sure he even had a sister?
The man said sadly, “She’s already been taken, I’m afraid.” As another plaintive howl echoed he added, “That’s her.”
“Let’s go and get her, then,” Tom said, though he suddenly felt a little halfhearted about the idea. In fact, this whole dream was getting a little too much. And he still wasn’t totally convinced that he had ever had a sister.
“Not so easy.” The man crouched down to face Tom. “To get your sister, I mean.” He patted the bed. “Particularly with that leg.”
The stranger was right—his ankle was not improving. In fact, it was deteriorating by the minute. The muscle of the entire calf had atrophied and the leg itself now looked like the man’s window-pole.
“Okay for me to sit?” And when Tom made space, he said, “I want to tell you a story.”
As the two of them sat on the edge of a bed the size of a small lake in a room as cavernous as a twelfth-century cathedral, he began: “My name is Carol—a hell of a name to give a boy, don’t you think?”
Tom wasn’t sure what to think, so he didn’t say anything.
“Carol Blamire. Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.” He sniffed and for maybe a whole minute he sat looking at Tom. Then he said, “What do you know about fairies?”
Tom frowned. He knew about elves and their like, living in the greenwood, flying like moths encased in gossamer gowns sprinkled with stardust, but he suspected that that wasn’t what the man sitting in front of him was talking about.
“Christ,” Tom sighed, even though his father would have grounded him for a week for the curse. But he couldn’t think of anything else to say; all he could feel was the pain, coursing up his leg and into his belly.
Something crashed out in the corridor. It sounded far, far away and yet the house, though spacious, was not exactly huge. The sound continued for a few seconds, and then a determined grunting noise started, coupled with stamping feet, all still a long way away.
“What’s that?” asked Tom.
“Trolls,” Blamire replied calmly. “It’s an Artemis Line.”
“What’s an Art—”
“Artemis Line.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a line of trolls stretching from down in Fairyland and up into your house.”
Tom started shouting for his mother and father.
“They can’t hear you, I’m afraid.”
“Are they … are they de—”
“No, they’re not dead. They’re just asleep.”
“In bed?” A surge of pain across his stomach caused Tom to pull back his T-shirt. His belly was rippling as though something had actually got beneath his skin and was moving around.
“We need to get that fixed for you.”
Tom winced and pulled down his shirt again. “Where are they? My mom and dad?”
“Downstairs.”
The tromping sound was interspersed with a crash of something breaking. It sounded to Tom like an Irish dancing troupe, all of them clicking and clacking their metal heels together.
“What’s a troll?” Tom had watched a DVD, some foreign movie with subtitles (Geraldine always teased him about how he always avoided subtitled films—Geraldine? Who was Ger—?—and then something tugged at the walls of his stomach and he cried out), and the troll there was as big as King Kong,
so he wasn’t sure how one troll could get into their house, never mind a whole dancing parade of the things.
“It’s a kind of fairy, but lacking any brains at all,” said the man.
Carol Blamire—what a stupid name.
“And they cannot move far away from water. That’s why they tend to live under bridges.”
“If they can’t move away from water, what are they doing”—Tom pointed to his bedroom door—“stomping around inside the house?” He pulled down the neck of his T-shirt just in time to see something ripple across his ribs. He felt a dull stab of pain and something sharp upended itself beneath his skin before moving away to his side. He writhed and fell back onto the bed.
“That’s the Artemis Line,” the man said. He reached over and laid a hand on Tom’s forehead. “One of them is standing in water while holding on to another. He, in turn, is holding another … and so on. And one by one, the trolls manhandle their way up the line, still holding on to the flesh of the trolls on each side of them and—”
“Mom! Dad!”
“I told you, they’re asleep. Your sister, too.”
“What sister?” he shouted out again, then added, “I don’t have a—”
“Gerry,” Blamire said. “Her name is—was—Gerry. As in Geraldine.”
“This isn’t making any sense. But what about her … What about my sister—the one I don’t have? What about Gerry?”
“Gerry has been taken.” The man glanced briefly toward the open doorway. “She was the one who opened the portal, so she is the one they came for.”
“The trolls already came for her? I would have heard—”
“No, the trolls are coming now. They’re the heavy gang. Think of them as the fairies’ bouncers.” Blamire frowned and considered that for a moment. “Do you know about bouncers? You know, nightclubs and so on?”
“Yes … I know about bouncers. Sometimes they’re bullies hired to hurt people,” Tom suggested, and the man’s face lit up.
“Absolutely,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Spot-on. The bouncers maintain order—their version of order—while the fairies and the elves, they’re the ones in charge.”
They turned in unison to stare at the bedroom doorway.
“Is it my imagination, or is the noise getting louder?” asked Tom.
Fearie Tales Page 36