“It’s getting louder.”
“You’re really going to have to help me here, because I have absolutely no idea of what’s going on, what’s happened, what’s—”
“There are four of them left,” the man said, sounding for all the world as though he was settling in and there was no possible cause for concern. Across the room, out into the hallway and then, down down down that suddenly impossibly long corridor a bestial grunt rang out, as though from a herd of cows so large that the sun never completely set on it … fighting for dominance against a thick chorus of clacking shoe-heels … getting louder by the minute. “Four portals,” he continued.
Ahoooum!
“What was that?”
“They’re coming.” Blamire didn’t add anything else.
Tom waited for a few seconds, then asked, “Portals? Like doorways?”
“Yes, doorways. Ways to get into—and out of: we must never forget getting out once we’re in—ways to get into and out of Fairyland.”
The howl that followed amidst the clatter of stamping hooves struck a chill down Tom’s back. When he spoke, he had unconsciously increased his own volume.
“Where are they? Is one of them here?”
Blamire nodded. “Of the four that are left, one is along a dirty blind alley that runs off a fluctuating street market in Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai and the Yangtze delta. Another is in a backroom broom cupboard in a disused and boarded-up brownstone on Bleecker Street in New York City. The third is the entire acreage of Chesuncook woods in Maine, and the fourth and final one is—”
“Here,” whispered Tom.
“Here, yes.”
“The little cupboard.”
“The dumbwaiter. Yes.”
“You said that”—he waved a hand and winced at the pain in his leg—“what’s-her-name? See, I’m already forg—”
“Geraldine. Gerry. You called her ‘Ger.’”
“You said that she discovered the dumbwaiter. I don’t remember that, but I do remember the little cupboard.”
“It’s because the fairies have her. We’ll have to deal with your sister another time. And probably not here.”
Tom hunkered down on his bed and rubbed his shin in an attempt to ease the pain in his ankle and the calf. He glanced around again at the door. It was now the length of a football pitch away. When he looked back at his guest, Blamire looked momentarily sad.
Ahoooum!
“We don’t have much time,” said the stranger. “And we have a long way to go.”
Tom leaned forward and allowed himself to rest against Blamire’s shoulder. The man placed a protective arm around the boy.
“Where … where are we going?” he asked.
“Downstairs. To your mother and father.”
Tom grunted and closed his eyes. “I thought you said it was a long way.”
“It’s further than you think.”
“What’s happening to me?”
“The changeling—the thing we saw right at the start of all this … that was holding your leg—the changeling is stealing you in the same way that it, or one just like it, stole your sister.”
“Am I going to die?” Tom asked suddenly.
The man didn’t immediately answer. Finally, he said, “The changeling is stealing your flesh … your body.”
“Why? What have I done to—”
“You’ve not done anything, young Tom. There is no tit-for-tat at play here, far from it. It is simply a matter of survival. When a fairy wakes up, its mind is a blank slate. There is nothing there. Everything that happened to it the previous day and the day before that and the one before that and so on … everything that happened, no matter how small, how trivial … it’s gone. Erased. Rubbed out. They can have anything they want, just like that.” Blamire snapped his fingers, then paused.
After a moment, he went on, “But they can’t have memories. They don’t know their name. Don’t have a favorite smell or sound, a longed-for taste or a book in which they might lose themselves. They have nothing. They don’t recall how to wash or how to wipe their filthy asses, don’t know how to speak. And that first few seconds of a morning, they have to discover all over again how to breathe. And that is why they—” He searched for the right word. “That’s why they seek to consume you … to eat and drink in every tiny thing about you.”
He held out his hands, palm up. “For what is the complex tangle of sinew and blood, bone and cartilage, except a complicated compendium of memories … things getting older, things getting bigger, things growing and things shrinking. We are rich pickings to them.”
“Rich Pickens,” Tom grunted. He had never heard of the fellow.
The trolls howled Ahoooum! and stamped and howled Ahoooum! and stamped some more.
“They’re like animals, aren’t they?”
“They smell blood. They don’t mean anything by it.”
If that had been intended to make Tom feel a little easier, it failed. Truth was, Tom felt a little spacey. He was losing consciousness. It wasn’t falling asleep—it was more than that, though he would not have been able to put it into words. It was a growing sense of not belonging. Of not existing.
Unable to keep his eyes open, Tom could only sense the movement around him, though he could feel rough-gloved stick-hands guiding his body as though it were the slenderest roll of greaseproof paper, like the stuff that his mother used when she was cooking.
“I think …” he began, surprised at the matter-of-factness about what he was about to say. “I think I’m going to die.”
Way outside in the corridor, the sound of stamping feet and the bestial chorus of pained grunts seemed to have receded. As though reading Tom’s thoughts, Blamire said, “The house is getting bigger. It’s becoming the one true borderland … the cusp of faerie and humanie.”
“Humanie …” Tom said with a soft chuckle as a shaft of pain shot up from his belly to between his shoulder blades.
One of the brittle twig-hands stroked Tom’s hair and lifted him onto somebody’s shoulder: Blamire’s? He didn’t know. And he could not face the sheer exertion of opening his eyes to see. He breathed in against the pain and felt straw brush against his face … and the smell was of vanilla and shit. He couldn’t have explained why that was what he could smell, it just was.
“Scarecrows …” he sighed. “Who’d’ve thought?”
As far as last words were concerned, he thought it was a pretty good line.
X: Lilac Time
Sometime during the third day since the group left Tom’s bedroom, the boy relaxed his tenuous hold on life and drifted away without ever opening his eyes again.
They had seen many things already, and there was a promise—like the smell of sweet-scented stocks in the night air—of more to come.
The scarecrows took it in turn to carry the boy’s body (now very light indeed) and the man called Carol Blamire led the way. Along the bedroom floor corridor, the light was suffused with a violet hue. And still they heard the sound of the Artemis Line, sometimes soft and sometimes loud … but it was always there if they paused to listen for it. But they didn’t have time to stop; instead, they simply plowed on through the memories.
“This is a bad one, Rintannen,” Blamire eventually said. They had paused for a minute to switch the boy from one scarecrow to another. Blamire looked around where they were standing. The scenery and topography changed constantly.
“I wonder who all this lot belonged to?” he asked no one in particular. The scarecrow hoisted Tom’s body over its shoulder and waited for instructions. The man slapped the scarecrow’s back. “Onwards, Rintannen!” he cried.
The next time they stopped was outside a white-goods shop called Vallances. It was evening time and three steps led up to the locked doors—these were bygone times, when shops closed well before six o’clock. Blamire sat on the top step next to the scarecrows and held the unmoving boy on his lap.
Ahoooum!
Blamire ignored t
he chant, the first one he had heard for some time.
It’s curious, he thought as they all watched the comings and goings of young people out on dates, how the males gravitate to the left side of the shop entrance and the females congregate on the right.
A man sat down on the step and rested his head on Blamire’s shoulder.
“I asked Sylvia to meet me for lunch today,” the man said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
It didn’t sound as if the man was expecting a response, so Blamire kept quiet.
“We were about to lose the house,” he said, and then burst into a fit of uncontrolled sobbing. “So I phoned her and asked her to meet me for lunch. Sylvia, I mean.”
“Sylvia,” Blamire said. “Nice name.”
“We lost the house,” he said, his voice soft and even now. “I couldn’t do that to her.”
Nobody said anything then for a minute or two. The four scarecrows propped against the huge windows of Vallances, the two men on the step and the emaciated bundle on Blamire’s lap all stared emptily across the busy road to the endless deserted field on the other side. There were ravens out there, circling over something. Blamire could not see what it was from where he sat.
“It’s just a memory,” Blamire said at last. “Not necessarily your memory and not even necessarily something that did or even will happen.”
Without turning around, the man started sobbing again. “I killed her,” he said, “with this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a thick-handled hammer. “I left her on the train tracks.”
“Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. Maybe she’s at home right now, waiting for you.”
“I killed her.” The man took a deep breath and, suddenly sitting up very straight, he hit himself in the face with the hammer. It struck the bridge of his nose and lodged itself in his eye socket. He shook as though an electric current was being passed through his body.
Blamire closed his eyes and clasped his hands tightly together. “It’s just memories, glimpses of the past or the future. None of it needs to happen.”
When he opened his eyes again, the man was gone. The boy was curled up beneath a wooden bench-table on which the four scarecrows were playing a game of Find the Lady.
A woman’s voice shouted, “Why? I don’t understand.”
Blamire got to his feet. Rintannen stood with him. They were in what appeared to be a back garden, looked down upon by houses and apartments on every side. He moved across to a low wall and peered over into the garden of another house. The garden path ran from a child’s swing just over the wall to the rear door, which was ajar. A woman was walking around, holding her head and muttering.
“But what have I done?” the woman wanted to know. “Just tell me that.”
One of the other scarecrows had moved alongside Blamire, its gloved hand resting on his shoulder. A playing card—the four of spades—fell from the scarecrow’s sleeve.
“She got up this morning and life was just fine and dandy,” Blamire said to himself. “And then everything went to hell in a handcart.”
Ahoooum!
The woman had seen them and had come up to the door, pulling it wide.
“He won’t tell me what I’ve done!” the woman shouted.
“Go back to bed,” Blamire whispered. “Try again.”
Then he turned around and the four scarecrows were standing on a snow-covered road. One of them held the boy in its arms and appeared to be saying something to him. Or singing.
As he got closer, Blamire heard, “… to tell him all I can, about the plan, for lilac time …”
“How long have we been walking?” Blamire wanted to know as he reached the group of scarecrows.
The scarecrows remained motionless and didn’t say anything. They never said anything. In fact, Blamire wondered if they could actually speak at all. Perhaps that was just in my head, he thought. And then: Who is “he?” And what’s lilac time?
Ahoooum!
They set off along the road, occasionally spotting wallpapered walls in the constant wind-blown flurry of fine snow. Blamire reached over and felt the boy’s forehead. It was gray-colored, like the rest of his skin, and he was completely rigid. Completely rigid? Were there degrees of rigidity, or was “rigid” a finite term?
He looked up from his school desk and saw Mr. Jones, his English language tutor, staring at him and repeatedly tossing a small piece of chalk into the air and catching it. He had apparently written on the blackboard a sequence of names—DICK DEWY, WILLIAM DEWY, REUBEN DEWY, FANCY DAY, GEOFFREY DAY, FREDERIC SHINER, VICAR MAYBOLD—and was partway through saying, “What do we think might have been Fancy’s ‘secret she would nev—’”
“You ask too many questions, Master Blamire,” Mr. Jones was saying.
“Sir?”
“I said, you ask too many questions.”
He nodded. “It was the Vicar, sir. Vicar Maybold.” He looked around a sea of faces staring at him while the teacher continued to toss the chalk. “That was Fancy Day’s secret.”
They were crossing a steep bridge. The traffic was driving on the wrong side of the road—and the drivers were in the wrong side of the cars—and Blamire felt out of breath. Two of the scarecrows were ahead of him, but the boy wasn’t to be seen. He turned around and looked straight into the stitched button-eyes of Rintannen, who was carrying the boy.
“Nearly there,” he said to the scarecrow. The scarecrow called Rintannen nodded. And when Blamire turned back to face forward he saw that the descending slope of the bridge had morphed into stairs that led down to the hallway beneath the bedrooms.
And he was almost at the bottom.
Above him, far off but getting closer, he could hear the sound of the Artemis Line …
Ahoooum!
He stepped down into the hallway and made for the open kitchen door.
XI: Memories
It was almost six o’clock by the big clock over the back door, and Charles Cavanagh must have been surfacing from sleep because he jumped up as soon as Carol Blamire entered the room.
“Who are you?” Charles asked.
Trudy Cavanagh snorted herself awake and stared wide-eyed at the intruder.
“My name is Carol,” Blamire began.
“Ah, Mr. Blamire,” Trudy said as she tried to straighten out her hair. “My, but you certainly start early in these parts. Remind me never to—”
“Mrs. Cavanagh, we don’t have much time. I suggest—”
“Are those yours?” Charles was asking, pointing at a shambolic-looking quartet of raggedy scarecrows propped up against packing boxes and cupboards alike. The one at the front wore a battered trilby, a thick woolen scarf with several large holes in it, a collarless shirt (that Charles momentarily thought that he recognized), a bow tie, and a grease-stained Barbour jacket. The thing’s two button-eyes appeared (Charles thought) to be pleading with him. Suddenly, the thing fell sideways and landed on the floor in a heap. “I don’t really think we want—”
Ahoooum!
Trudy frowned and looked toward the door just behind Blamire. “What’s all that? The noise, I mean.”
Blamire took a deep breath, visibly filling out, before releasing all of that air and just as visibly deflating. “We need to talk.”
Trudy sniffed and pulled a face.
“And what on earth is that smell?”
“It’s—” Blamire paused, then said, “—vanilla, I believe. And—”
“It smells more like sewage,” Trudy said.
“As I said, we need to talk.”
“Talk?”
And so it began … Blamire spoke mainly, though Trudy and Charles Cavanagh were not without questions, not least:
“Children? We don’t have any children.”
Charles flipped the switch on the kettle and walked across to his wife, placing a hand on her shoulder.
Blamire reached into his jacket pocket and produced a dog-eared brown packet from which he removed a quantity of photographs—old
ones, judging from the condition. Blamire flicked through; then, grunting with some satisfaction, he picked one and handed it across to Trudy.
Charles was staring at the bundle on the floor. It looked like some kind of papier-mâché model of a small man—a child, perhaps—who was folded up in a semblance of deep sleep or even death.
“What is that?” Charles wanted to know.
He was starting to lean over the bundle of rags that Blamire had deposited when Trudy said, “Where did you get this?”
Charles asked what it was again.
Ahoooum!
“Where did you get it?” repeated Trudy.
Blamire blinked in an almost foreign way—Ah, comme ci, comme ça, madame—and gave a little shrug.
“Isn’t that our house in Bramhope?” Trudy continued. She turned to her husband, but Charles had turned back to look at the bundle … against (or even onto) which one of the scarecrows had toppled, giving an almost protective or defensive air.
“Who’s the little girl?” Charles wanted to know. He looked first at Blamire and then turned to Trudy. “Who’s that little girl?”
Trudy felt a sudden flutter of palpitations. “Little girl,” she said, repeating the words coldly and barely above a whisper. “I have no idea.”
“She’s your daughter,” Blamire said. His voice was very soft.
“I never saw her in my—”
“Sweetie …” Charles was pointing at a vague outline partly visible in the open door behind the girl.
Trudy leaned forward just as the loud clomping sound had apparently reached the head of the staircase.
Nobody turned around at the noise, but Blamire said, without moving his attention from the photograph, “We have to speed up a little here. They’re coming for your son.”
Trudy looked up. “Who are ‘they’?”
Blamire shrugged, his patience wearing a little thin. “Trolls …”
Ahoooum!
“That’s them,” he added, jerking his head in the direction of the noise. “Plus fairies—you smelled them before?”
“The sewage?”
“Shit and vanilla, if you’ll pardon my saying. Plus changelings. The whole lot. They have your daughter and now they’re coming for your son.”
Fearie Tales Page 37