Fae

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  He remembered the words, and when he told his father two years later that he wasn’t taking over the farm but moving to Suffolk in the south of Virginia to enter the merchant trade, ignoring his pa’s stricken look, he didn’t know if it was what he wanted or what his pocket wanted. You go to sleep. Standing behind a counter and retrieving dry-goods for customers seemed preferable to tracking through peanut fields, waiting for the black-rot to ruin a year’s crop and bankrupt him.

  He had no desire to better himself until the day Cherish Gaston walked into the shop. He felt turned to liquid at the sight of her brown curls, some strong spirit intoxicating him, burning him when she spoke to him. A spirit that came from a different place than the lethargy. Within a year he had purchased the establishment from Mr. Penderfeld and married Cherish. On their wedding night he ignored the voice in his head crying No no no and sat his new wife down on the edge of the bed.

  “A husband and wife shouldn’t have secrets,” he told her. He imagined the words spoken in his great-grandma Louisa’s voice. He opened his pocket and his flower climbed out.

  Cherish and the tiny woman stared at each other. Cherish was a tenacious girl, but the sight was too much. She reached a hand across the bed and clutched Frank’s arm to steady her shock and the moss-woman saw it. “Bad,” it spit at Cherish, more a growl than a hiss, and before Frank knew what was happening it had launched itself at his wife’s face. Cherish screamed. Miniscule fingernails tore at her cheek, leaving scratches like small shaving cuts before he could bat it away.

  To her credit Cherish did not faint. Together they tossed a scarf over the woman and locked it in the cupboard. All night, while Frank delved into deeper adult truths in the shape of his sweet wife, they listened to his flower throw itself against the cupboard door until they thought the wood must break, howling one word over and over.

  Mine. Mine. Mine.

  He was twenty-three.

  When the baby came, he was ecstatic. Leaning over the cradle Frank forgot who and where he was, forgot everything, and when he looked again, his moss-woman had fled his unhooked pocket and attached herself to the rim of the cradle, crawling toward the baby’s head. Just as he was about to snatch her back, she paused, gaze roving up and down the tiny wrinkled form, then she turned a perplexed face to him and chirped, “What.” A question. He wondered then if they had children at all, or if they just grew out of moss, or out of each other, the way gnats seemed to coalesce from mud.

  “Maybe you should get rid of it,” Cherish said when he told her in the evening. She rocked the baby and watched him with loving eyes. He felt drenched in the sun by those eyes, rocked the way she rocked their infant son. He had explained the voices in his head to Cherish once and his pledge to his granam. He knew the small mind in his pocket still pulled at him; he had turned into a miserly shopkeeper for his age and a strict employer, even hated by some for his penny-pinching, and yet he and Cherish were well-off for it, never wanting for anything.

  “What if I was a different person without her, Cherish?” Twelve years with an invisible loving thumb on you, he refrained from saying. What would that do to you?

  His wife smiled, showering more sun on him. “I married you, Frank, and I love you so. Sometimes though, I think whoever you are is hidden. Maybe that’s the way it is for everyone, but…” She gazed out the dark kitchen window. “But there’s a… veil on you at times and it comes from her. Whatever comes through of you seems so… thin. I think you wouldn’t be a worse person.” He was not one of those men who considered women’s intuitions silly. His wife was strong and wise and he listened.

  After that Frank left his flower in her box as often as he could, putting off any decision to get rid of her, ignoring the animal yowls in his head as he went about his day. Then the war came, usurping every thought, raising its own yowl that was louder than anything he could have imagined.

  He had her with him, not trusting to leave her at home with his family, in battles that were visions from hell, while she told him through his fingertips or through a Morse code of his racing heartbeats where he should run or dodge or advance. Francis McFarlane became known for his luck. He advanced to corporal. At Berryville a bullet struck him in the chest, just at the pocket he kept her in, or he dreamed it did, and he went screaming into the dark of pain, but when he woke on the field there was no wound on him, only a scorched hole in the front of his pocket. Her magic protecting him again.

  Saving him. Saving her possession.

  ~*~

  “Mine,” she repeated.

  Corporal Francis McFarlane saw nothing, felt nothing in his freezing body, only the salt water sloshing now at his lips. Lord, don’t let me die in the dark.

  “Breathe,” she hissed. It made no sense.

  On his cheeks he felt the flutter of gauzy wings stretch to cover his face, barbs piercing his skin in a circle from jaws to forehead. Then beneath that death shroud she forced his lips open and crawled into his mouth.

  Violet light flared—no, he could see through the gauze. Luminescent globes that were the faces of men floated beside him, upturned to the last inch of oxygen, then the inch vanished. He was underwater. He could feel her shifting behind his teeth, then air slammed into his lungs—amazing, terrifying thrusts that scorched his throat and withdrew again without his diaphragm moving, a worm sliding back and forth in there.

  He scrabbled at the ceiling of the submarine, found holds to pull himself along, their steel edges lit up violet for him, past Dunsey, until he came to the rupture and wiggled his way through the twisted struts. Then he was out in the water of the bay, a stronger violet flare far above that was the burning Union ship to guide him to the surface.

  He shed his coat, kicked off his boots. Exhilaration keened Live live live and just when he made to stroke upward—inexplicable horror punched a fist in his stomach, as though he stood on the edge of a precipice, about to make the worst mistake of his life.

  He was forgetting something.

  He fought to think back, through the howls of Up! and You live! that ate his mind away as soon as he stopped moving, and there it was.

  Private Dunsey.

  Dunsey beside him in the submersible, flailing at the water, blind in the utter dark. Still alive.

  He’d swum right past him, oblivious to all but his own survival.

  McFarlane kicked back down and a dead, hateful space opened inside him. He would die, fish would eat his eyes. The man wasn’t worth it. The iron chains were on him again, pulling him up this time, as though gravity had been turned on its head, while the submersible, still slave to the old gravity, began to sink fast, its last air cavity gone. But there was Dunsey. Half out, squirming and trapped in the twisted metal, too panicked to free himself in the dark. With a tremendous kick McFarlane reached him, saw where the terrified private’s jacket had caught in the torn hull. It would take seconds to untangle him, the sinking mass drawing them both down all the while.

  Abruptly his light went out. Breathing became harder.

  Is that it, flower? he thought. Punish me to make me obey? I can do without you, you know! His heart convulsed at the thought.

  In his arms Dunsey went limp.

  With his free hand McFarlane ripped the wings from his face and spit her out. Where the barbs tore out of his skin the salt rushed in and he clenched his teeth against the urge to scream. His lungs burned. Another second, fumbling now in the dark, and he had Dunsey loose and was rising with him, boxing toward the surface.

  McFarlane’s thoughts were turning silky-soft at the edges, shutting down. They broke into the night like breaking through to heaven, the cold air a god, and Dunsey woke and gasped, beating at him before understanding where they were. Before them floated the burning ship, so close McFarlane could hear the Union sailors’ cries, and he spun and put it behind him, hauling a weak Dunsey toward what he hoped was shore.

  After a moment the dim, peeved glow of a winged figure ignited in the air ahead of him to guide him, beast ins
tinct deciding to help him a little.

  Less loyal than a dog.

  Pebbles rolled beneath his feet. They stumbled up the shore, Dunsey collapsed again, and McFarlane dragged him to the trees and a thicket that would hide them from any Union men who might make it to shore. The softness in McFarlane’s brain iced over and he shut his eyes.

  ~*~

  When he woke she was close. Black lakes watched him and blinked. He felt steeped in the old lethargy, the comfort of being looked after, and for a drowsy second he studied the strange familiar face inches from his. Reptilian or insectile, he could never decide. Then memory slapped him. A cold stone settled in his stomach. When she opened her mouth to speak, he knew what word she was going to say.

  “Run,” she chirped.

  The logic of it was a weight, a sickening turd sliding catty-corner through his mind, seeking a way out. Dysentery of the brain. It was the sensible thing to do. They would think him dead, at the bottom of the bay, his body unrecoverable. Dunsey hadn’t seen who rescued him. He could desert and no one would know and when the war was over, the goddamned war they were going to lose anyway—oh how long he’d known that—he could slip home in the post-war chaos, plead loss of memory. Just leave the death and the spilled bowels and the guns behind, as he’d left the men drowning in the submersible, as he’d been about to leave Dunsey. Protect himself and never a thought for honor.

  Dunsey.

  A sharp cry flew up from somewhere near. His own throat. He rolled and found the private beside him, still unconscious, his thin chest rising and falling, and McFarlane sank his own forehead to the dirt in relief. He tried to remember how old Private Dunsey was. Nineteen or twenty. Nothing but a boy, all of them boys. Wings fluttered at his hair. When he looked up she flew to his face.

  “Home.”

  He managed to shake his head, neck-bones grinding like unoiled gears.

  “West.” She let her gaze slide to the dark where the trees thinned.

  “I could have saved more of them, flower. If you’d of let me have the air, let me risk myself just a little.” Her face gave no hint he’d spoken. His words might have been raindrops, or a gust of wind. She flitted to his hand and McFarlane closed his eyes for a while, thinking of skeletons rolling around in a steel coffin at the bottom of a bay, thinking of his next move, until a stinging pain bloomed in his wrist. He lifted his arm and stared.

  She’d never bitten him before.

  He could see the fangs sunk deep in his vein, pumping, reptilian after all, and with every pulse came a new desire to survive, to run and hide, a yearning so strong his legs twitched with it.

  “So I’m a bear, huh?” he yelled at her. “No more freedom than that?”

  Beside him Dunsey groaned. The knowledge of what he had to do left McFarlane colder than the seawater. His own jacket was gone. With his free hand he searched Dunsey’s pockets, fingers grasping for the object that should be there.

  Closed upon it, drew it out.

  A staghorn folding knife. He opened it with his teeth.

  She fought with the fury of a child that cannot understand its punishment. A wing tore as she tried to twist from his fist, the purple-veined cartilage leaking thin plumes of red smoke. While he sought a tree deep in the thicket she went limp, a possum trick, but when he held her against the bark, bracing his hand over her face so he wouldn’t have to see it, she began to struggle again, arms and legs writhing with snake ferocity. He could feel her biting his palm.

  Stop bawling, you idiot, he thought, and meant it for himself.

  It took two tries to get the knife through abdomen and bark to the hilt and he put his weight into the thrusts. Stay. Yourself.

  He expected blood, yet there was only her skin-glow going out like a candle, that same smell of a charred wick, or he imagined it. His hand slipped from her face and she saw him. “Love,” she gasped. Another trick. Then there was no mouth to speak. She flattened, detail leaching away, smoothing out and draining inward, until there was nothing left around the knife but a butterfly-shaped patch of lavender moss.

  Back near the shore Dunsey was awake. He’d heard the struggle. McFarlane helped him to his feet.

  “Was that a Yankee back there?” Dunsey whispered.

  “No,” McFarlane replied. “Just an animal.”

  They stumbled south, staying hidden in the trees, toward the secret launch station and their unit. Toward Cherish, McFarlane thought, and a baby that was not made of moss. Toward a war that could last another hundred years, the bullet that might kill him tomorrow. Toward life. He felt thickened, real.

  ~*~

  Rhonda Eikamp is originally from Texas and lives in Germany. She wrote for the small press up to 2001, with two honourable mentions in Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. More recently, her fiction can be found in Daily Science Fiction, The Colored Lens, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Birkensnake. A story of hers will soon help annihilate SF in the upcoming Lightspeed special issue “Women Destroy Science Fiction”. Her past lives have included working at the UN in Vienna and picking grapes in Mainz. She currently translates for a German law firm.

  ~*~

  And Only the Eyes of Children

  Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  You’ve probably heard of the survival of the fittest? It’s where things first broke down. An immortal doesn’t have to be fit for anything; he’s going to survive anyway. Immortality was evolution’s biggest screw-up, and any ecosphere worth its salt is going to do its best to make sure an immortal never breeds.

  But they try.

  Oh, how they try. And sometimes they succeed, after a fashion, and they spawn things. And those things become stories, because they’re too horrid to be real, so they must be stories, they must, and thus we have fairy tales and horror films and unconfirmed internet stories of shocking infants in third-world countries, with photos quickly taken down after human rights advocates protest that no one should be gawking at tragedy like some sort of modern day freak show.

  “Human” rights. Heh.

  But though the immortals try to breed, they generally can’t. And thus, the Fae fascination with children.

  It even hits me sometimes. Right this moment, for example, I was completing a perimeter check of a park playground and settling on a bench. I pretended to check email on my phone, but I wasn’t really seeing anything on the screen because I was too busy sneaking peeks at the kids playing on the slide and swings. There were five of them, three girls and two boys, and most were strangers to one another until the game of tag started through the autumn leaves. It was all I could do to stay on the bench instead of jumping up to join in.

  I didn’t, though. A hundred years ago, a stranger could stop a stroll and play a few minutes with kids and everyone would have a good time. Nowadays people start calling police and shouting “Stranger danger!” if you so much as wave at a kid or give him a high five, forget chasing him giggling around a park.

  And that’s kind of a bad thing. Not only for all the little kids who grow up paranoid and nature-deprived and utterly dependent, but because all those jonesing Fae can’t get their tiny little hits of child through frequent, harmless interaction, and some of them finally snap and just take one.

  Almost two thousand kids a day go missing in this country. Think about that a second, okay? Every forty seconds. If you’re reading this at average speed, that’s six kids since you started. (Sorry; Fae personalities also tend to obsessive counting.) About half of those are family abductions, and half of what’s left are acquaintance abductions. We don’t have anything to do with those; that’s your own mess, humans.

  But about twenty-four percent of kidnappings are stranger abductions, and a very few—okay, three percent if we’re counting, and I always am—are Fae-related. Most of the time, those children are found a few days later, unharmed and a little confused (or assumed to be). Most of the Fae who like kids—really like them, I mean, and not just to eat—are pretty good about returning them nowadays
.

  But the other stranger abductions are entirely human in nature, and that’s where I come in.

  My phone rang—Blondie’s “Call Me”—and I took the opportunity to look across the park and watch the kids in a totally natural manner as I answered. “Hello, Jimmy.”

  “Have you seen the news?”

  I hadn’t. I have a Google Alert set and of course Twitter on my phone, but I was watching the kids. “Not yet. What is it?”

  “Amber Alert just went out. Little girl, age seven. Taken from her front yard.”

  Not a typical abduction, or Jimmy wouldn’t have called. “Where?”

  “Out this way. I actually know the family a bit; they come in every week or two.”

  Jimmy owns the Steer & Beer, a little dive over on the east side. He serves more root beer than beer, and he makes a mean Black Cow. He also fancies himself a marksman. Actually, he shoots Expert at local matches, which is two ranks above Marksman, but whatever.

  “You know them enough to figure this isn’t a family matter?”

  “Her parents are together, and while I obviously don’t know much, the police don’t seem to be looking for any relatives.”

  Bells and breadcrumbs, this was likely to be a serious one. And by serious, I mean there was a decent chance she’d been taken by some pervert-pander for sex trafficking. It’s a bigger thing than most people want to admit. “Are you at the Steer now?”

  “Meet me here?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I hung up and stood, and no one noticed. I’m one of the rare half-breed freaks myself, though not of the type to get an OMG!!!1! photo on the internet. No, I’m lucky enough to pass on a human street—which conversely means I’m pretty unlucky on what passes for a street in the Twilight Lands. So I tend to spend most of my time here.

  Exactly here, in fact. This is a good place for us. What, you don’t think of Indianapolis as being a particularly supernatural city? That just means we’re keeping under the radar. I know, New Orleans and Chicago and places get all the arcane press, but think for a second. Indianapolis has two affectionate sobriquets: “the Crossroads of America,” for its prominent location on first the National Road and later several interstates, and “the Circle City,” for its efficient, nearly ritual, circle and grid layout.