Terribly Twisted Tales

by RABE, JEAN

  Belle, the faerie, watched impassively, as though the struggle between boy and man-sized shadow were the most natural thing in the world.

  Amber couldn’t help but gawk. “What will you do with it?” she asked.

  “Sew it on when I get home, I suppose,” Perry replied.

  “You have a home?”

  “Of course I do, Amber bright and sparkling!” he cried merrily. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Amber said nothing. The ache in her chest returned, and she clutched Winston closer. Her legs gave out, and she sat down on a nearby log. Belle came and stood over her, smiling, shining as brightly as the moon. Looking at the lovely, glowing woman, Amber felt dizzy.

  “How can a lady be a firefly?”

  Perry grinned. “She’s my faerie may, found me when I run away. Sometimes she’s big, sometimes she’s small, sometimes you can’t see her at all. But she’s always with me. Always always and a day, ever since I run away.”

  The dizzy sensation was making Amber feel very tired. Had the world always been this confusing? She rubbed her eyes. “I ran away, too,” she said wearily. “My parents were being bad.”

  “I know how that goes,” Perry said, dancing lightly around the glade. “Parents are a mean lot, always scolding, always telling you what you can and can’t do. Are they frightful mean to you, Amber?”

  “I don’t think they mean to be,” she said, stifling a yawn. “But they do yell an awful lot.”

  “I wouldn’t put up with parents yelling at me,” Perry said. “Never have, never will.”

  “Oh, no,” Amber replied. “They don’t yell at me. Not lately, anyway. Mostly they just shout at each other.” She sighed and lay down on the log, putting Winston under her head as a pillow. “It’s my fault, though.”

  Perry took her hand. His fingers felt warm and soft.

  “I thought maybe they’d stop when I ran away,” Amber said, yawning in earnest.

  Belle came and stood behind Perry. She gazed down on the boy and the lost child like a loving mother. For a moment, the faerie’s face appeared almost human. Perry looked at Amber, too, and he smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not lost any more, Amber my gem. I’ve found you now.”

  Amber smiled back.

  Perry’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I know a place,” he said, “where there are no grown-ups, and you can do whatever you like, for however long you like. There’s good food and good faerie friends and—the best part of all—no one to yell at you.”

  “No yelling?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not ever?”

  Perry grinned. “Not ever, except in fun. It’s fun forever, and you never, ever get old. Want to go with me, precious Amber?”

  “If I go, will my parents be happy? Will they stop yelling?”

  “I promise,” Perry said, “you’ll never hear them yell ever again.”

  Amber nodded. “ ’Kay. I’ll go.”

  Gently, the strange boy pulled her to her feet.

  Belle extended her hand to Perry. In her palm, she held a fine powder that glittered like stardust.

  “Faerie dust to help you fly,” Perry explained.

  He took the dust and sprinkled it over Amber. As he did, Belle shrank down smaller and smaller until she was only the size of a firefly again. She flitted into the sky, circling Perry and Amber, dancing in the cool night air.

  Gentle laughter echoed in Amber’s ears. Then she was light as a cloud and happier than she’d been in ages. She no longer felt cold, or worried, or lonely. Her dress wasn’t damp, and her limbs didn’t feel tired and sore. She couldn’t feel the warmth of Winston’s fur in her hand, either—but that hardly mattered any more.

  The stars shone brightly in the sky overhead; Perry’s eyes twinkled in the moonlight.

  As soft as a summer wind, Amber’s glowing form lifted into the air. Perry held her hand lightly, guiding her, urging her on. Far below them, the manor house glowed bright and warm, but Amber heard no shouting.

  She smiled.

  Belle flew circles around the young girl and the strange boy as they flew off together, setting course for the nearest star.

  Gwendolyn and Shawn didn’t notice that Amber was missing until breakfast the next morning, and by then the happy child was long, long gone. Her parents searched the house frantically until the authorities arrived.

  Shortly after moonrise, the police located Amber’s body. They found her lying on a tree trunk in a small glade next to a clear pool, her head resting serenely on a stuffed teddy bear.

  In the space on the police report marked “cause of death,” the coroner wrote “exposure.” It was the best he could come up with. He found no good explanation for the demise of a healthy young girl on a fine summer’s night in the English countryside. In his experience, under such conditions, it usually took lost children much longer to perish.

  Nor could he explain the strange, contented smile on Amber’s face—a smile that not even the best mortician in the county could wipe away.

  RAPUNZEL STRIKES BACK

  Brendan DuBois

  Brendan DuBois is the award-winning author of eleven novels and nearly 100 short stories. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitch-cock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife Mona, a hell-raising cat named Roscoe, and a ball-chasing English Springer Spaniel named Tucker. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

  So there I was, cooped up in my tiny third-floor bedroom, trying to get through my advanced algebra homework, when my brother knocked on the door and opened it. Creep. He never bothers to wait, never bothers to call out to see if I’m decent or not. No, my older worm brother gave the one-knock signal—as if he’s doing me a favor or something—and then strode in, like the perv wanted to catch a glimpse or something.

  Like dozens of times before, Alan had a Shaw’s grocery paper bag in his hands, folded twice at the top. He put it on my dresser, which is by my bedroom’s sole window. Alan turned and gave me a smirk.

  “It’s ten o’clock, Patti,” he said. “Lights out.”

  “Not done with my homework,” I said.

  “Too bad.” He walked over and flicked off the light, leaving me in the dark, save for the light coming in from the hallway. “You know the house rules. Lights out by ten.”

  “My homework is due—”

  “Then get up earlier and do it,” he said. “And remember. Tomorrow night. It’s going to be very important.”

  My voice rose some. “How can I forget? That’s all you been talking about, all week.”

  “So remember some more. It’s on for tomorrow night.”

  Then he closed the door, leaving me in darkness.

  Okay, so not total darkness. Outside light from streetlights and other buildings came through the window, which gave me a bit of illumination, but not much. So I sat there and waited and waited, as I’m supposed to do, and stared at my desk and open books. My advanced algebra homework.

  My brother was preventing me from finishing it, a young man who probably couldn’t spell algebra if you spotted him an “a” and a “g.”

  Other young ladies in my position would have gone to Mother and Father to complain, which would have been nice, except in my case, Father is dead and Mother is on “vacation” in Florida with a long-distance trucker she met two years ago.

  And other young ladies would have gotten undressed in the dark, and would have gone to bed.

  But I’m not like other young ladies.

  I waited.

  I saw a tiny red dot of light appear on my ceiling, near the window.

  Sighed.

  Time to get to work.

  I got up from my chair, went over to the window, and slid it open with a bit of work. It’s an old apartment house built around the turn of the century—not this century, the last one—and the wi
ndow was heavy and made a creaking noise as I lifted it. I leaned out into the cool spring air and looked down, my long red hair cascading about my shoulders.

  The view from my window looked over a narrow alley in this part of the west side of Manchester, the biggest city in New Hampshire—and this particular neighborhood was the meanest. Not mean like some streets in L.A. or Chicago or New York City, but for me and the others who lived here, it was rough enough.

  I looked down the three stories to the two young men down there looking at up me, one of them holding one of those hand-held laser pointers in his grubby hand.

  One whispered, “Hey, hon, is the store open?”

  The other said, louder, “Sure, baby, show us your wares. C’mon.”

  I kept my mouth shut and went back into my room. From underneath my window I pulled out a length of thin rope attached to a straw basket. I lowered the basket down to the level of the two young men, felt tugging on the rope as they played with it for a moment, and then I hauled the basket back up.

  In the basket was a square piece of white cardboard. I held it, and with the help of a nearby streetlight, I saw the numeral “4” written there in my older brother’s handwriting. I went back to the grocery bag, opened it up, and after a bit of trial and error, picked out a plastic-wrapped package, about the size of a cigarette pack and with the same number written on its side. I put the package in the basket, lowered it back to the waiting customers—or low-life druggies, depending on your point of view—and made the transaction.

  The first of several that night, one after another, me being prompted by the laser red dot of light on the ceiling, some of the guys down there giggling and chortling at me, one calling out, “Hey, babe, your hair gets long enough, I’d love to climb up on it and give you some lovin’.”

  A long night supplying illegal substances to my alleged neighbors. Somehow, I didn’t think Mister Burke, my advanced algebra teacher, would buy that for an excuse for not getting my homework done.

  When midnight came and went, I leaned out the window for one last look at my neighborhood. The buildings around me were tenements built more than a hundred years ago for the French-Canadian immigrants who came in to work at the famed mills on the Amoskeag River. When the mills collapsed and the work went to the South and then to Africa, the brick buildings of the mills were rebuilt into upper-priced condos and art galleries.

  But the immigrant housing didn’t have such luck. It was bought up cheap by out-of-town landlords who did the very minimum upkeep, charged as much rent as they could, and pretty much ignored their tenants. From where I looked out, the alleyway was narrow, with clotheslines spanning the gulf. There were lights on and loud music and the smell of wet trash, and a block or two away, the warbling of a police siren. I glanced up into the night sky, but I only saw the orange glow of streetlights.

  I held onto the edge of the window sill. In a way, my brother Alan and were immigrants here. Just a few years earlier, the four of us lived in a small farm in a forgotten town up by the Canadian border, where the stars were so very bright at night, and the silence in the darkness was so loud it could keep you awake. Father loved his little farm, loved hunting and fishing and trapping in the mountainous woods nearby. Mother had no interest in spending time with Father and neither did Alan, but there were plenty of times when I went along with Father as he stalked deer or turkey, or cast a line into one of the streams, or set his traplines for muskrat and mink.

  I had loved this life, as only a young girl could, until one wintry day when Father was working a trapline and got caught on an underwater snag and drowned during the long night.

  My Father, my hero, my king, dead . . . and here I was, marooned and imprisoned in this third-floor walkup, dependent on my stupid brother for the rent and everything else, with no prince in view to save me.

  I closed the window and went to bed.

  So I got up early and did my homework and went to school. No big deal. Just an average-looking gal in an overcrowded and underfunded high school. As the day progressed, I got nabbed in the hallway by one of our guidance counselors, Mrs. Hanratty. She was in her late fifties, dressed for her age, and didn’t pretend to be our best bud. She took hold of my elbow and pulled me to the entrance to her office and got right to the point.

  “There’s a half dozen college applications waiting for you, Patti,” she said. “When are you going to come by and go over them with me?”

  I clenched my textbooks tighter against my hip. “Soon, Mrs. Hanratty, real soon.”

  She shook her head. “The deadlines won’t wait, you know that. What’s the matter, Patti?”

  I shifted the textbooks from one hip to the other. She said, “If it’s money . . . Patti, with your grades and background, you’ll be a cinch to pull in some hefty scholarships. That won’t be a problem. So—”

  I kept quiet.

  “Patti . . . so what’s the problem?”

  I pulled away from the office door. “Sorry, Mrs. Hanratty, I’m going to be late for biology. Later, okay?”

  Once Father had been buried, Mother started drinking more and more heavily. On the nights without Father bustling around, talking about the farm, about the gossip in town, about his latest scheme to make some money to fix the roof or shore up the far barn, she would sit and just stare into space. So when an uncle offered her a job working as a waitress in a diner outside of Manchester, we three left the farm and moved south. Uncle Jack got us this crappy apartment, and for a while it seemed to work. Alan got a job at a local dealership, washing cars and doing light mechanic work, while Mother did okay at that waitressing job, and I tried to fit in at a high school where the freshman class—of which I was a terrified member—had three times as many students as the entire population of my little regional high school back home.

  We adjusted, hung in there, until Uncle Jack’s job sent him to Washington, and then Mother started drinking again, and Alan decided a life of crime was more interesting and lucrative than washing muddy minivans.

  Mother didn’t know a thing, but I picked up on it after a couple of weeks, when I noticed that Alan no longer had oil stains on his hands or dirty fingernails and that he had a new gold chain around his neck. So after dinner and dishes one night, I asked him in the hallway outside of our bedrooms, “What are you up to?”

  “What’s that, Patti?”

  I said, “Nice gold chain, no more visible dirt, what are you up to now?”

  He smirked—one of his favorite expressions, as if he were putting something over you—and said, “Amateur pharmaceuticals. How does that sound?”

  “You better not get caught, and you better be sure Mom doesn’t find out.”

  Alan said, “Mom’s working on her own amateur drug status, or haven’t you been seeing the empty Smirnoff Ices in the trash?”

  “Leave Mom out of it. And Dad—”

  “Dad,” Alan snorted. “Just a dumb hick who—”

  I grabbed his wrist and said, “Don’t you dare—”

  And he slapped me, hard, and I fell to the floor. “Sister, you keep your mouth shut. All right? Just keep your mouth shut.”

  And that was the first time he had slugged me in a long while, and it wasn’t going to be the last.

  From the bus stop to our tenement building was a three-block walk, and I kept my head down and did just that. There were pawnshops and tiny grocery stores and bodegas, and New Hampshire may have this image of a white-snow state with white church steeples and white people, but there were minorities here, and they tended to cluster in cities like Manchester. In that three block walk, I heard Spanish and Portugese and Cambodian. The streets were a mess, and the sidewalks were cracked and buckling, and as I reached the steps of our tenement building—a type of three-story building known down in Boston as Irish battleships—a couple of guys sitting around the stoop whistled and said, “See ya tonight, babe, see you tonight. You get that long hair ready for us, okay? Mmmmm.”

  I felt the flush of anger and emb
arrassment, and ran upstairs to the apartment.

  One night, Mother didn’t come home from work, and I didn’t worry that much, knowing with a queasy sense of shame that Mother still had needs and desires. But then one night went into two, and then three, and on the fourth day when I came home, Alan was going through the refrigerator and said, “She’s gone.”

  “I know that.” I dumped my books on the kitchen table, a round table that I hated because none of the legs were even, meaning it always tipped when you sat at it.

  Head still in the refrigerator, Alan said, “No, dummy, I mean she’s really gone. I went to the diner today and she left a note for us. Seems she met up with a trucker named Gus or George or something like that—you know how her handwriting sucks—and she’s on her way to Florida. For a vacation.”

  Something cold clutched at my heart. “For how long?”

  “How the hell should I know? What am I, her friggin’ travel agent?” He stepped away from the refrigerator. “Hey, I’m getting hungry. Get supper going.”

  “Get it yourself,” I snapped, and then he came over to me, and I found myself on the floor, ears ringing. He looked down, breathing hard, and said, “With her gone, bitch, I’m in charge. And if you don’t like it, get the hell out. But I’m going to be paying the rent and utilities and the groceries for this crappy slice of heaven, and you’re going to do your part, understand?”

  I slowly nodded my head and put a few fingers to my sore lips. Sure, I understood.

  In the apartment I was glad that Alan wasn’t home, for it gave me a little time for myself. I made myself some toast and a glass of orange juice and watched TV for a while; I had that dull ache of jealousy that practically every one of my classmates had not only their own home computer but also a cellphone, and I had neither. And when friendships and alliances in school were made by e-mail and by texting your classmates, and you didn’t have the tools to participate, you were left behind.