by S. C. Green
He dragged himself home, shrugging off the jeers of his frustrated teammates. As he approached the bypass, the Gardens loomed ahead, lit by two glaring, old-fashioned metal lights screwed into the gateposts.
The wind picked up, and Tristan hugged his bare forearms. He crossed at the lights and turned at the corner of the gates, intending to walk down to the railway station, avoiding the Gardens completely.
Tristan...
A voice called him. He couldn't tell where it came from. He glanced all around. The street was completely deserted. The breeze shook the leaves that pressed through the iron grate. Over his head, branches shifted, stretching their talons toward him. The only place it could have come from was ... from inside the gates.
No way. I'm not going in there. He bent forward, eyes to the ground as he picked up his pace.
Tristan...
A strange feeling swept over his body, like a rush of heat blowing through a cold room. Suddenly, more than anything in the world, he wanted to pass through those gates, to walk inside the Gardens, to touch the crisp leaves between his fingers. He turned around, took a step toward the gate, then another.
This is...some kind...of dark magic...
...Fight it, Tristan...the voice whispered.
His own thoughts dimmed to a faint tremor, overpowered by the pull of the Gardens. A heavy feeling settled on his eyelids, pulling them shut. Tristan took another step, and then another. When he opened his eyes again, he was standing on the other side of the gates.
Tristan...
As quickly as the strange desire entered his body, it left again, leaving him short of breath. The shadows twisted below him, contorting under the streetlights. Tristan tried to pull his feet up, to turn around and escape the Gardens, but some invisible force held them frozen in place. His chest tightened; he swore he saw shapes moving in the corners of his eyes, in the shrubs beneath the sage bushes. He sucked a ragged breath.
Something brushed his ankle. He jumped forward. A strangled cry escaped his chapped lips.
Keep walking Tristan.
That voice...it came from inside his head, yet it wasn't him. Weirdly, he found he could walk forward, but not backwards. He was been led by this invisible force through the Gardens.
What is going on?
Only two hundred feet to go and he'd be safe. He squared his shoulders and forced his breathing to slow. He could feel his heart thumping.
Then he saw it, a dark shape leaping and darting across the pavement. He froze.
Another one came at him from the side, brushing against his foot with a sound like a chocolate cookie being crushed between sharp teeth. He cried and jumped back, squinting in the poor light.
It fell against the battered stone wall and stopped. A potato chip bag. Figures. The gutter was littered with rubbish.
You're frightening yourself. Keep moving. You're almost home.
He took another step forward.
Suddenly, even though the air fell still and soft as a pillow, the gutter fluttered to life. Plastic bags, flattened coke bottles, grease-speckled takeaway bags, bent cigarette butts and empty yoghurt containers stood on end and marched from their hobbit holes. Soda cans lolled to and fro, carving cruddy paths on the concrete. As one, every piece of rubbish rose from the gutter and scrambled, flew, rolled, tumbled and soared across the path and disappeared under the sage bushes.
The path, now bare, fell silent. Tristan – heart pounding – ran from the Garden as fast as he could.
***
The house was dark when Tristan got home. His stomach rumbled, remnants of his unsatisfying lunch swimming around inside. He unlocked the back door and set his bag down on the kitchen bench. He could hear the TV playing in the other room - Alice’s favourite show.
“Mom?” He fumbled for the light switch.
He jumped. She was sitting at the kitchen table, hands clasped in front of her, half-finished wine glass nestled between them. The empty bottle stood on the bench behind her, and another, also empty, peeked out of the recycling bin. She didn’t even flinch when the light went on.
“Oh, Tristan ... you’re home.” She sounded far away, as if he were talking to her over the phone, instead of across the kitchen table.
He opened the fridge. “Is there any food?” Eating something might calm his frayed nerves.
She looked around the room, her face blank, confused, as if she didn’t even realise where she was. “I ... I don’t know.”
“It’s okay, Mom.” Tristan pulled out a block of cheese and cut off a slice for himself. He grabbed the phone off the wall, dialled the local pizza joint, and ordered two large pepperoni and fries.
“I’ll need some money,” he said, sitting down across from her and stuffing the cheese in his mouth. “For the pizza. I got it with extra pepperoni, just the way you like it.”
She nodded, not even bothering to scold him for talking with his mouth full. Tristan found her wallet buried under a stack of unopened mail, and pulled out several notes. He kept two aside for the pizza and stuffed the rest in his pocket, thinking he could stop at the market after school tomorrow and pick up some food. His mother didn’t even notice.
They sat in silence, his mother sipping the wine and staring at the wall behind his head. Tristan stared at the bright floral pattern on the tablecloth, his mind racing as he replayed the scene in the Gardens over and over and over.
He hadn’t imagined it. He could still feel the tingling where that empty bag had caressed his ankle. He closed his eyes and watched the litter along the path dancing under his eyelids, rolling and soaring and tumbling through the air, as if drawn on invisible strings.
It was just the wind. He told himself, over and over. He wanted to believe it, but he couldn’t. He’d been standing there. The air was perfectly still. All that litter had moved of its own accord.
Tristan laid his head in his arms, his cheek resting on the tablecloth. A single tear rolled down his cheek. I want to talk to Dad. His father read thick books about folklore and archaeology and strange African rituals. He was fascinated with that kind of stuff. He would believe Tristan.
But Dad wasn’t there.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I was walking home through the Gardens tonight, and something really strange happened. I felt something grab at my ankle, like it was trying to trip me, and then all the litter on the ground-”
"Probably faeries." She mumbled.
"Excuse me?"
"Faeries. They live in the Garden. They were probably moving the litter around. That's the sort of thing they enjoy."
Tristan leaned forward. He'd never heard her even mention faeries before. Her eyes had focused on his face, and she tapped her fingers against the stem of her glass. "Have you seen a faerie, Mom?" he asked.
She snorted. "No. Marcus said I don't have "the sight", whatever that means. He was always mumbling about faeries in that garden. You know how he believed in all that nonsense about ghosts and spirits and witches."
This was the first time she'd mentioned Dad's name in a week. A good sign, even if she was talking about him in the past tense. He tried to keep her interested in the topic.
"It was probably nothing. I have to do an assignment about the old legends of the Garden. I was walking through thinking about the faeries and I must've spooked myself-"
"Your Dad had some books about faeries. I could find them for you, if you like. They might be useful for your assignment."
"I'd like that very much."
There was a knock at the door. Tristan’s mom sprang from her seat, like a coiled snake pouncing. Then, she seemed to deflate before his eyes, slumping back in her chair and shrinking into that pale shade of a person she'd been since his Dad had gone missing. "The pizza is here," she said listlessly.
Tristan paid for the pizza, and brought it into the living room. His mother followed with plates and napkins. Alice got up from her spot on the sofa and joined them at the table. Mum hunched over h
er, wrapping Alice tight in her arms, pulling Tristan in her embrace. "I love you." She whispered to them. Tristan saw a single tear run down her cheek.
Alice shot Tristan a wide-eyed look and tried to wriggle away. “Mommy, I’m trying to watch my show!”
Mum let them go. She reached across the table and opened the boxes. A rich, cheesy smell wafted through the room, but Tristan didn’t feel hungry any more.
***
Tristan woke to a darkened room and a tiny hand pulling away his blankets. “Twisty?” A soft voice whispered. “Are you awake?”
He groaned and rolled over. “Alice? What’s wrong? Why aren’t you in bed?” The clock on his bedside read 2:21.
“I need to sleep with you, okay Twisty?”
He reached out and felt her face. It was wet with tears. He placed his arm around her and pulled her up into bed with him, wrapping the blanket around both of them. “Of course it’s okay. Did you have a bad dream?”
“There’s something in my room. I can see yellow eyes staring at me.” She shuddered.
“It was just a dream, Alice. There’s nothing in your room except for piles and piles of toys.”
“I saw it, Twisty. I saw it right there in the corner.”
“Hush. You're safe now. There's nothing here except you and me. Now, go to sleep.”
She was silent for a while. Tristan started to fall asleep again, but then she said. “Daddy isn’t coming home, is he?”
“Of course he is.” Tristan stroked her hair. He didn’t want her to start crying again. “It’s just taking longer than we thought to find him. The police are very good at what they do. They are going to find Daddy and bring him home, and then everything will be okay again.”
He wished he believed his own words. But their father had been missing for five weeks. No one had seen him. No one had come forward with any information, even though they’d shown his picture on the national news and everything. The police were baffled, and Tristan was dangerously close to having his last vestiges of hope slip through his fingers. But he had to protect Alice for as long as possible.
“He’s coming back, Alice. Don’t worry.”
“I miss Daddy.”
“Me too.” He squeezed her extra tight. “Me, too.”
***
The following day Tristan stalked, bleary-eyed, past the gate to Settler's Garden, avoiding even crossing onto that side of the road. Alice sprinted after him, protesting, but he ignored her.
Their new route passed through the abandoned railway station. One rail car still sat on the disused track, its hatch and gear wheels rusting under the sun. Tristan's mom was forever petitioning the council to clean the area up, and turn the old station building into a historical café or something. Tristan liked it the way it was: a maze of twisted metal and empty bottles of Jack Daniels, the air thick with rust.
They crossed over the tracks and doubled back though Bibby Lane. Tristan hiked his bag up on his back – it was heavy with the folklore books Mom had found for him. Alice jogged beside him. "Why do we have to go the long way? I'm tired, Twisty."
"I don't want to go through the Garden again."
"But that's not fair, all my friends are there!"
He stopped and stared at her.
“What do you mean?”
Alice shrugged. “My little friends. They live in the trees and talk to me and play games with me.”
"Can you see them?"
"Who?"
"Your friends, in the park. Can you see them?"
She giggled. "No one can. Maybe I am just special. They told me I shouldn't talk about it."
He let it slide. She was probably pretending, anyway.
***
Some of his friends on the football team wanted to have a quick game at lunchtime, but Tristan decided not to join them. "I didn't finish my math homework," he lied. "Old Mac is making me clean her classroom." The team nodded their commiserations. As soon as the boys disappeared across the field, Tristan ducked back into the school and found himself a seat in the back corner of the library, right next to the section on machines and engineering.
Thankfully, the library was nearly deserted, shared only by the old librarian reading romance novels behind the desk and a nerdy senior girl slumped over some textbooks. Tristan dumped out his dad's books on the table. Choosing one at random, he flipped it open, his breath catching in his throat as he stared an old woodcut of a faerie court, joining together in a riotous dance as they surrounded a human corpse. The faerie in the picture looked exactly like the statue in the gardens.
The title of the chapter was "Seelie and Unseelie Courts". Tristan's eyes raced across the page as he drank in the information. The two courts vie for control of the realms of faerie, and have specific rules for their dealings with humans. The Seelie, according to the book, dispensed justice and arbitrated faerie quarrels, of which there were many. They moved about in a procession of brilliant light, and although they could be mischievous, they rarely caused any real harm to humans. The code of the Seelie bound them to repay any debt as quickly as possible.
The most evil and malicious faeries comprised the Unseelie, the Court of the Unblessed. These faeries and their hordes of fearsome monsters and unsanctified dead took part in the Slaugh – they rode on black clouds and faerie winds, causing mayhem and torturing humans wherever they crossed their path. The Unseelie had a code, too – they believed that to not use their powers was a sin, and that to act upon their passions, no matter how unsavoury those passions may be, was the ultimate state of being. Some scholars believe the Unseelie were actually fallen fey from the Seelie Court-
"Well, here's a face I don't often see in here."
Tristan jumped as the voice boomed in his ears. He dropped the book, and it clattered on the table.
"Scared you, did I?" Ms. McAllister leaned over the table, peering at the open book on the floor. "I ken you've got a filthy magazine in there."
"No, Ms. McAllister." Tristan mumbled, as he scrambled to pick up the book.
His teacher slid into the chair opposite him, and pulled one of the books off his stack. She flipped through the pages, sucking in her breath as she came across some particularly nasty images. "You're taking this assignment quite seriously, I see?"
Tristan shrugged, although his heart was pounding in his chest. He knew Ms. McAllister knew all about the faeries, but did he dare ask her what he wanted to ask. "Dave's my partner. If I don't take this assignment seriously, it won't get done."
She let out a hoot. "What folk story have you chosen?"
"We're going to do the Seelie Queen. You know, the one who has her statue in the Gardens?"
She set the book down on the table, slamming the cover down with a bang. She fixed her eyes on his with a hard stare. "Tristan, you should be careful in the gardens."
"What do you mean?"
"Remember that faeries, even the ones that seem small and sympathetic, cannae be trusted. Remember that whatever they ask you to do - even if it seems like nae trouble at all, even if you're happy to help them - there will always be a catch."
"I don't know. Ms McAllister, there's something-"
"I think that you do ken." She stood, nodding at him again. "Remember what I said. Remember there are people watching out for you."
And then she was gone. Tristan turned around the book she had opened. It had landed on a page that showed a horde of faeries – some tall and thin and beautiful, with light shining from their bodies, and others twisted with shadows and scorched with flames – descending on a village. People ran in all directions, but the fey were cutting them down, pulling off their heads, dancing on their corpses, waving their entrails around like streamers. The caption read:
Sometimes, the faeries courts will work alongside each to get what they want, or to exact revenge on humans for perceived slights. This bond never lasts long, however, and the courts are once again at odds.
***
"C'mon Twisty, I want to get this done. I'm near
ly on the last level of Zombie Apocalypse Slaughterhouse." Dave pulled on his arm. School had been out for an hour, and they’d been standing outside the gate to Settler’s Garden for the past twenty minutes. Every time Dave made to go inside, Tristan had to tie his shoe, or text his mom, or check that he had the right textbooks in his bag. He was stalling for time, and he knew it. He didn’t want to go back in there, but he didn’t want to tell Dave why.
"I need to be home before eight." Tristan protested, yanking his arm away. “Maybe we should do this another day, and just go play Zombie Apocalypse-”
"Maybe you don’t care, but I actually want to do a good job on this assignment.” Dave made a face. “Mom’s been on my case about my grades, so let's get this over with."
“Fine.” Tristan’s stomach twisted into a knot. He wrapped his clammy fingers around the straps of his backpack, lifted it higher on his shoulders, tried to force his face into a carefree expression.
Dave shoved his hands in his pockets. "Bit of a breeze here, eh?"
Tristan stared down the path between those two brick and iron pylons. He didn't want to go inside, but he couldn't have Dave call him a wimp, or, worse yet, an emo. He straightened himself to his full height, reminding himself that it was just a garden, just leaves and flowers and branches, and it couldn’t hurt him. He followed Dave down the path.
Leaves cascaded from the reaching branches, scraping over their canvas backpacks and tangling in their hair. Their sneakers crunched on fallen leaves and more empty chip packets. Tristan kept his eyes straight ahead, not wanting to see any evidence of Alice's friends.
Tristan ... be careful.
It was that voice again. The one that seemed to come from inside his head.
They stopped in front of the water fountain. Tristan gulped in air, feeling stifled by the cloying scent of the hyacinth and his own sense of impending doom. Dave took out his notebook and began scribbling down the message written on the silver plaque.
Tristan crouched gingerly on the edge of the fountain – resting his pad awkwardly on his knee – and sketched out the Slaugh panel and the beautiful faerie Queen. The water rippled and gurgled, lapping at the edge of his shorts.