David wondered how often they considered upping his dosage or putting him on something stronger that would turn his brain to mush. It was clear they didn’t understand him, and regarded him as a broken thing in need of mending. At times, it seemed they tried extra hard to like him. Much harder, he suspected, than other parents tried to like their own children.
At least they gave it a shot, however. The kids at school and most of his teachers didn’t bother. In some ways he preferred their honesty, but it did occasionally feel nice to see people delve to amazing depths of self-deceit just to make you feel wanted. Sometimes a nice lie was preferable to the truth. But not tonight. Tonight he needed something genuine, something his parents could not offer.
Brooke, David’s baby sister, looked up at him from her high chair. She was too young for tacos, but her tiny fists shook with the contagious excitement of their parents. Looking into her dull, brown eyes, David wondered if that was to be her lot in life—absorbing the emotions and passions of others, like human tofu. He supposed, in an introverted way which belied his age, that all people were something like tofu. Why should he expect Brooke to be special?
He had hoped that she would be different—an odd duck like himself. It would be nice to not feel so alone. Even if the eleven year age gap between them would remain unbridgeable, their shared strangeness would make the world much more bearable. It seemed that wasn’t in the cards.
He felt something out there tonight however. An ethereal weirdness that perhaps leached out from the hidden fairy hollows at Gingham Farms and into the drab world of man. It turned children into monsters and myths, and implored rational adults to fear the dark. That was, after all, why jack-o’-lanterns glowed in front of all the houses, save his own—to scare off the dark spirits adults claimed not to believe in.
Father urged David to take a seat across from Brooke. He did, and began assembling a taco from the ingredients spread across several bowls and trays. In lieu of beef, he used chicken. The family rarely ate red meat, what with David’s problems with iron. This particular medical issue had always bothered the young man, until last winter when he learned that fairy folk and other magical creatures were also harmed by iron. Now it felt something like a badge of honor.
Mother placed a plate of squashed avocado in front of Brooke, while father assembled tacos for her and himself. David waited patiently, knowing he dared not take a bite before his father led them in grace. A few moments later, once all the plates were made up, his father began their mealtime prayer.
“Thank you, Father, for this feast . . . ”
With closed eyes and folded hands, David pretended to listen. Instead his mind wandered to the haunted corn maze and the fairy hollow he knew must be there. He wondered what manner of strange things walked within the rows of corn.
Father’s voice cut out, and David and followed the cue to say “amen” before opening his eyes. The family began eating and a few moments passed before David worked up the nerve to speak.
“Maybe after tacos, we could drive over to Gingham Farms and check out the corn maze?” David used his most practiced “normal” tone as he posed the question.
His father raised one eyebrow. Mother glanced back and forth between the two of them, waiting on her husband to arbitrate.
“Come on now, champ. You know we don’t do Halloween.”
Champ. David hated that nickname. He’d never been champion of anything, and it felt condescending. Despite this, he wore a casual smile.
“It’s not really a Halloween thing,” David countered. “More like a fall thing. They keep it open through November.”
“Then we can go after Halloween,” father said with a smile. David had misspoken, and now the argument was lost. Anything else he said would fall on deaf ears. He took a bite of his chicken taco and glared at his plate.
***
Shouts and laughter penetrated the glass and the bars of David’s bedroom window. His parents had the bars put in after he tried to run away last year, and they served as a reminder that he dwelled in a prison rather than a home.
It was fitting, he supposed, that bars of iron—the bane of fairy kind—would block his way from the magic of the night and of the corn maze at Gingham Farms.
Instead of focusing on the last bit of homework on his desk—some mind-numbing geography assignment—David looked down at the street. Through the bars he saw a group of teenagers in costumes consisting of little more than black hoodies and plastic masks, carrying bulging pillow cases. They passed a gaggle of younger children, all decked out in proper costumes, trailed by smiling grownups. A black lab with a pair of bat wings strapped to its back trotted along aside them, occasionally sniffing the ground for fallen candy.
David smiled, but there was no happiness in it. He envied those kids, but he also pitied them. For all the fun they were having, it didn’t seem that any of them truly understood the rare quality of the night. Candy and costumes were all well and good, but Halloween was about that breach between the worlds and the magic which poured in.
Then again, maybe they did get it, he thought, somewhere deep within. Why else would they brave the cold night, scouring the town for candy that could be bought at half price tomorrow? Ever precocious, he pondered that perhaps there were things that could be understood by the soul, even if they never registered in the mind. He hoped that was the case, for their sake. While he found trouble relating to most people, he generally wanted the best for them.
He closed the shade and looked down at the map of Europe on his desk. The assignment was to label each outlined area with the proper country. It seemed a pointless task to David. His father had mentioned that countries in Eastern Europe change names and borders like clothes. What was the point of learning where Serbia was if it was going to merge with Bulgaria in five years? It was all so artificial.
A better use of his time—of all their time—would be to learn about the constants of geography. What locations had been regarded as sacred throughout history? What parts of the ocean connected to other worlds, like the Bermuda Triangle?
Where were the fairy hollows in the British Isles? Those were questions worth answering, not what flag flies over some arbitrary chunk of land.
David closed his eyes and let his pen hover over the map. He imagined himself as Volund, King of the Fairies, flying high above Europe on wings forged of steel, rather than the butterfly look of a Disney movie. He was looking for a way home—a fairy hollow that would lead him to Otherworld.
A magnetic force drew David’s pen to the paper, startling him from his daydream. The tip of his pen had pierced the map, just east of the French/German border. David pulled the pen away. Burning within the pinhole poked through his homework was an intense, amber light, as if someone were holding an LED against the underside of the paper. Confused, David flipped the map over, and saw no strange light—nothing but the tiny hole.
With a bit of hesitation he turned the paper around once more, and held it straight on front of him. The needle of light pierced through the German landscape with brilliant intensity. David stood up from his desk, and moved the map around. No matter which way he turned, or how high or low he held it, the light continued pouring forth.
With a trembling hand, David pressed a finger against the needle of amber light. It was warm. It felt pleasant. He pressed harder, forcing the pinhole to expand beneath his touch. Pale, orange illumination poured out from the tear in the map.
The hole was large enough to see through now. David brought the map close to his face and peered into the hole. On the other side he could see his bedroom, or more accurately a place that looked something like his bedroom. The windows, the door, were in the same places, but the walls were rough, hewn from natural stone rather than smooth, painted drywall. His floor was a patchwork of dirt and tree roots. The cool blues and greens of his real world bedroom gave way to bright, earthy tones in the world which lay on the other side of the hole in the paper.
To David, the other wor
ld beyond the paper seemed more real than that which he had known all his life. It was like opening his eyes from a dream for the first time ever. When he pulled the map away from his face and looked around his room—his real world room—everything felt dull and washed out by comparison.
He picked up his pen again and jabbed a second hole through the page, roughly two inches from the first. David forced the plastic body of the pen through to make the hole wide enough for viewing, then pulled it back, but no eldritch light poured out. Even with his eye pressed against this new tear in the map, only his washed out, mortal world room lay on the other side.
Placing the map back on his desk, David considered this conundrum. One hole, the one just barely past the French border in Germany, shined with Amber light and revealed a surface of grainy, golden oak beneath it. The other, which had been bore through the cellulose likeness of some Eastern European nation David had not identified, gave off no illumination, and beyond it lay only the vinyl laminate of his IKEA desk.
David closed his eyes again and let instinct guide his hand, rather than poking an arbitrary hole. He could feel the magic pulling at the ballpoint tip of his pen. It stabbed into the paper, and David felt that the pen was more in control than he was.
When he opened his eyes, his pen had pierced through somewhere in the southern U.K. Lines of orange-yellow light crept out of the pin prick in his homework and up along the plastic shaft of the Bic. A wild smile crossed David’s lips and he used the pen to carve an eyehole, working out from that tiny, glowing tear. Just as with the first hole, when David looked through this one, the world was a Day-Glo negative of the earth he knew.
“What are you doing there, champ?” Father’s voice called from behind.
David turned around, his glance darting back and forth between his father and the glowing paper.
His father’s expression betrayed no acknowledgment of the fairy fire burning from the holes in the paper.
“Um . . . just some extra credit for art.”
His father smiled and tapped his wrist.
“Wrap it up. It’s almost bedtime.”
“Sure thing, Dad.”
Once his father was gone David glared at the door before turning to the window. He pressed the map to his face and found that both magical rips lined up perfectly with his eyes. He scanned the room through the magical filter of the map and beheld the Otherworld version of his bedroom. While its size and shape were similar, no iron bars blocked his path while he peered through the hollows on the map.
A soft song drifted through his window. It was impossible in its beauty, yet eerily familiar. David couldn’t quite place it, but it evoked a rare, genuine smile. The tune cut in and out, getting lost beneath the festive noises outside.
David placed the paper face-down on his desk and reached past his “word a day” calendar for a box of crayons. A green face of angular features began to take shape around the two eye holes.
***
The wind battering the paper mask David had fashioned from the map was deafening in his ears.
The sidewalks were empty around him, and will-o-wisps glowed where there should have been street lights.
He pushed the makeshift mask up above his head and the knot to the shoelace holding it to his head caught in his hair. With the mask off, David could see that he was not alone on the street at all, but surrounded by trick or treaters and mischievous teens. Left to only his own senses, the neighborhood looked dull and monochrome, save for the bits of Halloween magic—a fiery carpet of brittle, dead leaves, bits of rainbow candy strewn across the ground, and the wavering illumination from jack-o’-lantern flames. The veil between worlds truly was thin, and wonders could be gleaned by those with eyes to see.
David was not sure what he hoped to find on this night, but he knew where to look.
Gingham Farms was a bit of a walk, and though he didn’t mind it, he figured it prudent to grab some food for the road. He ignored the more pedestrian houses—those bare of decorations—save for those where people waited on porches or stoops with buckets of candy. He was eager to find the fairy hollow at Gingham Farms, so he only knocked on the doors of houses with the most elaborate decorations. What he’d heard was true: the better embellished the décor, the better the candy given out. He’d even scored a full size snickers from a house where the fog bellowed out from the front door and obscured red glowing eyes beyond the threshold.
After a handful of houses, five candy bars, and an hour’s walk, David could see Gingham Farms ahead and to his right. The corn stalks glowed faint silver beneath the moonlight, though to credit their soft radiance to this reality seemed too terrestrial. Surely the light they gave off emanated from the magical portal deep within the corn maze.
David crossed the street and stepped onto the grounds of the farm, his paper mask sitting atop his head. Even through the soles of his shoes, he could feel the power leaching through the soil, beckoning him to Otherworld. He wondered if he was the only one who heard the call.
Wondered if he was the only one to recognize it as such.
A line of teenagers, families, and twenty-something couples stood in line outside the maze, waiting to pay for the chance to get lost in the twisting rows of corn stalks. David had no money. He also had no intention of paying to get into the maze, or waiting in line.
As he had done to slip past his barred windows, he pulled the homespun magic mask back over his face.
Through the eyeholes, no one stood between him and the entrance to the maze. With deliberate steps, he approached the mouth of the labyrinth. Even from feet away he could feel heat from the corn stalks which, through his fairy vision mask, appeared to glow with golden light rather than silver.
A whisper—words too soft to comprehend—wound through the rows of corn. To other children—if they heard it—the words might have seemed foreboding, but something familiar to David lived in the soft voice. It beckoned to him, and feeling more confident than he had been about anything else in his short life, he entered the maze.
An orange radiance, far more intense than the general amber glow of the mask’s vision, burned a trail in the ground. David likened it to a river of magma glowing just beneath the surface, and he followed it from the entrance of the labyrinth and down every branch that it snaked.
Wind coursed through the stalks from everywhere at once, and David thought of the magnetic repulsion that occurs when two forces of the same polarity come together. Was this further proof that he belonged there, in Otherworld? Was his spirit made of the same stuff?
The wind pummeled the paper mask, but he dared not lift it from his face and risk losing the radiant trail marked out on the ground for him. Nor did he wish to suddenly be caught in a crowd of terrestrial souls who could only sense the magic of this place on the most basic level. It was better to suffer the cacophony of wind against paper and press on, and so he did.
The magma glow meandered through paths cut between the luminescent grain. With each step the wind pushed harder against David, and with each step, the magic of the hollow compelled him more fully to move forward.
David turned right at an intersection and came to a dead end. The trail of magic below the soil continued on, beyond the wall of corn stalks. Reaching out, he parted the corn with both hands, and stepped through.
The light was nearly blinding, the spectral luminescence of each stalk amplified by the light given off by its neighbors.
Vertigo and nausea overtook him, and he feared that all the chocolate and sugar in his belly might escape through his mouth.
Stumbling through the corn stalks, eyes squeezed shut against the blinding light and ears deafened by the angry wind, David reached for his mask. It was too bright and the magic was too much for him, but in trying to tear off the mask to shut it out, he tripped on a root and tumbled into a circular clearing.
David opened his eyes. The glow here was less intense than it had been within the row of corn, and his vertigo subsided. Still, the soil burned
with the same consistent orange as the trail through the maze had. The wind continued its assault with wicked fury, but here it whipped forward in a circuit around the clearing, kicking up a whirlwind of soil, rocks, and debris. The cracking sound of the paper mask being attacked by the weather grew nearly unbearable.
Stranger than the cyclone in the clearing, or the fairy glow of the earth, was the creature which stood at its center.
It was female, David could tell from the midnight breasts sagging down to her waist, and the thick patch of grey hair between her legs. But she was not human. An elongated nose hooked down over lips that stretched too far across. Calloused ears, riddled with coarse, gray bristles reached up into fine, pointed tips. A mane of hair, mostly white but mixed with occasional streaks of glowing amber, stretched from her head down to the soil.
“Eldon?” She asked. Her lips peeling back to reveal teeth like broken glass.
Eldon. That was right, he thought. Eldon was his name, not David. Eldon had always been his name.
“Why, to the hollow, has my child roamed?” The creature asked in a musical voice, incongruent with her nightmare visage. He was amazed that her words carried above the raging wind.
The voice brought back a flood of memories. Songs, sung to him in infancy. Songs in a beautiful language he had forgotten existed. And then memories of terrible quiet. Not the complete silence reserved for the dead or the deaf, but the muted sounds that a drowning man hears when cast from the world of light above and into the frigid darkness of the world below.
“Mother?” David . . . no . . . Eldon asked.
A clawed hand with knuckles like splintered obsidian reached out. Eldon took the hand of his forgotten mother. She pulled him to his feet and dusted him off.
“To come here was solecism,” the dark fairy scolded. “What good does this pilgrimage, either of us do?”
The boy looked into the monster’s luminescent eyes, and found in them a love and a passion which he’d never seen in those of the woman who masqueraded as his mother in the world of man.
Doorbells at Dusk Page 3