by Graham Joyce
“I did. She is a charming lady. We had a good chat. I took some X-rays and a few other samples.”
“I appreciate it.”
“No problem. I’m happy to return a favor. But I have to say things are a bit complicated.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, I’d prefer to see you in person.”
“It’s okay, you can tell me now. Is it about Tara? ”
“How old is your sister?”
“She’s thirty-six.”
“That’s what I thought you said. Well, look, I’ll come straight out with it. The lady who came to see me today, she’s not your sister.”
“What?”
“Peter, I’ve done the X-rays and I’ll send them off for analysis just as I promised. But I’m telling you this as a friend: I don’t need any scientific analysis. I’m an experienced dentist and I’ve looked in a lot of mouths. Even at a glance I can tell you that the person who came to see me today isn’t any older than eighteen or so.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m sorry to be telling you this. I know what I’m looking at. Charming as she is, Peter, there is no way that person can be your sister.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Di gav henne drikke av raude gullhorn,
Dei slepte der nedi tri villarkorn.
(They gave her drink from a red-gold horn
They put therein three seeds of bewildering-corn)
LITI KJERSTI, TRADITIONAL NORWEGIAN FOLK SONG
I said to him, “Is that all you do here? Fuck each other and play in the water? Is that all you people do?”
It didn’t matter how insulting I made it sound, he would just smile at me and wait until I’d finished speaking. He never once interrupted me, nor did his words ever cross over mine.
We do lots of things.
Like what?
He thought for a moment. Well. We take time off its hook, for one thing.
Lovely. How do you do that on a Sunday?
Well, it’s easy enough. You just have to spin time backward and forward in the same moment.
Oh! Simple.
His features twisted between a smile tugging him one way and a frown pulling the other. Oh, I see: you’re mocking me. Very good. Good straight face. I like it. I like when you mock me. I need mocking.
Well, you were mocking me.
No, I wasn’t. That’s what we do. Stop time and start it up again. Kind of. I mean, you don’t want to stop time altogether, now, do you? That would be living in the past, wouldn’t it? And the excitement of life is what the future will bring, good and bad, isn’t it? And anyway, the past is only there inasmuch as it delivers the right now, isn’t it? And the present is only here inasmuch as it delivers the future, you see that? And the future, of course, isn’t here at all.
Shut up! Shut up!
I’m serious. I mean, you wouldn’t want to be frozen in time, like a fly in amber, now, would you? I mean, however sticky-sweet it was. Back then. Back whenever. So you have to run time backward and forward in the same moment, don’t you?
And how do you do that? Exactly?
You want to try?
I couldn’t understand any of it, so I gave him a long, hard look. But I had a strange feeling that it was a look that knew it had been there before, and would be there again. I think so.
He got to his feet. I’ll be back in a beetle’s heartbeat. Meanwhile, think of a moment in your life you would like to live again.
I thought hard. It wasn’t so easy. I didn’t want to be a child again, for sure; no schooldays, certainly not; holidays were fun, but no; and there were sweet moments with Richie, but that all seemed done with now. Then, as Hiero returned holding something in his hand, I remembered something much more recent.
It was when we were on your horse. Shortly after we’d met and I’d climbed up behind you and—
I know it.
—and we were cantering up that green meadow. There was a moment when you leapt the horse over a stream.
I know it. We’ve been there together many times.
We were in the air. What do you mean by that? We were midflight in that moment before touching down on the other side of the stream. The air was sweet. I didn’t know what was ahead. I want that again, that moment again.
You shall have it. He opened his fist, and in the palm of his hand I saw a single bloodred berry.
And I was there.
And the horse was in the air, not frozen exactly but not moving, either, with the horse’s wild mane floating like an anemone in the sea and the leap not completed; and the air was sparking, charged with that ozone before a storm and blue light, and the moment was full of possibility; and we were not frozen in time because I could dismount and run around the horse, which I did, and yet I could still see myself behind him, still mounted on the beautiful creature, and I was bent forward into its giant leap, the sweat of the horse in my nostrils, the gleam of it on the animal’s flanks, my fingertips digging into his hip flesh, and the both of us on the horse making the leap, still moving but not so fast as I was circling all about it, because I could fly, swoop and fly; and he was at my side laughing and yet and yet and yet he was still on the horse’s back with me hanging on behind him, it was insane and the air was smoky with ozone and I felt a tearing as if the sky might rip.
Can’t stay here too long, I recall him saying.
And I remember nodding because I knew in my guts that was true, and we went back and suddenly I was drinking something from a tiny glass—no, some fluid sucked itself right out of my mouth and filled a tiny glass that was in my hand, and I handed the glass back to him—no, he took it back from me and the fluid in the glass streamed upward against gravity and back into a pulpy red mess between his fingers before refixing itself into a shiny red berry, and I said, Yes, I’m sure, and then he spoke and smiled and though the words were unintelligible I knew he’d said, Sure you want to do this? There’s no going back. My head nodded itself. Sure? Yes. Sure? Yes, and him holding out the berry in the palm of his hand.
I had to shake my head, hard, shake it all off me like a dog flicks water from its back, and I came to with my legs crossed on the grass beneath me, in exactly the same position I’d been in earlier, all as if nothing had passed.
I was shocked. What just happened?
Well. We sent time in two directions.
Did you drug me?
It was the berry. Now you know how to do it yourself.
What berry is that?
It doesn’t grow in your world. Though there is something you should know. If you do that again and again you’ll forget.
Forget what?
Goodness me! He smiled that infuriating smile of his. I don’t know. I can’t remember!
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Peter called Underwood and told him what the dentist had said. He had also anticipated the psychiatrist’s response: it was inconceivable, he told Underwood, that the woman could be anyone other than Tara. As soon as the dentist had reported to him his extraordinary conclusions, Peter had gone to see Tara. Futile as he knew the enterprise to be, he had quizzed her on minute details of experiences they had shared in childhood. He also tossed in a few lies, designed to trap an impostor, but she correctly called him on it each time.
There were sequences of events that Tara knew in fine detail. She even turned the tables on him, and proved to his satisfaction that her memory of their shared childhood was better than his. The impostor theory made no sense: their parents had no serious money she could expect to inherit and there would be no financial motive for such an extraordinary charade. In any event, Tara had a large mole near her underarm, and another smaller mole on her throat, plus other minute features that Peter knew intimately.
All this he reported to Und
erwood, so that there wouldn’t be a ghost of doubt about it.
Underwood listened. He told Peter he had been thinking about the case. But more than that he wasn’t prepared to say. For one thing, it would be unethical. So Peter asked if he might offer a theory or two.
“These would be your wife’s theories?”
“Well, yes. We’ve been checking out the Internet together.”
Underwood clasped his hands to his head and pretended to look depressed. “Go on. Try me.”
There is a condition, Peter said, called hypopituitarism, a defect in which the secretion of some of the hormones associated with the pituitary gland is blocked. It could be a disease, he said, or it could be caused by a trauma to the brain, but it often resulted in an arrest of the growth hormones. It could be, he went on to suggest, that if Tara did suffer from a trauma when she disappeared or was abducted, then the brain might have gone into shock, choked off the hormone supply, and permanently frozen her physical development. How common is that? Peter wanted to know.
“Not common,” Underwood said. “But not unheard of. And I’m already considering it.”
Peter also suggested that if Tara had been raped and injured, she might be closing off her memory of the event, an event she might associate with adulthood and therefore unconsciously be choosing to remain a child.
“There’s something misaligned in this theory,” Underwood said. “She doesn’t talk like a child. Nor does she sound like a child.”
“No. It’s all a shot in the dark.”
“So where would you want me to take it from there?”
“Well, I was wondering if there are tests we could have done.”
“Tests for hypopituitarism.”
“Yes.”
“You’re bending the shoe to fit the hoof, aren’t you?”
Peter ignored that. “If only to rule it out. Hypopituitarism, I mean. Meanwhile, we continue to see if you can get to the bottom of what happened that day in the Outwoods. That is, if you’re prepared to keep seeing her.”
“Can I remind you, Mr. Martin, that you are paying me?”
UNDERWOOD HAD DISPATCHED PETER, with his theories, to the waiting room while he and Tara sat at her preferred seat by the window. “Can I ask you, Tara?” It was early evening; dusk was gathering outside, and the streetlamps were flickering on. “Now that you’ve been home for a few days and you’ve had chance to settle in, can I ask you: what do you think happened?”
“I haven’t got an alternative story for you, if that’s what you mean.”
“So you believe you went to live with the fairies for a while?”
“That’s your word for them, not mine. I’ve never used that word. Neither is it a word they would be happy with.”
“But they were what we commonly call the fairies?”
“They certainly never used that word for themselves, nor would they recognize it. And anyway, it conjures up something they most certainly are not. You, Peter, and several others have used that word and I haven’t corrected it because I don’t see the point arguing.”
“But these were people living in another dimension?”
“What’s that? What’s another dimension? Sounds like science fiction.”
“Another place, then.”
“Oh, most certainly in another place, yes.”
“Could you take me to that other place?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There are only certain times of the year you can get there, so far as I understand it. And only certain times of the day on those specific dates. Like now. It’s dusk. They call this the hinge of the day.”
“Can you tell me those dates?”
“Some of them, yes. I don’t claim to understand it. They have scholars who know it all because it’s complicated. But I remember being told that the equinox and the solstice were possible dates, but that the moon had to be right, and all that stuff.”
“All that stuff?”
“Like I say, I didn’t entirely follow it. But in order to come and go you have to be precise.”
“But if we went together at dusk on the spring solstice, you could take me there?”
“I think so. That is to say, I believe it would be possible. I’m not one hundred percent sure of the way, but having been once, I think that maybe I could. But I wouldn’t do it, because I wouldn’t want to get trapped there for another six months. Or twenty years, as it turned out. Once a lifetime is more than enough for anyone.”
“Quite. This place. You’ve already described it to me, the lake and so on. But when you returned here, did you bring anything back with you, any token, any memento, any object of any kind?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all.”
“I tried to steal one of their charts, to bring back with me. The illustrations, the artwork, are incredible. Stunning. They put a high value on art and music. But I was caught, and I had to leave it.”
“That’s a pity.”
“It is. You would have taken one look at a single example of their illustrated charts and you would have believed me instantly. There are colors you haven’t seen.”
“Really.”
“You’re a clever man and you think you know a lot. But you’re a baby compared to what they know. I’m a baby; you’re a baby. Their charts, their maps: they have the whole world mapped in fine detail and you can spread it out in front of you, calfskin, and it’s only the size of a newspaper and you have, like, magnifying glasses, optics that you move over them, and it has everything, this street, this house, my house, all in colored detail, hand-drawn, it blows your mind and it’s not just maps! They have globes of the world and you use optics in the same way and they are suspended in midair and you think surely there must be some fine wires holding them in the air, but oh, no, they just float, it’s their knowledge of physics it’s phenomenal and not just globes, they have models of the planets orbiting and the course of the stars you walk into this chamber and you walk between these glowing orbs and it’s the universe all suspended there you can pass your hand over and around but you can’t find what’s keeping it aloft, it’s like some gravity-defying perpetual-motion apparatus, an orrery, one that looks like it’s made of brass and mechanical levers but really it’s an orb made of spiders’ webbing but pulsing with light and things like that, they tried explaining it but it was all so far above my head it’s just mind-blowing, mind-blowing, the maps they have, it’s not like geography in school, they map the edges of unknown places, old ruins, ancient forests, new lands, but also at the borders of being born, sexual awakening, death, it would blow your mind.”
“Would you like a glass of water, Tara?”
“I’m fine.”
Underwood nodded. He waited a moment for Tara to recover steady breathing. “So nothing came back from that world with you. Nothing we can examine.”
“Unfortunately, something did. I doubt you’ll be able to examine it, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
Tara looked out the window. “Without making any sudden moves, do you think you could look down there? Behind that tree across the road. Do you see a man loitering there?”
Underwood turned his head slightly. “Yes, I see him. In the shadows.”
“I was followed back here by that man. I’m doing my best to ignore him. If you were to speak to him he would verify my story. He would be my proof. But you’ll never catch him.”
“That’s one of them? These people?” asked Underwood.
“Yes.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“I told you, he followed me. He’s stalking me.”
“Have you told the police?”
“Ha!”
“And what does he want?”
“He wants me.”
“Tara, let’s just suppose that I went down to talk to that man. Let’s just suppose I asked him what he’s doing. I think he would tell me that he’s waiting for a bus. You see, there’s a bus stop just a
few yards away from where he’s standing right now. Let’s suppose he told me that he was waiting for a bus. And if I said your name, and asked him, and he said he didn’t know you, would you accept that you are deluded, and that you don’t know him at all?”
“Go ahead.”
“That wasn’t a yes.”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“I’m not for one minute going out there, Tara.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
No one loves a fairy when she’s forty.
MUSIC HALL SONG
It was almost midnight when Zoe got back from The White Horse. She’d broken the eleven-sharp deal. Peter had made it explicit. She was to be back in the house by eleven; and that didn’t mean leaving The White Horse at eleven, nor on her way by eleven, but back home with a foot across the threshold by the stroke of eleven; and according to the clock on the living room mantelpiece, not someone else’s clock, wristwatch, phone, hourglass, sundial, or any other timepiece, chronometer, or instrument of time measurement here or in the known universe of any description.
And here she was, almost fifty minutes late.
Richie had told Genevieve, who had told Peter, that The White Horse was a skanky drug den. But Zoe had explained that it had been closed down and had reopened under new management, and that the venue had been running alcohol-free teenage nights, strictly monitored by trained security staff.
Peter was skeptical. If there were no drugs and no alcohol to be found on the premises, then why would any self-respecting teenagers want to congregate there? They might as well go to church, he pointed out.
“Music,” Zoe had argued. “For the music.”
“A likely story,” Peter had said. A raised eyebrow from Genevieve had stopped him from chasing that theme any further.
In the end Peter had pressed Zoe’s boyfriend into service. “Michael, a word,” he’d said, tapping the boy’s breastbone. “You get her back by eleven sharp. You. If you don’t get her back here by eleven, you’re to blame and you’ll be the one I’m coming after. And I’m a big bloke. And you won’t see her again. Got me?”