'Lark, you look great!'
This is why I spend all my time alone. Who needs company when you have to lie this much just to keep it happy?
Sit, order coffee. We're inside so I can't even smoke.
'Oh wow, how long's it been?'
Like that. It goes on. Not even worth the reporting.
She catches me up with things I don't care about but manage to at least nod along to. New boyfriend, she moved house. New job. Blah blah.
Murmur sounds at the right time.
She's not exactly a player, Luanne, but she's not exactly a civilian either. Scarlet's people lived out in the swamplands for a long time, clan scattered over small towns, no more than a thousand people in each. They have their share of witches out there and Luanne is one, no doubt. You can hear it in her voice, that wild bayou accent. You pay attention, you can see her jewellery is not all silver and gold. Look close enough you can see the leather and the bone and I bet at the end of her pendant, there's a crow's foot and not some jewel.
'But how about you? What's been happening!? Oh my, what happened to your face?! That's a terrible big cut!'
'Slipped shaving.'
'Oh Lark. But really, are you okay? It looks really sore.'
She's a happy type, Scarlet's aunt. Get along with anyone. I scratch at my whiskers. She blathers on about what she seems to believe is the miraculous properties of aloe vera and comes at it again.
'But, oh honey, what have you been doing these last few years?'
'You know. Working.'
'Oh, come on there's more than that! Last time I saw you, you were working on... what did you call it? Like a book.'
'Not a book. A monograph. Like a big essay.'
'Did it get picked up, published, I mean?'
'Sure.'
'I'll have to buy a copy and you can autograph it!'
'It's for private publication.'
'Oh, for the Library! Oh well. Scarlet can get me a copy, I'm sure.'
So that's the cat amongst the pigeons.
'Sure she can.'
She sips on her chai, which looks like gunk and smells like twig soup. Watching me carefully. She's not stupid. Ah, hell with it. I have nothing to say and I put my quiet face on.
'How are you doing with it all? The marriage. It's Sunday.'
Friday now.
'Who cares?'
'I care, Lark. I liked you two together. '
'Me too.'
'So, what happened? You're together for ten years, since you were kids, then it all ends and less than two years later she's marrying someone else.'
I lost faith in something she grew to believe in. 'Things happen Luanne. Ask her.'
'I did. We had dinner last night.'
Try to keep it out of my voice. 'You meet the husband?'
'Elliot, yes, I met him. He's very handsome and very well-dressed and very charming and very polished and very well-off.'
'So he is. Did he order wine that complimented the meal?'
'Yes, honey. Very well. He ordered very good wine and then explained, in what seemed punishing detail, all about it.'
'Figures.'
'I didn't like him. Lord knows, I had no reason why. I just didn't like him.'
Year or two ago, I'd thrill to hear something like that. Would have felt like winning an ally in a war only I was fighting. Now... what's the point? She's getting married on Sunday.
'Can't say I'm a fan either.'
'Lark, bless me, I shouldn't tell you this - I'm not entirely certain she's all that fond of him either.'
'You... you throwing me a bone? Because think what that means to me. You're right? She doesn't like him? What's that say? She'd rather marry someone she didn't like than come back?'
'No. Lark, settle. I know you could find a rainbow's bad intentions, you chose to look for them but that's not what I meant.'
'Then what did you mean?'
'I mean, she's going to marry him. I'm sorry to be blunt with it but it's true. But I'm not sure it's for love.'
'Then why?'
'I don't know. I was hoping you would.'
'We haven't spoken in months and the last time we did, didn't end well. '
When she told me she was going to take the credit for stopping the Old Man. When she said I was being left out in the cold, to keep attention away from her crew.
'She said something about that.'
'What?'
'Yeah. We talked. About you.'
'I don't want to hear it.'
'You probably don't. She's angry at you for something. Maybe angry at herself. It wasn't a long conversation. You bring out the snappy in her!'
She laughs at that but I don't join in.
'Luanne, look, I appreciate you trying to reach out - '
'I'm not here for you, Lark. I think you're an interesting guy and I liked you together but Scarlet made her choice and she's kin to me. Down my way, that's worth more than anything. Don't make any mistakes here - you're here to help me because there's things in her life she won't talk about and it's making me sad that she's not sharing her burdens. And no lie, I can see she's feeling something heavy on her heart and it ain't no wedding and I want to help.'
Honesty's refreshing.
'Alright Luanne. I'll come straight. She's running the show over at the Library now and everyone is wondering what her whole deal is. She's up to something. Little I know, it's heavy action. But she's locked me out. Her and me, it's not a break up anymore. She put me in front of the gun for - for the sake of whatever it is she's up to. So yeah, Scarlet's got her burdens but she's gone out of her way to keep me out of it.'
I look over at the next table, tired of talking so much this last night and day. There's the Devil, reading a newspaper. He's got a highlighter, circling words only he can know.
Look back at Luanne.
'I have to go.'
I stand, she calls out.
'Lark?'
'Yeah.'
'Take care, baby. Take care.'
Stay any longer, the Devil will mess with her too. She'll tell everyone who asks, in the knowing tone, how was breakfast with Lark? And she'll say well, he's still surly.
The Devil follows me a few blocks. I pass a fruit stall and a dog vendor. All the fruit withers. All the meat spoils. Then he gets bored. I feel surly.
iii
'Yeah, it's me.'
Her voice crackles over the phone.
'La- yeah, okay.'
'You were right. Special Executive. It's a deal.'
Katanya goes quiet.
'Alright. That change anything?'
'Not for you. Not yet. What are you doing Sunday?'
'Supposed to be going to a wedding. Need that spelled out?'
Don't take that bait.
'Your new guys going?'
'Yeah.'
'So, no one serious left at home base?'
'Just the initiates. And they just run the ...'
'The what?'
'The gift shop.'
...
'What?'
'You heard me. Elliot's idea. Twice a month, we have courses. Immanetising the Individual Through Ritual Practice. Like that. After, we take ‘em down and let ‘em wander. Sell ‘em some beginner stuff.'
'Christ I don't want to hear this. Listen, no one heavy around on Sunday. You in the party?'
'Nah, just a guest.'
'Do you hear what I'm saying?'
'Sure.'
I ring off. Now we see if Katanya has some moves as a second-storey woman.
Stop at a butcher's then back to Lazlo's joint. He's woken up and is watching an old Jack Benny clip with the sound turned down. He's mimicking the comedian's body language.
Bettina is still on the couch. Unwrap her bandages. Her face is healed as it's getting. There's a thin white line from the corner of her mouth to the corner of her eye. Trachea seems restored but the scars there are uglier. Rawer. Her forearms and triceps seem fine. She pulls up her shirt and I look over her belly an
d chest. Probably a dozen cuts but the scars are vanishing as I look.
The eye? Peel back that bandage. She sees my expression. Wish I didn't see hers.
Hand her the meat. She nods her thanks and she gets onto it raw. Me, I have a pork roll and more coffee.
Explain about Ava. About the glamour.
'Hide in plain sight, boy! That's the trick! It always is. The rubes and marks, they never pay attention to anything. They just want what they've always got. Try something new with them and you might as well show a cat a mirror!' Body language, voice, turned up to eleven. Old fucker loves being right.
So how do you break a glamour? That's what they call them, spells that fool the senses without changing the world. They're associated with the fey.
Who?
Okay. Look.
There's room for everyone in the magical world and it's easy to judge. I talk a lot about the brutes and the freaks but there's a whole other side. There's also the... the whimsical and the nice. There's whole lodges and cults of people who work to connect with the other side cause they think it's all love and joy and light over there. These are the types who talk with angels. The UFO contacters. The vegan breatherian types who talk about Gaia. And, okay, I have to come at it straight - their praxis is as valid as anyone's.
But, you know... come on. Why traffic with the dark forces if you're just looking to hold hands? Get a kitten.
All the time in the Library, I barely had to deal with ‘em. Had to help one or two out because there's entities who aren't shy about pretending to be all lovely. They have a bad rep for going after kids. But the Aquarius types, they usually behave ethically, ninety-nine percent of the time, the hippie types.
It's just they're so...
Soft.
Be fair, they think my trip is a bad one, can't understand why I like it spooky - they figure the world's bad enough. Only trying to help.
Still.
And all of those - out of them all - the worst work the fey current.
Tell a civilian 'fairy' and it's all Tinkerbell. Which is cool. Tell someone who’s made the scene, you might get Tuatha De Danan and the Celtic myth crew. Talk to a magician and you get two answers. One, you get the sensible - this is a race of spirits, a court, whatever, who were first contacted by, have to say it, druids. They entered mythology, consciousness and became a basis for a religion. Some were good and some were bastards but the whole pixie dust vibe, that's Disney. No culture that prizes Black Annis, a devouring mother, or Nuckelavee the skinned horse decorated with severed heads, is likely to have much interest in kicking it with fireflies and avoiding artificial colouring.
Then there's the magicians should know better. Worse than the New Agers and their mystic crystal revelations. Take a whole bunch of interesting monsters and render ‘em down like fat. Turn ‘em into boggarts and never seem to realise a tiny human spliced with a dragonfly is a goddamn abomination.
Give ‘em names like Rustyleaf and Nipplebadger and Splaybum. Fuck.
Drives me nuts? It's worse.
So those guys? It's like having someone you don't like talk about how great your favourite album is. How much they dug that movie that you know was made just for you.
Glamour. Fey magic. On account of all the fucking hippies - I never went near it. Could have tried to kick it till it bled a little darkness, but two things - first is that spoiling their fun is just being a dick. I can be a bastard, but try not to be dickish. Second, what if it worked? I'm gonna go to Mully, my old master, or my girl, or I'm busting up some fucked up coven of pervs - tell them I'm working Dark Faerie Sorcery?
Jesus. I wear leather jackets and steel toes. Can't be getting all up in that.
Looks like snobbery caught me out.
Explain all this, edited version anyways.
'The best tools we have to deal with this are working the fey tip. Want to deal with glamour, they're experts. But I don't know much about that.'
Lazlo pours us all a shot of something Czech and something blue. Burns like mouthwash.
'Fuck are we drinking?'
'Well, it started life as slivovitz but some people I know, well, they like to tamper.'
Bettina touches the centre of her neck. It comes away wet. There's a tiny hole.
'Lazlo...' he fixes her up.
Come over to talk to her. What the hell do you say to that?
She goes to say something but her voice is slow in healing. Does forefinger and thumb flapping-handed signal. She points to herself.
'I don't...'
She mimes reading a book. Points to herself.
'You read - '
She nods. 'I don't - '
Lazlo, finished with his work, pours us another shot. Bettina puts the glass on the coffee table. Gets it wet, sketches a word in the water.
FAIRY
Points back to herself. Taps her forehead. She knows.
iv
Lazlo's evil blue brew goes to my head. Have to delay some revelation. Strip his bed and pillow cases, lay back a moment, feeling my head spin. Get myself a few hours.
Wake up with a mouth like a dead cat. Clean myself up.
Come out. Bettina's gone shopping.
No. She's gone to the small l library. There's ten books on magic. Some are kid's book. Some are as scholarly as you can get for a book on faeries at the City's crippled public libraries, long since taken apart by a local council that wanted to get tough on education...
She's been going through, leaving slips of paper in three of them.
'Lark,' she clacks at me.
It's not a pleasant voice right now but at least she's healing. The eye? Can't tell. Truth is, I can barely look at the wound.
She wrote me a letter.
"Lark, I used to love this shit when I was really little. My aboulia used to read the books to my sisters and me when we were kids. Do not know if this will help but I seen you start with strange places too. Also, someone trailed me. Short black guy. Good worker."
Look her in the face. She's right. Kid's stories won't help but they provide starting places for ideas. Embed your ritual working into an existing cultural belief, story, legend, whatever, gives the magic a jolt. Cultural appropriation at its finest. Nothing more colonial than a magician.
'Played this perfect.'
She sort of smiles at me.
Nods. She knows.
'Been watching me work?'
She shakes a hand like, fifty fifty. Heh.
'You make this guy following you around?'
Shrugs. Points to her face. Shakes her head. No, she never recognised him. He wasn't a face.
To work. Spend ‘til almost dark when she taps a page. I take it.
'Read it,' she rasps. Better than the clicking a few hours before. No risks, she points to her ear. So –out loud.
We light up and I do.
v
The Fairy's Midwife
Excerpt from The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, Anna Eliza Bray, vol 1, 1836
ONCE upon a time there was, in this celebrated town, a Dame Somebody. I do not know her name. All I with truth can say is that she was old, and nothing the worse for that; for age is, or ought to be, held in honour as the source of wisdom and experience. Now this good old woman lived not in vain, for she had passed her days in the useful capacity of a nurse; and as she approached the term of going out of the world herself, she was still useful in her generation by helping others into it--she was in fact the Sage-femme of the village.
One night about twelve o'clock in the morning, as the good folks say who tell the tale, Dame Somebody had just got comfortably into bed, when rap, rap, rap, came on her cottage door, with such bold, loud, and continued noise, that there was a sound of authority in every individual knock. Startled and alarmed by the call, she arose, and soon learnt that the summons was a hasty one to bid her attend on a patient who needed her help. She opened her door; when the summoner appeared to be a strange, squint-eyed, little, ugly, old fellow, who had a look, as she said,
very like a certain dark personage, who ought not at all times to be called by his proper name. Not at all prepossessed in favour of the errand by the visage of the messenger, she nevertheless could not, or dared not, resist the command to follow him straight and attend upon "his wife."
"Thy wife!" thought the good dame: "Heaven forgive me; but as sure as I live I be going to the birth of a little dive;" A large coal-black horse, with eyes like balls of fire, stood at the door. The ill-looking old fellow, without more ado, whisked her up on a high pillion in a minute, seated himself before her, and away went horse and riders, as if sailing through the air rather than trotting on the ground. How Dame Somebody got to the place of her destination she could not tell; but it was a great relief to her fears when she found herself set down at the door of a neat cottage, saw a couple of tidy children, and remarked her patient to be a decent-looking woman, having all things about her fitting the time and the occasion.
A fine bouncing babe soon made its appearance, and seemed very bold on its entry into life, for it gave the good dame a box on the ear, as, with the coaxing and cajolery of all good old nurses, she declared the "sweet little thing to be very like its father." The mother said nothing to this, but gave nurse a certain ointment with directions that she should "strike the child's eyes with it." Now you must know that this word "strike," in our Devonshire vocabulary, does not exactly mean to give a blow, but rather what is opposite, to "rub, smooth down, or touch gently." The nurse performed her task, though she thought it an odd one; and as it is nothing new that old nurses are generally very curious, she wondered what it could be for; and thought that, as no doubt it was a good thing, she might just as well try it upon her own eyes as those of the baby, so she made free to strike one of them by way of trial; when, oh ye powers of fairyland, what a change was there!
The neat but homely cottage, and all who were in it, seemed all of a sudden to undergo a mighty transformation, some for the better, some for the worse. The new-made mother appeared as a beautiful lady attired in white; the babe was seen wrapped in swaddling clothes of a silvery gauze. It looked much prettier than before, but still maintained the elfish cast of the eye, like its redoubted father; whilst two or three children more had undergone a metamorphosis as uncouth as that recorded by Ovid when the Cercopians were transformed into apes. For there sat on either side of the bed's head a couple of little fiat-nosed imps, who with "mops and mows," and with many a grimace and grin, were "busied to no end" in scratching their own polls, or in pulling the fairy lady's ears with their long and hairy paws. The dame, who beheld all this, fearing she knew not what in the house of enchantment, got away as fast as she could without saying one word about "striking" her own eye with the magic ointment, and what she had beheld in consequence of doing so. The sour-looking old fellow once more handed her up on the coal-black horse, and sent her home in a whip-sissa. Now what a whip-sissa means is more than I can tell, though I consider myself to be tolerably well acquainted with the tongues of this "West Countrie." It may mean perhaps, "Whip, says he," in allusion to some gentle intimation being feelingly given by the rider to the horse's sides with a switch, that he should use the utmost despatch. Certain it is, the old woman returned home much faster than she went. But mark the event. On the next market-day, when she sallied forth to sell her eggs, whom should she see but the same wicked-looking old fellow, busied, like a rogue as he was, in pilfering sundry articles from stall to stall. "Oh! oh!" thought the dame, "have I caught you, you old thief? But I'll let you see I could set Master Mayor and the two town constables on your back, if I chose to be telling." So up she went, and with that bold, free sort of air which persons who have learnt secrets that ought not to be known are apt to assume when they address any great rogue hitherto considered as a superior, she inquired carelessly after his wife and child, and hoped both were as well as could be expected.
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