by A. L. Knorr
"Unbelievable," Jasher whispered.
I felt very deeply that we were present, no, had somehow facilitated even, an event that may only happen once in a century. I was wrong about that.
Late that night, the sound of a pounding of a hammer ripped me from my sleep. My heart vaulted into my throat and I gasped, nearly choking on my own tongue. I had been dead asleep and dreamless.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It wasn't a hammer - there was knocking at my door. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked at the clock. Two forty-three a.m. The full moon cast bright dappled shadows across the carpet. As the sleep fog cleared, I registered the sound of light rain and wind. A few raindrops spattered against the windows. I threw the covers back and padded to the door just as I heard two more taps.
"Georjie?"
I opened the door. Jasher's eyes were wide and bright like he was surfing a tidal wave of freshly brewed coffee.
"What's wrong?" I stifled a face-splitting yawn and covered my mouth. Both of my eyes sprang a leak.
"Sorry to wake you, but I thought you wouldn't want to miss this. Can you come down?" He didn't wait for my response, and vanished down the stairs.
I foraged on the floor with my toes for my slippers and spotted the faint white blobs peeking out from under my bed. After finding my robe, I wrapped it around me and left the room, raking the tangles from my hair. Rounding the corner at the bottom of the stairs, I paused and listened. Faint footsteps led to the greenhouse, so I followed Jasher there.
He sat on the threshold with the sliding doors open, his chin in his hands. I sat down beside him. There were no lights on and he didn't say anything.
"What's happen... Ohhhhh." A glimmer caught my eye, and then another. The clouds moved across the moon and its bright cool light illuminated the scene before us. More cocoons were forming, not as quickly as they had formed during the day, but they were still appearing faster than I could track them with my eyes. The foliage twinkled with what looked like colored fire flies.
"They can form in moonlight?" I whispered, amazed. "You never told me."
"I didn't know!" he whispered back, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears. "Georjayna," He put a hand on my forearm and peered into my eyes. "Moon fae," he said, drawing out the word 'moon.' A big grin split across his face.
"Moon fae." I grinned back.
We watched in silence for the next ten minutes as the little cocoons dropped. They soon slowed, and the twinkling lights stopped. The greenhouse became just a greenhouse on a moonlit night, the light changing as clouds slid across the moon's face. So, the event that I had thought would only happen once in a century, happened twice within a matter of hours.
Chapter 17
"You're really lucky, Georjie." Jasher's voice broke the stillness. I loved the sound of my nickname coming out of his mouth.
"Why?"
"This is your family's legacy," he said. "How many other families have this kind of connection with nature?"
“It's yours too, Jasher. You're part of this family."
He shrugged. "Yes and no. I know Faith wouldn't want me to feel anything other than part of this family, but I know where I came from and what I am."
"What do you mean 'what you are'? What are you, besides a Sheehan?" I turned to examine him in the dim light. There it was - the deep sadness I'd seen before in the photographs of him when he was young. It wasn't gone after all.
"Cursed."
"No Jasher, you're not cursed. You're blessed," I protested. But the memory of the party returned like a monster just under the surface of a black lake, and I knew I didn’t really believe that.
He gave a humorless laugh. "I appreciate you trying to look at the bright side, but it's not a blessing when your mother dies while you're still inside her."
I blinked at his bluntness. He'd just opened the door wide and beckoned me to come in.
"I should be dead," he was saying. "Whatever force kept my mother's body going to birth me was not good. It wasn't a miracle. It branded me. It's not a blessing to be able to see and talk to the dead. The dead should be at peace, not wandering around harassing the living. And I should be among them."
My skin grew clammy. He believed his words wholeheartedly.
"I don't know what it's like to see and talk to the dead, Jasher," I began. "But anytime there is life where there could have been death, it seems like a miracle to me. If you have been marked because you came close to the veil between the living and the dead, then you are special."
"No, Georjie. What little good my ability does, is far too feeble for the price that I've had to pay for it. You don't know what it's like to have more interactions with dead people than living. I have a much less rosy view of humanity because of what the dead have admitted to me. They have no qualms about telling you everything they did while they were alive. They're all looking for redemption. When they find an ear, they won't leave you alone. Living people keep their secrets and take them to the grave, but once they're in the grave it’s like they realize that the only way they'll feel better is by making sure they have no secrets left."
"You mean they tell you their life stories?"
"No, not their life story, if it was only that maybe I could bear it. They want to tell you their sins, ask you to do weird things for you. The ones like Conor are the nice ones who led good lives, and they're interested in being helpful. But most of them are not like that," he went on. "Most of them are the leavings of wretched humans who have nothing to offer the living except horror stories."
I understood why Jasher felt like he was cursed. I opened my mouth to thank him for telling me when he said, "And another thing. I'm not even so sure that most of the ghosts I've spoken with really are the ghosts of people."
"What else would they be?"
"Sometimes...sometimes it seems like no human being could ever be so wicked. They've done things that are beyond inhumane. The very word 'inhumane' means a lack of humanity."
"Can you give me an example?"
His mouth went flat and hard. "I don't want to put awful things in your head. But some of the things the dead admit to, with full detail and rich description, seem more like the acts of demons, not people."
"Do you mean they were possessed?" I asked.
"What else would you call it when a human being commits acts that are against humanity? Why would a human being ever do something evil, something that gains him nothing, if he hadn't lost control somehow of his own humanity?"
My mind went back to a horrific event that had happened in Canada when I was still in junior high school. "There was a man on a train once who attacked an innocent kid who was just listening to music. The man killed the kid...in front of everyone." I shuddered. "He showed no emotion while he was doing it, or so the witnesses said." I swallowed hard. Bile churned in my belly. It was an event that I could never forget. Kids had cried in the hallways at school after it hit the news. Some of them had been so disturbed they went home for the rest of the day.
"Exactly," said Jasher, quietly. "Things exactly like that. Do you think if that man had been in his right mind, he would done that? He destroyed the life of that boy, the lives of everyone who witnessed it, the boy's family, and his own life. Why would any human in charge of all his faculties do that?"
"No, I think he was very, very sick," I agreed. "But I don't know about possessed."
"What is illness but a type of possession? Something unwelcome and unwanted that has a hold or a power over your body, no?" He cocked a dark eyebrow.
I began to see how he was looking at it, but I didn't know if I agreed. "You could put it that way." I have never been a philosophical person, and the stuff he was hitting me with was firing neurons that had never been fired before.
"Then what else is a demon but something that has more hold over you than you do? Anything from alcoholism to pneumonia to depression to mental illness."
"But are you saying that the people who are afflicted with these horrible things are fa
ultless for their behaviors?"
"I don't know if I would use the word faultless," he said, frowning. "I think my experience with the dead makes me realize that human beings are not always responsible for what happens to them, but they are accountable for it. They are the ones who pay, whether they were under the influence of some other force or not."
I had never met anyone who thought the way Jasher did. I felt my understanding of the world being challenged, stretched. My perceptions of the nature of good and evil were widening but it wasn't without strain.
"My curse is why I'll never travel, never leave home." Jasher's voice was laced with bitterness, something I hadn't heard in his voice before.
This was what I was most interested in. I turned toward him. "Faith makes it sound like you prefer to be a homebody, like what makes you the happiest is working in the greenhouse or the backyard all by yourself."
"That's what you would do, too, if every time you went to a town or a city, the dead found you." He turned and looked me in the eye.
"So, what would you do with your life if you didn't have this curse?"
He laughed. "What wouldn't I do? I would go to University, probably study architecture. I would travel the world. Visit the Chinese temples in Paru and Panakha, go to Rome, Prague, Budapest, Angkor Wat. There's nothing that I wouldn't like to see with my own eyes. But the prospect of what would haunt me if I ventured out into the world is enough to make me want to crawl under my bed and never come out."
So there it was. He harbored much greater ambitions and desires than he had the courage to go after, because of a sight he didn't want to have.
I took his hand. "I'm sorry, Jasher. I didn't know."
He squeezed my fingers fiercely, hard enough to hurt. I could now see him as someone with real vulnerabilities and needs. We sat there, just holding hands. I felt a glowing warmth building in my belly like a breath blowing gently over hot embers.
"I've not shared that before," said Jasher. "I didn't mean to burden you."
I shook my head. "There is no true friendship without honesty." I shrugged nonchalantly. ”Or so I’ve read.”
He chuckled and turned my hand over, stroking my palm with the pad of his thumb. He looked into my eyes. He lifted his other hand, and traced my cheekbone with the finger. My pulse quickened at his touch. "And what about you, Georjie. What is it that you want? What did you come here for?"
I had a quick intake of breath. I hadn't expected to be asked that so bluntly. "Coming to Ireland happened by accident," I answered. My eyes dropped from his eyes to his lips. "But it doesn't feel like an accident anymore."
"No," he said. "It wasn't an accident." He kissed my temple, and put his arm around me. I lay my head on his shoulder and twined my fingers through his. The sounds of the night closed in around us, insects chirruping, the hoot of an owl. We shared a secret that, as far as we knew, couldn't be shared with anyone else. You might think that it was the perfect time and place for a kiss. Faith was away, we were alone in the house with a moonlit greenhouse full of fae cocoons spread out before us. But we didn't. Not then. It was more than romantic, it was spiritual. I never thought so before, but in that moment I realized - some moments didn't need a kiss to make them better.
Chapter 18
It was dusk. The day had been damp and hazy, the hottest since my arrival. Supper had been had, dishes washed, and the house was getting that feeling of evening stillness. I had just stepped out of the shower and wrapped my hair up in a towel when a couple of faerie names tinkled in my mind. I shook my head, thinking I'd imagined them.
I heard rapid footsteps on the stairs. "Georjie, you up here?" Jasher called.
I poked my head out the door. "In the bathroom. What's up?" More fae names snuck in through the back door of my consciousness.
I clued in to why I might be hearing fae names just as he said, "It's starting."
"I'll be right down!" I dressed frantically, pulling clothing over still wet skin, then ran down the stairs as quickly as Jasher had run up them. The fae names were whispering themselves into my mind and coming faster now. I was missing it.
Jasher was sitting in the same place as he had been when we had watched the moon fae form, with his legs out the patio door, on the top step.
"You're not going to go closer?" I plopped down beside him.
He shook his head. "Once they start, the best view will be from back here."
He was right. At first it was merely a twinkling, little flashes of white light. As the sun went down, the twinkling lights grew bright, and the soft pastel colors were detectable. The darkening greenhouse became our own personal solar system. It started slowly, but soon the sparkles were happening faster than we could spot them. The names chiming off quietly in my head became an endless stream of whispers as the fae introduced themselves to me.
"Can you hear them?" I asked Jasher.
He shook his head. "You can?"
I nodded. But I was too astounded for conversation and didn't say any more. The sight of the fae hatching was a laser-light show. Colors blinked and bright streaks shot around the greenhouse like tiny shooting stars.
"I wonder why they aren't leaving," Jasher said. "They always leave."
I got up and walked into the greenhouse, wanting to be closer to them. I walked slowly, tuning in to that inexplicable vibration humming under my feet. I stopped under the dome, open to the summer night sky. All around me twinkling lights zipped this way and that, blinking on and then going dark. Jasher joined me and the two of us stood under the open dome, silent. When the flashing, blinking, zipping lights stopped, we looked at each other in surprise.
As though someone had used a dimmer switch to turn them up, thousands of tiny lights illuminated fully and held steady. The twinkling lights lifted as each faerie hovered in the air. The spirits were so small that I couldn't make out anything other than a sparkle of light and the faintest fluttering of wings. The floating fae began to rotate around us, at first creating a cylinder spinning lights, but soon they broke into two swirling lines – a double helix. It was like an animated DNA strand I'd seen in a video in biology class once.
Every hair on my body stood on end. Jasher and I stood in the center of two sweeping spirals of light. That energy thrummed in the earth beneath us. The effect was beyond mesmerizing. The tiniest hairs on my body lifted in response to the soft wind the spinning fae created. Between the vibration under me, the fae sparkling around me, Jasher next to me, and the moon above me, I felt transported.
Jasher stepped closer and took me his arms and we stood there wrapped up in one another. His warmth enfolded me. The swirling fae sparkled past my periphery as I looked up at him. He bent his head kissed me, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. His warm lips touched mine and my body melted into his. It wasn't a deep, passionate kiss; rather a sweet one, gentle. I didn't close my eyes, I didn't want to miss the twinkling stars sweeping by. He didn't close his eyes either, and his dark irises reflected the fae lights in their inky blackness. I was looking at a universe of shooting stars in his eyes. I wanted to fall right through and into them.
Jasher ended the kiss before I was quite ready. He pulled back and raised a hand to touch my face. "It's you," he said, so quietly I almost didn't hear. His arms tightened around me, pressing me close to his chest.
"What do you mean?" I whispered.
He released me and stepped back. The flying fae parted for him as he backed up, then they closed around me once again. The twinkling double-helix seemed to be never ending. I didn't know what to do to acknowledge them, so I just lifted my arms out, making a sort of scarecrow, palms up. The tiny lights began to leave the double-helix to land on me. A warm rush went through me and my heart rate doubled. Feather-light touches all over me made me gasp. Lights floated in front of my face and then landed there too, winking on my cheeks and blurring my vision.
"Jasher," I gasped, and looked for him. I could barely see him. The twinkling lights so close to my eyes mad
e him look dark and fuzzy.
"Georjie," Jasher's voice was awestruck. "What I wouldn't give for a camera right now.”
I held my hands out in front of me. I looked absolutely coated in miniature Christmas lights. My sensitive scalp, still damp from my shower, detected the tiny whirring fans of their wings as they fluttered against my head. I looked down at my body. Every surface of me was wrapped with fae. I was a human form made of light. I barely dared to breathe.
"Why?" I exhaled the question lightly.
"Ask them," suggested Jasher. "Rasha told you her name, maybe they'll tell you what they want."
"Can I help you?" I asked, looking down at the lights covering my body.
Tiny bells went off in my head, thousands of them - all whispering the same word.
Wise. Wise. Wise. Wise. Wise. Wise. Wise.
"What did they say?" Jasher asked.
I looked up, puzzled. "Nothing that made any sense."
The lights lifted and began to swirl again, and this time they spiraled up out the dome and were swallowed by the night.
The magical moment was over so unexpectedly that it left me feeling bereft and wishing I had paid more attention. And isn't that the way the most precious moments of our lives come and go? They're over in a moment leaving us breathless and dizzy, and feeling like yelling 'Wait, don't go!'
Every name I heard that evening was seared into my memory. I could have written them all down and not missed a single one.
Chapter 19
I stepped out of the Ana County Library and onto the stone steps. After the fae hatched, I began to look a lot harder for answers. I had been researching faeries, trying to unearth clues about why they had targeted me, and why they might have said the word Wise in answer to my question. It had been an afternoon of fruitless reading. I had seen some beautiful pictures, some of which may have been done by artists who actually knew what fae looked like, but most of it was pure mythology.