Evidence.
Evidently.
Eventually.
Fucking mental case.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought she was special, but really she was just dumb. A bad girl who skipped school, stole her mother’s cigarettes and brandy. She left home at sixteen, looking for something more. She lived on the street. Learned to make a buck however she could. It was funny what some guys would pay for. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. That was a saying her ma used to have. Sometimes she missed her ma. Mostly, she didn’t. Each day on the street was like panning for gold: you never knew what you’d find, who’d turn up.
He was dressed all in black, not much older than she was. His hair was dark and slicked back. He had a goatee. His boots were spit-shined so that you could look down and see the reflections of streetlights and clouds. He was a magic man, he told her. He gave her a twenty just for a smile. That’s when she saw his gloved hands, each with an extra finger.
The next day, he came back with a pack of smokes, a handful of pills, bright and colorful as candy.
“What would you say if I told you there was a whole parallel world beside ours and that the beings who lived there controlled our destiny?”
The girl laughed.
“You know how sometimes, sometimes when you’re just sitting there, you catch this movement in the corner of your eye—just a shadow, really—and you blink, sure you imagined it?”
She nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. It happened to her all the time.
“That’s them,” he said.
She took out a smoke and lit it.
“People like you and me, we get that the life people are living is really an illusion, don’t we? Smoke and mirrors, hiding the real deal. The steal of a deal. That guy coming out of Banana Republic with a seventy-dollar shirt. The woman with her grande half-caff latte. They don’t have a clue. But you and I, we know different.”
The girl blew smoke at him, smiled. “So what, exactly, are you saying?”
“I’m saying I can show you the truth. I can take you away from all this and change your life forever.”
Now the girl was just tired. And she wasn’t a girl anymore. She’s what—in her twenties? Thirties maybe even. Time meant nothing in the fairy world. Her body hurt. Her teeth ached. She lay in bed at night and heard voices no one else seemed to hear. They’d get loud, then soft, but stayed steady, like a pulse. A strange heartbeat in her ears. Lisa’s babies. Hers. Lisa’s voice saying, “I lived next to a town called Reliance. My brother, his name is Sam. If I ever get out of here, he’s the first one I’ll find.”
When they started the baby on formula, she knew it was over.
Evie came into her room one night, said, “You need to go. Now.”
Evie had been so kind to her these last weeks. She snuck her and the baby out when the guardians were away. They went for rides in the country. Evie took her to a library in the afternoons, even let her check out books. It was far away, a place where no one would recognize them.
But now Evie was panicked as she pried open the window and helped her through.
“Where will I go?” she asked.
“As far as you can,” Evie whispered.
She pulled herself through and ran. But it wasn’t her own life she was running toward. It was Lisa’s, the girl who was Queen of the Fairies. Because somehow, after their years together, she knew Lisa’s life better than her own. It was more real to her—more vivid and sparkling and full of hope than her own past.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Lisa who lived in a house with her mother, father, and brother, Sammy. They all loved her very much. She ate oatmeal for breakfast and called it porridge. Her father was very sick and she thought she could save him. She was a good girl.
Good girl.
Good girl.
Chapter 49
Phoebe
June 13, Present Day
“So what you’re saying,” Phoebe said, “is that there really is no Teilo.”
“Right,” said Sam. He was speeding along through dark and twisting roads, hurrying back toward Reliance, hoping like hell the baby would be there. “He’s just a figure in some fucked-up fairy tale my mother and Hazel believed in, a story their own mother told them. They passed it down to their children. Hazel was a little . . . unbalanced, and took the story too literally. She came to really believe it, and then there was the pregnancy. I’m guessing that’s what put her over the edge.” Sam paused, took a breath. “Maybe she was raped,” he said, shuddering. “And, to deal with it, she convinced herself that it was Teilo’s baby. She hid him away, raised him with this crazy belief that he was of fairy blood. Some families have shit like cancer and heart disease passed from one generation the next—we’ve got malevolent stories.”
It made sense in an awful way. A legend passed down from one generation to the next that made each child feel special, like they were part of something much larger, much more magical than the mundane world of friends and school and rock collections. There are fairies on the back side of the hill. Your great-grandfather was really a changeling left to pass as a human infant in a crib.
Didn’t everyone want that? Have a secret longing to be more special than the guy next door? Didn’t everyone secretly wish there was another world you could find a doorway to, step inside, and become a queen?
Phoebe could understand that longing.
She had spent her whole life being nothing special. The girl who fell between the cracks. Who barely got through school, didn’t show much promise. The daughter of a drunk who wasn’t destined for any sort of greatness.
There was some part of her—some desperate, pathetic part, dying to be special—that wished it was true that Teilo really might have chosen her to give him Sam’s firstborn.
Phoebe swallowed hard, feeling like she had a golf ball stuck in her throat.
Phoebe remembered what Dr. Ostrum had told her—that the people in Reliance hadn’t vanished overnight, it was a slow drying-up, people moved on to other places. But that didn’t make for a good story. Every town needs a mystery or two, she’d said.
“So who is the father of Lisa’s baby?” Phoebe asked.
“It’s gotta be this cousin, Gene,” Sam said. “Shit, I bet he was there that summer, hiding out in the woods, masquerading as the Fairy King! We found a bed of ferns one time, a blanket and those brass binoculars.”
“Oh,” Phoebe said, relieved that they were talking about an actual person, not a mythical being. But then she remembered the dark shadow she’d seen pass behind her in the bathroom at Aunt Hazel’s. Thought of the nightmares.
“I still don’t understand,” Phoebe confessed. “Everything that happened at the cabin, the other Evie . . .”
“I think all hell broke loose when Lisa ran away,” Sam explained. “I mean, they’d kidnapped her, held her against her will for years, used her for some fucked-up incestuous breeding project where they were trying to make some crazy fairy prophecy they’d probably made up themselves come true. Lunatics! They knew she’d come to us. And they knew that the fairy book linked them to the kidnapping. It was proof. They wanted it back. And they wanted Lisa back before she told anyone about Gene, the baby, and the room in the basement. So they sent the fake Evie, knowing it would lead us to the real Evie, who seemed like this helpless wreck of a woman. Someone who needed taking care of. God, they played us, Bee. They knew our every move before we did.”
But there was one piece in Sam’s scenario that still wasn’t quite right: Lisa.
“Gabrielle,” Phoebe said, turning to look at the girl in the backseat. “Was Lisa already there when they took you, or did she come later?”
“What?” Sam asked. “What are you talking about, Bee?”
The girl bit her lip, looked up at Phoebe, and nodded. “She was there. She was the true queen.”
The car drifted from the passing lane into the right lane as Sam turned to look in the backseat. A horn blasted.
“Sam!” Phoebe cried. “Keep your eyes on the road. If you get us all killed, we’ll never find the baby.”
“I don’t understand,” Sam muttered, eyes focused on the dark highway, hands gripping the wheel as he straightened up the car. “Whose baby is it? Who is this girl? Where the hell is Lisa?”
“The baby’s Lisa’s, right?” Phoebe said.
Gabrielle nodded.
“Did you have a baby too?” Phoebe asked, remembering what Franny said about the milk leaking from the girl’s breasts.
She nodded again. “My baby died. They gave me Lisa’s.”
“Where is Lisa?” Sam asked again.
Gabrielle began to cry. Phoebe understood. Lisa was under one of the white crosses in the orchard. Whether she died giving birth or they killed her because they had no use for her after, she was gone.
“And did your babies have the same father?” Phoebe asked.
Gabrielle nodded. “Teilo. The Dark Man. King of the Fairies. He’ll come for you too,” she said, staring right at Phoebe. “You’ll see soon enough. You have something he wants.”
Phoebe’s stomach clenched.
“I don’t get it,” Sam said. “What the fuck is going on?”
“They took another girl,” Phoebe explained. “I saw the name Gabrielle written on the wall in the locked room in the basement. Then when we were talking to Hazel, I realized this isn’t Lisa. You were right all along, Sam.”
“But why?” Sam asked. “Why take a second girl?”
“I’m not sure exactly,” Phoebe said. “A companion maybe? But there’s something else I’m not understanding. If your mother knew Hazel really believed in the fairies, which she must, because she wrote the diary, then how did she not suspect her when Lisa went missing? Why didn’t she send the police after Hazel right away?”
Sam shrugged.
Phoebe pulled Phyllis’s red diary from her back pocket and opened it:
End of Summer, 13 years old
Dear Diary,
Yesterday, Sister apologized for how awful she’d been. She said she was sorry she’d been so caught up in Teilo. Of course I should go off and marry David when I get a little older. She was happy for me. Really. We had a picnic on a blanket she’d laid out in the woods. She made cupcakes and brought a thermos of hot, sweet tea. After, I felt very sleepy.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “Lay down awhile.”
When I opened my eyes again, David was there.
I looked for Sister, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“We love each other very much, don’t we?” David said, lifting my skirt. He unbuckled his belt.
“What are you doing?” I tried to ask, but what came out was a faint, buzzing June bug of a sound. I tried to sit up, but my body felt too heavy, as if I were made of bags of heavy sand.
Then he was on top of me. Inside me. I tried to roll away, but his arms pinned me to the blanket.
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it wasn’t David’s face I saw.
Teilo’s black eyes gazed back at me. And only then I realized that they were a lot like Grandfather’s. And then he smiled and I felt that familiar constricting feeling in my throat.
“Silly girl,” he said.
“Sam, how old was your mother when Lisa was born?” Phoebe asked.
“I don’t know exactly. Twenty, I think. Why?”
Phoebe didn’t answer but went back to reading.
Late Spring, 14 years old
Dear Diary,
Sister is the one who told David I was pregnant. She said that was the kind of girl I was—the kind who wasn’t careful, who would go into the woods with just any boy who asked.
I tried to tell him the truth: that she led me into the woods. That it was his face I saw at first. It was a terrible trick the two of them had played on me.
“My grandfather’s in on it too,” I explained. “He’s evil. He has powers. Sometimes . . . sometimes, I think he’s not human.”
David started to walk away. I grabbed his shoulder, made him turn toward me.
“I love you,” I said. “All my life, I will love only you.”
David shook his head, backed away from me slowly like I was brandishing a weapon. Somehow or other, I’d become a dangerous girl. A girl capable of anything in his eyes.
Sister was a great comfort to David. He kept coming around. She fed him tea and cake and stories. Stories about me and how I’d always been a little off in the head. About how on the back side of our hill, there was a town that used to be but wasn’t anymore; about how I, her poor crazy sister, believed there were fairies there.
When Sister told me that she was getting married, that she was going to be Mrs. David Nazzaro, it came as no surprise. But still, it was like she shoved a corkscrew in my heart, then twisted and pulled. Pop. A toast to you and yours. May you live happily ever after.
“It’s just for show, though,” Sister said. “I will always be Teilo’s bride. So will you. And you, you’re special. He chose you, Hazel. He chose you to give him a son—half fairy, half human. The child you carry will walk between the worlds.”
“Oh my God,” Phoebe said, staring down at the diary.
“What?” Sam asked.
Gabrielle looked at Phoebe and giggled. “You can’t change what’s happened. Or what’s going to happen,” she said. “One of the guardians, she used to come sit with us. She’d tell us stories. Stories about us. She said that everything happened for a reason. We didn’t always understand the reason, but Teilo did. Not the fake Teilo, that’s not who she meant, but the real one. We all had our destinies, she used to say.”
Destiny. Is that what this was all about? Phoebe touched her belly.
“Bullshit,” Sam said, peering back at Gabrielle in the rearview mirror. “Who told you all this? Hazel? Evie’s mother?”
“No,” Gabrielle said. “The older one. Lisa’s mother. She was Teilo’s queen once, too.”
Part V
The Happy Family
From The Book of Fairies
If you believe, people will doubt you. Call you crazy. There will come a time when you must make a choice—when your true beliefs will be put to the test.
Us or them?
The world of magic or the mundane drudgery of going through life with blinders on.
You choose.
Chapter 50
Phoebe
June 13, Present Day
They were coming up on Harmony when Phoebe got to the last few pages of the diary.
Spring, Age 15
Dear Diary,
The baby looks like his father. That’s what Sister says. She and David are married now, and we all live together in our house, just as Teilo promised. Grandfather’s gone, struck by lightning just after Sister and David got married. It’s funny though, sometimes I wake up in the night and can still feel his cold, bony fingers wrapped around my wrist. Mother’s gone to a home since the stroke messed up her brain. Folks in town say our family sure has had its run of bad luck. They bring casseroles and cakes but never set foot in the door. In fact, they seem to be holding their breath as they stand on the porch, nervously looking in, as if bad luck were a germ you could inhale.
Sometimes I see it like that too. This big old mushroom cloud hanging over our house. And if you followed it down to the source, you’d end up in Reliance. You’d find Teilo there, dancing in the shadows, laughing.
Sister and David coo over Gene. They play patty-cake and sing silly songs that make Gene giggle and blow bubbles.
I’ve tried, but I can’t make myself love him.
No matter how many baths I give him, he smells like the woods. Like Reliance.
It’s the Fairy in him, Sister says.
And the extra fingers, they’re supposed to be a sign of magic, but to me, they’re all wrong.
It breaks me into a million pieces to watch David with Gene. Sometimes I have to turn away because the tears are coming hard and fast.
Las
t week he caught me watching him, crying.
“What is it?” David asked. He’d just rocked Gene to sleep. Sister was out at the market. It’s worse when she’s away because then I can pretend it’s just me and David and Gene here.
“Sometimes I wish things had turned out differently,” I tell him. “I wish you and I—”
His eyes blazed and he looked away. “You made your choice.”
I laughed. “What choice?”
And then I told him. I told him everything. Even the things Sister had forbidden me to say. I told him about Teilo and the woods, the book we found, and how we each promised our firstborn. I told him that Teilo was watching us all the time, using us, playing us like instruments.
He shook his head. “You’re nuts,” he told me. “You don’t make any sense.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe I am the crazy one.
“I know that’s what my sister tells you, but please, David, please, if you ever cared for me at all, then do me one favor. Try to imagine for one minute what it would mean if I was right. I know you think that my sister is good as gold, but what if she’s not? What if the only reason you’re here is because they want something of you?”
“Who is they?” he asked.
“Teilo. The fairies. They’re using you, David. I’m not sure what for—appearances, probably. Or maybe it’s just to amuse them because they know how it tortures me.”
“Phyllis and I are married. We don’t keep secrets from each other.”
I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. “This house is nothing but a thick, tangled nest of secrets. You’ll see soon enough. ”
He said nothing.
“Do you love her?” I asked.
He winced a little.
I smiled. “You know I’m right, don’t you? I’m guessing you know something’s not right here. Maybe you’ve felt him. Or even seen him watching from the shadows.”
He looked panicked now, making me surer than ever that I was right.
“You have, haven’t you?”
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