THAT FACTION BREAKS OUR PROTECTION. PULL US INTO YOURS. SPELL IN THE TREE ROOTS OLDER THAN THEY CAN BREAK.
So much for punctuation being the issue in my understanding.
WHY CAN’T, I wrote, YOU SIMPLY TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT YOU’D LIKE ME TO DO, BECAUSE I DON’T UNDERSTAND A SINGLE THING YOU SAY.
NOT SAY. WRITE.
“For goodness’ sake!” I shouted. “Stop it. Just stop it. Stop focusing on all the wrong, tiny, insignificant things!”
Amber’s steps slowed as I shouted, but then she broke into a trot. Great, she thought I was yelling at her, that there was an emergency, that I needed her back here faster. Behind her, on the other side of the ripples, the world’s colors muted. Who knew that such a slight color shift could be so terrifying.
“I’m going back where it’s safe,” I told whatever faeries were listening.
Off to the side, I saw something glimmer. I turned to a ray of sunshine, pure, almost perfectly tubular, that came down through the branches and around the other shadows.
LIGHT HANDLE, my paper read. PULL US IN WITH THAT.
It did look like a handle, like a sleek chrome one, a long bar rather than the old-fashioned curved ones adorned with weird brass curlicues.
PULL US IN PAST THE ROOT MAGIC.
“I don’t trust you.” Because I didn’t.
YOU ARE IN OUR WORLD. WE LEAVE YOU HARM FREE. WE NEED NOT HAVE DONE.
True. Unless it was some sort of long con, once I stepped out onto the road these faeries could have whisked me away instantly, but they hadn’t.
YOU WILL WRITE ALL THIS IN YOUR BOOK
Again true. I could write all this in my faerie guide, making it a first-hand account of faerie-human collaboration.
“This better not be a trick,” I said, just in case that would guilt the faeries into admitting that it was.
I put my fingers around the sunbeam.
“Hopefully this is what you meant,” I whispered.
I closed my eyes, stepped backwards, and, with all my might, pulled the sunbeam in towards me. I kept my eyes closed because it seemed more likely that this would work if my eyes weren’t watching to tell me how what I was doing was impossible, and I kept going backwards until I tripped over a root. My hands shot out behind me to break my fall, and I lost my grip on the sunbeam.
With the thud of my bottom on the ground, I opened my eyes.
Around me now, the trees glistened with a cool light. Rocks and bits of gravel on the drive sparkled like diamonds. The farmhouse no longer sagged with broken windows and rotten boards. It was flawless, a pale pink, window boxes filled with orange and yellow flowers. The whole space was backlit like an electric flea market painting of a Catholic saint.
“I did it, didn’t I?” I whispered. “You’re in here with me now.”
Then I looked a bit further up, back out at the road. The outside world, at the far end of the driveway, was black like the night sky when it’s cloudy out. Worse than that. Like what a black hole must feel like to your soul.
And stepping through the darkness, Amber came.
“What were you yelling about?” she demanded. “Are you okay?”
“I’m good.”
“You can’t just yell for no good reason.” Her voice was tinny, like she was distant and her larynx had morphed into an old-fashioned Tannoy.
“I stubbed my toe,” I offered. “Studies suggest that yelling upon hurting yourself actually lessens the amount of pain —”
“Enough.” Amber held up her hand. “I don’t care. And here.” She thrust a small, shiny packet at me. “I bought some chips from the vending machine at the campsite. I know I said I’d go back to town for supplies.” I didn’t remember Amber saying she would. “I will, too, but maybe this afternoon.” She cracked her neck. “I’m sore all over. I’m going to sleep some more.”
The static overlaying Amber’s voice grew. I struggled to make out what she was saying. Added to the noise, my mouth, in this new, faerie-merged world, was parched. All I could think of was drinking.
“Can I have some of the water?” I asked Amber. She was swinging my aluminium water bottle in her left hand.
“I’d prefer not.” Crackle crackle. “Germs,” Amber said.
“I gave you my last juice box,” I protested.
“Well, go take an empty juice box and fill it up at the potable water pump at the campground.”
I looked out into the darkness. That wasn’t an option.
“Stop eyeing the water bottle, Enid,” Amber growled.
Fine. I’d just steal back my water bottle once she fell asleep and drink the whole gosh-darned thing. I’d also sneeze in Amber’s sleeping face to ensure maximum germ spreading.
Then Amber was gone, like she’d never been there at all, and I was alone with the faeries. Trapped, you might say, as I stared out at the rest of the world’s blackness.
“So,” I said as my vision blurred. “Now what?”
hen I could focus again, I was staring up at the backlit sky. Trees shimmered at the edge of my vision, and thick black lines, like in a coloring book, edged each object. My skin glowed. My body radiated color.
And all this was less awe-inspiring than it sounded: it was a bewildering, migraine-inducing visual cacophony. Thus, it didn’t take long for the novelty of the overlapped faerie world to lose its luster. Of course, the sparkle might have endured if the faeries, who had seemed so intent on bringing us together, had shown themselves or continued our written conversation or in some way indicated that I had done right by pulling them in with me. Instead, they stayed silent, and I found this unacceptable.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!”
Nothing.
A whole page of alphabet soup thrown down for them.
Nothing.
Wandering around in case they were somewhere else within the property.
Nothing.
Add to that, I was starting to feel seasick, irrespective of my landlocked state. The overlapped world was like watching a film with random frames removed. Example one: Amber had vanished, into the house surely, but via a jump cut, with that chunk of film just gone. Example two: moving my hand across my vision produced a discrete track of images. Clearly, the melding of faerie and human worlds was a bumpy mixture — heterogeneous, as the physics textbook might say.
That thought was clever enough to merit inclusion in my notebook. I flipped it open.
BRING HER HERE
A smile of relief rounded my cheeks. The faeries hadn’t abandoned me here, and perhaps they hated ripping out pages from my notebook as much as I did. Obviously we were copacetic, even though I had no intention of doing what they wanted me to do right away, assuming HER was my mother.
BRING HER HERE
“I will, just let me ask you a few questions first.”
I flipped the page.
BRING HER HERE
“Firstly, about this song that she stole: can anyone sing it and get powerful? Maybe even people with no discernable magical talents?”
BRING HER HERE
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand. You want me to bring who where?”
BRING HER HERE.
The addition of a period to the end of the sentence was not lost on me.
“Except I need some way to bring her here, don’t I? I can’t just walk out into that.” I gestured to the dark. “You made sure of that. So how about teaching me the song and I’ll summon her magically?”
Nothing.
“I promise to do my best to sing on key.” Just in case they’d heard my shower-time warblings and were fearing for their sanity and ears.
BRING HER HERE
“Have you not been listening? I have no way to get her here!”
WHITE OBLONG BOX
“Puppy paranoid jack rab
bit.”
QUESTION MARK
“Oh, we’re not just saying random words now?”
SHE IN HOUSE CAN
“Can what? Use magic?” This was a sudden lurch in the midst of my nauseated state. “Amber Holden has magical abilities and I don’t? How is that fair? I’ve been wanting my whole life to do magical things, and all she’s ever wanted to do is be some brilliant geriatric psychiatrist and cure Alzheimer’s or something.” Even such a noble goal shouldn’t mean Amber got to be magical. “She doesn’t even believe magic exists!”
NO MAGIC FOR HER
A relief.
“Then, as to me, are you sure,” I said, “that there is no way I can practise magic to get better at it?”
YOU HAVE NO MAGIC
“Yes. I believe we’ve been over that.”
SHE HAS YOUR MAGIC
“Amber? You just said she didn’t.”
NO
OTHER SHE POWERFUL SHE
SHE HAS YOUR MAGIC
TAKE THE HATCHLING MAGIC UNTIL THEY ARE TAUGHT
THEN GIVE IT BACK
THAT IS SONG
SHE KEEPS YOURS AND IT ROTS INSIDE HER
DISINTEGRATES HER DESTROYS HER UPSETS THE BALANCE
YOU HAD MAGIC AND SHE TOOK IT
“Why?”
SHE MISINTERPRETED IMPLICATION ARROW
SHE: SONG TO GIVE MAGIC
US: SONG TO TAKE MAGIC UNTIL PREPARED
“This seems …” I searched for an appropriate word “… fanciful,” I said measuredly.
DECOMPOSITION OF YOUR POWER BLOATS INSIDE HER LIKE CORPSE GAS
That was an image I didn’t need in my mind.
BRING HER HERE
“Are you going to help her? Fix her?” We were nearing the end of my notebook. Hopefully the next few answers the faeries gave me would be able to run the fine line between articulateness and thrift.
CHANGELING WILL NOT WORK TOO HARD TO DO
Which is what I’d said, assuming the not work part meant that people would notice I wasn’t me.
BRING HER HERE
“How? We never really clarified how we were going to do that.”
“Enid?”
More relief. It would be so much quicker to talk talk to the faeries than caps lock write talk to them.
“Thank goodness,” I said, “you’ve figured out how to talk.”
“When I was two.”
I spun around. The faeries weren’t talking to me; this was Amber Holden, who had wandered back out from the farmhouse.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked, static crescendoing before dropping to an intermediate hum. “I can’t sleep with your babbling out here. That house has no soundproofing whatsoever.”
“Faeries.”
Amber’s lips thinned. “That’s it. I’m done. Here.” She rooted around in her pocket and thrust her smart phone at me. “You are going to call Margery right now.”
WHITE OBLONG BOX
“Puppy paranoid jack rabbit,” I whispered.
“Seriously, Enid, something is wrong with you,” Amber replied. “She’s under Margery.”
Amber’s phone lay in my palm. I regarded it warily.
“I press what, exactly?” The ancient rotary at our house had not prepared me for using a phone that had more computational power than a NASA computer circa the moon landing.
Amber groaned and took the phone back. “Here,” she said after pressing some buttons. “Talk.”
“It’s ringing,” I told her. “Still ringing.”
“Not to me; to your mother,” she hissed.
“Yes,” my mother said, picking up just then. “Amber?”
“Actually,” I said. “It’s Enid.”
There was a decent-lengthed pause.
“So.” I decided to go first. “I’m at the farmhouse.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you could borrow Dr. Holden’s car and come and pick me up?” I would indeed BRING HER HERE.
“No.”
I sighed.
“Please.”
“I have no interest in driving out there.”
“Please.” I tried to sound as pitiful as possible.
“Fine.” I wanted to fist-pump Amber, but she didn’t raise her hand. “I’ll get Dr. Holden to pick you up.”
“No!” I squeaked. “No, not Dr. Holden. It has to be you.”
“Why?”
That was a good question. If I only needed a drive, my mother was right in questioning why I was so particular as to who was doing the driving.
“We-e-e-l-l-l.” I dragged out the one syllable as long as I could stand. “I’m here with Amber.”
“Yes.”
“And —” I swivelled so I was out of the immediate reach of Amber, who I figured would be coming after me once I got the next sentence out of my head “— she got drunk last night and now she’s hungover and she doesn’t want Dr. Holden to know because she’s underage and feels miserable and she doesn’t want to get into trouble.”
“Why you little —” Amber began, trying to grab her phone back. I zigged to the side, then zagged to try to avoid her.
“Dr. Holden can be somewhat of a teetotaller,” my mother said.
“Exactly.” Amber had my arm in her grip and was twist-ing my shoulder in a way that suggested I was going to need some long-term physiotherapy after this. “So, can you come instead?”
“Fine. But I —”
But I didn’t care what was going to follow my mother’s “But I” as long as my mother was coming. “Thanks, love you, bye, Godspeed,” I rapid-fire spat out, pushing a button on the phone in the hopes that it hung up the phone and then tossing Amber’s white oblong box as far as I could into the overgrowth.
“You better not have broken it!” Amber shouted, letting go of me. “Why did you have to tell Margery that?” She dashed over to where her phone had landed.
“It’s the truth.”
“You know what, Enid?” Amber picked up her phone from its bed of wildflowers. “Sometimes you’re a real jerk.”
“It’s what little sisters are for,” I told her.
“Don’t,” Amber said with a growl, “remind me.”
lay on the grass and waited, alone. Amber, after lecturing me about how I was thoughtless, rude, reckless, and never ever, ever, ever deserved to touch her phone again (the lack of parallel construction in her sentence bothered me too), had stomped back into the farmhouse, since, in her mind, the worst punishment available was denying me her presence.
So, my time passed in solitude. To quell my dizziness (and since I was exhausted), I used the wait for my mother to inspect the inside of my eyelids for leaks. Thus dozing, it took a few seconds to realize that the noises of tires crunching gravel and engine whirring off were not part of the faerie/human overlapped world soundscape but a result of what I’d done, what I’d engineered into being: my mother arriving to pick us up (according to her) and to be stripped of her rotting magic (according to me).
I stood. My mother, out of the car, stood.
It was awkward.
“Are you ready?”
That was my mother, I realized, asking me. She was more difficult to understand than Amber had been, the crickle-crackle louder and more forcefully pulsating around each word. Plus, her lips hadn’t moved. I hoped, with every ounce of myself, that these words-without-mouth were a result of the way bits of time kept vanishing in this overlapped world rather than a newfound telepathic ability of my mother’s. Digits crossed.
“I’m not going.”
That one was me.
“Enid, I —”
“No,” I said forcefully, although the exclamation mark disintegrated somehow. “I’m not going with you. Not yet.”
“It
isn’t as if I’m going to keep you chained in the attic,” my mother said.
Now I was certain some time had vanished, more frames excised from the movie reel that was this mother/daughter interaction. Confusion, as they say, reigned.
“As if you were an evil twin,” she clarified. “Instead, you’ll be on your own exciting adventure.”
The changeling. She was still on about that. I suppressed a groan.
“Listen,” I said as calmly as I could. “I know that this isn’t you talking. They explained it to me that the magic inside you has gone bad.”
“Who explained what to you?”
“She’s here,” I called out, in case the faeries had been napping like myself. This was a perfect subterfuge, as my mother would think I was alerting Amber to her presence, rather than the faeries. But back to my mother: “Think of it like those parasites that take over bees’ brains,” I told her.
“I’m hardly an insect, Enid.”
“No. Of course not. But you’re not yourself, either.”
“Then who am I?”
I didn’t want to speculate. “Come on,” I yelled instead. My voice was stronger speaking to the faeries. Speaking to my mother, it kept shrinking to a whisper. But to the faeries, my voice-box resonated like a bell whacked with a hammer. “She’s here. You promised!”
“Enid —”
“No,” I said, backing away from her.
“Stop this foolishness.”
“No.” I didn’t want to keep backing up for fear of losing my footing over the uneven ground. But I didn’t want to turn my back on my mother for too long, either. I needed the faeries to act. What were they waiting for?
“Let’s not fight.” My mother extended her hand. “We never used to fight.”
“We’re always snapping at each other.”
My mother thought, her hand still outstretched, her mus-cles losing tension and her arm starting to wobble. “We never fought when you were a baby.”
“Because I couldn’t talk.”
She looked puzzled, her face scrunched up and her head tilted almost ear to shoulder on her right side. “No, I, well, things, wait —”
She, my real mother, was clashing with the rogue magic inside her. I knew it. She just needed a push to help her along.
Enid Strange Page 15