by Gemma Files
“What do you know about fairies, Nuala?” she asked me, the night before: Devil’s Night, Mischief Night, when all the older kids were supposedly out egging house and TPing trees. Then continued, not waiting for an answer: “In the old days, my folks used to say Hallowe’en was when they let the ghosts of the damned out of Hell, and that’s why we dressed up—so they wouldn’t know who we were, if they met us out after dark. You go back further still, though, it wasn’t ghosts they meant at all, but the Daoine Sidhe, the good folk. Them under the hill.”
“What hill, Grandma?”
“Any hill, I guess. But ‘round here, they mostly meant Druir Hill, on the Dourvale Shore; don’t suppose you go anyplace near there, do you, when you crawl out under the hedge?” At that I looked up, shocked, which made her give a grim little smile. “oh yes, my girl, I know all about that—think you were the first ever got that same notion? Think again.”
“You did?”
“Many a time. Up the hill, past that table...there was a boy I’d meet there, sometimes, came right out of the woods. Mrs. Sidderstane’s son, from up at the big house, who wrote his name on the table top with his knife.”
Saracen, I thought. Unbeliever, from away.
“Oh, and he was handsome, too, with his blue eyes, though there was something about the way he looked at you...” She shook her head. “Any rate, the Shore’s not a good place, ‘specially at night, though I know you kids think it’s some sort of amusement park. All the things your Dad and me warned you about, they go double up there. And Hallowe’en’s the worst time to go, bar none.”
“Because of fairies?”
“Because I say so, miss. Now promise: you go out in that”—she nodded at my princess dress, my tinsel crown, the little mask of tissue-paper veiling I was pinning to it—“you stay away from there, far as you can get. or you don’t go at all.”
“I promise,” I said.
“I wish I believed you.”
“I promise, Grandma.”
“Well, it’s on you, now. I’ve said what I could.”
And she shrugged, turning back to the stove where she had biscuits baking. But I could see her eyes were wet.
Why wouldn’t you want them to know it was you, though? The fairies? That was what I should have asked—so she could tell me about changelings, or girls caught in rings, boys caught under hills. How time bends in the tunnels, so you might come in one end a child and leave the other an old, old man. How no matter what they serve you, you shouldn’t eat, because then it gives them power over you...and besides, it’s all nothing but dead leaves, really: leaves, and mulch, and bones. Nothing but glamour.
God knows I would have asked, had I only known to; just like I wouldn’t have done what I did the next night, I’d only known it was a bad idea. But I guess you can say the same about a lot of things.
—
Heather was a princess for Hallowe’en too, it turned out—a space princess, like from Star Wars. Grace was a kitty-cat. And Milton was doubling his fun by wearing a werewolf mask on top of his hockey sweater, so he wouldn’t have to choose between the two things he liked best, monsters and sports. “I can play goal for Frankenstein against Dracula, now,” he told us, muffled. “Beat that, Barbies!”
He danced with all of us in turn, though, once the music started—and later we all danced with each other, bopping around in tandem to Men Without Hats while the big kids passed tissue paper in front of the disco lights to make them strobe. Then grabbed a few Cokes and went outside to cool down, chatting our way past the smokers, the neckers and the scrappers, right to the forest’s edge. Which is where Leaf met us.
Not much of a costume, per se—just her usual clothes, threadbare and dusty, so out of fashion they almost looked cool. But she was wearing the best mask I’ve ever seen bar none, before or since: close-fitted enough you couldn’t see any seams, moving with her breath. It had lumpy skin, pale like a potato, a pig’s nose and dim little red eyes, and the mouth stretched so far in either direction that if the corners hadn’t hit its ears—those lobeless curlicue holes, with their flared and pointed upper ridges of cartilage—it almost looked like they might have just kept on going ‘til they met, and the whole top of her head popped off.
“Nuala,” she greeted me, her voice hardly even muffled. “And these your friends, of course: Heather...Grace. Milton.”
Milton didn’t quite recoil. “Uh...yeah, hi. Nuala, who’s this?”
“Leaf,” I said. “You remember. She’s taking us to a party, at her place.”
“Leaf who, though?”
I shook my head, only then realizing I’d never actually asked. But: “Redcappie,” Leaf replied, without hesitation. “Leaf Redcappie, they call me.”
Grace made a little noise. “I have to go home,” she said. “Heather—you should come too.”
Heather snorted. “What for?”
“Redcappie,” Grace hissed back, and Heather swallowed, starting as though she’d suddenly remembered something, while Milton and I just watched, confounded.
“Oh yeah,” Heather said, at last. “Yeah, we—have fun, you guys.”
“Heather?”
She and Grace had already grabbed hands, however, eyes darting, poised to turn. “Have fun,” Grace threw back, over her shoulder.
“And, um, nice to meet you, Leaf. Tell your folks...uh, anyhow.”
“Grace, what the spit, man!”
But they were out of range now, almost out of sight. They didn’t look back. Milton and I swapped glances, then looked to Leaf, who didn’t seem surprised.
“Wish them good even,” she said, “and you two as well, if you’d rather not come with, also. For ‘twas good enough to see you the once this night, Nuala, in your guise.”
I looked back at Milton, who shrugged. “Let ‘em go,” he said. “I’m always up for a party, ‘specially someplace new. This one’s been pretty lame, so far.”
Then he smiled at me, so I smiled too—and from the very corner of my eye, I almost thought I saw Leaf smile, even through the skin of her amazing mask. She reached out one hand, and I took it. Into the woods we went, all three—but when November finally dawned, on the cold hill’s side, only one of us came back.
—
I remember waking up, on my back, covered with dew. I was cold, and my eyes hurt. I think I’d been crying.
I remember stumbling home, through the woods. Crawling back through the hedge, so clumsy I tore myself on its twigs.
I remember what Dad’s face looked like, when he opened the door and found me wavering there. My grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, face in her hands, her shoulders shaking.
Heather and Grace came to visit me in the hospital, two days later, and stood looking at me for a long minute, still hand in hand, like they’d never broken apart in the last seventy-two hours.
“We thought you’d be okay, is all,” Heather said, finally. “You guys. Because you knew her.”
“Uh huh,” I replied, voice slow and grating, through my swollen throat. “I...thought I did, yeah.”
“So what happened?” Grace asked. “To Milton?”
“...Don’t know.”
And after we’d all taken a few minutes to digest that: “Well,” she couldn’t quite stop herself from saying. “You know that’s your fault, right?”
(Right.)
Once I was well enough to travel, my Dad finally left Overdeere again, taking me with him. We moved first to God’s Lips, then Barrie (ironically enough), then Mississauga, then Toronto proper. I graduated high school there, made Ontario Scholar, got into U of T. My grandmother was dead by that time, of course; she left everything to Dad, who left it in turn to me, as I only discovered after he had a fatal heart attack earlier this year.
I majored in History, with a minor in Library Sciences that I parlayed into my own personal line of research. Eventually, I stumbled upon the Connaught Trust, where the records that had eluded me thus far are kept. Which is how, years on, I learned the
truth behind the Dourvale Shore’s legendary reputation—about those three bloodlines of Overdeere which supposedly trace themselves back to Scotland, to the fairies, each family’s lineage weaving back and forth and in and out of the others’ like worms through a dead dog’s heart: the Druirs of Stane Hill, lofty and secret, plus their descendants the Sidderstanes, who lend their name to the Cannery, and own most of overdeere proper. Not to mention the poorest of all their many poor relations, the Redcappies.
Though few of this latter clan have ever been seen in town, they did once own a set of houses in Dourvale in 1935, before the development collapsed, leaving the village untenanted and derelict. And this also happens to be when the youngest Redcappie family member was a nine-year-old girl named Duille, which—in Scots Gaelic—means “Leaf.”
Old, old, her voice sighs through my head sometimes, at night, when I’m alone. Old, I am, and so strange. Like beer brewed in an eggshell.
But that’s not the whole of it, not yet.
Roughly a year after that Hallowe’en, two hunters tracking a downed duck found the hairy tip of a werewolf mask’s ear poking up out of the sod on Stane Hill. Their dog began to whine and dig at it, and as they struggled to pull him away, one hunter felt rather than heard a faint, erratic knocking from beneath their feet. Ten minutes of frenzied excavation later, they broke through a blister in the earth and uncovered a thin, dirty boy in a hockey sweater, his mask’s orifices clogged with dirt. When he finally stopped crying and screaming, he told them his name was Milton Recamier, and that he thought he’d been trapped down there for a few days. Maybe a week.
The authorities said he must have fallen into a Hell Hole and been trapped underground, but Milton claimed he’d been stuck inside the Hill itself, breathing its rock like air. Unsurprisingly, he quickly ended up in a mental institution, where he stayed until he changed his tune.
When we were both sixteen, I was visiting friends in God’s Lips when he suddenly walked up to me on the street. He looked ragged, literally and figuratively, with a weird sort of eczema at his temples that I later realized might have been the result of electroshock therapy.
“She told me to give this to you, if I saw you again,” he said, handing me a package.
“Who?”
“Leaf.”
It was an old paper bag, opening folded and scotch-taped to create a seal, and by the time I’d unwrapped it, he was already too far away to call after him, even if I’d been capable. Instead, I just looked down, frozen, my chest hot and hollow. Because what it held was—a knot of ribbon.
Green.
Trimmed in silver foil.
The kind my mother was wearing, the day she left.
—
I’d help you if I could, Nuala. For that you’re my friend. My one.
My only.
—
So little of that night I recall, still, at all. Shreds and patches.
Inside Leaf ’s relatives’ house—the Hill?—it was bright (dark), and hot (cold), full of figures (yes) in costume (no), adults and children (maybe), men and women (likewise); I remember shouldering my way through a crowd of whirling, laughing, dancing creatures, humming along and toe-tapping to music I thought I recognized somehow, even though I was equally sure I’d never heard it before. Milton was spun off, whirling away through the darkness, borne on the riotous tide; Leaf clutched me close and let him go, pulling me past reams of food spread out on tables, glistening and delicious-smelling, a feast for the ages. (But: Don’t eat any, Nuala, not one bite, I felt her say, right into my ear’s hiddenmost whorls, so they vibrated secretly. It will do you no good, if you ever wish to leave here.)
Milton, in the distance, was cramming his face with both hands. He looked like he enjoyed it, at the time, and whenever I think about it now, I really hope he did.
“Have to sit down,” I told her, indistinctly, to which she shook her head: “Nay, but keep on, I pray—slack not, ‘tis only a little way further. We’re almost through.”
Pulling me on, on, ever on, past men with horns and girls with tails, faces with two mouths, faces with none. Eyes and teeth and glittering scales, leaves and vines and fruit blooming straight from skin, crowns of candles lit like marsh-flame, guttering in the darkness. Past the flap of wings and the brachiating leap of things high above, hurling themselves back and forth as though from branch to branch in some massive, invisible copse of trees.
And then, suddenly, in the very midst of it all—a dark young man, blue-eyed and handsome, emerged full-blown, coming towards us through the crowd. Leaf tried her best to avoid him, but he eddied forward, blooming up between us with his arms crossed, frowning down. And I saw (thought I saw) that when he blinked, his lids—long-lashed, luxuriant, shadow-touched at their rims, as though lined with kohl—shut the wrong way ‘round entirely: not from the top, down, but from the bottom, up.
“Cousin Saracen,” Leaf murmured, masked head suddenly hunched, as if she feared to be hit. And: “Leaf,” he said, his voice strongly Scots-burred, original template to her merest imitation, “what is’t ye’ve done, my poor, small fool? Tae bring this one here, tonight...”
“I thought to show her, only. only that.”
“Ye should not have, as well ye know.”
“Yet she’s blood, kin—Jess Nuttall’s boy’s girl. You remember, aye? And...my friend, also.”
“That’s no account of mine, girl. Ye know my mother’s views.”
“But—”
He waved her protest away. “Show her the whole truth, Leaf, then loose her tae go, while she still can. Bid her see straight what she half-glimpses already, and let that be an end on’t.”
“And what of her company?”
“Him? oh, he’s e’en now caught, mazed fast—our families must have their will of him, to work away his debt. No concern of either of ours, therefore—not like her.”
Leaf sighed. “I know it,” she said, softer still, almost into her neck.
And...first we were standing there, then we weren’t, swerved sidelong into some smaller chamber all filled with moss and apples, sticky-sweet and vaguely rot-stinking. By my foot, the pale flower of some woman’s hand reached up from further down, submerged below the wrist in the rocky floor, splayed fingers discoloured by decay.
“Don’t look there,” Leaf told me, raising my head by the chin, as my vision swam. “Here, Nuala, best of all friends. Look to me, only. Look to me.”
And her mouth opened, the mask’s mouth, wide and wider, wider still. ‘Til it seemed the entire top of her potato-pale skull might tip back, drop free and roll away, leaving her nothing but teeth and tongue, gaped open wetly to the world. Except...
...it wasn’t a mask, of course. At all. Just her, the real her, finally visible, without the lies. Without—
—“The glamour.”
I don’t know what I said. What noises I might have been making. Which is odd, because I know for sure that I could hear her—Leaf, bending in above me herself as her cousin watched, lowering herself so we were eye to eye once more, where I crouched gibbering on that half-rotten, hand-flowered floor. And saying, sadly, as she did:
“Tonight we guise no more, for ‘tis the time of it—this one night of all the year, when we may walk abroad unremarked-on, wearing our own faces in jest as we cannot, any other time, or risk a broken covenant. And I did so want you to see me true, if only for the once.”
I gaped, and she sighed, and her cousin reached out a six-fingered hand to my shoulder, pushing me out through the Hill’s wall. I saw the roots and stones rush by me, through me, sifting my very atoms, resistlessly as rain. And then it was dawn, the cold light of day, and I was lying staring up into the sky, my spine hurting, every bone in my body lit up with what seemed like one single, awful ache.
They still ache like that, sometimes, even now. That’s when I know I’m seeing something I should probably pay attention to.
—
Here are some things I believe, now, though I have little or
no proof for them:
My mother is probably the tree they found her purse in, hands upflung into pleading branches like Daphne, with bark growing over every part of her. or maybe she’s a stone instead, standing frozen somewhere on Dourvale’s streets, with only the sun crawling across her skin to tell her time is passing. Maybe she’s buried in Stane Hill, same as Milton once was, except further down. One way or the other, I don’t expect to find her alive. I don’t expect to find her, not even if I was to finally start looking.
At Stane Hill, the Druirs’ seat, Leaf touched me to get me in, not that she probably needed to, and I touched Milton to get him in, not knowing he wouldn’t be able to leave without me ‘til he’d worked off the food he took. Blood opens the door, you see—both ways, probably.
The older I get, the more I watch Leaf ’s cousin surface in me—handsome Saracen with his poison-blue eyes, eternally young and unspeakably old, who once carved his name on a table to impress my grandmother, back when she was still sweet young Jess Nuttall. I sit in my apartment with my part-fairy bones aching, off and on, longing for my great-grandfather’s hedgerow, the hole beneath and the woods beyond. It’s my inheritance, after all.
We have the stink of human on us, we quarterlings, too much so for the eldest of our blood to ever find us sweet, Leaf ’s voice whispers to me sometimes, late at night, whether I’m dreaming or awake. The hills will not open for us; the rings are closed forever. Who can we turn to, therefore, except each other? Which is why no one will ever be coming for you but me, Nuala, just as no one will ever be coming for me, in the end, but...probably, possibly, if I only wait long enough...
(Oh, how I hope, my dearest, my only friend. oh, how I pray.)
...you.
I know myself, you see, at last. I’m no monster; not that Leaf was one either, not entirely. But in one particular, I agree with her completely: this Iron World hurts me, and I’m tired of guising. I want to take off my false face and see the one beneath, maybe the same one I used to draw, over and over: wrinkled like a nut, peeled like birch. And one day soon...