Modern Faerie Tales Read online

  “Can you please open your window?” she asked. “I can’t breathe.”

  “What’s wrong with yours?”

  She crouched on the edge of the seat and reached her hands into the front of the car, palms up like a supplicant. “Every time I touch the handle, it burns. Look.” She held her hand out to him, so he could see that part of it was flushed. Her fingers wiggled. “That’s from the door handle.”

  “Shit.” Corny sucked in a breath. Then he rolled down his window.

  The salt in the air cleaned her throat with each lungful from the open window, but it wasn’t enough to battle the rising nausea. “I have to get out of this car.”

  “We’re almost there.” Corny stopped at a red light.

  Corny parked the car outside the big building. The overcast sky made the outside of the building look even dingier.

  “Are you okay?” Corny asked, and turned his head to see her in the backseat.

  Kaye shook her head. She was going to vomit, right there, right on top of the empty soda cans and mashed fast-food boxes. She put her hand in the pocket of the sweatshirt and opened the door.

  “Kaye!”

  She half fell, half crawled onto the asphalt of the parking lot and dragged herself to the edge of the grass before throwing up. There was little in her stomach, and most of what she coughed up was stomach acid and spit.

  “Jesus!” Corny crouched down next to her.

  “I’m okay,” Kaye said, rising dizzily to her feet. “It’s all the metal.”

  He nodded, glancing back at the car and then looking around skeptically. “Maybe we should forget about this.”

  Kaye took a deep breath. “No. Come on.”

  She ran around the back, following the path she had walked with Janet. “Give me your jacket,” she said. “There’s glass.”

  Everything was different in daylight.

  Up the stairs and there it was, dingier now that she got a good look at it, but still beautiful. The cream of its flanks was closer to brown, and the gilt trim was mostly rubbed off. Its lips were carved in what she thought was a slight sneer, and Kaye grinned to see it.

  Together, they dragged the horse over the floor toward the stairs. Corny went first, taking the weight of it as they eased it down step after step. It barely fit.

  Downstairs, Kaye climbed out through the window as Corny pushed the carousel horse through.

  Outside, Corny started to panic. There was no way it was going to fit in the back of the car. Worse, the trunk was filled with boxes of used books and oddball tools.

  “Someone is going to see us!” he said.

  “We’ve got to find a way to tie it to the roof.”

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Corny dug around in the trunk of the car and came up with a single bungee cord, two plastic bags, and some twine.

  “That string is very thin,” Kaye said skeptically.

  Corny twisted it around the wooden creature’s neck and body and then through the inside of the car. “Get on the other side. Hurry.”

  He tossed her the twine, and she looped it over the horse and threw it back to him. Corny knotted it.

  “Okay. Good enough. We gotta go.”

  Corny hopped in on his side, and Kaye walked around and got in, wrapping Corny’s jacket around her hand to close the door. He took off, stepping on the pedal so hard that the tires screeched as they pulled out.

  Kaye was sure that a cop was going to pull up behind them or that the horse was going to fly off onto the road and hit another car. But they got back in one piece.

  Pulling over, they hauled the merry-go-round horse down into the forest and to the stream.

  “That thing better like this. I’m going to have splinters for a week,” Corny complained.

  “It will.”

  “And I’m going to have to pop the hood of the car back up in the center.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m just saying. That thing better like it.”

  “It will,” Kaye repeated

  They set the legless horse down on the muddy bank, angling it so that it sat relatively upright without their holding it. Kaye looked around for another leaf, and Corny took the knife out of his pocket without being asked.

  “ ’S okay. I’m just going to pick the scab.”

  He made a face but didn’t say anything.

  “Kelpie,” Kaye said, dropping the leaf into the water, “I have something I think you might like.”

  The horse rose up from the deep and stared at the broken merry-go-round horse with its luminescent, inhuman eyes.

  Whinnying, it clopped up onto the shore. “It has no legs,” the kelpie said.

  “It’s beautiful anyway,” Kaye said.

  The kelpie circled the wooden thing, snuffling appraisingly. “More, I think. Crippled things are always more beautiful. It’s the flaw that brings out beauty.”

  Kaye grinned. She’d done it. She’d actually done it. “So you’ll teach me?”

  The creature looked at Kaye and shifted, and where it had been now stood a young man, nude and still dripping, hair tangled with rushes. It looked from Kaye to Corny. “She, I will teach, but you must make it worth my while if you want me to teach you too. Come and sit near me.”

  “Nothing’s worth that,” Kaye said.

  The kelpie-man smiled, but his eyes were on Corny as he traced a pattern on his chest. Corny’s breathing went shallow.

  “No,” Corny said, so softly that it was hard to hear his voice.

  Then the creature transformed again, sinuous energy coiling until Kaye was looking at herself.

  “Are you ready to begin then?” the kelpie said in Kaye’s voice with Kaye’s mouth. And then the smile, not at all Kaye’s, curled slyly. “I have much to teach you. And the boy would do well to listen. Magic is not the sole province of the fey.”

  “I thought you said he had to make it worth your while.”

  “His fear is worth something, for now. I am allowed so little.” The kelpie looked at her with her own black eyes, and she watched those lips, so like her own, whisper, “So long since I have known what it was to hunt.”

  “How come?” Kaye asked, despite herself.

  “We, who are not the rulers, we must obey those that are. Mortals are a treat for the Gentry, and not for the likes of you and me. Unless, of course, they are willing.”

  Kaye nodded, pondering that.

  “Do you know how it feels to build magical energy?” the kelpie asked. “It is a prickling feeling. Cup your hand and concentrate on building the energy in it. What does it feel like?”

  Kaye cupped her hand and imagined the air in her hand thickening and shimmering with energy. After a moment, she looked up in surprise. “It feels like when your hand falls asleep and then you move it. Prickly, like you said, like little shocks of energy shooting through it. It hurts a little.”

  “Move it back and forth between your hands. There you feel magic in its raw state, ready to become whatever you want it to be.”

  Kaye nodded, cradling the energy that was like a handful of nettles, letting some of it trickle through her open fingers. It was a feeling she remembered, sometimes coiling in her gut or pricking over her lips before some strange thing happened.

  “Now, how did you accomplish raising the energy? What did you do?”

  Kaye shook her head slightly. “I don’t know . . . I just pictured it and stared at my hand.”

  “You pictured it. That is the easiest of the senses. Now you must learn to hear it, to smell it, to taste it. Only then will your magic become real. And be careful; sometimes a simple glamour can be seen through out of the corner of another’s eye.” The creature winked.

  Kaye nodded.

  “When you do magic, there are two stages: focus and surrender. Surrender is the part that so many do not understand.

  “To do magic, you must focus on what it is you want to do, then let go of the energy and trust it to do your bidding.

  “Close your eyes. Now picture
the energy surrounding you. Imagine, for example, a ring on one of your fingers. Add detail to it. Imagine the gold of the band, then imagine the gem, its color, its clarity, how it will reflect the light . . . that’s right. Exactly like that.”

  Her eyes fluttered open as Corny gasped. “Kaye! There really is a ring. A real, imaginary ring. I can see it.”

  Kaye opened her eyes, and there it was, on her index finger, just as she had imagined it, the silver carved into the shape of a girl and the glittering emerald set in her open mouth. She turned it against the light, but even knowing that she had magicked it into being, the ring was as solid as a stone.

  “What about undoing . . . things?” Kaye asked.

  The kelpie threw back its head and laughed, white teeth shining even in the gloom. “What have you done?”

  “Enchanted someone to . . . like me,” Kaye said, in a low voice. Corny looked at her, surprised and a little annoyed. He couldn’t be happy that there was another part of the story she’d left out.

  The kelpie grinned and clucked its tongue. “You must remove the enchantment on him in the same way that you would take off a glamour. Feel the web of your magic, reach out and tear it. Practice with the ring.”

  Kaye concentrated, letting the energy swirl around her, feeling it run through her. It seemed to ebb and flow with each beat of her heart.

  They were driving back when Kaye pointed to the hill. “Look at those lights. Wonder who’s up there.”

  “I don’t see anything.” He looked at her sharply in the rearview mirror. “You’re seeing magical lights?”

  Cemetery Hill had a steep incline on the side that faced the highway. That side had neither graves nor tombs, and in the winter kids would blithely go sledding, piling spare mittens and scarves on the monuments. An abandoned, half-built mausoleum stood on the other side. With two levels but no roof, the top was overgrown with smallish trees and vines. There were dozens upon dozens of monuments, tombs, and gravestones erected around it. Small glowing lights seemed to dart through the air.

  “Think that’s where the Unseelie Court is?” she asked softly, thinking of the way Lutie-loo had described it.

  “Let’s check it out.”

  He drove into the graveyard.

  They parked along the tumbled-stone path. She stared through the rear windshield at the darting lights as she waited for Corny to walk around and open her door.

  “Those are definitely faeries,” Kaye said.

  “I can’t see anything.” There was an edge of panic in Corny’s voice.

  Kaye followed the lights, saw them dazzle and turn, keeping just enough ahead of her that she could not see them clearly. She sped up her pace. They were so close she could just snatch one out of the air. . . .

  “Kaye!” Corny called, and she turned. “Don’t fucking leave me behind.”

  “I’m not leaving you! I’m trying to catch one of these things.”

  Suddenly there was an impossible explosion of fireflies, darting in and out of the trees. It must be well past midnight and too late in the season for fireflies anyway, the chill of autumn and recent rain stiffening the grass beneath their feet with frost. But the insects darted around them, each blinking for a long moment, then gone, then blinking again. Then she looked at them carefully. They were little winged creatures, even smaller than those she had snatched at. One flitted close to her and showed its teeth.

  Kaye made a shrill sound.

  “What?” Corny said.

  “Not bugs . . . they’re tiny, nasty faeries.”

  He dropped Kaye’s hand and snatched out blindly. It darted away. “I can’t see anything. Are those the things . . . what you saw from the road?”

  She shook her head. “No. Those lights were bigger.”

  He squatted down, his breath rising from his lips in puffs of white vapor. “Can you see them now?”

  She shook her head. “Lutie said something about the opening to the Unseelie Court being in a brown patch of grass, but practically the whole hill is covered with brown grass.”

  “Maybe the patch is bare by now.”

  Kaye knelt down next to Corny and cupped her ear to the ground. There was faint music. “Listen. You can hear it.”

  He moved to her side and pressed his ear to the ground as well. “Music,” he said. “Sounds like pipes.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, the smile on her face before she remembered that this was not a good place they were trying to enter.

  “Let’s walk a circuit around the hill. We’ll both look for any patch that seems weird.” Corny stretched from his squat and waited for her to start walking.

  The graveyard was unnaturally quiet. The moon was, if anything, fuller and fatter than it had been when she last saw it. It seemed unnatural; the thing looked bloated in the sky, and she thought again about the sun bleeding to death while the moon grew tumescent with devoured light.

  The newer, granite gravestones were all polished to an unnatural mirror shine that reflected her and Corny as they passed. The older markers were a pale, milky marble, grass stains and dirt washed out by the moonlight. Pale as Roiben’s hair.

  “Hey, what about that?” Corny pointed to a patch of grass that did seem a different shade of brown.

  Kneeling down beside it, Corny pulled back a corner as though it were the flap of a sod tent. Corny leaned in.

  “I should go in there alone.”

  “You said you wouldn’t leave me behind,” Corny reminded her.

  “It’s probably not safe for me to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Kaye shimmied into the entrance. “I promise.”

  The music seemed louder now, pipes and laughter swelling in the quiet night. Kaye heard Corny say “You said you wouldn’t leave me” as she followed the song inside.

  7

  Listening to the prisoned cricket

  Shake its terrible dissembling

  Music in the granite hill

  —LOUISE BOGAN, “MEN LOVED WHOLLY BEYOND WISDOM”

  She slipped inside the hollow hill.

  The air itself seemed thick with sweetness, and breathing was disorienting.

  Long, low tables were heaped with golden pears, chestnuts, bowls of bread soaking in buttery milk, pomegranates ripped in half and half again, violet petals on crystal plates, and all manner of strange delicacies. Wide silver goblets sat like toads on the tables, upright and overturned in equal proportion. Scarlet-clad faerie ladies brushed past men in torn rags, and courtiers danced with crones.

  Revelers cavorted and sang, drank and swooned. The costumes were varied and completely unlike medieval clothes. They were more like some demented, organic couture. Collars rose like great fins. Outfits were composed entirely of petals or leaves. Ragged edges finished off lovely dresses. Ugly, strange, or lovely as the moon, none were plain.

  “The Unseelie Court,” she said aloud. She had expected something else, a cave, maybe, filled with gnawed human bones and faerie prisoners. Something simple. Looking out into the throng of revelers, she didn’t know what to think.

  The room itself was massive, so large that she wasn’t sure what was on the other side. What looked like a giant slouched near a dais. Each step seemed to push her in a new direction, full of splendors. A fiddler was playing an improbable instrument, with several necks and so many strings that he sawed his bow at them wildly. A long-nosed woman with freckles and ears like a jackal’s juggled pinecones. Three men with red hair and double rows of shark teeth dipped their caps in a pile of carnage, soaking up the blood. A huge creature with bat wings and limbs like stilts sat atop a table and lapped at a beaten copper bowl of cream. It hissed at Kaye as she passed it.

  Above them all, the domed ceiling was frescoed with dangling roots.

  Kaye picked up a goblet off a table. It was ornate and very heavy, but it seemed clean. She poured a thin, reddish liquid from the silver carafe in the center of the table. Small seeds floated at the top, but the drink smelled pleasant and not entirely strange, so
she took a swallow. It was both sweet and bitter and went to her head so that, for a moment, she was obliged to hold the table for support.

  She took a silvery apple from a pile of strange, thorny fruit, turned it over in her hand, and gingerly bit into it. It was crimson on the inside and tasted like watery honey. It was so good that she ate it core and all, till she was licking her hand for juice. The next was brown and rotten-looking as she bit into it, but the meat, though gritty, tasted of a fiery and sweet liquor.

  She felt an infectious giddiness come over her. Here, nothing she did was strange. She could twirl and dance and sing.

  All at once she was aware of how far into the crowd she had gone. She had been turned around so many times she no longer even knew which direction was the way back.

  She deliberately tried to retrace her steps. Three woman walked past her, silver gowns trailing like fine mist. The low cut of the identical dresses showed off the women’s hollow backs. She looked again, but their concave backs were as smooth and empty as bowls. She forced herself to keep moving. A short man—a dwarf?—with intricate silver bracelets and shoulder-length black curls leered at her as he bit into an apricot.

  Every moment became more unreal.

  A winged boy skipped up to her, grinning. “You smell like iron,” he said, and reached out a finger to poke her side.

  Kaye scuttled away from his hand to a chorus of laughter. Her eyes focused on the pale grasshopper green of the insect wings attached to the boy’s back.

  She pushed through the crowd, weaving past dancers leaping in complex intertwining circles, past a clawed hand that snatched at her ankle from beneath the heavy scarlet cloth on one of the tables, past what looked like a debauched living chess game.

  A satyr with a curly beard and ivory horns was hunched over, carefully ripping the wing off a small faerie trapped in his meaty fist. The thing screeched, beating its other wing hummingbird-swift against the fingers that held it. Pale green blood dribbled over the goat-man’s hand. Kaye stopped, stunned and sickened to watch as the satyr tossed the little creature in the air. It flew in desperate circles, spiraling to the earthen floor.