Calvaria Fell, page 16
“Just in time for the show!”
“What show?” Accepts the bottle as it’s thrust her way. Takes a small sip, knowing Kash is watching.
More people bump and jostle across the chill stone surface, squeezing into available spaces, cheering loudly at spectacular explosions, none of which seem to be doing actual damage.
“Budge up, gorgeous!”
She moves out of instinct. The speaker grins, flicks his gaze to one of the others. “Oh my god, what are the Eadies packing this time?”
“Couple of Pukguksong-2s” replies someone further along, binoculars pressed tight.
“Get outta town—where they gonna go scoring valuable antiques like—”
“Shit, will you look at them fly!”
Sky explodes in a flurry of electric rainbows; jagged stabs and sparkling arcs smudged and streaked across the bruised and clouded haze.
“Can’t smash the force shields,” explains Kash, “but doesn’t stop them trying.”
A million questions, but now is not the time. Pearl waits, stealing glances. Familiar forms and faces, but many she swears she’s never seen before in Calvaria’s Grande Parade. The grounds must be larger than she thought.
The overhead war reaches its peak, fracturing into harmless fireworks. Spectators bump and shift. Kash nudges and a new boy squeezes between them. Can’t make out his face beneath the hoodie until a lemony starburst splatterpaints the sky.
“Skink,” says Kash, “meet my sister Pearl.”
Skink nods.
She nods back, trying not to gawk at his lizard skin, all rough and ridged, like bark. Large bright orange circles around his eyes. No nose, no ears.
“We’re enemies,” Skink says with a voice as gravelly as his skin. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
Kash laughs and pulls a spliff out of his jacket pocket. “Lotta folks not supposed to be where they wash up,” he says, lighting the tip with the battered zippo she recalls him trading from a Somali deckhand—one of the dozen or so times his intuition saved their lives in transit.
“What—you’re from another garden?”
Skink nods as he takes the spliff, puffs upon it with thin lizard lips. “And we’re totally whupping your arses with superior ordnance,” he says.
Kash laughs. “In your cold-blooded dreams my horny bro . . .”
Pearl frowns. “You’re hiding in Calvaria? Are there others?”
Skink’s reptilian eyes swivel toward Kash, then back to Pearl.
“Kash already asked me. Sorry, but I’ve not seen your friend.”
Undeterred, Pearl pulls the locket from her pocket, dangles it up close for Skink to see. “Found this pinned to—”
Skink wraps his bobbly fingers around the trinket, tucks it back inside her pocket in one swift, fluid motion. “Best be keeping it to yourself. Never know who’s watching.”
She leans in closer. “Tell me about that wall. The one with all the old stuff stuck all over it.”
Kash presses his thigh against Skink’s. “Come on, bro,” he says softly. “What’s the big secret? What do we need to watch out for?”
Skink clears his throat with a muffled croak. “Wall’s a memorial to the ones who disappear.”
“Disappear?” say the twins in unison.
“Those Manor House children,” Skink says, uncomfortably. “Thing is,” he adds, “they’re not children. Not really. They’re development delayed.”
The twins fall silent, so Skink continues. “As in, the parents pay for special treatments to suppress aging and maturation.”
A point-eared faery barges in, hijacking the conversation. “Ain’t right nor natural, for certain.” She waves her silken arm in a sweeping gesture. “Ain’t none of what we’re doing here true natural, of course, the difference being how you and me what works here, we sign up for what we get. Professionals is what we are.”
She jabs Skink with a bony finger. “We’re earning decent livings, whereas those overcooked little richling brats, they don’t get a say in nothing, sometimes till they’re way up in their thirties. Forties even if you believe the stories—not that I do. Not all of ’em. Some says parents want to keep ’em cute and small and safe from all the harms of Earth.”
The faery shuffles closer, fixes her birdlike eyes on Pearl. “Forty years—just imagine—stuck in a body looks like ten, dressed up like a doll and likewise treated—so what if they’ll be kicking on a couple extra centuries, that’s no way to treat a human being. And it makes them mean and sharp and cruel way more than brats of a natural kind. Take my word for it, you wanna keep your distance!”
A hush falls over the gathering. They’ve all heard this story before, thinks Pearl. So why has no one thought to mention it?
“Where do the children take the disappeared?”
“Into the Manor House,” calls a solid voice from further along the wall.
“Stay out of the mazes,” says another. “Sometimes there’s traps. Sometimes there’s hunting parties.”
Pearl recalls the faces staring out from the high windows. The ones who never smile back when she waves.
“Don’t get taken,” says Skink, swigging from his near empty hip flask. “Your Madame’s crafty, but her clout only extends throughout Calvaria. Beyond the hedges, you’re in no-man’s-land.”
Murmuring and muttering. Seems everyone has a story.
“What about the druid?” says Pearl. “He goes wandering everywhere. I’ve seen him.”
“That mad old druid’s been here longer than anyone,” says Skink. “Longer than the Madame before your Madame. Story says the children kept him prisoner in a cage for twenty years. Cut up his brain and let him go, eventually, so the goblins reckon. Not sure if it’s true or not. All the goblins here are full of shit.”
—
Next Grande Parade performance is thick with cucumber-nosed trolls, their tails long, hair lank and filthy, jewel boxes clutched against their chests. A brace of uldras riding Labradors and naked laumes tangled up in weaving. A Welsh hag faery and a couple of water nymphs, skin drying in the blousy breeze.
Pearl clocks other creatures embedded in the motion. Things she’s certain are not listed in The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography.
When the parade is done, Kash drags her aside. “Wanna see something amazing? He drags her across a lawn and then another, over the gently rolling hillock to a point under a shady tree offering a good, clear view of the Manor House’s west aspect. Large white framed windows look over the grounds of the estate.
“I’m not going closer,” Pearl says. “Not after what Skink told us.”
“Relax—you don’t have to move from this spot.” He unshoulders the brass telescope he’s been sporting lately, slung beside his decorative pouch of herbs and jeweled curved blade. Yanks it to its full length and aims it at the windows. “Third one along. Hang on, I need to adjust the focal length.”
She shifts uneasily. “I don’t like this. We shouldn’t be spying—”
“There he is!” exclaims Kash. “Looking out.” He lowers the telescope and passes it across. “See for yourself.”
She takes the brass contraption from his hand and aims.
“I can’t see . . . no, wait . . . Oh my god!”
She freezes, staring. Finally, she lowers the telescope. “That’s Finney.”
Kash grins. “Sure is.”
“But it can’t be.”
“Why can’t it be—he’s standing right there!”
“But he would have sent for us.”
“Pearl, we were homeless. How were messages supposed to find us?”
She presses the telescope against his chest. “We need to stand where he can see us.”
He slings it across his shoulder. “What we need is get inside the house.”
“No!”
He points to the window. “Finney’s alive and now it’s us who’s got to get him a message.”
Pearl stares at the big white window until horns sound for afternoon dance rehearsal.
—
The radio room, as Pearl has come to call the druid’s grotto, has a chill to it a few degrees below the garden’s shady understories. A cold and musty, forgotten corner filled with faded, half-grasped memories.
The druid’s seated, back facing the door, surrounding air humming with blends of electricity and white noise. Sound as undercoat for other messages. Formless, timeless whisperings searching for somewhere safe to settle.
He hums along to the song he’s sending out into the ether. One she’s heard so many times about the summer-land of bliss. About the land beyond where there’s no night. Songs luring innocents from land onto the Risen Sea, most never to be heard from again.
“You’ve got no right,” she says loudly.
He doesn’t respond so she shakes him by the shoulder.
The druid ignores her, focused on his broadcast, mouthing words soundlessly.
“Tell me how to get inside the Manor House. My friend Finney’s in there. Do you know him?”
The druid says nothing.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
Tired old wheels screech in protest as she wrenches the chair around. The druid gazes up with pale rheumy eyes. His lips still moving, thick tears streaking down sallow cheeks.
Pearl stares back at the old broken man, his robes filthy, hems blackened with soil. She groans and shoves the chair away. The druid sits for a while, staring at nothing.
Eventually, he staggers to his feet and ambles off into twilight, stumbling and unsteady. Shuffling through his nightly rounds with Pearl keeping a wary distance, wondering who else might be watching.
Temperature abruptly drops. Looking up, nothing to see but oppressive hedgerows neatly clipped. The druid’s song gets fainter. She hurries to keep pace. Too easy to get lost in the sea of mazes bleeding into other mazes with patterns only discernible from high. Which has to be the point, but it’s too late now, she’s made her choice, that druid’s going to help her, like it or not.
A blast of icy wind stirs up swirls of browned and yellowed leaves. Skies contaminated with the purplish bruise of Calvaria’s defensive shield. Hedgerows replaced with a stretch of open garden. Sleeping lions and blank-faced statues.
No sign of the druid, but ahead at fifty paces stands a sturdy slab of vine encrusted Manor House wall. Antique stone, solid and unmoving, a relic of the old slow years before technology swelled and surged and broke the world. Vines probably older than she is, growing strong. She’s climbing hand over hand as the sky explodes with the now familiar phantasmagoria of pyrotechnic frenzy. To have so much and even think about destroying it. Pretend warfare, intentional developmental delay. For what? The tarnished, rotting ruins of a gilded cage? The face of a boy half turned into a lizard?
The higher she climbs, the colder the wind snatching at her flimsy faery threads. Flinching at detonations—everything in this confection of illusions feels so real. Are the vines bearing her weight synthetic? Thoughts vanish as the marble balustrade is within reach. She clings tightly until the sun-bright fireworks disintegrate, then clambers up and over the side before the next one blooms. Crouches on the cold stone, gargoyle still, in case anyone is watching.
Dusty stone littered with lost leaves. Rusty window locks choked with age. She crawls up close, steals a peek through grimy glass. Inside, a vast and empty room. Shadow-brown furniture. Leaden chandeliers.
The stiff, jammed handle eventually turns. Wood shudders against her shoulder, then she slips inside. Musty scents enveloping; antique woods no longer growing wild. Darkness fading as her eyes adjust. Dusty drapes have her itching to sneeze. She buries her face in her elbow till it passes. Heavy furniture. A piano. Paintings of people in frilly cuffs and ridiculous ballooning skirts.
Pearl moves away from the window and kaleidoscopic skies. This room is only half a room. A half-partitioned doorway beckons.
Treading softly—used to stealth, having crept across a thousand floors in search of life-sustaining morsels. Only from those with a bit to spare. The kinds of lies she’s had to tell herself.
But this is different. She’s not stealing. Pearl’s reclaiming moments and memories stolen from her and Kash and millions like them.
Through the half-partition, another lighter room with grander windows. More detail in the painted lords and ladies, floral patterned rugs and carved armrests.
Starbursts filtering through glass: burnt umber, ochre and sienna revealing a silhouette of charcoal deep. A man in a jacket with his back to her. It’s him for certain. She doesn’t even need to see his face.
“Finney.”
Soft, but loud enough.
He tilts his head. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Finney! I knew it was you! It’s Pearl. Kash made it too. Come on—we can find a place to hide you in Calvaria!”
Glassed skies beyond him shiver with kinetic luminosity. “Too late,” he says.
“Nonsense—let me help you. Come on!”
Finney turns, takes a few steps, his movement accompanied by a peculiar sound. Familiar, but out of context. She can’t place it.
The fiery sky begins to ebb and fade. As he moves into a dusty shard of light, her breath sticks in her throat. Finney is only human from the waist up, his torso grafted onto the body of an animal, perhaps a goat or miniature horse. Hooves clopping on bare floorboards. His back fitted with a child-sized saddle.
“You never should have come here,” Finney says as a final missile scars the smoke-stained sky.
—
When Madame talks, everybody stops to listen. That’s the law in Calvaria’s magnificent faery kingdom because Madame is the one who gets things done. The one who connects the dots and mends the bridges when mistakes are made—and they so often are. Calvaria Estate is more complicated than it looks.
She wears a grim expression, but her eyes are flushed with kindness. News of trespass and apprehension travels fast within closed wall estates. A throng of Grande Parade regulars are gathered to learn what will happen to the twins.
“Those wicked, wicked little children,” Madame says. “Should have introduced you properly to Marlene when you arrived. Things might have gone a different way.” She sniffs. “Poor girl was a faery too—and a pretty little thing—but we had to have her overhauled. Did the best we could with what the children left, but the limitations, as you can see.”
Sidestepping and rustling as the crowd disgorges Marlene: a sluglike creature with a human face and caterpillar hands, shuffling forward, cherry lips pressed together in a thin line of disapproval.
“What’s done is done,” Madame continues, “and there’s no going back from it. No use crying over spilt milk. I’ve never been one for saying ‘I told you so.’ The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography is supposed to be a closed book, but a promise is a promise, and I will never go against my word. You two will get a page in the next edition.”
At Madame’s feet, a plaid blanket conceals a quivering shape.
“On the bright side, your contracts hold up watertight. This is your home now, like I promised. You will never leave and—as requested—you two will never be separated.”
She nods at a hairy hobgoblin, who bends to snatch the blanket away. The crowd gasps at what lies underneath.
“Although,” Madame adds, “I’m not sure what we should call you. Kashpearl? Pearlkash? Neither sounds quite right. Happy for you darlings to come up with a new name for the register. The goblin builders are hard at work on Peapod Cottage as we speak, combining your two bedrooms into one.”
The double-headed creature thrashes, not yet possessing full bodily control. The crowd shuffles back to give it room
“You have my word, I’ll never sell you on to Prince Balthazar’s Menagerie of Oriental Curiosity and Wonder, or Mammadou Wynae’s Carnivale of Biological Rarities.”
Madame seems very pleased with herself until the creature lets loose an ear shattering howl, its voices different timbres and out of synch, yet achieving powerful volume.
“Back to work then, my faery treasures. Word from the house is the Nobs are expecting new choreography for a victory dance!”
When the last of the baby trolls has shuffled off and the nixies have swept leaf litter from the floor, Madame hitches her trailing skirts, mind already distracted by other things.
She pauses to inspect a white robed shape slouched against a drystone wall. “What is this dreadful mannequin doing here? Pumpkin? Nettle? Have a couple of boggles come and clean this mess away immediately. Those dreadful brats abandoning their broken toys all over my nice, neat gardens.”
Madame steps over a gnarled staff attached to a pale arm sticking out of a pile of dirty linens, hems thickly encrusted with mud. A headless torso, the neck stump dense with coils and springs and tatty fiber-optic cable.
Behind a low hedge, a boggle squeals, holding high his prize—a druid’s head, features expressionless, glass eyes aimed at the blue dome sky.
Note: Lyrics quoted from Many Mansions Up There by R.F. Lehman, Public Domain
Air, Water and the Grove
Kaaron Warren
We’ve got food for seven days. Water for twelve. Because sometimes the Saturnalia doesn’t end when it should. It’s hard for people to settle, after. Mid-slash, mid-fuck, mid-theft. Do you just stop, then carry on with your suburban life? Leave things half done? Most people prefer to see it through. Take the extra hour or two. Chase away the doldrums for a bit longer.
We’ve stocked up on hydrogen peroxide and oxalic acid. There are going to be a lot of bloodstains and they’ll be coming in after with their bundles of clothes, “Oh, I had an accident,” is a good one. Or “I was helping an injured person,” is another, not one of them wanting to admit what they’ve been a part of.
“What show?” Accepts the bottle as it’s thrust her way. Takes a small sip, knowing Kash is watching.
More people bump and jostle across the chill stone surface, squeezing into available spaces, cheering loudly at spectacular explosions, none of which seem to be doing actual damage.
“Budge up, gorgeous!”
She moves out of instinct. The speaker grins, flicks his gaze to one of the others. “Oh my god, what are the Eadies packing this time?”
“Couple of Pukguksong-2s” replies someone further along, binoculars pressed tight.
“Get outta town—where they gonna go scoring valuable antiques like—”
“Shit, will you look at them fly!”
Sky explodes in a flurry of electric rainbows; jagged stabs and sparkling arcs smudged and streaked across the bruised and clouded haze.
“Can’t smash the force shields,” explains Kash, “but doesn’t stop them trying.”
A million questions, but now is not the time. Pearl waits, stealing glances. Familiar forms and faces, but many she swears she’s never seen before in Calvaria’s Grande Parade. The grounds must be larger than she thought.
The overhead war reaches its peak, fracturing into harmless fireworks. Spectators bump and shift. Kash nudges and a new boy squeezes between them. Can’t make out his face beneath the hoodie until a lemony starburst splatterpaints the sky.
“Skink,” says Kash, “meet my sister Pearl.”
Skink nods.
She nods back, trying not to gawk at his lizard skin, all rough and ridged, like bark. Large bright orange circles around his eyes. No nose, no ears.
“We’re enemies,” Skink says with a voice as gravelly as his skin. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
Kash laughs and pulls a spliff out of his jacket pocket. “Lotta folks not supposed to be where they wash up,” he says, lighting the tip with the battered zippo she recalls him trading from a Somali deckhand—one of the dozen or so times his intuition saved their lives in transit.
“What—you’re from another garden?”
Skink nods as he takes the spliff, puffs upon it with thin lizard lips. “And we’re totally whupping your arses with superior ordnance,” he says.
Kash laughs. “In your cold-blooded dreams my horny bro . . .”
Pearl frowns. “You’re hiding in Calvaria? Are there others?”
Skink’s reptilian eyes swivel toward Kash, then back to Pearl.
“Kash already asked me. Sorry, but I’ve not seen your friend.”
Undeterred, Pearl pulls the locket from her pocket, dangles it up close for Skink to see. “Found this pinned to—”
Skink wraps his bobbly fingers around the trinket, tucks it back inside her pocket in one swift, fluid motion. “Best be keeping it to yourself. Never know who’s watching.”
She leans in closer. “Tell me about that wall. The one with all the old stuff stuck all over it.”
Kash presses his thigh against Skink’s. “Come on, bro,” he says softly. “What’s the big secret? What do we need to watch out for?”
Skink clears his throat with a muffled croak. “Wall’s a memorial to the ones who disappear.”
“Disappear?” say the twins in unison.
“Those Manor House children,” Skink says, uncomfortably. “Thing is,” he adds, “they’re not children. Not really. They’re development delayed.”
The twins fall silent, so Skink continues. “As in, the parents pay for special treatments to suppress aging and maturation.”
A point-eared faery barges in, hijacking the conversation. “Ain’t right nor natural, for certain.” She waves her silken arm in a sweeping gesture. “Ain’t none of what we’re doing here true natural, of course, the difference being how you and me what works here, we sign up for what we get. Professionals is what we are.”
She jabs Skink with a bony finger. “We’re earning decent livings, whereas those overcooked little richling brats, they don’t get a say in nothing, sometimes till they’re way up in their thirties. Forties even if you believe the stories—not that I do. Not all of ’em. Some says parents want to keep ’em cute and small and safe from all the harms of Earth.”
The faery shuffles closer, fixes her birdlike eyes on Pearl. “Forty years—just imagine—stuck in a body looks like ten, dressed up like a doll and likewise treated—so what if they’ll be kicking on a couple extra centuries, that’s no way to treat a human being. And it makes them mean and sharp and cruel way more than brats of a natural kind. Take my word for it, you wanna keep your distance!”
A hush falls over the gathering. They’ve all heard this story before, thinks Pearl. So why has no one thought to mention it?
“Where do the children take the disappeared?”
“Into the Manor House,” calls a solid voice from further along the wall.
“Stay out of the mazes,” says another. “Sometimes there’s traps. Sometimes there’s hunting parties.”
Pearl recalls the faces staring out from the high windows. The ones who never smile back when she waves.
“Don’t get taken,” says Skink, swigging from his near empty hip flask. “Your Madame’s crafty, but her clout only extends throughout Calvaria. Beyond the hedges, you’re in no-man’s-land.”
Murmuring and muttering. Seems everyone has a story.
“What about the druid?” says Pearl. “He goes wandering everywhere. I’ve seen him.”
“That mad old druid’s been here longer than anyone,” says Skink. “Longer than the Madame before your Madame. Story says the children kept him prisoner in a cage for twenty years. Cut up his brain and let him go, eventually, so the goblins reckon. Not sure if it’s true or not. All the goblins here are full of shit.”
—
Next Grande Parade performance is thick with cucumber-nosed trolls, their tails long, hair lank and filthy, jewel boxes clutched against their chests. A brace of uldras riding Labradors and naked laumes tangled up in weaving. A Welsh hag faery and a couple of water nymphs, skin drying in the blousy breeze.
Pearl clocks other creatures embedded in the motion. Things she’s certain are not listed in The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography.
When the parade is done, Kash drags her aside. “Wanna see something amazing? He drags her across a lawn and then another, over the gently rolling hillock to a point under a shady tree offering a good, clear view of the Manor House’s west aspect. Large white framed windows look over the grounds of the estate.
“I’m not going closer,” Pearl says. “Not after what Skink told us.”
“Relax—you don’t have to move from this spot.” He unshoulders the brass telescope he’s been sporting lately, slung beside his decorative pouch of herbs and jeweled curved blade. Yanks it to its full length and aims it at the windows. “Third one along. Hang on, I need to adjust the focal length.”
She shifts uneasily. “I don’t like this. We shouldn’t be spying—”
“There he is!” exclaims Kash. “Looking out.” He lowers the telescope and passes it across. “See for yourself.”
She takes the brass contraption from his hand and aims.
“I can’t see . . . no, wait . . . Oh my god!”
She freezes, staring. Finally, she lowers the telescope. “That’s Finney.”
Kash grins. “Sure is.”
“But it can’t be.”
“Why can’t it be—he’s standing right there!”
“But he would have sent for us.”
“Pearl, we were homeless. How were messages supposed to find us?”
She presses the telescope against his chest. “We need to stand where he can see us.”
He slings it across his shoulder. “What we need is get inside the house.”
“No!”
He points to the window. “Finney’s alive and now it’s us who’s got to get him a message.”
Pearl stares at the big white window until horns sound for afternoon dance rehearsal.
—
The radio room, as Pearl has come to call the druid’s grotto, has a chill to it a few degrees below the garden’s shady understories. A cold and musty, forgotten corner filled with faded, half-grasped memories.
The druid’s seated, back facing the door, surrounding air humming with blends of electricity and white noise. Sound as undercoat for other messages. Formless, timeless whisperings searching for somewhere safe to settle.
He hums along to the song he’s sending out into the ether. One she’s heard so many times about the summer-land of bliss. About the land beyond where there’s no night. Songs luring innocents from land onto the Risen Sea, most never to be heard from again.
“You’ve got no right,” she says loudly.
He doesn’t respond so she shakes him by the shoulder.
The druid ignores her, focused on his broadcast, mouthing words soundlessly.
“Tell me how to get inside the Manor House. My friend Finney’s in there. Do you know him?”
The druid says nothing.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
Tired old wheels screech in protest as she wrenches the chair around. The druid gazes up with pale rheumy eyes. His lips still moving, thick tears streaking down sallow cheeks.
Pearl stares back at the old broken man, his robes filthy, hems blackened with soil. She groans and shoves the chair away. The druid sits for a while, staring at nothing.
Eventually, he staggers to his feet and ambles off into twilight, stumbling and unsteady. Shuffling through his nightly rounds with Pearl keeping a wary distance, wondering who else might be watching.
Temperature abruptly drops. Looking up, nothing to see but oppressive hedgerows neatly clipped. The druid’s song gets fainter. She hurries to keep pace. Too easy to get lost in the sea of mazes bleeding into other mazes with patterns only discernible from high. Which has to be the point, but it’s too late now, she’s made her choice, that druid’s going to help her, like it or not.
A blast of icy wind stirs up swirls of browned and yellowed leaves. Skies contaminated with the purplish bruise of Calvaria’s defensive shield. Hedgerows replaced with a stretch of open garden. Sleeping lions and blank-faced statues.
No sign of the druid, but ahead at fifty paces stands a sturdy slab of vine encrusted Manor House wall. Antique stone, solid and unmoving, a relic of the old slow years before technology swelled and surged and broke the world. Vines probably older than she is, growing strong. She’s climbing hand over hand as the sky explodes with the now familiar phantasmagoria of pyrotechnic frenzy. To have so much and even think about destroying it. Pretend warfare, intentional developmental delay. For what? The tarnished, rotting ruins of a gilded cage? The face of a boy half turned into a lizard?
The higher she climbs, the colder the wind snatching at her flimsy faery threads. Flinching at detonations—everything in this confection of illusions feels so real. Are the vines bearing her weight synthetic? Thoughts vanish as the marble balustrade is within reach. She clings tightly until the sun-bright fireworks disintegrate, then clambers up and over the side before the next one blooms. Crouches on the cold stone, gargoyle still, in case anyone is watching.
Dusty stone littered with lost leaves. Rusty window locks choked with age. She crawls up close, steals a peek through grimy glass. Inside, a vast and empty room. Shadow-brown furniture. Leaden chandeliers.
The stiff, jammed handle eventually turns. Wood shudders against her shoulder, then she slips inside. Musty scents enveloping; antique woods no longer growing wild. Darkness fading as her eyes adjust. Dusty drapes have her itching to sneeze. She buries her face in her elbow till it passes. Heavy furniture. A piano. Paintings of people in frilly cuffs and ridiculous ballooning skirts.
Pearl moves away from the window and kaleidoscopic skies. This room is only half a room. A half-partitioned doorway beckons.
Treading softly—used to stealth, having crept across a thousand floors in search of life-sustaining morsels. Only from those with a bit to spare. The kinds of lies she’s had to tell herself.
But this is different. She’s not stealing. Pearl’s reclaiming moments and memories stolen from her and Kash and millions like them.
Through the half-partition, another lighter room with grander windows. More detail in the painted lords and ladies, floral patterned rugs and carved armrests.
Starbursts filtering through glass: burnt umber, ochre and sienna revealing a silhouette of charcoal deep. A man in a jacket with his back to her. It’s him for certain. She doesn’t even need to see his face.
“Finney.”
Soft, but loud enough.
He tilts his head. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Finney! I knew it was you! It’s Pearl. Kash made it too. Come on—we can find a place to hide you in Calvaria!”
Glassed skies beyond him shiver with kinetic luminosity. “Too late,” he says.
“Nonsense—let me help you. Come on!”
Finney turns, takes a few steps, his movement accompanied by a peculiar sound. Familiar, but out of context. She can’t place it.
The fiery sky begins to ebb and fade. As he moves into a dusty shard of light, her breath sticks in her throat. Finney is only human from the waist up, his torso grafted onto the body of an animal, perhaps a goat or miniature horse. Hooves clopping on bare floorboards. His back fitted with a child-sized saddle.
“You never should have come here,” Finney says as a final missile scars the smoke-stained sky.
—
When Madame talks, everybody stops to listen. That’s the law in Calvaria’s magnificent faery kingdom because Madame is the one who gets things done. The one who connects the dots and mends the bridges when mistakes are made—and they so often are. Calvaria Estate is more complicated than it looks.
She wears a grim expression, but her eyes are flushed with kindness. News of trespass and apprehension travels fast within closed wall estates. A throng of Grande Parade regulars are gathered to learn what will happen to the twins.
“Those wicked, wicked little children,” Madame says. “Should have introduced you properly to Marlene when you arrived. Things might have gone a different way.” She sniffs. “Poor girl was a faery too—and a pretty little thing—but we had to have her overhauled. Did the best we could with what the children left, but the limitations, as you can see.”
Sidestepping and rustling as the crowd disgorges Marlene: a sluglike creature with a human face and caterpillar hands, shuffling forward, cherry lips pressed together in a thin line of disapproval.
“What’s done is done,” Madame continues, “and there’s no going back from it. No use crying over spilt milk. I’ve never been one for saying ‘I told you so.’ The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography is supposed to be a closed book, but a promise is a promise, and I will never go against my word. You two will get a page in the next edition.”
At Madame’s feet, a plaid blanket conceals a quivering shape.
“On the bright side, your contracts hold up watertight. This is your home now, like I promised. You will never leave and—as requested—you two will never be separated.”
She nods at a hairy hobgoblin, who bends to snatch the blanket away. The crowd gasps at what lies underneath.
“Although,” Madame adds, “I’m not sure what we should call you. Kashpearl? Pearlkash? Neither sounds quite right. Happy for you darlings to come up with a new name for the register. The goblin builders are hard at work on Peapod Cottage as we speak, combining your two bedrooms into one.”
The double-headed creature thrashes, not yet possessing full bodily control. The crowd shuffles back to give it room
“You have my word, I’ll never sell you on to Prince Balthazar’s Menagerie of Oriental Curiosity and Wonder, or Mammadou Wynae’s Carnivale of Biological Rarities.”
Madame seems very pleased with herself until the creature lets loose an ear shattering howl, its voices different timbres and out of synch, yet achieving powerful volume.
“Back to work then, my faery treasures. Word from the house is the Nobs are expecting new choreography for a victory dance!”
When the last of the baby trolls has shuffled off and the nixies have swept leaf litter from the floor, Madame hitches her trailing skirts, mind already distracted by other things.
She pauses to inspect a white robed shape slouched against a drystone wall. “What is this dreadful mannequin doing here? Pumpkin? Nettle? Have a couple of boggles come and clean this mess away immediately. Those dreadful brats abandoning their broken toys all over my nice, neat gardens.”
Madame steps over a gnarled staff attached to a pale arm sticking out of a pile of dirty linens, hems thickly encrusted with mud. A headless torso, the neck stump dense with coils and springs and tatty fiber-optic cable.
Behind a low hedge, a boggle squeals, holding high his prize—a druid’s head, features expressionless, glass eyes aimed at the blue dome sky.
Note: Lyrics quoted from Many Mansions Up There by R.F. Lehman, Public Domain
Air, Water and the Grove
Kaaron Warren
We’ve got food for seven days. Water for twelve. Because sometimes the Saturnalia doesn’t end when it should. It’s hard for people to settle, after. Mid-slash, mid-fuck, mid-theft. Do you just stop, then carry on with your suburban life? Leave things half done? Most people prefer to see it through. Take the extra hour or two. Chase away the doldrums for a bit longer.
We’ve stocked up on hydrogen peroxide and oxalic acid. There are going to be a lot of bloodstains and they’ll be coming in after with their bundles of clothes, “Oh, I had an accident,” is a good one. Or “I was helping an injured person,” is another, not one of them wanting to admit what they’ve been a part of.
