Such Tales as Fairies Tell: Showdown

“So, she’s your girlfriend now?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“That’s the best way I can put it.  We’re letting it run its course, go where it wants to go.  All that sort of thing.”

“Have I mentioned: you moron?”

“What?”

Will just holds his hands up, shaking his head: “Dude, if you need me to tell you…”

“It’s Anita… she’s… there’s nothing like her.  Just nothing.  If you knew…”

“I have met her.”

“And you don’t see…?”

“She’s pretty.  She’s nice.”

“There’s more.  It’s like they opened my eyes to it.”

“Listen up,” and Will has that face on, “if she really is fey, then you’re going to get hurt.  There’s not two ways about it.  And that’s not a guess, it’s a fact.  However nice she is, and even if she’s good in bed: you gotta get out of there.”

I can’t.  Surely you can see… surely you can even imagine… “It’s not like that,” he sinks into his stubbornness, “it’s not like that, we’ve got something good.”

#

And for a while it is good.  There’s no pressure, and no labels: just the two of them, and her touch: which is little short of a miracle – only deepening and brightening the more he feels of it.  He drowns every day in her eyes. And every day he just wants more of it.

But then things start getting weird.

Little things at first.  The pictures, for one thing, that he sees all over the place now.  As if the artist who painted the mural on the building suddenly got real popular and real prolific.  Suddenly he’s painting murals all over the city, and his art is showing up in galleries, on cereal packets, randomly on books Jordy sees on shelves.  He invades the library, he invades little coffee shops.  Each painting different.  Each painting a representation of both sea and hell.

And the shadows.  The way things sometimes don’t seem to have their own shadow.  The way a cat might have a dog’s shadow.  Or maybe a bird flies overhead and it has a dragon’s.  Jordy tells himself over and over again that he must be imagining these things.  And when imagination just seems a bit too far-fetched he tells himself he may be losing his mind.

#

“To her,” says Will, “you’re losing your mind to her.”

“Not that.  I mean a proper psychotic break.”

“It’s her, dude.  It is.  And maybe not just your mind.”

“What else do I have?”

“Your soul.”

“Since when did you start believing in souls?”

“Dunno.  And I don’t know if I do.  But: recently.”

Since Anita.

#

And he tells her about it.  He walks into his building, which seems so full of impossible angles these days, which has weird shadows all over it, and seems to have trouble keeping still.  He walks in there, and up to her apartment – where the absurdity abruptly ends and all thing except her seem carefully mundane – and sits down beside her.  He tells her about the murals and the shadows, the weird congealing of darkness that he sees and feels behind him sometimes when he walks home late.

“Oh, Jordy…” she murmurs.

“What’s going on?”

“You think I know?”

“Yes.”

“We’re happy.”

“I know we are.  Boella, I want it to stay that way.  I swear… but…”

“No labels. Remember?  Just you and me.”

It’s not though is it?  It’s not.  It’s everywhere.  It’s everything.  He asks her if she’s heard from Kirk recently.

“No.”

“But you will?”

“At some stage I guess. But Kirk isn’t you and me.”

He knows he shouldn’t.  But he lets himself be subdued and distracted by her kisses.  He lets her arms slide through him, encircle, complete him.  He feels, when their skin is sizzling hot and touching this way, that he’s becoming her.  It’s beautiful.  But when he lies beside her in the dark hours, while she sleeps, he finds himself noticing the way the darkness above him is alive and moving, making endless silver snowflake patterns.  He remembers everything she didn’t say, and how she didn’t react at all when he called her Boella.

#

He’s walking to a late shift at work when he feels what must be somebody following him.  It doesn’t really make sense that you can feel that, or feel someone watching you, when there’s nothing but silence to tip you off.  He’s heard somewhere that it’s a trick of the subconscious, recording sounds too high or low to be heard consciously, tapping into a peripheral vision not available to the conscious mind.  He doesn’t know if there’s any truth in all that.  But he does know he’s being followed.

He’s got nothing but his fists to defend himself.

He thinks: Kirk?

He wouldn’t put it past Kirk to come after him, maybe even get him out of the picture.  Kirk who played the innocent fawn, who took everything away from her, and then bolted into the forest without looking back.  If it’s Kirk, he’s screwed.  He can’t take Kirk – and if he brings a knife or something, and he wants to use it, he’s going to.

Jordy turns a corner and waits.

He waits.

Nothing comes.

And then a clot of darkness – an ultra-black mist, so dark it’s hard to be sure he has seen it – does seem to drift past.  Or rather… the world smudges for a moment – real dark – and then shifts back to its normal colours.

There’s complete silence.

Jordy feels as if he’s in some cheap action movie, or maybe a horror.  It would have to be a horror.  Snaking his head around the corner seems to take a day and half.  His heart is beating double-time.  The street is empty.  But this is a living horror movie, so he knows already what’ll happen next.  He thinks he could just step out onto the pavement and keep walking, he could just strut off to work and somehow the showdown will be averted.  He knows this in his heart, but his body works of its own accord to twist back around the corner, to turn slowly.

It’s there.  Having slunk past him somehow, melting in behind some boxes and waiting.

It.

Something else that can’t be hammered into what used to be his worldview.  This creature is the size of a child, it’s dark and hunched over.  He can’t see it well, but he can see that its skin has a reddish tinge, that it’s wet – maybe oily – and that its face is goblinoid, a work of ugliness, with oversized ragged ears, a jutting mouth, sunken eyes.

It watches Jordy cautiously.

Friend or foe?

It gives an impression of childhood villainy, furtive and sneaky and wearing its evil as ugliness.  But he doesn’t believe anything’s that simple.  He tries to see its shadow, but there’s not enough light for it to cast one.  So, does he dare?

Jordy approaches it as if it were a feral cat, or an unfamiliar dog.  Crouching, with his hand held out, his voice kept soft to sound non-threatening, his muscles all ready to scuttle backwards should the claws come out.  Leading with fingers.  “Hello.  Can you talk?  Can you understand me?”

It cocks its head.

“Are you fairy?  Are you… part of that…  Do you bite?”

No answer.  Just the searching of those inverted, searing eyes.  Something about this creature that locks gazes with him and holds him.

Am I trapped?

What am I doing?

The creature leaps.  It’s as fast as a snake striking, perhaps faster, perhaps lighting.  It springs out of its hiding place and launches itself at Jordy before he can react, before he can even really register that that’s what it’s doing.  As it flies at him it’s as if it dissolves.  The smudgy mist envelops and destroys it, dissolving itself as it flies at Jordy.  His arms fly up to defend his face – too slow if it’d still be coming at him – but they defend against nothing.  Against empty air.

The shadow of a bird flies off.

The air is prickly, sparkly, unwarrantedly alive.

#

“I can’t do it anymore,” he says to Anita.  “I have to know.”

“Know what?”

“What it was.  What you are.”

“Do you?  Do you really?  You want that.”

“I… I think so.”

“It changes everything.”

“Everything is changed.  Isn’t it?”

“I suppose. Oh, Jordy.  We were happy.  I wanted that.  I saw you, and you were so cute, and funny, and awkward.  Do you remember?  And I was just… just… I was Anita, and you were Jordy.  That was all.”

Not anymore.

“What do you want to do, Jordy?”

“Just talk, I think.”

“I don’t think there’s words.”

“Just talk.  Just anyway. I don’t know what else…”

“I’m tired,” she says.  “One more night, sleeping beside me, then everything.”

“You’ll be gone in the morning.”

“I won’t.  I swear.”

He doesn’t believe her.  He acquiesces anyway.  He holds her tight, in terror, thinking this’ll be the last time ever.

#

She’s there in the morning.  She kisses him.  She tells him she has to go to work, she’ll make him dinner tonight.  Come over.  They have so much to talk about.

Jordy walks to work, noticing that his shadow does a lousy job of mimicking his movements, it’s all over the place, flailing its arms around, sometimes dancing, and for a brief moment it grows horns.

And then work is intolerable.  Of course, it is.  He’s waiting, waiting, waiting.  All the time.  He fumbles his way through serving customers, giving them mumbled greetings with his eyes out the window.  There’s a TV on out the back; his boss is lounging around watching.  So, Jordy sees pretty quickly when the article comes on that shows a fire in his building.

“Hey,” his boss says, “isn’t that your place?”

“Gotta go.”

“You can’t go up there.  There’s firemen.  And you’d die.”

“Gotta go anyway.”  If he’s fired he’s fired. 

What looks like fire isn’t fire.  Maybe nobody else can see it, but those aren’t flames, that’s the mural come to life, those swirling reds and oranges are something living and circling, invading the building.

He knows who they want.

Jordy runs so fast his lungs feel ready to explode.  The pain in his chest is almost enough to fell him, but instead he keeps moving, even gasping, even succumbing to dizzy spells, and almost throwing up.  He gets to a building that sure is alight, but not with fire, with something otherworldly, with tongues that lick the building all over, that settle into its stone and dissolve it, bit by bit.  A murderous incompatibility.

Fire engines have arrived; police and ambulance.  There’s lights.  There’s a news van, and men with cameras on their shoulders.  Locals with cell phones recording the whole thing.  It’s a thick crowd to push his way through, and he isn’t polite.  He grabs one girl by the hair getting her out of the way, and only has time to mumble a quick apology.  A couple of firemen come to block his way, to underscore the cones and streamers.

“You can’t go inside.”

“I have to.  My girlfriend.”

“Do you know if she’s up there?”

“She’s up there.”  He does know.  Wherever she should be, she’s left, she’s gone home.  She’s up there.

“Which floor? Which flat?”

“Three.  Eighteen.”

“We’ll get to her.”

“You don’t understand-”

“You need to let us do our jobs.”

But it isn’t your job.  There are cameras approaching, looking to record his desperation, his love.  The vulture in that makes him want to pummel someone into the ground.  He’s pretty sure, one way or another, this is going to hurt, but he does it anyway: easing back for a moment, then decking the closest fire-fighter, making a mad dash for the main entrance before the other one can react.  He shouldn’t be this fast, he should be being held back and getting arrested on TV by now, but instead he’s sprinting forward.  The doors are jammed open, he can just race forward.

Into chaos.

Into an open area of constantly changing colours, rainbow mists dissolving and reforming, walls that are there one minute and gone the next.  There are brief glimpses of a forest – one that’s red and overgrown and wild, blooming in unthinkable colours, full of teeth, thorns, a wind that ripples through it.

“Anita!”

He doesn’t expect the lifts to work, so he makes a run for the stairs.  What he’ll do once he gets to her place, he has no idea.  Just that he needs to get there.  But he meets her on the stairs.  She’s still Anita, with her hair tied back, in her business skirt, wearing heels, and with her shirt buttoned demurely to her collarbone.  She’s carrying a spear made completely out of light – but there in this moment, it doesn’t seem incongruous, it doesn’t seem to defy reason.  She’s wrapped in an aura of colours, twinkling, ten times brighter than anything around her.

“Jordy.”

“What the hell?!”

“We were going to talk.”

“Yeah?  Are we still?”

“It’s here.”

“What is?”

“One of the Twelve Blades of Darkness.”

? ! “Uh-!  But-!  Which one?”

“Seven.”

“Seven.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Can you… kill it… stop it…?”

“Jordy, I have go home.”

Did you know?  Did you know in that first moment, when we met?  Did you know when I said your name and you told me you only spoke English?  But she didn’t, not then.  He thinks he’s sure of it. She really was just Anita, Kirk was just Kirk.  A whole other life imprinted on them both.  Until now… until not long ago…  “The seventh… the blade… it’s trying to kill you or something?”

“I can handle it.”

“I’m with you.”

“No Jordy…”

“I’m with you.”

He means it.  He bloody will stand beside her when this thing comes at her.  Maybe he’ll die beside her.  He knows he could, and he knows this is real, and he really will die if this mystical thing kills him.  And still.

The shadow sallies out of the mural, it glides through the snakes of colour and wild activity.  They shrink away from it.  It has no form, and the sight of it sends waves of panic through his brain.  He’s not armed.  But there’s nothing else for it.  He walks up there with Anita/Boella, fists clenched.  He braces with her as she readies for it.  He sees her rise to strike, feels it coming down on them, hitting them like a wave.  There’s cold and searing pain, there’s the sensation of floating, the surrounding of coloured fire, and the jolt of his face smashing against the floor.

#

And then distance.

And then a mist of colour and darkness, and the sense of floating intensified tenfold.

And then a voice.  “Jordy…?”

He can’t speak, he can’t move.  Anita…

It’s not.  A figure that comes towards him through slowly clearing mist isn’t her after all.  This one is tentative, tip-toeing, clutching her arms up against her chest.  Afraid.

Theresa?

She reaches his side and presses her hands against his shoulders.  “Jordy.  Jordy.  Are you all right?”

He finds his voice: “What are you doing here?”

“I saw you.  On TV. What you did.”

There’s no sign of Anita.  Of course.  Of course not.  She stepped through.  When the battle was done. She stepped through.  She went home.

“Oh, Jordy,” Theresa clings to him.  “I’m the most stupid.  I’m the most stupid girl ever, ever.  Are you hurt?”

His face is burning, sticky with blood, but it’s nothing.  He lets her help him up.  “I might be arrested in a minute.”

“I know, I saw that.  I’ll be here for you.  Okay? I promise.”

“Are you sure?”

“When I saw you, on TV, running into this place.  Jordy, I’ve never been so sure.”

“Okay then.”

Fairies, he thinks, letting her help him towards the obscured main entrance, they sure have a funny way of getting things done.

 

END

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work