“Yeah, because I’m trying to be normal.”
For some reason that makes her laugh.
“What?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “You and normal don’t really fit in the same sentence.”
“Whatever. You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. I only know the you you’ve been since we’ve met, and I like her. And I know I’m a better person because of knowing you.”
“Yeah, well, that goes big-time for me when it comes to you.”
“Really?”
“Of course, really.”
For a long moment she just looks at me, like she’s seeing me for the first time. I realize that maybe I should have told her sooner. I just assumed she knew that she’d been as much of an influence on me as I might have been on her.
“That doesn’t change anything,” she says. “This is still too dangerous a situation.”
“It’s not going away.”
“I know, but ... what about Thomas? You said he was going to talk to his grandmother.”
I glance at her bedside clock. “It’s too late to call him now.”
“So can’t we at least wait until you have talked to him?” I want to say, What’s with the “we”? because I’m certainly not dragging her into this any more than she already is. When it comes time to confront the soul-eaters, I’m planning to go solo.
But she’s right about waiting to talk to Thomas. All we have is bits and pieces. Maybe they fit together and we just can’t see it, or maybe something Thomas finds out will help us put it all together.
“Okay,” I tell her. “We wait until we’ve talked to Thomas.”
I can see Pelly visibly relax.
“So what are you going to do about your blue skin?” Maxine asks.
I wait for a long moment after Imogene and Pelly step back into my closet and close the door behind them before I get up from the bed and open the door again. My clothes hang there just like they always do, and when I push them aside, there’s no door in the wall behind them. There is a new smell, a faint whiff of I’m not sure what, exactly. Something ... other. And there’s a feeling in the air that tingles on my skin. Like static, only not so pronounced.
And Imogene and Pelly are definitely gone.
I run my hands along the back wall of the closet, but there’s no secret panel, or at least not that I can find. And even if there was, what would that prove? I know what’s on the other side of that wall. It’s our living room.
I slowly close the door and return to lie down on my bed because I’m starting to feel a little shaky.
Okay, I tell myself. You didn’t do that bad. You sat here and talked to Imogene with her skin all blue and her weird little friend and you didn’t feel faint or anything. That’s progress.
Except now my arms and legs are trembling and they won’t stop. My pulse is way too fast. I don’t think I could sit up even if I wanted to.
I try to think of something else, but that only brings me around to what Imogene said about what she was like when she lived in Tyson, carrying a knife and beating people up and everything. I try to imagine her like that, and I can’t. And she was a couple of years younger then, too. So I try to imagine a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Imogene with her knife and her toughness, and I really don’t have any luck with that.
It’s not like I haven’t seen kids like she says she was. We’ve got them in school, the toughs and the gang members, some of them only twelve or thirteen. No one messes with them, not even the jocks like Brent. They live in a world of their own, smoking cigarettes just off the school grounds during lunch, sneering at the idea of school spirit and dances and sports and pretty much anything the rest of us are interested in.
I try to fit Imogene in with their crowd, and it just doesn’t work. Sure, she looks punky tough some days, but she never acts it.
I wonder if she misses that old life.
I wonder if she still carries her knife.
I wonder if she would ever hurt me.
That stops me cold, and I feel guilty for even thinking it.
Of course she wouldn’t.
I sigh. This is no good, but at least my heart’s not drumming so fast and I feel like I have control of my muscles again. I sit up and look around my room. All the lights are on and there’s not an inch of shadow anywhere—not even under my bed because before Imogene and Pelly showed up, I put my desk lamp down there. Happily, Imogene made no comment about my room having the feel of a brightly lit supermarket, though Mom wasn’t shy about commenting on it. But she didn’t push it, for which I’m grateful.
The only place that’s dark is inside my closet, but the door to it is firmly closed. And I know there’s nothing in there because I just looked. But if there are these magical doors that Pelly can open, who says that soul-eaters can’t do the same?
After a moment I get up and wedge my spare chair under the knob and hope that’ll work as well as it seems to in the movies. If Imogene comes back, she can just knock.
Maybe we should have worked out a password or some kind of code so that I’ll know it’s her.
Except what if these shadow creatures can take the form of someone else, or mimic their voice?
I could go crazy thinking about all of this.
I stand there and continue to stare at the closet door until finally I make myself look away. I go back to my desk and flip through the stack of fairy-tale books that I’ve been studying, though there’s nothing useful in them. It’s kind of funny. I’m the one who was totally into fairy tales and the idea of fairies being real, but Imogene found out way more after one morning’s research than I ever knew. I guess it was because I’ve always read stories—and often those that are only based on fairy tales with lots of made-up stuff in them—rather than the reference books Imogene went through, where everything’s clinical and cataloged and all.
After a few moments, I turn my attention to my computer. Earlier this evening I found this site called SurLaLune and spent an hour or so going through the archives of their forum, seeing if I could find something that might help. The site’s all about fairy tales, and a lot of the people that post to it appear to be fairy-tale writers and scholars.
Anybody can log in with a question, so a few hours ago I pretended I was researching a school paper, wondering if anybody had any info on the darker side of Faerie. I check for answers now, and there are almost a dozen, but when I read through them, they’re not much help. Books that I don’t have are cited. I make a note of their titles. Someone brings up movies, and there are a few posts about how this sort of thing is more horror story than fairy tale.
Tell me about it, I think.
I know real fairy tales aren’t happy little Disneyesque stories of frolicking dwarves and singing animals. Some of them are downright grim and gory. But there’s always a point to them. These soul-eaters hunting us from the shadows are too much like a hundred overwrought horror movies where a bunch of teenagers get killed off one by one in ever more imaginative ways, and that’s it. I know we’re not supposed to take it seriously—it’s just good fun. Except it seems more like pornography than fun to me, way more so than some couple going at it hot and heavy.
I close my Web browser and check my e-mail. I see, as I scroll down through my inbox, that it’s mostly spam, as usual. Then an unfamiliar e-mail return address jumps out because I recognize the subject line. It’s the one I used for my post to the SurLaLune forum. I click the e-mail open.
Date: Thurs, 30 Oct 2003 01:54:03 -0800
From:
[email protected] Subject: Re: The dark side of Faerie
To:
[email protected] Hello fairygrrl,
I like your name—very punky.
I have to smile at that. I wanted a Yahoo identity that went with my interest in fairy tales and added the “grrl” to toughen it up. Then my smile disappears because I think of how the very first time I actually see fairies, what do I do? Faint away like a real grrl never would.
I
read your post to the SurLaLune forum and while I applaud any school that will allow its students to do research on fairy lore for a class project, I find myself having to do the very thing I swore I’d never do, which is sound like my mother:
That earns my correspondent another smile. I’ve made the same promise myself because we can’t all have moms as cool as Imogene’s.
Please be careful. Fairies aren’t all Disney or even Brian Froud (though he can be a little shadowy in some of his depictions, can’t he?). The spirits that hide in the shadows are dangerous and not to be approached on a lark—or even necessarily for a school project.
They have a hunger for what we carry in us—our mortal, short-lived souls—and are quick to take advantage of any opening we might give them. Remember what Nietzsche said: “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
But perhaps you already know all of this and are setting about your project with caution. And as I reread what I’ve written, I’m afraid I must sound like some doddery old drama queen, shaking her finger at you and muttering, “Beware, beware!”
But please be careful all the same.
Esmeralda
P.S. A last word of caution from your overly cautious correspondent: tomorrow being Halloween, when the veils between our world and that of the spirits are at their thinnest, I’d wait on starting anything until the weekend.
It’s too late for careful, I think. Or to wait until the weekend.
I wonder who this Esmeralda is and go looking for her on the SurLaLune site. Turns out she’s not a lurker like me. I read through a few of her posts and get the impression that she’s smart and really knowledgeable about pretty much every aspect of fairy lore. Plus, considering how much posting she does, she seems to have way too much spare time.
I try Googling her, but the only things that come up are those posts on SurLaLune.
I look at her e-mail again. I want to ask her for help, but I hesitate, because what do I really know about her? This e-mail might not even be from the same Esmeralda Foylan who posts to SurLaLune. For all I know, she might not even be a her. She could be some old guy sitting at a library screen making stuff up. Or some kid who likes to mess around with people, freaking them out with scary stories. After all, Halloween is coming up. Some people might think that acting all dire and foreboding in an e-mail to a poster named “fairygrrl” would be a good Halloween prank. A couple of days early, maybe, but it could be they were just setting me up for some big laugh on Friday.
Which—I glance at the time in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen—is already tomorrow, because it’s long past midnight now.
But I decide to trust my unknown correspondent. I like the way her voice sounds from her e-mail, and if she knows as much fairy lore as it seems she does, she really might be able to help. And we need knowledgeable help. I know Imogene doesn’t want us to contact Christy, but I’ve been tempted to do it anyway. We can worry about what he can use in a book or not later. But first we need to survive for there to be a later. So this is a good compromise.
Still, I can’t help but worry about what Imogene will say when she finds out. Sure, I promised not to go to Christy, but I’m pretty certain Imogene won’t see my writing to Esmeralda as a better option. Except it’s not like Esmeralda’s going to put us in a book—I mean, I did Google her, and all that came up was the SurLaLune posts. It’s not like she’s some famous writer like Christy.
It’s all making my head spin, so I make the executive decision and compose an e-mail to Esmeralda outlining everything that’s happened over the last little while: the school’s resident fairies and Adrian, the hapless ghost; Imogene’s Pelly and the fairy orchestra; the creatures in the shadows ... it takes me a moment to remember what Pelly called them. Then it comes to me: the anamithim. I describe Imogene’s encounters with them so far and how the vervain pollen turned her skin blue but also drove the soul-eaters away.
I finish up with:
It’s funny how it works, isn’t it? All my life I’ve wanted a fairy-tale adventure, but now that it’s here, what happens? I faint away and now I’m too scared to do anything except sit here in my room with all the lights on. But I’m not a hero. I guess Imogene could be since she’s way braver than me, but we’re only seventeen. We’re just kids. That doesn’t seem to bother Imogene, but it really makes me nervous. What can kids do about stuff like this?
I read it all over and correct some of the spelling and syntax, but then make myself stop fussing with it and simply send it off. I want to sit up and wait for a response, but I’m finally getting tired, and what are the chances that Esmeralda’s still up, waiting for me to respond to her e-mail? Not big.
So I let my screensaver fill the screen and stare at the fish doing their aimless swimming thing until I realize I’m nodding off. I crawl into bed and fall right to sleep, even with all the lights on.
* * *
My hopes are so huge that there’ll be a response from Esmeralda waiting for me when I get up that I’m sure there won’t be. Because that’s the way it usually seems to work when you really want something. Or at least that’s the way it usually works for me. But when I log on, the third new e-mail has that now-familiar return address of
[email protected] The message is brief:
We need to talk *right now*. I’ll be by my computer all day. As soon as you get this, click on the following link.
It will connect your computer to my direct messenger service.
Your worried correspondent,
Esmeralda
I’m so grateful, and actually feel a glimmer of hope. Maybe she really can help. Maybe there’s a way Imogene and I can get out of this mess all in one piece. I leave my bedroom and check around the apartment to make sure Mom’s gone to work, then go back to the computer. I hesitate a moment, the mouse’s pointer hovering over Esmeralda’s link, before I click on it. Nothing happens at first, then a new Web page opens.
It stays blank for long enough that I think it’s not working. I check the address line, and the URL has something about “th_messenger_services” in it along with a whole bunch of random letters, numbers, percentage signs, and the like. Then a line appears on the screen:
ef: Good morning, fairygrrl.
I look at the words, not sure what I should do. A cursor is blinking under the line, the way it does in a word processing document after you’ve hit enter.
A new line appears.
ef: Are you there? Simply type in your response when the cursor is on a new line and blinking, then use your enter key when you’re finished “speaking.”
Okay. I type “Hello,” and when I hit enter, it appears under the last line looking like this:
fg: Hello?
I wonder at the “fg,” then realize it stands for “fairy-grrl.” Esmeralda must have set the program to automatically indicate who’s “talking”—I guess it’s so that when you look at the screen, you can tell who’s said what, because the other lines she wrote earlier are still on the screen.
ef: Oh, good. You *are* there. I hope you don’t find this too awkward. But since you said you were a schoolgirl, I thought a long distance phone call might be too prohibitive, though of course I don’t know where you live or what your financial situation might be.
fg: No this is good.
I want to put a comma in after “No,” but force myself to keep typing and not worry about that kind of thing.
I live in Newford. My name’s Maxine.
ef: Newford, of course. That shouldn’t have surprised me. It’s always been one of the busier centers of Otherworld activity.
It has?
fg: Can you hip us?
I’ve already hit enter when I see the typo. She’s going to think I’m such a dork.
ef: I hope so. Your e-mail laid the situation out very clearly. The only thing I didn’t understand is this business of the high school fairies and how they brought your friend Imogene to the attention of the anamithim. What caused their enmity in the firs
t place?
fg: We don’t know. Pelly says they just did it for the sake of meanness.
ef: There certainly are beings such as that in the Otherworld. So just to clarify: none of you did anything? You didn’t insult them, or take something from them, or try to move into their territory?
fg: Not that we know. Well, unless Imogene befriending Adrian falls into one of those categories.
ef: Adrian being the ghost.
fg: Right. Who had a relationship with the fairies before Imogene came along. I think he’s got a crush on her.
ef: You mentioned that. And that he asked the fairies to help make Imogene believe that they existed.
fg: Do you think they’re jealous of her?
ef: Possibly, but it’s unlikely. Fairie *will* establish proprietary relationships with humans, but they are based on physical parameters. A ghost, by its very nonphysical existence, would be of no use to them.
fg: What do you mean by “of use”?
I’m thinking she means some kind of sex thing, so I’m also thinking ew. I haven’t seen much in the way of fairies so far—just Pelly, and that stream of them going out of Imogene’s window—but they’re all kind of gross looking.
ef: The primary use they have for humans is as a tithe to more powerful creatures.
fg: Like the soul-eaters?