|
Things like this only happened to people
like him in the children’s stories he illustrated.
“Shit.” Sam muttered aloud, thumping his
knuckles against his forehead. “Things like this don’t
happen to anyone.” He tipped his head back and yelled at
the ceiling. “Fairies don’t exist!”
He wasn’t sure who he was talking to but
he sat there, breath held and staring at the ceiling, and
waited for a response.
When the phone rang brashly he jumped so
violently that he lifted the chair of the ground. Heart in
his mouth, he stared at the phone balanced on the edge of
the small, red couch. He let it ring five times until it
occurred to him that he should answer it.
Sam scrambled over to the chair and
snatched up the phone.
“H..hello?” He stammered.
“Hello, Mr Jamison.” A cheerful man
hailed him down the line. “I work for Cross and Carney
Promotions. People from my office have been trying to get
in touch with you all week….”
“Jesus.” Sam slammed the phone down to
break the connection. He hadn’t who he’d been expecting on
the other end of the call, in a world where your cat brought
dead fairies into the house anything could happen, but a
prerecorded message trying to sell him a tacky cruise hadn’t
been on the list.
The fat, red cushions sighed when he lent
back and draped his arm over his face. He tried to think
about what he should do next but he couldn’t concentrate.
Every time he tried to follow a thought to its conclusion
his brain derailed and ended right back where it started.
In his kitchen, Sam lifted his arm from
his face and opened his eyes, looking at a dead fairy lying
on the table.
There was a thump in the hall. Sam
jumped and turned to the face the door but it was only the
cat going back out.
“God.” He muttered, a thought striking
him. “I hope it doesn’t bring anything else back in. I
don’t think I could deal with two of these.”
Too fretful to sit still any longer he
stood up.
“OK, OK.” He muttered to himself,
starting to pace back and forth across the kitchen. It took
him four and a half steps to get from the French doors to
the big American double fridge. “I just need to think about
this, I need to think everything through before I do
anything. Right. Right.” His hands tapped a nervous
rhythm against his denim clad thighs and he took a ragged
breath. “There’s no way I have a real…real dead fairy
here. It’s impossible, faeries don’t exist. Therefore dead
fairies don’t exist. They can’t. I’m just having some
sort of episode, or something.”
The thought was comforting. People had
‘episodes’ all the time and afterwards they were just fine.
Only last month one of the other teacher’s at Judith’s
school had locked himself in his car and refused to come out
for hours. Now he was feeling better and they were even
going to let him start teaching again.
Sam could deal with an episode. He could
blame it on working too hard. It would be the truth too.
The last few months had been enough to give anyone a nervous
breakdown. Between reworking everything he had done on The
Little Red Kettle after the author decided the eponymous
kettle looked too fat and trying to work on his own projects
he’d been spread so thin you could almost read through him.
He was overworked and overtired and when
Snooky had brought that poor dead animal in Sam’s brain had
blown a gasket. It had made see a chewed up fairy instead
of a mouse or a bird or a butterfly or whatever it was
laying in the middle of the table.
It all made perfect sense.
Sam licked his lips and walked slowly
over to the table. He reached out to draw back a fold of
white cloth with a palsied hand. He saw the wing first. A
butterfly shaped dirty white wing, torn at the frilled
corner where he had been careless earlier. Then he saw the
arm and the bluish torso that seemed to have been crushed
rather than pierced by the cat’s jaws. Grimacing Sam used
the corner of the cloth to poke at the little creature’s
head until it rolled to the side and he could see its face.
“Shit.” He sputtered, recoiling and
scrubbing his hand furiously against his leg.
Thin white tendrils framed the fairy’s
face. It was too thick to be hair and some of the strands
seemed to have been broken and hung crookedly. The face
itself was nothing that any sane illustrator would put into
a child’s book. It didn’t have a nose or eyes; just a
horizontal slit from forehead to chin that was crowded with
sharp, spiny teeth.
The sight of it repulsed Sam on a level
beneath rationality. He retched, acid bubbling against the
back of his throat and scalding his nose, but the thought of
turning his back on the dead thing wasn’t tolerable. The
muscles in his jaw clenched and fought the gag reflex back
until he had the fairy covered up again.
Then he scrambled over to the sink and
puked until all he was shaking and all he was bringing up
was sour-water.
Standing with his head hanging over the
sink he spat to clear the taste of vomit from his mouth.
Then he turned on the water and gulped straight from the tap
until his belly sloshed with water and he felt sick again.
One hand on the edge of the sink pushed
him upright.
He had to get rid of it.
With a spatula from the utensil drawer
Sam manoeuvred the dishcloth shroud into the big plastic
bag. It didn’t quite fit so with a shudder he poked it down
with the spatula. Something broke in the shroud, although
it sounded more like polystyrene being snapped than bone,
and he was able to seal the top of the bag.
He didn’t bother to get all the air out.
Judith would tell him off but he didn’t plan to ever let her
see it.
Leaving the bag on the table he went to
look through the kitchen cupboard where Judith kept all her
gardening stuff. It took him a while to find it. Neither
of them had had time for the garden lately and the tools
turned out to be buried in the back of the cupboard under
their new mortgage papers and a stack of credit card
applications that he didn’t know why they had kept. Once he
found them he armed himself with a pair of heavy duty
leather gardening gloves and a trowel. Then he gingerly
grabbed the bag from table. It hardly weighed anything and
he had to squelch the urge to unwrap it again to see if the
fairy was still there.
One hand rested on the handle of the door
for a minute. Then he set his jaw, opened the door and
headed into the back yard. It had been months since he cut
the grass, there was no need in the winter had been how he
defended the decision to Judith, but it wasn’t until he
stepped onto the lawn that he realized how long it had
grown. It reached past his ankles, soaking his jeans, and
when he walked over it he noticed it was pocked with
mysterious bald patches.
Something made the branches of the rose
bush rattle against each other. Sam’s stomach knotted and
he stopped dead. He lifted the trowel like it was a weapon
and waved it at the bush.
“Who’s there?” He demanded, his voice
rising shrilly, and poked at the bush. “Come out. Go on!
Get out of
there!”
Something brown whirred at him from the
heart of the bush. He yelled and flung his arms up, his
feet went out from under him and he landed on his backside
in the grass. His breath escaped on a winded grunt and the
bag with the dead fairy in it went flying off into the
grass.
Panicked Sam flailed at the air and then
the brown thing swooped overhead.
It was a bird.
A sparrow, or something.
“Jesus.” Sam let his head drop into the
grass and let his hand rest on his chest. He could feel his
heartbeat thudding against his breastbone. After a minute
he rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his
elbow.
That was when he realized he didn’t know
where the bag was.
He scrambled onto his knees and looked
around frantically. Paint-stained fingers combed through
the grass, patting and pulling in a desperate search. The
thought of Snooky finding it and bringing it back into the
house, or worse Judith finding it, was horrible.
He couldn’t let that happen. He had to
find it.
Ripping a handful of grass from the
ground he tossed it over his shoulder. Then he saw the edge
of the plastic bag. It was moving.
Without thinking he reached out and put
his hand on the bag to hold it in place. While he held it
down he crawled forwards and saw what was pulling the bag in
the other direction.
It was another fairy, a female. She was
wearing a dress made of woven grass and she was brighter
coloured than the dead male. Her wings were brightly
patterned in scarlet and black and the tendrils on her head
were black too. And they moved, constantly, like an
insect’s antenna.
He would have screamed but he couldn’t
force the noise out of his throat. If the dead fairy had
repulsed him the effect was ten times worse with the living
one. This was not some ethereal creature of folklore and
children’s stories. It was something vile and unnatural
that made his brain ache just looking at it.
“You…” Letting go of the bag the fairy
pointed at him and rasped the words through the toothy slit
in the middle of her face. “…killed…mate.” She spread her
wings and her chest swelled when she sucked in a wet,
slobbery mouthful of air. “Know you.” The black tendrils
stirred restlessly. “All…All know….you.” As alien as that
thing and that voice was Sam could still hear the malice in
it. “Get…you. Get you…yet, hu-man.”
“I didn’t kill him.” Sam forced the
words between his dry lips. “It was the cat…I didn’t do
it.”
The fairy just stood there and breathed
wetly at him.
“I didn’t DO it.” He repeated
desperately. When there was no response he lunged forwards
with his hand raised to slap the creature away. His knee
came down on the plastic bag, which made a wet popping
sound, and the fairy screamed in rage. Hands clamped to his
ears to try and muffle the sound Sam struggled to his feet.
“I didn’t do it!”
The fairy was still screaming and now she
had taken to the air. Bright wings battering at the air and
mouth opened so wide it looked like her head had split
apart. The rows of sharp, thin teeth were pointing straight
at him and suddenly he felt something prick his face.
He slapped his hand to his face and when
he took his hand away it was bloody.
Another sharp pain hit his arm. When he
looked down there was a small, black thorn sticking out of
his arm.
Thorn, he though muzily, or sting.
A flash of colour from the corner of his
eye caught his attention and he turned towards it.
More faeries had appeared around him and
were hovering in the air on blue, green and orange wings.
Their mouths were all gaped open and the black teeth or
stingers in their mouths were all pointing at him.
Run. The thought bloomed in his mind.
He had to run.
Whatever poison they had injected into
his body made it feel leaden and numb, like it belonged to
someone else, but he managed to shamble into motion. He
just had to get to the kitchen door and he could close them
out of the house.
Ragged breaths tore in and out of his
lungs but he kept moving, one foot in front of the other,
until he toppled into the kitchen.
He managed to kick the door shut behind
him. Then his legs gave way. He collapsed to the ground
and everything went black.
“I’m sorry, Judith, but we just can’t use
Sam’s work anymore.” Mark winced at the raw desperation in
Judy Jamison’s voice. He wished he could help her. Sam had
been a client for years. More importantly, they were
friends too. But there was nothing he could do. “It’s just
too,” he looked down at the disturbing pastel images of
repulsive fairies Sam had sent. “disturbing for us.
Doesn’t he draw anything else anymore?”
He listened to what Judy said.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I hope the
doctors will let him come home. If I can think of anything
I could use his work for I’ll call." |
