Emma sipped her freshly brewed tea. It was adequate tea. She was sure that her client’s daughter would have enjoyed it if she could have actually tasted it. It was probably her favorite in life, or something like that. But, tastes could always change, even for the dead. After a few months in the land of Fairy, her client’s daughter probably developed a taste for the more sweeter varieties of tea.
Yes, that would be how she would explain it to the client. That would be why the client needed to bring sweeter tea. Her daughter appreciated the reminder of home, it’s just that the fairy food her hosts had given her had been so sweet that it shifted her preferences.
Suddenly, there was a knock--not at Emma’s door, but at her wall.
Emma looked at the blank wall. Did she imagine it?
She stood up. Maybe it was a knock at her door and she only misheard it as coming from the wall?
She walked to her door and opened it.
No one was outside.
“Hello?” she called.
No one answered.
She sighed as she closed the door. She hoped that this wasn’t the start of the manesologist’s retribution. She could see them ordering their ghost helpers to pretend to be the departed loved ones of her clients to frighten her out of her con. But if that’s what this was, it wouldn’t work on her. One couldn’t trick a trickster.
Emma went back inside and pretended nothing was out of the ordinary. She strained her ears to hear the slightest rattle of a chain or the quietest moan. If there were any other weird sounds tonight, it would prove that Ernst, Morton, and Glass were out to frighten her.
Emma smiled to herself. She hoped that the three men would be dumb enough to try haunting her. She had just the plan for them. She’d call up their old rivals Burke and Robins, to dispel their little haunting. She was sure Burke and Robins would love the opportunity to expose and shame Ernst, Morton, and Glass.
Emma was so preoccupied with listening that she was quite startled when she found her eyes wandering over a bright green spot on her wall.
The spot stretched from floor to ceiling, and as Emma recoiled, she saw what it was clearly--a door.
It seemed to be made of wood but had the color of emerald. Its doorknob was gold--and it turned without a sound.
The door opened.
There was a man behind it, and behind the man was a tangled mass of flowers, grasses, and tree branches. These natural things were formed with unnatural colors, colors Emma had only ever seen in nature, but strangely, never in plants. The green was the green of a cat’s eye. The yellow was the color of early morning sunlight. The blue was the color of the ocean. And all this color, all this matter, was arranged in a spiral. There was no up or down behind the door. Ground was sky and sky was ground. White clouds floated like ice flows on blue rivers. Rivers held the sun affixed in its course--if that was, indeed the sun. Emma saw several things that looked like the sun shimmering in vibrant pockets.
And before all this stood someone Emma knew was not a man, though he had the proportions of a man.
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He was not a ghost. Emma knew ghosts. She had seen them, flittering and fluttering about in the evening light when few were round to see them. They were, by their nature, furtive beings, though it was often said that the living had no defense against the dead. But this was not a cringinging, cowering wight. Emma knew, instinctively, that she was looking at a member of what her grandmother had called the Kindly Ones.
She knew, instantly, how foolish she had been to call them “little people.”
She fell to her knees. “Please don’t hurt me!” she begged.
The Kindly One stepped out of the door. He was tall, taller than even Joseph Morton, but thin like a reed. His clothes were of the modern fashion but were a light, lively green far from the somber hues worn by the men of today. His chin was prominent and pointy. His eyes were as green as evergreen leaves.
Without a touch, the Kindly One closed the door behind himself.
“Please stand up, Emma Quinn.” the fairy said. His voice was far softer and pitched far higher than Emma would have guessed.
Emma stood, but trembled.
“I am John-a-Doors.” the fairy said. “And I am a being of many responsibilities and powers. Mostly, I lock and unlock doors, as my name suggests, but today, I come before you in my capacity as a messenger of the Dueling Courts.”
“Are you going to hurt me?” Emma asked.
John-a-Doors shook his head pityingly. “Of course not. I am a fairy, here on Fairy business. Violence is not our preferred method of conflict resolution, Ms. Quinn. We are not humans. We prefer methods of beauty over methods of ugliness, even when we act in anger.”
“Are you…angry at me?”
“Personally? No. I hold no ill will towards you. As a matter of fact, I pity you, just as those three manesologists did. Interesting how I share their sentiments and yet you tremble before me and laugh at them.”
“I am sorry! I am sorry for everything!”
“Emma Quinn, this is not a court of law, and neither I nor those that stand above me ask for your repentance. I am here to explain what they have done. Your compliance is not required, but your understanding is.”
“What do you mean by that? What have they done to me?” Emma thought of every fairy curse her grandmother had ever warned her about. She thought of her skin peeling off and her hair turning into spider webs and being turned into inanimate but horrifyingly self-aware stone.
“Oh no,” she gasped, “Oh no no no no no!”
“Calm yourself, woman.” John-a-Doors held out his hand. In it was a light the color of shallow, sunlit water. “Here, look, in my hand I hold calm. And now, I will give it to you.”
And John-a-Doors did just that.
The light vanished, and the clam was in Emma Quinn.
Emma grabbed her chest. Her heartbeat had slowed. Her anxiety had vanished as suddenly and as completely as the light in John-a-Doors’ hand.
“What did you do to me?” Emma asked
“I made you calm.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The precise mechanisms of our powers are not understandable. I am. I do. That is the extent of what can be explained about faeries and fairy magic.”
Emma nodded. This she could not understand, and could not hope to understand, but that fact, in and of itself, was strangely an easily understandable thing.
“You said the Courts sent you? The Dueling Courts? That’s both of the Courts that rule Fairy?” Emma asked.
“The Seelie and the Unseelie, yes.” John-a-Doors replied.
“They both want to punish me?”
“Firstly, Emma Quinn, those who stand above me are not punishing you. When the Courts punish a being, they punish without warning or explanation. They are acting upon you, and I am here to explain what their actions are. Secondly, though the rulers of Fairy are known for their bitter rivalry, there are some things in which they stand united. Ghosts, or as the previous owners of this planet called them, Gah Faonts, are one such point. What your ancestors intuited about ghosts living among faeries was very accurate, Ms. Quinn. Ghosts are very, very precious to my race.”
“I would have thought the Seelie would have stood for life and the Unseelie death.” Emma said. “I’ve always heard that the Seelie stand for warmth, and light, and Summer and the Unseelie cold, and dark, and death.”
““Then you have thought wrong. Allow me to explain, as that is why I am here, and you know very little about Fairy for a “fairy woman." The Great Division between Seelie and Unseelie began as a point of philosophical divergence between the first Anwen and the first Dagda. The first Dagda proclaimed that the ultimate reality was in ideas and intuition and that manifested material was but a lesser illusion. The first Anwen countered that ultimate reality was in manifestation and that the Dagda had the truth about the cosmos backwards. It’s a point of controversy across many, many worlds, not just Fairy. It’s the same point of controversy your philosophers Plato and Aristotle stumbled upon. But from that initial point of divergence, all of Fairy took sides. The first Dagda founded the Seelie Court and to his side came fire, light, summer, sky, future, and other things you have no name for. The first Anwen founded the Unseelie Court and to his side came water, darkness, winter, earth, past, and other things you have no name for.”
“Well, John-A-Doors, it sounds to me that the Unseelie would be very supportive of ghosts. Earth and water--that’s where most of mankind rests, in the end.” Emma smiled and tried to be charming and conversational. John-a-Doors said that she wasn’t facing punishment, and that made her feel a little at ease, but only a little as she sensed some ominous trap lurking behind his words.