That night, Emma had her first nightmare of Fairy.
Her thoughts had wandered to a very dark place. She could not tell where the ground or sky were, or even if there was a ground or a sky. She might have been underwater, but there was a sound like a whimpering wind that made her think that she was perhaps in the middle of the air. She thought of a stormcloud, but there was no thunder or rain. It was like the dark, sooty clouds that used to hang over London before the fireball had reduced it to haunted ruins.
There were eyes in the darkness, whatever the darkness was. They were bright like the eyes of a cat. Emma’s mind wondered if they could have perhaps been stars or maybe candles, but some deep instinct inside her heart overruled her brain and told her that without a doubt what she was looking at were eyes--and they were looking back at her.
Emma felt each gaze like a needle of anxiety stabbed through the core of her being. She wished very badly that the eyes would blink, but they never did. She was the trapped object of their gaze. John-a-Doors had told her that faeries were creatures that abhorred ugliness, yet if this wasn’t ugliness, it was a vicious, terrible sort of beauty, like the beauty of a tiger’s fangs. There was certainly something predatory about the eyes. Emma couldn’t shake the feeling that they were somehow consuming her, taking her apart piece by piece.
There were many, many eyes in the darkness, and the way they were arranged about her there couldn’t have been two eyes for every face. There had to be cyclops out in the darkness or things with several eyes.
Or, perhaps, they were all the eyes of a singular creature…
Emma awoke with a start and had to make some effort to recall her hand from the bottle of laudanum by her bedside. She wished that she had been woken up in the middle of the night, for she longed to go back to sleep. She had woken up in a cold sweat and was as tired as if her body had been running down the street while her mind was in that dark, nameless place. She was cheated out of her nightly rest and as she looked out her window she hoped to see darkness sos he could go back to sleep--but there was sunlight, and worse still, sunlight with birdsong. Part of her wished Sally McNeil was with her so that she could shoot them.
She could find no rest in either the dark or the light, she observed, and didn’t that sound like a fairy curse? It sounded like something out of a fairy tale.”The story of the wicked woman who couldn’t rest in the dark or in the light.” It was good enough to print.
Emma forced herself to rise and get dressed. Today’s session with the McBrides would be the one to prove if her previous troubles had all been simple bad luck or if there was a deeper, more sinister aspect in place.
And a more just aspect, she observed. If the Kindly Ones really were working against her as part of some kind of revenge she really did have it coming. Hadn’t she been warned about the Kindly Ones since she was a little girl? Hadn’t she been warned about their esoteric rules? “Mind the stones, Emmy, those are fairy forts. If you kick one of the stones, the Kindly Ones may turn you into a stone!”
And as John-a-Doors said, she had none much more than kick over a stone.
Still, there was hope, even if it was a dim hope. Emma couldn’t see how this time would turn out wrong. One could expect a huntress to be in a forest, but who would be at the training ground for knights but a knight, or a squire? Duncan could be the stableboy, that would be alright, he was a horrible young man in life, his ghost being anywhere that wasn’t a barred cell or a wooden stockade was something for his parents to celebrate.
Even if the Kindly Ones wanted to botch this session, how would they be able to do it?
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
….
As Emma ascended the hill, Mrs. Betty McBride called out to her.
“Are you alright, Emma?” she asked.
“Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry Betty,I should have given you my hand, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Emma realized that she didn’t help the old couple up the hill. The McBrides weren’t as frail as the Andersons, but they were still rather rickety and wiry. Emma thought they looked like scarecrows, their flesh just hung off their withered bones, and she usually helped them up the hill--but not today. Today, her mind was wandering, and Betty could tell.
“I don’t mean that girl, I mean you’re acting like your head’s in the clouds.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Emma said. “I suppose my head is in the clouds in a way. I’m thinking about Fairy right now.”
It was the truest thing she had ever told the McBrides.
“Making preparations in your head?” Betty asked.
“To the best of my abilities. Showing the dead like this, showing them as more than just vague suggestions, it’s more demanding…but more rewarding at the same time. I like that I can do more for you and Horace. That is its own reward.” Emma remembered that the goal of this, if everything went smoothly, was to gently coax a larger payment out of the McBrides.
“That’s very noble of you to say, girl, but you can expect something a little more uh, tangible in the way of rewards from me and Horace.” Betty jostled Emma with her bony elbow. “After all, I’m sure the other families have started putting a little extra in with the care packages, a little more than what you can send over to the ghosts, right?”
Emma smiled. Betty McBride understood her a little more than the others. She wasn’t fully a mark. She did believe in the power, but she didn’t buy the altruism act for a moment. Betty McBride came the closest of all the clients to understanding Emma. Emma appreciated that about Betty. It meant that she didn’t have to pretend as much around Betty. She could relax her guard--a little.
“You just be sure you have your head on straight before you go into your magic. Don’t go calling up someone else’s Duncan. Hell, I’m halfway convinced you have done that. Duncan in the company of knights…I could have believed outlaws, even chivalrous outlaws like Robin Hood, but knights? Ha! I guess it’s true what they say about ghosts being different from people!”
“They can be very different from who they were in life.” Emma said. “Sometimes they're different in a bad way, but I think you’ll find that Duncan’s ghost is different in a very good way.”
“You just focus your magic or tel-e-path-y or whatever it’s properly called and don’t you worry a bit about Horace and I. We used to trample over these hills together when we were your age. Growing old hasn’t beaten us down so that we can’t lick a single hill.”
Betty cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted down the hill. “Horace, old man, come on! We’re going to finally get a good look at our son!”
“Ah, he can wait!” Horace McBride replied with a swipe of his cane which made him stumble until he stabbed the end of it into the earth. “He’s dead, isn’t he? What’s time to the dead? They got all the time in the world!”
“But you don’t have all the time!” Betty got behind her husband and pushed him to the top of the hill, nearly causing him to lose his balance again. “We can finally see what he’s been up to all these years! You want to leave that to your ghost to find out, huh?”
“I doubt my ghost would care a lick.” Horace said. “I bet my ghost is going to be one of those wisp types, one of those that doesn’t have much of a body or much of a brain. Like that ball of green fire Ernst, Morton and Glass use as a servant. That’ll be me, and I’ll just float around like a soap bubble for all eternity. That’s my kind of luck.”
“Well, who cares about your ghost, old man!” Betty exclaimed. “We’re not here about your ghost, we’re here about our son’s ghost!”
“And let me guess, he’s going to be very hungry again like last time?”
Betty slapped her husband on the back of his head. “Horace! How dare you?” Then she whispered so that Emma could only barely hear “You know good and well we’re getting good rates from her! The mediums in Blackwall would have cost our inheritance!”
Horace rubbed the back of his head as he looked at Emma. “Well? I’m here now. Come on, I want to see the knights. Let’s see if ol’ Demon Duncan left behind a Galahad ghost!”
“Don’t rush her, you fool! This isn’t something you can just wish to happen! It takes focus!”
Emma smiled, more to herself than to Betty. “Would you believe that both are true?”
“You said Duncan’s with “Swan Knights,” yes?” Horace asked.
“Yes, that’s right.” Emma answered.
“Hmph. Doesn’t that sound very fairy? Swans. The Little People would like those birds, wouldn’t they? Weird little devils with their long, snakey necks!”