The Mermaid House: Part Sixteen

LEANDER AND VIOLET FLED toward Leander's car. Someone was whispering above the tidal roar, in a sing-song, female voice,
    "Jack and Jill went up the hill..."
    When something huge and black snaked from the shadows, across the sand, Leander shouted. Whatever it had been vanished into the night. It left no trail.
   "...to fetch a pail of water..."
    "Leander." Violet tugged at his hand, pulling him back. "Not that way."
    "Jack fell down...."
    They ran toward a slope of rocks, into the swampy darkness of a cave. He could hear the gurgling rush of water and hoped they weren't going to submerge themselves in the ocean. He could barely see. At least her voice couldn't reach them, here.
    "Violet..."
    She pulled him toward a black sky and a full moon. He saw the ocean then, inky and silver and wild against the rocks. She looked back at him, her face white, desperate.
    "Violet--" He saw no hope for them and a languid despair made him fall back.
    "They're not all evil," Violet told him, "the people of the sea."
    "The giant snake back there--"
    "It wasn't a snake. It was a water spirit, and it is what killed Owen Thyme...because she wanted him."
    He sank down against the cliff, exhausted, and gazed at the ocean. He put his head in his hands and wondered how his world had come apart around him.
    He heard her sit beside him. He reached out, blindly, and felt her hand twine around his. She whispered, "I am a failed thing...Leander, you made me a person again. Don't move from here."
    She pulled away.
    "Wait--" He scrambled up, but she was gone. He turned in place, blinking, shivering. He wanted to run away, didn't dare.
    He looked despereately back at the ocean and wished he'd brought his video camera, to prove all of this.
    He heard a scream, wild and lingering, and he bolted back down the tunnel. "Violet!"
    He ran across the moonlit sand, toward the ruins. He halted when he noticed dark spots in the sand, flinched when he realized it was blood. He ran forward. "Violet!"
    There was a crash above the ocean roar, as if a wall of glass had just fallen. He shivered again, felt sick. Around him, the air shimmered. Glass seemed to twinkle in the air, growing like frost.
    He breathed out, staggered back. Water began to pool around him. He heard a soft clanging, as if metal girders were being raised. He stood very still as the invisible world slowly appeared around him.
(Illustration: Harry Clarke)

The Mermaid House: Part Fifteen

SOMETHING DARK had followed them. As the figure sauntered forward, the first thing Leander noticed was the eyes, silvery and inhuman, before the shadows fell away from a young man in jeans and a black T-shirt. His long, blonde hair was knotted back. He was as pale as Violet, with that same otherworldly manner that caused an instinctual uneasiness. He smiled like an animal baring its teeth. "Introduce me to your friend, sis."
    "I don't want to know you." Leander was very aware of their isolation in the cold night around them.
    "His name is Joukainan," Violet told Leander without looking away from the young man. "He's my brother."
    "Just call me Johnny." The young man's grin was definitely wolfish. "Do you want to see a neat trick?"
    Leander couldn't move. A shudder ran through him. Violet's hand tightened around his, painfully, as her brother drew out a small knife and sliced into his own wrist. What emerged from the glide of the blade through his skin wasn't blood.
    Even knowing what he did about Violet, Leander didn't believe what he saw....flower petals dripping from Johnny-Joukainan's skin...black petals which swirled across the sand.
    "Tulips. A sacred flower to my people." Joukainan looked up and malevolence breathed from him. "What do you think Violet's filled with?"
    Leander backed away, pulling Violet with him. His stomach churned as his fingers tightened on her wrist. He could feel her veins, the pulse which meant blood, not some horrific, supernatural embalming. "Go to hell."
    "I've been in hell for some time." Violet's brother tilted his head. "Is he going to join the family, Vi? He looks like a buttercup."
    Violet whispered to Leander, "Go. Get in your car. I'll keep him back."
    Leander couldn't leave her. He had no defenses, no idea how to help her. And the creature calling itself Joukainan was smiling with teeth that seemed sharper than they ought to be.
    "Think he can outrun me, Vi?" Joukainan moved forward.
    Leander swallowed and almost bolted.
    Joukainan lunged. He grabbed Violet by the hand, slid the blade across her arm.
    "No--" Leander leaped forward. He pushed Joukainan away, but the other scarcely seemed to notice -- his gaze was fixed on the blood beading Violet's arm. His colorless gaze slid to Leander, who hovered between Violet and her 'brother.' "You. Boy. You made her bleed."
    "You're the one who--"
    "Get." The knife vanished. Joukainan gestured outward. "Both of you."
    When Leander and Violet hesitated, Joukainan shouted, "Go!"
   

The Mermaid House: Part Fourteen

BEWARE THE DARK DAUGHTERS of La Mer.
    A terrifying mermaid lived in a house that was sometimes a ruin and sometimes not and a girl who might not be one of the living had kissed him.
    There followed a series of grim days through which Leander moved as if he were a clockwork thing, his nightmares reels of pirahna-teethed mermaids and corpses wound in seaweed. After the funeral, his mom had found a job at the hospital. She now slept through her days and worked nights. He was alone again.
    He went out to the well one afternoon, with a large flashlight, and pushed away the board to peer into the darkness below. The light hit moss-furred stone, a pool of sinister black water.
    "Hey!" he called, feeling like an idiot. "Whatever you are -- I want to talk to you--"
    Something struck him in the forehead. He fell, gasped when the board slid back across the well. As if to emphasize its intentions, the invisible entity slammed a piece of stone from the wall of the church behind his house, over the board.
    Leander scrambled back. The projectile that had hit him had been an old soccer ball.
    "Then you tell me!" Leander pushed to his feet, turned in a circle. "Come on, ghost boy! How do I help Violet?"
    A wind swirled through the yard and Leander thought he heard a male voice whisper, Sutro.

He waited until the sun began to set before driving to the ocean road and clambering down the stairs to the remains of the Sutro Baths.
    Violet sat on a crumbling wall, swinging her feet and gazing at the sea. He wanted to run to her.
    She turned her head slightly. "Go away."
    "No."
    "Look at me." She rose to face him. There was a bruise on her cheek. The sun had set. Her eyes were dark. There was no inhuman silver glint. He strode toward her, reached out. She raised her hands and twined her fingers with his. She looked like a waif in her old jeans and denim jacket.
    "Your hands," he whispered, "they're warm."
    "And this." She pressed one of his hands to her breast. Her expression was pleading, but he scarcely noticed that, with his hand where it was. She said, "Not my breast, idiot -- what's beneath it. My heart shouldn't be beating."
    "Violet--"
    "And I bleed. Do you know what you've done? Then you go and practically bare your throat to
her--"
    "What is she?"
    "What are any of us?" The new voice made Leander hurtle around to stare at the shadowy figure leaning against a pillar. Violet gripped his wrist and pulled him back with her. She didn't drop her gaze from the shadow as she whispered a name.

(Illustration: Arnold Bocklin)

The Mermaid House: Part Thirteen

LEANDER TORE AWAY FROM the malevolent thing pretending to be a girl. Her eyes flashed the silver of a deep sea creature's scales and the inky tattoo on her brow writhed as if its tentacles would lash out at him...
    What was he doing?
    He ran for the door.
    It crashed open and Violet stood there, in jeans and a denim jacket. She looked like a warrior, feet apart, eyes dark, her hair swirling around her face. She said to Leander, "Get out."
    Aware of the cold thing behind him, he whispered, "I won't leave y--"
    She lunged forward, grabbed him by the wrist, and flung him out the door. He lost his balance, fell on the porch. He scrambled up as the door slammed in his face. He struck it with both hands and shouted Violet's name.
    All of the window shutters slammed closed.
    He stumbled down the stairs. He circled the house, tripping over roots, tearing through drifts of ivy. He found the back door. He yanked on the handle, but it didn't give.
    A wind crashed through the garden, swirling leafy debris over him. He sank down against the door with his arms over his head.

He woke to sunlight and birdsong. He could smell flowers. He raised his head. He sat against the back door of Mermaid House, in a patch of velvety, purple flowers.
    Violets.
    He stumbled to his feet and bashed at the back door until it fell open.
    "Violet!" He ran through the ruined house, shouting himself hoarse. As he pushed into the final room, he saw only shattered glass and graffitti, a puddle of black water within which lay a forlorn doll with its hair pulled out and its eyes missing. A shiver convulsed him. He backed away. And ran.
                                                                           ***
(Illustration: Edmund Dulac)

The Mermaid House: Part Twelve

THE WHITE-SKINNED GIRL, wearing a dress of ivory cotton, looked as though she'd been standing in the rain. Her hair was black and sleek. She was beautiful, but it was an unhealthy beauty, with the pallor, overripe lips, and dark eyes of someone in the last days of their life...a vampire's victim. The tattoo on her brow, a tentacled sea star etched in black ink, seemed to move.
    "Leander." Her head tilted to one side. "Why have you come to my door?"
    She knew his name. His breath whistled in his throat.
    She stepped closer and it was as if a shark had appeared as he swam. He backed away and hit the door, which opened behind him. He twisted around to see the cozy parlor and lamplight caressing sea fossils. Old-fashioned music scratched at the air, an unnerving melody that sounded as though it was being played on a phonograph. The beautiful girl slipped past him. "Come in."
    He was compelled to step into the parlor. The door shut behind him. The girl prowled around the false parlor, her gaze fixed upon him. "You came here for a reason. Why not tell it to me?"
    His dad was dead. "I want to see Violet."
    "Violet." The girl stood before him now. Water seemed to cling to her skin and hair. "Violet is mine."
    He whispered, "Let her go."
    She stepped closer. He could smell dark things, old stone and the sea. He felt as if he were submerged. When she glanced away, he breathed easier.
    "Let her go?" The thing that looked like a girl began to circle him again, her bare feet leaving wet prints. "I don't hold her. She made her choice."
    His voice grated, "Did you trick her?"
    She stood close to him again and her eyes were black -- he thought his heart would stop as she whispered, "Boy. What do you want? To free her? Be very careful what you ask for."
    He wanted to run out the door, away from this creature whose proximity leeched the warmth from his blood and bones. But he had lost his father. He couldn't abandon Violet. He wouldn't. And the worst that could happen to him...well, that would happen anyway, wouldn't it? Whether it was a heart attack, a car accident, or something else. Death was inevitable.
    He reached out, grasped the cold hands of the girl who was not a girl. He said, "I don't want to die."
    Her mouth curled. She placed her hands on his shoulders. Then she glided with him around the room. The crackling music grew louder. He steeled himself as she wound her arms around his neck and her lips glistened like some delicious, poisoned treat.
    Her kiss thieved away his warmth, but his arms slid around her. His fingers tangled in her heavy hair. He closed his eyes. His skin began to ice. His fingertips went numb. He couldn't breathe...

(Illustration: John William Waterhouse)

The Mermaid House: Part Eleven

THE HOUR BETWEEN DUSK and evening now held secrets, a world where the dead walked and abandoned houses came alive.
    Leander returned home and found a message from his mom on the phone. He walked to his room, shut the door, and sat on the floor with his head on his knees.
    He woke in the dark, curled on the floor, and thought of the last time he'd spoken to his dad.
    The doctors hadn't helped. His mom, while dealing with it, had no time for him. He hadn't been able to say good-bye...he should go to the hospital. But he couldn't get up to do it. The world had become an ugly place.

He parked his car in the empty lot of the old neighborhood which hid the mermaid house. This time, he found the house without a problem. Its windows glowed with light, but its air of ordinariness was an illusion. He paused to gaze at the enormous stone head, now in its beautiful phase and spouting morning glories from its mouth.
    He trudged up the steps, until the light from beyond the mermaid door touched his skin. He raised one hand, to knock.
    Before his fist hit the glass, sanity struck. He went ice-cold to his bones and remembered Owen Thyme, the winter that radiated from his skin, the silvering of his eyes. A dead boy had spoken to him and he'd been about to knock on the door of a sometimes-house he'd been warned held monsters.  
    He whirled, to run--
    --and found the dark-eyed girl with the tattoo of something black and tentacled on her brow standing before him.
                                                                                ***

The Mermaid House: Part Ten

LEANDER RETURNED TO the mermaid house in the day and once again found it an abandoned, boarded-up mess. He walked to the door, pushed at the bell. When no one answered, he stepped back and raised his video recorder.
    He filmed the house while walking around it. When he came to the back door, he discovered a broken window. He unlocked it, shoved it open, climbed over the sill. The house smelled like mold and the trash glittering over the floor. He approached the graffitied wall, read the words splashed in red: Beware the dark daughters of La Mer.
    His stomach convulsed. He began walking through the dreary rooms, saw no clues as to anyone having lived there.
    When something hit the floor upstairs, he almost bolted out the door.
    He trudged up the stairs, keeping to the wall in an effort to reduce the wood creaking. When he reached the landing, he found a tunnel of ivy with doors in it. He raised his video recorder as he moved forward. He opened the first door.
    Shadows flocked over a window scrawled with graffiti. Leaves rustled across the floor, past a graceful angel statue missing its head. He backed out of the room.
    He pushed open the next door with his foot. This room was empty of anything but a few dirty wine glasses flung about -- glasses, not bottles.
    One of the glasses rolled across the floor, popped upright --
    He stumbled back -- and realized he had gone deaf. He couldn't hear anything -- not his own steps, his panicked breathing, or his heartbeat. He felt as if he'd been submerged in water. He shouted, heard only a muffled sound.
    In a corner piled with dead leaves, something moved...a person-shaped shadow, spiky and whispering. An eye glinted.
    A tiny, bone-white crab fell from the shadow, hit the floor, scuttled away.
    Leander ran, tearing through the ivy, toward the stairs.
    He pitched forward, saw the stairs gaping before him. Terror slammed him against the banister and he clutched at the rotting wood as his camera clattered down the stairs.
    Something grabbed the collar of his shirt and prevented him from tumbling forward. He fell back onto the landing, his hearing returning with a roar as a female voice whispered his name.
    Sitting on the top stair, shaking until his bones rattled, he tasted blood. He raised a hand to his bleeding nose.
    He rose. He moved carefully down the treachorous stairs. He grabbed his camera and limped to the front door. Before he stepped out, he said, "I'll get you out of here, Violet."
                                                                              ***
(Illustration: Gustav Moreau)

Lily's Note:

You see where this is going, don't you?
    They prey on the vulnerable and the lost. The water tribes are the worst because they do more than seduce and ruin. They are savage, the outlaws of the sea. They're the voice that whispers Come into the water so that you drown. They're the light on the ocean that leads you away. They're what hide in the dark pools, waiting to drag you down.
    They come ashore, sometimes, when they are hungry, or when they are exiled by their own people.
    In 1986, Leander Cyrus met the Gorgon and her family of Jacks and Jills.
    How do you think this will end?


Missing Boy Feared Dead

Owen Thyme, a young athlete from the Noe Valley neighborhood, missing since yesterday, is now believed dead. Police authorities have found evidence of his drowning in an abandoned well behind his house, although a body has not yet been found. Rescue teams have discovered that the well was built above an underground water source that may, oddly enough, lead to the ocean and, unfortunately, hamper their ability to locate Owen Thyme. Bloody footprints were discovered leading to the well and a jacket belonging to the victim was found nearby.

                                            San Francisco Chronicle 1971
                                                                           ***

(Illustration: Warwick Goble)

The Mermaid House: Part Nine

HE WENT TO HER house after dark.
    Although there was no address, he knew it was the same house becaue of the mermaid door. But the windows weren't boarded up, the garden was neatly chaotic, and the Medusa head was a beautiful stone face with swirling hair and a smiling mouth. He moved carefully up the steps, wincing when they creaked. He peered into the cozy, sea-themed parlor. It was an illusion. The whole house was an illusion. He wondered what he was really looking at, what his brain wasn't registering.
    The front door flew open. He slammed a hand over his mouth to keep from yelling.
    Violet stalked onto the porch. "Idiot," she whispered, grabbing his other hand, dragging him off the porch. "They're home."
    "Your family? Why can't I meet them?"
    She stared at him. Then she pulled him from the house, down the street. She said, "I've told you, haven't I, what I am."
    "No, Violet." He turned on her. "You haven't. You've implied some pretty unbelievable things."
    "The houses in the woods, in fairy tales, the ones that belong to monsters...that's my house."
    He swallowed, said, "Again with the implications."
    "A shipwreck of a house. A gorgon face outside of it. They are from the ocean, and as old as the ocean. Don't come here again."
    His common sense decided she was elaborating on the truth, or that she was crazy. He said, "Then you come with me. We'll drive somewhere -- where do you want to go?"
    She glanced back over her shoulder. She looked down, frowned. He resisted an urge to reach out and touch one of the brown curls falling against her cheek. She narrowed her eyes at him. "Okay."
    They began walking towards his car. Idly, he said, "So...can you do magic and stuff?"
    "Not the kind you'd want to see."
    She said she wanted to go to the seashore, which was ironic, but he drove there, through the mist-shrouded night. She directed him to the oceanside road, where they parked. She led him down a stairway, to massive, concrete ruins on the beach. Graffiti and metal girders glittered against the ocean darkness. He saw stairways that led to the sky and knots of sea vegetation. Cypress trees twisted around columns. It was an eerie, stark landscape.
    "These were public baths, a long time ago. Indoor baths." Violet balanced on a low wall, her arms outstretched. "There were potted trees and chandeliers and statues and lots of elegance."
    Burningly aware of Violet's strangeness -- her eyes would catch the light and silver -- he stared at the ocean, and thought, She isn't human.
    Then: So what? What was so special about being human?
    She was suddenly very close, and her eyes went dark. And he was kissing her, his hands in her hair, her scent of flowers like a drug, her mouth soft as a plum.
    She pulled away and he gasped as air filled his lungs. She stepped back with a crooked smile, set her hand on a pillar.
    She flinched, drew her hand down, stared at it. Her eyes were wide.
    "Violet?" he spoke cautiously.
    "I cut myself on the stone. I'm bleeding," she whispered. She sat down on the low wall, staring at her hand.
    "Is it bad?"
    "Do you know," She drew up the hood of her jacket, "blood plasma is like sea water? Almost the same chemical constitution."
   "I did know." He sat beside her, watched uneasily as she touched the beading blood on her palm as if it was gold.
    "I have to go back." She slid to her feet and began trudging across the sand. "Come on."
    He stubbornly wasn't going to follow her -- let her wait at the car -- but he drew his gaze from the black and wild ocean and trudged after.
                                                                      ***
(Illustration: Richard Dadd)

The Mermaid House: Part Eight

LEANDER WONDERED WHY he hadn't noticed the silvering of her eyes before. He had to steel himself to keep from leaping up and running away from her. In the twilit gloom, with the hole in the ground before him and a creature beside him his instincts were telling him wasn't human, he felt as cold as the moon.
    "Let's put this back, shall we?" She reached for the board and, without his help, dragged it over the gaping hole in the ground. Then she rose. "Owen told me where you lived."
    "Owen Thyme?" he whispered.
    "The one you met on a moonlit road."
    He didn't want to look at her. He wanted her to go away and childishly wished she would.
    "Ignoring me won't make me go away."
    She was a stray something. He began to shiver. Then he thought of his father lying in that hospital bed. He realized the idea of Violet was far less terrifying than the reality of his father dying.
    "Okay." He rose and faced her, making an effort not to flinch from the otherworldly silver of her eyes. "Why don't you come in and watch a movie? Do you eat?" He walked past her, towards his house. He half hoped she wouldn't follow.
    She followed him. "I don't eat."
    His hand shook as he turned the doorknob. As she passed over the threshold, the house seemed to become degrees colder. He walked past his neglected dinner in the microwave, into the dark parlor. He switched on the TV, glanced at the clock. He'd meant to watch a movie tonight, a black and white classic on cable.
    She sat beside him on the sofa and he attempted to think of her as normal. She watched the movie without saying a word. When it was over, she said, "I think I saw that once."
    "It was called The Haunting."
    "The old witch scared me the first time."
    "I suppose that sort of thing doesn't scare you anymore."
    "Not really, no." She tilted her head. She wore a red T-shirt with Chinese symbols on it and tartan leggings, with boots and an aviator's jacket. She still smelled like flowers.
    "What happened to Owen Thyme?" He was pleased at how steady his voice was. "Did someone push him into that well?"
    "Keep away from that well. Especially at night."
    He wanted to throw a grenade into the well. "I went to your house. It was a wreck."
    "Maybe that's because it was built from shipwrecks."
    "A dead boy spoke to me. What are you?"
    "That's a rude question."
    "You're not going to answer it, are you?"
    She rose with quicksilver grace. "Someday I will."
    She left and he remained on the sofa, not quite sure if he had seen her leave. Her voice drifted back to him: "Don't come to my house after dark."
                                                               ***

The Mermaid House: Part Seven

Owen Thyme, who was dead, had spoken to Leander on an ocean boulevard. Leander had been allowed to see a veiled world no one else around him would ever believe in.
    He returned to an empty house and another note from his mom. He tossed a frozen meal into the microwave and walked to the kitchen window, gazed out at the backyard, a narrow tangle of trees and weeds. He was alone. He had nothing to lose.
    As the microwave beeped behind him, he went out the back door and strode toward the nest of trees in the far corner of the yard. The stained-glass window of the church behind his house glowed as he pushed aside ivy and spiderwebs and found a circle of gray stone with a board aross it in the grass. He stepped back. The sight of the well made him sick. This was where Owen Thyme had died, fallen into the well, his neck broken.
    He crouched down and pushed aside the board. He saw a black pit, fungus sliming the stone rim. His bones went cold as he peered down, saw a glisten of dark water. The smell of earth and water was not so innocent here.
    There was a glopping sound, as if something had emerged from the water below. He couldn't move, staring down at the darkness which began to take shape with something silvery gleaming in the center...
    An eye? Was it--
    "Leander."
    He jumped and a slim hand grabbed his before he tipped into the well. He was almost shocked when Violet from the mermaid house crouched beside him. She looked down into the well, up at him. She said sweetly, "What are you doing?"

The Mermaid House: Part Six

LEANDER COULD NOT rationalize that encounter on the ocean road, so he drove to Thyme's Auto Shop, where he spoke with a silvery-haired man in overalls. As the man checked out his car, Leander casually interrogated him.
    His name was Ben Thyme. He'd had a son that used to play soccer. There had been an accident...fifteen years ago.

It took Leander an hour of frustrated driving before he found the neighborhood again. When he found the shipwreck house, it didn't look the same in the failing light of day. He approached it carefully, picking his way through weeds that seemed to have grown overnight.
    A feverish ache in his bones made him shiver. The house's windows were boarded up. The roof had sunk on one side. The porch was slimed with old leaves and lichen. In the neglected garden, he saw a giant, stone head surrounded by snaky hair, its face set in an expression of horror, its open mouth vomiting the roots of a small, twisty tree that was strangling a nearby oak. There were toadstools everywhere, and a rippling fungus around the Medusa head.
    He stepped back. He stared at the boarded-up house with a sick feeling. The attic window hadn't been covered. The glass was dark. He stared up at it as every instinct told him to run.
    Something drifted across the glass, inside. He backed away. He looked around at the tangled lawn. This couldn't be the right place.
    He glanced at the front door and saw the carvings of sea creatures, the stained-glass mermaid. He moved up the stairs. Peering inside, he could see a deserted room, trash on the floor, a spray of graffiti across the moldering wall. Only part of a poetic creed was visible -- ware La Mer's dark daughters.
    He turned and strode quickly back to his car. When he got into it, he hit the locks and stared accusingly at the house and thought It's tricking me.
                                                                         ***

The Mermaid House: Part Five

BEWARE THE DARK DAUGHTERS of La Mer.
    The black water rippled with foam that glowed beneath the moon. A blood-red starfish clung to a rock looming over the silhouette of a woman who stood, waist-deep, in the ocean. Reflections of moonlight glittered across skin like diamonds, illuminated one half of a face that was white, cold. Something predatory seemed to swim in the dark pool of one eye. The inky tattooo swirling across her forehead was a tentacled sea flower with thorns. She raised one hand and in it was--
    Leander woke, that image of a dripping human heart making him choke, as if he had taken a bite out of it.
    It was morning. It was blindingly sunny. But he shivered when he remembered the pale crab crawling in the woman's black hair.
    He bypassed breakfast in the cream-carpeted living room furnished with white wicker and hurried out. His mom was at the hostpital and she'd left a note. He didn't bother looking at it.
    He rushed through the day, thinking of Violet and the shipwreck of a house. He couldn't seem to get warm, even in the pool of sunlight that bathed his desk in the last class.
    He was weaving through the student crowds in the hall when he passed the glass cases that held trophies and photos of past school victories. And he remembered where he'd seen Owen Thyme.
    He stood, isolated, staring at the photo of the 1970s soccer team and the grinning boy with the longish brown hair and chipped tooth. He read the names in the caption beneath.
    He turned and walked away.
    It's his dad. That's all. That was fifteen years ago, so it's not him.
                                                                 ***
(Illustration: Warwick Goble)

The Mermaid House: Part Four

LEANDER WAS THINKING about the girl named after a flower when his Chevy broke down on an ocean boulevard he wasn't familiar with. As night drenched his windows, he pulled to the side just as his headlights faded. He got out, looked hopelessly around at trees and grass silvered by mist. He slumped against the car, feeling sick. He didn't know how far it was to a place with a phone--
    He saw a bright light coming towards him -- headlights -- and, disregarding any horror stories he'd heard of psychos on the road, he waved his arms. He saw the lights fade as the car pulled to the side. He waited, but didn't hear the sound of an engine.
    A boy walked from the mist. He seemed harmless, dressed in a gray T-shirt and jeans. He smiled, thumbs in his pockets. "Battery?"
    "I think so." Leander relaxed.
    The other boy nodded, walked around the car. The wind stirred his long, brown hair. "That happens sometimes, here. I'd give you a jump, but--" He shrugged, looked up. "Leander, right? I'm Owen. You moved into my old house, the one with the well in the back."
    Leander thought he recognized the other boy from school and nodded warily.
    "You like San Francisco so far?"
    "I do like it." Leander hesitated. "My dad's sick. So we came here, for the hospital."
    Owen's eyes darkened. "Be careful then."
    "Yeah. Okay, so can you give me a ride?"
    "I probably won't need to. Try starting the engine again."
    Leander doubtfully slid back into the car and turned the key in the ignition. The car roared to life. "Hell."
    "Yeah. It's weird here." Owen leaned down. "Bring it down to Thyme's Auto Shop. My dad'll check it out. He's a great mechanic, and a blacksmith on the side."
    "Thanks." Leander gripped the steeering wheel. He'd never heard of anyone being a blacksmith outside of Amish communities and Renaissance fairs.
    "Could you hold on a sec? Let me make sure my car starts?"
    Leander listed to him crunch away over the gravel. He waited. When he didn't hear anything after five minutes, he scowled and steered his Chevy around, back towards where he thought Owen Thyme had parked his car.
    He didn't see it. He drove around, twice, before returning to the road.
    He ignored the prickling at the nape of his neck that told him something out of the ordinary had just happened.
                                                                          ***

The Mermaid House: Part Three

THE GIRL'S EYES SEEMED TO glint a fey silver before she hunched forward, into the last of the light. "I live there. You see that frame carved around the door? I made that."
    "I'm not looking into windows or anything."
    She rose. Trailing smoke and ash, she drifted past him. "Come with me."
    He followed.
    As the sun set, he realized the house wasn't as derelict as it had seemed. What he'd mistaken for boards across the ground-floor windows were actually wooden shutters. The upstairs windows were open, not broken, and gauzy curtains billowed, revealing hints of antique furniture beyond. The door was made of stained-glass, its image that of a mermaid swimming up through the waves.  Around the door was a frame of dark wood into which images of squid, seahorses, and starfish had been carved.
    She looked over her shoulder as she ushered him into a cozy parlor scattered with shells and fossilized sea life. "Come on in. Funny thing -- me inviting you."
   "Is it? I'm Leander."
    She looked at him again. "That's an unusual name."
    "My mom was really into Shakespeare. She wanted to be an actress before she got into real estate."
    "I'm Violet." She turned, holding out a hand. The cigarette had vanished. She didn't smell of nicotine, but of fresh-cut flowers.
    He grasped her hand, which was cold and slender and decorated with several rings engraved with skulls, fish, and Celtic designs.
    Something thumped upstairs. He looked at the ceiling, frowned at the water stain there. A drop fell. "I think something's leak--"
     She was gazing intently at the wet patch. "You need to go. Damn, it's so early--"
    "What..."
    "My family is home. They don't like company." She backed him out the door. Before she closed it, she said, "You should avoid places with the three Ws growing around them."
    "The three--"
    "Witchweed, white clover, and watercress. Look at our garden."
    The door closed.
    He stared at the glowing mermaid in the stained glass. Slightly unsettled, he moved down the stairs, looked back at the house, in velvet darkness now, its lamplight hidden.
    He thought of the wet, dark-haired girl he'd filmed on the porch and shivered. My family is home.

The Mermaid House: Part Two

THIS NEIGHBORHOOD ON THE fringe of San Francisco was otherworldly. Leander, whose favorite films were strange, elegant, and elemental, loved it. He drove his creaking Chevy to a parking lot that had no apparent owner because of its weedy state and got out to walk around. He didn't see many people -- an elderly woman weeding a garden;a kid on a bike. There were a few lights in the houses, most of which had For Sale signs on the lawns or seemed forgotten altogether in cloisters of gnarled greenery.
    He wandered up a road shadowed by more of those twisting trees and found the shipwreck of a house.
    It was far back behind a screen of blackberry bushes. It had once been white, but was now gray with age, its slate roof smeared with lichen and rotting leaves, a giant spiderweb glittering across the veranda. The lower windows had boards across them and the upper ones were broken, with tattered curtains drifting in and out, giving glimpses of darkness. The house seemed to invite attention while whispering Beware.
    Leander shook his hair from his eyes and aimed the video camera at the house.
    A young woman stood on the veranda.
    Her hair was black and dripping, her silvery dress clinging to a slender body that seemed slightly attenuated, as if the camera lense were distorting her. There was a tattoo on her forehead, twining above eyes that were black and malevolent --
    Stumbling back, he lowered the video camera -- there was no one on the veranda. How had she moved so fast...?
    "What are you doing?"
    "Ow." The ringing in his ears made him flinch as he turned and gazed at the girl who sat on a low wall, watching him. "Um...hey..."
    She had a cigarette between full lips. Dressed in a black sweater, jeans, and Doc Martens, she looked pretty in a subversive way. Heavy brown hair tumbled around a pale face, dark eyes smudged with smoky liner. She was his age, about, but regarded him with a cynicism that seemed older. She tilted her head. "I said, what are you doing?"

The Mermaid House: Part One

THE MERMAID HOUSE: 1985

IT IS A COBWEB BIRTH, the awareness of betwixt and between, the world of the children of nothing and night.

Leander Cyrus was seventeen when he came to San Francisco from a midwestern town where things had been as colorless as The Wizard of Oz before Dorothy landed in that Technicolor otherworld. He had a mother and a father, but he might as well have been an orphan, because they worked, and he was used to being on his own. He wanted to be a filmmaker, but that had been nothing but a hobby in his old town. Here, in this city not far from Hollywood, it was a possible career. His new school even encouraged it.
    It was as if the city were a cure he'd needed. He grew taller. His hair burnt to gold. His outcast love of the Seventies, reflected in his T-shirts and jeans, were acceptable in this place of sun and sea. And his mother, to make up for not being there, bought him a video camera, a sleek black Sony. His hands shook when he lifted it out of the box.
    He wasn't drawn to the glassy glamour of new San Francisco. It was the old places that fascinated him, the ones with histories: Cameron House and the Neptune Society Columbarium, abandoned buildings and creepy streets. He'd film them at dusk, when they had more character.
    He found the old neighborhood by accident, when he drove up a crooked hill street where the houses were tangled with trees he couldn't identify. The trees were twisty and dark, with heavy leaves that only allowed a bit of sunlight through. As the sun faded, orange shadows crept across a cluster of shabby Victorian houses and the street was submerged in weird light. He could hear the ocean, see it beyond some of the houses.
    An eerie disorientation made him shake his head, as if that would clear his skull.

Jack and Jill: Lily's Story

I WON'T USE YOUR NAME, BRAVE, fierce sister, because there is power in a name. (I'm even beginning to sound like them now). You've probably found my journal, so this isn't for you alone, but for others who've stumbled across Their path.
    And you know who you are, don't you?
    It began, for me, with a walk in the woods, on the day our mother died, only I hadn't known she would die. It was winter. I saw the two dead children at an old well. Their velvet clothes looked motheaten and old. They were so white, it was like they hadn't any blood. When they looked at me, their eyes were like polished silver. And they were barefoot, in the snow. They were so serious about the dolls they were playing with. The dolls were just sticks wrapped in gauze, with small, porcelain faces glued on top. I don't know what made me recite the nursery rhyme. It wasn't anything dad had taught us, though you'd think, with him being an expert in folklore, he'd have known about Them and warned us.
    "Jack and Jill went up a hill, to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill--"
    One of the kids stood up and looked at me. He was my age -- I was thirteen -- and he wore a red velvet suit patched with mold. He was holding an old Halloween mask, a plastic rabbit face. His skin wasn't an albino's white...it was like snow. I wanted to run when he said, "You shouldn't talk about them like that."
    I said, rude, because I was scared, "Talk about who?"
    "Jacks and Jills." The girl frowned. She wore green velvet and a necklace of beetles made of tarnished pewter. "Dead people stuffed with flowers."
    The sun faded then, and their eyes glowed. I could see the veins in their skin -- it was like looking at our mom's creepy, ball-jointed dolls come to life. And it suddenly got colder than winter, a chill you find in basements, in stone places. I backed away, whispered, "What are you?"
    "We could have been Jacks and Jills. We're only dead things now."
    And I heard you calling me. And I ran. I ran away from them. I ran out of that dark place.
    And a couple of years later, in a different city, I stumbled back into it.
    Do you remember Leander? The boy I loved? He isn't what we thought he was...

(Illustration: Arthur Rackham)

The Ballad of Maude Clare: End

SO, MY SISTER, you will sit and read this with your Jack and you'll believe things will be different, that this story of an isolated girl descending into the shadowy, bloody Otherworld of Faery isn't like yours.
    You'll look up at the boy leaning in the doorway, that dark hair shadowing his face that belongs to another century, a striking face, a human one. You'll ache for Maude Clare, who loved a Jack that couldn't love back. And you'll say, to your Jack, "Why did you give this to me?"
    He'll sit beside you, hands knotted between his knees, his fragrance of green things, of earth and smoke, making your heart race. His fingers, when they fold over yours, will be cold with antique rings, and scarred. He'll say, "I wanted you to know what could happen."
    "You think I don't know? You think I'm easily tricked?"
    "You're only seventeen."
    "Did Maude Clare die?"
    "The rabbit-headed man was an urban legend, there. Maude Clare's body was found beneath the yew. The Tiamats were a lawless clan, the children of the Dragon. The Mongoose family, who were humans with Fata blood, alerted higher powers -- now there are no more Tiamats. As for him, that Jack...well, he was the bones and dust found near the yew..."
    You'll look down at the book's black cover with its silver etching of a girl's face. You'll touch the name of the author on one yellowed page-- Ethan Mongoose -- trace the date it was published -- 1977. And your Jack will say, "He wrote it ten years later...for the two girls the Tiamats murdered."
    You'll look up at the Jack you've invited into your home, your heart, and you'll say what I hoped you would not, "This'll be different. Because you're different. And I will be a thing with teeth."
                                                                 The End

Author's Note: In Egyptian mythology, there is Dendera, or Wepuat, a rabbit-headed god who is sometimes taken for Osiris, the god of the dead. There is Nana Bozho, the Great Hare, a trickster in Native American folklore. The Aztecs had Ometotchtli, a god of fertility and celebration. And then there is the rabbit-man consort of Ostara, the Germanic goddes of Spring. Life and death and tricks. And how much of him is in our world now?

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Ten

THE MASKED CREATURES GATHERED around the monstrous yew didn't move as Sarah Morgan gently pulled away from Maude. No one cried out. No one spoke.
    Ruby Tiamat slid forward, the train of her gown slithering. "We knew you would come. Our braveheart."
    Cold breathed across Maude's skin. She stepped back. Her legs felt boneless.
    Sarah Morgan was as white and luminous as the others. Her gown was wet. Ghost light flickered in her black hair that was tangled with water lilies and a glittering dragonfly. Her eyes were the opal hue of a dead thing's.
    Jack spoke softly, "You cannot save her, Maude."
    "She drowned." Ruby looked at the youth with the plaited red hair. "Because she made Tauren angry."
    Maude whispered, "She can't be..."
    Ruby Tiamat leaned against Jack, wrapped her fingers around his, around the handle of the scythe. Her black gown blossomed with a serpentine pattern of red.
    "If you don't do this, Maude Clare." Ruby cupped Jack's face in one hand. "He will become dust. He bleeds for you. Sluagh don't bleed unless they truly love. Would you forsake him?"
    "Maude," Jack's voice tore. "Don't--"
    "You need a willing sacrifice." Maude clutched at the yew and didn't look at the boy who had betrayed her. She felt as if her heart was being squeezed into her throat. She wanted to strike out, to scream. She said, "I'm not willing."
    Ruby tilted her head. Flames glinted in her eyes. "We are rebels. We are the Dark Court. We are the children of the Dragon. And Jack, my soldier, died quite some time ago, didn't you, my love? You will die, Maude Clare, because you love him."
    "And Love," the pale-haired boy with the hobbyhorse stepped forward, "like words, can be sword and shield."
    Ruby turned on the boy, teeth bared. "I should have known not to invite one of the Monasty. Bloody trickster--"
    Maude breathed the words to Shelley's poem, "'Nothing in the world is single--'"
    "'--then hear thy chosen own too late'." Jack whispered, "'his heart most worthy of thy hate.' My sword past your shield, Maude. I am almost flesh and blood. The words work for me as well."
    "Jack." She didn't believe in her own death. She held out a hand, spoke to the fragments of the boy he had been. "Come with me."
    His eyes were filmed with ghost light. As he stepped forward, the golden scythe glinted.She imagined its sting against her throat, the blood flooding her mouth, her lungs, the terrible pain--
    He leaned close and whispered in her ear, "There is one here who can save you..."
    The scythe flashed.
    Cold flooded her. She heard a buzzing sound, as if every molecule in the air sang. She heard a voice, her name, beneath the cries of the Tiamats. She didn't want to open her eyes. There was that awful sound again...kh...kh...kh...
    It was coming from her.
    Darkness rose up in the form of a rabbit-headed figure and the world hazed into a landscape of twilit black trees blossoming with crimson tulips, a giant moon silhouetting an ivory tower filled with books and lamplight.
    Come, the tall boy removed the rabbit mask, revealing ruby eyes and long black hair. He held a hand toward her. 'Tho they have taken thy life, they shall not receive power from thy death. Not on my land.
    She gripped his hand. The pain faded as she breathed. Her heart beat again. Life, an alien, vibrant life, pulsed through her. The world looked more vivid. The air tasted of gasoline and clover, iron and magnolias.
    She was not a sluagh, a dead thing...she was one of them.
    As Azrael Umare gently led her away, she looked back over her shoulder, saw flailing shadows with vicious silver eyes and the copper-haired corpse of a once-beautiful boy at the foot of the yew.
    She thought of another boy, with wheat-gold hair and worried eyes. Ethan Mongoose...
    Hand in hand with the darkness that had saved her, she walked away from a world that was no longer hers.

                                                                           the end

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Nine

ONCE UPON A TIME, SPIRITS lived in the groves, the grottos, the caves. Now, all they have are the Between places -- abandoned buildings, bridges, wells. That is where they are allowed. And most of them, the nomads  and outlaws who live among us, are at war with us.

    Ethan Mongoose knew what they were. He gave her silver jewelry and a Celtic cross. The cross, he said, represented the pact between the kings and queens of their kind and humanity -- two worlds, intersecting.
    "Stay away from Jack Tiamat, Maude. Some of them don't mean to cause harm,but their physical essence -- it messes with our minds, a bad trip. And he's dangerous."
    "I don't believe you. Jack is not a...a spirit pretending to be human." But some small, secret fragment in her brain sent a twist of unease through her.
    Ethan's voice was low, as if he didn't want to be overheard, "My family is old. There've been encounters. They seek out the fragile, the lost."
    She wanted to ask more, but he quietly told her he had to go home. Before he left, he murmured, "They steal people."

    They steal people.
    Maude didn't wear the silver or the cross when she biked to the field as the sun was setting. Jack wouldn't hurt her. He was human. If the Tiamats were Other, he must be their prisoner.
    As she reached the field, she found Jack sitting on the low wall. In a soldier's coat and jeans and a black sweater, he was gazing down at his hands.
    She walked her bike over and stood before him. His sleek looks made her feel small and grubby. As the last of the light caressed his face, she reached out and placed one hand over his heart.
    She felt nothing. Where life should have pulsed, there was only a frightening stillness. She dropped her hand and went as cold as if the blood had drained from her.
    He looked at her, said, "Go home, Maude."
    She twisted her hands together so he wouldn't see them trembling. "Jack."
    "There is nothing you can do for me."
    She saw headlights on the road. Jack looked at her, his eyes black. "Go."
    She stepped back. "What is going to happen to you?"
    "Maude..."
    At least a dozen cars were pulling up on the dirt road. Doors opened and the beautiful people emerged. Eerily quiet, wearing pretty metal masks and moving with a grace that frightened her, they walked toward the giant yew that roofed the oldest part of the cemetery.
    "Stay here." Jack moved toward the luminous-skinned creatures while Maude remained very still in the wall's shadow.
    A girl in a tulle gown, lilies crowning her dark hair, ran toward Jack, calling his name. He caught her hands, bent his head, murmured in her ear. She twirled as she led him toward the yew. Maude realized that the girl was the dark-haired ballerina from the photograph in the field, the one who had disappeared seven years ago. Her name was Sarah Morgan. She was what Ethan Mongoose had lost.
    They prey on the lost, the fragile.
    Ruby Tiamat was moving toward the yew, her green gown billowing. She didn't wear a mask. In one jeweled hand, she held a golden scythe. Sarah Morgan stood with her back against the yew, her chin lifted, her arms above her head. A masked boy, his red hair in long plaits, twined her wrists with green vines.
    Ruby Tiamat, her face gorgeous as a leopard's, handed the scythe to Jack.
    Maude drew back, pushing a hand against her mouth to silence a cry as Jack accepted the scythe and turned to Sarah Morgan, who gazed at him with an adoration that was terrifying. Maude saw the ghost light silver Jack's eyes.
    The world tilted. She hadn't known him after all.
    Then she was racing across the field, without silver, without defenses, and she was tearing away the greenery that held Sarah Morgan. No one tried to stop her as she grabbed the girl's hand. "Run!"
***


(Illustration: Arthur Rackham)

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Eight

THE HOUSE THAT WAS not supposed to be was silent, flickering like an old-fashioned film. She hugged herself and, glancing at the fire in the hearth, wondered why it was so cold, why the air smelled like mildew and rotting wood and broken ivy.
    Jack walked into the parlor with the pretty boy beside him twirling the hobbyhorse as if it were a baton. Dressed in a black Renaissance jacket with crimson stitching, scarlet dragons painted on his jeans, Jack didn't look at Maude as he whispered in the boy's ear. The boy's eyes briefly closed. Then he whirled and left the room.
    Jack, who held a glass of dark wine, looked at Maude, said, "You wouldn't come to me."
    "I'm sorry I freaked out." She felt a little afraid of him now. "What is this place?"
    "My home."
    She moved to a shelf, selected a book just to see if she could. She pretended not to know things and said, "Last time I saw it, it was falling down."
    "You must've mistaken my house for someone else's." Then, sharply, he said, "Why did you choose that one?"
    She held a book of poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley. She opened it, read, "'Nothing in the world is single. All things by a law divine. In one another's being mingle -- why not I with thine?'"
    He snatched the volume from her and set it back -- she wondered if he'd grown up in a cave. She tilted her head. "You don't like poetry?"
    He didn't look at her as he murmured, "Not anymore."
    Music swirled in from outside as he reached out and wound his fingers around hers.
    "I don't want to dance." She pulled away, tried not to think of dance recitals, her dad's face when she opened his gift of ballet slippers, her mom twirling her in the kitchen...
    She snatched the glass of wine from him and drank. It tasted like blackberries.
    "Maude. You shouldn't have done that."
    She tried to give the glass back. It slipped from her fingers, shattered on the floor.
    "I'm sorry." Her face burning, she crouched to gather up the pieces.
    "Never mind." He squatted down, reached for a curve of glass. He flinched back, stared at the drop of blood that had beaded on his thumb. He whispered, "That can't be..."
    He looked up at Maude, dark terror in his eyes.
    "Jack." The red-haired Cleopatra, stunning in a gown of orange silk, bracelets glinting on her arms, stood in the doorway. Tiny flames shimmered in her eyes. "Is she pure of heart?"
    Jack tucked the bleeding hand into the cuff of his shirt as he rose, "Maude Clare. Go home."
    "What is wrong with your hand, Jack?" The Cleopatra girl smiled.
    "Nothing, Ruby."
    Maude couldn't look away from Ruby Tiamat. Beyond the girl, she glimpsed the glittering lawn party and a boy who looked like Ethan Mongoose standing beside her bike.
    "Maude. Out. Now." Jack's voice frightened her. It drove her forward, past the girl scented with cinnamon and fire, down the hallway, into the humid night.
    She ran down the steps, looked back at the house which seemed to shimmer. She plunged through the guests, whose faces were like masks, the eyes burning behind them.
    It was Ethan standing near her bike, and she'd never been more relieved to see anyone in her life.
    As she strode toward him, the lawn, the space between her and Ethan, seemed endless. When she breathlessly reached him, he said, his voice low, "I told you..."
    "Ethan--"
    "The worst time for you to come...midsummer." Silver bracelets clinked on his wrist as he grabbed her bike and steered it away. She followed him, not daring to look back at the party.
    Because, now, she couldn't hear anything, only crickets. There was no light or movement from behind her. If she looked back, she felt she would see the horrifying ruin of the house from the day before, the weed-snarled lawn and twisted trees. She would break, then, and this mysterious golden boy wouldn't be able to fix her.
    So she followed him, cold and feverish and feeling as if she'd just been saved from drowning.
    "Ethan. Tell me what they are."

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Seven

JACK TIAMAT WAS not what he seemed and a dark entity was warning her against him.
     Determined to learn some things, Maude biked to Snake Hollow the next day as the light was fading to red. Gliding through the shadows beneath the moss-draped oaks, she heard music, eerie and faint, as if a party from some distant era remained here as a residual echo. The sound made her skin prickle.
     When she emerged from the trees, she skidded to a halt and thought she'd lost her way.
      The abandoned house had been replaced by a mansion that shimmered in the heat haze. Guests in pretty clothes were scattered across the mown lawn. Cakes and colorful drinks glimmered on wooden tables. A small orchestra was playing beneath an arch of ivy and daisies.
     Maude set her bike against a tree and moved forward.
     The house...
     She looked quickly away from it, at the guests, the men in suits and the women in sleek gowns. No one seemed to be over the age of twenty. Maude, wearing  a peasant blouse and bellbottom jeans, moved unnoticed among them as they conversed or danced. When she passed a coppery-haired girl in white, seated on a crimson divan, the girl shimmered. Maude closed her eyes.
     When she opened them, the girl was gone. In her place sat a white dog with red ears.
     The instinct to run became overpowering. She carefully returned her attention to the impossible house which seemed to have been repaired overnight. The door was ajar. Beyond, she saw a posh parlor, and the enormous painting of a girl draped in orange silk resting her hand on the neck of a giant black salamander.
     She moved forward, up the steps, into a hallway with red lamps and black-painted walls ornate with wooden masks -- leafy faces and horned,slant-eyed and flower-crowned. She shivered as she entered the parlor with the giant painting hung over a black marble fireplace. It was a place that reminded her of embers and volcanic glass, with crimson velvet furniture and an entire wall of books bound in hues of red and black. Bird skulls and twisted seashells and metal keys like thorny flowers had been placed on the shelves.
     "Hey."
     She turned to stare at a white-haired boy in an ivory shirt and jeans. He held a hobbyhorse with scarlet ribbons swirling from its staff and an abalone shell spiraling from its brow. "Are you Maude Clare?"
     "I am." Maude eyed him warily.
     "He wants to see you."
     "Who?"
     "Jack." He smiled and gestured with the hobbyhorse as if it were a wizard's staff. "The prince of bestial virtues."
     Maude realized she was being summoned. She scowled. "Well, he can come here, to me."
     The boy bowed and slid away. She shivered and waited.

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Six

THE RABBIT-HEADED SHADOW man warned Maude on the night of Emily Crandall's birthday.
Emily had invited her as they'd been filling the condiment bottles in The Lantern. "It's kind of a happening, with a few friends."
     After sunset, Maude biked to Emily's house, past the corner theater with its neon marquee advertising Bonnie and Clyde, past the gas station where a few kids talked loudly around a thrumming station wagon. When she turned onto a tree-lined street of perfect houses, she could hear televisions, and children playing in a night filled with cricket symphonies and cooling air.
     She reached the house and set down her bike.
     The screen door clattered open. Ethan Mongoose, in jeans and a sky-blue T-shirt, smiled at her. "What are you doing here?"
     "I was invited." She moved up the steps, Emily's present tucked beneath one arm. He looked different in a house, more ordinary, less like a flower child.
     He nodded. "She always invites one new person."
     She followed him into a cluttered living room where several kids her age sprawled on the floor watching 'The Smothers Brothers' and sampling the snacks laid out on a coffee table.
     "Maude." Emily, dressed in a peasant blouse and jeans, a peacock feather in her hair, jumped up. "What'd you get me?"
    "You told," Ethan scowled, "everyone exactly what to get you. Don't act like you didn't."
     As Maude shyly watched, Emily tore away the glossy wrapping to reveal the Parker Brothers' ouija board she'd wistfully mentioned to Maude.
     "I'm her cousin," Ethan apologized, glaring at Emily as she opened the box and unfolded the ouija board. "You're not gonna use that now, are you?"
     "Groovy." A boy with long brown hair said as he took the board and set it on the coffee table.
     Ethan's voice sounded almost pleading, "Em."
     Kneeling beside the table, she looked innocently up at him. "It's almost the first of May. Don't you want to know?"
     The other three didn't seem to notice the tension between the cousins as Ethan Mongoose tucked his hair behind his ears. As he drifted to where they were all seated around the ouija board, Maude followed him. Settling beside him, she noticed the black rabbit's foot dangling from his pocket and felt a ripple of unease.
     A tawny-skinned girl turned off the lights and the television.
     "Shouldn't we light candles or something?" The brown-haired boy idly stretched his arms over his head.
     "My mom and dad'll be back by ten and I don't want the damn house burned down, so, no." Emily set the planchette on the board. She introduced Maude to the other three -- Stephen, Beth, Orrie. Maude glanced at Ethan, whose glasses reflected the streetlights.
     "Me, Ethan,and Maude first." Emily placed one hand on the planchette and Maude set hers over Emily's, while Ethan's folded over hers. Then Emily spoke in a low voice, "You were lost on this night in May, Sarah Morgan. Are you here?"
     Maude's stomach turned as she recognized the name of the girl on the Missing poster, the one whose photograph she'd found in the creepy field.
     "Em, I don't think -- what?" The boy with curly hair -- Stephen -- flinched back as the planchette shot across the board to the letter 'B'.
     "You're doing it." Emily glared at Ethan, who retorted, "It's your hand on top of the thing."
     Maude flinched as the planchette slid to the letter 'O'. Tawny-skinned Beth began to spell out the words. "Why does it say 'Boy Bad'? Which of the boys is bad?"
     When the planchette slid to the letter 'J', Maude snatched her hand back and scrambled up.
     The temperature plummeted. Someone swore. The brown-haired boy scrambled back.
     Maude felt her breathing become shrill as shadows seemed to ribbon acros the board, sweeping up into an unlit corner, forming a man-like shape with a rabbit's head --
     The radio switched on and blasted out the Rolling Stones 'Ruby Tuesday'.
     Beth screamed.
     "Maude." Ethan rose, staring at her. Their breath misted in the chill that crackled through the living room. He followed her gaze to the blackened corner, where something was making a terrible noise beneath Mick Jagger's voice, something that sounded as if it was trying to breathe.
     "...kh...kh...kh..."
     Maude grabbed the ouija board and flung it at the dark corner.
     The music went off. The choking sound stopped. The lights came on.
     Emily stood by the light switch, her face white. Like everyone else in the room, she was staring at Maude, who was shaking so badly, she had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. She said, "Why are you looking at me like that?"
     Ethan Mongoose whispered, "Maude...why was it saying your name?"
     "I don't know. I didn't hear it. I don't know." She backed away, her hands clenched. "I'm going home."
     "Maude--"
     "I'm going home."

***


(Illustration by Warwick Goble)

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Five

THE BLACK SCISSORS came this night,
and a cold, dark man was he.
My soul he stole and mended whole,
and took a faery doctor's fee.

     The girl's voice faded as a horse-drawn coach rumbled down a night road and clattered to a halt with a yell from the coachman as another horse, black as a night without stars, reared in its path. The rider, in a duster coat and tricornered hat, called out to those within the vehicle. His eyes glinted an otherworldly silver.
     Maude woke believing she'd heard hooves clacketing on the street outside. Her heart slamming, she slid up to look out the window. There was no horse, only leaf shadows and streetlight and the soft patter of rain...and the feeling that something had tried to warn her.
                                                                        ***
Maude asked Emily at the coffehouse where the Tiamats lived and Emily reluctantly told her, "Off of Nightshade Road, on Draper's Lane. Don't go there."
     The next day, Maude bicycled up a gravel path shadowed by Virginia creeper and oaks ribboned with moss. When she finally reached a clearing clotted with weeds, she breathed out. Across the clearing, hazy and unreal from the humidity, sat a plantation house, in ruins, its windows shuttered, cypresses twined into its black-streaked walls. Even at this distance, she could smell mildew and wood rot, cloying beneath the fragrance of magnolia and green things.
     She stared at the house. The glamorous Tiamats couldn't live there.
     A chill seeped through the heat. The buzz of the cicadas became frantic. The shadows around the house seemed too dark, like splashes of ink. It looked like a nesting place for horrors.
     "What're you doing?"
     She whirled, expecting Jack Tiamat.
     But the boy standing beneath an oak had hair the color of new corn. He wore bellbottom jeans and a Steppenwolf T-shirt and sunlight winked from his glasses.
     "That house," Silver bracelets glinted around one wrist as he pointed at it, "is dangerous. That's Snake Hollow. That's all swamp back there."
     She braced herself against the bike and glared at him. "Who're you?"
     "Ethan." He sauntered forward. "Mongoose."
     "Mongoose. I'm Maude Clare. I thought the Tiamats lived here -- is Mongoose really your last name?"
     "The Tiamats used to live here." His gaze slid to the sinister house. "And Mongoose is really my last name."
     She leaned against the bike. Her tripping heart had slowed. "You live nearby?"
     "Down the other side." He nodded in a general direction. "I was here, looking for something I lost."
     "Tell me about the Tiamats?" The buzz of cicadas was beginning to give her a headache. She could hear Led Zeppelin crashing faintly from a transister radio. She could smell barbecue and car exhaust and, although these ordinary things comforted her, she still felt freaked out.
     "They're a young family with old origins They're rich as anything, the best students at the university, and secretive as snakes."
     He sure spoke strange. She thought of Jack Tiamat's luminous skin and black eyes and the tricks that light and dark could play.
     Ethan Mongoose began walking and she followed, wheeling her bike through dandelions and creepers. He said, his voice carrying a faint lilt, "Don't get caught up with them. You hear?"
     Maude nodded. But this place of haunts and mysterious families made her forget other things. She'd been a little scared, but she had no intention of staying away from anyone now.

Lily's Note: The Black Scissors. I found only one reference to this name in West Virginia folklore. There was a highwayman who haunted the roads of this region some time during the 18th century. He was caught and identified as William Harrow, a nineteen-year-old tailor and indentured servant from Dublin, Ireland. He was hanged. No one ever claimed his body.
See also: Law and Crime in Colonial Virginia by Peter Saunders (Peregrine Press, 1977) Infamous Roads in Southern Folklore by Sandy Claimes (OldSmith Books, 1955)

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Four

SHE DIDN'T DREAM ANYMORE of the dark rabbit-man, but of places that were weird copies of reality; a school with scarlet windows and ghostly children; a red land with a giant moon the color of sea foam and houses filled with old books; a pterodactyl gliding past an ivory skyscraper with the silhouettes of people inside.
     In the late afternoon, Maude returned to the field behind the cemetery.
     The birdcage/dollhouse of black metal was gone. She wondered if she'd imagined that too. Disappointed, relieved, she sat beneath a tree and opened the book she'd brought and read until the sun began to fade.
     She looked up at a crow's call and a sudden chill.
     Jack Tiamat was sitting on the low wall that divided the field from the cemetery. In bellbottom jeans and a red shirt with ruby cuff-links, he seemed too elegant for his environment. She shut the book and breathed out, "I saw you at the Lantern."
     He slid down from the wall. "Walk with me?"
     "Through the cemetery? Because you're on that side now."
     "No crowds."
     She rose. As she slid over the wall, he reached out and steadied her, his hand sure and warm on her bare arm. She wanted to ask about the red-eyed boy in moldy clothes, but didn't, because she didn't want him to think she was crazy. It would be worse if she wasn't crazy, and that creature had been real.
     As they wandered among the tombstones knotted with trees she thought might be banyans, he indicated a giant that rose in the middle, its roots like massive serpents among the graves. Beneath the tree stood a mausoleum guarded by a black marble figure in a long coat and wide-brimmed hat. It held a key in one hand and, in the other, a pair of scissors that looked like a weapon. Maude gazed at the strange, sharp face. "That's creepy."
     The dusky light burnished Jack's curls as he stepped up onto the statue's base to read the inscription, "'Here lies the bride of the Dubh Deamhais. May the divine have mercy upon her soul.'"
      Leaves rustled in a sudden wind and Maude shivered as if she were standing on the threshold of a dark, ancient place. "Who is the...what you just said?"
     "Dubh Deamhais. He's called the Black Scissors." He stepped down. "He's like the Headless Horseman here, only not headless and only dangerous to some. He was a highwayman in the 1700s who made a deal with something bad."
     "The devil?"
     "No." Jack didn't smile when he said, "Faeries."
     She felt a chill, but smiled to show such a word didn't scare her. "Like the elves in those Tolkien books?"
     "No. Not like elves. He became a sort of wizard...not like Gandalf." His mouth curled and she liked that. As he moved past her, he said, "There's more."
     She followed him through shadows that seemed almost subterranean, to a part of the cemetery tangled with wood vines and ferns and prickly bushes that scratched her skin. The air was heavy with the scent of clover and the spice of magnolia. He moved toward a crypt which loomed among the broken stones, its walls rippling with kudzu, its base ringed with pale toadstools. Another statue stood here, a hooded figure of lichen-splotched granite with a large serpent curled around its bare feet. The inscription read 'Tiamat'.
     "Your family."
     "They are now." He touched the crypt's plaque. She noticed the rings he wore, how they seemed dulled by age.
     "This place," Maude drew back from the crypt built to resemble a mansion. It reminded her of the black metal cage/dollhouse. "I don't like it."
     "It is a graveyard." He turned. "I like it."
     She wanted to ask him why, but there was a powerful stilllness that prevented her. She tried not to think about what lay beneath her feet, bones and rotting matter and nothingness--
     She flicked her gaze to Jack and saw the darkness that had swallowed the whites of his eyes.  She backed up a step. His skin seemed luminous, as pale as the toadstools.
     She turned and fled through the cemetery, toward the low wall. The breath searing from her throat, she tumbled into the field and grabbed her bike.
     As she pedaled away, she looked over her shoulder once and saw only darkness among the tombstones and banyans.