The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part Two

IF THE MOLD HADN'T HINTED at otherworldliness, the buzzing sound that came from the shadow did. The sound reminded her of bees, electricity. She couldn't move...if she did, it would move also. And then it would touch her. Nausea burned cold in her stomach. She remained still. She closed her eyes. A wind smelling of clover and dark earth drifted over her. The buzzing became a whisper that sounded like a name, Azrae...
     She saw herself as if looking through another's eyes, her tawny hair clipped back with barrettes, her body skinny in jeans and the T-shirt her mother had bought for her, the one with the rose-crowned image of a blue-skinned god, dancing --
     Her eyes flew open.
     There was no shadow in rotting finery, only the rusting dollhouse that now looked like nothing more than a fancy birdcage.
     "Hey." The boy walking toward her didn't have a devil's smile. His skin was honey-tanned and he wore bellbottom jeans and a brown T-shirt. She scrambled up, stabbed both feet into the grass, and narrowed her eyes at him.

  "You okay?" With his coppery-red curls, he looked like an Aubrey Beardsley illustration of one of King Arthur's knights.

     "I'm okay." She didn't move. Her skin itched -- the air was prickly with electricity. What had she seen?
     He tilted his head. His eyes were the color of the ivy covering her aunt's house. "Your nose is bleeding."
     She flinched, dabbed at the blood with the back of one wrist. "It's nothing."
     He glanced at the black metal dollhouse, frowned. "You need to be shown the way back?"
     "I'm okay." But she wasn't. The empty horror of her parents' loss had returned. She dabbed at her nose again, tasted iron in the back of her throat.
     "This isn't a good place to be alone." He was watching her as if studying her. "I'm Jack."
     "Maude Clare." A breeze scented with clover almost made her convulse. She slid the crumpled photograph of the ballerina into her back pocket. "You live around here? Jack?"
     "I do."
     She began walking backwards, toward her bike. She wanted to leave the weird field, but felt compelled to stay because the boy reminded her of someone. He was watching her with a troubled concern that melted her icy dread. "I'll see you around."
     "You will, Maude Clare."
     She yanked up her bike, swung one leg over it, and pedaled away.
     It was only when she reached the street that she felt released from something ancient and alien.
    But she already wanted to go back, to see the boy with green eyes.

The Ballad of Maude Clare: Part One

THE BALLAD OF MAUDE CLARE:1967

MAUDE CLARE BEGAN to dream of the dark man with the rabbit's head after her parents died and she left the rainy splendor of Seattle for the cricket-droning summer of Evening, Virginia.
    She woke the next morning in a shabby room cluttered with boxes. She would never again see the apartment where she'd spent sixteen years of her life...never again smell her mom's coffee on Sundays, watch the slant of sunlight across her pink room, hear her dad whistling as he made dinner.
     Grief splintered in her throat like a piece of glass and she swallowed bitterness as if it were blood. She thought of her mom and dad and hoped they hadn't become spirits wandering the highway that had monstrously killed them.
     As she curled around her pillow, her Aunt Olivia walked in and snapped up the blinds. Sunlight burst through the indoor porch converted into an extra bedroom. Her aunt, looking angelic in her white shirt and jeans, turned. "Up, my girl. It's a beautiful day, just for you."
    "I don't want to."
    Her aunt settled on the end of the bed. "Maudie....I hurt too.  Please, just get up."
    Maude swallowed the splinter of sorrow and uncurled in the sunlight. "Okay."

Her Aunt Olivia made a living as a magazine writer and existed in an office cluttered with books and bizarre objects obtained during her travels. Because it was summer and there was no school, Maude didn't know what to do with herself to keep from sinking into the numbness that held her like an insect in amber. Evening was a small town with a main street of tiny shops and not much else.
     Her aunt bought her a bicycle, a Schwinn. She set it in front of the house, and said, Use this.
     One rainy afternoon, as Maude was biking past a rusting Chevy, a rabbit, black as a hole in the world, shot past her, and she sped after it.
     It led her to a field behind a cemetery that looked as if it were an ancient forest of tilted stones and fossilized angels. A weird, lavender glow caressed dandelions and blades of grass and an elaborate dollhouse of black metal set in the field's middle.
     She set her bike down and walked toward the dollhouse, amazed by its thorny intricacy.
     When she stepped on something and felt it shatter beneath her sneaker, she halted. She crouched down, pushed away the grass, picked up a broken frame containing the photograph of a teenage girl in a ballet costume. The broken glass fell as she turned the picture over, found words scrawled on the back. She spoke them quietly, "'She danced and she danced without care, spoke his name as he came from the air, in the shape of an ink-black hare, the prince called Azrael Umare.'"
     A wind rattled the leaves. The air hummed like electrical wires before a storm. She looked up at the dollhouse of ornamental metal and found that it had an occupant -- a child's toy, a rabbit of black velvet with red stitching and button eyes.
    A chill crawled through her as the rabbit seemed to flicker like an old-fashioned film.  She blinked--
     -- and scrabbled back with a hoarse cry.
     A shadow shaped like a boy was crouched in front of the dollhouse, and she could make out the silhouette of its ruffled, old-fashioned clothes. She smelled mold, clover...

Lily Rose's Journal: One

I THINK THEY ARE THE DARK FAERIES...

They call us 'things with teeth', because they have no true form, no real biology. They steal our identities. They steal us. I hope there are more good ones than bad. I'm going to tell you about both, because if you've ever encountered the bad, you'll need to know about the good.

I haven't met very many of the good.

My name is Lily Rose. I'm seventeen years old. I was 15 when I found out about the ones who walk between, the spirit people who call themselves Fatas, tribes and courts who mingle with our dead while taking us away from what we love.

Theirs is a world of rot and ruin that sometimes bleeds into ours...and that is something they cannot do -- bleed. They are not flesh and blood.

But we are.

These are the stories I've learned, and these are the secrets of the Fatas.

                       THE BALLAD OF MAUDE CLARE

                             A girl named Maude Clare
                             followed a hare
                             to a black metal house
                             that is no longer there.
                             And what did she find
                             in the dark of that place?
                             A prince with no heart and a beautiful face.