The Madness of Crows: Part Four

ANNIE WALKED DOWN A HALL painted the glossy crimson of Minoan temple interiors.
    Tess's aunt had given Annie the key to their apartment so that Annie could sometimes fetch things for Tess -- or the creature They had put in Tess's place, the object her aunt sang to, spoke to, and cared for.
    She switched on the lights in the parlor, stared at the empty place where the painting called Atenoux had hung.
    She stepped into Tess's room and sat on the bed. Gossamer curtains drifted in a breeze laced with honey and dusk. Unlike her own cluttered haven, this was a room of stark hues, ivory and black. On the bed was the pewter casket that had held Tess's medication. She frowned at Tess's reading glasses, the books on the nightstand -- Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and a book of poems by W.B. Yeats. So. Tess had begun to suspect.
    Annie touched a petrified sea horse dangling from the bedpost and whispered, "What happened?"
    He came, the little thing whispered, from Between.
    Annie dropped her hand. She began to shiver. She rose and left the apartment.
    As she clattered down the stairs, clutching the bannister to keep from falling, she felt the world shimmer. Her breath suddenly became vapor in the glacial air that swept from outside.
    On the veranda, shadows stirred, came forth, became two ivory boys and a girl. The taller of the blonde boys, in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jeans, looked as though he'd stepped from the Seventies. The sly-eyed boy in a ribboned jacket and striped breeches, a flower in his hair, resembled a Renaissance page. The girl's black velvet coat and plumed top hat didn't look like a costume. Her raven hair was knotted in two braids, and inky crescents were painted beneath her poison-silver eyes.
    Annie knew what they were, these creatures who looked human. She could see shadows slithering around them like ribbons, smelled moss and flowers.
    She remembered sauntering through a field of wildflowers with Tess, tugging her tie-dyed skirt away from nettles, clutching at her straw hat to keep it from the wind as she watched Tess's green-painted fingernails break the stem of a sunflower. Annie had been telling her friend stories. "The Empress of Ravens is beautiful but merciless. She's consort to the King of Crows. The Magpie Knights, who are twins, are also her lovers."
    "What are their names?"
    "Someday, I'll think of names for them."

The Madness of Crows: Part Three

ANNIE HAD BECOME AFRAID for Tess, because Fair Hollow had its secrets and they'd be like poison to Tess's fragile psyche.
    When Tess's aunt called Annie to tell her that Tess had been temporarily hospitalized, Annie knew what had struck the girl whose mother had encountered Them.

As Annie stepped into the hospital room, she noticed the walls were bare of any paintings. Tess was white and shadowy-eyed in the bed, and, as Annie sat beside her, Tess whispered, "Annie....he stood there...and his skin was white and he smiled at me and the crows came all bloody from his mouth..."
    Annie lifted her gaze to the stricken face of Tess's aunt,who didn't understand why Tess should never have come to Fair Hollow.

As Tess slept, her Aunt Lucia told Annie about Tess's mother, who, in their Chilean town, had once entered an abandoned house on a dare. Years ago, a girl had killed herself within, and, because the nightingales which nested nearby were sometimes found dead with blood beading their feathers, the suicide was called the Nightingale Girl. Tess's mother had gone into that house when she'd been twelve years old. She had emerged pale as paper, and shaking. She'd never told anyone what she'd seen.
    She'd seen the dangerous kind, Annie knew. The ones who inhabited neglected places, old bridges, graveyards, derelict buildings. The children of nothing and night.
   
Three days later, Tess had become catatonic.
    But Annie knew it wasn't Tess in that hospital bed.
***
(Illustration: Gustave Moreau)

The Madness of Crows: Part Two

DID VINE PROTECT YOU AGAINST THE DARK THINGS? Annie, who could read objects and people, imagined Tess's Vine as a young man with long dark hair and tattoos, painting in a garage with a Harley gleaming near the door. She drew closer to the canvas to study the central figure; a knight in armor like black glass, his face similiar to Tess's, his world a chessboard where a moon hung in the sky like a green lamp. Tess set her chin on Annie's shoulder as Annie read the painting's name, "Atenoux."
    "Vine listened to all of my stories."
    "The king of crows." Annie stepped back, remembering their childhood stories, the kingdom they had created. She whispered, "He painted the king of crows with your face."
    "He told me the painting is a talisman. Like the gargoyles in churches, someting scary to keep away the bad things. Your poems are like that."
    Annie frowned. She wrote poems about girls with snakes in their hair and sonnets about poison-eyed boys. Poems were her armor against such things.
    "My dad," Tess touched the painting, "would have called them loa, spirits."
    Annie said warily, "He would have called what spirits?"
    "The people I dream of." Tess gazed at the painting. "Them. Him."
    Annie stepped back from 'Atenoux'. She whispered, "He is winged, ink-eyed, night incarnate. Hands like lilies unfolding. Skin white as a saint's sin."
    "That's beautiful. Want some coffee?"
    Annie narrowed her eyes at the king of crows and murmured, "I don't like him."

Despite being observed by the king of crows in the painting, Annie had a great time. They watched a scary movie and played a game of Scrabble while drinking gourmet coffee -- Tess's aunt didn't believe in video games, though she had grudgingly given in to a Wii.
    When Tess placed the word 'fate' on the board, Annie breathed out. She'd never told Tess about Them. She said, idly, "So what about the loa?"
    Tess sorted her tiles. "My dad didn't believe in them, but my mom did. She called them something else -- asikaku. She said they lived in the mountains near her town."
    "Your mom was from Chile."
    "Mmh."
    "So when she said they lived in the mountains near her town, she meant the Andes?"
    Tess tilted her head. "She said they were beautiful ghosts who lived in courts called Hummingbird and Flamingo. She said she saw one, once, with silver eyes and red hair. He wore a coat of green feathers. She could tell what he was because his skin was white, as if he had no blood. And wherever he walked, little red toadstools appeared."
    "Where did she see this ghost?" Annie was careful not to sound panicked. Tess had never mentioned such things about her mom or dad -- or maybe she had, but Annie, back then, hadn't taken any notice.
    "When she was a kid. She got scared and ran. She said she knew he wasn't human. I guess you'd just know wouldn't you? Whether or not someone was flesh and blood. Human or not."
    Tess's mother and father had separated. No one knew where her father had gone. Her mother had been institutionalized for years, unable to cope with the common world. Annie hadn't known about the encounter Tess's mother had had with one of them. Sarah Rocquelette must have seen more, though, than the pretty toadstool boy.
(Illustration: Edward Burne-Jones)
***

The Madness of Crows: Part One

LET ME TELL YOU A SECRET, said the girl named Tess Rocquelette, and, with a whisper, nine-year-old Annie Weaver was initiated into a world of spirits and madness.

Repeating the name Atenoux, Annie lifted her gaze to the stuffed birds that seemed to glide through the red parlor. Tess's grandfather had hunted the hawks and doves, the owls and wrens, made their corpses trophies in the house where Annie had escaped many humid afternoons. Tess had been born in this house, with a twin brother, a bean-shaped afterthought wrapped around his tiny sister. He hadn't lived past his first breath.
    When Annie turned eleven, she and her family moved from New Orleans, to the town of Fair Hollow, New York. And it was in Fair Hollow that Annie's older sister was murdered by a thing called the crooked dog.
    When Annie turned sixteen, and was much wiser to the invisible world, Tess Rocquelette moved to Fair Hollow with her aunt, a playwright who wanted to be closer to New York City.
    When Annie came to visit, it was as if five years had never separated her and Tess. Tess's aunt had rented the upstairs of a majestic mansion that had been converted into apartments, their spacious home scattered with purple and black furniture from thriftshops and an aquarium of angelfish dividing the kitchen from the parlor. A large painting hung on one ebony wall. Annie was drawn to it.
    "The boy who painted it was named Vine." Tess's hair was still a sable fall. She wore a dark cotton dress and red Doc Martens. She'd always been graceful and pretty, even when they were little.
    Annie's jeans and her T-shirt, with its decal of a skull, seemed at odds with her golden freckles, the white-blonde hair which fell to her shoulders and into her eyes. She never felt pretty. "Who's Vine?"
    "It doesn't matter. He left me. I'm so sorry about Angyll, Annie. I never thought she'd do...that."
    Annie couldn't speak. Her sister's murder had been bewitched into looking like a suicide. But Annie knew the truth.
    Tess came to stand beside her and gaze at the painting. She murmured, "Vine was strong."




   
   

Lily's Note:

THEY DON'T LIKE BEING CALLED FAERIES. But that's what they are, whatever name they give themselves, or are given, whether it's fairies, skinwalkers, djinn, dybbuks, asikaku, or just spirits. And I am here now, in this cold place, by my own choice, even if it was a Trick.
    Sometimes, I see what will be, because the house I'm in, the Wolf's House, is never in one place for very long. Maybe I'm allowed to see stuff, like they're telling me "This is what will happpen to those you think will save you." But I can warn you, out there, and keep you from making the same mistake I made, and that others have made.
    They made a mistake when they let me see what will become of a girl named Annie Weaver.

                                                                        ***