Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (23 page)

And, in case all this was still insufficient to keep her from telling tales and giving away the game, the bogie then assured her that it was not only the very young who’d been tortured and suffered at the hands of priests and “fairy doctors.” Consider, he told her, the case of an Irish cooper (and here he had to pause to explain that a
cooper
was one who made wooden barrels and wash tubs) who’d suspected his own wife of being a fairy. She had been stolen, he believed, and an
almost
perfect imposter left behind. Only almost perfect, though, because the cooper claimed his wife was not so pretty, and, besides, the imposter was two inches taller than the woman he’d married. The cooper performed a sadistic rite of exorcism, aided by friends and even the unlucky woman’s own cousins. They held her immobile while she was forced to swallow a noxious concoction of milk, piss, and chicken excrement, and then placed her naked body above the hearth fire, instructing her to fly away up the chimney. However, neither torture proved sufficient to banish the pretender and restore the cooper’s mortal bride. So, the very next night, and again with the assistance of friends and family, the husband drenched the poor woman in lamp oil and set her ablaze with a hot brand. Her charred corpse was found in a shallow grave barely even a quarter mile from their home, the bogie concluded. He stared a moment, looking down into the girl’s eyes, and into all the places
behind
her eyes, to be sure that she’d understood.

When the sun rose, the fairies had all gone away, the revelers and the hairy, admonishing bogie, and many years passed before she saw any of them again. And no one knows that she is a fairy lady. No one alive, at least.

She keeps her secrets well, and in this day and age very few take note of her peculiarities or the way she always smells like a summer afternoon Her neighbors have no cows to stop giving milk if she strays too near, and no chickens to stop laying. She lives at the edge of a great, glittering city, and the people there are far too busy and concerned with money and taxes, electronic gewgaws and the price of gasoline, to worry about fairies. Whenever they might pause long enough to bother being afraid of anything, it’s likely no more than bankruptcy or old age, cancer or the gay couple who moved in next door or, perhaps, an imam overheard praying the salat on a commuter flight. There is no more time in their lives for fairies and changelings than there is for dragons and wicked witches, and often the fairy lady marvels what good fortune she’s had to be a changeling in so cynical and disentranced a time and place.

She lives alone, minding her own affairs, and the worst she ever receives is a suspicious, sidelong glance or a rude whisper on the bus. When she’s noticed at all, the busy, preoccupied people merely assume that this strange woman is most likely the victim of some mental illness, and, after all, there are pills, and worthy, tax-deductible charities, and board-certified psychologists, so it is nothing with which they need concern themselves.

But even here, and even now, there are bound to be inconvenient exceptions. And worse yet, exceptional exceptions, who are not content with whatever voguish delusions might presently be permitted to the omnipresent lunatic fringe. Those for whom the lure of crop circles, psychic healing, UFO abduction, ancient pyramids on Mars, intelligent design, and even the comforts of hoary astrology have all proven insufficient, and so they might reach back almost a century, finding, say, the “Cottingley Fairies” hoax more to their tastes than the latest schemes of the Church of Scientology. Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright posing with their Art-Deco fay clipped from magazine pages, and it hardly matters that, as old women, the perpetrators of the fraud both confessed. Because, clearly, they were
paid
to confess, our inconvenient believer will declare, paid handsomely by unscrupulous television producers and the international conspiracy to hide The Truth.

And this is how it starts, with a single, and distinctly inconvenient, exceptional exception. His name is Howard Groesbeck, and he is a nervous man who lives alone in a shabby apartment and works, ironically, in a convenience store. He will only eat foodstuffs that come in metal cans, and will only drink water that has been bottled in Canada (anywhere in Canada will do; Quebec, Nova Scotia, Manitoba—it’s all the same to him). His nights are spent looking at pornography on the internet, and his favorite color is brown. But, what is most important here is that at the tender age of thirteen (coincidence noted), he had the great misfortune to catch sight of a bogle while riding the subway. The bogle in question was wearing a knitted red cap, rather like a yarmulke, and was sitting next to an elderly Asian woman who was entirely too absorbed in her newspaper to notice the bogle. But Howard Groesbeck saw it quite clearly, and it saw him, as well. It winked. Ever since that day, he has been what the Irish cooper who murdered his wife might have called “pixy-led.”

He first saw the fairy lady three days before midsummer, when she came into the convenience store to buy a Coke and a foil bag of something salty. In his sight, the glamour was no more than an odd glimmering about her head and shoulders. Where almost anyone else would have seen a pale but smartly dressed woman, with raven hair and sage-green eyes, he saw the changeling daughter of elfin royalty. For him, her eyes blazed so brightly that he almost had to turn away. Her skin had the appearance of the rough bark of an oak tree, except where it was obscured by patches of moss and small blue flowers. Her hair could have been spun at the behest of Rumpelstilzchen himself, and it hung almost down to the floor. When she paid him with a debit card, Howard saw that her ring finger was a third again longer than her middle finger, and that her nails appeared to have been chiseled from obsidian. She caught him staring at her, and though it had never happened before, the fairy lady knew, immediately, that this peculiar man was able, by some quirk of nature or nurture, to see through the magic to the heart of her.

She winked at him, because she didn’t know what else to do. If she’d known about the bogle with the red cap, she might have only smiled.

Either way, Howard’s fate became, in that instant of mutual recognition, inevitable. Though, one could say, instead, that it had become inevitable many years before, that day on the subway when he was thirteen. He spotted the fairy lady again a week later, coming out of a dry cleaner’s only a few blocks from his apartment, and after that, he began to follow her, imagining that he was very clever and stealthy and that she had no idea whatsoever that she was being watched by the skinny, nervous man who’d clocked her at the convenience store. This wasn’t the case, of course, and every time that he spotted her (having coffee at a Starbuck’s, browsing in an occult bookshop, buying lime Jell-O, a can of sardines, and a bundle of asparagus at the market, standing on a crowded street corner, and so on) was a sighting that she had carefully orchestrated. Only that first was happenstance.

And, in the end—which, from another perspective might rightly be called the beginning—she allowed him to follow her from her apartment to a park at the edge of the city, where manufactured greenspace gave way to the real thing. There was a fairy ring of mushrooms here, a rough circle of fat toadstools, fly agaric, fleshy morels, and tiny white death caps sprouting from the leaf mold, clover, and dandelions. The centipedes often came to this ring to court moths and beetles, and the garden’s circumference was tended by seven rabbits and a mole (though all knew well enough to avoid the center). It was late in August, not far from September, and almost twilight. The evening was filled with the chartreuse flicker of fireflies, and with the songs of katydids, interrupted only by a catbird, scolding somewhere in the trees.

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes ani groves,

And ye that on the sands with print less foot

Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him

When he comes back; you demi-puppets that

By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,

Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime

Is to make midnight mushrooms
...

Howard Groesbeck, who had never read
The Tempest
, stood behind the bole of a maple for a while, thinking himself as good as invisible, certain that the fairy lady did not suspect she’d been followed. He’d found the courage to bring along his digital camera, hoping that it might capture what less exceptional human eyes could not see. Every other time he’d stalked the woman, the camera had remained in the bedroom closet. Now, it hung, forgotten, about his neck, dangling from its nylon strap, as his quarry stepped inside the ring of fungi and began, somewhat matter-of-factly, to undress. He did not guess that she removed her blouse and skirt, her bra and panties, her hose and shoes,
for
him, as that would have necessitated the knowledge that he was not half so clever as he believed himself to be. There is no need of fairy magic when a man’s own ego will suffice to lead him astray.

Once she was entirely naked and her clothes folded in a neat bundle on the ground, the fairy lady looked over her shoulder, directly at the maple tree where Howard Groesbeck believed himself to be so shrewdly concealed. She only watched for a moment, allowing sufficient time for doubts to begin forming in his mind, time enough for his mouth to go dry, time for his already racing heart to double its tempo. She could smell the razor surge of adrenaline from where she stood, and she thought, briefly, that he might possibly turn and run. Which, admittedly, would have made the whole affair quite a bit more entertaining, so there was a small disappointment when he stayed put. She cleared her throat and called out his name. Not the name nailed to him at birth, the one he’d been baptized under, but another, secret name that even he had only heard once or twice at the corners of dreams. But he knew it now, and, hearing it, Howard Groesbeck almost wet himself.

“I see no sense hiding,” the fairy lady told him. “You’ve gone to so much trouble, and come all this way into the wood, you shouldn’t be cowering behind a tree. Let me see you, please.”

He hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second, and then stepped out into the open.

“That’s much better,” she said, and, smiling, revealed to Howard the translucent, crystalline shards of her teeth.

“I can see you,” he whispered, his voice trembling like the last light of the fading day. “I mean, I can see the
real
you. I
know
what you are.”

“Yes,” she said, and turned about to face him. “It’s a relief truth be told. Don’t you think it must be a terribly lonely way to live, the way I do?”

It was something that he’d never paused to consider, a possibility that had never once occurred to him. Howard Groesbeck had imagined that this creature must surely come and go, at a whim, as she pleased, between the mortal world and the Hollow Hills. She must have countless daemon lovers, he’d thought, on more than one occasion. And he had followed her into this wild place at the edge of the park expecting to overhear unspeakable conversations, and hoping to witness her indulgence in profane sexual acts with a veritable bestiary of eldritch beings.

“They left me here, all alone,” she said, and, on cue, sighed and glanced down at her bare feet.

“Alone?” he asked, his voice seeming impossibly frail, and he swallowed and licked his lips.

“I’ve not seen another of my race in almost seventeen years now,” she replied. “They don’t come to me when I call. And, as you can imagine, the sons and daughters of Eve tend to shy away from me. So, yes, it can get quite lonely at times.” She looked lip then, her green eyes become searchlights in the gathering gloom.

“Why?” he asked, and he dared to take one step towards the periphery of the circle. “Was it a punishment? Were you banished?”

“Banished,” she said, and very nearly laughed. “Perhaps. But I could not say, as I do not know, and I don’t hazard to guess the intentions of my Lord Finn Bheara, King of the Daoine Sidhe, and his wise court in the glittering halls beneath the hill of Knockma.” It seemed to her that this was precisely the sort of nonsense that the nervous man from the convenience store expected to hear from a fairy changeling, and she congratulated herself for keeping a straight face.

“So, you’re alone?” he asked again, as though the matter had not already been plainly stated and settled.

“Not anymore, I’m not,” she told him, finding just the right tone for her voice, something that was not
quite
joy, but certainly more than common happiness. “Now I have
you,
don’t I?” And no sooner had the words left her tongue, than Howard Groesbeck found himself standing
inside
the circle of mushrooms, close enough to the fairy lady that he could have touched her, if he’d dared. There was no recollection of having walked from the maple to the fairy ring, or of having stepped inside. But, even so, staring into her bottomless green eyes, the confusion struck him as no more than a passing trifle, and he let it go.

She took his right hand in her left, then, and leaned close, kissing him lightly on the lips. He found she tasted of nutmeg and bay. “You are a kindly soul,” she said, “to come here and offer me your company so freely.” Hearing this, a pair of goblins hiding in a nearby thicket of green briar and blueberries almost spoiled her careful masquerade by snickering and farting and noisily snapping their twiggy fingers together. She ignored them, and, near as she could tell, the man from the convenience store hadn’t even heard the commotion.

“I should probably be going,” Howard Groesbeck muttered, slurring and speaking the words the way a sleepwalker talks when questioned. “I’m working the late shift tonight.”

“They won’t mind,” she said, “if you stay with me a little longer,” and, unexpectedly, Howard found himself agreeing.

“You’ve told no one else about me?” she asked, and when he said that he hadn’t, she knew straight away that he was telling the truth. Indeed, there was so little genuine guile about this man, she thought, it was almost hard to believe he was human born.