Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (7 page)

Is there something funny about the lighting in here all of a sudden? His eyes were brown. Why do they look lighter now? Almost gold.

And when did he last blink?

The dessert menu came along, and Caroline opened it, and made “hmm” noises, and kept on thinking, and smiling. And the thought occurred to her:

How many drinks have I had? There was the Americano, twice. And, what, two glasses of wine? No, this is the third one—

She looked up from the dessert menu, looked across the table.

The eyes were still there, and they still had not blinked. And they were indeed golden. But they were set on either side of the foot-and-a-half wide head of a gigantic snake.

She blinked, as casually as she could. Afterwards, the snake was still there. It was actually rather pretty, as snakes went: scaled in handsome patterns of green and gold, sort of a more attractive version of a rattlesnake’s patterning. But as it opened its jaws to say something about tiramisu, she could see the poison fangs angle forward, each as long as her index finger: and a long pale forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air for her breath.

Oh, no,
Caroline thought.
Not this. Not
now.

***

For quite a long time, when Caroline was younger, she’d wondered why her mother never drank. It was one of those things they’d never discussed until the day she turned eighteen and her mother sat her down “to have a little talk.” Even in this bizarre moment, Caroline still had a momentary flashback of that long-ago moment’s amusement—her idea that she knew what her mom was about to lecture her on. Afterwards she’d wished it was something so mundane as a discussion about the birds and bees, because it had explained things that she’d started noticing while she was in college and had just begun, rather belatedly according to all her friends, to experiment with booze. She had started to “see things”: images that made no sense, odd changes in people. They never lasted. At first she’d been able to dismiss the strange shifts in perception as something to do with the alcohol itself: possibly an allergy. Yet drinking had never made her sick, and soon enough she’d learned that she could simply prevent the effect by limiting her intake.

But it had all fallen apart when her mother said, both kindly and rather sternly, “Do you see things?”

“What?”

“Things that are only there for a few moments, and then vanish. Or things that seem to last a while before they fade. Visions. Creatures that can’t be there, but are. Do you See things?”

Now Caroline was feeling again the shock she’d felt then.
It’s been so long, now.
But then she’d been so careful for such a long time, especially right after that conversation—or rather, after the one experimental bender she went on after the conversation, that had confirmed it all: the beautiful historic city pub that had suddenly revealed itself to be full of peculiar animals, fabulous beasts, and people who were revealed as not quite human, or rather more than. The next day, when her blood alcohol was down to zero and she’d looked into the pub, everything had been normal again… except her. Her mother had been telling the truth: the women of her family could view the invisible, See spells and curses, peer a little way into the Other Side…or into some of the truths of this side, normally hidden.

And now here she was, looking at a dessert menu while having dinner with a giant snake.
And how the hell is he holding his dessert menu?
Still carefully keeping her smile in place, Caroline glanced at Matt’s menu, and saw the small delicate forelegs that ended in clawed talons. Not exactly a snake, then.
Sort of a—what did they call it? Mum told me a story when I was little about some kind of long skinny dragon that didn’t have wings, but did have legs. And they weren’t the romantic kind of dragon. They ate people. Young women, mostly.
She shivered again.
What did they call that thing? Damned if I can remember
—

“Tiramisu,” Caroline said aloud, in a musing kind of way.
And I can’t believe I did this to myself. Five units of alcohol, it must have been! I talked myself right into it. He’s so cute, I’m so nervous, I’ll just have a glass or two to take the edge off
—

But instead it had put an edge on her ability to See. Now all that remained to Caroline was to figure out what she was Seeing. Was this vision just a sort of analysis of Matt’s personality, a warning that he was a snake in the relationship sense? Or was he actually this weird dragony-wormy-snaky thing, pretending to be Matt?

There’s a reason you’ve been given this gift,
her mother had said:
you have a responsibility to help people! Sometimes a seeming will be a warning to someone: you must deliver it. Sometimes the seeming will be a hidden reality, a spell, a curse: you must act to help.

Which was one of the reasons Caroline had been so careful not to get into any situation where she’d have to use the gift, if she could at all avoid it. Now she looked up at Peppino as he came to take their orders, and she ordered tiramisu and a double espresso, which she really needed to steady herself a little. Then, when he was gone, she glanced across at Matt again, and did her best to stay as calm as if nothing was happening.
Oh yeah, like
every
Friday night you have dinner with a giant snake! And a smart one.
There was entirely too much going on behind those golden eyes, a sense of intelligent calculation.

But something else, too.
Who’s doing the calculating?
Caroline thought.
Or what?
For as she looked at him now, she thought she could see something else behind the mica-like sheen of the eyes: something that was struggling, like a just-eaten mouse inside some snake in a pet-shop aquarium. Not just something: some
one.
Trying to get loose, trying to warn her: but as helpless as the mouse inside the snake…

You could be imagining it,
some freaked-out part of her mind insisted. But somehow Caroline doubted it.
Even before he started looking like this to me, there was something about him that was changing. On and off, like flipping a switch. What’s doing the flipping? Is it Matt? Or something inside him—or something done to him?
For her mother had said,
You will see spells, curses…
At the time, she hadn’t believed it. But now—

And that was when the hair started to stand up on the back of Caroline’s neck again.
How many other women have flipped this switch?
she thought.
How many others have been charmed by him, and done the My Place Or Yours thing… and never seen ‘their place’ again?

The switch.
Could it be—that the moment
he
starts to feel something for somebody—then something done to him, the curse laid on him, wakes up, takes over
?

Her heart leapt at the thought: but her heart was cold, too. She had been eating the tiramisu more or less on automatic pilot: now she picked up the wine glass for one final sip, waiting for the espresso to arrive.

Across the table, golden eyes, unblinking, were fixed on her. “You’re quiet all of a sudden,” the snake said. “Are you okay?”

She kept her smile in place.
Absolutely not! But
this is something I have to deal with. There’s something else under the surface here. If I don’t do something about it, he’ll do something about somebody else.
And whatever her friends in Belfast might have thought, there was enough death in this city as it was.
What kind of person would just turn their back and walk away and let more of it happen?

Caroline swallowed. Then she took one more sip of the wine, staring down into the glass, catching there the dark reflection of her own eyes, in which no one would have needed the Sight to see her fear. Caroline blinked, drank, put the glass down, and very, very slowly—because it took some work—she raised her eyes again, and smiled at Matt.

“Do you want to come back to my place for coffee?” she said.

***

They went back slowly, at a stroll: or what was a stroll for Caroline. Next to her, the upper third of his body upright like a cobra’s, the giant serpent glided along, seemingly as leisurely as she.
It’s going to drive me nuts,
she thought,
if I can’t remember what mum said these things were called.

She was thinking hard, paying no attention to the rain, which had started up again, or to the yellow glow of the streetlights, or the white and red glare of headlights and taillights pouring past. In Caroline’s mind, another light suffused everything: firelight. Underlying it, she could hear the murmur of the stories her mum would tell her while she lay on her stomach, as close to the grate as she could get without singeing herself: watching the shapes take form in the flames, springing from the wood, in New York, on the peat, back in the little country townland of Aghalee.

When she was younger, the action in those stories had seemed random, unpredictable: a spell cast here, an evil fairy cutting up cranky there, people turned into beasts or monsters, people turned back. But later in life, when she’d done some study of folktales as part of her college education, Caroline had started to realize that the randomness was an illusion, mostly born of uneven storytelling. Inevitably, when you took them apart, spells had breakers built into them. It was just a matter of finding them, figuring out what they were.
And it’s not like we’re exactly prepared for this kind of thing, any more. You can’t walk into a bookstore and buy
Spellbreaking for Dummies.
Or download the user’s manual from the manufacturer’s website.

But if the stories
were
the user’s manual….
Or what’s left of the stories.
For so many of them had been dumbed down over time, Disneyfied—rendered more politically or environmentally correct, less potentially offensive.
And who knows whether the active ingredient, the real information about the ‘unreal’ world, is still there? Have we removed the reason the stories were told in the first place? If we have, the de-Grimmifiers and the Hans Christian Andersens of the world have a lot to answer for…

But those answers were going to have to come later. Right now she and Matt, or the serpent-thing that was pretending to be Matt, came to her building’s lobby door, and Harry the doorman opened it for the two of them. She saw his glance at Matt: veiled curiosity, nothing more.
Plainly everybody else sees the disguise, no matter what I see. Interesting.

And will it stay that way after he eats me?
said some cold thought in the back of Caroline’s brain as they went up in the elevator.
And what exactly am I planning to
do
about him? Lecture him on the error of his ways? What if, to keep him from eating me, or anybody else, I have to kill him? Whose body winds up on my kitchen floor? A giant snake’s, or Matt’s?

The elevator door opened, and they headed down toward her door, where Caroline paused, fumbling around in her bag for her keys. She paused in front of her door,

So…coffee. Take your time making it. Think. Think.
“Regular coffee,” Caroline said, slipping out of her coat and tossing it over one of the dining room chairs, “or more espresso?”

“Regular’s fine,” the snake said.

“Milk? Sugar?”

“A lot of milk.”

Yeah,
she thought,
milk. Snakes were supposed to like milk. It’s in Kipling.
But Kipling was the wrong place to be looking for answers right now.
He had that story about the sea serpent, but that thing was the size of a steamer. No hints for me there.
 Caroline looked into the little living room, saw the snake gliding gently along the wall and looking at her artwork, or pretending to.

“Some nice watercolors,” the snake said.

It was almost Matt’s voice: almost. There was a strained quality to it. The mouse, inside, struggling—

“Got them in Scotland,” Caroline said, turning away for a moment, trying to get a grip on herself. She glanced at the knife block on the counter. They were all extremely sharp. There was also the gun in the gun safe, but probably no time to get it out or do anything useful with it.
And do guns work on curses? Cold iron is the usual thing, in the fairy tales..

The coffee machine burbled quietly to itself. Caroline wandered into the living room, knelt down by the fireplace, where the fire was laid ready as usual, got down a box of matches from the mantelpiece, and reached in to open the damper. The wood caught quickly: it was dry. She looked up, saw the snake looking down at her, gleaming a little already in the light of the flames that were coming up.

She stood up hurriedly. “Sorry,” she said. “I was distracted.”
Smile, smile like it’s him that’s distracting you. Or like it’s Matt! Hang in there, Matt!
“You take sugar?”

“No, milk’s fine.” With those big cold golden eyes he looked up at the watercolor over the mantelpiece, a landscape, all Scottish heather and clouded hillsides, and a stream running through the heart of it.

Caroline swallowed, turned away again: then paused, surprised. Matt’s coat was over the back of her own, over the dining room chair.
Now how’d he manage that?
she thought, picking it up: anything to buy herself a few more moments of time.
His clothes, then, aren’t just part of an illusion. They’re real, they’re just hidden somehow—”
I’ll hang this up for you,” she said, and headed back to the hall closet.

“Thanks,” he said. Caroline was uneasy about turning her back on him, but at the same time, he didn’t seem likely to do anything sudden.
Why should he? He thinks he has me where he wants me….

Which he does!
yelled one of the more panic-stricken parts of her mind. But Caroline took a long breath, opened the closet, felt around for an empty hanger, didn’t find one right away. She pushed her coats and jackets aside, one after another.
All these coats, who needs all this stuff, they’re all out of style, I should take some of them to the Goodwill. If I live that long!

She found an empty hanger, and put Matt’s coat on it. Without warning, in the back of her mind, something surfaced—a strange image. Something to do with snakes, and clothes.
Now what on earth—?