Stranger at the Wedding

Cabinet des Fées

a fairy tale journal Cabinet des Fées a fairy tale journal Volume One, No. 2/3

Cover by Charles Vess

Published by Prime Books http://www.prime-books.com

For more stories, poetry, art, and information on forthcoming volumes, visit http://www.cabinet-des-fees.com CONTENTS

The Significant Other ...... Helen Pilinovsky 7 Katabasis ...... Sonya Taaffe 14 Stranger at the Wedding ...... R.W. Day 16 The Devil Factory ...... Bret Fetzer 24 The Hiker’s Tale ...... Mike Allen 35 Giantkiller ...... A.C. Wise 59 The Tower ...... JoSelle Vanderhooft 75 Lost or Forgotten ...... Janni Lee Simner 87 Night of the Girl Goblin ....Amal El-Mohtar 95 The Cat-Skin Coat ...... Jessica Paige Wick 98 Vox ...... Kimberly DeCina 108 Reformulating Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales and Sexuality in YA Literature ...... Christine Butterworth-McDermott 132

“The Lady of the House of Love”: Angela Carter’s Vampiric Sleeping Beauty ...... Jamil Mustafa 145

From Anxious Canons to Hysterical Texts: A Theory of Literary Revision ...... Jennifer Banash 158

About the Editrices ...... 181

The Significant Other

Helen Pilinovsky

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS. Oh, my! How much more so the case if the refrain concerns manticores, phoenix and chimerae? A major preoccupation of the fairy tale lies in its concern with the Other. In the first issue of this journal, we had a brief chance to discuss the fact that fairy tales have had a long and honorable history of representing the Other, with the forms taken by that Other serving as apt representation of the particular fears of society; in this issue, let us look more specifically at the nature of the Other, both conceptually, and specifically. Arthur Rimbaud is thought by some to have been the first to have proposed the central notion of the Other with the statement, “Je est un autre”, translated literally as “I am another”, and alternately (more correctly, if not, in English, grammatically so) as “I is another”; directly, “I” is the Other. Small wonder, then that the phrase and concept were handily adopted by psychoanalytic critics such as Jacques Lacan, who felt that “The I is always in the field of the Other”. Similarly, the idea of the Other was adopted by Simone de Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex posited the idea that the Other represented the minority position, the alternative rather than the default, the construct composed as much by what it isn’t as by what it is. In the modern vernacular, these views have come together in a manner still based in general theory and criticism, but not tied to a specific vocabulary of jargon

7 CABINET DES FÉES belonging particularly to psychology, literary criticism, or gender studies; the Other is present in every aspect of human endeavor, either in the construction of the ever-popular Us vs. Them dichotomy, or in the personal psyche. The fairy tale represents a rich proving ground for theories of the Other, with its multitudinous doubles and triads, its fantastic hordes. From the traditional talking beasts of the fairy tales, the helpful wolves and bears and birds of the forest who assist the men who enter it, to the unicorns and dragons and sphinx who may be benevolent helpers or hideous opponents, from the speechless dumb Beast of Mme. Villaneuve’s original fairy tale to the monstrous Bluebeard who acts as his darker, more human, and more complex double . . . the magical Others of fairy tales are legion. Their Othering is marked by their magical nature, but truly, these characters act only as stand-ins for the true Others of society who can only be addressed obliquely. In the case(s) of the fantastic beasts (of all stripes), the most common definition is the one which has them acting in synechdoche with an anthropomorphized natural world. Rarely are “natural” talking beasts treacherous or false; those roles are reserved for the supra- or unnatural creatures (demonstrating the role that magic serves in intensifying the process of Othering which occurs within the fairy tale) or, more aptly yet, for human creatures who display elements of the monstrous. Boria Sax has noted that “Just as marriage between two people unites their families, so marriage between a person and an animal in myth and fairy tale joins humanity with nature”. This is certainly one possible explanation, and an explanation that is in keeping with the one applied to the fantastic beasts of folklore in general. However, when the beast is also a bridegroom, further questions arise . . . . Unlike the tales of beastly bride/grooms such as those to be found in the tales of enchanted bears or swan-maidens,

8 THE SIGNIFICANT OTHER whose most egregious sin is typically to flee the family in favor of a much-missed natural environment upon the breaking of a specific injunction (the legend of Melusine serving as an excellent case-in-point), certain beastly bridegrooms move beyond the tropes of the traditional tales. Critics have noted the 17th century pre-occupation with the monstrous bridegroom in the stories of the contes de fées, a fact likely linked to the centrality, and the terrifying possibilities, of marriage in a culture of unequal marital rights. As Terri Windling notes, in her essay “Married to Magic”, in their stories the authors of the contes de fées “embodied the real- life fears of women who could be promised to total strangers in marriage, and who did not know if they’d find a beast or a lover in their marriage bed.” In some tales, such as the original version of “Beauty and the Beast”, the message is one of patience: in its early form, the Beast is dumb and truly animalistic, but capable of restoring himself to civility through the kind offices of his lover. The moral of the tale is that the heroine can make herself quite happy by accepting him for who, and what he is, providing a good example through her love. Only in Mme. Leprince de Beaumont’s English translation and revision is it suggested that she redeem him through her own active sacrifice, changing to suit him much more than he changes to suit her. The tale of “Bluebeard”, on the other hand, continues to bear a mixed message: though his monstrosity is less overt than that of the Beast, manifesting only in the eponymous follicular discoloration, his behavior is considerably more disturbing, and considerably less clearly defined for the reader. Charles Perrault’s epigram famously criticizes the Eve- like curiosity which leads to the heroine’s misfortunes; it reads,

Moral: Curiousity, in spite of its charm,/ Too often causes a great deal of harm./ A thousand new cases arise

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every day./ With due respect, ladies, the thrill is slight,/ For as soon as you’re satisfied, it goes away,/ And the price one pays is never right.

Charming. With such a victim-blaming moral applied to the actions resulting from one’s having been wed to a serial killer (and working off the implication that it’s quite all right to be married to a serial killer, so long as one doesn’t disobey him, rouse his anger, and thus justify his wrath), it’s hardly surprising that the terrors of the marriage-bed manifested in such colorful manners in the tales of the Othered bridegroom. Mating and marriage with the Other mark a union that carries magic in its tissues as a contagion; the brides and bridegrooms of the significant Other rarely remain unchanged. Sometimes, when pursuing an Other, or attempting to escape one, hero/ines can sometimes become magical themselves — Je est un autre. The transformation of the fairy tale is gradual, with the “I” becoming the Other and remaining, still, the “I”. This is clear, certainly, in the many variants of “Bluebeard” in which the heroine is not dependant upon the good offices of her brothers, but rather upon her own cunning: for example, in the Germanic variant of “Fitcher’s Bird” the young bride acquires the abilities of a witch or sorceress along the way, first in seeming, and then in fact. In other tales such as “The Frog Princess” or “The Blue Bird”, characters find that the trials that they undertake in order to reunite with their wronged fantastic spouse transform them from mundane to marvelous: they are changed from their former selves not only in the metaphorical transition from child to adult, as many critics of the fairy tales contend, but also from innocents to vanquishers of evil sorcer- ers and wicked fairy godmothers, the confidants of magicians, or akin to magicians themselves — in short, creatures fully as marvelous and fantastic as their enchanting and enchanted

10 THE SIGNIFICANT OTHER loves. Je est un autre, et vous aussi, peut-etre . . . or so the fairy tale implies. In this double-sized issue of Cabinet des Fées, we’re proud to present a selection of stories which do justice to the many faces of the Other, external, internal, and . . . well, other. In our first story, and returning to Cabinet des Fées in our second issue, Sonya Taaffe gives us a Prospero of the Earth in “Katabasis”, a figure who demonstrates the eventual Othering we’ve all yet to face. Rebecca W. Day follows with a tale which reverses the tropes of the animal bride stories and shows us what might have happened with a very different and not-so-little mermaid in “Stranger at the Wedding”, an appropriately Nordic saga of a man stolen away to bide beneath the sea. Brett Fetzer carries us across the waters and the centuries, and beyond that through Heaven and Hell in “The Devil Factory”: in Fetzer’s near- modern rural setting, an enterprising little girl from a poor and unhappy home encounters an imp with an offer she can’t refuse; six pennies a day to come and work on Sunday. However, once her creation’s complete, there’s still the (or rather, a) devil to pay . . . or would be, if it weren’t for the fact that her daddy had him roundly beat in all the forms of wickedness and cunning that counted. Mike Allen presents us with a delightfully creepy traditional ghost story in “The Hiker’s Tale” in a manner which innovatively melds the markers of the campfire tale with those of the Native otherworld. Alison Campbell-Wise asks the question of what happens after death literally and not figuratively in a retelling of “Jack the Giantkiller” which confronts the consequences of our putative “hero’s” actions . . . with surprising results. Turning to the Other within, “The Tower” by JoSelle Vanderhooft is a vividly jewel-toned villainous retelling of the “Sleeping Beauty” story which twists the contents of the original in a manner not out of keeping with that of Angela Carter’s “The Lady in the House of Love”. Janni Lee

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Simner’s “Lost or Forgotten” carries us through two mir- rored narratives which twine ever more tightly about one another, the first of a unicorn’s love turned mundane, the other of mundane love turned fantastic, until, finally, like the unicorn’s horn itself, we reach our point: the magic of love and the love of magic can never wholly be separated, and nor should they be. Amal El-Mohtar gives us a humorous original fairy tale with “Night of the Girl Goblin”, a tale of trials which is somewhat in keeping with the tale of “The Tale of the Three Billy Goats” which it references, while managing to provide some very inventive insights into otherworldly society. “The Cat-Skin Coat” by Jessica Paige Wick provides a fascinatingly experimental treatment of the sub-genre of the retelling itself, crossing over between the “timeless” setting of the traditional fairy tale and a familiar modern environment, as well as between the motifs of “Catskin”, “Tam-Lin” and the tales of the selkies. And in our final work of fiction, in another reworking of the villain’s role, Kimberly DeCina examines the construction of an “evil stepsister” with her reworking of the themes of “Diamonds and Toads”: avoiding the dichotomous structure of the good girl simply exchanging slippers with the bad so as to walk a mile in her shoes, DeCina focuses on the fact that both girls are silenced in the original tale, saying “A girl who denies herself is a girl whose voice is poisoned, twisted, silenced.” Hardly a happy ending, regardless of whether the silencing is accomplished through riches or vermin . . . yet DeCina provides a compelling alternative which nevertheless leaves a lingering question as to the process of identity-formation. Her characters make their own happy ending, but still suffer certain fears as to how their decisions will be judged . . . . In criticism, Christine McDermott eloquently examines the ways in which feminist retellings of fairy tales for young adults function in Bruno Bettelheim’s construction of the

12 THE SIGNIFICANT OTHER fairy tale, and, in some ways transcend it: Jamil Mustafa presents a thought-provoking examination of Angela Cart- er’s own take on the heroine as Other in “Angela Carter’s Vampiric Sleeping Beauty”; and, last and certainly not last, Jennifer Banash provides a fascinating deconstruction of the process which provides such tales in “From Anxious Can- nons to Hysterical Texts: A Theory of Literary Revision.” Till our next issue, we remain . . . .

Otherwise yours,

Helen Pilinovsky and Erzebet Barthold-Yellowboy

Recommended Reading:

Sax, Boria. The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature, McDonald and Woodward Publishing Company, 1998.

Silver, Carole G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Tatar, Maria. Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and his Wives, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004.

Warner, Marina. From The Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, The Noonday Press, New York, 1994.

Windling, Terri. “Married to Magic: Animal Brides and Bridegrooms in Folklore and Fantasy”, Realms of Fantasy, June 2004.

13 Katabasis

Sonya Taaffe

THE DARK DRIFTS DOWN, holds like glass all this dusk. The sunken sun, fires gone blue under the earth and the moon canted upward in the east; wind slow as water, tide that glazes ice on the tongue, and tastes of iron. A mesh of dream sieves this season for nightmare, the rustling stalks nodding heavily, blood-starred; a scythe of moon and how the roots run deep among bone and rusted coin forgotten below the sheaves, fires kindled to flare back memory. Skies cleared to deep lucidity that swallows focus, lures the eye farther into wind and light opening endlessly outward. Darkness pure as silence, obsidian frost. The burning on every branch, unconsumed. These are leaves that were your eyes. These bones that tangling runners wrapped around, flesh from earth, to earth, and the dry gourd of your skull rattles with the sickle stars. In your veins crackle cat-ice and the fiery, flighty crimson of summer’s ghosts, gone to ground; sway of candlelight peering from your eyes, the haunting, feinting flicker between heaven and hell. A pomegranate, torn open, spilling seeds like a hail of unanswered desires. Crabapples, half bitten out. The wind plays your marrow like a lyre. Dark, out of dark, into cold and brightness falling endlessly, like angels, like loosened stars: the earth cradles all this balance, as the door swings open, swings back, where you got out and blazoned your season like a scrawl on the sky. The wind stirs slowly. Take your payment. The sun will return this time.

14 KATABASIS

Sonya Taaffe has a confirmed addiction to folklore, mythology, and dead languages. A respectable amount of her work has recently been collected in Singing Innocence and Experience and Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books). She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Classics at Yale University and has trouble talking about herself in the third person.

15 Stranger at the Wedding

R.W. Day

NINE THE WORLDS THAT REST on Yggdrasil World-tree and nine the mothers of Heimdall and nine the daughters of Aegir and Ran, the Billow Maids, the white-capped waves, the sea-nymphs. Kolga Aegirsdottir, the youngest, the infinitesimal wave that laps at the legs of men, envies her great sister Hefring of the gaping maw, or Hronn, the welling wave who brings wrack and ruin to the longship that strays too far from the shore, but such powers are not for her, not for Kolga. Never for Kolga. Not for Kolga either the old, cold bones of men, the bilious host of the drowned who feast in her father’s hall. Their breath reeks of kelp, their ragged clothes hung all about with seaweed as they move wraithlike through the coral halls of Hler-halla where the gold of sunken ships lines the floors and no man’s hand can be raised against another’s. It is a place of peace, but the peace of the damned, of the drowned. The other maids may take occasional lovers from among the mortal dead, but not Kolga. She yearns for warm flesh-fat arms to hold her, a strong, living man who doesn’t reek of fish and death, so she’s gone ashore, lying in the shallows off Kinnar in Lummelund, and she’s stayed there three days waiting, for she is the subtle wave that wears away the coastline by inches, and patience is her watchword. And now she’s come home with him in tow, bold Ingvarr Osvaldrsson, too brave or too stupid to know you don’t take the proffered hand of a sea nymph, you dare glimpse beneath the white veil of the waves. He’s captured in an enchantment

16 STRANGER AT THE WEDDING that holds his soul as hollow and lifeless as the dead, but he’s warm and alive, and though he misses his wife without knowing he misses her, his body rises to Kolga’s, and they come together in her bed of seagrass and kelp. Three years she holds him, one turn of the wheel for each of the Norns: Verdandi, Skuld, Urd. Necessity, Being, Fate. And it’s fate in the end that binds them all, even the gods cannot escape the workings of Wyrd. So on the last day of the third year, it’s Kolga and her mother, Ran, Gatherer of the Drowned, and they’re speaking of the doings of men. You should let him go, Daughter. If he’s meant to dwell here, he’ll fall into my nets and return in due time. And his flesh will bloat and rot and he’ll be like them, Kolga points dismissively to the long hall, a pale reflection of vast Valhalla, its hoary tables encrusted with barnacles, her father’s foam-flecked beer pouring from cast-off shells, not honeyed mead filling the horns of heroes. No, Mother. After today, he’ll be mine for true. After today, he’ll have nothing to return to, no bond or pledge holding him to the human world. He’ll be mine. There’s triumph in her daughter’s eyes, but Ran is old and wise and she sees Ingvarr trapped like a spider in the web of his enchantment, gazing at her daughter like she’s as fair as Sif and Freya in one, so she pitches her voice to carry through the water. Quite a dusting out there’ll be in Kinnar tonight, then. Kinnar. The name of his home travels through the aqueous depths, slow-sounding, pulsating, tearing at the unraveling shreds of enchantment; his eyes widen and his back straightens. Ingvarr Osvaldrsson has remembered who he is. Ran slips away through the coral corridors. Her work is done. Awakening from an endless dream, finding himself submerged and yet somehow breathing, bold Ingvarr

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Osvaldrsson pisses himself, then is ashamed, backing away from the thin yellow stream that rises on the deep currents to dissipate, a minute drop in the expanse of the sea. It matters not a whit to Kolga; shit, piss, semen — all the fluids of life can be found here, in her home. But she wonders, in a strange aside, if this is why the warriors of Manannan mac Lir go into battle naked save for their blue dye, so that when they soil themselves, nobody sees the aftermath imprinted on their armor. He meets her eyes for the first time since she cast her spell over him on the rock strewn shores of Kinnar, and Kolga knows he is seeing her as she truly is, with no aid of glamour. Hair the color of the sea and just as changeable, elfin-thin face, whippet body, not soft and welcoming as a human woman’s would be. And still, beyond all illusions, still he wants her. This she did not expect. My wife is to wed? He watches his words bubble away into the sea, curious, entranced now by the strangeness of the place, not the magics of the nymph. Kolga nods and he pushes through the water toward her, takes her arms in a firm grip and kisses her, bends her backwards in an awkward spiraling dance that’s elegant in the water as they push off from the sea bottom and ride the currents. I want to see her, he says as they break apart. Just one more time, now that I remember. You’re mine. Yours. Yes. But I want to see. His hand lifts her hair so that it flares around her, a grey-green sun that gives no light, and she wonders if he misses the sun. The dead do, you can see the memory of light in their empty eyes. He takes her there among the anemone and schools of herring. She knows her mother and sisters are likely watching as well, but watching is a far cry from the slippery-slick

18 STRANGER AT THE WEDDING thrust of body against body, of lamprey-like mouths latched upon eager flesh, drawing pleasure each from the other as venom is drawn from a wound. Let them watch. Ingvarr Osvaldrsson is mine and I am his till the twilight of the gods and the world’s ending. She clings to the thought with exquisite fierceness as the moment of completion sends them both spiraling down, down, down towards the sea bed, locked one to the other for all time. She’s not stupid, Kolga Aegirsdottir isn’t; not a trusting human girl, though blind with love she may be, so she binds Ingvarr with enchantments, hedges her love with magics. You can watch, say your silent goodbyes, but you may not cross the threshold of any dwelling built by man. Do you understand? He assents, and she does not explain the consequences of disobedience, for in truth, there are none. She’s wearing a slight glamour, and the magic she casts is mild, a gentle spell to turn the mind, a drawing back. Ingvarr’s mind is weak from three years’ captivity and he’ll return of his own accord. But Ran Storm-Borne has a care for her daughters, though they might think otherwise, and magic they do not possess, and knowledge too, of the ways of men from old. No one can be allowed to hurt her silly, silly child. No one save Ran herself.

GUDRUN GALMRSDOTTIR FIGHTS TO BREATHE TRUE AIR, but the steam surrounding her has driven away any hint of breeze, leaving her naked and sweltering in the bath house. She’s surrounded by awkward women who don’t know what to say, unsure of how to give advice to one who has long known the duties of a wife, though for three years now she’s not had the chance to act the part. The secrets of women and the ways of men are known to her; she is not a virgin in need of advice.

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If she’d had her way, Gudrun would have done without the ritual bath altogether, but Ingibjorg, Sigurd’s mother, would have none of it; hoping, no doubt, that the cleansing rituals would wash away any trace of Ingvarr Osvaldrsson so that her beloved son would have the virgin bride he deserves. So the old lady desperately pours water onto the heated stones as though if she creates enough steam, it will miraculously rise into Gudrun’s sex and restore her hymen. On the other side of the tiny bathhouse, Ingvarr’s old mother presses against the rough log walls, wrinkled face and diminished form lost in the rising mist. Though they have not spoken of it, Gudrun knows what this day must mean to her mother-in-law. Oh, they buried Ingvarr’s sword and armor, raised a barrow over his goods worthy of a Thane, but it’s a far cry from mounding earth over a sword and some chain mail to watching your son’s wife marry another. Well, the old woman will have to understand — Gudrun can no longer live in her father’s house, not when she’s been mistress of her own. She wants a home to keep and a man between her thighs and children while she is still young enough to bear them. Better it should be Ingvarr, but the sea has taken him, and Sigurd is tall and strong and well regarded by the Thane. If his countenance is dark where Ingvarr’s was fair, if his nose is stubby and his skin tends to spot, well, no man is perfect. Even the Thane is pockmarked and scarred, yet his wife fastens her gowns with silver brooches and has traveled clear to Birka more than once. It seems a fair trade. The stones are cooling and the hour grows late, and with the Thane’s lady, Ulfhildr on one side and the withered Gythja who will solemnize the marriage on the other, Gudrun is plunged into the final bath, the cold bath. As the water closes over her, a frigid net seizes her chest, shrinking around her as her sprang-work cap tightens on her hair, she wonders if this is how it was for Ingvarr, drawn to

20 STRANGER AT THE WEDDING his death by the icy-white hands of the waves. She is so beautiful. Sigurd’s breath catches as Gudrun emerges from the Women’s House, clad in a new wool gown and apron made from the finest wadmal, wearing his mother’s bronze brooches cast in the shapes of animal heads, proud head high beneath the bridal crown. Not the poor wheat-woven thing she’d worn to wed Ingvarr, but a true crown of silver, borrowed from Lady Ulfhildr so that nothing on his bride would ever have been seen by Ingvarr Osvaldrsson. All things new, that was what his mother said, and Ingibjorg was wise, skilled in Seith-magic and reading the currents of fate. She’d pronounced it — nothing of the past must mar this wedding. The entire village has turned out to witness their union, to give assent to the exchange of dowry and mundr-price, to watch while the great sow’s blood pools dark in the bronze bowl as the sacrifice is made. Sigurd, as a warrior inured to blood, nonetheless turns slightly away as the blood-soaked branch spatters the bridal pair. As he turns, he glimpses a man standing off by himself, not part of the warband gathered around the Thane, nor one of the farmers or the thralls clustered together. A man apart in a world where men are known by their allegiances. A stranger, and yet disturbingly familiar. But there’s no time for him, whoever he is, for Gudrun is smiling up at Sigurd and the Gythja is leading them across the threshold of the longhouse with the villagers close behind, crowding around the smoking hearth, jostling for position so that all can see his Gudrun, fair as Freya, proud as a Valkyrja. Sigurd gestures to his man who brings forth a sword encased in silk brought from Rome of the East, the sword which tradition requires him to present to his bride to hold in keeping for their first son. Tradition weighs heavy in Kinnar, but Sigurd has done something new, something unexpected.

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Sent out into the night to search the barrow of an ancestor, to bring the past forward to the present that it might be perpetuated in his children with Gudrun, Sigurd Olafsson has chosen a path yet untrodden to honor the brave man who once loved and protected his Gudrun. But as she unwraps the sword and sees in the dim light of the torches the familiar bronze pommel and the sun-bright steel, still carved with Ingvarr’s runes naming it Gunnlogri, Battle- Blaze, she turns deathly pale and Sigurd’s mother moans aloud, “What have you done, my son, oh, my son?” His mother may loathe the memory of Ingvarr. Sigurd does not. “It seemed right to me that the weapon of such a fine man should not rot in the earth. It will serve to make our sons in some small part Ingvarr’s as well. That he might not be forgotten.” Gudrun is not breathing, just staring down at the blade as though it’s a serpent poised to strike. “Gudrun?” Sigurd says softly, and she begins to speak, but whatever reply she would make is lost in the sound of his mother’s moans, or is that a troll-borne wind, rising from the sea? The double doors slam open, hammering against the walls of the house like sword blows raining down upon wooden shields. Sigurd turns toward the sound of it to see the stranger standing on the threshold, the storm rising at his back like a cloak caught in the wind. “Take my wife, would you? Take my sword? Now take my life, if you can,” he mocks. No stranger now, for Gudrun knows him at once; the sword clatters to the floor as she steps forward to greet her dead husband. But before she’s gone three paces, the roof peels back from the longhouse, flensed like blubber from a great whale and the sea rushes in, massive waves crashing against the walls, spilling over log walls as the villagers fight to escape.

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But the stranger, Ingvarr Osvaldrsson, makes no attempt to fight the doom that he’s brought upon himself, just stands, drenched and cold, one hand reaching out to his widow, the other to the sea. Ran watches from the shore as the frightened humans flee from the ruined longhouse, running pell-mell for higher ground. They’ll be safe enough, for she has no interest in them, not now. Some of the men will find their way to her husband’s hall, but not today. Today, only Ingvarr the Betrayer holds her interest. Foolish man. Kolga had warned him. Don’t cross the threshold. Don’t look back. Even the old Seith-Woman had felt it, given voice to her fears in her warnings to her son, but he too was stupid in the way of men and failed to heed her warnings. Mortal or god, no one listens to mothers. Ran has lived long enough to know the past holds naught but pain. Well, there’s pain enough here now. Ingvarr still stands in the wreckage, staring at she who had been his wife, all thoughts of Ran’s beloved Kolga put aside, as she knew they would be. It never goes well for a Billow Maid to love a mortal man. Three days it will take him to die, Ran decides, three days to lie in a fever and sweat away his life, one day for each year of his sojourn in Hler-Halla. And three days she will let Kolga mourn before she calls upon Odin All-Father to send his raven Munnin to bear her daughter’s memories away.

R.W. Day’s stories have appeared or will appear in various places, including Book of Dark Wisdom and Deep Magic.

23 The Devil Factory

Bret Fetzer

CHILD, BACK IN THE HIGH ROCKY HILLS full of nothing but scrub brush and empty coal mines, a young mother worked her fingers to the bone cleaning house and pulling weeds and plucking chickens — because her no-good husband lay around all day drunk and smelly and ran around all night drinking and stinking up the town with his nasty smelly self. These two had a pretty little girl named Annabell and Annabell had to wonder how her daddy wooed such a clean woman as her ma, with his nasty smell and all, because even though he was her daddy and she had to love him, she could not deny he had a powerful stink and how did he get so close to anyone as to end up with a little girl? Annabell loved her daddy but she loved her ma more, because even when her ma was tired and hungry, her ma picked Annabell up in her arms and gave her scraps of bread and bacon grease and tucked her under rough and scratchy sheets and kissed her forehead, and who wouldn’t love a mother like that? So Annabell went climbing up among the scrub and rocks and thorns and brambles looking for flowers she could put on the dinner table, because Annabell didn’t think much of flowers herself but they made her ma happy, and if her ma was happy Annabell was happy and maybe even her smelly stinky daddy was happy too, if he hung around long enough to know it. Well, she’d been scratching up her hands for an hour or two and only had a three scrawny blue and yellow flowers to show for it, not much to brighten a dinnertime, when all of

24 THE DEVIL FACTORY sudden someone said, “Ain’t you got school to go to, little girl?” Annabell looked up and there stood this little man with little legs and little arms and a little body but a great big head with beady little eyes, kind of like her uncle Eustace, and he had little wire spectacles like her uncle Eustace and long bits of greasy hair pulled across his head like her uncle Eustace, but then she saw one thing not like her uncle Eustace at all, and that was two little horns sticking up out of his head, all white and sharp like a kitten’s teeth. (You’d think she would have noticed those first, but never mind about that.) “Ain’t got no school on a Saturday,” said Annabell. “Ain’t you got chores to do, little girl?” asked the little horned man, rubbing a dirty finger under his nose. “I get the eggs in every morning, ain’t got no chores after that,” said Annabell. “Ain’t you got no friends to play with?” asked the little horned man, scratching his horns like they itched. “Ain’t no one closer’n ten years to me for forty miles,” said Annabell. “Well,” said the little horned man with a crooked but not unfriendly smile, “how would a little girl like you like to get a job, not too hard of a job, just a little factory job, all you got to do is one little thing every Saturday and then you go home with a handful of pennies.” “Ain’t no factory for fifty miles,” said Annabell. “That ain’t exactly so,” said the little horned man, “but I can’t tell you how it is unless you says yes to my offer.” Annabell thought about how much better a handful of pennies was than a handful of crummy flowers and she said yes. Well, the moment she said so, the earth opened up at her feet and the little horned man — who was some kind of imp, it turned out — he grabbed her hand and led her down a steep and narrow staircase. Step after step after step after step

25 CABINET DES FÉES until, finally, they came to a wide room with a table down the middle of it, a table so long you couldn’t see either end no matter which way you looked. And all up and down this table sat the strangest people, all of them pale as a washer- woman’s sheets, with white hair and white lips and even their eyes were white, except for that black dot in the very middle. All those black dots looked at Annabell as the imp sat her down and pointed at a small black lump in front of her. The imp had Annabell pick up a tiny red scrap, no bigger than a daisy petal, and stick it into one end of the small black lump. And as she did so, so did all the pale people with their own tiny red scraps, stuck ’em right in one end of their own small black lumps. The imp was all smiles. Taking Annabell by the hand, he flew her back up the stairs, back to that scrubby, rocky hill, only now it was night, even though the sun had been where the moon was now when Annabell made her bargain. The imp shook Annabell’s hand, gave her six bright shiny pennies, and disappeared, the earth closing back up behind him. So Annabell ran home and her ma shook her fierce because her ma had been worried sick. But Annabell said she was okay and she held out the six pennies — six dirty pennies, because Annabell had rubbed them in the dirt, ’cause she knew her ma would be mighty suspicious about where six pennies had come from and Annabell said she found them in the field where all the coal miners fell asleep after drinking their paychecks away. Annabell’s ma got all fretful and said these pennies ought to go to those coal miners’ wives, who had enough trouble with their drunken, stinky coal miner husbands. But Annabell pointed out that these pennies could have come from any one of those drunken stinky men and if they went out there trying to give pennies back, it would stir up more trouble than it got rid of. Since Annabell’s ma was already thinking about the block of

26 THE DEVIL FACTORY cheese she could buy with six pennies, she let Annabell’s words sway her scruples — and who wouldn’t. On four Saturdays after that, Annabell stuck four more red scraps in four more black lumps, then she stuck the five lumps onto a bigger lump, then she stuck the bigger lump onto a long skinny lump, and funny if it didn’t look something like a skinny leg with red claws. Seven Saturdays later she had another leg. And the Saturday after that they stuck the legs into an even bigger black lump, kind of fat and squat but not unlike her uncle Eustace again, only he was skinnier in some places and fatter in others. The Saturday after that, Annabell had to stick on this funny looking part that wasn’t anything she had on her own self and she said what a funny looking thing it was. Next to her a pale old woman said, “Won’t seem so funny when you get older, child.” Annabell had a hard time believing that, ’cause it was awful funny looking, but she was too polite to say so. After that she made fingers and hands and arms and stuck those on too, then a big round lump for a head, then lips and ears and a nose, then Annabell used a spoon she to dig out two eye-holes, and then she squeezed two dull red stones into those empty scoops. And every step that Annabell took, all the pale people up and down the line took too, till step by step they all had strange black lumpy creatures standing in front of them. They each put together a pair of leathery wings, more like umbrella parts than anything a bird might use, but one Saturday Annabell dutifully took a wrench and tightened the bolt that held one wing, and then the next Saturday she tightened the bolt that held the other one. By now months had gone by, and Annabell was a little sick of this factory job — but every time she brought back six pennies her mother smiled, and sometimes they had cheese and sometimes they had meat, and once they even had a bouquet of flowers on the table, and even Annabell (who

27 CABINET DES FÉES didn’t care much for flowers) thought they made the whole room seem nicer. As Annabell stuck one stubby little horn onto the inky, lumpy forehead of the awkward, lifeless creature on the table, the imp leaned over her shoulder and whispered, “Only one more week!” “Why’s that?” asked Annabell, half happy and half sad about the job being almost over. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” giggled the imp, rubbing his hands together like he was about to sit down for dinner. The next Saturday Annabell came to the bottom of the stairs and there was no one else. The table stretched on in both directions empty and unattended. She turned around and there was no one there — the imp had disappeared. Didn’t matter; she knew what to do. She stepped to the table like any other Saturday, picked up the second stubby little horn and stuck it on the black forehead in front of her, right across from where the other horn already stuck out. She stepped back and frowned. Where’d the imp go? Who was going to give her the six pennies? It was time for her to go home. Then the devil in front of her — ’cause it was a devil she’d been making all this time, and she knew it just the same as you did, but six pennies had kept her at it all the same — that devil opened one eye and spun it in her direction. That eye wasn’t flat and dull no more, but glowed like a hot coal, red and orange and a little bit white-hot, right in the middle, so even looking at it made Annabell’s head hurt. Then the other eye, just as red and orange and white-hot, opened up and looked her way, and then the mouth smiled, and Annabell remembered sticking every one of those sharp little teeth in those lumpy black gums. Six pennies didn’t seem so important anymore and Annabell started running up the stairs, but behind her she heard those umbrella-like wings sweep the air and all at once

28 THE DEVIL FACTORY the devil put his arms around her waist, lifted her up, and burst out of the earth into the star-speckled night. “You are my one true love!” wailed the devil in her ear as the cold night air whistled past. Annabell could see churches and dust-dry farms and coalmine mouths laid out beneath her like patches on a quilt. Her throat went tight and her breath got short and screaming was out of the question. “I ain’t no love of yours,” Annabell whispered back. “I done felt your lovin’ touch on every part of me,” wailed the devil, “and every part of me loves you back!” Down below Annabell could see her own little house with her own ma standing in the doorway with a candle in her hand, waiting for Annabell to come home. “I done promised my ma I’d never get married without lettin’ her say yes or no or whatever she thought about it,” whispered Annabell. “That’s a powerful promise between a girl and her ma and you wouldn’t want me breakin’ it, would you?” Even though her eyes were glued on the house below, Annabell could feel the devil’s smile grow even wider. “Is it you that she loves,” he crooned, “or is it six pennies you put in her hand every Saturday night?” “If that’s so,” whispered Annabell, “then I’ll go with you and be your bride and let the everlastin’ fire swallow me up.” The devil swept down in a blur and landed on the scrubby dirt in front of Annabell’s house. But all of a sudden it wasn’t her ma who stood at the door with a candle in her hand; it was her daddy, eating a slice of melon, and the sweet melon juice trickled down his mustache and over his chin. “My ma’s gone to bed,” whispered Annabell, “so we’ll just have to wait until she wakes up in the morning to settle our bet.” The devil smiled. “Makes no difference,” he said, “for man and wife is married, and married folks is one flesh, so in

29 CABINET DES FÉES the eyes of the Lord that’s your ma standin’ there, and what’s good enough for the Lord is good enough for me.” Now this didn’t make no sense no how to Annabell, yet she could not deny the devil’s logic for she’d heard such things said in church, and she began to see why devils have such a bad reputation in these parts. “Daddy?” called out Annabell from the shadows. Annabell’s daddy spat out a melon seed and replied, “Where are you, sugar? Yer ma’s awful worried ’bout ya. And she told me to collect those six pennies you seem to find most every Saturday night.” Now Annabell knew her ma didn’t let her daddy near those six pennies ’cause he’d just go out and drink ’em all up. “Daddy, what if I was to tell you I didn’t just find those pennies?” “Don’t much matter where those pennies came from,” said her daddy, and the devil’s fingers slid around Annabell’s arm like a snake slides around a mouse. But as he spoke, Annabell’s daddy pushed back the door until light from the kitchen lantern spilled out into the yard. “Who all you got out there with you?” Annabell’s devil smiled, and his teeth glittered in the light, and his eyes burned whiter and hotter than ever before. “Mr. Annabell’s daddy,” crooned the devil, “what if I was to tell you that you could get twelve pennies, or eighteen pennies, or maybe even twenty-four pennies if we can strike a certain bargain.” “I don’t do business with no one nohow ’less I know what kind of fellow he is,” said Annabell’s daddy. “Sir, I am as honest as the day is long,” giggled the devil, and Annabell thought about how short the days were when she worked in that devil factory. But Annabell’s daddy shook his head. “Then I won’t strike no bargain with you,” he said. “No one ever caused so

30 THE DEVIL FACTORY much trouble as by being honest.” “You are wise beyond the common man, Mr. Annabell’s daddy,” chuckled the devil. “I confess it! I am no man at all, but a representative of the fiery pit!” Annabell’s daddy looked unimpressed. “I can’t say you look all that wicked to me.” The devil frowned. “Now sir,” he replied, “no need for that kind of talk. I am a wicked fellow, with nary a good deed to my name — mere minutes from my birth, and already kidnapping, extortion, and striving to rupture the sacred bond twixt parent and child are marked upon my soul.” “Extortion,” mused Annabell’s daddy. “Is that like when I told my dearest friend to spot me sixteen cents for a poker game, or I’d tell his wife a thing or two?” “That would be an example of sorts,” said the devil, eager to get down to business. “’Course, his wife gave me seventeen cents, so I told her anyway,” said Annabell’s daddy. “I expect that’s pretty bad too.” “It compounds the sin,” concurred the devil. “Then there’s that time I took a wheelbarrow full of toddlers over the state line to sell to lazy childless rich folk —” The devil raised his hand and hung his head. “Plainly you are a professional sinner, and I shall not shame myself further by parading my paltry newborn sins before you. Now can we proceed with my offer?” Annabell’s daddy mulled for a moment. “Don’t quite seem right to me,” he said, “I intend to play fair, but you being such an amateur and all, I might take advantage of you by accident.” “Amateur!” cried the devil. “My sins may be few so far, but sin lies in the very fiber of my being! Name any sin you please and I will commit it before your very eyes.” “Pick a sin to test your immoral mettle,” mused Anna-

31 CABINET DES FÉES bell’s daddy. “There are so many to choose from . . . ” “Somethin’ quick,” said the devil, “we got business to attend to.” Annabell thought back to her Sunday school lessons. “Judas gets chewed up every day in the jaws of Satan because he betrayed our savior,” she said, “and Satan hisself got cast out of heaven ’cause he done betrayed the lord God.” The devil curled his fingers around Annabell’s neck. “Plainly the two of you is in cahoots,” he sneered, “but your finagling ways are like glass. If I gave up this girl to betray the biggest devil in Hell, you could hear my screams of torment from mountaintop to lake bottom. My sins may be fledgeling, but I am not foolish.” “Seems to me you done already betrayed him,” said Annabell’s daddy. The devil about jumped out of his skin. “What do you mean?” “Seems to me you have fond feelings for this girl,” said Annabell’s daddy. The devil sneered, “Mere craven lust!” “Well, I ain’t never met a devil before in the flesh,” said Annabell’s daddy, “but I known a whole slew of men, and there’s something in the way you handle this girl, something downright . . . delicate.” The devil blushed pink and blanched white at the same time, which is quite a trick. “Seem to me,” said Annabell’s daddy, “you is in love.” “Am not,” declared the devil. “Is so.” “Am not!” squealed the devil, but he was looking over his shoulder like he expected a diabolic horde to tear him to shreds any second. “Then you’d better prove it,” said Annabell’s daddy. “After all, a tender and naive emotion like love just begs to

32 THE DEVIL FACTORY be trampled and soiled. Why don’t you sell that pretty girl to me for . . . what have I got in my pockets . . . I’ll give you two cents for her. ’Course, you could argue for more, if she means something to you.” “MEANS something?” said the devil, gazing at Anna- bell’s frightened face. Annabell had never seen such a riot of feeling as she saw in this devil’s eyes; he had completely forgotten he’d come to buy Annabell from her daddy in the first place. The devil turned to Annabell’s daddy and shrieked, “I’ll sell her for ONE!” No sooner had these words left the devil’s mouth than the earth began to shake. The ground at their feet tore asunder and a whole consort of demon, imps, and ghouls swarmed out like a hive of wet bees, tearing at this devil’s wings and plucking out his horns, shrieking that this pre- tense of soiling his innocent feelings of love — feelings unnatural to any truly diabolical being — was no more than a sneaky way of letting his love shine and he might as well stumble up to Heaven right now. All at once light poured down from the star-speckled skies and a host of angels flapping their feathers tromped on down, saying no devil felt no true love no how; this was some fiendish trick to put a spy amongst them; that if the devils cast him out of Hell they sure as — well, they just wouldn’t take him into Heaven — and they tried to squish the poor devil’s horns back onto his already bloodied brow. While all this hullaballoo went on, Annabell’s daddy swept her up in his arms and carried her up to her bed. Annabell found herself with a glimmering of just how her dirty stinky daddy got so close to her clean-smelling ma, because as he tucked her under the covers and kissed her forehead goodnight, she didn’t notice his stink at all. Annabell could feel the heavy fingers of sleep tuggin’ at her eyelids, but still she asked, “Daddy, now that you done

33 CABINET DES FÉES seen a devil in the flesh, will you change your sinful drunken smelly ways and be a better husband to my ma?” “Now, sugarplum,” said Annabell’s daddy as he stood up, “such a question — full of otherworldly speculation and philosophical import — I would love to answer . . . but I suspect that on our doorstep tomorrow morning will sit a young mere man, dark of complexion, muddy of thought, black-eyed and shoeless, but not such a bad sort all told, and he might have intentions of some kind towards you — though you’re but a child and should savor a bit more of life’s pleasures while they are still fresh and surprising, before you go making agreements with anyone — but either way he’s gonna need this one penny I done promised for you, so I had best deliver it to its rightful owner.” With that, her daddy slipped out the door and closed it quietly behind him. As Annabell drifted off to sleep — the gnashings of devils and angels still a caterwaul outside her window — Annabell closed her eyes with the soft happy thought that her daddy had never before paid nothing to nobody nohow whether he owed it or not, and Annabell chose to see this as the first step towards a better-smelling daddy and a happier ma.

Bret Fetzer has had stories published in The Literary Review and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, as well as a one-act play, co-written with Juliet Waller Pruzan, in The Kenyon Review. He wrote the narration for the documentary film Le Petomane; Fin de Siecle Fartiste, directed by Igor Vamos and two collections of his original fairy tales, Petals & Thorns and Tooth & Tongue, have been published by Rampant Books, a small press in Seattle, WA.

34 The Hiker’s Tale

Mike Allen

HELP ME! YELLED THE BOY. No noise disturbed the steep wooded incline where I froze, my heart dancing a crazy flatfoot. A distant catbird screeched above the flying saucer whine of the cicadas; that was all. Yet the boy’s voice shrilled again in my head, loud as a rifle shot. Please help me! I dropped my aluminum hiking staffs. One of them tumbled down the bank, right through the place where the boy crouched, right through him. Nothing more than an outline sketched in the furrows of bark, the cross-hatching of pine needles, yet clearly there, cowering amid the trees about ten yards below the trail. A slender boy, maybe ten or eleven, muddy face streaked with tears, his sweatshirt ripped, one jean pocket torn open. Through him, the late summer sun dappled knotted branches and twisted ropes of creeper and glistening pine. His lips parted, and in my head his voice: Don’t let it get me. I felt as if someone dropped a boulder in my backpack. I staggered — swooned, my grandmother would have put it — and grabbed at a birch sapling to keep myself from tumbling down the slope. A commotion erupted below the pines, in the brambles at the bottom of the gully. It sounded like a deer, like a herd of deer, trying to fight a path through the tangled thorns. The boy ran at me. I raised my arms to block him, but he ran through them,

35 CABINET DES FÉES through me. I howled as a cold electric jolt galvanized me from inside. When I screamed, it wasn’t just from the sensation, but an implosion of impossible recognition. I’d felt this before, this ice lightning. Suddenly I was terrified as a five year old shut in a cabin full of ghosts. My sinuses seared with the reek of copper. Static blasted in my ears. My skin curdled in goose pimples. Then the hallucination vanished, quick as it had struck. Whatever made the commotion in the brambles then crashed away through the brush, out of earshot in seconds. A stench of rotten eggs drifted past me like seeds on the wind. Then all was calm. No sign of a boy. No sound of running footsteps. A distant cicada changed its pitch from whine to buzz. To my right, the slope descended to the impassable brambles where I’d heard the deer moving. To my left, the ground rose even steeper in a mad, rocky quest to reach the mountaintop. I stood on a wide hump in the trail, gasping as if I’d sprinted the last quarter mile. My mouth felt desert dry. I thought of sipping from my canteen, then decided otherwise, realizing that the sulphurous taint still lingered in the air. My stomach twinged. Nothing I’d ever encountered in twenty years of life had felt that way. So I told myself then. I took a step, then bent over and dry heaved. As I squatted there, eyes shut, a phrase repeated in my head. Leave it alone, little panther. At first the voice was unfamiliar: old, dry and crackly as fallen leaves just before the first snow. But then, like twin muted beacons, I pictured my grandmother’s eyes, her coal-black stare ruined by cataracts. The voice was hers. When had I heard her say that? She had died thirteen years before, when I was only seven. It was a miracle I remembered the sound of her voice

36 THE HIKER’S TALE at all, and so strange that I remembered it then. The rustling continued — at first I though her voice had somehow escaped my skull, but as I recovered from this odd spell I noticed motion at the edge of the path. A large, grey spider, a wolf spider, its leg span as wide as my palm. Tiny brown young clustered on her back. She was so large that as she crawled across years of shed leaves they whispered beneath her weight. Leave it alone, little panther. I told myself that nothing had happened, that maybe I just needed fresh water. It was easy to buy into my own sales pitch. All in your head. Thirst and exhaustion. Just need to find a good resting spot. I picked up one of my aluminum walking staffs, then clambered carefully down the bank to retrieve the other, avoiding the mother spider and the thorns of a honey locust sapling. The trail wound uphill past a row of scrub pine, around a bank of cherries. Beyond their long drooping leaves stood a wooden sign which read CRABBES SUPPLIES in carved block letters. Directly across from the sign stood one of those wooden boxes mounted on a pole you see all along the Appalachian Trail, holding a notebook hikers can use to leave each other comments. The arrow on the sign pointed to a narrow side path that climbed straight uphill, forging through dense clusters of laurel. At that moment I realized I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than the company of another human being. I made a mental list of things I could stand to restock and started up the hill.

CRABBES SUPPLIES TURNED OUT TO BE a 1850s-era log home about the size of a storage shed, perched atop the

37 CABINET DES FÉES mountain ridge. Tan chinking filled the gaps between wooden slats aged mildew black. The roof’s blocky, gray shingles had been hand-cut with a hatchet. An ancient jeep as dirty as the slats sat behind the shop, parked on an old logging road that wound its muddy way down the other side of the mountain. The jeep’s fenders were caked with enough layers of mud to justify an archeo- logical dig. Somewhere nearby, a generator hummed. Through the window’s dusty glass I could see a heavy-set woman, her back to me, her silver hair pulled up in an elaborate bun. The painful pink and green print of her flowered skirt made her disproportionately wide hips seem even wider. I leaned my staffs against the wall and set foot on the single front step. It creaked under my weight. Then I drew up short. Viscous strands of cobweb crisscrossed the open door. I’d almost stepped through them. I checked for spiders — there were none — then brushed the webs aside. Except I didn’t. My hand passed through the webbing without breaking a strand. An electric tingle numbed my forearm, the same cold jolt I felt when the boy ran through me, though not as strong. The old woman spun around as if yanked on a string. At the same moment, a rail-thin and stunningly ugly old man stood up from behind the cash register. My hand shook as I passed it again through the cobwebs. Again, the cold, the shock. That happened. The boy’s terrified face, etched in shadow, flickered before my mind’s eye. As I stood paralyzed, the old couple watched me, both their heads cocked at precisely the same angle. I grew conscious of their gaze, and embarrassment compounded my fear. Leave it alone, little panther.

38 THE HIKER’S TALE

The old man finally broke the detente by displaying a smile full of long, crooked teeth. “Well, son,” he drawled pleasantly, “are you coming in or not?” His tone made up my mind for me. I hopped through the door with an apologetic “Hi!”— but the syllable was strangled by full-body shock as I passed through the cobwebs. “Whoa, there, tiger, you all right?” He came around the counter, a spindly arm extended to brace me. His wife put a fretful hand to her mouth. Something in me squirmed as the old man took my arm, but I didn’t resist as he helped me out of my backpack and steered me to a wooden chair. I was all too grateful for the chance to sit down. He must have been acclimated to decades of hikers stomping through, because I was a fright myself. Cheeks hollowed from day after day of dining on raisins, peanuts, jerky, granola and the occasional nasty but edible meal plucked and boiled directly from what the trail offered. Those sunken cheeks almost completely hidden in a scraggly shrub of black, curly, untrimmed beard, my densely curly hair grown out three times as far. Even without my Nine Inch Nails t-shirt sticking to my body, I stunk from four weeks away from air conditioning and plumbing. Not to mention I was freakishly piebald, my sun-exposed forearms and face dark as hickory, the rest of me pale as cream. And people with my complexion don’t normally have green eyes. That alone has earned me many double-takes through the years, but none of it phased him. “Check him for a fever,” his wife said. I tried to wave him away. “I’m fine, really. Just need a little break.” “Don’t usually see a man this young in such a state,” my host said. He had to press his hand to my forehead before he was satisfied. His touch felt so strangely cool that I wondered

39 CABINET DES FÉES if I did have a fever. But finally he nodded and backed away. “No problem with letting you sit for a spell. I think you need it.” Next, as I recuperated, came the small talk. Their names, they told me, were Herman and Gertrude Crabbe, the kind of names no sane parent would ever give their kid nowadays. As Gertrude approached and I shook her flaccid hand, I wondered how a woman so wide through the hips could have such a pinched, hungry face. Yet her voice had an earthy, soothing cadence. “Welcome to our little oasis,” she said. “You want something while you’re here? Bottled water? Crackers? Maybe a pillow?” My panic faded, though a nagging sense of unease never left. Something still bothered me about the Crabbes, though they acted as pleasant as you please. During the give and take, they told me they’d lived for the past 50 years in a cabin nestled in a hollow on the east side of the mountain, so secluded they never saw hikers there. Both had been born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and didn’t much care to live anywhere else. Gertrude told me she and Herman had both been born to large families, back in the days when everyone’s family was large, and each had been the family “eccentric,” the lone introverts marooned among their gregarious kin. Their serendipitous first meeting took place at a saloon in the tiny town of Warm Springs, where both had been reluctantly dragged by cousins with wild streaks. “I couldn’t believe how perfect we were for each other,” Mrs. Crabbe said. “I just looked at him, and I knew, and I could tell he knew. We hardly had to say anything.” I had no trouble believing in that instant attraction. These were two of the homeliest people I had ever met. Her with her hunched shoulders, beady eyes and crooked jaw, her head

40 THE HIKER’S TALE configured as if God had gripped her cheeks with thumb and forefinger and squeezed; him with those eyes set too far apart in his narrow face, the spiny hairs protruding from his ears and nostrils, that lipless mouth. They belonged together. Under normal circumstances I would never have revealed so much about myself in return, but every tidbit they offered seemed bent to draw something out of me, and even as I recognized the game I couldn’t stop myself from playing it. I’d not been the happiest boy, growing up in the coal- shaft riddled mountains outside Kingsport. A bookish waif is nothing to be among the sons of miners, who see you as something to piss on for sport. The only bookstore was at the Kingsport Mall, half a day away by a switchbacking road that made me throw up in the back seat more than once. My father taught at a high school in Sullivan County while my mother quietly seethed at home, an educated woman herself bound to cooking, cleaning, and chasing after an awkward, oversensitive and insolent brat. My dad would build up ferocious squalls of temper in the gray-bricked classrooms and release them at home in full glory once they were seeded by my mom’s resentful needling. Was it any wonder I spent so much of my childhood alone in the woods, a mite on the surface of our country’s oldest mountains, exploring an endless web of well-worn footpaths? Nothing had delighted me more than landing that art scholarship at UNC in Asheville. That, folks, was my great escape. And a setup for complete failure. I loved dabbling in art, but not living it under a professor’s dictatorship. Even the grace of the brush between the fingers, the high-inducing turpentine stench, turned into something sickening. After my plummeting grades wrecked my scholarship, I managed to stick around a semester and a half, reinvented as an English major surviving on a student loan. If anything, I performed even worse, and quit before midterms with most

41 CABINET DES FÉES of my spring loan still in the bank — a remnant of which was sponsoring my trek out of civilization. “You’re starting out pretty late for a thru-hiker,” Mr. Crabbe said. “By the time you hit Massachusetts, you’ll be knee-deep in snow, boy.” A good friend from high school days and his wife were waiting for me at the Pennsylvania border, I told. I’d winter with them, then finish the journey once the world thawed, I said, but it was half truth. In fact, I planned to look up my friend, but had no idea what I’d do after that. I was lost. The Crabbes listened to my tale of loserdom as if it were a death-defying war story. Whenever I stole glances at the doorway I could still see the ethereal webbing. “But you seem like such a smart boy,” Gertrude said, pursuing her unnerving lips. “Why’re you even struggling in school?” I couldn’t believe what came out of my mouth next. “I kept having nightmares after I left home. Just about every night. I couldn’t remember what happened in them, but I know they were bad because of the way I kept waking up. My heart would be pounding. Sometime I’d scream. I burned through four roommates my freshman year. I started to . . . well, I dabbled in substances to try to get it under control. But that wiped out whatever focus I had left.” “That’s a shame,” Mrs. Crabbe tsked. “A good woman would’ve taken care of that.” “Nightmares,” Mr. Crabbe said dreamily. Unbidden, I saw the ghost-boy’s face scream. There had been a woman, named Yolanda, whom I’d lived with up to and after my academic implosion. She was a candle-burning new-agey type who loved weed, and she started calling me Panther, like my grandmother had, though I couldn’t remember telling her about it, and finally asked her to stop. Our cohabitation was the last the thing to go

42 THE HIKER’S TALE sour before I took to the trail, the thing that made me decide I had to leave for the forest. I wanted to come back to my roots, but absolutely not to go home. I was trying to explain this without indulging in too much uncomfortable detail when Herman Crabbe floored me. “You got some Melungeon in you, I think,” he said. It took long seconds for my startled brain to even form a response. “Wow, that’s . . . I don’t think anyone’s ever . . . I’ve had people ask me if I’m Turkish. Or Arab. Or Greek. Or Indian. Even mulatto. No one gets it on sight.” Mr. Crabbe snickered. “You ain’t no Arab.” “My grandmother,” I said. “She was full Melungeon, if you can really properly apply such a term.” Both of them nodded as if I was confirming facts they already well knew. “Sure is a shame about that boy,” Mrs. Crabbe said, with no transition, as if it were the topic we’d been addressing all along. “I hope they at least find his body before the animals get it.” I nearly fell over and snapped that rickety chair. Herman sighed and shook his head as he straightened an assortment of candy, crackers and trail mix displayed by the cash register. “Probably too late.” When I recovered my balance, I asked, “What boy?” Herman stood and licked his crooked teeth. The couple exchanged glanced. Gertrude asked her husband, “You bring the paper?” “Yep, sure did.” The old man ducked behind the counter and started rummaging. “Here somewhere.” “Sad, very sad,” Mrs. Crabbe tsked, picking up her duster again. “A city boy from east of here, I think. The paper might’ve even had his name. Fell off the top of Angel’s Leap, about fifteen miles north of here. Surely you’ve heard of Angel’s Leap?” When I said I hadn’t, she was all too ready to explain it

43 CABINET DES FÉES to me. Its real name was McGlothlin’s Knob — that, I’d heard of — but everyone referred to it as Angel’s Leap: a craggy outcrop of jutting rocks with a popular but strenuous path winding to its peak and a 100 foot fall off one side waiting for the careless, of which there were no shortage. It was the biggest attraction on this part of the AT, in part because of its evil reputation. Bad things happened in the woods beneath its shadow, Mrs. Crabbe told me. Her husband reappeared, spread newspaper pages on the counter and crooked a finger to invite me closer. Gertrude stayed at my side, filling me in on the lore of Angel’s Leap as Herman guided my attention to a block of type. I spotted a name, Thomas “Tommy” Wayne Saunders, 9, of Hillcrest. Seven years ago, Mrs. Crabbe told me, a couple from Montana found dead inside their tents, their throats cut. Five years ago, a boy who wandered away from his family’s campsite escaped with his life, barely, from a man wearing a white mask. A year later, baffled police made a public appeal for help catching the suspect, and revealed the boy had been molested before he got loose. Two years ago, a missing college student found dead. An anonymous source quoted in the paper said his body was naked and impaled on a crudely carved pole. Gertrude counted off the horrors on her bony fingers as I tried to read. “They’ve never caught whoever did these things, whoever did any of it,” she said. The boy had vanished two nights before. His parents told the rescue workers they last saw him standing at the wooden railing at the top of McGlothlin’s Knob. No one saw him climb over or fall. A team of two dozen searchers still hadn’t found him. “Those parents should never have taken him up there,” Gertrude said. “They should know better. It’s a bad place.” “I keep telling you, woman, it ain’t the place that’s evil.”

44 THE HIKER’S TALE

Herman had kept his hand on the page to hold it flat. Now he moved his fingers, uncovering the black and white school photo above the story’s headline. I had guessed what I was going to see. But it still chilled me to the marrow to see his face smiling up at me. His unmistakable face. I fought to keep calm but didn’t quite make it. “That poor kid,” I said. “I bet his parents are devastated.” I became acutely aware of how close their faces were to mine, how they’d boxed me in on either side. They couldn’t have missed the way my eyes widened, the goose bumps that stood the hair on my arms on end. There are some things I never wanted to believe. But I’m not stupid. They knew about the boy. They knew I’d seen him, seen his ghost. I didn’t understand how they’d read my mind, but I was sure they had. As abrupt as a warning, I noticed empty eye sockets staring at me from the shelf behind and below the counter. An astonishing number of deer skulls, something like forty, sans their antlers, sat in regimented stacks down there. Quite a few of the eye sockets were occupied with dusty cobwebs, like leprous cotton. How long had I been talking with them? I had to get out. But an instinct I still can’t explain told me that a hasty exit would be a bad move, a very dangerous move. “You know,” I said, “I think I do need some more water. And some dried fruit would be good. Do you have anything freeze dried?” The old man gathered my order while his wife went back to dusting. As Mr. Crabbe manned the cash register I noticed an acrid, unwashed smell that undermined the comforting scent of old wood. It seemed to originate from him. I hadn’t noticed it before.

45 CABINET DES FÉES

One last nasty surprise lay in store, when the old man handed me the bag. Two of the fingers on his right hand were malformed. They were oddly bent, insect like — plastic substitutions for a missing pinky and ring finger. Skin had been grafted over these prosthetics. He grinned when he noticed the grimace I failed to suppress, and waggled his grotesque appendages in front of my nose. “That’s what happens,” he said, “when you don’t put food on the table quick enough for the missus.” Gertrude Crabbe cackled hard enough to trigger a coughing fit. While she was recovering, I quickly thanked them both and left, suppressing another cringe as I passed through the ethereal webbing in the door. I set off at a brisk pace, just shy of a trot, my mind and stomach churning all the way down. The sun had lowered considerably, its light sparkling faintly through the trees. When I reached the main trail I opened the box contain- ing the notebook for hikers’ messages. A ratty, spiral-bound pad lay inside, nearly filled with pen scrawls. Nothing that I skimmed help to enlighten me, though the final message read: “The Crabbes are creepy.” Beneath that, I wrote “Amen!” and signed my trail name, a concession to my long gone grandma: Panther.

TWO HOURS LATER, WITH THE SUN BANISHED beneath the mountains, my reason overcame the nagging urge to flee, and I sought a place to camp for the night. The wooden shelter I cam upon had once been used as a smokehouse. Inside, the crusty smell of salt mingled with a fruity hint of tobacco. I should have been laying out my sleeping bag, donning an extra shirt and calculating how much of my crackers and jerky and dried fruit I could afford to eat that night. Instead I sat on the bench inside the shelter, my pack on the floor beside me, opening and closing my Buck knife, listening to

46 THE HIKER’S TALE my own heartbeat and thinking. The noises of crickets and peepers provided an eerie soundtrack to the film spliced together in my head. The ghost-boy. The webbing. Herman licking his teeth. Then I broke the spell by swearing. In my preoccupation I managed to slice the pad of my thumb. I held my hand up to the grey light of dusk drifting through the doorway and watched my blood form a bead. It threatened to drip. That happened. It all happened. A memory welled in that drop as it fell. A small boy exploring the collapsed shell of a mountain cabin, feet crunching on rotten boards. A noise like the plaintive dial tone after a hangup rising in my ears. Darkness congealed into a face. The shock of a ghost touch. Freezing fire. I remembered: my tiny foot settling on a board that snapped even beneath the slender weight of a five year old. The sudden noise made my heart freeze. In that cabin, hollowed moss caked husk, that squatted in the woods above the ancient cottage of my mother’s mother. Even in my childhood my grandma’s house creaked with disrepair, central crumbling landmark on the farm gone to seed since my grandfather died, years before I was born. Her house fascinated me with its unending nooks and crannies, with its leaning outhouse, with its chickens behind frayed wire, with its covered well. But nothing fascinated me more than that dark relic in the woods, its shadow always drawing my eye from beneath the elm trees when I slipped out the back door to play. Grandma was a tiny woman, her hair waves of grey and black always tied back in a sloppy ponytail, face chestnut brown with wrinkled webs around her eyes and mouth, eyes a startling pale blue beneath thick black eyebrows. She frightened me; I didn’t like to be alone with her, though she

47 CABINET DES FÉES was always kind. There was a tension between her and my mother, who took after her late, lighter-skinned, taller husband; a cold barrier that I sensed in some instinctual way but did not catalogue consciously until I was much older, and noticed how mom fell quiet on the rare occasions someone spoke of her mother. Not so dearly departed, I could see. I came to believe it was all about skin color. But, when grandma was alive, she had insisted on visits, insisted on every opportunity to see her grandson, and my parents had dutifully obeyed, making the long trek on those horrible rutted roads in the rusted WV Beetle that was all they could afford when they were young. I asked Grandma many times about the caved-in cabin in her woods, and when she answered it was always the same. “Leave it alone, little panther.” I never asked her permission, but decided I would see for myself all the same. Toward the end of one week-long stay I snuck away from my cot in the middle of the night. I had no flashlight, but the moon was bright enough. Then, inside. I barked my knee crawling in through a hole in the wall that gaped beneath the moon. What was I hunting there? I remembered: the face that formed out of the dark. That terrible touch, cold lightning through every inch of me. I couldn’t recall what happened next. More blood dripped as my hand trembled. A snatch of an image: my grandmother’s eyes, practically glowing beneath the moonlight, her nose inches from mine. She had pulled me from the ruined cabin. Inside it, something whimpered. I clenched my bleeding thumb in my fingers, once again aware of the fruity tobacco scent, the reep reep reep of the peeper frogs. The old man was right — by the time I reached Massa-

48 THE HIKER’S TALE chusetts the trail would be smothered in snow. The world I wanted to escape from would certainly flush me out without sympathy. That creepy storekeeper had the better of me in more ways than one. I’ve always felt alone, been aware of a boundary that cordoned me off from others, evoked awkward silences and downcast eyes when I’ve tried to breach the gap, I once chalked that up to skin color, my mother’s shame. I didn’t learn what a Melungeon was until my senior year in high school. My blood was mixed, yes, but not in the way I’d come to believe. Melungeon was once an insult, now defanged by virtue of being mostly forgotten. They called themselves Black Dutch or Black Irish, but people believed they were a mix of Indian and Negro, and in some towns in 18th century Tennessee the government took away their property rights. The Melungeon did intermarry with blacks, because of the forces of society that throw outcasts together, but they weren’t to begin with African. No one has pinpointed for certain how they came to be. Some claimed them to be descendants of Moorish sailors from a marooned Portuguese vessel, taking Cherokee and Powhatan wives. Others sources point to the lost Roanoke colony, with its cryptic CROATOAN; some fancifully go even further back, much further, to Carthaginians fleeing the Roman tyranny, the Phoenicians, even to a certain lost Biblical tribe. And there are tales that supposedly originate among the Cherokee of a tribe from under the hills, a tribe with features that could be called a combination of white and black and Asian, who walked without fear among the beasts of the spirit world, and did not know death until they came to live above ground. My grandmother was unmistakably Melungeon, and she

49 CABINET DES FÉES met death when I was little and didn’t come back. I knew nothing of a spirit world or any beasts within it. But I thought about that webbing in the shop door, and the way the Crabbes had known what I was without asking, and it frightened me. Then a shadow flickered beyond the doorway to the shelter, and I knew a different kind of fear. My gasp of surprise caught in my throat. I saw nothing through that opening but the jumbled blur of trees in deep twilight, but at the same time I saw, unmistakably, the scrawny figure of a boy, etched out of the darkness. He stared at me, wide-eyed. I tried to say his name, but he had vanished. A breeze outside shifted, shaking the branches ominously. I heard a distant, rhythmic rustling of leaves, someone walking through the brush. A stench of rotten eggs assailed me. My bleeding thumb forgotten, I opened the Buck knife and crept to the door. On the crest of the hill high above me, in a gap between trees, a figure stood silhouetted against the bruised twilight. The figure — a man, I thought — turned and walked below the line of the hill. It was a strange thing to think at that moment, strange especially for a twenty-year-old man facing the unknown with his heart in his throat, but it’s what I thought: Grand- ma would know what to do. A woman who was little more to me than scraps of eerie memory, yet there was strength in those memories. A tiny old woman who had ventured out in the middle of the night to pull a frightened little boy from a place he didn’t belong. I stepped outside, careful to avoid leaves and brush as I stalked up the hill. As a childhood I’d had gift of padding

50 THE HIKER’S TALE silently that drove my mother crazy. This gift did not fail me then. On the hilltop I peered down into a long, narrow gully, dug by uncounted centuries of converging water runoff. The bottom of the gully widened into a clearing, shrouded by encroaching night. Though my vision reduced most everything to mottled black and white, somehow without squint- ing I could see Herman Crabbe in the clearing. Gaunt, an animated skeleton, he spread his arms, and a ring of what appeared to be blue smoke stretched open in front of him. It was as if his hands had pierced a membrane, and he was forcing the hole to gape large enough to pass through. A bewildering double image confronted me. Though I saw Crabbe using both hands to hold the opening, other limbs were reaching through, spiny arachnid limbs. Then he stepped completely through, and changed. What crawled out the other side of that smoky opening was not human at all. Its legs moving like arched lightning, the monster ascended the far side of the gully, climbing through the murk with heart-stopping speed. The vast spider I beheld was formed of shadow and movement, like my ghost-boy. Once the Crabbe-thing crawled out of sight, my heart didn’t slow its pounding. But the opening he made, the blue smoky ring, still hung in mid-air, slowly shrinking. Knife held before me, every nerve screaming for me to run the other way, I descended the gully, stepping as light and cat-like as I think I’ve ever managed. I expected the Crabbe-spider to lunge from the shadows any moment. But nothing like that happened. When I reached the opening it was little more than an eerie curl of blue light, dangling before me, glowing bait in the deep woods abyss. I poked my finger in it, and felt a mild jolt, that nerve-chilling shock that was starting to become familiar.

51 CABINET DES FÉES

I shoved in two fingers, then both hands. The substance yielded to my touch. I spread my arms, as I’d seen the storekeeper do, and opened the hole in reality. Through the hole, the trees, the gully, the shadows all looked the same, but another world was superimposed over them in double-exposure: a landscape of sourceless silver light, of odd refractions that twisted objects into shapes that hurt my eyes if I stared too long. I put one foot in the opening and stretched it to the ground, then paused. If I passed all the way through, would the opening still be there when I returned? Would I be stuck on the other side, in the spirit world, like poor Tommy Saunders? For now I was certain what had happened to this poor boy. Not all the pieces fit, not yet. But I was sure that Tommy Saunders, against all odds, was still alive. The Crabbes had brought him into this shadow world, somehow, for who-knew-what horrible purpose, but he’d escaped them. Maybe they’d believed him dead, but from my meeting with them they’d gleaned in some arcane fashion that their prey still lived. And now Mr. Crabbe had returned to the shadow world, to hunt the boy. Tracking in his true form. I didn’t dare leave the opening to search in that unfamiliar space. But I’d seen the boy just minutes ago. He couldn’t be far away. Holding out my knife in the direction Crabbe had crawled, I yelled Tommy’s name. The woods fell silent. I threw away all caution, shouting, “Tommy? Can you here me? Tommy?” “Here!” A boy’s voice. Something stirred nearby, something large. The sound made my guts flip-flop. “Run to my voice!” I screamed. “Run! Run! Now!” I couldn’t tell if Tommy heard me, the commotion in

52 THE HIKER’S TALE the woods became so loud. I clutched the knife in a white- knuckle grip and kept shouting. Then the boy appeared, stumbling pell-mell out of a bewildering tangle of silvery gloom. He pitched himself headlong into the gully. Behind him the tops of trees whipped back and forth, as something giant shoved its way between them. But the thing that emerged from the shadows a moment later wasn’t the gigantic spider I’d braced myself for. It stood upright on two thick legs. Thorns covered its body. The gully flooded with an overwhelming rotten egg reek. Tommy tripped and landed on all fours. I yelled for him to get up. Then the thing chasing him stepped down into the gully, and I lost any ability to think coherently. Spikes of bone protruded at every joint from a hide like layers on layers of burn scars. The pulpy mound of its head spilled over its chest and shoulders in a cascade of sucking mouths and writhing eyes. Spined organs that had to be genitalia jutted from its abdomen like tusks. A spike of nausea and terror hammered me between the eyes. I shrieked something, I don’t remember what. Tommy shrieked too, and scrambled to his feet. Repulsive as the demon was, something rang false about it, a hint that what I was seeing wasn’t real, that it wasn’t a monster so much as a costume, or a suit of armor. Somehow I knew this, and the thought held me fast, as did Tommy’s wide, terrified eyes. But whatever hid inside it, the thing was a running murder machine, and I was just flesh. I screamed for Tommy to move. Then they were both running toward me, the creature just yards behind its prey. Tommy bowled into me as the demon’s spike-studded fist descended. I stuck my arm out through the hole in the world and slashed blindly with the knife. A sledgehammer kissed me. A howl split the night.

53 CABINET DES FÉES

Then I landed on my back in the wet earth, panting, with Tommy’s warm weight on top of me. Nearby, a muffled voice groaned in pain. I put an arm around Tommy’s shoulders and hauled us both to our feet. As I did so, someone put a hand to my back and helped me up. With a cry I turned, holding out the knife, and found myself face to face with Herman Crabbe. The illumination from the flashlight he carried amplified his ugliness tenfold. “Whoa, there, tiger,” he said, as his flashlight beam found the blade. I backed away, keeping the knife between myself and Crabbe, my other arm cradled protectively around the shivering boy. Tommy pressed his face against my stomach. His clothes were wet, and he reeked of sweat and urine. The muffled voice groaned again, then coughed. Crabbe turned his flashlight in the direction of the noise. “You did quite a number on him, tiger,” Crabbe said. “I’m impressed.” The hole in reality still remained, but had thinned to a wispy blue outline. Beyond it, a man lay on the ground, wearing jeans and a torn flannel shirt. At first I thought he had the palest face I’d ever seen, but then I realized he wore a papier mâché mask, painted white. Gertrude Crabbe stood over him, pressing the business end of a shotgun against his chest. The man’s shirt was shredded down the side. The flesh revealed there bled from a series of deep, parallel gouges. Claw marks. I held up my knife in wonder. The blade was clean. Despite that boy cuddled against me, I said a few choice words, several in a string. Panther, my grandmother always called me. And then, as if not focusing on it somehow made it

54 THE HIKER’S TALE easier to see, a scene unfolding in shadow-forms edged onto my awareness. Before me, the thorned demon lay twitching on the ground. Huge though it was, it was dwarfed by the tremendous spider crouched over it. Clearly female, its grotesquely swollen abdomen blurred the moon. With its forelegs, it was winding, winding, binding the monster beneath it in a tight cocoon. “It’s like she says,” said Gertrude’s husband. “It’s amaz- ing, how perfect we are for each other.” He aimed his flashlight at me again. “Looks like you took his prey away, and a good thing, too.” He laughed, a harsh, alien sound. “You get that boy back up to the store. Clean him up, put some blankets on him. Give him some water, make sure it’s in small sips, maybe a candy bar if he can hold it down. When we catch up to you, we’ll drive you both into town.” Had the Crabbes been watching as my face-off with Tommy’s abductor went down? They must have. What would have happened had I lost the face-off? The balance of events seemed too delicate to disturb. I didn’t dare ask. Instead I tilted my head toward the man on the ground. “What about him? He’s bleeding pretty bad.” Herman’s lips peeled back in a toothy grin. “We’ll take care of him. You go on.” I didn’t see fit to argue. I glanced back once as I carried Tommy up the trail. The demon, still twitching, was almost completely encased in Gertrude’s cocoon. I was still trembling with revelation. “How am I going to find it in the dark?” Though his face was hidden, I think he was smiling. “I think you’ll find that you can see just fine.”

* * *

55 CABINET DES FÉES

I’M STILL AMAZED I MADE IT UP THAT HILL, carrying that child. My mind reeling the whole way. The pieces fit now, at least as well as I would ever understand them. The man who I had . . . slashed . . . was something like yet unlike the Crabbes, a self-made monster who had turned Angel’s Leap into his stalking grounds. He had stolen Tommy into shadow with the worst of intentions, but his quarry had escaped. A terrified boy, snatched out of the world, but still resourceful enough to stay out of this demon’s clutches for what time he had left to him. I was both chilled and completely unsurprised when the Crabbes arrived at the shop without their captive in tow. They made no mention of him, and I chose not to ask as to his whereabouts. They had retrieved my gear from the shelter, though. I thanked them. Gertrude Crabbe fussed over Tommy while Herman readied the Jeep. He indicated I should follow him. As the engine warmed up, he put a hand on my shoulder and leaned close, so that I was staring right at his crooked teeth, ghoulishly lit by the Jeep’s headlights. His acrid breath assailed me as he spoke. “We’re going to drop you off a block down from the dispatch center. You go in, tell them you found the boy wandering in the woods. Don’t mention us, and don’t mention anyone else. Tommy won’t remember anything different than what you say. Gertrude’s made sure of that.” Given everything I had been through that day, I had no problem swallowing the idea that Gertrude Crabbe could hoodoo a boy’s memory. I nodded. The question burning in the back of my mind escaped before I could stop it. “Why didn’t you stop this? You could have ended all these terrible things a long time ago.” He stared at me, his face a horror mask. “You know that ain’t our nature. We don’t seek. We wait.” He shuffled

56 THE HIKER’S TALE closer, raised his hand with the malformed fingers to make a pinching gesture. “A little lasts us a long time.” He shook his head, patted me on the shoulder. “The old blood’s gotten thinned out, but it still shows itself in all sorts of strange ways. Some of us know from the moment we come out of the womb, what we’ve got, what it means.” His too wide eyes caught mine, as he grinned in manner that I can only describe as mischievous. “Some of us have to learn all that the hard way.” All four of us rode down the logging trail, Herman driving, me in the passenger seat, Gertrude in the back with Tommy, who amazingly, was asleep. Herman’s eyes never left the patch of light cut out of the darkness by the jeep’s headlamps, but when he spoke it was as if he was looking at me, his bulbous eyes staring into mine. “You know, tiger,” Mr. Crabbe said, “you’re all right. When you come back down the this way, feel free to stop in. We’d love to have you by.” “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. That was the last we spoke. I never have taken the Crabbes up on their offer. I did keep my word. I followed instructions and kept my mouth shut. I didn’t stay around to witness Tommy’s reunion with his family. The accolades that could have been mine, plaques, newspaper stories, television crews, would have drawn too much attention. I wanted nothing to do with that. By the afternoon of the next day, I’d abandoned my hike. Showered, shaved, gotten a haircut. I was nestled uncomfortably in the back of a bus, heading for Pennsylva- nia, intending to drop in on my friends a little sooner than expected. From there, I didn’t know. I just knew, I still didn’t want to go home. As the road rolled by and the world rolled into night, I saw things moving in the twilight, and in the dark. Beasts in

57 CABINET DES FÉES the fields, or clinging to branches or sheer rock walls, lumbering or scuttling through the midnight streets of the scattered towns that clung for their lives to the highway. But I didn’t pay near enough attention as I should, because I peered at them through the memory of my grandmother’s eyes, the night she jerked me by the collar of the pajama top from the haunted cabin that she allowed to linger on in the woods above her farm. I still don’t know what was in there, what shades she lived with in that lonely valley. But now I could remember, how I turned at the sound of whimpering between the rotted wooden slats, and she took my chin in her hand, and made me look back at her, at her dark face and her startling blue eyes that practically glowed in the moonlight. The shadows formed a shape about her, something massive and terrifying and full of flowing, feline grace. You leave those ghosts alone, little cub, she said. You come away. You’ve hurt them enough.

Mike Allen lives in Roanoke, Va. with his wife Anita, a comical dog and a demonic cat. The Philadelphia Inquirer called his most recent collection, Strange Wisdoms of the Dead, “poetry for goths of all ages.” Mike is a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for speculative poetry, and his short stories have turned up recently in H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror and Helix. He’s also editor of the poetry journal Mythic Delirium and the upcoming fiction anthology Clockwork Phoenix. By day, he’s a newspaper reporter; his favorite assignment to date remains his interview with the inventor of The World’s Only Ass-Kicking Machine.

58 Giantkiller

A.C. Wise

THEY HAD PROMISED SHE WOULD SLEEP through the whole thing, but fragments kept rising up in her mind, disconnected slivers like pieces of a dream, but real. I’ll grind you bones to make my bread. Crack! It was a terrible sound, a wet splintering sound and pain came with it — so much pain. Even sleeping, she could feel the needle going in and out, each deft stitch making her whole again, but she couldn’t forget the sound. Crack! It was the world breaking apart; it was her very being coming undone. Voices wove in and out of the waking sleep and they floated, disembodied above her head as she drifted in her half- dreams. “My hammer was never made for such work as this.” “Why did you agree?” “She thinks it will make her happy.” “It won’t.” “It never does.” “She’ll hate us in the end, or herself.” “They usually do. Why did you agree?” “Strange penance for my sins.” She tried to struggle up from the dreams and catch the voices. They were familiar somehow. They knew her and she knew them, but the impression came to her that she did not yet exist, that she was just being born; then the rest of the thoughts were drowned out in the pain. I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.

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Crack! She had never imagined there could be so much pain, but she couldn’t even cry out. Her lips were numb and broken. She choked on the tears gathering thick and heavy in her throat, swelling her split skin until she couldn’t breathe. “At least she always small for her kind, makes it easier, don’t you think?” “Nothing about this is easy.” “What should we do with the extra skin? What are you going to do with the bone?” “Burn it.” Her limbs would not obey. Every part of her felt like it was on fire. She was panting, shallow breaths and struggling to open her eyes. She could feel them flickering behind her lids, but they stayed closed. Dreams had snagged her too tightly — winding her in cloud-stuff of gauze and killing vines whose roots sought their way beneath her skin. All the wrong parts of her were frozen. She could still feel the needle going in and out, still hear the splinter and crack, like wood splitting, but she couldn’t scream. “How will she find him?” “He’s never made a secret of his life. He’s still in the same town, spreading his ill-gotten gains. To them, he’s a hero.” “He’s a con-artist and a thief, never better than that.” “He was a charmer. He charmed her mother while he robbed the old man blind — for years. She was no fool though — there must have been something to him.” Crack! I’ll grind your bones to make my bread. “What will she do when she finds him?” “I don’t know, kill him, I guess.” “Then why the change?” “She wants to find him as one of his own, bide her time, hurt him the way he hurt her. Death will be a mercy at the end.” “And you approve?”

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“Of course I don’t approve!” “Why didn’t you ever tell her how you feel, then? Give her a reason to stay.” “What could she possibly want with a twisted and broken creature like me?” Crack! The voices faded back into dreams, but still she could feel the needle going in and out, in and out . . . .

HELENA GASPED, SITTING UP IN BED, TREMBLING. A few coals still burned fiercely in the brazier and by their angry crimson light shadows chased each other across the floor. Her hair fell in a wild sweating tangle about her face and she pushed it back with a shaking hand, slowly rising from the straw, careful not to bump her head on the cross beams of the floor above, which formed the ceiling of her cellar room. It smelled like earth and the stores that were kept down here with her; tallow candles with their rich fatty scent, sacks of grain and shelf after shelf of pickled things — floating sickly and pale in their brine. She could hear feet shuffling across the floorboards above, the creak of wood and the scrape of chairs. It was time to get to work. Hunching and stiff, she pulled a rough woolen dress over her head and ran her fingers through her tangled hair, then pushed up the trap and ascended into the storeroom above. “You’re late, girl!” The innkeeper’s wife snapped, cracking a towel at her like a whip. “You’ve got customers waiting. Get to it!” The woman turned and bustled away. Although she scarcely came up to Helena’s chest, the girl bowed her head, her ragged hair falling in front of her eyes as she complied. Passing through the kitchen, she emerged with drinks and food. Despite her size, she was almost invisible in the bustle of the room, serving drinks, clearing plates and mumbling unheard thanks when a few coins were pushed her way.

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Her gaze swept the room as she wove through it with a tray piled high with dirty dishes. Maybe today would be the day. Her eyes passed over half a dozen faces, but his wasn’t among them. Her step was a little heavier as she returned to the kitchen. Today would not be the day — it would only be another day for breaking her back with things to be hefted and carried and scrubbing her fingers down to the bone with things to be cleaned. She was glad for the low light as she emerged from the kitchen again. If today was not to be the day, then she would rather remain invisible. The innkeeper often laughed, saying that his customers were glad of the low light too, for if they were to see her in the broad of day, it would put them off their feed. Like his wife, he scarcely came up to her chest, but Helena took his abuse in silence. He wasn’t the one she was here for after all. Across the room a flicker of movement caught her eye and she was just in time to see a man point and then lean in to whisper something to his companion. She turned away. She didn’t have to read lips to know that he mouthed cruelties, nor did she need to watch to know he laughed at her now. Her awkward gait, her scarred and ruined skin, her unusual size; she was an endless source of fodder for jest. At first she used to think: If only my father was here, but that could only be followed by the inevitable: If only my father was alive. She had given up those thoughts long ago. Now she subsisted on thoughts of a man she had never even seen, except as a very young child. He was the man who had charmed her mother and robbed her father blind. He was the man who had made her mother a widow and herself as good as an orphan. He was the man for whom she had put herself through a world of unimaginable pain; the man whom the locals called a hero — Jack, the Giantkiller. He was the man she had come here to break and kill.

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Helena took a deep breath, trying to bring herself back to the here and now. The steaming bowls she carried made her stomach ache with hollow pain. How long since she had eaten anything cooked for her and not someone else’s scraps and leavings? For a moment her fingers tightened reflexively on the tray and she heard the wood give a warning crack. She took another deep breath. She had her father’s temper — or so she had been told. She set the tray down and served the stew, paying no mind the curious or mirth-filled eyes that watched her as she did. The regulars fell into two groups; those who smirked behind their stares and those who thinly veiled their pity for her, but still did nothing to help. Newcomers fell into two categories as well; those who recoiled in horror from her and those who sought to use her for sport. The door opened, jarring her from her thoughts. A gust of icy wind, carrying a few flakes of snow, swirled through the tavern and for a moment, conversation came to a halt. A man stood in the doorway, shaking snow from a rich and heavy cloak. A murmur of voices went up around her and her heart leapt up in her throat. It was him, it had to be! It was Jack. “Don’t stand there gawping, girl! Get back to work!” The innkeeper’s wife gave her a bruising pinch on the arm as she passed, smoothing her skirts and hair and she went to greet the wealthy and favored client. For a moment Helena’s eyes stung and then she turned to the kitchen, drawing herself up to her full height as she did — the top of her head brushing the lintel of the doorway as she passed. Inside she slouched again, waiting impatiently near the door for her tray to be loaded again. From his post by the stove, the cook grinned at her. “Master says our special guest has just arrived. He’s bringing out the good stuff. Mind you don’t spill.” He offered a gap-toothed grin and pushed the plates across

63 CABINET DES FÉES the rough wooden counter to Helena. With slow dazed motions she took them. She could feel her heart thunder in her chest and all at once, her legs were jelly beneath her and wouldn’t obey her commands. They ached with the memory of old wounds — a thousand fractures, a thousand scars and phantom pains chased themselves up and down beneath her skin like a legion of ghostly butterflies. “I wouldn’t just stand there — it’ll get cold and the Master won’t forgive you for that quickly.” The cook gestured towards the door, but the sound coming from the other side of it froze Helena once again. The most haunting and beautiful music was spilling through the door from the main room, accompanied by the sweetest of voices. Such music was not made for this tavern, or this world — it was unearthly. She had heard the sound a thousand times over in her dreams and she would know it anywhere in this world or the next. It was her father’s harp. The sound of it put fire in her aching limbs and she moved, but once she was in the main room, it was as though she was rooted to the floor again. A thousand nights of bitter dreaming, a world of pain and now the man was finally sitting before her — not some smoke born fantasy, but real flesh and bone. She felt the hate and anger boil up in her and at the same time she was powerless to even move towards him, so raw was the emotion within her. He was laughing, surrounded by other men, no doubt telling the glorious tales of his past exploits. At his elbow on the table, the harp was singing, filling the room with its unearthly sound. His head was thrown back and the laughter made little lines at the corners of his eyes that stayed even when the laughter had stilled. His hair was still blonde, pulled back sleekly at the nape of his neck, but there was age in his face, though it was handsome still and not a care in the world seemed to have touched the bright sparkling blue of his eyes.

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As though he sensed her gaze he paused, while the men around him continued to laugh at his jest and across the room, his eyes met hers. Unlike so many others, he did not recoil in fear or laugh, or veil pity within his jeweled gaze; he only smiled, a gesture that was almost kind. That smile was worse than almost anything and it made the rage boil up in Helena once again. She took a step towards him, but before she could reach him, one of the other patrons stuck out a foot, tripping her and she went sprawling to the floor. Howls of laughter accompanied her fall and the crash of dishes rang in her ears. All the savory smells of the specially prepared dishes were soaking into her hair and clothes and their heat scalded her skin. She heard a shriek from the other side of the room and then a roar and the innkeeper and his wife were upon her, blows and curses raining down before she could even regain her legs. “Leave the girl be!” The voice was quiet but commanding, used to being obeyed and the blows stopped long enough that Helena could look up. Eyes of piercing blue pinned the innkeeper and his wife and Jack towered above them both. His face was stern, but his gaze still sparkled though with a hint of danger in the blue light. “It’s not her fault.” He continued. “That gentleman there tripped her.” And Jack pointed, indicating the man who flushed darkly and bowed his head. Stepping through the crowd that had gathered, Jack offered his hand and incredulous, Helena found herself taking it and letting him raise her up. Her scarred hand was larger than his and looked strange against his smooth skin, which had forgotten hard work over the years, though it was still strong. “I assume my usual room is ready for me?” This he cast over Helena’s shoulder at the innkeeper, who swallowed and

65 CABINET DES FÉES bobbed his head. “Good, then have one of your boys fill a tub and you,” he turned to Helena and flashed a dazzling smile, “may use my rooms to clean up.” Helena found a lump had filled her throat and she could not speak, only bob her head as the innkeeper had and stare dully. This was not the man she had expected; crass and rude, brash and bragging. His hands were not a killer’s hands; his ways were not a thief’s. Dazed, she let him lead her to his rooms, leaving her there with a freshly drawn bath and thick towels, while he retired to the main room once more.

THE SMELL OF BURNING FLESH WAS IN HER DREAMS. She woke to pain that made that which she had suffered as she had drifted in and out of dazed sleep appear to be nothing. Every part of her was aflame. When she tried to stand, the pain shot through her like quicksilver and she collapsed, her own screams echoing in her ears, drowned only by her choking sobs. The fall split the seams of her skin and Weyland and John had come running and helped her up and put her to bed again. John had stitched her up again, refusing to meet her eyes, while Weyland had held her hand. It was months before she could walk on her own and even then, every step was filled with pain. Special crutches were carved for her, but fire still haunted her every step and despite John’s skill, the scars did not fade. They crossed her skin like a map drawn on her flesh, the river of her veins turned inside out. She was a monster, but she was whole again. And she was changed.

BUT THE BODY WAS NOT HER OWN. Her limbs felt awkward even now as she bathed herself, washing the smell of the rich creamy broth and the meat in pastry from her hair. In the

66 GIANTKILLER gleam of candlelight that filled the Giantkiller’s room, she studied the network of scars and watched the play of water running over them, glittering as it spilled back into the tub. Steam rose around her and though she rinsed and scrubbed, she still didn’t feel clean. Helena could hear footsteps coming up the stairs and she hastily pulled the towel from the chair nearby and dried herself off as best she could. The towel was made for a woman much smaller than she though and so, still dripping as the latch began to lift on the door, she snatched the sheet from the bed and wound it around herself. Strands of wet hair hung in her eyes and through them she saw the man she had come to kill standing in the door. He hesitated a moment and then smiled and stepped into the room, shutting the door softly behind him. Helena awkwardly tugged at the sheet and watched him warily as he moved into the room. “You should move over by the hearth, you’ll catch a cold.” Obediently, she shuffled over to the hearth and stood there, listening to the sizzle of drops falling from her skin onto the heated stone. Jack rummaged in his bag and drew something out, passing it to her. “These should fit you. There’s a screen over there where you can change.” He pointed to a corner of the room, but didn’t take his eyes from her face. There was something in the way he was looking at her, as though he recognized her or as if he was searching for something hidden just beneath the surface of her skin. He didn’t seem to see the scars or the awkward way she inhabited the frame that was no longer her own. Tentatively she took the clothes from his hand and slouched her way over to the screen. Safely behind it, she slipped the clothing over her head. They fit remarkably well, as though they had been tailor-

67 CABINET DES FÉES made for her — the way John’s clothing had been. They were finer clothes than she was used to and they were soft against her ruined skin. Still, she felt out of place wearing them and hunched and slouched as she came out from behind the screen, as though she were trying to disappear into herself. It was not until he smiled at her that Helena realized that she had been waiting for Jack’s approval and she felt sick to her stomach. He was still looking at her in that odd way that made her uncomfortable. Not since she had left home, not since Weyland, had a man looked at her with anything other than pity or scorn. “Why are you being so nice to me?” The words came out as a harsh accusation and she winced at the roughness of her voice — like stone grinding upon stone. What was wrong with her? Why did she feel so powerless against this man? She had waited her whole life for revenge and now he stood before her and she could only sway from foot to foot, like a lost little child, bowing her head and avoiding his eyes. She tried to summon up her anger using the memory of being held in her mother’s arms and looking down from the cusp of the clouds at her father’s broken body, so far below. He had looked like a doll then, his splayed and twisted limbs all made of rags. From way up there, he had looked no bigger than human size, no bigger than she was now. Helena shuddered, but confusion and disgust was all she could summon at the memory, rather than rage. Even so young as she had been, she remembered feeling terrified and ashamed at how small her father had seemed. Jack continued to watch her in silence as though expecting something and she tried another memory now, summon- ing her mother’s face in place of her father’s. She tried to picture her mother’s features gone slack, her beauty faded and her face grown old. After her father had died, she had

68 GIANTKILLER seemed to go away inside, become no more than a shell, leaving Helena to raise herself nearly alone. Her father’s death had left them destitute, after Jack’s thievery, her mother had worked her poor fingers to the bone just to keep them alive, but all the while it was as though no one was home inside. If not for her father’s sake, for her mother’s then, could she summon the old rage? “I . . . I tried to find you.” It was Jack who spoke at last and his voice in the silence startled her. Helena looked up, her eyes going wide. His handsome face was turned to the floor, as hers at been, avoiding her gaze. The color that touched his cheeks was from more than the flames. He seemed sincere in his emotion, whatever it was that struggled across his half- hidden face. He was searching for words, afraid of her almost, but not for the reasons she thought he should be. Why should he come searching for her? What had she been to him but a mere child in a house where he had been a thief and a murderer? “You killed my father!” She blurted at last and felt something crack within her, like a great stone had been resting on her chest, weighing her down. She stood up straighter, taking a deep breath, the crown of her head brushing the criss-crossing beams of the ceiling. Her eyes sparked, glittering dangerously in the firelight and in her scarred face, she smiled a hungry smile at him. “You murdered my father, Jack called Giantkiller. I smell it in your blood and I smell it in your bones and I have come to take them from your skin to decorate my wall!” She took a menacing step towards him, but he only gaped up at her incredulously, not seeming at all afraid. Helena hesitated, uncertain once more. In fact, she could smell him, but it was not death secreted beneath his skin she smelled, it was something she had almost forgotten, some-

69 CABINET DES FÉES thing that made no sense in this place. He smelled like home. “She never told you.” Jack whispered, half to himself and then turned to her, his eyes wide and sparking with anger of their own. “The man your mother was married to was a drunken and abusive lout.” His fingers clenched and unclenched at his sides. “He . . . I . . . I loved her!” He burst out unexpectedly and stopped, seeming to surprise even himself with his words. “I was going to take her away.” His voice dropped to a hush. “I was going to take you away too . . . I wanted to . . . . I wanted to make things right and when I couldn’t get to you, after he . . . I nearly went mad!” “Don’t you talk about my father!” Helena crossed the room catching Jack by the throat. “You’re a thief and a liar and a murderer! My father’s harp sings for your pleasure and his gold buys your comfort- able life — but no more!” Tears stung her eyes and blurred her vision as the man with the startling blue eyes struggled in her grasp. Some- where deep inside her, from the same place where the stone had cracked other things were coming loose as well. The whole world, in fact, was falling apart around her. Her limbs ached, her splintered bones and her scarred skin flaring with new pain. As she squeezed and Jack thrashed in her grasp, she imagined that her skin was splitting along its old wounds and thick, sluggish blood was seeping to the surface. The smell of burning flesh was in her mind. A thought was trying to force itself into her mind, a memory like a dream. Startling blue eyes peered down at her as she lay in her crib and the most beautiful music she had ever heard filled her ears and then a voice, not the harp’s voice, but a man’s voice, strong and warm, was singing her to sleep. It was Jack’s voice.

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She thought of his eyes and her mother’s a warm brown gaze. Her father’s eyes had been almost black, hidden beneath low beetling brows that made her think of caterpil- lars. She remembered trying to catch them as she lay in her crib and he leaned over her, his breath heavy with the fumes of drink, humming discordantly as his harp sang to her. Jack’s eyes were in her mind and her mother’s and her father’s and her own — muddy green in her scarred and hideous face. The thoughts were like fire, like the pain in her limbs. Crack! I’ll grind your bones to make my bread. Helena was sobbing, her hand trembling on Jack’s throat. She was beginning to lose her grip. Blue eyes, brown eyes, black eyes — where did she fit in? None of it made sense. If it would all just go away, if she could just wake up and find it had all been a bad dream — her father seen from the clouds, the crack of her bones, the scent of burning flesh, everything. “Your eyes, they’re just like my mother’s.” He whispered, his throat nearly closed by her touch. She opened her hand and heard him slump to the floor, gasping for breath. “No!” Helena bellowed, stumbling away from him. “It’s not true.” “I tried to find you.” He pleaded from the floor, even as she backed away. “Leave me alone!” He reached for her, catching at the hem of her dress as she stumbled past him. She nearly fell on the stairs, but kept her feet, barreling through the main room of the inn and out into the cold night air, drawing freezing breath into her lungs. Snow swirled around her and she stopped, shivering, her body still shaking with sobs. Flakes clung to the tracks her tears made on her ruined skin and made long freezing ropes of her hair.

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Dropping to her knees, she retched, but nothing came up and she huddled over in the snow, shaking uncontrollably. “Helena?” A hand touched her shoulder and she whirled around, peering through the snow. “Weyland?” She had expected Jack and her mind reeled, trying to comprehend. “I’m sorry.” He helped her to her feet and she stared up at him in confusion. His burning beard and hair were like a beacon in the snow. Even lame, he stood taller than her, his eyes like smoldering coals as he looked down at her. “I hoped I would catch you first, are you alright?” “What are you doing here?” “After you left, Jack came to us. He came looking for you. He spent years and half your father’s fortune trying to find a way back up to your mother and you. I told him where you had gone and that it was too late for your mother. He was heart broken Helena, but he still wanted to find you. He wanted to make things right. I swear, until he told me, I didn’t know. I would have told you . . . ” She stared at him through lashes thick with tears, unable to believe her ears and then all at once she flung herself at him, pounding on his massive chest with her clenched hands. “It’s not true, I’m nothing like him! Change me back! Put me back the way I was. I don’t want to look like this anymore! I don’t want to look like him! I don’t want to be so small!” The wind howled and snatched at her words, swirling them away from her in a flurry of freezing snow. Weyland caught her wrists and held her arms while she sobbed against his chest, murmuring words he could no longer hear, glad she could not see the pain in his own eyes. “I’m sorry, Helena, I can’t. I can’t change what was done. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

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* * *

SHE SAT ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, her scarred legs dangling down and swinging in an uneven rhythm. Even at rest, pins and needles of fiery pain still traced their way up and down the healing scars, but she had learned to ignore them. Slowly, Helena set aside the mirror she had been looking in and glanced up at Weyland, leaning in the door. She could not fathom the look in his eyes as he watched her. At first she had taken it for pity, but now it seemed to go deeper than that, a kind of sorrow, or loss that she did not understand and looking at it made her heart hurt, so she had to look away. “Do you think they’ll ever heal?” she asked, tracing one of the scars that ran the length of her forearm. “I don’t think so. John did his best, we both did but . . . ” he trailed off and shrugged. “Everything has its price.” “It’s worth it.” She replied after a moment, her jaw set and her expression firm. She rose, shakily and moved past him. He watched her limp from the room and the memory of smoke from burning flesh stung behind his eyes and made them swim.

“DO YOU THINK SHE’LL BE OKAY?” Weyland turned to see John, who had slipped up like a shadow to stand at his side. They both watched Helena as she moved slowly across the endless field of swirling white. The look in the little tailor’s eyes was unfathomable as well and he absently ran one hand over his embroidered belt as he watched her pain-filled gait. “I think so.” Weyland replied at last. “She managed once before.” “Broken bones mend more easily than a broken heart.” “I know.” Weyland sighed. “And even now, you won’t go to her?”

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“I can’t.” Weyland shook his head. “Not now, it would only confuse her.” “Are you trying to protect Helena, or yourself?” “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re meddlesome?” Weyland grinned and some of the light came back into his eyes. “Just trying to help.” John grinned back. “Give her time, give us both time. Helena has a lot of pieces to put back together before she’ll be whole again, but she’s strong. She just has to learn who she is all over again. That’s all.”

A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and currently lives outside of Philadelphia. Wise’s work has appeared in Story House, Insidious Reflections, Flesh and Blood, and the anthologies Time for Bedlam and Shadow Regions.

74 The Tower

JoSelle Vanderhooft

There is an armor-tearing rain tonight. It falls in sheets beyond my open window, and the sky turns like an angry stomach. I am bare-elbowed to the elements, my unbound hair billows with my loose gowns, white on white like any sepulcher. There is a fierceness to my looks tonight, one most unbecoming in a virgin. The wild wind tangles my silken hair about my eyes and trails it wantonly across my lips until I look more opheliac than royal, more distressed than in distress. Of course, I could fix that easily enough with a wave of my wrist and the click of the casement lock. Then we would be separate, the storm and I. It would be free to rage about the steeples, and I to stretch myself across the bed, knees together, arms crossed upon my plunging bodice as if becalmed by eternal prayer extending into sleep. I would do well, overall, to recall my place: I am pale girl on pale sheets in a room that will not blush even when the sun is at its zenith. Still, I am yet unwilling to shutter up the storm for all the ill it does my beauty and my gowns. The Tower is dark and slick tonight, and I can smell its ancient mortar and the moss that clings for life in every fissure. High above the waking world I can smell many things: the blood on a serpent’s fangs when he downs a dove, autumn in its ferment and slick leaves. I can smell him, too. Beneath the ozone mist and the vein-cracked lightning a strapping knight tilts for my prison. A stocky one it seems, and wealthy, for the salt stinks on his iron chain and there is no trace of tarnish on his gorget. I lean from the window until the rain sweat-flecks my face, my nostrils flared in memory and want. I suppose I find it

75 CABINET DES FÉES touching, really, even a bit nostalgic in the way of yellowed lace that lines a hope chest. He is like so many that have come before, bursting under argent mail, his breath ragged with lust and expectation, but mostly with bold reassurance. I cannot count the heroes who have tried this quest. I cannot count the bones beneath my feet. They snap beneath my ankles like dry kindling. For all the worrying of time and teeth, they still stink of the flesh they used to wear. Deep within my gut, something stirs like footsteps in a forest. I feel the curl of claws against my womb, the hunger pulsing through my jugular. There are teeth beneath my flesh and a low growl in my belly. I quiet it with a caress and a promise. All heroes are the same, I tell the Urge; they walk the same, they fight the same and come in the same time. I move my hand a little lower, where the second heart threatens to over- beat my own. He will come in time, I whisper, just be patient. It sighs and coils itself inside my ribs, and all is still again. Licking the thin smile from my face, I return to weather and the man who labors beneath me. It’s strange how a storm opens yet conceals the world. I cannot see the briar-forest tangling into the horizon, yet I know it sprawls. I know the moistness of the loamy earth, the prick of briars, the red berries’ fatal pungency. Though I cannot hear the vines collapse beneath his blade, I can smell their hurt: they are dry and brittle in the autumn but their blood still has a greenness. Their drying thorns can still scratch their revenge. Beneath his breastplate they unhook a single, argent loop. It is a thing that will remain unmissed until it is too late. When all is finished and the sky is clear, I will go down and thank these, my co-conspirators, with my hands. A king’s touch, after all, will cure scrofula, but a princess’ caress is more than enough to raise the dead. But for now, alas, there simply is no time. A last flush of decay and he is free. The wet earth presses up beneath his sabatons as

76 THE TOWER he makes for the Tower’s base. Like all who have passed before him, he will find the door unbolted and unguarded. It is now that I must wait. Regretfully I close the casements on the storm and cross the bony carpet to my bed. The lightning cracks in saline fractures down the walls as I arrange myself upon the sheets. I have lived in this high tower all my life. The great thorn-forest and the shifting weather, these naturals have been my only friends save one. There are no locks, no hatchet-jawed guards at any entrance. No fell enchanter keeps me here to serve his lust or his revenge. Unlike other maidens I am free to travel through the Tower’s halls as I see fit. I know its stifling hallways and its anterooms where jade vases spill golden flowers on the floor. I have called down the endless pit and paced the parapets where the breeze breaks into crows. I know each oubliette and passageway as surely as I know the lines that irrigate my twitching muscles and the growl that circumscribes my belly. As I lie beneath the lacy canopy and spread my bridal veil about my face, I can smell him moving still beneath me as if I could see his progress through these floors and walls of graying stone. First, he hesitates before the door as it swings open like a mouth. Rust and dirt pour out in clouds of time, and he has to turn away. Even his expensive breaths cannot protect him from a sneeze and cough. When he can breathe again he draws his sword. The steel still stinks of briars as he enters. He shifts back when the door slams loudly in his wake, and a gust of tobacco from his meaty lungs mixes with the torch smoke. His sweat pours less freely now, but is sour with adrenaline. The briars were hard enough, but this is the unknown. He would not confess it even if he knew it, but this is the subtle smell of fear. Try as he does to tell himself that he is brave and worthy of the princess at the top, the smell will only strengthen as he ascends. Now he walks

77 CABINET DES FÉES down the Torch Hall to the spiral stair prepared for anything. It does not come. There is only the clang of metal on oxidizing stairs and his own steady heart. I have a trouble waiting for them sometimes. The Tower is so very high above the earth that it often takes several hours or several days for my door to be breached. If, that is, they ever come at all, for like all living things heroes move in cycles, and this is a careless one. Sometimes they pierce themselves upon the swords of rusting armor suits. Sometimes they break upon the spinning stairs or tumble through the never-ending pit like common waste. Sometimes they simply die of fatigue or fright, and it is a messy and unsatisfying task indeed to clear the corpus. But thankfully this one seems made of stronger stuff. He does not tremble in the stone Medusa’s emerald gaze. The umbrageous Hall of Time that winds upwards for three hundred miles does not sink him to his knees (though the sweat pools behind their pits before he’s done). He finds no terror in the chamber where the furnace bellows, and he leaps the chasms between rotted staircases with such grace that I lose him for a time. Here’s a brave one indeed, I tell myself, and the Urge twists with intestinal impatience. Soon, I tell it, soon, and soothe it with a kiss. When I scent him next there is a hint of copper in the salt and oil that lines his brow. So. He has stopped to rest in the Hall of Glass, where the first snows never melt. Icicles being sharp as any dirk, he has split an unprotected finger (bared to stretch his wrists out from the gauntlet’s heft). The blood pounds through my veins like rain upon the roof. He is close now, yes, so very close. I wonder if I can still force restraint. It is all that I can do to now lie still and not dig my nails against my palms. After all these years I am a virgin. This is not the time to stain my marriage bed. Instead I lick my lips and rub my thighs together until the red wet blushing overwhelms me. Patience, patience, patience, I whisper with each breath. He’s

78 THE TOWER coming, he will come, he will come — oh! There are two things remaining. Beyond the Hall of Glass that yearly burns in its self-generated light there is a dangling chain. A straight ascent through darkness is a challenge, particularly for one so heavy-fitted. Now he is so close that I can hear the great chain rattle in its rust. Through the clouds of wasting metal and mannish brine I can hear him at last. Hand over hand he rises, grunting out each mile as the chain keeps time. Then, free of its fleshy burden, the metal rope rings peals against the stone walls like a bell. Unlike so many in these lingering months, he has reached the final challenge. A high-windowed lightning flash reveals my threshold, locked and barred. I do not understand the way a door repairs itself without a smith. So many have thrown their swords into its fissures, hacked at its hinges and shoved the tips of blades through its tangled locks that I would imagine it a ruin now. Yet it appears the same for every hero, a door as tall and narrow as a church candle, perpetually smooth, unscarred, untouched as if it too waits for a kiss. Of course, I never watch them as they enter. I have enough to do to swallow down the heat that bubbles up into my throat. Besides, it will not do to be awake when the door is finally breached. All heroes like to think they are the first, that lips can’t tremble and a heart can’t twitch unless it do so by their leave. It is an illusion I am not content to break, especially when I must fight to keep my place in the Tower. Soon enough, the final door comes crashing in, splintered through and groaning on its hinges. I do not know how it can possibly heal from such destruc- tion, but I have no time to mourn for wood and metal. Now his ragged breathing fills the room, his metal footsteps grind the brittle bones to paste as he lumbers forward. He stays a long time at the bedside, gazing through the

79 CABINET DES FÉES sheer curtains, I expect. Like all those who have come before he must wonder at my beauty. Indeed, their eyes always linger in a pattern. First upon the platinum hair that coils like serpents on my shoulders and crests across my narrow body like storm waves. Next upon the gowns that knit me up in a second skin. Here they try to calm their breath and pulse to no avail. Silk is a thin thing, especially when lit by lightning flash, and as I wear no petticoats I may as well be naked. Men have told me I am perfect, but I don’t quite agree. My skin is paler even than the cloth and so close to the bone even my veins seem white. I am a thing, it seems, of flesh and bone — fluted wrists and ankles, hips too narrow to ever dream of giving them an heir, each bone almost as visible as those that line the floor. Perhaps it is the briar- forest or the Tower perilous, the long quest or, most likely, the wayward blood of men. But they never leave when I’m revealed, not even when their eyes flick to my breasts and find them small as winter apples. Finally, they travel up my slender neck and stop upon my lips. These are ghost-pale as the rest of me and parted slightly, like an unsealed invitation. They will always count to three before they finally descend. The first is for honor, the second for valor, the last a prayer that they are good enough to rouse me. Then there is a falling down, and heat. Their lips are sometimes cold and sometimes warm, sometimes soft as worm-skin, sometimes firm as fruit. Rarely do they ever kiss by the book, for they take liberties. Their tongues slide through my lips and deep into the darkness. Usually, they dangle but a moment, before they draw slug-like circles around the arching roof, down the bone-wall of my molars to claim what flesh they find. When they do it feels as though I have devoured the sun; the great claws scrabble so hard against my ribs I almost pray that they, like doors, can heal. The only way I know to mask the growl is to gasp and

80 THE TOWER slowly part my eyelids. I am prepared to do the same this time, but his kiss is not forthcoming. This Tower swallows time like water and holds it in deep within its granite walls sparing me from age and consequence. Yet, I have no way to tell the difference between a second and an hour, unless I have the sun. He may have hesitated but a minute, or it may have been a year before I felt his hand upon my cheek. His thumb is calloused, gentle, and does not dip inside to part my lips even wider. Instead it strokes across my cheek with grace, or something like it. Not knowing what to do without a kiss, I at last decide that I will look. My eyelids raised upon a thing so strange, a gasp tears from my throat. I am used to every kind of man, all heights, all climes and colors. There have been princes from the North in furs and horned helmets, and emirs from the far East in great turbans and soft sandals. Though all have bent their knees and clutched my hand, all have ended on the floor, eyes spinning in their skulls to ask me ‘why’ before the blood comes. But of all the heroes who have passed, I’ve never seen a one as this. There is not a hero in his face, only a brow that has seen too much sun and eyes that hold a georgic hollowness. To bed at twelve, to rise up with the sun and break his back across the hoe and plough, this has always been the way of such callused hands and freckled cheeks. Though he is no more than twenty-two, he has been bent for sowing, not straight-backed as a knight should be. He does not have the hands for a broadsword, and his borrowed armor fits him poorly: though he is heavy, it is still too large. Most telling, he lacks a noble gaze; he does not look at me in want, but something very much like understanding. In all my years within the Tower I have not seen its like. The growl is low inside my feet as I sit up and turn away. “Please,” he says. He does not court or beg but says it as

81 CABINET DES FÉES a brother. “Gracious Lady, will you look at me? I promise not to hurt you.” The rumbling inside my ankles says this will not last long. Still, I look away not knowing how to give him what he wants. At last, he lays his hand upon my shoulder. I tremble at its gentleness and do not understand why the growling has gone out. “What do you want of me,” I scarcely force the whisper from my lips. “I want to see your eyes,” the farmer says. Though it takes much effort for him to sit down, he at last achieves it; the bed dips dangerously, but he steadies me from falling. “You do not want a kingdom or a kiss?” I fold my hands inside my lap. Deep in the marrow of my thighs, the climbing claws. I gaze down at my knuckles. “No, Lady. Just your eyes.” “Why do you ask this of me?” “Because no one has looked on them and lived, and I wish to be the first.” I can not think of how to answer him, and thankfully he presses on. “In my village, midwives whisper tales of you. It is said you have devised the tower you inhabit, that you have lined its halls and chambers with a substance that traps time. This way you may remain while the seasons turn and men grow old and perish.” “Even so?” I have been in my Tower so very long, I had forgot all things outside save for the Briar-Forest and its heroes. I almost wonder what more they say of me, until the growl within cuts off all speculation. “Across the ocean and beyond the burning lands, they whisper of this tower and the ghostly Princess dwelling at the top. Scrabbling in my father’s fields I knew that this was so, because many there have been who ventured forth to see you for themselves. Some were wracked by mutinies and tempests and returned, broken-limbed and sallow-faced. But

82 THE TOWER there were others, Lady, who did not return and some who did. These last ones spoke of briars that tore their clothes and a window where a girl untouched by sun looked out upon them with such eyes that they fell to love and fear her both at once. They said the very ground on which they walked was haunted. At night they heard a lowing on the wind neither man nor beast could make that filled them top to toe with dread; the smell of blood and grist was everywhere, as if they stood inside a cemetery and the tower was an abat- toir. When these returned and told their stories in the market, in the taverns and the fields to all who’d hear, I felt a thing too terrible to speak and knew I had to see you.” “And what was that?” I still will not obey him, even though he shifts too close to be a hero or a suitor anymore. This time, when I feel the teeth inside my arms I try to still them. Stay, please stay, I caution. Give me but a little longer. “In the old stories, they speak of Princesses who are cursed as if they were . . . .” he shrugs his thought away. “My Lady, I was born in the fields at planting time, when the dirt was soft with rain. I cannot read the common prayer book or write out my name. Indeed, I know no more than the proper way to shear a sheep and the best time to sow barley. What do I understand of knightly quests and marriages? Yet, alone of every class of men, I think that I know sorrow.” He laughed a little, and my stomach shook. “What else can a farmer feel when the storm shakes down his orchards and the worm turns in his potatoes? What can he do but bow his head, no better than he was before, and note his loss in the dirt lining his hands?” When he runs his fingers through his tawny hair, I can smell the fertilizer and the toil. “Oh, dear Lady, I have shut myself inside my room and hoped the sun would fall. I have cursed the land that will not yield and the people who pass my cart and never buy. I have pulled up sorrow by its roots only to have it grow anew after the rain.

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I think that you have, too.” When I turn my eyes on him at last, he rewards me with a smile free of blushing. “They say that you’re as pale as death or any fence post, yet I know that you still live,” he moves closer still, ’til we sit side by side as best friends might. “What tells you that I am?” The growling stirs again beneath my ribs; I have to hold myself to keep it down. I do not know how long I can contain the thing inside me, no matter how hard I may blink it back. “You have a little color in your eyes,” the farmer dusts beneath them, catching tears upon his fingertips. “Faint, yes, but if I look I can still see the grey. That means you have a little hope, somewhere.” “I do not hope for anything but food,” it is a warning, the only one I’ve ever given. Yet his folly or his kindness makes him misunderstand. “And freedom,” he extends his rough-patched hand in benediction. “Poor Lady, you must be so very lonely. Won’t you come with me?” Almost as if I meant it, I reach to take it. Fast, too fast. The growl is leaking from my wrists and lips and even from the eyes he lately praised. I part my lips — to scream or perhaps to feast I do not fully know. Late, too late, the horror fills his face as the Urge pours from me, tooth and nail and tearing, free at last. I do not know which of us swipes him first, the creature or myself. But his heavy armor pulls him to the floor. In the crashing down of metal and the split of bone, my four eyes sight the chink made by the briars. My own breath shrieks around me as we dive, claws out and teeth gnashing. His sword lay by his hand, but he did not move. I will always wonder why, and what he meant as my claws breached his armor and his flesh. He looked at me as if he’d always loved me, and only said “I understand.”

84 THE TOWER

* * *

THE STORM IS FIERCE TONIGHT. It pounds upon the casements, trying to get in. But for once, I am too busy to ignore it. There is a gash across my gown and a flush of copper on my mouth. The tongue that licks it tells me I am pretty, and asks me to lie down. The door is off its hinges and the floor looks like a feast. Reclining in this pair of unstriated arms, I am too tired and heavy now to care. The wind will rip through the Briar Forest displacing thorns and branches, and the lightning will throw shadows on the spattered wall. Long ago, I think I could feel time. Now I only know eventually the door will mend, and the blood will fade. So it has been so many times, so it will be again. But this time something is . . . . In my arms, the creature stirs and traces my mouth back into a line. What is it? Are you still unsatisfied? “No.” We are of the same flesh, it and I; one pair of spindling legs, arms, two faces — one enfleshed and one of bare red muscle and sharp teeth, we could not move closer if we tried. Sated now I only wish to hold it and be held as we clean the gristle from our lips. Then what? the Urge that is me and not quite laughs with the realization. Do you wish you had accepted? But it knows this is not so. I do not even have to shake my head. “We’ve eaten and I’m tired,” I preempt it as I huddle closer. Its arms stink of intestines now, and sweat, and a little bit like sun and earth. It is all that I can do now not to weep. Shh . . . its claws are heavy in my hair and almost gentle. You know it wouldn’t last. You may have left our tower, you may have gone as far as the Briar Forest’s edge where the earth slopes and the Burning Lands begin. But when you stood atop the closest hill, you would have looked back, and doomed yourself. Sometimes it has more confidence than I. But I am weary and I will agree.

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There is nothing but a promise outside these walls, its breath chuffs in my nostrils as it holds me closer, harsh. And promises are brittle, clumsy things, broken easily as briars snap and bricks crumble to ash. Do you understand what a promise means? I try not to cringe as it presses kisses on my shaking jaw. There is no promise here, but certainty. “That is ever the way of the world, and why it must remain outside,” I agree. Wondering when they will roll up in white, I close my eyes and lean into its dripping chest. “Let’s sleep now, lover.” We will stay like this forever, it and I, for none will get so far as this last one. Though I have stoppered time, the Tower consumes. Soon the armor and the sad, dripping remains will vanish through the floor leaving only bone behind — a nameless monument to expectation for my feet to grind down into dust. This is how it has been and will be until Time and weather eats us from without and my Tower breaks upon itself. Only then, in the collapse will I be free. In my Tower which is prison and release, I sleep with horror and it sleeps with me on the bones of everyone who’s ever loved. We have consumed them as we are ourselves consumed. The rain lulls us, persistent as my grief.

JoSelle Vanderhooft’s first poetry collection appeared in 10,000 Several Doors. Other poetic works can be found in Jabberwocky, Sybil’s Garage, Mythic Delirium and Star*Line, and her first novella, The Miller’s Daughter, was published last year. She edited Sleeping Beauty, Indeed, an anthology of lesbian-themed fairytales for Torquere Press and online, her fiction can be found at Reflec- tion’s Edge and in the first issue of Cabinet Des Fées.

86 Lost or Forgotten

Janni Lee Simner

LONG AGO, BEFORE THE TREES COULD SPEAK, before the winds were fixed to the corners of the earth, a unicorn loved a maiden. He came to her, as she sat by his pool in the forest, and he laid his head in her lap. She stroked his silver mane, looked into his silver eyes, and knew that she loved him as well. Yet he was an immortal unicorn, and she a mortal child.

NOT SO LONG AGO, a young man loved a young woman. He came to her, at the university they attended, beside the lake where she studied, and he rested his head in her lap. She ran her fingers through his unruly hair, looked down into his brown eyes, and she, too, fell in love. Because they were both mortal children, they lay together that very night, and many nights after. When she conceived, halfway through their final semester, they decided to marry. The day after graduation they spoke their vows with joy beside the lake, while the winds blew warm from their fixed places and the trees whispered their names, in voices no mortal could hear.

THE UNICORN LEFT THE MAIDEN and ran through the forest, chasing the winds. Each breeze he caught said the same thing: “You must run farther still. Another has the answer you seek.” At last he stood at the very edge of the world, where the furthermost wind told him, “There is a way. Do you truly wish to take it?” With a single nod of his head, a single glint of sunlight reflecting off his horn, the unicorn said, “I truly do.”

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* * *

THE YOUNG WOMAN BORE TWIN GIRLS, with silver hair that shimmered beneath the hospital lights, silver eyes that stared wide at the world. As the young man held them, he felt a shiver of fear beneath his joy. Yet still he named them, as he and his wife had decided: the older Sara, for her recently buried grandmother; the younger Amelia, for the sister he’d lost long ago.

THE UNICORN RETURNED TO THE MAIDEN, wearing a young man’s form. Yet still the maiden knew him. “I would always know you,” she said, for in those days knowing was not yet bound to any one name, any one shape. She drew the unicorn close and they lay together, amid the silent trees. When the dawn broke, she was no longer a maiden. When the dawn broke, he was no longer an immortal beast.

THE YOUNG MAN’S DAUGHTERS GREW SWIFTLY. Amelia turned into a smiling, dreaming girl, forever gazing out windows. She heard the trees whispering to one another, and while she didn’t understand their words, the joy behind them was clear. She told her mother, and her mother nodded, encouraging without understanding. Sara turned into a scowling, angry girl, forever slamming windows shut. She too heard the trees, but when she told her father, fear flashed across his features, and Sara grew frightened as well. As the girls moved through the years, the young man’s fear only deepened.

THE UNICORN HAD KNOWN the price he would pay and accepted it. But the woman had not known and did not accept. She loved the unicorn still, but now her love was darkened by grief.

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That grief never left her, not even when she bore first a son, then a daughter. As the years passed she watched lines deepen the unicorn’s face, watched his silver hair fade to gray, and she knew all those years were nothing, beside what the unicorn had lost. “Do not grieve,” the unicorn said. He only found his wife more beautiful with the changes of each year. “Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is truly lost.” “That may be comfort to a unicorn,” the woman said, “but not to a mortal child.”

THE YEAR SHE TURNED SIXTEEN, Amelia stole out in the night. She waited shivering beneath the trees, at the edge between forest and town, for a boy who didn’t show. As she waited the trees whispered, “Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is truly lost.” For the first time, Amelia understood their words. She laughed with joy, all thoughts of the boy gone. From the corners of the earth the winds reached out, tugging at her ankles, urging her to run. Amelia lifted a foot, feeling as if she were balanced between earth and air, light enough to fly away. A hand gripped her shoulder, pushing her down. “What are you doing?” Sara demanded. “Nothing,” Amelia lied, as the wind died and the trees fell silent. “Good. Let’s go home.” Amelia heard the fear in her sister’s words, and because she loved her sister — because she didn’t want to frighten her sister — she followed Sara away. Back in their room Sara shut all the windows, drew all the shades, turned her music so loud Amelia couldn’t hear the trees. Sara relaxed a little then, for with the windows closed and the music on, she couldn’t hear them, either.

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* * *

“OUR DAUGHTERS WILL RUN WITH THE WIND,” THE unicorn said. “Our sons will pass the blood on to their children. Our children will carry the gift of our love for all time.” But still the woman felt no comfort, not then and not when the unicorn died, only a season later. His son and his daughter went out to bury him. In the forest, as they dug into the earth, the trees found voices and softly, so softly, called to the unicorn’s children. The son didn’t hear and continued his digging. But the daughter heard, and halted. She looked to her brother, saw grief in his brown eyes; thought of her mother and saw the same. So she heeded the calls of the trees, trading grief for joy, laughing as she flew with the winds, deep into the forest. Her brother cried after her, but she didn’t answer. He buried his father alone, returned to his mother, and together they bore a double grief.

SARA KEPT THE WINDOWS SHUT, but she couldn’t keep her sister home. Night after night Amelia crept off to dance with the wind, to listen to the trees. Alone with her fear and her silence, Sara waited, wondering each night whether her sister would return. Her father waited as well, remembering another child, years ago, and the fights she had had with her parents. He said nothing to his daughters; he would spare them the anger and bitterness the fighting had caused, if he could spare them nothing else. His wife knew nothing of the danger; she slept peacefully beside him, dreaming untroubled dreams. Amelia knew nothing of the danger, so when she returned home, her dreams were untroubled as well.

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* * *

AFTER A TIME THE WOMAN’S SON MARRIED, and his wife came to live with them. Grandsons followed, one child after another, and in them the woman found, not an end to grief, but a means to set grief aside, for a time. But her last grandchild was a girl. The woman knew the danger, and strove to keep the child from the wind and the trees. Instead she taught her cooking, and weaving, and other household tasks. The girl fought with her grandmother, who wouldn’t let her outside alone. She fought with her father, who arranged her marriage not out of love, but because he was certain once she was married — once she was a woman — she would be safe. The wedding was outdoors, and a spring storm blew in halfway through. The girl felt the wind, dancing over her skin. She heard the trees, whose voices she’d been kept from all her life. She made her decision in an instant. She followed the wind and was gone, leaving her puzzled groom at the altar alone. This was one grief too many for the woman, who took to her bed and stayed there, her back turned to the window and the trees.

ONE NIGHT WHILE AMELIA WAS OUT, a spring storm blew in. Sara’s music couldn’t cover the sound of wind through the trees. Sara hid beneath the covers, but then she heard shattering glass, wind crashing through a window. “Amelia,” she whispered, making her decision in an instant. She cast the blankets aside and ran for the forest, ignoring the rain, calling her sister’s name, fearing that if she didn’t bring Amelia back, no one would. She found Amelia at the edge between forest and town, running hard for home. Sara grabbed her, held her. “I thought I’d lost you,” she said.

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“Nothing is ever lost or forgotten,” Amelia answered. The sisters held each other in silence, while the rain stopped and the winds slowed their blowing through the trees. “Amelia,” the trees whispered. “Sara.” The call was too strong to ignore. Sara turned toward the woods, frightened, eager. Amelia took her hand. Together they ran through the forest, dancing with the wind, listening to the trees. Together they ran, through all the stormy night. But when morning came, only one of them returned.

THE WOMAN DIED LATE THAT SPRING, with her son and her grandsons beside her. The sky was clear the day they buried her, the wind soft. If the trees mourned, no one heard. The son carried his grief from the grave with him, knowing his sons would carry it in turn. Nothing would ever be lost or forgotten.

WHEN THE MAN SAW HIS DAUGHTER return alone, he drew her close. “Amelia,” he said. Amelia bowed her head, tears falling against his chest. “I couldn’t hold her. I couldn’t bring her home.” The man knew grief then, but he also knew joy. “I feared,” he said, “that I would lose you both.” He told his daughter everything then, and his wife as well: about the sister who’d left his family long ago; about other daughters, lost to other generations, since a time before the trees could speak, before the winds were fixed to the corners of the earth. Amelia heard it all, and she understood at last. She continued to run through the forest, sometimes for the joy of running, sometimes to call for her sister and unknown aunt. The trees whispered their names back to her, but revealed nothing more.

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Her father’s fear diminished, each night Amelia returned, until he understood as well. In time Amelia fell in love, and married, and bore sons and daughters of her own. She told her children all her father had told her, so that they would know his grief, and hers. But she also took them with her, when she ran on windy nights, so that they would know her joy: her daughters by hearing the voices of the trees, her sons by understanding the voices their own daughters would one day hear. And she knew that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

Jannie Lee Simner has published more than 30 short stories, including appearances in Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales, Realms of Fantasy, and Say . . . Have You Heard This One?. Her first three novels were published by Scholastic, and her fourth, Secret of the Three Treasures, by Holiday House.

93 Night of the Girl Goblin

Amal El-Mohtar

GOBDOLYN WAS PRETTY, IN THE WAY that goblin girls were, which is to say, a manner too profound and esoteric for human understanding. She had strong, splendid teeth and pleasantly kept fangs which locked in a shapely fashion over her green lower lip; her thick and exquisite hair was a corn- silk blonde that fairly blossomed from her head to her ankles, her bosom to her belly, her back to her bottom, and between her generously proportioned green toes. Her figure had all the grace of an expertly hewn stone brick. Many loved her desperately. But Gobdolyn was not the kind of girl-goblin to bat her eyelids at fawning suitors; in fact, few girl-goblins were, most being of the impression that goblin boys should be neither heard nor seen until they had something intelligent to say, which usually took at least a few years between utterances. Nevertheless, the time had come for her to marry, and her father, Gobledegranz, was holding a contest for would-be grooms. Gobdolyn herself, in conference with her father, had decreed the terms. “The goblin who will win my heart,” she cried from atop her tower, “shall be the one who can remain silent in the dense wood until I call his name, and remain unseen in my room even while he puts his arms around me. Anyone found to have sewn his lips together or used an invisibility cloak shall be disqualified.” Well, most of the goblin boys left right there and then,

94 NIGHT OF THE GIRL GOBLIN muttering to themselves all the while. Goblin men love a good grunt and are generally quite proud of the sight of their bulging green bellies peering out from beneath their hairy shirts, and many were of the opinion that Gobdolyn, while undoubtedly pretty, had set rather impossible terms. Still, there were those who would try. Gobledegak, Gobledegeek and Gobledegook were three brothers, all thought to be quite exquisite specimens of goblinhood. All wanted to try for Gobdolyn’s heart. Gobledegak tried first. He was pretty clever. He closed his eyes and hid behind a tree and didn’t speak, didn’t speak at all, and waited for Gobdolyn to call his name. He waited a while. He waited a long while. And then, sweet as the sound of flint striking against flint came the sound of Gobdolyn’s voice. “Oh Goblede-geee-eek! Come speak!” Gobledegak froze. His eyes grew wide. “No!” he shouted. “You don’t want him! Take me!” And so was Gobledegak disqualified. Gobledegeek had heard nothing about this, however, and so when his turn came to be silent he was unprepared for Gobdolyn’s trickery. While biting his lip to keep from grunting, he heard Gobdolyn’s clear-as-lead-pipes voice chiming prettily, “Oh, Goble-de-gaa-ak! Come back!” Well, Gobledegeek was furious. He let out a mighty goblin roar, crying, “No, Gobdolyn! You don’t want him!” But it was too late, and Gobledegeek was also disqualified. Now, Gobledegook, being younger than his brothers, was actually stupider than them, for all know that goblin boys only grow wiser with time, similarly to rocks. And so, being stupid, he didn’t bat a goblin-lash at the sound of Gobdolyn’s sweet-as-pickled-herring voice when she called “Oh, Goble-de-gee-eek! Come speak!” For he merely thought, well, that isn’t my name, and I can’t speak until she calls it.

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And when Gobdolyn’s soft-as-hair-shirts voice called “Oh Goble-de-gaa-ak! Come back!” he thought the same. And then there was silence for a while. Finally, after two more nights and days, a very annoyed voice called, “Oh, come on out, Gobledegook. You’ve passed the first test.” And at that, Gobledegook blinked, shrugged, said, “suits me!” and came out of the dense wood. Now, for the next test, Gobledegook wasn’t sure what to do. He had to creep into Gobdolyn’s room quieter than the quietest mouse and slip his arms about her without being seen. Gobledegook may have been the youngest of the three goblin brothers, but he certainly wasn’t all that much smaller or less clunky than they. And so he, stupidest of the three, tried very hard to be clever and think up a plan. Gobdolyn, in the meantime, had everything worked out. First, she had booby-trapped all her windows with bells and whistles and buckets of paint, so that anyone trying to creep in would be easily found out. She drank cup after cup of Yer Bamate, a ghastly goblin drink guaranteed to keep her awake all night. She made absolutely certain that there was no way to enter her room without her knowledge, no way that she wouldn’t see the intruder. And then she waited. She waited. She waited longer. She watched the moon rise up in the sky, then sink. She waited longer still. She watched the sunrise with baggy eyes. She wondered where on earth was that annoying Gobledegook? And then she fell asleep. Gobledegook, stupidly, had been so preoccupied with thinking that he’d simply forgotten to go to Gobdolyn’s room at all. When he remembered — thanks largely to a rooster’s crowing — he sighed, knowing there was nothing for it but to give up. So up he trudged to her room in the highest tower, and he pushed open the door, and then, tripping on a strategically placed roller-skate, went sailing through the air and into Gobdolyn’s bed, where his arms

96 NIGHT OF THE GIRL GOBLIN instinctively wrapped around her sleeping brick-hewn body. It was only then that she woke up, and, seeing that Goblede- gook had passed the final test, sighed loudly. “I suppose we’ll get married now,” she huffed, tossing her corn-silk hair. But Gobledegook only blinked. “What? Married? But —” His eyes watered. “But I’m too young to get married!” And he began to cry. Gobdolyn frowned. “You stupid goblin boy! Then why did you go through the tests?” Gobledegook sniffled. “You s-said the w-winner would get your h-heart. I like hearts!” He snorted a great sniffly- snort, and tried to dry his eyes with his big leathery hands. “That’s all I really want. What kind of heart is it, anyway? Deer? Pig? Bear?” And so it was that Gobledegook won the very fairest of bear-hearts in all the goblin-land, while Gobdolyn went on to have an immensely fulfilling career in public goblin relations before eventually inheriting the goblin throne by herself. She remains in her kingdom to this day with her cat, Thomas, and when asked about her love life, simply shrugs and says that, yes, there is some truth to the rumors about her and the Billy Goats’ Troll, but she’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.

Amal El-Mohtar lives in Ottawa, where she may often be found drinking tea, reading and telling stories, playing the harp, and cuddling her long-suffering cat. Her work has appeared and is appearing in Star*Line, Abyss & Apex, Astropoetica and Shimmer. She also co-edits Goblin Fruit, a webzine devoted to fantasy poetry, with Jessica P. Wick.

97 The Cat-Skin Coat

Jessica Paige Wick

When Mrs. King was pregnant she ate pomegranates and figs and cheeses wrapped in grape leaves. When she gave birth there was snow on the ground and blood on the blanket; everybody said what a shame it was, and that is all they said of Mrs. King. Mr. King’s daughter was the most beautiful and she was named Blanche. Without her mother Blanche grew up like a boy, in boy’s clothing: she could run fast and shoot straight and climb the highest trees. When Mr. King remarried, the new Mrs. King looked on Mr. King’s daughter with dislike. She had two daughters of her own, and they did not have eyes as dark as grape-leaves and hair as bright as pomegranates. They were not more the image of the other Mrs. King with every year that passed. On her fourteenth birthday, Blanche found blood on her blankets for the first time, and Mrs. King could no longer look at her and see a wild boy. Mr. King began to remember his first so beautiful wife. Before this, he had always ignored Blanche because he saw snow in her name and blood in her beginning. At night, Mrs. King kneaded his shoulders; he roamed the halls of their house restlessly, like a beast, always alone and snarling. Blanche still ran wild, and once, while running wild in the city, Blanche found an alley-cat with her paw caught under a dumpster, and upon freeing the alley-cat it became as familiar as her shadow. Blanche’s sisters called it “Tom Cat” even though the cat gave birth to a litter of nine kittens. The

98 THE CAT-SKIN COAT one way in which Mr. King was like his daughter was this: they both liked cats. He often was heard to say, stroking the sinuous back of a kitten as he looked at his daughter’s hair, “They’re so vulnerable this young; what kind of person would harm them?” Still, Blanche was now a girl, she dreamt in a girl’s bed at night, and one day Mrs. King brought home a present for the girl: a coat made entirely of cat skins and fashioned with a hood. When Blanche said “Mother, where are my cats?” Mrs. King offered her the coat and Blanche drew back, refusing to touch it, repulsed. She imagined the skins touching her skin and somehow changing her. She did not want to change. Mrs. King smiled and said: “Are you afraid? How silly. We all must learn to wear what we’re afraid of and why should you be different? You’re growing up now.” Then she forced Blanche into the coat. When Mr. King saw Blanche in the cat-skin coat he became rigid and at night he entered her room . When Blanche saw a shadow over her bed she thought it was the shadow of a thief and punched him in the eye; he left. The next morning Mr. King had a black eye but Blanche could not believe that it had been him in her room at night. When she saw a shadow over her bed the next night Blanche shouted and punched him in the other eye; he left. The next morning Mr. King had two black eyes and Blanche closed her own eyes for three hours before she would open them again. She set out boy’s clothing and her cat-skin coat, and took a kitchen knife into her bed. When she saw his shadow over her bed the night after — Blanche sat right up and screamed “Father!” and pointed the kitchen knife. But he tore the cat-skin coat away and struck the kitchen knife from her hand and there was blood on the blankets.

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When Mr. King was done he snarled in the speech of beasts, and Blanche understood because of her cat-skin coat: “You are the same as your mother.” Then he locked the door and went away and Blanche made herself stand and put on her boy’s clothes. Then she buttoned on the cat-skin coat and undid the window. All she left behind was blood and a stain of salt that would season no meat. Everybody thought it was a shame about Blanche. But Mrs. King grew fat again although it was observed that her daughters grew thin and there were parties at the house almost every night. The windows were always bright. Blanche meanwhile bound her hair under the hood and ate from garbage. The only thing she was certain of was she would not be going back . Then one day Blanche heard a voice in her ear, and it told her: “Go to the corner of the street with oranges and pick up the wallet there.” Blanche did as she was told and picked up the wallet. Inside was a great treasure and Blanche’s mouth watered, for she had become as thin as a stray, and on her ribs you could play scales with a stick. But an old woman was peering blindly at the street and Blanche asked if she had lost her wallet. “Why, yes,” the old woman said. Blanche’s stomach told her to answer with: Just wondering. Instead, it growled as she said: “I found one here on the street.” “That’s very kind of you, my boy,” the old woman said. “It will be remembered.” With those words, the old woman reached underneath the cat-skin coat’s hood. Blanche stayed still. She was shocked by the strangeness of fresh air licking against her forehead; she never took the hood off. The old woman wrote a line across Blanche’s forehead

100 THE CAT-SKIN COAT with her thumb, and said, “This is my mark. I have a brother who will see it, and maybe then you will find your own fortune.” But she found no fortune and, more important, no food. Blanche felt herself become more and more like the cats who made up her coat and she never took it off. People on the streets looked at the coat and it made her invisible to them. She was not harassed, but she was not helped, either. Then she heard the voice in her ear again and it said, “Take the right fork at the next three crossroads you come to.” When Blanche followed the voice’s directions, she found herself standing outside a great castle which had white turrets and white walls and apple trees drowning in thorns and brambles. Blanche felt fear clutch her heart in its claws but she kneeled and began to clear the thorns away with her bare hands. “Well done, boy,” someone said from behind her, when she finished clearing the thorns from one tree. Blanche felt the claws tighten in her heart because the voice sounded like Mr. King’s, at first. She turned quickly, and it was not Mr. King, but an old man who was the old woman’s twin. When Blanche was too long silent he said, “Cat got your tongue?” and Blanche said, “I have a cat on my heart.” The old man replied, “I have wise eyes; these seams you see around them are fate’s stitches, over one thousand, and each one is a secret knowledge only I know. I garden for the castle but I’ve never seen you before.” Blanche said, “I’m looking for a job.” The old man said: “What’s your name?” and when she was too long silent he said, “I’ll call you Tom. You can help me in the mornings and in the evenings. Where do you live?” After that, Blanche worked in the black dirt and the brambles which circled the castle. The old man taught her

101 CABINET DES FÉES the names of flowers and trees; she had not known there were so many in all the world. Strips of her cat-skin coat tore away and Blanche wrapped these around her hands for protection. Everyone at the castle grew to know Tom who never took off his stinking coat. But whatever magic in the cat-skin coat kept Blanche invisible still worked, and after the first few weeks, nobody remarked on Tom any longer. Mr. Prince, who owned the castle, had a son named Orion. Orion came home from school one day to see someone he took at first for an animal helping the old man in the garden. He said to his mother, “Who is that girl?” Mrs. Prince lifted her perfect eyebrows and said, “That is Tom, the gardener’s boy, no girl at all.” Orion shook his head and said: “No. That is a girl. How can I prove it?” For reasons known only to the air, the cat-skin coat did not protect Blanche from Orion’s hunting eyes and he found himself helping wrestle the thorns in the garden into a more manageable wilderness. His fingers bled and his palms bled and the course of his fate line shifted. One day, Orion looked up from the dirt and said, “Tom, let’s race.” Blanche was good at running and she outran Mr. Prince’s son. But that night, while stringing the garden with paper lanterns, she noticed for the first time that the dirt on her face under the hood had hardened into a stiff mask and she could not see her face. When she touched the mask it crumbled away, and her fingers looked naked to her where they showed outside the cat-skin coat. The next day, Orion said, “Tom, let’s shoot.” He gave her a gun and Blanche out-shot Mr. Prince’s son, although the claws in her heart hurt her. When she woke the next morning, cat hairs colored the hollow her body left in the gardening shed, and the cat-skin coat was much balder.

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The next day Blanche, Orion and the old man set up tables in the garden for the party Mr. Prince and Mrs. Prince were having. The voice returned, but was so faint it was only a scratch of sound in the air, and it said: “Take heart.” “What?” Blanche said. “Take heart.” “What?” Orion said, while the old man shook his head. The next day Mrs. Prince read the guest list for the party to Mr. Prince and her son. They did not notice Tom, crouched in the brambles and, of course, Mr. King and his family were on the list. When she heard Mr. King’s name Blanche’s spine straightened with a crack, but the claws in her heart did not tighten. Without their pricking goad she did not know what to do, so she skulked to a remote corner of the garden and paced. As she paced she shed short cat hairs, and it was like this that Orion found her. Although certain Blanche was a girl, when she turned to him it was with such a ferocious snarl that he stepped back. He said, “Will you come to the party?” Blanche shuddered violently, once, and said in a low voice, “No.” In that moment Orion saw his friend Tom and knew, the way friends know, that something very bad had happened to send Tom into his cat-skin coat, which Orion had never seen Tom without. “Please, come to the party,” Orion said. “I will lend you some clothes.” When Blanche said nothing he added: “I will help you if you let me; help is a lock, you are the key.” Blanche smirked and a pale slash of skin was visible through fur. She said, “Who can climb the highest in the tree?” and she climbed higher than Mr. Prince’s son. From the branches of the tree Blanche could see the whole thorn- entangled garden and the square of floor where ladies in

103 CABINET DES FÉES evening gowns and gentlemen in tuxedos would whirl once the sun was set. Then she thought of Mr. King and climbed down so quickly that she might as well have jumped. She heard a name and looked at Orion in the branches, hanging against the sky. He said something she did not hear. She thought of the old man who was the old woman’s twin, and then, without another word, Blanche went to her shed where she slept and packed her few things into a bundle. When the bundle was wrapped up tight, Blanche pushed the cat-skin coat’s hood over her head and said, “Don’t you have any advice?” But if it had ever been anything more, it was no longer special, and the coat was just a coat, after all. Blanche walked through the garden with no voice in her ear but her own. Music drifted from the garden like the smell of a freshly sliced pomegranate or the taste of salt on meat, and Blanche stopped, because, she realized, she wanted to see the party. She tied her pack to her back and climbed to the top of the tallest tree. She saw tables with cheeses wrapped in green leaves and tall glasses of blood. The flimsy paper lanterns looked as though they’d swallowed the stars and diamonds glittered like sparks thrown from a great bonfire on all the dark elegant shapes in the party. Mrs. King wore the most diamonds and was so immense with fat that she required six chairs and had five chins, each bristling with its own hair. Mr. King looked the same as he always had; he smiled. Blanche’s stomach heaved and she gouged five chunks from the tree. When Blanche saw her stepsisters she knew that their mother grew fat from pieces of them, for they were as pale and as thin as the top of a tallow candle. Blanche shuddered against the tree and then climbed out of the branches so swiftly that birds of prey studied her as a model.

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All of the windows to Mr. Prince’s house were closed except one, which opened into a bathroom. Once inside, Blanche cleaned away the filth and put on Orion’s clothes. She brushed her matted hair until it shone like the wet inside of a pomegranate. Then she buttoned up her cat-skin coat and hid her shining hair with its hood. She held the gun Orion had given her and strode into the party as if she was as tall as a house. Mr. Prince looked at her, and Orion did, too, and the old man, and Mrs. Prince, and then one by one by one the rest of the guests looked too. The sisters recognized her and stared like ghosts gazing at the living while Mrs. King failed to recognize the cat-skin coat she had carved up herself. Mr. King was the last of the guests to look, and there was nothing in his gaze. “You don’t recognize me, do you, father?” she said. The party guests were unsure of what to do and some laughed nervously behind their hands while others wondered what Mr. Prince was going to do about this, since it was Mr. Prince’s job to police the city. “I was going to run,” she said, “and never, not ever, come back, but I see what you’ll do, and I know what you’ve done.” Blanche took a deep breath and then she began to unbutton the cat-skin coat. The slow striptease struck one and all as somehow obscene, as if an actual cat had come to the party and begun to peel off its skin. When the cat-skin coat hit the ground, Mr. King still did not recognize his daughter, but Mrs. King did. Bystanders say that she grew even more immense and when she huffed forward, to try and force Mr. Prince into a quelling action, the ground trembled. Blanche did not know whether she would have the strength to speak the story with all these strange eyes and all these listening ears, but she walked down an aisle toward her

105 CABINET DES FÉES father, and she shouldered the gun. As she passed Orion, who was as still as the rest of the guests, she said, “If you want to help, don’t take your hand from my elbow, no matter what happens, no matter what shape I take,” and for the first time since blood on the blankets she was touched by a hand that was human. “Father,” she said, once more. “Don’t you recognize your daughter?” When Mr. King still only shook his head, she leveled the gun at his heart. When still Mr. King shook his head, she spoke and told the party what he had done to her, what he was doing to them, why the girls were silent. While she told her story Orion’s grip was steady, as steady as her aim was, but when the story was done and she stood there, a pale little girl, his grip loosened for one moment. She looked at him, stricken. The look lasted for only a second, and Orion tried to tighten his grip again, but it was too late; she pulled entirely away, and walked with the gait of a cat instead of the gait of a girl. “Preposterous,” Mr. King said, although a hungry look had entered his eyes. The look said he could eat her as easily as wolves did cats, eat her like pomegranates, like cheeses wrapped in grape leaves, drink her like wine until there was no trace left of what she was. Blanche pulled the trigger. Mr. King fell backwards, spilling red wine on his shirt, into the thorns, where he quickly became so entangled that red wine was joined by redder blood. He shrieked: “I’m sorry!” But the more he thrashed and tried to escape the thorns the more blood he shed, while the party watched. Mrs. King shed pounds and pounds and, when she tried to lean forward to save Mr. King, the thorns so cut up her hands that she could never use them again.

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While all the attention was on Mr. and Mrs. King, Blanche hugged her sisters each once; although they pulled away, she understood. Then she picked up the cat-skin coat and left the party. When she was beyond the guests, Orion caught up with her. “Wait,” he said, but she didn’t look at him, and moved more quickly. When Blanche made it to the edge of the bramble hedge, Orion caught up with her again and said: “Please, wait.” But still she did not look at him, and walked more swiftly. When she was beyond the hedge, and her foot touched the black asphalt river, Orion caught up with her again and this time he snatched the cat-skin coat right off her back. Before she could turn into a monster and snatch his skin from his back, Orion fleet-of-foot raced back to the castle and threw the cat-skin coat into the oven. “Wait,” he said. Blanche looked at him. “For a while. Thank you.” The cat-skin coat turned to ash and dust. And they lived.

Jessica P. Wick co-edits Goblin Fruit, a webzine devoted to fantasy poetry, with Amal El-Mohtar. She says she is an irritable lump, but we don’t believe her. She lives just outside Los Angeles, where, if she climbs high enough, she can enjoy the sunset bouncing off the dome of smog, and has been known to mistake falling snow for seeds.

107 Vox

Kimberly DeCina

MAMA’S TONGUE WAS LIKE FLINT and her gaze was sharp as diamond, and no one ever argued with her. That was best, too, because when someone tried she’d run him ragged. Her eyes were swooping, piercing things that found faults and cracks in any armor, and her hands were rough and could hit hard when they did. She never struck me, but somehow I knew that. Everyone did. Everyone came to our inn because the view was pretty, right on the border of the woods, though Mama sometimes wryly added that it “wasn’t quite the view those ridiculous drunks meant.” The brush crept right to the edges of our walls, and sometimes a befurred creature or two would lurk nearby, though never too close. Inside, there were tables to be served and food to be cooked, ale to be kept flowing so the customers stayed longer. The two of us didn’t have much time for peace. And as we served a good full house most nights, we seemed to do the job well. But Mama hadn’t been the same since Papa died. Before that she’d smiled and even laughed now and then. She had danced at Christmas. She’d bought ribbons from the trader, who smiled and looked appreciatively as she tied her hair up and revealed the curve of her neck. Her face had still been set in hard lines, and her hands were red and rough, but she once had a bit of brightness to her that had faded since, something in her eyes that was a little kinder. But neither of us had cried much when he went. I’d never seen a tear from Mama, not even during the sickness or the night that he’d

108 VOX slipped away, and she’d barely given me two days of mourning before she said “Amalia, I need your help now.” I didn’t protest. There was an inn to manage and work to be done. Sometimes, though, I imagined him home and whole again, chatting with customers and swinging Mama around playfully when her frown got too deep. But this was something I never told her. Mama worked hard and ran things well, and any red- faced offers to “run this place right” earned a man such a look he held his legs tight together in self-defense. If you told her she needed anyone, her face would get dark and her lip would twist a little. She would look at you, and the world would suddenly fall silent. It was then, without her saying a word, when you knew she could see every bad thing about you that ever was or would be. And you never, ever wanted to hear those things out loud. I wanted those eyes. I saw them flare when she taught me, not the things other girls knew — how to pinch their cheeks to roses and dress to fit their curves — but old riddles and mindbenders, the way to carry five laden plates at once, how to step on a man’s foot and make it look like an accident when he peered at you the wrong way. They were eyes that understood cleverness, knew about strength, and bathed in them like they were moonbeams. She saw them as far better than ever being pretty. The trader came Thursday every week, like clockwork, though Mama hadn’t bought very much from him in a long time. He had always stopped, for as long as I could remember, to bid us good afternoon and buy his lunch. I liked him; he had large brown eyes that seemed to smile even on the hottest or coolest day, he always tipped well, spoke softly, and he never drank. I also wasn’t so young I couldn’t see how he looked at Mama, the places where his eyes lingered and the extra care he took when he spoke to her — a subtle

109 CABINET DES FÉES tilt of his head, an especially soft word. Whether or not she noticed, she seemed to treat him no differently. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, though, that he brought his daughter. She had been there suddenly, sitting on the end of his wagon one day, like he’d found her as a baby under a cabbage leaf and she’d sprung up overnight. My eye caught her at the window and it was held there, suddenly making me still. A few of my dirty plates nearly dashed to pieces on the floor as my body jolted. No one my own age could have seemed more different to me. I had seen children my age and younger playing before, their feet beating out music on the cobblestones as they chased hoops and giggled in the sun. But she was fairer than any of them — both of hair, more golden than brown and plaited with a time and care I could never afford, and of face, smoothed into creamy skin and delicate cheekbones, an elegant nose. She was rounder than my stick-and-spindle limbs, and she wore her father’s eyes well; they regarded the window, observing it simply and with no critique or guile. All this I noticed, knew, in a moment. When she met my stare and smiled at me I felt ugly, when neither beauty nor plainness had ever mattered before. It took me two weeks to even speak to her, two more to pose the question of taking a walk with her. Her name was Catarine.

WE WOULD VENTURE INTO THE WOODS as if still young enough for expeditions, looking for trails through the brush and cutting our own if we found none. She was my guide, then, strange as that was and serene though she seemed. Before Catarine I had never even tiptoed there, the world behind my home as uncharted and new as a blank page for us. But exploration was calling towards us, and she heard it beckon even when I didn’t. She’d name all of the birds and

110 VOX the fluttering of insects, even when she didn’t know the true names, fixing at least twenty different kinds of flowers in her hair before those days were through. She came closer to a squirrel than I ever thought possible, nearly nose-to-nose before it blinked and scampered away. We found the best trees for climbing, as I bid her risk tearing her dress to find the hidden magic in knotholes and handholds. In branches high above the undergrowth we exchanged histories: her father’s tales from town after town while her mother brought her up behind secure walls, the way a strange illness brought that life crumbling to ruin. From her mother’s loss she knew the pangs of loss fresh and blood-flecked, not the scabs I’d patched on hastily, giving them two years to find purchase. And so she wept, when she spoke of it, and when she bent her head to my shoulder and clung to me I did too. She told me things beyond riddles and useful tavern- keeper’s tricks, things no book would ever give credit to. What it meant when a cat sneezed, the story of the querciola, what to do against the evil eye — it filled my mind with a rush of the unknown, the quiet, tempting idea of mystery. Neither of us were children, in truth; we both had our monthly cycles, though I’d resigned myself to life as an old maid long ago. But she swore we had the hearts of innocents, that unicorns and winged sprites would fall at our feet if we only looked hard enough and believed. I looked and believed with all my heart, for her sake. Catarine was a thing of lace and veils, just as much as she was made of leaves and twilight, and all of it so much lovelier than I. In time there was nowhere she went that I wouldn’t have walked, no idea she could have proposed that I’d discount. My childhood came too late and went in the rush of a few months, all of it spent with her, traipsing home with my clothes covered in grit and my day wasted and idle. My

111 CABINET DES FÉES mother’s brow would arch disapprovingly when she met us at the door; I had never disobeyed her before, but for those brief days it never mattered. Something inside me was different, blossoming, always caught between a dance and a shiver.

“CHILD, TELL YOUR FATHER I’d like to marry him as soon as he has the mind for it.” The proposal came unexpected, lightning-bolt quick, jostling my bones with its lack of romance and even further lack of necessity. The trader — Peitro on the rare days he spoke to me, perhaps Papa now if he accepted — had yet to see my mother raise her eyes to him, yet to earn anything but diamond, steel, and flint, and yet there would be a wedding, and libations, and a sister. And all this less than a year after the man’s wife had passed. I turned to meet Catarine’s eyes, which were sunk low, her hands fingering something in her pocket. “I will ask him,” she said. “Tell him,” Mama insisted, voice carving the air, “that you will wash in milk and drink wine. And my own daughter will wash in water and drink water.” That proclamation — so strangely poetic, so totalitarian — had a hint of winter frost in it, and of more than idle promises. Somehow, I realized with a naked self-consciousness, I’d displeased her worth a heavy punishment. But I didn’t know how. Catarine nodded, squeezing her hand tight in her dress pocket, and turned around to walk out to the cart. Later she would tell me — as her superstitions were his too, had been her mother’s — that he poured water in a broken boot to see if it would hold all the way to the top. If it had spilled through, he would have refused, but the bottom stood firm. And so he accepted the next morning,

112 VOX bringing my mother a spray of wildflowers that she cooed over and promptly used to decorate some stranger’s table. I would wonder, for a long time, why the fates had approved.

CATARINE AND I WERE PUT IN SEPARATE BEDS, but she pushed them together the first night when I trembled beneath the covers at something I didn’t know how to name. Her presence there warmed me, her hair curling against mine, and the long, smooth fingers of her hand twining with my own. I expected the shared space to be confining, setting nerves on edge. I had rarely been held before, even childhood phantoms earning just a voice at the door calling for a brave heart. And yet it was nothing of the kind, not with the way she fit against my back, the way her arms looped around my waist just so and made me strangely conscious of my own curves. She murmured reassurances that night, voice tinkling bell-like against my ear. Wine dulled your senses, she said, and milk would curdle, more fit as a gift for the fae than for bathing anyway. And my mother, for that was the subject that spun me up tight and made me pale — well, she saw what in its way was meant to be seen, a man with a wander- lust who needed safe haven for his daughter and healthy decisions made for their coin. She would talk, but talk was all it was. “We are maidens,” she told me, lips close to my cheek, the sound of her lulling the tarantella of my heartbeat. “For we are lovely and virtuous and so no harm shall come to us.” “You are lovely,” I corrected her. My words spun out thin and flimsy in the dark. “I will be the hag of these woods before long, with you wed to a prince and guarded by your fae and horned horses.” “I desire no prince,” Catarine murmured then, and there was a rustle, and a sigh, and then a thin circle of metal

113 CABINET DES FÉES pressed into my palm. “Here.” I squinted in the dark as I brought it to my eyes, eager to make out its form. “A metal button,” she told me, and she spoke as somber as one talking of the saints. “A charm against malocchio. It came from my mother’s dress. Keep it with you.” I stared at it helplessly a moment longer, feeling strangely heavy, before she guided our entwined hands to drop it in the pocket of my nightgown. “Put it in your dress when you change in the morning, too. Have it beside you always. It will protect you, Amalia, shield you as I will. The evil eye won’t have a single resent- ment for you.” And she kissed my forehead then, a soft and gentle thing that I felt long moments after. “And this will protect you, too.” The water fell sharp and cold as daggers, raising goose- pimples on my skin and making me beg for searing summer heat. But autumn was firmly inside our house, mercilessly chilly as I sat there and shivered, pouring icicles into my hair. Not that Catarine fared much better, queen of some foreign land though she looked as she self-consciously stroked the cream down one arm, as if waiting for it to curdle. We exchanged looks over our respective tubs, trembling sympa- thetically, bearing this strange creation of our now-mutual mother together, never knowing its meaning. At breakfast, Catarine only sipped her wine. And when I met Mama’s gaze humbly, waiting for a look that would see right through me and shatter all protections, nothing was forthcoming. There was a hint of a curling of her lip, a flicker in her eyes that suggested more than I knew, something I knew better than to inquire out loud. For all her eyes could send messages, there was only one word I could hear in all this, one I wondered at.

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Wait. I clutched my hand tight in my dress pocket. There was more to come and I saw it immediately. The next day there was a large tub of water for both of us. We curled as close together as if it were bedtime, hoping for a touch more warmth and comfort from each other’s nearness. Trembling and numb I still felt her closeness, the awkward touch of hands and hips, her face close to mine but now reading blank as new parchment paper. I nearly touched her breast once, an accident I avoided at the last moment, pulling my hand back quickly to send ripples around us. I wondered, suddenly, if we were far too old to bathe together. The third day, there was milk waiting for me, and water for her. That divide after the sudden, intimate unity, the metal edges of a too-small tub, the way water weakens milk — I felt it choking vice-like against me, with the sudden strength and clarity of a brick house not even hurricanes could move. It was as if I’d been played with, taunted with her presence and then thrown from her again. And Mama smiled. When one is not born an evil stepsister, but made, the change is by degrees. We were put to work together quickly, summers in the woods long over and now turned over to my teaching Catarine the best way to mop a floor, to serve a mug. I murmured tricks of the trade from the corner of my lips as we worked, for she was my sister — no, even more than my sister, and she deserved to keep step with me when we had thrust this upon her. But all this was in secret, hunting down cracks in the wall built between us and whispering into them when no one was watching. A week of this and then Mama bid me rest, her smile genial enough to hide how it cut smooth and knifelike across her face. I accepted only reluctantly, glad to see her happy for once and fully intending to give Catarine her own respite

115 CABINET DES FÉES in due time. But mother’s work for Catarine stretched out longer and harder, the full load of it more than I’d ever dared take by myself. And my attempts to rise and help even a single task were met with a clucking tongue; the thought of defying it gave me pause. Something in me quaked at the thought that she’d look at me, pierce through my skin to find some secret, sleeping thing at my core and let her words brand me failure and monster. My mother’s pattern in those days was easy enough to guess, or so I thought: the luxuries and shelters I’d never before afforded, all gifted to me at my stepsister’s expense, all caulking whatever cracks in the wall between us we’d managed to allow. As winter crept up on us I was given a coat of fur, while Catarine had nothing. The finest of our food and drink went to me, the closest place by the fire. Pietro, so often traveling the road to towns hunting for Christmas gifts, was able to see and say nothing. I still curled up by night with her, murmuring my apologies, the position of our beds something Mama either had not seen or deemed unfit to be upset about. Her eyes regarded me slow and sad in those evenings, and I who was no stranger to hurt knew she felt it, saw it pool in her hair and the lines of her hands, the creases of her dress. I saw it in spite of sweet-voiced protests: “You have worked all your life, Amalia, and I’ve sat pampered and princess-like. Your mother sees justice in hard lines, but it’s never faulty, it’s not untrue — ” She was lying, though, not just mistaken or painting things brightly but spinning out a falsehood as sure as any sin for my own sake. And when she threw aside feelings of betrayal and kissed my cheek, murmured charms of protection, as if it were I who needed them, I felt wracked by guilt colder than any coat of fur could relieve.

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* * *

IT’S ENVY, SOME WILL TELL YOU, that creates a wicked stepsister. But it wasn’t fully so for me. Catarine was beautiful, so much moreso than I, and even as hair turned limp and clothes grew threadbare she would be beautiful still. Lovely with reddened hands or covered in ash, graceful bent over dishes for hours at a time, but this was the beauty I’d always known, had walked and spoken and bonded with strong as a firmly-forged chain. And her kindness, for all I thought it far better than mine, was my balm and comfort too. Covetousness, though, is envy’s cousin. And this is what would stab through me one afternoon as I watched her work, saw the eyes of admiring drunks and envious wives who hungered for her youth. Watching her move among them, shining out of their midst, what made a wicked stepsister was the stray, stabbing thought that they couldn’t have her. She was mine. The thought was no innocent possessiveness of a childhood friend or clinging little sister, for she was my peer and we were far too old for such things. This was the culmina- tion of half a year, of secrets whispered amidst the leaves and the weight of her arms in the evenings, her body glistening with water in the bath. This was Catarine at her most unavoidable, the way her too-innocent kisses burned, the way she was more than my sister, could never be just my sister, and calling her such would be a lie beyond any I’d ever dare tell. Once such a thing is surfaced it can never be beaten down again. Some trace of it remained even in my most steadfast defiance, lining my thoughts with curses. When the evenings came and made my thoughts too weary for self- denial, it drew out of me like the cry of a trapped animal, desperate to be free and whole again.

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She was a woman, and this bad enough, but now my sister too. Regardless of what means had positioned us this way, it was so. I felt a curious pain none should ever feel, felt myself soiled from the inside out with no way of reaching the growing stain. To have cursed and corrupted yourself in spite of every effort, there’s a time that’s eventually had where you know no sense. You only wish it burned away the way they burn witches and traitors, the way an oven can make meat safe for feasting. And so, one day edging on Christmastime, I took Catarine’s button from my pocket and threw it into the snow. And from then on no guilt could touch me, no remorse make me waver, and I bricked the wall between us as firm as obedience to Heaven. In a few evenings, the beds were pushed apart for the first time. My mother smiled. This is what makes a wicked stepsister: to ache for beauty in all things but to know yourself ugly, to beg for a pure heart but feel yourself twisted and malformed from within. To reach out for a bit of grace, so forbidden to the likes of you that to preserve it and yourself you must hate it instead. I had known more than she ever did that I was not meant for fae and unicorns, anyway. I saw the darkness presented to me, knew that within it I wouldn’t see her face, and so I leapt forward to drown in it.

DECEMBER PASSED AND STRETCHED INTO JANUARY, then February, and I grew harder with the passing days just as the trees hardened with icicles and frost. Strangely enough, Catarine said nothing. Over time I wasn’t sure what she would have thought of it if she even knew. The looks she gave me, though, were wounded and terrible, and I’d often wish I were blind and could avoid them.

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The weather was fierce and hard, and seemed to leave Pietro stranded in town after town, even his letters unable to reach us. The man was good in his way, but I wondered if his eye hadn’t roamed, instead. My mother’s tasks, in turn, grew harder and more sadistic. Catarine was to wash the dishes within an hour and go supperless if she didn’t, tend the fire when it hadn’t had time to cool and nurse the burns on her own. Finally, Mama threw her a dress of paper and told her to go out and gather strawberries, eyes sparking and lip twisting dangerously as she commanded it. “It’s the middle of winter,” I found myself saying, my voice falling insignificant as snowflakes. “There are no strawberries. She’ll freeze — ” “Be silent, Amalia.” And I was. But Catarine wore the paper frock, which clung to her body flimsy as a cloud, and trembled underneath it. She took the basket, and a small crust of bread, and in a handful of minutes she’d met my eyes with a silent, shaking gaze and was gone. My stomach twisted in knots as I watched her leave. Mama meant for her to die, she must. For all my forced hatred in the world I hadn’t anticipated that. And it was all I could do to not run out the door afterward, pull apart those defenses brick by brick. I cursed, even as I made my mind a blank slate, the fear and self-hatred that made me stay behind. It was her return, though, that set the beginning and the end of things in motion. Catarine returned three hours after she’d gone, her basket filled to the brim with perfect berries and her eyes sparking like tinder. She looked healthier than she had in months, the beginnings of lines fading from the corners of her eyes and her skin beginning to smooth itself back to fairness. I emerged from my bed, where I’d curled up in the

119 CABINET DES FÉES covers and tried to swallow down my worry, to meet her at the door. Mama stood there already, and for once her eyes were broken things, staring at the miracle before her. “Good evening,” Catarine said. A gold piece flung itself from her lips, shining in the dim lamplight, and clattered to the floor. The next hours were chaotic things, three voices bub- bling up out of turn, sometimes at once, and clashing together trying to make sense of themselves. Mama hunted with frantic conviction for something to attack with — how dare she survive? How dare she find strawberries in winter, as if she were good enough for miracles! — as Catarine stammered out the story, her cheeks pink with the cold and her exuberance, gold loosed against the floorboards with each word. There were fairies in the woods, she said, little men who could grant wishes, who would reward kindness. They had taken her in and asked for some bread, and she gave it, and to help sweep the back step, and she’d done it. And they’d blessed her with this, with these coins, with a quickly renewing beauty. It was just like the stories told her, like her fallen mother had told her, and all that was required was a bit of kindness, and hard work, and — By now there was a pile of gold at her feet, and it twinkled like a thousand tiny suns, mocking me. It was the wealth we’d never had, that Mama had most likely always craved. It was a magic that had never touched me, a childhood of stories and pretend play that not even my love for Catarine could return. It was the mother who had loved Catarine and let her believe, the patience and goodness I was too stubborn for, too angry, too twisted and sick inside to know. I kicked out hard and scattered coins everywhere, aching so much I could barely speak. “You’re allowed to throw gold around like you’re made

120 VOX of it, then?” I managed to choke out. “Wasteful girl! They’ve made you a freak, is what they’ve done!” “Amalia, please.” She shrunk back, eyes lowered to the gold-splattered floor. I hated that submissiveness, then, hated her for not defying Mama, or me, or telling me we could be together in some strange world of the supernatural that would allow it. “I don’t know why you hate me so — ” “They take your bread and demand your work, and this is a gift in return? No man will look at you without greed in his eyes! No one will think of you as yourself again!” “Not even you?” Someone had pulled the floor out from beneath me. I stood there, dizzied and dumb, trying to choke out some response. Mama made no move on my behalf, waiting patiently for it, but nothing was forthcoming. “How do you think of me, then?” she added. “Your eyes match your mother’s, the way nothing can move them, but they didn’t always. Tell me, I — ” “That’s enough.” I’d never been so thankful for my mother’s darker interventions, though I wasn’t quick enough to stop her from striking Catarine with a force that seemed to rattle the coins piling up in the floorboards. My stepsister took a few frightened steps backwards, bowing her head again. That was when I realized with slow, cold horror that they both knew. Perhaps they always had. “Tomorrow,” I managed to snap out, “I’m going to go pick strawberries.” I rushed up to my room, careful not to trip on gold pieces as I went up.

THE COTTAGE WAS EASY ENOUGH TO FIND, when you’re following the broken-branched trail of a freezing girl while you yourself are covered comfortably in fur. It was certainly easy enough when I’d seen enough magic to know it existed.

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Through a watery-eyed blur I saw it, a ramshackle thing of twigs and stones, half-formed from the shifting crust of soil. I clutched my pail of bread and cake to me; Mama had insisted I bring it, as Catarine had brought her food, but none of it mattered to me ultimately. The last thing I wished for were more coins. I had other business. They were good enough to answer when I knocked, three unearthly faces at the door. Three little men, just as she’d described, they were squat and brown, staring at me piggishly through small, round eyes and coarse beards. I glared back at them, a bit too harshly perhaps, for a long and awkward silence passed before one of them barked for me to come in. I pushed through them to sit by the fire, their chair too small for my body, pushing me into hunched and twisted shaped as I struggled for comfort. “I have business,” I muttered, as I studied the placement of me knees. “Business regarding a girl you received yesterday, a girl you worked magic over — ” “My brothers and I hunger,” one interrupted, his voice like the shifting of soil across hours and years. “Have you anything to share with us?” I didn’t even touch my cake, the question making me bristle. “It’s not polite to interrupt. And I’ve come through the harsh winter where hardly anything grows to see you, yet you beg my food from me. Earn your own.” Three sets of annoyed eyes met my defiance, but I didn’t care. I was furious, at Mama’s heartlessness and my own cowardice that so failed to stop it, at stupid fairy stories and their promises of air. My own dreams were impossible still, and why then should I give these false mystics any quarter? “You worked magic,” I began again, and as anger bubbled up fresh inside me I took the cake from my pail and tore into it in front of them. “You worked it over my

122 VOX stepsister, who now litters our floor with coins whenever she speaks.” “Your sister was kind and good to us,” another gnome cracked angrily with the sound of ever-decaying leaves, “so we did reward her.” “She shared,” muttered the first, licking his lips. “You took advantage of a poor, lost girl fallen victim to cruelty,” I snapped. “She believes in the triumph of her own self-sacrifice, and now she is robbed of her voice for fear of having to sweep up its remains!” I’d devoured the cake messily, so quickly it was as if I were starving. I licked defiantly at some crumbs in the corner of my mouth, and started on the bread. Share your food, indeed! “She’ll receive a thousand proposals,” my voice broke at this, “and none of them touched by anything but greed, she’ll be seen as perfect, and pristine, and freakish — ” “There is a broom for you,” the third one said, sounding of sleet and the frozen river. “Sweep away the snow at the back door.” “It was swept for you but yesterday and I am your guest, not your maid! Do it your damned selves!” My bread was finished and my stomach felt tight at the quickness of the meal. I flung the pail at them, eyes emblazed and hands curled into fists, my whole body tense and taut and raging. “You took her from me! You took her further than I can ever go, you touched her with something I’ll never attain, and you smiled at it all and called it justice!” “She was so much better off with you?” one of them cooed bitterly. My heart jolted and coiled in my chest and I didn’t answer. “She ran to the fae and begged them to embrace her.” The sleet-voiced gnome gave me a look of long, somber ages, of sleepy decay. “There’s many a road to escape. She chose one.”

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“If I thought I’d ever deserved it I’d have chosen it with her.” It all felt too tight, too warm, too caged. I stood suddenly and rushed to the door. “You wrap yourself in curses for the wrong reasons,” one of them said, though which I could no longer tell, but I was already slamming the door behind me. Let them judge me as they would, but I’d thrown myself into the only choice I’d seen fit, and I’d done it so those scant months felt like ages ago. I took trembling, pained steps into the snow, my eyes stinging against it, barely registering the door as it slammed behind me. I had fallen so low I felt there was no emerging, and I moved now with the conviction of a girl wallowing in self-pity. I was halfway home when a rock twisted my ankle, pitching me forward towards the slush. Pain shot through my leg and I cried out, managing to catch myself on my hands but hissing as they began to blister with cold. My eyes stung with tears, as my breath began coming in tiny gasps and whimpers. Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn. “Damn.” My stomach wrenched unexpectedly. I felt it writhing with the urge to vomit, bile twisting in its pit to heave cake and bread up through my throat and let me smell my own sick. It would have been fitting enough, perhaps. But as I gave in to the demand and let it squirm up my throat, thick and heavy there, it grew. It grew so that it made me panic, cough and heave wildly, all the while wondering if I would choke, and then it spat itself onto the ground. A toad was suddenly squatting there, a wrinkled, ugly brown thing as low as I felt. It croaked once and hopped off, eager for a way to survive the winter. So they had cursed me after all. Still sprawled on my hands and knees, ankle throbbing,

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I laughed bitterly. In a handful of minutes, my laughter had changed into sobs. I didn’t dare form words, and a good half hour passed before I continued the travel home. When I returned, Catarine wasn’t home. “I boiled yarn and threw it at her,” my mother told me as I came in through the door, without so much as a hello. “Told her to go to the river and wash it clean. Perhaps this time she’ll be so kind as to freeze. Did you find whatever nonsense you were looking for?” “Yes,” I said. The wrenching feeling wasn’t so horrible the second time. When the toad splattered against the floorboards I met my mother’s eyes without another word and looked deep, seeing her with the clarity with which she had always seen me. I found the cracks and weaknesses there, the petty hatreds and unhealed wounds from mourning, the signs of how her heart had slowly frozen, her fear of what would occur if Pietro ever returned. And I liked to think that had she not been screaming at the creature on her floor she would have shuddered under my look. She certainly didn’t frighten me any longer. She was nothing compared to this. I fled to my room and burrowed myself in the sheets, waiting for Catarine to return. But she didn’t return that night, or the next night, or the next. Mama spat out awkwardly that it was finished, then, and set me to work again. I wasn’t permitted to speak to customers, and so the rumor circulated that I’d been struck mute, that the tragic loss of my stepsister had shocked me into the loss of my tongue. It might as well have been true. I was a thing in mourning, barely functioning from moment to moment, my spirit and my regrets with Catarine wherever she lay. As she’d grown more beautiful from her curse, mine seemed to lay me out ugly, thinning my hair and letting my

125 CABINET DES FÉES eyes grow dull around my own grief. I began to be known as an unfortunate tragedy, a spinster in this place forever, to be certain. When one is silent so often, she hears things. Gossip and tale tales creep around her ears, finding her far more easily than if she spoke. Tongues are as loose as if the world were drunk and, if they are drunk, looser yet. And so as weeks passed by and the year was firmly seated in March, hints of spring beginning to line the woods, a story began to piece itself together. Had I heard of the girl who nearly froze to death washing yarn? What sort of silly fool would do that, in the dead of winter? I barely paid it any mind, at first, didn’t want to hear. They say she’d nearly died, stupid girl, but a prince had been passing through. Princes in the middle of nowhere like this, could you imagine? Well, he’d seen that lovely young thing hard at work at her task, and fallen madly in love. I desire no prince , I remembered her say. And he’d swept her up right there, and rode off to be married. A princess born from love at first sight! Wasn’t that something? I’d nearly dropped a plate. Was there a chance she lived somewhere far away, lost to me forever? That night Mama was already spinning schemes, half- mad things about disguises and switching bodies as Catarine slept, tying the girl up and throwing her into the river. They were fancies, born out of facts we didn’t know and chances we didn’t have, and I was tired, so tired. My mind, muddied and fogged these last few weeks past, was at least clear enough to know my answer, which came so crisp and ready it was as if it wasn’t all my sixteen years in the making. “No.” “No?”

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I knew her, for all she’d frightened me once, and I knew she couldn’t stop me. “You spin your own webs and weave yourself up in them, and go mad trying to escape again. Enjoy it. I’ve finished. I’m an unnatural thing, perhaps, lower than these toads, but I’ll bear that sin if it means that for a moment I may hurt less than this.” Mama had a tongue like flint and eyes like diamond and no one ever argued with her. But I was a thing of sharp edges too, borne up from loss and fear, the hate of my own needs, and still I knew I could never be one to cut people as she did. Of all the things to be in the world, to be her weapon was a choice I locked up then, in chains, rope, and prayers. Some coins still lurking in the floorboards, and a pail of cake and bread. It wasn’t much, but it would do. “You have nowhere to go.” “I’ll manage.” I left her to sweep up the toads. Had I heard of a girl offered marriage by a prince, who had escaped when they stopped to rest for the night only to die out in the cold? . . . To find some great city and live there on her own? . . . To vanish into the woods without a trace? Foolish girl, who would ever refuse a prince? I’d heard many things, in fact, but the men in the woods would know the truth of them. It was where all my deepest instincts sent me. As I left the inn behind, a flash of light against the snow made me squint and look harder. I pushed a hand through the clinging slush, ignoring the cold, revealing the details of what I’d spied. My legs rocked unsteady already against the force of my decision. The sight of what I’d found nearly made them give out again. It was a small, round metal button, unmistakably Catarine’s. It had survived the winter.

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I picked it up with trembling hands, slipped it into the pocket of my coat, and set out again.

I KNOCKED WITH AN UNSTEADY HUMBLENESS at the ramshackle cottage door, waiting for those three pairs of beady eyes and perhaps the further brunt of their curses. For the sight of her I would share the bread, though, I would sweep. I would live as their maid for threescore years if it meant seeing my stepsister again. But it was one pair of large brown eyes at the door, and a small woman’s hand brushing the knob, and a wordless noise passed between us, an astonished sob. “Catarine.” A toad pushed through my lips, and crowded around her skirts. She smiled, a beautiful, broken smile, and scooped it up in her hand. “Come in.” The fairies, I learned quickly, were gone. They’d left behind their fireplace, their chairs, their beds — “pushed all together it’s larger than what we had,” she pointed out shakily — but otherwise it was as if they’d never been there at all. “Sews it all up neatly,” I’d whispered, not daring to speak any louder. “As if we were mad and our afflictions . . . invented.” “Our need for the fae was finished.” She’d touched my hand and I’d nearly jumped, but I’d allowed it, letting our fingers twine together as if nothing had ever seen that to its end. “I’ve been a monster, Catarine.” “And trust will come slow and when it’s deserved.” Her voice shook for the first time that I could remember, and awkwardly she drew me closer. “But can’t we just forget that for a moment? I’ve missed you so much.”

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I took her in then, fragile and silly and naïve, lazy when she wasn’t pushed to work and self-sacrificing for the sake of longing to be pure. Submissive to a fault, maddeningly so, but damn it, she’d defied a prince and run. She was mine. “You’re my sister — ” I began. “Not by blood, and why do you think it’s so at all? That your mother would swallow her pride for my father’s modest earnings, far from a fortune, that she’d settle for a husband that’s so far from home her neglect was too easy — what did she wish her grip on, Amalia, but you and me?” “ . . . we’re making a mess of the floor.” Looking down at scattered amphibians and a treasure’s chest worth of bullion, she laughed. Stroking a gentle finger across the spine of the toad in her hand, she smiled weakly. “Let’s name this one? ‘Malocchio’, I think. Did you know, toads sometimes bring the evil eye? And coins are a charm against it?” My smile was a sad, hopeful thing. “Catarine — ” And then she was kissing me, and I couldn’t think enough to say anything.

A GIRL WHO DENIES HERSELF IS A GIRL whose voice is poisoned, twisted, silenced. I learned this slowly, by degrees, as we mapped out life in that house together — which plants and creatures would prove edible, where the closest town could be reached. We promised to keep things meager, preferred it so, though we buried great caches of coins as treasure to be unearthed at a moment’s notice. Once we firmly seated ourselves in spring, we explored the land around us, and then, each other’s bodies, the learning of each territory slow and patient, a building trust and a rediscovery of that which was already so familiar. I wonder, sometimes, how deep our sin runs, if on some future day we’ll burn for what we are. But as time passes and

129 CABINET DES FÉES the toads grow smaller and infrequent, as Catarine whispers out pennies instead of fortunes, I know there’s at least some force that sees how we fought against the magic that pushed us towards some other destiny, where stepsisters never love themselves and there is no mercy, where princesses are good and perfect and silent forever. We’ve made a house of our own and forged our way, and soon our voices will be ours again, chiming out the strange and lovely resonance of life fought out together as both sisters and lovers will do.

Kim DeCina attends the University of South Florida, where she majors in social work. She’s loved fairy tales and myths for as long as she can remember. “Vox” was previously featured in Sleeping Beauty, Indeed, a collection of lesbian fairy tales from Torquere Press.

130 131 Reformulating Happily-Ever-After: Fairy Tales & Sexuality in YA Literature

Christine Butterworth-McDermott

BECAUSE OF THE PHENOMENAL MARKETING SUCCESS of the Harry Potter series and the sophisticated versions of classic fairy tales produced for adults by Gregory Maguire (Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), fairy-tales and fairy-tale retellings have also seen a resurgence in contemporary children’s and young adult markets. Since the 19th century, fairy tales have generally been marketed as children’s literature despite the fact, as scholars like Marina Warner, Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes have noted, their literary history is emphatically adult. Before the Grimm Brothers published Nursery and Household Tales in 1812, traditional fairy tales were either related as adult entertainment or used to warn young aristocratic girls of possible scenarios they would face as they headed into courtship and marriage (as in Perrault’s Contés des Fees). In either case, as Tatar explains in The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the tales were filled with “sexual innuendo” or “off-color allusions” (23). It was only when the Brothers Grimm encountered criticism regarding the appropriateness of some of the tales, that they were “systematically purged of references to sexuality” whether this included the perverse incestuous father in “Thousandfurs” or the pleasurable sexual seduction of Rapunzel by her prince in the tower. Tatar believes this “paved the way for the [censoring] process which made [fairy tale] acceptable children’s literature” (11).

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Adults reclaiming the fairy-tale and reinserting blatant sexuality back into their narratives began in the Victorian age, but for women writers of young adult literature today, the most influential literary works of this nature were Anne Sexton’s 1971 poetry collection, Transformations, and Angela Carter’s 1975 collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber. Carter’s work in particular “twists” the traditional happily ever after ending in that her main characters are no longer passive women waiting for a prince’s kiss to awaken them. Her Sleeping Beauty is a vampire, Little Red seduces the wolf so she will be “nobody’s meat,” Beauty becomes the Beast as she physically consummates her relationship. Borrowing from Sexton and Carter’s breakthrough work, contemporary young adult collections like Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch, Francesca Lia Block’s The Rose and the Beast, Jane Yolen’s stories “Cinder Elephant” and “Snow in Summer” and novels like Debbie Viguié’s Scarlet Moon use fairy tales to subvert expectations of being a “good little girl.” Instead, these authors assert more pro-active and savvy heroines. Rather than have Snow White rescued by either the seven dwarves or awakened by Prince Charming, in “Snow in Summer,” Yolen has Snow herself kill the evil stepmother who set her up to be raped, with a iron skillet swung with a mean backhand (95). Traditionally, just as she is about to be beheaded by her husband’s scimitar, Blue- beard’s wife is rescued by her brothers, yet in Block’s retelling, “There are no brothers. There is no sister to call out a warning” (“Bones” 165). Instead, our heroine “a slightly feral one-hundred-pound girl” is ultimately smart enough to slash at Derrick Blue with a knife and run away. In her retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the abusive and incestuous stepfather is blown away by Red, using grandma’s shotgun (“Wolf” 128). Although faced with truly dark situations, the women here are quick-witted and aware.

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As Warner noted in her article, “The Absent Mother,” such subversion has always been one of the primary functions of fairy tales. The entertaining façade of a well-known fairy tale allows writers to weave daring messages regarding the status of women and love relationships into the tapestry of a familiar plot. Fairy-tale narratives traditionally create “a picture of a possible escape” from the status quo in order to “mount a critique of the times” (24). As Michel Foucault explains, “If sex is repressed, that is condemned to prohibi- tion, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression” (6). The relatively taboo subjects of sexual harassment and violence, female sexual pleasure and same-sex relationships all figure prominently in the latest crop of young adult fairy tales, even as they are forbidden in sex education classrooms of many high schools. The fairy tale, with its “naïve setting of childish beliefs in magic” and its “simple structure,” “binary oppositions and neat resolutions” becomes “a form of camouflage” to discuss the truths that exist in the world. As Tatar claims in Secrets Beyond the Door, although “disobeying orders, violating bans, and intruding on prohibited terrain may get [characters] into trouble . . . these actions also open the gateway to . . . discovery” (1).

Symbolically, the fairy tale has much to offer in terms of a trajectory of discovery that would be familiar to the growing adolescent. According to Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment, the fairy tale heroine must “leave the security of childhood,” which is represented by “getting lost in the dangerous forest” (226). The “forest” can be any unknown environment from Little Red’s woods to the Beast’s castle to the attic in which the old woman sits with her spinning wheel. Often the “security of

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childhood” is tenuous — most heroine’s biological mothers are dead, the fathers are either ineffectual, incestuous, or under the sway of a second wife, or the family environment holds some other threat. Generally, there is some physical reason for these characters to leave home but also psychologically, it is time to move on, grow up, and formulate an identity apart from being someone’s “child.” Viguié and Donoghue use traditional settings. Scarlet Moon is “Little Red” at the time of the Cru- sades, but the most important sequences in the novel do take place in parts of the “unknown” forest. Donoghue uses the traditional settings of fairy tales — modernizing not the surroundings which could be anywhere at anytime, but the subject matter. Yolen places her Snow White in Appalachia and Block uses the landscape of Los Angeles throughout The Rose and the Beast. Their heroines are the same age as traditional heroines, in or just out of adolescence, and in the same predicament of suddenly being out on their own in the unknown world for the first time. In Yolen and Block, the teenage heroines must run-away from home due to the abuse suffered at the hands of step-mothers and fathers. In Donoghue, the Cinderella heroine of “The Tale of the Shoe,” has used her mother’s death to make her home a symbolic prison. Ruth, Viguié’s heroine, is motherless and soon loses her brother, which forces her into becoming a lady blacksmith in town.

Bettelheim tells us that once in the unknown world, the heroine must “learn to face up to [her] violent tendencies and anxieties” which are “symbolized by encounters with wild animals . . . meeting strange figures and experiences.” in

135 CABINET DES FÉES order to “get to know” herself. This Other can represent some part of the self the character longs to deny or some evil created by society that must be defeated. Traditionally, this can be seen as Red making her pact with the Wolf, Sleeping Beauty meeting the spinner, Beauty learning to love the Beast, Cinderella defeating her stepmother, and so on. Warner believes that the confrontation between heroine and Other is the most important psychological moment in the fairy tale. For with the elimination or assimilation of the Other, the heroine becomes not only more knowledgeable about the ways of the adult world, but also herself. Blue- beard’s wife learns lessons about greed, curiosity and self- preservation, Cinderella discovers wealthy marriage is possible if she brushes off the ashes of grief, and Sleeping Beauty finds after some deep reflection that sexual consummation is not as bad as her prick on the finger might suggest. As Elliot Gose notes, “Psychoanalysts would suggest that most fairy tales are concerned with an ‘identity test,’ the attempt of the self to recognize its shortcomings and con- flicts, the impulses toward anarchy or inertia that threaten it, and the possible directions of solution” (43). Perhaps no other question for teenage girls is a prevalent as their own sexuality. As young adults become more radically sexualized in their real world environment, it makes sense that their literature would also reflect their anxieties and desires. From the heroine’s handling of her sexual situation, the adolescent reader is able to see possibilities for shaping her own life. Confronting the Other (the wolf, the beast, the prince, the witch) in the contemporary fairy tale is in many ways akin to symbolically confronting our deepest sexual desires and fears. The level of sophistication of topics, particularly sexual ones, in these works is quite profound and the subject matter is often provocative. Questions this audience might raise — How may I protect myself from those who want to objectify me?

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How do I deal with my own sexual power? How can sex be pleasurable? What alternatives are there for me as a sexual creature? — are at least explored, if not always fully answered. Unlike the Grimms’ collection, or even re-tellings geared to pre-pubescents, the stories written for teenagers restore the incest and sexual violence that was always a part of the fairy tale of warning or advice for the female audience. Stories like “Bluebeard,” with its murderous husband, “Donkeyskin,” in which a father wants to take his daughter as a second wife, and the more sexual version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” presented by Perrault in which Red is devoured by her neighbor, Mr. Wolf, have fallen away to privilege tamer versions (“Cinderella”/and the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap”) with “happily-ever-after” endings. Yet, it is the darker versions of the stories young adult writers have drawn up to make their point about rape and violence in the contemporary teenage girl’s life. In Donoghue’s retelling of “Donkeyskin,” “The Tale of the Skin,” the heroine is shocked by her own father’s lust much as the princess is in the original text is, although Donoghue makes the reader even more sympathetic by using the first person rather than a distanced third: “I knew,” the narrator tells us, “that something was very wrong. He pleated me along the length of his body in a way no one had ever done before” (150). She wisely plans her escape before her rape occurs. Snow in Yolen’s story also does not hesitate to defend herself when drawn into the woods by a boy her stepmother has hired to rape her: She kicks him in “the place [I had been] told about, and while he was screaming, I ran away” (94). As mentioned before, both heroines of Block’s retelling of “Little Red” and “Bluebeard,” defend themselves with violence when pressed. There is a very active sense of self-defense in these stories. Unlike Little Red in Perrault’s story, these girls are aware that the “tame wolves/are the

137 CABINET DES FÉES most dangerous of all” and are prepared to meet them (13). Moreover, while many of these writers clearly indicate that escape from destructive violence is necessary, they also advocate that positive sexual relationships (whether heterosex- ual or homosexual) are possible. They dismiss the passive idea of love at “first sight” — or at “first kiss” — their heroines don’t jump out of their deathlike sleeps to marry the first prince (or princess) they see. Instead, the stories show that love requires deep friendship, understanding, and a recognition of equality. Sexual fulfillment is the added bonus of taking time to cultivate these relationships. Moreover, even if this relationship exists outside the social norm, it is suggested that if the individual is fulfilled then the relationship is worth it. According to David Rosen, a psychoanalytic critic, the assimilation of Other, allows the heroine to avoid being “frozen” into a “state of despair” or passivity. If she can bring what she desires into her life, she can break from a “false self” which is “a manifestation of one’s parents and society’s wishes” and live as her “true self” (223). In Scarlet Moon, Viguié’s retelling of “Little Red,” the assertive Ruth finds sexual satisfaction with her wolf. The sexual attraction between William and Ruth is obvious from their first meeting, but it reaches its positive crescendo only after Ruth’s doubts have been eased and William has exposed his secret life as a werewolf to her. When he asks to marry her in a voice that “is little more than a growl,” Ruth knows she is taking a risk; however, she also realizes, “I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay here with him, be a part of him.” (121). Betsy Hearne claims that one of the charms of the fairy tale is how by confronting the Other than self, we see “the slow growth of loving and accepting the unacceptable, whereupon, miraculously, disparate parts [of ourselves] become integrated” (133). By accepting the sexual in William, Ruth accepts it in herself. By loving something others would

138 REFORMULATING HAPPILY-EVER-AFTER find unlovable, Ruth transforms it and gives it viability. This is also true in Block’s version of “Sleeping Beauty” called “Charm.” Block’s drug-addicted Sleeping Beauty, Rev, is rescued by Charm, an actress who is a former addict herself. Rev due to her addiction and her gang-rape has “shut down,” and rejected the vital sexual part of herself. Under Charm’s careful watch she is able to detox and begins to see what it means to be loved by someone. After Rev has realized that she and Charm once knew each other as children, they share a kiss and Rev feels “as if all the fierce blossoms were shuddering open. The castle was opening. She felt as if the other woman were breathing into her body something long lost and almost forgotten. It was, she knew, the only drug either of them would need” (97). These authors show that as violent and threatening as sex may be, it is also regenerative — and its positive accepts must be integrated into the self. This offers powerful hope to young, female readers, who are, as Steven Swann Jones suggests, “are still in the process of defining themselves, working through their feelings toward those with whom they are emotionally involved, establishing their place in society . . . and determining their spiritual outlook” (20). In “Cinder-Elephant” Jane Yolen turns the traditional image of Cinderella on its head by making our heroine overweight. When the stepsisters mock the Prince for falling “in love with a fat hen,” Elly wisely “smiles into the cinders. It was a happy smile and a sad smile, too. But she didn’t tell them anything. Would you?” (26). Yolen has the Prince’s father speak for most of us by saying, “Princes marry swans — not hens,” still the Prince is able to see through this myopic position and finds his “true love” (26). Yolen’s light touch is evident in her moral that “if you love a waist, you waste a love” but her point surely assures many girls that societal conventions can be overcome (28).

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Here, the fairytale still functions traditionally as a literature of hope — the weak triumph over the strong, or the outsider beats the odds for success — Yolen just changes the defini- tions of strong & successful. As Tania Modleski explains, “the energy women use to belittle and defeat themselves” in real life can be “rechannelled [by romantic stories] into efforts to grow and to explore ways of affirming and assert- ing the self” (58). Donoghue approaches this in an even more radical way by having her Cinderella fall in love, not with Prince, but her Fairy Godmother in “The Tale of the Shoe.” Driven nearly insane with grief at her mother’s death, Cinderella will not let herself feel worthy. There are no evil step sisters or mother in this story, just “the shrill voices . . . all inside. Do this, do that, you lazy heap of dirt” (2). After the God- mother arrives, Cinderella is rejuvenated and believes she should find her adult life by participating in the rituals of female flirtation. At the ball, she “tittered at the old king’s jokes . . . accepted a chicken wing and nibbled it daintily . . . danced three times with the prince, whose hand wavered in the small of [her] back” (5) Still, when the prince asks her name, she “can’t remember it,” clearly showing that her true self is subsumed by what she expects to be socially acceptable (5). When she decides she has “had enough” of trying win the prince at the ball, she realizes that she really has feelings for the woman who has healed her grief and helped her resusci- tate her feelings of self-worth (7). In both these stories, and in Viguié’s Scarlet Moon, sexual love exists on an individualized plane rather than on a socially constructed one. In this way, these stories are, as Foucault suggests, “deliberate transgressions.” By relating to and sympathizing with the heroine who chooses the socially unacceptable lover, the readers are forced by the authors to re-evaluate social conventions regarding love and sexuality.

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In each case, the individual love is paramount — and by privileging it, the authors are privileging the teenage reader’s own instincts to find what sexual relationship works best for them. In all of these stories, we see the final part of Bettelheim’s trajectory fulfilled. The heroines learn in the forest to face that Other in themselves. And by either eliminating it (if it is negative like an incestuous father or violent lover) or accepting it (if it is an equally passionate encounter or individually viable alternative), they become adults. Their sexual identity is achieved: they must stand up for themselves against negative sexual power and they fall in love or lust of their own free will. One of the exciting things about young adult fairy tale literature is that it works in the tradition of addressing the questions of young people in the here and now. As Marina Warner suggests “uncovering the context of the tales, their relation to society and history, can yield more of a happy resolution than the story itself delivers with its challenge to fate: ‘They lived happily ever after’ consoles us, but gives scant help compared to ‘Listen this is how it was before, but things could change — and they might.’ (xxi). This idea that things could change and they might — or even that things should change and this is why — is widely explored by Block, Donoghue, Yolen and Viguié. As Jack Zipes suggests in Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale:

The purpose of producing a revised fairy tale is to create something new that incorporates the critical and creative thinking of the producer and corre- sponds to changed demands and tastes of audiences. As a result of transformed values, the revised classical fairy tale seeks to alter the reader’s views of traditional patterns, images and codes (9)

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Or as Maria Tatar more succinctly puts the same idea — “Magic happens on the threshold of the forbidden” (Secrets 1). By crossing that threshold, by reformulating happily-ever- after, these authors have created some of the most subversive fiction for young women in contemporary literature.

WORKS CITED

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. NY: Vintage, 1989. Block, Francesca Lia. “Charm.” The Rose and the Beast. NY: HarperCollins, 2000. 73-97. _____. “Wolf.” The Rose and the Beast. NY: HarperCollins, 2000. 101-129. _____. “Bones.” The Rose and the Beast. NY: HarperCollins, 2000. 153-166. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. NY: Pantheon, 1978. Donoghue, Emma. “The Tale of the Shoe.” Kissing the Witch. NY: HarperCollins, 1997. 1-10. _____. “The Tale of the Skin.” Kissing the Witch. NY: HarperCollins, 1997. 145-166. Gose, Elliot B., Jr. Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1972. Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. “Little Red Cap.” The Classic Fairy Tales; Texts, Criticism. Ed. Maria Tatar. NY: Norton, 1999. 13-16.

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Hearne, Betsy. Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale. Chicago: UCP, 1989. Modleski, Tania. Loving with A Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. London: Routledge, 1982. Perrault, Charles. “Bluebeard.” The Classic Fairy Tales; Texts, Criticism. Ed. Maria Tatar. NY: Norton, 1999. 144-148. _____. “Cinderella.” The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. Ed. Maria Tatar. NY: Norton, 2002. 28-43. _____. “Donkeyskin.” The Classic Fairy Tales; Texts, Criti- cism. Ed. Maria Tatar. NY: Norton, 1999. 109-116. _____. “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Classic Fairy Tales; Texts, Criticism. Ed. Maria Tatar. NY: Norton, 1999. 144-148. Rosen, David H. “Archetypes of Transformation: Healing the Self/Other Self Through Creative Active Imagination.” The Fantastic Other. Eds. Brett Cooke et al. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 221-242. Tatar, Maria. Hard Facts of the Brothers Grimm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003 _____. Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2004. Warner, Marina. “The Absent Mother.” History Today. 41 (1991): 22-8. _____. From the Beast to the Blonde. NY: Farrar, 1994. Viguié, Debbie. Scarlet Moon. Simon, 2004. Yolen, Jane. “Cinder Elephant.” A Wolf at the Door. Eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. NY: Aladdin, 2000. 17-29.

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_____. “Snow in Summer.” Black Heart, Ivory Bones. Eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. NY: Avon, 2000. 90-96.

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tale As Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington, Kentucky: UKP, 1994.

Christine Butterworth-McDermott is an assistant professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches courses in Fairy Tales, Creative Writing and Modernism. Her fairy tale poetry has been published in literary journals, and select poems have been nominated for a Rhysling Award (published in the 2005 anthology by Prime Books) and have received Honorable Mentions in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (17th and 18th Annual Editions). She has been published in American Transcendental Quarterly, The Henry James Review, and a chapter of hers appears in Twice-Told Chil- dren's Tales from Routledge Press (her main interest is how novels/short stories retell classic fairy tales).

144 “The Lady of the House of Love”: Angela Carter’s Vampiric Sleeping Beauty

Jamil Mustafa

UNLIKE ITS DORMANT, CHANGELESS PROTAGONIST, the story of Sleeping Beauty has altered considerably with the passage of time. Beginning in the thirteenth-century Icelandic epic Volsunga Saga and the fourteenth-century Arthurian romance Perceforest, the tale developed into a form more recognizable to present-day readers in Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (1636) and Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” the first story in his collection Histories ou contes du temps passe (1697). As Iona and Peter Opie observe, Perrault’s rendering of the fable differs considerably from Basile’s. Indeed, they contend, comparing the two texts demonstrates “that the tale Perrault immortal- ized was not the whole story; or rather, that his tale was in part defective” (102) insofar as it includes “an essential part of the story incorrectly transmitted,” a “seemingly unnecessary appendage, in which the king’s mother turns out to be an ogress yearning to eat her grandchildren—an appetite usually attributed to stepmothers” (104). In contrast to Perrault’s somewhat perplexing story, Basile’s version makes perfect sense: “In Basile’s tale it is revealed that the sport-loving king was already married,” that his two children are therefore illegitimate, and that his wife’s “jealousy, and consuming desire to kill her husband’s bastards, is thus understandable, even if not pardonable” (104). Substituting mother for wife in a sort of Oepidal swap, Perrault portrays Sleeping Beauty’s

145 CABINET DES FÉES royal lover not as an adulterous rapist but as a chaste and considerate suitor. In 1982 Perrault’s somewhat sanitized version of Basile’s tale was translated by Angela Carter and given pride of place in Sleeping Beauty & Other Favourite Fairy Tales. Three years earlier, Carter had included a darkly poignant adaptation of the Sleeping Beauty story, “The Lady of the House of Love,” in The Bloody Chamber. In Carter’s narrative, Sleeping Beauty becomes a doomed vampire queen and her prince a British soldier fated to perish in World War I. While Carter’s retellings of classic fairy tales have attracted considerable scholarly notice, very little of this attention has been directed to “The Lady of the House of Love.”1 Yet the story merits and rewards close study — both for its ingenuity and sumptu- ous prose, and for the ways in which it foregrounds the (illicit) sexuality central to Basile’s text but partly or wholly elided in Perrault’s. “The Lady of the House of Love” combines the primal power of Basile’s tale with the sophistication of Perrault’s, while updating the Sleeping Beauty story for postmodern readers by hybridizing it with gothic fiction and problematizing its traditional gender roles. All three renditions of the Sleeping Beauty story feature cannibalism, though Carter’s version explores this topic most thoroughly and suggestively. In “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” the wife/ogress attempts to trick her husband into eating his own children; in “Sleeping Beauty,” the mother/ogress believes she has devoured both them and her daughter-in- law; and in “The Lady of the House of Love,” the vampire queen dines upon countless youths before trying but failing to consume her British soldier. The childless wife/ogress in Basile’s tale realizes that her already tenuous position is further jeopardized by a woman who can provide the king with an heir, and she acts with the ruthlessness she feels her situation requires. Even as the king consumes his macabre

146 “THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE” meal, he taunts the queen with her infertility and reminds her that she has “brought nothing into this house.” In Perrault’s story, the actions of the mother/ogress stem not from an instinct for self-preservation but from an innate depravity, for her “ogrish tastes” are so powerful that she can “hardly keep her hands off little children” (17). In Carter’s text, the queen’s awful appetite is likewise an essential part of who she is, for she “loathes the food she eats […] but hunger always overcomes her” (96). While each tale depicts eating in a somewhat different fashion, the fact that it appears so prominently in all of them leads us to consider its various figurative and psychological implications. By feeding her husband his illegitimate children, the wife/ogress seeks, in effect, to send them back to where they came from, to compel him to absorb them into his own body. By trying to eat rather than to nourish her grandchildren, the mother/ogress inverts and perverts the maternal role. By luring men into her bedroom and devour- ing them there because “she only knows of one kind of consummation” (103), the vampire queen discloses a voracity that is fundamentally sexual in nature; thus Carter makes explicit what Perrault discreetly suggests. Once the prince has disenchanted the princess and her attendants in “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” courtship and consumption are linked in a light and humorous fashion. The young man and woman remain in her bedroom talking “for hours” and perfectly content, while the members of the castle’s staff are “all dying of hunger” (16). The lovers are sated, but the servants are “ravenous” because “none of them [are] in love” (16). Only “[a]fter supper” can the prince and princess consummate their union, when “the chief lady-in- waiting [draws] the curtains round their bed for them” (16). Like the retinue in Perrault’s tale, the vampire queen is (love-) starved — though her hunger is a subject not of humor but of

147 CABINET DES FÉES horror. When she meets her match, “[s]he has not eaten for three days. It is dinner-time. It is bed-time” (104). There is only one kind of food she craves, for “[w]hen she was a little girl, she […] contented herself entirely with baby rabbits […]. But now she is a woman, she must have men” (96). Carter emphasizes the essentially erotic quality of the vampire’s hunger by conflating her mouth and genitals in an evocation of the vagina dentata, and projecting this imagery upon the thorny, skeleton-fed roses in her garden of death. “All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges” (95), her fangs concealed within her “wide, full, prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson,” her “morbid mouth” (101). Her “red lips [are] like the obese roses in her garden” (102) that bloom in “thickets bristling with thorns” (98); and, after she dispatches her lover, “her keeper will bury his bones under her roses,” for the “food her roses feed on gives them their rich colour, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures” (105). Like the “plush petals” of these roses, which are “obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications” (98), hers is an “extraordinarily fleshy mouth […] a whore’s mouth” (101) uncannily reminiscent of a grave-mouth or hell-mouth. The vampire queen possesses both petals and thorns. Her “teeth [are] as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar,” and her “claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler” (94). These lush, sensu- ous, and yet ghastly phallic and yonic images coalesce in “the dark, fanged rose[,]” which the vampire — newly deflowered by her lover, who has consumed her blood — “[plucks] from between [her] thighs” and leaves him “as a souvenir” (107) of their night together. As she depicts “Nosferatu’s sanguinary rosebud” keeping house and taking lives “behind the hedge of spiked flowers,” knowing that “[o]ne kiss […] and only

148 “THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE” one, woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” and hoping for a man to “free [her] from the shadows” (103), Carter not only draws upon the womb/tomb motif common to gothic fiction but also invites us to consider the ways in which the genre’s features might complicate the construction of gender in Sleeping Beauty’s story. At the conclusion of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” Perrault offers a lesson that strikes us as at once peculiarly insipid, given his story’s many rigors and horrors, and amusingly wry: “A brave, rich, handsome husband is a prize well worth waiting for; but no modern woman would think it was worth waiting for a hundred years. The tale of the Sleeping Beauty shows how long engagements make for happy marriages, but young girls these days want so much to be married I do not have the heart to press the moral” (20). Like Perrault’s other morals, this one appears designed more to poke fun at social conventions than to instruct readers, yet it does lead us to consider how Sleeping Beauty’s story might (not) affirm the passivity expected of women in their social and sexual relations with men. Certainly by excising the sexual violence of Basile’s version of the tale — not to mention the now-requisite princely kiss — Perrault adds a patina of gentility to a brutal and sexually charged story, thereby glossing over the uglier aspects of male dominance. But his mother/ogress is nothing if not active and powerful — though, of course, she wields her power only when her son is safely away at war and is immediately rendered impotent upon his timely return. However we interpret his characterizations, Perrault allows women more room for action than Basile does. As “Sun, Moon, and Talia” begins, “wise men” foretell the “great danger” Talia will face. Her doom, though awful and unavoidable, results not from malignity but from predeter- mination, and her fate is in the hands of men. By contrast, in

149 CABINET DES FÉES the first section of Perrault’s tale women fill the stage and specifically feminine attributes and behaviors come to the fore: the wise men become fairy godmothers; the gifts they bestow — beauty, wit, grace, and musical ability — seem designed to attract a husband; and stereotypically feminine shortcomings cloud the future of the princess. The “old fairy” is “deeply affronted because she [has] been forgotten — though it [is] no wonder she [has] been overlooked; this old fairy had hidden herself away in her tower for fifteen years and, since nobody had set eyes on her all that time, they thought she was dead, or had been bewitched” (9). The fairy’s reason for absenting herself from public view might well be vanity — she has, as the text emphasizes through repetition, gotten old. Since pride — perhaps mixed with jealousy of an infant who will grow up to become a beautiful princess — motivates her to punish, it makes sense that vanity would compel her to hide. It is highly suggestive that the old fairy’s isolation both enables and mirrors the young woman’s own seclusion. The Sleeping Beauty story takes women at both ends of their life spans and removes them from sight, as if suggesting that they are significant only during the years when they might marry and bear children. The importance of this phase in a woman’s life is underscored by the fact that the old fairy chooses to strike down the princess only after she has reached maturity and is ready for marriage. As many readers have noted, the fairy’s curse that “in spite of her beauty and accomplishments, the princess [will] prick her finger with a spindle and die of it” (10) is strikingly sexual in nature. Metaphorically, the old fairy dooms the girl to a fatal wedding night. Fortunately, the spell is vitiated and the princess is saved for marriage and childbear- ing by the good fairy, who ensures that “at the end of a hundred years, the son of a king will come” (11) to initiate the young woman into adult sexuality.

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To what extent does Carter’s transgressive retelling of Perrault’s tale reveal and overturn its underlying assumptions about gendered scripts? Sensitive to the multiple possibilities of the Sleeping Beauty story, Carter establishes its familiar male and female roles before using irony to transpose and ultimately blend them. The British soldier is all a prince should be: “blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled” (97), and handsome — in short, “he is a hero” (103). Meanwhile, the vampire queen, while not completely immobile and asleep, is at least a languid “somnambulist” (93) who is “so beautiful she is unnatural” (94). Moreover, she is delicate — a “belle” with “white hands” (94), a “girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth” (100). This man and woman are not what they appear to be, however. He is strong and brave simply because he is naïve, for “he is like the boy in the fairy tale, who does not know how to shudder,” and it is his “lack of imagination [that] gives his heroism to the hero” (104). Although he follows her into her bedroom, unlike Basile’s king he cannot “take criminal advantage of he disordered girl,” whom “he would like to take […] into his arms and protect” (105). In his ironic innocence, he sees her as “very young” (100), as little more than “a child” (100) of “only sixteen or seventeen years old, no more” (101), though she has existed for centuries. She is in fact nothing less than “the hereditary commandant of the army of shadows who camp in the village below her chât- eau,” the “queen of night, queen of terror” (95), a “butcher bird” (102) who “has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey” (104). Yet she is haunted by the notion that change might be possible. She asks herself, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?” (93, 103); and she thinks wistfully of how a “single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” (97). Thus does Carter add another

151 CABINET DES FÉES level of irony to her tale, further complicating its depiction of gender: the soldier wants to protect the vampire, from whom he himself ought to be protected; and yet it seems she is after all the one in danger — from him. As in Basile’s and Perrault’s tales, this danger is prognos- ticated but inexorable. The vampire queen continually “lays out her inevitable Tarot” (94), which “always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution” (95). But immediately prior to her prince’s arrival, the deck is stacked against her: her “waxen fingers […] turn up the card called Les Amoureux. […] [T]he lovely cartomancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love and death” (97). So disturbed is she by the arrival of her fatal suitor that when she sees his face she upsets her card table, and her cards fall to the floor. He “[retrieves] the cards and [shuffles] them carelessly together […]. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He [covers] it up with a happier one — of two lovers, smiling at one another” (101). Her fate literally and figuratively in his hands, he chooses love over death — not realizing that for “a girl who is both death and the maiden” (93) they are one and the same, for “she knows no other consummation than the only one she can offer him” (104). At the moment of ecstasy, his head “will fall back, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm [he] will mistake for that of love and not of death,” as “[t]he bridegroom bleeds upon [her] inverted marriage bed” (105), her “sacrificial altar” (104). In yet another ironic twist, however, it is she and not he who will be sacrificed to love. The vampire queen imagines that prior to bedding and bleeding her suitor she “will assure him, in the very voice of temptation: ‘My clothes have but to fall and you will see before you a succession of mysteries’” (104). Following Basile instead of Perrault, Carter reveals rather than conceals the

152 “THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE” carnal mysteries at the core of the Sleeping Beauty tale: penetration (of a thorny barrier or a hymen); consummation (in a rape, a disenchantment, or a kiss); and reproduction (in the form of two children who either mysteriously appear or are delivered by the entranced princess nine months after her violation, depending upon how discreetly the original Italian is translated). Carter reverses as well as elucidates these mysteries, for it is the woman who longs to penetrate the man, and she rather than he who pursues and seeks to consummate their relationship. Furthermore, while Basile and Perrault have a man marry an ogress, Carter has a vampire marry a woman, for the vampire queen’s father was “Nos- feratu” (95) and her now-“dead mother” (95) a human being. This mixed-marriage motif recurs (reversed yet again) when the vampire draws mortal men into her bedroom while she wears “the only dress she has, her mother’s wedding dress” (96). Transpositions abound, yet ultimately Carter returns to her source material when the vampire queen meets her doom in the form of her would-be protector. A “lace négligé lightly soiled with blood, as it might be from a woman’s menses” (106) deceives the suitor, who believes the blood to be the vampire queen’s when in fact it belongs to her victims. But Sleeping Beauty does bleed in this version of her tale as in the others, for when she drops the dark glasses that shade her unnaturally photosensitive eyes and they shatter on the floor, “she kneels to try to gather the fragments of glass together” and “a sharp sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb” (106). At last she has herself been penetrated, and she reacts with “an awed fascination” as “she watches the bright bead of blood form a drop,” for she “has never seen her own blood before, not her own blood” (106). Prince becomes both predator and nurturer when he “puts his mouth to the wound. He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done” (106). This scene in

153 CABINET DES FÉES which the man applies “the innocent remedies of the nursery” (106) to the vampire queen’s wound is extraordi- nary because it not only transposes gender roles but destroys them, even as the man’s act of kindness destroys the woman — for she has now indeed become a woman, thanks to the “exorcism” (106) he has performed. On the one hand, the man’s nursing-as-suckling renders him the woman’s meta- phoric child; on the other hand, his nursing-as-ministering puts him in her mother’s place. In crafting this virtuosic moment of intertextuality, Carter draws upon Basile’s Sleeping Beauty tale, Renaissance notions of the female body, and classical psychoanalysis. The suitor’s nursing calls to mind Talia’s children, who seek “the nipple, and not finding it, [begin] to suck on Talia’s fingers, and they [suck] so much that the splinter of flax [comes] out,” thereby awakening her to her maternal duties. It also references the ways in which popular and medical texts of the Renaissance found women’s bodies to be “notable for the production of liquids — breast milk, menstrual blood, tears” and “conceptualized all these fluids as related forms of the same essential substance” (Paster 25). Finally, it reminds us of Freud’s observation in The Interpretation of Dreams that the “secretions of the human body […] may be used in dreams interchangeably” (238). This association also underlies Carter’s sly reference to the vampire queen’s infancy as the time “before her milk teeth grew” (95), which leaves us wondering precisely how and upon what this vampire- human hybrid baby fed. As blood, milk, and semen blend, so too do male and female, adult and child. In the womb/tomb of her nursery/boudoir — a place where, like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” she feeds her victims before feeding upon them, serving them “coffee […] and little sugar cakes” immediately prior to “[leading] them to her bedroom” (96) — the vampire

154 “THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE” queen is a ravenous phallic mother who emasculates men, piercing them and reducing them to bloody, “ominous marks […] left on the sheets” (94), traditionally the signifiers of a woman’s lost virginity. This space in which sex becomes as fungible as bodily fluids also blurs the distinctions between childhood and maturity, for it uncannily reminds the soldier “of childhood tales on winter evenings” (98), and he must tell himself “he [is] no child, now” (99). Likewise, the vampire appears as “a child dressing up in her mother’s clothes, perhaps a child putting on the clothes of a dead mother in order to bring her […] to life again” (100), even as the children of Basile’s tale figuratively resurrect their own mother. The vampire’s “white dress” possesses a “carnival air” that “[emphasizes] her unreality” (102), and in Carter’s dreamlike, carnivalesque tale it seems almost anything is possible. Even as she ingeniously fashions a postmodern pastiche by blending Basile’s and Perrault’s versions of the Sleeping Beauty story with elements of the gothic, Carter demonstrates a keen understanding of the reasons why this narrative has continued to fascinate readers of both sexes and all ages. Thus her adaptation, while sensitive to the evolving roles of men and women in our culture, enriches rather than diminishes the text. Because negotiating (or transgressing) barriers is so much at issue in all versions of Sleeping Beauty’s tale, “The Lady of the House of Love” pays appro- priate homage to its textual forebears by cutting through the story’s tangled constructions of gender, age, and sexuality as through thorny thickets and (re)awakening the fertile loveliness hidden away at its center.

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Notes

1To the best of my knowledge, there are only four English- language studies focused on “The Lady of the House of Love.” See Ecaterina Lia Hantiu, “Exploring the Archetype of the Monstrous Woman: Angela Carter’s Lady of the House of Love,” British and American Studies 4 (1999): 41-46; Ana Gabriela Macedo, “Angela Carter’s Fairy-Tales: Carnivalesque Excess and the ‘Laugh of the Medusa,’” Violência e Possessão: Estudos Ingleses Contemporâneos, ed. David Callahan, Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira, and A. D. Barker (Aveiro, Portugal: Universidade de Aveiro, 1998) 107-12; Linda C. Middleton, “A Consummation Devourly to Be Wished: Representations of Anorexia in Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love,’” Constructions and Confrontations: Changing Representations of Women and Feminisms, East and West: Selected Essays, ed. Cristina Bacchilega and Cornelia N. Moore (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1996) 140-49; and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Post-Modern Nexus,” Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modern- ism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1990) 109-23.

Works Cited

Basile, Giambattista. “Sun, Moon, and Talia.” The Penta- meron of Giambattista Basile. Trans. Richard F. Burton. N.p., 1893. Sleeping Beauty: Tales of Aarne-Thompson Type 410. Trans. and ed. D. L. Ashliman. 1998. 2 Jan. 2006 . Carter, Angela. “The Lady of the House of Love.” “The Bloody Chamber” and Other Stories. 1979. New York: Penguin, 1980. 93-108.

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Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. Ed. Stephen Wilson. Wordsworth Classics of World Literature. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997. Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. The Classic Fairy Tales. 1974. New York: OUP, 1980. G. K. Paster. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disci- plines of Shames in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Perrault, Charles. “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” Comp. and trans. Angela Carter. 1982. New York: Shocken Books, 1984. 9-20.

Jamil Mustafa completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, “Mapping the Late-Victorian Subject: Psychology, Cartography, and the Gothic Novel,” examines links among imperialism, psychological theory, and literature in late-nineteenth-century British culture. Dr. Mustafa has taught courses in composition and literature at the Univer- sity of Chicago, Harold Washington University, Columbia College, and Loyola University. He is an associate professor at Lewis University, currently teaching abroad as a visiting professor at Bethlehem University.

157 From Anxious Canons to Hysterical Texts: A Theory of Literary Revision

Jennifer Banash

Revision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction . . . an act of survival — Adrienne Rich

Patriarchal Poetry reheard. — Gertrude Stein

A Cinderella Story

Once upon a time, the oral tradition in France reigned supreme. Fairy tales were passed down by word of mouth in furtive whispers from governesses to children, priests to congregations, mothers to sons. They were remembered, as Jack Zipes argues in When Dreams Came True: Classic Fairy Tales and Their Tradition, “as talk,” part of the popular discourse of the day. However, Zipes is quick to point out that “gradually, this talk was elevated, cultivated, and made acceptable so that it could enter into the French salons by the middle of the seventeenth century” (31). It is important to remember that fairy tales or folktales were originally largely a woman’s genre. Joyce Carol Oates explains in her essay “In Olden Times. When Wishing Was Having . . . Classic and Contemporary Fairy Tales” that “the fairy tale,

158 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS as a literary/cultural genre, has traditionally been associated with women; and women have, at different times and in distinctly different ways, impressed upon these tales the nature of their deepest fantasies” (98). However, in a world of printed text and bound books, the transition from the oral tradition to the literary fairy tale was coordinated by the proper name of a man. By the end of the 1690’s, fairy tales were so popular that both men and women began writing them down and publishing them, but it is in the work of Charles Perrault that the figure of the modern author emerges most forcefully. Perrault, a lawyer by trade, often frequented the salons of influential writers of contes, such as the salon of his niece, Mme. L’Héritier. His major work on folktales soon followed, with literary versions of such classic tales as “La Belle au Bois Dormant,” and “Le Barbe Bleue.” As a result, Per- rault’s graceful and elegant literary fairy tales came to supplant the oral tradition of the time. Rather than continu- ing and further developing an anonymous oral tradition, women now read the authorized versions of these classic tales to their children. As a result, Perrault’s tales were celebrated long after his death in 1703, read in the hushed quiet at bedtime, the well-worn pages creased and turning in the dim, yellow glow of the lamp-light. For years, his kingdom remained largely unchallenged, suspended in that golden haze of fairy-dust, surrounded by a nighttime dream-world of castles, gilded chambers, and creeping mists. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, revisionist wolves crept into the forest. Indeed, authors such as Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Anne Sexton, Angela Carter and others have made careers out of the revision of classic fairy tales. Thus, I would like to turn to fairy tales as a way to engage with the power and problems of literary revisions. Although few reader are conscious of their own emotional

159 CABINET DES FÉES investments in any particular version of these classic texts, works by these revisionist authors often prompt radical reactions. The viscerally troubling practice of revision forces readers to confront their unconscious assumptions about the power and place of canonical works of genius, and the violence and pleasures of powerful revisions. In the following pages, I will offer a psychoanalytic account of revision as a critique and development of the work of Harold Bloom. I will attempt to link Bloom’s anxiety to its sister concept, traumatic hysteria. Unlike adaptations such as Disney’s Cinderella, which do not radically revise the details of Perrault’s narrative, Tanith Lee’s contemporary short story “When the Clock Strikes” self-consciously transforms the narrative elements that define the Cinderella of Disney and Perrault. In Red as Blood, or, Tales from the Sisters Grimmer, Lee revises what has become the canon of classic fairy tales: Perrault’s “Cendrillon” and “La Belle au Bois Dormant.” to de Beaumont’s “La Belle et le bête, and Grimm’s “Little Red-Cap.” Lee’s revision of Perrault’s “Cendrillon” is both familiar and deeply de-familiarizing. All the usual elements of the story are present: the coach, the prince, the beautiful young girl grieving for her dead mother, the dress, and the fancy ball. However, Lee is not writing an adaptation, but a radical revision — a point underscored by the opening of pages of the story, which begins in an abandoned ballroom in a nameless, decimated city:

Yes, the great ballroom is filled only with dust now. The slender columns of white marble and the slender columns of rose-red marble are woven together by cobwebs. The vivid frescoes, on which the duke’s treasury spent so much, are dimmed by the dust; the faces of the painted goddesses look gray. And the velvet curtains — touch them, they will crumble.

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Two hundred years, now, since anyone danced in this place on the sea-green floor in the candle-gleam. Two hundred years since that wonderful clock struck for the very last time. (290)

Immediately, the reader is stranded in a place of neglect and decay. Instead of the lurid Technicolor Disney set, with its allusion to Perrault’s Grand Siècle sumptuousness, Lee gives us cobwebs and neglect. The vivid colors of the elaborate frescoes have become lifeless and dull — particularly the graying visages of the “painted goddesses” that echo ashen face of a very different Cinderella. Lee skillfully draws our attention to the fact that this is on old narrative which has been told repeatedly. The narrator of the story acts as guide and historian for a young tourist: “However, as you have some while to wait for your carriage, I will recount the tale, if you wish” (290). The narrator thus becomes a substitute for the figure of the author, and the tourist takes the place of the reader. Their dialogue composes a frame-tale which mediates the meaning of the revision. Throughout the story the narrator constantly suggests that the reader is profoundly uncomfortable with this version. Because of the use of the second person the reader is clearly implicated as well: “Possibly you have been told the story? No? Oh, but I am certain that you have heard it, in another form, perhaps” (290). There exists an uneasiness between the narrator and the tourist — the narrator seems overly concerned with the tourist’s reactions to the story, and even becomes defensive: “I hazard you have begun to recognize the story by now. I see you suppose I tell it wrongly” (297). This uneasiness is particularly fraught because it cannot be resolved in the text itself. After all, those who are faithful to their own favored version of classic fairy tales such as “Cendrillon” will not be receptive to radical

161 CABINET DES FÉES changes of “their” text. In short, there is no chance of the narrator and tourist ever agreeing on the trajectory of the narrative. It is interesting to note that the dialogue is completely one-sided, as the narrator consistently baits the tourist with questions that s/he is unable, or unwilling to answer. It is also curious to note that these eruptions often happen when the text is being radically and violently revised. Our heroine in this complicated landscape is anything but simple or good. In Lee’s revision, the protagonist, Ashella, is not only evil incarnate but a card-carrying satanist: “At six or seven, the child had been lisping the satanic rite along with her mother. At fourteen, you may imagine, the girl was well-versed in the black arts” (292). Instead of the domestic goddess we are expecting, Lee presents readers with her polar opposite, an archetypal bad girl whose driving force is not love or escape, but to avenge her mother’s death. This revenge fantasy now focuses on the role of class and inheritance. Rather than trying to find Prince Charming, the story becomes a catalogue of Ashella’s attempts to destroy the kingdom that robbed her of her birthright. Thus, instead of the good girl transforming into the beautiful princess, Lee’s narrative presents a series of scenes which detail Ashella’s growth as a fearsome sorceress developing her powers. That the story is entitled “When the Clock Strikes” is no surprise, as the text is obsessed with the passage of time. The key symbol is the obligatory clock with its fatal stroke-of- midnight. However, in this version, it becomes a metaphor for the life-cycle and a harbinger of death: “The twelfth figure: do you recognize him? It is Death” (290). The clock marks the difference between the events of the narrative and their re-telling two hundred years later. Indeed, by the end of the story the clock is so important that the narrator becomes obsessed with it, “I shall stay here in the ballroom,

162 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS where you came on me. I have often paused here through the years. It is the clock. It has a certain — what shall I call it? — power to draw me back” (305). The clock represents revision in the narrative, as well as the reader’s hope that the story will, despite its obvious flaws, remain the same — after all, the clock is broken. In this revision, the broken clock becomes an image of how “Cendrillon” has itself stopped time — becoming the version of this story. Ashella returns to the clock, under its sign giving us a new and very different stroke-of-midnight transformation. In the climatic moment, Ashella refuses the prince’s hand. “‘If it were only so simple,’ said Ashella, smiling, smiling. ‘But the debt is too cruel. Justice requires a harsher payment’” (303). At the stroke of midnight, Ashella transforms into the figure of Death himself, her once-beautiful form now a mass of gleaming bones draped in black rags: “At the eleventh stroke he beheld a thing in a black, ragged cowl and robe. It grinned at him. It was all grin below a triangle of sockets of nose and eyes. At the twelfth stroke, the prince saw Death and knew him” (303). The unveiled figure of Ashella/Death disappears immediately after pointing a long, bony finger at the prince, cursing him: “‘I curse you in my mother’s name . . . I curse you in my own name . . . And in the name of my Master, who rules the world’” (303). In this crucial moment, the mode is again metafictional, and Ashella makes clear the stakes and power of revision. She offers three very particular curses. In the first, she invokes the name of her own mother — a harkening back to her own mother as the unacknowledged “author” of the text of her revenge: “Now all this while she [Ashella’s mother] had not been toiling alone. She had one helper. It was her own daughter, a maid of fourteen, that she had recruited to her service nearly a soon as the infant could walk” (292). Ashella is thus connected to the textual body of her mother, but has her

163 CABINET DES FÉES own will as well. Though her mother provides her ground and origin, this is, after all, to be Ashella’s revenge. But, there is a final troubling name. Ashella calls upon her “Master, who rules the world.” In the plot, this would seem to be Satan, but as a reflection on revision it hints at the masculine proper name of authorship. Is that master-name not only the Satan of the story, but perhaps the Satan of Perrault himself? At this crucial point, the narrator interjects, taking us back to the frame-tale: “Shall I finish the story, or would you rather I did not? It is not the ending you are familiar with. Yes, I perceive you understand that now” (303). The tourist’s implied discomfort with this version highlights the anxieties informing revision, heightening the metafictional stakes. After all, the narrator is clearly analogous not only to Ashella, but Tanith Lee herself, and thus we cannot help but identify with the “you,” making “us” the tourist/reader. As much as this short story is a playful revision of Perrault, it is more seriously a meditation on the complicated relationship between a classic work of literature, the later revision, and the audience.

Hysterical Revision

Reading a radical revision such as Lee’s begs a number of troubling and interesting questions. Why is such a revision is necessary? Is this really revision at all, or merely an adaptation? Why are certain texts, such as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Du Maurier’s Rebecca constantly revised, while other texts remain untouched? Why are certain literary works or genres more susceptible to revision than others? Furthermore, what is the difference between revision and adaptation, and why should we care? I want to begin to answer these complex questions by making a clear distinction

164 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS between two practices, adaptation and revision. Although there are many ways in which critics define such practices, I argue that adaptation attempts a faithful retelling of the original text. It strives to keep the spirit of the original version intact, its goal a perfect translation. For example, the 1932 film version of Bronte’s Jane Eyre utilizes close-ups of the original novel to underscore the passage of time. As the camera zooms in on the text, the audience hears a voiceover, the narrator reading the book aloud. Thus, the spirit of the novel is literally inserted into the film. The presence of the novel is a visual testament to the film’s faithfulness to Bronte’s book. Whatever changes, transformations, or failings necessarily attend any reiteration of a narrative, and certainly the film makes changes to Bronte’s novel, there is no critical force at work. What makes an adaptation an act of good faith is the attempt to represent the original, to provide the audience an experience of the same. In part, this is why so many adaptations are so cautiously dreadful and dull. One need only think of the turgid, fawning Merchant-Ivory adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels to underscore this point. If adaptation is an attempt to represent and reiterate the original, revision is a critical intervention. Revision alters the material of the original in such a way that the reader is forced to literally see it anew — as a re-vision of the original text. Unlike adaptation, revision self-consciously changes elements of the original, and, more importantly, makes no apologies for doing so. Unlike the failings of an adaptation, the differences in revision carry critical force. Revision alters any number of elements, from subtle shifts in perspective and tone to wholesale transformations of narrative, charac- terization, setting, time period, gender and more. Above all, these changes are not polite. Revision does not tip-toe around canonical texts — one of the main failings of adaptation.

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Rather it puts its hands on the original and pushes it around — and often the reader too. Thus, instead of a good-faith celebration, revision changes the significance of the original. Critical revisions bring out the darker work of texts, high- lighting the ideologies that coordinate these narratives, especially ideologies of power. Thus race, gender, and class are all frequent targets in critical revision, indicting the original, and making it difficult to ever see it in the same way again. When Tanith Lee revises “Cendrillon,” she changes both the narrative and the perspective of the story. Lee’s revision highlights the patriarchal assumptions about gender and sexuality that inform the classic versions of the tale and exchanges those assumptions for a violent revenge fantasy that willingly destroys the happily ever after. While there are a myriad of ways to critically account for revision, I believe that psychoanalysis offers a strong and compelling explanation. Literary revisions depend on the play of perspectives, suggest connections to anxiety, neurosis, and repetition compulsion. Indeed, many revisions are arguably coordinated by Oedipal dynamics, the authoritarian parent-text and the upstart revision. Indeed, the role of telling a counter story, of taking a previous narrative and rereading it is central to Harold Bloom’s theory of cannon formation in the work of the Romantic poets, and it is his theory in The Anxiety of Influence to which I will now turn. Bloom provides a useful account of the psychodynamics of revision, but one which will itself demand revision to account for something besides the products of genius. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom argues that poetic history is indistinguishable from poetic influence since “strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (5). Bloom divides all of literature into categories of “strong” and “weak” poets, and argues that the formation of canons stems from

166 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS misreading, or misprision, where a poet “swerves” away from his predecessor in order to write a “corrective” poem of his own, “which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poet moves” (14). Bloom asserts that this misreading automatically assumes that the precursor did not go far enough. Thus, the “strong” poet seeks to correct the predecessor’s failings through their own work. This correction is really an act of completion, as the text is viewed by the younger poet as incomplete, or lacking in some way. Bloom offers a concise formulation of this cycle:

Poetic influence — when it involves two strong, authen- tic poets, — always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist. (Bloom’s italics 30)

Although Bloom isn’t specifically using the language of fathers and sons, clearly there is an Oedipal dynamic at work. This dynamic is set up by the strong, original “father” text, which for Bloom, represents what the “son” (the other poet) must rebel against. This is a theory of poetic history that is mired not only in caricatures of masculinity, but in the fraught sexual politics of the Oedipal dynamic. Bloom characterizes the creation of the son as “willful,” “perverse,” and the resulting text as “distorted.” However, Bloom is quick to point out that such perverse tactics are necessary to continue and enrich the modern poetic tradition.

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In their major work, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagina- tion, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar use Bloom as a hostile witness to explain the very problems that literary history and theories of authorship present to women writers. However, from my perspective, they are still using the trope of anxiety to think through the experience of female authorship. Like Bloom, Gilbert and Gubar discuss gender in essential terms, and thus they are quick to reproduce his categories. Like Bloom, they are also seeking recognizably “strong” authors, and such concede to Bloom too much critical power. On both counts, I want to offer a very different account of how Bloom might provide a very different way to think through the very different practice of revision, in which the notion of the “strong” artist is not so clear, and in which both essential accounts of gender, and even the key term “anxiety” itself must be rethought. Though Gilbert and Gubar highlight the gender politics of anxiety, Bloom himself avoids the gendered emphasis of the Oedipal complex with the more euphemistic Freudian- ism — “family romance”: “Most poets — like most men — suffer some version of the family romance as they struggle to define their most advantageous relation to their precursor and their Muse. The strong poet — like the Hegelian great man — is both hero of poetic history and victim of it” (62). This formulation is, at best, oddly evasive. Clearly the precursor stands for the father, and the Muse assumes the role of the mother. The “anxiety” of influence is the anxiety of castration. However, Bloom displaces the key metaphor, exchanging “castration” for “flooding,” thus conflating the violence associated with the father’s jealous protection of his rights to reproduce with the pre-oedipal stage in which the infant cannot differentiate between the mother’s body and its own. The weak poet is figured as the infantilized reader,

168 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS unable to reproduce: “The anxiety of influence is an anxiety in expectation of being flooded.” (57). Rather than seeing themselves in conflict with a father- rival, the child instead attempts to merge with the mother’s body and her desire. Since flooding reflects a relationship of subordination, it is no wonder that Bloom views such a relationship as potentially dangerous. After all, the child in complete subordination, able only to realize the mother’s desires, seems much like Bloom’s account of the passive reader. Bloom’s theory is a persuasive one, and it offers concrete results in a powerful position from which to read within the canon. It uses psychoanalysis to brilliantly account for the struggles of poets and the production of texts, but the cost is much like the cost of psychoanalysis itself — the uncritical reproduction of patriarchal privilege. Therefore, in place of Bloom’s anxious canon, I would like to offer a hysterical revision. In part, Gilbert and Gubar anticipate this move in their critique of Bloom. However, their own work continues through the structure of anxiety. For them, the hysterical woman remains just another figure of the madwoman. Indeed, they associate hysteria with the literal and pernicious diseases of women: “such diseases of maladjustment to the physical and social environment as anorexia and agoraphobia did and do strike a disproportionate number of women” (53), and they go on to see hysteria as a disease of female subjugation to patriarchal socialization. However, I will argue that Gilbert and Gubar have missed an opportunity to revise and reengage both Bloom and Freud through the trope of hysteria, and that the concept of hysteria will allow us to offer both a better account of the structure of revision and a more nuanced use of the metaphors of gender. Thus, I will exchange Bloom’s trope of anxiety by developing Freud’s earlier notion of hysteria. Accounting for revision through hysteria, I will utilize Bloom’s idea of mispri-

169 CABINET DES FÉES sion, but swerve away. I am exchanging castrating fathers and anxious sons for hysterical daughters and polymorphous mothers. In part, I want to do this to avoid just what Gilbert and Gubar identify as the patriarchal side of Bloom. Revisionists are not interested in becoming independent, strong poets. Indeed, they seek to merge with the precursor text, thus reverting to the pre-oedipal stage and becoming one with the mother’s own textual body; as Bloom might say, they are flooded. Much like Bloom’s account of castration anxiety, this merging is a violent, disruptive event. Without the father to guarantee meaning, the revisionist can engage in a polymorphous and endless play of difference which we will name traumatic hysteria. The revisionist assumes the place of the unruly daughter, while the precursor text acts as the mother’s body. In essence, I mean to revise Bloom, to take his compelling account and rewrite it hysterically. To exchange anxiety for hysteria, it is necessary to return to Freud’s early work.

What is Hysteria?

Although Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the text in which Freud refines and re-defines his own position on trauma, it is in Studies on Hysteria, Freud’s first published book, that his work on trauma originates. Besides the inclusion of invalu- able case studies such as “Fraulein Anna O.” and “Miss Lucy R.,” Studies on Hysteria, which Freud wrote jointly with Josef Breuer, establishes several fundamental points in the study of psychoanalysis. It is the first recorded explanation of Breuer’s theory of a “talking cure,” and a description of Freud’s own success (and failures) with this method for dispelling traumatic neurosis. Studies also explains the importance of mastering the transference for the analyst, and stresses the idea that traumatic neurosis must be traced back

170 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS to the first provoking cause in order to be completely eradicated. More importantly, Studies reminds us that the concept of hysteria, if not psychoanalysis altogether, began with women: “Freud invented psychoanalysis between 1895 and 1900 on the basis of clinical experience with hysterical patients, nearly all of them women” (3). Hysteria, as Wil- liams explains, was characterized by a range of multifaceted bodily symptoms which complicated physicians understanding of the condition immensely, as these bodily symptoms seemed to be physical in origin. A patient could suffer from any number of physical symptoms, including but not limited to “uncontrollable fits, contortions, paralyses, pain, muscular rigidity, yet with no identifiable physical reason for these ostensibly somatic signs of unrest” (3). By the nineteenth- century, after completing work on hysteria at Salpêtrière, Freud ascertained that these seemingly random collections of physical symptoms were a significant medical discovery. As a result, hysteria was diagnosed as not a single physical affliction, but as a range of “possible neurotic forms” (5). As Freud himself argues in Studies on Hysteria:

Our investigations reveal, for many, if not for most, hysterical symptoms, precipitating causes which can only be described as psychical traumas. Any experience which calls up distressing affects — such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain — may operate as a trauma of this kind; and whether it in fact does so depends naturally enough on the susceptibility of the person affected. (6)

Here, Freud describes a significant connection between trauma and hysteria. For Freud, trauma itself acts akin to an infection, a foreign element which enters the susceptible

171 CABINET DES FÉES body, creating its own independent existence and lingering long after the original traumatic event has passed. This definition of trauma also includes experiences which are not solely physical, and can include conditions such as shame and anxiety. However, it is important to note that it is the memory of a traumatic event, a recapitulation of the original episode, which is at work in hysterical neurosis — not the original instance of trauma. As Ellie Ragland points out “the traumatic event does not entirely disappear. It insists. A literal piece of it — a bit of the real, Lacan will say — continues to return into language and conscious life” (2). Ragland accurately describes Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the symbolic and the real. For Lacan, what is repressed in the real will always return once again through the symbolic order of language. For Freud, the connection between trauma and hysteria was clear enough to christen the condition “traumatic hysteria”: “Observations such as these seem to us to establish an analogy between the pathogenesis of common hysteria and that of traumatic neurosis, and to justify an extension of the concept of traumatic hysteria” (Freud’s italics 5). In his formulation of traumatic hysteria, Freud unites what will later become two separate conditions. Unlike the later physical shock of a traumatic neurosis, for Freud, hysteria is a much more flexible condition, arising from any number of causes. Whereas trauma is largely described as an external condition in later Freud, (i.e. the railway disaster, war, etc), hysteria does not depend on overwhelming external forces. As such, hysteria offers a more flexible way to account for literary revision, as it does not depend on an etiology of external shocks. For Freud, as well as many contemporary psychoanalytic critics, trauma is only successfully abreacted or worked through, in language. “The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an

172 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS adequate reaction — as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively” (10). Freud exchanges action for language, and the importance of repetition and narrative in the talking cure becomes clear. He goes on to assert that “Each individual hysterical symptom immediately and perma- nently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing the accompanying affect, and when the patient had described the event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words.” (Freud’s italics 6) For the early Freud, creating a narrative of the original event resolves the trauma. Significantly, there is a tremendous ambiguity about the relation between this second curative narrative and the original event. Freud refers to the trauma as a “reminiscence,” suggesting that it is less the actual event than the story of that event which the patient tells herself over and over. The meaning of the event is then resolved by creating a second narrative that discharges the energy of these reminiscences. In part, that second narrative thus gives meaning and sense to that first, disturbing story. Freud suggests a structure of two texts: the traumatic event, which becomes an endlessly repeated reminiscence, and the secondary talking cure. The relationship between these two texts has much in common with Bloom’s theory of revision, but some significant differences as well. Bloom works within a model of the family romance, an Oedipal struggle between the precursor and the ephebe, and this structure informs Bloom’s conception of revision, a family matter, intimately caught up in the reproduction and development of lineage. However, what if we shifted Bloom’s emphasis on family romance, and instead concentrated on the power of the precursor text as an experience prompting hysteria instead of anxiety? In part, this would suggest why cultures at large, or

173 CABINET DES FÉES sometimes individual readers, become obsessed with a text. The endless iterations of a canonical text are like the reminiscences that haunt the victim of a trauma. Only through the work of the talking cure can those reminiscences be worked through. The danger, of course, would be to reduce the process of literary revision to the structure of trauma itself, and while the two have much in common, they are also distinct in crucial ways. It is for this reason that I will argue for a return to the earlier Freud, and the much more literary account of hysteria he provides.

Applied Hysteria: Working Through Revision

I would like to end by returning to Tanith Lee’s “When the Clock Strikes,” and re-reading it through the lens of hysterical revision. With the canon’s emphasis on the idea of “great authors,” “genius,” and “great works of literature,” revision is difficult to account for. Bloom suggests that the revisionism of the anxiety of influence is the founding moment of a new “great work,” and that anything else leaves the upstart author no better than a passive reader. Indeed, there seems to be something almost distasteful about the entire category of revision, more often than not suggesting a kind of parasitical relationship between the genius and the reviser, who, unable to offer a substantial enough statement of her own imagination, must instead go on to cannibalize greater talents. However, as I have been arguing above, the desires and stakes of revision are quite different. Unlike the would-be genius, the revisionist seeks to be flooded by the original text, to merge with it. However, this is an emphatically active process in which the meaning of the parent text is ultimately transformed. Optimistically, to write as a revisionist is to deny genius and celebrate the collaborative work of

174 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS meaning. However, the very choice of texts suggests the cultural power that these parent texts provide, and the deep and troubling cathexis of the upstart revisers. To revise is to both love and hate, and if a merging with the parent text is the moment of love, the second moment is that of hysterical symptoms in which the parent text is made to stutter, repeat, gasp, and shriek, as the revision merges with it. The revision is thus not an original work of genius, but a complex repetition with a critical difference I name hysteria. Returning to “When the Clock Strikes,” it is clear that Tanith Lee is uninterested in occupying the space of Bloom’s ephebe. Unlike the romantic ideology of authorship which believes in individual genius and the cultivation of a radically idiosyncratic and personal voice, Lee’s work with classic fairy tales and the styles of genre fiction, abandons these dominant conventions. Instead of developing a personal style that would be immediately recognizable (such as Woolf’s fragmentation, or Lawrence’s long sentence), Lee speaks in a pastiche of style:

Those who usurped the city were villains and not merely that, but fools. Within a year, external enemies were at the gates. A year more, and he city had been sacked, half burned out, ruined. The manner in which you find it now is somewhat better than it was then. And it is not now anything for a man to be proud of. As you were quick to note, many here earn a miserable existence by conducting visitors about the streets, the palace, showing them the dregs of the city’s past. (305)

In this passage, Lee is clearly using the traditions of the gothic to describe the half burned out city. She emphasizes the ruined architecture, the destabilized social order, and the

175 CABINET DES FÉES earlier trauma, which are utterly predictable gothic elements. The voice itself is unremarkable, and does not provide the experience of an unmistakable subjectivity so important to the great works of Romanticism. Read through those conventions, a critic would certainly deem Lee a failure. In part, I want to suggest that she is simply playing a different game. The stakes here are not the unique voice, but the poetics of hysterical revision. For Bloom, much like later psychoanalytic critics that emphasize trauma, powerful precursor texts provoke intense reactions, and these result in a new text of mastery. Indeed for Bloom, this new text is so powerful that it blots out the original and becomes itself a precursor text. Conversely, while Bloom emphasizes mastery, I would argue that hysteria invokes an open-ended process of engagement. However, for both Bloom and myself, the author misreads the precursor text, seeing within it missing pieces of text, or holes to be filled. Bloom however, values only the unique voice of genius that seeks to repress and replace the precursor text. Hysterical revision, I would argue, is instead an engagement with the precursor text. Rather than repressing or replacing the precursor, the revision works through it in the open. One does not need extensive critical training to discover that Lee is working through Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon.” Thus the ornate clock, the carriage, and other details unique to Perrault are all here, but there significance has been transformed. It is as if revision synthesizes Bloom’s creative and critical moments. On the one hand, a precursor text provides the material for a misreading, but on the other hand, there is no need for a critic to unearth that precursor text, for revision is always a deeply critical project. Women have always been at the center of hysteria. Indeed, as I have mentioned previously, hysterics were first diagnosed by physicians as suffering from a diseased or

176 FROM ANXIOUS CANONS TO HYSTERICAL TEXTS malformed womb which manifested disturbing and irrational behaviors. In the midst of ordinary everyday experience, the hysterical woman would break the decorum of social conventions, crying out, screaming, even physically attacking herself or others. While male scientists decided this was the failure of the woman to fulfill her role in reproduction, theorists such as Susan Suleiman have suggested that these hysterical women were in fact reacting to the claustrophobic social norms to which they were subject. This is much like the objections to revision that Bloom and other apologists for the romantic ideal of authorship lodge against revisionists. After all, isn’t the real problem with a writer like Tanith Lee is that she is unable to produce an original work? Is not her revision a symptom of a fatal disease affecting her reproductive capacities? Further, just as Suleiman suggests that the irrational and hysterical woman served as a muse for the poets of Surrealism, allowing them to articulate a critique of the pernicious and enforced rationality of everyday life, so the hysterical revisions are both symptom and cure for the influence and repressive functions of canonical and deeply influential popular works of literature. Hysteria thus provides a new and complex metaphor to understand a literary practice that is too often devalued, precisely for its close association with both the literal and figurative feminine. Lee’s text performs the symptoms of hysteria, lashing out irrationally, descending into obscenity. Enacting a return of the repressed, the significance of the precursor text is challenged and fundamentally changed. The revision offers a new textual body, comprised of both the original and the secondary addition of the hysterical author. This hysteria is, in fact, infectious. Put in touch with their own unconscious anger and emotional investments, readers themselves have a touch of hysteria. This is the inverse of anxiety. Instead of a hierarchal appeal to genius, the process of hysterical revision

177 CABINET DES FÉES invites the reader into the precursor text. Rather than something to be overcome or passively submitted to, hysterical revision breaks this dialectic, offering both the flood of a traumatic event and the invitation to work through it, though this invitation is for an interminable analysis. Because hysteria refuses closure, there is no final cure: only another symptom and another opportunity to work through it again.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. London: Oxford UP, 1973. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton UP, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. by James Strachey. New York: Norton & Company, 1961. _____. Studies on Hysteria. Trans. by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. 2000. _____. Dora: An Analysis of a Case History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Lee, Tanith. “When the Clock Strikes.” Red as Blood, or, Tales from the Sisters Grimmer. New York: Daw Books, 1983.

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Oates, Joyce Carol. “In Olden Times, When Wishing Was Having: Classic and Contemporary Fairy Tales.” The Kenyon Review. 19:3-4 (summer/fall 1997): 98-120. Perrault, Charles. Perrault: Contes. Ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Ragland, Ellie. “The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort Da! Paradigm” Postmodern Culture. 11.2, 2001. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein: Women Madness and Narrative.” Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature. Ed by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. New York: Methum & Co, 1987. Kali Tal. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Williams, Linda Ruth. “Freud, Hysteria and ‘the Art of Interpretation.’” Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Wittenberg, David . Philosophy, Revision, Critique : Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2001. Zipes, Jack. Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales. New York: New American Library, 1989. _____. When Dreams Come True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Jennifer Banash is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa. Her first novel, Hollywoodland: An American Fairy Tale, is available now from Impetus Press. She lives, works, and writes in Iowa City, Iowa.

180 About the Editrices

Helen Pilinovsky (Articles Editor) is a folklore scholar who is currently pursuing doctoral studies at Columbia University in the department of English and Comparative Literature. She has had articles published at the Endicott Studio website and in Realms of Fantasy magazine, and has had reviews placed in Marvels & Tales: The Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, and in the New York Review of Science Fiction. She has guest edited issues of Extrapolation and The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and is now completing her dissertation on the translation and acculturation of the fairy tale.

Erzebet Barthold-YellowBoy (Fiction Editor) is a writer, bookbinder and artist. Her short stories have appeared in Elysian Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and are forthcoming in Jabberwocky 2 and other places. In 2001 she founded Papaveria Press, a private press specializing in fairy tales and fantastic visions. When she is not writing or binding books, she plays with bones. Using natural elements to reshape and revisit myth and folktales, each of her bone panels includes a small poem or microtale on the back. A sampling of her work can be seen at http://www.erzebet.com.