Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (35 page)

Six days out of seven, Paul worked at a linen factory on Bedford Street, and he came home soaked to the skin from the wet spinning rooms. It was my job to take his clothes from him and drape them out the window to dry for morning. He would scrub his skin dry with a cloth and sit in his nightshirt by the hearth until he felt human again.

He would have a bite to eat, and then I would watch with envy as he painstakingly practiced the rolling clerk’s hand, replicating as closely as he could the elegant script of the copybook he had bought. Reading and writing didn’t come easy to him, but we could both see that they would in time. For me, the letters seemed to swim so that they traded places, the words as unreliable as a cross-eyed thief. I couldn’t look at them very long without feeling that old spark of temper, and so I watched my brother copy the letters night by night, sweating as he tamed them to his hand and made their curves smooth and sleek. He meant to look for work as a clerk when he mastered them, and then he would never need to smell the factory’s muddy, pulpy reek again.

Paul would work as long as he could, and then he would read from the paper that was passed around the rooming house, stumbling over some words but getting smoother every day.

That night, as he climbed into the single bed, I couldn’t hold the question back.

“Do you think there was something to what he said?” I asked.

Paul looked at me quizzically as he slid under the covers.

“Who said?”

“Michael Cleary, that that was a changeling he burned and his Bridget would come back on a gray horse.”

Paul paused for a long moment, and I could see it warring on his face. We were raised to call out a warning to the fairies when we threw out the wash water, but we had lived in Belfast for the past four years, since he was 15 and I was 11, come up from the country and terrified of everything from the factories belching smoke to the mass of people who surrounded us. People in Belfast had less use for the fairies than they had for the French, and they had no use for the French.

“Fairy or not,” he said finally, “burning to death’s a bad business, isn’t it, Ned?”

When my brother slept, I slipped out the door, taking the big key off its hook and locking it securely behind me. He didn’t like for me to roam through the night, but as he had told me the first night we spent in Belfast, tucked into a pew at a boarding house that didn’t even let you lie down, there was nothing he could do to stop me.

I knew the Belfast streets better by night than I did by day, and even if it was a city that spun around the factory whistles, there was life here after the darkness filled the streets.

It was a working town, not like London where we had heard that there was a musical hall for every night of the week, but there were still a few little places where you could see acrobats, mystics with snakes in their baskets, and the odd comic singer. One that I passed was just now emptying people into the street, causing a brief crush that made me anxious and nervy.

One couple, baby in arms, started at me and hurried away, and I winced. Sometimes I could look a fright when I wasn’t paying attention, and I straightened up and ran a hurried hand through my hair to do a little better.

Distracted, I looked at the posters plastered to the theater’s walls. They featured pretty young women, and a pair of boys who probably couldn’t scratch together the cash to go in were standing close. The posters made them laugh and gesture, shaping fat bottoms and round bosoms with their hands, pretending to faint and paw, but there was something about the pictures that broke my heart. Those girls with the shape of their legs so clear, and the sweep of their dresses down to the very line of their nipples, they made me
want
so much that I was nearly sick, and I had to turn away.

I walked faster, as if I could outrun it, but in Bridget Cleary’s fate, I could hear an echo of my own. I had a name for this wanting now, and the terror of it was twisting me up. I wondered where my parents’ son really was, because despite what they had called me and despite how my face looked like Paul’s, with its short nose and round blue eyes, I wasn’t Ned. I wasn’t
human
.

For the first time in months, the shadows of Belfast looked long and grasping rather than comforting, and I realized that I was practically running. That was a good way to get clopped about the head by a policeman, and so I made myself slow down.

As I walked I found myself thinking about the fairy forts that hid in the hills. Someone once tried to tell us that they were abandoned settlements of the old people who lived in Ireland long before, and it had made us all laugh. But before our people, and his old people, there were people before that too, weren’t there?

My mother taught us about the fairies, and about how a bit of bread and a bit of salt in our pockets would keep us safe while we roamed, and how a small saucer of milk on the doorstep could buy some luck in a lean season. She taught it to us the same way that she taught us to sweep and to tell good eggs from bad, and we accepted it all as one and the same.

I was walking faster again, and I made myself slow down again.

I knew one man in Clonmel who had gone out into the fields and chased after a golden spark all night. In the morning, his bare feet were cut to ribbons on the quarry stones, and whether he was chasing a golden spark, a golden girl, or the lights at the bottom of a bottle, it was only by good luck and grace that he hadn’t broken his neck.

I winged my shoulder on a man rushing by, and he spun me around with the force of it. For a moment, in the light of his lantern, I could see just the sharp planes of his face, no softness about it, and I had to stop myself from screaming because it looked so strange.

There was another girl I knew from the village, a girl about Paul’s age. She and I had hated each other round and round, the way that two strange people will. It’s like there is not enough love in the world to go around, and if you’re odd, you have to fight for what you can get. She ran out on her folks one night, and they never saw her again, even though her family put notices in the paper for weeks after, telling her she could come home no matter what she found on the moors. Most people thought that she had taken off after a bad man or perhaps got done in by the bandits that haunt the roads, but her brother told me that they had found her dress folded up on a stump in the forest, as neat as it would be on her bed at home, and her shoes set next to it and filled with flowers.

The Belfast night was brighter than it should be. The moon was already set, but the stars, though dimmer than what I knew in Clonmel, were dropped like sparks on the sky. That was the wrong thing to think, because I imagined that like sparks, they would go out, leaving the heavens as cold as a dead hearth. Then I thought about them not going out, but being snuffed, one after another, and that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I was running again, and the streets looked strange and dark to me. The thought struck me that it wasn’t Belfast I was in at all, and that only made me run faster. The streets were crooked where I thought they were straight, and when I dashed by the window of a milliner’s shop, I thought the wooden heads turned to follow my progress.

My breath was coming in dragonish plumes out of my mouth, and though I was dripping sweat, I knew how cold it was. It was almost spring, but people could die in the cold of Belfast’s streets. The thought of myself as one of those frozen corpses made me want to laugh, and I bit my tongue because I thought that if I started I would never stop.

When I was small, I used to beg to play with my mother’s china shepherdess, a pretty figure all smooth and cool. I was so careful, carrying her around in my hands, the one bit of finery my mother had from her mother, and I never broke it, either. That was my father, who saw me playing with her like I was her mother, and slapped her from my hands to shatter on the floor.

I almost brained myself on a hanging sign, but I saw just in time to duck my head and get a scrape on my temple. I left skin and some hair there, but I didn’t look back. God almighty, but I wished I could tear more of myself off like that.

I was nine when I had my worst fit, right before Sunday mass. I was bare as an egg, and getting ready to put on my clothes, and I couldn’t. I didn’t want them, I never wanted them, and when I looked down at myself, naked and scrubbed, I made myself sick. I started to beat my body with my fists, and claw as well, and then I fell into a fever so high that my parents had the priest in. I remember Paul sitting by my side, holding my hand hard in his.

“Please don’t take my brother,” he said over and over again, but now I could see that they already had, perhaps long ago, and left me in his place.

I ran flat into a woman, her face tired and scared, and she stiff-armed me away from her with a curse.

Ned Graham wasn’t me, had never been me, I knew that now. Maybe they had taken him from the cradle, or maybe it was when he played on the doorstep. Mother had looked away, and not ever noticed that her baby was gone and I left in his place.

I was wrong, I had been wrong my
entire life
, and finally, this skin was choking me. I needed out of it by water or by fire like poor Bridget Cleary, I must climb out of it, or I would die, I was sure of it.

I would be rid of it, and there would only be Paul to mourn the thing I left behind.

Paul…

As I thought of Paul, I skidded to a stop, and then my heart dropped down to my shoes, though not for a memory this time.

The banks of the river were high and sharp in the poorer areas of the town, and another step would have sent me right down into the frigid water. Some dirt crumbled from the edge in front of me, falling down twelve feet, and I breathed hard, imagining myself tumbling into the water, all my frantic thoughts quelled by the cold once and for all.

I might have done it after all, but I thought again of Paul, and then of something my mother had told us at the same time she showed us how to carry a bit of bread and salt in our pockets to bring us safely home.

I took a deep breath and stripped my coat away from my shoulders. It was damp with sweat, but I turned it inside out anyway, shoving my arms through the sleeves and noting in a numb way that it was grown too tight over the past year. I turned three times on my heel, and when I stopped, I could see with perfect clearness the two figures standing just a few paces away.

“So the child figured it out,” the first said, shaking his head. He was taller than any man I had ever seen, and his skin was dark like an African sailor. In the starlight, which was surely brighter than it should have been, I could see the brown and withered leaves where his hair should be, and the glint of his eyes. He was dressed like a fine gentleman of the town, and in his hand, he carried a cane capped with the silver head of a cat.

“I do not know whether to be pleased or not,” complained his companion. She was small and dainty, every inch a Belfast lady until you saw that she was bald underneath her hat. When she smiled, her teeth were as sharp as knife points. The hand that rested elegantly on her hip was the same as mine, but the other, held up as if to pluck lies from the air, was the paw of a fox.

“You did that to me,” I snarled, turning like an animal brought to bay. Behind me was the river, and before me were two creatures I knew to be just as dangerous.

“We did,” the dark gentleman said, inclining his head and making the leaves rustle. “But you stopped yourself. Why did you do that?”

I narrowed my eyes at his polite, curious question.

“Why didn’t I throw myself into the water, you mean?” I asked sarcastically. “I suppose I thought it a bit chilly for a swim, didn’t I?”

“No you didn’t,” the lady chimed in. “You thought it was just perfect.”

“We could see it in your eyes before you left the theater,” the gentleman added. “We thought, ‘There’s one who will leap and thank us.’ Won’t you do it now?”

I started to answer them, but then I stopped. They stood within in an arm’s length of me. If they had wanted me in the water, they could have pushed, and if they were really disappointed with the game, they could have left. There was no reason they would stand around talking to me unless they were bound. No, there were rules to this, and it was all the better for them if they played them with people who were Belfast-born and didn’t know the rules. Some city-raised might have turned away in anger and fear, breaking their spell and freeing them. I wasn’t, though, and I started to smile.

“I’ve won, and you’re sorry,” I said. “You owe me a forfeit.”

Their smiles froze on their faces, and I laughed out loud. I was right, and no matter how beautiful they were, now they looked like cats who had licked flypaper.

“Careful,” the lady said coldly. “After your forfeit is done, we will still be here.”

“I was ready to plunge into the water of the river,” I retorted. “Tell me how afraid that makes me.”

“Is that your forfeit?” the gentleman asked, and I thought he might have liked me a little, because otherwise he would have taken it as I said it.

“It’s not.” I hesitated, and then I simply shook my head. There was only one question that mattered when fairy gold turned to leaves in the morning and fairy girls turned to goats by midday.

“What am I?” I said, and I looked between the two of them, waiting for them to tell me for certain sure.

The gentleman raised his eyebrow, and shrugged, gesturing me to come closer. I don’t like being so close to people who weren’t Paul – that was why I was such a failure at the factories – and it seemed this distaste extended to fairies as well. Still, I did as he said, and when I stepped close, I could smell him. He bore a strange peppery scent with a note of metal to it, and I realized in my heart the way I had only realized before in my head that there was nothing human about him.

“Hmmm.” He leaned in until the strange and alien scent of him filled my head, and when he stared into my eyes, I could see that his were simply black, no white, no color, nothing but bottomless black. I could feel the heat of his skin, and I flinched when his hand came close to my face, hovering by my cheek, but not touching.