May 4
The Devereaux-Hatfield Home, Sullivan, Maine
TAYLOR DIDN’T
understand Corentin’s unease as they parted ways for the night. Corentin headed back to bed, and Taylor settled in for a session of organizing Corentin’s journal.
Taylor poured over the random stacks of paper. Post-its, receipts, to-do lists, and an assortment of personal notes lay out before him like an ever-evolving puzzle. Corentin was the puzzle, and these mundane mementos held the key to the picture. It had only been two days, but they had already accumulated piles of random thoughts. Corentin had taught him what to keep and what was insignificant. He taught him where to file them, what tabs belonged in which sections, and how many pages to leave blank between entries to permit room for additional notes.
Corentin once told him why the journal always had to be a physical object and never any other form.
“It needs to be a book,” Corentin had said as Taylor watched him duct-tape the new stack of composition notebooks together. “It has to have pages. Be tactile. My fingers do the reading for me when… I go.” He had smiled at Taylor back then. But Taylor hadn’t missed how the smile didn’t reach his eyes.
Taylor had sat in silence as Corentin wrote him a how-to guide. The guide was more of a rulebook in the end.
“Added pages are okay,” Corentin had said, and Taylor nodded. “Photocopies are okay too. The photocopy of the police report always goes on the inside back cover. Always.” He had waited for Taylor to say something, but Taylor’s words failed. “Always, all right? Don’t forget it.”
Taylor had nodded as he trembled. “O-Okay.”
“Good,” Corentin had said, as if he were ordering a soldier into a suicide mission, instead of instructing him on the creation of a sacred object. “Page one is the first blue tab. Personal history goes there. Start at the beginning. Name. Approximate age and birthdate. What I am. What I do. Keep it updated. No detail is too small. I’ll help you with that.”
“What if I screw it up?” Taylor had blurted out, and he’d tried to blink away the sting of tears. He looked from Corentin to the journal. “What if it doesn’t work? What if I fuck up? What if—”
Corentin cupped Taylor’s cheek and their gaze met. “You’re not going to fuck it up. You can do this.”
They had stared at each other for what had seemed like hours, but it had only been seconds. Corentin was the first to look away.
“You can do this,” Corentin had said as he ripped off another length of duct tape.
That was two years ago, and Taylor’s nerves were just as fresh as they were that night. He knew what he’d signed up for, but it still didn’t stop the nerves. Love always needed an element of fear. That’s how he could appreciate it was a small and fleeting thing. With a rapid timetable like Corentin, every day was a gift.
Taylor gathered the notes from Corentin’s ongoing adventures with Ramona and arranged them into a uniform chronology. Something caught his attention in Corentin’s notation. He squinted at what passed for Corentin’s handwriting.
“She reminds him of Phillipa,” he said, then ran a hand over his face to keep from obviously frowning.
Corentin hadn’t been there the exact moment Phillipa died. Taylor had been, and he would never forget the smell of gasoline when he came to in the overturned truck. Phillipa’s breathing had become a shallow whistle as her life drifted away. She had died in her true Enchant form of the cursed Beast, the disgraced prince who took advantage of beauty to preserve her heritage. The truck exploded before he could recover her body.
Phillipa died a hero. That act of selflessness made her soul truly beautiful.
“Hey,” Ringo said, and Taylor blinked out of his daydream. “Drink your tea. You need to get sleepy.”
Taylor took another sip of his Super Big Gulp of chamomile tea. “I don’t know how drinking this is going to help other than making me need to pee like a racehorse.”
Ringo settled on Taylor’s shoulder and watched him sort through the insurmountable information. He took a long breath, his tiny shoulders heaving with a sigh. “How do you keep track of it all?”
Taylor sorted through a selection of pictures. He piled the sunrises separate from the noonday sun and the sunsets. “I just do.”
The truth of it was, he was winging it. Even with Corentin’s list of rules, as long as he met those particular criteria, the rest was up for interpretation. Taylor tried not to stray too far off the path.
Despite learning how to construct a journal, once Corentin had cast Cronespawn magic upon it, Taylor wouldn’t be able to touch it. They had to find a work-around, and Ringo seemed to have the ideal method. Able to flip the pages with a snap of his fingers, Ringo protected all of them.
The hum of
Shark Tank
droned in the background. Ringo had long lost interest in the products he couldn’t live without. It would be dawn soon, and Taylor would need some sense of rest. Good thing he had the day off.
Ringo perked and then stood on Taylor’s shoulder. Taylor sat up straighter too as he noticed the ratcheting click of the printer finishing. “I got it,” Ringo said, and took off for the office area.
Taylor resumed his work, considering the open pages of Corentin’s journal. His handwriting was a form of genius high art. Taylor had once written it off as a horrid mishmash pretending to be penmanship, but when he studied the pages, Corentin’s brilliance shone through. The mundanes would call it hypergraphia, but Taylor knew better. It was a man telling the story of himself. Corentin had a gift for writing on a near microscopic level. He wrote within the margins, within the lines, and within the letters themselves. To the casual observer, the notebook pages had been covered in a solid swath of blue, pink, red, green, or whatever color pen he had that day.
The pages were a mystery, a map of Corentin’s mind that Taylor could never navigate.
He never stopped trying. He would always look for Corentin when the rabbit hole came, and he would be the one to take him home.
Ringo returned from the office, bouncing along as he tried to stay aloft. He offered a stack of papers to Taylor. “Hot off the press, Mon Capitaine.” He slapped his hands over his mouth as he caught the first image on the top sheet. “Is that seriously you in a slutty Princess Aurora costume?”
“Yup,” Taylor said nonchalantly. He flipped through the papers and considered the best angles of his and Corentin’s bedroom escapades.
Ringo rubbed his eyes in defeat as Taylor slid in the racy pictures, and then Ringo snapped his fingers to magically affix them to the pages.
“You guys really do that stuff?” Ringo asked in disbelief.
Taylor nodded. “Mmmhmm.” He wiggled, feeling the residual soreness of Corentin’s spankings on his rear. He held in a gasp of arousal and passed it off like a sudden sigh. “Corentin is an
excellent
teacher.”
Ringo tossed up his hands. “Dude. There is too much information, and then there’s you, who has slapped me in the face with every edition of your kinky encyclopedias.”
Taylor laughed and then took another swig of his second Super Big Gulp of chamomile tea.
“Oh, oh, daggumdrops,” Honeysuckle muttered as she fretted by the sideboard next to the TV.
Taylor perked up as she scanned the packet of papers in her small hands. She muttered to herself as she flipped from one page to the next.
“Oh my,” she said with sadness. “Oh, Tinker Bell.” Her wings drooped as she flipped to another page.
Whatever it was couldn’t be good, Taylor surmised, or it could be amazing. There was never much of a difference between Honeysuckle’s excitement and worry.
“What is it?” Taylor asked as he turned in his chair to better face her.
Honeysuckle’s wings perked like the ears of a startled cat, and then she spun in midair, hiding the papers behind her back. The papers were much larger than her, and the top half flopped over her hair. “Nothing,” she said and smiled brightly.
Ringo rubbed his jaw. “Nothing looks like something.” He narrowed his eyes and flew toward her, and Honeysuckle zipped back.
“It’s really nothing,” she said, shaking her head quickly. “We should simply continue noting Taylor and Corentin’s love for each other.” Her voice was a nervous chirp, and Taylor’s curiosity grew with her crooked smile. Ringo reached for the papers, and Honeysuckle continued to dodge. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
Taylor had had enough. “Let me see them,” he said firmly.
Honeysuckle sank like a sad, slowly deflating balloon.
Taylor pushed his chair out, the wooden legs screeching across the laminate. He approached her like a cat stalking a terrified mouse. “Give,” he commanded, holding out an expectant hand.
Honeysuckle looked at the papers, and with a longing sadness, handed them over. Her mournful expression gave Taylor pause and made him question if he wanted to look, after all.
Taylor glanced down at her, and she watched him with sad wintergreen eyes.
“They’re Corentin’s,” Honeysuckle said with a frown.
Taylor swallowed and readied himself for what it could possibly mean. He skimmed the papers, but before he could comprehend the words, the Bangor Police Department seal snared his attention with a stab to the heart.
“Bangor PD?” Taylor asked as Ringo perched on his shoulder. His emotions warred with sadness and pride. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
Ringo shook his head and chuckled. “Beats me. I’m damned proud of the son of a bitch and smacking him for not saying anything sooner.”
“Don’t,” Honeysuckle said.
Her firm order gave Taylor pause.
She bowed her head. “Keep reading,” she whispered.
Taylor shook his head at her. “I don’t understand.”
“I do,” Ringo said, his tone grim. “I do…. Oh… Storyteller.”
Taylor looked again, and there were the damning phrases in Corentin’s own hand scratched in violent red ink.
“Failure!”
Corentin had scribbled over his name.
“You can’t!”
He had scratched over the space reserved for experience.
“You’re stupid!”
Corentin had belittled himself where it asked for a signature.
The angry, self-loathing comments went on throughout the packet of papers. Some so self-depreciating that Taylor’s stomach acid bubbled with nausea at how cruel Corentin could be to himself.
“Why…? Why would he do this?” Taylor pressed his fingers to his lips. The papers trembled in his other hand. He searched the living room as if the pictures on the walls held the answers. They looked so happy in the pictures. Did Corentin truly loathe himself that much?
“Why do you think he wouldn’t tell you?” Ringo said, and the three of them looked toward the open journal and loose notes and photos stacked on the table.
Taylor’s gut clenched. “He can do anything. He can be anything he wants to be.”
Honeysuckle looked at Taylor with unmistakable doubt that he didn’t believe his own words.
Taylor looked to the packet of papers and then to the journal across the room. “What do I do?”
“Your move, boyo,” Ringo said, crossing his arms.
Taylor slipped the papers back into the drawer, making sure to shuffle them under other random printouts. “He doesn’t need to know this.”
He surprised himself at how easily he made a decision. Corentin had instructed him on what was important and what was insignificant. As his stomach turned, Taylor decided the discovery wasn’t worth noting. Corentin would never know. Taylor would, and he’d have to live with the fact that he lied about it.
“But he should know about applying to the PD. It’s encouraging,” Honeysuckle insisted.
“We need to figure out how to include it without the negativity,” Ringo said. “He needs to know.”
“Not now,” Taylor said as he headed back to the table. “I’ll tell him.”
“Excellent,” Ringo said with a beaming grin.
“Later,” Taylor said, considering the journal like an admiral pondering strategy. “Get those pages for me,” he told Ringo.
Ringo snapped his fingers, and a wad of pages flipped in the journal. “What do you mean later?”
Taylor didn’t want to say anything and opted for momentary silence. All the while, the TV droned on, dulling his need for explanations. Ringo watched him, and Taylor ran his teeth over his bottom lip.
“You’re right,” Taylor said.
“Right about what?” Ringo paced a path through the stacks of notes.
“About telling him in an encouraging way instead of… well….” Taylor didn’t finish his thought, and Ringo nodded.
The discovery was yet another nail in the coffin that Taylor was fighting a losing battle with keeping this week afloat. The talk with his father was so far taking the top spot on the horrid things that could happen in two days. Though meeting Aliss Magnus wasn’t something he could discredit as much as he wanted to. When she had told Taylor how to break Corentin’s curse, he’d made an effort to convince himself he hallucinated the whole thing. Ringo seemed to understand the silent agreement to never speak of it again. After all, Ringo had suggested they forget about it. Taylor was happy to let it drop.
He gnawed his bottom lip and ran his hand through his hair. Corentin had rubbed off on him with the same anxious habit.
His smartphone rang, snapping Taylor out of his thoughts. What time was it? He checked the clock, and it flashed 4:15 a.m. Who would be calling just before the asscrack of dawn? The phone blared with a metal cover of “Once Upon a Dream” and vibrated across the end table, way too close not to be heard in the bedroom.
Taylor scrambled for the phone and stumbled over the carpet. He failed to stop his momentum and crashed to the floor in a pile of princess. The phone tumbled off the end table and clocked him in the face before hitting the floor.
The goth male vocalist continued to screech and roar his angst about meeting strangers in REM sleep, and Taylor hurried to swipe the screen. “H-Hello?” he croaked as he wobbled to his feet.
“Mr. Hatfield?” a woman said on the other end.
Taylor caught the undertone of concern in her voice. He popped his back. “Yes, to what do I owe the pleasure?”