"Well," he said, "I went fishing. That’s what I do. Drop a line
into the other realms and see what I can hook. Strange matter isn’t easy to
find. I call it that because I haven’t a clue what it is, or what it’s for. It’s
organic…maybe alive, maybe not, and it has some…quite unique properties. Fishing
the dimensions can be very dangerous, you know. You never can tell when you’ll
hook something big and nasty by mistake, and then up it comes through the
planes, mad as hell and looking for revenge…But I got Matthew what he wanted,
and he paid me in cash right there on the spot. Good money. Far too much, for
someone in my reduced circumstances. That was when I started to get suspicious.
But I didn’t do anything. I had new booze to drink and new drugs to take, and…he
was a Drood, after all. You don’t mess with the Droods. Then I heard you’d been
ambushed by an elf lord with an arrow made of strange matter and hired by the
Droods…and I knew. I felt bad, Eddie; really I did. I’ve always known you were a
Drood; you can’t hide a torc from elf eyes. And we’d had some good times
together, in the old Wulfshead…You bought me drinks and listened to me talk, and
you never laughed at me. So after I heard…what had happened…I waited for you to
come looking for me. And here you are. But you’re not here to kill me, are you?
You want something."
"The strange matter’s still in my body," I said. "And it’s
killing me. Can you get me a cure?"
"No," said the Blue Fairy, meeting my eyes steadily. "It doesn’t
work that way. I need to know exactly what I’m looking for when I go fishing, or
I can’t find it. And I don’t know nearly enough about strange matter to have any
idea of what its counterpart might be. I’m sorry, Eddie; really I am. I didn’t
know what they were going to do!"
"Would it have made any difference if you had?" I said.
"Probably not," he admitted. "It was very good money."
"How would you like a chance to redeem yourself?" said Molly.
"How would you like to go fishing for something for us?"
"What did you have in mind?" said the Blue Fairy.
"We need a skeleton key, to get us past the Hall’s defences," I
said.
"Is there such a thing?"
He smiled suddenly. "Oh, yes. There is…I’ve waited years for
someone to come and ask me. It’s really very simple. Quite elegant, actually.
But are you sure you want to do this, Eddie? Once word gets out that the Drood’s
defences have been breached…"
"Let it," I said. "Let the whole family crash and burn, if
that’s what it takes to get to the truth."
We went out into the next room. The Blue Fairy dug through a
pile of debris and came up with a very ordinary-looking fishing rod and reel.
The kind of thing people use when they go fishing for recreation rather than
competitive sport. The Blue Fairy then produced a knife out of nowhere, pulled
up the left sleeve of his dressing gown, and made a shallow incision just above
the wrist. I could see a whole series of scars reaching up his arm to the elbow,
some old and some not, from where he’d done this before. Golden blood welled up
from the cut, and he held his arm out over the space he’d cleared on the floor
before him. The blood dripped down to form a golden pool. When it was about
three or four inches in diameter, the Blue Fairy pressed his fingers against the
cut and muttered under his breath, and the wound healed over immediately,
leaving just another scar on his arm.
The Blue Fairy pulled his sleeve down again, not looking at the
three of us watching, and snapped out half a dozen words in Old Elvish. I caught
some of it, but his accent was unfamiliar. The pool on the floor blazed suddenly
with a golden light and spread out on the floor until it was almost a yard in
diameter. It didn’t look like a pool of liquid anymore. Looking into it was like
staring into a deep well that just kept getting deeper the longer you looked. I
felt like I was off balance and might fall. I grabbed Molly’s arm for support
just as she grabbed mine. We both smiled at each other a little shamefacedly.
Janissary Jane didn’t look into the pool. She kept all her attention on the Blue
Fairy. And she had both her punch daggers at the ready.
The Blue Fairy took up his fishing rod, checked the hook was
secure and the line was running smoothly, and then dropped his line into the
glowing golden pool. The hook disappeared, followed by more and more line as the
Blue Fairy kept feeding it in.
"How far down does it go?" said Molly.
"All the way," said the Blue Fairy.
"Some questions, you just know you’re not going to get an answer
that helps," said Molly.
"Elf blood has many useful properties," the Blue Fairy said
calmly.
"Even diluted, degraded blood like mine. All elves have an
built-in talent for travelling. They can walk sideways from the sun, access
other planes of existence, enter dimensions you and even I couldn’t even
conceive, let alone operate in. But the blood itself is enough to open doors and
allow me to go fishing. Sometimes just for the fun of it, fishing at random for
whatever’s there…sometimes to order, for a price. If I concentrate hard enough,
I can find pretty much anything…and what you need, Eddie, is a Confusulum."
"A what?" I said.
"A Confusulum," the Blue Fairy said patiently. "Don’t ask me
what it is is, because I’ve no idea. That’s the point. It doesn’t actually
change anything, just confuses the hell out of everyone. It works on the
uncertainty principle that nothing is necessarily what or where it seems to be.
I found the first one years ago, quite by accident, and it scared the crap out
of me. Everyone needs some certainties in their life. I threw it back in, but
something about it stuck in my mind. The Droods’ family defences are based
around certainties: friend or foe, permitted entry or not, that sort of thing.
But the Confusulum will take all those certainties out of the equation. The
Hall’s defences will be so confused they won’t know whether they’re operating or
not, whether you’re permitted entry or not, even whether you’re actually there
or not. They’ll be so confused you’ll be able to walk right through them while
they’re still struggling to make up their minds. By the time anyone at the Hall
notices that their defences have just had a major nervous breakdown, you’ll be
in.
"The Confusulum isn’t one hundred percent guaranteed; its
uncertainty even applies to its own nature. So there’s no telling exactly what
its effects will be or how long they’ll last. But since I’m the only one ever to
encounter a Confusulum, you can be sure your family have no specific defences
against it."
He fished randomly for a while, just getting himself in the
mood, and Molly and Jane and I sat more or less patiently around the golden
pool, watching. I was having trouble getting used to the idea that I could be
going home so soon, and that my family’s notorious protections could be brushed
aside so easily. And all because of a little man nursing a grudge and just
waiting to be asked.
The first thing he pulled out of the pool was a seven-league
boot with a hole in its soul, followed by a small black lacquered puzzle box, a
stuffed moomintroll, and a statue of a black bird. The Blue Fairy threw them all
back, and then stared into the pool with a look of fierce concentration on his
face. His eyes bulged, and his lips drew back from his gritted teeth in a fixed
snarl. Beads of sweat popped out all over his straining face. His line jerked
suddenly, sending slow ripples across the surface of the glowing pool. The Blue
Fairy let out a long breath and began to slowly reel his line back in. He took
his time, keeping a light but constant pressure on the line, staring so intently
he wasn’t even breathing anymore. And finally he brought something up out of the
golden pool.
I couldn’t tell you what it was, exactly. It clung to the hook,
writhing and twisting like a living thing, even though I knew on some deep
instinctive level that it wasn’t alive and never could be. It changed size and
colour, shape and texture, from moment to moment, its dimensions snapping in and
out and back and forth. It looked like all the things you see out of the corners
of your eyes when you’ve just woken up and you’re still half asleep.
"Quick!" said the Blue Fairy, his face contorted with
concentration.
"I brought it here for you, Eddie, so it’s up to you to give it
a shape in this dimension. Impose a single nature on it, so it can survive here.
The link you make will mean it will serve you and only you. But do it quickly,
before it becomes something we can’t bear to see with only human eyes."
I concentrated on the first image that came to me. It just
popped into my mind: a simple circular badge I’d seen in an old head shop in
Denmark Street years ago, a white badge bearing the legend Go Lemmings Go. And
just like that, the twisting unnerving thing on the hook was gone and the badge
was resting on the palm of my hand. It looked and felt perfectly normal,
perfectly innocent. I pinned it carefully on the lapel of my jacket.
"All the things you could have chosen," said Molly. "Everything
from Excalibur to the Holy Hand Grenade of Saint Antioch, and you had to choose
that. The workings of your mind remain a complete mystery to me, Eddie."
"That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me," I said, and we
both smiled.
"By any chance, are the two of you an item?" Janissary Jane said
suddenly.
"We haven’t decided yet," I said.
"We’re still working on it," said Molly.
"We’re…partners, on this particular enterprise."
"Partners in crime."
"Or possibly a suicide pact."
"You two deserve each other," said Janissary Jane, shaking her
head.
None of us had noticed that the Blue Fairy had inadvertently
allowed his line to drop back into the glowing pool. He cried out abruptly as
something below grabbed the hook and tugged hard on the line. The Blue Fairy was
almost pulled forward, and the line whirred through the reel until it ran all
the way. The Blue Fairy was jerked forward again but hung on grimly.
"What have you got?" I said. "What were you concentrating on?"
"I wasn’t thinking about anything! I didn’t catch this; it
caught me!"
I hit the button on my reverse watch, and nothing happened. I
hit the button again, and still nothing. I shook my wrist vigorously.
"Oh, shit," I said.
"It sounds so much more helpless when he says it," said
Janissary Jane.
"He’s had a lot of practice recently," said Molly. "What’s
wrong, Eddie?"
"I appear to have broken the reverse watch," I said. "Or
exhausted its batteries, or whatever the hell the damn thing runs on. I think I
asked too much of it when I forced it to save you."
"So it’s my fault?" said Molly.
"Always," I said, smiling.
We all looked on as the Blue Fairy wrestled with the fishing
rod, the taut line jerking back and forth across the pool. It snapped abruptly,
and the Blue Fairy stumbled back. And something huge and long and inhumanly
strong burst up out of the golden pool, reaching for him. It was a single
tentacle, dark purple in colour and lined with rows of suckers full of grinding
teeth. More and more of it burst up out of the pool, snapping back and forth.
"Get out of here!" yelled the Blue Fairy. "I’ll handle this!"
"Don’t be a damned fool!" Janissary Jane yelled back at him.
"You can’t handle this on your own!"
"It came through my blood," the Blue Fairy said grimly. "So only
I can put it back down. Go. You’ve got things to do. Things that matter. This…is
my business. No damned thing from the vasty deeps is going to get the better of
me in my own home! Will you all please get the hell out of here, so I can
concentrate? And Eddie, make your family pay! For what they did to you, and what
they did to me."
More and more of the tentacle was forcing its way into the room,
yards and yards of it, straining against the edges of the pool that contained
it. The Blue Fairy threw his fishing rod aside and sketched ancient signs and
sigils on the air with dancing hands, leaving bright incandescent trails on the
air. He was chanting in Elvish in a form so old I couldn’t follow one word in
ten. Magic spat and crackled all around him, and for the first time, he was
smiling. A cold, inhuman smile.
Molly and Janissary Jane and I left him there, standing on the
edge of the golden pool, defying the monstrous thing that had come fishing for
him. I left him there, because I had important things to do, and because…it was
the only gift I could give him, for his help. A chance to stand alone against a
fearsome foe and either win back his pride…or gain the good death he craved. I
looked back at him, one last time, before I closed the door. He stood tall and
proud and powerful in his magic; and for the first time it wasn’t difficult at
all to see the elf in him.
Molly and Janissary Jane and I stood in the street outside the
liquor store, looking up at the Blue Fairy’s window. The vivid flashes of light
had stopped, and it had all gone very quiet. People passed by, paying us no
attention. Thinking this was just another day, no different than any other. They
didn’t know there was another world, a more dangerous world, that they would see
if they would only stop and look. Molly and Janissary Jane and I looked up at a
silent, empty window and finally turned away.
"Should we…?" said Molly.
"No," said Janissary Jane. "Either way, it’s over. Finished."
"It’s time to go home," I said. "For I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep."
"I love it when you talk literary," said Molly.
"Eddie…" Janissary Jane said. "I’m sorry, but I’m not going with
you. I know my limitations. Fighting demons in Hell dimensions is one thing;
taking on your family in the seat of their power…that’s way out of my league.
I’d just get in your way. So…I think I’ll sit this one out, if that’s all right
with you."