The Girl Who Would Be Queen
O
n full moon nights, the man who called himself Teilo came for both of them. He wore a mask. Black leather gloves and jacket.
“Shh!” he warned. “We don’t want to upset the guardians.”
It was a game. It was us against them. The guardians were overprotective, Teilo said. They didn’t approve of him visiting his girls.
“But how could they keep me away?” he asked. “A way. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Up, up, and away!”
He led them through the small opened window, took them to the orchard. They all held hands and danced in a circle. The queen threw back her head and laughed. “I think,” said Teilo, “that you each grow more beautiful every day. The fairy world suits you.”
They both knew it was a lie but smiled anyway. They knew they looked washed out, had tangles in their hair, sores on their lips and in their mouths. Moth-girls who never saw sunlight, never washed in a tub, only a bucket with a sponge. Girls who lived on white bread and sweet sugary Kool-Aid that had a bitter aftertaste and made them sleepy. Their teeth were rotten. Their breath, rank. They bruised easily, like old fruit.
Once, they were dancing and a voice from the trees called out, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing!” shouted Teilo. “Mind your own business, Evie!”
Evie stepped out of the shadows, looked at the girls. She looked tall and brave and very, very angry. “You’re not supposed to talk to them! They shouldn’t even be outside,” she said. “I’m telling Mom.” She ran back to the house.
“We’d better get you girls home,” Teilo said. “The ball’s over. Time to turn back into pumpkins. Pretty little, pretty little pumpkins in my pumpkin patch.”
That night they heard a lot of shouting outside their locked door. The voices were muffled but furious, and they caught only a few words here and there:
Dangerous. Ruined. Teilo. Who do you think you are?
Then hammering, as nails were put into the outside of their little window.
They held each other there in the dark, shivering on their thin mattress.
Teilo didn’t come to visit again for a long, long time. But Evie did. She warned them. “Don’t talk to him,” she said. “He isn’t who he says he is. They’re all a bunch of liars. The only one you can believe is me. If you trust me, if you’re patient, I’ll get you both out of here one day. I swear it.”
Phoebe
June 13, Present Day
P
hoebe carried the diary out of the hidden room, flipping through pages as Sam searched the rest of the basement.
End of Summer, 11 years old
Dear Diary,
Sister says we have to make a deal with Teilo.
It seems like whatever I do, however hard I try to break away, he’s there. Even when I don’t go see him, when I make excuses to Sister, he’s there in my dreams. He’s always there.
I have my own secret name for him. I call him the Nightmare Man.
Sometimes in the night, I wake up screaming. Grandfather comes into my room, gives me a bitter tablet to place under my tongue. “Excitable child,” he calls me as he encircles my wrist with his fingers. Then he asks, “What did you dream?”
“I don’t remember,” I tell him and he gives me this horrid little smile. Sometimes I wonder if maybe my pulse is telling him a story, beating out words in some kind of code that only Grandfather can understand.
“So what’s the deal we have to make with Teilo?” I asked Sister when we were on our way into the woods. Lately, when we go there, I feel like everything is alive—like the trees have eyes and ears and we have to be very careful about what we say and do.
“If we promise him our firstborn,” Sister explains, “he’ll give us what we wish for most in the world.”
What I wish for most is that we never met Teilo.
If I said that out loud, something terrible would happen to me. I just know it.
Phoebe skimmed ahead.
Mid-summer, 12 years old
Dear Diary,
Sometimes I wonder if Sister’s making all this up. I don’t know how she could, but still, I wonder. . .
I wonder if a person can bring something to life by wishing it. But why would you wish for something dark? Something evil?
Phoebe skipped ahead again, and found an entry that made her heart sink like lead into her stomach.
“Oh my God, Sam,” she said. “I know whose diary this is.”
Sam turned away from the boxes of books and papers he’d been going through. “Whose?”
“Listen:
Midsummer, 13 years old
Dear Diary,
I am in love. And the best part is . . . he loves me too! We’re keeping it a secret, though. Grandfather says I’m not allowed to go out with boys and that if he ever catches me with one, I’ll never leave the house again. Grandfather says boys only want one thing. But he’s wrong about David. David has promised to take me away from all of this, as soon as I turn eighteen.
He works at the general store, but he goes to high school. He’s an artist. A potter.
The other day he gave me a gift: a blue bowl with a mermaid painted at the bottom.
“It’s too pretty to eat out of,” I told him.
I filled the bowl with water, made it ripple, and the mermaid seemed to come to life. Then a crazy thing happened, a thing that made me wonder if I was going mad. I looked into the bowl and saw the mermaid’s sweet face turn angry and horrid—it was Teilo’s face looking back. Then I heard a laugh, felt cold breath on my neck. He was standing behind me. Only when I turned, he wasn’t there.
I told Sister about this later. She demanded to know where the bowl had come from, and when I told her, she got quiet.
“David loves me,” I told her. “He says that when he’s done with high school, when I’m old enough, we’ll get married. We’ll move far away. California maybe.”
I left out what I was thinking. Away from Teilo. Away from you and Grandfather.
Sister just smiled, said, “You think you can leave that easily?”
Phoebe closed the book and looked up at Sam. His face was pale. “It’s my mother’s,” he said.
Phoebe nodded. “And I don’t know who or what Teilo is, but your Aunt Hazel’s been involved with him for a long, long time.”
Sam turned from the boxes, jogged over to the steps.
“Stop,” Lisa said as Sam stepped onto the rough wooden basement stairs. “We’re not allowed up there. It’s dangerous.”
“Bullshit,” Sam mumbled, taking the stairs two at a time. Phoebe tucked the diary in her back pocket and followed him. Lisa hung back, muttering, “Not safe, not safe, not safe.” An incantation.
Phoebe wondered what they would find up there—the King of the Fairies? A doorway to another world?
She flashed back onto the dream she’d had back in the cabin: the hand reaching into her belly, pulling back the door of flesh, muscle, and skin.
She thought of the tiny graveyard in the orchard.
“Sam?” she said, voice quavering. “Maybe it’s time to call the police?” He didn’t show any sign of having heard her and hurried up the last steps. Phoebe stayed right behind him. And behind her, Lisa tentatively followed, mumbling, “Not safe,” again and again.
The door opened into an ordinary kitchen with laminate countertops, a peeling linoleum floor, slightly sticky underfoot. Empty cups, bowls, and gin bottles littered the counter. Phoebe surveyed the room and felt a horrible sense of familiar unease—this was so much like one of the kitchens of her childhood, reeking of spilled booze and sour milk. There was a large spray bottle of Raid on the cluttered table. Phoebe shuddered. It was as if she’d gone back in time to when she would walk through the kitchen and find her own mother passed out on the living room couch. And now, like then, she felt she was a meek little girl, powerless to other people’s demons.
“Sam?” The word was little more than a moist puff in the air. She wanted to leave this place. To run as fast as she could and not look back.
Sam turned left, walking through the dining room into the living room.
Phoebe covered her nose and mouth and walked over to the sink. Among fossilized pots of orange macaroni and cheese and SpaghettiOs were baby bottles and half-empty bags of curdled formula. Phoebe’s stomach clenched. She couldn’t bear the thought of a tiny infant being in a place like this, cared for by a woman who obviously could barely care for herself. She put a hand on her stomach and made a silent promise:
I will keep you safe. I will keep things like this from ever happening to you. You will grow up in a clean house, eating wholesome, organic, Sam-approved food.
“Sam,” Phoebe said, holding one of the bottles up. “The baby was here.” He looked over and nodded grimly.
She dropped the bottle of curdled formula and followed Sam into the living room.
Both rooms were cluttered and filthy: stacks of junk mail, books, and magazines covered the table and floor. Ashtrays were overflowing. Afghans that had no doubt once been bright and cheery hung over the furniture tattered and stained. The lights were on, but there was no sign of life.
“Hazel?” he called out. There was no response.
“Sam,” Phoebe asked, eyeing yet another bottle of gin on the coffee table, this one half-full. Next to it, a ring of condensation, still damp and glistening. “When was the last time you were here?”
“When I was a kid. Before Lisa disappeared.”
Lisa had followed them into the living room but stood with her back pressed against the wall, eyes open wide, hands clenched into fists, fingernails digging into her palms.
“You okay, Lisa?” Phoebe asked. Lisa showed no sign of having heard her.
Sam climbed the mottled brown and orange carpeted stairs in the living room. The wall was covered in school photos of Evie. There she was in first grade, pudgy and freckled, smiling for the camera. Then later, in fifth grade, the freckles faded, the smile replaced by a scowl. In her high school graduation picture, she was tall and lean with close-cropped hair and piercing eyes.
The light in the hall was on. They passed reprint landscapes in cheap frames, a plaster handprint Evie had done when she was seven. Phoebe placed her own hand over it, fingers working their way into the grooves Evie’s hand had left behind.
Where
was
Evie?
What was happening to this family’s girls and women?
The first bedroom, Hazel’s, was empty. A bed was covered in a flowered quilt. There was a
Reader’s Digest
on the nightstand and a small television. There were some dirty clothes on the floor: a stained nightgown, a faded pair of enormous pink briefs with the elastic sprung. Phoebe looked away, embarrassed.
Sam went across the hall to the second bedroom. “Jesus!” he yelped. Phoebe ran in.
“Evie’s room,” Sam said.
There was a twin bed, neatly made. Next to the bed was a desk. Above it, a poster of a tarot card: the Hanged Man.
Phoebe’s skin felt cool and damp, like she’d just entered a cave.
“Look familiar?” Sam said, pointing at the image. It showed a man hanging upside down by his foot, his leg crossed, his hands bound.
“Teilo’s sign,” Phoebe said, instantly recognizing the rough shape the man’s upside-down body made.
There was a scattering of notebooks on the desk. Sam picked one up, thumbed through it, scowling. Then he set it down, picked up another. “They’re all full of writing, but I can’t decipher it. It looks a lot like your chicken scratch, Bee.” Sam gave her a quizzical look.
“Let me see.” Sam handed the notebook over, and she flipped through it. “A lot of people use their own form of shorthand. It just makes writing faster,” she explained.
“And makes it so other people can’t read it,” Sam added.
“Right, she was definitely trying to keep whatever she wrote a secret,” Phoebe said, “but I can read this just fine.”
“You can?”
“It’s pretty simple, really.” She held the book out for him to look at. “See these dots—they stand for the word
the
. She’s dropped most of the vowels, used phonetic spelling. And she’s simplified some of the letters, like leaving the
A
’s without the line across. And this squiggle here,” she said, pointing at the page, “is a
G
. The word is ‘talking’.”
Sam squinted at the notebook. “You can actually read it?”
“Sure,” Phoebe said. “She’s talking about the fairies, Teilo, a magic door in Reliance.” She set down the notebook and picked up another, an earlier one, the cover worn and faded.
“Okay,” Sam said. “So we know Evie was helping Teilo, but who the hell is he? He sure doesn’t pop out of a secret door in the woods. Who lives in that room in the basement?”
Lisa stood in the doorway, as if she was afraid to step over the threshold. She laughed a high, nervous laugh.
“I don’t know, but Evie definitely does,” Phoebe said, a knot forming in her stomach. “But I’m not sure she was always on his side.” She pointed at the notebook. “Listen to this, it’s from fifteen years ago, in August:
“ ‘They’re keeping her so doped up she doesn’t know where she is. It kills me to see her like this; it’s like being gutted. But I know it won’t last. It’s just for a short time. I sneak into her room at night, curl up next to her, and tell her I promise I’ll get her out. I bring her little treats: chocolate, colored pencils, bubble gum. One day, I’ll find a way to break the spell. We’ll get on our horses and ride away from here. I’ll use my magic key and save us both.’ ”
Phoebe remembered what Lisa had said, that Evie was the one who let her go. But why had it taken fifteen years? What was she up against?
Phoebe looked up at the hanged man poster above the desk. What struck her most was his expression of perfect calm. Here he was, hung upside down, looking completely at peace, a yellow halo glowing around his head, making him seem saintly, enlightened.
She glanced back down at the notebook, flipping ahead until something caught her eye. “Listen to this,” she said.
Evie had taken notes from a book called
Tarot for Beginners
:
“‘The hanged man suspends serenely upside down, having let go of all worldly attachments. The hanged man has perspective obtainable only by someone who is free from everyday reality. He is an outcast who appears to be a fool, but in reality, he is the most enlightened of them all. He understands change is coming and has opened himself up to it completely. It’s a card about surrender. About being suspended between the worlds.’”