Fairytales for Wilde Girls (12 page)

Sixteen unicorns had disappeared. Her herd was no more. Their hiding places had run out. They had reached the edge of the woods.

 

The smoke attracted her, and the smell. Searing flesh. Meat, but meat gone wrong – something warm bloody squishy perfect, now fried to an awful charcoal.

The Lady peered through the foliage at the forest's edge, the foal burrowing its nose into the small of her back. Before her stood a log cabin – she knew it from Dark's descriptions, a kind of trapping-forest that humans ensnared themselves in, surrounding themselves in deadwood and false greenery. She did not like the smell. She did not like the smoke rising from the funnel in the cabin's roof. Whenever there was smoke, the unicorns would take it for a forest fire, and the herd would gallop to high ground, plunge into the waterfall, press their bodies together and shiver with fear.

The Lady was shivering now.

Night fell. The foal was mewling, hungry and tired. He bit her fingers when she tried to stroke him. They watched the smoke grow thicker, sniffed the changing scents. Winter was arriving, and the foal was shivering, too – not from fear, as she was, but from cold. She did not want little Dusk to die. He was the herd's last baby, Seaweed and Pearl's only bequest. Dark's last star.

Then, movement in the cabin – the entrance opened, and the line of sixteen hunters, clad in foreign furs, moved out in the darkness, calling jovially to each other. The Lady held her breath as they passed her and the foal. Then came noises like the popping of logs in fires.

Dusk was shaking violently. Without the pressing warmth of the herd surrounding him, he wouldn't survive the harsh winter. His coat was like ice and there was nothing comforting in the feeling.

The Lady feared the hunters and the strange place they lived in, but she feared losing Dusk more. She urged him up and led him into the cabin.

Inside was a blazing fire contained in a strange rock cave, platters of meats and fruits, and purplish, glutinous liquid in glasses.

And on the walls, mounted on high plaques, were sixteen unicorn heads.

The foal collapsed in front of the fire, weak and shivering, squeezing his black eyes shut.

The Lady fell to her hindknees, too, her odd limbs trembling madly, Dark's name printed on her lips in silent black ink. He was the grisly centrepiece, his golden horn protruding regally from his downy forehead.

As she watched, he blinked his cold black eyes and his neck shifted slightly. He looked down upon her, the Lady who had spent her days and nights balanced on his forequarters, who knew his every sinew, every ridge along his spine.

He opened his dead mouth and spoke, in his usual tricky cadence:

We are proud of you, Lady, but this we must ask;

You must hunt the hunters if you are to save Dusk.

Beside him was Moon. The Lady's precious unicorn-mother blinked her long lashes and said:

And when you are safe, you must do as I ask;

Go to the forest of metal and glass.

The other heads on their mounted plaques stuttered into life; they cricked their long necks and stared down at her and spoke in unison, their voices mingling, echoing:

Spill blood for blood spilt, and save the foal Dusk

Then you will avenge what has happened to us.

Lady, we love you, we're glad you were born,

But once they are dead, you must cut off your horn.

She knelt there, crying at the sight – her herd without those strong shoulders that had borne her all her life, never to gallop again.

They gave the same advice on loop, chanting it. Dark regarded her with his cold eyes and waited.

Then be happy, not sad, for you're always with us,

When at last you are safe, you'll do what we ask:

Cut off your horn and go protect Dusk

Go to the forest of metal and glass.

She didn't hear the steady march of boots in a line. She didn't notice the hunters return until they were spilling through the door, roaring and falling about each other, upending the trays, painting the walls with the thick liquid like bloodpaint. One unhitched his gun – Lady knew ‘gun' from Dark, a word that dropped like a hot bubble of hatred from his mouth when he once described evil to her – and the Lady roused the foal and ran, tripping over furniture. She twisted her body and leapt through the window – opening cuts and splattering blood – and the foal leapt after her, scraping his flanks against the sill, and the thundercrack of the guns gave chase.

Dusk and the Lady cantered into the Safe Place, the Woods, while hot bullets embedded themselves in the trees around them; and the Lady sang for help, screaming beautiful pleas, rousing every creature who knew her voice. At the waterfall, she instructed the mermaids and nereids to hold the foal in the water, to hide him below but keep him from drowning. Wordlessly, they converged on Dusk, and wrapped him up in their pale-green arms, their reedy hair. The blue scales on their arms and cheeks glistened in the faint moonlight. Only the foal's head was kept above water. His mane was a short fuzz, not a wild mass like the Lady's, and he had not yet grown into his stubbed horn. Dusk glared resentfully up at her, too young to understand.

The birds circled the forest, and piped the hunter's positions in music notes to the Lady. The woodland creatures scampered along boughs, telling the trees to hide nothing from the Lady tonight. They obligingly parted their leaves and allowed the faintest trickle of moonlight to fall to the forest floor, a rinse of white for the Lady to see by. It was more than enough for her.

The name misled her; she believed that being called ‘hunters' meant that the humans could kill like her. She was proved wrong, and she found easy satisfaction in her work that night, although she had never before hunted with no intention of eating.

There were sixteen of them, and she took the time to hunt each individually. The Lady lured them to rocky crevasses, into the depths of the cold pools of the river. She drove them up trees and into quicksand and into the earth itself, and each time, she would catch them and sing them songs in the only language they understood, like she did with all her kills. She pinned them to the earth and sang to them of death. She sang in a voice like blood, a voice that spilled warmly, that bubbled, that darkened, that pooled over them. She thought she saw understanding in their eyes before she drove them through with her horn.

The sixteenth was the easiest. Panicking, hearing the Lady's bloodsongs carried on the wind, the death-screams of his fellows, he was running back to the cabin. She waited for him in the doorway, warmth and light from the fire spilling in a halo around her. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her. She had cut off her horn as instructed, and was standing in her skin-coat, her coloured mane tangling about her body as she watched his odd expression. He stared at her body, which she had always thought freakish, malformed, but his face said otherwise. She extended a hand, and lured him forward with a murmured lullaby, her voice like a shooting star.

The last hunter fell into her arms, and in her hidden hand she raised the ivory-white horn.

 

The Lady and the unicorn foal travelled for days, following the smoke, the acrid smell of searing meat, until eventually they found the forest of metal and glass that old Moon had spoken of. A
city
, it was called, and there the Lady traded her mane and her horn in a bustling market, knowing they'd both grow back.

After the trade, a hornless lady, the first she'd ever met, led her to a staircase, and under the cover of darkness Lady led Dusk up, up, up, until they came to a room not unlike the cabin of the hunters, except with material like soft moss coating the floor, and waterfalls that pooled into shallow basins at a touched command. She soothed the weary foal, stroking his nose and braiding his mane, and he nuzzled into her lap. Together, they slept on the false-moss floor, the windows thrown open letting in the awful smell but also the wind, the cold moonlight, a sense of home.

Early the next morning, the Lady bedecked the room to look more like their forest. She gathered wildflowers from the square of greenery nearby, and shovelled dirt on the strange spongy floor, and later, while the foal was nibbling on carrots torn up from a stranger's garden, she mounted her trophies on the walls.

Sixteen hunter's heads in a row.

 

Edgar's Shadow

There he was in the leaf-littered court again, appearing like a mischievous shadow with his pink skateboard. Wind tugged his curls this way and that. The asphalt was rain-slicked. She sat reading under the quickly thinning tree, hiding her grin between the pages, while he pulled nonchalant tricks up the court – before a great clatter and a shout of ‘OW!' jolted Isola right out of her storybook.

Edgar was sprawled near Boo Radley's house, the back wheel of his snapped skateboard rolling gleefully away.

‘Edgar! Are you all right?' She hurried towards him and tried to help him sit up. ‘What is it? What hurts?' she asked, hovering anxiously.

‘My pride,' he groaned.

‘Do you need an ambulance?'

He grimaced, shaking his head. ‘Ah, but my board could use a hearse,' he said, catching site of the broken axle. Wincing in pain, he clutched at his leg where a dark stain was rapidly spreading.

Isola swatted his hand away and rolled up his trouser leg. Midway up his calf was a spectacular gash, bloodied with bits of scrubbed flesh; a meat pizza.

‘Oh, cool,' said Edgar, peering at the wound.

‘Cool?'

‘Yeah.' He shifted slightly, and his whole leg began to shake. He said with false bravado through clenched teeth, ‘Doesn't even hurt.'

‘Wait here,' she told him. She made to stand, but he grabbed her hand.

‘Wait! Mum's inside – I can't let her see!'

‘What?'

‘Just . . . just take me to your place. Please? If Mum sees that I've gone and done this –' The plea loomed large in his eyes.

‘But, Edgar, you're gonna need stitches,' she said in confusion. ‘You have to go to the hospital.'

‘No!' The remaining colour drained from his face and towards his leg; the trickling blood looked suddenly redder. ‘You can stitch it.'

Isola thought involuntarily of Wendy Darling in her nursery, sewing Peter Pan's wayward shadow back to his muddied feet. She blanched. ‘What? No! Edgar, I can't!'

‘Please.' He squeezed her hand between both of his, a fleshy Venus flytrap. ‘
Please
, Isola.'

Isola shook her head. ‘I can clean it up, but I can't –'

‘You sew your dresses, right?'

She spluttered. ‘That's not the same!'

‘But it's the same principle.'

‘Why won't you go to the hospital?' Isola demanded. She had half a mind to leave him in the gutter and fetch Mother Poe herself.

‘I can't stand hospitals,' said Edgar, anguish in his voice Isola didn't think had anything to do with the wound. ‘Besides, my mum – I already told you, she moved us out here because she was afraid of some radiowaves. If she sees this, she'll move us to the moon.'

Isola bit her lip.

Edgar, grimacing, flicked some gravel out of the gash. ‘I'm sorry, it's so gross,' he apologised. ‘Does blood freak you out?'

‘Um, no,' said Isola truthfully. She had an intimate relationship with blood. Vivien's Wood was fraught with risks. She'd had a childhood of climbing trees and rolling down hills and wading barefoot into rock pools. Every mark on Isola's body was accompanied by a strong remembrance of the time and place; the slits, the grazes and splinters, welling or oozing or pin-pricked or sloppy with blood.

She even remembered her first period. A Thursday, high summer, a shock of stickiness between her legs. When she'd got to the bathroom and stripped, she'd found that the bright blood spilling down had spelt out her name in luminous red letters, printed in twin on both thighs like those butterfly paintings she'd made in nursery school.

‘C'mon, Isola. Please.'

‘Well . . .' She hesitated, but tugged him upright anyway. ‘I guess I wouldn't want to upset Lotus Blossom.'

Edgar gave a pained smile; his face was almost the same colour as his teeth. ‘You can't upset a Lotus Blossom. Only uproot it.'

Just then, the hermit emerged from his squalid house, splaying like a spider in his crooked doorway and yelling, ‘Oi! Get away from m' house! Jezebel's daughter!' He pointed a gnarled finger at Isola. ‘Ezekiel thirteen eighteen! “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against your magic charms; I will set free the people that you ensnare like birds!”'

Edgar turned to stare down the hermit, wincing as he put weight on his injured leg. ‘Hey!' Then he looked confusedly at Isola. ‘Did he just insult you?'

Isola shrugged. ‘With a Bible verse, so I don't think it counts.'

‘And you, boy!' Boo Radley shouted at Edgar. ‘Revelation eighteen twenty-three! “The light of a lamp will never shine in you again. The voice of bridegroom and bride will never be heard in you again.”' His accusatory finger swung back to Isola. ‘“By your magic spell all the nations were led astray!”'

‘C'mon,' said Isola, ‘he's not worth arguing with. All the sense went out of him when his wife died.'

They turned and headed towards Number Thirty-six, Edgar limping and Isola supporting him, as Boo Radley yelled down the street after them, ‘“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”'

‘Exodus twenty-two eighteen,' groaned Isola, already tiring under Edgar's weight. ‘He's been giving me that one for years.'