Don't Let the Fairies Eat You (29 page)
“Allow me to attend one other wifely duty,” Elise said. “You must have me in bed while I’m awake, for I am wild as they come, and you’ll wish to perfect our marriage in the truest way.”
The Nameless man did not argue with this, beckoning her to enter his bedroom, but she begged for a moment to make herself ready. He did no such readying, no paste of mud and leaves this time, only lying restlessly on the bed, impatient for Elise to attend her final wifely duty.
Taking the last of the Phoenix man’s feathers, she rubbed every inch of her skin until she glowed red as hot coals. When she came to the Nameless man’s bed, she reached out and embraced him, squeezing and squeezing until blisters covered his body and his flesh became charred. The embrace ended in fiery dust, and all that remained in the bed was a golden key.
Elise took the key to the baby’s bedroom, and certainly he was a poor thing to behold, but she loved him just the same, cuddling him to her breast. The heat of her red skin tempered his hunger for her flesh, warming him like the fevered womb he so loved.
And so there in the cottage they lived, hidden away in the forest where few venture, a burning mother and her savage son. Some whisper of a witch in these woods, casting spells and curses, but it is only hot-skinned Elise, her false wailing drawing travelers to her door. Some folk say you can still hear her baby wailing with her, hungry for family flesh, but this is nothing beyond a silly rumor. He is full-grown by now, lurking farther from his mother each day, and he’s not nearly so fussy about whom he eats.
Once there were two adolescent boys, Calden and Belfry, who were starving on the street. Then they found knives and they weren’t starving any more, for purse-cutting and mugging led to coins, which led to food, so long as they weren’t caught. Usually Calden eyed their donators carefully, to be sure no one watched, to be sure they found someone worth the time to take from, and to be sure he or she was the type to be easily intimidated or beaten.
Yet one day it was Belfry who pointed out the soon to be generous individual, and Calden caught sight of a well-dressed old man. He hobbled over the stony street, a cane in one hand and a coin in the other. The coin quickly left his hand, spinning through the air as it fell into the palms of a youth much smaller than Calden or Belfry, who thanked the old man and ran off in a blink.
“Someone who can afford to throw gold at the street must be prosperous indeed,” Calden said to his friend.
“It didn’t look like gold to me,” Belfry said.
“I don’t care if the money is gold or silver, so long as it’s ours. Perhaps he can throw coins our way and make us prosperous too.”
“We don’t look as shabby and innocent as that little boy. How will we make him care about us?”
Calden drew his dagger. “We’ll make him care about himself.”
They were on the old man in moments, kicking his cane out from under him and tossing him onto the street. Calden snatched the man’s money bag out of his coat and held the heavy sack high, flashing a greedy grin.
“No, you mustn’t open it!” the old man cried.
Calden did not merely open the bag—he slit its side with his dagger, believing coins would rain from the torn leather and that he could make a witty jab about throwing coins in the street before he and Belfry ran off with their profits. Yet nothing emerged from the bag. The knife flew out and it hung, limp and light, as if there had been nothing inside but air.
“Where is your money?” Calden growled, grabbing the old man by his expensive collar.
“That
was
the money,” the old man moaned, and there were tears in his eyes. “Sixty-five years ago, I made a deal with the devils in the graveyard north of town, when I was a lad like you two, penniless and ragged on the street. They fashioned a bag of human flesh, and so long as I reached into its mouth, I would find gold coins waiting for me. But I had to keep the bag safe for sixty-six years or I would forfeit my soul and any further money.” The man suddenly reeled up from the ground, and now his fists took hold of Calden with the fury and strength of a man half his age. “And now my soul is theirs! They’ll come for me this night and I’ll have guarded that bag against my chest for nothing! All you needed do was ask and coins would have been yours. Now there is nothing for anyone and my soul is forfeit!”
Calden and Belfry stood stunned for a moment, and then Calden shoved the man away. “Off me, you madman. Keep your secret purses and your lunacy too.”
The man hobbled back, retrieved his cane from the street, and resumed his unsteady gait, sobbing now and then as he left the boys.
Calden then beckoned Belfry close. “We’ll follow him.”
Belfry frowned. “But Calden, you said he could keep his secret purses and—”
“I said, we’ll follow him.” Calden felt unnerved at the man’s tears and sudden willfulness, and wondered if he might be telling the truth.
The two boys followed the old man for a ways, sticking to alley shadows in the dusk, and to the more plentiful darkness when the sun vanished beneath the horizon. The man lived in a tall house of many windows, but once he’d ducked inside his door, the windows filled one by one with wooden planks nailed into place, as if the old man had been prepared for this turn of events.
The boys waited at the street corner for hours and had nearly fallen asleep when they saw lights coming around the house’s side at midnight. Small, hooded figures held lanterns glowing with orange-yellow flame and walked a line along the street. They said nothing and barely made a sound until the leader of the line knocked at the old man’s front door. No one answered, and then all the little hooded figures knocked at the boarded-up windows. The old man squeaked in fright from within, and as if all the knocking was simply a formality, the hooded figures slapped the windows.
The glass panes swung open like doors, as did the nailed-on wood, beckoning the hooded figures inside, which is just where they went. The man’s squeaking turned high-pitched and horrible, a scream that echoed over the street, loud enough that the boys were afraid at first that they’d be blamed if caught outside the house. Yet no one lit a candle in their own houses nearby and no one came seeking the source of the scream. The hooded figures crept through the windows unmolested, and they dragged the shrieking old man from his house undeterred.
“We’ll follow them,” Calden said to Belfry.
Belfry frowned. “But he said he had to give his soul in exchange—”
“I said, we’ll follow them.”
The boys followed the little hooded figures into the darkness beyond town, and soon they appeared as nothing more than a line of lanterns floating over nighttime pastures and into a thick forest. Calden had heard of a graveyard there, but it was not hallowed ground, if rumor was to be believed. Many people had been buried there in barbarous times, and only betrayers, witches, and bandit kings were buried there now.
Calden and Belfry stopped at the edge of this graveyard, hiding in the shadows of the trees while the hooded figures formed a circle among the graves, some old and overgrown with weeds, some fresh with mounds of earth, and some open like hungry mouths. The old man sat in the center of this circle, between an open grave and an overgrown one. The hooded figures made noise now, snickering and growling as they closed in on their victim.
“It’s not my fault!” the old man cried. “Two street urchins mugged me and tore open the bag!”
“Jon Dalmer, son of Beatrice Green and Horace Dalmer, it is your fault because you are the one who made the agreement,” the leader hissed, the same who had first knocked on the door. “You made the agreement without the influence of drink or drug, without the intimidation of fire or blade. You made the agreement knowing the price.” Curved and shining scissors emerged from the leader’s cloak.
Strangely enough, the sight of the blades seemed to somber the old man, Dalmer, and he ceased his sobbing and screaming. “Yes, I know. The price is my immortal soul, which you will now extract for my failure of but one year.”
“If it helps your heart bear it any better,” the leader said, “then I will say that it is not immortal, for all things must change. All things die in constant, and you are not losing as much as you believe.” The scissors slid forward and other hooded figures laid the man down on his back.
“We should confess,” Belfry whispered. “We should tell them it was our fault.”
“A lot of good that will do,” Calden said. “You heard the leader of these devils—the old man knew the deal he was making long before your grandfather bought your grandmother for an evening’s delight. Now, be quiet.”
The hooded figures held Dalmer down by his arms and legs, so tightly that he couldn’t even squirm, and the leader of his tormentors ran the scissors along his body from head to toe, toe to head, again and again, as if he didn’t know where to find the man’s soul.
“He might’ve hidden his soul in an egg,” Belfry suggested. “I heard a story of a man who hid his death in an egg, and a giant who hid his heart in an egg.”
“Have you heard the story of one boy who threw another into an open grave and buried him alive?” Calden asked. Belfry shook his head. “They’ve yet to tell it, but they will, and it’ll be a true story, if you don’t shut up now.”
“You’ve kept the bag close all these years,” the leader said to the old man.
“Yes,” said Dalmer.
“You’ve kept it safe all these years.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve kept awake some nights, worrying that someone might take it or destroy it.”
“Yes,” Dalmer conceded. “It drove my wife away. My children left my house and never speak to me. I had to fire all my servants, who were once paid with the bag’s coins, and generously. I could not trust them anywhere near it. If I could do it all again, I would never have made that deal. I would’ve been poor all my days, however few or many, not to have my life ruled by that leather sack. Its price was too high from the first day to the last.”
“I see,” said the leader. His scissors halted over Dalmer’s feet. A pale, tiny hand yanked away both of the old man’s boots, then his socks, and then the scissors snipped at his wrinkled flesh, stripping away the thinnest layer of skin from heel to toe. “And now I have collected your soles.”
The circle of hooded men hopped away from the old man and laughed hysterically. Many fell to the ground, rolling with joy, while others slumped over headstones, struggling to catch their breath for they were cackling so heavily.
“Is that all?” the old man asked, looking to his raw feet.
“If by all, you mean the suffering and torture you crafted for yourself in the years and years you’ve held the bag, then yes,” the leader said. “That is all.” And he laughed with his slightly smaller friends. He laughed so hard that his hood flopped up, revealing the pointed ears, the beady eyes, and the dirt and moss skin of a goblin. The old man only wept.
“They’re no devils,” Calden said, grinning. “And there’s no need to forfeit one’s soul. Death will wait in just the same way as always. We’ll follow in the old man’s footsteps.”
Belfry frowned. “But the goblin said he crafted suffering and—”
“We’ll follow in the old man’s footsteps.”
The boys emerged together from the dark woods and all the laughter and weeping was snuffed out like a tiny candle’s flame. The goblins scowled, and the old man scowled like he was one of them. They parted to allow Calden to bluster into the circle, with Belfry stepping nervously at his heels, and the boys stood before the leader goblin as if Dalmer didn’t exist.
“We wish to make the deal with you, goblin,” Calden said. “We wish to take the bag which gives all the coins we can pull from within and carry it for sixty-six years.”
“You scoundrels!” the old man cried. “Haven’t you pestered me enough for a day?”
“But it’s night now,” Belfry said innocently, and the goblins cackled around him.
“They say the fairies love a simpleton,” Calden muttered, and all but the leader of the goblins returned to scowling. “Make the deal with us, goblins, or I’ll show you what a true blade looks like.”