Make Willing the Prey (Dreams by Streetlight) (19 page)

It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it
isn’t real
.

The pain subsided only a little
while the vision remained.  He said he had fed on them, that he was more
powerful.  Why hadn’t his true name worked?  She would simply have to summon as
much will as she could to defend all three of them.

Lewis ran to her side.  “I’m
sorry, Jina,” he croaked. 

With one arm still around Sandy,
she put the other around him and clung to them both.  If anything was true
about those old fairy stories, perhaps...

“Jina, Jina, Jina...” S.A.
chided.  “Now we must move on.  You hurt me very badly with that thing over
there.”  He motioned towards the spike.  “Now it’s my turn in this game, and it’s
time for me to punish you.”

Her skin began to burn all over
her entire body.  The mold gave way to blisters.

“I’ll hold them.  I’ll hold on to
them until you’re finished, and take them out of your twisted idea of
fairyland, Perrihaunisplaun.  You’re nothing but dirt, and nothing you do to me
will hurt.”  She wanted to chuckle at her unintended rhyme, but instead began
chanting, “It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t real.”  Again the pain
subsided, and she felt nothing.

But the visions, the visions
filled her with terror.

A praying mantis polished its eye
with a forelimb and then popped off its own wing and ate it.  Soon it was
replaced with a hundred cockroaches crawling over a sickly, half-wilted
flower.  Drops of blood fell from its withered petals. 

She closed her eyes but it didn’t
help.

“I cannot fear what isn’t real.”

The room filled with skulls. 
They morphed into the faces of screaming children.  She heard the sound of
chalk screeching on a blackboard, and then the sound of cats being murdered. 
Flies, snakes, rotting carcasses, she would not let them destroy her will.  She
was going to empty S.A. of all his power by enduring everything he had to throw
at her.  Each time she thought of giving up, another of Pandora’s demons —
determination, anger, rebellion, hatred — surged through her, pushing her on. 

The room filled with wasps.  They
landed on her, covered her skin, stung her.  It helped that she couldn’t feel
it.  It made it easier to believe it was illusion.

Why didn’t any of the apparitions
hurt?  They had started too... Until she had said...

The rhyme.

S.A. had written rhymes.  Were
they spells?  Did she have to use his name in a spell?  Did rhyming make it a
spell?

This would be difficult without
paper.  But it would be possible.  She had written enough songs in the shower.

Ignoring the half-rotten kitten
corpse that limped towards her, she concentrated on the words.  Giving them a
tune made it easier.  When she was ready, she started singing:

I have no worries, I have no
fear,

What I really want is for you to
be out of here

Your spiders are dross, your croc
is a fraud,

Yet here you stand pretending you’re
God.

Perrihaunisplaun, if that’s your
true name

I’m singing this now because I’m
on to your game,

Perrihaunisplaun, I sing this
banishment song,

You must leave this house, now
go, move along.

Perrihaunisplaun, leave forever,
return nevermore,

Let us walk out freely, through
the front door.

Leave us in peace, I know that
you will

Because this is my spell and ...

She had forgotten the last part…
what was it?  It didn’t matter...

“And... I think you’re a pill.”

Everything vanished.  The bugs. 
The skulls.  The screams.  S.A.  The piano.  The couch.  The furniture.

Sandy still wore her wedding
dress, and an old telephone hung on the wall by the stairs, just as it had when
they first entered the house.  The kaleidoscope and railroad spike littered the
floor.  Everything else was gone.

Jina’s mouth hung open, and she
felt like she had been run over by a tow truck.  The sudden urge to laugh
struck her, and she wasn’t sure why.  She was having enough trouble remembering
who she was.  She shook her head which helped a little.  Ah yes, the spell.  It
worked.

A door creaked on unused hinges
in a nearby hallway.  The smell of fresh, outside air touched her nose, and the
staleness slowly left the room.  Sandy sat, looking as empty as before, but
with a little smile on her face. 

Lewis still held on to her for
dear life.

“Hey,” she shook him a little.  “Lewis,
come on, let’s get out of here while we can.”

Full of aches, she stood.  She
helped Sandy to her feet first, then Lewis. 

She followed the waft of cool air
to the hallway, and, leading the others like children, stumbled out onto the
cracked concrete porch.  Daylight stung her eyes. 

No one had a phone, and no one
had a car.  Walking slowly, she led them down the street towards Sandy’s
apartment.

Epilogue

S
andy sat
in her living room surrounded by cold iron, books, firelight, and cleaning
supplies. 

Gaudy knickknacks lined the
mantle, rested on window sills, and hung over doorways.  Her apartment was a
museum displaying iron objects acquired from thrift stores and antique malls:
horseshoes, candlesticks, skillets, nails, rusty farm tools, hammer heads, and
decorative crosses. 

But they did not make her feel
safe.  The fire warmed the room, but it did not take the chill from her heart. 
The books made her feel smarter, but no less confused. 

And though the cleaning solutions
smelled strong, they did not make her feel clean.

She vigorously muttered a
repetitive chant as she polished an intricate silver frame with tarnish remover
and salt.  She wasn’t merely cleaning the physical surface of this mirror – she
also was cleansing its energies.

The three had found themselves in
a world that had moved on without them.  What had only been a few days to Jina
and Sandy had been six months outside.  They’d been reported missing, searched
for, and given up on.  They’d been dropped from the rolls of the University.  Jina’s
roommate had packed up her stuff and shipped it to her family.  Sandy’s family
had continued paying her rent in the hopes she would be home soon.

Upon their sudden return, they
had little in the way of explanation as to where they’d been for so long.  At
first they tried to tell the truth, but when no one believed them, their
abduction turned into a spontaneous and irresponsible road trip across North
America.  It fit expectations far better than the truth ever could.

Lewis had it worse – he’d been missing
for nearly a year.  His hold on reality was inconsistent, so he never knew when
to shut up about his story.  Everyone thought he was crazy.  And in part, he
was.

Jina visited Lewis every day at
the hospital, as often as they let her.  His treatment for PTSD was going well,
and soon he learned to lie about the specifics of his experiences.  The doctors
were good, but Jina and Sandy were his best support group because they believed
him.  He was scheduled to be released soon.

They had all spent the last few
months piecing their lives back together, in one way or another.  For her, that
meant trying to get back into school, hoping to shift coursework from World
History to Mythology with a focus on European fairy lore.  In the meantime, she
made do with a wide variety of personal studies – including her experimentation
on this mirror.

The silver vines of the frame now
shone as if new.  Sandy smiled in appreciation.  Resuming her chant, she
selected a clean rag and sprayed cleaner on the dusty glass. 

The mirror reminded Sandy of
him.  But for some reason, she took comfort in looking at it.  From the moment
she had first seen it in the seelie room, she felt drawn to it.  Now she hoped
to use it to track him down Perrihaunisplaun and mete out justice for crimes
she could never describe to the police.

It had come into her possession
through a strange event.  Four months ago, she had received a letter from an
estate lawyer.  One Hans Perry, formerly of 6th Street, had named her his wife
in his will.  Mr. Perry had been dead for over forty years, so the lawyer was
happy to finally find her.  Even though her supposed husband had died before
Sandy was born, no other Sandra Ella Windham existed, so the inheritance was
hers.

She had inherited the house, a
bank account with a few thousand dollars, and a stock portfolio worth just over
a million.

Even though Jina had banished
Perrihaunisplaun from the house forever, nothing could make her go back there. 
Instead she hired a crew to empty its belongings.  She had all loose items
boxed and delivered to a storage shed.  Another crew fixed up the house, and
she sold it.

Most of the antiques were useless
to her, so she sold them through an estate broker. 

Everything from the seelie room,
she kept.  Most of it lay packed away in storage.

Then there were the books...

Someday, when she finished
school, she planned to buy a house and set aside a room as a dedicated
library.  For now, she let the books pile around her apartment.  There were so
many of them that they lined every wall.  Some were rare, very expensive. 
Others were unique, and she could find no reference even to their existence. 
The collection also included a number of handwritten journals.  She had even
added to the collection, shopping around for anything she could find about the
fae.

She had already read dozens of
the dusty old tomes, and had learned much.  The difficult part was sorting fact
from fiction.  Did faeries really steal toradh, energy, from food, leaving it
empty of any nutritional value?  Where did they live?  How did faerie magic
work exactly?  Were there really different breeds or species, like nymphs,
sprites, and selkie?  Or were those just human tales interpreting what people
saw through their various cultural filters? 

One thing was sure – faeries were
real, they were evil, and Sandy hated them.

The mirror was probably about as
clean as she could make it.  Its reflective surface would always be marred
where flecks of mercury had gone missing from the back.  If anything, it added
to the beauty of the antique.  It made it seem real.

She set the mirror down gently on
the coffee table, and flipped her notebook open to the right spot.  This was
where she tracked any information that could be useful in locating,
manipulating, binding, hurting, and destroying faeries.  The pages were
wrinkled and worn with overuse. 

Jina had written a spell there
for her.  It included his true name, which by all accounts and prior experience
would create a bond he could not escape.  She’d be angry to learn Sandy was
experimenting without her, but Sandy had always imagined herself doing this
thing, this one act, herself.  They had all been his victims, but he had taken
the most from her.  He had destroyed her dignity, possessed her soul,
controlled her very desires.  He had violated her in a way that no crisis
hotline or rape councilor would ever understand. 

No amount of inheritance money
would make up for what he’d done to her.

Gripping the mirror in anger, she
began a new chant. 

Mirror shiny, mirror bright,

Reflect to me just one tonight,

Mirror shiny, mirror true,

Scry to me a face of blue,

Mirror shiny, mirror tame,

Use the power of his name,

Mirror shiny, mirror show,

The Perrihaunisplaun I know.

She braced herself when she saw a
vision start to coalesce.  His image formed clearly, but instead of fear or
rage, she felt…