Bravado's House of Blues (15 page)

“You have grown, sister,” the seedling said with a lilting laugh. “The Mistress will not recognize you all big the way you are.”

Molly spun on her knees, as the seedling ran toward the woods. “Bring me a sister,” the seedling called as she disappeared into the shadow of the wood.

“Well, isn’t that a fine how-do-you-do?” Molly asked, standing.

Sir Reginald had stood too close, and Molly had grown too tall since the first day of dwarven ale and knocking mushrooms of fire. Her head came nearly to Sir Reginald’s chin. She was too close to him, and he to her. For a moment, she thought to step back, to catch her breath. A wave of dizziness nearly overwhelmed her, and Sir Reginald caught her. She lifted her eyes to his, and as the world succumbed to a fiery sunset, she found her lips pressed against Sir Reginald’s.

The Mistress of Switches had not mentioned this in her tea lessons, Molly thought. Once they had parted, she picked up her satchel and took Sir Reginald’s hand. “Let us get this child to the queen,” she said. “Won’t the princesses be surprised when we bring this lot home?”

DEAD POETS

O
ffal, carrion, rot and decay. Panic rises in Katie as she staggers across the living room to shut the French doors. The stench of death rides the autumn wind.

For a moment, she stands frozen, staring out at the rose garden, searching in vain for the source of the stench. With eyes watering, and throat clenching, she shuts the doors and reels to catch herself on the back of the couch.

Dear God in heaven.

She crosses to the kitchen, one hand over her mouth. The urge to gag flits through her as she runs a cloth under the tap. Once she covers her mouth and nose with the damp cloth, she rifles the cabinet for anything to overcome the smell.

Half a can of air freshener later—
Piney Woods
—she collapses on the veranda and flips open her cell phone.

No signal, of course. She lays the phone against her forehead and watches the dust motes dance in the last rays of sunlight. The breeze has blown across the garden for days now, and the intoxicating aroma of heat and roses has teased her mind with memories of her childhood and days with no end.

Now, something, or someone, has been eviscerated in the garden and fermented in the heat of the day. With the evening’s shifting of the breeze, she now suffers the full brunt of the carnage.

Her stomach churns, adding the tang of bile to her already overloaded senses. This is not what she wanted. Nothing in her cute little house seems appealing any longer.

The odor slithers into her psyche, addling her thoughts. What in the verdant grove could be . . . She sits bolt upright. Oh, it couldn’t be?

She slips on her sneakers and holds the cloth to her face with one hand, grabbing the fireplace poker with the other. Please don’t be Grandma, she whispers as she flings the doors open again. The odor has subsided a bit, or perhaps she’s just getting used to it. In either case, she steps gingerly from her house and stalks around the path through the three trellises flowing with wisteria. The raucous call of a crow causes her to jump, smacking the fireplace iron against a trellis with a bang.

“A raven caws in the gloaming night,” she whispers, clutching the poker to her chest

“our darling girl stands a’fright

abattoir’s wind has come of late

blows the ire of Sweeney’s gate”

Three years of English literature and her fear thrills with hackneyed poetry. The sigh that escapes her lips buzzes behind the drying terry cloth. Death lingers nigh, she thinks, walking beneath the wisteria.

She clears the end of the hedge row and crosses the lawn. No bodies strew the lengthening shadows. The windows of her grandmother’s house are open, and she hears singing from the kitchen.

Okay, Grandma Eloise has not been butchered. That’s good.

Her heart lightens somewhat as she walks the path beneath the growing dusk, careful to step on only the white stones. Safe, she thinks, when her feet touch the porch. Safe at last.

The door squeaks a bit as she opens it. Grandma straightens from the oven and places a beautiful bundt cake on the counter. The overwhelming smell of sugar and eggs, vanilla and . . . lemon of all things . . . wash away the blight of death.

“Playing robber?” Grandma asks.

Katie smiles behind the terry cloth and shrugs, placing the fireplace poker on the table beside the cake. “Sorry, Grams. Something horrid has happened in the garden, and I thought perhaps you’d been murdered.”

“Oh, my,” Eloise says with a shake of her head. She places the oven mitts on the countertop near the sink and rinses her hands. “Murdered, you say?”

“Yes,” Katie says with a vigorous nod. “The smell is overwhelming.”

Grandma laughs then, a light airy trickle that causes her eyes to scrunch up and a rosy glow to brush her cheeks. “Oh, my child. It’s that fool butcher bird.”

Over jasmine tea and steaming lemon poppy-seed cake, Katie learns of the shrike that nests among the thornier hedgerow, and its proclivity to impaling its victims on the long thorns of the hawthorn hedge. How scrumptiously morbid.

“It’s nesting now,” Grandma assures her. “But after a few weeks the little ones will be gone, and the aroma will die back.”

“Lovely metaphor,” Katie says, toying with a bit of glaze on her third slice of cake. She slumps over her plate, her left hand cupping her right ear. “I’d hoped to enjoy the last days of Indian Summer before the rains return and the world runs gray with pain.”

Grandma sniffs and sips her tea. “Your grandfather hated that bird, you know?”

Katie straightens. “Hate is such a strong word.”

“Loathed, perhaps, would be better,” she offers. “If that bird hadn’t kept the voles on the run, he’d have burnt the hawthorns down to spite that creature.”

“The stench is quite something,” Katie agrees. “I can just see the epic battle, man versus nature.”
How lovely
, she thinks. “And only his love for your roses stayed his hand in the end?”

“I don’t know about all that,” Grandma says. “I know he’d have egg on his face come the spring if the garden club got wind of him chopping or burning anything.”

“Oh.” Of course it was nothing so grand.

The briefest of smiles crosses Grandma’s cheeks. “But he did plot that bird’s death more than one evening over a stiff whiskey and a full pipe.”

Katie stands, catches up both their plates, and sets them in the sink. Out there in the dying light, she thinks, the bird snatches its victims unawares and hangs them to die, slowly, on the vine. She thinks of Poe and Keats, staring into the yard.

“Are you all right, dear?”

Resolve floods through Katie, who turns and nods once. “I shall take up the noble cause.” She smacks one fist into her opposite palm. “I will strike the blow my ancient fathers failed to strike.”

“Watch the ancient talk.” Grandma also stands, and brushes her hand across Katie’s shoulder. “Let the bird raise her little ones.”

The tone of her voice is obvious, but Katie pretends not to hear. Outside, the shadows pushed the final pools of light into oblivion.

“Tomorrow I will scout the terrain.”

Grandma pauses her hand on Katie’s shoulder, squeezing it once before letting her hands fall to her side. “Tomorrow you could call your mother, and see about returning to school.”

Oh, that was the ploy, was it? Katie narrows her eyes. “I see. Perhaps it is you I should be wary of.” She hugs her Grandmother with a grin. “In league with the foul bird, methinks. Trying to drive me from my humble home?”

Grandma steps back, holding Katie at arm’s length. “It was the gardener’s home before he moved to Florida,” she says raising her eyebrows. “And you are welcome to stay there as long as you need.”

Katie gives a little curtsy. “Thank you.”

“Let us hope your needs change.”

For three weeks, Katie scours the vast yard dressed in a bee-keeper’s hood and an old army gas mask she acquired at that fashionable surplus store in town. With a long pair of barbecuing tongs and a box of biodegradable bags, she haunts the hawthorn, recovering the shredded and decaying bodies of field mice, crickets, small birds, and an occasional snake.

Each night as the stars appear between the scuttling clouds, she burns a block of cedar or mesquite. The fire dances in the brazier, gold and red, a pagan’s delight, while she buries the day’s body count in the vegetable garden.

Even when hunting, she rarely thinks of anything but poetry—T. S. Eliot, of course, is first on her mind, but there is also Bryon, or Tennyson in a pinch.
The Deader the Better,
her favorite shirt proclaims on the front.
Read Dead Poets
, reads the back.

The shrike is not idle all this time, by no means. For every partial mouse or decapitated mole she discovers and inters, the butcher bird finds others. The nest remains hidden from Katie, but in the morning as the smell of coffee and bacon fills her home, she hears the song of the little ones, crying for their food.

The irony of her stuffing bacon into her yap as she listens to the hungry cries of the baby birds is not lost on her. The tragedy haunts her in the quiet moments, but after a hearty breakfast, and a brief nap, she dons her warrior attire and hunts the elusive carrion fruit.

The weather has begun to turn wet again, as it is wont to do in the fall. Katie keeps the wood stove going much of the evenings to beat back the chill.

The plaintive cries of the young fell silent days before, and the reek of decay fades. Still, she prowls the shadowy corners of the garden, searching for her nemesis. It is in this fervor, her holiest of crusades, that the abomination appears to her through the morning mist.

It is the twenty-third of October when it changes. She will recall it for the rest of her days. The morning mist has burned off and the weak sun toys with the shadows as she sojourns this day. New territory, she deems. Look where she’s failed to look. That is the way of it. But the prize is not always what one expects.

Tucked in a corner of the garden, behind Grandpa’s prize winning R. roxburghii plena, her vision shatters, her heart is sundered. Amidst the longest of the hawthorn’s wicked plumage, the shimmer of the gossamer wings catches her eye. She pulls aside the helm and mask and leans forward—

face of bone china

tiny skirt of marigolds

bosom impaled in cold cruel death

—thus ends the lightness of heart

Her legs give way and she falls to the ground. The rain soaks her as she sits in the mud, studying the lifeless fey. It isn’t until Grandma kneels beside her, draping her in a blanket and pulling her to her feet, that Katie realizes the day has gone, and the shadows rule the garden.

“Did you see,” she asks as Grandma pulls her into the little house. “Did you see what our Sweeney Todd has done this day?”

Grandma does not say a word, but strips Katie of her wet and muddy clothes. As each garment is shed, bee-keeper helmet, gas mask, sweatshirt and jeans, a bit of the anger and horror slips past the gate. By the time the shower is running and the windows are fogged with steam, Katie stands in the heat of the water, weeping.

She weeps until the water runs cold. The icy fingers drive her to a dry towel, and her favorite clothes. When she emerges in her college fleece and an old pair of sweats, Grandma has the stove pinging, and the cocoa steams in oversized mugs.

Katie curls into a blanket on the divan, her feet tucked beneath her and the steaming mug held tight in her hand.

Grandma sits in the rocker across from her, near the stove. “Do you recall your summer here?” she asked. “When you were seven?”

Memories of long drowsy days in the sun puts a smile back on her face—playing with her dolls as the walls of thorns protected her from the rush of the world. “Yes. Those were wonderful days.”

“Do you remember how your doll disappeared one afternoon? How you cried in Grandpa’s lap because your best friend in the whole wide world had been stolen by some villain?”

This puzzles Katie. She does not recall any trauma here in the garden. Nothing horrible has ever happened in her memory. “Are you sure it was me?” she asks finally.

Grandma sighs. “Yes, dear heart. It was you. The pixies were thick that summer, having been driven from the forests near Redmond in all the construction. Raphael, the gardener, found your doll in the hawthorn among the shrike’s recent meals. The cloth was torn and much of the yarn hair was missing, but the way it had been impaled on the thorns scared Raphael. He left soon after, swearing that the fey had cursed you.

“This house has sat empty all this time.”

“Sixteen years,” Katie breathes. “And all this time, have you seen the pixies?”

“Not a one,” Eloise says. “Your grandfather found several impaled on the thorns, like your doll, like the voles and the sparrows. The butcher bird, your Sweeney Todd, will take what it needs. That year, your grandfather had wanted to protect you from the horror and did as you have done, clearing the dead, hiding the food. The shrike resorted to what it could. Once the first pixie had been taken, things began to go wrong.”

Katie sits up. “Wrong?”

“Tiny things at first. The milk went bad within a day. Cakes fell, the odd missing sock.” She touches the side of her face, her eyes lost in history. “Your mother knew immediately what had happened. The mark on your face.” She trails off.

Katie touches her own face, finger tracing the mark she carries. Wine stain, she had always been told. But what if?

“Fairy marked,” Grandma says. “You were too old to steal, as pixies are fond of doing, and trading one of their own for you was not feasible. Instead they took a bit of you, a small touch on the cheek to remind us of the part we played in the butcher birds’ depredations.”

“And why did you allow me to repeat his mistake?” Katie asks. “Why did you not warn me of the appetite and the need to feed? Why did you allow me the crazed notion that I could fight this bird and risk the wrath of the Fae?”

“This is not poetry, girl. This is real life. Your Byrons and Keatses will never be enough for you. You are cursed and blessed in ways we cannot imagine.”

Katie sips her chocolate and falls deep in thought. In her mind’s eye, she sees the fairy kiss that graces her cheek, a burnt red cluster of wing beats, and angry, wailing fists.

“I found the pixie that day,” she says, finally. “I pulled it from the thorns and hugged it to my face, thinking it a toy. I remember the soft mewling as it died against my cheek, its blood stinging my flesh.”

Grandma stops rocking and stares at her. She holds her hand over her mouth and moans. “It is the bird’s nature to find its food, no matter the source,” she whispered. “She must feed her young.”

“But we interfered,” Katie says, feeling overly hot. She flings the blanket aside and stands in her fluffy pink bunny slippers. “I’m not crazy, I remember the pixies, and the way the trees glowed with their magic on Samhain. I remember you leaving ginger snaps and root beer on the wrought iron table in the back, so the pixies would leave you alone.”

“And then the shrike began nesting nearby. At first we loved the pageantry, the way it courted with such amazing dances and songs. Then when the voles were under control, we celebrated. It wasn’t until that October, with the pixies in the trees and the autumn sun blazing overhead that we realized the price one must pay for certain favors. The roses have never bloomed more full. The shrike was a harbinger of prosperity and balance.”