Hidden Among Us
Authors: Katy Moran
For
Delilah Wells
“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.”
From “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, by John Keats
THE COVENANT
1
I’m building a tower.
The red and yellow bricks are smooth in my hands, and the fire is making them warm. Rain bashes at the window. It’s getting dark but Mum says it’s not the night. The radio is playing. Mum has gone out to the barn to get wood. She’s cross because the roof is leaking and our firewood keeps getting wet. Most days since we came to live here I sit in the wheelbarrow and go with Mum, but today I was making my tower and I said no.
So now I’m on my own. It’s Uncle Miles’s house, but we never see him. Dad says he’s like a ghost. Lissy doesn’t count because she’s a baby. A few weeks ago, she wasn’t even here at all. She was just nobody.
The scream comes blasting out of nowhere.
Lissy, upstairs. It’s not her usual crying. Something else. Something bad.
I’m scared so much it hurts in my belly but I get up anyway, leaving the tower of bricks by the fire. The hall is cold. It’s full of the screaming from upstairs.
“Lissy!” I shout. “Lissy, it’s OK!”
What am I going to do?
I’m running up the stairs now because it sounds so bad, that screaming, like someone’s hurting her, or she’s scared—
And she stops when I’m halfway up the stairs. The scream stops. Our house is quiet again, just the radio in the kitchen. And me. Like it was before she got here, before she was born.
“Lissy?” I call, but she doesn’t answer because she is just a baby. She can’t do anything.
I run. Up the stairs, along the hall. The curtains are open and I can see Lissy’s baby basket on the big bed. Rain is rushing down the window.
Maybe that’s it: she’s gone back to sleep, really quickly.
I feel sick now but I keep going, walking slowly across the stripey rug till I reach the bed and stand there looking into Lissy’s basket.
She’s gone. My baby sister has gone.
There’s just a tangled blanket. And a pile of dead leaves, all brown and broken. Where did they come from? A leaf jumps like it has come alive, and the biggest spider ever crawls across the sheet where Lissy lay.
I can hear screaming again but this time it’s me.
2
She’s been gone for over three weeks. My baby. If we’d left the Reach when Adam wanted to, when I was still pregnant, would they still have found us? It’s all my fault.
Will writing this down even help?
It’s two o’clock in the morning now, but it was only just past midnight when I left Adam and Rafe sleeping together in the big double bed. I couldn’t stand lying there in the dark, wanting to turn back time.
I’ve let everyone down.
I knew sleep would never come. I went downstairs; I pushed open the great oak front door and stepped outside into the darkness. Miles once told me this door was made over seven hundred years ago, but there are parts of the house which belong to a time before that. Hopesay Reach is an old, old place. It remembers everything.
Miles took away all our protection, and they came.
The cold was breathtaking, but I deserve to suffer. I’ve got to find Lissy, whatever the cost. I dropped to my knees on the front lawn – whitened with a late frost, a killing frost that will blast every last blossom from the fruit trees. All I could hear was her sharp cry echoing inside my head.
She needs me; I can’t help her.
I begged.
It was all I could do, my only option. I begged them for mercy, in a jumbled mix of French and English that probably didn’t even make sense.
“Je veux mon bébé,”
I whispered to the cold, cold ground.
“I’ll do anything. Bring her back and I’ll do whatever you want.”
I would have torn open the earth to find her; I leaned forwards ripping the grass with white-cold hands. I broke the ground, tearing a fingernail from its root. Exquisite pain shot up my hand and through my arm, but it was nothing compared to losing Lissy. My mouth opened wide but the scream was silent, and that’s when it happened. I never thought they’d listen.
One did.
A voice whispered through the darkness. “
Miriam
—”
I scrambled up, breathing hard. The frozen grass burnt my bare feet. The yew tree on the lawn was shaking: branches twisted and whipped by a sudden violent wind. The waters of the lake shivered. The yew is older than Hopesay Reach itself, older than the village church, they say, and it must have weathered a million storms. But that wind sent two of its branches crashing to the ground. My hair was torn and twisted; I remember the nightgown flapping against my legs.
I looked up. A ragged black shape passed across the silver face of the moon. It circled in the sky, wheeling above me, wings spread. I didn’t know what it was – some kind of bird of prey, a falcon? It dropped hard and fast like a stone. But when the bird landed, there was no falcon, just a tall boy with tangled red hair.
Despite my agony and fear, I’m still breathless at the wonder of it, three hours later in the grey light of dawn.
He was one of the Hidden. There was a smear of blood across his cheek; so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes away, not for a second. There was something familiar about him, even then. I felt like I’d seen him before.
“Miriam.” He spoke quietly. He knew my name. I didn’t know his, not then, but I saw the fear and hesitancy in his eyes. “I hear your voice in the rain.” He shrugged: an odd, fluid and wholly inhuman movement that always betrays his kind to those who know, and I do. “I come against my father’s word.”
I’ll admit a jolt of fear knocked through me when he spoke.
My father?
“Please,” I whispered, “please help me. I can’t bear to be without her. Please bring Lissy back. She’ll die. She’ll die without me. Won’t she?”
“You ask me to do what has been forbidden.”
Tears streamed down my face and I asked if she was still alive.
“Of course.” He sounded incredulous, as if I’d said something stupid, but how could the Hidden know how to look after a baby? They can’t have their own children, not any more.
It’s why they took mine.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said, so gentle and beguiling.
“I’ll take you to her.”
I looked back at the house. “My little boy.” I shook my head. “I can’t come with you. Not to stay. I can’t leave him. He’s only four.”
It’s true what the fairy tales say: a man follows his beloved into the fairy hill. When he steps out into the light of day, it is not the next morning. A thousand million mornings have come and gone as he danced with the Hidden, with the fairies, the fee, the elves, the Sidhe, whatever you choose to call them. In the end, it is all the same. He dissolves into dust. I couldn’t risk that, finding Lissy but leaving Rafe without a mother.
“Please don’t cry. Lissy belongs to us now.” He sighed, as if upset by the difficulty I was causing, my inability to accept she was gone.
“But she’s my baby,” I whispered. He wasn’t going to help me. I turned away, and all I wanted to do was lie down on the frozen ground and die.
“Wait.” He laid one cold hand on my arm. “Then we’ll make a covenant: you can borrow her.”
“What do you mean?” My voice was cracked, desperate. Even after all these years, there are still a few English words I don’t recognize. “What’s a covenant?”
“An agreement. A deal.” He shrugged again. “I’ll bring Lissy to you, and no matter how far from here you run, in fourteen years you must return to Hopesay, where our worlds meet. Bring her home to the Reach. Don’t fail me, Miriam, I’m trusting you.”
I told him fourteen years wasn’t enough. We
could
run. We could hide.“What if I don’t bring her back?”
He smiled. “You will. Don’t try to cheat me, Miriam.”
I tried to interrupt, but he spoke again, and what he said and did will freeze my blood and bones till the day I die.
The boy reached out and softly blew on his outstretched fingertips. As I watched, a tangle of briar roses appeared from nothing, cupped right there in the palm of his hand, fresh green leaves and petals stained pink like the sky at sunset, still flecked with dew.
“With this gift, I curse thee, Miriam Harker,” he whispered. “Hear this. Unless one of the Hidden willingly gives up their own life in exchange for Lissy, in fourteen years any mortal child born from your body will die if you don’t bring Lissy home to my father.” He smiled, as if he’d just made a joke and he was waiting for me to laugh.
I watched, breathless with horror. The green leaves twined about his fingers were starting to wither, turn brown. The petals began to curl up, yellowing.
“So don’t try to shut the Gateway, Miriam,” he said, gently; “and don’t cheat.”
The briar roses shrank to nothing but a withered stick, then a small heap of dust in his palm, which he let fall to the frozen ground.
“Just promise you’ll bring her back.” I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. My whole body tingled with fear. Yes, and wonder, too.
The boy nodded. “My word is my bond. Do you believe in a god, Miriam? Some enormous mind who made the very earth we stand on? A force that shapes the world and makes sense of it, something kind and good and merciful?”
His question stunned me; I thought it might be some kind of trick. Twenty-five years of church-going prompted me to find an answer, even though in truth I’m not sure there is one. “Of course I believe in God.”
“Good,” he said, quietly, “because only such a thing will now save me from my father’s rage. I’ll come back with the sun, and bring her.”
Before I could speak again, he was gone. Simply gone, leaving nothing but a whirlwind of green summer leaves. As I watched, they withered and turned brown, just as the briar roses had done, landing on the frosty earth.