THE OTHER
A
Not-Yet-Finished Tale
©2009 The Angst Guy (theangstguy@yahoo.com)
Daria and associated characters are ©2009 MTV
Networks
Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just want to bother me,
whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com
Synopsis: In yet another weird alternate universe, Daria is still
a Scorpio, but her birthday is on Halloween,
with significant consequences—and her best friend Jane is not who you think she is.
Author’s
Notes: This story has changed
directions a number of times since its creation. (It was originally entitled “Basilisk.”)
This version has been rewritten and is being presented anew. It was inspired by
Prince Charon’s Iron Chef of September 2005, asking for fantasy-based Daria fanfic, though it does not answer
the challenge exactly as issued.
This story makes extensive use of a
special font for the title, chapter titles, and quotes. Chaucer is a true-type
font with a sophisticated but haunting flavor. Chaucer (one of several fonts with
that name) is available as a free download from Fontage.com or Searchfreefonts.com.
No viruses or bugs, just a neat way to spruce up a ghost story.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Richard Lobinske for straightening out
the difference between “Tudor” and “Elizabethan,” and for fixing an error in
how years were named. Thanks to smk for badly needed
proofreading. Thanks again to Prince Charon for a push in the right direction.
*
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
*
Chapter One:
Unreal Estate
[T]hey that are born on Hallowe’en whiles
see mair than ither folk.
—Sir Walter Scott, The Monastery
Now,
that’s a haunted house.
Arms crossed, Daria Morgendorffer stood
in the driveway of her family’s new home and inspected the two-story dwelling
before her. The aura of wrongness about the building rubbed itself against her
face like an invisible cat. The house had everything a large home normally had,
but a little more: rows of red bricks that did not appear to line up properly;
empty windows that seemed to show movement when you looked away from them; a
yard full of bare-branched shrubs and dead leaves when the bushes and trees in every
yard around were just starting to turn yellow and gold with autumn.
It was the dark radiance, however, that
clinched it. It was the perception that the trees, the lawn, and all other
features close to the house were shaded as if during a full eclipse, an
unnatural dimness that was easier to sense than to see. The nearer the house,
the greater the degree of gloom until nothing by the house appeared to cast a
shadow at all. Even the sky above the
house was darker than normal, near to twilight.
So clear all this was to her, she
thought, but so invisible to everyone else.
She lowered her gaze to where her parents
and younger sister talked excitedly with the real-estate agent by the FOR SALE
sign, then looked up again at the structure she and her family would soon
inhabit. It was as out of place in the upscale subdivision as a tombstone in a
flower garden.
Will
we take possession of our home, Daria wondered, or will it take possession of us? Probably both, in
that order.
“If I let it,” she added aloud, just
loudly enough that everyone nearby knew she had said something but could not
tell what. Her parents and the real-estate agent glanced uneasily in her
direction. Her cute through-and- through younger sister, Quinn, frowned at her and
walked away, her long orange-peel hair bouncing with just the right amount of
bounce.
“Don’t you love it, Daria?” said her
father as he gestured at the house. “No more dinky ranch
homes for us! Now we’ve got a place with real
spirit!”
Daria raised an eyebrow at him. No truer
words had been spoken that entire day.
“Dear,” said her mother, “why don’t you
leave your backpack in the car? You don’t have to lug your books around every
place you go.”
“I’m fine,” Daria replied, looking away.
“I just think you should . . . oh,
whatever. It’s your back.”
Daria ignored her. The backpack was heavy
but tolerable—and necessary. Her parents and the agent had begun to talk among
themselves again when she spoke in a louder voice, one meant to carry. “Why was
this property stigmatized?”
Her words had an electric effect on the
adults. (Quinn had already disappeared around the house to see the backyard.) “Stigmatized?”
said her mother. “Who said anything about our house being stigmatized?”
“No one was supposed to tell you anything
about it!” cried her father.
“Jake!”
snapped her mother.
“It’s okay, I’ll handle this,” said the balding
agent. He turned to Daria and spread his hands in a gesture meant to convey honesty
and openness. “You see, young lady, ‘stigmatized’ doesn’t mean anything,
really. It just means a place once had some negative press. It happens to a lot
of properties. The important thing is, it’s a lot of
baloney. The house is fine. Maybe someone didn’t like the architecture, or said
the house was the wrong color, whatever, who knows. What’s wrong for one buyer
is perfect for another—as in this case.” He beamed reassurance. “I wouldn’t
worry about it.”
“I’ve heard,” Daria said calmly, “that a property
can be stigmatized if someone died in it.” She noted the looks of dread on her
parents’ faces before adding, “Or if it’s haunted.”
“Haunted? Oh, sweetie, that is the
silliest thing!” Her mother turned to her father with a narrow look. “Isn’t
that right, Jake?”
“Absolutely!” said her father, getting
the hint. “A person would have to be crazy to think this place was haunted!” He
did a double-take and blurted a moment later: “I didn’t mean that you might be crazy, of course! You’d
never be crazy enough to think this
place was haunted, even if someone did die in—”
“JAKE!”
Suppressing a smile, Daria turned away. As
her parents argued, she wandered away to further inspect the house, free of
distractions. Upstairs, she decided. The source of the disturbance, ghost or
otherwise, is upstairs. I hope it’s in the mood for company. It will be a
challenge to lay this one to rest. It’s a strong one.
Her parents finished arguing. Daria knew
her father was in the doghouse again.
“She’s a bit overdressed with that long
skirt, isn’t she?” the agent remarked to change the subject. “It’s pretty warm
out for September.
Daria gave no sign that she heard him.
She continued examining the house and the mad, shadowy radiance about it. This is the worst haunting I’ve ever seen. Could
that crazy lady who died here be the cause of this? This is pretty bad.
“Oh, she dresses as she likes,” said her
mother. “I do wish she’d stop wearing the same thing all the time, but it could
be worse, I suppose.”
“That design on her backpack, is that one
of those medical things? That snake wrapped around a stick thing?”
“Oh, that.” Daria heard her mother sigh. “I
don’t know. I think so.”
“Teenagers,” said the agent in a jovial
voice. “She one of those Goth kids?”
“Not really,” her father began. “The
psychiatrist said that—OW! Damn it, Helen!”
“Sorry, didn’t see your foot,” said her
mother through gritted teeth. “Daria’s different, that’s all. She’s still just
a teenager. Don’t worry about her. She’s actually quite bright, just not especially
. . . um, sociable. We’re working on it.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said the agent.
“You know how kids are these days. It’s just—”
“I love
this house!” Quinn called in delight, having returned from her journey around
the property. “The backyard has a great privacy fence in case I have friends over
for—I mean, in case we throw family parties and invite our friends! How big are
the bedrooms? Which ones have a walk-in closet? I have a ton of stuff to move
in!”
“You can’t have the master bedroom, of
course,” Helen said, “but there are three other bedrooms and two of them are
nice, so there’s plenty to choose from.”
It’s
in an upstairs bedroom. The one that
isn’t nice.
“And Quinn,” called their mother, “I don’t
want you and Daria to fight over which room will be yours.”
“As if.” Quinn
tossed her head and her long hair whipped around her. “Can we go in now?”
“Can I get a picture of the four of you
first?” said the agent, pulling a disposable camera from his jacket pocket. “Can
you go over by the sign there? It’s for my office. I’ll send you a copy.”
Jake and Helen herded their daughters
across the yard to the FOR SALE sign, which had a SOLD sticker slapped over it.
Standing slightly separated from her family, Daria stared impassively at the
camera. The real-estate agent had trouble looking away from the girl’s cinnamon-red
eyes. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back in a long ponytail held by a small golden
clip in the shape of a snake. When the clip was shut, the snake’s tail went
into its open mouth. An elaborate open vest of dark emerald material, sporting
numerous pockets, covered a long-sleeved blouse the color of dying yellow
embers. Over this girl wore gold neck chains with small gemstones or occult
symbols for pendants; he recognized an encircled pentagram among them. Her
rings were also disquieting. One sported a tiger-eye that looked like the
eyeball of a living being, another was fashioned like two
entwined snakes, and another like a glistening black spider whose legs were wrapped
around her finger. How she could stand to wear those, the agent had no clue.
A sudden breeze stirred the girl’s black,
ankle-length skirt, revealing black leather boots, decoratively tooled. And what
was in that weird, bulky backpack? If
this kid isn’t a Goth, I’ll eat my
Realtor’s license, the agent thought. She’s
probably a psycho. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Thank
God she’s not my kid.
Content, Daria gave the camera lens her
best deadpan stare. She knew the real-estate agent’s opinion of her (he was so
easy to read), but it was of no consequence. Her parents’ opinions mattered
more, but not by much. It paid to be one-up on them
whenever possible, as they were rarely honest with her. She couldn’t understand
why. It bothered her profoundly to catch her parents in any lie, big or small.
Why didn’t they trust her enough to tell her the house was haunted, even if
they didn’t believe it themselves? Did they think she would scream and run away?
Did they still believe the psychiatrist’s report from Highland High that she
was socially withdrawn to an “extreme degree” and was perhaps mentally unsound?
Apparently so. The aggravation of it was unbearable.
It wasn’t like she didn’t already know as
much about the house than her parents did, if not more. The house was located
in an upscale
One-up on the real world: it was the only
way to deal.
Everyone went inside. Quinn charged
upstairs, determined to get the best bedroom available. Her father went with
her, anxiety written over his face. Protecting
Quinn, no doubt, Daria thought. What
a waste of time.
Daria took her time exploring the ground
floor, knowing full well (as did Quinn) that the vast personality differences
between the two sisters ensured that one would never, ever pick a room the
other might also want. This left Daria free to absorb the wrongness in the dwelling and relish her otherworldly intuition
that the house had issues no one but she could sense. Family room, kitchen,
dining room, garage, closets, basement—the shadowed and shadowless aura reached
everywhere. Daria drank it in, meaning to save the best—the upstairs—for last.
The house did more than tickle the
intuition. It paraded its abnormality about like a loud but cacophonous
marching band. The trendy dwelling with the red-brick façade was only two
decades old, no ancient mansion cursed with a long history of murders,
suicides, and disappearances. Yet it was disturbingly off, as if built from unearthly blueprints that guaranteed no rational
map of the home would ever be fully accurate. It disrupted space and time,
shouted out that this was a threshold, a borderland between real and not real,
sanity and madness. Straight lines were warped, parallel lines slanted askew,
angles re-bent. Daria could not help but like it.
It was a marvel to her how her family remained
insensible to the fact that rooms in this remarkable home were
never the same each time they were entered. The dimensions of walls, ceilings,
and floors shifted at whim; furniture moved about or changed shape and form;
doorways jogged to the left or the right when least expected, even disappearing
at times. Daria admired how the windows revealed different views of the
outdoors each time she looked through them, cherished the cracks in the
ceilings that shrank, grew, or writhed like crooked worms. The kitchen was typical:
countertops changed height and shape; the peninsular center counter became at
times an island. And there was the calendar.
She squinted at it. The day-by-day calendar
on the kitchen wall showed the date to be Monday, February 12th—which it wasn’t.
It was Saturday, September 13th, 1997, the local school year already well under
way. Daria gently tore off the calendar page and saw the same date on the page below:
February 12th.
“Don’t pull off all the dates, dear,”
said her mother, checking the cupboards. “I want to keep it current. Are you
sure you don’t want to put down that backpack?”
“What’s today?” Daria asked, looking at
the calendar. She knew the answer, but wanted to find out what her mother saw.
“Today?” asked her mother, turning to glance
at the calendar. “It’s right in front of you: Saturday, September thirteenth. You
know that.”
Daria thumbed through the pages. February
12th was on every page, all the way down.
“Do you like it?” asked her mother
nervously. “The house?”
Daria let the calendar pages drop. She solemnly
turned in place by the kitchen counter, surveying the room before she adjusted
her gold-frame glasses—and quickly nodded yes.
“That’s wonderful, dear,” said her mother
in relief. “See, I told you everything would be fine!”
Daria peered over her mother’s shoulder. The
sliding glass door behind Helen Morgendorffer looked out into the backyard,
revealing a rectangular cement patio slab immediately outside, beyond which was
a wide strip of mowed grass bounded by a whitewashed board fence and an
uninspiring assortment of shrubbery. The problem was, it was exactly the same
scene Daria had seen from the dining room windows—exactly the same, as if the dining room and kitchen had briefly
changed places on the corner of the house. The cement patio outside the kitchen
was not present when she had looked out from the dining room, however. She examined
the wall to the right of the patio doors and saw a door there, leading directly
to the garage—but hadn’t that same door gone directly to the dining room only a
few minutes earlier?
She smiled. She couldn’t help it.
Her mother turned around to see what her
daughter was smiling at. Noticing nothing amiss, she turned back. “Dear? Are
you all right? Nothing’s wrong, is it? It’s just that you never . . . well, you
so rarely seem like you’re happy.”
The smile faded. Daria turned to go back into
the living room.
. .
. thy hands I cuh . . . rit.
She stopped in her tracks. The feminine voice
was faint but real, not like any haunting voice she’d ever heard. It wasn’t her
mother or sister, so—
“Are you all right?” repeated her mother.
. .
. to thy hands I . . . spirit.
Daria walked over to a family-room window
as if intending to look outside. “Who are you?” she whispered.
A gasp— Who’s there?
“Daria?” Her
mother stood in the entryway to the kitchen, looking very nervous. “Who are you
talking to?”
Leave
here, said a different voice, harsh and withered and old. Leave here.
“No one,” said Daria to her mother. She headed
for the stairs. Her mother watched her go, then sighed and drifted back into
the kitchen.
Daria ascended the steps with a slow,
deliberate tread. The backpack’s weight was making itself strongly felt; her
blouse was well damp around the armpits and down her back. Her right hand
fished into an inner vest pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic bag with a
whitish lump inside that she mashed between thumb and forefinger. Reaching the
top of the stairs, she paused and extended her awareness. The room at the end
of the hall—that was the one she sought. There the air was most clouded, the
ambient light reduced to a dull haze. She felt a chill on her face even at that
distance. The power of what lay on the door’s other side had to be significant
to drain so much positive energy to sustain itself. Two
hauntings at least, from their voices, possibly more—or something else entirely.
This would be a real challenge. Good thing she had come prepared.
She ripped open the small bag. The
pungent odor of garlic wafted out. She dabbed some of the damp material on her
face, neck, and hands, then stuck the bag in her vest again. She then pulled a
sprig of hyssop from another pocket, entwined with a blackberry leaf and a
rosemary sprig, brushed her clothing with them, then
stuck them in the pocket with the crushed garlic. Her fingers touched her
necklaces, ensuring the most important ones were well displayed. She then took a
paper packet from a skirt pocket, tore off the packet’s top, and held it ready
to throw at a moment’s notice. If that failed, she had more defenses, ancient
and new. If even that was insufficient, she had the button-box in her pocket.
If that failed—well, nothing else would matter.
Daria began a slow pace down the hall. Her
sister was nattering away to their father in one of the normal second-floor bedrooms,
checking the closet to make sure her wardrobe would fit inside. When Daria was
only a few feet from the door at the end of the hall, she paused. Nothing could
be heard. Cold air leaked through the cracks around the door to raise goose
bumps on her skin.
Nervous she was, but not afraid. It is difficult
to frighten a person born on the last night of October, in the great autumn
doorway between light and darkness, summer and winter, the seen and the
invisible. Daria was a child of Halloween, and the only living recipient of all
the preternatural powers that children of All Hallow’s Eve were once reputed to
have. She saw and heard everything in her world and the next, both living and
dead. Everything in both worlds saw and heard her as well. Forced by
circumstance to defend herself from the invisible world, she became a self-taught
expert in alchemy and herbal lore. She knew the writings of Albertus Magnus,
Jabir ibn-Hayyan, Francis Bacon, and John Dee forward and back. She knew three
ways to make a cockatrice, knew the flaws inherent in each, and wisely had
tried none of them. She met evil things and learned to be cautious in their
presence.
And she knew enough to never run. They
always caught you if you ran. To go down fighting was the only realistic option,
even if it was hopeless. You simply never knew.
Will
we take possession of our home, or will it take possession of us? Probably both, in that order—if I let it. This one’s going
to be different, very different. May as well meet the
distinguished opposition if I plan to move in today. Here goes nothing.
She opened the door, stepped inside, and
shut the door behind her without one look back.
Chapter Two:
The Quick and the Dead
I was born in a crossfire hurricane
and I howled at my ma in the driving
rain. . . .
—M. Jagger and K. Richards, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
The first thing in the darkness that caught Daria’s
attention was, of course, the ghost.
The ghost seemed at first to be of the
traditional sort: a pale, irregular column of luminescence hovering in the
center of the refrigerated room. Oddly, it was more bluish than white. The
figure was taller than Daria but humanoid in form, if grotesque. From the
strength of the space/time distortion consuming the house, Daria had expected
something larger and more substantial, perhaps even demonic in form, though she
did not expect to see a true demon. True demons did not bother themselves with simple
hauntings.
As her vision adjusted to the darkness, the
ghost took on distinct features. In moments Daria found herself facing a tall,
thin hag with stringy hair. The figure faced her proudly erect and with lifted
chin, looking down on her with a superior if slightly mad air. A shapeless
dress or nightgown with a cast-back hood and a ragged lower hem was the
apparition’s only clothing. Bone-thin arms hung limp at its sides, long-nailed
fingers curled like the claws of a raptor.
It was the crone’s face that most
inspired repulsion and wariness. Its eyes were almond-shaped holes above hollowed
cheeks and a long hooked nose. Wrinkles, moles, and scars decorated the ravaged
skin, and a tuft of hair seemed to sprout from the old woman’s chin. The mouth
was a thin slash, lips sucked in over toothless gums.
Keeping her gaze focused on the spirit-hag,
Daria carefully poured a bit of the contents from the open paper packet into
her free hand, then tossed it over both shoulders as
she muttered a long incantation. The material was salt mixed with an assortment
of spices and ground herbs, a curse-breaker prepared with an eye toward
overkill in keeping with Daria’s desire to never give the other side an even
break.
The spirit lowered its head and stared at
Daria directly. The sight was unnerving, but she kept her wits and flung more
material from the packet around her feet, continuing to murmur the incantation.
When finished, she folded the packet up and put it in her pocket, dusted her
hands, felt her necklaces again—especially the large quartz crystal that was
her dearest treasure—and took a step toward the spirit.
The apparition instantly grew taller by
several inches.
You
see more than is good for you, said the slash of a mouth in a hoarse, gravelly
voice. Leave here or die.
“Thanks for the advice,” Daria replied, “but
I believe I will stay and do as I wish.” Her hand went into her pocket and came
out with the hyssop, blackberry, and rosemary sprigs, which she again brushed
over her clothing for added protection. She didn’t like the way the ghost was
behaving. Ghosts were usually eager to press in upon the living to tell their
tales or whisper their warnings, to befriend or frighten. They wanted the
living to remember them.
This one acted as if it had something
else in mind. The tall translucent old woman watched Daria’s actions through narrowed
slits where its eyes should have been.
You
are doing that wrong, said the ghost.
“Wrong?” Daria said. After a
moment, she added, “Have you read Kipling?” She tried to take in the rest of
the room without looking away from the ghost.
What
do you mean, Kipling?
“Rudyard Kipling, the writer.” The room
was almost square, bare of furnishings and dimly lit. The windows ahead and to
the right covered by plywood boards; razor-thin slivers of light leaked through
along the edges. It was unseasonably warm outside, but the dark room was cold
enough to make Daria shiver. “Have you ever read anything by Kipling?”
The ghost frowned and awaited an
elaboration.
“Not all magic is alike,” said Daria. She
could make out something like a box hanging from the ceiling at the far end of
the room. A door appeared to be behind the ghost on the left wall. “Remember
what Kipling said in one of his poems? ‘There are nine and sixty ways of
constructing tribal lays / And every single one of
them is right.’ It’s the same for magic, of course. You know that, don’t you?
Magic fits the user, always.”
The ghost’s long fingers twitched. Do not presume to tell me about magic, mortal
wretch.
“Then do me the same courtesy,” Daria
retorted. It was unpleasant, the way the ghost had reminded her she was mortal.
Its irate expression hinted of worse things than madness.
Who
are you? The spirit’s fingers flexed, claws fanning out.
Daria knew the lore that warned against
giving up names, but she did everything her way and was damned if she would do
otherwise. The truth was always less confusing to remember than lying. “I am
Daria Morgendorffer the curious, an alchemist and a student,” she said. “Who
are you?” She took a half-step closer to the spirit. The ghost was easier to
see when she did not look directly at it, keeping her gaze slightly to one side.
The ghost’s manner changed. It almost seemed
to shrink slightly, as if relaxing. Daria,
it said in its grating voice: Persian,
then Greek, then Roman: possessor of good things, rich, queenly. The hag’s
mouth twitched. Queenly, it repeated.
The withered face hardened and grew sharper in focus. You are more the fool for your presumption than your curiosity. You
have one foot in the grave up to your hip.
Her instincts sounded air-raid sirens. Daria’s
right hand slipped into her jacket pocket and found the small control box with
the recessed button. “Your attempts at drama are getting bad reviews,” she said.
“And your threats, pardon the expression, lack substance. I will stay as long
as I wish.”
Stay
and perish, then. The ghost advanced a step in Daria’s direction. You do not know who I am, queenly one.
“I believe I’ve heard of you,” Daria
said. “You’re the madwoman who died in this room.” She was no longer sure of
that, though. The madwoman had not been a giantess. And where was the second
ghost, the young girl? She made herself let go of the button box, fighting down
panic, then felt in her pocket for another paper
packet, a heavier one than before.
I am
not mad, said the ghost. It came another step closer, shoulders rising and
eyeholes narrowing further. As it did, Daria automatically took a step back. You are the mad one, queenly child. You do
not know me. You would bow down and beg for your life if you only knew. I do
not forgive and I do not forget. I am the dark and the cold and the eternal,
the suffering and the dying and the end. I am the end.
Daria swallowed. This was not normal
ghost behavior at all. Who was this
creature? What was it? Her fingers
found the packet and she took it from her pocket in her fist. “I am a poor
yardstick by which to measure madness,” she said, projecting bravery she did
not feel. “I intend to make this room my own.”
The hag stopped moving. This room is mine only, it whispered.
Attack was imminent. Daria took the
packet in her fingers and carefully tore off the top. “Not any longer,” she
said.
The madwoman rushed at her snarling like
a beast, with razorlike fingers and night-black eye sockets and a multitude of serpent’s
fangs in its formerly toothless jaws. Arctic cold stung Daria’s skin as she
flung the contents of the packet at the spirit and shouted a word of power. A
glittering arc of powdered gemstones flew from her—black obsidian, lapis
lazuli, and amethyst mingled with shards of jade, scattering in the black air
as one of the pendants on her chest flashed. White light filled the room and
was gone in less than an eye blink.
The ghost shrieked and melted in that
flash of white light, and left nothing behind.
There was an awful, expectant silence. Daria
stared into the darkness before her and realized she was shaking like a leaf.
Feeling a terrible need to sit down, she took a moment to slow her breathing
and regain her poise. I won, she
thought. I beat her. Thank all Magic, I
won. She raised a hand to her throat and touched the silver necklace from
which hung a perfect crystal of quartz, painstakingly engraved on every face with
runes of power. It had been engraved and enspelled by Daria herself, and had perfectly
deflected the attempt at spiritual possession. She was never as grateful for
anything as she was in that moment for that little crystal.
“Touché,” she whispered to the vanquished
hag, feeling a bit giddy. “That will take you days at least to recover from, if
not longer. Enough time for me to ward you away or lay you out forever. You are
not the only one who has embraced the one true philosophy.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve and turned
to leave, mission accomplished. After a good rest, she would explore the room
further. One more ghost laid, though it had been a
rough one. Pity the house would revert to normal in time with the hag gone. She
decided to report back to her parents that she had chosen this room for her—
Daria
Morgendorffer, said a frighteningly familiar voice
behind her. She whirled with a gasp, one hand instinctively raised with her fingers
forming a warding sign to fend off an attack.
I
do know of you, said the old crone. The vision stood in the center of the
room just as it had only moments earlier, but this time it was in sharp focus, seemingly
solid. The hag did not look so much like a disheveled madwoman as it did an
enraged giantess. Pinpoints of glacier-blue light now glowed in the black
spaces where eyes were not.
I
do know of you, the hag repeated, more softly. An arm came up and a clawed
finger pointed at Daria’s face. You erased
the power of Saucer Top, the fairy mound in the hills north of
It was vital to say something in return,
but Daria struggled for words. Who is
this witch-shade? Why didn’t the crystal and the gem defense work? How in hell does
she know so much about me? “I seem to have a reputation,” she finally said,
thinking her response was lame. She straightened as she tucked her hands in her
vest pockets. Her left hand came out clutching an acid-filled crystal.
The crone gestured as if brushing away a
fly. A brutal, invisible force smacked Daria’s hand and knocked the crystal out
of her numbed fingers and across the room.
Daria’s right hand stayed in her vest
pocket. Her thumb covered the button on the box, ready to mash it in. She was done
with all other alternatives.
The ghost’s long finger curled back into its
hand, though the arm remained outstretched. How
is it that you, a mere child, were able to do all this?
Talk
and keep talking. “I am a Scorpio born on All Hallow’s Eve under a new
crescent moon,” she said with a dry mouth. “I was born to the dead and not to the
living. On my arrival, there were portents in the sky and disturbances in the skies.
By the will of fate or Heaven, I see the unseen, hear the unheard, and speak
with the voiceless.” She lifted her chin, pretending to be brave. “And I annoy
them as I like.”
So
you do, so you do, agreed the monstrous old woman.
She appeared even larger now, over eight feet tall. The rumors about you were correct, then. You are the last of the
Children of Samhain, the last of the Gifted of Autumn.
I also had heard you were not of the living born—
Talk!
“Kind of an interesting story. My parents were at a Rolling
Stones concert at the Cotton Bowl in
—your
mother was struck by lightning at the rear of the crowd near the concert’s end,
and she lay as one dead, without a heartbeat, until delivered of you by medical
personnel. You entered the world as Mick Jagger sang “Jumpin’
Jack Flash” to the howling of the crowd and the winds, drenched in freezing
rain, the heavens split by lightning and shattered by thunder. I know the tale.
Daria blinked. “Uh . . . yeah, that’s . .
. that’s it. My, uh, mother was in law school in
Word
gets around, as you say. And the portents in the sky—?
The hag paused.
Daria feared that honesty would not pay
off this time, though she could not say why. “A Soviet rocket launch. Gigantic
clouds and lights were seen at night over
Oh,
not on All Hallow’s Eve, no coincidence. Most interesting,
your tale. By any chance, child, do you know what cargo that rocket
carried aboard it as it hurled into the heavens?
“You know about rockets?” said Daria. “Huh. I guess everyone knows about rockets.”
Humor
me, child. I trust you’ve looked it up.
Daria hesitated. She did not know what
the ghost was getting at, and she did not like where she was being led, much
less that she was being led at all. “The spacecraft was part of a Soviet early
warning system, if I recall—”
The hag’s mirthless chuckle cut her off. Lucky you were, queenly one, to have had such
fanfare—
The chuckle rose to a shrill roar as the
hag grew to the ceiling. —And you are thrice
a thousand times accursed for disturbing the invisible world with your
insolence, your glorious pedigree be damned to death! What little you know of grammarie has served only to delude you, wretched child!
Your greatness was imagined! Your end is nigh!
Daria’s voice failed her. If the button did not
work, she was worse than lost. Damnation stared her in the face.
The towering ghost smiled wickedly. Your presumption exceeds my earlier
estimation. Too easily have you come to your present state of self-described wisdom. Your understanding of the secrets of the Other World
is wide as the sea and shallow as a pond. You stumble blind through a valley of
shadows, at risk of losing more than mere life and limb for a thimbleful of arcane
knowledge. For all your effort, child, you know nothing at all. Your naïve
imagination is helpless to foresee the least of the gorgons that stand in your
path, and I number myself the first of them, and the last.
Daria stared at the spirit, paralyzed
with horror. Push the button! shouted a voice in her head. Push it! PUSH IT!
You
treated me with contempt, said the creature. It took a step toward her,
then another. Daria was almost within its reach. You thought me a maggot, yet now you find me burrowing into your heart.
How do you think to avoid destruction after making me your devoted foe? How
dare you presume any knowledge of the unspeakable? How dare you invade my
domain and mock me? ME! The great hag took one more step as it shouted at
her at the top of its ghostly lungs. DO
YOU KNOW WHO I AM? DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM, YOU IGNORANT WHELP? DO. YOU. KNOW. WHO. I. AM?
“Yes,” Daria gasped as she pushed the button. From
the backpack she wore came a shrill, ascending whine. She looked up as the
ghost reached for her. “You’re dead.”
The backpack’s electromagnetic pulse bomb
went off with a thunderclap. The room was instantly filled with uncountable blinding
arcs of purple lightning, ceiling to floor and wall to wall, radiating out through
Daria’s pack, clothing, fingers, and hair. In the brilliance of that instant, she
saw the hag blasted into nothingness by the discharge. Then—
Daria awoke on her back on the floor, ears
filled with the deafening shriek of aching eardrums. The stink of ozone, fried
dust, smoldering fabric, and burnt hair was all around. Her vision was filled
with crisscrossed afterimages from the electrical discharge. Grimacing from spasms
of pain in every joint in her body, she rolled over and pushed herself up on her
hands and knees. Her glasses were missing, her skin sore with minor burns, and
her hair frizzed out in a giant ball—but she was alive.
I
can’t believe it, she thought. The
stupid thing actually worked . . . or did it?
It had. She was alone in the room so far
as she could tell. She felt for certain bracelets on her wrists and found that
they had disintegrated, as they were supposed to do when diverting from her
flesh the titanic energies from the EMP bomb. She had one bomb only, though. If
the spectral hag came back for her, she was done for.
She heard an intense hammering on the
door leading to the hall. She got to her feet, shrugged off the backpack and
dropped it, then half-stumbled across the room and
opened the door.
“Are you all right, kiddo?” cried her
father, pulling her into the hall. “What’s that smell?”
“Short circuit,” Daria mumbled through bruised
lips. “I think I blew a fuse when I turned on the light switch.”
Her father ran downstairs to find the
fuse box in the basement. Daria leaned against the hallway wall to recover. Her
sister came out of a bedroom down the hall, looked Daria over, and made a disgusted
face. “Should have known that was you,” she said, then returned to the pink
bedroom and shut the door.
Her mother and the real-estate agent
stamped upstairs to check on her next. Daria’s mother, a workaholic corporate
lawyer, threatened to file suit unless the agent immediately had the house’s
wiring checked. While her mother ranted, Daria borrowed a flashlight from the
agent and went back into the cold, smelly room. There she found her glasses,
scorched but otherwise undamaged. She also found the real light switch, but
when she flipped it, nothing happened. She turned the flashlight beam up and
found there was no ceiling fixture. She would have to plug regular lamps into
the wall sockets, one or more of which were doubtless controlled by the switch.
The room was curious. She examined it as
feeling crept back into her shaking limbs. The walls had thick gray padding on
them, likely for the protection of the madwoman who had spent the last years of
her life here. A handrail ran along one wall. (One hell of a madwoman, if that’s what that ghost was, Daria thought.
How’d they manage to keep her in here?)
The padded walls, the ceiling, and the carpeted floor were covered with
hundreds of black scorch marks from the EMP bomb’s detonation. She reminded
herself that she would have to get rid of the remnants of the bomb, still inside
the smoldering backpack, as soon as humanly possible. Questions about it could prove
troublesome.
Daria’s father called from downstairs,
summoning her mother and the real-estate agent to help him find the fuse box.
Once they were gone, Daria took a small comb from one pocket, removed the
Ouroboros hair clasp she favored, then fixed her hair with
the help of a bathroom mirror down the hall. When back in the room, she
continued her exploration. The flashlight revealed that the object hanging from
the ceiling on the far side of the room was an old television set—useless now, as
the EMP bomb would have ruined anything electronic. The boards over the windows
looked as if they could be pried off without trouble. If Daria could prevent
her mother from giving the room a makeover, it would be quite suitable for a
bedroom. Living in a room formerly inhabited by a witch-ghost would be very
satisfying, though the space/time distortion the witch-ghost had left behind
would fade in time. Where did ghosts go
when they were disintegrated? she wondered as she
always did, but she’d never figured that one out and soon let it go.
She turned the beam of light on the other
door in the room, the one against the left wall. The door had a brass knob on
it. Daria studied it, thought about the possibilities (Has to be a closet, duh), then checked out her supply of alchemical
and herbal defenses and weaponry. Without the EMP bomb and the gem powder, both
of which would take months to replace, she was down to basics. She could get
her other backpack out of the car, dig out the Universal Waite tarot deck she
had secretly purchased when she was eleven, then do a Celtic Cross
reading. That would give her an idea if what lay behind the door was harmless,
and what she could do about it if it was not.
Or she could just open the door.
She remembered the first voice she had
heard downstairs, the girl saying a prayer. The second spirit should be close
by, unless the EMP bomb had blown it into ectoplasmic particles. A pity if so.
She listened, heard her parents talking
elsewhere in the house, then took the knob and pulled the door open. It was much
heavier than she had expected. She turned the light on the ragged edge of
fabric around the door—and spotted wire mesh that she discovered was made of
lead. Great Hecate! Why was the closet door armored against magic? Was the
entire room so armored? Was it to help imprison the madwoman’s ghost? She hadn’t
even been dead that long.
Inside the closet it was blacker than
black, a supernatural fog of night. Daria let go of the knob and stood in the
doorway, looking and listening. “Hello?” she said.
“Who is there?” It was that girl’s voice
again. It sounded oddly familiar.
“I’m Daria,” she said. “You have nothing
to fear.” Her intuition felt that whoever or whatever was inside the other room
would probably not harm her. Her intuition had always been right—though
sometimes only in the short run.
“I am beyond fear, by the grace of God,”
said the voice. “Where is that creature, that awful—”
“Gone,” said Daria simply. “Who are you?”
“Who am I? Who was I, ye mean.”
“Fine. Who were you, then?”
Something stirred in the depths of the
darkness. Daria stepped back to allow room for whoever—or whatever—was to come
out. After a moment, someone did.
Before Daria appeared a feminine figure
that was Daria’s height. Her red-brown hair was worn long and full, exactly as
Daria now wore her auburn hair. She had cinnamon-red eyes like Daria’s. The
ghost, nearly opaque and in full color, wore a black formal gown in the Tudor
style, the same color as Daria’s skirt.
The ghost also had Daria’s face and
mouth, her thin build, her below-average height. The apparition looked Daria up
and down in astonishment, as Daria did her. The two were almost identical
twins. The other girl’s hair was a shade lighter and she had freckles, as if
she had in life been out in the sunlight more than Daria had.
“Merciful God,” said the girl in the
black gown. Her white face rose and her eyes met Daria’s. “What did ye say you
were named? Pray, tell me again!”
Daria blinked. “Daria,” she said. “Daria
Morgendorffer. What’s your name?”
“My name is—” said the other girl, then corrected herself. “My name was Jane.”
Chapter Three:
Daria and Jane
I would not be a queen for all the world.
—William Shakespeare, King Henry the Eighth
“Jane who?” asked Daria, unable to think of
anything else to say.
“Jane Dudley,” said the apparition in a soft
voice. She looked around to take in the details of the bare room. Despite the
minuscule amount of light present from the flashlight and cracks around the
boarded windows, Jane appeared to have no trouble seeing.
The longer she looked at Jane, the more
Daria was struck by the uncanny resemblance the two shared, except in matters
of clothing. Jane’s outfit was somber and only mildly revealing. The apparition’s
pale shoulders and the top of her small bust were framed by the square neckline
of the black gown, which was laced up in front. It flared out from the hips, then descended so that the hem swept the floor. The sleeves
were tightly fitted. The effect was both elaborate and simple. The dress was
more appropriate for mourning than anything else, though this did not dull its marvelous
complexity.
When Daria looked up again, the young
woman’s hair had changed; her waterfall of light auburn hair was now pulled
back beneath a black French hood that seemed to be trimmed with velvet. A black
cape hung from her shoulders down her back. The alteration was surprising,
though Daria knew some ghosts were able with effort to change their appearance
within certain limits. Jane seemed to be creating a more proper look. Daria
resisted the urge to reach up and touch the apparition’s hair and cap.
“Whither was I brought?” asked Jane. “I
have no knowledge of this place.”
“This is
“This is the future world and not mine
own time, then, as that dreadful harpy of Satan informed me?” Jane shrugged. “Mayhap
she did me a favor. The further removed from the miserable disasters of my
time, the less complaint I can make of it. If this be very far from my former
world, so far that a return voyage is impossible, then praise be to God.”
“I believe that is the case,” said Daria.
“Speaking of time, what year are you from?”
“What year did I die,
ye mean.” Jane’s shoulders slumped. “I departed life and entered this . . .
this twilight, this joyless space between earth and heaven to which I am condemned,
in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred fifty-four, February the
twelfth.” She looked up at Daria, contrite. “I am distracted from my better
nature, forgive me. I owe you my deepest gratitude for your merciful rescue of
me from the creature that kept me imprisoned here. I felt I would go mad were I caged any longer, even in death.”
She
died February 12th? That’s the date on the calendar in the kitchen! “You’re
welcome,” said Daria, more puzzled than she was before. “I’m glad you’re, ah,
doing as well as can be expected.” She hesitated. Normally, she questioned
ghosts only briefly before beginning the process of sending them on to the next
world, wherever that lay and whatever it was. In this case, however—
“I have to ask,” she continued, “if you
have any idea why that creature, whatever she was, would keep you prisoner.”
“None, I dare say. The grotesque harpy surely
had her designs, but they are a mystery to me. Now that ye have done for her,
there is a golden end to it after all, so I am no more wearied thinking on it.”
“Did she capture you while you were alive
or, um, later?”
“After my death.
Ye needn’t speak around it; it is a fact and better to face it. As to the
witchcraft she used, I know not, nor would I sink to even learn the least of her
odious and damnable methods.” Jane’s voice faded as she glanced down once more at
Daria’s necklaces and rings. Concern suddenly filled her face.
Uh-oh. “I should explain a few things,” Daria said, hoping
to head off a confrontation. “The current year is nineteen ninety-seven, the
thirteenth of September.”
“Nineteen—oh, do ye say so? How long is
that since I died? Wait, I can do it. What year again, pray tell?”
“Nineteen ninety-seven.”
“What? Ah, one thousand nine hundred . .
. that’s four hundred forty-three years. Praise God for the wonder of it all!
Do I alone see this day, and not another I knew when I last drew breath? I
scarcely believe it!”
“There’s more. You aren’t in
“
Daria was taken aback, but nodded
vigorously. “Yes,
“
“Yes, of course.
“My cousin Elizabeth became queen? When
was this?”
More astonishment, now
from Daria. “Your cousin?”
“Yes! Mary was queen when I died. She and
Elizabeth are—I mean, were—they were my cousins, the daughters of King Henry,
my great-grand uncle.”
Daria was struck by a sense of unreality.
“You’re from the House of Tudor?”
“Nay,
“Hold on,” said Daria. Her sense of
unreality deepened. “You said something just now, that
Jane was silent.
“Are you Jane Grey?” whispered Daria.
“I was,” said Jane softly. “That was my
name before I married the unfortunate Guildford Dudley, who shared my miserable
fate. I was the Lady Jane Grey and am now her shade.”
The two teenagers stared at one another,
Jane at Daria in sadness and mortification, Daria at Jane in astonishment and horror.
Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days’ Queen of
Someone knocked at the door. “Daria?”
called her father. The knob rattled as the door swung open.
Daria gasped and stepped between Jane and
her father, trying to block the ghost from view. She raised the flashlight beam
so it illuminated her father’s face, blinding him as he stood in the doorway.
“Oh, there you are!” said Jake
Morgendorffer. He shielded his eyes against the light. “Just
me, kiddo! Didn’t mean to scare you. Your mom’s
getting the electrical repair work sorted out with the agent. We’ll get the
lights fixed in here in no time! We—” He stopped and looked around in horror,
as if he had just remembered something about this location. “Daria!” he cried, “you’d
better come out of there!” He reached for her but did not dare put a foot in
the room, so his reach was woefully short by several yards.
“Why?” she asked after a pause.
“Because this room is where . . . um, it’s
just not a really good room. There might be asbestos in the padding. Come on
out before you breathe any of it.”
“You didn’t have a problem with me being
in here before.”
Jake panic visibly increased. “Your old
dad wasn’t thinking clearly earlier. There might be another electrical problem
in here. Maybe spiders, too! I don’t want you to get scared or get cobwebs in
your hair or anything. Come on out!”
Daria fought to keep from smiling. “You
can come in and get me.”
“Daria, tell you what! There’s a great-looking
bedroom down the hall you can have! The carpet and the walls are kind of pinkish,
a little, which is great ‘cause you’re a girl! How about that room?”
“Once again, Dad, you’ve hit the nail on
the head,” said Daria. “I am a girl. However, pinkish colors are no longer in
for girls. Gray is in. This room will be mine.”
“What? You can’t—oh, I get it! Great
joke, Daria! That’s the first joke you’ve ever made, I think! You really had me
going there.”
“I was serious.”
“Ah . . . can we talk about this later,
kiddo?”
“No.” She drew herself up, wondering how
it was her father had not yet spotted Jane. “I’ll be out after I look around a
while longer. Please excuse me.”
“Are you sure?” Her father was at wit’s
end. “You haven’t seen anything unusual in here, have you? Anything . . . you
know, ah, that looks . . . unusual?”
“Just you.”
“Um, okay. Well, um, I’ll, uh, be fixing
up that pinkish bedroom for you! I’ll be right down the hallway! I’ll leave the
door open, too, just in case you see a spider!”
“Thanks.”
When he finally did leave a few moments
later, Daria turned and found Jane was still there, with a smirk on her face.
“I marvel at your father,” Jane said. “His
love for you is plain, however absurd its exhibition.” The smirk faded and was
replaced by a despondent look at the open door. “Ye are more fortunate than you
ken.”
“He didn’t see you,” Daria whispered. “How
did you manage that?”
“It seemed wisest that he not know of me
yet. ‘Tis a trick I taught myself whiling away my
time betwixt worlds. I was not cognizant of how many years had passed since my
death, only that there was nothing to do but walk, watch the seasons change and
the people come and go, and wonder why I was not in Paradise. My flesh had gone
to the grave, but my restless, burdened soul still wandered. When melancholy
did not have me in its grip, I gave in to curiosity and found I could show
myself to some but not to others, or to arrange mine appearance to look as I
remembered being in my days of life.”
She looked down at her black gown. “Of
late, it seemed pointless to dress in any other than what I wore when I was executed.
I am dead, and to pretend otherwise is to deny God’s will. I do not know why I
am still trapped in this timeless Purgatory, but there is nothing for it but to
go on as I am, and accept God’s wisdom though I do not understand it. ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ So Job
was asked, but he had no answer, and no good answer have
I, either.”
She’s
got this religious thing down hardcore, thought Daria. Though she was
hardly in a position to offer religious advice to anyone, she tried anyway. “Maybe
there’s a purpose to your being here, only you don’t know it yet,” she said,
then mentally kicked herself. Oh, that was lame. Way to go, Ann Landers.
Jane chewed her lower lip in thought. “I
will not serve evil,” she said at last, giving Daria’s adornments a significant
look. “I am not to be a familiar spirit to any sorcerer, for as
Crap,
here we go. “I did not summon you to make you my familiar,” said Daria
testily, trying to keep her voice down. “I rescued
you. You were already walking around on your own, as you said yourself, when
that witch captured you. Speaking of which, do you know if she had some kind of
special box or bottle with her, something she tried to keep hidden?”
Jane frowned. “She did carry a small
thing wrapped in a cloth, which she hid away. I found myself strangely pulled
toward it when it was in my sight, and I sense its presence nearby e’en now, though I know not where it is or what it be.”
“I thought so.” Daria turned around,
flashing her light over the padded walls. “We have to find it.”
“What seek ye?” asked Jane. “The package?”
“It has to be around here somewhere.”
“How do ye—oh. I
understand. It keepeth me prisoner here.”
“Exactly. It’s
also why your form is so vivid and sharp in detail. I think she had a soul jar.
It’s some article that you owned or possessed in life, something intimately
bound to you that she’s enchanted and used to trap you here. If it weren’t for
that, you’d have left here long ago.” Daria set off around the room at a slow
pace, swinging the beam back and forth. “There must be a trapdoor or something
around here, some hiding place . . .”
“As a spirit, I could once move about at a
thought,” said Jane, who followed Daria and scanned the room as well. “If I
remembered Bradgate and wished to be there wandering its fields, I found myself
there in a moment. More often, though, I dwelt on my last months, where my
parents had hoped to keep me as queen and where I was imprisoned after, and I was
alone, until that harpy—”
“Daria?” called a woman’s voice from the
bottom of the staircase.
“Damn it,” said Daria. “It’s my mother.”
“Do not abuse Our Lord’s name,” hissed
Jane with sudden heat. “I won’t have it.”
“Daria, the movers are about to start!”
Helen shouted. “I’m putting you in the other bedroom, the pink one! Not Quinn’s,
but the other pink one!”
“I didn’t misuse anyone’s name,” Daria grumbled,
irked. “I’d better go. Mom’s nothing if not relentless, and I want this room,
not the other one.”
“Very well,” said Jane. Daria picked up
the ruined backpack and headed for the door, but as she grasped the knob Jane
called out, “A moment, please.”
Daria looked back. “What?”
“Despite mine admonitions, I am more
grateful for your kindness than I can properly say. If you—if you have the time
later to visit—”
“I’ll be back,” said Daria, feeling
strange. She felt if she were saying goodbye to a part of her. “We can talk
more then. You’re safe here.”
A crooked smile appeared on Jane’s lips. “I
expect that is true,” she said as she raised a hand in farewell. “Until later.”
Daria nodded, then pulled the door shut and
went down stairs, to her father’s vast relief. She went to the garage and there
disposed of the remains of the EMP bomb by throwing it into an empty garbage
can. She brushed off her clothes, then opened the
garage door to find her family and the movers outside on the driveway. The
real-estate agent took his flashlight back and left, but not
before giving Daria’s mother a sour look behind her back.
“Where have you been?” snapped her mother,
who then said, “Wait!” and turned to shout at two movers carrying a long sofa. “That
goes in the family room facing the entertainment center! I’d better go in and
make sure they do this right.”
The next three hours were chaotic and
frustrating. Over Daria’s objections, all of her things were moved into the bedroom
that, alas, was very very pink. Daria glumly
suspected the padded room would quickly fill with unwanted junk and acquire a
lock on its door that she was not meant to pick, but at least she had free use
of it until then, so long as her parents did not know she was in there.
That evening, after the Morgendorffers returned
from dining out, Daria waited until her parents were preoccupied in the kitchen
before she got another flashlight, went into the darkened bedroom again, and
shut the door. She wrinkled her nose at the burnt odor that still hung in the
air. “Jane?” she whispered.
“Here,” said a voice behind her.
Only Daria’s iron will kept her from
jumping. “Ha, ha,” she said, turning around—but the rest of her retort died on
her lips as she looked at the spirit’s new outfit. Jane wore another
Tudor-style gown, a sumptuous green-velvet dress with big sleeves, covered with
gold-embroidered whorls and roses. On her head she wore a close-fitting white
cap strung with small pearls and emeralds, letting her hair flow down her back.
“Ye are fond of the colors that touch my
heart, too,” said Jane with a shy grin. “I would prefer not to mix black and
green, but to each her own. The Tudor colors are vert and argent, more so the former.”
“That’s impressive,” said Daria at last,
looking over the gown. “I’m not obsessed with fashion like my sister, but as
period pieces go, that one’s a keeper.”
A puzzled look crossed Jane’s face.
“Oh,” said Daria. “I said, your gown is beautiful. Sorry, the language has changed over
the last few centuries.”
“It is
striking,” said Jane, looking down as she adjusted the broad skirt with pale
hands. “The tincture of your vest put me in mind of it. I wore this when I was
made queen and went to the Tower to hold court.”
To
the Tower, where you later had your head chopped off, thought Daria, who
then tried to think of something else. “How old are you?” she asked, then
quickly amended that with, “I mean, how old were you
in life?”
“Sixteen years and almost
four months. I was born on the twenty-first of October, in the year of
Our Lord one thousand five hundred thirty-seven, but because I was a girl and
not the boy they had wished, my parents delayed the announcement. King Edward’s
birth came before mine and the news obscured that of mine arrival, as one would
expect. Poor Edward. I had so hoped—oh, ‘tis nothing.”
“The twenty-first,” said Daria. “I was
hoping you were born on the thirty-first. That was my birthday, though much
later of course.”
“All Hallows’ Eve?” Jane raised an eyebrow.
“Ah, much about your nature is clear to me now.”
“I’m an alchemist,” said Daria, deciding
to face the issue head-on. “Before you jump on me about it, I am not a sorcerer
who conjures familiar spirits to do my work. If you saw how messy my room gets,
you’d know I don’t conjure anything. Alchemy is—” the one true philosophy, better than any religion “—a lost science,
a worthy field of study, and it’s my only defense against sorcery. I can’t help it that I see things I’m not supposed
to see because of the circumstances of my birth, but I do, whether I like it or
not, and that makes my life very complicated. I don’t traffic with Satan and I
don’t hang around people who claim to do it. I have better things to do than that.
And when I encounter—um—” She stopped, wishing she had shut up one sentence
earlier.
“Speak your mind,” said Jane gravely.
Daria sighed. “I was going to say that
when I encounter ghosts or supernatural creatures, I send them on to the next
world whenever possible. I’ve done it before lots of times. It’s not difficult,
usually. I do it whenever I can.”
The silence drew out.
“Were ye contriving to lay my spirit,
then?” asked Jane without expression.
Daria looked uncomfortable. “I thought
about it at first, but now I don’t know. I don’t understand why we’re so much
alike. I don’t understand why you were brought here in the first place. I don’t
know who that witch-hag was, or even if she was really the old madwoman who
died in this room or someone else. This is very confusing, and I’d like to find
out what’s going on before I do anything else.”
Jane nodded. “I would prefer you ‘send me
on,’ then. My wretched existence is naught but a burden. I had imagined on my
death that I would be released to walk in
“Oh.” Daria mulled the problem. “I will
see what I can do about the sending-on part. It can be done quickly, but it’s
better if done properly, which means we have to find the soul jar. That might
take time.”
“No sorcery,” warned Jane. “Do not
imperil your soul on mine account.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” said Daria. “In
the meantime, I can leave you something to read if you think you can handle our
version of English. I’ll use my computer.”
“Your pewter?”
asked Jane, leaning closer.
“It’s, um, sort of a very fast printing
press. I’ll print out something for you to read, but I’ll lay the pages out on
the floor in a row. Maybe we could put a table in here, too.”
Jane looked startled and pleased. “I had
not thought of that. Once again, I am in your debt. T’would
be a sin to greatly delay mine entry into
“Do you think there’s something to all
this?”
“What? Oh, the two of us alike as twins?
Could there be a purpose to it?”
“Yeah. You were
born in fifteen thirty-seven, and I was born in nineteen eighty-one, which
would be—”
“Four hundred and forty-four years apart.”
Daria got a distracted look on her face. “Four
hundred . . . hmmm, a triple number, maybe a master number. Usually those emphasize
the basic number, here being four. There are four elements in classical
alchemy—”
“Four Gospels,” interrupted Jane.
Daria rolled her eyes. “Four legs on
tables and animals,” she continued. “Four sides to a square. Four seasons to a
year, four winds, four corners of the earth—”
“Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse.”
“That’s the perfect place to stop,” said
Daria. “Numerology and interpreting codes were never my forte, but I do know a
little. I’ll have to check some books on that.”
Jane gave Daria a troubled look. “They
who are soothsayers or interpret omens are abominations in the sight of the
Lord,” she said unhappily. “I should have kept mine own counsel rather than
give such advice as could damn you.”
“Look, Jane,” said Daria with a sigh, “I’ve
seen some pretty convincing evidence indicating that there are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy. We’re not entirely
on our own, I agree, and sometimes omens are more of a help than a hindrance. And
don’t tell me there aren’t omens in the Bible, either. Revelations is stuffed
with them. Then again, I don’t have any proof that there isn’t some Higher
Power out there looking out for us, though I’ve come to doubt anyone’s looking
after me, personally. If there is, I’d like to have all my Halloween-born
senses removed, given all the trouble they’ve gotten me into.”
“Mayhap, as you said before, there is a
purpose to your being here, only ye
don’t know it yet.”
“Touché,”
Daria muttered. She did not like that idea and did not waste time thinking about
it any further.
“And proof is not required to believe in
God. All that is required is faith.”
“Faith is what I have little of, except
in alchemy and in the stupidity of mankind. I’d think you’d have a pretty
strong belief in human stupidity yourself, all things considered. As far as God
goes, I’m more an agnostic than an atheist. My mind is open and waiting, sort
of, kind of, more or less.”
“I suppose I must make do with that for
now, though it disturbeth me to think that—oh, for
later, for later.” She ventured a smile. “We look so much alike, yet we come
from such dissimilar worlds. Please take no offense if I say that I wish you
had been my sister in life, and ye shared my love for Our Savior.”
After a short silence, Daria found her
voice. “Do not take offense at me for saying I wish you had been my sister,
too, and shared my love for alchemy. Or that we both could have been normal,
and not have met like this.”
“No offense taken.”
“It would be nice to have someone around
who was intelligent enough to hold a conversation, even if we didn’t agree on
anything.”
“On the topic of human stupidity, which
is admittedly boundless, yes, we do.”
“It’s a start.” Daria looked at the open door.
“I need to get those papers printed off for you. If I’m gone for too long my
parents will come looking for me again. We can talk later. I don’t have
anything to do tomorrow, so I can stay up for a while when I come back. I could
tell you what’s happened since your time, fill you in
on Elizabeth and everyone after her.”
“Mayhap ye could be my tutor,” said Jane.
Her face was impassive, but hope rang clearly in her voice.
“Mayhap I could. I warn you, though, I
don’t work for free. You’ll have to be my tutor, too—my Tudor tutor.” Daria
cracked a smile.
Jane returned it. “My stock of royal gossip
is somewhat out of date.”
“All the better.
That makes it history, and I love history. See you soon.”
“And you as well.”
Daria assembled her computer on the floor
of her new bedroom and began printing out a complete history of the Tudor
dynasty. When she became bored and could not stand to look at the pink walls,
ceiling, and floor any longer, she went downstairs to check out the freshly
stocked refrigerator. Everyone else was sitting in front of the TV. Her mother
was on her cell phone talking to someone named Eric, Quinn was on the portable
phone talking to someone at a department store called Cashman’s, and her father
was asleep with a bowl of microwaved popcorn in his lap. Daria got a soda in
the kitchen and paused again to examine the haunted calendar, the one with
February 12th on every page.
Jane
was born four hundred forty-four years ago, she mused. She’s still sixteen and a third years old, in some sense, but I’ll get
older normally and catch up to her pretty soon. I turn sixteen on Halloween, then I’ll be exactly as old as she was when she died on—wait,
that’s wrong, I won’t. We weren’t born the same day; she was ten days earlier
than me. We’re not exactly aligned, then. I thought there might be a cycle or
some kind of resonance between us, but if we’re not born exactly four hundred
forty-four years apart, then—eh, one less thing to worry about. Resonances are nothing
but trouble. Still pretty weird how much alike we are in some
ways—a lot of ways, really. Pure weird.
“Don’t forget about school on Monday!”
her mother called as Daria went upstairs, then uncovered the cell phone. “What?
Oh, no, Eric, I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to—yes, I’ll be in Monday,
ready to learn the ropes! What’s that? I might make partner one day? Oh, Eric,
that’s wonderful! I can hardly wait!”
Chapter Four:
Esteemed Up
Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the
dead.
—The Others
Monday arrived on time as it always does,
however unwanted and unloved. Jake Morgendorffer drove his two daughters to the
local high school to start their academic year, saving them from the horror of
walking the short distance and possibly getting sweaty. (Quinn was very insistent
on this point.) They were still two blocks from their destination when Jake
decided, against his better judgment, to give his daughters a quick pep talk.
“Girls,” said Jake, raising his voice
over the radio’s boy-band music, “I just want you to know your mother and I
realize it’s not easy moving to a whole new town—especially for you, Daria,
right?”
“Why?” growled Daria from the backseat. “Is
something wrong with me?”
“Oh, no! No, no,
no, no, no, no, I meant, eh, you’ve been talking to yourself off and on all
morning, and I thought you might—”
“He meant no harm,” came
Daria’s voice from the back in a stage whisper—then at a normal volume added, “Thank
you for your gracious concern, Father.”
“Uh, what?” said Jake, startled. Where did she get that English accent?
“Nothing, Dad!”
Daria snapped, then added under her breath, “Don’t do
that!”
In the front passenger seat, Quinn groaned
and turned up the radio. Alternative rock music filled the car. Jake could
still hear Daria, however, who was apparently having yet another intense
conversation with herself.
“Ye were most surly to him.” The English accent again.
“I was surly? Tell me again about what
you said about your parents making
your life a living hell!”
“Your father is deserving of your unceasing
gratitude! Two days, and has he once struck or belittled you?”
“Stop trying to fix my life! It’s isn’t
broken. I knew this would turn out to be a mistake.”
“A mistake? This
venture was your idea! Your manners
are inexcusable!”
Quinn quickly turned the radio volume
dial up after glaring back at her sister.
“Daria?” called Jake, trying to see her
in the rear-view mirror. “Were you talking to me?”
“No, I wasn’t!”
“But I thank you for your concern!”
“God damn
it!”
Grimacing, Quinn jammed her fingers in her
ears.
Jake turned the radio off in time to hear
from the backseat: “Forgive her, Merciful Redeemer, for her swinish blasphemy!”
“I knew
this was going to happen on my first day at school!” Quinn hissed through her
teeth. “I knew it!”
“Kiddo, are you all right?” called Jake,
risking a look back. His eldest daughter sat against the right rear door, arms
crossed, with the blackest possible look on her face.
“Yes, Dad,” Daria growled, then added (with
a very American-like accent), “and thank you for your concern.”
Thoroughly confused, Jake went back to
driving. Quinn turned the radio on and up again, though not quickly enough to
avoid hearing Daria say, “There, I said it. Happy now?”
Then answer herself
with, “Ye could have said it as if ye meant it.”
“I was just going to tell you girls,”
said Jake, his voice higher than usual, “that the first day at a new school is
bound to be difficult, and—”
“Just drive, Daddy!” Quinn told him. “Get
me to school before she goes totally
The red-brick walls of
Quinn slammed the car door, already gone
and bolting for the school doors. A dozen students who had until this moment been
outside talking before classes immediately surged after the redhead with cries
of: “Hey, wait!” “What’s your name?” “Are you new here?” and “Will you go out
with me?”
Jake looked for Daria. She was getting out
of the car, too, but before she slammed the door, he heard her say, in that
peculiar English accent, “Good day, Father!”
He watched as she went through the school
doors alone. When she was gone from view, he turned away and stared out the
windshield. “What am I going to tell Helen?” he said.
The situation was no better at school.
Daria signed in at the main office, muttering to herself all the while, then was directed to stand in the purple-walled hall with four
other newly enrolled teens to await an official tour of the campus by the
principal. The other students included her sister Quinn, who kept a wide and
watchful distance from her sister.
“I must, however reluctantly and tardily,
beg your forgiveness,” whispered Jane in Daria’s left ear. “Ye were clever
enough to locate the soul jar, then kind enough to bring it with you as the
means for me to accompany you on this day, and ye have been ill repaid.”
Daria looked quite cross for a moment, then quietly wandered away from the other students. “I might
owe you an apology, too,” she whispered with a frown. “Mondays always bring out
the best in me, as you just heard. Starting the day at a new school full of all-new
airheads makes it all the worse.”
“I would think you would find a place of
learning your refuge and not your hell.”
Daria came to a stop around a corner in
the hallway, by a stairwell. “Jane, you were tutored one-to-one by some of the
smartest people of your time. That, however, was four centuries ago. Modern
schools are not like that. Imagine if you had to take your lessons from a tutor
who was at the same time trying to teach two dozen half-wits who were more fit to slop hogs or shovel manure than to think.”
“Surely ye wrong these children. Ye
should—”
Thundering feet echoed up the stairwell.
Daria pressed herself against a purple wall just as a group of brawny males
wearing athletic jerseys stampeded by. They shouted and laughed as they tossed
a battered book from one student to another, until one teen pushed open the
door to the boys’ restroom down the hall and hurled the book inside. The students
cheered, then quickly left.
Moments later an angry youth wearing
glasses stamped up the steps, then went down the hall looking high and low for
something. He stopped to peek in the restroom, went inside, and moments later
exited holding the thoroughly soaked book at a distance from his body, cursing roundly
all the while.
Daria cleared her throat pointedly. “Well?”
she said.
“The point is conceded,” said Jane glumly.
“That was a fair argument for restricting education only to those who
appreciate it. In the future I will endeavor to remind myself that you know
this world better than I. Ye could acquire better manners, I have no doubt of
that, but perhaps I could as well. I have been too long accustomed to speaking
my mind to those untutored in listening, and often forget myself.”
“That’s my problem, too. It gets me
nothing but trouble. A truce, then?”
“Agreed. I will
restrain my tongue and listen instead, in hopes of learning.”
“And I will . . .” Daria exhaled heavily.
“It is very hard to be nice to idiots.”
“I believe I understand your dilemma. If
I was remiss in telling you before, thank you for printing those history pages
at your home. I cannot believe the wonders of this world. So many books ye
have!”
“I avoid bringing the good ones here, for
obvious reasons.”
“Are ye fearful for your safety?”
“No. I’m fearful for my sanity. You’ll understand
once we get to class.”
“I pray you exaggerate.”
“Wait and see,” said Daria. “I remember
back in
She heard Jane gasp. Seeing nothing amiss,
she turned around—and looked into a bulging stomach as wide as a pup tent, covered
by a dirty green shirt equally as wide, less than three feet from her face. Recovering
from her start, she looked up.
A misshapen giant, every bit eight feet
tall, peered down at her through a snarled mane of light brown hair. The chaotic
mop nearly covered an oversized pair of plastic sunglasses perched on the giant’s
bulbous nose. The creature had come around the hallway corner unseen and
unheard, from the direction where the other students waited for their school
tour. Thick overhanging eyebrows, a sloped forehead, a few long tusks poking
out from between its lips, and a large Adam’s apple gave the giant more the
look of a caricature than an actual being. Long white fangs dangled from crude earrings
on the giant’s long, pointed, outwardly turned ears.
Lowering her gaze, Daria noted the
T-shirt ended above the giant’s belly button, below which began a giant-size
pair of baggy mauve-gray trousers belted by a rope. The giant wore no shoes: its
hairy, dirt-smudged feet were a yard long and half as wide, the toenails in dire
need of a pedicure. Its hairy-backed hands were also disproportionately large,
though its arms seemed oddly thin for a giant.
“What is that?” asked Jane, every bit as astonished as Daria.
Daria craned her neck and looked again
into the giant’s face. Its mouth was twisted to one side as if uncertain of what
it intended to accomplish here.
“I would say it’s a troll,” said Daria
weakly.
At that, the troll nodded vigorously,
shaking its great mop of hair and releasing a fair quantity of dust (or
dandruff) into the air.
“Scandinavian, I think,” Daria continued.
She slipped a hand into a skirt pocket. “Probably
“Is it dangerous, then?”
“I guess we’re about to find out,” said
Daria, and she spoke a little louder. “Good day to you,” she said to the troll.
The troll smiled and gave her a shy hand
wave. Just wanted to meet her then, her intuition suggested. But why me? Does it know me from somewhere else? What does it want? And why hasn’t
anyone in this school noticed it?
She stepped to one side to peer around
the troll and down the hall. The four other new students were engaged in
conversation. Still no principal in sight. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing amiss.
“I get it,” she said. She took her hand
from her pocket. “He’s changed his shape. Must be an innate
ability. Everyone else sees him as just another student. You and I see
him as he really is—me because of my birthday, and you because—well, you’re
already part of another world, so like me you can see there and here both.”
“We should send it away,” said Jane with
finality. “I have seen many a queer thing in my time, but all the tales I ever
heard about faerie-kind were unanimous that they are the devoted and tireless servants
of the Devil and cannot be trusted.”
The troll’s eyes widened, and it energetically
shook its head no. It reached into one of the wide, well-deep pockets in its baggy
trousers, felt about, then pulled out a slip of paper. This it carefully handed
to Daria with fingers as thick as prize beef salamis.
With one last glance at the troll’s
earnest expression, Daria gingerly took the paper and examined it. It was a
torn-off half of a sheet of notebook paper on which was printed, in crude block
capitals with a red crayon, the following:
THIS
IS SHAG HE IS OK
“Well, that explains everything,” said
Daria in a monotone.
“It does?”
“No, I was being sarcastic. I can still draw
a few conclusions. Someone wants us to know the troll is ‘okay,’ so there is at
least one other person around here who knows about the troll and maybe even
knows I’m here. And that person likes . . . Shag, and
also likes crayons, but dislikes punctuation.” Daria folded the paper and
tucked it into a pocket of her long black skirt. “Okay,” she said, “so my new
school has a troll. The last one had boggarts, so by rights I should count
myself lucky.” She looked up at the creature’s amiable if grotesque face. “Are
you by any chance a student here?”
Another vigorous nod.
A fly was dislodged from the troll’s snarled locks and made a hasty escape.
“I will use Scripture against it,”
announced Jane, before Daria could say a word more. In a forceful voice she then
said, “‘Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.’”
“No!” Daria began, hoping to interrupt
her and keep the troll from being driven away—
—but the troll stayed right where it was.
Moreover, it nodded in an excited manner at Jane’s words, then reached in another
vast pocket and pulled out a second sheet of paper. Daria took the page and
skimmed it.
“Oh, God,” she groaned a moment later.
“I warned thee about thy sacrilegious
pronouncements!”
“This high-school troll cannot be driven
away by Scripture,” said Daria, holding up the sheet. “He is a Christian
Scientist. He’s a Protestant troll, Jane.”
A moment of dead silence, then: “He is what?”
“You remember the talk we had yesterday
about the Protestant Reformation, all the different Protestant denominations
that split off from the Church of England and spread everywhere? He belongs to
one of those churches. The two of you can talk Gospel all day long if you want.
Congratulations, you’ve made your first new friend at school.”
“That is impossible! He is by nature a soulless
puppet of—”
“DEWEY! DARIA!” roared a commanding
female voice that echoed the length of the hall.
Startled, the troll grabbed the Christian
Science tract and hurried off down the hall. It made little sound as it went.
“That’s our cue,” Daria grumbled,
following the troll at a slower pace. “Please don’t talk until we’re alone
again, okay? I don’t want to be locked up in an asylum.”
“A what?”
“Later.”
Angela Li, the principal of Lawndale
High, was a loud, artificially cheery Chinese woman who made it clear that
instant obedience was expected of everyone. The tour lasted exactly forty-five minutes,
during which time she took no questions and sent five loitering students to
detention, plus a student whose crime was to wear an athletic shirt bearing the
name of a rival school.
“As you can see,” said Ms. Li at the tour’s
end, “our Lawndale High students take great pride in their school. That’s why
you’ll each be taking a small psychological exam to spot any little clouds on
the horizon as you sail the student seas of Lawndale High.”
Every one of the half-dozen students in
the group, except for the troll, immediately looked at the stone-faced Daria.
She stared back with unlimited annoyance. “What?”
“Miss Morgendorffer,” said Ms. Li decisively,
“you will go first. The rest of you may go on to your regularly scheduled classes
until you are called.”
“No one said anything about a test!”
exclaimed Quinn, who had constantly moved about the group to keep as many
people as possible between herself and Daria.
“It’s nothing to worry about in your case!” Ms. Li said cheerily, then motioned for the group to disperse. “Off you go! Make
Lawndale High proud!” She quickly put out a hand to stop Daria as everyone else
left. “I will personally escort you to the psychologist’s office, Miss
Morgendorffer.”
“Thanks,” Daria grumbled.
“However, let’s first stroll through that
metal detector and let the security dogs sniff your backpack, shall we?”
The school psychologist was a tall, prim,
middle-aged woman who wore a white lab coat for no reason that Daria could see.
She waved Daria to a chair as she looked through the papers on her desk. Sensing
that her day would continue to trundle downhill with increasing speed, Daria
sat down with a sigh and with great care lowered her school backpack to the
floor between her feet. Wandering off from the other students and talking with
her invisible friend, she figured, had led directly to this undesirable consequence.
People were so unreasonable.
Except for the ruffling of papers the
room was silent, which made it easier for Mrs. Manson to listen to what Daria
was whispering to herself. Strangely, the girl appeared so absorbed in her
actions that at first she was unaware that she was being overheard.
“Can’t you wait until we get home?”
“I merely asked about her position here.”
(This was said with an English accent.)
“It’s hard to explain.” Daria looked up,
caught Mrs. Manson smiling at her, then lowered her head again and tried to
hide her mouth with her hand. “She’s a psychologist. Her job is to listen to
students complain, then blame them for not fitting in.”
“By my faith, I cannot tell when ye are
jesting and when ye are serious.”
“You’ll get used to it. You know, the
fact that the troll isn’t in here with us means everyone else thinks he’s
human. He might also be as new to the school as I am—well, as you and I are.”
She made a face. “A troll showing up here the same day we do stretches the laws
of probability to the breaking point. I can’t see any connection between—”
“Dora?” said Mrs. Manson.
Daria looked up, shaken out of her
reverie. “It’s Daria.”
“Sorry. Do you always talk to yourself
like that?”
“Only when I want
intelligent conversation.”
“I heard from the main office that you’ve
been talking to yourself since you arrived here. Sometimes that’s a sign of
unresolved self-esteem issues. Are you worried about your first day here?”
“I’m more worried about all the other days
I’ll be spending here, assuming I can’t take the GED now and get home by this
afternoon.”
“Why don’t we take a little psychological
test? It won’t take long. Here are some pictures. Tell me what you see in this
one.”
“Hmmm. I see two
people talking. One is a psychologist with a projective test. The other is a
student with a bull’s-eye drawn on her back. The psychologist is asking if the
student wants to drink the purple Kool-Aid now or choose what’s behind door
number three, which is either a starving lion or more purple
Kool-Aid. The student chooses to take the GED but is given to the lion instead,
which finds itself still hungry afterward and eats the
psychologist. This improves the lion’s self-esteem, though it later dies of
indigestion. End of story.”
Mrs. Manson gave Daria a dark look and let
the picture fall flat on the table. “That will be all,” she said in a low voice.
“I sincerely doubt it,” said Daria as she
picked up her backpack and left.
“Ye are a true diplomat,” Jane said once
they were alone in the hall again.
“I’ve faced worse things than her. I’m
still having problems with the idea that I’m going to school with a troll.”
“We
are going to school with a troll,” corrected Jane.
“Excuse me?”
There was a brief pause. “I have given
considerable thought,” Jane said slowly, “to our original plan to destroy the
soul jar. If it would not seriously inconvenience you, and my knowing that the
matter is wholly in your purview, I wish to remain with you for at least a while
longer before you make an attempt to—”
“If you’ll stop making me sound like a
ventriloquist in front of my family, sure, you can stay. I mean, it’s not like we
have a deadline or anything.”
“Deadline?”
“Time limit.”
“Oh.”
“So, you want to come back despite the
horrors you’ve witnessed so far?”
“For a fortnight at least, if your patience
can withstand mine immoderate companionship.”
“Hmmm. I thought
you had spiritual problems about hanging out with an alchemist.”
“The longer I remain here, the greater
the chances that you can be persuaded to accept Our Savior as your own. It will
be time well spent.”
“And the more books you’ll get to read
when you aren’t trying to convert me.”
“A studious mind is a blessed mind.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll learn a little
too much? Maybe you’ll be the one who gets converted.”
“If I was willing to die for my faith, ye
may consider that possibility of little note.”
“Okay, got me there. That’s our first
class. Get ready for American History.”
“The history of all the
“No, just the part that thinks it is.”
Daria opened the door and entered the room—and
stopped dead two steps later.
“You again,” she said aloud. Shag the
troll had the desk nearest the door. He was barely able to squeeze into his
seat. He nodded and gave her a thumbs-up.
“Please have a SEAT!” boomed the teacher,
a tall graying man whose bloodshot right eye bulged out in a disturbing manner whenever
he emphasized certain words. Daria spotted an empty desk in front near the
middle of the room, and she headed toward it and prepared to sit down. At the
last moment, however, she noticed that someone had spit on the seat about a
dozen times. Wrinkling her nose, she looked around the room for another empty
desk.
That was when she saw someone wave at her
and point to an empty seat near the back of the room. The seat was adjacent to the
hand-waver who brought it to her attention.
Who, like Shag—but in a very different
sort of way, was not human.
Chapter Five:
The Old Order Changeth
O, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The hand-waver was a girl with wild black
bangs, an open red jacket, black shorts, and long pointed ears. A too-large
black tee beneath her jacket completed her wardrobe. Her childlike face had all
the characteristics typical of faeriekind: large, almond-shaped eyes (royal
blue in this case); a small, pointed nose; and a mouth that at times seemed
nonexistent and at others stretched quite widely, making her resemble an anime child. The unkempt hair was
between a bowl cut and shag cut in style, though not successfully either. It
was doubtful if her locks had ever known the touch of scissors or comb.
The girl’s slender body was that of a six-year-old
child’s, small for the size of her head, with a graceful neck but unusually
long, thin limbs. As she approached the hand-waver, Daria saw that the girl was
actually kneeling on her seat in order to gain the height necessary to rest her
knobby elbows on the desktop and sketch out the picture of a flying eyeball
done in red crayon. The faerie girl’s fingers were long, narrow and delicate as
spider’s legs. Her dusty bare feet, like those of the troll, appeared oversized
for her slender limbs and had no toes. Standing, she would be lucky to reach
four feet in height.
Without taking her eyes off the girl,
Daria took the seat offered. The faerie girl grinned as she put down her crayon,
showing off perfect pearly teeth. Further interaction between them was delayed
as the class bell rang in the halls.
“CLASS!” announced the teacher in a gruff
voice. “We have a new student joining us today. Please welcome Daria Morgendorffer.
DARIA, you may raise your hand.”
Daria managed to take her gaze off the
elfin girl long enough to look at the teacher and raise her left hand.
“Very good!” The
teacher chuckled in an unpleasant way. “Last week we began a unit on westward
expansion. Perhaps you feel it’s unfair to be asked a question on your first
day of CLASS, but as long as you have your hand raised.
. . .”
I
knew today would get worse. She waited, resigned to making herself look
like a fool once again.
“Daria,” said the teacher with a scowl, “can
you concisely and unemotionally sum up the doctrine of Manifest Destiny?”
Great. He would ask me
that one. She had spent so much time studying alchemy and the occult that
her knowledge of many other matters had suffered. Still, being from
“Very good, Daria,” said the teacher,
staring at her through narrow eyes. “That was almost . . . suspiciously good.” He turned his attention elsewhere, as did those
students who had watched their interaction. “All right, class,” he continued, “who
can tell me which war Manifest Destiny was used to justify?”
Daria stared in disbelief. What just
happened? She hadn’t said a thing!
“This is
a treat!” the faerie girl squeaked, sounding like an anime character as much as she looked like one. “Glad
t’ meecha, yer Majestyship!”
“Huh?” said Daria, looking at the girl
again. On her black tee was written a curious phrase: Mystik Spiral.
“Not you!”
snarled the girl. “I’m talkin’ t’ the Queen!”
“Me?” said a startled Jane from Daria’s
vicinity.
“Yeaaah!”
The girl pointed at Daria’s nose. “We been waitin’ for ya since ferever!”
“Shhh!” said
Daria, looking at their classmates. “We’ll talk later!”
“Talk now!”
snapped the little girl with a glare. She waved a hand at the room around them.
“They can’t hear nothin’!
They think we’re bein’ good! I fixed it!”
“Ye fixed what?” asked Jane. “And what devilish
abomination are you?”
“Faerie glamour,” said Daria, catching
on. “It’s magic. She’s created an illusion that makes everyone in the room
think we’re not doing anything out of the ordinary.”
“Hush up!” The faerie girl then smiled
broadly. “I’m Zip! We’re here t’ look out for ya, yer Highness-ess-ess!”
“We?” said Daria and Jane at the same
time.
“Yeah! There’s mil-yins an’ mil-yins of us! There’s me an’ Shag, he’s over there—hi,
Shag!—an’ Snerk an’ Noggin an’—” Her voice dropped to a whisper as her face
took on an uneasy look “—Guinevere, only don’t call ‘er
that, call ‘er Jennifer, she gets mad if ya call ‘er by ‘er real name, so don’t. It’s Jennifer, got it?”
“You, Shag, Snerk, Noggin, and . . .
Jennifer,” said Daria slowly. “Is that all?”
“Quiet! Yeah, that’s us!”
“That’s only five, not—”
“Shut up! I wanna
talk t’ the Queen!”
“Oh, God.” Daria
rubbed her temples with her fingertips, anticipating a headache.
Jane did not chastise her for the oath. “I
do not understand any of this!” she said instead. Abruptly she solidified in
the air between Daria and the elfin girl, completely unnoticed by everyone
else. She wore the black gown in which she had first greeted Daria. “Who art
thou, and what dost thou want with me?” she said to the faerie child.
“I’m Zip!” repeated the girl,
straightening with pride, “the last-born of their Royal Majesties-ers Titania an’ Oberon, or maybe Titania an’ someone named
Goodfellow if the rumors’re true, at yer service!”
“A changeling,” muttered Daria.
“Silence! Yeah,
okay, maybe I’m that, too. We got sent ‘ere t’ protect ya,
yer Queenshipness! We’re yer bodyguards-es-es. Nothin’ll ever get past us!”
“But protect me from what?” cried Jane.
Zip’s confident oratory faltered but was
swiftly restored. “Uh . . . anything! Yeah, anything!
You name it!”
“May I butt in here?” asked Daria,
pinching the bridge of her nose.
“NO!” yelled Zip. It was impossible to
believe that no one else in the room heard that, but a glance around proved,
indeed, that no one else had.
“I want
her to speak,” said Jane sharply.
Zip subsided with a frosty glare at Daria.
“If you’re a changeling,” said Daria as
calmly as she could manage, “then you were exchanged as an infant for a human
child. Do you know who it was you replaced?”
Zip thought for a moment, then shrugged
and shook her head no. The question seemed to bother her, but the frown
vanished in moments.
“Do you live locally?”
“Yeah, over that-a-way
somewhere.” Zip gestured vaguely in three directions. “Big
house with my big brother. step-brother, whatever,
something. Cousin, maybe.” She grinned. “He calls me
Janey when he’s awake, but I’m Zip an’ you’re
Janey—uh, Jane. The Queen.”
“Okay,” said Daria, “and how did you find
out about your mission to protect Lady Jane?”
“Queen
Jane, Four-Eyes!” retorted Zip.
“What is your problem, you little twit?”
snapped Daria, her patience gone.
“A twit am I? You’re the pox-ridden tart who did fer Saucer Top! A fine faerie hill it was till you came along!”
“They were trying to kidnap my sister!”
“You coulda found
another one!”
“Enough!” Jane put a pale hand in each
antagonist’s face. “No more of this! Zip, whatever thou art,
mind thy tongue! Thou must to be civil to Daria, whatever else thy
feelings be on the matter.”
Zip rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever, long
as she don’t try t’ do fer
me or the rest.”
“I will be minded to ask her to do
exactly that if thou canst show the least courtesy!”
“Okay, okay!”
“And I am no longer a queen,” Jane
continued. “Daria was correct and proper to address me as she did. Thou should’st do the same.”
This did not sit well with Zip, to judge
from her expression, but she grumpily agreed.
Daria completed another quick survey of
the classroom. Everyone acted as if nothing unusual was going on, except for
Shag, who was asleep. The frustrated teacher was trying to get a pigtailed
blonde student to name the leader of the Mexican army at the
“I repeat,” Daria said with a sigh, “how
did you find out about your mission to protect—” She pointed at Jane rather
than risk another argument over honorifics.
“Oh. Well, I get letters tellin’ us what t’ do, an’ then I tell everyone else. I got
one this mornin’!” Zip reached into her red jacket
and pulled out an open envelope with nothing written on the outside. From this
she plucked a folded sheet of white paper, which she held up for Daria and Jane
to see. A single line was written upon it in black ink.
Queen Jane arrives to-day — guard her well
Daria frowned. “Who wrote that?”
“My mother, o’ course!”
Zip snapped, putting the letter away.
“Is that her handwriting?”
“Yeah, you nitwit!
Are ya blind?”
“Thou wert warned,” said Jane in a tone
that brooked no further mercy.
“Okay, sorry! ‘Course it’s my mother’s!”
Zip hesitated as doubt crossed her face. “Or my father’s.
One of ‘em. Maybe Robin or
someone did it. It looks official, don’t it?”
“Have you seen either of your parents or
their handwriting before now?” Daria pressed.
“What’s that got t’ do with anything?” A swift glance at Jane, then— “Not really, no.”
“I don’t like this,” said Daria to Jane. “No
one could possibly know you were here, yet you have a retinue of faerie
bodyguards at the ready, fully informed you were coming. No one but I knew . .
. except for the witch.”
“You destroyed her, though,” said Jane. “She
will trouble us no further.”
Daria did not respond. She chewed her
lower lip, her mind suddenly filling with uncomfortable possibilities.
Zip’s large blue eyes darted from Daria to Jane and
back. “What witch?” she asked in a nervous voice.
“Daria freed me from the clutches of a
witch-hag,” said Jane. “She destroyed the ogress and sent her accursed shade to
the Inferno.”
Zip looked at Daria with wide, awe-struck
eyes. “Oh.”
“Zip could be right,” said Daria. “The
faerie royals could have ordered changelings brought to this world to look
after you—but that means they knew about your arrival over a decade and a half
ago. How would they have known you would be here? And why?
Did you have any dealings with their kind?”
“Dealings with faeries?” Jane could not be more
astonished. “And endanger mine immortal soul, forsaking eternity with Our
Savior in
“Right, stupid
question. So, how did they know?”
“My mother an’ father know everything!”
said Zip with indignation. “That’s why they sent me!”
Daria tried to think it through. Her
discovery of Lady Jane now seemed less like coincidence and more as if it had
been fated—or engineered. Her parents had hunted for weeks for a home in this
area, and suddenly that stigmatized house, suitably devalued in price to fit
their budget, appeared on the market. Serendipity? The hand of divine providence? An intentional
manipulation?
She shook her head, feeling quite
strange. Will we take possession of our
home, or will it take possession of us?
“I think we need to talk, the three of
us,” Daria murmured. “Something is wrong, and it’s starting to worry me.” She
looked once more around the classroom at the students and teacher who went on
with the lesson as if nothing was amiss. “Zip, do you know of a place we can
meet where no one will overhear us?”
“Sure! We can meet anywhere an’ no one’ll hear anything!”
“Oh.” Daria thumped her forehead with her
fist. “The glamour, right. Duh.”
“Duh!” Zip gave
Jane an anxious look. “Sorry!”
“After school, I think,” said Daria. “Somewhere
quiet without a lot of people around.”
Zip’s face lit up. “The self-es . . . self-es-teem class!” she cried. “We meet
tomorrow after the last bell! All the others’re in
there ‘cept Shag, but we’ll get ‘im
in. And the teacher’s so funny! We made him turn all his clothes inside out an’
he didn’t notice!”
“But how did all of you . . . how could .
. . forget it. Tomorrow, then. I’ll have to find a way
to get into that class.”
“Just act real weird in school,” advised
Zip knowingly. “It’s easy. You’ll get in.”
Daria spent the remainder of the class
thinking while Zip pestered an annoyed Jane with dozens of fairly personal
questions about her life as a queen. Coincidences were piling up too quickly.
This entire scenario could not be an accident—but the only other possibilities
were that it had been completely plotted out by a powerful agency (the
witch-hag?) with everyone manipulated like puppets, or there was a resonance
between her and Lady Jane, so that coincidences became impossible to avoid. Yet
there was no resonance, as their birthdays were not exactly four hundred
forty-four years apart. And the witch was blasted to magical atoms.
Or maybe not. Or
a being even more powerful and dangerous was pulling the strings. It would pay
to be on guard for further “random” flukes of luck.
When
Daria noticed it was almost time for class to end, she gave the other two a
head’s-up and got ready to leave.
“Race ya t’ next class!” Zip said as she pocketed her red
crayon.
“I’ll walk, thank you. Are there any
other, um, bodyguards in our classes today?”
“Yeah, me! An’ Shag, an’ . . . an’ Jennifer.
Noggin an’ Snerk’ll be in class tomorrow after
school. It’ll be fun!”
“Be still my beating heart.” The bell
rang, and Daria got with everyone else to leave the room. As she passed the
empty desk she had almost taken, she grimaced. “Who would spit on a chair?” she
asked of no one in particular.
“I did that,” said Zip without a trace of
shame. “I didn’t want Jane t’ sit there. I wanted ‘er t’ sit with me!”
“Remind me not to have you pick out my
lunch tray.”
“Oh, like I really would. I’ll get Jane’s,
though.”
“She doesn’t eat.”
“I’ll get it anyway. Race
ya t’ next class!”
“Didn’t we already discuss this? All
right, I’ll race you—”
Zip turned into a blurred streak and was
gone.
“—not,” Daria finished. “I sort of
expected that.” She looked around and noticed Jane was no longer visible. “Jane?”
she whispered.
“Behind you,” the air whispered back.
“I just want you to know,” said Daria as
she headed down the hall for the next class, “that this is not how normal
schools in this day and age are operated. Unfortunately I’ve never been to a
normal school, so I couldn’t tell you at all what they were like.”
“Perhaps if ye abandoned witchery and
adopted Christ as your unspotted Master, ye would have fewer monstrosities
about with which to occupy your time.”
“Perhaps if I burnt the handkerchief in
my backpack, I would be rid of one immediately.”
“Ye wouldn’t!”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t, but I like
saying it to keep you on your toes.”
“The blindfold is safe?”
“As safe as I can possibly make it with
my witchery.”
Jane tut-tutted,
but anxiety crossed Daria’s face. Was the bloodstained handkerchief truly safe?
The fragile cloth was once the blindfold that had covered Jane’s eyes at her
execution, and now it was her soul jar, all that chained her to her ghostly
existence. Daria had carefully wrapped it in a larger cloth impregnated with
chemicals and herbs to preserve it, then stored in a hidden pocket of her pack.
It was impossible to guess how the witch-hag had obtained it. All that mattered
was to ensure it could not be easily destroyed.
Which was curious,
Daria thought, because both she and Jane had been in absolute agreement not two
days ago that destroying the soul jar as soon as possible was for the best,
sending Jane on to whatever fate lay beyond. Why had they both slipped
from this goal? Despite the occasional spat, the two of them got along well
enough. Like twin sisters, almost. Were they really
thinking of continuing their odd relationship indefinitely? Was that wise?
Daria opened the door to her next class,
walked in, and came to a full stop with a gasp. It wasn’t that Zip and Shag had
beaten her to the room. It was the other faerie nonhuman, standing right in
front of her, that caused her to almost jump out of her skin.
“Pleased to meet you,” Daria said when
she found her tongue. “Jennifer, I presume.”
*
“Muh-OM!” cried
a distraught Quinn over dinner that evening. “My entire future is at stake! If
anything else mental happens, I’ll have to move into a foster home and change
my name to Bertha and dye my hair so it doesn’t match any of my clothes, and
what would that make my driver’s license look like? It would be the end of me,
Mother, the end!”
“We’re not sending Daria to a different
school,” said Helen Morgendorffer firmly. “Did anything good happen to you today?”
“No, nothing at all!
Except they did ask me to join the Fashion Club, but I said I’m new here and
need time to paddle around the track before I start snowboarding, so for now I’m
just in charge of sales and fundraising for school events and that’s all.”
“That’s wonderful, Quinn!” said Helen. “Isn’t
it, Jake?”
“You bet!” Jake replied as he used his
fingers to load peas onto his fork.
“Plus they said I could have bodyguards
because of all the money I’d carry around and because of certain people who like have a thing,
but I’m only going to pick cute guys with nice cars, not anyone with a dirty pickup
truck and tattoos of beer cans on his arms.”
“You’re dating a guy with a tattoo?” Jake
gasped, dropping his fork and all the peas piled on it.
“Keep up with us, Jake!” snapped Helen.
“But I thought she said—”
“Not now!” Helen turned back to Quinn. “That’s
a good start, dear. Maybe you can join the Fashion Club later.”
“I doubt it,” muttered Quinn. “They don’t
have bodyguards.”
“Daria, how about you?”
Helen tapped the table with a fingernail to get her eldest daughter’s attention
and make her stop staring into space through her empty dinner plate. “What
happened with you today in school?”
Dragged back into reality, Daria mulled
over possible answers. Well, I met a
teenage troll, a faerie girl, and a genuine death-wailing banshee,
all disguised by magic to look like regular students. The ghost of a teenage
British monarch I rescued followed me to class because I put her bloody
handkerchief in my backpack, and we’ve decided to attend school together
despite our severe religious and philosophical differences. On the down side, I
didn’t learn anything because the faerie girl used an enchantment to make
everyone forget about us, which gave her time to drive us both crazy—by “us” I
mean myself and the ghost, who is by the way almost my exact double except for
her gowns and use of “thees” and “thous”
—and there’s the nagging problem of the giant witch-hag that I tried to blow up
the day we moved here but possibly survived and has issues with me over it. Oh,
and I’m supposed to meet more fantastic beings tomorrow if I’m made to stay
after school for talking to myself when I was actually talking to the ghost queen.
“Nothing,” she finally said with a shrug.
“Nothing interesting happened at all?”
“Nope.”
“Were you a little nervous about school
this morning, kiddo?” asked Jake, trying not to sound nervous himself. “You
were talking to yourself a little and I thought—”
“It was a play.”
“What?”
“I was rehearsing a play.”
“Oh! Thank God! Keep up the good work,
kiddo! Talk to yourself all you want!”
“No, Daddy!” wailed Quinn. “Make her
stop! It’s like three of us live in a normal home and she’s outside in the
bushes with a chainsaw and a hockey mask like that Norman guy!”
The phone rang at that moment. “Quinn,
remember what the family counselor told us,” said Helen as she got up to answer
it.
“The part about
supporting each other through this crisis, or the part about me moving into a
foster home if Daria starts keeping dead things under her bed?”
“Stop it.” Helen picked up the cordless
phone on the kitchen counter. “Hello? Yes. Yes, she’s my daughter. What? Oh,
no, that can’t be. The psychiatrist said she was normal, loosely speaking. I
mean, what’s normal anyway?” She laughed for a moment. “What? Oh, she does that
all the time, it’s nothing. I see. After school? How
long? Just a minute.” Helen put a hand over the
mouthpiece. “Daria, would you—”
“Sure,” said Daria, still staring at her
plate.
“Dear, I didn’t even—”
“After school, four
weeks, self-esteem, whatever.”
Helen stared at Daria for four long
seconds, then took her hand off the mouthpiece. “Yes,
that’s fine with her. Okay. Bye.”
“It was about the test the school
psychologist gave her, wasn’t it?” said Quinn. “Did it say when she was going
to start making dresses out of human skin?”
“Quinn,” warned Helen before turning to
her other daughter. “Daria, did you know anything about—”
“Yes.”
“And you’re—”
“Yes.”
Helen gave a heavy sigh as she put down
the phone.
“What’s going on?” asked Jake, looking
worried.
“The school psychologist wants Daria to
stay after school to take part in a special class tomorrow,” said Helen, sitting
down at the table again. “It’s a class for students with—um, special needs,
personal issues, that sort of thing.”
“Will she get a straitjacket?” asked
Quinn.
“No, no, no, it’s not that kind of class.
It’s . . . different.” Helen cleared her throat. “Let’s finish our meal
together, shall we?”
“Okay,” said Jake, still looking worried.
“So, Quinn is not going out with some
guy with a tattoo?”
Chapter Six:
A Matter of Time
There is no armor against fate.
—James Shirley, Contention of
Mid-September gave way to late October. Greenery
had long ago turned to rust and gold. Carved pumpkins grinned by the front
doors of the subdivision’s houses. The winds cooled, the nights grew longer,
and the bloodstained handkerchief concealed in Daria’s backpack remained whole.
“So,” said the earnest teacher sitting on
the edge of his desk, “when we talk about ourselves, what are
we talking about? Anyone?” He looked about the
classroom for a raised hand, then pointed to one student
for a response.
Whatever answer was given by the
nonexistent teenager was heard only by the bewitched teacher. What he believed
was taking place before him in the self-esteem class was not at all what was
there.
At her desk near the center of the class,
Daria penciled in an answer on her science take-home test, due the next day. An
empty pizza box (delivery) sat on the desk beside her. She no longer noticed
anything the self-esteem teacher said about self-esteem, self-affirmation,
self-healing, or self-anything else. This was her second time through the
after-school class, but she saw no need to discontinue coming. It was more
interesting than staying home.
Behind her and to one side, the emaciated
Jennifer peered out an open window, her skull-like face half shrouded by her long,
colorless hair. She took a drag from her cigarette and blew a cloud into the
air outside. Nothing she did made a noise, as if her presence frightened sounds
away. The skull on the back of her dark jacket glistened like new-drawn blood.
Wearing threadbare pants and a small gray
T-shirt on which was printed “The N” (against a background of sliced-up strips
of movie film and a blue smiley face), little Noggin sat on the floor and
amused himself. He had removed a panel from the wall opposite the windows and pulled
out a bundle of wires and cables, inspecting it through the inch-thick lens in
his huge eyeglasses. A miniature pair of wire cutters awaited work in the grip
of his left hand.
Clad in a sumptuous autumn-red Tudor gown
with amber trim, Jane stood near the back of the classroom with the remainder
of the after-school group seated in a semicircle before her.
“‘Almighty and most merciful Father,’”
Jane read slowly, one pale index finger pointed at an open book on Zip’s
desktop. “‘We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have
followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended
against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have
done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there
is no health in us.’”
She took her finger from the page and briefly
made a face. “Forgive me, but this new manner of spelling is still arduous to
quote. I trust that my faithful congregation will understand me despite my
stumbles. I would prefer to use the Book
of Common Prayer from the reign of my cousin, Elizabeth, as I would
doubtless be better able to follow that than this, but I am reliably informed
that such a text would prove difficult to acquire.”
“I’m not breaking into a museum to steal
a prayer book,” Daria said without lifting her gaze from her homework.
“I did not ask it of thee, thou shameless
paramour of Antichrist,” Jane replied with a faint smile. She turned to her
tiny congregation. “One of thee, name a thing thou shouldst
have done, but did not. Anyone?”
“Do you want me to turn the page now?”
Zip asked eagerly.
“Not yet, good Zip.
I must have an answer first. Shag, wast there a deed
or commandment thou didst ignore that should have been done?”
The troll’s face creased in a frown of
deepest concentration. After several long seconds, he offered her a shrug and a
bashful smile.
Jane appeared to deflate slightly. “Snerk,
then,” she said to the gray-and-red clad hobgoblin with the backward-turned
baseball cap. “I cannot imagine thou didst
leave a single commandment unbroken in thy passing.”
Snerk’s smirk
grew wider than the rest of his head, a feat made easy with his rubbery,
exaggerated facial features.
“Come, hob, confess what thou wast to do but did not.”
After a cough and a series of warming-up
noises, Snerk said in a gravelly deep voice, “Be good.”
“Ah, there ‘tis,” said Jane. “Snerk has
admitted in a round-about manner his sin of o-mission,
which is to not do something that we are commanded to do by Our Savior, Jesus
Christ. Now, let us examine the sins of com-mission.
Who can define what a sin of commission is? Anyone?”
“Be good?” offered Snerk, with a trademark
smirk.
Jane was about to deliver a fresh reprimand
to the hobgoblin for his failure to take the lesson seriously when there was a
knock at the classroom door. Jane, Zip, Shag, Snerk, Noggin, and Daria looked
up in surprise. Jennifer continued to stare out the window.
“Excuse me,” said the earnest teacher,
getting off his desk. He strode to the door and reached it as it opened to
reveal the school’s science teacher, a stern-faced forty-something harpy (not
in the literal sense, but close).
“Has one of these male hoodlums been out
in the hallway in the last ten minutes?” she asked, glaring at the students. “Some
aspiring saboteur shut off the electricity to the teachers’ lounge.”
Daria and Jane both turned and raised
eyebrows at the little gremlin examining the electrical wiring. Noggin noticed their
attention, spread his hands as if protesting his innocence, then gave up and
began making repairs to a cable he had cut.
“No one’s left the room, Janet,” the
earnest teacher assured her. “In fact, we’ve had one of the most fruitful talks
about Being and Becoming that I ever remember!”
“No doubt,” the science teacher sneered. Detecting
nothing out of the ordinary through the haze of Zip’s faerie glamour, she
grumbled something about testosterone and started to leave when she noticed
Daria, and stepped back into the room. “Miss Morgendorffer,
that was an excellent report on medieval chemistry you gave last Friday.
It outclassed everything those male simians you have for classmates came up
with! Trust men to come up with a waste of time like alchemy!”
“Indeed,” said Daria with a straight
face.
“Alchemy!” said the earnest teacher, his eyes
alight. “What was it Shakespeare wrote in Julius
Caesar? Oh! ‘That which would appear offense in us / His countenance, like
richest alchemy, / Will—”
“Don’t talk to me about Julius Caesar,
Timothy!” shrieked the harpy. “He was an ignoramus! We’re doing a unit on
timekeeping this week, and of course the two, quote,
most important western calendars, end quote, are both named after men, and they’re
both riddled with mistakes! Julius Caesar’s calendar was wrong, and Pope
Gregory’s calendar was wrong, too, and neither of them ever admitted it!”
“Now, Janet, to be fair, they did the
best they—”
“Later!” The door slammed.
The earnest teacher shook his head as he
walked back to his desk. “Such a fascinating woman,” he muttered—then realized
his students were listening. “I, um, was of course talking about someone in literary
history,” he said. “Now, where were we? Something about Being
and Becoming. Hmmm.”
“We shoulda made
‘im dance a jig fer the old
bat,” said Zip with a grin. “That woulda been big fun!”
“And a sin,” said Jane in gentle reproof.
“A sin of commission.”
“Oh, yeah.” Under
her breath Zip added, “Still woulda been fun.”
Jane glanced over at Daria, who was
staring into space in a distracted fashion. “Good Heretic, what did the lady
mean when she spoke of a pope’s calendar? Surely no one has let
Daria did not answer. After a moment, she
reached down and pulled her science book from her backpack, then quickly
thumbed the pages, searching.
“She’s thinkin’
again,” teased Zip. “Prob’ly ‘bout what she wants fer her birt’day tomorra. Sweet sixteen on All Hallow’s
Eve!”
Daria was now reading a passage in the book
with great intensity. Jane solemnly watched
her and recognized the warning signs that something was up. “Good Zip,” she
whispered, “close the book and put it away. We will
continue our religious studies another time.”
“Okay.” The faerie girl did as she was
told, then pulled a red crayon from her jacket and began sketching an
unflattering caricature of the earnest teacher on her desktop.
“We need to go to the library,” said
Daria in a strained voice. She shut her book and jammed it into her backpack.
“We, as in ye and I, or all of us?” asked
Jane.
“Everyone,” said Daria flatly. “It might
be nothing, but I’d better check it out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The calendars.”
Daria got up and began putting her backpack on. “We have to hurry.”
Zip looked up from her drawing. “Now?”
“Now!”
The faerie girl gestured at the earnest
teacher, who abruptly looked up at the clock on the wall behind him. “Goodness,
time to go!” he exclaimed, though half an hour remained before the class was
scheduled to end. He began putting away his papers to go home. “See everyone
back here next Monday!” he added.
After Noggin put the wall section back
in, the group left and headed down the hall for the staircase and the door out.
Zip as usual trotted well ahead, with Snerk and Shag (Noggin perched on the
latter’s shoulders) following the two teenage girls. Jennifer brought up the
rear at a distance, cigarette burning in her boney fingers. Halloween
decorations lined the walls: pumpkins, ghosts, witches, black cats, black and orange crepe streamers.
“Would ye care to explain the nature of
this emergency?” said Jane, gliding along beside Daria.
“When did
“When did—what are you talking about?”
Daria grimaced as the group left the
school building. “I was afraid of that.”
“What could possibly be so fearsome that
a change in the calendar would put you to flight?”
“Your birthday,” said Daria, short of
breath from the quick pace. “When we celebrated it last week, it might not have
been your real birthday.”
“What?”
“If you and I were born on that same day,
that would indicate there was a resonance between us. I have to find out if your
birthday on the twenty-first was changed to a different date on today’s
calendar. All the Western nations switched calendars
from Julius Caesar’s calendar to one being pushed by Pope Gregory the
Thirteenth, because Caesar’s calendar wasn’t keeping the correct time.”
Jane’s eyes opened very wide. “
“Knock it off with the Papist this and
the Papist that!” snapped Daria, red-faced. “I’m sick of hearing about it! The
world changed, being Catholic or Protestant doesn’t matter, so get over it!
Gregory’s calendar was more accurate than Caesar’s, that’s why
“Mind thy tongue!”
Daria stopped and angrily looked Jane in
the eye. “Do you remember a pope named Gregory the Thirteenth?” she growled.
“No! Paul the Third and Julius the Third
were the only ones of which I had knowledge in my life! No Gregory sat on the
throne of
Daria took up her fast pace once more. “Then
it happened after your time.” She stamped her boot once. “Damn it!”
“Stop it! What is this . . . this
resonance you constantly prattle on about? What does it have to do with
anything?”
“If you and I were born four hundred
forty-four years apart, exactly, then my finding you was not by chance. Four
hundred forty-four is a power number. It has meaning. Nothing that is happening
or will happen to us will be by chance. Someone else planned it out, everything!”
“Well, of course not! The Lord God has
predestined all events that—”
“I’m not talking about God!” Daria
shouted. “I’m talking about the witch-hag!”
Her delicate face betraying her shock,
Zip dropped back so she was only three paces ahead of Daria instead of a dozen.
“But ye destroyed her!” protested Jane. “No
trace of her remained when I was set free!”
“I—I don’t know if I did! I mean, I saw
her blown to pieces by the bomb, but I’d already thought I’d gotten rid of her
once, and she came right back!”
“Witch-hag?” said Snerk, striding along behind
with his hands in his pockets.
Jane turned around, continuing to float
over the ground. “Thou knowest her?”
Snerk was not smiling. “D’ye mean th’ Great Hag?” he said
with a strained expression.
“What Great Hag?”
“Everybody, shut up and let me think!”
yelled Daria. “Stay on guard!”
They reached the public library in good
time, though it was twilight by then. Once inside, a sweaty and tired Daria
headed for a public computer and logged in, then began searching for books
about calendars and time. The others stood nearby and traded uneasy looks. No
one in the library gave them more than the briefest glance.
Daria clicked through several results
before pulling a pencil from her green vest and jotting down a note. She logged
off, got up, and headed for the stacks, the others in tow.
“Is this bad?” whispered Zip.
“I don’t know,” Jane whispered back. “I
do not understand what she fears.”
Three minutes later, Daria pulled a book
from a heavily laden shelf and flipped it open while standing in the aisle.
After skimming a few sections, she found a table and ran her finger down a
column.
Her finger came to a stop. After a
moment, she rechecked the figure. It did not change, no matter how hard she
willed it.
“Ten days,” Daria said.
“Ten days what?” said Jane.
Daria swallowed. “The calendar correction
for the year you were born is ten days. The Julian calendar under which you
were born was wrong. You weren’t born on October twenty-first. You were born on
the thirty-first, tomorrow, same as me.” She let the book close in her hands. “We’re
in resonance.”
“But what does that mean?” Jane nearly shouted. “I do not understand what you speak of!
Be clear!”
Daria looked at her double with haunted
eyes. “We look alike for a reason,” she said. “We’re the same person. I am you.”
“That is such nonsense!”
“I was born of the dead, as I told you
before,” said Daria hoarsely. “My mother was struck by lightning and was dead,
technically speaking, when I was born a few moments later. It was exactly four
hundred forty-four years after you were born. Someone meant for it to happen
that way. It could only be because someone wanted you back in the world again,
reborn from the dead.”
Jane stared at Daria in horror. “How can
you be certain? Can it not be coincidence?
“No! The chance for our meeting to be
pure luck is negligible. Even the faerie court anticipated your arrival here by
sending changelings to protect you. I wish I knew what they know, it would
really help.” Daria looked down at the book in her hands. “I never thought
about a calendar change. It never occurred to me that—well, it doesn’t matter
now. You and I were both right, that first day we met: we’re both here for a
purpose, only we don’t know what it is. Not yet.” She looked at Jane again. “I
am afraid God and fate have nothing to do with this. This is the work of
someone else.”
“The hag’s sorcery?”
“I don’t know if it’s the hag, but sorcery,
necromancy, yeah, whoever did it gave it the works. Whoever it was is very
powerful and dangerous, far more than I am.”
“Could this be a good thing, though?”
said Jane with a touch of hope.
Daria shook her head. “I don’t have the
faintest idea, but I don’t like it.”
“What must we do?”
A long silence, then Daria spoke. “I don’t
know.”
Zip gently tugged on Daria’s sleeve. “Are
you a changeling, too?” she asked.
Daria made no answer as she put the book
back on the shelf.
“We had best go home,” said Jane abruptly.
“Snerk, Shag, Noggin—we will meet thee in school tomorrow. Be alert for danger,
what sort I cannot say. Good Zip, I wish for thee to remain close by. Thy speed
might prove useful. Canst thou contact thy brother and tell him thou wilt be at
Daria’s?”
“Sure. I can run there an’ back in no
time.”
“My family hasn’t met Zip yet,” said
Daria. “They still think I have no friends here.”
“They won’t even see me,” said Zip with a
grin.
“Jane,” said Daria in a different tone.
Everyone in the small group looked at her. “Jane, I need to find out what’s
happening. I need to use my cards.”
The ghost’s face hardened. “We have
spoken about divinations being against the Word of God, and ye promised ye
would avoid it. In Deuteronomy God
states without condition that interpreting omens and all manner of divination
is—”
“And is
that not the same as when prophets foretell the future?” Daria interrupted,
eyes blazing.
“No, it
is not!”
“But you’ve
changed your mind about other things, haven’t you? Do you still think trolls
and hobgoblins are in league with Satan?”
“N—that
has nothing to do with this!”
The
lights went out. The library was plunged into night and silence.
Everyone
froze in place. “Stay close!” hissed Jane. “I can still see! Shag, guide all to
the outside!”
The troll did so, his movements making it
clear he could see in the darkness as well.
“I don’t hear anyone talking,” said
Daria. She raised her voice. “Can anyone hear me? Hello?”
No response. The library was dead quiet.
“Oh, crap,” Daria whispered.
“Encircle Daria!” ordered Jane. “Defend
her at all costs!”
“But we’re yer guards!” said Zip in protest.
“Follow my orders!”
“I can defend myself!” Daria shouted.
“Oh, shut up!”
They made it into the main chamber near
the doors to the outside. Not a single human was visible, though there had been
a dozen or so only minutes earlier. By the front door was a television set
connected to a VHS machine that had played a looped tape of activities the
library planned for children through the end of the year. It was as dark as the
rest of the building, until the group approached it. The television set then
made a popping noise and began to warm up.
“Hold!” said Jane. The group watched as
the picture brightened. A black background appeared, on which words began to
appear in white letters.
YOU DO NOT
KNOW ME
No one moved. The words faded and new
words appeared.
I AM THE
END
The television popped again and went
completely black, its power gone.
“It’s the hag!” Daria cried, reaching
into her pockets. “She’s here!”
“Get Daria to her home!” shouted Jane. “Shag, the doors! Snerk, carry her!”
The troll hit the doors in a crouching
run and smashed them apart, glass fragments spraying and metal framework
clattering underfoot. The hobgoblin caught Daria around the waist and slung her
screaming over his left shoulder, running after the troll. Jane flew quickly along, with Zip carrying the gremlin on her back right
behind.
“J-J-J-Jennifer!”
Daria wheezed as she was jostled about. “Wh-where’s J-J-Jenni-fer?”
Jane looked around. The banshee was nowhere
in sight. “Keep going!”
The trip to the Morgendorffers’ house
took only a few minutes. Several unfamiliar cars were parked in the driveway.
Snerk put Daria back on her feet when they reached the sidewalk in front of the
home.
“I think it best if all of us stay the
night here, if that can be managed,” said Jane to Daria. She glanced at Shag,
though, and frowned. “It might be difficult to accommodate thee.”
Shag made a quick series of hand
gestures, the meaning of which was not hard to decipher. “Thou wilt stand guard
outside?” said Jane. “Thou goest with my blessing,
then.”
Daria coughed and rubbed a sore spot on her
chest where she had bounced against the hobgoblin’s shoulder during the run. “Okay,”
she gasped. “Let me . . . ring the doorbell . . . and clear . . . the way . . .
to my room.”
“Where be it?”
said Snerk. The knowing smile had returned.
Daria pointed upward, still panting. “That
. . . side . . . in back.”
Snerk picked up Noggin and put him on his
shoulders. Giving the group a thumb’s up, he ran around the side of the house
and was gone.
“Is he going to climb up to your room?”
asked Jane.
“Yep,” Zip told her. “He climbs good.”
“I locked the windows!” Daria said.
“That don’t
matter. He’s good with locks.”
“Whatever. Okay, I’m ready.” Daria
straightened and looked around them once more. “You didn’t see Jennifer?” she
asked Jane.
“I fear not. We must hope and pray for
the best.”
Daria felt great unease at banshee’s
disappearance, but she tried to sound confident. “She can take care of herself,”
she said, then went up to the front door and tried the knob. It was locked, so
she rang the doorbell. Jane vanished as she did.
Moments later she heard footsteps and the
door opened. A teenage boy from school answered it. He looked big enough to be
either a football player or a brick wall. “Yes, ma’am?” he said, seeing Daria
and no one else.
Daria walked in, hearing a faint whistle
of wind by her feet, and headed for the stairs.
“Do you live here, ma’am?” asked the teen,
looking puzzled.
“Sometimes,” said Daria, stamping up the
steps.
“Quinn!” called the teen over his
shoulder. “Do you have a sister?”
“Get back in the kitchen, Robert!” Quinn
yelled through the house. “What kind of bodyguard are you?”
“Sorry, ma’am!”
Daria went straight to her hated pink bedroom.
The door was open. She walked in and flipped on the light switch—and jumped.
The banshee sat on the edge of Daria’s
bed, taking a long draw from her cigarette. Snerk was closing the outside window.
The gremlin was busily examining Daria’s computer. Zip was staring open-mouthed
at Jennifer, who ignored the faerie girl.
“Don’t touch that!” Daria told Noggin, then she turned to Jennifer. “What happened to you? Where
did you go?”
Jennifer made no answer, but continued to
watch Daria with half-closed eyes. She took the cigarette from her mouth and
blew a cloud of smoke at Daria’s feet.
Daria heard the bedroom door squeak as it
closed behind her. She turned, expecting to see Jane. Too late, she remembered
that Jane Grey was immaterial and could touch nothing solid.
What had been concealed behind the open
door, then pushed it shut, was not Jane Grey.
Chapter Seven:
The Queen of Winter
…The Lord thy God will send the hornet among
them, until they that are left and
hide themselves from thee, be
destroyed.
—Deuteronomy
7:20
Daria stepped back upon seeing the
intruder, but no threat was forthcoming. The newcomer was a young woman, tall
and slim, who leaned against the bedroom wall with one black-gloved hand on her
hip and one completing the act of pushing the door shut. Her long legs were
crossed at the ankles in idleness. Nothing about her betrayed the least caution
or concern. Her royal blue eyes, though, drank in all.
The visitor wore knee-high black boots of
finely tooled leather, polished to a high shine. The pattern thereon was too
elaborate for Daria to discern any one image or symbol. Into the boots tops
were thrust fine black breeches embroidered with gold thread. Silver buckles
were visible below the kneecaps, sealing the hems. A skin of black-scaled
leather from a serpent or reptile formed her belt. Her white silk shirt bore a
dozen gold buttons in a neat row, with full sleeves gathered at the
silver-stitched cuffs. Thin ebony gloves covered her hands. A crimson jerkin
with gold trim was worn over the shirt and buttoned at the bottom, emphasizing
the newcomer’s slender waist, the gentle curves of her small breasts, and a certain broadness in her shoulders. An engraved silver
gorget guarded her throat with a silken ruff visible at the top, and a
brilliant diamond as large as a thumbnail mounted in front.
The figure was armed as well. Two long,
thin rapiers hung from her belt at either hip, the unsheathed mirror-bright
blades crossing at the tips in back. Each weapon had a gleaming basket hilt
made of woven gold wire, with inlaid blue sapphires and lapis lazuli glittering
on each silver pommel.
The woman’s heart-shaped face was more
arresting than her outfit. Her steady blue eyes were framed by hair of silken
jet, coifed in a pageboy style, the ends curling in toward her neck, with a
curtain of bangs across her forehead. Not a strand or thread was out of place.
A corner of the young woman’s blood-red
lips curved up in a bemused way. Her voice was deep and had a nasal quality. “I
heard you long to know what the
“Who are you?” said Daria, recovering. “How
did you get in here?”
The woman raised a painted eyebrow. “Is
that more important than the intelligence you originally sought?”
Daria did a double-take. “And how the hell did you know what the witch-hag
told me? How could you possibly know?”
“All things have ears,” said the visitor
with a shrug, “and all things with ears love gossip.”
Daria drew herself up, not liking the
answers she was given. “Who are you?” she said in a stronger voice. “Why are
you here?”
The bemused smile broadened as the woman
uncrossed her long legs and stood upright, hands still on her hips. She
appeared to be in her early twenties. “Hornet I am called, an emissary from the
royal court of their majesties Oberon and Titania, rulers of the Other World. I
bear tidings you might wish to learn.” The woman glanced at the silent banshee.
“One of your number, Guinevere, requested an audience. Her petition was granted,
and here I was sent.”
The moment the visitor said Guinevere, everyone whirled to look at
the banshee. Death-faced Jennifer merely stared at the woman—and did nothing
more.
Daria swallowed. “Gwe—”
She caught herself “—Jennifer went to the faerie court? When? How?”
The woman’s smile dimmed with mounting scorn.
“You cannot be so simple,” she said. “Is there anyone present who can ask
questions for you?”
Zip stepped up to Daria’s side, looking
up at the emissary with an irate expression. “Don’t insult ‘er,”
she said through her teeth. “She rescued Lady Jane from the witch-hag, an’ that’s
more’n you
ever did.”
“Have a care,” whispered the emissary.
She did not even glance at the smaller girl. “The hornet thou toyest with may yet sting thee.”
“Don’t you dare ‘thou’ me, foundling,” hissed Zip.
Hornet’s gaze dropped to the faerie girl,
though her head did not move. “Careless child,” she said softly. “Thou wilt
remember my welt.”
Before further words could be traded, Jane
materialized out of the air in front of Daria. She wore the emerald gown she had
worn as queen. “Deliver your message, Hornet,” she told the emissary. “Precious
time is wasted on petty grievances. Speak, and we will listen.”
The ghost’s sudden appearance did not
surprise the visitor. She came to attention, though she seemed at ease and even
relaxed. “Milady,” said the young woman with a bow, “I am sent by their
majesties Oberon and Titania to offer you their wisdom, such that it may succor
your cause against the fury you hope to escape.”
“What fury is it, then?” said Jane, her
chin high. “Who is the ogress who imprisoned me and harries us even after her
destruction?”
“Your adversary is dreadful, milady. The crux
of it is this: she is the Cailleach.”
For a confusing moment Daria thought the
emissary had said it was the colic. Then she caught on that it was something
called the KAL ach, spoken with a hard
Scottish ch
as in loch. To her chagrin, she hadn’t
the least idea of what such a thing was, despite all the ancient and medieval
bestiaries she had read.
Hornet’s revelation had a dramatic effect
on others in the room. Zip, who had to walk around Jane to see Hornet again,
gasped aloud. An agitated Noggin wrung his hands and checked to see if anyone
was behind him. Jennifer’s sunken eyes glowed briefly white. Snerk drew back
with a mixture of astonishment and horror. “‘Tis Herself!” he cried. “Th’
Great Hag!”
In the face of such outbursts, Jane became
uneasy. It was obvious she knew nothing more than did Daria about their foe. “Am
I to assume these are catastrophic tidings?” she said as her composure
returned.
“Yes, milady,” said the sword-woman. “The
situation is dire for us all.”
“Deliver me from my ignorance, then, and
swiftly,” said Jane. “Tell me what ye know of this . . . Cailleach.”
“As you wish. Do
you remember, milady, tales from your childhood of Black Annis, the crone with
iron claws who prowled the night and ate children found out of doors? Do you
recall legends of Peg Powler or Jenny Greenteeth, monstrous hags who lurked
beneath the quiet surfaces of rivers and ponds, lying in wait for wayfarers to
snatch and rend?”
Though taken aback, Jane nodded. “Black Annis, yes. My nurse meant to frighten me with her,
but I knew the creature was but a fable.”
“Then you have heard of the Cailleach:
once an entity of unsurpassed power, now relegated in
the minds of forgetful humanity to fairy tales. The Cailleach is no bedtime
fiction, but instead an elemental being beyond good or evil. In her prime she was
the sky in its fury, the sea in its wrath, the winter in its deadly embrace.
She raised crags and palisades only to hammer them down; dug winding valleys
she later covered and forgot; stirred great whirlpools that swallowed ships and
threw waves that drowned the coasts. In the time-lost past at the very birth of
all legend, her white empire encompassed the north from horizon to horizon,
land and sea imprisoned beneath an endless frozen wasteland. Deeper
than sleep or death was the ice, and colder than the end of the world.
The primeval realms trapped below were crushed into nothing, erased from earth
and memory. Ages after her fall, so great were the scars she left,
she was still spoken of as if alive.”
The emissary began to chant. Her voice
was too coarse for singing, but her delivery and rhythm were faultless.
“Mountains
for her stepping stones,
“Blizzards
for her royal gown,
“Lightning
for her ragged crown,
“Thunder
for her ringing groans.
“Valleys
with her claws she carves,
“Oceans
with her toe she swirls,
“Tempests
with her breath she hurls,
“Kingdoms
with her chill she starves.
“Queen
of witches, snow and frost,
“Queen
of souls to abyss lost,
“Queen
of raging storm and tide—
“Only
thee dost Death abide.”
“The Cailleach resisted the coming of
spring to the earth,” she continued. “She fought over every crystal of ice and
every frozen clot of soil, but after countless ages she was at last brought
down. By the nameless powers arrayed against her she was changed into a
monolith of white stone, yet even then her furious dreams wreaked havoc over
earth, sea, and sky. In that prison of stone, though, she stayed, weakening, insensible
of the rise and fall of beasts and empires. Then came
disaster: she was awakened and set free by a mortal woman, for reasons we cannot
fathom. What the Cailleach now schemes, no seer can predict. With unknown
sorceries she has cloaked her intentions too securely for any to gain real knowledge
of her goals. We dare not confront her and risk her merciless attention, yet we
dare not disregard the consequences of inaction. We are at an impasse.”
“What does she want of Daria and me?”
said Jane in a faint voice.
“We do not know,” said Hornet. “However,
it appears that a prophecy about the two of you has largely come to pass. A
final portion remains, yet to occur. It is impossible to say what will result,
or how it relates to the Cailleach’s intrigues.”
“What prophecy?” said a startled Daria.
“You know of it,” said Hornet. “It is in
the song that was played at your birth, you who were born of the dead.”
There was silence for several heartbeats.
“Whoa,” said Daria, raising both hands in
a warding gesture. “Hold everything. You can’t be talking about the Rolling
Stones.”
“I can, and I am,” said Hornet. “Stone
monoliths have been sacred to the memory of the Cailleach since time
immemorial, raised in hopes of warding off her wrath. Consider: the name of the
musicians’ group who heralded your birth implies the spirit in those stones is
active and moving about. The Cailleach has returned, but what the Rolling
Stones foretold was your own coming, Milady Jane, and yours—” Hornet hesitated,
her twisted smile in bloom. “How do you wish to be addressed, dear alchemist? Daria the Destroyer? Daria the Great?”
“Just call me Daria,” grumbled Daria with
a glare. “That is enough. And you cannot be serious that—”
“I am,” Hornet interrupted. “The only
certainty we have is that both you and Lady Jane are at the heart of the
Cailleach’s plotting. Had she sought your destruction, Daria, you would long
ago have ceased to be. Despite your childish taunts and futile attempts to
destroy her, she has for some reason let you live. It is uncharacteristic of her.
It is doubtful she felt even the mightiest of your blows, so we anticipate that
she is unscathed and has regained some or most of her former power. In the
opinion of the
Another short silence passed before Daria
spoke up. “That’s great,” she muttered. “That’s just peachy. Excuse me while I
drink some drain cleaner and finish our adventure early.”
“How did the
“A field sprite noticed the Cailleach’s
white pillar had vanished from where it once stood in a highland wilderness,”
Hornet said. “Once notified, the court began preparations to send changelings
to your world to monitor events in the long term. All those sent are here
present, including the troll outside.” Here the emissary’s gaze again drifted
down to tight-lipped Zip, who regarded the young woman with narrowed eyes. “The
changelings have done well, except for infantile breaches of decorum on the
part of one.”
Daria took a moment to scrutinize Zip,
then Hornet. “The two of you look vaguely alike,” she said. “Are you related?”
“No!” said Zip and Hornet at the same
instant. They glared at one another in cold and unmistakable hatred. Others in
the room eyed the pair warily, fearing the worst. Jennifer alone was unmoved,
though she watched the proceedings with interest.
“You two were exchanged as infants,” said
Jane with new understanding. “Zip was left in your place on this world, and
you—”
“—took her place in the
Other World.” Hornet’s lips pulled back to show white teeth. “This malformed
runt inherited the empty and unheated ruin that would have been my home, the
absent parents and self-centered siblings who would have been my family, the threadbare
rags that would have been my clothes, and the ashes that would have been my
dreams. By the good grace of their majesties, Titania and Oberon, I have today better
lodging, connections, attire, and dreams than I would had I not been taken. I
am an eagle who would have been a mockingbird.”
“Yer a cuckoo
in an eagle’s nest,” said a scowling Zip.
“You have heard of the pot calling the
kettle black?” Hornet responded evenly. “No matter. You
are welcome to my birthright in this world, child. My home is in the palace of
my liege, their majesties. I return here only as dictated by necessity.”
“I spit on everything you got! I want
what I have! My parents made me the guard of a real queen—me, the youngest!
They gave this big job to me!”
Hornet shook her head in a patronizing
manner. “Your parents—and I assume their royal majesties are your true parents, as they are evasive when questioned on the
matter—have many children. Their offspring command faerie rades and hunts,
probe astrological mysteries, generate immortal poetry and art, and otherwise
distinguish themselves and honor their praiseworthy line with their surpassing deeds.
They have made it known to me that you alone have disappointed them by your
childish antics, your lack of erudition, and your failure to accomplish even
the smallest enterprise of note. Were it not for my reports, they would have
long ago, and perhaps deliberately, forgotten that you exist.”
“You LIE!”
screamed Zip, white with rage. Her hands balled up into tiny fists.
“Cease at once!” said Jane, putting herself
between the two. “Leave off this insane baiting of one another, or ye will grant
the hag’s desire to destroy us all!”
Zip pulled back, biting down on her lower
lip. Her bright eyes glistened with tears.
“I humbly beg milady’s pardon,” said
Hornet after a reflective pause. “We live in trying times, when tempers fray
easily under trivial provocation.”
“Are you involved in these events in any
way, other than as a messenger?” asked Jane of Hornet, hoping to prevent another
embarrassing argument.
“I am,” said Hornet. “Until today I was
entrusted by the king and queen with overseeing the changelings and their
progress, guiding them as best I could while remaining unseen.”
Zip’s mouth fell open. She seemed to
shrink under the weight of Hornet’s admission. “No,” she whispered. “Not so.”
Ignoring the faerie girl, Hornet looked
into the eyes of the other changelings in the room, one after the other. “It is
true,” she said. “I have been your invisible shepherd. I left all the messages describing
your tasks and reported back to their majesties on all results. You have
accomplished much to be proud of.”
Though shaken earlier, Snerk and Noggin
looked at one another and smiled in relief. Jennifer shrugged.
As Hornet spoke, however, Zip reached
into her red jacket and pulled out an envelope, from which she extracted a
folded slip of fine paper. “Who wrote this?” she asked in a quavering voice. She
held up the note she had once shown to Daria, alerting all to the arrival of
“Queen Jane.”
Hornet gave the letter a bored look and
said, “I did.” She did not react when Zip tore the paper into shreds in a few seconds’
time.
Jane groaned when she saw the faerie
girl’s anguish. “Have ye anything more to declare?” she asked Hornet wearily.
“We need to discuss our strategy in light of this intelligence.”
“Only that I am turning command of the
changelings over to you, as befits your station,” said the young woman. “I may
look on at times to see how you fare, but I have much else with which to occupy
myself at their majesties’ behest.”
“Do you have your own men-at-arms?” asked
Jane. “Er, faeries-at-arms, or
what?”
Hornet shook her head with a faint smile.
“I walk alone, milady. It is my nature to be, as they say, a lone wolf.”
“Fittin’ fer a bitch,” Zip said under her breath.
A muscle twitched in Hornet’s cheek, jerking
a corner of her red mouth.
“Zip!” said Jane hotly. “How darest thee!”
“Thy tongue is overlong and wants
trimming,” whispered Hornet, looking down at the changeling with a face of
stone.
“Thy pedigree cannot be trimmed,” Zip
retorted, imitating Hornet’s manner of speech. “Any fool knows naught can be
trimmed from nothing.”
Hornet closed her blue eyes for a second,
then opened them as if nothing had happened. However,
it seemed in the instant her eyelids rose, she flickered and moved—only she could
not have moved, as she afterward stood exactly where she had been. The event
reminded Daria of a motion picture with one frame missing from the film,
causing a barely detectable jump in the action. In that same moment, Zip gave a
short cry and clapped both of her delicate hands to her cheeks, pressing hard
as if in pain.
“I bid you farewell and good fortune,
milady and company,” said Hornet with a quick bow. “I am pleased to have been
of service. Until later.” She stepped back against the
bedroom wall and reached over to reopen the door to the hallway. She brought the
door around until it concealed her as it had before. The door then drifted away
from the wall, revealing no one and nothing behind it.
“I wasn’t kidding about the drain
cleaner,” said Daria. “Anyone care to join me?”
“This is no time for frivolities.” Jane
ran a ghostly hand through her auburn hair. “We absolutely must take—”
“‘Scuse me,”
mumbled Zip—and she fled through the open door and was gone like a shot.
“What was that about?” said Jane, looking
at Daria. “Was something the matter?”
Daria looked into the hall where Zip had
vanished. She had a hard time forming her answer. By chance she had looked down
just before Zip’s departure and had noticed an odd thing. A ribbon of scarlet
was running down Zip’s right arm from where her hand was pressed to her cheek.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, then she
was off and pulling the door shut behind her.
“Did I miss something?” asked Jane of no
one in particular. No one answered.
[to be continued….]
Author’s Notes (in progress)
A bit
of story background follows, just for fun. This is a complicated tale, though
it is hoped it is not difficult to follow. Strange how it all
seems to fit together.
The
official word on stigmatized properties
·
http://www.realtor.org/libweb.nsf/pages/fg703
·
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmatized_property
The shape
of Daria’s hair clip:
The
Ouroboros
·
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
The
Rolling Stones Live at the Cotton Bowl
Halloween
Night, 1981
·
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/02/28/210003.php
(concert #6)
Note: The Stones did not perform “Satisfaction” on the
first night of their two-day stay at the Cotton Bowl. They ended with “Jumping
Jack Flash” on October 31. The lyrics to that song can be easily found with
Google, the song title, and the word “lyrics.” For additional information, see:
·
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpin%27_Jack_Flash
“Giant
UFO Over Two Continents”
This
is actual history. Go about halfway down the page for the information.
·
http://www.astronautix.com/articles/gianents.htm
….Meanwhile a seemingly independent strand of the mystery
was about to be woven into the grand tapestry of the solution. Smith had
informed me that yet another “fuzzy halo” UFO had been seen and photographed on
the evening of Saturday, October 31, 1981. According to the story (which was
featured in two issues of the APRO Bulletin), the UFO was seen in three
Argentine provinces and in
Daria’s
EMP Bomb
·
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator
Websites
about Lady Jane Grey
About.com’s short, easily grasped biography.
·
http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_lady_jane_grey.htm
·
http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/aboutJaneGrey.htm
English History’s superb Jane Grey page, many
pictures and links.
·
http://englishhistory.net/tudor/relative/janegrey.html
The only portrait in existence that is probably of
Jane Grey herself, discovered recently.
·
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4620996.stm
And a
few other helpful sites:
·
http://www.ladyjanegrey.org/
·
http://www.geocities.com/jane_the_quene/index_english.html
·
http://www.bitterwisdom.com/ladyjanegrey/
·
http://www.royalpaperdolls.com/LadyJaneGreyDollPage.htm
Comment:
I was struck by the physical descriptions of Jane Grey that made her an almost
exact duplicate of Daria: the reddish/auburn hair and red-brown/brown eyes; the
short stature and light build; both born in autumn (Daria very possibly in
October, like Lady Jane, as Daria is a Scorpio per Beavis and Butt-head: Reading Sucks); both with cuter, more
beautiful, less intelligent younger sisters; their own extreme intelligence;
their social isolation and loneliness; their love of reading; both spoke French
as a secondary language to English; their issues with their morally
questionable parents, who tried to force their eldest daughters to behave in
ways the daughters greatly disliked (Jane’s case was much worse than Daria’s);
their marvelous grasp of invective (Jane could really burn the air when she was
angry, given some of the things she is known to have written to others); their
self-righteousness and intolerance on certain issues; their complete disdain
for the viewpoints of others, to the point of becoming fairly obnoxious; their
problems with the opposite sex; and more. The degree to which Lady Jane Grey
and Daria Morgendorffer are alike is rather amazing.
Miscellaneous
Notes
The scene in Chapter One in which Daria notices the
kitchen and dining room have changed places comes from “One J at a Time.” Watch
when Daria looks out of the dining room windows in that episode and carefully study
what’s outside, noting that she has a door on her left—a door that can’t exist!
She’s standing where the kitchen should be, but the kitchen is gone. The scene
is technically impossible. Look at the backyard fence’s arrangement for clues
as to where in the house she is.
The notorious entryway between the family room and the
kitchen changed physically several times in the TV series. In some episodes the
entryway is on a flat wall, and in some the walls to either side are not
parallel, so the entryway is on a sort of corner.
Some of Daria’s quotes in Chapter Three were
borrowed from (and modified from) what she says in the fourth-season episode, “Groped
by an Angel.”
Daria’s bedroom in Chapter Three is the pink bedroom shown
in “Aunt Nauseum,” the spare room in which Rita
stays.
Original 06/26/06, modified 09/04/06, 08/12/07, 07/10/08,
10/31/08, 02/12/09-03/5/09
Not yet
FINIS