THE REVEREND LIZZIE BLACKMORE was staring at the carnage in front of her. Or, she gradually realised, the lack of carnage. A few moments ago, the fairy prince Finn, who’d once been in some sort of ill-defined romantic relationship with her friend Autumn, had been in her kitchen at the Vicarage. He’d been on fire, but he’d been alive. Before Lizzie could react, however, before she could get her hands on the extinguisher or the fire blanket, he’d . . . exploded.
He’d exploded, and she’d thrown up her hands instinctively to protect her face, terrified in that second that she was going to die. The horrible adrenalin of that was still coursing through her.
But she’d realised the explosion hadn’t hurt her, hadn’t done anything to her. She’d lowered her hands. And now she could see what the explosion had done. At the centre of a very real pattern of burns on her kitchen tiles was lying . . . Finn’s head. It lay on its side. There was no blood. His eyes were closed.
Oh God. Oh God.
With a great effort of will, she made herself squat down to look more closely, wondering if, as in a horror movie, his eyes were going to open again. They didn’t.
“Finn?” she said, desperately. There was no reply. Of course there wasn’t. The bottom of his neck was . . . smooth, sealed. There was just a base, like he was an action figure. The inside of his neck was dull gold, without any features, without organs. Feeling like she was in a dream, she reached out and touched it. It felt slightly rough. Almost like plastic. Or was that just a matter of associations on her part? Yes, because this didn’t honestly feel like any material she’d ever touched.
She felt herself wobbling. What could she do for him? Nothing she could think of. He’d been blurting out some sort of warning.
She stood up. She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t. She started backing out of the kitchen. Her heel encountered something. She looked around.
There on the carpet lay Finn’s hands. They were also both perfect. They were sealed at the wrists, golden inside.
Increasingly lost in the surreal, Lizzie looked around for more fairy body parts. She found, on the landing, part of his leg. It was still in a rounded section of what looked like leather trouser. It looked tailored, almost, to his current situation.
She took a deep breath and thought of her training, accessed that stoic part of her reserved for the most awful funerals. And the occasional wedding. She went to get her gardening gloves. She searched the house wearing them, and found the rest of the bits, handling them with the gloves as if she might disturb evidence in a police investigation that would surely never come to pass.
In the end, she was pretty satisfied that she’d found all of him. But what to do with him? She tried just holding the parts together, wondering if they’d somehow fuse and he’d come back to life. (She’d started with the thigh and calf to try to avoid the worst horrors of that.) It didn’t happen. He was cold, she realised. Not like human corpses were cold, but like an object. The absence felt incidental, as if he could just be heated up again. But then, perhaps that was how those who weren’t used to the dead felt about their dear departed. Lizzie was very used to the dead. The human dead.
Where could she put him? The kitchen table didn’t seem respectful. She was thinking about Autumn now. About how she was going to break this news, what she’d have to show her. She decided it was going to be pretty awful no matter what or how. This purpose-built Vicarage had odd storage spaces here and there, including a room behind the room where the washing machine and drier were kept that contained nothing but an old broom and seemed to offer no suggestion as to what the space might be used for. So Lizzie now found a use for that room. A macabre one. Along its small collection of shelves she lined up what could only be described as pieces of fairy.
Then she called Autumn. She woke her up at half four. And, using the voice she kept for breaking bad news, she told her to prepare for a shock.
* * *
An hour later, they both stood there in that little musty room, all the lights on, darkness still outside on this September morning, cups of strong, sweet tea in their hands, staring at what lay on the shelf.
“Are you sure that it’s really him?” Autumn asked. She’d already touched his face. She’d done that immediately.
“He was talking to me before it happened. You always said there was an element of unreality about his nation, his people. When you went there, you said it was like a dream.”
“A nightmare.”
“It’s almost as if when he comes here he’s . . . a story. A prop in a movie.”
Autumn put down her cup and went to touch one of the exposed gold surfaces. “Or maybe this is just what the attack or the blast or whatever that was did to him.”
“I think you can call it an attack. He mentioned the fairy court and his father, as if something had happened to them. He said ‘they’ were going to bring the war here, that we were all . . . going to die.”
Autumn didn’t even acknowledge the threat. “So we were right about there being some sort of conflict going on inside the land of fairy. Some sort of civil war. Fomented by the agents of Maitland Picton’s ‘people,’ whoever they are. They want to annex fairy, then us.” She stroked Finn’s hair. “God, I was so fixated by him, then I was so scared of him. Then you and I started to treat him as some sort of annoying . . .”
“That was mostly you.”
Autumn looked momentarily guilty. “You joined in.”
“I think he was a person. Of a sort that we hadn’t really begun to understand. I’d say we should have a funeral, but the way those parts are, they sort of say to me . . .”
“That he can be fixed.”
“Yeah.”
Autumn was silent for a moment. Then she seemed to decide she was going to say something. “Me and Luke . . . we, err, got together.”
Lizzie didn’t know if she was meant to attempt surprise. That was frankly a bit beyond her right now. “Finally.”
“Before marriage. Couple of times. I hope that’s okay.” The look on her face was a mixture of nervousness and cheeky glow.
“I’m not judging. I hope that’s okay. Was it . . . ?”
“Wow. Just wow. Leaving it at that.”
That was obviously what Autumn had most wanted to tell her. “Really? You’ll leave it at that?”
“Well, without drinks.”
This was not the first time that Autumn had grandiosely failed to read the room when it was only her and Lizzie in it. Lizzie really wanted to say two things. One: that she was glad for Autumn, if tired by her continual assumption of puritanical judgment on Lizzie’s part, but that maybe she could also consider how long Lizzie had been without romance in her life and . . . no, gah, that was unfair. Why was she feeling angry about this? Oh, possibly because of two: the pieces of fairy. “Autumn, was this really the best time—?”
“He doesn’t look dead. He doesn’t look real. I can’t react to that. Not like I—”
“Sorry. Sorry.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
They looked at each other in silence for a moment. There was still an awkwardness between them. What was this about? Suddenly, as if her brain had said sod this, Lizzie realised that a terrible joke had popped into her head. “Oh,” she said. “No. I mustn’t say it.”
“What?”
“It’s . . . awful. Just an awful joke.”
“You always say people come out with awful jokes at funerals. And that it’s healthy. And you just had a go at me for—”
“I did not—”
“And I’d really like to hear a normal reaction from you right now.”
“Okay. I just thought . . .”
“Go on.”
Lizzie looked helplessly at her, biting her lip. “The elf on a shelf.”
Autumn managed a very solemn nod. “That is . . . indeed a terrible thing to say. You should be ashamed of yourself. Points will be taken off your vicar licence.”
“I want to say Finn would have liked that. But I really don’t think he would.”
They both, finally, managed to laugh. Perhaps not as much as they could have. Still, the tension was punctured. A bit. Autumn hugged Lizzie. Lizzie held her, still aware of some little distance, some awkwardness entirely on her part that she hated and didn’t want to acknowledge or understand. She squeezed. She didn’t want Autumn feeling that emotion off her.
“Lizzie,” whispered Autumn, “what are we going to do? I mean about . . . everything?”
“We’ll work it out,” said Lizzie. “It’s not just us now.” She hoped that sounded like she meant it.