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he first time was an accident, I swear to God. But sometimes once is all it takes. One mistake, and you’re damned.
I lost a baby tooth when I was eight. It came out in a bloody smear, tiny and pearlescent like a seashell. I showed it to my parents, but they didn’t pay any attention to me; they were too busy caring for Benny, my baby brother, who’d monopolised them ever since he’d come screaming and shitting and puking into their lives six months earlier. The only time they paid me any heed was when they caught me screaming at him or pinching him or threatening him.
“He’s your brother,” they’d scold me. “Your little brother. You have to protect him.”
I didn’t want to protect him, though. I didn’t want him at all.
I stormed back to my room, stamping my feet as hard as I could, and threw the tooth at my wardrobe. It bounced off the mirror and landed on the carpet. It looked small and sad and pathetic there, ignored and alone—exactly how I felt. Then Cleo, our crabby old cat, materialised from wherever she’d been hiding in my room and pounced on the tooth. I shooed and kicked her out, dodging the vicious claws that swiped at me as she retreated into the hall, hissing. Cleo hated me, hated everything and everyone pretty much. Especially Benny, the new interloper. My parents actually closed the door of his nursery at night, for fear of her scratching or smothering him or whatever. I wouldn’t have minded if she had. Serve him right.
Once Cleo was banished, I picked up the tooth and, like a good boy, I put it under my pillow. I knew the routine.
The next morning the tooth was gone, and a fifty-cent piece had taken its place. The Tooth Fairy had visited. That made me happy. Someone was paying attention to me. To me, not Benny.
It felt good. I wanted more. But my other teeth were rooted solid in my gums. Not like the one I’d lost, which had been wobbly for weeks. I wondered if maybe I could knock one out, but the thought terrified me. I didn’t like pain, or blood. No, I didn’t want to knock my teeth out, not for fifty cents, not for fifty dollars. Not my teeth.
Not my teeth.
That gave me an idea, one both as simple and as ridiculous as only an eight-year-old could come up with. Cleo had killed a mouse months earlier, torn its head clean off and left it on the doorstep, a gift, or a warning. Dad had taken the head and buried it behind the house, under the jacaranda tree at the back of the yard. Mum said he should just throw it in the bin. But he’d insisted, said it was a living thing and deserved respect.
One afternoon, when Mum was taking care of Benny and Dad was still at work, I went into the backyard and dug it up. The bugs and worms had done their jobs on it, so all that was left was a bare skull. I ran it under a tap, and it came up shockingly white. I looked at it closely, looked at its empty eye sockets, the eerie curves and hollows on the sides of its head. And, most of all, I looked at all the sharp little teeth embedded in its jaw. So many teeth. I imagined getting fifty cents for each of them. I smiled, baring my own teeth at the skull, as if taunting it.
My teeth are fine right where they are, thank you very much.
But those teeth, these tiny dagger-like teeth, they had an appointment with the Tooth Fairy.
I secreted the skull underneath my pillow that night. It was so small, I barely felt it there as I slept, dreaming of being special. Being noticed.
The next morning, it was still there.
I was disappointed—but stubborn. Night after night, I tucked the skull beneath my pillow, hoping that it would be taken, that I could fool the fairy. Night after night, nothing.
Until one night, the night of the full moon. The first night.
That swollen moon shone its sickly yellow light through my bedroom window, making the shadows as sharp as the little teeth under my pillow. I took a long time to fall asleep that night, and when I finally did, I had horrible dreams, dreams of tiny knives pricking at me, crab claws scratching my toes, hungry, hungry.
When I woke the next morning, the skull was gone.
I looked at the rumpled sheet beneath my pillow, frowning. There was no coin there, no gift from the Tooth Fairy. Instead, there was just a small silver-grey lump, covered in a thin layer of white corrosion.
There were also teeth. All the teeth. Left behind. Rejected.
I stood beside my bed, still half-asleep and confused. I looked at the lump of metal, at the teeth. Then I understood, with the kind of logic only a child could have.
It didn’t want teeth.
It wanted bone.
* * *
The first time was an accident. The second was not.
I fished a chicken bone from the bin. I cleaned it off thoroughly, and I placed it under my pillow when I went to bed.
The following morning, the drumstick bone was still there. Then I remembered the mouse’s skull, and the light in the room the night it had vanished, that sickly yellow light of the full moon.
I put the bone away with the tiny mouse teeth and lump of metal, and I waited.
The night of the next full moon, I brought the bone out again, placed it under my pillow, and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep, I just couldn’t. I imagined the fairy coming, dressed in shimmering cloth and glowing like the Winnie the Pooh nightlight I’d outgrown just the previous year, the year Benny had been born.
A scratching noise caught my attention, woke me from the half-sleep I’d drifted into. I sat up in bed, looked out across the floor of my bedroom, scattered with toy cars and action figures, all lit stark with amber moonlight.
At first, I didn’t see it. Then one of my action figures moved, and I realised I’d been looking straight at the fairy. My heart pounded as it approached. It looked more like an insect than a fairy, all long slim limbs with bulging joints. Its sharp fingers and toes scratched on the wooden floor like nails on a blackboard. Its head was almond-shaped, with large black eyes that shone liquid in the moonlight, colours running like an oil slick. When it blinked, the eyelids came from all sides at once, twin lenses irising in a split second. And its mouth was wide and thin, stretching half-way around its head like a snake’s.
I’d imagined gossamer wings, but this fairy’s wings belonged on a dead bat, flesh torn and rotting. At each wing’s tip was a long, curved barb which scraped on the floor as the fairy dragged itself forward in a herky-jerky motion, grabbing at the floor, first one wing, then the other. But its eyes, its black, bottomless pits of eyes, they were always on me.
I remembered my dreams of a month ago. The crabs gnawing at my toes. Hungry. Hungry.
The fairy disappeared beneath the edge of my bed, and the scratching stopped. I wondered for a moment if I’d been dreaming, and now I was awake, alone in my room, no tiny skeletal monster scrabbling across the floor.
A barbed wing appeared at the end of my bed, hooking into my sheets. Then another. They pulled, and the fairy raised itself onto my bed and looked at me.
I didn’t scream, barely breathed as it crawled towards me, still in that unreal stop-start manner. When it was almost upon me, it tilted its head to one side, quizzical.
Without taking my eyes off it, I reached under my pillow and pulled out the bone. I held it out, an offering.
It moved so fast I barely saw it. It snatched the bone from my hand with surprising strength, grasped it in its tiny needle-like fingers. It sniffed at it.
Then it opened its mouth.
Opened, and opened, and opened.
Its jaw unhinged, fell back against its emaciated body, and its whole head seemed to become a mouth. It jammed the bone into its maw. It kept going in, further than should have been physically possible, past the back of its head. Then the jaws snapped shut like a mousetrap. I heard a muffled crunch, watched the jaw grind as it chewed on the bone. It only took seconds, but it felt like forever, sitting there in my bed, no longer the safe place it had once been.
The fairy swallowed, blinked, then looked at me again. Those black eyes were dizzying, dangerous oily pools to drown in. Holding my eyes, the thing squatted on the bed and grunted. It straightened again, turned, and skittered away with shocking speed, gone from my bed in a heartbeat.
Left behind on my sheets was a lump of silver metal, white corrosion forming across its shiny surface, dulling it. I checked out my room, eyes darting from corner to corner, searching for the fairy.
There was no sign.
The room was empty, silent apart from my own ragged breathing and the fast thud-thud of my heartbeat in my ears. I fell back into my bed, the adrenaline fading from my veins. My eyelids were heavier than they’d ever been. Despite myself, despite what I’d seen, my eyes fell closed.
Then there was nothing. No dreams, no thoughts. Just nothing. Oblivion.
When I awoke the next morning, sunlight streaming through my window, I thought the whole awful thing had been a nightmare. But then I saw the metallic lump on my sheets, felt the absence of chicken bone beneath my pillow. Then I knew. It was real.
* * *
After that second time, I didn’t want anything to do with the fairy again. I tried to tell my parents about it, but they thought I was just making up stories, trying to get their attention, jealous of Benny.
I wasn’t, though. For the first time, I wasn’t jealous of him. I just wanted my mummy and daddy to protect me from the horrible fairy.
I became withdrawn as the weeks passed, sullen. I didn’t harass Cleo anymore, left the poor old thing alone. I was aware that, under her patchy fur and skin, she was made of bones. Everything was. Everyone was. My mum, my dad. Benny. All bones. Every time I looked at them, I saw the fairy, mouth impossibly wide.
Hungry.
Hungry.
My grades at school went down. Mum and Dad tried talking to me about it, but I didn’t respond. How could I? I’d tried to tell them already. I felt like something inside me had broken, something that could never be fixed. How could they understand? They didn’t believe me. I barely slept, awoken by any tiny noise, with my heart pounding. My appetite disappeared, replaced by a dull nausea that sat in the pit of my stomach.
“You have to eat,” Mum said, face drawn with worry. “You’re skin and bones.”
I laughed at that, a bitter, hysterical laugh, and Mum recoiled, eyes terrified.
She wasn’t afraid for me anymore. She was afraid of me.
The next full moon came, slowly waxing through the passing days until it shone bright and proud, almost a second sun in the dark, cloudless sky. That night I didn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep.
Don’t worry. I haven’t got any bones for the fairy, not tonight. The Tooth Fairy doesn’t come if you don’t put a tooth under your pillow. It’s fine. It’s fine.
But it wasn’t fine. Not at all.
I didn’t hear the fairy until it was on my bed. I’d left my bedroom door open to let the light from the corridor come in, somehow less scary than the moonlight that filled my room like pale honey, flooding it, drowning me in it. Then it was just there, on the edge, by my feet. My breath caught in my throat as it moved up the bed slowly, in those tiny sudden movements that haunted my nightmares. Made its way towards me.
There was a sudden flash of chocolate brown fur, and the fairy was gone, grabbed by Cleo who’d been hiding in my room again. She violently shook the creature in her mouth, growling deep in her throat.
She chomped once, twice, threw her head back, and swallowed the fairy.
It all happened so suddenly. Cleo looked at me with that disdainful satisfaction that cats all seemed to possess in spades, then sat back and started to wash herself. I just stared at her, shocked.
Cleo stopped washing herself. She coughed once, then again. Her green eyes found mine, and I saw something there that I’d never seen before, not in my whole life with her, through all our conflicts.
Fear.
She coughed again, but this time the sound caught half-way. Something was blocking her throat. She thrashed on the bed, clawing at everything in range, including my legs through the sheets. I reached out to her, tried to help, but she scratched at my hands. I pulled away; my fingers bloodied. Still, she struggled silently. Then, all at once, the fight went out of her and she collapsed onto her side, limp, her eyes wide open. Her mouth drooped open, pink tongue lolling out. Blood oozed onto my sheets.
A tiny hand emerged from the red wet darkness of Cleo’s maw. The thin fingers closed around the bottom of the cat’s jaw. Then another hand, this one grasping the top, slender fingers sliding between her bloodied fangs.
Nothing moved for a few seconds. Then, with a single violent motion, the hands pulled apart, and Cleo’s furry face split in two, her jaws broken open. The hands pushed apart, and I could hear bones crack, flesh tear.
The fairy emerged from Cleo’s mouth, covered in dark red blood. It clambered out of the dead cat’s maw and studied me with those black eyes again. Then it turned and grabbed at the bottom of Cleo’s jaw with both hands.
There was more cracking and tearing, and the fairy pulled the lower jawbone clear out of Cleo’s head.
I screamed then, finally, screamed as the fairy ate the bone, screamed as it shat another lump of metal. Screamed as it scrambled away across my bed with preternatural speed. Screamed as it vanished.
I screamed as my parents turned my bedroom light on. I screamed as they screamed.
I thought I’d never stop screaming. In some ways, maybe I never have.
* * *
Psychologists. Tests. Therapists. More tests. The following weeks blurred together, muted by the cocktail of medications and treatments they tried on me. There was talk of me being committed, but my parents rejected that. I wonder sometimes if they regretted that decision later. I tried to tell them that I didn’t kill Cleo, that it was the fairy, but they didn’t believe me. How could they? They were grownups, and fairies were for children.
The weeks passed, and I pretended. I pretended I was all right, that everything was all right. Home life returned to...well, not normal, but bearable, at least. Mum was distracted by Benny, who was suffering from colic. Dad’s work was frantic. They both focussed on other things, grateful not to be distracted by me anymore.
Once upon a time, that would have bothered me. Not anymore. I didn’t want attention. I just wanted to be left alone. By Mum, by Dad.
And especially by the fairy.
There was no bone under my pillow, and it still came. I remembered Mum once told me never to give food to the magpie that lived in our jacaranda tree. If you feed it, you’ll never be rid of it. I hadn’t understood then, but I did now. I’d fed the fairy, and now I’d never be rid of it. It would come back again, and again, and again. Hungry. Hungry.
I had to kill it.
The next full moon came around terrifyingly quickly. A month used to be an eternity for me, as it was for every eight-year-old. Now I felt a hundred years older, my whole life measured in the wane and wax of the moon. That night, after my parents had gone to bed, I snuck downstairs to the kitchen, and grabbed a meat cleaver. I wasn’t strong, but the cleaver was heavy, so I figured its weight would do most of the work for me. I’d seen my mum cut clean through an entire raw chicken once with that cleaver, with just a single blow.
I hid the cleaver underneath my pillow, same as the mouse skull, same as the chicken bone. This had all started underneath the pillow. Now it would end there, too.
I lay on my back, wide-awake, and listened as the hours passed. The room was full of moonlight. Nothing could hide. Not even a fairy.
It climbed onto the bed in one jerky motion. My heart was pounding, but not from fear, not this time. No, this time it was rage. I smiled as it approached, keeping its obsidian eyes on mine the whole way. It looked at me, head askew, mouth closed tight.
Hungry.
Hungry.
I nodded, reached under my pillow. My fingers found the hilt of the cleaver, wrapped around it as the fairy approached.
The instant it was in range, I whipped the cleaver out from beneath the pillow and swung it down at the fairy with all my strength.
There was a loud clang, and the cleaver just stopped. The impact jarred my shoulder, sending a lightning bolt of pain through my arm. The fairy had caught the cleaver with its wings, those fragile-looking, moth-eaten wings. Each barb hooked against the steel, holding it above the thing’s slender head. Its eyes still on me.
It wrenched the cleaver from my weak hands, hurling it to the wooden floor. The blade spun over to the door, out of reach, useless.
The fairy’s mouth opened, slowly, wider and wider as its jaws unhinged, like a ravenous anaconda preparing to swallow a bison.
I didn’t scream, not this time. There was a sudden warmth in my pyjamas as I wet myself. I barely noticed. All I saw was the fairy. Its eyes. Its mouth.
A shrill sound drifted into the bedroom, distant but insistent. Benny was crying.
The fairy stopped, closed its mouth. Then it turned and moved away, so fast that it blurred. It scampered from the bed and across the bedroom floor. The thin wood of the door barely slowed its progress as it crunched straight through, taking one corner clean off.
I sat in bed, frozen. He’s your little brother, my mum’s voice echoed inside my head. You have to protect him. And she was right. He couldn’t protect himself. I had to do it. I had to.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I just sat there, pants soaked, clutching the sheets with paralysed hands. I sat, listening to Benny’s crying. Listening, eyes closed tight, just listening.
His crying stopped, cut off.
I stayed there for a very long time, listening, praying for the cries to resume. To hear that horrible noise that I hated. I’d have given anything to hear it again. Anything.
I heard nothing. Terrible silence.
Eventually, I climbed out of bed, my pyjamas sodden. Near the door, my bare toes found the meat cleaver. I picked it up, then opened my door and looked down the hallway.
Benny’s nursery door was open, just a crack. My parents had stopped closing it since Cleo had died. They didn’t think there was any point anymore. They were wrong.
I crept down the hallway to the nursery door and listened. Nothing. No scratching, no crying. I pushed it open and stepped inside, looked at the cot.
Time slowed to a crawl. It was hard to breathe, or even to think, looking at...at that. At my little brother, who I was supposed to protect. At Benny.
At what was left of Benny.
The fairy had emptied him. There was nothing left but meat and skin, a crudely opened parcel of flesh, spread across the cot. So much blood for such a small body. How could there be so much blood? Benny was tiny. He was weak. He couldn’t protect himself, not from Cleo, not from me. Certainly not from the fairy.
I was supposed to protect him.
Amongst the flesh, glistening like diamonds, were lumps of that silver-grey metal. Lots of them, hundreds, everywhere. So many.
I didn’t scream, didn’t cry. There was nothing left inside me to do either. Instead, I just curled up on the floor next to the cot, cradling the meat cleaver against my chest, and waited for dawn.
* * *
More doctors, more tests. This time I was institutionalised. The police wanted to charge me with murder, but the doctors said I wasn’t fit, even in juvenile court. That I wasn’t mentally sound. I was put in the hospital, one of those hospitals where you’re not allowed to leave, even if you want to.
I didn’t care. I just waited. Waited for the next full moon, for the fairy to come for me.
But the full moon came and went, and the fairy didn’t show. Another passed, and another. No fairy. The doctors told me that it was all in my head. They told me I’d killed Cleo, that I’d killed Benny. That I was very sick. They injected me with things that made me feel muffled inside, put electricity through my head.
Full moons smeared past me. No fairy. I was taking pills that made me sleep, but my dreams were filled with Benny and mantises Benny and crabs and Benny and... oh my God Benny.
Months became years. My parents visited at first, with kind words, but their faces told a different story. Their faces said that, when they looked at me, they saw Benny, not their beautiful baby boy, but the tattered mess left behind in the cot. They came less and less, and eventually stopped coming entirely.
Mum died in a car crash, apparently drunk. Soon after, my dad went to the beach and walked into the sea. They never found his body.
I was alone. Not even the fairy visited me.
Years and years, dozens of full moons. Beneath the weight of drugs and shocks and therapy, the fairy faded, became a nightmare, a fantasy. I did kill Cleo. And I did kill Benny. Fear became remorse.
The doctors said I was cured. They said I could leave the hospital. I was twenty-six years old.
It was hard, being in the real world. But I deserved it, deserved punishment. Got a job flipping burgers. A crappy apartment. Months passed, years. More full moons. No fairy.
Then I met Trish, and everything changed.
I never told her about my past. I couldn’t. She’d have run away screaming. We were married two years after we met. I was thirty years old. A year later, she gave birth to our daughter, Alex. I felt complete, alive, for the first time in twenty-three years.
Twenty-three years. Or about three hundred lunar months. The number of bones in a baby, before a bunch of them join up, reducing the number. Three hundred, give or take.
* * *
Trish was a nurse and was working the night shift. I’d been left home with Alex. I was watching television when I heard something in our tiny two-bedroom apartment. I muted the television, the hairs on my arms and neck prickling. I glanced at the window and saw the moon.
The full moon.
Like a sleepwalker, I got to my feet and stumbled into the hall, to the single bedroom that was serving as Alex’s nursery. Opened the door. Looked inside.
It was a dream. A fantasy. It didn’t exist. I’d killed Cleo. I’d killed Benny.
Hadn’t I?
The fairy perched on the head of my baby daughter’s crib, its spindly body hunched, the claws of its wings gripping the rail tightly. Same black eyes blinking like camera lenses. It looked at me, then back to Alex.
Hungry. Hungry.
I screamed and lunged at it, grabbed the fairy with both hands. I fell to the floor and rolled on top of it, using my weight to pin it to the ground. I screamed again.
There was a sharp pain in my side, a stabbing, burning pain, and I cried out in agony, but I didn’t let go. I couldn’t. Not this time. Not again.
I didn’t protect Benny. But I could protect Alex.
Something pushed against my body from beneath, and I was hurled aside with impossible force. My back slammed against the wall of the nursery. Stars sparkled in my vision. Distantly, Alex was crying now. I prayed that she’d keep crying. Keep crying, my baby girl. Keep crying.
She did.
My vision cleared. The fairy was standing on the floor beside me, looking into my eyes. It had something in its hands, grasped tight in its needle-like fingers. Something red and slick and curved.
It took longer than it should have to realise the fairy was holding a bone. A rib bone. My rib bone.
I looked down. My t-shirt had been sliced open. My flesh was sliced, too. There was a lot of blood. My head swam. I didn’t like blood, didn’t like pain. Just like when I was eight and a half.
The fairy opened its awful mouth wide and ate my rib. Then it crouched and took a shit of soft metal on my daughter’s nursery floor, before turning and speeding from the room.
I lay there, bleeding but relieved, so relieved. I hadn’t protected Benny, but I’d protected my baby daughter. I’d protected Alex.
My relief dried up, turned to dread. This time. I’d protected her this time.
I clambered to my feet, shaky and sweating and nauseated. I looked down at my daughter, at the most precious thing I could ever imagine. Just took her in, while she cried fiercely. Keep crying. A sad smile twisted my lips awkwardly. Keep crying. It means you’re alive. It means I protected you.
I bent and kissed her on the head for the last time, then turned and left the apartment, her frightened screams filling my senses long after the sound was gone.
* * *
That was five years ago. Or was it six? I’ve lost count.
I live on the streets, alone. It’s safer that way. Nobody else gets hurt. I don’t want anyone else getting hurt, never again. This is my problem, mine alone.
Alone. It’s best. One mistake, and you’re damned.
It’s a full moon again, and I’m waiting, huddled in a cardboard box under a bridge. I’ve travelled clear across the country, trying to outrun the fairy, but I can’t, I know that, even if I could still run. It’s a full moon, and it’ll come for me, as it does every full moon.
Feed it once and you’ll never get rid of it. Hungry. Hungry.
I tried to fool it, after I lost my rib and my life in the same night. The next full moon after that, I waited with a goodly variety of animal bones I’d taken from rubbish bins, stored up and hoarded, waiting. Hoping. The fairy went straight past them and took the end clean off my left index finger in a single bite. I even tried human bones, dug up from a little graveyard in the suburbs, but it didn’t want them. I knew that, even before I tried. It didn’t want them.
It wanted me.
What’s left of my body. So many bones taken. My whole right leg, most of my left. The toes slowed it down, so many little bones there. Same with my hands. I still have one finger and a thumb remaining on my left hand. My right arm is gone. About half my ribs have been taken, and the bones inside both my ears, leaving me deaf. I don’t mind that, really. It stops me hearing that awful skittering as its nails and wing barbs scrape on the ground.
There, to my left, the shadows of the full moon shift. It’s coming. I close my eyes and wait, accustomed to the pain and blood now. It doesn’t bother me anymore. Because as long as it’s me, my pain, my blood, then Alex is safe. I’ve protected her. Maybe that’ll make up for Benny.
There are two hundred and six bones in the adult body. I wonder how many more the fairy can take before it kills me.
