This is where things gets ugly, I’m afraid. No good thing—no spell—ever lasted.
I woke up one night, ice cold and sweating. My sheets were sticky again, and this time it was a lot. I screamed when I saw it, or wanted to scream, but it came out just a sad and wailing sound. All that blood pouring out of me; my hopes, my love, just slipping away between my thighs. I writhed on the mattress, on that slick pool of red.
“Pepper-Man!” I cried out. “Pepper-Man!”
“I am here,” he said calmly. He was in the white wicker chair by the window, thin curtains billowing in and obscuring his pale form. His voice was somber, his face chiseled in the semidarkness.
“What is this?” I asked him. “Why is this happening?”
“It is a faerie child you carry. It was never meant to walk this earth.”
“But why?” I sat up shivering; knelt on the mattress with the sheets a twist around my feet, flecked with stains of blood.
“It cannot live like you do, it belongs to the mound, like me. That is the curse of faerie.”
“No.” My voice was just a whisper. “My child can’t die. I won’t let it.” I doubled over in pain again, pressed my face against the pillow while a fresh wave of nauseating pain coursed through my body.
Pepper-Man rose from the chair then, reached out a hand. “Then come with me now, come to the mound. Maybe there is still a chance! Maybe we can save the child!”
Silently I took his fingers. I tried to stand up, but I couldn’t, so he gathered me in his arms and we set off; jumped out through the window and down on the chilly lawn, went into the woods, between the silent trees.
My consciousness was slipping then; the sky above became a blur. The dark blue night and the tall, black treetops bled together, became wings before my vision. My nightgown was soaked through; Pepper-Man’s hands were slick. My child was leaving me, drop by shiny drop.
“You knew it all along,” I accused Pepper-Man in a faint voice.
“Yes.”
“But I have heard of others, half-faerie, half-man…”
“Those are just in your books.”
“I don’t believe you,” I argued weakly, only because I didn’t want to believe.
“Those few who live to birth are weak and sickly. We leave them in cradles and take healthy children back in their stead, to soothe the mothers, mostly. Our kinds were never meant to breed, my Cassandra. We are like day and night, light and darkness, life and death.”
“A twilight child.”
“Just that.” I could hear that he was smiling.
“But it can live in the mound?”
“Maybe it can, if we arrive there in time.”
“You should have told me.”
Pepper-Man didn’t reply to that.
In the mound they laid me on a mattress filled with hay and herbs. Harriet brought me drought to drink. Gwen stripped me of my clothes, smoothed the wet tendrils of my hair and wiped perspiration from my brow. They spread my legs wide and looked at the damage.
“Faerie births are never easy.” Harriet shook her head.
“Oh, she comes through just fine.” Gwen was looking at the bloody mess.
“Her?” I asked.
“It is a girl.” Gwen’s eyes were shimmering gold.
They had cleared the space before one of the fireplaces, the very same spot where we would make Tommy Tipp some years later. There was a fire blazing, water and herbal concoctions boiling in copper pots. The air in there was dense and warm, scented of blood and greenery, faintly of decay.
The other faeries had withdrawn to the other side of the room or left the mound altogether. I was grateful. It felt like a courtesy, them doing this for me, giving me some space in my desperate hour of need.
Pepper-Man was there, though, quiet sentinel, feeding the flames with oak, ash, and thorn, aiming for a smooth passage.
“If she pulls through, she must stay here with us.” Harriet caught my gaze with hers, warning me, perhaps. “She can never live out there with you. She would wither then, be gone for good. She was never meant to live.”
I nodded silently, gulped down what I could from the wooden cup presented to me. It tasted harsh and bitter. Tasted like defeat. Any life would do, though. Any life for my girl.
“Now you must sleep,” Harriet said, and when the herbal brew laced my system, I did. Even through the pain, through the waves that ripped me apart, I slept.
Then, when I woke up again, my life had changed forever.
She was such a tiny thing at first, my Mara, lying there on an oak leaf. We fed her my milk from a rosy red petal and covered her body in soft downs. Pepper-Man made her a cradle from twigs, and the spiders spun her a dress of silk. Every day after school I walked to the mound to take care of my little daughter. I let Harriet take my milk and my blood to feed her when I was gone. She grew fast, though: within a month, she was the size of a newborn child. Within the year, she looked like a girl of five; brown of hair, blue of eyes, beautiful in every way. She stopped aging when she reached adulthood, has been a young woman now for years. Radiant and healthy, always.
Isn’t that what all parents wish for their children? That they will grow up and be strong?
There would be no other children, though. Faerie births are hard, and I was never quite the same again after. The medical exam Dr. Martin had me do before the trial only confirmed that fact: my womb is broken—torn and poorly mended.
The mound itself is a womb for the dead, spewing out twisted life, and that is where my daughter lives, safe and protected, always.
There is another version of this story, but I am not sure of its origins.
It could have been Dr. Martin, coaxing me and twisting my mind. He did that sometimes, asked and asked until I gave in and made up other stories, just to make him stop.
In that story, I am sitting at the table with my family. It’s another Sunday dinner; roast or ham or something glistening at the center of the table. Olivia is sullen for some reason. Her pouty lower lip quivers as she chews through the meat. Her long lashes fan out on her creamy skin, her gaze is glued to the plate.
Ferdinand, home for the weekend, is just at the onset of puberty himself. He is a pale shadow by the table, playing with the brussels sprouts on his plate with the fork; rolling the green balls back and forth between the heaps of meat and the sickly white potatoes. No gravy for Ferdinand, he likes things neat.
Mother at her end is folding and refolding the napkin in her hands. Her coral-red fingernails are smoothing the soft paper repeatedly. She isn’t eating, she is chewing her lips. All her lipstick is gone and I can see her swallow and swallow. Her eyes look wrong, like shattered crystals; something is broken in there. I think she might have been crying—or if she hasn’t already, that she is about to very soon. This is a rare thing, it barely happens.
Father is somber. He’s serving himself more potatoes, pours more gravy on top. He doesn’t look at us. Doesn’t look at Mother. He is looking at his food, and his lips stretch, and he eats. Mother looks at him, though, expression somewhere between pleading and fury. Occasionally she looks at me and her face goes blank. She is ice and smooth, like white stone.
“I’m doing better in school this term.” Ferdinand’s voice is very quiet.
“Good,” says Mother. “That is good.”
Father chews. Olivia sulks. Ferdinand falls back into silence.
“Cassie, how are you these days?” Mother’s voice has a shrill edge to it.
“Fine,” I say, or rather whisper. Truth is I am not fine. I am sick a lot, I throw up. I have a baby in my belly.
“No more trouble at school, I hope?”
It hasn’t really been more trouble than usual—those days I kept the snide girls and bullies at bay by being scary, by telling stories about Pepper-Man. I would glare and scowl and say he had taught me to perform a curse: How to make beauty fade. They would snigger and roll their eyes, but stay away; no one wants to be ugly. The teachers were always complaining about my lack of effort, about my poor attention span. Even the ones who appreciated my “considerable imagination” had given up on me, but I didn’t grieve the loss. I had too many things going on, too many things to think about.
None of this is new, though, which is why I get suspicious when Mother asks.
“Have you gotten any new friends?” She folds the napkin, unfolds the napkin.
“No.” I am surprised by the question. She really ought to know better than that.
“No?” She repeats it as a question, biting into her lip. “No … boys?”
“No,” I blurt out, eyes widening—the idea is silly.
Mother gives me a shivering smile, goes back to mock eating, pushing pieces of meat onto her fork with the knife, but never lifting it to her lips. “I think you have looked so pale recently. Are you eating well? Not developing some affliction, are you?”
“No.” It’s starting to get uncomfortable now, and I know where this is headed. She has figured it out, what is going on, or at least developed a strong suspicion.
“Well.” Mother’s fork is still hovering in the air. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you? If something was wrong?” She says that last part with a hard edge, gaze darting across the table, toward Father.
“Of course.” I can feel my cheeks flush. I had never planned on telling, I think. I had somehow believed that the baby was mine and mine alone, that it was just another secret to keep. Now I saw that I had been wrong. This particular secret spilled out, was just as real to others as it was to me. The realization rattled me. Now it was I who swallowed hard and fought to chew through the meat.
“Cassie is getting fat,” said Olivia.
“No,” said my mother, voice stern, gaze mended. “She’s not.”
In the next part of this story, I am sitting in the back seat of the family car. It is a large brown one with a spacious trunk, but I couldn’t tell you the brand. Father’s hands are on the wheel, his eyes are peering back at me from the rearview mirror. In the passenger seat beside him is Mother, wearing a navy-blue coat of wool. She has a pocket mirror in her hand, is freshening up her lipstick. I can see her reflection from where I’m sitting. Her eyes look tired, and small cakes of pale powder are haphazardly strewn around her face. I think she’s looking old. Older than before. Only her curls are as they have always been; very yellow, very hard.
“Don’t drive so fast,” she tells Father. “We’ll get there soon enough.” She doesn’t sound very enthusiastic about the prospect. “Although I guess you are eager to have it dealt with.” Her voice is pure venom, laced with loathing.
Father says nothing, he just drives on through the barren landscape in the early hours of dawn. The first hint of winter has come, coating the fields in a thin crust of ice. It’ll melt again in a matter of hours, but the skeletal fingers of frost have definitely been there, warning of the season to come.
I’m in pain.
“How are you doing back there?” Mother half turns in her seat to look at me. “I’m sure you are eager to get there as well?” Her voice is not as toxic as before, but it holds no warmth either. Again, she has that wary expression when she looks at me, as if I am a potential danger, as if I might bite. As if I’m something she can’t handle and she knows it. There is no blame in there, but no compassion either.
I don’t say anything. I feel sick.
“You should have told us earlier.” Mother’s lips are pursed when she looks into the mirror. “It gets harder the longer you wait.”
“How do you know?” I’m not trying to hide my resentment.
Mother doesn’t answer my question. “You don’t have to tell Dr. Martin about this,” she says instead.
“Why?”
“He would only make a fuss.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what doctors do.”
“You were the one who wanted me to see him.”
“I know,” she sighs, closes the mirror and puts it back in her purse; her gaze drifts out the window. “We don’t have to tell everyone everything,” she says. “Some things ought to stay in the family.” Father grunts his approval by her side. She turns to him, snaps: “You don’t get to have a say in this.” Back to me: “You just say it was a boy if they ask you when we get there.”
“What boy?” I feel utterly miserable. Angry, too.
Mother shrugs. “A boy from school. They won’t ask for names.”
We drive on.
Halfway there, we have to stop so I can throw up. I’m standing by the roadside, retching, holding my hair away from my face. I am wearing an oversized shirt to hide my “condition,” one of Father’s old work shirts, I think. It smells like copper and peppery cologne.
Mother is leaning against the car, looking in the opposite direction. Her sunglasses have huge frames—making her look like she has insect eyes. Father is standing on the other side of the car; in the middle of the road, staring into the horizon. He doesn’t look at me.
The clinic was as one expects such places to be: sterile, cold, white and silver, softened by a touch of turquoise. No one asked me about the boy. The nurses were kind but impersonal and everyone spoke in hushed voices, as if they—like Mother—just wanted to get it over with.
I remember the cold surface of the operating table, remember the hard mattress in my lonely recovery, the smell of fabric softener from the bedsheets. A woman cried and spoke in Spanish on the other side of the pink curtain separating our beds. A faint scent of roses lingered in the air.
No roses for me, though, but on our way back I was given a box of caramel cupcakes. Father bought them for me in a store nearby the hospital. I didn’t eat them, I was too sick and still in pain. I dozed the whole way home. When we got there, I stuffed the cupcakes under the bed, then I lay back on the bedspread and cried.
Pepper-Man wasn’t there.
I was alone.
As I said before, I don’t know where this second story comes from, but Dr. Martin wrote about it in Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis. It’s one of the things that made your mother so angry with me, I suppose.
They said it never happened, Mother and Olivia, but Dr. Martin certainly thought it had. He had them examine me before the trial, and felt the results proved him right. Something had indeed happened to me; the doctor who examined me was very clear on that. Dr. Martin could never track down the clinic, though. Neither he nor my lawyer could find anyone who would have remembered me. None of this existed in any file.
“Your parents are well connected,” Dr. Martin said. We were talking in “our” room at the hospital, during my trial. “I am sure they found a way to cover their tracks.”
“Why does it matter?”
“It could mean a lot to the jury.”
“Why?” I asked, though even I realized the importance.
“A broken and traumatized woman is no murderer, not in any common sense. You shouldn’t go to prison, Cassie, you should stay here at the hospital.”
“I don’t know if I remember it right,” I argued. “And my daughter isn’t even dead. She is living in the woods, in the mound, still.”
“Exactly.” Dr. Martin smiled a tired smile. “Which only proves my point. Have you ever thought about why there are two stories about what happened in there?” He touched my forehead gently across the table.
I shrugged. I knew what was true, of course. I knew that my Mara was safe and sound, but the other story was still there, made up or not, and Dr. Martin so dearly wanted to believe it. “Can’t both stories be true?” I asked. “Why is it that only because one thing is true, the other thing is not? Why do we always have to decide?”
He chuckled then. “You really are something, Cassie … Don’t you think we need a foundation of truth to measure what’s false?”
“Like science?”
“Just that.”
I didn’t know what to say at first. How could I describe what I felt inside, that “truth” to me was like mercury, always changing, moving—didn’t matter? I could easily hold two strings of truth in my mind and feel them both to be real without getting all confused about it. Now I realize that’s not how most people feel, but then I was far more oblivious.
Truth is such a fickle thing, isn’t it? Subjective and shifting like a living being.
Pepper-Man or no Pepper-Man—that’s just two sides of the same coin. Two sides of the same Cassie-coin. It all depends on which side you look at.
I could see them both.
I could stop here. I would like to stop here. I am old now and tired. I’m thinking I should stop typing now and let the past be. But then you would still have questions. Questions about the body in the woods, questions about what happened later—those other deaths that occurred … I guess I owe you some answers about that. The “family tragedy.” The violent end. Somebody ought to know what really happened.
And so I keep writing—and you two keep reading.