It was a tabloid reporter’s dream, that’s what it was, the abrupt end of our family. The violence struck out of nowhere—or that’s what they thought, anyway. The two caskets so differently treated: surrounded by flowers and nothing at all. Two bodies in the ground.
Your mother might have told you about it, or you read it in the newspapers. You will know how our father was found down there in the bear pit, wooden spikes pinning him in place, and that huge red hole in his chest where the spear went in—came out. I suppose you imagined what it looked like, your grandfather splayed on spikes. I never saw it myself, but I too can imagine: red rims in his beard, red in his eyes, red on his gray-striped pajamas shirt. The rifle by his side down there—useless. Where his heart ought to be, there was just gristle and flesh, torn and broken, red, pink, and white.
Spear went in—came out.
I told you before that the day on the porch was the last time I saw my brother, but it wasn’t the last time I spoke to him. He called me the night of the murder, just after it was done. That’s why I wasn’t surprised at all when the police came knocking on my door. He called to warn me, I think, about it all.
“It’s over,” Ferdinand said when I picked up the phone. His voice was bubbling with jubilant excitement.
“What is?” I felt cold.
“He is dead! I watched him go myself.”
“Oh no,” I breathed—not from sorrow, mind you, but from the implications of it all, what it would do to my girl—what it would do to him. A little piece of me even wondered what it would do to me. In my mind’s eye, I saw it again: the hospital bed, the sad tray of food and the white, bitter pills in a plastic cup. “What did you do?” I asked Ferdinand. “What did she do?”
“She trapped him.” He sounded amazed.
“Trapped him, how?”
“She came to me last night. Wanted me to help her dig a hole in my garden.”
“A hole, huh?”
“Yes, and I did. It was fun.”
“Digging a hole isn’t ‘fun,’ my brother. I think you may have had far too little fun in your life.”
“With her it was,” Ferdinand insisted. “We laughed, and we sang, and she told me all these amazing stories—”
“I bet she did.”
“—about the woods and the mounds and the places she had gone with her hawk.”
“And?”
“Then I brought a bottle of wine outside, and I drank a few glasses while we whittled the spikes.”
“You drank wine while you crafted weapons to kill your father?” I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.
“Yes.” The exuberant tone in his voice had dwindled some. “And we made holes for the spikes at the bottom of the pit, and planted the spikes down there.”
“Yes—and?”
“She cut down a young birch, removed all the bark, and made a spear out of it.”
“Really now?” I felt sick.
“Then dawn was coming and she said I was to get some sleep, because tonight it was all about to happen. She took the spear with her, I don’t know what she did with it, but when she came back it was all black with letters—”
“From Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis, no doubt.”
“Yes, how did you know that?”
“Oh,” I sighed. “Just a hunch I had.” That book had become the very symbol of everything that she loathed. “And then what happened, when she came back?”
“She told me to go and fetch Father. I was going to tell him there was an intruder on my—their—property. A crazy woman, she said. I was to tell him that there was a crazy woman…”
“And did you?”
“Yes. I let myself in with the spare key and woke him up, very careful as not to wake her up. We didn’t want Mother out there, it would only cause unnecessary trouble…”
“Of course.”
“He came at once, lumbering in his pajamas, even brought his old rifle along. He always liked a hunt, you know. When we came to the garden, though—he saw her, Cassie, I swear he did, dancing before him in the wan moonlight. She danced and she laughed and she egged him on. ‘Come and get me, old man—let’s see if you still can, you vicious worm, you filthy bear…’ She kept saying things like that. It was actually kind of vile, but I don’t get how he saw her, Cassie…”
“The faeries have their ways…”
“Do you think he had the sight like us?”
“I doubt it.”
“But you don’t know that for sure, do you?”
“No.”
“Anyway, he finally had enough of the teasing and came launching at her, bellowing from his chest. It was so loud and ugly I felt sure all the neighbors would wake up and come running.”
“But they didn’t?”
“No, and not when he fell in, either, though the sounds he made then were even worse. Those screams, Cassie, those screams … and the mess down there … I didn’t know there could be so much blood. Didn’t know it could come from so many places at once. I think, Cassie”—his voice became brittle and shivering—“I think it wasn’t all real to me before then. I don’t think I realized what I was part of—that we were actually going to do it … kill Father…”
“What did you think was going to happen? That you and Mara would sit out there under the moon drinking wine and whittling stakes just for the ‘fun’ of it?” I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking, couldn’t keep the acid in check.
“No, I … I just didn’t think—”
“No. You really didn’t, did you?”
“But then she lifted the spear. It was already there, resting on the grass by the pit, and she took it in her hands and she ended the screaming. Easy like that, with one single blow. She must be terribly strong.”
“You’re not saying…”
“I think she rammed it into his heart. There was a big, black hole there afterward, where his heart should have been—but wasn’t.”
“Maybe he never had a heart?”
“I threw up then, in the flowerbed. My head was buzzing like crazy.”
“And she?”
“She laughed and declared them even. ‘A life for a life,’ she said, and then she took off, into the woods, as she does.”
“… As she does. And now you are stuck with a dead man in your garden. What are you going to do about that?”
“Fill in the pit, I think. Fill it in and plant some bulbs. It’ll be a nice tulip patch in the spring.”
“Easy as that, huh?”
“What else am I to do? Call the police? Call Mother?”
“What does Mara say?”
“Nothing. She hasn’t been back since she left for the woods.”
“She might be, though, brother, and if she does come back, please don’t let her in.”
“Why not?” Again that shiver in his voice. Maybe on some level, he too knew that after the night they’d just shared, Mara wasn’t safe company for him. “You ought to be pleased, though,” he said at last, when the silence between us stretched, “even if just a little…”
“Why?”
“The bear is gone, her pain has ended.”
“If you really think that, you’re a fool. Pain like that doesn’t go away, and she is the fool for thinking that it would. The rush from the kill will end, and what then? She still has a very long life to live.”
“I won’t be sorry that I helped her, though.” He sounded like a child.
“Not yet,” I warned him. “You’re not sorry yet. Doesn’t mean you won’t be.”
“Doesn’t mean I will.”
“As you wish.” I gave up. “I’m sure you feel like quite the knight, but hurry up, now, your night isn’t over. You still have a hole to fill in.”
“Yes, yes, it really wouldn’t do if Mother came over and saw him down there.” Again, there was that shiver.
“No, my dear brother, it certainly wouldn’t.”
“I didn’t expect there to be so much blood, and those sounds that he made—”
“Go, go, go—fill in that hole!”
“Yes, Cassie, you’re right, I should go. I should go fill it in. I’ll do that now.”
“Good Ferdinand, you do that now.”
And that was the last time we spoke.
He never did fill in that hole, though, did he? Something happened between the time we hung up and the time he was found that prevented him from going outside to finish the job.
Could it have worked?
Maybe.
Maybe filling it in and planting tulips was just the right choice.
Maybe Mother would have thought that Father had left her, ignoring the fact that his valet and jacket were still there, the car in the garage, and—
No, it wouldn’t have worked.
From the moment he chose to wear Mara’s colors, Ferdinand was lost. There was no coming back from what he did—no coming back from what he’d witnessed. It’s hard, being the knight of a harsh queen.
As it was, however, it didn’t take Mother long to find her husband in her son’s garden. According to the police and the newspapers, Mother woke up, found him gone, brewed some coffee, and threw on a shawl over her morning robe. Then she grabbed two cups and walked over to Ferdinand’s to ask him if he had seen his father. At that time, I think, she still thought Father was out hunting pigeons, having seen the rifle missing from its rack. She took the shortcut through the gardens, not being properly dressed and all, planning to slip inside through the back door and wake her son with some fresh morning brew … On her way there, her sharp eyes caught sight of something unusual: a pile of dirt that shouldn’t be there; a freshly dug hole on the lawn. Wondering what that nonsense was about—the garden, she thought, was perfectly fine—she wandered over, balancing the cups, and looked down at that grisly scenario. Her husband was very much found, punctured and maimed by wooden spikes, and if he’d ever had a heart, it certainly wasn’t there anymore.
Mother screamed, dropped the coffee, and ran to Ferdinand’s patio doors, drumming with her fists on the glass, calling to Ferdinand to let her in. She had “just found your father dead in the garden!” She didn’t call it murder yet, mind you, didn’t suspect even that her son was involved, though her husband was dead on his lawn. She did realize that he was dead, so there was never any question of medics or an ambulance. I guess that was due to the hole in his chest. You can’t get much deader than that.
When Ferdinand failed to respond, she didn’t go in through the back door as she had planned, she went back to her own house and called the police. I don’t know what she said to them, only that it was logged as an accident at first. Mr. Thorn had had an accident. When they arrived at the scene, though, it was quickly changed to murder. Not only was the bear pit a lethal trap in itself, but the weapon that had speared his heart was missing from the scene.
They knocked on Ferdinand’s door several times during this first round of investigations, where the body was removed and the scene secured. He quickly became a person of great interest, and though Mother was both shaking and sobbing at the time, she readily agreed to let them inside, using Ferdinand’s spare key.
They found him then, of course.
I have asked Mara many times what really happened that night; why he never filled that pit back up. She says she doesn’t know, says she never went back—but I know that she is lying. I know that not only because the bloody spear was found beneath his hanging body, but because of the ring of mushrooms that had suddenly sprouted forth on his living room floor. They never told you about that, did they? About that sudden infestation of fungi in his house, those pearly white mushrooms that appeared overnight. Not there the day before, said the help. I only know because I went to Ferdinand’s sad funeral, and overheard the police officers talking to each other. It didn’t make sense to them—but it certainly did to me.
After they found Ferdinand, it was a clear-cut case to the police. Especially since the spear was inscribed with nasty quotes from Dr. Martin’s book. Ferdinand had taken it to heart, they said, that book had “ruined his life” and become his truth, and so he killed our father with it.
Then he killed himself.