Changeling The Lost - Rites of Spring.pdf
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By Jess Hartley
,
Joh n S nea d
,
Travis Stout and Charles Wendig
Sticks and Stones
1.
This time, it’s a baby. You hate making babies.
Head of a gourd with black checker piece eyes.
You stuff its fraying mouth with brittle hay
and rat tails.
He’s out there, right now. Hands of see-through
skin reaching into that crib.
The Nightjar.
You paint the baby’s toenails red with drops of
pig’s blood.
Why would any parent paint her baby’s toe-
nails?
Never you mind. You affix the ears (swatches
of Hedgespun burlap tacked to the gourd), which
means you’re done, which means it’s almost time,
isn’t it?
You wait.
And then it happens. A wisp of mist. A shud-
dering shadow.
That wretched mouth opens. The dead baby —
not even a baby, but you know that, don’t you, Mis-
ter Hands? — lurches to life, its squalls only part
human (for contained therein are pig squeals and
rat squeaks).
You hand the baby through the darkness, into
the pale translucent grip of —
see an image of the fetch baby there in his grip, but
then, as in all his dreams, the image took wing. Like
a herky-jerky moth, the fetch baby ducked and
dodged every attempt to grab it; soon, it was gone.
Joey rubbed his eyes. Outside, a bird toodle-ooed.
“Springtime,” he mumbled.
It earned a smile. Small. But a smile, nevertheless.
3.
April.
A plump bumblebee orbited a tangle of lush
irises, and Joey watched the buzzing bug with rapt
fascination. Somewhere, a bus honked. Voices
murmured. Over head, sharp-winged swallows
did a lunatic dance of near-misses, chattering with
delight. The tangle of life, born of the season, held
him fixed. And he hadn’t even eaten the acid, yet.
“Is it true?”
Joey nearly pissed himself. Lucky for the lad, he
hadn’t.
“I know you,” Joey said to the pale slip of man
now sitting next to him on the bench. Whispering
wheat hair so yellow it was almost white. Fingers
thin. Lips, too. When the fellow exhaled, Joey felt
the wind on his face. With it, the gentle briny swell
of an ocean breeze. “You’re Lady Miss Pity’s boy.”
“Eurus.”
Joey snorted. “If you say so.”
“So is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“That you helped Them make fetches. The
Keepers.”
Joey felt his guts tighten. The fellow didn’t
seem to be fucking with him; his eyes were distant
and sad, his stare barely his own (a characteristic
shared by all the Winter people, it seemed, those
wayward fools). Still.
2.
The clock radio dropped to the ground and
shattered. Joey Hands lurched upward out of bed,
face slick with sweat despite the cool March morn-
ing air creeping in through the window. His arm —
dead-ending in an unintended fist — lay across the
rickety bedside table, where the clock radio once
sat.
He looked down at his palms. Criss-crossed
with puffy scars. The fingers fat with calluses, the
nails brittle and yellow. For a moment, he could
2
“I’m out here, enjoying my day,” Joey said. For
emphasis, he reached across and took a fist full of
the airy prick’s Polo shirt. “And you dare to bother
me with things I can’t rightly remember or muster
a care about? I’m smelling the flowers. Watching
the bees. Listening to the sounds of a city crawling
its way out of a goddamn thaw. And you throw this
garbage in my face?”
“It’s just —”
“Just what?”
“It’s my fetch.”
“What about your fetch?”
Eurus paused. Seemed to reconsider. Those dis-
tant eyes, searching.
Then he blurted it out:
“My fetch has cancer. And I
want to cure him.”
low captives, a cruel necessity for which you know
you’ll one day pay a price), which maybe says she’s
sharp. But smart sharp? Mean sharp?
Doesn’t matter in the end product, of course.
You’re no chef. You don’t know what the ingredients
mean when it comes to taste.
You put the spyglass down.
You feel the Nightjar’s whisper hands on your
shoulder.
Fetchmaker, fetchmaker, make me a —
5.
May.
It got hot out, unseasonably so (which
made the Summer boys antsy, stir-
ring for a fight), but the air
amongst the Thorns was
still cool. It wasn’t a tem-
perature thing. It was
an in-your-bones
thing, an in-your-
soul thing. The way
gooseflesh rose
upon an arm or
neck when one steps
foot in a haunted
house. The chill in
the air went to the
marrow.
Joey reached in
between the creeping
threads of rose-thorn and
gently wrapped his ungentle
hands around a succulent blood
plum. Pulling these things out of the
briar always reminded him of that game, Op-
eration. Touch a thorn? Bzzt! Too bad, thanks for
playing. You don’t mind if the thorn has a drink of
your soul, do you?
He withdrew the fruit without scratching him-
self or the plum’s tender skin.
Joey stretched his right leg out, wincing, then
hiked up his pant leg. The gash was red, fresh, ready
to bleed once more if he dared move the wrong
way (hell, if he dared sneeze). A small price to pay
for ridding his Hedge cottage of those goddamn
human-eyed cormorants, with those long black
beaks ready to crush a rock or a fool changeling’s
skull. Dirty Hedge birds, those.
4.
Atop the blustery
bluff, the Nightjar
hands you the spy-
glass.
You peer be-
tween worlds as he
demands. You do not
see the wide stretch
of Hedge maze. You in-
stead see a city street at
noon.
Hustling. Bustling.
Summer heat rising like
a ghost off the blacktop.
With those awful see-through
hands, Nightjar points her out to you.
There she is. The runaway in the red skirt. The
brash blue-dyed pigtails.
Give me your gift, that’s what the Nightjar says.
That’s what he always says.
You don’t want to. You feel like such a traitor.
A — what’s the term? A Benedict Arnold? But you
employ your eye through the spyglass, and you give
him your gift.
In the girl, you see things. They don’t really
make sense, but do they have to?
Cherry pits. Is she sweet, sour? A handful of
holly leaves and 23 teeth (the canines, which means
you’re going to have to knock them out of your fel-
3
His heavy hand crushed the plum over the
wound. Sweet-smelling red sap oozed downward
with the sluggish drip of slow honey.
When it touched the gash, it burned like a lit
cigarette.
But anywhere the juice ran, the wound tight-
ened, puckered like a nervous butthole, and the
infection seized up and soon disappeared. It hurt.
But it helped.
The pain radiated off him, and the bramble
wall shifted, shuddered, curled in on itself, if only
a little. Joey sucked in a deep breath and slid to the
dusty potholes of this backwater trod.
He thought about what Eurus had told him.
Cancer. The fetch had cancer. And, as if that
wasn’t enough of a corker, the crazy wisp of a man
wanted to save the life — the stolen life — of the can-
cerous fiend. He didn’t know fetches could get can-
cer. Or that any changeling would want to save his
wretched Other Half.
“Proving yet again,” Joey said to himself, “that
I don’t know shit about shit about shit.” He snorted,
then went to stand —
And found Eurus standing only 10 feet away.
With a camping machete.
“Eurus?” Joey asked, but even as the question
left his chapped lips, he knew that it wasn’t true.
This wasn’t Eurus. Same lithesome boy’s body with
a man’s eyes. Same wispy hair. But the eyes were off,
a little. Not nearly as pale. Maybe a bit younger-
looking.
And no sea breeze to accompany him.
The fetch. This was Eurus’s fetch. Joey had heard
of some that could come into the Thorns, desper-
ately drawn to it the way a fat fly is to a bright blue
bug zapper.
“You made me,” the fetch said. Fidgeting with
the machete.
“Nonsense and bullshit,” Joey answered.
“You made fetches.”
“Bullshit again. I didn’t make anything. They
made them. I just . . . supplied the ingredients. Put
them together. I barely remember anything about
it, anyhow.”
“Eurus says you hate us.”
“Eurus ought to learn not to get chummy with
hollow men.”
The fetch’s hands were trembling, now. Rage?
Sadness? Something altogether more complex?
“Why shouldn’t two halves of the same soul come
together? Why not make nice? We feel complete
when we work together. Sometimes, we say the same
thing at the same time. Isn’t that a sign?”
“No sign I’d care to read,” Joey said, and spat on
the ground. “You ask me? I’d rather not be reunit-
ed with my Other Half, especially if that half was
made of brittle twigs and cat eyes. You keep asking
me, and I’ll tell you that I don’t really buy this Oth-
er Half garbage anyhow. You’re no half of anything.
Just a pale imitation of life. We’re the alive ones.
You’re just dead things made to dance.”
“You’d have me die, then,” the fetch said.
“I would.”
“And what of your own Other Half? He’s dead,
then?”
“Dead as dead can be,” Joey lied. “Killed him
myself. Not that he was ever really alive in the first
place. Not much different than gutting a scarecrow
of his straw.”
The fetch narrowed its eyes, cocked its head just
slightly. Did he know that Joey was lying? Or was he
already aware how Joey let his fetch live a happy life
in a city a couple of thousand miles away? Joey’s fetch
was better at living Joey’s old life than he was: kept the
wife happy, the kids safe. Joey had been an itinerant
philanderer, a notorious drunk, a loutish roustabout.
The Joey-fetch wasn’t any of those things, not anymore.
“So, you won’t help me.” A statement, not a
question. The fetch’s hands tightened around the
machete, its grip a swaddle of black electrical tape.
“That machete for me? Going to chop off my
precious head for not curing what ills your flesh is
heir to?”
Eurus’s fetch frowned. He relaxed his grip on
the blade.
“No. Just for hacking brush. For protecting my-
self.” He paused, looked sad for a moment. A ruse,
Joey thought. “I’m a good man.”
“You’re not a man. You’re a thing. A collection
of things.”
Joey could see the fetch relinquish its hope — it
left him in a small exhalation, and his already sal-
low chest sank further. The fetch simply turned heel-
to-toe and walked back the way he came, his feet
falling silently on the flat stones of the old trod.
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