In the House of the Fae

I woke on the morning of my eighteenth birthday to a frightening series of crashes and muffled shrieks. Confused and disoriented, I thrashed my way out of bed and dashed down the hall to the top of the steps. At the bottom lay my mother, Erika Ward, in a tangled heap of crutches, limbs, and plaster. “Mom, God, are you okay?!” I gasped, hurrying down to help her up. “Sweetheart, I’m fine,” she panted, leaning on me heavily for support. “I just wanted to get downstairs, and one of these stupid crutches got caught on the banister.” “Ma, why didn’t you call me? I would have helped you!” “Well, I know, but I didn’t want to wake you up; it seemed so ridiculous to get you out of bed just to help me walk down the steps.” My mother had broken her leg two weeks earlier when the ladder she was climbing collapsed as she tried to remove a piece of cracked siding. Despite two operations to set the leg, a plaster cast, and dire doctors’ warnings about too much exertion, Erika insisted on carrying out her normal routine. This was not her first tumble down the stairs. “You’re going to break your neck, and then you’ll really be stuck,” I said, helping my mother into a kitchen chair and arranging her crutches nearby. “I wanted to have breakfast ready for you,” Erika smiled ruefully. “So much for that idea. Your gifts are on the sofa though. I managed to do that last night.” After making breakfast and unwrapping the silver-backed vanity set my mother had bought for me, I helped her back to her studio so she could begin work for the day. I settled her in her chair and arranged the paints and brushes within arms’ reach, but Erika made no move to pick up either. “What’s the matter, Mom? Does something hurt? I can call Dr. Petras; he said that--” “Evie, honey,” she cut me off. “It’s not me I’m worried about; it’s you. You’re eighteen today and things are supposed to be starting for you but…” she trailed off, looking uneasy. I thought about what my mother was saying. It was hardly a new theme; I’d been fretting over the same issue since I’d “graduated” three weeks earlier. (As a home-schooled kid, my graduation was hardly a colossal affair, though my mother did her best to make it special.) The problem was…what was I going to do now? And though I knew that almost all people asked this once the diploma was safely in hand, my situation was somewhat more complicated. From the time I was three weeks old, “incidents” (as my mother called them) began happening in our house. It was very rarely anything serious; however, after the third time I shattered all the windows in the house with my cries, my father decided he wasn’t cut out for the job of dealing with a child that was clearly “different”. He packed a bag and left Erika to raise a newborn alone. As time went by, the incidents grew more and more severe; they seemed to be triggered by fear, and occasionally pain or anger. There was no possibility that I could ever enter school, not with my strange and dangerous abilities, so my mother took on the task of educating me herself. Now, however, I was finished and there was nowhere for me to progress to. My control over my reactions was somewhat improved, but the possibility of a lapse was always lurking; it was extremely risky for me to be in a public place for very long. “Trying to get rid of me, Mom?” I joked half-heartedly. “Looking forward to having the house to yourself?” “Sweetheart, it’s not that; you know that I’d keep you here forever if I could. But I want you to have a life. I want you to have friends, and a job, and a family…I want you to be happy.” “I’m happy, I really am. For now, at least. And who knows what could happen; maybe in twenty years I’ll be some big CEO of a massive company with seven children! Weirder things have happened. Please don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be fine.” Erika picked up a brush, turned it over and over in her fingers. “I wish I knew what all this means…what I did wrong…” “Mom, you can’t blame yourself!” I said, hugging her. “You did the best you could with everything that you had to work with. Please, please don’t worry anymore; everything will be fine.” I straightened up and uncovered the easel holding my mother’s latest work-in-progress. “I’ll be in the shower; call me if you need anything.” Walking slowly up the stairs, I wished I could feel as confident as I sounded. On my way to the bookstore in town later that day, I still couldn’t seem to shake off my anxiety. Despite my best efforts to concentrate on trivial things like the weather (sunny and warm today; perfect birthday weather), fear-filled questions kept popping up. How was I going to support myself? I knew that college was not an option; my lack of money and my condition made it impossible. I would have to go right into a career, but unless I found a job in which I could be completely isolated for the majority of my day, this too was unfeasible. And what about a family? That wasn’t something I was ready to write off immediately. What about traveling, seeing sights, living before I died? Much as I liked the town I lived in, it didn’t offer much chance for experience. Rockledge Island, Maine is a miniscule peninsula surrounded on three sides by the dark waters of Moosehead Lake. Though it’s only a short drive from the larger town of Redland, the two places seem situated on two different planets. Cloaked almost completely in pine forests, the tiny peninsula seemed hostile and bleak when my mother first brought me here ten years ago. Exhausted by a series of moves that had all ended badly in one way or another, Erika sat down one day determined to find the tiniest, most secluded town possible for her and her unusual daughter. Maine seemed an obvious choice, with its vast woodlands, and the possibilities associated with a house on a lake appealed to my mother’s artistic nature. So we moved out of the place we’d rented in Iowa and into the Maine wilderness, much to my displeasure. However, I soon got used to the quiet and the isolation and came to think of the house on the lake as my refuge. Still thinking about this as I pulled into the parking lot of the bookstore in Redland, I had to wipe away a few stray tears before getting out of the car my mother and I shared. I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on enjoying the weather and my shopping. I hadn’t been out in a while and, as usual, I was shocked at the sheer number of people around me. Accustomed as I was to seeing only my mother, the neighbors and perhaps an occasional beach-comber, five people often seemed like a crowd. Today, though, it seemed that just about everyone was out taking advantage of the sun and the warmth. The heat, the crowd, and the books all helped to lift my mood as I browsed slowly through the shelves, looking for nothing in particular. I was glancing through a book on photography (I’d always liked the idea of seeing the world through a camera lens) when a large volume bound in green leather caught my eye. I bent down to pull it off the shelf, and as I did, I noticed a man in dark sunglasses watching me covertly from across the store. I blushed self-consciously, and turned my attention back to the book in my hand. It was an anthology of Irish folk tales and legends, according to the tag on the blank cover, but when I opened the book I discovered that it was printed in a language I didn’t recognize. However, beautiful illustrations and sketches were featured on nearly every page, and I poured over these. For some reason, the scenes represented in the pictures seemed strangely intriguing, and it wasn’t until I felt someone’s eyes on me again that I looked up. It was the same man from earlier, but he had moved closer while I had been engrossed in my book. I felt more than a twinge of nervousness and with it the strange, humming sensation in my head that always signaled an episode. As I went on watching the man he wandered, seemingly nonchalant, to the aisle next to mine and picked up a small paperback. I was ready to pass my fears off as my own paranoia, but just then the humming increased and I turned to see another man in identical dark glasses enter the store, look directly at me, and begin moving my way.