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I sometimes wondered if my future love of romantic novels hadn’t come from that one chance comment.
The sound of the paper crackling as I opened it reminded me of her, but the contents of the letter soon had my undivided attention.
“My dearest Soheila,” it read in a slanting script that leaned toward the right margin of the page as if in a hurry to get to the end of each line.
I write to tell you one last story—you were always my best listener!—the story of the Ganconer. I came here to this country to find him—to track him down to his roots, so to speak, but I am afraid now that instead of me tracking him down, he has been pursuing me all along—since my childhood.
When I was but a boy of twelve my sister Katy fell ill with a wasting disease that the village doctor could not name or stop. She, who had been a lively, beautiful girl, grew pale and then so weak that she could not leave her bedroom. The village doctor said it must be consumption, although she didn’t cough or have fever, and urged my family to take her away to the mountains for a change of air, but when the ideawas broached to Katy she grew hysterical and shrieked that she would die if made to leave her bed. My mother said we should carry her out of the house kicking and screaming if need be, but my father, always tender of heart where Katy was concerned, couldn’t bear to do it. And so we stayed and Katy grew thinner and paler with each day.
One night I heard her cry out and, thinking she needed something, I crept into her room. When I opened the door I thought I must still be asleep and dreaming. The room was flooded with moonlight, but the moonlight was in the shape of a white horse and on that horse rode a man cloaked in shadow. I stood speechless in the doorway—in shadow myself—as I watched Katy rise from her bed and go to the man. He reached down his hand, and that’s when I saw that he was made out of shadow himself. He was no more substantial than the shadow branches that fell across the floor, but I watched my sister take his hand and be pulled up onto the back of the moonlight horse. I watched my sister wrap her arms around the shadow man and rest her head upon his shadow back. Her face was glowing in the moonlight, a smile on her lips, but I saw, too, that she was falling into the shadow, being eaten alive by it. I tried to cry out then, but I couldn’t. It was like a hand had reached out—a shadow hand—and squeezed my throat. I felt cold all over and deathly afraid, but I knew that if I didn’t cry out I’d lose my sister forever. To this day I don’t know how I did it, but somehow I summoned the will to speak.
“Leave her!” I cried.
The shadow man turned to face me then, only he wasn’t a shadow man anymore, he was gaining flesh—pale white flesh as though the moonlight was pouring into a mold and making something whole. But his eyes…his terrible eyes!…were still wells of shadow, and when I looked into them an immense sadness came over me, a sadness that felled me to my knees and dragged me into the dark.
I woke in the morning on the cold floor to the sound of my mother’s cries. She was holding the lifeless body of my sister, who lay on the floor beside me.
“What happened?” she demanded when she saw that I was awake.
I told her everything I had seen, never once thinking she might not believe me, and when I had finished I saw that she did believe me.
“Who was he?” I asked.
“That was the Ganconer, the Love Talker, a demon that robs women of their lives. They say that once he was as human as you or me, but he lost his way in the woods one day and fell asleep and the Fairy Queen came with her Riders and found him. He was so beautiful that she had to have him. She took him back with her to Faerie, where he dwells to this day, more fey than human now after all these centuries, a creature of shadow and moonlight. The little spark of human still left in him longs to be human again, but he can only become human if a human girl falls in love with him. And so he enchants girls, hoping to make one love him, but if he fails, the girl perishes.”
“But our Katy loved him,” I said. “I saw him becoming human. He was turning into flesh—all but his eyes. And then he saw me…”
“He would have killed you no doubt, if Katy hadn’t stopped him. There’s where her love of him left off. She must’ve broken free of him and run to save you.”
“Then it’s because of me she’s dead,” I said.
My mother—God bless her—looked as stricken then as when she’d been wailing over her dead daughter. She tried to tell me it wasn’t so, and in time I let her think she’d convinced me.
But I have always known otherwise.
That demon—I have long realized that the creatures we call fairies in my country are indistinguishable from the demons ofyours—had killed her, but I had a hand in her death as well. And that is why I’ve made it my life’s mission to track him down and banish him to Hell—or Faerie or whatever dark pit he came from. (Yes, I know my mother’s tale says he was once human, but is that any reason to forgive him? On the contrary, I think it is all the more reason to condemn him.) All my studies—the degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge, the honors, and papers and publications, even the founding of the Royal Order of Folklorists—were all in service to this goal. And now at last I believe I’ve found the spell to undo him.
I know that if I had told you what I planned to do you would have tried to stop me, but I have no choice: I must confront him. From the moment when I looked into the blackness beyond his eyes a part of me has dwelled in that darkness. I have felt myself, in these last weeks, growing weaker. I believe he is somehow draining me of my life as he once drained Katy. Unless I confront him I will never be whole. And so, before I embark on this last journey I send you the manuscript of my last book for you to dispose of as you see fit. There is no one whom I trust more,azizam. Know always that I went into the darkness with your face before me and that if I don’t return it was not from want of loving you.
Dooset daram,
Angus Fraser
August 29, 1911
The signature and date caught me by surprise. The letter had been addressed to Soheila—and hadn’t she spoken of the writer as a dear friend?—but Angus Fraser had taught at Fairwick a hundred years ago. Perhaps the letter had been written to Soheila’s mother—or grandmother even. I opened the book in my lap to the title page and found his name under the title. Angus Fraser, DLitt Oxon; Ph.D. Folklore University of Edinburgh; Ph.D. Archaeology Cambridge, 1912.
This must have been the book he’d sent the Soheila in the letter to publish. Had he come back? I wondered. From what Soheila had told me it didn’t sound as if he had. And if he had died using this spell to confront the demon that had killed his sister, was it such a good idea for me to use the same spell to invoke the same demon?
Assuming it was the same demon.
I sat with the book open in my lap and the sugar bowl of boiling water in front of me. Soon it would be too cool to use. The instructions said that once the spellcaster entered the circle she shouldn’t step out of it again. So if I was going to do this…
What finally made up my mind were two lines from Angus’s letter:From the moment when I looked into the blackness beyond his eyes a part of me has dwelled in that darkness…Unless I confront him I will never be whole.
When I read those lines I felt the spiral coil burning through my flesh.
I knew it was the same for me.
