AllFreeNovel
Share Us
FOURTEEN
Ilit the candles while reciting the names listed in Fraser’s book. They were the same names Soheila had told me at the reception.
“Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, hear me.
“Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, I call you.
“Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, come to me.”
When I finished lighting all the candles I uncovered the sugar bowl. A plume of spice-scented steam rose into the air. It smelled like pumpkin pie. Comforting and incongruous at the same time.
I took out the object I’d removed from my desk drawer. The offering. It was a stone my father gave me when I was six or seven and I’d been having nightmares. He had told me that he found it on the shore of a lake in Scotland—a loch like the one the Loch Ness monster lived in. It was chalky white and had a hole worn through the middle. He said people called stones like these fairy stones because if you looked through the hole at the break of dawn you could see fairies, but that they also protected their owners from nightmares. I’d slept with it under my pillow every night until I was in my teens and my parents were dead. Then, when I was fifteen, I’d talked Annie into going to Central Park with me at dawn. I convinced her by playing the dead parents card, as she put it. We smoked pot and sat on the boulders overlooking Sheep Meadow, waiting for the sun to appear through the buildings to the east. When the first rays of light streamed across the meadow I held the stone up to myeye. I hadn’t seen any fairies, but I’d heard a buzzing in my ears—like a hive of bees swarming over my head. I’d put it down to the pot and lack of sleep. I stopped sleeping with the stone under my pillow then, but I kept it in the same box where I kept my mother’s letters.
Now I dropped the stone into the hot water, reciting the three names.
“Lilu, Liderc, Ganconer, accept my offer.”
The plume of steam wavered and then thinned into a long tail, as if it had been funneled through the hole in the stone. It coiled in the air—a party streamer tossed on the breeze…
There hadn’t been a breeze before, had there? At least not when I was talking on the phone with Paul. But now a stiff breeze blew through the open window. The candle flames danced in it, the wicks guttering in the pools of melted wax. Outside I could see treetops tossing in the wind. The steam twisted in the air, coiling like the tail of a kite. I watched it, mesmerized, for several seconds until I realized that it was no longer coming out of the sugar bowl. It had separated from its source and taken on a life of its own.
The next gust blew out the candles.
It’s just the wind and water molecules, I said to myself.
But those water molecules were glowing now like phosphorescent plankton—as if they also had a life of their own.
I took a deep breath. The steam eddied toward me as if borne on my breath. The brand on my breast tingled. I exhaled and the steam moved again. It arranged itself into the shape of a face. His face.
I opened my mouth…amazed, yes, but also suddenly stymied. I hadn’t really figured out what I was going to say if he showed up. The only thing I could think of was “Who are you?” and that hadn’t worked out so well before. Before I could think of what else to say he beat me to the punch.
“Who areyou?” he asked, as if he’d just thought of a comeback to my previous question.
I laughed out loud, my expelled breath pushing him back in the air. “My name’s Cailleach McFay,” I said.
“Cailleach.”The name was a sigh on the wind that caressed my face. I found I liked hearing my name on his lips.
“I know you,” the breeze whispered, tugging at my shirt collar. “Don’t you remember?”
“Is it you? Did you come to me in my dreams when I was a girl?”
“Yes,” he answered, his voice hoarse with emotion, “though you and I have known each other longer than that.”
The breeze insinuated itself between my breasts and traced the lines of the spiral pattern on my left breast, making the skin tingle and my nipple harden. The coil flamed up as if I’d just been branded. Would my fairytale prince have done that?
“You don’t know a thing about me,” I said, batting the breeze away. “And I don’t even know your name.”
His lips formed a smile, stiffly, as if he wasn’t used to moving those muscles—or did he have muscles? This image was different from his earlier visitations. I had a feeling it was just a remote projection. “I have many names,” he said. His voice, I realized now, wasn’t coming from his mouth. It rode the air, billowing in and out of the window, winding around me like a silk scarf. Outside the trees thrashed. “Those you called me by and many others. You can call me Ganconer.”
“Are you the same…” I hesitated on what to call him. “…manas in Angus Fraser’s story?”
He frowned at the mention of Angus Fraser’s name and the wind coming through the window turned cold. Gooseflesh rose on my skin where it touched me. “Don’t believe everything that man says.”
“Did you seduce his sister? Did you kill her?”
“Katy.”The name was a sigh torn from the wind. “I lost her. It was hissss fault.”
“I doubt that,” I said, beginning to grow impatient with this apparition. Awake and with my eyes wide open he was decidedlyless charming than he’d been in my dreams. Even if he was the same creature as my fairytale prince he had changed…or maybe I was the one who had changed. Maybe I had outgrown him. “Listen,” I said. “I called you here to tell you to go…”
