Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

He pulled one out and slid it into his hand, careful to touch it only on the edges. The plastic surface was wrinkled in places, making the grooves look like terrain readouts on radar. The disks themselves were bare black plastic, and only dates were written on the sleeves: 5/23/68, 8/4/70, and so forth.

He heard the lid clang down on the noxious groundhog, and called out, “Hey, Bliss, what are these? Home demos?”

“Do you always just pick things up without asking?” she said as she joined him.

“Just wondered what kind of albums you’d have. My curiosity took over. I’m sorry.”

She took the record from him. “When my dad was in Vietnam, Grandpa and some of his brothers recorded some music, then took it over to Asheville to a place that could make them into records. It was fairly inexpensive, which I guess is why they’re so thin and wobbly. They’d mail them to him, and he told me the only record player they had was a cheap plastic one with a burned-up motor that he had to spin by hand.” She tilted the disk so the light struck its surface. “See how some of the grooves are almost gone? He played them so much, he plumb wore ’em out.”

“You should get them transferred to digital.”

She smiled patronizingly. “That would defeat the point, wouldn’t it?” Reverently she returned the record to its place, then turned out the lights.

He followed her back into the kitchen and noticed a piece of blue glass on the windowsill behind the sink. “You trying to keep Curnen away?”

“It keeps away more than just her.”

“Like what?”

“Other things that live in the woods that you wouldn’t want in your house. Would you like a drink?” she asked as she opened the refrigerator.

“Sure.” She handed him a beer, and took one for herself.

He popped the tab and was about to drink when he caught himself. “Wait a minute. If I drink this, will I end up ‘under your spell’?”

She did not smile. “You think I’d do that to you?”

“I’m asking.”

She took the beer from his hand and put them both down in the sink. “Never mind. This isn’t really a social visit, is it?” She looked up at him, her expression grim. “Do you remember how I told you the Tufas were descended from fairies? That the real Tufas still have fairy blood, and all the things that go with it?”

He nodded. Hearing it spoken so simply, in a normal kitchen, made it sound even weirder.

“Well, I have a bunch of it,” Bliss continued. “A bunch of Tufa blood, a bunch of Tufa magic. And I’m a First Daughter, just like my mom and my grandmother. The first girl child in the family. That’s why I’m considered… well… a leader.”

“Really.” He tried for a neutral tone, but the skepticism seeped out.

Her eyes flashed. “I’m not joking with you, Rob.”

“I didn’t say you were. But it is hard to accept.”

“Try living it,” she snapped. “I have to exist in the mundane world, you know, not in some storybook. Knowing who and what I am, and having to keep it secret all my life, ain’t very damn easy. I brought you here to convince you that you could get hurt if you stay and keep asking questions. And the only way to do that is to also persuade you I’m telling the truth.”

He backed up a step. “If you try to poke that spot on the back of my head again, I won’t take it real well.”

“I promise I won’t do that. But I want to show you something else I hope will help you believe.”

She led him through the small dining room to a corner doorway almost hidden by an enormous china cabinet. She unlocked the door with a big, old-fashioned key. It opened with only a slight creak. An overhead bulb illuminated a steep flight of wooden stairs.

At the ninth stair, the steps changed from wood to stone. Nine more steps, and they reached the hard-packed dirt floor.

They stood at one end of a minelike tunnel that stretched ahead of them into the darkness. Shelves lining the walls held old books, strange musical instruments, and odd objects d’art that Rob couldn’t identify. Bliss threw another switch, and a hanging fixture at the far end of the tunnel revealed another door.

Rob followed her toward the second light. After a few steps, he risked a look behind him and saw the bottom of the steps much farther away than it should have been. He felt vaguely nauseated at this disorientation; he turned to her and whispered, “I think we’ve gone far enough, nobody’ll find my body here.”

“Yeah, it’s a little weird the first time,” she said without looking. “But it’ll pass.”

Again he looked back. Now there was nothing but darkness behind them, and the light ahead did not seem to be getting any closer. He felt the presence of the earth above him, millions of tons of house and valley floor that could collapse and crush them at any moment. “Have I mentioned my family history of claustrophobic insanity?”

She said nothing. He glanced back a third time, and when he faced forward again, the door was suddenly right in front of them. He looked back again, and this time he saw cellar steps just as they should be, thirty feet away down a low-ceilinged corridor. Had he not been with Bliss, he would’ve fled screaming from the sheer freakiness. “This part of that Tufa magic you were talking about?” he asked.

“Beats anything ADT has to offer for security,” she said. She unlocked the door, braced one foot against the wall, and slowly pulled it open. It scraped loudly across the floor.

She led Rob into a small, musty room. The air here was cooler and drier than in the tunnel. The shaft of light through the open door fell on an oil lamp atop a small table. She took a match from the box beside it, lit the wick, and adjusted it for maximum light.

The room reminded Rob of an elevator shaft. The floor was a twelve-foot square paved with smooth flat stones, while the rock walls receded into darkness far above. A tapestry, six feet wide and at least fifteen feet long, hung from the unseen ceiling.

The cloth radiated both antiquity and, oddly, sanctity. Rob felt sure it would crumble in his fingers if he dared touch it, but the atmosphere of reverence was too great to seriously contemplate such an idea.

As the light played across its surface, the colors and images woven into the fabric seemed to move and flow. “Look familiar?” Bliss asked.

He nodded. “It’s the same as that painting at the library. The Fairy Fellers’ Master-Stroke .”

“Not exactly. Look closer.”

He did, and finally saw what she meant.

The tapestry depicted the same scene, but from the opposite perspective. Here the axman’s face was plain, as were those of a whole new crowd of people behind him—including a young man in Victorian garb hunched over a sketchpad. The old couple with their odd wheelbarrow device, prominent in the background of the painting, dominated the tapestry’s foreground. It was as if two snapshots had been taken of the same moment from two different angles. “Okay, that’s weird,” he said. “Explain it to me.”

“I can’t.”

“That’s not the best way to convince me of something.”

“There simply is no real-world explanation. This tapestry is older than anyone can remember. I don’t even know how it’s stayed in one piece this long. What I do know is that it’s been kept in my family for generations, and part of my role in the Tufa community is to protect it. Just like my mother did, and my grandmother, and so on.”

He pointed to the artist diligently working at his sketchpad. “Is that supposed to be the guy who did the painting I saw at Cricket? The one who went insane?”

“Can you think of another explanation?”