Sean Cullen - The Prince of Two Tribes

“Hi, again. Sorry I was staring at you. I think I might know you from somewhere.”

He put the pizza into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “No, I don’t know you.”

“I think you know my brother, though. Brendan Clair.”

Chester paused with another morsel of food halfway to his mouth. What passed over his face? Fear? Worry? Delia pushed on.

“I’m Delia.” She held out her hand.

He ignored it. “Brendan Clair, huh? I know him but we aren’t friends.” He stared straight ahead at the mirror behind the bar.

“Why not?” Delia asked.

Chester turned his head and glared at her. “What do you want?”

“Me? Nothing. I don’t… ” Delia stammered. She decided on the direct approach. “Fine. Just tell me, has anything weird happened to you lately? Anything connected to Brendan?”

Chester laughed bitterly. “Don’t you follow the news? I had a breakdown! I lost my crap for a whole day. Ended up in the psych ward. Are you just trying to make fun of me or something?”

“Can you remember if Brendan had something to do with it? It’s important.” Delia put on her best pleading look, her big blue eyes wide.

Chester just stared. At last, he said, “How could you know that?”

Delia leaned in closer and gripped his arm. It was hard and muscular. “Because I had the same thing happen to me,” she whispered. “I lost a few hours of my life. A couple of my friends lost a whole day.”

Chester licked his lips. Nervous sweat beaded his brow. “It happened to you, too?”

“I’d like you to meet my friends and talk to them. Something weird has been going on with my brother, and I think you can help me get to the bottom of it. Will you help me?” She amped up the pathos, calling on all of her hours of teen-drama TV viewing to mimic a girl in need of a friend.

Chester was about to answer when a woman with dark hair greying at the temples and Chester’s brown eyes approached from the other side of the counter. “How’s your food, Chess?”

“Great, Mum. Thanks,” Chester answered.

“And who’s this?” Chester’s mum asked, smiling at Delia.

“A friend.”

“A girlfriend?”

“Come on, Mum.”

Delia came to his rescue. “I’m Delia Clair.”

“Clair?” The woman’s face lit up. “You wouldn’t be related to Brendan Clair, would you?”

“Yeah,” Delia confirmed. “I’m his sister.” Delia watched in surprise as tears filled the woman’s eyes.

“He was so sweet to Chester when he was in the hospital. He was the only one who came to visit him and I swear that after he came, Chester began to improve immediately.”

Delia caught Chester’s eye and raised an eyebrow. He frowned and looked away.

“Do you want something to eat? Or drink?”

“No thanks, Mrs. Dallaire. I just ate.”

“Well, if you want anything at all, you let me know.” A waiter waved a hand to summon her back to work. “And you tell Brendan I said hello!”

“I will!” called Delia to her retreating back. Turning to Chester she said, “Finish your pizza. We have to talk.”

An hour later, the four of them sat around a table in the Communal Mule, a cafe not far away. When Chester saw Dmitri and Harold, Delia had to turn on all her charm to keep him from turning tail. He eyed them warily and said nothing. Over the last hour, though, his guard had slowly come down as he listened to their accounts of their lost day and their conviction that Brendan was somehow responsible or at least involved. The clincher was the drawings.

“You drew these?” Chester said, impressed. “They’re pretty good.”

“Thanks,” Harold said. “They’re some of my best work. The only problem is, I can’t remember drawing them.”

“And then there’s this.” Delia laid the grainy image from the webcam on the table. The little figure was blurry but recognizable as a female dressed in oddly old-fashioned clothing. Brendan stood behind her in the frame, looking up at the camera, his face frozen in an expression of surprise.

Chester stared at the photo for a long time. Then he mumbled something under his breath.

“What did you say?” Dmitri prompted.

Chester looked up, his face pale. “I said, she’s with him most of the time.”

“Who? Who is she?” Delia demanded.

“More like what,” Chester answered. “She’s a tiny person… with wings like a bug or a dragonfly. She flies around him. Usually she’s hiding in his pocket.”

“Wait a minute,” Delia interrupted. “Are you saying you’ve seen her?”

“Lots of times.” Chester nodded shyly. “And other ones like her, too. Big ones. Little ones. They’re all over the place.”

“What are you talking about?” Delia said, mystified.

Chester sighed and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I don’t remember anything from that day when I tried to run away. It was like I was hypnotized or something. I only remember waking up in the hospital. My mum told me Brendan had come to see me there. It didn’t make any sense. I mean, all I ever did was pick on him and these guys.” He jerked his head at Harold and Dmitri.

“Why should he come and see me? And there was something else. I felt more at peace with myself than I had since my dad died. I felt better. My mum forced me to see a therapist and talk about why I’d had that episode and stuff, but I knew I was going to be okay. They finally let me out of the hospital and then… ” He paused, as if deciding whether he should tell them, but continued. “That’s when I started seeing them.”

“Who?” Dmitri asked softly, not wanting to hurry him.

“The beautiful people. They glowed sort of, like they were shining from the inside out. There weren’t many of them. I’d just see them once in a while on the street, as if they were trying to pass themselves off as normal people. At first, I didn’t know how no one else could see them. They were impossible for me to ignore. I asked my mum if she could see them, but she said she couldn’t see anything special about the people I pointed out. I stopped asking her ’cause I didn’t want her to think I was losing it. The thing was, I didn’t feel crazy. I felt special. I could see things that other people couldn’t. I just had to keep it to myself.

“I started to see impossible things, little people in the trees and in the grass running around right under people’s noses. There was one guy who hung out with a pack of squirrels, and people must have thought he was a squirrel ’cause they never batted an eye. I should have been scared but I wasn’t. I loved it.”

Harold and Dmitri listened with rapt attention to Chester’s story, both of them wishing they could see these people he was talking about. Something about what he was saying seemed to resonate with them. They never even contemplated disbelieving him because deep down what he was saying rang true.

“Do you see any of these people right now?” Delia said suddenly.

Chester frowned and looked around. He looked out the window of the cafe. “There. The guy on the corner with the hat.”

They all craned their necks and looked out to see a man in an overcoat and a wide-brimmed felt hat standing at the crosswalk waiting for the light. He didn’t seem in any way unusual. He held a newspaper under his arm and was talking animatedly into a cellphone.

“He doesn’t seem weird to me,” Delia scoffed.

“Okay,” Chester said. “How cold is it today?”

“What does it matter?” Delia asked.

“It’s minus ten Celsius,” Harold offered.

“Minus eighteen with the wind chill,” Chester confirmed. “Look at his hands.”

The man wasn’t wearing gloves. His hands were bare. “And that jacket?” They saw now that the guy was wearing a thin spring jacket that couldn’t possibly have kept him warm in the subarctic chill.