Chris Adrian: The Great Night

“Jordan Sasscock!” she shouted, lifting her face out of her hands, and somehow that made her feel better. She was sure a voice answered her, but instead of saying, “Shut up!” or “Yes, dear?” it said, very quietly, “Poodle.”

“Leave me alone!” she said, not sure whether she was addressing Jordan or Ryan or sardonic voices that, while they weren’t exactly hallucinations, weren’t voices that anyone but she could hear. “It’s just a party,” she said to herself, when nothing and no one else answered her. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” She got up, not considering the worst things, turned around, and found she had missed the entrance in a shadow and had sat down very close to it. She put her arms around herself and bowed her head and walked into the park.

A t the top of the hill, just beyond the threshold of ordinary human senses, a door was opening in the earth, letting out a light that was as lustrous and thin as autumn sunshine. The light spilled down the hill and seemed to calm everything it touched: branches stopped their trembling despite the wind, and little creatures paused in their snuffling, as if leaf and shrew both were waiting and listening for the sound that shortly came drifting up out of the hole into the earth. It was a noise of bells, at first extremely faint and then not much louder but somehow more obvious, perhaps because, though the noise was soft and the individual tones quite pleasant, there were odd harmonies and overtones unnerving to animal ears. Shadows appeared in the light, reaching down the hill, followed by a variety of figures.

They came in twos, matched by height (because that was pleasing to their Mistress) though not by form, so lovely creatures were paired with homely ones and wizened faces with young ones. Opposite and antagonistic natures were paired together as well, though this was harder to tell simply by observation, except where the smiles (also mandated) were obviously forced and where, instead of just holding hands, each partner held the other’s wrist in a mutual, clawing clutch. It was as stately a procession as a bridal march, though a very keen observer, or one who had seen the faeries pour out of the hill in the days before their King was lost and their Queen went into mourning, would have noticed a tired, shuffling quality to it. In other days, decorum restrained a joy at the dusking of another night; now it propped up tired, depressed spirits, some of whom would have preferred to stay under the hill, dreaming of better times.

Soon dozens and dozens of them had come out into the night, the first few no taller than a thimble. The last few, as tall as streetlamps, were followed by eight more, all of a middling height, who bore a litter upon which their Queen reclined, propped up with coarse black pillows, blackbirds fluttering in her hair and two black cats, entirely uninterested in the birds, asleep on her lap. She yawned as she went through the door, carried after the rest of the procession in a half loop that took her to the flat top of the hill. There her bearers set the litter down on the thick, soft grass and danced around her in a ring. Every step was choreographed for the Queen’s pleasure, though it had been years since she had taken an interest in the design of the dance and many months since she had really paid any attention to them as they performed for her.

Still paired, the faeries danced five turns around the litter, twisting and dipping, one now leading and then following, one lifting the other partner when the bells rang a particularly discordant note, the lifted dancer now doing a split and now a curtsy toward the Lady, until the bells rang faster and the couples disengaged, everyone dancing alone, increasingly frenzied yet precise, as the bells rang ever louder. It was a sight to nauseate and entrance any human observer, though the dance was not what it once was, and the dancers, for all the ways they leaped high and threw their bodies low, looked as bored, in their frozen, smiling faces, as their Queen.

In waves the bells reached toward a crescendo until they broke, and then a hundred different unsettling overtones hung a few moments more in the air over the hill. The frenzy of the dancers broke as well, and they stopped, scattered in heaps around the litter but not sweating or out of breath. Smiles vanished, finally no longer required, and they all stood and bowed toward their Queen, who was idly stroking one of the cats and entirely ignoring the other, though it pressed its face into her belly. The birds in her hair had flown away. She flicked one hand absently at her court, and they rose, their unsmiling faces now showing every sort of emotion except happiness. A frog-sized gnome with very curly brown hair was glaring furiously at her, and a feathered, pony-sized woman was staring at her with a combination of sadness and desire, while another lady, tall and pale and barked like a birch, was silently weeping.

They stood around like that for a time, silent conversations passing from face to face; the host had grown accustomed to such long, boring silences, for the Queen had the privilege of speaking the first words of the night, and this was especially true tonight, the Great Night, the midsummer holiday when all their customs were most formal. Some nights it was halfway to dawn before she called for a game or named the clouds or sang a song (always sad ones, these days). Tonight she seemed to nap a little, clutching now at both cats, who did not squirm like ordinary cats would but suffered her tight embrace, staring into each other’s eyes, panting and gasping a little at the pressure around their necks and chests. The darkness had hardly fully settled under the trees before she started and sat up and spoke.

“Where’s Puck?”

A collective sigh escaped from the host, and they dropped their stiff poses, some of them reclining on the grass while others turned away from their enforced partners to seek out their real friends and lovers. Some of them retired in twos and threes to the edge of the summit of the hill, not quite brave enough to leave entirely, but so sure no Great Night festivities were coming that they were already conspiring to make their own party. But three individuals stood by the litter. Formerly Oberon’s closest servants, they had given up or forgotten their names when he disappeared and borrowed others from the human world.

“Up to no good,” said Fell, who was beaver-sized and somewhat beaver-faced.

“Out in the city making babies cry,” said Lyon, one of those faeries whose appearance mirrored his disposition but not his name; he looked to be made of tightly spooled string and was seven feet tall at his shoulder.

“Searching for our Master, and ever faithfully,” said Oak, who might be mistaken for a human boy if you missed his rabbit’s feet and thickly furred face and bottom. He was the nearest thing Puck had in the entire faerie company to a friend since Oberon had disappeared.

“Summon him,” said the Queen, holding out the cats. Oak and Fell each took one, holding them at an odd angle, and began to squeeze them not quite in succession, so they let out an overlapping series of shrieks and yowls. Despite the abuse, the cats remained docile, not clawing or spitting but only making noise, as dutifully as any instrument. The cats sounded for nearly five minutes, the company around them drawing farther away from the players, not because they didn’t enjoy the music but because of how much they feared Puck. There was a tune in the wailing of the cats, not very obvious at first, but it was actually a very short bit of song they were playing, repeated again and again, something that shared a lot of notes with “Danny Boy,” though to anyone who knew that song it would seem as if notes of violence and threat had been inserted at random into the music. It was those elements, as much as the mandate of obedience laid by Oberon upon the wild spirit who had nearly destroyed them a thousand years before, that drew Puck into the presence of the Queen. Before he appeared, walking quite unremarkably up the hill, a whistling was heard, an echo and exaggeration of the song of the cats. Puck’s whistling grew as loud as and then louder than the cats, until he stopped a few feet before the Queen and bowed.