There is always a peculiar distance to fairy tales. They are denuded of urgency, rinsed of true horror even as the words relish in gore. Love is presented to us as something that must be as vast as a horizon and just as unreachable. But as I counted my breaths and hid under the bed, that boundary of the page lifted, and I understood precisely how the maiden in the robber bridegroom tale must have felt. How she had bit down on her tongue to keep from screaming when she realized that she might never escape this house alive.
Indigo’s bare feet were ten paces away from me now, still pointed at the mirror. She had always moved gracefully, but thistime, her feet made the sucking, slapping sounds of a sea creature as she left the room. This, I thought, was the sound of Melusine’s footfall when she curled back her scaled tail and stepped into her bath.
Minutes passed before I finally stood. I returned the bottle holding the tooth and the cassette to their hiding place. What appeared to be blue dye, though I did not know where it had come from, tinted my palms like spreading poison. I wiped uselessly at the dust on my shirt and pants. I thought my hands would shake, but they were still, and the force that moved my body out the door did not belong to me.
Halfway down the stairs, I heard the voices of the physician and nurse rising, the buzz that precedes an emergency. I could hear Indigo from the lower levels of the house, her words indistinct and retreating. She must have gone searching for assistance. I was left alone in the hallway with Hippolyta’s door slightly ajar.
Inside, Hippolyta looked entombed in her silks and jewelry of braided hair. Glowing wires crossed her body. Her breathing was shallow, and one hand clutched the oxygen tube attached to her nose.
Hippolyta flinched when I closed the door. Her sightless eyes roved the dark. Sweat glazed her skin and the air smelled unstirred, stamped with the sourness of human waste.
“Who’s there?” she asked, neck straining as she pushed herself up.
“Who is Catskins?” I asked, walking toward her bed.
Far outside the room, the voices grew louder. I was aware of each second slipping away from my possession. Hippolyta cracked a smile and licked her lips.
“I told you!” said Hippolyta, speaking to the air. “I told you he would look!” She raised her thin fist, puckered with needles,and thumped her chest. “I can feel the ragged edges of where the secret lived, but it grew tired of me and left . . . so cruel, don’t you think? Did you find it? Did you discover what it was I misplaced?”
“Please,” I said, straining to keep my voice even. “Who is Catskins?”
I could sense the answer, its particles assembling into a haze I could no longer ignore. Indigo’s spell on me had begun to slip. But a small, final piece of me was still willing—or needed—to believe there was some misunderstanding.
“It’s what Indigo called Azure,” said Hippolyta, her voice thready. “Indigo can be so cruel... but you already know that, don’t you?” Hippolyta said in singsong: “I saw but should not have seen. You should see, but you cannot.”
The moment Azure’s name was spoken, the House fashioned itself into a hand, reached into my skull, and stirred my memories with one blue finger. Deep within, cramped tight and budlike, lived an image that had been starved of light. Now, it bloomed.
I am nine years old. I am kneeling in the garden outside my parents’ house, a plastic bag beside me. It is springtime, and I can smell the charnel sweetness of the flowering Bradford pear trees that line our backyard. I am clawing through the dirt, my fingers closing around a pair of sneakers and the book I’d buried. Treasures I had thought would grow into an athlete and a storyteller, a band of friends for my brother and me to play with. I drop everything except a whistle into a plastic bag and walk across the street. I throw my treasure into the neighbor’s trash bin. I do not look back.
Too often the truth of a memory lives not in the mind but in the heart, in the subtle and sacred organization that makes up one’s identity. But it is a tender place to reach, and I am wounded by touching it.
The image was true, even if its edges were ragged, poorly defined. I could not piece together what I already knew. Whatever it was, it had been taken from me.
The House was silent once again. It did not care that my heart was broken. We had a bargain, and I still had to honor my part in the deal.
“Where did Azure go?” I asked. “When was the last time she was at the House?”
“Oh, child,” said Hippolyta. “Who said she ever left?”
I heard the knives in Indigo’s voice. I could see her kneeling in the dirt, pushing mounds of earth and worms over a body whose shape I did not recognize. The room shimmered.
“Where—” I tried to say.
Hippolyta interrupted me. “Shh!” she said. “I already told him!” Her sightless eyes focused somewhere near my face. “The Otherworld kept all from me, and to see you need a key. Indigo wanted a blue-eyed starling and Azure wanted a red, and if I’d never stopped to look then nobody would be dead!”
The Otherworld. That dark turret in the distance.
“Is that where she is? In the Otherworld?” I was close enough to Hippolyta’s bedside that I could smell her breath. “How do I get the key to the Otherworld?”
Her body convulsed. She threw back her head and laughed. The machines she was wired to startled alive and began to wail. The door to Hippolyta’s room was thrown open. A small knot of doctors, nurses, and attendants stormed inside.
“Step aside, sir—” said a brusque voice.
“No, she needs to tell me more, I—”
A physician shouldered past me. My arm knocked into the bedside table and my hands closed around a bottle of sedatives. The machines tethered to Hippolyta’s veins and lungs screeched.
“Sir, get away,now.”
