What’s that?
She’d shrugged.I can’t see any more than that.
She dropped his hand and folded her hands in her lap. He understood – go chase your ghosts and leave me alone with mine. He rode the Tube home, each stop a rush of warm, fetid air as the doors opened and shut on the almost empty carriage, diving underground as the city began to flicker with light and thrum with noise. As soon as he got home he sat at his laptop and set up an alert for the phrase ‘The Apple and The Pearl’.
Eleven months later, deputising on a touring musical in Nottingham, a hit.Seeking violin, harp and French horn for a touring balletThe Apple and the Pearl.Ask for Belinda.He had joined the Grub at Leicester at sunrise in June and the next day he watched the dancers warming up from a chair placed just behind the deputy stage manager as he called beginners. The oboe sounded, the orchestra tuned, and the curtain rose and immediately he knew – if there was a door to Fae that might open to him, if he was ever going to get back home, this was it.
The score stitched together from all those tunes from the Otherworld. The story an almost-lucid version of an old Fae folktale. The shrieking noise they made instead of applause, their wings glittering in the reflections of the stage lights, the bell that chimes at precisely the same note as the one that used to call the court to hunt that gives him a shiver of pleasure every time it tolls.
He pledged that evening without a single hesitation, Belinda the tricoteuse squinting at him over the half-moon of her glasses, his instrument thrumming happily in its case. He’d seen immediately that she was a woman who bore more than a drop of Fae blood herself, but he kept that knowledge tightly guarded, ready to deploy like a cyanide pill in case of emergency.
That night he slept deeply and dreamlessly for the first time in years. Swaying with the movement of the Grub, lulled by the hiss and chug of the wheels. By the time he opened the score and started to learn it the next morning,all his doubts and suspicions that he had never really been taken to Fae as a child at all, and that the architecture of his mind was instead cracked and broken in some way so as to make him believe so, were gone. If he is mad then here, at last, are people as mad as him.
Not that he intends to stay here for very long. From the moment Belinda pricked his finger on that first day, he was making plans. Because they all think it’s random, like the wheel spins and if your number comes up then you’re unlucky, but Henry knows that’s not true. Henry knows the type of humans the Fae wish to pass their eternity with and by the end of his first week he’d seen several of them sitting in front of AJ in the pit.
There’s the oboe, a mousy middle-aged woman who nonetheless draws the sounds of heaven from her instrument, a woman born aboard the Grub – how could a creature from the Otherworld resistthat –struck by some kind of melancholy she thinks she hides, but Henry can hear it keening from her music as soon as she purses her lips. Lance the trumpet has that swaggering, aggressive heterosexuality the Fae Queens adore, leaving a trail of broken hearts and misplaced virginities behind him like a cross between Sergeant Troy and George Wickham. Jasper the percussionist is blind in one eye – how’s that for a mythological symbol – and then there’s AJ himself. Something Fae in his bones, for sure. The longest serving member of the company, although apparently not continuously. When he found that out, Henry put theknowledge in a little box to consider later, because what exactly was AJ doing out in the world when he left and why did he come back again?
True, the last person to be taken was a dancer, a month or so ago and Henry was savagely disappointed that he hadn’t seen it coming. He’d joined the vigil in the dining car while the Crow shrieked around the Grub that afternoon and tried to keep himself from throwing a salt pot at the wall.
But if Henry were a betting man – and he’s not, but he knows Fae and he knows the fair folk and he knows that they love musicians above anything else – he’d put money on it being a musician. Not just any musician, but Michael, the first violin, a man so drenched in misery you could almost smell it coming in hot waves of grief from his skin. A potent mix of Jean Valjean, Miss Havisham and Heathcliff.
What happened to him?he asked another of the second violins, hoping it was a dead parent, a depressive episode, a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
Max had shaken his head.Heartbroken. His girlfriend was the harp, she left a few months ago. He’s not been the same since.
Shit, Henry thought. If there was one thing the Fae couldn’t resist it was a mortal – a mortal musician – suffering from unrequited love. Henry started to shadow Michael everywhere. But Michael’s misery is not enough. When Belinda had held out her watch for him to sync to her own, Henry had looked obediently at the digital numbers, wound his own watch slightly late and strapped it backon his wrist. When Lance had told him about the salt in his pocket he’d nodded earnestly, but before every show he conscientiously dips his hand into the huge vat in the dressing room then empties his suit jacket down the toilet near the stage. He takes care to leave the Grit after each show at the back of a crowd and only drifts away from them when he’s sure they’ve forgotten about him. From the very first night he’s stayed outside the Grub in wind and rain until a few minutes before midnight, sitting on rocks and sand and itchy grass, waiting for twinkling lights, for the scent of peaches, for the sound of hoof-beats, anything. And always, nothing. Every night he’s climbed aboard the Grub as the engines start to heave and made his way in despair to his cabin full of pranks and lain down for the night fit to weep.When will I go home? Tell me, when?
Although – and go on then, he’ll admit it – being here has done him the power of good. This is the closest he’s come to the Fae in years. The stench of magic here, the sour tang of it everywhere, the nearness of the creatures that fill the auditorium each night, the wild roar of them, the full blast of their glamour. Never his court, never his Queen, sometimes beings more like goblins and gnomes, but still, it feeds him.
So let the bastards complain about the soured milk. Let them work it out, if they can, let them realise he’s the changeling, he’s the reason they’ve got to drink their coffee black, let them go to the Crow itself and complain. He’s going to stay. Being here – despite all the shit – is healingthe crack forged in him as he was pushed through that door. No, not healing. Filling it with molten gold, like those Japanese vases. If all else fails he’ll go to Belinda and beg,is there really nothing you can do for me, use me as a sacrifice, swap me for someone, use whatever influence you have?He is almost – not quite, but almost – prepared to concede that even if he can never return to Fae, he will stay here for the rest of his natural life, playing this score, pretending to fill his pockets with salt, lingering outside the Grub until the warning whistle, waiting for death or Fae, whichever comes first.
Voices outside, then a humming rumbling baritone as someone begins to sing. The door to the green room gives its long creak again, and in come Steve the bassoon, Jasper the percussionist and Wilf the cellist. Oh fuck.
This is the very last combination of souls he wants to see. The three musketeers, as they call themselves, with Lance their occasional, mocking D’Artagnan. They spend their days talking absolute bollocks in the Grit, and their nights getting drunk and talking even more bollocks in the Grub. Jasper is in the middle of a torturously circuitous story, Steve is singing over him and Wilf stops, hands on his belly, and belches. They settle in a corner and Steve takes out a pack of cards and begins to deal a game of rummy.
Sandra has finished her sandwich now and she’s slowly wiping her hands with a napkin. Henry carefully avoids eye contact. Sartre – not that he’s the kind of pretentious idiot to quote Sartre, at least not out loud – must have done a pledge aboard the Grub. There are people everywhere; it isalmost impossible to have a moment to yourself. You either shut yourself up in your cabin or you take a long, long walk between the Grub and the Grit and hope you don’t bump into someone else who’s had the same idea. You can’t even eat on your own. People like Sandra come and sit next to you, to ‘keep you company’ and ‘make sure you’re settling in all right’.
It was for lack of space to himself that everything went wrong two days ago. He’d thought it was a sure thing. Halloween, the day he’d been longing for, his best shot since leaving that car park. He’d woken with the midday reveille – which naturally sounds like hoof-beats for him because the Crow is a bastard – and his chest had been fit to bursting with the thrill of it. Halloween. The night the Fae came. The night he’d go home.
He’d spent the afternoon seeing to his suit, brushing off each speck of dust. He’d showered and dabbed himself with the rose oil he’s been oiling his skin with for years, ever-hopeful something would take him based on the scent of flowers alone. He examined himself in the mirror. He’s more than forty – well, hisbodyis – but he hardly looks a day older than twenty-six. Long ago he decided he would rather die than moulder in the human world, ageing and sagging and rotting from the inside out. Creams, skin treatments and a strict gym regimen have kept him looking like the airbrushed images on the front of magazines. Women do double takes and men lick their lips at the sight of him, and although it gives his ego a boost, he ignores itall. He hasn’t taken a lover in fifteen years. The thought of all that slick wetness, the smells and theleakingmakes him want to heave. When he goes back to Fae – and hewillgo back to Fae – he will go as a princeling, not the troll he’d left as.
Two nights ago, he’d stayed outside the Grub after the show. The train was stopped by a river and he’d seen lights flickering on the bank, a warm smell of peaches drifting in the air despite the autumn chill and he’d walked towards the glow, violin slung over his back, his heart singing, the kind of broad, boyish smile on his lips that he hasn’t had in years.
But they were uncatchable. Every time he thought he was near, the world would go topsy-turvy and they would move off to the side, behind him, somewhere just out of his vision that he couldn’t quite see. He wandered, following the lights, until he came to the caboose. In the glow of the orange light he saw a huge black bird pecking at one of Gino’s bread rolls. An old-fashioned lantern with a thick pillar of a candle sat beside it.
The Crow looked up at him and cocked its head.
But it’s Halloween!he’d said in desperation.
The Crow gave a soft caw and went back to its soup.
He’ll try again tonight. Fae time doesn’t run parallel to human time – and hasn’t he found that out the hard way? – but the veil is still weak. Whoever turns up tonight could be powerful, maybe even wanting to keep the merriment of the Hallow’s Eve feasts going with a little mortal sport.All Souls’, the day of dead things. Henry could almost hear them, hooves thundering, horn blaring out into the mist to call the hunt, bells tinkling with the frost. He shut his eyes to the graves and took a long breath of the damp air.
From the corner of his eye he sees Michael stuffing his notebook into his bag and starting to stand. Henry takes that as his cue. He puts his violin back in its case, flicks the latches and follows Michael out of the green room, along the corridor and through the door to the stage because he does not want to take any chances, not on All Souls’, not surrounded by graves, not here in this in-between place where up is down and in is out and there is nowhere in the world better for him to get home or die trying.
***
‘Alors!’ Cecile claps her hands and the stage falls silent. Michael slips into the chair at the piano and folds his hands into his lap. ‘We begin with the court procession. The spacing was atrocious last night so I’ll give you five minutes – ten, I am feeling generous – to work it out and then we’ll run it.’
