Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce Read Free Book Online

could you have done that was so bad? Did you kill someone?”
    “Of course I didn’t.”
    “Then it can’t be so bad that we would hate you!”
    “Oh, you would. Simply because you wouldn’t believe me.”
    “Then give us a bloody chance! Just tell it straight up. The plain and simple truth.”
    Tara turned away from him. Her acorn-brown eyes dulled as she gazed across the bowl of the old spent volcano. It was as if she were seeing another time, or hearing other words inside her head.
    “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

CHAPTER SIX
    The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;
    Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.
    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
    Oh, yes, the bluebells were out in May. Do you remember how they were? Their perfume stole the sense right out of your head. It turned you over and shook the juice right out of you. You couldn’t walk between them that year, they were so dense; you had to swim in them. The madness of it! The scent was so subtle that it got all over you, in your nostrils, in your cavities, and on your fingers like the smell of a sweet sin. Didn’t it bind you in blue lace and carry you away?
    We walked there together that year, didn’t we? There were tiny paths between the bluebells and I went off the path and you told me I’d be punished for going off the trail, for treading bluebells underfoot. You said there was a law against it. But you meant lore.
    Yet there were so many of them, troops of them, so scented and ringing out and waving to me that I had to find my own trail between them. At the time I believed or was tricked into believing—that I hadn’t crushed a single flower or green blade or bulb underfoot, that they lifted me a few inches off the ground, bore me up and carried me over. I was wrong. It was a trespass. I know that now.
    We all know it now.
    Youth fears nothing because it knows nothing.
    I lost myself in the bluebells. Heart, mind, and soul. I know there was a moment where I was of this world, and then there was an instant when I felt odd, dizzy, estranged. I think that was the moment that the doorway opened. Though I didn’t step through it. Not then. Not yet.
    We were talking, you and I, and we arrived at that ancient rock covered in thick lichen the exact color of marmalade, that outcrop poking up like a fist with a finger pointing to heaven. That’s what we always said: a marmalade finger pointing to heaven. I was planning to tell you about the argument I’d had with Richie, about how it was all going wrong and what had happened that brought us to the brink of a big decision. I was pretty sure it was going to go only one way, but I hadn’t told him yet. I was planning to discuss it with you, to see if there was a way that I could tell him that wouldn’t hurt him. But something stopped me from telling you.
    It was the rock. There was a cloud of little golden beetles flying around the rock, their sleek backs glittering in the May sunshine like flints striking a stone. And so the golden light fizzed and crackled with hundreds of tiny sparks of wing light. You were astonished, too. You who were never amazed. We both stood and stared. It was like a blessing, it was like a gift.
    But I knew something was happening. And I forgot all about Richie, and I forgot all about telling you. I just watched the air fizz with tiny prickles of fire, knowing something was about to happen.
    The next day I asked Richie to come with me, here, to the bluebell woods. I was determined to tell him. I don’t know why but I thought this was the right place to tell him it was over. I couldn’t give him what he wanted. I would never do that again: take someone to a beautiful place to dump them! It’s not a good idea. I think if it ever happened again I would take them to some industrial scrap heap to let them down. It’s cruel to lay such things over a beautiful landscape. But anyway, I knew nothing in those days, and I thought it was poetic and the right thing to do.
    He just