Chapter Seventeen
‘Disabuse thyself of fancy, dear Reader! The creatures known as Fairies, though oft adorned in the trappings of Myth and Wonder, were in truth mindless beasts void of Feeling and incapable of Woe, all of them strangers to Affection, Love, or any bright stirrings of Soul. That such beings have passed from this World is neither Tragedy nor Marvel, but the natural Consequence of their own brutish simplicity.’
Frida shut the book with a disgusted snap, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
She coughed, waving it away, and put the tome into her steadily growing pile that deserved to be burned on the altar of a storm monkey.
In the last hour, she’d read a lot about sage, crystals and dancing topless under a new moon.
‘What crap,’ she muttered, taking another gulp of cold coffee as she opened the next with a burgeoning sense of dread.
Within a few pages of Forest Fairies and Their Ungodly Ways, she’d learnt that the majority of fairies shrivelled up in the sun.
They only ate bones and every single one of them had voices as beguiling as ‘the tender touch of moonlight on daisies’.
Dozy’s voice, she remembered all too well, had been like old dead leaves.
She found herself thinking desperately about Plan B, where she somehow grew the strength of ten Olympic athletes and managed to drag a warded fence up to the Hawthorn.
Maybe the storm monkeys would help. Sixteen Jellies could probably re-wire a few fences, right?
She shoved Forest Fairies and Their Ungodly Ways away.
She’d done the mandatory training on how to rig wards in an emergency, but that had been five years ago at the very start of her tenure, when she’d been more interested in figuring out when it was ok to polish the stone giants.
Dumbly, she started flicking through The Dark and Devious Fairies of the Green Woods of Ye Olde England, wishing that Antony and Hamish were with her.
Antony had always been the best at research, and Hamish best at choosing the playlists, making the coffee, coordinating the snacks and being generally helpful in the most distracting way possible.
Should she circle the walls to see if she could find a hidden tunnel? Should she go back to the Hawthorn and threaten it with an axe? Should she be constructing some impossible radio tower out of toothpicks and griffin feathers that would somehow give her phone the ability to function again?!
Words and useless diagrams about how to prepare a shelter to protect against woodland fairies skittered before her eyes.
It might have been helpful, if the author’s advice wasn’t to hang a siren’s vocal cords from the rafters and sprinkle ground-up giant’s teeth across the door.
This book, like so many of the others she’d picked up, had been written in the 1700s by a pompous man with a surplus of adjectives and an unhealthy fascination with destroying as many ‘heathen beasts of the woods’ as he could.
Mr H. Botherington was this one’s name. Along with the normal rubbish about fairies appearing to be as doting as new mothers with their newborn babes, whilst simultaneously crawling with enough malice to rival the devil himself, Mr Bother claimed that:
‘When thou dost venture into the deep Woods, thou must turn thy garments inside out and refrain from uttering thy true Christian name in a Fairy’s sly hearing. For to speak thy name is to yield thyself unto their Power, and to summon a Peril from which no mortal craft may deliver thee.’
Well, Frida thought with a sigh, Dozy already knew her name. There wasn’t much she could do about that now.
‘Their Hearts,’ Mr Bother went on, relentless, ‘are black as the very Night, and within their beating marrow lieth the very Fountain and Root of their Magics. Should you, by Providence or by Artifice, find thyself in a Position to sever one from its Breast and preserve it from Corruption, thou wouldst count thyself most fortunate indeed.’
Frida spent a few moments considering whether she’d have the guts to go back up the hill and carve Dozy’s heart out as Mr Bother seemed to be suggesting, but the thought made her nauseous.
Zookeeper she was, fairy-killer she was not.
She prayed it wouldn’t come to that. She was about to stop reading when she caught the words, ‘The manifold and diverse Gifts of lustful Pleasure bestowed by a Forest-Fairy are as freely given as a Druid upon the Winter Solstice.’ She snorted but read on.
‘A Fairy’s locks – long, leafy, and untamed as the Woods themselves – do cascade with deliberate Artlessness down their Backs, as they engage in wanton Dalliance beneath the silvery Eye of the full Moon.
’ Apparently, witnessing such an event would lead to one’s imminent doom.
She sighed again, closing the book. The coil of panic inside her tightened with each resonant tick of the clock.
If Rule Number One of zookeeping was DO NOT RUN, and DO NOT STEAL THE CHOCOLATE CROISSANTS was Rule Number Two, then DO NOT PANIC was a firm Number Three.
She took off her misshapen cap and placed it carefully on the table.
She stared for a while at the weather-beaten khaki and the faded pink logo she’d been so proud to receive.
Her heart ached as she drew the cap back towards her and held it tightly against her chest. The front cover of Mr Bother’s book was red leather, with an embossed illustration of a knight riding fearlessly through a dark wood.
A hero, obviously. In his hands he held a long sword which may as well, let’s be honest, have been a penis.
The metal glimmered by the light of a sickle moon, its edge a clarion call against heathen beasts.
If she closed her eyes, she could make out the silhouette of her mum sitting at the corner desk by the window, her dark hair curtaining her face, poring over some random book about centipedes or tidal anomalies caused by merpeople.
Your fairy isn’t a beast, Friduska, and you don’t need a knight to save you.
The only heathen in this place is Mr Bother.
Frida attempted a smile. She knew her mum was right, but right now, she’d be ecstatic if some knight with a pointy sword strode through that door.
In a burst of rage, she picked up the book and flung it across the room.
It landed with a crash, and she dragged her hands through her hair, ripping tendrils out of her braid.
‘What am I meant to do, Mum?’ A desperate cry lodged in her throat as total silence filled the vaulted room.
Her voice broke. ‘Somehow, this is my fault. I know it is.’ Although she didn’t know how it could be, something in her heart told her it unequivocally was.
She stared at the empty table where her mum had always sat.
There were no books on it now and the chair was neatly tucked in.
She tried, desperately, to come up with some pearl of wisdom, some Ada Rose silver lining, but there was nothing.
She glared at Mr Bother’s book, lying splayed and bent in the corner, with the knight on the cover staring up at the ceiling.
Her head fell onto her arms. There had been no hero to save her when her mum had died, and there was no hero to save her now.
She looked at her tattooed arms, pinching the curve of Fireheart’s tail, the edges of the yellow rose on her wrist. ‘I’m totally alone,’ she whispered.
The only answer was the infernal ticking of the grandfather clock.
It was six o’clock. Past closing time. How many hours had her friends been asleep?
Four hours, five? Too many. A sleep of a hundred years stretched before her as she shoved her cap back on, everything swirling in her pounding head.
The pain when the lightning had struck. The glow when her body had been violet.
The sickly grey of Raz’s fear. The sweet, childish sound of Lucky’s chirps.
The glittery escaped tidal wave. The churn of the forest, the rumble of the earth.
The anguish in Dozy’s eyes. How they’d looked at her, really looked at her, like they’d known her.
A trick, it had been nothing but a trick.
Frida rammed back her chair. Her heart felt as if it was going to burst. Desperately, she stared through the windows, silvery spotlights seeming to move over the inky waves.
The LEZ was her sanctuary. She loved watching the gentle-hearted water horse, Helion, causing accidental tidal waves with a flick of his seafoam tail.
Seeing guests turn red-faced as the Lagarfljót Worm licked their own penis.
Appreciating the zebra stripes of the inkanyamba flowing like black and white ribbons, or sitting in Grass as the hoop snakes spiralled, eating their own tails and being chased by Millie von Sunshine the jackalope.
These creatures had all lost their families. They’d lost their homes. None of them had anywhere else to go apart from here.
Did Dozy even know that Higgleton Common had been destroyed?
She left the books in a pile and headed for the door, her thoughts in a whirl, but there was one thing that shone clearer and brighter than the rest. If no knight was coming, then she would have to be the knight.
She may not have a sword but she sure as hell could find a machete.
If this was like the wood from Sleeping Beauty, then she would cut a way out of it if it was the last thing she did, and she’d get the help she needed, the help her friends needed.
She pushed open the doors and felt the bite of sea air on her cheeks, her headache spiking yet again, but she was too focused to care – already taking the steps at a run.
Firearms training had been next year’s plan, but she sure as hell could wield a blade.
And if she had to turn what was left of the Hawthorn into sawdust to fix this, she’d do it.
It would break her heart, but she’d do it.
‘Come on Jellies,’ she exclaimed when she reached the bottom of the steps, the monkeys napping in a sticky heap in one of the larger pots Fritz used to make the sauce.
A chocolate-covered moustached monster of yellow eyes and coloured sprinkles.
It should have made her laugh. Instead, it just made her more determined.
This was their home too.
‘Let’s go,’ she said briskly, already getting behind Grace’s wheel and starting the engine.
With a bit of grumbling, the chocolate monster split into sixteen pieces and flooded back onto Grace.
As before, Jellybean took pride of place on the front seat, aggressively licking the remnants of Fritz’s wares off his furry tail.
The others spread themselves over the roof and in the back amongst Hamish’s books.
The thought of Antony’s and Hamish’s meltdowns when they saw those tedious books covered in chocolate only gave her an extra boost, for her two friends’ faces, leached of life and entombed for a hundred years in ivy haunted her.
Unacceptable.
She put her foot down and sped down the causeway, focused so much on getting back as quickly as she could to Ground Control where there was a supply of weapons in a locked box in the Head Keepers’ office, that she didn’t notice when outside the steady beam of Grace’s headlights, the silvery spotlights started to flicker off slowly, one by one, like falling stars.