“Now, now, dear, has no one taught you how to greet a guest? Your manners are sorely lacking.”
The sheets were no looser than they had been, but they were getting no tighter. “I don’t think manners apply to the uninvited.”
“Manners apply to the uninvited most of all.” The woman dipped lower in the air, reaching down to tap the fingers of her right hand against Crystal’s cheek. “Remember that, if you can.”
Crystal took a breath—and then she moved, calling on everything she’d learned from her games of catch-and-keep with Chester, who was faster than anyone else she’d ever known. The sheets reacted to the motion, but they were too slow, if only by a fraction of a second, missing her wrists as she yanked them free. Then her dagger was in her hand, and she was slashing wildly at the sheets still holding her down, preparing to lunge for the woman who had dared to invade her home, who had dared—
The binding spell crashed down on her with enough force to slam her against the mattress, knocking the air out of her lungs. Her dagger fell to the floor, slipping out of her nerveless fingers as she stared, unmoving, into the dark above her bed.
“Oh, you naughty thing. I see why they worked so hard to hide you. You were quite the catch for them, weren’t you? I’m sorry to have to bind you, but you left me no choice. Try to breathe. This will all be over soon, and this silliness will fade away.” The woman fluttered out of Crystal’s view. The mattress creaked as a weight settled on it. Then a gentle hand grasped Crystal’s chin, turning her head until she was facing the little woman who sat beside her.
Crystal glared with all the force that she could find. The woman smiled.
“You’re sixteen, aren’t you? Don’t try to answer, I already know. Don’t you think it’s past time you stopped running off to some childish fantasy land, leaving this world—this good world, that you were born a part of—wanting? It’s time to grow up, my dear.” She tapped Crystal’s cheek again. This time, she bore down enough that the sharp tips of her nails bit into Crystal’s skin. “I’m here to help you. I’m the Truth Fairy, you see, and that means I can do what you haven’t been able to do on your own.”
Crystal tried to struggle.
Crystal failed.
“Haven’t you ever noticed how fairies only come when there are things to be taken away? Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Birthday Pig, they come to leave things behind them. Presents and chocolates and things like that. But the Tooth Fairy comes when you lose a tooth, and she takes that tooth away, and you never see it again. What she leaves is a hole. Something that your new tooth can fill. Do you understand yet, my dear?”
Crystal’s eyes screamed hate at her—hate, and terror, because something of what the Truth Fairy was saying made perfect, terrible sense. All the children she’d known in elementary school, the ones who had traveled to worlds of their own, worlds like her own Otherways, but different… they’d all forgotten their adventures, hadn’t they? She’d wondered why, with increasing confusion, as friend after friend suddenly swore their quests and their trials had been nothing but fantasies. She’d been to some of their worlds, traveling through mechanisms as strange and wondrous as her own Passage Star. And then one day, those children just forgot.
And there had been other children in Otherways before her.
“You can’t be part of two worlds forever. The heart doesn’t work like that. There isn’t room, any more than there’s room in a mouth for two sets of teeth. Baby teeth fall out. Childhoods end. That’s how adult teeth, and adult lives, find the space to grow.” The Truth Fairy leaned close, voice almost a whisper as she said, “Haven’t you ever noticed how so many people seem to walk around empty inside, like there’s a hole cut out of the middle of them, a space where something used to be, and isn’t anymore? Someone has to dig the holes, Crystal. When your baby teeth don’t fall out, someone has to pull them.”
Hearts can heal, that was what Naamen had told her. But there’d been more to it, hadn’t there? Hearts can heal, as long as they remember the way home.
Hearts could forget the way home.
The Truth Fairy rose on buzzing wings. Crystal’s eyes widened, the reality of the moment sinking into her bones. There was no rescue. There was no salvation. Her name was going to be added to the quiet ranks of the forgotten, and never spoken again, not now, not tomorrow, not to the next child to stumble through the light of the Passage Star.
She was never going home again.
The knife went up. The knife came down. And somewhere deep inside her, in the place that the Truth Fairy’s knife sought with such unerring skill, Crystal Halloway screamed.
Morning dawned, as mornings always do. Paul and Maryanne Halloway were in the kitchen when their daughter came down the stairs, still yawning and wiping the sleep from her eyes. “Morning, Mom and Dad,” she said, voice muffled by the hand she pressed against her mouth. “Breakfast?”
“Scrambled eggs and toast,” said Maryanne. “How did you sleep?”
“Really well.” Crystal smiled a little blearily, as she dropped herself into a seat at the kitchen table. “I had the weirdest dreams.”
Her father looked up from his laptop, leaving his half-composed email unsent. “What about?”
“You know, I don’t remember now?” Crystal’s smile became a puzzled frown. “Something about a rabbit, I think. I don’t know.” For a moment, her frown deepened, taking on an almost panicked edge. “It seemed so important…”
“Don’t worry yourself, dear.” Maryanne put a plate of eggs and toast down in front of her daughter. “Eat up. You don’t want to be late for school.”
“Yeah.” The frown faded, replaced by calm. “We’re talking about college applications today. I should probably be on time for that.”
Crystal ate quickly and mechanically, and after she left, her parents marveled at how focused and collected she’d seemed, like she was finally ready to face the challenges of growing up.
Neither of them saw the empty space behind her eyes, in the place where a lifetime of adventures used to be. Neither of them saw the hole cut through her heart, waiting to be filled by a world that would never satisfy her, although she would never, until she died, be able to articulate why.
Neither of them really saw her at all, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. Done was done, and a heart, once truly broken, could never remember the way home. Crystal’s father had grown up in that same house; had known adventures and excitement in a world whose name he no longer knew. He would love his daughter all the more for having lost the same things he had lost. And her mother… she didn’t remember the talking horses or the magical wars or the young prince with webs between his fingers, not consciously, even if sometimes in the night she cried. Both of them knew that empty space more intimately than they could understand.
And none of them, not Crystal, not her parents, could hear the distant, thready sound of a giant spider—the Guardian of the Passage to the Beyond, the one who had guided and guarded a hundred generations of human children, nurtured them, loved them, and lost them all—weeping.
AN EMPTY HOUSE WITH MANY DOORS
MICHAEL SWANWICK
Michael Swanwick is the author of the novels Bones of the Earth, Griffin’s Egg, In the Drift, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Stations of the Tide, Vacuum Flowers, and The Dragons of Babel. His latest is a Darger and Surplus adventure titled Dancing with Bears. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in numerous anthologies, and has been collected in Cigar-Box Faust, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Gravity’s Angels, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, and The Dog Said Bow-Wow. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.