"Spindle Red" by Lyndsay E. Gilbert aka Liadan

Loud Ladies: Issue 207                                November 2005

Faerytales for the Feminist Soul

THE FATE OF PRINCE CHARMING

Dear Readers

Sweet, golden haired Rapunzel was not innocent.  It wasn’t a patch of thorns that tore her prince’s eyes out- it was Rapunzel.  She sharpened her long fingernails and raked them down through his charming blue eyes and into the pretty, fair flesh of his cheeks- right down to his very manly jaw.  The flesh and gore stuck behind her nails, the white, peeled skin now slick and red with blood. When she was through with him she let him bleed all over the cold stone floor of her chamber while she carefully cleaned her hands and filed her fingernails, redoing her chipped blue varnish to perfection.  After that, she used the silk rope he had bid her sew as the means of her escape to hang him from the tower window. 

Sometimes princesses don’t want to be rescued.

Next time, dear prince, why don’t you ask her if she wants to fall into your arms you arrogant bastard.  Ask her when she has learned enough of the world outside to know what falling into the arms of Prince Charming betokens.

This princess doesn’t want to fall into anyone’s arms, no thank you!  I’m doing quite alright by myself.  Indeed, this is the first Christmas in three years that I haven’t been suffering boy-related ailments.  Ah, what’s my secret, I hear you ask.  Quite simple really- I’ve relieved myself of the need to constantly be attached to another half- I don’t have a boyfriend.

Genius.

So, let’s get this straight- Sleeping Beauty drove Prince Charming’s sword through him when she woke up.  Just because he did her a damn favour didn’t mean she was going to ride off into the sunset with him and lie down in his bed.  The same goes for Snow White; by the end of that tale I rather say her name was Blood Red.  The Seven Dwarfs should never have eaten that last dinner she served them... they should have known she wasn’t going down alone after all those years of domestic servitude to the smelly little brats. And Cinderella? Well- she smashed the stupid glass slipper and made him eat it in the end.

Ember

Chapter One

The station was packed, last minute Christmas shoppers bundling with their bags of goods towards the platforms.  Ember downed the last of her coffee, dregs and all, and followed the shoppers towards the train.  She didn’t bother to get her ticket ready for inspection; it wasn’t that she thought the inspector was particularly filled with the Christmas spirit- but rather that he was too busy and not about to go checking every ticket of the mass herd that was surging towards him. 

He moved aside swiftly and Ember offered him a sympathetic smile as she passed him by.  It was wasted; the old miser looked right through her, making her smile feel ridiculous on her face. A woman jostled past her, the edge of a wrapping-paper roll narrowly missing Ember’s eye.  Exasperated, she wondered why the woman hadn’t already wrapped her gifts by eight o’clock on Christmas Eve.

Ember had worked the Christmas Eve shift last year as well, and the train home then had been much the same.  She didn’t manage to salvage a seat, standing instead by the doors of the train, closed in and claustrophobic with the bodies and bags of fellow passengers pressing against her.  It was going to be a long ride…a long ride home to an empty house. This, she reminded herself, was her own fault, but she had personally counted it a necessity. Eighteen was not a good age to partake in good old family holidays- even if it was to be over the Christmas vacation. 

The summer trip to Spain had been an absolute disaster, and she had promised herself after a gruelling trek through hot Barcelona yelling at each other while in search of food, that she would never go on a family holiday again.  Alone or not, she decided it was best to face Christmas at home, and she had pacified her mother’s fears by saying that she would spend Christmas Eve and Day with her father and step-mother. 

In reality she had never intended to do so.  Her father was the type to serve a vegetarian a duck at Christmas, and Ember being such a vegetarian had suffered this instance before, followed by the frustrating experience of telling her father for the umpteenth time that she was still a vegetarian and had been one for many years.  Further to this she didn’t enjoy good relations with the man being that she wasn’t the son he’d so desperately wanted but never had.  Perhaps there was something in the excessive amount of alcohol that he regularly consumed that transported his brain back to the sixteenth century.

Either way, Ember had chosen not to go there and besides, if another excuse was truly necessary, she’d promised the editor of the university magazine she wrote for that she’d have another story completed by Boxing Day.  The story didn’t seem to be going anywhere to date and Ember feared that the Faerytales for the Feminist Soul column was going to have an empty space in Tuesday’s issue of Loud Ladies.  It would take a full day’s work to pull off the deadline, and if that day must be Christmas then so be it. 

She was a girl more inclined to celebrate Yule on the twenty-first of December, the pagan festival of the longest night.  She’d brought a few friends round and they’d had a good night of DVDs, palm reading and star gazing.  Thinking of this she found herself staring out the window of the train as it began to trundle out of the station, but it was impossible to see anything.  The darkness outside combined with the electric lights of the train caused only her reflection to be thrown back at her. 

Even in a glass window it was easy to see that her hair was red, the dark smouldering red of fire, fighting to survive inside a dying husk of coal.  Her parents had named her Ember for that colour, and despite the teasing it had gained her at school she left it untouched by dye and wore it long, extremely long.  All that she truly detested were the little patches of freckles that danced across her cheeks.   The reflection did not cast them back at her, but she could see the pale white of her face, and that her eyes were dark, though it could not tell them to be green.  Her mother had told her such colouring was a sign of old blood in your veins, and Ember had secretly found that pleasing.  Little else of her could be seen, only that she was crammed between a great many human beings, a pram, shopping bags and even a bicycle.

It didn’t seem that there was any place to move, no inch to left or right in which to even sway, but she was soon proved wrong.  The train passed its third stop and picked up full speed again.  Then a soul-piercing scream assaulted the air. 

Panic broke loose like a surge of free electric, raw and wild, people rushed forwards, crushing each other.  Ember was dragged with them, the air refusing to enter her lungs as a grown man’s elbow cracked against her chest.  White pain blazed across her vision and she flailed her arms out, desperately searching for something solid to cling to.  But then the panic ceased, replaced by a somehow more frightening calm.  Ember looked about her in a daze, only just grasping the fact that every passenger was staring in the same direction.

Gulping in a painful breath of air she turned to see what had silenced them.  A woman wearing a bright red coat was there by the doors, her eyes wide and tear filled, brilliant blue and utterly mad.  She held in her shaking hands a small black pistol.  Ember’s stomach wrenched once before diving down into an unending depth, causing her to give a dry wretch. She followed the direction of the gun to find it pointed at a child, a girl with eyes the same startling blue as the red-coated woman, and similarly desperate.

“Mummy,” The girl whispered, her eyes spilling tears that were pooling at her chin and dripping down onto a plastic doll, clutched to her chest, “Mummy…I’m scared…”

Ember looked back to the woman again, her tongue numbing in her mouth and rendering her unable to speak- what would she say anyway?  The woman gripped the pistol tighter and stepped forward, raising it to the girl’s head- “Give me back my daughter…” She said, her voice cracked and raw.

Ember stepped forward instinctively, all pain and dizziness forgotten.  She placed the girl behind her but the woman didn’t seem to really see this move, she began to sob hysterically.  It was a horrible sound, a beast in pain, not a human surely, “This is not my daughter, this is not my daughter, this is not my daughter…’ she began her mantra, repeating it over, gradually rising in pitch.  In the reflection Ember saw the girl side step out of her protection, looking up and facing the raised black pistol. 

“Give me back my daughter!”  The woman screamed, then she dropped the gun, falling to her knees and screaming until Ember could almost taste blood in her own throat.  A man knelt down and lifted the pistol as the train came to a screeching halt and suddenly there were police everywhere.  The woman was dragged from the train floor and pulled out of the carriage; the child was whisked into the arms of another officer.  And just like that they were gone. 

The train ride home simply continued, and Ember sat on the floor sipping a cup of water that was brought to her.  Two officers remained on the rest of the journey to oversee the witnesses.  They took her contact details and a quick statement.  The plastic cup of water was all the compensation given for the shock, and then the officers moved on to question the other witnesses. 

By the time she reached her stop the train was mostly empty, save for a smattering of passengers that stared at her and whispered among themselves.  She stepped off the train steadily somehow and made her way off the platform and to the pick-up bay where she found her pre-ordered taxi still waiting.  Numbly she opened the passenger door and slumped into the seat.

“Where the hell have you been?”  The taxi man asked, “If you miss your first train you should bloody well call and let us know.”

Ember was silent, her mind blank of any answer, seeing nothing but the woman’s eyes and the red of her winter coat.  The taxi man sped off, controlling the car angrily and causing the engine to jump every time he changed gear.  Her stomach churned, but she could not be sick, giving only another silent and dry wretch that caused her throat to burn.

The taxi pulled up outside her house and she paid without much notice, stumbling out of the car as if drunk.  “Happy Christmas!” the man spat through tobacco stained teeth.  She shut her door, not seeing him speed off eagerly.  She was staring at her house. In that instant all her sickness disappeared, to be replaced by a new fear.

Lights were switched on, illuminating the house as though it were a Christmas tree itself.  But only she had the key to the house.  She fumbled in her pocket with a shaking hand, drawing it out and staring at it as if it were something foul.  She had made sure every light had been safely switched off when she’d left the house that morning. Then she had locked the door carefully with this very key, checking it twice.

With legs like water she walked up the empty driveway and tried the brass handle of the door.  Still Locked.  No one could be inside.  She forced herself to slide the key into the lock and it turned with a decisive click, the last sound she clearly heard before the pounding of blood in her ears drowned everything out.

She stepped into the hallway, calling out a strangled “Hello” to which there came no reply.  She entered the front living room where the large fir Christmas tree was twinkling brightly, multi-coloured lights flashing off the red and silver tinsel.  The room was empty.  Clumsy with fear she tripped in the hallway, making her way from room to room downstairs. Every light was on, but there was no sign that she had company.

Logic was intruding upon her fear, fighting it stubbornly.  She must have been switching everything on instead of off, it had been very early after all, and perhaps she had been too tired.  Sighing at her own stupidity she switched the lights back off one by one, leaving only the Christmas tree on in the living room and also the kitchen light.  The hallway upstairs was dark, so she supposed the bedrooms there were alright as well.

She went to the front door and locked it again before retiring into the kitchen and boiling the kettle.  Writing often came hand in hand with an addiction to caffeine and her particular fix was coffee with milk and two sugars.  As she waited for the kettle, she sat down at the table and pulled her notebook towards her.  She had left it there the night before, when she had worked into the little hours of the morning. 

Her eyes scanned the local newspaper cut outs she had glued in most recently, detailing child disappearances, and mysterious reappearances.  The children had no memories of their abduction.  Some articles included black and white pictures of mothers clutching their returned children to them, smiling, but with a lingering fear and exhaustion etched on their faces, most evident in their eyes.

But Ember had circled the faces of the children, and she had wondered at the expressions there.  Something disturbing, something that wasn’t childlike or adult.  But something altogether different. 

Above them she had penned the word ‘changelings’ but she knew she could never write an article on such a thing involving these recent abductions.  The police had been so far unable to find any traces of the abductor.  But if she were to write about changelings and faery folk she would all at once be considered mad, insensitive, and even suspicious.  

She scribbled down the events she had witnessed in the train, and her hand shook as she did so.  

‘Give me back my child.’

She made coffee and continued to write until she was satisfied she’d recorded as much detail as possible. Then she made up a sandwich and cleaned the kitchen.   She needed to go outside and wheel the emptied bin into the backyard, but she was too scared. 

Irked by her own fear she picked up the wireless house-phone and punched in the number of her best friend.  They had met at a Star Wars convention in London seven years ago and been surprised that they lived extremely close to one another.  They had kept in touch upon returning home, and although neither of them was quite as obsessed with Star Wars as they had been, they were now the closest of friends.  

Katelyn picked up after five rings, “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Ember, just wan’t to go out and bring the bin round the back.  I’m feeling a bit chicken.”

Katelyn laughed knowingly, for it was usually her that made such phone calls.  Ember told her about the incident on the train as she retrieved the key and let herself out into the dark driveway.  She switched on the porch light and walked towards the bin, still talking to a horrified Katelyn.  Then she stopped talking.

A square of yellow light danced upon the driveway, and Ember turned knowing it was coming from her own upstairs bedroom at the front of the house.  Her light was on.  Her blinds were pulled but a tall black shadow moved behind them for an instant before disappearing.

“Ember?”  Katelyn’s voice was small and high, “Em, you there?”

“There’s someone in my bedroom.”  Ember replied, her voice a strained whisper.

“Then come up to mine and we’ll call the police.”

That was the sensible approach.  But Ember knew she wasn’t going to be sensible.  Why was anyone’s guess.  Maybe there were things the police just weren’t capable of dealing with.

“I’ll call you back.”  She said into the phone, cutting Katelyn off before she could protest.  The phone began to ring again immediately, and Ember went back into the house leaving it on the bottom step of the staircase.  Eventually it stopped and she stood as still as she could, listening.  She heard movement from her room, the rustle of a turning page, a quiet sound in truth but one that thundered loudly in her ears, setting off the deafening pulse of blood inside her head once more.

She took the stairs step by step, missing the sixth that was notorious for waking her mother up when she was trying to sneak back to her bedroom at unholy hours in the morning.  Even numb with fear she observed every habit that she had acquired in the art of sneaking.  But she knew in her heart of hearts that it was all for nothing.  Whatever waited in her room was well aware that she was in the house, and they weren’t being particularly discreet about their own presence.

She reached the end of the staircase quicker than she truly wanted to and paused outside, numbly visualising the inside of the room before her, its layout.  Her bed was situated under the window at the far wall- her sofa along the left hand wall.  Her wardrobe and bookcase were facing it on the right.  There was a set of katana swords just beside the door and she resolved herself to make obtaining one her main priority upon entry.  But when she finally opened the door her plan of action died instantly.  She simply stared, and stared some more, frozen in the arch of the open door, her hand still gripping the metal handle and her heart somewhere in the tips of her toes.

The intruder was relaxing lazily on her sofa, leafing calmly through a green, hardback book she recognised as Anna Franklin’s Encyclopaedia of Fairies, an odd thing for an intruder to do, but this was no ordinary intruder by any stretch of the imagination.  All of Ember’s research, studying faerytale after faerytale had not prepared her for this.

He looked up at her through long midnight-blue hair, making her feel like she was the true intruder here in her own bedroom.  A mocking smile spread slowly across his face. “An interesting collection you have here,” he said, motioning with one sweep of an elegant white hand to the piles of books that lay around his feet.  An open copy of Tales from the Brothers’ Grimm lay beside him on the sofa and she could see the bright coloured annotation she had penned inside it.

None of her reading, labouring over tale after tale, pouring over every tiny detail, amounted to anything.  No tale had ever mentioned the possibility of a very real and very handsome faery sitting very casually on the sofa of a teenage girl on Christmas Eve, a faery with an interest in literature at that.

He stood up and stretched calmly, reminding her very much of a cat with all the cream treating itself to a luxurious stretch.  He picked up a magazine and tapped the front cover.  Fleetingly, Ember realised it was a copy of Loud Ladies, the magazine she wrote for weekly.

The faery made a ‘tutting’ noise before spreading a pair of gothic wings that had been folded against his back. They seemed to Ember like shredded black lace, except that they were glowing dimly, and twitching with life.  He threw the magazine at Ember’s feet and the mocking smile dropped from his lips to be replaced with a glower that made her blood run cold. 

His eyes twinkled with menace, black and alien in his pale, angular face as he spoke, “You’ve been writing dangerous stories girl,” His wings waved slowly, causing a breeze to blow across her.  The pages of the magazine fluttered noisily as he continued, “We don’t like Mortals who come too close to uncovering the truth about the Fair Folk.”

Her senses came galloping back to life, and she cursed herself as her mind adjusted to unreality.  She of all people should be able to handle this- she’d started writing to live in such a fantasy world.  She had read warnings, dismissing them too easily though they had been numerous- to tell the tales of the Fae is a dangerous business, be wary.

 Reading them then had made her scoff, for in the 21^st century she’d thought herself untouchable.  The idea that creatures of myth might be real had been nothing more than an entertaining fantasy. She’d only courted it to make life more exciting, something other than a university assignment and another failed relationship.

Her plan of action would remain, faery intruder or not.  She shot a hand out, reaching for the katana on the top of the stand to her left.  Her fingertips only just touched the cloth-wrapped handle when the faery man made his own move. 

His grace, a hypnotising elegance that she had so often written of, entranced her.  His tall form flowed with all the purpose of the setting sun, long blue hair streaming out behind him as he came for her.  Then suddenly he was behind her and whispering in a foreign tongue that conjured the voice of the wind and the flow of the stream inside her mind.  A spell. The magick of Faery that she had dreamed of a thousand times was real and it was going to kill her now.  She was going to die on Christmas Eve at the hands of a faery.