ERIC REITAN

FAERIE STORM

FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE AERYK Severance had been looking for the doorway into
Faerie. He knew it was there. He had known ever since the day of his mother's
funeral, when he was five years old. First Mary Pratt had told him--Mary Pratt,
his fellow searcher and his guide, who at six was pretty even then, and who in
later years would be his lover. And then his murdered mother had come to tell
him it was true. Ever since that day he'd searched, and in his searching's he'd
learned one thing for sure: somehow the doorway was linked to music, and to
madness, and to love. Mary Pratt became his guide because of all the people he
had known, she was perhaps most closely linked to all three.

Mary Pratt had told him to expect a visit from his mother. She told him at the
funeral. He was standing by the grave when he saw her first. It was raining, a
cold drizzle that misted the surface of the coffin and seeped under the collar
of his shirt. The minister was speaking of eternal rest and dust and peace; he
spoke of a bloody sacrifice on a wooden cross, and of God's love. Aeryk tried to
understand it, but it was so hard. He was only five, after all.

His father's hand gripped his shoulder so tightly that it hurt, but Aeryk didn't
complain. His father had always been that way, as long as he could remember: a
presence at his back, unseen, made real by pain. He was often gone until after
dark, working at that blocky brown building Aeryk had been in only once, working
with papers and pens, providing for the family. Aeryk could almost pretend his
father didn't exist, except it was his father who did the spanking, whenever he
or Bobby had been bad (like the time that Aeryk had poured his grape juice in
the bedroom wastebasket, or the time that Bobby had broken the crystal dove in
the living room, but they'd blamed it on Aeryk)--three quick sharp blows, never
more, and then stiff hands lifting him to his feet, and his father telling him
not to cry, that men didn't cry.

But the pain now was almost comforting: it gave him something to focus on,
something steady and solid and real. He concentrated on that pain while they
lowered the damp black coffin into the pit. He concentrated on the pain when his
imagination told him that Mommy wasn't in the pit at all; she was at home,
waiting for them; she was making spaghetti, because she knew that Aeryk liked to
eat spaghetti on cold, rainy days.

And then he saw Mary, who was spreading out a picnic, by a gravestone, in the
rain. He saw her pour two glasses of milk, and put one on the picnic blanket,
and drink the other in one long gulp. Then she laughed and said something to the
gravestone, and she stroked it with her fingers in the way his mother used to
stroke his face.

At last, when the thunk, thunk, thunk of piling dirt became less echoey, Aeryk
slipped out of his father's grip and left the grim wet gathering to ask this
girl what she was doing. She looked up when he approached, and she offered him,
silently, a scone. He saw that it was wet, and shook his head.

She told him her name and suggested that he sit, but Aeryk shook his head again.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

She smiled. "I'm having lunch with my Daddy."

Aeryk looked at the gravestone. "Your Daddy's dead," he said.

She took a bite from the scone that she had offered him. "There were these two
men," she said around the mouthful. "One was Chinese, the other American. They
went to a cemetery together, to visit their mothers' graves. The American had a
bunch of flowers, and the Chinese guy had a picnic basket. The American put the
flowers on his mother's grave, then went to see what the Chinese guy was doing.
The Chinese guy was spreading out a big picnic on his mother's grave. `Do you
really think your mother is going to come up and eat that?" said the American.
The Chinese guy smiled and looked at the American. You know what he said? 'She
will eat this meal at the same time that your mother rises from the dead to
sniff your flowers.'" Mary took another bite from the scone. She chewed for a
moment, staring at the gravestone. "My Daddy never did like flowers."

Aeryk shook his head. "You're weird."

Mary looked at him. "That your mother they're burying?" she asked.

Aeryk nodded.

"Don't worry," she said. "She'll come back and talk to you. My Daddy did."

"Don't be stupid."

"I'm not stupid. Mommies and Daddies who still have little kids don't go to
heaven when they die. Heaven's too far away. They go to Faerie, which is closer,
so that they can keep an eye on you. There are doorways between here and Faerie,
so sometimes they can even come and visit. Then, when you're grown up, they go
to heaven."

"Who told you that?"

"My Daddy did, before he died, so I know it's true."

But Aeryk felt a lump in his throat, and a hot pulse behind his eyes, and he
remembered his Mommy lying in the hospital bed with the broken mouth and the
gauze and the big dark bruises around her eyes, and he remembered her pale
hand--how he had squeezed it and squeezed it, willing her to squeeze him back.
She hadn't been able to speak to him. She hadn't been able to say a word. "You
are stupid," he said, and he turned and ran away.

He drove home in a rented limousine, sitting in the back with his father and his
little brother Bobby, who was four. Bobby kept on opening and closing the
ashtray in the door. His father stared straight ahead, his face expressionless
except for a twitching in the eyes. The car smelled of leather. Outside, the
cold gray world slipped by.

Aeryk listened to the click, click, click, of the ashtray being opened and
closed, and suddenly he wanted to scream, to scream and scream. He wanted to
smash his little brother's fingers in the ashtray and punch his father's face to
make his eyes stop twitching. He wanted to rage and kick. He wanted thunder and
wind and hail, not the anemic drizzle of the rain.

He clenched his fingers into fists and clamped his jaw, and held his breath
against the burning sting of tears.

And then came the voice, as Mary Pratt had said it would. "Be still, little
Aeryk, Be still." Aeryk turned and looked into his mother's face. She was
sitting where his father had been. She wore the red silk dress that they had
buried her in. Her cheeks were rosy from the mortician's make-up, but her throat
was a near-translucent blue. Aeryk blinked and stared into his mother's pale
eyes.

"Mommy," he said.

"Oh, Aeryk. I miss you so." And a pale hand reached out and closed around his
fingers, and it was icy cold and far too tight. "There is something I must tell
you," she said. "It is important that you listen very closely. Okay?"

Aeryk nodded mutely.

"Good boy. You are a good boy, Aeryk." She closed her eyes for a moment, then
opened them and looked into his face. "The world is a crazy place, Aeryk. It
isn't safe. As much as I want it to be safe for you, as hard as I tried to make
it safe, there are bad things here." As she spoke, the chill of her grip around
his fingers started seeping up his arm. It ached in his elbow, his bicep.
Creeping tendrils of cold stretched to his shoulder and then moved inward,
reaching for his heart. "The man who made me die," she said, "the one who beat
me and left me naked in my kitchen in a pool of my blood ...." She stopped and
her eyes slipped shut. When they opened again there was a fierceness in them, a
terrible fire. "He is closer than you think, Aeryk. He is closer than you
think."

Aeryk felt the ice grip his chest, and he wondered if his heart would stop. He
fought to keep on breathing. "Are you in Faerie?" he whispered.

A tiny smile touched his mother's mouth, but the fierceness did not leave her
eyes. "Faerie? You can call it Faerie if you like."

"Then I can go to you," he said. "I can go to you and I'll be safe."

"Oh, Aeryk," she said.

But then the pink and purple skin was peeling from his mother's face like pale
rust, and her eyes shriveled in her sockets, blackening. Aeryk threw up his arms
and he screamed. He screamed and screamed until he felt his father shaking him,
and then he wanted to throw himself into his father's arms and press himself
against his solid chest, but his father let go and turned away, and stared ahead
with no expression on his face but twitching eyes.

AERYK DID NOT SEE Mary Pratt again for eleven years. He spent those years in
search of Faerie. At first Aeryk thought the entrance would be a place, and in
the evenings while Bobby and his father stared at the TV (Bobby drinking root
beer, his father drinking Michelob), Aeryk searched the large old house in which
they lived, and the woods around. He searched in every cabinet and closet, and
especially the wardrobes, remembering the Chronicles of Narnia. He stalked
through the basement, certain he was overlooking some hidden room, or a secret
hollow which concealed an eldritch key. And then he'd wander through the woods
behind the house, or climb a tree and sit in silent waiting listening for the
sounds of forest folk--the wood sprites and the dryads.

As he grew older, although he did not stop believing in a world of Faerie, his
understanding of it became less literal, and he began to look for Faerie in the
smell of spring flowers and the raging summer storms that sometimes crashed
along the coast. He knew that there was something more than just this world of
flesh and grief, something that was hinted at in the visions of the lunatic and
in the thrill of music. He began to play the violin; and when he played, when
the smell of rosin hit him like a drug and the resonations buzzed through his
fingers and his jaw, when he played La Folia by Corelli and his fingers danced
through the cadenza--the shimmers of the Faerie world were there, palpable, just
out of reach. He could almost see its wild hillsides and its dreamy yellow
skies.

And so he played, he played and he composed his own ragged melodies which--while
often awkward and unrefined--swelled with his passion for the Faerie world, and
sometimes came so close to bringing it alive that for a moment he believed that
he would really cross the gap. While he played he often thought about his
mother, and sometimes his harsh dissonances in the lower registers were tonal
paintings of her half-dead body on the kitchen floor. And often when he played
there was another face he saw: the face of Mary Pratt, six years old and eating
scones while sitting on her father's grave.

In all those years his father beat him only once, but it was enough. It happened
when he was ten years old, when he still half-believed a doorway into Faerie lay
hidden somewhere in the house. He was pretending that the entrance lay behind
the display case in the kitchen, and if only he could move it out from the wall
far enough, he could slip behind it and into another world.

But his efforts ended in disaster. The case came crashing down, and all the
ornaments t the porcelain figurines his mother used to collect, and those blue
Christmas plates from Sweden displayed along the upper shelf--were scattered and
shattered in a moment of wild sound. Aeryk stood in silence, staring at the
ruin, until his father came.

His father had been drinking. He always drank now, mostly beer. After Mommy's
death his father had started coming home from work sooner, but he'd been no more
present: he'd sit and drink and watch TV, and when the news came on he'd go to
bed. Aeryk and Bobby moved quietly when their father was home, as if somehow
they knew what lurked behind his eyes, waiting for a sound to set it free.

The first thing to hit him was his father's scream; then came the blows, one
after the other, in the face, in the gut. Aeryk curled into a ball on the floor
while his father kicked him, and for a moment he was sure that he would die. He
looked up at his raging father, and as he looked into his father's face there
was a change: a widening of the eyes, an opening of the mouth, a look of fear
creeping in and driving out the rage. And his father looked around the room, the
very room where his mother had been killed--and Aeryk saw the way his father
began to shake, the way the self-loathing settled in. Aeryk closed his eyes and
felt his own cold fear.

His father stumbled from the kitchen. After a time Aeryk rose to his feet and
limped into the living room. His father was curled up on the sofa, clutching a
pillow to his chest. Bobby stood at the edge of the stairs. Aeryk crossed the
room and sat down on the edge of the sofa. He put a hand on his father's
shoulder. He Wanted very much to cry.

After that he played the violin for hours every day, while his father closed
inward on himself and shut out his children even more. The music became Aeryk's
comforter.

He met Mary Pratt again along the Newport cliff walk, in the summer when he was
sixteen. She was standing on the rocks with her back to the sea, looking at the
great stone house which rose above the stretching grass like some European
palace, whispering the mysteries of wealth. She was balanced on her toes, her
body arched, her dark hair streaming in the wind. Her face was a mask of
rapture.

He did not recognize her, but when he saw her he knew that in all his years of
searching, the thing he had been looking for was her.

She did not seem to notice his approach, but when he stood before her, she
turned her eyes to him and smiled lazily, as if coming awake. "Hello," she said.
"I dreamed about you last night. We're going to be lovers."

"Lovers?" The word sounded strange to Aeryk. His friends in school had
girlfriends, or boyfriends. They did not have lovers.

She jumped down off the rock and faced him. "Do you remember me?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"I remember you," she said. "Maybe it's your baby face. You haven't changed so
much since you were little."

And then suddenly he knew. "Mary," he said. "Mary something. The one at the
funeral."

Her smile was radiant, and she took his hand and led him along the cliff. "Where
are we going?" he asked.

"To look for Faerie."

He followed where she led. He followed as she showed him all the secret places,
the quiet corners of the world where magic lurked so near that he could taste it
on his tongue. She took him to the cliff in Jamestown where the high school boys
would go to prove themselves in foolish manhood rituals, leaping from the edge
with their sneakers on to plunge into the still dark waters far below. And
Aeryk, who had never had the urge to join the other boys in such displays of
bravado, learned what it was like to jump and fall and hit the water: the sudden
thrill as rushing air was turned to icy froth; the adrenal pulsing in his face
and throat; the drag of his shoes as they soaked up water like heavy sponges;
the momentary confusion, not knowing which way led to air and life. And in the
instant before breaking the surface: the silence, the fragmented light, the
sense of utter peace and stillness. Aeryk knew he was on the brink of Faerie.

She took him to the coast at midnight and showed him how to hunt for crabs. And
as the moon reflected in the rock-trapped pools she ran her fingers through his
hair. In the shadow of the old lighthouse, as dawn splashed orange highlights on
the sky, she let him touch the pink cream softness of her breasts.

They were together every day throughout that summer. Two weeks after he met her
she shaved her hair over one ear, leaving behind a velvet fuzz, and she showed
up at his door with lips painted black and a spider pendant hanging in the
hollow of her throat. "I thought that I'd become a witch," she said.

"You look more like an angel to me."

Mary laughed. "Aeryk, Aeryk, Aeryk. You're always so corny."

He played his violin for her, while she lay at his feet with her eyes closed. He
played his own compositions, and somehow in the midst of it, she began to sing,
wordlessly--and her voice was pure and high and haunting, and it wove through
the resonating violin like a thread of light: a perfect contrapuntal harmony
that refined and purified his own roughedged compositions. The sound of her
voice made him ache, and almost cry. Soon he found himself improvising with her,
voice and violin intertwined; and in the heart of it, steady at the heart of
sound, they both could feel the gateway's presence.

Afterward they would have made love, had it not seemed so redundant. Instead
they lay together on the floor, holding hands; and she told him they would be
together forever, linked by music and madness and love.

A week later they found a stack of wooden planks in the garage. The wood had
been there for years, but Aeryk had never paid attention to it. It was Mary who
suggested that they build a tree house out behind the house. They built it in a
week, working several hours every day. Mary found some old roofing tiles and
some carpet remnants. They scattered old pillows in the comers and put movie
posters on the walls. When they were finished it was clean and intimate. "Our
love nest," Mary said, and Aeryk laughed. Then they did make love, amidst the
pillows, while robins watched with tiny, gleaming eyes.

He hardly saw his father at all that summer, but Aeryk was used to that. His
father had stopped drinking after the incident in the kitchen, and he'd thrown
himself into his work again: getting up before dawn, working at the office until
nine at night, or sometimes ten. Bobby was out with his gang of friends all day,
smoking or skateboarding or cruising the mall. The large old house was mostly
left to Aeryk and to Mary. When others were at home, they had their love nest
(their gateway) in the woods.

He never met her family. She said her mother was a drunk, and that they lived in
a trailer park: an ugly, dirty place where men wore Wrangler jeans and the women
still used light blue eyeshadow, somehow thinking that was beautiful. One month
after they met, Mary stopped going home at night, and stayed with Aeryk in his
room. He never introduced her to his family. There was no point. His father,
slipping in and out in the dark, never said a word.

FAERIE CAME TO THEM at last, wild and real, with the storm. The hurricane took
shape in the Atlantic ocean and swept toward land in the familiar way,
threatening the Carolina coast. But then it started moving north, and it became
clear that a piece of it might brush New England. Some of the locals made plans
to drive inland for a few days, others shuttered up their houses and prepared to
brave the storm. Aeryk's father left a note that he was leaving town, and that
his sons should do the same. Bobby laughed when he saw the note, then told Aeryk
not to expect to see him for a while, and he left the house.

Aeryk and Mary were left alone, and as they sat in the house watching the news
reports and looking out the window at the deceptive sunny calm, they knew what
was coming. At last it was coming, raging and seething: the doorway into Faerie.
And they would wait for it, greeting its music and its madness with their love.

It was a magic fantasy of youth, a reckless dream: amidst the thunder and the
wind they would make love, their bodies slicked and pounded by the rain.

The anticipation was almost more than they could bear.

They spent the evening before the storm reading to each other in Aeryk's room:
fairy tales and passages from The Lord of the Rings. Later, when the storm
arrived, they would go outside. Mary was downstairs in the kitchen, fixing
herself some food, when the first plump raindrops splatted against the window.
It was then that Aeryk's father came home. Aeryk was reading in his bed when he
heard his father's car, and a strange flutter went through him. He sat up in
bed, and he wondered if he should go downstairs. He heard the door open, and the
rumble of his father's voice. Aeryk closed his book and set it aside, wondering
why his heart was beating in his throat. And then he heard a grumble and a hiss,
and then a crash as something shattered on the floor.

Aeryk ran out of his room and down the stairs, seeing his father's form vanish
toward the back of the house, where the master bedroom lay. Mary was standing in
the kitchen doorway. A plate of sandwiches lay broken at her feet. Her eyes
glistened.

"What happened?" Aeryk gasped.

Mary's mouth worked silently. Her hand went to her throat.

Aeryk crossed the gap between them and tried to put his arms around her but she
jerked back. "What happened?" he asked again.

Mary swallowed and looked down. She shook her head as if to clear it. "He called
me your slut," she said. "There she is," he said. `Aeryk's little slut.' And
then he..." She looked down at the broken plate. "Oh, God. I made a mess."

"And then he what?" Aeryk took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes.

Mary poked at a sandwich with her foot.

"And then what?" Aeryk resisted the urge to shake her.

Mary shrugged. "He said that maybe he should kill me, too."

The wind was picking up outside. The rain was drumming against the windows. The
hurricane's full fury was still some time away.

Aeryk wanted to scream. He wanted to scream as badly as he had wanted to scream
so many years ago, in the limousine, driving from his mother's funeral. He
wanted to rage and kick and thrash. And he recalled the vision of his dead
mother, sitting next to him and warning him: He is closer than you think. He
remembered his father's twitching eyes.

He was bursting into his father's room before he knew that he'd left Mary's
side. His father was sitting on the bed. Aeryk struck him where he sat, struck
him across the face with his fist, hard enough to knock him back. And then he
leapt onto the bed, straddling his father's prone body, and grabbed him by the
hair. Aeryk wanted to choke him, to strangle him, to make him pay for all the
years of emptiness and coldness, to make him pay for the time that he was
beaten, to make him pay for his mother's death. His father stared up at him in
silence. Aeryk smelled the beer, as if his father had been bathing in it. He
clenched his free hand into a fist and tightened his grip on his father's hair.
"Why did you come back here?" he demanded.

His father opened his mouth, closed it. His eyes seemed glazed. "You better
watch out for that slut of yours," he said. "One day you might walk into a room
and find her naked underneath some other man. You never know when it will
happen."

Aeryk let go of his father's hair. "Fuck you," he whispered.

He heard Mary walk in behind him. "Aeryk," she said. "Come on, Aeryk."

But there was a wetness in his father's eyes. "I don't know who he was," his
father said. His head lolled off to one side. "They didn't expect me home. They
were on the kitchen floor, like they couldn't wait to get into the bedroom. She
was never that eager with me." Now that he spoke the words at last they came on
top of each other in an urgent stream. "I killed him first. He wasn't very big,
so he was easy to kill. Your mother fought harder."

"Oh, my God," breathed Mary.

Aeryk stared at his father's face, at the slackness of his father's mouth.

"It was his semen they found inside her." He closed his eyes. "That's why they
never suspected me. The DNA didn't match. I broke a window from the outside, and
buried our silverware with the man's body. Then I called the police."

"Oh, my God. Oh my God."

Aeryk stared in silence at his father. He heard the crack of his own jaw. He had
known. In a way he had known all his life.

The wind was starting to whistle through the windows. "Why did you come back
here?" he said at last.

His father let out a laugh. "For a minute there," he said, "I was hoping you
would do it for me."

Aeryk rose. He stood over the bed, looking down on his father. He saw what he
hadn't seen before, stuffed under his father's belt, like a tumor. "You should
have done it long ago." It was not what he had meant to say.

"Aeryk," Mary whispered. She came up behind him and put a hand between his
shoulder blades. He took a step back, into her, and her arms slipped around him.
Her breasts pressed up against his back. The wind was starting to howl.

"Don't do it, Daddy," he said.

His father sat up slowly in bed. He took the gun out of his belt, looked at it,
then tossed it away from him. It clattered on the floor. "I've always been too
much a coward."

Aeryk turned away and left the room. Mary trailed after. He sat down on the edge
of the sofa and stared at the floor, hearing the rising storm.

Mary sat down next to him. She put her arm around him and leaned her head on his
shoulder. "Oh, Aeryk," she said.

"The storm," he whispered. "Faerie." He turned to look at her. "Is my mother
still in Faerie?" he asked. "Or am I too old now? Time for her to move on into
heaven."

"I think she's there," Mary whispered. "Your Mommy and my Daddy, both of them.
Looking out for us."

Aeryk looked toward the window. The rain was beating on the glass and the wind
was howling and swirling searching for a way inside. "Do you hear it?" he said.
"It's a symphony. You hear the tremolo in the cellos? The pounding of the
timpani?" He lifted up a finger. "There. Triplets in the brass."

"And the violin," Mary said. "Weaving through it all, like that solo from
Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. You can't forget the violin."

The gun fired. They heard the dull thump of the body on the floor. The storm
raged on, indifferent.

Mary rose slowly to her feet. The tears overflowed her eyes. She held out her
hands to him.

Aeryk felt her fingers around his own, warm and soft and precious. He let her
lift him up. He tried to speak, but choked. She led him toward the door. As
always, he followed her.

The wind was wild. The rain came down as if the fundament of some heavenly ocean
had cracked, and the seas were pouring down. They ran hand-in-hand through the
storm, ducking falling branches, squinting and blinking as the water washed
their eyes. They stopped at the base of the tree house and stripped off their
clothes. They kissed each other in the raging wind, and even with the rain they
could taste the salt of tears. Even with the rain, their naked skins were hot
against each other. When their urgency became a pulsing fire in their
faces--when grief and loss were mingled with the wild thrill-- they climbed into
the tree house, and there made love. The rain poured through the open windows
and splashed against their joining flesh, and their moans were lost amidst the
howling of the wind.

The storm still raged when they were through. They lay side by side on the tree
house floor, fingers locked together. They listened to the storm's wild power,
and let it beat down over them, cleansing them, washing everything away,
everything but the swell of their desire.

Mary mouthed the words: "I love you." Her skin was flushed and beautiful. Aeryk
took her face in his hands, and felt his love for her like a madness. He moved
to kiss her on the mouth, and saw her sparkling eyes, and was just about to meet
her parted lips when it all went white, blazing white, and-- with a wild
crashing noise-- they crossed at last the threshold.

The sky beyond was pale blue with hints of yellow at the edges. It was
quiet--the loudest thing seemed to be the sun. In the distance, perhaps,
children played.

The picnic blanket was laid out carefully on the grass. The trees had leaves of
greenish silver that gave a rustle like foil and then were still again. Milk and
scones were set out, along with salad and raspberries and a dozen quartered
kiwis. The gravestone had grown into a marble monument of dancing lovers (their
ears pointed, their eyes slanted, the little nubs of horns upon their
foreheads). Aeryk felt Mary's warmth beside him, and he turned to look at her.
She was radiant and soft, and the redness of her cheeks was the redness of life.
She looked at him, smiling. "They come," she said.

Aeryk turned. His mother approached, wearing gauzy white and feathers in her
hair. There was a man with her he did not recognize, but he knew it must be
Mary's father. He had Mary's eyes.

They sat down on the blanket. He met his mother's eyes. She did not speak, but
she reached out and he took her hand and held it for a moment. There was sadness
in her eyes.

They ate in silence. They ate until all the food was gone. Then his mother took
his hand again, and at last she spoke. "You must love each other," she said.
"For us." He glanced at Mary, but her eyes were on her father, who was smiling
and reaching for her, cupping her cheek in his hand. She said something but he
could not hear the words, as if a veil of privacy enveloped them.

Aeryk turned back to his mother. She was so beautiful, he'd forgotten how
beautiful she was. "What about Daddy?" he asked.

She patted his hand and looked away. "He was always such a lonely man."

Aeryk heard distant laughter, the laughter of children. He heard the squawking
efforts of a novice violinist. He looked around at the still blue sky. The
sounds were coming from all around, drifting in and out. He heard the sobs of a
child's temper tantrum, the wail of a hungry infant. A high voice sang The Itsy
Bitsy Spider. The sounds came and went, distant, ephemeral: the children of the
world.

"You are a beautiful violinist, Aeryk," his mother said. "We have all listened
to you here." She smiled and patted his hand again. "Music," she said, "and
madness, and love. Take these things with you, hold them close to you. In the
hardest times, they will carry you."

The rescue workers found the lovers curled together, unconscious, amidst the
shattered remnants of the tree house. An EMT commented that it was a miracle
they lived. "Someone must have been looking out for those two," he said. They
found the father in the house, dead by his own hand, the mouth beneath his
ruined head shaped in an oh of surprise. There was also another body found in
the woods outside the house, many years old and mostly decayed. It had been
exposed by the beating rains.

The lovers were taken to the hospital, and cared for there. The nurses commented
on how peaceful they seemed, as if they'd both seen angels. Or, perhaps, seen
faeries.