Young Writers Society

27 MIDNIGHT TEA

It was a twenty-minute walk to the Book House, and Christian spent every moment of it looking over his shoulder to see where the hellhound had gone. Every shadow that flickered in the light of the streetlamps, every rustle of the bushes could be a monstrous dog stalking them. Once or twice he thought he saw something fly overhead or whip around a corner, but each time he tried to get a closer look the shadows faded into the night. His heart pounded in his throat.

“You alright?” Liza asked. She had shed her suit-coat, which was slung over one arm with sweat-stains in the pits, and she was barefoot except for her nylons. Her high-heels dangled from her fingers.

With an effort, her companion pulled his attention away from a particularly menacing shadow and focused on the street. “Fine.”

“It was quite an ordeal,” Liza said, and then they fell silent.

It was with a massive sense of relief that Christian finally unlocked the door of the Book House. The cuckoo clock in the reading-room chimed the half-hour: it was half past eleven. Liza sank into the reading-chair, rubbing her temples. The orange cat leapt into her lap to greet her.

“Ugh. What a day.”

Christian offered her his bed and took a spare quilt to the reading-room to curl up on the loveseat by the window. His head and feet hung over its arms even when he had scrunched his body up as small as it would go, but it didn’t matter; he couldn’t sleep anyway. He twisted and turned on his cushions, stopping to listen at every noise from outside.

The house settled into the silence of the after-midnight hours; the cat curled against his stomach to sleep. Once, Christian heard the floorboards creak and shivered beneath his quilt. After a moment of listening, however, he heard nothing more, except the ticking of the cuckoo clock over the reading-chair, and decided it had been the floorboards and walls shifting. He burrowed deeper into the quilt, listening.

There was another creak, from the direction of the kitchen.

He sat up, threw off his blanket, and crept into the foyer armed with a flashlight, prepared to hit hellhound or harpy over the head if one had somehow gotten into his house. The floorboards creaked again. Liza appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Can’t sleep either?”

Christian put the flashlight down and shook his head at his own stupidity. No evil creatures had broken into his home—of course they hadn’t. But he was so used to being the only person in the house.

“No,” he said.

“Care for a cup of tea?”

Without waiting for him to answer, she shuffled back into the kitchen and flipped on the light. She was at the sink when Christian entered, filling the kettle with water from the tap. He sat at the corner table by the window to wait. In due time the kettle was singing on the stovetop, and not long after that the table was laden with a tea pot, two mugs, milk, and sugar. For a long while, they drank their tea in silence except for the odd comment on the events of the evening.

Then Liza said, “It’s my fault, you know.”

Christian blinked. They had not been talking about anything in particular—and he was sure she didn’t mean the bus incident was her fault.

She folded her hands around her mug and gazed into the depths of her tea as though speaking to it instead of Christian. Her voice was as calm as if discussing the weather, but a tear traced its way down her cheek and quivered at the end of her nose. It fell into her tea with a soft plop.

“When we were younger—”

She stopped, cleared her throat, and began again, “When we were younger, I thought it was so magical that he was a balloon-artist. You know? And he had this charm, such a way with people—”

Conrad, Christian realized, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Of course she was talking about Conrad. The cat sauntered into the kitchen, hopped onto the table, and rubbed against her arm. She scratched its ears absently. Christian bit back the urge to tell it no pets on the table.

“I used to be like that,” Liza was saying. “But somewhere along the line I became a stick-in-the-mud. I don’t go out anymore. And it’s so hard to talk to people these days—”

“You?” Christian said, forgetting the hellhound and his discomfort by surprise. “But you always know just what to say.”

Liza shook her head. “I just know how to make it look like I do. But it’s hard. It takes effort. And I don’t know when it got to be that way. I’ve tried so hard to be—I don’t know—fun, or interesting, or sociable, or whatever I was when we met, because I thought it would be hard on him to be stuck home alone except for a wife who’s gotten to be a bore, and now he’s run off anyway and it turns out I’m not any better at being alone than he is.”

Her eyes scrunched up as if she was about to cry again, but she breathed deeply through her nose until her face relaxed into its usual calm expression.

“I went to the police, you know,” she said.

Christian’s stomach clenched. “What—what did they say?”

She took in a long breath and gave a drawn-out sigh.

“They asked me about his behavior recently and what the circumstances were, and when I told them he’s been going out at night, they—they laughed at me. They said the best thing for me to do would be to go home and wait for him to come back, and if he didn’t I could consider myself well shot of him and start looking for a new husband.”

Christian watched her as she took a long drink of tea. She caught him looking at her and said, “I’m fine.”

She certainly wasn’t fine, but her voice was steady and her expression calm. Her willpower amazed him. His stomach turned as she took a handkerchief from a pocket and blotted her eyes as if bothered by nothing more than allergies. He couldn’t bear to see her trying to look put-together when he knew she was miserable—but what could he say?

His mouth decided for him.

“He’s alright—”before he could stop himself. “Mostly alright, I mean. There’s his leg, but—”

She stopped in the middle of raising her tea to her lips and stared at him over the rim of her mug. Christian swallowed. Slowly, she lowered her mug and set it back on the table.

“What do you know about this?” she whispered.

“Liza—”

“Christian Abernathy, if you know where my husband is, you tell me this instant.”

Her nostrils flared.

“You won’t believe me,” he said.

She leaned over the table and glared at him. “Try me,” she said.

28 THE TRUTH

Needless to say, she didn’t believe him. He started with Celadon Park, jumped back to his introduction to it through Conrad, and then realized it would make the most sense to begin with the balloon-artist’s tale. He moved back and forth through the story with no concept of time or logic. Minerva, the roses, Conrad’s leg, the ringmasters and harpies and hellhounds and Rovers and the Fair all figured in his narrative as he gazed at the kitchen table, telling his story to the book titles glinting up at him from beneath the glass tabletop.

If he had looked up now and then, perhaps he would have seen Liza’s expression change. Her glare had been fixed in the beginning, but as he talked her face slid into a look of disbelief and then horror. But Christian, unable to face the glare he thought she still wore, stared at the table and talked himself hoarse until she broke through his babble.

“Christian, stop it.”

He looked up. Her voice was constricted, her eyes wide and glazed over with tears.

“Liza?”

“Stop—just stop it.”

Christian’s heart fluttered in his throat. This wasn’t right; she was supposed to be comforted by knowing where her husband was, or—or something like that, he thought.

“Liza,” he said, “what’s wrong?”

Her eyebrows shot up, and she slumped back in her seat.

“What’s wrong,” she said wonderingly. “What’s wrong? It’s—it’s fantastic. It’s unbelievable.”

“Oh,” Christian said uncomfortably. A memory of the balloon-artist patting his leg at the same words glimmered at the top of his mind. “Well—yes. Yes, it is. But—”

Tears leaked from her eyes, not from sorrow and loneliness this time but horrified tears at her friend’s apparent nervous breakdown.

“Either,” she said, “you are mocking me in the cruelest way I could ever imagine, or you’ve finally read too many books and lost your grip on reality.”

“Liza—”

“And I’m going home.” She pushed away from the table and strode toward the front door. Christian stared after her for a moment and then jumped up and followed her.

“You can’t go home now. It’s three in the morning, the buses won’t be—”

“I don’t need a bus.”

She snatched her shoes from the foyer and opened the door. Christian reached for her hand in desperation.

“Liza, you can’t—that hellhound could still be out there—”

She swung around to face him, glowering at him through her tears.

“Let—me—go,” she said in a low voice.

He released her hand but called after her as she marched off the front stoop and down the street. “Liza—Liza!”

The night had grown cool and foggy, so humid that Christian’s hair curled into ringlets about his ears and forehead as he watched after her. Liza strode into the mist with her high-heels hooked over her fingers. He gazed into the fog long after she’d vanished from sight, his brow furrowed and his hair growing curlier and curlier.

The ivy on the park wall glinted in the fog. Christian brushed the damp hair out of his face.

A hellhound howled somewhere beyond the wall.

Christian skittered back inside his house and slammed the door shut. His heart pounded as he peered out the foyer windows, but silence had fallen again and he could see nothing but fog and the dim shape of the wall.

The cat crept into the foyer and wound around its owner’s legs, mewling uneasily and starting at odd noises. The cuckoo clock chimed four. Liza would be home by now, Christian thought; he should call to make sure. But if he called now, she would surely know it was him, and perhaps she would refuse to answer the phone, and he would have no way of knowing if she’d made it home safely or not.

His heartbeat calmed gradually as he sat on the foyer floor, peeking out the window every now and then to check that the street was empty. The fog swirled. The cat tensed and stared out the window with glowing eyes.

“What is it?” Christian asked, for he could see nothing but fog. The cat twitched its tail at him in reply. The sky was the dark blue-grey of the pre-dawn hour; the Fair-folk would be packing up to go through the portal soon.

Exhaustion draped over the accountant like a blanket. He slipped into sleep there on the foyer floor, his slumber riddled with unsettling dreams in which harpies and hellhounds chased him through the maze and he could not find Conrad or Minerva, no matter how long he searched.