by Scott Taylor
“The basement has grown significantly.”
“The basement?”
“Yes.”
“It’s grown?”
“Significantly. Including its new additions.”
“Even the new additions have grown?”
“Yes.”
“Significantly?”
“Significantly.”
Duncan sipped the coffee he hadn’t asked for. It was fine. Good, even. Remarkable, that they would have a coffee maker in this little portable trailer. Grandmother would have gotten a real kick out of it. He smiled, although a part of his chest had become tight and hot.
The coffee was louder when Charity drank, swallowing the whole cup at once. Her coat, with its sawblade shoulder pads, was such a vibrant red that she might have dried up and died if she spilled any of the coffee. Besides, she was busy. She had a regimen of sharp-heeled pacing to get back to, glowering at her whiteboard and Duncan in turn, waiting for one of them to give her an answer.
“I don’t have a key to the house anymore,” Duncan said simply, that tightness pulling harder on his ribs for a second. “Haven’t since I was seventeen.”
“Well neither do any of them,” Charity chimed, frustration tuning her sing-song voice scordatura. She reached into her pocket, cherry red leather rustling, then held a heavy iron key on its old brown string.
Duncan watched it sway like a dog watching a cat’s toy. “What happened to her beads?”
Charity started pacing again, though each time she turned around, she put the key in her other hand so that it was always facing Duncan. “What beads?”
“The ones on the key. Did you put them somewhere?”
Her free hand spasmed openly. “Haven’t seen them, maybe they’re in the house!” Then her other free hand joined in. “And do you really think the Strangers care who has the right key?”
“They’re Sídhe.”
“They’re trespassers!”
“Well… how did they get in?”
“Do I look like an expert to you?”
“Actually, wait, no, there are a few other ways in. Never mind.”
“…Like?”
“I used to climb the hawthorn tree sometimes, when my mom forgot to call ahead and Grandmother was out for the night. The thorns hurt, but you can get to the roof from it, you know. Grandmother usually left the window open.”
“So you could climb in?”
“No, she just left a bowl of milk in the sill at night.”
“Why?”
“Because the foxes would get it if she used a first-floor window.”
“…Well no wonder the house is infested now.”
“Oh no, not with foxes?”
“No!”
“Right…”
Charity wiped a bit of sweat off her brow, then readjusted her hair—also cherry red. Her words became hobbled, as if she followed them with a shillelagh and bashed in one knee each. “I am prepared. To offer. Twenty percent of my commission. If. You. Get. Them. Out.”
That was probably a lot of money, considering the difficult kinds of sales Charity took on. But if Duncan took a parting gift before he even set foot in the house, surely the Strangers would know that he didn’t belong there.
Duncan sipped at his coffee. It was colder now. He pushed it away.
“Duncan, we’re friends,” Charity said.
“Of course we’re friends.” He looked at her with alarm.
She stared, clearly waiting for more, but Duncan wasn’t sure what more she wanted. She started tapping the key against the plastic table. “Okay, how about thirty percent?”
“I’ve never done this kind of thing before.”
“It’s easy.”
“Have you done it before?”
“Yes. It’s easy.”
“Then how do I get them out?”
“I don’t know!”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Fine. Thirty-five percent.”
“Will you look for her beads while I do it, in case you did take them?”
“Yes, fine, whatever, yes.”
Duncan took the key. It was lighter than when he was a kid. But, there was still a carefully-wrapped covering of fabric along the haft to keep his fingers safe from the cold metal.
The foxglove had come to greet him as usual, brushing against his fingertips. The flowers seemed warm, as if someone had just worn them. A blue perfume scent hung on the air, and always on the edge of his ears were the bees, humming their impatience, reminding him that he was not to linger in the front yard. He hesitated to go in, though, without seeing the back first.
As he walked beside the house, it watched.
Bare wood and peeling cream paint burned white in the day, and the windows looked to have been ever-so-slowly melting over the past few years, such that the upstairs hallway draped a languid, certain gaze over him.
Far behind Grandmother’s house were the woods. Impossibly tall things of needles and glorious bark, spiriting away the sunlight in their green cloaks to hide all their small, treasured denizens.
But close behind Grandmother’s house was only one tree. The hawthorn. It stood in a patch of bare dirt, as its vast and regal roots would not share cups with any other creature.
Now, though, it was not entirely alone. A long carpet had been rolled across the ground, with Grandmother’s mismatched, brightly-upholstered chairs arranged to flank it. And at the end of the carpet, beneath the shade of the hawthorn’s crown of boughs, was Grandmother’s wicker lounge.
A man sat in it.
Duncan had suspected that, as a child, he’d sometimes encountered the Fair Folk in the woods behind Grandmother’s house. But never one who so confronted him with the fact of its existence.
His skin was bark, his face ringed with deep green leaves. Though his eyes were but twisted knots of wood, they peered at Duncan with a familiar derision.
The last time Duncan climbed the hawthorn tree, his hand had pressed on a spike along its bough. Stiff wood pierced skin. A smear of blood remained on the branch where before there had been an adolescent boy. Duncan could still make out the patch of packed dirt that had pummeled his chest, left his limbs tingling, driven the light out of his eyes. When his vision returned, he stared up into the Hawthorn’s crown. And it had looked down at him just the same.
Duncan’s mouth was dry. He didn’t dare speak to this Sídhe, lest it answer. But there was something that gave Duncan pause, kept him from turning tail right then. The Hawthorn King’s head was ringed around the top with a faint, scratched impression, as if something was meant to sit there.
When the Hawthorn King turned to look at him directly, a stiff and uncomfortable motion, Duncan backed away.
Better not to stay outside any longer.
Duncan returned to the front of the house. The back door hadn’t worked in years. Not since he’d tried sticking a pen into its lock to see if he could figure out how to pick it. With the cunning of a small child, he had never told Grandmother how it got stuck, and with the cunning of someone who had another perfectly functional door on her house, Grandmother hadn’t bothered paying to get it fixed.
The old front stairs creaked as usual, but a new trio of mushrooms had grown from them. Duncan knew better than to anger such strange things, so he stepped carefully around them and slipped his key into the lock.
The door swung in without conviction, like lips mouthing a curious word.
Down the hallway, the kitchen was soaked in light. But it was the thought of water that filled Duncan’s head as he stepped in. A faint, hissing sound suffused out from the walls.
There was water flowing through the pipes. Flowing down. Her French press was in its usual cupboard, nestled just above the counter. Duncan rubbed the ornate metal knob of the tea drawer, teasing out its little swirling design. It kept his eyes busy such that he wouldn’t be so tempted to look at the basement door, the only possible destination for the flow in the pipes.
Before the narrow stairs.
Bestowed with mismatched hinges.
Beholden to an iron latch.
Betrayed in untouched purpose.
Beyond was untamed dark.
The tea drawer pulled out with a polite rumble. Maybe the basement’s utility sink was on. None of it was labeled. The water from that sink hadn’t been so bad. He picked a cotton sack full of dried flowers with a faint dark-blue tint. Although, the water did start to taste like rust after two nights down there.
Grandmother must have meant to finish this tea.
Duncan found himself repeating her movements. The way she half-stepped back to the cupboard, stretching an arm to grab the honey. His feet shuffled with the same dry murmurs. He pinched the tip of the French press with the same thumb and middle finger, and pressed down with relentless, slow motion. And when someone else walked spritely into the kitchen, just as he used to, Duncan’s head spun toward the doorway with her same guarded surprise.
It seemed to Duncan that the Stranger wanted something from him.
The head of a fox looked back at Duncan, tilted to the side. The Stranger’s hands were covered in soft, dark fur, but his body was clad in woven hawthorn leaves—their stems tied firmly together like the links of little chains. A soft wool overcoat draped from his shoulders, unbuttoned and hanging down with his leaning posture. Duncan knew it didn’t belong to this Sídhe—although it fit him well, with his tail perched under the back of the coat.
The Sídhe did not speak, but his vulpine eyes sparkled with worry. He first put a furred hand to his chest, then swept it graciously around the kitchen as if to say, “Welcome, make yourself at home.”
Duncan nearly kicked himself. Already, he was one step behind the Sídhe. But, as the strange fox stepped over to the table with rhythmic, musical motions, Duncan cleared his throat and quickly pulled an extra mug from the cupboard.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” He asked, trying to mimic Grandmother’s gracious tone whenever she’d had her book club over.
The Sídhe’s eyes narrowed, the fur of his scruff raised, but of course he was unable to refuse. He simply nodded.
Duncan dared to press his victory. “Cream?”
This time, the Sídhe’s fuzzy fingers tapped at the table. But it seemed he couldn’t resist, and nodded again.
“Honey?”
The strange fox let his snout fall close to his chest, ears flicked back. Already, he’d been bested so thoroughly by a Son of Mil. Despite himself, Duncan felt badly for the… well, intruder didn’t seem like the right word.
As Duncan turned on the sink, the Sídhe’s head perked up, and he gestured frantically at the fridge instead. Duncan opened it to find Grandmother’s water filter, halfway full.
She’d always said she couldn’t stand the mineral taste.
This Sídhe could make all the requests he liked, it just let Duncan be a better host.
Duncan prepared two mugs—cream and honey in both—and by the time he looked back, found that the strange fox was playing with a line of small mushrooms that had grown from the kitchen table. The rows of mycelium traced through the table’s legs, down into the floor, and surely even farther beneath.
Duncan sat across from the Stranger, and softened his expression as the strange fox spent a moment quietly exploring the mug’s handle.
“This kind of tea isn’t supposed to have cream and honey,” Duncan said. “Grandmother would always get frustrated when I asked for it.”
The two of them waited for the tea to cool. It smelled nice, floral.
Then, the Stranger lapped at it, flicking droplets carelessly onto the table. Just more food for the mushrooms, Duncan supposed.
“Hey—” Duncan started, trying to be careful with his words. This Sídhe didn’t seem particularly imposing, but surely he was a subject of the Hawthorn King outside, “did you turn on the water in my basement?” It almost sounded natural to call that part his, since nobody else ever went down there for long.
The fox shook his head.
Duncan sipped down most of his tea. “Then who did?”
The Sídhe finished his own mug and, while licking his chops, slanted both of his hands above his head. Duncan thought of branches at first, but… he peered closer. The fox’s fingers weren’t pointed outward like a crown of boughs, rather pointed together like the crest of a roof.
“How could a house…” he trailed off. Abandoned places drew strange things to them, it wasn’t worth questioning.
Duncan finished their game of host and guest by taking their empty mugs to rinse in the sink. He spoke quietly, the words feeling like splintered wood in his gums, “Thanks for stopping by. I should probably let you head out, right?”
The Sídhe, having thoroughly lost, rose from the table—but rather than make eye contact and respond to the question, he turned and skulked back into the rest of the house before Duncan could object.
Duncan wasn’t about to be cheated out of his victory that easily.
The familiarity of the dining room was nearly as disconcerting as its changes.
Grandmother’s bookshelves loomed over the space, every strip of colored spine in the same order that Duncan had made a childhood game of memorizing. The same candlestick stood in the center of the table, the same half-melted blue candle rising shyly from it.
Duncan noticed a bizarre pattern in the strange fox’s steps before he vanished on the other side of the room. His paws moved carefully, avoiding little, pale things that wound their way between the floorboards. Roots. New, and spreading. The feet of chairs and bookshelves were held fast, as if the roots warred with the fungi for dominion.
The air had its old musty smell, but so too was it green and grassy, a promise of milky sap and shoots and mushrooms. It was damp in Duncan’s nostrils. He took a great breath, and continued on his way. He could hear the Sídhe running upstairs—toward Duncan’s old room.
It had been nice to sleep in Grandmother’s house. With his mom and dad, there was always the hand of a clock nudging him forward, the time to trade him back and forth.
He was never supposed to be here. He simply was. The house hadn’t demanded he justify it.
At the far end of the hallway was his room. The door sat awkwardly in its warped frame, but he knew how to plant his shoulder against it and shove.
Inside was a place of dust and sunlight, streaming as it was through a large window that overlooked the backyard. In fact, the sun poured unabated, as the window was open. He passed his bed—unmade and messy, with a pillow adorned in orange, black, and white hairs—but paused before he reached the windowsill.
The side table should have been bare, scuffed wood. Instead, a circle of bent wire sat there, graceful in construction but clumsy in material, threaded with dye-stained wooden beads. “There you are,” he mumbled, peering at the circlet. It was thin and a bit tarnished, bent and reshaped from a coat hanger.
Before he could pick it up, something yipped sharply, dragging his attention back to the open window. The Sídhe sat on his haunches, on the very edge of the roof. He still wore the overcoat but looked very small compared to the hawthorn tree behind him. Immortal, as Grandmother had called it. A crown of green leaves whose spines and skin caught the sunlight like spears, and utterly overwhelmed the strange fox in their shadow. It was as old as the house. Older than Grandmother. Every summer, they’d had to hack and cut at the branches that grew too far, as they threatened the roof below.
Grandmother once said, after watching Duncan climb it, that she would ask the tree kindly not to drop him, though she didn’t think it would listen.
The strange fox glanced back at the hawthorn, and padded nervously to the corner of the roof, beyond the tree’s shadow. Then, he leapt backwards.
Duncan stared at the empty space where he’d been for a moment. But, when he turned back to the room, he caught a glimpse of an orange tail disappearing into the hallway—and the wire circlet missing from the side table.
The pipes hissed in the walls, but Duncan had a fox to chase.
Despite the Sídhe’s natural speed, Duncan began to catch up.
It was the roots. They moved before the feet of the strange fox, stumbling him. Worse, they coiled whenever his paws rested too long on the floorboards. Only by scrambling and lurching onward could the Sídhe keep from being ensnared.
He clutched the crown of beads so tight that the metal nearly punctured his skin. Otherwise, it surely would have fallen, clattering, into the greedy roots.Duncan didn’t move delicately. His strides simply tore any roots that tried to hold him.
By the time the Sídhe reached the front door, his bristling tail was close enough that Duncan could reach out and grasp it. But he held back, the walls of Grandmother’s kitchen looking down at him with scrutiny. Was Duncan really going to risk hurting a guest? The Sídhe flung open the kitchen door and leapt from the porch, tumbling into the flowers beyond with a great combustion of pollen. As Duncan came to a stop at the top of the stairs, the Sídhe struggled back to his yellow-dusted feet.
Had he turned and fled into the forest, Duncan could have caught his breath, assured of his claim to the house, and walked bold-faced back to Charity. But the strange fox, resolute in his lowered shoulders and desperate in the tail tucked between his legs, trudged instead toward the backyard.
Duncan wondered if the house had planned this somehow, to make Duncan come back this way as he followed the fox.
Because, of course, there was the basement door.
Beneath the side of the house.
Between heaping flanks of dirt.
Bedecked in chipping cream paint.
Before he’d moved in as a teenager, Duncan had used it nearly every time he visited. While voices clashed and smoldered in the kitchen, he could spirit his way down the side yard and into the dark and quiet.
The strange fox hurried his pace past the door. Duncan slowed. Both, Duncan was sure, could feel the cracks in its paint watching them.
By the time Duncan rounded the corner to the backyard, the strange fox had already placed the crown on his own head.
He stood, fuzzy snout lifted, moth-bitten coat draping from his shoulders, chest puffed as he dared to meet the eyes of the Hawthorn King.
Those wooden knots seemed unimpressed.
The fox stood his ground beneath the house. He quickly tried to readjust the crown, which kept slipping from between his ears, and made sharp little noises that must have sounded so certain and unquestionable before they left his throat. He stomped a paw on the dirt.
The Hawthorn King reached out a hand, impatient.
The strange fox lowered his head, trying to rile up his bristling fur.
But for all the fire in his eyes, the strange fox could only cower away as the Hawthorn King began to stand, with such terrible creaking slowness, from his wicker throne. The Hawthorn King’s head turned to Duncan, but the anger in his furrowed bark brows had stuck in the fox’s fur like pitch. He looked at Duncan like an equal.
His parents had looked at Grandmother that way.
Duncan turned away to keep the pit in his stomach from opening up to swallow him, and found himself watching the strange fox.
It was evening now, and the Sídhe would have cast a long, lovely shadow across the back of the house. Were he not already standing in the hawthorn’s.
The strange fox stared at Duncan, imploring him.
“None of you are supposed to be here,” Duncan murmured, feeling immediately that his lips had gone bloody, unfamiliar in swollen numbness.
The strange fox clutched the crown to his chest now, giving up its place on his head. He looked up, while the windows of the house looked down, and sprinted back the way he’d come.
“Wait!” Duncan called out.
Between the walls of dirt.
Bereft of the basement key.
Before he could be made to leave.
Bestial hands turned the antique doorknob, and it opened.
Behind Duncan, the Hawthorn King held out a grasping hand toward the basement door, and an open and generous palm toward the house.
A simple trade. Duncan’s domain for the Hawthorn King’s subject.
In the basement, there had been concrete. Four walls. Old dusty things had split the room apart, bones of a life in the den of a quiet beast.
But the beast had grown. Significantly.
Duncan stepped through the door, and his shoes threatened to slip on wet boulders. Delicate, luminous mushrooms covered nearly every cavernous surface. And pressing obscenely through the stalks and caps like an unwelcome knock at the door, were roots.
Cool, clear, dark water filled the grotto. One cave became many by will of stony columns held together by mycelium and mold. Piles of great stones rose from the water, algae shimmering in the reflected light.
Duncan looked down to be sure there weren’t roots waiting to rise up and hobble his leap—he knew better than to trust that tree. But the roots clung tight to the ceiling and walls, refusing at each turn to draw close to the water.
Duncan heard the familiar flow of the basement sink. His mouth went dry. He turned in the direction it should have been, and found that the cavern stretched well beyond the foundation of the house itself, out under the backyard. It was too far to see the sink, but the strange fox was just close enough. A small thing, curled in on himself as he sat on the edge of a great, wide stone, not but a few inches from the water—as far from the roots as he could be, without getting wet.
Both of them froze as the flow of the sink became a groan, a growl, a roar muted by the dark water and vibrating through the very stones at their feet.
Duncan was still. He didn’t have to go further inside. It wasn’t worth it, no matter how much Charity’s thirty-five percent might have been.
What sort of person could possibly claim this house as his own?
He turned back to the basement door. It looked at him.
It would close if he looked away again. His bones knew it. Would it obey the bearer of the crown? The Hawthorn King? What would become of the strange fox? He didn’t belong down here.
Duncan would have to be an idiot to try jumping across these rocks. So instead, he nudged off his shoes, and jumped into the dark water.
The surface swallowed his head so quickly. For a long moment, he flailed and sank. But, just before his ears revolted and popped in his head, his bare feet came to rest on a surface so flat, so rough that it could only be the floor of an unfinished basement.
The house had caught him. Then, the floor shifted beneath his feet and rose, until his spasming arms split the placid lake, until he was returned to the light of the fungi, until the water could only rise up to his waist.
While Duncan doubled over and hacked up some of that dark water, he found it tasted just as it had years ago. Cool. Alive. It would have been pleasant if not for the heavy edge of dissolved iron.
The fox’s eyes shone wide, far down the stretching cavern. He tried to hide the crown with his curled knees while the basement groaned around him.
Duncan must have looked pathetic and wet. But he took a deserved gulp of air and walked. The water slowed his strides. It barked each time his thigh broke the surface tension, and it cushioned him each time he stumbled against some of the rocks. He stepped up to the fox’s castaway throne.
The strange fox had to shift his feet every few seconds to keep from slipping into the depths.
The rushing hiss of the sink became blood in the air, circulating back and forth across Duncan’s ears. When he took one more stride, to stand before the strange fox, some of that blood dashed across his paw.
The strange fox tried to stifle a yip. But his whole body betrayed him with a panicked recoil. He shook that paw desperately to cast out the water. The crown hung limp in his hands, easy to grab, and he inched onto a higher part of the stone.
“It’s going to keep rising,” Duncan said. But, of course, if the strange fox owned the house, he would have turned off the sink already.
Grandmother’s beads caught the light of the mushrooms above them, and did nothing, no matter how the strange fox clutched at them.
Duncan didn’t take the crown. He stepped away from the Sídhe. He drifted a few fingers in the cool water. “She never went down, you know.”
Duncan crossed the rest of the distance to the basement sink, while all around him the walls groaned in pain. The roots were thick on the ceiling above him, close to the heart of the hawthorn tree, as they dug through the foundation.
The sink gushed, a wound trying to clean itself. Duncan reached for the knob. It was finicky, but he knew how to handle it. He lifted one side of the little porcelain wheel and pressed down on the top, to keep it from just spinning loosely without actually turning the water off.
As the hiss of the pipes gave way, the basement moaned, asking him to help. Duncan dipped a hand down into the basin. He rooted around for a second, then his palm brushed against something thin, hard, and plastic.
He pulled out the old cup. A crack down the top half dribbled out most of the water, but he couldn’t complain. He’d put it there, and he doubted he’d need a full glass. A poor host was still a host.
The water had been cold and heavy in the basement, but it refreshed him in the sunlight. Duncan strode through the tall flowers and fungi, his late evening shadow sweeping across the entirety of the backyard. He found the Hawthorn King sitting just as he always did, heavy in his wicker chair.
Duncan looked over his shoulder, past the gnarled trunk of the old tree, to where the sun just barely peeked through the woods. It was dangerous, when the sun rose or set, to walk a path owned by the fairies—that was when they could come and go, and take someone with them. Duncan walked down the dirt path, to the tree.
Those eyes of knotted bark were frustrated with him, of course, for returning without that fox and his crown. The Hawthorn King moved as if to stand up, and Duncan took the chance to say,
“You’re right, it is getting awfully late, isn’t it?” He held the water out toward the Hawthorn King. “Do you have time for a drink, or should you be heading home?”
The Hawthorn King reached defiantly for the cup—until his thumb touched its side, where a thin line of water was dripping down from the crack. The boughs of the tree shook, thundered above them. The Hawthorn Man snapped his hand back and slammed a fist on the wicker lounge, snapping some of the cords in its arm. His glare made demands, orders, declarations.
Duncan put the cup against his lips and took a long drink. Then, as he swallowed the last of the iron taste, answered, “You should get going then, it’s almost dark.”
He turned and walked back to the side of the house. Then, resting a hand on the warm hide of the great three-story beast, glanced back over his shoulder.
Beneath the hawthorn tree, in the first sunless shades of dusk, was an empty seat.
After a few nights, Duncan had gotten comfortable with the ever-present shifting of the house. A creaking, murmuring thing that he couldn’t ever pin down.
The dark grotto, much to Charity’s anguished groaning, had remained. But it meant that Duncan had more time. Nobody, as Charity had insisted, wanted to buy a house with something like that under it. And the only way she could even hold on to the listing was if she could get someone to tend the place for free.
So it was, Duncan stood by the kitchen window, looking out at another night. The stars were thick out here, revealing their gestalt shape in the creamy galactic arm.
He sipped from a mug and quietly thanked Grandmother for her French press. It was a kind thing to do, making another person something to drink. Usually, at least.
He looked down from the stars. Kitchen light leaned out from the window, revealing the shape of a tall stalk of foxglove in the yard.
Duncan found a shallow bowl in the cupboard.
He opened the fridge.
The cream seemed to like the bowl’s shape as it poured.
Although its little lock was stubborn, the kitchen window opened smoothly, welcoming in the cool night with its daring flower perfume.
Duncan set the bowl gently on the windowsill.
Scott Taylor (he/him) is a short story and novel writer most interested in speculative and surreal fiction. He works as a fiction editor and lives in Bellingham, Washington with his family and a decisive black cat. With a fascination in the hidden wonders and terrors of the world, Scott explores multiple media of art, from prose to playwriting to music, finding that each medium feeds into the others.
Scott’s short story “The Stoneshaper” was featured in Summer Solstice: Life Expectancy.