“Who’s there?” I called out. No answer, only a furtive muffled sound.
I called out again.
“Go away, Aniday.” It was Béka.
“You go away, you old fart. I’ve just come in from the rain.”
“Go back the way you came. This hole is occupied.”
I tried to reason with him. “Let me pass by, and I’ll sleep somewhere else.”
A girl screamed and so did he. “She bit my damn finger.”
“Who is there with you?”
Speck shouted out in the darkness. “Just go, Aniday. I’ll follow you out.”
“Vermin.” Béka cursed and let her go. I reached out in the darkness and she found my hand. We crawled back to the surface. Stinging rain gathered in her hair and flattened it against her skull. A thin layer of ice caked over her head like a helmet, and the drops collected on our eyelashes and streamed down our faces. We stood still, unable to say anything to each other. She looked as if she wished to explain or apologize, but her lips trembled and her teeth knocked and chattered. Grabbing my hand again, she led me to the shelter of another tunnel. We crawled in and crouched near to the surface, out of the rain, yet not in the cold earth. I could not stand the silence, so I yammered on about the father and son we had followed and Igel’s instructions. Speck took it all in without speaking a word.
“Squeeze out that water from your hair,” she said. “It will dry faster that way and stop dripping down your nose.”
“What does he mean, he found a child?”
“I’m cold,” she said, “and tired and sick and sore. Can’t we talk about this in the morning, Aniday?”
“What did he mean that he’s been waiting since I got here?”
“He’s next. He’s going to change places with that boy.” She pulled off her coat. Even in the darkness, her white sweater threw back enough light to allow me a better sense of her presence.
“I don’t understand why he gets to go.”
She laughed at my na?veté. “This is a hierarchy. Oldest to youngest. Igel makes all the decisions because he has seniority, and he gets to go next.”
“How old is he?”
She calculated in her mind. “I don’t know. He’s probably been here about one hundred years.”
“You’re kidding.” The number nearly fried my brain. “How old are all the others? How old are you?”
“Will you please let me sleep? We can figure this out in the morning. Now, come here and warm me up.”
In the morning, Speck and I talked at length about the history of the faeries, and I wrote it all down, but those papers, like many others, are in ashes now. The best I can do is re-create from memory what we recorded that day, which was far from truly accurate to begin with, since Speck herself did not know the full story and could merely summarize or speculate. Still, I wish I had my notes, for the conversation was years ago, and my whole life seems to be nothing more than reconstructing memories.
That my good friends could one day leave profoundly saddened me. The cast of characters, in fact, constantly revolves, but so slowly over time that they seemed permanent players. Igel was the oldest, followed by Béka, Blomma, Kivi, and the twins, Ragno and Zanzara, who came late in the nineteenth century. Onions arrived in the auspicious year of 1900. Smaolach and Luchóg were the sons of two families who had emigrated from the same village in Ireland in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Chavisory was a French Canadian whose parents had died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Besides myself, Speck was the baby, having been stolen as a four-year-old in the second year of the Great Depression.
“I was a lot younger than most of the others when I made the change,” she said. “Except for the twins. From the beginning, there have been twins in this line, and they’re impossible to take unless very young. And we never take babies. Too much trouble.”
Vague memories stirred the sauce of my thoughts. Where had I known twins before?
“Luchóg named me, because I was a speck of a girl when they snatched me. Everyone else is ahead of me in line for the change, except you. You’re the bottom of the totem pole.”
“And Igel has been waiting for his turn for a whole century?”
“He’s seen a dozen make the change and had to bide his time. Now we’re all in line behind him.” The mention of such a wait caused her to shut her eyes. I leaned against a tree trunk, feeling helpless for her and hopeless for myself. Escape was not a constant thought, but occasionally I allowed myself to dream of leaving the group and rejoining my family. Dejected, Speck hung her head, dark hair covering her eyes, her lips parted, drawing in air as if each breath was a chore.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
She looked up. “Help Igel.”
I noticed that her once-white sweater was fraying at the collar and the sleeves, and I resolved to look for a replacement as we searched for the boy.