I actually found this fic while browsing through my old floppy dicks (ahh the days of minimal hard drive space) and was surprised to find that, despite being at least a year old (and probably older), I could find few qualms with it. This was surprising, as back then I was hardly an insane grammer and spell checker and would frequently turn out stuff of less-able quality than today (not that I'm perfect now, either). it's not my best work but it does show a certain old-style skill which I appear to have moved away from in more recent years. I'm not sure if I'll continue this, but I did want to show it off a little, so I hope you enjoy it.
All characters featured are © to Scarab Dynasty as of 25/06/2004.
Changeling Gateway.
One.
'I've decided to call him Jake.'
Romilly's voice was trembling as she fought to utter that chosen name out loud. Even before she had started to speak, she had known what Ira's reaction would be. He was already standing there looking ready to pass out, a bat gripped in his shaking hands and his large eyes wide (even the bad one) as they stared at the monstrosity sitting hunched over at the end of the crib.
Romilly continued to stand perfectly still and listen to her heart thudding.
It wasn't the first time a knife had flashed, threateningly over her neck and heart. Romilly's family lived in the danger zone; the very heart of Amacity, where every fifth person you met on the street was someone out to kill you. Usually people started worrying if they reached the close-down at six-thirty and a shot hadn't been fired in their direction or a trap sprung under their feet or somebody's throat hadn't been slit open by guards as they tried to get over the security wires into the Dead Town.
'Oh God, Rom. You've got to be joking, tell me you're joking.'
She just wasn't used to the weapons being clutched in the fingers of infant monsters that was all. Most people were sensible enough to lock out the faeries, hang up their Yule flasks and keep them away.
But Romilly was a young girl, barely older than a child herself. She just hadn't paid enough attention, and now the price of her ignorance was the creature sat on the bedpost over the empty crib, clutching the red teddy bear in one hand and it's two-pronged Bodkin in the other. A baby's silky face (too silky, Romilly thought, too silky and pale and generally ugly) in a baby's cotton-cream smock.
At first glance, and even second, it had looked like Molly. In fact it had taken Romilly several minutes to notice that its cheeks were the wrong shade of grey and its hair was white, and its legs jutted in the wrong directions. It had sharp splintered teeth and it's eyes and lashes were startling rainbow, touched with the soul-deep green of fairy foliage -scattered, remnants of the parasitic world it came out of. Its eyes glittered with the ability to kill. It could easily murder the man who stood there with a baseball bat clenched in his fists and would have no problem with doing so. The only reason it hadn't yet, Romilly knew, was that it had been left to this girl in this house.
Even Changelings didn't go around killing the... friends of their foster mothers. It wasn't practical.
'No,' Romilly whispered, looking at Ira. He had short, dark hair and slight cheek bones –just like baby Molly's had been– and eyes as hard as stone, though one of them was thick and black and blind - had been that way for years. 'No, it needs a name, Ira. I'm... I'm going to keep it. We're going to keep it.'
She turned back to the thoughtful stare of the Changeling's bright eyes. It's sharp, ugly face, she thought grimly, made Ira look almost like a saint. 'If Molly was a boy,' she said, 'I would have called her Jake.'
'That's not Molly,' Ira spat. 'Yasuis, Romilly, you can't keep it. It's a Faerie!'
'I know that,' Romilly said. She stepped slowly towards the Changeling, trembling, though the small, red-lit bedroom was reasonably warm, even whilst filled with the draft from the open window where the muddy curtains were still flailing, the material scratched and torn by Faerie fingers. Her shadow passed through the light of an oil lamp and ricocheted into the Changeling's eyes, hurting it.
The Changeling's four fingers tightened around its knife. Then it leapt forwards, slashing at her neck.
Romilly didn't scream as the Bodkin sliced into the skin of her throat, leaving behind a sliver of blood. She kept her lips pursed with pain and shock, but she didn't recoil or waver. She couldn't remember ever being so brave before. Normally other people called her the biggest coward in town. Yet now she stood there refusing to budge, even when the Changling let out a single witchlike cry.
And the Bodkin –the knife itself– screamed with him: a scream that almost pierced her eardrums. Splinters of grey, dust-like Faerie magic burst from the shining blade as it shrieked out loud, swearing and cursing in a thousand ugly languages.
The dust of those Tongues started to leak into Romilly's skin where it had been cut. The Faerie's magic was already boiling in her blood and rushing upwards, hard and fast towards her heart and brain, like a migraine. Romilly felt the heavy, devilish thoughts of Faerie magics thicken in her blood. She was betrayed by the beating of her own heart as it forced the faerie-infested powder round and round until it riddled her whole body like corridors in an ants nest within a matter of seconds. Only then as a series of sharp, short explosions seemed to fire within her brain, did Romilly let out a cry of pain.
Ira swore and flung himself at the Changeling like a man without fear. The Changeling -Jake, Romilly told herself- screeched in alarm and dropped the Bodkin on the bed as Ira flung his bat towards it, only for the little creature to catch it in its fists and drag it forwards out of Ira's grip. It lurched out at Ira's throat as it had at Romilly's, pulling shards of wood from the broken bat and stabbing at his neck.
'No!' Romilly yelled. She reached out to tear Ira back. The Changeling was clutching his throat and scratching at him with hard little claws. Then it leapt, catlike onto his shirt tearing at the skin of his face, until he thrust at it with his elbow and flung it away, then pitched himself back into the three legged stool where the oil lamp sat burning.
The lamp fell to the extremely inflammable floor and smashed, amongst hay and broken shards of wood and newspaper cuttings. A heavy orange blaze leapt out of the broken glass like an imprisoned monster escaping and rose up, eating into the wood and cut paper, burning ink bubbling and leaping with the flames. 'Watch it!' Ira cried, catching a choked breath. 'Romilly, put it out!'
The Changeling squealed in horror, scrambling to hide in the crib and knocking the teddy bear so it rolled under the bed, as Romilly beat on the flames with her slippers until they died into smoke and black dust.
'Little swine!' Ira yelled, gasping with fright and clutching his face, covered in bleeding scratches. The Changeling peered over the cot and mimicked his scowl. If this was to be its father, Romilly imagined it thinking, it had probably been better off in its mudnest. Or wherever it was they had grown the thing.
Romilly resisted the urge to start screaming again, or crying. Her hands trembled, her palms were sore where the flames had burned her, her lungs felt raw from the smoke. Her eyes travelled about the room, from the crib where her week-old baby had lain, to the smouldering black curls of the newspapers, to the window where the cold air rushed in over her thin bones.
'Shut the window,' she breathed.
Ira glanced at her in disbelief. 'I said shut the window,' Romilly repeated. 'Don't let it out into the streets. We don't know where the Snipers are, it'll be shot if it goes out there.'
'Romilly,' Ira said, an almost begging note in his desperate voice. 'For the love of God…'
At the uttering of the word God, again, the Changeling winked its many-coloured eyes and clutched the remains of the broken bat and the bodkin a little more tightly in its hands. Romilly's eyes skipped from the baseball bat to the window. Outside in the blackness, somebody was, for some insane reason, trying to make a break for it across the open streets. They could hear the Snipers shooting, a ricochet of pellets making sharp, hard thumps against the tarmac.
'Romilly...'
'Ira you can't let it get shot no matter what it is.'
'God, heaven and seven hells woman, why did I...'
'Ira, please.'
'...Ever get bloody engaged to...' he stopped and sighed. 'Alright.'
Ira looked uneasy, but all the same, he edged in the direction of the window. The Changeling sat and watched him as the window latch clicked shut. Then it reached out a single, thin finger in Ira's direction. He lurched away immediately in alarm.
The Changeling drew back, rocking the crib and sniggering, and that was perhaps the most frightening thing about it. For where its screech resembled the call of a cave bat or an angry rodent, its laughter was soft and bubbling. A perfect mimic of how Romilly imagined Molly might have sounded when she laughed, if they'd had her long enough to hear her. No wonder so many parents were fooled. The Changeling picked at the lace of the newborn baby's bedclothes. For a moment or two, ignoring them.
Romilly wasn't a stranger to faerie arrogance either. She'd always heard that the things were born with it in their veins -arrogance and superiority and the idea that their kind was somehow better than all others. Since nobody usually saw faeries so close, or stayed for long in their company, such assumptions could not be ascertained. But at this exactly moment, the ideas seemed true enough.
'Now, Ira,' Romilly said, evenly. 'Out of the room.' Ira's one good eye flickered with suspicion.
'Out?' he repeated. 'Romilly, what are you doing?'
'I'm going to leave it,' Romilly said, 'and yes, I know it won't go away, it thinks it's mine, now,' she added on the end, guessing that was what he was about to say next. 'Anyway. I want to talk to Karin.'
Lines of desperation crossed Ira's face, highlighting his eye and inviting a morbid kind of fascination.
'Romilly—'
'We're going to have to clean up this… mess,' Romilly said quickly. She wiped a hand along her throat. The wound was thin and numb, but there was no pain or blood any longer. 'I need a cloth, Ira, Hurry.'
The Changeling let them leave the room. It let the door slam and the key click in the lock. Then it sat there alone in the room with angry thoughts in its head and human blood on its nails. Its prickly mind, for some reason dwelling on a single word Romilly had spoken, God, trying very hard to figure out what it meant.
There is a scientific explanation for the existence of Faeries in this strange world I'm creating here (I always described it as a cross between a 1984, Modern suburban Durham, a sci-fi thriller and Gotham City, (for those of us who know out comic books, if you don't know comic books, just think about the locations seen in "a dark and stormy night" style gangster books, and you're sort of halfway there) , but that information can be saved until another time. I hope this chapter was good enough to warrant a review, and perhaps some constructive criticism. I like that. I like that very much.
Thanks for reading this far, either way.
-Scarab.