The Planes

Marie stared at herself, who was standing three feet away. She had to be lit, like a candle. Then she flared into existence, flickering. Marie hadn't pictured herself this way, but perhaps the other Marie, the one three feet away, staring at her with an identical expression of apprehension and distaste, felt the same way about her. 

"I'm not sure I have this all quite down," said the Marie who could take a seat without setting it ablaze.

The Marie with eyes like fire looked exasperated. "Why not? It's very simple."

"For you, maybe. I didn't know there were two of me, let alone a hundred."

"There aren't a hundred." There was a brief pause as that Marie flickered and almost gutted. Then she was steady. "There are infinite us. Us's. However you'd like to say it."

"And they're all like you, are they?" Marie eyed the other Marie's feet doubtfully. They were blue, like the heart of a flame, and didn't quite touch the floor. Neither did her own, but the chair was quite high. And she was wearing fluffy bunny slippers.

"Of course they're not. And they're not all like you. I've only met a few, but we're all the same, and we're all different. That's the purpose of coming from other planes."

Marie furrowed her brow. "Don't you mean other worlds? Alternate universes, and that sort of thing?"

"I mean what I said. As far as I know, other worlds are all about physical stuff. You know. There's an us with fur, and an us made out of a gold, and an us grown out of a tree like a branch. Planes are different. Planes mean time and matter and space. We've got old versions of ourself, and versions that don't exist in the physical world, and versions that are just sounds, and a version that's just a pair of eyes with no mouth. God, I pity me. Us."

Marie opened her mouth and closed it. She thought she needed a drink. "I'm getting a drink," she announced, and went to the cabinet where she kept glasses. She offered one to the other Marie, who was standing a little too close to her bookcase for comfort. 

"No thank you." The other Marie's tongue was also a flame, with a blue root. "One sip of alcohol does me in. I just blaze up and then go out."

"Ah." Marie poured herself a glass of scotch. She drank. Then she poured another. "I don't understand one thing."

The other Marie, the other her, groaned. "What now?"

"Why are you telling me now? Why tell me at all? What do you want with me?"

The other Marie shifted uncomfortably. A single spark went up from the end of her ponytail. "Because I'm not sure what else to do. The planes are... in trouble. I'm not in charge. I'm not sure what's going on. But I can only get me- us- to help. So... you're all the help I've got right now."

"Help? What am I supposed to help? What's wrong?"

"The best way I can put it is this: The world is ending."

"Ah." Marie drank her second glass. She had a feeling she would need a third. "And there's only us to stop it?"

"So far."

Marie poured a third glass. "Oh dear."

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Earl King

Earl King will do you grevious harm.

If your parents warn you about witches and gouls and monsters under the bed, they should warn you too of the Earl King. Child-snatcher. Wood-eater. King of the hunt.

And as beautiful as a summer's night. He is like the throne of the forest. White as birch, a perch for birds and small beasts. Where he treads in the leafy aisles between trees he leaves no tracks. Nightingales nest in his antlers, morning doves, and love birds. Entire dawn choruses are sung from his antlers.

Like a timid fawn, he approaches children and shy maidens. But timid fawns do not have eyes as old as the woods themselves. They do not have eyes with teeth. They do not swallow people whole.

Where the woods go, he goes. Where the hunt goes, he goes. If you dream of a bow and arrow, of Orion the hunter, of the path the moon carries through the night, you may wake to see the Earl King in the shadows of your room. And it will be too late to make a sound.

Earl King is silent.

Earl King means you grevious harm.

Art by Stephanie Pui-Mun

Text by Lucie MacAulay 

The Shadow Month

Once, in a very old house, at the end of a very narrow lane, two children lived with their mother. The children were very content in their old house.

In the winter, when the floorboards felt like ice and they put off getting out of bed as long as they could, they made fires in the stone fireplace in the drawing room, and pretended to read the books with no pictures inside.

In the spring they went tot he attic and let the birds in, scattering crumbs on the floor, holding as still as they could to coax the birds into their palms.

In the summer, when the house swelled with heat and the apples burst with juice on their branches and the grass turned green and then withered in the hot dirt, they raided the blackberry bushes until their hands were brown with dirt, purple with juice, red with blood where the thorns had scraped them, and leaned against the old ash tree in the backyard that someone had told them was to ward off evil.

In the autumn they watched leaves fall from their branches like flakes of gold from gilded statues and lay on their backs thinking of their wonderful summer, and also thinking of candy-flavoured hot chocolate in the coming months.

Then there was the inbetween month. Their mother did not believe in this month, and insisted that when they were older they would grow out of such fanciful tales. The children did not think you outgrew the inbetween month.

This was not a month when grass and trees flourished, when wind blew, or water fell, or the wind howled, or the sun burned.

This was a month when shadows grew.

They grew long and black and thick as ink puddles. And not just puddles, but streams and rivers and oceans of shadows. They reminded the children of the shadows in between houses, and of the shadows between the underbellies of beds and the floor, and of the shadows in between rooms in long, dark hallways.

The children kept at least two candles lit at all time in the inbetween month, in case one blew the other out. They kept their eyes on the shapes of the shadows, lest one turn into a hand or a mouth and come too close. When the girl was scared she held her brother's hand as they climbed the stairs and went down the corridor. When the boy was scared he climbed into her bed at night and pulled the blanket over his head. But the shadows, they realized after the third year in the house at the end of the lane, were not very frightening.

And they left presents.

The first present was a black flower. Not red-black, or purple-black, or blue-black. It was blacker than black, blacker than night. Like a piece of the world cut out in the shape of a flower, a stencil through which the children saw the void. The shadows left it in a vase on the girl's bedside, so when she woke with her brother (who had crawled in just before midnight), they saw it open its petals like a hand uncurling its fingers.

The second present was a black cat. The children were not sure at first what it was. It vanished in direct sunlight, and was skittish. When they held their hands out to it the cat fled. But at night they felt its black paws on their cheeks, its warm fur against their necks, its purring like a triphammer.

There were other presents: black candies that tasted like several fruits at once, or like honey, or like chocolate, or like ancient seeds pried from pods that had lain in the sun. There were sugarplums with black sugar. There was an old book with blank pages that, when the children flipped through it quickly enough, showed them a story of a shadow house and the girl inside it who lost her shoe. There was black paper and black pens, black ribbons and black bows, black glass sculptures and even a black knife that looked like sharpened shadows.

When the children's mother finally deemed them too old for such stories, and sent them to bed when they tried to tell her that she could see the black cat in just the right light, the children became angry.

In the winter they would not come out of their beds at all, keeping their feet warm and the fireplace cold. In the spring they did not venture up to the attic, and watched the birds out the window instead. In the summer their mother was dismayed by the animals that came to eat the blackberries that had fallen off the bush in the backyard when no one had bothered to eat them. In the autumn there was no one to watch the leaves turn colour, and they curled and turned brown and became a graveyard of leaves.

Then the inbetween month came again. This time the children were ready. When the shadows left them presents on their beds they kept their eyes open, hoping to see faces. In the hallways they stared at the shadows, and held out their hands. The shadows were as skittish as the cat had been. But the shadows were lonely, and they took the childrens' hands. And the children knew what it was to belong to nothingness. To the absense of light. It was the most peculiar thing. They knew what it was to be the space in between two things when the shadows took their hands their arms. They knew what it was to be the space in the world where only void shone through, when the shadows had swallowed them up to their necks.

Then they knew what it was like to be shadows, and to live without seasons and months and houses and blackberries.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay