Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Learid reappeared the following afternoon. It was cold and damp, and I was looking forward to an afternoon of doing absolutely nothing with my husband when I saw him peeking around the corner of the living room doorway.
I took advantage of the opportunity I had sit on the floor, legs crossed, hands folded in my lap and a patient look on my face. Henry was upstairs, and I would be able to hear the clomping of his tread on the stairs with enough warning to get to my feet if necessary.
“Would you like something Learid?” I asked the corner where I had just seen movement and a small dark shadow.
There was no response at first, and I made an effort to not stare directly at the space on the floor that looked like little more than a shadow with glowing eyes. The only reason he really stood out was that his mottled brown skin and dark hair didn’t really wash out with the white tiles we had in the kitchen. Maybe if he’d looked like white birch rather than any old twig it would have helped.
He moved forward a bit, stepping onto the tiles right near my foot. A small hand glanced across the back of my own.
“Will you go to where the books are today?” He asked in hushed tones, sounding more like a suggestion from another room than a living thing standing right in front of me with big imploring eyes angled up towards my face.
I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen talking to a man who was three inches tall, had purple in his spiky hair, and eyes like currants. This was the moment when I calmly got up, walked away from the hallucination, went to my husband and said, “Honey, please go commit me to the nearest mental institution.”
But I didn’t. I mean, I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen talking to a little man who looked like something out of Harry Potter but without the threatening claws and evil intentions. That I knew of at least.
I decided the best thing to do would be to answer the question. That’s what one does when faced with a tiny creature of possibly mythical origin, right?
“We may go to a bookstore tonight, but we haven’t decided on any plans, so no promises. Did you like…” I trailed off when I realized he was gone again. Just vanished from the floor at the apex of my crossed legs where he had been standing looking up at me. If I hadn’t heard the creak of Henry on the stairs moments later, I might have taken offense.
“Did you want to come with us if we did go?” I asked the empty room, but there was no reply.
We snuggled up on the couch, our feet burrowed under a throw with nothing to do but read the afternoon away. I really loved weekends for exactly this reason. It was even a small blessing that we couldn’t afford to spend a dime at the moment. There were fewer pressures to get out of the house and do things socially. We could be hermits with our books, and for once no one could judge us.
When Henry and I had gotten together, there had been some adjusting. I’d moved back east when it was suddenly serious. He’d accepted that I really did need to bring all the books even though it made the move so much more expensive. I’d learned about his life-threatening allergy to nutmeg that Christmas. Not fun to spend that much time in a hospital at the holidays but what do you do when your fiancé suddenly turns bright red after sipping a few times from the special holiday concoction you’ve brought him? He had learned that I was liable to completely destroy a kitchen with no notice just because I felt like cooking something different.
The most pleasant discovery we had both made upon moving in together was our equal love of the written word. Sure, my nose was often buried in something ancient and not infrequently romantic in some way while he was more likely to be flipping through a newspaper or financial magazine, but part of what made him so wonderful at his job was that he read every bit of financial news from around the world every single day and could actually translate complex situations into digestible bites of information for the clients and senior executives at his company. He was nearly indispensable to them.
“Pen, did you move my glasses?” he had asked that morning when he entered the living room with two mugs of coffee and a heavy newspaper pinned under one arm.
The glasses in question were usually kept on the shiny side table on his end of the couch. Out of reach of the dog but still at hand whenever he could possibly want them. A quick search of the floor around the table turned up nothing. I got down on my belly and peered under the couch’s skirt.
I came face-to-nose with Learid. He stood over the curved metal that usually rested behind Henry’s ear, yanking on the rubber cover to the end. All movement stopped when light slipped under the skirt with my hand. He didn’t bolt off to the shadows that were creeping towards him and seemed to want to pull him into their fog. With one hand I reached under the couch and carefully nudged him off his prize, pulling them from beneath the couch with a quiet “found them” for Henry’s benefit and a last smile for the frozen little man.
“You made me coffee?” I teased. Henry always made enough for both of us. I was the one most likely to forget to make enough for two.
“Yes, I am hoping it will lull you into a false sense of security so I can spend the day enticing you to make your roast chicken for dinner. There will be the promise of foot rubs I will probably never deliver, all the coffee refills you could possibly want, and perhaps,” he pressed a not so chaste kiss to the curve of my chin just below one ear lobe, “a kiss or two to bend you to my will.”
I smiled at the man. He was not subtle; he would never be subtle; and I completely adored him. “Chicken for dinner it is! But I’ll require a kiss or two before I can make any promises about its preparation.”
Long arms wrapped around my waist and lifted me into the air, the attack refocusing on my lips with sweet insistence. I wrapped a leg around his hip and both arms around his neck sinking the fingers of one hand into the hair at the base of his skull and exploring his mouth with my own. The paper dropped unceremoniously to the floor. I giggled into his mouth when I heard it crinkle under his foot as he shuffled forward to prop me against the moulding in the doorway.
“Kissing you,” he exhaled deliciously into my neck. “It’s one of my favorite things.”
“Kissing you,” I shot back, leaning away from him so I could scatter loud, smacking kisses to his cheeks, “is totally my favorite thing to do.” Then I pushed back and unwound my leg and arms from him, dropping down to sternum height again and pulling his face with me for one final lingering smooch.
“I suppose I can roast something up,” I sassed. “Since you asked so nicely.”
I danced away from his grasping hand and collapsed on my end of the couch, pulling a novel into my lap and smiling up at him with one hand out for my coffee. My lips tingled, partially from the smirk and partially from the kissing. There was something rewarding about seeing your husband of three years still a bit dumbfounded just from making out, which he was, standing across the room from me with a silly look on his face until he shook himself a little, handed me the coffee and gathered the newspapers we’d dropped back into his hands.
“You know, I wasn’t finished there,” he muttered playfully.
Pete, the rescue dog we’d brought home a few years ago, slunk into the space between us, laying his head on the curve of my hip and thumping his tail against Henry’s leg until he lifted a hand and absent-mindedly stroked the speckled flank it was attached to. Pete was of “indeterminate” breed according to the shelter. He looked like a dog, maybe with a little bit of retriever in him and some terrier but aside from those little clues, it was unclear what pack of canine he could call his own. We loved him. That was all that apparently mattered in his mind. He followed us from room to room, and street to street when we took him out for long meandering walks in the neighborhood. The kids down the street adored him because he would stand stoically while they patted his head and attempted to climb onto his back.
I wonder now if the general sense of calm he exuded wasn’t partially what kept Learid in the house rather than running at the first site of a furred beast with four legs. The one or two times I saw them actually interact, Learid showed no great fear and Pete could not have been less bothered by the walking and talking twig man who sauntered between his legs like he owned the joint.
“Yes I realize you weren’t done. But we’ve already christened that particular part of wall, and I think that we should branch out.” I smiled over the top of the book in my hands. “And I really want to actually read this book this afternoon.”
Henry rolled his eyes at me. Branching out wasn’t something he was overly fond of but he seemed to take my need for adventure with a pretty even keel so I didn’t complain too much when we did the same things over and over again - even in the bedroom. It was always fun regardless. Silence descended over the living room, and I was content, nothing more than the whisper of pages turning and the occasional huff of the dog.
I’d never seen Learid saunter so brazenly across any open space, and there was no way that he didn’t know that we were there. I had just seen him under the couch, and in the time since we’d locked eyes, Henry and I had both settled heavily into the cushions above his head. But not twenty minutes after our eye-rolling and christening discussion, I saw movement at the corner of my eye. Movement enough to distract me from the words on the page.
He was moving steadily from the shadows of the coffee table out into the pattern of the rug. I couldn’t help but notice the ingeniousness of his camouflage. The swirl of dark blue and red provided shading dark enough that his brown and purple coloring blended well. But he was still moving, and if his goal was the bookcase he seemed to be making his way to circuitously, there was a lot of open space between him and it. Thank God Pete was a dog, and old, and couldn’t care less about something the size of a mouse moving across the floor. Henry was another story.
The couch shifted underneath me. Henry was staring at the floor. He had shifted forward and was focused on the little man. He must have noticed me noticing him at that moment. Our eyes met. I quirked one eyebrow.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” he asked out of the corner of his mouth.
“Learid, you’ve been noticed.” I chose to address the fairy - I hadn’t been able to come up with any other classification for him. He didn’t have wings but he also didn’t have pointy ears and pointy shoes so I was basing my label off everything I’d ever read about size and shape and features of fictional beings. Fairy was all I’d come up with that was even close even if he didn’t have the wings I had always assumed were part of the package.
He froze but didn’t dash back for cover or forward to his goal. He just stood stock still trying his hardest to blend into the pile of the carpet.
“Unless you have magic skills in those twiggy little hands of yours, we aren’t going to suddenly forget that we saw you,” Henry said. He was taking this with much more calmness than I had ever expected. I hadn’t noticed the twigginess that first time I had seen him but Henry was more observant.
Nothing seemed to happen for a second. Learid stayed frozen. We continued to stare at him. Then he surprised me - as much as a fairy you’ve just become accustomed living with can surprise you, I mean - and spun around to step back across the living room, scaling one leg of the coffee table and stand at attention next to my coffee cup with his hands behind his back and a general air of a soldier presenting himself for casual inspection. He moved very fast when he wanted to.
“And who are you?” His voice was harder than it had been before and louder. Before I had heard pages rustling in the other room and a question so quiet it was more like a suggestion than actual sound waves. Now it punctured the quiet of the room.
Henry snorted inelegantly from across the couch as the cushions moved under me and he hunkered down to make eye contact with our visitor.
“I am Henry - the husband. Who are you?”
“I am Learid of Libros.” I swear I saw him move to bow, but he stopped himself in a moment.
“Of Libros? What is Libros?” We asked in unison. Henry was taking this much better than I thought he would. Not a week before I had been wondering if I would be trying to convince him not to commit me to an institution if I tried to explain the situation to him without proof in front of his eyes.
“Libros is my home. It is where the books are captured and bound and released into the world.”
I paused to think about his explanation. A place where books were captured, bound, and released. It didn’t sound quite the same as what I always imagined happened to get a story out there. I thought it was something like an author made things up. I could even deal with an explanation that was more “we inspire the books” like a muse out of ancient Greece. Of course I could imagine that kind of thing. But that wasn’t the tone of my little friend. It was his use of the word “bound.” It didn’t sound like pages strung together with string and glue but like a wild creature tied down and in captivity.
“And what are you doing here, Learid? This is not a place where ‘books are captured and bound’.”
He turned and regarded me with one raised brow before turning to spin slowly in a circle and take in the entire room that was lined with bookshelves, the written word, anything you could read with your eyes and hands.
“This is not a place where books are captured, no. But this is a place where books live.”
“And you want to be in a place where books live?”
“No I am doing research on places where books live. We must find new sources or the stories will die out. I must find them.”
“And you’re searching for new stories here?”
“You don’t understand. Stories are wild. They flit through the ether. At one time - long ago - no one had stories. The only way to capture them was through song. We had tried before, but only singing to the characters and the land would bring them together to form an entire beginning, middle and end. Then, many centuries later, we learned of ink and feathers and the magic of nature that could bind a story to a living skin. Through dance and the fencing of song, we were able to solidify some of our captures. The words moved across parchment and vellum, the living skin of creatures great and small, and were recorded for everyone to share.”
“At points in time, the methods have changed slightly. We created machines to spread the written word farther and farther around the world and taught humans to use them. Stories became the anchors that bound your society together and made sure that everyone of every color and every place had grounding tales to remind them they were all from the same world.”
“Now the stories are running out. We are finding fewer and fewer in the channels we used to hunt. They are weaker. They lack a central line to the heart. Our continued way of life depends on my success.”
With the end of his story, the tick, tick, tick of his hard feet tromping back and forth across the discarded newspapers, glass coasters and coffee table stopped. He had been making his way in circles around the outer edge, both hands behind him. This was the most I had seen of him for an extensive period of time. The dark coloring I had taken for skin tone and camouflage appeared now to be tattoos that swirled around his arms, neck and into his scalp. His outfit was similarly patterned and looked to be made leaves or bark, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
“Well what can we do to help?” Henry’s words surprised me. Sure, just offer the fairy we’ve never heard of before into our home and let’s offer to help him on his quest.
“I am searching for an opening. There is an opening in a story to rewind the central line and link everything back to the well. But something is blocking the opening. Something has pulled the flow of story from its natural course, and we don’t know what it is in the shelves. We can’t find it.”