Chapter 4
Chapter 4
The words he used were all English (and I had questions about where he’d learned English) but they didn’t make sense. Stories weren’t something that were hunted. They came from the minds of men and women who were learned and admired. If what Learid said was true, then stories had never come from brains but were flitting through the air all around us all the time. We had been bumping into them daily, inhaling them with every breath and tasting them with every meal. It was mind-boggling.
Henry stood at this point, towering over the tiny man on our coffee table, and stretched. His voice scratched and reverberated in his chest as he asked, “Why should we believe you, little man?”
The fairy snapped back at the question. His chin drew in and he looked offended. “Henry! Don’t be rude.”
“Why not?” he shot back. “He shows up here. There’s nothing to prove that he’s not here to simply rob us blind or at least magic us to the point of stupidity. Why should I trust the words from his teeny tiny mouth?”
“Oh maybe because he’s been here for at least a week and neither of those things have happened?” I asked the question without thinking and probably had the tone of a recalcitrant fifteen year old, but I didn’t care.
“He’s been here a week?” Henry raised one brow in my direction - a skill I usually found too exciting to ignore for long - and turned the full force of his attention on me instead of splitting it between us. I began to stutter.
“Yes, I mean, I saw him for the first time about a week ago, I guess?” I tried to catch Learid’s to confirm my timeline, but he was busy staring at my husband who towered five feet over his head. If he’d had them, his heckles would have been up. I almost lost my concentration just looking at his face.
“Why does it matter how long he’s been here? It’s not like he’s done anything except climb around in the bookshelves.”
I feigned nonchalance and relaxed back against the couch cushions, pulling my book to my knees again and hoping that we would change the subject with my shift in position. Henry collapsed next to me after breaking into a grin.
“Do you really think that I would believe any creature who loved books as much as you do would be a danger? I’m fascinated to learn that he’s been here a week though.” The raised eyebrow turned towards me again, and I had the good grace to blush. We usually shared everything, but I had kept this from him - he had been my secret.
“I haven’t taken anything except the knowledge that you all have a wide-ranging love of stories.” Learid paused for a moment, his chin turned up and his eyes squinting into the corners of the room, nostrils flared. “There is something here that is off though. I hear a buzzing underneath the stories in the air. A noise I can’t turn off it would seem.”
“A buzzing?” Henry’s interest was piqued, and the questions about secrets and knowledge were swept away and around the corner for the time being.
“Yes,” Learid paced the length of the coffee table slowly before taking a running leap and landing on the cushion right in front of my knees. He climbed hand-over-hand up the crocheted blanket I had thrown over my legs until he stood on my kneecap, crouched alertly and listening hard.
With another leap, he was on the back of the sofa, running across the couch cushions above Pete’s head. The old dog followed his movements with pitched ears and eyebrows. Learid ignored him. Halfway across the cushion he stopped, leaning forward not unlike Pete would have after a particularly cunning squirrel when he was a puppy.
“What is that?” One spindly arm rose from Learid’s side and a slender finger pointed at the table behind the couch, reliquary of all our forgotten mail, magazines we hadn’t gotten around to reading and various papers from Henry’s job. They were all pinned under the slender grey tablet reader neither of us had used since our last vacation. When we weren’t traveling, it was little more than a paperweight in our house.
“Newspapers, magazines, mail, the everyday detritus of life,” Henry ticked things off on his fingers as his eyes took in the mess.
“No that,” Learid stated, pointing more matter-of-factly and hopping onto the papers before climbing on top of the shiny device. His wooden feet clicked across the surface. “This is not paper. It is none of the things that you have said.”
“That’s my e-reader,” I supplied. “I download books to it, read them when we aren’t close to our books or are on the road. It holds a lot.”
“It’s disturbing. I can hear the stories but I cannot see their threads as I normally do. Can you not?” He crouched down, sliding his knobby fingers across the glass tentatively.
“Hear them?” I rose up on my knees, dislodging Pete’s head from my hip, and twisted to get my face as close to the table as I could. Learid moved backwards from his crouch, not rising but tugging on a small fistful of my hair, pulling my ear closer to the glass.
“Can’t you hear it?” He whispered.
I could hear Pete breathing heavily behind me, grunting unhappily at having been moved; Henry’s lack of audible breath really just proved that he was listening as hard as I was. Learid was silent beside me, one hand still twisted in my hair.
I didn’t hear anything.
“I’m sorry - I don’t hear anything. Not even the battery is whirring. It’s an old model. I probably need to charge it.”
“This thing is silencing the stories. They are being ripped from the paper and no one will be able to see them. They will be forgotten” He spoke the words quietly, and I could feel his fingers unwinding from my hair, unrooting himself from my person and drawing inside himself. He was gone before I could lift my cheek from the tablet. Henry’s hand was soft on my lower back.
“He was there,” he said quietly. “And then he was gone. What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s found the answer he was looking for?”
There was much to talk about but the grief in Learid’s voice in his final utterances left us with little desire to unpack all the happenings of the week. Only Pete sighed with relief as we both turned back to our Sunday reading, both distracted by the twig man and his story.