Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Ehrlich, there’s something wrong with our son.” The words fell like dropped change from Cora Greaves’ lips one morning, clattering across the stone and glass countertop to make coffee in a mug at the other end quiver expectantly. Heavy things. Heavier still the head that barely nudged from the morning paper to acknowledge them.

“Something we should be concerned about, pet?” A slight rustle of paper and she felt the familiar weight of a single dark eye settling over her.

“The groundskeeper found him on the estate this morning.” Cora continued evenly, picking up the dropped change one coin at a time and counting it: There. Is. Something. Wrong. With. Our. Son. Subtotal + taxes and all other associated fees of raising a child = 0.00$ NO SALE

“He was camping by the lake like some sort of...indigent--you know that poor man almost called the police on him?”

The newspaper was finally retracted to reveal a thin, stern face with hair that faded handsomely black to grey at short sideburns. Ehrlich Greaves was a darkly attractive man at 46, a perfect offset to his wife, who sat at an elegant 41. “That’s the fourth time in two weeks,” he said, brown eyes pinching shut. “Have you by chance asked him where this new affinity for the outdoors has come from?”

Cora tried stacking the change differently in her head.

Is there something wrong with our son?

There is.

Subtotal, taxes, total = 0.00$

“I was too mortified to ask. Even if I wasn’t he didn’t say a word to me. Just, took his morning shower, ate the breakfast Karina prepared and went to school.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s the matter but I simply won’t tolerate it. Greaves don’t rough it. I’m going to call Doctor Lang and have him come by after dinner tonight--set out the Orcadian Scotch he likes.”

Yes, that was the way-- when your child was...ill, you called the doctor. She put the dropped change back into her purse and remembered to zip it. Tightly.

Chapter Text

The cards were a meditation, the swift fwipfwipswish blending into the flicker of a projector that played behind her son's eyes. Although she couldn't see the images, she sensed them when their eyes met--amber orbs distant; slightly sad and sometimes fearfully wide. Maggie hesitated in front of the open bedroom door, waiting for him to notice her.

"Albert? Sweetheart?" 

"Yeah mom?" 

"Did anything happen? You've been..." she paused, searching for a word that wouldn't betray her worry. "You've been quiet since the amusement park last month."

The red-head shrugged. "Just tired-- school's getting rough-- not like that!" he assured as her expression shifted. "I'm not being bullied again. No one bullies me anymore."

And that was the other thing: somewhere in the last few weeks high school social politics hadn't just ceased to bother him, but had ceased to exist entirely.  She told herself it happened: when kids grew up things that had been life or death simply no longer held that power over them. An objectivity replaces it, but objectivity needs experience.

Social Anxiety and Desire to Fit In: Exit Stage Left.

But when? When did the timid, stammering boy she'd known for fifteen years slip into the wings, and who was she seeing now? the understudy or the leading man? There was no doubt.

"I'm glad to hear that honey, but you can talk to me about anything. Really."

"I know," fwipflickswish -- the cards continued to move between deft hands, dancing between nimble fingers: vanishing, reappearing in time to the images she still could only sense. 

"I love you Albert." The words felt vaguely helpless, but what else was there for it? She shuffled over the threshold, leaning down and pushing shaggy bangs back, planting a kiss on a freckled forehead.

"Goodnight mom." 

The reels of the projector changed.

Chapter Text

She’d been her brother’s shadow the moment he came home from the hospital, an eager babysitter when she was old enough; even a Halloween in-joke -- Bobby as Peter Pan and Sheila in head-to-toe black, the errant shadow. They’d begun to grow apart when Sheila started high school and Bobby was still stuck in middle: the two buildings separate but on the same grounds. It had been enough. They made their own friends, Bobby finally a few his own age; so it was a surprise when Sheila suggested they go to the amusement park ‘like old times.’ Bonnie remembered her son hesitating a moment.

“Will Hank be there?” He asked dubiously.

“Of course!”

“Eeeeeewwww...I’m not coming on one of your dates! That's gross.”

“We’re not -- it’s not a date, we’re all going,” her daughter shot back with a laugh.

Feet waved under the table in thought as Bobby tapped a pencil on the brown paper cover of his math book, blond bangs obscuring the slightest frown. “I’m a little old for the amusement park, Sheila.”

“You’re nine, besides what does that say about me?” She quirked a narrow eyebrow at him, daring him to reply.

“That you’re ooooold!” With a belling laugh the two shot up from the kitchen table after each other, tearing into the living room -- Sheila only just managing to scoop him into her arms as he attempted to escape up the stairs. Bonnie smiled to herself, flicking an affectionate glance at her husband where he stood over the stove, clearing up the last of dinner. She gave her blessing for the outing with the caveat of homework and chores being finished in advance.

Things started going wrong the moment they returned: a door slamming followed by a stampede of feet up the stairs and yelling that put Bonnie’s heart in her throat-- but when her two children nearly battered the bedroom door down, hearty, hale and whole, she was willing to chalk it up to sugar and adrenaline. Robert teased her gently about switching to decaf.

Morning brought the first tinge of true concern -- a babble of whispers silencing at the first sound of a foot on the stairs. They’d managed an impressive Saturday breakfast, everything from pancakes and waffles to halves of grapefruit, bacon and eggs.

“Is this an apology or are you telling me we need to go grocery shopping?” She asked.

A pause. “Both?” Her son offered, ice-clear blue eyes darting to his sister for -- guidance? permission? It was too demure for the playful secrets they usually kept. When a strawberry blond head dipped, he stood from the table, rinsed his plate and slipped away with only a squeeze to Sheila’s hand.

Then, the night terrors started. Bobby hadn’t had one in years and Sheila never, but at the first jolting scream into a room that was [too dark, too empty, too quiet?] the other sibling was there faster than either of them.

“I got this Dad,” Sheila glanced up at her father, half-pleading and he gave in, closing the bedroom door with a bleary shake of his head.

“You shouldn't have done that Robert.” Bonnie closed the book she was reading, her husband catching the PhD on the end of the author’s name and nothing more. She’d been pretending to read it for weeks; an excuse to stay up and listen for the padded footsteps and impossibly gentle turn of a knob that meant one of her children would be waking up in the wrong room.

“It’s just a rough patch Bon -- they happen.”

“He’s wetting his bed.”

Robert froze at the edge of the bed. “How do you--?”

“Sheila does the laundry when we’re out, I caught it on the baby monitor. Unless we have a cat burglar who breaks in to do our laundry.”

“You’ve been spying on our children?” Robert winced. “Bonnie, if either of them notice they will never trust us again. They’ll never believe I didn't have anything to do with it.”

“Our seventeen year old daughter and nine year old son can’t stay out of each other’s beds. There’s a word for tha--”

“Don’t be perverse, Bon,” he blustered out an insulted laugh. “They’ve always been close. Maybe the amusement park--” hands waved helplessly, “kicked things up? Look, Sheila will be graduating and applying to colleges soon. I think it finally hit them this is their second to last year living under the same roof.”

Bonnie cast her gaze to the vanity mirror, hating the doubt she saw there. She didn’t want to recognise the woman staring back because recognising her meant admitting she had been thinking things no...normal mother ever would.

“I want to believe that, god I do, but Rob the signs are all there.” She wiped at her eyes before finally breaking the staring contest with the mirror -- Doubting Thomas that the woman who lived there was.

“Christ, you’re serious? Don’t you think that insults over a decade of parenting experience?” He balled a fist over the covers before finally sliding his legs under the sheet. “We may have left them on their own more than we should have but give us -- fuck -- give yourself some credit.” Socked feet nudged Bonnie’s. “Honestly, listen to yourself, do you really think--?”

“Then what’s the goddamn mystery? Robert -- they are keeping something from us and I need to know what. Don’t you?” She scrutinised him a beat, waiting to feel his reply before he spoke it.

“I -- yes -- Jesus -- I don’t know. We’ll have to get them alone,” Robert finally conceded and the comment was nearly enough for her to let out a dark chuckle. “What haven’t we tried in the last seventeen years that will magically work now?” He asked her, grasping a hand over the covers to squeeze his beneath it.

“Sheila’s driving lessons,” she said after a pause long enough to mask the fact that she’d thought of it a week and a half ago. “I’ll tackle Bobby while you’re out, somehow.” Literally, if need be.

“I don’t know--”

“You still trust her Rob, it has to be you. She smells disapproval from me a mile away. And let me get something straight -- I want you to be right. I need--”

“I know, you will be.” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and kissed her cheek, and for the first time in weeks she met her own gaze in the mirror and held it. The defiance that flickered back was a match flame in the dark, but it was almost enough. For tonight, almost had to be enough.

Chapter Text

Vera dreamed of the stars before her oldest daughter was born-- an endless road stretching to the primordial depths of the universe-- the size of it, and the sheer lonely cold of darkness between each glittering point of light shuddered at her heart. When she told her grandmother, the old woman asked her a few pointed questions and promptly set about making a quilt in the Old Way--a map, she said--to lead the babygirl home.

After Diana went to the amusement park, the quilt caught Vera’s eye for the first time in years where it rested, pinned vertically to her closet wall. She counted off the symbols in each block (a lantern, a box, a hammer and anvil) before tracing a finger around the central design: a many-spoked wheel, pointing in all ten directions. A compass. All this overlaid in spiralling scroll-work of every color.

“Thas’ the rainbow road.” She repeated the words in the voice she first heard them in--a thick, easy tongue, wet by generations of southern living. “Follow tha, and it getchu home juss fine.”

Sometimes Vera imagined there was a pattern to the road, finding the subtle symmetries and then losing them in a blink, the path dipping back into the understitching of the universe.

The sudden urge to take a seam-ripper to the edges gripped her as a long nail picked at a single weakened thread. Her daughter’s destiny was there: between what she could and couldn't see, and the temptation to look had never been so strong as it was since that night.

Diana had taken her first steps on the road, she was sure of it, because she’d also lost it. Why else had she awoken to find her daughter blanketed in star charts and reams of her father’s research, tracing arcs and parabola, connecting dots she only understood in the broadest terms? Her father had tried to explain it, but it was easier when she was little and only wanted to find herself in the night’s sky. As she grew he’d told her that around every star of her in the sky there were other planets and to never, never forget that she had her own orbit, her own pull. But she was out of ambit now, as if she’d been flung out of her own gravity well and set adrift with her feet still on the ground.

“Find it baby, you gotta find it.” Her finger hopped tracks, tracing a way back to the center of the wheel. “Not everything is one foot in front of the other.” A fingertip swirled over the circumference of the wheel befor stabbing at the very center: a lone, raised silver star. (This was where her grandmother and husband differed in opinion: Faith told her that the center of the universe was brilliant with Creation, while Science told her husband it was dark with Void, matter stretched and unspooling into nothing.) The abrupt thought that her daughter may be able to answer which streaked across Vera’s mind so brightly it left spots behind her eyes. She knew it was true, “It’ll lead you back juss fine babygirl, Don’t you worry none.” Her feet followed her hand, weaving around each other in a feather stitch in an effort to summon the road from the fabric itself-- but it wasn’t hers to walk. As if to tell her this, her eyes blurred again, the road receding into the quilt-- the way as lost as the walker. “Don’t you worry none.”

Chapter Text

 They’d always hesitated to call their daughter “gifted”—a gift implied some one (thing?) had bestowed it, or worse yet that of Changelings: children whisked off into the dark, parents none the wiser and their child replaced with a member of The Fair Folk. Cassidy and Phillip had a number of conversations about her “powers” and had come to what they thought was a reasonable explanation: there was nothing magic about it—what Terri could do was nothing more than recognize when someone was overconfident and more prone to mistakes. It had given them something to comfort her with when she came home crying, or when “Freak” had been spray-painted on her locker.

“They just don’t understand how wonderfully perceptive you are, baby, it’s their loss,” And that’s when they’d given her the necklace—to remind her that no matter where they were, they loved her, and all she had to do was touch it to know that.
It was the loss of the necklace that started the whole mad business. The day after she lost it, she broke Jimmy Whitaker’s nose in gym class, offering no explanation other than “he said it was a bad dream.”

“What did he say was a bad dream sweetheart?” Phillip asked, apologizing to the principal and escorting Terri out to a green and tan minivan.
“The night he vanished! Sunday! Thinks he knows everything I—” Terri growled and turned her head to press it into the back seat window. Philip took a breath. They’d all heard the story by now: about how Andrew Whitaker saw his son “vanish under the bed” the night before only for the boy reappear at the front door a few hours later—sleepwalking was the final verdict even though as far as anyone knew, the boy hadn’t slept-walked a night in his life. It was the conclusion the police had come to, and the one they repeated to the press the following morning, even as children five counties away who had been missing for weeks also returned.

The dots were there, but no one was brave enough to connect them.
Phillip turned the car into their driveway and Terri unbuckled before they were completely stopped, nearly jumping out, the dog leaping in happy circles to see her.
That was the other thing. Freddie had become viciously protective of her, snapping at anyone who moved too suddenly or spoke too loudly towards her, and only she could calm him. Mad as it sounded Phillip was convinced the dog knew.

“I sent her to her room,” Cassidy said, meeting her husband in the driveway, wiping two delicate hands against jean-clad thighs, “They say there’s a first time for everything but...” Her eyes spoke what her lips refused to.

‘Is that our daughter? How would we know?’

“It’s her,” Phillip said, answering the unvoiced question. “If she wasn’t Freddie would be treating her like he’s been treating us.”

Cassidy huffed and shook her head. “And where did you read that? Scientific American?”

“William Butler Yeats, ‘Fairy and Folktales of Ireland,’” he replied, “genre focus class in college. Thought it was a better choice than reading Hamlet for the twentieth time.”

“Lucky for us,” his wife muttered, “Really Phillip, what is going on? It feels like...in the last two days the world has stopped making sense, between Jimmy’s dad and...she didn’t even ask us to turn around and help her look for the necklace.” She reached out, holding both of his wide hands in hers.

“I started contacting the other families, the ones in Mullica and Cherry Hill,” Phillip admitted with a sigh. He hadn’t been sure at first; the news crews had already been around, making a circus of it that they were sure was just the beginning. “I—I know what you’re going to say but if Andy Whitaker is going to put his head in the sand who else am I going to compare notes with?” They walked back into the house together, Cassidy taking a familiar place by the stove, her arms slack at her sides.

She frowned and shook her head, “I’d rather have an answer, no matter how insane than to pretend nothing happened,” a resigned puff of air whispered out between her lips. “What did the others say?”

Phillip cast a furtive glance out the kitchen window, as far down the street as he could see. There weren’t paparazzi exactly, but plenty of “freelance photographers” started to filter into town since word of the “one night disappearances” came out.

“Same story as us only—well—the timeframe’s off until you look at where the carnival’s been.” He pulled a much used county road map out of his back pocket. “All the other parents said the same thing—their kids went missing while the carnival was in town.”

“So what are we looking at?” Cassidy asked back, “attempted kidnappings? That’s a bit...dated, isn’t it, Phil? If it were that simple there would be an investigation already.”

‘Step right up, step right up ladies and gentlemen and have your fate foretold by that Modern Day Delphi, the Mistress of the Fates, the talented, terrific, and sometimes terrible Miss Terri Crawford!’

No, Cassidy told herself. This wasn’t the old days, no one even had real sideshows anymore. There were regulations now, health and safety; even unions. Even the scabbiest of scab outfits, the kind hired out by cheap county officials to run a handful of decrepit, tin and cracking plastic rides had safety measures out the proverbial clown car trunk.

“Cass these places are nomadic, they can out-run anything, even a criminal investigation. This isn’t TV, there’s none of that ‘don’t leave town’ crap—and even when there is people still run.”

“I can’t think about this right now, Phil,” Cassidy said at last, “Not while Terri’s—“

“Safe, in her room,” Phillip cut in, rubbing one of his wife’s upper arms comfortingly.

“But is it her?” She repeated. “Can you tell me, beyond a doubt that child is our girl?”

That was the second unvoiced theory: trauma could manifest as “strange” behavior. Anger, Sudden anti-social habits. (She had always been close to Freddie but now Terri reminded him of Emily Dickinson and her dog—the creature that held all her secrets and who, when he finally passed left her adrift in the world. He didn’t want that to be their daughter, but if they didn’t try to understand what happened…)

“I’m going to make some calls—maybe police in another town, or hell, another county are investigating it. If they haven’t connected it as a cross-county phenomena, maybe what I’ve found out will give them what they need.” He kissed the top of Cassidy’s head. “Gonna go talk to Terri.”

Cassidy nodded, moving over to the coffee pot, pouring a lukewarm mug and adding a shot of whiskey to it before taking a long sip.
Philip paused at Terri’s bedroom door down the hallway; as usual she was talking to Freddie, but her words were more hushed than usual. Breaking a personal covenant he’d made when his daughter was born, he pressed his ear against the door.

“I just thought he’d be there today, boy. I waited. I waited all through lunch but he never...did Dungeon Master lie? Were my powers fading as I got closer to going home? He said the dream would come true and—something must have happened. We shouldn’t have left. God Freddie, why did I let Bobby help me escape? I could have helped them, protected them like they protected me.”

Philip’s throat went dry and tightened painfully, his worst fears finding truth in his daughter’s whispered words. Wincing his eyes shut, he turned away from the door, one hand clutching tightly shut as he strode to the side table where a clunky cassette dictation machine sat beneath an off-white telephone on a stand in the hallway. Taking a deep breath, he dialed Andrew Whitaker’s work number.

“Hey, Andy, it’s Phil. I’m sorry about what Terri did to Jimmy, let me get you a beer after work and talk it over. I know it’s not much of an apology but—” His eyes darted down to the dictation machine. “Great. Marchiano’s. Thanks again, and I am sorry about Terri. I’ll make sure she apologizes. Yeah, see you later.”

He hung up the phone, letting the breath he’d taken out slowly, his hand relaxing. Maybe if he plied with Andy enough drinks he’d get him to say what he really saw in Jimmy’s room that night and the phantasmagoric shadow that hung over their children, and was extending its claws into them, forcing them to deny or rationalize it all away— would fade. Because if they believed their children’s hushed whispers, who would protect them from fear of the shadows that surrounded them on chilly evenings, when the cold snaked down their spines like fingers?

 It was their duty to seek the rational, to pick up the shadows and name them, and in doing so, banish them into the light.