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Coven at World's End
Two
Sixteen-year-old Sarah Mannhardt paced the kitchen in a storm of
anger. "Them darned fairies ruin everything! All they want to do is
play! I'm not a child anymore, Mother. They won't let me have any
friends at all!"
Elizabeth Mannhardt, Beth to her friends, would have been lovingly
amused by Sarah's innocent rage under other circumstances. Now, she was
forced to agree with Sarah's self-assessment of her budding maturity. She
had become a self-willed young woman during the past year and had revealed
innate psychic abilities that rivaled her own.
Her heart melted with tender love for her daughter in any case, but she
was more than a bit unsettled by the story Sarah had told her of Leo's
treatment by the phenomena Sarah personified as her fairies. She had
always meant to take the time to probe deeper into Sarah's experience with
the phenomena. She dared not put it off any longer.
"Sarah, you need to tell me something more about these fairies of
yours."
Sarah casually cocked her head in the direction of the forest. "But
you
see them all the time!"
"Yes, we see them all the time, but few of us have ever
observed the behavior you describe."
The disclosure startled the girl. "You
haven't? But you believe me,
don't you?"
Beth took a deep breath to calm herself. "I've had dealings of my own
with the fairies, as you call them, when I was your age. I'll certainly
believe anything you have to tell me."
Sarah turned to the back window where the last of the day's light
rapidly faded with the setting of the sun. "You don't really think
they're bugs, do you?"
"They've been referred to as fireflies, but nobody in World's End
confuses them for bugs. Neither do I believe anyone has ever thought of
them as fairies. You must understand our position on this matter. Most
of us have never been able to approach them. I don't think you realize
that your relationship with the phenomena is unique, and I'm more than a
little concerned about that."
Sarah was cautiously disbelieving. "Honest? You don't know what they
are?"
"We have one opening between World's End and the ordinary world.
You've gone back and forth your whole life. The human world is known.
This world is our refuge and our sanctuary, but I assure you, it is has
never been explored, and very little of it is known."
Sarah seemed brought up short by information new to her. "I thought
you knew everything there is to know about World's End, or at least
everything worth knowing."
Beth shook her head regretfully. "I'm sure we've taken far too much
for granted, but there are too few of us to explore and investigate as
much as we would like and perhaps as much as we should have. I don't
think anyone has ever explored the forests more than a mile or two beyond
the gateway and World's End."
Sarah gazed at her in perplexity. "I used to think that if you went
through the woods you just wound up back in the ordinary world somewhere. I never thought of World's End as a whole other world."
"You know better than that now."
The sun, the trees of the forest, the even-tempered seasons year-round.
"You never talked about it. I asked. You would never answer my questions."
Beth sighed in deep-felt pain. "I was always afraid of your
questions. I never had enough answers.."
Sarah had figured that out for herself long ago. The day would come
when she would have to try to answer them all for herself. Nobody had ever
tried. She had never doubted that it could be done.
Beth sidestepped and took a seat at the kitchen table. "Sit down.
Tell me about the fairies."
Sarah took a seat as instructed. "Well, I guess there's not much to
tell. They're just little bits of light."
"Are they truly alive?"
The girl shrugged guiltily and stared at the floor. "Sure. I mean you
can tell by the way they move around that they're smart."
Beth was confused by the girl's behavior. "What secrets are you
keeping, may I ask?"
Sarah looked up with an anguished expression. "They make me see things
sometimes."
"See things? Hallucinate?" Beth tried to keep her calm. "Sarah, are you
serious?"
"I talked to a little girl once. She couldn't have
been for real."
"And?" she
said softly.
Sarah looked embarrassed. "I know it was just a dream of some kind.
She had wings. A double set of them, like a dragon fly."
Beth tried to hide her startled surprised. "You talked to this
creature?"
"All the time when I was little, except it wasn't in words."
Beth forced a neutral demeanor as calm and reasonable as possible.
"What did you talk about?"
Sarah grimaced. "She taught me so many things. I can't even
remember what they were, but I can still feel them inside me." She
glanced up, embarrassed. "It's
like when ordinary people visit World's End. When they leave, they never
remember. I think the fairies make it happen. I thought you guys would
know about that."
Beth felt herself growing rigid with tension. "We've never sensed danger."
"I don't think there is any danger, at least not from the fairies."
"We'd certainly know if there was," Beth said, reassuring herself in
the process, and not quite succeeding.
Sarah cocked her head. "Then why are you so upset?"
"They harmed your young friend."
Sarah chuckled. "They stung him on the butt because he tried to kiss
me and he used vulgar language. Big deal."
"They inflicted deliberate injury."
Sarah's smile diminished. "So? He deserved a bite on
the butt. They protect me."
"I don't understand why you brought him here?" Beth confessed.
Sarah gave her mother a challenging stare. "I'm certainly not part of
his world. Everybody senses it. I have no real friends. I don't even have
any enemies."
"You know we're special, Sarah," Beth admonished with as much
compassion as she could muster. "We don't appreciate it any more than you
do. We don't understand why. We're stuck with it. It's why we send you to
school in Oak Grove, so that you understand the difference between our two
worlds and can be comfortable in either, if the need ever arises."
Sarah shook her head irritably. "I suppose you're going to tell me you
don't understand what I was trying to do with Leo?"
Beth understood all too well. "He's not your type, Sarah."
"Tell me about it. He's in serious trouble and I thought I could help
him bringing him here and making him my friend."
"Changing what he is."
Sarah looked away, defeated even by her own assessment of her
relationship with Leo. "Yeah, trying the show him the world isn't as ugly
as the one he knows. But it isn't the world. It's the people. The
ordinary people of the ordinary world of Oak Grove. It's not
fair, mother. Not to them and not to us. Why are we so different?"
"We don't understand why," Beth assured her. "We just live with it."
"Don't worry. Leo's not going to be my boyfriend. I could never fall in
love with him. But I'll always want him. He's almost a man. He's a
good-looking boy."
Beth forced herself to silence. Sarah had the situation well in hand. "Even
so, I'll have to speak with the Council about this incident. It makes me
very nervous."
Sarah had no concern for the fairies.
"I'm sorry about Leo. Sarah, you're the youngest in World's End. I've
told you how things have been with us."
About many of the older women, those with daughters, disappearing into
the forest after the Coven was destroyed. About how those daughters had
been conceived of chance encounters in the forest two decades earlier.
"It's all we have to live with," Beth said. "The hope. Wait for it.
It's worth waiting for. It's the way things have always been with us."
Maybe. Sarah decided she would have to think about it further.
"There's nothing you can do for Leo," Beth added. "We've tried to help
in the past. The Coven was far more open than we have been. It availed us
to nothing. The ordinary world is too vast and it's people have limited
resources. Sarah, it's a place of learning. You know far more about the
nature of life than they. You know their lives will serve them well when
this world and these lives have passed away. They don't see as much as we
do."
"I don't disrespect them," Sarah said. "I think I sometimes envy
them for their innocence."
"Innocence. We're far more ignorant of our world than they are of theirs."
Sarah sighed, thankful the conversation had gone so well. There had
been others, and her mother had been far less tolerant and understanding
of a six-year-old's mastery of the forest. "Well, I didn't know the fairies were such a big deal."
"Don't take anything in or about World's End for granted" Beth said
solemnly.
"Leo asked about the Coven. How did Oak Grove ever find out about it?"
"The Coven was driven into the ordinary
world. We, their children, returned. Our parents, those who were able to
return, refused to do so. Your grandmother, while she was still coherent,
panicked at the thought of ever coming back."
"The Montegarde sisters came back," Sarah said.
"They don't remember much of what happened, and I
don't think their sanity survived intact."
Sarah suppressed a mental image of the gnarled expressions typical of
the two harridans, one of anger, the other of quiet desperation.
"Sarah, it's been almost twenty years. Nobody understood at the time
what happened. We certainly don't know any more about it today."
Sarah gave the mystery a moment's thought. "Then it could happen
again. Is that what you're worried about?"
Bingo. "I would like to be able to tell you that it can't. The truth of the
matter is, we don't know."
"Wow."
But that was enough for a sixteen-year-old girl to think about. "Time
for bed," Beth said, rising to her feet. "You have school tomorrow."
Sarah stayed put and looked suddenly uncomfortable. "They do other
things, too, you know."
Beth paused, chilled by Sarah's sudden confession. "The fairies?"
"They like to dance. They all get together and do a whirlwind of
light. I'm right in the middle and we just spin and spin. I know they
like it. And they show me places I've never seen before."
Beth tried to contain her horror. "In your dreams?"
Sarah shook her head solemnly. "I took Leo to a place in the woods
I've never seen before. I was going down to the river. I took the same
lane I always take. I wound up somewhere else."
"Through another gateway?"
"I think so."
"Do you think the fairies were responsible?"
"They gave me a better spot to be with Leo," Sarah said without
hesitation. "He didn't work out too well, but it was the right spot to
try. After Leo ran away, I wanted to look around some more. I've
never seen those kinds of fairy rings before."
"You shouldn't have," Beth whispered.
Sarah shrugged. "It hardly mattered. The place was gone.
I found myself standing near the river."
"Others have had similar experiences," Beth confessed, and she tried to
hold back the stab of pain that went with her own experience. "We've
never associated those incidents with your fairies."
"The fairies make the gateways," Sarah said confidently.
"You're sure about that, or is it a guess?"
Sarah took a moment to think it over. "I'm not absolutely sure, but
it's more than a guess."
"Is it wise to attribute everything unusual that happens to the
fairies?"
Sarah gave a stern nod. "I can tell. They let me know. Besides, the ordinary world's got nocturnal
lights, too, that they can't explain. I'll bet the fairies are
everywhere."
"Perhaps."
Sarah frowned. "You don't think so?"
"I simply don't know."
"You know more than you tell me."
"Only to protect you against things a child shouldn't have to worry
about."
"I'm not a child anymore, Mother."
Beth chuckled. "Tell me about it."
Sarah gave up with a sigh of exasperation. She got up and stretched
with an enthusiastic yawn. "I gotta got up early tomorrow. Volleyball
practice."
"Leonard won't remember about today," Beth reminded the girl.
"Remember
not to do or say anything to draw attention to yourself."
"I can handle poor Leonard." She paused at the base of the stairs. "You found a gateway
of you own before I was born. The fairies made it happen, you know."
Beth stared out the darkening window. "I suspect that may be the case."
"And you're afraid it might happen to me, too. You were my age when it
happened. You were sixteen when you met him and you got pregnant with
me."
Beth turned away to hide her tears.
"Did he look like me?" Sarah ventured in a whisper.
It was territory Beth had never dared explore in past conversations,
but Sarah was eager to know, and she was old enough to hear the truth.
"Yes, of course. Your eyes and hair."
Sarah went to her upstairs bedroom. Beth dimmed the kitchen lights and
stood at the back window, looking out across the open field to the
cathedral interior of the poplar
forest, dimly illuminated from within by points of light flitting among
the trees. Even as she watched, one ventured into the open and paused.
She felt certain it was aware of her presence and was responding to her
focus of attention. Then it was gone in a flash, and she brushed away her
useless tears.
Ordinary people weren't the only ones who had trouble with their memory
in World's End. She couldn't help but suspect that she, too, had
known the fairies as a child, and that they had shown her glimpses of
other worlds just as they had shown Sarah. Where else could the special children
of World's End have originated? Except for Delores Montegarde's daughter,
Jessica, an infant conceived by rape during Delores' stay in a Oak Grove
hospital, the ordinary world had never fostered an inhabitant of World's
End. The children of
World's End had been a varied lot, but all far from ordinary children.
Beth didn't know how to forewarn Sarah without risking injury to her
childhood innocence. It would be a time of wonder and joy, but afterwards,
it would be a time of sorrow as well. She had wandered the forest at night for years after
Sarah's birth in search of a gateway to another world and the man
with the pale eyes and white hair who lived beyond. She did not want the
same fate to befall Sarah, although she knew herself powerless to
intervene. She could harm her daughter trying too hard to protect her,
and she could no longer fool herself into believing she would have any
major effect on the strange cycles of life and death in World's End,
regardless of how she handled the situation.
People were not in control of their own destinies in World's End. She
had no idea what the future held in store for the Coven, or the Council as
it now called itself, and its members. She had no way of knowing whether
its strange history should have been taken as a warning, or if their
little corner of the universe behind the gateway was as much a sanctuary
and refuge for its special inhabitants as they preferred to believe.
There was no long-term written history of World's End to study, and
certainly no oral history within which to try to separate fact from
fantasy. In World's End, memory was a commodity forever in short supply.
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