You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,42

the uproar around Dr. Martin’s book had subsided, people didn’t fear me as much anymore. The village youth started to drive by in their cars, throwing eggs and other nastiness at the walls of our little brown house. I found letters reciting Bible verses on my porch and a dead rat in my mailbox.

Out here, there’s no way to come and go unseen.

Dr. Martin was horrified at the prospect of me moving so far into the woods all alone. He said it wasn’t safe, but I knew it would be. I would move further into faerie land, so that their power would be stronger—would keep me safe, as it always had. And time has proven me right, hasn’t it? There’s been no more verses on my porch or dripping foodstuffs. I am merely an eccentric old lady now, “that writer out in the woods,” solitary in her secluded home, doing whatever eccentrics do.

People have almost forgotten about the trial, and about those other deaths too. That’s what people do: they forget and they move on.

Not your mother, though.

Olivia will never forget.

If you are still with me, we should move on too.

XVII

The night Tommy Tipp died in the eyes of the world, we had known for some time that something wasn’t right. I guess it was akin to cancer for other people, that slow onset of a disease you know can only end in misery. Of course, Pepper-Man-in-Tommy’s disease played out a little differently.

At first, it was just small things: a twig peeking out of the skin on his thigh, a root coming loose by his earlobe, then the honeyed oak stick stopped working and his hips became all skewered. His colleagues at Barnaby’s thought it might be gout, and wanted him to go see a doctor. He never did, of course, what was the use in that? We knew very well that the body was falling apart, that the last few drops of Tommy Tipp’s heart blood were slowly burning to an end. It didn’t matter much to us, really, Pepper-Man had another body he could use, but we still despaired—it was our life together as man and wife that was coming to an end.

I pleaded with Pepper-Man to find a solution: “What if you eat another heart, and we built a new body from scratch?”

“I wouldn’t look like Tommy then.”

“Maybe we can say that Tommy left me for someone else and then I found myself another husband?”

“Would you really go through it all again, Cassandra? Build a new life with a different decoy?”

“Wouldn’t you?” I asked.

“Not particularly.”

Pepper-Man was not wearing Tommy’s body right then, it had grown uncomfortable and was hard to move around. He was sitting by the kitchen table cleaning his teeth with a straw. The carcass of a bird lay before him on a plate, all void of meat. He’d developed a taste for seasoned flesh as Tommy.

“I have tired of this game. It has been interesting, being Tommy Tipp, but I do miss my freedom. It is hard being a slave to the mortal clock.”

“You did it for me, though, I will never forget that.” I sat down before him, cradling a cup of faerie tea.

“It is just a matter of days now before the body is all spent. We should rid ourselves of it before you have to wheel it around in a chair.”

“But how do we get rid of it?”

“We take it down in the basement and dissemble it with the cleaver.”

“Easy as that, huh?”

“Yes, my Cassandra, just like that.”

“But what do we tell people? This is poorly thought through. They will ask where he is, you know. Barnaby will—”

“You could say that he left you, or that he had an unfortunate accident.”

“I don’t want people to think that he left me.”

“We could put him under the car and say he was doing some tinkering, then something came loose and crushed his skull. Maybe the car began to roll—”

“Maybe he was painting the east wall.” I was suddenly inspired. “It’s been peeling for some time now, and then he fell down the ladder.”

“A very clever idea; such falls may cause a lot of damage.”

“Won’t he be just twigs and leaves when he hits the ground?”

“The glamour will still hold for some time, long enough for people to be convinced he is dead.”

That settled, we went about our day. The next morning Pepper-Man was back in Tommy’s body, showing up at work at exactly 8 a.m.

Things didn’t go so smoothly later.

That same night, as