You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,51

at night. They are just images, pretend-people that my readers can relate to. My books are just me taking a sip of fairyland magic and running with it, spinning it, spooling out a story.

The faeries love my stories, just because of that humanity. To them, they are glimpses into our world, into the minds, hopes, and dreams of people still alive. They are also a payment for the faerie jars themselves. They give me inspiration and I bring them dreams. That is how such bargains have always worked—we sate each other’s hunger. Pepper-Man takes life from me, but gives me life as well. The faerie jars are a part of that life, and Mara is another. Tommy Tipp, or at least the wicker version that we made to save me, was a part of my faerie bargain, too.

But the regular readers, too, love my stories. At first it was morbid fascination, I think, that drew them to the shelves and made them pick up my little pink book. I had kept my married name, of course, and it was proudly displayed on the cover in golden letters with curlicues:

Golden Suns by Cassandra Tipp.

I was so proud of that book. The first one of many, as it turned out.

Later, when the memory of the trial and Dr. Martin’s book had faded, I became the sad widow who worked through her grief and family tragedy by writing about love and happy ever afters. They thought it was beautiful then, my readers, beautiful and romantic that I wrote of such things after having lost my one and only.

Mostly, though, it was habit that made my readers come back. They do that, you know, if you tell a good story. They crave more of that same feeling you gave them, want to immerse themselves in your waters again, swim deep in your lagoons and drink from that same well. I gave them a good swim forty-two times. You can count them all on that shelf in the parlor. Every one of them was fueled by a set of faerie jars; grown from rabbit’s teeth, flower buds, and leaves. I have read them all out loud in the mound, too, with golden eyes peering at me, the heat from the hearth licking my back. I received cakes and wine for my trouble, followed by ever more exquisite jars to quench my literary thirst.

But Dr. Martin was gone by the time Golden Suns hit the shelves.

Only four years after he published Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis, he died quietly in his bed. “Natural causes,” as they say, though I had my own thoughts about that.

* * *

I have often wondered what he’d make of all this, the success that I’ve become. He, who wanted to commit me to a hospital and have me chew pills and get shots forevermore. Not out of some ill intent, but because to him, as much as he loved me, I was still his patient.

The first time I saw a Japanese translation of Golden Suns, I pretended he was there with me, his hand resting on my shoulder, and he said:

“Look at that, Cassie. I can see that I was wrong. You really have a purpose to fulfill in this world. It would have been a terrible mistake if you spent your life in a hospital.”

But that was just wishful thinking, mind you. I know that it wasn’t real.

* * *

Mara was never fond of Dr. Martin. To her he would always be the man who tried to take me away.

I had taught her to read, and she read a lot, and read his book too, shortly before he died.

I don’t know what she had expected it to be—perhaps another faerie mound fantasy, or the adventures of her mother, rescued by the woods—but of course it was not a happy story, it was gritty and harsh, littered with medical terms and regrets.

It left me little credit, truth be told.

“It says in here that you are making me up,” she confronted me one day. I was in the kitchen, making a pie.

“It is just what Dr. Martin thinks, it doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “You know how it is with faeries and humans. You are the hidden people, after all, and should stay that way, too, for many reasons.” A lesson I myself should have taken to heart a very long time ago.

“But he is spreading these lies to the world,” she said. “He makes you sound stupid,