Serial Saturday: "Fairies Under Glass" Part 9

Part 9

"Redecorating"

Beep.... beep... beep-beep... beep... b-beep-beep-b-beep... beep!

Lewis groaned and rolled over, rubbing his face as the uneven mechanical chimes continued at random intervals.
What was wrong with his alarm clock? His room seemed a lot brighter than usual, as well. Was there something he missed?
He opened his eyes and peered at the digital display. The bright numbers started with 13: and flipped back and forth from 89 to 12 and 07 and every number in between. A human-like figure only six inches high crouched next to the pile of loose electrical circuit boards and wires, happily touching different leads together to watch the numbers flicker in and out.

I'm dreaming... Lewis thought as his eyes threatened to drift shut again. I'd better wake up before I'm late for class.

The beeping continued, and consciousness slammed into the young man's head with the realization that he was indeed awake, and he had no idea how late it was, without the aid of the broken clock. He rocketed out of bed and stared at the mound of loose pieces that used to be his alarm clock.

Ashwyn squinted up at him, still holding the wires in her tiny hands. "Good morning!" she said. "This thing started beeping and I was just wondering what made it go--and now I can make it stop, too!"

Everything from the night before came rushing back, from the decision to steal a piece of "irreplaceable art" from the Moulton House gallery, to the unexpected use for fairy dust...

Lewis clutched his head and groaned. "Ugh, it wasn't a dream..." The beeping was starting to reverberate around his skull. "Could you stop that?" he snapped, a lot more sharply than he intended to.

Ashwyn dropped the wires with a guilty expression. Her voice reached his ears, soft and penitent.
"I--I'm sorry... I'll fix it! I'm good at fixing things... I-I just get so... s-so curious..."

Lewis said nothing, only grabbed his clothes and set about starting his day. Maybe he wasn't too late for anything; maybe he could still salvage things before anybody started asking too many questions.
He dressed in a striped tee shirt and jeans, laced his shoes, and smoothed his hair down with a bit of water. By the time he emerged into his room again, his alarm clock sat, whole and functioning, right in its usual spot on his nightstand.

9:25, it read.

Lewis felt his heart thudding in his chest as his eyes went right for the calendar hanging on his wall. Monday was circled in red marker, with block letters spelling QUIZ TODAY in no uncertain terms. Panic set in, and Lewis lunged for his backpack.
"The quiz!" He wailed, "How is it Monday already? How could I miss Sunday? I'm late for the quiz, and..."
He opened the door and stopped short.

Quincy, along with his classmates Brayden and Malina, stood in the hallway. Quincy had her hand raised, as if she'd been about to knock.

Lewis blinked in surprise. "What are you guys doing here?"

Quincy tilted her eyebrow. "Umm, we were just going to invite you on a hike with us."

Brayden waved the map he was holding. "We talked about hiking up to Rawlings Point, remember?"

Lewis could hear Ashwyn's wings fluttering behind him, and he instinctively held the door closer to his side, as if that could block their view of the room even more, in case one of them spotted her. "Yeah, but--" he couldn't get his scrambled thoughts in order. "What about... classes?" He shifted the backpack strap on his shoulder.

Quincy shrugged as Malina gave a small giggle. "What about them?" the dark-haired girl tugged on her braids. "Dude, it's Sunday; we don't have classes today."

Sunday; Sunday! So he hadn't missed a day, after all. How was that even possible? He must have spent hours trying to understand Ashwyn...

Malina shifted her backpack in discomfort. Quincy started making faces at him, at which point Lewis realized he'd been standing there lost in thought for far too long.

"Are... you okay?" Quincy drawled with a dubious expression.

Lewis heard a soft voice muttering behind him, but he dare not break eye contact with anyone outside his door. "I'm fine," he said. "Umm... Let me just--" He forgot to finish the sentence as he let his backpack drop to the floor. "Uh, give me a minute, guys," he finished. "I'll meet you outside."
Quincy shrugged, and Brayden shared a glance with Malina and nodded.

Lewis wasted no time in shutting the door and frantically pulling the textbooks out of his bag, instead searching for his water bottle and the stash of granola bars he'd recently purchased for snacks.

"You're going outside?" trilled a happy voice as Ashwyn buzzed around the room. "Oooh, that sounds so fun! What is Rawlings Point? Is that like a mountain or something? I can't wait to see what your mountains look like!"

Lewis stopped in his tracks and turned to stare at the bobbing orb of light. "Ashwyn..." he groaned reluctantly. "Please stay here! I don't know what might happen to you if anybody else found out what I've done--and I would definitely lose my job if somebody like Krasimir, Adolf, or Mr. Gilroy found out that I stole one of the displays!" He pointed to the dismantled frame on his desk.

Ashwyn landed on top of his desk lamp so he could see the disappointment in her face. "But..." she stammered, "Please?"

Lewis sighed and shook his head. "Maybe later, once I'm sure there's a way that you can come with me and not get discovered. But right now, I really need you to stay here, stay hidden, and I'll check in on you when I get back." He almost caved when she let out the most pitiful sigh he'd ever heard, but Lewis made enough of a concession to hopefully assuage the guilt he felt. "Here," he said, pulling a few Geography and Earth Sciences textbooks from his shelf. "You can read these and look at pictures of my world while I'm gone, and when I get back, you can ask me whatever questions you have. Make yourself at home." How many questions could there be, really?

Ashwyn brightened at this. "And next time you go out, I can go with you?" she begged. "If I promise to behave?"

Lewis shrugged. "I'm happy to have another discussion, I guess."

The small fairy zoomed a series of loops in the air to express her excitement.

Lewis finally left his room and shut the door behind him. When he reached the front door of the main commons, Quincy was slumped against the side of the stairwell lost in thought, Malina was halfway through a book she'd brought with her, and Brayden was sprawled on the top step with his backpack under his head and his eyes closed.

Quincy stood and tilted an eyebrow, giving one of her dark braids a twitch as she watched him. "You all good in there, Grant?" she chided.
Lewis nodded. "Let's go," he said.

They took a paved path through the woodlands, to the trailhead leading up to Rawlings Point. As was common among acquaintances at Browning Academy, the conversation turned very quickly to everyone's jobs.

Brayden turned out to be a clerk at the campus general store, a job he liked, he said, because he enjoyed organizing things and the mundanity of restocking and such. "At least I'm not on the janitorial staff," he chortled, side-stepping a series of overgrown roots curling over the trail. "Those floors would be a pain to clean all the time--that's a different division, though, so it's a separate rotation of people who come through and clean the floors and wipe down the refrigerator units and such."

Malina wrinkled her nose in due scorn at the idea. "Eww, gross," she muttered. "I hate cleaning up food and stains."

"What do you do?" Lewis asked her.

Malina grinned. "I work in the municipal building. I'm a clerk, so it's a lot of filing I do, and locating specific record types, all of that sort of thing. It's kind of cool to see how far back the records go, how different life was back in the days before Browning Academy had its own campus--did you know that it started back in the early 1800's as a single schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere?"

"And now it's a self-contained, sustainable community," Quincy responded, "still in the middle of nowhere!"

"Where do you work, Lewis?" Brayden kept the conversation going as Malina scowled at being overshadowed by Quincy.

Lewis shrugged. "Oh, I'm posted at the Moulton House museum."

"Oh, cool!" Malina's face cleared and she actually smiled. "All those halls full of relics from a bygone age!"

"Sheesh!" Brayden crowed as they crested an incline. "They've got a lot of paintings and statues and stuff in there, don't they? How boring!"

Quincy snorted. "It can't be all boring, right Lew?" she nudged him in the shoulder with her backpack. "Tell them about the exhibit hall you're stationed in."

Lewis frowned and shook his head. Was she trying to weasel information out of him? "Oh, that's just a temporary exhibit from some fantasy artist--"

"Fantasy?" Malina gasped.

Quincy grinned. "It's wall-to-wall fairies in there! He's even got a sculpture of a gryphon hanging from the ceiling, and a unicorn statue that looks like it's made with real horse-hide!"

"So you're, what," Brayden wiped sweat from his forehead as he tried to understand, "a tour guide in there or something?"

Lewis shook his head, his cheeks flushing with tangible heat. "No," he stammered. "I'm just, uh, just a janitor."

"Are you kidding me?" Malina was actually skipping now, in her excitement. "If I worked there, I'd never stop staring at all the cool things, and imagining what it would be like to live in my own fantasy world!"

Lewis' ears burned. If she only knew how close to the truth she was! "I just clean and stuff," he muttered. "I'm not really into all that artsy-cratfy stuff."

"Oh, is that why you lied to me about having a writing assignment just so you could research fairies?" Quincy crowed.

Lewis winced as he thought about the living fairy currently holed up in his dorm room doing who-knows-what, even as Brayden hooted at the idea, and Malina rolled her eyes.

They'd reached the top of Rawlings Point by then, and sat at one of the picnic tables left up there. Browning Academy lay sprawled below them like a living map as the four friends ate a small picnic lunch.
No one had said much since Quincy pointed out that Lewis had been attempting to research a fictional creature, so he ventured to regain some of his credibility by saying, "I don't much like the job as it is right now, though; if this Krasimir Schlimme guy intends to stick around into the next quarter, I think I'd want to switch to something else."

"Ugh, me too!" said Quincy. "I think Malina's job sounds pretty cool. What else do you think you'd be interested in trying, Lewis?"

The young man shrugged. "Something that didn't require too many shifts," he said. "I like a quiet job, but maybe something outdoors would be fun."

"Not in the winter, though!" said Brayden. "The storms out here can get pretty brutal, I hear."
Lewis bobbed his head. "Oh, good point," he said.

Malina twirled a lock of her curly brown hair around her fingers. "Guys, it's only October," she reminded the group. "We still have at least a month to go before we should worry about winter and snowstorms."

They headed back down as the sun coasted across the sky, and by the time he arrived at his dorm again, Lewis had made two new friends, and Browning Academy was feeling less and less of an experiment in isolation.

He pushed open the door, and the memories of the radical change in his life that had so recently occurred came rushing back. Perhaps this was due to the fact that his entire room had been transformed into something not unlike the exhibit hall in Moulton House.

Books from his shelves--as well as the shelves themselves--had been fanned out and structurally rearranged to create a sort of mini-village. His clothes were hung like banners from the walls and ceilings, folded and tucked to mimic the notion of a mountain range seen from a distance. What Ashwyn had used for adhesive, he couldn't figure out and he almost didn't want to know. Various tools and personal hygiene implements had been repurposed into desk ornaments, and even the frame that he'd taken apart had been further disassembled into individual pieces, virtually unrecognizable for what it had been in its original state.
Ashwyn came bursting out of some unknown corner, buzzing happily.

"Lewis!" she shrieked. "You're back! You must have walked a very long ways. Did you have a good time?"

Lewis felt his knees buckling as he stared aghast at the change wrought over his room. He wanted to sit, but he didn't have anywhere to do so! "Oh snap, this is so much worse than an alarm clock!" he blurted. He stared at the fairy, who came to land on a desk lamp that almost resembled the one he'd originally owned, but it too had been reassembled somehow into a different object altogether. "What did you do?" he choked.

Ashwyn toyed with the folds of her skirt--which was now purple, Lewis noticed. Where had she gotten the material for a new dress? Not one of his shirts, he hoped! "You said make myself a home..." she stammered.

Lewis clapped a hand to his forehead and saw the vague outline of his desk chair under a layer of blankets that had been on his bed. He sank gratefully onto this, noting how much softer it was now. "I said make yourself AT home, Ashwyn!" He groaned. "Not... this!"

She huffed and sat down, pulling her knees toward her chest. "You don't like it?" she murmured. "I made it all myself. I thought it would feel more like my home this way..."

"But," Lewis waved his hand. "These are all my things! I need them just the way they were! I don't want my shirts to be mountains or my textbooks to be..." he gestured to the ornate geometric design of covers and pages, "whatever that is! Please, Ashwyn," he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "Just--put everything back, would you?"

"Okay," she said softly, and Lewis opened his eyes to watch her flit to and fro, taking down the shirt-mountains and uprooting the toilet-paper trees. Once he could tell that at least the bathroom had been returned to normal, Lewis grabbed his pajamas and sought refuge in there. He went through his normal night routine without opening the door, and when he did, he had to blink in surprise.

Nothing in all the books he read prepared him for the incredible show of relative strength Ashwyn must possess, to be able to accomplish so much in such a short time. His bookshelves were back the way they should be, with his textbooks and notebooks and binders all neatly organized and accessible. The clean clothes had been neatly folded and returned to their respective drawers and shelves in the closet, while the dirty ones now filled the small hamper by the foot of his bed. His desk was clear, his bed neatly made, and the only thing really distinct to his eye was the small house that now stood on his bedside table. A rather nondescript and innocuous affair, he recognized the grain of the wood as the frame that had been around Ashwyn's display--she'd even used the grass clippings and paint chips to decorate it, while pieces of the glass pane now served as windows for the little house.

Ashwyn herself stepped out of the door and flew up to perch on Lewis' outstretched hand.
"Is that better?" she asked in a voice full of hope.

Lewis nodded without saying a word. He sank onto his bed and scratched the top of his head. "How did you even do all that stuff? And to put everything back like that? How is it even possible?"

Ashwyn shrugged her small shoulders as she sat on the broad surface of his alarm clock. "All of us Little Folk are known for our ability to build things. We can think of what we want, and we just," she waved her arm indiscriminately, "make it. I especially like making things." She grinned and wiggled her toes as they peeked out from the edges of her skirt.

"Like the house?" Lewis asked.

Ashwyn nodded.

He tilted his head to relax on his pillow while still watching her. "And the dress?" he asked.

Ashwyn shook out her skirts again. "Made it," she confirmed.

"Out of what?" Lewis felt a yawn overtake him, but he didn't really feel like turning off the light just yet.

"Nothing of yours, I promise," Ashwyn reassured him. "I just made it out of my old dress."

Lewis thought back to the night before, when she'd been so stiff under that pane of glass. He wondered what she'd done with the staples.

"Ashwyn, can I ask you something?"

She turned to face him, reclining on her hand. "You saved me from that awful menagerie," she said. "You can ask me anything."

"How does Krasimir make you and the others look so... dead? Like pieces of art, not living beings. If you're all alive, and you're all so strong and clever--how did you get trapped in the first place?"

Ashwyn sighed, and a little shiver made her wings glimmer slightly. "I don't know how it started," she said softly. "By the time he reached my village and scooped up more of us in his little jars, he'd already caught so many. He would trap us in those glass jars, and spray a horrible gas over us, something that made us stiff and unable to talk or move. Then he would pin us down with the metal knives, paint over our skin and our wings, stick the tiny dresses and clothes onto us, and trap us against the backdrops or onto the scene that he'd made for us. We would always be unable to move or resist as he arranged our bodies to suit his purposes--if we so much as wiggled even a little bit, he would spray us with the potion again, and our bodies would be even more stiff than before." She ran her fingers through her hair that fell around her face. "Especially for us fairies, when he would pin down our wings, our whole bodies would just freeze up, like being trapped in ice, but it wasn't cold."

Lewis couldn't fathom such cruelty against such an innocent being. "So you're all paralyzed because of this drug, and because of the staples he uses," he mused. "But the other day, I heard him tell Adolf that whatever it was could be wearing off."

Ashwyn leaned toward him. "You mean others are awakening, too?" she asked. "That hasn't happened for so long since he captured us! The only artifact on Phantasm strong enough to overwhelm all other kinds of magic would be the Phantasmagyth--"

"On where?" Lewis caught the strange word and turned it over in his mind.

"Phantasm," Ashwyn answered. "That's the name of my home, the place The Hunter stole us from."

Phantasm; it sounded incredible and otherworldly. "And what did you say the artifact was called that could harness actual magic?"

Ashwyn stood to her feet with her arms at her sides, like a student reciting a poem. "It's called the Phantasmagyth, and if the Hunter's poison is wearing off, then it must be nearby somewhere. The Phantasmagyth protects all of us." She cast a hopeful smile in his direction. "Does this mean you've decided to help me rescue the others?"

Lewis felt the wave of fatigue wash over him as he realized how late it had gotten while they talked. "I'm... still thinking about it," he admitted.

She stepped down from the alarm clock and dangled her legs over the edge of the night stand. "You know," she spoke in measured tones, "if you bring me to the museum with you, next time you go, I could tell you more about Phantasm, and the Phantasmagyth. Would you want to know more?"

Lewis leaned over to turn off the desk lamp, and he looked down into Ashwyn's earnest face. "Actually, I'd like that," he said. "Good night, Ashwyn."

"Good night, Lewis," she said, and slipped into the little house as Lewis switched off the light and lay down in his bed.

His dreams were filled with scenes of the exhibit hall of Moulton House flooding with clouds of fairies flying in all directions, as the gryphon screeched and circled around the ceiling, while at the center of it all, the unicorn stood totally serene, with the Phantasmagyth clasped around its horn... or hanging around its neck... What does the Phantasmagyth even look like, anyway? Lewis pondered over this last conscious thought all through the night, dreaming of different configurations and designs with each turn of his psyche.

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