I came home from my meeting with the Admiral to find my books taunting me from the desk. Those books promised a normal future and a self-defined life. I would study hard, pass my exams, and head off to university in September, where I could make new friends, learn to live alone, and maybe meet a guy and fall in love.
Everything felt different now. Everything certain was cast into doubt. A war was going on that no-one had bothered to tell me about, and it looked like I might get conscripted. Assuming I could put all of that out of my mind long enough to crack open my notes, I was no longer sure I had any reason to bother.
A brown envelope sat on top of my books. My name was written on it in flowing black script.
I called downstairs; "Mum, what's this on my desk?"
"A boy came by to deliver it while you were out," Mum shouted back. "Handsome young man. Is there something you're not telling me?"
"No, Mum!"
I shut the bedroom door. The envelope was a folded square of rough brown paper sealed with black wax. Inside was a round glass crystal hung from a loop of leather cord. Written on the inside of the folded paper were these words:
"Come to the net shops at midnight. Hang this in the moonlight. Come alone."
The note was signed, "Éven".
My heart thumped.
He wanted to see me.
* * *
A little before midnight, I checked that Mum was snoring in her room, and I went to the front window to see if Mr Bleak or any other eerie figures were lurking in the street.
All clear.
I double checked my reflection in the bedroom mirror to make sure that I had picked the right shirt, and that I had nothing stuck in my teeth, and I raced out of the house and down the steps to the beach.
The Old Town net shops stand on the shingle like a miniature city of tar-black clapboard skyscrapers. They're not shops in the usual sense, but workshops; sheds as tall as buildings, built high on the small beach so that fishermen could store their nets safe from the elements overnight.
As a boy, I called them witch huts, because they were so tall and narrow and black that I convinced myself only witches would live inside them. They would need high ceilings for their big black pointy hats.
It made sense when I was five.
It made a kind of sense now.
The sheds loomed like menacing shadows as I stepped between them; spaces of monolithic nothingness carved out of the starry sky. I knew I was taking a risk coming here on my own, but I couldn't tell anyone where I was going. The people who didn't know about Éven would think I was mad, and the people who did know would try to stop me.
Éven's choice of venue did not set me at ease. This corner of town was dead at this hour, but for the constant caw of gulls. If anything went wrong, the nearest help might be minutes away. And I was assuming it was really Éven who sent the message.
It had to be him.
I wanted to see him so much that I couldn't stand to think that it wasn't. I wanted to see him, and he wanted to see me. This was the start of something. Something I had never had before.
I found a clearing among the sheds, a little yard laid out for repairing nets and gutting fish. A gull glowered at me from the edge of the clearing, but he seemed more interested in the struggling crab he had thrown down on the shingle than in me. He stabbed his beak at the poor creature's underbelly.
The stone-white moon cut in between two sheds, and I noticed some nylon ropes stretching across the yard above my head. I passed the crystal over one of the ropes and looped it through its own cord.
The dangling crystal caught the moonlight. It glistened and glimmered and slowly turned, though there was no wind.
My watch said it was midnight on the dot.
I looked around for any sign of Éven, and saw a dozen spots of moonlight dancing on the walls of the sheds all around me. Little white spots cast by the light through the crystal.
And then, there he was.
He stood before me with his arms behind his back, his head tilted, his beautiful lips parted in a perfect smile.
"Hello, Ben."
He was a pale spectre against a backdrop of tar-painted boards, bare-skinned from the waist up, his body taut with muscle. He was silver and immaculate. Shadow and light danced across his skin, and then the shadows seemed to settle against him, clothing him with night. While he dressed himself with darkness, the look in his eyes seemed to strip me to my soul.
"Do not be afraid," he said.
His voice, deep and smooth, stirred my blood.
"I'm not afraid." A tremble gave me away. I took a step forward, to show how brave I could be, and he gestured for me to stay back.
"You cannot touch me," he said. "This is fragile magic, and you are...disruptive."
Disruptive.
He didn't want me any closer. And maybe I had misunderstood the invitation. He was only curious about me, that was all. I was weird. I was different. The Admiral knew it, and so did he. I was odd, and all the other oddballs had come to stare.
"What do you want?" I asked. My tone was harsh. I saw worry in his expression, and regretted myself at once.
"I was concerned," said Éven. "You made a powerful enemy in Lady Selkie, and there are those who will take interest in you for what you have done. The Horseshoe Men. They have found you, yes?"
I nodded.
"They said you're dangerous," I told him.
"They like to say that."
I felt emboldened. "You have to convince me that you're not," I said. "You tried to release a sea monster in the same water I swim in—the same water my mum swims in. My brother almost died because of that creature."
"You saw the thread that bound me. I was not in control."
That wasn't good enough. "But that thing was a monster, right? And it was one of you. How do I know you're not a monster too?"
I could tell he was unhappy with the question. He knitted his brows and pulled his lips into a taut frown. The dark of his eyes was like the hollows of a skull, and I was suddenly afraid.
"Your people," he said.
I shivered.
"What?" The word caught in my throat. I tried again. "What do you mean?"
"Your people make us monsters," he said. "Ligeia was a blessing once. She was one of the fifty sisters of the sea, and she guided ships safe through storms. The Queen of the Oceans gave your ruler the horn to summon her, as a gesture of peace, and your people enslaved her and turned her against her purpose. They used Ligeia to crush the Spanish fleet."
Every British school kid probably knew that piece of history about as well as they knew the Battle of Hastings, or at least the official version. The story of England's unlikely defeat of the great Spanish Armada was one of those proudly jingoistic victories that we're still supposed to have national pride about.
But Éven's version didn't sound like something to be proud of. We had cheated. We had used magic.
"The experience drove her mad," he continued. "The British made her kill so many people, and when the grief became too much for her, they cast her aside. She could not be controlled, so they put her into a deep sleep, to dream in nightmares for hundreds of years. She has laid dormant beneath the waves ever since."
If that was true, the monster that I saw was a horror of our own making.
But was it true, or was this just a story Éven was telling me to win me over to his side?
"Did they tell you about the War of the Thimble?" Éven asked.
I shrugged.
"What did they say?"
"That you fought a war across Europe for a hundred years over nothing."
"Because we are juvenile and thoughtless creatures," said Éven. He scowled at the idea. "That thimble was more than a shiny trinket, Ben. The High Queen gave her heart to a mortal king. A gift in love, which took the form of a silver thimble. The king betrayed our queen and used the thimble to bind her. Our worlds fell into decline.
"We fought a war to save our people from extinction at the hands of human cruelty. That is the true history."
That wasn't what the Admiral told me. Not even close.
Of course, she wouldn't tell me that story if she wanted to recruit me. She would tell me the other version, about how dangerous the fairies were.
And if Éven wanted to use me, he would tell me his version. He would tell me the fey were victims, and man was the aggressor.
I wanted to believe the best of them both, but I was smart enough to know that I couldn't take either one of them at their word. Not yet.
"I have no reason to trust you," I said.
"I am not asking for your trust. I am asking you to question everything you are told. You are special, Ben. You are immune to magic. Some will try to use you because of it. Some will want you dead."
"And you?" I asked. "What do you want?"
I was nervous about his answer. I knew what I wanted him to say, and I knew what I expected.
I was different, that's all. I was useful, somehow.
He chewed on his lip and lowered his eyes. Such a human and uncertain act that I almost mistook him for a boy like me; just another school day crush.
He was much more than that. He was magic and mischief and wonder. There was no-one at school like him.
"I am fascinated by you," said Éven.
My heart raced.
"Because I'm strange?" I said.
"Because you are special."
I heard the yowl of a gull and nervously looked around. A group of birds took to the air. I turned back, and Éven was suddenly much closer now. He held a hand up to my cheek, yet he did not touch me. He was so close that I could see that he was truly just a phantom in the moonlight; a projection of a man who wasn't really there. I could see through him to the clapboard of the huts beyond.
Still, I saw enough of him to see how he looked at me. I recognised the hunger in his face; the same hunger that I knew he could read in mine.
"I am drawn to you, Ben," said Éven.
He was the one who had visited me the night before. He was the reason Mr Bleak's bells rang in the street.
"You were watching me," I said.
"Watching over you."
I saw the stars in the shadow of his brow. I felt his eyes settle on my mouth. I saw him part his lips with his tongue.
I drew a breath.
"I need to see you again," he whispered.
I nodded.
"I need to see you when I can..."
He trailed off.
"Touch me?" I offered.
He put his hand to my face, and I shivered.
There was nothing there.
He faded in front of my eyes. The lights cast by the crystal seemed to spark and die like firebugs. The shadows curled away; the smoke of a snuffed candle.
He opened his mouth to say something more, but before he could speak he was gone.
The crystal stopped spinning.
There was nothing left.
I heard a jingle of bells from the beach. I looked around and saw a black cat hissing at me from the space between the net shops.
I fumbled the crystal off the nylon ropes overhead, slid it into my pocket, and ran.
* * *