A Place Beyond The Map (6 page)

“So I can make a wish for whatever I want, and this stone will give it to me?” Phinnegan inquired, his face brightening. He looked eagerly at the Faë, a smile creeping across his face.

“Well, not exactly. You see, this one is rather small. It has a limited capacity for what it can do. Got a spot of school work you don’t want to do? It can take care of it. Need to sweep up a bit? No problem. But it can’t give you a pile of gold or anything like that, if that’s what you’re after.”

The smile on Phinnegan’s face faded.

“That’s disappointing, isn’t it? It can do my chores and my homework? I can do that myself. Not much of a wishing stone.”

“Well, it does have other uses,” the Faë remarked with a sly smile.

“Like what?”

Periwinkle reached into Phinnegan’s hand and took the stone back. Waving a hand to silence Phinnegan’s protest, the Faë took the stone and rolled it between his two palms. A few moments passed. 

And then Phinnegan heard the melody. His eyes widened and he stared at the Faë’s palms.

“You hear it I see,” the Faë whispered as he continued to roll the marble in his hands.

“Yes,” Phinnegan whispered in return. “I’ve heard it before. The night you stole into my house. When I followed you down the stairs and through the house, the sound grew louder. And then when you fell-“

“You mean when you nearly made me snuff it,” the Faë interjected in a sharp whisper.

“When you fell,” Phinnegan continued, “the melody stopped. And I haven’t heard it since. It was coming from that little marble?”

The Faë nodded and opened his hands wider, letting more sound escape.

“It’s beautiful,” Phinnegan breathed. “What is it?”

“It’s –“ the Faë began, but never finished, for the sound coming from the stone became a shriek. Phinnegan pressed his hands to his ears to try and muffle the sound, but to little effect. The look on Periwinkle’s face was one of pure dismay.

“Oh, bloody hell,” he exclaimed. “Now I’ve done it.”

“Done what? What’s happening?”

The Faë looked him in the eye and was for once completely serious.

“They found me.”

Phinnegan was at a loss.

“Who found you? What is going on?”

The Faë never answered. Instead a booming voice shook the very earth beneath their feet.

PERIWINKLE LARK, YOU ARE HEREBY ORDERED TO APPEAR BEFORE THE HIGH COURT.

Phinnegan watched in horror and listened to the booming voice declare Periwinkle a criminal.  The stone was growing in size and becoming more translucent and fluid. Phinnegan could not understand what was happening, but he saw that Periwinkle appeared to be fading before his eyes. Without thinking, he reached out to grab the Faë’s hand.

“No! Don’t!” Periwinkle shouted.  But the warning came too late.  Phinnegan had already reached across the shimmering orb of fluid translucence.

Just as Phinnegan touched the Faë’s hand, he saw a bright flash and heard a crash like thunder.

And then everything went black.

CHAPTER 5

Under the Mountain

When Phinnegan opened his eyes, a black darkness surrounded him. Not the black of his bedroom on a moonless night, but a total and complete darkness of impenetrable depth. He held his hand up in front up his face, or at least he tried to, but as he saw nothing, he really couldn’t be sure that he had.

The flash of light.

Could he be blind? The flash had seemed bright and sudden enough to damage his eyes. Or could it be that the invisible force that grabbed him by the core and pulled him with some unnatural strength that damaged his eyes? Or worse, was he dead? People who had transcended the veil of death and returned to tell their tales did describe seeing a bright, white light. 

Just then, he heard a faint cough from his left.  

I can’t be dead. People don’t cough after they die.

Still unable to see through the dense darkness, the strange cough unsettled him. The hair on his arms stood on end and he scrambled backwards across the rough floor until his back bumped against a wall.  He heard the cough again, fainter than before.

“Who…who’s there?” Phinnegan called out into the darkness. 

The only answer was another faint cough. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and felt his way forward.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” he called out again.

A familiar lilting voice replied, though weakened from coughing.

“It’s only me, mate. Your favorite Faë.”

Periwinkle’s voice was now closer. Phinnegan assumed that Periwinkle, too, was feeling his way through the darkness.

“Where are we? What happened?” Phinnegan queried the darkness. “You were rubbing that stone and then there was a flash of light and a crash…are we dead?”

“Not dead, mate. But close enough.”

“And the voice…” Phinnegan whispered, his words trialing off as he recalled what the voice had said about the Faë. Could those things really all be true?

“We are in a very dark place, mate. Figuratively and literally. So dark I can’t see my own bloody hand in front of my face. I know of only once place that would be this dark. Féradoon. A black place in more ways than one, I’ll promise you that.”

“Féradoon?” Phinnegan asked. “What’s that?” He paused, remembering the booming voice. “That voice said it, right? Doesn’t sound like any place I’ve ever heard of.”

“You wouldn’t have heard of it, mate,” the Faë answered, his voice becoming stronger. It sounded like he was only a few feet away from Phinnegan now. “It’s not in your world. Even in mine it’s not a topic for polite conversation.”

Phinnegan’s heart lurched at Periwinkle’s words, which he spoke so nonchalantly. 

 “Do you mean we’re not in Ireland anymore?”

The Faë barked a short laugh.

“Ireland? Uh, no.  No, we definitely are not in Ireland anymore. Nor England nor France nor the Americas. We’ve left your world all together. Welcome to the land of the Faë. Though this isn’t really a proper spot for a visit.”

Phinnegan’s breath caught and his limbs quavered beneath him. He heard Periwinkle’s words, but his mind could not comprehend them.  He struggled with the innate impossibility of somehow traversing into another world. But behind the fear that now gripped him, anger trickled forth. Phinnegan began to suspect the Faë was playing some cruel joke on him.

“Are you having a joke on me? You’ve said yourself that you Faë are a tricky lot. How do I know this isn’t some…some, illusion?”

“Illusion? Look around you, mate, if you can that is. For me, it’s blacker than pitch. I don’t deny that I’ve had some fun at your expense with the sticky root and the like, but this is not my doing. We’re in a tight spot.”

Phinnegan remained unconvinced.

“But how do I know that this isn’t some magic trick? Maybe I’m blind-folded and you’re just standing there smirking at me while I look the fool. And another thing – “

“Oh, stop your bleating,” Periwinkle interrupted, his tone exasperated. “I know more about magic than you can imagine and I can promise you this is
no
magic trick. Do you think I just shone a pretty light in your face and then pulled the wool over your eyes, is that it? No, mate. This is bad and this is real, or I’m Morgan le Fay.”

 “Well, if all you say is true,” Phinnegan whispered after several silent moments, “this does sound bad.”

“Believe me now, do you,” the Faë sneered. “And oh yes, it is bad. Quite. The devil take me for being so careless.” Periwinkle continued speaking, but his voice dropped so and he assumed the Faë was talking to himself.

“How could you be so stupid? Did you really think they wouldn’t notice?”

“Notice what?” The question escaped Phinnegan’s lips before he could hold it back. Raised with manners as he had been, he thought it rude to listen in on another’s conversation, even when that conversation was with one’s self. But he couldn’t deny he wanted to know the answer to that question.

The Faë became silent. As the moments passed, Phinnegan’s anger and frustration rose once again and they betrayed him in his voice when he spoke.

“Would you just tell me what the bloody hell is going on?”

Phinnegan’s demand was greeted with further silence. He could almost feel the harsh glare Periwinkle was undoubtedly casting in his direction. 

“What’s going on is we’ve been captured,” Periwinkle stated after a few moments.

“
Captured
? By whom?”

“Well if the stories are true, and I have no reason to believe they are not, then Féradoon is now sort of the unofficial headquarters for that favorite son of the Faë, Vermillion. He and his lot are our most likely captors. I told you, they’ve got a vice grip on this world now. And they’re squeezing her for all that they can. I never should’ve activated that stone.”

“Activated the stone?” Phinnegan recalled the smooth, spherical wishing stone. “Is that what you were doing then, when you were making it sing?”

Although he could not see Periwinkle, Phinnegan assumed the Faë must have been nodding his response out of habit, forgetting that they conversed in total darkness.

“Err, yes. “When the wishing stones are activated, they open a sort of window between our worlds. Not anything you can travel through, not one that size anyway, but you can see and hear things. The stones are linked to the Faë that saved them.”

He paused for a moment, then continued, his voice quiet.

“They’ve been watching mine, no doubt, so I thought to trick them by using the stone of another. I was going to give it to you, if you remember. Evidently their tracking methods are better than I gave them credit for.”

The Faë’s admission that he was likely being watched reminded Phinnegan of the deep, booming voice they had heard back in Ireland beneath the wych elm.

“If they were watching you…does that mean that you did those things that the voice said? That you are a thief? A traitor?”

“Well, mate, I don’t need to tell you that I am a bit of a thief. Your father’s pipe, if you recall. As to the traitor bit, if standing up to that lout labels me a traitor, then I wear it proudly.”

Phinnegan pondered this answer. In his short life, he had heard of courageous rebels who resisted some unfair authority, even peacefully, and were labeled criminals and traitors. Of course, these people had all been written about in books, whether fictitious or historical, but the principle was the same.

“What did you do?” Phinnegan swallowed the lump in his throat.

“Did you kill someone?”

Periwinkle chuckled in the darkness.

“I may be a thief and a ‘traitor,’ if they want to call me that.  But I assure you I am no murderer. I’ve only…well, shall we say disrupted…some of his plans. That’s all. I’m a bit of an instigator, you could say.”

“What sorts of things have you done then?” Phinnegan asked, his curiosity piqued by this admission.

“Most of it boils down to a bit of thieving. But with a Faë like that, stealing some trophy ruins the whole conquest for him. But I’ve done a bit of vandalism as well. Once, a few years back at the beginning of this mess, when Vermillion first proclaimed himself as some sort of prince-in-waiting, he commissioned a statute to be made in our capital city of himself.” The Faë chuckled. “When it is was all finished, I made a few improvements.”