The Night They Left Forever
EVERYTHING would have been fine if they’d never traveled across the ocean to the city. Everything would have been fine if they had not moved into the ancient stone house. Certainly, disaster could have been averted had they not hired that old lady to tutor their daughter.
Maybe, even, everything would have been fine if they had never bought Elly that doll that looked like a peasant girl.
But all of those things happened, and everything was not fine.
BACK in the 1990s, Elly and her father and mother, and her little sister, Jae, took a trip to a city in Eastern Europe, a city in a country that used to be Communist-ruled, but which, by the 1990s, had shaken off the totalitarian yoke and was embarking on an uneasy new adventure.
Elly’s father was there to teach the ruling oligarchs of the nation how to create laws for the regulation of their markets, and Elly’s mother spent her days treating the city’s residents for various types and levels of mental illness. Together, her mother and father sought to bring the city into the modern 20th century, her father with very modern capitalism, her mother with very modern psychiatric medicine.
Some decades later, the country would sink into tyranny and succumb to the brittle assurances of a metal-eyed strongman.
But for a shining moment, back in the 1990s, the city was golden and eternal.
ELLY was only eight years old, and her little sister, Jae, was five.
Elly was a sweet child, ingenuous and carefree, wide blue eyes, blond hair that sparkled in the sunlight, a smile that people remembered. Little Jae was rambunctious and unknowable, a smirk on her face and scabs on her knees.
Her parents worried about Elly, about what would happen when she discovered the truth about the world, the ugliness of reality, the cruelty of the human race. No one worried about Jae. Jae would be fine.
DURING its long history, many different types of people ruled the city, a lot of kings and queens, some good, some bad, some neither good nor bad. For a few hundred years, in the shadowy ancient past, the city was a separate kingdom of its own and vassal of Rome.
Elly and her family stayed in a big stone house just on the edge of a river that cut the city in half, which was three-quarters of a mile from the docks, where the ocean fed the river, and where ships used to pause to deliver food and luxuries to sell in the city’s markets. The docks had since fallen into ugly disrepair.
The house was built in 1476, and it had seen a lot of things since then, marauding invaders in 1532, an opulent royal procession in 1498, and, one night in 1893, a spaceship full of little men from a planet far away, who spun through the street on which the house sat, lit everything brighter than noontime, then shot back into the sky, never to return.
A great tree sheltered the house, a great tree that looked as though it were hundreds of years old, wrinkled and wizened and wise.
HER FATHER was bespectacled, youthfully balding, still scrawny. He always looked uncomfortable in his 1990s suit and tie. Her mother was dark-skinned, slender and beautiful, although Elly and Jae were pale.
Shortly after they arrived in the old city, Elly’s parents gave her a gift, a little handmade doll in a colorful dress, a rosy-cheeked peasant girl.
“A little princess,” said her father, and her mother added, “For our little princess.”
Elly could see that the doll was a peasant, not a little princess, but her parents could not. Elly knew that she was no longer anyone’s little princess, but her mother and father did not. Still, she did not say this. Instead, she thanked them and smiled, and she hugged her new doll. She would love the doll, because she loved her mother and father.
Her parents bought Jae a bouncing rubber ball, which Jae threw out the window, eyes wide with delight.
IN THE WEEKS before school was to begin, little Jae learned to swim in the river (which, to amuse their children, the city’s new oligarchs had cleaned up after the fall of Communist tyranny). A local girl babysat Jae, a cheerful teenager eager to earn a few coins.
“Gung ho!” Jae shouted in her squeaky, little-girl voice, and the other children from the city covered their faces when Jae cannonballed into the water, then laughed and splashed her when she re-emerged. Then she called out some 90s American kid thing, some sort of catch-phrase or trendy jargon, and the city kids stared at her, blinking and smiling without comprehension.
Elly was older and not ready for school, and so her busy parents consigned her to the care of a tutor, an old woman who had overseen the house for 60 years, and who was to prepare Elly for her classes and keep her safe and out of trouble.
WHEN the old woman first saw Elly, she opened her eyes wide in astonishment.
“It’s uncanny!” she exclaimed.
(Uncanny, Elly figured out, was a fancy grownup word that meant amazing and kind of weird.)
AFTER A FEW WEEKS, the old woman agreed to explain to Elly what she had found so uncanny. She took Elly across town into an old building in the center of the oldest part of the city, they ascended a staircase, then she led Elly through twisting passageways till they reached a dim, cavernous attic library.
The old woman and Elly sat beneath a dusty painting of a little girl who looked very much like Elly.
Heavy, faded books creaked on lunging shelves.
Elly loved the smell of old books.
“In 1672,” the old woman said, “a strange ship arrived at the harbor of our city. This ship was very mysterious. Most ships at the time had a captain and a crew, and maybe even some prisoners captured from foreign lands. But though the ship, which arrived here in 1672, was a large and stately vessel, nevertheless the only passengers aboard were one little girl and the strange animal, or person, who accompanied her.
“He looked like a monkey, but he was dressed and groomed impeccably, and he seemed to speak some sort of language.”
(Impeccably, Elly figured, was a word grownups used that meant “very nice.”)
“This fellow, or creature, was known as ‘Figmo,’ or something a bit like that. ‘Figmo,’ he would say, and point to himself. The little girl, rudely, never introduced herself, at least not to the city’s mayor, and the various other dignitaries who came to greet her (although, in retrospect, it appears that the city’s children would come to know her quite well).
“The young girl wore beautiful and strange purple and blue clothes made out of fabrics that no one in this city had ever seen before, and she spoke a strange language. Her ship was well-stocked with foreign delicacies and old wooden chests filled with gold coins. When she arrived in the city, she brought most of her gold to the local bank, then used the rest of it to rent this house.
“She was welcomed as kindly as could be expected, considering that she didn’t speak the local tongue, had no desire to learn it, and did not leave her house much during the day. She ate the food she had brought with her, and Figmo was occasionally at the market, with a few gold coins in his little felt purse, picking up provisions for his friend.
“At night, she sat outside in front of her house, right by the banks of the river, or sometimes a little farther away in the center of the city gardens. She often played a strange instrument that looked a little bit like a flute but sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard before, so beautiful that the townspeople were drawn to their windows to listen. But they never approached her, and they never left their homes.”
“EVENTUALLY,” the old woman said, “other little friends appeared in the dark of the gardens after midnight, who listened to the young girl’s solo concerts, talked excitedly and incoherently and giggled in the shadows. Concerned parents would insist that it had not been their children. Their children had been peacefully asleep. But if no parent of the city would admit to a child’s absence the night before, then who had been in the gardens?; and could a child be in two places at once, her body peacefully asleep in her little bedroom in her little stone house, while her spirit danced in the gardens and spoke a fanciful language?
“When the city-folk summoned the police, as they invariably did on a nightly basis, the police would find the gardens deserted, and when they paid a visit to the little girl, she would great them at the door in her nightcap and nightgown, her eyes dull and groggy.
“Did the parents of the town notice a strange mysterious smile on the lips of their dear children? Did the teachers at the local school hear the little boys and girls speak to each other in the visitor’s alien tongue, when they thought no one was listening?
“One morning, they awoke to find their children’s beds empty — every single one of them, across the city — and as the panicked residents rushed from their homes in the early light of dawn, they were greeted by the sight of the young girl’s ship as it left the harbor, heavy with passengers, its sails full of wind.
“The wind carried to the shore the sound of children’s voices raised in song, and the morning stars lit up their smiling faces as the ship raced toward the horizon. When the royal navy was summoned, a stormy sea suddenly held their vessels back, and when the storm cleared, the foreign ship was nowhere to be seen.”
THE OLD WOMAN paused. She seemed to lose her train of thought.
“Within a couple of weeks,” she said at last, “the children began to appear in their parents’ dreams, smiling at them from a golden city perched on snowy cliffs that abutted a rocky green ocean. They said hello; they were happy….
“It took a long time for children’s laughter to return to the city, but return it did, because the parents of the city eventually had more children, and life went on.
“Years later, a resident of the city returned from a sea voyage to report word of the missing children. His ship had been swept off course during a storm, and he and the other passengers had docked for a few nights in an unknown island kingdom, awaiting calm. The children of the city were happy and peaceful in a mountain city on this island kingdom, very far from their home. They’d become educated and rich, and they were living exactly the sorts of lives that their parents would have wished for them in their most hopeful fantasies. It might even have been a magic kingdom, because they appeared to have aged very little if at all in the many years since their abduction (or escape, depending on how one looked at it). They sent their love and joy. ‘How might we find them?’ the parents asked, and the man replied, ‘Your ship must be swept off course, during an ocean storm. That is the only way you might find them.” Then: ‘Listen to them, for they are speaking to you in your dreams,’ he insisted.
“The parents didn’t know whether to believe him, and for the rest of their lives continued to wonder what they had done to deserve their fate; who the little girl was; why she had taken their children; whether messages can truly be sent through dreams; and, lastly, whether there is such a thing as Magic.”
And the woman now added a new question that had just occurred to her: why had Elly been somehow drawn to the very house where the little girl had lived hundreds of years before, another little girl from a faraway country who looked so much like Elly and who resembled her in other ways as well?
Elly thanked the old woman for the interesting story, she went upstairs and went to bed.
THE GREAT OLD TREE that sheltered the house creaked in the wind, and the branches of its shadows snaked across the room. Elly thought that the tree must have seen all these events, everything that the old woman had told her, but the tree wouldn’t confirm or deny any of it. Something scurried across the branches, some little creature whose shadow loomed large in her room, like a monster.
Across the hallway, Jae hummed gently, in her sleep.
Jae’s childish, sleepy hum was beautiful.
Something chirped in the night, a bat, or a night-bird, or just a cricket.
Elly stared at her ceiling, and she didn’t sleep.
She sat up, climbed out of bed, bounded across the dim hallway and woke her sister, who followed her outside into the moonlight. Soon, they were at the docks, which were no longer crumbling and useless, and that great crewless and stately ship sat in the harbor, as she knew it would. Behind her, the city glowed, starlight flickered in the window panes. No streetlamps, no cars, horse carriages sat idle. Horses, tied up outside the dark stone houses, stood sleeping. Children’s laughter echoed from the ship deck.
To Jae, Elly mused, in that old and intricate, flower-scented language, “What could be more beautiful than to live forever in dreams?”
She thought her parents would agree.
Elly looked up, and she saw Figmo on the lookout platform at the top of the main mast. He looked like a funny little man, and like a monkey in a fine suit and tie.
He called out to the two girls: “Figmo!” In his monkey/little man voice.
Jae smiled, and then Elly smiled too.
“Remember him?” Elly said, and Jae said, “Our friend, Figmo.”
Elly remembered a lot of things, now, that she hadn’t remembered yesterday, and her sister did, too.
ONBOARD the ship, children soon surrounded Elly and Jae. The children ran and danced about the deck in their gowns and breeches, and other such clothing of the year 1672, the smallest in pudding caps to cushion their little skulls. They were so tiny, so fragile and so just like children.
The ship rounded the rocky cliffs of the southern coast, and Elly and Jae watched the city disappear into the sea mist. A porpoise leaped and squawked in the chilly night air, then crashed down through the moonlit waves.
“I just saw a mermaid,” Jae said. “Just over there, swimming along beside us.”
Jae pointed at the ocean, just to the east of the ship.
Elly said that was impossible.
“Mermaids aren’t real,” she told her sister.
Jae nodded seriously, and she stared at that spot in the ocean, just to the east of the ship, where she could have insisted she had seen a mermaid swimming along beside the porpoises, under a sky filled with night birds and no airplanes.
“What could be more beautiful than to live forever in dreams?” Jae whispered, still watching for the mermaid.
^^^
Steven S. Drachman is the author of a science fiction trilogy, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book.
Illustration by the author.
