The Midnight Dancers: A Fairy Tale Retold Read online

  Actually, he asked questions and she told him more about herself. About her family, about her mother dying and her father remarrying. About their school, and their family. About what she planned to do with her life.

  “Not much,” she said ruefully. “I can sew. I can file. I guess I can get a job as the church assistant secretary, if I wanted it.”

  “Which you don’t,” Michael supplied.

  She laughed. “No way,” she said. “Dad and I butt heads about the church enough as it is. Being in closer quarters might either ruin the church or result in murder.”

  “You’re a smart girl. Why don’t you go to college?”

  “Dad and Sallie are willing to send me to the Bible college outside Baltimore, but I’m not sure I want to go. It’ll just be more school. I’ll still be living at home, still doing the same old stuff.”

  “And you don’t want to do that.”

  She paused. “No, not really.”

  “What do you want to do, Rachel?” he probed.

  She clasped her hands on her knee and looked up at the stars. “I really don’t know,” she confessed.

  “Do you want to be an actress?”

  She laughed. “Not particularly. Why? Do you think I’d make a good one?”

  “You have to ask? Fishing for a compliment?”

  “No,” and she giggled at him. “When I was little, I wanted to be a nurse.”

  “Then why not be a nurse?”

  “I don’t know,” she sighed.

  “Because your parents are trying to live your life for you?” he pursued. “My mom and dad tried to do that for me. I didn’t let them. Now they let me have my own way.”

  “What did your mom and dad want you to do?” she asked.

  “Two entirely different things. My mom and dad never agree on anything, especially me. My mom wanted me to be a lawyer. My dad wanted me to go into investments, like him.”

  “And what did you end up doing?”

  He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “What I wanted to do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “What I’m doing right now.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Taking a break. Following my own star. Finding my own pleasure where it finds me.”

  “Hmm,” she nodded. She was confused, but she guessed it was meant to be poetic.

  He fixed on her with his blue eyes. “It’s your life, Rachel. Not someone else’s. Not your parents’. Not God’s. You do what you want to do, and let the rest of the cosmos deal with it.”

  Obviously, he’s not a Christian, she thought. She attempted to be tolerant.

  “The rest of the cosmos,” Prisca giggled, hearing the last line.

  “I’m serious,” Michael said. “Christians preach a lot about guilt. Do you girls get that a lot from your parents?”

  “Oh yeah,” Prisca said.

  “In a way,” Rachel said. “More from our church.”

  Prisca rolled her eyes, agreeing. “You’d think they ran our lives for us,” she said.

  “Why not just tell them all to chuck it and leave you alone?” Michael asked.

  Prisca and Rachel exchanged glances.

  “Maybe someday,” Rachel said. “But not now. Not while we all live at home.”

  “Right now, you just … behave like good girls during the day and go wild during the night?” Michael guessed.

  The sisters laughed. “You could put it that way,” Rachel agreed.

  “What about you, Alan?” Michael asked the young man, who had been a mostly silent listener.

  “Ah, my parents don’t care much what I do during the week,” he said. “Just so long as I go to church with them on Sundays.”

  “Parents are always easier on boys,” Prisca said. “It’s not fair. We’re watched like hawks!”

  “Except at night,” Michael smiled.

  “I actually feel sorry for my dad, sometimes,” Rachel mused.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Michael said. “I bet he never feels sorry for you.”

  “You’re right,” Prisca said. “He just orders us around like we’re his army regiment.”

  Michael was nodding, as though this was what he expected, but Rachel felt that this was unfair. She tried to think of something to say in defense of her father, but decided after a moment that she would rather not talk about this any longer. What she really wanted was to dance with Michael, but she didn’t dare be so bold.

  “So—where are your parents?” she asked.

  “Mom’s in Europe and Dad’s in Bermuda,” he said, looking out at the bay. “They’re both in between vacations.”

  “Your family goes on vacations separately?” Prisca asked.

  “It keeps everyone happy,” Michael said. “Mom had skin cancer, so she wants to stay away from the tropics. Dad hates the damp weather.”

  “And you?” Rachel asked.

  “I’m happy in any climate so long as I don’t have to share it with them.” He spoke lightly, as though it were a joke. Rachel didn’t want to inquire further.

  He turned to look at her. “Actually, I’m having a few friends come down and meet me here for fishing. You might enjoy meeting them. It’s a shame there won’t be enough to round out the party. I noticed your group is short on men.”

  “Yes,” Prisca said. “There’s never enough guys for all of us to dance with.”

  “But there’s more than enough girls for each guy,” Michael said, glancing at Alan, who guffawed. “But I can see that for you, this is a problem. Especially if you all like to dance. Maybe sometime I can find a solution.”

  “Oh, that would be so great!” Prisca said breathlessly. “You are so nice!”

  He smiled at her, and his eyes took on that odd glint. “As I told Rachel, I am a nice man.”

  “Maybe on my birthday,” Prisca said, artlessly.

  “When is your birthday?” Michael asked.

  “Two more weeks,” she sighed.

  “How old will you be, then?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen candles!” he said. “That’s a special occasion. I’ll have to see what I can do for you, Prisca.”

  Prisca flashed an eager smile at Rachel, who colored at her sister’s transparency. Apparently, Michael thought it was charming. Rachel was just embarrassed.

  “We should go in a few minutes,” she said, feeling that the hour was getting later than it should.

  “So soon?” Michael asked.

  Rachel couldn’t help being struck by how sad he looked to see them go. We must really add something to his life, she thought. And that was a weird thought, given his privileged position.

  ten

  Paul didn’t reach his campsite until early in the morning, and when he did, he was still restless.

  His immediate instinct was to dislike and distrust Michael Comus, but he preferred to give people the benefit of the doubt. He wasn’t surprised that the man had allowed a covey of curvaceous teenaged girls to use his private grounds for their dance parties, but he had a feeling Michael was going to start charging a toll eventually. For some reason that thought hadn’t occurred to Rachel, and it bothered Paul.

  Maybe she just doesn’t realize, he thought as he paced on the beach, stepping through the wavelets in his bare feet, that guys are rarely spontaneous when it comes to girls. There’s generally a reason for everything they do.

  On the other hand, girls, he had noticed, typically do generous or kind things for guys on impulse without any ulterior motive. This could confuse inexperienced guys, who believed, by default, that any attention given to them by a girl was surely premeditated and significant.

  Heck, if I’d known that about girls, I’d have had a much easier time in high school and college, he thought wryly. But I had to figure that out by trial and error. Maybe Rachel doesn’t know. Or maybe her dad hasn’t had time to tell her.

  Someone had to tell her, and soon. This whole thing was getting more and more dangerous, and he sti
ll hadn’t had an opportunity to convince the girls to tell their dad what they were doing. And they were even less likely to be open to that now, especially if they found out Paul knew their secret. I’ll have to try finding some indirect way of addressing the issue with them. But how that was to be done, Paul had no idea.

  He shook his head, still not weary but worn out inside. At last, he managed to get himself to go back into his tent and lie down.

  Rachel slept late as she dared, then stumbled to the sewing room to begin the project for Paul. She threaded the sewing machine with black thread and rapidly cut out two pairs of simple pants. The rest of the black satin she carefully folded back into the bag, along with the slim packet of expensive bodice material, and secreted it in a corner of the sewing room. Her sisters all knew about her dress plans, so the only person who might find it was Sallie. And Sallie rarely, if ever, tried to clean up or sort through the jumble of fabric and half-finished projects. Her father, who was allergic to sewing machines, never darkened the door of the room.

  By the time she was threading elastic through the pant legs and waistband of the second pair, she heard Paul arrive for the girls’ lesson. But Linette and Debbie, who were sleepy and grouchy, had missed their chores and had to make them up. Sallie explained this to Paul, who said he could come back.

  “It’s a hot day. If you like, you can go swimming off our beach while you’re waiting,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Rachel heard Paul reply, relief in his voice. “I think I’ll take you up on that.”

  The elastic on the last leg was too tight: Rachel re-did it, then cut the garment from the sewing machine with a satisfied sigh. Folding them over her arms, she went downstairs to scout out Paul.

  She paused beside the open door of the downstairs bathroom, seeing her limp navy blue swimsuit hanging abandoned in the corner of the towel rack. It was a hot day. A swim sounded lovely right now.

  Rachel slipped into the bathroom and changed into her swimsuit. She put her t-shirt and skirt back on, picked up the satin pants, and went carelessly out the door to the woods that led to the beach.

  Once in the woods, she looked down from the cliff to the water. At first, she didn’t see Paul, only his juggling bag lying on the beach, next to his discarded shirt. She peered through the brush this way and that. Then she happened to look at the swimming rock, and saw him.

  At first she saw only his head, bobbing in the water, and his arm. He was walking in the deep water toward the rock holding something above his head, a silver wand. His flute. He was attempting to keep it dry, with mixed success.

  She watched, amused, as he attempted to climb onto the wet, slippery rock with one hand, trying to hold the flute aloft and dry in the other. He fell off several times, sometimes spectacularly. At last, he managed to clamber onto the rock with the flute in his teeth, the instrument glistening with water. She smothered a laugh. He sat on the rock, pulled his knees to his chest, and attempted vainly to find something dry to wipe his flute on. A handkerchief he pulled from the pocket of his shorts was wet. He tried rubbing it against his bare chest, but that was also wet.

  Finally, he rubbed it through his hair and shook the water out of it. Then he crossed his legs and hunched over his instrument, putting it to his lips. His back was partly to her, and she could see the muscles in his arms and fingers working. A wild trill came from the rock, through the air, and pierced her heart.

  It was a fierce, untamed melody; unlike the mellow or cheerful piping she had heard from him before now. It was years away from the practiced, strained flute music of the school band, or the tame cooing of the worship choir’s wind section at church. She hung on it as the music stabbed at her again and again, like a hawk beating its wings against her breast. His tanned skin glistened in the sun, his fingers flew more rapidly than she could follow them, and the song seemed to possess him and change him from the ordinary bland “good boy” to someone from a different reality, a denizen of faery or Olympus or some other alternate world she had never heard of.

  Pan, she thought, he’s like Pan, in that book. The Wind in the Willows.

  After an unbelievable interval, Paul lifted his head to look at the horizon, and the music ceased. Rachel stood quietly, aware of nothing but the water and wind and the echo of music.

  Softly, she made her way down to the shore, wondering if he would play again. She slipped into the willow grove, where the guys docked their boats. I’ll be a siren and sneak up on him, she thought.

  Noiselessly she slid into the water and swam slowly towards him. His back was still towards her. He lowered his head and the music began again.

  She let herself drift up against the rock, and leaned against it. It had started to warm from the sun, and she let her crossed arms rest on that warmth. The water pushed her rhythmically against it, and she waited, listening. The melody now was less fierce, more inviting, but still wild and unpredictable.

  When he finished, he raised his head to the horizon again. I’ll startle him if I say anything, she thought, but instead he turned his head and smiled at her, squinting in the sunlight.

  “Hello mermaid,” he said.

  She grinned. He had guessed her thought. “Hello,” she said. “I heard your song, and I came.”

  “Ah,” he said, “I must be improving.”

  He turned and looked at the horizon. “This is a wonderful rock,” he said.

  “I love it,” she responded.

  “Am I taking your place?”

  “No, I’m fine here,” she said. “The water’s warm.” She kicked out her legs luxuriously.

  “Do you come here often, mermaid?”

  “Not as often as I would like.”

  He nodded. “Do you ever swim at night?”

  “Sometimes I have,” she said carelessly.

  “I hope you never swim alone at night, mermaid.”

  “If I really was a mermaid, Pan, I would swim wherever and whenever I chose,” she said.

  He looked at her curiously. “What did you call me?”

  “Pan. Like in the book. The Wind in the Willows. I’m reading it.”

  “Really?” Now she had surprised him, and she smiled.

  “You play the flute like him,” she said.

  He toyed with his instrument. “But the great god Pan is dead,” he said at last. “To invite him now is to invite death.”

  “Death? Why?”

  “Well, according to the legend, he died every year with the harvest of the grain, and rose again in spring. He was one of the corn gods, the god of shepherds.” He was silent, then added, “And of course, he prefigured Christ.”

  “Jesus was a corn dog? I mean, corn god?” she pursued, laughing at her gaffe.

  “No, He was the true Good Shepherd, the reality behind the fairy tale,” Paul said.

  “Hmm,” Rachel said, feeling the water with her fingers. “Why did you say that to invite Pan was to invite death?”

  “I was quoting someone from my theology class in college. What it means is, we can’t invoke the pagan gods any more, even the ones that were close to reality. Because Christ has come, and all pagan gods have shrunk into dead tales or demons.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t call you Pan?”

  He smiled at her, winsomely. “Just call me a faun, if you like, mermaid. They were mythical creatures who resembled Pan, and played the pipes.”

  “Yes, like in Narnia,” Rachel murmured. Dad had read her that book, long ago. “All right, faun.”

  Paul looked at her again, his lips half-parted. Then he said, “Since we’re talking in this fanciful fashion, mermaid, may I tell you a story?”

  “Sure,” she said, bobbing in the water.

  “It’s not a happy story,” he said, warning. He put his flute to his mouth and blew a short ffift! then rubbed it.

  “I promise not to cry,” she said.

  “Don’t promise that,” he said, and set his flute down. “Once upon a time, there were men and women in the world
.”

  “Just as there are now.”

  “Just as now. And there was a devil, as there is also now, and he desired to destroy the happiness of man and woman. So he created a twisted looking glass. This looking-glass was not a mirror, but a piece of glass so invisible that a man could look through it and not realize he was seeing a twisted reality. And it reflected a bit, like a mirror, so that a man could see himself, or what he thought was himself.”

  “Go on,” Rachel said.

  “Now, this glass was made particularly for men, and the devil made sure that men looked through it whenever they chanced to look at women. And this glass changed the women.”

  “It made them ugly,” Rachel said, thinking she had heard this story before.

  “No, not really. That’s actually a lot harder to do than you might think. What the mirror did was more insidious. It reduced them.”

  “Reduced them?”

  “So that, to a man looking through the glass, the woman appeared to be an object, a pretty plaything put there for his pleasure. Now, the man might know that the woman had brains, or talents, or any number of other gifts, but when he looked through the mirror, he saw her only as a toy. And the devil made every effort to push that glass before a man’s eyes when he was as young as possible. So that most men were so used to looking through the glass that, even when it wasn’t there, the images they saw in the glass dictated their reality.”

  “Hmph,” was all Rachel could think of to say.

  Paul kicked the water with his toe. “There was a further trick to the devil’s glass. The glass taught men to sort all women they saw into two types—worthwhile, and not worthwhile. Or ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ as some men took to calling them. Good toys and bad toys. And so this was the way they had of speaking about women among themselves. And as you can imagine, the women couldn’t help overhearing these conversations. And even though most of the women hadn’t glanced through the mirror, they couldn’t help thinking of themselves in this manner. As toys. Good toys or bad toys.”

  “What was the difference between the good toys and the bad toys?” Rachel said, scraping at the rock with her fingernail.