C. M. Rosens

October 27th – Helen Stubbs – ‘Uncontainable’ (2016) – Read it here. Catch up on the challenge here.

Wow, this did NOT go where I thought it was going. Not one for those who need a TW for baby death. Definitely on the changeling theme, but as I say, not where I thought it would go.

I love the idea of evil beings or people, who really knows, being seen for what they are by a feral child. Also I loved the implication that if one goes, another arrives in the village to take their place, but doing a different job, and in a different guise.

This reminded me of a short from the México Bárbero anthology (the first one – there is a second), Lo que importa es lo de Adentro, dir. Lex Ortega, where only the little disabled girl Laura can see the ‘harmless’ man in the neighbourhood for what he is – a bogeyman who kills children and harvests their organs for sale. This segment is a modern take on the folklore of El Coco / El Cucuy, the bogeyman in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries who eats children.

In this story, Rochelle/Rachel’s uncanny perceptions and knowledge, combined with her aggression, rejection of gifts, violence, and spurning of the priest, sets her up as a changeling to me, so when the story took another, more macabre direction, I really appreciated the twist.

I think this story might be vying for top place in my favourites. I’m really getting into Australian and Aotearoan writers and short horror fiction – see my interviews with Lyndall Clipstone and Mason Hawthorne for more ideas for what to read next.

For my take on changelings and the horror of being the only person who sees things for what they are, see my short story THE SNOW CHILD.

Instead of reposting extracts from that story again, I thought I’d post something else that I started a long while back, which is a changeling type story set in the Pagham-on-Sea universe, but not set in Pagham-on-Sea itself.

TW for baby stealing and baby neglect and death.

Experimental paragraphs as potential openers

Ellie Jenkins hated mirrors. She’d seen a monster in one as a child, and never gotten over it. Of course, nobody believed her; Aunty Lisa hadn’t wanted to bring her sister’s kid up in the first place, and wasn’t interested in whether Ellie saw monsters or not.

Nick Emlyn Hall loved mirrors. He’d seen a monster in one as a child, and never gotten over it. Only his foster-brother believed him, and that was because Cameron saw monsters in mirrors too.

Nick and Ellie meet at a ballroom dancing class – but Ellie hates mirrors, and this class thankfully doesn’t have any, as it’s above a Private Shop (UK term for a shop that sells sex toys, etc.)

I added this detail in because I went to a private one-to-one burlesque class for my hen, arranged by a close friend, which was above a shop like that, and upstairs all the rooms had numbers… you know. I had a great time, and by total coincidence, it was the same dancer I had already booked (unbeknownst to my mate) to belly dance at my wedding.

Anyway, Nick and Ellie meet while ballroom dancing, and at some point Romance and Plot happens, and after their first time having sex (in a Wetherspoons toilets after Ellie discovers her boyfriend is having it away with her mum whom she is trying as an adult to reconcile with) they have this exchange at Nick and Cam’s house:

Nick looked at Ellie, who was brimming with questions. “Do you own a full length mirror?”

Ellie shuddered involuntarily, a distant memory of Aunty Lisa’s making her cringe. “No.”

“You don’t like them, do you? Why not?” Nick swung his legs, much to Cam’s irritation, scuffing the cabinet doors with his heels.

Ellie shrugged. “It’s stupid. When I was little, I thought I saw a monster in one.”

Nick gave Cam a look of triumph. “There you go.”

“That doesn’t…Ellie, what sort of monster?” Cam turned to her now too, the first time he had deigned to even look at her since she came into the kitchen.

She didn’t feel like explaining something so childish. “I don’t know.”

“Grey skin? Wrinkled? Massive eyes? Really long nails?”

Th details were hazy now, but that description struck a chord. Her hesitation drew a sigh from him.

“Small? Probably only about as big as you were?”

“What…what are you saying?”

The brothers exchanged glances.

“Mirrors can show us what we really look like,” Nick said slowly. “If we approach them in the right way. It’s easy to do by accident.”

Ellie wasn’t ready to hear that. She didn’t want to be seven years old again, having night terrors about the things she saw in Aunty Lisa’s mirror after spinning in front of it in a rare new dress. She could barely get her head around what he was saying to her.

“Are you saying I’m not real?”

“I’m saying you’re not really Ellie,” Nick said, and that was worse.

The three characters have a chat about changeling lore here, and Ellie learns where changelings really come from. A lot of this is hinted at in my story THE SNOW CHILD as well, which uses similar lore to the bits I’ve used here, but I’m undecided as to whether I want to tie them all into the same universe. I think I probably will, so a lot of things may change. Or not. We’ll see. But this is a section from the changeling chat.

Ellie is finally persuaded to see her real self in a mirror and face the monster she thinks she is.

“Hey.” Nick crossed the room and touched her arm. “Do you want to see yourself properly? You are real, I promise. You just – you just wear this body like a shell. Like a set of clothes.”

“And my personality?”

“That’s all you. Bit of nature, bit of nurture, but all your version of Ellie Jenkins. It doesn’t change that part of you.”

Ellie stood in front of the mirror, her back to it, and turned slowly anticlockwise. Her reflection was blurred, as if there was Vaseline on the glass. On top was Ellie, the human Ellie, the way everyone saw her. Underneath was…someone else.

Ellie turned anticlockwise again for another full turn, heart pounding, hands clammy.

This time, the thing underneath was closer to the surface, the mirror showing her more grey and less pale flesh. She turned around one more time, and there she was.

Wrinkled grey folds of skin, stone coloured but tree bark textured, blotched with patches of moss and paler lichen, hung on a frame that matched hers in dimensions, her breasts full and drooping, rolls and curves all pretty much the same, and her face was much sharper and flatter than she’d expected to see. Hr nose almost didn’t exist at all, a nub of slit nostrils in the middle of her face, eyes huge and round, bugged slightly and taking up most of the space where her forehead had been. Her hair was dandelion down, sprouting delicately from the dome of her skull in wispy poofs of white.

Nick and Cam appeared behind her, also naked, and when they turned three times, the family resemblance was unmistakeable despite the differences in their builds. It wasn’t their appearance, which was basically the same as hers; grey wrinkled skin like lichen-covered bark, both considerably mossier than she was, with short, dark green fronds sprouting over them in thick patches.

Human beauty standards didn’t apply between them.

Ellie looked down at herself, expecting to see the skin she was used to, but the glamour of human Ellie Jenkins had also been stripped from her body and the reflection matched the distorted reality.

Everything made sense.

There was no horror, although she’d anticipated there being something, some panic or tingle of fear, of disgust, but there was only a profound sense of fitting. She’d worried that she wouldn’t fit her real skin, but in fact, it made better sense to her than the human one she had.

“Do you like it?” Nick asked.

Ellie nodded, running her new – old? Real? – hands over her body, exploring the fibrous textures of her form.

“What happens to the babies? The real Ellie? Where is she?”

Nick winced. “Human babies don’t tend to live long in Faerie. They get taken because they look cute, but the new parents…get bored easily. Eventually, the stolen kids get mulched, and their bodies fruit into sprites, imps, that sort of thing.”

“Mulched?” Ellie stared at him in horror. “You mean…”

“There’s a garden,” Cam said, without emotion. “They call it the Golden Green.”

Ellie felt sick. “The Golden Green? Why…?”

“Things rot really prettily in Faerie,” Nick said flatly. “Anyway, the real Ellie doesn’t exist anymore. She probably spawned a whole swarm of wood sprites and tooth fairies, if that’s any consolation. Like mayflies, you know? Except they live a bit longer.”

Ellie covered her mouth, forcing down bile.

“Look, none of that matters, because to all intents and purposes, you’re the only Ellie now, so that makes you the real one,” Cam said, in a manner that was meant to close the conversation, but didn’t actually help. “Like I’m the real Cam, and Nick’s the real Nick.”

Ellie couldn’t take all this in at once. She ran her hands over her body, the one she had always had but never knew was there, and tried to take it all in.

There was a slight concave pit in the middle of her chest, and no navel. “What’s this?”

“From the seed pod,” Nick said, showing her his own. “They grow us in the Golden Green. Cam and me, we’re from the same pod. We sensed it the moment we met each other. You’re from a different one. Different bush, probably. I got a sense of connection to you the moment we met, so I suspected straight off you were one of us, but I don’t think we’re linked beyond that.”

“So…we’re plants?” Ellie explored the dip in her chest, imagining a small stem burgeoning out of it, connecting her to sunlight and water and air.

“Sort of.”

Ellie ran her hands downwards, between her legs, and paused, surprised at the absence she felt. “Where’s my…?” She looked properly at the brothers. “Where are your…?”

“Cocks?” Nick’s sharp mouth split into a perfect triangle, giving him a wicked air. “Don’t need them. We don’t get rid of waste that way, and we don’t reproduce like that.”

“So what are these?” Ellie grabbed her breasts, but they were hard and light, and rattled when she shook them. “Oh wow.”

“Seeds.” Cam rattled his own, a little smaller than hers. “We all carry seeds. These are pods, really. They release when we die or we’re fully mature, but changelings don’t often live that long.”

“How long?” Ellie jiggled her seed pods, listening to the percussive shake, feeling nothing. Unlike her human tits, she had no sensation there.

“A hundred years.”

“Oh.”

“Most changelings don’t last a year,” Nick said. “Not in the bad old days, when people were wise to us. They’d kill their own babies if they thought they’d been swapped. It was all extremely grim. I went around a few times before my luck started to hold.”

“Like, we reincarnate?”

“No, that’s a specific worldview, isn’t it? This is more like…recycling.” Nick looked at Cam for corroboration. “When you kill a changeling, or one dies, or whatever, these seeds get released. They’re a part of us. Every seed you bear inside you is another you. The more you have, the better chance of being recycled.”

“So…the seeds release, and they – what? They grow?”

“Essentially. They get collected up first, because you can only regrow in the Golden Green.”

“Where the human babies get…mulched.”

“Yep. But that’s nothing to do with us, that’s how the sprites and small swarming things get born.”

Cam nudged him. “The roots of our bushes feed on them too. What’s left.”

“Oh, God.” Ellie felt sick again.

“Oh, right. Yeah. Well, anyway, not really our fault. Circle of life, right?” Nick shifted from foot to foot, or rather, stump to stump, his belly round and ripe and rippling with the movement. Ellie found she was still attracted to him, so perhaps in her plant-changeling life her orientation was towards juicy, agendered fruit.

Attraction was also a human thing, if she didn’t have the requisite parts to do anything about it, so maybe that tug towards him was something else she didn’t yet have a name for.

“It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” Nick asked, changing the subject and drawing her attention back to the mirror. “Look at us. Like a horror film.”

“I really like it,” Ellie admitted, the strangeness of it ebbing the longer she remained fully exposed, filling every part of her form with herself. Her whole personality fitted into it perfectly, no need to hide or conceal or suppress any bit of it, no need to squash anything down or over-accentuate anything else. She was, for the first time in her life, both complete, and completely comfortable. “I think you’re a dead sexy goblin man.”

Nick’s triangle smile made his big, globular eyes shine with a pale, sinister light, and she loved that even more.

“Excellent.”

Cam coughed.

“Cam is allergic to fun,” Nick said.

Cam sprouted thorns across his whole body, a savage gleam in his sunlit eyes.

Ellie patted herself down, checking herself for similar protrusions. “Oh my God, that’s amazing. Can I do that?”

Nick laughed. “No. I told you. We’re from different bushes.”

“Why does everything you say sound mildly dirty?”

“Mildly?” Nick tossed his head, mock-offended.

“You can probably sprout something,” Cam said, thorns retracting. “Try.”

Ellie closed her eyes, double lids folding over her enhanced field of vision, and took notice of what was beneath her skin. Additional things that felt like muscles but probably weren’t flexed and relaxed in her shoulders, and something squeezed through slits that opened up like gills.

She opened her eyes. “Any good?”

The other two nodded, vaguely impressed. Her shoulders were covered in nettles, their stinging undersides not bothering her own skin, but shielding her head in a clump.

That’s all folks! Let’s see if this experimental writing goes anywhere.

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