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  Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night

  by

  Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma

  Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night © 2018 Katherine Fabian & Iona Datt Sharma

  Cover art © 2018 Lodestar Author Services

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the authors except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the authors.

  Contents

  Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night

  by

  Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma

  "Home is our comfort at the winter's height

  Sing for the coming of the longest night."

  - Iain Frisk and Nigel Eaton, "The Halsway Carol" (2010)

  To A.: ma tha thu ga iarraidh.

  - Iona Datt Sharma

  To my wife, Amy. I love you.

  - Katherine Fabian

  Part 1

  The glitter is everywhere. Layla has found it inside her phone case and inside her bra. It's insidious and it has that horrible Play-Doh smell and it doesn't even make sense, glittery face paint for the donkey in the nativity play. But Amy wanted to be a fairy princess donkey, and Layla had two utility bills to pay and two slices of buttered toast to unstick from the wall and didn't have the energy to argue. Amy is impressively sparkly even from here.

  Her name isn't really Amy, of course. It's Ambika, after an aspect of Parvati. The vedic Ambika was consort of Shiva, goddess of strength, abundance, and retributive justice, and now the beast of burden in some white-people creation myth. Which is unfair, given that the people concerned were actually first-century Palestinians and Layla had three hours' sleep and is just in a horrible mood. Katrina is the one who's good at all this crap. She charms all the mums and dads, remembers their names, asks if they're skiing this year. Layla just chews her hair and wishes she were literally anywhere else, including the mortuary. But Katrina had a client emergency and Layla could get away from work early – she's a pathologist and among their many other virtues, dead people don't complain – which is why she's sitting in this dusty hall at Our Lady Star of the Sea, C of E Infants, breathing in disinfectant as the Archangel Gabriel forgets his words.

  "I bring you tidings of great joy," Layla murmurs, alongside half the audience all aching to put the child out of his misery. The old biddy sitting next to her seems surprised she knows the line, which is more-than-usually racist given Layla spends so much of her time at these things. School plays, PTA meetings, bric-a-brac sales, music recitals, demonstrations from the magic classes. Amy and her little sister, Jae – who is currently sitting at the front of the hall with the rest of her class, last seen picking her nose but not, thank goodness, eating it – are growing up in a loving, supporting family. They're just like everyone else, really.

  Just Like Everyone Else, Really was what Layla and Meraud were going to call their band, back when they were fifteen and ruled the world. It's a happy memory. Absurdly, Layla wants to cry.

  Instead she slumps down further in her plastic chair and, because she's the worst mother ever, lets her eyes close for a moment.

  Behind her, two preteens, brought along to watch a younger sibling's star turn, are arguing fiercely about whose turn it is to something something Bartholomew something something. It takes her until Archangel Gabriel has stumbled all the way to the end of his scene to determine that Bartholomew is (a) a hamster and (b) not long for this world. Poor Bartholomew. Though on the plus side, at least he didn't have to sit through this play.

  She jerks upright a few minutes later to the old biddy saying, "Why is that man shouting about King Herod?"

  That doesn't make sense either, Layla thinks sleepily. Herod has had her turn already. There was scenery chewing. That little girl is going to play Lear. Layla comes properly awake and turns to the window just as someone with bright blue hair thuds a fist into it.

  Layla, he mouths through the glass, and then – it's not fucking Herod, is it. Meraud.

  The parents are tutting, trying to buzz him away like he's a fly. For a second Layla is frozen by indecision, half out of her seat, so the parents whose view she's blocking are tutting as well, passive-aggression in surround sound. Then she gives up. She grabs her tote bag with Amy's inhaler and glitter pot and all the rest of the suburban-mum-of-two crap she has to cart everywhere like a goddamn fairy princess donkey and heads out into the cold.

  Nat's waiting for her by the school fence, tapping his feet. Layla resents that.

  "What are you doing here?" she demands. "You can't just bang on the window during the three kings' macarena."

  Nat ignores that. "Where's Meraud?"

  "Meraud?" Layla repeats, though Meraud is the only possible reason Nat could be standing here in this sleet-slicked playground, with his blue hair and ear studs and utter lack of interest in being like everyone else, really. "He's not—he didn't come."

  But she did ask him, Layla thinks suddenly. He came last year, when Amy was Angel #3. He did a little magic to keep them both warm and guided her hands to the hip flask in his coat pocket. She remembers kissing him on impulse, tasting the sharpness of spirit in his mouth. Katrina laughed at them and took the kids home with an indulgent smile.

  "Yeah," Nat says sharply, pulling Layla back to here and now. "He's gone."

  "Gone," Layla says, still sounding like a parrot. "Gone where?"

  "Just gone!" Nat says, as though she's the incomprehensible one here. "Gone. Disappeared. Can't be found."

  "He can't be gone," Layla says impatiently, wanting to get this over with, whatever it is, and head back. Even now Amy might be crossing the great expanse of stage between Nazareth and Bethlehem with no familial witness, because, as discussed, Layla is the worst mother ever.

  "Can't he," Nat says. "When did you last see him?"

  Recently, Layla thinks. Quite recently. A Friday, because Jae had swimming. Last Friday, or the one before.

  "Yeah, exactly," Nat says, not kindly. He's going to say something else, but Layla is distracted by the muffled sound of applause and the scraping of chairs. She's got maybe five more minutes before the school is not in loco parentis.

  "Wait here," she tells Nat, and runs back inside.

  It takes her most of her five minutes to find Jennifer, whose daughter is Chloe, who does ballet with Amy, who has just come running up radiant with pride and glitter. Any minute now she's going to say Mum, Mum did you see me, and Layla asks silently for her forgiveness before explaining to Jennifer that something's come up, it's a minor family emergency, nothing to worry about really but if she could take the kids for an hour, Layla is sorry to just impose like this—

  "Of course," Jennifer interrupts. With understanding, because she's a suburban mum of two and, unlike Layla, kindness itself. "Take as long as you need. I hope everything's okay."

  Layla thanks her, kisses Amy's perfect little head and runs back out to Nat.

  "Come on," she says, without checking to see he's following. It's ten minutes' walk to her house and the four o'clock darkness is already closing in. "Tell me."

  Nat glances at her and they start walking, heads bowed against the freezing rain. It's getting colder.

  "Two days ago," Nat says, abruptly. "He was supposed to come to dinner.
He didn't turn up. And I thought that was just Meraud being Meraud. You know what he's like."

  They both know what he's like. Nat is Meraud's other partner, to be formal about it; his other person whom he stands up on a regular basis.

  Although that's not fair. Meraud came to last year's play. He stayed after. When Layla needs him, he shows up.

  "But then he wasn't answering my texts," Nat says. "So I thought maybe he's sick, maybe he's hurt? I got freaked. I went over there this morning and…"

  "And what?" Layla says, when he trails off. They're almost at the house and suddenly Layla is irritated again, that her whole day is being upended for this assault of vagueness. If Meraud was hurt or ill Nat would have led with that. This random visitation that refuses to resolve gets on her tits.

  "What?" she says again, as she pulls the front door open against the force of the wind. Inside it's dark, the unwashed dishes where she left them. Katrina still isn't back. "What did you find?"

  "Nothing," Nat says, lingering by the door as if unsure of his invitation. Against the white-tile background of Layla's kitchen, he looks as bright and out-of-context as a parakeet. "I checked all the rooms. I looked for – you know. Signs of a struggle."

  "That only happens on TV," Layla says, pissed off at how ridiculous he's being. "Look, it's not a big deal. He'll have gone away for a few days without telling us, that's all."

  "Without telling us," Nat repeats. "He wouldn't."

  "He would, though," Layla says. Meraud – lovely, loving Meraud, with something unearthly in the substance of him – absolutely would. Nat doesn't argue.

  There's a long, charged silence. The wind howls beyond the window panes.

  "Well, what do you want to do?" Layla snaps finally.

  "I don't know what to do," Nat says. He sounds bleak, lost. "I'm going to – I don't know. Something."

  He pulls his coat close around him and heads back out into the darkness before Layla can react. For a second she thinks about running after him, then pulls herself together. Katrina texted with apologies while Layla was with Nat – the client emergency has become a client corporate merger and she doesn't know when she'll be home – and Layla needs to pick up the children. She walks over to Jennifer's immaculate terrace two streets over and finds them half-asleep and compliant. They go to bed early once they're in.

  Layla doesn't. She fills her evening with the nonsense of adulthood, emptying things that need emptying and tidying things that need tidying, undoing some small amount of the chaos that two small children and two busy adults generate over time. Some hours later, dishwasher running and suspicious stain on the cushion cover soaking in cold water, she finds herself sitting at the kitchen table idly leafing through the detritus. The unpaid gas bills. Some bumf from the school, some special programme for children from magic-using families. Perfectly accurate, perfectly pat: like children of non-traditional backgrounds, or children who speak another language at home.

  She wonders what Nat is planning to do now, having established Meraud wasn't overpowered in his own living room. Call the police, possibly. The coastguard. The mountain rescue.

  She's being mean, she reflects, without much inclination not to be. After their shared childhood, she and Meraud drifted apart for several years. When they met again at a mutual friend's party it was as relative strangers, who had had their polyamorous bisexual awakenings apart. They got reacquainted that night and many nights after, but this time Meraud came as a package with Nat, his vivid, wary, genderqueer boyfriend, who didn't bother to hide his distrust of Layla, her wife, her kids, and everything else about her north London respectability. Layla didn't care. She had Meraud back in her life, now lover as well as friend, altered and fey-brilliant with age and somehow still the solemn child-of-a-magic-using-family that she'd known. For the sake of Meraud, Layla put up with Nat.

  Nat, who came running across London, because he loves Meraud and he didn't know what to do. Meraud, who probably wasn't attacked in his living room, but could have been in an accident, or mugged in an alleyway. He's a powerful magician but has all the vulnerabilities of skin and flesh.

  And it's so cold tonight. Cold like a knife's edge.

  "Fuck," Layla says, and picks up her phone.

  ___

  Nat was on the verge of finding Layla convincing. She is convincing. She has that annoying, brisk manner of primary school teachers and parents of small children. You're making a fuss about nothing, Nat, go on home. And Nat could have done exactly that. She's probably right, anyway. Meraud might have walked out on his life or gone on holiday by mistake or even now be stumbling home from Cockfosters with a hangover. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing he's ever done.

  Nat was almost convinced. He went home. Fucked around on the keyboard for a while, trying to write the bridge for someone else's latest catchy pop hit. Even thought about thinking about his tax returns. But that last nagging worry wouldn't let go. He came back to Meraud's echoing flat in the Docklands with the dust building up on the surfaces, threw himself down onto the sofa, and dislodged the phone underneath. He got into it with no trouble – Meraud uses the same passcode for everything – and is now sitting on the edge of a chair feeling like ice water is flooding through his veins.

  "I rang around," says a voice from the door. Layla, looking like she hasn't slept since he saw her last though it's closer to morning than night now, the early hours still impenetrably dark. Meraud never closes his blinds.

  "What?" Nat says, looking down at the phone screen.

  "Hospitals," Layla says. "I rang around and gave them his description. I wanted to call you, but I didn't have your number."

  And Meraud wasn't there to ask. Nat thinks about making some comment about that or about how it took her long enough to figure out this is serious. Instead he just hands her Meraud's phone and lets her see what he saw: a morass of ominous notifications, dozens of unread texts and emails. Layla asked him to the kids' play; Nat asked him to dinner. A couple more from Nat – he knows when she gets to those from the raise of her eyebrows. She flicks past. There were a couple from someone called Ethel; Nat didn't know the name. Someone who must be one of Meraud's clients furious about being stood up. Even one from the inimitable Truth-in-kindness Moonchild: it must be serious if Meraud's mother has remembered her only child's existence. He hasn't replied to her; he hasn't replied to anyone since mid-November.

  Which means that Meraud has been missing for more than two weeks, and no one has noticed.

  "Shit," Layla says, when she finally looks up.

  "Yeah," Nat says, clipped. "I didn't—we didn't, did we."

  He's getting up as he says it, trying to get some meaning out of this cluttered, glass-chrome space. Meraud's books and papers should be familiar, and so should the various artefacts of his magic, bunches of dried herbs and plants in pots, trays of pins and bottle caps and marbles and polished-down sea glass and spilled tarot decks. But everything feels distant and irrelevant. In the other room, Meraud's bed is loosely made, the covers spilling to the floor. Nat has tied Meraud down and fucked him into incoherence on that bed and sitting on it now makes him feels like a stranger.

  "We should call the police," Layla says, following him; Nat wants to shake her off like a fly.

  "That'll go well," he says, more sharply than he'd meant to. "Hi, yes, we'd like to report a disappearance. He's a consulting magician. What does that mean? Oh, he escaped from fairyland when he was five and he does things for anyone who pays him. What relation is he? Hard to say but we're both fucking him. That's gonna go, oh, brilliantly."

  "We've got to do something!" Layla yells. "What else is there?"

  Nat doesn't know. He can't cope with her right now. Instead he turns around on the spot, thinking that must be something in this room that's a clue. Some clue in these sheets that have touched Meraud's skin, some clue in the stack of books on the bedside table. Nat thumbs through a dictionary of obscure magical technical terms, a collection of essays. A printout of someone'
s PhD thesis on iconography in Microsoft Office products, because Meraud never met a ridiculous tangent he wouldn't follow. Nat feels a wash of love as he opens the printout to where a KitKat wrapper is acting as a bookmark – Chapter 3: Paperclips, Power and the Panopticon: Automated help functions through a Foucauldian lens.

  "No novels," he says, knowing this intellectually but suddenly finding it strange. There must be some in the flat – Meraud's magic comes from resonance and symbolism, and he doesn't discriminate between Harry Potter and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in that regard – but he doesn't read them for pleasure.

  "Guess it's the thing," Layla says, and they share a look of understanding. Meraud doesn't read fiction because – well. That's a story, and one that's been in Nat's mind since he first realised Meraud was missing.

  Once upon a time, some way from here but not as far as you might think, two young hippies, who were into traditional music and collected woodland folklore, got into a small boat on some body of water – a lake, a pond, a utility company reservoir, it doesn't really matter – and rowed themselves out from the bank. The boat wasn't motorised. It probably had a red flag hanging off the stern. When they reached the other side, they were somewhere else.

  Nat has heard Meraud explain this more than once and he thinks he understands it, but the explanation is never quite the same each time. It usually starts like this: the place over the water is not so different from the place on this side of the water. Think of it, Meraud says, as though the world you know were underneath the substance of another, with cracks in the firmament that let the light of the other world in. That's why magic is possible, Meraud goes on: because of those cracks where the other world extrudes into this one. All the tricks of magic – the gathering together of rosemary and thyme, pebbles and other found objects – are to make things of this world believe they are things of that world, where more things are possible.