In ve Iglé

 I walked towards the sound of the water noticing that the sand beneath my feet seemed firmer in this direction; after maybe only twenty seconds the sand became sparser and I could see red rock beneath.  The water turned out to be a small spring, leaping from a crack in the rock  and puddling in a shallow pool before running along a channel the width of two fingers and disappearing into the ground some distance away.  The water was cold and refreshing and once again I found myself regretting that I’d set out so ill-prepared; this would have been an excellent place to refill a water bottle from.

As I looked around, splashing a palmful of water onto my face I saw stones piled up here and there in what might have been roughly rectangular shapes, and wider paths past them that might have been streets.  I rubbed my eyes with more water, and then splashed some onto my shirt, figuring that it being damp might help with the heat, and looked around again.

The buildings seemed intact all of a sudden; I could see a squat red block with an empty doorway and a mustard-yellow awning shading it.  Two windows loomed blackly above, the shadows inside impossible to penetrate from where I was standing.  A wooden frame held trays of what looked like watermelons, though I had no idea where you’d grow watermelons in a desert.  Alongside the building ran a street, paved for the most part but with gaps in the surface where I could imagine someone slipping and twisting an ankle.  Some kind of wiry yellow-green grass grew up against the side of the building, little tufts of it sprouting here and there.  It looked like it was probably torn up when it was noticed.  Overhead the sun shone but it seemed weaker, or least less hot, and I noticed that I wasn’t sweating any more.

I rubbed my head and looked down at the spring, which wasn’t there.  Without thinking I knelt and patted the ground, unable to conceive that the water could just vanish, and instead, as I touched the cool liquid, the water reappeared and the building and the street faded away instead.

A mirage?  It seemed too unlike anything out here for that; too much detail, and the sun’s strength changing wasn’t something a mirage could do.  I pondered, letting the water run over my hand, and then, gradually, the memory of my one-time mentor and no-longer friend Isabella Bonfontaine, came to me.

Iglay is a strange place, she was saying.  I could remember her standing in the courtyard of a bar in Covent Garden, a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other.  It tries to fill you with its memories.  You can’t stand there for any length of time without being made to remember something that never happened to you.  Someone in the chairs, hunched over and trying not to listen turned to face her at that point, and shouted, ‘Will you shut up!’  That’s my point, Isabella had said, sloshing her drink out of its glass as she waved it around.  It just keeps on, pressuring you, trying to force you to leave by never shutting up about its past.

Why was I remembering her?  Was this place like Iglay, a city overfull with memories, looking to pass some off to vistors and passers-by, to take the pressure off itself.  I considered it odd that there should be two cities with the same problem though.

And then my mind started working; I’m going to blame the heat and the sun for me not seeing it sooner, and thank the water for its cooling.  What I had transliterated as Inveigle wasn’t… it was, in fact, in ve Iglé.  In, despite the impossibility of seeing it as anything other than the English word for me, wasn’t even a preposition; it was… a number, I thought after nearly thirty seconds struggling to recall it.  I couldn’t remember which one though.  Ve, however, was a preposition, but it also escaped me.  And Iglé was also spelled Iglay and Iggely if you believed some of the medieval manuscripts.  Number, preposition, Iglay.  I had no idea what that could mean.

Inveigle

 I left the Hotel Borealis around noon; the receptionist was the same on who’d checked me in the previous day and she looked tired, as though she’d been on shift continuously since I’d arrived.  She lifted her eyes from whatever she was looking at behind the long, steel counter just long enough to identify me and sneer, and then her attention returned to whatever it was that was more interesting.  I considered wishing her a pleasant day and decided against it.  I do not like raising my voice unless there is no other choice and she was far enough away from me that I would have needed to shout.

The heat from the desert hit me like a wall.  I hadn’t noticed the air-conditioning in the hotel once I’d adjusted to its internal temperature, but now outside again the difference was apparent.  The heat was dry but breathing felt difficult at first: I found myself gasping as though the air were somehow thinner instead of just drier, and it only gradually subsided.  I kept walking while I adjusted though and soon stepped out of the shade of the hotel’s colonnade and into the full midday blast of heat and light.  It was less of a shock than leaving the hotel had been, but it was still another shock; enough that I reconsidered leaving the hotel at all.  But the city in the pillars that I had seen last night under the borealis would be treacherous at any time, and at night I’d be hard pressed to see what was coming.

I should, I realised belatedly, have taken water with me.  Instead I strode manfully across red sand that crunched underfoot like cinders and headed north-west with the bravado of an idiot.  After half an hour the city was still nowhere in sight and I was sweating copiously; sweat ran down either side of my nose, behind my ears and down the back of my neck, wicked from my scalp by my hair.  My clothes were soaked through; small patches of sweat had grown and merged and now my shirt clung unpleasantly to my skin and my shorts felt heavy and clammy.  Thirst was increasing; my throat was dry despite my sweat and I found myself licking my upper lip frequently, trying to pick up the salty sweat before it evaporate.  The sun beat down overhead, a constant reminder that what I was doing was foolish, and each footstep trudged a little further away from coolness, water, and civilisation.

Two hours and some handful of minutes had passed by the time I struggled into the shadow of a tall stone column and while the temperature difference wasn’t that great it was enough to afford me temporary relief.  The stone was wind- and weather-worn but still towered above me.  Shading my eyes from the afternoon sun and staring up until my neck hurt I estimated that the column was eight, perhaps nine metres tall, and if the city was three thousand years old then it must have been over ten metres when it was constructed.  The stone was rough to the touch and warm and if anything had ever been carved into it it had eroded away long since.  Beyond it were hints of stone paving beneath shifting red sand and, a little further along still, were two stone lumps that might have been animals once.

There was no sign of any water, though I was probably still outside the old city limits.  Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that whatever water had once flowed here might have dried up as the millenia passed and I estimated that I might make it back to the hotel without collapsing but only if I stayed here less than an hour.  And probably less if I couldn’t find shade to stay in.

A sensible man would have turned back at that point and remade his plans to come back another day.  I, however, wiped my forehead and licked my fingers to try and conserve some water, however futile the gesture, and stepped back out into the furnace of the desert afternoon and continued into the city.

Even up close I couldn’t make out what animals or objects the next two stone lumps might once have been, but carved beneath the left-most one, in letters now only shallowly incised, were runes that I slowly translated to read Inveigle.  A name, or an instruction?  As I pondered my ears registered a regular tapping sound, something both familiar and confusing.  It took nearly thirty seconds before I finally identified as the sound of water dripping.

Breakfast before dawn

“We stop serving breakfast at dawn,” said the receptionist primly.  She looked like my sister, if my sister braided her hair and had glasses; the same shaped face, the same snub nose; even the same slightly-whiny voice.  Her outfit: an entirely respectable two-piece suit over a white blouse with a little brass (or bronze, I couldn’t quite make it out) brooch pinned to the lapel on the left was the kind of thing my sister would have put on.

“Dawn seems kind of early,” I said.  I was checking-in to the Hotel Borealis for seven nights and had been looking forward to a week of rest; lazy days sitting on the terraces that overlooked the red sands of the Sonora Desert, quiet evenings in the bars of the hotel, and maybe a night or two at the casino.  Having to wake up before dawn just for breakfast didn’t fit with my agenda.

“Ok boomer,” she said.  “This is your room key — it’s electronic.  Place it against the plate on the door and wait for the beep.  There’s a light that will flash green…” I stopped listening.  I knew how hotel keys worked and my booking was for a suite with the mini-bar prepaid so there really wasn’t much she could say that interested me.  I wondered if I’d be able to make a decent Old Fashioned from the mini-bar or if I’d have to call down to room service.  “…in the event of a fire.” She finished and half-smiled at me.

“Thanks,” I said.  She looked slightly surprised and I wondered if she’d slipped some more ‘ok boomer’ like comments into her little spiel.  “What was the room number again?”

“413,” she said, pointing at the little white card containing my room keycard and a slip of paper bearing the wifi password.  Where the number should have been written was empty space, which she realised at the same time as I did.  “Let me write that down for you, in case of memory loss,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said again, with less sincerity.

The suite was three rooms: a bathroom with an actual bidet — something I assumed had gone the way of the dinosaurs by now — and a Japanese toilet with more functions than my smartphone; a bedroom with the expected kingsize bed that could sleep at least three people plus their dogs; and a sitting room that was slightly overcrowded with overstuffed furniture.  The armchairs bulged and the couch positively lounged and sitting on any of them was like sitting down on a cloud; after a moment you’d forgotten you were sitting at all and felt like you were just being somehow supported in the air by fluffiness.  Getting up proved trickier and I resorted to just rolling off the couch onto the floor and navigating my way up from a solid surface.  All of these faced the huge, plate-glass picture window that looked out on to the Sonora Desert.

Behind the couch, facing away from the window, was a desk and stiff-backed chair.  I considered moving the chair around to the other side of the desk so that I could see out of the window from there too, but it seemed like too much effort.  I wasn’t intending to spend all that much time at a desk anyway.

The borealis woke me at 2am.  I had drawn the curtains across the window before going to bed, and they were floor-length, heavy, weighted curtains of a thick brown material that drank in the light and suffocated it until the room was pitch black.  The noise — the strobing hum that seemed to sweep across the room, bounce off the walls and arc back again, throbbing against the bed, was the culprit.  I sat up, unable to see anything and feeling disoriented, wondering where on earth I was.  Slowly I remembered that I was in the hotel, though that didn’t explain the noise, and I fumbled for the bed-side light-switch.

Instead of the lights I found the switch for opening and closing the curtains and, with a stately whoosh, they drew apart letting greenish-yellow light flicker in from the sitting room.  Thoroughly confused now, I got out of bed and went to the door, convinced that the room lighting had come on anyway but was somehow faulty, and was greeted in the doorway by the borealis in full, glorious performance through the plate-glass window.

It’s not June, I murmured to myself.  The hotel’s brochures were quite definite on the borealis only being visible in June.  I expected that the hotel staff had any number of disgruntled idiot customers at other times of the year who did little more than reveal their illiteracy to the receptionist (and probably escalated it to the manager; what else would an idiot do when proven wrong?) regarding the borealis.  And yet… here I was, being inconvenienced by something I’d deliberately intended to avoid.

The shimmer of the light across the sky was mesmerising though, and the Sonora Desert below it responded; glittering and shining, reflecting back the light from the electromagnetic interactions above and creating odd illusions: a monstrous creature here seemed to stalk westwards towards the columns of an ancient city; then it collapsed into the ripples of a vast ocean on which sailed boats with strange-shaped sails.  Despite myself I moved towards the couch and sat down, transfixed by the display.

At 5:30 the borealis ended and darkness settled back over the cold sands.  The stars twinkled slowly back into view as my night-vision restored, and my stomach rumbled.  With a sigh I reached for the phone.

“Room service?  Yes, I’d like to order breakfast please….”

On fleek

The house looked pleasant from the outside: there was a paved path across a neatly mown green lawn and the white picket fences were bolstered by medium-height green shrubs.  A couple of tall, leafy trees cast shade over the white patio furniture, but they were far enough away from the house that it was unlikely that their roots were doing terrible, invisible things to the plumbing.  The house itself was a piece of classic Americana: it was made primarily out of wood and about as resistant to storm damage as a cardboard box.  It sprawled: the main house had four wings coming off it in seemingly random directions, some of which had two, three or five stories, and others of which slummed it with only one.  The roof was shingled and cellar-doors hinted that the house had below-ground floors as well.  There was a veranda at the front, a porch down one side, a deck at the back and barbed wire on the fourth side, though that might have been an oversight.  A small name plaque just above the doorbell read "Dunnukin".
There were also nearly one hundred and eighty people camped outside, spread across the road and occupying the front gardens of the rest of the houses in the street.

"What, I say what, and I mean, what, in the name of all tarnation is going on here?" The tall, portly man in the military uniform sounded like Foghorn Leghorn.  He was smoking a cigar, which smelled like a damp bonfire in December, and he was staring at a young woman sat in a high-backed chair.  She had an iPad in her hands, and was tapping at the screen with a look of concentration on her face.
"Interviews," she said.
"I say what now?"
"Do you?"  She looked up, uncurious, and then went back to the screen.
"All of these people want interviewing?" Foghorn Leghorn gestured vaguely at the windows.
"No silly, those are the journalists.  They want to conduct interviews.  With the gentleman of the house, should he be at home."
"And if he be'ent?"
Now she looked up with interest.  She had a face like a porcelain doll: skin the colour of fresh milk, eyes a dazzling blue and lips reddened with just a caress of lipstick.
"Be'ent?  Not aint?"
"Aint if you like it, I say.  What now, though, what now and why do all these folks want an interview with a man who mightn't even be at home?"
"To find out if he is who he says he isn't?"
"What what?"
"To find out if he be who he says he be'ent? Is that clearer?"
"Young lady, you're not so young as you can't be bent over my knee and slippered!"
"You so much as lay a finger on me and I'll hashtag-meToo you all over my blog," she said, just a tinge of pink blushing her cheeks.  "You can go and pay for that kind of thing like any decent pervert."
"Lords of creation, you're a minx, madam, what!"

"Is this really fair?" asked Death.  He was sitting in a motorcycle side-car wearing a leather jacket he'd borrowed from James Dean.  Riding the actual motorcycle was War.
"They're everywhere," said War.  "It's not about fair anymore, it's about attrition.  And I know all about that.  That turned out to be me too, even though I thought it was Pestilence."
"Did you?"
"Turns out he does malnutrition instead," said War.  "Too many words these days, that's the problem."
"So you set Psychological Warfare on the journalists?  That still seems... unfair," said Death.  "Couldn't you just have asked one of the kids for help?"
"Pestilence is looking after Famine," said War.  He sighed.  "Famine's been overtaken by himself I think.  He's barely coherent these days, I met him at a state fair a few months back and couldn't understand a word he was saying.  If Pest can bring him back to himself, that would be good."
Death gazed off into the distance for a long moment, and War shivered.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," he said.  "It's not nice being reminded that you come for all of us."
"Famine's a long way from my reach," said Death thoughtfully.  "Though he's enriching my sphere of influence all the time."
"Keeping you busy?"
"Tasteless," said Death.
"You can talk.  You don't have journalists wanting to idolise you whenever you set foot outside of your house."
"Move house?"
War shrugged.  "And go where?  It's not like it's hard to find me.  Even here: I thought I could avoid conflict and three days after I moved in the Residents' Association had started a pitched battle with the Neighbourhood Watch.   It was like the Somme all over again.  Even down to the trenches."
"I like the trenches.  They add to the ambience I think."
"You just like skulking in the shadows."

Paucity

"QTNA, amirite, fam?"
"Fam," said Pestilence, his gaunt white face bright in the sodium streetlight as the car passed momentarily beneath it, "what the hell is QTNA?"
"Questions That Need Answering," said Famine.  He sounded happy but his face was drawn and his eyes suggested tears.  "All the ones on fleek, right, like, the ones that are sleek right, the ones that arise in the night, amirite?"
Pestilence turned the heater in the car on and shivered.  Technically he never felt the cold, but he had the sensation that this was one of those nights, the ones when the old gods woke up and took a turn around the property to see where things were being neglected.  Some sensitives described it as the feeling of a storm over the horizon but headed your way, others described it as a bone-chilling, bed-wetting terror that pressed down like a pillow over your face at midnight.
"What," he said slowly, precisely, "is wrong with you Fam?  You're practically incomprehensible these days."
"QTNA, amirite, fam?" said Famine miserably.  "Take a left here, bro."
On the left was a sheer drop, fifty metres down to a concrete carpark behind a big box retailer, but Pestilence flicked on the indicator and took the turn as smoothly as a racing driver.  The car behind him slowed at first, the driver unable to understand the indicator, then fishtailed as the driver stamped on his brakes and lost control watching the car in front of him drive off the road.  Red taillights disappeared downwards and the driver wrenched his door open and ran to the edge of the road, unwilling to believe that he'd just seen a suicide.
Below him were the floodlights illuminating the carpark, and a complete absence of wreckage.

Pestilence's car hummed softly as it drove through the air.  Around them the world had changed, becoming more shadowy and less substantial, and they might be driving on a cobweb bridge spun by the world's largest spider.
"Better than the horses," said Pestilence after a while.  "Don't get me wrong, I liked them, but they're harder to ride, and they get all temperamental and jittery when something big's happening.  None of that with these machines."
"Yeah," said Famine.  He drawled, sounding Texan.  Then he yawned.  "Jesus, bro, how long have we been away?"
An aurora rippled across the sky in front of them reflecting off the polished black bonnet of the car.  Pale greens and blues swapped large bands of themselves around like a rubik's cube preparing to be solved.
"Five years," said Pestilence.  "It didn't feel like it.  I couldn't have told you that back in the World.  I'd have thought it was only a few days."
"Too long," said Famine.  "Too much belief in us these days."
"Deeper than belief," said Pestilence.  "We're victims of our own success, you know?  People know deep down that we're real and that we walk amongst them.  They're proud of it, in some odd way.  You know they're worried that I'm going to win against their antibiotics?  I attended a conference on it.  Everyone knew I was real, everyone knew in their hearts that I was going to win, all they could do was hold me back for a few days.  I could have proclaimed myself King in that hall, and they'd have raised a temple to me."
"Same," said Famine.  "They all think they're pretty much one harvest away from being guests at my table.  It's like two thousand years ago again, only they're somehow starving because they're too afraid to eat."
"Why are you all incomprehensible though, Fam?"
"Hah."  Famine's laugh was practically a sneer.  "Paucity of vocabulary, mate.  There's a famine of language going on, and it's caught up with me.  Empty words, empty phrases, sounds parroted by the sublebrities of the day and mimicked across social media.  I can read all the dictionaries you want, I can sit and discourse for hours with the erudite and intellectual, but at the level of the lowest common denominator it's on fleek, amirite?  Fam?"
"You're a mystery to me, Fam fam," said Pestilence.  "Am I doing it right?"
"QTNA, mate," said Famine.  "What happened to the other two?"
"War's got groupies," said Pestilence.  "I think he's hiding from them.  And us, for that matter, I don't think he's handling the fame so well."
"And the big boy?"
Pestilence drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching the aurora dance for a few seconds.
"Last I heard," he said, with reluctance clearly audible, "he'd invented the Selfiecide."
Fam laughed, a hearty belly laugh that seemed wrong coming from someone thin enough to think emaciated was a compliment.  "You've got to hand it to him," he said. "He moves with the times."
"You'd think he'd be busy enough."  Pestilence sounded disapproving, his voice tight and prissy.
"He's only getting busier," said Famine.  "Like us all though, amirite?"
Pestilence looked over at Famine, wondering if there was irony there, and then peered through the windscreen.  "Ah," he said. "We're heading back in.  It was nice talking to you, Fam."
"I can still hear you, bro," said Famine quietly.  "It's just that it's a bit of an echo chamber at the moment.  You can still spill the serious tea with me, you know, bro?  I've got the screenshots."
Despite himself Pestilence giggled, and the car transitioned from the unreal back to the real, entered the World on a dusty, empty highway.  A little distance away the red light of a diner's neon sign flickered a welcome, and somewhere far away in a lost direction forces that might be gods paused to observe that there were Horsemen out there still, untouchable by any of them.

Fam

Moths were fluttering under a streetlight outside, dancing around to some music only they could hear.  Stood below them were two women on the wrong side of thirty wearing crop-tops and mini-skirts and made up to look like they were in their early twenties.  Their slouch suggested they didn't want to be there; the way they straightened up and posed whenever a car cruised too slowly past or a single man went by suggested they were on the clock.
Pestilence sighed and turned away from the window.  Across the diner table sat Famine, the laminated tri-fold menu held in pale, wasted hands.  "Emphysema," he said.
"Nice," said Famine.  "You don't get that a lot.  And you've avoided anything obvious, like a job-related illness.  Both of them?"
"Nah, I got the one on the left," said Pestilence.  "You can have the one on the right, bro."
"Cool, fam."  He waved to the waitress who wrinkled her nose and reluctantly hauled herself off a counter stool and lumbered over.  She was heavyset and her beige uniform had grease stains on the skirt  and down the left-hand side of her blouse.  She was wearing support stockings that might once have been white but were now a uniform grey and her name badge had been broken in half at some point.  All that was left was a red-bordered white plastic shard reading "AIL".
"A couple of hotdogs for the ladies outside, please," said Famine.  "With extra mustard.  It must be cold out there.  And I'll have the entire breakfast menu.  Twice."  He looked at Pestilence.  "Fam?"
"You're Fam, bro," said Pestilence.  "I'll have a banana split.  Extra whipped cream."
"What from the breakfast menu, son?" asked the waitress.  She shifted her weight from one thick leg to the other and farted.
"All of it," said Famine.  "Twice."
"There's seventeen items on there, hon.  Which of them do you want?"
"All seventeen.  Twice.  That's thirty-four items."
The waitress eyed him coldly while she counted up seventeen twice in her head and decided that the answer was in fact thirty four.  "Fine," she said.  Behind her a cockroach scuttled across the floor.  "Two breakfasts for kings, a banana split with extra whipped cream, and hotdogs for your girlfriends."  She turned away and waddled to the kitchen.  Half-way there she turned back.  "How do you like your eggs?"
"All the ways you do them," said Famine.  He smiled as nicely as he could, but his hollow cheeks and dark-ringed eyes still made it look like a skull grinning.  "You're fam too, fam," he said to Pestilence.
"Nah bro, I'm your bro.  You're fam."
"Not Fam, fam.  Fam."
"Fam?  Shut up."
"Bro, just hang, right?"
"Jesus, Famine, were you always like this?  What were you like when you were a kid?"
Famine stared at Pestilence, his eyes burning in his head like coals.  "The teachers called me trouble," he said.  "They blamed me for the other kids's problems.  Like when everybody's lunchbox turned out to be empty because all their mothers had forgotten to pack them lunch."
"That sounds like something you'd do," said Pestilence.
"Yeah, right, but I didn't know I was doing it back then," said Famine.  "My dad was still Famine back in those days.  When I was eight he got me into the family business, let me team up with Crop Failure and his gang.  I'd go out riding a Harley on the weekends and we'd tear up some cornfields or a potato crop.  Didn't know that the whole Famine thing was going to land on my shoulders.  Bro."
"A Harley?" Pestilence nodded his head slowly.  By the kitchen another three cockroaches had appeared and were creeping under the door.  "Rich fam, Fam?"
"Nah, but War's parents were sharing out the spoils.  They liked horses, so the cars and bikes and aeroplanes were being handed out like candy.  They were good times."
"My sixth grade class all came down with galloping pleurisy three days into the start of the school year," said Pestilence.  "I got exclusive tuition for the rest of the year, and the teachers all treated me like I was the only survivor of a car crash or something."
"I heard about that," said Famine.  Outside a young kid in chef's whites was delivering hotdogs to the women in the lamplight.  Everyone looked confused.  "Didn't the same thing happen the next year."
"Sort of," said Pestilence.  "Half of them got yellow fever and the other half got scarlet fever.  After that  there weren't any kids near my age to be in class with me.  What did you put in the hotdogs then, Fam?"
"Tapeworm," said Famine.  "Classical and classy, that's me.  How're the cockroaches going?"
"Hundred and fifty so far," said Pestilence.  "I don't think we're going to get served you know." Screams came from the kitchen.
"Should have ordered ahead," said Famine.  "You've think we'd remember by now."

A brewery of egg-shells

Grey Ellen stood in the corner of the Innishere public house.  Outside it was raining, a slow but solid curtain of water that fell down relentlessly from a sky the colour of polished lead and turned the hillside roads into ad hoc streams.  Birds huddled on branches under broad leaves, heads tucked under wings, and the smells of wet peat and dark loam rose up around them.  Inside, the fire in the long stone hearth crackled happily throwing out waves of heat into the main room and any rain finding its way down the tall chimney evaporated back up before it ever reached the flames.  Cooking smells -- browning pastry, popcorn and burning sugar swirled amongst the tables, and the drinkers held tall glasses of dark ales and golden lagers to their lips while they listened to their companions hold forth on myriad topics.
Mrs McAleethie came in, shaking her umbrella off so that rainwater glistened brightly in the air before spattering on the nearest tables.  She hung it on Grey Ellen's arm, and then draped her sou'wester over Ellen's head where it joined two others.
"I'm a glass of white, Seamus," she said to the barman, looking around the room.  "And I'm not a one to go calling out the Queen of the Fairies or nothing, but she's up and taken my wee bairn and left me with a thing that looks like a raven had sex with a stick and they got to arguing over who should be pregnant."
There was a moment of silence while the drinkers considered what that might look like, and then a gentle hubbub returned and Seamus poured a glass of white wine at the bar.  He picked a fruity Sancerre as it seemed like Mrs McAleethie was a mite upset.
There was a clatter as Grey Ellen dropped the umbrellas and shook the raincoats off of her head.  She kicked aside outdoor boots and trampled Wellingtons, and generally made a complete pig's ear of a mess in the corner.  Mrs McAleethie scampered to the bar to grab her glass of wine before Ellen might think to take it for herself.
"Sweet chaos, sister," said Ellen.  She was called Grey because the locals believed that she straddled, somehow, the world of men and the world of the fay, and naturally that meant she couldn't be trusted.  It was pure coincidence, so they said, that her hair had greyed before she reached the age of twenty-five, and that a chance encounter with leprosy had left her with skin that only a zombie could envy.  "When you make bold statements like that you risk drawing the gaze of Our Mother of Nails.  What on earth could bring you to think that she'd violate the treaties and truces that we have and swap out a bairn for a boggart?"
"Aside from the fact we seem to make a fresh treaty every three months, swearing that this time we believe they'll honour it?"  Seamus's words seemed almost incidental, but somehow no-one else had been speaking when he spoke.  The gentle hubbub rose around him again and he swabbed the bar with a stinking, grey cloth.
"The child is little more than a toast-rack with the head of a Barbie doll," said Mrs McAleethie. "And not a new one, neither, but one that your older sister tried to barbecue one summer to punish her for putting out for Ken too often.  Calling it a child is a mercy to it, so it is; if it had feathers we'd pity it and drown it in the Holy Water at the Kirk, but as it is the Father, Lord bless his inebriate soul, says that the thing is just afflicted with the ugly and should be loved despite it."
"But are you sure it's a changeling?" asked Grey Ellen, her eyes bright in her thin, undernourished face.
"That I'm not," said Mrs McAleethie in the tones of a woman who was sure she was right but was trying hard to appear humble.  "I guess it's possible that I've bore a child who looks so little like me or my husband that we've both been wondering if we were both cheated on."
"You must be sure," said Ellen.  She hugged herself. "Have you suckled the child?"
"Bejesus no!  I'd sooner let the dog!"
Heads turned.
"But I won't!"
Heads turned away again.
"Then do as I say," said Grey Ellen, deepening her voice and ducking her head.  "Set the child before the fire in a bassinet and set a pot of water onto the fire to heat.  When the water seethes and bubbles as though raging at the injustice that Our Mother of Nails has committed to you, you must crack a dozen eggs and discard the contents.  Place each shell in the liquid, and bring it back to the boil.  If the child be a changeling it will surely reveal itself, and then you must seize it and plunge it into the boiling water as well.  But watch carefully -- when it flees your child will be returned and you must pluck it from the water before the heat hits it."
"Boil the baby," said Mrs McAleethie with an unwholesome tone of pleasure in her voice.  "All you drinking here, you're witness to what she just said.  I'm off to boil the baby, as per her instructions."
"That's not quite what I said," said Ellen, but Mrs McAleethie was hauling on a sou'wester and unfurling an umbrella and heading out into the curtains of rain.

The fire was small, but still enough to heat the McAleethie kitchen, and the baby in the bassinet was set in front of it and sweating like it was the middle of summer.  As Mrs McAleethie cracked eggs and set the white and yolks aside, casting the shells into the pot, the baby sat up.
"Have you been talking to Grey Ellen?" said the baby in a deep, masculine voice that suggested a lifetime of rich foods and courtly dancing.
"What if I have?"
"Only she's the only witch I know who thinks boiling eggshells is a sovereign remedy," said the baby.  "A dozen, right?"
Mrs McAleethie stopped cracking and turned to the child.  "You're a changeling," she said. "Ellen said that this would force you to reveal yourself."
"You could have just asked," said the baby.  "I've been here eight months and you've not said one word to me.  If I was really your child I'd be struggling to acquire language right now.  My first words would likely be "I want a divorce.""
"And what are you doing here anyway?  Where's my wee bairn, Johnnie Sebastian?"
"Dead," said the baby.  "He had kidney failure at nine days.  The Queen didnae want to see you upset, so she provided you with a surrogate for a wee while."
"Dead!" Mrs McAleethie sat back. "So it is.  And how does having you here help?"
"With the grieving," said the baby.  "You've had much longer to come to terms with losing the child, you'll get over this better and you'll have other children.  What are you going to do with the eggshells you're brewing so, then?"
"Ellen said to boil the baby," said Mrs McAleethie absently.  "Sodom and Gomorrah child, now I've no child at all.  What am I to do then?"
"Get pregnant," said the baby. "Or adopt."
"That's like stealing, but it's legal, right?"
"Mostly," said the baby.  "Though I'd not tell them about Grey Ellen and you taking her advice to boil babbies if I were you."
"Gomorrah," said Mrs McAleethie.  "I always thought I'd get the true child back after all this."
"He's a bit decomposed," said the baby.  "Quite runny in a lot of places too.  I... wouldn't."
"I can understand that," said Mrs McAleethie. "Of course, it seems a bit unkind to leave him with your Queen in that state too, ye ken?  I'm thinking maybe you could deliver him to Grey Ellen?  By way of thanks for all her advice?"
She and the baby shared a smile.