The Twilight Kingdom

Chapter 2

Chapter 2The Guelph Renaissance Faire was located in a conference centre fifteen minutes from the campus. A large red velvet sign hung over the conference doors and directed them towards the back parking lot, and the back courtyard outdoors where most of the festivities were occurring. Libby whispered her comments and critiques to Felicity—if this is the renaissance, why are there porta potties? Shouldn’t we all s**t in the woods? And then get the black plague?—as Denis parked. Felicity tried to keep her chuckles under wraps; it seemed unfair to gossip about the faire as they were going to it, especially in Denis’s car and when he seemed so damned excited. He kept up a steady stream of elated comments about his successful defense, how difficult yet how easy the whole process ended up being, and how he was just so excited for the future.

“That’s so great,” Felicity said. Then, to Libby, Felicity continued to gossip.

The back and forth between the front and the backseat conversations made Felicity feel fragmented, but she was used to it. Libby made her feel included in all the s**t-talking, while Denis allowed her inner child’s glee at the possibilities for the future and the magical past take hold. So what if the faire itself might be filled with delusional men and women? So many of the attendees’ get-ups seemed to have been stitched together from cheap Halloween costumes and torn away from the wrinkled bins of a thrift store—and Felicity should know, too, because she spent half a summer working in the back lot of a chain thrift store, sorting out crap, and saving for her education. She was well aware of the illusions, and delusions, of a fantasy life mottled together from someone else’s discards. So what if these people seemed to be very into it, rather than maintaining some critical distance, liked she’d done at the Value-Save?

Whatever. It was fun. It was an adventure. And it wasn’t going to last that long, anyway. Nothing like this ever did.

It was already past five by the time everyone arrived from their small party at the university. A Friar Tuck look-a-like at the entrance of the courtyard was taking tickets, and he gave them a heavily discounted rate. “For the King’s honour, I request two pieces of silver before you enter his Kingdom.”

“So what does that come up to with inflation?” Denis asked, playing along. “Two dollars?”

Friar Tuck nodded. The rate turned out to not cover anything else; the shows, plays, exhibits, and meat-on-a-stick treats from certain vendors were all still separately priced, and still pretty expensive. Libby nit-picked this facet, but Felicity still thought this was a deal. For the price of a coffee, she could feel as if she was wandering through time. A dream, even. And she didn’t have to use the coffee for a coffee nap. Win-win.

They walked into the centre of the courtyard and stopped as a round of mock-jousting began. There were no horses, only stuffed horse heads on sticks; children’s toys. The knights were not wearing chain mail, but strips of tinsel. They were all pretending, playing make-believe, as they ran at one another with pool noodle swords. Yet the entire crowd cheered as if it was real.

“This is fantastic,” Denis said. “Do you want to stay?”

Marla did, as well as his supervisor and second reader. Louis wanted to get some meat-on-a-stick and Libby also seemed tempted, but instead gestured to the other side of the courtyard to a display on corporeal punishment. A woman with her hair in thick plaits had put her head in barracks made of cardboard.

“Look,” Libby said a moment later, after the woman was released and another man in a monk’s costume was put in barracks. “I think I see the future. And the cursed witches. Double-double, baby.”

Libby gestured to several event tables that were pressed against a forest lining the back of the courtyard. Multiple signs hung over the sides of tables and announced each one of these displays as a psychic’s booth. Each one seemed to have their own speciality. Channelling. Mediumship. Past Life Regression. Tarot. I-Ching. Astrology. Crystal Healing. And so much more! In one flash, the Renaissance Faire had become a new age exhibition where geodes, tinctures, and chakra guidebooks were also sold along with readings.

“I don’t get it,” Libby said. “If they’re psychic, why do they need to advertise?”

“Because we’re not psychic.”

“Don’t tell me you’re taking this seriously, are you?”

“No,” Felicity said. “Of course not.”

In spite of their harsh words, both women stopped and looked at the display. Felicity even found herself getting happy. There was something so quaint and wonderful to all of it, even if she agreed with a lot of Libby’s comments. This stuff was hokum. Hooey. But it was also kind of nice and pretty, too.

There was an entire table filled with amethyst that first caught Felicity’s attention, all of it on display and available to touch. With Libby by her side, she felt her way through more rock specimens and learned the names from the man with a ponytail behind the table. Libby flipped her dark hair over her shoulder. She made a whispered joke about how Denis and his girlfriend were already behind a table, the jousting match now over.

“A man doing palm readings. Oh, look at it! He’s holding their hands. This is just a scream,” Libby added.

Felicity nodded. She moved to the next table. Libby followed. When Felicity ceased being interested in updates about Louis—who was also getting a reading, along with the other committee members and a handful of other students who’d attended the official defense—Libby switched to gossip about those who were not here.

“Did you hear that Melissa failed her proposal? The wrong kind of citations. Sunk her. And Daryl didn’t get ethics approval, so his defense was shifted back to the next semester. Shitty.”

“Really shitty. Their supervisor should have caught that.”

“I know, right? But I think Carla—Doctor Norton, excuse me—has a drinking problem.” She mimed a drinking motion with her hand. Then she smiled. Her stained teeth made Felicity look away.

When she and Libby had first met, it had been in Doctor Norton’s class on the Romantics. She’d always insisted on being called by her title of Dr. since it had taken her almost seven years to obtain, and since they, too, were also on a similar path, they should take pride in this moniker and use it as much as possible. “Especially since,” Dr. Norton went on in rather morose terms, “we are living in an era where we do not respect expertise.” The class had followed her commands; she was always doctor, doctor, doctor. But once she began to show up to class smelling like whiskey and taking months to grade anything, the respect had waned. Meanwhile, Libby and Felicity had been paired to do a project together for the class, and they’d bonded over the insanity of being taught by an expert who was slowly eroding her own status as an expert, while also demanding recognition.

Back then, Felicity had also thought that Libby was so smart. So beautiful. Her gossip seemed like information shared between the two of them, and only them, like girls sharing secrets at sleepovers or her mother’s updates about the other well-known drunks at her bar. It took Felicity two years of chatting over coffee, instead of studying for comps, to realize that Libby spoke this way with everyone—drunk teacher or not as the impetus, this was just how Libby interacted. She liked to talk about people to people—which really made sense for someone doing a study of autobiography for her dissertation—but since Felicity, too, was also a person, Felicity knew deep down that Libby talked about her to others. She had to. It was just a part of who she was, what she did, and though Felicity sometimes trembled with fear about some of the personal things she’d told Libby, she accepted Libby for her blabbermouth. After all, it seemed so much better than being a hypocritical drunk, or a hypocrite talking about drunks.

In a way, Felicity was even grateful for Libby. At least she knew exactly who she was dealing with.

But today, she just wanted to have fun. And Libby was making that quite difficult.

“So,” Libby said, after they had walked around the psychic booths and looked at all the medieval get-up in the other booths at least once. “What’s the deal, here? You gonna get a meat-stick? Or a reading? Or something else?”

“Oh. Um.”

“I think I’m going to get a reading,” Libby said, not waiting for Felicity. Libby glanced behind them at an older, black woman with a turban on her head. When she spoke to her customer, her voice held a booming cadence mixed with a Jamaican accent. “Get a load of Miss Cleo over there. Call me now.” Libby chuckled at her own impression of a popular psychic from the late 1990s. “Yeah, that settles it. I’m getting a reading with Miss Cleo.”

Without another word, Libby stepped aside. She bought her reading with cash from her purse and then sat behind the screen with Madame DuSchene, the psychic’s real name. Felicity was left holding a hard piece of Malachite in her hand, unsure what to do now that she was alone.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” the woman selling the malachite asked.

Felicity didn’t want to be a ma’am. God, she was only twenty-seven. Too young to be a ma’am. “I’m fine.”

“Okay. You might want to put down the malachite, though. It’s got some negative energy. It might be a bit much for you.”

Felicity baulked at the suggestion, but also heeded it. The woman made a face, pursing her lips. “What’s wrong?” Felicity asked.

“Step aside, maybe, away from the energy field. I’m still getting something…dark off you.”

Felicity wished Libby was there to act as mouthpiece. To tell this woman that she wasn’t a damn oracle or shadow or even make a dumb joke that only Felicity could hear. She didn’t want to think that she was in a bad energy field. She felt like she was bad energy. Really, truly, deep down.

So she stepped aside. The woman still seemed perplexed. She reached for a crystal around her neck.

“Something’s unfinished,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re unfinished in some way. Something’s missing. Did you get left behind in a ritual?”

“What? No.”

“Hmm. Were you in the middle of something before you came here? And you left it undone?”

“Maybe the first sentence of my dissertation,” she said with a chuckle. She hadn’t really started. Could you really call it starting your dissertation if you put down the title and then wrote your name? Gender-Bending Avatars and Money Laundering: Exploring Homer’s Odyssey in Treasure Hunt by Felicity Garland. It was such a long title, and probably not exactly what she was going to examine anyway, but that didn’t really matter, because she was definitely not in the middle of anything.

Felicity was about to walk away when the woman asked again, “What was your last dream? Did you not finish it?”

So suddenly, like the French author Marcel Proust with the Madeline cookie—or so she’d heard about in other people’s research—the dream she’d not finished came to her. She understood now that, when she’d been in her office and overcome by sleepiness, she actually had fallen asleep. So asleep that she’d managed to reach REM, where her dream emerged. Now it was in bits and pieces, scattered images that were mostly incoherent the moment she tried to put words to them, but ones that nonetheless provoked a profound sense of harmony in herself. Childhood home. The bathroom. Bathtub filled with glass, and then a box that was dropped. Blackness coming out in three pieces. Three shadows. A doorbell. Another room, a staircase. A bell.

Then she was awake.

The dream—all on the tip of her tongue—was so profound and yet utterly meaningless. It was just brought on by the party down the hall. A defense, a celebration, and maybe even hearing Libby’s voice. Something left over from her side-quest online. None of it mattered now. None of it mattered in real life.

“Yes,” she told the woman at the psychic table. “I was dreaming. But it was just a dream.”

“That’s it, then. You need to finish it.”

“How are dreams finished, though? Don’t they end when you wake up?” Felicity made a face. “And for that matter, when do dreams start? They are always in-medias-res.”

“I like that term. In medias res. It means in the middle of something. That’s all we are historically.” The woman gestured between her body and Felicity’s across the table. “We are the middle of larger humanity. But your life, that’s finite. That does have a beginning, middle, and eventual ending.”

Felicity felt cold. “I thought we were just talking about dreams, here?”

The woman shook her head, over and over again. Her necklace and bangles clicked in movement. She didn’t say anything for some time, leaving Felicity feeling as if she was wearing no clothing. Her dream hung before her vision like a magic eye painting. She was worried that this woman could somehow see it and hear it, though she’d not put words to any of the images.

“Here.” The woman handed her a card and gestured to a booth around the corner from her own, in the corner of the courtyard. “Go and see Phoebe. She will give you a discounted reading from me. It’s important.”

“She’ll know the dream?”

“She’ll know what you need to do next.” The woman smiled, oh, so briefly, before she waved her hands. “Now, go! I have customers to see.”

Felicity looked down at the card. It simply said: You’ve Been Called. There was a neon-coloured phone outlined in pink, followed by three stars in blue. Each time her eyes fell on the stars, Felicity swore she heard noise, something like interference. She looked at the booth. The sound grew louder.

In spite of everything, Felicity followed the sound.