Ivory Apples Read online

  Praise for Ivory Apples

  “Ivory Apples is a legendary fantasy novel of the great-nieces of their Great-Aunt Adela, almost as celebrated and mysterious as the book itself, and the charming superfan Kate Burden—a sort of wicked Mary Poppins on the dogged hunt for hidden magic But magic has always its own desires, far beyond any fan’s dream.”

  —Peter s. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn and Summerlong

  “Ivory Apples is like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls: stories within stories within stories within stories that keep you reading all the way to the bottom. I finished in eight hours and now want to read it again. What a charming book in all senses of the word.

  —Jane Yolen, author of The Emerald Circus

  “An absorbing fantasy about the power of art, family secrets—and obsession . . . Goldstein has crafted a dark, suspenseful tale in which the power of the faery world is appealingly disruptive and dangerous.”

  —Kirkus

  “A contemporary fantasy that is wholly original. I want to read it again and again.”

  —Ellen Klages, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Passing Strange

  “Lisa Goldstein is writing some of the most exciting fantasy out there. Ivory Apples is terrific.”

  —Jo Walton, author of Among Others and Lent

  “So many contemporary fantasists have learned from Lisa Goldstein’s weird, wise, humane and graceful example; her books comprise the best sort of magic school. Now, in Ivory Apples, she leads us deep into a wondrous grove that only she could scry. Goldstein is a true enchanter.”

  —Andy Duncan, author of An Agent of Utopia

  “A powerful fairy tale set without compromise in the modern world—the characters are convincingly real, and the magic is genuinely enchanting and perilous.”

  —Tim Powers, author of Alternate Routes and Down and Out in Purgatory

  “Lisa Goldstein’s work invariably surprises and inspires me. Ivory Apples is no exception. A vivid tale of magic and its consequences, filled with beauty and terror. Would you like a muse of your own? Really? Be careful what you wish for.”

  —Pat Murphy, author of The Wild Girls

  “A fine, swift, effervescent fantasy.”

  —John Crowley, author of Ka and Little, Big

  “It’s great, I loved it, you will also love it.”

  —Tor.com

  Praise for Lisa Goldstein

  “She has given us the kind of magic and adventure that once upon a time made us look for secret panels in the halls of wardrobes or brush our teeth with a book held in front of our eyes, because we couldn’t bear to put it down.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Lisa Goldstein is the perfect, born storyteller. Her story pulls you in and wraps you round, and it is hard to think of anything else until it is over.”

  —Diana Wynne Jones, author of Howl’s Moving Castle

  “Lisa Goldstein’s work deserves to be celebrated along with that of Alice Walker and Shirley Jackson.”

  —Lucius Shepard, author of Life During Wartime and The Jaguar Hunter

  “Lisa Goldstein . . . never writes the same type of story twice, and she never disappoints.”

  —Mark Graham, Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “Goldstein’s style remains unerringly unaltered. There’s a subtle beauty to all her work; a charm which draws the reader in and keeps them there, not wanting to put the book down until it’s finished. And this is another thing I like about Goldstein—no sequels. Her books are solid and complete in one volume and never seem to leave you with that ‘unfinished’ feeling.”

  —SF Site

  “Goldstein fearlessly rubs the dreamlike logic of fairy tales up against stark realism, and each one makes the other more real.”

  —BoingBoing

  Praise for The Uncertain Places

  “Goldstein’s complex and ingenious plot transplants the forest realm of European folktale, where witches grant wishes with strings attached and you’d better be careful which frog you kiss, into the sun-drenched hills of Northern California in the 1970s—and beyond.”

  —Ursula K. Le Guin

  “An exquisitely beautiful, eerily compelling modern fairy tale.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

  Other books by Lisa Goldstein

  Novels

  The Red Magician (1982)

  The Dream Years (1985)

  A Mask for the General (1987)

  Tourists (1989)

  Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (1993)

  Summer King, Winter Fool (1994)

  Walking the Labyrinth (1996)

  Dark Cities Underground (1999)

  The Alchemist’s Door (2002)

  The Uncertain Places (2011)

  Weighing Shadows (2015)

  Collections

  Daily Voices (1989)

  Travellers in Magic (1994)

  IVORY APPLES

  LISA GOLDSTEIN

  Ivory Apples

  Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Goldstein

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-298-2

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-299-9

  First Edition: 2019

  To Lucius Shepard:

  Thanks for all the crazy phone

  calls. I still miss them, and you.

  The best joke in here is yours.

  CHAPTER 1

  THERE WERE A LOT OF THINGS I didn’t understand about Great-aunt Maeve when I was growing up. For one thing, although she and my father insisted that we call her Maeve Reynolds, that wasn’t her real name. We’d seen that name, Adela Madden, on the book she’d written, Ivory Apples, which had been published a long time before I was born.

  My sisters and I asked my father Philip about this, of course, but all he told us was that she valued her privacy, and that we weren’t supposed to give away her real name to anyone. For a while I thought Maeve was some kind of secret agent, hiding out from people who wanted to kill her, and whenever we went to visit her I’d look for proof of this theory. I never found anything, though.

  We usually saw her about once a month. My three sisters and I would pile in to our ancient VW station wagon, and after the usual fights over who got the front seat we would drive to the post office, where Philip picked up Maeve’s mail. The letters and packages were all addressed to Adela Madden, and I wondered why other people got to use her real name when her own family had to call her something else. This was one mystery Philip could clear up, though: the letters were from fans of her novel, and they knew her only by the name on her book.

  Then we’d take the twisting highway out of Eugene, Oregon, which was where we lived. The houses grew farther and farther apart, and trees crowded up to the road as if to watch us go by. Sometimes Philip would swing out into the oncoming lane to pass the car in front of him, and I’d hold my breath until we returned to our lane.

  After a long drive we’d take the exit at a small town. The town flashed by as we passed: a restaurant, a gas station, a single stoplight. And then another branching off and another road, this one smaller and filled with potholes. We were driving through trees now, the only car within mil
es, and we would tell stories about how the world had ended and we were the only people left, until the stories scared us too much to keep going.

  It took an hour or two to reach Maeve’s house. I know this sounds imprecise, and I have to admit that back then I never really noticed my surroundings much—except for those times when Philip tempted death in the other lane, of course. Instead my sisters and I talked or argued, pinched each other surreptitiously, sang or played games.

  This time I’m talking about, the visit that changed everything for me, it was 1999, and I was eleven years old. After me came my younger sisters in steps of two years, Beatriz, Amaranth, and Semiramis. (My mother had disliked her own name, Jane, and had chosen increasingly florid names for us. She had even started to regret naming me Ivy, which she said was becoming too popular.) Semiramis’s birth had been difficult, and Jane had died a few months later.

  Philip did his best with us. He taught engineering at the U of Oregon and spent a lot of time with his students and colleagues or writing for journals, so we had a housekeeper, Esperanza, come in to cook our meals and clean up. On the weekends when he wasn’t too busy he’d try to do things with us, or take us to interesting places. Still, we grew up fairly wild, and with little idea of how girls, much less women, were supposed to behave.

  As we pulled into Maeve’s dirt driveway we could see her outside, working in the garden. We spilled out of the car, delighted with our freedom after being caged up together.

  We didn’t run toward her, or hug her. We never did. There was a formality to her, a distance, that seemed to forbid it. “Hi, Aunt Maeve,” we called out.

  She stood up and brushed her hands on her skirt. She was tall and heavy, with most of the weight around her middle and thighs. Her hair was thick, a wiry gray, and she wore it brushed back from her forehead. Her face reminded me of a stone, rough and open. She wasn’t as ugly as this makes her sound, though; something about her gave her the presence of a queen, or a goddess. I saw a Greek statue once that looked like her.

  She headed toward us. She went with a bobbing clumsiness, like I imagined the Little Mermaid would when she first tried to walk on land. “I moved this stone over here, but it doesn’t seem very happy in its new spot,” she said to Philip. “They’re very conservative, don’t you find, stones.”

  She made a lot of comments like that, said a lot of things I don’t think Philip understood. His way of dealing with it was to change the subject. Maeve was really my mother Jane’s aunt, someone Philip had inherited after Jane had died, and though he tried to treat her politely, his frustration would sometimes show.

  “Well, we made it,” he said. “I brought your letters.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Letters.”

  People from all over the world wrote her letters but for some reason she disliked reading them, and Jane had taken over her correspondence. The job had grown until most of the fans got an answer, if only just a form letter, and then when Jane died Philip had taken over.

  I’d watched them go through the mail once, and it had been so boring I’d never done it again. She got checks from publishers around the world, what seemed to me like a lot of money, and she would sign them for Philip to deposit later. A producer had written, wanting to make a movie of her book, but she tossed his letter in the trash, much to my disappointment.

  Most of it, as I said, was fan mail. Some of the letter-writers told her how much they liked her book; some sent her presents; some asked questions. She and Philip decided which ones needed replies, and then Philip would make some notes and answer them when he got home. Some had theories about the world she had created, and these she would set firmly in the pile that got a form letter.

  A few times Philip asked about something the letter-writer raised, but she would just shake her head and smile with her lips closed, as if opening them would let all her secrets come flying out. “I like to keep things mysterious,” she’d say.

  The day that I’d watched them, Philip had tried to get her to use email, and to take a look at a website someone had created for her. She refused to get a computer, though; she said she was too old to learn how to use it. Philip had sighed quietly. I don’t think she realized how much work she made for him.

  “You kids want to wander around a bit?” he asked us now. “Just stay together and don’t go too far, okay? And keep away from the river.”

  I left them opening letters and packages in the dining room. It was only in the last year that Philip had allowed us to go outside; before that we’d had to do all our exploring indoors. The house was made out of wood and glass—really more glass than wood, with enormous windows surrounded by walls weathered like driftwood. It was crowded with all manner of things, most of them presents from her fans, candles and vases and plants, stones and shells and masks and figurines. Paintings of scenes from her book lined some of the walls, and the rest were filled with bookshelves, and with stacks of different kinds of boxes, carved wood, painted tin, old orange crates from California with pictures of bright yellow suns.

  Despite all this we had grown tired of staying in the house, and the woods outside seemed to beckon us. They started at the back yard and stretched out for miles; a creek ran through them, and there were open meadows where you could sometimes see deer.

  I was the oldest, and my sisters were used to following wherever I led them. As I moved into adolescence, though, I wanted more and more to strike out on my own, away from my sisters. Now I imagined Beatriz piercing the silence of the wood with her chatter, and Amaranth hurrying ahead, impatient for a destination. Semiramis just looked at me, smiling, but even that seemed an invasion of my privacy.

  I told them firmly to go away, but Amaranth still followed me a ways into the wood. “I told you, Rantha, I don’t want to look after a bunch of babies,” I said, and she finally left me.

  I did feel a glimmer of guilt as I went on. I knew that at nine years old, Beatriz was too young to look after the other two, and that although Philip was pretty relaxed with us he would be angry at what I had done. But the feeling of freedom was so intoxicating that I shrugged off my guilt and went farther in.

  The trees here seemed sized for me, not too tall or too close. It was late summer, and some of the leaves had already changed color or dropped to the forest floor. A pale, watery sun sieved through the branches, lighting some places and leaving others in shadow. I passed familiar landmarks, a mossy stump, a fallen tree with other trees sprouting from it. Birds sang in the distance.

  I was thinking about my mother, something I’d been doing a lot lately. Jane had died five years ago, and Amaranth and Semiramis, who were seven and five now, didn’t remember her. Even Beatriz had forgotten some things—and, most terrible of all, my own memories were starting to fade. I felt as if, once the last remembrance of her was gone, her time on earth would be erased, wiped out as if she had never existed.

  I missed her dreadfully, and her absence seemed to take on more weight as I got older. This year I had gotten my first period, and Philip had tried to help me but had gone mute with embarrassment. And I knew there was more waiting for me, other things outside of his experience: makeup, high heels, boys. And sex, a word that seemed tinged in red whenever I thought of it.

  I had started thinking about words that year, and I wondered if there were words or phrases to capture this feeling of loss. I turned over words like coins—“sorrow,” “desolate”—but none of them seemed to fit. Well, maybe I’d find something later, in one of the books I was always reading.

  I stopped. The woods around me had grown dim and the trees seemed different, crowds of thick, tall pines, their branches blocking the sun. It looked like another forest entirely, older, shaggier, wilder. And it had grown silent, all the birds hushed now.

  I felt a spark of terror and began to hurry, trying to find my way out. Trees crowded around me, looming like giants, closing off the paths I tried. Branches caught at my clothes. The air turned cold and sharp and tasted like iron. Things moved at the edg
e of my vision, as if herding me somewhere. The woods grew darker.

  Finally I saw a stream running across my path, so narrow that one step would take me across it. I left the path and followed it deeper into the wood, thinking that it would lead to the creek. The woods still looked strange, though, and the stream never joined up with anything, just ran silently through its bed of mud and moss and stones.

  It disappeared several times in the gloomy light, and I had to stop to look for it. The air grew colder, shivery. I heard splashing up ahead, and I ran toward it.

  The woods opened out, and in the sudden light I saw a lake. Giant mossy rocks stood on the opposite bank, one piled atop the other, and a waterfall cascaded down them. A great forest stretched out in the distance, a forest I’d never seen or heard of before, and a mist lay over the tops of the trees, turning the leaves gray and the trunks the color of bone. More trees lined the shore, nodding to their reflections in the water; they had leaves of red and gold, the fiery colors of autumn, though it was still summer, as I said, and the leaves near Aunt Maeve’s house were mostly green.

  And there were people, laughing and sliding down the rocks or scattering through the gusts of leaves. They had pointed ears, and fingers and toes as long and gnarled as twigs, and their hair, brown with a greenish tinge, was tangled with leaves and flowers and berries. Their eyes were longer than other people’s, green or black or gray, and seemed lit from within by gleeful mischief. They were tall and short, though none larger than a child, pale and dark, some of them beautiful and some with strangely exaggerated features—a wide mouth, a nose like a potato. They dressed in rags of rust and red and green, or gossamer shawls that trailed them like wings. Someone was playing a set of pipes, and someone else tossed circlets of flowers, which the others caught and set in their hair.

  And lying in the lake, naked and completely at ease in the water, was my great-aunt.