The Badman Alley

Beautiful, airy Celestine swung down the lane, the willows supple and bowing, September chill still and waiting. The trees, the students, even the buildings with their open-door mouths and glass window eyes watched and admired; her slim, bare legs moved brightly, bouncing with her stride, her long blonde hair picking up the sunlight to shine. They watched her, this aloof, mysterious girl, and wondered: where was she from? What was she like? Why always the faint faraway smile?

Her studies were varied: mathematics, folklore, poetry, rhymes. Never the real, dreary world, and what courses she took that dirtied their feet in the ashy remains of history left her cool and dreaming, gazing out the window and wagging her fingers to a lively inner tune. One slippered foot waved quietly from a crossed leg, skirt flaring, and beneath her lashes pale freckles lay silent like stars. 

She had summered in town as a child, a local boy said, stayed with a maiden aunt in a broken-down place over the hill, her mother back in the city. On sunny days she came to play at the college, pretend adventures, just a skinny thing, and she worked into her games the librarians and scholars and the gruff, unshaven men who cleaned up the trash. She ran wild, he said, same blue eyes, blonde hair tangled, and now here she was back again, enrolled like any other girl, all grown up. Gone were the dirty white socks, scuffs on the elbows; now everything was soft, clean and smooth. But no one knew her. Not really. 

Had anyone bothered to watch—they did, of course, but really watch—they might have seen her eyes sparkle with secretive glee whenever she passed the Badman alley, that gray space between the Jonas Badman bookstore and the all-night study center. There was nothing there, really, just broken pallets, tires, slats, jumbled bits of nothing. It had been an alley since time immemorial, perhaps since before the pilgrims, a shadow between wigwams, and in the middle of it was a large, flat, square, ugly metal grate. She glanced down the alley, down at the grate, and smiled to herself, as if that gray, lowly place had once been the scene of fond adventures. It was strange, the gaze of this golden-haired girl, but looks can be deceiving. 

Her roommates, Ida and Claire, knew as much as anybody. They said she spoke little, was content with her own company, and spent her time dreaming. She was polite, to be sure, they said, but her eyes had a way of glassing over coolly when the girls talked of films, fads and music. Celestine seemed to know nothing of new things—the people, the fashions; her own clothes were fine and beautiful, but she seemed to pair them together by chance, creating ensembles that were odd or ingenious. It was noticed that she had a slightly strange odor. 

Being wicked and ordinary, the curious girls filched the letters from Celestine’s mother out of the trash and read them in secret. The words were sober, careful, and sere, though underneath lurked an odd anxiety. Was she eating? Was she well? Would she call? Would she please call? Darling, please, you know you must call. It seemed out of place with the cool, confident girl, her bright eyes and smiles. 

She disappeared at times; that was known. Hours, even a day, returning only when no one was about, sometimes at night. Her clothes, dumped in a closet, looked dirtied and damp, as though she had been adventuring, as though she had rambled to faraway places of windstorms and rain. 

Windstorms and rain.…

Behind the alley’s magic portal, the land of Bella-Donna was indeed the scene of windstorm and rain, but also one of sunlight and song. The trees wept blossoms on the pathways, white with purple veins, falling to splash into petals and scent. They dropped at the feet, especially, of Queen Celestine, the traveler, the girl from another world. She visited when she could, those glens, those stones, the fairies. The little magic ones kept her company as she roamed to places strange and alarming. Terrible mumpf-ducks rolled on the horizon, and they all hid together, pressed down into the moss, hugging each other and trembling. When the kite-lizards soared in the sky, they pretended to be trees, standing still and breathless with their arms outstretched, for the vision of those beasts is poor, their eyes not orbs but a constant flowing jelly. Sometimes a sprite would weaken and droop, and in a soul-tearing, horrifying crash it would be gobbled, leaf slippers and all, and great, glittering tears would roll from Queen Celestine’s eyes like rain. 

Not all was danger in Bella-Donna, however; there were games, and fêtes, and journeys of adventure and romance. They danced the tarantella in secret flower valleys, the girl-nymphs wearing charcoal mustaches and breeches, an enchanted he-boar hammering the chimes. They cloud-gathered at the daunting peaks, scooping handfuls of mist to weave in lace, dropping stones on the rockhawks that harried the lambs. Once she had bathed in a mountain pool, diamond-drops rolling down her skin, and a horseman princeling saw her nakedness from head to toe. Ashamed, chivalrous, knowing his crime, he made redress by plucking out his eyes and tossing them in a fire; he settled in a homely shack, alone in his blindness, and every spring kindly Celestine would leave at his doorstep baskets of fruit, honey, and nectar. 

All these wonders—the jade gardens, the fairy chants, the white mountain shrines—they all waited for her, hidden and gay, just through her magic gate. In time her ordinary world grew paler and paler still, and then one day she realized that she could only hardly remember it at all.

It was a besotted boy who found her, finally, by accident, in Badman alley. He had come to urinate into the grim, metal grate, looked down, and to his surprise saw a girl, emaciated and filthy. She sat crouched in the drain, eyes wide from hunger, lips drawn back like a corpse. She rocked back and forth on bare feet, grinding her teeth, dirty claw hands cutting her knees, chuckling and gibbering. Quiet! she warned the fairies. Be still, my friends, the kite lizards are flying!