The Death Fairy

By Laird Stevens

The Death Fairy is a fantasy, a psychological thriller about Asia, a woman who is best friends with her mother's ghost. Her Mom sends her dreams that reveal her life in ways that are impossible: she killed herself when Asia was a baby. But Asia loves the dreams. She can "float inside" them and experience her mother's life as though she herself were living it.

But one day, she meets someone who puts her mother in a darker light. She begins to doubt her mother's truthfulness. At first, the two are in conflict, but they are soon at war. The rest of the novel is best summarized by a question: who will win?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laird Stevens
• Release date: May 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9780986706622

Laird Stevens

THEMATIC BIO Laird Stevens My life–at least, the part of it that I still carry with me today–began with music. My father played the piano by ear. He played, and I wrapped myself in the sound. He was my earliest God. One evening, when my mother put me to bed, she said that I would soon begin piano lessons, and the thought was so electric that I stayed awake until morning. Seven years later, my beautiful world–impossibly intricate, and shamelessly cerebral–was destroyed in a flood of hormones. There were a few survivors, but the shadow of sex was on them all. To make sex pretty, I called it “love” (as I had been trained to do), but it wasn’t love, and it didn’t become anything like love until a few years later. Certainly, it had to do with love, but the walk from sex to love was long and difficult to understand. After that, there was literature. At fifteen or sixteen, I developed an incomprehensible thirst for other people’s stories. My story, which was both new and exciting, was not yet connected to anything else. Reading Dickens and Dostoevski and D.H. Lawrence, I found a place to fit in. And then, finally, there was philosophy. Descartes showed me that nothing I knew was certain. At sixteen, it was easy to agree. I knew that music and love were guiding my life. I didn’t even presume to ask why. I knew that if I ever made sense of my life, it would be in terms of the stories that I now read compulsively. But after reading Descartes, I started caring about something quite different. I started caring more about questions than I did about answers. I would get my answers in due time, once I started asking the right questions. And the right questions were the ones that cut deepest into my belief system, the belief system that I, like Descartes, had patched together uncritically from childhood to the present. Much later (I was twenty-two at the time), I was reading Plato and discovered what he called “the divine madnesses.” These were things that we did that made us feel like Gods. But, and this was an insurmountable ‘but,’ we were not Gods, and could never do these things unless we had the help of the Gods. The four divine madnesses were music, love, poetry and philosophy. Music was possible only if a God took over our bodies and wrote it for us. The same was true of poetry. Love (and I had no trouble believing this) was a gift of madness from the Gods, and so–unparadoxically–was philosophy: the reasoning of a God was simply madness to a person unpossessed. So said Plato, at any rate. But whatever issues you may have with Plato, remember that no one since has had any better ideas. We still talk about how musicians and poets are “inspired” when they write: they breathe something in, and this allows them to create. Science has nothing useful to say about love, and I have no good answer to the question, “Where do ideas come from?” They gallop into my consciousness like wild things, and if I manage to catch the good ones and let the bad ones go, my day is nothing less than extraordinary. My commitment to the idea of divine madness varies, but it is the most useful one I have ever found when it comes to defining my own life. It is one that I would recommend everyone try on for size.

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What Others are Saying about The Death Fairy

The book's action sequences are riveting.

The book's vivid journey through Asia's dreamscapes will enthrall readers to the end -Kirkus Reviews

A page-turner. Stevens’ elaborate and chilling world of the death fairy piques the reader’s curiosity from the first page until its unravelling in the last few chapters.-The Concordian

This book kept me gripped for the entire time! It was a well-written easy read. The characters were very real and likable. I kept wanting to read more to figure out what was really going on, so the book was hard to put down. The storyline wasn't so much frightening as just creepy--but in a good way. I highly recommend it!-Amazon Reviewer

This book certainly lived up to my expectations. I brought it with me during an overseas flight and once I picked it up I didn't want to put it down. The story is a perfect blend of mystery, intrigue and creepiness with an ending that will have you holding your breath.-Amazon Reviewer

Great story. Smooth, easy read. A book you can pick up and put down a few short hour later with a satisfied curiosity and a lingering feeling of: hmmm... creepy...-Amazon Reviewer

The Death Fairy

By Laird Stevens

The Death Fairy

By Laird Stevens

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright 2012 by Laird Stevens

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Paperback edition by Paris Press Inc., Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

eBook edition ISBN 978-0-9867066-2-2

Chapter 1

Asia was down by the river, with the biggest stones she could find stuffed into her jacket. She was ready, but it wasn’t quite time. She would know when it was time. She had always known things like that, without ever knowing why she knew them.

It had been a strange life. Asia was a strange name. Her mother had also been called Asia, and her grandmother too. No one remembered beyond that. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, she had called her little girl Asia as well. What would happen to little Asia without her Mom to look after her? But she couldn’t think about that: she was sure she was doing the right thing.

Her mother had killed herself at the age of twenty-nine, when Asia was just six months old. So she had never known her mother. And yet, if you asked her what person had meant the most in her life, she would unhesitatingly have said, my mother. She had never known her, but she was the person she knew the best. Much of Asia’s life had been flavored by contradictions like this.

She had grown up alone with her father, in a big house with lots of land around. There were no real neighbors: you could walk to the village, and on the way there were a couple of houses, but there was no one across the road, or even within shouting distance. Asia wasn’t shy, but she was self-contained; she learned to read early, and often would spend the whole day reading. Sometimes months would pass without her leaving the property.

She had gone to school, but hadn’t liked it, so her father kept her at home. She found other children childish. She liked people, but they had to be big people. With children, she felt awkward; with adults, she was herself.

Then, when she was eleven, her father took her to Paris for the summer. He had been worried about her; he thought she needed a break from the house and the solitude it represented. He rented a big, furnished apartment on Boulevard Raspail in the 6th arrondissement. And she loved it. It changed her life. She loved the apartment, on the top floor of a seven-story building, with its four-meter-high ceilings and its walls covered with tan-colored cloth. There was a view of the Pantheon from the living room, and from the kitchen you could see the Eiffel tower. She loved the neighborhood: there were half a dozen bakeries within two minutes of the front door. There was a metro right across the road, and another just half a block away. She loved the river, and the fact that you could walk right beside it, and the bridges, and the churches, and the Luxembourg Gardens, but most of all she loved sitting outside and sipping tea, and listening to her father talk about Paris as the city itself rushed by.

They stayed for June and July, and then left when everybody leaves, to spend August on the north coast in a fishing village. It was nothing like Williston–before Paris, Williston was all she knew; she had never seen a city, or even a large town–but it reminded her of home. She had wanted to go back to Paris, to stay there, to live there. But her father had said he had to make arrangements. They could return next summer if she liked and stay as long as she wanted.

She hadn’t understood any of this until much later on. But her father had to arrange for the house to be rented–he couldn’t sell it because Asia’s mother had willed it to her daughter–and had to arrange an indefinite leave from the university where he taught. Her father was a medical researcher, and had many patents; he worked only because he enjoyed company.

They spent the fall in Williston. She had no memory of those months; she spent them waiting to go back. And then, right after Thanksgiving, they did go back, but not to Paris, not right away. It was too late for school that year, her father said. They would travel together until May, and then return to Paris to enrol her in a local lycée. He had rented an apartment on rue Montparnasse. It was just around the corner from the Raspail apartment–he knew she loved the neighborhood–but it looked onto a courtyard and not the street, and so wasn’t quite so noisy.

Until then he wanted to travel in warmer countries. In general, France was milder than Vermont, although France could be icy and Vermont quite temperate; but now that he was free to choose his winter, he chose to make it a warm one. They flew to Rome and stayed in a grand apartment on Piazza Adriana, just behind the Castel Sant’Angelo, a minute’s walk from the Tiber. She remembered that winter vividly. She had no hat. She had no boots. She had no mitts. She wore a jacket instead of a coat. She was never even remotely cold. She had never known until then what a burden the winter was. There were days, it is true, when it went down to zero–she counted in Celsius now–but those days were very few. And on those days, the Romans (the rich ones, anyway) trotted out their furs. But they didn’t know what cold was. Asia knew what cold was, and this wasn’t it. She walked along the Tiber every day, and imagined what it was like to be two thousand years old.

And on most days the temperature climbed to at least ten (50˚) and sometimes reached twenty (68˚) in the sun. As winter began to fade into spring, they made day trips, and sometimes these trips expanded to fill entire weeks. Venice had taken her by surprise and been her playground for ten magical days. (She turned twelve in Venice.) And then finally came May, and they packed their things, and said goodbye to Rome, and took the train to Paris.

Her father’s Italian had been limited–that had presented a few problems, but none that were insurmountable. His French, on the other hand, was fluent. He enrolled her in Lycée Montaigne, on the southern edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, and then set about teaching her how to speak French. He gave her a grammar and a dictionary, and then spoke to her only in French for the next four months. By the time she started 5e, her conversational French was as good as her English. After one term, she was fluent, and from that time on, he spoke to her only in English.

It occurred to her once to ask him why he had learned French. There was no need for French in Williston. Montreal was a couple of hours away by car, but they had never been.

Before you were born, I had a sabbatical and spent the year in Paris with your mother. It was a good year. She didn’t want to leave. Unfortunately, in those days I had no choice but to work. Do you know where our apartment was?

She shrugged. He walked to the window and pointed. It was that one right there, two floors down. That was fifteen years ago. The pictures in the blue album are all from Paris. Did I never tell you?

The albums were how she knew her mother, the albums and the diary her mother had kept. There were twelve albums, all color-coded. They kept her mother alive for her. In Williston, they stood at the back of her desk, with stone bookends on each side. When she had first come to Paris, she had bought a special suitcase that fitted them perfectly, and that was what she took as hand luggage. No one was allowed to touch her suitcase.

It was not uncommon for Asia to spend the whole day with one of the albums. These pictures were what she knew best. She made up stories about them, pretending to know what her mother was thinking and feeling in order to understand what made her look exactly the way she looked, exactly like that. Sometimes, she stared at a picture for so long that she started to believe her own stories. And at night, the last thing she did before getting into bed was say goodnight to her mother.

(The diary was different. She had read it often, but she was not yet emotionally mature enough to make sense of it. Also, between the entries her mother had written poems. They were short, written to someone called Tristan; the tone was very sad, but Asia had never heard of anyone called Tristan. So while the pictures tended to include her–she knew everyone in the pictures, and she was even in some of them herself–the diary excluded her. Tristan was a man who had never entered her life.)

They stayed in Paris for six years, until she had finished her baccalaureate. And though at her lycée she was known as l’Américaine, in her heart she felt like a Parisian. And it didn’t take long for her to feel this. It definitely happened before her thirteenth birthday,