All Bellknaps Go Under the Mountain

For July’s second, free, story, we are delighted to have Margaret Dunlap sharing a story of magical bargains and lawyering! ~ Julian and Fran, July 14, 2024

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All Belknaps Go Under the Mountain

by Margaret Dunlap

I found Granddad in the barn, pinned under a hay bale. The hay, in turn, was pinned by the goat, because insult naturally follows accident, and the goat had never in her life met a stationary object she didn’t feel the need to see the view from the top of. If I were living at home, it would have been a bit dramatic, but ultimately another Wednesday night. Except I hadn’t lived with Granddad since I left for college—a BA, law school, and two years as a junior associate ago—and it was only by fate or coincidence I came to the mountain that night and was there to find him.

Even now, I’m not sure which of those to credit or blame.

Regardless, there I was, in my DC law firm suit and too-expensive DC junior associate heels, trying to bribe the goat off Granddad. He, meanwhile, lay there griping at me to calm down and leave the goat be. He was fine, the goat was fine, everything was just fine. If I hadn’t been five hours in the car, or if I had eaten something since breakfast, maybe I would have laughed. Instead, I found myself snapping, “Goddamnit! If things get any more fine, we’re gonna have to amputate.”

The barn fell silent. Granddad and the goat both stared at me.

“You okay, June bug?”

I was not, and burst into tears.

By the time I got myself together, the goat had gotten tired of the view from the hay bale and sauntered off. I helped Granddad to his feet. “How’s the leg?” I asked.

He gave a small grunt. “It’ll do. You hungry?”

I shrugged.

“Come in and wash up. Never met a problem breakfast for supper couldn’t help.”

#

I washed my face and hands in the tiny powder room off the kitchen where Great-grandma Betsy’s cross-stitched motto, Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness, had chastised four generations of Belknaps to scrub behind their ears. From what I could gather, Great-grandma Betsy’s fixation on physical and spiritual hygiene was the only reason she and Great-granddad Elias had relented on installing indoor plumbing, a transition that was thankfully long complete by the time I came to live with Grandma and Granddad when I was nine.

Judging myself sufficiently closer to God, I went up to my old bedroom to change. All my clothes had come away with me long ago and I hadn’t brought a suitcase, but in the closet I found one of my uncles’ old flannel shirts—washed so many times, all that remained was the plaid and the softness—a pair of paint-spattered jeans that could have been my mother’s from her early married years, and some worn-out sneakers a cousin had abandoned at the end of some long-past summer. Once upon a time, the mountain had been full of Belknaps, but time had scattered us—to marriage, the army, college, death—until Granddad was the only one left, surrounded by the family’s castoffs like drifts of leaves.

He was frying eggs and bacon when I came down. Was he more stooped than when I’d visited six months ago? Or had it been nine? He definitely favored the leg that had been pinned under the hay, and I shuddered as I imagined what might have happened if I hadn’t come.

He looked up from the pan and caught me staring. “Food’s almost ready.”

“I’ll set the table.”

After that, the only sounds were the scrape of the spatula on the cast-iron pan and the clink of plates and forks. The warmth of habit and familiar routine filled a hole in my chest I hadn’t noticed was empty, and for a moment it seemed like breakfast for dinner really was exactly what I needed. Then I lifted my fork to my mouth and discovered the concept of eggs had become revolting.

“Something wrong with the eggs?”

“I’m not hungry,” I lied.

“If you didn’t come for dinner, do you want to talk about why you’re here?” His expression sobered. “Something wrong with that boy of yours?”

I shook my head.

“You sure?”

“Yes. Things with James are fine.”

“Why haven’t I met him?”

“Because he’s a junior associate at a major firm working hundred-hour weeks, and you never leave the mountain?”

“So are you, and here you are.”

I shrugged. “It’s different.”

“So what is it?”

I was going to tell him, really, I was, but when I opened my mouth, the only thing that came out was “I missed you.”

He smiled at that. “Missed you too, June bug.”

We chatted a bit after that. About the goat, and the weather, like I had never left and nothing had changed. But Granddad must have been tired because when I got up to do the dishes, he just said good night and went to bed.

The dishes didn’t take long, and then I was alone in the kitchen. Too hungry and restless for sleep, I took the old barn coat down from its peg by the door, and—wrapped in the smell of hay, goats, and Granddad—slipped out into the autumn night.

#

Through the yard, past the barn, was the Old Orchard. In Great-granddad Elias’s day, hard cider was the farm’s main cash crop, but marrying Great-grandma Betsy put a stop to that sort of nonsense. She was old-school Methodist and dead against drink, both the drinking and the selling. He preferred her to the cider, and the orchard fell into neglect. When I came to live with my grandparents, it became my secret hideaway. No one cared if I used the branches as a jungle gym or hid among the leaves in the height of summer. Cider apples aren’t much good for eating out of hand, so the fruit of any blossoms that survived my exploits could be happily sacrificed for juggling practice, stockpiled as ammunition, or left for the birds and ants.

The only apple that night was tucked away in a notch, half-dried and branch-scarred. I twisted it off and took a bite, letting the concentrated juices burst, bitter and astringent, against my tongue, filling my head with the scent of summer. Somehow, it was the most delicious apple I had ever tasted.

I kept walking. 

And walking.

Hours passed. The moon, impossibly, grew larger as it rose higher off the tree line, and though I would have sworn I knew every inch of that mountain in every light at every season, I found myself in the center of a perfectly circular clearing I had never seen before.

I sat down on an old log. The stars wheeled overhead, like the sky was a giant spinning bowl. A second later, my few bites of dinner spattered on the ground, accompanied by what was left of the apple.

“Humans,” a man muttered, “spreading your diseases . . .”

I looked up and saw a man—no more than four feet high, dressed all in green, with skin like the bark of an oak tree in winter and a wild, wiry beard. He kicked leaves over my vomit and scowled. When the mess was hidden, he sniffed the air, made a face at the lingering reek, and said something in a language I didn’t know.

The smell vanished.

He gave a nod of satisfaction, but then something else caught his nose. “No,” he said. “Not sick . . .” He leaned in, still sniffing, until our faces nearly touched, then abruptly broke into a delighted grin. “Oh good!” he said. “You’ve brought the baby!”

My heart leapt in my throat and my hand twitched at my belly.

The baby.

No one knew about the baby.

If I hadn’t snuck off on my lunch break to pee on a stick in a CVS bathroom that afternoon, I wouldn’t have known about the baby.

He laughed at the shock and confusion that raced across my expression. “Afraid I’ll rip it from you? No, I’m a patient man. I can wait for the seasons to turn in their own time.” He wagged a finger at me. “It’s good you aren’t trying to hide it, though. Humans always try to get out of their bargains. That’s what the stories say, and for once they say it true. But the deal I made with your husband is set and locked, and the babe is mine.”

I blinked. Something did not track. Really, none of this tracked, but what my brain latched on to was: “The deal you made with my husband?”

“Did he not tell you? Did he think he could bargain his land against his firstborn child, then steal the babe away to pay his debts with you none the wiser? They try to do that sometimes. Tell you it was a sudden fever, or that the fairies stole it in the night. As though we’d take a child we hadn’t dealt and paid for.” He drew himself up in compensation for his wounded dignity. 

I held up my ringless left hand. “I don’t have a husband.”

“Can’t tell me you don’t have a man, though,” he said with a leer. “Doesn’t matter if you’re married or not. A deal’s a deal, all the same.”

The details might not have mattered to him, but I was a junior associate at a major law firm. Everything was in the details. And none of these added up. “He doesn’t know I’m pregnant,” I said.

The man threw up his hands in exasperation. “Do you think any man makes a bargain in the fairy glade for their firstborn child after they learn their wife”—he gave me a look—“or their not-wife, is carrying? Not even humans are that monstrous. We made a deal in good faith that spring planting follows winter and summer harvest follows spring. I held up my end, and soon it will be time for him to hold up his.” He paused, squinted at me, sniffed again. “Be a while, though, won’t it?”

Objection. Irrelevant. Redirect. “In the fairy glade . . . You made a bargain with him . . . here?”

“Of course we made our bargain here! There are rules. We haven’t forgotten them, even if you lot have.” 

“Right here?”

“Yes! Under the full moon. And no, he wasn’t drunk, but it wouldn’t matter if he were. It’s not our fault your kind can’t hold our liquor.”

And that’s what stuffed it. “You didn’t bargain for this baby.”

He patted me on the head as though he found me sweet, or dim. “I know it’s a shock, but it doesn’t change the fact that—”

“—that the father of this child has never set foot in this county, let alone on this mountain.”

The man blinked. “Come again?”

“If you made your bargain here, it wasn’t with the father of this baby,” I said, even more sure as I said it. It was nice to finally be the one causing and not suffering from confusion in this conversation.

“Are you trying to tell me the father of your child is not Elias Belknap?” 

It was my turn to laugh. “That would be impossible. And illegal . . . on several levels, since Elias Belknap was my great-grandfather, and very very dead.” 

The man looked at me in shock, then sagged. “Dagnabbit! I always get the time change wrong.”

#

The family plot was as overgrown as the Old Orchard, but I managed to get the rusted scrap-iron gate open. A few of the stones had fallen over, but Granddad had kept his father’s marker clear. The little man traced out the letters that spelled Elias Belknap and his dates, sniffed at the stone, muttered something else in his language, and sighed. “Dagnabbit.”

“If you bargained for his firstborn, you’re a bit late.” I pointed to where Great-aunt Chrissy, Granddad’s older sister, was buried in the next plot. Three other, younger, siblings slept beside her. Granddad was the last of his generation still aboveground.

The man glared at me. “It’s not my fault time runs differently under the hill than it does here.”

“Under the where?”

An exasperated sigh. “Under. The. Hill. You must know the stories: human wanders into another world, spends hundreds of years among the fairies, then comes home to find no time has passed at all.”

“I thought the human went to fairyland, spent a single night there, and returned to find a hundred years gone by back home.”

He threw up his hands again. “And there’s the problem! Flip two tiny details, and the next thing you know, you’re coming to collect a baby who’s dead of old age.” He shook his head, but after a moment, he turned back to me. “Great-grandfather, you said? Direct blood from he”—he nodded to the gravestone—“to thee?”

He had an appraising look I did not like. “Why?”

“Same family. Still on the land. I kept the bargain, didn’t I? Way I see it, your clan owes me a child.”

My stomach dropped. “You didn’t bargain for this baby. You admit it.” 

“I bargained for a baby, and I haven’t received one.”

“No one stopped you from coming to collect over all these years. Doctrine of laches: ‘Unreasonable delay in seeking remedy for the legal right or claim is an affirmative defense to prevent it from being enforced.’” I could hear Professor Smith’s voice in my head as I rattled off the legalese for: You snooze, you lose.  

“Technicality.”

“Weren’t you the one saying your contract would still be enforceable if my great-grandfather had been drunk?” 

The little man scowled, but then his voice shifted, and suddenly his lack of height didn’t make him any less imposing. “You’re not even sure you want this baby,” he said.  

I opened my mouth, but couldn’t answer.

“Can’t deny it, can you?”

“I just found out a few hours ago. It’s still sinking in.”

“Is it this man of yours? The one who’s never come to this county, let alone this mountain. Does he not want it?”

I shook my head. “He doesn’t know.”

“You haven’t told him? Is he not a good man? Does he not like children?”

James was a good man. He loved children. I’d known from the moment I saw the positive test, he’d be thrilled. We both wanted a family. We weren’t exactly trying, but had reached the point of hypothetically discussing whether, when the time came, it would be better to combine our offices to make space for a nursery in our city apartment or look for a house in the suburbs with more room.

The one place we’d never discussed moving was here. James had been raised in Manhattan’s canyons of glass and steel. His idea of wilderness was taking a walk through a park along the Potomac. He would have come to the mountain if I invited him, but I never had. Because if he could not love this place that infused my blood and bones, how could he really love me? 

The little man’s face was inches away. 

“He never has to know. I could take the baby now. Nothing has to change.” 

My blood froze. “You can’t do that.”

“Of course I can. Magic.”

“But, earlier, you said—”

“Give it to me,” he hissed. “Your family will be secure on this land for seven generations. What is one child against that?”

“Seems to me,” a familiar voice broke in, “seven generations are going to be tough to come by without babies.” Granddad stood in the open gate, one hand leaning on the old stone wall to spare his leg.

The little man’s eyes narrowed. “This is a private conversation between me and the young lady. No concern of yours.”

Granddad made his way over, his shortened stride an echo of the man who had once been as ageless and towering as the mountain.

“My great-grandchild is very much my concern.” He looked at me and huffed. “So that’s what brought you home.”

“I didn’t come to sell my baby to the fairies,” I protested. “I just . . . went for a walk to clear my head.”

“And then you ate an apple and found yourself in the fairy ring under the full moon,” Granddad finished for me. 

“How did you know?”

The little man looked between us both. “It’s you. You’re the baby.”

Granddad nodded.

“No,” I said. “You’re not. Great-aunt Chrissy—”

“Technically, my cousin. Your great-grandparents raised her as their own after her parents passed, like your grandma and I did for you.” He paused and looked off into the dark woods, as if searching for a memory. “Years after your great-granddad told me what he had done, I wondered if that was why he took her in.”

“He told you he sold you to the fairies?!”

“I got old enough to ask why he was taking me out in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, and he couldn’t have me asking your great-grandma Betsy, could he?” He shrugged. “Without the cider money, he needed a way to keep the farm. Once I was old enough to keep a secret, but still young enough to believe, he told me how he’d done it.” Granddad sighed and looked down at his father’s weathered grave. Then he nodded to the little man in green. “Kind of you to wait until I was old enough to believe again.”

The man gaped. “But—but I bargained for a baby!”  

“Babies don’t stay babies,” he said.

But he said it to me.

#

When I hugged Granddad for the last time, it felt like the night I came to live on the mountain when I was a little girl. The night my world had shattered and the warmth and strength of his arms reassured me that I would not. “You take care of yourself,” he said.

“You too.” Which seemed like a stupid thing to say, but maybe it wasn’t. “Thank you.” 

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “All Belknaps go under the mountain, in the end.” 

#

Because they told me not to follow, I stayed by Great-granddad Elias’s grave the rest of the night, until the moon sank behind one line of mountains, and the sun crept over the other. When it was light, I tried to track their footprints, but lost them long before they would have reached a circular clearing in the middle of the wild woods.

I’ve never found it again.

There were practical things to take care of when I got back to the house. I had to call the sheriff, report the death. Call the office to let them know I wasn’t dead. But the first call I made was to James.

He picked up immediately. “Melissa! Where are you? What happened?” He had a thousand questions, but one sentence answered them all. 

“We’re going to have a baby,” I told him. “Can you come here? I’m on the mountain.”

He didn’t hesitate. “I’m on my way.”  

#

James doesn’t love the mountain the way I do. He loves it in his own way. Fiercely, deeply. The way he loves me. 

The way he loves our son.

We named him after his great-granddad. James’s parents had wanted him to be a Third, but James explained how I found my grandfather had passed when I came to tell him I was expecting, and they understood.

That’s the story we tell anyone who asks. It’s a good one, and true enough.

It’s the story I tell my son when he wants to hear about the night I came home to the mountain and found Great-granddad under a goat.

He’s still a baby, after all.

But babies don’t stay babies, and someday—when he is old enough to understand, but still young enough to believe—on a night when the leaves have fallen and the moon is full, we’ll tell him the real one.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Margaret Dunlap is a screenwriter and author of more than a dozen published short stories and novelettes for Uncanny, Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and as part of the Locus Award–nominated team behind Bookburners. Her television credits include cult-favorite The Middleman, Eureka, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, and the Emmy-winning Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. She grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but now lives in Los Angeles, at www.margaretdunlap.com, and on social media as @spyscribe.

“All Bellknaps Go Under the Mountain,” © Margaret Dunlap, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!