Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties Read online

  She dragged the wagon to the ferry docks. And then she did something she’d never done before: instead of getting on the boat to do her job, Imogene stood on the dock and watched Big Edd’s ferry lurch out into the water toward Manhattan. Then she turned and went home.

  Even though it was only four in the afternoon, she crawled into bed and didn’t get up for dinner.

  She woke with a start and it was still black-dark outside. Grandfather was standing over her, smoking his pipe.

  “What’s wrong?” Imogene said, raising herself up on her elbows.

  “How did you know, child?” asked Grandfather.

  “How did I know what?”

  “To stay off the ferry yesterday.”

  Imogene lay back down. “I didn’t feel good, that’s all,” she mumbled. “I’ll deliver the flowers this afternoon.”

  “Well, have a look at this,” said Grandfather, and he shook out an early edition of the morning newspaper above her.

  Imogene took it and squinted at the headline.

  The feeling drained from Imogene’s hands, and before Grandfather could stop her, Imogene was running outside, the cold air burning her throat. She ran until she reached the rocky beach and then the dock.

  The mermaid wasn’t there.

  What was there instead: Grandfather’s phonograph player, closed and safe and snug in the sand, covered in white seashells—a thank-you gift from the deadly Staten Island Lorelei.

  Never, ever help a mermaid, even if you have your own reasons for doing so and even if you come across one as seemingly helpless and hopeless as the one in this story. No good will come of it, especially if the mermaid indeed turns out to be a deadly Lorelei—and most humans, no matter how knowledgeable, cannot tell the difference. You know, as Imogene did not, that the Lorelei have only one purpose: to sink ships and claim their passengers.

  Another fact about the Lorelei: they often attempt to bewitch a boat’s captain. It’s like capturing the king in chess. Once you have the heart of the captain, the boat’s more likely to go down, and everyone on board becomes your prize.

  Imogene’s Lorelei may have been nasty to look at and wretched and a bad singer, but she was no dummy. Enchantment takes many guises, and she knew that she could control people by making them feel sorry for her. As you saw, it was just as easy to trick and manipulate humans with ugliness as it would have been to use beauty.

  Imogene never saw Big Edd again, and neither did anyone else. But she and Grandfather did honor his memory in their own way. Someday, if you just happen to walk past a flower shop, stop inside and ask the owner if they carry a rare, Staten Island–grown, bright yellow variety of orchid known as Big Edd’s Ballad.

  A Short Note on Perfume

  Women have long relied on perfumes to make themselves appealing. Long ago, the Lorelei used a special kind of perfume to help lure sailors to their deaths; it smelled like the freshest sea air and made men think wistfully of their youth.

  Clearly the Staten Island Lorelei in Imogene’s tale hadn’t known about this scent, or she wouldn’t have had such a hard time luring Big Edd to his end.

  A note to young ladies (and pass this on to your mothers also): fairies are fond of flower-like scents or those evoking wood. Therefore, wearing certain perfumes might help you garner favor with local fairies.

  These days, the following eaux de toilette are pretty easy to find in your pharmacy:

  If the perfumes are too expensive, you can always try a bit of rosewater or orange blossom water—or even fresh lemon juice. One dab behind each ear and one on the inside of each wrist should do the trick.

  Fairies also like the smell of smoldering embers and may visit your fireplace long after the fire has been put out and you’ve gone to bed. Any perfumes that have smoky traces in them are equally adored.

  The Blight of Pools

  Not all bodies of water make good habitats for fairies. You might think that pools are among the best inventions of all time, especially during summer, but they are absolutely poisonous to most winged fairies. The chlorine in the water, which turns your hair green if you spend too much time in the pool, does far worse things to fairies: when they are splashed with chlorine water, it melts their wings, like acid.

  Also, fairies often confuse pools with ponds and use them for drinking water, which painfully dissolves them from the inside.

  If your family has a pool in the backyard, make sure that it’s covered up when not in use; you may save a fairy’s life.

  Trolls, on the other hand, have a far stronger constitution than their distant winged cousins; they love your pool. In fact, if you leave it uncovered at night, they may come and bathe in it, leaving a fine, foul mess for you to deal with in the morning.

  Why Human Hair Turns Gray

  Although they likely didn’t know it, Imogene and her grandfather were dealing with not one but two types of fairies in Tale No. 6. The first, of course, was the Lorelei—but the second type is known as the Fading fairy.

  As you know, when humans age, their hair turns gray or silver or even white. This actually has nothing to do with natural causes; the Fading fairies are draining and stealing the rich colors for themselves.

  The Fades are the most widespread of all winged fairy breeds, literally dwelling on every continent—wherever there is a human population—and yet very few people have ever heard of them. They are so tiny that it is difficult for even people with the sharpest fairy sight to spot them.

  This is how they got their name: the Fades are vibrantly colored when they are born, but as they age, they fade to black-and-white, like an old newspaper—and then to nothing. One of the few fairy breeds that seem unable to manipulate time in some way, the Fades desperately usurp human hues to keep from disappearing entirely. They drain one hair at a time while a person sleeps and store the color in bottles, from which they sip as necessary.

  Clearly the Fades had been visiting Imogene’s grandfather for years, since his hair was entirely white at the time of the story.

  Why Fairies Covet

  Human Babies

  And now we travel from old age to extreme youth.

  As you learned in “Time in the Fairy World,” many fairies love being young, but weirdly, they often dislike their own babies. Many fairy babies are hideous-looking, even ones that will eventually grow into beautiful winged creatures someday.

  So, in many cases, a fairy swaps her own ugly baby for a pretty human baby. The fairy baby left in human hands is known as a changeling. Of course, the human mother doesn’t know that the baby is a changeling; she thinks that it’s her own child. That’s because the fairies have cast a spell over the ugly fairy baby to make it look human.

  Changeling swaps happen frequently, and when the babies have grown, the fairies reclaim them, leaving the human mothers with nothing. No one knows what happens to the human babies who are taken in the first place—although in the old days, many children would abruptly turn up at country orphanages, speaking strange languages that no one had heard before. Perhaps the fairies keep the human babies until they reclaim their own and then turn the human children out into the world to fend for themselves.

  If there is evidence of fairy activity near your home and you’re worried they might steal your baby brother or sister, link a daisy chain along the edge of his or her crib, just in case.

  But sometimes there is nothing you can do to prevent a fairy kidnapping, as you’ll see in Tale No. 7.

  Tale No. 7

  Ball Lightning at

  Coney Island

  The day that Lucius was born, the hospital burned down. Well, not the whole hospital—just one wing of the building, actually—but it was still upsetting for a lot of people, and this is how it happened:

  It was a quiet, heavy-aired summer night, the sort where fanning yourself with a sheet of paper does no good and the mosquitoes seem fatter and meaner than ever. Even the heat lightning that flickered in the sky seemed cranky and listless; then, suddenly, what appeare
d to be a ball of lightning shot out of the swollen purple sky and smacked into the side of the hospital, setting it on fire.

  This was according to one of the baby ward’s night nurses, who just happened to be holding Lucius and singing him a little lullaby and looking out the window when the lightning ball came. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but no one really believed the night nurse’s story.

  “There’s no such thing as ball lightning,” said a whole host of scientists and meteorologists and firemen who’d been called in to inspect the scene; they even made her take a lie detector test—which she passed, I might add. But they still called the nurse a liar (“Was she drunk?”) and took away her job; the official cause of the fire was eventually attributed to faulty wiring in the hospital’s basement.

  Lightning seemed to follow Lucius wherever he went. First his nursery school had an incident; then, when he was three, the roof of the next-door neighbor’s house, where Lucius was playing with a friend, caught fire one stormy afternoon. When Lucius’s backyard tree house went up in flames a year later, his older sister, Cecilia, began to worry about her brother’s welfare.

  No one ever suspected Lucius of any foul play; after all, he was the sweetest child anyone had ever seen, a quiet boy with downy black hair and still hands and almost-silver eyes. Mirror-colored eyes, in fact. Like a magpie, Lucius liked objects with a sharp shine to them: tinfoil in the sunshine, a knife gleaming in the glow of a table candle.

  But he did have his oddnesses, to be fair. For one thing, he didn’t really start speaking until he was two years old, and then the words didn’t quite sound like English. In fact, they sounded like no language that anyone had ever heard before, but soon he learned to say “Mama” and “Papa” and “dog” too, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  One afternoon, Cecilia was babysitting Lucius, who was six by then; they were playing in the garden of their family’s West Village town house. It was raining but they didn’t care; the floors inside had just been waxed and the house stunk.

  “Get off the picnic table,” yelled Cecilia, who was eleven. Lucius teetered on one end of it, threatening to pitch it forward like a seesaw.

  “Nothing can hurt me,” yelled Lucius, waving a plastic sword. “I’m invincible!”

  A flash of lightning lit the sky, followed by a terrific crack of thunder, and suddenly Cecilia saw a ball of fire surging from the sky toward the yard.

  “Lucius!” she screamed, and tackled him off the end of the table. They fell to the ground, her body covering his, and the fireball flew over them and hit the ground, leaving a black, smoldering hole in the grass. Lucius began to cry, and later that evening their parents were hysterical.

  “My babies!” wailed their mother, holding Lucius in her arms. “What would I have done if that bolt of lightning had taken you both away from me?”

  “It was a ball of lightning, not a bolt,” Cecilia told her.

  “Lightning doesn’t come in balls,” sniffed her mother. “But what does it matter? You’re both safe, thank God.”

  It was a happy ending until it wasn’t: the next morning when the family woke up, Lucius was missing.

  “Most kids turn up within twenty-four hours,” the detective told Cecilia’s parents down at the police station. They’d been there all day. Cecilia sat on a bench outside his office while the adults talked. One of the policemen had a TV on his desk, and the local news blared at top volume.

  Cecilia’s mother came out of the detective’s office.

  “Mom, look,” said Cecilia. “There was a fire at Vesuvio Bakery.”

  Vesuvio was the family’s favorite bakery in SoHo, a neighborhood east of theirs. Bright mint-green paint covered the store’s wooden facade and inside it was dark and calm, the sort of place where you told secrets.

  “Lucius loves that place,” Cecilia’s mother said. “Those pecan honey buns. So sticky. What a mess,” and then she started crying again.

  On the way home, Cecilia couldn’t stop thinking about the fire at Vesuvio. The idea of it nagged at her. She brought it up again.

  “Restaurant kitchens catch fire all the time,” snapped her father. “Now stop talking about it. There are more important things to think about.”

  Cecilia frowned, but she kept quiet. When the family got home, she went upstairs into her room, and when the house was dark and filled with anxious sleep, she silently stuffed a sweatshirt and a jar with her allowance savings ($42.67) into her school backpack. She dozed on her bed until a pale light began to seep into the sky in the east.

  Down in the dawn-lit kitchen, she taped a note to the refrigerator.

  Then Cecilia silently slipped out the front door.

  It was as she suspected.

  A round burn mark—about three feet wide—blackened the side of the Vesuvio Bakery. Cecilia went inside, where the baker and his wife were cleaning up after the fire.

  “Excuse me—have you seen this boy?” she asked them, holding up a picture of Lucius that had been taken on Cape Cod the summer before.

  The baker shook his head. “All we’ve seen today is firemen, young lady,” he said. “We’re closed, so scram.”

  “Were there pecan honey buns on the premises before the fire?” Cecilia pressed.

  “What a funny question,” said the baker, sweeping some ashes into a dustbin. “There are always pecan honey buns on the premises. Although we noticed that a bunch of them were missing from the tray last night, before the fire.”

  Lucius had definitely been there.

  Cecilia went to a deli next door, bought a root beer and some peanut butter crackers, and sat at the counter, waiting for her next clue. She drank and ate, watching the television above the deli meat section and trying to look casual. She bought another root beer and tried to make it last.

  At about two o’clock, another clue came in over a newscast on the deli television.

  “A mysterious fire has just closed down the Delancey Street–Essex Street subway station,” said a very concerned reporter who was wearing too much brown lipstick. “Police suspect arson and are investigating at this very moment.”

  Cecilia ran outside and hailed a taxi. She was only eleven, but everyone knows how to hail a taxi in New York City. I know dogs who can hail taxis in this town, for goodness’ sake. Ten minutes later she stood in front of the Delancey Street–Essex Street subway station. Yellow police tape zigzagged across the entrance and a group of firemen were just pulling away on their enormous red truck. A circular burn mark blackened the subway stairs.

  Cecilia sat down with a thump on the curb and eavesdropped as the police talked to neighbors and witnesses.

  “It was like when you pour gasoline on a grill,” said one man, who owned a kebab stand across the street. “Whoosh! A big ball of fire out of nowhere. And then it was gone.”

  The sugar from the root beer was starting to give Cecilia a headache. She looked up at the wall next to the subway entrance.

  A slightly charred advertisement for Coney Island hung to the left of the stairs.

  I’ve heard it said before that all we really have in this world is our instincts. After all, human instincts are strong, and in ancient times, we had to rely on them for our very survival. These days we often underappreciate them and certainly don’t use them enough.

  At that moment, as Cecilia stared up at the poster, her instincts were telling her that her six-year-old brother was on that subway, en route to the rickety old Cyclone, where fun times were apparently back. And while she didn’t know why Lucius was going there or why these balls of lightning were following him every hour—or why they were plaguing him at all, for that matter—she knew that she needed to help him.

  When the policemen snipped away the yellow tape from the subway entrance, she went down the stairs and got on the train to Coney Island.

  No black smoke hung in the air above Coney Island when Cecilia emerged from the subway, which was a good thing for everyone in the area besides her. Until she heard about or saw
evidence of the next Lucius fire, she had no way to find him.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Coney Island, but it is not really an island at all; rather, it’s a beachside town in Brooklyn, that is home to a very old and famous amusement park. There is a blaze of video arcades and all sorts of creaky rides and places where you can buy thick bales of gritty cotton candy.

  Under different circumstances, these diversions might have been tempting for an eleven-year-old girl, but today Cecilia was too tired and worried to pay attention. She needed a rest, and after walking around for a little while looking for a small, black-haired, silver-eyed boy, she ducked inside a public library.

  “Can I help you find anything?” asked a librarian, shaking Cecilia’s shoulder gently.

  “No, thank you,” said Cecilia blearily. She had fallen asleep in a plastic chair, curled up like a cat. A fluorescent light buzzed idly overhead.

  “The library is for reading, not sleeping,” the librarian told her. “Let’s find you a nice book.”

  Cecilia thought for a minute.

  “Actually, do you have any books on lightning that comes in balls?” she said. “Oh, and maybe a book about Coney Island.”

  This is what an encyclopedia had to say under the entry “Ball Lightning”:

  Given inconsistencies and the lack of reliable data, the true nature of ball lightning is still unknown. Historically, ball lightning was often regarded as a fantasy or a hoax. Reports of the phenomenon were dismissed for lack of physical evidence and were often regarded the same way as UFO sightings. Natural ball lightning appears infrequently and unpredictably and is therefore rarely (if ever truly) photographed.