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

  Edie rode an old swaybacked gelding called Molasses. Actually, Molasses wasn’t officially Edie’s horse; he belonged to the school. But no one else was allowed to ride or groom Molasses. He and Edie belonged to each other, that was a fact. If you tried to put a saddle on Molasses and you weren’t Edie, you would get a nip. Molasses might be eighteen and mostly used up, but he still had quite a set of chompers.

  On this morning, however, there was not a lovely calm in the stable when Edie arrived. Instead, there was something anxious and odd and chaotic happening. The grooms ran from stall to stall, carrying blankets and buckets; a few of them stood in the middle of the stable and argued.

  Edie tugged on the sleeve of her favorite groom, a tiny, tough former jockey named Pinkney.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “It’s bedlam,” Pinkney told her. “When we got here half an hour ago, we found all of the horses exhausted and sweating, like someone had been riding them all night.”

  “All of them?” asked Edie incredulously. There were nearly fifty horses in the stable.

  “Every single one,” said Pinkney, rubbing his temples with his thumbs.

  “Even Molasses?” cried Edie, but she didn’t wait for Pinkney’s answer. She ran to Molasses’s stall and rolled the door aside. The horse’s wet body steamed in the cold winter-morning air and his head dropped with tiredness.

  “We can’t figure it out,” said Pinkney as he followed Edie into the stall and helped her throw a blanket over Molasses’s back. “All of the doors were locked. Nothing was out of place. But just look at this horse. He’s practically a pile of soap.”

  He stopped talking for a minute, and then he said, “That’s strange.”

  “What’s strange?” said Edie, wishing Pinkney would leave. She wanted to soothe the horse in private.

  “Look at that,” Pinkney said, pointing at Molasses’s legs. Mud spatters covered them, all the way up to the horse’s chest and belly. Edie wiped one leg down and the towel turned desert-colored, a deep maroon. It could have been from the surface of Mars, it was that color. Then she gently picked up one of the gelding’s hooves; sandy dirt caked the bottom.

  “There isn’t any sandy red dirt in Central Park,” Pinkney said, rubbing his temples again. “Last time I checked, anyway. I bet we’ll never get to the bottom of it, not ever,” he added unhelpfully, and shambled out of the stall on his bandy little legs.

  Edie tenderly chiseled the mud from the horse’s hooves. And while she did this, she imagined someone else riding her beloved Molasses and felt a green flash of betrayal.

  “I can’t believe that you went riding with someone else,” she scolded, standing up. “How could you?”

  Molasses just blinked at her and then slowly swung his head in the other direction.

  Edie felt ashamed then.

  “I take it back,” she said quickly. She pressed her nose against the horse’s muzzle and breathed in his patient, hay-scented breath.

  When she was sure that Molasses was warm and clean and safe again, Edie left for school.

  There was no question of riding that afternoon; when Edie walked by the stable after school, a handwritten sign hung on the closed front gates.

  Closed for Maintenance

  Which really meant that the grooms were letting the horses rest after their mysterious midnight run.

  The next morning, just before dawn, the sign was still up. Edie pounded on the big wooden front doors until footsteps approached on the other side.

  “Closed for repairs; come back tomorrow,” said Pinkney’s voice from inside.

  “Wait—it’s me, Edie,” said Edie.

  “Oh,” said Pinkney, opening the door. He looked like he needed a drink. “Get in here quick and help us out, will you?”

  They marched through the ring and up the stable ramps.

  “It happened again,” Pinkney told her, his brow covered in sweat, even though their breath made white clouds in the cold morning air. “We even left a groom overnight as a lookout—Little Burl. But this morning when we got here, it took five cups of coffee to get him awake and talking again—coffee, and a few smacks. It was like he’d been drugged or something. And all the poor horses have been ridden within an inch of their lives.”

  Molasses was a wreck. Mud covered his legs and clogged his hooves again, and this time thistles and burs and tiny purple flowers knotted his mane and tail. He bucked up several times when Edie tried to comb them out; there was nothing left to do but pull out the scissors.

  “Oh, he looks awful,” Edie cried when she and Pinkney finished the emergency haircut. Humiliated, Molasses turned around and faced the wall.

  “Pinkney, where are there thistles around here?” Edie wondered, holding up the sad tendrils of mane. “I mean, thistles and flowers in New York City, in the middle of winter?”

  The jockey examined the matted horsehair.

  “These remind me of fine heather,” he said, fingering the flowers. “The kind that you only find covering the great moors in Scotland; they turn the whole countryside purple.” He left to tend to the other horses.

  Edie frowned. Someone was giving Molasses a very hard time, and if she didn’t do something, the horse could be ridden to lameness—or worse. Clearly the grooms couldn’t be relied upon to catch the culprit.

  She buried her schoolbag in the hay in the stall’s corner and hid in the girls’ bathroom. She stayed there all day and into the evening and then into the night, until the last groom left and closed the front gates with a clatter.

  Edie tiptoed out of the bathroom toward Molasses’s stall.

  A long, low whistle came from one of the stalls and Edie froze. Goose bumps rose on her arms. But then the whistle turned into a tune, sort of an off-key “Yankee Doodle,” and Edie relaxed: the grooms had left Little Burl there again to watch over the horses.

  She slipped into Molasses’s stall and kept watch from the scratchy pile of straw in the corner.

  The stable creaked in a midnight sort of way and cold air seeped up through the floorboards. Every few minutes Edie’s chin nodded down to her chest. Soon Little Burl stopped whistling “Yankee Doodle,” and Edie knew that his chin must be nodding to his chest too. She pinched herself to stay awake.

  Nod, pinch, nod.

  But as Edie was about to nod off for the hundredth time, a rustling sound came from the corridor. She jerked her head back, held her breath, and listened.

  It was a faint noise at first, but it grew louder; it sounded like little feet scurrying across the floorboards.

  Mice, Edie concluded with disgust, drawing her knees to her chest. Molasses shifted uneasily as the mice ran down the hall toward the stalls in the back.

  “Hey!” shouted Little Burl. “What the—”

  But he didn’t finish his sentence; instead came the sound of a body falling onto the floor, followed by deep, rattling snores.

  And then the scurrying came back again, toward Edie’s stall.

  She stood up and grabbed at the first weapon she could reach: a rubber currycomb.

  Suddenly a face peeked into the stall, a very ugly little face. It looked like a clenched fist or a newborn baby’s face, all wrinkled up, its eyes almost closed. Pointed ears jutted from the sides of its head; its mouth curled into a devilish grin.

  The creature stared at Edie and Edie stared back; then suddenly it darted into the stall on long, spider-like legs. Those awful legs and its pencil-line arms made the creature seem sprawling and gangly, even though it stood only about a foot high. Molasses reared up, baring his teeth, his eyes rolling backward.

  Edie screamed and threw the currycomb as hard as she could. It hit the spindly creature’s head with a rubbery doink, knocking it over backward.

  She held her breath, terrified of what would happen next.

  Edie was right to worry; after all, pixies have unpredictable tempers under the best of circumstances.

  Everyone knows about pixies; even Shakespeare made one int
o a character. Surely you’ve heard of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a prankster who turns people’s heads into donkey heads and other generally naughty but amusing things.

  Like many fairy breeds, pixies originally came from England, but when they migrated, they mostly tended to move to France, since they are very fond of cheese and you can’t find better cheese than French cheese. Not many pixies have made America their home, so I was quite surprised when I first heard about this New York City–based population. Pixies usually hate overcrowding, and the few American ones usually live on the great western plains and mountains.

  All pixies live near stables. They love horses, and for centuries pixies have famously “borrowed” steeds and taken them on wild nighttime rides. At least at the Claremont Riding Academy the pixies had been bringing the school horses back each night; usually when pixies get bored or tired, they just hop off the horses and leave the animals to find their own way home.

  Pixies are normally friendly toward people who work in stables, although they’ve been known to throw milk pails and stools at grooms and farmers. Like their brownie cousins, pixies can turn objects into other things; they can also make themselves disappear. In fact, they make themselves invisible about 90 percent of the time; it’s just easier that way.

  But no fairy is invisible to a human with fairy sight, like Edie.

  I bet you want to know what happened next.

  Both Edie and the pixie leaped for Molasses at the same time.

  The pixie landed first, and Edie threw herself on top of the creature and tried to throw it to the ground. But the pixie grabbed Molasses’s shorn mane and dug its feet into the horse’s sides and Molasses shot out of the stall like a racehorse at the starting gate.

  Down the ramp, around three times, through the ring, and out the front door: Edie gripped the horse’s mane and found herself hugging the fairy as they both held on for dear life. And then Edie realized that they weren’t alone: all fifty school horses—each carrying a screeching pixie—pounded out of the Claremont Riding Academy onto West 89th Street and headed toward Central Park.

  Molasses crashed through a thorny hedge and galloped across a field; he headed for a huge tree. Edie screamed and ducked, her eyes squeezed shut. But they didn’t hit the tree, and Molasses ran even harder and the pixie squealed with glee. Suddenly they were going so fast that the trees and skyscrapers and other buildings surrounding the park became a black smear and the city seemed to flatten itself out.

  Then Edie realized that they weren’t even in the city anymore: the whole herd of school horses was galloping across water, a lot of water—maybe even an ocean.

  The pixie whooped and shrieked and a terrified Edie dug her legs even harder into Molasses’s side, which only made the horse go faster yet. The tears streaming out of Edie’s eyes cut salty paths straight back across the sides of her face, over the tops of her ears, and into her hair. After a while the horizon glowed blue in front of them and the herd tore into the daylight, the sea shining silver below their hooves.

  And suddenly they were on land again.

  Edie had seen pictures of deserts before, but this desert didn’t look anything like those pictures. Instead of gentle curves and hills of silky sand, this desert was made from vast, packed-sand steppes that cut into the horizon on all sides. The horses fanned out, gasping for breath, white foam hanging like string from their mouths.

  One of the pixies threw something onto the ground, a leather ball: it was odd, hard, misshapen, as though it had been left to wither in the sun for years.

  All fifty pixies screamed in delight and suddenly they held big wooden mallets, grasped from the thin, dusty air; they kicked the horses, and like vultures swarming to a carcass, they all attacked the ball at once.

  A savage game of desert polo had begun.

  Mallets cut through the air like swinging swords, sometimes hitting the ball, sometimes knocking a pixie down under the hooves of the stampede, sometimes thwacking a horse on the back of the head or even in the face. There were no goals, no rules, no teams; there was only an endless, anarchic chase. Molasses bucked and reared, but the pixie kept him in the game. A mallet smacked Edie on the knee and another hit her side and black bruises swelled up immediately.

  Then the ball rolled near Molasses, and suddenly they were surrounded by raised mallets and grinning little fist-tight faces.

  Edie screamed, certain that she was about to be pummeled to death. Her pixie clubbed the ball away just in time and the bloodied mob galloped after it.

  That’s when Edie saw that the ball wasn’t a ball at all.

  It was a goat’s head.

  Edie fainted and fell off Molasses, and then there was only the sound of the herd galloping away.

  A low-hanging gray haze hid the sun, but it was still hot—very hot, in fact—and sweat drenched Edie’s hair by the time she opened her eyes again. The horses were far away by then; Molasses was gone too, mixed in with the herd, which kicked up a tornado of dusty sand wherever it went.

  Edie watched the polo storm move farther and farther away until it was a wisp on the horizon—and then it was gone.

  She was all alone in that strange desert.

  Edie tried to cry, but she was too dried up inside and the tears wouldn’t come.

  Then she tried to walk, but she kept ending up back at the same spot, and so she gave that up too.

  There was nothing left to do but sit on that hard ground and wait for more nothing to do.

  For some reason, the words to Little Burl’s stable tune kept running through Edie’s mind. She swallowed a few times and began to sing to herself:

  Yankee Doodle went to town

  Riding on a pony

  Stuck a feather in his cap

  And called it macaroni.

  Edie laughed, and it was sort of a crazy laugh, and then she sang the song again. What else could she do?

  Nothing, nothing at all.

  So she sang it again and again and then she stood up and shouted it at the top of her lungs.

  Suddenly her words came back to her in an eerie echo, growing louder and louder like an approaching freight train until the ground trembled with the sound.

  Edie threw herself down on the ground and curled up on her side. She lay that way for a long time, wondering what it would be like to be lost forever. How did people who were “lost forever” spend their time? Were there still hours and days and minutes? Would she be lonely, or would she get used to it here?

  Soon it grew dark again, and it got cold too, as it always does in the desert at night; Edie shivered and curled up tighter, and then she fell asleep.

  Someone was washing her face with a rough, wet cloth.

  “That hurts,” she protested, pushing it away. She opened her eyes and blinked. The room came into focus.

  Her room.

  Edie was back in her bed at home.

  “Your face is filthy,” said Edie’s mother, standing over her. “Where on earth have you been? I can’t believe that it’s possible for a young lady to get so dirty. Just wait until your father hears about this.” She dipped the cloth into a bowl of water and scrubbed Edie’s forehead.

  “Stop it!” Edie cried. “You’re scrubbing too hard.”

  “Dirt, dirt, everywhere,” said her mother, washing even harder. “Dirt and mud and manure. We must get you clean. We must.”

  Edie covered up her face with her hands, but the cloth kept on rubbing and dabbing, and when Edie opened her eyes again, her mother was gone and so was her bedroom. She wasn’t home after all.

  She was still in the desert.

  Molasses stood over her, licking her face with his rough, warm tongue.

  Edie squinted up at him. The horse had come back for her. The pixie was gone; maybe abandoned in another part of the desert, like Edie had been, or maybe smashed in the polo stampede.

  Molasses nudged her with his muzzle and Edie stood up on wobbly legs. It took her a while to get up on his back, but he was pati
ent and eventually she managed.

  They trotted off across the dry desert steppes, and then Molasses went faster and faster and finally broke into a gallop, and soon water splashed up on their legs.

  They were running back across the sea.

  Edie wrapped her arms around the horse’s neck and buried her face in his shorn mane, feeling his powerful muscles moving beneath his hide. Then the ground was hard under his hooves again and Molasses slowed down and clip-clopped up West 89th Street to the Claremont Riding Academy: through the sawdust-strewn ring, up the ramp, down the corridor, and back into his stall.

  When Pinkney and the other grooms arrived at the stable just after dawn, they were astonished to find the girl still fast asleep on her horse’s back.

  You may have noticed that the name “Edie” sounds remarkably like the name “Edythe.”

  I would have given you a gold star for being so observant.

  This is indeed my own story.

  “Edie” used to be my nickname. This experience happened to me when I was ten years old.

  Molasses was the only horse that returned to the stable that night. All of the other horses vanished. I guess that the pixies decided to keep them for good. For all I know, the horses are still with those pixies, playing ferocious games of desert polo—or someplace else entirely. Antarctica, or maybe the North Pole. Perhaps leaping over waterfalls in the Amazon jungle.

  Reporters wrote articles for years about the disappearance of the forty-nine Claremont Academy horses, and they wrote articles about me too. Scholars said that my description of the pixie desert sounded very much like the steppes in Afghanistan, and they wondered how I knew so much about the geography there.

  At first they said that I had quite an imagination.