Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties Page 4

Digitalis,

  Arum dracunculus,

  Spiraea ulmaria,

  Lathyrus odoratus,

  Cypripedium calceolus!

  It was time for Daisy to plant her garden. She shook the packets out onto her white pillowcase.

  And one by one, she ate every seed.

  A strange spell indeed, those seeds cast. And a long-lasting one too: they held Daisy in a bright, frightening dream for days, vines unfurling in her mind, flowers blooming and rising until they were bowed by the sky. And then, suddenly, the spell was over: Daisy was in her bed and a circle of angry faces hovered over her.

  “She’s awake,” someone said, and then her mother’s face loomed closest.

  “What were you thinking?” the woman cried. “Why did you eat all those seeds?”

  Daisy’s throat felt like sandpaper.

  “Am I a flower?” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “A garden,” murmured Daisy. “I’m a strange and beautiful garden. Do you think I’m pretty now?”

  “She’s still delirious,” someone said.

  “Crazy, more like it,” said someone else. “Call the doctor again.”

  “Galanthus nivalis,” Daisy mumbled, and she fell back asleep.

  It didn’t work, Daisy’s plan: she did not become a rich, strange garden; she did not turn into a beautiful flower; her family did not find her beautiful at last; in fact, they were wary of her now and she felt more alone than ever.

  She stayed in bed for days and listened to all the normal-day sounds in the rooms around and beneath her: the clink of dishes; the opening and closing of doors; footsteps on the stairs, quieter as they passed in front of her door. And the whole time, Daisy thought about the fairy ring and the flower fairies and longed to visit it again. Had the fairies missed her? Did they wonder what had happened? On the seventh day, Daisy’s legs no longer wobbled, and that night, when the house and everyone in it were asleep, she crept down the stairs.

  It was late October then; the ground was cold and the grass was starting to wither, even in the fairy ring. Daisy wrapped her nightgown tight around her body and hugged her knees to her chest as she sat on the lawn. A dog barked down the street; the wind blew dry leaves across the yard. For a moment Daisy’s heart wilted in despair; maybe the flower fairies would not come tonight, or ever again. They were failing her when she needed to see them most.

  But soon the gold light came and the vines unfurled from the ground; the fairy ring came to life, and the flower fairies appeared and began to set out their feast. Daisy spoke to them for the first time. She said simply, “Please make me beautiful.”

  The flower fairies stopped and stared at her, and this time they did not go back to their feast and their dances. They formed a circle around Daisy, and suddenly Daisy began to change. She grew smaller and smaller until her shoulders were even with the blades of browning grass and the sky drew further away. Her last thought was that maybe they were turning her into a thorn-covered flower fairy like themselves, which would be easy for her, really, since she already knew what it was like to be strange and alarming and secretive.

  But the flower fairies did not change Daisy into a fairy.

  They changed her into a flower instead, a frail little bloom, which basked each day in the weakening autumn sunshine until winter’s first frost came and put the world to sleep.

  There are two ways to look at this story. On one hand, it is possible that the flower fairies thought they were fulfilling Daisy’s deepest wish by turning her into a flower, which would make this tale one of bittersweet, eerie loveliness.

  However, as you now know, flower fairies have long been regarded as a darker species, and history suggests that their intentions were probably not so kind.

  For thousands of years, people who have stumbled into fairy realms—whether through fairy rings or otherwise—have had spells cast on them. It’s very likely that the first time Daisy entered her backyard fairy ring, the flower fairies used an enchantment to give her the seemingly harmless idea about becoming a flower in the first place.

  And with each of her nighttime visits, they probably strengthened the spell to tighten their hold on her, and the simple idea gradually turned into something more dangerous. Once Daisy went so far as to swallow the seeds, the flower fairies had the girl completely in their power and took the final step to make her part of their “strange and beautiful garden” forever.

  It’s impossible to know for certain.

  Further Notes on Fairy Rings

  Over the years, many people have tried to remove fairy rings from their properties, but such a feat is impossible. No matter how hard you try to dig one up, it will always reappear, and the fairies that live there will make your life a misery.

  If there is a telltale dark ring of grass in your yard, steer clear of it and touch it as little as possible. Fairy ring grass can be cut along with the rest of the lawn, but never dig into it, even if you think you’re making a nice gesture by planting flowers there. It will be seen as a hostile gesture.

  Over the years, many fairy rings have been unwittingly paved over to make roads (and there are always more car accidents at these points than at others) or partially dug up and filled in with the cement foundations of a house or business (no restaurant built on top of a fairy ring will ever succeed; meat rots, milk spoils, and bread molds faster at such an establishment than at the one next door).

  One sign that your house is built on top of a fairy ring: ivy or some other vine grows with unusual quickness around the house, as though threatening to swallow it up.

  Or: if hot water runs out quickly. This is because fairies in the realm beneath the house will take their share of hot water from the boiler first and leave the house’s occupants to fend for themselves.

  Another sign: animals like to crawl under the house or under the porch. Dogs, squirrels, possums, even skunks: all species are naturally drawn to fairy rings and like to lie on top of them. Fairies love most animals (see “Fairies and Animals”) and pamper them when they visit.

  If you suspect that your house indeed resides on top of a ring, there are certain things you can do to make the fairies less resentful. For starters, plant a fragrant rosebush at the southwest corner of the house; fairies especially like white cabbage roses. Or leave a bowl of flour on your back porch; fairies will borrow from it in the night.

  It should be noted that not all fairy rings belong to the darker types of fairies, like the flower fairies we met in Daisy’s tale. Fairy rings can also be sites of great joy, especially on spring and summer evenings. Old books mention spectacular fairy celebrations taking place on May Day, which a few privileged humans have been permitted to attend.

  One ancient manuscript says that if you run around a fairy ring seven times at midnight during a full moon, you will be allowed a brief glimpse of the fairies even if you do not have fairy sight—although this doesn’t work for most people. This is just as well, as fairies might think that you were spying on them.

  The Link Between Fairies

  and Diamonds

  Like flowers, jewels are another important symbol of beauty. Diamonds are the most precious gems on earth. They are very hard to find, especially big ones, and they are extremely expensive.

  But what people today don’t know is that the diamond’s glinting sparkle is actually a fairy soul.

  The bigger the diamond, the more important the fairy was when he or she was alive.

  Pink and yellow diamonds—the most rare—contain the souls of fairy royals.

  If you hold a diamond up in the sunlight at high noon on May Day, look at its reflection on the ground and you may be able to see the outline of the fairy whose soul is inside.

  As you will learn in the next tale, fairies are often connected with jewels in other mysterious ways as well.

  Tale No. 3

  Behind the Brass Doors

  in the Lincoln Tunnel

  George was nine years old when he learned that his parents
didn’t know everything. It was an unsettling revelation, and this is how it happened:

  They were in the car, driving out to the Jersey shore for a summer weekend away. George’s parents sat up front while George sat in the back with the family’s dog, an Irish setter named Pretzel. Pretzel, of course, did not resemble a pretzel at all, but that’s neither here nor there. The car was stuck in traffic in the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel.

  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of riding through the Lincoln Tunnel, which runs under the river between New York City and New Jersey. It’s a stinky, grimly lit affair, with walls the color of old coffee-stained diner mugs. I’m fairly certain that President Lincoln, for whom the tunnel is named, would have picked something else to honor his memory, but he just got unlucky in this respect.

  Anyway, there are two good things about the Lincoln Tunnel, from a child’s point of view. The first is the big, fat blue line painted down the tunnel’s walls at the exact center, where New York becomes New Jersey and vice versa. It is always fun to stick your hand as far as you can into the front seat, toward the windshield, so you can officially be the first in the car to cross over the line.

  This is what George was doing at the moment.

  “Hey, knock it off,” snapped his father, who was driving. He batted George’s hand away.

  “You’re distracting your father,” said George’s mother. “Sit back and put your seat belt on.”

  George flounced back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “I didn’t hear that seat belt click,” said his mother.

  George put on his seat belt and stared out the window at the second interesting thing about the Lincoln Tunnel: the small brass doors that stood about every hundred feet or so. They looked strange to George, like bright gold teeth in an old yellowing smile.

  “What’s behind those doors?” he asked.

  “Oh, just pipes and stuff,” said his father distractedly. “Gears. That sort of thing.”

  Pretzel leaped across the seat and landed on George’s lap. He barked at the window, steaming up the glass with his dog breath.

  “What’s he barking at?” George’s father frowned, peering in the rearview mirror.

  George shoved Pretzel back to the other side of the car and looked out the window.

  “Hey,” he said. “He’s barking at that weird little man with the really gross beard.”

  George’s mother craned her neck around to see what he was talking about. “What weird little man?” she demanded.

  “That one,” George exclaimed, and indeed, a very small, very weird man stood next to one of the brass doors. A gray matted beard gushed from his chin and dragged on the dirty tunnel floor; flies buzzed around it, and George thought he saw some sort of half-eaten sandwich nestled in the middle. A red pointy hat teetered on the man’s crown.

  “Where?”

  “Right there,” shouted George, pointing, and Pretzel bounded into his lap again.

  “It’s like a zoo in here,” wailed George’s mother, reaching over the seat and pushing the dog down onto the floor. She stared at George. “I suppose you think you’re being funny, making up a story like that.”

  George looked out the window again. A cobwebby gray cape covered in pockets hung from the man’s shoulders, and he rooted around in these pockets until he fished out a big, rusty key. And just liked that, he opened one of the little doors with the key and disappeared inside, the door slamming behind him.

  “I’m not making it up,” George said crossly. “He just went in through one of those doors. You’re just too old and slow to see him.”

  This, of course, did not go over very well; the shouting from both parents in the front seat sounded like this: “What! How dare you! Lie! Sass your mother! Shame! That’s enough! Too old to tell lies! Fib! Not another word!”

  And at that exact moment, George’s world tilted slightly and it did not tilt back to its old spot again—not that afternoon, or ever again. Because he knew that he was right and his parents were not, that there had been an ugly little man with a smelly beard and a rusty key, and it had suddenly become clear that adults didn’t know everything about everything after all. George still felt weird until they stopped for gas on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel but very nearly forgot about it when ice cream came onto the scene shortly thereafter.

  The following week: School. Homework. Soccer practice. George’s mother served an especially nasty meat loaf on Wednesday night that should probably remain undescribed. In other words, a normal week.

  But then, that weekend:

  “Mom! Dad! That man is there again—look!”

  George and his family were stuck in traffic again, just past the fat blue halfway-point line down the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel.

  “Pipe down back there,” said his father, squinting out the front windshield.

  “We’re never going to get there,” complained George’s mother, ignoring her son.

  Well, it is very hard for a boy of nine to resist a lightning-does-strike-twice mystery dangled a mere two feet from him. The little man was very real and as dirty as ever, although the sandwich appeared to have fallen out of his matted beard (or, George reasoned, it had been discovered and devoured as a midnight snack). He opened the same little brass door with his key and disappeared inside. Just as the door was about to close, George leaped out of the car and stopped the door with his sneaker.

  It was strangely silent on the other side of that door, and George found himself at the beginning of a corridor, a very dark one with a low ceiling—a tunnel within a tunnel. The dirty-bearded man must have picked up a flashlight or a lantern, because a dim light shone far down the tunnel, and as that light got farther away, a black-ink darkness seeped into the air around George. Not wanting the yellow flicker to disappear and leave him in that bog of black, George hurried down the cramped tunnel.

  The tunnel bent left and right and then left again, and George could hear the little man hack and cough in the dark ahead. George’s hair filled with dirt from the tunnel ceiling, and it got in his eyes too. He was just wondering if anyone else had ever followed the man down this secret passageway deep below the Hudson River when the ground suddenly curved sharply downward and George was sliding down—first head over heels and then heels over head—until … ooph!

  He was in a deep pile of leaves.

  The fall knocked the breath out of him and he lay there stunned until the air filtered into his chest. Gulping deep leaf-dusted breaths, George realized that it was light again. He burrowed through the pile and peered out the side.

  It was an impossible sight, but there it was: an endless, dimly lit forest of trees with black-green leaves and thick, ropy trunks; blood-red fruit dangled from the branches.

  Mist swirled around the gnarled roots of the trees like a snake. A harvest was happening, an under-river harvest of that ripe, strange fruit, with hundreds of little bearded men working in the trees. The sound of chimes filled the air, and George noticed tiny silver bells tied to each tree branch that tinkled every time a man reached up and plucked a piece of fruit.

  Several of the little men stumped over to the leaf pile where George hid; they started to chat in deep, crabby, rasping voices that reminded George of a garbage disposal grinding up a fork.

  Then the first little man wedged a dirty, stubby finger up his nose and dug around with great gusto.

  The second one began to burp: deep, satisfied, thunder-crackle belches. George found this very entertaining.

  And then, for good measure, the third man added to the conversation by bending over and letting out a great crackling fart. The discussion got louder and so did all of the accompanying noises until there was a symphony of grunts, burps, and, well, you know.

  This probably shouldn’t have been the first hint that these little men were not human grown-ups, who, as we all know, never pick their noses or burp or any such thing.

  In fact, these men were dwarves.
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br />   I’m sure that you’ve at least heard of dwarves. Of all the fairy species, dwarves most closely resemble humans and are often considered less magical as a result. Under certain circumstances, this can be a dangerous misconception, because dwarves are just as handy with spells as the next type of fairy.

  But in general, they are not malicious creatures. This is mostly because they dwell underground and inside hills and mountains and don’t usually bother with the world of people. In fact, they have terrible eyesight from dwelling in such lightless places and often have to rely on their sense of smell to get by. Throughout history, dwarves have been known as miners and great metalsmiths, although there are, of course, some varieties of dwarves who have nothing to do with fire and shovels and melders.

  The Harvester dwarves of the Lincoln Tunnel are a perfect example; they were much handier with gardening shears than picks and axes. Another reason that Harvesters are black sheep within the dwarf family is that they spend a considerable amount of time in the human world, as you’ll see shortly.

  And here’s the funny thing: this breed is famous for copying the most repulsive habits of men, which, as you’ve seen, range from nose picking to burping to much worse behaviors. Not that the dwarves know these habits are rude; they just see people doing them all the time and therefore probably think that they are casual, appropriate behaviors.

  There have been sightings of these ill-mannered Harvester dwarves all over the world, but they’re believed to be indigenous to Spain, southern France, and Italy. I find them very amusing and was delighted at first to hear that they’d cropped up in New York City—that is, until I heard the outcome of this particular tale.

  No matter how funny these gross little “men” might appear, remember that the same rules apply to dwarves that apply to all fairies. Keep your distance, never eat their food, and never, ever steal from them.