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

  This may seem random, but while we’re on the topic of kitchens, I thought it was worth bringing up.

  For some reason, fairies simply cannot help themselves when it comes to stealing spoons; they take them all the time. Teaspoons appear to be great favorites, although no variety of spoon—soupspoons, serving spoons, slatted spoons—is safe from a fairy.

  To protect your silver spoons from going missing, tie them together with a piece of red ribbon or red string; this will ward fairies off.

  If you open your cutlery drawer and a silver knife is missing, don’t be alarmed. Fairies have probably borrowed it to carve a roast at a big feast. It will be returned within 24 hours; fairies believe that it’s bad luck to keep a human’s knife, and they’re probably right.

  However, most things that fairies “borrow” from humans are never returned, as you’ll see in the next story.

  Tale No. 5

  The Number One Train

  Felix liked having a name with an x in it; people always remembered it. This would come in handy later in life, when he was a rock star—which he had planned on becoming since he was about, say, three years old.

  I’m sure that many people want to be rock stars but don’t really do anything about becoming one, but Felix, who was now twelve, was not one of those people. In his opinion, the best rock stars played the guitar, and so three times a week after school, he went for a guitar lesson way downtown at the Greenwich House Music School with a man who was so good at the guitar that he could play it behind his head and with his toes.

  Felix always took the subway downtown, the number one train, and one afternoon, while he stood on the platform with his guitar case, he looked down on the tracks and noticed a big, fat rat lumping along.

  Usually subway rats scurried away as quickly as their rodenty little legs would carry them, but this fatso took his time, carefully inspecting the ground and not caring at all if anyone spotted him from above. Eventually he seemed to find what he was looking for: a pair of broken spectacles. The rat picked them up with his long yellow teeth, lumbered back into the dark train tunnel, and disappeared. Felix found this odd, but soon the guitar chords to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” became a more pressing matter and he forgot all about it.

  But then, the following Thursday: there was the fat rat again; this time he sniffed around the tracks until he found a hat that had fallen off some unlucky man’s head, a once-handsome fedora with a pheasant-feather band. The rat picked it up and tossed it onto his back; soon it looked like a hat with legs was waddling away into the tunnel. Felix laughed and glanced around at the other people standing on the platform, but no one else had noticed this comical sight.

  From then on, Felix saw the rat every time he stood on the number one train’s platform. The creature always retrieved strange items: a dirty glove, a holey sock, a boot (which was quite an ordeal to drag into the tunnel), a dirty red mitten, a tennis shoe with green laces. Watching the rodent carry away a filthy scarf printed with yellow smiley faces one afternoon, Felix wondered what kind of odd nest the animal was building.

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  It became hot for May; one afternoon a heat wave cooked the city in hundred-degree heat. Felix waited on the subway platform and fanned himself with his sheet music. Usually several other people stood around, waiting for the number one train, but today the platform was empty. The train seemed reluctant to arrive. Felix sat on a bench, took out his guitar, and began to strum a quiet song.

  A cold rush of air gusted over him and Felix looked up to see if he was sitting under an air-conditioning vent, and that’s when he saw it:

  An odd figure standing at the far end of the platform, near the tunnel.

  Felix blinked. The person certainly hadn’t been there a moment earlier, but nor had he come down the stairs from the street, which were on the opposite end of the station.

  The figure walked toward him now, wearing peculiar attire for a hot afternoon: a long, tattered overcoat with the collar up, a dirty hat, mismatched gloves. Two completely different shoes gave the figure a lopsided gait. A pair of glasses glinted on a face hidden behind a scarf, and Felix almost laughed at the awful outfit until he saw that the scarf had smiley faces on it and remembered that the rat had taken a smiley-face scarf into the tunnel weeks earlier. Then he realized that the figure must live in the tunnel with the rats and he stopped laughing.

  Suddenly the figure stood in front of Felix and Felix found himself putting his guitar in its case. The figure pointed with a red-mitten-covered hand toward the tunnel and then Felix was following him into that dark subway tunnel—guitar in hand—walking on the iron rails. The light from the station faded away.

  They took a right turn and then there was dirt under their feet instead of iron rails. Felix didn’t know how long he walked and he couldn’t even see the figure in front of him. All he knew was that his heart was pounding and he couldn’t stop walking or turn around; a strange spell seemed to be pulling him along, like a big magnet attracting a paper clip. Felix couldn’t even shout for someone to come and save him; that same weird spell had shrunk his voice down to a pale little mouse squeak.

  A door opened in front of them, spilling a dull yellow light into the black air, and then Felix was in a long hallway, still clutching his guitar.

  Several fat rats gathered around the figure’s feet; they whisked away its hat, overcoat, shoes, smiley-face scarf, red mitten, and glasses—leaving the figure clad only in a hooded cloak with very long sleeves. Folds of fabric hid the man’s face completely, which scared Felix more than a pair of glowing red eyes or some such.

  Another door opened on the far end of the hallway and a second cloaked figure floated in, and then another, and another.

  Soon the room was full of them.

  Felix found himself trapped in a den of goblins, deep in the tunnel of the number one train.

  Goblins are nasty, silent creatures with very ugly little faces. Usually they’re quite small, no taller than a toddler, but these days some breeds in the Western Hemisphere grow as tall as human adults. They dwell in underground lairs and labyrinths, modeled after rat mazes.

  When appearing in human realms, goblins often take the shapes of animals like cats or owls, or else they shroud themselves entirely in human clothes to hide their horrid appearances. They are incurable thieves and kidnappers, and also great “tempters,” meaning that they offer up enchanted fruits to humans that will put them under the goblins’ power—or worse, kill them. As one famous poet once wrote:

  We must not look at goblin men,

  We must not buy their fruits:

  Who knows upon what soil they fed

  Their hungry, thirsty roots?

  While goblins have a very bad reputation, they’re actually rather boring when it comes to their day-to-day lives. They’re as lazy and slow-moving as slugs; Felix must have felt as though he’d traveled for miles through that subway tunnel, but in reality they’d only gone several hundred yards before entering into the goblins’ lair. One of the main reasons goblins kidnap kids in the first place is to make them do much-hated housework and chores—and provide entertainment.

  And on that note, let’s get back to poor Felix.

  The goblins watched Felix silently. Or at least Felix felt that they were watching him, but he couldn’t tell for sure because of those sinister, face-hiding hoods. One goblin raised his right arm, and Felix felt his eyes closing.

  When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in a room with several other children his age. A boy stood over him, staring into Felix’s face.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “I’m Felix,” said Felix. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Dick,” said the boy. “Well, Richard, if you want to be formal about it. I’m named after the president.”

  “The president of what?” asked Felix, confused.

  “The United States, dummy,” said Dick. “Don’t you even know who Richard N
ixon is?”

  Felix stared at Dick. Now that he got a good look at the boy, Felix realized that Dick’s clothes looked, well, wrong somehow. His tight button-down shirt had big flowers splashed all over it, and his yellow pants swung like bells around his calves and ankles.

  “Nixon hasn’t been president for a million years,” Felix informed him. “And you look like you belong on The Brady Bunch or something in those clothes.”

  “Aw, man,” said Dick, slumping against the wall. “I’m never gonna get out of here. And if you think I’ve been here a long time, check her out.” He pointed to a pale girl in the corner, who wore a floor-length calico dress, lace-up booties, and a bonnet. “That’s Mary. She still thinks the president is someone named Theodore Roosevelt.”

  Felix sat up in disbelief. “What are you all doing here?” he asked Dick.

  “We work for them,” Dick said.

  “Doing what?”

  “We each do different things,” Dick told him. “I deliver messages and do errands around the lair. Mary was a baker’s daughter in the real world, so she cooks for them. Buster builds things for them.” Dick pointed to a scrappy-looking boy wearing a vest and newsboy cap. “And Helen and Flossie are their maids.” He pointed at two girls in the most old-fashioned clothing of all: long pioneer dresses.

  “I’ve never even heard of the guy who was president when they came down here,” Dick added. “Some dude named Franklin Pierce.” Then he looked at Felix’s guitar. “I guess they brought you down here to play for them.”

  “Oh,” managed Felix. “Really.”

  “Yeah, we thought that they might be going back out to get another kid,” Dick continued. “When the rats started coming back with those clothes and glasses and things. That’s when we know one of the goblins is going to get dressed up like a person and go into the real world. The rats are their advance scouts. They probably had their beady little eyes on you for a while, you know.”

  “I saw them every day,” said Felix, his throat dry. A rumbling noise shook the room and dirt fell loose from the ceiling.

  “It’s the subway,” explained Dick. “Just overhead.”

  Felix could hardly believe it. “Wait, it’s right there?” he exclaimed. “Don’t you ever try to run away?”

  “Sure,” said Dick. “But it never works.”

  “Why not?”

  “Try it and find out for yourself,” whispered Dick. “But I’m warning you: the goblins never sleep, and they never leave a door unguarded. We’ve tried to dig tunnels out ourselves, but the rats always find out and squeal on us. You might as well get used to it here. There’s no way home.”

  As it turned out, Dick had been right about the music. That evening, Mary was called away to prepare the goblins’ supper feast; Helen and Flossie went with her to serve it. Dick and Buster went also to set up the chairs and table. Felix was left alone in the room until a small goblin brought Felix and his guitar into a very long dirt-walled-and-ceilinged room. Fires roared in dug-out fireplaces.

  Felix sat in an empty chair against a wall and waited.

  Soon nearly a hundred cloaked goblins filed into the room in two lines and took their seats on either side of a long banquet table. Helen and Flossie carried in large bowls containing the first course. The food inside them looked like spaghetti to Felix and his stomach rumbled.

  “Trust me, man, you don’t want it,” whispered Dick, who was standing next to Felix. “It’s worm spaghetti.”

  Felix blanched.

  “You’re lying,” he said to Dick.

  “Night crawlers and maggots,” Dick told him. “Mary has to cook whatever she can find in the ground. Wait until you see what comes next.”

  The second course looked like some sort of stew. Felix’s stomach started to rumble again.

  “Look closer,” whispered Dick. Felix squinted at the stew pot as it was passed down the table and saw a boot bobbing about on top. And a broken wristwatch, and then a batch of unhappy-looking cockroaches.

  “A good rule of thumb: try to eat as little as possible around here,” Dick told him.

  “That won’t be hard,” Felix whispered back.

  “Yeah, but not just because the food is gross,” warned Dick. “You never know which food is enchanted and which food isn’t. Enchanted food will put you in their power, and if you eat enough of it, you’ll turn into one of them. There used to be a lot more of us kids, you know,” and he nodded at several smaller cloaked figures at the end of the table.

  Sweat began to pour from Felix’s brow. Just then, the room fell silent and all hundred goblins turned around and faced him.

  It was time for Felix to play his guitar.

  His hands trembling, he pulled the guitar up onto his lap—and then his mind drew a blank. What on earth was he supposed to play for a roomful of subway-dwelling goblins?

  Do something easy, he told himself, although his hands were so numb that he didn’t know if he could manage anything at all.

  The first song that came to mind was “Good Day Sunshine,” by the Beatles.

  He strummed his guitar and began to sing:

  I need to laugh, and when the sun is out—

  Suddenly all hundred goblins stood up angrily; the soup boot was violently hurled in Felix’s direction, missing him by inches.

  “Don’t sing anything about the sun,” hissed Dick. “They hate the sun. Do the worst, most boring song you can think of.”

  Felix faltered—until he remembered one of his lessons, when he and his ultra-cool guitar teacher had been messing around and making fun of a corny singer called Barry Manilow, who sported a fluffy bouffant. They would sing Manilow lyrics at the top of their lungs and howl with laughter as they played along.

  Lady, take me high upon a hillside,

  High up where the stallion meets the sky—

  This one definitely counted as the worst song Felix could think of now, and so he started to play it.

  The goblins sat back down and began to sway from side to side, obviously enjoying the music a great deal. It was just Felix’s luck to fall captive to completely un-cool, Barry Manilow–loving goblins. When the song was over, the creatures stood up angrily again, which was Felix’s cue to start from the beginning.

  He had to play the song twelve times before the goblins let the children go back to their room.

  Bed was a burlap sack stuffed with straw. Felix made himself wait until the other children were asleep before he would let tears roll down his cheeks.

  At first, there was no way of telling time, and Felix began to wonder how long he’d been in the lair. A week or a decade? Who was president now? Who was on the cover of Rolling Stone? When the goblins came back with the next kid, would Felix himself look like he was wearing some period costume?

  But then he figured out an easy way to keep track of the days: every time a subway rumbled overhead, he knew that about twenty minutes had passed, and he began to keep an elaborate number-one-train schedule in his mind. Felix would imagine the people in those trains overhead, on their way to a boring day at work, or to a bowl of canned tomato soup at home, or to a new movie at a downtown theater, and this was how Felix stayed connected to the real world and kept his wits about him.

  He began to look for ways out, but his hopes for escape waned quickly. Dick had been right: the goblins appeared to be everywhere. Sometimes when Felix would walk toward a door, a goblin would simply appear in front of it, out of thin air.

  The rats ran loose everywhere too, carrying documents and other items around the maze for the goblins and spying on the children with their vicious little black eyes. Felix wondered how the other children had survived down there for so long, dwelling without hope.

  But then something happened that showed Felix that hope springs eternal, even in the most seemingly resigned of hearts.

  Mary rarely spoke; she kept her head down and her face expressionless as she made breakfast, lunch, tea, and supper for the goblins. She never grimaced as she dug up
worms, or complained as she flattened roaches and coated them in dirt and fried them up.

  One morning, the 5:02 subway rolled overheard as usual, and the wall torches lit themselves, as they did every morning. The children opened their eyes and stretched and yawned—and then they realized: Mary was gone.

  Her plan had been ingenious, from what the children were able to piece together later that morning. For hygiene reasons, Mary’s kitchen and her worm garden were the only places where the rats were not allowed to snoop; it turned out that she’d been digging a hidden tunnel for years from the worm garden. She’d dug a little bit at a time, using the discarded dirt in her recipes so there would never be a telltale pile to tip off the goblins.

  Now the rats crowded into the worm garden, sniffing around, looking for the entrance to Mary’s secret passage.

  “Maybe we can find it first,” Felix whispered to Dick, Helen, Flossie, and Buster, and for the first time, he saw a glimmer of excitement in their eyes.

  “But it’s gonna be harder than ever to walk around the lair now,” said Dick, who as the messenger boy knew the maze better than anyone. “Both the goblins and the rats will be watching us closer than ever.”

  Just then, they heard a great chorus of rat squeals: a wild celebration had begun.

  Mary had been brought back.

  She had made it out of the lair; once on the subway tracks, she’d nearly been flattened by a speeding train. She ran toward the yellow light of the station anyway, but peering up at the platform, Mary found that she was too terrified to venture into the alarming, electric modern world. That’s where the rats found her—trembling on the verge of freedom—and before she could gather the courage for a leap up onto the platform, she had been whisked back to the goblin lair.

  Everyone was summoned to the banquet room: all hundred goblins, the army of rats, and then the children.

  A little goblin came into the hall, carrying a tray of beautiful red pomegranates, glistening with silvery water droplets. He set it down at Mary’s feet.