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

  Felix was confused.

  “Why are they giving her such nice food?” he whispered to Dick. “I thought they’d want to punish her for running away.”

  But then Felix saw that Dick had tears in his eyes.

  “They are punishing her,” Dick whispered back, and he was right.

  Mary had to eat all of the goblins’ strange, luscious red goblins’ fruit—and after that, she never uttered another word or tried to run away again.

  The lair fell back into its grim routine, and gradually Felix stopped keeping track of time. There was no point. The schedule in his mind became soft and faded, he stopped listening for the encouraging subway rumbles, and soon he even stopped noticing the dirt that dusted his neck each time a train went by.

  Night after night, he played his guitar for the goblins—the same awful, tired Barry Manilow song—while the beasts swayed back and forth. Felix eventually stopped hearing the music and just played along numbly, waiting until they’d had enough and he could go to sleep.

  Then one night, he had a strange, vivid dream. His guitar teacher was sitting in the lair with him.

  “Dude, I can’t believe you’re playing Barry Manilow,” the teacher scoffed to Felix.

  Felix’s face got red.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he begged.

  “Whatever—I’m gonna tell everyone,” said the teacher. “And what’s more, don’t come back to me for lessons when you get out of here. I don’t want my cred to plummet because you’ve become such a loser.”

  Felix jolted awake, his heart pounding. It had been such an awful nightmare that he was glad to get back to his life in the goblin den.

  But that night at supper, as he strummed his Barry Manilow tune for the millionth time, Felix got mad.

  He knew that his destiny was to become a huge rock star, not some feeble dinner entertainment in the middle of nowhere.

  How dare these goblins rob him of his greatness?

  And with that, Felix narrowed his eyes and angrily strummed out the first lines of his old favorite song, “Stairway to Heaven.”

  He cringed and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the goblins to shoot out of their seats and throw things at him, or do something even worse.

  But nothing happened.

  In fact, there was not a sound in the room, besides the crackling fire. Felix opened his eyes. The goblins sat as still as statues, as though time had suddenly stopped. After a few seconds, they began to stir again, clearly not realizing that they’d been frozen, and they stared up at Felix expectantly.

  Felix began to play the usual little Manilow recital, but his hands were no longer numb. In fact, his heart beat faster than it had for days, maybe weeks; blood flushed his cheeks. Once the goblins started swaying, Felix daringly switched to “Stairway” again—and the same thing happened.

  The goblins froze.

  This time, Felix kept playing and did not stop. Something about the tune was having a near-magical effect on his captors, and for the first time, he saw an opportunity to escape.

  “Dick!” he shouted. “Look at them—now is our chance!”

  Dick looked around the room nervously. “But what if they wake up?” he cried. “And what about the rats?”

  “Throw the food to them!” yelled Buster from the far side of the room. “Now! You too!” he shouted at Helen and Flossie, and the children grabbed the bowls of wormy food from the table and threw it on the floor. Swarms of rats scampered over to the worm piles and began to devour them. Felix played “Stairway” furiously, hoping whatever spell he was weaving would hold up.

  “Follow me!” shouted Dick. “Run!”

  The children ran hard, leaving the famished rats and the frozen goblins behind, down through the dirt tunnels; the flames from the torches blazed to the ceilings, angry to see the children escape. Felix’s guitar swung crazily on its neck strap and he tried to play as he ran to keep the spell going. They passed a room containing a crystal table, and on that table gleamed a tray of succulent red fruit—a deadly reminder that made the children’s hearts pound even harder.

  “That’s the door out,” cried Dick, and it was: beyond the door there were no fire torches and it was black-dark as they staggered along, and soon they heard a sound, the most beautiful sound in the world:

  The number one train was approaching.

  They smashed themselves against the walls as the train tore past. And then when it had gone, the children ran toward the platform light and Felix almost cried when the newspaper stall—with its stale Baby Ruths and hard Snickers bars and magazines—came into sight. Helen and Flossie hustled along as well as they could in those long dresses, holding them up in front, showing the sort of lace pantaloons that young girls haven’t worn since before the Civil War.

  Felix threw his guitar onto the platform and heaved himself up, pulling Dick and Buster and Helen and Flossie up after him. The five children collapsed on the pavement, gasping for breath.

  They were free.

  “Where’s Mary?” cried Helen suddenly.

  Another number one train rumbled through the station and out again on the other side. Felix and Dick leaped down onto the track and stared into the tunnel. Had Mary followed them and fallen behind?

  Just then, a quiet shape came toward them from the darkness.

  “Let’s get out of here,” cried Dick. “What if it’s one of them, coming to get us?”

  “It’s not,” yelled Felix. “Look—it’s Mary.”

  It was Mary, silent Mary, in her sweet calico dress and lace-up boots, standing there, still as a pale ghost in the black tunnel.

  “Hurry up!” cried the children. “They’ll be coming soon! Oh, please hurry.”

  But Mary just stood there and watched them sadly for a few minutes longer.

  And then, without a word, she turned and disappeared back into the darkness.

  There are clearly two lessons to be learned here. Firstly, once you have eaten goblin fruit, there is no way to save you. Never, ever taste a piece of it—or any fairy food, if you can avoid it—no matter how hungry you are or how delicious it looks.

  And secondly, of all the fairy breeds, goblins are the most responsive to music. This is the only proven way to get the better of them. Some chords and melodies inexplicably freeze them, and Felix was lucky that—miraculously—“Stairway to Heaven” was one of them, for other melodies have been known to make goblins more powerful and even savage.

  One tale tells of a lucky little girl who was able to bewitch some goblins who’d stolen her little sister: she played a frenzied sailor jig on her French horn, and, unable to control themselves, the goblins danced until they turned into a frothing stream of water. Unfortunately, this effective tune was never written down and saved for posterity; otherwise it would have served as a surefire way for any human to whistle his way out of goblin captivity.

  Upon their return to the real world, Felix and the other children became known as the Subway Stowaways, and their case baffled the world. New York City records showed that two sisters named Helen and Florence “Flossie” Browne had gone missing in 1854, a Benjamin “Buster” Jenkins vanished in 1932, and a Richard “Dick” Murphy had disappeared in 1969.

  And yet here they all were, real as night and day—and looking exactly the same as when they had vanished decades earlier. Scientists, astrologers, and even beauticians all clamored to know their secret, but of course no one believed their explanation.

  However, there were no records of a missing girl fitting Mary’s description, which was not unusual for a poor baker’s daughter—probably an immigrant—in the early twentieth century. When the Subway Stowaway children insisted that the police go back into the tunnel to find her, they were unable to find an entrance to the “alleged goblins’ lair” (as the newspapers called it), and no sixth child was ever recovered.

  Time in the Fairy World

  As we’ve just seen, time in the fairy world runs according to its own rules, and no human has ever fig
ured out exactly what those rules are—not even me. Fairies have discovered how to manipulate time: speed it up, slow it down, stop it altogether when it suits them. If humans were to uncover time’s secrets in this way, it would be considered the most important discovery in the history of our species, but right now that skill belongs exclusively to the fairies.

  We have no way of judging the accurate age or life span of fairies; there’s no rule of thumb, such as “One human year equals seven dog years”—although we do know all fairies eventually grow old and die, like humans.

  Each breed appears to slow time at different stages in life according to varying priorities. For example, dwarves value wisdom and experience, and so they speed up their youths and remain wizened and elderly in appearance for most of their lifetimes. Many winged fairies—especially those associated with flowers—tend to favor youth and beauty and therefore “freeze” themselves at younger stages of life; they die suddenly, without wrinkles or any physical evidence of old age—but they age internally regardless, and their bodies just give out without any visible warnings.

  As you now know, humans who wander into fairy realms are greatly affected by the strange behavior of time there. Some enter as adults and reemerge as babies; they find themselves speaking in backward sentences as time rapidly reverses itself. Some captives emerge from fairy realms after being there for decades and find themselves the same age as when they “disappeared,” as you saw in Felix’s tale.

  And yet others—as you saw in George’s tale—others enter the fairy world as children and come out old and decrepit. More than once, a human has come out of a fairy realm and simply turned to dust, the way that bodies do when they’ve been underground for a very long time.

  Clocks often behave strangely around fairies, as you’ll remember from the story about the Algonquin brownies. If you notice that your wristwatch has stopped or is just suddenly wrong altogether or if your grandfather clock chimes at odd hours, that may be the reason—a fairy may be nearby.

  If you wake up feeling especially groggy, you may have slept longer than you thought: if a fairy had anything to do with it, you might have been dreaming for days or even weeks, even if your clock says that you were only asleep for eight hours.

  End of the Free Ride

  When you have to travel from point A to B, you simply get into a subway like Felix, or a car or a train or a plane, and off you go.

  Fairies, on the other hand, have a much harder time traveling long distances, and astonishingly enough, the smaller varieties of fairy have traditionally traveled long distances by letter. That is, before you seal up an envelope containing a letter or note, they will crawl inside and simply hitch a ride.

  But these days, who sends letters? The only envelopes that get sent out of our houses contain bill payments and other unpleasantries, and no fairy in its right mind wants to hitch a ride to a telephone company payment center.

  Here’s how you can turn this situation to your advantage: buy some nice paper and pens and start sending letters to your friends and family in different parts of the country—or to a faraway king or head of state. Why not send a letter to a famous author, intrepid reporter, or Hollywood star as well? Fairies will soon learn that your room is an outpost for adventurous letter travel, and they’ve been known to reward today’s rare letter writers with gifts and strange, lovely dreams.

  Garbage Dumps and Other Unlikely

  Fairy Habitats

  Most winged fairies are great aesthetes, meaning that they love beauty. But a few breeds could care less about prettiness, and the modern world offers them plenty of tempting places to live, like the filthy subway goblin lair you’ve just visited.

  Vast stinky garbage dumps and landfills provide excellent homes for gnomes, who are aboveground cousins of dwarves. Like dwarves, gnomes are squat creatures with huge, bulbous noses and absolutely filthy long beards. They dislike humans and scenic nature in equal parts, so today’s sprawling, people-free, disgusting garbage dumps are the perfect place for them.

  Dump-dwelling gnomes build hidden houses from discarded plywood and cinder blocks and furnish them with thrown-away refrigerators, couches, mattresses, and tables. Next time you walk past your local dump, take a close look at the heaps of trash. Do you notice anything odd, like smoke rising from them? If so, gnomes probably live there, in a house carefully hidden beneath piles of garbage, and are enjoying a fire in a makeshift fireplace. Or perhaps the smoke is coming from a gnome kitchen, where they are cooking a stew of banana peels, dirty diapers, rancid meat, and coffee grounds.

  However, I certainly don’t advise that you wade through the trash to find out.

  Sewers make fine homes for goblins, while natural history museums are easy places to spot brownies. In New York City’s Museum of Natural History, the famous dioramas of trees, bushes, and taxidermy animals are absolutely overrun by nature-starved brownies at night.

  Laundromats are also great after-hour destinations for small fairies of all breeds; they love to take turns spinning in the dryers.

  You would think that flower stores would be enticing fairy habitats, but they are not. Fairies get very attached to certain trees and other plants, and it upsets them when those plants are sold off and carted away.

  Enchanted Fairy Isles

  Now it’s time to leave the garbage dumps behind and explore one of the more beautiful and fantastical kinds of fairy habitats: enchanted fairy isles.

  Recorded sightings of enchanted fairy islands are very rare, but they exist in all four oceans, in each of the seven seas, and in countless rivers on six of the seven continents.

  Some of the islands dwell underwater and silently rise to the surface on moonless nights; others are always above water and shrouded in fog—or are simply invisible to human eyes. No human has ever set foot on a fairy island—or if he has, he has not lived to tell us about it.

  The most famous fairy island, Tír na nÓg, stands in an Irish lake, and savage battles are the favorite pastime of the fairies living there. They don’t even care if they get wounded or killed, because on Tír na nÓg, those warrior fairies will simply come back to life the next day, their wounds healed, their bloodied axes clean again.

  There are islands similar to Tír na nÓg in the United States, including one in the Mississippi River near St. Louis, and another in the Rio Grande, and yet another in the Yellowstone River.

  There is even one in the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. In fact, a river-spanning commuter cable car passes directly above it many times a day.

  It’s really quite extraordinary how many people zigzag over that nameless, invisible island each day, on their way to work or on their way home, thinking about things like television shows or electricity bills or turkey sandwiches on pumpernickel bread—oblivious to the wild fairy battles taking place a hundred yards beneath their feet.

  Oceans and rivers and streams offer up all sorts of additional exciting fairy activity, as you will see in the next story.

  Tale No. 6

  The Ballad of Big Edd

  In case you weren’t aware, mermaids are also fairies—one of the few species that you don’t need fairy sight to glimpse. There are many different kinds of them all around the world. I particularly like the Arctic mermaids, who build shimmering underwater ice palaces, an army of seals and walruses at their command. Equally fascinating are the terrifying Amazon River mermaids, often mistaken for enormous piranhas. Over the years, more river explorers have fallen prey to these creatures than to malaria or poison arrows.

  But, of course, the most well known of the dangerous mermaid breeds is the Lorelei.

  The term “the Lorelei” implies that there is only one, but there are actually hundreds of them, part of a large order ruled by a strict queen. Each one sits upon rocks in the middle of the sea, combing her long, golden hair. Sailors who spot a Lorelei and hear her bewitching songs are supposed to automatically fall under her spell; they usually crash their ships into the rocks where the Lore
lei perches. No one knows whether those men die or are kept as her slaves.

  You probably think that the Lorelei are terribly wicked creatures, but I feel bad for them sometimes. They’re quite sad, actually, and very lonely. Imagine sitting out there on a rock in the ocean, with absolutely nothing to do but steal sailors once in a blue moon, having no one to talk to or laugh with—not now, or ever.

  To make matters worse, each Lorelei is assigned by the Lorelei queen to a different part of the world, with no consideration for that mermaid’s individual happiness. She could end up shivering in the bitterly cold English Channel or coughing in the most polluted part of the Ganges River in India. Or off the coast of Alaska, where Lorelei are regularly harpooned by hunters in helicopters, who mistake them for some sort of harbor seal.

  Or she could get assigned to the waters off the coast of … Staten Island.

  And now we get to the main part of our story.

  Imogene had a rather unusual life for an eleven-year-old girl. She lived on Staten Island (part of New York City just across the water from the Statue of Liberty) in a fragile glass greenhouse with her grandfather. They raised orchids in this greenhouse, and they slept and cooked and ate their meals in a little shack next to the glass building.

  Every morning Imogene woke up at five, when the rest of the city was still heavy with sleep. Grandfather, with his shock of white hair, would be up already, sitting in the greenhouse, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, his fingernails black with rich soil. Imogene too would drink a cup of coffee and eat a piece of bread and jam and listen to the newspaper pages turn and the sound of warm drops of water falling from the greenhouse’s glass ceiling; she would breathe in the faint, silken scent of the flowers and watch the stars disappear overhead one by one, until the last bite of bread and jam was gone.