Faery Tale Read online

  However, our perfunctory chats in the hallway evolved into glasses of wine, and before I knew it, a year or two passed and I was volunteering my apartment for use as her Reiki studio during the days, in exchange for a small monthly fee.

  Raven’s clients were aplenty, and due to long hours at work my apartment was typically empty, so it worked out perfectly. In any case, it was Raven who first let me know that my apartment was filled, very certainly, I mean chockablock, with faeries. She just came right out and said it.

  You can imagine my surprise.

  After two years of living in that apartment, not once had I been woken in the middle of the night by a tiny ring of creatures dancing merrily around my ficus tree. Nor had I been pricked, prodded, tripped, or poked, and no imaginary toddler had ever wandered off into the depths of my dark closet only to find its way home again days later with a frightening, changeling-like look on its face. In other words, I had no evidence of an alien occupation of my remarkably modest living space.

  Not to mention, everybody knows that faeries don’t exist.

  At least not anymore, a small voice from the depths of my imagination said.

  Shut up, I told it. Because they don’t. Every adult learns this. Yet I found I was moved by Raven’s innocence, and I suspected I was somehow mourning the loss of mine.

  With my neighbor’s startling declaration that there were, in fact, faeries in my apartment, it really got me thinking.

  In the last few centuries, the archeological community has made some fairly astonishing discoveries, many of which point to the alarming number of myths and legends that possess at least a thread of historical basis. One great example is Troy, the legendary city at the center of Homer’s Iliad—now thought to have been located near the coast of northwest Turkey. Everyone thought that German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann was completely out of his gourd when he began to dig on a hill in the Turkish countryside in search of the mythical city. But by following geographical descriptions from the text, Schliemann’s obsession was rewarded when he found layers upon layers of a city that had been burned, pummeled to destruction, and rebuilt (about thirteen times). Among many other conclusive discoveries, archeologists have since unearthed shards of pottery that date to the time period that Homer’s epic work so definitively describes, as well as urns that stored grains and foodstuffs—in such great quantity that historians concluded the inhabitants were trying to store up for years while their walled city was under siege.

  In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth paid ten thousand pounds—about the cost of an entire castle—for a unicorn horn. I kid you not. Ancient Greek natural-history writers had begun describing the creature as early as the fifth century BC. Soon thereafter, writings chronicling the discovery of this mythical beast could be found across the world, from China and Japan to the streets of Israel in texts from the Old Testament. By the sixteenth century, the existence of unicorns was so generally accepted that the average medieval person would have been able to speculate on a unicorn’s height, weight, and even their diet. It wasn’t until later in human history that we discovered these sea creatures called narwhals with proboscises that look suspiciously similar to the horn of the fabled unicorn. But by then, the hunting and trading of the narwhal tusk had allowed the myth of the unicorn to thrive for centuries. Queen Elizabeth would have been none too pleased, I imagine, to learn she’d forked over the price of a castle for a mere whale tusk.

  As time passes and we continue to find empirical evidence of the various truths that underlie myth, I continue to wonder if the whole idea of faeries couldn’t somehow fit into a similar equation.

  That faeries were a part of my imaginary world growing up was not surprising. As a professor at Cornell University, my father nourished me and my older sister with Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, and pretty much any other magical, swashbuckling tale from his meticulously alphabetized library (or the depths of his fanciful imagination). There were make-believe games and long walks in the woods, where he’d tell us tales of trolls, giants, brave Native Americans, or the Greek gods with their water nymphs and torrid affairs. At playtime I’d imagine I could talk to the faeries, that I could see them flying around our vegetable garden on little transparent wings. The highlight of my after-school career was playing Wendy in Peter Pan, sporting a bright blue flannel nightgown my mother bought me at Woolworths. I was devastated that Tinker Bell could despise me.

  Our family wasn’t particularly religious in any traditional sense, which is probably why, as an adult, I didn’t feel so weird taking an interest in the truth behind the existence of magical beings. In fact, for me, “religion” boiled down to conversations with God in the bathroom.

  It sounds bizarre, I’m sure, but I began to associate God and bathrooms when I was in third and fourth grades, in the years when my parents were constantly arguing, or when my father, beet red on a Tuesday morning, yelled at me for leaving my shoes in the middle of the living-room floor or for not drinking all of my orange juice. In those days, I was in tears most mornings before breakfast. I don’t delight in describing my father this way; he was an exceptional man. He could quote Chaucer at length in Middle English. He taught us to swim, ski, hike, rock climb, survive in the wilderness. But my father possessed a deep-seated frustration that seemed to eat at him. Disappointment simmered in a vat somewhere beneath his skin until it erupted explosively in terrible bouts of anger. More than anything, Alan Pike wanted to be a great American novelist. Stories lived in him—hauntingly broken tales about Tibetan Longumpas and lone explorers, and he wove them aloud from time to time for friends over a glass of whiskey. But he never put a single word to paper. He couldn’t.

  When you have a gift and you stifle it, it will consume you. My father tried to force it down by smoking marijuana, by drinking double Gibsons with extra onions, you know, just enough to take the edge off. And at age forty-eight, he found himself with a wife who loved him but could no longer live with him and a family coming apart at the seams. While my sister gracefully tiptoed around his moods, I was too oblivious (or defiant) to take him seriously. As a result, I bore the brunt of his fury.

  In third grade, during Mr. Yale’s class, I would requisition the hall pass and retreat to the bathrooms, which during class time, were blissful, spacious, private. There, I didn’t have to pretend to be a happy, normal kid. I could sit and, for just a few moments, allow myself to feel the way I was feeling. It was there, next to the discarded paper towels and bits of unused toilet paper, that I could ask for what I really wanted and feel that someone, or something, might actually be able to hear me. Since then, the bathroom has been my own personal church of sorts. When most women retreat to the ladies’ room to powder their nose, I retreat for a spiritual tune-up.

  When I began to look at my life in a different way, I wondered how many people, like me, needed to seek God in the bathroom. The world is falling apart, and outside the playground is splintered and dark. Where can we go in our daily lives to feel the things we need to feel? To feel the soothing balm of faith? To feel loved? Safe? Happy? What about hopeful?

  More important, what has happened to the magic we were surrounded by as children? The loss of our magic, our innocence, is the worst sort of emotional deforestation. My biggest fear is that if we continue to stifle this loss, half the people on the planet will forget what their forest even looked like in the first place.

  The more I thought about it, the more I wondered where our modern culture has left faeries today. If they were ever “here,” where did they go, and why did they leave us? As I began looking closer, I found that faeries still had a huge following—believers—all over the world. Perhaps these believers would be able to help me believe once more. Perhaps, with their help, I could even find a faery, sit it down for some nectar or something, and ask, “Where did we all go wrong?” The heaviness I’d felt on my heart began to lighten.

  And my adventure was just about to begin.

  2

&n
bsp; Hunting Trolls in Paradise

  Yes, faeries do still appear to humans—often, in fact, especially if one learns the best way to seek them out.

  —EDAIN MCCOY, A WITCH’S GUIDE TO FAERY FOLK

  I WAS sitting on a plane bound for Cancún, Mexico, my mind a fluttering mess.

  Are the power outlets the same in Mexico? I don’t speak enough Spanish. I really shouldn’t have taken this time off from work. Does this seat recline? Ooh! My own little TV! Do the pilots for JetBlue receive the same training as the pilots for regular airlines? Or do the affordable prices signal some sort of half-baked pilot training?

  Soon, I thought, we could all be dead.

  If we all died, the chain of blame would regretfully run back to my poor friend Raven, who’d organized this trip. When she asked if I would be interested in going south of Playa del Carmen to participate in a week of yoga and meditation with a group of women, my sense of adventure kicked in and I couldn’t say no.

  But even more than time to bliss out on the beach, I had faeries on my mind. In doing some research I’d discovered there was a type of faery rumored to live in the ancient temples of Mexico—essentially “cousins” to the Celtic faeries or trolls—called Los Aluxes (pronounced al-oosh-us). I told myself this could be an interesting experiment. I’d do a little poking around while there, and if I found there was something to this faery nonsense, I’d go for it: try to make a formal, once-in-a-lifetime adventure of this faery search. Mexico could be a great place to begin. After all, if I could find evidence of faeries in Mexico, the least likely of places, couldn’t I find them anywhere? I decided to leave the fate of my adventure up to the locals. Perhaps I’d find someone who could help lift the shroud of mystery that surrounded these strange little creatures.

  I leaned back in my seat, hoping to relax, but the memory was too fresh. No sooner had I closed my eyes than I was transported back to the worst plane ride of my life. For one shockingly painful moment I was there all over again, on a flight from JFK in New York City to Ithaca, New York.

  Outside it was dreary midwinter, and the tarmac was spotted with piles of black New York City slush. I had quietly asked the stewardess if I might move to sit by myself in an empty row. I couldn’t stand to be near another human being, and despite how hard I was trying, I couldn’t get my body to stop shaking—it was coming from the inside out. It was exactly one week before my father’s sixty-sixth birthday, and instead of heading home to surprise him, I was going home to bury him.

  I took a deep breath and managed to rein in the memory, along with the tears that threatened to slip out from underneath my dark sunglasses. Tilting my seat back and reclosing my eyes, I tried to get some rest.

  “Are we there yet!?” I yelled to be heard over the rushing air coming in from the windows. We’d been driving in the old Volvo for nearly seven hours. In the midsummer heat, my skinny eight-year-old legs were glued firmly to the vinyl seat. My bangs were sticking to my forehead. We had to be getting close. I could almost smell the salt air of the New Jersey shore.

  “I swear to God. You girls ask me that one more time and we will pull. This. Car. Right. Over,” my mother warned. My mom was suitably scary, but Kirsten and I shrugged. We were death-defying in our excitement.

  “We’ll be there soon enough, Sig,” said my father. With one hairy, tanned hand guiding the wheel, he glanced at me in the rearview. Our eyes met and he flashed a grin, giving me a quick eyebrow raise above his aviators.

  The moment we arrived at the rental house, we threw down our bags, changed into our swimsuits, and raced to the beach. Sleek in her black swimsuit, my mother settled onto the blanket as Kirsten, Dad, and I ran toward the water. In his navy blue Speedo my dad reminded me of James Bond, embarking on a secret mission into the midnight waters of the Caribbean. He used to be a frogman in the Navy, and even though he preferred to discuss books and philosophy, I guess they thought he was really good at what he did—the Navy SEALs tried to recruit him after he completed his officer certification training. He liked to tell Kirsten and me how it seemed like a great idea at the time. He was just about to accept, to become a real Navy SEAL, when he saw one of his buddies back from SEALs training. His nose was broken, Dad told us, spread all over his face. He said thanks, but no thanks.

  I marveled at the look of my bare feet on real sand as we edged into the surf. Standing side by side with Kirsten, our toes greeted the water and it was freezing cold. I closed my eyes for a second to listen to the crashing of the waves against the shore, wanting this moment to last forever. I watched my father as he waded in, and in a moment he was gone, only to resurface several yards away with a loud “Whoop!” and a sputtering of water.

  “Come on, girls! The water’s beautiful!”

  We glanced at each other warily, our arms and legs now covered with goose bumps in the cool afternoon breeze. Suddenly a swim didn’t feel like the best idea.

  “Dad! It’s freezing!” Kirsten shouted.

  “Yeah, it’s too coooold!” I whined. He waded back over to us, taking a solid beating from a large wall of water in the process. As he leaned in close I could see his eyes were red from opening them underwater.

  “You’ve just got to regulate the thermostat, girls. Take a little water, and get your wrists and the back of your neck wet . . .” He demonstrated, making splashing himself look like the most appealing endeavor in the world. “Wooh! Now you try it.”

  We squatted clumsily, sticking our wrists under the water. But it was no use. Surely this water was subzero. Eventually, after much deliberation, just as we sensed he was about to abandon us, his patience run dry, we decided to dunk under at the count of three. We dunked, and as I came up, I was hit full-force in the face by an incoming wave. Water rushed into my nose and mouth and I was swept off my feet. Tossed like a doll, I somersaulted over and over. I couldn’t tell which way was up and my lungs were burning. I panicked. Soon my mouth would open without my permission, just to get some air. But as I began to spasm and choke, I felt a grip on my arm so tight it hurt, jerking me up through the water, and I surfaced, frantic and coughing. My eyes and nose were stinging. When I looked, I could see we were still out on the water, past the breaking point of the waves. My father’s strong hands were buoying me, and Kirsten was looking on, wide-eyed.

  “You’re okay, huh, puppy?”

  The water plastered his dark hair to his head, and he looked at me intently, assessing any potential damage—emotional or otherwise—brought by this, my first near-drowning experience. I could feel my face crumble. I burst into tears.

  “I wanna go in! I wanna go to the blanket!” I wailed, snot bubbling from my nose.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” he sighed. I knew I had let him down. I knew he wanted me to be tough. It was our first swim of vacation and I ruined it. But I wanted my mom. My throat and nose burned from the salt water. I’d had enough.

  He gestured and I climbed onto his back, wrapping my arms and legs around him like a petrified monkey. Kicking his legs smoothly, he reached the point where the waves were crashing and I reached around his neck to plug my nose, just in case. But we moved effortlessly through them, me hanging tight, his feet planting firmly in the sand. Up on the blanket my mother wrapped me in a towel and poured us ice-cold lemonade iced tea from a battered thermos. We sat quietly, the four of us. I wanted to tell my dad thank you, or I’m sorry. I turned, but his eyes were lost—he was seated, still as a Tibetan monk, gazing fixedly out over the ocean.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent into Cancún.” Jolted awake, I looked out the window to see crystal blue water dappled with the shadows cast from a few hovering clouds. As we moved inward over the continent, nothing but miles and miles of dark green jungle met the eye, cut here and there by stretches of sandy roads that dead-ended like an afterthought in the middle of the brush.

  It was a straight shot down Highway 307 from the tourist trap that is Cancún to the New Age tourist trap that is Tulum. As we tumbled with
our yoga mats and luggage into a waiting van, I felt a little nervous. Mexico had been the last place I’d expected to discover a cultural belief in faeries. But everything had seemed to come together with an odd synchronicity.

  Out of curiosity I’d just begun reading up on faery lore from various countries. I was astonished to learn that from Japan to New Zealand, nearly every culture in the world believed in one type of faery or another. In Russia there were rumors of Domoviyr—male earth faeries that lived side by side with humans in their homes. Or the Rusalki—lovely female water faeries found in the shallow pools of Russia’s forests. Polish folklore told of Poleviks, magical creatures that aided in the growing and harvesting of agriculture. Of course England, Scotland, and Ireland were just roiling in faery tales. The strongest lore came from Ireland and its famous ancient historical account, The Book of Invasions, which described a race of magical beings called the Tuatha Dé Danann, who legend told were among the original conquerors of Ireland. It struck me as interesting, because I’d read elsewhere that the phrase Tuatha Dé Danann was now synonymous with faeries in modern Ireland. And I found that in Mexico, there were stories of encounters with Los Aluxes, or “the little people.”

  The trouble was, searching for stories about Los Aluxes and actually encountering one were two very different things. How did one go about “finding” a faery anyway? Local wisdom dictated that Aluxes were traditionally spotted in the temples of the ancient Mayans; and that if you encountered one, you’d recognize it because they look like small children, or sometimes like little gnomes. But let me just say: if I were to encounter a gnomelike “otherworldly being” while rooting around in an ancient Mexican temple, I would absolutely freak out and run screaming into the Mexican jungle, jaguars and poisonous snakes be damned.