Faery Tale Read online

  It seemed an odd request, but Sam answered. “My father is Seamus Healy, of Healy’s Pub down in the valley.”

  “He says his father is Seamus Healy,” the tall man repeated to his companion, “proprietor of Healy’s Pub down in the valley.” At this the stout man nodded sternly and whispered once more to the tall man.The tall man cleared his throat.

  “And do you mind if we ask you what you’re doing here?”

  “I was supposed to meet a friend to camp in the woods, but he never came and it started to rain, so I thought I’d stay the night here.”

  The tall man narrowed his eyes at Sam and then related this, too.

  The short man nodded and then the pair looked at one another.

  “Well,” said the tall man carefully, “I think we’re going to go now.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, bewildered.

  “Good night,” the tall man said.

  According to Sam, the two men then closed the door and left. When he awoke in the morning and the rain had stopped, he wondered if it had all been a dream. On his way out of the cabin, he looked in the fresh mud for tire tracks. He was sure he had heard the sound of a tractor after all. But there were no tire tracks. To make matters more confounding, he realized in the light of day that the path in front of the shack was too steep (and far too narrow) for a tractor to pass through there.

  “And that’s it,” Sam concluded.

  “So, do you still think it was a dream?” KP asked.

  “I can’t be sure,” he replied. “But I’ll tell you one thing. When I hear your sister talking about how there are no faeries left in Ireland, I remember that night. And in my opinion, the faeries up on Ben Bulben are alive and well as ever.”

  The next morning KP decided that since the pedometer had still not turned up, it was time to fess up that we’d lost it. We’d simply have to buy her a new one, ship it somehow. I was hoisting my pack into the trunk of the car, when something nudged at me just to look one last time. Halfheartedly, I moved a few of KP’s things aside, and there, in the corner of the trunk, was the pedometer.

  “Aha!” I shouted out loud. “Aha, aha, aha!” I ran with it, lofted in my hand, over to Kirsten—who’d just walked up to our hostel pal—doing a little dance around her.

  “You are never going to believe what I just found . . . in the trunk!”

  “No.”

  “Aha, yes!” I exclaimed, holding out my palm.

  “You did this.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “But I looked in the trunk!”

  “Well, maybe you didn’t look hard enough,” I said, insulted. The girl was looking on, bewildered. “I think you owe somebody an apology,” I continued.

  KP looked at the girl. “I’m sorry—”

  “Not her!” I exclaimed. “Them.”

  “But why did they have you find it? Why not me? That’s mean! It’s like they had you find it just to spite me.”

  “Well, maybe you couldn’t find it because you never really believed they would help you in the first place. And I did.”

  “It was mean.”

  “Whatever. They proved it to you, and now you have to give them props.”

  “Fine! I give them props,” she conceded.

  But she wasn’t truly convinced.

  I had been trying in vain to get in touch with famous storyteller Eddie Lenihan all summer, and had only succeeded in doing so right before we left Galway. It was regrettable because Eddie lived in Crusheen, which was much closer to Galway than Doolin. So although we were now on our way to KP’s friends’ house in Kells Bay, we would detour back north to meet yet another man I’d seen interviewed in the documentary The Fairy Faith.

  As we drove, I told KP another story from Ben Bulben in County Sligo. It was a story related by Yeats in The Celtic Twilight, told to him by villagers there. One night, a little girl disappeared. There was excitement in the village because it was rumored that the faeries had taken her. One man had seen it happening and tried to hold on to the girl in vain—he found he held nothing in his hands but a broomstick. The town constable instituted a house-to-house search and ordered all the ragweed in the field where the girl had disappeared to be burned, because ragweed was sacred to the faeries. I read aloud.

  “In the morning the little girl was found wandering in the field. She said the faeries had taken her away a great distance, riding on a faery horse. At last she saw a big river, and the man who had tried to keep her from being carried off was drifting down it—such are the topsy-turvydoms of faery glamour—in a cockleshell. On the way her companions had mentioned the names of several people who were about to die shortly in the village.”

  “And did the people die who the faeries predicted would die?”

  “Yes, according to the townspeople, they certainly did.”

  I told KP about my meeting with Peter Knight in Glastonbury, and how he believed a lot of the danger in these stories that surrounded interactions with the faery realm could just be Christian propaganda. We sat in silence for a while, watching the scenery pass by. Sam’s story from the pub fascinated me. It provided a glimpse into the world I wanted so badly to experience. But there was no way we could make the long drive up to County Sligo to walk the haunted, hollow mountain. I could only hope that a visit to Eddie Lenihan could provide me with what I so desperately needed—some answers.

  19

  The Secret of the Black Dog

  . . . Lady Wilde records black dogs that belonged to the Cave Fairies, the diminished and conquered Tuatha Dé Danann.

  —KATHERINE BRIGGS, THE FAIRIES IN ENGLISH TRADITION AND LITERATURE

  EDDIE Lenihan was practically Ireland’s National Treasure. He’d appeared on television, in all the major papers, and he’d published numerous books—one in particular about faeries entitled Meeting the Other Crowd. He was a bit of a celebrity in America as well, at least in the storytelling world—he’d been featured on NPR, and the New York Times had singled him out as one of the few traditional storytellers left in Ireland. He was the folk heartbeat of the country, and I imagined there wasn’t an eyewitness account of a faery sighting that Mr. Lenihan hadn’t heard in his years of recording stories around Counties Clare and Kerry. He was a wild-looking man with curly, shoulder-length hair and a great bushy beard that gave him the appearance of being part man, part lion.

  I felt an instant kinship with Eddie, and not just because I liked his frankness and easy spark of humor. I was only a young grasshopper, and he was a seasoned storyteller of epic proportions, but we had one thing in common—we were both digging for any stories that local people might share about supposed encounters with faeries.

  Lenihan is so much more than a storyteller. Sure, when he tells a tale, you find yourself glued to the edge of your seat.You’re nearly afraid to blink, that you might miss the slightest facial inflection, or worse, that you might carelessly break the spell he has so masterfully woven with his words. But more than that, Lenihan is a story collector. Sitting in his living room, KP and I were surrounded by cases and cases of mini-tapes, cluttering every available surface, each holding years, lifetimes of stories that Eddie had recorded. So it was only natural that he wanted to know, as soon as we sat down, how my story collecting was going.

  “Have you found many faery stories since you’ve been in Ireland?”

  “No,” I answered simply. “Truth be told, aside from one story about Ben Bulben, I haven’t had much luck.”

  “Yes . . .” Eddie leaned back in his chair, letting out a long sigh. “They’re getting harder and harder to find. And you can’t believe all the stories you hear. You just can’t. When it comes to faery stories, or even ghost stories for that matter, I always say two things. One, if the person is a big drinker, I don’t necessarily believe them. Two, if a person is on drugs, forget about it. You’ll see anything you want to see when you’re on either drink or drugs.”

  “So how do you know which stories to believe?” I thought, thinking back t
o Sam’s tale from Ben Bulben.

  “I’m more inclined to believe a story when it comes from a person who is not afraid of the dark. Because look, imagination is a wonderful thing, and when a man is frightened, it can make him see things that aren’t truly there. It’s when you meet practical people, who have been out at all hours . . . I listen to those people. And very often you’ll find out that what they have to tell you is not easy to dismiss.”

  “Like what?” I asked, leaning in.

  “Well, for example, even today, if you were to ask most young people, especially those living in the countryside, ‘Would you bulldoze a fort?’ most of them wouldn’t. Of course they’ll laugh it off. ‘Ah, not that I believe in the faeries or anything, but, but . . .’ They’ve all heard stories about people who have interfered with these places and who have come to some misfortune or even death within a short distance of time after destroying an old fort on their land. Now, it has to be said, those misfortunes might have happened anyway. But when you’ve been collecting stories as long as I have, you see after a while there’s too many coincidences for it to be coincidental. There’s something there. Whether it’s the belief in these things that brings on the consequences, or whether faeries are factually and actually there, there’s something to it.” Eddie looked at us intently.

  Eddie explained that he often gets calls from people who are having problems of a bizarre nature, something they just can’t explain, and that most of them are folks who don’t believe in faeries and ghosts and the like. He’ll typically ask if he can come out and see the place for himself. “Just to make sure they’re not pissing around.” He winked.

  One man was accidentally decapitated while trying to remove a white thorn, a tree sacred in Ireland to the faeries. Building a home over a faery path was another frequent trouble in Ireland. Recently, a man in Kerry had called Eddie after building a brand-new house at the back of his old family land. It had all the modern conveniences, but he was having a very perplexing problem. Despite everything he tried, there was a bedroom at the center of the house that was always freezing cold—even when the heat was on full blast. After going out to the house to see for himself, it was clear to Eddie that the man wasn’t making it up. So he suggested he call a priest to come in and bless the house. When that didn’t help, Eddie figured the house had been built on a faery path. When Eddie declared his verdict, it jogged the man’s memory, and he told Eddie something he’d completely forgotten: many years ago, before his mother passed away, she had pulled her son aside. “Listen to me,” she’d warned. “If you inherit this house when I’m gone, whatever you do, you mustn’t build down there,” she said, pointing downhill to a pretty spot of land at the back of the property. Of course that was precisely where her son had built.

  “See, the old people knew,” Eddie explained. “There were precautions he should have taken.”

  According to Eddie, in the olden days, before people built a house, they would get four hazel sticks—good, solid ones—and place them at the four proposed corners of the house. They’d hammer them in so that cattle couldn’t knock them, and if the sticks were disturbed in the morning, they knew they’d better reconsider where they were building—the faeries were communicating that was their place. They’d move that stick to another corner, leave it overnight, and see how the newly oriented house fared.

  “Now, who I am to say,” Eddie added, “perhaps the old people believed in faery paths because those are the cultural circumstances under which they were raised. Nowadays people might say it’s a ley line, I suppose. But try telling that to one of these older people. They’d say you were talking absolute nonsense: you put your bloody house in the way of the faeries, and you won’t block them!” He paused a moment to take a sip of his tea.

  “The faeries will have their way, one way or another,” he continued. “Because after all, what chance have you against a people who can only be seen if they want to be seen or can take any shape they like?”

  Valid point. We wouldn’t have very good chances at all.

  “Have you ever had an experience with the faery world?” I wanted to know.

  He smiled at this, and I noticed KP lean forward in her chair.

  “You know, it’s an odd thing. In all my years of collecting stories and writing books, I’ve had only one. When I was teaching in Limerick, I used to have to drive up and down the highway to get there every day. One particular morning I was passing near Bunratty, past an old farmhouse with a big field in front of it, when something caught my eye. I looked and in the middle of the field I saw this huge monster of a black dog. And as sure as I saw it, the next moment it was gone. I could hardly believe my eyes; it was quite a shock. I got into the staff room and one of the lads said, ‘Jesus, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!’ I told him what happened, and of course they all laughed. ‘You were tired, you were asleep,’ they said. But I knew what I saw.”

  It was the disappearance of the creature that hadn’t made any sense to Eddie. There were no bushes nearby, no ditch it could’ve slunk into. It was in the middle of a flat field, so where had it gone in one second? He never saw it again and soon forgot all about it. About six months later, he was visiting an old man in that area, and they were talking about “the black dog” in general. In Ireland, apparently, the black dog was a favorite shape the faeries took.The old man told Eddie that in the 1950s, in front of that very farmhouse, in the same field where he’d seen the dog, there used to be a faery fort, but the farmer had bulldozed it.

  “It would have been highly unusual back in the fifties, when people still believed, for a farmer to do such a thing,” Eddie said. “But that was the fort where the black dog used to be seen. Many of the locals had seen him. He’d be lying there at the mouth of the fort, paws spread out in front of him, a huge dog, watching people on the road. He never interfered with anybody, and nobody interfered with him, either. You see, all the locals knew—he was no simple dog. He was ‘one of the boys’ guarding their property.”

  I recalled running my fingers through the fur of the monstrous black dog on the Isle of Man. But as quickly as the memory flashed, I brushed it away.

  Curious to understand what he’d seen, Eddie made more inquiries and was stunned at what he discovered: that black dog had been seen in that very spot for well over seventy years.

  Eddie raised his brows at the two of us. “Dogs don’t live to be seventy years of age. So, I still believe to this day, that what I saw, it was something more than meets the eye.”

  I’d met a man at the Aille River Hostel who’d also encountered a massive, rather eerie black dog, this one when he was walking near an old fort just outside of Doolin. This dog had also “disappeared.” It could be easy to dismiss such stories when you consider that Ireland is still quite rural in areas, and farm dogs are known to wander. But whatever it was these men thought they saw, they truly believed in their hearts that they had witnessed something that just wasn’t “normal.”

  I tuned back into Eddie, who was continuing his train of thought. “At least with the black dog you knew what you were facing, and you could just avoid it.” He lifted a single finger. “But if you ask me, the more frightening stories you hear are of faeries being able to take human shape. The person that is sitting next to you could be one of them. And you’d never even know it.”

  It hit me before I was aware of it—a flash of a familiar face—with a pair of crystal blue eyes that strangely hadn’t seemed . . . human. The man I’d spoken to with his giant black dog, in the middle of a field on the Isle of Man. Just like that, pieces of a puzzle clicked together. I could only describe it as a sense of knowing. I’d asked Ninefh in Glastonbury how the faeries might try to communicate with me, how they might try to prove, if they wished, their existence.

  You’ll experience something only to find out much later what it all meant. When they want you to know.

  Just when you think you’ve forgotten it, or just when you’ve given up trying to figure it out, you�
��re slapped with a verification. I realized there was always a key, a sign. Experience, verification. It was almost as though something was trying to help me believe.

  Like in Glastonbury when I was wondering where to go.

  You’re going to the Isle of Man next, aren’t you?

  Here the key was the black dog. The dog was at the heart of my connection with the man in the field. If it hadn’t been for the dog, I wouldn’t have spoken with him. Now I’d heard two stories in the past twenty-four hours about sightings of black dogs and their connection to the world of faeries. Why hadn’t I encountered stories about them previously? Likewise, I hadn’t read that faeries could shape-shift into human form. Yes, in folklore people “saw” them—the man who came to fetch the midwife, for example, but it was never explicit that faery had become a man. Rather, I figured it was some sort of specter. So why now? Why through Eddie Lenihan?

  I had to hand it to the faeries—their timing was impeccable. It was because Eddie Lenihan was someone I believed. He was a critical thinker. He was a skeptic whose interest in this subject compelled him to collect stories. He was an educator, a folklore expert.

  “Those stories you heard about faeries taking human shape,” I ventured. “Did any of those stories seem . . . authentic to you?”

  “Very much so. I got to know some of the men I interviewed extremely well. The old people weren’t stupid. These faeries they’d encountered were dangerous lads. You messed with them, and you were dead. Simple as that. Or what, carried away? That would be worse. They take your spirit and you’re the living dead then. Whether that was true or not was neither here nor there. The fact is, people believed it to be true, which shows you that the belief in faeries was very strong.”

  The rosy-cheeked man hadn’t seemed dangerous to me. A bit otherworldly, but not dangerous. But maybe I’d proven myself, or maybe it was even my advocate. Who knew? I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.