Faery Tale Read online

  “Here you go, guys,” he said in flawless English.

  Cheri and I exchanged a subtle look of surprise.

  Not only was our bartender fluent in English but he sounded like a Californian surfer. His name was Rally, we learned over lunch, and he was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, but grew up in Santa Barbara. Now he was back in Mexico working the bar at the Diamante K while his girlfriend worked nights as an exotic dancer in a nearby city.

  Three beers and a shot of tequila later, I decided to let Rally in on the real purpose of my visit to the Diamante K hotel. He nearly tripped over himself behind the bar.

  “What?!” he exclaimed. “You heard about them? That is some crazy shit!” Recovering, he lowered his voice a bit and leaned in, excited.

  “All right, here’s the thing about them, the Alux.”

  I noticed that he called them simply “Aloosh”—rather than “Los Alooshus.” A nickname for a faery?

  “They’re supposedly like trolls,” he explained. “They’re little, hairy, kinda ugly, and they’re like . . . this tall.” He raised his hand to the height of a three-year-old child.

  “Have you ever seen one?” asked Cheri.

  “Uh, I think so. See, that’s the thing. They’re . . . spirits.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied, getting more animated. “Some of them are nice, some are mean. But it all depends on you . . . and your vibe. If you have a good vibe, while you sleep, they’ll sleep with you. But if you have a bad vibe, while you sleep, they’ll do really bad things to you. Especially the female Aluxes.” This was the first I’d heard about gender. The Mexicans believed there were male and female Alux?

  “If you’re a guy,” Rally explained, “the females kind of . . . like you. They’ll start doing mean things to you so you’ll pay attention to them. But some of them, they seem to get jealous or something. If you have a girlfriend, or if you don’t pay attention to them, you know, they might kill you.”

  “Kill you?!” Cheri and I exclaimed in unison.

  “Yeah. But you won’t believe it until you hear it from everybody else. There have been a few times where I thought I’d seen one, but I wasn’t sure. I’d tell people here, and they’d be like, yeah, they’re Aluxes.”

  “So,” I asked, “do you think they might have some special tie to the Mayans?”

  Rally leaned back on the counter thoughtfully. “Well, the Mayan people used to build little Aluxes out of rocks, sticks, whatever they could find. You understand? They were created to be like little scare-crows. It was just to scare off animals from their crops at first. But then, something happened: They started coming alive. They got little spirits.

  “Out there in the Yucatán jungles, you’ll still find them, little wooden or rock Aluxes, with their little hair. They say if you move one, the next day you’ll see it standing over there,” he said, gesturing out to the beach. “And then the next day you’ll see it in a different position over there. They come out at night and start moving around. If they see people, they freeze, they stay still. If you steal one from the jungles out there, or if you find one, you have to take care of it. Put out a little water, a little tequila, and cigarettes, whatever . . . to please them. But you better be careful—if you stop paying attention to them, or if you start caring for someone or something else, they’ll do bad things to that person, or animal.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “So they’re jealous little creatures, apparently?”

  “Yeah, they’re incredibly jealous.” Rally looked at me for a moment, rather intently.

  “That’s so interesting, the whole idea that people can obtain them,” I mused, sipping my beer. “Our tour guide was saying people could buy them. I don’t get that. What are you buying? Are you buying a pile of rocks that you then put in your yard, and that would turn into an Alux? Like some sort of grow-your-own-faery Chia Pet? I mean, what are they selling really, to someone who doesn’t even believe in it?”

  Rally seemed disappointed in me.

  “If you were in the right place you could see for yourself. Certain towns, they sell these little troll dolls made out of wood. The shop-keeper will tell you, you buy it, you better give it whatever it wants. Every single day. Because there’s a spirit attached to that thing.”

  I told Rally that I’d heard the Diamante K was absolutely crawling with Aluxes. He hadn’t seen any at the hotel himself, but he told me other staff members reported seeing them all the time.

  “Out there by that last torch, they say they see them out there. They like to kick it around trees and stuff, and there’s a little bit of jungle around here, so I’d imagine they come around. Little kids see them. They sometimes go play with them. But some of them, I tell you, they’re not so nice. So they’ll start hitting the little kids. You see the kids just wandering off and talking to no one . . . that’s when you can tell they’re talking to an Alux.”

  “So . . . do you believe that the Alux are real?” I asked directly. He squirmed in his seat uncomfortably and gave a little laugh.

  “Uhhh . . . well, I’ve heard some crazy stuff. There’s this good friend of mine, he’s sort of a Rasta guy. He was digging a garden in his yard when he came across this little Alux, you know, the little wooden figure. It had been buried in the ground. He knew what it was, and he was psyched. He was like, ‘I’m gonna keep this thing!’ So he took it home and he took real good care of it. But he had this dog that he loved, though, and as soon as he brought the Alux home, he noticed that the dog started barking at night. Pretty soon, the dog started showing up with little cuts all over it in the mornings. He couldn’t understand why. He wasn’t letting the dog out or anything, so it didn’t make sense.”

  Our beers were empty, and Rally reached swiftly into the fridge to grab us two more. “Pretty soon,” he continued, “my friend figures out that there’s no other way these little cuts could be showing up on his dog, and he gets so angry that the Alux might be hurting his dog that he kicks it across the room and starts cursing it out.”

  Rally paused for effect.

  “He woke up the next morning and found his dog dead. It was hanging from the rafters.”

  “No way!” I whispered. The look of horror on my face was enough to lighten the mood, and Cheri and Rally both burst out laughing. “Yeah, they’re scary,” he agreed. “I tripped out!”

  Since we were on the subject of Rally tripping out, I asked him to tell me about the time he saw an Alux. He nudged his chair in a little closer, looking slightly embarrassed.

  “Well, here’s what happened: I had just moved to a place out here in Tulum, just a little hut in the jungle. My neighbors had three dogs, and all of a sudden they would just bark and bark and bark. At nothing! Eventually, the neighbors told me, ‘Seems like we might have an Alux in the backyard.’

  “So one night, the dogs woke me up with their barking. I looked outside my door, and there was a little shadow right there. Some black thing standing in the doorway, looking at me. And then it just ran off.”

  He paused again for effect.

  “I went back to sleep, but then I heard the barking outside again, and I started yelling at the Alux, like ‘Get the hell out of here!’ I went back to sleep, but the next thing I knew, I felt this, like, searing pain on my back—something was burning me! I look, and there’s my lighter, lying there, right underneath my hammock.”

  The sun was setting and we knew we had to get back, but I couldn’t help feeling a sense of foreboding about returning to my cabana. As we said our goodbyes, I saw two guys who looked like maintenance men carrying large metal pails through the restaurant. The billowy smoke was heavy with a spicy, earthy scent.

  “What are they doing?” I asked.

  “That’s copal,” Rally answered. “It’s a special kind of incense. They burn it every day, about this time, for the Alux. It’s like a tribute.”

  It was nearly dark as we made our way back up the sandy path, passing statues of Mayan demigods with
their angry stone faces flashing at us in the torchlight. Back at Casa Violeta, Raven was concerned when I told her about the Rasta man and the bizarre death of his dog.

  “Sigs, I really think you should sage your room before you go to sleep tonight. Light some sage and ask that the space be protected and cleared out. These things don’t sound very nice, and I really don’t think you want them hanging around.”

  I tried to laugh off my sense of unease . . . but I went straight to my room and burned the sage. As the pungent scent saturated every nook and cranny of my cabana, I felt my worry begin to subside. Glancing around at my newly sanctified abode, I thought, This house is clear! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, little buddy.

  Hours later, the sound of shattering glass shocked me awake. I bolted upright in bed, fumbling for the penlight on my key chain. Looking around in confusion, I saw that the glass candle, which I had blown out before falling asleep, had shattered into a hundred glittering pieces on the floor. Outside the cabana, the ocean wind was roaring. It must have somehow blown the candle clear across the nightstand. But it was so heavy, and it was right next to me—not near the edge. I suddenly felt the blood coursing harder through my veins. It was the wind, it was the wind, it was the wind, I told myself.

  But, Signe, what if it wasn’t the wind?

  Don’t be ridiculous! Listen to how windy it is outside . . .

  What if it was the little—

  La-la-la . . . I can’t hear you . . .

  —Troll-like creature . . .

  La-laaaa-laaaaaa!

  —with his dark, beady eyes, and his bizarre leathery skin and wild, matted hair—

  Fabulous. Now my heart was racing. I was completely and hopelessly awake.

  I searched the darkness for any movement, any shadow. But everything had gone eerily still. Suddenly, in a flash I saw the tanned, weathered face from the night before, now red with anger, lurch toward me in my head. But tonight, it pissed me off more than it frightened me.

  I’m sorry, I told him, But I won’t be talking to you. The image flashed at me with a renewed and more frightening veracity.

  You must not have understood me. I am going to bed. And you are going to leave me alone!

  (And I have completely lost my mind!)

  I saw him one more time, and then he was gone.

  I lay awake trying to make sense of my experience. I knew I had a vivid imagination, and that gave me pause. I read somewhere that when it comes to the human brain, we only truly understand how approximately six percent of it operates. To me, that means it’s highly probable that the other ninety-four percent can be pretty darn tricky when it wants to be. But still, there was something so undeniably clear about that image I had seen. It was so incredibly vivid, and I had felt this big wave of anger, as though someone was standing there, flaming mad.

  Regardless of whether there was any truth behind the stories I’d heard, or whether my ninety-four percent was playing some very frightening trick on me, after the night I’d just had, I could no longer play the part of the dispassionate observer. This trip to Mexico, my first real exploration into the world of faeries, had cemented something for me. I now felt that there could be something else out there, something unseen. And I wasn’t satisfied.

  I wanted to experience more.

  3

  Finding Faeries in Upstate New York

  Every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies,” there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

  —JAMES MATTHEW BARRY, PETER PAN

  AT the sound of the bell, I pushed my way downstairs and burst through the red double doors to find my dad parked out front in the rusted old Volvo.

  “Hey, puppy! How was school?” He reached over to give my knee a solid pat as I buckled myself into the front seat. On Wednesdays, Dad had to teach, and I always loved the look of him in his beige suit, crisp white shirt, and paisley tie.

  He flicked the volume back up on NPR, the theme song blasting. “And now, this is the BBC World Service with News Hour . . .”

  “Siggie, I thought we’d take a walk, head over to Potter’s Falls.” He shifted into gear as we pulled away from the curb.

  My heart sank. “Dad, if we go to Potter’s Falls, will we have to walk all the way down to the falls?”

  I looked at my brand-new, bright red Converse sneakers and silently cursed Potter’s Falls for even existing, with its water-slogged and muddy trails that delighted in destroying all pretty red shoes that dared tread upon them.

  “What’s the point of going to Potter’s Falls if we don’t see the falls, Signifer? We’d be missing—”

  “—the muddy part,” I mumbled.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he said absentmindedly, tuned in to the broadcast now.

  We drove out Route 79, listening to the radio as Dad tapped his finger on the console. The autumn sky was vibrant blue and shocks of red maple and burnt yellow oak leaves flashed past the dusty window until we turned into the gravel pull-off on the side of the road.

  Despite my initial reluctance, the rocky, pine-shrouded path, with its shadowy greenness, always marked the beginning of some of my favorite, most magical woods. I shut the door with a heavy clunk and zipped up my jacket to my chin. The sun was still streaming, so while it was cold to the nose, it was still deliciously warm in the shafts of bright sunshine.

  “Come on, schlomo. Let’s get there before the sun goes down,” Dad kidded, slinging his weathered blue JanSport over one shoulder.

  As we moved down the hill, the tall pines on either side eased into a forest of maple, birch, and hickory. We dragged our feet, delighting in the crashing, swooshing noises it made as we shuffled through the bright carpet of fallen leaves. I caught up with him, slipping my hand into his, and he turned to me, his dark, crinkled eyes sparkling.

  “You know, the Iroquois used to walk these same trails,” he began, his deep voice hushed. “These were their hunting grounds. Close to water. Here they had everything they needed—deer, mushrooms, wild berries. We don’t know half the edible things in this forest.”

  I could almost see the little girls wearing deerskin as they moved from bush to bush, collecting berries in a hand-stitched sack, and the men, creeping along the rim trail, bows taut, taking aim at a doe bent at the water’s edge, peacefully drinking from the rushing stream.

  “When they would hunt, or when they were patrolling in times of danger, they would slip on their hand-sewn moccasins, made out of the softest deerskin. And their feet would move over the ground like they were walking on a cloud of silence. They could move through this forest like a ghost.”

  “Whoa!” I whispered back.

  Dad paused to look at me. “Do you think that you could do it, Signe, if your life depended on it? Do you think you could stalk deer in these woods like an Iroquois maiden?”

  “Yes,” I said, seriously. “I think I could.”

  He stood still then, a conspiring smile playing at his lips. The forest around us was silent except for the occasional twitter of a bird lodged high in the trees.

  “First, you’d have to listen,” he said. I stood stock-still, drinking in the quiet, the soft rush of the wind through the trees.

  “Now,” he said in a hushed voice. “Let’s see if we can walk like an Indian.”

  “You’re going to Cortland?” My mother chuckled on the other end of the line.

  “Yes! Why is that so funny?”

  “Honey, Cortland is the land God forgot.” She paused a moment. “Well, God and Smith Corona.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Back when people still used typewriters, Smith Corona had a huge plant in Cortland, New York, only thirty minutes from Ithaca, where I’d grown up. Schools thrived and business boomed. But today Cortland is just another exit off the interstate, with a few car dealerships, fast-food joints, Blockbuster video stores, and a classic greasy spoon called Doug’s Fish Fry.

  Oh, yes: and a lady who makes faery houses in her basement.

  Some months b
ack, I’d spotted the odd little houses at a crafts store in Ithaca, and with some effort I’d managed to track down their creator who’d agreed to meet to answer a few questions.

  “Let us never forget, Mom. Cortland is the Land of Our People!”

  “Right.” She laughed. “You have fun. And tell your cousin Stan I said hi.”

  Upstate New York was a wonderful excuse to spend time with Stan, who is eleven years my elder. He was there when our dad died, tirelessly helping Kirsten and me move our father’s furniture into storage. He cleaned the layers of dirt, dust, and cobwebs that had accumulated in the last few years of my father’s neglect, taking bag after bag of spoiled food from the fridge to the dump. He was one of the first people I called with news, and he seemed to understand me better than I understood myself. When I was growing up, Stan had his own TV segment on the Rochester Morning News called “Hey, Stan!” which made him a local celebrity. He would do things on camera like stay overnight in haunted places, impersonate a fifth-grader for a day, or get his back waxed. People loved him and were constantly coming up to him saying, “Hey, Stan! Get it?! ‘Hey, Stan’?!”

  No wonder he left.

  Now he was married to a beautiful podiatrist named Suzi, and he made his living gluing together toothpick structures in his basement. He’d sold his latest creation, “Toothpick City,” to an architectural museum in Majorca for a good heap of money. And now he’d agreed to take the weekend off from “Toothpick City II: Temples and Towers” to chauffeur me around upstate New York on this next step of my investigation into the world of faery.