Faery Tale Read online

  The bus ride to the Land of My People was misery. By the time I reached Syracuse it was after midnight and my shoulder felt damp from my bus neighbor’s drool. And of course it was raining. Cold, Land of My People rain. There are a few places in Syracuse you really don’t want to be after midnight, and the bus depot is most certainly one of them. A presumably homeless man with his hand down his pants ogled me as I disembarked, and I felt his stare boring into the back of my head. Luckily, I quickly spotted Stan’s hulky six-four frame in his battered orange Jeep.

  “Hey, big cousin!” I said, relieved, as I hoisted myself into the Jeep and leaned over to give him a peck. “You look great. Did you lose some weight?”

  “Suzi told me if I lost fifty pounds she would buy me a hot tub.”

  “God, your life is so hard.”

  “Hey, little cousin . . .” He grinned, looking me over. “You tired, or you think you can stay awake for a glass of wine?”

  “I’m really tired. And I was counting on staying awake for a glass of wine.”

  “Perfect!” He patted me fondly on the shoulder.

  The next morning was gorgeous and sunny as we took I-81 from Syracuse to Cortland. If you’re just passing through, I guess you’d never imagine what it must have looked like four hundred years ago, before the first white people came, building houses that would grow into the squat towers of the city of Syracuse.This was the cradle of the ancient Iroquois Confederacy, the Six Nations. I knew all the tribes that came together to form the Confederacy, and my father would challenge us to list them on our fingers—Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk . . .Tuscarora. Thanks to my father, these woods were alive to me.

  As we pulled up to faery artist Diana McClure’s home, I noticed the houses were sprawling, with manicured lawns and picturesque views. I felt terribly judgmental, but somehow wealth and faery fascination hadn’t seemed like an expected marriage to me. Grabbing my notebook, I turned to my partner.

  “So, Stan, what did I say?”

  “No talking, unless you give me the nod.”

  I waited, eyebrows raised expectantly.

  “And no interrupting.”

  “And?”

  He looked down at his sneakers.

  “No making fun,” he allowed, peering up at me.

  “Good.”

  The Diana McClure who greeted us looked like she’d stepped from the pages of a Lands’ End catalog—khaki pants, her hair softly graying, her light eyes shyly avoiding mine. It struck me that I was hoping she’d be . . . well . . . weirder.

  “Thanks so much for having us,” I began.

  “Oh, well, I saw Stan’s toothpick buildings online—and those are pretty darn amazing-looking!”

  So there it was: my toothpicking cousin was my in.

  Stan laughed, clearly tickled, and our carefully agreed-upon rules went swiftly out the window as he and Diana dove into an in-depth conversation about the virtues of toothpicking, the value of an excellent glue gun, and being someone who builds something in your basement. This gave me a moment to study the tableau that awaited our attention. In front of me an entire faery village was spread across the shiny dining-room table. It was like a Tolkien novel in miniature—little rounded stucco buildings six to eight inches high, painted in muted colors of green, pink, and violet, with tree bark or ceramic roofs. Each house was its own kind of child’s wonderland, decorated with rough-hewn mica, quartz, agate, seeds, mushrooms, and miniature pinecones. On some of them, the tiny doors pushed open and you could see one or two items had been placed inside—a cloth carpet, a miniature wooden bed. It was simply amazing.

  Peering over my shoulder, Stan pushed open one of the doors.

  “Hey! There’s a little flat-screen TV in there!” he exclaimed.

  “Ha-ha-ha!” I laughed, shooting him a dirty look.

  As we talked, I got the sense that the faery house business was booming. But I wondered if the people buying them were believers, or chintz collectors, like the people who collect shot glasses or spend their life savings on a mission to possess every known variety of Beanie Baby.

  “So, Diana,” I began, “do you think the people buying your homes believe that faeries really do exist?”

  She considered this a moment. “Yes, I think so. I mean, if you buy a birdhouse, you’re inviting the birds to come. It’s the same thing with the faeries: if you buy a faery house, you’re inviting the faeries to come.”

  “And what about you? Do you believe faeries are real?”

  She avoided my eyes a moment, embarrassed. “I mean, I believe that all sorts of stuff we’re not tuning in to exists. People always want to know where artists draw our inspiration. And I guess in this case, I’m going to have to blame it on the faeries. I think these houses incorporate their ideas as much as mine. I was a very limited artist before I began working on these. I’d worked with clay to produce functional pots, ones that would sell. These days when I’m working, the ideas just come. More ideas than I can really deal with!”

  So it seemed that for Diana, the faery world was her muse. But I wondered, what inspired her—the idea of faeries, or the faeries themselves ? As we trooped down the stairs Diana told me that she had never once heard little voices whispering in her ear. She’d never even seen a faery. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  We spent the better part of an hour touring her basement workshop where she showed us drawers upon drawers of semiprecious gem-stones meticulously organized by color and type. Plastic organizers filled with polyurethane-glazed mushrooms, pinecones, tree bark, and silk flowers stood stacked and ready for action.

  Diana had mentioned over the phone that there was a psychic medium in Syracuse who I should really speak with while I was in town, a woman who, according to Diana, had an excellent rapport with the faery realm: Coleen Shaughnessy. Since I’d scheduled a meeting with Coleen right after my interview with Diana, time was running short. But as we said our goodbyes, I realized I had one final question to ask her.

  “Sorry, Diana, I’m just wondering. Have you noticed anything in your life . . . change since you started working on these homes? You know, in trying to do something for the faeries?”

  She considered this carefully. “Well, I guess it depends on what you believe. I mean, I’m not so good at the sales, and so I kept saying, ‘Bring people to me that are interested in doing something with these.’ And then . . . people came.” Her gray eyes looked at me meaningfully. Did she mean me?

  As we pulled away from the drive with a wave, I couldn’t help but smile. I was inclined to disagree with Diana about not being so good with “the sales.” Her houses start at thirty dollars apiece. She’d sold me two for eighty.

  Coleen Shaughnessy looked like Joan of Arc.

  “It’s no wonder you’re doing what you’re doing!” she exclaimed, as she ushered me into her home. “You have so many little faery energies all around you!”

  “Thank you!” I said, thankful I’d insisted Stan stay in the car for this one.

  As I sat at her dining-room table I studied her small, roundish glasses and the etched lines around her eyes that suggested a lifetime of easy laughter. It was the bowl haircut that reminded me of the French saint. That, and the fact that Joan of Arc was known for her conversations with faeries.

  At the mention of faeries, Coleen laughed girlishly, tossing her hands up in delight.

  “I love the faeries!” she exclaimed. “I’ve known they existed ever since I was a child. At my family’s lake house I could feel an energy between the water and the shore. It wasn’t until later that I learned places like that—between the water and the land—are called ’tween places.”

  “’Tween places?” I asked.

  “Yes. ’Tween places occur where two things overlap and become, for a moment, neither one thing nor the other,” she explained. “Faeries love anything ’tween. There are ’tween times, too—between night and day, between morning and afternoon.”

  I nodded eagerly, waiting for Col
een to continue.

  “As a little girl, I met flower faery friends, and there were little brownies that helped me clean. And then, of course, downstairs in the cellar, there were the dark elves under the stairs.”

  Oh, yes, of course. Dark elves. Who hasn’t heard of them?

  My look of fear must have betrayed me because, across the table, Coleen chuckled.

  “No, no, don’t worry, dark elves aren’t bad,” she reassured me. “But their eyes, their eyes do scare me.”

  “Why?” I asked hesitantly. “What do their eyes look like?”

  She leaned in toward me. “When I saw them they were . . . bright. But the rest of them is inky black. And if they stepped out from the shadows they would be dressed from head to toe in dark clothing.” I pictured an evil Legolas from The Lord of the Rings, jumping out from behind the washing machine. It was terrifying.

  “But why are they there? I mean, why would they gravitate toward humans in a house? Wouldn’t they rather be outdoors?”

  “They don’t gravitate toward houses. They gravitate toward dark spaces. There are dark elves outside, too. But in homes, we’re the ones who stumble into their space.”

  She stopped and looked at me. “You could encounter them, too, you know! You’ve probably felt them, especially with your vibration. When you go down into the cellar and you think, ‘Oohh.’” With a mock shiver she added, “‘It feels like there’s something down here.’”

  Right. I wouldn’t be trying to connect with dark elves anytime soon. Despite my new fear of dark elves (add that to the list), Coleen explained that making gestures of friendship is very important in the faery kingdom. Buying something like a faery house, for example, would be a good way to let them know you know they’re there. Putting honey out, creating a little space for them in each room, talking to them, buying them shiny things—these were all good ways to open the lines of communication. As she described the various methods for building a relationship with the faery realm, it began to seem like an awful lot of work to me. They sounded just like . . . women.

  “So is creating a bond with the faery world ultimately beneficial to people?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she assured me. “Oh, the faeries can do many things. But unlike your angels and guides, the faery realm does not have to help you a bit if they don’t want to, okay?” Her voice was stern.

  “Okay . . .”

  “So the fact that you already have a bunch in your aura, that told me right off the bat, ‘Oh, okay, they already like her.’ Believe me, that’s a very good thing.”

  I found I was smiling at the thought that the faeries might like me, and were already hanging around me. Could it be true? And if it was, were they around all the time? Because that would be a little pervy.

  “Some people have to earn their trust over and over again,” Coleen continued. “But when they like you from the start, they can give you all kinds of gifts—health, wealth, prosperity, gifts of prophecy, clairvoyance, all those kinds of things. I’m very blessed. I get faery gifts all the time.”

  “So when you see a faery, what does it look like exactly?”

  Coleen’s face lit up. “Some of the time, I’ll just see little lights. But sometimes, within the lights, I’ll see their actual forms. There are also a number of things they can shape-shift into. They can become a dragonfly, a butterfly, a bird, or even a larger animal.You can tell the difference between a faery, or say, just a normal butterfly, because they’ll do something unusual, out of character. You’ll have it on your finger and try to fluff it off, and it’ll hang on! And you go like this”—she shook her hand—“and he’s still hanging on.”

  Thinking back to unusual encounters with nature in Manhattan, the only creatures I’d had regular contact with were cockroaches, and we met as mortal enemies engaged in combat. I refused to believe—no matter how fond of the natural world faeries were—that they would deign to shape-shift into the form of a New York City roach.

  “So . . . sometimes faeries look like fireflies?” I interrupted.

  “No,” she insisted. “People always try to tell me that’s what I’m seeing. But there is absolutely no mistaking it. It’s bigger than a firefly or lightning bug, with a totally different color of light. And lightning bugs don’t have little forms inside them at times. I mean, hello?”

  I asked Coleen how someone like me might be able to see a faery, and she explained that anybody could learn to see beyond our physical world, see the faeries, if they wanted.

  “If you develop a good relationship with the faeries—if they trust you and know you’re an open person—you can’t not connect,” she explained. “But you must be a person pure of heart—a good, loving, kind heart. You must respect the earth and the faery realm, or they won’t want anything to do with you.” Thinking for a moment, she seemed to grow solemn and reached over to touch my hand.

  “Signe, I want to tell you something.”

  “Of course.”

  “What you’re attempting,” she began, “this is a very important time to be doing it. Right now, the faeries are trying to reestablish contact, to get more information flowing back and forth between the human species and their world. If we work together, we can help to heal the planet. The planet is sick now, in a lot of ways. If we are going to survive, if the planet is going to survive, it needs a lot of healing. The faeries can help us to do that.”

  I felt as though I had been socked in the gut, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Had my search for faeries begun with me turning off the radio when I’d had enough? Or was I really somehow responding to a larger call to action? Was I helping the faeries, or was it the other way around?

  I snuck a peek at my watch and realized that Stan had been waiting in the Jeep for almost two hours. Yikes. Giving Coleen a hug goodbye, I made my way down the steps and opened the door to climb in.

  “Sorry for the wait, big cousin, but I’m telling you—you would not have been able to handle it. You would have definitely had to crack a joke.”

  “Probably, but man. It would’ve been fun.”

  “Not for Coleen and me.” I cleared my throat.

  “Well, Siggie, I’m just glad you made it out in one piece,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I was just hoping you weren’t tied up somewhere in the basement. A captive of dark elves or something.”

  So even Stan knew about the dark elves?

  I looked at him, then burst out laughing.

  The bus ride back to New York City was long and quiet, with too much time to remember. I’d grown up breathing the air here, the particles of water that evaporated off the grass, the leaves of the trees. These hills were in me, my father, my mother, in Kirsten. I looked out the window past the fields and into the woods, trying to penetrate their greenness, somehow transport myself there from the confines of the mothballscented bus seat. Under that wild canopy of green, with my feet planted on a winding trail or on the mossy carpet at the base of a rushing stream, I would be once more where the Indians walked.

  As the Port Authority came into view, I wondered: What had happened to the girl within me, the one who was happy to take a walk in the woods, pretending to be an Iroquois hunter with her father? God, I missed those days. Coleen had told me I had faeries in my aura. If I did, I certainly wasn’t deserving. Going back upstate made me realize that somewhere in my life in Manhattan I had become distracted by all the wrong things—the money, the clothes, the success, the shoes, the handbags . . . what had happened to the little girl who loved a good story and an apple on a log in the woods with her father? Every time I reached out and took a step toward the faery world, I felt closer to that little girl. With each small peek into the faery realm I felt as though I were somehow reclaiming a small piece of myself.

  But coming back to Manhattan with faery dust between my toes came with its own price tag. The horns blared louder, the neon lights looked more garish, and I so missed seeing the great swaths of trees. Sighing, I tugged my duffel bag out from underneath the bus
and headed out to the crowded New York City streets to fight my way into a cab.

  4

  A Faery Special Invitation

  To see a faery one must learn to “see” with the heart and mind as well as with the eyes.

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

  I AWOKE every morning to the sound of birds. Granted, they were pigeons on the fire escape battling over a discarded Frito Lay bag, but as far as I was concerned, they were bluebirds and I was a red-haired Cinderella, awakening in the soft light of dawn to begin the morning’s duties. In April, Eric and I had packed up our respective apartments and moved in together to a newly renovated one bedroom on the seventh floor of my building. Our lives found a new energy: the house was filled with friends, great food, and music to fit every mood from Eric’s collection of one billion CDs. We were madly and utterly in love.

  My weekend trip upstate had been informative but the travel had been draining, and I soon realized that if Raven had seen faeries in my old apartment, perhaps it was possible to contact them from the comfort of my very own home.

  There are, surprisingly, several books that teach everyday people how to contact, invite, and otherwise get in touch with the faery kingdom. Sadly, none of these books are written for people who live in New York City.

  “Go into the forest at sunrise and gather the first dew from each blackberry bush that you see . . .”

  Nope.

  “You will need a small chime and a striker.”

  You want how much for that thing?

  And then there was my all-time favorite: “On the first day after a full moon, bury six white rose petals under an apple tree.”

  Sure, I knew where to find white rose petals. But the last time I saw an apple tree in Central Park was . . . never. Other books included spells that called for such commonplace household items as red-tailed hawk feathers, six four-leaf clovers, hollyhock, or fresh—not bottled—spring water.