Faery Tale Read online

  The experiment in my apartment might not have turned up any magical creatures, but it helped me realize that there was no more denying it—my quest had become an obsession, and a fun one at that. I made up my mind to plan a trip: one grand voyage to the home of the ancient Celts, to see what I could really discover about faeries. My only concern was how on earth I was going to juggle a grand voyage with work. I told myself that somehow I could find a way. Autumn came and the leaves began to turn, and Eric and I began talking about life somewhere else, but what a dream.

  As the days grew shorter and fall decayed into winter, there were days when I felt the city was eating me alive. Every time I was pushed on the train it bothered me a little more. Every time I got stopped on the street by some spa promotion, I wanted my thirty seconds back. Every time a homeless man threw my money back at me because he wanted quarters instead of a stack of nickels, I got closer to saying, “See you later, Manhattan.”

  We each began to reach our own personal city limits. And the more we talked about the future, the more I started daydreaming about taking the time to really write this book. Eric had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina, and we fantasized about a house with a yard by the beach. His younger brother, Ben, still lived there and had a boat.

  The next thing I knew it was December 15, and Eric was down on one knee, with a ridiculously sparkling diamond ring between his fingers.

  “Signe, I want you to be my wife,” he said, his soft brown eyes questioning. “Will you marry me?”

  I’d been hoping, hoping so much, but trying not to expect. And now that it was happening . . . well, I didn’t know I was a crier. Horrible, machine gun-like sounds issued from my mouth, and when I uncovered my eyes I whispered, “Ask me again.”

  I discovered in that moment, when you’re going to be with somebody for the rest of your life, you get unlimited do-overs for embarrassing moments.

  He laughed. “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes!” I squealed.

  That night we decided. So long as at least one of us could keep their job and work remotely, it was time for a change.

  5

  Waking Up in the Kingdom by the Sea

  I was a child and she was a child,

  In this kingdom by the sea . . .

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE, ANNABEL LEE

  A WEEK before our move to Charleston, panic struck.

  I had quit my job to search for faeries.

  It was 11:24 a.m. on a Tuesday, which would typically find me in my office, fluttering frantically between emails and phone calls. Instead I was sitting barefoot in a Cornell T-shirt on the couch, with bile slowly rising in my stomach. What had I done?

  Outside on Broadway I could hear the roar of traffic—my white noise. Looking around the room cluttered with half-packed cardboard boxes I couldn’t help but feel I was being swallowed whole—everything in me and around me was under construction. And for what? I had quit my job and purchased myself a one-way ticket to utter obscurity. I pushed my breakfast away and ran into the bathroom, just in time to kneel and dry-heave into the toilet. I knew I should be welcoming this change with optimistic excitement. But as I leaned my head against the cold tile, I thought, No.

  Periods of transition have never been my forte.

  I sat on the long blue sofa, waiting. My mother looked tired sitting there next to Kirsten, who was swinging her feet against the edge of the couch. Out the big picture window I could see our birch tree, and a gypsy moth caterpillar with long, spiky hairs, winding its way up the trunk. I thought of the tin can filled with gasoline, the way my father would pluck their writhing bodies from the papery bark, the way they would twist and buck in the stinking liquid until they suffocated or drowned. Either way was a terrible way to die.

  Over on the love seat my father’s fingers were interlaced in his lap. He was letting Mom do this, this talk to us. Trial separation . . . I rolled these foreign-sounding words around on my tongue, tasting them.They were bitter and left a fluttering in my stomach. I glanced at him and his face looked drawn and sad, like a quitter. He cleared his throat. “We’re going to fix up the house and sell it. So your mom and I can both get new houses of our own.”

  “We’re going to live apart.” She paused. “And you two will live with both of us . . . you’ll spend time with both of us. What I mean is, you’ll have two homes soon, instead of just one.”

  My gut clenched.

  “But I don’t want to leave,” I whispered.

  “I know, sweetheart,” Mom sighed.

  There was a long moment of silence, as the weight of it settled in.

  “But the most important thing for you both to know is that we love you more than anything.” Her voice caught in her throat.

  “And that will never, never change. And we want you to know that this has nothing to do with you girls—this is not your fault.”

  My fault? I hadn’t considered this.

  Later that week my fourth-grade teacher took me to the school library. Her hand felt cool and papery in mine, and it calmed me. We settled into a corner and she pulled books off the shelf. Inside I looked at pictures of children crying, all of them wanting to know, Is it my fault? My face flushed with anger. They were the ones quitting, pulling my home out from under me, making me leave the place where I knew every leaf and pinecone, every shortcut and mossy stone. Trial separation, divorce. They were the ones arguing all the time.

  But if it didn’t have something to do with us, then why did everyone keep bringing it up? Could it actually be our fault they couldn’t stand to be together anymore? That we were going to leave our house on Woodcrest Avenue forever?

  My NewYork friends couldn’t really understand why we picked Charleston. But despite my anxiety, I knew we’d done the right thing. In moments when I least expected it, like a subversive magic, I could feel it calling. Locals called Charleston the little Kingdom by the Sea, and its majesty was undeniable. Its haunting echo felt ancient, dark, Gothic, and salty like the ocean. Some of our closest friends lived there—they were a built-in welcome wagon full of love. The city had done its part to lure me with palmetto trees, winding creeks, marshy wetlands, and the ghostly footprints history had left on its cobblestone streets. Now Eric and I were nothing more than hermit crabs, pulling our bodies blindly along the sand to the silty waters of the Low-Country’s Atlantic Ocean.

  In my spare time I tried to learn everything I could about faery lore to create a foundation for my journey. I had purchased a round-trip ticket to England and once we got settled down South, I would be leaving for nearly three months. It was in the midst of all this mayhem and nausea that I made a very interesting discovery.

  After reading volume after volume of folklore, I started to notice that all the stories were oddly similar. I’m not talking about fairy tales here, I’m talking about faery tales. And especially in British, Irish, and Scottish folklore, there were only a few variations on a very few themes.

  Exhibit A: The Midwife. In this story, a midwife in a small town is awoken from sleep by a tall, well-dressed stranger, begging her to come help birth his wife’s child. He promises a great reward, and she agrees. Once aboard his finely appointed carriage, she is asked to blindfold herself. Considering the heavy pouch of coins, she complies. They arrive at a great estate, and the woman wonders how such a grand building could be within traveling distance from her home without her knowing it. Inside she finds a beautiful woman in the throes of birthing, and all her concerns are put aside as she focuses on the task at hand. After the child is born, one of two things happen. There is either ointment that she is asked to put on the child’s eyes (and some gets in her eyes as well), or all those present in the room pass around a bowl of water and are asked by the lord and lady to dot each eye—the midwife dots one eye, not two.

  Thanked, paid, and delivered back home, she pretty much forgets about the whole thing, until one day she sees the beautiful woman walking through the crowded market. “Good day, my lady,” she says, rushi
ng over. “How is your beautiful child faring?” The woman seems surprised, but responds in kind, “He is quite well. And you can see I am quite well, too. You see me with both your eyes, do you not?”

  At this, the midwife is confused. Of course she sees her with both eyes! But after a moment, she then realizes truly, she can only see the woman with one eye, her left.

  “No, in actuality, my lady, I can see you only with my left,” she responds, utterly befuddled. The woman leans in even more closely and softly blows on the woman’s face.

  “And now, you shall never see me again.” With that, the woman disappears, and the poor midwife, it turns out, has gone instantly blind in both eyes, never to recover.

  The same basic story is retold in England, the Isle of Man, Scotland, and Ireland, under various guises. Sometimes the victim is a poor woman in need of employment. Sometimes it is a blacksmith, even. But if the gender or type of employment varies, the result is always the same: when a human encountered the faery world, the results were never good. Blindness was a typical fallout from a faery encounter.

  Then there are what I call the “Fall-Down-Dead Series,” in which some poor sap is stupid enough to kick, taunt, or in some way try to trick or swindle a faery. Unfortunately, there is no mincing about in these cases—the person simply drops down dead. Regardless of country or narrative bent, the outcome is, quite predictably, the same. Humans who interact with the world of faery, whether knowingly or unknowingly, do so at great cost.

  Leaving behind the stories of the midwives, faery servants, or black-smiths, we come to the wonderfully woeful world of changelings. It’s interesting to me that although the world of faeries in modern times has been so incredibly extinguished—I mean, who thinks about them, talks about them on a daily basis anymore—and yet your basic man on the street would at least know what a changeling was. Funny, isn’t it? Yes, we’ve all heard about the practice of faeries stealing human babies, and leaving a sickly, or oddly “old”-looking child in its place. On the Isle of Man in the middle of the Irish Sea, mothers never left the nursery at night without placing a pair of iron tongs over the baby’s crib, the fear of baby snatching was so prevalent. Apparently, the ancient word on the street was that faeries abhorred iron. It was the only weapon that worked against them. Growing up outside of Ithaca, we always had a horseshoe over our door for good luck, and it was a tradition I carried on as an adult. But as I did my due diligence in faery research, I learned to my surprise that the origin of horseshoe hanging, too, was connected to the faery world. Horseshoes were made of iron, and in days gone by, hanging one above your door was a signal to the faeries that they weren’t welcome there. In fact, the belief was that if you had a horseshoe hanging above your door, a faery spirit couldn’t even cross your threshold.

  The day of the move came, and with the help of friends we managed to pack the truck in less than three hours. I carried boxes in and out of my familiar old building as though I were moving through water. It felt like some sort of space-time continuum had opened up and that every molecule of air was wavering like a desert mirage, breathing with uncertainty, with possibility. Before we knew it, we were driving away from New York City for the last time.

  It rained our first week in Charleston. The water pelted down like silver bullets, its own type of confederate fury, as though the weather itself had sensed the presence of me, the carpetbagger. The house was empty, but it was ours, and for the first week while Eric worked furiously in his office to catch up from the move, I tried to settle into a rhythm that made me feel worthwhile. Boxes crowded every corner, and I worked on unearthing our belongings while Eric worked on earning us a living. I couldn’t reconcile my place in the world—I had packed away for months saving for my trip into faery land. Now Eric was working and my job was to take care of the house—the unpacking, the estimate on the new roof, the putting together of furniture, the nesting, the arranging, the grocery shopping, the cooking, the cleaning. For that first rainy week, it devoured me. I felt like I had no control: I was there to open boxes and toast sandwiches.

  Then, just as we were beginning to emerge into our new home, I woke up one morning and the sun had emerged as well. I picked up the cat and carried her with me into the sunroom, watched her pupils dilate as she took it all in—the sun shining through the river birch in the backyard, the male cardinal calling from beneath the waxy green leaves of the laurel bushes. I don’t know how long we stood there, eyes darting from one thing to the next, two tame animals regarding the wild ones. But I can tell you one thing. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was on my way to obtaining that elusive feeling of finding home.

  At night I fell asleep to the persistent chirp of cicadas, and I woke to the singing of our backyard birds. Our Charleston friends opened their worlds, and in observing them, I was able to understand some of what my new life meant. I watched Eric’s brother Ben balance barefoot on the edge of his flat-bottomed boat, arm arced smoothly as he cast his shrimp net into the muddy waters of the creek. I watched his girlfriend, Cameron, watering her sunflowers barefoot on Sullivan’s Island. I watched Eric’s intent brown eyes soften as he gazed out at the sea. It was in noticing these little things that I began to feel something stir within me. And I realized that somewhere along the line in life, I’d fallen asleep. Maybe this was why I’d had so little success thus far on my venture into the faery world. I’d been racing through my days with my eyes shut to the world around me, despite my best intentions. As I felt myself come awake, I wondered if I hadn’t discovered the first real step to connecting with enchantment. How can we expect to see and experience the faery kingdom until we have come alive enough to notice and be grateful for the beauty of our own?

  The night before I set off on my trip, we had out first party, both a housewarming and a goodbye, at least for me, for the rest of the summer. My heart was filled nearly to bursting. It felt so incredible to have the house filled with people, to hear the tinkling of glasses and the laughter bubbling from inside our new home, that in that moment, I deeply regretted my decision to leave this unbelievable life that had unfolded here in such a short time. My friend Laura made her way over to me from across the room, her green eyes not missing a thing. As we stood there she let out a little sigh. “You’ll be back,” she assured me, “but you know you’ve got to do this.You’re embarking on an incredible adventure! And besides”—she leaned in with a smile—“if you’re right about all this, you’ve got faeries waiting on you.”

  The next morning, Laura’s words echoed in my head as I sat in the dim cabin lighting, the huge plane hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean.

  In taking stock, I had come to a few realizations, if not rather belatedly:1. I was unemployed. Yeah, I know, that was not news. But now, as the plane moved farther and farther from my creature comforts, the lack of financial inflow was seeming a bit more . . . realistic.

  2. I was currently unemployed because I felt the need to fly to England in the hope of encountering invisible creatures of a nonhuman ilk.

  3. Because encountering said invisible creatures seemed to require a single-mindedness and interior focus that I did not possess in my daily life, I had left an incredibly handsome and sexy fiancé behind.

  It all seemed too immense. When the plane landed in London, my journey would truly begin. And I’d discovered an eerie coincidence. W. Y. Evans-Wentz had made this very journey—to many of the same places I hoped to visit—exactly one hundred years before. It was the summer of 1909 when Evans-Wentz began his exploration into the world of faeries, and something about the timing of it all sent a shiver down my spine. Either faeries were all around us, or they weren’t. Either they existed, or they didn’t. It was time for me to find out.

  ENGLAND

  6

  An Enchanting Encounter in Hampstead Heath

  As we humans moved away from our close connection to the earth, we lost our link with the wild folk. We forgot how to see them, how to contact them, and how to treat them.
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  —ANNA FRANKLIN, WORKING WITH FAIRIES

  WELCOME to Hampstead Heath: you are here.”

  When you’re walking in the woods in the United Kingdom, you must be careful not to get “pixie led.” The pixies, who are apparently a terribly tricksy bunch who delight in toying with mortals, will jumble your head, leading you this way and that, until you end up exactly where they want you to be—and exactly where you don’t want to be. It seemed that, for reasons yet unknown, I was meant to be in the park, for the park certainly found me—despite my very best efforts. I turned and headed into the Heath, my feet following a thin dirt trail until the path exploded into a field of knee-high Queen Anne’s lace and long, lush green grasses blowing softly in the breeze. It nearly took my breath away. But my fear of the unknown was palpable. Where did the path lead? If I got this lost attempting to follow simple directions, how on earth would I find my way back through an eight-hundred-acre park?

  Breathing in the sweet smell, I found my way to a wooden bench under the shade of some tall trees at the edge of the field. I dug out my pen and a small notebook and began to write. I hadn’t been writing more than a few minutes when I heard a snuffling sound coming up the path toward me and turned to find a floppy-eared black-and-white spaniel bounding toward me.

  “Hi, puppy!” I crooned, massaging his velvety face in my hands. This dog belonged on calendars. I smiled at the woman following him.

  “I love your dog,” I murmured, as he jumped onto the bench next to me and proceeded to crawl into my lap.

  “Oh, Harry, no!”

  “It’s okay, I don’t mind,” I reassured her. She looked to be in her late forties with dark brown hair and surprisingly warm brown eyes.