Faery Tale Read online

  A moment later I was standing face-to-face with Wendy Froud.

  8

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Where I live, I am surrounded by a landscape of wild beauty.

  When I touch a rock or stand under a tree, I am in the presence

  of sentient beings. What do they feel or look like on the

  inside? What they look like are trolls, gnomes, and faeries . . .

  I look at the land, I listen for the story it wants to tell.

  —BRIAN FROUD’S WORLD OF FAERIE

  WENDY was a red-haired beauty with gorgeous blue eyes and a wide, warm smile. As she ushered me inside and called to Brian that I’d arrived, I noticed that everywhere around this airy, enchanting space were little creatures. (Aside from their little terrier, aptly named Elfie, that is.) Wendy’s creature creations, some beauteous, some wizened and gnarled-looking, decked tables here and there. Brian’s paintings hung from the walls, the very paintings I’d seen as simple pages in his books. I heard a shuffling coming down the hallway and a moment later Brian appeared, leaning a bit on a wooden walking stick.

  “I seem to have wrenched my back,” he explained, giving my hand a hearty shake as we moved over to the big kitchen table.

  I thanked him for seeing me, especially given his injury, and as I settled in, taking out my notebook and recorder, I couldn’t help but marvel at the two of them.

  Their clothes were simple, ordinary—but there was something about the way they looked that made them seem somehow timeless. Maybe it was Wendy’s long, wavy red hair, or Brian’s mustache, glasses, and rosy cheeks. But something told me I had stumbled into faery land. A rather complicated woman once asked me, “What are we here for, if not to live our own fairy tales?” Sitting at the table with Brian and Wendy Froud, I knew I’d been led to exactly the right place.

  I told them a little more about the book I was working on, even sharing my bizarre experience in the cabana in Mexico. Then, clicking on the recorder, I settled in with my tea, and began.

  “So,” I said with a smile. “Tell me about the faeries.”

  Brian chuckled. He told me his interest in the faery world had first been piqued by the art of Arthur Rackham. The trees that Rackham painted had faces, and Brian realized quite suddenly that was precisely how he felt about nature. As a little boy he’d spent his free time playing in woods: climbing up trees, crawling through secret places in the undergrowth. Even then, although he didn’t know how to explain it, he believed there was an inner life to trees, that trees had soul, personality.

  “It was when I began to wonder what was going on behind the drawings that I began to reexamine fairy tales. I wanted to understand the reality of faeries. I started doing some exploration, reading other people’s theories on the faery world. At first I thought, I don’t know . . . all this sounds a bit weird.” He laughed. “And at the same time, a lot of it sounded like common sense. It’s very typical of faery, actually. In one way it simplified everything for me, and at the same time, it suddenly made everything very complicated.”

  I asked what he meant.

  “Well, the most basic belief is that there is spirit behind everything. Everything has life and soul. And the complication is, of course, is that if everything has life and soul, then everything is very individual. It meant I had to have a relationship with everything now, in a very precise, individual way. If you start to believe in faeries, it’s a reengagement with the world. It’s a reengagement with the minutia of this world.”

  “Okay, I can understand that,” I replied. “But what do you mean when you say there’s spirit behind everything?”

  Brian sat back in his chair a moment and then explained that the Mystics from The Dark Crystal are derived from the spirits of the trolls he felt on Dartmoor. When Jim Henson had seen Brian’s first painting of a troll, he wanted some of that feeling in the movie. The Mystics were the spirits of rock and earth all around him, which Brian began to recognize when his eyes were opened to the world of faery.

  As for Wendy, faeries were always a part of her life. As a child her mother read her Tolkien and the Chronicles of Narnia and Wendy believed in them so much it never occurred to her that there wasn’t another world. After all, her parents had named her Wendy after the Wendy in Peter Pan.

  “I was devastated when I got old enough to realize that Peter was never going to come and take me away to Never Never Land.” She smiled. “But as I got older, I realized that through my work, I had actually helped to create the world I myself wanted to escape to. Now I’m one of those people that helps other people get there.”

  “Yes, it’s very sad,” Brian agreed. “As children, we’re very involved with the faeries. But there comes a time when adults say, ‘Don’t be silly, dear.’ And so our belief is eroded. When we rediscover our belief, it results in a reawakening. At my readings and signings, people express it to me by saying they feel they are coming home. They tell me they want to go away and write, or make something, or they want to write a letter to somebody. They wanted to reengage with friends, or family, or themselves. It reminded them of connection . . . to everything.”

  “So often people have a creative response to our work,” Wendy added. “And what could be better than that? In my puppet-making workshops, we begin by doing a meditation, where my students see something that comes from their own creative mind. Then we work to take that image and make it three-dimensional. It’s a bit of the faeries, a bit of magic, that they’ve created and can take away with them. And of course, now they can have a relationship with that being.”

  “What do you mean by ‘a relationship’?” I asked. “With a puppet?”

  “It’s beyond what they create,” Brian explained. “Within the meditation, you do actually genuinely touch faery land—you’re in it, whether you realize it or not. So when you come back, and make a figure, it’s imbued with its own personality. After all, the being itself has helped you to make it. It wants to be brought into our very human world. And very often, this is because there is some interaction or relationship that needs to take place between the human that is making the figure and the being that wants to inhabit it.”

  “You are essentially imbuing those figures with spirit. Not unlike,” Wendy mentioned, “the stick figures you mentioned from Mexico. People were creating those figures and bringing them into our physical human world, and in doing so, they were imbuing them with spirit.”

  My mind flicked back to the stories about the Alux. The Mayans created the scarecrow-like figures, gave them offerings, prayed to them, honored them. But really, who was the creator and who was the doll? Perhaps humans become the conduit that the faery world can orchestrate in order to create something . . . or get what they need or want. Wasn’t that what I was doing in putting my entire life on hold to come halfway around the world, searching for answers, searching for this elusive thing called magic . . . on what level was I also doing their bidding?

  “Sure, it’s just . . . sticks and stones or, in our case, material stuff,” Brian continued. “But somehow, it contains the magic. It contains spirit. They’ve essentially gone into faery, and what they’re bringing back . . . well, it’s not just a puppet, not just a toy.”

  “Ha!” I exclaimed. “I wonder if the word hasn’t gotten out . . . the faeries know they can come to Brian to get their portraits painted, or they can come to Wendy to be given a portal into our world.”

  Brian and Wendy seemed to think this was one of the funniest things they’d ever heard. I found I delighted in making them laugh.

  “I suppose there is some truth to that.” Brian chuckled. “In my work, there is typically a central figure . . . and round the edges of the picture come crowding all of these faces. It’s like they all want to be in the painting. They don’t jostle, because the way that I paint, each thing has a relationship to the thing close to it, but they all sort of . . . get in.”

  In Brian Froud’s World of Faerie, Brian wrote he truly felt the beings that visite
d him came to impart a message to the human world. He was, in a way, only their bridge. But what I hadn’t expected was to be so taken in by the book. I mean, sure, it’s beautiful. It’s a large, glossy coffee-table book, filled with shimmering paintings of a fantasy realm. But as I turned, gazing deeply, page after page, something struck me. It was their eyes. Something about their eyes alone grabbed hold of me, and drew me in. There was something about those eyes that was so incredibly individual, so incredibly real, so incredibly wise. It was as though for a moment, in returning their gaze, I was almost able to recapture something long forgotten. I remember thinking, so this is what it might be like to be gazing into the eyes of a real, live faery.

  When I shared my impressions of his work with Brian, he smiled and bowed his head a moment. “It’s important that I talk about this,” he began, his voice soft. “I’m an artist. And I use any trick I can possibly use to make you believe. In reality, there’s no such thing as painting faeries as precisely as they look, because they are changeable, mutable, and often you’re trying to paint impressions. My experience with faeries is that you can feel their presence very strongly, you understand that they’re there, you understand what they look like, but pinning it down to a precision is impossible.”

  He explained that when he painted, he tried to do it intuitively—trying a series of lines until one felt right. Eventually he’d notice something emerge; a face that now had its own personality.

  “I really don’t have an imagination.” He smiled. “I don’t picture things in my head and then paint them. I paint what it feels like. Hopefully I’m getting it right. When you’re looking into the eyes of the faeries I paint, you are, in fact, looking into the soul of faeries, the soul of the world and beyond, into the very cosmos itself. Because faeries, like the cosmos, are infinite. Faeries possess an unimaginable depth.”

  I nodded, taking a sip of the sweet homemade elderflower liquor that Wendy had placed before me.

  “Traditionally in folklore, when you enter into the faery world, you get trapped, lost. You lose sense of time, or you go mad. So my paintings, actually, are very akin to maps. They are flat, they are meant to be read in a linear way, there’s geometry going on underneath, and so the eye travels along a flat plane. When people look at the paintings, it allows them back into faery land on a safe journey. They’re a way to take you where I’ve been, and safely back again.”

  “How do people get lost in that world?” I wondered.

  Brian thought a moment. “Truly I think it’s the faery glamour . . . people think that it’s pretty and lovely, and safe, but it’s not. It’s dangerous. You don’t realize it, but when you’re in a faery place, or you’re meditating, visualizing a journey into the faery realm, it’s bringing you into contact with real things, with reality. What I’m doing is not fantasy, it’s reality. I’m trying to reengage you on a deep level, to what that world is really like. And then, when you ‘come back,’ you’re experiencing the world in a much more open and connective way.”

  Brian believed the trouble is that most of us walk around completely deaf and blind to the world around us. To begin to really engage with the faery world, we had to understand that we are all connected through our very own essence.

  “We all have souls,” he explained. “And for thousands of years the earth itself was seen to have a soul, you know. If you can understand this, that we’re all just made of this ‘soul stuff,’ then you begin to see faeries are just made of soul stuff, the trees are made of soul stuff— you begin to understand how we, as humans, are connected to the faeries.”

  I nodded, waiting for him to continue.

  “Nature is wonderful, beautiful, mysterious,” Brian went on. “But people forget that nature is dangerous. They forget that you have to treat it with respect.You can’t condemn a river, saying it’s bad because it drowns people. But the fact of the matter is that a dangerous river can kill you. It’s the same thing with the faery realm. There are energies out in nature that you just really have to respect.”

  As I asked Brian more about the process of actually seeing a faery, he was able to shed some profound light on the subject.

  “It’s often thought that faeries use our own thought patterns to manifest themselves. For example, when a faery appears to a person, it will typically look quite similar to the creatures we see in storybooks. This is because if you were to see a ball of energy, would you really know it was a faery? No. So they try to ‘speak’ our visual language. We see wings, and flowing dresses, and heads and eyes. The problem is, we think we’re just making it all up.”

  It was a tricky bridge the faeries must maneuver, in using our imaginations. It struck me that in Mexico, I might have succeeded in “seeing” a faery. It just wasn’t a type of faery I found very desirable.

  “Everybody thinks that faeries are on the margins,” Brian continued. “They talk about how faeries live in the ’tween places, between light and dark, et cetera.They’re right, in a sense. Faeries are on the edge of everything. What they don’t understand is that faeries are on the edge of the beginning of everything else that exists.”

  Brian and Wendy assured me that something does change when you begin to acknowledge faeries, and they encouraged me to try it for myself. They might begin to give me gifts, Wendy explained, little things that I could come across that most people might just walk by but that meant something to me. I promised to keep my eyes open.

  “So, given all your experience with the faery world,” I ventured, “do you think there could be a way for me to prove the existence of faeries?”

  “No,” Brian replied. “But on the contrary, perhaps there’s no way to disprove them, either. Just be aware of everything when you’re trying to interact with them. You’ll find it’s often the most seemingly insignificant things that turn out to be the most important. And that’s what fairy tales tell us all the time.”

  “Look.” He softened, as though encouraging me to take heart. “There is no conclusion. Every ending is merely a beginning. Once you step onto the faery path, and you have, there is no way off. You can’t go back, and you can’t step off. Because they won’t let you. So you have to keep going. You just have to stay open.”

  As I headed back down the road toward Chagford, Brian and Wendy waved from the front of the house. Looking back at them against the stone wall, I felt like I could’ve been Mandy Patinkin or Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride, you know, in that classic scene where they get the miracle pill coated in chocolate and set off to rescue Princess Buttercup. Brian and Wendy, standing there side by side, were perfectly suited for a much younger (and far more attractive!) Carol Kane and Billy Crystal as they waved, wishing me luck on my journey.

  “Bye-bye, Signe!” I imagined Wendy calling.

  “Have fun meeting the faeries!” Brian chimed in.

  (Under her breath to Brian.) “Think it’ll work?”

  “Her? It would take a miracle.”

  I smiled to myself. This would take a miracle indeed.

  Back at Cyprian’s Cot, Shelagh served tea and we chatted about the history of the house. To my amazement, she told me it was built in the sixteenth century.

  “Wow. That’s incredible,” I mused. “With so much history under its belt, do you think this place could be haunted?” I asked, half joking.

  “Actually, it’s funny you should ask,” she said. “I’ve been at the house by myself at night, and walked past the living room and smelled the very distinct smell of pipe smoke. With no reason as to why I should be smelling it. But it’s so strong, it’s almost undeniable. And”—she glanced at me—“I’ve had guests tell me they feel like they’re being watched, at night, in your room.”

  Well, that was enough to freak me out.

  “I did have a woman who came to stay here once, who claimed she could see and communicate with spirits. She told me there was definitely a presence in your room, and in the living room.” She must have seen the look on my face, because she quipped, “But sh
e said it really seemed to be a calm, protective presence, more than anything. Not harmful at all. Really.”

  That night I slept with the radio and the bedside lamp on. Faeries, I was getting a little more comfortable with. Faeries, I might be able to take on. Ghosts, no way. Not in this lifetime.

  The next morning I nervously set out to drive the heinously narrow Devon roads to Scorhill where I would meet Jo, the woman I’d met in the pub my first night in Chagford.

  Of course, en route to the stone circle I got into a car accident. Someone came around a bend on the single-lane road going about fifty miles per hour. Realizing in a panic that he wasn’t going to slow down or even acknowledge my presence, I jerked the wheel as far left as I could to avoid the head-on collision—slamming my precious rental directly into a stone wall. He kept on driving. Hands still shaking, I arrived at Jo’s to find her waiting near the road and made myself, for the time being, ignore the fact that the driver’s-side mirror was now dangling from a wire. And on the second day, God created car insurance. Summoning a smile, I let Jo take the lead as we made our way up the lane toward the entrance to Scorhill moor.

  Jo was an energy healer, which meant, like Raven, she worked to heal people’s ailments through the practice of Reiki. She believed that our world was filled with energies that existed beyond normal human perception, and that everyone could interact with this energy, if they wanted to. Jo first became aware of energies—which she broke down further into faeries, stone circle guardians, and the like—by spending time on the moor while she was first studying Reiki. At first she was only aware of energy she could feel coming from rocks, and she noticed that when the wild Dartmoor ponies were pregnant, the expectant mothers would often sit in the ancient circle of stones just before giving birth. Eventually it evolved into what she said was an ability to discern different types of energies—and on Scorhill she believed she often felt the energy of faeries.