Faery Tale (5 page)

I shone my penlight in the doorway, but there was nothing there. Still, every receptor in my body tingled. I could
feel
something. I looked away for a moment. When I looked back,
it
was there: a short, long-haired, troll-like man, with wild, brown, matted hair. His eyes were ovals of chocolate brown, his face was leathery and creased with wrinkles. His shoulders were hunched forward, his arms straight down at his sides, his chin thrust out, and he was staring at me.

I blinked hard. He was gone. Or had I even seen him in the first place? I weighed my options. I could grab my ladies' razor and face it head-on, just in case it had somehow scurried off into my bedroom. I could shatter the quiet Mexican night and yell for Karla or Raven, which was pretty tempting. Or I could realize that it was just my overactive imagination playing tricks on me. Bolstered by common sense, I washed my hands and, with a tight grip on my penlight, ran quickly back to bed, plunging my feet under the covers and tucking the mosquito netting tight under the mattress.

But no sooner had I closed my eyes than I saw it again. This time it was standing just inches from my face on the other side of the mosquito netting, staring. My eyes shot open. Nothing there. I closed my eyes, this time squeezing them tightly. Again, the image popped back into my head.
Okay, I can handle this.
I don't know what possessed me, but I knew that if I was serious about getting to the bottom of this question about faeries, I had better, imagination or not, try to talk to it.

Okay, little guy . . .
I began.
Uh, I'm really glad that you're here! But . . . you know what? Tonight just isn't the best for me. 'Cause, God! I am so tired! And right now, I just really need to sleep. So . . . if you could just please leave me alone so I could go back to sleep, that would be great.
Then I added for good measure,
But, if you want to come back tomorrow, we can talk then, okay?
Okay. Now there was nothing to do but pull the covers over my head and wait for the sun to rise. I was certainly too shaken up to even fantasize about falling back asleep.

 

I did my best to push the events of the previous night from my mind as Karla and I discussed my search over a bowl of papaya the next morning. She recommended I visit a hotel up the beach, closer to the ruins, called the Diamante K.

“The Diamante K is
full
of Aluxes,” Karla said, wide-eyed. “Just go there and ask the bartender. They speak English and they'll tell you—people see them there all the time.” As up front as Karla assured me I could be, the amateur faery sleuth in me knew this was clearly an undercover job. I mean, really. You can't just show up at a hotel bar and start asking around about faeries. So I recruited my new friend Cheri from the group, and after our morning meditation let out, we hopped into a taxi to lunch at the Diamante K. As we made our way down the bumpy dirt road, I couldn't help but open up about my late night, possibly pee-induced hallucination.

“I don't know, Signe.” Cheri frowned. “That completely gives me goose bumps . . . how do you know you weren't
really
seeing it? You know, these things, if they are real, maybe they don't exist in the same way we do, on this plane. Maybe the only way we can see them is by somehow using our imaginations. But that wouldn't make them any less real in
their
world.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “But if that were the case, then what's the difference between imagination and reality?”

“Perspective.” She smiled.

Who knows, maybe she had a point.

We pulled up to the hotel and made our way down a sandy path to the open-air bar, where we settled in.
Dos Coronas, por favor.
The bartender gave us a once-over and nodded. The restaurant was open to the elements, and dozens of ornate mobiles—crafted from driftwood, shells, coral, and fishing wire—swayed in the wind. Also swinging were dozens of winged female figures, like those found on the prows of old whaling ships. Arrayed in hand-painted hues of purple, green, hibiscus, or sea-glass blue, they seemed to float in the ocean breeze. By the kitchen a waitress chatted with a line cook in Spanish, and behind us on the gently sloping beach, sedate hotel guests lounged in cushioned chairs or suspended hammocks.The atmosphere of the place was utterly tranquil.The bartender reappeared with two deliciously frosty beers.

“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.