Faery Tale (6 page)

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

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

La-laaaa-laaaaaa!

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.

—JAMES MATTHEW BARRY,
PETER PAN

 

 

 

 

A
T 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 back, 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.

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.”

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.