The Fear of Fairies - 1. Chapter 1

There were once a young man and a young woman who were very much in love and wanted to be married as soon as they could. But they were very poor, and their parents said they must wait until the families had saved enough money to buy the wedding clothes and pay for the wedding feast and make all the other arrangements. But the two young people did not want to wait, and so they ran away into the forest.

They wandered through the forest all through the day, and as night was falling, they came to a castle. They knocked on the doors to ask for lodging, but there was no answer. As the doors were unlocked, they went inside, curled up in a corner, and were soon asleep.

They awoke in the middle of the night to find a large group of people staring at them. These people were at the same time more beautiful and somehow more grotesque than ordinary people. They were fairies. They asked the young couple what brought them so far from their village, and the two young people explained their predicament.

"Oh," the fairies said, "we can provide the wedding clothes and the wedding feast and all that you need to be married, and it won't cost you a thing. But one of your children will belong to us from the day of its birth, and you will never know which one until the child is already lost to you forever."

The young couple were horrified at the proposed bargain and said, "Oh, we couldn't do that."

The fairies said, "Well, then, sorry--we can't help you."

The young couple whispered urgently to each other. “Alice,” the young man said between clenched teeth, “let’s get out of here. The place is crawling with fairies.”

But the young woman replied, “Oh, Arthur! Don’t be so provincial! This is our only chance to be married soon. And don’t you realize that it’s every girl’s dream to have a wedding dress made by real fairies?”

And so to the fairies they said, "Very well, we agree to your proposal," while to each other they said, "There will be time enough to get out of it later."

As the young couple left the castle, one fairy said to another, “Do you suppose one of their children will really be a fairy?” The other replied, “Oh, you know what big families these peasants have. The odds are there will be at least one.”

The young couple were married in unexplained finery. As each child was born, they carefully examined it for signs of the supernatural, but saw none. As the years passed, they began to think that all the fairies had said had been a joke.

One day, the middle child, named Thomas, then five years old, was playing with some clay his mother had given him. He called her to come to see what he had made. "When I grow up," he said, "I'm going to live in a castle that looks just like that." His mother saw, in astonishment and horror, that Thomas had built an exact model of the fairies' castle in which she and her husband had stayed.

The couple, now prosperous, hired a governess to supervise Thomas and keep him from supernatural influences. They made certain that he attended church often, hoping that godly influences would prevail. They arranged that he should soon be apprenticed to the carpenter Callan, so that idle fairy-like thoughts would not have time to take root in his mind.

One day, as the governess was bringing Thomas home from church, she stopped on the road to talk to Callan, a handsome man about whom most of the marriageable girls of the village whispered. Thomas wandered to the fence separating the road from an open field. The governess and Callan seemed far away and long-ago. Then from the fields Thomas heard hunting horns, coming closer.

He saw hunters with clubs galloping on horseback. In front of them, parting the grass, a small man suddenly appeared. Thomas watched, wide-eyed but unable to move, as a hunter overtook the small man and struck his head with a club. The hunters then rode on, laughing. Thomas ran to the small man, who he was sure must be dead. He was surprised that the man was unhurt except for a bloody cut.

"That was close," the man said as Thomas helped him to stand. "Those church groups are the worst."

Thomas was shocked. "Don't you go to church?"

"Of course not. I'm a fairy, silly. I know some fairies go to church, but to me it just seems like fraternizing with the enemy. Hunters want our blood, and they quote their Bibles for justification, though they had other excuses before they had Bibles."

"But why were they hunting you? Why would they want to hurt you?"

"Now there's a question that's puzzled human and fairy alike. The hunters call it sport. They call it being blooded. They soak a green cloth in the blood of a fairy and wipe the red blood on their faces. They think it's important to soak every trace of green from their cloth. Wildwood green. Fairy green. What does that tell you? We have a song that says:

"Is fairy blood so very red

That hunters must use it for their vow

To drown the green from every thread

And baptize every brow?

Why are we the only game

The hunters will allow?

"Fear of fairies fuels their flight;

Fear of fairies drives them all,

Fairies in the wood's dark night,

Or in the mirror on the wall.

"They hunt us far, they hunt us near,

They say it's sport or pleasure,

But fierceness must begin with fear

And blindness for good measure.

For fairies all have jobs in town;

Why, there are fairies all around,

At work or at their leisure.

"Fear of fairies makes them blind;

Fear makes them deny what's true,

Fairies of the woodland kind,

Or in the mirror in plain view.

"You see," the fairy said, "in the village I could pass unnoticed as a human, and often do."

"You could not," Thomas objected. "I can see you're different right away."

The fairy regarded him closely. "Could you now? And how many others like me are there in the village?" Thomas named a few people. "Very good," the fairy said. "They are all fairies. And it is also true the everyone has at least a little fairy blood. The stronger the fairy blood, the easier it is to recognize another fairy. So don't forget to mention one other person who is a fairy."

"Who?" Thomas asked.

"You," the fairy answered.

Thomas stared at the fairy in horror, then turned and ran. The fairy called after him, "My name is Robert. I will see you again."

Thomas ran back to his governess and said loudly, "Don't worry! I'm back!"

The governess said, "Back from where?"

Thomas said, "From over there! I was gone a long time!"

"Nonsense," the governess said. "Callan and I have only been talking a moment. I can see it's time to get you home right away."

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Now Thomas himself began to avoid passing open fields or woods alone or at night. Soon he began his apprenticeship to Callan. Thomas spent much of his time in church with the village priest, where he felt safest from the wild and supernatural forces which, to his mind, surrounded the village. Callan was pleased enough with Thomas' work that he said nothing about all the time the boy spent in church, though he did not seem to approve entirely. The years passed, but walking alone by the edge of the village still made Thomas uneasy.

When Thomas was fifteen years old, there was to be a dance on the village green. For the first time, Callan insisted that Thomas come along, having allowed him to beg off before. "Come on, boy," Callan said, "there's more to life than measuring planks."

At the dance, Thomas stood to the side with the glass of red wine Callan had forced into his hand. The twilight deepened into night, and Thomas drank two more glasses of wine out of nervousness, but would not dance. Finally Callan, who had already danced with almost every girl in the village, took the glass from Thomas' hand.

"Lifting a glass doesn't count as dancing," he said. "Get out and move your feet."

Thomas shook his head. "I can't. I'm not like you."

Callan frowned impatiently. "Thomas, I want you to ask someone to dance right now. There's a girl, right over there, and hardly anyone has asked her all evening. Now you go ask her."

So Thomas asked the girl to dance. His palms were sweating and his face was flushed. Each step of one jarred each step of the other, and the two could not seem to find any rhythm together. After stepping on the girl's foot, Thomas blurted an apology and ran from the green.

He ran into the surrounding woods, his head still swimming from the wine. He saw twinkling lights ahead, red and blue and green. When he reached them, he saw that they circled a clearing. There were fairies, dancing in a ring. Without thinking, Thomas stepped into the ring, joined hands, and danced with the ease of a born fairy.