Fearie Tales

by Fearie Tales- Stories of the Grimm

  No one had told me of this secret place, as I now in earnest considered it; if I had not escaped from the crowd, to wander and explore on my own, I would never have discovered it. But after lunch I had decided to leave the resort, go off in an easterly direction through the scrub, pines, a few brambles and tortured olives—a route which a locally produced chart of the region displayed as a blank, uninspiring expanse of yellow land and azure blue ocean—to see what I might see. And then, if sticking close to the sea, I should come across a way down to a beach or a rocky shelf from which I might swim and fish …

  … which was precisely what had happened.

  Earlier, after my first snorkeling swim to check out the scene underwater—especially the reef—I returned to dry land to find a youth (one of the double handful of tourists along the beach) standing near my belongings, looking at but in no way interfering with my equipment bag and other possessions. He seemed particularly interested in my rubber-powered speargun, which I’d left behind while I reconnoitered the reef in flippers and mask.

  The spot where I had settled myself, making it my base of operations, was, as I have said, close to the bay’s eastern extremity, where in wilder seasons the ocean had worked to undercut the cliffs. Tumbled from those layered heights, a number of huge flat slabs of rock had half-buried themselves in the sand, where one of them made a fine horizontal bench facing the sea. And it was there, directly in front of this great slab—where some unknown person had planted that previously mentioned concrete anchor for a long-since-disused, dilapidated and discarded sunshade—that the English youth stood waiting for me.

  I had seen him earlier as I came down the cliff path. He and another youth of a like age, maybe sixteen or seventeen years, had been trying to drag a great knotted driftwood log—in fact the seven-or eight-foot trunk of what had looked like an ancient, gnarled olive tree—from where it had washed ashore back down the beach to the sea. Hauling first on one end of the log, then on the other, their determined efforts had left a helix-like scar in the sand, like the trail of a monstrously huge sidewinder. Odd, because that had been some fifty or more yards west of my present location, in the middle of the bay; yet now I saw similar scuff marks in the sand right here, just a few paces from where I was gathering up my swim gear.

  So, perhaps there had been another old log which I hadn’t noticed … but likewise odd that I had failed to notice it when the boys were working on it. There again, I had been chiefly interested in the sea; my thoughts had been centered on what I might find in the reef’s cracks and crannies, the secret lairs of fishes that might be hiding under its shallow submarine shelves …

  I had asked the youth if there was anything I could do for him and found that I was correct: he told me he had seen my speargun as I came down the cliff path and was interested. So I had shown him the safety catch and explained how the gun was loaded, then unloaded it and put it down under my towel: out of sight, out of mind. And finally I had asked him about the party he was with—how had they found their way here?

  They were a two-family party he told me, neighbors back home in England who sometimes vacationed together. A local taxi driver at the resort had told them about the little bay, how it was a nice place to picnic—but it wasn’t a good idea to stay too late, not on an evening. It was a very “special” place, and lonely. And he’d heard it was frequented, on certain rare occasions, by “foreigners.” Which was all he would say about it; but he had also asked them not to tell other tourists about it: the resort might lose money, while an overly talkative taxi driver could find himself unwelcome there, unemployed and losing money of his own!

  Well, that was okay: they certainly wouldn’t mention this place to anyone else; unfortunately this was to be their last day here. Bright and early tomorrow morning they would be gone, off to the airport on the far side of the island and back home to spend the rest of a doubtless dreary summer in England.

  And that had been that. The lad had set off back along the beach to where his party was camped beneath a nest of sunshades they had obviously brought with them, and I had been left on my own to eat an orange and my egg-and-tomato sandwiches and drink a small warm beer straight from its bottle. While I didn’t have the luxury of a sunshade, at least there was some shade cast by the layered cliffs looming on my left …

  That had been then and this was now. Still dripping brine, I gathered up my things and headed up the beach toward the huge flat rock where I had left my equipment bag, towel and small heap of clothing. And that was when I saw my uninvited guest.

  The way his black robe, a cassock, probably—it was hard to tell in the gradually failing evening light, with salt water dripping from my hair and forehead into my stinging eyes—but the way that robe was spread out voluminously all around him on the great rock bench where he was seated within arm’s length of my property, well, at first glance I had understandably taken him for a priest from the island’s Orthodox Greek church. Until, moving closer, I quickly discovered my mistake—that in fact he was simply an aging, possibly eccentric local.

  “Hello there!” I said, taking my towel and backing away as I began to dry myself.

  Nodding his large head, he replied in a cultured but paradoxically guttural, phlegmy-sounding voice, “And a good evening to you, sir.”

  And with that … well, that was it. It was in that voice, in the air, in the sudden absence of the previously congenial atmosphere. What had been—whatever it had been—was no more. Now I was just a little cold inside; I thought I felt a shiver in there, and I wondered what in the world there could be in a mere presence and its voice that could do that to me.

  Still backing off, my legs came up against a smaller flat-topped boulder, which caused me to sit down abruptly facing the stranger. And suddenly wary, I let my flippers, mask and snorkel fall to the soft sand and stood my speargun on its pistol grip close to hand, leaning it against my seat.

  As for possible reasons for my nervousness, they were several. For one thing, I had remembered what that taxi driver had told the tourists: that it would be inadvisable to picnic or party here in the evening; that the little bay was somehow special; and that odd, foreign folk were known to sometimes frequent the place.

  My first thoughts on that had been: But weren’t the majority of guests at the resort, including the British, foreigners of a sort? And now I thought: Ah! But then there’s foreign and there’s foreign … a term in common usage which might also mean outlandish, alien or simply peculiar. And right now “outlandish” appeared to fit this uninvited one just perfectly.

  As to why that was so, and some of the other reasons for my apparent nervousness:

  There was this smell that I hadn’t noticed before; a smell which seemed that much stronger in the stranger’s immediate vicinity. It had been more than noticeable—I might even say unavoidable—when I had approached him closely to reach for my towel: the smell of the dried-out, weedy tidemark on a shore at low tide … the shore of an ocean that has a tide, that is.

  Then there was his overall look, his decidedly odd appearance. His unseen body would have to be gross, even obese, under that flowing, all-enveloping cloak, cassock, mantle … whatever the garment was; gross and probably unwashed, which might possibly account for the smell. And as for his face—

  —but his face was in the shade of a hooded extension to the rear of his cloak, that dark garment which I now saw seemed to have a purplish tint in the oh-so-slowly failing light. And despite that, out of common decency—which is to say, in consideration of what this poor fellow must recognize as the anomalies of his own weird features, and be embarrassed by them—despite that, for this reason I hesitated to study his face for too long or too intently, still I found it fascinating. And to my own discomfort I felt compelled to stare at it.

  “I seem to have disturbed you,” he observed in that guttural swampy croak of a voice. “You didn’t expect to come across me here. Well, I apologize for my … presence. But this is a place—one might even say a priva
te place—which I sometimes enjoy to visit. And so, just as I would seem to have, er, interfered with your privacy, so you have interfered with mine.”

  Before I could reply—perhaps to protest, possibly to excuse myself, but in any case failing to find the right words—he shrugged, which caused his cloak to gently billow or ripple, its purplish tints flaring up and momentarily intensifying, and went on: “But no harm done, and in a little while I shall be on my way. A pity, really …”

  “A pity?” (That he would soon be moving on? Not from where I was sitting!) But what he had said was true enough: this lost, lonely place had seemed very private—to me as well as to him—but now even its ambience was lost, its genius loci, its spirit-of-place; and strangely, it felt like and was more surely his place now, no longer mine at all.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding—scowling, I thought, though his expression in the shade of his cowl was difficult to interpret—and squirming under his billowing cloak as if uncomfortable, agitated or disappointed. “A great pity, for I think I might have enjoyed a little conversation. I note that you are an Englishman and, I would hazard a guess, decently educated? In recent decades I have only rarely come into close contact with men of any learning whatsoever. Men who might more readily understand and marvel at a life—an existence—such as mine: its origin, various stages of mutation and evolution before … before it engendered the likes of me. And its mysteries, of course.”

  While he was speaking—his choice of words and subject leaving me more or less bewildered, making little or no sense in the context of a first meeting and the customary initial discourse between total strangers—I had found myself once again drawn to look at the peculiarities not only of his face but his entire person. For I had begun to form the vague fancy that, head to toe, this unfortunate man might be horribly deformed … Why else wear that grotesque, stifling garment if not to hide from view a yet more unseemly body?

  But his face, his face!

  For now as then, when I was trying to avoid looking at him too openly or curiously, still I find myself shrinking from describing him or … or it. By which I mean his face—I think. For even the memory is disturbing.

  However, it was a long time ago, and time and the healthy mind have ways of reducing or entirely eliminating the unthinkable or unbearable. And so I shall persevere.

  His head, despite being large, appeared rather small in comparison with the outward-flowing vastness of the shoulders that must lie directly beneath it under his cloak; and the ugly face upon that head bore a flattish nose, little or no chin worth the mention, and eyes that were more than slightly protuberant. As in many fish species, those eyes in their deep-sunken orbits bulged unblinkingly and the leprous, flaky, grayish-blue flesh around them was deeply pitted. His neck at both sides—or as much as I could see of it where the cowl failed to shroud it—was scarred by deep parallel creases or horizontal, gouge-like flaps. I believe that at the time I thought they were cicatrices, resulting from tribal or cultish acts of self-mutilation. That at least was my initial impression—in support of which there was the tortured flesh of his cheeks.

  For from his cheekbones under the orbits of his eyes down to his mouth, and from his lower lip down to that round blob of an atrophied chin, further evidence of this self-abuse seemed indisputable. It was there in the form of eight coiled bas-reliefs, somewhat similar in design to the tightly wound fossils of common ammonites.

  Then there was this unfortunate creature’s froggish mouth, with fat yellowish lips so long they almost reached the sides of cheeks which in turn supported a pair of stunted, distinctly rudimentary ears, again mostly in the shade of his garment’s cowl. A disk of metal—an earring of sorts, depending on little more than an inch of golden chain from the meager lobe of the underdeveloped or deformed ear on the right—glinted dully with each slightest motion of its bearer’s head.

  As for the rest of him, his limbs and presumably prodigious body: all was hidden beneath the peculiar tent-like canopy of his strange garment … a circumstance for which I felt unaccountably, or rather not yet justifiably, thankful.

  But however I had tried to hide my revulsion of his looks and especially his smell—for it was becoming increasingly obvious that those loathsome waves of stench were indeed issuing from him—he had not failed to notice my reticence. As a direct result of which:

  “You find me repulsive!” he choked, coughed, finally spat the accusation out. “I am too unlike for your tastes … is it not so?”

  “Why, I don’t even know you!” I protested. “You’re a complete stranger and we’ve barely spoken. I haven’t said more than a word or two to you since finding you here.”

  “But you have looked at me—and in such a way!” His cloak trembled with the agitation or restless anger of the figure beneath it.

  “Then if I have somehow offended you,” I replied, “though I assure you any such offense was unintentional, I am sorry. And as for the matter of the disturbed privacy of this place: that can very quickly be put right. You say you’ll be leaving soon? Please don’t trouble yourself, for I’ll be leaving even sooner—indeed right now!”

  “Do you deny that you have gazed at me? And such an intolerable examination at that?” His words were thick as bubbles on a black swamp, gurgling from that awful mouth. “‘No offense intended,’ you say … which is not to say that you don’t find my … my changeling countenance unnatural, unpleasant, even hideous to your inalienable land-born eyes!”

  I was on my feet by then, moving toward him. And why not? Even if he intended me harm, I didn’t actually fear him; I felt sure he would be incapable of any sort of rapid physical exertion; he was—he must be—simply too huge under that purple-rippling cassock-like cloak. Besides which, I wasn’t closing with him directly but more properly reaching for my belongings, that little heap of casual clothing and my equipment bag where I had left those items on the huge bench-like slab of rock … items which to my discomfort I now saw were closer to him than I had previously thought, and much too close for comfort.

  Then, holding my breath rather than suffer the full extent of his dreadful smell, as I took up my things and backed away again, I saw the golden glinting of the disk dangling from his shrunken ear where his swiveling head as it followed my every move was causing it to sway. Being that much closer now, I recognized the earring’s distinctive style and recalled where I had seen jewelry of its like before. And in that same moment I remembered what little I knew of its somewhat esoteric origins.

  But then, before I could further gather my thoughts on that subject—as I once again took my lesser seat opposite the other and began to dress myself—the oh-so-peculiar stranger leaned toward me in what was an aggressive, almost threatening manner to babble and cough a further guttural accusation:

  “What? And is my aspect so fearsome … so fascinating … so freakish, then? You continue to stare at me, damn you!”

  Well, of course I did, keeping an at least wary eye on him! And indeed, who wouldn’t have? But now I saw what I hoped was a way to more surely excuse myself, a way to “explain” my obviously unacceptable interest in him, and protested:

  “But it isn’t you! And I’m very sorry if you find my curiosity disturbing and offensive. It’s simply that I’m fascinated by the earring or pendant, that ornament you’re wearing in your ear. It’s that, I’m sure, which has caused me to seem so disrespectful!”

  “My earring?” he gurgled, leaning back to regain his previous posture. “This golden bauble of mine?”

  “Gold?” I repeated him. “Is it?”

  He at once narrowed his eyes—but before he was able to reply I quickly went on: “But of course it is! Indeed, since it’s the same as other pieces I’ve seen, including a few items I’ve been fortunate enough to acquire for myself, then it must be gold—well, gold of a sort—albeit impure and strangely alloyed stuff.”

  “Stuff?” He in turn repeated, and finally nodded. “Well, yes, but exceptionally rare stuff—I can assure you of tha
t! And you’ve seen similar pieces? You even own some? Oh, really? Well, now you’ve interested me and must tell me more. And if I have seemed a little too brusque or overly aggressive, perhaps you’ll forgive me? But let me explain that among my own people, while I admit to being, how to put it: a deviation?— yes, even among my own—a changeling of sorts, still to them I am completely acceptable. Which tends to make me very sensitive to the gauche opinions of certain ill-bred others and causes me to shy from them. And because I value my privacy so highly, I occasionally come to this favorite place of mine where I’m unlikely to come into contact with anyone else—especially toward evening, as now. But even so, my privacy cannot always be guaranteed, as witness your presence here.”

  “Ill-bred others”? A rather poor choice of words, I thought. Or there again, perhaps apt when applied to himself. For I now found it not in the least unlikely that—physically, at least—he might well be the product of just such ill or impure inbreeding. But on the other hand, which is to say mentally, he appeared highly intelligent, despite that in his reasoning he seemed oddly wandering, and in his discourse more than a little obscure. (But of course, while I was given to think and consider such things, I hardly intended—or dared—to communicate them by allowing my uneasiness to get the better of me, perhaps becoming too obvious; for with regard to his strange appearance he had already made his sensitivity to the reactions of other, presumably normal persons perfectly clear—and anyway, common decency alone would forbid my showing signs of revulsion.)

  So once again I tried to appease him. “I quite understand the value you put on your privacy,” I said. “Why, I’m a private person myself, which is why like you I find this place so very much to my liking.” (Which had been true enough—until now, at least.) “But, you see, my interest in coins and medallions, especially when they’re minted in precious or rare metals, is almost an obsession. In fact I’ve made it both my hobby and my work; it’s how I earn my living.”