Fearie Tales

by Fearie Tales- Stories of the Grimm

  Ahoooum! A howl rang out and reverberated amidst the fevered clomping.

  “Is that them?”

  Blamire nodded.

  “Fairies …” Trudy said. “Shit and vanilla.” She turned back to Blamire. “Why do I feel so calm?” Here she was, in her new house—the house they had been in for barely a couple of days—and they had both of them slept in chairs (she presumed, because she was pretty sure she had not been to bed) and here was a complete stranger telling her that she had two children and there was some troupe of trolls and fairies grunting and stamping their way down to them from God-only-knew-where and …

  “I think you should leave,” Charles said, getting to his feet.

  Trudy reached over and grasped her husband’s arm. “No, Charlie-mine,” she said. She turned the photo around and held it up, right in front of him, and pointed to the blurred face at the doorway in the photograph. “Look. It’s me,” she said. “Me laughing at some … some child I’ve never seen before.”

  Charles looked at the photograph and then at his wife, then back at the photo. She reached across the table and lifted another one from the pile. She turned it over and saw the same girl, a little older now. She had her arms folded and was determinedly looking to the side as a younger boy was apparently attempting to push her over. And again, the same face was watching it all, apparently whooping with laughter, barely holding on to a glass of what looked like white wine. (God, Trudy thought, how I wish I could have a glass right now). The three of them were in the garden at Bramhope.

  And there was a shadow on the grass, holding what was clearly a camera, recording the whole thing.

  “That’s you,” Trudy said, stroking Charles’s arm and smiling up at him. “You taking the photo.”

  Charles snatched it from her hand and stared openmouthed.

  “Now, Mr. Blamire, tell me one more thing.” Trudy gestured at the wrapped-up bundle of skeletal remains against the wall. As she did so, a wind must have blown across from one of the windows (though she could not see if one was even open), because the scarecrow that was slumped against the remains slipped sideways as though preparing itself for some kind of confrontation. “Is that my—”

  Blamire nodded and moved away from the table. “They’re getting close now,” he said, but not to Trudy. “We need to prepare ourselves, Rintannen.”

  The bigger of the scarecrows got to its feet and the others followed, arms stretched out to their sides like rickety marionettes. Was it Trudy’s imagination, or were the scarecrows’ faces now sterner—their eyes slanted, their flat chests more solid, their legs firm and fixed in place?

  “Oh, Jesus!” was all Charles could say.

  Trudy could not manage even that. She held her hand to her mouth as if trying to hide her sudden, sheer delight, for suddenly the world that had lost its sheen had now regained its childhood excitement. Yes, there were dangers in this brave new world, and things she did not understand … but there was magic here, too.

  Ahoooum!

  The grunt from outside the kitchen door was louder now, shaking the crockery that littered the breakfast-bar counter.

  The door pushed open.

  “They’re here,” Blamire announced.

  XII: The Battle in the Kitchen

  Blamire scooped up the photographs and handed them to Trudy and folded her hands around them as though they were the most precious of jewels. Trudy began to shake, her body jerking as though pummeled by a thousand fists.

  “Concentrate on the boy,” Blamire said, his voice little more than a whisper.

  The convulsions took Trudy’s body, but it wasn’t just the physical exertion, it was the barrage of images and pictures.

  “My … my d-d-daughter” was all she could manage. “Umm … uh … umm … ummm—” Each utterance sounded like her reaction to a fierce blow to her solar plexus.

  Blamire patted her shoulder. As she started to turn, one of the scarecrows scooped up the boy’s rigid corpse and laid it on the kitchen table, pushing aside cutlery and crockery.

  “Concentrate on the boy,” Blamire said again as he turned to face the kitchen door.

  This cannot be happening, Trudy thought. She could hear a faint, far-off moaning. She watched the other scarecrows get to their feet and shuffle penguin-like to stand around Mr. Blamire. She clamped her teeth hard and swallowed … and was then both surprised and concerned that the moaning had abruptly ceased.

  “Sweetie,” Charles whispered, “none of this is happening. Is it?”

  She looked at the shrunken figure on the table and placed a hand lovingly on its face. “I think it is, Charlie-mine,” she said. “This is our son.”

  “Our son …” He could have made it into a question, but there didn’t seem to be any point. That was the reality—this was reality?—they now faced.

  “Say hello to Tom,” she said. “Tell him all you know.”

  Blamire shouted, and Trudy looked up in time to see a thickset bald man push open the kitchen door. As the man grunted, another appeared, climbing over the line of odd-looking men, all grasping each other tightly.

  Charles looked across in a daze, one hand on the body on the table and the other held palm-up as though to ward off evil spirits.

  But the things coming through the doors were not spirits, at least not as they understood the word; rather, they were like a multitude of Three Stooges look-alikes: some were tall, some small; some were skinny, others like little barrels on legs; some had slender faces with dark rings around the eyes, while others had rotund moon-shapes, slashed with thin-lipped mouths bereft of humor or softness.

  Ahoooum! the figures chorused, their long brown coats swirling like cloaks as they turned and grappled, hands upon arms, while clog-and boot-encased feet clacked on the wooden floor and mingled with the more muted sound of even more feet on the hallway carpet.

  “Look in the drawers,” Blamire suggested.

  More of the figures spilled into the kitchen, hands grabbing as—

  Ahoooum!

  —the doorway filled up.

  “The Artemis Line,” Trudy said.

  Two scarecrows had moved over to the kitchen units and were pulling open drawers, mostly to no avail, as Trudy had not yet unpacked, and anyway, she had absolutely no idea what her visitors were looking for.

  “Anything that could be used as a weapon,” Blamire snapped.

  “You can read minds?”

  Blamire ignored her and instead cried, “Yes!” when one of the scarecrows turned around brandishing a large carving knife.

  “So you need to find the one in the water and sever his—or ‘its’—connection to all the others that followed?” Trudy asked.

  “Well, you can—”

  Ahoooum!

  “—gain some time by just going back down the line to the dumbwaiter and make the split as close to that as possible.”

  “And then what happens?”

  Ahoooum!

  “They’ll still keep coming, but it’ll give us some time.”

  “To do what?”

  “To bring the boy back.”

  Charles had been listening as he flicked through the photographs. He was frowning. Could it be that these pictures captured a life he might have had in some other variant of the world? Because he was starting to believe that was the case. He looked at Trudy.

  Ahoooum!

  “He said for us to concentrate on the boy,” she said.

  Flicking through more photographs (which seemed to be reproducing all the while, for he was sure there were considerably more than when he started), Charles said, “What should I do?”

  “Tell him some stories,” Blamire said. “They’re in the photographs … lots and lots of stories. And after all, that’s all any of us wants or needs when it comes right down to it: stories.”

  Charles leaned closer to the figure on the table.

  “Hey, Tom”—the name sounded right in his mouth, like popcorn at the cinema. (Had he and Trudy been to the cinema wi
th this boy? He imagined they would have done that, many times.) He flicked through the photos, turning them toward the boy’s face one by one. But the boy’s eyes were closed … weren’t they? Were they really closed? Charles felt he could see a crack, like a light shining beneath a door. And then, just as he was about to turn over another one, he froze—for there was the boy, the very boy right now in front of him, hugging Charles’s legs as tight as only a father’s legs can be hugged by a son. “This is you …” he started to say.

  Tom, his name is Tom, a small voice wanted him to know.

  “You were standing next to me. You were upset,” Charles said. He said it because he remembered it.

  “I do … I do remember it!” he cried, and turned back to the photograph. He had no idea who was on photo duty because Trudy was in the shot, looking crestfallen.

  Trudy looked over at him and—

  “The hamster,” Charles said, as though he were reminding her of the most obvious piece of information. But Trudy—

  Ahoooum!

  —looked blankly at the photo.

  “Tom,” Charles whispered, and he stroked the corpse’s forehead, leaning over as far as he could. And he reminded the boy about Ray and Jean coming to visit and Tom wanting to show off his new hamster to their two girls, Rebecca and Laura. But in his excitement, as he was lifting up the wooden run, he—

  Charles shook his head in denial. “I never did this,” he said. “I never made a … I never made a hamster run in my life.”

  “Finish the story,” Trudy whispered. “Look.”

  She pointed and—

  Ahoooum!

  —the boy was fleshing out. There could be no doubt about it. And color was slowly returning to his cheeks.

  “And you dropped the wooden run onto the hamster’s neck—”

  “Sleedo,” Trudy interrupted. “It was called Sleedo … your hamster.”

  Charles stared at his wife in wonder.

  Ahoooum!

  He looked around and saw one of the scarecrows swinging a small shovel it had found by the coal bin near the back door. The shovel connected with two of the trolls and sent them spinning away from the Artemis Line—and best of all, they were from well down the line, and so every troll after them fizzed out in a spray of sparks.

  Trudy leaned over and ran a finger along the boy’s cheek. Was it her imagination, or was that a tear?

  And did the boy’s face feel softer?

  “Keep going,” she said.

  The next picture showed the boy sitting on Charles’s knee.

  “Oh my God,” Charles said.

  “What is it?”

  Ahoooum!

  From memory, he began to recite, “‘First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys …’”

  Behind them, Blamire took hold of the head of one of the trolls and yanked it around until there was a loud crack. Still listening as the troll lifted its hands and burst into a green fountain-spray, Trudy thought that where wrestlers and boxers had cauliflower ears, these things had cauliflower-entire-faces.

  All around the kitchen Blamire and the scarecrows were swinging things they had found in boxes or in the cutlery drawer.

  “June,” Charles said as a troll fell against the table, its mouth twisted into a grimace of obvious pain before it, too, disappeared in a crimson cloud of gas bubbles. “No doubting it,” he continued.

  An eyelid flickered.

  Ahoooum!

  “‘June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away …’”

  Trudy reached out and grasped her husband’s hand. “He’s remembering, Charlie-mine.”

  Ahoooum!

  This time, the war cry sounded more feeble.

  And then Ahoooum! came again, and once more, Ahoooum! Each more feeble yet.

  Blamire and the scarecrows wielded chairs at the trolls, breaking necks and knocking them out of the Artemis Line until, though the chant and the clacking feet could still be heard, the noise was not actually in the kitchen but further away, down the hall.

  Blamire looked around in a sudden panic. “Rintannen!”

  A lonely howl rang out, and Blamire ran for the door, spinning it wide-open.

  “Rintannen!”

  “‘So they went off together,’” Charles was saying as he stroked the boy’s hand.

  Out in the corridor—a surprisingly long corridor, she noted—Trudy could see one of the scarecrows down on the floor, having its arms and legs pulled free of its body by two of the trolls, who had managed to keep their own arms free while their fellow creatures held on to their heads and necks. The scarecrow howled again and tried to move its arms, but they wouldn’t work. The trolls had interlocked their arms and, before Blamire could reach Rintannen, the things pulled in unison and yanked the scarecrow’s head from its body. One of them plucked out the sewed-on button-eyes and flicked them against the wall.

  Blamire reached out and jammed two fingers into the troll’s own eye sockets and yanked. The thing grunted, and as its link with its fellow was broken, it exploded. The second troll fared the same; just seconds later it, too, was nowhere to be seen.

  “‘But wherever they go,’” Charles was still quoting, “‘and whatever happens to them on the way …’”

  Blamire lifted the discarded head of the scarecrow and held it to his own face. Trudy could not hear what he was saying.

  “‘… in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always—’”

  “‘—will always be playing.’” Tom said, completing the story’s closing line. “Hi, Dad.”

  Epilogue

  It felt to Blamire as if the land itself were moving at the same pace in the opposite direction to the one he was traveling, thereby doubling the distance he covered with each step.

  Ahead of him stretched an apparently endless forest.

  Behind him stretched the same view.

  It was identical on either side, too.

  There was just one blip on the landscape, a way off, but he knew what it was. Blamire lifted the binoculars that Trudy Cavanagh had given him. I’ll bring them back, he had told her. And then he had left.

  “It’s there,” he said. The scarecrows remained silent, although they at least did him the courtesy of looking in the direction of his pointing arm.

  Blamire had no real idea if the things rationalized information the way humans did; he had never seen excitement or fear from them … just swaths of loyalty and honesty. He fought back the recurring image of Rintannen’s head and arms being unceremoniously wrenched from the scarecrow’s torso.

  “Come on.” He set to walking again, and the scarecrows took up his easy pace.

  He had promised the couple—Charles and Trudy; nice people, he thought—that he would find their daughter. And I’ll bring her back, too, he had assured Trudy. Whatever, her eyes had said, though her face had feigned interest, even gratitude. The truth was that neither of the Cavanaghs had appeared to be particularly bothered. But then, Blamire thought, would most people when a strange man comes around to your house with a bunch of walking scarecrows and tells you about fairies and changelings, and an Artemis Line of noisy trolls plus Oh, and by the way, you have a daughter—well, you could see that might be rather hard to swallow.

  To his left, two of the remaining scarecrows trudged, swaying from side to side the way they always did, stick-arms flicking. On his right was the third one, and in the knapsack on Blamire’s back—I’ll bring it back, too, he had assured Trudy Cavanagh; Whatever, she had said with a gentle smile—was all that was left of Rintannen.

  He didn’t know whether he would be able to do anything about the deceased scarecrow (did scarecrows die? He didn’t know; come to think of it, he didn’t know many things), but he would give it a try.

  Whatever, he imagined Trudy Cavanagh saying.

  A gloved stick-hand rested on Blamire’s shoulder and he stopped. One of the scarecrows was looking at a piece of
wood—a way-marker—that had been driven into the ground a few feet in front of them. The wood had been hand-carved into a pointing hand. The fingers were emaciated to the point of being skeletal, and the nails cracked and split. On the hand’s palm, just under the bent-around fingernails, were the words:

  THIS WAY TO FAIRYLAND

  “Anyone wants to change their mind, now’s the time to do it,” Blamire said.

  The scarecrows started up again, walking. Ahead of them, now clearly visible, was the side of a wall. It was an interior wall, partly polished wood paneling, partly wallpapered in a kind of William Morris rip-off. As they got nearer, Blamire stopped and closed his eyes. “Charity?” he said.

  The response in his head was immediate, as he had expected it to be. “You there?”

  “Nearly.”

  There was a pause and then Blamire said, “They still there, the Cavanaghs?”

  “Settling in. Just three of them now, mind. That what you’re aiming to set right?”

  He nodded, though he knew she couldn’t see.

  “You need to recover the dumbwaiter is what you need to do,” said his wife.

  Blamire opened his eyes. Just a few feet in front of him, the wall with the dumbwaiter was forming itself out of thin air. “Well,” he said, “maybe so.”

  Another pause and then the other voice said, “It’s there, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s here.”

  “And you’re close to it?”

  “Yes, we’re close to it.”

  One of the scarecrows tapped his shoulder. The two doors to the dumbwaiter were shuddering in their mountings.

  As Blamire removed the knapsack from his back, the rest of the corridor began to take shape, walls and ceiling and floor, with other doors appearing every few yards. As he watched, several of the doors were starting to open, very slowly. He unzipped the bag, took out the axes and handed one to each of the scarecrows.

  “I’m going to have to go,” he said as he shrugged himself back into the knapsack straps.

  “Be careful,” his wife said, and she chuckled. “I always say that, don’t I?”

  “Yes, you always say that.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “You’d better.” And then she was gone.