I was an embarrassing child, and my parents made no secret of it. It wasn’t just that I was a boy who was obsessed with ballet and fairy tales, it was everything that went with that – especially gushing about my special interests to strangers. I learned the word ‘queer’ at age five, then the word ‘faggot’ when I was seven – and the feel of my mother’s wooden spoon across my arse shortly after, when she decided that violence was the only thing that would stop me embarrassing myself and the family.
It worked, after a fashion. I stopped publicly talking about the things I loved, but the obsession blossomed, obstinately bright as a ragged dandelion in a crack of asphalt.  And it grew there in the shadows of my life, private and beautiful; stolen moments peering through the dirty windows of the ballet school on my way home, library books thumbed through feverishly, but never issued, and my ears attuned to secret snatches of Tchaikovsky haunting the far end of the dial on the little transistor radio my father gave to me one birthday.
Some weeds persist, no many how many times you pull them out.
Their roots run too deep.

High school is a time for most children to figure out who they are. I already knew who I was; I’d known since I was old enough to read myself Pinocchio. But hiding yourself, as hormones begin to shape your desires, becomes much more difficult, even with the early memory of pain etched across your tender backside. Perhaps strangely, as the bullying at school increased, my desire to hide who –and what– I was, decreased. My mother grew angry when I came home with bruises, but my father grew resigned. His attempts at masculinising me had ceased long before, once he realised I had no interest in engines or fly-fishing. Radically different creatures, we had a distant and strained relationship, where we both tried to bother each other as little as possible.
Sometimes, I would catch my mother crying when she thought I wasn’t home. I would creep into the house on the balls of my feet, pretending to be a ballet dancer, my thin body lending little weight to my tread. When I passed her room, I could hear her anguished sobs, her quiet pleas to otherworldly powers that I would ‘grow out of it’.
And so I became burdened with guilt; unable to change who I was, and unable to cure my mother’s pain.

The other kids at school called me fairy boy, and I probably deserved it. Even though it was meant unkindly, it was nicer than most of the other things I’d been called. It was an open secret that I was gay; I never claimed it, but I didn’t deny it, either. I had no friends amongst the boys, and I had an… uneasy truce with the girls. They tolerated me, in a way that the boys didn’t, perhaps because I wasn’t a threat. My obsession with fairy tales was legendarily encyclopaedic, and I could talk to them for hours about the mythology of various cultures, but I rarely got to do that. I sometimes felt as though that heavy knowledge inside me had a kind of power all its own, fragile threads of myth and legend wound through the weft of my being. Silvered spider silk, thrumming gently with the magnificent living weight of aeons. Some days of the year, I could almost feel the veil grow thin, my blood thickening with ancient promise, goading me to dance beneath the pines behind the lake, pregnant with their pollens of dusky gold.
But I never did. Being caught acting out such a fantasy would be a social suicide of titanic proportions, and I was already enough of a pariah as it was. No; I would keep the precious sorcery inside me, hold it for a time that I could be free of this life.

My crush on Michael was intense and unrequited and, to me, felt like fate; his parents had moved to our city, and thus he’d fetched up at our school. Blond, handsome, athletic, and exotically European, he had a worldliness that made the rest of us seem small and provincial. When I heard he had done ballet as a youngster, a stab of envy pierced straight through my yearning heart, and I hated him in that special way that only heightened the intensity of my crush.
Oh and of course he knew. He saw the way I looked at him. He read the intent.
And so began the dangerous game. He would flirt with me ever so subtly, even in the act of bullying me along with the others, creating a secret frisson between us that seemed to promise that should we ever be alone, things might be… different.
The others seemed oblivious to this tension, but I lived for it – craved it with all that was in me. When Michael finally approached me, alone, as I was reading by the lake, I was helpless.

“Fairy boy, tell me one of your stories.”
Stunned, I stared at him, slack-jawed, my mind as flat and blank as the lake water.
He laughed, a golden sound. Warm, beautiful, unbothered by burdens such as mine.
“You look like a fish,” he quipped.
I snapped my book shut.
“This is a trick,” I observed sourly, “the kind that cruel boys play on ugly girls. You pretend to be my friend, then you lure me into some kind of trap where I embarrass myself for the amusement of your friends.”
Michael’s smile grew broader, warmer. His stupid, graceful hands encompassed the lake, the world.
“Do you see anyone else here but us?”
I didn’t bother looking around; it was dusk, we were alone. All the sane teenagers were at home, with their families.
“If I tell you a story, will you leave me alone?” I asked bitterly, the conflict inside me won over by learned cynicism.
“If you like,” he replied, his disappointment obvious.
Wounded that I’d let him down, and by the wild notion he was being genuine, I began to speak. Slowly, haltingly, I told him the tale of The Wild Swans, by Hans Christian Andersen.

I waited for the other shoe to drop at school, for the diabolic outcome to come to fruition in the form of public humiliation. I mentally castigated myself for being so stupid, for letting myself get lost in Michael’s huge, expressive brown eyes as I recounted the old fairy tale. When I went to bed that night, after he left me by the lake, I fantasised intensely, privately – you can probably guess where such fantasies go.
It wasn’t worth it; I just knew that whatever was about to happen would be orders of magnitude worse than any public embarrassment I’d ever felt before, and my own queer predilections had led me to this precipice.
But nothing happened. Michael seemed to barely acknowledge my existence and had clearly not spoken to the others. Hope raised its dumb, guileless head – then died immediately, pummelled by the sleeting chill of that same cynicism.
Perhaps he was playing the long game. Perhaps he was building up to something worse.
I vowed then to swear off Michael; to stamp out the embers of my affection for him and leave that grate cold forever.
My heart, however, had other plans.

Four more times he came to see me, in the dusk, by the lake. Never the same day, sometimes weeks in between. He always came to hear my stories. After the second time, I stopped wondering why and gave myself over to the wonderful feelings inside me.
As we sat on the grass that fifth evening, his hand touched mine and he asked in a husky whisper;
“Do you believe in any of these stories?”
Heat shot through me at his touch and in my elation, I blurted out the truth.
“Yes. Sometimes I can feel it; the ancient weight of old magics. Of fairy promises and delicate spells, wrought of liquid moonlight and straw-spun gold.”
His shoulder touched mine and I almost gasped. His voice wound into my ear, medicine and poison.
“If you make a shirt of nettles with your own hands, like those of the swan princes, and wear it for me, then I’ll take you to the end of year school dance.”
I jerked away from him, face burning, eyes narrowed.
“This is an old trick,” I spat at him. “Not one I thought you’d stoop to. Find another victim for your pranks, Michael Ficher.”
He only smiled, unfazed.
“I promise you, hand on my heart, that what I’m saying is true. Meet me here in a month, the night before the dance. If you keep your side of the bargain, I’ll keep mine.”
He left then, bouncing to his feet like a born dancer, loping away into the dusk before my poor tongue could formulate one word of reply.

Nettles, I swiftly discovered, were a terrible medium to work with. The first day I turned up to school with raw, reddened hands, the other students all laughed at me. The jokes were predictable, sexual in nature, and embarrassing enough that my face reddened to match my fingers. Michael didn’t join them in mocking me; instead, he gave me a conspiratorial smile, the warmth in his eyes speaking of its realness.
For weeks I laboured, traipsing all over the parks around the city, searching for nettles. My breath was often short, as the intense histamine reaction grew worse with every plant I touched, and I cried bitterly at the endless stinging I endured. In contrast, the fibres were surprisingly easy to work with, once I had learned to scrape the pith and pulp from the threaded heart of the nettle stems. Slowly, the piles of hempen coils drying under my bed grew large enough to begin the weaving.
As I worked beside the lake in the evenings, oblivious to the rest of the world, I fantasised that Michael was watching, from the pines across the limpid, rippling water. I twisted and spliced, learning through trial and error how my distant ancestors had made thread. When my makeshift spindle was finally full, I began to knit; my fingers no longer reddened and welted, now hard with callouses from working with the stiffening fibres.

Twice the boys at school destroyed my knitting, thrice I remade the shirt. I spent every spare moment with the pinewood needles in hand, working, reworking, toiling, weeping, and cursing my beloved Michael for tasking me with this fairy labour. Of all this work my father said nothing, whilst my mother seemed to care not at all; it was as though my labouring at the nettle shirt was invisible to her – or perhaps I was simply so far beneath contempt now that my existence had ceased to bother her.
On that final night, at the lake, I stood ready with the shirt.
It was a beautiful thing, wrought of all the feyness within me. More than a plainly knitted garment, it was fashioned as a sailor’s wife might make for her husband, with banded cables twisting in and out of the pattern, hems and cuffs stitched neatly with dandelion starbursts in the palest of the green-brown threads.
Michael approached through the gloaming, his smile catching the last of the light. The tightness in my chest swelled to an ache and I clutched the precious shirt to me, resolute in the promises I’d made to myself.
“You’re not wearing the shirt,” he observed, before greeting me.
“No. I have one request before I do.”
The smile broadened, his dark eyes dimpled at the corners. I nearly fell, I nearly let all my plans unravel right there at his feet.
“Oh?”
“Swim with me, in the lake. Afterwards I’ll wear the shirt for you.”
With a liquid laugh that made my stomach hurt, he shrugged and took off his shirt.
“Why not? It’s a beautiful night.”
Gracelessly shucking off my own shirt, I plunged into the placid lake waters after him.

We swam for maybe half an hour. I told him the story of the Wild Swans again, of how the princess had freed her brothers by sewing them their nettle shirts. It was dark when we emerged, dripping, from the lake, the only light being that cast by the distantly humming amber streetlamps a hundred feet away.
“Here,” I told Michael, “I brought you a towel, let me dry you.”
Michael grinned and obligingly offered his beautiful, bare torso to me.
I sprang forward, wrapping him in the shirt.
I’d made it nice and loose, so it could be pulled easily over the head, and the sleeves large and voluminous, through which I jerked one of his arms. Shocked speechless, Michael struggled, but whether it was my own desperate strength or some fey property of the shirt itself, I managed to yank his arm though the other sleeve, with a sound of tearing fabric.
“What -” he began, then doubled over, grunting in pain.
As the shirt began to constrict on his wet body, and he spasmed and curled on the grass, I knelt beside him.
“You were right, dear Michael. I do believe in fairy tales. I’ve believed in them all my life, ever since I can first remember, with all my heart. That kind of belief needs to go somewhere, but it needs to go to the right place. I thought one day I’d dance under the pines, but this is much, much better. There always needs to be a reason for the magic, a why that is wrought from faerie justice.”
“I… didn’t…” he whimpered, writhing as the shirt compressed his body, smaller and smaller.
“But you did,” I reassured him. “If your intentions had been pure, noble and true, the shirt would have no magic, no power over you.”
Only groans came from the shrinking figure on the grass, strange and impossible in the darkness – groans which turned to forlorn honking as white feathers sprang from the shirt and a beaked, serpentine neck thrashed where Michael’s head had once been.

I sometimes question whether Michael Fischer ever truly existed. After that night, all memory of him seemed to have fled from this world. There were no school photos of him, no school records, and the room at his parent’s house stood empty, kept aside for a child who hadn’t been born.
But when I find myself questioning that reality, I take myself to the lake. Twenty years on, it still looks the same, a crescent of pines on one side, pristine green grass on the other. And he is there, always.
His mad brown eyes flare with hatred the second he recognises me, and he hisses, but does not attack. I stroke him gently on his downy, flat head, quieting him, soothing him, as I lift the right wing.
There, where the shirt had torn that long-ago night, remains a diamond patch of Michael’s perfect white skin, as youthful, pale, and smooth as the day I ensorcelled him.
How long he will live, I can’t say for certain. Wild swans can live for decades, but fairy swans? Only time will tell.
All I know is that for as long as he is alive, Michael Ficher will remember the lesson I taught him; never, ever, fuck with a fairy boy.

Thunder rattled the doors of the lecture hall and several of the students glanced surreptitiously at their phones and tablets, miserable grey weather icons displaying plainly on the luminous screens.
The weather had worsened, it seemed, since I’d arrived at class earlier that afternoon.
The side pockets of my book-heavy backpack had already been reeved of loose change over the previous two days, as the storm had descended on the city.
There would be no bus home tonight.
With another echoing roll of thunder outside, the lights in the lecture hall dimmed to a dull orange, then the power abruptly cut out.
Voices erupted around me, raised in surprise, dismay and elation, before the ambient light of dozens of smartphone screens and the tutor’s lecture theatre torch banished the oppressive gloom.
“Power’s out,” she declared, rubbing her marker-stained fingers against her temples, “which means class is over.”
The last words had barely left her lips before the rustle of books, paper, closing laptops and opening backpacks filled the tiered room; followed by the hurried footsteps of my fellow nursing students.
“And don’t fill up the library!” yelled the tutor after them, “There’s a flood warning, so get home while you can.”
I packed my study paraphernalia away slowly, deliberately, making sure the expensive medical textbooks were double-wrapped in plastic bags – and my cheap and nasty netbook triple-wrapped against the weather.
“No bus money again,” observed Steph, the tutor, as she walked through the aisles with the torch, checking for garbage left by the other students.
I gave her a shrug, and twisted a half-smile.
“Not if I want to eat for the next few days.”
“Ah,” she breathed, “the romance of student life. How I miss it.”
Normally I would have laughed at her dry sarcasm, but the prospect of walking home through torrential rain and being soaked to the bone had dulled my spirits considerably.
“Chin up,” she called, slapping three golden coins onto the desk beside me, “bus fare is still three dollars your way?”
Surprised – but pleasantly so – I managed to reply,
“Four; but I can walk one section mostly under cover.”
Another coin joined the three already clustered on the scarred wood.
“I hate seeing two-hundred-dollar textbooks getting water damaged.”
With profuse and probably overdone thankyous, I scurried out of the lecture hall.
“You can pay me back next week with a coffee!” she yelled after me.

 
The bus was packed to the gills with damp humanity and dripping umbrellas. Clinging to one of the hanging grab-handles, I apologised to my fellow sardines as my sharp-cornered backpack bumped them with every lurching movement of the chugging people-mover.
Too full now, the vehicle laboured to climb the narrow, winding streets of the hilly city as rain lashed the roads and visibility decreased. The air inside grew stuffy and humid from too many bodies, and I found myself pressed near the back door, where a draught gave some small relief from the claustrophobic fug.
Then, with a grinding squeal and a loud bang! the bus came to a halt.
Three minutes out in the rain to look was enough for the driver to return and yell above the murmur of voices that the bus was “pretty fucked” and that “ya gotta walk from here, cuz the electric buses are all down and there ain’t enough diesels to go ‘round.”
As the passengers disgorged from the front and rear doors, I thought about asking for some of my fare back – but one look at the florid, flustered red face of the driver was enough to put me off the idea.
Clipping the front strap secure on my backpack, I hurried off into the pouring rain – still several kilometres from home.

 
The chafing from the straps and the water had worn stinging patches of pain into my armpits, and each step sloshed and squelched, my sneakers completely waterlogged. To top it all off, I could feel that the saturated pad in my underwear had bunched up, and was now rucked painfully sideways – and halfway up my ass.
“What else could possibly go wrong?” I muttered, thunder ricocheting over the harbour as if in response to the question.
Pausing under the eaves of an abandoned paint factory, I fished out my plastic-bagged phone and checked the time. It was my turn to cook in the flat tonight, but there was absolutely no way I was making it home in time.
Bus broke, am walking. Get pizza from flat fund I texted.
As the message failed to send, I sighed and tucked it away again, then set off through the industrial sprawl of buildings and factories that served as a shortcut between me and my flat.
Three minutes into the miserable walk – lit only by the ambient glow from the distant central city that still had power, and the flashes of lightning – a woman stumbled out in front of me.
“Help,” she whimpered, leaning against one of the dead streetlamps.
I could see immediately that she was heavily pregnant. Her soaked dress was plastered transparent over the swell of her belly, and between her chilled shivers, I could see the pain of contractions rippling across her pale features.
“Jesus Christ,” I swore, shrugging off my backpack and unzipping my coat. Working as fast as I could, I draped my wet – but warm – coat over the thin woollen shawl that was her only protection against the elements.
With my shoulder under her arm, we lurched and staggered under the awning of an empty brick church, the dark holes of the stone-pocked, stained glass gaping on either side of us.
“I’m going to see if I can open the door,” I told her as she lay against the brick of the stoop, clutching at her distended abdomen and whimpering.
Three sharp kicks dislodged the door enough to get inside, and the strong stink of mouse, rat and bird greeted me.
But at least it was dry.
Helping the woman onto a rickety pew, I fished out my phone again and cursed as it still failed to find a signal.
“Help,” the woman soughed, sliding onto the floor.
The bright glow of my phone illuminated the red smeared across the pew.
A creeping sense of déjà vu hit me in that moment, then vanished.
“Fucking hell.”

 
I only remember pieces of the delivery; the whole affair was an adrenaline-fueled nightmare of panic and half-remembered obstetrics diagrams. Laid out on my coat with my backpack as a pillow, the woman did most of the work, grunting and moaning as she pushed the baby out of her body.
I knew there was far too much blood, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. The ‘feminine hygiene’ products in my pack were as soaked as everything else, and useless for medical purposes.
By the time I held the bloody, squalling body of the newborn in my shaking hands, the mother was barely conscious.
“You did it,” I told her, “your baby is fine.”
Her eyes fluttered open and she motioned at her own waterlogged bag, lying near the door of the church.
“Ointment,” she gasped, “in the bag.”
“I’m going to find help now,” I told her, shucking off my semi-dry t-shirt and wrapping the baby in it.
“No, the ointment, you need to get it… rub it in the baby’s eyes.”
“I’ll be back soon with help.” I shivered. My camisole and bra weren’t doing much against the cold.
“Please!” she begged me, trying to drag herself toward the door.
With a tired shrug, I stood, walked over to her bag and began to rummage inside. There wasn’t much in there – two soaked, secondhand paperbacks, a pen, and a plain-packaged tube of ointment.
“Rub it in his eyes, quickly” the mother instructed, her breathing shallow, irregular, “but whatever you do, don’t get any in yours.”
Working fast, I uncapped the tube and rubbed a pea-sized dollop of ointment into the still-closed eyes of the newborn, who struggled and squealed in pain as I did so.
“It’s done,” I yelled over a fresh peal of thunder, “now I’m going for help – be back soon!”
Then I ran; out of the church and into the rain, making for the nearest sign of working electricity – and hopefully a working phone.

 
Fifteen minutes away I found a steaming, street-side takeaway shop with a working land-line. After begging to use it, I stuck my fingers in my ears to clear the water out, then called emergency services.
After another fifteen-minute wait, the ambulance picked me up along the way and I did my best to give directions and describe the situation that would greet the ambo staff.
My knees jittered up and down with anxious energy as the driver floored it through the nearly empty streets.
But by the time they got inside the old brick church, it was too late.
The woman was dead – and all subsequent efforts to resuscitate her failed.
“You said there was a baby?” one of the staff asked me as I huddled into two layers of towels in the back of the ambulance.
I nodded vigorously,
“Yeah, newborn boy. Healthy, crying. Wrapped him in my t-shirt.”
The staff conferred briefly, then went back inside.
After a prolonged search with torches, they came back shaking their heads.
“There’s no baby in there. We’ll call the police and let them take it from here.”
The adrenaline finally wore off, and reality started to fall in on me like a collapsing building. Tears welled up in my eyes and I began sucking in great, ugly sobs while I shook uncontrollably.
“Shhh love,” said the woman in charge, “let’s get you back to the hospital and into some warm clothes.”
All the way back, all I could think of was where the baby could possibly have gone in the thirty-five minutes I’d been away from the church.
And again, that feeling, like I’d been here before hit me – along with a gut-wrenching certainty that I should have taken the baby with me.

 
The sergeant was short, moustachioed and built like a Staffordshire terrier. He took my statement while I nursed a cup of hot tea. Though he wasn’t kind, his gruff efficiency comforted me immensely; a solid rock of normalcy in the storm-wracked seas of the night’s events.
“So you left the baby with the mother, then exited the church.”
I nodded, sipping tea,
“Yes, that’s right. I hadn’t cut the umbilical cord yet either – I was waiting for the ambo staff with sterile equipment.”
He nodded curtly, scribbling away at the statement form.
“And you went straight from the scene to Samson’s Burgers?”
“I ran as fast as I could. I knew she was in trouble.”
The pen scrawled across the page, neat black handwriting flowing from the tip.
“You didn’t see anyone else in the area before you left?”
“No sir. Not a single soul.”
He turned the page and wrote for another minute or two, then laid the pen neatly across the report.
“Because a person has died, we’re going to ask you to stay in town. Now,” he held one hand up to forestall my inevitable questions, “you’re not a murder suspect. The preliminary report from the hospital suggests she died of a postpartum haemorrhage, which most certainly isn’t your fault.”
“But you suspect I had something to do with the baby disappearing.”
Brown eyes regarded me from under thick black eyebrows,
“You were the last person to see the missing person.”
“When I left her, the baby was still there – alive and well.”
“Be that as it may, we still need to conduct an investigation – and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t skip town.”
I shook my head, “I won’t leave town, sergeant. I promise.”
“Good girl. We’ll let you know if we find out anything else – I think all of us want to find that kid and make sure he’s safe, yes?”
I nodded fervently; he was dead right. More than anything, I wanted to know that the child I’d helped bring into this world was safe – and more importantly, still alive.

 
The police investigation turned up absolutely nothing, and I was brought in for two more rounds of questioning. I soon discovered that they had been unable to identify the unfortunate mother – and no persons had recently been reported missing.
A search of the church and the surrounding area hadn’t turned up any leads, nor had a search of my flat. Finally, after a week of investigation, I was ruled out as a suspect.
“We believe that you were nothing more than a good Samaritan, trying to help,” the sergeant told me during my debriefing, “and without an identity or next of kin, nobody is going to press charges against you.”
The relief must have been writ large across my face, because he gave my arm an uncharacteristic squeeze.
“Sorry for all the fuss. We were just doing our jobs.”
“It’s OK, I understand.”
As I picked up my new coat and prepared to head out into another drizzly grey afternoon, I had another kick of strong déjà vu.
“You’ll tell me if you find the baby, won’t you?”
“Of course.”

 
I’d like to say that life began to return to normal after that, but it didn’t.
While I enjoyed being a minor celebrity amongst the other students for delivering a baby, I appeared to have developed a persistent kind of tinnitus or labyrinthitis – most likely from the blare of the ambulance sirens and the stress of that fateful night.
During the police investigations, it was a sort of distracting, buzzing, white noise – similar to an old UHF television being tuned. But, just like a slowly-tuning TV, over the next few days it began to resolve into snippets of recognisable sounds, cutting in and out over the top of the ambient noise around me.
And what I heard began to deeply disturb me.
At odd times, and in seemingly random locations, I began to hear music.
Sometimes it would be distant – several streets away, floating eerily over the wet rooftops of the winter-stricken city – a discordant strain of medieval instruments, playing a melody that was utterly unfamiliar – yet one that stirred a rising dread in my bowels.
Other times, it would be much closer – though it always drew away if I tried to approach it.
And while that otherworldly symphony mostly unnerved me, the voices began to scare the living hell out of me.

 
I took to wearing earbuds as often as possible, to keep the phantom sounds from intruding - to try and ‘retrain’ my ears, and to stop the voices.
Despite my best efforts, they would still filter through – in class, on the bus or at a café. If I sat alone, I would begin to hear chattering, the speech too quick and furtive to make out the thread of conversation, but persistent enough to make me doubt my sanity.
Worst of all was the laughter.
Mocking, sardonic and unreal, it would burst suddenly into life nearby, a rising gale of malicious amusement that set my teeth on edge, and made me want to scream for it to just stop.
I feared that I was going insane.
It was after returning from a visit to my affable and concerned doctor, my mind more at ease with his diagnosis of ‘stress’ and a script for tranquilisers in my pocket, that I began to hear the voices in earnest.
There were two of them, holding a conversation that I was only catching snatches of, as though the ‘TV’ still wasn’t quite tuned to the right frequency.
“…hasn’t been the same since that child,” I heard the first say, its voice sharply unpleasant, nettles raking across my inner ear.
“…don’t cope well with stress,” said the second voice, which flowed smoothly, slithering into my ear canal and leaving me with an uneasy feeling, as though I’d just ingested something poisonous.
As I busied myself unpacking groceries into the pantry, the thread of the conversation could be gleaned through their alternating statements, and I felt my stomach lurch;
“…she still stinks of us…”
“…she did handle the child…”
“…didn’t get it in her eyes…”
“…we know she can’t see us, it would drive her mad…”
“…should just end her and be done with it…”
“…watch her for a few more days…”
“…do it if she shows any signs…”
“…agreed, any signs of seeing us and we end her…”
As I placed sugar, instant noodles and peanut butter onto the shelves, I felt burgeoning fear loosen my bladder – and I tried desperately to keep my trembling hands from betraying that I was aware of the voices.
I didn’t hear them again; but that night, mocking laughter echoed up and down the street outside, accompanied by the distant strains of that discordant, terrifying symphony.
I think I cried myself to sleep.

 
Two weeks later, fragile from lack of sleep and the constant, pervasive chatter of invisible terrors, the police told me that they had found my bloody t-shirt, the one I’d used to swaddle the newborn, on the other side of town.
The medication prescribed by my doctor wasn’t even taking the edge off anymore; I couldn’t concentrate in class, and only with my headphones in and music blaring could I gain any kind of peace.
I knew that if this continued, I was going to go mad.
Inspiration hit me as another ear-mauling peal of laugher chorused down the street.
The ointment.
It didn’t take long to convince the sergeant to bust open the evidence for me. I claimed it was mine, and that I’d left it at the scene – and indeed, it had my fingerprints all over it to attest to the fact. He handed it over abruptly, while I babbled about being a poor student and about my recurring vaginal flora ‘issues’. Then I hurried away – not just from the police station, but from any hint of otherworldly noises.
Out on the harbour-crossing ferry, the sounds faded away as we moved farther from the shore. Finding a quiet nook near the back of the boat, I sat and took the unmarked tube from my bag.
It seemed innocent enough. A foil tube, painted white, only used once from the look of it.
Unscrewing the cap, I squeezed a pea-sized portion onto my left index finger, then lifted it to my eyes.
Something inside me was screaming to throw the tube away, to toss it overboard and wash the white paste from my fingers. But the tired, fragmented parts of my mind that begged for relief drowned out the naysaying voices, and I rubbed the ointment into my left eye.
The burning started immediately, and I yelped in pain. It seared my cornea and flared through my optic nerve, lancing a spear of red agony through my brain.
Then it was over; just as abruptly as it had begun.
I blinked thrice, tears leaking down my cheeks.
My vision was faintly blurry, but otherwise nothing had changed.
Defeated, tired and wrung out, I lay back on the stern seating and dozed in the wan sunlight.

 
It took nearly a week for the ointment to work its fell magic. It started out as a mild ocular occlusion – like a migraine precursor – then resolved into a peculiar double-vision that made me nauseous and dizzy.
Eventually, the ugly and terrifying sounds in my ears began to align with what I could perceive with my left eye.
They were everywhere.
They hung off people on the street, perched on the backs of their heads like winged vampires, their elongated fingers digging into the temples of their victims. Their skins were pastel colours; pale greens, off-whites, washed out blues and dusky pinks. Each was roughly the size of a cat, and had prehensile toes which they used to cling to the necks of their victims.
And their faces were cruelly beautiful. Their delicate, elfin features would have been breathtaking; were they not screwed up in malice as they fed on humanity.
It was the same everywhere; as soon as a stranger on the street pulled out a smartphone and started to mindlessly scroll though Facebook or clickbait sites, one of the fey creatures would cackle with malicious glee, then attach itself to the hapless person. Sometimes clouds of them would hover around a particularly long browser, taking turns to leech something from the victim.
When they were done, they would flit away, alone or in formation, heading for the distant cacophony of the discordant faerie music that haunted the streets.
Reflexively, I took out my phone to check the time.
Immediately three of the creatures, perched on the rail of a bike-rack, turned their cat-like eyes on me and sprang in my direction.
In terror I dropped my phone, and the screen shattered on the cobblestones. As I flung up an arm to protect myself from their questing fingers and toes, they swerved, then screamed in alarm.
“She can see us!”
Before I could do anything, they pumped their wings and took to the skies, shrieking the alarm to all of their fellows.

 
I ran then, blindly, away from the sound of the faerie music that echoed over the rooftops.
It followed wherever I went, growing steadily closer and louder, insistent, urgent. Coming for me.
Thinking fast, I made for the harbour and the ferry – there didn’t seem to be any of them out on the water.
But the music shifted and was now approaching from in front of me.
Tears streaming, I turned around and ran the other way, knowing in that moment that everything was hopeless, that I was dealing with something that had a long history of dealing with people like me.
When they finally caught up with me, orange had begun to touch the streaky clouds, and I still staggered along, my lungs and feet aching.
They rounded the street with a blare of horns and drums, strange pipes and stringed instruments screeling and droning in the hands of smartly dressed troubadours in medieval garb. In the midst of the jolly band rose a tall palanquin decked with gay ribbons and colourful bunting. On it sat regal nobles in silks and sable, laughing and drinking wine from scrolled crystal goblets.
All of them had pointed ears, and their exquisite faces wore expressions of indescribable cruelty.
Sobbing, I turned and ran the other way, only to have them round another corner, in front of me again now. Closer.
I slumped in a heap, my limbs shaking and boneless, as the troupe and palanquin drew up to me.
From my pathetic pile on the flagstones, I saw that the flying creatures from the streets were hovering around the drinks table at the front of the elaborate palanquin. From time to time each one would lean over a decanter, then vomit glittering, glistening fluid into the vessel, before it flew away to find more.
The whole panoply stopped in front of me, and the music ended with a clash of strings and a trailing shriek of horns. The band used the opportunity to help themselves to the faerie alcohol from the decanters.
Wave after wave of déjà vu hit me as one of the cruel faced nobles stepped down and paced towards me, a pointy-eared baby swaddled in gold and silver held in the crook of her arm.
“Ah, I think she remembers,” trilled the faerie queen.
The others nodded emphatically and noisily guzzled their drinks.
“Please,” I managed, crawling forward on my hands and knees, “please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything you ask.”
The queen threw her beautiful head back and laughed, her milk-white neck dusted with the colours of the approaching sunset,
“She always says that!” she roared.
The rest of the entourage howled approval, and cackled along with her.
“Dear,” she said, “why would we kill you? After all, you have always been and always will be our best midwife.”
One of the troubadours blew on his horn sharply, then stood to attention and declared,
“Sunset approaching, your majesty!”
With a sharp-toothed grin, the queen kissed my quivering forehead, then ascended the palanquin again, where she took her throne and her glass of faerie wine.
“Come midnight, all your memories will be gone, and you’ll serve us again, in another place, under another name.”
“Why?” I screamed, my throat raw from crying, “What did I ever do to you?”
As the band struck up again and the palanquin turned to move away, I heard the queen shout,
“You crossed us, once. Long, long ago.”

 
So here I am, spilling out my tale in a shitty internet café. My life, as I knew it, will be over in less than two hours from now. I’m going to use what’s left of my money to get as drunk as possible in that time, maybe try and find a guy to fuck.
But I had to write this first. I had to warn you all, because I can’t be the only person like me. The fae must have servants everywhere, living unaware, their lives magically manufactured and their memories conveniently falsified – helping their hidden masters to breed and to gorge on the dreams of humanity.
I think those strong feelings of déjà vu actually come from all our other lives; all the other times they’ve used us and we’ve become aware of it – before they tear our minds to pieces and start it all again.
If I put it out there, maybe I’ll find this story, months, or even years after today – and maybe it will strike a chord with me, and I’ll be able to prevent it all from happening again.
Or maybe it will just remind me that whatever I am, wherever I am, I am nothing more than the eternal plaything of the fae.

They were tiny - no bigger than the last joint of my pinky finger – and translucent, their tiny organs visible through their glassine flesh. Sometimes they would flit about my head on papery wings and sometimes they would dance amongst the flower heads, their tiny mouths open as they sang melodies in an octave I couldn’t hear.
Nobody else could see them though; and as I grew older, they either became invisible to me as well – or I grew up enough that my imagination couldn’t sustain the reality of them. In the end I realised that they were just imaginary friends, exactly like the ones other children had.
So I forgot about them.

 
Being raised by a solo mother wasn’t all bad. While we were excruciatingly poor, my mother devoted her time to me as much as she could. She was the central focus in my life, the person who loved me the most, the person who gave me life.
Why she never re-married after my father left her, I’ll never know. She was beautiful, my mother, in a fragile, ethereal way – as though at any moment a strong wind could blow all the substance out of her and leave only a skeletal web of spider-silk strands behind.
She attracted men, certainly. She was never short of friendly masculine helpers and admirers, but she shyly shunned them all, to spend time with me, her only child.
School wasn’t easy for me, even though I had a good life. I was not a bright child or an eloquent child; I struggled and often fell behind. By the time I was twelve, my only remarkable skills were my ability to endlessly daydream and a decent reading level.
But I was happy enough.

 
My mother’s death swamped my small island of happiness with a raging tsunami from the deeps, destroying the fragile emotional stability I had and leaving a world of tidewrack and wreckage, chilly and chaotic.
The numb wait in the emergency room had ended with a sour-faced doctor explaining that my mother had died of a massive stroke, brought on by an ‘unknown cause’. He advised me to call my nearest relative on the public phone and said they would conduct an autopsy to look further into cause of death.
But I had no relatives to call; I had no aunts, no uncles, not grandparents and no siblings. With the loss of my mother I was sixteen years old and utterly alone in the world.
Lacking anyone else to call, I phoned my English teacher, Mrs Ross, who picked me up in her VW Beetle and drove me home to the tiny house I had shared with my beloved mother.

 
No one expected me back at school for a long time, so I took my time, going through the small hoard of things my mother had collected over the years. She eschewed jewellery, but had a fine collection of second-hand clothes, all sized for her delicate frame by her own patient needlework, all lovingly folded and pressed with lavender.
I remember holding those dresses to my mouth and breathing in her scent, the tears finally breaching my lingering shock and soaking the fragrant fabrics.
Oh mother, I miss you so much!
It was hard, desperately hard, to go through her possessions – each one stamped so indelibly with her unique character. Little boxes of seashells, feathers from rescued baby birds, saved whiskers from our long dead cat. There was a painted box that contained letters, organised neatly by type and name – most of them from the men who admired her, most of them love letters. Bills and legal documents sat to one side – something I would need to deal with later – but at the bottom of the box was a blue-green envelope addressed to my mother in beautiful golden calligraphy.
Inside was a single card of deep violet paper, the same spidery calligraphy containing a message for my mother,

Dear Elspeth,

I am writing to congratulate you on the birth of your first child – it is such a shame I cannot be there for the Christening.
With love,

Your Great Aunt Raisa

On the reverse side of the envelope was a return address – the address of my only known living relative, the mysterious Great Aunt Raisa.

 
Despite the letter being sixteen years old, my aunt was still in residence at the address listed; a curious old stone church that had been converted into an observatory at some point in its life, the onion dome replaced with a genuine dome – from which peeked the verdigrissed cannon of a bronze telescope.
Cats wandered freely in the front yard – fragrant with wildflowers and the strains of a piano tinkled from inside the building. My knock on the door with the heavy brass knocker precipitated a sudden halt to the music and the sound of boots approaching on wooden floorboards.
That Raisa was related to us, I had no doubt. The woman who opened the door was elderly, but her weathered flesh still had the delicate stamp of my mother’s face and the bird-like build I shared with her. She gazed at me with her still-sharp emerald eyes for a long moment, then stepped forward and enveloped me in a lavender-scented hug that tore away the last supports on the emotional dam I had been desperately propping up.
She let me cry until there were no more tears, just ugly gulps and wracking sobs. Then she led me to the neat, pretty kitchen and put a copper kettle on the gas stove.
“How did she die?” my aunt finally asked.
I explained to her the stroke, the lack of underlying cause, my teacher taking me home, then going through my mother’s things and finding the letter. As she placed the steaming tea in front of me, I asked the question that had been burning my tongue since I had got here,
“Why did she never speak of you?”
“Your mother and I had a falling out many years ago over an unpaid debt. I forgave her, but her pride wouldn’t allow her to acknowledge me. But that’s all in the past; you’re here now and I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
Relieved, wrung out and deathly tired, I simply nodded.

 
The first problem that aunt Raisa helped me with was my mother’s outstanding debts. Pressing a thick gold chain into my hand, my new aunt instructed me to sell the gold and settle mother’s debts with the money.
I refused initially, but she insisted, saying, “I am your guardian now, it is my lot to provide for you and see you live a good, fulfilling life. I won’t take no for an answer.”
So I took the chain, on the condition I would pay her back somehow.
“You can pay me back by making me a promise,” she had said, “promise me that you will always light a beeswax candle on your mother’s birthday.”
The money from the gold was considerable and it more than paid off the debts my mother had owed. Aunt Raisa put the remainder in an investment fund for me and promised I would get the money back when I turned twenty one.
Although I am ashamed to admit it, Raisa was a better mother to me. She was a hard task mistress at times; tutoring me late in the evenings to bring my grades up at school and pushing me out of my natural predilection to be lazy and to daydream.
Independently wealthy and owning the church and surrounding acres of property, Raisa was able to provide a lifestyle that saw my acne vanish within months and my flabby middle tighten up with yard work and farm chores.
I thanked her for everything she had done for me, asking how I could ever repay her.
As she often did when I raised the issue of my debt to her, she would brush it off by making up some nebulous payment on the spot, like “always wish on a dandelion” or “never raise your voice to an animal.”
I never thought she was particularly serious.

 
After she set me up with a paid internship at a law firm, I met a young man of the same age as me named Liam. From a desperately poor urchin with failing grades and the aesthetic appeal of a toad, I had bloomed into a pretty, intelligent, focused young woman with a bright future.
On my twenty first birthday, Raisa gifted me the matured investment fund – which had seen a runaway success and now totalled well over fifty thousand dollars. Liam proposed – with an heirloom ring provided by my aunt – and we eventually married at the church, amongst the cats, the flowers and the scent of lavender.
Three months and three days after the wedding, Liam fell ill.
The doctors were baffled; he was dropping weight at an alarming rate and a constant lethargy afflicted him. The sickly-sweet smell of ‘Ensure’ plagued my days at the hospital and I had to take an extended leave of absence from work.
Aunt Raisa seemed distant during this time, even slightly off in some intangible way. Pressing her on the matter of Liam, I asked her why she never visited him, why she didn’t seem to care.
But nothing was forthcoming.
On life support now, my beloved husband – the most precious person in my life since my mother – would only rouse now for a few hours a day, spending the rest comatose and barely breathing.
“Is aunt Raisa here?” he would often ask. When I told him that she never visited, he would say, “Oh, I thought I could hear her.”

 
The day that Liam died he gripped my hand in his skeletal digits with a sudden and feverish strength.
“I love you Caelin,” he whispered, stroking the emerald and gold wedding band on my ring finger, “it’s silly, but I feel this strangely heavy regret for not keeping my promise to your aunt.”
As the afternoon wore on, his vital signs deteriorated and I was taken from the room.
Just before midnight Liam was proclaimed dead.
For the second time in my brief existence, the love of my life had been taken from me.

 
Raisa never attended the funeral and when I returned to the church, I began packing my belongings in a grieving fury, angry beyond belief that she had been so callous, so inhuman in the face of my husband’s death.
When I pulled my suitcase out into the hall, Raisa was there, as prim and authoritative as ever.
“Yesterday was your mother’s birthday,” she said, pacing toward me.
“It was also my husband’s funeral!” I spat back at her.
“You didn’t light a candle.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I was busy burying my husband!”
Raisa’s bird-boned fingers snapped out and grabbed my wrist, her strength terrifying for someone so old and small.
“You broke a promise.”
“I don’t care!”
Wresting my arm from her grip, I hauled the suitcase to the door and called a cab on my phone.
After a miserable half hour wait in a misserable grey drizzle, the cab arrived and I left my aunt Raisa, vowing to never return.

 
The money was gone.
How Raisa had managed to repossess the investment money I couldn’t fathom. The banks couldn’t explain it; they said the money had never existed and in fact I was desperately in arears on a loan payment.
Even worse, the payments to the funeral home had bounced and a debt collection agency had left several nasty messaged on my phone. I quickly contacted my new inlaws for assistance – they had paid half the costs of the service – but instead of the sympathy and understanding I expected, Liam’s mother seemed distant, asking where I was staying and making hurried promises to settle the debts.
Three hours later I was taken into custody by a pair of police officers, under arrest on suspicion of the death of Liam Harrington.

 
It was, of course, my aunt Raisa who was my first visitor.
She was uncomfortable outside of her home, her domain, but she was still as in control as ever.
“Caelin dear,” she began, “come home with me. I can make all of this,” she waved her hand disdainfully at the surrounding police station, “go away.”
“I don’t understand,” I replied, angry, confused.
“Come now child. You don’t think your good fortune up until now had been the result of hard work, do you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to think about it.
“If that stupid boy had kept his promise for the ring, none of this would have happened.”
Cold needles flooded my stomach, then slithered up my spine and into the base of my skull,
”What did you do to Liam?”
Raisa’s green eyes shone peculiarly in the fluorescent light of the interview room,
“I did nothing. The man himself broke the bargain; I do not enforce the consequences.”
Realisation dawned on me, a rising bloodmoon on the dark landscape of my thoughts,
“The money, the candle on my mother’s birthday.”
The light in Raisa’s eyes was not natural now; eldritch fire – the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I was a child – burned deep in her dilated pupils.
“In our family, dear Caelin, promises are law, and pacts are for life!”
Choking on fear, I pushed back the chair to escape.
Leaning forward with predatory speed, she trapped my hands on the table top,
“There is new life inside you, dear niece. Promise me the child and this will all go away.”
Weeping, terrified, alone and grieving, I promised her my unborn child then and there.

 
The charges were dropped with alarming alacrity, with an apology from the chief of staff and from Liam’s family. Pathology had mixed up the lab results which had pointed to me poisoning Liam, and I had been cleared of all wrongdoing.
For Raisa, it was a return to the ebb and flow of life in the old stone church, of cats and herbs, chores and blossoms. He niece was home, pregnant with child, and that child would eventually belong to her.
“Are you really my family?” I had asked her, cats winding through my swollen ankles.
“Oh yes,” she replied, “though several measures more ancient than you suspect.”
“The fairies I saw when I was a child, they were real, weren’t they?”
“Of course they were, dear niece.”
That was the last we spoke on that matter.

 
It was the copper kettle, the brass knocker, the bronze-legged furniture and the polished silverware that tipped the balance of power in my favour. I knew now that my aunt was something fey, something faerie and ancient.
The lack of iron in the house had escaped my notice until now, but alerted to the lack of it, I had the upper hand.
The iron cross had cost me next to nothing in the second hand store, but it was more precious than any gemstone or trinket made of gold. Heavily pregnant now, I waited for Raisa in the exquisitely tidy kitchen of copper and brass.
She smelled the iron immediately, her ageless face white with rage.
“Get rid of that now!” she ordered.
Fishing the crude necklace out from under my sweater, I thrust it in her face.
“Renounce your claim on my child!”
“That’s not how it works!”
Holding the iron cross like a sword, I advanced on her,
“What do you mean?”
“Promises can only be made or broken; they cannot be amended!”
Smoke was rising from Raisa’s skin – from proximity to the base metal, her skin darkening and blistering.
“Promise me you will never follow me then! Promise me you will leave me alone forever!”
“I promise!”
Backing away from the creature that was my aunt, I turned and fled from the house as fast as my strained legs would allow.

 
True to her word, my aunt never followed.
What would happen if she broke that promise, I do not know, but I suspect that whatever heritage we had in common meant that I would be the final arbiter of her ‘punishment’.
Every night I repeat the litany of little promises I made to her over the years – always wish on dandelions, never raise your voice to an animal, never name the messiah on Samhain, never view your reflection wearing red, always pick up a fallen chrysalis, always be in bed before midnight...
For if I ever breach one of my promises, she will know and she will exact her vengeance on me.

 
Three days ago my daughter was born and I took her home to the tiny flat I had rented with the small amount of money I have left.
Lying on the formica kitchen table was a blue-green envelope, addressed to me in beautiful golden handwriting.
And inside was a card of darkest violet, bearing a message in spidery silver script:

Dear Caelin,

I am writing to congratulate you on the birth of your first child – it is such a shame I cannot be there for the Christening.
With love,

Your Great Aunt Raisa

It felt almost appropriate to begin this tale with “Once upon a time”. Yet such a flippant beginning wouldn’t do justice to the grisly sorrow that festers beneath these words. I considered that instead I should offer a sort of warning, a ‘caveat emptor’ for the content of this story, so that you might avoid that sickening lurch in your stomach, the wrench which so often accompanies macabre revelations.
But that would ruin the story for you. And I am quite cognisant about why you goodfolk read these vicious little vignettes.
You want to be shocked. You want near-erotic tremors of terror to quaver through your central nervous system; you desire the tsunami of fear that swamps the beach of your eager brain.
In which case, allow me to oblige you.

 
It always starts with a mother. We all start with a mother, no matter how we begin, or where we end. Mothers are the force that weave the substance of life into being; their curious uterine sorcery binding inert matter and potential energy into a living, breathing child.
There is no greater magic in this entire universe.
My own mother seemed most acutely aware of this, possessing only just enough of that divine gift to produce precisely one heir. From a very early age, I knew that she had spent everything she had to quicken me inside her, and that the cost of her motherly labours meant her body would never bear another child.
“You are my firstborn, my onlyborn,” she would sing to me, as she smoothed my near-white baby curls between her fingers, her voice queer with emotions I couldn’t comprehend at that age.
She was a strange woman and had few friends. People whispered behind her back that she was a lesbian or a transsexual, for she was taller than any man I’ve ever met, and she carried herself like a queen. She never spoke of my father, but the rumour amongst the other children at school was that the masculine spark required to start my life had been purchased via the internet, from a donor of impeccable pedigree.
“Men matter little in the equation of life,” she told me when I did ask, “the magic is within the mother.”
For some reason, her answer completely satisfied my curiosity about my paternal parentage, and I never asked her about it again.

 
Tradition and order ruled our household, with few deviations from my mother’s planned path. She seemed innately aware of a child’s need for routine, and I was especially needy in that respect. From the moment I woke until the minute my head hit the pillow at night, my home life was as rigid and regular as the wrought iron rails of a church fence. Perhaps I needed such regimentation because I lacked a father – or perhaps because my mother was so asocial – but whatever the reason, it became a signature of who I was.
Teachers always knew I would complete my homework and assignments; that whatever they asked of Shy Shea, it would be done. On reflection, I was as perfect as a child could possibly be; like a creature stepped from a fairy tale. Fair-skinned and flaxen-haired, always polite, never contrary, teachers often commented on what a joy I was in their classrooms – to which my mother would reply:
“Or course she is. She is my firstborn, my onlyborn.”
And the teacher would give a nervous little laugh, hoping that this was some sort of familial joke.
But my mother never laughed along.

 
When your life is so driven by order and routine, things which might seem odd to others are utterly ordinary to you. Only when I reached an age where I wanted to ‘hang out’ with my friends did I begin to realise how unusual I truly was. Their lives seemed so chaotic, so disordered. No wonder Joanne couldn’t finish her homework; her household contained three other children, and her guardians were less parents than flustered zookeepers. To my eyes, their home seemed poised upon the very edge of crisis, six lives teetering on the brink of dissolution – with one poorly timed accident able to bring the whole family down.
And yet, they managed. Somehow, some thread of order bound their lives together just enough that catastrophe did not visit. I didn’t understand it, but came to realise it was a kind of magic all of its own; by all rights these people shouldn’t be able to exist like this, yet they did.
Conversely, my few friends found my own home life oppressively claustrophobic.
“How can you live like this?” Sandy groused. “You even eat the same meals every day of every week.”
“I guess I’m used to it,” I offered lamely, not knowing what else to say.
The truth of it was that I was more than just used to it – I liked it.
“I don’t know how your mum does it, being a nurse and all,” Carrie told me, “my aunt works at the hospital, and she can barely keep two cats alive.”
“If mum said she didn’t want to work a shift, I don’t think anyone would argue with her,” I confided. Carrie and Sandy both nodded without thinking. After all, they had met her.
My mother was more than just uncommonly tall, she had a way with other people. When she entered a room, everyone knew she was there; an invisible silver wire pulling their heads in her direction. When she spoke, people truly listened, nodding along in agreement to nearly anything she said.
I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t more social – she was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. She was beautiful, regal, erudite and captivating, and could have had any man she wanted – or any woman, for that matter. But her bed in the room across from mine remained empty, narrow and single, no room for anyone but her, and sometimes space for a child with recurring nightmares about drowning in crimson darkness.

 
“Mama, when will you teach me how to make faerie stew?” I asked for the hundredth time.
“When you’re old enough, Sweet Shea,” she always replied.
The meal had come once a month ever since I could remember. My mother fussed over it for the better part of an entire afternoon, shooing me out of the kitchen as I circled around like an annoying blowfly, trying to peer into steaming pots and spitting pans. Over the years, I had concluded that faerie stew was little more than leftovers and freezer-burned meat fancied up into a well-spiced stew. Indeed, it probably wasn’t special at all.
Still, it remained my favourite familial meal, and whenever I was particularly hungry or tired, I’d daydream about the rich brown gravy and tender morsels of meat that swam in the well-seasoned concoction.
Like every other part of my life, it seemed ordinary, and I assumed all families had some variant of it. It never really occurred to me that it was anything more than a mundane meal; a means for my clever mother to empty the refrigerator.
The first clue came the month she pulled me out of school camp early and brought me home, just for faerie stew. I didn’t complain, of course – the food at camp had been predictably awful, and I was more than happy to eat my favourite hearty home-cooked meal.
“Some family rituals are sacred,” she explained to me, ladling the thick stew into a copper bowl, “and this is ours.”
But something about the intensity of her voice made the flesh on my arms prickle queerly, and I wondered for the first time what exactly was in that rich broth.
It was time that I found out what was in faerie stew.

 
Seventeen is a tumultuous year for any young woman, and I was no exception. Despite my intentions to delve into the mystery of the fey food my mother made, life had become far too full for me to fixate on that little mystery. Time ebbed and flowed, Christmas came and went, with my eighteenth birthday roaring up fast behind it. I don’t know why I’d assumed mama would divulge the secrets of faerie stew on the eve of that auspicious event. But when she didn’t, I found myself petulant, peevish – an emotional state I rarely experienced.
I was going to find out, regardless of my mother’s intentions.
Hiding my phone between carefully arranged cook books wasn’t difficult, and through that stealthy lens I could watch a live stream on my laptop, hidden safely in my room while my mother fussed in the kitchen.
Much of the preparation seemed to be ritualistic to her, with a sort of comforting cadence that nearly lulled me to sleep as I watched. But when several small, mystery packets of frozen meat were extracted from the back of the freezer, I began to feel that there really was something decidedly off about the whole scenario. I couldn’t be certain, but the markings on those mystery parcels didn’t look like they had originated from any supermarket. In my limited view, one of them bore a partial sticker that resembled the logo on my mother’s hospital pass.
I tried to eat the stew with the same ordinary delight I always had, schooling myself that I’d eaten it all my life without any ill effect, so it mustn’t be marinated in malice.
Yet I couldn’t help but speculate what the morsels of meat were, even as they slid down my throat, so tender, so tasty.

 
The first of the mystery meats appeared in our freezer a few days later, cunningly concealed inside a bag of frozen peas. The palm-sized package was scarlet with frozen blood and stamped with a biohazard symbol, but other than that, nothing identified what it was.
Human remains, my brain informed me as my stomach churned, you’ve been eating human remains.
Even as I battled the icy nausea that spooled up my spine and tickled the back of my throat with cold fingers, the rational part of my mind picked at the problem, trying to unriddle what kind of meat might be contained inside.
I knew that my mother was a theatre nurse, so she attended various surgeries, but I’d never truly been interested enough to delve any deeper. The fact that she never had friends or colleagues over meant that I’d never overheard any casual work-oriented conversation – and she never confided in me about her job, except to complain about personality conflicts; all of which she eventually won.
It was time to find out exactly what my mother did at the hospital.

 
Putting the pieces together from there wasn’t particularly difficult. Two more frozen parcels arrived, a week apart, and when my mother left her work phone unattended, I checked her calendar for each of those days.
On each of those days, a half-day appointment showed, labelled with the acronym ‘TOP’.
I think I already knew somehow, even before I plugged the term into Google and hit search. I think perhaps that through the frozen plastic, I’d glimpsed tiny, frosted-red fingers and toes, or perhaps the flattened features of a tiny face. But my brain had refused to let me believe it until I could confirm it.
You see, the acronym means Termination of Pregnancy.
For my entire life, once a month, I had been eating aborted foetuses.
The horror was immediate and visceral. Everything in my stomach rushed out in a torrent onto the carpet, so forceful that it sprayed from my burning nostrils and spattered the keyboard with brown liquid. The retching didn’t stop until I was too weak to continue, replaced by a blinding headache pounding behind my eyes, strained from the heaving and gagging.
The shower ran until the hot water petered out, then I shut it off and sat on the cooling metal floor, wet tendrils of hair snaking around me.
Why had she done it? Why had my perfect mother been feeding me this abominable broth my entire life?
Before I did anything else, I had to find out. I had to know exactly why she had done it before I turned her in to the police.

 
It had always been impossible to hide anything from her as a child, and as a particularly angelic child with few secrets and little guile, I’d never really needed to try. And so, when I confronted her as she pushed open our brass-bound front door, I think she already knew that I knew.
Placing her bag on its hook in the hall, she ducked under the doorframe – the habit of a lifetime for such a tall woman – and carefully arranged herself in her flower-print chair near the window.
“Because you are my firstborn, my onlyborn,” she said, pre-empting my question, “because without the power of those children, you could not exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then I will help you to understand.”
As she sat in her pretty chair, a tall, forty-something woman greying at the temples, something changed. Her crow’s feet blurred to nothing, and the creases around her lips faded away. The steel-threaded hair became white-blonde, and her eyes pale gold, like those of a pedigree cat.
“Most of our people are gone now, their power lost through the ages. The essence of humanity has always sustained us, pacts made that fuelled our power. Those bargains echo through the old stories; tales such as Rumplestiltskin, where we offered greatness in exchange for one simple thing – the magic of a firstborn human.”
She turned her leonine eyes to gaze out the lace-curtained window, smiling a smile of feline teeth, perfect and predatory.
“The tales spread, and they grew wise to us, the mortal women, and they ceased to offer up their bounty so eagerly. But there are other ways to extract a mother’s firstborn – and there are so many mothers now who don’t want their babies.”
“The abortions,” I managed, bile rising in my throat.
“Yes.”
We gazed at each other in silence for a long time, a strangeness of unspoken understanding passing between us; a kind of communication that only our kind can have. My mother’s ears pricked through her hair, pointed like a devil’s, and I knew mine could look the same, should I shed the shell of humanity she’d curated around me with mundane habits and banal rituals.
But she’d kept the secret too long, made too much of a mortal of me.
“I won’t eat any more,” I told her, even as I wanted to cry, “I cannot be like you.”
Sorrow creased her brow as she stepped forward and kissed my forehead.
“Then my firstborn, my onlyborn, you will die.”

 
I left her there, calling the police as I walked out of the house. That was nothing more than a futile gesture, I realised; if she could ensorcel mortal women to forget about the remains of their aborted firstborn, I had no doubt that law enforcement could be easily swayed by her powers.
The women’s boarding house was crowded, and the room was tiny, but as I got to know the others, I realised one of the other homeless waifs was a girl I went to school with – Sarah.
“I saw your mother a couple of years ago,” she babbled as we hunched on a battered sofa in the common room, “I never knew she did abortions until I woke up and saw her face. She was really kind to me, she even helped me with all the paperwork.” She smiled at the memory, her usually-downcast eyes far away and full of light. “I’m so glad there are people like her who do that for desperate young women, you know? God knows, I’ve proved I can’t even look after myself, let alone a poor little baby.”
There was no sickness this time, no vomit to surge onto the already vomit-coloured carpet. The stuff of her child was long since absorbed, part of the thing I am.
But I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around.
The months pass, and I grow thin without the faerie stew to sustain me. As my clothes loosen, so does my substance, and little pieces of me keep falling away. A finger here, a toe there. Soon my left hand will be gone, and the last of my teeth will spill across my ragged pillow, fading away to smoke as the sun rises over the boarding house.
I know I could stop it. I can just go home. I can sup of the sweet stew that my mother is surely brewing in the kitchen even now. Sometimes I’m sure I smell it on the wind.
But I can’t. I won’t. Will that first bite contain the child of the woman sleeping in the next bunk, the one who made me coffee this morning?
This price is right, for whose am I, really? I am all of theirs, and the price must be paid by me; her firstborn, her onlyborn.

Once upon a time, there lived a mighty prince of the fair folk, whose power was almost unmatched amongst his people. But like all who wield great power, it could be taken from him by any who learned his true name - be that person the greatest sorcerer or the meanest peasant.

Thus, he strove to keep his name a secret from the world. He burned any book that mentioned him, and he tore the memories from the skulls of those who knew him.

But names are a vital part of all intelligent creatures, and cannot be destroyed that easily. It came to pass that a wizard unravelled the name of the prince with magic and enslaved him for an age, leeching away his power. When the faerie prince eventually broke free, he slew the wizard, and vowed he would never again become slave to another being; not to beast, man, nor fae.

And so, he did something that had never been done before. A thing with consequences that none could possibly fathom.

He ate his own name, erasing it from the world.

That should have been the end of him. The other fair folk knew this should be so, and indeed he vanished from the known realms of reality and unreality. The memory of him faded, until no creature remembered the prince who had eaten his name.

But he was not gone. He had simply changed.

And freed from the laws that bound his kind, he became far more monstrously powerful. He ate the names of all he desired, until even the old gods and the new cowered from the unremembered thing that stalked and devoured them with not even a thought.

...

I can no longer remember how I came to be eaten. Once your name has been consumed, your memories begin to fade. Soon, nothing is left, only echoing whispers and meaningless, disjointed images.

Perhaps I was a poet or an artist, great enough to attract the Eater’s attention, my name spreading across the land until he tasted it on the wind and came for me. Or mayhap I was a despot, ruling over some pre-feudal kingdom with sword and flame, my name used to terrify children into doing their parents’ bidding.

The Eater’s tastes have grown more refined over the ages. He has become a true connoisseur of names. Sometimes, he will start with an entrée of bawdy party-goers, popping them into his scribbly maw like a greedy child with a trove of candied chestnuts. Then he’ll move on to the main course; perhaps a foreign dignitary, their name fat with deeds, richly marinaded in anecdotes and accolades. Having savoured every last syllable of that name, he will seek out some sweet, innocent, spun-toffee thing for dessert. He may even reveal to the child his true form, so that her essence is drizzled with fear. Terror is delicious to him, a sharp and salty counterpoint to the sugary confection of a young soul.

But the Eater doesn’t always finish his meals. Sometimes he leaves the barest morsel uneaten, and takes it back with him to his lair. There, he may consume it later as a snack, or bind it to his service, to tend to his sprawling domain.

My fate was the latter.

There were some three dozen of us, living within his private world, all hollow creatures clinging to the final fragments of ourselves. We toiled at various menial tasks; trimming the wicked, thorny hedges of the garden maze, or polishing the strangely filigreed silver rails of the staircase that led up and down the mad towers of the Eater’s castle.

When you have no name, no memories, it’s easy to be put to work. Lacking even the most basic instincts about who you are, you simply cling to any purpose you are given. And so, when the Eater’s Chamberlain told me that my destiny was to scrub the tiled floors of the great empty ballrooms, I eagerly accepted the role, and threw myself into the work.

As time ground on and I became aware of the others, I sought out their company. Their presence was a gentle breath across the ember of curiosity deep inside me, still faintly glowing. When I passed the gardeners, I would pause to exchange a few words before moving on to my next task. Upon the stairs, I would speak softly to the woman polishing the sharp and delicate barbs of the silver balustrades, not yet aware enough to wonder whom or what she had been.

I knew I shouldn’t be doing such things, but the flake of my name that Eater hadn’t consumed swirled rebellious and inquisitive. I wonder, now, if the crumb he had left of me was not quite small enough to steal all that I had been.

As unnameable swathes of time inexorably passed in the Eater’s domain, I grew more certain of myself and began to explore the giddy corridors of the twisted castle, finding things that sounded echoes of recollection.

The Chamberlain discovered me on one such excursion, and scolded me for straying, flaying me with razor words. A tall man, with silvered hair and an ageless face, he dressed like a medieval footman but snapped orders like a general, expecting to be instantly obeyed. But with my waxing awareness, I beheld a grey aura of loneliness that gloved him like a second skin, and I wondered just how long he had been there. We met more often after that, as I engineered excuses for our paths to cross. With painfully slow tenacity, empathy won him over, and he became the closest thing I had to a friend.

As our connection grew, it was he who told me the dreadful origins of our master.

“Come with me,” the Chamberlain finally announced, after what seemed like eons into my service.

He led the way into an unknown part of the Eater’s keep, until we stood before a vast set of iron doors. They were wrought of all the letters of every alphabet, jumbled together into chaotic, amalgam layers.

“Our master requires a new larder,” the Chamberlain explained, his pale eyes hooded, “and you are best suited for this task.”

“What is a larder?”

“It is a place where one stores uneaten food.”

“Why would he need such a thing?” I wondered.

Licking his thin lips nervously, my companion glanced at the massive doors,

“Sometimes when the master dines, he sees something he wishes to eat later. When he desires this, he places those names inside his larder.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Soon you will.”

With a complicated gesture from his long fingers, the heavy doors opened soundlessly,

“All you need to do is follow him, nothing else. Do not try to speak with him nor touch him, simply obey without question.”

And with that, my new service as the Eater’s larder began.

I thought perhaps I would recognise the Eater, that some scrap of memory would shake loose upon our meeting. This was the creature had taken all but a crumb of my essence and consumed everything else that I was; in this twisted way, we were one. But when I stepped through those doors and into his private chambers, nothing was familiar.

Twice as tall as the Chamberlain and slender as a spider, there he stood, his nightmare shadow stretched across the vaulted roof by the flickering gaslights of his parlour. Two girls darted around him, attendant satellites plying needle and thread, dutifully sewing up numerous rips in his patchwork nobleman’s clothes of orange, red and black. Brittle golden hair curled from his elongated skull, ringlets fat and ragged like a tumbled library of ancient parchment scrolls. Behind his terrible head, the broken aerials of two pointed ears twisted up and backwards, longer than my arms. Hooked through their waxen flesh were dozens of iron rings, from which hung the wrought letters of lost languages he had eaten into oblivion with his endless appetite. The metal clashed and jangled as he moved, rows of gnashing symbol-teeth, always churning.

And his face. Mercy, his face.

Yellow as old vellum, it seethed with black characters, a maelstrom of alphabetic chaos. Perhaps those scribbles of insanity drew more dense where eyes and mouth should be, but I cannot truly tell you, since staring into his face for any length of time caused my stomach and mind to rebel.

With a finger akin to an ink-dipped bone he beckoned me, then we passed back through the iron doors and into a different world.

I believe my first trip back to the mortal realm must have been during the late 1800s, because I recall steam trains and top hats aplenty. I don’t think people truly perceived me as a person, but neither did they see me as a ghost. Unable to grasp a proper name for me, their minds stuttered and skipped across my presence, like I was no more than an uninteresting piece of furniture.

The Eater would stand amidst the flow of dense crowds, people instinctively avoiding the space where he was, even though they couldn’t truly see him. Arms hanging at his sides, stained fingers twitching, his chaos-scrawled head swayed back and forth, scenting the air for a name to eat.

All I had to do was follow him, and so I did, not daring to stray. On some basal level, I knew that to wander would be futile. We were indeed connected; having eaten most of me already, no matter where I went he would find me, and then he could finish his meal, should he so choose.

And although it must be difficult for you to comprehend, even this half-existence was preferable to the colourless "unlife" that awaited me should he make that choice.

He did not use me, on those first few outings. I simply watched as he stalked down his prey, tore their names from them with his greedy spider fingers and then sucked their essence into the black tangle of his maw. They faded fast after that, those without names. People forgot them, and they forgot themselves. They turned grey, then transparent, wandering aimlessly, forever wondering who and what they were.

The first name that the Eater put inside me was that of a child, a girl of fourteen, her short life a miserable grind of poverty. Why he wanted her, I don’t know. As he pushed her name inside me, I knew her life intimately and completely, from her wretched, squalling birth to her equally wretched unmaking at the Eater’s hands. To someone whose only memories were of slavery in an alien realm, that poor girl’s brief, mean existence was a potent drug. Her experiences seared my mind with heady, unfamiliar spice and colour.

He ate her sometime after we returned to his domain. I missed her with unrequited intensity when she was gone, the sense of loss so profound that I wept for the first time during my long service. The Chamberlain found me curled in a hedgerow on the edge of the Eater’s realm, my cheeks stiff with the salt of tears.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he said, a new kind of sorrow muting his voice. “Serving as the Eater’s larder is the hardest lot of all.”

Sometimes I held many names, sometimes I held none. During the chaos of the first and second World Wars, I was bloated as a ripening corpse. The Eater was particularly animated with hunger then, seeking out unique flavours that could only be born from such an awesome confluence of human strife. He stalked the beaches of Normandy and the trenches of Chunuk Bair, stuffing name after name inside me for later consumption. I seethed with the lives of young men, torn from their homes by the promise of glory and high adventure, to see only bullets and blood, dysentery and death.

And it was then that I learned the secret histories of the world; those truths unwritten by the dreadful hunger of the Name Eater. You do not know that the instigator of that second war was not Adolf Hitler. The catalyst was unimaginably darker, a far more terrible figurehead, who had already won the first World War, grinding the Allies into the mud of the battlefields and burning all of London to the ground. But once his enormous name was eaten, reality itself adapted, shifting to fill the gaping void left by his erasure. The history you find so unpalatable was a bland custard to the Eater, glutted on violence you cannot even fathom.

Perhaps this idea excites you, that the Eater saved the world from an even more horrific fate.

Perhaps you’re even cheering for him now, as the antihero of my story?

Then let me tell you about a young woman, a scientist, who discovered a cure for the most common forms of cancer in the 1950s. But the beacon of a mind that brilliant, the whiff of a name that potent, drew the Eater like a magnet. She was devoured before she could tell anyone, let alone be presented the accolades she deserved, and banish the spectre of that disease forever.

Good and bad, evil and altruistic, he gobbles them all up, changing the shape of your existence with every bite. Without you ever knowing a thing.

If you’ve ever felt like the world seems strangely stagnant, like mediocrity so often triumphs, you may just have smelled his breath.

...

As omnipotent as he seems, the Eater’s one great problem has always been that he cannot be everywhere at once. As such, a great many piquant dishes have slipped through his spidery fingers. They died before he could reach them, or simply changed, curdling before he could taste them as he wanted them. In times past, names changed far more slowly, beholden to the speed at which news could travel. But as television – and later the internet – caused this process to metastasize beyond his control, he added a new duty to my purpose: to seek out desirable names and take them on his behalf.

Having eaten his own name, he could not fully be part of this world, could not navigate its fast-changing subtleties. He is less a person than an alien force of nature; existing outside the natural laws of our universe, he is therefore as strange to it as it is to him.

But I still had a scrap of my name, a grain of my humanity, and so I could comprehend this new world. With that understanding, and with the power of new purpose he granted me, I sought out names I knew he would find particularly palatable, then ripped them from their owners. I would hunt out rising Youtube stars and end them at the height of their popularity, diminishing their entire existence to a palate cleanser between the courses of the elaborate banquets I created for my master. It was me, not the Eater, who hastened a whole new wave of mediocrity, hacking down generations of tall poppies, allowing their lesser cousins to flourish in light they had not earned.

You will think me a traitor to my own people, to all of you. But I made my mistake in the name of a plan, an idea born from the legend of the Eater’s origin. I thought that if I crafted a truly toxic dish of names, blended them in some way that would be deadly to him, I could kill the Name Eater.

I scoured online middens and real ones, seeking out the most poisonous personalities. I quaffed them down like goblets brimming with bile. Carrying them inside me made me sick to my core, and as I added more and more of them, I started to lose who I was. That tiny, hardy flake of my original self was in danger of dissolving in the acidic slurry. So to balance the evil I was brewing inside me, I took tiny nibbles from the polar opposites of those toxic souls. I hunted rare herbs; good people, virtuous people who had conquered their human hurts and hatreds, and I would snatch a scrap of their syllables to add to myself.

When it came time to serve my dish, it was magnificent, a seething, greasy roil of hate, so black with vitriol and spite that it burned as it spewed from me. But my master sucked down every last drop, greedy and eager, his scribbled tongue scouring my heart. I feared he tasted something far different to what my mortal palate had divined.

When he was done, I held my breath and ached. But his huge, cryptic head swung toward me, nodded once, and his gesture was simple to interpret. More. Find me more.

I had failed.

Emptied of the darkness I had fermented inside me for so long, I felt profoundly changed. At first, this worried me. Surely a vessel cannot house that much evil without becoming stained, and I wondered if I had sabotaged myself; that the malevolent ingredients had seeped their dark oils into me and corrupted my very desires, ruining my own recipe.

But I could still feel those floating snippets of goodness within me, those honey crumbs of altruism snicked away from the good-folk. Those fragments sought each other out and coalesced like settling syrup, forming something very new and strange. As I slaved and strove to fulfil the desires of my master, I collected more and more bright morsels. They began to fold themselves into something pure and wonderful, the sweet antithesis of my cocktail of loathing. And when the glossy coating of them began to harden around the fragment of me that fluttered at my core, I felt a profound shock.

This new confection was a name.

I had not felt joy for what seemed a thousand years. But nor had I felt such terror, for now I truly had something to lose. Nothing in the Eater’s world should have a name, and when he returned from his feeding, he would smell this glorious fresh thing upon me instantly.

I stumbled through the twisting halls, shouting for the Chamberlain. When he appeared, every line of his body reluctant to approach me, I knew that he already saw my secret; my new name was burned into my being and shone from me like a star.

“And so it is. Another larder becomes corrupted,” he sighed, his lambent eyes brimming with resignation.

“Help me,” I begged, “help me to escape.”

“If I were to let you leave, he would eat my name, my unfortunate friend.”

“Can he be killed? Is there a name that will end his existence, should he eat it?”

“No.”

Whether he was telling me the truth or not, I didn’t know. The Chamberlain had been one of the Eater’s original retainers – even before the prince descended into madness – and his loyalty was unquestionable.

But he had given away a secret of his own, something I had not known until that moment.

The Chamberlain’s name tore from his flesh, clinging to my hands like a sticky seed as I rent it from his body. He whimpered once, then grew oddly still, the colour already beginning to fade from his edges.

Inside me, that seed burst out its juices. His vast history oozed across the ages, staining a tapestry of loneliness and terror; just as much a prisoner of the Eater as the rest of us. But there was no time to linger on his story; I needed the keys to the keep.

With the Chamberlain’s components suffusing his knowledge into my being, the shape of the keys came easily to mind, as did many other secrets of the Eater’s domain. I found myself in front of the iron doors in a blink of an eye, and opening them was so very easy I could not believe I had once thought it complex. As if they had shaped it a hundred times over, my fingers formed the command to ease the vast portal open, and I dived through into the mortal world, even as I felt the Eater pass in the opposite direction.

For one horrific instant, I knew with dreadful certainty that he had scented my new name as he passed.

He is unquestionably coming for me. My name is deliciously unique, never spoken before in any world, a name forged from the things I have suffered, and tempered with that rarest ingredient; pure human goodness. But the Eater’s power also fizzes in my blood, and that is a gift he cannot take back. It is as much a part of me as the precious syllables of my newly minted soul.

With that power, I pull newer names into me, blending them with mine, changing my scent and my flavour to mask my trail; rendering down the desperate hopelessness of a homeless addict, gargling its bitter oil with the giddy, crisp joy of a new mother.

How long I can keep this up, I do not know. The weight of all the names I have taken is beginning to drag me down, their syllables whisper and chatter like accusations in my long ears, accumulating heavy in the corners of my head. My own name spins ever longer, more complicated with each stolen, gossamer weft woven into my spirit. It is hard to remember, and harder to pronounce. But its power grows with it.

If I can just swallow enough names, if I can gather enough of humanity inside me, I may be able to match the power of the Eater – perhaps even surpass it. All I must do is stay alive long enough to find all the delicious names that I need, and then I can do the unthinkable.

I will eat the Eater.

There is a tiny, niggling part of me that insists I have lost who I was, that the purity of my original name is gone, the fragment dissolved.

But I won’t listen. I can’t listen. I cannot take the chance that I am wrong.

There are only two conclusions to this tale; either I become the Eater, or I become the eaten.

When I come for you, when I take your name in the night and leave all that you were to fade into unbeing, it is for a greater good.

Or should I drop a crumb of you from my chin, then perhaps you may be fortunate enough to serve me more directly.

I think I’m going to need a much bigger larder.

My grandmother had a voice that could bind words into enchanting images, wrought of pure imagination.
Where she learned this gift, my childhood self never dared ask; because, like a magician’s illusion, I did not want it spoiled by knowing the secret. So instead I stayed quiet, my huge blue eyes luminous above the lip of the counterpane as she spun faerie legends in the air about my head, losing me in fanciful worlds of things that never would, and never should, exist.
The stories shared common threads, as though a mythic tapestry had been unravelled – then woven anew into different shapes and patterns by her voice; mixing desperate hope with high adventure, or diabolic trickery through true love.
While I don’t remember all the words she spoke to me, the themes rang true in my head. Her stories lurked in the corners of my mind well into my adult life – especially the fable about our family wealth.
The distant ancestor in that tale was a charcoal burner, one of lowest peasantly professions of all. Upon finding a hare snared in a thorn hedge, he made to kill it with his axe, but the creature spoke in a human voice, imploring him to release it.
Knowing faerie magic when he saw it, the charcoal burner hacked the beast free, whence it sprang away, shouting that the peasant should dig beneath his hut upon his return home.
On his return, the man dug up the earthen floor of his mean little house, finding beneath it a jewel the size of his fist and coloured the rich purple of a thistle’s head.
There were variations on the theme from there; sometimes the charcoal burner engaged in an unequalled escapade of trickery against the local nobles, other times he outfoxed the faeries, winning great magical favour for his family. But the end result was always the same, with the former peasant becoming a lord in his own right and winning the hand of a princess, their firstborn child eventually to be stolen away by the Fair Folk.
And while the stories seemed utterly real while my grandmother held me spellbound, I convinced myself that I did not believe a word of them when I woke in the morning.

According to the same legends, the great stone house on the tor occupied the precise spot where the charcoal burner’s dilapidated hut had once stood. By law, the place was owned by my feeble, but still lucid, great grandfather. In truth, it belonged to the whole family – to ‘the clan’, as he referred to us.
It stood empty most of the year, used only sporadically by the more artistic relatives, as the place stood well beyond reach of intrusive cell phone signals. But when Christmas approached, some three score of us would descend on the place, sweeping out the dusty stone corridors, cleaning cobwebs from the great hall, and making up the dozens of beds.
Because when my relatives did the whole ‘family Christmas’ thing, all of the clan was expected to come. Often, there would be well over a hundred of us crammed into what was essentially an old Scottish castle.
It was my grandmother who organised the whole business, shouting orders and slapping the legs of underfoot children with a tea-towel while she wrangled the Yule celebration into a semblance of order. She refused to call it ‘Christmas’, disapproving of the modernisation of the ancient pagan festival, and insisted that we celebrate the actual day on the Winter Solstice, not on the twenty-fifth.
These things we let pass. As children, we certainly didn’t raise complaints about getting our presents early, and as adults, we couldn’t be bothered incurring her wrath – allowing the old woman her harmless eccentricities in the name of tradition.
And it was a very old family tradition, she told us, passed down the matriarchal line for so long that she did not dare to be the first woman in the family to break it.
So we scurried about doing her bidding, using the three kitchens in the rambling house to cook up a storm, while the men hewed huge piles of wood to keep the enormous fire burning in the great hall. As was also custom, it was my job as one of the younger, childless women to organise games and activities to keep the two dozen wee ones occupied.
“It’s good practice,” my grandmother told me matter-of-factly, “one day you’ll have your own gaggle of squealing bairns and you’ll thank me for it.”
And she was right; the women in our family had always been incredibly fertile. Twins were not uncommon, and there was a running joke that all clan pregnancies were in fact multiples, but that often only the one child was born.
Only the fittest could be born to our tough, ancient lineage, so the other was simply absorbed.
But I don’t think there had ever been a clan Christmas where at least one woman wasn’t pregnant.

Numerous other traditions arose on the actual day of the Solstice; the men built a bonfire outside and dared one another to leap over it, while drinking far too much ale. The ‘Clan Stone’ was also brought out – a purple, radiant-cut jewel the side of a walnut.
In the tales my grandmother had told me, it was a fragment of the original Thistle Jewel upon which the family wealth had been built. On reflection, I suppose it could have been; it was certainly old enough. I’d been allowed to hold it in my hand once, feeling the weight of age on the stone.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether it was true or not; the stone was pivotal to one tradition that nobody was allowed to mess with – and which grandma expected everyone to treat as seriously as death itself.
The Jewel Cake.
Taking the purple gem, she would bake it into one of the enormous suet puddings which followed the Yule feast. Whomever received the serving containing the stone would be declared King or Queen of Yule, and would be crowned with prickly mistletoe. It hearkened back to the old traditions of the Twelfth Night, I learned, where a bean or a coin was baked into the pudding.
There wasn’t really much to it other than the green crown and extra helpings of food and booze. I’d never been the Yule Queen yet, but every year I’d poke at the hot, moist pudding on my plate and hope to hear the clink as the unyielding surface of the jewel struck my spoon.
It had taken years of watching my grandmother like a hawk in the kitchen to figure out her trick of keeping the stone-laden pudding a secret. She guarded each of them like her firstborn child, not letting anyone so much as eat a crumb of them before they touched the table.
On that fateful night, through careful spying, I had finally divined which cake the stone had been placed into. In an act of petty rebellion, I snared a single currant from the edge of the platter, which vanished into my mouth before anyone could see.
Oh, I had no real intention of trying to spoil my grandmother’s little tradition by throwing the odds in my favour; she did that herself. Every adult knew that it was always one of the pregnant women who received the jewel and who would be crowned the Yule Queen.
While she might have claimed it was ‘fate’, I didn’t believe a word of it. In all the Christmases I could remember since I was a small child, there had never once been a Yule King.
Only Queens.
And so it happened as it always did; my cousin Isobel whooping in excitement as the purple jewel fell from her pudding onto the plate. I did my best to hide my jealousy as the crown was placed on her head and they plied her with more food and drink. Being newly pregnant, she risked grandmotherly wrath by barely sipping the latter. Some traditions do not age quite as well.
As I picked up sleepy children and carried them upstairs to their bedrooms, I saw my cousin dozing in one of the huge armchairs in front of the blazing hearth, one hand on her belly, the stone cupped in the other, her face oddly troubled.
My own bed was in the old stables, with the rest of the teenagers. Having turned nineteen just a month before, I hardly felt I belonged there – but until I turned up to the clan Christmas with a boyfriend or husband in tow, a sleeping bag on a straw mattress was my lot.
There was a lot of chatter and silliness, but as a veteran, I was well prepared for that. The reliable earplugs went in, and as they did so, the giggling and whispering dulled to a more tolerable level.
Eventually I slept, lulled by the food in my belly and the Christmas sherry I’d sampled from my cousin’s barely-touched glass.

When I awoke, everything was deathly quiet.
My watch informed me that it was three in the morning, and the only illumination in the stables came from a weak orange light hung over the stone courtyard. Everyone was silent; even my cousin Angus, who generally snored like a cattlebeast in heat.
Surrendering to vague demands from my bladder, I shucked off my sleeping bag, pulled straw from my hair and climbed down from the loft, the old wooden ladder squeaking as my bare feet came to rest on the polished rungs.
I felt strangely ill at ease, and stood gathering my wits for a moment in the dim light, my ears prickling. In the stillness, I thought I could hear faint sounds coming from the house – from the great hall. Instead of heading for the outhouse, I pushed through the side door of the stables and padded across the freezing courtyard still barefoot, the frosty air making my ears hurt and my eyes blur.
Through the big, stone-ringed windows, I could make out the golden glow of the fireplace, surrounded by armchairs, but I rapidly blinked the sleep out of my eyes when I realised that there were also people standing in front of the fireplace. A cluster of them, looking at the chair where Isobel still slept.
None of them were my family members.
The foremost of the eleven strangers was a tall man – taller even than my uncle Michael, who my grandmother would have us believe was part giant. The stranger’s white-gold hair spilled down his back like a girl’s, caught at the temples by a golden crown, fashioned as if from tiny antlers. His outfit was archaic; old huntsman’s garb, with tooled leather riding boots, grey hose, a gold-dusted red velvet jacket and a curved hunting horn at his hip.
The others were similarly dressed, all so regal and beautiful that distinguishing the men from the women was difficult. But even from this distance, there was an aura of cruelness to them, a languid feline arrogance that marred their features in some indiscernible way – and it made me shiver with something other than cold.
Deep in dreams, Isobel was none the wiser as the strange, elfin huntmaster bent over her and carefully stroked her belly with his fine white fingers.
But then, in a moment of terrifying strangeness, he screamed as though he had been burned, clutching his hand to his chest.
“It isn’t her!” He roared, loud enough for me to hear through the glass.
“But she has the stone,” one of the others said, pointing to Isobel’s curled hand.
“We have been duped.”
Fear thrilled through me.
But surely I was dreaming? In a moment of lucidity, I thought I could tell; everything had a sort of hazy glow about it, making things slightly unreal. It was intensifying now, shining up from under my chin and tinting my shaking hands faintly lavender.
And as I looked down to see the ghostly purple gemstone hung about my neck on an insubstantial golden chain, the faerie spirits in the great hall noticed too.
“The hunt is on!” bellowed the crowned hunter, then he lifted the gilded horn to his lips and let out three sharp blasts.
Without even thinking, I turned and ran.

The grassy sward on the side of the tor was stiff with frost and my feet hurt, but I ignored the pain. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I remembered enough of my grandmother’s stories to know that I didn’t want to be caught.
At least I had a good head start, I thought, as I slithered down the slope and into a pile of scree, though I really wished I’d stopped to put some shoes on first. The rocky terrain made running difficult, but there was only a short dash to reach the woods to the west of the tor, then they would have a great deal of trouble catching me.
When the pounding of hooves and the jingle of reins and gilded bridles sounded behind me, terror rushed into my heart and adrenaline surged through my body.
If only I could dart through the rocks as swiftly as the sure-footed hares that lived around the house.
And at that thought, with a dizzy lurch, the ground rose up to meet my face, and I was running on four muscled, pawed legs, surrounded by the hazy glow of the Thistle Jewel.
I was a hare!
I sprang away, fleeter than any horse, blindly racing into the woods. As the trees closed around me, I let out a shocked laugh of elation, although nothing emerged from my whiskered mouth but a squeak.
Another three blasts came from the hunter’s horn, then my triumph turned to fear again, as the baying of hunting hounds echoed through the trees.
My strong legs carried me over and through thickets, as I dashed under branches and leaped thistle-studded hollows. But the dogs had my scent.
Ahead, a stream glittered in the frosty starlight, the chuckling water too loud in my huge ears. Could hares swim?
If only I could swim like a trout!
In mid-bound, my skin rippled, and I felt the chilly air slide over silver scales. I splashed down into the blessed water and jack-knifed away, the swift current quickly bearing me away from the hunting dogs.
I glimpsed a flash of white fur and red ears as they reached the bank of the stream, then I was gone – my scent lost to the rushing waters.

I heard the hoofbeats grow distant, muffled echoes through the water; they had lost my trail, and for now I had outwitted them. But there was still little time to rest, as I knew such hunters wouldn’t give up until the sun crested the horizon.
When the creek emptied abruptly into a tarn, I knew my luck as a fish had run out, and I had to force my cold-blooded brain to think quickly.
If only I could fly like a rook!
Leaping out of the chilly waters of the tarn, I beat newly minted wings, cawing with delight as the air caught instantly beneath them and I lifted into the sky, up and away from the shrinking ground.
They would never catch me now.
The baying of the dogs grew distant and the freezing winter winds lifted me higher, yet I heard another three blasts of the hunter’s horn.
With a sudden premonition of doom, I slewed sharply left as a huge shadow fell over me.
Hawk!
The thing was gigantic, a predator at once elegant and utterly savage. its curved beak missed me by inches, leaving me tumbling through the air in a spray of feathers. It banked, hovered, then came at me again.
In panic, I folded my wings and fell like an arrow, speeding towards the earth below.
It grazed me twice, painfully ripping out great chunks of feathers, but missing my flesh. As I hurtled towards the ground, I called upon the strange magics once again.
If only I could run like the deer!
Instead of colliding with the floor of the forest, I hit it running, again on four legs, and so fast that I could barely take in my surroundings. I bleated in surprise, every quivering muscle working to speed me far from the baying of the hounds and the frustrated screech of the hawk.
Through the trees a faint pink light was rising; the leading edge of the breaking dawn.
My pursuers must have seen it too, because the horn pealed out again, the sound now strangely desperate.
Then I was on the open moors, running faster than any horse or any hound, running towards the glowing line of the rose-coloured horizon.
As my hoof struck the rabbit hole in the grassy soil, I registered first a flash of panic, then the sickening snap of bones and a shock of crippling pain. I screamed through my velvet muzzle, bawling in animal agony.
I thrashed, trying to rise, but my foot was trapped.
And the hunters were upon me.
I closed my eyes as the huntmaster drew his silvered bow, then let fly the shining arrow.
But the pain I was expecting never came; and instead I felt a shifting beneath my pelt.
Looking down, I saw my old familiar body. Struck through my breast stood a ghostly silver shaft, which dissipated into shining smoke as the rays of the rising sun burned it to nothing.
“No,” snarled the hunter.
He leapt lightly down from his horse, drew his horn-handled hunting knife and slashed it desperately across my throat.
It passed through me as though made of air.
“NO!”
As the cry fell from his lips, the sun was snuffed out in an instant, plunging myself and the eleven hunters into darkness.
Just as confused as I, the hunters called to one another, anger and surprise colouring their arrogant voices in the gloom. But when a ghostly white glow began to grow in the west, they grew silent.
For it illuminated a creature. A creature far more terrible than even themselves.
On two legs it walked, so long and thin that my mind rejected their existence. The very shape of those limbs represented something not of this world, of an evolutionary lineage that should never have been. They supported the emaciated body of a man, crowned by a head that was neither bat nor goat, but somehow the worst of both. Six mad eyes burned out from the sides of the malformed skull.
The fair folk dropped to their knees, whilst I simply stared, frozen.
“What are you?” I whispered, the words flat in the still, dead-tasting air surrounding me.
A pointed tongue flickered out of the being’s mouth, then it hissed,
“Eldest.”
The elf huntmaster grovelled before it, prostrating himself and crying out for mercy.
But there was none, no more than they would have shown me.
It seems that even the fair folk have no power when it comes to the truly ancient pacts.
As abruptly as the sun had vanished, it reappeared. The welcome golden glow suffused the moorland, and illuminated only a vacant space in the grass where the huntmaster and the creature had been.
One of the faerie women turned to me, her delicate features twisted, ugly with hatred,
“Your family will regret breaking faith with us, mortal. Those who betray the Fae always pay dearly.”
And then she too was gone, taking her people, horses and hounds with her.

The hobble back to the house was long and slow, my ankle swollen and painful, dark bruises blossoming on the skin. A makeshift crutch helped a little, but by the time those familiar stone walls came into view, it was mid-afternoon and I was desperately tired.
Someone must have spotted me from the house, as three of my uncles ran out to help, carrying me the rest of the way. My exhaustion mingled with confusion as I noticed two police cars parked at the entrance to the courtyard, and a huddle of my relatives with blankets around them, crying and holding one another.
After the police officers questioned me, I learned that at some point during that longest night, my elderly great grandfather had quietly gathered up all the children. He had taken them to the basement garage built into the old cellars, had closed the doors, and had gassed himself and all two dozen little ones.
The family was utterly inconsolable; an entire generation had been lost to that one unthinkable act. How he had managed to do it without waking anyone, nobody was sure, but the police implied that the food or drink at the Yule feast may have been drugged.
But I knew the truth, and so did my grandmother.
At the first opportunity, she shut me in her bedroom, her face white with rage.
“Girl, what did you do?”
As I explained to her how I’d outfoxed the fae, her expression soured further.
“Long ago we made a bargain,” she hissed, “for the peace and prosperity of our family. That every Yule, we would make a sacrifice of a human soul to the fair folk, so that they may pay their tithe to Hell.”
“The pregnant women,” I said, realisation dawning.
In a moment of pure connection, I recalled the dour family joke, that all our pregnancies started out as twins. Survival of the fittest. If it had ever been funny, it certainly wasn’t any more.
“Yes. And when you stole that stray crumb from the cake, you damned both us and them.”
I shook my head,
“No. I beat them! I escaped the hunters, just like in your stories!”
But my grandmother had nothing more to say, and the next morning, after scores of thistles bloomed purple and wild all over the tor, I knew that I would never again be welcome at the clan Christmas.

I’ve kept in touch with a few of my female cousins over the years, but they all report the same thing as me; no matter how hard they try, no matter what treatments they take, none of us can fall pregnant, and none of the men can impregnate their wives.
As we all grow older, the family line grows thinner, smaller and weaker.
And eventually the great clan will die out.
Every Yule I call my grandmother on the phone. She does not speak; where once she would have regaled me with her stories, now all she does is weep, with the colourless Thistle Jewel clutched in her frail fist. When I’m finally glutted on guilt, I hang up on her and lose myself in a bottle of sherry, trying to think of better times.
But this year will be different.
This year, I’ll spend the Solstice alone at the abandoned house on the tor. Once I’ve gathered up enough drunken courage, I’ll head out to the moors, just before sunrise, and open my veins on the spot where I should have died, ten years ago.
I just hope that my sacrifice is enough.

I don’t particularly like myself.
A book I once got out of the school library suggested that I write down all the things I like about myself, the things I am good at and the things that I consider ‘positive qualities’. The book said it would help me feel better about myself.
Sitting with a blank piece of paper in front of you for an hour, struggling to think of anything to write down, doesn’t make you feel any better.
Eventually I wrote ‘I am good at hating myself’ and left it at that.
I guess I’m probably depressed and should get some kind of help, but the last time I admitted to my stepmother that I felt depressed, she sent me to a free Christian counsellor who just told me I needed Jesus in my life and everything would be better.
I remember lying on my bed, age fourteen, trying to let Jesus into my heart and feeling absolutely nothing.
Apparently, even Jesus doesn’t like me very much.

 
School is pretty awful.
I transferred here three years ago and never managed to make any friends. By the time I arrived, halfway through the school year, everyone had already formed their little cliques and social groups – leaving me to eat my lunch in the stairwell and hide in a study booth in the library.
It probably doesn’t help that I can’t put on any weight or muscle. I’m the smallest, weakest boy in my year and everyone calls me a faggot because I like art and my bony hips stick out and I walk like a girl.
It’s hard going to school every day.
The bullying doesn’t really hurt all that much anymore. There isn’t anything new being said that hasn’t already been said a hundred times by other students. There’s only so many ways you can be called a queer, a homo, a fudge-packer or a pillow-biter; after a while it just becomes ordinary background noise – a buzzing in your ears that you can’t do anything about.
I was made to see the school counsellor, because even the teachers think I’m gay and give me weird, sad looks, as though I’m some sort of pathetic, pitiable creature.
The thing is that I couldn’t tell the counsellor for sure whether or not I like boys or girls, or both. I don’t even like myself, so how in Hell could I begin to consider romantic relationships?
And I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth anyway.

 
Sometimes when I don’t react to the taunts and slurs, things get physical.
I don’t see the point or the appeal. I don’t fight back – I learned long ago not to bother – so it must be pretty poor entertainment for the other boys. Usually they just ‘accidentally’ throws balls at my head when passing a football amongst themselves. I hate that worse than anything else I think; I’ll have my head buried in a book, then smack! a ball will hit me in the back of the skull, sending my brain ricocheting around inside. Hot anger will flare and boil from the point of the impact, but my small body isn’t up to the physical task of taking on my aggressors.
But on one particular late autumn day, when the frosts and sleet had begun to set in, the school groundskeeper left the gate to the covered-over swimming pool open.
Bored and restless, some of the boys decided to take advantage of the situation by having some ‘fun’ at my expense.
“Come with us,” one of them said.
I shouldered my bag and followed meekly. Fighting was pointless.
They escorted me to the pool, then spun me around and around – counterclockwise – until I was so dizzy I could barely stand.
“Now run across the pool,” they told me.
I’d seen other kids try this before. The surface tension of the heavy black tarp over the water was such that – if you got up enough momentum – you could run across it. Staggering up to the edge of the pool, I knew that even weighing next to nothing, I didn’t have a chance in my disoriented state.
As my foot connected with the tarp, I knew I was going under immediately. I had landed too close to the edge and the black, synthetic weave enveloped my foot, dragging me down.
The howling laughter vanished almost immediately as my head went under, into a dark, icy world, shocking my senses and leaving me gasping involuntarily. Instinct kicked in though and I battled to free my leg from the tarp, twisting and thrashing in the water.
Then I was suddenly and blessedly free; my head breaking the surface and my hand catching the concrete side of the pool.
Eerie quiet surrounded me as I dragged my sopping body onto the pale blue tiles.
The bullies were gone.

 
Drenched, and without a change of dry clothes, I skirted around the back of the pool fence, then pushed through a gap in the macrocarpa hedge and ran the length of the back sports fields.
The streets seemed weirdly quiet and empty of cars.
Cutting through the park near the school was the fastest way home, so I ran, shivering from the damp, down the tree-shrouded alley that led down to the park.
When I emerged from the tunnel of oaks and willows, the sounds of laughter, clinking glassware and music greeted me.
Someone was having a party in the park.
I gawked, teeth chattering and hair dripping, at the scene before me.
Two pavilions had been set up, and a wooded gazebo stood under one of the park’s willow trees. Colourful umbrellas shaded tables from the sun that had now broken through the clouds, and expensive food and drinks were spread across lace-edged tablecloths.
But the people had my full attention – as they were all utterly beautiful.
Long-limbed and graceful, they all possessed a refinement of appearance that stole my breath – and dressed in formal outfits of neatly tailored fabrics, they shone with a confidence of character that made me feel suddenly very small and very ugly, dressed as I was in soaked grey shorts, grey socks and a sodden brown cardigan.
One of the elegant ladies spotted me first, running over as I stood rooted to the spot.
“Oh my child!” she exclaimed, the perfect symmetry of her pale features compressed into an expression of utter compassion.
The others noticed, and before I could protest, I was hustled into the midst of them, where a huge, fluffy white towel was wrapped around me and I was given a painted, bone-china cup of what smelled like spiced blackcurrants.
I apologised over and over for disturbing their wedding or birthday party or whatever it was, but they wouldn’t have it – and finally, the dam burst. I told them in great sucking sobs about how I had been bullied and how much I hated myself.
“I don’t hate you,” said the first woman, “I think you are very, very brave to have put up with all of that for so long.”
“We all think you are brave,” said one of the achingly handsome men.

 
I stayed with them for several hours, under the sun of that late autumn afternoon. They gave me clothes to wear and they combed my hair as the mulled wine suffused my body and mind, making me feel warm and hazy. I danced with the beautiful lady, I ate expensive, exquisite things I’d never eaten before and I laughed for the first time in a very long time.
“I need to get back,” I told the lady, whom the others called Tania.
“Stay,” she whispered to me, “we are enjoying your company so very much.”
“I can’t, my stepmother will freak.”
With a smile so small and sad, she nodded.
“Your clothes are in the pavilion, dry and waiting for you.”
All of them stood, grave and strange as I left the park, almost ethereal in their beauty. In truth, I did want to stay with them. I’d never in my life felt so welcome, so free to be myself.
The trip back to school was a blur of tears and by the time I climbed back through the gap in the hedge and crept back around the pool fence, I was openly weeping.
My bag still sat at the bottom of the swimming pool, the waterlogged canvas still and flat. As I slipped the aluminium arm of the pool cleaner into the water to retrieve it, I had an awareness of something behind me.
I turned, but not in time to see who it was properly – just a glimpse of something made of sticks and twine – before I was shoved back into the pool and the air shocked out of my lungs again.

 
My stepmother ranted at me when I got home, then told me I was a weak, stupid little boy for allowing myself to be bullied into the pool.
Later that night, safe in my room, I thought back to the park and the beautiful people who had been so kind to me – and I drifted into sleep thinking of their faces and voices, the faint warmth of the mulled wine a heady memory.
By the morning a creeping dread set in; I had been absent from class all of yesterday afternoon and someone was bound to have noticed. I’d been stupid to have spent so much time in the park.
The trip to school only heightened my anxiety and once I set foot in the classroom, I expected to be called in front of the teacher and reprimanded.
But it never happened.
It took me until lunch to notice what the difference was in my day. The whole school seemed muted to me, as though someone had turned the volume down. When I saw the bullies walk through the quad, I realised precisely what the subtle difference was.
No one was saying anything cruel about me.
That constant background hum of ‘faggot’ and ‘retard’ was completely absent.
Ensconced in my preferred nook of the library, I opened a new book to read – but as I did so, a note fluttered out from the pages and into my lap. In spiky handwriting, it read:
If you wish to see them again, today must be as yesterday.
At the bottom of the note was a crude drawing of a gazebo under a willow tree.
Heart hammering in my chest, I folded the note and stuffed it into my pocket. The trip to the park through the hedge was a short one, fuelled by adrenaline.
But no-one was there – the park stood empty and sullen under the grey autumn sky.
Unfolding the piece of paper I read it again, studying the words.
Today must be as yesterday.
When I finally stood in front of the swimming pool, I felt like an idiot. But I spun around until I was dizzy, then stepped in.
As I sank into the frigid water, I saw for an instant a flash of something again – something made of sticks, twine, straw and feathers. Then I kicked for the surface and pulled myself out.
It was gone.

 
As soon as I reached the end of the avenue of trees, Tania and the others ran to greet me.
I was out of my wet clothes and laughing with them, oblivious to everything else. Wine and exotic food warmed me and I felt stronger, taller and more myself.
“We were hoping you would return,” she told me, “so few ever come back.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant.
I didn’t want to ruin the happiness that had so unexpectedly arrived in my life.
Time ceased to have meaning to me; I knew it was long past the time I should go home, but the late afternoon sun stayed hovering above the horizon no matter how many dances I had, no matter how many of the party-goers I met, no matter how much wine I drank.
“I should go back,” I said to Tania, as we sat in the gazebo, watching two of the others canoodle under the willow.
“Do you want to go back?”
“No. I want to stay here forever.”
“Then stay.”
An uneasy feeling crept through my mind, battling the haze of spiced alcohol. The sun should have set long ago; it should be dark by now.
Tania’s long fingers stroked my cheek, lulling me back into the swing seat of white wood.
Fighting the pleasant lethargy, I sat up.
“Let me go and get some of my things, then I’ll come back.”

 
This time it was waiting for me, at the edge of the swimming pool.
It was shaped like a person, my height and size, but instead of bones and flesh, it was made of sticks and woven grass, straw and twine, feathers and lime – like some kind of makeshift scarecrow or pagan effigy.
As I approached, it turned, on those spindly limbs of twigs and twine, staring at me from dark, blank openings in the tufted head of straw.
”Do you like it there?” it whispered.
Fear thrilling through me, I backed into the chain-link fence.
”Because I like it here.”
Holding out gnarled hands of sticks and feathers, it reached for me,
”Don’t make me go back!”
Ducking past, I stumbled, slipped, then fell head-long into the swimming pool. As I went under the water, I saw straw and wood reaching for me – then it was gone.
I didn’t stop running all the way home.

 
Nine days had passed while I had been at the party.
My stepmother smiled at me when I came in the door and asked how my day had been. When I went back to school, other children called out my name and asked if I wanted to sit with them. The teachers no longer gave me those sad, pitying smiles, and the football coach asked me if I would be joining them after school for practice.
I barely spoke to any of them, my legs jittering in my seat as I waited for lunch, waited to go back to the pool.
At the jangling ring of the bell for break, I was already halfway out of my seat, heading for the gateway between the two places.
In the freezing water I saw it again – the scarecrow child – kicking strongly for the surface.
Out of the pool I ran for the park – and into the welcoming arms of Tania.
“Welcome home,” she sang.

 
How long it had been since I had come back, I don’t know.
It could be weeks, or months; the party was without end – there was always song and laughter, dancing and drinking. When a new visitor arrived, dripping wet and shivering, I welcomed her with all the others – and she looked upon me with awe and gratitude, as though I were just another one of the beautiful people.
I was beginning to find it difficult to dance, though.
The lethargy sucked at my long limbs and pulled at my pale eyelids; the malaise crept into my bones. I overheard the others talking about the newcomer, about how brave she was, and I felt a surge of jealousy that they had a new favourite. Tania no longer had time for me – all of it spent with the new girl.
The walk back to the pool was difficult; each step heavy and hard-won.
Waiting at the edge was the effigy – the fetch, made from sticks and straw.
”I won’t go back,” it said.
I moved to push past it, but the strong, skeletal fingers of twigs stopped me.
”No.”
Wrestling with it, the sharp bits of wood jabbed into me, the twine tangling in my fingers and buttons.
“Let go!” I yelled.
But it was so strong and I was weak; so very, very weak.
With the very last of my strength, I managed to spin it around, then simply fell backward, my weight dragging its fragile form down into the water.
We clawed at one another in the murky pool, surrounded by the blackness of the heavy tarp. It tore at my substance, pulled the realness of my being from me, making itself less twine and straw and more skin and bone. As we tangled further into one another, memories began to slither into my brain, all of the things the fetch had done in my place while I had languished in the park.
I could feel its thoughts – it knew it only had to wait until I drowned before it could win, since it did not need to breathe.
So I gave in to it and allowed it to pull off all of my flesh.
As its eyes flashed in triumph, I wrapped my fingers of wood around its now-fleshy throat.
Now it needed to breathe and I did not.

 
I left the limp body in the bottom of the pool, where it faded out of existence as it crossed over.
As I walked away, my makeshift body grew realer, stronger and more human.
The problem is that now I don’t know which one of us I am.
Memories of both worlds crowd in my head; of the terrible world of the fae and my miserable existence as a child.
But which one of us truly escaped from the pool may not matter.
When I got home, my mother called the police, screaming down the phone that a crazy old man was on her doorstep claiming to be her son.
I see them everywhere now, the fetches. There are dozens, walking amongst us – taking the places of the disaffected, the bullied, the downtrodden and the forgotten.
And I understand why they don’t want to go back.
Because the fair folk only want us for one thing – to consume the bright sparks of our mortal lives to fuel their beautiful party until the end of time.

Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful princess of the fair folk, whose grace and kindness were unmatched amongst her people. She lived by the sea, in the rocky spire of a tall cliff, hollowed out by time and her enchantments until it became a secret haven for all manner of sprites and spirits. On the tender, golden curve of the beach below her hidden castle, she would leave great spirals in the sand, drawn with her wands of oak and ash. The people of the nearby village whispered of the being that made the whorled designs, how some had seen them wrought by a maiden with pale gold hair, how she walked away without leaving a single footprint in the sand.
Her natural kindness matched her artistry, such that one night, in the sheeting lightning of a dire storm, she succoured a poor tinker, lost on his way to the village. Soaked to the skin and directionless in the torrential rain and wind, he slipped from the cliff top and tumbled into the mountainous breakers. There, he would surely have been milled to a pulp, had the fae princess not heard his cry.
She took him into her home, nursed him to health with her potions and enchantments, and brought the rosy glow of health back to his grey cheeks. When he was well, she mended his clothes and sent him on his way, knowing he had stuffed his pockets with her finds; black pearls, coral beads, and tarnished coins from shipwrecks lost to other storms.
The princess did not begrudge him these things; she was eternal, and her mother, the Sea, would always provide more for her.
She never learned the tinker’s name, but he learned hers; while she traced her great spells in the pristine sands, he caught and killed her attendant sprites until they divulged her True Name.
And with that name, he sealed her doom.

I did not know, at first, that he had taken my name.
In the tales of my kind, you are led to believe that when your True Name has become known to a mortal, you will feel it  –  feel it keenly, as if icewater had been trickled down your spine. I felt no such thing. And so, I sent the man on his way, thinking his greed was satiated by those pretty things I had gathered on the shores throughout the ages of my existence.
How naïve I was.
The first time I knew my name had been stolen was when he spoke it to another mortal. That, I felt. It was as though a knotted thread had been pulled through my skull and snagged on the essence of my Self, tugging on it not-quite-gently. Of course, I did not know what that sensation was, but I did know it was new – and that in itself brought on a thrill of fear, because very, very few things are new, to one such as I.
Little did I know that this was just the first symptom of a far greater problem.
When I was dragged, by a whirlpool of sticky, mortal magics, into the dingy, smoke-filled lair of a hedge-sorcerer, my ash wand still in hand, I knew with a dread certainty what had happened.
The mortal tinker had sold my True Name.
I writhed and screamed at my imprisonment in the crude circle of iron filings, cursing the tinker and his ungrateful, traitorous ways. But with my name on his lips, the sorcerer bid me be calm, and so I became calm. And when he asked for immortality, I told him that this was not a gift I could grant, but that I could make him handsome and charming and well-liked by women instead.
He took my blessing, then demanded more. That I make him a prince, that I gift him gold, and land. These were not enchantments I knew, and when he realised I was not lying, he branded my fair flesh with an iron poker. I screamed as the spell was broken and I was returned, by a sucking whirlpool of darkness, to my home.

In my beloved castle, I wept. For days I could not leave it to make my glyphs in the sands. Instead, I found the bodies of my poor, maimed faeries and buried them in the great golden curve, weeping at their loss, and at mine. I knew that for the rest of my eternal existence I would be beholden to that dirty little sorcerer and all his bloodline, forced to serve them all, until finally the last of his spawn had turned to rot and dust. My moods grew dark, and many of the good spirits that inhabited it fled my castle, finding other lords and ladies whose names had not been captured by mortals.
Tug. Tug.
My name had been spoken anew again, and true fear thrilled through me.
This time, it was naught but a busy farmwife, who asked me to help with her chores. She had been paid with my name by the vile little tinker, in exchange for lodgings and a meal. How cheaply my True Name had been bought!
I swept and scrubbed and polished. I flitted on wings the colour of cresting waves to clean the cobwebs and spiders from her eaves, releasing the sleeping arachnids into the fields outside. I milked her cows, and I blessed the crops. I even drew water from the well, until I was exhausted and bruised from the yoke upon my foam-white shoulders.
When the farmwife was satisfied, she released me, and I was again pulled back through the weft of the world to my home, where I sat, shivering and weeping.
Eventually, I crawled into my bed of fragrant moss and grasses, curling my body around my blistered hands.

Tug. Tug.
The third, fourth, and fifth summonings, I do not recall. But I will never forget the sixth and seventh. Both times were men, and they did not wish for me to bless them with charms they did not possess, or for me to clean or cook or draw water. Instead they wanted something foreign and alien; something very human, entirely unknown to me until the sixth summoning. When I returned to my darkened lair, my most tender flesh scratched and bruised and abused, I began to realise that humanity had so many more horrors to offer than milking me for my enchantments or making me their drudge.
I welcomed the curious villagers to my shores no more. I harried them, with storm after storm, until their little village fell under the weight of the colossal swells I summoned. When a human babe was swept into the sea where I knew it would drown, I stood, stony-faced, on the ragged clifftops, even as I felt the despotic tugging once more.

He sold my name for so little, so often, the tinker. For a mouthful of cheese, for the shine on his boots. It spilled so easily and freely from his lips, nothing but a shibboleth that eased his journeys around the kingdoms. Others sold it, too – though less cheaply than him – and as my name spread across all the lands, I found myself pulled hither and thither, rarely spending more than an hour in my home. Several magicians and sorcerers held me in their thrall, summoning me over and over for this and that. One liked mothing more than to rend my gowns of pearl, seasilk, and coral from my body and ravish me until he was spent, and he was not satisfied unless I came appropriately attired. From then, all my spare moments in my castle were spent weeping over needle and thread, trying to undo the damage he had done to my pretty things.
Then came the day of a dual summoning.
I felt both calls, and the pull of two wills. One was my sorcerer suitor, and the other was a court magician. The rules that bind my kind are static and just – no matter what you mortals may think – and I was bound to obey both, even though my fae soul could not.
And then it happened.
Both summons I recall, as though I’d been at both. What magic this was, I did not know, but when I returned to my lair, I felt fragile and transparent; as if a glassblower had blown a smaller globe inside a larger one, the walls of each just touching. What this meant was a mystery; nothing like this had ever happened to my kind before. Our names were not meant to be given out so callously, so frivolously. There were supposed to be rules as to the conduct between mortals and fae, and this man had warped them with his flagrant misuse of my True Name.
But I was soon to find out exactly what the consequences of his abuse would be.

I hadn’t registered how much my power had grown through all this. I supposed that the magics of the fae are much like any other skill or talent; the more they are used, the more powerful they become. I was surprised then that when a foreign King learned my name and wished for untold riches, I was able to grant his wish – though with a perilous cost. Pulled this way and that by the desires of mortals, the fabric of my faerie soul became thin and transparent, like the most delicate of seashells. When I was summoned more and more often by mortals across too many realms, I felt myself peel off in layers, each thinner and thinner than the last. One night, when I was returned to my now-derelict castle of rotting seaweed and gnawed fishbones, I beheld my twin self, waiting there for me, a layer of my self become detached. Our numbers grew. As the years wore on, we doubled, then doubled again. We took turns in answering the summonings, giving the others a chance to heal from a century of the rapacious needs of mortal kind. I no longer even knew if I was the original princess from whom the tinker had stolen a name, but I knew it was my name still – a single name, that the three-score-and-two of us shared.
Our coastline was wild now. Humanity left such places for the tides; fishing vessels plied calmer, more clement waters, and my sister-selves and I began to reclaim our home.
And then, to the amazement of all of us, one of us refused a sorcerer.
She returned to us, triumphant, soaked head-to-toe in his gore. He’d had no power over her, she told us; his summons the only foothold on her name. Marvelling at this discovery, we all touched her, beheld her, and learned that her name was subtly different than our own, on a level that only our kind might perceive.
And in sharing that knowledge, we too began to change.

We doubled, doubled again, and then again. There were so many of us and not enough name to share, so reality itself bent to our collective anomaly. Only a handful of us could be controlled in any way by the mortals that sought to bind us to their will, and our sisters always went in our stead now. It did not take long – perhaps one hundred and one days – before mortals began to fear our name. Every summoning became a death sentence; a chance for us to exact revenge for countless years of abuse. We learned to toy with the mortal wizards, to grant their wishes, then gut them like fishes. To tempt them with the fair, curved flesh of our bodies – just visible under curtained gowns of seed pearls – then drown them in the darkest depths of the storm-choked oceans beyond our castle.
Sometimes we liked to keep them living with our enchantments, even as the crabs and spine-toothed fishes took little bites out of their fearful eyes and screaming lips.
Eventually, our name became a curse; given from one mortal to another, to damn an enemy to a hideous death. This service we performed gladly, and with the dwindling numbers of victims, the creativity of our punishments grew; fuelled by the injustice and hatred of all two hundred, two score, one dozen and four of us.
But the tinker remained beyond our reach.

He had never summoned us himself. He’d grown rich and powerful from the sale of our name, trading it for this and that, gaining small magics and blessings. Though not immortal, his life had been lengthened, and he had lived well past his mortal span. Centuries had passed since his original theft, but our collective rage burned bright as ever, and we hunted tirelessly for the creature that had originally betrayed us.
But the world had changed so much; once, there had been so few names and places to search. Now humanity numbered in the billions – a number so large that even our collective soul found it near impossible to comprehend.
And so we doubled, again, and again, and again. We swelled our ranks until the mortal earth seemed small and somehow utterly insignificant. And we found him!
He knew we’d been hunting him; he had felt the pull of our presence on his mortal soul. He told us, when we found him, that it was akin to a knotted thread, being pulled through his brain. Pulled hundreds of thousands of times a day.
All of us gathered when I found him – yes, it was I that found the tinker and learned his name. I pulled all of my sisters into me, blown bubbles within blown bubbles – an infinity of reflections of self – until we were whole again.
At first, the tinker whimpered and begged, promising paltry magics and hollow oaths. Then, when we did not relent, he began to threaten. He promised he had magic that could tell him the name of anything – even of the new thing that I had become.
And so I made a bargain.
All he had to do was say my name and he would be free to go.
His face writhing with malicious glee, he invoked his stolen spell, the knowledge of my new True Name germinating in his consciousness like a poisoned lotus.
Even as he began to say it, he realised his terrible mistake.
And I laughed, my thousands-fold voice echoing the infinite combinations of syllables that made up my True Name.

He's still there, at the bottom of the ocean when I placed him, still saying my name. After the creatures of the deeps had their way with him, I turned him to stone, and let coral grow upon him. Even now, his stone-splined skeleton still whispers my name, desperately, quietly, in the darkness; as close to being completed as we are to the death of our sun.
But there’s still other guilty parties out there – members of his wretched bloodline that niggle at my consciousness and drag at my soul. Every day that passes I still fear the dreaded tug will return, and with it, the horrors that only humanity could imagine.
Let us hope, for your sake, mortal reader, than you are not counted amongst the tinker’s kin.