The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  His accent was one she’d never heard before—British, certainly, but an unfamiliar variant; she couldn’t even be sure it was English. For all she knew, it was Welsh, or Scottish, or even Australian or South African.

  And apparently her American accent was giving him a little trouble, too.

  “Do you want a ride?” she said, speaking slowly and loudly and, she hoped, clearly.

  The man eyed the rental car, then looked Jenny over. “Aye,” he said at last. “And my thanks to you, lady.”

  This time it was definitely “lady.”

  “Get in, then,” she said. She climbed in on the driver’s side—the right, that is, a fact she still wasn’t entirely used to.

  The man approached the passenger side hesitantly and stood, looking down at the door.

  Impatiently, Jenny leaned over and opened it for him.

  He made an odd little noise that she took for a sign of relief, then carefully climbed into the car and settled on the seat.

  Jenny looked at him, puzzled; she hadn’t really noticed when she first saw him in the road, or standing in the ditch covered with mud, but he was dressed oddly—his pants were more like baggy tights, with crude garters just above the knees, and he wore a sort of tunic instead of a shirt. His hair was unfashionably long, but he was clean-shaven—or rather, he had no beard; he was a few days past clean-shaven.

  The overall effect was vaguely medieval.

  “Are you an actor?” she asked. “Is there some local festival or something?”

  “Nay,” he said, “I’m no player, but an honest workman.”

  She started the engine, and he startled at the sound.

  “Where are you headed?” she asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Where should I drop you?”

  He simply looked baffled, and she gave up. She would just drop him at the first pub she came to and let the locals deal with him. She put the car in gear.

  He grabbed at his seat—he hadn’t put on his seatbelt, she saw.

  She drove slowly and carefully—the fog still lingered, and night was falling, and one scare on these roads was quite enough.

  Besides, she wanted to be able to stop quickly and jump out if the man started to act even weirder. Now that she was over her initial concern about sending him into the ditch, she was having second thoughts about giving him a ride at all—back home in the States she wouldn’t have picked up a stranger, so why should she here? Sure, England had less violent crime, but there were still nuts here and there.

  Maybe if she talked to him he’d reassure her—or maybe she’d know he was a dangerous loonie.

  “So what were you doing in the woods?” she asked.

  He hesitated, then said, “Feasting with Queen Mab.”

  Jenny had trouble at first understanding what he said, but the words did eventually register.

  He was a loonie, she realized, though not necessarily a dangerous one. She wished she hadn’t offered him a ride.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Aye. I’d followed a fairy light, and found myself at the Queen’s table, whereupon I was bid join the feast, which I did with a will. I passed many a long year there in pleasant company, and but today did I at last depart.”

  “Oh,” Jenny said.

  For a moment they drove on in silence; then Jenny asked, just to break that silence, “You said years?”

  “Aye, I’d say so,” the man said. “Surely, years it must have been, for the world to have changed as it has—your garb, your speech, and this carriage are all strange to me.”

  Jenny blinked, trying to decide whether this was as completely nonsensical as it sounded. “Just when did you follow the fairy into the forest?” she asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t—it sounded so stupid.

  “’Twas May Eve, in the Year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and ninety-five.”

  For a moment Jenny didn’t respond.

  “That was four hundred years ago,” she said eventually.

  “Four hundred, you say?” The man’s eyes widened in wonder. “Zounds, so long as that?”

  “Yeah,” Jenny said.

  They were nearing a village—not much of one, but she thought it would do to get rid of her passenger. She slowed still further and began looking for a sign that would indicate a pub or

  inn.

  “You doubt me,” the man said. “Perchance you think me mad. No wonder on it, I’d think the same were I you.”

  That was the most reassuring thing he’d said yet; she threw him a quick glance.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “William Tinker.”

  “I’m Jenny Gifford. Look, is there anywhere in particular I can drop you? Anyone who’d know what to do with you? Do you have any money or anything?”

  “I’ve no coin, nay. As for one who’d know to aid me—a priest, perhaps, who knows the ways of fairies?”

  “I don’t think modern priests know much about fairies,” Jenny said, though she admitted to herself that British priests might well know more than the American ones she’d met.

  William Tinker hesitated, then ventured, very cautiously, “A witch, perhaps? I’m a good Christian, and would not consort with such, but…”

  “A witch.” Jenny grimaced. A psychiatrist would probably be better.

  But then she spotted the pub on the corner and pulled over to the curb.

  “Here,” she said, “go in there and ask if they know a of a witch. Tell them you’ve been visiting fairies in the wood for four hundred years.”

  That was perhaps a bit cruel—they’d mock him, most likely.

  But then they’d probably send him to the National Health, and get him taken care of.

  Tinker looked at the signboard, then pushed at the car door; it didn’t open, and he looked helplessly for a handle or latch.

  Jenny leaned over and opened the door for him.

  He got out carefully, then bobbed to her in something that was almost, but not quite, a bow. “My thanks to you, good lady.”

  She felt guilty about dumping the poor loonie like this, and she was momentarily tempted to park the car and go into the pub with him, to make sure things didn’t get rough—but it wasn’t

  her problem, and she wasn’t a native here.

  He’d be all right. This was a peaceful English village, not a bar in Detroit or L.A.—or even London.

  And it just wasn’t her problem.

  She took her foot off the brake and pulled away.

  Three days later, in her hotel room in Bayswater, she had the TV news on as background while she wrote a letter to her parents back in Cleveland. Something startled her, made her look up, though it took a second to realize what she had heard.

  William Tinker, that was it—someone on the TV had said the name William Tinker.

  And there he was, the same man she had picked up on that lonely road, with a woman on either side—an overweight matron on his left, a thinner, younger woman on his right, both in long dresses and wearing necklaces.

  Tinker himself was dressed in modern clothing now—a simple shirt and slacks—but it was unmistakably the same man. His hair was still long, but looked considerably cleaner now.

  “…naturally, so-called modern scientists are dismissing his story without even bothering to investigate,” the older woman was saying, “but some of us recognize the possibility of wonders.”

  The camera cut to a blond host in a tweed jacket. “Then you believe that Mr. Tinker really has spent the last four hundred years at a faerie feast?”

  Back to the woman.

  “No, not literally—but we believe something extraordinary has happened in that forest. It may be that Mr. Tinker was affected by forces in the wood that reverted him to a past life, and that he was really only in there for hours and simply swapped
identities, or it may be that he really did enter in 1595 and was somehow transported to our own time—my compatriots and I favor this latter explanation, since it would account for his clothing, and the fact that no one fitting his description has been reported missing.”

  “And you consider this more likely than an attempt at fraud, or a simple delusion?”

  “Oh, very much so,” the woman said. “What would be the point of such a fraud? And we have medical reports that will attest that Mr. Tinker appears quite sane, other than his belief that he spent four centuries in that forest. Furthermore, his teeth show no sign of modern dentistry, and the doctors say he’s never been immunized against anything, or received any of the other lasting benefits of the National Health—he doesn’t appear to have ever seen a doctor before. We’ve asked linguists from Balliol College at Oxford to tell us whether his speech is authentically Elizabethan, and so far, while we haven’t heard their final opinion, none have found any specific inaccuracies.”

  “And have any historians questioned Mr. Tinker?”

  “Not yet,” the woman conceded. “After all, he only emerged from the wood three days ago.”

  “So you believe that in fact, Mr. Tinker is from the sixteenth century?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Mr. Tinker, do you have anything to add to that?”

  Jenny stared as Tinker said, in that strange accent of his, “I do truly believe that I am William Tinker, born in the Year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and sixty-seven, and that I came upon Queen Mab’s table in the forest on the last day of April in fifteen hundred and ninety-five—but if you say I am mad, I’ll not debate. I think I am not, and yet to pass four centuries with the

  Good Folk and not age a day is surely a great wonder; were it proven me that ’twas all a dream, that would be no greater marvel. In truth, I wonder whether all I see about me, this world of a

  twentieth century, is not but a dream.”

  “Mr. Tinker, you seem to be in remarkably good health for a man more than four hundred years old,” the host said, with just a slight sardonic edge to his voice.

  “Aye,” Tinker said. “’Tis the magic of the wood, beyond question.”

  Jenny sat and watched as Tinker and his two companions—presumably the village witches from that town she’d abandoned him in—held their own against the host’s growing sarcasm.

  The younger witch hardly said anything, but the older argued at length for the existence of powers beyond modern understanding—not fairies, but spirits or powers that gave rise to tales of fairies, or if even that seemed too mystical, she was willing to consider them as energy fields created by the living things of the earth.

  Was it so utterly impossible that someone could become caught in such an energy field?

  “And these fields,” the host asked, “preserved our Mr. Tinker for some four centuries? Would this sort of thing be responsible for the legends of the Fountain of Youth, then?”

  “It very well might,” the elder witch declared.

  Meanwhile, Tinker himself seemed to be growing ever more uncomfortable, caught in the middle of this debate, and when at last the host announced that time had run out, poor Tinker was visibly relieved.

  Jenny turned off the set and sat on the hotel bed, staring at the blank screen, for several minutes.

  Maybe, she thought, he wasn’t a loonie.

  After that she began to watch the news regularly. She saw the reports from the experts, proclaiming Tinker to be either genuine or the best fake ever—neither linguist nor historian nor physician could find anything to contradict his claimed origin.

  The real bombshell was when his clothes were carbon-dated and proclaimed authentic late-sixteenth-century.

  It was after that that reports of would-be explorers getting out of hand at the forest began. Curiosity-seekers had gone poking about there ever since Tinker’s first television appearance, but now entire mobs were sweeping through the woods, searching for “Queen Mab’s table.” The authorities were dismayed, to say the least.

  It was a relief to Jenny when the forest was closed to the public; she hated the thought of all those people trampling through the underbrush, scattering candy wrappers and beer cans on the moss.

  She watched the televised reports with a sort of dreadful fascination. Picketers were protesting the government’s decision to restrict access—there was talk of secret conspiracies to keep the “fountain of youth” energy for the government elite.

  And there were a few reports coming in, not very reliable ones, of people disappearing into the forest and not coming back out—presumably, they’d found the fairies.

  She spent hours on end in her hotel, watching. She knew it was stupid, a waste of her remaining vacation time, that she should be out enjoying London, but she couldn’t tear herself away.

  She was staring unhappily at yet another interview when someone knocked on the door of her room.

  Startled, she opened the door.

  There were three men standing there. One of them held a microphone, another a video camera.

  The third, somewhat disguised by a woolen cap and sunglasses, was William Tinker.

  “Ms. Gifford?” the man with the microphone asked.

  “Yes,” she said, puzzled. “What’s going on?”

  “We understand that it was you who first found Bill Tinker after he emerged from the enchanted forest,” the man with the microphone said—Jenny recognized him now; he was a newsman. She couldn’t think of his name.

  She glanced at Tinker, who looked apologetic.

  “I wished to speak with you,” he said, “and I knew not how you might be found. I agreed that I would give your name, that you might be interviewed, if I might accompany them and speak to you in private.”

  His accent wasn’t quite so distinctive any more—he was beginning to adjust to his new surroundings, she supposed.

  “I don’t want to be interviewed,” she said. “I’m not part of this.”

  “Then you weren’t the one who found him?” the newscaster asked.

  “Oh, sure I was,” she admitted. “I almost ran him down, so I gave him a lift into town, that’s all.”

  “And did he tell you he was four hundred years old?”

  She glanced at Tinker uncomfortably. “He said he’d been in the forest since 1595,” she said.

  “And did you believe him?”

  “No. I thought he was nuts. But he seemed harmless.”

  “But didn’t you tell him, when you dropped him at the Plow, to ask where he could find a witch?”

  “I said something like that,” Jenny admitted, embarrassed. “I didn’t think he’d want to see a doctor. Listen, I haven’t agreed to an interview, and I’m not going to—not until I’ve talked to Mr. Tinker in private.”

  It took some further argument, but eventually Jenny was able to close the door of her hotel room with Tinker and herself on the inside, the newscaster and cameraman outside.

  “Now, why did you want to find me?” she demanded.

  “Softly, pray,” Tinker said, holding up a hand. “Your pardon, I pray you, Mistress Gifford.

  She glowered at him.

  “Prithee, lady, I come to you most humbly to ask a service—will you even hear me, or have I angered you by bringing with me these relentless hounds with their cameras?”

  He pronounced “camera” in very nearly the modern fashion, she noticed—it was presumably a new word for him.

  “What kind of a service?” she asked quietly.

  “Lady, I beg you,” he said, “though I be an Englishman born and bred, and loyal to my Queen, whiche’er Elizabeth it may be—can you take me with you to America? I must escape my own land!”

  She stared at him.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Need you ask?” he said, gesturing at the closed door.
“In mine own land I shall have no peace, ’tis plain.”

  “Can’t you just hide somewhere?”

  “Where? This land is so changed I know naught of it.”

  “You know that forest,” she said, a trifle bitterly. “Can’t you go back there, to Queen Mab’s table, if you can’t take the modern world?”

  His hands flew up in an odd gesture, then he hushed her and glanced at the door again.

  “They’d have that of me,” he said. “They’d have me lead them thither, with their cameras and mikers and all.”

  “Well, why not?” Jenny demanded.

  He stared at her, chewing his lower lip, and she stared angrily back.

  “You’d have the truth?” he asked.

  “Of course!”

  “All the truth, then?”

  She blinked. “Yes,” she said, a bit less certainly.

  “In truth, then—there is no Queen Mab in the forest, no Little Folk.”

  “What is there, then? What about the people disappearing in there? Is this all a hoax?” Jenny tried not to let her fury show—he was a fake!

  “Nay, nay! I am all I say, trapped four centuries in the wood, and I swear it in God’s name. But ’twas no fairies that held me, but a demon, a spirit sprung from the wood itself.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “’Tis plain enough. I was held there ’gainst my will,” he said. “I’d followed a fairy light, as I thought it, though now I know ’twas but a lure, and then was I caught and held by the spirit within the wood.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “What did it want you for?” A thought struck her. “And is it still there?”

  “Oh, ’tis yet there, verily. And it hungers, I doubt me not.”

  “Hungers?” she almost screamed. “What about all those people going in there looking for your fairy queen?”

  “I fear that some of them will ne’er emerge,” he said, shamefaced. “Oh, ’tis sinful of me, and a disgrace I do not bear easily—but if you only knew…”

  “So tell me.”

  He sighed. “I was not alone when it lured me in,” he said. “Else I’d not have been such a fool as to follow. I was with a dozen of my townsmen, gathering wood for a May Day blaze, when we saw the light before us. Kit saw it erst, and called out, and old Stephen warned him to let it go, but Kit laughed. ‘What have we to fear, then,’ he asked, ‘when we are twelve stout Englishmen?’ And in our folly we gave chase, into the forest depths—and there our paths turned back upon us so that we traveled ever in circles, trapped therein. And a voice spoke to us that bade us calm ourselves, calm and rest, and at last we did—we lay ourselves down and in our exhaustion we slept.