And if this Anwen was trying to get through to there, where was his Anwen? Was she waiting beyond? Was she being tortured? Raped? Trapped in a world of fae revelry unaware that her husband longed for her return?
Ever since the first sheep Peter had been avoiding the changeling’s attentions. When he looked at it all he saw was the thing which had taken his wife’s place. Its ears were slightly pointed, its nose straighter. It was the little imperfections that gave it away. The more he looked, the more he saw, the more he knew that this creature was not his Anwen. He ignored the pain in its eyes when he spurned its advances; he would not betray Anwen further with the creature.
He was preparing to go out on another watch for the night when it stopped him, its face faking worry. ‘Peter, you can’t keep this up. You’re tired, stressed. You’re killing yourself, my love.’
He looked at it and it shrank back from him. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know what you are. There’ll be no more dead sheep tonight. Never again.’
‘You’re talking madness. What are you saying?’
He lurched forward, grabbing slim shoulders in his big hands. ‘I want my wife back!’ Pushing the changeling aside, he walked out of the door.
~~~
When he returned the following evening, red-eyed and enormously tired, the thing was curled up in a corner of the kitchen. Its eyes were red as well, as though it had been crying, though he knew it had not. Why would a fae changeling cry?
‘I thought you’d gone,’ it said. When it got no reply it struggled to her feet. ‘I’ll make you some dinner. I thought you’d found out… I thought you’d left me. I never meant to hurt you.’
It turned its back to him and that was when he hit it, the hammer smacking into the back of its skull with a sickening crunch. The body fell as though its strings had been cut. There was no blood, and that just confirmed his suspicions.
An hour later he was dumping the body onto the little bonfire he had built on the mound. If it wanted a sacrifice, it would have one. One can of petrol and a match later and it was burning, the flames leaping high into the night sky.
Now it was just a matter of waiting. Waiting for his Anwen to return.
Cardiff, February 2012
‘He’s going to get away with it,’ Hughes said as they walked back to the office he shared with Croft. ‘Enough people will believe his wife really was swapped with a fae to give reasonable doubt.’
‘We can’t prove she wasn’t,’ Croft replied, his voice carrying a hint of resignation. ‘The body was too badly burned to get any DNA from. The hammer had no tissue on it. We can’t identify the body.’
Hughes nodded. ‘The regular detectives uncovered town gossip that the wife had been having an affair all summer. Some student. He left town in the autumn. No one thinks Gwent knew, but he could have found out and killed her.’
‘It might explain her behaviour too. She feels guilty over the affair, wants to rekindle the marriage. She thinks a bit of kinky sex in the barn is going to make everything right and doesn’t realise her husband is a superstitious nut job.’
‘Huh,’ Hughes grunted. ‘Except it’s not superstition. The mound in his field really is an old fairy gateway. Something could have come through. We’ll probably never know, and neither will Gwent, not really. The longer his wife doesn’t appear on his doorstep, the more likely it’ll be he comes to realise he burned his wife to a cinder out of paranoid delusion.’
Green Bridge Farm, December 2012
‘He’s been dead for… four to six hours,’ the coroner said. ‘It’s not easy to tell with the condition of the body.’
David Croft looked down at Peter Gwent’s body, sat in the corner of his north west field, frozen eyes fixed on the mound he had burned his wife on. At least, Croft considered it a near certainty that Anwen Gwent had died at the hands of her husband; the court had decided differently.
‘He still believed his wife was inside the mound,’ Croft said. ‘That’s what got him off the charge.’
The coroner nodded. ‘Yeah, well I wouldn’t say he was definitely wrong.’
Croft frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘He froze to death, in a field in South Wales. There’s still ice on some of his clothes and there’s evidence of blood vessels rupturing from water crystallisation in his eyes.’
‘Uh-huh, it gets cold out here.’
‘Yeah, it can do.’ The old man started packing away his gear while his assistant brought up a body bag. ‘But it didn’t get below five Celsius last night.’
On the 22nd of March 1895 the body of Bridget Cleary was found in a shallow grave. A coroner’s inquest the following day decided that she had been burned to death. A search had been under way since the 16th when rumours had begun to circulate that she had gone missing, and by the time of her discovery nine people had been charged regarding her disappearance, including her husband, Michael.
Prior to this Bridget had been ill enough for a priest to be called to administer the last rights. Members of her family, including her husband and her elderly father, Patrick Boland, came to believe that Bridget had been replaced by a changeling after going walking near some local woods. Their remedies for this included such trials as hanging her over a fire. She was eventually killed after refusing to eat, taken as a sign that she was a changeling. As her husband attempted to force feed her by menacing her with a burning stick, her chemise caught fire, and her husband tipped lamp oil over her.
After all that Michael Clearly was convicted of manslaughter and spent fifteen years in prison. He got the lesser charge because he continued to claim that he had not killed his wife, but a fae changeling who had taken her place. He was finally released in 1910.
And that was in a world where fae are just a superstition.
As far as we know.
About the Author
I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.
Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.
I got into writing through roleplaying, however, so my early work was related to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote “high fantasy” when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing City of Heroes. I still loved the idea of a modern world with magic in it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more successful short stories, as steps along the path to the Thaumatology Series.
Writing, sadly, is not my main source of income. By day, I’m a computer programmer. I work for a telecommunications company in Manchester, England. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, and (recently) Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.
For More Information
The Thaumatology Blog: http://thaumatology.wordpress.com
Other Books
&
nbsp; Thaumatology 101 – ASIN: B006IYIESW
Demon’s Moon – ASIN: B006JPN7A0
Legacy – ASIN: B006OKR8PK
Dragon’s Blood – ASIN: B0072S1DOU
Disturbia – ASIN: B007GNICZO
Hammer of Witches – ASIN: B007YG2I44
Tales from High Towers’ Study – ASIN: B006ZAJ7TY
Table of Contents
Introduction
A Night on the Town
Hunt
After Twilight
Succubus
The Body Trade
Changeling
About the Author
Tales from the Dubh Linn Page 8