by Gwyneth Rees
‘Mum, Evie’s here to see you,’ her mother said, but Grandma didn’t react. ‘Here, darling,’ Mum said to Evie, ‘come and hold her hand.’
So that’s what Evie did, only it didn’t feel like she was holding Grandma’s hand because her hand was so still.
When they got back to Grandma’s house, Dad opened the boot of the car and Mum was surprised to see Evie’s doll’s house sitting next to their overnight bag. It was lucky the boot was so big, Evie thought, or it wouldn’t have fitted in. Mum stared at it. ‘Why have you brought that?’
‘Grandma wanted me to,’ Evie murmured.
Evie’s Mum didn’t say anything else but she exchanged a puzzled look with Evie’s dad as he lifted the doll’s house out of the boot and carried it into the house.
Dad had to set off for home again soon after that. When they’d dropped him off at the station, Mum busied herself with unpacking their things. Whenever they’d stayed with Grandma before, Mum had slept in the single bed in the spare room and Evie had slept there too, on the camp bed they brought with them from home. They hadn’t remembered to bring the camp bed this time but Mum said it didn’t matter. Now that Grandma was in hospital, Mum said she would sleep in her bed instead.
That night Evie found that she couldn’t get to sleep even though she was really tired. In the end, she got up and went downstairs to the dining room, where Dad had put her doll’s house. Grandma only ever used the dining room when she had visitors and the door was kept shut most of the time. The doll’s house was still in the middle of the dining table and the moonlight was shining in on it. Mum had obviously forgotten to come in here before she went to bed because a window had been left open and the dining-room curtains hadn’t been pulled.
Evie moved towards the doll’s house. As she did, there was a noise of something being knocked over inside. A tiny voice said, ‘Ouch!’
Evie froze.
Before she could investigate any further, the light came on in the hallway and her mum was calling out, ‘Evie, is that you?’ Seconds later, Mum was standing in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. ‘What are you doing?’
Evie quickly turned her back on the doll’s house and headed towards her mother. ‘Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.’ She closed the dining-room door behind her before Mum could notice that anything was wrong.
‘Neither can I. I know it’s silly, but I’m really not liking being on my own tonight. Do you want to come and sleep in Grandma’s bed with me? Maybe that would make us both feel better.’
Evie was only too pleased to agree.
She had never slept in Grandma’s big brass bed before and as she climbed in she found that the mattress was very soft with springs that you could almost feel.
‘I’m sure this is the same bed your grandma and grandad had when I was a child,’ Mum said. ‘It must be ancient.’
Evie snuggled up close to her mother, who reached out and turned off the bedside light. ‘Do you think Grandma will wake up tomorrow?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Don’t get your hopes up too much,’ Mum warned her gently.
‘I know, but . . .’ Evie was remembering the conversation she’d had with Grandma only the day before – about how hoping for things was important. Hoping for something didn’t always mean that you got it, Grandma had pointed out when they’d talked a bit more about it on their walk home, but if you gave up all your hopes and dreams, then you’d end up being a very sad person indeed.
‘Do you think if I keep hoping to see a fairy, then one day I’ll really see one?’ Evie had asked her.
‘To see a fairy you have to be in the right place at the right time in the right sort of mind,’ Grandma had replied. ‘Buttercup told me that. So the only thing you can do is make sure you’re always in the right sort of mind – and then hope that one day you’re in the right place when a fairy’s about!’
As Evie drifted off to sleep she was thinking about the voice she had heard coming from her doll’s house. Had she been imagining it? Or was it possible that her doll’s house had already been occupied by its first fairy visitor? She decided that as soon as Mum was asleep she would sneak back downstairs to check. If only she wasn’t starting to feel so sleepy herself . . .
Evie could feel something tickling her toes. She turned over to ask her mum if it was her, but found that her mum was fast asleep. The bedside clock with its illuminated hands showed that it was the middle of the night now. She must have fallen asleep too without realizing it. She could feel a funny breeze down by her toes, which was strange since she was lying under a sheet and blanket that were both tucked in at the bottom of the bed. She stuck her head under the covers to look down at her feet and to her amazement she saw two yellow lights.
Then she heard a voice. ‘This is a very long tunnel.’ The voice was light and tinkly like a fairy’s.
As she shifted her position in the bed to see better, the lights suddenly went out.
Next to her, her mum was stirring. ‘Evie, what is it?’
‘Nothing,’ Evie murmured, closing her eyes again. She must be dreaming, because fairies didn’t live at the bottom of your bed. They lived at the bottom of your garden. Everyone knew that.
The next morning, Evie spotted that the little box of violet creams she had left on Grandma’s dressing table had been opened. The cellophane had been ripped off and left beside the box, and when Evie looked inside there was one chocolate missing. Evie frowned. Her mum was the only person who could have eaten it, but her mum didn’t like violet creams. Anyway, Mum wouldn’t normally take anything of hers without asking.
Just then her mother came into the room looking for her hairbrush. She was yawning. ‘I don’t know about you but I had a terrible night’s sleep in that bed. I hate soft mattresses.’
‘I slept really well. I like this bed.’ Evie touched the brass-bed frame fondly. Somehow, sleeping there made her feel closer to Grandma.
‘Well, if you like it so much, do you want to sleep in it tonight and I’ll take the other room?’
‘OK,’ Evie agreed enthusiastically. ‘Mum,’ she added, as her mother turned to go back into the bathroom, ‘did you eat one of my violet creams?’ Evie pointed at the little box on the dressing table. ‘There’s one missing.’
‘Of course not. Didn’t you eat it yourself?’
‘No.’
Mum pulled a face as if she wasn’t up for spending too much time thinking about violet creams right now. ‘Maybe you ate it in your sleep.’
Evie went to inspect the box again. She remembered her dream from last night – at least she’d thought it had been a dream. Could those sparks of light at the bottom of her bed have been fairies after all? Grandma had told her that fairies liked to eat violet creams. Was it possible that instead of waiting for her to put one out on the window ledge they had come inside the house and helped themselves?
They visited Grandma again that afternoon and this time Mum left Evie alone with her while she went to speak to one of the doctors. While she was gone, Evie leaned closer to Grandma and whispered, ‘I think I saw two fairies last night, Grandma. They were in your bed. I think they took one of your violet creams.’
Evie thought that Grandma’s closed eyelids flickered slightly, but she couldn’t be sure.
When she got home from the hospital she opened the box of violet creams and left it on the window ledge. Grandma had told her that fairies had a very good sense of smell, so if that was true maybe they would smell the chocolates and come back for more. She went to bed very early that evening, telling Mum she was tired, but really she just wanted to get to bed as quickly as possible in case the fairies came back.
Evie had left the curtains open and, as she lay on her side looking out of the window, she could see the moon. She waited and waited for a fairy to appear. Eventually, she heard her mum come up to bed and still there was no sign of any fairies. Her eyelids were starting to feel heavy so she let them close, thinking she would just rest them for a few seconds.
S
he opened them again when she heard tiny high-pitched voices. The room was brightly lit by moonlight now and when she glanced at Grandma’s bedside clock she saw that it was three o’clock in the morning.
Evie’s first thought was to rush to the window and look out, but she stopped herself. She didn’t want to scare the fairies away. Then she realized that the voices weren’t coming from the window. They seemed to be coming from inside the room, from the bottom of her bed. She felt movement under the sheet down by her feet, so she put her head underneath the covers to look. When she was younger she had sometimes snuggled right down under the covers, pretending she was in a real cave and that the bottom of her bed was really the start of a tunnel that led to all sorts of exciting places. She suddenly got that feeling again as the voices got louder, and she saw two sparks of light just like the night before.
Gradually, the sparks became bigger and brighter and Evie saw that they were coming from two fairy-sized lanterns. Then she saw the first fairy. The fairy was holding her lantern high above her head to keep the covers off her as she flew up the bed. She was so small she could have sat on Evie’s hand. The first thing that Evie noticed about her, apart from her beautiful shimmery wings, was the two white stars glowing in her hair. She was wearing a short pink floaty dress with pink stars embroidered on it. Her shiny dark hair was tied up in two bunches, each fastened with one of the stars. The second fairy was dressed in a floaty lilac dress, which was covered in little sparkles. Her hair was bobbed neatly at her shoulders and swung prettily when she moved her head, and she wore a dazzling crescent-moon hair clip.
The two fairies flew up the bed and out from between the sheets right in front of Evie’s nose. She could see under their skirts as they flew across her face. They were both wearing sparkling fairy knickers that exactly matched their dresses. They didn’t seem to realize she was watching them.
‘Where are they?’ the one with the stars in her hair whispered. ‘Don’t say she’s eaten them already!’
‘I know there’s chocolate here somewhere. I can smell it!’
‘Excuse me,’ Evie said nervously, sitting up in bed. ‘Can I help?’
Both fairies shrieked as if they’d just seen a ghost. The one with the moon hair clip nearly dropped her lantern.
‘Please don’t be frightened,’ Evie added quickly. ‘I love fairies. So does my grandma. She’s seen lots, but you’re the first ones I’ve ever met, so please don’t fly away.’
The fairy with the pink dress recovered first. She flew back towards the bed, peering at Evie curiously. ‘She looks harmless enough,’ she said to her friend.
‘I’m very harmless!’ Evie said quickly. ‘And if you stay and talk to me, you can have some more of my violet creams.’
‘Are they yours then?’
‘Sort of. I bought them for my grandma, but she isn’t well enough to eat them.’
‘She must be very sick if she can’t eat violet creams!’
‘She’s had a stroke.’ Evie’s voice trembled slightly. ‘She’s in hospital.’
‘Oh dear.’ The fairy looked sorry.
Evie didn’t really want to think about Grandma’s illness right now so she said quickly, ‘I can’t believe you’re really here! What are you called?’
‘I’m Star,’ the pink fairy replied, ‘and this is Moonbeam.’
‘What lovely names! Are you called Star because you’ve got stars in your hair – and Moonbeam because you’ve got a moon?’
‘Oh, no – it’s the other way round,’ Star explained. ‘I wear stars in my hair because I’m called Star. They’re real ones, you know. I borrowed them from the Night Sky.’
‘And I’ve got a moon in my hair because I’m called Moonbeam,’ the other fairy said. ‘The Night Sky couldn’t lend me the real one, of course, but this is a very good copy, don’t you think?’ Before Evie could answer, she added, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Evie.’
‘We’re very pleased to meet you, Evie,’ the two fairies said in unison, giving little curtsies. Then they looked at each other and giggled.
‘The fairy queen likes us to do that whenever we meet a human for the first time,’ Moonbeam explained. ‘She likes her fairies to have good manners.’
‘Tell me about the fairy queen!’ Evie gasped, swinging her legs round to sit on the edge of the bed, still hardly believing this was really happening. ‘Is she very beautiful?’
‘Oh, yes. Fairy queens always are. Ours is called Queen Celeste and she rules over all us dream fairies.’
‘Dream fairies! Is that what you are? Grandma’s told me about fairies, but the ones she met were outside in the garden.’
‘They would be flower fairies,’ Star said. ‘They’re much more common than us. You won’t find us in people’s gardens. We live in Dreamland.’ She said the last bit proudly.
‘Dreamland?’ Evie repeated, fascinated just by the sound of it. ‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s the most beautiful part of fairyland,’ Star explained.
‘That’s what we think anyway,’ Moonbeam put in. ‘It’s where dream fairies come from. It’s very beautiful.’
‘So are dream fairies very different from flower fairies?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Star replied. ‘Our dresses are much sparklier and we wear matching knickers. Flower fairies don’t, you know. They always wear knickers made out of plain white flower petals.’ She pulled a face as if she found the thought of plain white knickers very boring indeed.
‘Not so many humans know about us either,’ Moonbeam added. ‘That’s because you have to fall asleep in a magic bed before we can visit you.’
‘A magic bed?’
‘That’s right. This bed is magic. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here!’ Moonbeam flew over and landed on top of one of the brass bed knobs.
‘But how can you tell it’s magic?’ Evie asked, staring at Grandma’s bed. ‘It doesn’t look magic.’ She wasn’t sure exactly what a magic bed would look like, but Grandma’s certainly wasn’t sparkling with fairy dust or sprouting magic wings or doing anything else out of the ordinary.
‘It’s all to do with how a bed is made and who sleeps in it afterwards,’ Moonbeam explained. ‘First it has to be made by a person who believes in fairies.’
‘And if lots of different people help to make the bed, they all have to believe in fairies,’ Star added.
‘And even after a magic bed has been made, it still has to get its magic switched on,’ Moonbeam continued.
‘Switched on?’
‘That’s right. For a magic bed to become actively magical – and able to transport dream fairies from Dreamland into your world – three humans who all believe in fairies have to sleep in the bed first. Not all at the same time, of course. One after another is fine. Your bed was activated last night when you slept in it – you must have been the third person to believe in fairies who did.’
‘This is so . . . so cool!’ Evie said. ‘I just can’t believe it’s really happening!’
‘Well, it is, and when you wake up tomorrow morning, you’d better not think we were just a dream,’ Moonbeam warned her. ‘A lot of humans do and it makes us very cross.’
‘Of course, if you let us eat another chocolate then you’ll have proof that we were really here,’ Star pointed out. ‘If you’ve got any left, that is.’
‘Of course I’ve got some left! I put them on the window ledge for you.’
‘The window ledge?’ Star sounded horrified and immediately started to fly towards it.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Those greedy flower fairies are always stuffing their faces with things people leave out for them on window ledges,’ she grumbled. ‘Queen Celeste says it’s no wonder they’re getting so fat! We’ll be lucky if—’ She stopped abruptly and shrieked in delight as she saw the chocolate box still sitting there, lit up by the moonlight. ‘Ooh, yummy!’ She gasped as she descended on the chocolates and stuck her finger straight into the middle of a violet cream. S
he broke off a tiny bit of the chocolate coating and used it to scoop out a dollop of the fondant centre, which she stuffed into her mouth.
Evie watched as Moonbeam did the same – a little more delicately. ‘It must be wonderful being a fairy,’ she sighed. ‘Though I expect you have to work really hard in fairyland, making magic potions and things to help people, don’t you?’
‘Oh, no,’ Star mumbled through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘Mostly what keeps us busy is all the parties we have to go to.’
‘Parties? ’
‘That’s right,’ Moonbeam agreed, tearing a scrap of coloured tissue paper from the inside of the chocolate box and using it to dab the corners of her mouth. ‘We have to make a different party dress for each party and it takes ages to sew on all the sequins. We could make our dresses sparkle with fairy dust if we wanted, but Queen Celeste says that would be a waste of good magic.’
As Moonbeam talked, Star was looking out over the garden warily, as if she expected a flower fairy to come and snatch the violet creams away from them at any minute. ‘You know, I think it would be safer if we brought these chocolates inside and shut the window.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t let the flower fairies have any,’ Evie said, smiling. She brought the violet creams back inside and the two fairies followed.
‘We’d better be getting back now,’ Moonbeam said. ‘Queen Celeste doesn’t like us keeping humans awake in the middle of the night for too long – she says it makes them grumpy.’
‘Oh – please don’t go yet!’
‘We’ll come back and visit you again soon,’ Moonbeam promised.
Star was already lifting up the covers at the top of the bed to create the mouth of a cave for herself and Moonbeam to fly inside.
‘Where do you go when you get to the bottom of the bed?’ Evie asked them.
‘Dreamland, of course!’ And they both disappeared under the covers.