by Ramsey Isler
One last link, and then I’m going to bed.
A click of her mouse brought her to a new page. The screen displayed a scan of an old manuscript written in what appeared to be Chinese. Sam searched the rest of the page and let out a relieved sigh when she saw there was a translation. A quick scan of the text revealed promising information that woke her up more than coffee ever could. She leaned in close, and read more.
* * *
The Ornery Fairy
translated by Angela Bushwell
The parchment displayed here is a lovely 14th century piece I discovered in the Guangdong region of China. Like many of China’s fairy tales, it depicts an encounter between one of the ordinary folk of the area and a fairy. But, unlike most of the Chinese fairy stories, this time the human gets the upper hand.
Most of China’s fairy tales are told in vague terms and have very few descriptive details to give you a full sense of the fantastical beings, places, and events in the stories. This lack of detail isn’t unique to Chinese folklore—most fairy tales are like this no matter what culture you look at. But this story is very different. It describes in great specificity the events that led a simple housewife to banish an unwelcome fairy from her home.
But, enough with my blathering. Let’s get on with the story. The full translation reads as follows:
There was once a young woman in Guangdong who brought honor to her family with her cleverness. Her husband loved her for her masterful cooking and her unmatched eloquence. Her children were curious and wise beyond their years. Their family was well-regarded in their town, and good fortune followed them wherever they went. Until the fairy came.
The fairy, who heard tales of this remarkable woman whispered amongst the townspeople, became curious about her. So he visited her house to see if the rumors were true.
“Welcome to our home,” the clever young woman said to the fairy. “How can I help you?”
“I hear you are very clever,” the fairy said, “but are you as clever as one of us?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I have never tried to be.”
“I am going to stay here,” the fairy said. “Let us see if you are really clever. If you are, I will leave.”
So the fairy stayed at the woman’s house and went about causing trouble for her family. Their ox fell ill, and died. The family’s garden bore putrid crops, and then went barren. The wooden beams in the house began to splinter and crack. All of the good fortune the family had enjoyed was gone. The woman tried to learn the fairy’s name so she could banish him, but she was not successful. The woman’s husband tried to reason with the fairy, and when that didn’t work he tried to kill it with an ax. That did not work either, and the fairy injured the poor husband. The clever young woman decided that she could not trick the fairy into leaving, so she would have to trick him in another way.
She went into the forest and gathered plants and flowers. First, she dried eight ripe Chinese dates and crushed them finely. Then she took two handfuls of arbor-vitae seeds and polygala root and steeped them in fresh rainwater. But the most important ingredient was pure mercury obtained from a traveling merchant. There were three balls as big as a pig’s eye. It was very expensive, and the young woman traded all of her family’s valuables for it.
She poured the mercury into a marble bowl that was as white as the full moon. Then she added the potion on top of it. The potion had a wonderful aroma. It was light and sweet. The clever woman brought it back home and her children smelled it. They wanted to drink it, but the woman said, “No, you must not! It is only for the fairy. Do not touch this, or your father will punish you.”
That evening, the woman left the bowl on a short stool in the kitchen. The fairy appeared, smelled the potion and said, “What is this lovely dish?”
“It is a soup, for you,” the young woman said. “If you like it, maybe I will make more for you.”
“Foolish woman,” the fairy said. “You’re supposed to be making me leave, not giving me reasons to stay.” The fairy stared into the pearly bowl and saw his own reflection in the bright mercury. He laughed, and drank the potion greedily and laughed more when he was done. But then, without warning, the fairy fell into a deep sleep.
The fairy did not wake for three whole seasons. During that time, the family’s good fortune returned. The woman’s husband became a very well-respected government official, and the family was offered a home in the capital city.
When the fairy finally woke up and saw that the house was empty and snow had fallen, he realized what happened. The fairy, outsmarted by the woman, was ashamed. He was never seen in the town again.
* * *
Sam read the story several times. Then she opened a new browser window and started researching the translator, Angela Bushwell. She was an esteemed academic who had just published an entire book on Chinese folklore. She seemed legitimate.
Sam could have dismissed it as yet another product of some storyteller’s imagination. But this story was too detailed, and the description of the fairy was eerily similar to that of a naughty Kith like Hax. This tale had to have some truth it.
Next, Sam searched for the ingredients listed in the story. Many Chinese medicine sources listed these items as sleep aids and insomnia cures. The materials were not easy to get, but it was certainly doable. Then there was the mercury; pure quicksilver. Prolonged exposure to it is poisonous to humans, but what effect would it have on Kith biology? A footnote in her father’s journal briefly mentioned that toxins dangerous to humans have little effect on the Kith, but that didn’t exclude the possibility that other substances might wreak havoc on Kith bodies. If this potion could put a Kith out of commission for months, it could be exactly what she needed.
So Sam had a hypothesis to work with. Now she needed to test it.
* * *
Two nights later, Sam drove up to the workshop to move her plan forward. She carried a small plastic cooler that was slick with condensation caused by the ice cubes inside. As she entered the building she held it to her chest like an invaluable parcel. The workshop was empty again, but Sam found herself getting used to that recently. Two weeks had passed since the others went on their little vacation, and every time Sam visited the workshop the silence that greeted her became less strange. Piv, however, was starting to miss his friends. He’d never admit it to her, but she noticed that recently he was less perky and had a dramatically diminished capacity for jokes.
She could hear him tinkering as she approached his work desk. As usual, he stopped working as soon as he detected her presence. Sam turned the corner that led to his little nook of the building and she found him staring at her with his head propped on one hand. He looked thoroughly bored.
“Hallo,” he said to her. “What brings you here at this hour? Shouldn’t you be washing Rupert?”
“Yes,” Sam said as she walked over to his work desk. “This is usually bath night for him. But he won’t mind if we put it off until tomorrow.”
Piv sniffed the air around her. “I smell something. What do you have?”
“It’s an...experiment,” Sam said.
Piv’s thin eyebrows rose. “That sounds promising.”
Sam opened the cooler, reached in, and recovered a tiny white bowl covered with a plastic top. “I made it myself.”
Piv wrinkled his nose. “What is it?”
“A drink,” Sam said as she carefully removed the top from the bowl. She’d spent days making the broth absolutely perfect. She’d even scouted the weather reports and gotten actual rainwater from a recent spring storm. It took hours to get something she felt confident in. The instructions in the Chinese story had been fairly detailed, but she’d never had to do anything like this before and tasks like powdering dates and milling seeds were absolutely foreign to her. But she pressed on, and she was quite proud of the shimmering liquid that settled atop a fine layer of mercury. It was a much smaller dose than what the story suggested, but that was because Sam wanted to get a batch
going as quickly as possible. Besides, she only intended for Piv to taste a miniscule portion to test it out. She didn’t want to put him into a coma for months...at least not at the moment.
“It smells delightful,” Piv said as he gazed into the bowl and saw his own reflection. “Who’s that galoot in the bottom of the cup?”
“I have no idea what a galoot is,” Sam said, “but that’s you in there.”
“Of course it is. I’ve just never seen my countenance like...this.” Piv stared into the bowl and didn’t say another word.
“It’s supposed to be some sort of elf potion,” Sam said as she turned her attention back to the cooler to retrieve a tiny spoon. “I was wondering if you coul—”
Sam dropped the spoon. She had only turned away from him for a couple seconds, but in that time Piv had grabbed the bowl and upended its contents into his gullet. He swallowed the whole potion while Sam watched in shock. When he was finished, a tiny drop of mercury dribbled down his chin.
“That,” he said, “was...delicious! However did you learn how to make such a potation?”
It took a moment for Sam to get her lips to utter the words, “Piv...you weren’t supposed to drink all of it. It will...do things to you.”
Piv shrugged. “I think you’re right. It did do things to me. I feel fantastic. Absolutely...fan...tast—”
Piv never finished the sentence. His head fell onto his work desk with a soft thud.
Sam rushed to his side and shook him by the shoulders. “Piv, are you okay?” She got no response. She was just about to panic when she heard something that gave her pause.
Snoring. Piv was snoring.
Sam laughed nervously and gently patted him on the head. “You little idiot,” she whispered to him. She cradled Piv’s feather-light body into her arms and took him to a spot under the skylight where the moon cast milky shafts of light down into the workshop. He looked utterly peaceful there.
Sam quietly walked out the door, and went back home to crush more Chinese dates.
* * *
Sam spent all of the next day readying a full batch of the potion. She decided she needed Hax out of commission for as long as possible. So she doubled the dose recommended in the Chinese fairy tale. Just to be safe.
She took a big, porcelain bowl and carefully poured more quicksilver in. Then she poured a fresh batch of the magical broth into the bowl as well. The mercury in the bowl caught the light from the kitchen lamps and made the whole mixture shine like an elixir from another world. She taped a plastic top onto the bowl and placed the bowl snugly in the round indentation she made in the ice inside of her cooler. Then she closed everything up and walked to her car.
The moon was obscured by a thin blanket of cirrus clouds when Sam went back outside. She carefully placed her cooler into the snug spot on the floor behind her car’s passenger seat, and headed to the other workshop to find Hax. The trip to the second workshop was never pleasant at night. The overgrown weeds and dark dilapidated buildings that surrounded the Kith’s second home always created a foreboding atmosphere. Sam had lived in the Detroit area long enough to not be scared of the place but, just for insurance, she kept her gun tucked in a little hip holster she’d bought years ago.
When she arrived at the old factory that served as the Kith’s personal playground, there wasn’t much light emanating from the place. That was normal, as far as she knew. The Kith took extra precautions to not attract attention to this location. She checked the trees, but there were no crows here. Sam walked carefully around the building...twice. Nothing seemed awry.
She approached the back door. A few quick finger jabs entered the security code and the door clicked open. Sam took a deep breath, and listened. Nothing made a sound. She took one last look around her. Nothing moved. She shrugged, and entered the building for the first time since she handed it over to the Kith.
She should have been prepared for what she saw. But she wasn’t.
The place was nothing like a factory. It was more like a greenhouse. There were plants everywhere. Ivy covered the interior walls, and slender trees with ragged leaves reached up to the ceiling. The floor was covered in grass. Sam wondered how much of this had been in place before the Kith left for their European vacation.
Amidst the foliage were signs of past work. In one corner a sawhorse stood, with oddly shaped wooden pieces placed meticulously on top. To Sam’s left there was a small metal table covered in neat rows of light bulbs of various sizes and colors. This was what the Kith did in their free time.
Sam could see some telltale signs that hinted at which elf worked where. A neatly arranged set of wooden chairs in various stages of assembly marked Kibblefor’s station. A collection of plastic frames, capacitors, and LCD panels hinted at Melkidoodum’s TV fetish. Sam had no idea what kind of tinkering Hax did here, and that made it difficult for her to figure out where he might be. Then she remembered that Piv had once told her that Hax preferred to work on the top floor; the old attic that Hax had found oddly fascinating. Sam felt icy shivers along her spine just thinking about the last time she was up there.
You’re a big girl. Big girls aren’t afraid of the dark.
She headed to the staircase that led to the attic. It did not creak and screech as it had before. The Kith had obviously done some maintenance on their own. When Sam reached the door she listened carefully for any sounds. There were none. She knocked on the door, lightly. No response.
Sam grasped the doorknob, turned it, and stepped inside. She was immediately greeted by a faint, eerie yellowish-green glow she had seen once before. The light just barely registered in the otherwise total blackness. The smell of the place was familiar. She stepped forward again, and her foot sank into a slimy goo that covered the floor. That muck was also familiar. Her mind was putting the pieces together just as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she saw a group of the horrible things that had given birth to Hax.
The “eggs” hung from the exposed steel rafters. Sam counted five of them, and their backs were facing her. She knew from past experience that the other side of these things would be transparent. She didn’t want to see what was in them. She knew what was in them.
This was Hax’s hobby.
Suddenly a lot of things made sense. Things that seemed completely unrelated now coalesced to form a frightening picture. Hax’s comments about wanting the Kith to be represented everywhere, his desire for this independent workshop, the list of missing people in Detroit that coincided with the departure of the other Kith on a vacation that Hax lobbied for. It all made sense. Hax never really intended to stop the Swema sale from going through. He wanted it to happen to enable the elves to cover more territory so he could do this. Everywhere.
She stepped backwards, closed the door, and started back down the stairs. But she stopped when she grasped the handrail and realized her hand was shaking. She tried to think of something calming; something that brought her joy and would remove the horrors she’d just seen.
She found nothing.
There was nothing left in her life that was calming. Yusef was gone. Akida was gone. Her father was dead. Her entire life revolved around Better Timepieces and the elves in her employ.
But this realization, though it brought her no joy, did keep her hand from shaking. Instead of the chilling fear that pulsed through her just moments ago, she now felt a heated determination. Better Timepieces was all she had, and she wasn’t going to let anyone take it away from her.
She clutched her cooler to her chest and quickly made her way outside.
The night was different than it had been when she came in. Smoky clouds had appeared overhead and dimmed the moonlight. A frigid breeze blew in from the west. The seasons were changing. But she had little time to enjoy the crisp night air. She had to get the hell away from this place.
* * *
Sam drove as fast as she thought was safe. She kept looking in the rear-view mirror; half expecting to see Hax there, staring at her from the back seat.
She put the thoughts out of her mind and focused on getting back to the workshop where Piv would hopefully be awake.
Light rain fell in a gentle mist that covered her windshield in a fine sheen of water. Her phone rang. She looked at the screen and the caller ID said it was Akida again. She couldn’t talk to him right now. Not after what she had just seen. The guilt would be overwhelming. He had been right all along, and Sam just wouldn’t listen. Now she had to fix this mess.
She pulled up to the workshop and her tires screeched as they fought for traction on the slick asphalt. She grabbed her cooler, ran to the door, entered the security code and scanned her thumb. The locks slid open. Sam slipped inside and left the door slightly ajar in case she needed to make a hasty retreat out of here. The whole process took less than ten seconds.
The lights were off. The workshop was so quiet that her light footsteps might as well have been the thundering stride of a giant. Sam turned on a few lights and paused for a moment. If it hadn’t been for Hax’s sinister vacation idea, this place would be full of busy Kith at this hour. Now there was nothing. This was how it was going to be from now on. Sam knew it. Whatever happened, she knew the Kith would be out of her life after this.
Sam hurried to the rear chamber of the building. When she reached the double doors that separated that area from the rest of the workshop, she cautiously peered into their glass windows to look for anything strange. All she saw was Piv’s small body lying where she’d left him. He was still fast asleep, and looking peaceful in his slumber. There were no tragedies in his dream land.
She walked to him and knelt by his side, placing her cooler on the floor. “I don’t know if you can hear me,” she said. “But I really hope you can. I need you awake. Hax has gone crazy and he’s...he’s kidnapping people. You were right. Everybody was right and I was too proud to see it, and I was too greedy to let you go. I’m sorry. I’m just...so...so sorry. Just wake up and we can fix all of it. Please, Piv. Just wake up.”