The Hemlock Forest

by C. R. Cummings

  The Hemlock Forest

  Prequel to Run, Run, Run Away

  by

  C.R. Cummings

  Amazon Edition

  Copyright 2012 C.R. Cummings

  CHAPTER 1

  Do you ever wonder what life would be like if that one decision you made, that one thing you did, that one footstep you took could be undone? A ‘do-over’, like in a children’s game? That’s what I want, a ‘do-over’.

  The forest reached out for unending miles around me as I mused again about what my life had become because of the one thing someone else had done.

  It wasn’t my fault…I had done nothing but try my best to be a good wife, a good mother and a good person. If I was a cussing sort I would be screaming out at the top of my lungs how unfair it all was. If I could hurt the one that that caused all this I would…that little evil seed of hate festered inside me. I lay back on the damp pile of leaves and looked up at the tree.

  The willow. It was his fault. I wanted Milton to cut it down, kill it, burn it, anything to get rid of it. He wouldn’t do it. He had the same memories, the same experiences and was changed even more than myself…however he was peaceful with it, had accepted it all. He even went as far as to say he felt sorry for the willow. Not I. Never.

  A breeze had come up, though I couldn’t feel it where I lay. It’s was evident by the movement in the long strands of the branches of the willow. They were swaying gently, a quiet dance…my heart felt the words it was singing…”I be sorry” over and over again. Maybe Milton was right. Maybe, just maybe, the willow had grown up and knew what wrong he had done.

  A deep sigh escaped from my lips as I sat up and picked up the writing pad again. The story had to be told. My Skyler might become well someday and even though Milton kept putting off telling Polly the truth it needed to be told. He would be upset if he knew what I was doing. This was my one defiant act as his wife. I looked down at the notebook and started to re-read what I had written, a children’s story. A dark horrible children’s story.

  “Once upon a time in a time of wonder there were two fairies. One was named Nosen the Boggart and other was Willow of the Wisps. These two fairies were very young in the life of fairies (which is quite long you know).

  They both lived in the Realm of Mortals, Alainn, through the doorway from the Firinn, the realm of the folk, in the magical land of Scotland. Their family name was Seelie and over time the folk divided into two parts, the Blessed of the Seelies and the Fateful of the Seelies

  The folk in of the Blessed are woodland fairies, brownies, flower fairies, pixies, druids, the shape shifters, (the wisps and the Frìths), and more. All are good, wonderful, playful, helpful, charming, and a total delight to come across in one’s travels. They lived in the air, woods, ponds, flowers, trees and anywhere the sunshine could reach, all traveled in and out of the inner world of fairies, through the silvery doorway to the kingdom of Larnnrich in the land of Firinn.

  The Fatefuls on the other hand, are dark fairies. However that doesn’t always mean that they are bad fairies, but they do like the dark. If they live above ground you will only see them at night or on a dark stormy day. They love the netherworld the best and tended to find caves and tunnels and holes in the ground to live in. One of these Fateful folk is the Boggarts.

  Nosen Boggart lived in a magnificent underground cavern with the other Boggarts in the mires of Scotland. Willow lived in the deep woods nearby and the two had become best friends.

  Now Boggarts are interesting creatures; they can be good or bad, but they are always mischievous. Some in the fairy realm knew them when they were completely fair and good, and they called them brownies then. Some of the brownies found they liked the dark better than the light and they changed into Boggarts. Overtime the cute little brownies, that were normally helpful and fun to be around and who only got themselves in trouble now and then, became a bit more malicious in nature. From living deep inside the earth, in the dark caverns, they became distorted, as did their magic. Not from living in the dark, but from the varied combinations of magic that soaked into the ground and penetrated the very soil they dwelled in.

  After time everyone, both in the fairy realm and the mortal realm stayed as far away from the devious little creatures as they could. If one heard their horrible cries ring out, it was always best to turn and go the other way. They liked to steal and wreak havoc wherever they went. If a person or fairy was found to cherish an item, whatever it may be, a shoe, a horse, a child...the boggarts would find a way to hurt the thing, or steal it away never to be seen again. The few boggarts that retained some goodness were known to give things back, but they were not good at giving items back to the rightful owners. The owner of a missing green shoe may find themselves with a cow in their kitchen, and so it went.

  It got so bad that the Boggarts had to use what remained of their good magic and form a siphon to capture as much of the dark magic that soaked into the ground as possible. In this manner, using the siphon, the Boggarts were able to stop their decent into revolting foulness, keep some of their good magic and remain a friend to the fair folk. The siphon was called the Sumair Stone, and they hid it deep within their tunnels where it could not release any of the bad magic it had soaked up.

  Nosen Boggart was still young and still mostly good. He happened upon the Wisp fairies by chance one summer night as he traveled deep in the woods, searching for a spoon one of his brothers had stolen away and instead found the lively folk.

  The Wisps were fair and good and a delight to be around. They were playful and loved to dance while in their folk form, and fly and play and sit on flowers in their wisp form. They are thoughtful creatures, quiet and full of sunshine. If one happens upon a Wisp it is always best to tell the little creature how wonderful and beautiful they are and in their happiness they will bestow good fortune. But woe be it to the one who swats or hurts or tells the wisp that they look like a fly. This will offend the wisp and bring you nothing but bad luck.

  Nosen had never seen the Wisps in any form other than their wisp form and he was delighted by their fairness. He stood, enchanted, as they feasted and danced and frolicked in the woods. They sang amusing songs of sunshine and fairy bells, of dew drops and moonbeams. There were other fairies with them, thin lithe folk that swayed and played alongside the wisps, as well as brownies and pixies. Hidden in the dark leaves of a shrub he stayed all night and watched.

  Nosen did not know that he was seeing a rare site. Frìth fairies spend most of their lives as a flower, or a tree, or some other form of plant. That night the Frìth fairies had released their enchantment on themselves so they too could join in with a night of frolicking and merrymaking. One younger wisp had seen the Boggart in his hiding place and it delighted him that a Boggart would come to play with them. His name was Willow and he made sure that he pranced and played with his friends nearby so the hidden boggart could watch them. Then as the sun started to rise, Willow went to him and a friendship was born.

  Willow and Nosen became inseparable. The two played mischievous and charmingly innocent games to their hearts content and to the amusement of any that happened upon them. It might be a game of tag with Nosen chasing after Willow in his wisp form, or lost treasure where one would hide something and the other would have to find it, or they would create riddles for the other to solve, or a game of hide and seek in the deep woods or down in the caves of Nosen’s home. Many a time other fairies joined in with their play, and all about them would be sounds of merriment as the game was afoot. They spent many years enjoying each other’s company and bringing the fair folk and the boggarts back together as friends.

  One day they were almost through a long running challenge of hide and seek. Willow had to change hiding places a
number of times as Nosen or one of his team mates had gotten too close to his hiding spot. Willow went deeper than he had ever ventured before into the tunnels of the boggarts home. He only needed to make sure that he wasn’t found until sunrise to win the game. At the end of the tunnel there was a sealed door, but Willows eyes could see the smallest of cracks. He changed into a wisp and entered the room to hide, thinking that Nosen surely wouldn’t find him there.

  In the center of the sealed room sat a stone pedestal with a round black stone on it top. The stone was black and riddled with purples and blue streaks that seemed to pulsate and move within the stone. Willow changed back to his fey form, to get a closer look at this magnificent thing, just as bolt of purple fire shot out and zapped him.

  As he fell back he felt a surge of darkness he had never felt before; a yearning for something that did not belong to him. He looked at the stone and had to have it. All around the room there were treasures and items that the Boggarts had stolen from others over the years. As the stone continued to send zaps out about the room one hit the sealed door and shattered it. Willow watched the stone’s power with awe as he snatched up a jeweled bag and hurriedly plucked the stone from its resting place and stashed it neatly inside. Tucking it securely inside his shirt he ran from the room, up the tunnels, through all the passageways, pushed past the multitude of Boggarts and his friend, Nosen. They knew what the small fey had taken; all the Boggarts had felt the disruption in magic when the stone had been activated, and knew what it meant. They chased him and tried to stop him, tried to tell him what he was holding, but Willow hadn’t listened. Instead he ran and ran until he was out in the sunshine. The stone pulsed through the bag and kept shooting rays of blues and purples out, zapping trees and shrubs and birds and anything that happened to be in the way.

  The stone zapped the good Frìth fairies and disrupted their magic, changing them forever into the form they had chosen. It zapped the fair folk that tried to stop him; from some it sucked their magic away completely, to others it gave evil dark thoughts and to still others it transformed them from gentle wisp folk into wise gnomes, or one eyed fachans, or strange feathered creatures.

  Willow didn’t stop. The need to possess this thing was too great and he ran deep into the woods wreaking havoc in his wake. Boggarts, in the hundreds, chased after him screaming and threatening to tear him from limb to limb. Good folk followed also, but started to hold back as the stone zapped them over and over again, until all had stopped following. They were forced to leave the chase to the Boggarts who were unaffected by the zapping.

  Still Willow didn’t stop, he ran until he came to the doorway into Firinn. He threw himself through it, leaving the Boggarts on the other side. And he ran and ran; the stone now silenced in its jeweled bag, nullified by the heavy magic in the Realm of the Fairies.

  All would have been good if Willow had stopped there. The Sumair Stone was just a pretty stone in the realm of goodness. But Willow didn’t stop; he ran and ran and ran until he felt he could run no more. And still he ran on, until he reached the other side of the realm to a small hamlet called Rootmire where the forest fairies had their doorway to the Hemlock forest in a middle world of Meadhan.

  The guardian of the doorway was away at home having his mid-morn meal of honey and bread when Willow came upon it. Willow passed through the doorway without hindrance and bumped right into a cute little mortal girl with a bounding blond ponytail, a huge smile and a handful of flowers she had been picking. Behind her were her parents, a nice woman carrying a picnic lunch and a huge man wearing a backpack filled with camping gear and carrying an axe.

  Startled at seeing mortals, Willow changed into a wisp without thought, dropping the bag as he did. It fell at the little girl’s feet, opened and the Sumair Stone rolled out...and started to zap. It zapped the little girl, with bright red and blue lines of magic. It zapped the trees, and the fairies in the trees (that had been invisible to the mortal family but were now made visible as the stone zapped them). One fairy, horribly disfigured, fell dead in front of the little girl, who had started to scream, and continued to scream as the stone zapped over and over again. It sought out anything of magic that was in the area, killing, changing, maiming, and revealing all the magically things to the horrified family, as it lapped up the magic, then dispelled it back out. It zapped the Hemlock trees, but couldn’t penetrate their own fair magic, nor take any itself.

  It zapped Willow and extracted out his magic. As he fell he changed from a wisp back into a fairy, then into a large tangled willow tree, with his grief stricken face etched into the bark. The stone pulsed and zapped and sucked the magic from the forest, then it shot it back out in changed forms, shifting all the remaining fairies into wisps. Then it zapped the man.

  Now as anyone knows, fairies magic can only do so much to a mortal. If the mortal is good, the magic has to be good in some form. Of course it will still hurt them, but there will always be goodness somewhere. But if the mortal is bad, evil beyond belief can be inflicted upon them. As luck would have it the man was good and the magic the stone threw at him tried its best to hurt him, tried to change him, tried to inflict evil into his soul. But the man was strong and his only thought was to protect his family.

  He held up his axe as if to smash the stone and the magic hit the axe the hardest. Only the fairest, lightest bits of magic rolled around the axe to hit the man. It opened his eyes and mind to the fairies. It gave him knowledge that no mortal should have about the fair folk; it touched his very being and molded it in ways yet to be discovered.

  However the main force of the enchantment bounced back and hit the Sumair Stone and the silvery doorway back into Firinn. Everything went silent as the stone and doorway were stunned by the reverberating magic.

  The family was frozen solid in shock, they couldn’t move, they couldn’t talk. The silence in the forest was eerie and finally broken by a baby’s wail. The man gathered up their little girl who was staring blankly and hung limp in his arms, while the woman searched for the baby. They found it nestled in a large vine of flowers. The vine had wilted and now looked more like a woman than a vine. The Frìth fairy was near death, her new born babe held tightly in her arms. As the mortal woman came close the fairy held out the baby to her. Hesitating only moments the kind woman took the child and watched tearfully as the fairy finished converting completely from her vine form into a beautiful female fairy, shriveled, died, then faded away before her eyes.

  Taking the baby and the still limp little girl the man and the woman hurried from the area until the man felt they were safe. He stayed with his little family until he was sure they would be safe and only then returned to where the Sumair Stone lay. As he came close he could see it starting to pulse faintly again. He knew that this thing needed to be put somewhere quickly so it could not continue to wreck its evil.

  Nearby was an old Hemlock stump, its center hollow. The man gingerly picked the stone up and dropped it into the stump. Using his axe he chopped at the rim of the stump until it had fallen in, and he said a prayer that the stump would hold the evil tight. All around him fairies who hadn’t been touched by the magic of the stone came out of hiding and tried to go through the doorway, out of the now hexed forest, but the doorway was sealed.

  The man walked close as he heard their dismay and his axe started to vibrate in his hand. He held it up and touched out towards the entry and the portal opened before his and the fairies shocked eyes. A key...his axe was now a key that could void the hex the Sumair Stone had created. The fairies fled the forest, back into their private realm of Firinn, without even a thank you to the Woodsman for saving them.

  The man and his wife, along with their now changed daughter and the new little babe left the forest for a time. It wasn’t long before they discovered how much they had been altered, how much their lives had been affected forever by what had happened to them in the Hemlock forest. The man and his wife decided it was just another adventure in their lives and dealt with all the
changes will great care and diligence.

  The babe...

  “Elise?” Milton’s voice bellowed through the trees. I scrambled to close up the notebook and stuffed it back into my bag that held my painting supplies. He thought me working on my next book, the cute one about little butterfly like fairies. I was making good money with them and he seemed pleased that I had finally found something I loved to do and a way to make money from my paintings and silly stories.

  I could hear him moving through the forest towards where I sat. The doorway roots into Firinn was off to my right, closed and silent since the last and final time Milton, or the Woodsman as they were apt to call him, opened it with the axe and let them into our private world in the Hemlock forest.

  “Elise, she’s finally awake.” Milton called out as he came around the last tree on the path. He was beaming and holding the hand of our daughter Skyler. She was so beautiful, golden hair shining even in the dim of the forest shade. Her face was that of an angel and I wondered anew how Milton and I could have produced a child so strikingly magnificent. If only her mind had been sound.

  As they entered the glade it took a moment for Skyler’s eyes to focus on me. Yes she was back to normal…that vacate look she had had since birth. She wasn’t all there, had never been and now with the changes wrought on by the damn Sumair stone, she never would be. But she was awake and as normal as normal was for her now.

  “Mommy?” her little voice asked, trying to center on me.

  I smiled and rose up from the ground and went over to her, kneeling down in front of her. Quick motions were never good around her, here in the forest or out in Alainn where we lived most of the time.

  “Did you have a good rest my dear?” I asked, looking deeply into her eyes. She was there, deep down. I could see the glimmer of recognition in the blueness of her eyes.