by Signe Pike
Hunger satisfied, we returned to the inn to freshen up for our nighttime sojourn into the Chalice Well Garden. I sat on the edge of the bed as Raven packed her supplies into a small satchel, adding her iPod so that she could record the whole evening, just in case anything unusual occurred. We dressed up in our finery—Raven in a white dress she wears for all her ceremonies, and I with my red hair twisted and pinned at the nape of my neck, a nod to the Raphaelite paintings that felt oh so faery to me.
My heart was beating in my throat as we stepped into the night. Raven took my hand, and we made our way up the path and through the gate toward King Arthur’s Court—the waterfall of the Chalice Well that fed into the Healing Pool. We passed the garden lamp where Raven had seen the short figure flash by years ago, and continued up the path into the dark, following the sound of the clear running water. Maybe normal people would have thought wandering through a deserted garden in the middle of the night was awesome. Me? Not so much. I felt like there was someone behind me, breathing down my neck in the dark. I felt like there were a thousand eyes in the trees. I felt like we were intruders, out of our element and unwelcome. But Raven, oblivious to it all, carried on blithely. The waterfall, which had seemed so tame during the day when I’d encountered that friendly little bird, now felt wild and dangerous. I kept my gaze fixed on the back of Raven’s head as we hiked uphill, past the gently trickling Lion’s Head Fountain, under the long tunnel of the arbor. The breeze played with my hair as we emerged on the meadow, and it was a relief to see the open evening sky.
“Where should we go?” Raven whispered.
“How about we sit under that old tree?” I gestured. It had caught my attention earlier that day because it looked just as one would imagine a faery tree should look—ancient and gnarled . . . rather like the trees I’d seen near the Scorhill Circle. Close to a thick row of hedges that marked the edge of the garden, a thick, low branch jutted out from the trunk at waist level, barring access in a way, keeping it secret, untrodden, if only visually. We went around the back of the tree and thought it would be polite, since the area felt so secluded, to ask permission to enter. We lit the candles and set them out in a circle around us, placed the mirrors on the grass, and put one near the trunk of the tree. I stood next to Raven as she lifted her arms and began speaking, calling in the directions, her voice resonating in the quiet night.
“Spirit of the East, spirit of air, we come before you with empty hands and open hearts, teach us, show us how to live . . .”
As she went through each of the directions, she softly explained that this would cast a protective circle around us, one that would also help us tune in with the energies of the earth. When the circle was complete, we sank down in the grass back-to-back. I felt safer this way, even though the darkness was thick all around us. Raven said aloud that we were there to connect with the faeries, in whatever way they saw fit. More than a few of her students had come out of their journeys to advise that we should be very clear about our intentions. In light of this fact, I decided perhaps I would write the faeries a letter. I pulled it from my pocket now and began to read aloud. I told them how I wanted so badly to know if there was magic, still, in the world, and that to me, they represented everything magical there is. I told them I believed as a little girl, that I’d loved them, that I hoped I’d been loved by them, and that if we could make this connection, maybe through sharing any experiences I was granted, I could help others believe once more.
We were quiet for a moment then, not quite knowing what to expect. My eyes searched the bushes and trees all around us, watching, waiting. Mentally I willed something to happen. Okay . . . here I am! Sitting in the dark . . .
Suddenly, something began to move in the bushes at the edge of the clearing. Raven was facing the open slope of the meadow, but I was facing a dense, tall crop of grasses with thick hedges beyond. I froze. I could hear the rustling—shuffle, shuffle. (Pause.) Shuffle, shuffle. It couldn’t be more than ten feet away from me, by the sound of it. It seemed to move matter-of-factly, and I could hear it getting closer. I tried to keep calm, but I felt my chest tightening. I reached back and clutched Raven’s arms, linking them in mine. I could tell her ears were keenly perked as well, but she was radiating excitement. Shuffle, shuffle . . . I couldn’t see what it was, but something was coming toward me. My legs felt vulnerable, my bare feet so close to the edge of the circle, to the edge of the grass. Any moment it was going to appear—was it some kind of animal? I really didn’t want to freak out; this was where it counted.
But some sort of Homer Simpson-like noise issued itself from my mouth.
“Neeeaaahhhhhhhhhh . . .” I said, pulling my legs into my chest. Just as I thought I was going to have to shout “Stop!” as soon as it had come, it was gone. My heart was clamoring inside my chest.
“Raven, I did not like that. I did not like that at all.”
She patted my arm, completely unfazed. “Do you want to go in?”
God, I was such a sissy! “No,” I said, reluctantly. “But can we switch places?”
I mean, come on! It was only natural that the brazen sorceress with the magical powers should be facing the scary part of the hill, right?
“Maybe we should sing,” Raven suggested. So we sang . . . and it was truly challenging to come up with songs that a faery might like. According to legend, faeries possess the most beautiful voices and create the most unearthly enchanted music imaginable. Uh, what have we got that compares?
I heard Raven shuffling through her bag as I was winding up with my contribution—an off-key rendition of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and she picked up her iPod to see the time.
“Well, Sigs, we’ve been at it for fifty minutes,” she said. “But we can obviously stay out here as long as you’d like . . .”
“Let’s stay out a little longer,” I said, wanting to be patient. We decided to sit in silence for a while, taking in the night.
We’d been sitting quietly for a few minutes when I was startled by Raven letting out a loud gasp.
It scared the living hell out of me.
“What? What is it?” I whispered urgently.
“Oh my God!” she said, her voice filled with wonder. “Signe! Do you see it?”
“No! See what?”
“Oh my God, they’re everywhere!” She sounded shocked, almost beyond words.
“What? What are you seeing?”
“I—I’m seeing little lights everywhere. You’re not seeing this?” I could feel her moving her head from side to side in disbelief.
“No,” I whispered fiercely. “I’m not seeing anything.” My eyes strained in the darkness. I turned to look over her shoulder and saw nothing but black.
“Signe,” she said seriously, “they are definitely here. I cannot believe you’re not seeing this! They’re zooming right over your head!”
Of course they were. They were probably thumbing their noses at me while they performed the opener from Riverdance on my forehead. But I thought a moment. What if this was really happening for her? Why couldn’t I see it?
“Tell me what you’re seeing,” I whispered, my brow knit in concentration. “No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to have any impressions for my mind to work with . . .”
But Raven wasn’t listening. She was laughing, laughing in delight, and looking around her in utter amazement.
“Oh,” she whispered reverently, “thank you . . . thank you . . .”
I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want to accuse her of making this up, and I certainly didn’t want to disrespect her, but how could I know if what she was claiming to experience was real?
“Signe, seriously, they keep just zipping right over your head. I can’t believe you’re not seeing this.”
I felt my frustration flare, but I made myself sit quietly, squinting around me, hoping to see something, until she let out a long sigh that signaled the event, such as it was, was over. If there was nothing there, it meant I couldn’t trust my friend’s ac
counts. Every instinct in me, since I first met her, had told me that Raven was the real deal. But if there was something there, why wasn’t I able to see it? I was, once again, being snubbed by the faeries.
That night we unwound by nibbling on some Toblerone and reading in our respective beds. Raven was knee-deep in The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda, and I had flipped open Janet Bord’s book on faery sites to a section on the Isle of Man. As I thumbed through, I was astounded—the author had devoted nearly ten pages to this place that I’d barely even heard of, and there were no fewer than sixteen well-known sites on the tiny island! Then again, Wales, where the author had lived for the past thirty years, had an astonishing sixty pages. It would be far better to head there next—and I was far closer to Wales than to the Isle of Man. On the other hand, I would be driving Raven back across the country to Oxshott at the end of our trip, so I’d be equally far from both places, it seemed. How to decide, how to decide . . .
The next morning we went to check our email at an Internet café in town, where I discovered, with nausea-inducing shock, that my car accident in Chagford would not be covered by my insurance, as I’d been led to believe.
I began to panic. This could cost me thousands of dollars. That was my budget for the whole summer. I would be stuck in the United Kingdom, starving and alone, with no way to get home, no way to pay my bills that were accumulating there in my absence.
Slowly it dawned on me that this had faery mischief written all over it. I seethed with anger. How dare they? I had given up everything to come here for them. I’d left everything behind in this stupid effort to believe. And what was this, some kind of test? I had tried to be forthright in my skepticism, but always respectful, and I considered myself a hopeful skeptic at that. How could they have let this happen to the one woman who was trying to revive them, trying to champion them?
After I’d exhausted myself venting to Raven, I decided to switch gears and call Peter’s acquaintance. Anything to set aside the growing knot in my stomach.
I flipped open my UK cell and dialed the number I had jotted down. When a woman answered, I explained why I wanted to speak with her, but she seemed very reluctant to meet me.
“Please,” I begged, “it would mean so much for the book. I can respect whatever terms you’d like . . . I’d just really like to talk with you.”
She let out a long sigh on the other end of the line, but agreed somewhat warily. “All right then. Give me your number, let me check in with them”—I assumed she meant the faeries—“and see what I can tell you. I’ll call you back and let you know what I hear. But I can’t make you any promises,” she warned.
Wow, I hadn’t come across this yet. Her secrecy made me all the more eager to meet her. And her tone made me feel like a scolded child.
“Okay, I understand. I’ll . . . just look forward to hearing from you then.” Hanging up the phone, I tried not to chew my fingernails as I waited. I wasn’t sure when she would call back, so I was surprised when about half an hour passed and my phone rang, startling me from my reverie.
“Thank you for understanding,” she said, her tone completely different than before. “I’m allowed to speak with you, about everything. Some of it for the book, and some of it just for you. And you’re not to use my real name, or write about where we meet. If you can agree to this, I can meet you now.”
“Okay,” I said quickly. “Um, when would you be free to meet?”
“Now.”
“Oh, right! Now.” I raised my brows at Raven as I snapped my laptop closed. “Okay, no problem, just tell me where.”
The directions were easy to follow and as I entered the building, I was met by a middle-aged woman with sparkling eyes and curly, dark hair peppered with white.
“You can call me Ninefh,” she said, slipping me a card with her contact information and proper spelling of the pseudonym printed in capital lettering on the back. Gesturing for me to make myself comfortable, she didn’t waste any time.
“Well, so, you’re looking for the faeries. You’ll be going to the Isle of Man next, I suppose?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I am now,” I murmured.
Earlier that day I’d noticed an advertisement for the Isle of Man in the window of a travel office near High Street. Now this was the third time since arriving in Glastonbury that I’d come across it. This time it was a sign I couldn’t ignore.
“Good,” she said. “When you get there, there’s a special place I need to tell you about. Have you heard of the Fairy Bridge?”
“Only in passing,” I admitted. The bridge, she explained, was significant because in forgotten times, it marked the boundary between the elves’ land and the land of men. Legend had it that a great battle had been fought at that site, between human and faery, and the faeries won. Now as long as anyone could remember, it was an island tradition: those who crossed or even passed by the bridge must salute the faeries—a gesture of acknowledgment and respect that would ensure safe travels on the island.
“Otherwise the islanders are absolutely terrified something awful will happen to them,” she said. “And this includes really wild bikers . . . they will all do it, because they are afraid they won’t get off the island in one piece otherwise.”
She looked at me intently. “In a country where the belief in faeries is endemic, there’s always a fear of offending. And you do have to be careful. Because there’s just no restraint.” She paused for a moment, then repeated, “There’s just no restraint. That’s the simplest way to put it. If they’re enjoying themselves, there’s no restraint; if they are going to have it in for you, there’s no restraint. They just don’t have the same moral code that we’ve got, so . . . you offend them at your peril.”
As I listened to her talk, it seemed that the Isle of Man faeries worked on a tit-for-tat basis.To have a favor granted, or to contact them, for example, one must sacrifice something in exchange. Ninefh went on to describe a visit to a place called Elfin Glen with her husband, who had been having problems with balance. She made an offering—a pink quartz heart—and it immediately began to snow. Her husband’s balance problem disappeared. But on the way down, she fell and sprained her knee.
“You see, it was my knee in exchange for his healed sense of balance. But don’t worry,” she went on. “If you cross the Fairy Bridge, and you stop and acknowledge them, they will guide you from there.”
I couldn’t understand why the faeries would want to help me. “But why would they want to guide me?”
“Ah,” she said with a laugh, “because they’ll use you. It’s as simple as that. They won’t do it unless it’s beneficial for them, don’t you worry about that. And they’re not to be treated as lovely little New Age angels,” she added. “’Cause they’re not.”
I laughed. “That’s something I learned pretty early on,” I agreed, telling her the story about the Alux showing up past midnight in the cabana bathroom in Tulum. It seemed to be true that, as Peter Knight said, the world of faery was populated by many different creatures, spirits, if you will, and in fact very few of them might have “wings” in the way we imagined.
But it was hard to understand this new world I had encountered. And the question “What is a faery?” still loomed large in my mind. Ninefh was happy to be plied with questions, and there was something about her that made me trust in her experience, so I let fly.
“Maybe you could tell me,” I ventured, “what is the difference between faeries and, say, angels?”
“Well, angels have to do as they are told.” She flashed a wicked grin. “Faeries . . . don’t.” Ninefh believed that faeries are only partially incarnated, or physically present, on the earth. They were lacking one element, unlike us who have access to all four elements. The faeries, she explained, use us as a go-between, to do things for them in our world that they cannot do.
And according to Ninefh, there was a specific reason that twilight and nighttime were the best times to encounter the faery realm. In a
wood at twilight, trees, which are always “breathing” in and out, breathe “out.” Their respiration cycle reverses as the light fades, and suddenly, carbon dioxide is released. Ninefh believed that due to their biological composition, certain beings are able to “hide” easily in air saturated with oxygen. However, their biological composition makes it more difficult to mask themselves as the night air becomes more saturated with carbon dioxide. It was enough to send my head spinning, and I took a moment to gather my thoughts.
“I’ve read a lot of folklore that describes kings and queens of faery land,” I mentioned. “Where do they fit in all of this?”
“Ah, the gentry,” she mused fondly. “Well, as far as I understand it, you’ve got a level of tiny faeries, like worker bees. They’re the ones that go out and do things, and they behave in one mind—they have one sort of collective mind. Then you have the royal court, the Shining Ones, or sometimes they’re called the lordly race.They oversee and direct the rest of them. They’re tall and beautiful to look at. There’s a lot of ancestral ties going on, and the races of faeries change depending on where you are geographically. It’s not dissimilar to what you find with people, really.”
It was beginning to feel like the more I learned about the faery world, the more I didn’t understand. And now here I was on this journey, with the feeling that I was expected to do something for the faeries, but what? The words of Brian Froud echoed in my head: Once you begin walking the faery path, you don’t need to worry about straying . . . they won’t let you off. As we moved toward the door, I looked at Ninefh, searching for the right question. Her warm eyes sparkled at me, and she gave me a reassuring pat.
“You know,” she said, “there’s always an element of choice: you can make it difficult for yourself, or you can make it easy.” With that, she burst into laughter, as though this were the most amusing thing. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread creeping in.