Extract from Away with the Fairies
John watched from the bedroom window for the lights to come, as he remembered them coming years before when he was a boy.
Back then, he and his sister Fay had waited, small fists clenched with excitement, breath fogging up the glass. Night after night they had watched until, one evening, the lights had appeared, dewy and twinkling, from the woodland path at the end of the garden.
Back then, the lights had sparkled on the frosty grass and danced, shimmering, across the lawn. They had settled on the leafless branches of the cherry tree and perched on the washing line outside the kitchen door until a small noise from somewhere in the house startled them and they flew, glowing softly, back along the path to the woods and were gone.
He watched. The lights did not come.
It took Wendy a while to find Frith End, hidden away as it was at the edge of Hopley. As she approached the house the front door swung open. He must have been waiting at the window, she thought.
‘Mr Connolly?’
‘Are you the girl from the estate agents?’
His shirt and trousers had a crumpled look, as though he’d slept in his clothes. She introduced herself and held out her hand, but he turned abruptly and disappeared inside. She followed him through a dark, wood-panelled hall with closed doors on either side into a large kitchen-diner that smelt of damp and rotting food and TCP.
‘Sorry about the state of the place,’ he said. ‘It’ll take a few days to straighten out.’
She looked around. It looked as if there was more than a few days’ work needed in the kitchen area alone. The sink was encrusted with mould. The cupboards badly needed replacing. In the corner, a blossoming flower of blistered plaster and a dubious brown stain signalled the creep of rising damp. It was a shame, she thought, turning to look at the other side of the room, but the place did have potential.
The far wall was almost entirely covered with a mass of paper. Newspaper clippings, pages torn from books, hand-drawn diagrams, and scribbled notes jostled for space. Labels written in faded black marker pen had been tacked up to delineate rough groups: LOCAL HISTORY, ENCOUNTERS, and THE LIGHTS. It looked as if he was in the process of taking them down. A messy stack of papers lay on the kitchen worktop, alongside hardened nodules of Blu Tack.
She flicked through a pile labelled SIGHTINGS. On top was a faded newspaper article that had been cut out roughly with scissors and pasted onto a piece of card. Strange Lights Over Hopley; Experts Baffled. A date had been written underneath in biro.
Further down the stack was a pencil drawing of something that looked like a dandelion clock. In the centre of the picture, a tiny figure had been drawn in minute detail. It wore what looked like overalls and an angry expression. A caption underneath the picture read: February 2nd, garden, evening.
Wendy went to slide the sheet of paper out of the stack, but noticed John was watching her and instead neatened the pile carefully with her hand.
‘A fascinating collection,’ she said. ‘Was it for an art project?’
‘This was all my mother’s doing,’ he said vaguely, his voice complicated by something she couldn’t quite catch. He made a sweeping gesture that took in the piles of paper, the wall. ‘Her life’s work.’
He picked up a grubby scrap of paper that had fallen to the floor and placed it on the stack of papers gently, reverently. ‘She spent years out there, in the woods, looking for my sister.’
Wendy didn’t know it yet, but John’s sister, Fay, had died when they were both children. It was almost twenty years ago now. Between the greengrocer, the milkman, her next-door neighbour, and the team at the estate agents, she gleaned a surprising amount. The residents of Hopley and its surrounding villages were a tight-knit tribe. Nothing happened without someone hearing about it.
The kids used to roam around the fields, playing where they liked. Things were different then. One day, high summer, Fay disappeared, just like that. Little Johnny came home all alone, mud on his knees, saying Fay wouldn’t come with him. She’d gone into the woods, he said.
A mass panic ensued. The woods were searched. The surrounding area, everywhere. Nothing. No body, no clothing, no sign of foul play. It was as if she’d just vanished into thin air.
And that was the story, as far as the greengrocer, the neighbour, and the milkman were concerned. But Jean, the office gossip, had more to tell.
The kids had been close—they would be, as near in age as they were. Young John became withdrawn, a silent child. The family weren’t doing too well, according to those who knew. Blame had been cast, arguments had. Unexpectedly perhaps, it was the father who broke first. Old Mr Connolly went out into the forest one day and put a gun in his mouth. John’s mother endured, one way or another. In recent years, she’d taken to muttering to herself, telling strange stories that didn’t make any sense. Jean thought the dementia had got her.
After Wendy had gone, leaving an appointment card and some glossy informational booklets, John spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through dusty cardboard boxes he’d found piled in the rooms at the front of the house—what had once been the living room and his father’s study. Most of the boxes contained old magazines, letters, unopened Christmas cards, and other assorted papers. One particularly dented old box at the back contained a heap of his old school books. Another, next to it, was full of Fay’s things. Her books and toys had been packed up long ago, when he was still a child, and given to a children’s charity in Godlingham. These were the odds and ends that remained, things that held no value to anyone but her. And now, to him.
He carried the box out to the kitchen table and carefully lifted its contents out, item by item. Soon, Fay’s childish existence was spread like a constellation over the table top. There was a collection of smooth, round stones she had gathered on walks in the woods, an old, desiccated-looking acorn, two pine cones, and an old glass bottle they had found buried in the garden one day. He remembered her excitement at finding it, and was surprised to feel tears welling in his eyes after so many years.
At the bottom of the box lay a thick, leatherbound notebook tied up with a piece of yellow string. Fay’s rounded handwriting covered the first few pages. She wrote of her walks, of watching the lights come at dusk, although she called them fairies. They have left a trail that only I can see, her last entry read. They want me to go with them.
After a couple of blank pages the remainder of the journal was filled with his mother’s small, looped handwriting. Some of the entries were dated. They started the year after he had moved away, two years after his father had died. He imagined his mother sitting alone in the kitchen, looking out at the fading light, reading Fay’s words and adding her own. He read on, only realising that night had fallen when he heard the sound of rain against the window. He had missed the dusk. The thought that the lights might have come without him seeing them grasped him like a vice, and after a moment he shook his head to clear it.
He went to the kitchen window and looked out at the garden, but all he could see was the murky outline of his own face looking back at him. Outside, the trees, tossed by the wind, roared like dark waves.
When Wendy returned to Frith End a few days later, as arranged, the front door did not swing open. Instead she knocked, the heavy brass knocker emitting a dull thud. The day was grey and she shivered and wondered how long to wait before knocking a second time.
When John opened the door, he seemed even more distracted than before. His glasses were askew and tufts of his dark hair stuck out in all directions. As before, he turned and disappeared before she could say anything.
The doors in the hall were still closed. In the kitchen-diner, the wall where the papers had been was now bare. It would need painting, but it was a start. A journal sat open on the worktop. The stacks of papers had grown. There were now seven or eight messy piles of varying heights, and they surrounded the book like an ancient henge.
He apologised again. ‘There’s still so much to do.’ He ran a grubby hand across his face and sat heavily on a wooden stool.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I can come back another day.’
He looked as though he wanted to say something else, but didn’t. She left him there, flicking through the piles of papers.
It was dusk. John stood at the window, waiting for the lights to come. The notebook lay open on the sill in front of him.
When they come, he read again, they come at nightfall, just like the kids always used to say when they were small. I wish I had listened. How did I live here for so many years without seeing them?
He watched, his mother’s voice echoing in his head, and then they came. They span and twinkled at the end of the garden, four or five little sparkling orbs, like a string of Christmas lights bobbing in the wind. He wondered again what the tiny creatures could possibly be. Were they fairies, as his mother had thought, as Fay had thought? He watched as they investigated the dilapidated garden shed, darted in and out of the long grass and fronds of dead ferns and bracken. On the right hand side of the garden there had once been a rockery, and two of the glowing balls alighted there, one on a mossy rock, the other on top of a cracked chimney pot. Could they see him there, he wondered. Did they know he was watching them? He peered more closely through the window, trying to make out the detail at the lights’ dark centres. It seemed impossible that these tiny balls could contain the figure of a person.
Had his mother never thought to take a photograph? He took his phone from his back pocket, brushing his thumb against the screen to open the camera app. The screen flashed on, then went black. He tapped, swiped, pressed buttons. The screen remained blank. He glanced out at the garden and recoiled back from the window.
One of the orbs of light, now clearly more than mere light—a complete, miniature figure about five inches tall—was floating, its tiny face pressed against the glass, staring at him through small, cold eyes. The being looked accusing, angry. It covered its tiny ears with its tiny hands.
He dropped his phone, and it hit the tiled floor with a sharp crack. The fairy—for what else could he really call it now?—started and zoomed away to regroup with the others. They span in and out around one another in the centre of the lawn for a few moments, then retreated together along the path to the woods.
He stood in the dark kitchen, transfixed, then turned to the notebook once more and began to leaf through its pages. The answers had to be in there somewhere.
Bio:
Victoria Sharples has a Creative Writing MA from the University of Kent and her work has been published by Ink, Sweat & Tears, After the Pause, and Gone Lawn. Currently, her interests include puzzles, folklore, magic, and the uncanny.