The Truth About Fairies

By Jon Jacks

Many tales warn us to beware the Fay Queen: yet when she steals-away Rouger, his friend Luna sets out to find her magical realm.
A small key made of a mistletoe berry provides her first clue, a box containing all our fears another.
Yet it’s the secret of the Fay Queen’s eternal beauty that will ensure her success – for the queen may take the youth of any girl foolish enough to willingly approach her

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: May 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310554919

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Chapter 1

At the very edge of the world there’s not, as you would expect, a fence to stop you falling off.

There aren’t even any warning signs. Not even ones telling you to beware of the gradual erosion and crumbling of the Earth. And this despite the fact that the land frequently falls away in great chunks, in the same way a great cliff eventually succumbs to the sea’s relentlessly pounding waves.

Here, naturally, the raging waves of endless time and endless space are far more forceful in their endless striking of this odd object, unexpectedly blocking what they regard as their rightful way.

The people who have chosen to farm and live here regard themselves as being the hardiest of men. Other men similarly regard them as being hardly very bright.

The farms passed on to each succeeding generation are smaller, less productive. In many cases, they’re also in need of a new farmhouse, the previous one at last tipping over the edge despite all the efforts – extensive underpinning, massive chains, huge weights, hot-air filled balloons – made to save it. Usually, too, these farms come with far less cattle, sheep and goats. Fortunately, the number of horses tends to remain stable because that’s where they tend to remain – in the stable.

Just such a farm, then, is the perfect place for a certain tinker of ill-repute to come plying his wares of amazing, magical cloth, made of moonlight sheen.

*

Chrostonus Kingleshon had deliberately built his farmhouse as close to the edge as anyone dared.

He was entranced by the view afforded from his balcony. It was a truly awesome sight of spiralling universes, glittering stars; a moon he could watch rising from below, a sun he could see setting long after anyone else.

From here, he would also often fish. He had to admit, though, that he had never caught anything of any worthwhile size.

Now, when you live on the very edge of the world, storms are particularly feared. Everyone has at least one tale to tell of an entire house whirled up into the air, sent spinning off into space still containing an obliviously sleeping family. Luckily for these World-Enders, they’ve found that an old-wives’ tale always seems to hold them in good stead: ‘Red sky well-before morning, take heed its fair warning.’

So when Chrostonus (or ‘Chros’ for short) spotted one night that the sun rising up from far below the Earth was suffused with a red glow, he tied all his horses, all his cattle, and even his sheep and goats (if he could, he would have also enlisted his ducks and hens to help) to the harnesses attached to his house, urging them all to pull it clear of the edge.

You could be forgiven, of course, for presuming that Chros was crazy. But this is not the case; to think this would serve him a grave injustice.

For Chros had long ago had the foresight to construct a house supported on a large number of large wheels. And so the house moved relatively easily, the animals having to strain within their harnesses far less than they had feared when first informed of the task expected of them.

With the house safely moved, the animals safely stabled or sent back to their grazing fields, Chros clapped his hands together in satisfaction.

‘Well, what an amazingly brilliant idea!’ a tinker who was just passing by exclaimed in admiration. ‘Here’s an intelligent man at last for me to talk to!’

Naturally, Chros was flattered by this praise, but he was no fool.

‘Thank you,’ he replied smugly, yet looking at the tinker’s overloaded horse and cart with distaste. ‘But if flattery is your trade, then I can assure you I have no need of any more.’

We’ve been more than fair in our description of Chros up until now, so it’s only fair to point out here that it was actually the tinker’s more exotic appearance that made Chros distrustful of him.

‘There’s not a racist bone in my body!’ Chros would insist whenever his far more thoughtful wife Timinamma berated him for this attitude.

‘Then we’d have no problem if you thought only with your bones!’ Timinamma would almost invariably scornfully reply.

And yet, to be entirely fair to Chros, he thought everyone had an exotic appearance. Which means we can’t entirely form our opinions of the tinker from Chros’s rather biased viewpoint.

‘Of course I’ll be on my way!’

The tinker responded to Chros’s rudeness with surprising joviality.

‘But tell me, please, before I go,’ he continued innocently, ‘when the storm arrives, what’s to stop the wind also making use of your wheels – and blowing your poor house and family right over the edge?’

‘Ah yes, well, you see, I had thought of that,’ Chros lied, stalling for time in the hope he could quickly arrive at an answer to the tinker’s question.

‘Ah, yes, of course, silly me!’ the tinker said brightly, pointing over to one of many piles of large stones scattered around Chros’s fields. ‘You’re going to wedge one of those large stones beneath each wheel, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, yes – that’s exactly right!’ Chros pronounced with an obvious relief he had sought to hide.

‘Dinner’s on the table, Chros!’ Timinamma cried out through the kitchen window. ‘Come and get it now before it goes cold!’

The dilemma Chros faced was written all over his anguished, perplexed face: should he placate his wife and leave the wind to blow them and their home over the edge? Or should he save their house, and come to blows with his wife for wasting his dinner?

It was a hard choice to make.

‘Ah, I see your wife has made your dinner too early, my friend!’ the tinker chuckled amiably. ‘But I have just the thing to take a wife’s mind off a wasted dinner.’

And with that (and here we can only hope you can forgive both tinkers and World-Enders for their unhelpfully antiquated sexist talk and inappropriate attitudes to gender differences!) he produced from his horse’s saddlebags the first sparkling yard of a most wondrous bolt of cloth.

Even someone as coarsely reared as Chros could see at a glance that the cloth rippled silkenly in the tinker’s hands. Its patterns and remarkably bright colours changed for the better with every undulation, every curl of its folds. And that is really not anywhere near as remarkable as you might suppose when you learn of its secret: for it is made entirely of uncountable numbers of scales collected purely from butterfly wings.

Chros’s eyes opened wide in wonder and relief: yes, this tinker could keep his wife occupied while he secured their home.

‘In you go then,’ he said gruffly. ‘But mind you don’t actually end up selling the wife anything!’

*

‘I love it here; it really is like no other place on Earth!’

The tinker was an accomplished spinner of yarns when it came to saying what people wanted to hear. The Kingleshon’s farm was, of course, much like any other farm precariously clinging to the edge of the world. Yet at every World-End farm he had visited, the tinker had discovered that the people living there believed there own view was totally unique. And this is why they also believed that the erection of any safety fence would therefore be tantamount to sacrilege.

‘Yet I have to wonder,’ the tinker asked seemingly innocently, ‘is it really safe for your children?’

Timinamma miserably hung her head, while tugging ashamedly at the curving folds of her long dress.

‘Oh dear: I am sorry!’ the tinker exclaimed, placing his clasped hands against his mouth as if praying that he could retrieve every last word spoken. ‘Do I detect…do I detect that you remain childless?’

Timinamma nodded sadly, still too distressed to speak.

It wasn’t that she was a naturally unhappy woman: far from it. She was a woman of great, yet unfortunately hidden and subdued depths.

She was like the vast majority of women; she had simply never had the opportunity to make the most of her considerable talents. Despite this, she always made the best of things, always strove to see the brighter side of everything that befell her, believing that we have to accept our given-lot in life. Some are born to an easy, wealthy life; others to one of poverty and struggle.

Yet no one had been born of her.

And she seemed to be rapidly reaching an age when even she would have to finally give up all hope of ever having a child.

(Now, at this point, many people might recognise this situation as being a staple of all fairy stories; so, could we just remind you, please – what is it you’re reading?)

Chros had given up any hope of having children long ago. In fact, he frequently attempted to point out to his distraught wife the advantages of not having children.

Was the edge of the world really an ideal place to raise them?

Naturally, every child was warned not to draw too close to the very edge itself. Yet how many children disobeyed those instructions? How many, indeed, thrilled at cocking a snook, or even three or four snooks, at authoritarian restrictions instigated to save their lives?

The choicest spots were always the most dangerous. They gleefully swam in the pools of dammed streams that, just a few cart lengths’ on, merged into the great rivers remorselessly flowing over the edge, the waters churning, surging, roaring, thundering, before leaping out into space in vast spume-flecked waterfalls. The waters plummeted into the darkness below as immense curtains of rippling quicksilver, the fall eventually vaporising it all into the clouds that would start the process all over again.

The fish, may the good fairies bless them, suddenly finding themselves more weightless than ever, swam for the safety of these rising clouds, lest they were tricked by the elaborately lured hooks and long lines of opportunist fishermen.

‘I have something that might tempt you into raising your hopes, something unbelievable to show you,’ the tinker said to Timinamma, withdrawing something from the saddlebag he had brought into the kitchen with him.

And with that, he brought out and placed upon the table before her a gloriously sparkling fairy, pinned to the inside of a velvet-lined box.

*

Chapter 2

Naturally, despite the relatively large pin skewering the fairy to the box’s base, she was otherwise alive and well.

She looked most unhappy, Timinamma thought. Well, furious, actually.

She scowled and pouted petulantly. She sounded like she could be complaining, but her voice was so fast and high-pitched Timinamma could only hear it as a wailing buzzing.

Even so, Timinamma couldn’t help but be entranced by the fairy’s incredibly luminous beauty. The wings spreading out on either side were almost transparent, yet shone with the yellow glow of sun-bathed cornfields.

Timinamma frowned in puzzlement.

‘It says "fairies",’ she said worriedly, pointing at the label placed above the fairy’s head. ‘But there’s only one there!’

‘Is there?’

The tinker anxiously snatched the display box back, stared into it with obvious concern. His expression instantly changed to one of intense relief.

‘Oh, no, no: they’re all still there, thank goodness,’ he breathed elatedly, placing the box back in front of Timinamma. ‘For a moment there, you had me fooled into thinking they’d escaped!’ he added with a gentle chuckle.

Timinamma could still see only one fairy pinned there. She frowned again, perplexed once more.

‘Ah, naturally, you can only see one!’ the tinker explained, noting her confusion. ‘That’s all part of their trickery, of course! They can take on many forms: they don’t just exist in one form, even one size, like we poor mortals! That’s what makes them so hard to pin down – if you pardon the dreadful pun!’

‘I’m not used to seeing fairies, to be honest,’ Timinamma innocently admitted. ‘We don’t get them around here, I suppose, because they fear being blown off the edge of the world!’

‘But Timinamma – I’m sorry, you don’t mind me calling you Timinamma, do you? It’s such a beautiful name!’

He looked into her eyes so apologetically that she naturally gave him permission to use her real name, although she couldn’t quite remember when she’d told him it.

‘Well, Timinamma,’ the tinker continued excitedly, ‘of course fairies live around here! The only problem is – as you’ve just so delightfully innocently admitted to me – you just don’t know what you should be looking for!’

He gently took hold of her elbow, as if about to guide her down a particularly precarious path.

‘Let me aid you, Timinamma: let me help you see the fairies that exist all around you!’

*

(A word of warning, children: you should never, ever try this at home, unless you too want to see fairies!)

‘A fairy can vanish in a blur of bright light if they so much as think you’re about to look their way!’ the tinker – whose name, it turns out, was Tinker – reverently explained to Timinamma. ‘So you have to know exactly what you’re looking for!’

Picking up the display box containing the fairies, Tinker