Abducted By Faerie

By Michel Henri

Jack Rafters is a tough, resourceful enigma. the least likely man to end up in the hands of faerie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Publications
• Release date: Jul 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386220794

Book preview

DEDICATION

This story is dedicated to my wonderful family, namely

My wife Carolyn-Anne & My son Adam Michael

For their love and tolerance during my problematic life.

With grateful thanks to Robert S. Field for his sympathetic editing

Profile

Hi, my name is Jack Rafters I am, I believe, thirty years old, an honors’ graduate of Oxford University’s Balliol College in England and so, I contend, well educated. I am a Specialized Skills Officer with the United States Central Intelligence Agency, employment to which, by reason of the extraordinary empathic gifts with which I am blessed, I am admirably suited. My work takes me all around the world, although I often find often in England’s green and pleasant land, a place I love.

My parents are no longer alive. That, at least, is how I have come to think of them. It suits me to imagine, sadly, that they lost their lives in a tragic accident in 1981 during a famous road race in America called the Cannonball Run. This is a truth I have fashioned. There may be another, but it is lost in the time before my memories began.

My education was, and continues to be, (I believe, passionately, in lifelong learning), exceptional; formative and shaping, but overall constructed more from empiricism than instruction. Much of it has been garnered travelling the world, exploring, researching, photographing remarkable places and people, and writing of my adventures and experiences. It has always been my hope that one day a travel publisher might collate my writings and photographs into journals that be famous the world over. Of course, given the nature of my employment, it would have to be published under a pseudonym, my authorial light (like so many of my gifts) hidden under a bushel.

As a child I wanted to know about everything; how things were made, how they worked and for what reason they were invented. Curiosity filled the void left by my parents, my eagerness to learn a self-discovered consolation for the loss of parental love. And as a young man, footloose as ever, you might even say whimsical, I would just get in my car and drive somewhere, anywhere; it always excited me, not knowing where I would stop for a night’s rest, the chance of a new adventure.

Rarely was I disappointed. I’ve always had the gift of the divination of adventure, a nose for mysteries, some so strange as to defy explanation, even for one as worldly as I. And the strangest adventure of all began on a whim.

Whilst on an overdue summer leave in England, the beautiful county of Cornwall became suddenly irresistible to me. Perhaps the long reach of its deep history and folklore snagged my persistent curiosity and pulled.

So off we went, my car, curiosity and me, to Cornwall.

The Duchy of Cornwall

A pleasant journey and several miles of meandering through Cornish highways and byways with no clear purpose other than to drink-in as much scenery as the picture-cropping windows of my car would allow, I stopped my car on a narrow incline, pulling over onto an obliging flattening of the grassy verge. Not knowing exactly where I was, I looked out over the amazing landscape for features and landmarks to inspire my next choice of direction. I choose not to pore over road maps. It is so much more exciting to just drive, to go where I feel, reading the signposts simply catching names to remember and recall in future writings. As I scanned the verdant rolling lands before me I began to think it quite possibly beyond the wit and creativity of mankind to do justice through art alone to such natural wonder, though many have tried. Their expressions of it are simply superficial impressions, beneath which lies Cornwall’s soul, deeper than we can imagine, hiding away, beyond the reach of mere mortals.

In the distance I spotted atop a knoll an old oak tree, which led my eyes to what looked like a small, medieval castle, so ancient and romantically set as to be really quite mesmerizing. I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off it. So off I drove, taking such lanes and junctions as I thought might lead to the building for a closer look. Upon arrival, I was surprised to discover it to be a quaint hotel. I pulled slowly into the small car park and sat for a few moments appreciating the glorious shrubbery that bordered it.

Getting out of my car, I paused awhile to breathe-in the vista that stretched away from the hotel towards the setting sun, before making my way towards a small terrace that appeared to skirt the building, where once again I gazed upon the beautiful scenery, its majesty defiant against any words or brush strokes that might seek to capture it. I then walked slowly up to the hotel’s front entrance, the blossom from the climbing plants that arched around the large wooden doorway a sweetly welcoming, though strangely heady, scent. At the top of the well-worn stone steps, an odd feeling of beckoning gave me cause to stop and turn and there, not a quarter mile distant, stood that big oak tree, the very tree that had led me to this