Faery Tale (29 page)

Eddie explained that he often gets calls from people who are having problems of a bizarre nature, something they just can't explain, and that most of them are folks who don't believe in faeries and ghosts and the like. He'll typically ask if he can come out and see the place for himself. “Just to make sure they're not pissing around.” He winked.

One man was accidentally decapitated while trying to remove a white thorn, a tree sacred in Ireland to the faeries. Building a home over a faery path was another frequent trouble in Ireland. Recently, a man in Kerry had called Eddie after building a brand-new house at the back of his old family land. It had all the modern conveniences, but he was having a very perplexing problem. Despite everything he tried, there was a bedroom at the center of the house that was always freezing cold—even when the heat was on full blast. After going out to the house to see for himself, it was clear to Eddie that the man wasn't making it up. So he suggested he call a priest to come in and bless the house. When that didn't help, Eddie figured the house had been built on a faery path. When Eddie declared his verdict, it jogged the man's memory, and he told Eddie something he'd completely forgotten: many years ago, before his mother passed away, she had pulled her son aside. “Listen to me,” she'd warned. “If you inherit this house when I'm gone, whatever you do, you mustn't build down
there
,” she said, pointing downhill to a pretty spot of land at the back of the property. Of course that was precisely where her son had built.

“See, the old people knew,” Eddie explained. “There were precautions he should have taken.”

According to Eddie, in the olden days, before people built a house, they would get four hazel sticks—good, solid ones—and place them at the four proposed corners of the house. They'd hammer them in so that cattle couldn't knock them, and if the sticks were disturbed in the morning, they knew they'd better reconsider where they were building—the faeries were communicating that was
their
place. They'd move that stick to another corner, leave it overnight, and see how the newly oriented house fared.

“Now, who I am to say,” Eddie added, “perhaps the old people believed in faery paths because those are the cultural circumstances under which they were raised. Nowadays people might say it's a ley line, I suppose. But try telling that to one of these older people. They'd say you were talking absolute nonsense: you put your bloody house in the way of the faeries, and you won't block them!” He paused a moment to take a sip of his tea.

“The faeries will have their way, one way or another,” he continued. “Because after all, what chance have you against a people who can only be seen if they want to be seen or can take any shape they like?”

Valid point. We wouldn't have very good chances at all.

“Have you ever had an experience with the faery world?” I wanted to know.

He smiled at this, and I noticed KP lean forward in her chair.

“You know, it's an odd thing. In all my years of collecting stories and writing books, I've had only one. When I was teaching in Limerick, I used to have to drive up and down the highway to get there every day. One particular morning I was passing near Bunratty, past an old farmhouse with a big field in front of it, when something caught my eye. I looked and in the middle of the field I saw this
huge
monster of a black dog. And as sure as I saw it, the next moment it was gone. I could hardly believe my eyes; it was quite a shock. I got into the staff room and one of the lads said, ‘Jesus, you look like you've seen a ghost!' I told him what happened, and of course they all laughed. ‘You were tired, you were asleep,' they said. But I knew what I saw.”

It was the disappearance of the creature that hadn't made any sense to Eddie. There were no bushes nearby, no ditch it could've slunk into. It was in the middle of a flat field, so where had it gone in one second? He never saw it again and soon forgot all about it. About six months later, he was visiting an old man in that area, and they were talking about “the black dog” in general. In Ireland, apparently, the black dog was a favorite shape the faeries took.The old man told Eddie that in the 1950s, in front of that very farmhouse, in the same field where he'd seen the dog, there used to be a faery fort, but the farmer had bulldozed it.

“It would have been
highly
unusual back in the fifties, when people still believed, for a farmer to do such a thing,” Eddie said. “But that was the fort where the black dog used to be seen. Many of the locals had seen him. He'd be lying there at the mouth of the fort, paws spread out in front of him, a huge dog, watching people on the road. He never interfered with anybody, and nobody interfered with him, either. You see, all the locals knew—he was no simple dog. He was ‘one of the boys' guarding
their
property.”

I recalled running my fingers through the fur of the monstrous black dog on the Isle of Man. But as quickly as the memory flashed, I brushed it away.

Curious to understand what he'd seen, Eddie made more inquiries and was stunned at what he discovered: that black dog had been seen in that very spot for well over seventy years.

Eddie raised his brows at the two of us. “Dogs don't live to be seventy years of age. So, I still believe to this day, that what I saw, it was something more than meets the eye.”

I'd met a man at the Aille River Hostel who'd also encountered a massive, rather eerie black dog, this one when he was walking near an old fort just outside of Doolin. This dog had also “disappeared.” It could be easy to dismiss such stories when you consider that Ireland is still quite rural in areas, and farm dogs are known to wander. But whatever it was these men thought they saw, they truly believed in their hearts that they had witnessed something that just wasn't “normal.”

I tuned back into Eddie, who was continuing his train of thought. “At least with the black dog you knew what you were facing, and you could just avoid it.” He lifted a single finger. “But if you ask me, the more frightening stories you hear are of faeries being able to take human shape. The person that is sitting next to you could be one of them. And you'd never even know it.”

It hit me before I was aware of it—a flash of a familiar face—with a pair of crystal blue eyes that strangely hadn't seemed . . . human. The man I'd spoken to with his giant black dog, in the middle of a field on the Isle of Man. Just like that, pieces of a puzzle clicked together. I could only describe it as a sense of knowing. I'd asked Ninefh in Glastonbury how the faeries might try to communicate with me, how they might try to prove, if they wished, their existence.

You'll experience something only to find out much later what it all meant. When
they
want you to know
.

Just when you think you've forgotten it, or just when you've given up trying to figure it out, you're slapped with a verification. I realized there was always a key, a sign. Experience, verification. It was almost as though something was trying to
help
me believe.

Like in Glastonbury when I was wondering where to go.

Here the key was the black dog. The dog was at the heart of my connection with the man in the field. If it hadn't been for the dog, I wouldn't have spoken with him. Now I'd heard two stories in the past twenty-four hours about sightings of black dogs and their connection to the world of faeries. Why hadn't I encountered stories about them previously? Likewise, I hadn't read that faeries could shape-shift into human form. Yes, in folklore people “saw” them—the man who came to fetch the midwife, for example, but it was never explicit that faery had become a man. Rather, I figured it was some sort of specter. So why now? Why through Eddie Lenihan?

I had to hand it to the faeries—their timing was impeccable. It was because Eddie Lenihan was someone I believed. He was a critical thinker. He was a skeptic whose interest in this subject compelled him to collect stories. He was an educator, a folklore expert.

“Those stories you heard about faeries taking human shape,” I ventured. “Did any of those stories seem . . . authentic to you?”

“Very much so. I got to know some of the men I interviewed extremely well. The old people weren't stupid. These faeries they'd encountered were dangerous lads. You messed with them, and you were dead. Simple as that. Or what, carried away? That would be worse. They take your spirit and you're the living dead then. Whether that was true or not was neither here nor there. The fact is, people believed it to be true, which shows you that the belief in faeries was very strong.”

The rosy-cheeked man hadn't seemed dangerous to me. A bit otherworldly, but not dangerous. But maybe I'd proven myself, or maybe it was even my advocate. Who knew? I let out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding.

“So after all the stories you've listened to, all the people you've met—what do you believe?” I asked.

I saw a flicker of something in his face, and then he chose his words carefully. “People can believe what they want, but I'd have great respect for these faery places myself. I wouldn't interfere with them. I'd bring
nothing
out of a faery fort, I don't care who laughs at me for that.You go in, have a good look around, measure them, photograph them, sure. But I'd bring nothing out—not even a leaf out of one of the bushes. Because that's not my property. That's
theirs
. I've heard too many stories of people who have interfered in one way or another and ended up the worse for it.

“Right now,” Eddie continued, one finger aloft, “there's a murder a day in this country—probably two or three. It's not that long ago that a murder in Ireland would have been very unusual. Something's gone wrong. And I would much prefer to be listening to these old people—call them superstitious, call them what you like. They were interesting, and they had respect. They had respect for certain places and there was a reason behind it. The reason was that they had inherited a system of values, and I think that is something worth keeping.”

These days, the demand for Eddie's storytelling was cutting into the time he'd like to have for his writing and his collecting of folklore. But he can't refuse to go places to tell his stories, because that's what keeps them alive. He was worried that if a new generation can't hear them, where they came from, and the context out of which they came, something could be lost.

“I have always said, and I am not a bit ashamed of it, that Ireland was always a third-world country with a little dab of white-wash on it,” he said. “People thought that they had nothing. But that's not true, they had something. They had their beliefs. They had their stories. And they threw it all away for money.”

He was referring, I knew, to the economic boom Ireland experienced beginning in the 1990s.

“People wanted a bigger house, a bigger car, three holidays . . . they tried to substitute things for things that you can't substitute anything for. Helpfulness, kindness, charity, human decency. It costs you
nothing
to help people,” he said vehemently. “Nothing at all. These”—Eddie held up a tape—“these are invaluable. They cannot be replaced. Money can buy a lot of things. But not these.” We gazed around the room, taking in the hundreds of stories surrounding us from a generation whose memories were turning into dust. Then Eddie looked down at Charlie, his dog, who was flopped at my feet with his legs open, angling for a belly rub.

“Sometimes I think that's why I admire dogs so much. They're better human beings than we are.” He reached over to stroke the dog's head.

“Charlie,” he murmured, “you might be talking to the faeries every night and regard it as a very natural thing. While we have to go looking for them.”

 

We said our goodbyes and I turned back to give Eddie and Charlie the mutt a final wave as we pulled out of the drive. I looked at KP, feeling like a kid who'd brought my parents to show-and-tell at school.

“So what'd you think?” I asked anxiously.

“It was pretty awesome,” she said. “So that's how your interviews typically go?”

“Yes. And no. There's always something different that intrigues me. It's as though all the people I'm meeting . . .” I paused. “Well, I know this sounds completely ridiculous.”

“No, Sig, go on . . .”

“Well, it's as though all the people I'm meeting I was somehow
meant
to meet. Believe me, I know how crazy it sounds. I'm following my instincts about where I need to go, who I need to talk to, who I need to meet, and every single time I have an interview, it's as though I'm given a clue. Or a piece to a puzzle would be a better way to describe it. They'll say something—something almost out of the blue—and in the course of the conversation it means something to me, helps me to figure out something mysterious that I've experienced. I noticed it first in Glastonbury, and from there it's just happened over and over again. It's just like Eddie said: after a while there are too many coincidences for things to be coincidental.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I think I can see what you mean.”

I looked out the window, watching the countryside go by, just thinking about the black dog. I could almost see him, lying dutifully in the field with his paws crossed, reminding all who passed:
this
was once a faery fort.