Faery Tale (37 page)

“You may find,” Marie said then, “that they're shy at first, but are actually quite sweet. They love to cuddle, and they might want to hold your hand, or come into contact with you if you're okay with that.” My troll and I were so far ahead of the rest of the class! “Your troll may seem a little sad,” she said, “and if you want to, you can give it a hug.” I hugged its hairy little body to mine, and I instantly felt it go from sad to bursting with joy. I put it down on the ground and it danced around me, grinning in delight, swinging its arms like a little monkey.

“You might notice a change in the troll's demeanor,” Marie said. “Hugs make them really happy.” All right. It was a little odd that things were happening in my visualization before Marie said the exact same thing. Perhaps this wasn't going to be convincing for anyone else. Maybe it was just serving a personal need. But it was convincing to me.

On the way back to the house Lini and I swapped stories—she'd met her house gnome as well and, like me, was profoundly touched by the experience. She, too, felt a surprising authenticity, and we confided that we were both looking forward to getting together with these loving beings in meditation again soon. That night as I drifted off to sleep I remembered something else Brian Froud had said. “Within the meditation, you do actually genuinely touch faery land—you're in it, whether you realize it or not.” The thought made me smile. Perhaps the faeries were far closer than we thought.

 

I spent the rest of my time at Findhorn attending regular group meditations or sitting in the nature sanctuary while people around me sang in the early morning hours. Findhorn had somehow cleaned me, put me back together. I'd been eating vegetarian for four days, and my body felt light and clean. I'd been skipping wine at the general store, helping myself instead to Lini's incredible selection of herbal teas.

In Scotland, I think, people remember where they came from. We come from the earth, are composed from its elements. And yet we treat it with such disrespect—the only thing that can truly sustain us. I simply can't understand. Maybe the problem is that most of us live in the places that can make you forget.You can't walk around expecting to feel an organic connection to a high-rise. And I could never quite find peace in a city that never slept. But there was something about Scotland that allowed you to truly feel the land, and the force of it all can bring tears to your eyes.

Findhorn was the last stop on my faery-finding journey. I reflected back as I rode the train from Edinburgh to London. I'd seen what I thought might have been faery lights in Glastonbury. All summer long, I'd had bizarre impulses, which I followed, despite not fully knowing why. I didn't know what I could say I'd accomplished. But I knew one thing. I was different now. And yet I felt more myself than I had ever been. In leaving one life behind to go on a search for the fantastical, I had rediscovered a whole new one. In chasing the beliefs I had as a child, I'd somehow managed to grow up. And I truly liked the woman I'd become.

As my plane lifted off the ground at Heathrow, I wished for a safe journey, smiling at the thought of a thousand little winged creatures supporting the plane's mass. I'd spent so much time with people who were living magical lives—from Brian and Wendy Froud to the entire peaceful and progressive community at Findhorn. And in seeing the way these people chose to live, their values, how they treated one another, the planet, the wonder with which they greeted each day of living, I was able to see the world around me as enchanted once again, too.

Maybe, I mused, it's not us who are helping the faeries by believing in them. Perhaps it's the humans who stand to benefit, if only we could make the faeries believe in
us
once more.

—HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSON

 

 

 

 

E
RIC met me at the airport; hands in his pockets, he gave me almost a sheepish grin, and his dimple was right where I'd remembered it. Outside Charleston International the palmettos swayed in the evening breeze and the night air felt balmy, humid. My massive pack soon rested just inside the front door, and I looked upon my house in new wonder. Good God! I had a whole huge closetful of clothes I could wear—and a washer and dryer—no more washing my clothes in the sink! Just riding in a car was a luxury—
you mean, no waiting for the bus?
Everything felt new after having been away for three months. After a hot shower I pulled back the sheets and crawled into bed, my feet reaching over to find Eric's. We intertwined our legs and I drifted into a fast and dreamless sleep.

 

Now that I was back, my focus was on collecting the pieces to the puzzle, trying to understand if there could be hidden connections in any of the clues I'd been given throughout the course of the summer. By digging through history, I hoped to discover what stuck and what led me amok.

Among what I termed loosely as “evidence,” I had the photo from the old Fairy Bridge on the Isle of Man of the inexplicable small, glowing light. In addition, Raven had since forwarded me pictures of bizarrely colored orbs from our nighttime climb down Glastonbury Tor. But it was the less concrete occurrences (typical of faery) that I had found the most compelling: In England I'd experienced the inexplicable sparkling in the hedgerow of the Chalice Well Garden. There'd been the robin that seemed to find me at will with various insects in its beak, and the seeming arrival of my faery advocate—after which point I felt guided throughout the rest of my trip through feelings, and even sometimes, uh . . . a distinguishable voice in my head.

On the Isle of Man I'd felt overly sleepy in Castletown, destroyed (or sacrificed?) my iPod when my water opened in my pack, and there was the murder of Betsy Crowe—and the connection, if any, it might have had with my hike that day. I'd had the bizarre encounter with the towering man and his black dog in the fields of Glen Auldyn, and then there was little George's eerie hint that we were getting close to Fairy Bridge . . . when none of us had a clue where we were. After which point I'd met Charlotte, who cropped up to provide me with a “tune-up” as well as the rock I wished for on my birthday after my visit to Fairy Bridge, which I found on Point of Ayre. And let us not forget the bikers: gifts from the faeries if ever there were.

In Ireland, Peter Guy took me to the site of the last battle between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fir Bolgs, where I somehow knew the function of the old “cattle well” before asking the museum attendant. There'd been the disappearing and reappearing of the tent poles (and the borrowed pedometer), and the image in my mind of the bearded redheaded man at the fort on Black Head near Doolin. In Crusheen, Eddie Lenihan told me of faeries shape-shifting into human form and their connection to the mysterious black dogs. And there was the strange vision of an ancient line of pagan people climbing and worshipping at Mount Brandon. In Scotland there was my odd confirmation at Findhorn, when I'd been told to “say hello” to the faeries by the beach, and the strange way things seemed to happen in my trolls and gnomes meditation
before
Marie Soderberg suggested they might occur.

 

Then there were the things I thought of as “the Connectors.” Wendy Froud mentioned that the faeries might leave me gifts—things that would mean something only to me, like the black feathers I'd been finding all summer. Another connector could be the strange terracing I'd noticed on both Glastonbury Tor and Fairy Glen on the Isle of Skye. Then there were the bizarre shapes of the hills themselves: Glastonbury Tor, Hango Hill in Castletown on the Isle of Man, Fairy Glen in Uig, and Doon Hill in Aberfoyle.

 

Most urgently, now that I was back at my desk, I wanted to dig into the backstory of Betsy Crowe. A certainty had settled within me and had haunted me throughout the trip—there was
something
to discover, some hidden connection. I tore through the pages of an obscure British volume called
Manx Murders
.
Please, oh, please
. And there she was. Elizabeth “Betsy” Crowe, murdered in 1888. I held my breath and read on. Her brutal murder, on Old Douglas Road outside Ramsey, rocked the entire island, and it had remained unsolved.

But Betsy's neighbor, twenty-five-year-old John Gelling, had been brought in as the main suspect. The book contained a map of the area, not drawn much to scale, but it gave me an idea of where the Old Douglas Road was—a rough cart track that ran from Ballure Bridge up along the tiny glen, and then along the reservoir until it intersected with the paved road I'd crossed. The field with the ruin was beyond. There was no way of telling whether the stone house I visited belonged to Betsy, John Gelling, or another neighbor. Comparing the map of the murder scene to a modern map of the area and tracing my route, it seemed I was near the murder spot, separated only by a small stream, where I'd seen the blue coat hanging inexplicably in the middle of the dark forest. A coincidence, I was certain. But I kept reading.

There were some suspicious oddities in Gelling's account of his whereabouts that night. But the piece of the story that stopped me in my tracks was yet to come.

Gelling was asked by prosecutors about a jacket, one which he had washed the morning after the murder. He claimed that toffee had melted and stained the pocket of the coat the previous week. The prosecutor challenged that it was blood. The coat was wet from the shoulders down to the tail, quite a thorough cleaning job for a stain in a pocket. I read on, my heart in my throat.

The jacket in question was blue.

A traveler walks to an abandoned cottage and then begins to fear for her life on a trail in the forest, just prior to seeing a blue jacket hanging in the woods. She is perhaps fifty yards away from the place where a woman was murdered 121 years before.

The evidence against Gelling was, after a grueling inquest, found to be circumstantial, and despite the weight of suspicion he was never found guilty of murder.

He never even went to trial.

All I know is the terror I felt and what I saw. I've since spent many nights lying awake, thinking about Betsy Crowe and the blue jacket, struggling for closure. Each time comes the vision of that tree—the old gnarled tree that stands stooped by the ruins—and the feeling that whoever had lived in that house had loved that tree. Who knows? It certainly wouldn't have been uncommon at the time—perhaps Betsy Crowe was a believer in faeries.

As I focused next on the subject of the black feather, pieces began to fall into place, little by little. While crows (ravens, Irish croachs, or whatever you want to call them) were a most common bird in Ireland and the United Kingdom, they were certainly not the
only
birds. I've stumbled across many feathers in my lifetime of woods walking—turkey feathers, jay feathers, cardinal feathers, pheasant feathers, osprey feathers—but never so many black feathers, dropped in my path, in a period of three months. I wanted to know
why
I was continually finding them at faery sites throughout my journey—and why had I been compelled to use them as part of what could only be described as offerings?

In folklore, crows almost always appeared as messengers. Their purpose was to relay a message from the world of the dead, the afterlife, or the divine, to a mortal. To my surprise, I learned that Celtic folklore in particular was filled with them.

In the Celtic pantheon, the crow was sacred to a being called the Morrigan, and I was embarrassed to say I'd overlooked her. When I'd first come across the Morrigan (in Peter Berresford Ellis's myth
The Ever-Living Ones
), she was introduced as the Great Queen of Battles. But when you look at the etymology of the name, it actually translates quite literally to “Great Queen” (
mór
, great;
rígan
, queen). In the eleventh century, when
The Book of Invasions
was finally transcribed on paper, the Morrigan was listed as one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. But as I traced the mythological thread further back, I discovered that the Morrigan was known by another name: Anann. And Anann was known by another name, too.

Danu.

I felt like I'd just opened a set of Russian nesting dolls. Danu was, of course, the bringer of all life, the biggest deal in the Celtic pantheon; she was the Celtic Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed. And, according to myth, Danu was “the mother” of the race we so fondly call “the faeries.”

I had unwittingly been honoring the ultimate queen of the faeries at every significant site I visited. And in light of that, I couldn't help but wonder—were my car accident (which cost me money) in Chagford and the death by drowning of my iPod after my trip up Snaefell (which cost me money) literally a form of Celtic votive tribute like that which the old deities were used to receiving? Or was this simply another validation, to prove that their hand was in it all along? More than that, though, I wondered if I hadn't been put to work on a greater purpose. Awakening, connecting something in those places that needed to be brought to the surface once more. Typical to faery, it was illuminating and confusing all at once.

There were so many other links and commonalities I stumbled upon after arriving home.

Regarding the mysterious terracing on Glastonbury Tor, the Glastonbury Abbey website says, “If the maze on the Tor is real, human labor formed it four or five thousand years ago, during the period of the vast ritual works that created Stonehenge.” And it bore a striking similarity to the terracing I noticed on the hills of Fairy Glen on Skye. It was an intriguing connection. What
were
these forgotten places, so long ago?