"The Fairy Hunt" by Catherine Torkelson
Photo Credit: Image Licensed through Squarespace library
The Fairy Hunt
The alarm clock at her bedside table read 11:52 PM, but ten-year-old Lucy Norton was still wide awake.
She knew she wasn’t supposed to be, but it wasn’t like she had any control over it. Well, she had written in her diary for a little longer than usual, and then drawn a couple of elaborate mermaids in the margins, and then laid flat on top of her comforter with her eyes wide and full of daydreams. But still, she’d been trying to fall asleep for at least an hour now. The overhead light was off, but her eyes were open and her brain was whirring. So, there was no helping it: Lucy was wide awake, and excruciatingly bored.
A creak in the room next door jolted her out of her wandering thoughts. It confused and alarmed her, although she wasn’t sure why—midnight creaks weren’t uncommon in the Norton household, between the dog wandering about and Mom and Dad taking turns to tend to the baby. But after a moment, her brain caught up to her heart and she knew exactly why the noise disturbed her—it wasn’t a floorboard creaking, but a window. A window in Sofie’s room.
As quickly and quietly as she could, Lucy slid out of bed and tiptoed to her door. She opened it just a crack and peeked into the hallway. Gus, who had stretched himself listlessly across the shiny wooden floor, lifted his chin to look at her. But Lucy stepped over the spaniel without even bothering to scratch his ears. She held her breath and reached for the doorknob.
The door swung so slowly that Lucy felt she must be dreaming. Her heart was racing but her mind was quiet. There was nothing in the world besides her and the door, and the vague notion that something impossible might be behind it.
Then the world opened, revealing its muddled innards. A strange figure was hunched over the crib, her unnatural features illuminated by Sofie’s dim, flickering nightlight. She was small and slender, no taller than Lucy, but her face was no child’s face. It seemed both old and young at the same time. Tucked behind her tiny, steepled ears flowed a gigantic mass of curling bronze hair. When she glanced up at the little girl in the doorway, her pink lips twisted into a small, indecipherable smile.
A wave of calm and trust washed over Lucy and she smiled back. The girl held out a tiny white hand and Lucy stepped forward, taking it. It was soft and cold to the touch, but somehow there was a steady warmth to it.
With her free arm, the girl swept her waterfall of hair over one shoulder, revealing a bundle strapped to her back. An infant’s pale face stared sleepily up at Lucy. With surprising strength, the girl yanked the child off her back, causing it to cry out in pain or fear. In one fluid motion, she deposited the screaming baby in the crib and scooped up Sofie, all without releasing Lucy’s hand.
Somewhere down the hallway, her parents were stirring. Someone was grumbling and stumbling, yanking on slippers, throwing open a door. And at the same time, the girl was tugging Lucy roughly towards the open window, but ugly awareness was already creeping its way back into her skull. She attempted to pull her hand free, but the girl pulled harder, until they were nearly at the window. She climbed over the ledge and gave another tremendous yank. As Lucy was wrenched forward, she felt a squishiness under her foot. As if in slow motion, she glanced down to see Peggy, Sofie’s favorite stuffed elephant, staring blankly up at her from under her toes, and then the world was slipping out from under her as the toy skidded backwards. Her face banged heavily against the window ledge, and she came back to herself entirely lying face down on the shiny wooden floor, with her chin throbbing and the wails of the unfamiliar child resounding in the background. She raised her head just in time to see the tail end of a lavender dress disappearing out the window. Lucy braced herself, anticipating the crash of kidnapper and victim colliding with the ground, but the sound never came.
When Lucy’s mother plodded through the open nursery door, Gus was dashing anxiously around her ankles, whimpering. She shoved him to the side with her foot and gently lifted the screaming baby from the crib. Then her eyes fell on Lucy, who was still stretched out on the floor, with her blond hair disheveled and knees scabbed from the fall.
“What are you doing?” Mom asked.
Lucy didn’t say anything. She didn’t know how to explain what she’d seen. She didn’t know if she remembered how to speak. So when her mother ordered her back to bed, Lucy rose without protest and stumbled back into her room.
All through the dragging hours of the night, she sat up in bed, too energetic to sleep, with her ear pressed against the wall separating her from Sofie’s room. She feared that the kidnapper would come back for her, or that the strange new baby would creep from its crib and attack her in her bed. She waited for the sun to rise, trusting that with it the nightmare would fade, and the world would right itself. But even as she hoped, she found herself rubbing at the bruises on her chin and knew undoubtedly that what had happened was real.
Despite her fear, her denial, and her pain, a plan was slowly materializing in her mind. If Sofie truly had been stolen, then she was in danger, and in desperate need of saving. Her parents would never believe what she’d seen, but thankfully, she knew of someone else who might.
…
The old woman who lived down the road was crazy, according to the neighbors. Nearly fifty years ago, the infamous Sonya Church had killed her own child and hidden the body where no one could find it. The fairies had taken it, she’d said. Everyone knew the truth, but without the body, the truth was useless. So the investigation had stumbled and stopped and started again, and all the while the woman had remained in the house where her baby had vanished, the subject of gossip, the center of disdain.
The house, which at one point must have been quaint and cozy, had since sunk to ruin. Tall, hideous weeds had overrun the lawn and flowerbeds. The yellow paint on the walls was dirty and peeling, and the windows were so thick with grime that nothing, not even light, could be seen through them.
It was the door of this dilapidated yellow house that Lucy knocked on. She was tired stiff from her sleepless night, and on edge after her parents’ scolding that morning. Despite her better judgment, she’d told them the truth. Now they were both angry with her, convinced that she was jealous, malicious, lying for attention. As the memories and sun beat down on her, she clutched Gus’s knotted purple leash tightly in her fist. He was panting noisily, rubbing his hot fur against her bare calves while she shifted nervously from foot to foot.
The door swung open sooner than expected and the old woman’s faded brown eyes immediately latched onto Lucy’s face. The way she silently scrutinized her, examining her from top to bottom, made the girl uneasy. She felt like she was being sized up, and if the witch pronounced her plump enough, she would be crammed into the oven to eat.
Finally, Sonya Church nodded curtly and stepped aside. Lucy, who had suddenly recalled every warning her parents had ever given her about talking to strangers, was half-inclined to run away, but before she could make up her mind, Gus scurried through the doorway. The tug of the leash jerked the girl inside.
Surprisingly, the entry hall she found herself in was ordinary and clean. The gray tiles on the floor were whole and shiny; the wallpaper, cream-colored and pleasant. Equally puzzling was the house’s resident. The woman, despite being over seventy years old, seemed more stretched than she was shrunken, more vibrant than she was faded. Her tall form, wrapped in a classy black pantsuit, strode confidently through a wide doorway. After a moment, Lucy followed.
The living room was also perfectly comfortable and tidy. The couches were large, deep brown and inviting, with yellow and red pillows arranged alternately on the cushions. There were glass-topped coffee tables, scented candles, and towering bookshelves, all in pristine condition. Only the large windows were smeared with thick, crusty mud and black paint, so that the natural light filtered sparingly into the room and formed strange, speckled constellations on the lush red carpet.
“Please, dear, have a seat,” the woman said slowly. “I am Sonya Church. And you are?”
Lucy sat warily on one of the fat brown couches. Gus laid down on the floor beside her, nuzzling his face into the carpet, beady eyes fixed on the small circles of light glimmering on the floor. The old woman shuffled over to an easy chair on the other side of the room and sat down facing Lucy.
“My name is Lucy Norton. I think you might be able to help me. My baby sister’s been kidnapped.”
“And no one else believed you, did they, Lucy?” Sonya Church’s eyes flickered mischievously. “People always come to me when no one else believes them. No one believed me, either. They said I killed Henry myself. But what I killed wasn’t Henry. And killing the monster couldn’t bring my baby back.”
Lucy sucked in her breath. Her palms felt slick with sweat and her heart was hammering, from excitement or nerves or both. But despite her discomfort, she felt a faint sense of relief. She had come to the right place after all. “If it wasn’t your baby,” she said, “what was it?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, dear,” Ms. Church said. “First, tell me what happened.”
"Fairies don’t raise their own young, child. They are selfish, lazy, entitled creatures, unconcerned with the mundanities of child-rearing. So they dump their fairy spawn on unsuspecting human families."
Lucy paused, then slowly began sharing her story, starting with the window creaking in the night and the strange woman leaning over her sister’s crib. At first, she hesitated, remembering the scorn in her mother’s face and the sadness in her father’s, but as she went on, the words spilled out so quickly that she couldn’t imagine having kept them inside any longer. She recalled the way she’d suddenly relaxed and moved forward, trusting the stranger. She explained how she had slipped and hit her head and the trance had broken, but Sofie and her abductor had already vanished out the window. The more she talked, the more she felt like herself again, not the liar or lunatic reflected in her mother’s eyes. The nodding sympathy of Ms. Church propelled her forward until she stumbled over the tale’s awkward ending: remembering the ugly rumors about this house and its occupant, and subsequently knocking on Ms. Church’s moldering door.
“It was prudent of you to come so quickly,” Sonya said gravely. “This is a matter we must handle with the utmost haste. You were right, my son and your sister were taken by the same culprits and for the same purpose.”
“What happened to your son?” Lucy asked.
“I wasn’t like you,” Sonya said heavily, “I didn’t see it for myself. I just felt the difference in my child, until one day, I looked down and realized that it wasn’t my Henry I was holding. So I researched. I wandered the forests. Finally, after reading about fairies and changelings in a book about Irish folklore, I took a trip to Ireland and talked to people with similar stories. It was there that I learned about the feast.”
“Feast?” Lucy asked. “Please say that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”
Sonya Church nodded solemnly. “Fairies don’t raise their own young, child. They are selfish, lazy, entitled creatures, unconcerned with the mundanities of child-rearing. So they dump their fairy spawn on unsuspecting human families. The changeling takes on the form of the human infant, and the human infant is taken back to the fairies’ den in preparation for the feast.”
“But that’s horrible!” Lucy protested. “How could they eat babies?” She thought of her sweet baby sister’s first smile, her first laugh, her favorite rattle. “Sofie can’t even crawl yet! She’s completely defenseless!”
“The fairies are wicked creatures,” Ms. Church said darkly. “They think only of themselves and their pleasure. It is their way.”
“Is it too late?” Lucy asked, high-pitched panic rising in her voice. “Sofie hasn’t already been eaten, has she?”
Ms. Church stood and crossed the room, placing a hand on Lucy’s shaking shoulder. “It’s okay, dear,” she said. “I’m sure your baby sister is still alive.”
“How do you know?” Lucy asked fiercely.
Ms. Church stepped over Gus and sat down beside Lucy. Her hand rubbed comfortingly against her shoulder. “I didn’t know any of it when I needed it most,” she said. “They took Henry in the spring. He was only six months old. I found out about the Feast of the Full Moon the next spring, almost a year later. All that time, searching, learning, talking, I thought I would feel relieved when I finally found out what happened to him. But I didn’t feel relieved. I just felt angry.”
The rubbing stopped, and Lucy glanced over at the old woman. She had her face in her hands. “The following full moon was the one-year anniversary of Henry’s death. When it was time for dinner, I took the changeling out of the highchair and put it on the cutting board. I chopped it up while it screamed, then I boiled its flesh in the stew I was making. I ate the monster, just like its parents ate my baby.
“I think I went mad, at least for a little while. I smeared the windows with filth and let the house fall apart. I wandered the streets raving, telling anyone who would listen about Henry and the fairies. But eventually, I realized that Henry’s murderers were still out there, and that other babies were in danger. So all these years, I’ve been waiting for my opportunity to get back at those beasts.” She grinned viciously, her teeth yellow and sharp like a wolf’s. “I’m too old for fairy hunting, so I’m willing to settle for letting you do the dirty work. You can deliver me my revenge, after all these years. Go to the fairy den and snatch their feast right out from under their noses. Make a feast out of them.”
Lucy squeezed her hands tightly against her scraped knees, watching the pink skin turn white. “What would have happened to me if that fairy’s trance didn’t break?” she asked without looking up. In her mind’s eye, she could see that small, beautiful creature, the bronze-headed fairy, luring her to the window, a twinkle in her chocolate eyes. She felt the rush of wind from falling into open air, then the gentle breeze of beating wings. Soft, cold arms wrapped around her, delivering her to the fairy den.
“Who could say?” Sonya murmured. “They might have eaten you too. Or they might have enslaved you or kept you as a pet. Fairies like pretty things, and you, child, are quite pretty.”
Lucy was still staring at her knees. “I hate them,” she said, surprised by the hardness in her own voice. “I need to save my sister from them. As soon as possible.”
“I agree,” Ms. Church said quietly. “You must rescue the girl immediately, since the full moon is tonight.”
“Tonight?” Lucy asked.
“Tonight,” the old woman confirmed. “But don’t worry, child, because I have been waiting for this very night for fifty years. Accompany me.” Sonya stood and headed for the doorway. Lucy followed.
Ms. Church disappeared inside a hot, dark garage while Lucy waited anxiously at the door. When the old woman reemerged, she was carrying a long, glimmering dagger.
Alarmed, Lucy stumbled backwards. Sonya, who was gazing lovingly at the weapon in her hands, didn’t appear to notice.
“Iron,” she said affectionately, running a finger along the silver blade. “Fairies are especially vulnerable to it.”
Then Ms. Church’s eyes shot up abruptly, finding Lucy’s in a heartbeat. “Get your dog, girl, and something of your sister’s. You’re going fairy hunting.”
…
Lucy opened the front door as gently as she could. Behind her, Gus was waiting in the driveway.
Mom was slicing tomatoes in the kitchen, while the baby shrieked from the highchair. She glanced over her shoulder at Lucy, her expression cold.
“Darling, take Sofie upstairs, please. It’s time for her nap.”
Reluctantly, Lucy seized the squirming child by the armpits and hoisted her out of the chair. The baby kicked her hard in the stomach and she struggled not to drop her.
Once they were in Sofie’s room, Lucy plopped the changeling unceremoniously into Sofie’s crib.
“I know what you are,” she told it warningly.
The changeling didn’t seem to understand what she was saying. It only stared at her blankly, with its fingers in its mouth. Lucy made a face at the baby and to her chagrin, it laughed.
Lucy glared at the little creature. Then she snatched Peggy the elephant off the floor and muttered over her shoulder, “We’ll see who’s laughing tonight, when Ms. Church makes you into stew.”
Her fellow fairy hunter was still waiting patiently in the driveway when Lucy stepped out of the house. She held the elephant triumphantly over her head before bringing it down before Gus’s twitching nose. His tail began to wag.
“You recognize Sofie’s scent,” Lucy said approvingly. “We’ll walk to the woods, then you can smell it again.”
They walked for about ten minutes in the muggy April heat, following a gravel road. At the ditch, they abandoned the road and crossed a bridge, then treaded for several minutes through tall grasses and taller wildflowers. Their tiny heads in shades of purple, yellow, and white waved delightedly as the pair passed by. Lucy paused several times to lean over and itch her ankles, andeach time her eyes fell on the glinting dagger strapped to her waist.
At the edge of the trees, Lucy once again held the elephant to Gus’s nose. For several seconds, he sniffed it, then he turned around, stuck his nose into the foliage, then the mud, then the trail, until finally he began to shuffle forwards.
As Gus nosed his way through the woods, Lucy followed at a slow trot that did not at all reflect the urgency of the situation. The image of the bronze-haired fairy was swimming hazily in her mind. When she thought about encountering her again, she felt torn between eagerness and dread. She slid her hand carefully against her waist and clamped her fingers over the handle of the dagger.
Gus was moving faster now, while the woods were thinning around them. Bursts of high-pitched, ephemeral laughter were audible, as was a cacophony of bird song and the banging of drums. They were close, much closer than Lucy wanted to be, but she forced herself to put one foot in front of the other and do it again, and again, until finally she was too afraid to go even one step farther, and she sank on trembling feet down to her hands and knees and peered from behind a burly tree at the fairy party in the clearing.
At least thirty beautiful fairies were dancing wildly mere feet from where she crouched. She stared, transfixed, at the strange scene playing out before her. It was like a human dance, full of dips and dives and spins and footwork. But when the fairy men lifted their partners into the air, instead of falling back down, the women yanked their men up into the air after them, and the dance continued up, up, up into the sky until the entire swarm of dancers came crashing down.
Dozens of caged birds were singing oddly, hauntingly, while fairies jumped and twisted to their irregular notes. A single black-haired drummer sat by the bird cage, thumping out a slow, booming rhythm that reminded Lucy of ancient tribes and human sacrifice.
Lucy squinted at the rows of leaping colors, waving like the heads of wildflowers in a storm. There was the bronze-haired fairy. But Sofie was nowhere to be seen.
Beside her, Gus was beginning to whimper. Not wanting to risk him revealing their location, Lucy crawled a short distance from the clearing and tied his leash to a tree. She put the stuffed elephant down beside him. Then she patted his copper head and snuck back to her hiding place just in time to see the bronze-haired fairy slip away into the woods.
Lucy scrambled to her feet. For a few seconds, she stood stalk-still, half-concealed behind underbrush and trees. A loud woop sounded beside her, and she flinched, certain she’d been spotted, but the moment passed and then another moment, and the wooping continued but no fairies swarmed her, no one jeered or laughed or enchanted or swallowed her, no one seemed to have noticed Lucy but a single singing bird, whose beady eyes followed her as she drew her knife from her pocket and inched forward, one step at a time, with her heart in her throat and a cavity in her chest.
Once she was a little farther away from the party, she began to walk faster in the direction she’d seen the fairy heading. She was breathing in time to the banging of the drums, partly to conceal the sound, but also to focus, to calm herself. Now was not the time for fear.
A new, gentle sound was drifting between the trees. Lucy veered right to follow it. She was conscious of her weight on the crackling forest floor, of the dryness in her mouth, the unsteadiness of her breath. The melody continued, growing louder with every step. It was soothing and exhilarating at the same time; reassuring and terrifying, but above all else, it was beautiful in its strangeness. It was music she’d never heard before.
Finally, Lucy ducked under a wizened branch and emerged before a gigantic oak tree. Its branches were so tall and dense that barely any sunlight could pass through them, leaving the earth beneath them bare and cold. And on the dirt, leaning against the bulking trunk sat the bronze-haired fairy, with her back towards Lucy, humming her haunting lullaby as she sharpened her knife.
Beside the fairy, Sofie lay flat and unmoving on a bed of leaves and twigs, naked and bald and with empty, staring eyes.
When the fairy woman put her knife to the baby’s soft white throat a fury exploded in Lucy so violently that before she knew what she was doing she was charging forward. She flung herself at the fairy, knocking the knife out of her hand and pinning her against the oak tree. Lucy was small, but the fairy was smaller, and she struggled vainly, randomly, while Lucy pressed one hand against her face to cover her eyes and with the other held the dagger to her throat.
The girl’s body fell limp as the blade brushed against her neck. She was whimpering like Gus. The sharp pitiful noises were amplified by her rapid, ragged breathing, but Lucy felt nothing for the beautiful little monster as it trembled beneath her knife.
A soft cry sounded beside Lucy, startling her. The fairy flinched, a gasp of pain escaping her lips. The crying was steadily becoming louder, until it reached a wavering wail. Lucy felt like she was coming back to herself again, slowly, splayed out on Sofie’s bedroom floor, while an abandoned infant howled in the background. But she wasn’t at home, she was here, in the woods, under the oak tree, and the wailing child wasn’t the fairy’s changeling, it was her sister. It was Sofie.
Slowly, Lucy pulled her hand off the fairy’s face. It was streaked with tears and dirt, red-nosed from crying, wide-eyed from fear. As she gazed into the fairy’s wet brown eyes she felt strangely calm again. She knew she couldn’t kill the creature. She withdrew the knife and left the girl where she lay, half-propped against the knotted tree trunk, weeping and gasping for breath.
Lucy quickly backed away from the tree and scooped Sofie off the ground. The baby’s cries quieted as she snuggled into her sister’s arms. Meanwhile, the fairy remained silent and unmoving against the tree, watching the blade that Lucy carefully positioned away from the baby’s bare vulnerable flesh.
Once she felt she was far enough away from the oak tree, Lucy turned around entirely and scrambled through the woods, trying to retrace her steps back to where she’d tied Gus.
Good old Gus was waiting loyally where she’d left him. She shifted Sofie in her arms so that she could free a hand to untie the knot, but she was trembling horribly. Finally, she bent over and unhooked the leash from his collar, and they left it behind, alongside poor Peggy the elephant, as proof of their adventure.
The drums were still booming in the background, no matter how far away Lucy walked. Or were they just ringing in her ears, reverberating through her skull? She shifted the heavy mass of Sofie in her arms and wished she had something to wrap her in. At least it was summer, so she wouldn’t be cold.
“I know I should’ve done it, but I just couldn’t,” Lucy said. Gus glanced up at her, tipping his head inquisitively.
“Don’t be like that! I know it’s wrong. I know they’ll just take another baby next month, and the next month after that. But I still couldn’t do it.”
Gus stopped walking and turned to face her.
“You wanted to hurt them. You’re a true fairy hunter, Gus, and so is Ms. Church. But I don’t want to be a fairy hunter anymore. They’re not monsters. They’re just people,” Lucy said. “They dance and laugh and cry, just like people.”
Gus flipped his head dismissively and turned back around. He trotted down the path with Lucy on his heels.
Fairies eat babies. They dump their offspring on families and eat their children and then dance and laugh and sing and do it again because they don’t care. They’re selfish, and cruel, and irresponsible, and a plague on humankind. They all deserve to die.
“But still,” Lucy insisted aloud, “I don’t want them to be scared. I don’t want them to cry.”
…
That same evening, Lucy once again knocked on Sonya Church’s door. She shifted the baby in her arms. She was dressed in a pink onesie dotted with embroidered daisies.
The old woman opened it, beaming.
“You saved your sister! I’ve been so worried all day, regretting sending you alone. I just don’t know how far into the woods these old bones could take me.”
“It’s okay,” Lucy said, smiling. She stepped into the house. “But actually, this isn’t my sister. This is the changeling.”
Suddenly, Ms. Church’s face darkened, and she backed away. “Why would you take that thing here?”
“You wanted to be a mother, didn’t you? And the fairies stole that chance from you.”
“Of course I did, but that doesn’t mean I want to raise some fairy’s spawn. Fairies are evil creatures. They eat babies!”
“But Ms. Church, you also ate a baby. It was helpless and scared and didn’t deserve to die, but you killed it anyway. Does that make you a bad person? I don’t think so. I think both you and the fairies deserve a second chance.”
“I’m seventy-one years old, child,” Ms. Church said. “The time for me to be a mother has come and gone. And I don’t deserve to raise a changeling after I killed the one given to me.”
“Are you sorry you killed Henry’s changeling?” Lucy asked.
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I suppose it was wrong, but it was wrong of the fairies to eat my baby, and I wanted to do to them what they’d done to me.”
Lucy remembered the bronze-haired fairy, and how she’d put her knife to Sofie’s throat. She was furious at the fairy and at all the fairies, for putting themselves first and others last, for targeting the innocent and helpless, for laughing and dancing and ignoring the pain of humans. But no matter how much she dwelled on their cruelty, her mind always came back to the shaking, the whimpers, the doll-like face and the falling tears, and despite everything, she couldn’t bring herself to hate the fairies.
“Ms. Church, take the changeling and raise her,” Lucy said finally. “Raise her to become a good fairy who would never hurt anyone. And I think that once you come to love her, you won’t want to hurt anyone either. Fairies and humans can be the same. I believe that.”
Sonya Church sat up slowly. She gazed down at the child, who smiled and waved her fists above her head.
“She is a beautiful child,” she said finally. “Fairies and humans both love beautiful children.”
A smile broke over the old woman’s face as she watched the baby. Lucy smiled back at her, relieved. She held out the child, and Sonya took her.
“I won’t be able to stay here anymore,” Sonya noted, glancing around her at the house she’d lived in for over fifty years. “We can’t have Sofie growing up alongside her doppelganger.”
“So you’re leaving, then,” Lucy said sadly. “With the second Sofie.”
“You mean Amelia Church,” Sonya said slowly. She seemed to be savoring the name.
“Thank you so much for your help today,” Lucy said, suddenly remembering her manners.
“No, child,” Sonya said, lovingly stroking her fairy daughter’s silky head. “Thank you.”
Catherine Torkelson is a junior at K-State majoring in English and Spanish. She is from Wichita, Kansas. In addition to writing, she also loves reading, baking, taking walks, and spending quality time with loved ones. Her favorite animal is the camel, because camels are so odd and cute.