Original fiction: Under the Hill
This one is more my own fairy-story. Similarities to Kamichu or Mokke are unintentional but inevitable.
Under the Hill
Olivia Macintyre had issues. Serious issues. They weren’t issues of the sort that a psychologist or psychiatrist could help with; they weren’t even the sort that one would need help with. Olivia liked having the issues that she did. She could see faeries and ghosts. Usually the most boring and obnoxious faeries and ghosts that Scottish folklore had to offer, but living in Faerie seemed to be a fairly boring and obnoxious experience for them so, really, it wasn’t their fault.
Frequently a man called John would take walks with her along the beach near her home on the west coast of Scotland. The sea and sky were usually the same colour here; if the sea was steel-grey, which it frequently was, so was the sky. If the sky was periwinkle-blue, which was rather less common a state than Olivia would have liked, so was the sea. It was only on stormy nights that there was any real difference-the sky then was black, louring-crouching, almost, it seemed. It billowed with watery light that when the storm broke metamorphosed or metempsychosed itself into plunging ropes and sheets of water that splashed into the olive-dark sea traced through with whitecaps.
John only had one working nostril, the other being inperforate, but seemed to have no trouble breathing. One evening Olivia asked him why this was.
‘It serves to differentiate us from you.’
‘Is that the real reason?’ asked Olivia. ‘I should think most faeries should know what was human and what wasn’t.’
‘Most do. Most humans don’t. You’re not very good at recognising us. You’re not special because you see us, Olivia; you’re only special because you know what you’re looking at.’
‘Hm,’ said Olivia.
At one point Olivia lost track of John for a while. One night an old abandoned mill near her home worked long past midnight. Annoyed-there was nothing in there to grind, for Jesus’ sake!-she got out of bed, pulled a gown around herself, and went out to see what was going on.
Opening the door to the mill she was very nearly knocked bodily to the ground by an unspeakably horrid stench. It was like burnt wood soaked in lye-covered rotting fish, eaten and then breathed out by the mother of all wet dogs.
A rough, shaggy being, nearly twice Olivia’s own size, was working the mill. The old useless stones ground angrily against each other with a noise nearly as horrible as the smell. The being grunted with exertion. Olivia rolled her eyes.
‘There’s no real reason to be doing that, you know,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ grunted the being. ‘I’m Urisk. Urisk grinds. Urisk always grinds.’
‘There’s nothing to grind in there, Urisk.’
‘Urisk always grinds!’ shouted Urisk, swinging a meaty, horny paw at Olivia, who backed out of the room. ‘Doesn’t matter what. Doesn’t matter anything. Urisk always grinds!’
‘Son of a bitch!’ muttered Olivia. ‘Now I’ll get no sleep to-night. Look, just…keep your distance, all right, Urisk? You smell awful.’
‘Fine,’ grunted Urisk, and went back to its pointless work.
After the Urisk incident Olivia elected to spend more of her time walking down on the beach then up in the hills. Being down at the beach at night a lot meant selkies. The seals would come up on to the beach and disport themselves and flip and flop all around Olivia with their cute, silly faces, then strip into human or at least semi-human form and reel wildly around in half-mad dances.
Sometimes Olivia wished to join in and even came very close to doing so, but something stopped her. Perhaps it was the idea that she herself would become a selkie and take to the sea-an idea without much justification or merit, but just something that nagged at her.
On one of these nights she went home to find an old woman in her kitchen.
‘May I ask why you’re in my kitchen?’
‘I’m sorry, dearie,’ said the old lady, ‘but I simply must borrow some oatmeal to take home to my family! Do you mind?’
‘No, no,’ said Olivia. ‘I’m sorry.’ She went over to the cupboards. ‘How much oatmeal do you need?’
‘Just a tad. The young ones like a little before bedtime, you see.’
‘Of course.’ Olivia, no longer bemused by things like this happening, gave the old woman about two cups of oatmeal. ‘Would you like me to drive you home?’
‘I’d love that,’ said the old lady.
They got into Olivia’s car. The old lady, as a faerie, was not at all familiar with automobiles and spent a lot of the ride out into the hills asking about various parts of the dashboard.
‘That’s the fuel gauge,’ said Olivia. ‘It shows me how much longer I can drive before filling up the petrol tank again.’
‘That’s the radio,’ said Olivia. ‘It plays music.’
‘This is the steering wheel,’ said Olivia. ‘It steers.’
Finally they reached a large hill. The old lady got out, thanked Olivia profusely, and vanished.
Two weeks or so later Olivia got an invitation in the mail.
You are invited to a ceilidh (party)!
Thursday after next, Castle of Stone Vagabonds, Kingdom of Iron Angels, Faerie.
Just off the A830 to the left going towards Fort William.
Olivia bristled at the fact that the faeries had thought that she, whose family had been in Scotland for over a thousand years, needed to be told what a ceilidh was.
The back of the card said ‘bring a friend! (Olivia Macintyre + 1)’. She laughed. Who the Hell would she bring to a ceilidh in Faerie?
Oh, yeah. Dan. Dan might like to go.
Daniel Urquhart was a friend of Olivia’s from university. They had moved in the same geeky humanities and classics circles and remained close after graduation, chiefly due to both living in the same sparsely-populated part of Scotland. Dan was the only person in the world, other than Olivia herself, who knew about her issues, which they had last discussed when Olivia had complained about Urisk’s behaviour the previous month.
Olivia called up Dan and left a message on his Ansaphone. Dan called back while she was at work (Olivia worked in historical preservation at one of the big castles nearby) saying that he would be delighted to come.
The day of the ceilidh they met at a coffeehouse in Fort William and drove out towards the brugh at the nearest relevant entrance to Iron Angels, a political union of individual faerie brughs and households covering most of the area from Faerie’s Glasgow to Faerie’s Mallaig.
‘It’s on the right,’ said Olivia, ‘as we’re coming from Fort William going toward my house.’
‘I know,’ said Dan. ‘How long’ll we have to walk?’
‘Not very long. There are entrances to Faerie all over the place in the area that they mentioned.’ Olivia stopped the car beside a blasted old oak.
‘So, is there a spell or a trick or…’
‘No, you just walk in.’ Olivia led Dan up the hillside behind the oak to a large flat rock. She turned on her heel, walked a few metres away from the rock, and jumped into a sinkhole. Dan, after a moment’s hesitation, followed.
‘So,’ said Dan nervously, looking around at the drab stone walls. ‘Is this…’
‘Welcome to the Castle of Stone Vagabonds,’ said Olivia. ‘I think Julio and Bob live here. There’s also a married couple of brownies in the north wing.’
‘But don’t brownies usually give covert help to farm families?’
‘Yeah, usually. The entire species isn’t limited to one occupation, you know.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Quiet. I hear music.’ Olivia led Dan downstairs. ‘Yep!’
For lack of a better term, the place was hoppin’. Somebody had put an enchanted guitar and drum set in a corner of the largest room in the brugh, where they played some kind of folk-rock vintage circa 1965. A group of fish-men sat in a corner, uncomfortable in the light and heat of the ceilidh, dousing themselves with as much of the water as they could get away with. Olivia spied John chatting up the ghost of some Viking lord. A selkie in her seal form sat propped up against the wall, her tongue lolling from her mouth, playing up the strange resemblances between some seals and some puppies for all it was worth.
‘Hey, John!’ called Olivia.
‘Oh, you brought your plus-one!’ said John. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, Olivia. Glad you could make it.’ He shook Dan’s hand. ‘John. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Dan. Likewise. Tell me…will I forget who I am and get tricked into eating your food and stay forever, or does that not really happen?’
‘Oh, it happens,’ said John. ‘Don’t worry. You can eat and drink and party as much as you want and Olivia will make sure to drag you out when it’s over. She’s immune to this sort of thing.’
‘Good.’
‘Hey, John,’ said Olivia, ‘do you know where Julio and Bob are? It’s their party, isn’t it?’
‘They’re probably talking to Urisk,’ groaned John. Olivia groaned with him. ‘God, I hate that thing. It never shuts up about the damned economy-which, by the way, has gone to pot ever since the Prime Minister of Saints’-Pity got overthrown. Damned bore, that’s what Urisk is.’
‘Really,’ said Olivia. ‘I would never have guessed from its insistence on working the ruined mill near my house night after night.’
The party was fairly sedate, as Olivia expected from her fairly unadventurous crop of faerie, spook, ghost, and goblin acquaintances. Some of the selkies amused themselves by transforming back and forth from seal to human form several times in quick succession-the moonlight through a high, small window in the brugh’s main room allowed this. A kelpie named Donnchadh, a friend of Urisk’s (just as annoying as expected), showed up, splashing in through the door without remembering to solidify his equine body. This made Julio shout at Urisk for its choice in plus-ones, which apparently had a history of being pretty inappropriate.
The enchanted instruments stopped playing about halfway through the night. Dan, not entirely certain of John’s reassurances, fastidiously avoided all food and drink until Bob brought out the fried cod and he could no longer resist. It dulled his senses a little, but not as much as he had feared. Some wirry-cows brought out some apples, which apparently double-crossed and cancelled out the cod and brought him back into full possession of his faculties.
Olivia noticed some ghillie dhus shrinking away from the main mass of the party.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t like it here,’ said a ghillie dhu. ‘I want to get back to my tree. There are no trees here and no children here. I’m worried someone will cut it down if I’m not on guard.’
‘Nothing will go wrong,’ said Olivia. ‘They don’t log in this part of Scotland any more.’
‘The humans stopped logging?’ asked a very surprised brownie. ‘Wow. Humans stopping logging? Is that even…I mean, no offence, but it’s kind of what you do. At what point and for what reason did you stop?’
‘Only in Scotland,’ said Olivia. ‘A couple of decades ago, I think. We decided that we needed to replace a lot of the forests we’d destroyed or our own environment would suffer.’
‘Wow,’ said the brownie. ‘How about that.’
‘Well?’ asked Olivia while the ceilidh was winding down. ‘How’d you like it?’
‘I wish I knew some faeries,’ said Dan.
‘Check the woods on the hill across the road from your house,’ said Olivia. ‘The Johnsons live by the stream. You’ve probably seen them around, actually.’
‘But…I thought only you could…’
‘Everybody can see them, Dan. It’s not what you see that makes you special; it’s what you recognise. John’s helpful in that he only has the one nostril so it’s easier to tell the difference, but most humanoid faeries are pretty normal-looking.’
‘Yes, I see that now.’
‘Anyway, we should get going,’ said Olivia. ‘Julio, Bob, thanks for the ceilidh!’
‘Any time!’ called Julio. ‘We should do lunch some time!’
‘Sounds good to me! Earth or Faerie?’
‘Whichever. We’re fine with eating your food; it just smells a little funny to us, so…hey! Urisk…Urisk, stop smashing those chairs together!’
‘Urisk always grinds!’
Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘Let’s go, Dan,’ she said.
So they left. The next day Dan woke up with a hangover to end all hangovers, even though he had only had the cod and the apples. He drank some coffee, took a shower, still felt bad, called in sick to work, and went back to bed.
Under the Hill
Olivia Macintyre had issues. Serious issues. They weren’t issues of the sort that a psychologist or psychiatrist could help with; they weren’t even the sort that one would need help with. Olivia liked having the issues that she did. She could see faeries and ghosts. Usually the most boring and obnoxious faeries and ghosts that Scottish folklore had to offer, but living in Faerie seemed to be a fairly boring and obnoxious experience for them so, really, it wasn’t their fault.
Frequently a man called John would take walks with her along the beach near her home on the west coast of Scotland. The sea and sky were usually the same colour here; if the sea was steel-grey, which it frequently was, so was the sky. If the sky was periwinkle-blue, which was rather less common a state than Olivia would have liked, so was the sea. It was only on stormy nights that there was any real difference-the sky then was black, louring-crouching, almost, it seemed. It billowed with watery light that when the storm broke metamorphosed or metempsychosed itself into plunging ropes and sheets of water that splashed into the olive-dark sea traced through with whitecaps.
John only had one working nostril, the other being inperforate, but seemed to have no trouble breathing. One evening Olivia asked him why this was.
‘It serves to differentiate us from you.’
‘Is that the real reason?’ asked Olivia. ‘I should think most faeries should know what was human and what wasn’t.’
‘Most do. Most humans don’t. You’re not very good at recognising us. You’re not special because you see us, Olivia; you’re only special because you know what you’re looking at.’
‘Hm,’ said Olivia.
At one point Olivia lost track of John for a while. One night an old abandoned mill near her home worked long past midnight. Annoyed-there was nothing in there to grind, for Jesus’ sake!-she got out of bed, pulled a gown around herself, and went out to see what was going on.
Opening the door to the mill she was very nearly knocked bodily to the ground by an unspeakably horrid stench. It was like burnt wood soaked in lye-covered rotting fish, eaten and then breathed out by the mother of all wet dogs.
A rough, shaggy being, nearly twice Olivia’s own size, was working the mill. The old useless stones ground angrily against each other with a noise nearly as horrible as the smell. The being grunted with exertion. Olivia rolled her eyes.
‘There’s no real reason to be doing that, you know,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ grunted the being. ‘I’m Urisk. Urisk grinds. Urisk always grinds.’
‘There’s nothing to grind in there, Urisk.’
‘Urisk always grinds!’ shouted Urisk, swinging a meaty, horny paw at Olivia, who backed out of the room. ‘Doesn’t matter what. Doesn’t matter anything. Urisk always grinds!’
‘Son of a bitch!’ muttered Olivia. ‘Now I’ll get no sleep to-night. Look, just…keep your distance, all right, Urisk? You smell awful.’
‘Fine,’ grunted Urisk, and went back to its pointless work.
After the Urisk incident Olivia elected to spend more of her time walking down on the beach then up in the hills. Being down at the beach at night a lot meant selkies. The seals would come up on to the beach and disport themselves and flip and flop all around Olivia with their cute, silly faces, then strip into human or at least semi-human form and reel wildly around in half-mad dances.
Sometimes Olivia wished to join in and even came very close to doing so, but something stopped her. Perhaps it was the idea that she herself would become a selkie and take to the sea-an idea without much justification or merit, but just something that nagged at her.
On one of these nights she went home to find an old woman in her kitchen.
‘May I ask why you’re in my kitchen?’
‘I’m sorry, dearie,’ said the old lady, ‘but I simply must borrow some oatmeal to take home to my family! Do you mind?’
‘No, no,’ said Olivia. ‘I’m sorry.’ She went over to the cupboards. ‘How much oatmeal do you need?’
‘Just a tad. The young ones like a little before bedtime, you see.’
‘Of course.’ Olivia, no longer bemused by things like this happening, gave the old woman about two cups of oatmeal. ‘Would you like me to drive you home?’
‘I’d love that,’ said the old lady.
They got into Olivia’s car. The old lady, as a faerie, was not at all familiar with automobiles and spent a lot of the ride out into the hills asking about various parts of the dashboard.
‘That’s the fuel gauge,’ said Olivia. ‘It shows me how much longer I can drive before filling up the petrol tank again.’
‘That’s the radio,’ said Olivia. ‘It plays music.’
‘This is the steering wheel,’ said Olivia. ‘It steers.’
Finally they reached a large hill. The old lady got out, thanked Olivia profusely, and vanished.
Two weeks or so later Olivia got an invitation in the mail.
You are invited to a ceilidh (party)!
Thursday after next, Castle of Stone Vagabonds, Kingdom of Iron Angels, Faerie.
Just off the A830 to the left going towards Fort William.
Olivia bristled at the fact that the faeries had thought that she, whose family had been in Scotland for over a thousand years, needed to be told what a ceilidh was.
The back of the card said ‘bring a friend! (Olivia Macintyre + 1)’. She laughed. Who the Hell would she bring to a ceilidh in Faerie?
Oh, yeah. Dan. Dan might like to go.
Daniel Urquhart was a friend of Olivia’s from university. They had moved in the same geeky humanities and classics circles and remained close after graduation, chiefly due to both living in the same sparsely-populated part of Scotland. Dan was the only person in the world, other than Olivia herself, who knew about her issues, which they had last discussed when Olivia had complained about Urisk’s behaviour the previous month.
Olivia called up Dan and left a message on his Ansaphone. Dan called back while she was at work (Olivia worked in historical preservation at one of the big castles nearby) saying that he would be delighted to come.
The day of the ceilidh they met at a coffeehouse in Fort William and drove out towards the brugh at the nearest relevant entrance to Iron Angels, a political union of individual faerie brughs and households covering most of the area from Faerie’s Glasgow to Faerie’s Mallaig.
‘It’s on the right,’ said Olivia, ‘as we’re coming from Fort William going toward my house.’
‘I know,’ said Dan. ‘How long’ll we have to walk?’
‘Not very long. There are entrances to Faerie all over the place in the area that they mentioned.’ Olivia stopped the car beside a blasted old oak.
‘So, is there a spell or a trick or…’
‘No, you just walk in.’ Olivia led Dan up the hillside behind the oak to a large flat rock. She turned on her heel, walked a few metres away from the rock, and jumped into a sinkhole. Dan, after a moment’s hesitation, followed.
‘So,’ said Dan nervously, looking around at the drab stone walls. ‘Is this…’
‘Welcome to the Castle of Stone Vagabonds,’ said Olivia. ‘I think Julio and Bob live here. There’s also a married couple of brownies in the north wing.’
‘But don’t brownies usually give covert help to farm families?’
‘Yeah, usually. The entire species isn’t limited to one occupation, you know.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Quiet. I hear music.’ Olivia led Dan downstairs. ‘Yep!’
For lack of a better term, the place was hoppin’. Somebody had put an enchanted guitar and drum set in a corner of the largest room in the brugh, where they played some kind of folk-rock vintage circa 1965. A group of fish-men sat in a corner, uncomfortable in the light and heat of the ceilidh, dousing themselves with as much of the water as they could get away with. Olivia spied John chatting up the ghost of some Viking lord. A selkie in her seal form sat propped up against the wall, her tongue lolling from her mouth, playing up the strange resemblances between some seals and some puppies for all it was worth.
‘Hey, John!’ called Olivia.
‘Oh, you brought your plus-one!’ said John. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, Olivia. Glad you could make it.’ He shook Dan’s hand. ‘John. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Dan. Likewise. Tell me…will I forget who I am and get tricked into eating your food and stay forever, or does that not really happen?’
‘Oh, it happens,’ said John. ‘Don’t worry. You can eat and drink and party as much as you want and Olivia will make sure to drag you out when it’s over. She’s immune to this sort of thing.’
‘Good.’
‘Hey, John,’ said Olivia, ‘do you know where Julio and Bob are? It’s their party, isn’t it?’
‘They’re probably talking to Urisk,’ groaned John. Olivia groaned with him. ‘God, I hate that thing. It never shuts up about the damned economy-which, by the way, has gone to pot ever since the Prime Minister of Saints’-Pity got overthrown. Damned bore, that’s what Urisk is.’
‘Really,’ said Olivia. ‘I would never have guessed from its insistence on working the ruined mill near my house night after night.’
The party was fairly sedate, as Olivia expected from her fairly unadventurous crop of faerie, spook, ghost, and goblin acquaintances. Some of the selkies amused themselves by transforming back and forth from seal to human form several times in quick succession-the moonlight through a high, small window in the brugh’s main room allowed this. A kelpie named Donnchadh, a friend of Urisk’s (just as annoying as expected), showed up, splashing in through the door without remembering to solidify his equine body. This made Julio shout at Urisk for its choice in plus-ones, which apparently had a history of being pretty inappropriate.
The enchanted instruments stopped playing about halfway through the night. Dan, not entirely certain of John’s reassurances, fastidiously avoided all food and drink until Bob brought out the fried cod and he could no longer resist. It dulled his senses a little, but not as much as he had feared. Some wirry-cows brought out some apples, which apparently double-crossed and cancelled out the cod and brought him back into full possession of his faculties.
Olivia noticed some ghillie dhus shrinking away from the main mass of the party.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t like it here,’ said a ghillie dhu. ‘I want to get back to my tree. There are no trees here and no children here. I’m worried someone will cut it down if I’m not on guard.’
‘Nothing will go wrong,’ said Olivia. ‘They don’t log in this part of Scotland any more.’
‘The humans stopped logging?’ asked a very surprised brownie. ‘Wow. Humans stopping logging? Is that even…I mean, no offence, but it’s kind of what you do. At what point and for what reason did you stop?’
‘Only in Scotland,’ said Olivia. ‘A couple of decades ago, I think. We decided that we needed to replace a lot of the forests we’d destroyed or our own environment would suffer.’
‘Wow,’ said the brownie. ‘How about that.’
‘Well?’ asked Olivia while the ceilidh was winding down. ‘How’d you like it?’
‘I wish I knew some faeries,’ said Dan.
‘Check the woods on the hill across the road from your house,’ said Olivia. ‘The Johnsons live by the stream. You’ve probably seen them around, actually.’
‘But…I thought only you could…’
‘Everybody can see them, Dan. It’s not what you see that makes you special; it’s what you recognise. John’s helpful in that he only has the one nostril so it’s easier to tell the difference, but most humanoid faeries are pretty normal-looking.’
‘Yes, I see that now.’
‘Anyway, we should get going,’ said Olivia. ‘Julio, Bob, thanks for the ceilidh!’
‘Any time!’ called Julio. ‘We should do lunch some time!’
‘Sounds good to me! Earth or Faerie?’
‘Whichever. We’re fine with eating your food; it just smells a little funny to us, so…hey! Urisk…Urisk, stop smashing those chairs together!’
‘Urisk always grinds!’
Olivia rolled her eyes. ‘Let’s go, Dan,’ she said.
So they left. The next day Dan woke up with a hangover to end all hangovers, even though he had only had the cod and the apples. He drank some coffee, took a shower, still felt bad, called in sick to work, and went back to bed.