Secret History: Inamorata Shandy's Genuine Fake Fairy
Greetings, gentle readers!
Last Sunday, at the behest of the department head, I made an excursion to Grant's Pass, OR where I met with a wonderful prospective donor, Miss T.
I trust that you, gentle readers, will not think less of me if I say that I am not the most sociable creature, and that I seldom enjoy the process of currying favor. Miss T., a beautiful lady of venerable years and respectable girth, very quickly put me at my ease. We spent a great deal of time discussing her twice-great grand-aunt's formidable collection of natural history items, which she has recently inherited. Understanding that such items require careful preservation, and unsure of her own ability to provide that sort of curatorship, Miss T had called the S.I.N. asking if we might be interested in acquiring it for our cryptozoological department. I went out to investigate, and indeed, found it well appointed!
Once the gloves came off, I had a wonderful time, and I was relaxing afterward with a bit of sweet tea when my hostess asked if I had any interest in examining a "genuine fake" that had been found in her great-great-grand-aunt's effects. Of course my curiosity was piqued! Miss T. disappeared into the attic and returned with a linen-wrapped bundle in a cedar box. She unveiled its contents, what appeared to be a sideshow gaff of a mummified fairy, complete with ravaged iridescent wings and wisps of hair flying away from a peeling scalp.
Favorably impressed and rather amused by this revolting display - Lady Cottington's work has always pleased me more than I care to admit - I commented on its un-lifelike but very realistic appearance.
"Aunt Ida tried to pass it off as real to the Ashmolean Museum," she said. "She went around and around with the Keeper. It was an enormous prank, of course, but one they both enjoyed immensely. He had a plaque made up for her that said 'There's no such thing as fairies.' She mounted the plaque under the display. It was a running joke between them.
"I've always wanted to know if she made it herself," Miss T. said, whereupon I offered to examine it for her. An object like that, created by a single person and then boxed up in an attic for who knows how many years, will retain strong impressions of its creator, I explained, and I would be able to tell her at once if it was her great aunt's work.
She thought this was a fine idea, so I scooped up the "fairy" in one cotton-gloved hand. I stripped the glove off the other with my teeth and carefully lay my fingers on the ghastly ribcage. I was immediately rewarded with the shock of my life. Only experience allowed me not to drop it right then and there.
"I can only presume that nobody from your great-great-grand-aunt's time until now has psychometrically examined this 'fake,'" I said. "If they had, they would almost certainly have noticed that it is quite real."
Miss T. thought I was having her on at first, and I am still not sure she believes me, but she graciously allowed me to package the fairy up and bring it back with me to the S.I.N. for further examination. I did take a few pictures, however, which I will share with you anon, along with some of the fairy's story, which I have been researching in our archives.
Anyway, I do believe that Miss T. will donate most of her collection to our good institution, and I am glad of that, for she tells me there is another 'fake' very much like this one at her brother's house in Arcadia, MO, and that he might be willing to part with it. I am eager to see if this is true and have already asked if I might be sent to obtain it!
I will certainly keep you appraised of the situation!
Curiously Yours,
- Lorelei Knightley-Someday
***
Deceased "fake" fairy
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Found in 1899 by Inamorata Hopewell-Shandy
More pictures can be found here! Please go look!
The Shandys were among the first of the thaumaturgical gentry to emigrate to America. The young family made its way as best it could, always dogged by chaos - that unique brand of win some/lose some referred to in witching circles as "Shandy Luck." Never wealthy, and with talents barely reliable enough to qualify them as charlatans, they roamed the East until Fate brought the Shandy family to the Midwest, and Chicago.
Vervain Shandy was a stage magician of some note. "The Grand Shandy" is best remembered for his epic rivalry with Fortinbras Hopewell, yet in the beginning, they were friends. They had attended Hamner Hall and then the Salem Institute together, and found themselves united by that sort of underdog solidarity so peculiar to educational institutions.
The Hopewell family had absolutely no documentable history of magical talent, and sat even lower in the pecking order than the Shandys. Fortinbras was a sport, a rogue talent. Some distant ancestor, name lost to years and perhaps further shadowed by illegitimacy, had been gifted, and the strains of that blood had long lay dormant, not manifesting until Fortinbras' birth.
Rather than fight over the same low rung on the social ladder, Fortinbras Hopewell and Vervain Shandy decided to ally themselves and reach higher. They worked together for years, and even the mean scraps of genuine magic they could summon between them were sufficient to distinguish them from other stage magicians of the time, whose reputations were built on jealously-guarded trickery and clever fakes.
Shandy was more powerful, but the chaotic nature of Shandy magic meant demonstrations of his power could never be entirely safe, and so Hopewell often supplied the magic while Shandy supplied the showmanship. Nevertheless, like many Shandys before him, Vervain nearly put an end to his own career on multiple occasions, whether by almost committing grievous harm to himself or by accidentally perpetrating untoward magics and transformations upon his audience. Fortunately, by the time a large audience in Philadelphia was reduced to a state of total undress and bizarre hirsutism, Hopewell was adept at undoing Shandy's handiwork, and the affected individuals were only to eager to attribute the uncanny incident to mass hypnotism.
Because the Grand Shandy's performances relied on real magic, he became even more well-known in professional circles than in public ones. His acts could not be reproduced by ordinary means, and it is an unfortunate truth that no fewer than four men died attempting to do so.
When Hopewell confessed his intent to retire into a life of stability and comfort, leaving Shandy to work alone, Shandy was crushed. Their disagreement spun out of control, and the simple holding spell that Shandy cast on the retreating Hopewell misfired tragically and, reflected back upon the caster, paralyzed Shandy from the waist down.
Obviously, the two parted ways on ill terms.
As sometimes happens with injuries dealt by magic, Shandy's body was slow to repair itself and magical interference merely exacerbated the condition. His convalescence at the fine home he'd had built just outside of Chicago was slow, and in his fallow time he undertook the study of alchemy and anatomy, seeking to cure with science what he could not cure with magic.
His researches naturally led him down the path of homonculi, golems, and other such constructs, for he believed that by learning to channel life essences into small animates, he would uncover principles that would allow him to rerout his own energies and cure himself.
Shandy's journals chronicle his extensive and unsuccessful experiments with the black hen and dunghill method of homonculus incubation, which, while ancient and reliable, proved problematic as the inevitable Shandy luck reared its head once more.
To create an homonculus, one must replace a portion of an egg's white with a quantity of human semen, seal it with wax or new parchment, and incubate it in a dunghill for thirty days. Coincidentally to this, an unfavorable conjunction of the planets caused several of Shandy's black cockerels to lay eggs. This fact remained unknown to Shandy, who used a full dozen eggs in his first experiment, of which at least five were cock's eggs.
The astute reader will no doubt recall that cock's eggs, when incubated properly, produce cockatrices. This is evidently true even if the contents of the egg have been adulterated. Said adulteration had no effect upon the resultant crop of cockatrices other than to make Shandy himself immune to their baleful gaze, though a number of barnyard animals and at least one groom were temporarily petrified.
As they cannot breed and therefore have no use for one another, cockatrices will attack one another on sight. While it is not true that a cockatrice will die if it sees itself in a mirror, it is true that a cockatrice, believing its reflection to be a rival, will attack its own reflection with such ferocity that it batters itself into senselessness.
Taking advantage of this ferocity, Shandy used a series of mirrors to lure the creatures out of the garden and indoors, and thence into an old steamer trunk. Cockatrices are formidable animals, posessed not only of a debilitating stare but also a cockerel's sharp spurs and a wickedly strong reptilian tail. Trapped, they fought with one another to the death. Shandy killed the last one himself, and confessed that the episode left him quite depressed for days.
The hen's eggs incubating nearby cracked when the cockatrices dug their way out, unfortunately, and subsequent experiments failed to yield anything resembling a human form.
Shandy left that avenue of enquiry and drew now upon a completely unrelated method of creating homonculi, one which involved mandrake roots plucked at a specific hour from the ground near a gallows. Dismissing as superstition the need for semen spilled from a hanged man and working according to his own theories, Shandy once more contributed his own materia vitae to the endeavor, fertilizing the mandrake garden himself.
He incubated the most human-shaped mandrake roots in a heated solution of blood, milk, honey, salt water, and certain alchemical essences. The results of this experiment were startlingly successful, yielding a number of small creatures which resembled nothing so much as tiny, winged humans.
When people commonly refer to fairies, they mean tiny, winged humanoid creatures full of mischief and wishes. Real fairies are great and terrible beings who do not much resemble the diminutive creatures of folklore and fairy tale, and resent the comparison. In this sense, therefore, there really is no such thing as fairies. Certain lesser nature spirits resemble "fairies," but they are made of mutable stuff and capable of taking corporeal form only briefly. Even if one captured a spirit of this type and dissected it, one would find nothing inside but thistledown or notes of music or a brief but vivid dream.
These little beings created by Shandy's experiment were real, functioning animals, and proved able to reproduce themselves in the ordinary way. While this capacity represented a prodigal alchemical success, it was problematic in other ways. The creatures bred like rabbits, quite out of control, and within a few months had overrun the hall, working their mischief incessantly, night and day. Shandy's journal from this time reads like the ramblings of a man being driven to madness by insomnia . . . which he was.
He trapped and distributed a few as curiosities to various other alchemists that he disliked, but realized quickly that he could not in good conscience sell them as pets. The little creatures were untameable, uncontrollable, and very clever. They passed knowledge from one generation to the next, and quickly learned to pick locks, set traps, and work any number of mechanical devices. Their rudimentary culture would have made a fascinating study for a thaumatozoologist, but Shandy wished only to put an end to it.
The first group was quite pretty, but inbreeding over successive generations brought about a singular unwholesomeness of countenance quite at odds with the pearlescent markings and iridescent wings. They proved to be inveterate escape artists, and they did not tolerate handling well.
Their sole redeeming feature, in Shandy's eyes, was that they were not particularly durable. Due to their small size they were not appreciably harder to kill than a rat. It is for this reason alone that Shandy Manor was not completely overrun, as every inch of it was soon baited and trapped.
Vervain Shandy did eventually marry: the dishonored daughter of Melilot Chatoyer, a French countess with whom he had been corresponding for quite some time over the matter of a certain cursed jewel. He let his futile quest for a cure fall by the wayside as he explored the wonders of a life lived with a little less bitterness.
Very little was heard from Shandy's little fairies for a long time, until the birth of Vervain and Melilot's first child, Inamorata Rue, whereupon they discovered that a house booby-trapped for fairies was antithetical to the well-being of a small human. Many of the protections were removed, and the population surged again, with Shandy Manor becoming almost unliveable for certain parts of the late spring and early summer.
One would think that a child would delight in the presence of such creatures, and make companions of them, but neither child nor creatures desired this, and they were as at odds as the housecat with its house-mice. The creatures tormented little Inamorata, and, never a sentimental child, she killed them in progressively more inventive ways.
In her adulthood, Inamorata live-trapped these creatures, euthanized them, and carefully aged them in her attic. She would then pose them and mount them, sometimes adding tiny artifacts in addition to the jewelry they sometimes made for themselves. Their flesh proved quite durable and slow to decompose, eminently suitable for this purpose.
Her income from these "genuine fakes" was considerable, and kept Shandy Manor from being seized by debtors for over a decade after her mother died, leaving her with very little in the way of income.
The Shandy house unfortunately passed out of the family sometime in 1932 and it is not known whether Vervain's little creatures still live there in any number. Their natural lifespan is unknown.
Still, the fact that the old Shandy house has changed hands twenty-seven times does make one wonder.
Last Sunday, at the behest of the department head, I made an excursion to Grant's Pass, OR where I met with a wonderful prospective donor, Miss T.
I trust that you, gentle readers, will not think less of me if I say that I am not the most sociable creature, and that I seldom enjoy the process of currying favor. Miss T., a beautiful lady of venerable years and respectable girth, very quickly put me at my ease. We spent a great deal of time discussing her twice-great grand-aunt's formidable collection of natural history items, which she has recently inherited. Understanding that such items require careful preservation, and unsure of her own ability to provide that sort of curatorship, Miss T had called the S.I.N. asking if we might be interested in acquiring it for our cryptozoological department. I went out to investigate, and indeed, found it well appointed!
Once the gloves came off, I had a wonderful time, and I was relaxing afterward with a bit of sweet tea when my hostess asked if I had any interest in examining a "genuine fake" that had been found in her great-great-grand-aunt's effects. Of course my curiosity was piqued! Miss T. disappeared into the attic and returned with a linen-wrapped bundle in a cedar box. She unveiled its contents, what appeared to be a sideshow gaff of a mummified fairy, complete with ravaged iridescent wings and wisps of hair flying away from a peeling scalp.
Favorably impressed and rather amused by this revolting display - Lady Cottington's work has always pleased me more than I care to admit - I commented on its un-lifelike but very realistic appearance.
"Aunt Ida tried to pass it off as real to the Ashmolean Museum," she said. "She went around and around with the Keeper. It was an enormous prank, of course, but one they both enjoyed immensely. He had a plaque made up for her that said 'There's no such thing as fairies.' She mounted the plaque under the display. It was a running joke between them.
"I've always wanted to know if she made it herself," Miss T. said, whereupon I offered to examine it for her. An object like that, created by a single person and then boxed up in an attic for who knows how many years, will retain strong impressions of its creator, I explained, and I would be able to tell her at once if it was her great aunt's work.
She thought this was a fine idea, so I scooped up the "fairy" in one cotton-gloved hand. I stripped the glove off the other with my teeth and carefully lay my fingers on the ghastly ribcage. I was immediately rewarded with the shock of my life. Only experience allowed me not to drop it right then and there.
"I can only presume that nobody from your great-great-grand-aunt's time until now has psychometrically examined this 'fake,'" I said. "If they had, they would almost certainly have noticed that it is quite real."
Miss T. thought I was having her on at first, and I am still not sure she believes me, but she graciously allowed me to package the fairy up and bring it back with me to the S.I.N. for further examination. I did take a few pictures, however, which I will share with you anon, along with some of the fairy's story, which I have been researching in our archives.
Anyway, I do believe that Miss T. will donate most of her collection to our good institution, and I am glad of that, for she tells me there is another 'fake' very much like this one at her brother's house in Arcadia, MO, and that he might be willing to part with it. I am eager to see if this is true and have already asked if I might be sent to obtain it!
I will certainly keep you appraised of the situation!
Curiously Yours,
- Lorelei Knightley-Someday
***
Deceased "fake" fairy
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Found in 1899 by Inamorata Hopewell-Shandy
More pictures can be found here! Please go look!
The Shandys were among the first of the thaumaturgical gentry to emigrate to America. The young family made its way as best it could, always dogged by chaos - that unique brand of win some/lose some referred to in witching circles as "Shandy Luck." Never wealthy, and with talents barely reliable enough to qualify them as charlatans, they roamed the East until Fate brought the Shandy family to the Midwest, and Chicago.
Vervain Shandy was a stage magician of some note. "The Grand Shandy" is best remembered for his epic rivalry with Fortinbras Hopewell, yet in the beginning, they were friends. They had attended Hamner Hall and then the Salem Institute together, and found themselves united by that sort of underdog solidarity so peculiar to educational institutions.
The Hopewell family had absolutely no documentable history of magical talent, and sat even lower in the pecking order than the Shandys. Fortinbras was a sport, a rogue talent. Some distant ancestor, name lost to years and perhaps further shadowed by illegitimacy, had been gifted, and the strains of that blood had long lay dormant, not manifesting until Fortinbras' birth.
Rather than fight over the same low rung on the social ladder, Fortinbras Hopewell and Vervain Shandy decided to ally themselves and reach higher. They worked together for years, and even the mean scraps of genuine magic they could summon between them were sufficient to distinguish them from other stage magicians of the time, whose reputations were built on jealously-guarded trickery and clever fakes.
Shandy was more powerful, but the chaotic nature of Shandy magic meant demonstrations of his power could never be entirely safe, and so Hopewell often supplied the magic while Shandy supplied the showmanship. Nevertheless, like many Shandys before him, Vervain nearly put an end to his own career on multiple occasions, whether by almost committing grievous harm to himself or by accidentally perpetrating untoward magics and transformations upon his audience. Fortunately, by the time a large audience in Philadelphia was reduced to a state of total undress and bizarre hirsutism, Hopewell was adept at undoing Shandy's handiwork, and the affected individuals were only to eager to attribute the uncanny incident to mass hypnotism.
Because the Grand Shandy's performances relied on real magic, he became even more well-known in professional circles than in public ones. His acts could not be reproduced by ordinary means, and it is an unfortunate truth that no fewer than four men died attempting to do so.
When Hopewell confessed his intent to retire into a life of stability and comfort, leaving Shandy to work alone, Shandy was crushed. Their disagreement spun out of control, and the simple holding spell that Shandy cast on the retreating Hopewell misfired tragically and, reflected back upon the caster, paralyzed Shandy from the waist down.
Obviously, the two parted ways on ill terms.
As sometimes happens with injuries dealt by magic, Shandy's body was slow to repair itself and magical interference merely exacerbated the condition. His convalescence at the fine home he'd had built just outside of Chicago was slow, and in his fallow time he undertook the study of alchemy and anatomy, seeking to cure with science what he could not cure with magic.
His researches naturally led him down the path of homonculi, golems, and other such constructs, for he believed that by learning to channel life essences into small animates, he would uncover principles that would allow him to rerout his own energies and cure himself.
Shandy's journals chronicle his extensive and unsuccessful experiments with the black hen and dunghill method of homonculus incubation, which, while ancient and reliable, proved problematic as the inevitable Shandy luck reared its head once more.
To create an homonculus, one must replace a portion of an egg's white with a quantity of human semen, seal it with wax or new parchment, and incubate it in a dunghill for thirty days. Coincidentally to this, an unfavorable conjunction of the planets caused several of Shandy's black cockerels to lay eggs. This fact remained unknown to Shandy, who used a full dozen eggs in his first experiment, of which at least five were cock's eggs.
The astute reader will no doubt recall that cock's eggs, when incubated properly, produce cockatrices. This is evidently true even if the contents of the egg have been adulterated. Said adulteration had no effect upon the resultant crop of cockatrices other than to make Shandy himself immune to their baleful gaze, though a number of barnyard animals and at least one groom were temporarily petrified.
As they cannot breed and therefore have no use for one another, cockatrices will attack one another on sight. While it is not true that a cockatrice will die if it sees itself in a mirror, it is true that a cockatrice, believing its reflection to be a rival, will attack its own reflection with such ferocity that it batters itself into senselessness.
Taking advantage of this ferocity, Shandy used a series of mirrors to lure the creatures out of the garden and indoors, and thence into an old steamer trunk. Cockatrices are formidable animals, posessed not only of a debilitating stare but also a cockerel's sharp spurs and a wickedly strong reptilian tail. Trapped, they fought with one another to the death. Shandy killed the last one himself, and confessed that the episode left him quite depressed for days.
The hen's eggs incubating nearby cracked when the cockatrices dug their way out, unfortunately, and subsequent experiments failed to yield anything resembling a human form.
Shandy left that avenue of enquiry and drew now upon a completely unrelated method of creating homonculi, one which involved mandrake roots plucked at a specific hour from the ground near a gallows. Dismissing as superstition the need for semen spilled from a hanged man and working according to his own theories, Shandy once more contributed his own materia vitae to the endeavor, fertilizing the mandrake garden himself.
He incubated the most human-shaped mandrake roots in a heated solution of blood, milk, honey, salt water, and certain alchemical essences. The results of this experiment were startlingly successful, yielding a number of small creatures which resembled nothing so much as tiny, winged humans.
When people commonly refer to fairies, they mean tiny, winged humanoid creatures full of mischief and wishes. Real fairies are great and terrible beings who do not much resemble the diminutive creatures of folklore and fairy tale, and resent the comparison. In this sense, therefore, there really is no such thing as fairies. Certain lesser nature spirits resemble "fairies," but they are made of mutable stuff and capable of taking corporeal form only briefly. Even if one captured a spirit of this type and dissected it, one would find nothing inside but thistledown or notes of music or a brief but vivid dream.
These little beings created by Shandy's experiment were real, functioning animals, and proved able to reproduce themselves in the ordinary way. While this capacity represented a prodigal alchemical success, it was problematic in other ways. The creatures bred like rabbits, quite out of control, and within a few months had overrun the hall, working their mischief incessantly, night and day. Shandy's journal from this time reads like the ramblings of a man being driven to madness by insomnia . . . which he was.
He trapped and distributed a few as curiosities to various other alchemists that he disliked, but realized quickly that he could not in good conscience sell them as pets. The little creatures were untameable, uncontrollable, and very clever. They passed knowledge from one generation to the next, and quickly learned to pick locks, set traps, and work any number of mechanical devices. Their rudimentary culture would have made a fascinating study for a thaumatozoologist, but Shandy wished only to put an end to it.
The first group was quite pretty, but inbreeding over successive generations brought about a singular unwholesomeness of countenance quite at odds with the pearlescent markings and iridescent wings. They proved to be inveterate escape artists, and they did not tolerate handling well.
Their sole redeeming feature, in Shandy's eyes, was that they were not particularly durable. Due to their small size they were not appreciably harder to kill than a rat. It is for this reason alone that Shandy Manor was not completely overrun, as every inch of it was soon baited and trapped.
Vervain Shandy did eventually marry: the dishonored daughter of Melilot Chatoyer, a French countess with whom he had been corresponding for quite some time over the matter of a certain cursed jewel. He let his futile quest for a cure fall by the wayside as he explored the wonders of a life lived with a little less bitterness.
Very little was heard from Shandy's little fairies for a long time, until the birth of Vervain and Melilot's first child, Inamorata Rue, whereupon they discovered that a house booby-trapped for fairies was antithetical to the well-being of a small human. Many of the protections were removed, and the population surged again, with Shandy Manor becoming almost unliveable for certain parts of the late spring and early summer.
One would think that a child would delight in the presence of such creatures, and make companions of them, but neither child nor creatures desired this, and they were as at odds as the housecat with its house-mice. The creatures tormented little Inamorata, and, never a sentimental child, she killed them in progressively more inventive ways.
In her adulthood, Inamorata live-trapped these creatures, euthanized them, and carefully aged them in her attic. She would then pose them and mount them, sometimes adding tiny artifacts in addition to the jewelry they sometimes made for themselves. Their flesh proved quite durable and slow to decompose, eminently suitable for this purpose.
Her income from these "genuine fakes" was considerable, and kept Shandy Manor from being seized by debtors for over a decade after her mother died, leaving her with very little in the way of income.
The Shandy house unfortunately passed out of the family sometime in 1932 and it is not known whether Vervain's little creatures still live there in any number. Their natural lifespan is unknown.
Still, the fact that the old Shandy house has changed hands twenty-seven times does make one wonder.