Fey house - Part 1

When you were young, did you believe in fairies? Tiny winged creatures that could exhibit serene beauty merely by sitting on a toadstool and leaving sparkling residue that supposedly had magical properties. As you grow up these beliefs leave you, as they did me. However, they shouldn’t. These creatures are probably at your window right now… watching. They watch all of us, but dare not reveal themselves. They are everywhere, spread finely across our world. You probably think this a whimsical idea born of an overactive imagination or narcotic substance, but I’m sorry to say that you are wrong.

I spent a night in a building called Fey House many years ago. So long ago that I don’t remember where it is, just the look of that old house stood on that solitary dirt track. The building was named after the fact that fireflies congregated around it at night (or so I was told). The taxi dropped me off right outside the decrepit house. The windows were translucent with thick green algae and the white brickwork had suffered an invasion of ivy and lichen. I reluctantly heaved my suitcase up the path. I had no true desire to stay in this place, however unfortunate circumstances (otherwise known as wood worm) forced me to evacuate my own home and seek refuge in the only affordable lodgings I could find at short notice.

I opened the front door slowly and stepped into the foyer. The room was only slightly warmer than outside and seemed to be in a state of abandonment. There was an unmanned reception desk covered in a layer of dust that coated my finger as I dragged it across in random swirls and shapes. I heard no sign of anyone coming to see to my arrival so I called out “Hello!” my voice split the silence and rang around the room… I got the feeling I was talking to myself. I turned around and headed for the door, irritated and tired.

I heard a fluttering behind me.

“Don’t go…”said a small whisper in my ear and I felt a brush against my hand. I turned quickly, alarmed. An old woman with kind features was stood behind the desk, smiling. I approached her, noticing the desk was no longer dusty. Confused I looked at my hand for proof that it once was, but found none...

“Can I help you?” inquired the old woman in a sweet tone. I was silent for a moment, still in a daze. Her voice was not the same as the one I had heard previously.

“I… uh… called yesterday. You said you had a room.” I said, finding my voice again.

“Oh yes. Mr Sall are you not?”

“Yeah… that’s me.” I was handed a key with the number one written on its tag. It looked too new, and the tag was barely frayed.

The old woman led the way up a staircase and, pointing to a door, she said “Make yourself at home” before descending back to the foyer. Despite it not matching the lock’s appearance, the key opened the door without hassle. The room was small and basic with only a bed dressed in plain white sheets and an accompanying night stand, leaving the room feeling bare, yet complete in its own simplistic way. I paced slowly up to the window, testing the floorboards as I went. They groaned terribly, reminding me of the age of the establishment; however I then noticed something that made the worryingly feeble floor the least of my concerns.

The window was completely spotless. I looked out through the clear glass at the spot where I had stood not long ago, looking at this very window, except back then it was covered in algae. With the disappearing dust on the desk in the foyer, the small voice in my ear when I went to leave and now a seemingly self cleaning window, I realised there was more to this place than dust and a kind old lady. That was the moment I should have left and not given Fey House another thought, but something in me, curiosity perhaps, made me stay the night and figure out these little mysteries.

There was a simple explanation in theory, the old woman must have been cleaning the window when I arrived and when she came downstairs she could have wiped the dust from the desk before I turned around. However, I did not believe my own theories and I was right not to. The voice and the fluttering noise remained unexplainable, and in practice there was no way that the old woman could have cleaned the window, both inside and out in the time it took for her to appear. Different ideas circled around endlessly in my head, anything I thought of I would disprove a few moments later. The confusion was exhausting and my already weary mind began to falter.

My eyes shot open as I felt something sharp digging into my wrist. I looked down to see a small figure biting into my arm and lapping up the blood that flowed out of the wound. I didn’t move, too shocked to have any kind of reaction. The creature noticed me stirring and stared at me. It was the size of my index finger and looked human, except for razor sharp teeth that were too long to be fully concealed in its mouth, slender claws on its hands that reached down to its toes and a pair of fragile looking wings filled with blood vessels that pulsed grotesquely. This was my first encounter with a fairy and not the last I would have that night. It made a high pitched screech that caused blood to spray from its mouth onto my shirt. It flew away, to where I did not see, but I was aware of how agile and quickly it darted off. I lifted my wrist to my face. It was still bleeding freely; I wiped the blood on the bed sheet and looked again. There was a ring of tiny holes that ran deep into my wrist, accounting for the large amount of blood that poured out of them.

I got out of bed and made for the door, though I wasn’t sure where I was going to go. I tried the door and found it locked. The small whisper from earlier piped up again, however this time the words were spat violently “You can’t escape from us”, I turned towards the source of the voice and saw it flying towards me, claws outstretched like a living dart. A simple swat was all it took to ground the devilish creature; it struck the wooden floor hard and I heard the breaking of its tiny bones. It lay writhing in the floor, curdling my blood with an ear-splitting screech. I silenced it with my foot, feeling it crunch beneath my shoe like a large spider.

My eye sight blurred and the room began to spin. Objects in the room started to change, morphing into something new... something grotesque. When my vision returned the space around me had transformed. The floorboards were rotten and broken and the window was once again covered in algae. The most horrific change was the bed. The crisp white sheets were I had been resting were now stained red with dried blood and a foul stench was permeating through them. I approached it cautiously and slowly removed the sheet. There was no mattress underneath. Instead there were corpses. At least five naked bodies in various states of decay and with internal organs spilling from opened abdomens in an orgy of gore and death. I had slept on these... I fought the urge to vomit, not wanting to further defile these poor people. I realised that the creature that lay crushed on the floor must have done this, but not on its own. It had said “us”, there were more of them, however at the time I couldn’t even begin to think if the size that their swarm turned out to be.

‘Fairy dust’ or Fey poison as I call it. That was the substance that had caused me to hallucinate. Caused me to not realise the horrors of the room I had slept in, I know that now, but I didn’t then. I didn’t really care what had caused it at the time; I just wanted to get out of Fey House before more of its namesake arrived. I kicked down the door, as the dust’s power had faded the door revealed itself to be almost hanging off its hinges.

Blood. There was blood everywhere when I opened the door and saw the house for the first time with un-tinted eyes. It stained the walls and the floors, all of it dried. I started to wonder whether the five in my room had been the only victims of these creatures so far, or if others had fallen prey to this trickery. I ran down the stairs, almost stumbling with desire to leave and never look back. The foyer was dusty like in had seen it when I arrived. There was no trace of death in this part of the house, the creatures were clever, they seemed to know how to trap people in their home, as they had done to me.

The front door was locked and was too sturdy to break down; the old woman must have locked it overnight. It was at this point that my thoughts turned to the old woman. Was she who she appeared to be? Or was she something hideous hiding behind the manipulation of the fairies? I needed the key to leave, meaning I was to find out.