I woke up. The van door was still open. They hadn’t yet shoved me inside.
Oddly, there was no one around. No customers, no one working the booths or attractions. Not even the nuns, or the other children, or Sister Abigail. Just rows of attractions and rides, music playing as if nothing were amiss. The lights brightened the night sky. I guess the funfair itself wasn’t over yet.
“Georgie? Yolanda? Cathy?”
No one answered.
Just in case, I called for Sister Abigail and the other nuns, too. No response. Everyone had vanished. What was going on?
“Ow…”
My headache was totally gone. I felt like a mist had lifted, clearing my thoughts. But I also felt a dull, heavy pain below my waist. Still, I wouldn’t get answers just standing around like this, so I started walking.
It was like walking through old photos of Coney Island, some foreign amusement park with more staff than customers. This was a desolate place; a very strange experience. I walked through the center of the fair, gazing up at the big, flashy merry-go-round. I passed the deserted chocolate banana stand and a punching machine. I ducked under a roof laden with magic 8-balls—presumably the winner’s prize—and walked on down the empty main road.
“Another merry-go-round?” I muttered.
Before I knew it, I was at the very back of the fairgrounds, where I discovered a smaller merry-go-round. Warm, orange bulbs covered this one, and an organ played a friendly song. The ride chugged along softly like a locomotive as it slowly turned. Of course, there were no riders. Ponies made up more than half the animals on the slowly turning stage, but I also saw baby elephants, a Pegasus, giraffes, and dragons. They all looked as if they were having a great time. Antikythera, Becky, Charlotte, David, Elizabeth; each of them had a name tag, displayed in alphabetical order. All of them looked old. They’d clearly been running around this platform for a long time. Their creaky movements certainly weren’t smooth, but they were well oiled, and their bodies appeared waxed and shiny. Someone had done a good job of maintaining them.
“Oh.”
As I stared, flickering, hazy green lights appeared atop the animals. The lights held the reins and danced around on the carved wooden saddles.
Boys? No, girls.
They frolicked and played among the ponies.
Their hair fluttered gracefully. Their long limbs, if human sized, would undoubtedly appear very beautiful. But their legs turned into birds’ feet at the knees, and colorfully-feathered wings sprouted from their shoulders. These wings were small however; it was hard to say how they’d ever get airborne. Their big, black eyes darted this way and that, teeming with curiosity. These girls were tiny, the largest of them barely a foot tall. They flitted and danced happily through the air.
What a rare sight, especially in town.
When had I first seen them? I’d first noticed them when I was very little and my adopted siblings took me into the forest. On the bank of a small pond, insects I’d never seen before swarmed through the air in spiral columns. But the other children ran right into the middle of that swarm, clearly unable to see them. That’s when it all began. I thought I’d imagined it, but the eldest girl, who’d kept her head in the swarm the longest, came down with a nasty fever after we got home. After that, I was sure there were things in this world that only I could see.
Humanoid creatures like these girls weren’t so bad.
Sometimes I’d see unfamiliar birds dart across the sky, or I’d glimpse an ungulate-like creature I could not identify. The easiest to see were swarms of insects, invisible except for their wings as they fluttered in the air. Or there were the black, mist-like patches that you couldn’t focus on no matter how hard you stared.
Sometimes I’d encounter things I instinctively knew to avoid, certain that if our eyes met just once I wouldn’t survive. I could smell the danger on them.
I mostly saw these creatures around old trees or hollows in the forest, near moss-covered rocks or springs, near faerie rings of mushrooms. So it wasn’t all that difficult to act with caution and avoid them.
But honestly, I only knew they existed. I’d never communicated with them at all. They seemed wary of me, so if I ignored them, they wouldn’t approach.
“What are they though?” I muttered aloud.
“Them? They’re Gallopers.”
That surprising answer came from a hoarse, alcohol-roughened voice.
“Who?!”
I jumped and turned around. In the merry-go-round’s shadows, I saw a little hut. The word “Fortunes” was written in brilliant bulbs on the roof. People in a festive mood and ripe with a little booze would enter that hut hoping to speak with some magical thing—a god, Tarot, or a crystal ball. Such people wanted some guarantee of future happiness, a fortune teller’s bread and butter.
I moved closer.
In the shadow of the entrance, an old woman sat behind an oddly-shaped, three-legged table. She wore Romani clothes, presenting the classic picture of a fortune teller, but I couldn’t tell if she was a real Romani. I was only certain she was very old. An elaborately decorated Easter egg stood upright on the messy desk before her. The egg wobbled but somehow maintained its balance.
“Open those eyes of yours, and you’ll soon understand. The wooden horses are all racing clockwise, yes? That’s how you know it’s a proper British Roundabout.”
The woman seemed disinclined to identify herself. Well, she was right about this much; these horses definitely ran clockwise. The horses nearest me all faced left.
“An American Carousel will have them running counter. I’m sure you saw that one in the central clearing, all those Yankee horses that don’t know what it is to be tired.”
The old woman waved a hand dismissively.
“Their proper name is Gallopers. They’re steam-powered, the old-fashioned way, slower than you could walk. Old-timers. They’re verging on a hundred, you know.”
She laughed. Honestly, at first I’d assumed “Gallopers” was a name for the tiny girls.
“So,” she said, after a dramatic pause. “The little green ones flitting all about them? Those are good neighbors.”
My jaw dropped, and I let out a strange little squeak.
“You can see them, right?” she said.
I wasn’t sure what to say. While I gaped at her, she looked closely at my face. Her eyes were different colors and seemed to see right through me. From the way she moved, I could tell she was nearly blind.
“Hmm. I wondered why… That explains it,” she muttered to herself.
“Wait, wh-what do you mean, ‘good neighbors’?” I asked.
“Oh, you don’t know?” she smiled. “Never heard of them in your bedtime stories?”
I shook my head.
“I…don’t have any parents, so…no stories.”
“Parents? Hmm. I see. Well, there you have it.” She nodded, not at all sorry.
“Um…”
“Right. If you want to ask, sit yourself down.”
She pointed to an empty chair. I sat down. Woven cane covered the seat and felt strange beneath me. It seemed light enough for easy transport, handy for Romani. It was oddly shaped but embraced my hips comfortably.
“So, about them.”
I glanced back at the Roundabout, at the girls playing around the ride.
“Like I said. They’re the true friends, the good folk, the Daoine Sídhe, the wee folk. They live in the forests and at the bottom of ponds, in the soil and mud, in the shadows of rocks, and sometimes in the hawthorn trees. We call them neighbors. You may know them better as faeries or spirits.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a well-worn deck of Tarot cards. She shuffled and began laying them out on the table with unsteady hands.
“Specifically, those ones are Ariel. You might know them from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”
I didn’t, but I know what she was trying to tell me. They were the wind. They had wings and antennae, like insects.
“So they are faeries,” I said. I’d wondered if they might be, but I’d never told anyone I could see them and never met anyone else who could. That word had long stayed buried within me.
The old woman snorted. “The neighbors are all quite whimsical, the Ariel included. They often snatch away children or brides, tear up fields, and cause all sorts of damage. Don’t ever call them by their true name—it’s too dangerous. That’s why we have so many other names for them.”
“Oh.”
“Everything started with a word: ‘Let there be light.’ A name grants one control over something, outside and in. Speaking of which, what’s your name?”
“Oh. Agnella.”
“Hope? Hmm, good name for a fatherless child. Let’s see,” she said and flipped one of the cards on the table.