Working that summer in the Gryphon’s Inner Dale Bookstore and Cafe was quite fun. It was what I would expect of an eclectic farm and business owned by eccentric foreigners…sort of.
We had a variety of humans guests from random places who stayed in our guesthouses in the Teton National Park. We were not busy, though, because we offered nothing except the cabins and the book shop. With fancy resorts all around Jackson and no advertising, I was surprised we had any guests at all.
A black bear named Chief came to visit one morning, about a week after I started working there, and terrified me from leaving the shop until Cedar, the gnome who owned the shop, came in around lunch time to check on me.
“Don’t mind him,” said Cedar when I told him. “I’ll invite him to tea, and you can get to know him better.”
Then he left… I mean Cedar. The bear hung around the whole week.
I was invited to tea at a picnic table behind their log cabin, wondering if I was going to be meeting a talking bear. After working for fairies, I could believe almost anything.
No, Summer and Cedar had prepared sandwiches for us and a bowl of fruits and nuts for the bear, which he ate about ten yards from us. I informed my employers that, for humans, it was dangerous to feed bears and get them used to human contact. It encouraged bear confrontations in town. They were surprised and fascinated by this. I didn’t really know how things worked in the fairy world or with fairies, but they told me that contact with fairies was a very different thing for wild animals. The animals stayed just as wild as they had always been.
So, we had many wild animals around, and I stayed away from them. I observed them from afar, and I took many pictures of the animals. Summer and Cedar requested that I not take pictures of them, so I respected that.
Summer time passed into autumn and the leaves of the Quaking Aspen changed into vibrant reds, yellows, and oranges. My Southern blood required that I wear a sweater or coat constantly. My car did get fixed by Ron… the shop, not the former owner… at some point. It broke again, and was fixed, temporarily, for a few months.
My first fairy customer was a tall, thin man who immediately asked for Summer when he came into the shop. I went upstairs where she was shelving a few books. Summer was so thrilled when she saw our visitor that she embraced him like a long-time friend. Since Summer was a sprite who had hidden her wings by magic, I assumed the man must be the same.
“Mina,” said Summer. “This is Cypress, a famous Undine sculptor.” He held out his hand, and I saw that it was webbed when I shook hands with him. “Mina is a human who is kindly helping us around the shop.”
She then escorted our guest to one of the cabins to stay with us for a week. I didn’t see what luggage he had, or if he had walked here. I only saw him again at dinner time. We ate in the shop’s cafe. Summer made a trout dinner that would have been perfect for one of the most expensive restaurants in Jackson, and those were world-class fine dining places. The richest people in the world vacationed in Jackson. I told her my thoughts on her incredible cooking.
Apparently, the meal was very good by fairy standards as well, because Cypress complimented it many times.
“Would you like to hear a story about a ghostly feast I experienced once?’ he asked, once he had a glass or two of expensive French wine.
“It is almost Halloween here,” I replied. “It is the season for ghost stories in the human world.” My employers also encouraged him to tell his story.
“Ah,” he replied as he leaned back. “It happened about two years ago.”
***
The winter wind howled through the woods of the Gnomes’ forest like the cry of wolves on the hunt. My companions and I were not adventurous, nor were they the kind who took risks. As an Undine, the only one in this caravan, I typically would not travel in winter. We water people hate extreme temperatures, but the king had commissioned a limestone sculpture for a new garden in his solarium for his daughter’s birthday. It was to be the personification of wisdom as a gorgeous woman, and it needed to be done by spring. My diamond-tipped chisel broke, the kind you can only get from the Ogres, and I had no choice with my limited funds but to travel to their homeland myself to get a replacement. We, odd travelers, had joined each other’s company for the sole purpose of traveling safely from the southern Dryad town of Greenbow to the northern underground Ogre city of Jasper’s Deep. There was safety in numbers, and our company was a large caravan of twenty-four. Yet, the blizzard had taken us by surprise in both its suddenness and its fierceness.
“We have to find shelter!” shouted Foxglove, the Nomad warrior that Turnip the Brownie had hired to protect his family of six. The Nomad, with his thick flowing robes, sat on a brown mare while the tiny rat-like family of brownies followed him in their wagon, pulled by a massive dog, a mastiff.
“I see a large house up ahead,” I shouted above the wind. My salamander had four blankets over him under my saddle, and he was still moving like a sloth drunk on cinnamon tonic. I was at the very back of the line, but I could see a two-story house to my left through the snow.
“Cypress, we cannot stop there,” shouted the Hiru merchant back to me in his serpentine dragon form at the front of the caravan. He pulled his long wagon himself. “It’s haunted by the spirit of the Countess of Sapphire Lake.”
“I don’t care if the devil himself is there,” shouted the Ogre miner, walking through the snow behind the Hiru dragon with his wife. “We can’t stay in this blizzard. We will all freeze to death by morning.”
“We must go there,” I shouted in agreement, and most of the other travelers agreed. We turned the caravan and headed to the house.
I didn’t care much about hauntings. I cared about the king’s wrath when my sculpture was late or even inferior to what he wanted. I had no inspiration. There were beautiful Undine women to model for my sculpture, but they didn’t give me the sense of being the embodiment of wisdom. They were young, innocent girls who knew nothing about life and death. I had taken the commission because I needed the money. I was a good sculptor, but I had no patron to pay my bills. The jobs had run dry. I needed the money to live, but even more, I wanted to make a sculpture that would be the pinnacle of my career. A job from the king was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. It needed to be the kind of sculpture that made a person famous and sought after. I needed a solid flow of work. I never wanted to return to digging ditches ever again.
The wind picked up, and I pulled the hood of my thick wool cloak down to block everything but the barest sliver of visibility. I was risking my life over a chisel. It seemed ridiculous, but here I was with no way to change my mind.
The estate we traveled towards was far larger than we all had expected. Multiple massive buildings were surrounded by a stone wall with an iron gate. Foxglove and the Ogre miner had to force the frozen gate open. As we walked through into the circular courtyard of the complex, a Sprite husband and wife with butterfly wings and the Hiru dragon merchant decided that they would rather travel on without us than stay at a haunted house. I had to admit, the house was dreary and run-down.
The rest of us continued to move on through the courtyard and, like children, waited for someone to take command. A run-down servant’s quarters and barn stood to our right, and remains of a stable and greenhouse stood to the left. Sounds of voices filled the breeze like a conversation of whispers muddled beyond comprehension. Huddled together, we searched for the voices with our eyes. Finally, I came to my senses.
“We need to find shelter for our animals,” I shouted. “The barn looks sturdy enough. Come, let us find shelter for them there.”
The entire group agreed, and we took our wagons into the massive, greying barn. I had been sure the barn was not big enough to hold all of our wagons when we had entered the grounds, but it subtly grew as we came towards it and entered it. No one in the group said anything, so I decided it was an illusion, the product of my tired imagination and the difficulty of seeing through the storm.
The inside of the barn was not as deteriorated as it looked from the outside. The wood rafters looked solid, and the smell of pine and hay tickled my nose. The structure looked no more than a few years old.
As we entered the vast building, we each found a stall for our beasts filled with clean, fresh hay. We busied ourselves silently with the duties necessary for staying the night. When we finished unharnessing our beasts, we gathered in the center of the building, big enough to hold a country dance. The majority of our group was made up of Ogres and Dryads. The Nomad and the Brownie family arrived last.
“I do not know what the rest of you plan, but we have decided to stay in the barn for the night,” said the father of the Brownie brood.
“I stay with my employer,” said the Nomad warrior, leaning on a supporting post with his arms folded.
“The polite thing would be to check the house for owners,” said the elderly Dryad woman, Myrtle. She and four other Dryads had come with wagons filled with exotic lumber to sell to the Ogres in Jasper’s Deep. The mountains of Rokorokubi had few trees that were useful for fine carpentry.
“I don’t believe in hauntings,” continued Myrtle. “There is fresh hay here, and it didn’t get here by itself. We need to repay the person to whom we are indebted.”
“I agree,” I replied. I had at first thought I would stay with the brownies, but I hadn’t considered that this hay belonged to someone who had stored it for winter. “Yes, we need to pay for the hay. All of us are going to use quite a lot to feed our animals.”
The twelve of us agreed to go to the main house, and we left the Brownies in the barn to watch our animals for the night.
We went out into the cold and continued on to the marble steps and massive doors of the main house. The group waited before the doors, and I stepped forward to use the brass knocker. The sound of the knocker echoed on the wooden door extraordinarily loudly, resounding above the roaring wind. Then, the door unlocked and opened silently, revealing a dark interior.
***
“And so I’ll have to continue the story tomorrow night,” said Cypress.
“Wait! No!” I cried. “You can’t do that.”
He laughed as he got up. “I ran out of time and energy. I promise I will continue at tomorrow’s dinner.”
And that was what he did.
THE END… Until the next month’s episode.