Oh Human Child
Copyright 2012 by PoMoCo, Smashwords Edition
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
When young teen Jacob's brother is kidnapped by the unseelie fae, he doesn't hesitate to set out to rescue him armed only with a baseball bat, some celtic knotwork, and his best friend Tylor. Together the pair must brave witches, trolls, and a faerie court to rescue the kidnapped boy, but Jacob isn't the sort to give up or give in easily in this modern fairy tale.
"It was a fairy." Jacob spoke quietly, pulling the aluminum baseball bat out of his closet and laying it across the bed.
"What?" Tyler looked up from the comics he was holding. He wasn't reading it, he was just sort of holding it awkwardly. He did a lot of things awkwardly, truth be told. Dropping trays in the lunch room, never showing up on time, always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Right now he was pretending to read the same comic he'd been pretending to read when he'd heard about Jacob's parents' divorce a few weeks ago. He hadn't offered a comforting word, he hadn't offered a shoulder to cry on, he'd just pretended to be very absorbed in what he (wasn't) reading, hating himself and wishing he knew what to say.
Jacob didn't mind. Tyler was just like that.
"A fairy took my brother."
Tyler didn't know how to respond. He'd been feeling awkward, and sweaty, and overweight - even more so than usual. His skin felt flushed and his scalp itched, and he'd been uncomfortable since he'd biked on over after hearing the news. He felt like a big dumb heel - Jacob was his (only) best friend, and he had no idea what to do or say or what was expected of him. Up until now, Jacob hadn't said a word after his mother had let Tyler in, so his friend had defaulted to standing around, making half-hearted attempts to spur conversation, having second-thoughts about the sleep-over their parents had arranged. Everyone involved seemed to be a little bit awkward about it.
"My mom said that your mom said that the cops said-"
"No." The certainty of the word stopped Tyler cold. "A fairy took him."
"He was kidnapped?" the words came out in a conspiratorial whisper. Echoes of parental warnings to avoid strange old men in cars came flooding back to Tyler, a dread of strangers that had turned into a distrust of adults in general. Not that, in his experience, kids his own age were much better.
"Taken. Sort of." Jacob floundered a little, eyes gazing across his room. It had always unnerved Tyler a little just how clean Jacob's room was. It went beyond the "a place for everything and everything in its place" mantra that his own father espoused; Jacob's room practically had a stark unlived-in sparseness to it. What few toys he kept were placed neatly on his shelves, his clothes were hung neatly in the closet rather than strewn across its floor, and his bed was always made. It just... weirded Tyler out a little.
"Why did your mom say-"
"I couldn't tell her!" Jacob's frustration showed as he pulled a cigar box out from under his bed. "Just like I couldn't my dad, or the cops, or anybody. I probably could have told Gran. I'm risking telling you. I swear to god if you laugh I will never talk to you again."
"No, no, I believe you."
Inside the box was a necklace with a small Celtic knot-work pendant. "Okay, so. The fairy came around last night. Calling. Singing to Ethan. I don't know what else. It was like... you remember that old movie your brother made us watch? The one with the aliens? Where, like, the one dude couldn't move but like he knew they were all around him?"
"Communion." Tyler shuddered. It had given him nightmares for weeks.
"Yeah. It was like that. I could hear it whispering, and I could hear Ethan talking, but I couldn't move or get up or even scream. Like, I could try to scream, but all that'd come out is a whisper."
"Aliens kidnapped your brother?"
"What? No, that's dumb. It was a fairy. Gran used to tell me stories about them, stories that her own grandmother had told her - about how they'd do chores for milk, pull tricks on people they didn't like, and how sometimes... sometimes they'd take kids."
Oh, Tyler thought. A FAIRY fairy. Understanding what Jacob meant made things both better and worse. He grew quiet and still again, not sure exactly what to do or how to react to his best friend admitting a belief in mythological creatures. His eyes flickered to the comic he'd left on Jacob's desk.
Jacob set his jaw. "You don't believe me."
"Well..."
"That's okay. I didn't think that they were real until last night either. Then the fairy showed up, and I started remembering all the stories Gran would tell me. You're gonna help me anyway, right? You'll stick by me. That's what friends do, even if they think their friends are crazy."
"I don't think you're crazy."
Jacob gave a weak half-smile and slipped the necklace over his head. It wasn't a protective talisman or anything, but Gran had left it to him, and it made him feel better.
"Do you think it's going to come back?" Tyler wasn't sure he believed in fairies, but if he did he was pretty sure he was afraid of them. He was having third-thoughts about this sleepover.
"No reason for it to. We're too old. They only like to take little kids."
"Oh, good."
"We're going to go out and get Ethan back."
Sneaking out was easier than Tyler had expected. Jacob's parents were exhausted and distracted from the worry over their younger son, enough that they scarcely paid attention to the older. Just when he had started to hope that his friend hadn't been serious about the whole "going to rescue Ethan from the fairies" thing, about an hour after the adults went to bed he was startled back to awareness by impatient hands shaking the recliner he'd been dozing in. Wordlessly Jacob tossed Tyler his coat, zipped his own up, and the pair slipped out into the cold winter's night.
The boys' breath fogged into small clouds as they walked their bikes slowly and through the streets, the crunch of their tires in the snow the only companion to Tyler's heavy breathing in the eerie still of the night. Jacob's family lived in an unincorporated suburb, mostly unsold and uninhabited pastel model homes scattered around a largely wooded area. Plenty of room for a six-year-old to wander off and get lost in. A part of Tyler hoped that the whole fairy thing was true - Ethan had been missing for a freezing sixteen hours.
"Okay, we're far enough." Jacob climbed onto his bike, and Tyler followed suit. His was an older bike – a hand-me-down of his brother's – and while it still rode fine, its rusted chain was unfortunately loud, and the last thing the boys wanted was to wake up Jacob's parents.
"What's the plan?" Hushed as it was, Tyler's voice sounded enormous in the still night.
"We look for a fairy mound. Or some standing stones. Gran said that clover or mushrooms in a circular pattern were also signs of Fairy, but it's winter, so I think a mound or stones are a better bet."
"What's a fairy mound?"
"It's like a hill. I think. Fairies live underneath it."
The pair gazed around at the vast emptiness of the woods for a few moments before Tyler spoke up again. "What about the Bridge?
In the dark of winter's night, the old cobblestone and mortar bridge definitely looked like it could be something out of a fairy tale, and lit by moonlight it was very easy to think of the woods it inhabited as an enchanted forest. The stream it had been built over had long dried up, save for a thin trickle in the late spring and early fall, and in mid-winter it was completely dry, leaving the bridge a strange anachronistic monument in the middle of a gravel-paved bicycle trail. The boys crossed it swiftly, glancing over its sides into the ditch below.
Jacob left his bike at the far end, carefully scrambling down the side of the ditch to the stream's bed, Tyler slipping down after. The span under the bridge was a short passage of dark earth, shielded from moon and snow, littered with junk. The boys had - in happier, daylight hours - played on and around the bridge, but Tyler had always refused to head underneath, citing a fear of spiders. He hesitated only a moment before following his friend underneath, instinctively crouching low to avoid even brushing against the webs or eggs or whatever spiders might be able to last the winter.
"Did you grab a flashlight?" he asked. Jacob shook his head, moving slowly over the unseen ground, mindful of the junk that had been stashed under the bridge. The old mattresses, rusted broken bikes, unsalvageable car parts, and assorted trash sort of ruined the fairy-tale atmosphere.
"Who's dat trip trappin' unner ma bridge?" The growled gravelly voice seemed to fill the dark space, coming from everywhere and nowhere, and Tyler felt his heart stop. He instinctively turned to bolt back into the safety of the open woods, his foot tangling in a coil of something unseen and sending him crashing to the frozen earth, even as Jacob flattened himself against the bridge's structure.
"Eh? Who's dat? Trip trappin'?" Old and hoary, the voice sounded like steel stumbling on whiskey-soaked breath over rotten teeth. Something large shifted in the darkness.
"You-" Jacob's voice caught, but he steadied himself and the grip on his bat. "You the fairy that took my brother?"
"What? Who you callin' a faerie?" the voice growled, and Tyler found himself trying to scramble to his feet again, only to get tangled up in whatever it was he'd tripped over in the dark. "I ain't no faerie, yer a faerie. Imma troll, and yer unner ma bridge!"
A light was struck, small in the dark, and across the span of the under-bridge Jacob found himself staring at what he first took to be a homeless drifter lighting a cigarette. As the match-light neared it he was horrified and fascinated to see no withered flesh, but rather a collection of junk and garbage, formed into the crude facsimile of a man's face. The hands that held the match and the cigarette were likewise not human, but rather rusted rivets and pipe held together with coiled wire.
"Oh, what the fuck." Tyler was frozen, his hands stopping in their efforts to free himself.
"Yeah, whadda fuck ya doing unner ma bridge?" The troll waved the match to extinguish it, and the darkness returned save for the cherry-red butt of his cigarette. "Ya come bustin' in unner here, tonight of all nights, an' 'm gonna hava eat ya just on principle. Ain't nuffin' personal, kid."
"Fuck!" Tyler squeaked, cold hands pulling at the coils tightening around his ankles as they began to drag him in the direction of the voice in the darkness.
"Ain't nuffin' personal," the voice repeated. "Don' worry, I ain' really gon' eatcha. Jes' chew yer up a bit. Don' really got nuffin' to digest wit, see?"
"Stop!" Jacob shouted, recovering from his own stunned fear.
"Rules is rules," the Troll responded almost apologetically. "Comes unner my bridge at da Solstice, an' I gets to eats it. 'S tradition."
Jacob stepped into the darkness, swinging his bat in a wide arc. "I said stop!"
He felt the aluminum connect with something that wasn't entirely solid, powerfully enough to elicit a cry of pain from the Troll. Tyler felt the coils around his ankle loosen, and he scrambled to his feet. Jacob kept swinging at the darkness, only to have the bat ripped from his hands. Sharp rusted wire slithered up his legs like snakes, pulling him off of his feet and sending him crashing to the ground. Half of a car's transmission swung at Tyler as he neared the edge of the under-bridge, knocking him painfully back to the ground with a thud.
"Yer come unner MY bridge on DIS night an' attacks me?" the troll's voice thundered, reverberating from the earth and stone around them. Jagged shards of metal formed themselves into a gaping maw. "ME?"
"Let us go! We're just looking for my brother!" Jacob sobbed, struggling against the wires that were pulling him towards the junk-mouth.
"Yer brudder? Hrm. I hadda brudder once. Why you fink yer brudder gonna come unner my bridge?"
Jacob struggled, but while the wires had stopped pulling him forward, they hadn't let him go.
"Something - a fairy - came and took him last night."
"Wann't me. I can't leave my bridge. Not even tonight." The coils loosened around Jacob. "You... you're a good brudder. Brave. My brudder was a good brudder too."
Jacob stumbled back, away, joining Tyler as they ran out from under the bridge.
"Ya find yer brudder. Ya takes care of him. I'm letting ya go, and I don't gotta, so that's a favor, gots it? You pays me back by taking care of yer brudder." The voice was fading as the boys bolted from under the bridge, clawing their way up the side of the ditch back to the path. "Ask the crone. She might know."