Away With the Fairies Read Free

fingers fumbling to find the right button. But he managed to end the call and stuff it in his pocket. Then he turned and ran hell for leather back to the house, unaware that all the other searchers had stopped to stare at him and that one of the policemen was on the radio to headquarters. After a moment, the policeman signed off, clipped the radio to his belt and began to follow in a more leisurely fashion.
     
    ****
     
    “OK,” Mum said. “Let's go and have a look.” And she started up the stairs. June held back, reluctant to go back to the strange place her bedroom had become. Mum opened the bedroom door and instantly something small and green shot through it and flashed past her and down the stairs, brushing against June as it went. She shrank back with a small mew of disgust.
    “What in Heaven's name was that?” Mum was standing outside the bedroom door, clutching her chest. Her face had gone white underneath the red puffiness, giving her a livid, mottled look.
    “It's a fairy,” said June.
    Mum looked down the stairs where the creature had run. “I don't think so,” she said thoughtfully. “No, I don't think so at all.”
    Then she pulled herself together, beckoned to June, and together they went into the bedroom.
     
    ****
     
    The front door was open when Ben got home and there was no sign of anyone. He glanced into the front room and the kitchen, then stood indecisively in the hall. He had run all the way and was panting hard, which probably accounts for why he didn't hear the scuffling noises.
    “Up here,” Monica called from the girls' room, and he made his way up the stairs.
     
    He hesitated in the doorway. Monica and June were sitting on Lucy's bed staring at the wall. His heart skipped a beat. It was exactly the way Lucy sat during her episodes of petit mal.
    “Just come and sit next to us,” Monica said, her eyes never leaving the wall, “and tell me what you see.”
He came into the room. There didn't seem to be anything unusual to see... unless … there seemed to be a greenish light playing over the wall. He looked back towards the window, thinking there must be a tree casting a shadow, but of course there wasn't. There had never been a tree before, why should there be one now? He looked back at the wall and suddenly the picture snapped into place – a forest, dark and gloomy in a grey-green twilight, the leaves on the trees moving ever so slightly in a breeze he could not feel or hear. Little scuffling movements in the leaf-mould beneath the trees. Something long and thin running up a tree trunk, so fast it was gone before he could grasp what it was.
    Stunned, he sat down on the bed next to June.
    Monica turned and looked at him. “You can see it, then?” she said. “The wood?”
    “Fairyland,” June murmured.
    Ben dragged his eyes away from the incredible, impossible picture playing out on the wall and looked at his wife. “Lucy's Fairyland?”
Monica nodded. “That's where she is. June saw her go in.”
    “And Mitzy,” June said. “Mitzy went in too.”
    Ben drew a long, ragged breath. He felt as if he were teetering on the brink of madness. He didn't want to accept this ridiculous thing. He would almost deny his sanity rather than accept the evidence of his own eyes. But he wanted Lucy more. He wanted Lucy back and if that meant venturing into strange mad places, he would go.
    “Good,” Monica said, as if they had had a whole conversation and the matter was settled. “You stay here with June and she'll show you how to open the way and keep it open. I'm going downstairs to get the spare clothes-line.” And she left the room.
    June looked away from the wall and the picture vanished with a pop.
    “Right, Dad,” she said. “First you have to squinch your eyes sideways like this. Like in those pictures...”
     
    ****
     
    Monica went through the kitchen and into the utility room to get the washing-line. As she reached up to the shelf, she heard a rustling noise in the