Rip van Winkle
Published in 1819, Washington Irving’s short story tells of a man in the Catskill Mountains of New York before the American Revolution. He wanted to get away from his nagging wife and his endless chores, so he ran off into the woods to take a nap. Supposedly, he met a group of little men capering in the wilderness. He drank from their jug, he bowled ninepins with them, and he fell asleep. When he awoke, his children had grown, his wife no longer recognized him, and America had won its independence. Twenty years had passed as easily as an afternoon nap.
After becoming reacquainted with his family and his hometown, Rip learns that the men with whom he had passed time in the woods were likely to have been the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew, who had been mutinied against and abandoned on the shore of James Bay in Quebec, more than 170 years previous.
* * *
So, there I was, Dr. Israel St. James at last. No more dusty old storage room for me, oh no. I had a proper office, with a hardwood desk, a padded chair, a set of bookshelves, and windows. Oh, the windows. I hadn’t realized the benefit that a regular helping of sunshine and fresh air can do for one’s temperament.
To go along with my proper office was a proper title: Curator of the Abnormal Relics Collection, the college’s official name for the cache of wonders kept within Archimedes’ Lost Apothecary. (Technically, it was no longer lost, of course, but the name had developed considerable staying power.) I also had at my disposal a small grant to fund any research I might perform in the course of my duties, but the Novoscope only gave its warnings of unusual activity perhaps two or three times a year, so I had much idle time to spend combing the college’s other collections for items of interest.
The two relics that formed the bulk of my operation, the Apothecary and the Novoscope, were displayed in my office in a fashion more fitting to their importance, not to mention the beauty and quality of their craftsmanship. Rather than being wedged in among a lot of dusty shelves any old how, they now each had a small plinth to raise them nearer to eye level, which allowed them to better complement the décor of the office. Next to each relic was a bookstand on a pedestal. The one next to the Apothecary held a copy of the original catalog from the Baghdad House of Wisdom that listed the location and nature of each relic within its labyrinthine interior. The one next to the Novoscope was a log of each instance in which it had indicated a relic-related incident. My grant paid for a small staff of clerks to man the office outside of my own hours, who had been instructed to monitor the Novoscope and record each new event in the book with the current time, the direction to the event as indicated by the revolving dragon on top of the Novoscope, and distance to the event as indicated by the Chinese rod numerals shown beneath the dragon’s head. A set of compass bearings was discreetly inscribed on the top of the Novoscope’s plinth to enable one to note the bearing to the event, and a clock hung on the nearby wall for an accurate report of the time of the event. As events were so few and far between, however, and since there was little actual clerical work that I didn’t handle myself, the job amounted to a small salary in return for staying up all night watching a Han Dynasty pot in case it made a noise and started moving.
It wasn’t long after I had achieved my doctorate that word of my expertise spread beyond my own college. The rest of the university had already heard rumors of my existence and unusual preoccupation, but now the rumors were leavened with a certain measure of respect. I may still have been regarded as a crackpot, but when a professor found something he couldn’t explain, he sent it to the office of Dr. Israel St. James, the Curator of the Abnormal Relics Collection. I was a loon, but I was a loon who knew things. My office had begun to fill up with unusual items from other colleges, items that hadn’t made enough of an occult impression on the world for the Novoscope to detect them, but which had still drawn enough attention from the faculty that my counsel had been sought. An art historian from Fine Arts sent me a landscape painting that gave anyone who examined it too closely a case of the hiccups. A geologist from Earth Sciences gave me a fist-sized chunk of raw marble that glowed with the brightness of a lantern with no heat or apparent fuel of any kind. I kept it on my desk for the benefit of the night clerks. It made for a great saving on lamp oil.
One morning when I arrived at my office, the night clerk jumped up from the desk and showed me the log for the Novoscope. At a little past eleven o’clock the previous night, there had been an event 13,317 li away from Cambridge at a bearing of 289 degrees, 18 minutes. I went over to a large globe in the corner to find the location of the event. My calculations located the event in the Catskills region of New York. My first mission outside of England was taking me right back home.
I immediately headed for the bursar’s office to requisition funds for my voyage to New York. My grant had been sitting more or less idle for years, so I had fairly little trouble putting together the money for passage across the Atlantic. I arranged with the college council to stay in contact with them via the new transatlantic telegraph cable linking North America and Great Britain, and I gathered all the gear I might possibly need to collect the new relic. Not knowing how I might possibly go about the task, I threw together a collection of any equipment for which I might find a use yet could still fit easily within my trunk, plus one or two random things whose utility might make itself clear later. I debated whether to bring along any of my relics and decided to take the Rod of Asclepius with me, gently packed into a box with straw, just in case I found myself getting grievously wounded again.
Two weeks later, I disembarked from the ocean liner in New York harbor and once again breathed the air of home. I had grown used to England in the last ten years, and the hustle and bustle of America took me slightly aback, but I quickly became reacquainted with the busy atmosphere. England may have been the land of tradition and firm foundations, but America was still where things rolled up their sleeves and got started.
Speaking of getting started, I wasted no time in catching a coach bus to Monticello, where I found myself a reasonably priced hotel room and grabbed a copy of the local news sheet. The item of interest was a series of mysterious disappearances of loggers and other laborers, which was slowing down the progress on a new rail line to Port Jervis on the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. Search parties sent into the woods after the missing men had either not seen anything or not returned at all. The holidaymakers in the local resort were atwitter about the disappearances, worried that there were bandits in the woods come to prey on them, possibly Southern dissidents upset about the Confederate defeat.
The railroad workers were staying at a work camp just outside of the town, so I headed there to get a firsthand account from anyone who may have seen anything. The atmosphere at the camp was very anxious. They were keeping watch on the surrounding woods, as though they expected something to come out of the trees and attack them at any moment. They wouldn’t even let me in until I told them I had come from Cambridge to investigate the disappearances. I had debated going in as a reporter or a detective, but this was only my first case away from the university. I figured that I should keep the deception to a minimum.
I spoke with the remaining members of the most recent search party to return. They told me that they had ventured out ahead of the completed track along the proposed route. Some of them claimed to have heard singing. One said that he had seen the plants move under their own power. No one had seen any signs of bears, bobcats, or any other of the dangers they had expected to encounter in this area. The one thing they all agreed on was that the plants would often seem to have moved while no one was looking, as though the forest was trying to prevent them from being able to leave. They had only been able to escape by ignoring the trees and following the sun with a compass. Thus prepared, I returned to my lodging in town and made preparations to leave for the construction site the following day.
I made my way to the railroad at around ten o’clock the following morning, with the sun high enough in the sky that I would be able to see it above the trees. This far away from the town and this near to autumn, some of the morning dew was still on the grass. I pulled my overcoat and scarf tighter against myself to keep out the chill and pulled down my hat as I ventured away from the work site and into the deep woods. To look at the area, I would never have guessed that teams of men had gone this way before me. The grass was all standing tall and proud, and the bushes were all full and unbroken. I took out the compass that I had borrowed from the workmen and set out on the bearing they had given me.
It was at least noon when I finally found what I was looking for, and frankly, it was a pure stroke of luck. I could have walked by that little clearing a dozen times without seeing anything out of the ordinary, but I just happened to sit on a rock to take a drink from my new canteen and saw a flash of denim out of the corner of my eye, covered in a mat of vines and overgrowth. I pulled the vines aside and found one of the railroad men, lying in a swaddle of plants like a sleeping baby. His pulse was slow and his breathing was thin and faint, but he was alive. I looked around the immediate area, and now that I knew what to look for, I could see at least twenty other men hidden in the undergrowth. They were all missing their shirts, and some of them had beards. The railroad crew wasn’t missing twenty men. Something much bigger was going on here.
There was a rustling of the foliage behind me. I turned with a jerk, expecting to see a bear or a bobcat. I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised to see Sasquatch creeping up. I was not at all prepared, however, to see a young woman in a green dress and slippers sliding smoothly around a tree. She had flowing red hair and sparkling hazel eyes, and she was smiling at me.
“Welcome, kind stranger. Have you come to rest your tired feet?”
“I’ve come from the railroad company. They want their people back.”
“These poor men were so tired when they came to me. They needed to rest. You can rest here for as long as you like, gentle sir.”
“I don’t need any rest. I just need to bring these men back to town.”
“But you do need to rest. You are so terribly tired.”
“I’m not.”
“You are tired of your work. You are tired of the people who do not trust you. You need a rest, Israel.”
“How do you know my name?” I tried to back away from her, but she laid her hand on my upper arm, and I stopped in my tracks.
“You do good and noble work, but your superiors do not respect you. They give you their trinkets and want you to lock them away. They do not understand the importance of what you do, because they do not want to understand. You are special, Israel. You deserve better.”
My knees sagged, and I collapsed to the ground. The woman knelt down beside me and stroked my neck and head with her fingers. I had never felt so comforted in my life. And what’s more, she was exactly right. I thought that I had prestige in the university. I thought that people respected my expertise about their abnormal relics, but they only wanted someone to take away the weird things that scared them. They didn’t want to understand my work. They only wanted to be sheltered from it. I was alone.
This woman understood what I was going through. She felt my pain, and she wanted to make it go away. I wanted nothing more than to melt away in her arms.
I laid my head against her breast, and she wrapped her arm around my shoulders. I could hear her heart beating in her chest. I noticed the gemstone in the middle of her décolletage, an iridescent green oval. Suddenly, I noticed a strange glint within the gemstone. It was definitely not a typical stone. Every instinct that I had developed about relics was screaming at me that something was not right here. This woman had a relic, and she had a sylvan glen full of sleeping men, and I was ready to fall asleep in her lap right then.
I pushed myself away from her and got to my feet. “What is this? Who the devil are you?”
“Good sir, I only want to help you.” She took my hand and pulled it toward her, toward the stone on her gown. Now that I had a better idea of what was going on, I was not about to touch that stone by any means. I tried to pull away, but she was surprisingly strong for having such soft hands. I managed to get out of her grip, but in the struggle, for just a fraction of a second, my hand brushed against the stone.
There was a beautiful meadow. Flowers bloomed, and dragonflies flitted through the air. A ring of young men and women danced around a maypole. There were older men mixed in with them, men dressed in rough overalls and boots, and they were grinning like mad men. More old men were scattered around the meadow, all being cradled by young women. The looks on their faces were more than love. They lay in the arms of those women with the eyes of worship, as though they could no more tear themselves away than fly.
There was a lane of ninepins. Lithe men bowled with a group of worn-looking old sailors. There were several earthenware jugs being passed among them. Every time a sailor bowled a lane, he followed his throw with a long pull from a jug. Empty jugs were tossed aside and replaced with fresh ones by a gang of tiny servants, like children. Another tiny gang reset the pins after each throw. The young men looked over the game like chaperones, ensuring that everyone behaved properly but fully intent on enjoying themselves as well.
There was a throne formed from a tree. Not a throne that had been carved from a tree, but a tree that had grown into a seat with a glorious display of leaves and flowers along the top. Occupying the throne was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. She wore a gown woven from silken mosses, flower petals, and butterfly wings. She rose from her seat and flowed toward me like an emerald cloud on legs.
“Welcome, Israel St. James. Welcome to the court of Titania. I bid you stay awhile. Stay as long as your heart desires.”
At that moment, my heart desired but one thing. I found myself approaching her as though I were floating. I was so close to her that I could smell the flowery scent of her breath.
“And now,” she said, “pay tribute to your Queen.”
Her lips enveloped me, and my world collapsed. I danced around the maypole, and I bowled the ninepins, but always and forever, there was the kiss.
I couldn’t tell how long I had been unconscious, but when I woke up, I was in a different part of the woods, and the sun was no longer visible above the trees, though it was still light. I climbed a tree, slowly and with much tearing of my clothes, until I could see the smoke from the railroad work camp. I took a reading from the compass, which fortunately I still had, and descended back to the forest floor to make my way back to civilization. It was a pretty long way away, but I needed time to think anyway. Fortunately, I had emerged from Titania’s court by way of Archimedes’ Apothecary. In the last few seconds before waking, I had received a flash of images and sensations similar to when I first touched Dr. Pidgeon’s St. Jerome relic back at Cambridge.
The young woman in the glade was obviously some sort of emissary for Titania, using the stone to capture people on her behalf. She had lured the workers in like a siren, manipulated them into touching the stone, and they had gone off to dreamland. I had only touched the stone for a brief instant, and from the position of the sun, I had been out for several hours. The stone seemed to send people to sleep depending on how long they touched it, which by my rough estimate meant about a day of sleep for each second of contact. Those men in the glade must have been in contact with the stone for a long time, maybe hours.
What was more, the queen called herself Titania. Titania was said to be a queen of the fairies, if Shakespeare was anything to go on. I had seen them dancing around a maypole and bowling ninepins. I’d seen a lot, but fairy magic was a new one. On the other hand, if the whole business with the fairies was real, then the bewitching woman in the forest must have been one, too. If she was, and if half of the fairy folklore I had heard was true, then the kidnapped men still had a chance.
I reached the camp and told the remaining workers to have a party ready to retrieve their lost men at my signal, and then I borrowed a few things and retired to my lodging back in town. I stayed up until well past sundown making my preparations to rescue the kidnapped men, and the next morning, I put on my hat, coat, and scarf and set out for the fairy glade.
The plants had shifted somewhat since the day before, but I was still able to use the compass to find Titania’s emissary, still surrounded by her collection of human cocoons.
“Welcome back, kind sir,” she said. “Have you decided to return to my lady’s court, perhaps for a longer stay?”
“Oh, not today,” I said. “It is quite lovely there, though. Have you seen it?”
“But of course, good sir. I once served there myself, before I was sent to do my lady’s bidding in these lands.”
“Don’t you ever feel the urge to return, to join your brothers and sisters in their dance?”
I was impressed. Her composure didn’t falter one bit. “My duties here are far too important. Some must serve abroad so the rest can dance at home.”
“In that case, good lady,” I said, throwing my coat over a branch, “if you cannot go home to the dance, let me bring the dance to you.” I offered her my hand and gave her what I intended to be an easygoing smile. It probably wouldn’t have won me any prizes at a cotillion, but the fairy returned it with an intoxicating smile of her own and took my hand. She obviously thought that by playing along with my scheme, she might be able to enthrall me into touching her stone for longer this time, but I had come prepared. I would not fall victim to her charms a second time.
We waltzed around the glade like there was no tomorrow. I was only a passable dancer, occasionally merging into other dances by accident, but she matched me step for step with impossible grace. I could feel her attempting to enchant me again, but I was able to resist. She tried to move my hand toward the stone a couple of times, but every time I made some excuse to move away. She took my maneuvers in stride, though, clearly believing that she had all the time in the world to compromise my resolve.
As we danced, I allowed my scarf to flap loose, gradually working it around until I had managed to get it around her neck while making it seem a part of the dance. She played along, posing with it as though it had been her idea. I took the ends of the scarf in my hands and twirled her around the glade, wrapping the scarf around her waist and arms. As I spun her into my embrace, I quickly wrapped the remaining ends of the scarf around her wrists and took hold of the loop of scarf around her neck. I pulled the scarf apart, splitting it down the middle, and it came completely away from her, revealing the length of thin steel wire that I had inserted into it the previous night.
The fairy gasped in shock and pain, as though she had been dunked into an icy river. She attempted to squirm free of her bindings, but she was unable to move without coming into contact with the steel that encircled her neck and arms. Though she was in no physical pain, she writhed as though wrapped in red-hot barbs.
“Please, kind sir,” she said. “If you release me, I shall reward you handsomely. I shall serve you in any way you desire.”
“Not this time, nymph,” I said. “I’ll not tolerate your enchantments again."
The fairy stared at me with a puzzled look on her face, unable to understand how I had resisted her allure.
“If there’s one thing that everyone knows about fairies,” I said, noting with pleasure her disgust at the word, “it’s that you can’t stand iron. It plays merry havoc with your abilities. That’s why I sewed a steel wire into my scarf last night, and that’s why I worked a strip of it into my hatband.” I tapped the brim of my bowler for emphasis. Immediately, her beatific face took on a look of pure malevolence.
“You have insulted my lady,” she snarled at me. “She will not forget this transgression, child.”
“Well, if she wants to come after me,” I said, “then she can find me in London most of the time, surrounded by cobblestones, smokestacks, bricks, and iron. She is welcome to try.”
She sat on the forest floor grumbling, while I went on.
“Now, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to take these men back to town, I’m going to take that stone from you, and you are going to run away.” I pulled a flick knife from my pocket and extended the blade, and the fairy’s eyes grew wide. “But before that, I want you to tell me why you took them. Was it because they were cutting down the trees and driving iron spikes into the ground, driving their railroad through your forest? I hope it was some sane reason like that.”
“The rails go everywhere,” she said. “If we took every worker, we would never stop.”
“Then why these men?”
“They are as good as any others, and my lady desires entertainment,” she said. “These men were brought to my lady’s court because she desired it to be so. The only thing that matters is the will of my lady.”
“Yes, I was afraid of that,” I said. I put on a pair of heavy work gloves and knelt down with the knife. She edged backwards as far away from the blade as she could, while I grabbed her gown through the heavy leather and cut the stone loose from the hem of her neckline. I wrapped the stone in my handkerchief several times and placed it gently in a pocket of my coat, and then I took out a pair of wire snips and cut the fairy’s bonds. “If there can be no reconciliation here, then go. Leave these men in peace and never return.”
Without the stone that enabled her to do Titania’s bidding, and with me holding the knife to drive the point home, she fled into the woods. It was like watching a lioness slink away from a kill, her head bent in shame at having been bested by one she considered inferior. I didn’t know if she had a way to rejoin her queen or not, and I didn’t care. She might have been able to find a susceptible man and bend him to her will, but men were to be found in cities, and cities were places of iron. I did not consider her odds favorable.
Once she was well away, I retrieved the signaling firework that I had borrowed from the railroad crew and lit the fuse. The firework burst well above the tops of the trees, and within ten minutes, the rescue crew arrived to collect the sleeping men. There were more of them than the railroad crew were expecting to see. The fairy must have been at her work for a while.
We cut the men from their wrappings and put them on handcarts on what existed of the railroad track for transport back to town. I accompanied the men into town and made sure that they were set up in the town hospital. I told the orderly that they might be asleep for a very long time, and that they might be somewhat non compos mentis when they awoke, but until then, an occasional dusting was all they would need. As long as no one forgot about them, they would be just fine.
I brought the stone back to Cambridge and found a place for it in the Apothecary. I then requested some books from the library’s folklore section. If fairies were real, then there was no telling what other eldritch creatures existed on the margins of the world. I would need to be prepared. The world seemed to be a more strange and dangerous place that I had suspected.
