[Submission] In a Midnight Grove
And if you should wander into a moonlit grove, beware its inhabitants strange and old.
In a Midnight Grove.
Childhood was a strange dream.
As she stood on the top of the hill now, seventeen, on the cusp of adulthood – leaving her hometown, university and all the new and adult delights and despairs that it held. Life had a funny way of unravelling in front of you when you least expected it. But she did not know that yet.
This reality all melted away as she gazed down upon it. A small and unassuming children’s playpark, its once neon blue bars and railings chipped and rusted with time. It sat defunct and disused amongst a narrow footpath which led through a field, with a hazy patch of woodland wilderness in front of it, a corner shop and modest football pitch to its back.
Here had been her beginnings; some of her earliest and happiest memories had been formed here.
Five years of age, being pushed on the swing by her Granda as she giggled with glee, feeling invincible, feeling like she could fly, like the world was hers to conquer. She could see up over the shop’s high walls into the yard behind it, the cylinders of gas that would be sold each winter for heating the home. Of course, she didn’t know that that was what they were for at the time – they were just flaming orange and red cylinders, blazing out of the grey numbness of the crumbling shop wall. This was the least interesting thing about the swings, because to the right of the shop lay the wild grove. The one that she was not allowed to explore with her cousins or siblings, the one that even her Granda, who loved an adventure and would often assent to her every whim, warned sternly against.
‘It’s no good going in there Aíne,’ her Granda would caution, ‘the gentry live in there. The banshee will get you and then where will we be. No – better to leave it to the foxes and the rabbits.’
As Aíne grew older, her fear of the grove developed into a dark curiosity, it had an allure to it that children will often find in things that are forbidden. The closest she had ever gotten to entering was one stormy day when she had sneaked out of her Granda’s house. Bored beyond compare doing a jigsaw in the living room, she had watched out the window into the storm whilst her Granda slept, the comforting heat of the fire blazing behind her, grazing her back. And her eyes were drawn to that patch of land, that they always had been since she had been aware of it, and it seemed to pulsate in the rain, to glimmer and distort and whisper ‘Come away o human child, to the waters and the wild…’
She found herself right on the edge of the forest – she could even see a lone, otherworldly hawthorn tree through its gathered trees and bushes, when she felt the grasp of her Granda’s hand on her shoulder and was pulled back into the world of the living.
‘Aíne,’ he had said, his voice serious, and devoid of its usual playfulness ‘It’s for your own good I keep you away from that grove. There’s more children were lost to it and especially little girls. Please, if you love your aul granda don’t go near it again.’
And from that day on she had avoided going near the grove, or thinking about it, but it was always there, somewhere on the peripheries of her mind, like a lazy fly on a summer’s day tapping clumsily against a window for entry. And part of her knew that it was only a matter of time.
Now, she was seventeen, about to turn eighteen in the morning, and she wanted to run away. From everything. The expectations of her parents. Her encroaching adulthood and all the responsibilities that came with it. She was the grove’s, and it was hers.
She walked down the gentle slope of the hill in the cascaded moonlight, her white night dress blending against her pale body. She moved trancelike, her feet bare despite the biting cold of November. Across the colour-leeched grass she glided, floated, towards the patch of hawthorn trees which beckoned, called, enticed.
In the hollow grove, a lone hawthorn tree stood isolated, separated from all the rest, standing sentinel over a deep, glassy pond. Aíne walked towards it, pushing through brambles and scraping up against trees as she went, almost in a daze. Her hands outstretched towards it, and she felt some inconceivable invisible pull towards the tree. She placed a hand against its cracked, ancient surface. It had stood there long before her birth and would remain there long after her death.
She breathed in the tree’s rich, earthy smell – the scent of the natural world, of roots, the human condition irrevocably tied to its mysterious genesis. She was comforted; she felt at home. This comfort was interrupted by the feeling that something, someone, was watching her. She looked up and spotted a dark barn owl perched on one of the tree’s many sturdy branches, its lamplight stare fixed upon her. She gazed at it for a moment, then turned her attention to the pond.
In all her memory of this grove, of staring at it from the swing set, walking past it on her way to school every day, she never remembered seeing a pond. This was new. Or was she just unobservant? She pushed herself away from the tree and walked slowly, deliberately, towards the pond. She knelt on the cool, sharp grass at its side and stared down into its depths. All to be seen was the impenetrable darkness of the night and her pale, moon-like face. She glanced up at the inky night sky, at the full disc-like moon and back at the pond’s surface. She jumped backwards. A man’s face had appeared on its surface, his gleaming yellowy eyes fixated on her, his long ebony, tattered hair cascading over his shoulders. His face was impossible to describe, like he was everyone and no one all at once. And suddenly she felt very afraid. Like she had become prey. Walked into a land that she had not been invited to enter.
Those eyes. She could have sworn she had seen them before. The distant tom cat that had frequented her Granda’s house as a child but never came close enough to pet. On a crow that seemed to always perch outside of her bedroom window, made distinct from the others by those strange glowing eyes. In the rust-coloured fox that she saw sometimes on her way to school in the mornings, when she passed through a country lane to town. Part of her had always hoped that this had been a guardian angel. She had never considered the alternative.
Those same eyes glowed out at her now in the darkness, and seemed to beckon, to call her in. They promised safety and trust, their unblinking constancy the only light in the darkened grove.
For a moment, she thought he had spoken – a husky whisper, like the wind itself – but no, she was sure it had only been her own breath, as she gazed upon those eyes still blazing out at her, almost protruding out of their sockets.
She backed away, bumping into the hawthorn tree that had comforted her moments earlier. Her hands clung desperately to its crackled surface as if it were some sort of buoy in a storm.
The man approached, slowly, his body language deliberate, those keen yellow eyes still fixed upon her – unblinking.
Somewhere on the gentle night breeze, she thought she heard him whisper in a voice like cast iron yet as incorporeal as the stars ‘Aíne.’
‘How… how do you know my name?’ she finally stammered out.
He smiled, a wide, thin half-moon smile, cunning and unsettling. And in that moment, she recognised the smile too. Whoever – whatever this was, she felt she had known him since she had been a child, too innocent and unpractised in the ways of the world then to be aware of what she had been letting in by acknowledging its presence.
His face bore down upon hers, now only centimetres from her, his proximity so close that she could feel the heat from his body. Aíne’s heart felt as though it were clawing its way up her throat to meet her mouth. She scarcely dared to breathe.
He placed a hand on her shoulder, and her whole body tensed, ready to flee or fight or whatever his next action might require of her. A long, spidery hand brushed down her arm.
Aíne could feel her chest rising and falling desperately, and she felt in real danger of having a panic attack, before this man – this creature that appeared as a man – had the chance to harm her.
She breathed deeply, and steadied herself ‘What do you want from me?’
He laughed noiselessly, and winked, those gleaming eyes cast upon her body, sizing her up, examining her with the precision of an artist with their subject.
Aíne had grown tired of his toying with her, like a cat with a mouse.
‘What are you?’
He did not speak, and Aíne wondered if he could speak at all. The silence was nauseating.
Luminescent yellow eyes bore into her skull, and she could feel them inspecting her, the question they posed. Why had she come to the grove tonight?
She felt herself vomiting out the words before she had a chance to control herself, ‘Because I’m scared.’
His eyes remained fixed upon her, like the cold grip of death, pressing her.
‘Of life. Of reality. Of having to grow up, embrace the mundanity that is the march from right here to the grave. I’ll complete university and probably have a good time. Then I’ll get a job and work the same day over and over until retirement or until I drop off my feet before I even get the chance to get there. It’s – it’s the mundanity. Doing the same thing over and over again until I eventually go insane. I’m so scared.’
He leant down into her ear, and she gasped as she felt his icy breath tickle her, making her flinch and turn her face away. He raised a skeletal hand and pulled her face around, so that once again, he could fix those intoxicating, dream-like eyes upon her. They burned with passion and the potential of what could be, and somehow, Aíne could understand what they were trying to convey. What if you could escape the mundanity?
Aíne gulped back tears from her outburst, quickly swatting at her eyes, now staring him down with her pale blue eyes.
‘What?’ she said, so softly it was almost not aloud.
His silence reigned. He did not speak, did not look at her now, but instead turned his wild head towards the pond, an elongated, balletic arm stretching out towards it, the impossibly long forefinger pointing.
She took a step forward – but something stopped her.
Hadn’t she been warned about bodies of water before by her Granda?
Aíne cast her mind back to warm winter nights sat by the fire with her Granda, him telling her all the old stories, the tragic Deirdre, of Diarmuid and Gráinne, but water, water? Then, it came to her.
Bodies of water, particularly ponds and lakes were believed to be portals to the Otherworld. But they were only fairy stories, told to entertain children on stormy nights.
She pulled her eyes from the pond and looked back at him. He was a mere pace behind her. His yellow eyes glinted and for a moment she saw her own face reflected back in his. Their meaning was clear. Embrace it.
Water cleansed. Water healed. It was a vital tool to sustain all life. We are all made partly of water, and like nature it has the power to give life and take it. One cannot control a body of water.
She felt its pull now, more keenly than when she had stepped into the grove. She could feel it calling. This giver and taker of life. Step down into its depths and emerge on the other side. In the Otherworld. To never know pain, or mundanity, or the trivial stresses of the human world again. She could become immortal. A god.
His eyes glinted as this last word ran across her brain, and there was something cunning in those eyes, older than time itself, though Aíne was too taken in at this point to notice.
Water cleanses. She could live peacefully, untouched by the iron grasp of death, or war, suffering or grief ever again.
Water heals. Her family would forget she had ever existed, devoid of any of the pain of her loss.
The man took a step forward, standing beside her, his looming presence suffocating her. He held out a fine, but strong hand, almost glowing in the darkness. Aíne did not notice claws that decorated the ends of his fingers. She placed her small hand in his, and together, they walked towards the pond.
Aíne stretched her gleaming neck, like a moonlit poplar branch and dipped her toe into the water. It was freezing – as cold as death. She looked up into the man’s face, those ever-watching, unblinking eyes trained on her.
They implored, ordered her. Go on, do it, they glinted.
Aíne obeyed, wading out waist deep in the pond, her white nightdress billowing around her like a lily in the water. She waded further and further, until her feet no longer touched the ground, and she could feel herself, sinking, sinking, submerged in the engulfing darkness of the water.
It was then that she realised what she had done.
Aíne paddled desperately against the still water, the light of the moon her only sign of the surface. Her hands reached out and found only a solid, freezing roof. Ice.
‘NOOOO – NOOOOOOO!’ she screamed and garbled in the water. She thought she could make out those lamplight eyes through the ice.
‘HELP ME! HELP MEEEEEE! I’VE MADE A MISTAKE,’ her voice was beginning to fade, consciousness sinking before her, and she could scream no longer. Something, she did not know what, compelled her to garble out one more desperate sentence ‘I’ll never invoke the help of the gentry ever again. If I am spared, I’ll not step foot on their land as long as I live.’
***
Dawn was breaking its way across the hill, the first ray of the sun’s light gleaming against the spinner in the playpark. All was silent across the land, the inhabitants of the living world still in the deep mysteries of their dreams. All except for one.
‘Aíne?’ a rich, weathered voice said into the silence. ‘Aíne, oh no, my wee pet!’ The figure ran across the dewy grass, crossed by the hawthorn trees and ran over to the pond, with the vigour and urgency of a much younger man.
‘Oh christ nooo,’ he moaned as he spotted the white figure, almost angelic in its peace, floating face-up at the pond’s centre. He waded into the water, up to the middle of his blazer jacket, and cradled the floating figure in his arms, pulling her to the side of the pond.
‘Awwww god Aíne no. How am I ever going to explain to your Ma and Da, and you my pride and joy and all. Gone before your aul granda.’ He groaned a wretched, choking, horrible cry – one such as one never hopes to hear a loved one ever emit in their lives.
Now laid gently across her Granda’s lap, the girl’s eyes fluttered open and she gazed up into the misty, early morning sun, the lined face of her Granda blocking out some of its light. His pale eyes, the same as her own, globed and filled with shock.
‘Oh thank god and all that’s holy! Oh you’re alive! What were you doing pet?! Hmmm.’
The girl stuttered and tripped over her words and could not speak. Her grandfather took his blazer off and put it around her, walking her back up towards his house. Over his shoulder, he took a knowing look towards the grove. He remembered the lines of a poem he had learned in his youth, many years ago now, but they had stuck with him; ‘Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.’
MORAL.
And if you should wander into a moonlit grove,
Beware its inhabitants strange and old,
As fickle and sly as feigned love
Ignore their calls, in haste depart
Or your mortal soul will become their lark
This short story was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “fairytales”
Andrea Cartmill is an aspiring writer from Armagh, Northern Ireland. Her writing journey began in 2022 and she has since had two published short stories. She is inspired by all things spooky and strange, and is fascinated by the darker aspects of life, and how this impacts an individual. She enjoys reading and writing of all genres, but particularly enjoys horror and fantasy. As well as this, she is inspired by Irish folklore, having heard many tales of fairies and the banshee as a child, and she is keen to see more Irish stories in the worlds of fantasy and horror. Some of her favourite writers include Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Claire Keegan and Colm Tóibín. In her spare time she enjoys walking her dog and going to the cinema.
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