Faery Tale by Signe Pike

“It’s entirely about trust.” I waited for her to continue. “You’re here searching, for what? I don’t think you’re really sure. But you’re here, and I think that right now, you’re having to teach yourself how to trust again. That’s where the real magic lies. To find what you’re looking for, you’ve got to learn to trust.”
    Â 
    The second night in London I dreamed of my father. He was leaning against a column in my mother’s living room, waiting for me to notice him. He looked just as he did before he died—some gray-white stubble beginning to show on his usually clean-shaven cheeks, his peppered hair thinning at the scalp. He didn’t speak, but just looked at me, imploringly, sadly. He closed his eyes a moment, as if to show me how good it felt to rest. He looked tired. I understood what I was supposed to do—but all I could do was clutch him, lean my face into his as my stomach seized and I began to cry uncontrollably, tears streaming down my face. I could only say, I miss you so much, Daddy, I just miss you so much that I just can’t get over it , as I wailed against him.
    I knew he was asking me to let him go.
    I just couldn’t.

    While in London, I was staying with Rebecca Campbell and her husband, Anthony McGowan, in their three-bedroom flat in West Hampstead. Becky now ran a fashion company full-time, but her novel had been one of the first I edited in my career, and over the years we had become closer to family than friends. Their home proved be the perfect nest from which to prepare my first steps into the world of faery.
    Back in New York I had come across a documentary entitled The Fairy Faith , by John Walker. Walker’s search felt very similar to my own, and we shared a similar sentiment, that the belief in faeries has been with humans for thousands of years. From the Greeks to the Romans, from the Japanese to the Celts, most cultures known to us believed in some sort of faeries. However, “in the past several generations,” his resonant voice boomed, “we seem to have abandoned them, relegated them to the nursery. Science has turned an ancient belief into superstition.”
    In Devon, England, Walker had interviewed a man who explained that faeries can affect our minds as well as our imaginations. In other words, faeries can control what we see, and, therefore, they can control whether we see them or not. The idea that faeries could control or, in the very least, hold sway over our imaginations intrigued me—especially after my experience in Mexico. But what really blew me away was Walker’s interview with Brian Froud. Together with a man named Alan Lee (now the Oscar-winning conceptual designer for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy), Froud wrote and illustrated a book entitled Faeries in 1978. It was not only a New York Times bestseller, but it would become a classic that ultimately launched Froud’s career. When Jim Henson discovered Brian Froud’s work, he took a trip out to Devon to meet him. Before long, Froud was the conceptual designer for two of the most memorable cult classics for my generation: Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal . He was the mastermind behind the characters that had ignited my imagination as a child. Who doesn’t remember the peaceful, hump-backed Mystics? I’d watched enraptured as they ceased their daily duties to raise their head and, each in their own tone, call out that long, deep note that summoned the One destined to find the missing crystal shard. Who doesn’t remember the nasty, vulturelike Skeksis, with their Yodalike “Mmmmhm! Gelfling, mmmmh!”
    Brian Froud was the faery godfather of our imaginations. He was also the author and illustrator of nearly every faery book that had caught my eye in a Barnes & Noble long before I ever really gave faeries a second thought. Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book? Brian Froud. Good Faeries/Bad