Fairy Lights

Grandpa and I were spending another night on the porch, having a beer and listening to the sounds of an early spring. The snow had melted, and the critters were just starting to wake up. The forest was alive with the sounds of insects and small animals as they moved about in the light snow that still seemed to hang around sometimes. I had seen a possum the other day, heard him too as he dug through the trash, so I knew that the snow wouldn't last much longer.

As we sat, Grandpa telling me a story about the time a bear cub had crawled into the cab of his truck, I saw another hopeful sign.

In the woods, about ten feet or so from the house, were fireflies.

They were hovering in the air, winking on and off, and Grandpa's story suddenly fell into the background as I sat, unable to take my eyes off them. They were beautiful, the first fireflies of the season, and as Grandpa's story rolled over me like white noise, I felt myself getting up and going to see them. They weren't too far away. I could get to them in a few seconds and…

I got a little mad when Grandpa grabbed my arm, but the second I took my eyes off the lights, I forgot why.

"Don't follow them lights, son. Bad things happen if you follow the Fairy Lights."

"Fairy Lights?" I asked, sitting back down.

"Yeah, devious little buggers. They're not actually fairies, though. Even they don't really know what they are, but they fear them and avoid them if they can."

"Wait," I said, my head still a little floaty, "like real fairies?"

"One story at a time, kiddo. We're talking about the Fairy Lights. They almost got me once. Did I ever tell you about that?"

He threw his bottle out into the woods, and, to my surprise, the fairy lights stopped blinking.

"Nope, but it sounds like you're about to."

Grandpa smiled, "Seems that way. This story begins as most bad decisions often do; with drinking."

I was about sixteen when I had an encounter with the fairy lights.

It wasn't the first time I had seen them, but it was the first time I had really been affected by them.

I first saw them when I was about two or three, sitting on my grandma's porch. I got up and tried to toddle after them, wanting to catch them and see what they were. When my grandma scooped me up, boy was I mad! She said I swung my chubby fists at her until there was a door between us and the lights, and then I was just as mild as paint. She told me a few years later, when I was older, that the lights were bad and that I must never follow them.

"They lead people into the woods, and most of those people are never seen again. No one knows what they are, but they seem to delight in getting people lost."

I alway went inside when I saw them after that, not wanting the temptation. Grandma told me too that they usually took children, so I was especially wary of them. Grandma had always been honest with me about the things that could hurt me in the forest, and when she told me to beware, I bewared. She helped me a lot, she taught me a lot, and I owe her my life more times over than I can count.

This time though, she wasn't around to save me.

They say that luck belongs to children and drunks, and a good thing for me it does.

It was Saturday night, and my friends, Dale, Fred, Clarence, and I had pulled back into the woods in Dales's old farm truck. We had been working all day at the mill, chopping trees to load onto trailers, and we were sticky and tired. Dale had hooked a jug of his dad's shine, his dad was a prolific moonshiner in those days, and we were drinking and talking and just relaxing after a long day. There was talk that America might enter the War, World War Two, and we were all scared that we might get drafted. We were just backwoods hicks, we didn't know about foreign places and distant theaters of combat, but we knew that men died in war and that men came back crippled and changed. The drunker we got, though, the less we started caring about war and the more we started loosening up.

Dale was in the back of the truck, pretending to be our teacher, Mr. Popper, when he saw the lights.

Dale had a knack for imitations, and Mr. Popper was an Englishman with a very thick accent. Dale had been strutting about, speaking to us in that way that Mr. Popper had. Mr. Popper always sounded like someone in a Shakespeare play and went way over the heads of some Appalachian stump thumpers like us. We had all been laughing and cawing at the way he captured the man so well, and he had just been raising his finger to deliver one of those plummy British idioms that Mr. Popper was so fond of when he stopped and looked out into the woods.

He had been silent for about five seconds, just staring drunkenly out into the forest, when he finally whispered, "What is that? "

We all turned around to see what he was seeing, and that's when we saw the lights too.

Growing up in the middle of nowhere, I had never seen a radio tower before. These lights were like the blinking light on top of one of those towers. They were foggy and hard to discern, and they would wink on and off as they seemed to float. The longer we watched in our drunken haze, the more enticing those lights began to look. Dale had climbed slowly out of the back of the truck and began to walk towards them, and Fred and Clarence were moving like deep-sea divers as they followed. Even drunk out of my mind like I was, I seem to remember that there was something I should remember about those lights. The more I tried to think about it, though, the more important it seemed. I just couldn't come up with it, though, and decided to follow them into the woods.

And so, all four of us found ourselves tripping through the pitch-black woods by night, stumbling and laughing as we followed the lights.

The farther into the woods we went, the more the idea that we shouldn't be here nagged at me. I had a bottle in my hand that I seemed unable to let go of, it was RC cola or something, and the other three were staggering after those lights, all of us laughing like fools. I remember Clarence tripping over a log and cutting his forehead real bad, but he just got up grinning and laughing as he followed those lights. The lights seem to be making us drunker if that makes any sense. We kept stumbling after them, deeper and deeper, as they got farther and farther away.

I say they got farther and farther away, but it was like they never moved. Them lights kept blinking and twinkling in different colors, and they always seemed to be farther away than we remembered him. We kept stumbling after them, and they just kept getting farther away, and in our drunken stupor, we just never questioned it. We all just laughed and chuckled, saying how we would catch them and find out what was making those lights.

I don't know if they ever figured it out, but I still haven't to this day.

The deeper into the woods we got, the more it seemed like it was getting foggy. The ground was really hard to find, and as we tripped along, we started to feel like we were in a cloud. I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense, but you have to remember that I was 16, drunk, and under the influence of whatever those lights were. I can only really remember this in that muzzy way that you remember dreams. I can see the lights, and I can see the fog, and the trees around me are vague outlines as my mind goes in slow motion and then in double time.

I couldn't tell you how long we wandered through those woods, but I know where that wandering came to an end.

We had come to a point where the lights had started to get closer. There were about seven of them, each of them a different color. I wouldn't be able to have said it at the time because we really didn't have such things, but they were like the lights on a Christmas tree, only bigger. Oranges and reds and purples and blues and greens and whites and even a black one that shouldn't have been able to be seen, but it was. The fog was thick around our feet, and I couldn't have told you what part of the woods we were in. We could've been halfway to Ellijay for all I know, but it hardly mattered as the lights seem to be letting us get close at last. We came through a stand of trees, and there they were, just floating fifteen feet away from us. Each of them was about four and a half feet tall and seemed to wink in and out of existence as we watched them. I can hear their voices telling us to come on, to come see them, and I saw Dale stumble forward, his hand outstretched to do just that.

Then he fell forward, and I never saw him again.

It didn't bother me that Dale had disappeared. In fact, at the time, it seemed funny. I remember Clarence almost double in over laughing, thinking that Dale was pulling a trick or something. Clarence and Fred went forward next, hands outstretched like they meant to touch them, as they laughed and slurred their words. They were laughing and joking, saying how they wondered if the lights would be cold or hot, then they both disappeared and it was just me.

I would've gone with Clarence and Fred, but the need to make water had overtaken me. In my drunken state, I hadn't even been able to get my pants down, and as I wet myself, the lights kept talking to me. They wanted me to come to them, they wanted me to touch them, they wanted me to see what they had for me. I wasn't afraid, far from it. I wanted to go, I wanted to see them, and I wanted to see where my friends had gone. I knew that the lights had made them disappear, and I really wanted to see where they had gone to.

If that rock hadn't been in my way, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Mostly because I'd be dead, and you would've never been born.

The rock seemed to grab my foot, and I went down hard on my face. As I fell, the bottle I had been holding smashed, and I felt my hand get wet and painful as the glass sank into it. The voices in my head changed then, and I heard the worst screaming of my life. It was like the pits of hell had opened up, and I could hear all the tortured souls within. I looked up, and I could see the lights pulsating very fast, hurting my eyes, hurting my brain, and I put my face down in the dirt and waited for all that screaming to be over.

When I came to, it was morning time, and my hand was on fire.

The alcohol had worn off, and as I looked around, I could see the lights and the mist from the night before were gone. I was facedown on the forest floor, my pants stiff from having dried that way, and my hand hurting something fierce. As I got up, though, these things were nothing next to the surprise that awaited me.

I stood up and almost tumbled headfirst over the edge of a ravine.

Down below, I could see the bodies of my friends. The lights hadn't taken them anywhere. It appeared that the only thing that had taken them was gravity. I stumbled away from the edge of the cliff and went running into the woods. I didn't care about my hand or my pants or anything except the need to get as far away from what I had seen as possible.

The state police found me two days later, dehydrated and starving.

My parents, it seemed, had reported me missing, and after they found Dale's truck, the state police and volunteers had begun canvassing the woods. They had almost given up when they found me sleeping next to a tree. They had bundled me up, got me some food, and asked me what happened to Dale, Fred, and Clarence. I told them about the lights, I told them about the ravine, but I couldn't begin to tell them where that ravine might be. I told them that when I had come to, I had seen the bodies of my friends down that ravine and had started running in a panic.

They had thought for a moment that I might have been responsible for them falling into that ravine, but there was nothing in my background to show that I had any tendency like that.

So they let me go, and a year later, I joined the army and went overseas.

They never found the bodies of my friends, but I have been throwing bottles ever since to keep those lights away.

I watched him closely as he finished, wanting him to turn and tell me it was all a joke or just a goof. Instead, Grandpa sat looking out at the woods; silent as the grave. He took the bottle out of my numb hand and threw it out into the woods. It made a skeletal breaking sound as it hit the tree, which seemed to bring him out of his state.

"Why do they fear the sound of breaking glass? "I asked him hesitantly.

Grandpa only shrugged, "I have no idea, son. Grandma, my Grandma, might have known, but by the time I saw them, she was three years in her grave and too far gone for me to ask. "

"Are they the ones who clean the glass up? "

It was a question I had been wondering about for quite some time, and I thought perhaps I had my answer now.

Grandpa, however, just shook his head, "Heavens no, not they. That's for," but he stopped, looking at me side-eyed, with a gap-toothed grin, "but I think that's enough stories for tonight. These old bones are ready for bed."

He got up and went inside, and I followed close behind him.

Suddenly, I wasn't so keen to sit out here by myself.