The Bone Flute

We live in a quiet neighborhood. It's not exactly a silent neighborhood - there is always some kind of sound. Birds twittering, a dog barking, leaf blowers whining, delivery trucks rumbling, basketballs dribbling. It's quiet in the sense that not much happens that is unexpected or unusual. That all changed one afternoon.

It was especially quiet that afternoon. No leaf blowers or delivery trucks were audible. Which is strange because I received a delivery. There it was on the doorstep. A small rectangular package, maybe 6 inches long and 3 inches wide. Just big enough for the postage and for my address to be scrawled on one side. Actually, it wasn't addressed to me specifically. It was addressed to "Occupant."

I suppose it might have been delivered by drone, although I wasn't aware that had been approved yet by the city authorities. It was unlikely to have been hand-delivered. Small articles of mail like this usually ended up in the community mailbox at the end of the street. If the mail truck had come by to make an individual delivery, I would have heard it. But there it was.

I realize now that I had options. There was no return address. In fact the postage stamps were printed in an alphabet I couldn't read. I could still have refused delivery, I suppose. I could have tossed the darn thing in the trash. But I opened it. I was expecting something like a complimentary ballpoint pen with an appeal for a donation or a suggestion that I might want to order a couple hundred of them to promote my business. That's not what I found inside.

It was a flute - a crudely carved flute made of what looked like bone. What kind of bone, I could not tell. It might even have been human bone, maybe an ulna from a not too large individual. The thing was hollow, as a bone would be once the marrow is removed, and it had openings on each end with rough holes drilled at varying intervals.

I'm not much of a musician. When I was in third grade our teacher decided that we needed to learn how to play the recorder, so I attempted it under duress but never got much farther than "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Even so, curiosity got the better of me. I decided I wanted to hear what the little object sounded like, if it even made a sound. I gave it a blow, not even bothering to cover any of the holes with my fingers.

The flute produced a long, eerie sequence of notes - an odd melody not unlike the call of some kind of alien bird species. I was so shocked I almost dropped it on the floor. Then, because of a strange compulsion, I blew on it a second time. It produced the same tune, but, other than that, nothing extraordinary occurred.

My wife came running downstairs, asking what on earth was that? I held out the flute, but she wanted nothing to do with it. We shrugged, set it aside and went about the rest of our business for the day.

Our dinner that evening was uneventful. We washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen as usual. It is important to point out that we left the the kitchen in reasonably well-ordered condition when we retired for bed. It may also be worthy to note that we had adopted the habit of sleeping with earplugs inserted during our residency for many years in a much larger and much noisier city. We awoke at our usual time and went downstairs to find a disaster.

All of the cupboards at floor level had been thrown open. Dishes were scattered on the floor, along with flour and sugar and salt and bottles of herbs and spices. The cupboards the next level up, however, were completely untouched.

We were speechless. As we cleaned up the mess, we speculated that perhaps an animal had found its way in. We did not have a dog in residency at the time, but a dog door had been installed by the previous occupants, so a raccoon or opossum could have gotten inside without too much trouble. We had never seen raccoons in the yard, but we knew of at least one opossum. We still clung to this theory even after I found that my liquor cabinet in the dining room had been tampered with. I told myself that I could have left the door ajar and that I might have left the lid of the whisky bottle untightened, so that the contents evaporated. This seemed so much more reasonable than a booze-tippling opossum.

No more mysterious packages arrived that day. We made a quick shopping trip to replenish our supplies, including the whiskey, and returned to find the kitchen cupboards all intact and their contents unmolested. I encountered nothing out of the ordinary until later in the day as I set out on my afternoon walk. Someone had left a flat stone on the bottom step of the front porch. Suspecting a prank perpetrated by the local youth, I bent down to move the stone and discovered that it concealed a small gold-colored coin. As I tucked it in my pocket for later inspection, I noticed that it was composed of real metal and could not have been some plastic prop from a toy treasure chest.

Using a magnifying glass later that evening, I was able to make out part of an inscription on one side: "HEN RIC DI GRA REX." There was also a depiction of a small boat with a shield displaying the British coat of arms. I am not a numismatist, but I have enough knowledge of European history to recognize the name of one of the King Henrys of England: "Henricus Dei gratia Rex" is "Henry, king by grace of God." Which Henry, I couldn't tell, but if the coin were genuine, it was a gold noble from the 14th or 15th century and might be worth thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of dollars. Of course it would be difficult to find a buyer, given the lack of a documented provenance.

That night we blocked the dog door with a piece of plywood braced with a footstool before retiring. There was no way a tipsy opossum was getting through. I had a sip of the new whisky before heading up to bed and took note of the level of the liquid before closing up the cabinet.

The next morning we awoke to even more thorough devastation in the kitchen. Both the first and second level cupboards had been ravaged and dishes and foodstuff were scattered about indiscriminately. The blockade of the dog door, meanwhile, remained in place. My liquor cabinet had been violated again and almost two inches of whiskey had disappeared from the bottle. When I discovered that the stone had been replaced at the bottom of the porch steps and that it concealed another gold coin, there was no denying that the invader or invaders of our home could not have been specimens of simple suburban wildlife. We were dealing with something other than natural.

A few searches on the internet produced an answer. Or two. Or three. In Irish they were called "Sióga." In Welsh their name was "Twylyth Teg." In French, they were "Fées." They had many names in English. "The Fair Folk," for example, similar in meaning to the Welsh. English "Fairies" is derived from an earlier version of the French name, and ultimately they originate with the Latin "Fata," the Fates, distributors of destiny. We were victims of an infestation from the Other World.

I came across some hints for how to deal with them. I had noticed that the honey jar had been a prime focus of the nightly raids. We kept finding blobs of the sticky stuff all over the floor. The sweet breakfast cereals we stocked for visits from the grandkids were also targeted and had been almost completely depleted. And the allure of the whiskey bottle was a clinching piece of evidence. Several of the sources I consulted suggested leaving gifts out for the Fair Folk. Honey and milk were highly recommended. Our supply of milk had been undisturbed, and I had noticed that the refrigerator seemed to be off limits to our visitors. Now I understood why. The outer shell of the appliance was stainless steel, and iron, along with iron-based alloys, is anathema to the Fae.

So we left out bowls of milk mixed with honey, Honey Nut Cheerios, and, of course, a tall glass of whiskey. The next morning we found that our offering had been accepted. The bowls were mostly empty, the glass was drained, and we now found two coins under the stone on the front porch. For the next day or two, the results were the same, but then the bowls were completely empty, the whiskey glass was broken, and cupboards were ransacked. Apparently the offering had not been sufficient, even though it had contained more or less the same quantity.

From then on we increased the size of the food containers and ended up filling plastic buckets with our offerings, including the whiskey. When we noticed scrape marks on the ceiling, we began leaving everything on the porch. It certainly simplified the clean-up process. The monetary gifts we received in return also increased. There were now three, four, five coins each day, but for the reasons described earlier, we had no way of converting the gold pieces into locally valid currency. In the meantime, our grocery bills were increasing exponentially.

Everything finally came to a head when the tree fell over. Like most of the houses in our Southern California neighborhood, we had a palm tree in our front yard. Just for the record, palm trees are just as much trouble, or maybe even more, than regular deciduous trees. The latter tend to drop their leaves during one or two months out of the year. But even though we kept our palm tree trimmed, it dropped bark and other debris all year long every time there was a strong wind. So we wouldn’t have mourned its loss excessively. It’s just that it fell across the porch, blocking the door and leaving a nice dent in the roof of our SUV, which we had left parked in the driveway.

Were the Fairies responsible? Let’s just say that there wasn’t a breath of wind and no one else’s trees were affected. I had noticed the tree seeming to lean more and more since we had begun leaving the buckets out front. I suppose they had to rest somewhere after finishing their meals. In my mind then and now there was and is no doubt. It was time to take more drastic action.

The Catholic Church still practices exorcisms, and my internet searches suggested that this was one reliable way that Fairy infestations could be terminated. In fact it was the only suggestion that anyone said had ever really worked. Filling the house with sage smoke or discordant music seemed just as likely to drive me out, and I wasn’t sure where to get a bottle of holy water.

Unfortunately I didn’t get very far with the priest at St. Junipero’s. When I called the rectory, he asked if I was a member of the congregation, and when I answered truthfully, he suggested that I come to Sunday mass and have a chat with him afterward. I considered it - I truly did. But the matter seemed to require a speedier resolution.

While we were discussing the issue yet again, my wife asked me to describe again what I had done with the flute on the day before the first incident. When I told her all I had done was to blow on it she asked which end I had blown into. I remembered it as the small end. What about blowing the other end? Would that reverse the summoning? Make it a dismissal? A banishment? It was worth a try.

The first step was to find the flute. We had laid it aside, but where had it ended up was not easy to guess. After an interval of frantic rummaging, we discovered it in the tool drawer alongside the screwdrivers and box cutters. Now, did we actually dare to try it? Would it instead anger the little beggars? Or very big, oversized beggars, as the case now seemed to be? We tried it.

As far as we could tell, our experiment was a success. The next few mornings, our offerings remained untouched and the cupboards were unscathed. Even the whiskey bottle was untouched. But now the question was what to do with the flute. Bury it? Burn it?

Since burying would leave it too close to home, we tried the latter but were ultimately unsuccessful. The flute barely even darkened in the flames. It seemed that we had only one other option.

I had seen a news story about a similar looking bone flute showing up in an archeological dig in Britain. It had been dated to the 14th-15th Century, just like the gold coins we had been given. What if we mailed it to the museum where that flute was being displayed?

After sending it off, with no return address included, of course, I realized that I had confused the city with the county and included only the latter on the address label, along with the number and street. Who knew where the instrument would actually end up being delivered? Perhaps someone in Britain would receive a mysterious package, open it and decide to try playing the flute just as I had. Damn Fairies!