Stefan Bachman - The Peculiar

Feathers fell from the sky.

Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath. They whirled down the roofs, gathered in the corners of the alleys, and turned everything dark and silent, like a winter’s day.

The townsfolk thought it odd. Some locked themselves in their cellars. Some hurried to church. Most opened umbrellas and went about their business. At four o’clock in the afternoon, a group of bird catchers set off on the road to Kentish Town, pulling their cages in a cart behind them. They were the last to see Bath as it had been, the last to leave it. Sometime in the night of the twenty-third of September, there was a tremendous noise like wings and voices, creaking branches and howling winds, and then, in the blink of an eye, Bath was gone, and all that remained were ruins, quiet and desolate under the stars.

There were no flames. No screams. Everyone within five leagues disappeared, so there was no one left to speak to the bailiff when he came riding up the next morning on his knock-kneed horse.

No one human.

A farmer found him hours later, standing in a trampled field. The bailiff’s horse was gone and his boots were worn to nothing, as if he had been walking many days. “Cold,” he said, with a faraway look. “Cold lips and cold hands and so peculiar.”

That was when the rumors started. Monsters were crawling from the ruins of Bath, the whispers said, bone-thin fiends and giants as tall as the hills. On the nearby farms, people nailed herbs to their door-posts and tied their shutters closed with red ribbons. Three days after the city’s destruction, a group of scientists came down from London to examine the place where Bath had been, and were next seen in the crown of a gnarled oak, their bodies white and bloodless, their jackets pierced through and through with twigs. After that, people locked their doors.

Weeks passed, and the rumors turned to worse things. Children disappeared from their beds. Dogs and sheep went suddenly lame. In Wales, folk went into the woods and never came out. In Swainswick, a fiddle was heard playing in the night, and all the women of the town went out in their bed-gowns and followed it. No one ever saw them again.

Thinking this might be the work of one of England’s enemies, Parliament ordered a company of troops to Bath at once. The troops arrived, and though they found no rebels or Frenchmen among the tumbled stones, they did find a little battered notebook belonging to one of the scientists who had met his death in the oak. There were only a few pages of writing in it, badly splotched and very hurried, but it caused a sensation all over the country. It was published in pamphlets and newspapers, and limed up onto walls. Butchers read it, and silk weavers read it; schoolchildren, lawyers, and dukes read it, and those who could not read had it read to them in taverns and town squares.

The first part was all charts and formulas, interspersed with sentimental scribblings about someone named Lizzy. But as the writing proceeded, the scientist’s observations became more interesting. He wrote of the feathers that had fallen on Bath, how they were not the feathers of any bird. He wrote of mysterious footprints and strange scars in the earth. Finally he wrote of a long shadowy highway dissolving in a wisp of ash, and of creatures known only in tales. It was then that everyone knew for certain what they had been dreading all along: the Small Folk, the Hidden People, the Sidhe had passed from their place into ours. The faeries had come to England.

They came upon the troops in the night-goblins and satyrs, gnomes, sprytes, and the elegant, spindly white beings with their black, black eyes. The officer in command of the English, a well-starched man named Briggs, told them straightaway that they were suspected of great crimes and must go to London at once for interrogation, but it was a ridiculous thing, like telling the sea it must be judged for all the ships it had swallowed. The faeries had no intention of listening to these clumsy, red-clad men. They ran circles around them, hissing and teasing. A pale hand reached out to pluck at a red sleeve. A gun fired in the darkness. That was when the war started.

It was called the Smiling War because it left so many skulls, white and grinning, in the fields. There were few real battles. No great marches or heroic charges to write poems about later. Because the fay were not like men. They did not follow rules, or line up like tin soldiers.

The faeries called the birds out of the sky to peck the soldiers’ eyes. They called the rain to wet their gunpowder, and asked the forests to pull up their roots and wander across the countryside to confuse English maps. But in the end the faeries’ magic was no match for cannon and cavalry, and the rows of soldiers that marched among them in an endless red tide. On a great slope called Tar Hill, the British army converged on the fay and scattered them. Those that fled were shot down as they ran. The rest (and there were very many) were rounded up, counted, christened, and dragged away to the factories.

Bath became their home in this new country. It grew back a dark place, pressing up out of the rubble. The place where the highway had appeared, where everything had been utterly destroyed, became New Bath, a knot of houses and streets more than five hundred feet high, all blackened chimneys and spidery bridges wound into a ball of stinking, smoking dross.

As for the magic the faeries had brought with them, Parliament decided it was something of an affliction that must be hidden under bandages and ointments. A milkmaid in Trowbridge found that whenever a bell rang, all the enchantments around her would cease, and the hedgerows would stop their whispering, and the roads would lead only to where they had led to before, so a law was passed that commanded all the church bells in the country to toll every five minutes instead of every quarter hour. Iron had long been known as a sure protection against spells, and now little bits of it were put into everything from buttons to breadcrumbs. In the larger cities, fields were plowed up and trees chopped down because it was supposed that faeries could gather magic from the leaves and the dewdrops. Abraham Darby famously hypothesized in his dissertation The Properties of Air that clockwork acted as a sort of antidote to the unruly nature of the fay, and so professors and physicians and all the great minds turned their powers toward mechanics and industry. The Age of Smoke had begun.

And after a time the faeries were simply a part of England, an inseparable part, like the heather on the bleak gray moors, like the gallows on the hilltops. The goblins and gnomes and wilder faeries were quick to pick up English ways. They lived in English cities, coughed English smoke, and were soon no worse off than the thousands of human poor that toiled at their side. But the high faeries-the pale, silent Sidhe with their fine waistcoats and sly looks-they did not give in so easily. They could not forget that they had once been lords and ladies in great halls of their own. They could not forgive. The English might have won the Smiling War, but there were other ways to fight. A word could cause a riot, ink could spell a man’s death, and the Sidhe knew those weapons like the backs of their hands. Oh yes, they knew.

Bartholomew Kettle saw her the moment she merged into the shadows of Old Crow Alley-a great lady dressed all in plum-colored velvets, striding up the muddy street with the bearing of a queen. He wondered if she would ever leave again. In the corpse man’s barrow perhaps, or in a sack, but probably not on her own two feet.