The Windvale Sprites (3 page)

The man who spotted the Mereton Warbler just happened to have a shotgun about his person at the time, as he was hunting hares. He shot the bird, had it stuffed and presented it to the museum under its present glass dome. Now, the Mereton Warbler was not a large bird so after the shot had passed through there was not much left for the taxidermist to work with. He made do with sparrow feathers, which he painted with watercolours, but a lot of it was presumably guesswork. The result was strange and a little creepy to say the least.

The corpse was crudely wired to a twig and at its skull. Several powdery moths lay dead at the bottom of the display. A tarnished brass plaque on the base proudly declared the name of the murderer:

The library, by this time, had reopened its doors although the large-print section was cordoned off with yellow tape saying DANGER – DO NOT CROSS in unusually big letters.

It was a familiar place to Asa, who had visited it every week for as long as he could remember and knew pretty much every book in the children’s section.

There were two librarians, Mr Trap and Mrs Fields, and the library was a very different place depending on who was working that day. Mr Trap was an irritating man who was probably quite young but dressed and behaved like someone much older. He had a moustache that didn’t suit him, an air of weary resentment and a superiority complex.

He hated kids and if he could answer your question sarcastically, he would. But he treated the old-age pensioners with a cringey respect and talked to them about the weather and bus passes as if he wanted to be just like them. Asa found Mr Trap thoroughly nauseating and preferred the days when Mrs Fields was in charge.

Mrs Fields was the opposite of Trap. She was an old lady (genuine) with a friendly nature and a hearing problem. In fact she was so friendly and so hard of hearing that any job would have suited her better than a librarian. Readers were constantly asking her to ‘shh’ as she sang or talked to herself, unaware of the noise she was making.

Today was a ‘Mrs Fields day’ and there she was, behind the counter, clumsily knocking over a stack of books with her elbow.

 

‘Um, excuse me?’ he said. Mrs Fields looked up and a big grin spread across her face.

‘Hello, dear, how can I help you?’ she yelled and a few people looked up from their browsing.

‘Um, I want to find out about Benjamin Tooth, the man who shot the …’

‘Benjamin Tooth!’ Her grin spread wider and her voice got louder. ‘Alchemist, inventor, astronomer, astrologer …!’ She knew the brass nameplate by heart. A man in the Human Sciences section scowled and raised a finger to his lips.

‘Shhh!’

‘Sorry!’ she shouted and then turned to Asa and giggled as though she had been told off.

‘Follow me,’ she whispered, and led Asa to the local history shelf. She took down a large book on the social history of their town.

‘There will be something about him in here, dear.’ Her voice was slowly rising in volume again. ‘Look under his name in the index or under “Mereton Warbler” – he was the man who discovered it, you know.’

‘Do you mind?’ came a voice from the next aisle. ‘People are trying to read.’

‘Sorry!’ called the librarian then she winked at Asa and scurried back to her desk.

Asa looked through the book and was quick to find a chapter on Tooth. It made interesting reading:

Asa’s heart leapt and he read on.

Asa slapped the book shut and stood up, then he sat down again, found the chapter and read it through for a second time just to make sure. Then he slapped the book shut and stood up again. He looked briefly around him as if he expected to see the trunk sitting, forgotten in a corner gathering dust. It wasn’t, so he wondered what to do next. The first thing to do, he thought, is to have a good think about what to do next. So he set out to find somewhere a bit quieter than the library, somewhere he could concentrate.

As he walked home he sifted through the information he had just unearthed and thought about what it all meant. Most importantly, he knew he was not insane, and neither was Benjamin Tooth. Tooth was the only other person that knew about the fairies; the problem was he lived nearly two hundred years ago and, for that reason, was unavailable for a chat. Asa’s hopes rested on a locked trunk that had also been missing for almost two centuries. What were his chances of finding it? Where could it be?

But he was almost certain he knew where to find the elves or goblins or whatever they were. Benjamin Tooth, so the book had said, lived on Windvale Moor, a wild, rugged area twenty miles from Mereton. The wind was blowing from that direction on the night the storm brought the creature into his garden. Windvale Moor was the place to look.

The next day was a Tuesday and again Asa was free to do as he pleased. The previous night he had meticulously planned his trip to the moor, writing lists of equipment and provisions and secretly gathering everything together. At first light he crept downstairs, scribbled a feeble lie on a piece of paper explaining to his parents where he hadn’t gone, slipped out the back door and cycled off towards the south-west.

As the sun rose and the morning started warming up the ride was a pleasant one and the town petered out around him, replaced by farmland. This in turn became sparser until, coming over the brow of a hill a little over two hours later, Asa saw the huge expanse of Windvale Moor stretching out before him.

The moor seemed so vast at first that it made Asa feel dizzy. It fell away from him in a turbulent shaggy carpet of grasses and furze, then rose up another sweeping hill and away again on to the horizon. Through the bottom of this valley wound a narrow, fast-flowing stream. He felt like a tiny dot on the landscape but at the same time, very conspicuous, as though he were being watched.

 

He stood in that one spot for a long time, just trying to get a sense of scale. He could hardly focus his eyes and felt as though, if he were to take a step on to the moor, he would be swallowed up. He took out his binoculars and spent some time watching a small herd of deer on a faraway hill, which helped bring things into perspective.

Eventually he set off down the hill and stopped at the stream. There were no reeds or vegetation along the banks of the brook, the grass just ended as if a machine had cut the channel, but the water was crystal clear and sped over smooth pebbles. Asa spotted small brown trout swimming against the current and rising to snap at flies.

He tasted the water, which was sweet and pure, and then carried on up the other side of the valley until he reached an overhanging bank where he sat down and took out his binoculars again. He stayed for an hour in this position scanning the valley below him for signs of life. As his eye became trained he started to pick out small birds in the vegetation, reed warblers and yellowhammers flitting from perch to perch, tiny brown or blue butterflies blown across the grass and pockets of grazing rabbits. But no fairies, so he continued over the hill and into a more rugged terrain with rocky outcrops and
wind-stunted
trees scattered across the heath.

He found another sheltered position and settled down again to watch and wait. Far away across the moor he spotted a distant farmhouse and he wondered for a moment if this could be the remains of Benjamin Tooth’s isolated home.

Just then his attention was grabbed by a bird of prey that crossed his view and soared along the ridge of a hill.

The hobby, like a miniature peregrine falcon, skimmed above the waving grass before catching a thermal and rising a few metres, hanging in mid-air and scanning the ground for prey. Then it dipped its wings and dropped out of the current to swoop away and make another low pass above the heather. Asa had been watching the falcon’s nimble aerobatics for ten minutes when it suddenly dived behind a patch of heather and out of sight. It reappeared almost immediately, hovered above the spot and then plunged down again. Now Asa saw what it was chasing, as something scooted out from under the bushes and darted away. The hobby saw it and once again lunged with talons outstretched. The prey leaped clear into the air and hung there for the briefest of seconds allowing Asa a glimpse of what looked like a huge dragonfly.

But the bird would not give up and was soon upon it, lashing out and sending it spinning to the ground. Asa leaped up and in an instant was tripping and stumbling down the hill, waving his arms and shouting for all he was worth. He was over a hundred yards away but had not gone further than a few steps before the hobby spotted him and took off across the moor. Not long after, Asa arrived at the spot and collapsed to his knees panting for breath. He hadn’t seen whether the bird had escaped with its prey and searched the grass around him.