Dont call me a fairy. We dont like to be called fairies anymore. Once upon a time, fairy erfectly acceptable catchall for a variety of creatures, but now it has taken on too many associatioymologically speaking, a fairy is something quite particular, related in kind to the na-iads, or water nymphs, and while of the genus, we are sui generis. The word fairy is drawn from fay (Old French fee), which itself es from the Latin Fata, the goddess of fate. The fay lived in groups called the faerie, between the heavenly ahly realms.
There exist in this world a range of sublunary spirits that carminibus coelo possunt deducere lunam, and they have been divided sint times into six kinds: fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery, subterranean, and the whole class of fair-ies and nymphs. Of the sprites of fire, water, and air, I know o nothing. But the terrestrial and underground devils I know all too well, and of these, there is infinite variety and attendant myth about their behavior, , and culture. Known around the world by many different names—Lares, genii, fauns, satyrs, foliots, Robin Goodfellows, pucks, lepres, pukas, sidhe, trolls—the few that remain live hidden in the woods and are rarely seen or entered by human beings. If you must give me a name, call me hobgob-lin.
Or better yet, I am a geling—a word that describes within its own name what we are bound and inteo do. We kidnap a human child and replace him or her with one of our own. The hobgoblin bees the child, and the child bees a hobgoblin. Not any birl will do, but only those rare souls baffled by their young lives or attuo the weeping troubles of this world. The gelings select carefully, for such opportunities might e along only once a decade or so. A child who bees part of our soci-ety might have to wait a tury before his turn in the cycle arrives, when he bee a geling aer the human world.
Preparation is tedious, involving close surveillance of the child, and of his friends and family. This must be done unobserved, of course, and its best to select the child before he begins school, because it bees more pli-cated by then, having to memorize and process a great deal of information beyond the intimate family, and being able to mimic his personality and his-tory as clearly as mirr his physique aures. Infants are the easiest, but g for them is a problem for the gelings. Age six or seven is best. Anyone much older is bound to have a more highly developed sense of self. No matter how old or young, the object is to deceive the parents into think-ing that this geling is actually their child. More easily dohan most people imagine.
No, the difficulty lies not in assuming a childs history but in the painful physical act of the ge itself. First, start with the bones and skin, stretg until one shudders and nearly snaps into the right size and body shape. Thehers begin work on ones new head and face, which require the skills of a sculptor. Theres siderable pushing and pulling at the cartilage, as if the skull were a soft wad of clay or taffy, and then the malicious business with the teeth, the removal of the hair, and the tedious re-weaving. The entire process occurs without a gram of painkiller, although a few imbibe a noxious alade from the fermented mash of as. A nasty uaking, but well worth it, although I could do without the rather plicated rearra of the genitals. In the end, one is a copy of a child. Thirty years ago, in 1949, I was a geling who became a human again.