Inheritance

A short story about selfishness, servitude and getting what you wished for

I’m posting this on impulse. I’ve been having that internal debate about whether to post or polish, and (at 6 a.m. here) I’m going with post. My justification is that I’m working on four projects at the same time at my IRL day job, I’ve had 3-4 hours sleep every night this week, I’m working on four short story submissions simultaneously, and this week I realised that two whole chapters of the novel I’m serialising were based on a pretty tenuous character motivation and needed to be entirely rewritten (waving goodbye to some lovely angsty dialogue in the process). Oh, and I have three kids. So, I hope you enjoy this simple faerie story, and that you’ll forgive me if you don’t!

Jamie unlocks the door of the ramshackle cottage his grandmother left him in her will. It has been raining on and off for weeks and the swollen door sticks in its frame. He kicks it, and it flies open, swinging wide and ricocheting off the wall. Jamie puts out a hand to stop its forward motion, and sees there is already someone, or something, inside the cottage.

It is leaning against the scrubbed wooden table in the kitchen. It looks like a person at first glance, but its limbs are too long, its features too angular. Its face is almost bird-like and, when the thin mouth curves into a smile, it reveals small, pointed teeth.

"Hello, James Stephen Lewis," says the creature.

"Who are you?" snaps Jamie, raising his fists and planting his feet in a fighting stance. He practically grew up in the dojo, and he’s only eighteen - still young enough to know he’s invincible. He’s not afraid. "How did you get in?"

"I will answer your second question first,” replies the creature in a bored drawl. “I have been waiting for you here since your grandmother died. She bequeathed me to you along with this dwelling. I am, for all your days, at your service."

"What?"

"Of course, you do not know the story. Your ancestor, David Matthew Lewis, greatly desired a faerie servant. He ... enlisted my services in the year 1878. I have served your family since then."

"Then why has no one ever mentioned you before?"

The faerie flashes another sharp-toothed smile.

"Would you have believed them? I have heard that, in your society, those who talk to faeries are considered ... What is the word? Insane."

Jamie doesn't reply, but he lowers his fists. He doesn't know what’s happening, but it’s slowly dawning on him that an uchi mawasi geri to the head probably can’t harm this creature.

"If you require assistance," says the faerie, annunciating each word and lacing it with the vitriol of the indentured, "do not hesitate to speak my name. It is your grandmother's last bequest to you: the name of Balmony Vetch Wilbereth."

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Jamie pushes the encounter with Balmony Vetch Wilbereth from his mind. Every time it surfaces in his memory, he forcibly removes it. He goes to uni, gets in debt for a piece of paper he'll never use, then works the gig economy for a few years. He sells his grandmother's cottage and builds a business based on a half-baked idea and the promises of coaches on social media. By the time he turns 27, he's deep in debt, and not all of it to banks who take your property when you can't keep up repayments. Some of it is to Eva di Medici who reportedly takes other things - family members, fingers, eyes.

In short, Jamie is desperate; desperate enough, it seems, to believe in magic.

One night, he drinks too much alone in his apartment. He says the faerie's name, and suddenly he is there, sitting across from him in an armchair in front of the TV. Jamie doesn't mess about - he tells him straight, through the alcohol haze, "I want to be rich - so rich none of these fuckers can touch me."

It isn't immediate, not the wave of a magic wand or the snap of a wizard's fingers, but his luck starts to change - fast. The bank gives him an extension, someone shoots Eva, and the cops pick apart her operation. His product catches on. It's shared by influencers, worn by celebs. Less than a year later, he makes his first million, and he doesn't stop there: magazine articles follow, there are chat show appearances and a book deal.

Sometimes, when he wakes at 3 a.m., he wonders if he owes it all to a faerie servant. But in the harsh light of day, he knows faeries don't exist. He'd just drunk too much that night, fallen asleep and had a messed-up dream. Every time he remembers the face of Balmony Vetch Wilbereth, this is the story he tells himself. He almost believes it, too, most of the time.

It's a few years later that he meets Rhiannon. Jamie knows right away that she’s the one. She likes him too, he knows it, but she is too loyal to her husband, too devoted to her kids. Every encounter is followed by weeks of her guilty silence, and Jamie isn't prepared to live like this - the dirty secret of a suburban housewife. So he says the name again, and tells Balmony Vetch Wilbereth that he wants Rhiannon to fall in love with him - to give up everything for him.

And she does: her marriage, her children, her friends. The faerie follows Jamie's instructions to the letter; Rhiannon falls in love with him, but it doesn't stop her guilt eating her up. In the end, it trumps her love for Jamie, and all his devotion and adoration, until she packs her suitcase and says she is leaving him.

"Make her stay," he tells Balmony Vetch Wilbereth.

And she stays. But the Rhiannon that Jamie knew slowly fades. The woman he lives with becomes a fathomless well of regret. She loses her ability to make small talk, her wicked sense of humour, her easy smile, her health. Soon, like her guilt, cancer eats her up, and here she lies now, a frail thing with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes; shiny yellowish skin with bones showing through. And it is his fault.

Jamie knows - he has always known - that it was wrong, the way he had made her love him. But he loves her, he really does, and so he wants to make it right.

"Make her well," he tells his faerie servant when he appears in the room on the palliative care ward.

"She is not sick," replies Balmony Vetch Wilbereth. "She is dying, and she will soon be dead."

"You have to do what I tell you!" Jamie shoots back, all his fear and sorrow becoming anger. "You belong to me! You're my servant! If I command you to do something, you will bloody well do it, and I'm commanding you to save her, so fucking save her!"

The faerie is unfazed by his outburst. He leans forward on the plastic hospital chair. It squeaks as he moves.

"Let me tell you something, James Stephen Lewis," he says. "The acquisition of wealth, the manipulation of human emotions - these are simple magics. But taking a life from the very threshold of death? That is something else entirely. It demands sacrifice - hers, or yours."

Jamie is selfish, and he is never satisfied. He takes advantage of others, and he will do any number of questionable things in order to get what he wants. But even he recognises that Rhiannon has paid enough for his happiness - for a life she never really wanted in the first place. It is he who must settle this debt.

"What sacrifice?" he asks.

The faerie doesn't hesitate. "You will become my servant, James Stephen Lewis."

"I will come when you call me?"

"Oh, no. It is more of a ... live-in situation."

"What exactly does a servant of yours do?"

"Whatever his master tells him."

Jamie looks at Rhiannon. He remembers how she was before, and imagines how she could be again. He owes it to her, that life she should have had: a world without him in it.

"OK," he says. "OK."

The corners of the faerie's mouth lift to form his vicious smile.

It is 147 years since the magician who called himself David Matthew Lewis stumbled upon the notes of a much more distinguished sorcerer from ages past, and used magic he barely believed in to bind one of the fae to his family; a faerie servant for a human lord. Except he hadn't even been a lord; he was a commoner, an amateur entertainer who practised parlour magic.

The faerie had been forced to assist, turning the magician's cheap, sleight-of-hand tricks into real enchantments. David Matthew Lewis made his name, and amassed a following of those who believed he really had access to the occult, while all the time his faerie servant stood invisible beside him. It had been humiliating.

But the faerie had been patient. Human lives were short, and he had thousands of years to bide his time. It was tiresome being at the beck and call of human masters and mistresses, but he felt no need to intervene. He knew humans; knew how their greed and hunger would almost always outweigh their sense of self-preservation. Why should he spend time trying to disentangle himself from a vow made to one of them? Leave mortals to their own devices long enough, give them enough rope, and they would invariably hang themselves. Like James Stephen Lewis.

The faerie takes his human servant to his lands. No one in Jamie's homeland ever wonders what happened to him. His life, his business and all its connections fade away in technical errors, misplaced orders and unexplained forgetfulness. He exists now only in Faerie, a vassal in the draughty castle of his master. The first thing Balmony Vetch Wilbereth does is command James Stephen Lewis to forget the name he received from his grandmother. Then, he begins to exact his revenge on seven generations of Lewises. He would have liked to make each of them suffer, especially that upstart entertainer who started it all, but James Stephen Lewis is all he has, and so it is he who must pay the price for nearly a century and a half of indignity.

At first, Jamie comforts himself with the thought that the woman he loves is safe and well, but he soon forgets her face. After a while, he cannot even recall her name, or how he really felt about her. His master barely lets him sleep, so it takes Jamie less time than most to lose his mind. And, once you lose your mind in Faerie, it is impossible to find it again.

In his last lucid days, James Stephen Lewis has time to regret every time he spoke the faerie's name, and every command he issued. He has time to lament his trust in something so clearly not of his own world, and to reach the conclusion that all who become enslaved to the fae eventually come to: fairy tales are harmless, until you start believing in them.