In the center, a space of about eighteen feet was open to the sky, covered in lush, emerald grass.
'There it is!' Sarah grabbed my arm and pointed. Her voice dropped to an awe-filled whisper. 'The famed West County faery ring! It's perfect! Just what I imagined it would be! It's like a holy place, don't you think?'
I left her hugging herself with delight, marching over to squat next to the bare earth that marked the boundaries of the faery ring. The ring was about four feet wide, a perfect circle of bare earth surrounded by lush grass growing on the inside and outside of it. There was nothing to indicate the cause, no mushrooms visible, but I knew they weren't always seen. I touched the sun-warmed dirt, and mused, 'I wonder if there's a lab around here where I could send a soil sample so we can find out just which fungus caused this ring?'
'Infidel,' she said without heat, slapping her coat pockets, pulling out the spell pages, and turning around in the way women who have forgotten their purses have. 'Do you have the camera?'
I cocked an eyebrow at her. 'You took it away from me at Denhelm, if you recall.'
'Oh, that's right—you insisted on taking pictures of the farmer's son rather than the bog man mummy. I must have left the camera in my bag.'
'You have to admit, the son was much better looking than that moth-eaten old bog man.'
She straightened up to her full five-foot nothing. 'That bog mummy is said to have been used in a druid sacrifice, and thus could well contain the spirit…oh, never mind. I can see by the mulish expression on your face that you are closing yourself up to any and all things unexplainable. Let me have the car keys so I can run back to town and get the camera.'
'I'll do it—'
A little sparkle lit her eyes. 'No, you stay and meditate in the faery ring. Maybe if you open yourself up to the magic contained within, you'll see how blind you've been all these years. Here, you can read the spells over while I'm gone, but don't try them out until I get back. I want to see everything the ring has to offer!'
I took the pages she handed me, plopping down to sit with crossed legs in the middle of the circle. 'All right, if you're sure you're OK with driving on the wrong side of everything.' I plucked a piece of grass and chewed the end of it as I shucked off my light jacket. 'I'll soak up a bit of sun while you're gone.'
'Portia!' Sarah's eyes grew huge. 'You can't do that!'
'Do what, sunbathe? I'm not going to take off my clothes, just roll up my sleeves,' I said, suiting action to word.
'You can't eat anything that grows in the faery ring. It's…it's sacrilegious! In fact, I don't think you should be in the ring at all. I'm sure that's going to anger the faeries.'
I rolled my eyes, chewing on the blade of grass. 'I'll take my chances against the fungus. Remember to stay on the left.'
She hurried off after delivering herself of a few more dire warnings as to my fate if I continued. I sat enjoying the sun for a few minutes, but that quickly lost its charms. I made a search of the area surrounding the ring, but there was nothing there but trees, grass, daisies and buttercups, and the wind whispering through the leaves.
'Right. A little scientific investigation is in order,' I said aloud to break the silence. I seated myself again in the faery ring, plucking another blade of grass to chew while I consulted the photocopies Sarah had thrust upon me. The text explaining the purpose of the spells was couched in dramatically obscure language, no doubt fooling the more gullible reader into believing its authenticity. 'It's going to take a lot more than some lame attempts at mysticism to fool me,' I muttered as I ran my finger down the spells. '
A glimmer of something caught the corner of my eye. I turned my head to look at it, thinking someone had dropped a penny or bit of glass on the ground that had caught the sunlight, but there was nothing.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, as if something that posed a threat was approaching.
'Honestly, Portia, how pathetic is it that you're letting Sarah's chat about magic get to you?' I rubbed my arms against a sudden prickling of goose bumps, and gave myself a mental lecture about allowing someone's enthusiasm to sway my common sense.
A little flash of light in midair had me whipping around to look at it.
There was nothing.
'Oh, this is ridiculous. I'm spooking myself, and over what? Figments of an overactive imagination…'
Directly in front of me, something twinkled in the air again, just as if tiny motes of metal had reflected the sunlight.
To my astonishment, the twinkling continued, growing thicker until the air around me seemed to collect, flashing like a thousand tiny, nearly imperceptible, lights.
'I'm hallucinating,' I said, closing my eyes. 'It's the sun. I'm sun blind, or having heatstroke, or the fungus in the faery ring is a hallucinogenic.'
I opened my eyes, sure I would see only the top of a sunny hill, but instead gawked as the twinkling lights gathered themselves into an opaque form.
'It's got to be the fungus,' I said quickly, getting to my feet and backing up out of the ring. 'It's from the peyote family or something—'
As I backed away, I stumbled over a lump in the grass, falling onto my butt. My mind came to an abrupt stop as the form turned into a person. I shook my head, blinking rapidly to clear my vision. 'All right. Time to get some medical aid. This silliness has gone on long enough.'
'Oh, there you are!' the hallucination said as it turned to me. 'Thank heaven you called me. Quickly, we don't have much time. I must pass on the Gift and be on my way before they find me.'
The hallucination—in the form of a woman, slightly shorter than me, with long black hair and brilliant blue eyes—stood over me with her hands on her hips, an exasperated look on her attractive face. 'Merciful sovereign, are you faery struck?'
'Don't be ridiculous,' I answered, my voice coming out as a croak. I cleared my throat. 'There are no such things as faeries. Oh, man, what am I doing? I'm talking to a hallucination?'
The woman—I couldn't help but think of her as such when she looked so real—rolled her eyes for a moment, then startled me by grabbing my arm and hefting me to my feet. 'Don't tell me they didn't conduct the preliminaries with you? You passed the trials, yes?'
'That must be some serious fungus,' I answered, brushing the bits of grass off my butt as I looked at the faery ring. 'I could swear I felt someone touch me.'
'Hello! Can't you hear me? I'm talking here!'
'It's amazing, absolutely amazing. I'm going to have to get a sample for the nearest lab to analyze. This could be dangerous if children came across it—who knows what sort of thing they would hallucinate.' I dug through my pockets, hoping for a plastic bag or something I could use to hold a sample of the earth. Unfortunately, I had nothing on me other than a package of gum. 'Damn. I'll just have to wait for Sarah, then pop back to town to get something—'
'Are you deaf?' the woman in front of me shouted, waving her arms in the air. I watched her, amused at the lengths my imagination would go to under the influence of a delusionary drug. She looked quite normal, dressed in a tight pair of green pants and a chunky tan and green sweater. She was frowning, clearly unhappy about something.
'I suppose I could humor my brain,' I said, eyeing her. 'At least until Sarah gets here. Hello.'
'What is wrong with you?' the woman asked, slapping her hands against her legs. 'Didn't you hear me? We don't have time for you to stand here and be strange!'
'You'll have to forgive me. I've evidently been poisoned by hallucinogenic fungus spores. What did you want to know? And…this is silly of me, I know, but could you tell me your name, if you have one?'
'Oh, for the love of…they were supposed to meet with you and fill you in when they gave you the summoning spells! Honestly, the incompetence these days, it's frightful. You'd think they could do something right after having a few millennia to work it out. My name is Hope. Who are you, please?'
I smiled at the illusion, giving my brain and the fungus full marks for creativity. 'I'm Portia Harding, of Sacramento, California, and I'm currently employed by a biomedical firm as a researcher in Atomic Scale Technology. Is there anything else about me you'd like to know? Favorite color? Perfume? Shoe size?'
The look from her intense blue eyes had me forgetting for a moment that she wasn't real. 'Your shoe size is irrelevant. We don't have much time at all, and even less now that I have to do everyone else's jobs and fill you in. I
