Once by James Herbert

Author:James Herbert [Herbert, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction - Horror
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FROM ANOTHER REALM

THOM FELT wonderfully at peace.

He had become used - more ‘attuned’ - to the sights around him, yet was still in wonder at it all as he and Jennet slowly, leisurely, made their way through the deepest part of the woods. He saw many more sights that made him gasp because of their beauty, and many more that caused him to laugh out loud in delight, although Jennet assured him there was still more that went unperceived by him.

‘On the deepest night do you always see every star?’ she had asked him.

‘I suppose it isn’t possible to catch every single one,’ he had replied.

‘But you have little machines which have their own special eyes to record such things.’

‘You mean cameras?’

‘Kamras. It has a nice, capable sound. Doesn’t it reveal to you much more than when you use only your eyes? Doesn’t such a machine reveal many, many other stars beyond your own vision? But even so, this Kamras cannot capture them all. Yet the stars are still there, alive with their own energies, playing their part like everything else that exists on whatever plane or dimension.’

Yes, but it’s a matter of distance, isn’t it? Humans are only capable of seeing so far.’

‘Precisely,’ she had said.

There was a case early in this century where two little girls claimed to have photographed faeries. It was in a place called, er…’ Thom racked his brain ‘… Cotting, Cottingley, I think. Before she died, as an old lady, one of them confessed it’d all been a hoax, they’d photographed paper cutouts of their own drawings.’

‘And what do you think they based those drawings on.’

‘Pictures from storybooks?’

Jennet shook her head. ‘Memories,’ she said.

Jennet had skipped lightly on to a fallen tree trunk and turned to face him. In answer to a question he had put, she replied:

‘In the main, our function, or “purpose”, as you put it, is to nurture nature itself. We are in the spirit of the woodland, the meadow, even in the gardens of humans. You’ll find our essence in mountain ranges and in the wildest and deepest of oceans, in the hillside, or lake and pond. We are in the rain and in the rays of the sun. We are in the wind and fire. When people look at something that you have made with wood—’

She knew he was a carpenter?

—be it simple or complex, they are aware it’s come together by your effort and design. Yet when they take in a tree or plant, then they fail to see that this also has been accomplished by the work of others. Sun, seed and soil are our tools and our spirit stimulates the life.

‘And when we work with humankind, itself, in the cultivation of crops and vegetation, in growing the perfect rose or finest corn, it’s then that our mutual accomplishment is at its most glorious. But whereas Man always works from the outside, the faery works from the inside.

‘Remember the flute uses the wind to play its notes, but it’s the player who assembles those notes.

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