NOTE: All characters are 18+, and fictional. Any similarities to actual people (or Faeries) is purely coincidental.
ALSO NOTE: For those who like to follow my work, this is a departure from my usual material. I wanted to try something cute and fun, while keeping it erotic. It's nothing like my usual work, so please drop a comment if you'd like to see anything else in this genre.
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My wife and I bought a house way up a mountain in a small town upstate. The other houses around us were all of the same ilk; kind of old and run down with updates that stood out like a sore thumb. I seem to recall there were only about three dozen houses that clung to the side of the steep rise as ours did. It used to be a summer community where the residents would flee the city to come and enjoy the rural life a few weeks or months out of the rear. The rest of the time, it was usually too cold and snowy to be much fun.
We moved in that September, and found a few things that puzzled us. For one, literally every house in the community had a pickup. We thought we'd moved into hick-town USA, until the first snowfall. That evening when we got home from work, we had to leave our car at the bottom of the hill and walk up in the snow and ice. A week later, we joined the 4-wheel drive club.
The other thing I noticed was the iron horseshoes mounted over almost every front door, and almost as popular were wind chimes and dream catchers hung under the eaves or in front windows. My wife and I are both pretty academic, and we both had a fascination with medieval history. I, especially, learned a lot about old Norse and Celtic cultures. So one thing I recalled was that, after the Christification of the Celtic tribes, people often hung horseshoes over the door either U side up, or U side down depending on the intent.
U side up was to catch good luck in the bend, bringing fortune and blessings. U side down was a warding, to protect the house from evil spirits. I noticed that every single one had them were U side down. Even the house we bought had one. We also knew that Dream Catchers were used to catch bad spirits that tried to haunt your dreams at night, and wind chimes were used to drive away evil spirits in some cultures.
Again, we were more familiar with the Urban life than the rural, and it just seemed to fit the old-style homes and culture of the area. We hadn't really met anyone yet, so we didn't get any of the backstory... until Christmas.
Winter there often came with a ton of snow that made driving... pretty interesting. Try going down a road on a 30 degree angle in the show. We called it the 'Controlled Freefall'. So, when a big snow hit on Christmas Eve, we were sort of trapped and had to back out of plans to visit family.
We had just finished a late breakfast when we heard a knock at the front door. This was literally the first time anyone knocked on that door, so we sort of jumped with a little shock. Who would be out there in this weather?
It turned out to be our neighbor's kids. Timmy and Drew asked if they could shovel our walkway for five dollars. It was kind of awesome. The last time I heard those words, they were coming out of my mouth when I was their age. Here we were, actual home owners, with neighbors and everything!
"Sure." I said. "Be careful. It's slippery."
"And my dad wants us to ask if you want to come over for eggnog tonight." The younger one said.
"That's so nice!" My wife said. "We'd love to."
We paid the kids for their work, and tried to find something to bring to the neighbors. My folks always taught us never to show up empty handed to someone's house. The best we could do was a cheap bottle of wine, so I stuck a ribbon and bow on it, and at the appointed time, we went over.
Their names were Raul and Ginger. He was an EMT with the local hospital, and she was a nurse. They were about ten years older than us, and very friendly. We thanked them for the invitation, and retired to their beautifully decorated living room for eggnog and music while we talked and got acquainted.
During the conversation, I asked about the horseshoes and wind chimes. They looked at me like I had just said a dirty word in front of their kids.
"It's umm... a sort of tradition, I guess." Ginger said. "We were told they keep the fae folk away."
My wife shook her head like she wasn't sure she heard right. "Fae folk? You mean Faeries?"
Raul nodded. "I know, it sounds crazy." he laughed. "But I have to tell ya, we took ours down when we first moved in, and all sorts of weird shit happened."
"Like what?" I asked.
He took a long sip of his eggnog as if for courage, then sighed. "Okay, this is gonna sound stupid, but... the cat started acting really strange. It would go chasing around the house at all hours, like it was trying to catch something."
"Mice?" My wife suggested. "Out here, there must be a million of them."
"Not mice!" Ginger frowned. "She caught lots of mice, but she was jumping up on the furniture, up the walls, in the windows... like she was after a fly or something, but there was no fly."
"Then she jumped up on Timmy's bed in the middle of the night. Clawed his arm pretty bad." Raul added.
"Oh shit!" I gasped.
"Yeah. And that wasn't all." He went on. "Our fireplace flue just closed by itself. I started a fire, and it was burning fine for at least an hour, then all of a sudden, the whole house was full of smoke. That flue doesn't open or close easily. There's no way it just happened to fall closed like that."
"And the water heater." Ginger said.
"Right." Raul continued. "Stopped working for no apparent reason. Two days, no hot water. We got a plummer out here to look at it, and I swear to God, the minute he drove up, the damned thing turned on again like nothing was ever wrong with it."
"Well, that could have been the starter, or..."
"There were lots of other things." Ginger insisted. "Doors that opened or closed on their own, a window that cracked for no reason. All sorts of stuff."
Raul took over again. "Then our neighbor on the other side, Bob, that big dude in the old log house..."
I shrugged. We hadn't met him yet.