Videte Ne Quis Sciat

Lars never found out what he was having for dinner that night, because the man didn’t need assistance— he needed an innocent victim. The house that Lars found himself taken to wasn’t the suburban white picket fence home he had expected, but a run down shack in a very poor state of repair. The walls were papered in pictures of flowers cut from magazines and catalogues, and though he was chained up for the first few days, the shackles didn’t last long. They didn’t have to, because Lars was kept weak enough that he couldn’t walk if he wanted to.

The man revealed himself to be Fiacre, king of the faeries, and Lars had been fortunate enough to become heir to the kingdom. Daily the young boy was fed a tea made of flowers that would help him transition into the faerie ways, but this tea was brewed with small measures of foxglove and nightshade and it kept Lars in a constant state of illness— always drowsy, unable to keep down any bread that was thrown to him, he became grievously ill. It was part of the process, Fiacre said.

Kept in such a weak state, Lars retains very little memory of these days. He was barely conscious and one day was much like the next. It never became clear what ‘Fiacre’ wanted with him, because he was left more or less to rot in his grimy shed. After years had passed, the media buzz surrounding the young boy’s disappearance faded, and slowly he was forgotten. He might never have escaped, were it not for a hiker passing by and hearing the sounds of vomiting from what looked to be an abandoned shed.

His family were of course ecstatic to have him back, and Lars’ health recovered with the reliability of youth. The man that called himself Fiacre was submitted to serious psychological evaluation at a mental institute, safely locked away, but Lars didn’t feel safe. It didn’t matter that Fiacre’s body was incarcerated, because he could simply take on another body. Such is the power of the faeries. Lars became skittish, and he saw Fiacre everywhere. It was easy to identify the faerie king, because his skin had a blueish grey hue and his teeth were uneven, pointed like a wild animal’s.

Any time Lars saw Fiacre, he ran. At sixteen he was old enough to live alone, and he quickly lost contact with his parents, travelling around the States as unpredictably as he could manage. Should he stay still too long, or allow anyone to get too close, Fiacre could easily find him again, and Lars couldn’t allow his life to be taken over like that. He wouldn’t become one of them, he wouldn’t. It was no way to live, often going hungry and sleeping rough, but it felt safer than a more typically secure life. Much to his own surprise as much as anyone else’s, Lars lived a relatively quiet life. It was erratic, yes, and unstable, but his early adult years were safe at least from the threat of Fiacre. Any glimpse of him, and Lars would simply hitch hike five states away.

Years and years he spent trying to evade the king of the fairies, but Fiacre was clever and fast and Lars eventually resigned himself to never truly being able to escape the king’s pursuit. With a sense not of sadness but of relief, he put the plug in the bath and set the showerhead running, surrounding himself with iron pots and pans and knives. Submerged in the water, he knew he was safe— running water and iron are two of the most fatal downfalls of faerie-folk. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on one’s perspective, the woman that lived downstairs heard suspicious sounds and called the police, and they dragged Lars from the bath before he was able to complete the task of drowning himself.