The intercom buzzed. Travis Hellerman looked up from his computer screen with weary eyes. “What it is it now?” he demanded in a tired voice.
“Line three,” the receptionist replied. “Sounds like another fairy sighting. Sorry to bother you, but he seems pretty insistent.”
Travis sighed. “All right, whatever.” He shook his head resignedly. Since he’d come to work for the Citizen’s Reporter, one of New York City’s best-selling pulp newspapers, he’d heard thousands of crazy reports. Only a few of them actually turned out to yield decent stories. When were people going to realize this wasn’t the Star or National Enquirer?
The Reporter was well known for flying on the ragged edge of journalism. If people wanted raw, unbiased facts, they still went to the Times or some other publication. But most people, the Reporter’s founder knew, wanted a lighter edge to their newspaper. So the stories found in the Citizen’s Reporter sometimes told what people claimed they saw or believed, rather than what necessarily was true. It was a fine line most reporters had trouble straddling, but Travis had mastered the art.
One thing he’d learned in his three years with the Reporter was that people often honestly believed the things they told him. He could understand this because he’d seen a few for himself. A couple of the ghost sightings he’d investigated had turned out to be real, or at least had elements that rational science couldn’t explain.
There were a few incidents that stuck in his mind as truly exceptional. He once checked out a Satanic cult that could supposedly do real magic, and found one of its members partially embedded in the floor of an apartment, within the pentagram they’d painted there in blood. There was no way they could possibly have built the floor around him like that, and the autopsy had shown pieces of wood with flesh apparently grown around them. It was as if he’d really sunk into the floorboards somehow. The whole thing still sent shivers up Travis’s spine.
Then, of course, there was the fairy incident. A man had called him up a year before, insisting he’d captured a fairy in a jar. He had photos and video of it, and sent Travis some of this over the Internet. At first the reporter had thought it was just a clever amateur film of a naked woman with fake wings inside a giant prop. He dismissed it and went home. The next day, though, he checked the pictures more closely. In a couple of shots the man was holding the terrified-looking fairy, and it looked awfully real for amateur stuff. He decided to check it out.
However, when he visited the place, the man insisted he had no idea what Travis was talking about. The reporter showed the pictures, some of which included the caller’s face, but while he identified himself, he had no memory of taking the photos. After some wrangling, Travis talked his way into the building, and found the digicam (with the images still on it) plus the broken jar where the fairy had been held. Yet the man still insisted he hadn’t called, but had spent the previous evening asleep. He even had no idea the jar had shattered, and hadn’t been aware of the fact until Travis showed up.
This left the reporter mystified. It was either an immense prank or something strange had really happened. If it had been a joke, no one had come forward to claim responsibility, and of course the caller got nothing out of it, not even a brief mention in the paper. No one had gained anything, and Travis had always felt like he’d missed out on something big.
To ensure that didn’t happen again, he decided to check on any fairy story that came along. Of course, he knew better than to put a note in the paper asking anyone to report such things to him. Within hours, every wacko in the city would be calling. Instead, he simply left instructions with the receptionist to forward any calls about fairies directly to his desk. This resulted in maybe a dozen or so leads a year, but none of them ever panned out.
Now, here was another one, and he was already working on a deadline. Well, he thought, he’d humor whoever it was and get back to his piece as quickly as possible. He hit a button on the phone and said, “Travis Hellerman here, how can I help you?”
“Hi,” said a nervous voice. “I’m Kyle Morris. You’ve never heard of me, but I read your paper. I thought you might be the right person to call about this. I really don’t know who else to turn to.”
“All right, what’s going on?” asked Travis, not bothering to hide his boredom.
“Well,” said Kyle, “you won’t believe this, I’m sure, but my friend has a fairy in his apartment.”
“You don’t say,” droned Travis.
“He found her last night,” Kyle went on, oblivious to the reporter’s lack of interest. “He hit her with his car, and then brought her up to his room. I saw her myself, and I’ve held her in my hands. She’s real, all right, but her wing’s broken, so she can’t fly very well.”
“Right,” Travis replied. He decided to ask some questions and pretend to write down the answers. That always made the crackpots think he really cared. Then he’d feign taking down the number, and never call. “So what did this fairy look like?” he asked, as though he were really curious.
“About three, maybe four inches high,” he answered. “She’s incredibly gorgeous. Her eyes are blue, and her hair is pure white, coming down to about her waist. She looked just like a real woman, except for size. Oh, and there are two wings coming out of her back. They look like dragonfly wings. One of them got snapped in half, so Dave has it taped back together.”
Travis was about to proceed with his plan to ditch this guy when something made him pause. The description was not like the ones he usually received. Most of the time, the supposed fairies were glowing, or colored wrong, or much smaller, or something else. This one sounded all too familiar.
Casually, he pulled open a desk drawer and reached into a file in the back. Taking it out, he withdrew the half a dozen or so grainy pictures of the fairy report from a year ago. The images matched exactly what Kyle had described. The height, appearance, wings, and even hair color were exactly right.
It couldn’t be a coincidence, Travis thought. Either this was for real, or it was the punchline of a joke set up months ago. Whichever it was, he meant to get to the bottom of it.
He looked more closely at one of the pictures the previous informant had taken. In it, he was holding up the fairy’s wings, showing that they were real and not just glued on. “Kyle,” he said into the phone, “you said you were holding this fairy, right? Did you look at the wings closely?”
“Oh yeah,” he answered. “I looked at her closely, all right.”
“All right, here’s a question. Did the wings come out of her shoulders? Or were they up on her neck?”
“What?” Kyle hesitated only for a moment. “Oh, sorry, neither. They come right out of the middle of her back, between the shoulder blades.”
Travis almost dropped the phone. That was exactly as it was in the photograph!
“Okay, Kyle, I believe you,” he said, trying to hide his excitement. “I need to come see this for myself. Where are you right now?”
Kyle told him. Hanging up quickly, Travis grabbed his supplies and rushed out of the building, his deadline completely forgotten.