My name is Kathleen McCullough. I am eight years old, I have a red dress that matches my hair, and my favorite time of day is the night. My family lives on the western outskirts of the village. The Woods run close to us, right up to the wards of the boundary stones. Our neighbors say that the fairy road runs right through the property, that it was bad luck to build here in the first place. Mother says tells me not to speak of it, that such talk is unfit for a good Christian girl. But I see how her hand always settles on something wooden when she prays, and how she sprinkles salt on the hearth and threshold every evening. I have never seen the little folk, though I have often peered out my window at night hoping to catch a glimpse of them as they pass by. Shannon tells me that the old man in the Woods will come and eat me if he catches me looking. It gave me nightmares the first time he told me that, and I didn’t look out of the window at the Woods for weeks after, even during the day.

But something drew me back to my nighttime vigils, despite my misgivings. Maybe it was the moonlight on a cloudless night, how it cast everything into silvery light. With the stars burning cold and bright in the sky above, every familiar sight became alien in my eyes, and the mundane became fey. The wheelbarrow with the cracked axel became a basin of silver fire, the garden shack a painted and shuttered chamber for somber, hidden proceedings.