The Faery Folk

In 1825, in the Hampshire countryside of the Kennet Valley, a voiceover from Thomas Eldridge—a folklorist whose fate is tangled with the story—recites a common local belief that there is no Heaven or Hell, only a troubled conscience, and tells of a dying man who cried out that devils filled the room until his wife wrapped him in a sheepskin. The scene shifts to a thirteen-year-old girl, never named and referred to only as "Her" for most of the narrative, as she walks along a footpath beside the forest. T errified yet compelled, she enters the darkness and hears a child singing "London Bridge is broken down." She glimpses narrow beams of sunlight, a suppurating arm in a torn ulster overcoat covered with bluebottles, and a tarnished crucifix clasped between the swollen fingers of a dead man. She reaches a clearing where cursed broken sarsen stones lie humming. What she sees there makes her scream. A labourer ploughing nearby sees her body thrown into the air by invisible hands; he and a yeoman farmer rescue her. They find her bruised, bloodied, and with her lower right leg eaten to the bone, the weeping flesh marked by teeth.
Seventy years later, in 1895, Thomas Eldridge, a collector for the Folk Lore Society, arrives at the Matthews' farmhouse. He has spent months in the villages gathering testimonies of customs and beliefs before they disappear. Hector Matthews, a powerful man in his eighties bowed by age, awaits him with his Staffordshire bull-terrier cross, Thorn. Hector is wary and gruff, suspicious of incomers, but he welcomes Thomas with tea and old wisdom. Their conversation moves through local superstitions: Good Friday bread hung from the ceiling cures illness; rosemary blooms and cattle low at the birth of Christ on old Christmas Eve; healing concoctions of wood-sage, horehound, tansy tea and marshmallow poultices. Hector speaks darkly of progress, the degeneration of man, and the earth's memory of slaughter and murder. When Thomas asks about Hector's sister, Hector reveals that what she witnessed in the forest was "man as an aberration, a changeling."
Hector slowly tells the story of his sister's attack. She was local and had jumped over the petting stone when she married. The creatures that abused her were misshapen goblins she later called faery folk: cannibalistic beings that ate her flesh. Afterward she forgot her own name, slept as if dead for days, and claimed to visit "the other land." She returned with knowledge of medicinal plants and ancient lore, passed on to her daughters, who refused to speak with Thomas. She barely ate but lived to a good age on milk, curing people without payment. Hector mentions stone circles in Woolmer Forest older than Stonehenge and a blight in the earth, and insists these things are only whispered about. Thomas connects the account to Professor John Rhys's theory of a cannibalistic prehistoric race and asks whether the creatures come from our future. Hector forbids Thomas from writing any of it and promises to renounce anything he says. Thomas counters with details: silver-grey feathers sent to the British Museum that were never categorized, lights that responded to the girl's thoughts, and liminal creatures crossing a threshold and changing form to become acceptable to human eyes. Hector is unmoved: "Man in a degenerate state. I have said all I'm going to say."
Hector grows cold and tells Thomas he must leave to catch a train. But he knows where Thomas really intends to go, and warns him that the forest and field are olid—foul with the stench of death. Thomas mentions hearing a child singing a strange version of "London Bridge is Falling Down"; Hector implores him to abandon his foolishness. Thomas then realizes the date: Walpurgis Night, the same night his sister was savagely attacked, and insists he must see the stones. Hector accepts this with sorrow, hands him a lantern and the sister's silver crucifix for protection, and asks for it back on his next call. Thomas steps out into the gathering dark, the first stars appearing, while Hector and Thorn watch him from the farmhouse door.
Alone with Thorn, Hector is agitated and wipes tears from his eyes. "You sense it, too," he tells the dog. "They'll find him in a day or two. Christely saw him when her was in the forest all those years ago." He would never have stopped Thomas; no good would be done in trying. The screen fades to black, leaving the certainty that Thomas has walked into the same hidden, hungry threshold that destroyed Hector's sister.