FABLE

Chapter Forty Two

I watch from my bedroom window until I see the tail lights of my dad's car disappear into the darkness. It took ages for my parents to leave.

They asked Jamie and Zee to go home as soon as Felix left, and then they interrogated me for almost an hour. They probably would have carried on longer if they didn't need to get to Biblio for the late night Sunday supper service.

That's one perk of having chefs for parents - it's always just a matter of time before they have to rush back to the kitchen.

With my phone on silent and a giant mug of chai on my bedside table, I sprawl out on my bed with my laptop in front of me.

It's time to clear some things up.

First I check the official Fable fansites, then the most popular Tumblrs and Fable Twitter accounts. As expected, everyone thinks the boys are spread out across the globe on vacation during the hiatus between albums.

A lot of fans are posting theories about where they are, speculating about why all five of the Fable guys have gone quiet on social media over the past few days - but no one seems to suspect the truth.

The truth being that the Fable guys aren't taking a break. They're renting a cabin deep in the woods in Portland to record a secret album.

Not exactly an easy one to guess. Still, all it would take is one local fan to recognise the boys and post their location online, and it's game over.

Once I'm satisfied that the boys' secret is still under wraps, I think back on the dream I had last night, about my gran telling me a bedtime story. She said it was a fairy tale, but it's not one I'd ever heard of, or have heard of since.

I don't know why, but I feel like it's one piece of a much larger puzzle.

So I start typing keywords into the Google search bar, not really expecting to find anything of use.

irish fairy tale witch beach sea cave girl serpent full moon

The first few results are irrelevant - an advert for a book of fairy tales, the wiki of a popular anime about mermaids, a review of a new Irish poetry anthology - but the fourth result down catches my eye.

In Search of the Creeslough Sea Maid, Prof. Eagla McAuley
Welcome to Mythology.org, home to scholarly papers by Britain's most renowned academics. Our archives include....

I click the link, and I'm taken to a page with a photo of a middle-aged lady, with short grey hair, red-rimmed spectacles and a long thin face. The caption beneath the photo reads 'Eagla McAuley, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, M.A., Ph.D. (RUI).'

Next to the photo, there's another picture. It's not clear, but it looks like a close-up shot of the pages of an old book or a manuscript. The paper is covered in strange symbols in thick black ink, possibly in Gaelic or some ancient language. There's no caption or description for the photo, but something about it seems important. So I right click and save it to my desktop.

The rest of the webpage has a lot of text, so I skim through it. The first few lines are an introduction to her academic paper, and about three paragraphs down I find what I'm looking for.

It's widely acknowledged that the myth of the Creeslough Sea Maid is endemic to the northernmost villages of Ireland, but variations of the story can be found as far South as Kilkeel. The fable is assumed to be more than three thousand years old, and has long fascinated scholars of Celtic folklore - both for its longevity in oral tradition, and for its links to several older, more obscure mythologies. Each telling of the tale varies, but the central theme is always that of a sea witch or sorceress who finds or kidnaps a beautiful girl, and raises her until fate intervenes in the form of a young man.