R/Nosleep (Get Spooked)

Fairy Lights

By u/Erutious

Grandpa and I were spending another night on the porch, having a beer and listening to the sounds of an early spring. The snow had melted, and the critters were just starting to wake up. The forest was alive with the sounds of insects and small animals as they moved about in the light snow that still seemed to hang around sometimes. I had seen a possum the other day, heard him too as he dug through the trash, so I knew that the snow wouldn't last much longer.

As we sat, Grandpa telling me a story about the time a bear cub had crawled into the cab of his truck, I saw another hopeful sign.

In the woods, about ten feet or so from the house, were fireflies.

They were hovering in the air, winking on and off, and Grandpa's story suddenly fell into the background as I sat, unable to take my eyes off them. They were beautiful, the first fireflies of the season, and as Grandpa's story rolled over me like white noise, I felt myself getting up and going to see them. They weren't too far away. I could get to them in a few seconds and...

I got a little mad when Grandpa grabbed my arm, but the second I took my eyes off the lights, I forgot why.

"Don't follow them lights, son. Bad things happen if you follow the Fairy Lights."

"Fairy Lights?" I asked, sitting back down.

"Yeah, devious little buggers. They're not actually fairies, though. Even they don't really know what they are, but they fear them and avoid them if they can."

"Wait," I said, my head still a little floaty, "like real fairies?"

"One story at a time, kiddo. We're talking about the Fairy Lights. They almost got me once. Did I ever tell you about that?"

He threw his bottle out into the woods, and, to my surprise, the fairy lights stopped blinking.

"Nope, but it sounds like you're about to."

Grandpa smiled, "Seems that way. This story begins as most bad decisions often do; with drinking." I was about sixteen when I had an encounter with the fairy lights.

It wasn't the first time I had seen them, but it was the first time I had really been affected by them.

I first saw them when I was about two or three, sitting on my grandma's porch. I got up and tried to toddle after them, wanting to catch them and see what they were. When my grandma scooped me up, boy was I mad! She said I swung my chubby fists at her until there was a door between us and the lights, and then I was just as mild as paint. She told me a few years later, when I was older, that the lights were bad and that I must never follow them.

"They lead people into the woods, and most of those people are never seen again. No one knows what they are, but they seem to delight in getting people lost."

I alway went inside when I saw them after that, not wanting the temptation. Grandma told me too that they usually took children, so I was especially wary of them. Grandma had always been honest with me about the things that could hurt me in the forest, and when she told me to beware, I bewared. She helped me a lot, she taught me a lot, and I owe her my life more times over than I can count.

This time though, she wasn't around to save me.

They say that luck belongs to children and drunks, and a good thing for me it does.

It was Saturday night, and my friends, Dale, Fred, Clarence, and I had pulled back into the woods in Dales's old farm truck. We had been working all day at the mill, chopping trees to load onto trailers, and we were sticky and tired. Dale had hooked a jug of his dad's shine, his dad was a prolific moonshiner in those days, and we were drinking and talking and just relaxing after a long day. There was talk that America might enter the War, World War Two, and we were all scared that we might get drafted. We were just backwoods hicks, we didn't know about foreign places and distant theaters of combat, but we knew that men died in war and that men came back crippled and changed. The drunker we got, though, the less we started caring about war and the more we started loosening up.