We got hired out to do an extermination down in Savannah in one of them hi-brow, snooty shopping centers. You know the type, they don’t have stores, they have “Boutiques”. Anyway, the owner of the property called us cause the stores were all complaining of missing and broken products. The furniture store owner says that one day they came in and found all their chairs glued up on the ceiling, I guess the couches and tables must have been to heavy to stick. None of the security cameras picked up any thieves or the like and nothing out of the ordinary. So they got to thinking they might have gotten themselves a rodent problem, but none of the locals could find any evidence of any critters. Well somehow they got our number and gave us a call, and it was a good thing too!
As soon as we pulled up to the first store we knew exactly what was causing all the calamity. Right there under the front window was a tiny decorative door, probably about six inches tall. Upon further inspection we found similar doors of various colors stuck on the front of every one of those buildings.
I’ve seen stories on the interwebs about local artists in big cities up north making these tiny doll sized doors and sticking them up all over because they think its cute. The people love them, they nicknamed them “fairy doors”, cause they’re the perfect size for the wee folk to enter. What a horrible idea, fairies are the last thing you want on your property.
Now its no secret that I hate fairies and I think they would be better off with the rats. I find easier to just grab yourself one of those electric fly swatters from the local Walmart and just wack the crap out of them. Sometimes a decent rat trap set with a piece of bread dipped in honey is good too.
Unfortunately that wasn’t going to work here. You see, fairies get in all the time, usually only one or two, here and there. Most of the time their pranks are usually dismissed as everyday nuisances. A pair of earrings missing, lights being on that you thought you had turned off, the cat catching fire, you know nothing unusual. What we have here is full scale invasion, and why? Cause some jackass got the idea in their head that putting up doors for them was a great idea! You see, once those things were in place, it became an official invitation to them. When you throw down the welcome mat for these things, you’ve made them official guests in your building and they expect you to treat them in that fashion. If they’re there uninvited, they’re easy to get out, just like I said earlier. As invited guests, they don’t have to leave until they want to, which could be days or never. Also, these things are easily angered and offended, by having us coming in to get rid of them is a serious offense.
Thankfully for the store owners, they wont have to suffer any further wrath cause technically they don’t own the building, so only he’s the only one who will have to deal with them. You see, after we told him what the problem was, he just laughed at us and refused to even pay our travel expense, told us he doesn’t believe in fairies. Unfortunately for him that only works in Peter Pan.
After talking to the different store owners they decided to pool together and pay our fee, well everybody except the Irish guy who owned the shoe repair store on the end. Apparently he already knew what was going on and his business has tripled ever since his new guests have started doing his work for him. Don’t ask me why, but those little bastards really love fixing shoes. Well now that we was sure what the problem was, we had to set about fixin it.
Now like I said before, a sure fire way of getting rid of these pixied vermin is to straight up off them. That wasn’t gonna be good enough in this case, with this, we was gonna have to make them want to take leave of their own volition. So now that me an Jr had a bead on what we was dealing with it was time to get down to the brass tacks, time to slap these little vermin with an eviction notice!
What we had to do here is make the stores unhospitable for them, the first order of business was to take care of them there doors. Now you’d think that it would be as simple as grabbing a pry bar out of the truck and snatching ‘em of the wall, but you’d be wrong. Even if the doors were pulled down, the openings are still there. What we needed to do is seal them things up! For that, you’re gonna need some iron.
You see, fairies hate iron, hate it with an unholy passion. Iron is your best protection against them cause it burns them when they touch it. I’m not talking about accidentally touching the stove burn, its almost like they start to cook from the inside out. If they touch it long enough, they’ll go off like a potato in the microwave! Besides iron, there’s other things you can use to get rid of them. Yall know my personal favorite, the electric fly swatter! Also, if you know anyone who does landscaping or owns a flower shop you’d be in luck. There’s all sorts of flowers and plants that they hate too and you can use them to keep them out, the one that seems to work the best is St. john’s Wort. I like grabbing a mess of bottles from Sam’s Club and crushing the pills up into a fine powder and sprinkling it everywhere, its like Sevendust for the fae!
So I sent Jr down to the local hardware store to find the smallest nails he could, pop a couple of them into each tiny door and done! They is sealed! While he was doing that I set about buying up the St. John’s Wort. Let me tell you, while its not illegal to buy high quantities of that stuff, when you walk up to the register with forty pounds of it you’re gonna get some looks. I also bought one of those cheap coffee grinders cause I sure as hell wasn’t gonna crush all that up by hand.
I got back to the plaza to see that Jr had about half of the doors taken care of, but Jr wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I found him in the flower shop in the middle of the plaza. He was sitting there sipping tea with a lovely young lady named Sadie May Hawkins. Apparently he’d been trying to nail one of the doors shut when she came walking by and he hammered his thumb instead. I could tell by the way he was mooning at her that Id most likely be finishing this job by myself. If you hadn’t guessed it, this would be the soon to be Mrs Sadie May Fenton. They say love is blind, so I’m guessing that Sadie might need some of that laser eye surgery. Don’t get me wrong, I love my brother, but he isn’t exactly what you’d call a looker, what with him only being able to grow the one eyebrow and all.
Anyway, he was no good to me after that, so I just set him to grinding up the tablets. I also set Miss Sadie to seeing if she could order some Boxwood shrubs to plant around stores, they hate that stuff almost as bad as the Wort. I figured we could “hedge” our bets, see what I did there with the play on words, and Jr thought me going back to night school to finish my GED was a waste of time! Well it took a couple of days to get the boxwood all planted and to get the wort all ground up. Sunday morning when all the shops were closed Jr and I set to spraying all the shops with the powder and then locking them up tight. You see, St. John’s Wort won’t kill them, but it will make them pretty miserable, like sitting in a room with a dog that just ate a bowl of chili.
We figured we’d lock them in all night and when the shops opened in the morning theyd come flying out as soon as the shops opened for business. We arranged it so everyone would open at the same time at 6am Monday morning. So there we were, 6am, keys in locks, Jr and I standing in the parking lot waiting. There were eight shops in the plaza, not counting the cobbler, I counted to three and they popped the locks and stood aside.
At first nothing happened, but after a few moments the buzzing started. Softly at first, but it just kept getting louder and louder, like the stores were packed with swarms of locusts. The windows started to shake and you could almost feel the asphalt vibrate the buzzing was so loud. Just when you thought the windows were gonna shatter, the doors exploded open with screaming rainbows! What looked to be about a couple thousand of pixies came roaring out the front off the shops swarming the parking lot with a myriad of twinkling lights, the breeze being churned up from all those tiny wings was enough to scatter leaves and trash around the ground. For a split second they seemed to almost stop in mid air, almost frozen, without warning, they charged Jr! I myself was caught totally by surprise by the sheer number of those things that were hiding inside those stores and I was almost felt bad about what I had done to Jr.
You see, while we were at the flower shop and no one was looking, I stuffed a whole bunch of Foxglove in a bag and stashed it in the truck. While Jr slept, I boiled it all down and sprayed Jr’s clothes with it. Now Foxglove is what you’d call an aphrodisiac to fairies, its kinda like when hunters use doe pee to attrack the bucks, like catnip to cats, like spanish fly to co-eds! So while they was circling the parking lot, they caught a wiff of Jr standing there smelling like a fairy whore house.
Jr let out a milk curdling scream as he was lifted a couple a feet into the air and slammed to the ground. Between the screams, crys and buzzing you could barely hear the sound of cloth ripping. Almost as fast as it started, it was over. The pixies lazily kited off to the morning sun and Jr just lay there on the asphalt in nothing but his underwear and boots, curled up in a ball, sobbing. He had little brusies and cuts all over him along with a thin coating of sticking looking gel. Seeing as he was just hammered by a heard of horny fairies, I’ll give you three guesses on what he was covered with. Again, I almost felt sorry for doing it, almost.
Sadie rushed to his side and she’s been there ever since. The plaza hasn’t seen a fairy since and Jr and Sadie tied the knot soon after, they’ve been married for nearly 2 years now. It wasn’t long after the wedding that they welcomed their first child into the world, a big ‘ol chub of a baby boy, Wardell Neely Fenton Jr Jr, we call him Little Jr for short. Anyway Jr promised no traveling until Little Jr was 2 so that’s why there havent been any updates as of late. Jr stayed home and just worked on the towing end of business and I hired out to a good friend of ours until Jr could return. Beaman ain’t much of a trapper, but he can crawl his big ass under a house with a giggin stick quicker than most. Hopefully we’ll have a line on some new jobs soon, now that Jr is back in the fold and Little Jr is almost old enough to stick his first chupercabra!
HUNTING TIP FOR THE DAY
So what with Jr now gotten himself hitched and done doffed of a youngin, I figure we could educate you folks on Changelins.
What’s a Chanelin you ask? Well that’s when the fairies snatch your baby ad replace it with one of their own, but it looks exactly like yours so you cant tell the difference. Now why do they do this? I have no idea, but there are some theories out there. Some say they think its some sort of social status thing, you know to be raised by humans, maybe its their version of the dog in the purse thing. Some think that its how the bigger ones make new ones, takes yours and turns it into one of them. Personally, I think they do it cause their assholes, of course I think that about pretty much everything that comes from that side of the tracks.
Anyway, how do you tell if your baby has been switched? A big tell is if you got yourself a nice calm baby and all of a sudden its all fussin and crying all the time, I mean non stop! Day in and day out, the only time that thing shuts up is when its sleeping and that’s usually not for very long. Changlins like to make a fuss and drive you completely crazy, again, they are assholes! If your baby catches ill and no amount of doctoring has fix ‘em up, chances are, they aint sick, they`re a Changlin!
Now if you think you might be stuck with one, the only way you`re gonna get rid of it and get your kid back is to trick it into reveling itself. Now these things are super tricky and they want to stay! So your usual stuff might not work. Take iron for example, sure it burns them when you touch them with it, but sometimes they’ll just burn and scream and now you`re stuck with an infant that`s all burnt crispy, screamin in pain, may or may not be dead and you`re off to the hoosegow for child abuse!
So you’ve got to be smart about it, again, iron is a good tool if you use it right. Go get you some iron bars and replace the supports of the crib with them and put the mattress back on it. Put that sucker in the crib and leave it there! If its your baby then no big deal, it’ll just sleep like normal. If it’s a Changlin, then it`ll be close enough to the iron to feel it through the mattress, it won`t get burned and you don’t like you beat your kid! Starving the thing is another good way, they`re greedy little monsters who`ll eat all day if you let them, so not letting them eat gets them good and mad, holding them under the water until they talk works too! Sure these seem like some pretty violent things to do to a baby, so you better be damn sure that you’ve got a Changlin and not just a crappy, spoiled kid, of course if that`s the case, you might be better off with the Changlin…
Your best line of defense is preperation, fairy proof your home before you even pop that bun out of the oven! Now ive mentioned before that there`s different types of plants you can use around the house to ward those things off. Plant them fresh around the outside of the house, dry some out and hang them in the nursery room. Again, IRON!! Change out the crib bars just like I said, sprinkle iron filings along the window sills. My personal favorite? Wind chimes! Not many people know this, but the sound of iron bells ringin are just as painful to fairies as being touched with it. They hear can those things for miles around and they`ll steer clear. Did you think were just for decoration, or that people put them up because they like their music? Throwing a cat across a piano sounds about as good. NO! they were originally used to keep bad things away! For thousands of years people would place them around their homes, all over the world. You can find them in almost any culture. Unfortunately people got stupid and forgot why we used to do things. Now that we got all these specialty stores popping up all over, Import this, Potter that or what have you, they`re popular again, I guess that’s good.
Anyway if you set the place up before you have the kid, it shouldn’t be a problem. If you think you might have one and aint sure what to do, by all means, give us a call and we`ll come on by and give your baby the work over for you and hopefully get your real one back in the process!!
Anyway, until next time folks!
Happy Hunting!
