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A NOVEL OF 85 300 WORDS BY JANE JONES

This is a dark fairy tale about a woman with a secret. It would appeal to the same market as Joanne Harris's work, comparing with novels such as Sleep, Pale Sister.

Titania lives a peaceful suburban life with her husband Ben and two grown up children, but at the same time she lives another life in the fairy world with Oberon, her Fairy King. She maintains a balance between her worlds, keeping control of the frustration she feels at having a creative spirit trapped in an ordinary life, until her friend Narcissus introduces her to Jonathan, a tall, black exotic poet many years her junior, and they begin an affair.

Titania's world is gradually torn apart and as her worlds collide she retreats into a terrifying nightmare of magic, hearing voices in her head and seeing enemies everywhere. When Jonathan tires of her it is too late to return to her former life and tragically she realises that the only thing left for her is to withdraw from the mortal world and go off into the forest with Oberon.

Titania: Come, my lord; and in our flight, tell me how it came this night that I sleeping here was found, with these mortals on the ground. (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare)

Chapter One

Titania, Queen of the fairies, knitted cobwebs into a gossamer shawl that would one day enfold her fairy grandson, while her mortal husband freed the handbrake on her car. He appeared beside her on a grassy bank under a tree in full leaf. "You look as though you've been busy" she said, putting the knitting to one side with a slight frown at his greasy hands.

"Well, I've done your car for you now and I'm just going to water the garden but I thought I'd make a cup of tea first and have a break. Would you like one?"

"That would be nice, thanks."

As Ben scrambled to his feet he looked down at the shawl in her hands and sighed with satisfaction at the pretty domestic scene. Titania's loving smile followed him as he plodded towards the house to put the kettle on. How kind he is, she thought, and reliable, and solid. Her two fairy children adored him, having known unhappiness in their lives before Titania married him. He asked for nothing yet gave everything. Titania in her turn made few demands on him, content to live alongside him in quietness and peace for the rest of their days.

The summer air was filled with fairy music, 'music such as charmeth sleep'. A warm breeze shook the trees gently and scented the dappled sunlight with the sweet smell of woodland flowers. Fairies laughed and played at her feet while someone else's dreams played gently across her eyes. When Ben came outside again she was dozing quietly, leaning against the tree with the knitting in her lap, so he left her tea beside her and took his own into his workshop. She half woke when she heard the shed door close and in her languor she thought how much harder life in the mortal world would have been without him.

Titania breathed out a little sigh when she awoke fully and picked up the delicate shawl once more. Shadows played among the trees now and ephemeral thoughts flickered across her mind, disturbing her peace. The contentment she had been feeling when she fell asleep eluded her now for some reason. Her back ached and bits of leaf and twig had somehow attached themselves to the pristine white of the shawl. She felt vaguely irritated and frowned at the disharmonious sounds emanating from Ben's workshop, which clashed with the music of her fairies.

She had resigned herself to seeing out her allotted span in the mortal world but lucky though she knew she was to have such a wonderful mortal husband, there were still times when her fairy wings ached from being folded away for so long. She sometimes yearned to set them free and feel them stretch out once again in the sunlight, although they would probably be useless now she thought, crushed under the weight of life, atrophied by disappointment and heartbreak.

Not that there was any actual heartbreak nowadays of course but there were times when a profound sense of being ordinary swept over her. Ordinary in a way that she would have found difficult to express to anyone mortal. She felt the inevitable onset of middle-age without the dignity that comes from a life well lived. Her royal status in the fairy world held no sway in the life she was leading now and she moved wearily through the mortal world, a stranger on its shores.

Just lately something was changing though, something happening in the unseen. For some time now she had been aware of the twitching of invisible antennae. Even though it was midsummer there was the expectant feeling usually associated with the arrival of spring, invisible shoots pushing up through the earth, tiny inaudible movements deep down inside. The woods were listening, waiting. Titania found herself listening too, even when there was no sound, seeing shadows when there was no sun, sensing the invisible presence of people who were not there. It was as though an unseen cast of actors was gathering behind a thick curtain waiting for the opening chords to announce the first act of a new play.

Eventually Titania dismissed her fairies and went into the house and up to her den. She turned off the radio when the phone began to ring so that she could listen to her fairy child. Ben always found it slightly unsettling that she never needed to ask who was on the other end of the line when the phone rang.

"What's going on?" Titania asked her daughter.

"I don't know, but something is - I can smell it."

"Is it good or bad?"

"I'm not sure, it could be either but it's a long way off."

"I know, there's been a shift somewhere. Like moving on to a different level."

She thought about it for a bit. Cassandra, her fairy child, was rarely wrong in her intuitions. If they could both feel it then something powerful must be happening.

As she pondered she suddenly had a vision of herself on a stone bridge, hugely spanning a bottomless chasm. The bridge was wide and steady, walled securely, yet she swayed when she looked over the sides into the abyss below. In front of her, towers reached into the cloud and little minarets sparkled as they reflected the light coming from the place where she was heading. A wide street opened up from the end of the bridge and a busy throng of people went cheerfully about their business. Titania headed onwards breathlessly until she nearly reached the end, stopping in a nervous moment. A voice said "don't look round" but she turned her head anyway and gasped at the thick mist that had come down behind her to obscure the place from where she had come.

She shivered for a moment as she came out of the vision and then she and the fairy child quickly went on to talk about more mundane matters, before either of them became lost in the other world they both inhabited.

"How's the baby?" Titania asked.

"Fine" replied Cassandra.

"I've nearly finished his christening shawl"

"Mother, we're not genderising this baby."

Titania knew who 'we' meant. William, her mortal son in law. She and her fairy child both knew that the baby she was carrying was a boy. They didn't need to say it; they could read each other's thoughts as well as the baby's. He was already connected to his mother and grandmother, sending his thoughts and feelings to them from the womb.

"Don't worry, it's okay," she said, "I'm not going to make trouble, I'm not like your grandmother you know."

"You know, you've never really talked about her but since I've been pregnant I've been thinking a lot about your childhood. I know it wasn't good but you've never told us much about your own mother. I hardly remember her."

"She can't always have been bad."

"Well, she was a baby herself once of course, but even then she was trouble by all accounts. My grandmother was like a little bird and my mother was the cuckoo that suddenly appeared in her nest.