Neil Gaiman

fiddlersgreen:

Pixies

They’ll help you, folk say, unless you thank them: if you leave them gifts or payment they’ll be off into the night, never again to sweep your floor or sew your shoes or stack your CDs into alphabetical order.

But there are some that wouldn’t take a thank you. Those are the bad hats that sour the milk, vinegar the wine, crash the computer, freeze every mobile phone.

One family had enough. They loaded up their SUV in the middle of the night with all the possessions they could not bear to part with, and drove away with their headlights off. When they reached the village they stopped for petrol. “Going somewhere?” asked the attendant.

From the back of the car, from the cardboard boxes of the last good wine, the ancestral china wrapped in rolled-up duvets, a pixie voice called out, “That’s right, George. We’re flitting.”

The family turned around and went home again. When a pixie has your number, they said, there’s nothing else you can do.

Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman for The Royal Mail