Laurie has finally returned to Idlewood, the beloved family home deep in the Maryland woods where she found comfort and peace as a lonely young girl. But things are very different now. There is no peace in Idlewood. The haunting sound of a distant piping breaks the stillness of a snowy winter's evening. Seemingly random events have begun to take on a sinister shape. And dotty old Great Aunt Lizzie is convinced that there are fairies about -- and she has photographs to prove it. For Laurie, one fact is becoming disturbingly clear: there is definitely something out there in the woods -- something fiendishly, cunningly, malevolently human -- and the lives of her aging loved ones, as well as Laurie's own, are suddenly at serious risk.
Once upon a time there was a nice big girl named Laura. She had rosy cheeks and nut-brown hair and three dimples, one in one cheek and two in the other. This nice big girl (no, she was not a nice little girl; she was five feet, nine inches tall and weighed one hundred and twenty-seven pounds).... As I was saying, this nice big girl lived in a nice little house. (It was little, even if it wasn't a house. It was actually an apartment, the kind they call an efficiency; so you see, it was very little indeed.) One winter day she was sitting by her window watching the snowflakes make pretty patterns on the pane when there was a knock at the door. A messenger dressed in blue, with gold braid, had brought her a letter. Little did she know it then, but the letter was from the elves, inviting her to visit them in their woodland haunts.
An hour after the mailman had handed her the special delivery letter Laurie was still sitting by the window staring at the big fat snowflakes. Instead of thinking pretty thoughts about their exquisite patterns she was wondering how many more inches the snow-beleaguered city of Chicago was due to get this time. She swore aloud, in language unbecoming a nice girl, big or little. What evil imp had possessed her to select Chicago as the place in which to write her dissertation? Why not Florida, or California, for God's sake?
There had been sensible reasons for the decision. The chance to sublet a friend's apartment, at a reasonable rent; the proximity to the university, with its excellent library. And there was the real reason: Bob. Bob was majoring in philosophy at the university. Bob was big and blond and adorably homely...and selfish and lazy and arrogant. She had not discovered that he possessed these additional attributes until after they had tried a brief experiment in communal living, and she thanked heaven that some residue of common sense, and the terms of her lease, had persuaded her to keep her own tiny apartment. Well, she should have known better. No doubt Bob's field of study had given her a false impression. She wouldn't have been surprised to find that a budding lawyer or doctor or business executive was a ravening chauvinist in sheep's clothing, but philosophers were supposed to be gentle, rational, and fairminded. She should have remembered Nietzsche and the Superman, Plato's views on slaves, women, and other inferior creatures, and similar philosophical aberrations.
The storm-gray skies were so dark that she could see her face reflected in the window glass, and its malevolent expression and dim transparency suggested something out of a horror story -- a windblown demon, pausing in its flight over the cities of men to perch for a moment and leer in at her window. A doppelganger, the phantom double of the soul, whose appearance portended danger and death. The externalization of her own evil thoughts, grimacing and glowering at her....
Laurie's wide mouth curved in a smile of amusement, and the reflected features changed from diabolical to benign. Malevolence sat strangely on her face, it was round and pink and healthy-looking, with big brown eyes -- the Morton brown eyes, so dark they looked black in most lights -- and a generous, full-lipped mouth. Normally her mind was as healthy as her face; hostile thoughts were alien to it. She had spent too much time thinking up rude descriptions of Bob. At least the letter had given her something new to worry about.
Laurie should not have been staring out the window. She had a towering pile of notes on the table, on the left side of her typewriter, and a stack of virgin typing paper on the right side. She should have been working. Instead, she reached for the letter and read it again.
