Amongst the Radishes

“You bleedin’ moron! That’s not a radish! That’s a human girl!” I heard the Unseelie creature squawk out as he gesticulated wildly down towards me. 
I had been bound up, gagged, and tossed on top of a cart overflowing with radishes the size of apples. They were all bright and shiny reds, pinks, purples and blues, looking more like Easter eggs than root vegetables. One of my neighbours, Mrs. Clarion, had been growing them since long before I was born. Nearly her entire backyard had been turned into a radish garden, with only some flower beds and shrubs skirting the perimeter and a small corner dedicated to an assortment of other household staples. 
I had asked her more than once over the years what on Earth she needed with so many radishes, and each time she had always replied ‘The Fair Folk’s blessings do not come cheap’. 
I believed her the first time she said this, stopped believing it when I got a little older, and then abruptly started believing it again when I caught one of them skulking amongst the radishes under the light of a full moon. 
I hadn’t realized he was a fairy at first, of course. From a distance, I just thought it was a skinny and shabby vagrant raiding a local garden for food. Since I was so close to both home and friendly neighbours, I was perhaps bolder than a girl my age should have been in that situation. I stormed into the garden, waving my phone around, threatening to call the cops if the trespasser didn’t get the hell out of our neighbourhood.
Only when he looked up at me did I remember that many old folk tales have supernatural beings, from mischievous pucks to Saint Peter himself, disguised as beggars to test the virtue of the unwary. 
And I, it seemed, had just failed. 
I saw a set of gold-fleck, obsidian eyes gleaming in the moonlight, set deeply into a protruding and elongated face. His skin was a dull and orcish green, his nose long and his ears pointed, his cheekbones sharp as knives and high as bell towers, and his dirty white hair hung about him in a tangle of unkempt dreadlocks. He was leaning on what looked like a shepherd's crook with a carved-out radish dangling from it, a free-floating flame with no apparent source burning brightly inside the hollow. 
I was so stunned by the being’s undeniably inhuman appearance that I just gawked at him for a moment, and he took advantage of my inaction to swipe my legs out from under me with his cane. Even though he looked decrepit, he moved with a surprising amount of speed and grace, bouncing about as if he could refuse to obey gravity on a whim. I was helpless as he tied me up without a word and threw me into the cart with the rest of his haul. Mustering what seemed to be all of his might, he began pushing his heavily-laden cart over to the doors that I had always assumed led to Mrs. Clarion’s root cellar, but what I could now see was actually a set of rails that plunged deep into the Earth. 
I screamed as loud as I could for help, but the gag muffled me enough that no one was able to hear me. As soon as the cart was on the track, the Hobgoblin-thing groaned in relief and hopped on the back. With a tap of his cane, the cart began rolling forward. Slowly at first, but gradually picking up speed as it chugged deeper and deeper underground, until we were barrelling down the tunnel at a breakneck pace. Every time we spun around a sharp bend, I was sure the cart was going to capsize and kill us both, but whatever fairy magic was pushing it forward also held it and its contents firmly to the track. The only light came from the flame dangling from the goblin’s cane, so I couldn’t see very far ahead. It felt like we made a lot of turns though, and I know we passed by at least a couple of junctions, implying the existence of a vast network of Unseelie tracks crisscrossing far below the surface. 
When we finally started slowing down, we came out into a vast cavern filled with stockpiled radishes, some of the heaps reaching all the way up to the ceiling. The cave was lit by thousands of hollowed radishes dangling from the stalactites by dewdrop-laden threads of gossamer that fractured their light into fractal rainbows. I saw hordes of Unseelie busily carving out radishes and spooning out the insides into wooden tubs so that they could be stomped into what I could only assume was some kind of godawful goblin wine. 
My captor meticulously tried to steer his cart through all the ruckus and rumpus towards one of the great radish heaps, but was stopped by one of his fellow Fair Folk; the one who had so astutely pointed out that I was not a radish.   
Acknowledging my presence for the first time since he bound me up, he glared down at me in the firelit gloom of the cavern. He was squinting tightly, as though he was trying to weigh his comrade’s accusation that I was not, in fact, a radish. 
“Are you sure?” he asked at last, looking back over to the other Fey. “She’s awfully red in the face. And she was awfully concerned about the welfare of all these radishes here, which seems to me an odd state to be in if you yourself do not also happen to be a radish. She might be a radish, Nullthorn, she just might.” 
“Haymswitch; radishes do not have faces to be red in, they do not have minds to be concerned or voices to speak said concerns, and most notably they do not have mouths to gag or limbs to bind!” Nullthorn sighed, his voice heavy with exasperation. 
“Now hold up just a minute, there,” Haymswitch objected. I could tell by the look on his face that he was in the process of concocting some kind of hair-brained excuse for bringing me down to this mystical undirheim of theirs. “Mandrakes are root vegetables, just like radishes, if you follow me. Mandrakes dream of being human, and if they dream hard enough their roots start to take on a human form. You pull ’em out of the ground before they’ve turned all the way and they’re known to get awfully ornery, just like this young lass was. I don’t think it’s completely inconceivable that a radish might accomplish something similar, once in a Blue Moon or so, especially when there’s fairy magic involved. We could have an exceptionally rare and successful instance of self-willed transmogrification on our hands here.” 
“She hardly looks like she just crawled out of the ground,” Nullthorn said, looking me up and down with an incredulous eye. “And what about her clothes and makeup and that little gizmo on her wrist there?”
“What about them?” Haymswitch shrugged. “Roots grow around discarded human bric-a-brac all the time. It’s no wonder. None at all. She’d be attracted to them, if anything.”
God knows how much longer he’d have carried on with this nonsense, had my frustration with it not grown strong enough to overcome my shock and terror with the surreal situation he had dragged into.
“I’m not a radish!” I tried to scream through my gag, my voice of course coming out muffled and muted. They both looked down at me, Haymswitch with alarm and Nullthorn in mild but still irritated vindication.  
“She just said that she’s not a radish,” Nullthorn insisted.
“You don’t know that. She’s got a gag in her mouth,” Haymswitch countered. “She could be saying anything. She might have said ‘time for hot haggis’, or ‘fine lot of catfish’, or even ‘Sublime yachts are rubbish’. It’s impossible to tell.”
“I’m not a radish!” I screamed as loud as I could. I was thrashing against my bindings now, and I could feel the knots around my wrists starting to come loose.  
“She’s clearly saying that she’s not a damn radish!” Nullthorn shouted.
“We’ll of course she is. She spent all that time in the dirt dreaming of being something more, it feels so real,” Haymswitch claimed. “What do you think mandrakes are screaming about when you pull them out of the soil? About how they’re not bleedin’ mandrakes! That’s what I’d wager.”
“Haymswitch, would you please stop wasting both our time and just admit you got caught?” Nullthorn sighed. 
“Oy, you’re taking her word over mine? That’s a bloody outrage, it is!” Haymswitch declared. “Between her and me, which one of us do you really think has the most incentive to lie about whether or not she’s a radish?” 
“You, because you’re the one who got caught harvesting the radishes!”  
“Exactly, I was harvesting radishes! I harvested her; therefore, ergo, forthwith, ipso facto, et tu Brutus, she’s a radish! Why would I have brought her back here if she wasn’t?” 
“Oy, Haymswitch! What’s that you got there?” one of the other Unseelie asked. I noticed that a crowd of them had started to form around us. Whether it was due to my presence or just Haymswitch’s bizarre ramblings, I’m not entirely sure. 
“A radish!” Haymswitch replied without the slightest hesitation. “Don’t you know a radish when you see one, Gingsly?”
Gingsly stared down at me, skeptically arching an eyebrow. 
“I dare say I do; and that, Haymswitch, t’ain’t no radish. That there’s a human girl, if ever I saw one,” he replied.  
“That’s what I told him!” Nullthorn agreed. 
“I’m not a radish!” I shouted again, though I regretted drawing attention to myself since I was now nearly free of my ropes. 
“Radish says what?” Haymswitch mumbled.
“What?” I heard someone in the crowd shout back, prompting Nullthorn to shake his head in frustration. 
“Haymswitch; enough. You’re not fooling anyone. You’ve got to take her back up,” he ordered. 
“Hold on now, hold on. Let’s talk about this for a tick,” Haymswitch pleaded. “What if we just throw her on the heap for now and see if she takes?”
“She is not going on the radish heap, Haymswitch!” 
“Why not?”
“Because she’s not a radish!” 
“And we can’t have unprofessionals mucking around amongst the radishes. It will cause an avalanche; or worse, a stampede!” Gingsly claimed. “Toss her in an empty cart and haul her back up to the surface.”
“Oy, we can’t send her back now, lads! She’s seen too much of our clandestine, arcane operations!” Haymswitch claimed. “We can’t risk her telling others! They’ll send the Grimms down after us for sure! It’s obvious what we’re up to!” 
All the goblins looked at each other uncertainly, and then around at the convoluted setup they had created for themselves.
“…Is it?” one of them finally asked.
“I know this place like the back of my hand and I’m still not a hundred percent sure what we’re doing,” another chimed in. 
By now I had managed to wriggle loose from my ropes, but as I tried to get up, I caused the pile of radishes I was lying on to slide out of the cart and dump me onto the ground with them. Though the Unseelie seemed startled by my sudden escape, none of them made a move against me. I quickly scrambled to my feet before any of them could change their minds, pulling the gag out of my mouth with my now free hand.
“I am not a radish!” I shouted clearly for the first time.
“…Well why didn’t you say so?” Haymswitch asked innocently. “Nullthorn, it seems I’ve unknowingly picked up a stowaway. What’s say we see her on her way then, why doncha?”
Sighing and shaking his head again, Nullthorn took a cautious step towards me with his hands held up in a non-threatening gesture. 
“Just stay calm, kid. No one’s going to hurt you,” he said as gently as he could in his gravelly, crackling voice. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this. Haymswitch was supposed to just vanish if he got caught and come back for his harvest when the coast was clear. But he’s an idiot, and tossed you into his cart instead. Just step into one of the empty carts and I’ll have one of my workers, not Haymswitch, take you back home.” 
“No! No, stay back! I’m not letting any of you take me anywhere!” I screamed, picking up a radish and holding it as threateningly as I could; which wasn’t very much, considering it was a radish. 
“Fine, have it your way. If you want to go wandering up the tracks yourself in the hopes of finding the door you came through, be our guest,” Nullthorn said. “We’ve got better things to do than fight with you.”
“Well, we have other things to do. I don’t necessarily know about better,” Gingsly added. 
“Can it! The break’s over! All of you get back to work this instant! I want every new radish shined and sorted by sun-up!” Nullthorn barked. 
“No! I’m not going to wander through goblin tunnels by myself!” I shouted. “You are going to magic me back home right now or, or… I will knock down that huge pile of radishes!” 
“What do you mean ‘magic you back?’ What would we be using these tracks for if we could do something like that?” Nullthorn asked. “Kid, either one of us drives you back up in a cart, or you’re on your own.” 
I cocked my arm, ready to chuck the radish I was holding into a particularly large and precarious pile of radishes that I judged to be within throwing distance. Nullthorn’s reaction was once again one of exasperation, and he seemed to just be waiting for me to get it over with. Infuriated, and already close to vomiting on the overpowering stench of radishes, I threw the one I was holding into the pile. 
It landed dead center, and sent a few more radishes tumbling, but the pile otherwise remained intact. Nullthorn just shook his head and started to walk away, and I picked up another radish with the intention of throwing it at the back of his head. 
We were both stopped in our tracks by the sound of more radishes falling loose from the pile. 
I had expected to see radishes falling from the top half of the pile, but instead, I saw them rolling out from the bottom. They hadn’t been pulled down by gravity but were apparently being propelled by some kind of magical force, and they were rolling towards me. 
“Stampede!” Gingsly shouted, sending all the goblins into a panic as they frantically fled in the opposite direction. 
Not fully realizing the danger I was in, I simply stepped backwards, thinking that the radishes would lose momentum before they could get to me. To my dismay, they actually picked up speed despite the flat floor they were on; and the faster they moved, the more radishes from the pile joined them. With a yelp I threw the radish I was holding at them, only for them to weave out of its path before honing back in on my position. I broke into a sprint and began searching desperately for any form of safety I could get to. 
I noticed that the goblins had all gotten off the floor and hauled themselves up onto elevated platforms built into the cavern walls or suspended from the ceiling, but a radish stampede still wasn’t enough to make me want to throw my lot in with theirs. 
Instead, I hopped into one of the carts, hoping that would be sufficient high ground against the onslaught of heel-high terrors. I made it in just as the tsunami of radishes slammed into its back end. The cart lurched forward, but the radishes quickly circled around it and cut it off from the other side. They piled up higher and higher, and I knew it was only a matter of seconds before they started pouring into the cart. I was completely surrounded, with no way of escape other than just plowing straight through them. 
Haymswitch had controlled his cart with his shepherd's crook, and I saw that this one had a similar cane holstered to the rear end. Without a second thought, I grabbed it and started banging the outside of the cart with it as hard as I could. 
The cart immediately bolted forward, squashing the radishes in front of it and sending me slamming into the rear wall. When I looked up I saw that the radishes had resumed the chase and were rolling after me in hot pursuit. The steering stick had flown out of my hand when the cart accelerated, so the only way I could steer it now was by shifting my weight around. 
And I had no way to slow down. My only hope was that the cart would stop on its own when it reached its destination. 
The rickety track had me bobbing up and down and nearly threw me out of the cart altogether. When I looked behind me again to see if I was at least making any progress in escaping the radishes, I saw that not only were they still chasing me but that the goblins had joined the pursuit as well. They rode along the tracks on contraptions that resembled Penny-farthing bicycles, and were trying to lasso what I could only assume was the alpha radish at the head of the pack. 
I whipped my head around to look forward, and saw that the cart was heading towards a giant heap of rancid, rotting radishes. There were no other tracks for me to switch to, so if I didn’t jump, a collision was imminent. But even if I survived the jump, I’d be crushed by the radishes that were chasing me. With no good options left to me, I braced myself for impact while banging the walls of the cart with my feet, screaming for it to stop. 
It didn’t listen, and I slammed into the mushy, fetid pile at full speed. The viscous concoction was enough to slow me to a stop, as well as shield me from the pelting radishes coming from behind, but the stench was overwhelming and within a matter of seconds I had fallen completely unconscious. 
When I woke up, I was gagged and bound again, but realized to some relief that I was back on the surface.
“I’m just saying that was what you would most definitely call an atypical reaction,” I heard Haymswitch say, and saw that I had been slung over his shoulder and that he was carrying me through Mrs. Clarion’s radish garden. “Why would they chase after her like that if she wasn’t one of their own? I don’t care how many limbs or eyes or whatever other non-radish parts she may have, I still think that she could very well be some heretofore unknown specimen of radish, or at the very least some sort of crossbreed.”
“Haymswitch,” Nullthorn huffed, barely hanging on to his last thread of patience. “Shut up.” 
Haymswitch set me down by Mrs. Clarion’s back door, and Nullthorn pounded on it in a secret knock before the two of them ran back off down the track, shutting the cellar doors behind them. A moment later, the back porch light came on, and Mrs. Clarion opened her door to find me tied up on her welcome mat, covered in stinking radish mulch.  
Though she did look alarmed, she didn’t help me immediately. Instead, she picked up a letter that had been pinned to my ropes and made a point of reading it aloud. 
“Mrs. C, we recovered this during this Moon’s radish harvest. After extensive debate amongst ourselves, we were unable to come to a unanimous conclusion as to whether or not it constitutes a radish (though we do note that it fervently maintains that it is not). Regardless, it induced a severe adverse reaction in our strategic radish stockpiles and subsequently compromised the organic certification of our compost heap. As such, I’m afraid we cannot accept it as part of your sacrifice and return it to your care in (approximately) the same condition we received it. Regards, Nullthorn.” 
With a sigh, she lowered the letter, and glared down at me in mild annoyance.
“Young lady, what on earth were you doing in my radish garden at this time of night?”               
Category:RTWC23
Category:The Vesper's Bell
Category:Cryptids
Category:Food
Category:Weird