Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles

by Thomas Lennon

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-3491-5

  eISBN 978-1-68335-534-2

  U.K. paperback ISBN 978-1-4197-3905-7

  Special edition ISBN 978-1-4197-3916-3

  TEXT COPYRIGHT © 2019 THOMAS LENNON

  ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT © 2019 JOHN HENDRIX

  BOOK DESIGN BY CHAD W. BECKERMAN

  Published in 2019 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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  For Oliver

  OFFICE OF FINBAR DOWD

  Deputy Commissioner

  Special Unit of Tir Na Nog

  Collins House, Killarney

  Kerry, Ireland

  23 June

  TO: Trainees of the Special Unit

  FROM: Office of the Deputy Commissioner

  POLITE WARNING!

  A box containing this diary was mailed to the Galway office of the garda by Lieutenant Ronan Boyle. The package was 18 kilograms (40 pounds) in weight and poorly taped together.

  Boyle’s files span several years and conclude with his disappearance—seven Wednesdays ago. This document is available via Ireland’s 1997 Freedom of Information Act. The commissioner hopes that you might glean some experience from these pages and avoid Boyle’s fate, which seems nasty. If Boyle is not deceased, he is at least very, very missing. Information leading to the safe return of Ronan Boyle to the Special Unit headquarters in Killarney will be rewarded. No questions asked.

  An ever-so-polite reminder that reprinting this manuscript in whole or in part, or even quoting it in an offhanded, “just me and my mates having a goof” sort of way, will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of human and faerie law.

  Some of Boyle’s original notes appear to have been scribbled in the dark and are reprinted here as close as anyone could guess. Evidence on the papers is confusing, as the garda laboratory in Dublin has confirmed that the ink is both human blood—some Boyle’s and some not Boyle’s—as well as the blood of two different male leprechauns, plus one kind of fudge.

  In short: The statements in the following text represent the views and opinions exclusively of Ronan Boyle (posthumous?), Lieutenant, Garda Special Unit of Tir Na Nog. They do not reflect the views or opinions of the An Garda Síochána itself or the government of the Republic of Ireland.

  With my best wishes and hoping not to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law,

  F.D., D.C.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE NARROWEST FELLOW

  6 December

  It almost never snows in Ireland. Ireland is a temperate zone. Snow-wise, the best you can hope for is a dusting. If most Irish snows were Parmesan cheese on your spaghetti, you would gesture to the waiter and say, “More, per favore—that isn’t nearly enough.”

  But Tuesday the sixth of December was a bona fide blizzard.

  When my phone buzzed at four thirty in the morning, I was in a profound coma. The night before had been the retirement party of Captain John Fearnley. Fearnley is a lovely man who had been like a father figure to me since the scandal. Two years ago, I was sitting on a metal file cabinet in his office, as there are no extra chairs. Fearnley prefers that no one talk to him for a length of time that would necessitate them sitting down, but he made an exception for me on my first day.

  “Gonna make a basket. Awesome?” he said, handing me half of his tuna sandwich, his eyes filled with kindness.

  He may in fact have said: “Gonna make the best of it, aren’t you, son?” but I couldn’t be sure. Fearnley has the kind of country accent that is almost impossible to understand, even for Irish people. I took the sandwich and had a bite. I’d never eaten a tuna sandwich before, and the smell was intriguing.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said as my face went flush and tears welled up in my eyes.

  “Sauron. Lettuce. Tall stout,” he mumbled, tousling my hair and very likely saying: “It’s all right, son. Let it all out.”

  But I wasn’t crying, despite my sorry state. Tuna had just been added to the list of things to which I am very allergic. If you have food allergies like me, you’ll know the best thing to do in this circumstance is to make yourself throw up, which I did. There was a brief pause. Fearnley didn’t make a fuss, and he didn’t judge. The kindness never left his eyes.

  “Idris Elba, Idris Elba,” said Fearnley, handing me his handkerchief.

  I am fairly certain that this was actually “Clean yerself up, clean yerself up.”

  Then he gave me two euros for the Fanta machine, because he’s the type of everyday hero who does things like this.

  Now, two years later, it was four thirty in the morning, and my mobile phone was vrrrrrrrrrrrrring. The view out the window of my shared flat looks directly onto Galway Bay. The sun wouldn’t be up for almost four more hours. Between the waves crashing on the seawall and the snow driving sideways, Galway did not look like a planet I would want to visit without a space suit.

  I had been asleep for approximately three hours. I looked to the mirror, expecting to present a sad state, but was pleasantly surprised to see I looked so very handsome. This was because I was not yet wearing my glasses. I put them on and saw that I was still, in fact, regular Ronan Boyle, the nearsighted, gangly person that I was the night before, but somehow even worse, as I’d only slept for approximately three hours.

  The voice on the opposite end of my phone kicked me out of my slumber. It was a mysterious garda1 officer named Pat Finch, whose ghoulish face is so crisscrossed with bright red veins that it looks like a map of hell drawn by a monk in a medieval lunatic asylum. Pat Finch looks like what a heart attack would look like if it could walk around eating fish-and-chips and saying terrible things about Roscommon Football Club’s starting lineup. But underneath all of that on the outside—Pat Finch is really just a nasty person.

  Pat Finch was not someone you wanted on the other end of your phone at any time of day. But here he was. Or rather in my brain, it seemed, because he was yelling so very loudly.

  “Is this Boyle with the Galway garda?” he bellowed.

  “Aye,” I replied. “But there are two Boyles in the Galway office, sir. I suspect you must want the other one—Conor, he’s the ranking sergeant. I’m the younger one—Ronan, intern in the evidence department.”

  “Are you the little skinny one?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. By all accounts, I am fairly thin. Not from a strict regimen, but as a by-product of many severe allergies and being a terrible cook.

  “Yes, I suppose,” I said.

  “THEN GET YOUR SKINNY BEHIND OUT HERE TO CLIFDEN, YOU EEJIT,” and with a wet snort that sounded like a boar with a mouthful of macaroni, he hung up.

&
nbsp; Clifden? I thought to myself, as I was the only person there to think anything. Dolores, my flatmate, was nowhere to be seen. (Dolores is my legal guardian and has been ever since the scandal two years ago. She is a professional busker in Galway and one of the most beautiful fiddle players you’ll ever meet. She is also very popular, which means I’m almost always on my own, without a legal guardian. This is fine by me, as Dolores is an absolute delight, but not great with domestic things and positively terrible with kids.)

  There was a bit of trouble getting myself immediately to Clifden, because I can’t drive, I have no car, and I did not know what Clifden was. It’s not a town, as I had thought. Clifden is a castle out on the coast in Connemara. It was almost two hours before I got there via the 923 Coach.2 By then the blizzard had dissipated into rain, as Ireland is a temperate zone, and it hardly ever snows.

  Later, I would mark this trip to Clifden Castle as the day that changed my life forever. The events of the next few hours were so confusing that I managed to forget that today, the sixth of December, was also my fifteenth birthday.

  When I arrived, there were several garda vehicles on site and a sleek military jeep that I almost couldn’t see, except for its tires. The body was covered in a green camouflage that blended perfectly with the field beyond it. The jeep’s license plate was a bit spooky—black and gold, bearing just the image of a harp and the number seven. Who the devil gets that sort of license plate with almost no numbers at all? I wondered to myself, as wondering things to myself is eighty-five percent of what I do.

  I should point out that Clifden Castle is actually just the ruins of a castle and has been for at least ninety years. But saying “Clifden Castle ruins” takes too long, so no one does that.

  As I jogged through the mush toward the ruins, Pat Finch climbed out of the jeep and rushed up toward me. His version of the garda uniform was unfamiliar to me. His face made me gasp, as it’s straight out of a Kabuki nightmare.

  “Are you Boyle?” he shouted.

  I nodded.

  “You’re just a boy? Ha. Brilliant. Follow me,” he said with an evil glint in his eye. “Meet the captain, and stick these in your nose if you know what’s good for you.”

  Finch handed me a pair of regular orange plugs, and I stuck them in my nostrils as I had been instructed. This says a lot about human nature, for if some street kook in Eyre Square had told me to shove orange plugs into my nose, I would have told him to get stuffed. But Pat Finch is an imposing figure.

  We wound our way through the ruins, and Finch clicked on his torch,3 leading me down a moldy spiral of stone steps into the depths of the castle. We descended into a set of caverns that must have served as storage rooms when the castle was still functioning. It was cold down there, but at least it wasn’t raining. Steam was puffing only out of our mouths, as our noses were safely and orangely plugged. For no reason at all, I said to Pat Finch, “Perfect place to store cheese, eh?” Because I say very stupid things when I’m nervous, and right then an impending sense of dread was filling my stomach.

  We entered a cavern, and I followed Pat Finch toward some work lights that had been arranged around a strange little crime scene. Several Connemara Garda officers were hustling about, searching with torches, as were officers wearing the same curious uniform as Pat Finch, each carrying a wooden shillelagh,4 which seemed odd to me at the time.

  In a moment, I would understand why our noses were plugged: because leprechauns, especially when they’re trapped or in distress, can create awful smells. It’s a defense mechanism, much like that of a skunk, to which leprechauns are not at all related.

  And I was about to meet my first leprechaun.

  When I saw the little man, I gasped so hard that I popped the earplugs from my nose. My nostrils were instantly flooded with the smell of the worst fish soup in the history of the world. Soup that if served to them would make French prisoners riot. I scrambled to replug my nose. Pat Finch hiked his straining belt and said, “He’s musking. It’s how you know the little devil is lying.” He gave the leprechaun a firm kick. The leprechaun hissed back at him.

  As I had never seen a real live leprechaun before, I then did what any sensible person would do and let out a high-pitched scream that sounded like a teenage parrot passing through a wood chipper.

  I thought I must have been dreaming, back in my bed in Galway. I kicked myself in the shin with my heel to check if I was awake, and the pain was both a brief distraction from the chill in my bones and solid confirmation that I was awake.

  Pat Finch then gave a kick to my other shin.

  “Ouch!” I screamed.

  “Just giving you a second opinion,” said Pat Finch. “You’re not dreaming. Now keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. And if he tries to give you gold, don’t take it. Never take gold from one of these devils.”

  I nodded, wincing at the now perfectly balanced pain.

  The leprechaun in custody was a male, approximately twenty-eight inches tall. (At this time, I did not know that leprechauns are more powerful the smaller that they are. While I have not met him in person, I have been told by those who have that Raghnall, King of Tir Na Nog, is less than eleven inches tall and probably the ugliest thing that has ever lived.)

  This leprechaun was a relatively weak adult male. His name we did not know yet, as it is a rule with faerie folk that you have to guess their names, which is very time-consuming.5

  This leprechaun’s face looked like a potato that had somehow had a baby with another potato, and then that potato baby grew to be a thousand years old and got very constipated. His beet-red beard was tinged with ashes, and his eyes were fixed in a permanent squint from the centuries of pipe smoke6 that had wafted up at them.

  The commanding officer on the scene was Captain Siobhán de Valera, who is a distant descendant of Eamon de Valera, once the president of Ireland. The captain is a serious, handsome woman with jet-black hair that she keeps in a tight bun. She was wearing high boots with leather kneecap protectors, and in her gloved hand she twirled one of the finest fighting shillelaghs I’ve ever seen.7 It was made from oak root—almost purple in color and as hard as a lead pipe. The air made a pleasant whirring sound as she twirled her shillelagh. The captain paced with a scowl on her face that I would later find out was a permanent fixture.

  “Domhnall the Intrepid? Brian the Bold?” she whispered at the leprechaun. She was trying to guess his name, as by possessing a leprechaun’s name you can wield tremendous psychological advantage over them.

  “Don’t bother with that. He’s been read his Republic Rights. Just have him tell Boyle here where the changeling is,” grunted Pat Finch. Republic Rights are the rights that faerie folk have when they are outside of Tir Na Nog and in the human Republic of Ireland.

  Captain de Valera turned in my direction, and her mismatched eyes shot right through me. Siobhán de Valera has one green eye and one brown eye, which takes a bit of getting used to. Her uniform was different from that of ordinary garda officers. On her long leather coat was a badge with the Irish word CAPTAEN on it, and you can probably guess what that means. Across her back was a strap with quick-release, gold carabiner hooks, which is how all Tir Na Nog Garda carry their fighting shillelaghs. On her belt was a befuddling array of accessories: a small electric torch, a bandolier of clay pipes—just the right size for leprechauns—a standard-issue garda electric Taser, two flares, a flask of Jameson whiskey, and then two other tiny flasks labeled with Irish words I didn’t know at the time.

  In truth, what I did not know at the time could fill a book, which is what I am attempting to remedy here in this diary. Like all Irish children, I had heard of the wee folk—leprechauns, far darrigs, harpies, and such—and that they love mischief and they come from Tir Na Nog, which is the land of the faerie folk. But like most sensible children, I always assumed that this was a bunch of made-up blarney—stories invented and embellished in pubs by glassy-eyed old-timers who were pissed as farts on rum and punch.

 
But let me assure you of the fact that I was about to learn, on this day, the day that I did not recall was my fifteenth birthday:

  Tir Na Nog is a real place.

  And the wee folk are not a friendly pack of elves who will fill your shoes with candy while you sleep. They are small, hard-drinking swindlers who would steal your nose and replace it with a turnip if they thought they could make one single euro from doing it. There are also more types of wee folk than I had ever imagined, and if you knew how frequently and freely they travel into the human Republic of Ireland, passing right under your bed, you would have trouble sleeping. Some of the faerie folk are delightful. Some are disgusting. As for my involvement with the Garda Special Unit of Tir Na Nog, I will relate to you the events of my education as they unfolded—unless the details are of a case still being investigated by the Special Unit headquarters in Killarney.

  Captain de Valera paced. On her belt, I could see more oddities—a pouch of tobacco and tiny handcuffs with an old Celtic symbol. Leprechauns cannot be held in handcuffs unless you can also distract them with a clever poem that highlights their peril and plays into their inherent narcissism. This detail keeps a lot of qualified candidates out of the Garda of Tir Na Nog, as instantaneous poem writing while in a crisis situation can be a trick.

  Captain Siobhán de Valera stepped toward me, sizing me up. She raised her purple shillelagh. I flinched backward, until I realized she was doing it to measure me and not to whack me. She checked the distance across my shoulders and then my hips as if she were planning to make me a suit, or perhaps a coffin.

  “Well done, Finch,” said the captain. “He’s practically a pole. He’ll do nicely if my theory is right.”

  “Ronan Boyle. He was the narrowest garda in our records,” shrugged Pat Finch. “An intern—all the way from Galway.”

  If no one’s ever said this about you, let me tell you that it is distressing indeed. The knot in my stomach started to somersault on itself as I imagined being used as some sort of pole, here in the depths of the ruins of Clifden Castle several hundred feet belowground and way out in Connemara, where nobody knows me. Who would even notify Dolores, my guardian and one of the most beautiful fiddle players you’ve ever seen?