Chapter 3
Friday morning, I drove boxes to Goodwill and forced Mom to sort through mementos and books. As we labored, the basement was still, tamed either by my ruthless disposal of its goods or by Mom’s familiar presence.
After an hour, however, the rumble of the washing machine ceased above us. “I’d better hang up those pants before they wrinkle,” Mom observed. “Don’t you need a break?”
“No thanks,” I said as she clambered out. A sudden breeze whipped the door closed behind her. As if in echo, the bookcase behind me creaked.
I turned to find it tilting precariously. A box of books slowly inched its way toward my head.
“Stop it!” I demanded, shoving the box back into place and nudging the bookcase upright. “It’s almost as if the place is haunted,” I muttered under my breath.
Half an hour later I’d worked my way up under what would have been the eaves if the basement had been an attic. Here, the ground sloped toward the ceiling so I had to walk crouched over for fear of grazing my head on nail ends sticking through from the floor above.
In this shallow work space, I made some small headway, organizing Mason jars and labeling boxes of Christmas tree ornaments. At last, I stood, a box of discards in my arms, and straightened too far too fast. My head banged painfully against the floor joists, making me swear and drop back into a crouch so I could feel through my thick hair for blood.
“He doesna like it when you take his things, lassie,” came a voice from behind me, and my head swiveled around to take in a most unusual sight. Perched atop a wicker picnic basket in the corner was what can only be described as a leprechaun—a small, cheery, red-bearded man dressed solely in green and decked out with four-leafed clovers. I blinked, but the image did not fade.
How hard, exactly, had I hit my head?
“What are you doing here?” or “Who are you?” would have been obvious responses to this intruder into my basement. Instead, I found myself saying: “You can drop the accent. Leprechauns don’t live in dirt basements. What are you—a gnome? A dwarf?”
The pseudo-leprechaun frowned, and before my eyes his clothes faded to a dusty olive, his beard to curly brown. The clovers, I could have sworn, turned into camel crickets and hopped off into a dark corner. I wasn’t close enough to see for sure.
Despite the transformation, he only shrugged and smiled. “I thought you liked Celtic legends, figured you’d be more likely to believe in me if I took the form of an expected stereotype.”
“I did like Celtic legends, but English ones, not Irish. Didn’t you see me put L’Morte D’Arthur in the Goodwill box?” I barely refrained from stamping my foot in frustration.
But why did I assume he knew any of this? What was I doing talking to a total stranger in my mother’s basement?
“Well, you haven’t been around much lately,” the ex-leprechaun said in his own defense. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You’ve seen through my disguise. Are you willing to take my advice?”
“Advice on what?”
“On this.” He spread his arms wide, encompassing the piles of life’s debris. “Leave it alone. Didn’t you notice the warnings?”
“So it’s you who’s been throwing things at me!” I took a step forward, almost banging my head again in the process. “Why should I give up when I’ve got two and a half more days to make headway? I...”
He waved his hands furiously and began to object, but I raised my voice and overrode him.
“I’m going to make sense of this place...” I began—
“Don’t!” he yelled—
“...if I have to spend every waking hour. I’ll...”
“No! You’re standing on the...”
“...clean up this place if it kills me!”
“Salamander,” he finished lamely, his voice now meek and resigned.
Despite myself, I peered down at what should have been dirt floor. The ground wiggled. A rock mound slid aside to reveal one golden eyeball.
“Challenge accepted,” the beast intoned. Then it went back to sleep.
Chapter 4
Our minds are quite adept at dismissing perceptions that have no place in the expected world. Brown basement spirits and tremendous salamanders surely had no niche in my experience, so by the time Mom and I joined up with my brother and sister at a local waterfall, I had completely forgotten the strangeness of the morning. We walked through clumps of purple hepatica flowers, then we waded through the frigid creek and climbed up the wet rocks to frolic in the dry space behind the falls. Our hooting laughter even awoke a dozing peeper who joined in the odd daytime chorus.
Back at home, though, I became increasingly irritated. I put the sensation down to dehydration and dosed myself with several glasses of water before tucking myself in for an early night.
And I slept. Quiet and serene until...I woke suddenly in total darkness.
The bed shivered beneath me. But I often wake that way, thinking a dream is a tangible earthquake.
This time the bed shook again, less gently. It took several minutes before I managed to fall back asleep.
Chapter 5
“It certainly took you long enough.” The ex-leprechaun was waiting just inside the basement door, leaning nonchalantly against the wall where the outside daylight streamed harmlessly past his shadowed nook.
“It’s no business of yours,” I brushed him off, rubbing the sore spot between my eyes. I’d held back from the basement’s pull as long as I could this morning, and the effort had put me in no good mood.
Now I turned away to see what sense I could make of the jumbled camping equipment. But my companion persisted, leaping atop a cooler as I lifted a sleeping bag off the floor.
“I was going to offer to help,” he said, and I couldn’t tell from his voice whether the offer was still open. Well, it must be, or he wouldn’t be peering down at me. Unless, of course, he just enjoyed the opportunity to gloat.
“If you want to help, you can start by sorting out that mess,” I told him, pointing to a tangle of twine, string, and rope of various thicknesses.
The ex-leprechaun snorted, but began, absentmindedly, to pick at a knot. “You’ll never get it done like this, you know. And the longer you spend down here, the more hold the salamander will have over you.”
Surveying the basement, I was forced to agree. This was a job for ten people, not for me and one argumentative dwarf.
Even so, his words drove me crazy. “And I suppose you have a better solution?”
“As I said, I could help.” He snapped his fingers and a grinding noise prompted me to spin around in time to see a mass of carpentry tools reorganize themselves, becoming clean and shiny before my very eyes even as a host of bent and rusty nails leaped for the trash box.
“And in exchange you want my first-born child,” I said waspishly, turning back to the little man and doing my best to raise one eyebrow. “I’m not planning on having children any time soon, so that wouldn’t do you much good.”
“I’d think of something,” the ex-leprechaun said contentedly.
“No thank you,” I snapped. “I don’t need your help. And if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do.”
Chapter 6
Work I did. All that long morning and even longer afternoon, I ran up and down the slope from basement to street carrying trash bags and Goodwill boxes to the curb and the car. Mom looked on with worried eyes, but I paid her little heed—there was no time for family fun.
By lunch, I was beginning to realize what my rash words had wrought. Even the one-block drive to the thrift store was becoming increasingly difficult as the salamander slowly drew me deeper and deeper into his basement belly. If I didn’t finish soon, I might find myself unable to leave the dank basement even to retreat to the house above for sleep.
Meanwhile, I was haunted by the vision of the little man standing in shadows by the open doorway earlier that morning. He hadn’t been looking at me, had he? He’d been peering out into the green world,
unable to put so much as a finger in the sunlight.
I shivered and worked harder at dredging the dreck from the basement pile.
At supper, I could barely hold my head up long enough to chew, and I fell into bed dreaming of the two-thirds of the basement as yet unorganized. I woke after a scant three hours and returned to my lair, where the dim bulb now seemed a welcome beacon against the looming dark.
I sorted for a while. But I knew I had no chance. What did the ex-leprechaun want from me? I wondered. My sight? A year of my life?
It might be a worthy trade.
By now, I had crept back up under the eaves and was peering down at the napping salamander. It was a beautiful beast, though terrible—awful in the original sense of the word.
The mythologists had gotten it wrong, of course. Salamanders were not beasts of fire. Any naturalist could tell you that the lizard-like amphibians were denizens of damp earth.
This one curled around itself in sleep, glistening black hide spotted with blue and silver that sparkled in the light of the overhead bulb. I guessed it to be twice as long as I in total length, and I marveled that none of us had ever noticed it before.
But I supposed we wouldn’t notice, unless the salamander wished to be seen.
For a moment only, I considered slaying the beast. How thick could salamander hide be really?
But the monster had no need even to open an eye in its defense. I knew I couldn’t kill it. After a lifetime spent protecting plants and animals, I had finally found a species new to science. I couldn’t be party to causing extinction in my own mother’s basement.
Instead, I knelt down and placed a hand atop its shoulder, feeling the sluggish beat of its cold-blooded heart. “I’ll never get out of this mess,” I whispered. “I wish...”
“Don’t, lassie.”
I shot up, but not so fast that I forgot to keep my head bowed away from the floorboards above me. The ex-leprechaun was perched on a pile of winter clothes, his hair as tousled as if he’d just roused from slumber. His subsequent words confirmed my surmise.
“I might have known I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep tonight,” he complained. An earthworm dropped out of his hair as if he hadn’t quite decided what appearance he meant to wear. “Are you ready to accept my offer?”
I caught myself an instant before nodding mutely. “Maybe I will, if the price isn’t too high. I’ll ask you again—what do you want from me?”
“Well now, that’s not an easy matter.” The dwarf was cheerful now that I was taking the bait he’d dangled. “There’s not much you have that I want, now is there? No husband, no child, no pet even. Plenty of student loans and no assets. I could take your knowledge.” His eyes gleamed, but my glare was enough to head him off that topic. “Though what I’d do with it down here I have no idea. Ah, I know!” It was obvious that the idea was no epiphany but one he’d thought out in advance. “You can give me a day in the outside world.”
“You mean take my memory?” I squirmed uncomfortably at the thought, desperate enough nonetheless that I was considering the idea.
But he laughed at me. “Your memory? You read too many novels. No, all I want is your escort in the world above.”
“For a day?”
“For a day.”
I must have looked confused because he condescended to explain. “I’ve got deep earth magics, you’ve got magic of the sunlight. I don’t dare go out there,” he pointed through the wall, “for fear of being eaten alive and spat back out. But if you foil the salamander for long enough to let me out and back without it noticing, there’d be no skin off your teeth. Just a day of your time.”
“And for that you’d get me free of this?” I couldn’t believe my ears. There had to be a catch.
“Simple as sunlight.”
“You clean the basement with magic and I take you outside for a day?”
“Yes, yes, and yes again!” I could tell that he was getting annoyed with my persistence. “Do you want it in writing?”
I did, but I also didn’t want to push the issue. So we shook on it instead.
“Do I get to watch?” I asked as he impatiently set me in an out-of the way corner. He nodded once, short and sharp. Then he began to clean.
Chapter 7
The first few boxes raised such a cloud of dust that I didn’t see much, just heard whizzes and bangs as objects flew past me in every direction. I spared a thought for Mom, sleeping above us, and hoped she’d turned her deaf ear up.
She must have. Because when the dust settled, I was still alone with the leprechaun, now in a basement stacked and sorted and entirely organized.
We were ecstatic, both of us. I think my dwarf hadn’t been aware he possessed quite so much magic. No wonder we danced a little jig there on the now-clear floor.
Our dance woke the salamander, of course. And I’ll admit it was my own fault—I treaded on the beast’s tail.
We stilled as the salamander lifted its head to peer around its den. I held my breath as golden eyes bored into me. Salamander facial expressions turned out to be impossible to decipher.
“What a surprise,” it said dryly after an endless moment. One brilliant orb drifted closed as if it intended to fall back asleep.
I must have cleared my throat, though I didn’t mean to, because the salamander turned the still-open eye to face me once again. “You’re off the hook. You can go,” it added, dismissing me.
I turned to the dwarf giddy with excitement. The raised door jamb didn’t trip us, and the lock clicked easily into place as we leaned together on the outside of the faded wood.
A pile of trash bags overflowed from the can, but we ignored it. Instead, we took one step into dawn sunlight. Another.
Behind our backs, the basement shook. Somewhere inside, glass shattered. A clatter of metal as tools disorganized themselves.
The resultant jumble, I suspected, would be worse than when I’d started.
I didn’t care. Mom hadn’t really expected me to clean the basement anyway.
As the salamander had said, I was off the hook.
Chapter 8
I told Mom that the ex-leprechaun was a friend from college come to visit for the day, and such was her opinion of my college friends that she accepted the tale without question. The two of us spent the day in the woods, wading through mud puddles then peering at cardinals and mushrooms. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could feel a shadow trailing us just beyond the scope of my vision. It came no closer, though, and the leprechaun was safe with me.
We parted at dusk at the basement door, he on the inside, I on the outside. In the end, we were oddly formal despite a day spent on fun and games.
“Thank you for saving me,” I said, and on impulse I extended one hand toward him.
“Thank you for the day,” he replied, raising my fingers to his lips.
His mustache was softly scratchy, like newly fallen leaves in autumn. The earthy scent of actinomycetes wafted into my nose.
“Are you still too old for fairy tales?” he asked, turning away before I had time to answer.
Then he was gone, lost in the dim recesses of my mother’s basement. For my part, I was cobbling together a story for the Goodwill clerks in the morning.
I hadn’t meant to put L’Morte D’Arthur in the giveaway box, I’d tell them.
If worse came to worst, I supposed I could always buy the beloved book back.
AND THAT’S ALL I HAVE for you today. Be sure to join my email list if you’d like to download two free novels and enjoy weekly emails, many of which contain short stories like the ones included in this anthology. Thanks for reading! You are why I write.
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Thirteenth Werewolf and Other Stories Page 6
