Ronan Boyle and the Swamp of Certain Death

by Thomas Lennon

  “Meet me at the boat landing one human hour from now. I can secure us a vessel and a captain,” whispered Figs as he slammed the little door to the pub closed behind him.

  It was drizzling out on the main drag because it always is. Dazed and battered, I picked myself up and went over to a small fountain to wash the Barfinnaps off my face.

  As it turns out, the fountains in EDGE also flow with Barfinnaps, so splashing my face from the fountain only compounded the problem, adding more Barfinnaps to my eyes and nose. YECCCHH.

  I quietly barfed, and then pulled out my tin whistle. I consulted my translation book, and then asked a passing wee woman how I might get to the boat landing that Figs had mentioned. She gave me very precise, rude directions, which involved sticking a pickle in my ear until it came out my nose. It was either a nasty insult or a genuine mistranslation on my part. As I have stated: I am not very good on the tin whistle and received the lowest passing grade in the class at Collins House.

  Rí and I made our way through the wooden bridge that is EDGE, passing at least one hundred of the 116 pubs. EDGE leprechauns love a specific kind of harp music that they call heavy metal. It’s nothing at all like the human version of heavy metal—leprechaun heavy metal is gentle music about the smelting and handling of precious metals, the heavier, the better. The all-time biggest hit in the leprechaun heavy metal genre is a song called “Girl, Let’s Find a Forge and Smelt this Platinum (into Buckles),” and the inappropriate but infectious party jam, “Wee Woman Got Some Brass in Her Pants.”

  Relaxing heavy metal drifted out of almost every building. The wooden streets of EDGE are consistently creaky—the result of thousands of years of drizzle on raw wood. It’s a dangerous combination and the type of thing that leprechauns couldn’t care less about. There was a seventy-five percent chance that Rí and I would fall through the wooden street and into the river far below.

  I, Ronan Boyle, can worry about multiple things at the same time, so I also fretted about what would happen to Log without me. Of course, Log can take care of herself. If anything, I should worry what Log was doing to everyone else in the Pile of Unicorn Corpses. Then I worried that Log must be SO WORRIED about me. And rightfully so! I do not instill confidence, except for the beret.

  As we tiptoed through town, Rí and I had to pass ever-so-gently over many wee folks who were in the fitful napping phase of their bleak Barfinnaps journey.

  “[Something in the language of the animals]?” asked Rí of a stout Yorkshire terrier that trotted by, wearing the standard of the leprechaun royal family. After some indecorous butt sniffing between them, the terrier gave Rí directions to the harbor.

  The stout Yorkie’s directions led us below town and into a zigzag of poorly constructed rope bridges. As carefully as we could, we made our way to the harbor below.

  As it is covered by an ancient bridge, the EDGE harbor is always pitch dark. As a remedy to this, the leprechauns attempted to light the harbor with a system of oil lamps. But, being thrifty, the leprechauns used the cheapest fish oil available for the lamps. So the lamp system of EDGE harbor doesn’t light things very well at all, but on the other hand, it also makes the whole place smell like a legitimately dangerous delicatessen.

  EDGE is the last town downstream on the River of GLOOM. River houseboats (the most common vessel on the river) are dismantled in EDGE harbor, where their parts are added to the structure of the town above, mostly in the form of new pubs. (It’s cheaper to get a new boat Upnog in Wee Burphorn and float downstream than to spend the fuel to chug up the river against the current.) There were a few ancient-looking vessels moored to the piers, all of which had steam-powered motors, designed to travel Upnog. The largest of these was a houseboat-type craft. It was a two-story steamer almost three meters tall and fifteen meters long. Wooden letters across the stern spelled out the name, but two significant letters had fallen off. I strongly suspect that at some point the complete letters must have spelled out the name the Lucky Devil.

  From all the frightening things that were about to transpire for me and my fellow travelers on this ship, the broken name was more fitting. I will always remember the ship as precisely what was written on the stern: Lucky Devil.

  * Famous for wanting to turn all humans into sausages and annex Ireland as a suburb of Tir Na Nog. She is very popular in Tir Na Nog.

  * The name is not wordplay, it’s the legal warning of the side effects of drinking. Barfinnaps: intense barfing, fitful naps.

  * Harpies are giant nasty birds with the faces of dried-up witches. They have a seven-foot wingspan and are absolutely terrifying—even to each other. This is interesting, as I don’t know any animal of the human realm that is quite so frightened of each other. It would be like if sharks ran out of the water whenever they saw a shark. Or if you heard a bear cry out, “Holy moly, a bear! Get me out of here!”

  * Hello, Finbar Dowd here! I’ve made an effort NOT to interrupt this volume of Ronan Boyle’s diaries, but this is not the plural of vendetta. It’s really just “vendettas.” Vendetti is an Italian company that makes SMALL VENDING MACHINES. Keep in mind that the author of these diaries, Ronan Boyle, was just fifteen years old at the time of this writing, and is still listed as missing in action at the time of this publication. Any information leading to the safe return of Lieutenant Ronan Boyle and/or his belt will be rewarded by the Special Unit, Co. Kerry. Cheers, your associate, Finbar Dowd.

  * Púcas have no need for clothing in their animal forms, but as they cannot control their shape-shifting, they are often left in a human state in what we would describe as “naked as a jaybird.” This can be soooooooo awkward. Later, Figs told me that’s why he always keeps the hat handy, to “cover his bits in the in-between phases.” Sergeant O’Brien at Collins House is a púca but I had never spent enough time with her to observe this tricky logistical aspect of her fashion life.

  * By human standards, Captain de Valera is quite striking, with mismatched green and brown eyes, and hair the color of the semiprecious stone called jet. Her face is somewhat hypnotic. This is not my opinion. At least I don’t think so. This is an objective fact that the captain is very attractive, just not by leprechaun standards.

  † Dun Gollie is the down-noggest city in Tir Na Nog, populated entirely by Gancanaghs, nasty faerie folk so beautiful that a human will fall in love with them upon a single glance.

  Chapter Four

  ANCHORS AWEIGH

  A curious furry creature sat on the upper deck of the houseboat, puffing on a clay pipe. She was one meter tall and covered head-to-toe in luxurious fur. I had never seen anything quite like her, even in my Irish and Faerie Law class or in the vast tome called YIKES! A Visual Guide to Wee Folk. Her eyes were enormous, like a lemur’s. Her hands were three sizes too big for her body, with webbing between the digits. Her ears were somehow even larger than her hands. The ears seemed to operate independently and were constantly adjusting themselves. Her toes had suckers on them, like the tentacles of an octopus. It seemed as if this little creature was built more for swimming than for being on land. As I watched, her foot reached up, pulled her pipe from her mouth, and used the mouthpiece to scratch deep inside her ear. The unfortunate angle from which I saw this event revealed her backside to me, which had markings that looked like another set of eyes.*

  The little creature had a broad smile and a way of looking directly into your soul that was either intimate or genuinely disconcerting. She puffed her pipe, and the smoke billowed out of her nose and ears.

  A wet thing—which turned out to be a nose—brushed up against the back of my neck and I shrieked, jumped a foot in the air, and lost five years off of my life.

  “Well done, Boyle! You found the harbor. Your friend Log MacDougal is positively hilarious, and I might be in love with her,” said a mule in a hat whom I assumed to be Figs Dromgool, having changed his púca form. “Now be a luv and scratch my chin, will ya, Boyle? I’ve got an itch that’s making me bonkers.”

  I oblige
d Figs and scratched under his chin. He whinnied in ecstasy and twitched one of his mule legs. Log jogged up behind him, checking over her shoulder and giggling like the psychopath she can sometimes seem to be. Her pockets were full of darts and bar towels. Under Log’s arm was a leprechaun-sized video poker machine—all of this was stolen from the Pile of Unicorn Corpses. The poor girl can’t help it; stealing is in her blood, as she was raised in Tir Na Nog by leprechauns.

  “There she is! The great love of my life!” giggled Figs. Log gave him a playful slap to his hindquarters, and he responded by delivering a spectacular fart in her direction.

  Oh, brilliant. Now Log and Figs were best mates. I laughed along, the way that you do when some new person adopts your best friend as their new best friend, but in reality you’re not at all happy about it.

  “Have you met Capitaine Hili?” asked mule-form Figs.

  “No,” I replied, “the only thing around here is that creepy little monster. Don’t look right now, or she will know I’m talking about her. She’s got another face on her bottom. Truly unsettling.”

  “Capitaine Hili!” shouted Figs, waving his nose toward the monster with the pipe. He extended a foreleg and bowed, as best as a mule can.

  The creature waved back to him and chuckled with the throaty and medically unsound laugh of someone who has been smoking a pipe for hundreds of years.

  “Bonsoir, Monsieur Dromgool,” coughed the furry creature.

  “That is Capitaine Hili,” said Figs. “Say something nice about the eyes on her bottom; she’s quite proud of them. Let me negotiate with her. Be a luv and act like a sick little boy; it’ll help with the price.”

  Due to my various food allergies, I basically AM a sick little boy, so this was not too tricky for me.

  Figs trotted up the gangplank and had a colorful conversation with the little captain. There was a good deal of rude gesturing from the furry little woman, and several raspberry sounds from her mouth. Then voices were raised to a boiling point, followed by a flurry of back-and-forth cheek kissing. Figs called out to me.

  “Boyle, you and Log get the provisions aboard! We’ve got ourselves a ship. Also, can you fade me five hundred euros, mate?”

  I hoisted the burlap sack of provisions onto my shoulder and fell over—as the sack turned out to be a good deal heavier than I am. We now had a ship and a frightening little creature as our captain. I wrote an official IOU to the wee woman. I was now something like one thousand euros in debt to the Garda Special Unit of Tir Na Nog.

  Log hoisted me and the sack up with her free arm and carried me aboard. Rí followed behind sniffing the gangplank, checking around for trouble as he always is.

  Twenty-ish human minutes later, Log and I were below deck, unpacking the provisions that Figs had brought for the trip. The engine room of the ship is a muggy, clangy, moldy, damp deathtrap. It’s also not very nice. This icky steerage hold would also serve as our quarters for the voyage.

  Rí napped on a pile of rags near the steam engine. The sack of “provisions” Figs had brought contained coffee, ice cream, coffee ice cream, sixteen bottles of Jameson whiskey, a checkerboard, thirty-four tins of Mikey Farrell’s Imitation Unicorn Meat, and a copy of the latest weekly edition of Gadfly!, the best-selling leprechaun gossip magazine.

  A naked little man with a hat over his bits popped in just then from the porthole above our heads.

  “’Allo luvs! How’s everyone settling in?” asked the little naked man who logically had be Figs, now changed into human form. (Note: The hat was a big clue. Second note: I would later find that human-form Figs and pig-form Figs look exactly alike if I’m not wearing my glasses.)

  “Fine,” I said, “but we haven’t much human food in these provisions.”

  “Keep looking! Way down at the bottom of the sack!” said little naked Figs, “Figs wouldn’t forget about you beefies!”

  I dug down into the sack, and under several pints of Jameson whiskey–flavored ice cream was human food—eight boxes of Lucky Charms and fourteen tins of SPAM. Figs cackled, thinking this was ever so funny. (The wee folk find it hilarious that there’s a leprechaun-themed cereal that humans eat. I did not laugh and tried my best to look annoyed—although, in truth, I love Lucky Charms and would eat it three meals a day if I were allowed. I also am particularly fond of SPAM, which is an underrated spiced meat blend.)

  Figs wriggled down the ladder, carefully covering his bits with his hat. He snatched the copy of Gadfly! from my hand and a glass jar from inside the sack.

  “I’m down to, like, one or two a week,” said Figs as he embarrassedly twirled the glass jar in his hand. The label read: OH-SO-VERY HOT PICKLES, NOT FOR MINORS UNDER 300 YEARS.

  We all stood quietly for a moment, not addressing the fact that Figs was stark naked, and perhaps a (recovering?) hot pickle addict. After a while, I broke the silence:

  “About Capitaine Hili,” I asked, “what, um . . . how shall I put this? What is she?”

  “Oh, right. You have likely never seen a Tokoloshe in yer life, have ya? Curious furry little things. Don’t look at their bottoms. Yech. Like another face.”

  “What’s a To-ko-loshe?” asked Log in a nervous giggle.

  “The Tokoloshe are river faeries from Africa,” said Figs, “but she’s a good deal taller than most of ’em and much more agreeable than others I’ve met. If you’ve got to travel on water, the Tokoloshe are your best bet—as long as they don’t turn invisible on ya. Gotta travel on water with a Tokoloshe. I would no sooner trust a leprechaun to drive a boat than I would trust them to fly an F-16.”

  “But there’s a leprechaun navy, isn’t there?” I asked. “Captain de Valera told me about it once.”

  “Aye, there is. But the leprechaun navy is basically a heavily armed musical theater troupe with one working ship,” said Figs. “I saw their musical adaptation of A Bonnet for Bonny Bobby’s Buggy last year and it was like—ugh. There’s seven days of my life I’ll never get back. Anyway, Capitaine Hili is an old friend. The rules with the Tokoloshe are pretty simple: Be nice and she won’t eat your goats.”

  “Eat my goats?” I asked. “Tokoloshes do that?”

  “Oh yes. But, hey, glass houses, Boyle, we all eat a billy goat here and there,” said Figs. “I’ve got a few frightening shapes that you haven’t seen just yet. Also, there’s a complicated detail of the Tokoloshe—if they do turn invisible on you, it wipes out their memory completely, so you often have to remind them of a great deal of their biography when they rematerialize. Things like: how they know you, what they’re doing, what a Tokoloshe is, etc.”

  “That sounds tedious,” I worried.

  “You’ll get the hang of it right away. I tend to just give her the headlines, ya know?”

  Capitaine Hili waddled over. She had put on a boat captain’s hat, flip-flops, and a “funny” T-shirt that read: 2 KIDS IN COLLEGE—WORKING MY FINGERS TO THE SORBONNE.

  Ugh. If you know much about Ronan Janet Boyle, my dislike for amusing T-shirts is only rivaled by the fact that puns make me VERY uncomfortable. I’m not entirely sure why, but when people make puns around me, I have the same awful feeling that I get when I see someone drop their ice cream cone on the first lick.

  Figs gave a nod. Log and I bowed to Capitaine Hili. I doffed my beret. This pleased the capitaine quite a bit, and she chuckled, with a sound that served as an excellent reminder that smoking a pipe is dangerous and harmful to your vocal cords.

  “Très bien, très bien!” said Capitaine Hili.

  As this was the second thing that she had said in French, I was beginning to wonder if everything she said would be in French. I would test my out theory with:

  “Je m’apelle Ronan Boyle!” I said, extending my hand and employing my very best middle school French.

  “MAGNIFIQUE!” said Capitaine Hili, kissing me firmly on both cheeks and then on the mouth (wha?). The smell of pipe smoke was ghastly. She beamed.

  Then she said a paragraph in French that I will not
write in this diary, as I could not understand it, except for the last part, which was: “Ne c’est pas?”*

  “I like zis one. Zee skinny one avec zee chapeau!” said Hili, squeezing my middle as if to see how long it would take to cook me. “Now zen. Zee ship depart in dix minoots!” she called as she climbed the ladder up to the wheelhouse, which was an accomplishment because as she was wearing flip-flops.

  “I think she said that the ship departs in ten minutes,” I said.

  “Boyle speaks French! This is a godsend!” said Figs. He leaned in close and added: “Hili and I have been mates for a hundred and seventy-five beefie years, and I seldom know what she’s saying.” Human-form Figs took his pickles and gossip magazine and headed up toward the deck. “And you should come topside when we pull out of the harbor, it’s a magnificent view.” And with that, we got a very un-magnificent view of Figs’s human behind as he climbed the ladder. Log giggled, but she does that almost all the time, even if nothing particularly funny is happening.

  The ship’s engine began to belch and chug. Steam and smoke blasted from a pipe above my head. The whole boat rattled and clanked and groaned. If I were an expert on faerie steam ships—which I am not—I would have said that this vessel was unsafe, and “not seaworthy in any obvious way.” Many parts of the engine seemed loose, as if they had just been tossed in a pile instead of properly bolted together. Some parts of the motor were taped together with regular human tape. The clear kind, not even duct tape.

  Sensing how nervous I was, Log reached out and held my hand, because she’s good like that.

  A moment later, the ship lurched forward, bumped off the dock, and somehow did not sink.

  “Anchors aweigh,” giggled Log, and we climbed up to the main deck of the Lucky Devil.