“He was murdered,” he said.
I was astounded. “How? Why?”
“We don’t know. But he’s not the first. More like the tenth, and they’re coming closer together.”
“A serial killer . . .”
“We don’t know,” said the leprechaun. “Come to the wake tonight.” And he was off down Dawson Street, quick and dapper, just one more self-possessed businessman, if shorter than most.
Who would kill the Old Folk, though? I thought. Who stands to profit? It’s hard enough for most mortals even to see them, let alone to kill them. One or two might have been accidents. But ten? . . .
THERE WERE NO ANSWERS for my questions then. I went back to work, because there was nothing better to do, and when my boss still wasn’t back by four, I checked out early and made my way down to the Long Hall.
The place doesn’t look very big from the frontage on South Great Georges Street. A red-and-white sign over a wide picture window, obscured by ancient, dusty stained-glass screens inside; that’s all there is. The place looks a little run-down. Doubtless the proprietors encourage that look, for the Long Hall is a pint house of great fame, and to have such a place be contaminated by as few tourists as possible is seen as a positive thing in Dublin. If you make it past the genteelly shabby façade and peeling paint, you find yourself surrounded by ancient woodwork, warm and golden-colored, and glossy wallpaper and carved plaster ceilings that were white in the 1890s, but are now stained down by time and smoke to a warm nicotine brown. The pub’s name is deserved. It’s a narrow place, but it goes on and on, nearly the width of the block in which it resides. There are barstools down the right side, and behind them a bar of great height, antiquity, and splendor—faded, age-splotched mirrors, bottles of every kind racked up to the ceiling, and most importantly, long shelves running the length of the back of the bar, to put pints on.
I wandered in, pushed between a couple of occupied barstools, and ordered myself a pint. This by itself gives you plenty of time to look around, as a well-pulled pint of Guinness takes at least seven minutes, and the best ones take ten. Right now, the front of the bar was full of people who had left work early. It was full of the usual sound of Dubliners complaining about work, and the people they worked with. “So I said to him, why don’t you tell him to go to the F ing Spar and get a sandwich and then sit down for five F ing minutes, sure she’ll be back then. Oh no, he says, I can’t F ing spare the time in the middle of the F ing day—”
I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes . . . yet still I had to smile. This is how, when I return home, I know for sure that I’m in Dublin again. The second you’re past passport control in Dublin Airport, you hear it . . . and after that, you hear it everywhere else in town, from everyone between nine and ninety-five. Only in Dublin do people use the F word as casually as they use “Hey” or “Sure” or “Listen” in the US. It’s an intensifier, without any meaning whatsoever except to suggest that you’re only mildly interested in what you’re saying. Only in Ireland would such a usage be necessary: for here, words are life.
I glanced toward the back of the bar. Between the front and the back of the pub was a sort of archway of wood, and looking at it, I realized that it was a line of demarcation in more ways than one. A casual glance suggested that the space behind it was empty. But if you had the Sight, and you worked at seeing, slowly you could see indistinct shapes, standing, gesturing. You couldn’t hear any sound, though; that seemed to stop at the archway.
It was an interesting effect. I guessed that the wizards the leprechaun had mentioned had installed it. I walked slowly toward the archway, and was surprised, when I reached it, to feel strongly as if I didn’t want to go any farther. But I pushed against the feeling and kept on walking.
Once through the archway, the sound of conversation came up to full as if someone had hit the “unmute” button on a TV remote. There had to be about eighty of the Old People back here, which was certainly more warm bodies than the space was rated for; it was a good thing all the occupants were smaller than the normal run of mortals.
There was just as much F-ing and blinding going on back here as there had been in the front of the bar, but otherwise, the back-of-the-pub people were a less routine sort of group. There was very little traditional costume in evidence; all these Old People seemed very city-assimilated. I glanced around, feeling acutely visible because of my height—and I’m only five-foot-seven. Near me, a tall slender woman, dressed unfashionably all in white, turned oblique eyes on me, brushing her long, lank, dark hair back to one side. Only after a long pause did she smile. “Oh, good,” she said. “Not for a while yet . . .”And she clinked her gin and tonic against my pint.
“Uh,” I said. A moment later, next to me, a voice said, “It’s good of you to come.”
I glanced down. It was the leprechaun who had come up to the office. “This is one of the Washers,” he said.
Even if I’d thought about it in advance, the last thing I’d have expected to see in a city pub would’ve been a banshee, one of the “Washers at the Ford” who prophesy men’s deaths. I was a little too unnerved just then to ask her what her work in the city was like. She smiled at me—it was really a very sweet smile—and said, “It’s all right . . . I’m not on duty. Days I work over in Temple Bar, in a restaurant there. Dishwashing.”
“Dishwashing??”
She took a drink of her G and T, and laughed.“Most of us give up laundry right away.Won’t do their F ing polyester!”
We chatted casually about business, and weather, and about the departed, while I glanced around at the rest of the company, trying not to stare. There were plenty of others there besides leprechauns and bansidhe and clurichauns. There were a few pookas—two of them wearing human shape, and one, for reasons best known to himself, masquerading as an Irish wolfhound. There were several dullahans in three-piece suits, or polo shirts and chinos, holding leisurely conversations while holding their heads in their hands (the way a dullahan drinks while talking is worth watching). There was a gaggle of green-haired merrows in sealskin jackets and tight pants, looking like slender biker babes but without the tattoos or studs, and all looking faintly wet no matter how long they’d been out of the Bay. There was a fat round little fear gorta in a sweat suit and glow-step Nikes, staving off his own personal famine by gorging on bagged-in McDonald’s from the branch over in Grafton Street. And there were grogachs and leanbaitha and other kinds of the People that I’d never seen before; in some cases I never did find out what they were, or did, or what they were doing in town. There was no time, and besides, it seemed inappropriate to be inquiring too closely about everybody else while the purpose was to wake one particular leprechaun.
They waked him. It wasn’t organized, but stories started coming out about him—how much time he spent down around the Irish Writers Center, how he gave some mortal entrepreneur-lady the idea for the “Viking” amphibious-vehicle tours up and down the river Lif-fey: endless tales of that kind. He was well liked, and much missed, and people were angry about what had happened to him. But they were also afraid.
“And who the F are we supposed to tell about it?” said one of the dullahan to me and the banshee at one point. “Sure there’s no help in the Guards—we’ve a few of our own kind scattered here and there through the force, but no one high up enough to be paid any mind to.”
“We need our own guards,” said another voice, one of the clu-rachauns.
“And you’d love that, wouldn’t you? You’d be the first customers,” said one of the leprechauns.
There was a mutter. Clurachauns are too well known for their thieving habits, which make them no friends among either the “trooping” people like the Sidhe or the “solitaries” like the leprechauns, dullahans, and merrows. The clurachaun only snickered.
“What do you call a northsider in a Mercedes? Thief!” said one of the leprechauns, under his breath. “What’s the difference between a northsider and a clurachaun? The northsider is better dressed!”
The clurachaun turned on him. The others moved back to give them room for what was probably coming. But there was one of the People I’d earlier noted, a grizzled, older leprechaun whom the others of his kind, and even the clurachauns, seemed to respect: when he’d spoken up, earlier, they’d gotten quiet. “The Eldest,” the banshee had whispered in my ear. Now the Eldest Leprechaun moved in fast and gave the younger leprechaun a clout upside the head. To my astonishment, no fight broke out.
“Shame on you, and the two of you acting like arseholes in front of a mortal,” said the Eldest. The squabblers both had the grace to look at least sullenly shamefaced. “Here we are in this time of grief when no one knows what’s happening, or who it might happen to next, and you make eejits of yourself. Shut up, the both of you.”
They turned away,muttering, and moved to opposite sides of the pub. The Eldest nodded at me and turned back to the conversation he’d been having with one of the merrows, who looked nervous. “I did see it,Manaanan’s name I did,” she said, shrugging back the sealskin jacket to show that strange pearly skin underneath: it was hot in the back of the pub, with so many People in there. “Or . . . I saw something. I was comin’ up out of the river the other night, you know, by where the coffee shop is on the new boardwalk. I wanted a latte. And I saw it down the street, heading away from the Liffey, past one of those cut-rate furniture stores. Something . . . not normal.”
“What was it?” the Eldest said.
She shook her head, and the dark wet hair sprayed those standing nearest as she did. “Something big and green.”
No one knew what to make of that. “Aah, she’s got water on the brain,” said one of the clurachauns standing nearest. “It’s all just shite anyway. It’s junkies doin’ it.”
The Eldest glared at him.“It might be,” he said, “and it might not. We don’t dare take anything for granted. But we have to start taking care of ourselves now. Everybody so far who’s been taken has been out in some quiet place like a park, or in the waste places around housing estates. Now whatever’s doing this is doing it in the city. Nowhere’ll be safe soon.We have to put a stop to it.We need to start doing a neighborhood-watch kind of thing, such as mortals do.”
To my surprise, then, he turned to me. “Would you help us with that?” he said. “We could use a mortal’s eye on this. You know the city as well as we do, but from the mortal’s side. And you’re of good heart; otherwise, the deceased wouldn’t have given you a word. He was a shrewd judge of character, that one.”
“How can I help?” I said.
“Walk some patrols with us,” he said. “That’s how we’ll have to start.We can get more of our city People in to help us if it’s shown to work.”
My first impulse would have been to moan about my day job and how I had little enough time off as it was. Then I thought, What the hell am I thinking? I want to know more about these People—
“Sure,” I said. “Tell me where to meet you.
“Tomorrow night,” said the Eldest. “Say, down by the bottom of Grafton Street, by St. Stephen’s Green.We’ll ‘beat the bounds’ and see what we can find.”
AND SO WE DID that for five nights running, six . . . and saw nothing. People’s spirits began to rise: there was some talk that just the action we’d taken had put the fear on whatever we were trying to guard ourselves against. It would have been nice if that was true.
We walked, most of the time, between about nine at night and one in the morning: that was when the last few who’d been taken had vanished. I was out with a group including one of the merrow babes—I could never tell them apart—and two more leprechauns from my first one’s clan, over on the north side of the Liffey, not far from the big “industrial” pubs that have sprung up there, all noise and no atmosphere.As we went past the biggest of them, heading east along the riverbank, we heard something that briefly froze us all. A shriek—
As a mortal I would have mistaken it for a child’s voice. But the People with me knew better. The three of them ran across the Ha’penny Bridge, past startled tourists who felt things jostle them, saw nothing, and (as I passed in their wake) started feeling their pockets to see if they’d been picked. The People sprinted across Crampton Quay in the face of oncoming traffic, just made it past, and ran up the stairs and through the little tunnelway that leads into Temple Bar. And there, just before the alleyway opens out into the Square, when I caught up with them, I saw them staring at the cracked sidewalk, and on it, the empty tumble of clothes.
It was another of the People, but a clurachaun this time, stolen things spilling out of the clothing’s pockets—billfolds, change, jewelry, someone’s false teeth. But the threadbare tweeds were all shredded to rags as if by razors.
The merrow began to tremble. She pointed into the shadows, between the kebab place next to us, and the back door of the pub down at the corner.
Something green, yes. A green shadow melting out of the courtyard by Temple Street, turning, looking to right and left . . . and when it looked right, it saw us.
The great round eyes were yellow as lamps, and glowed green at their backs with the reflection of the sodium-vapor lights back on the Quay. Humans walked by it and never saw; and it looked through them as if they were the mist curling up off the water of the Liffey, as if they didn’t matter. Massive, low-slung and big-shouldered, swag-bellied but nonetheless easily two tons of hard lean muscle, the size of a step van, the big striped cat put its tremendous round plate of a face down, eyeing us, and the whole block filled with the low, thoughtful sound of its growl, like a tank’s engine turning over.
It saw the leprechauns. It saw the Washer. It saw me . . . or at least I think it did, as someone who could see the Old Folk and was therefore of interest. It didn’t need us, though, for tonight. It had had enough. It gazed yellowly at us for a moment more, then padded leisurely away across Temple Bar Square into the shadows behind the Irish Film Centre—the lighter-colored stripes, livid green like a thunderstorm sunset, fading into grimy city shadow as it went, the darker stripes gone the color of that shadow already, vanishing into it as the lighter ones faded. Only the shape of the slowly lashing tail remained for a moment under the stuttering light of the streetlamp at the corner of the S quare . . . then slipped into the dark and was gone.
A horrified, frozen silence followed.
“F me,” said the leprechaun at last, when he could speak again. “It’s the Celtic Tiger . . .”
THE OLD PEOPLE MET AGAIN late that night in the Long Hall, after chucking-out time had officially been called and the mortals pushed (or in select cases, thrown) out into the street. The Old Folk, for their own part, pay no attention to licensing laws, having little to fear from them. There’s no point staging Garda raids on pubs open past “time” when between the first bang on the door and the forced entry, everybody inside literally vanishes.
Many of the Old Ones were afraid to say the name of what we’d seen. The idiom had become popular in the early nineties, adopted as inward investment boomed and the economy became the fastest-growing in Europe. It had become a favorite phrase and image for Irish people everywhere, a matter of pride, turning up in countless advertisements. But no one had foreseen the side effects, perhaps not even the Old People. They were seeing them now.
“We should hunt down whoever coined the F ing name and make their last hours unpleasant,” said one of the Washers.
“Too late for that now,” the Eldest Leprechaun said. “The damage is done. Give the thing a name, and it takes shape. They gave a name and a shape to the force that’s always hated us. It’s everything we’re not. It’s New Ireland, it’s money for money’s sake, brown paper envelopes stuffed full of bribes—the turn of mind that says that the old’s only good for theme parks, and the new is all there needs to be. It’s been getting stronger and stronger all this while.And now that it’s more important to the people living in the city than we are, it’s become physically real. It’s started killing us to take our strength from us, and i
t’ll keep killing us and getting bigger and stronger . . . until it’s big enough to breed.”
A sort of collective shudder went through the room. I shuddered, too, though it was as much from the strangeness of the moment as anything else. There are no female leprechauns, but nonetheless there are always enough younger ones to replace the old who die. Power in Ireland does not run to mortal’s rules, either in reproduction or in other ways. If the Folk said the Tiger could make more of itself, it could.And when the food supply ran out in the city, the Tiger’s brood would head into the countryside and continue the killing until there were none of the Old Folk left . . . and none of Old Ireland. What remained would be a wealthy country, the fastest-growing economy in Europe, then as now: but spiritually it would be a dead place, something vital gone from it forever.
“I think we all know who we need now,” the Oldest Leprechaun said. “We need the one who speaks to the Island in tongues and knows all its secrets—”
A hush fell. “We don’t dare!” somebody said from the back of the crowd.
“We have to dare,” the Eldest said. “We need the one who died but did not die, the one of whom it was prophesied that he would come back to the Island in its darkest moment and save its people.We need Ireland’s only superhero!”
A great cheer went up. Everybody piled out the doors of the Long Hall, carrying me with them.
That’s how we wound up heading down College Green in an untidy crowd, around the curve of the old Bank of Ireland and past Trinity College, heading for the river. Across O’Connell Bridge and up O’Connell Street we went, in the dark dead of night, and late-night revelers and petty crooks alike fled before our faces, certain that we were an outflow of Ecstasy-crazed ravers, or something far less savory. Past them all we went, nearly to the foot of the grayly shining needle of the Millennium Spire, and then hung a right into the top of North Earl S treet, catty-corner from the GPO . . . and gathered there, six deep and expectant, around the statue of James Joyce.
Emerald Magic Page 3
