Emerald Magic

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Miki was in a mood that night. The tunes were all fast and furious, one after the other, with no time to catch a breath in between. Most of the time, when we got to the end of one of our regular sets, she’d simply call out a key signature and jump directly into the next set.

  I didn’t really think of it as peculiar to this particular night. Once she got onstage, you never knew where Miki would let the muse take her. Having a long-standing fondness for jazz tenor sax solos, as well as a newfound love for Mexican conjunto music that she’d picked up on our tours through Texas and the Southwest, she could as easily slide from whatever Irish tune we might be playing into a Ben Webster solo, or some norteño piece she’d picked up from a Flaco Jimenez album.

  But that night it was all hard-driving reels, and we didn’t come up for air until just before the end of our first set. I took the momentary respite to kill the volume on my guitar and give it a proper retuning, not really listening to what Miki was telling the audience. But I did note that they all had the same, slightly stunned expression that I was sure I was wearing.Miki in full tear on her box could do it to anyone, and even playing onstage with her, I wasn’t immune.

  I got the last string in tune, then suddenly realized what Miki was telling the audience.

  “. . . have to ask yourselves, why these stories persist,” she was saying. “We’ve always had them, and we still do. I mean, alien abductions—that’s just a new twist on the old tale of people getting taken away by the faeries, isn’t it? Now I don’t want to go all woo-woo on you here, but tonight’s one of the two nights of the year that these little buggers are given complete free rein to cause what havoc they can for us mortals. The other’s on Halloween.

  “Anyway,” she went on, smiling brightly at the audience in that way she had that immediately made you have to smile back, “whether you believe or not, it can’t hurt to wish a bit of good luck our way, right? So while we’re playing this next tune, I want you to think about how everybody here should be kept safe from the influence and malice of these so-called Good Neighbors.What do you think?”

  She cocked her head and gave them a goofy look, which got her a round of laughter and applause.

  “Key of D,” she told me, and launched into “The Faeries’ Hornpipe.”

  “Remember,” she said over the opening bars, directing her attention back to the audience. “Faeries bad. Us good.”

  I looked out at the crowd as I backed Miki up. People were still smiling, some of them clapping along to the simple rhythm of the tune. And I’d bet more than half of them were doing what she’d said, thinking protective thoughts for everybody inside the pub.

  This was Miki’s big plan? I found myself thinking.

  Don’t get me wrong. I appreciated whatever effort she might have made to solve my problem, but this didn’t seem like it would be all that effectual. And I sure didn’t see the connection to that old ballad, “Tam Lin.”

  But then I realized that the Native women I’d noted earlier were all standing up, backs against the various walls. One after the other, they lit smudgesticks and soon that pungent scent of herbs and twigs was drifting through the pub, only this time, except for me, nobody seemed to notice.

  And then I realized something else. While the audience continued to clap and stomp away to the music, while I could still hear the music, I wasn’t playing my guitar anymore. I looked over at Miki and there seemed to be two of her, superimposed over each other. One still playing away on that old box of hers—she’d switched to a tune that I recognized as “The Faerie Reel”; the other regarding me with a serious expression in her eyes.

  The sound of her playing and the crowd was muted. Actually,my sight felt muted, too, like there was a thin gauze hanging in front of my eyes.

  “It’s up to you now,” the Miki who wasn’t playing said. “Go outside and deal with him.”

  “What . . . where are we?”

  “In between. Not quite in the world, not quite in the otherworld, where the spirits are stronger.”

  “I don’t understand. How did you bring us here?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “They did.”

  I didn’t have to ask who she meant. It was the Native women, with their smudgesticks and something else. I heard a low, rhythmical drumming, under the music, under the noise of the crowd. Mixed with it were the sounds of rattles and flutes, keeping time to Miki’s tune, but following their own rhythm at the same time. I couldn’t see the players.

  More spirits, I guessed. But Native ones.

  “And I’m not really with you,”Miki added. “You’re on your own.”

  “I don’t understand—” I began, but she cut me off.

  “There’s not a big window of time here, Conn. Get a move on. And remember what I told you.”

  “I know. Think of the ballad. Why can’t you just tell me what you’ve got planned?”

  She smiled, but there was no humor in it. Only a kind of sadness.

  “You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” she said. “One way or another, you can finish this business tonight.”

  You know how in a dream you find yourself doing things that don’t make sense in retrospect, but in the dream they’re perfectly logical? That’s what this felt like. I got up and put my guitar in its stand, then made my way down from the stage and through the tables to the front door of the pub. No one paid the slightest attention to me except for Tommy, who gave me a smile and a thumbs-up as I passed the soundboard where he was sitting.

  I thought of stopping to see if he could tell me what was going on, but then I remembered Miki saying something about there not being a lot of time, so I continued on to the door. Considering how weird everything else had gotten, I didn’t really expect Harnett’s Point to be still waiting for me outside. But it was. And that wasn’t all that was waiting for me.

  I stepped out into the parking lot, then stopped dead in my tracks. Nita stood there, waiting in an open parking spot between an SUV and a Volvo station wagon. She looked as gorgeous as ever, and my heartbeat did a little skip of happiness before my chest went tight with anxiety. I looked to the left and right, searching for some sign of the butter spirit, but so far as I could tell we were alone.Which I knew meant nothing.

  “Nita . . .” I said, stepping closer to her. “What are you doing here?”

  The smile she’d been wearing faltered. “Your friend Miki . . . she asked me to come. She said we had to do this, then everything would be all right.”

  I shook my head. What had Miki been thinking?

  In the light from the bar’s signage behind me I could see that her eyes were already getting puffy and her nose was beginning to run—her allergy to me kicking in.

  “I shouldn’t have come, should I?”Nita said. “I can tell. You don’t really want me here.”

  The sadness I saw rising up in her broke my heart.

  “No, it’s not that,” I told her. “It’s just . . . oh, Christ, Miki couldn’t have picked a worse night to have you come.”

  She started to say something, but a voice to the side spoke first.

  “Using words like that will just make it worse on you, Conn O’Neill.”

  I turned and this time I spotted him. He was perched on the roof of an old Chevy two-door, one car over from the Volvo. The butter spirit with his hair like dreads and that glare in his eyes.

  “I’m not afraid,”Nita told me.“Miki told me all about it.”

  “I wish she’d told me,” I said.

  The butter spirit jumped onto the roof of the Volvo and grinned down at me.

  “Don’t know what you’ve got planned here, my wee boyo,” he said. “I just know it’s too late.”

  Nita and I both felt it then, a sudden coldness in the air. Looking over her shoulder, I was the first to see him: a fog lifting from the pavement of the parking lot that became the figure of a man with a cloak of wreathing mist that swirled about him. The Grey Man, his features sharp and pale, framed by long grey hair. Old Bonele
ss himself. He didn’t seem completely solid, and I remembered my dad telling me how he sustained himself on the smoke from chimneys and factories, on the exhaust from cars and other machines. That had never made sense until that moment.

  His gaze had none of the butter spirit’s meanness. Instead, he appeared completely indifferent, and in him, that struck me as far more dangerous.

  “Get away, girl,” the butter spirit told Nita. “Or you’ll suffer the same fate as your boyo.”

  Nita ignored him. She moved closer to me.

  “H-hold me,” she said.

  She could barely get the words out, her allergy to me closing up her throat.

  “But—”I began, but couldn’t finish.

  She tried to speak, only she didn’t have the breath anymore. Swaying, she would have fallen if I hadn’t stepped forward and taken her into my arms. I lowered her to the pavement and knelt there, holding her tight,my heart filling with hopelessness and despair.

  “Let her go,” the butter spirit said.

  I wanted to. I knew I should get as far away from her as I could so that she could recover from the allergy attack. But Nita still had the strength to grip my arm and she wouldn’t let go. I knew what she was trying to tell me. So I looked down into her face, and I kissed her instead.

  Her skin changed under my lips.When I lifted my head, I found myself holding a corpse.Nita’s lovely brown skin had gone pallid and cold, and her gaze was flat. Empty. Her lips moved, and a maggot crept out of the corner of her mouth.

  I might have pushed her aside and scrambled to my feet in horror, except somehow I managed to remember Miki’s cryptic reminders about the old ballad. So I held her closer. Even when the flesh fell apart in my grip and all I held were bones, attached to each other by bits of dried muscle and sinew. I held her even closer then, tenderly cradling the skull against my chest.Wisps of what had once been her thick brown hair tickled my hand.

  I still didn’t really see the connection between the ballad and our situation. I was the one in peril with faerie, not her. I should be the one changing shapes. But I knew I wouldn’t let her go, never mind the gender switch from the ballad.

  None of this made much sense anyway, from the butter spirit’s first taking affront to me, through the years of petty torment to this night, when the tithe he owed the Grey Man was due. None of it seemed real. It was all part and parcel of that same dreamlike state I felt I’d entered back on the stage inside the pub. I suppose that was what let me continue to kneel there, holding the apparent remains of Nita in my arms, and still function.

  “This man is yours,” I heard the butter spirit say. “My tithe to you.”

  Before the Grey Man could do whatever it was he was going to do, I lifted my head and met his flat, expressionless gaze. I still felt disconnected, reality floundering all around me, but I knew what I needed to do. It wasn’t Miki’s advice I needed to take, but my dad’s.

  “I’m honored to make your acquaintance, sir,” I said, falling back on the formal speech patterns I remembered from Dad’s stories.

  For the first time since he arrived, I saw a flicker of interest in the Grey Man’s gaze.

  “Are you now?” he said.

  His voice was a voice from the grave, deep and husky, filled with cold air.

  I gave a slow nod in response. I was no longer trying to figure out what Miki’s plan had been. Instead, I concentrated on the stories from my dad, how in them, no matter how malevolent or kind the faerie spirit might seem to be, the one thing they all demanded of us mortals was respect.

  “I am, sir,” I said. “It’s a rare privilege to be able to look upon one so grand as yourself.”

  “Even when I am here to eat your soul?”

  “Even then, sir.”

  “What game are you playing at?” he demanded.

  “No game, sir. Though in all fairness, I feel I should tell you that your butter spirit actually has no claim to my soul. That being the case, it puzzles me how he can offer me up as his tithe to you. It seems to me—if you’ll pardon my speaking out of turn like this—rather disrespectful.”

  The Grey Man turned that dark gaze of his to the butter spirit. “Is this true, Fardoragh Og?”

  The butter spirit spat at me. “Lies,my lord. Everything he says is a lie.”

  “Then tell me, how did you gain a lien on his soul?”

  The butter spirit couldn’t find the words he needed.

  “Well?”

  “H e . . . I . . .”

  “If I might speak, sir?” I asked.

  The butter spirit wanted to protest—that was easy to see—but he kept his mouth shut when the Grey Man nodded. I explained the circumstances of the butter spirit’s enmity to me, and how when I’d realized my mistake, I’d tried to apologize.

  “And where in this sorry tale,” the Grey Man asked the butter spirit, “did you acquire the lien on this man’s soul?”

  “I . . .”

  “Do you know what would have happened if I had taken it in these circumstances?”

  “N-no,my lord.”

  “For the wrongful murder of their son, I would have been in debt to his family for eternity.”

  “I . . . I didn’t . . . I never thought,my lord . . .”

  “Come here, little man.”

  With great reluctance, the butter spirit shuffled to where the tall figure of the Grey Man stood. I didn’t know what was coming next, but I knew that if I could get Nita and myself safely out of the situation, the last thing we’d need would be the continued enmity of the butter spirit, magnified by who knew how much after the night’s ordeal.

  “Sir?” I said.“May I speak?”

  The Grey Man’s gaze touched me, and I shivered. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s just . . . this all seems to have been a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, sir. Couldn’t we, perhaps, simply put it all behind us and carry on with our lives?”

  “You ask for clemency toward your enemy?”

  “I don’t really think of him as an enemy, sir. Truly, it was just a misunderstanding that grew out of proportion in the heat of the moment.And I should never have disrespected him in the first place.”

  The butter spirit actually gave me a grateful look, but the Grey Man appeared unmoved. He grabbed the butter spirit by the scruff of his neck.

  “You offer a commendable sentiment,” he told me, “but I care only for the danger he put me in. It’s not something I can afford to have repeated.”

  With that, he pulled the little man toward him. I thought, how odd that he would embrace the butter spirit in a moment such as that. But the Grey Man didn’t draw him close for an embrace, so much as to devour him. The butter spirit gave a shriek as the foggy drapes of the cloak folded over him. And then he was gone, swallowed in the cloak of fog, with only the fading echo of his cry remaining before it, too, was gone.

  “Now there is only one last problem,” the Grey Man said, his dark gaze returning to me.

  I swallowed hard.

  “I am still owed a tithe from your world,” he said. “Some human artifact or spirit. But I stand before you empty-handed.”

  I didn’t reply.What was I going to say?

  “I can only think of one solution,” he went on. “Will you swear fealty to me?”

  I had to be careful.

  “Gladly, sir,” I told him. “So long as my doing so causes no harm to any other being.”

  “You think I would have you do evil things?”

  “Sir, I have no idea what you would want from me. I’m only being honest with you.”

  For a long moment the Grey Man stood there, considering me.

  “I owe you a favor,” he finally said. “I know you spoke up only to save your own skin, but by doing so, you prevented me from an eternity of servitude to your family.”

  “Sir, it was never my intention to—”

  He cut me off with a sharp gesture of his hand. “Enough! You’ve made your point. You’re very respectful. Now give i
t a rest.” He sighed, then added, “Burn a candle for me from time to time, and we’ll leave it at that.”

  I knew he was about to go.

  “Sir,” I said before he could leave. “My friend . . .”

  He looked down at the bundle of bones in my arms, held together with sinew and dried muscle.

  “It’s only a glamor,” he said. “Seen by you, felt by her.”

  And then he was gone in a swirl of fog.

  I’d managed to keep my soul. The butter spirit would no longer be tormenting me. But I still knelt there with bones in my arms where Nita should be.

  At that moment there came a roar of applause from inside the bar. I turned in the direction of the door. It seemed so inappropriate that they would be cheering the Grey Man’s departure, but then I realized that it was only that Miki had ended her set.

  I started to get to my feet, not an easy process because those bones weighed more than you’d think they would. But I refused to put them down.

  I was still trying to stand when the door opened and one of those tall Native women I’d seen inside the bar came out into the parking lot. A moment later and the others followed her, one by one, nine of them in all. The last of them was an old, old woman with eyes as dark as the Grey Man’s.When her gaze settled on me, I felt as nervous as I had under his attention.

  “You did well,” one of the younger women said—younger meaning she was in her forties. I couldn’t tell how old the oldest of them was. She seemed ageless.

  When they started to walk across the parking lot, I called out after them.

  “Please! Can you help me with my friend?”

  The old woman was the closest. She reached into her pocket and tossed what looked like a handful of pollen into the air, then blew it in my direction. I sneezed. Once. Twice. A third time. Blinked to clear my eyes.

  By the time I was done, the Native women were gone. But Nita was in my arms—the real Nita, seemingly unaffected by allergies. Her eyelids fluttered, and she was looking up at me. A small smile touched her lips.

  “I had the strangest dream,” she said.

  “It’s okay. It’s all over now.”

  “Did . . . did we win?” she asked.