Something shot through the opening, hitting my shin with enough force to bruise.
I scarcely had time to yelp before whatever it was scampered up my leg with rodent-like dexterity.
My purse hit the ground as I became a spastic fit of shivering, slapping, arm-flailing shrieks. “Get it off! Get it off getitoff!”
I crashed into Crixus, whose hand dove under my skirt to capture the little body climbing the curve of my backside like an outcropping of rock.
“Gotcha!” Crixus announced.
“Turn me loose, I say!” the squirming little body ordered.
Flick’s rumpled head popped out of Crixus’s pocket. “Paddy Cabbagehead McNaughty! Is that you?”
“Oi!” Paddy cried. “As I live and breathe! Felicitious Firecratch McWhiskeybottom! We got your post!”
“We?” I asked.
That’s when I heard it.
The strains of a jaunty jig played in a key high enough to buzz the tiny bones inside my ear.
Leprechauns. Hundreds of them. Capering across my sofa. High-kicking their way across my coffee table.
“Told ya,” Crixus said, following me into the apartment. Liam shut the door after us and locked it.
Somehow it wasn’t the bodies swarming like ants around my ankles that had the room feeling like it had halved in size. Liam and Crixus flanked me like sentinels, surveying the chaos through eyes equally dark and assessing.
“What are they doing here?” I asked.
“Why, we were invited o’course,” Paddy said, still clutched in Crixus’s hand.
I glanced at Flick.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I didn’t invite them. I’ll bet it was that Sweeney. He likes a piss-up, he does. ”
“The hell is a piss-up?” Liam asked. He felt like a self-willed shadow looming behind me.
“A party where there be enough booze to get pissed,” Flick explained. “And from the looks of it, these lads have had plenty.”
“It better not have come from my cabinet,” I said, picking my way to the kitchen, trying not to inadvertently step on the revelers.
No such luck.
Bottles littered the every surface, many of them tipped over, drooling the last of their contents onto the counter. The liquor cabinet stood open and empty.
“And who’s this brasser with the grand diddies?” At the sound of tittering laughter and small splashes, I looked down to see my sink occupied by a circle of small, wet red heads. The bubbles erupting around them ceased abruptly.
“What did you just call me?”
“He fancies you, lass,” reported another leprechaun sitting on the spray head next to the faucet. His hands held a bendy straw whose end dipped below the water’s surface. “Do I have really have to keep at it?” he asked the snickering company.
“Shut your cakehole, Patches Stoutdrinker O’Nugget!” bellowed the most formidable among the group. With his pink skin and buckteeth, he looked like nothing so much as a skinned rabbit. “And keep up your blowin’.”
“You’ll not be talking to Patches like that, Angus Hooligan O’Toole,” Flick said, climbing down out of Crixus’s jacket. “He’s not your feckin’ slave.”
“Well look who it is,” Angus sang. “Felicitous Firecratch McWhiskeyBottom. Certifiable header and general gobshyte.”
“You forgot king,” Crixus broke in.
“King,” Angus snorted. “Everyone knows he ain’t the full shilling. Are we really expected to take orders from a king that’s off his bloody nut?”
“You know the rules as well as I do,” Crixus said. “The world takes on much more bad luck, and we’re all fucked. The humans cop to our existence, and life becomes a shit show in a hurry. The conspiracy blogs are already fingering some kind of extraterrestrial intervention.”
“You read those too?” Liam asked, skewering Crixus with a skeptical gaze.
“Of course I do,” Crixus said. “Closest thing to the truth on this fucking rock.”
“I knew it!” Liam stabbed a finger in the air. “I knew it!”
“Humans can go to the divil,” Angus spat. “Isn’t a man jack of us who can fight the cycle they’ve brought upon their heads.”
“It’s the Tato Mens, I tell you!” Flick insisted. “They’ve upset the balance!”
Angus and Crixus exchanged a pitying look.
I found it difficult to conjecture about the world’s future when my present included a sink turned hot tub by a passel of bickering leprechauns.
“Lads!” shouted a squeaky voice from the bedroom. “I’ve found it! The end of the rainbow!”
I followed the little bodies scuttling past my feet.
There, in the top drawer of my dresser, a squatty little leprechaun in a miniature green tuxedo t-shirt stood among the rows of my neatly folded panties. And a rainbow they were, sorted by color much like the clothing in my closet had been before the flood that had caved in the ceiling of my closet.
“Have a look at these!” he said, unfurling a pair of silky green thong panties like a war banner.
“You get out of there!” I said, snatching the panties out of his tiny hands and hiding them behind my back.
They were jerked from my grasp, and I spun around to find Crixus twirling them around his index finger. “There may be hope for you yet,” he drawled.
“Give those back!” I tried and failed to grab them off his hand.
“Finders keepers,” Crixus said.
Liam aimed the barrel of his gun right between Crixus’s eyes. “You heard what the lady said.”
“You know you can’t kill me,” Crixus said, handing over the panties.
“Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy trying,” Liam answered.
“Now, there’s no need to fight, boyos,” the leprechaun in my drawer said, holding up another pair of panties. “There’s plenty here for all of us!” My underwear started leaping from my drawer like so much rainbow-colored popcorn before it was snatched up by dozens of tiny hands.
“Stop that! All of you!” I successfully snagged a couple of pairs, but there were too many of them scattering in all different directions.
“Ooh! I’ve got me a G-string!” one shouted, stretching them above his head.
Liam swooped down and grabbed it from him then shot the panties back at me from his index finger. “How come you couldn’t be wearing these when I kidnapped you?”
“Well excuse the hell out of me,” I sad, volleying back an irritated glare. “Perhaps if I had known I would be abducted at gunpoint that day, I might have chosen different unmentionables.”
“It was your first time,” he teased. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
The tone of his voice was suggestive enough to indicate any number of the firsts he owned.
I looked at my bed, once the anchor and center of my quiet sanctuary, now covered in leprechauns springing about like they were practicing gymnastics floor routines. Little footprints marred the formerly pristine, snowy-white down comforter. My pillows had become bleachers for rows of green-clad onlookers. From the section nearest the bed, three sets of hands held up playing cards of various numbers, swiped—or so I guessed—from the deck I had picked up at the airport returning from my recent excursion to Vegas.
The gymnast narrowed his eyes at the body in the middle of the row. “What’s the idea, giving me a six? Me form was perfect in that last double layout, you tosser!”
“Oh! Is that a six, then?” the judge glanced up at the card, which was nearly half his height. “My apologies, lad, I had meant to grab a nine!” He did some quick shuffling and held up the nine of clubs.
The crowd applauded this new development, and the gymnast bowed low over his gold-buckled shoes.
The sound of their shouts and cheers became a low-level hum, worrying the edges of my mind like the beginnings of a migraine. I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed fingers into my temples. When I opened them again, the world seemed to tilt on its axis, threatening to send my furniture
, along with the rest of my life, sliding off into some airless nonexistent pocket of the universe. My own heart beat a rhythm in time with an invitation from a yet unknown adversary: Give up. Give up. Give up.
“Feeling okay, Doctor?” Crixus asked.
I shook my head no, unable to form words.
“She needs air,” Liam said. “I’m going to help her out to the balcony. You clear a path. Now.”
Crixus bristled under Liam’s instructions but moved to comply, shuffling leprechauns out of his way as he walked. “All right! Everyone out! Party’s over!” he barked.
Disappointed sighs rose from the crowd. “You heard me! I said out, or each and every one of you gets reported to the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs!”
A vast exodus of green figures made their way toward the door, looking like a miniature version of New York City’s Hudson River, tinted a verdant hue for Saint Patrick’s Day every year.
Liam wrapped an arm around my shoulders and steered me through the living room and out the sliding glass door to the balcony. Air made heavy and damp with the promise of rain slid across my feverish skin like a cool silk sheet.
He settled me into a patio chair and seated himself in its mate. I had purchased the small bistro table set shortly after I had moved into this apartment, when I still dreamed of taking my morning coffee while looking out over the bay.
Life had since taught me that stealing a few moments to eat over the sink was far more likely. So many things I had meant to do simply eroded away as I slid on a track between one day and the next.
The man I was supposed to meet. The family I had meant to have. The relationships I had yet to mend, all clipped away like thorns from a rose so I could move unhampered from goal to goal, collecting accolades and paychecks.
And now, with an expiration date on my head, I was forced to confront a simple and devastating truth: it was entirely possible to die without ever having lived.
“I can’t do this,” I announced.
Liam looked over at me, the planes of his face cast pearlescent by the moon as it swam between clouds. “Do what?”
“This,” I said, gesturing to him, to the apartment, to myself. “Whatever this is. I can’t do it.”
“You mean, life?”
“This is not my life,” I said, drawing my knees to my chest and stretching my dress over them like I had done with large T-shirts when I was a child.
“Then whose life it?” he asked.
“Yours,” I said. “And his.” I glanced through the glass door to see Crixus picking up handfuls of leprechauns and dropping them into an empty pillowcase. I had to stifle a laugh as one of them reared back and bit his finger, causing a string of words I didn’t need to hear to understand. “I’m not cut out to be part of your world. Or his. I don’t belong.”
“What makes you say that?” He tried to make this question sound neutral, but something in it warned me to tread lightly.
“Because up until a few days ago, I didn’t so much as believe in ghosts. I’ve studied the human brain, degrees of consciousness, disorders with names too long to pronounce, much less memorize. Do you know what that taught me?”
“A frosty demeanor?” he asked.
“I am not frosty,” I insisted. “I do my best to be warm and welcoming to everyone who enters my office.”
“You were pretty rude to me, as I recall.”
“Rude? You pulled a gun on me!” Irritation brought fresh blood into my cheeks, the air seeming colder against my skin.
“After I tried asking nicely,” he replied.
I fought the urge to hurl an empty terra cotta pot at his head, a leftover from a failed attempt at an herb garden. “What studying human behavior has taught me is that at the end of the day, there is really only one thing that brings misery to someone’s doorstep.”
“And that would be?” he asked, extending his long legs to prop his shoes up on the balcony railing.
“Choices. Their own or someone else’s. But most the time, it’s their own. By taking responsibility for those choices, most people can achieve some level of equilibrium and happiness in their lives. I’ve made a study of this. Made it my life’s purpose. And yet, because of other people’s choices, everything I’ve worked for could be swept away in a single second.”
“There are no guarantees, lady. Not for any of us. You of all people should know that.”
I knew by the immediate flare of anger in my gut that there was truth in his statement, predicated on his knowledge of me. “What do you mean I of all people?”
He glanced at his shoes for a moment before continuing. “Did you choose to have a schizophrenic mother?”
“What kind of ridiculous question is that?” I asked, feeling my stomach tighten. “Of course not, there’s no way I could have.”
“And your mother,” he continued. “Did she choose to be schizophrenic?”
“No one does,” I said.
He caught me in his gaze and held my eyes, knowing I would be unable to look away. “Does that mean she’s not your mother? Or that she didn’t deserve to live?”
“I didn’t say that! I said—”
“She’s part your life. Whether you like it or not. Yes, you can make choices that minimize that, but it doesn’t mean she isn’t real.”
I was silent for a moment to let his words sink in. I didn’t like where this was going.
“You spend so much time diagnosing other people. Picking them apart and putting them back together. Sure, you can reel off a list of your own problems. You’ve even gotten pretty damn good at living around them. But you’re going to be stuck just the way you are until you accept one thing.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“This is happening.”
I hugged my knees tighter to my chest. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that this, what’s going on right now, this is your life. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can respond.”
“I can’t!” Tears squeezed my throat closed, and for a moment, my thoughts stayed backed up in my chest like a train on the track. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you. I’ve ordered my life the way it is because that’s all I can handle. I know my own limits.”
“You’ve made your own limits. Built yourself a neat little box. And now you’re pissed off because you got shaken out of it, and there’s nowhere to hide.”
“I’m not pissed off!” I shouted, realizing and regretting the unintentional hilarity of my statement. I deflated, leaning back into the chair. Tears I had been blinking away slid down my face, warm as they soaked through the fabric covering my knees. “I’m scared.”
Liam rose from his chair and came around to kneel in front of me. His large warm hands rested on my bare feet. “You may not be a part of our worlds, but we are a part of yours. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. And I’m guessing Mr. Happy Pants in there feels about the same way.”
We both looked through door at the precise moment one of the leprechauns mooned Crixus and dove under the couch. The words ‘dead meat’ and ‘grisly little fucker’ filtered through the glass.
Liam and I shared a snicker at his expense.
“Come on, lady,” he said, standing and offering me his hand. He helped me rise and as soon as I was steady on my feet, wrapped his arms around me, pressing me into his chest, his chin resting on the top of my head.
A hug.
How long had it been since I had been held by something bigger than me? Someone stronger in any sense of the word. A quick taking of stock had me looking further back than I would have guessed. Before my mother deteriorated completely. Before I was twelve, when she was institutionalized. Before I had been shuffled through foster homes for six years because I had no other family.
Brief, awkward squeezes from colleagues, clients and acquaintances were the nearest reference I had. Making and keeping close friends required some mysterious dance I was well versed in, but never seemed to have t
he time and impetus to practice.
Though I couldn’t yet bring my arms to band around Liam’s waist, I leaned into him, allowing him to absorb some of my weight.
“We’ll figure this out,” he said. “In the meantime, I think you need to try and get some sleep. Things seem to be calming down for tonight at least.”
And that’s when my car exploded.
*****
The next few moments were a haze of roaring flames and shouted commands. “Get back!” Liam ordered, pushing me away from the railing with a protective arm.
Crixus nearly yanked the glass door out of its track while barreling his way through. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded.
Neighbors began wandering out to the adjacent balconies in various states of undress. Some in bathrobes, some in only boxers. Their shocked exclamations filled the night like the smoke billowing up from the parking lot below.
Larry, our apartment building’s doorman, darted across the parking lot with a cell phone stuck to his ear. Seeing my assigned parking spot, his head snapped up in the direction of my balcony. He looked equal parts relieved and alarmed to see me standing there.
“Faith and begorrah!” Flick said, peeking over the edge of Crixus’s jeans pocket. “That’s your car, isn’t it lass?”
“Was,” I groaned. “Was my car.”
Rage twisted his small features. “Those bloody Tato Mens have gone too far this time! Something has to be done about them!”
“Tato Men?” Liam asked. “I’ve never heard the Westies called that before.”
“Don’t be daft, lad,” Flick said. “The Westies haven’t got a thing to do with the Tato Mens. Aside from they’re both after Dr. Schmidt.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “The Tato Mens are after me?”
“Oh they are indeed. I didn’t want to say anything earlier as I didn’t want to upset you. But they’ve been in your office, they have. Saw the signs meself.”
“Signs? What signs?”
“Well, the fingerprints for one. They were all over your fish tank. Probably planning on hurting the poor beast in a variety of ways before they got around to eating him. Why do you think I had Saint Pádraig bless the wee thing?”
Unlucky: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Page 6
