Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [11]
“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