Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [60]
When the water crested his shoulders he began to swim, and as he did, he felt his legs melt away, forming a deeper muscle, powerful, moving together as one. Then it was as if he was moving through the air, at home in the element of water, and elation swelled up inside him.
Patrick turned in the sea and looked back to the rocky coast at the tiny shadows still standing, side by side, in the dusk; he thought he saw one of the shadows wave to him, but he was unsure. He lifted a hand in return, a hand with a slight webbing of skin between the fingers now. He looked farther up and suddenly saw the green hills rising, verdant in their splendor, the purple mountains beyond, the summer slopes bathed in a glorious array of the bright colors of the land, scarlets and crimsons, delicate yellows and the palest of lavenders.
In his ears he heard his mother’s voice, one last time.
Save yourself, Patrick Michael Martin, from the famine, and from all that has held you blind until now.
Blind to what?
You’ll see.
Below him, the ocean swelled, no longer grey, in blue-green splendor, gold below. He knew its deeper treasures were his now, could hear the sea wind calling, heard the song from the depths, the same wordless tune his mother had sung to him on the way to this place, telling him not of what she missed, but what lay in store for him.
He dove into the waves and went off to find it.
Banshee
BY RAY BRADBURY
It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.
It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate, and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.
I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of final screenplay in my pocket, and my film director employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.
Then, I knocked.
The door flew wide almost instantly. John Hampton was there, shoving a glass of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.
“Good God, kid, you got me curious. Get that coat off. Give me the script. Finished it, eh? So you say. You got me curious. Glad you called from Dublin. The house is empty. Clara’s in Paris with the kids. We’ll have a good read, knock the hell out of your scenes, drink a bottle, be in bed by two and—what’s that?”
“Tell you later. Jump.”
With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half boots, his hair, as always, windblown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.
Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laugh, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.
“Let’s see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink.Watch.”
He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his backside, leafing my manuscript pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a page drop and flutter to the carpet.When he finished he let the last page sail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.
“You son of a bitch,” he said at last, exhaling. “It’s good. Damn you to hell,