Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [65]
He leaned at me. He put his hand on my chin and lifted it and gazed long and sweetly into my eyes.
“You’re not upset?”
“No,”I said, but my voice broke.
“By God, now, if you aren’t. Sorry. A joke, kid, only a joke.”A nd here he gave me a friendly punch on the arm.
Slight as it was, it was a sledgehammer striking home,
“I wish you hadn’t made it up, the joke, I wish the article was real,”I said.
“So do I, kid. You look bad. I—”
The wind moved around the house. The windows stirred and whispered.
Quite suddenly, for no reason I knew, I said. “The banshee. It’s out there.”
“That was a joke, Doug. You got to watch out for me.”
“No,”I said, looking out the window. “It’s there.”
John laughed. “You saw it, did you?”
“It’s a lovely young woman with long black hair and great green eyes and a complexion like snow and a proud Phoenician prow of a nose. Sound like anyone you ever in your life knew, John?”
“Thousands.”J ohn laughed more quietly now, looking to see the weight of my joke.“Hell—”
“She’s waiting for you,”I said.“Down at the bottom of the drive.”
John glanced, uncertainly, at the window.
“That was the sound we heard,”I said. “She described you or someone like you. Called you Willy,Will,William. But I knew it was you.”
John mused. “Young, you say, and beautiful, and out there right this moment . . . ?”
“The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
“Not carrying a knife—?”
“Unarmed.”
John exhaled. “Well, then, I think I should just go out there and have a chat with her, eh, don’t you think?”
“She’s waiting.”
He moved toward the front door.
“Put on your coat, it’s a cold night,”I said.
He was putting on his coat when we heard the sound from outside, very clear, this time. The wail, then the sob, then the wail.
“God,”said John, his hand on the doorknob, not wanting to show the white feather in front of me. “She’s really there.”
He forced himself to turn the knob and open the door. The wind sighed in, bringing another faint wail with it.
John stood in the cold weather, peering down that long walk into the dark.
“Wait!”I cried, at the last moment.
John waited.
“There’s one thing I haven’t told you,”I said. “She’s out there, all right. And she’s walking. But . . . she’s dead.”
“I’m not afraid,”said John.
“No,”I said.“but I am.You’ll never come back.Much as I hate you right now, I can’t let you go. Shut the door, John.”
The sob again, and then the wail.
“Shut the door.”
I reached over to knock his hand off the brass doorknob, but he held tight, cocked his head, looked at me, and sighed.
“You’re really good, kid. Almost as good as me. I’m putting you in my next film. You’ll be a star.”
Then he turned, stepped out into the cold night, and shut the door, quietly.
I waited until I heard his steps on the gravel path, then locked the door and hurried through the house, putting out the lights. As I passed through the library, the wind mourned down the chimney and scattered the dark ashes of the London Times across the hearth.
I stood blinking at the ashes for a long moment, then shook myself, ran upstairs two at a time, banged open my tower room door, slammed it, undressed, and was in bed with the covers over my head when a town clock, far away, sounded one in the deep morning.
And my room was so high, so lost in the house and the sky, that no matter who or what tapped or knocked or banged at the door below, whispering and then begging and then screaming—
Who could possibly hear?
The Butter Spirit’s Tithe
BY CHARLES DE LINT
1
It happened just as we were finishing our first set at the Hole in Tucson, Arizona, running through a blistering version of “The Bucks of Oranmore”—one of the big box tunes, so far as I’m concerned. Miki was bouncing so much in her seat that I thought her accordion was going to fly off her knee. I had a cramp in the thumb of my pick hand, but I was damned if that’d stop me from seeing the piece through to the end, no matter