Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [71]
“You never said anything before.”
“What was I going to say? I thought you’d be telling me about him soon enough. And if you didn’t, what would you think of me, telling you stories like that?”
“Has anyone else seen him?”
She laughed.“How do you think you got this job?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve been working here for almost nine months and you’ve lasted the longest of anybody who’s worked this floor in all that time. How long have you been here?”
“Almost a month.”
“Most people don’t last a week. There’s almost always an opening for the job on this floor. Management tries to shift some of us to it, but we just threaten to quit when they do.”
“So that’s why it was so dirty when I first came on.”
She nodded.
“And it’s the butter spirit that scares people off?”
“Most people just think this floor is haunted, but you and I know better.”
“They got on the wrong side of him,” I said. “Like I just did.”
“Don’t worry,” she told me. “Whatever he’s done—”
“Fixed it so my pants won’t stay up.”
She grinned. “It doesn’t last.”
“Well, I can work in my boxers, but I don’t know how I’m going to get home.”
“If it’s not gone by then, we’ll see if we can rustle up a long coat for you to wear.”
3
“So I’m assuming it wore off,”Miki said when I was done.
I nodded. “Before I left the building at the end of my shift.”
“Then what was tonight all about?”
“He likes to remind me that the tithe is still coming due.”
Miki got a hard look. “You see what I mean about how this is all shite?”
She looked off the stage, trying to see if the little bogle man was in view, I assumed. He wasn’t. Or at least he wasn’t visible. I knew, because I’d already checked.
“It’s not shite,” I said. “It’s real.”
“I know. It’s shite because it does no one any good. There’s a reason the Queen of the Faeries gave Yeats that warning.”
“What warning?”
“He was seeing this medium and through her, the Faerie Queen told him, ‘Be careful, and do not seek to know too much about us.’ But do any of the punters listen?”
“I wasn’t trying to find out anything about them.”
She nodded. “I got that. My point is, any contact with them is a sure recipe for heartache and trouble.”
She had that much right.
“You don’t seem any more surprised by this than Nita was,” I said.
“I’m not. Messing about with shite like this is what got Donal killed.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, it’s not something I’m going to shout out to the world.” She paused a moment, then added, “So what happened with Nita? She sounded nice from what you had to say about her.”
“She’s wonderful. But that little bugger made her allergic to me, and that spell hasn’t worn off yet.Whenever she gets physically near to me, her nose starts running, and she breaks out in hives. Sometimes her throat just closes down, and she can’t breathe.”
I finished tightening my last string, dropped the string-winder under my stool, and plugged my guitar into my electronic tuner.
“We seem to still be able to talk on the phone,” I added.
“Is that who you’re always calling?”
I nodded. I didn’t have a better friend in the world than Nita. And at one time, we’d been far more than that. But the butter spirit thought making her allergic to me would be a good joke—especially when he didn’t let the enchantment wear off. Talking on the phone was all we had left.
“I always thought it was one of your brothers or sisters,” Miki said.
“Nita’s like a sister now,” I told her, unable to keep the hurt from my voice.
Miki gave me a sympathetic look.
“So it’s not just breaking guitar strings and pulling your pants down,” she said.
“Christ, that’s the least of it. Mostly things happen in private. Shutting off the hot water on me when I’m having a shower. Or fixing it so that the electricity doesn’t work—but only in the room where I am. It’s the big jokes that I dread. Once I was