Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles Read online

  “’Twas all his doing! I’ve no part of it!” said Liam, as the wee folk are quick to throw each other under the coach to save their own skin.

  And with that, using his gancanagh powers, Lovely Liam vanished into thin air, or seemed to, by camouflaging himself into the room.

  “Curse my eyes!” said Captain de Valera, rubbing them. “Lovely Liam got in my line of sight, and I accidentally looked right at the little devil, Boyle . . . I’m in love. Like my heart has been zapped with Cupid’s hot lightning! I WANT TO SHOUT IT FROM THE HIGHEST ROOFTOP. TRUE LOVE! I MUST WRITE A SONG ON ACOUSTIC GUITAR FOR HIM. Now go and catch that gorgeous wee man of my dreams, because I love him so much and must kiss his little head and bathe him in honey!”

  This was a disastrous turn of events. After one accidental glance, the captain had fallen madly in love with Lovely Liam. Unfortunately, this is precisely how it works with gancanaghs. She was under his spell, and there was no way to fix it.

  “You go for dear darling macushla, and I’ll catch Wee Glen!” she yelled.

  The captain was in turmoil. Macushla is an Irish term of endearment, roughly meaning “pulse of my heart.”

  Captain Siobhán de Valera was one of the toughest officers I’ve ever met, but a gancanagh’s powers are ferociously strong, and she was fighting to stay professional. I began to swing my shillelagh around the room, hoping to hit Lovely Liam with a lucky shot, as if he were a piñata and I were a blindfolded child who should have taken a nap long ago.

  The captain, lovestruck and heart racing, dove for Wee Glen with her leprechaun cuffs, but he was quick with his shillelagh and leveled a firm crack that missed her face but connected with her shoulder.

  Captain de Valera rolled backward in pain. Through gritted teeth she growled, “Remind me to make a mixtape for Lovely Liam.” This was the first time I had a sense of the captain’s age, as I did not know what a mixtape was, but I assumed it was a gift basket of different kinds of tape: electrical, duct, masking, etc.

  The captain was in deep, but she managed to fight on with Wee Glen, who took two quick swings at her knees, only to curse when he realized she was wearing knee protectors. The captain got in a good swat and knocked his hat off, which confused and shamed him for a moment.

  Wee Glen did a spry flip over her head, landing behind the captain—driving the point of his shillelagh into the small of her back—a cheap shot that knocked her flat onto her jaw.

  “I must survive . . . to devote my life . . . to Lovely Liam. I shall make him coupons for foot rubs and brew him soup from only the juiciest rabbits,” whispered the captain to me, her eyes filled with wild passion.

  Of all the frightening things I had seen this day, watching the captain not in control of herself was perhaps the scariest. It was awful to see her so much in pain and so much in love at one confusing, violent moment.

  My fear somehow dissipated, replaced with as much anger as a Ronan Boyle type can muster. I gave up blindly swinging for the Lovely Liam and dove at Wee Glen with a strange growl and a berserk swing of my staff.

  I knew that no matter what, I must protect the captain and get her out of this awful den.

  My shillelagh took Wee Glen’s legs out from under him and sent him spilling bottom over teakettle across the filthy floor and crashing into the merrows like bowling pins.

  The merrows barked and flapped their tails in a panic toward an aquarium across the room. They used their human arms to hoist their fish bottoms back into the water. I wish I had not been distracted by this, for just then, Wee Glen came back at me, twirling his stick like a ninja and landing three fast whacks to my body. The blows were dampened by the cadet jacket, which as you know is Kevlar blend—specifically for striking moments like these.

  Now I was as angry as I get—which is pegging a solid seven on a meter that goes to, say, twelve.

  I picked myself up and delivered two double-handed swings at Wee Glen. He was faster than me—and good with his staff—but he was also coming out of the pickle fits, and his arms were a foot shorter than mine.

  Wee Glen and I whacked back and forth, exchanging strikes at a pace that felt like an old movie running at the wrong speed. I got a few lucky shots in, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that Wee Glen was the better shillelagh fighter of the two of us. His whacks were taking a toll—and it didn’t help that his stick was made from heavy oak root.

  I was no match for Wee Glen. As he landed a hard crack across my temple, I could feel the frames of my glasses snap. I tumbled to the ground, starting to black out.

  When I fluttered my eyes open, I couldn’t find my glasses, so everything looked a bit like a very scary painting by Claude Monet in his later years.

  Captain de Valera was in her love-fever, muttering to herself and scribbling something in her notebook as fast as she could.

  “Captain!” I shouted. “Now is not the time. You must fight this feeling and stay strong!”

  “I know . . . I know . . .” gasped the captain, trying to finish what she was writing, but it was clear she was losing her inner battle and possibly her very mind. She was two people now, and I didn’t seem to know either one of them.

  With my vision at about fifty percent, I was plenty surprised when Wee Glen landed on my neck, his shillelagh lined up with my temple as if he were planning to drive my head like a golf ball into the Scottish Highlands. On his shoulder hung the small leather bag that Lovely Liam had tossed to him before he vanished into the scenery.

  I did a clumsy backward somersault and shoved Wee Glen off of me. I gave a little kick to his midsection, which caused him to accidentally drop the bag right into my hands and produce a pickle burp that burned off a portion of my eyelashes.

  “Careful, it’s a vastsack!” called the captain.

  This meant nothing, as I did not know what a vastsack was at this time, and I was worried about if eyelashes grow back.

  Wee Glen slid across the disgusting floor, kicking up sawdust and stems. He was unaware that this bag of his was now in my hands. I looked into the bag, and I was one second away from learning the nature of a vastsack.

  A vastsack is an enchanted bag whose internal compartment is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. It turns out there are a few of them on display in a trophy case in the astonishingly bad cafeteria at Collins House. One of those is from the 1800s and looks to be the size of a coin purse from the outside, but on the inside, it is large enough to carry four African elephants. A garda officer in Sligo found this out the hard way when he stopped a clurichaun on a routine ID check, opened the little purse, and dumped four African elephants into his left hand. The elephants were fine, just very surprised to be in Sligo. The officer now has a plastic, robotic hand in the place where he lost that one, and everyone says it’s the most interesting thing about him.

  Another vastsack I would later see in an evidence locker in the Joy Vaults in Dublin looked like a Dolce & Gabbana Fall Collection 2013 handbag, but inside it could hold the town of Bern, the fifth-largest city in Switzerland.

  I was peering into this vastsack like some kind of eejit when the smack of Wee Glen’s shillelagh connected with the back of my skull with a dreadful thunk that must have pleased him a great deal.

  With one of my trademark shrieks, I was sent spinning into darkness that seemed to go on forever. With a soft thump, I landed on an incline of about ninety degrees. If it were a ski slope, it would have been called something like “Widowmaker” or “Big Mistake.”

  I kept on sliding, trying to get a grip with my hands on the leather wall. I was racing toward who-knows-what at the bottom, and, honestly, running out of shrieks.

  That I was now inside the vastsack had not really registered in my brain, as it seemed impossible—the same as it wouldn’t seem likely to you that you could fall into your lunch box. The slope started to level out, and about two minutes later, I came to a squishy landing at the bottom of a pitch-black ravine. I clicked on my torch and tried to get my bearings.
I felt like what a genie inside of a bottle might feel like, if the bottle were the size of Wembley Stadium and made of imitation leather.

  I screamed out, “Hello? Anybody there?” as you know I tend to say stupid things when I’m nervous. Trying to walk in the vastsack was like navigating a half-deflated bouncy house. I held on to the side and kept my torch pointed ahead of me. Here’s what I encountered inside the sack (all entered as evidence at Collins House, in my first case, People v. Wee Glen, #770141):

  1. An entire herd of stolen sheep (twenty-four in total), their fur spray-painted with a bright pink marking to show that they were the property of a human farmer.

  2. One new Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedan with the temporary license plate 7BQ J63 and a parking permit in the window for the town of Claremorris. (Leprechauns cannot drive human cars, but they love fancy things. And they love to steal. And while this is the entry-level Mercedes of a reasonable price, for a leprechaun it’s a very elegant car. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wee Glen stole it just for the wonderful smell of the interior.)

  3. Four hundred and seventy-five bottles of French wines, the entire former contents of the Malton Hotel’s wine cellar. Only four were missing—including a 1971 Petrus. Wee Glen and Lovely Liam drank the most expensive ones first, in classic faerie folk fashion. The concept of “saving something for later” does not exist to the wee folk, and it accounts for about ninety percent of why they get into mischief.

  4. A crumpled five-euro note and copious amounts of lint. So much lint that I had to wade through it for some time, up to my waist.

  The sheep had surrounded me, and sometimes it was hard to tell where the lint stopped and the sheep began. If anyone could be more nervous and confused than I was right then, it was the twenty-four stolen sheep. They huddled around me as I tried to calm my nerves by counting the wine bottles.

  I had no plan for how to extricate myself from the vastsack. The walls were too steep to climb without mountaineering gear or leatherworking tools, but this problem would sort itself out a moment later when there was a thunderous shake and I was thrown out of the sack, across the Rainbow Room, and into the disgusting aquarium with the merrows.

  The water was frigid salt water to mimic the Irish Sea. Clearly, the tank hadn’t been cleaned in ages, as it reeked of algae and merrow poop.

  I tried to pull myself from the tank as fast as I could. When underwater, a merrow’s eyes cover over with a protective lid that makes them look completely black. It is, in a word, unsettling. Spending even one more second in this creepy tank was not something on my to-do list.

  Across the room, Wee Glen and the captain were in a heated stick fight—their struggle for the vastsack had sent it flying and dislodged me from it. A few bottles of wine tumbled out after me, as did one sheep, but luckily the Mercedes did not, as it would certainly have crushed me.

  The captain is a master with her staff. She was one of the first pupils of Yogi Hansra. The captain’s staff was a blur. It danced from one hand to the other, over her shoulders, behind her back—like the staff itself was alive, and she were some kind of snake charmer taming it. The only way to keep up with the fight was from the sounds of the whacking and the cracking and the ouching.

  The captain was driving Wee Glen backward across the room as I slid down out of the aquarium, wet and shivering, merrow-poop-scented, scanning the filthy floor for my shillelagh or my glasses or both.

  “Boyle, catch!” shouted the captain, tossing me her leprechaun cuffs.

  I grabbed them out of the air, which was almost impossible with blurred vision. Then she tossed me a crumpled piece of paper, which I did not catch. I picked it up off the floor and opened it—it was the note she had been scribbling in a frenzy. It was a short poem.

  Captain de Valera shouted to me, “NOW, BOYLE!” as she knocked Wee Glen’s staff from his hand and pinned him to the floor, her staff right into his beard. I squinted and read the poem aloud as best I could.

  Oh dear little Glen with the most gorgeous ears,

  how your beard and your fame have grown over the years.

  In Oifigtown square where the traffic’s directed,

  A statue of you shall one day be erected.

  A shining brass Glen, from your toes to your bonnet,

  Even pigeons who sit there will not poop upon it.

  But lo, how your folly has turned into woe,

  As down to the Joy Vaults you’re likely to go.

  Three to six months of pain, gruel, and toil,

  For you’ve just been handcuffed

  . . . by Cadet Ronan Boyle.

  And with that, I did clasp the handcuffs onto Wee Glen, as this is the only known method to arrest a leprechaun: lightning-fast moves, combined with a vanity poem. Saying wonderful things in verse about a leprechaun will distract him from literally anything. Wee Glen kicked and fussed, but he was safely in custody. I wish I could say I was a big part of the captain’s plan, but my participation was mostly just good luck.

  The captain and I caught our breath, feeling quite connected for the first time, as traumatic experiences tend to do that. In the tank, the merrows blank-stared at us with their creepy black eyes. From the main room, the sound of the bewitched instruments could be heard, playing a song by Ragús, the name of which escapes me.

  The captain’s poem was decent, but honestly, I’ve read poems by Captain de Valera over the years that knock this one on its bottom. The love-curse had taken a toll, as did the shillelagh fight. Wee Glen wriggled and attempted to make some filthy gestures, but he couldn’t escape the cuffs. The captain hoisted him to his feet.

  “Nice work, Cadet Boyle,” said the captain. “And heavens, you smell truly awful.”

  I nodded, for the stink of the merrow water in my jumpsuit was dreadful, somehow even here in the Pickle Parlor.

  The captain read Wee Glen his rights and picked up his vastsack from the floor, collecting the stray wine bottles into it, remarkably unbroken. I helped corral the loose sheep back in as well, which was a bit of a trick.

  The captain tied the vastsack to her belt. I picked up my shillelagh, and we headed out back through the parlor.

  “Lovely Liam has disappeared, or is somewhere very near, but we can’t see him, which is a shame—for it means our case is not quite closed and that I cannot make him a little crown of flowers, which is all I want to do as I gaze into his eyes, which are the color of a spring sky,” said the captain.

  The love-curse had not gone away, nor would it until she was treated later that night at Collins House.

  We led Wee Glen out past the barrelchase into the main room. Big Mikey nodded his antlers at us as we passed, and many of the pickle-fitting wee folks made more obscene gestures. Someone called out, “Keep them ears shined on the inside, Wee Glen!”

  I’m not sure if they meant to keep the inside of his ears shined, or to shine his ears while inside of prison.

  We shoved past that thing at the door, which was back on its feet. He put out his hand for a tip, as it’s customary to tip the door thing when leaving the Pickle Parlor. Captain de Valera slipped him two euros, as she is as generous as she is violent.

  We loaded Wee Glen into the barrel lift, and I operated the crank that would raise us back up to the street level of Nogbottom. Going up in the lift is much harder, it turns out, and it took us almost fifteen minutes to get back up.

  When we arrived at the surface, it was eight P.M., Friday night—because it always is in Nogbottom. My face lit up and I laughed out loud. In all the chaos, I had forgotten that we had left Lily behind. But it wasn’t just that I was happy to see her—in her mouth was a strange, wriggling blur.

  That blur was Lovely Liam. She had captured him as he tried to flee the scene. He was still camouflaged, but this sort of detail does not matter to a dog. Dogs only use their eyes as a backup sense; their nose is the main way they see the world. Lily recognized his cologne from the Malton Hotel cellar and made the arrest. (To clarify: As the wolfhounds that work
in the Garda Special Unit cannot speak English or Irish or the language of the faerie folk, the policy states that if you are held in the maw of a Special Unit wolfhound, you are automatically under arrest and will have your rights read to you as soon as possible.)

  Lovely Liam gave up his camouflage and came into view. The captain stepped forward and kissed him for far longer than was appropriate, but she did manage to get a pair of regular human-sized handcuffs on him. The captain part of her was winning out against the star-crossed lover. Luckily for me, my glasses were smashed somewhere down below in the Rainbow Room, so I can’t quite say what Lovely Liam looked like beyond his heavenly shoes, and I did not fall in love.

  “Let me go, macushla,” whispered Lovely Liam to the captain.

  The captain stroked his hair, fawning. It was clear that she was thinking about setting him free. But just then she tightened her grip on his hair, and in one swift move she threw him into the vastsack as she pulled it from her belt.

  “And don’t trifle with the sheep, my love!” said the captain as she tied the vastsack tight. “Now, Boyle, as I’m a bit beaten up and more in love than I’ve ever been, perhaps you can lead us home.”

  I smiled at the captain, and her face lit up. I wouldn’t see this again for many months. Pending the presentation of the evidence to a human and faerie magistrate, the Malton Hotel robbery case would be closed. The flock of sheep was a bonus; they had been reported missing from Tullamore. The Mercedes-Benz belonged to a doctor in Claremorris named Frances Gainer, who specializes in freezing the fat off of people’s middles.

  On the walk back through Nogbottom, I was more relaxed and a bit more confident, which allowed me to take in the wonderful strangeness of the town, even with my hazy eyesight. I noted some of the little details, like the troughs of light beer for the working animals and the ones of strong cider for the nonworking animals.

  We passed through the main plaza and headed back toward the Bridge of Riddles. From the apartments high above came the sound of dozens of harps being practiced. A wee leprechaun child, no more than about three hundred years old, waved at me from an upper apartment.