Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles Read online

  “This leprechaun has replaced a human baby with a changeling,” Pat Finch belched to me as he gave the leprechaun another swift kick. “And Captain de Valera thinks you may be just the lad for the job.”

  “He’s stolen the baby from the Republic and replaced it with this,” said Captain de Valera as she held up a particularly ugly log. The log was dressed in baby clothes with a terrifying face carved into its upper portion. On a small branch that protruded where a child’s arm might be, there was an evidence tag marking it as EXHIBIT A.

  The leprechaun giggled in a fit of glee as the captain held up the log, delighted with his handiwork, sending toots of pipe smoke out of his little snout like a devilish steam engine. His pockets jangled with what was clearly a lot of gold.

  Captain de Valera twirled her shillelagh pensively. “When I saw this log, carved with such meticulous craftsmanship into a changeling for a human baby, I knew it must be the work of one of the great leprechaun carvers of Tir Na Nog,” she said as she paced the cavern. The steam from her nostrils made me aware for the first time that she was not wearing nose plugs. She was used to the foul smell of leprechauns when they are musking.

  “There’s no way this changeling was carved by any other than Tagdh of the Floating Lakes,” the captain pronounced, and she tossed the log to a junior garda officer on the perimeter of the crime scene. “Pack it up and label it: changeling log, carved by Tagdh, greatest of the leprechaun tricksters, not this amateur we’ve captured here. Why, this wee fellow here would probably make a changeling out of peat. Pack it up, lads, we’re done.”

  There was a strange glow in the cavern. I turned to see that the leprechaun’s face was now steaming red, with vapor rising from it as he twitched like a steel teakettle left in a microwave by someone who has never read the instructions for a microwave.

  Captain de Valera turned and gave me the smallest smile you could imagine. A moment later, the leprechaun bolted up, spilling gold coins everywhere as he howled: “TAGDH OF THE FLOATING LAKES NEVER CARVED A CHANGELING LOG THAT WELL IN HIS WILDEST DREAMS! ’TWAS CARVED BY ME OWN SELF! I, RAURI, KILLER OF UNICORNS!”

  And with that, Captain de Valera spun, knocking the leprechaun’s hat off with her shillelagh. She extended her hand to meet his tiny one. “Ah. Rauri, Killer of Unicorns. Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she whispered in his ear with a devilish smile.

  The leprechaun, now name-known and registered as Rauri, Killer of Unicorns, fumed. He’d just been tricked into telling us his name and had his hat knocked off—which turns out to be a major insult to faerie folk.

  A garda officer with a camera popped in and snapped off a few pictures of Rauri, front and profile. Another officer measured his height and his beard with a bronze staff, and a third knelt down and did a charcoal rubbing of the underside of his little shoe. This was before I knew that leprechaun shoes are the best-made things in either our world or Tir Na Nog. Leprechauns will spend centuries perfecting their shoes. The buckles are made from solid gold. According to tradition, leprechaun kings and queens never dance—even at a wedding or céilí.8

  Some thought this was because it was undignified for faerie royals, but the reality is that their shoes are simply far too heavy, with gold and jewel-encrusted buckles that outweigh their entire body. As for the charcoal rubbing the officer was making—this is standard policy when registering a new leprechaun in the files of the Garda of Tir Na Nog, as the soles of leprechaun shoes are as distinct as snowflakes, no two being alike.

  Rauri, Killer of Unicorns, fumed and kicked. He then did something that leprechauns only do when they are very angry—he snapped his pipe in half. A few of the garda officers gasped at the sight of it.

  “File that shoe print in Killarney, and while you’re at it, run a check to see if any unicorns are missing in Tir Na Nog,” said Pat Finch to the officer with the charcoal sketch as Rauri fidgeted, alternately fuming with rage and then weeping over his broken pipe.

  I didn’t know it then, but the likelihood that this Rauri was actually a “killer of unicorns” was precisely zero. The average unicorn stands fifteen hands high9 from its hooves to its withers, and the horn on its head is not for show. Yes, unicorn horns can make dirty water clean, but the horn’s real purpose is as a weapon—very specifically, for killing leprechauns. The horns, or “dowsers” as the unicorns call them, are as hard and sharp as diamonds and could poke through an armored tank as if it were a soggy cheese sandwich that you had forgotten about after a long, wonderful day trip to the beach.

  Leprechauns love boastful names like Rauri, Killer of Unicorns. The more pretentious the name, the better. Later on, I would meet and befriend “Owen, Handsomest Fellow of the Sugar Marshes Ever,” and “Aileen, Whose Luscious Eyes Sparkle Like Ten Thousand Emeralds in the Sun.” (He wasn’t, and they don’t.) Yet both of these are totally normal leprechaun names. It would be as if your name was “Sheila, Who Is Better Than Adele at Singing.” Leprechauns are confused by the mundanity of our human names and see them as a sign of our low self-esteem.

  Captain de Valera let her fingers casually flick one of the clay pipes on her belt. Rauri’s eyes seized upon it like a starving man as they began to well up with tears.

  “Care for a new pipe, would you?” she asked him, knowing full well the answer was a million times yes.

  “Aye, miss. Let Rauri, Killer of Unicorns, have one of yours! You’ve so many to spare!” he pleaded in his leprechaun accent, which sounds a lot like a human from Dingle who’s had a strong dose of helium.

  “Tell nice Mr. Boyle from Galway here where the human baby is, and we’ll see about that pipe,” said the captain.

  Rauri’s eyes darted back and forth. He was clearly torn about revealing the location of the baby, but the notion of a new clay pipe was just too much to resist.

  “I was within my rights to change that baby!” Rauri cried out. “The parents of that ugly, stupid baby caught me at the end of the faintest rainbow you ever saw in your entire life. I told ’em I would give ’em no gold, but that if they let me go, I would talk to the horses at Ballinrobe Raceway and find out which one was going to win the derby the next day—making them as rich as twenty sultans.”

  Captain de Valera smacked the back of my head with her shillelagh. “Why aren’t you writing this down, Boyle?”

  I fumbled to extract my notebook from my trousers and began to copy down the leprechaun’s story. This was technically my first official act in the Garda Special Unit of Tir Na Nog, the division of the Irish National Police that oversees crimes of the faerie folk.

  “I was as good as my word,” said Rauri. “The fools set me free, and I made haste to the racetrack at Ballinrobe, stopping only for a wee bit of the juice of the barley with my mate Mike, who is a troll under a bridge on the Robe River.”

  “Which bridge?” asked Siobhán de Valera.

  “The stone one with the fork at Creagh Road,” whimpered Rauri, his eyes locked on the pipe, which Siobhán was now casually spinning in her fingers. “Go and ask Mike. He’ll tell you for sure that I was on my way to Ballinrobe, and I did as I said.”

  Pat Finch nodded to a garda officer. “Send a car around to Creagh Road and see if this Mike the Troll will back up the little man’s story here,” he said. The officer nodded and departed.10

  “So Mike the Troll and I made merry under his bridge, and then he decided to join me, and we made off to the racetrack,” said Rauri. “When we arrived at the paddock at Ballinrobe, the horses were still awake, nervous about the race the next afternoon. Mike and I thought that the least we could do was be sociable and share some of our strong whiskey with these poor, dim-witted horses. Which we did, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that the whiskey and craic11 flowed until a wee hour.”

  At this point my hand was practically frozen stiff as I wrote down the leprechaun’s story. I dropped my pen, which skittered across the stone floor. I blew on my fingers to warm them up, but even my breath was cold down there in the caverns,
so that didn’t do much good. Captain de Valera shot me an annoyed look, although it may have just been a regular look, and her mismatched eyes and permascowl made it seem like I was a target for her shillelagh again.

  “Sorry,” I blurted. “Just trying to keep up,” I said, collecting my pen from the ground.

  Pat Finch snorted and tugged at his belt, which seemed to be in endless escape mission from his tummy toward the ground. The captain took a small pouch of tobacco off of her belt and began to methodically pack the clay pipe. Rauri’s lips trembled as he reached for the pipe, and she gently pressed back against his hands with her shillelagh.

  “Get to the point,” said Captain de Valera. “Where is the baby?”

  “Mike and I got a wee bit drunk with the horses, who gave us the inside scoop—that the one among them called Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer would be the winning horse at the derby,” said Rauri the leprechaun. “We thanked the horses and left. And if Mike ate one of the smaller horses named Bingo Was His Name-O, well, I can’t recall if that happened at all, and I’m not even sure why I would mention it.”

  “Shall I ring the racetrack and see if a horse has been eaten?” I asked in an unplanned effort to seem useful.

  “Indeed, Mr. Boyle,” said Captain de Valera. “And radio the lads on their way to question Mike the Troll and tell ’em to check the bridge for horse bones. Eating a draught horse is a fifty-euro fine, but eating a racehorse could mean a year in the Joy Vaults,” said the captain pointedly to Rauri as she poked his chest with the tip of her shillelagh.

  The Joy Vaults is a slang term for the subterranean cells beneath the Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, sometimes called “the Joy.”

  The aboveground levels of Mountjoy Prison hold Ireland’s medium-security human prisoners. It’s a place with which I am familiar, as I have spent the third Tuesday of each month there in the badly lit visitors’ ward. After the scandal, my parents, Brendan and Fiona Boyle, became inmates, numbers 477738 and 477739. More on that in a moment.

  The Joy Vaults are the nine subterranean levels of the prison, lake, and stables that are reserved for the faerie folk, sheeries, banshees, leprechauns, unicorns, etc., who violate the laws of the Republic of Ireland. The first three levels down are minimum security, and the bottom six are reserved for more serious offenders. After years in the garda, I have still only seen the first four levels. The ninth level I’m told is strictly for banshees, whose appearance always harbingers the death of a human. As a result, the lower levels of the Joy Vaults are not guarded by human officers but by deputized leprechauns.

  “I returned Mike under his bridge and made it back to the parents of that ugly, ugly, unkind baby,” said Rauri. “I told them about Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer, and they went to Ballinrobe that day, and they bet their life savings on the mare.”

  “And she lost!” I shouted out like a person who has watched a lot of Sherlock Holmes on the telly, which I am. “Because she was so drunk on your leprechaun whiskey!”

  “No, you eejit,” replied Rauri. “She won. All of the horses were drunk, and one of them may or may not have been eaten by Mike the Troll. The parents of that hideous, sarcastic baby were exactly as I had promised—as rich as twenty sultans. I thought it was only fair that I get a wee finder’s fee for all me troubles. They disagreed and set about to kill me with a hurley stick. I lay in wait in a nearby well, and then, by cover of night, I returned and swapped their baby for this magnificently carved log. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT WITHIN MY RIGHTS. LOOK IT UP!”

  The air hung heavy for a moment. Captain de Valera shot Pat Finch a look. “He’s not wrong,” she said. “Write up the baby’s parents for Second-Degree Tinkering with Faerie Folk, and Rauri here will get a one-hundred-euro fine for making a changeling.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” said Pat Finch.

  “Now, is the baby hidden where I suspect it is?” asked the captain of the wee man.

  “Aye. Down the oubliette,” whimpered Rauri. And with that, the captain handed him the new clay pipe, loaded with fresh tobacco. Rauri struck a match on his nose and lit the pipe, sucking in a huge plume of smoke as if he’d been underwater and the tobacco was fresh air. He giggled with glee as Captain de Valera turned to me, her permanent scowl remaining precisely as it always looked.

  “The oubliette. This is what I had feared. And that’s where you come in, Ronan Boyle,” she said.

  “I will do my best, ma’am,” I replied, my voice sounding weaker than I had expected. Perhaps because I had now had the nose plugs in for so long, combined with the frigid cavern air and approximately three hours of sleep.

  “You’re just the lad,” said the captain as her eyes fixed on a narrow hole in the wall of the cavern. “Do you know what an oubliette is?”

  “No, ma’am,” I replied.

  And it was true. At this point I had no idea what one was, but was only moments away from never forgetting.

  “‘Oubliette’ is from the French for ‘to forget,’” she said as two garda officers started to forcefully attach mountain climbing straps to my midsection. “In some old castles, it was a shaft where they would dump the bodies of their enemies. The bottom was sometimes lined with spikes. And down there their foes would be quite literally forgotten,” said the captain.

  “Like a fast-acting dungeon,” chuckled Pat Finch, the veins in his face pulsing like a jack-o’-lantern whose candle was about to flicker out from a strong cross-breeze.

  The two garda officers attached a clamp to the harness on my back and began unfurling a hundred feet of nylon rope, which they secured around my middle.

  “This oubliette was sealed up,” said the captain. “Without a wrecking ball, the opening will only fit the narrowest possible fellow.”

  I understood now that I had been called into this case simply because I, Ronan Boyle, was the narrowest possible fellow. The only one who would fit into the hole.

  And now it was my job to be lowered into the oubliette and collect the human baby that Rauri, Killer of Unicorns, had stashed down there. I pulled out my nose plugs to get a few deep breaths. The musking, fish soup smell had changed and was now a tobacco and fish soup smell, which was somehow even more atrocious.

  I stepped toward the hole. Making myself as narrow as I could, I pulled myself into it. A profound darkness wrapped me up like a blanket. Captain de Valera passed her torch in after me. I fumbled for it and clicked it on. The officers on the other end of the rope started to lower me down.

  * * *

  1 The Irish word for police.

  2 Bus.

  3 The Irish word for flashlight.

  4 One of these:

  5 Later, when I came to work in the office of the Garda Special Unit of Tir Na Nog, I would create an app for faerie name-guessing, and it’s been a real time-saver.

  6 All leprechauns, male and female, smoke clay pipes, which is disgusting. It’s also why leaving a clay pipe by your fireplace is such an easy way to catch a leprechaun. This is something humans used to do until they realized that leprechauns do not mean well at all. In my many years in the Garda of Tir Na Nog, I have come across precisely two cases where a human caught a leprechaun and actually received a crock of gold, no strings attached. Leprechauns are unrivaled in their devilish cleverness and will go to great lengths to trick and befuddle humans. They also bite, can create foul smells, and will whack you with a shillelagh so hard on your kneecap that it will shatter. Knee replacement surgery is covered by insurance for Garda of Tir Na Nog officers as it is such a common occurrence.

  7 Shillelaghs are mostly for fighting, it turns out; they just pose as walking sticks when not being used for fighting.

  8 Céilí means dance, celebration, or party.

  9 A hand is four inches.

  10 All bridges in Ireland have trolls that live under them, which on the surface sounds horrifying, as bridge trolls eat goats and children without manners. But since 1963, bridge trolls have been protected by Irish law and the World Wildlife Fund, because they had been
hunted nearly into extinction. In exchange for this protection, Sharon, Queen of the Trolls, made an accord with the Irish government that bridge trolls would eat only very sickly goats and truly horrible children. And for the most part they have held up their part of this accord, which many people say accounts for Ireland’s population of hearty goats and respectful boys and girls.

  11 Fun and gossip.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE OUBLIETTE

  As I descended into the oubliette, it felt as if I had three hearts: one in my chest and two others pounding in my eardrums. The electric torch only illuminated the stone wall three inches in front of my face, and I decided it would be better just to close my eyes until the rope had lowered me down far enough to feel the floor or the crunchy bones or whatever horror show awaited me at the bottom of this dreadful abyss.

  A moment later, to my surprise, I was comfortably in my favorite movie theater, watching My Life as a Dog and eating a smoked Gouda and marmite sandwich with Dame Judi Dench.

  In reality, I wasn’t actually in a movie theater with Dame Judi Dench, but if you’re like me, when you start to have a panic attack, you go to a happy place inside your imagination. And this is mine: my favorite movie theater, with my favorite actress, watching my favorite film. And in my imagination, Dame Judi leans over to me and says, “Ronan Boyle, this is the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my entire life.” And I reply, “Please shut up, Dame Judi Dench,” as it’s rude to talk even in an imaginary movie theater, and she of all people should know this.

  A moment later, I was yanked out of my happy place and back to reality by the soft thump of my feet on the floor of the oubliette. I shined the torch around to get my bearings, but soon realized I didn’t need it, as the room was somehow supplying its own illumination.