236. Cunning Glen

 236.  Cunning Glen

When I left the Gentlerain home, I went to my grandfather’s golf course, sure that I would find him there, and so he was.

“It’s good you’ve come. I was wondering where you were,” said Grandpa.

We played a little. He had taught me well, and I was getting to be good at the game. After a while, he suggested we go have lunch and we went to the golf course´s restaurant.

“¡Salve, Rhabarbarum!” Grandpa saluted the Lar who was in charge of the bar, “my favorite grandson wants to ask me something and he doesn’t know how or if he should. Tell him what to do.”

“Ask,” said Rhubarb, “with your rosy mouth.” It was his mouth that was rosy, like his pink and green locks. His eyes, which usually have the colour and the shine of beady, dark pink rubies were on me with what felt like scorn. Rhubarb has a twin brother, Marrubium, who rarely leaves the kitchen. They are so alike that you can only tell them apart when their eyes change colour. Then one´s eyes go green and the other's become like amber, and if you remember which colour goes with which Lar, you can know who you are dealing with.  

“Actually, Arley can do what he wants to get me to do all by himself,” said Grandpa, “and the muliercula who asked him to do it, well, so could she.”

“I don’t think she can,” I said. “I think she is in no condition to do anything about this,” I said, wondering if I should be glad that Grandpa had brought up the subject or not.

“The bakeress could do it all by herself,” said Grandpa to Rhubarb, ignoring me and my assessment of Pearl's mental state, “but she would rather have someone else pick her cotton for her.”

Rhubarb gave a sort of scoffing laugh.

“Her name is Pearl,” I said. And then I was sorry to have divulged that. Perhaps Rhubarb didn’t need to know who we were talking about.

“There you go misjudging me again, Arley,” said Grandpa. “I called Fi’s wife the bakeress because that is what she is and what she is rightly famous for. But you think I am belittling her. If she were a big shot in the army and I had called her the captain general because that was her true rank, you wouldn’t have objected, Arley. So you see, I don’t have a problem. You do. Except you don’t any more, now that I’ve made you see a captain general is no better than a baker. Someone has been scaring you, child. Don’t let people put mistaken ideas about what’s equal and what’s unequal in your heart.”

Grandpa turned again to Rhubarb and explained to him that I wanted to do his fiery son’s wife a complicated favor,  but wasn’t sure how to.

“That’s what this woman has done to this boy. She’s foisted her problem on my grandson because she thinks she can’t handle it herself, and now he thinks he can’t handle it either. And wants to foist it on me.”

“I haven’t asked you for help, Grandpa,” I said.

“Because you don’t think I will want to put my own business aside to help you with Pearl’s, myself being a shallow, selfish man. And you think you can’t go lower in the hierarchy and ask your uncles either. Of course, Fi is unaskable. Asking him to rescue his very own child is totally out of the question. He won’t kill the bakeress like she basks in thinking he might, but he will make more than sparks fly when he finds the  kidnappers. Conflagration, hecatombe, unbridled devastation, the desolation of wherever the unfortunate kidnappers live, blah, blah, blah. But you needn’t ask me for help, Arley, because there is one uncle you can always count on to help the downtrodden and the underdogs and fools and drunkards.”

“Uncle Gen. But Pearl doesn’t want…”

I stopped speaking because I saw Gradpa’s face contort.

“No!” hollered Grandpa. “No, no and no! Not Mr. Do-it-right! No cloud-rousing! Not the Prince of Tempests in Teapots! No way! No scandals, Arley!”

I began to consider Wildgale and Richearth, but before I could guess which might be of help, Grandpa said, “Don’t forget your subtle Uncle Evenfall. He is crazy as a coot, but not violent on impulse,  nor does he count  with a hyperbolic army of fanatical followers. Rhubarb, poor Evenfall is the most intelligent of my sons, isn’t he?”

“Ingenious, I would say,” admitted the lar, not too enthusiastically.  

“But he will be of good help to Arley, won’t he?”

“If found. He’s so amiable he has to be slippery,” said Rhubarb shrugging.  

“Remember him when you go searching for the missing brat who is the cause of all this brouhaha, Arley. You have to do something else first, don’t you? That needs to be done tonight. Well, after we’ve lunched on shepherd’s pot pie, head for the mound through Cunning Glen. You’ll find all you will need this evening there.”

He said no more on the subject, and I knew better than to ask for more information. Grandpa is definitely unsafe to have dealings with. Despite my misgivings, I did pass through Cunning Glen, though I suspected that what I would find there would be the reflection of my face  in a puddle of  muddy water.

What I found going through this picturesque but disturbing site was Michael O’Toora wading in a stony green brook, his trousers rolled up to his knees.

“Give me a minute to find my glasses,” he said. “They’ve slipped off my nose. I have to speak with you.”

“I do have a couple of hours,” I said, “before I have to go see a man about some gold.”

“That’s what I want to speak to you about. Your meeting with the murkee. I’m here to help you handle him, Arley.”

An obliging toad spotted Michael’s spectacles and Michael  walked out of the icy, running water.  

“This is how it works, Arley. Picture a murky, murky night. Moonless  gloom,  no stars in sight. The surroundings black as coal, the world within a bowl of thick squid ink, shadows shudder and sink in the swallowing, shadowless  dark. ´Tis not a totally silent night. Creaks, cracks and croaks coming from behind the oaks be there might. Maybe the howl of a hound, while you’re hiding near the mound, in a bush like a bat, crouching there like a patient cat, hoping your eyes don’t glow,  waiting for your prey to show. And it does. And for a second, your gifted eyes can see a face the size of the mound itself. ´Tis checking the density of the  blackness, is the face.  And then there he is! Not a giant any more, but about my size now, a little old man stretching arms and legs on the top of his home, the eerie mound. Aye, there’s your prey, me lad, but before you jump on it… ”

Michael pointed at a violin case lying under the nearest tree.

“I will have started to play my fiddle and the murkee will have broken into dance. Very softly and slowly at first, so shall I play, and so he will dance ballet lazily too, and that should give you a chance to seize the fellow by the wrist and twist his arm, and I will keep playing until you’ve gotten him to promise you what you want him to promise you, and even longer shall I play. For you must on no account let go of him before dawn, even if he has promised you falsely – that’s how it would be – to do as you bid. For in the dark and once free, you would never be able to make him keep his word. The sun has to touch the murkee before you let him go. It’s best for the sun to hit him from behind. Soon as he is touched by a sumbeam, he will holler OW! And then and only then will you release him.”

“But when will he keep his word?”

“He will have made his promise good when shouting OW!”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as sure is. That is what will have hurt him, not the sunlight, but his word being made good. Now, he will vanish back into the mound the minute he is loose. You will see him jump to the top of the mound and see his face grow great, till gigantic again and large as the mound and all over it, it shrinks until it has disappeared. 

Now listen carefully, for we must do this right. It is three things you will have asked the murkee for. First, to give wee Melissa the gift of shaking gold, which is what all this fuss is about.  Next, he must be asked to tell you where little Candle is, and he will if he knows. That he will do while he dances in the dark, with you twisting his arm. Lastly, you must ask him not to seek revenge for having been bullied and to accept  payment for his services to prove you are even.”

“What will he want?”

“No! On no account must you ask him what he wants. He will ask you for your shadows, pressing you to give him at least one, making you feel selfish, for you have two and he none, though this is only because he is always immersed in total darkness. Contrary to popular belief, shadows are a thing of light. No light, no shadows. ”

And up went the shadow that was once the wizard Henry’s and cried, “I’ve been in hell, I have! I don’t want to be again. Please not me!”

“Of course not,” I said, “I’m not giving up either of you. But what can I give him that he will take?”

“He’ll want the darkness in your soul,” said Michael. “You must never give him that. At first it might sound like a good idea to get rid of the darkness in one’s soul, but believe me, it isn’t. Not if you want to go on living among us. If you were to turn into a creature of nothing but light, you would be a fool like Parsifal of the Grail, and you wouldn’t be able to live in this world any longer. You would ascend into the upper light and we would lose you. All those who want to live out of the total light need a little darkness in their souls to drag them down, even if only to recognize evil when they see it. You can’t do without it here. Ask not  the murkee what he wills or he will halve your soul!”

“But what can I give him?”

“Here,” said Michael, opening his violin case and extracting three black feathers. “Give him these for his hat.”

“The murkee has a hat?”

I couldn’t see what use someone who lives like the dead buried in the earth and only comes out when there is no moon and there are no stars and everyone has extinguished fires and artificial lights could possibly want with a hat. To my knowledge, murkees only had long tangled beards and maybe some tangled hair on their dusty heads.

“Right,” said Michael, “indeed he has no hat. That’s why you are going to give him this one.”

He drew a wide-brimmed hat like those worn by cavaliers in the eighteenth century out of the violin case too. It, too,  was black.

“What good would black feathers be on that so black hat?” I said. “And aren’t they kind of small for it?”

“They are small because they are chicken feathers. They aren’t from a black hen born in darkness. They are from a black and white hen born by day. That’s so he can’t do much mischief with them. But we won’t tell him that. He needn’t know. He will be pleased with these gifts for a while, for no one gives him anything, and pull an arm out of the mound to take them when we aren’t looking. Once he has accepted them, he will have foresworn revenge and can’t exact it even if he later finds he has no use for a hat.”

“Are your feet freezing?” I asked Michael, suddenly noticing they seemed a little blue.

“They’re almost dry. Nothing a spiked dish of tea won’t fix,” he said. He drew a towel out of the violin case too, and dried himself, and put his socks and shoes back on. And we sat under that tree nearest to the river and had some tea with a dash of whisky all come out of the violin case too.

“Was it my grandfather AEternus who suggested you help me, Michael?”  I asked my leprechaun friend.

“What? No. It was the Leafies that overheard you and Brightfire’s Pearl conversing. We leprechauns  know a thing or two about deals with murkees, so they came to me with the tale.”

An hour before sunset, we left for the old man’s mound. It was near the Gentlerain home. You could see it very well from there. In fact,  it could be said the murkee was one of Uncle Gen’s neighbours. One of those he wished to romanize, probably. There are no really bad people here in Apple Island, but there are a few beings who were here before the eldest among us got here. They haven’t been chased out of this isle because they give little or no trouble, creepy as they might seem to us. Michael and I continued making plans about how we would muddle the murkee, and since I meant to do everything Michael suggested religiously, all would have gone according to plan if…