I linger at the doorway as the man passes through. My heart catches in my throat as I say, “You brought me to a bar?”
The man turns back to me and waves me in. “Aye! Come on, lad. We’ll get you that drink.”
I creep into the entrance, feeling like a burglar in the night. If I felt exposed and paranoid on the bus before, now I have sirens blaring in my head and blue-and-red lights flashing behind my eyes. I mean, this guy must know I’m underage. He can’t be that dumb!
The man sits at the bar. The place is pretty crowded, but no one so much as looks at me. Do I look old enough to be here, maybe? I stand up a little straighter, hoping that’s the case.
Tentatively, I take a seat on the barstool next to the man. He calls to the bartenders, “Two drinks! Whiskey straight!”
The girl bartender doesn’t even look our way; she’s too busy with her other customers, flirting for her tips. But there’s a man about my dad’s age, his hair gone white at the temples. He walks down to us, looks between the man and I, then says, “I don’t serve kids, Red.”
The man, Red, smirks. “Is that so? Where I come from, a young lad need only see over the counter to wet his whistle!”
The bartender shakes his head. “Too bad we’re not where you’re from though, are we? I’m not losing my license for your games, Red. Come back some other night.”
Red stands, eyes squinting, cheeks puffed. Through a trick of the light, he seems like a shriveled crabapple.
I stand, ready to leave with the man and find another place to get the drinks for the party.
Only, Red doesn’t leave. Instead, he climbs onto the first rung of the barstool and crouches over it. He starts clapping his hands.
The bartender gives him a stern look. “Red…”
The man grins. He throws his head back and begins to sing. “With a skip in his walk and a brogue in his talk, he will challenge you ever so charmingly!”
As Red’s song fills the bar, I feel the mood of the room change. Around us, men and women begin to sing along.
“Sing too-ra-loom-a-loom-a!”
Patrons start throwing their beer bottles and pouring their drinks at their mouths, the frothy liquid missing their mark and running in rivers down their necks and shirts.
I press myself flat against the nearby wall to avoid a thrown chair. How is this even happening?
Red cackles. “Sing too-ra-loom-a-lieeeee!” His voice, shrill on that long note, shakes the very rafters. I see him catch and hold the bartender’s gaze, challenging him. It’s like he’s questioning whether he should keep up the madness by finishing the verse or not.
The people in the bar go from happy if a little destructive to actively angry and violent in an instant. Some stand and flip their tables while others throw down, grabbing each other, punching and kicking and biting.
The old bartender bellows, desperation in his tone, “One drink! One drink, you daft fool!”
Red plops down onto his chair, pleased with himself. The bartender pours two glasses of whiskey, slams them down in front of us, and backs away.
“Thank you kindly, good sir.” Red beams.
He urges me towards my drink as I say, “What the hell just happened?”
“Ah! A good bit of bedlam always does the trick, I say. But, here, let’s drink.”
I shake my head, take a breath, and tell myself this is normal. I’ve never been to a bar. That kind of chaos? It could totally be normal.
I grab the shot glass. Whiskey, it seems, will be my first drink then.
Red says, “To the fine bartender’s health!”
The bartender waves him off from down the counter where he’s pouring another customer’s beer.
Red downs his drink and calls for another. When the bartender tries to tell him off, all Red has to do to make his drink magically appear is pretend he’s going to climb onto his chair.
That one drink turns into two, three, six. When Red finishes his eighth drink, he excuses himself to attend to the little boy’s room. I’m definitely drunk, because he looks blurry for a moment, short and with a big wide mouth like a Cheshire Cat. I squeeze my eyes shut and, when I open them, he’s normal again and ducking into the restroom.
With Red gone, I call the bartender down. “Hey,” I say, my words a little loud, “what was that stuff earlier? With the singing?”
The bartender stares me down. “You don’t know?”
“Pfft. Nah.” I grip the counter for support. “Just met him. Literally bumped into him on the street.”
I could swear, as I speak, that the bartender goes pale. He turns on his heel and walks away from me. I’m calling after him, but he taps the girl who is tending with him and says, “Cover for me a minute?”
He ushers me to the far end of the counter, notably away from the restroom doors. His tone is serious as he says, “You need to watch out, kid. You’re in over your head. I’ve seen that old trickster in here plenty before, but never with a guest. He’s up to something. The fair folk don’t hang out with us mere men and not expect something from it.”
“Fair folk?” I laugh. “Like… fairies?”
“Of a sort.”
“Wait.” Through the fog of alcohol-induced stupor, it all starts to click into place. The hair. The clothes. The accent. The almost supernatural way that Red could down a beverage. Not to mention whatever that was earlier with riling up the whole bar with a simple song. My head is fuzzy from the booze and my lips a little loose. It’s the only reason I can think for why I blurted out, “Is he a… a leprechaun?”
“Clurichaun, so far as I can tell actually,” the bartender says. “My brother had a run in with one once. They came over from Ireland with the other immigrants.”
I say, “Why would they want to do that?”
The bartender gives me a look that bores into my brain, one that asks if I’m stupid or something. He says flatly, “They’re blue-collar fairies; they go where there’s work.”
I’m bowled over. “That crazy drunk elf has a job?”
I think back to that hundred he gave me for just a sip of my parent’s whiskey. Whatever it is he does, he is very well paid.
I step back from the barstool.
The barkeep eyes me. “Where are you going?”
When words stick in my throat, I wave him off. I make my way to the bathroom. My limbs are heavy. I had not realized how drunk I am—this was what it feels like to be drunk, isn’t it? At least now I won’t have to dodge any questions at parties about my past drinking escapades. This feels like a story worth telling.
I find Red washing his hands in the low porcelain sink. For a moment, he looks different again. His eyes too sparkling; his mouth too wide. I’m ready to be sober.
He grins in the mirror at me and I lurch forward. He must think I’m stumbling, because Red laughs as he steps up to catch me. But I have him.
I grip the edge of his crimson jacket. “Where’s the gold, Red?”
He clucks his tongues. “It appears you’ve had enough to drink, lad!”
I shake my head. The movement makes my vision swim. I steady myself and say calmly, “You’ve got a pot of gold. You’re fairy folk. I caught you. I want my share.”
Red’s gaze goes hard. His smile thins for a moment. “Been talking with the bartender, aye?”
I don’t even flinch.
His jovial nature is back in a flash. “Alas! I’m off the clock, as it were. Though if you’re quite insistent on a reward…”
Silence lingers between us. When he doesn’t continue, I shake him slightly. “Yeah?”
His lips curl. “I could be persuaded to share something else, something more precious than gold.”
Red reaches to a pocket on the inside of his jacket.
He pulls out a small object, saying, “This flask was given to me by a courtier of the Autumn Queen herself. See how finely crafted it is?”
He angles it so I can get a better look. The glass flask is wrapped in textured leather, black in the center band and smooth dark brown along the top. The bottom half of the flask is encased in some sort of metal. There’s a coat of arms etched into it.
“Made from glass blown in the fires of Faerie and wrapped in the finest hand-soaked leather. And this?” Red says as he grips the metal half, “Why, only the purest silver for my guests.”
He tugs gently and the two pieces separate. I realize then that the engraved silver bottom is actually a cup, fitted to perfectly hold to the leather protecting the flask. He sets the silver cup down in the porcelain sink.
“I’m not angling to run, lad,” he says, nodding to my hands still wrapped around his jacket collar. “You need your reward. ‘Tis not just any mortal man can say he’s sipped from a flask such as this, let alone what delicate nectar lie within. And I promise, oh yes, that you will never in your life taste anything like it before or after. A solemn vow on that!”
I let him go.
Red brushes off and straightens up. His fingers nimbly remove the cork stopper from the mouth of the flask. With a flourish, he pours the amber liquid into the cup, which he then offers to me.
The silver is cool in my hand, impressively so. I sniff the contents. It smells of honey and cinnamon, smoke and tree bark. There are other scents I cannot place except to think of them as impossibly otherworldly.
“A toast!” Red says, “To the clever lad who saw through my disguise this fine evening!”
I take a swig. I gasp as the liquid burns my throat, but it’s the taste of the damn thing that shocks me more. It is starlight on an owl’s wing as it dives for its prey.
“Drink up, laddy!”
Red nudges my hand and the cup back to my mouth. The next sip is a father’s joy to see his son home from war. The sip after that is the velvet of a rock worn smooth by the battering of the ocean.
“No more. I can’t stand any more!” I gag on the tastes that shouldn’t be, bent over the sink in case I retch. Movement is painful and slow, as though I’m working through black tar and needles.
I drop the silver cup, but never hear it clatter against the ground.
My head is clear. I know that instinctually. I also know that, despite the slight delay in my reflection, what I see in the mirror is real.
Red is drinking the last of the brew from a cup that never spilled a drop. More than that, he has changed. All the moments I thought I saw him looking a little shorter, more wrinkled around the edges, his eyes glinting and his mouth stretched come crashing back to me. It’s as though a film had been over my eyes all night, lifted now by that toxic drink.
His enormous mouth gapes open, filled with a sticky bell-like laughter. “You’ll not soon forget tonight, lad!” He says, “You’ll wish you had never crossed the fae!”
I lean heavy and sluggish against the sink, one arm supporting me. I grasp at the air with my free hand, reaching for Red.
Then the blackness and void call me. I dive into that unloving embrace, convinced I’ll never wake into the mortal world again.
~*~