Madam ‘H’, Sasarana and James met us at the doors. I could swear the nun statues pasted into the library’s front wall were staring at me accusingly. Their derisive looks were almost as bad as Madame ‘H’s. It wasn’t my fault that Cliodhna had gotten fixated with me, was it?

“Take her down to the Vault,” said Sherlock. There was a nervous quaver in his voice.  “It’s the only safe place now.”

Sherlock waited outside while the others pulled mom into the library, down the stairs and into the children’s department.  I hesitated, not wanting to go inside right yet.

 “What are you looking for?” I asked Sherlock.

Bells from the churches in town started to ring. Slowly, one after another they all joined together until a great cacophonic noise ripped the air in waves of chaos. Then she was there, down the hill, bathed in the light of the intersection, Cliodhna. She was dressed like a spy in a dark, waist hugging trench coat, along with an oversized hat that was tilted down so that it hid most of her features.

“She’s not supposed to show up until the end of the week – right?” I said not really sure of anything.

Sherlock seemed to be fretting about his ‘t’ shirt and head bandana, maybe he felt underdressed for the meeting. He took the bandana off his head and quickly wrapped it around his neck like a cravat. “Quickly,” he said, “lend me your jacket.”

“You want my jacket?”

“Yes, if you want to survive to fight tomorrow, give it to me now.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to fight at all, not really. Everybody was telling me that I was a leader, a fighter, but personally, I wasn’t feeling it. I shrugged out of the surge jacket and tossed it to Sherlock. He caught it and slipped into it. I have to say, with the black and red, he did look rather dapper.

“Whatever happens, get inside and lock the doors.” Sherlock strode down the hill towards.

I knew Cliodhna was off her rocker, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to retreat into the library. I have to admit, I was totally fascinated with this confrontation. It was like any good book, rife with conflict.  Against my best judgement, which wasn’t very good to begin with, I followed Sherlock down the hill, catching him up.

“Are you mad?” he said tensely through his teeth.

“Apparently,”  I said with false bravado.

Out from the corner of one of the banks, at the bottom of the hill, stepped Yin and Yang. The big black fellow was dressed in a white suit and the big white guy had on a snappy black suit. They took up their positions on either side of Cliodhna.

The street lights flickered and a tumble weed rolled across the street.

“Sherlock?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you have a gun holster around your waist?”

“More appropriately, you should ask why we have guns.”

Running my hand down to my waist I found the smooth handle of a large revolver.  The lights flickered again.

“Don’t tell me, we’re in Faerie.”

“I won’t then. Do you know how to use a revolver?”

A few times, when my dad was home from leave, he had taken me to an indoor range and had taught me how to shoot. I wasn’t very good at it, but that didn’t disappoint him. He had said that some people just weren’t meant to use a side arm, no big deal. I think maybe he was saying that to be kind.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” responded Sherlock. He stepped out into the middle of the empty road his spurs jingling.

“You’ve got spurs,” I observed.

“Cliodhna likes them.”

I wasn’t surprised by that. She seemed to like all things gangster, spy or cowboy. “How is she doing this? I thought we could only get to Faerie through the Vault.”

“The Vault is a more permanent passage way. She can do this for very small amounts of time, when she’s really angry. If we can get her to use more of her power, she just may vanish.”

“That’s your plan? Get her to expend her power by killing us?”

“You weren’t supposed to be part of it,” he said dryly.

“Sorry.”

“It’s your life.”

It was like a showdown in some grade ‘B’ cowboy movie. We were facing off against Cliodhna and her goons in the middle of an empty street. Another tumble weed rolled between us. It was a nice touch.  I noticed that the traffic lights facing us were still red.

“Let me do the talking,” muttered Sherlock. He was now chewing on a big, fat cigar.

“I can see where your son got his smoking habit. Cliodhna do that?”

“No, I’m hoping to provoke her. She hates second hand smoke.”

We all moved closer our spurs jingling. I was tempted to start singing. One of John Wayne’s first cowboy rolls was this character names Singing Sam. A cowboy that sang before he filled people full of led. I noticed that Salt and Peppers’ hands were twitching over their own six shooters. Cliodhna was carrying a big old sawed-off shot gun. My dad used to tell me how soldiers sometimes preferred a sawed off for close in fighting, how their blasts could leave devastating holes in the middle of people.

“Are you sure you want to get close to her?”

Sherlock grunted. “Try stopping.”

He was right. My legs seemed to be moving of their own volition. Cliodhna raised her hand, we stopped and she raised her shot gun and took aim…

“You have thirty seconds to get out of town…” she drawled, which sounded funny because I think she had an Irish accent. She was chewing something. Hocking and spitting she sent a big wad of chewing tobacco onto the pavement.

I groaned. “That’s nasty. You guys ever pay attention to any public service advertisements about tobacco consumption. I mean it really isn’t good for your health.”

They both looked at me. Sherlock was stunned, and Cliodhna, for some reason, looked offended, almost violated. Strangely enough she wasn’t chewing tobacco anymore and Sherlock’s cigar had vanished. That was strange.

“You daaaaare…” Cliodhna wailed in the highest, shrillest voice I’ve ever heard. Its pitch was so intense it brought me to my knees in agony.

When she stopped, her shotgun was inches away from my head and her finger was trembling on the trigger. There was a glossy, faraway look in her eyes. I could feel Salt and Pepper on either side of us their sidegun drawn and aimed.

“I told you not to talk,” hissed Sherlock agitatedly, quietly, as though we were in the middle of a mine field. “Why do you always have to talk?”

“You talk.”

“Yes, but…”

Strangely enough, I wasn’t freaking, or passing out. In fact I was rather cool. I calmly put my finger in the mouth of the shot gun and moved it away from my head. Cliodhna’s scarlet red lips twitched.

“You don’t want to do that?” I told her calmly.

A look of startling confusion overcame her. “I don’t? Why don’t I?”

“Well, for starters, you’d blow my head into a thousand pieces and no matter what Salt and Pepper did, they’ll never be able to put me back together again.”

“Salt, Pepper?” she asked inquiringly trying to find some reference point.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Your boys here, ebony and ivory, and I’m not talking Stevie Wonder.”

She must have been a big television fan because all of a sudden a light went on behind the crazy woman sheen in her eyes.  “Oh, like Sammy Davis Junior and Dean Martin…” she said excitedly.

All of a sudden, on either side of me stood Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior, which was really disturbing. I expected them to start cracking jokes, or dancing, or singing, which was really, really disturbing. Cliodhna was smiling, as though I had just given her the best Christmas present in the world.

“I can tell we are going to get along famously…”

“Mistress mine,” said Sherlock breaking into our moment, which I was terribly grateful for.

Cliodhna pulled a perturbed and pouting face at Sherlock. “Oh, you still here Ciabhan?” Then she noticed the red surge jacket. “Oh, very nice jacket…”

Her spy trench coat melted on her changing into an identical surge jacket, but with about several pounds of gold and silver lace all over it. She looked like a rock star. “Look,” she said quite proud of herself, we look like twins.”

I had no idea how we were going to get out of this, but I was beginning to think distraction was the better course than valour. The red lights had changed to amber. Wasn’t that backward?

Cliodhna linked her arms around our shoulders and brought us into her grip. She was astonishingly strong and probably able to snap both our necks, except for the fact that she seemed delightfully excited.

 “Can I make a confession?” she said conspiratorially.

“Please do,” I grunted feeling her grip tighten. I could tell Sherlock was having a hard time breathing. His skin was taking on a blue tinge.

“Once I get you two back to Faerie, we’re going to have so much fun…” she twirled a few strands of Sherlock’s white hair in between her fingers. “Dear Ciabhan, you are in such need of a makeover. The hair, the wrinkles, the wizened muscles will have to go…”

I was desperately gazing at the amber light, hoping, praying it would change. Somehow I knew that something was going to happen as soon as it did. Whether that was good or not, I didn’t have a clue. Then it dawned on me: did I do magic when I made the chewing tobacco and cigar disappear? And, if so, could I do it again? Was that why she had gotten so upset?

“And you, my beauty,” she said, I’m assuming towards me, “you are going to make me marvelously famous…”

Green, green, green, I desperately thought.

I could feel her hot lips on my cheek now, and boy were they hot. My skin started to painfully burn. “Greeeeen!” I shouted.

And the lights turned green.

In the centre of the intersection a black dot appeared spiraling open, growing into larger proportions until it occupied the entire centre of the intersection. A spectral wind began to blow, sucking air into the black hole. It seemed to effect Cliodhna more than me and Sherlock. Cliodhna swatted at her hat, to snag it before it blew away, but too late. It summersaulted from her head and into the black hole where it vanished, blinking out of existence.

“Aaargh!” she yelled. “That was my best hat.”

Reaching for her hat had provided us with an opportunity to twist free of her.

“You,” she shouted, pointing a black lacquered finger nail at me, “you did this! Your mother is as good as dead.”

Steve and Sammy were the first to get pulled in. They tumbled over each other and slowly slid, clawing at the pavement, into the nothingness that was the hole.

Cliodhna struggled forward, fighting against the wind that was trying to pull her in. I looked over at Sherlock. His hair and beard were flapping towards the hole. “I’m going…”

I knew what he was going to do before he said it. He was going to tackle Cliodhna and force her back into the hole. I also knew that it wouldn’t work. Don’t ask me how I knew this, I just did. Instead of driving her into the hole he was just going to make her stronger. Not only would it fail, but in the end it there would be nothing stopping her from waltzing into the library, killing my mom and claiming the Vault. Something like that, in my world would have excited the police, but I had a feeling we weren’t exactly dealing with my world; it was more Cliodhna’s world now. But Sherlock was right; our only hope was in driving her into the hole. He was just the wrong one to do it.

I tackled Cliodhna.

I once tried out for the football team at school. They had these sledges. You would run and tackle them and push them across the field with all your might. Grunting and sweating as I pushed an enormously heavy sledge across the field, it had dawned on me that in a game the sledge would be pushing back. I expressed my concerns for the flowers and butterflies we would be grinding into the grass to the coach. Needless to say, the coach asked me to turn in my helmet.

Cliodhna, in surprise glared at me. She had expected Sherlock not me, and then she grinned and began to push back. She was a lot stronger than any sledge. I had made a fatal mistake. I had thought what was true for Sherlock would not be true for me. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed.

“I knew you would come to me. It was only a matter of time.”

If this, bone crushing embrace, was what substituted for a hug in Faerie, I wonder what a kiss was.

“Sherlock,” I called out, painfully hoping the old fellow would come to my aid. Out of my peripheral vision I could see my red surge coat beating a hasty retreat up the hill, so much for the Light Brigade. 

“So, what brings – a girl like you – to a place like this?” I gasped between breaths. It think I felt my ribs cracking.

Although the spectral wind still howled about us, the pressure lessened. Maybe I had hit on something here. Cliodhna couldn’t crush you if she had to think. This was very valuable information if I was going to live.

She looked at me adoringly. “My dear Fionn, you, of course.”

“What about Ciabhan? I thought you two had a thing?”

She frowned admonishingly and squeezed. “I thought we already went through this?”

“Do you have to do that,” I said letting go of her back and sticking my hands up in the air, the international sign for surrender, “squeeze so hard.”

The pressure subsided. Then her head jerked up and her nostrils flared as though she was sensing some new danger. I saw her eyes focusing on something behind me, something that surprised her. When she tried to unwrap her arms from around me I grabbed her and tangled her up.

“You idiot,” she snarled, “let me go.”

In her eyes I saw the reflection of someone or something running down the hill…It wasn’t a person. It looked like a panther, a very large, black panther. Cliodhna was now desperately trying to get away from me, and the effort was threatening to pull my arms out of their sockets. Then the black shadow hit us. In a tumble of tangled limbs and fur and curses we tumbled into the black hole that was tugging on us. The last thing I remember was Cliodhna and her famous, ear drum shattering scream.