In return for three small symbolic gifts, the Irish Government gets to pose three questions to Mab, Queen of the Fae, about future events. The questions are purposefully vague, and the answers are not something that the government relies on too heavily. Fae can be maddeningly imprecise in their answers, and will often lie to you if they believe you will learn more from a false answer than from an accurate one.
There’s also considerable doubt among scholars as to whether the Fae can even tell the future. The only predictions that haven’t come through have been those where someone aware of the prophecy intervened, intentionally or otherwise, to sow a seed of chaos. Whatever the Fae would have you believe, it seemed that mortal free will is a factor.
Another aspect of the arrangement is that the government agreed to keep the existence of the Otherworld as quiet as possible. The other side of that deal was Queen Mab would stop stealing children and sending changelings to our realm in their place.
Trolls have few sweat glands but I still woke the next morning in a cold sweat. The details of the dream were fading fast, but an image of the grinning wolf head and those shining yellow eyes remained.
I took a hot shower to try and clear my head and shake off the funk. I emerged about fifteen minutes later to find my two thin grey towels had been replaced by a short stack of thicker fluffier ones in a series of bright colours. I was going to be mad at Sam, but changed my mind when I smelled them.
I found an e-mail on my phone from Cormac, informing me I’d been excused from on-call duties for the week, which was nice, and reminded me that I’d have to speak to the Magistrate about overtime pay for May.
I did what I did whenever I found myself on a loose or a dead end, and hit the streets. I struck out towards the North Circular Road, then followed it clockwise while I let my mind wander. I walk fast and people tend to get out of my way so I found myself passing the Mater hospital less than an hour later.
As I stopped to look at the building where my mother once worked, a door opened and a young couple emerged pushing one of those double-prams that the parents of twins must order online. A wild idea struck me.
I knew that Mei Yang, our head of Research, kept strange office hours due to a complicated child custody arrangement and spent Tuesdays at home, so I called her there first. After a few rings she answered, though the first sound I heard over the phone was her toddler singing at the top of her tiny lungs in the background.
“Hello?” she said over the racket.
“Hi, Mei,” I said. “It’s Vic from work. You have a few minutes?”
“Oh, Hi!” she said. “I heard you made it back. How’s life back in the mortal realm?”
“Good,” I said as I heard her move between rooms on her end. “Just catching up on what I missed.”
I heard a door close, abruptly muffling the noise of Amateur Disney Hour. “You need help with something?” she asked.
“I do. I was wondering if any progress has been made in tracking down ‘Doctor Anderson’ lately?”
My question was met with silence. Only the diminished sound of singing let me know that we hadn’t been disconnected entirely. Truthfully, I understood her reaction. Ever since the incident in our containment vault six weeks earlier -- or ten weeks now, I realised -- our department had been running down lead after lead trying to identify the visitor who had appeared in our midst and in our memories. But work was slow and the few leads we had led nowhere. All we had to go on were the false memories shared by the group; memories that spanned years in some cases. And though we knew those memories to be false, they had not fully left us. Mei had been collating each of our testimonies, trying to piece together the fabricated history of Doctor Robert Anderson. The whole process had left us with a paranoid feeling, like our lives were not really our own.
After what seemed like an age, she found her voice again. “Sorry, no additional progress to report. We checked out all the people and places we remember him mentioning -- his flat, his nephew, and so on, but came up blank. The flat exists, but no record of him ever living there. Why would there be?”
“Can you shoot me what you have?” I asked. “I fancy running down some leads on my tiime off.”
“Sure, no problem. I have to take Holly to movement class now, but I’ll send you what I have when I’m on my laptop later.”
I didn’t know what ‘movement class’ was and didn’t ask. I just thanked her and hung up. That was a lead. Who better to restore the memories lost to the realm of Fae than a Fae who had form in messing with memories?
I felt energised. On a roll. I kept walking, hoping for inspiration to strike a second time, but nothing hit me before I reached Five Lamps, so I decided to fall back on the time-honoured policeman’s tradition of finding a snitch and leaning on him until he said something that could be taken down and used against someone else.
The particular snitch I had in mind was named Greg Derrick. He was ostensibly a barber, though his barbershop had a storage room far too large for shipments of combs or little scissors. We’d found contraband there in the past, but allowed Derrick to continue his operations as he tended to stay away from the really dangerous stuff.
I’ve never required the services of a barber, but I understand some of them act like a community hub and hangout for men who are too old for sports and too young for allotment gardening. Derrick’s was one such establishment, frequented by a host of criminals, both the magical and mortal. Derrick himself had a foot in each world, an ear for detail, and a deep desire to avoid being arrested, so we used him for local knowledge.
I made the trek to Dolphin's Barn and entered his shop, expecting shifty looks from his clientele, but it was early enough in the day that his only customers were a frazzled-looking mother and her three young sons. One of them was sitting on a booster cushion in the chair, getting his hair cut by Derrick’s assistant while the other two collaborated over a video game on a mobile phone, their heads almost touching. As I entered, the bell rang and heads turned curiously towards me. My glamour was perfectly coiffured, so I certainly couldn’t have passed as a customer. I nodded and smiled awkwardly at those present while scanning for Derrick.
He emerged from the back room a moment later, cleaning his hands with an old towel before flipping it over one shoulder. He looked around the room and made one of those ‘who’s next’ gestures before he saw me and his eyes narrowed. Derrick was old -- if he was human, you’d guess he was in his mid-eighties -- and his short stature was exaggerated by a stoop. He had only a fringe of white hair left and wrinkled spotted skin. But his dark eyes were clear and sharp and I had long suspected they could pierce even a blood glamour.
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” he told the young mother, then beckoned to me and turned back into the door he had emerged from.
I followed into the store-room which was piled high with small wooden crates that I was sure I’d seen before. Derrick sat on a small stack of them and grinned up at me.
“Nice glamour,” he said. “Sir Arthur still does excellent work.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I heard you were dead,” he interrupted before I could continue. “Trolls everywhere were celebrating.”
“I’m not and I doubt they were.”
“Last of the Silver Clan dead? It’d be a national holiday for some of them,” he said as he reached into the little toolbelt-slash-apron thing barbers wear and pulled out a pack of tobacco.
“I’m Grey, not Silver,” I said as I lifted the lid of one of the small crates to see a Fae Stone nestled in a protective bed of hay. Ronnie, you twit, I thought to myself. “Importing Fae Stones? You know that’s illegal,” I said to Derrick.
“My supplier assured me they were locally-sourced. If you have evidence they’ve been imported, I’d be quite keen to see it.”
I let the lid drop and turned to him. “I’m actually here to talk about a different kind of Fae import.”
He stopped rolling his cigarette and lifted an eyebrow, which was quite a feat, considering the slackness of his skin and the bushiness of said eyebrow.
“A Fae Trickster, maybe an old Changeling, appeared or re-appeared on the scene around Paddy’s Day. His mortal form is an older Irish man, about sixty, with curly grey hair and a receding hairline to about here.” I indicated ‘about here’ on my own head and continued. “The name he used was Robert Anderson, but I don’t know how useful that will be.”
Derrick kicked his heels into the stack of crates a few times while he thought and finished rolling the cigarette. Then he put it inside the tobacco pouch and tucked the whole thing into a pocket of his apron. “I haven’t heard of a new Fae about. You say he’s been here since Paddy’s Day?” he asked with a quizzical look.
“That week, yeah. So two months and a bit now.”
“Hmmm. That’s worrying.”
“Why so?”
“If I’ve not heard even a rumour of him, that means he either left Ireland - went abroad or gone back home - or he’s still here but lying low.”
“And that worries you?”
“Lying low means he’s either waiting for something, or hiding from something. I’m not sure which of those options I like the sound of least.”
I got back to my flat in the afternoon and dug out the laptop I used when I needed to access the office systems from home. Yang had e-mailed me the case file for Anderson, and I spent a few hours going through it.
His nephew -- his sister’s son, named for him, and who spent about fifteen years in Australia before he got homesick and came back, I recalled from many conversations -- seemed to have never existed. His flat in Ranelagh did exist, but was owned by a married couple who lived there until they decided to move to the country in 2019. The flat had been on AirB&B ever since. Anderson’s alma mater was Trinity, but the school had no knowledge of him, of course.
Every other lead we had tried to run down had turned to gossamer in a similar fashion. Former friends and acquaintances either didn’t exist or had no knowledge of him. But we kept working away at them. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d find something to corroborate our memories, but I was also worried that, deep down, this was just a side-effect of the false history he had implanted in our minds. It felt real to us, so it should be real.
I dropped the laptop onto the coffee table and leaned back on my sofa, staring at my ceiling. As I stared at the dimpled plaster, the starfield from my dream the night before came back and replayed itself. Was that a real memory? Or was my mind just filling in a gap? And the wolf?
I straightened again and opened my laptop. I thought for a moment and typed ‘wolves in Irish mythology’ into the search bar. Damn, that’s a lot of results.
I spent a few more hours trying to find significance for the grinning wolf I remembered, before I gave up and put on my coat. I was never any good at research. I thought better when it was a Q&A, and Trinity College was only a twenty minute walk away.
Summer evenings in Dublin are my favourite times in the city. The air was cool, but some heat still radiated from the paths which were equally occupied by commuters running for the bus and tourists taking in the atmosphere.
I arrived at Trinity a short time later and found my way to the Classics department. It being the evening, I was surprised to find a receptionist manning the front desk, but I waved my phoney Garda ID and asked if there was someone I could speak to.
“What is this in relation to?” the receptionist asked, cautiously.
“Oh, nobody’s in trouble,” I said. “I’ve got a case involving a lover of Irish mythology and legends, and I’d like to pick someone’s brain about some symbolism.”
“Oh,” he said, reaching for a phone. “Sure thing. I think Doctor Clark actually worked with the Gards before.”
I nodded thanks and did a slow turn of the small office vestibule as he waited for the call to connect, taking in the crowded shelves and even-more-crowded notice-board.
“It’s quite late,” he said by way of apology. “A lot of the staff won’t be here.”
As he said this, my eyes landed on a board listing the members of the faculty. It was one of those black felt ones with horizontal ridges to hold white plastic letters. Could it be? No fucking way.
I turned back to the receptionist who was still waiting for the phone at the other end to be picked up. “Is Professor Corrigan in?”
“Professor Miles Corrigan?”
“That’s right,” I said, pointing to the sign. “Room 209.”
Professor Corrigan was in his office, which was small and made smaller by the overstuffed bookshelves on each of its walls. It was like someone had put The Magistrate's Drum Library into a car-crusher. Each shelf was probably two layers deep and towered alarmingly. Even the windowsill had been drafted into service as a bookshelf, where they were stacked two rows high and blocked most of the incoming light. The only clear spot was where a space had been carved out on a shelf to house a small kettle and tea-set.
Behind the desk sat the man I had known for more than a decade and less than ten minutes as Doctor Anderson. He looked the same as he ever did, shock of curly hair around a high forehead, over half-moon spectacles and an understanding smile.
“Mister Grey,” he said. “I was wondering how long it would take you to track me down. Please have a seat.”
I sat.
“I’d like to remind you that we had a deal,” he said, turning to the kettle. “I went from that place and have harmed no living creature since, unless you count causing mental anguish to undergraduates. Tea? Yes, of course you’ll have it. Drop of milk and no sugar, correct?”
“I’m not here for tea,” I said.
He busied himself at the tea-set. “I’m sure you’re not. Are you here to arrest me? Send me back?”
“I’m here for the third part of our deal.”
He turned back to me with the teapot and two upturned cups on a small tray. “Oh? The ‘favour to be named later’?”
“That’s right. Though I expect you to uphold the second part of our deal, even after it’s granted.”
Anderson sat back in his chair and rested his hands on his cardigan. “Of course,” he said. “What is the favour? If it is within my power to grant you, it is yours.”
“I went to the Otherworld as part of the Bealtaine delegation,” I said.
“Ah, yes. I heard there were some problems with it this year.”
“I just got back yesterday.”
“Oh, I see.” He picked a pen off his desk and idly spun it a few times in his fingers. “Did someone break one of the rules?”
“That’s what I’d like to find out,” I said. “I want my memories from the trip restored.”
He leaned back in his chair and spun slightly from side to side as he considered. His gaze worked its way along the stuffed shelves and then up the wall to where a wooden owl served not so much as a book-end but as a book-interrupt. It was crudely-carved and its eyes were painted yellow circles, but I found the way it seemed to gaze back disconcerting.
He considered the owl for a short time then turned back to me. “Very well, Mister Grey. I accept.” Then he righted the two cups and poured tea into both. He added a drop of milk to one and slid it towards me. “Drink,” he said.
“I don’t want-” I began.
He interrupted with a raised finger. “Drink,” he said again.
I lifted the cup and took a sip and everything crashed to blackness.
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