Just my luck, it's probably Catherine.
That stung. He turned his attention back to his great-uncle's neat handwriting. Not a tremor to be seen — it didn't seem like an old man's handwriting at all. He must have written it years before he died. It was hard to focus on it, though, with the afternoon dying and the world turning dark outside.
A thick, ragged line of ink ran right across the middle of a page. It followed a seemingly inconsequential sentence about a party at a gambling club where he had again met the young lord named Caradenus Something-or-Other, who had featured in the brothel story. There was nothing beneath the black line, although there were many pages left in the book, all of them blank.
No. Here, several pages from the end, leaping out at him from all that emptiness like black paint spilled on snow, was a last addition, also in his great-uncle's handwriting, but much less steady, the lines uneven on the page, the words large and hurried.
I have come to the end. I will never finish my story, because the ending is something I cannot face. I hoped where I should have had no hope and fell into shame and darkness because of it. I was sent forth and the way back is forever barred to me, beyond even desperation.
I thought I could tell it but it is too bleak. I have lost what few men could even dream of having because of my own hubris — that courage that even the gods abhor.
It had the stark look of a confession, or a hurried last will and testament.
Puzzled and disappointed, Theo leafed back over the pages that had led up to Dowd's abrupt abandonment of the notebook, but could see no suggestion of what might have stopped him. He decided to go back to where he had begun skipping and read more carefully, but it was a less enchanting process now that he knew the story would have no resolution. He tried as always to keep up with the minutiae of invented names and places, the intricacy of invention, but he was finishing the fourth beer now and his eyes were getting heavy. The sky had gone slate blue, the trees were shadows.
I really ought to get up and turn on a light… was his last conscious thought.
Apparently he had got up and managed to turn on the light before dozing off, because although the sky outside the window was black he could see the lines of the countertop in front of the sink and the curve of the faucet and the white face of the little microwave quite clearly, all bathed in a sort of shuddering yellow light. He felt stupid, like he'd been partying seriously, and not just with a few beers, either.
Gotta change that bulb, he thought.
But the glow was coming from the shelves beside the sink, not from any of the lamps in the room, an unsteady glare that grew brighter even as he stared.
Fire… ?
Even that thought could not spring him out of his chair — he felt as though someone had draped an invisible, weighted net over him. He stared at the gleam on the bottom shelf as it wriggled and pulsed, then died. Then, in the moment before the shining spot faded and the room dropped into darkness, he saw something that finally made him lurch up out of his seat. By the time he reached the light switch he had decided it had to have been a remnant of dream, and that four beers had been a few too many.
Oh, man, what have we learned here? Maybe that depressed people shouldn't drink…
But when the light came on, the woman was still sitting on the shelf. She was still about half a foot tall. She had wings.
"Shite and onions," she said, hugging herself, then dropped lightly down to the countertop beside the sink, translucent wings beating gently to slow her descent. Her feet and legs and arms were bare, the rest of her covered by a red dress that shimmered like butterfly scales. "That damn well hurt."
"Oh, Christ," Theo moaned. "What now?"
The tiny woman stared at him, frowning. She was terrifyingly solid, not a blur, not shadow. She had short carrot-colored hair — a bad color to go with a deep-red minidress, a heretofore unsuspected part of his own mind noted — and a heart-shaped face that was somehow a little too wide across the eyes and cheeks. She looked like the type who would have freckles, but if she did they were far too small to see. She didn't look happy, although he didn't know why she should be. He wasn't all that happy himself.
"This is a dream, isn't it?" he asked hopefully.
She bent to rub her knees, then straightened up. He could not get over how small she was. It was sort of like looking at a cute girl at the end of the block, except this one was in perfect focus and only a yard and a half away. "Well, if it's a dream, then I'm dreaming too, and I'm going to put in a request for a better one next time, 'cause this one is desperate. Now are you going to sit there staring like a gobshite or are you going to offer me a thimble of tea or something? I ache all bloody over from getting here."
"You… you're a fairy."
"That's one to you. And you're a mortal, so that's sorted. Now, I'm tired and I'm hurting and I'm afraid I'm in a bitch of a mood, so how about that tea?"
If this was a dream, what did it mean? It's one thing to fantasize about women, but women half a foot high? What does that say about your sense of self-esteem, Vilmos?
"Look," she said, and suddenly he could see that imaginary or not, she was definitely exhausted. "That tea? I'm not shy. I'd get it meself, but I'm not big enough to turn the knobs on your whatchamacallit here, your stove."
"Sorry." He walked toward the countertop, turned on the burner and put the kettle on it. She still didn't disappear. When the ring began to heat up she even extended her hands toward it, warming them. "So you really… really are a fairy," he said at last. "I'm not imagining it."
"I am. You're not."
"But… why do you talk like… like you're Irish?"
She rolled her eyes and blew a minute strand of hair off her face. "Thick, you are. We don't talk like the Irish — the Irish talk like us, more or less. Get it?"
"Oh."
The unreality of the situation began to seem a little less glaring, but no more explicable. The water boiled. The fairy fluttered her wings and lifted herself back half a foot to get out of the way of the steam. He fumbled two teabags and two cups out of the cupboard.
"By the Trees, fella, I'm not going to drink that much. Just pour me a bit of yours."
"Oh. Right." He put one cup and one teabag away, then set the tea to steeping. He didn't have a thimble, so he retrieved one of the Heineken caps from the pile on the bookshelf. "Is this okay?"
She sprang up and hovered beside him, wings beating swift as a hummingbird's. She sniffed the cap. "If you wash it out. I've nothing against beer, but I don't want it in me tea, thank you very much."
He sat down with his mug, lost in a roaring internal silence of utter dumbfoundment. The fairy kneeled on the counter, blowing on her capful of tea to cool it.
"I'm sorry if I haven't… haven't been a very polite host," he began.
"Don't worry," she said between sips. "They often get taken that way, your kind. It's the glamour, I expect."
"Are you… do you… What's your name?"
She gave him a look that did not seem entirely friendly. "What's yours?"
"You don't know?"
"Of course I bloody well know, you great eejit. But you have to tell me first, then I can tell you."