Time: Friday morning 8 May, through Sunday morning 10 May
Place: The Fiendish Glow
Follows: Faery
Rings and Other Things
Uno,
Dos, Tres, Quatro, Cinco
and
An
UFfer Takes on a Fiendish Glow
All live persons used with permission. Special thanks to UFfers Penny and Leslie.
"Al'" Jack Kerrigan is a fictional character.
[Friday, 9:30 AM]
Lora awoke with a massive headache. She crawled off to the shower. Coffee just wouldn't kill this one, she knew; she recognized a sinus headache when she had one, and she needed steam.
Twenty minutes later, she shut off the water, only to feel the pounding return. After a moment, she realized the pounding wasn't just in her head.
"Lora? Lora? Are you okay?" came Brenda's voice.
"Fine," Lora called back. "I'll be out in a minute."
"What are you doing in there? You should be resting."
"Sinus headache. Only a hot shower helps." Lora dried off as quickly as she could, knowing Brenda probably was waiting to use the shower as well. As she slipped on her robe, she noticed that even in the harsh lighting, her skin had a neon tone to it. "Brenda?" Lora called, hoping she was still out there.
"Yeah?"
"Are you still glowing?"
Brenda looked at her arms. Yes, there was still a bit of a glow, but not like this past week. "Yes," she said.
"Have you been glowing all week? I mean, really glowing?"
Brenda leaned against the wall next to the door, again wondering about Lora's "delusions" while she was in the subbasement. "Uh, Lora? I think we need to talk."
[flashback to Wednesday afternoon]
"Och, al' Kerrie, ye'r daft as ye aelwaes bin," Siobhan laughed as she placed another whiskey next to the small Irishman.
"An' ye know not wheare ye came from," he replied to the quickly departing waitress.
"Please, continue Mr. Kerrigan," Brenda said, wanting to hear more of his stories about this building, hoping for a clue as to what might have happened to Lora.
She'd read many of the Glow's historical records. The building had been constructed in the mid-1800's by well-to-do immigrants and used as a safehouse for their less-fortunate compatriots, giving them a job and a place to stay until they could find their own way in the New World. It had been a particularly auspicious place to start; the immigrants coming through the Faer Hibernian Foundation quickly found their way into as high a level of society as their education and background, and social prejudice, would allow.
In the wake of the US Supreme Court's 1857 decision against Dredd Scott and the subsequent expansion of the Underground Railroad in Canada, the Foundation's founders decided to assist the fugitives in what little way they could. While the former slaves were legally free once they reached Canadian soil, a number of them wished to travel further, to ensure that they remained outside the reach of the bounty hunters that were constantly on the lookout for the "runaways". The historical records failed to note that a number of underground chambers and secret passageways were constructed to house the fugitives as new identities and new jobs were created for them -- a little tidbit Kerrigan filled in.
After the US Civil War had ended and laws passed guaranteeing blacks freedom, the secret underground chambers and passages lay in disuse. As the Irish immigrants were assimilated into Canadian society, the Faer Hibernian Foundation found its employment services needed less and less, but its genealogical and social services were still in high demand. In the 1890s, they moved their headquarters to a larger building, and let out their original building to a variety of Irish- or Celtic-owned businesses. The old passageways were forgotten; most even escaped the electrification of Toronto and the construction of the underground light-rail system. Few of the original builders passed on their knowledge of the underground construction. Jack Kerrigan's grandfather was one who did.
Through the decades, snatches of discussion and rumors circulated among all the "irregulars" that used the Foundation building as a social center, gentleman's club, settlement house, pub, school, or private residence. Few of the businesses lasted more than a couple of years in the building; they either folded or they moved into larger quarters in more affluent areas. Some of the businesses left so quickly that rumors of hauntings arose in the neighborhood. The disappearance of a number of petty criminals, rumrunners, and drug dealers -- a number of whom had ties to organized crime -- led to rumors of Mafia-type organizations using the building as their unofficial headquarters, and of there being skeletons, piranha, and bogeymen more fantastic yet, hidden in the basement. Most of the neighborhood folk discounted these rumors, but not Kerrigan. As a result, many of the staff considered Kerrigan daft and laughed at his tales of faeries and disappearing refugees, but Brenda wanted to hear more. Her skin tingled, and she knew her glow was intensifying.
[11:30 AM, back in Lora's bedroom, over coffee and scones]
"Wow," Lora said, still nibbling on her first scone -- her stomach wasn't reacting to food well yet, "you mean there are all kinds of passages down there?"
Brenda nodded, biting into her third.
"Then I could have royally gotten lost. That is, if I ever really wandered around in the first place."
"Your pearl necklace is missing," Brenda said when she finished chewing. "So some of what you told me had to be true."
Lora's hand involuntarily went to her throat. "Anything could have happened to it," she said quickly.
"But you feel up to working tonight?"
Lora nodded. "I really feel fine, Brenda. It's strange, but I feel like I've only missed a day, not nearly a week."
Brenda gave her friend a teasing smile. "You know, there are tales of visits to the land of the faer folk where a person believes they're only gone a day and they're gone a week."
Lora picked up a pillow and threatened her friend with it. "Yeah, right!" The thought of actually visiting the "faer folk" definitely frightened the redheaded Glow Worm, so she quickly changed the subject. "How goes the War?"
Lora's paleness suddenly took on a somewhat green pallor, totally unlike the neon-green glow that Brenda was familiar with seeing on herself. She quickly got up to help her friend to the bathroom. "Come on," she said gently. "We can finish this discussion later."
[Saturday morning, 8 AM, staff breakfast before the breakfast crowd shows up]
"We don't hear much," Brenda said over her coffee. "We've been so busy just trying to keep the place running. But I've heard that Aristotle is also missing and that may have something to do with Nat's research."
Lora poured herself another cup of coffee. "I still think it's the Dark Knighties."
"Dark Knight Cousins now," Brenda corrected her, adding more jam to her scone.
"Whatever," Lora said, contemplating more jam for her toast. "Or maybe it's the Die-Hards? After all, they don't want anything to change, right?"
"Doubtful. Obvious suspects are LaCroix, Janette, the Enforcers, or even Nick (when he's in one of his darker moods). But Aristotle's leaving without a trace is the biggest cause for alarm. I'm betting it's Aristotle. Where could he have gone? Could he be hiding the research?"
"Possibly. But what if it's the Enforcers?" Lora mused.
Brenda took another sip of coffee. "If the Enforcers are in town, everyone would know of it."
"Not if they took the research and left. What if they took Aristotle as well?"
"Aristotle's been sighted a few times, but no one's managed to catch up with him."
Lora picked up another pancake and began the task of adding butter and syrup. "Do you think that Nat was really onto something? I mean, her cures haven't exactly worked before."
"The fact that her notes are missing says something."
"Weren't they triple-encoded or something?"
"Which brings us back to Aristotle, or Larry Merlin."
"Larry Merlin? Has anyone tried looking for him?"
Brenda poured another cup of coffee for herself. "I don't think so. Pen and I will be going to that Dark Knight Cousin party tonight. We could try to ask around."
Just then Pen arrived with a fax in her hand. "You gotta see this."
[Sunday afternoon, 10 May]
The three Glow Worms sat around the table in the office. The Sunday Brunch crowd had just left; the three were finally getting to some lunch, going over the 'Glow's' financial records, and preparing a report for their mysterious benefactors.
"So, how was the party last night?" Lora asked, taking a sip of her Baileys™.
"Are you sure you should be drinking that?" Brenda asked.
"I feel fine," Lora said, although she noticed that with the first sip her glow was beginning to intensify again.
Pen was on her third shot of Cuervo and her "sunrise glow" was well on its way. "She says she's fine. Let her drink!"
"The party?" Lora asked again. "How was it?"
"It was a party," Brenda shrugged.
"Did you get any leads? Any information?" Lora asked, eager to hear more about the quest that some of the factions seemed to be off on.
"Ask Pen," the shortest of the three said. "She was following Penny and Lesley around all night -- or at least trying to."
"Only trying to book them for an appearance here, babe," Pen returned. "And maybe do some special programming to enhance the atmosphere in this joint. . . "
"Pe-e-e-nnn," Lora whined.
"Nothing," she told Lora, curtly. "Not one peep about anything even remotely useful. How about you, Brenda?"
"I kept running into one of the Unnamed who wanted to do nothing but discuss the use of honey sticks in 'maintaining the Relationship between The Guys' -- and then there was the matter of the rats running all over the place. . . " she shuddered, remembering. While she had had to dissect a prepared rat twenty years before in AP Biology -- and had been born under the sign of the Metal Rat herself -- the real-life, flea-bearing, people-eating variety was a rodent of quite a different color.
"In short -- nothing?" Lora asked, impatient and a bit miffed at having to stay back at the "Glow" while her compatriots got the chance to party.
"Nothing," the other two Glow Worms said together.
Lora made a moue. "That was one heck of a prize, though. It would've been nice," she said, somewhat sullenly.
"Hey," said Brenda, "we got the Glow up and running, even without a lot of help from the faction; we took care of a major potential anti-vamp problem (and political hot potato, to boot); we actually had a party upstairs in the cantina. . . For four of us, we're not doing all that badly."
Lora chuckled, her glow getting brighter as the alcohol hit her. "Yup. I'd say we done good!"
Brenda stared down at her coke. Their time here was almost over and now Pen had a new problem. "What have you decided about Nyx, Pen?" she asked softly.
Pen's face turned serious. "I called her this morning. She won't be back for a while."
"How are you going to handle the place?" Lora asked. "Is Heather going to be able to stick around? And don't you have to get back too?"
"Heather pretty much lives at the Shrine. Once the War's over she should be able to come by regularly. However, Nyx was supposed to come up here to live full time. We'd even made arrangements for her mother if she wanted to join her."
"I guess with that job offer she's not going to be able to do that now," Lora said, grabbing a sandwich from the stack.
"Nope," Pen said, pouring another tequila and wishing the stack of sandwiches was a stack of chocolate.
"Top left-hand drawer of the desk," Brenda said.
"Huh?"
"You look like you need a chocolate fix, badly. There's an emergency stash in the top left drawer."
Lora again laughed. "You didn't think we'd actually work in a place that didn't have emergency chocolate, did you?"
Pen whipped open the drawer and was delighted with her find -- another one-pound bag of Hershey's Nuggets™. "You two think of everything!" she said, bringing the bag back to the table and spreading a handful of the silver-wrapped packets of comfort on the desk in front of her.
Brenda smiled at their faction leader. "We came here to do a job. . . "
"And had every intention of minimizing the suffering," Lora finished for her. She had tossed about five of those bags in her suitcase before heading to Toronto; she liked to be prepared.
"You guys are too much," Pen said, shaking her head. "I don't know how the Glow would have done without you." She knocked back the contents of her glass, then slammed it down on the table. "And I don't want to find out how it would fare without you now."
"Huh?" both women said in unison.
"When I talked to Nyx this morning, we decided to ask you two to stay on as permanent managers of the place. I still have to talk to Heather before I can make a firm salary offer, but we want you to stay."
Brenda and Lora looked at one another, then back at Pen. Each had very strong reasons for very much wanting to go home. The thought of staying beyond the originally planned two weeks just had never entered either one's mind.
"I don't know, Pen," Brenda began. "It's a tempting idea, but I've no idea what sort of havoc my teddy bears are wreaking at home. More importantly, I miss my other half. We're trying to build a house, and a life, together. I might be able to manage to come up every now and again, but I couldn't ask him to move even further away from his family."
"Ditto. I like my life quiet," Lora said. "Yeah, there's been a War going on here since we've arrived, I know, but the pace of a restaurant is always hectic anyway. I just don't know if I'd want to do this full-time."
"And then there's always the citizenship issue to contend with," Brenda added. "While Canadians can retain their citizenship if they naturalize as US citizens, as far as I know, the converse is not true. If I recall properly, if we stayed, we'd have to naturalize. I don't think either of us counted on that."
"No problem with our citizenships, Brenda, except where Canada is concerned. The US government doesn't recognize dual citizenships, so we'd retain our US citizenship whether we became naturalized Canadians or not."
"Wait a minute," Brenda said, "you just confused me."
Lora smiled. The US government was so confusing. "The US government just wouldn't recognize our Canadian citizenships, if we naturalized; we'd always be US citizens in Uncle Sam's eyes. However, that might cause passport problems, not to mention the tax headaches."
Pen shuffled through a stack of papers and pulled out an official-looking blue legal folder. Flipping back to a well-worn page, she passed it to Brenda.
"Special dispensation," she said. "Our benefactors foresaw this problem and secured us the necessary dispensation and permits. We can hire, fire, and keep on who we wish, so long as they can prove bona-fide Celtic heritage, or so long as they have the glow."
Lora took the folder from Brenda and scanned the sections in question carefully. "Looks like it's in order," she confirmed.
"What about families, SOs, etc.?" Brenda asked.
"Looks like they factored that in too," Lora said, pointing to a section on one page.
Brenda took the folder from Lora. "Tax benefits, work permits, visas, citizenship allowances -- what didn't these guys think of?"
Pen reached out to both of them. "Think about it. That's all I ask."
Lora munched on her sandwich hesitantly. These "benefactors" worried her; they were making things just too darned easy. What did they know about them? Her suspicious mind, honed by years of working in the "puzzle palace", kicked into overdrive. "What do we know about these people?" she finally asked.
"What do you mean?" Brenda asked.
"Don't you find it just a wee bit too convenient that they've managed to address every practical objection we might have to staying on?"
"Yeah," Brenda frowned. "It is weird -- like one of those bad science-fiction series, where the hero is sold into slavery in some totalitarian futuristic regime that wants to use him for a guinea pig or something. . . "
"Trust me, babe, trust me," Pen said. "It won't be like that. I'll be here as often as I can get work up here -- which I expect to be pretty often, now that the Glow is open for us."
"Pen, didn't you gals even look behind the surface of the contract when you signed it?" Lora asked, becoming increasingly alarmed.
"What do you take me for -- an idiot?"
"Just -- naive?" suggested Brenda.
"Well, are you going to tell us about these mysterious benefactors or not?"
"Another time, babe, another time," Pen pushed them off. She rose from the table and stretched. "This is too much paperwork for right now. Let's go freshen up our drinks."
Although Brenda protested, Lora was ready for another Bailey's™. The three headed for the pub area.
Kerrigan was holding court at the bar -- well, he thought he was holding court -- telling his tales of "faer folk" for any ear that would listen. Just a few regulars and staff members were hanging around, but Kerrigan's voice boomed as though the pub was crowded.
Pen leaned against the bar to get Siobhan's attention while Brenda and Lora listened to Kerrigan's ramblings.
"They're as real as yew an' me," Kerrigan insisted. "An' if ye doan' leave them a gift, there's no knowing what they'll do t' you. They could take' you to their land o' faery, and if you come back -- muynd ye, most nivvir retorn -- it could easily be a hundert years luyter, an' yer great-grandsoan's lookin' ta marry." The young man he was talking too looked bored and more than a little nonplussed. The few children hanging around, though, lapped it up like honey candy. Brenda and Lora exchanged a knowing wink and intensification of their glow -- they'd come too close to that very fate befalling them hardly a week before.
Pen grabbed the tray of beverages -- and the bottles from which they came -- for the three Glow Worms and headed for a nearby table, where Lora and Brenda joined her.
"What's this?" Brenda asked, finding her Coca-Cola™ replaced with a pitcher of hard cider.
"You can't toast with soda," Pen told her.
As they sat down, Pen held her tequila high. "To The Fiendish Glow," she began.
"May it find much success and prosperity," Lora added.
Pen tossed back her drink, while Brenda and Lora took deep draughts of theirs.
"Sliante o dha duit!" Pen said, refilling her glass and downing it.
"Sliante!" Brenda and Lora repeated.
"May it never lack for food or drink, and may it always be full of friendly people," Brenda proposed after taking a moment to refill everyone's glasses.
"May it always be full," Pen and Lora echoed, as they all drank again.
"May its roof never leak," Lora said, getting into her Bailey's™.
"May its roof never leak." A fourth drink.
Brenda looked over to where Kerrigan prattled on to the captivated youngsters. She refilled her glass, nudged Lora, and signaled Siobhan to get the old man another of whatever he was drinking (and glasses of milk for the children). She stood, and raised her glass in his direction. "May we always have a kind soul to tell us the history of the place, and remind us that the world is more than that which we see, and that which we can scientifically prove."
"An' to the boys an' colleens smart enow' t' understand it," Kerrigan replied.
The children, somewhat confused, were nonetheless pleased to be included in the grown-up ritual.
"Felicidad," Pen added, waving another shot all around.
"Happiness," Brenda and Lora translated.
"Salut!" Pen continued. At this rate, she would drink her way through the bottle by dinner time.
In rapid succession, toasts of "À votre santé!" "À vos souhaits!" "À vos espérances!" "L'chaim!" "Nz Drovya!" and anything else the inebriated trio could think of flew through and around the pub.
When they had drunk the last drink, and fallen flat on the table, Kerrigan took his whiskey and raised it in the direction of the trio, poured some on the floor for the building to drink, and some in another glass for the "Fiair Folk".
"And may the luck o' the Irish always smile upon it," he winked.
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PARALLEL STORY: McCANN'S
RAGAMUFFINS
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