Meanwhile... in Killybegs, Ireland

PART ONE

In which Daniel Pantsback has the worst substitute teacher ever,
a restaurant owner in Greece gets a big idea,
a battle is fought on Cliff Coopersmith’s hand, and
Daniel, Molly and Martin go on a vacation to Ireland.

LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN

It was the last day of school before Spring Break vacation and Daniel Pantsback was having a hard time concentrating in class.

It wasn’t because he was excited for his upcoming trip to Ireland or that he would get to meet his grandfather for the first time. He was having a hard time concentrating because his normal teacher, Mrs. Venner, was out sick and he and his class had the worst substitute teacher in the history of substitute teachers.

“My name is ‘Guy’ and I will be your substitute teacher today," he told the class. “Now… what are you kids studying?”

“Compound Fractions!” Molly blurted out, snapping Daniel back to attention.

Molly McMartin and her brother Martin were Daniel’s best friends, although Molly was the one he usually talked to since Martin mostly just played video games or watched television.

Guy smiled at her and nodded at the class.

“I see. Have fun with the new guy, right?” he said. “Why don’t you tell me something that you are studying that is actually a thing, since there are NO such things as compound fractions.”

“Actually, compound fractions are things,” Daniel explained, even though he didn’t even like them.

“Huh," Guy said, unimpressed. “Well what else are you learning about?”

“We were about to start learning the Metric system,” Molly told him.

Guy laughed for at least a full minute.

“Why?” he asked. “I mean, when are you ever going to need to know the Metric system? It’s got all these crazy numbers and they only use it in Europe,” Guy said, still laughing at the class.

Molly was getting agitated, which is a fancy way of saying she was getting “perturbed”, which is an even fancier way of saying she was getting angry at how little this substitute teacher seemed to know about anything.

“Actually, it’s based on the number ten so it’s a very simple system,” Molly explained slowly. “The metric system was first introduced in 1799 and is in use everywhere in the world except for three countries. Burma and Liberia recently passed laws to switch over to the metric system, so that just leaves the United States as the only country in the world not officially adopting metrics as the standard form of measurement.”

“Well that’s just crazy!” Guy said.

“I know.” Molly agreed.

“The rest of the world should be doing what we’re doing!” Guy shouted. “So forget math. What are you learning in writing?”

“Foreshadowing,” Daniel told him.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you mention something early in a story that doesn’t seem important, but actually turns out to be very important later on.”

“What do you mean?” Guy asked, clearly not understanding.

“Well, if you were writing a story where you mentioned compound fractions and metrics, and then by the end of the story the characters needed to use compound fractions and metrics to save the world or something. That’s foreshadowing.”

“I see,” Guy said, although everyone could tell he had no idea what Molly was talking about. “Go ahead and take out your textbooks and read them.”

“Which ones?” Daniel asked.

“Whichever.”

And that was pretty much how the rest of the day went.

By the end of school most of the class had stopped reading and had started watching the minute hand slowly turning on the clock over the classroom door. Guy didn’t seem to care. After lunch he had started going through the drawers in Mrs. Venner’s desk and had found a pile of cell phones that had been confiscated, which is a fancy way of saying, “taken away” from students who had been using them in class.

Guy had turned them all on and was using what little battery power they had left to make phone calls to his friends and family. And apparently he had lots of friends and family. Now he was talking to his cousin, Niko, in Greece.

“I really hate substituting, but it pays the bills.” Guy shouted into the phone, ignoring the kids in the classroom. “These kids are the worst!”

Niko shouted something back but Daniel couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Nah,” Guy told him. “I got fired from Tutorrific, the tutoring place I was working. Apparently they felt that I wasn’t ‘smart enough’,” he said, holding his fingers in the air and bending the first two in each hand, emphasizing quotation marks even though his cousin in Greece couldn’t see them. “They also said I wasn’t, ‘good with people’, which is crazy.  I’m great with people. Right class?” Guy said, holding out the phone so the class could speak.

No one did.

Daniel, Molly and Martin started passing notes back and forth about their upcoming vacation plans. They were all excited that they were going to be traveling without their parents. It made their vacation seem like more of an adventure. They were also excited that they were going to be as close to each other in Ireland as they were at home.

Here in La Crosse, Daniel and his family lived only a few a houses away from the McMartins and, as it turned out, In Ireland both of their families lived only a few houses away from each other too, even though they were technically in two different towns. So Daniel and Molly and Martin were making plans. Actually, it was mostly Molly who was making plans.

Molly and Martin had already been to Ireland two years earlier, visiting their grandparents who lived in a town called, Tynan. Daniel had never been to Ireland but his grandmother had come over to America to visit a few years ago. His grandparents lived in a small town called Killybegs. Daniel had never met his grandfather and was really looking forward to it.

The town of Tynan is in County Armagh and they have one of the oldest libraries in all of Ireland! Molly’s note read.

BORING! Martin wrote beneath it before handing it to Daniel.

Martin hardly ever looked up from his video games but when he did he rarely spoke more than a few words. In fact, an entire sentence would seem like a long speech from Martin.

Sounds great, Daniel wrote, trying to keep an open mind. He liked reading, but didn’t know if he wanted to travel half way across the world just to look at some old, dusty books. What else? Daniel wrote, handing the note back to Molly. Guy was still on a cellphone and watched them passing notes. He just smiled and winked at them. Half the kids in class were sleeping.

Armagh has an observatory for looking at stars, Molly wrote.

What about Killybegs? Daniel wrote back. Is there anything fun to do there?

Molly considered this for a second then handed the note back to Daniel.

Killybegs is really just a small town with a small hill and a small pond.  Not much to do there.  But we’re still going to have a fantastic adventure!  Molly wrote back.

Before he could write anything back the substitute teacher slammed a cellphone down on the desk.

“All the batteries are dead. Does anyone have a cellphone I can use? I was right in the middle of something.”

Everyone in the class looked confused.

“I’m talking with my cousin Niko in Greece and I’m giving him some advice on running his restaurant. It’s really important. It’s a huge idea… literally.”

The class just stared at him blankly. Daniel knew that most of the kids in his class had cellphones but no one wanted to hand it to the substitute. For one thing, he might confiscate it and keep it with the others. For another, a call to Greece, or anywhere overseas, was expensive.

“Oh, fine!” Guy shouted. “I’ll just use mine.” And he pulled out a cellphone from his jacket pocket and continued the conversation with his cousin.

MEANWHILE… IN GREECE

A butterfly landed on the edge of a fancy, blue plate in a small, Greek restaurant and gently flapped its wings.

MEANWHILE… FIVE FEET AWAY

Niko Popadopolous tossed a large, square chunk of fried cheese onto a fancy, blue plate sitting that was sitting on the counter. He was barely paying attention and almost threw the appetizer onto a butterfly that had been sitting there. The butterfly flapped its wings and lifted off, fluttering out the door. Niko watched for a moment then turned to deliver the cheese to the one customer in his restaurant.

“Here you go, mom,” Niko said, sliding the plate in front of a grumpy woman in a black sweater and black skirt. She grunted, nodded at the cheese, picked it up in both hands and started eating it like a hamburger. The fried cheese was called Saganaki, and it was made from feta cheese, which was made from goat’s milk. The cheese was covered in olive oil, then fried in a pan. It was really delicious and by far the best selling item on his menu because it was the only thing he ever sold on his menu.

Niko owned a tiny restaurant on the small, Greek island of Thassos, in the Aegean Sea. In America it would be called a Greek restaurant since all they served was Greek food. But as it was actually in the country of Greece everyone there just called a restaurant.

Niko’s restaurant was called OPA, after a famous Greek word that had a lot of meanings but no real definition. People in Greece shouted “Opa!” when you were about to ride your bike into a tree. So in that sense the word meant, “Stop!”

But people in Greece also shouted “Opa” when you broke a plate by dropping it on the floor. So in that sense, the word meant, “Hooray, now we get to buy more plates!”

The problem with the word “Opa” was that people shouted it at weddings, when new babies were born, or when someone ate something really delicious.

he problem for Niko, though, was that no one ever shouted “Opa!” in his restaurant.

In one sense this was good because it meant nobody was breaking his plates. But in another sense it was bad because it meant that no one thought his food was delicious.

Niko needed to find a way to get more customers to his restaurant. He needed to do something big. He needed to do something loud. He needed to do something people would talk about for years to come. As luck would have it, he got a call from his cousin, Guy Popadopolous, all the way from America. And Niko knew that when it came to big and loud there was no one better than an American.

“What’s your best-selling item?” Guy had asked over the phone.

“Saganaki. It’s a kind of fried cheese.”

“Sounds delicious. Instead of frying it can you just cover it in alcohol and set it on fire? Everything looks really impressive when you set it on fire.”

“Like what?” Niko asked.

“Tiki torches, gas grills, fireworks...”

“But those things are supposed to be set on fire. And they’re not food," Niko explained.

“Exactly!” Guy shouted over the phone. “It’ll be amazing!”

“I suppose so…” Niko said when their call went dead.

A few seconds later his phone rang again. It was Guy calling from a different phone.

“And another thing,” Guy said. “Make it big. Really, really big! People love big and they love fire.”

“They do?” Niko asked.

“Of course!  You should know that. You’re Greek! The Olympic Games started in Greece and they always light that huge fire at the beginning of the games.”

Niko realized that Guy was right… about everything. When the phone went dead for the fourth or fifth time Niko was walking past his mother who handed him the empty plate.

“Nio,” she grunted, which was an unfancy way, in Greek, of saying, “bring me more cheese.”

His mother was old and was missing most of her teeth so soft cheeses were the only thing she could eat, which was convenient because even when she had her teeth soft cheeses were the only thing she wanted to eat. Her favorite dish was Saganaki although she never really seemed to enjoy it. Or much of anything.

Niko went to the kitchen and prepared another slab of cheese. But this time, instead of frying it in a pan he coated the whole thing in Ouzo, which was a fancy Greek drink, and brought it out to his mother. He held the plate of cheese as far from his face as possible, struck a match, and lit the cheese on fire.

His mother’s eyes lit up. A smile lifted the deep frown lines around her mouth and she laughed. She laughed in a way that Niko had never heard her laugh before. She lifted her hands in the air, giggled, and shouted, “Opa!”

His mother tried to blow out the flame like a birthday candle but it didn’t work so Niko got a bowl and put it over the plate, extinguishing the flame. The cheese was perfectly fried and melty and delicious.

When his mother took a bite, instead of grunting, she sighed, smiling.

Niko knew, at that moment, what he had to do. It would take some time, and require a lot of planning, but it just might be the biggest thing anyone on the tiny island of Thassos, and maybe even the world, had ever seen.

MEANWHILE… IN LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN

When school was over, Daniel went to Molly and Martin’s house to play for a few hours before heading home to pack for the big trip. Daniel and Martin were playing a video game called, Medieval Monsters, where their characters were warriors from long ago, running through castles and caves trying to defeat ogres and trolls and giants on their way to saving the land. Martin was pretty good but Daniel kept getting stomped on by giants. Molly sat across from them reading facts about Ireland from a travel book.

“Did you know that Ireland is called The Emerald Isle because it’s so green?”

“No,” Martin said.

“Did you know that the ship Titanic was built in Ireland?”

“No,” Martin said.

“Did you know that the harp is the national symbol of Ireland?

“No,” Martin said.

“Did you know that the longest town name in Ireland is Muckanaghederdauhaulia? It means, ‘Pig Farm That Lies Between Two Bodies of Water’.”

“No," Martin said.

“Did you know that Irish is the national language of Ireland, but it’s only spoken in six of the counties? The rest speak English.”

“Is one of those counties the one we’re going to?” Daniel asked. “Because I don’t speak Irish.”

“No,” Martin said, although Daniel wasn’t sure if that was an answer or if Martin was just used to saying the word. Molly was also getting upset with her brother. He almost always spoke in one word sentences, but this was ridiculous.

“Did you know, Martin, that there’s a thing in Ireland called the Blarney Stone. Legend says that if you kiss the stone you’ll be given the gift of eloquence, which is a fancy way of saying you’ll be able to speak really well.”

“Huh,” Martin said, not looking away from his game. He had just defeated over a dozen trolls while Daniel was having trouble with just one ogre. After his character died for the tenth or twentieth time, Daniel put down the controller so Martin could finish the level on his own.

“Did you know,” Molly continued, reading from her travel book,“That there are thirty-two counties in Ireland? Twenty-six in Ireland and six in Northern Ireland.”

“Why do they call it ‘Ireland’ and ‘Northern Ireland’?  Usually it’s called North and South, like North Dakota and South Dakota. You don’t just call it North Dakota and Dakota.”

“Virginia and West Virginia,” Martin said.

Daniel and Molly ignored him.

“Northern Ireland is controlled by England. The rest of Ireland is Irish. There was fighting for years over this, but it seems like things are fine now.”

“That’s good," Daniel said. “The last thing we need is to get mixed up in any trouble when we’re over there. What part of Ireland are we going to again?”

“Well that’s the funny thing,” Molly told him. “Our grandparents live in Tynan, the town next to Killybegs, which is where your grandparents live. But Tynan is in Northern Ireland and Killybegs is in Ireland.”

“But how will we see each other then?” Daniel asked.

“It’s a border in name only. There’s no real border you have to cross or anything.”

“Good,” Daniel said. “Otherwise that would be crazy.”

Martin cleared the level in Medieval Monsters so Daniel picked up the controller again.

“Do you think that monsters and trolls and ogres and things every existed in real life?” Daniel asked.

“Of course not,” Molly said. “Now THAT would be crazy.”

MEANWHILE… IN TYNAN, IRELAND

Dermot McGillicutty was putting the finishing touches on his new guard shack, giving it a coat of white paint to make it look official. All he had left to do was to paint the words BORDER CROSSING on the mechanical arm that went up and down, blocking the road into Kittybegs, and he was in business.

Dermot took great pride in his new guard shack. Those people in Ireland couldn’t just be allowed to walk willy-nilly into Northern Ireland without some sort of passport or paying some sort of fee. That would be crazy. So Dermot had taken it upon himself to build this new border crossing to protect Tynan from everyone outside of Northern Ireland.

Now all he had to do was wait for someone to come by.

MEANWHILE… IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Chip Johnson closed the box and taped it shut, sticking a shipping label on it, bound for a hospital in Arizona.

Chip worked at the CDC, which was a shorter way of saying the Center for Disease Control. Their job was to study bacteria and viruses and germs and pretty much anything else that might make someone sick and then develop vaccines and cures to make them better.

“That’s it,” Chip said. “That’s the last of the influenza vaccine for this year.”

“What’s that?” asked the delivery driver.

“Influenza. It’s a fancy way of saying ‘the flu’. This is a vaccine to help lower the chances of people catching it. Flu season is almost over, which is good because this is the last of the vaccine we were able to make this year. We are now, officially, all out.”

The delivery driver loaded the box into his truck.

“Why don’t you guys just make more now so you have enough for next year?”

“We can’t,” Chip explained. “Until we know what next year’s flu looks like. Every year the flu virus changes so we have to wait to see the new version to be able to create a vaccine.”

“What if a new flu happened tomorrow?”

“Flu season runs from October through March. It is now the end of March so flu season is over. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“But what if it did?”

Chip laughed at the delivery driver.

“The chances of some weird, germy, super-sickness coming along are so small that we don’t need to worry about it. The chance is so remote that it’s almost impossible. It would be crazy.”

“That’s good to know. I feel much safer already,” the delivery driver said, closing the door on his truck, taking his clipboard, and driving away from the CDC building.

MEANWHILE… IN SOUTH LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN

Cliff Coopersmith was enjoying his last day of school at South La Crosse Elementary before he went on Spring Break. And he was enjoying it thoroughly.

Cliff was a student at the school, although not a good one.  He was also a bully at the school and he was a terrific one. He would take kids lunch money, threaten to beat people up, knock books out of people’s hands, and pull pranks on his teachers better than anyone. Cliff was a student and a bully, but he liked to think of himself more as an artist. An artist at terrorizing people.

Currently he was performing one of his greatest acts yet.

The Swirly.

A swirly is where you take a person, preferably a small one who is unable to fight back and, even better, who is scared to tell on you, and you hold them upside-down by their ankles over a toilet bowl. Then you simply dip their head in the toilet, flush the toilet so it swirls their hair around and, if the mood strikes you, repeat over and over again.

Cliff was on flush number three, holding a second-grader named Taylor or Tyler or Skyler or something like that. Either way the kid was small and wore glasses and Cliff liked that.

Cliff was holding one ankle and his best friend, Butch, was holding the other. They were shaking Taylor/Tyler/Skyler over the swirling water when suddenly bright, shiny change fell into the toilet bowl. Cliff saw quarters!

Dropping the kid onto the floor Cliff called out, “Dibs”, before Butch could lay claim to the money.

Sticking his hand in the toilet, Cliff picked out seventy-nine cents, which he promptly placed in his pocket, as Taylor/Tyler/Skyler ran away.

“Wanna split it?” Butch asked about the money.

“Not really.”

“But we were both holding an ankle. And the money did fall out of the pocket on my side,” Butch explained.

“I called ‘Dibs’. I don’t make the rules. I just live by them.”

“You never follow any rules,” Butch pointed out as they walked out of the bathroom. “See? You didn’t even wash your hands and you are always supposed to wash your hands after going to the bathroom.”

“But I didn’t go to the bathroom,” Cliff said, smirking.

“No. But you stuck your hand in a toilet. That might even be worse. And it didn’t look like very clean water.”

Cliff just shrugged his large, gorilla-like shoulders and swept his black hair out of his eyes with the hand that hadn’t been in the toilet.

Now that Butch mentioned it, Cliff noticed that his toilet-water hand did feel a little itchy and tingly. But if he went back and washed now he’d look like a sissy so Cliff decided to play it cool because washing hands, in his mind, was definitely not cool.

MEANWHILE… IN LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN

Daniel and Molly and Martin sat in one long row on the plane as it took off from La Crosse International Airport. It was a long flight but Daniel and Molly had come prepared with books, games, and a sense of curiosity and wonder for all the new things they were going to experience. Martin just brought his handheld video game, headphones, and a couple dozen games and backup batteries.

After a few hours of flying the captain spoke over the speaker system.

“Attention passengers. If you look out of the left side of your plane, you will see Canada’s majestic Hudson Bay, which is actually an inland sea. There are small provision stores along the shores, run by the Hudson Bay Company, some of which have been in operation since the early sixteen hundreds. To the north you will see the Southampton Islands. And even though the Hudson Bay is usually iceberg free, because of global warming you will see a couple dozen icebergs that have broken off from the glaciers. If you don’t believe in global warming, please don’t look out of the right side of your plane because you will see… pretty much the same thing. Just… go ahead and close your windows and pretend the icebergs aren’t there.”

Daniel looked out of his window and watched as the icebergs floated along. One of the icebergs, a bit larger than the rest, seemed to be turning east, away from the others. Daniel pulled out a pair of binoculars from his backpack and looked down. He couldn’t be sure, but he swore he could see people on it, and a large engine with a propeller sticking into the water.

Daniel pointed this out to Molly, who leaned over Daniel and looked through the binoculars too.  Her crazy, wavy hair was in his face and at first Daniel pulled away to give her room, but slowly found himself leaning forward. Her hair smelled like strawberries.

“What are you doing?”

Daniel hadn’t realized it, but his eyes had been closed, taking in the scent of Molly’s hair. She was now staring directly at him, her smiling face inches from his.

“Um… your hair,” he stuttered. “It… it smells good.”

“Thanks,” she said, sitting back in her seat. “I know you like strawberries and I knew we’d be sitting next to each other for hours, so I thought I’d try out a new shampoo.”

“Great. Thanks. It works,” Daniel said, unsure of what to say which, in such cases, usually meant that he said nothing at all.

Molly pulled out a book, still smiling, and read.

Daniel gazed out the window at the large iceberg that was floating away from the others.

MEANWHILE… IN DUBLIN, IRELAND

When the plane touched down at Dublin Airport all of the passengers stood up and let out a big, “Ahhhh” because they had been sitting for such a long, long time. Daniel, though, sat a while longer, looking out his tiny window at the world outside. The sky was dark, which was normal because it was nighttime, but it was darker than just that. The clouds were even darker than the night sky which, until now, Daniel would have thought was impossible since nighttime was pretty much the darkest thing going.

He saw drops of rain splatter against his window and when the door of the airplane opened, a cold and damp draft flooded the entire cabin, which is an unfancy and actually confusing term that means, ‘the main part of the plane where everyone sits” rather than the normal use of the word cabin which means, “tiny house in the woods”.

It took another hour to collect their bags and then pass through customs, which was where you went whenever you flew into another countries airport, where they made sure you had a passport and a visa, which are both documents you need to travel to different countries. They also checked everyone’s bags to make sure they weren’t bringing in anything illegally. Most people hated this part of traveling but Daniel loved it. It was his first time being in a whole other country and everyone was speaking with an Irish accent!  It was very exciting.

It was so exciting that Daniel almost walked right into a kind, older woman who was standing right in front of him. He tried to step out of her way but she immediately pulled him in and gave him the biggest, longest hug of his life, lifting him off the ground and swinging him back and forth so his feet were moving side to side, knocking into people as they tried to move by.  Daniel thought to himself, People in Ireland sure are friendly.

The woman finally let him go and said, “Look at how much you’ve grown, Daniel.  I hardly recognized you.”

“Grandma?” Daniel asked.

“Who else would I be?” she said, laughing at Daniel’s foolishness. “Do you think in Ireland that strangers just walk up to other strangers and hug them?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Daniel muttered, recognizing his grandmother who he hadn’t seen in the last few years.

“Well, you’re sure now, because they don’t,” she said.

“Where is Grandpa?” Daniel asked. I’m really looking forward to meeting him.”

“Oh, he’s back at home. There’s some kind of problem with the wells that needs tending.”

“Wells?” Daniel asked.

“I’m sure you’ll see,” his grandmother said, giving him another hug.

Daniel had no idea what this meant and tried to remind himself to ask later. For now he was distracted by the McMartins, who were meeting their family as well less than twenty feet away. Molly and Martin and their parents were receiving hugs like Daniel had, but something else was going on too. Something that made Daniel uncomfortable.

MEANWHILE… IN THE DUBLIN AIRPORT, LESS THAN TWENTY FEET AWAY

Molly and Martin had met their grandparents, as well as a few assorted aunts and uncles and cousins, in much the same way Daniel had, with one big difference. As a member of their family would greet and hug them, the rest took turns staring angrily at Daniel and his grandmother. Martin observed the stares but didn’t say anything.  Molly also saw them and did.

“Grandmum?” Molly asked her grandmum. “Why are you all staring at the Pantsbacks like that?”

“It’s not polite to ask silly questions, dear,” her grandmum said, turning to Molly and smiling as if she hadn’t been staring and frowning just a few seconds earlier.

“It’s not polite to stare and frown either,” Molly said.

“Let’s go, dear,” their grandmum said, helping them to gather their things. “And let’s not speak of the Pantsbacks anymore.”

“But we’re going to visit with them tomorrow. They live the next town over.”

“Oh no, dear,” Molly’s Grandmother said. “They live in a whole other country.”

And before Molly could ask her parents what was going on the McMartins were gathered up and left the airport.

MEANWHILE… IN IRELAND (100 YEARS AGO)

The history of the problems between the Pantsback's and the McMartins went back almost a hundred years, right before Northern Ireland separated from the rest of Ireland in 1921. When that happened, someone in England with a big map and a marker drew a line across the northern part of the island and said, “We’ll take this part.”

Sometimes the line followed rivers and sometimes the line followed mountains. But when that line passed through Tynan the person drawing on the map, who had never been to Ireland at all, saw that Tynan was a much bigger town than Killybegs, so he put Tynan in the Northern Ireland side, and left Killybegs out.

When this line was drawn what it also did was to separate two lifelong friends, Patrick Pantsback and Michael McMartin. In fact, the Pantsback and McMartin families had been the best of friends for many hundreds of years, but with this line things changed. And it all had to do with a well.

The line meant that the McMartin’s were now in Northern Ireland and the Pantsback's were in Ireland proper.

The English who created Northern Ireland had wanted the line to mean, “You guys stay out. Everything inside this line is part of England now.” But what it also meant was, “You guys can keep everything outside this line because we are keeping all of the good stuff inside of the line, which is why we drew the line where we did in the first place.”

So the Pantsback's were left in their little town that had nothing of interest to someone drawing lines on a map… unless you looked closely. Because there, on Killybegs Hill, was a well. And it was this well that had made the Pantsback's and the McMartins such good friends, and now tore them apart.

Legend had it that many hundreds of years ago, when leprechauns and fairies roamed the lands, that Killybegs Hill was a magical spot. And legend had it that one day two young boys, Peter Pantsback and Malachy McMartin, were playing up on this hill, near an ancient well, when they found a leprechaun sleeping nearby.

The boys caught this leprechaun and, as legend goes, when you catch a leprechaun he will offer you gold if you promise to let him go.

The boys offered to let him go for a hundred gold pieces, which they split evenly between them. The two lads used the money to buy nice farms and take care of their families and years later became old men, sitting on the same hill looking out over their farms talking about their good luck.

“Wasn’t that an adventure, catching a leprechaun?” Peter said.

“Indeed it was,” Malachy replied. “A once in a lifetime adventure.”

Only it wasn’t. Apparently it was a twice in a lifetime adventure because as they sat quietly on the hill looking out over the green fields below, they heard a noise coming from inside the well. It was a grunting and clinking noise, as if someone was trying to carry something heavy, and metal, up the well.

The two old men looked at each other, and then back and the well, and saw a cloth sack flop over the edge and land on the ground, spilling gold coins at their feet! A moment later a leprechaun climbed out of the well… and fell into the arms of Peter and Malachy.

“Not you two again!” said the angry Leprechaun. “I suppose you’ll be wanting another hundred gold pieces to let me go again?”

Peter and Malachy looked at each other. They had used the first hundred pieces of gold wisely and bought lands and farms and were now well off. They didn’t need more gold.

“Tell you what,” Peter said. “You can keep your gold.  What we’d like instead is for you to tell us a story.”

Well, the leprechaun couldn’t believe his good luck. For there is nothing more important to a leprechaun that his gold.

“Agreed!” said the leprechaun. “Any story you’d like.”

“Then tell us,” said Malachy, “The story of the fairy folk. All of it.”

And that’s when the leprechaun realized that he had been tricked. With the knowledge of the fairy folk, these two men would learn secrets that they could use to get gold, and more, whenever they wanted.

And legend had it that the Pantsback's and the McMartin's passed this information down from father to son, from generation to generation.

The problem with legends, though, is that sometimes the more ridiculous the legend the less people believe them, which is really a shame because the more ridiculous something is the more fun it is when it turns out to be true. So if you’re going to believe in legends at all it’s probably worth believing in the most ridiculous ones.

The Pantsback's had nothing to do with England or Northern Ireland or the line that was drawn, but that didn’t stop the McMartins from being angry at them for now having the well all to themselves.

The other problem with legends is that, if they are not told often enough, they become stories and these stories then turn into fairy tales and these fairy tales then become silly superstitions. And that’s exactly what happened to the legend of the Killybegs Hill well.

The McMartin's knew that, at some point in their past, the Pantsback's and the McMartin's had been friends and had become rich together. But then the McMartin's got less rich while the Pantsback's always had plenty of money. The McMartin's didn’t believe the leprechaun story because it sounded so silly and superstitious. So they just suspected that the Pantsback's had somehow gotten more money than the McMartin's although they were never really sure how or why. But that didn’t stop them from disliking the Pantsback's for it.

To be fair, the Pantsback's didn’t have much money nowadays either, but that didn’t stop the McMartin's of treating them suspiciously whenever they saw them.

Sadly, gold does that to people.

MEANWHILE… IN PRESENT DAY SOUTH LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN

“Hey, come back here!” Cliff Coopersmith yelled at the kids who were running away from him on the playground.

He loved bullying but he hated running. e was currently trying to take lunch money away from a couple of kids and they weren’t making it easy.

“If you don’t make me chase you I’ll let you keep half!” he yelled, as he wiped some dirt that had gotten in his eye. He also wiped his runny nose with his hand, and hit a few kids with his hand and in the cafeteria he handed the lunch lady two dollars with his hand.

he same hand that had been in the toilet and not been washed.

The number of germs you get on your hand when you wipe your eyes, and wipe your nose, and touch people, and handle money is big. There are lots of germs all around us all the time and normally our bodies can fend them off, even in large numbers. But when you have done all of these things Cliff had done after sticking your hand in a toilet and not washing it, then the number of germs becomes astronomical, which is a fancy way of saying that there are literally billions of them.

This was bad enough and these super-toilet germs were likely to cause some sort of virus on their own. But Cliff was about to make things, as usual, a whole lot worse.

When Cliff bought a burrito with his stolen lunch money, he put it in the microwave. He wasn’t interested in eating it as much as he was watching it explode. After breaking several microwaves at home doing the same thing, his mother stopped buying microwaves at all, now heating things up on the oven. So instead, Cliff had taken to blowing things up in the school microwave.

And burritos were the best thing to explode. Meat, cheese, beans, rice, whatever was in them would explode everywhere, and stick to the sides, and usually stink up the entire cafeteria!

Only this microwave was different.

Cliff had broken so many microwaves that the school was forced to buy cheaper and cheaper microwaves as they had very little money for things that weren’t books or paper or school supplies. And cheaper microwaves meant cheaper safety features, like the lead-lined glass that kept the harmful microwave radiation IN the microwaves instead of letting it out.

But the microwave oven Cliff was using was so cheap and so poorly made, that more microwaves made it out of the machine than stayed in it.

Now normally a little bit of microwave radiation isn’t a bad thing. But in larger doses it can cause mutations, which is a fancy way of saying, “rapid and usually unpleasant changes”.  And that’s exactly what happened when the microwave radiation hit Cliff’s hand, changing the billions of germs, mutating them, allowing them to grow to enormous size and terrible strength.  Cliff couldn’t see it or feel it because germs, even big ones, can only be seen under a microscope and Cliff had no idea what a microscope was.

But if he could see what was happening to the germs on his hand instead of watching his burrito explode he would have been afraid.

Very afraid.

MEANWHILE… ON CLIFF’S HAND

On Cliff’s hand a mighty war was raging…

“Attack!” shouted the Regular Germ Captain to his troops, who ran straight at the much larger, much angrier Toilet Germs. The Regular Germs looked like tubes with bristles on them, where were not very effective against the large Toilet Germs, which looked like giant green basketballs with long, sharp spikes sticking out in every direction.  But the Regular Germs knew their duty and they attacked over and over again.

A human hand normally has around one million germs on it, but not all of them are bad. In fact, many of them are needed to take care of your skin or to fight of other, bad germs and bacteria. But toilet germs are a different kind of germ. They don’t get along well with other germs and they are very hard to get rid of.

The Regular Germ Captain changed his strategy.

“Multiply!” he shouted to his troops.

Germs can replicate very quickly, which is a fancy way of saying that they can make copies of themselves, and that’s just what his troops did by splitting themselves in half, then in half again, and again. The problem, though, was that the Toilet Germs could do the same thing. So to make up for the increasing number of Regular Germs they TOO began to multiply faster and faster. Soon there were germs on top of germs on top of germs and it was difficult to tell who was winning at all. Both sides were evenly matched.

But that changed in an instant.

Just when the Regular Germ Captain thought they might have a chance, a brilliant white light filled the sky, and he could feel his body getting warmer.

“Microwave radiation!” shouted the Regular Germ Captain but by then it was too late. No one heard him over the roar of the enormous Toilet Germs.

Microwave radiation changed all of the germs on the battlefield in that moment. The Regular Germs each grew a few extra bristles and a couple of them had what looked like hands and feet attached to them. But the radiation didn’t change them too much. The Toilet Germs, however, grew to twice their normal size and their spikes grew even longer! There was no hope of defeating them now.

“Retreat!” the Regular Germ Captain shouted to his troops. But by then it was too late. All was lost. The Toilet Germs had won. There was no one who could stop them now.

The funny thing about life, even in the life of a germ, is that you should never assume that anything is over until it is absolutely, finally over.

Just when the Toilet Germs were about to pounce on the smaller, weaker Regular Germs, reinforcements came.

“Nose Germs!” the Regular Germ Captain.

And in a mighty wave the nose germs, who had been sneezed out of Cliff’s nose a second earlier, rushed by and knocked most of the Toilet Germs off of the hand and into the air where they were now floating free, unable to get back, carried along to wherever the wind would take them.

And wherever they landed would feel the awful, powerful, radiation-changed might of these new super-germs.
       .

MEANWHILE… IN ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA

Barry Smith was a weatherman and he loved clouds.  He loved all kinds of clouds. He loved the super high, wispy clouds, called Cirrus clouds. He loved the low, wide clouds, called Stratus. But his favorites were the regular, puffy clouds, called Cumulus. In fact, the only clouds he liked more were rain clouds, which were just Cumulus clouds full of moisture, called Cumulonimbus clouds.

At the television station where he did his weather reports he liked to stand on the roof and watch the clouds go by all day. His boss didn’t like this because he was supposed to be working, but Barry felt a sense of wonder and amazement as the clouds would roll past.

A large set of cumulus clouds were coming his way, carried along on the wind.

The wind is also amazing, Barry thought to himself, because you can’t really think to someone else. They bring rain, and pollution, and air, and all sorts of things, both good and bad.

And this was normally true. But these clouds were different. For these clouds had germs in them.

Big germs.
Mean germs.
Super-gigantic-mutated-angry Toilet Germs.

Barry didn’t know this, of course, because germs are too small to be seen without a microscope, which is not normally something you bring onto a roof to watch clouds with. The germs, carried on the winds, swept past Barry, and onto Barry, and into Barry’s nose and eyes and ears. But Barry couldn’t feel the germs. Not directly. But his body knew they were there anyway and tried to get rid of them by sneezing.

“Achoo!” Barry sneezed loudly. “I hope I’m not coming down with a cold.”

The good news was that Barry was not coming down with a cold.

The bad news was that he was coming down with something much, much worse.

And as the clouds rolled by Barry could almost hear the people on the street below, and down the road, sneezing too.

As Barry watched the clouds moved past he was also amazed by another cloud fact. Clouds were carried along on wind streams that took them all around the planet, around and around as the clouds changed from one type to another, and came down as rain in one spot and later picked up moisture to become clouds again in other spots.

I wonder where these clouds are off to, Barry thought to himself.

The answer, of course, was Ireland.

MEANWHILE… IN KITTYBEGS

On the way to his Grandparents house in Killybegs there wasn’t much to see.

It was dark because it was night. It was dark because the clouds over the skies blocked out any moonlight. And it was dark because Killybegs was such a small town that there weren’t any large megastores with well-lit parking lots or downtown areas with streetlights to make things bright. Killybegs was the darkest place Daniel had ever seen, or at least it would have been if he could have seen anything at all.

His Grandparent’s house was a small, white building with a thatched roof made of sticks and branches. It didn’t look like it would keep water out very well but his grandmother insisted that it had worked just fine this way for hundreds of years. She took Daniel and his parents inside and made them tea after lighting a small fire in the large fireplace.

Warming himself by the fire Daniel noticed that the logs weren’t that big, nor were they burning very brightly, and they weren’t giving off any smoke.

“What kind of wood is this?” Daniel asked.

“Oh, that’s not wood, dear. It’s peat. We get it from the peat bog out back.”

“What’s a peat bog?” Daniel asked.

“It’s where a swamp once stood. It’s made up of mostly rotted plants that have compressed down to look like… well… a bog. You can walk on a bog although the ground is a bit squishy. And when you cut out logs of peat and either compress them or let them dry to get the moisture out they can be burned in a fireplace. Isn’t that great?”

Daniel thought it was interesting but he wasn’t sure he’d classify it as great. It was definitely something Molly would think was both interesting AND great, though.

“There are peat bogs and peat farms and companies that harvest peat so it can be used in homes or even for power stations to make electricity.”

Daniel would take a look at the bog tomorrow in the daylight but decided not to bring any matches or anything else that might set it on fire, just in case.

“Is Grandpa home?” Daniel asked. He didn’t see anyone else in the small house and wondered where his grandfather might be this late at night.

“There wasn’t room for all of us to fit in the car so he stayed home while I picked you up. If he’s not here he’s probably at the pub next door.”

“You mean like a bar?” Daniel asked. He hadn’t noticed any pubs, or any buildings, when they pulled up to the house.

“Less like a bar, and more like a pub,” his grandmother said. Daniel loved her accent and the sing-songy way she had of talking, although he often found the exact things she said a bit confusing. “Would you like to go fetch him?”

“Sure!” Daniel said. He thought it would be great fun to go and get his grandfather.

“Go to the end of the driveway and take a left. You can’t miss it.”

Daniel looked at his parents to make sure it was okay and they nodded that it was, smiling in a way that Daniel knew meant something was up. He usually wasn’t allowed to walk alone at night, and especially not in new countries that he had never been to before.

At the end of the long driveway Daniel took a left and walked down the road.

And walked…
And walked…
And walked…

Daniel realized why his parents had let him go to fetch his grandfather by himself at night. It was because there was nothing out there.

He finally arrived at what looked like another house on the same side of the road. There was a small sign over the front door that said, “Finnegan’s Pub”.

Daniel guessed that this must be the place, and walked in.

The house did, in fact, look like a pub inside. There was a bar, taps for beer, and bottles on shelves. The rest of the place was mostly tables, chairs, couches, a fireplace, and a small stage.

The place was empty except for the bartender, who was stacking chairs and cleaning up.

“Sorry,” said the bartender. “But you are too young. I cannot serve you any beer.”

“I don’t like beer.”

“Good for you. Plus, that leaves more for me so ‘good for me’ too!  Of course, I sell beer, so you not buying it is actually bad for me.” The bartender thought about this for a moment and then shook his head. “Either way I’m afraid that I am closed.”

“I’m not actually here to buy anything,” Daniel started to explain.

“Well that’s good because as I said, we are closed. Of course, that’s also bad because I run a business and businesses only stay in business by selling things. Maybe you should come back tomorrow when you are interested in buying something. Just not beer.”

“I’m actually looking for my grandfather,” Daniel said, before the bartender could keep talking around and around.

“Is your grandfather’s name Finnegan by any chance?” asked the bartender.

“No.”

“Good. Because I am Finnegan and I don’t recognize you at all.”

“My grandfather’s name is George.”

“George Pantsback?” Finnegan asked, to which Daniel nodded.

“He’s my best customer!  And you just missed him. He left a few minutes ago.”

“But… I didn’t see him on the road between here and home.”

“I didn’t say he took the road,” Finnegan said. “And I didn’t say he was going home, either. He went to check on the well.”

“The well?” Daniel asked.

“Sure. The well. On Killybegs Hill. To keep the fairy folk out. Your grandfather’s a regular Fergus Mac Leti.”

“Who?” Daniel asked, not understanding anything the bartender had just told him.

“Fergus Mac Leti. Don’t they teach you anything in school?”

“I don’t go to school in Ireland,” Daniel explained. “I’m from America.”

“I thought you sounded funny. And that explains why you don’t know anything. Sit down, lad,” Finnegan said, taking two chairs off of a table and sitting them across from each other. “Are you old enough for tea?”

“Yes, sir,” Daniel said.

“Well then, prepare yourself for the best tea in Killybegs… and the worst tea in the rest of Ireland… and I will tell you the tale of Fergus Mac Leti. But his story is tied to the story of the leprechauns. You do know their story, though, right?”

“I know what a leprechaun is," Daniel said. “But not where they come from.”

“Well they are from here. And they are from a long time ago. It all starts on Killybegs Hill… or Killybegs Mound as it was known then, since it hadn’t grown into a proper-size hill yet.”

MEANWHILE… 500 YEARS EARLIER NEAR KITTYBEGS MOUND

Fergus Mac Leti stepped out of his house one morning to find his fields overrun, not with weeds or with insects or with wild animals eating his crops, but with fairy folk.

Specifically, leprechauns.

They had spent most of the night dancing and partying and all sorts of other things that had destroyed most of the vegetables on his farm. Fergus was getting fed up with the magical creatures in Ireland. There were all manner of fairies and pixies and ogres and trolls and giants. But leprechauns were the worst.

They were the only ones who talked to humans, unless you counted the trolls and ogres and giants who only said simple words and phrases like, “Smash” and “Hungry” and “Mine.” And when the leprechauns talked to humans they usually tried to trick them out of something, like money or their clothes or, occasionally, their lives. And if a human was clever enough and didn’t get tricked by the leprechauns, they would create mischief of the sort that was currently ruining his farm.

It hadn’t always been like this.

The fairies and giants and leprechauns used to be spread out all over the world, where they mostly stayed to themselves. But over time, as people stopped believing in ogres and trolls and pixies and other magical creatures, they had no other choice but to move to the one place, the last place that anyone believed they existed.

Ireland.


And it was because the Irish were the only people who believed in leprechauns and other magical creatures that Ireland was the only place you could find magical creatures.  And most of them seemed to be camped out on his lawn.

Fergus knew all about the leprechauns and how sneaky they could be. Just yesterday he had taken a nap on the edge of a nearby lake when he woke up to find himself being dragged into the water by three of the little creatures. Fergus was not very big, but he was very fast and very strong and very, very clever. He quickly grabbed the three leprechauns and intended to drag them into the water when they shouted, “Let us go and we will each grant you one wish!”

“I want land,” Fergus said.

“Granted!” said the first leprechaun.

“I want long life,” Fergus said.

“Granted!” said the second leprechaun.

“And I want gold,” Said Fergus, which was the worst thing he ever could have said.

Leprechauns love three things: making shoes, dancing, and gold. But not in that order. If you rated the top one hundred things leprechauns love, gold would be in spots one through ninety-eight. The last two spots would be for dancing and shoe making.

It was the shoe-making that earned the leprechauns their gold, making shoes for the other magical creatures. And leprechauns hated to part with it. So if you ever asked a leprechaun for their gold they would have to give it to you, but you wouldn’t get it without a fight.

“Granted,” spat the last leprechaun, glaring at Fergus.

This had been one week ago. And every night since Fergus had received his lands, his long life, and his gold, leprechauns and fairies and ogres and trolls had been having a party on his lawn.

The leprechauns wanted their gold back and they weren’t going to go easily. But Fergus had an idea to get rid of them once and for all.

One afternoon, when the leprechauns and other creatures were sleeping, Fergus dragged his pot of gold to the well at the top of the Killybegs Mound, which was the tallest hill in the entire area, so everyone could see what he was doing.

The well was fairly wide, made of rocks stacked up tightly and neatly. The well was also wide, so Fergus measured it by walking around the well, just to make sure it was wide enough. There was a wooden post with an arm that hung over the center of the well.  This arm held a rope which led down to a bucket which, usually, led to water. But Killybegs Mound had been a dry well for years, although it would still work just fine for what Fergus had planned.

Removing the bucket, Fergus tied his pot of gold to the long rope and set it on the edge of the well. Then Fergus put his hands to his mouth and let out a mighty shout.

“To all magical creatures on this island!  I will give all of my gold to whichever of you makes it to the top of Killybegs Mound last!

Any of the magical creatures who had been sleeping were most likely woken up with the pot of gold was set on the edge of the well, because fairies and pixies and especially leprechauns are very sensitive to gold’s particular smell, and they can see gold, even when their eyes are closed.

They all leapt to their feet, but weren’t sure how to proceed.

“Did he say the ‘last’ person to the top of the mound gets the gold?” asked one leprechaun.

“Aye. He did, indeed,” said another.

“Well what are we supposed to do then?” asked a dwarf.

But the giants had already figured out the answer.

Scooping up ALL of the magical creatures who had travelled across Ireland to Killybegs Mound, the giants began throwing them down the well one by one. Once all of the magical creatures were disposed of the giants began fighting among themselves, throwing each other down the well too.

It wasn’t long before the biggest and strongest and widest giant of them all, whose name was Fahoch Usal, had wrestled all of the other giants and tossed them down the well too.

That left just Fergus and Fahoch, man versus giant, and the pot of gold still sitting on the side of the well.

Fergus didn’t run.

Fergus didn’t fight.

Fergus didn’t have any grand plans of any sort.

He simply smiled at Fahoch, and pushed the pot of gold into the well.

Fahoch, of course, with no other option, jumped in head first after it.

The thing about giants is that they are extremely heavy. So when Fahoch jumped into the well he pushed all of the other giants below him, who in turn pushed all of the trolls in front of them who, in turn, pushed the ogres who pushed the dwarves who pushed the elves and the leprechauns and the fairies and the pixies further and further down the well until they eventually popped up on the other side of the planet, much too far to ever return to Ireland.

Fahoch’s feet blocked the entire well, making it so that the fairy folk could never return.

And that is how Fergus Mac Leti had banished the magical creatures from Ireland.

At least… for a while.

MEANWHILE… IN PRESENT-DAY IRELAND

When Daniel left Finnegan’s Pub he felt a light sprinkle of rain and decided to head home, since it was going to take a while and he didn’t want to get all wet.

It was nighttime, but the clouds had parted and an almost full moon was shining down brightly on the land.

Daniel looked up at the moon and saw it, hovering, in front of Killybegs Hill. And there, on top of the hill, was a man looking down the well.

That must be my grandfather! Daniel thought to himself, setting off for the hill.

Daniel had barely made it to the top when the kind old gentleman looking down the well turned around and saw him.

“Oh, you scared me!” said the man to Daniel. I thought you were a leprechaun sneaking up behind me to push me down the well.”

“I thought Fahoch Usal was blocking the well?” Daniel said.

The old man rubbed his short grey beard slowly, considering Daniel.

“The giant is nothing but bones now, so there are lots of small bits where a leprechaun can sneak through. Their powers are weak underground, but they’re stronger after it rains… and especially if there is a rainbow. That’s where they keep their gold.”

“So it's gold you're after is it?” Daniel asked.

“No,” his grandfather said. “Not any more. Now I’m just trying to save Ireland.”

Daniel put out his hand. “My name is Daniel and I am your grands—”

“Aaaah!” Daniel’s grandfather shouted, looking up at the moon. “It’s a moonbow!”

“A what?” Daniel asked. ll he saw was a white glow around the moon. It was pretty, but didn’t seem like anything to get terribly excited about.

“A moonbow! It’s like a rainbow, only at night. Very, very rare. That is where their pot of gold will be. If any are coming through, that’s where I’ll find them!” he shouted, running off into the far fields towards the end of the moonbow.

PART TWO

In which Daniel meets his grandfather, a man builds an enormous pair of glasses and then gets swept out to sea in a hot air balloon, a germ-cloud infects a delivery driver, we learn about hurling and road bowling, and a leprechaun king awakens from a long slumber, which is a fancy way of saying sleep.

IN BREWER, MAINE…

Brewer, Maine was a MUCH smaller town than Bangor, Maine, although Bangor, Maine was a pretty small town in its own right. The tiny town of Brewer and the much larger town of Bangor were separated by the Penobscot River, with three bridges connecting the two towns.

Even with the bridges it was often difficult to get people from Bangor to come to Brewer to go shopping, even if it was for things they needed, like eyeglasses.

Bill Swanson stood outside his store, Eyeglass Emporium, looking up at his latest idea to bring in business. He had built a huge pair of eyeglasses on top of the building, looking out over the Penobscot River towards Bangor. He had built the massive eyewear a week ago but still no customers had come.

As Bill looked up at his eyeglasses wondering if he should maybe add flashing lights, a police car pulled up.

“Are you the owner?” asked the policeman.

“Yes, sir!” said Bill. Do you need some glasses?

“No,” said the policeman. “I need to write you a ticket.”

“What for?” asked Bill.

“Hanging a sign without a permit. You need to get approval to put signs up on buildings, especially when the sign is a huge pair of ugly eyeglasses.”

Bill looked up at his sign. It was a bit ugly, if only because Bill had tried making a pair of actual glasses, ten feet tall and thirty feet wide, which was roughly the size of a tractor trailer. He had even put real lenses in the glasses.

The policeman pulled out his ticket book and began writing.

“But people need to be able to see my store from Bangor., Bill said.

“If they need glasses,” the policeman said, “Then they aren’t going to be able to see your sign from anywhere.”

Bill guessed that the policeman had a point.

“Is there any way, officer, I can get you to not give me a ticket?”

The policeman stopped writing and looked up at the black frames and shiny glass lenses.

“I suppose,” the policeman said. “If you can have this sign down by the time I get back from lunch, I won’t write you a ticket.”

Bill thanked the officer, who drove away toward a nearby diner for lunch. The officer had given Bill a great idea. If people had bad eyesight and couldn’t see his sign then he would bring his sign to them!

Bill ran across the street to a store called Beth’s Balloons.

By the time the policeman left the diner and was getting back into his car to write Bill a ticket, he saw a large shadow pass overhead. Looking up in the sky the policeman witnessed a massive pair of black eyeglasses floating over his car… hanging from a huge rope… attached to a huge hot air balloon!

“Thanks, officer!” Bill Swanson shouted from the balloon’s basket as he drifted by. “This was a great idea! Now everyone in Bangor will know about my glasses.”

“I don’t think so!” shouted the officer up to the balloon.

“Why not?” Bill asked as he drifted over the diner and off into the distance.

“Because,” the policeman replied. “Bangor is the other way!”

The officer was pointing west while Bill and his balloon and his eyeglasses were clearly drifting in the opposite direction, carried along by the wind and the clouds.

He was drifting sort of north and sort of east, and the only things in that direction were more of Maine and then, far away, Canada.

Bill wasn’t sure how long his balloon was going to stay afloat since he had just bought it and didn’t bother to take any classes or read any books on how to fly hot air balloons. He just assumed it would fly out over Bangor, although now that idea seemed fairly silly, assuming a balloon would go where you wanted it to go with no regard for wind patterns.

So Maine and Canada were his two options for places to land. Unless, of course, the balloon decided to go a bit further, and land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Bill didn’t like the thought of landing in the ocean since he didn’t know how to swim. He just hoped the balloon would land soon, or land much, much later, on some other piece of land in the Atlantic. He tried to think of what else was out there. If he did make it all the way across the ocean he tried to think of what country he would come to first.

The answer, of course, was Ireland.

MEANWHILE… IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Chip Johnson was just putting on his jacket and getting ready to leave his office at the Center for Disease Control when an alarm went off in the building.

Chip had heard alarms before. He had heard the microwave alarm going off when someone’s lunch burrito was finished being warmed up. He had heard the smoke detector alarm going off when someone had left their lunch burrito warming up in the microwave for too long and it had exploded (the burrito, not the microwave). And he had even heard the fire alarm going off when someone had left their lunch burrito in the microwave for waaaaay to long, setting off a fire.

But this alarm was different. It sounded… worse.
    “
Gus!” Chip shouted.

A teenager from the mail room came running around the corner, food smeared all over his face and a half-eaten burrito in his hand.

“Yes, Mr. Johnson?” Gus replied through a mouthful of food.

“Did you leave your burrito in the microwave again?”

“No sir!” Gus said, proudly, little bits of meat and beans flying out of his mouth as he talked.

“Then what is that alarm?” Chip asked, more to himself than to Gus, both of them looking up at the red flashing lights on the ceiling. He was surprised when Gus answered.

“That’s the Code Red alarm.”

“What’s a Code Red alarm?” Chip asked. He had worked at the Center for Disease Control for years and had worked on some of the worst bacteria, viruses and plagues known to the world. In all that time he had never heard of a “Code Red”.

But, apparently, Gus had.

“You know how there are weather stations around the country that sample the air?”

“Yes,” Chip said.

“And you know how they measure the air quality, like the humidity, air pressure, acidity, and stuff like that?”

“Yes,” Chip said.

“And you know how there are sensors for things like smog and smoke and pollution and things like that?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes!” Chip said, the alarm starting to hurt his ears.

“Well, there are also sensors for things like germs and viruses and plagues.”

“Fine,” Chip shouted over the alarm. “But what does this have to do with a Code Red?”

A Code Red means that the sensors have detected something that the computer couldn’t find a match for in our database.”

“And?” Chip asked.

“There is a super-virus out there, in the air, worse than anything we have ever seen before. And the alarm means that we don’t have a vaccine.”

Chip knew that it took months to develop new a new vaccine, and many more months after that to make enough to stop a large-scale virus. And if this was the worst thing that they had ever seen, it looked like he was going to have to cancel his vacation. People would be getting sick all over the world.

“Can you turn off this alarm?” Chip asked Gus.

“Yes, sir.”

“And can you heat me up a burrito?  It’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes, sir!” Gus replied.

MEANWHILE… ON THE KILLYBEGS/TYNAN BORDER

The next morning Daniel’s grandmother sent him to their family store to get some eggs. The store, she had told him, was closer than Finnegan’s pub, only down the road to the right.

A few minutes later he saw two stores on opposite sides of the road.  On one side was “Pantsback’s Family Grocery”, and then there was a large white barrier set up across the road with a guard shack in the middle. A man was snoring loudly inside. On the other side of the road, just past the barrier, was “McMartin’s Family Store”.

That must be Molly and Martin’s family! Daniel thought to himself, hoping he would see his friends soon. He decided to just peek into the McMartin’s store to see if they were there.

He walked up to the guard shack and waited, then cleared his throat, then knocked. But the guard did not wake up. The name on his uniform said Dermot. Daniel tried calling his name as well, but no luck. So Daniel simply walked the few feet over to the McMartin’s store.

When he opened the door a tiny bell tinkled over the entrance.

“Hello!” said a kind woman as she came out from behind the cash register. “What can I help you with today?

She was smiling brightly and Daniel thought she seemed very nice. She seemed so nice, in fact, that it took a second before he realized that he had already met her, although when he had she hadn’t been very nice at all. This woman was Molly and Martin’s grandmother.

“I was hoping to see Molly and Martin.”

Her smile faded and turned into a very sour sneer.

“Get out. No Pantsback is allowed in this store! Or in this part of town, or even this country!”

Daniel wasn’t sure what was going on but the woman seemed pretty mad, so Daniel turned to leave. Over the door he saw a sign written on a piece of wood that read, No Pantsback's Allowed!

Daniel crossed back over the border, past the sleeping guard, and stepped into Pantsback’s Family Grocery.

A bell, identical to the one in McMartin’s Family Store, tinkled over the door when Daniel entered.

“Hello!” said a kind man behind the cash register, reading the sports section of the newspaper. “What can I help you with today?” He put down the paper and smiled brightly. Daniel thought he looked familiar. Very familiar.

“Aren’t you Finnegan… from Finnegan’s pub… from last night?” Daniel asked.

“The one and only."

“And you work here too?”

“It’s my family’s store.”

“It’s MY family’s store," Daniel said. “My last name is Pantsback.”

“So is mine.” Finnegan replied.

“I thought it was Finnegan.”

“That’s my first name. Finnegan Pantsback. I’m your uncle.”

Daniel wondered why the man hadn’t properly introduced himself the night before, but people seemed to behave a little differently in Ireland than what he was used to in America.

“Had a rough time at McMartin’s, did ya’?” Finnegan continued.

“Yes. I know you told me about the history of the Pantsback’s and the McMartin’s, but it seems a bit silly to take it so seriously. I’m not even from here.”

“We don’t get a lot of television channels here in this part of Ireland so it’s sort of our entertainment,” Finnegan explained. “Speaking of entertainment, it looks like the weather’s clearing up! What say we close the shop and catch a bit of hurling?”

Daniel didn’t know what hurling was, but he did know what the weather was and it certainly wasn’t clearing. The clouds had gone from dark purple to a medium gray, but he would hardly call that “clearing up”.

“What about your customers?” Daniel asked.

“What customers?” Finnegan replied, spreading his arms out to the empty store. “I can open the store any time. But hurling… ahhh… each match is different and each only happens once. If you miss it, you might miss something great!

Finnegan led Daniel out of the front of the store, the tiny bell tinkling, flipping a sign that read, “Back in a While”. Then he flipped another, smaller sign that read, No McMartin’s Allowed.

Daniel heard another tinkling further away and saw the grandmother at McMartin’s Family Store closing up her shop as well. She turned and glared at Daniel and Finnegan. Finnegan, for his part, ignored her.

They walked down the middle of the road to the guard shack and turned left, down a dirt path. The path wound behind some trees and there, not far from the store, was a large field with lines on it. A big white line divided the field in half.  Two teams were warming up with big flat bats and balls.

“What’s this?” Daniel asked.

“This, my boy, is hurling! It’s been played for over three thousand years, you know.”

“How is it played?”

“It’s all rather simple, really. There’s the field and goals, of course. There are fifteen players on a side. The object of the game is to use the wooden stick, called a ‘Hurley’, to hit a ball, called a ‘Sliotar’, between the other team’s goalposts. If you get the ball over the crossbar it’s one point. If you get it into the net, which is guarded by a goalkeeper, it’s three points. You can carry the ball, but no more than four steps, unless you want to kick or slap the ball to pass it, although sometimes it makes more sense to balance the sliotar on the hurley and just go for it until the ball falls off, gets knocked off, or you hit the ball into the upper or lower goal.”

“That is simple,” Daniel said, sarcastically, which is a fancy way of saying that you didn’t think something was simple at all.

“Told you. Let’s have a seat,” Finnegan said, motioning Daniel to sit on some nearby benches. “The match is about to start.”

A referee jogged out to the middle of the field and blew a whistle. Both teams gathered, although neither crossed the large center line.

“Does the center line mean anything?” Daniel asked. “Besides just dividing the field in half?”

“That line is the center line AND it’s the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. You’re not supposed so cross borders without a passport, which makes this game even more fun because a few of the players don’t even have passports so they have to stay on their own sides.”

“That referee is the man who was sleeping in the guard shack,” Daniel said.

“Dermot McGillicutty. He’s a terrible guard but he’s a pretty decent referee. He’s from Northern Ireland so he tends to favor his own side a bit, but what referee doesn’t?”

The two teams stood ready for the start of the game. The blue team’s jerseys had the name “Killybegs Krushers” and the yellow team jersey’s had the name “Tynan Titans”.

The referee blew the whistle, both teams dropped their sticks, and everyone started wrestling each other to the ground, fighting.

“Is this part of the game?” Daniel asked.

“Not really,” Finnegan said. “Although this is how it usually goes with these two teams.”

“Why?”

“Because it's Ireland versus Northern Ireland. It’s a microcosm of a much larger conflict being played out on a small sports field.”

“What’s a microcosm?” Daniel asked.

“It’s a fancy way of saying that something very big has been shrunk down very small.”

To Daniel, the fighting didn’t look very small.  It looked very big and very unpleasant but more than anything, it looked very confusing.

MEANWHILE… IN LONDON, ENGLAND

Reginald Smithwick checked his green tie to make sure it was straight. It was his first day at his new job and he wanted to make a good impression. He had almost been late because of the London morning traffic, which was quite heavy at times since there were so many people in London and so few places to fit all of their cars.

Reginald walked through the front door of the Royal Records Building and went inside, where a stern-looking woman was waiting for him.

“You’re almost late.”

“Yes… but I’m not actually later. Traffic was—”

“No excuses. Next time, be more early,” she said, cutting him off.

“Yes. I will—’

“This way,” she barked, leading him into a small square room with wooden filed cabinets that lined each of the walls from the floor to the ceiling. Papers were sticking out of drawers, sitting on the large table in the middle of the room, or on the floor. There were even a few, Reginald noticed, stuck to the blades of the ceiling fan.

The woman made a clucking noise in response to the filthy state of the room, but Reginald gazed lovingly at the mess, his eyes full of wonder.

Reginald loved four things in life:
#1: Organizing Messes
#2: Filing Papers
#3: Learning New Things
#4: Numbered Lists

"This is your new office,” the woman barked. “Your job is to manage all of these… documents.”

“What are they?” Reginald asked.

“These are all of the treaties and terms and laws and contracts and decrees between England and Ireland going back four hundred years.”

“There are a LOT of documents here,” Reginald noted.

“Exactly. The government of England has no idea where are at with Ireland. We might have a treaty. We might be at war. Or we might owe them money. Or worse, they might owe US money!” She let out a sound that, to Reginald, sounded like a quick dog bark. He supposed that was her way of laughing. “Anyway, it’s your job to sort it out and make sense of it all.”

Reginald was about to thank her, and possibly hug her, for actually paying him to do something that he would have done for free. But he didn’t. The woman simply turned and left the room, and left Reginald alone with thousands of pieces of paper, and dozens of beautiful file cabinets to arrange them in.

MEANWHILE… ON A ROAD NEAR KILLYBEGS HILL

Eamon O’Toole was a busy man.

A very busy man.

A very, very busy man.

Eamon was a delivery driver and he had a very long route, delivering logs of dried peat to families all over Killybegs and beyond. It had been a cold and wet week, which meant that people wanted more peat to burn in their stoves and fireplaces. Actually, it was almost always cold and wet in Ireland which is why Eamon found that he was always so busy, racing between the peat bog and various homes in his truck all day long.

The problem was that Eamon didn’t really like peat. It smelled a bit odd and it was flammable, which was a fancy way of saying that it could catch on fire, which was great in your fireplace but terrible if it happened in the back of your truck.

What Eamon really wanted to do in life was to be a florist, working in a shop with beautiful, scented flowers all day. He loved flowers of all kinds and someday, when he had more time, he was going to start a flower garden in his tiny back yard. But for now he delivered peat.  Stinky, catch-on-fire-at-any-minute peat.

While he was driving, Eamon was listening to a man on the radio talking about the need to slow down in life and take in the important things; the sights, the sounds, the smells. In fact, he said something very meaningful to Eamon. The man said, “You have to stop and smell the roses every now and then,” which was a fancy way of saying that sometimes you needed to stop moving so fast in order to see the beauty in life all around you.

So Eamon did just that.

Pulling his delivery truck over to the side of the road Eamon scanned the gray and green and wet landscape. It took a moment but something red finally caught his eye. There, by the side of the road, was a single, red rose.

Eamon turned off the van and walked up to the beautiful, delicate, slender flower.

He lowered his head, placing his nose over the center of the folded petals and breathed in through his nose, taking in the fragrance of the rose, which is a fancy way of saying that he smelled it.

“Aaahhh,” he breathed. It was a beautiful flower. It was a beautiful day.

And that is a beautiful cloud, he thought to himself as a white, puffy cloud drifted overhead. Breathing in deeply he tried to stop and smell the clouds, too, which was silly because there is no such saying as, “stop and smell the clouds”… and for good reason.

This particular cloud was full of germs.

Cliff Coopersmith Toilet-Water-Microwave-Hand Germs to be exact.

And when Eamon breathed in the cloud, the germs went up his nose, down his throat and throughout his body.

“Aaachooo!” Eamon sneezed as his body tried to get rid of the germs. But it was no hope. here were too many of them. Still, his body had to try, so it kept sneezing and sneezing.

In fact, he sneezed so much on his way back to the delivery truck that he started to feel dizzy, and with one mighty sneeze he passed out and hit his head on the ground, knocking out a tooth.

His gold tooth.

MEANWHILE… IN GREECE

When Niko Popadopolous’s mother blew on the flaming cheese it didn’t go out at first. In fact, blowing on it actually made it rise higher. But, luckily, a few seconds later the flame burned itself out, leaving behind a delicious, melted, fried cheese.

And when his mother shouted, “Opa!” Niko knew he had the answer for how to get more customers to come to his restaurants. And that answer had to do with goats. Lots and lots of goats.

Goat milk was the key ingredient in feta cheese, which was the best kind of cheese for saganaki, the flaming dish his mother had eaten. And Niko’s idea, with some help from his American cousin Guy, was to create the biggest saganaki in the world!

He would make a block of cheese a big as his restaurant, cover it in Ouzo, which was a fancy, and flammable Greek drink, and then he would set the entire thing on fire!

Niko had brought in hundreds of goats from nearby islands for their milk so he could make the cheese. His mother was milking them while Niko was on the phone with the offices of the Guinness Book of World Records.

“Have I got a world record for you!” Niko told them, as he explained his idea.

The people at the Guinness Book of World Records were definitely interested for many reasons.

First, it would most likely be the biggest flaming cheese in the history of the world.

Second, they could take a nice trip to the island of Thassos, which would count as work but would really be more like a vacation.

Third, because it meant they could eat delicious flaming cheese for free.

MEANWHILE… IN IRELAND

Daniel was walking home with the eggs from the family store when he came to a curve in the road. He couldn’t quite see beyond the curve and the trees, but he heard a lot of shouting as a cannonball rolled towards Daniel, making him jump to avoid it, almost causing him to drop the eggs!

A moment later a group of men came jogging around the curve towards.

“Where did it go?” asked one of the men as he jogged past Daniel

"Did you see the bullet?” asked another.

“Are you an idjit? asked a third. “Did you see where it went or not?”

Daniel wasn’t sure what they meant by “bullet” but he assumed they meant the cannonball so he pointed back down the road.

“Yeah!” cheered the men, running after it. One man, an older, gray-haired gentleman dressed in a long shirt and vest with a cap on his head, stayed behind. Daniel couldn’t tell if he was growing a beard or just hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

Are you lost, son?” the man asked.

“No, sir.” Daniel said. “I’m just bringing some eggs to my grandmother.”

“Your accent,” the man said.  “Are you American?”

“I am.”

“And your name is Daniel?”

“It is.”

“Then that must make you my grandson!” the old man said. “Pleased to meet you, finally.”

The man shook Daniel’s hand, almost knocking the eggs out again.

“What is all of that with the metal ball?” Daniel asked.

“Road bowling!” his grandfather said. “Only the greatest sport in the world, right in front of hurling. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Daniel’s grandfather walked toward the crowd of men, who were now looking in the bushes.

“The ball is made of iron and steel and it’s called a “bowl”, or a “bullet”. It weighs about point eight kilograms and is about eighteen centimeters around.”

“I don’t know metrics yet,” Daniel said. We’re just starting to learn them in school.”

“Just starting to learn metrics? I think what you’re learning is how to fit metrics into the very bad way of measuring that you use in America. How many fingers do you have?”

“Ten,” Daniel replied.

“And how many toes?”

“Ten.”

“See? You’ve been using metrics your whole life! All metrics are just different ways of counting to ten. You just move the decimal point up or down the scale if you’re talking bigger numbers or smaller.”

“I get the ten part,” Daniel explained. “It’s the conversions I have a problem with.”

Daniel’s grandfather thought about this for a moment and then said, “King Henry Doesn’t Usually Drink Chocolate Milk.”

“What?”

“King Henry Doesn’t Usually Drink Chocolate Milk. It’s a way to remember the metric scale. Kilo, Hecta, Deka, Unit, Deci, Centi, and Milli. So if you’re talking about grams, meaning weight, the scale from the top down goes Kilo-gram, Hecta-gram and so on, down to milligram. For meters the scale from the bottom is milli-meter, centi-meter, deci-meter, meter, and up. Start with the unit and if you’re going up, add a zero to the end of the number for each place. If you’re going down, add a point and a zero for each place you’re going down. Every number on the scale is either ten times bigger, or ten times smaller than the other.”

“So,” Daniel said. “If something is a meter long, then it is ten decimeters, or a hundred centimeters, or a thousand millimeters?”

“Exactly!”

“And if something is one milliliter, it is point one centiliter, point zero one deciliter, and point zero zero one liter?”

"Yes!  And the best part is that everything converts within all that too. One milliliter of water, which is volume, equals one cubic centimeter, which is area, which equals one gram, being the weight of one cubic centimeter of water!”

“Found it!” said one of the men on the side of the road. Another gentleman put a mark on the road where the ball had gone out of bounds.

Daniel’s grandfather took the bullet, ran a few steps, and threw the ball, underhand, down the road. The men cheered and went racing after it.

“There are two or more players, or teams in a match. The one with the fewest shots to the finish line wins. If the bullet goes off the road a chalk line is made where it went out and the next throw is from there.”

“What if there’s a tie?” Daniel asked.

“Then it comes down to who has thrown the farthest past the finish line. Tricky stuff, road bowling, since the course is miles long with lots of twists and turns. If you’re interested,” his grandfather said, “I could use a good Road Shower.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a caddy in golf. Someone to race up ahead, then come back and let me know the best path the ball should take.”

Daniel agreed and ran off down the road after the bullet.

MEANWHILE… AT THE BOTTOM OF KILLYBEGS HILL

When Eamon the peat delivery driver woke up, he was face-down on the ground with a very sore mouth. And a scratchy throat.  And watering eyes. And a runny nose. It was as if all at once he had taken on the worst cold in the world.

Climbing back into his truck he drove off to finish his deliveries for the day so he could go home, drink some hot tea, then climb into bed and get some sleep.

His face was sore, but mostly it was numb from when he had fallen down. It was so numb, in fact, that he didn’t realize his gold tooth was missing, left behind on the side of the road, at the base of Killybegs Hill.

MEANWHILE… AT THE TOP OF KILLYBEGS HILL

When Eamon’s gold tooth fell on the ground at the bottom of Killybegs Hill, an eyelid popped open. Not Eamon’s eyelid. It was an eyelid that belonged to a leprechaun king who had been asleep inside the well at the top of Killybegs Hill, for a long, long time.

When a leprechaun is resting they can often sleep for days or even years, coming out only for rainbows, moonbows, and certain magical times.   Declan Dragoon was just such a leprechaun, having slept for almost five hundred years underneath Killybegs Mound, or Killybegs Hill as it was now called.

When he had been tricked into the well and ogres and trolls and giant after giant had jumped down it blocking his way out, Declan decided that he would make his way back up and out of the well to get his revenge on the Pantsback's and on the world of man for tricking him.

If he was awake now it must mean that there was a rainbow... or a moonbow… or that gold was nearby.

From where he was napping, in the rib bone of Fahoch Usal, the skeleton of the last giant who had jumped down the well, Declan could smell gold. Not much, but enough to wake him from his slumber.

Climbing up the giant’s rib cage like a ladder, then up his spine, and then shimmying up the shin bones, Declan was soon at the top of the well. The giant’s feet were still blocking the well entrance but enough time had passed that there was a very tiny gap through which a very tiny leprechaun could slip through.

And for the first time in five hundred years that is just what Declan Dragoon did.

MEANWHILE… IN NEW ZEALAND

An antipode is a fancy word that means a point on the opposite side of the planet. So if you stuck a pin into one town or country, where it comes out on the other side of the Earth would be its antipode. This is important to know because of how magical creatures travel across the world.

They travel through wells. And all wells are antipodes.

See? It’s that simple.

Only it’s not.

Because magic is tricky. Very tricky. Which is probably why you aren’t very good at any kind of magic other than card tricks or vanishing coins.

Real magic… fairy magic… is based on the energy of the planet. So on each planet magic works just a little bit differently. But on THIS planet, it works as follows:

    1. You have to believe in magic.  Not hope, not wish… but believe.
    2. Anything is possible if you believe that it has already happened in the future.
    3. Magic works best outdoors and under full moons and rainbows.
    4. Once a wish is made real (or a spell or a charm or a curse) it is very hard to make it unreal.
    5. A well in one location will connect you to its closest antipode.
    6. Food always tastes better if someone else makes it.

And that’s it. Leprechauns understood these rules better than almost any other magical creature, which is why they were among the most magical creatures on the planet. At least, they were the most magical creatures in one specific part of the planet.

New Zealand.

New Zealand is the antipode of Ireland and, as such, when the fairies and pixies and gnomes and dwarves and trolls and giants all jumped down the well on Killybegs Mound they mostly wound up in New Zealand. And with a giant stuck in the entrance to the well blocking their way back they were stuck on the other side of the planet with no way home.

Until now.

When Declan Dragoon made his way past the giant’s skeleton and up through the well, magical rule number four happened (see above). When Declan stepped out onto Killybegs Hill it became a reality, which meant that all of the other magical creatures who were awake knew they could come home too.

But many more of his magical brothers and sisters were sleeping. So Declan jumped down the well with the golden tooth, all the way to New Zealand, waking magical creatures as he went.

It would take some time, but they were coming. And they were not happy. For as nice as New Zealand is, it was not home. And when they got home they were going to make the humans pay for tricking the magical creatures down the well all those years ago.

MEANWHILE… IN IRELAND

Daniel’s grandfather had won the Road Bowling match and was in great spirits. He had even showed Daniel how to road bowl using the eggs from the store he was carrying, which meant that now they had to get more eggs for his grandmother.

As they were walking back to the family store Daniel decided to ask the question that had been bothering him since the night before.

“Did you find what you were looking for, at the end of the moonbow?” Daniel asked.

His grandfather looked at Daniel suspiciously, as if wondering how much to tell him. After a moment his concerned expression relaxed, and he put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder.

“No, and it’s a good thing, too. That means they haven’t come back.”

“Who hasn’t come back?”

“Why, the leprechauns, of course. A lot of people think they are cuddly and kind but they are not. If they come back they’re bringing their magical friends with them and Ireland, and the world, will be plunged into chaos again. It’s my job to stop them.”

“Why?” Daniel asked.

“Why will the world be plunged into chaos or why is it my job to stop them?”

“Both.”

“You ask a lot of questions,” his grandfather said.

“Do I?” Daniel asked, smiling. His grandfather smiled too.

“Chaos, because magical creatures don’t like non-magical creatures. Especially since the non-magical creatures are the ones who banished them. And it’s my job because I’m the only one left who believes, which means I’m the only one who can see them.”

“Is that all it takes? You have to believe in order to see?”

“That’s the trick to life, Daniel. Your entire existence in this world is tied to an infinite number of dimensions where every single possibility is happening. What you ‘experience’ is what you expect to see. Expect as much as you can out of life. Believe.”

Daniel thought about this for a while as they rounded a turn and saw the family store in the distance.

“So leprechauns are real, just not for anyone else, because you’re the only person who believes in them?”

“More or less,"

“So if they don’t exist for anyone else how can they bother anyone else?”

“Just because something doesn’t exist in your reality today doesn’t mean it won’t exist tomorrow. Things ‘happen’ to you all the time that you don’t expect or think about, don’t they?”

“I suppose.”

“And things happen in your life that are the result of other things happening in other people’s lives, even though you’ve never met them or thought about them?”

“I suppose that too.”

“That’s how the world works. Infinite dimensions, each experienced in a different way, with thoughts and beliefs and realities all stacked up and mixed together. Your life is navigating and creating through it all. So start expecting what you want out of life and you’re much more likely to get it.”

“So if I expect to see leprechauns I will?” Daniel asked.

“Hopefully not, but you have a better chance. They’ll most likely be hiding, though, which will make it more difficult, whether you believe or not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The trick to finding something, dear Daniel, is NOT to be looking for it at all.”

Daniel was about to ask another question when they came to their family store, and the guard shack in the middle of the road.

“Morning Dermot,” his grandfather said to the guard.

Dermot McGillicutty snuffed in through his nose, looking suspiciously at Daniel’s grandfather.

“I can’t let you by without a passport," Dermot said, standing straight, adjusting his uniform, and trying to look as official as possible.

“We’re not going by. We’re going to our family store, right here,” Daniel’s grandfather said, pointing to Pantsback’s Family Grocery.

“Huh,” said Dermot, who had clearly been looking to do something official. As Daniel and his grandfather approached their family store Dermot raced in front of them. “Did you find any leprechauns out there today, Mr. Pantsback?” he asked, snidely, which is a fancy way of saying he was intentionally being mean.

“Not today,” Daniel’s grandfather said.

Dermot snorted and looked at Daniel. “Did you know your grandfather is the biggest loon in all of Ireland?”

“A loon is a kind of bird," Daniel said. “Do you think my grandfather is a bird?”

The guard looked confused for a moment, and then realized that he was being made fun of.

“I mean,” he corrected, “That your grandfather is loon-eeeee. Looney.”

“Have you ever seen a leprechaun?” Daniel asked Dermot.

“Of course not!” Dermot said.

“Then on behalf of my grandfather, you’re welcome.”

And together, Daniel and his grandfather walked into Pantsback’s Family Grocery and purchased more eggs for a nice, late breakfast.

MEANWHILE… ON THE IRELAND/NORTHERN IRELAND BORDER

Dermot McGillicutty stomped back to his guard shack after having been made fun of by Mr. Pantsback and a young boy, most likely his grandson and most likely from America judging by his accent. Dermot, who was from Northern Ireland, was generally suspicious of regular Irish folk and especially suspicious of Americans, but he was even more suspicious of those who made fun of him, which tended to happen a lot, which was why he had built the guard shack in the first place.

Dermot hadn’t always been a border crossing guard. In fact, he used to own a chicken farm, selling the eggs to both Pantsback’s Family Grocery and McMartin’s Family Store. But Dermot McGillicutty was a rude man who didn’t really like himself very much and rather than working on that he looked for any reason at all to dislike other people more. This often included making up thoughts and ideas in his head about other people that weren’t really true in order to make it true for him.

Over time this led to Dermot disliking most people and generally becoming even ruder than he normally was. He became so rude that one day his chickens all got together and decided to leave the farm and take their chances in the wild among the foxes and the hounds rather than put up with another day of Dermot flinging chicken feed at them or grabbing their eggs out from underneath them.

Alone on his chicken-less farm Dermot sat on a feed bucket and thought about his life and how he might make it better. Sadly, he didn’t think about how he could become a better person, but rather he thought about how he could go on being rude and disliking the world around him even more, where people would have to put up with it.

And that’s when he settled on the idea of working for the government.

Unfortunately, even with their low standards the government did not have a position for a chicken farmer who specifically wanted to be rude to people, so Dermot decided to take matters into his owns hands.

Constructing a guard shack out of leftover wood from the chicken coop that had started falling down in his back yard, Dermot then went to a second-hand store and purchased a guard uniform, sewing his name into the upper right pocket on the shirt so it looked official.

The funny thing about something that looks official, like a guard shack or a uniform, is that people ask very few questions, assuming they are for real.  If anyone had asked Dermot for any sort of document or identification from the government proving he was supposed to be there he would not have been able to provide it, but no one thought to ask. Who, really, would be silly enough to go to all the trouble of building a guard shack and pretending to be a guard if they weren’t being hired or paid to do it?  The answer, of course, was Dermot McGillicutty.

I’ll have to work on some sort of official document tomorrow, Dermot thought to himself as he sat back in his guard shack chair and closed his eyes for another nap.

MEANWHILE… ON THE ROAD TO KITTYBEGS

Daniel’s grandfather stayed behind at the family store to talk with Finnegan so Daniel walked home by himself carrying another carton of eggs.  He was happy to be walking alone, as he had so many thoughts swirling around in his head.  The fighting between the two Hurling teams, the rules of Road Bowling, leprechauns, the idea of it being as easy, or as difficult, as simply believing in something to make it real all competed for his attention.

Daniel decided to try an experiment.

He closed his eyes and thought about finding money. He considered how great it would feel to simply look and find money on the side of the road, how the money would feel in his hand, what it would look like, and how it would feel to buy something nice for his grandparents as a gift for letting him stay with them. Daniel considered that if there were an infinite number of dimensions all around him, then there would be, literally, millions of dimensions just like THIS one where he would find a dollar, or twenty dollars, or a penny. All he had to do was believe.

Opening his eyes he looked down at the road, and in the road, and in the bushes beside the road. No money.

It then occurred to him that in Ireland they didn’t use America dollars and pennies. They used a currency called the Euro, which was the same type of money used in all of Europe.

Daniel was about to close his eyes and try again when he thought he heard a slight noise from behind the bush where he had looked for the money.

Carefully, quietly, he sneaked up on the spot.

At first he didn’t see anything. At second he didn’t see anything. But then, looking straight down, he saw a tiny man with a red beard in a green suit who was sitting on the grass just below him, putting a needle and thread through the soles of one of his worn shoes.

Daniel carefully set down his eggs, but when he reached over the bushes to grab the leprechaun it wasn’t where it had been.  It was standing a few feet away, looking right at him.

“I found you!” Daniel said.

There were so many questions he wanted to ask the leprechaun. He wanted to yell for his grandfather but he was too far away. Daniel realized that not only did he believe enough to see leprechauns, but his wish to find money came true.

“You did," said the leprechaun, putting on his newly-repaired shoe.

“What is your name?” Daniel asked.

“I am Declan Dragoon, King of the Leprechauns, at your service.”

“At my service?” Daniel wondered aloud. “So, now do you have to give me all your gold?”

“I’m afraid not, my dear boy. You see, ‘at your service’, is just a figure of speech. And finding a leprechaun is not the same as catching one. And catching a leprechaun is almost impossible without magic!” The leprechaun smiled slightly, snapped his fingers, did a little dance, and disappeared.

Daniel couldn’t decide whether to take home the long-overdue eggs to his grandmother and tell her and his parents what he had found, or to go back and tell his grandfather, who would probably be the only person who would believe him.

That’s not true, Daniel thought to himself.  Molly and Martin would believe me too.

MEANWHILE… IN LONDON, ENGLAND

Reginald Smithwick had organized, arranged, and sorted all of the laws, decrees and treaties between the countries of England and Ireland.  Well, they weren’t so much “between” the two countries as they were a bunch of documents from England telling Ireland what they had to do.

It all started hundreds of years ago. England was a small island that happened to have a lot of money and a very big navy. So they sent their ships full of English people all over the planet. And each country the visited, whether it was India or America or islands in the Caribbean Sea, England took over and started ruling them. At first no one really liked the English rulers telling them what to do, but England brought order, and law, and money, and generally made things better in these countries… for a while.

In fact, England ruled so many countries that there was a saying; The Sun Never Sets on the English Jack, which is what they called their flag. This was a fancy way of saying that England ruled countries all over the world, which they did.

But like most rulers, they eventually got greedy and started charging taxes, then raising taxes, then raising them even higher, and then being very unpleasant when people couldn’t pay their taxes, until finally the countries revolted, which is a fancy way of saying that they fought back and kicked England out.

So over time England ran fewer and fewer countries until finally all that were left was England and an even smaller island a few miles away, called Ireland.

In 1609 when the Irish revolted against the English like all of the other countries before them, the English did not leave. In fact, they sent more English to the north of Ireland from lands they had appropriated, which is a fancy way of saying they had stolen it.

This was easy for the English because they were right next door and they had this huge navy and lots of soldier just sitting around since they weren’t running the rest of the world anymore, so they just sort of camped out in the north of Ireland for a long, long time. And the English people living in Ireland liked being ruled by England because that, to them, was home, even though they were living in another land.

And that was, more or less, how it went all the way up to today.

The problem was that England had an army but the Irish just had people who were angry but couldn’t fight back very well. And the more they fought back the worse England treated them, which then meant there was less money, less food, and a worse quality of life.

So every few years, after a bit of fighting, the English and the Irish signed treaties and laws and rules and agreements in order to calm things down, even though it never made the English go away or made the Irish less angry.

As far as Reginald could tell, all of the paper in the file cabinets was meaningless because it only ever addressed the small fights every few years and not the really big problem.

Once everything had been neatly organized and filed, Reginald’s boss returned.

“Well?” she asked. “Where are we with Ireland?”

Reginald held up an envelope that had just arrived on his desk that morning.

“Apparently this is the most recent document,” Reginald said, holding up the letter. He was about to tell his boss that he hadn’t had a chance to read it yet when she snatched it out of his hands and read it.

“The Treaty of McGillicutty,” she said, reading it aloud. “I’ve never heard of this before, but it looks official.”

“What does it say?” Reginald asked.

“It says that the English living in Northern Ireland are awesome and everyone outside of it who is Irish or a visiting American is suspicious and that we should close the borders and not let anyone in or out. There’s also a bit here asking for military support because of some fighting at a hurling match.”

“That doesn’t sound official," Reginald said.

“That’s not for us to decide,” his boss said. “We must do what the document says!”

And with that she marched out of the room.

MEANWHILE… AT A SECRET FAIRY LOCATION

Declan Dragoon had been repairing his shoes when a young boy had startled him. Declan hadn’t been out in the world in over fifty years so he could forgive himself for being a bit rusty when it came to hiding. It was interesting that the boy had found him at all since most people didn’t even believe in leprechauns enough to see them when they were standing in plain sight.

But this boy was different.

And there was a look about him… something familiar.

When Declan had disappeared in front of the boy he had reappeared here, standing next to the well on Killybegs Hill, greeting each of his fellow leprechauns as they hopped out of the well. He also welcomed hundreds of pixies and dwarves and elves and fairies and ogres and trolls.

There were more popping out of the well every second as Declan addressed them as one big group on the far side of Killybegs Hill, away from the houses and the road, in case anyone else might be able to see them.

“I know you have been far away, sleeping or living in New Zealand, for the five hundred years. So to you all I say, ‘Welcome Home!’”

An enormous cheer went up from the group.

Declan told the tale of the magical creatures. How they were the first to inhabit the Earth, and how many thousands of years ago non-magical creatures started to spread across the planet. And as the humans sent their ships full of people all over the planet, the humans started taking over, ruling the lands and trying to rule over the fairy folk.

At first the magical creatures didn’t like the humans telling them what to do, but the humans did bring food and comfortable furniture and gold and generally made things better in these countries… for a while.

In fact, the humans ruled so much of the planet that there was a leprechaun saying; there are so many humans that you can’t throw a stick without hitting one. And when you do throw a stick, throw it hard, which was a fancy way of saying that magical creatures didn’t much like humans and didn’t mind throwing things at them, which they did.

But like most things, bigger wasn’t always better, and the humans eventually got greedy and started taking more land than they needed, and cutting down more trees than were necessary and polluting the land and the air and the sea until finally the fairy folk revolted in the only way they knew how.  With magic.

But there was a problem.

As any magician or magical creature or person under a voodoo spell can tell you, magic has a lot to do with the power of believing in the power of magic.  And as humans grew in size and in number, they became so busy with their day to day chores of sitting in offices and watching television and playing with money that they found less and less time for magic.  This large-scale ignoring of magical creatures led to their shrinking in both size and magical power, until all that was left was a small island whose people still believed.

Ireland.

The Irish didn’t necessarily like the fairy creatures, but they understood that this was their land too and that all creatures had as much right to the world as any other. The fairy creatures, for their part, also understood that in order to keep their magic at all, they needed the Irish to keep believing in them. It wasn’t always easy, or without conflict.  But it more or less worked and even, at times, led to some pretty spectacular stories, which is something the Irish valued over office work and television shows and playing with money.

And that was, more or less, how it went all the way up to today.

The problem was that the Irish had had the island to themselves for a long time now, after all the magical creatures had been tricked down a well. This meant that people were starting to forget magic even existed, which made the magical creatures weak.

But Declan Dragoon had a plan to regain their full magic.

And all they had to do was take over the world and enslave the humans.

But first, he had a score to settle…

MEANWHILE… AT DANIEL’S GRANDPARENTS HOUSE

Daniel had taken so long in getting back to his grandmother’s house with the eggs that he found she had already made oatmeal with brown sugar and some fresh-baked bread for toasting. His parents had gone to a day spa, which was a fancy place where people spent a lot of money to relax. They wouldn’t be back until the next day so technically it should have been called and day and night spa, or just a spa leaving out the timeframe, but Daniel was too distracted to think much about it. Instead, he was telling his grandmother all about the Hurling and Road Bowling, but had decided to leave out some of the talk about leprechauns for now.

As he was finishing breakfast his uncle Finnegan entered the kitchen.

“Is there any oatmeal left for me?” he asked.

“There is,” Daniel’s grandmother said. “Just save some for your father. Is he coming along soon?”

“I don’t know,” Finnegan said. “I thought he was here with you.”

Everyone turned to look at Daniel.

“I just left him about twenty minutes ago. Right outside the family store,” Daniel explained.

“Oh well. He’ll be along," His grandmother said. “He’s always hurrying off to do one thing or another.”

Finnegan handed his mother a folded letter. To Daniel it looked like parchment, which is a fancy term for very old-looking paper. “I just found this on your front door when I came in,” Finnegan said, handing it to his mother.

Daniel ate the last of his toast as he watched his grandmother’s look change from amusement at receiving a letter, to concern, to worry, to fear.

“What is it?” Daniel asked.

“It’s a note… a ransom note. Your grandfather has been taken.”

“What?” Daniel asked. “Who would want to kidnap grandpa?”

“I don’t know,” his grandmother said, “But I think this note is for you.”

She turned the parchment around so Daniel could read it. The note was written in a beautiful, long kind of handwriting that looked even older than the paper.

The note read:

       We have your grandfather.
       Bring us our gold by tomorrow or we will throw him down the well.
       Yours truly,
       D.D.


“Who is D.D.?” his grandmother asked.

Daniel wasn’t sure how to explain all of this without sounding crazy. e wasn’t sure anyone would believe him. But he knew that he had to try and save his grandfather.

“Declan. Declan Dragoon.”

“Who is Declan Dragoon?” his grandmother asked. “And why has he taken George? And what is this gold he’s talking about?”

“I can explain,” Daniel said. “But first we’re going to need some help.”

PART THREE
In which the magical creatures return and plan their revenge,
a hot air balloon flies over Ireland, the world’s largest flaming cheese ignites,
Daniel’s friends return, and the magical creatures are tricked once again… sort of.

MEANWHILE… AT THE PANTSBACK RESIDENCE

The phone rang five times at the McMartin residence before someone picked up.

“Hello?” A kind, old woman’s voice asked.

“Hello. My name is Daniel and I was hoping to speak to Molly… or Martin, if they are avail-”

The phone line went dead. Daniel shrugged and tried the number again.

“Hello!” An angry, bitter old woman’s voice shouted.

“I was hoping to speak to Molly or Martin? I’m their friend, Daniel, from America.”

“We don’t accept calls from Pantsback's,” the woman said, hanging up.

Daniel wasn’t sure what to do. He thought about walking down the road to their house but assumed the woman, Molly and Martin’s grandmother, would most likely slam the door in his face and not let him in or them out.

After receiving the ransom note Daniel decided to try and call Molly and Martin to see if they could help. He had no idea what they could do but Molly was the smartest person he had ever met and even though Martin usually had his head buried in some sort of video game and rarely spoke more than a word or two at a time, he was often very resourceful and came in handy at just the right moment.

Now, without being able to reach them, he wasn’t sure what to do.

Daniel asked his grandmother a question. She was sitting at the kitchen table, crying, splashing tears onto the ransom note.

“Where does Grandpa keep… things?”

“What kind of things?” she asked, looking up.

“Well, he loves Hurling and Road Bowling and he certainly knows a lot about leprechauns. Is there a place he keeps… I don’t know… stuff for all that?”

“That’s all in the shed, dear. Out back.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to go find Molly and Martin first. Then we’ll get Grandpa back.”

MEANWHILE… THE MIDDLE OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

Bill Swanson had been flying over the ocean for days.

He was tired, because there wasn’t enough room in his balloon to lie down and sleep. He was hungry because he hadn’t meant to fly out over the ocean for days and days and hadn’t packed a lunch. He was scared because after three days of floating along on the wind and through the clouds and over the ocean he wasn’t sure if he’d ever see land again. But he did see land again. In fact, it was a beautiful, large, green island!

I wonder where I am, he thought to himself, not really caring much one way or the other since he was mostly just interested in getting down first and getting back home second.

He found his answer a few moments later, as he drifted over an airport with a big wooden sign that read, “Welcome to Ireland!”

The balloon was heading for a nearby hill next to the airport and realized that if he just stayed on this course he would hit the hill and be able to get out of the balloon.  But one of the funny things about balloons is that you are sort of at the mercy of the wind. And as any good weatherman or weatherwoman can tell you, you can’t really control which way the wind blows.

To be fair, the wind was blowing towards the hill, but it was the large jet that flew right past Bill’s balloon as it was taking off that created its own wind, which hit the balloon and blew him off course, away from the nearby hill and north, towards another hill. It was so far away he could barely make it out. He hadn’t brought a map so he had no idea what that hill was, but he knew he would be there in another few hours.

If he had brought a map he would have known that the name of that particular spot of raised land was Killybegs Hill.

MEANWHILE… IN THE GUARD SHACK

Dermot McGillicutty was sitting in his guard shack trying to unzip a sandwich bag and was having quite a bit of difficulty. This bag didn’t have just one of those lines that sealed the sandwich inside, but two, which made it twice as hard to open.

Dermot had hit his hands so many times with a hammer while putting together the guard shack from the fallen down parts of his old chicken coop that he didn’t really have much feeling in his fingers anymore. This made it difficult to peel apart the tiny, plastic flaps to get at the sandwich and it made it even hard to hold the sandwich bag while trying to open it.

Which is how the sandwich fell on the floor.

As Dermot stopped to pick up his sandwich he pushed a button on his cellphone and started an app called, “The Five Second Rule”. It basically started a five-second timer, within which time you needed to pick up your food. If the buzzer went off and you hadn’t collected whatever food you had dropped, you weren’t supposed to eat it because of all the germs and bacteria it would collect from sitting on the floor.

Dermot bent over and raced to collect the two bread slices which were both stuck to the floor. He peeled them up leaving half of the peanut butter on one slice of bread and half of the jelly on the other. There were two sandwich-sized splotches on the floor.  He slapped the two halves of bread together just as the timer was going off.

“Yes!” Dermot shouted in triumph, stuffing a bite into his mouth.

The truth was that you really shouldn’t eat any food, regardless of how little time it has spent on the floor because of all the nastiness and filth that is generally on the bottom of your shoes, which then gets on the floor, which then gets on your food the instant it lands on the ground. But Dermot didn’t know that.  In truth, there were a lot of things that Dermot didn’t know. But he didn’t know that either, and acted as if he knew everything.

What he also didn’t know was that while he was bent over and picking up the halves of his sandwich, a small boy walked by his guard shack without stopping.  Dermot saw him, though, as he took a bite of his floor sandwich and the boy crossed from Killybegs into Tynan.

“Huy!” Dermot shouted.  “Yoocncrisswootapapoot.”

“What?” the boy asked.

“Yoocncrisswootapapoot!”

“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “I don’t understand. I think you have something in your mouth.”

Dermot finished chewing his sandwich and swallowed..

“I said,” Dermot said, “You can’t cross without a passport!”

The boy walked the few steps back to the guard shack.

“Sorry, Sir. I looked but didn’t see anyone in there,” the boy said, handing over his passport.

“Well then you should have waited.”

Dermot could feel his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth and wanted a drink. He really didn’t have time for a child who didn’t know the rules.

“Entrance to Northern Ireland is denied.” Dermot said, handing back the passport and walking back to his shack.

“But why?” the boy asked him.

“I don’t need a reason. I’m the guard and you’re not.”

“But I’m just going to the McMartin’s house. It’s right over there. It’s a hundred yards away.” Then the boy corrected himself. “Three hundred meters,” the boy explained.

“Sorry. The rules are the rules.”

“What rules?”

“MY rules!” Dermot said, laughing, which only made him thirstier. “Now go away.”

Dermot returned to his guard shack, not noticing that the boy didn’t return to Ireland, but rather continued walking the few hundred feet up the road.

What Dermot DID notice was that the chips he had brought for lunch were also in a Ziploc bag. He was definitely going to have a talk with his mother about packing such difficult meals for him.

This time Dermot pulled the tiny tabs on the bag too hard and his fancy dill pickle potato chips flew all over the guard shack.

“Cheese and crackers!” Dermot yelled, which was his fancy way of saying something that normally would have been considered bad language.

He hit the button on the app and started picking up as many chips as he could, placing them on the counter.

“Hello?” A voice from outside said. Dermot didn’t have time to respond. He had four seconds left to pick up the rest of his chips!

“Hello?” the voice said again.

Dermot grabbed another five chips, but he kept squeezing too hard when he picked them up, breaking the chips into more and more pieces.

The voice stopped and he could hear feet walking up the street.

When the timer on his phone went off he hadn’t even collected half of his chips. This made him sad AND angry, which is not how a border guard should be.

“Wait!” Dermot shouted.

The man who had been walking by was Finnegan Pantsback.

“Oh, hey Dermot,” Finnegan said. “I just need to retrieve my nephew. He’s right over there.  I’ll just be a minute.”

“Sorry,” Dermot said. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Why not?”

“No passport, no entrance to Northern Ireland.”

“I’m just going over there. Right over there. I can see him from here.”

“The rules are the rules, I’m afraid.” Dermot told him, looking back to the crumbled chips all over his floor that were now sticking to the peanut butter and jelly mess. Ants were starting to file into the building.

“That’s ridiculous,” Finnegan said, walking past.

“Stop! Stop or I’ll shoot!” Dermot warned.

“You don’t have a gun,” Finnegan told him as he walked on.

Dermot turned and grabbed his soda can that his mother had packed him for lunch.

“I’ll throw this at you,” Dermot shouted to Finnegan’s back.

“Then I’ll throw it back at you harder,” Finnegan shouted over his shoulder.

Dermot was not very good at sports. Nor was he very coordinated, which is a fancy way of saying that he could not usually do two things at the same time. For instance, he could throw a can of soda very accurately, just not very far. Or he could throw a can of soda very far, just not very accurately. Finnegan was getting farther and farther away every second. Dermot did his best but the can sailed at least ten meters in front of Finnegan.

Finnegan, for his part, was very good at sports and was very coordinated. He picked up the soda can and threw it back at Dermot.

Dermot let out a little scream and turned to run away, the can hitting him squarely in the middle of his back.

Dermot tried to rub the sore spot but couldn’t reach where it had hit.

“Chicken and biscuits!” Dermot shouted in pain.

He picked up the soda can and set it on the counter of his guard shack.

While he was deciding what to do he saw two more people trying to cross the border from Killybegs into Tynan. It was Finnegan’s mother.

“Icnnursnnthucanahmeebk.”

“What?” Mrs. Pantsback asked. Dermot couldn’t answer her because his mouth was so dry from the sandwich and chips and screaming in pain. He needed to take a drink.

He popped open the tab on his soda can, forgetting that there was a lot of built up carbonation, which is a fancy way of saying that the fizzy part of the soda was now super-fizzy from being shaken and thrown back and forth. The soda exploded out of the can, hitting Dermot in the face, sploshing all over the guard shack windows and walls, and finally settling on the floor among the peanut butter and jelly and chips and ants.

Dermot was a mess.

“You can’t cross without a passport!” he shouted in frustration. He thought about starting the “Five Minute Rule” app again, but had no idea how to pick up a spilled beverage. Plus, his cellphone had gotten all wet and sticky and now it wasn’t working properly.

“I just need to get my son and grandson. They’re right over there. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“No!” Dermot shouted. “That is it!  I have had it! This border is closed for the rest of the day and no one is allowed to cross!”

“Well you’re just being ridiculous.” Mrs. Pantsback told him, and walked on into Tynan.

Dermot was being ridiculous, of course, but he didn’t see it that way. In fact, he saw a bunch of people crossing the border who had no respect for the rule of law, even though there wasn’t really a law allowing Dermot to set up a guard shack in the first place. In fact, the only thing separating Ireland from Northern Ireland were lines on a map. There was no real border between the two places and a passport certainly wasn’t required to go back and forth anywhere else in the country.

Dermot walked out of the guard shack and sat on a bench.  A hurling game was being played on the nearby field. From the shouting and fighting and blue jerseys and yellow jerseys he could tell it was the Irish Kittybegs Krushers and the Northern Irish Tynan Titans.

And that was when something clicked for Dermot.

Literally.

And the clicking came from the phone in his pants.

It was a call from a number in England. A woman, a bossy woman, was on the phone asking Dermot all sorts of questions about the border crossing and what was going on. So Dermot told her. There was fighting everywhere. People crossed the border without passports, ignoring him, and throwing things at him.

“Well,” the woman on the other end of the phone said, “That simply will not stand. We’re sending reinforcements to help you protect our border!”

She hung up the phone without saying goodbye, which happened all the time on television shows but which Dermot thought was quite rude.

Still, he was happy to finally be getting some support. And perhaps they would help him clean up the sticky, filthy mess in his guard shack.

MEANWHILE… IN LONDON, ENGLAND

Reginald Smithwick looked at his boss whose name he still didn’t know and wondered if he might turn out like her someday if he was ever in charge. It seemed to him that if people worked in the government for very long they sort of forgot that the government was run by people who were there to make lives better and easier for the rest of the people. In fact, they usually created more rules and roadblocks and procedures that made everyone’s lives harder.

His boss was about to make some people’s lives much harder.

“With all this fighting and illegal border crossing, we’d better send in the military.”

“Really?” asked Reginald. “It just sounds like a family visiting another family who live next door. And I researched the guard and can’t find any record of him or his guard post ever being approved… by anyone.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said to him. “Do you think some idiot is just going to build a guard shack, stick it in the middle of the road, and put on a uniform and simply pretend to be a border guard?”

Reginald had to admit that it did sound ridiculous, but not impossible. He was going to say so when he realized it was too late. His boss had already picked up the phone and was dialing.

“Send in a platoon to the Tynan and Kittybegs border, she shouted into the phone.

There was a pause on the other end.

“A platoon,” she muttered into the phone through clenched teeth, “is a fancy way of saying a group of soldiers, somewhere between twenty-six to fifty of them.”

She slammed the phone down and looked up at Reginald.

“Let’s see if that doesn’t solve the border problem!”

“Don’t you think that’s too much?”

“Too much?” she asked. “I’m worried that it might not be enough.”

MEANWHILE… RIGHT NEXT TO THE GUARD SHACK

McMartin’s Family Store was right next to the guard shack, on the far side of the street. Molly came running out, throwing her arms around Daniel, as he reached the door.

“It’s so good to see you!” she said as a look of concern crossed her face. “Why haven’t you come to visit sooner?”

Daniel wasn’t much of a hugger, especially of girls, but Molly was his friend and she had sat next to him on the plane and often helped him with homework and she was pretty and her hair smelled like strawberries. So he hugged her back.

Daniel was about to tell everything from the border guard to his grandfather when Martin walked out of the store. He was smiling as he walked up and clapped Daniel on the back.

“Top of the mornin’ to ya’!” Martin said loudly, and with an Irish accent.

“Hi?” Daniel replied.

“Isn’t it a beautiful mornin’? he asked Daniel, then breathing in deeply through his nose. “If the air was any sweeter it would be bad for my teeth.”

“What happened to you?” Daniel asked.

Martin ignored the question and went off to a patch of grass next to the store, picking up three-leaf clovers, inspecting them, and tossing them over his shoulder.

“We went to visit the Blarney Stone yesterday,” Molly said.

“So?”

“Legend says that whoever kisses the Blarney Stone will have the gift of gab for the rest of their days.”

“But the accent?”

“Yeah, we don’t know what that’s about.” Molly said, shrugging her shoulders. “My grandparent were weirded out at first but he hasn’t touched a video game since yesterday. And he’s said more in two days than he has in the last two years. So everyone is pretty thrilled.”

“That’s good… I guess?”

“I don’t know if it’s good or bad but it IS different.”  They both looked over as Martin sang a song to a clover he was holding in his hand. “How is your vacation going?” Molly asked, suddenly excited.

“Same.” Daniel said. “Good and bad. That’s why I’m here actually. I need your help.”

“With what?” Molly asked.

A few seconds later Daniel’s uncle, Finnegan, walked up followed by his grandmum. Daniel introduced them to Molly and Martin.

“It’s a long story, but we have to go now. I can explain on the way.”

“Okay,” Molly said without hesitation. “I just need to get my passport to cross the border.”

“That probably won’t be necessary,” Finnegan explained.

Molly looked at him with a questioning look.

“The guard shack is temporarily closed for cleaning.” Daniel’s grandmother explained.

Molly and Martin walked with Daniel and his grandmother and uncle back into Klllybegs, explaining all that had happened along the way.

As they walked, the sun passed through the clouds. In the distance the clouds were darker and where it had been raining a giant rainbow filled the sky over Killybegs Hill.

It was the biggest rainbow that Daniel, or any of them, had ever seen.

Molly and Martin thought the rainbow looked beautiful.

Daniel knew better.

MEANWHILE… IN LONDON, ENGLAND

Reginald Smithwick was looking at a map rolled out on a large conference table. His boss marched in with three military-looking men.  They were all very serious.

“What’s going on?” Reginald asked.

“New information is coming from the front,” his boss said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a fancy way of saying the front line of a battlefield. Right here,” she said, jamming her finger onto the line that separated Killybegs from Tynan. “Apparently the rebels are throwing acid at the border guards now. This requires a more forceful military response.”

“Acid?” Reginald asked, shocked.

“Well,” his boss explained. “Technically it was a carbonated soda product but soda can take the rust off of a car bumper. So technically it’s an acid. And acid is a weapon when thrown at someone. So we must respond with bigger weapons. Report, General,” she barked to one of the men in the room.

“Did you know that if you leave a tooth in a glass of soda overnight that the tooth will bounce like rubber?  It removes all of the enamel,” the general said. The other men huddled around the table nodded in agreement.

Reginald, however, knew that wasn’t right.

“I’m sorry. But that’s not true,” Reginald said. “Soda has citric acid and phosphoric acid but in small doses. Much smaller than, say, orange juice. So low, in fact, that the acids that are already in our stomach have no problem handling them at all. What you were saying about a tooth bouncing is a myth… like fairies or leprechauns.”

His boss glared at him. The military men sneered.

“Citric AND phosphoric acid?” his boss asked.

“Yes.”

“Then that’s TWO acids.”

“Well… I guess…”

“We’re going to need a bigger response. Send in a battalion!” the General shouted.

“Um… Sir?” one of the other men asked.

“Yes?”

“A ‘battalion’ is between three hundred and a thousand soldiers. Do you want closer to the three hundred or the full thousand?”

“I want them all!” the General shouted. “With another battalion on standby in case things get hot!”

Reginald was pretty sure the phrase, ‘When things get hot’ was a fancy military term for ‘when things go bad’.

And Reginald was pretty sure that things were going to go very, very badly.

MEANWHILE… IN THE PANTSBACK FAMILY SHED

The shed that belonged to Daniel’s grandfather looked like a tiny version of the main house, white, with windows and the same kind of thatched roof. Inside the walls and benches were covered with handwritten notes, leprechaun artifacts, and a giant wall map with Killybegs Hill at the top of a round circle, with a line drawn down the middle and the words “Aotea Island, NZ” at the bottom. There was an upside-down well at the bottom of the circle with the line connecting them.

Everything in his grandfather’s shed was lit up and colorful from the brightness of the rainbow that was shining outside, and getting brighter.

“What do you think it means?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know.” Daniel replied. “But I bet the answer is in here, somewhere.”

The more Daniel and his friends looked the more they found and the more they found the more they understood just what they were dealing with, even if it didn’t make sense.

They had each split up their tasks. Martin was in charge of learning how the leprechauns were able to disappear and where they went. Molly was tasked with finding out about any weaknesses the leprechauns had.  Daniel was going to find out what other creatures they might be dealing with. So far Daniel had only seen a leprechaun, but the walls of the shed had information on fairies and pixies and ogres and trolls and all manner of magical creatures.

“Do you know what an antipode is?” Martin asked.

“It’s a place that’s opposite another place.” Molly said, as if it was the most obvious fact in the world.

“Right,” Martin replied.  He had stopped talking with an Irish accent but at least he was still talking. “But did you know that is how magical creatures travel?  Wells are antipodes, connecting to other wells around the world.  Killybegs is connected to an island off the coast of New Zealand.” Martin was looking at a paper and frowned. “Hey, there’s a well in La Crosse, Wisconsin, right near our school! Its antipode is an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean called ‘Diego Garcia’.  You don’t think…”

“I think if there were any magical creatures in La Crosse that we’d have come across them by now,” Daniel said.

Only Daniel was wrong.

But that is another story.

“So your grandfather did the only thing that will banish a magical creature. He got them to go down a well and was able to seal up the end so they couldn’t get out. So that’s what we’ll need to do.”

“That’s not all,” Molly said. She was in charge of learning the leprechaun’s weakness and she was holding a stack of Daniel’s grandfather’s notes in her hands. “The only way to seal a well so leprechauns can’t escape is with something magical. The last time it was with giant’s feet.”

“Giant’s feet are magical?” Martin asked.

“No,” Molly explained. “But the giants are so their feet count as magical items.”

“Sealing the well is step two,” Daniel said. “Step one is figuring out how to get them down the well again in the first place. What other weaknesses do they have?”

Molly thought about this and looked at the papers.

“The only weakness they have, as far as I can see, is a love of gold.”

“Huh,” Daniel said, thinking.

“How about you?” Martin asked. “Any luck on the other creatures?”

“Yes. Only I wouldn’t call it luck. There are leprechauns but there are also banshees, basilisks, bogies, brownies, bigfoots, centaurs, cerberuses, cyclopses, demons, djinn, dragons, dwarves, elves, fairies, fauns, gargoyles, genies, ghosts, ghouls, gnomes, goblins, giants, gremlins, harpies, hobgoblins, imps, manticores, medusas, mermaids, mermen, minotaurs, nixies, nymphs, ogres, pixies, sasquatches, sirens, spirits, sprites, sylphs, trolls, unicorns, wraiths, wyverns, and yetis.”

“And they’re all going to come out of the well?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know about the yetis.” Martin said. “Might be a bit too warm for them.”

“There is some good news, though,” Molly explained.

Daniel and Martin whipped around, amazed that there could actually be any good news in all this.

“According to your grandfather’s notes, ALL magical creatures can be affected by gold. It’s why humans, who are non-magical creatures, have tried to gather as much gold as they could throughout the centuries. It helps them to control the magical creatures.”

“Control them how?” Daniel asked. He was looking at a gold watch that was hanging from a hook over one of the benches. Below it was a jar of Irish pennies. The gold watch and the pennies meant something but Daniel couldn’t quite form the idea in his mind. Somehow, though, he knew they were important.

“It can send them down a well, for one thing. But the notes also say that gold can wake sleeping creatures up from their slumber. Even the tiniest amounts if it’s nearby,” Molly said.

“That must have been what woke Declan Dragoon,” Daniel said, although something was troubling him. Molly noticed.

“What?”

Daniel thought for a few more seconds before answering.

“If Declan was awoken by the gold, then how come none of the other magical creatures were woken up by it?”

“Maybe they weren’t close enough.”

“Guys,” Martin said from the corner of the shed where he was looking up at another large drawing on the wall. Daniel and Molly hurried over. “It looks like we have a problem.”

“What is it?” Molly asked.

“Leprechauns are at their strongest power right after a rain, but especially when there is a rainbow.”

The picture on the shed wall of a rainbow started to glow. The colors from the rainbow outside poured in the window, matching up with the curved arches on the wall.

The three friends walked out of the shed and looked up to the top of Killybegs Hill. There, standing on the edge of the well, was Declan Dragoon.

The leprechaun king stared at the three children down below, held up a small gold object in his hand and winked.

“Is that a gold tooth?” Martin asked.

Daniel figured it out.

“He’s using the gold to attract the other magical creatures. And when they come out of the well, their powers will be enhanced by the power of the rainbow!”

As if in response the ground beneath them started a low rumble. hen it started to shake. Then it started to shake violently, knocking Daniel and his friends to the ground. A few seconds later the rumbling and shaking stopped.

Looking up from where they were laying on the ground Daniel could see a small hand reach up and over the top of the well. A few seconds later a tiny person with a long, white beard popped out. He looked lost and scared.

“Is that a dwarf?” Molly asked.

“No. I think it’s a gnome,” Martin replied.

“How can you be sure?”

All three friends looked over and saw a small statue in the small flower garden next to the shed. It was a statue of a lawn gnome, with a blue, button-down jacket and a red cap, and a long, white beard.

When they looked back up the hill the small creature put on an identical jacket and hat.

“Ohhh.” Molly and Martin said as the gnome stumbled off over the far side of the hill.

“That’s not so bad,” Martin said. “If that’s the worst of it I think we can handle—”

Suddenly there was an eruption of fireworks from the well. Sparks of red and blue and green and violet and colors the three friends had never seen before exploded out of the well and across the sky, mingling with the ribbons of color from the nearby rainbow. A few of the sparks flew close, where Daniel could make out tiny bodies and wings and faces as they blurred past.

“Fairies.”

“Awww,” Molly said. “They’re cute too!”

A terrible, horrible roar came not just from the well, but from what seemed like the very hill itself. A much larger and uglier hand grabbed the stone rim of the well and out hopped a much larger and uglier creature.

“Troll.” Martin said.

But it wasn’t just one troll.  Right behind him came springing out of the well a dozen more trolls, followed by winged creatures, hairy creatures, tall creatures, short creatures, bearded creatures, slimy creatures, ghost-like creatures, and worse. Thousands of creatures blurred together, streaming up and out of the well, running down the hill and towards the rainbow.

“Um… that looks bad,” Molly said.  “Do we have a plan?”

“I have an idea,” Daniel said.  “We’re going to need peat.”

“Who’s Pete?” Molly asked.

“Peat’s not a who…”  Daniel clarified.  “Peat’s a what.”

MEANWHILE… AT THE GUARD SHACK

Helicopters landed, assault vehicles and tanks rolled to a stop, and a thousand soldiers stood at attention behind the tiny, white guard shack in the road.

Dermot McGillicutty missed all this because he was bent over trying to pick up two chickens.

When he had taken apart the chicken coop in his back yard to use the wood to make a guard shack, his chickens had long since left both him and his farm.  Now that it was raining, though, a few of the chickens who lived in nearby bushes noticed the dry shack and recognized the familiar smell of a chicken coop.  Rather than sit in the rain they walked into the shack to stay dry.

Dermot was holding a chicken under each arm when he stood and saw the battalion.

“I surrender?” Dermot asked, confused, dropping the chickens.

An important looking man in a military uniform stepped out of a helicopter and approached him.

“I’m General Billingsworth of the British Army.  Who’s in charge here?” the man asked.

“I am.” Dermot said proudly, puffing out his chest, unaware of the chicken feathers still stuck to his uniform.

“Well?” the man asked. “Where are the border crossers?”

“What?” Dermot asked, confused.

“You wrote the home office. You said there were high numbers of illegal border crossings and clashes with the locals. We’re here to fight them off and secure the border.”

“Oh.  That…” Dermot said, looking first at his feet, then up in the air. He was looking anywhere, searching for an answer that wouldn’t make the General Mad or him look stupid. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any answer that wasn’t going to do both. So, to his credit, he opted for the truth.

“Well, the illegal border crossing… ummm… they actually turned around and went home.”

The general looked mad.

“How many were there… exactly?” the general asked, emphasizing the word exactly.

“Three.  Well… three went into Tynan, to that store right over there. And then the same three, plus two from Tynan, kids really, went back into Killybegs. So… five total… sir.”

Luckily for Dermot, the general didn’t look mad any more. Unluckily for Dermot, the general was a deep shade of red and he looked furious.

“Where is the fighting, then?” the general asked, in what Dermot thought sounded a lot like a growl.

“Well that match ended hours ago… sir.”

“Match?”

“Well, yes, the hurling match.”

“Explain,” The general said, squeezing his eyes shut with his fingers, as if trying to hold off a really bad headache.

“Well, every time Tynan plays Killybegs in hurling, right over there on that field, a fight breaks out.  It’s very unsportsmanlike conduct. And someone could get hurt.”

As Dermot was explaining himself to the general, the residents of Killybegs AND Tynan came out to see why there were over a thousand soldiers and tanks and assault vehicles and helicopters on their border. Hundreds of people were lined up on the Killybegs side and the Tynan side, all waiting to see what was going to happen next. News reporters and television cameras were set up all along both sides of the road.

The general marched up to one of the tanks and spoke to the driver.

“Run over the guard shack and let’s go home.”

The driver, who was eighteen years old and had always wanted to run something over in his tank, stepped on the gas and headed straight for the guard shack. He was seconds away from demolishing it when everything went horribly wrong.

Another chicken stepped out of the bushes and began walking toward the guard shack, along the white line that Dermot had painted in the road that separated Tynan from Killybegs. This was unfortunate, but the tank driver had his orders and his training had taught him that you don’t disobey your orders simply because a chicken was crossing the road.

But a person? Well, that was another thing altogether.

When the driver was three seconds away from crushing the shack, Dermot jumped in front of the tank to save his chicken. Rather than crushing the guard shack and the chicken into little bits, the tank swerved to avoid Dermot, missing the guard shack completely.

Instead, the tank wound up squarely on the other side of the white line, in Killybegs where it came to a stop.

Everyone was silent for a moment, which seemed to stretch on for minutes. he only sound was the whisper of the wind and Dermot’s chicken softly clucking.

And then it happened…

One of the reporters, no one was quite sure which one, shouted, “The British are invading Ireland!”

Instantly, everyone began screaming and shouting and throwing things. Cans of soda bounced and splattered off of tanks harmlessly. A customer walking out of McMartin’s Family Store began throwing eggs at the customers who were coming out of Pantsback’s Family Grocery. The customers coming out of Pantsback’s Family Grocery began throwing eggs back. The Kittybegs Krushers hurling team began hitting balls at the soldiers. Some kids started throwing water balloons.

It was mayhem!  It was chaos!  It was pandemonium!  All of which are fancy ways of saying that things were quickly getting out of control.

General Billingsworth, however, was determined to put them back in control.

HIS control.

Rather than using regular cannons the general ordered water cannons be used to spray the people, forcing them back and, hopefully, getting them to stop throwing things.

Water cannons sprayed from the tanks and assault vehicles.

Storm clouds thundered overhead.

Through breaks in the clouds a giant rainbow appeared.

And from the sun that was able to break through the clouds, it allowed the mist from the water cannons to form dozens more tiny rainbows on the Kllybegs/Tynan border.

And as anyone familiar with leprechauns can tell you, rainbows make magical creatures stronger.  So the fact that there were now dozens more rainbows certainly wasn’t going to help what was happening that very moment on Killybegs Hill.
.

MEANWHILE… ON THE FAR SIDE OF KITYBEGS HILL

When the magical creatures went down the well all those years ago they had two choices. They could make the long, long trip to New Zealand, which was the antipode of Ireland, or they could go to sleep for a long, long time. Declan, and many others, had chosen to sleep, waiting for the day when they could get revenge on the humans for tricking them.

That revenge started when Declan Dragoon was the first magical creature to make it out of the well in ages thanks to the golden tooth that had been left in the nearby road, waking Declan from his slumber.

Most leprechauns horde their gold, which is a fancy way of saying that they never share it with anyone. But Declan was different. He was smart.

And he was king.

The first thing Declan did upon waking was to repair his shoes. There is nothing more important to a leprechaun, other than gold, than his shoes.

The second thing he did was to kidnap George Pantsback, who was the great, great grandson of Fergus Mac Leti, the human who had tricked him and his friends down the well five hundred years ago. Declan had demanded that the George Pantsback return his gold but there wasn’t any left. It had all been spent over the years.

So now Declan’s plan was to help the other magical creatures wake from their slumber and to take over Ireland, and then the world.  And once the magical creatures did that, he was going to throw George Pantsback down the well to see how HE liked it!

Declan jumped down the well that morning, holding the golden tooth.

And as he fell down, down, down, all the way to New Zealand, the tooth awoke all of the slumbering magical creatures. And for those who were living in New Zealand, Declan had informed them that the well was open, and that they could return home.

Now, on the side of the hill, Declan saw George Pantsback, tied up with a gag in his mouth, sitting on the ground with his back against the well, watching the last of the magical creatures as they jumped out of the well and gathered at the bottom of the hill.

The fairies were creating a storm, the giants were putting on hard-soled shoes for stomping on houses (with flat soles for stomping on people without them getting stuck in the rubbery parts), the trolls were sharpening their teeth on rocks, and banshees were practicing their shrieking.

Declan said, “Huh. I don’t see any Yeti’s.”

A gnome in a blue coat and red hat shuffled by said, “Must not be cold enough for them.”

The huge rainbow was helping the magical creatures regain their powers quickly and the dozens of smaller rainbows in the distance were helping them even more.

Declan considered this to be a good sign.  A great sign!  Their powers were going to be at their strongest!

MEANWHILE… IN THE SHED

Daniel had taken Molly and Martin to the peat bog behind his grandparent’s house and explained how it worked. Using a shovel they cut square blocks out peat out of the ground and carried them back to the shed.

Martin was trying to set it on fire with a grill lighter.

“It’s not working,” he said.

“It needs to be dried. If there’s too much moisture it won’t light.”

“Will this work?” Molly asked, holding a hair dryer she found on a shelf.

Daniel nodded. “So the plan is that we’re going to melt these coins and add in the gold watch to make a gold coin. Then we simply thrown the coin down the well, and hope all of the magical creatures follow it down again.”

“How do we trick the giants into going last again?” Molly asked.

“I haven’t gotten that far in my planning yet. My grandfather’s notes said that pennies were slightly magical, and when they are thrown into a magical well their effect is even stronger. So hopefully--”

“I don’t know,” Molly said turning off the hair dryer. “I’ve made lots of wishes by throwing pennies into wells and most of them never came true.”

“His notes said that because there isn’t any gold in a penny that it takes ten pennies in the well to make one wish. That's why only some wishes come true.”

“Well there are hundreds of pennies in the jar,” Martin said, placing a peat block into the small stove in the corner of the shed. He clicked a grill lighter and the peat caught on fire!  He added a few more bricks, making the fire bigger, before closing the stove door. “So we should definitely get our wish.”

“That’s the plan,” Daniel said, placing a metal pan on the stove while Molly dumped in the coins and the gold watch.

The ground underneath the shed began shaking and the walls shuddered back and forth.

Outside the window they could see the top of Killybegs Hill. A great hand reached out, followed by another. A few seconds later a giant leapt out of the well and landed on the hill with a mighty trembling of the ground.

Next came a few ogres and trolls, then another giant, bigger than the last.

What they couldn’t see yet, on the other side of the well, was Daniel’s grandfather who was slowly and quietly working at the ropes that bound him.

MEANWHILE… ON THE IRELAND/NORTHERN IRELAND BORDER

When the British tank swerved to avoid hitting Dermot and ended up in Ireland, people panicked. When the Irish threw their soda cans the British tried to get them to stop by squirting them with hoses. To get the British to stop squirting them with hoses the Irish hurling team started hitting balls at the soldiers. The soldiers, to stop the Irish balls, began shooting bean bags at the crowd. The Irish crowd, not wanting to get hit by bean bags, started throwing rocks. To stop getting hit by rocks the British started firing rubber bullets. And because rubber bullets really hurt the Irish started to wrestle with the British soldiers to take their rubber bullet guns and see how they liked getting shot with them.

On both sides of the guard shack there was fighting and wrestling and balls and bean bags and rubber bullets and people shouting and screaming insults.  It was so crazy and loud that the general had a hard time being heard when he kept yelling, “Cease Fire!” which was a fancy way of saying everyone should just calm down for a second.

But as it turned out the general didn’t need to shout.  Something very quiet caught everyone’s attention.

Standing in the middle of the road was a gnome in a blue coat and a red hat. At first people thought it was a statue, like the kind you find in most gardens. But this gnome was moving!

The little gnome with the long beard walked up to the group of people who were no longer fighting, cleared his throat, and said, “Excuse me.  I seem to have wandered off and lost my way.  Can you please direct me to Killybegs Hill?  I’m late for a meeting.”

“What kind of meeting?” asked an elderly woman who had, up until a few seconds ago, been trying to choke one of the hurling players.

“A magical creatures meeting,” the gnome said as if it were the most normal thing in the world.  “We’re back, obviously. And now we’re going to take over Ireland and make all of you humans our slaves.”

“Wait,” Dermot said, stepping out of his guard shack. “Do you mean just Ireland or both Ireland AND Northern Ireland?”

“I would assume all of Ireland,” said the gnome, helpfully. “Because I believe that after Ireland, we’re taking over the rest of the world.”

MEANWHILE… ON THE FAR SIDE OF KITTYBEGS HILL

Declan Dragoon stood at the base of Kittybegs Hill, beneath a crowd of magical creatures of all shapes and sizes. He had a plan.  A good plan. A plan to take over the world and make the humans their slaves. He had spent hours writing and re-writing a fantastic speech full of amazing words and phrases meant to inspire the magical creatures. It was a speech that would have them standing on their feet and cheering. It was a speech that would make them all want to join Declan in taking over the world.

As he raised his hands a hush fell over the crowd.

Declan cleared his throat and said loudly...

“I—”

“Excuse me,” said a gnome in a blue coat and a red hat as he wandered over towards Declan.

The leprechaun king stared at the gnome.

“Excuse me,” said the gnome again.

“Yes?”  Declan asked, perturbed, which is a fancy way of saying he was not happy about being interrupted but he was polite enough to not say it.

“Are these the humans you were looking to make your slaves?”

The gnome pointed his thumb to the side of Kittybegs Hill. Declan leaned to the right. The gathered creatures all turned and looked behind the hill.

There, on the other side of the mound, were thousands of humans in tanks and assault vehicles and in helicopters and on foot, staring at the leprechaun king. For a second no one moved.

So much for plans, Declan thought to himself.

“Attack!” he shouted to the magical creatures.

From the other side of the hill he heard a human voice also shouting.

“Attack!” it shouted to the human creatures.

All at once there was shouting. All at twice there were explosions and rubber bullets and water cannons and bean bags flying through the air.

The fairies and pixies were the first ones to attack, flying around the soldiers and tying their shoelaces together so they tripped and fell.  Next went the ghosts and banshees, scaring the helicopters. The trolls were slower but fast enough to sit on tanks and assault vehicles, getting them stuck in the soft grass.

It wasn’t the plan he had thought up but Declan was sure it would work all the same.

He walked up the hill and stood next to the sitting and tied up George Pantsback.  He removed the gag from George’s mouth.

“Say goodbye to your world, human,” Declan said, laughing.

“It’s not my world.” George said. “It’s OUR world and we need to learn how to live together in it.”

“Perhaps,” Declan said. “But YOU won’t be living in it at all.”

MEANWHILE… INSIDE THE SHED

“We need to find a way to get the magical creatures back into the well!” Molly shouted over the noise of trolls roaring and banshees shrieking.

A few minutes earlier tanks and helicopters and soldiers passed their shed. When they looked out the window they saw an entire battalion camped out on George’s grandparents back lawn.

George’s grandmother and uncle come running out but were told by the military to go back inside. Since most of the residents of the town of Killybegs AND Tynan were there, including the McMartin’s, the Pantsback family joined them.

And then it happened.

From the far side of the hill a tiny leprechaun shouted, “Attack” at the same time as the general. And they had been fighting ever since.

It had only been a few minutes but so far the humans appeared to be losing pretty badly. The tanks were sat on and the helicopters could not keep up with the fairies and ghosts. The giants were trying to step on the humans, scattering them everywhere.

Daniel finished pouring liquid metal into a ceramic cup. He had melted the pennies and the gold watch over the peat flame, using a metal bowl that was attached to the end of a long stick.

“What’s the plan again?” Molly asked.

“We make a special coin using pennies and gold. Then we throw it down the well. One of two things should happen. The first is that the magical creatures all chase the coin down the well.”

“And the second thing?” Martin asked.

“Since it has more than ten pennies in it, we make a wish when we throw it down the well. A wish to banish the magical creatures for another five hundred years. If all goes well, our wish comes true.”

As the metal cooled in the cup the three friends watched the battle outside. It was not going well for the humans at all.

“Do we have a backup plan?” Molly asked.

“Not really. The only other thing that might work would be to get rid of the rainbow so that the creatures lose their powers.  Or to create a light that’s so bright it sends them back into the well. But it’s never that sunny in Ireland and I have no idea how to get rid of a rainbow.”

“Well then let’s hope this coin idea works!” Martin said as a helicopter fell out of the sky and landed right in front of their window.

Daniel looked at the metal cooling inside the cup. He dumped it out onto the shed floor.

“Um…” he said.

Molly and Martin turned around to look.

The metal hadn’t cooled into a nice, flat circular coin as they had hoped. Instead, they were looking at round, golden ball.

“Not quite a coin, is it?” Martin asked.

“It should still work to get them down the well chasing after it,” Daniel said, hopefully.

“What about the wish?” Martin asked. You can’t wish on a ball, can you?”

“You can if it’s made of pennies," Molly said.

“Is that in a rule book or something?” Martin asked.

Molly glared at him. “I liked it better when you didn’t talk.”

“Ouch!” Daniel said, loudly. He was holding his right hand.

“What is it?” Molly asked.

“The gold ball, it’s too hot. I can’t pick it up.”

“But we’re running out of time!” Molly said.

Daniel thought about this. “That’s it.  We need more time. Martin, go and talk to them.”

“What?”  Molly asked.

“What?” Martin asked too.

“You kissed the Blarney Stone.” Daniel explained. "You have the gift of gab. You should be able to stall them for a while.”

“But I don’t—”

Martin wasn’t able to finish what he was saying.

A giant foot stepped on the edge of the shed, opening it up to the rest of the battle.

MEANWHILE… OUTSIDE THE SHED

Declan had his hands on his hips, watching as the fairy folk were easily handling the humans. Even with all of their machines and guns, they were helpless against the magic and the might of the fairy folk!

Declan picked up George Pantsback and sat him on the edge of the well. He knew that the human had been quietly trying to untie the ropes but it wouldn’t work. Not in time to save him anyway. He was about to push the human in when he smelled something… familiar. Something like… GOLD!

The other magical creatures smelled it too and for a moment the fighting stopped.

Declan watched as a young boy emerged from a nearby shed that had been ripped open by a giant’s foot.

The boy walked into the middle of where everyone had been fighting.

The boy cleared his throat.

And then the boy sang.

MEANWHILE… ON THE BATTLEFIELD

Martin had no idea what he could say that would convince the fairy folk to stop, even with the gift of gab. But he did know that most of them had been asleep for a long, long time. And he knew that when he slept for a long, long time it often made him even more tired than if he had just slept a normal amount of time!

So he did the only thing he could think of to get them back to sleep.

He sang…

    “Over in Killarney
    Many years ago,
    Me mother sang a song to me
    In tones so sweet and low.
    Just a simple little ditty,
    In her good old Irish way,
    And l'd give the world if she could sing
    That song to me this day.
  Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
  Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry
  Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
  Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby.”

Martin looked around on the field.

Everyone, from the pixies to the soldiers, had stopped what they were doing, watching Martin sing.

Daniel watched, too. He didn’t think it would be enough to lull everyone to sleep, but it might just give him enough time to do what he had planned.

  “Oft in dreams I wander
      To that cot again,
   I feel her arms a-huggin' me
    As when she held me then.
   And I hear her voice a -hummin'
   To me as in days of yore,
   When she used to rock me fast asleep
   Outside the cabin door.
   Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
   Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry
   Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
   Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby.”

Humans and fairy creatures alike were both sleepy and a few had tears in their eyes from Martin’s beautiful song. Nobody was fighting. Nobody was even moving.

So Daniel made his move.

The metal ball had cooled enough that Daniel could hold it in his hand.  He ran out of the damaged shed towards Killybegs Hill.

Daniel aimed the ball at the well and, instead of road bowling, he thought of an America game. Skee Ball. Daniel played it at carnivals and amusement parks. It was where you tossed a small, wooden ball at a series of holes. The more difficult the shot, the more points you got, usually somewhere between zero and a hundred.

This shot, though, would be worth a lot more.

Daniel aimed, lined up his arm, and tossed the ball with all of his might.

He had been so fixed on the well that he almost missed what was happening on the side of it. There, at the top of Killybegs Hill, was his grandfather, tied up on the side of the well.

The leprechaun king was trying to push his grandfather into the well as the old man fought back as best he could.

The golden ball rolled between feet and past tanks and even through a ghost.

It climbed the hill and hurled towards the top.

Most of the humans and fairy folk were unaware of what was going on until the ball had rolled past. They smelled the gold, and immediately came out of their daze.

As one, they all ran straight for the well!

Daniel watched as the battle field cleared and the creatures scrambled to be the first to grab the golden ball.

The plan was going to work!

The ball made it to the top of the hill with enough speed to clear a bump and sail through the air, right towards the center of the well.

It was a perfect shot!

Almost.

Declan stopped fighting to push the old man in, and instead reached a hand out and caught the ball as it fell down the well. The magical creatures stopped in their tracks.

“Ha. Ha,” Declan said quietly.

“HA. HA,” he then said loudly.

“Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, HA, HA, HA, HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!” he then shouted.

The magical creatures watched as Declan claimed the prize for himself. This not only put them in a bad mood but it made them even angrier that a human had tried, once again, to trick them back into the well!

Declan cleared his throat to speak.

“I believe—” he started to say, but was cut off when one of the giants wiped a tear from his eye, in order to see the ground better when he tried to step on more humans. This tear turned into a giant ball of water as it landed next to a tank, scaring a soldier, who started firing bean bags.

The mayhem started again as the creatures ran back down the hill, even angrier than before.

Declan Dragoon held the golden ball high in the air in his right hand.  With his left hand he pushed Daniel’s grandfather down the well.

Things had just gone from bad to worse.

Much, much worse.

MEANWHILE… IN GREECE

There was a very large crowd at the very small restaurant on the especially small Greek island of Thassos, in the Aegean Sea. They were all there to see the biggest thing that had ever happened to the island.  It was a giant piece of cheese the size of a school bus that had been covered in gallons of Ouzo and set onto a giant plate.

Niko lit a match and held it up high as the crowd cheered.  There were people from the Guinness Book of World Records standing by to take pictures. Reporters and news people from around the world were there. But nothing made him happier than the look his smiling mother was giving him, proud of her son for doing something so big.

Niko dropped the match onto the plate, which set the Ouzo on fire, which set the cheese on aflame.

A fireball the size of a house shot up from the cheese like an exploding volcano, high into the air.

Birds flying nearby were cooked, clouds dried up from the heat, and the crowd below were instantly sunburned.

Everyone shielded their eyes from the flaming cheese, which was even brighter than the sun.

And then, all at once, the crowd shouted OPA!

MEANWHILE… FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE IRELAND

Bill Swanson was tired and hungry and thirsty and cold and wet and scared. He was all of these things because he had been flying in his hot air balloon for days across the Atlantic Ocean with no food, water, or jacket. So he could forgive himself if he was starting to become delusional, which is a fancy way of saying that he was seeing things that weren’t really there.

He saw a small town, which was probably there. And he saw a hill with a well with a man sitting next to it tied up in ropes, and all of that was probably there too. And there was a giant rainbow in the sky that he was about to fly through, which might actually be there. But he also saw giants and trolls and leprechauns all battling soldiers and tanks and helicopters and people hitting balls with bats and that just could not be.

Rubber bullets and bean bags were flying past. Tanks were shooting at the giants, knocking the balloon back and forth from the explosions.  Helicopters screamed by trying to get away from ghosts and shrieking creatures.

There was no other explanation for it. He was seeing things.

Speaking of seeing things, Bill looked over the side of his basket and saw that he was still carrying the giant pair of glasses through the air.  He had hoped he might be able to snag them on the well and stop the balloon, but no such luck.  He was heading too far to the right of the well and was most likely going to sail right past Ireland altogether.

But as he passed below the arch of the rainbow a curious thing happened. He felt his back get warm. And then he felt his back get hot.

Turning around, he saw a huge fireball in the sky.

And now he was not only sure he was seeing things, but smelling things too because carried along by the breeze he thought that the giant flame in the sky smelled a bit like… cheese.

Bill shielded his eyes from the light and turned away.

But the huge glasses below the balloon didn’t. In fact, they were pointing exactly in the direction of all the fighting.

And when the fireball was brightest, the glasses focused that light into a beam, which hit the ground around the hill and exploded the dirt and grass.

As the balloon slowly drifted by, the beam of light from the fireball almost hit dozens of creatures that Bill had only read about in fairy tales. A giant’s shirt caught fire. A ghost evaporated. And a gnome had his beard burnt off. Magical creatures were flying and running and stomping in every direction.

Tiny bits of light flew up to his balloon and flew through it, poking holes in the fabric and letting out the hot air inside. A few of these lights flew around his basket and Bill could see quite clearly that the lights were actually fairies! They looked quite angry but Bill could not have been happier. The holes they poked in his balloon were sending him down towards the ground which was exactly where he wanted to be.

And that’s when it happened.

The beam of light hit the ground, and the grass, and then headed for a swampy section of grass that looked a bit like a peat bog.

Which it was.

Which was bad.

The beam of light not only dried the peat in the ground, but it also set it on fire, lighting up the entire countryside around the hill. The heat from the flames rose into the sky, drying up the clouds which made the rainbows disappear.

Without rainbows the magical creatures were losing their powers. In a panic they ran and flew and galloped and floated towards the well, trying to escape the raging fire.

One by one, and sometimes two by two, or even more by more they jumped down the well.

Bill’s balloon crash landed just as a giant walked over him, almost crushing both he and his basket.

The giant was being chased by three children.

MEANWHILE… AT THE EDGE OF THE WELL

Declan Dragoon watched as the light from the eyeglasses set fire to the ground. Magical creatures hate fire. And when a few of the gnomes and trolls jumped into the well it was to be expected. They had been underground for the last fifty years and weren’t used to regular light, much less this bright light.

But when the peat bog caught on fire there was a stampede, which is a fancy way of saying that everyone ran at the same time, straight at the well.

Declan put his hands up to try and calm them and to keep the fight going. They were winning! The humans could not stop them! But they couldn’t hear him over the noise of the helicopters and tanks.

As he was waving them back a centaur leapt through the air and into the well. On the way by, though, a hoof accidentally kicked Declan’s arm, knocking the golden ball out of his hand and down the hill.

Some of the magical creatures turned for a moment but decided better of it and jumped down the well anyway. Declan, however, was not afraid of fire, or humans. He was going to get that gold… and then get his revenge! He was going to--

And that was when Declan Dragoon, the leprechaun king, was bowled over by a scared goblin and knocked into the well, carried down, down, down by the weight of all of the creatures jumping down the well above him. With the last of his powers he hurled a curse out of the well, up into the air, and down towards the humans at the bottom of the hill.

MEANWHILE… RUNNING BEHIND A GIANT

Daniel, Martin and Molly stood near the shed looking up at the well.

“You’re grandfather…” Molly said, unsure how to finish.

Daniel just nodded. He would have to worry about his grandfather later. For now he needed to close the well before the creatures figured out a way back.

All around them stood dumbfounded soldiers, which is a fancy way of saying that their minds were still trying to work out a reasonable answer to something they had just witnessed that was, actually, very unreasonable.

The only magical creature left was a giant, running across the fields, toward Kittybegs Hill.

From the top of the hill something rolled down.  Daniel walked over, set his hand on the ground, and scooped up a metal ball as it rolled towards him.

The golden ball.

“I know how we can close the well,” Daniel said.

“How?” Molly asked.

Daniel saw a tape measure lying on the ground outside of the half-destroyed shed.

“We need to know how wide the well is. Martin, grab that tape measure!”

Martin was steps away from the shed when a blue, sparkling ball shot down out of the sky. What the children did not know was that this was Declan Dragoon’s curse. What they did know was that it looked dangerous and should be avoided.

“Look out, Martin!” Daniel shouted.

Martin jumped out of the way at the last moment as the curse slammed down on the ground where Martin had been standing. The blue light sparked and landed on the tape measure.

After a few moments the light disappeared. Daniel, Martin and Molly approached the tape measure slowly.

“Well?” Martin asked, unsure.

Daniel shrugged.

Martin picked up the tape measure carefully. It seemed fine. Martin shrugged back.

“Let’s go!”

Daniel led his friends to the well on top of Kittybegs Hill. Inside the well was a swirling mass of bodies trying to get down, with one small leprechaun hand trying to get out.

“How wide is the well?” Daniel asked.

Martin pulled the measuring tape out and Molly stretched it across the opening.

And that’s when they noticed the curse.

“These measurements don’t make sense," Martin said.

“What?” Daniel asked.

Instead of centimeters and meters, or even feet and inches, the tape measure had a jumble of different kinds of measurements. Some were in feet, some in inches, some in millimeters or meters, and others in compound fractions.

“What does it say on your end, Martin?” Daniel asked.

Martin read the tape, confused.

“3.6 meters plus 6/2 inches plus 9/18 inches.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Molly said.

Daniel thought hard for a moment.

“King Henry Doesn’t Usually Drink Chocolate Milk.”
    “
What?” Molly asked.

“What?” Martin asked.

“King Henry Doesn’t Usually Drink Chocolate Milk. But that’s only for converting between metric measurements. We have to add the compound fractions first, then convert them, then add them”

“6/2 is the same as 6 divided by 2, and that’s 3,” Molly said. “So the first number is 3.”

“Both 9 and 19 are divisible by 3,” Martin said.“3 goes into 9 exactly 3 times and 3 goes into 18 exactly 6 times. So that’s 3/6 which is the same as 1/2 inches.”

“So 3 and a half inches?” Daniel asked.

“Yes.” Molly agreed, doing the math in her head. “Which is 8.9 centimeters. So the opening of the well is 3.6 meters which is… twelve feet!  Twelve feet exactly!”

Daniel held up the golden ball.

“Then we have to get this ball into a disc twelve feet around.”

“How are you going to do that?” Molly asked over the loud thump of enormous feet.

“Like this.” Daniel said, running down the hill towards the giant.

At the base of the hill Daniel ran as fast as he could while trying to avoid the enormous feet stomping towards him. Martin and Molly were close behind.

Daniel tossed the ball under the giant’s foot as he ran past them, away from the fire and towards the hill.

The giant’s foot landed on the ball and squished it into a disc the size of a pizza.

“Wow!” Molly said. “That worked!”

“Not quite.” Daniel said. “Let’s go.”

Daniel picked up the disc and ran after the giant, tossing the metal pizza under another foot.

This time the disc was flattened to a round circle the size of a couch.

“One more should do it!” Daniel shouted.

The problem, though, wasn’t that the disc was particularly heavy. It was actually very thin. The problem was that it was so large around that it was difficult to throw.

Daniel, Molly and Martin picked up the disc and stood shoulder to shoulder.  They spun around while Daniel shouted…

“One.”

One of the giant’s shoes fell off halfway up the hill.

“Two.”

The giant was almost at the well.

“Three!”

And the friends stopped spinning and let go of the disc.

It flew through the air, carried on the wind, reflecting the light of the flames and the blue sky in beautiful red and orange and green and blue and gold streaks.

The disc landed in front of the well, where the giant stepped on it once more before diving, head first, into the well.

Daniel and Molly raced up the hill and placed the disc over the opening of the well. It fit perfectly.

Martin arrived a moment later with a hammer and nails from the shed and proceeded to nail down the golden disc over the well.

“Hopefully this will work for at least another five hundred years!” Daniel said, happy to be rid of the magical creatures, but sad that his grandfather was gone, with no way back out of the well.

MEANWHILE…AT THE DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

It had taken a few days to sort out the mess on Killybegs Hill.

The British military returned to England. The Irish hurling players promised to behave themselves. And Dermot agreed to take down his guard shack and go back to raising chickens and to generally stop causing problems.

The Ireland Pantsback and the Northern Ireland McMartin families were friends once more and the entire island of Ireland, as well as the rest of the world, was saved.

Molly and Martin were hugging their grandparent’s goodbye.

Daniel stood with his grandmother and uncle, saddened.

“I’m going to look for him.” Daniel said. “When I get home to La Crosse. There’s a well. A magical well. I think that if… maybe… I can go down it and—”

“Don’t be silly, dear," his grandmother said. “Your grandfather will be fine.”

“But how—” Daniel started to ask.

“It’s not like he hasn’t been down a well before,” Finnegan said, smiling.

Over the airport intercom a voice said, “Final boarding call at Gate C for Flight 314 departing to La Crosse, Wisconsin… in America.”

“That’s you, dear.” His grandmother said. She gave Daniel a big hug. Finnegan did the same. Daniel didn’t want to leave but what choice did he have?

A moment later the same announcer spoke over the airport intercom.

“Flight 442 from New Zealand now arriving at Gate D.”

An airline employee opened the door for Gate D that led to the plane that had just arrived.

Walking through the door was a crumpled, tired, dirty and unshaven man with a big smile on his face.

“Grandpa!” Daniel yelled, running over to hug his grandfather.

“I much prefer traveling by plane than traveling by well.” His grandfather said.

“There’s so much I want to ask,” Daniel said as the door was closing on his own gate. Molly and Martin were talking to the airline employee trying to get them to hold the door for Daniel.

“Then you’ll just have to come back again for another visit,” his grandfather said.

“I will,” Daniel promised.

Daniel waved to his grandparents and uncle as he boarded the plane with Molly and Martin. Daniel noticed that Martin was, once again, nose-deep in a video game.

“I guess the magic of the Blarney Stone doesn’t last forever.”

“Maybe,” Molly said. “But that’s okay. It gives us more time to talk!” She wrapped one of her arms around Daniel and pulled him down the aisle.

Daniel noticed a smile cross Martin’s lips, as if to say, better you than me.

Taking their seats Daniel looked out at the bright blue sky and green fields around the airport.

There were no clouds.

There were no rainbows.

And there were no leprechauns trying to take over the world.

As Daniel looked out his tiny window he saw a butterfly land on the wing of the plane, gently flapping its wings.

And there, behind the butterfly, by a fence at the edge of the airport, Daniel could just barely make out...

... a tiny gnome in a blue coat and red hat, waving goodbye.

THE END

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