Whence the Rainbow Ends
by Zachary Robert Long (3869 words, estimated reading time: 18 minutes)

Mason needed it to rain.

Okay, need was a bit of a strong word. He didn’t need it to rain. He wanted it to rain. Not one of those massive storms that sometimes hit Atlantic Canada and lasted all day and all night. No, what he needed was for it to piss down for an hour, maybe two, and then fuck off. Because what Mason really needed was a rainbow.

And yeah, maybe need seems like a strong word there as well. But after nearly two years stuck in a pandemic, he really did fucking need this. Despite what the Weather Network said, he knew it was due to start raining at any moment. But so far the skies around his place were calm. Cloudy but light. Not the dark of impending showers.
But the sky had been red that morning and that was a better predictor than the weather channel any day of the week.

Mason was seated at his desk up against the window in his tiny bachelor apartment in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t nowhere-nowhere, since there were plenty of houses around and a convenience store down the way. There was just nothing to see or do if you weren’t into trails. Your regular old-fashioned nowhere.

On the monitor in front of him was his work. He freelanced with one of those online transcription companies. You know, the type that continually found new ways to screw their workers into taking on more work at lesser fees but would sue your ass off if you named them in a short story.

His attention wasn’t on the work, which was evident by the fact that instead of pausing the video like he intended he actually set it to go twice speed. As he was in the process of losing his place in the project, his attention was rapt on the sky outside his window. Was it darkening?

---

He was excited when he finally left the city to find more affordable housing in the valley. Having been in the city so long, he was sure a bit of fresh countryside air would do his lungs well. Or at least that’s what he told himself to make up for the fact that he couldn’t afford life in the big city any longer.

But it did do him well.

After downsizing, selling what wouldn’t fit, and getting the rest moved in, he locked up his new place and went for a walk. Just around the block a couple times. But he repeated it the next night and the one after that. Soon he was branching out and wandering all over the tiny town he lived in. It was exciting to explore a new area without worrying about getting mugged. Considering how little exercise he got, the walking left him feeling healthier than he ever had before.

But then the pandemic struck and even though he never really encountered anyone on his journeys, he got wrapped up in the idea that he had to stay home at all costs. Of course, staying away from people while on a nature walk would have been perfectly fine. But with his anxiety, he thought it was better to be safe rather than sorry and so he stayed in his apartment to hibernate like a bear in its cave.

It was only once he had finally got his vaccination that he felt he could get back out and about. Unfortunately he found the few adventures to the outdoors he did wind up taking had become stressful rather than refreshing. He found himself facing down a panic attack whenever he wandered out of sight of his apartment building.

So it was a few weeks ago that he was trying to figure out a way he could get over his new affliction, ignoring whatever transcription work he was supposed to be doing that day, when he looked out the window and saw a rainbow. He thought nothing of it at the time, but he did notice how the end of it looked to be just beyond the tree line down and across the street.

The next time he saw the rainbow was several weeks later when he had just about accepted that there was nothing he could do about his situation. He accepted that he was a failure and that was all there was to it. He would just have to learn how to be a hermit. Maybe somewhere deep down in the bleakest, least visited part of his mind was a will to fight against this realization but what good would it serve him to fight if it was just inevitable he would lose?

But then he saw the rainbow – and he would always refer to it as the rainbow, not a rainbow, for he knew it was the same one. It did in fact end just beyond those trees down and across the road.

And right then and there, he knew that there was something he could do. If he couldn’t have adventures all over the town anymore, then he could at least have the one right in front of him.

It only took him a minute to grab his jacket, stuff his wallet and keys in his pockets, slip on his shoes and rush out the door. He was halfway down the street when he noticed that the rain was picking back up and the rainbow was disappearing before his eyes.

He screamed and ran for the tree line but it was too late.

The rainbow was gone.

“Fuck it,” he mumbled to himself in disappointment. Then he realized where he was and froze. It was only the sidewalk up the road a little ways from his apartment, past the neighbors house but not the one after that. Yet even being that close to home didn’t help. He was still outside.

And that was fucking terrifying.

He turned on his heels and started speed-walking back to his door. He couldn’t tell if any of his neighbors were watching him but he could feel their eyes on him anyway. Glaring into his soul and seeing how he was just a scared little boy. He hated it and he wanted to speed up even more but then they would know for sure that he was a coward so he forced himself to slow down and walk. He got to his door and could still feel them boring holes into him so he stuck the key in the lock, only to find it was unlocked already. He reached in and grabbed a poncho for the rain, closed and locked the door, then started back towards the tree line.

He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He was terrified to be out there where people could see him like this but he was more scared of them judging him for being scared. The only way to beat them was to show them. He knew that logically there was nobody really watching him. But he also didn’t have any way of proving that, which was enough for his anxiety to latch onto like a crocodile sinking its teeth into the arm feeding it.

He looked both ways twice before crossing the street in a light jog and then did the same before ducking into the tree line as if he was a spy being followed. He wasn’t, but he was concerned that he was may be stepping onto private property. Despite how close this little forest was to his place, he had never explored it before. From the outside it looked like it perhaps hid a property but there weren’t any paths leading into the densely packed woods like there were pretty much everywhere else more than two trees were found together in town. They loved walking trails in this town. But, if he was being honest with himself, he would admit that he didn’t really have any recollection of this particular stretch of woods. That is until he had noticed the rainbow.

The trees were grown incredibly close together where they pressed up against the sidewalk. They were so close together that Mason wondered how they got enough sunlight to grow so thick. Squeezing through them was a struggle but he was able to manage with only a few scratches along his legs to show for it.

Once inside, the forest seemed much larger than Mason had expected and the trees were far more reasonably spaced apart than those by the street. There weren’t a lot of shrubs or bushes along the bottom, the leaves of the trees preventing the sunlight from reaching that far down. Mason thought that the likeliest reason considering how much darker it was here than out on the sidewalk despite only being a few feet apart. A solid carpet of green and orange moss crept up the trunks of trees, over rocks, and anything else that happened to find its way onto the ground.

In the center of the wooded area was a lake. Mason approached the edge and looked down in the deep, dark blue water. He hadn’t known this was here and that seemed odd to him. His doppelganger stared back up at him from the water and he could tell without a doubt that the lake was much, much deeper than it looked.

And much older, too.

The woods as well. The trees were gigantic. Some would take three or four people holding hands to fully wrap around the trunk. Something about that and the forest didn’t seem right. Maybe it was the lack of trash. Everything in here was perfectly natural but at the same time that made it entirely unnatural. Even on the most remote hikes that Mason took, and he’d been to some pretty out-of-the-way spots, there was always signs of human encroachment. It was something that irritated him but now that it was missing it had a disquieting effect. The sidewalk was hardly three feet from the edge of the woods and yet there was no garbage anywhere. There wasn’t even the smell of the juice plant down the street and that wafted on the wind to turn the middle of the week into an odoriferous nightmare.

There weren’t any animals either. Not one squirrel, nor one bird, and both were known to frequent his street. Hell, he saw a fox one day hanging around the juice plant and, one night early after the pandemic started, a deer wandered down the street while he was having a smoke out front. Animals were a constant presence out there in the countryside but there was no sign of them here.

He hadn’t expected to really find anything when he wandered out to look for the end of the rainbow. This was a little more than nothing. He couldn’t explain how it was that he knew it, but he was positive this was where it had landed. He was just too late to catch it.

He was ready to leave but the anxious part of him screamed that that would never happen. He had followed the rainbow to this place and by doing so he signed his life away. The trees were going to be too tight together to get out now and he was to die in this place.

But, as was often the case, his anxiety was wrong. If anything it was easier getting out than it had been getting in and it only took him a minute to get back to his apartment. This time he didn’t care if his neighbors saw him running. The thought never even crossed his mind.

---

That was the last time he had seen the rainbow.

Nothing really happened. But that was exactly why Mason needed another rainbow. And he knew for sure that one was coming.

Not because of the weather radar. Not even because of the red sky that morning.

No, he knew that a rainbow was coming because he had started to notice that tree line again.

It had been a surprisingly calm autumn as far as rain and storms go, and that last storm had been nearly a month ago now. In that time he had continued taking on transcription work to pay the bills and he had even started going for walks around the neighborhood again. Nothing explorative, just a short square that took fifteen or twenty minutes depending on how much energy he had. But looking back over the intervening weeks, it became clear that he hadn’t been noticing it since the last time he’d entered. It had a way about it. It seemed to hide in plain sight, even its absence was absent. Or perhaps it didn’t exist when there wasn’t a rainbow pointing the way.

Or maybe it had been waiting.

He knew that seemed crazy, so he assumed it had always been there and he’d just been too busy to notice.

But something told him that wasn’t the case.

It was that same something that told him it was going to rain today.

And it was right.

It came down quick when it finally came. The apartment’s parking lot turned into a muddy mire. Raindrops crashed into the metal roofing above to ring out throughout Mason’s apartment like a drum circle with no rhythm. The neighbor’s house was obscured by blankets of water. A compost bin flew across the sidewalk and out into the road where a pair of headlights deftly swerved around it.

Then it left as quickly as it came.

One moment the sky was pissing down like a hurricane and then the next it was sunny and bright.

Mason hadn’t waited to see the transition. He had already left his desk and was slipping on his shoes by the time the rain stopped. He was out the door, locking it behind him this time, and down the street a moment later. The video on his monitor still playing at two-times speed.

He hadn’t even looked up to see the rainbow before crossing the road. But he knew it would be there and a quick glance confirmed it. He felt like a fourteen-year-old kid with a crush, his stomach doing awful yet pleasurable flips. Nobody ever found the end of a rainbow before, had they? He might actually be the first.

The trees seemed even closer together than they had the last time. It was as if they had increased their fortifications after his previous excursion. He had to suck in his stomach to fit between them and even then the bark still scratched at his exposed skin.

Then he saw it.

He had in fact found the end of the rainbow. His earlier guess was correct, too. It did end at the foot of that old lake. The butterflies chewing at his insides bit harder as he took in the sight.

Because there in front of the lake, at the end of the rainbow, was a pot of gold.

Mason look around for a camera, positive that he was being pranked. Maybe one of his friends had set this up? It would take a lot of work but it was doable. He might not have said that a few years ago, but people had a lot of time to waste on a dumb prank being stuck inside through the pandemic. Only Mason didn’t really have friends anymore. Not since he locked himself up inside and focused on nothing but work.

Walking slowly, as if he might step on a land mine at any moment, he crept towards the pot of gold.

It was about as classic as it could get. Big ol’ black pot, probably cast iron he reckoned. Overflowing with golden coins. He tentatively reached out and poked it. He expected it to be a prop or maybe even a balloon or something. Pretty much anything except a fucking pot of gold. But it was as solid as a pot of gold should be and those coins sure looked real old. In the movies and cartoons he’d seen, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow always shone a bright luminous yellow. But these coins were the color of the stains on Mason’s toilet.

He reached down to pick up a coin.

“Careful,” a voice behind him said. “If you do that then I’ve got to kill you.

Mason yanked his hand back and turned around. He screamed a short high-pitched burst.

In front of him was the oldest person he had ever seen. She was three feet tall and the wrinkles on her face looked like they had aged to the point of growing their own wrinkles. The skin fell off her bones in some places, but in others it looked like it was stretched out taut. She was smiling at him and her teeth were…wrong. They weren’t rectangular like a human’s but they weren’t like an animal’s either. They looked as if they were a mix of both together, as if she had fashioned them herself. She was nearly naked, for all she wore was a dirty robe. Her back was crooked so that she walked bent forward and this made the robe hang off her neck and shoulders to obscure everything below. But in doing so it left her back exposed and this Mason could see was covered in warts and bumps, old scars that could have only been from a sword, and under these were faint traces of some kind of tattooing that seemed all but lost in the crusts and clots of her suppurating bed sores.

“At least,” she paused to chuckle, “that’s what the legends say. Don’t they?”

She stared at him, waiting for an answer and he realized that he must be dreaming or be having some kind of mental episode because he was staring at a leprechaun. That knowledge took that edge off of it for him, the fear and tension he had just felt fading away in a rush.

“Yes, I guess they do,” he said. “But you’re not going to kill me, are you?”

“Me?” She hobbled over to a nearby rock and managed to sit herself down upon it with great effort. “Do I look like I’m in any kind of shape to do something like that?”

“You look old,” he took a step back from the pot of gold. “If you don’t mind me saying.”

“I do mind, thank you very much young man, but I have to contend that you’re right.”

He tried to make eye contact with the leprechaun but it was hard to tell where exactly her eyes were in all those wrinkles. It didn’t help that he could see the gold from the corner of his eye and it was pulling at his attention.

“You don’t have to pretend not to notice it. Go ahead, take some.” She waved backhandedly at her pot of gold. “In fact, take it all.”

His mouth dropped. “All of it? Surely that has to be against some kind of leprechaun code.”

“Code?” She laughed. “You think there’s some kind of code of the leprechaun, do ye? All you know is what’s in your fairy tales and your legends and that’s only ever half right. Treats us like we’re some kind of magical being. As if we’re not as much an animal as cats, dogs, or humans.”

Her voice had been light with an air of age about it. But as her rant built, so too did her volume and Mason felt his cheeks flush red.

“I’m sorry,” he said and meant it.

“Ay, I know you are. Can read that on your face. Now you don’t know if you should ask for your wish or not.”

“Wish? Do you give me one?”

“If you ask something within my power, you’ll get one. Won’t even make ya catch me first. My bones couldn’t take it.” She leaned in towards him. “So what will it be, young man?”

He thought about it for a moment and then said, “I wish I wasn’t afraid to go outside anymore.”

“Ah, what a waste,” the leprechaun said. “Haven’t you realized you already cured yourself of that by coming here? I could have made you a star, given you wealth beyond your wildest dreams… many things, and you go and choose what you already have.”

“You’re already giving me wealth,” he pointed to the pot of gold.

“Ay, I guess I am at that. But do me a favor and let me have but one of the coins. Something to remember it by.”

“Of course.” Mason reached down and plucked a gold coin from the pot and tossed it to the leprechaun. He knew it was a little rude but he really didn’t want to risk touching her by getting close enough to hand it over politely. It landed at her feet.

“Thank you, young man,” she said. “Now I think it’s time for you to head along now. Go ahead and take the pot, too.” She watched him struggle to pick it up, really fight to find the best grip. But once he had it he was off and running, the trees opening up to make an exit for him. She waved after him. “I hope it treats you well.”

The leprechaun waited on her rock for many minutes after Mason left.

The coin stared up at her from the dirt.

With a heavy sigh she bent down to retrieve it. It wouldn’t have mattered whether or not he handed it to her like a polite young man should be raised to do. Polite, rude, it was all the same to her. She had lived too long and seen too much. Her time was at an end.

Still, you’d think if they remembered her kind then they’d heed the warnings.

But that wasn’t the case these days, so at least the world she was leaving behind was one that was finally ripe for exploitation and profit.

She could take comfort in knowing that.

She waded into the water and let herself drop beneath the surface. It was colder than see expected. She had only the faintest memory of her earlier time in the lake at the end of the rainbow.

She pulled her knees up to her chest with both arms to sink faster, though she knew this was a pointless act. The water in the lake didn’t function the same as water. It had its own laws and what those were was unknown even to one with all her ancient wisdom.

She screamed as the gnawing began, was shocked to hear sound leave her mouth. Bubbles rose towards the surface. Blood clouded the water. With great effort, she reached into the wound in her stomach and pulled out the child. She held it close to her and smiled at its bloody mouth, its green eyes, and fist-sized wart hanging off its back.

She pressed the coin into the baby’s hand and it held on firmly.

Consciousness faded as the infant began to devour its mother, gathering the energy necessary for the long swim towards the surface of the ancient lake where it would wait for the next rainbow before seeking out the rest of its gold.