Move

by Conor Kostick

  The agony of trying to wrench free of his grip caused me to cry aloud.

  ‘Then you will come again and I will find you again. And again. And again. More times will you be devoured than there are leaves on trees.’ He chuckled. ‘After which, there are other demons looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘Demons?’ The question came with a shriek of pain.

  ‘Those who have been particularly wicked in life come here in death and are ours to play with.’

  ‘Am I dead? I didn’t die. And I wasn’t that wicked, was I?’

  Instead of answering, he ran a black tongue over his lips before catching a drop of my blood on a talon and sucking it with relish.

  ‘Poison!’

  Releasing me, he threw himself to the ground, rolling around, coughing and vomiting. With each spasm I heard children’s voices, as though he were disgorging a playground.

  ‘Poison. No, you are not dead. Not dead. Not dead.’ The Monk’s voice fell to a whisper, his expression one of baleful fury.

  I was about to run out of the room, when I had a thought. Still nervous, I nevertheless forced myself to step towards the quivering body of the headmaster. By his fierce expression he wanted to intimidate me, but I could see the fear in his eyes. The blood was rapidly drying on my hand, but I reached out towards him and he writhed, jerking his enfeebled body in an effort to get away from my touch.

  Now it was me chasing him and I found myself unexpectedly laughing with the relief of my pent-up fear. It was a bitter laugh, though, full of pain. Knocking desks aside as he tried to crawl away, I pursued him to the corner of the classroom. The faces on the wall watched with expressions of horror.

  ‘Go back to where you belong!’ The demon shouted in terror, holding its arms before it. ‘You shouldn’t be here!’

  There was little of the Monk left now, the image of the headmaster, which must have somehow been drawn from my thoughts, had melted, revealing a horrific monster, something like the hungry ghost in the book, all bloated stomach and sharp claws.

  When I thrust my bloody hand at him he blocked it with his arm, except that the resistance to my blow withered away. His skin broke open, spraying the air with millions of tiny flies. My hand passed through bone and on to his face which also broke apart, a howl of fear and frustration abruptly ending as my whole palm sunk into his mouth and nose. Those once sinister eyes locked on mine, and then lost their lustre. Pouring out of the slumped body was a sea of tiny flitting insects. Disgusted, I snatched my hand away and retreated as the minute creatures hopped and crawled down the corpse, and began to spread across the floor. With the startled masks still watching me, I left the classroom.

  Only one turn was needed and I found the exit from the school.

  Outside, a great shudder wracked my body and I had to fight back the urge to be sick. Pain helped. My T-shirt was torn and was stuck to me at the upper arm by dried blood. Still, I’d learned something important about this place. The demon seemed to have been surprised I was alive and my blood was poison to it. That gave me heart. The scary inhabitants of this place weren’t ready for me. It sounded like he had expected me to have been dead, a spirit or a soul or something. Janey Mack, but you wouldn’t want to come here when you died.

  Even though the experience had been disgusting, for the first time since I’d been swallowed by the darkness between the universes, I felt a certain optimism. After all, look what I’d done; I’d killed a demon that moments earlier had seemed utterly terrible and invincible.

  18

  Untrammelled Appetites

  Where should I go to feed? Even though I had no particular goal in mind, the anticipation of sustenance quickened my stride. I sniffed the air. There were wisps of unhappiness floating above the morning crowds, but nothing too substantial, enough merely to arouse my appetite for more. Very few people could meet my eye. Many of those whose gaze ducked down, especially the women, gave off frissons of self-doubt. Was I staring at them because a button was undone? A spot was visible beneath their make-up? Because I knew something about them? This was pitiful nonsense. The stream of office workers had carried me past Trinity College and my hunger urged me inside.

  Here the pickings were only slightly better. Less of them were intimidated by my scrutiny; in fact the opposite, there was a certain amount of self-importance to devour. Who was I, a young kid, to be looking at them? Did I envy them? I should.

  This one was a little tastier. She had come out of the library exulting in her triumph. The early bird catches the worm, she told herself. By coming in ahead of the others of her class she had managed to get her hands on the psychology books they needed for their exams. No one would find them behind the huge black history volumes on the second floor, no one but her. I chuckled aloud and she jumped aside, shocked.

  There were trails for me to follow, walking eagerly to sniff them out, like a dog, sometimes turning back on myself. Disdain, ambition, competitiveness, lust, complacency. Never enough to hold me to one particular person. At least, not until I came to the building marked ‘Dental Hospital’. Even outside of the doors I could taste pain and fear. With a low growl, I pushed my way in and ran up the stairs.

  I spent the morning sitting among the people who came and went in suffering. The availability of this sustenance changed the nature of my appetite. Never satiated. Never. But I was no longer finding it necessary to grasp at the faintest tendrils of dark feelings. Now I was awake and determined to obtain stronger meat, that which comes from the heart.

  Over in the Physics buildings, I sensed a professor at work early. Almost at random, I went inside; he would do. Up the stairs to his lab, where the name on the door was Byrne.

  ‘Hello?’ He looked up, curious. ‘Can I help you?’

  This was an affable elderly man, living a comfortable life, happy with his work, not an obvious source of energy for me. Yet he was human, I could break him open. I fastened my eyes upon his.

  ‘You are making a fool of yourself in McCarthy’s on a Friday. They think you are a sad lonely man and they are right. You have absolutely no hope with Eithne. She is only being kind and your fantasies are entirely misplaced.’

  At first he opened his mouth, about to retort, but the mention of Eithne’s name killed that. Instead he glowered at me angrily. Good.

  ‘Why didn’t you credit Ger Singleton on your paper to the Royal Irish Academy last year?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know.’

  He flushed. Excellent, I inhaled heartily.

  ‘That wasn’t the worst of it, though. What about the reference you wrote for him to the Research Council. He trusted you. He probably still does. That would change rather a lot, don’t you think, if he could see what you had written. Jealousy? Fear that he would supplant you? That he would get the O’Reilly Award?’

  The professor was cast down, physically slumping back into his chair, ashamed to meet my eye.

  ‘What are you?’ he muttered. ‘How do you know about those things?’

  ‘When you were a boy, your family had nothing. Remember crying because Robert McCarthy recognised your blazer, it was the old one his family had given away to Oxfam? Robert pulled you around the playground, showing the ink marks on the inside pockets. You were denying it through your tears, but you knew he was right. You’ve come a long way, Professor. If your father was alive, he would be very proud of you. Or would he? Your father believed there was never any excuse for a lie. Remember? What would he think about the way you’ve treated Singleton?’

  ‘Stop it,’ the professor whispered, his face bright red.

  ‘Come with me.’ I had him.

  ‘Go away. Get out.’ There was no force in his words.

  ‘Why did you let your brother fall? He was only six and he was stuck, high up on the climbing bars. He was screaming for you. What were you doing Byrne? Busy with your older friends, too embarrassed to help him? Until tiredness, vertigo and fear won. You turned just in time to see hi
m let go and break both his ankles.’

  ‘Oh God.’ A tear rolled down his cheek.

  ‘Get up!’

  This time he complied.

  ‘Go ahead of me, show me the way to the roof.’

  It is extraordinary the difference in the walk of a person at ease with themselves, and one in the throes of misery. Byrne didn’t look up at all, his hands barely moved from his sides. From over his shoulder, I leaned to whisper in his ear.

  ‘How long do you think Veronica waited for your call? You know what it meant to her, a girl like that, to sleep with you. She trusted you. She believed she had met her soul mate in you and you let her believe it. What was it you said? If she was the princess in the fairytale, then you were the woodcutter, poor but honest. That, pathetic as it now sounds, clinched the matter, didn’t it? Your evident pride in truth over riches. But afterwards you panicked and couldn’t even ring her, couldn’t talk to her. What must she have gone through?’

  Feasting on this man was good. All the better for the fact that his feelings had been buried deep, unexamined for years, smoothed over. He was ill prepared for them, and for me. There was no barrier between us, not like the girl or the monk. They had already examined their flaws under a harsh light and would not flinch from them. Pure force would be needed there. Byrne though was hurting and I was drinking at the wounds.

  The fire escape made a loud racket as I pulled it down, worrying me that we might attract attention and this delicious feast would be interrupted. Byrne just stood there, passively, until I ordered him up. The day was breezy, low clouds swiftly moving above a skyline of cranes and grey buildings.

  ‘Come here. Stand on the lip.’

  While I sat on the granite wall that surrounded the edge of the building, Byrne clambered right up on to it. There was nothing between him and a three-storey fall onto tarmac. His death was certain.

  ‘Look down.’

  For a moment he glanced at me, the smiling boy sitting in front of him, and then his gaze continued on past me, to the drop.

  ‘In a few minutes I’m going to order you to step off. How does that feel?’

  There was not the will in him to answer, but I enjoyed his fear all the same.

  ‘Hold out your left arm. Now stand on one leg, and hold the other over the edge.’

  I let out a long sigh; this was good food. Yet I wanted more. Always I want more. And there was a lot more to be had from Byrne. It would be a waste to kill him now. With a chuckle at the sight of the professor, shaking as he balanced on the edge of destruction, I got up. My appetite had risen again, along with my strength. Time to roam the world and, where it did not produce its own misery, help create some.

  19

  Trudging through Hell

  After walking for hours through featureless dust, I was growing frustrated. Did my experience of time match that of Earth? If so, how much harm had the hungry ghost done already? At last, I saw a dot on the horizon. It was a young boy. At first, I thought he was sick, the way he was crouched, like he might have had a bad stomach ache, but, after a while, I realised that he was leaning over to study ants as they scurried across the dirt.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ he replied, without looking up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I crouched down beside him.

  ‘Thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Lots of things. Like this ant. Is it the same one I saw before, or another one? It’s hard to tell from here. Then I was thinking about the nest. I don’t know how many ants are in this nest, but I think twenty thousand. This made me wonder if they are performing difficult computations.’

  I felt like laughing, but he was serious.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Each one of them has a few brain cells, let’s say a quarter of a million.’ Still the boy had not spared me a glance. ‘Together, they amount to enough brain cells to be pretty smart, nearly as smart as a human. What if they aren’t really individual insects, but each one is a part of a much bigger whole? What if there’s a pattern? These are strange ants, see, they aren’t carrying food back to the nest. What are they doing?’

  Once he had said this, I turned my attention to the ants. Actually, they were fascinating. The boy was right. The way they were marching around had some kind of purpose. There was meaning here. Even when they climbed over stones or blades of grass, they came back into line, the distances between each ant varied, but it was not random. Or was it?

  After several days, I realised that you could distinguish between the individual ants, some of them were different colours, some were slightly larger or smaller than the others. The boy was not crazy when he had wondered if he’d seen a particular ant earlier. This discovery would help I lot, I was sure.

  There was a boy beside me. I’d forgotten that.

  ‘Have you worked it out?’ I asked him.

  ‘No. But I think it has something to do with Pi.’

  I started to look again. The constant motion was intriguing, but it was hard to keep up with them all. Just when you thought you had an insight into the pattern it disassembled again. The ants were definitely purposely, collectively, engaged in some fascinating activity.

  Since I was comfortable here, not needing to eat or drink, or even move, I lost track of time. Perhaps ten years went by. I know that ten years is a very long time. But under this unchanging purple sky my earlier question was answered. There was no time here, not like I was used to. The only motion was the endlessly fascinating to-ing and fro-ing of the ants.

  ‘Ahh,’ the boy sighed. I noticed him again. ‘It’s me. It’s my thoughts.’

  Was it? Did they respond to his thinking?

  The ants began to move a little more urgently.

  ‘Would you mind if we ate you?’ The boy sent me a predatory glance, sure that he had ensnared me.

  ‘No. But if you are a demon, you shouldn’t. I’m not dead. I’ve come here a different way. I’ll poison you.’

  An ant crawled over my finger and with its mandibles prised a tiny flake of dried blood from where it had stuck to a hair of my hand. Several more came to me and I watched with great interest as they crossed my knuckles, treading so lightly I could hardly feel them. That was before a new kind of ant came, one with oversized jaws. This one did not try to get up on to my hand, but instead tore a thin layer of skin loose from my fingertip, working at it for perhaps an hour, before being able to leave, carrying its trophy above its head.

  ‘It will take a long time.’ The boy was apologetic.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  The pattern no longer interested me. It was as though a cloud had come between me and the sun, except that there were no clouds, no sun. Just the constant gloomy sky.

  After a few days, I looked up, the boy was face down in the dirt, dead. Dead ants lay all around him, the last few struggling to move, twitching their legs and antenna.

  Disappointed, I stood up. Only after I had walked for several miles did I start to remember. I was Liam. Everything was restored to me and I gasped, short of breath.

  ‘Jaysus!’

  I’d killed another demon, but entirely by luck. I could have been crouched over that bit of dirt for eternity. I wasn’t going to be caught like that again; I would trust nothing in this world.

  ***

  Not long after leaving the dead ant-demon I saw a mountain on the horizon. I almost gave a little skip of delight. It was a sign that the drab terrain was not endless. Naturally I walked toward it, a cone shaped silhouette against the purple sky. After several days, I realised it was not getting any closer.

  The steady crunch of my feet on to the dirt sometimes formed the basis of a rhythm that caused my mind to recall tunes. Chart hits mostly. I was idly speculating on ‘Hand In My Pocket’, trying to remember the lyrics, when I found myself back in the school disco, listening to the same song. These were fairly tame events, no drink except that which we had smuggled in. The moment was familiar. Deano was danci
ng with Jocelyn Doonan, who I had a terrible crush on. Back then I had moved, come up behind Deano, tapped on his right shoulder, and, as he had turned, had slipped in to steal his dance partner. Jocelyn had laughed aloud at my daring and Deano hadn’t dared to give me any aggro. After standing for a few moments, while everyone around him was dancing, he gave up.

  This time I couldn’t move. I had to watch from the back of the room, among some of the other lads, pretending to be enjoying myself, but actually suffering from acute jealousy.

  ‘Just look at Joss. She’s such a slag, isn’t she?’ Rory had his foot up on a chair beside me.

  ‘Isn’t she?’ I echoed. I could see what he meant. Jocelyn was wearing a loud pink bra under a tank top and she obviously wanted the straps and the lacy top to be visible. ‘Actually,’ I continued, having given the matter some thought, ‘I don’t think she is. No offence mate, but I think you are just jealous. I know I am. I think she’s great.’

  ‘Liam fancies Joss! Liam fancies Joss!’ Rory tried to make a chant out of it, but I didn’t care. I simply shrugged.

  The disco faded and, strangely, the mountain had come a great deal closer. The ground was rising and the dark cone filled the horizon ahead.

  ***

  A small cloud was drifting across the land; it stopped and came directly towards me. When it was close I could see that it was a ball of wasps. Black and yellow, they hummed as they intermingled in a tight pack. The ball suddenly expanded, to form a face of hovering wasps.

  ‘Food.’ The word emerged distinctly from their constant buzzing.

  ‘Not for you. I’m alive. If you eat me, you will be poisoned and die.’

  ‘Food.’ Repeated the wasp demon with an urgent buzz.

  ‘Go see what happened to Ant Boy before you try it.’ I warned him.