Move

by Conor Kostick

  ***

  After I’d exhausted all these moves, I was very close to the top; I could feel it somehow, even if I couldn’t see it. The howls and shouts of the crowd of demons packed tight below me had risen in pitch until they had merged into one great frenzied shriek. They knew that it was very nearly over.

  ***

  Even though the boy was naturally a light brown colour, right now he was pale, a green shade of white, lying among the red smears of his bloody crawl, nursing his broken arm and looking as though he was about to be sick. The girl was completely horrified by what she had done. Both of them were gripped by terror as to what would happen next.

  I felt as though I were feeding on their raw insides and I had never enjoyed such power.

  The real feast, though, would come from this man, a man whose armour against me was disintegrating all the while. It was all very well for him to believe that all life was suffering, to try to attain complete detachment, but he couldn’t do it. No matter how strong his training, he was still a human after all.

  ‘Strike again!’ I ordered.

  The girl stood over the prostrate boy and, sobbing, slowly raised the metal pan, preparing to deal another heavy blow.

  ‘Wait. What do you want?’

  The man’s voice was calm, but he was suffering, I could feel the leaks.

  ‘You.’

  ‘You can have me, just leave the children.’

  I laughed at this, the triumphant gloating roar of a lion over its fallen foe.

  ‘I have you all.’

  ***

  There was just one more move left. The one that had started it all. It would be easier to slide back down the mountain than to listen to Tara’s screams. But I was determined not to lose any ground. Plus, I’d learned that facing up to my fears was not as terrible as the slow but persistent harm that had resulted from avoiding them. To the barge then.

  Tara looked so young. Her eyes were locked on to mine, two glistening stars in a white face. We were slowly drifting past each other as the momentum of the barge carried it on, all the while grinding against bone and flesh with a sound so ugly that no horror film has succeeded in capturing it.

  This time, instead of staring at her foot, I held Tara’s gaze and leapt over to her. In an instant her arms were around me and she was writhing, pulling hard on my shoulders, trying to haul herself away from the pain.

  ‘Hold still.’

  There were screams and shouts from all around us.

  ‘Hold still. It will be over soon. And it will be all right. Really. Everything will be all right.’ I meant it too. I wasn’t referring to her foot. That was gone. But to her life. To our life. The utter conviction in my voice got through to her. There were no screams and we looked at each other again, face-to-face, tears pouring down our cheeks.

  ***

  This time when I returned to the mountain, it was with the absolute conviction that the world I had been travelling through was of my own making. My memories returned in full lucidity. With understanding came the knowledge that all the times the hungry ghost had taken over my body, it had done so because the worst and most cowardly part of my own being had given it strength. All the time I had been damaging the walls of the metaverse, I had let it get a greater and greater purchase on me and it was by displacing me that it could escape the demon realms and enter the physical universe. As it had gained mastery over me, I had been thrust down, still alive, into the great crevasses of darkness between universes, outside of space and time. This I now understood and all the memories of my body during the time the hungry ghost had controlled me were now mine.

  Most importantly of all, I knew how to defeat the demon. All the years I’d been moving, I had been damaging the metaverse and leaving behind a whole range of dark emotions from which the hungry ghost drew its energy. By reliving and accepting all those experiences, I had absorbed those emotions into my memory and had closed the ruptures in the fabric of the metaverse.

  A beautiful golden light poured through my mind and rushed to the horizon, obliterating everything: the demons; the plains; the mountain; and along with them all the fear, jealousy, anger and shame I had avoided by moving, only to let it accumulate in the torn parts of the metaverse. I let go of it all. I freed myself and as I did so, the wounds of the metaverse sealed themselves tight.

  ***

  ‘Pick up that shard of glass.’ I was going to have him cut their throats, then his own. Between each death, there would be an ocean of fear and horror for me to drink.

  As he bent down, I felt a terrible constraint come over me. Somewhere a million trees had risen from the ground and re-rooted themselves; an implosion had sucked back into itself all the devastating energy of an earlier explosion. I was trapped, cut off from the cold tears and spaces of the metaverse, which had once been mine to live in.

  Worse, I was no longer hungry. I was full, too full. I felt sick and bloated. All the horror around me that I was feeding on was pouring into me, with nowhere to go. I could feel myself swelling. I had to stop eating, but I could not, it was not in my nature.

  ‘Stop,’ I groaned at the girl, bending over as I did so.

  She put the pan down, but it was too late, all three of them were open and raw, and irresistible. On and on I filled myself, knowing that I could not contain it all. Where had that cold vacuum gone, into which I should be pouring myself, endlessly? I was stretched to my limit and yet an unstoppable flood continued to pound into me. It only took a tiny rupture and in an instant I was ripped apart, cutting short my scream of pain.

  ***

  ‘Christ! What’s been happening here?’ I came back to find myself in Geoffrey’s room, with blood and glass on the floor and three very distraught people looking at me.

  ‘Liam! It’s you!’ Tara hobbled over to take me by the shoulders and look into my eyes. ‘It really is you, you’re back. What happened to the hungry ghost? How did you get rid of it?’

  There was a part of my mind that carried the faint memories of the hungry ghost, like a rapidly fading echo.

  ‘It destroyed itself. Once I’d fixed the damage I’d done to the metaverse, it couldn’t get rid of all the energy it was feeding off.’

  ‘You were just in time,’ muttered Geoffrey. He picked up the phone and called for an ambulance.

  ‘You all right?’ I crouched down beside poor Zed, looking at his bloody hands.

  ‘Fine, mate. Glad you’re back.’

  ‘Me too.’

  21

  Coda

  So that’s it. You can see why I don’t move any more. I’m not risking having another hungry ghost come into the metaverse. These days I have to do everything the hard way. Like typing this all out. I can’t touch-type. I have to keep looking down at the keyboard and prodding the keys with my index fingers, so this has been a bit of a chore. Tara has a smooth, very quiet way of sitting at the computer and writing for tens of minutes without pause. For her, the keyboard clicks softly, like an insect language. But for me it’s tap, tap, search, and tap. Right now, she is upstairs, asleep; when she gets up, she will be pleased to see I’ve finished.

  I’m glad I made the effort to write all this down, though, now there’s a kid on the way. You see, it occurs to me that maybe our children will have the ability to move too. In which case they should know about the consequences, at least, as far as I’ve understood them. I look forward to telling them, but it’s been good to put it all down and remind myself of how much I learned through all this, not least about facing up to my mistakes, or getting through tough times. Taking the rough with the smooth, as my dad would say.

  I don’t regret what happened. Well, obviously I am sorry for those hurt by the demon and it’s especially sad about poor Rascal. It could have been a lot worse, though, an awful lot worse. But it wasn’t and, on the plus side, I know so much more about Tara than I could ever have learned without being able to move.

  Actually, it’s not just Tara I got to know, to some extent it’s th
e whole of our species. I’ve seen every possible type of behaviour. Some of it is terrible and grim, food for hungry ghosts, although typically the negative activity of our species is subtler than you get from the really horrible and messed-up individuals. And I’m not just referring to the obvious things, like brutality and cruelty. Selfishness is rife, but of the kind where people convince themselves they are acting for the best.

  I wish people could see themselves as the hungry ghost saw them. It might stop them spending so much of their lives being false, or anxious about matters that really are not worth suffering for. But on the plus side there’s a lot of love out there too, enough that the hungry ghost didn’t find it easy at first. All in all we’re not a bad lot, given the chance.

  Of course I miss being able to move and when things go wrong, even stupid little things like not finding the corkscrew, I can’t help but be tempted. I’d say I still could move, if I really wanted to. But this universe seems like a pretty good one to have ended up in, and when bad things happen, as they surely will, I’ll just have to deal with them the old-fashioned way. These days I can face being sad, or ashamed, or failing, or any of that stuff with relative equanimity.

  After all, I’ve been to hell and I came back.

  About the Author

  CONOR KOSTICK was a designer for the world’s first live fantasy role-playing game, based in Peckforton Castle, Cheshire. He lives in Dublin where he teaches medieval history at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of several historical, political and cultural works. Conor was also a reviewer for the Journal of Music in Ireland and was twice chairperson of the Irish Writers’ Union. He co-wrote The Easter Rising: A Guide to Dublin in 1916, and co-edited Irish Writers Against War, an anthology of writings by Irish authors in response to the war in Iraq.

  Epic (2004) and Saga (2006), two fantasy futuristic novels by Conor Kostick have received great acclaim worldwide.

  Copyright

  This eBook edition first published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,

  12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, Dublin 6, Ireland

  Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777

  E-mail: books@obrien.ie

  Website: www.obrien.ie

  First published 2008

  eBook ISBN 978–1–84717–420–8

  Copyright for text © Conor Kostick 2008

  Copyright for typesetting, editing, layout design © The O’Brien Press Ltd

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  For permission to copy any part of this publication contact The O’Brien Press Ltd at books@obrien.ie.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  The O’Brien Press

  receives assistance from

  Editing, typesetting and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd

  Other books by Conor Kostick

  Epic

  ‘The most important Irish novel of the year.’

  Sunday Independent

  IBBY honour list 2006

  A USA School Library Journal Best Book of the Year 2007

  On New Earth, Epic is not just a computer game, it’s a matter of life and death. If you lose, you lose everything; if you win, the world is yours for the taking. Seeking revenge for the unjust treatment of his parents, Erik subverts the rules of the game, and he and his friends are drawn into a world of power-hungry, dangerous players.

  Now they must fight the ultimate masters of the game – The Committee. But what Erik doesn’t know is that The Committee has a sinister, deadly secret, and challenging it could destroy the whole world of Epic.

  ISBN: 978–0–86278–877–3

  Saga

  Shortlisted for Reading Association of Ireland Award 2008

  ‘Give this to fans of video games and readers of James

  Patterson’s Maximum Ride series.’

  School Library Journal

  In the virtual world of Saga, Ghost is a fifteen-year-old, anarcho-punk airboarder, with no past and no memories, only a growing realisation of her own extraordinary abilities. But who is she really? Why is she becoming embroiled in a battle with the sinister ruler of Saga—the Dark Queen?

  And what happens if Ghost dares to reach into such a world, or to delve too deeply in search of her identity? Will that lead to liberation? Or madness, death and destruction?

  ISBN: 978–0–86278–979–4

  Epic and Saga are available from www.obrien.ie and all good bookshops.