The Call

by Peadar O'Guilin

  As Nessa is coming out of the office, Squeaky Emma is on her way past. “The Turkey had me in there too.” The smaller girl rolls her eyes. “Can’t even go to the loo now, apparently!”

  Nessa nods. She’s wondering if the boys will be interrogated too. If Anto will reveal his puzzlement at the mysterious piece of paper written in Irish that turned up under his pillow. How many people here can speak that language, after all? And how many of them currently reside in the girls’ dorm? Only two, as it happens. Only one of whom owns a book of poetry.

  But Anto must have kept it to himself. She still catches him watching her at dinner later on, but she looks right through him, just another boy among many.

  By now everyone is talking about the dogs, and speculating, as they always do, about Sídhe spies and other nonsense. They haven’t noticed that the Year 7 table is empty—surprise training exercises are not uncommon.

  What is uncommon is the arrival of Conor at a girls’ table. He sets himself down beside Nessa in Antoinette’s place. Nessa can feel the warmth of his body squeezing her off to the left. He’s broad enough that the same must be happening to Aoife on the far side. He turns his great square head ostentatiously back toward the boys’ tables and gives a thumbs-up. But some of the teachers at the top of the hall have spotted him and they are watching out for trouble with narrowed eyes.

  He turns back now and smiles across Nessa at Megan.

  “You’ve been bad-mouthing me again, you red-haired bogger”—although he himself is only from Tipp!—“so I’m just giving you fair warning now that I don’t lose money on any deal. You understand me?”

  “No,” Megan replies around a lump of bread. “I wasn’t bad-mouthing you at all. I was just wondering aloud if it was you poisoned the dogs so you could have your way with them?” She turns back to her plate, stifling a yawn.

  Under the table, where no one sees, Nessa squeezes her friend’s wrist. Please, Megan, she’s thinking. Please, just this once, pull your hand from the fire!

  Conor stiffens, but sensing the narrowed eyes of the teachers on his back, he calms himself. “When you least expect it, Megan,” he says, “you’ll find those little red cheeks of yours scarred with a razor.”

  “A pretty threat from a dirty animal rapist, but an amateur one.” Megan grins, despite Nessa’s tight, tight grip trying to make her shut up.

  “Amateur?”

  “Who do you think was in the boys’ dorm that night? Who was standing over your bed while you dreamed of those deliciously seductive puppies? Here’s a proper threat, shit-breath: You’re always boasting how you can’t wait for the Call, how good you think you’re gonna do against the Sídhe … well, the next time I’m standing over your bed, I won’t hold back. I’ll take a knife to your tendons. We’ll see how fast you run then, won’t we?”

  All the color drains from his face. Then he rallies. “I always win,” he says. “I’ll make you a promise and I’ll keep it the way the Sídhe keep theirs; I’ll—” He’s interrupted by the big hand that lands on his shoulder. Nabil.

  “You are lost, my friend,” the Frenchman says.

  The boy pastes a false grin on his face and goes back to his table. Nessa hears him saying, “The teachers don’t want me seducing those girls … again! Not a whole tableful! Not at dinner!” Laughter explodes and his witticism has passed around the entire refectory by the time dessert has ended. Then the bells sound, and it is the first time they realize that one of the Year 7s has been Called.

  In the following week two boys are Called from Year 6, both with unhappy outcomes. That’s three boys in a row, and the superstitious girls of the college are finding it hard to sleep.

  But Nessa always sleeps. She has trained herself that way, learning to turn off her fears and fantasies like a light switch. And so she walks into the gym with her classmates more awake than most.

  She refuses to quail when she hears that today’s exercise is hand-to-hand combat. Those with firmer footing usually beat her, except for the ones who drop at the first touch of her hand, thinking to do her a favor. That’s the last thing she wants, and she grinds her teeth at the very thought of it.

  But it could be worse. Indeed it should be much worse, for today, once all the proper stretches are done, Nessa finds herself paired off against Rodney McNair. He’s a sandy-haired boy of middling height with the body of Bruce Lee in his prime. He can hold his own with Conor sometimes and might do even better if he wasn’t such a show-off. Rodney is not the sort to go easy. Instead he will drag out the fight, playing the matador for the benefit of the watching students.

  Nessa has always pinned her hopes of survival on skills other than fighting. But she is tired of losing the one-on-ones to braggarts like Rodney; to cruel Conor; to apologetic friends. So while her opponent is still turning to grin at some of the other boys, she wakes him up with a tooth-loosening slap across the face. He’s still rocking back on his heels, his stance all wrong, when she yanks him forward into a head-butt. Forehead to forehead, it hurts her as much as it hurts him, except that she knows it’s coming and has already prepared her next move in advance of the distracting pain.

  A second later, Rodney is on the mat and his hands don’t know whether to clutch at his groin or his face. Nessa keeps her arms by her sides, as if the clash of heads was little more than a bump. She prays that nobody can tell she is swaying.

  Sergeant Taaft is over there in an instant. “How?” she cries, grabbing Rodney by the shoulders. “How did you mess this up? For Pete’s sake, just tip her and she’ll fall!”

  “I was … looking away … She … she cheated, she—”

  “If you can’t beat the likes of her, how do you expect to—”

  “Sarah!” It is Nabil, striding over. “Sergeant Taaft!” She follows him grudgingly into the corner.

  Nessa feels her face growing hot because she likes the big Frenchman and knows what he must be saying. “Don’t talk like that in front of the cripple … ” although, being Nabil, he’ll use a more polite word.

  Still, there’s a nice moment in the shower when Megan holds out her hand for a high five. Hidden by the steam, Nessa slaps her palm and allows herself a small grin that only her closest friend ever gets to see.

  Her happiness is only increased on the way to the first class of the day. A crowd of boys is filtering through the door and Conor is furious with Rodney, his ally, his almost equal. As though it is a personal affront to him, to all of Year 5, that Rodney hit the mat so hard and so quickly.

  “She’s strong,” Rodney whispers. “Those arms are like stone. You have no idea … And she didn’t wait for the—”

  Nessa misses the rest of it as chairs screech and she has to take her place near the back or be caught eavesdropping.

  That’s when Frankenstein enters. He is a tall man, stooped, and far closer to being a zombie these days than he is to Mary Shelley’s creation. But his nickname was fated nearly sixty years ago when his parents baptized him Francis James O’Leary.

  “Call me Frank,” he used to say to the Year 1s. “Not sir or Mr. O’Leary. Honestly, Frank will do.” He laughed easily in those days, a grinning giraffe of a man.

  But that was before his wife died. Before the bureaucrats refused her treatment on the grounds that she was past childbearing age and not involved in educating the young or any other vital service such as … bureaucracy. She was an artist apparently. Good riddance, says the State.

  That was only six months ago, and Frankenstein returned from the funeral dramatically changed. Visibly broken. It won’t be long, Nessa thinks, before he joins his wife in the ground. The stench of alcohol fills the class, and when he leaves it will follow him down the corridor like a cloud of doom.

  Yet Frankenstein has earned some tolerance. He knows each plant that grows in the Grey Land and can speak with authority on every monster that has ever been mentioned in the survivor accounts, the so-called Testimonies. He slumps into his seat, but Anto has a question for him.

&n
bsp; “Sir,” he says, and Nessa likes how formal he is with the teachers. She is just realizing now that even behind their backs, he calls them by their real names rather than “the Turkey,” or “Frankenstein” or “Twinkleturd.”

  “You’ve told us that every single … uh, animal, in the Grey Land is made from human beings. But, uh, where do they get them all? I mean, the Testimonies make the place seem as full of life as our world is.”

  Frankenstein blinks slowly, but eventually he stirs himself to answer, his breath billowing out so that students in the front row recoil.

  “You know where they come from, boy.” His voice is distant, as though he is already speaking from beyond the grave. “All those thousands that disappeared trying to leave Ireland when the Sídhe blocked us off … And others from centuries ago who found ways into their world.” He nods a few times, and his head begins to settle onto his chest. I’ve done my bit now, he seems to be saying.

  But Anto persists. “Surely, sir … surely it can’t have been more than a hundred thousand or so who disappeared? But it’s like … like every niche in the Grey Land is occupied, you know what I mean? Tiny people instead of mice. Instead of birds and foxes and fish and … and even spiders! The Sídhe twist them into shape. I get that part. But how can there be so many? I mean—”

  Frankenstein waves him into silence with long, knobbled fingers.

  “Your daddy never explain the birds and the bees to you, boy? The Grey Land is full of life, because life breeds. The Sídhe have made themselves gods. The same deities you children all swear by—Crom and Lugh and Dagda—they were Sídhe! But more than gods, they have become like your Darwin. Winding the clock of evolution and letting it go its own way.”

  “What do you mean by ‘your Darwin,’ sir?” Anto asks.

  But Frankenstein is already fast asleep at his desk.

  Later, after a day of lessons and grueling runs, after a spear-making workshop and a dinner of gossip and laughter in the refectory, Conor Geary sits himself at the head of the very same classroom where earlier Frankenstein fell asleep.

  He is first to arrive—as a leader should be—and now he looks on indulgently as his Round Table assembles before him. Rodney, in disgrace, takes a chair in the second rank, keeping his face to the floor and showing only the blond stubble on the top of his head. Chuckwu is in next, grinning and chewing only Crom knows what. He’s the tallest of them and can run for days without rest. He claims, openly, to be a coward, but Conor has never seen him flinch from anything.

  Soon after, Fiver arrives along with chunky, dour Cahal. Tony is next, then Liz Sweeney, Bruggers, and Keith. They all grab chairs and swap stories of this morning’s combat session. Most did well of course. They are here because they’re the best. Some of them have even knocked Conor from his feet the odd time, and he likes that. He wants them to stand up to him, because if he can’t prove himself the greatest of them, then why is he even sitting here?

  The door opens one more time and Sherry glides in, winking at him over the heads of the others. She’s only a Year 4, but she’s his main consort these days. She’s smart enough and fast enough that he has hopes for her survival. And as the leader, he needs to be seen to have a girlfriend. He trusts she’s too wise to get herself knocked up. She doesn’t deserve her place here if she does.

  He waits for Sherry to sit at the back, then waits some more, daring them to get restless so that Chuckwu will say something stupid and earn another kicking. But their discipline has been growing over the year since he formed them and at last, slowly, he nods.

  “I salute you, my fellow survivors,” he says. No one from the Round Table has yet been Called, but this is how he always begins their sessions. Many of them will die, of course. Even these, the best of Year 5. But they are a seed for the future and, as he often does, he allows his vision of that future to spill out of him now, so that they will go to their beds inspired and ready for the Call, whenever it should come.

  “I want it now,” he says to them. “I want to feel a scrawny Sídhe neck under my hands.” They grin back at him, although some shift nervously, not as prepared as they need to be. “And when I return I’ll start building a place for the rest of you. We will be the best trained, the strongest in the country. And we ought to rule, not the feeble old farts who have never even dreamed of the Grey Land. Not the bureaucrats. Us. Us! Only we can save the Nation.”

  “How?” Sherry prompts. She’s still fairly new and wants to hear it all.

  It’s Cahal who answers, his voice a rumble from that thick farmer’s neck of his. “The Nation is wasting resources,” he says. “On kids who don’t have a chance.”

  “It should be us,” Liz Sweeney agrees, her voice high with excitement. She is as tall and muscular as most boys in the year. “People like us. If the best food and medicine and training came to us, the odds would go up from one in ten to … to … three in ten at least! Five in ten maybe! Instead they waste all the good stuff on walking dead like Aoife and Clip-Clop.” Clip-Clop is their name for Nessa.

  Conor nods his approval. Nessa, he thinks, Nessa … And it’s a shame, it really is. Because, from the waist up, she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. He dreams of her all the time, a weakness he obviously never shares with the Round Table. Only Sherry knows, because he’s called her Nessa by mistake more than once. He’s had to strike her then—it couldn’t be helped, and he doesn’t feel good about it! But he’s had to strike her and tell her that he had used that name as an insult because Sherry had sinned in some unspecified way.

  Still. She must suspect.

  And it angers him more than anything. The waste of it. How this beautiful girl through her foolishness, or the foolishness of her parents, exposed herself to a supposedly extinct disease and destroyed her future.

  He can’t bear to look at her and can’t help it either. It’s as though the Sídhe had designed her specifically to taunt their greatest enemy. What flawless skin they gave her! Pale and smooth beneath the pure black line of her eyebrows, sweeping over well-defined cheekbones and around a mouth designed to smile, although it so rarely does.

  “People who are like her,” he says now, “won’t even be fed after the age of five. Or whenever it becomes clear that they are useless. Our ancestors would have exposed them as babies on a hillside, but we can do better than that because we are not cruel. We can use injections.”

  “Medicine is expensive,” Cahal rumbles. “Pillow will do the job quickly. Won’t hurt either.”

  The door opens and they all jump, as though they should feel guilty for wanting to save the country.

  Anto pokes his head in. “Oh,” he says, deliberately using English, “is this where we’re all meeting?”

  Bloody Liz Sweeney actually grins at him!

  Anto must have wondered where they were all going and followed along to annoy them. He really should know better after Conor was forced to discipline him. But the little fool never misses an opportunity to mock his betters. He thinks he’s a joker, and there’s got to be jealousy in there too, knowing that they will survive when he has doomed himself with pacifism and the diet of a sheep.

  Conor stands and puffs out his heroic chest. He doesn’t need to risk any Cage time by starting a fight when an instructor might pass by—the memory of Anto’s bleeding face is enough to remind everybody of his authority.

  “It wasn’t funny last time you made that joke,” Conor says, “and it certainly isn’t—”

  He stops talking. Anto too falls back a step and clutches that crucifix he wears. Because Cahal’s seat is now empty.

  “Somebody … somebody watch the clock,” says Conor. His throat is dry and Anto comes into the room, almost on his tippy-toes. “You don’t belong,” says Bruggers, a lanky kid from Cork City. But he too turns to watch the clock. A minute has passed soon enough and Conor is struggling to maintain his breathing. He needs to be their anchor now. Their pillar. They must see him unperturbed.

  But he’s jealous. He
always expected to be the first of the group to be Called. As if the Sídhe would want to remove the greatest threat first. Not that they could.

  Two minutes, says the clock.

  Cahal is a strange one. He has a thick body in an era that builds teenagers to look like greyhounds. But poke him with a finger and you soon encounter rock. Or metal maybe. Cahal is a robot, pure and simple. A machine.

  Two and a half minutes.

  Conor removes his jacket. “He’ll be cold when he returns,” he says, confidently. “Everybody step back from his chair.”

  And then the second hand of the clock on the wall passes the three-minute mark and the last four seconds seem to hang in the air.

  Cahal was sitting, but now he falls to the ground, naked and cold and surprised. He sees the famous silver spirals in the sky above him. He feels his eyes running with the bleach stink in the air. But in spite of the evidence, as has happened to hundreds of thousands before him, he needs a few moments to accept the reality of where he is.

  It’s a ledge on the side of a cliff.

  To his right, a curtain of what might be slime or mucus drips slowly over the cold black rock and down into the dark crevice a long way below him.

  To his left, a series of vines offers a way to the top.

  Cahal puts his head between his knees and takes a few panicked breaths of the acrid air. He stifles a sob, a sound that nobody back at school thinks him capable of making. But he is the youngest and the last of a family of seven. Turlough was bigger and stronger than he was; Niamh was quick and athletic and ever so kind. She brought him food, and when she returned for brief holidays he ran laughing from her tickles.

  The Sídhe Called her one of those times, and Cahal saw what came back before his softhearted parents could prevent it.