The Call

by Peadar O'Guilin

  “I have some news … ” She is only realizing now that she is in shock and that she is about to spread that shock to those in her care. To boys and girls who need to stay focused on survival. This isn’t like her at all. But she hovers on the edge of saying nothing, of making matters worse, until Nabil covers the microphone with one hand and whispers into her ear, “They will hear of this anyway.”

  She nods and he fades away into the background.

  Ms. Breen takes another breath. “Something … something … unfortunate has occurred.” Another breath. She has never spoken so badly in her life. When she started out in her scholarship, when she published her first papers on Sídhe history, there were still a hundred and fifty survival colleges in the country and pupils were assigned to one or the other depending on the day of their birth. Nobody will say how many schools remain open, but these days the children who come to Boyle can have their birthday any time in the month of September. And it’s even worse than that, because this year, for the first time, the number of new entrants has fallen below the fifty mark.

  She grabs the lectern, aware of her cracked nails, of the wrinkled skin on her hands. What use am I? And then, in anger, she smacks the wood hard enough that the pain brings tears to her eyes and everybody jumps.

  “It’s like this,” she says, and she’s speaking in English so that even the Year 1s will get it. “Mallow Survival College is gone.”

  Everybody stares. Her statement has no meaning. “What I’m saying, children, is that everybody there, everybody in the whole college was murdered in their sleep. Those children who had relatives in Mallow have already been … been taken aside by the counselors. That’s why they’re not here with us. As … as always, we must be supportive—”

  Everybody starts speaking at once. Children shouting questions or hugging each other or crying. Ms. Breen is normally more careful than this. She prepares all her big statements, preempting questions and concerns, heading off destabilizing rumors, consulting with the counselors in advance. She’s been at this a long time after all. Too long.

  Now she just goes back to her seat at the top table, staring straight ahead. It is up to the portly Mr. Hickey to put a stop to the riot.

  “Enough!” he cries into the microphone. “We don’t know any more than that, all right? There were survivors—a few of the veterans who were drinking in the town and gave the alarm when they came back. The night watch were killed too. So something put them to sleep first. And that’s that. Enough! Shut your traps! Enough!”

  And it is enough. The questions cease.

  “Now,” says Mr. Hickey, “we’ve spoken to Ms. Fortune”—he is referring to the chief cook—“we’re going to be having lunch early today, so stay in your places. And from now on, starting with this meal, all food will be tasted by the dogs first, under the supervision of Mr. Downes and Mr. Connolly.” Behind him, the other teachers are looking surprised. When was any of this agreed? Hickey is on another of his solo runs. But nobody objects because these precautions are obvious and sensible and somebody has to take charge.

  Ms. Breen continues to stare into space, but the hunt master hasn’t finished quite yet. “And finally,” he says, “I can’t speak for the government, or for any of my colleagues here behind me, but I don’t think this outrage could have been committed without the help of somebody inside the school. I think that’s obvious. We don’t want any witch hunts here in Boyle, but if you see anything strange from now on, anything at all, please report it at once—at once! To one of the instructors. Nabil? Will you take charge?”

  Everybody trusts Nabil. Except Taaft maybe. It’s a good choice, so good that it takes a little of the tension out of the room.

  But here and there children of all ages are still crying. Sure, they got all the siblings to the counselors before the announcement was made, but the world of the Irish teenager is so small now that many of them know somebody who attended Mallow. At Nessa’s table, Aoife has her face in her hands while Squeaky Emma tries to comfort her. And Megan says, “Crom twist the Turkey inside out! Has she no sense?”

  But Nessa has no idea how it might have been done differently.

  A school. A whole school full of trained killers destroyed in their sleep. And she remembers the drugged dogs in the corridor. She remembers them and she shivers.

  She leaves the rest of them behind and finds the big Frenchman. “Nabil?” Unlike Taaft, he does not like to be called “sir” or “sergeant” or “master.” He hates salutes, and once, when a pot smashed behind him, Nessa saw him launch himself into the bushes. But other than that, he seems sane enough.

  “I have something to report,” she says, “about the dogs.” Because what she could not admit to Ms. Breen, she will tell him. She must tell him, if she and her friends are to live.

  It’s nighttime again and Nessa is in the loo, trying to persuade herself to flush the poetry down the toilet and go back to bed. The news today has shaken everyone, but that’s not why she’s here. It’s because she’s an addict of her own dream. She imagines a farm in Donegal and somebody to share it with.

  If I had wealth

  Silver in my pocket

  I’d take the shortest path

  To the house of my beloved

  After she made her report to Nabil and sat down again, everybody was hugging everybody else. And she needed a hug too, she really did. But not their pity. Not that. Alone of everybody at her table, she sat straight and impassive until Anto walked right up to her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked sharply.

  He looked so handsome, his eyes all but black in the low autumn light. She glanced away, and his disappointment was so very obvious.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, nodding back to one of the boys’ tables. “I told them I would ask you what you were saying to Nabil, that’s all.”

  “All right,” she said. “But … but I can’t tell anyone.”

  “Fine.” And he was gone. And she is here again, in spite of the fact that Nabil has forbidden it and that he will know who is responsible if she is seen.

  She bangs her head against the wooden walls. “By Crom,” she says. “By Lugh and Dagda, go back to bed.”

  She pauses to wonder how it became a fashion among the children of Ireland to swear by the gods of their murderers. Even as a six-year-old, with no knowledge of what was to come, she and her little friends had a long list of sacred names to take in vain. Why not swear by sex as their parents do? Or by plague and the devil like their ancestors?

  But people like to shock with their words, don’t they? And what could be more ugly than the fair folk?

  “Doesn’t matter,” she mutters now.

  She opens the window and finds a waxing moon that’s far too bright for comfort. Her bad idea is looking worse by the minute. But she’s smiling anyway, every muscle thrilling with excitement. And then she hears somebody shouting. Shamey, one of the “veterans,” has wandered into the unused parking lot at the back of the school.

  Three years ago he returned from the Call completely unmarked. Well, physically unmarked anyway. Nessa sees that he has been into the town of Boyle—shrunk now to a single inhabited street and an empty church. It retains just the one pub, and that’s enough for Shamey. He’s seventeen years old, just about. His hair is long and he sports a scraggly beard that has failed so far to submerge the spots on his cheeks. He shouts, “I’m not having kids, you hear me? You all hear me, you Sídhe-twisted scum? Just to send them to … to that place? Are you mad?”

  Veterans serve no real purpose. In theory they give talks or lead classes when teachers are ill. Mostly the post is a chance for them to recover from the Call before finding a place in the real world. Meanwhile, they get to do pretty much anything they want.

  But not this.

  Shamey’s words are an attack on morale that cannot be tolerated, and indeed the two night guards, Tompkins and Horner, ex-SAS, as it happens, bring him down as gently as their training allows. Which isn’t
gentle at all. Nessa watches as Horner gets him in an armlock and Tompkins stuffs his mouth with a rag of Lugh knows what.

  At that moment, as if he knows she’s there, Horner looks right up at the bathroom window. He has such a youthful face—like that of a boy’s corpse, lying drowned in a river with large, large empty eyes.

  “Get a move on!” Tompkins says. But it’s still a full count of three slow heartbeats before Horner turns away. They spirit Shamey off and Nessa finally finds the courage to shred the poetry and go back to bed.

  Like Antoinette’s parents, Mr. Hickey was one of the first survivors. That puts him in his late thirties, or would do if he hadn’t spent every one of the last twenty years eating and reading, drinking and reading. Going AWOL in Dublin to steal books … And all the other usual behaviors inspired by a short visit to the Grey Land. But the kids like that he’s close to them in age, and especially the fact that a good chat can sidetrack him for entire lessons at a time.

  “No!” he protests. “Burke, you know this is hunt theory and not history. You know it.”

  Everyone is grinning at Solomon Burke—Bruggers, as the boys call him. Everybody except Heather, who came from the same town as Rodney McNair and whose red eyes show she liked him more than she’s been letting on.

  “But really, sir,” says Bruggers, using the English honorific instead of the Sídhe term “High One,” “the legends say they used to steal our babies from the cradle. And that they’d substitute their own young ones instead—”

  “If they ever did such a thing, Burke—if!—they stopped it a long time ago. And anyway, there are plenty of stories of them stealing away older children too.”

  “How would we know though?” Bruggers grins at Conor, hoping his triumphant derailing of the class is properly noted. “About the babies, I mean? Maybe the Sídhe never stopped swapping them out. Maybe that’s where we get our Hitlers and our Cromwells and all.”

  Mr. Hickey throws his eyes to heaven. He was born into a world where even the dustiest academics knew no more than a few hundred words of Sídhe, or Primitive Irish as they called it. There were no survival colleges back then.

  “Listen,” he says, “we don’t need the Sídhe to teach us evil. We were the ones who put them in the Grey Land, remember? And not for just a day or however long it is the Call lasts. We Irish … we trapped an entire race of people in hell for all eternity just so we could take their homes for ourselves. You can read it in The Book of Conquests. I mean, look at it from their point of view. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the People of the Goddess Danú … There they were, a few thousand years ago, living in a place they loved so much that they called it the Many-Colored Land. Then this other group arrives, pretty much the same as them, speaking the same language even, except this new lot—our ancestors—were the first in the world to have iron weapons. They thought it gave them the right to take everything! Everything!”

  The truth of it is undeniable, but it’s not a popular opinion, and the cheerful mood of the class instantly chills.

  “Look,” he says, “I’m not saying that anybody here deserves what’s happening to them, all right? By the Cauldron and the Spear, I was training for the Olympics when it happened to me!” And his voice cracks. “I was thirteen.” He takes deep, deep breaths for a while, and it’s clear he must have one of the better counselors because he steadies himself soon enough. “The point is, we’ll never beat them if we don’t understand them. And it might even be that we can’t beat them, but that we can find some kind of compromise and make peace with them. Forgive them even.”

  This is too much for Megan. “Crom twist you!” she cries. It’s enough to earn her a night in the Cage, but not in Mr. Hickey’s class. “You actually expect us to forgive them? Sir?”

  He shrugs. “Let me ask you this, Ms. Donnelly. Do you want them to stop what they’re doing? Do you? Because, if so, then they will have to forgive us.”

  “I’ll forgive them with my fist,” Conor says, and even Megan nods, her jaw tight. “They agreed to the treaty, to leave Ireland to us. That’s in The Book of Conquests too, isn’t it? Now they need to stick to it.”

  The only person in the room who has survived a Call shrugs sadly. “All right then, class. Back to work. Here’s what I want you to concentrate on when you’re out in the woods next week … ”

  Once a fortnight, Year 5 stages a hunt. On this particular evening, Nessa will join the prey. She always needs more practice in learning to hide, although she’s not so fond of the non-damaging but painful beating doled out to those who are caught, or the freezing misery of the losers’ showers.

  But as Mr. Hickey often reminds them, it’s just as important to be one of the hunters: to put yourself in the minds of the Sídhe as they seek out the only remaining thing that can bring them joy.

  Halloween creeps ever closer. Trees shiver with the previous night’s rain, and the first ice of the year is only a week away.

  Nessa has done her usual trick of making crutches for herself, and so good is she with them that she can go several steps at a time without her feet touching the ground, using them more as stilts than anything else. If only she could keep up such gymnastics for more than a few minutes! If only she could outpace even one of her classmates …

  Tonight she needs to stay free a mere six hours as teams of four comb the woods, hoping to win the privilege of a hot bath and a hot meal; hoping to deprive her of the same.

  They’ll have plenty of light to find her. A splendid full moon sprinkles silver through the trees, and this, apparently, is the closest that beautiful planet Earth can ever get to the Grey Land’s sickly pallor.

  Nessa pauses at the base of a large pine, breathing heavily, her nostrils filled with the scent of resin, her keen ears picking out the sounds of smaller creatures fleeing her presence. And then she jumps, as less than three hundred feet away she hears a shout. It’s Bruggers calling, “All clear, east! Advancing!”

  Conor’s loud tenor replies from somewhere to her right. “I see a few holes in the ground. It’s Clip-Clop and her crutches! She can’t be far!”

  All the advantages are theirs. Those are the rules. There’d be no point otherwise. Mr. Hickey gave his hunters time to look over the terrain and to set traps. They get to choose their own teams too, and so, not surprisingly, Conor has a bunch of his cronies around him. They even carry flashlights because, unlike the Sídhe, their eyes are not so well adapted to the environment. The beams pass through the branches around her, but create more shadows than they kill.

  Nessa has to force herself not to plunge away off into the trees. Conor’s no fool; he just isn’t. He knows how to stay quiet, so if they’re calling to each other, it’s because they want her to hear and to panic. They’re hoping she’ll flounder into whatever trap the remaining two members of the hunting party have prepared for her. Of all the teams, why must it be Conor’s?! He glares at her sometimes like he means to eat her, and she has never figured out why, when Megan’s the one who always stands up to him.

  The flashlight beams swing left and then right. Nessa eases herself to the ground and feels around for a stone. By the time she’s upright again, a dozen steps and the trunk of a pine tree are all the protection she has left. Bruggers whispers in his singsong Cork accent. “She’s come over the stones, see? Smart bitch, our Clip-Clop. But she can’t be more than three hundred feet from here. Probably half that or her arms will have fallen off by now.”

  Nessa’s arms are tired. Bruggers is to her left and Conor must be nearby too, but he doesn’t reply and has turned off his flashlight. It’s nerve-racking not to know where he is, to think he could be looking right at her. But if she freezes they’re going to find her anyway, so Nessa takes a gamble. She eases herself around the side of the tree. Bruggers is ten steps away, his back turned.

  But where is the other one? The glorious leader?

  And then she spots him, like a giant predator in the branches of a nearby tree, his head swiveling from side to side to catch her
scent on the air.

  She stills her panicky heart. But then she thinks, I could split him open with this stone. Claim it was an accident. After all, sooner or later he’ll try to get Megan back for the fool she made of him …

  But the urge passes. Instead she waits for his attention to swing away from her before launching her missile down into the forest behind her pursuers. It’s not a big stone. Its impact is tiny, but suddenly Bruggers is charging down through the undergrowth and Conor, who barely has to flex his knees when he drops from the branch, calls out, like an absolute lúdramán, “To me, knights! We’ve got one!”

  Two more figures come pelting down the slight slope behind Nessa to join their master, and off she flies herself, in the opposite direction. Four more hours to go, she thinks. Four more hours to stay free. She’s getting better at this: twice now, in the last six months, Nessa has avoided capture.

  She plows through some bushes, careless of the noise she’s making, desperate to put some distance between herself and the knights. She stumbles, half falls over the edge of an ancient man-made ditch, breathing hard, and comes to a stop.

  She needs to move more quietly again. There are six other hunt parties out there after all, any of whom could condemn her to a beating and a cold shower if they find her. But what, she thinks, if it’s Anto who comes instead? “Tell nobody you caught me,” she’ll whisper …

  That stupid thought is delicious enough to quicken her heart. Magical here in the moonlight. And why shouldn’t she kiss him anyway? it whispers. Others are doing it all the time. And more. Soon enough Nessa will be dead. Everybody knows it. Her poor parents. Her friends. Surely here, all alone in the dark, she can finally admit the truth.

  “No!” She says the word aloud and it’s like a thunderclap in the otherwise silent forest.