The Call

by Peadar O'Guilin

  “Swear to me,” says his new lord. “Swear to me if you ever wish to be whole again. Swear by the Cauldron that will keep you young forever. Or I will make a garment of you.”

  Conor swears. What choice does he have? He swears. But first, because he is the strongest of all his peers, he overcomes the pain long enough to say: “I want something!” His voice emerges as a scream; he can’t help it. “I want something first.”

  When the Sídhe learns of his demand, he laughs—how he laughs! And Dagda promises, he swears, to grant Conor his dearest wish.

  Nessa struggles to sit up in the library bathroom. She’s not sure what has happened. Other than Conor hit her in the head with something and was then Called.

  This is the first time in her life she has wanted somebody to die at the Sídhe’s hands. It’s an unworthy, horrible thought, but it’s there, and the blood in her hair and the nausea in her belly keep pushing it to the front of her mind.

  And then he’s back. Has it been three minutes already? He stands in front of her, naked, but without a single wound on his body. He lacks even the scars that everybody has after years of rough and dangerous play under the supervision of the world’s best killers.

  And then she gasps, still too dazed to be afraid of the boy who twice now has planned her death. “Your arms,” she cries. “Your … your legs.”

  Conor is in even more shock than she is, his nakedness of no concern to him. His head bobs down, as though on a string, and he lets out a whimper of his own. For these limbs are not his. He has a right leg and a left leg, but one looks African, one maybe Asian. His arms too are different sizes. One is certainly Caucasian, but hair grows more thickly on it than anywhere else on the boy’s body.

  “What happened?” she asks, all enmity forgotten.

  He opens his mouth as if to answer, but then shakes his head and, making no effort to retrieve his fallen clothing, stumbles out and off into the library.

  An hour later, Nabil has caught Conor and has herded him into Ms. Breen’s study.

  She knows about the broken paperweight and wonders what his intentions were toward Nessa.

  Any of Ms. Breen’s students could beat her up, the head of the college. But rarely has she feared to be alone with one before. And yet, here she is.

  “Can you tell me about it?” she asks.

  Within the week, Conor will be required to testify before a swarm of expert interrogators and all of his experiences will be made public. But whenever she can, for those whose minds haven’t been destroyed by their visit to the Grey Land, Ms. Breen likes to get their fresh first impressions.

  Conor won’t be supplying any. He hangs his head, as though guilty, and then says, “I’d like to stay. As … as a veteran maybe.”

  “No” is all she says, and he doesn’t push it, or ask why.

  “I’ll live in Boyle then. It’s only a few miles away.”

  “Why, Conor? Boyle is dying. Why not go home to Tipperary? Cashel, wasn’t it? Your parents are still there.”

  He shrugs and then screws up his face. He’s been in her office many times, this one. He has sat in front of her, legs spread wide, his chin jutting, and every sentence out of his mouth constructed with care. But not today. He’s like her mother in the worst throes of her dementia. But eventually he finds the words. “I still have friends here. To … I worry about them. Liz Sweeney. Fiver.” Another shrug.

  “All right, young man, I can’t stop you if you want to live in Boyle, but I’m not having you visit the college, right? And your friends won’t be getting out to you either!”

  “I just need to be close to … I just need to be close.”

  She nods. He relaxes, and she takes that as an opportunity to hit him with: “What happened to your hands, child? Why are they different colors?”

  “He … I mean, they, captured me.”

  “Obviously.”

  “It … it was a joke to them.”

  “But they let you live?”

  He jumps, as though caught in the girls’ bathroom with a weapon in his hand.

  “Why?” she pushes. “Why did they let you live?”

  And he leaps to his feet, and trips, because they’re not really his feet at all. “They didn’t let me live!” he cries. “They didn’t! I got away! I bested them all and I got away! By the Caul—” He stops, hyperventilating, and again Ms. Breen fears for her life. But finally he straightens and his eyes seem to harden.

  “Are you all right?” she asks him, and in reply she receives the same sort of nod she might have gotten before he was Called.

  “We do what we have to to survive,” he says.

  “For the Nation to survive,” she corrects him.

  He makes no answer.

  Ms. Breen is relieved to watch him go. She doesn’t realize that she will see him again very soon.

  It’s only been a few weeks since Conor left the college, and Nessa can’t quite get over how relieved she feels. And all for the price of two measly stitches in her scalp! Rain pelts the glass as Nicole deals cards to Megan, Marya, Aoife, and herself for a hand of Twenty-Five. Other students lounge around on sofas, goggle-eyed at ancient magazines full of bizarre celebrities. “By Crom, she’s like something the Sídhe got hold of!” And over everything, the crackling radio struggles from one thirty-year-old hit to the next. Who has the resources these days to make new music? To record it? To store it?

  But Nessa doesn’t care. Her belly is pleasantly full and an old-fashioned fire roars in the grate, with boys taking turns to pile on the wood. She stifles a yawn, thinking of Anto, who sat at the top table for the first time this evening, ignoring the stares at his deformity. But he did meet the eyes of one girl. He did smile, and Nessa grinned right back.

  Now she follows suit on a two of hearts, while Megan flings up her hands and snorts, “Who invented this stupid game?” Then it’s Aoife’s turn, and she hesitates.

  The blonde girl hasn’t spoken much since Squeaky Emma was Called, so even Megan is patient as she breaks the biggest taboo of them all.

  “What … what will you girls do if you survive?” she says.

  Nicole looks away, embarrassed for her. Marya covers her mouth and nobody dares answer.

  “It’s just … it’s just I think the State’d make me marry some guy. And I’m not … you know, I’m not cut out for it.”

  “Men aren’t worth it,” says Megan, winking at Nessa, who fights and fights against the idiot grin that her face wants to make.

  But Aoife takes the comment seriously. “I don’t hate men. I adored my stepdad. It’s … it’s the, uh, the act itself. You know what I mean? It’s … it seems so vile.”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Nicole. “Agreed. Vile is the word. So disgusting I doubt I could do it more than five times a night. As for ten? He’d have to be Crom-twisted gorgeous.”

  Marya laughs, all shock and delight, until even Aoife joins in. And slowly, the group cooperates in getting her away from the horrifically unlucky subject of “after.”

  But then Megan of all people digs it up again in the middle of a particularly bad hand.

  “I don’t care if I don’t make it,” she says, and Nessa feels a chill on her heart. “I mean it. The country is done for, and we all know that’s the truth. Aoife is right. Even the survivors have nothing to look forward to except decline and old crones with tightened assholes in charge of everything.”

  Marya, however, is a true believer and surprises them all by smacking the table with her little fist. “So why bother?” she hisses. “Nobody can make you stay in a survival college if you don’t want to. Why not enjoy the rest of your worthless life? You don’t have to put up with all the training.”

  “Oh, I want the training,” Megan says, glaring right back at her. “Because the Sídhe did this. They’re the ones who ruined everything. Everything! My parents are weeping wrecks. I’ll never travel in a plane or climb Everest or whatever Crom-cursed crap everybody had that we don’t. But there’s something I can
do. Something I want more than living forever or flying into space. I want to kill a fairy.” She uses the English word for the Sídhe, while both spit and spite fly from her lips. “I want to kill as many of them as I can, but even one would make my life worthwhile. Even one!”

  The whole common room has fallen silent at Megan’s outburst. Her eyes travel around the table, meeting their gazes one by one. Marya stands abruptly, then circles around to where Megan sits and hugs her hard. “Me too!” she declares. “Me too. I want to be a Fairy Killer.” And Nessa, though she never allows herself any show of passion, wishes she had been the one to hug her best and only friend. It’s Megan who supports and tolerates Nessa, who gives total loyalty for no other reason, it seems, than that they travel on the same bus.

  It’s not too late though. Nobody is stopping Nessa from hugging her right this minute.

  Yet habit pins her to her chair.

  Slowly, wordlessly, they all take up the cards again. Round after round, with Nessa keeping score on a scrap of paper and the rain beginning to weaken, until eight o’clock comes around and Marya insists on tuning the common room’s ancient radio to the news station. “I want the lists,” she says, and everybody lets her have her way, so that they catch the very first part of the broadcast. The announcer burbles on about how great the survival of the Nation is going today: the achievements, the government appointments, and so on.

  “And now,” she declares proudly, “the list of today’s survivors. We had ten today! From all over the country. So, in order of their return, we have O’Donnell, Charlie. McDade, Elaine—”

  Megan grins. “Two Donegal names to start! We are the best!”

  Nessa holds up a palm for the high five that must inevitably follow.

  But it doesn’t. Because Megan is gone, and it will be exactly three minutes and four seconds before any of them see her again.

  Sodden rock walls rise to either side of Megan, but not so far away that she can’t reach out and touch them. She is terrified. All her brave talk of a few moments before is worth less now than a breath of the heavy stinking air at the bottom of the canyon in which she finds herself. She pants, trying desperately to make herself move.

  “Stupid wee bitch,” she tells herself, and her voice echoes from the dripping walls. Then she all but leaps out of her skin when a horn sounds. “Crom twist you!” she shouts, outraged at her own cowardice. Then she turns. She turns and runs toward the place where the sound came from.

  A rock has appeared in her fist and she has no memory of picking it up. All she knows is the voice in her head, Sergeant Taaft’s, screaming at her to run, to run for her life. And then she is around the corner, smacking into a woman so beautiful that in the last century she would have launched a hundred stupid magazines.

  “How delightful!” the Sídhe manages to say before Megan makes a cavern of her face.

  “One for me,” says the girl, struggling to keep her food down. She stumbles on, triumph and nausea and terror all still fighting for control of her belly.

  The canyon splits into a dozen passages, each barely wide enough for her to run along without scraping shoulders and elbows with every step. She stumbles over rough rocks and slides on Lugh only knows what foul excretions. She follows the echoes of laughter, gripping her pathetic weapon, praying to her mother’s God that she’ll take one more Sídhe, just one, down with her.

  And then, somehow, the hunt has passed her by. The laughter grows fainter, trailing off in the direction from which she herself has come.

  She has been in the Grey Land less than twenty minutes and already she has thrown off the pursuit. She stands confused, trying to deal with the bizarre idea that she might not have to die. “Thank you, God,” she whispers, and finds herself trembling, uncontrollably. Did she really smash in somebody’s skull? Now the vomit comes, and the force of it is enough to push a stream of tears from her eyes too.

  But, yes, why shouldn’t she live? She deserves it more than Conor and a whole lot of others. She has dropped her stone, but she retrieves it and grips it hard, blood and all. “It’s more of the same if any of you stand in my way,” she growls.

  And off she goes again, through the endless maze of rock, before they realize their mistake.

  The geography of the Grey Land makes little sense to Megan. The canyon walls at some points widen, while at others they close in around her. That seems normal enough. What puzzles her is the way the materials of which the walls are made change from one type of stone to another, when surely if water or weather had formed these passages, the rocks would have eroded at different speeds? And why are there no plants growing here?

  And then, without warning, she hits a dead end.

  Megan doubles back, running a full two hundred yards in the wrong direction before she can find another viable passage. But again, although the walls of this one are made of what appears to be millions of pebbles crammed together, it too ends in the same place. And then, just as she is trying for a third passage, she hears the hunting horn.

  They’re coming back. They’re coming back for her and she wants to weep with rage.

  “I could lead you out!”

  She turns to find a creature standing less than a couple feet behind her. It hunches low like an ape. One of its long clawed arms constantly touches the earth around it as though unsure of its reality, while the other is used to hide its face, so that its Sídhe words, though comprehensible, are muffled. The spines of a porcupine cover the rest of its body, but so thick are they clumped, and so inappropriately placed, that the creature impales itself with every movement.

  Megan tightens her grip on the rock. “Why would you help me?” The Testimonies are full of warnings against trusting the monsters of the Grey Land. Half the beasts adore their Sídhe creators, while the rest crave human meat.

  “Carry my message back with you to Ireland. That is all I ask. My only price.”

  The horn sounds again and the creature jumps, cutting itself some more. “Tell Red Hugh not to go to Kinsale. Do you understand me? He’s not to go. The English have it surrounded. This is the last favor I’ll ever do him. The last!”

  “All right. I’ll pass your message along.” Megan follows the creature as it leads her back toward the horns. She would have agreed to anything to save herself, but is puzzled why it thinks she can bring a message to a man who died hundreds of years ago, for who else can the recipient be but Red Hugh O’Donnell? She has only heard of him at all through an accident of birth, since he too came from Donegal. Yet somehow this tiny connection makes the monster’s offer of help more real to her.

  Then the voices of her enemies cry out in excitement over some clue she has left behind. Their proximity drives all thoughts of the mystery from her mind.

  “This way!” says her monster, ducking down a side passage. But it’s too late! It’s too late! The first of the Sídhe is right ahead of her, a spear in his hand, a great grin on his face. “She is here!” he cries. “She is hiding with a traitor!”

  She throws her rock with every iota of force in her body, aiming for the head. It catches him in the chest with a crunch of bone, but already other excited footsteps are coming along behind him.

  She sprints after the guide, who may, or may not, be leading her into a trap, but what difference can it make now?

  The walls widen out, and stone gives way to packed earth riddled with holes. She sees many of the spiny creatures here, and the sight of her sends them into a panic as they desperately cover their faces and leap into their burrows. And Megan has no choice, none at all, but to follow her ally into what she supposes to be its own lair. Soil falls on her head near the entrance; a death trap, she thinks, but it turns to harder clay farther in.

  She’s praying again, praying that none of the creatures will betray her, and that by the time the Sídhe have figured out which one of the hundred holes is hers, she will be back at home.

  But it’s hopeless, of course it is! And her plight gets worse, because no more tha
n six feet into the burrow, her supposed friend comes to a stop.

  “Keep going!” she says to it.

  “This is my home,” it replies mournfully. “We traitors are allowed to dig no deeper than this. Nor can we. Only rock lies ahead.” Megan wants to weep. To cut herself beating at the monster’s spiny body. “They might not find us though!” it says. “They might not!”

  Then the poor grey light at the entrance to the hole disappears.

  “Hello, thief,” says a beautiful voice.

  Megan freezes.

  “Listen,” it says, “most of the day remains for us to play, you and I. Almost all of it. Imagine what I shall do to you. And as you suffer, little one, as you suffer, think on this: The place where you gather to train, the place where you found our sister in the rock? We will kill all of your tribe who remain there. A dozen days of your time, perhaps a score. And we will come for them. I tell you this because it is a happy final thought for you … ”

  The man who is speaking pokes his head in, reaching blindly with his deadly hands. But Megan has hands too and, before he knows what has hit him, she has taken his eyeballs so that he falls back in confusion and the other Sídhe call out in admiration of her clever attack.

  She has no time to waste basking in their praise, however. To the protests of the terrified monster behind her, she caves in the loose soil at the entrance to the burrow.

  “We’ll smother,” it cries.

  “No, we won’t. Unfortunately. They’ll dig me out long before that.” There is no escape from the Grey Land now but death, and it can be quick or it can be terrible beyond all imagining. “Give me one of your spines.”

  “Why?”

  “Just give it to me. Please!” And the desperation in her voice must have convinced it, because in no time at all she has one in her hand and she begins stabbing at the skin of her wrists.

  The digging has begun outside, and the laughter. And the taunting.