The Call

by Peadar O'Guilin

  On the other side of the hill, a gun barks out and one of the figures jerks and falls forward, still half immersed.

  Time to fight, Rebecca thinks. She wants what she’s been promised. Wants it more desperately than anything in the world. And so she sprays the nearby tents with an antique semiautomatic, reloads and single-shots the sergeant, who barely has time to say, “Private Madigan, what are—”

  Several of her comrades have made it out of their tents with weapons loaded. Most aim for the figures on the hill, but a few shots come her way too until she throws herself flat and feels the air above her head humming with death.

  She curses and reloads, her hands as steady as ancient boulders. But there’s no need to fire a second burst, for a few of the Sídhe have made it off the slopes now to run riot among the soldiers. The most beautiful woman Rebecca has seen since her Call taps a man once on the neck. He falls, grabbing at his melted windpipe, while her other hand sinks through the captain’s head as though it were jelly. Rebecca feels like she is flying. Like she is a goddess. Only once before in her twenty-five years has she felt so alive. Only once.

  Now a dozen Sídhe—no, a score of them!—are dancing naked among the humans, until finally the first of them, the young woman, is standing over Rebecca.

  “We have promised,” she says. “We have promised to allow you eternal life in the Grey Land.”

  “Thank you,” Rebecca says, her voice barely audible above the fizzing rain.

  “Wait here then,” the princess says. “Until the killing is done.”

  “I’m not staying here!”

  The Sídhe’s grin widens. “Come then, sister. Join us!”

  And Private Madigan’s heart leaps. She has tears in her eyes and a knife in her hands as they run off toward the college.

  Ms. Breen runs into Conor on the ground floor of the staff corridor.

  “What … Conor? What are you doing here?”

  He grins. “It’s all right. I’m one of you. Honestly! Even me! And it’s happening. It’s happening tonight. They’re already arriving.”

  She glances nervously toward the bedrooms, each with a veteran, or a highly trained instructor.

  “Oh,” Conor says; he’s holding a can of kerosene and he waves it about gaily. “Don’t worry. They’re not supposed to wake up. It’d take an earthquake, it—”

  Ms. Breen has no idea what he’s talking about. She has just come home from the bedside of a dying friend and finally, finally it hits her that something is deeply wrong here. She begins to back away, her palms sweaty against the wall of the corridor. This is a mistake. Conor narrows his eyes, sending a chill through her. He’s very large for a fourteen-year-old. Man-sized really, and muscled like the great athlete he is. And she has just given herself away.

  Her time runs out. He drops the can and the liquid spatters everywhere. He pulls her away from the wall and flings her back again. “Oh, I get it now,” he says, shaking his head in disappointment. “Another mess I’m supposed to clean up. This will give me no pleasure, by Crom, no pleasure at all.” He cocks his right fist. “I was never one of the kids who mocked you behind your back.” He doubles her over with a punch. Ms. Breen coughs, having no wind with which to shout for help. “Even though you were so ugly. Like something the Sídhe spent an hour working on!” Her glasses crunch under his boots, and without them she is patting desperately at the wall, as if it’s the mat in the gym and she’s asking for mercy. “What? You think you can surrender? To me? The future king of all Ireland?” He grins ruefully. But only until her fingers find the fire alarm she was looking for.

  In the stories it is often church bells that awaken dreamers from a fairy’s spell. This alarm is far louder than any of those. It is insistent, impatient, and brutal beyond words.

  Nabil and Taaft leap apart, their decades of training urging them to untangle limbs and surge from the bed.

  “Get off me, get off, you Arab shit!”

  “I am a Frenchman, you whore. French!”

  The door shatters and a beautiful child stands on the far side, its eyes huge, its mouth fixed in a grin.

  Nabil stands helpless as the alarm continues to scream at him. Why, he wonders, is the boy’s head so small? Why is he naked? And how did the door break down like that?

  As though it’s all a dream, a small hand stretches out—

  Then a book flies past Nabil’s shoulder and smacks the boy right between the eyes, so that he tumbles backward into the corridor, where, already, an army of tiny figures gathers.

  “That’s not a child, you stupid frog!”

  And suddenly a shiver passes through the Frenchman’s body, as he recognizes those large eyes from a hundred illustrations. And such is his shock that all he can think to say is “You threw my Koran at it?”

  “I knew you were an Arab!”

  He has no time to reply to her deliberate ignorance, because the chest-high figures are reaching toward him and he remembers what he has been telling the students for years: Don’t let them get their hands on you! Never the hands!

  He jumps back, but Taaft … Taaft is not as confused as he is. She has made a morning star for herself, swinging the strap of a metal canteen to crack the first Sídhe across the nose. It laughs at the pain, but falls and trips those that follow. And finally, Nabil has recovered enough to join in. His feet are deadly. He smacks a girl in the abdomen.

  “By God!” he cries. “They weigh as much as adults!”

  Taaft screams as a hand brushes her own and leaves a dent in it. “I’m all right,” she cries. “Keep them out, keep them out!” She breaks a tiny neck. He cracks a little skull. They have made a pile of bodies that is impeding the others behind it, although the corridor is crawling with them.

  But then a human, an actual human, is standing at the door in a soldier’s uniform. She points an ancient Steyr AUG rifle into the room. “Time to die,” she says with a grin. There’s no cover for the instructors, no cover at all.

  An almighty crash comes from the corridor and the soldier foolishly looks away from her targets. Two Sídhe seem to fly at her, to strike her full in the face. As she goes down, more bodies fly over her. Nabil hears bones crunching. He sees blood spatter the walls. And then Anto comes past swinging that huge arm of his, smashing the enemy like a bag of grapes until they flee before him.

  The boy pauses at the door, his face a mask of Sídhe blood.

  “I thought you didn’t like to kill.” Taaft always was great at diplomacy. “You wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  All Anto says in reply is “Can’t you smell it?”

  “The blood?”

  “The burning. They’re burning the student dorms.” And off he runs.

  Nessa wakes, the alarm so loud it hurts and the stench of smoke heavy on the air. Her main concern is the hand reaching for her face.

  Unlike Nabil, unlike almost everybody, Nessa never freezes in surprise. She grabs the wrist, twists once, and rolls out onto the floor.

  “Get up!” she cries to wake her friends, but screams are drowning her out. She crawls on all fours to stay under the smoke that rolls in from the direction of the stairs. It’s glowing out there, as fire spreads through sloshes of kerosene deposited by gangs of human traitors.

  The sound of laughter fills the room, along with the slap of small feet on the floorboards.

  Nessa finds Nicole with four dents in her forehead where fingers pushed into it. She hears Marya curse in the name of the Cauldron, but the sound is cut off all too quickly.

  Then Aoife falls to the ground right in front of Nessa. Other girls used to mock her for her sloth, but of all of them, Aoife is the only one to think of throwing a sheet over her attacker. It’s so, so simple! The terrible hands can’t touch her skin, and as the creature fought to free itself, she must have leaped on top of it, bringing it to the ground.

  It struggles though. As strong as a full-grown human until Nessa’s powerful fist rams into the side of its head.

  “We have to
go for the window,” Nessa says. “We can drop out onto the bushes … ” They may break their legs, but it’s a chance, isn’t it?

  Three other girls are still resisting the invaders with their superb training, but already flames have entered the room, and, though they don’t know it yet, even the attic has been doused with fuel and the roof is fiercely burning in defiance of the weather.

  They crawl from bed to bed as the last of their comrades die, as the floorboards above them weaken and the Sídhe get smaller.

  One of the enemy cries, “She’s missing! She got away!” And Nessa thinks, You’re wrong! Two of us are getting away!

  “We have an agreement,” the Sídhe insists, and several of them run through the smoke as though in a panic.

  The window is no more than six feet away and already open, with poor Rachel from Year 3 lying dead beneath it.

  “I want you to go first,” Aoife whispers.

  “No! It has to be you. It—”

  A roar comes from behind them. A human voice raised in outrage and horror.

  Anto is there, coughing and hacking with the smoke. He needs to get down! To get under it! He could die!

  But he scatters the Sídhe.

  “Go,” Nessa says to Aoife. “He’s here for me. Get to the window. Now! Now!”

  Aoife lurches forward. Then a support falls, caving in half the ceiling. And Nessa is right beneath it.

  Anto staggers, blinded by the smoke, hacking his lungs up.

  He prepares his cursed arm for a swing as another figure stumbles toward him, but stops in time when he recognizes Aoife’s voice.

  “You’ve got to get her out. Nessa! She’s going to burn to death! She’s burning!”

  She’s under a bed apparently, which itself lies under a flaming beam of wood. And for the first time since his Call Anto thanks all the gods and the Cauldron and the Sídhe themselves for the horror they have worked upon his body. Because nothing else they could have done to him would have made him better suited to rescue the girl he loves. No other human, no group of humans, could shift such a weight.

  He screams as burning wood chars his skin. He hacks and coughs. He is mere minutes away from collapse with the smoke, but when he finally throws off the beam, relief fills him, for the bed didn’t take the full weight of it. He and Aoife push the mattress aside …

  But instead of Nessa, all they find are empty pajamas.

  He stares at the clothes in horror. He’ll stay there and die there, except Aoife drags him away and shoves him face-first out the window. She tumbles down after him to lie in the bushes.

  Above them, the whole first floor is now ablaze.

  In three minutes and four seconds, Nessa will return to it, either dead or alive. The flames will consume whatever’s left.

  Nessa has always intended to survive her Call, regardless of what anybody else thinks. But now, lying on her back with the silver spirals above her head, and air that burns worse than the smoke she just left behind, she knows she is going to die.

  In three minutes and four seconds, flames will be eating the bed that was protecting her from the burning ceiling. The floor will char with heat intense enough to cook her in the time it takes to blink. Here or there, she is dead. Her parents will sink from fear of loss into its certainty, and Anto … Anto will have nobody to leave secrets beneath his pillow; to drag him to Donegal and garden with him in the shadow of Mount Errigal.

  Nessa is not given to self-pity, but now it threatens to smother her, and not even the sound of a hunting horn can shift it.

  She finds herself lying on a small flat area at the top of a slope so steep that in parts it resembles a cliff. A stream runs down the face of it, leaving acidic muck in its wake all the way down to the bottom. Nessa ignores it. She also ignores the wrist-thick worms with human faces that emerge from the mud to taste her skin. Is she edible? they wonder nervously. Is she bait to trap them?

  The horn sounds again, closer now, and Nessa struggles with herself until the part that never surrenders finally gains dominance. She’s already thinking of standing up when the footsteps come pounding toward her and, in a heartbeat, a gang of Sídhe stands about her in a semicircle.

  “Why doesn’t it run?” one asks.

  “Its legs,” a woman says. She wears a cloak of human skin, decorated with startling patterns of bone. “We should fix them for her. Make them like an ostrich’s and she would give us more sport than this!”

  The woman bends down, and only now does the girl remember that avoiding the Sídhe is more than just a matter of life or death: It’s about agony too; about the outrages they work on human flesh and bone before sending the remains home as a souvenir for the friends and parents. Far better to face the fire than whatever they have planned for her!

  But before the hands can touch her, another Sídhe arrives, out of breath and laughing.

  “No, my friends!” he cries. “Not this one! This one is not ours to kill! We have made a promise to one of the thieves that only he may end her life. Not us! He will do so with bare hands and we shall make him king of all the Milesians!”

  Nessa sits up. “Who is this? Who are you talking about? Conor? You have made a deal with … ”

  The newcomer is the most handsome man she has ever seen. His face is kind and full of humor as he kicks her in the side hard enough to knock her over onto her stomach. He laughs, and the huge worms slither away in terror.

  Now Nessa has a view of the swamp at the bottom of the hill. Beyond it lie thousands and thousands of tents. Grey banners fly over them while hordes of tiny figures mill around the one spot of color she can see: a vibrant green blob that shines and sparkles.

  “We can’t kill her,” the newcomer says, “but we can play, yes? We can twist her any shape we like so long as she can live an hour in the Many-Colored Land. Let us make her a spider! The thief king can break her legs off one by one!”

  “No!” a woman insists. “Her legs should be plaited into her arms. We can bend her spine so that she makes a perfect ring! We will bring her with us on the invasion. It will raise morale when we roll her among the tents.”

  Nessa’s limbs turn liquid with terror. Oh, Crom! Far, far better to find her own death! So, with one hard jerk of her arms, she shoots herself forward and over the lip of the slope. She expects to tumble down that sheer hill, breaking bones all the way, but there is far too much muck for that, and instead she slides over the water-slicked surface faster than an Olympic tobogganist, while cries of joy and applause and the sounding of hunting horns ring out behind her.

  A mass of hungry spider trees lie in wait at the bottom of the slope. They like rivers and other marshy areas, but they enjoy human flesh more. They snatch at her as she hurtles past, each attempt scratching her skin and slowing her down. By the time she comes to a stop, three separate plants grip at one limb each, tightening and squeezing like pythons.

  “Crom take you all!” she cries. “Lugh curse you! Dagda reject you!”

  She rips at the nearest with her teeth. The sap tastes like blood, but the thought of what the Sídhe have planned for her, and Conor after them, keeps her snarling and snapping until she can rip an arm free.

  The horn is sounding and her enemies, who have tumbled bravely after her, are no more than a hundred paces behind.

  And yet, when at last Nessa finds her feet, she must pause. The camp of the Sídhe army lies only a few hundred strides away and it’s huge. There are baggage “animals” and lumbering war monsters of tortured human flesh. But it is the glowing spot of color she saw from the top of the slope that draws her eyes. It hangs in the air above the army and its shape is that of a door—the same door she saw in the Fairy Fort in the forest. The exact same.

  Sídhe soldiers, by the thousand, are building a mound of earth and stone. By the rate they’re going, it will be high enough to reach that glowing portal in less than a day.

  But then fingers are pointing from the camp, and with cries of delight dozens of figures come running
toward her. Meanwhile, behind her, her pursuers have freed themselves from their own spider bushes and those terrible hands can’t be more than a minute from taking her.

  A massive rhododendron saves the lives of Aoife and Anto, despite a thick trunk at its heart that bounces them toward the sparser foliage on the edges.

  The boy is coughing and weeping. “She’s gone,” he says. “Oh, God, she’s gone!” and Aoife hugs him like she wishes she was hugged when Emma was stolen.

  Aoife is terribly aware of the mound off to the west. The feeling is stronger than it’s ever been, and for some strange reason the image of a huge door keeps appearing in her mind. It’s about to open, she thinks, and she wonders if that means her Call is imminent.

  But she can’t think about that now, because they are in a terribly dangerous place. Fire spits from the windows above them and something strange is happening in the old parking lot. Hundreds of people are gathering there, adults and children alike. No! Not children. She shivers when she finally understands what she’s looking at. Belly-high Sídhe are herding the population of Boyle ahead of them and forcing them to kneel on the soaking, cracked concrete.

  Before them all stands a tall, muscular human boy, proud and powerful: Conor.

  Behind Nessa, the stream feeds into a small lake.

  She staggers into the water as the Sídhe rush toward her. It stings every cut and bruise on her body, but despite her legs, Nessa is as strong a swimmer as any in her class, and she makes it to the far bank before the resident monster can do more than shout curses after her. It catches a few of the Sídhe though, forcing the rest of the hunters to run around the banks with spider trees slowing them all the way.

  She has gained herself a few minutes. No more. And nowhere does she see any trees with branches thicker than a finger—not a single one. Nessa has always bet big on the ability to make crutches here, but instead her only chance now is to find a place to hide.

  So she gets down on her hands and knees to stay out of the line of sight, and she clamps down hard on the urge to cough that grows stronger with every breath of the foul air.