The merchant sputtered as he said, “Help me. Help me boy.”
Dughall laughed heartily at the merchant’s words. “Help you? Help you?” he said incredulously. “Old man, I’m the one who put the blade in you. Why should I bother to take it out until I am assured that the last breath has passed from your rancid lips?”
“But what of your immortal soul, boy? If you kill me, what will come to your immortal soul?”
Dughall bent down so he could look the dying merchant in the eye. He smirked the smirk that would become one of his defining features, born in that moment.
“Well, old man, I suppose your soul, if you have one, awaits the same fate as mine then.”
“But I haven’t killed anyone,” the merchant choked out.
“Ah, but you have. You killed my mother.”
“No, I didn’t,” the merchant pleaded with Dughall. “Please, you have to believe me. I didn’t get anywhere near her. I didn’t kill her. It was someone else then.”
“You may not have been the one who beat her and bloodied her and left her in a heap for me to find, barely recognizable as my own beloved, but you are the one who sent her each night to her real death, the death of her soul. And you are the one who sold her life for a price to the one who did her in. How much did you get for it? Huh, how much you filthy rotten pig?” he bellowed as he took the hilt of the sword and twisted it.
The merchant choked out muffled screams of agony as Dughall inflicted pain to his once master. “Please,” the old man pled. “I am sorry,” he whimpered. “Please. . . ”
“Too late you fetid scum. You shall die here, alone and broken and suffering, just as she did. And if you do have a soul, it surely will rot in a hell worse than any you can imagine for the horrible crimes you have committed in your life. And while it is indeed a pleasure to watch you die in agony, I must be off.”
With that statement, Dughall gave the sword one last painful twist and turn before he drew it out of the near dead body of the merchant. He took the merchant’s napkin and wiped the blade clean of its owner’s blood.
“A fine sword,” he said aloud. “It shall come in handy on my quest.”
With these words, he turned his back on the merchant and left him to die. Dughall had taken the first steps on his path to becoming a bloodthirsty conqueror. He found killing far too easy and in a way pleasurable. In the years to come he would find that with each new death, it became easier and easier to end the life of another like one would swat a gnat or a fly. Anyone who stood in the way of all that he desired was to him like a mere insect, of no consequence. In time, he stopped counting the number of human lives he took along his path to conquest.
Here now, sitting at the control panel of the LHC, it was no different. All these humans around him, the team of thousands, they were of no consequence to him. Even those in the nearby towns and villages above, what should he care if they too perished when he implemented his plan?
There was a slight gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach, a feeling foreign to him for so many years. What is this? He could not place it, but it seemed a bit familiar. Why do I feel this edge in my gut? Perhaps it was something he ate or a human virus trying to bring him down with an illness.
Just then Macha appeared by his side with news. It was upon casting his eyes on her face that he realized what that horrible feeling was in his stomach.
Dughall felt a pang of guilt. He was slightly amused with himself. He didn’t realize he could still feel that. Apparently he had a pang of guilt over the probable loss of Macha.
To be expected, after all, he reassured himself. She entombed herself for over a thousand years just so she could help me to resurrect when the time was right, he thought. She has been a faithful servant, he told himself.
Of course, if she hadn’t entombed herself and put herself into the deepest pixie sleep, she probably wouldn’t be alive today, he rationalized. Yes, that’s true, he thought, she would have gone the way of all the other pixies and faerie folk. Vanished with the rest. Vanquished by humans and stamped once and for all out of existence.
The faerie people were so blind to the nature of their own condition. As times changed and humans left their ways of nature worship and chose the one God, the faeries retreated away from humans to survive, never fully realizing that they needed the interaction with humans to even exist.
Macha may, in fact, be the last of her kind, thought Dughall. But his mind could go no further down the road of guilt or sympathy. For Dughall, that road was short indeed and a dead end.
The sacrifice of one pixie, it is no matter if I can achieve my most fervent desire, he thought. In fact, Macha is probably prepared to sacrifice herself for me. With that thought, the pinching feeling in his belly ceased. He sat upright and with a clear purpose.
Nothing would get in his way, not even the death of the world’s last pixie.
46. Piecing it Together in Dublin
As Liam drifted to sleep on the small bed, he hoped that he’d wake from his nap to find myself back in the States, the whole thing just a crazy nightmare.
Instead, he woke to find Fanny flopped on her stomach on the other bed, maps spread out in front of her. It looked to Liam like she was trying to look busy rather than actually doing anything.
On the other hand, Jake was the picture of concentration, intently reading some webpage on his laptop. His hair was more tousled than usual, his eyes rimmed in red and bloodshot from hours of looking at a computer screen.
Liam stretched his arms above his head and breathed deeply. He wasn’t in a dream after all. His daughter’s life depended on his belief in their outrageous story.
“Jake, you found anything interesting?” he asked.
It took Jake a minute to register a voice from the outside world. He slowly turned and ran his hands through his shock of now jet-black hair, pausing as if to collect himself.
“Well, I don’t know if I’m getting anywhere with this, but I have an idea. It’s a bit off the wall. . .”
“Off the wall? More off the wall than our best friend disappearing into another dimension?” asked Fanny.
“Okay, well maybe not that off the wall. Okay, check it. Dughall’s supposed to want to get to the Netherworld, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what Hindergog said.”
“Sure but what’s he after? I mean, why does he want to go there?”
“That’s the mystery, isn’t it nub?”
“Don’t be short with him Fanny.”
“Yea, work with me on this. What I’m saying is we have to know what this guy is after. What does he think he can find in the Netherworld?”
“I don’t know Jake. Hindergog didn’t say anything about what the psychopath wanted.”
“But the story he told, it had clues.”
“What kind of clues Jake? What do you think he’s after?” Liam asked.
“Well he was power hungry, that much we know. And he clearly didn’t care who got hurt in his quest for power, so we know he’s dangerous.”
“Yeah, but Jake, we don’t know what’s in the Netherworld really. We may have to wait for Emily to come back to answer that,” Fanny said.
“That’s what I was thinking too, but then I started to think about what Dughall might think he’ll find there. You know it doesn’t matter what he’ll actually find there, only what he thinks he’ll find.”
“Okay, that’s riveting Jake, but we don’t know that either.”
“I think we do have some clues about that. Dughall heard the story of the well from that guy that he killed – what was his name?”
“Cormac,” offered Fanny.
“Yeah, Cormac. Anyway, according to Hindergog, Cormac told Dughall all about the Sacred Well and the portal and the torc. And then there was the pixie. . .”
“Macha?”
“Yeah, Macha. Sounds like she knew a lot. She probably told him things too. He probably knew a lot about the Netherworld – at least what people thought was on the other
side of that Well.”
“Jake, that’s some good deduction, but I’m not following what you think that tells us about why Dughall wants to enter the portal,” Liam said.
“Yeah, or how you think he’s going to do it. He doesn’t have the torc you know. Hey, you know, come to think of it, if he doesn’t have the torc, he can’t get through the portal, so what are we worrying about?”
“Ah, you see, that’s just the question I had. We know he wants to go to the Netherworld and badly. And if Hindergog and those in his world are so worried, they must know something we don’t and that must mean there’s another way in.”
“Right, some other portal,” said Fanny.
“Or, a way to create a portal,” Liam said.
“Exactly Mr. Adams! That’s what I’m thinking. And here’s the biggest clue that Hindergog gave us. He mentioned a large machine being built by humans.”
“We build a lot of big machines,” said Fanny.
“Yeah, but not many of them have any capability of opening a portal to another dimension. There may, in fact, be only one. . .”
“The super collider!” Liam shouted.
“That’s right. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN.”
Jake and Liam locked eyes for a moment while the truth of what they’d said passed between them. The butterflies in Liam’s stomach and the chills up his spine told him that they were onto something.
“Okay, would one of you like to let me know what the hell we’re talking about?” screeched Fanny.
“Mr. Adams, you do the honors?”
“Sure, Jake. Well Fanny you may have heard of atom smashers before.”
“Nope. Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Oh, okay. How to explain this? Well scientists – physicists mainly – build these giant machines called colliders or atom smashers so that they can do experiments on the nature and structure of matter.”
“Still not following.”
“They smash atoms together Fanny to see what happens!” said Jake.
“All right, you don’t have to get all testy with me.”
“You should pay more attention in science class.”
“You should stop being such a nerd.”
“Okay, stop fighting you two. Fanny, atoms are extremely tiny, but they contain a lot of potential energy. Our understanding of atoms is what enabled us to build atomic bombs.”
“Oh, those kind of atoms.”
“Well, everything is made of atoms and atoms are made of smaller bits of stuff – particles. And when you collide these particles you get massive amounts of energy and observe what comes out of the collision. That’s what scientists are doing at the LHC. They want to see what is produced by the collision of particles at near the speed of light.”
“But if they do that, won’t it make an explosion like a bomb?”
“No, they aren’t colliding whole atoms, only subatomic particles. There won’t be bomb-size explosions, but when they smash the particles the mini explosions produce even smaller bits of matter. And that’s what they’re studying – those smaller particles.”
“I sorta get what this collider thing is doing, but what does this have to do with Dughall?”
“Well, if Jake’s theory is right – and I’m betting it is – Dughall may be trying to use the LHC to create his own portal.”
“Not following,” said Fanny. “I thought this thing was smashing particles. They plan to open up a doorway to another dimension with this machine?”
“Well no, that’s not in the plan. I don’t think anyone is even theorizing about that,” Liam said.
“It’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got. Fanny, remember the static electricity we felt at the portal?”
“Yeah, it was awesome!”
“And remember the silvery mist we saw?”
“Jake, I’m not a science geek like you. Just spill it already.”
“Okay, here’s what I’m thinking. The static electricity and the silver mist - they are both related to mega amounts of electromagnetism.”
“Yes,” Liam said. “That’s right. And where is there more concentrated electromagnetism than anywhere else in the world…”
“The LHC!” offered Jake.
“What do magnets have to do with the colliding thingy?”
“It’s complicated Fanny, but essentially the collider uses immense magnets, five stories high, to accelerate the particles through a circular tube - also massive - twenty-seven kilometers around. The magnets both accelerate and bend the particles around the huge circle to get them to great speeds before they collide.”
“Yea, so the most powerful superconducting magnets ever built are at the LHC.”
“And so you think Dughall will use these magnets. . .”
“To open a portal,” said Jake.
“But how?” asked Fanny.
“That I don’t know. Do you have any ideas Mr. Adams?”
“Well, first of all, I don’t see how he’d get anywhere near the LHC. I mean this is a huge compound with hundreds – if not thousands – of people around all the time. And the collider itself is a mile underground. And it’s not like you just flip a switch and turn the magnets on or off.”
“Yeah, I was reading about it,” said Jake. “It takes weeks to cool it down enough to operate at full power.”
“Yes, exactly, it has to be super cooled to -271° Celsius. And there’s a whole command center with many people and oversight. I just don’t see the possibility of Dughall being able to use the LHC in any way.”
“We may not see how he’d do it, but we can bet he’ll try to find a way,” said Fanny. “Mr. Adams, you weren’t there to hear Hindergog, but from his story, one thing’s for sure. This Dughall guy is pure evil and he’s smart. If there’s a way, he’ll find it.”
“I agree with Fanny,” said Jake. “We have to assume he’ll find a way.”
“So we don’t actually need to know how he’s going to do it. All we need to do is make sure he doesn’t get anywhere near the LHC,” said Fanny.
“You’re right Fanny. You know what that means?” Liam asked.
“Road trip,” said Jake.
“Exactly. You guys up for another road trip?”
“As long as we’re not walking,” said Fanny.
Jake was already packing his laptop.
Liam knew they had to go to CERN, but it meant leaving Emily – or at least the place where she was last seen. He felt doubt about whether he was doing the right thing, but he knew he had to do something. Sitting around a small hotel room with Fanny and Jake wouldn’t bring Emily back.
By late afternoon, they were on a plane to France where they would get a train to the small town on the Swiss/French border that was the headquarters of CERN.
47. A Present for Miss Emily
“Miss Emily, are you ready to go now to your next Master?”
Hindergog. Even with my eyes closed in silent meditation, I knew that voice.
“Ready? I don’t know if I’m ready exactly. But you’re here, so I guess it must be time to move on.”
“Lies again Youngling. I thought we were through with lies,” croaked Madame Wong from her resting spot under the large maple tree. “You know you are ready.”
“Yeah, okay. She’s still busting my chops though,” I said as I smiled at Hindergog.
“Come Miss Emily. I will take you.”
“Okay little guy but just give me a minute to say goodbye to Madame Wong.”
She rose from her lotus position but still came only to my chin. I had to bend down to embrace her.
“Thank you,” I said as tears came to my eyes. “I’ll never forget you, Madame Wong.”
“Madame Wong will be ghost that haunts your memory,” she cackled.
“Yes,” I laughed. “You will haunt me for sure!”
“You will be my special little bird Miss Emily,” Madame Wong said then disappeared. Not only did Madame Wong disappear, but her little cottage and the giant maple tree –
even the well and meadow and stream – all gone, swallowed by the insubstantial mist and fog of the Netherworld. It was like it had never been there at all.
“Hindergog, where did she go?”
“Hard to say.”
“But she was here, right? I’m not going loco am I? There was a little Chinese woman here, and a small house and a tree?”
“Yes, those things were here.”
Hindergog began walking in the silvery mist now engulfing us again.
“Hindergog, where are we going?”
“I must deliver you to your next Master.”
“Yes, but who is it? Who am I going to see? What will my next master be like?”
“You will see,” he said as he scurried along in front of me.
After a while, Hindergog stopped. He turned to me with a most serious look on his face.
“What is it Hindergog? Do you have something to tell me?”
“Something to give you,” he said as he pulled a small item out of pocket hidden on the inside of his tweed vest. The parcel was wrapped in a beautiful purple cloth.
“What’s this?” I asked as he handed it to me.
“This. . . this is something that will help you. Something I made many, many Earth rotations ago. Something I made for my first mistress. . .”
I gently opened the cloth and couldn’t believe my eyes. Inside was the most elegant dagger! It had a smooth, sharp silver blade, but the hilt was gold and encrusted with precious gems, some of a type that I had never seen before. The gem at the top was perfectly round and set in gold. At first it was milky white like an opal, but as I studied the jewel it began to change and flicker. The gem became perfectly clear and seemed lighted from within. Then I began to see pictures in my mind like a movie in my mind’s eye. Fanny and Jake were there – on a train. Fanny was leaning on a man that looked familiar. Who is that?
Dad! It was my dad, and he didn’t look like a zombie anymore. It was my own dad, back from the undead. And he was on a train with Fanny and Jake. But going where?
The jewel then clouded over again and became milky white. “Hindergog, I just had a vision. Did the jewel at the top here – did it make my vision happen?”
Emily's House (The Akasha Chronicles) Page 20
