by James Comins
Chapter Fourteen
Annie
or, Doesn’t Anybody Feed You?
When Lenna woke up, she was not in a perfect world without Brugda. She was slumped, her head leaning on Andy, and something had just screeched to a stop. Her eyelids drooped and it was dark and she wondered where the scratchy straw and wool blankets were. Then she remembered.
A thin line of bristly brass-hinged trees loomed over the open door of the Opel as she stepped out. Her feet crunched on emerald gravel, specks of green reflecting the starlight. It was too dark to see much more than the painted canvas of crystal stars and moonlit rainclouds above and the black silhouette of a hill below. They were on a slope.
Andy stood beside her, looking and looking. He turned to her and smiled, the sort of smile you give to someone else to cheer them up. All of a sudden Lenna realized that Andy was her friend. She took his big hand.
“Soylent, and follow,” said Pol, walking ahead. Lenna wanted to ask questions again, but right now it was a spooky outdoors night and anyway Pol said to stay silent. They filed along crunchily through the dark till they came to the end of the green gravel road, and then it was squish squish squish up a muddy hill with no trees. Diamond stars were everywhere around them. The moon was see-through, frosted like antique-store glass. It spun above them. Crickets and buzzy things made the linen spring grass feel loud and alive.
Magic was approaching. Lenna could smell it, a smell of gunpowder and iron. Some kind of war magic, ghostly old and brimming with last words and final prayers and the cries of comrades. Lights like foxfire bobbed ahead of them as they walked toward the magic. As the four of them came nearer, they saw what the lights were. A wall of fireflies flew in a slow circle, surrounding a broad space on the flat crown of the hill, revolving around a great black shape in the center like a maypole or a circle dance. The circle was maybe half a mile wide, this twinkling parade of fireflies. Lenna was overcome by the joyful blinking dance.
One by one, the fireflies began to die.
They dropped out of the circle, their yellow flashing lights snuffed out, and piled up in a thin line on the damp linen grass, gone forever from the world. The sight caught somehow in Lenna’s throat, and she squeezed Andy’s hand.
“Jost in time,” whispered Pol, and stepped across the threshold of the firefly corpses.
As Lenna crossed the boundary, she felt herself pass coldly through a magic circle. Everything changed from alive to dead. The life inside her body seemed to drain away, and she sweated sickly and shivered. Colors vanished, fading away to black and bone. The last remaining fireflies went from warm yellow to creepy-colored in an instant. Her hands were white in the rotating moonlight, and Andy was silver gray. The grass was dead and crackly. The world was cold and fallen on the top of the flat hill.
Something crouched in the darkness, a shadow against the sky, tall, angular and wicked. Pol stalked straight towards it.
“Och, ‘tis a Jute,” he called out, his baritone voice rattling weakly in the circle magic.
“Dad?” Andy hissed.
“Shh. Listen.”
Above Lenna, the waning glass moon dripped to red, casting a bloody cast on the dead white. Four hot fires sprang up at the corners of the hill, triangle-patterned and flickering. The light was ghoulish.
The crouched figure unfolded.
“Yutah,” came a very thin, hateful voice.
Pol laughed, boyish and free. “Well, Annie M’goo. Shame to call on you on such a soggy evening.”
“What brings the Dagda to the Hill?” asked the hissing voice.
“Brigid’s returned. She has a thing needs doing. If y’aren’t too busy.”
In the flickering firelight, Brugda stepped forward and growled: “Why here, Morrigan?”
“Oh, can we all talk now?” asked Lenna.
“This is Tara!” Brugda declared. “The Hill of the King! My home.”
“Nice to see you, too,” said Annie or Magoo or Morrigan or whoever she was.
As the mysterious hissing woman rose into the red moonlight, Lenna gasped. Creeping chilly horrors ran up her arms and legs. The white face appearing from the shadows was sick and wrong and deformed. It had a Neanderthalic brow ridge like butterfly wings; a chin long and curved down and pointed like a hornet’s stinger or a rhinoceros horn; blue eyes as dry as paper lanterns; ears shrivelled to the sides of her head; a nose square and jutting; and black lips. Her hair was black, too; long and strandy, like the hair on a Voodou doll. The dagger point of her chin had worn through the skin there, leaving a weeping patch of crusted blood.
As she rose, and rose, and rose from her crouch, Lenna thought she must be the tallest woman in the world. Her black rags clung to papery skin plastered over a skeleton. One leg stuck out from her dress without muscle or fat, and it might as well have been a bone.
“Doesn’t anybody feed you?” shrieked Lenna. She rushed forward and hugged the deathly skinny woman. “You should have dinner with Emily and Pol! Emily is a very good cook.” Lenna nodded into the ratty fabric.
The hand that clasped her shoulder was very very long and very very strong, full of knucklebones.
“Why eat? I don’t die,” said the woman.
“Are you Morrigu? Andy told me about the Morrigu.”
“That’s one of my names,” she said. “I prefer Annie Morgan.”
“Andy says--” Gulping, she realized that all the things Andy had told her were secrets, and that she mustn’t say any of them. “He said you were very nice,” she lied. Darting back to Andy, Lenna hugged him and whispered, “sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he replied.
The black shiny halo around her head got a little darker, and the world grew darker with it. Someday all the light would be gone, if she didn’t stop lying. She was so stupid for making that stupid bargain.
“Brigid,” said Annie in her horrible voice. The long, misshaped head of Annie Morgan bowed over the little woman, who faced her sourly, unimpressed.
“Morrigan,” Brugda replied. “You’ve made a boneyard of Tara.”
“I like boneyards,” said Annie. “Look. There’s no High King alive in Ireland, Brigid. No one lives over the hill. At least if it’s a boneyard there’s kings under it.” The bonely woman frowned. “They’re going to put a highway through Tara, I hear.”
“There’s a king,” Brugda said hoarsely. “Always a king.”
Pol took Lenna’s hand and Andy’s shoulder. “Miss Annie Morgan, may I introduce to ye Miss Lenna ...” Pol looked expectantly at her. “Miss Lenna ...?”
“Just Lenna.”
“Aw, butcha’ve got to have a last name, doncha?” said Pol cheerfully.
“You don’t,” said Andy. He sounded like a new tornado was forming in his belly. “You haven’t got a last name, Dad.” His jaw tightened. “You’re just the Dagda.”
Pol twisted around in the red moonlight on the white world of the hill. A twinkle appeared, but he kept himself from smiling. “Is that such a small thing to be, then?” he said.
“Why are we here?” Andy asked his father sharply.
Annie took a mile-long step towards Andy with her crusted bare feet. “You’re the son of the Dagda?” she said. Her face was a bleeding moon above him.
“Does me as much good as shoes on a snake. I’m Andy, Miss Morgan. Andrew.” He was shaking a little, looking up at the terrible woman, but Lenna thought he was brave anyways.
“She’s your namesake,” whispered Pol with a conspiratorial grin.
Andy’s hand was shaking Annie’s when he shouted, “What?” and took his hand back. “It’s a zombie I’m named after?”
Annie smiled like a skull wrapped in threads of black hair. “You don’t need to worry about zombies. The dead don’t walk. Well, not usually.”
“I haven’t got a last name, and now it’s a corpse is my first name? Dad. Tell me I’ve got a name by rights. That’s all I want.” Andy pounded past the goddess to face his father. “Tell me. I nee
d to have a name that’s mine.”
The corners of Pol’s mouth twitched upwards. There was something impish in his crow’s-footed eyes. Lenna thought he was mean for smiling.
“It’s been long I’ve waited to give you this,” said Pol.
“What?” shouted Andy to his father. “What, what, what?”
“You can say no, if you’d like to,” Pol replied.
The wind flickered the four tall fires into the shapes of huge animals. Thunder rattled in the distance.
“I can say no to what?” Andy answered. “What is it you’re giving me?”
“A name, Andy. It won’t be you was the first to have it. But you’ll be the only one left. It’s a name means something. Only if you want it.”
Lenna watched Andy fight his anger down. He was so brave, she thought.
“Yeah, Dad. Okay. Give me ... whatever you’ll give me.”
Pol took something shiny from behind his ear. He muttered something and shook it. Out it folded like a Japanese fan into a silver triangle. From the triangle grew a spider’s web of strings, attaching themselves to opposite corners like inchworms stretching out.
“This was my brother’s harp. You’ll have it and his name. There’s more to it than that, though.”
Andy softened. “Your brother?”
“He’s buried under the hill.” Pol tapped the crunching cloth grass with a wingtip shoe.
“How’s your brother going to feel, your giving away his name and his magic whatsit like this?” asked Andy.
“I think he’d be proud.”
Lenna drew back to give Pol and Andy more room. So did Annie. Brugda stood her ground silently.
Pol cleared his throat. “By the life of my father Lir, by wood and stone and iron, I Dagda give you the name of Manannan the Harper, the Storyteller, the Bard. This is the harp of Manannan. He was fifteen years younger than I am. And you are fifteen years old, Andrew Manannan O’Donnell. Here, take it.”
Andy strummed the crosshatched strings. The notes were a music box opening. He seemed to understand it naturally, and began plucking the same tune Lenna had heard him play on the guitar, the Ham Sandwich tune. A thread of gold wove upwards and trailed away from the sound.
“And how’s that, Andy Manannan?” asked Pol.
“Heavier than a U2 album.” Andy hugged his dad.
“Excuse me,” said Lenna. “Miss Morgan? Um, do you know where Mo Bagohn is? Or the Fomor? Or or or my friend Binnan Darnan?”
“Yes,” said Annie. “Some of them. Call me Annie.”
“You know!”
Andy grinned at Lenna, who grinned back.
“Who’s Binnan Darnan?” Annie asked her.
“Binnan Darnan has a black dress and a pointy nose and floofy black hair,” Lenna replied.
“Very sensible fashion sense.”
“She’s been kidnapped by the Fomor!”
Brugda hobbled forward. “Morrigan,” she said. “A reason brought us here. I need a deep favor.”
“Then ask,” said Annie, shrugging with her shoulderblades.
“This child. I’ve kept her as well as I could, as a favor to someone. My time is over. Take her from me, Morrigan, and be her guardian. I can’t carry her longer.”
“I have to go away?” said Lenna. She turned, shocked, and looked at Brugda. The horrible old woman had always been the grown-up who had looked after her. Not a parent, exactly. Momma Joukka Pelata was her parents. But Momma Joukka Pelata hardly even noticed her, and Kaldi and Talvi had done whatever they were told to do. Brugda had always been there, a lighthouse in the storm of life, even if she had been an awful and mean and nasty lighthouse. She was a lot more like a mother than a sister, Lenna thought. Or an evil stepmother. Or, not evil, but ...
“Yes,” Brugda rasped. “You have to go away.”
“Without saying goodbye to to Kaldi and and and everyone?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not coming with me to find Binnan Darnan?” Lenna asked.
“No.”
“You’re just giving me away, Brugda?”
She shouldn’t have said it, but she did say it.
“Yes,” said Brugda, wheezing.
Annie Morgan spread her flapping black sleeves and they became wings, thick and wide above her impossibly tall head. She was a crow in the hot wind of the fires. Dark songs whistled in the air around her. The stars faded to pure black, but the sliced-diamond moon stayed red as blood. Annie smiled. “Climb onto my back, Lenna. We’ll find your friend.”
Lenna’s wrist got caught by Brugda’s arm as she tried to go to Annie.
“Wait.” Brugda blinked. “Things to say.”
“Well, say them,” Annie said in her throat-scratch voice.
Brugda bent to see Lenna’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she told the girl.
“I did do something,” Lenna told her, looking down. “I hope it isn’t too bad. Watch out for angels, Brugda.” She faced Andy. “Andy, you shouldn’t hate someone just because they’re a zombie.” She went and hugged him. “I’m glad you have a name, Mr. the Manannan.” She turned to Pol. “Tell Emily thank you for dinner! And tell Talvi and Kaldi and Aitta goodbye until I’m back.” She thought for a moment. “And then tell them hello!”
She ran across the drum of Tara, climbed onto Annie’s thin back and flew away.
