Completely Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  ‘You were given what you thought you wanted, and you discovered you didn’t want it. Not at the price you’d have to pay. The same thing has happened to me. I’m sorry for what I’ve done but there’s no time,’ she said, directing her words at Danny. ‘We’re all going to die unless you all trust me, completely. Yes or no?’

  Danny realised, to his somewhat lightheaded horror, that his artificially-aged teenage son, dead father and dead grandfather were all staring at him, waiting to follow his lead.

  ‘It’s you,’ Tony said gently.

  ‘No,’ Danny protested meekly, aware that Carman was coming in for another go and that this time the element of surprise was not on their side, ‘I’m not the one in the prophecy. Luke is.’

  ‘Ach,’ the Morrigan said, and Danny only dazedly noticed that she was talking like a Belfast native now. ‘Prophecy. What a load of oul balls.’

  ‘Son,’ Tony told him in a rush. ‘You’re the one. Forget about prophecies and witches and all that. Luke’s your wee son and he’s in danger.’

  ‘But–’ Danny began, indicating the brick shithouse that was baby Luke.

  ‘So?’ Tony shot back with such forcefulness it made Danny start. ‘You’re his da. Protect him. That’s what you’re for.’

  Yet again, it was all about choices. He’d longed to be the master of his own destiny, to feel like he was in control. Hell, he’d bitched about it. And now, four generations of his family – and that wasn’t including the Morrigan, who added on a couple of hundred more – had placed him in complete control, and all he could think was, I don’t want it. I can’t handle it.

  So?

  That ‘So?’ was the key to it all, Danny suddenly realised. He hadn’t wanted to have a child so young; he hadn’t handled the responsibility that well. He didn’t want to face this monster now, he didn’t want to lead, and be responsible for the fate of his loved ones.

  But, So?

  Life did these things, life short-changed you and stacked the deck and delighted in throwing its faeces in your face like a demented chimp. What did it really fucking matter what you wanted or what you’d received before this present moment in time? What really mattered was what you did right now, what you kept doing.

  What mattered was the bottles you kept making and the pints you kept missing, the friends you kept by your side through it all, and the commitment to a little bundle of skin and sore gums who had no idea you were doing it all for him, but who loved you anyway because you were his daddy, and his whole world, and you were awesome, and you owed it to him to try to stay that fuckin’ way for as long as possible … or at least until he saw you dancing at a family wedding.

  ‘You’re how old?’ James was asking Luke during Danny’s latest revelation.

  ‘Long story,’ Tony interjected quickly.

  ‘What the fuck’re they feedin’ kids these days?’ James whistled.

  Danny squared his shoulders and faced the beast, ready to–

  DIE!

  Carman’s scream was no longer being blocked out. Something – the closest analogy would have been a tentacle, if tentacles were thirty feet long and as thick as a small car – lashed out at the group with enough force to send every one of them sprawling end-over-end, arse over shite, backwards. Danny landed next to his Granda Morrigan in a heap, and only the prospect of imminent attack and gruesome demise made him hurry to untangle himself. He helped his granda get to his feet.

  ‘Fuck this for a game of darts, son,’ James wheezed as Danny pulled him up. ‘Aren’t ghosts meant to be insubstantial?’

  There wasn’t time to reply. Much as her darling son had done when activating the Network, Carman had thrown out the book on Gloating Super Villain Etiquette. She wasn’t interested in taunts, or a good old mwahaha-let-me-explain-my-plan-and-oops-also-my-weakness monologue. She was using her ludicrous size and weight advantage to try and wipe out her opponents as quickly and as messily as possible.

  Take control. The words sounded in the four men’s minds, planted there by the Morrigan. Each of them swung their silver Swords like never before, in powerful and graceful arcs, and the Swords themselves glinted with inner light as they sliced through gargantuan tentacles, chopped into grotesque excesses of flesh. Black ichor gooped out from under Carman’s mottled, pallid skin.

  Screaming like banshees, the five Morrigans charged.

  Danny, Tony and James acquitted themselves admirably, but they were mere amateurs compared to Luke and the Morrigan. Those two fought like legends made flesh. Danny caught sight of his son once or twice as he leapt and ducked and dove in his desperate attempts to keep himself alive, unflattened and undevoured.

  Luke was leaping twice as high, moving faster than the rest of them, almost keeping pace with the Morrigan herself, who was more or less single-handedly keeping them all alive. He had time to marvel that, in his brief, if intense, one-on-one duel with Luke he had been able to hold his own for any length of time at all.

  You know why. Because even then, even when he thought he despised you, he was holding back. He knew. Even here, even now in the madness of the melee, the Morrigan still spoke to him.

  Roars of pain, both audible and psychic, ripped through the standing stone circle. Great disembodied pieces of that horrific body flapped on the grass. Carman’s central mass was noticeably smaller now, her attacks less deliberate and measured, more frenzied and desperate.

  We can win this! Danny thought, the first flicker of hope he had felt since the battle began.

  No, the Morrigan’s voice came back instantly. Not like this. She’s about to–

  Another roar, this one entirely on the psychic plane, so powerful that all of them were knocked flat on their arses. Danny rolled as he impacted, steeling himself for Carman to press her advantage. No attack came. As he got to his feet, he saw that Carman had retreated into the centre of the circle. Her monstrous visage, leaking blood in copious quantities, had withdrawn into itself.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ James hollered into the sudden storm-intensity winds that had sprung up. He had planted his silver Sword in the earth and was using it to brace himself. Danny, struggling to keep his balance, did the same.

  Watch.

  The winds were all heading in Carman’s direction, as though she were the centre of the vortex. At first Danny thought this was a new style of attack – that she was trying to suck them towards her where she could finish them off – but then he saw what she was really targeting.

  More faeries tumbled into the circle. They were all shapes and sizes, all screaming. Just as she’d done before, she was drawing her own creations back into herself, leeching their essences, using every faerie soul she consumed to regenerate her own wounded form a little more and leaving them hollowed-out husks. The reduced bulk that had given him hope had swollen back to its former levels. Carman didn’t stop. The faeries kept coming, screeching in their death throes as they went.

  Danny felt himself despair.

  Look, Danny, came the Morrigan’s voice. Look what she’s using!

  He looked around, his arms on fire from the effort of holding on to the Sword still anchored to the earth. For a few seconds he wondered what the hell he was supposed to be looking for and how much longer he could keep his gaze fixed on the carnage – in myths, people had been turned to stone for looking at things a hundred times less terrifying than this – and then, that great carcass shifted, and he saw it.

  The Dagda’s Cauldron.

  Objects placed in the Cauldron were resurrected; at least they were once upon a time, until Carman had perverted the magic behind it, turned the Cauldron into the birthing chamber for her species of horrors. Now, it must be serving as her power source, her regeneration battery.

  When she’s done regenerating, it will vanish again, the Morrigan told him. She was standing about six feet to his right, her long hair whipping out in front of her. He was reminded of the first time he’d seen her physical form, on that beach long ago, when he’d been reduced to
a bumbling idiot by how beautiful she was, how imposing. She was no less so now. Danny noticed for the first time that she was unarmed, wielding no sword. Unlike her male descendants she was showing no signs of strain against the vortex, she seemed in no danger of being sucked into Carman’s hungry mouth.

  How do we kill her? he asked her.

  She looked over at him and smiled. It was a tired smile on that beautiful, ancient face, one that displayed every single one of those thousands of years she had existed.

  Kill her? Here, in this place? I’m not sure you can, Danny. I’m not sure anyone can. She was born on far-off shores. She is of Greece, not Ireland. She has never felt at home anywhere; that is her strength, and her weakness. She belongs to this world and to yours, to both and to neither.

  He could barely stand now. It was chaos. Tentacles whipped around, snatching at arms and legs, waiting to flick them unawares into that black hole of a mouth. They were trapped in the funnel of a tornado with a Kraken at its centre.

  Tell me what to do, he begged her.

  I don’t need to. You will know, Danny. You will know when the time comes. Love will form your choice. I only hope you make better choices than I did.

  And at that, she began to run, faster than any human could hope to match, straight for Carman. Some part of that monster registered the tasty morsel it was about to swallow whole and a rumble of expectancy and desire made the monoliths tremble.

  The Morrigan leapt gracefully into the air, over and under tentacles that snicked out in an attempt to snag her and prevent her escape. Escape was not her plan, anyway. She dove, straight into the heart of the beast, and just before it closed around her and enveloped her, she thought of Mag Tuired and the glories of battle and slaughter. She was able to reach into the monstrosity and pull something out, throw it clear.

  This done, the Morrigan’s mind turned from thoughts of war. She thought of the washerwoman in the pool, dunking her little sons under the surface, and her handsome husband walking toward her with her baby in his arms. A moment of perfect happiness. She held that moment close.

  Then, she was eaten whole.

  The little universe they inhabited paused for a fraction of a heartbeat. Somehow in that deathly still, Danny had time to register his connection to the Morrigan change, as a sense of powerful contentment radiated from her. Impossibly, he could have sworn that in the midst of the madness, he saw the image of a little girl, her eyes closed and her chest rising and falling gently as she slept.

  Then, all was white light, and noise, and the sensation of being knocked backward even more powerfully than they had been pulled forward.

  Carman exulted in her triumph. She revelled at the glorious stupidity of the sacrifice of her greatest enemy, a hollow gesture of desperation, a …

  ‘Lose something?’ Danny said, free hand resting easily on the rim of the Dagda’s Cauldron.

  Carman’s triumph flipped to outrage in the blink of an eye. Danny staggered under the fresh psychic assault – she threw everything she had at him and, despite all of his training and his heritage, his defences simply weren’t going to be enough.

  Another hand fell on the rim of the Cauldron. He felt the pressure in his mind ease, and thought for a second that the Morrigan, had somehow been belched back into existence.

  ‘Dad?’ the owner of the hand said.

  His vision cleared. It was Luke who had spoken. Danny nodded gratefully at his son to let him know he was okay. Tony and James joined them at the Cauldron. They were still alive. All of them, still alive, thanks to the Morrigan’s sacrifice. He tried to put the Morrigan’s words out of his mind. Surely with the Cauldron at their mercy, they had the power to end this, here and now? All he had to do was–

  Stop. Don’t. It was Carman, but not with her former, withering power. She had even ceased her approach, hanging back. To his astonishment, her fully monstrous form began to fold in on itself – flesh rolling into flesh with a noise he would try to forget for the rest of his life – until she stood before the four men in her human guise once more.

  ‘Can we talk?’ she said.

  There was a long and slightly disbelieving pause by way of response.

  ‘I think I speak for us all,’ Luke replied, garnering looks of surprise from his older companions as he spoke, ‘when I say, fuck no.’

  Danny grinned. As one, all four men raised the Swords. Normally he would have despaired of chopping a metal cauldron to death with swords, but he knew – they all knew – that this was different. When they plunged those Swords into the cauldron’s interior, it would be their intent that would get the job done, not the physical act itself, and the Dagda’s Cauldron would be no more.

  ‘Wait!’ Carman said desperately, taking another half-step forward. From this distance, they could see her skin rippling. Danny wondered if she really had folded herself back up from Cthulhu-sized proportions to human, or whether she’d simply fooled their brains into thinking she had. He realised he didn’t want to know.

  ‘Destroying the Cauldron won’t kill me,’ she said.

  His initial thought was to dismiss it as desperate ravings, but Danny thought of the message the Morrigan had given him. Carman could not be killed in the Otherworld. She belonged to both worlds, and to neither. Whatever the fuck that means.

  ‘She’s right,’ Luke said. At the looks he got from the others, he shrugged. ‘I know how she works. The Cauldron is channelling her powers, but it’s only the amplifier, not the source. Destroying it will weaken her, but it won’t kill her.’

  ‘Do rightly,’ Danny said, raising his Sword again.

  ‘Think about this!’ she begged them. ‘Think about what’s been done to Ireland tonight. Think about how many people have died. This Cauldron can bring them back – can bring them all back,’ and now she was looking at only Danny. ‘Including your father.’

  ‘I’m here now,’ Tony pointed out.

  ‘Within this circle, yes,’ Carman shot back. ‘You have the Morrigan to thank for that. She’s gone. Outside this circle, if Ireland goes back to the human world, you won’t go with it. You can’t. But with me on your side, you can go back. Everyone who died when I brought Ireland to Otherworld … I could bring them back.’

  ‘You’d swear an oath?’ Luke asked.

  Her eyes flashed as she looked at the young man she had once hoped to be her ace in the hole. ‘You know about–’

  ‘I know more than you think, Mitéra,’ Luke said.

  ‘Oath?’ Danny asked.

  ‘Magical rules for magical creatures. She swears an oath and she’s bound to carry it out,’ Luke explained.

  Danny felt elation wash over him. If they could get Carman to tie herself up in knots she could never undo, she would never pose a threat. He could use the powers she possessed to finally do some fucking good.

  ‘Makes sense,’ James nodded. ‘Magic’s full of that stuff. Why they’re so big on tricksters. Half the battle’s working out the get-out clauses in the contracts. Explains why all lawyers are proper bastards.’

  ‘You think I should do this?’ Danny asked him. He noted that Carman had made no promises about what would happen to James.

  James snorted. ‘Jesus, no!’ he said. ‘Only reason she’s here now is people have had the chance to kill her before and haven’t taken it. Don’t make the same mistake, Danny.’

  ‘It won’t just be your father you’ll lose,’ Carman pressed on, again addressing Danny directly. ‘All of those years your son has lived with me? Destroy that Cauldron, and they’ll be taken from him.’

  ‘I don’t want them,’ Luke returned hotly. ‘Not the way you gave them to me. Here, alone? With only the bad memories you allowed me to see, over and over? You can have those years back. I never wanted them.’

  ‘We don’t ever get all that we want. The process is called living,’ Carman snapped, reminding Danny uncomfortably of his own ‘So?’ revelation of not long before. ‘Take my word for it, Danny, a human body, even one with Luke’s un
ique heritage, can’t cope with losing nearly twenty years in an instant,’ and she snapped her fingers with a sound like a rifle shot. ‘You’ll get your precious baby son back, Danny. Whether you want him back alive – that’s your choice.’

  Danny felt like screaming. Was this what the Morrigan had meant, about choice?

  ‘Leave me my Cauldron intact and I’ll return you and your family to your world,’ she went on, her voice silken. It was astonishing to think only moments before she had assumed a form that made Godzilla look like the Cookie Monster.

  ‘You’d put things back the way they were?’ Danny asked. Hadn’t this been what he’d been hoping for since he’d held his father’s body in his arms. A reset button? A do-over? An ‘and then he woke up and it was all a dream’ ending, to all of this madness?

  ‘Danny?’ Tony said warningly.

  ‘This is a mistake, son,’ James echoed.

  Carman just shook her head. ‘No. No going back. Our two worlds wouldn’t be as separate as they were before. After all,’ she went on, very reasonably, her talking-to-children intonation making her sound like a primary school teacher. ‘There’s got to be something in it for me, hasn’t there?’

  He thought of Ellie, somewhere outside the circle, probably trying to get back inside. She wouldn’t be able to. The only reason they had both been allowed in previously was to allow the showdown between himself and Luke that Carman had engineered.

  What would he tell her, if he took the chance to destroy the Cauldron, if he succeeded in trapping Carman in the Otherworld forever, and if in doing so …

  He looked at his son, the living anachronism. There was no terror on Luke’s face, despite what was being talked about. For a moment, just a moment, Danny saw, not the magically aged adult, but the little boy he had picked up and tickled a thousand times over this past year. The baby who had fallen asleep on him during midnight feeds at least twice a week; that weight of his little head that he’d missed so while in parallel-Belfast with his shiny, empty new life.