Completely Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  ‘You made a deal,’ he told his father. ‘You made a deal, for me.’ Tony nodded. He could hardly deny it. ‘Did you regret it?’ Danny asked him. ‘Making that deal? Even when the day came, and you had to walk away from me? Would you have gone back, if you could have, erased the first ten years we had?’

  ‘No,’ Tony admitted. ‘Not for a second.’

  ‘This is what life is,’ Carman said harshly. ‘No clean endings. Sorry to say, the evil witch doesn’t get vanquished and go quietly into the night. Life is making deals. Life is making the best of what we get.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Danny said.

  ‘Then we’re agreed,’ Carman said, trying and failing to keep the salacious edge of pleasure from her voice as she spoke.

  ‘No,’ Danny said.

  That brought her up short. The human-skin she was wearing rippled more forcefully this time, and wondered if she were to throw her true form at them at this reduced distance, would he even have time to destroy the Cauldron before she annihilated them?

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t accept your terms. What you’re offering is not enough. But,’ and he exhaled, knowing what he was about to say would likely define every second of the rest of his life, not to mention those of countless others, ‘I’m willing to talk.’

  She narrowed her eyes. He increased his grip on the Sword, prepared to bring it down on his side of the Cauldron, saw his three companions do the same. The moment passed and she began to laugh, clapping her hands admiringly.

  ‘You do your kin proud, Danny,’ she said. ‘Talk, then. What else would you ask of me?’

  The Ultimate Boon

  BELFAST / OTHERWORLD, NOW

  ‘I can’t get through!’ Steve said, for the hundredth time. He gathered himself and charged once again at the nearest gap between the standing stones, screaming a war cry and swinging the flail in his right hand–

  Ellie winced at the doooofff noise that followed shortly thereafter as Steve was knocked onto his back. She knelt beside him and saw that he was breathing heavily, face red with exertion.

  ‘We’re not getting back in, Steve,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not giving up,’ he replied, and got back to his feet. He paced along the circumference of the circle, pressing experimentally here and there, probing. The invisible barrier remained solid wherever he tried. With a cry of frustration he swung the flail against it, causing a brief emission of blue-tinted sparks to erupt as if two electrical fields had collided, but no other effect.

  ‘Your efforts are admirable,’ Wily told him, ‘but fruitless. It is not the witch keeping us from returning.’

  ‘What’s he talkin’ about?’

  ‘Danny,’ Ellie said. She was oddly, insanely, calm. ‘Danny’s the one keeping us out. Probably doesn’t even realise it, like, but he is.’

  ‘Danny’s keeping us out?’ Steve scoffed. ‘Why the fuck would he do that?’

  ‘He’s protecting us, Steve.’

  ‘Safe!’ Steve spluttered. ‘Did’ja see that thing in there? How safe’s he?’

  She put her hand on his shoulder. He almost recoiled, but caught himself just in time. ‘Steve, he knows,’ she said.

  ‘I know he knows,’ Steve mumbled miserably.

  ‘He took it well, I thought.’

  ‘Yeah, well, as we said – alternate universe and all that shit. Plus he’d been living with Maggie as you said, and he’d probably been regularly throwin’ the lad into–’ and he caught Ellie’s very meaningful look at this point and did just about the neatest conversational three-point-turn in the history of oral discourse. ‘Anyway, yeah. I have to help him. He could be gettin’ hurt in there, Ellie.’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I just do. He can handle it, Steve. He wanted to keep us–’

  With a roar that shook the street, a fleet of jeeps and trucks appeared on the scene. Personnel transports, the size of which they’d never seen, full of army grunts – more and more of them disembarking with each passing second. Two military helicopters crested into view over the top of the nearby courthouse.

  Steve, Ellie and the two wolves found themselves encircled by a ring of steel, ranks of soldiers dropping to a crouching position, guns trained on their positions. The wolves placed themselves between the guns and the humans, their bodies crouched, ears flattened, teeth bared.

  ‘DO NOT MOVE,’ a voice boomed from above. ‘ANY ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE OR TO ATTACK AND WE WILL OPEN FIRE.’

  ‘–safe,’ Ellie finished.

  FORMER SITE OF LECARROW, COUNTY ROSCOMMON, NOW

  ‘I can see it! I can see it!’

  Tom Beckett craned his neck to look in the direction the bus driver was pointing. They had formed a little community here, when all of them felt as though they had driven for long enough to put that nightmarish vertical wall of suspended sea far behind them. Horns had been blared and hand signals exchanged and the little convoy had come to a halt.

  The fact that the phones still worked seemed the one thing that was keeping them all from completely falling apart. Families were in contact, some for so long that batteries were running low and a sort of bonding event had grown up around the scavenging and sharing of mobile phone car chargers.

  They’d all crowded round on the bus and watched the TV, which not only still worked but was still picking up channel signatures effortlessly. Rolling news channels had finally found a topic worthy of rolling news, although the fantastical nature of events still didn’t seem to vary their content from a succession of people saying, ‘Er, from what we can tell’ in five hundred and forty seven different ways.

  Some of the convoy had even appeared on the news using FaceTime, or whatever videocalling equivalent their smartphones possessed, to give live updates to the world. Tom had already overheard one businessman brokering a book deal.

  A couple of hours ago they’d received the order, not only from the government officials and UN representatives various people had managed to contact, but also loud and clear from the rolling news coverage, that they were to head to Lecarrow in County Roscommon, or where it had once stood at any rate. The vast majority of their vehicles possessed satnavs so they would be able to navigate there without much of an issue – could even travel as the crow flies since the roads and byways the satnavs were recommending now no longer existed.

  Lecarrow had been chosen because it was deemed to be the geographical centre of Ireland, the furthest point away from the sea. If the barrier should break and the waters rush in, it would buy them a little extra time.

  Besides, they were not the only ones. Other ships had tried to dock. Other planes had tried to land. The news channels had claimed eight hundred people were now heading toward Lecarrow from all directions.

  Those eight hundred, Tom included, were now the most famous people on planet Earth. The complete disappearance of Ireland’s landmass was the biggest news story in human history and, with the interconnectedness of the planet, there was barely a person alive on Earth who didn’t know about it.

  Tom wondered about that. He liked to think of himself as a man of reason – he hadn’t gone to Mass since he was eleven years old and he didn’t hold much truck with the paranormal. He regularly watched Brian Cox documentaries and, though they mainly featured the professor walking moodily up a mountainside, he had even understood some of the science. Yet as much as he racked his brains, there just didn’t seem to be a rational explanation for something that could not only neatly excise a landmass from the planet but leave the seas suspended around it.

  The scientists on the news were giving it a go, of course; talking about exotic matter and strangelets and quantum tunnelling, but the religious nuts almost seemed more plausible than they did. The consensus seemed to be that Ireland had either been Raptured to some form of Heaven for the unwavering faith of its flock, or cast into one Hell or another for the unwavering blasphemy of its sinners.

  I know whi
ch one my money’s on, Tom thought.

  They’d arrived not twenty minutes before at Lecarrow, after only one stop so the bus could take on an extra passenger whose van had run out of fuel. There had been some people there already, more of the lost and stranded, waving to them as they arrived in a circle of headlights on the endless plain.

  The bus driver was right. Above their heads, they could see a blinking light move across the sky. A faint roar of engines carried across the air. Everyone began jumping and embracing one another. Their rescue had indeed arrived and, thanks to the miracle of technology the whole world would watch every impossible minute of it.

  For the first time in a long time, humankind would begin to really believe that there were bigger things out there than themselves.

  LITOCHORO, GREECE, NOW

  The mountain began to awaken.

  BELFAST / OTHERWORLD, NOW

  ‘You need to release whatever hold you have on the human world,’ Danny told Carman.

  She looked at him, through him. Carman’s eyes didn’t stop for mere physical obstacles. She could have made Superman’s eyes water.

  ‘Just so I understand you, Danny, you’re asking me to release my hold?’ she asked.

  Danny thought about it. He had to be careful not to give her something she could use during these negotiations, a slip of the tongue she could exploit and pervert. Carman had brought nothing but disaster to his world and he failed to see what unfortunate consequence could arise from her control being taken away.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, feeling like he was growing into this leadership thing after all. ‘Let it go. Now.’

  Carman bowed her head. ‘Consider it granted,’ she said.

  FORMER SITE OF LECARROW, COUNTY ROSCOMMON, NOW

  Tom’s phone blared. Everyone with a working mobile who wasn’t currently engaged in a call negotiating image rights or talking to hysterical relatives suddenly found their phones ringing, all at once.

  The rescue plane was coming in, a huge barnswallower of a military beast, landing about a mile away. The noise was unreal – the ground shook as the giant wheels of the craft touched down. He saw little point in answering a call he wasn’t going to be able to hear, so he let the phone ring even as he watched others in little refugee group try in vain to scream loud enough to be heard, or cup their hands around their ears to block out the din.

  The bus doors opened. One of the passengers, a girl in her early twenties, sprinted out. Arms and legs pumping, she ran until she stood in front of the motley group of onlookers who’d gathered to witness the plane’s landing.

  She screamed and hollered and gesticulated but thanks to the noise from the plane’s engines, still roaring from its descent, he could hear nothing. Tom’s phone vibrated in his hand. It was a text from his sister.

  Go, was all it said.

  ‘… out! Go! We have to go, right now! Now!’ the girl’s voice finally could be heard as the plane’s engines wound down a little more, and Tom, and the rest, heard it.

  Not all of the noise was coming from the plane. Not all of the rumbling underfoot was coming from it either. The winds were picking up around them, whipping cruelly. The taste of the sea was upon them, the tang of salt.

  For a heartbeat the world seemed to pause, everyone trapped in a paralysis of horror as the realisation of what was thundering toward them from all sides sank in. And then–

  There was only running, and the throttling of engines. Tom processed the next few minutes in flashes. He seemed already to be drowning, not in water but in terror. When his mind was able to come up for air, he saw time moving incrementally around him. He got into his car. The shaking underfoot was growing stronger. The plane’s engines, not getting the time to idle down, were already powering up again, setting the world afire with noise. The cars beside him were roaring past – it was less than a mile to the transport but no one wanted to waste a second.

  He could see men in military uniforms, shouting, as he exited his car, knowing that this was the final time he would see it. Had he been able to think, he would have realised that the shouting men were doing so because some of his fellow refugees, in unthinking hysteria, had driven their own vehicles in front of the transport before getting out, blocking the plane’s takeoff route.

  The Ulsterbus was waved right on, the transport’s ramp lowered so it could drive straight up. It went past Tom with inches to spare, knocking him over with a rush of air at its passing. Hands were upon him, men pulling him up, shouting instructions. He was shepherded to seating, told something about buckling in, and straps were shoved at him. There seemed to be some sort of high-volume debate about whether the bus passengers should come out or stay inside. With numb fingers he tried to fasten the buckles.

  A shot rang out.

  There was a second or two of relative quiet after the shot, albeit with the plane’s usual roar continuing to thudthudthud-thrumm, but Tom was already becoming accustomed to that and was now picking out other sounds. An elderly couple were deposited beside him, with what looked like a family of four, filling his row of seats. There was a little girl of about seven who was screaming in panic, constantly screaming and thrashing, preventing her mother from buckling her inside. The father slapped the girl across the face.

  Another shot rang out at the same time. Tom could see the father’s face contorted in wretched guilt. For a moment it had sounded as though his slap had been performed with incredible force. The girl was strapped in and the father met Tom’s eyes for a split-second.

  They began to move. Tom had never felt such relief, capped a nanosecond later by frustration. They were moving too slowly, far too slowly. He and the rest of the passengers screamed and hollered and begged and cursed, but the damn plane was still ambling along as though it hadn’t a care in the world.

  The plane’s entry ramp began to close. Craning his head around over the seating, Tom could see there were people still out there, still driving. They weren’t waiting any longer. That could only mean–

  A great force shoved them all backward into their chairs. Those passengers with lung capacity left for fresh screams let loose. He feared the worst, expected to see water crashing in through the entry, but when none came he realised that the plane had hit the gas in a hurry.

  Above the rumble of the plane’s engines, a deeper roar was now impossible to ignore.

  Outside, blessedly out of Tom’s capacity to see but in full terrified view of the plane’s pilots, the Atlantic Ocean was approaching from the west and curving around to the south, the Irish and North Seas from the east and north. Lecarrow had been chosen wisely, but its centrality also meant that, when the water eventually reached it, it would do so from every direction at once.

  Three unstoppable mega-tsunami were about to obliterate the final tiny remnant of the Irish bedrock.

  From observation aircraft, from satellite footage, the world watched as the rescue plane desperately increased its speed, until finally the nose of the great beast pointed upward, and the plane climbed as fast as its pilot dared into the dawn skies where Ireland had once stood.

  Seconds later, the waters finally met; first two, then three incredible forces acting upon one another. A mighty torrent of water shot vertically into the air, thousands of tons of sea arcing many hundreds of feet upwards and missing the rising plane by a whisker, as though a final attempt to prevent their escape.

  The seas roiled and swirled, seethed and spun into a furious maelstrom, a moving liquid scar, the mobile tombstone of all that was left of Ireland.

  BELFAST / OTHERWORLD, NOW

  Four generations of Morrigan men stood together. Emotions were running high. The air was thick with unspoken pride and tacit sadness. There was only one way to deal with this smorgasbord of sentiment.

  ‘So they’ve still not won the title?’ James Morrigan said incredulously.

  Danny shook his head. ‘Nah. Had a decent Cup run a few years back, like.’

  ‘Bunch o’ overpaid prima donnas, the lot of t
hem,’ Tony said.

  Luke was following this conversation as best he could. ‘Sport?’ he offered. This was met with grunts of approval from his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, as though he had contributed something of grave import.

  ‘You should come back,’ Tony said, into the long and awkward pause that followed. He was addressing his father. ‘We’d head to a game. Take the young fellas.’

  ‘I can’t,’ James said quietly.

  ‘We’ve got her by the balls,’ Tony protested, gesturing to the centre of the stone circle and to Carman, currently embroiled in a complicated ritual to bring something forth from the Cauldron’s depths. ‘Look what she’s doin’ for Ellie! Danny could tell her to bring you back properly too!’

  ‘Son,’ James said, setting his hand on Tony’s shoulder, ‘you’re missing the point. I don’t want to go back, even if I could. What am I goin’ back to? I’ve been dead for donkeys years. Who would I live with? What would I do with my time?’

  ‘I miss you, Da,’ Tony said wretchedly, ‘Danny never even got the chance to know ye. Wee …’ and he had the good grace to hesitate here as ‘Wee’ Luke, currently towering over them all, reacted to his name with a cheery wave, ‘Luke as well.’

  James glanced at each in turn. ‘I think me and the lads here understand each other pretty well. Son, I’m at peace. Your mummy’s at peace. I’d tell you more but I’m pretty sure it’s against somebody’s rules, somewhere. Someday you’ll know.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Tony said, sounding almost childlike himself.

  ‘I know. Ach, c’mere, my big son. C’mere to me.’

  Father and son embraced, one last time. Tony had no words, and if he had, he could not have formed them. When they parted, James gathered Danny and Luke into a hug so manly that if it had lasted a second longer they would have spontaneously grown beards. He told them how proud he was of them both.