Hollow Oaks

by Paddy Kelly

  And there were sounds too, voices and moans, desperate and cold.

  Another explosion, and I cringed again, in the heat and chill. My body felt like it was twisting in opposite directions at once. The sounds climbed higher, shriller, like nails dragged up a slate wall, unhinging into swears and screams.

  I crouched there, trembling, as the world shook itself bloodless. Stones creaked, plaster fell in plate-sized slabs, and the flame and smoke wound in a swirl, up into a blinding topknot of purple as the anam slipped free, raging hot, bulging the stitches of the world.

  Suddenly I was a giant, looking down on this roofless room, and then a tiny thing, peering up past leg and crotch to milk-sour goddess tits and — boom. Another jolt. Hair floating, clothes trying to crawl off, and eyes seeing beyond the wall and earth and sky, all rising up, as if underwater, but weighed down—

  One boom, then another, and with bones bending, eyes full of fire, it erupted in a shriek and I was shoved brutally sideways, spit trailing from the mouth in a suspended arc as I swung floorward, fast then slow, and the world flexed and slammed up into my face.

  The purple flames dissipated. In the ringing silence, I lay there, shivering, eyes shut, the weight of the rucksack pressing me down. I heard the gurgle of water. The Poddle! I was still there, inside the border zone. But why was everything so quiet, and so cold?

  I opened my eyes, to find myself peering into darkness, in a great open space. The water was there, but also a weird buzzing, the minuscule shuffling of things on the ground.

  Was it night in Tara? It had to be, as I saw dim stars. I also made out dark walls, some distance off, shattered and broken. And something was creeping across my hand.

  I sat up with a fiery yelp and shook the hand, dislodging a thumb-long six-legged thing. It landed, clicking, and scuttled off into the murk. Past a thousand other things.

  Bugs. There were bugs everywhere. On my hand, on my sleeve, in my hair, as if I were sitting on an ant hill. It looked like the ground itself was moving.

  With a frantic scramble to my feet, I wiped myself down, then shoved a hand in my pocket, looking for my keyring, which had a light. Then I remembered Ishbéal.

  "You okay?" I whispered towards the pocket. "I didn't crush you?" She grunted. "Then come out, I think we're in Tara—"

  "No," she moaned, voice muffled. "Not Tara. This is the worst of places."

  "What?" A breeze swept past me, old-cupboard rank but also faintly metallic. "Did you bang your head or something? Of course it's — oh! Look at that."

  The landscape around me was coming into view, as my eyes adjusted to the starlight. Sparse grass, alive with bugs, stretching away into low, stony hills, lacking trees or vegetation. And far off … I squinted. A yellow glimmer, like a small fire, spreading light on a collapsed wall of huge stone blocks. The glow moved, in a soft bounce, then vanished.

  I turned. A few metres away lay the source of the gurgling — a stream, two metres across, with a grassless edge. The Poddle? Hang on … there was no Poddle in Tara.

  And where was the Taran side of the border zone, that Tommy had activated? I saw only bare ground, carpeted in course grass, over which insects swarmed.

  Another flicker of light in the distance, that vanished just as quickly.

  Something tickled me. I looked down. Bugs, crawling up my trouser leg. I frantically swept them off, as a breeze wheezed past, cold and sour as a dying breath. A blister of fear swelled in my gut. What was going on? Where the fuck was I?

  I peered around in the dark, squinting as my eyes adapted. But the more distinct the landscape grew, the further my heart lowered itself into my stomach. Because it was becoming obvious. This wasn't Tara. And it wasn't home. It was a barren place, the only life being the coarse grass and the insects, in their millions, like bugs on a corpse.

  The yellow glow reappeared, having come out from behind the broken wall, thirty metres distant. Now it didn't dim, and wasn't moving at all, except for growing brighter.

  Which meant it was coming towards me.

  I watched, frozen in place. It drifted closer, yellow like a pale sun, held by one person in a group. Ten metres away, the group stopped, peering at me, and I peered back, wondering if I should wave. But then I saw how they looked. Skinny and dirty, and half naked.

  One barked a word, and all ten of them started to run. In seconds, they had spread out, making a half-circle around me. I pulled my arms to my chest as I stared.

  Desperation was the word that best described them, the men skeletal and gaunt, the women with rough bindings across their breasts, weirdly like mine. A few breasts were bare, skinny nippled things with ribs beneath them. Many wore ornaments strung around their necks on roughly-made cords. And their eyes — all green and brilliantly bright.

  Bugs climbed all over them, but they didn't seem to notice. And despite the filth and emaciation, they all stood fiercely proud as they glared at me. Dangerously so.

  A man stepped forward, along with two women armed with short spears. As he came nearer, heat stirred inside me, a sudden gut-stab of need. Despite the filth, for a moment my impulse was to devour them, all three, warm and dripping.

  The man stared at me, one green eye, one flat and grey, possibly damaged. His hair was dirty, tied back, and there were scars on one shoulder, as if he'd been burned there. Around his neck, on a cord, hung a large and vaguely familiar shell.

  He opened his mouth, showing many missing teeth, and said something I couldn't follow. Irish, or some bastardised variant. Seeing I didn't understand, he motioned with his hand, telling me to turn. I did, and the rucksack was yanked roughly from my back.

  On the ground was something I'd missed in the dark — a burnt ring, the size of the one in the border zone. I turned back, and saw Grey-eye squatting, rummaging through the rucksack. The others gasped when he pulled out an anam bottle, and held it high.

  Movement behind them. Another yellow light, and more people — twenty, thirty, stepping out from behind the collapsed wall. They were hauling something. A sled, weighed down.

  An insect scrambled across my cheek. I left it there and sank to my knees, under the weight of the fuath, and the long day before me, and the longer ones ahead. Grey-eye turned to me, put the pack down and stepped over. When he got close, it happened again — a convulsion of hunger, powered by his smell, by the promise of devouring him.

  "Please," I said, from the ground, unable to stand. "Tell me. Cad atá ar súil?"

  I'd asked him, I hoped, what was going on. He attempted a smile, displaying dirty teeth, and the holes where some had fallen out. Behind him, cold stars burned and the larger group shuffled closer, dragging what they were dragging, their lamps like pale eyes in the dark.

  And he spoke. What he said was thick and accented, made worse by his missing teeth. But it was short, and at the end were a few words I could translate.

  Tóg linn abhaile. Take us home.

  He smiled on, peering at me, his sour smell sending my guts into knots. And I understood. They'd been trapped here, so long, for centuries. Not wiped out after all, just sent into hiding. And they'd hatched a desperate plan to send Dreabh through that well, to Earth.

  It was clear now. Dreabh wasn't from Tara. He was from here. And they'd been waiting, hundreds of them, the world killers, the enslavers of races, the murders of my kind, and Ishbéal's. Waiting for their saviour, who after long centuries had finally come.

  That saviour was me. And I was about to set them loose again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  With a boulder to my back, and insects crawling over me, I watched the Sidhe at work. And what they seemed to be doing made me excited but also terrified.

  They were building a border zone.

  They'd started by marking out the locations of the six columns, using what looked like divining rods Dreabh had sent over with me in the pack. Apparently they were able to sense the shimmer of anam in that Dublin basement, one world distant.

  The sled they'd dragge
d up had contained oak pillars, skinny and roughly hewn, and I watched as they dug holes to slide them into. Two were already vertical. And as I observed them, across forty metres of dark ground covered in straw-like grass and nibbling insects, loosely guarded by two women with spears, I was forming a theory.

  They'd been in contact with Dreabh the whole time. The nun had even mentioned it, back in the van. He'd talked to the ones in the well, she'd said, using his shell. And, assuming that was the shell in the photo in the nun's house, Grey-eye had the same one.

  They'd used it to talk to the child they'd sent across, all those years ago. To tell him how to set them free. Maybe it only worked within the well, where the two worlds touched. Which meant that holy well was like a portal oak, despite Ishbéal's refusal to admit it.

  Portal oaks joining Earth to Tara, holy wells joining Earth to … here. The bug world. And what joined this world to Tara? Fire, if I had to guess. Dreabh had even said it — wood, fire, water. Suddenly the universe I knew was a lot bigger, and also more terrifying.

  Once they got the border zone working, I figured they meant to escape to Dublin, maybe out along the Poddle tunnel, and into hiding. Then back home, to Tara.

  And was that so bad? They just wanted to live, like the rest of us. And being trapped in this awful place, living and dying here … didn't they deserve to just go home?

  But from what Ishbéal had said, how they'd lived before had been through the deaths of others. Her kind, my kind, maybe even their own. They'd messed with dangerous powers, woken the fuath, or maybe even created them, in their hunger for power. If the Sidhe escaped from this place, two worlds would end up a great deal worse off.

  Worst case scenario — unleashing the fuath on Earth, letting them spread as they'd spread across Tara. Sucking the desire of the human race to live. Seven billion bodies.

  So I had to stop them. But I had nothing to stop them with. Except a fuath.

  My head ached. I pulled my knees to my chest, to pool what little warmth was dribbling through me. The night was cloudless, with icy-bright stars, and a biting wind that swirled every so often, with nothing in its way but me. The fuath seemed to be sapping me faster, body and brain. I needed a spark, a slap in the face, something to help me think straight and plan. And it hit me I had such a thing in my pocket, which they hadn't searched. The urges.

  The guards, their backs to me, were watching the dozen or so people working to raise the border zone. So the next time the wind gusted, I slipped a hand into my coat pocket, prised open the zip lock bag, and pulled out an urge.

  A squint at the sticker showed me it was vitality. I broke the wax seal, and gulped it down. Oily, with a stab of salt. Back into my pocket went the empty bottle, and I settled back, swelling with anticipation, to wait.

  It didn't take long. The air lost its weight, my limbs grew light, my breath fast, pumping bright blood to every tip and extremity. One of the guards looked back, then turned away again. Clearly I was still harmless, as there was no place I could run.

  "Did you hear that?" The tiny voice came from my pocket. I looked down to see Ishbéal peering out. I turned sideways on my arse, to hide her from the view of the guards.

  "Hear what?" I whispered.

  Like a tiny meerkat, she was looking around. "Over there. Towards the stream."

  I turned. My muscles were dancing, aching to get moving, to do something.

  "Look," she hissed. "There, by that low rock. Look."

  I squinted, moving my head from side to side. The rock she meant was in the other direction from the crowd of Sidhe. Layers of dark, and then, beside it, movement.

  It looked like … a small arm, waving.

  "A fairy!" I hissed at Ishbéal. "What the fuck's she doing here?"

  "They must have come with the Sidhe. As slaves. Dear goddess, they have been here this whole time, for centuries. Living and dying in this cursed dark."

  Ishbéal scrambled from my pocket so fast I couldn't react, and sprinted out of sight. The guards, still looking away, didn't notice. Damn it, I should run too, while I had the chance. But to where? I had no idea of the layout of this version of Ireland. And the small hope still burned that if the Sidhe managed to build a border zone, and connect it to Crafters Lodge with the concentrated anam, that they might bring me home, like Dreabh promised.

  I hugged my knees tighter as another pillar became vertical at the border zone. Five up now, and one more to go. I watched, legs twitching, brain glittering, until I felt something pulling at my coat. I barely swallowed my yelp of surprise as I looked down.

  Ishbéal. After checking the guards, I hoisted her onto my shoulder, on the side away from the Sidhe. She spoke in little pants.

  "Fairy. Trapped here. There are many, in hiding. The Sidhe don't come to this area often. Too scared. This is … a terrible world, Bren McCullough. Nothing lives here but insects and weeds and worms. It is all dead. They destroyed it, they—"

  "Will you slow it down?" I whispered. "Just tell me what she said, from the start."

  "He. Carmath. He said the Sidhe found this place, centuries ago. A whole world, with a killing sun like yours, but also anam. And with the anam from here and from your world—"

  "Ah! Two kinds they could use. That they could combine. Holy shit."

  It wasn't a thing I'd heard of, but it made perfect sense. Two worlds besides your own, meaning two types of anam you could import and use. A whole different level of crafting. And, given the Sidhe ruled their world utterly, it was crafting a lot more powerful than that on Earth. This place was their source. A whole world's power, just for them.

  "They found more in this world," Ishbéal said. "The fuath, in the deep waters. It was here, hiding from the sun, they discovered how to use them, using my kind as hosts. And yours. The blood of the consumed went back to Tara, to make the water of years. But they wanted it stronger. Better. They wanted more anam. So they built … the tower."

  One of the guards turned to look at me. I started muttering, doing a slow back-and-forth sway, hoping it looked like I was praying. It seemed to work. She turned away.

  "Go on," I whispered down to Ishbéal. "What tower?"

  "It still lies over there, on the dark pool — a charging frame the size of a mountain, made to concentrate the anam. Like the pit and the copper cage. To make it more potent. Many Sidhe worked there, using that power to adapt the fuath, to change them. So proud, the Sidhe. They thought they could do anything. That every world was theirs. Until the day they had an accident. And they … woke them."

  "Woke them?" I said, my throat dry.

  "That is all he said. They made the fuath remember how it was to be alive. To desire. They became hungry. And they spread, everywhere. Into everything. They ate it all, every speck of life, from bird to fish to Sidhe to dirt. A whole world, consumed by them.

  "The Sidhe here fled back to Tara. They took the infection with them. The fuath, and their hunger. The fuath spread again, this time through their kind, and mine. The great death started. The bodies piled up. And when it was over, every Sidhe in Eíre was dead."

  Heat stirred inside me, crawled in a skittish circle, settled back down.

  "But the ones here," I said. "The ones who were stuck. How did—"

  "They escaped the death in Tara, and crossed back over for refuge, along with some of my people. They found a world piled with bodies, and the fuath dormant. In the panic, the connections back was closed, so they remained here, eating insects and worms. Waiting for rescue."

  Waiting, I realised, for me. A cool breeze gusted, sending my hair flapping. And over at the border zone, the final oak column slid into the ground. Time, it seemed, was up.

  "And the nun," I said. "She dumped craft items into that well. Which was connected to here. Anam leached through. Enough so they could send Dreabh across as a child."

  "Which finally gave them what they wanted. The means to escape."

  My fingers tapped madly as the vitality urge sent sparks through me. I needed
options. A place to run to. A place to hide from … all this.

  "The small folk here," Ishbéal said, "they were slaves, but many escaped, and now they live in that tower. A place the Sidhe will not go. They offered us refuge—"

  A shout from the border zone, which now stood complete in the yellow flicker of the two ball-lamps. Ishbéal scampered into my pocket and out of sight. I saw Grey-eye directing people out of the zone, then he turned and barked an order across to my guards.

  They turned to me, their bright eyes startling in the dirty paleness of their faces. One spoke. I didn't understand, but her gesture indicated I was to go over to Grey-eye, and his mob. Their big-headed spears, pointed at me, told me it wasn't up for discussion.

  I stood, my limbs all tingly and light. But the vitality urge would soon fade, and I had to make use of its effects before it did. But how? Run to the lake. Hide. But the border zone looked ready. And maybe they planned to take me with them. Maybe if I just—

  The guards moved, one standing to either side of me, grabbing an arm each. And at their touch came a belly-punch convulsion below my heart. Saliva welled.

  I turned to one, met her gaze and saw beyond it, to the succulent meat of her mind, the slippery heat of her blood. I stifled a groan, fixated on her, that lickable sheen—

  A shove got me moving across the stubby grass, trampling insects. My breath came hot. The fuath was waking. She wanted them. And I wasn't sure I could keep her down.

  The six vertical columns, with niches already hacked into them, rose before us like a weird crown. A few paces away ran the stream, a silverblack slash in the dark. The people gathered had stepped back outside the zone, watching me like filthy urchins.

  Grey-eye stood beside a scuffed pillar, and I was brought to a halt in front of him. The fuath kicked again, making my ears ring. The guards held my arms as Grey-eye turned to the border zone, and to the crowd behind it. He shouted in that garbled version of Irish, from which I caught only the word oscailte. Which meant open. They were going to do it.