Hollow Oaks

by Paddy Kelly

  "They are ahead of us," she panted. "Do not stand to check! They have guessed our route. Two of them stand at the lake, where the stone bridge starts. Where our boat is."

  "I need to see," I said. "I'll be careful, okay?" She nodded. "Right, here I go."

  I eased my head around the wall, where an orange bug sat, its feelers inches from my face. The moon, now a few hands high, lit the world well enough so I could make out the Poddle-twin's rut along the ground. I traced it to where I guessed the shore of the lake to be, and slid my gaze to the right of that point.

  In a few seconds, I'd found them. Two figures, standing. To either side of them sat low stone blocks, maybe the remains of a wall. The wind whined, so hopefully they couldn't hear us. But that also meant we couldn't hear them speaking or sneaking up on us.

  I pulled my head back. "Fuck." I checked my watch. Sunrise was coming in about ninety minutes. I turned to Ishbéal. "So what the hell do we do now?"

  "Cross the lake. The stone path they are guarding extends a good way into the water. Carmath's boat is hidden near the end. We can move there in secret, but you can't. So we require a distraction. What can we do?"

  The fuath. I could call her. But I feared if I did it again, she'd never let me go.

  I pondered. "They can't stay out until sunrise, can they? It would kill them too."

  "Carmath says they have a cave. Fifteen minutes running time from the lake."

  "Shit." Even if they left their posts fifteen minutes before dawn, it was cutting it too close for us to cross that lake safely. "Then we need something dramatic, and quick."

  The wind gusted against the wall I hid behind, swirling grit and insects in a rain-like rattle. I closed my eyes and listed what I had — my anchors, a plastic bag with a lust urge, the uisce beatha…

  My eyes snapped open. The uisce beatha. A thing that would burn.

  I peered along the broken wall. It stretched maybe fifty metres, giving me cover the whole way if I crouched. I turned to Ishbéal. "I need dry stuff, like grass. Can you two get some?"

  Ishbéal slipped around the wall to inform Carmath of what I hoped wasn't a truly terrible plan. I extracted the bag with the urge, returning the urge to my pocket, giving me an empty bag. Into that I shoved my ciggs and the grass the fairies returned with. They headed off to get more. The handkerchief went into the neck of the bottle, as a wick, and the bottle went into the plastic bag, which I stood on the ground, supported by stones.

  When the fairies returned with more grass, I shoved that in too, and nodded.

  "Okay. Now we need to teach Carmath there how to use a lighter—"

  "I can show him," Ishbéal said. "The dark-skinned one trades them to us with tobacco."

  Of course he did. Gernaud, you contraband-dealing bastard, I could kiss you.

  "Here." I handed her the lighter. "Show him. Tell him we'll sneak along the wall, as far as we can. When he sees us at the end, he lights it and screams like a human, loud as hell. Tell him to do it for a few seconds and then run for it. Hopefully they'll come to check. And then we'll make our move."

  "I come with you?" Ishbéal said doubtfully. "What if you are captured?"

  "You think you've better odds crossing that whole lake by yourself?"

  She thought about it. "Very well. Wait here." She slipped around the wall, to where Carmath was waiting. I pulled out the lighter and tested it in my cupped hands. It worked. But would the rest of the plan? And was I really going to swim? In my clothes?

  "Ready." Ishbéal was back. I lifted her into my pocket.

  "Right," I said. "Let's do it." I handed the lighter to Carmath, who gave me a surly nod. I turned, bent low, and proceeded along the broken wall. In some places I had to crawl and in another I had to dart across a gap, but when I reached the final big stone, I peered around it and saw the two Sidhe still calmly talking by the lake.

  I turned to where Carmath was, although I couldn't see him. I took a few breaths, shoving oxygen into trembling legs and arms. Then I gave a wave and saw light flicker.

  The grass I'd prepared caught quickly, then the plastic bag. Carmath started yelling, and did a good job of making it deep and loud. I peered over the stone and saw the two Sidhe start running, heading left along the edge of the lake, leaving the jetty open.

  I bolted from my hiding place, and ran. An intensely bright flare came from my left — the plastic bottle releasing its contents into the blaze — but I kept my gaze fixed on where I was going, as I curved around some boulders. My teeth jarred under the pounding of my boots, and my arms pumped, fists clenched, like I was punching a wall in front of me.

  Two yells shattered the fading night. I didn't look back to see who'd spotted me, I just picked out the shadows sticking out into the water ahead, and leaned forward to run harder.

  Before me, from the heart of the lake, rose the tower, so big it looked painted onto the skyline. A collapsing monstrosity clamped onto a dead world like a fungal growth.

  More yells from behind but the jetty was now close, a ribbon of grey that cut out into the lake, and I kept going, my chest hot with pain, until I staggered onto it.

  Calling it a jetty was generous, as it was just above the lake's surface, and, in places, below it. Two metres wide, it stretched fifty metres out, pointing a line to the squatting edifice. One big breath, then I gathered my nerve and leaned forward to—

  "You," a voice boomed out from behind. I couldn't help it. I looked back.

  Dreabh was there, walking with a limp towards me and the lake. In the moonlight I made out a gaggle of Sidhe fifty metres behind him, beside a square boulder, watching.

  He had the gun. I backed up a glacial step or two, trying to pretend I wasn't moving at all.

  "I didn't mean for us to get stuck here," I yelled across to him.

  He stopped five steps from me, right where the jetty started at the lake's edge. Dark stains on his face and the gun in his hand but it wasn't pointed at me. Not yet.

  "You couldn't just do what I asked," he said. "One simple thing. You see these people, how they suffer here. I just wanted to bring them home. And you ruined it all."

  "I ruined it? After you lied to the nun, and Burke, and Vesta, who we had to fucking bury—"

  "An accident. I never planned to kill. But the thing inside you kills. We can help you with it."

  That was a lie. But right there, with dark water sloshing around me, and stars atwinkle overhead, the words were sweet as honey. I wanted them to be true. I ached for it.

  "Help me, how?" I said, with a tremble. Trying to remain suspicious. Trying.

  "Don't listen to him," Ishbéal hissed from my pocket. "His words are poison—"

  I put a hand over her to muffle her, to keep her down inside my pocket.

  "The ones here know of your parasite," Dreabh said. "They can remove it."

  The warmth of his words, in this burnt out shell of a world. The sheen of his eyes, like sunlight through grass. Tears prickled my eyes. What had he done, anyway, that was so bad? He'd just tried to save his own people. He'd crawled out of that holy well as a boy, hungry and bony, their final, desperate hope. He'd cured people, that's what the nun had said. Tried to help them. Showed them the way. Saved so very many.

  I couldn't look away from his eyes. The wind faded. My breath moved into step with his. Dreabh wouldn't hurt me, I saw that now. He wasn't false. He was truth.

  "Nobody else has to die, Bren. There's been enough death."

  I was nodding, my eyes locked onto his, a sob building in my chest. Who did Dreabh actually kill? Nobody. Vesta was an accident, like he said. And Burke? That was Grey-eye. I wasn't even sure they'd trapped me in Tara. Could easily have been anyone.

  "They want me to shoot you. For your meat. But you deserve a chance, to repair what you've done." He lowered the gun, lay it on the ground. "You see?"

  Tears streamed down my face as he took a step towards me. The fuath was chattering in the backstage of my head, but I barely heard her. Dreabh was
the true thing. The safety.

  A mad squirming and kicking came from my pocket as he stopped, only three steps away, and held out his hand. A winged bug sat on it.

  A growl in my belly as she shifted, smelling him. A tin-whistle shriek in my ears.

  "Drop your hopeless plan," Dreabh said. "You are a sinner, but that can change."

  "I am a sinner," I said, openly sobbing. His eyes, their warmth, I could die in them.

  "Come with me, to the cave. All God's children need forgiveness, Bren, even you."

  A click in my skull. God? Dreabh was a Sidhe, he didn't believe in Christian gods. And with that niggle of doubt, the shine on him darkened for an instant, showing what I'd been refusing to see — two calculating eyes, with only one promise, and that promise was death.

  I probed behind me with a foot, and took a backward step along the jetty.

  "Thanks," I said, looking at his chest and not his eyes. "But I've seen how you help people." Another careful step. "I think I'll take my chances elsewhere."

  Dreabh sighed, and raised a hand. For a moment I thought he was waving to me, but then I caught a blur of motion and an explosion of pain burst from my shoulder.

  My astonished eyes slid to the arrow sprouting from my flesh. I gasped, and staggered sideways, aware of voices, inside me and out. One of my feet reached the stone lip, and slipped off. My balance fled, and my body buckled and, in stark silence, I tumbled in.

  Freezing water slammed into me, rushing into ears and nose. I was dragged under by the weight of clothes and boots, with only half a breath, thrashing, finding nothing to grab. Bubbles jiggled up, icicles rammed into nose and brain, and I was sinking, a dead weight, a—

  The fuath's voice ripped across the lake in an opalescent ball of light, and suddenly I wasn't sinking, I was turning, tilting, but not falling. Held up. Bubbles slipped past but I hovered steady in water that was now a lattice of diamond-strings and gold, each layer the shimmering of a knot.

  Things fell past me, sinking down. Arrows. A bullet. I watched them diminish until a thrashing in my pocket snagged my attention. The fairy, she couldn't breathe, so I lifted her up to my hair which she grabbed and I spread my hands to call calm from the water, to make an air bubble around my head and around her, without thinking how or not how.

  She stopped kicking, holding on. I inhaled cold and biting air as I looked past the silvery skin trembling, to the lake that had become alive. Rolling density and shape, curled with a tracery of green, like fluorescent ink. Each current defined, its tension and line, and in one direction, a glowing fan of green-red threads, spreading out.

  The Poddle-sister, pouring in. A living flow joining the silent mass.

  Another arrow plunged, a thin trail of bubbles after it. I looked up, to bright shapes moving along the rim above, burning bodies peering down. I drifted, towards the middle of the lake, over the deeper dark. Eyes open, seeing the world, the hunger, the need.

  You see how easy it is to let me lift you and hold you up—

  I couldn't stop her I didn't want to she was already most of me. I breathed, cellar-cold, with a void below, ten metres, more, and darkness. The island's roots ahead, rearing up, weighted rock pressing to groaning—

  And then a voice, not me, not her. A moan, making bubbles tremble.

  I stopped, and hung. Above me, the fat minds of the hunters, looking down in anger. Near my face, inside the bubble, the small one kicking, a crackling fear-fold.

  She was speaking. Something was coming. From below.

  The water throbbed down there, far beneath my boots. A whisper, carried in the tremble. A sound beneath words, shaping itself. Old, drowsy, but waking to the light of us.

  Down we peered, through the scaffolding, to motion. Things coiled in the depths. Creeping up, as if remembering how, from the wreckage of the floor. From among its bones.

  We hung, fear sprouting frost-forms, hearing their songs, still and listening.

  Sisters the others they are there they rise the sisters so cold so hungry—

  In my head she spoke on as shapes unmelted from dark to barely seen, clawing from one layer to the next, rising. Voices not yet words, just slices and sounds, remembering the taste of everything that once was. And the cold rose too and I heard them.

  The need the need the need—

  Spreading out, all around, I saw them, and I knew them. We both did.

  Fuath. Ascending from the cold, pulled up by our light, by the seaweed halo of our hair. Stretched purple forms, sexless and streaming, grey-glow skins in rags. They rose around us in the water, arms limp by their sides, mouths and empty eyes all alike and open.

  Inside me, Esmerelda coiled. She feared them, these ones that remembered death. Who had broken this world, sucked it dry, then slept, hungry, as they waited for more.

  And we were it. A morsel, delivered to their door. And now they would feed again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Inside the gyre we hung, watching them dart close to absorb our heat, and beneath to block our escape, tightening their ravenous orbits at every turn. They melted and solidified, eyes black, mouths wide-open in my twisted sight. Circling their sister, but mostly me, and the small one I carried. The warm promise of our minds, that food they'd so long craved.

  "Get away," Ishbéal moaned in my ear, entangled, wet as a rat. "Swim!"

  I opened my mouth to speak. My jaw shook, my breath curling against the skin of the bubble I was holding in place. "Where," I gasped back. "Ishbéal … too cold…"

  The fairy yanked my hair, sending through me a pang of pain. And they reacted to it, quickening. A couple darted right up to me, waxen faces trailing hair.

  I closed my eyes, but I still saw them, just as brightly. Images too, leeching in. Tress and candles and children and long-endless pretty days. Sunlight smile touch ending and void.

  Move back sisters leave this one leave him I said he's mine—

  Two swept in, venous blue twins. I turned my head in crawling disgust, and caught a glimpse, over the edge of the lake, past rock and earth, of … something. Six incandescent somethings, shimmering in a careful circle. Like fingers rising. Or pillars.

  The zone! It had to be. A thrill of hope surged in me. The Sidhe had fixed it, and now we just had to get there, crawl through it, get home.

  But my attention had wavered a little too far, and the swirling fuath, sensing it, swarmed closer. From one stretched a long-bone hand, reaching—

  "No," I gasped into my tiny air pocket. "I said fucking no, don't you dare — ah!"

  It touched me, with no weight, and darted back as Esmerelda burst into an incoherent babbling, flower-folds of her light spreading out. But her anger didn't drive them away, it only made them pause, mouths open … and then fall inwards all at once in a solid shriek.

  A yell burst from me, blowing the bubble from my face, and in the midst of clawing hands, with nowhere to go sideways or down, I went the only possible direction — up.

  Rising, slow then faster then a blur, crashing through the surface into hot-gulp air, where, for a moment, I hung, over the lake of boiling foam of faces, and saw, far below, the silent lake bed, ridges, blocks and bones, a slow crawl of slipperiness and shadow.

  My hold broke and I plunged back into the lake, slapping water aside. Inside me she screamed, and her burn became my burn, turning me, then propelling me, hard and fast, ahead. Through the water we ripped, with the fuath following, clamouring for the fleeing scrap of my mind, ploughing a roaring gouge.

  Ahead I fast-saw the tendrils of the stream, pulling closer. We had a direction, an aim. I dug for old memories of lust and guilt and longing, anything to power her, to feed our fire, and the growl of Esmerelda's eating shot us onward into the stream's outflow gullet.

  Sounds twisted as I ripped through narrow water, sending it back in sheets, like wings. They followed us up the Poddle-stream, a furious rope packed with mouths. The tiny channel turned, curled, the shimmer of the sixfold shape drawing closer, larg
er. Forms moved on the flat, running, as behind me the fuath clawed the distance back, inches then hairs, until there was no way left to go but out.

  In an explosion of water, I soared over the lip, then past it, where hard earth slammed me, face and chest, rolling and skidding to a chin-bruised battered halt.

  I stood, trembling, water pouring off me in sheens of light. The stream, beside me, was all froth, lashing and squealing. And the pillars rose a hundred metres ahead, across an interminable stretch of ground. In the meat of my arm was the arrow, and far off, but moving fast, Sidhe-forms. Dreabh. Coming nearer.

  The zone. I stumbled that way, towards the light, with stars soft-puckered above me, as in my head she screamed as the others followed us in the river, lashing at the edges.

  Minutes eaten, don't know how many, and the pillar shapes were ahead, mere meters distant. Blood seeped from my shoulder, and every step was a bright crunch of life extinguished. I stumbled past a shattered pillar, in pieces on the ground. The stump of another. And at edge of the ring, I stopped.

  The zone wasn't active. I saw the glow of its pillars rising, one or two brighter knots in each. But an after-image. A ghost. They hadn't fixed it. No way out.

  My legs gave, and I collapsed onto all fours on the prickly grass. Trapped. Fucked. Finished.

  The Poddle-twin raged to my left, attacking its own bank. Cracking rock, sluicing earth, a furrow crawling closer. The fuath had melded into one single sharpened desire — to have us and to stop us.

  But let them rage, what did it matter, when there was nothing I could do—

  The crack spat out of the dark, and a shower of splinters erupted from a snapped-off oak column a metre from my head. Footsteps. With a head the size of a world, I looked up.

  Figures jogging along the rut of the river, coming towards me. The one in front, maybe fifty metres off, not hard to recognise. Dreabh, crackling with rage, a hard-coiled stone of murder. The gun in his hand. He'd shot at me, and in seconds he'd do it again.

  "The river, Bren!" The fairy's voice. "Look at the river. They're coming."

  I knew they were, digging their hungry furrow towards me. But I couldn't move. No way out. Killers near. Seconds to think before I was finished. So think is what I did.