The Fomorians

by John Triptych

  Amy stood up and took everyone’s empty plates. “That was a really good meal, Mr. Urquhart, thank you. I was surprised you were able to get some tomatoes since you did say that all you had left was the frozen stuff.”

  Gareth poured himself some coffee from a fresh pot that Erin had brought in. “It’s not a problem at all. I learned how to cook canned tomatoes from my days in the military. One can do most anything with a proper kitchen these days.”

  Unlike the others, I was still on my second plate of food. As I chewed on a piece of bacon, I said, “So I’m guessing that the Fomorians don’t know about this place?”

  “Very few people know about this place,” Gareth said as he pulled out a pipe from the top pocket of his dressing gown. “As long as we refrain from too much activity in the street outside, we’re reasonably safe down here. We’re still tapped into the electrical grid and there’s a diesel generator at the far end of the tunnel, so we’re good for now.”

  I bit into a piece of buttered toast with jam. “How big is this place?”

  Gareth pointed to his left. “We are currently sitting in an abandoned part of the London Underground. The original plan for the Jubilee line was to go on west, past Waterloo station and connect to Pimlico station across the Thames. Then it was decided to change that and go north up to Westminster station instead. But by then the workers had already dug a mile’s length of tunnels west of Waterloo and the authorities didn’t know what to do with it. That’s when the order stepped in and bought the whole lot as private property. So what we did was simply to wall up the connecting tunnel and start to construct rooms down here. All done in secret, of course.”

  I used my tongue to clear out the bits of food in my gums. “You keep talking about this order. What exactly is it?”

  Gareth cleared his throat before continuing. “Our official name is the Order of Arthurians. We are a secret society dedicated to the defense of England in the time of her greatest need.”

  I used my fork to gather the remaining food left on my plate for one last mouthful. “Secret society? Arthurians? How come I’ve never heard of this before?”

  Gareth sighed as he placed some bits of tobacco into his pipe. “Well, if you’d heard of us before, then we wouldn’t be a secret society now would we?”

  Amy and Erin were both sitting with us, but neither of them said a word. Erin simply rolled her eyes after I made my remark, while Amy elbowed my side and frowned with obvious displeasure before getting up and taking my now empty plate over to the kitchen.

  I had to swallow a bit as I finished the last of my food. “Right, okay. Sorry about that. Do go on, please.”

  Gareth looked at me while taking out a box of matches. “You’ve heard of the legend of King Arthur, I presume?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Who hasn’t? We were taught all of this at school. He was a mythical English king, his castle was called Camelot, he had a magic sword called Excalibur and he had a whole troop of knights with him. They even made a movie about him that my dad would always watch, it was about them going on a quest to find the Holy Grail. The part about the killer rabbit and the holy hand grenade was the best bit.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “He died, didn’t he? Something about his own son killing him and all that.”

  “That’s the short version,” Gareth said as he lit his pipe and started puffing. “Although he was mortally wounded in that final battle against Mordred, the myths tell us that he was carried off into the isle of Avalon, there to be healed, and was fated to return to England in the hour of her greatest need.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what does this have to do with us?”

  Gareth continued to smoke his pipe. “Pay attention, lad. The Order of Arthurians was started centuries ago, some books say the eleventh, or perhaps even during the tenth century. This society was dedicated to help King Arthur upon his return. It is a most secretive order and its archives and traditions were passed on to succeeding generations over time. The members of the order were sworn to absolute secrecy, and they could only divulge the existence of this society to fellow members and to potential recruits. As the years passed, the only time the order was ever mobilized was during the two world wars. New recruits were getting harder to come by, since almost everyone thought that King Arthur was just a myth and that Britain was never really in any danger. In the end, only myself and one other man carried on the traditions of this society.”

  He finally had my attention. “So, was King Arthur real then?”

  Gareth shrugged. “I still don’t know. Even at a time like this, I still can’t be certain. But one thing for sure is that England is in dire trouble and needs a champion to defend it and expel its enemies. My whole life has been dedicated to this cause and then I found your sister in Amicus Tarr’s house. After she told me all the things that had happened, it all started to come together.”

  I nodded. “How does Amicus Tarr fit into all of this?”

  “I saw his website before the Glooming began and was instantly suspicious when every one of his prophecies came true afterwards,” Gareth said. “The order had kept a file on him for years now, ever since he made these wild claims and because of his connection with a group of magicians called the Temple of the Black Sun. Several of our members had fought against these self-styled wizards before, you see. We all thought that this magic was nonsense and we concentrated on obtaining material assets like money and research materials, while these wizards were going all around the world searching for purported magical artifacts. I myself believed that they were onto something but our leader, Peter Sands, did not. Peter preferred that we concentrate on obtaining military weapons and more practical assets over what he called hocus pocus rubbish. In the end, it proved to be his undoing.”

  I placed my elbows on the table and leaned forward. This was all very interesting. “What happened to him?”

  “The last entry in his diary stated that he would be assisting the British military in fighting off the Fomorian advance as they closed in on London,” Gareth said. “I only wish I had been over there to try and reason with him about what course of action we would take, but I was somewhat indisposed.”

  “Where were you then?”

  “I was doing some field research in Grim’s Ditch near Harrow when the Glooming happened,” Gareth said. “The trench was some sort of Neolithic earthwork of unknown purpose and I sensed something magical about it. As I walked along its path, something happened, and the next thing I knew I was no longer on earth.”

  My eyes widened. “You made it to the otherworlds!”

  “That’s correct, lad,” Gareth said. “But that world that I went to was quite strange. You see, time passed differently while I was in it. When I got back to earth, only a few weeks had passed, but when I was in that other place, I spent nearly two decades living over there.”

  Amy had been silently listening, but she almost stood up after she heard it. “Oh my god! That’s an incredible story.”

  “It was hard to believe as I could barely understand it myself,” Gareth said. “It was then that I stumbled across Peter’s diary in our sanctum here and decided to investigate Amicus Tarr. And that led me to you, Amy.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said as I pointed at Erin. “If she’s your daughter, then where was she during all this time?”

  Gareth glanced at Erin and then turned his attention back to me. He paused for an inordinate amount of time before he answered me. “She was with me, lad. I raised her in the otherworld.”

  I sat back on the dining chair, stunned. “So that explains why you told me you were trained to fight Fomorians,” I said to Erin. “You were in the otherworld all that time.”

  Erin showed no emotion as she nodded. “Now do you believe me?”

  I turned my head to look at Gareth. “So if you’re the last of these Arthurians, what’s going to happen now?”

  “Erin told me what happened when s
he encountered you,” Gareth said. “And your sister told me what happened when you went up against Amicus Tarr. I may not be sure about whether King Arthur is ever coming back to lead England’s defense, but I feel that you’re the next best thing. Therefore, I’m dedicating what’s left of this order to help you in any way possible, lad.”

  I didn’t say a single word; my mouth just hung wide open.

  The next few hours were spent in the library as we pulled out as many books as we could about the Fomorians. Amy ran up and down the spiral staircase as she sorted through each and every book to find whatever little tidbit there was. Erin had gone out to do some scouting; she wanted to try and pinpoint the location where the gangsters were holed up. I sat right beside Gareth, facing the center table as we checked out the entries, some of them written in dead languages as well as older versions of English. Gareth seemed to know many of these forgotten tongues, so he was quite busy writing down the translations on a note pad.

  I carefully turned the pages of an old book, trying to make out the stories. “Hold on, it says in this book that the Fomorians were the children of Ham, who was one of Noah’s sons. It also says here they settled in Ireland after the great flood that drowned the world. Then it says that they carried Ham’s curse with them and that’s why they became monsters.”

  Gareth had his reading glasses on as he pored through his notes. “Yes, well the origin stories of the Fomorians are very convoluted. Some stories state that they came to Ireland after the flood, yet others state that they were living in Ireland the whole time. Celtic mythology is a morass of inconsistencies and contradictions. What would you expect from a culture that had an oral tradition for telling their tales—when that happens then we get multiple versions of a single story. It was only after the advent of Christianity that the monks began to record these tales in writing. And by then many of these myths were changed in order to suit the Christian viewpoint.”

  “Hang on a minute,” I said. “So if everything’s so inconsistent, then how do we go about doing this research? I mean, how do we know if what we’re doing is right?”

  “We’ll just have to use our combined experience, lad,” Gareth said. “We need to disregard any sort of linkage that mentions or hints about Christianity. If we can get as close to the original stories as we can, then maybe we can find a kernel of truth in them that coincides with what we know now.”

  I nodded glumly. I hated doing this kind of research. It reminded me of having to do my homework after school, only this time there was no internet so everything had to be done piecemeal. Ray was particularly good at doing this sort of academic work, and the thought of him not being here only made my irritation even worse.

  “Look,” Amy said as she placed a book down beside me. “It mentions the name Orna and it’s about the Fomorians.”

  “Good job, lass,” Gareth said as he stood up and peered over her shoulder. “Now we can find the real meaning behind what that name is about.”

  Amy started pointing at the text in the book with her fingers. “It says here that Orna is in fact a sword of some sort. And it says that it belonged to a Fomorian king named Tethra, who was the ruler of Mag Mell. What’s that?”

  Gareth smiled. “Mag Mell is the name of the Irish underworld. It’s a mythical realm that can only be travelled to after a glorious death, like Valhalla. The sources aren’t clear on whether it’s a land of the gods or an afterlife. Based on our combined experiences, it must exist somewhere in the otherworlds.”

  “If Orna is a sword,” I said, “Why would this Drel fellow be looking for it?”

  Gareth went back to the book that he was reading. “That is the question, lad. Though I think we may be able to find some answers when we can talk to those hard men who took you prisoner.”

  I frowned. “Hold on a minute, you want to talk to them? They’ll probably try to kill us if they have the chance.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Steve,” Gareth said. “I think the better plan would be is to take one of them and interrogate him.”

  As soon as those gangsters were mentioned, Amy looked like she was about to cry again. “Whatever happens, we need to get Mark back safe and sound, please.”

  “We will do that, Amy,” Gareth said to her. “But we need to get as much knowledge as we can out of these books first, so that we know what we’re dealing with.”

  He was right, even though we were all getting impatient, it was still the better plan to do the research beforehand. I looked at the book in front of me and started reading it again. “Look at this entry, it says that the first king of a people called the Tuatha De Danann in Ireland was Bres, who was half Fomorian,” I said. “Is such a thing even possible? How could anybody that’s human ever have a child with these monsters?”

  Gareth looked up from his notes. “Not all the Fomorians looked like monsters, lad. Some of them looked like ordinary men and women, and a few were even quite good-looking. Many Fomorians ended up intermarrying with peoples that came into the island to settle. In fact, one of the chief gods of the Celts, whose name is Lugh, had a Fomorian as his grandfather, a very powerful creature named Balor, whom he slew during a titanic battle.”

  I remembered one of the Fomorians who had chased me in the London Underground. He looked like an ordinary man. “Right, I did encounter three of them in the Tube, before I ran into one of the portals, and one of them looked quite plain, aside from the clothes he was wearing. But he did speak with a very venerable accent. Myrddin sort of distracted them so I was able to get away.”

  “Speaking of which,” Gareth said, “I wanted to ask you about this Myrddin fellow, the one who was able to bring you back to earth.”

  “There’s not much to tell about him,” I said. “He called himself Myrddin the Wild. He looked like a disheveled man dressed in rags and furs. He can speak to plants and animals and he told me that he can foretell the future. That’s about it. I thought he was a homeless man when I first met him in the dark. Gave me a fright, he did.”

  Gareth pursed his lips. “Very interesting…old medieval legends tell of a madman wandering the woods by the name of Myrddin Wyllt, and it was said that he had the gift of prophecy. The Welsh chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, the one who first wrote about the tales of King Arthur, renamed him Merlin, the magician. Wyllt is Welsh, and it means ‘wild.’”

  Amy was intrigued. “I thought you weren’t sure about whether the legend of King Arthur was true or not?”

  “When it comes to King Arthur, I’m not,” Gareth said. “There have been theories that Arthur was derived from the Roman Artorius, and that he was a war leader who supposedly fought the Saxons when they invaded Britain. The legend of Merlin was combined with the legend of Arthur and that formed the stories that we know about in the present time. But from what your brother has said, it seems that Myrddin is indeed real. We may need to find him and enlist his help if we are to liberate the country from the Fomorians.”

  I shrugged. “Easier said than done. He seems to just pop up every now and then.”

  Amy shuffled through several pages of the book that was lying in front of her. “What I don’t understand is why the Fomorians would want to invade Britain. I’ve read several versions of the stories here and it seems that these creatures were only encountered by people who tried to settle in Ireland. That would mean that the Fomorians stayed put and it was these other races that invaded their territory. When we watched the news just before they attacked us, Ireland had already been lost when they returned back to earth, so why are they are over here?”

  Gareth nodded. “That is another question that needs to be answered, lass. If we can find out the reason why they are here, then we can find a way to drive them out. There must also be a reason why they have exiled a portion of the country’s population into the otherworlds. These may be three separate questions, or they may all be part of the big riddle of it all.”

  “I wondered about that too when I encountered those people that kept Erin as a pri
soner,” I said. “They were all either very old or very young. It was like the Fomorians took everyone of fighting age and sent them somewhere that we don’t know about.”

  Amy shuddered. “Surely they didn’t kill them, did they?”

  “It seems they only kill those that try to resist against their conquest,” Gareth said. “That’s from what I’ve seen. There was quite a bit of slaughter when they first came through, but I think that had more to do with instilling terror among the populace in order to prevent future rebellions.”

  I tapped my fingers on the book I was reading. “How can there be a rebellion when there’s nobody left in the city? I mean other than us and the gangsters, London is deserted.”

  There was a sound that was akin to a slight twisting of metal, then Erin came through the door that led to the outside. She was wearing a brand new black leather jacket. “I’ve found the gangsters’ whereabouts. We can go after them now.”

  Chapter 7

  Gareth, Erin and myself were leaning over as we silently observed the two gangsters below. We were concealed near the top of a partially constructed building overlooking the British Museum across the street. The night skies were unnaturally clear and the full moon shone brightly above us. For some strange reason the fog that had been surrounding the city had lifted the moment the sun went down, according to Erin. Amy had wanted to tag along, but I insisted it was better she stay behind. My older sister wasn’t exactly the fighting type, but then neither was I for that matter. I had hoped that when it came to physically confronting those thugs it would be Gareth and his daughter that would do the fighting for me. It had taken us almost two hours to get into position since we had to walk all the way from Newington. Nobody still living in the city would dare to use cars nowadays; Gareth had told me that the Fomorians were somehow attracted to them.