The Call
Page 9
That’s only if Aoife’s awake of course. Otherwise her greeting is a lot less seductive and is made up of nothing but swearwords.
They will never kiss again.
Not everybody arriving in the Grey Land is fortunate enough to find themselves alone. Squeaky Emma has appeared naked in front of a group of Sídhe, who sit before her, for all the world like an interview panel in a movie. She gasps, backing slowly away. And now, now she learns that there are others of their kind right behind her, that she is in a circle of them.
Then a princess, the most beautiful girl Emma has ever seen, her skin glittering in the silver light, her eyes unnaturally huge, rises to her feet and closes the gap between them with a single stride.
“Please … ,” Emma says. Every inch of her flesh is prickling as the hairs of her body stand on end. The princess places a hand just above Emma’s left breast.
“Oh, its heart!” the Sídhe exclaims. “So fast! A marvelous heart!”
“Please … ”
“I must taste it for myself.” And the fingers sink into Emma’s chest, as though it were soft cheese.
It’s a long, long time before they finish with her.
Anto watches Nessa take off the second she sees Megan running for her life through the trees. With her crutch-fueled superpower, she might just make it in time to distract Conor from his quarry. But she’ll arrive there exhausted, and then it’ll be trouble all round.
Everyone in the college thinks Anto is a pacifist, and they’re sort of right: He won’t eat any animal that’s not trying to eat him. And he’ll take a beating rather than lower himself to the level of the bullies.
But if Conor harms so much as a hair on Nessa’s head, all bets are off. So he chases after her, the forest a blur to either side of him. He sees her swinging up to the top of a hillock …
And then, just like that, Nessa disappears! Anto cries out, certain she’s been Called.
But it’s not her, not Nessa. The whole world around him has melted and reformed itself in grey and silver and black. The air has turned sharp enough to scald his throat. It forces its way down to his stomach, and there it lingers like a diseased hand, lazily stirring the remains of his breakfast.
Eyes streaming, naked, he falls to his knees. How can this be?
In front of him, where Nessa had been just a moment before, lies the crest of a hill, jagged with slicegrass and immature spider bushes, scrabbling for life in thin soil and loose stones.
He’s got to run. The Sídhe always know when they have guests, and the exact point of arrival. A welcome party will turn up any minute, and if he ever wants to see Nessa again he’d better be gone. But where?
And then he hears the shouting—a human, he does not doubt—from beyond the lip of the hill in front of him. It may be a trick, but Anto has to look anyway and he crawls right up to the edge, to where an astonishing sight awaits him. The slope on the far side is scattered with shattered tree trunks—Crom only knows how they got there—and farther down, Chuckwu is swinging a branch, fighting for his life, hopelessly, pointlessly, against a dozen laughing Sídhe.
They dance around him, leaping over his attacks, rolling under them to bounce joyfully to their feet, the grey spider silks of their clothing fluttering behind them.
Anto doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even feel afraid. This is all still a dream to him. So he grabs a long rotted trunk and, holding it lengthwise across his belly, charges down the hill. Bones crunch and Sídhe go tumbling in all directions. The violence should sicken him, but instead, as Anto drops his weapon and continues his run down through the scattered enemy, he is screaming in exhilaration.
As he hoped, Chuckwu has come pelting along after him, but not the Sídhe. A glance over the shoulder shows them taking a moment to pick themselves up, milling about excitedly.
The boys keep going. Downhill, always downhill. They can’t yet know what a terrible decision this is, for who has time to think amid all the wonders and horrors of the Grey Land?
They pass a swamp where head-sized bubbles rise into the air and pop, each one releasing a cry for help in any one of a dozen languages. They see twisted creatures, former men and women, hunt each other through ankle-high forests; they drink from streams whose waters taste like tears, and indeed each swallow fills them with a few heartbeats of deep sadness.
They seem to have left the pursuit far behind them when Chuckwu takes Anto by the shoulder and says, “Thank you.”
It’s been hours since they’ve paused to rest. Maybe a whole lot longer, but who can ever tell in this place?
Anto nods. “You’d have done the same for me.”
“I wouldn’t.” The admission makes both of them uncomfortable, but the truth has always been important to Chuckwu. He is half a head taller than Anto, and nearly as well built as Conor. He has more endurance than anybody else in Year 5, and looking at him now, Anto thinks, He’s not even breathing hard.
“What about now though? After what we’ve been through?”
“I’m sorry,” Chuckwu says with a shrug. “I’m just not brave like that. I’ll save myself first, and it’s only fair you should know.”
An awkward silence follows.
Anto cracks first. “You’re braver than you think. You were fighting a dozen of them by yourself! And you were kicking the crap out of them.”
“No, I wasn’t.” But Chuckwu grins shyly. “They weren’t even trying to fight. Just dancing around, you know, like that game where you take a Year One’s book from him and play keep-away?”
They’re walking now, away from the stream, through woods of startling, frightening noises, battling slimy fronds that wrap around their ankles.
“I was amazed to see you coming down that hill for me, Anto. Isn’t fighting—I don’t know—isn’t it against your principles or whatever? I mean, you spar pretty good in the gym. But I heard bones breaking back there!”
Anto heard that too, and is starting to feel a little sickened by it. Still he says, “I’ll always fight for my friends. Always.”
“But we’re not friends, are we, Anto?”
“Of course we are, Chuckwu! We must be, or I wouldn’t have helped you out.”
Chuckwu laughs, he can’t help himself, and in that unguarded moment, it’s easy for Anto to see the tiny child who arrived at the college five years before, clutching a teddy bear that was not abandoned until after two full years of the worst bullying.
“The Sídhe haven’t given up,” says Chuckwu, “and they know this place better than we ever will. So where are they?”
“Ahead of us,” Anto guesses.
“Right, they’re ahead of us. Behind too maybe. How long have we been here? I don’t even know.”
Anto feels cold, and it’s not just the normal chill of the Grey Land. Their ordeal has barely begun. A whole day of struggle awaits them. Above their heads, a dozen spirals of silver light slowly turn through the sky. There is no day or night here, but some of the books posit that the speed of the spirals or their relative positions can be used to tell the time. Maybe.
“So here’s the deal,” says Chuckwu now. “I know I said I wouldn’t fight for you, but there’s no reason we can’t still work together. When they spring the trap, you run left and I’ll run right. Regardless of where we are. Left and right. As fast as we can.”
“Unless they’re coming from the left. Or the right.”
“True. True. Maybe we should just split up now then, eh, Anto?”
Maybe they should, but it turns out to be too late. A dozen Sídhe come jogging from the direction of the marsh and drive the boys before them, downhill, always, always downhill. They run for what feels like hours. Perhaps it is. They are ragged, bleeding from clashes with slicegrass and dive-bombing pigeon-sized men. They encounter a dozen sights more horrifying than anything they could have imagined, even after years of reading Testimonies. The air tears at their lungs and the linings of their eyes. But the Sídhe never close with them.
“They’l
l have to make their move soon,” says Chuckwu.
Anto doesn’t need to ask why. The enemy will want time to “play” with the boys before they kill them. He’s half thinking they should turn and try to barge their way through the crowd of hunters behind them, but arrows keep them moving until they are pushed onto what looks for all intents and purposes like a paved path.
It leads into the narrowest of valleys with slopes angling steeply to either side of them. They can run comfortably here side by side, faster than the leisurely pace of the hunters, so that they seem to be getting away again.
But it is not until they are in the middle, the very middle of the valley, that they realize they are quite alone. They slow to a complete stop. Anto is bent over and breathing hard while sweat chills on his body, but Chuckwu is looking up at the steep climb to either side.
“You hear that?” Chuckwu asks.
Anto pauses, straining his ears, and yes, he can hear it. Giggling. He regards the mud-covered sides of the valley. It’s only a climb of maybe a hundred paces to get up to the boulders and trees at the top. The slope is too smooth though, without so much as a weed to grab on to. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because both boys now recognize that this is the place where the Sídhe wanted them all along. This is where they’re going to die.
The path continues down the valley in front of them and seems to open out down there.
“We should sprint for it,” says Anto, although he hasn’t got the strength.
Chuckwu shakes his head firmly. “Up the sides,” he says. “They’ll be waiting for us down there. The whole welcoming committee is—”
“Look out!”
A boulder comes flying down the hill and each dives out of the way just as it smashes onto the path. It bounces ten steps up the far wall and tumbles down again. Neither boy wastes time catching his breath, because more rocks are coming both in front of and behind them. Giant pool balls crash together and splinters fly to sting and shred their skin.
A rock comes for Chuckwu—it’s barely the size of his head, but he saves himself only by diving in behind the rubble from previous attacks. He finds Anto already waiting for him, the shorter boy’s face a mask of blood-spattered dust.
The avalanche pauses. Applause and laughter break out at the top of the far slope. When Anto looks out from the protection of the rubble, he can see Sídhe rolling more rocks into position above him.
“I’m making a run for it,” he says, pointing down toward the far end of the valley.
“You can’t!” says Chuckwu. “You’ll be crushed. We have cover here now. We just need to wait for them to use up their rocks. Then we can fight them off. If we can hold them until—”
“No! No!” Anto grips his arm tight enough to bruise. “We can’t afford to wait. I know we can make it! We—”
He doesn’t get to say anything else before more rocks begin to fall. Anto pulls at Chuckwu, but the bigger boy wrenches himself free. “Please, Chuckwu!” But then he has to dive out of the way.
True to his word, he starts sprinting and Chuckwu curses him for a fool. All along Anto’s path, the enemy releases boulders to roll down on top of him. Except … except, none of them strike the boy. He always has plenty of time to avoid them, and now, at last, Chuckwu realizes what Anto has been trying to tell him: The Sídhe want them alive. Of course they do!
He begins to follow Anto, but it’s too late. The enemy, beautiful men and women, are sliding down the walls of the valley, laughing all the way. Their intention is clearly to hunt down Anto, but it also puts them between Chuckwu and the only way out of the valley. Others of their kind are coming in from behind him and that means he’s dead. One way or the other, he’s dead, and the right thing to do is to find a way to finish himself before they can lay their terrible hands on him.
Chuckwu has always been a scaredy-cat. When they took his teddy away, he wrapped his arms around a pillow instead. And later it was Conor’s sermons he relied on, to keep the nightmares at bay and imagine that he might live.
But that is not to be. Chuckwu’s only hope now is to avoid pain. To bash in his own skull. To cut his throat with one of the sharp fragments lying around.
Instead he flies forward, as fast as his powerful legs can carry him. He screams, “For the future!” and crashes into the Sídhe that are pursuing Anto, lashing out with a rock, so that two of them fall dead straight away. He throttles a third, and punches another in the side of the head.
And when they finally grab him and begin to twist his body into terrible, agonizing shapes, Chuckwu the coward does not freeze in horror as so many have before him. No, Chuckwu bites and kicks and delays. “Run, my friend!” he screams, the sound already more animal than human. “Rnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd Rnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.”
The Sídhe are both astonished and delighted.
Anto has yet to escape the valley. Rocks shatter all around him, loud enough to hurt his ears. He ignores them, relying on the Sídhe’s desire for live capture to keep him safe. A shard of stone rips into his shoulder and lodges there. Powdered rock stings his left cheek. And still he runs.
Once they realize what he’s up to, the enemy start throwing themselves down the slopes, heedless of injury. They’re behind him because he should never have made it this far. But they have plenty of time to catch up on their fading prey.
I’m done for, Anto thinks. Done for!
But then he hears Chuckwu screaming, “For the future!” Like a ridiculous war cry from one of those movies that’s so old they made it in black and white. Anto should go back and die with him, but instead he weeps and finds the strength to accelerate.
Only twenty paces away lies the mouth of the strangely artificial valley. Here the sides of the hills become actual walls too steep for the Sídhe to slide down. Yet a laughing gang of them waits at the top with a final boulder, larger than five of the others put together. A great heave, and it drops like a sledgehammer. No matter how fast Anto runs, it will reach the bottom before he makes it to the exit and there’s no way he’ll climb over it before the hands of his enemies take hold of him and melt his flesh.
“Rnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!” he hears behind him, the heart-freezing cry of a beast in agony. “Rnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd.”
He throws every ounce of energy, of courage, into his charge.
The boulder strikes the path like God’s fist, close enough that Anto might have reached out and touched it. Instead he is already diving forward, brushing underneath it as it hops once, before finally settling to block the valley.
He crawls on all fours for a few minutes, his breath hoarse, the only sound the war drums of his own pulse. But he knows he can’t let up. It’s hard to gauge how much time has passed, but there may yet remain hours of pursuit. Certainly more than he has the energy for. His muscles barely have the strength to tremble and he is leaving a steady trail of blood behind him. Surely they’ll bring their terrible dogs to bear now?
Even so, when he has staggered one or two hundred yards farther, the hills and trees open up and fall away completely to reveal the most astonishing panorama.
The sea of the Grey Land lies before him: an expanse of black molasses-like liquid, barely stirred by a lazy, putrid breeze. He has read about it of course, but not this part of it. He’s looking out over a sheltered bay, maybe two and a half miles wide, and from one end of it to the other are piles of wreckage: shattered airplanes; fishing boats; military landing craft; and far, far out toward the horizon he spots the outline of an overturned cruise liner like a massive carcass, lying where it died.
Farther down the beach is something that should be equally strange here in the Grey Land: spots of color—real color. He knows they must be “windows.” A phenomenon that fascinates Nessa.
It’s amazing he can think of her here, in this place. The curve of
her cheeks. The set of her jaw as she fights and fights to hide that she cares. He knows, deep down, that she will be dead within the year, for she would never survive what he has been through so far this day. Fast as she moves on those crutches—if she even has time to make any—she just won’t last long enough.
“Oh, God,” he prays, “that’s how I know you don’t exist. Because how could you do this to her?”
So tired is he, so confused, that it takes Anto a few minutes to recognize this as an opportunity to save his life. There must be a thousand great hiding places in that graveyard of ships. A million! And no “dogs” will find his scent in all that water. But he’d better be out of sight before they follow him out of the valley. They can’t be more than a few minutes behind him.
Anto staggers forward. First comes a sterile beach of hard pebbles that dig into his torn feet. After there’s a wet, itchy sand, that sends out clouds of the most appalling vomit-like smell every time he breaks its surface. And then there’s the water itself. Sludgy as old porridge, and it leaves an oil-like sheen on his skin when he washes off the blood. Otherwise though, if the Testimonies are correct, it should be harmless.
The sea has risen to his waist by the time he reaches the first piece of wreckage—a jetliner—and still there’s no sign of any pursuit.
Water passes inside through a rip in the fuselage. It might be a good place to hide, but he’d feel more comfortable if there were another way out of it. So he moves on, deeper, allowing the chill slime of the sea to creep up to his sternum. A likely looking fishing boat is waiting only a little farther along. And now that the bulk of the plane is hiding him from the beach, he can take his time getting there.
But then, just as he’s pondering trying to swim the last hundred feet, what appears to be a floating sheet of metal moves.
The water around him shivers like a lump of jelly, sliding away in great lumps as the rusting metal reveals itself to be the shell of a tank-sized monster. He freezes—the natural response of tiny prey since the beginning of time. Maybe it won’t see me here, worthless crumb that I am, hardly worth the trouble of eating …