Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR)

by Laurence Donaghy

  Things moving behind the car. It would provide a momentary blockade, but no more than that. He shouldered Steve off against the far wall and reached for his weapon. The silver dagger of his father. Closing his fingers around its hilt had never failed to dispel some of the despair he’d felt down the years.

  The sound of breaking glass from the back. They were through the windows. Into the house.

  “Get them to the basement,” he told Dermot, indicating Steve and Ellie. “Michael! Move!”

  Through his grief Michael complied, hauling Ellie as though she weighed nothing. As he lifted her, something fell from her pocket and tumbled as it impacted the floor.

  “Go! Go!” Tony urged. Thumps from the back; he’d blockaded the kitchen, thinking it a weak spot. It was saving their lives now. The car in front of him rocked as one, two, many things hit it from the other side, trying to topple it.

  They were through, and he was alone. He heard the bolts of the basement door be thrown back. Big, solid iron bolts. The last line of defence.

  He made the call to his son, not expecting it to work for a second.

  “Ellie?”

  “Danny...”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, Danny, I-“

  “Da, I-“ his son began

  “Danny listen to me. We’re in trouble. Ellie-”

  “We? Ellie’s with you? What’s going-”

  What to tell him? The truth? He couldn’t, and the reason that he simply didn’t have a hundredth of the time he would have needed to do so wasn’t the one that sprung to mind.

  “You’ve gotta get back up here as quick as you can,” he said instead. “Get the sword. Get something. There’s too many of them out there, son.”

  They weren’t out there anymore, though, that was the trouble. The car crashed onto its roof, forcing him to leap backward out of the room entirely or be crushed underneath it. He jumped straight into two of them; not the wolf-faeries, for the simple reason they probably wouldn’t fit inside this modest place as well as some of the others.

  These were humanoid, if you could look beyond the needle-sharp teeth, the purple eyes, the pointed heads, the spindly bodies, the pale yellow complexion. There were three of them, all armed with claws and those teeth and they were skittering down from the broken barricade in the kitchen toward him, emitting an unearthly tik-tik-tik noise as they did so-

  He whirled. The dagger tasted blood and the nearest tik-tik burst into a shower of its own guts with a high-pitched squeal of agony. The phone was knocked from his grasp and he went down under the other two, hoping even as he felt claws tear and teeth bite that his son had heard enough.

  Hoping for forgiveness.

  * * *

  The Apotheosis

  The Otherworld, Now

  Passing through the circle of the standing stones – if standing stones could be used to describe them any more than ‘a few bits of steel’ could have been used to describe the Empire State Building – Danny knew that his journey in this place was drawing towards its end.

  The interior of the circle was immense. Far too big; even though this was quite a big hill they had ascended, he knew instinctively that the space he’d just entered when passing between those massive monoliths around him that the cavernous within he had been brought into was in defiance of the laws of physics. If such things meant anything in a place like this.

  The more time he spent here, the more visions the Morrigan had shown him, the more he had began to feel as if he was working this place out. Science and logic were secondary here. Twenty-odd years of living in a human world where cause preceded effect and you couldn’t make things happen by willing them so had the effect of leaching the necessary perspective required to make sense of this dreamscape in which he now found himself.

  He was dealing with it, though. The key was the synaesthesia; its ability to take one sensory input and effortlessly transform it into another was akin enough to how this place worked that his mind could deal with the adjusted rules of this universe.

  He wondered if this was the difference between himself and any of the humans who’d attempted to exist here before; both Bee and the Morrigan had alluded that he was the first mortal to survive a visit here in centuries.

  The legions of faeries who’d growled threats at him had largely been left behind on the slopes of the hill – few lurked in this interior space within the monoliths, though those he could spot made his blood chill; clearly only the crème de la crème of faeriedom got past those standing stones, because the things stalking around and about were nothing short of living nightmares – in the main, shaped similarly to their brethren on the slopes, with each reminiscent of a hideous mixture between animal and man, but each an order of magnitude larger and nastier.

  In the centre of the interior a raised stone altar rose from the earth, a circular slab of stone with nine steps leading up to it on all sides.

  On the altar, two thrones. Ornate beyond comprehension. The larger throne, golden, occupied by the largest and most intimidating example of manhood Danny had ever laid eyes upon. Although sitting, and on an elevated dias, Danny knew that if he unfolded into a standing position he’d be well over ten feet tall. He was clad in a king’s robes, long and flowing and deepest green. He wore a modest circlet of thin gold around his head. Fingers like pint glasses drummed on the golden throne’s armrests. Gimlet, unblinking eyes seared into Danny’s skull.

  And yet for all this, Danny barely glanced at him.

  Because to his left, although sat on a smaller, more modest throne comprised of a jet-black substance that seemed to suck light into itself, sat who could only be Carman.

  Carman the witch. Carman the Queen, mother to all of the faeries around him.

  He had pictured her in his mind, of course, from the moment he’d first encountered her name, during his adventures with the Morrigan through her own distant past. He had pictured a tall and statuesque woman, strikingly beautiful; somewhat similar to the Morrigan herself, truth be told. He had pictured her as fearsome beyond measure, had wondered if he’d get within thirty feet of her before she would snap her fingers and cause him to fly apart; any being capable of producing the hordes he’d somehow managed to get past outside…

  She was none of those things.

  She was all of those things.

  Her features did not settle. They flowed. Her body was not one shape. It was many, forming and reforming itself, her queenly attire impossible to make out as it pulsed between every dimension and format possible and cycled through every colour known and a few that seemed new and disturbing in equal measure.

  As Wily approached the bottom of the stone steps (and behind him, as the spaces between the monoliths were one by one blocked by the huge hulks of the interior circle faeries), Danny tried to focus on her, tried to get a bead on what she looked like. He could not. He found himself thinking of the boundary between sea and land, constantly in flux as waves wash up onshore, forever changing.

  Looking at her, his mind began to water, his sanity to crumble. This was her strength, he realised. Her first line of defence. She existed on a different plane. He flashed on myths like Medusa or the Basilisk, able to petrify or to kill with a single glance. Carman, it seemed, was in the same league.

  As with her appearance, her voice – when she spoke – was neither low and booming nor high and shrill, but both and all things between, and he felt himself further thrown, dizzied by it.

  “Destroyer of our rath,” she said/shouted/spat/hissed. “Why have you come here?”

  His eyes were itching as though ants crawled behind them. He felt wetness on his face and touched his fingers to his nose. It took him four tries to find it, and when he did and pulled his fingers away, they were crimson with the blood now dripping steadily from his nostrils. He felt wetness from his ears, pressure building up in his eyes and he realised that it was blood there too, blood welling up behind his eyes.

  He was dying. He was, quite literally, falling apar
t under her gaze.

  Wily shifted under him, breaking his stupor, bringing him around a little. Danny dismounted like an infirm octogenarian, managing to reach out with a trembling hand and pat the wolf-faerie on the flank as he did so, glancing into its long lupine face. Wily seemed surprised at this gesture, blinking his huge eyes slowly and staring back at Danny until it seemed that he was glimpsing past the creature’s appearance and into its essence.

  The synaesthesia flared, but differently; on the surface, it had thrown smells and tastes, pictures of seemingly random places, memories of events at him. He knew now that was only because he had not learned to adapt that skill; the core of the ability was to take something and make it something else. To change it, and in changing it to learn something about what made it work.

  Danny saw it. The faerie’s mind was mapped out before him, its memories ridged like spines, like paper files in a cabinet that he could skim through with a finger as effortlessly as he might run a hand through his hair. Files that he could take things from, if he so chose.

  Files that he could add to…

  “Thank you,” he told Wily as he performed his first real act of magic on the creature.

  Nothing changed. He turned from Wily to address Carman, feeling his eyes hurt as they settled on her fluidic countenance once more and forcing himself not to try and use sight to make sense of what he was seeing. She was confusing his sight, she was muddling his hearing; it was what she did to throw those would oppose her off-balance.

  The answer – it was so simple – the answer was to hear her appearance. See her words.

  The pressure faded behind his eyes. It was as if someone had been crushing his mind under their boot and he had just wriggled free; merely feeling that weight lift off his thoughts felt wonderful. He inhaled sharply, strength flooding back into his limbs.

  “This one shows promise,” the King said. His voice was discernible, even if it was so powerful that it seemed to shake the soil as he spoke; aftershocks rocked the surface as the echoes of his words faded.

  Carman had not come into focus. Not yet. She was leaning forward in her throne now though, and for Danny even to be able to recognise that was a measure of his progress.

  Danny spoke the words written in twenty-feet high flaming letters all the way from his skin to his soul. Words that had taken him through the looking glass and into this realm of madness.

  “I want my son.”

  “He is ours,” Carman replied. Her voice fluctuated, but not to the same degree it had, and hearing it caused him none of the wave of paralysing nausea that had almost been the end of him mere moments ago. “He is ours by right.”

  “Where is he? Where is my son?”

  At some invisible signal from their Queen, the surrounding faeries took a long step toward him. He sized up his chances against these things, and with difficulty forced down the rage. This wasn’t how these fuckers worked. They were products of a different age. To get out of this alive, to get out of here with Luke in his arms, he needed to play by whatever rules necessary. Nothing else mattered.

  “Tell me what I have to do,” he said.

  The King clapped his hands. Each time they came together it was like withstanding a sonic blast; Danny staggered back a few paces, seeing the soundwaves arcing toward him – and with a flicker of effort, reaching for them and changing them, tweaking their flightpath so that they curved around him.

  The sound died in his ears, leaving a faint taste of Wednesdays in December behind.

  “I like this one!” the King rumbled. He seemed oblivious to the power of his approving applause. “Live thee or deal? Speak! Answer!”

  Danny blinked. Some sort of faerie riddle? What would the penalty be for a wrong answer? Obviously live seemed the right response; but since he wanted something from them – the return of Luke – he felt sure they would demand some price in return. Whether he could survive that price was in question, but with his abilities – embryonic through they undoubtedly were – surely he had at the very least a chance?

  “Deal,” he said.

  “Yes?” the King inclined his head. “You agree?”

  “Yes,” Danny confirmed.

  The King roared his approval. Danny was forced to remould the sound into the smell of strawberries to avoid his eardrums perishing forever. He barely had to think about it this time; the groove the ability wore within his mind was deepening, becoming quicker and easier to access each time he went back to it.

  “He has chosen! Hail the courage of he who will live the ordeal!” the King was roaring.

  An answering roar of appreciation rang back from the faerie hordes who, Danny dimly perceived, were now a hundred-deep at each gap between the monoliths, crowding around the extremities of the standing-stone circle to observe its interior. He dimly perceived this because his mind was taking him back to what the King had just-

  “Live the ordeal?” Danny choked. “Live thee, or deal? Live the ordeal? Wait-!”

  And as the King threw up his hands and led the feverish chanting of his race in rhapsodic agreement with Danny’s choice, the sound of Carman’s laughter rang in his ears as the circle expanded…the monoliths faded…the horizon rushed toward him-

  The smell of rotting fruit.

  He’d heard that laugh before.

  That was his last thought before hands as big as wolves wrapped themselves around his arms, his legs. They felt warm. Blood roared in his ears.

  Wait, he wanted to say. I didn’t know. But there was no time. Somewhere, surprise registered inside him. He’d known it was unlikely he would prevail in this place, but for it to come to this – for it to -

  They ripped him apart. Tore him limb from limb.

  As the dancing and the revelling reached fever pitch, as the King screamed his approval, as the bloodloss and the trauma reached Danny’s brain and shut it down, forever, into death, the five unimaginable creatures who each held a piece of what was formerly Danny Morrigan capered to the area in front of the altar that held their King and Queen.

  “Throw him in,” Carman commanded.

  A wave of her hand, and a cauldron was suddenly present before the thrones. The dismembered parts were tossed inside where they lay haphazardly on top of one another. Firewood appeared without having to be gathered. Fire was produced without a spark or fuel. This was not a realm of physics. There was no need for cause and effect.

  The pieces of Danny Morrigan’s body began to blister and burn.

  Watching this impassively, Carman unwrapped something that had been lying in her lap. On her knee, the infant – around four years old, in human terms – looked up at her with massive eyes. Remarkably, given what he was looking at, he was calm, composed. There was not a hint of fear.

  She smiled.

  Soon. Very soon now…

  **

  Belfast, Now

  Surprised to be alive, Tony Morrigan stared into the face of the man he was fairly sure was about to correct this anomaly.

  “Tony,” said Dother pleasantly, standing in the ruins of Dermot Scully’s front room. The car that had smashed half the room to rubble was beginning to smoulder in earnest now. With a casual wave, Dother gestured in the direction of the vehicle. The flames died instantly.

  This done, he glanced down at the bodies of some of his footsoldiers and frowned at the man being held securely before him in an admonishing way.

  “Was all of this really necessary?”

  “I’ll show you necessary, you fucker…” Tony retorted, struggling a little to get loose, in truth a little bit just for the sake of appearances; even if the two faeries each gripping one of his arms were to slacken their vice-like grip, he wasn’t sure he had the strength left to stay upright, let alone launch into another round of resistance.

  Dother shrugged. “You will insist on these silly circles. What choice did we have?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tony shot back. “Danny’s down there. He’s…”

  “Can we skip the
part where you tell me how your son’s going to kill this and end that and bring about an end to the evil empire of the other?” Dother asked, his face pinched with what seemed to be more impatience than anger. “We don’t have much time…”

  He trailed off, stopped. Sniffed the night air. The faeries holding Tony did the same. Sarah materialised at his shoulder; how much of a metaphor that was he couldn’t be sure. Tony couldn’t help but jerk in fear at the sight of her. She hadn’t aged a day since the night on the hilltop his father had died.

  “The ordeal?” she asked, a touch incredulously. “I sensed…”

  “Yes,” Dother nodded. “Remarkable of him to have gotten this far.”

  “Danny?” Tony guessed. He struggled despite himself. “What ordeal? What are you doing to him down there…?”

  Dother pointed to the basement door, nodded to Sarah. “Break it down,” he ordered her. “Bring the others. Alive, if possible. Time is short.”

  Sarah melted into her true form, or at least as much of it as the restricted space left inside the house would allow her. Tony’s feet scrabbled desperately on the ground as all earlier notions of exhaustion fled his body and he tried with every ounce of strength he had left to break free of his captors; not to assist those in the basement, but simply to put more distance between himself and the monstrous shape unfurling in front of his eyes.

  Terror choked him, made him incoherent; he babbled inanities, cursed any who came near him, begged Dother for mercy.

  On hearing this plea, Dother merely smiled. “Someday, I must introduce you to my mother,” he said softly.

  **

  The Otherworld, Now

  Replacing the package that had sat on her lap back between the thrones of onyx and gold, Carman turned her attention to the wolf-faerie who stood in the inner Circle, far beyond where his kind were usually permitted to travel.

  “You carried him to us.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Wily pondered this. “It seemed correct,” was all he could offer. Only later would he note his speech patterns had changed, his difficulties forming words receded.