“Hey,” ghostly Danny said brightly, “my arse didn’t go through. Class. I can sit down.”
“Yeah,” Tony replied, his voice seeming faraway, “cos the time travel and the walking through walls…workaday stuff.”
“Beats being dead.”
A deep chill shot straight to the older man’s heart at hearing his son say those words. “Dead?” he said hoarsely.
Danny held up a hand. “Relax,” he said. “I think it’s temporary.”
“Temporary,” he echoed.
“Yeah.”
“Temporarily dead.”
“I think so. I think the Cauldron has something to do with it. When the Morrigan showed me it being used…before, I mean, in ancient times and…and I’m really not helping here, am I.”
“Well I’m pretty sure I’m dreaming,” Tony said, with remarkable cheerfulness. “Or I’ve taken drugs. I’d remember taking drugs. Or maybe not.”
Danny shrugged. “Okay. Dreaming. Fine.”
“So what happens now?”
“Ummm…what do you mean?”
“Well…do we, I dunno, do we suddenly find ourselves performing a one-man-show in Vegas, do we open a whelk farm or I dunno, start fighting off cheese toasties with fangs from Venus, or what? How’s it work?”
Danny regarded him. “It works like this,” he said. “I ask you some questions, and you answer them. And you answer them truthfully.”
“And then you’ll go away?” Tony said.
“Aye,” Danny said, eyes flashing. “I go away. Because God knows at this point in time you wouldn’t want to spend any time with your son, now, would you.”
Tony laughed. He didn’t seem to notice, or care if he did, the expression on the apparition of Danny’s face as he did so.
“You think this is a big joke? You’ve a wee son at the other end of the country waking up every morning expecting, hoping, to see his Da leaning over him. Every time the fuckin doorbell rings he thinks it’s you, that you’ve lost your keys while you were kidnapped by pirates or stuck down a lost diamond mine or rescuing some abandoned kids. Not sitting here in a hovel in the middle of nowhere trying to get a picture on a shitty TV.”
Tony looked at him, or to be more accurate, through him. When he spoke, Danny got the impression he wasn’t really talking to him anymore, that he’d dismissed him as real and was talking to himself.
“So this is what it is,” he mused. “I’ve come to torture myself in my sleep now too. Of course – that explains your age. Twenty or so?”
“More or less,” Danny replied, thinking of the untold eons he had spent as a free-floating consciousness. Now didn’t seem the right time to mention that.
“Right. And your attitude.”
“My attitude?”
“I was gone from your life for – what – ten years?”
“To the day.”
Tony smiled at that. Danny felt his hands fold into fists. “To the day,” he said. “I went back as soon as I could. Yeah. But never said why.”
“You never had to. See, right about now’s when I get the letter.”
“Letter?”
“Yeah. The one you send explaining everything. Suppose you meant for my Ma to get it and ordinarily she would have, but she was knackered that day and I was off school. Stomach ache. My balls – I was just sick of the looks I was getting. And the letterbox went and I bounced out and there it was. I wouldn’t have even known maybe it was from you but considerate fucker that you are, you drew a wee shamrock up in the corner, like you used to doodle all the time, so I knew. And I ripped the fucker open thinking this was it, that something had pulled you away and this had been the first chance you’d had to let us know what it was.”
Danny took a steadying breath. Sitting across from him, his father said not a word. Outside, the shadows lengthened as the day waned.
“I read it so many times. I had it memorised by the end of the week. My Ma thought she’d threw it out but I went to the bin and I got it back and I kept it, I kept it in my room and I’d take it out every so often and read it again, in case it said something different the next time or in case if I took the first letters of all the first lines it’d spell out a secret code that said IGNORE THIS LETTER, I’M BEING HELD HOSTAGE.”
He stopped again. This was painful, physically painful. The ache he’d felt in limbo had just been a prelude to this, it seemed.
“Dear Linda,” he said softly. “I know by now you must be going out of your mind. I can’t imagine what you must think of me. I should have had the courage to tell you all of this before I walked out of the door, but I couldn’t. So instead, I’m writing to you to offer you some sort of explanation as best I can.”
Another breath. This one caught slightly. He blinked through wet eyes.
“Please understand that I didn’t want this. If it were in my power, I would be back with you and with Danny now. But I can’t do that. And the reason why…”
Again, he had to stop. Only for a moment, before he could go on.
“…the reason why is that I simply can’t do it. I can’t go on pretending to be happy with the life that has become mine. For years we thought that having a son would make our lives complete. I thought that I could be an amazing father. But the truth is, I’m a fraud. All I do is pretend; pretend that everything is fine, pretend that this life makes me content, pretend that I’m thrilled to be coming home when I spend time away from you both.”
He pressed his eyes together, feeling the tears flowing from them and spilling hotly down his cheeks. All the while he continued to talk.
“It’s not you. It’s not Danny. It’s me. I’m not good enough for either of you, and so I think it’s best for all of us if we all try to move on with our lives. I know you’ll be a wonderful mother. I know Danny will grow up into a person, a man, to make you proud. And I know how it sounds, but please believe me when I say that I love you both, so much. I’m telling you all of this because I wanted you to have an explanation, to stop thinking that it might be somehow your fault. It isn’t. It never was. Having a family is just…it’s too much for me. I had to escape.”
As they always were, the last five words were the hardest to force out. The five words that had popped up like a cartoon thought bubble throughout his life for the last thirteen years. Five words he’d heard again and again throughout the unfolding relationship with Ellie, and then with little Luke when he’d come along.
“And I’m glad I did.”
It was dark outside. Night fell with a finality in rural Wexford. The cottage was chilly, draughty. Danny drew in breaths, angry at himself, wondering how in the world he could walk through walls and not stop his nose from running like a fucking tap when he cried. He wiped the memory of a nostril with a ethereal sleeve and waited for his father to speak.
“And reading that…you felt…?
“How do you think I fucking felt?” Danny spat back. “I cried myself to sleep for a fortnight. And then one night, when my Ma had fallen asleep, I went and got it from the floorboard where I kept it and unfolded it and instead of reading it like I thought I was gonna…I ripped the fucker up. I ripped it up so small until I couldn’t rip it up any smaller and believe me, I tried to, and I went to sleep hating you that night, and every night after.”
“You moved on.”
Danny’s mouth opened and closed. “I-” he began, and then tried again. “Moving on? Moving on? You call white-hot, to-the-bones anger moving on?”
“It is. Denial to anger. The first stage of grief moving to the second stage. Trust me, I should know. I went through the same thing when your granda was killed. Only in my case it took me a lot longer…”
Danny blinked. “Was killed?” he said. “Granda Morrigan died of a heart attack.”
His father laughed hollowly. “Of course,” he said, with a mock flourish, “The years of lies. How could I forget?”
“Lies? What are you talking about?”
And with those words as a prompt, the
story began to spill from his father’s lips.
**
Belfast, Now
The journey from Dermot Quinn’s house to the city centre had not lacked for interest. The car crashing through the front of Quinn’s house had not gone unnoticed, obviously; as his private car carrying their extra passengers had just begun to pull up, the emergency services had begun to arrive. Ambulances. Fire brigade.
The police.
Ordinarily, he would have been able to defuse the situation. He would have ordered the soldiers he’d been gathering around Quinn’s house to beat a tactical retreat, had a quiet word with some representative or other of the authorities, and used a combination of his natural talents or the mere fact of who he was to ensure that ripples from this event did not besmirch the surface of his plans.
Ordinarily.
But not, as a for instance, mere moments after witnessing his most trusted lieutenant, his first creation upon his return to this plane of existence be clubbed to death by an insignificant, grubby little human. A human he’d had the chance to kill multiple times, and had sneered at the prospect of dirtying his hands in doing so. That same man had driven a golf club – his blood boiled – a golf club through the beautiful head of his beloved Sarah.
Dother was in no fit state to follow his usual gameplan.
As a result, he had not called his soliders off. Massed, not particularly intelligent, not much more than sets of fangs wearing fragile human glammers, they had seen the approaching whirling lights and sirens and the humans they were bringing, and they had scented blood and sport and all of the things that had been second nature to them in the world past, the same things denied to them in this world, where they had to hide, to behave.
Not tonight.
Tonight, he had set them loose.
Thus, despite the fact his extremely large personal limousine was not the most inconspicuous or difficult to identify mode of transport in the world, he had been able to proceed unmolested from the scene. He’d even been able to shed some of the dead wood along the journey, in the shape of…what had been his name? Steve?
Everyone else, police included, was far too busy fighting for their lives, desperately trying to fend off attacks from groups of what seemed at first glance to be crazed people, and at second glance to be something else entirely…
He saw more flashing lights and sirens howl past. Outside in the Belfast night, rain was beginning to fall. It spattered the windows, made chaotic trails as it dripped in intricate patterns, lashed by the wind outside and the speed at which they were travelling toward their destination.
Lircom tower. His home. Hub of the network. Centre of the web-
His hands clenched into fists.
Draped inside the back of the limousine with him, the unconscious bodies of Ellie Quinn, her uncle Dermot and Tony Morrigan lay. They were of no consequen-
No. He caught himself. He had thought that before, hadn’t he, and it had cost him Sarah. Clearly, so close to the end, everyone inside this car (save the hulking soldiers there to shoulder the burden of carrying the human passengers once they arrived) had some sort of part to play.
Around him, everything was in flux. Not in the crude physical world he had been vomited into centuries prior, but in the realms he and his kin could tap into; the world underneath the world. A world awaiting its time to return. Distances meant nothing in that realm; to tap into any part of it was to examine the whole thing entire.
It was moving. It was twisting. He knew it to his bones. It went beyond sight or sound, taste, touch, smell.
The limousine pulled into the underground car park of Lircom Tower and without fuss, came to a halt in his CEO reserved parking space. As it did so, as he emerged from the car and the captive humans were carried along with him, Dother allowed a thrill of excitement to pass through him.
He had guessed the cause of the stirrings from the old beyond age realm he called home.
They were labour pains.
**
Co. Wexford, 2000 AD
For hours, who knew how many, his father had continued to talk, continued to outline a family history he had known nothing of and casually one-eighty everything Danny had ever thought he’d known about his life.
When he’d finished, for a long time all Danny could do was sit there, dumbfounded. At some point in proceedings his father, still talking all the while, had gotten up and made two cups of coffee. He was finishing off the last dregs of his own cup now. Danny noticed that his father’s hands were shaking as he knocked back the by-now tepid coffee.
His fingers flickered out and to his surprise, they were able to grasp the cup in front of him. It was a strange sensation; the cup was there, was solid…and yet Danny had the distinct impression that if he really wanted to he could pass his fingers right through the china shell and into the liquid within.
What to say? Where to begin? To hear his father talk about the Morrigan lineage, the traditions…he’d told Danny the story of that first day in the Mournes with his own father, the circle of dead bodies, discovering his place in the world.
He’d told him how his granda died. Danny had ached with sympathy for his father. All of the agonising he’d done over his own worth…he couldn’t begin to imagine how it would feel to be, however accidentally, the cause of your own father’s death.
Tony Morrigan was sitting now, staring into nothing. Convinced still no doubt that this was all some dream he was having. He looked lost, haunted, and every time his eyes focussed somewhat and he saw the image of Danny before him a look of pain ghosted across his face.
He hadn’t abandoned Danny by choice.
Except…he had, in a way. He’d chosen to reverse the curse and accepted the price for it, knowing full well it would drive a wedge between father and son, destroy any semblance of relationship he’d built over the first ten years of Danny’s life.
Danny had known little Luke for less than a year, and having him taken from him had been the event that had sent him down this rabbit hole. He wanted his little boy back so badly it amazed him.
What would it be like to be with your son for ten years, and then to have to walk away from him. More than that, to have to walk away from him and pretend as if it was something that you wanted to do?
“Talk to him.”
He started. The voice that had just spoken was not his father’s.
“Hello again,” said Doubt, perched vulture-like on the end of the kitchen table. “Miss me?”
“You’ve-”
“Changed. Yes, I know. Well I thought two of him might get confusing. Doesn’t he look so sad? I think you should talk to him, Danny. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Why are you shaped like him?”
His father glanced around. “Who are you talking to?” he asked.
Doubt, now embodying the personage of Thomas, late of Lircom PLC and Danny’s boss/underling, depending on which parallel universe you subscribed to, tilted his head to the side to regard father and son. Together with the birdlike stance he’d adopted on the table, the overall effect was disconcerting to say the least.
“It’s…nothing. Just daydreaming,” he told his father.
“My imaginary grown-up son…is having a daydream…inside my dream?”
“Yes.”
“I need a drink,” Tony said with some certainty, standing up and walking in a rather wobbly line to one of his cupboards.
‘Thomas’ tutted disapprovingly. “This is probably how it starts,” he said ruefully. “Wee drink here, wee drink there…and then when he eventually does come back, they’re not so wee anymore, are they?”
Danny turned his attention to the apparition. “What do you want?” he hissed. “I thought I left you behind.”
Thomas giggled. “Left me behind?” he said. “Jesus Christ, it’s a wonder I can squeeze myself into only one body, Danny, the amount of issues you’ve got wandering about upstairs,” and he tapped his head.
“I’m past that. He�
��s explained-”
“Yeah. Daddy’s in the clear. Hooray. It’s what every abandoned orphan child wants to hear, isn’t it – it was all a big mix-up! Daddy had a gun held to his head! He didn’t want to leave me!”
“Fuck off,” Danny snarled.
His father blinked as he set two shot glasses down together with a bottle of whiskey. “Alright,” he said equitably, “I wasn’t sure if I should be encouraging my son to drink-”
“Not you. Him.”
His father looked in the direction. Thomas danced a merry little invisible jig. “Who?” he said.
“He’s…he’s…ach it’s complicated. He’s my nasty wee inner voice. I accidentally brought him to life when I was creating the universe.”
A shot glass full of brown liquid slid to a halt in front of him a few seconds later.
“Drink,” Tony said firmly.
“You think it’ll help me?” Danny said as he lifted the shot glass to his lips.
“It’ll help me.”
Knocking it back, he felt the whiskey enter his system. It was beyond strange – slightly out of phase as he was, he could feel the liquor go places it wasn’t supposed to go. He shivered spasmodically and then felt a warmth spreading from his gut.
“Another?”
“Another.”
The second was even better than the first. When he’d finished draining the glass the second time, he risked a glance over to where Thomas had been perched, hoping to see only empty air there. He was to be disappointed; not only was he still there, he actually seemed to have grown a little.
“The one thing you always had,” Thomas was chortling, “the one crumb of comfort you clung to when you were miserable, was that hey, no matter how unhappy you got, as long as you stuck it out, saw it through, you’d be better than that bastard of a father of yours.”
Danny shut his eyes, and found to his horror that even this didn’t completely banish the vision from sight. His own eyelids were transparent.
Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Page 29