“I’m sorry,” Tony said, very quietly.
“Don’t be. You did what you had to do and you couldn’t have done anything different. In fact…” Danny exhaled and said something he never thought he’d say aloud, “…the whole reason why it hurt so fuckin much when you left was because you’d been a great Da.”
He could see those words settling on his father like snow. Tony didn’t meet his son’s gaze at first and then he seemed to shake off that urge. When he looked at Danny, he did so with gratitude and with tears in his eyes.
“Thank you. But you’re wrong, you know. There’s some things I could have done differently. Done better.”
“His death wasn’t your fault. It was an accident.”
“Do you think he knew that?”
Danny smiled. “After the stories you’re after tellin me about you and him, against the worst Carman had to throw at ye? Now who’s over-thinking it?”
Tony’s mouth opened to respond…and stayed open. Danny thought at first his father was in a state of shock at something he’d seen; he whirled around, expecting to see the wet mess of the whatever-it-was he’d just decapitated reforming itself, like Dracula in a Hammer Horror movie or the T1000. Nothing was there.
“Dad?” he said, now concerned. He moved forward and waved a hand in front of his father’s face. He didn’t blink. His mouth remained half-open. It was as if time-
“You’re almost there.”
He turned, and now something was there. Not the monster.
“How did you get here?” he asked the Morrigan.
She was standing amidst the rubble and the detritus of what had once been a neat, if rather cramped, little home, looking incongruous in her usual green-tinged finery amongst the wreckage. She looked around at the results of their battle and raised an eyebrow.
“Been working out a few issues?”
“I thought that…thing…was my own self-doubt. What the hell was it?”
“What you’re up against. A small taste of it. Nobody’s fucking around here, Danny,” she said, her voice diamond hard. “When this is over with, when you’re back there…there’ll be no more stalling. It’ll be you versus the best she has to throw at you, and if you somehow best them, it’ll be down to you and her. It doesn’t matter how much you think you’re starting to get your head around this, understand the power you have – understand this; she has thousands of years of experience behind her. You need to wake up and realise that.”
“So all this is a test? A training ground? What?”
“Yes. No. Both. It’s all part of the Ordeal, Danny. When you go into the Cauldron, you don’t automatically spring back out fully-formed. You have to earn your resurrection. That’s why it doesn’t work for the Low Folk, for the faeries – they go in, they come out, but they come out wrong. Twisted. For us, for the Tuatha…it’s different. It has to be, otherwise what’s the difference between them and us?”
He sighed and turned away from her, not able to look at her at that precise moment. How did she expect him to handle all of this? A few days ago the biggest crisis in his life had been putting the bin out and stepping in a suspiciously solid, brown and squeaky puddle.
“I didn’t bring you here. You did that. You chose this place as your third stage.”
“Third stage?”
“Think of the Cauldron as a speeded-up model of your entire existence, except it’s a little out of sequence. To gain entry, you have to go through death, which you did-”
“Thanks. I’d almost forgotten,” he said, knowing full well that every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life – however long that may be – the sensation of literally being ripped apart wasn’t likely to be lurking very far away.
“-and after death,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “you have to negotiate your birth. Your emergence from nothing.”
He thought back to the indeterminate amount of time he’d spent in that formless void. Was that the magical equivalent of the womb?
“How long was I…?”
“It doesn’t work like that there. Minutes. Millennia. It’s all in the perception. The important thing is, you had the strength to pull yourself together. To reform yourself. Have you any idea how difficult that is?”
He thought back to the endless cycle of thought. The utter unshakeable conviction that he was dwelling in Hell, and that it was going to last for all eternity…and the feeling that in some ways, as the Morrigan had hinted, it had lasted an eternity.
“Yeah,” he said, with feeling. “Yeah, I have.”
“And from death…to birth…to childhood,” she said, and waved a hand to indicate the cottage in which they stood.
Danny began to understand. “I came here…to grow up?”
“Yes.”
“So this…this really happened? I really came here, to this place, thirteen years ago?”
“Yes.”
“But won’t that…I don’t know, fuck up the timeline or something? My Dad’s going to remember me-”
She smiled a brittle smile and looked at him not unkindly until he understood what was going to happen.
What had to happen.
“He’s not, is he.”
“No.”
“But the cottage…”
“Fix it.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Fix it.”
“What, like Mary Poppins? Sing a jolly wee song and watch all the plates jump back on the shelves and the table legs unsplinter themselves?”
She looked ill. “Sing a wee song?” she said. “Jesus, I hope not. Danny, tidying up a cottage is not beyond you. Wasn’t that long ago you created a universe.”
“Fair point,” he said, and closed his eyes. Okay. You can do this. Remember back to the blackness. You took that blackness and made light. This is the same principle, surely…except it’s not blackness. Remember back to how the cottage looked before. Now overlay that with how it looks now, like…like…like you’re putting a tablecloth on a table. Except it’s a shitty tablecloth.
He exhaled, eyes still closed, and tasted the faint but unmistakable tang of magic in the air around him. Now…grip the tablecloth. Good solid hold. Fuck, where did those all plates come from?
“From me,” the Morrigan’s voice butted in, laced liberally with amusement. “Just wanted to make this a bit more challenging.”
“Thanks so much,” he hissed.
Grip it. Come on you’ve seen this trick done before. Jesus they look expensive. Okay. PULL-
Anyone walking past the twilit cottage would have seen the interior lit by a pulse of blindingly powerful white-blue light, a single heartbeat of force. Thankfully, the nearest living witness larger than a beetle was an elderly badger, who merely put the sight down to experience and wandered off.
Danny opened his eyes.
“Jesus Christ…!”
“Well done,” the Morrigan said.
It had worked. He couldn’t believe it. Not a plate smashed, not an ornament out of place. The fireplace, the table, the kitchen, all were back in one piece. It looked as if the place had been hit by a twister with Asperger’s.
Danny staggered. The walls of the cottage were suddenly transparent; looking down, he could see himself phase almost completely out of existence.
“Almost time to go,” the Morrigan said urgently.
“Go? Where?”
“No time,” she said, walking to him and, taking his hand, placing it on his father’s forehead. Danny had the extremely odd sensation of his fingers phasing slightly into his father’s brain; the effect was electric…images, sounds, smells, sensations, all of them pulsed up through his arm into his own cerebrum through the conduit-
“Make him forget,” the Morrigan said. “Quickly. You must.”
A thousand objections raised themselves in Danny’s mind, but there was something more; some higher power, his own intuition, the synaesthesia…something that told him unequivocally that this was non-negotiable. He plunged his
digits into the melting pot and was momentarily overwhelmed by the overload; memories rushed at him like speeding cars on an insanely busy motorway.
For long moments Danny felt sure he’d be taken out by some of the sixteen-wheelers, not least of which was the lumbering behemoth of James Morrigan’s death, the monster in the closet of his father’s tortured mind, although running it a close second was the image of his own son, waving cheerily to him for what – unbeknownst to him – would be the final time for a decade.
He saw the recent memories, from tonight, from Danny’s arrival. Good memories. They came to him like puppies, all yipping and excited barking, making the painful memory of ten-year-old Danny’s betrayal at his father’s hands much less powerful.
You know what you have to do, the Morrigan’s voice resounded in his mind. Do it. Now.
He reached out for those memories, and he murdered them all.
When it was done, he removed himself from his father’s mind, recoiling from the horror of what he’d just done. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he looked into the Morrigan’s face and saw genuine respect in her eyes.
“One more stop,” she said.
They had faded from existence before he got a chance to ask her where.
**
Something was different.
Tony Morrigan couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Wandering around the cottage aimlessly for the last ten minutes (after having found himself asleep – fully clothed – slumped over on the kitchen table) had failed to turn up any answers.
Drink? Had to be. He checked his watch. Jesus Christ. He’d have sworn it was the 17th, but his watch claimed it was the 18th. Somehow, he’d lost a day. Well, that explained the incredible fucking headache he was nursing. Felt like someone had stuck icy-cold fingers into his brain and had a good old rummage around in there.
He moaned softly, cradling his head as two soluble painkillers fzzzzzzzzzzzd softly into nothingness in a tumbler on the table before him. This couldn’t go on. He’d always been fond of a drink, and obviously Christ knew with all he’d been through recently there was ample temptation to indulge himself, but losing days? Much more of this and he’d develop a full-blown problem with the stuff.
Moments later, the rest of the JD was glugging softly down the sink as he stood and looked over the Wexford vista displayed at his kitchen window. It was a beautiful day, a glorious day, and he would have given anything to have shared it with his son.
His jaw set.
Cupboards opened and closed. Items were fetched.
He sat at the kitchen table and began to write, the words seeming to come from somewhere deep within him. Words he didn’t even know he had.
Meanwhile, testimony to Danny’s less than perfect skills of recollection, but as yet unnoticed and unseen, a thirty-two inch LCD TV sat in the corner of the cottage and gleamed.
**
The Otherworld, Now
Something was different.
Wily was not a being who dealt in different. For longer than he could remember he had performed a solitary function; to stalk, to hunt, to kill. Long, long ago, he had been free to roam of the lands above, brighter lands where a bright shining disc others called ‘the Sun’ rose and set. He had been set loose across the country, able to track and kill however he pleased.
Things had changed. Most of his kin had perished in a war he could barely recall. The remainder, led by the Queen, had been led down here, to a dark and shadowy place where if you ran too far in one direction, you found yourself coming from the other direction, a place wrapped up around itself. The Queen called it home, but they all knew it for what it really was.
A prison.
Caged, restless, he had taken to prowling endlessly until the passage of time had become meaningless. His only saving grace had been that the Queen continued to breed, so the numbers of his kin were continually replenished. Some were strong and took their place amongst such as he as hunters. Some were not, and they quickly became the prey. He had chased down and killed more of his kin than he could count, participating in a culling exercise until he and the rest of the elite were the best of the best.
Not long ago – perhaps only a few hundred years, if he could still remember the human concept of such a thing as a year – a hole had been opened, albeit briefly, and some of his pack had been released into the lands above before it closed once more. Unable to reach the portal in time to take his place amongst them, ever since he could only imagine the sport they had enjoyed.
But now…
Since the human…
He felt different. He felt reduced somehow. Less sure of himself. Less sure of everything. His ‘name’ for example. The King had spoken the truth when he had said that such as he did not need a name. In all the thousands of years he had existed, he had never once felt the need for one. How would having a name assist in killing?
And yet…
He liked having a name.
He had been ordered to speak to his kin. There were few, perhaps none, so senior amongst the wolf-faerie ranks left in the Otherworld, so when he howled for them to gather around him, they had heeded his call in great numbers. He stood on the crest of a hill with the circle of the standing stones a distant light perhaps eight miles east, with hundreds of his kind surrounding him in all directions.
He had been ordered to tell them everything.
He did. He told them of the human, of the naming, and of the things the human had said. Of the way the human had spoken to him.
At first met with growls, after a while, as he continued to speak, the great wolves around him had one by one fallen silent as they absorbed what he had to say.
When he had finished, the clamouring began. The demands. It only took one wolf, hesitantly at first, to begin the process and before long the rest had adopted it also, as it spread between them like wildfire. Like a virus.
The Naming of the Wolves had begun.
High above, under the blood-red skies, a solitary crow circled.
**
Belfast, Now
“Nothing ever changes.”
Those were the first words that filtered through to Tony Morrigan’s bewildered mind, as the world slid back from blissful oblivion to horrible, painful reality. He cursed each returning sense as it brought with it a world of pain.
Blobs became shapes, and shapes became people.
When the memories flooded back, they made the pain that had accompanied the gradual return of his conscious mind look pitiful.
“Ellie?” he said weakly, sitting upright. He was seated on a luxurious black lounger. The Belfast skyline was in panorama around him. They seemed to be almost touching the clouds; there was only one building in Belfast that tall-
Ellie, lying on a companion lounger about three feet to his right, chose that moment to come to herself. She did not bother with the niceties of piecemeal reconstruction of their predicament. She simply sat bolt upright and began to scream.
He moved to her, not without some difficulty – he was still feeling the effects of the impact of the car-cum-grenade manoeuvre he’d been subjected to only hours earlier. By the time he reached her, he had been joined in his placatory efforts from the opposite side by Dermot. Tony reached Ellie first and put his hands on her shoulders as she continued to scream, over and over and over and over-
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! DADDY! DADDY! DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!”
“I know,” was all Tony could think to reply, repeating the two words with each utterance of her cry. He reached out a tentative hand and placed it on her shoulder. She reacted slightly to the touch, glanced at him with eyes full of bottomless despair, and he felt almost ashamed at the inadequacy of his gesture.
Eventually, Ellie could keep it up no longer. She collapsed into Tony, her entire body shaking with disbelieving sobs. He held her to him, not saying a word, knowing that anything he could say would be pointless. As he held her, shushing her with nonsense words, he shifted his attention from the heartbroken girl in
his arms to the voice that had jerked him from unconsciousness had come from.
Sitting behind his desk, “Mr. Black” regarded them dispassionately. Little wonder he didn’t look impressed. Ellie was a mess. Dermot looked like shit. Tony knew he himself must look an order of magnitude worse. And Steve…
“Steve? Where’s Steve?” he asked urgently.
“Who?” Dother replied with a frown. “Oh…yes, Danny’s great friend. Not really involved in any of this, though, is he? Not really his concern. I’ve spared him the worry.”
“Where is he?” Tony asked again, dread rising within him.
“Left early. In mid-transit, to be specific. I think the road broke his fall, and his legs, and his arms, and most likely his neck.”
Tony closed his eyes, taking a moment to grieve for the young man who he knew had meant more to his son than he himself did. Dermot looked as if it was taking every ounce of effort in his body not to simply curl up in a foetal position and quietly expire from sheer terror. He kept shifting his eyes from the man coolly observing them from behind the desk to the various hulking great brutes scattered around the circumference, including – hard to miss – the two standing directly in front of the office’s only doors.
“What do you want?”
Dother laughed. “I was merely observing that nothing ever changes. It seems that we,” and he gestured theatrically to himself and his henchmen, “we villains are contractually obliged to bring the heroes to our lairs and, once there, to explain our schemes to them in detail. Accept my apologies for the lack of piranha tank or go-go dancers, won’t you?”
Amazingly, it was Ellie who spoke next. Even more amazingly, when she did so, emerging from Tony’s embrace as if from a protective cocoon, it wasn’t with sobs or screams. She had, it seemed, no more of either to give. What she did have, however, in plentiful supply, was anger. Cold, hard anger that did not threaten, was not hysterical, was simply point of fact statements.
“This is funny to you?” she said.
Dother fixed her with a stare. If he was as surprised by the transformation as the rest of them were, he showed absolutely no outward sign of it. When he spoke, each word that emerged from his mouth did so dripping with sadistic relish.
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