“Funny? No. Not at all. I think it’s hilarious.”
“You killed my Daddy.”
“He killed my,” and there was an almost imperceptible pause, “my daughter. Be thankful I didn’t return the favour to him.”
“That spider freak? It was your daughter?”
“Ellie…” Tony said warningly. Dermot, if it was possible, had ratcheted up his terror level another few notches. His head went from Ellie to Dother, back to Ellie. He looked like he had mid-court seats at the Men’s Singles Final in Hell.
Neither Dother nor Ellie took a blind bit of notice. For all that the rest of them mattered, they could have been performing a conga line across the office floor.
“I created her. I loved her. For longer than you can imagine.”
Ellie’s voice did not waver. “She begged for death. Can you imagine that?”
Finally, Dother did react. In one impossible motion he was up and out of his chair and over the desk in a movement arc that was over far too quickly to have been constrained by mundane considerations like gravity.
His eyes…how they burned. Tony half expected Ellie to burst into flames on the spot.
“Hardly surprising that she begged,” Dother replied. “Considering the messy death your father gave her. The clean death I gave him was a mercy by comparison.”
He was rattled. Tony could see it. The jibe was clumsy compared to his self-assured composure only moments before.
“Kill me. Save me. That’s what she said,” Ellie continued. She may as well have been discussing the shopping list for all the care her voice betrayed.
“You are LYING!”
Ellie began to laugh.
“You think…” Dother said slowly, forcing each word past lips reluctant to let them escape, “that this…is funny?”
Hearing this, Tony – and by the look in his eyes, Dermot along with him – had a sudden and awful premonition of what Ellie’s response was going to be. Trapped in the fuck-knew-what-floor headquarters of someone who commanded giant spider-ladies and Christ only knew what else. Surrounded. Injured. Helpless.
“Hilarious,” Ellie said.
As the word fell from her mouth, Tony steeled himself to spring. It’d be a suicidal move, of course, but he was determined that any move on Dother’s part to get to Ellie would have to pass through him on its way to her. Besides, completely fuckin crazy as her fearless taunting of this lunatic was, at some level he couldn’t help but admire the sheer brass balls of it.
Dother made no move. Tony went unsprung. Dermot, for his part, looked as if he’d been planning to spring too, albeit in the opposite direction.
There was no explosion of murderous rage from the man before them. Only a smile, faint at first, that soon grew into a lethal face-bisecting beam unsettling in the extreme to behold.
“Excellent,” Dother murmured, “here I am thinking nothing ever changes, and you prove me wrong. How fortunate for you that your presence may be required at the big event.”
“The network,” Dermot breathed, before he could stop himself. He shrank back as Dother’s attention turned to him and the man’s smile took on an even more predatory quality.
“Yes,” Dother nodded. “Insert evil speech here and all that, with a liberal sprinkling of explaining my scheme to you in minute detail.”
“Danny’s coming,” Tony said with quiet confidence. “You’re not ready for him. He’ll stop your Network.”
Dother made a grand show of checking his watch. “Yes, how does this go,” he said, his voice still dripping with boredom, “let’s see if I’ve got it right. Network’s due to come online in…six hours. Does that give brave Danny enough time to survive the trials of the Otherworld? Reclaim his heritage? Seize his inner power?” and he mimed sticking two fingers down his throat while rolling his eyes. “Rescue his girlfriend? Rebuild his relationship with his father, make sure Greedo shoots first…probably duel me while the countdown ticks down behind us, slay me with a mighty thrust of the silver sword and deactivate the Network with…” he looked to them with a shrug, “what’s traditional? Four seconds on the clock? Two? It’s been ages since I’ve seen a Bond film.”
No one replied. His utter assurance had returned, the brief crack in his façade had withdrawn. He turned and walked to the patch of wall on the far side of the office, behind his desk, and began to manipulate something there. Something in the way he had walked there told Tony that whatever this change of plans was, it was not something to be greeted joyously.
Silver light bathed the office interior.
“I think,” Dother said softly, as they shielded their eyes from the majesty of the Sword of Nuada, “to hell with the way the story’s supposed to go. Let’s do this right now, shall we?”
He reached out and grasped the Sword.
Ireland vanished from the face of the Earth.
To be concluded in Book 3
* * *
Book 3 - Completely Folk’d - a sneak peek
The 9.15 from Heathrow, poised to touch its wheels onto the tarmac of the Belfast International Airport, found itself gliding over not solid land, but a mere few hundred feet above swirling Atlantic waters.
The pilot was a trained and seasoned professional, responsible for single-handedly bringing a plane down with two engines out of commission almost two years previously, an action that had earned him a modest amount of media attentionat the time.
He panicked.
The engines flared, but the strength of the winds so close to the water’s surface, coupled with the plane’s slow descent speed, made pulling the nose of the aircraft back up an impossible task.
A fireball lit the night sky.
**
Everyone in the office felt it. As if some force had, with no apparent visible effects, simply reached down and plucked the land beneath them from under their feet and dropped it from a great height.
There was no seismic shift. The building around them did not even so much as tremble. Nonetheless, every single one of them Dother and his henchthings excepted gasped and clutched at their stomachs as if suddenly trapped in an elevator plummeting downward at great speed.
“What did you do?” Tony wheezed.
“I’ll tell you what he did,” a new voice growled from behind them. “He started without me, is what he did.”
As one, they turned and beheld the figure who stood between the two guards at the office’s entrance.
“Hello, Mother,” said Dother.
“Mother?” Ellie choked. “But…but you can’t be…?!”
**
Packed in like bloody sardines. Tom Waits glared daggers at the rear spoiler of the people carrier in front of him even as the six-year-old wearing the white Spurs cap ,(seriously? Spurs?) on the back seat craned his neck to look behind and once again pulled the most ludicrously annoying face Tom had ever seen a child perform. Same kid who’d spent ninety percent of the voyage over running pell fucking mell across the fucking ship while his useless fat parents had sat struggling to breathe as they choked down burgers and fries.
Still. Another few minutes and the Dublin HSS would be fully unloaded and he could leave that people carrier behind and start winding his way to Mullingar, where even now; according to the last SMS he’d received anyway, Suzie his fiancé was currently browsing her extensive selection of Ann Summers lingerie, choosing the outfit she’d be wearing to greet him when he arrived at her door.
His hands tightened on the wheel. Somehow, that thought wasn’t doing much to relieve his impatience with the unloading process…
Ah! The cars were moving! He thanked God and edged forward, moving slowly but inexorably out from the massive ferry’s interior and into the Dublin night, greeted immediately by a spray of water from the wind whipping up the waters below.
That little bastard ahead of him flicked him the V-sign. Tom debated whether to return the favour.
It was then that the cars started moving faster. For a whole second, perhaps two, Tom th
ought that the traffic coming off the ferry had simply de-clumped. He actually smiled.
Then the splashes.
Then the screaming.
The people carrier in front of him vanished and Tom saw it, saw the impossibility that there was nothing beyond the exit ramp.
His foot slammed on the brakes, even as the people carrier hit the raging seas below. He stopped ,briefly but the untethered exit ramp, not anchored securely to the Dublin harbour, was swinging freely and there was no stopping his forward momentum; as if to underline this, the white van behind him slammed into his back bumper, forcing him forward and Tom Waits screamed as the last remaining solid foundation underneath his vehicle ran out and he fell-
EVERYTHING dropping…and cracking… the waters pouring in and he was gasping, gasping, face pressed to the roof, going under and trying to open the door and coming up and going under again and trying, this time finding the release catch for the door , pulling it for all he was worth as the water roared in his ears, and coming up…or trying to…catching the last breath of air he could as his car filled completely with the freezing waters and going under and trying to swim out and can’t, can’t swim out, why, why, seatbelt, fucking seatbelt is still buckled, and can’t see anything, so dark so murky where’s the release find it find it find it find it use your hands click click CLICK YOU BASTARD CLICK and there, there it’s loose, kick, swim, swim, swim swim get out get out so deep down…
…so deep…
…swim up…got to swim up…up…which way is up?
Something floated past him. Something light in the darkness. His arms flapped at it desperately. He snagged it, brought it up to his face, even as the last bubbles of oxygen escaped his panicking mouth. A white baseball cap.
…up…
His fingers uncurled from the cap, and it floated away from him, vanishing into the dark.
**
The hill around the wolves began to shift. For a moment it was as if someone had crudely superimposed a picture of a building over the hill, and then it was as if the building had been drawn on a child’s balloon and the child had heaved in a huge breath and blew for all it was worth, because the spectre of that building went straight through the hill and outward in all directions.
The centre of the expansion was not the hill the wolves had been gathered upon, but the central hill upon which the gargantuan standing stones stood.
As the wolves turned to look at the standing stones, they ran into one another, for a moment re-solidifying into the image of a huge skyscraper, one that any resident of Belfast would immediately have recognised as Lircom Tower, before liquefying partway back to the standing stones. The oscillation began again. The grass under the wolves’ feet hardened and became cold and gray. Metal rose at intervals, metal with lights attached, in straight rows.
“Prepare yourselves for the hunt,” Wily called to his fellows. Howls of excitement rang out from all around him. “Show no mercy...”
Completey Folk’d by Laurence Donaghy Due for Release 2013
A small request – a plea if you will. If you have enjoyed reading FUBAR by Laurence Donaghy, or indeed Folk’d, please take time to rate it on whichever device you have purchased the book. Thank you!
Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Page 32