Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  Purple.

  He tasted purple on the air, for a moment, just a moment. The same purple he tasted every time he kissed Ellie. How? Why now? he managed to think, but thoughts were a luxury at this moment, and the floor was rushing up toward him.

  It stopped.

  There was a half-second of utter silence.

  “The other person…has hung up,” a prim electronic voice announced, albeit at a ridiculous volume.

  It took the three of them a few minutes to manage to find the strength - and the balance - to stand up. Steve was first to manage it and Doc last; Steve and Danny had to hook a hand each under his armpits and pull him up. He kept trying to open his eyes, wincing and clutching a hand to his temple, and closing them again. They plonked him down on the lab’s comfy little 2-seater couch and each sat on one of its arms. For a while the only sound was that of their elevated breathing.

  “WHAT THE HOLY FUCK WAS THAT?”

  Danny and Doc looked at Steve. His words had come through bloopily, as if he were shouting at them underwater. Danny had tinnitus so bad it was like the cricket version of Woodstock was going on behind his eardrums.

  “SOME SORT OF…” Doc began, and then stopped and stared into space for a moment. They waited patiently. Eventually, he simply shrugged. “FUCKED IF I KNOW!”

  They continued in this vein of uppercase shouting for a little while until the sub aqua effect began, thankfully, to lessen until it faded completely and speaking volumes were returned to normal. Doc even fished out some painkillers and they consumed them hungrily with a glass of water, even as the professor sat down at his workstation and began to tap gingerly at the spectrographic program before him.

  “Just tell me you’re not gonna call that number again,” Steve said. “Please?”

  “No intention of it, never fear. Ah…the program was able to analyse the feedback - excellent!”

  Danny hauled a spare swivel chair over and sat beside Hammond. Steve, after some searching, managed to do the same. “Well?” Danny asked, when he tired of seeing Doc flick through graph after graph. He’d been no slouch at linguistics, but it had been at an undergraduate level; the stuff Doc was flicking through now was light-years beyond his ken. “Doc, what was that?” he said again, trying to bring Doc out of his reverie.

  This time it worked. “There are seven distinct layers of sound. The first - the loudest - layer seems to be electronic – that’s the…the screech we heard. Unfortunately it seemed to react with the amplifier at a frequency painful to human hearing…although how that happened I haven‘t a clue, because it should be impossible…”

  “Doc…” Danny said pointedly.

  “Yes, well, the point is,“ Doc said, “spectrographically, it’s rather similar to what you’d get from a large electromagnetic pulse. Which again, is impossible…the only thing to produce an EMP burst like that would be, well, a nuclear detonation…”

  Doc sighed. “Doc…please? Much as these layers might seem fascinating to me at another time…what’s causin it? What is it?”

  His old professor turned to look at him. “I think it’s a message,” he said.

  Strange. In a way that was what Danny had longed to hear. His worst-case scenario had been to come here and have Doc tell him that it was just Ellie’s phone, wherever it was, having a technical fault. To have his one avenue of exploration shut in his face. Doc was saying the opposite, was saying that there was something to this. And yet Danny didn’t feel relieved. Didn’t feel determined, or vindicated. He felt cold.

  “A message?” he repeated.

  Doc nodded. “There are voices.”

  “Voices? More than one?” this came from Steve.

  “Whose voices?” Danny said. “What are they saying? Let me hear.”

  Doc was back at his computer now, flying through open windows like a mosquito. “They’re barely discernable…” he said, frustrated. “I’m not sure how audible they’re going to…”

  “Let me hear them!” Danny burst out. He looked almost surprised. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to Doc Hammond, but the older man didn’t seem angry to be the target of the blast. He simply nodded and with a few clicks, was in a media player. Danny watched him hit play.

  The central speaker on the sound system crackled and hissed into life. Danny leaned forward in his chair. The silence in the room was somehow just as unbearable as the sound avalanche had been not long previously. His hands were trembling. He interlaced his fingers together to try and get them to stop. And then it started.

  And then it stopped.

  “That was it?” Danny asked.

  Hammond nodded.

  “Play it again. Turn it up!” he pleaded. He’d heard…something, yes. A voice, certainly. But as to what it had said - he hadn’t a clue. He glanced across, intending to ask Steve had he been able to make anything out.

  Steve was curled up into a foetal ball on the swivel chair, his head between his legs in the ‘crash recovery’ position, and his fingers plugged securely in his ears. Danny reached across and tapped him firmly between the shoulder blades. Steve arced upwards until he was in a normal sitting position again. Danny let his eyes drift to Steve’s ears pointedly. His friend still hadn’t removed his fingers from them.

  “IS IT OVER YET?????”

  Rolling his eyes, Danny reached across and yanked his friend’s arms down. Fingers unplugged from earholes with, Danny could have sworn, an audible phflub. “Fuck ye!” Steve said reflexively.

  “Relax Stephen, I’ll ensure the volume levels are not hazardous, you have my word,” Doc promised him. He looked to Danny. “Ready?”

  Danny nodded, and Doc played the message again. Danny leaned closer and Doc indeed had raised the volume on last time (although it was still infinitesimal next to the wall of sound that had erupted before), but even though he concentrated as hard as he could, he still couldn’t tell what was being said. Worse, the words didn’t even fire off any synaesthetic flashes.

  “Play it again. Louder,” he said.

  Doc sighed. “Danny…“ he began.

  “Wouldn’t do ye any good lad,” Steve said.

  “Oh aye?” Danny said, feeling a good old meltdown a la Steve’s car outburst brewing and in no mood to put a stop to it. “And why would that be, Mr Fuckin’ Expert?”

  “Sounds like Irish,” Steve said conversationally.

  He and Doc studied Steve with some surprise, whilst Steve tried his best not to look smug about this sudden role reversal.

  “So what’s it say in Irish then?” Danny asked.

  Steve shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “You don’t know? How can you know it’s Irish and not know what it’s sayin?! Do you speak Irish or don’t ye?!”

  “I speak it grand lad, as you know,” Steve shot back. “But I speak English too and if you asked me to read Shakespeare, I wouldn’t have a fuckin’ clue what he was on about.”

  “…some dialect of ancient Gaelic?” Doc mused. “Incredible.”

  “Spectacular,” Danny bit. “Fuckin’ wonderful. If there was room in here I’d do a cartwheel or two. What the fuck is ancient Gaelic doing comin out of my girlfriend’s phone? Ellie wouldn’t know Irish from Swahili. And how are we supposed to know what they’re sayin?”

  “Danny, we’re in a university! In Ireland! This place’ll be fuckin’ stuffed with brainy bastards who could translate that no bother! Am I right?” Steve asked Hammond. “I bet you know the fella for the job.”

  “I do,” Hammond said.

  “There you go!” Steve said triumphantly. “See? Where’s he at? Somewhere along University Square? What number house?”

  “Alaska.”

  Steve’s smile wilted. “Alaska?” he thundered, outraged. “What’s a Gaelic expert doin in Alaska?”

  “Kayaking, I believe.”

  On seeing Danny throw up his hands in despair and Steve, somewhat wisely, decide to quit while he was ahead, Hammond sought to reassure them. “Not to worry. Profe
ssor Blackwell’s the best we have at the minute, but there was another fella, rumoured to be just as good if not better. He was Blackwell’s predecessor here…I never knew him, but by all accounts he was fully immersed in all aspects of ancient Celtic civilisation…”

  “Where can we find him?”

  Hammond pursed his lips. “You probably couldn’t,” he admitted. “But I can put in a call to the School admin team and get his last known address. I’ll tell them it’s a potential consultation for a research paper or something…minor misuse of privileges of course, but…” he looked at Danny, “…all in a very good cause.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Danny simply said. He didn’t need to embellish it. The linguistics expert would doubtlessly pick up on his tone, his body language, and know the depth of his gratitude for all that he’d done for them today.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later, Danny and Steve exited the School of English, address and amplified recording of the whispering recorded to a digital Dictaphone in tow. Hammond had insisted they ‘borrow’ the Dictaphone, on the proviso Danny returned it personally. When the time came, of course.

  Danny looked down at the scrap of paper he’d scribbled the name and address down on. Dermot Scully. The letters of DERMOT, coloured, triggered a flash; he’d heard that name before.

  “How’s uncle Dermot, by the way?" Ellie had asked of her father, her eyes flashing with defiance as they had sat around the dinner table.

  And Michael Quinn had deflated. All the smugness and the pomposity had gone out of him, and he had sent his daughter a look of shock and betrayal, which she had returned unflinchingly.

  Quinn. Scully.

  Another flash; Ellie, applying for a loan, the phone pressed to her ear. They’d been wanting to try and get things for the house - a new suite, a new fridge. Money was so fuckin’ tight and with his wages…and they’d said no. But there she’d been, trying - he could see her now, answering those endless fuckin’ questions from some idiot in a call centre (“here go easy on the call centre monkeys love…”) and setting her password…

  Scully.

  He got into Steve’s car and sat, fearing that if he didn’t the world would simply spin away from underneath him like a fairground ride gone nitro. What was going on? What the fuck was going on? First the disappearance…then the phone thing…an ancient Irish message which only one person in the country could hope to decipher…and that person just so happened to be Ellie’s family’s black sheep?

  “What’s all this about your Uncle Dermot?” he had asked her once, as they painted skirting boards. They’d moved in five days ago. Luke was at his Ma’s and he was fervently hoping the skirting-board painting would be peppered with sex - if not, considering how much he was already beginning to loathe painting, he was beginning to seriously warm to suicide as a lifestyle choice.

  Ellie looked pained. “He was…he is…well,” and she’d sighed. “He used to mind me when I was younger sometimes, when Mummy and Daddy wanted to go out for a night.”

  Danny had pushed away the image of Michael and Christina Quinn ‘out for the night’, which he was unable to visualise without seeing them in 1920’s garb body popping to the Charleston whilst manic Big Band music played in the background. They just seemed the sort.

  “Aye…?” he said aloud, and cursed under his breath as he noticed that he’d failed to spread enough newspaper to cover the carpet properly. Piss. Fuck. Now she’d see it. Balls.

  “He used to tell me the best bedtime stories,” Ellie had said. “I liked him. It was hard to believe he was my Da’s brother sometimes. He was so unlike him. He was spontaneous and he was funny and…well. You get the picture.”

  “Do I?” he’d said as innocently as he could.

  “Yes you do,” she shot back with a half-smile, before it eroded away. “And then…about five years ago…he had a bit of a breakdown. Daddy’s really embarrassed by it. Even more embarrassed than when anyone asks about Granda Scully…”

  Bit of a breakdown. Bit of a breakdown. Like one of those old Windows 95 screensaver animations, the four words seemed to bounce around inside his mind.

  And again, there was no sense of a puzzle coming into focus, no pride or achievement or feeling of usefulness; only the sense that the tear in the accepted reality he’d constructed around his tidy, if not exactly ideal, little life was popping another few seams. Where was it going to end?

  For the first time that afternoon, his mind wandered back to the encounter with the…the whatever-the-fuck in the alleyway the night previous. He’d convinced himself so completely it had been a person going for him that he’d almost started to whitewash over the incident in his mind. But now he forced himself to relive the thing looming in front of him, the shape of it, the sheer fucking wrongness of it. And the shriek-

  His eyes went to the Dictaphone he held in his lap like a talisman. The shriek in the alley - the one the shape had let loose with even as it scrabbled and scampered and skippered toward him; it was the same kind of shriek that had come from the Ellie’s number…

  “Lad?”

  Bit of a breakdown.

  They were moving, he realised. “Yes?” he said.

  “Do you not think we should…” Steve shifted uncomfortably in his seat, “…well, is this not something the police could be doin? It’s sorta their job to look for a missing person like, isn’t it? That’s all I’m sayin…”

  “You wanted me to feel useful, didn’t you,” Danny replied, knowing there was more to how he felt than that but not wanting to involve Steve to that extent. Not yet. For all his sometime faults, Steve was a good lad through and through, but he simply didn’t have the imagination to cope with what Danny would have to tell him if he were to be fully honest about the things going through his mind. Christ, he wasn’t sure he was really coping with them.

  Steve seemed to accept this and they kept driving, heading for the North of the city where Dermot apparently lived. Something tickled Danny’s mind, though, and after a moment’s thought he figured out what it was.

  “And it’s missing people, lad. I know the wee fella is only small and I know Ellie is with him,” or at least I fuckin’ hope she is, “but he counts too like.”

  Steve frowned across at him. “There you go with that again,” he said.

  “Again?”

  “That wee fella business. That’s twice now. You said it earlier on too.”

  “Sorry, do you want me to call him Luke or somethin’? Does my use of nicknames offend you?”

  And then Steve said the three words that ripped Danny’s world asunder. Not just because of what they meant, but because when he said them, it was without a single trace of deception, with only genuine puzzlement in his voice.

  “Luke?” he said. “Who’s Luke?”

  The Rabbit Hole

  “Ellie? Who’s Ellie?”

  He kissed the top of her head as it lay on his chest. It was a good weight. He liked that weight. His other hand held his mobile phone, which had just be-beeped with an incoming text message, apparently from Ellie.

  “Very funny,” he said. “Girl was your best friend once upon a time.”