Judging by the size of her, the sheer bulk of her legs and her swollen carapace which terminated at her entirely human torso, she must have been crammed in beneath that expansive desk she sat behind, wedged in with an incredible level of discomfort, and yet all she’d ever done was smile sweetly at people and wave them on in.
He couldn’t remember her having rows of needle-sharp teeth before. But as those teeth sank into the loose, tattered folds of skin ruptured by the pen’s thrust at his neck, Thomas’ brain, now becoming lethally starved of oxygen, let go of the piece of his mind that was keeping him sedate and for one final moment came around, came back to consciousness.
“AAAAAGH-“
The rest of the strangled cry of panic was cut off when Sarah’s carapace wrenched powerfully, her teeth still locked in his neck, and ripped his head clean off his shoulders.
The receptionist began to feast.
“Microsoft’s loss is our gain,” murmured Mr Black, walking to the window and looking out over the city once more. His eyes focussed on the West, on one street in particular, even as the crunching and snapping of bones behind him told him that Sarah was busily offering her own unique brand of severance package.
It was all anatomically incorrect of course; real spiders couldn’t eat anything solid. They had to liquefy their prey to consume it through a feeding tube like milkshake through a straw.
Where was the fun in that?
“Well done, Danny,” he said softly. “Not long to go now, my boy. Not long at all.”
***
Slam.
“What was that?!” Ellie called from the kitchen, where the smell of chicken and vegetables was getting stronger by the minute. “Did something fall? Aaron okay?”
Danny lifted his boot from the carcass. Something had been scuttling across the floor; a harmless little money spider, but in his book anything that scuttled in the presence of a child deserved an instant and merciless death. “It’s fine,” he called out. “Just a bug.”
Maggie was making a face, which he considered a little unfair; their own place in Kensington was occasionally full of the fuckers as well, so it wasn’t like creepy-crawlies were class conscious. He remembered one time last September opening their hot press and finding-
Except...it was bullshit, wasn’t it?
He turned the memory over in his mind wonderingly, trying to poke at it from all angles to see if it would deflate like a popped balloon. It didn’t. He could clearly remember last September going to their upstairs hot press, looking for a towel because there hadn’t been one on the towel rail when he’d emerged from the shower, and when he’d pulled one of the towels down from the shelf, it had fallen...legs kicking crazily...and as soon as it had hit the ground, that horrible tangle of legs had sorted themselves out in an instant and it had raced across the carpet, only to come to an end under his searching heel.
How? How had they done this? How had they created such perfect lies?
Flash. Jesus, how he’d missed those. Memories...creating memories...he was in Mr Black’s office, listening to cashier guy’s Irish mythology stories...yes. Yes.
The Sword of Nuada…?
But that was just a myth – like faeries don’t exist? – okay, but where did that leave him? And why was he immune? Why was “remembering his power”? What made him so different?
“You’re miles away again,” Maggie observed.
“Sorry,” he said, and found that he meant it. Maggie...Ellie...Steve...so far as they all knew, this was the way things had always been. They were innocents in this. His eyes fell to the sleeping form of Aaron. They weren’t the only ones. Aaron wasn’t Luke, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t anyone either. He was Steve and Ellie’s.
What if he was able to find some way to put things back the way they were? What would happen to them all? What would happen to little Aaron?
He already knew the answer. The same thing that happened to Luke. He would vanish without trace, no-one there to mourn him because no-one would remember his existence. Looking down at that little sleeping bundle ffffffnew-ing quietly through his tiny nose, the realisation shocked him, but not half as much as the realisation which followed hard on its heels, which was: Luke was there first. And Luke is mine. There was nothing civilised about that thought, nothing but primal protectiveness.
He had only two real leads; Bee, and Michael Quinn. He knew for a fact that Quinn knew something about what was going on; going back over meeting the man the day before, there was no mistaking the fucker’s body language. And then there was the comment from Steve...about forgetting…
As the dinner started, as they sat around the dining table in the front room, the through-connecting doors to the back room where Aaron lay sleeping now thrown fully open so that he was easily visible and checked, Danny took his opportunity to find out as much as he could. “I met your Da yesterday Ellie,” he said, casually.
“Did you?” Ellie said. “I haven’t spoken to him since yesterday morning, I wonder if he’d have mentioned it to me.”
“He seemed a bit distracted,” Danny observed.
Ellie’s face clouded. “Mmm,” she admitted, shooting a quick quasi-interrogatory look at Steve, who kept his face composed and buried himself in the business of dishing out the mashed potatoes, all but with a golden halo of innocence around his head. “Well, he’s been a little…preoccupied with this Lircom buyout of his company.”
“I think we all were,” Danny said. “They didn’t seem one bit inclined to sell. But didn’t your Da own most of the controlling interests? I would have thought any buyout would have had to have his approval...”
“He hates Lircom. He always has. It came as a surprise to me too,” Ellie shrugged. “But he has told me before that the Lircom Chief Exec can be extremely persuasive.”
Danny felt something form in his mind; a sense of some overall picture, for the first time since all of this madness began. Somehow all of this was linked, he was sure of it.
Steve yawned ostentatiously. “Maggie,” he said, “what did you think of the Prussian Army’s decision to mobilise against France in 1870?”
Maggie almost choked on her broccoli. “I don’t know much about history,” she said apologetically.
“Oh it doesn’t matter,” Steve said, “this is the boring the arse off everyone section of the dinner. Did you miss the memo?”
“Fuck you up,” Danny said, jabbing a chicken leg at Steve accusingly. “Just showing some concern is all, alright?”
“And I appreciate it Danny,” Ellie said, skewering Steve with another menacing glower. “I’m a wee bit worried about Daddy myself.”
“Aye, his memory’s fucked,” Steve said casually.
“His memory is not ‘fucked’!” Ellie said, eyes flashing dangerously. “Jesus, Steve! Can you ever go a single sentence without using the word fuck in some form or other!”
“Ah c’mon! He called his own grandson...what was it...?”
“Luke,” Ellie said quietly.
“Jesus,” Steve said over the sudden explosion of coughing from Danny’s direction, “you alright, lad? Choke on a chicken bone?”
“Mmm…fine…,” Danny nodded, covering his mouth. When he’d recovered, he sank his teeth into the chicken leg in his other hand, to hide his expression and also quite simply to satisfy the urge to sink his teeth into something; Michael fucking Quinn’s fucking head wasn’t fucking here to fucking substitute, so this would have to fucking do until he got his hands on the bastard.
It was true. Quinn knew. Knew at the very least. At worst – what??? This whole craziness was his doing somehow? One way or another he’d find the fucker and beat some answers out of him, find that sword he must be carrying about and create some memories right up his hole if he didn’t fix the mess he’d made of everyone’s lives...
What mess, Danny?
He closed his eyes for a second, trying to push the thought away, but it too had sank its teeth in and wouldn’t be shaken loose so easily.
What mess would that be, Danny? The mess where you’ve a beautiful girlfriend, a big house, a crackin job, a top-drawer motor, the ear of the top man at the company, and where you can fall asleep at night and know that there won’t be screams wakening you up during the night, or shitty nappies, or bottle making, or the Playhouse fucking Disney channel? Where your mates are still your mates, and you haven’t scared them off by catching responsibility and them being convinced it’s contagious?
All of that righteous anger he’d been building up on since his epiphany in the bathroom, strengthened only seconds ago by Ellie’s revelation about her father, was threatening to seep away.
As it turned out, all it took was the tiniest of whimpers from sleeping little Aaron in the next room.
Hearing it, Danny was immediately up and out of his seat, the dinner forgotten.
When time resumed, with him standing there half-poised to go check on Aaron, he stared into faces full of incomprehension for the umpteenth time that night. Maggie and Steve hadn’t so much as moved from their seat.
Ellie had, however. Ellie was out of her seat too, though she’d paused when Danny had done the same thing. She looked at him and he thought – maybe it was his imagination, but he thought for a second he saw some flicker there, some buried knowledge in her eyes that at some level she knew something was wrong with all of this too.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said, to Maggie first, and then to Steve.
He took two steps forward, kissed Ellie full on the lips, and walked out of the house, the taste of purple and the sensation of rightness still fresh on his lips.
Back in the dining room, all was quiet for a long moment.
“Are you not supposed to drop car keys in the middle of the table first or somethin’?” Steve asked into the silence.
***
He rapped her door, once, twice, three times. On the third knock she answered, and seeing him standing on her doorstep, she didn’t do anything except nod curtly. “About time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
She cocked her head to look at him, possibly the most searchingly inquisitive look he’d ever had turned in his direction in his entire life. Body cavity searches had been less thorough. Jesus, Mr Black was less thorough.
“Yes, I think you are,” she said, and he thought he detected a faint air of approval in her tone. She reached behind the front door and came up holding something he recognised.
He took the spade from her, weighed it, turned it over in his hands. It felt heavy, solid, and real. His fingers curled around it as if drawing strength directly from its very existence.
“What do I do?” he asked her.
“What you were born to do,” she said, and with this, she closed the door.
Or at least, she tried to. She would have, but his foot was jammed in the bottom like only the best Watchtower salesmen learn how. “Ohhhhh noooo you fuckin’ don’t,” he said firmly, pushing the door back open again. “None of this cryptic ballix, thank you very fuckin’ much. You seem to know the answers, love. So tell me.”
She looked affronted. “That’s not how it works in the stories,” she protested.
He lifted the spade. “Do I look like I give a flyin fuck?” he said. “I’m pretty sure wee old ladies don’t get bonked on the head by the hero for wastin’ his time either, but let’s see what we can do about improvising as we go along, eh?”
Even his speech was reverting back to normal. He felt comfortable inside his own skin, something that no amount of sitting in high-powered meetings could ever hope to achieve for him.
“The hero is it,” she snorted. “Someone’s a high opinion of himself.”
He was about to reply, but she shrugged, reached for a shawl and threw it around herself before stepping out to join him outside. She linked his arm, to his surprise, and they began to walk down her path. “Tell me what you know first,” she said.
“I think I have to find some sort of Sword,” he said, being careful to drop the uppercase S in there to give it its proper respect, “that can reshape memories. I’ve a feelin’ it’s not exactly gonna be in the Ulster Museum, is it?”
“The Silver Sword of Nuada,” she said. “It’s held in the Otherworld. Their kingdom. To go there you’ll have to pass through a gateway.”
“Right. Gateway. Otherworld. Well that’s not so bad is it?” he said. Previously he’d felt sure if he stopped at any point to examine what was going on his world would melt away around him; but too much had happened. They had reshaped his entire world on a whim; whose whim, he was still debating, and not entirely sure he liked some of the possible answers...
“It’ll be incredibly dangerous. No mortal has been there and returned to tell of it for fifteen hundred years,” she said matter-of-factly, and then shivered. “Fuck me. It’s freezin’ tonight.”
“Oh,” he said, absorbing Bee’s pep talk.
They were at his old gate now. Hard to believe he’d driven past this house twice only a few hours previously and not been able to have the memories flooding back then as they did now; the countless times returning with shopping, lugging Luke’s pram, coming in from work exhausted, seeing Ellie rise to greet him through the living room window.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, squeezing his arm. “I said mortals, after all.”
“What’s that meant to-“ he began, but she had slipped out of his grasp with a spryness that belied her years, and was knocking on the door of his house. No, not his house. Their house; the house of the couple that answered the door to her now, the woman with two little girls behind her, the man looking with no small measure of confusion and suspicion at Bee on his doorstep and Danny, spade in hand, standing on his lawn.
“Ach Casey love, what about ye,” Bee said easily. She indicated Danny with a nod of her head. “This is our Danny, my wee nephew. He’s doing a degree in landscape gardening at Queens and his practical examination is coming up in three weeks, God love him!”
“Uh...okay...” Casey, who was burly and who Danny did not want to have a disagreement with in the near future, said with more than a little doubt entering his voice.
“Well love would you mind if he flattened out your wee garden? It’s part of his landscape practical only. Free of charge. Isn’t that right love?”
“Absolutely,” Danny agreed. Jesus. Were all old people this devious?
“Uh...” Casey mused, clearly smelling something was slightly off about the prospect of a university student offering to landscape his garden at 8.45pm on a Friday night.
“God love ye?” Bee suggested.
He melted in the face of the God love ye. “Aye sure, go on,” he said.
“I’ve been asking him to flatten that thing for months!” his wife chimed in from behind him. She leaned past her husband to address Danny. “Want a wee cup of tea, love?”
Danny shrugged. What the hell. “Yeah, thanks,” he said, sending the spade’s head into the soil, wondering if he was destined to spend the rest of his life digging up this fuckin’ hole. Ah well. It beat rolling a rock up a hill, he supposed.
Bee winked at him. “I’ll see you later,” she said, and disappeared into his – Casey’s – house.
He got to work.
***
“He is breaching the rath,” Sarah reported, skittering across from the desk to where her boss stood at the window. Not a trace remained of the late, unlamented Thomas Doonan; not a finger, not a single hair. He had been wiped clean from the face of the Earth.
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