Folk'd

by Laurence Donaghy

  “I know,” Mr Black said. He could feel the vibrations, as if someone was reaching out and plucking one of the strings of reality itself.

  “Again,” she added pointedly.

  “I know.”

  “He rejected the world we created for him.”

  “I know. Wonderful, isn’t it? Mother will be thrilled.”

  “Should I have one of the soldiers...?”

  Mr Black’s lip twisted. Those wolf-beasts were as lumbering as they were idiotic. “In the middle of the city, before night has even fallen?” he said. “We’d be exposed, Sarah.”

  “Soon, such concerns won’t matter,” Sarah said, betraying her emotions on the matter with a trace of hunger in her voice and an involuntary semi-skitter of her legs, a little spider-dance of excitement.

  He glanced across at the half-receptionist, half-giant arachnid and pursed his lips in amusement. “Yes, I can see how you’d say that,” he said. “But we’re not there just yet. Much is in the balance...” and he was silent for a moment, deep in thought, before finally snapping back into life once more. “Leave him be. He’s not ready. Let him enter...” and seeing her reaction, he stared at her in direct challenge, “...I said let him enter. Do you have a problem with that?”

  One of her backmost legs thumped, once, on the ground, her only outward demonstration of the emotions raging beneath her exterior. “No,” she said.

  “Good,” and he walked back to his desk, pressing a button on its side which Danny, had he been here to see it, would have been slightly disappointed to note did not open up a giant trapdoor in the floor. It did, however, slide back a wall panel to reveal a recessed glass case set into the wall.

  The room was bathed in a silver glow.

  “Let him enter,” Mr Black said softly. “And get me Michael Quinn. I want to see him. Tonight.”

  “Yes, sir...”

  He watched her move across the room in that flowing mass of legs, as stable as a rock, as deadly as anything that had ever walked the Earth. With Sarah outside his door, he feared attacks from no-one. And with the contents of the hidden panel at his disposal...

  “Say hello to mother for me, Danny,” he said, and placed his hand upon the object within. A moment later, Thomas Doonan had never existed.

  At least, not in this world.

  ***

  He wasn’t prepared for the clunk. The clunk threw him. Three times he’d flattened this little mound of shit previously, and nary a clunk to report on any of those occasions. But the last time he’d driven the spade into the Earth, the rath all but destroyed once more, it had come down on the soft soil and –

  Clunk.

  In a flash Bee was out the door and at his side. How she heard the relatively modest noise from inside the nice, warm, tea-filled house she’d been in for the last forty-five minutes, he had no idea.

  “Where’s my fuckin’ cuppa?” he asked indignantly. “I was promised.”

  “I’m tryin’ to keep them busy in there,” she said. “Anyway, yer woman seemed to have an eye for ye; if she’d have come out here she probably wouldn’ta went back in again.”

  He prodded the spade back down into the soil experimentally this time. Sure enough, it hit resistance that it hadn’t hit before; something was buried underneath.

  “How come this never happened before?” he asked.

  “Because now you believe,” Bee said. She gestured to him impatiently. “Well? What are you waitin’ for, an RSVP? Dig!”

  He grumbled but set about it, removing more of the soil around the object until only a thin layer was left. Whatever it was, it was about five feet long and two feet wide and deep enough that he couldn’t get the spade under it, even at the sides.

  “Wipe off the soil.”

  Grumbling forgotten, he dropped to his hands and knees and brushed off the remainder of the covering earth. He heard an intake of breath from the direction of the old woman.

  “It’s a tablet.”

  “It’s a doorway,” she corrected him.

  “So how’s it open?”

  She looked at him, as if daring him to laugh. “You have to piss on it,” she said, deadpan.

  “What?!”

  “Ancient magic, son. It was all blood and piss and sweat and tears in them days.”

  “The blood and sweat and tears I could do!” Danny exclaimed. “How the fuck am I meant to pull out the oul lanyard and have a slash in the middle of someone’s front garden? Have you seen the size of that fucker Casey? He’ll pull my balls off!”

  She shrugged. “It’s what ye hafta do. Simple as that.”

  “Ach fer fucks...” he sighed. Checking the front room window, he could see the family were watching TV. All had their backs to him. He had a quick peek up and down the street. No-one was coming. His hand went to his fly...

  “Alright,” Bee said, holding up a hand. “I was only jokin’, son. Ya looked a bit tense there, thought it might help.”

  He glared at her. “Thank you so much,” he said.

  “Honestly, I don’t have a clue how you open these things,” she said, shrugging. “But then what would I know – I’m only the silly oul bat reads the tea leaves, eh? You try.”

  Try? Try what? He looked in bafflement down at the stone tablet embedded into the soil beneath what had once been - and maybe would be again - his garden. It was big, it was solid, it was depressingly unmagical looking. He’d seen all this sort of shite a million times before in fuckin’ movies with wee elves and hairy fuckers with big feet, but all of that seemed to count for exactly zip right at this moment.

  Usually in the books or the movies that dealt with this sort of stuff the one trying to open the magic door or get the special sword or complete the Big Important Quest had some sort of advantage, some sort of something going for them, whether it was a ring or a scar or a group of heavily-armed killers backing them up. What did he have? A neurological disorder and a partially-incontinent octogenarian with three of her own teeth left.

  Songs will be sung about this one…

  As if on cue, his pocket burst forth with a tinny rendition of that timeless classic, Backstreet’s Back by the Backstreet Boys.

  “It’s for you,” Bee said.

  “Yes thanks,” he snapped, fishing it out. Aw, fuck. “Maggie…”

  “Yes hello,” Maggie replied, with the very, very, clear tones of a woman who wishes to make it crystal clear that she is keeping her voice under control simply out of politeness, and in doing so holds the moral high ground. “Thanks so much for a wonderful evening. I particularly enjoyed seeing you kiss that fucking slut; although you might have had the courage to at least stick around afterward. Still, an interesting way of telling your girlfriend and your best friend that you’ve been having an affair.”

  He closed his eyes. There really was absolutely nothing he could say; lies wouldn’t help, and the truth was a hundred times less believable than the most outlandish lies he could ever have come up with. “I’m sorry, Maggie,” he said, “for what it’s worth.”

  “Is he yours?”

  “Mine…?”

  “The kid,” she snapped.

  He should be.

  “No.”

  “I don’t know why I’m asking,” she said, still in that spaced-out uber­calm tone, the sort office workers use as they reach inside their holdall on the one Monday morning too many and take out the submachine gun.

  “I have to go,” he said, and was good to his word a second later, because he went - not off the call, but off his feet altogether, the phone thudding into the upturned dirt littering the garden.

  “You fucker,” Steve hissed, standing over him.

  ***

  “Mr Quinn. Mr Black apologises for the lateness of the hour,” Sarah said sweetly.

  Michael Quinn regarded her with scepticism. “I’m sure he does. Can I go in?”

  “Yes, please, go ahead,” she said, inclining her head in the direction of her boss’ office. Strange; though he could hear the
clackclackclack of her fingers flying across the keyboard as he walked to the office entrance, he could practically feel the eyes on his back as he moved; almost as if there had been more than one person in the reception. Or as if she had more than two eyes.

  He was there, sitting behind his desk, just as he’d known he would be. He looked up at the new arrival into his office with that winning smile. “Michael,” he said warmly. “Good to see-”

  “Save the shite, alright? This isn’t one of your corporate away-days. I know you didn’t summon me across town at almost ten o clock at night for nothing, so let’s hear it.”

  Mr Black’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Be careful, Michael,” he said, his volume soft but his tone hard. “Our…arrangement…has entitled you to certain privileges, but that’s all they are - privileges. They can be revoked.”

  “Like fuck they can,” Michael shot back. “Who d’you think you’re dealing with here? The lapdog you made the Morrigan into?”

  Mr Black shuddered. “Please. You know my stance on dogs. Am I to take it you admired my work with young Danny, then? I suppose it’s a step beyond that old cliché of friends close and enemies closer - why not simply make friends of your enemies?”

  “The reverse works too.”

  “Meaning?”

  Michael leant across the desk to stare into that maddeningly calm face and those big unblinking eyes. “Why wasn’t it instant?” he said.

  “I’m sorry? I don’t quite follow.”

  “Yes you do. You make a wish – poof – wish granted. I made one, and first my daughter and my grandson vanish and everyone notices…and then everyone forgets my grandson existed, and then, days later, they come back?”

  “What are you comparing this to, exactly?” Mr Black said. “How many other wishes have you had granted through supernatural means? Am I suffering in comparison to an animated blue genie with the voice of Robin Williams? Or perhaps I should be a scantily-clad girl hanging around Larry Hagman for want of something better to do?”

  When no reply was forthcoming, Mr Black leaned back in his chair and regarded Michael with a look that didn’t try particularly hard to hide the contempt bubbling to the surface. “You have no idea what’s involved in shifting reality,” he said. “The complications. The difficulties. So please, do not lecture me – ever – on matters of which you know nothing. You asked for something. It has been given to you. Whether it took a few days is immaterial.”

  “It has been given to me?” Quinn choked. “Nothing has changed!”

  “Nothing has changed?” Mr Black laughed. “How can you say that, Michael? Things couldn’t be more different for your daughter.”

  “They are exactly the same! I wanted a second chance for my daughter! A good career! A shot at the life she deserved! And she’s right back where she started!”

  “You wanted Danny gone from her life. I removed him. What your daughter chose to do with the alternative path was entirely up to her. I wonder, Michael,” and Mr Black took a break from the utter lies he was telling to spread his hands, “if having a child wasn’t simply something your darling daughter wanted to do. Perhaps it wasn’t the terrible oversight you believed it to be. Perhaps she - what’s the human term for it? - “trapped”? - first Danny, and now Steve? Like a…like a spider in a web, I suppose.”

  Michael, card-carrying lifelong arachnophobe, was unable to disguise the shiver of revulsion that went through him at that particular image. “That’s ridiculous,” he said hotly. “My daughter would never-”

  “How do you know? How well do you really know her, Michael? How much of her childhood did you miss for this business trip or that three-day conference? What was her favourite toy as a child?”

  “What?”

  “Favourite television show? Favourite musician? Which posters did she have on her bedroom wall?” Mr Black fired out the questions staccato, one after the other, his mouth and lips contorting incredibly quickly even as the rest of his face remained entirely static.

  Michael sat down in the chair and began to laugh. “I’m getting parenting lectures from you?” he said incredulously. “Compared to you and your kind…I’m a fuckin’ Saint.”

  “Careful,” Mr Black said very quietly, his face dark. He looked almost regretful as he spoke. “I’d hate to have to change the nature of our relationship. Now,” and he smiled, all pleasantries and sunshine again, “I need you to do something for me. I did a favour for you that means I own you for exactly one year and one day, and it’s been…” he made a show of checking his desk calendar, “…two days?”

  “You’ve already taken my company! I’m selling up to you! Paving the way for this precious Network of yours! You’re getting FormorTech at 20% of market value!”

  “Yes,” Mr Black returned easily. “But that, Michael…that was yesterday.”

  Realisation of just how deep the hole he had stumbled into truly was had begun to dawn in earnest in the other man’s eyes. “With the power you have? Why do you need me to do anything?” Michael Quinn puzzled, a faint look of hope settling on him.

  “Go and visit your brother.”

  “Dermot?”

  “Yes. Dear old Dermot, the loveable rogue. Wasn’t he the one responsible – albeit indirectly – for your recent good fortune in the first place? How is he? Never mind. Go and see how he is for yourself. And while you’re at it,” Mr Black leaned forward and licked his lips, “I’d be grateful if you’d eviscerate him.”

  “If I’d what? You can’t be serious. He’s my brother…”

  Mr Black nodded. “Yes. He is. Curious as to how two brothers have different surnames. How did that come about by the way…?”

  “Quinn is my mother’s maiden name,” Michael replied, suppressing the real reason with only a momentary shadow passing across his face. It seemed to dawn on him then how ridiculous this impromptu question and answer session was. “Look, I don’t care what agreements we have. You’ve failed to deliver anything you promised. My daughter is as miserable now as she was before, if not more so. You took my company. Now you want me to kill my brother? You must be out of your mind!”

  Mr Black winced. “I see,” he said, with some regret. He pressed the intercom button on his desk. “Sarah, could you come through to the office?”

  “Absolutely, Mr Black.”

  “What do you want him dead for?” Michael asked. “He’s just-”

  “He’s not just anything,” Mr Black cut him off. “And I don’t just want him dead. I want his intestines spilled and for him to die in unimaginable agonies. Anything else simply won’t do, I’m afra…ah! Sarah, glad you could join us.”

  Michael Quinn glanced behind him, and the thought occurred to him that he had never seen Sarah the secretary out from behind that ubiquitous desk before this moment.

  His jaw dropped open.

  The girl had killer legs.

  “You wanted something, Mr Black?” she asked, stopping at the edge of the desk and perching herself on it, so he could almost - not quite, but almost - see a little more than he was supposed to. That was, he reflected, just about the shortest skirt he’d ever seen.