The pull on his legs increased even as he pressure on his lungs went from pain to agony to unbearably excruciating; the temptation to open his mouth and try to locate any air, anywhere, was becoming too great to resist and he knew he would be doomed; the soft disgusting freezing muck would fill his mouth in an instant and he would suffocate. He could not raise his arms to clear his nose, could not move, was only aware of the acceleration of the downward motion-
If only the soil were oxygen.
If only it tasted like air.
Those were his last thoughts before the blackness claimed him.
The following are pages from the
second part of the Folk’d Trilogy:
Folk’d Up
Beyond All Recognition
By Laurence Donaghy
Due for digital release July 2012
The Meeting With the Goddess
It was a crow. A crow, perched on his shoulder, as if crows perching on your shoulder was the done thing, was blasé. And every so often it would lean forward and peck him with its big fuckin’ beak, right in the crook of his neck, not hard enough to draw blood but hard enough to penetrate right through his unconscious and make him emerge into the waking world. What the fuck was a bird’s beak made of anyway? Diamond?
“GETTAFUCKOFFYAFUCKER!” he said, his entire shoulder blades going into spasm in one almighty heave, forcing it to take off in a phutphutphut of wings, pushing down with his palms so he was no longer lying facedown in the-
…grass?
He got to his feet and blinked in the moonlight and had the urge to shield his eyes, which he succumbed to, and then his brain reminded him that generally speaking moonlight is not something people normally have to shield their eyes from. So, ignoring the crow, which had landed a mere six feet or so away, he looked up.
Generally speaking, the moon wasn’t usually that fuckin’ big either. It was hanging so low and so huge that if there really was a Man in the Moon Danny could have told him if he had something trapped in his teeth.
Without fuss, the memories rushed back at him; the alternate reality, the awakening from it, the tablet, the fight with Steve…the being dragged through the bowels of the Earth itself…
He dropped his gaze to the crow, which was regarding him with equal interest. For a moment man and bird simply stood there, watching one another with measured intent, on a shadowed hilltop in the middle of a great plain lit by the glow of an impossible moon. Danny was the first to break the silence between them.
“Let me guess. You talk?”
“No,” the crow replied.
Danny rolled his eyes. “Well that’s a relief.”
The crow hopped a few feet sideways. Insofar as birds could have facial expressions this one looked decidedly snooty to Danny’s eyes. “You’ve never talked to a bird before?” it demanded.
“Never. More’s the pity,” Danny replied. “Ha! Nevermore. Get it?”
“That’s a raven you ignorant mortal! I am a Crow! Feared omen of the battlefield! Kings and chieftains would await my appearance and the portents for good or ill that it would bring!”
Danny sat on the grass again, because he needed a moment to take stock, and as he sat, he shrugged with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “So?“
“So?“ the crow spluttered, which for a thing lacking lips was not an easy thing to do. “So?“
“Yeah, so? And what? What do ya want, a fuckin’ medal?”
The crow fluttered up and down a few times, looking for all the world as if were hopping with rage. “Have you any idea who you address in such a way?!”
“No,” Danny said patiently. “I thought that’s where we came in.”
“I am The Morrigan!”
He flashed immediately on the name; back to Mr Black’s office, to the on-hold narration playing. The Morrigan…some sort of warrior goddess. Beyond that, and the obvious fact they shared a surname (surely not a coincidence…) he didn’t know much.
“You have the talent,” the crow said, as if sensing the flash. “It’s true, then.”
“What talent? You’re meant to be The Morrigan?”
“I am The Morrigan!”
“You’re a fuckin’ crow!” he exclaimed. “What’s your great power - shitein on your foes from a great height? Stoppin’ them getting’ any sleep by sittin’ in a fuckin’ tree all night cawing like a cunt?”
“Crows are a form of the goddess. An aspect,” the crow explained, in a tone that suggested it was flabbergasted at his stupidity.
“So where’s the rest of her?”
The crow didn’t answer. “You have the talent,” it said instead. “Because of that, I’ll choose to ignore the staggering lack of due respect you’re showing.”
“Ach thanks,” he said. “I appreciate that so much. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“I shall allow it,” the bird said graciously, ruffling its feathers.
He lunged.
The bird never saw it coming. It squawked, a proper bird aaaaawwwwrrrrkkk and not a recognisable word, and it tried to launch itself up and away to safety, but his sprawl across the three feet or so that had separated them had been timed to coincide with the bird sticking its beak into his feathers and for a crucial fraction of a second the attention of even one of its beady little eyes had been away from him; time enough for him to clamp first one hand, and then two around the bird’s scrawny little body.
The crow’s head went crazy, pecking him this way and that, until he increased the pressure on his clamping hand enough for him to let go with his other hand and use two of his fingers to pinch that wicked little beak shut.
“My question is,“ he said, ever so slightly out of breath, and starting to bleed from a few shallow puncture wounds on his left thumb and right palm, “why shouldn’t I break your wee fuckin’ neck?”
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING!!!
He nearly released the bird from sheer shock. The words had come at him in his own inner voice. It was like hearing your own subconscious rebel against you, and for a long moment he actually wondered if he had finally, somewhat understandably, snapped under the strain and gone truly round the bend.
No. No, the voice wasn’t his own, despite coming from inside his head; it smelt different. It smelt of dirt, and blood, and of this strange place he’d found himself in.
“I’ll tell ya what I’m doin’,” he replied, vocalising because it was easier to structure his feelings that way, “I’m getting sick of all this shit goin’ on and you were just the talkin’ crow that broke the camel’s back.”
I am trying to help you. You have no idea what sort of place you’re in. No mortal has been here in-
“Aye,” he broke in, “hundreds of years. Blah blah blah. And I have some sorta talent. So you said. Whoopee. Look. All I wanna know is how I make this all stop. How I go back to the way things were. Is that so fuckin’ hard? Is that so much to ask?”
There’s so much you don’t know. So much you don’t understand.
The voice was almost pitying now. He felt like squeezing his hand around the little black body currently occupying the interior of his fist until it exploded. If one more person pitied him, just one more-
The landscape around him turned blood red so quickly and so completely that he was left stunned by the speed of it. He looked up, and saw that massive overhanging Moon had shaded itself crimson - just like in the…
Rrrrroooooo.
Like the crow’s thoughts, this sound arrived in his head uninvited, but it didn’t come from the goddess aspect busily crapping itself into his palm.
Let me go. Let me go now.
He complied. The crow fluttered up and away, but it didn’t abandon him; it hovered about twenty feet above his head. Crows were particularly ungainly birds, he could see that now. Little wonder they’d never sank into the public consciousness as cute little critters merrily chirping musical interludes in Nature’s endless majesty, so much as the grim harbingers of death. They radiat
ed menace.
“It’s coming,” the crow called down to him. “One of their soldiers. One of the elites, by the look of it. Behind you. Look.”
He rotated and saw it almost immediately, lurching across the plains toward him on his vantage point on top of the small hillock. It moved like the crow flew; in a way that looked clumsy, but was filled with power; it came at him across the ochre-tinted grass in a stop-start way that put him in mind of those scary fuckin’ skeletons in the Jason and the Argonauts movie he’d loved as a kid.
“Do something then!” he shouted up at his flying companion.
“Me?”
“Yes you!” he said, his voice hoarse with terror, as the thing began to rumble on the upward incline, now no more than two hundred feet or so away. “You’re the fuckin’ Morrigan aren’t ye?”
“Should I shite on it? Or wait until tonight, perhaps, and keep it up all night cawing?”
He glared death at the crow. The crow, who had evolution on his side, did the same and won. “What do I do?” he cried out, taking one step backward, then two, testing the surface beneath his feet, trying to judge how quickly his feet would spring off it, estimating the running speed of the thing moving at him. Knowing it was moving faster than he could hope to match.
“Fight it.”
Memories of his father’s dream-tussle with one of these fuckers refused to go away. His Da had shown some surprisingly agile moves for a guy with a dog’s tail stickin’ out of his arse, but he couldn’t swallow the recollection of how powerfully the wolf-thing had ripped the tail clean out of its socket, or the taste of warm blood as it sprayed from the wound; he had woken up screaming and shouting and staggered to the bathroom. And yet the next morning, he had hardly remembered any of it.
He was still moving backward, his steps turning to bounds turning to almost full-out backward jogging, because the one thing he could imagine that was worse than seeing this fucker coming at him would be turning and running from it with the knowledge that between one foot landing and the other it would be closing on him, closing and gaining and pouncing and sinking its teeth-
A glance up. The crow was gone. Fucker.
He had retreated far enough that he was descending the far side of the hill, and for a few moments it had slipped from view around the curve of the summit. But no longer; here it was again, coming down now to him, gravity assisting its descent. It wasn’t going to slow down to talk to him or to impart some cryptic message, he saw - it was going to keep bounding until it went right through him and scythed him neatly in two.
There was always something, wasn’t there? Some spear or some sword or some piece of the landscape that came to the rescue.
Thirty feet. Twenty. He could see the muscles in its shoulders ripple. It was fifteen feet long. Fifteen feet. Each of its four legs was as big as a large dog, and its head, as it ran, was all red eyes and bobbing jaw line revealing a thin white line of teeth, though he knew that the brief glimpse he could see of those teeth was like the one-tenth of an iceberg visible above the surface of the sea.
He planted his back foot in the soil and stopped his retreat and made his move, the only gambit he could think of, his last desperate hope for survival…
To be published by Last Passage in July 2012
Folk'd Page 29