The Invasion Read online

  Do Lúcás – ba chóir duit ceann acu a léamh, áfach …

  To part us two is

  To part the children of one home

  To part the body from the soul

  Anonymous, c.1150. Translated by Gerard Murphy

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Grave Robbers

  Not So Lucky

  The New Recruit

  Prison

  Infestation

  The Professor

  The Nightmare

  The Ambassador

  The Battle Kingdom

  Visitors

  Angela

  The Great Slaughter

  Fingers

  The Tunnel

  Boiling

  The Boat

  The Lie

  The Escape

  Death of a Scholar

  Vengeance

  The Promise

  An Army

  Ambrosio

  Aoife

  The Trap

  The Lowest Ebb

  A Dozen Steps

  Morris

  The Hurt

  The Immortals

  The Park

  The Cage

  The Duel

  The Plan

  The Altar

  The Lost

  Among the Dead

  Acknowledgements

  The Grey Land Series

  Copyright

  The Grave Robbers

  Aoife tumbles out of her cot on to an ice-cold floor. Where am I? Am I … Am I there?

  It comes to her almost as a relief.

  However, this is not the Grey Land. Not yet. The palms of her hands find the smooth, familiar walls of the gym. And all around her, Boyle Survival College’s last thirty or so students fill the air with sighs and snores, with the smell of rarely washed bodies and the creaks of makeshift beds.

  Perhaps she’s taken a fever, because she can’t get up. Her head is spinning and she convulses, hands over her mouth, as a wave of nausea punches her savagely in the guts.

  It eases off until she can get her back against the wall, sweat chilling on her forehead.

  ‘No …’ a boy cries in his sleep.

  ‘By Crom, they’re eating my face!’ says another. It’s Krishnan, a thirteen-year-old so lanky that his feet stick out over the end of his mattress. His toes twitch and curl as though they’ve been stabbed through with pins.

  The hackles on Aoife’s neck rise as all around her the rest of the children start tossing and turning in their beds, their voices suddenly louder, as if each and every one of them is having the exact same nightmare.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Aoife tells herself.

  Her gorge rises in her throat again. The cold sweat seems to sizzle on her brow.

  Out! Out!

  But already the sleeping children are settling again.

  Plenty of rumours have been flying about ever since the events that saw the Sídhe attack the school. Rumours of how Ireland and the Grey Land are closer to each other than they’ve been for centuries. Within touching distance, people say.

  This is why the enemy appear so much more often now than they used to. And Aoife thinks that the frequency of these episodes of nausea and fear that only affect the young is rising too.

  But what do I know?

  She decides to get out anyway, hoping the freezing Roscommon air will make her feel better.

  She knows the way in the dark, almost as though poor Emma’s ghost is pulling her through the night. Once out the door, Aoife passes the shadowy burned-out dorm building and walks down the alley formed by two long lines of caravans where the investigators and archaeologists now live. They won’t allow ‘civilians’ anywhere near the Fairy Fort they’ve been digging up, but Aoife has seen the dread on their faces at the end of each day’s work. Sometimes the last shreds of her curiosity want her to go and find out what they’re up to in the forest, but then she remembers what happened last time she did that, and she turns into a sobbing wreck. Emma! Poor Emma!

  A dark figure looms suddenly in front of her and Aoife still cares enough about her life to gasp.

  ‘It’s me. Nabil.’

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she says, angry at him for frightening her. ‘You can’t stop me any more.’

  He sighs, and she knows it was the wrong thing to say, for, of all the instructors, Nabil looks out for the students best and was a major player in saving their lives during the attack.

  ‘Here, my friend,’ he says. ‘Take my flashlight. Give it back in the morning.’

  Now she feels even worse for snapping at him, but manages a small ‘thank you’. Then he’s gone and she’s free again.

  The freezing wind gets her teeth chattering. She’s wearing nothing but her tracksuit and a thin raincoat she’s been using for a blanket. She used to have Emma to keep her warm and thinks of all the times she told her friend to leave her alone, to let her sleep – as if they were going to have eternity together! As if nothing could ever go wrong! How could she have been so stupid?

  Up ahead lies the graveyard. Funerals are never allowed in survival colleges or there’d be little time for anything else. And the bodies of students who die are sent back to the parents. So the few graves on college grounds are mostly for teachers and instructors. People without family or whose families don’t want to know them.

  And then there’s the odd body so horrifically altered by the Sídhe it is deemed better to tell the parents that the scientists in Dublin, having examined it, then mislaid it.

  Emma’s parents accepted this explanation. They know what it really means and they have another girl back home to worry about.

  Aoife moves in among the trees, escaping the wind again. Her once-plump cheeks are so cold they ache. She can’t feel the hand that grips the flashlight. And that’s when she hears the digging. No animal could make such a rhythmic, metallic sound. Only people. People hacking at the frozen soil of a graveyard in the darkest part of the night.

  She stops in her tracks. How can there be somebody out here?

  But her second thought is one of fury. It’s souvenir hunters, she thinks. Dragging Emma’s body from its resting place for the pleasure of gawkers. How dare they defile her! How dare they.

  She crashes through the undergrowth, blundering out of the wood and into the graveyard proper, the ground slippy and hard as granite. She has come out right beside the heap of earth where Emma is buried, although you wouldn’t know it, for there are no markers.

  She stops right there, confused to find it undisturbed.

  Then the hairs on her neck rise. She swings around, turning on the flashlight by instinct. It’s an old wind-up one. Nobody makes batteries any more and its light is a pale blue flicker, but it’s enough to see the boy in front of her raise hands to cover his face.

  ‘Who are you?’ she cries.

  ‘Dubhtach, I was named.’ His voice would shame an angel, at once friendly and musical. ‘For my dark hair. See?’

  Aoife is already backing away, her legs like jelly. It’s not a boy in front of her, of course, but a little man. She can see now how his skin glitters ever so slightly in the torchlight. How every part of him, from his delicate fingers, to the square cut of his jaw, has been sanded to perfection by whatever god or devil created him.

  And he’s following, walking steadily forward, his grin wide and welcoming.

  ‘Leave the thief alone,’ says another voice, a woman. ‘We have what we came for. We must swallow it before we are too small. And this one … I feel it. This one we’ll be seeing very soon.’

  Aoife flings the torch at the little man’s head. It knocks him back a pace and she uses the distraction to flee for her life, off into the woods.


  When she returns an hour later with Nabil and Taaft, they find the graveyard full of holes and scattered remains. Of the Sídhe themselves no sign is left.

  ‘What did they want with rotted flesh?’ asks Taaft. ‘Are the little scum practising voodoo now?’

  ‘I never heard of that,’ Nabil replies. When he speaks English, he sounds so much more French than when he’s using Sídhe. ‘But I do not like it. It’s strange of them, no? They will have a reason.’

  ‘I’m going back to bed,’ says Aoife. Emma’s safe; that’s the main thing.

  Or is it? The woman Sídhe said they’d be seeing Aoife soon, and she knows what that must mean. It’s funny how little she feared the Call only a few hours before, and how much she trembles now that it is finally reaching out for her. This impression becomes all the stronger when she realizes that, while she was gone, one of the few surviving Year 4s – Andy Scanlon – has turned up in his bunk with flippers for hands and blank skin where once he had a face.

  He must have been lying there in the dark, his body cooling, as Aoife was stumbling outside.

  Not So Lucky

  Nessa sits near the front of the bus, one arm draped around the case beside her, as though it’s the dearest of friends. She watches Ireland streaming past the window.

  Ivy and weeds push crumbling houses into the earth, and even trees rise in triumph over the corpses of factories and schools. The beauty of it overwhelms any sense of sadness. In winter, the bright green fields are all glamour in their capes of sparkling frost and the distant hills are little more than daubs of white paint against an intense blue sky.

  I shouldn’t be here to appreciate this, she thinks. Nessa’s supposed to be dead. But she’s not, she’s not! She has paid her dues. No one has ever had to go twice to the Grey Land.

  They pass through fading towns where only the old remain, and so rare is the sight of a working bus that all conversations stop and many people wave. Do they know there’s a recent survivor on board? They’d make more of a fuss if they did, and Nessa smiles at the thought of it. She smiles at everyone and everything, enjoying even the experience of potholes and roads blocked by cattle and a market at Ardee.

  Other children get on there, a group of January-born ten-year-olds heading for a survival college near Balbriggan. She decides she’s not going to think about them for now, for the ninety per cent of them the Sídhe will murder in the next few years. Nessa has survived. She’s off to Dublin for the first time in her life, to see Anto, the boy she loves. A fourteen-year-old like herself, who came back from the Grey Land of the enemy with his life and a large chunk of his sanity intact.

  She’s feeling shy already as rusty road signs tick the kilometres down. Will his parents be there? Will they mind if she kisses him? Will they care about the delicate twigs she was left with in place of legs after a bout of polio as a child?

  They won’t mind, she decides. Although they might put up a fight if she tries to steal their son away to Donegal. She grins and her cheeks hurt with it, because she hasn’t changed her expression in hours.

  And then the bus comes over the suspension bridge near Drogheda to find the Dublin end blocked by a minibus and a government car. It rumbles to a halt with the kids straining their necks to see what’s wrong.

  The driver, nine-tenths belly, the rest grey moustache, exchanges a few words with an old policewoman before turning to the passengers. ‘We all have to get off,’ he shouts. ‘It won’t be for long, all right? Ten minutes.’

  The pitted surface of the road hosts a group of trench-coat wearing adults that wouldn’t look out of place in a movie.

  ‘Line them up!’ says a man at the front. And then, ‘Wait! Don’t bother.’ He strides ten paces over to Nessa. The Sídhe have been murdering adolescents for the last twenty-five years, which means this tall stranger may just be old enough to have escaped the Call. But no. There is a strain about his movements that suggests he will never relax again. This man has seen the Grey Land. He would have been one of the first, back in a time when nobody understood what was happening. Before the specially trained counsellors were around to help with the aftermath.

  ‘This is her, isn’t it?’ He whispers the words, as though it burns his tongue to do so.

  Some of the early survivors used food to cope with the trauma. Some turned to drugs, or immersed themselves in bizarre obsessions. Others faded away to nothing. But this man’s muscles stretch his coat to breaking point. He’s the type who’s been training every day, maybe every minute since his Call.

  ‘Yes, that’s her,’ says a young woman, and Nessa gasps when she catches sight of the beautiful and sad Melanie in the midst of the adults. The girl with a hole in her chest. One of the few students of Boyle Survival College to make it through the school’s destruction.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Nessa. ‘Mister …?’

  ‘Detective. Detective Cassidy,’ the man says. ‘And I am the one who doesn’t understand.’ He has a hero’s square jaw and his blue-eyed gaze is hot enough to melt a glacier. ‘How …?’ he asks. ‘How did the likes of you survive the Grey Land?’

  Nessa refuses to flinch. ‘The same way you did, Detective. I fought the Sídhe and I won.’

  Cassidy swings around. He pulls the smallest, feeblest of the untrained ten-year-olds out of the crowd. In the cold air, the boy’s terrified breathing appears in little puffs of mist, but all the stranger does is whisper in his ear, before nudging the little boy towards Nessa.

  ‘What … what did he say to you?’ asks Nessa. She has never been so confused in her life. She has left her warm jacket on the bus. She badly needs to pee and, above all that, the earlier euphoria of her imminent meeting with Anto is giving way to something more akin to panic.

  Out of the blue, the tiny little ten-year-old kicks her bad left leg and down she goes, the frozen ground slamming the air from her chest.

  The big man looms over her. ‘Vanessa Doherty,’ he says, his voice stiff with loathing, ‘you couldn’t have escaped the Sídhe. You can’t even beat this little child. I am placing you under arrest for treason.’ She feels handcuffs on her wrists and can’t understand what’s happening. What about Anto? She needs to see him! ‘The Nation will survive,’ he says. ‘I doubt you’ll be so lucky.’

  The New Recruit

  The bus station stinks of greenhouse tobacco and the damp warmth of a hundred people fighting for tickets on the rare remaining routes. But no matter what their errand, everybody finds time to stop and stare at Anto. It’s that freakish outsized arm of his. The Sídhe gave it to him, of course, and none of those staring will ever understand the pain he suffered at the fairy woman’s hands.

  That trauma follows him wherever he goes. It wants to smother him, to leach the world of joy. Yet Anto grins. Nessa won’t let that happen. Somewhere a bus is bringing her closer to him, with that smile of hers, that’s too bright, too intense for any shadow of the Grey Land to withstand. He can’t wait to show her Dublin. He wants her hand in his, her head on his shoulder like the night she risked her life to climb into his bedroom. He can already feel the warmth of her cheek against his neck.

  But now he shivers. A pair of policewomen are approaching him and his family with purpose. Please, he thinks, don’t let this be about Nessa.

  His parents have brought him here to meet her. He’s thought of little else for days, suffering the teasing of his nine-year-old sister and embarrassing maternal comments such as, ‘She’ll be sleeping in the spare room. I’ll be watching to make sure you keep your paws off!’

  But Ma has seen the guards approaching too, and she’s the one to squeeze his shoulder. You can deal with it, son. That’s what she’s saying. And she’s right. Nessa’s had a lifetime of stares, hasn’t she? Anto won’t let her down, so he straightens his back, always sore from the extra weight of the giant arm.

  ‘Oho!’ says Anto’s dad. ‘They must be coming to give you another medal for all those Sídhe you battered up in Boyle.’

&n
bsp; ‘Please, Da. I don’t wanna talk about that.’ Anto remembers the crunch of bones. Their screams, their laughter.

  The guards take one look at the boy’s left side and nod. They don’t bother getting him to confirm his identity, but the younger one – still in her fifties – can’t seem to keep herself from mouthing, ‘Holy God!’

  The other is more businesslike. ‘The State needs your service, Mr Lawlor.’

  ‘You don’t mean me, I take it,’ Da says, and the guards ignore him.

  ‘We need you to come with us.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Anto says. He can barely squeeze the words from his throat. ‘We’re here to meet my, uh, my friend, I—’

  ‘Vanessa Doherty won’t be arriving, son. I’m told she’s been given a mission of her own.’

  Anto hasn’t seen Nessa since she went home to give her Testimony and be with her family. He finds it hard to cope with the dreams, and none of the counsellors can help him the way she does just by sitting near him, by being so … serene. Is that the word? Nothing gets to her. Except him, and only in good ways that make her smile and talk about her strange interest in lost poems and songs.

  ‘Are you saying my boy has a mission, guard?’ asks Da, puffing up his chest.

  He’s oblivious to Anto’s shattering disappointment, but Ma can feel the quick rise and fall of his breathing under her fingers.

  ‘We’re not allowed talk about it, sir. But he must come with us. We have a car waiting.’

  ‘A car!’ Da is delighted. Thrilled. ‘You hear that, son? A car!’

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ says Anto. He doesn’t like the sound of the word ‘mission’. He needs to find a school now, a real school where the pupils aren’t murdered. He’s supposed to learn a trade and to have time to get to know the girl he loves. Da pushes him gently towards the women, but he resists.

  ‘You want to get us in trouble, son?’ asks the older guard. ‘And remember, your friend’s not coming today. You’re not missing out on anything.’ Her face is beginning to harden. They could arrest him, or even his parents. The Nation will do anything to survive.