The Call Read online

  “I’ll do whatever I have to,” says Sherry. “Isn’t that what Conor taught us? Rulers have to act, and here I am, acting. Now listen, he doesn’t want you and he doesn’t want me either, for the moment. He wants her. Clip-Clop.”

  “He … he what?”

  “You believe me. I can see you do. I’ll cut her throat. I swear by the Cauldron I will.”

  “No.” Perhaps Liz Sweeney is shaking her head. “He doesn’t want Nessa, and you’ll see the proof of it tomorrow. The hunts are starting up again.”

  “You have a plan? A plan to get her?”

  “It’s Conor’s plan. In the forest she … ” Perhaps Liz Sweeney thinks better of what she was going to say with Aoife in the room. Perhaps she makes some kind of a gesture. “All I’ll say is that she’s finished here.”

  Deep inside Aoife, her spirit stirs. It’s not that she dislikes Nessa, in spite of the fact that Emma always fancied her. “Shame you’re not her type, Emma,” Aoife told her once, pretending not to be hurt. And she has to admit to the charms of the girl from Donegal: those dreamer’s eyes, that regal bearing. The air of tragedy that hangs over her, like the cancer-suffering heroines of the books Aoife liked so much in her first years here. Aoife has had more than a few fantasies about Nessa herself, but they always shatter against that haughty exterior.

  But still. But still. Are they really planning to murder her?

  “I … I can help,” says the younger girl.

  “What? You can show off for him, can you, little Sherry? Pregnant Sherry the idiot?” and Liz Sweeney, from the sound of her voice, is grinning like a mad thing. “You’re a Year Four and you won’t be hunting tomorrow, will you? You’ll all be in your beds clutching teddies and scared of the dogs in the corridors.”

  “What if I get to her first?”

  “Don’t be an idiot!” And her voice turns to a whisper. Too low for Aoife to follow. Not that she’s trying.

  Sherry leaves and the doors swing shut behind her.

  For a moment Aoife is thinking she should warn Nessa that something awful is being planned for her. But then the image of Emma’s corpse pushes to the front of her mind and it’s all she can do to keep her gorge down.

  The Testimonies are crammed with nightmare images. And over the years students have hidden forbidden photographs of some of the Sídhe’s worst victims in between the volumes of an encyclopedia in the library. But never has Aoife seen anything worse than what they did to her Emma! Nessa will be caught early enough to suffer such a fate. There can’t be any doubt in the matter. Terrible hands will turn her skull inside out while she yet lives.

  Conor’s gang would be doing her a favor. They’ll avenge whatever slight they think they’ve suffered and she will be free.

  Besides, Aoife can’t interfere. She has too much of a fight on her own hands as it is: She needs to reinforce the walls of her imagination against the horrors that wait beyond. If she works at it, Aoife will be able to imagine the field trip to an Iron Age site where Emma, out of the blue, first kissed her. Nobody ever heard Emma coming! Quiet as the mouse that gave her that stupid nickname. And the kiss! With Ms. Buckley just behind a lump of scattered stones! She feels those little hands on hers, and remembers how her body bent of its own accord so that their lips could meet …

  And then the pillow is jerked away from her face and sunlight gouges at her eyes.

  “If you say a word,” says Liz Sweeney, “even a word about this, to anybody, you’ll wish that Crom himself had come for you!”

  “Leave me alone,” Aoife replies, outraged to have Liz Sweeney’s big feet trampling over her most precious memories.

  Perhaps it is the red, red eyes. Or the lost weight. Or the quivering lips. But Liz Sweeney simply sneers and drops the pillow before leaving the dorm.

  Hours later, Aoife jumps at the clang of a bell. It’s just the sound of dinner, however, and she realizes she’s been asleep. She used to be a great eater, and now habit carries her downstairs and across two corridors to get to the refectory. So slow is her pace that she’s among the last to arrive. The rest of Year 5 are in their seats. Many of them are laughing, faces flushed, hair glistening after the run they must have returned from. It’s raining outside and the windows are fogged and the whole huge room reverberates with clinks and voices and shouts.

  Aoife can’t help looking at the empty places around the tables. There aren’t so many yet: The Sídhe have killed less than ten out of sixty Year 5s. If the pattern holds, it’ll average one death a week until summer.

  She walks in to take her seat beside Marya and Megan. And here she sees an empty chair she wasn’t expecting. For a moment she wonders if she missed the sound of the mourning bells, but then she remembers that Nessa always finishes a run ten or twenty minutes behind her classmates, depending on the length of the course.

  Megan shrugs. “You’re looking more awake.”

  “I am?” Across the way, at one of the boys’ tables, Liz Sweeney is braying like an ass and Aoife surprises herself. “I’m hungry!” she says. Her waking is as slow as spring, but deep inside, a new purpose is germinating and looking for the light.

  But then she pushes the hunger away and stands.

  “Where’re you off to?” asks Megan.

  “I … there’s somebody I need to see. Right away! But I’ll need to talk to you too, Megan. Later.”

  She leaves the red-haired girl gaping after her.

  Rain makes the going hard for most of the students, but Nessa, with superb coordination, with excellent reflexes, can always move faster with a bit of mud on the ground. She likes to slide. She takes advantage of every feature of the landscape: skidding on the slopes while swinging around on trees, and springing from rocky areas on her crutches. If they don’t snap of course. It’s exhausting though, and as always she soon falls behind.

  But this one time, instead of soldiering on, she simply stops and waits. By now Nabil and Horner have loped off with the main pack. When they get to the end, instructors and students alike will pile into the showers before racing down for dinner. Nessa won’t even be a blip on their radar—she’s always last anyway.

  She walks quite sedately for a while, shivering a little, listening to a thousand and one rustlings from the undergrowth around her as she goes over her plan.

  Now that Shamey is gone, his room in the staff accommodation block is freed up for Anto, and she will tell any lie to get in there to see him. In this way she can say her good-byes before winning a transfer from Ms. Breen.

  As she walks, she’s already battling the sadness she’ll feel in parting from Megan. Anto, at least, is a survivor now, but the odds are that she’ll never see her only friend again.

  Stop! she orders herself, when tears threaten. Just stop.

  It’s only five o’clock by the time she creeps out of the trees and onto the painful gravel near the staff entrance. This late in the year, and with the rain, lights are on everywhere in the school and they guide her up to the door, illuminating the signs that threaten Cage time for anybody going in unescorted. In spite of everything, Nessa, whose avoidance of the run is already begging for punishment, hesitates.

  But it’s not the Cage that holds her back.

  She knows Anto won’t be the same after his ordeal. She knows it. She pauses on the step, shivering at the rain running under the collar of her tracksuit. And what if he doesn’t want to see her? He ran from Marya, didn’t he? Like she had the plague.

  The door opens easily and she pushes through to that familiar corridor lined with instructors’ rooms, each with a name on the door. And she follows it down, toward the darker end, where the communal laundry basket overflows with filthy tracksuits still damp from the run. And there, sure enough, is a handwritten sign: ANTHONY LAWLOR.

  And now the nerves come! The oh-so-sweaty palms; the continual swallowing. She makes a fist and holds it over the door. Thinks better of it, and leans her ear against the wood instead. She hears nothing, nothing at all.

&n
bsp; Who or what lies inside? And yes, the “what” is important, because some of those who return are as damaged in body as they are in mind. Like Eithne Fitzgerald with her knotted legs. Like Ryan McMurty, who bore the impressions of a Sídhe’s fingers in his forehead. For the rest of his short life, he suffered headaches as well as bizarre visions he claimed were prophetic. All were faithfully recorded, but nobody has yet made sense of them.

  I should have brought a poem. She might have slipped it under the door for him. A reminder that somebody cares. No matter what he has become. And she realizes that she has to tell him this in person. Before the Call spirits her off to the Grey Land.

  And then the main door is opening—the one she came in, at the end of the corridor. Nessa throws herself under the stinking tracksuits, not even taking the time to leave a peephole for herself and praying that the movement remains undetected.

  Footsteps come all the way down to her position and she expects at any second to have her cover pulled away. Instead she hears the faintest of tapping against wood and a stage whisper.

  “Anto? Anto, are you there?”

  “Go away.” Nessa jerks in spite of herself at the muffled sound of his voice. The parched emptiness of it.

  “It’s Aoife. Can I come in?”

  Aoife? Of all the people, she is the last Nessa would expect to find here. Not that she and Anto are enemies—quite the opposite actually. Aoife rarely keeps any of her grandmother’s cakes for the boys’ tables, but Anto’s gentleness has won him a nibble or two over the years.

  “Anto? It’s about Nessa.” Nessa stiffens in her burrow. Never has she strained so hard to hear, but all the dirty clothing, the distance, the wood of the door frustrate her. For all she knows, there’s no response at all.

  “Listen,” says Aoife, “there’s a hunt tomorrow afternoon and Conor’s gang … Conor’s gang are going to … I think they’re planning to kill her.”

  What? Nessa thinks. They’re planning what? Yet she feels no surprise and realizes she’d been thinking the same thing herself, ever since Liz Sweeney spilled the tea on her.

  Anto’s response is only heartbeats in coming, but Nessa crouches there, like the cat in the box, waiting, waiting, to find out if she’s alive or dead.

  And then all the possibilities collapse into one outcome, and it’s a sentence of death.

  “I don’t care! Go away, Aoife. I want all of you to go away.”

  “Then why did you even come back here? You didn’t have to work as a veteran!”

  But Anto, it appears, has nothing more to say.

  Aoife departs and Nessa must have left shortly after her, because she finds herself wandering out in the rain, not sure where she is going or why. She was the one who was supposed to reject him. For her own safety. She was the one who’d fought forever against a poisonous fantasy, who’d regretted romantic gestures, who’d pitied him and feared for him.

  Every time she met him, when he focused those liquid eyes on her, she would say, “Oh, no, thanks! I couldn’t possibly!” And for what? For what?

  In her mind’s eye the farm in Donegal dissolves, becomes a dirty flat in some town where Nessa lives alone.

  Eventually it is the cold that drives her indoors, and for the second time that day she enters through a forbidden door and plonks herself down next to one of the ancient radiators, shivering and too empty even for tears.

  The dogs find her shortly afterward.

  There’s always a pack of them wandering together, a bizarre mix of breeds and mongrels of varying levels of aggression and friendliness, so that when a Jack Russell growls at her, it is up to the big Doberman to shove it off. Then he settles his warm stinking body up next to her and snuggles down. A few of the others follow until she has a pile of them crushing in around her, panting, yawning, farting. And there she falls asleep.

  The following morning, she’s in Ms. Breen’s office.

  “Your behavior, Nessa … your behavior is getting stranger all the time. You realize that, don’t you?”

  Nessa is standing before her in the cramped office with its menthol stink. She responds no more than a corpse would.

  “The Lord knows I’ve tried to keep you out of the Cage, but you’ve made it impossible for me. After we found you with the dogs last night! In the Year Seven corridor of all places!”

  Ms. Breen looks expectantly at her, waiting for the excuse, the apology that never comes. And finally she sighs. “Very well then. You can report to Nabil tomorrow after breakfast.”

  And finally a feeling finds its way through the girl’s hopelessness: It is puzzlement.

  “Tomorrow, miss?”

  “Ah, you think we’re going to let you out of this afternoon’s hunt? When your year hasn’t had one for three weeks now because of … because of that Sídhe you found in the rock? No, no. I’m sentencing you to two nights, but starting tomorrow.”

  This is the perfect opportunity for Nessa to ask for her transfer, to explain the threats to her life, or at the very least the integrity of her limbs. And yet moments later she finds herself back in the corridor, with grey daylight pouring through the upper windows and leaching her will.

  She needs to turn back. It’s not too late. Instead, as happened with the dogs the night before, a pack of girls finds her, Megan at their head. Again she is surrounded by warmth and, yes, by love.

  “Aoife told me everything,” said Megan. She hugs a shattered Nessa to her muscled shoulders. “I’m not letting those vomit-lickers have you. Understand?”

  “Mmmm.”

  And Megan slaps her hard enough that Aoife, Marya, and Nicole all jump back.

  “That’s right, Nessa! It’s wakey-wakey time! Come on. Frankenstein’s class is up next, followed by a riveting hour with the Turkey. After that we’re going to plan a humiliation for King Conor and his merry men. You hear me? One more screwup and even Liz Sweeney will have to drop him like the stickiest sock in the basket.”

  And now Nessa feels a smile come to her face, and for once she makes no effort to hide it. Instead she hugs each of the girls. She knows Megan would do anything for her, and Aoife is kind enough to help even an enemy. But the presence of Marya and Nicole comes as a great surprise.

  And she lets them lead her off to class.

  To avoid suspicion, they don’t sit together.

  Aoife, looking thinner than Nessa has ever seen her, lies facedown on her desk and goes to sleep right at the front. If Frankenstein notices, he says nothing. His hollow owl eyes blink moistly and his failing voice drones on and on. He always sweats these days, as though melting under the intermittent heat of the radiators.

  “Of course, the Sídhe have other art forms. Music and dance are obvious ones. They carve marvelous tools of bone … ” He chews his own flaking lips, and if rumors are to be believed, he’d like nothing better than to wet them with cheap vodka. Even three rows back, students shy from the foulness of his breath. “But they save their greatest inspiration for the works they do in human flesh. It is the only form of magic for whose existence we have actual scientific proof.”

  “How is it proved?” asks Bruggers, shocking Frankenstein with a pertinent question.

  After a few more pitiful attempts to moisten his lips, the teacher mumbles something about the cellular structures of the bodies, both living and dead, that have returned from the Grey Land, but Nessa is no longer listening. All of a sudden she finds herself staring at Frankenstein’s face. There is something about it that she can’t quite put her finger on.

  He has been a teacher here since long before her arrival, and when she first knew him his lectures on the strange biology of the Grey Land were among the most interesting for her. But then that thing with his wife happened. A bad death by the standards of this world, and he mustn’t have had any friends to pull him out of it again, because he went so far downhill that Ms. Breen was overheard saying he was on his last warning.

  Nessa has always thought it a sad story, but a romantic one too, and she pa
id it no more interest than that until now.

  She puts up her hand. “Uh … Frank?”

  He stops his mumbled explanation for a moment and she continues. “Are you, uh … are you ill, sir?”

  “Ill, child?”

  “Your face, sir. It’s … yellow.” Not completely, but little streaks have appeared there under the sweat that trickles down his face.

  “Oh, lord, not again,” and his voice is the saddest sound Nessa has ever heard. “It’s … Not that it’s anybody’s business here. It’s just jaundice. I’ve been … I’ve had to cover it with … ”

  “Makeup, sir?” This from Bruggers, who can’t be bothered to hold in a snicker. And Frank O’Leary pushes back from his desk and all but runs from the class.

  Mourning bells ring twice more at lunchtime. Anne-Marie, the last of the Year 7s, has met her fate, along with a boy from Year 6. So it is a somber crew that sits down to eat.

  “Imagine,” says Marya, “Year Seven is gone now!”

  Aoife, who has started eating again, doesn’t even glance up. But Nessa can see the two tiny dorms in her mind’s eye, the beds empty and quiet until September.

  “They didn’t even make their one in ten,” Marya continues. She comes from one of those homes where nobody saw anything wrong with speaking from a full mouth, so that food could be consumed and generously shared all at the same time.

  “We’ll make up for it!” says Nicole, but nobody likes to say such things, or even to hear them, and she shuts up when their eyes slip away from her.

  “I would hate to be the last,” says Marya now, waving little fists about. “Can you imagine?” And they can. Among all the terrible outcomes, it’s one that crops up again and again. Watching your friends live or die, while all the time the odds of finding yourself in the Grey Land keep climbing. Far better to be taken soon. But not now. Never right now!

  “Look, how’re we going to do this?” asks Megan at last. “I was thinking, we wait for the lists of hunters and hunted to go up. The chances of all of us being in one of those groups have got to be tinier than Conor’s wee piggy eyes. Am I right?” They all nod. “And then, if Nessa is a hunted, she arranges to meet up with one of our hunters so she can be ‘caught’ and get out of the forest right away. Or vice versa.”