The Call Read online

  But nobody is acting like they believe any of that. Antoinette is even smoking out the window, grinning back at the rest of them with dark pudgy cheeks. At least fifteen of them are here already. Athletic girls from every part of Ireland, whose birthdays happen to fall in September or early October.

  Nicole natters at Marya; Squeaky Emma fades into the background while Liz Sweeney scowls at everybody from the far corner.

  They’ve all been home for two weeks and have plenty to chat about. Aoife holds up a bag of sugary treats baked by her Polish grandmother. She got her blonde hair and a ridiculous level of generosity from the same place, but her accent is just as much dirty Dub as Anto’s. “You hear Ponzy made it?” she asks Nessa.

  “I did!” And finally Nessa feels the tension easing from her shoulders. “Good old Ponzy! Will he come back as a veteran?”

  “Dunno … He’s staying home for now. Can’t wait to read his account. Hey, you having a biscuit?”

  Nessa, of course, never has a biscuit. She shakes her head.

  As promised, Megan has gone to drop in her report to Ms. Breen, the school principal—aka the Turkey. So Nessa can dump her gear on her friend’s bed until she gets organized.

  First out of the bag is her History of the Sídhe: a mere hundred pages that contain all human knowledge of the species that has sworn to make the Irish extinct. There are larger books about them, of course, running to thousands of pages in some cases. But their writers have little more to offer than fear and speculation. Nessa prefers facts, and there isn’t a paragraph in the History that she doesn’t know by heart.

  The next book is a heftier one. It consists of last year’s Testimonies: the accounts of boys and girls who returned from the land of the Sídhe alive and with enough of their sanity intact to report on what they saw and heard.

  The final book, a present from her mam when she first left home, is Dánta Grádha—a collection of love poetry. It’s exactly the sort of thing she told Anto she has no truck with. She knows most of this one by heart too.

  The double doors swing open again. Sarah Taaft stands there like a single block of muscle. The former US Marine must be in her late forties, weathered by wind and sun, but it hasn’t softened her in the least. “We’re going for a run,” she shouts in English—she has never learned a word of Sídhe. “Tracksuits on.”

  Nessa feels a moment of dread as that pale gaze swings her way. “You coming, Nessa?”

  “Of course I’m coming.” She feels herself turning red, all the more so when Taaft rolls her eyes.

  “We won’t hold up for you.”

  “You never do.”

  Nessa doesn’t need their charity. She is the first one changed. The first to reach the double doors. And nobody can catch her down a flight of stairs. She has developed a technique of locking her legs in place and sliding down from step to step on the tough soles of her feet. She is never more than a breath away from disaster, with only her arms on banister and wall to keep control.

  Taaft shouts down after her. “No frickin’ stairs in fairyland, kid! It’s not gonna help you there!”

  Nessa hits the ground floor at enormous speed, falling with precision to slide along the polished tiles almost as far as the main entrance.

  Chuckwu is just arriving with his bags over his shoulder. “What’re you doing on the floor?” he asks.

  “Going for a run of course.” She refuses a hand up. Already she can hear the rumble and laughter of the rest of the dorm charging down the stairs behind her. “Gotta go.” From here to the trees she can only limp, and in no time at all the class passes her by. There’s Antoinette, grinning and blowing her a tobacco-scented kiss, while Liz Sweeney tries to muscle past. Even Megan has arrived, one arm still out of her tracksuit. “That dirty wee bitch of a turkey! Tell you later, Ness … ”

  And finally here comes Taaft, jogging past her. “Seriously, kid … ”

  Then they’re gone. Nessa’s legs ache by the time she reaches the trees, but she doesn’t allow herself to rest. “Stick to the rules,” she mutters. “Stick to the rules.”

  She’s an expert at this by now. She spots branches that are just the right size and knows too exactly how they should be broken, until, moments later, she has created a pair of springy crutches for herself.

  Nessa has stronger arms than anyone she knows. Over short stretches she can keep up with most of the runners in her class, male and female alike. But not today. This is going to be a loop run, as they call it.

  It takes her an hour, down into the dip between the hills, her crutches skidding dangerously on the first fallen leaves of the year; then curving up the switchback, along the ridge, until, as twilight falls, she reaches the formation known as “the Old Man”; the lone figure of Sergeant Taaft is sitting there, an illicit bottle of beer in her hand.

  Nessa halts before reaching her. She trembles and sweats, panting far more than any of her classmates would have by this point.

  “Just give it up, kid,” Taaft says. “Go home.”

  Nessa bites back the first reply that comes to her. It’s dangerous to antagonize Taaft. There’s a reason she’s the only member of staff without a nickname.

  “Why are you out here, Sergeant?”

  Taaft looks up. She has an angry face, made of toothaches and crab apples. But amid the pine smells and the forgiving rays of a dipping sun, she is as serene and lovely as the Madonna. “Maybe I’m hoping to catch a fairy.”

  “One of the Aes Sídhe?”

  “Sure. You think I don’t know that word, kid? The ‘People of the Mounds’?” She takes a long swallow from the clay bottle. Several more lie at her feet. “I even know where they got the name. I read that Book of Conquests of yours. How you drove them out of their homes and forced that treaty on them—”

  “I wasn’t even born! Nobody was!”

  “Your people sent them ‘under the mounds.’ Whatever the hell that means. And thousands of years later they turn up again and they’re gonna wipe you out.”

  “They won’t!” Nessa takes a deep breath. The sweat is starting to cool on her skin. She knows she should go, but will not give Taaft the satisfaction of rattling her. “More of us are surviving all the time,” she says. “It’s up to one in ten from one in a hundred twenty-five years ago.”

  “The fairies won’t stand for it, kid. You can bet your life they’re working on a plan right now to turn those odds back around. Whatever they come up with, I only hope it brings them here where I can snap their scrawny necks.”

  And that’s exactly what she does to the clay bottle. It cracks as loud as a gunshot, spilling beer onto the soil.

  Nessa swallows. “I have to get back, Sergeant.”

  Stopping to chat was a mistake. She’s given her arms time to remember how tired they are. She skids down the slope, her legs catching on stray roots and stones. By the time she makes it into the refectory, everyone else has showered and their spoons are already scraping the bottom of their plates.

  Anto looks relieved to see her and then pretends not to notice as she heads for one of the girls’ tables and squeezes in between Megan and Antoinette. Conor Geary, on the other hand, has followed her with his eyes all the way from the door. He towers over everyone at the boys’ tables. He could squash her with one blow of his fists and always looks at her as though that’s exactly what he intends. She will find out why soon enough, but it won’t be today.

  “By Crom, but you stink!” says Megan. “Luckily this filthy stew is slowly killing all my senses. Look! I saved you just enough to keep you in the bathroom all night.”

  “Why should I go to the bathroom at all, Megan, when your bed is right beside mine?”

  “You’re calling me a turd, Nessa Doherty.”

  “I’m what?”

  “If my bed is a toilet, and I’m in it, then—”

  Antoinette interrupts them. Her plate is so clean it looks like it has just come out of the shop. She dips a fork into the rapidly cooling sludge. “Always hap
py to help, my darlings,” she says.

  There are eight to a table here in the massive hall, with each class in its own section, boys and girls separate. The biggest cohort consists of the Year 1s, the ten-year-olds. They look so tiny, so puny and sweet. They freeze like rabbits whenever the bell rings or when one of the burly instructors so much as looks at them.

  At the top of the room lies the survivors’ table, where three of those who have come back from the Sídhe eat in the company of the instructors. Nabil is there tonight, although he doesn’t touch pork. His great dark eyes always seem so sad in such a gentle face. Maybe the scars running through his beard hold the reason for that. He doesn’t impress Taaft, however, who scowls on discovering that the only free seat is on the Frenchman’s left.

  Then there are the teachers’ tables, where Alanna Breen holds court. A famous scholar, she wrote History of the Sídhe and speaks their language like a native. She is joined this evening by the cadaverous Ms. Sheng, teacher of field medicine, and the portly, red-faced Mr. Hickey—another actual survivor, one of the early ones—who instructs in hunt theory. He’s laughing about something, but whatever the joke, he’s the only one who gets it.

  Many of the remaining teachers prefer to eat alone or in the nearby town of Boyle.

  Alanna Breen clinks her glass and silence spreads through the room. She stands, uncaring of the way the folds on her neck wobble when she moves, even though this particular feature has earned her the nickname of “the Turkey” among the students. Her appearance isn’t helped by a tiny chin cowering in the shadow of a great ski jump of a nose. However, her voice is strong, and the words come easily, each one a perfect grammatical jewel of case and gender or tense and number.

  “You’ll all have heard by now that one of our own, that Ponzy, survived a Call.”

  She waits for the cheering to come to an end. “He won’t be returning to join us here at Boyle, but his account will be published early next week. There’ll be copies in my office, and Mr. Hickey”—she bows to the red-faced gentleman at her side—“Mr. Hickey will be sharing the relevant parts with you all.”

  “The relevant parts, miss?” This was from Bartley, one of Ponzy’s two remaining classmates in Year 7.

  “The relevant parts,” she confirms, and so stunned are the audience that nobody else speaks for a while. Survivor accounts are always published in full. But the boy on the bus this morning, the one who was Called, said something about Ponzy, that he had been … changed.

  “We all knew Ponzy,” says Ms. Breen, “or Jack Ponsonby, as I suppose I should say. He has asked … he has asked that we remember him as he was. And having read his account, and in consultation with our master of hunt theory, I have agreed to leave out the final paragraph and any photographs of Ponzy’s … um … injuries. Now, that’s the end of the matter. We’re glad to have him back. To have another living soul to keep the future alive for our dear country. We’ll be serving dessert in a moment. But first the toast.”

  And she raises her glass, they all do, and cries, fervently, passionately, “The Nation must survive! The future is ours!”

  Nessa sees that the ten-year-olds haven’t joined in, but instead they are resting their heads on the tables.

  “Poor darlings,” says Antoinette. “They’re sleeping. They’ve been given the Welcome Tea.”

  “It’s pretty sick, if you ask me,” says Megan, and Nessa nods, despite the fact that she disagrees with her friend. The Year 1s are about to get the most important lesson the survival college can teach. In a few hours, each of them will wake up naked and alone in the forest. It is an experience that will terrify them, that will mark them forever. It is meant to, because if it ever happens again, it means they’ve been Called by the Sídhe.

  History class is a chance to doze right up until, out of the blue, the Turkey asks Antoinette, “Why do you think you’re here?”

  “Who? Me?” Antoinette practically jumps out of her seat. She hastily covers up the heroically proportioned male torso she’s been scratching onto her desk. It’s not really the sort of thing Ms. Breen appreciates, what with being the head of the college and all. “Um, why am I here, miss? Uh … the Sídhe want to kill me?”

  “Oh, they mean to do more than kill you, child. They want to twist you. To crumple you up like an old sheet of paper. I’m here trying to save you, and you don’t listen to a word I say!”

  The principal doesn’t normally teach class herself, but Chapman is having one of her “days” and won’t recover until her stash of alcohol has been exhausted. Ms. Breen already has the paperwork ready to fire her. And several other teachers are on the list too.

  But Ms. Breen is made of sterner stuff.

  She herself is of the lucky generation that passed through adolescence just before teenagers started turning up with terrifying, impossible mutilations. She remembers airplanes leaving Irish airspace, only to fall empty from the skies. She recalls reading about the last ferry to leave Dublin, about how it ran aground on the Wicklow coast with no life on board apart from rats and lonely pets. And she had a younger sister, Antoinette’s age, whose body she was never allowed to see after the Sídhe Called her.

  Ms. Breen wants to scream at her students, but what would be the point?

  “It’s just, miss,” says Antoinette, “I don’t see what that man … Geng … Geng … ”

  “Genghis Khan.”

  “Yeah, him. I don’t see what he has to do with us.”

  Ms. Breen grins. She holds up a picture of the man himself. “Antoinette, I’d like you to meet your ancestor.”

  “Him? He looks nothing like me! My dad’s Nigerian! And my mother is—”

  “I know exactly who your mother is, child!” An incredible woman, though far less charming than her daughter. “But you’re right. He looks nothing like anybody in Year Five. Yet he is ancestor to all of us. Every single one. I know you don’t believe that, and you don’t see what this has to do with the Sídhe, but I will explain. Now, let me start by saying he had a great many mistresses.”

  “Like me, miss!” shouts Conor, and his status in the class has everybody laughing dutifully. Even Ms. Breen smiles tightly.

  But Nessa freezes, because Anto, the compulsive joker, can’t resist playing with fire. “Oh, not like you, Conor,” he says. “I doubt the Khan’s mistresses were anywhere near as pretty as you are.”

  Now the class is laughing for real. Even Conor joins in, in apparent good nature.

  But after the lesson he turns his fury on Anto in the corridor.

  The children have been trained to fight, to maim even, by the ex–special forces of half the world. And Conor has learned better than anybody. Anto is pretty good—fast enough to block the first blow or two—but before some of the others can bring his attacker down, while Nessa is struggling to push forward, Conor has already blackened an eye and broken a rib.

  Nessa feels her gorge rise. All she can think is, What if Anto is Called right now? In this weakened condition? What if the Sídhe Call him?

  He may be thinking the same thing, because he’s shaking and blood is dripping from split lips. He’s desperately trying not to cry in front of everybody. Nessa wants to go to him and lift him up. She wants to hold him close, and it’s the right thing, the only human thing, to do.

  She bottles it all down. It’s his own fault. His own bloody fault—he was practically asking for it. Nessa is here to survive. She cares for nobody and her face is as serene as the statue of a saint.

  Anto must see her there in the crowd, as his friends help him up, but he knows the rules too and his eyes sweep over her. He limps away, the beaten dog.

  Nobody speaks up for him. Nobody goes with him. Many, in fact, snigger.

  Conor, meanwhile, shakes off his own gang like so many fleas. “Sooner he learns respect, more of his blood stays on the inside.”

  “Don’t worry,” says Megan in Nessa’s ear. “That dirty wee shite will spend days in the Cage for this.”

  Onl
y if an instructor catches him in the act, because being a bully is somehow never as bad as being a snitch.

  That night Nessa does the stupid thing again, the thing she swore she would never repeat. It has been building up in her since the boy from Omagh was Called on the bus, and the events of this day have made the pressure unbearable.

  When the others fall into exhausted sleep, she slides out from under her quilt and puts the paper into the breast pocket of her pajamas.

  “Where are you going?” Megan whispers. She has a godlike instinct for knowing when Nessa is doing something wrong.

  “The bathroom?”

  “You never go after lights-out.”

  “I do. You just sleep through it.”

  “No, I don’t, you filthy whore. I warned you about this last time, didn’t I?”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “How do you expect me to sleep now?” But Megan sighs and lies down.

  As promised, Nessa heads for the bathroom, which is in a little annex at the end of the dorm. She meets Squeaky Emma on the way out. The girl only comes up to Nessa’s shoulder, but she’s one of the fastest runners in the year.

  “The … uh … You might want to wait a bit, Nessa. And open a window. Sorry.”

  “Sure,” says Nessa.

  The smell isn’t as bad as advertised, but she opens the window just the same. Then she removes her dressing gown and climbs outside in thin pajamas. She’s three stories up. Down below, cracked old paving stones are waiting to welcome her should she fall. They nearly get their chance when a leg catches on the windowsill. But after that her powerful arms do most of the work.

  The cheap construction of the dorm buildings provides Nessa with plenty of handholds. Even better is the ivy that has had a generation to grow strong. She climbs crabwise, full to the brim with joy. This is not the act of a survivor. It goes against everything she believes, everything she needs to be doing. None of that can keep the smile off her face.

  Now she’s at the corridor window. A yelp comes from inside and she spots some of the dogs wandering around. They’re supposed to patrol for nonexistent Sídhe spies. But the students’ theory is that the authorities just want to keep boys and girls apart. Nobody pregnant has ever survived a Call. Not once in twenty-five years. But then why not just have us in separate schools?