The Invasion Read online

  ‘What about the others? The ones who don’t go home?’

  ‘Expelled,’ says Annie. ‘They’re tied to a boat and it’s sent drifting out to sea. Sometimes it comes back empty. Sometimes it doesn’t come back at all.’

  Nessa tries to suppress a shiver.

  She thought she’d never sleep after that, but now a truncheon against the door has both her and Annie leaping up in painful surprise. ‘Malley! Stay in bed. Not a foot outside of the blankets or it gets broken. Doherty, you’re coming to the professor.’

  ‘The what?’

  Annie yawns, already going back to sleep. ‘Whatever you do, baby,’ she mutters, ‘don’t touch anything.’

  Nessa dresses and finds herself in a group of six. There’s the spiky-haired young woman she fought yesterday. Ciara? Was that her name? Whoever she is, she’s glaring and rubbing her sore arm as though in memory of the pain Nessa caused her. There’s another woman in her twenties with sallow skin and a plain face. She looks utterly, utterly normal, except Nessa can’t help staring and neither can several of the others. What is it about her? She’s at least ten years older than Nessa’s fourteen, but her uncertain smile is all so … so innocent.

  A line of armoured guards herds the prisoners along between them. They carry truncheons. They keep alert. Nessa knows they have to. Nobody over the age of ten and under the age of forty is harmless these days. The guards keep their distance and drive their charges through a series of bewildering turns until the group arrives at a huge metal door, scarred, scratched, etched with acid and, in several places, badly scorched. One of the men speaks into a tattered walkie-talkie. ‘Where is she?’

  The reply comes hissing and crackling: ‘Behind her desk. I can see her on the screen.’

  ‘You’re sure she’s not faking the images again?’

  ‘I haven’t taken my eyes off her.’

  The guard bites his lip. ‘All right, lads. Gas masks at the ready in case she tries to get funny again.’

  They nod and grip truncheons while one of them pulls back the bolts and slides open the heavy door as quickly as he can.

  What’s inside? Nessa wonders, her heart beating fast. And then she remembers what the warden told her, about how the worst murderer in Irish history lives within the prison. What was it he said? She’s killed, and God forgive me, I’m sure she’ll kill again. Are we to be murdered? she wonders.

  The guards herd them into a large space crowded with equipment and chairs and sharp metal objects. Nessa scans the room for a monster, but all she sees is a frail little woman, her white hair in a sloppy bun.

  The door slams shut. Not one of the guards has come inside.

  ‘Sit down, ladies,’ the woman says pleasantly. ‘Wherever it’s convenient.’

  ‘Who by Lugh’s greasy spear are you?’ Ciara asks in Sídhe.

  ‘I won’t be having any of that funny talk. Speak English in this room. Or German if ye must.’

  ‘What’s German?’ The spiky-haired girl is mystified.

  ‘It’s a country beside England,’ another prisoner replies. ‘They had a war, I think.’

  ‘No,’ says Ciara, rolling her eyes. ‘No, by Crom – everybody knows it’s Spain that’s beside England.’

  Nessa looks around the long rectangular room that’s half scrapyard and half laboratory. Machines lie everywhere, their innards exposed. Dust covers mugs on shelves, spoons stuck to them with old honey. The only clean objects Nessa can see are a collection of skulls. All were human once – she can tell that much. But a short time before they died, the Sídhe got their hands on them. Now some are shaped like crocodiles, some like cows or snakes or baboons. One still looks completely human, except for an indented spiral, drawn idly with a lazy finger. Nessa has to swallow hard when she sees that one, wondering how much it must have hurt. Wondering at the terror, the hopelessness of the victim’s final minutes.

  Meanwhile, the strangely innocent woman with the sallow skin wanders over to one of the tables. She picks up a box. And then, a crack sounds, loud enough to make everybody jump, while the girl herself flies backwards to land in a heap on the floor.

  The old woman stifles a yawn. She doesn’t look like a murderer. ‘I suggest ye don’t touch anything. Now –’ she clears her throat, as the victim groans, vomits, and climbs up onto her knees – ‘ye may call me Professor Farrell. Or just Professor will do.’ She has been standing behind a desk and she limps around to the front of it, a feeble creature, her bones probably brittle, her hair wild.

  Warden Barry said she was the Nation’s leading expert on the Sídhe. A resource so valuable that any crime she commits can and must be overlooked.

  The professor pokes the woman on the floor with a metal walking stick.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Uh … uh, Fonseca, miss. Angela Fonseca.’

  Professor Farrell’s eyes widen. ‘Oh! You’re that one. Just as well you weren’t killed just now. Sit then. All of ye must sit!’

  ‘Why should we?’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Ciara. Not that it’s your business, by Crom.’ Her entire mouth is made for snarling. ‘I’m sick of orders. Sick of it. Sick of that sack of a husband and the screaming little Sídhe-twisted puppy I bore for the Nation.’

  ‘How lovely for you. Do what you’re told, Ciara.’

  ‘Why?’ She stands, muscular, imposing, glaring down at the diminutive professor. ‘Why do you old ones get to give all the orders?’

  A fine mist sprays from the end of Professor Farrell’s cane. The front of one of the girl’s prison shoes simply melts and Ciara falls back screaming and grabbing for her foot.

  ‘This is the only question of yours I will answer,’ says Professor Farrell, as Ciara writhes on the floor. ‘The old are in charge because we are the only ones who know anything. For example, how to make acid from sodium bisulphate and table salt. The rest of ye are taught only to survive and have babies, and ye’re not even very good at that!’

  ‘You …’ Ciara isn’t quite ready to give up, although tears stream down her face. ‘You wouldn’t talk like that if … if you’d seen the Grey Land.’

  ‘Yes, I believe it can be unpleasant. Now, here’s what’s going to happen. Ye’re all unusual in some way, and since the attacks on the survival colleges in Mallow, Bangor and Boyle, ye’re suspected of treachery to the Nation.’

  Other than Nessa, watching carefully, and Angela Fonseca, still on the floor, everyone protests loudly.

  ‘I don’t care,’ the professor says. ‘Save yeer moans for when they’re sending ye out to sea. But I’ll tell ye this: every woman who cooperates with me has a chance of being cleared of treason. At the very least, Warden Barry’ll give ye another week before getting rid of ye.’

  She takes the names of the remaining prisoners. When the professor reaches Nessa, however, she pauses. ‘Little twig legs,’ she says. ‘I know who you are. I’ll get to you soon.’

  One at a time, she invites the others over to a desk where medical and scientific junk fight for space, and there she examines them, none too gently. Ciara screams as the professor probes the Sídhe handprint on her arm. ‘Wait by the door,’ the old woman says afterwards. ‘You’re nothing but an accident.’

  The next woman claims her eyes changed colour in the Grey Land. The professor shoves needles into her until she weeps and then studies her tears. But she too is dismissed and told to wait by the door. In the end only Nessa and Angela remain unexamined.

  ‘You’re next, polio girl. I’ve been looking forward to this.’ The old woman has an evil, witch’s grin, but Nessa will not give her the satisfaction of seeing her flinch. I don’t like you, she thinks, and this too she keeps from her face, fighting not to pull back when samples of skin and blood are taken with more gusto than necessary. But Professor Farrell is merely going through the motions. Her eyes don’t really light up until she produces a Bunsen burner and sets it aflame.

  ‘For your sake, girl, I hope you were telling the truth in your
Testimony.’

  ‘I was.’ Mostly. Nessa left out the part about how Conor died. Her account stops right at the moment she walked naked from the burning dorm, and, as with most Testimonies, nobody cares too much about the aftermath. Let the counsellors deal with that.

  ‘Put your hand over the flame, girl.’

  Nessa does, leaving it there, feeling no pain except for a gentle, ticklish warmth.

  ‘By God! That’s 1,200 degrees right there. They must have loved you, those Sídhe, to give you such a gift.’

  ‘They did not.’

  ‘Don’t move your hand, we’re not done. Now, girl, answer me this. Where does the heat go?’

  Into Nessa’s bones is the answer, gently, gently, spreading evenly throughout her whole skeleton. She can release it anytime she wishes. Or hold it in. She could spit it into the professor’s face if she were that kind of person, but of course she is not.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she lies. She has to speak around a thermometer stuck in her mouth. The mercury hasn’t budged. ‘Into the air?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool! I’m measuring the temperature around you. You think I wouldn’t have planned for that when I knew you were coming? No, no, it’s not the air. You must answer me, or it’s the boats for you, girl.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know, Professor. For all I care it goes to the sky, or the Grey Land or—’

  ‘Stop!’ Professor Farrell’s eyes bulge, her breathing suddenly quick. ‘The Grey Land! Now that would be some trick! It goes to the Grey Land!’

  And Nessa realizes she has something the professor really wants: a mystery. The woman may be a monster, but she loves her work to the point of obsession. As long as Nessa can keep her intrigued, she will get to stay away from the boats that may or may not take her back to hell. But the heat is filling her bones now, and the evenly distributed warmth is turning hot. She might have to release it soon, and what good is her mystery then?

  ‘My hand is tired,’ she says, doing her best to sound bored. ‘Can I take it down?’

  Professor Farrell nods and extinguishes the gas.

  ‘I’ll call the guards to take the rest of them back to the cells. But you two –’ she means Nessa and Angela – ‘ye’re coming with me. I’ll introduce ye to His Excellency, the ambassador.’ Her eyes gleam and she even rubs the palms of her hands together like the villain in a movie. ‘Yes, always an interesting first step … I can’t wait to see what he makes of ye!’

  She picks up an ancient telephone – it even has a dial! And mutters into it for a few minutes. Moments later, the metal door slides open. The others are taken away, and that seems to be the end of it. The three of them are left alone, with the old woman murmuring to herself, taking notes with the filthy chewed stub of a pencil.

  ‘That’s pretty amazing,’ Angela says to Nessa. She has the little voice of a mouse, husky and squeaky at the same time. Her eyes never quite meet those of the younger girl. ‘That thing you do with the fire.’

  Nessa smiles. Angela has spoken in Sídhe, but the professor no longer seems to notice them so Nessa responds in kind. ‘I know it is. But why didn’t she test you?’

  The young woman smiles sadly. Her face is so ordinary, yet Nessa still can’t shake the feeling that something is deeply wrong with her. She has dark, sorrowful eyes, and she moves like a lost chick, so full of uncertainty, of worry and yearning.

  She takes a deep, ragged breath. ‘I … I’ve told people this a host of times and I’m sure you won’t believe me any more than they did. But … I haven’t been Called.’

  Nessa can feel her mouth hanging open and forces it shut. Questions rush up her throat, but like the fire that still lies coiled in her bones she holds them back. Everybody gets Called during their teens. Everybody. A few famous cases have made it beyond their eighteenth birthday before it happened to them, but they are always the ones who have it worst. Waiting and waiting, the tension rising day after day as the odds of it happening grow ever shorter. It’s driven a few of these hangers-on to suicide, despite the extra counselling they get telling them to keep training, to hold their nerve …

  ‘I’m twenty-five,’ Angela says, and all Nessa can do is blink at her. ‘Nobody will marry me. There’s no … there’s no legal mechanism, you see. Nobody will take me as an apprentice. The Nation won’t pay for education. Either I’m lying about the Call or … or it may still be waiting for me. They can’t believe a word that comes out of my mouth.’

  Nessa’s not a hugger, but she wants to hug this girl. ‘I believe you, Angela,’ is the best she can manage. And she does. There’s a look the Called have, and it’s nothing like the innocence on this young woman’s face. ‘Don’t cry,’ she says. ‘It might never happen now. You’re past the age, after all.’

  Their conversation is interrupted by a loud buzzer. A voice comes over a speaker in the ceiling. ‘Professor, it’s Warden Barry. I hear you want to take these two to see His Excellency.’

  ‘I do. I will learn so much.’

  ‘Well then, please stay away from the exit. You know the drill.’

  The door opens again, just long enough for a few lengths of chain to be thrown inside.

  The warden continues. ‘Professor, you we will have to handcuff. For obvious reasons. And you will use the cane provided by the guards. Do not attempt to take the metal one with you.’

  Professor Farrell snorts. ‘What makes you even think I want to escape? I came back the other times of my own accord.’

  ‘People died those other times. They had families.’

  ‘A great achievement on their part, no doubt.’ The professor yawns. ‘Very well, girls. Ye’re about to learn one of the Nation’s great secrets. As if the enemy don’t already know! Come on.’

  The Nightmare

  Anto wakes when a glass of water is thrown over his face. It drips down his cheeks in the pitch-darkness. ‘You were screaming,’ says a voice. ‘Keeping us all awake.’ But there’s no anger in the words. All of Ireland has long since learned to deal with the likes of him.

  ‘Thanks,’ Anto whispers. He’s panting. His throat feels raw and the sheets cling to his sweaty skin. He wants to scream again, because his arm is throbbing in the exact spot where first she touched him, the Sídhe woman. So beautiful, she was. He can see her gorgeous face painted on the darkness. A goddess, an absolute goddess. It’s all he can do not to whimper.

  His arm grew under her touch. But how? It’s not as if the rest of his body became smaller to compensate. The substance came from elsewhere. From the Grey Land itself, a colony of evil at home in his flesh.

  Nessa should be here. With him. But even the thought of her helps. It pushes aside that other woman and slows his breathing back to normal. Nessa has drawn so many lovely pictures for him. Of a house with a dog. Of clean air and no strangers to gawp at his disfigurement. Already his eyes begin to droop. Nessa. She anchors him so that no storm of the Sídhe can tear him away from happiness.

  He starts to drift again, but then he sits up, gasping. Nessa! Of course! She’s in trouble. That’s why he’s here; that’s why! The State wants him out of the way, but if the most important person in his life needs him, then, ‘out of the way’ is the last place he should be.

  Don’t be a fool! part of him says. There’ll be another explanation. He spends the rest of the night trying to find one.

  Anto gets to the canteen later than everybody else. It’s not so very different from the refectory at school, except there are a lot more men here than women, and Anto has no idea where he’s supposed to sit. He balances his tray awkwardly with his normal hand and looks around for a familiar face. Lots of people are staring at him for some reason.

  He spots dark Karim, looking so much older in the morning light than she did yesterday. She sits forehead to forehead with another woman, their heated conversation leaving no place for a mere boy. But as he passes, Karim’s friend turns to him and he recognizes the mocking voice from the night before that suggested he get a pet.
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br />   ‘Well,’ she says, her face glittering with almost as many piercings as Anto’s granny had, ‘can’t believe you didn’t shoot the boy for that stunt with the bull, Sergeant. And then you gave him my seat on the truck!’

  ‘Look at him, Ellie,’ Karim says, ‘he’s simply too delicious to kill.’ Ellie winks, and with that the two women lower their heads, leaving him alone in the middle of the floor.

  A few of the men at a table nearby are grinning. Others shake heads or roll their eyes. Some nudge each other.

  ‘Hey, Bullboy, you can sit over here!’

  It’s Ryan, slurping from a big bowl of porridge, although he has to hunch over in his chair for the sake of his sensitive wing stubs and every spoonful raised loses half its cargo when he twitches. He’s tired-looking too, like everybody here. And old. None of that stops him grinning. Anto slides in between him and stocky Byrne, who, despite the Irish surname, looks wholly Chinese and mutters a Sídhe greeting in a strong northern accent.

  ‘We’re just hearin’ now,’ Ryan says, ‘that you were from that school that was burnt down in Roscommon?’

  That explains the stares. Anto nods, remembering screams and deadly Sídhe attackers no larger than toddlers.

  ‘You must know this already,’ Ryan says, ‘but the rest of us are just hearin’ that the whole school was a nest of traitors.’ Ryan misinterprets the look on Anto’s face. ‘Oh, not you! We know you’re not one, lad, or they’d have sent you off in a boat, right, Byrnie?’

  ‘Right,’ Byrne says, although he doesn’t look quite so sure.

  Three men on the far side of the table make no pretence of having any conversation of their own. One is Corless, whose enormous jacket Anto bled on the night before.