Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Read online

  Folk’d Up Beyond All Recognition

  (FUBAR)

  Laurence Donaghy

  Published by Last Passage

  www.lastpassage.com

  * * *

  Previously, on Folk’d…

  Danny Morrigan had it all planned out. Do the degree in English Literature (doable, if a bit dull), get a job teaching – across the water in England if necessary, fuck knew he’d little enough keeping him in Northern Ireland – and split his time equally between instructing extremely bored teenagers how to read Cliff notes about Macbeth’s motivations and using a semi-respectable teaching paypacket to drink, laze and ride out the remainder of his twenties.

  A ‘phonecall one day changed all that. His ex-girlfriend (and that was putting it strongly; they’d been together a few weeks and had drifted apart through mutual inaction) Ellie had informed him that her pregnancy test kit was one stripe shy of being a tube of Aquafresh. Danny, whose father had abruptly walked out on him at the age of ten and returned to his (and his mother’s) life ten years later with a similar suddenness, was faced with a snap decision about what to do. He chose to try and make a go of it with Ellie, for the baby’s sake.

  Eighteen months later, and father of a bouncing baby boy christened Luke, Danny and Ellie struggled to get by on not much money. His degree aborted so that his baby wouldn’t be fatherless, Danny worked in a callcentre for Lircom, a telecommunications company so heartless they’d once unsuccessfully attempted to install a vending machine for first aid supplies.

  After a particularly shitty argument with Ellie about the unexpected direction his life had taken, Danny’s day went from bad to worse as he was informed he was surplus to requirements at Lircom. Chickening out of telling Ellie, he was almost deafened by an ear-splitting electronic squeal from his mobile. Returning home that evening, he found himself walking into the Marie Celeste; Ellie and Luke had vanished, seemingly the instant before he’d opened the front door.

  Dazed, disbelieving, not knowing what to think, Danny found himself the unwelcome recipient of suspicion from Ellie’s father, the wealthy CEO of a rival company to Lircom. Going through the motions of reporting Ellie and Luke to the police as missing, Danny took the opportunity to have his old linguistics professor analyse the strange electronic squeal and discovered, with the help of his friend Steve, that part of it was a voice speaking in an ancient Gaelic dialect, repeating the words consider it granted over and over.

  Things went from strange to plain crazy when everyone, including his friends and family, seemed to forget about baby Luke altogether, as if the child had been erased wholesale from their collective memories. Not knowing if he was crazy or if everyone was against him, Danny found unexpected sympathy from an elderly neighbour, Bee, who informed him that the source of his troubles was the mound in his garden. By digging it up, he’d disturbed a faerie rath and thus brought a curse down on himself. Not believing a word of it, Danny threw the old woman out, even as she told him his troubles were only just beginning.

  Waking up the next morning, Danny himself acted as though nothing were amiss. He was now through the looking glass; in a parallel reality where Ellie and he had never gotten together, where she had never conceived Luke and he had finished his degree and gotten a graduate recruitment job as a middle manager at Lircom. Wealthy, successful and carefree, he had everything he had craved, everything he considered taken from him. He had the ear of Mr Black, Lircom’s enigmatic, brilliant, reclusive Chief Executive.

  And yet…

  And yet he was troubled. Snatches of memories plagued him. He wondered why the world tasted wrong. Why his girlfriend’s head lying on his head felt wrong. Accepting an invite to come over and have drinks with Steve and his girlfriend – none other than Ellie in this reality – Danny experienced a world-shattering revelation; he was living a lie. This world, however it had come about, was missing one thing – his son. He remembered that he had a condition called synaesthesia, the ability for one sense to trigger another sense, for colours to have smells and for sensations to be coloured. It was this ability that allowed him to perceive the truth.

  Kissing an astonished Ellie impulsively, leaving Steve and his own girlfriend in this reality – Maggie – aghast and betrayed, Danny went back to the house he owned and encountered Bee once more. Now convinced she was telling the truth, he dug up the restored mound at the bottom of what was once his garden, exposing a stone tablet that triggered a huge wave of sensations within him, opening a portal that sucked him downwards…

  Meanwhile, “Mr Black”, actually the ancient entity Dother, son of an immensely powerful and malevolent witch called Carman, receives a phone call from his long-lost brother Dian. Dother asks his brother to collaborate with him, as with the Morrigan now crossing over, a plan centuries in the making has come to fruition.

  * * *

  Copyright © 2012 Laurence Donaghy

  The right of Laurence Donaghy to be identified as the Authorof the Work has been asserted by him in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First Published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  LAST PASSAGE

  www.lastpassage.com

  Apart from any use permitted in under UK copyright law, this publication may not be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Folk’d Up Beyond All Recognition is a work of fiction.

  ISBN: 978-1-908956-06-4 Apple

  ISBN: 978-1-908956-05-7 Amazon

  ISBN: 978-1-908956-07-1 Kobo

  Also by Laurence Donaghy

  Folk’d

  Typeset in Verdana by Last Passage Studios, Nottingham UK.

  Cover Design and Illustration: Kevin Elliott ([email protected])

  Last Passage Publications,

  Nottingham, UK.

  Follow Laurence Donaghy on Twitter: @LarboIreland

  More information: www.laurencedonaghy.co.uk

  * * *

  The Meeting With the Goddess

  The Otherworld, Now

  Choice.

  That was what it all boiled down to.

  Life was essentially chaos, a string of entirely random events thrown together by an idiot in the dark, a cosmic amoeba building a piece of clockwork the size of the Milky Way out of bits of sponge and glue while wearing oven mitts, ordered and sequenced by those million fucking monkeys on their million fucking typewriters.

  Any illusion that humanity had some part to play in ordering the tune gave us comfort that we maintained some small degree of control over this great misshapen wheel of fortune, upon which, whether we liked it or not, our lives span in a constant whirligig.

  Deep in his heart, Danny Morrigan had never really gotten over the fact that the choice of having a child had been removed from him. The fait accompli of Ellie’s pregnancy had simply been sms’d fully-formed into his sequence, a left-turn at the start of the second act.

  He envied the couples who courted, dated, got engaged, married, and moved in together thereafter. The couple who did every little step on the journey in the preordained order as if they were sailing regally down some great canal way of existence with a following breeze at their backs, while he seemed permanently stuck trying to paddle upstream in a certain creek without a crucial instrument.

  And it was hard.

  It was hard to have a child. It was hard if you did what you were supposed to do and tried to become a proper parent to the little soul you found yourself entrusted with. The first time his Ma had
babysat for little Luke, then all of ten days old, to allow he and Ellie to go into town for a bit of shopping and a bite to eat.

  They had sat there in that miserable little café, fingers tapping staccato beats of nervousness on the table, casting glances at mobiles, fighting the urge to ring more times than would have been classed as psychotic. They’d been home half an hour earlier than agreed.

  What bugged him was when people, Steve included, had asked him after a few months how he was finding fatherhood - good or bad? As if a transition that huge in your life, going from thinking solely about yourself and your own pursuits to suddenly having this little person who supplanted all of that, who ripped up most of the things you thought you knew about yourself, could be pigeonholed into one of two little boxes; as if summing up the impact a child had had on your life was like some sort of review, to be topped off with a one-to-five star rating or a percentage score.

  So, Parenthood the permanently life-changing concept, what’dya make of it? Oh well, I’d give it 56%; it started well enough but it tailed off badly after the first four or five years. Here’s hoping the director can correct that for, God forbid, any sequels.

  To his mind the correct answer – the only fucking answer – was and had always been, it depends. Not on the week, or the day, or mostly even the hour; it fluctuated constantly, almost minute-to-minute. He remembered Luke’s first smile and the elation that had come from witnessing it, but he also remembered the three nights that Luke hadn’t slept because he had gastro - three nights of cleaning up projectile vomit and holding a baby emitting hundred-decibel squeals of (entirely justified) rage because his miniscule wee arse looked like Nagasaki circa August 1945.

  Ellie was terrified that he’d only come back to her because she’d been pregnant. It was true - he had gone to her for that reason. But in the time they’d spent together since, they’d gone through more than he and Maggie, than he and anyone had ever gone through, and the mere fact that on average they’d been able to tolerate each other’s company while coping with a small house, a cramped budget, curtailed careers, problematic parents, and a wee fella all thrown into the mix…Jesus, the fact that they hadn’t been actively trying to beat each other’s faces into a bloody paste on sight by now was a bit of a miracle.

  Was that love?

  Was that the life he wanted?

  Was that…grass…he was tasting?

  Danny’s brain, which until that moment had been stuck in a sort of neutral that had allowed him to philosophise, began a kind of connect-the-dots activity through its neural pathways that controlled short-term memory.

  The argument. The mobile. The electronic squeal.

  The empty house. The empty crib. The emptiness.

  The search. The feeling of falling as everyone began to forget. The feeling of him forgetting.

  He had forgotten his own son’s disappearance.

  The connect-the-dots puzzle in his mind paused for several masochistic moments at this point, to really let him marinate in the guilt juices of this one. He could feel the guilt weighing on his shoulders, as though it were nibbling at him, a physical thing.

  The other life. The feeling of wrongness. The revelation at Ellie and Steve’s house.

  Shit. Christ. He had. Dear God. He had almost fucked Maggie. Okay, so reality itself had been reordered at the time and the universe had clearly gone through some kind of top-to-bottom magical reversal by a being of unimaginable power.

  Still…

  If Ellie found out she’d cream him.

  Another pause, so the guilt could ramp up another notch. He felt like a guilt cake slowly rising to perfection in the kiln of self-reproach.

  Someone sniggered.

  He was going to have to open his eyes, he decided at the point of hearing the sniggering, because the sound of the sniggering had coincided rather neatly with the final dot-to-dots being joined and a memory of being sucked into the earth through a portal in what had once been his front garden had surfaced rudely. When something like that happened to you and you found yourself alive, tasting grass and being sniggered at, you at least owed it to yourself to open your eyes.

  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 hard little fuckin’ beak, right in the crook of his neck, not hard enough to draw blood but hard enough to penetrate right through his unconsciousness and make him emerge into the waking world. What the fuck was a bird’s beak made of anyway? Diamond?

  “GETTAFUCKOFFYAFUCKER!” he said, spasming his entire shoulder blades 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 where the almighty fuck WAS he anyway?

  He got to his feet and blinked in the moonlight, 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’d something trapped in his teeth.

  He dropped his gaze to the crow, which regarded 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.

  “You laughing at me, ya big feathery cunt?” he asked it evenly.

  “Shouldn’t I?” the crow replied.

  Talking crow. Danny was vaguely aware that he should be going through all the clichés of disbelief, fear and incredulity, in the same way he was vaguely aware that a section of rainforest the size of fuck knew what was cut down every fart’s end, or that so-and-so many kids born in Africa every second didn’t make it. These things mattered, but right then and there, after the parallel universe and the amazing vanishing baby trick the cosmos had pulled on him, they weren’t top of his worry pile.

  “You’re not gonna talk only in poetry or somethin’ are ya?” Danny demanded. “If I sniff so much as a whiff of iambic pentameter comin’ outta that beak-”

  The crow hopped a few feet sideways. Insofar as birds could have facial expressions, this one looked decidedly patronising, to Danny’s eyes. “I assume you’ve never talked to a Creature of Omen before?” it demanded.

  “I’ve been very drunk in some very dark clubs,” Danny offered. “Chances are I’ve done more than talked to some Creatures of Omen, mate.”

  “Ignorant mortal! I am a Crow! Harbinger 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, because he needed a moment to take stock, and as he sat, he gave this news all the grave import he could muster, summoning on all his years of living and breathing as a Belfast native to come up with an appropriate riposte.

  “So!?“

  He did this very deliberately. Expert linguists have agreed that the Belfast So!? is unique in all the world’s retorts contained in all the world’s dialects of all the world’s languages for some simple, yet awe-inspiring reason. There exists no counter-move to its powers. Said properly, with exactly the right amount of disdain and nonchalance, coupled with a sneering contempt and flavoured with a soupçon of aggression, the most reasoned and logical statement simply falls apart under its withering gaze. It is the Rosetta Stone of putdowns from which all other scoffs are derived, diluted from its purity.

  Had it been said to Moses when he presented the Commandments from Mount Sinai, Christianity would have crumbled there and then and everyone would have filed off sheepishly to see if manna could indeed be rolled up and smoked.

  “SO!!“ the crow spluttered, which for a thing lacking lips
was not an easy thing to do. “For millennia the Crow served as mystical portents of doom! Divining the chaos of the battlefield and choosing from its infinite variations an unerring picture of the future yet to pass! My magics were ineffable! My conclusions unchallenged!”

  “So?!” said Danny.

  “So? So??? SO????” the crow thundered. Danny knew he had the wee bastard.

  “Yeah, so?!” he concluded, and then sealed the deal. ”And what? What’dja 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 with the infinite patience men had employed for millennia to allow the other person in the argument to implode with rage. “I thought that’s where we came in?”

  “I am The MORRIGAN!”

  Danny 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 - shittin on your foes from a great height? Stoppin them gettin any sleep by sittin in a fuckin tree all night cawing like a cunt?”

  “Crows are a form of the goddess Morrigan. An aspect of her whole,” the crow explained, in a tone that suggested it was flabbergasted at his stupidity.

  “So where’s the rest of her?” Danny asked, deciding to forgo the temptations presented to him by the phrase aspect of her whole but making a note of it for later.