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Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Page 11


  “Just as well you’re wearing that nappy,” Bee said.

  “You had…questions?”

  “I trust you’ll answer them wisely?” Bee asked.

  “I will,” he replied.

  “Where is her child?”

  Steve felt Ellie stiffen beneath him, felt her stop trembling all at once as the question left Bee’s lips, as though some pulse had gone through her body. She removed herself from his position of support, though she glanced at him momentarily with what might have been gratitude in her eyes, before it was replaced with something infinitely colder.

  “Luke,” Ellie said, and closed her eyes as a great shudder took her. It looked to Steve as though she were shaking something off; and he wasn’t far from the truth. The last of the influence was wearing away. He could feel it too.

  “She has him, of course,” the thing that had once been Aaron replied. “He was the…” and he waved a tiny little hand in the air, searching for the right word, “…the collateral.”

  Women were a puzzle to Steve. Take Ellie, for example. One minute she could be collapsing and needing propped back up against him, trembling like a leaf in a storm, pressed so close to him he could feel her heart thudding in her chest…along with everything else, everything he was trying to decide whether he should be thinking about or not.

  The next minute-

  He could only watch as she launched herself across the room at the changeling, sweeping her arm around and scooping it up with a clenched grasp of her fingers, lifting it completely off its little blue-babygro’d feet and slamming it bodily against the far window, the one looking out into their pitiful little backyard. So hard was the final slam that cracks spiderwebbed across the glass.

  It had all happened in under two seconds.

  The changeling found itself looking into the eyes of the woman who had been feeding it warm milk less than five minutes previously, the eyes of a mother. Eyes which had promised always to love, never to leave, always to protect.

  Not it. Him. Not Aaron. Luke.

  “I want my son.”

  If her arm was showing any strain from keeping his not-inconsiderable weight, size notwithstanding, pinned to the window, she was showing no visible sign of it on her face. There would have been no room for anything besides the cold, hard fury.

  “I can’t help you-“

  She must have increased the pressure on its neck, because it started to have difficulty forming words after that. Steve could see the muscles standing out in her arm like rope, but still her hold held.

  “I! WANT! MY! SON!!!”

  “You don’t understand…” it wheezed, staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. “I’d tell you if I could…please, believe me. This is so much bigger than any of you…than me…when the network comes…none of it is going to matter anyway…”

  “Network?” Steve said. Beside him, from the corner of his eye, he saw Bee rear backwards, her eyes wide.

  “Get away from the WIN-!”

  Too late.

  The glass of the window Ellie was holding the changeling against shattered inwards, and something came through from the back yard outside. Throwing his hands up to protect himself from the flying shards of glass, and only partially succeeding, Steve’s brain ceased to function in normal time and instead seemed to function by sending him snapshots for him to process.

  Teeth. Claws. A wolf. Too large. Far too large.

  Ellie, screaming. Hitting the floor. The changeling, freed from her grasp.

  The not-wolf, now in the room. Eyeing Ellie. Teeth showing. Gathering itself for a spring.

  Bee, screaming. Ellie, sprawled, bleeding. Helpless.

  The wolf in the air.

  “NO!” a cry came. Not from his mouth.

  The not-wolf’s jaws, closing with a wet crunch. The sound of something mortally wounded.

  Ellie. Ellie, alive. Ellie, unbitten.

  The not-wolf, backing off a few paces until its massive bulk was against the wall, and shaking its great head so that the thing between its jaws fell to the floor. Blood…Jesus God, blood everywhere…

  But not Ellie’s blood.

  “Mammy,” the changeling wheezed with destroyed lungs, looking one last time at Ellie before lying still. The not-wolf, confused at this turn of events, began to come around from its momentary stupor and sink to springing position once more-

  -something exploded against its jaws. Something that sent white liquid fountaining in all directions, a few droplets of which landed on Steve’s lips.

  “Eat that ya fucker!”

  Instinctively, his tongue reached out to taste the droplet. It was milk.

  The wolf howled long and loud, a howl of outrage and betrayal, thrashing around wildly, its eyes wide and full of pain and incomprehension. The howl was at such a volume that all three humans were forced to clap their hands over their ears; the pitch seemed to scrape directly across the mind, jagging its edges; Steve sank to his knees, unable to stop himself from closing his eyes out of some insane impulse to block them from this sonic assault lest they explode in his sockets.

  Seconds, maybe minutes, passed, before he realised the sound was gone, that he still seemed to be alive and not an aperitif. He opened his eyes once more, steeling himself for whatever horrors might greet him.

  Broken glass. Blood. Bee, slowly climbing back up the doorframe. Ellie, weeping, her knees drawn up to her head, her body slowly rocking back and forth. The changeling’s body, already looking as if it had been dead a hundred years, no more than stringy strands of flesh stretched over a bleached skeleton.

  The not-wolf was gone.

  Bee saw his look. She reached out and picked up the bottle of milk she’d hurled. “My backup plan in case the first ‘un didn’t work,” she croaked, her voice weak and shaking. “Twenty times the foxglove. Sent the bastard packin.”

  He reached Ellie, knelt down beside her. She emerged from her self-made cocoon, and he flinched to see how haggard she looked, how suddenly exhausted. He saw her look at the body of the changeling.

  “It saved me,” she said, in a small voice. A child’s voice.

  “Yes,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

  She got up and opened the back door in the kitchen. For a moment he feared she was just going to walk out, but she sat, alone, on the back doorstep, chin on her legs, staring into space. He saw her shake her head violently, clearing it. He saw tears come. Once or twice, she dry-heaved as it became too much for her to process.

  He made as if to go to her, and was stopped gently but firmly by Bee.

  “She needs-”

  “What she needs is a moment. And who she needs…” Bee looked at him, “isn’t you.”

  He couldn’t deny the truth of either. So he sat back down amidst the chaos and glass and waited, as his own head sorted the Tetris blocks of memories – real memories – into rows as best it could manage.

  She was back, standing in the doorway. She looked pale, and tired, but there was an edge to her. “I don’t understand what’s happening. I just want my son back. I just want…” she paused, tasting the air, tasting reality, “…I want…I think…it’s strange-“

  “Danny,” he finished for her.

  Her confusion cleared a little at the word. “Yes…” she said, sounding a little taken aback, and then looked at him in despair. “Steve, I don’t know what’s real and what’s not real anymore.”

  “You will,” Bee said. “But we need to go.”

  “Go?” Ellie said faintly.

  “Back to the garden thing? To where Danny went?” Steve guessed.

  “Danny went? Danny went where?”

  Bee shook her head, ignoring Ellie’s question. “No. That closed altogether when he went through. If…when,” she amended hurriedly, “when he comes back, he’ll have to come out somewhere else.”

  “Back? Back from where!” Ellie demanded. “Where has he fuckin gone? So help me, one of ye better answer me!”

  Bee looked to Steve. You
tell her. “Where those things come from,” was all he could think of to say, mostly because it was all he knew himself. He looked to Bee for approval of this explanation, as did Ellie. Bee nodded.

  “You’re sayin he knew about this? He knew about Aar…about…” and she faltered, had to suck in a steadying breath, unable to look directly at the hideous corpse in the middle of the room, but unable to quite look away from it either, “about…that?”

  “No,” Bee said firmly. “No, he didn’t know. He wouldn’t have left ye if he did, love. He’s daft as a fuckin brush, but he loves ye. He does, aye.”

  Ellie frowned in incomprehension as she attempted to drill holes in Bee’s forehead with her stare. “Who are you?” she said. “Why are you talkin like you know us?”

  Bee looked back at the young woman with nothing but pity in her eyes. “I know this is…well, I know how it is,” she said. “And I might have some answers for ye, but likely as not I won’t for most of it. But one thing I know for sure,” and her eyes flicked to the body lying between them, “is that we can’t stay here all night and chat. Unless ye fancy it…?”

  “No,” they chimed in unison, memories of teeth and claws flashing through their minds.

  “Network…” Steve said, the changeling’s words returning to him. “Did it mean the Lircom thing?”

  “Lircom thing?” Bee asked.

  He shook his head. “Dunno exactly. Some sort of massive internet upgrade all across the country. Faster connections, and it’s cheap as fuck. Everyone’s getting it. It’s going live tomorrow. Danny mentioned it to me…”

  “What would these…these fuckin…things…have to do with that?” Ellie asked. “What has any of it got to do with taking my son away from me?”

  Her mobile rang, sending a startled jolt through all three of them. She grabbed it from the fireplace and stabbed the call answer button immediately.

  As she talked, low and urgently at a volume the others couldn’t make out, even at this close proximity, Steve gave up trying to eavesdrop and sank to his haunches. The body of the thing that had wee’d in his face less than twelve hours ago in the guise of his pretend son was undergoing the most rapid loss of form he’d ever seen; it was like watching a motion-lapse camera recording footage of a bowl of fruit taken over the course of six months, compressed into the space of five minutes.

  The flesh was simply dissolving, losing coherency from the bones, which themselves seemed to be losing some of their own integrity; he watched the edge of one begin to powder into a fine white dust. At this rate, in another few hours, there would be nothing left; the remains of that strange little being would have returned to the ether.

  Right along with the body, the cast-iron certainty of the memories of the last year or so of his life seemed themselves to be being buffeted, eroded by waves of a parallel life. Recollections of attending Aaron’s birth now stood alongside memories of receiving a text message from…from someone…from Danny, yes, from Danny…a text message that had listed all of the important facts about the birth. Of his child’s birth.

  The real one.

  Two feet away from him, his fake child was crumbling into dust, and taking his fake fatherhood with it. All of the panic and the giddy sense of responsibility vertigo he’d felt over the last few days, he’d fought to swallow back down again, out of shame that here he was, with a small child and a partner who depended on him, and he was behaving like a spoiled kid himself.

  He had an explanation for that now, of course. He had never been a father. This had been some sort of bizarre, skewed, tangential version of his recent past, in which he, and not Danny, had been the one to sleep with Ellie, he’d been the one to get her pregnant. And they – these monsters, these faeries or whatever they fuckin called themselves – they had been so clever, creating these entire set of fake memories stretching back.

  Fake memories. Of him being a good father.

  Only in the last two days had he found he was slipping under the waters of coping; the confusion and the panic he’d experienced had not just been at the bind he suddenly found his life to be in, it had been at his own attack of cold fatherhood feet after a year or so of making a pretty decent fist of it.

  Except he hadn’t. It had all been made up.

  The moment it had ceased to be made up – in the last two days, where there was no new set of memories, just these ones, no parallel train track of existence – he had started to fuck things up.

  Despite having the knowledge of how to make bottles dropped into his mind like a Supernanny version of The Matrix, he’d ballsed up making them time and again. Not because he didn’t know how. Because he didn’t want to do it.

  What had he said to him, to Danny, before the ground had opened up and claimed him?

  She was mine and the wee man was mine and even though you had this amazin job and a big house an all, I thought - well, there we go, finally I’ve beaten him to the mark on somethin. I thought - when it’s time for him to have a wee one, he’ll be the one comin to me for advice.

  Memories continued to unfurl inside his mind, and he was astonished at how many of them he wasn’t welcoming back. There was one in particular he would have done anything to continue to forget.

  **

  Belfast, 2011 AD

  “How did this happen?”

  She kissed him somewhere between this and happen, mashing his words into unintelligible mumbles, but he didn’t mind one bit. He was kissing her back, and they were rolling on the bed, back and forth, like a horny pendulum. If someone had stopped time and asked Steve what day it was, what month, any sort of question requiring any iota of thought, he’d have made the duelling banjo rednecks from Deliverance look like the next stage of human evolution.

  Afterwards, when they were lying there panting and exhausted with the worries of the world seeming to be ascending gracefully from his body in a hot-air balloon of contentment, he reassembled his pre-sex train of thought one carriage at a time and asked the question again of the girl lying beside him.

  “Maggie?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How did this happen?”

  Her head was resting on his chest. “Because Danny and Ellie asked you to check in on me, make sure I was alright? If I was coping with the trauma of being single again…”

  He laughed. “That was four months ago.”

  “Well?” she shot back, tugging on one of his chest hairs until he yelped in alarm and slapped her hand away where it could do no more damage, or at least until he could muster a more manly pain noise. “You’re just being really thorough.”

  “I…” he said, and his mouth was suddenly dry as he realised this was it, “…I love you.”

  He could feel the up-and-down of her chest on his pause. He was expecting it, of course; but it didn’t make it any less nerve-shredding to experience it. After a moment or two, it resumed, but it was quicker and shallower than before, and he fancied he could feel her heart thudding against his skin.

  He’d considered possible replies. Obviously he was hoping for one in particular, but he’d come up with a list of others that covered the whole spectrum. On the positive side, there were alternatives, like I adore you, or the admittedly nauseating you complete me or something like that. Moving toward neutral territory there would be the replies that wouldn’t completely cause him to lose hope – something like I’m falling for you too, perhaps.

  Of course, she could always give him the dreaded thank you and they could lie there in embarrassed silence until he worked up the courage to do the decent thing – get up and chuck himself off the nearest high ledge.

  The response he got was none of those things.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  **

  Now

  Ellie had finished her phonecall. Steve brought himself back to the present as he registered her expression. “What is it?”

  “Mum. My Da’s missing. He said he was going to work tonight but she can’t get him on the mobile, and when she
phoned work they’d no idea what she was on about.”

  “Work? At this time of the night?” Steve said, trying to eke some politeness into his voice. He had a whole set of fake memories of her ones being dickheads, and the funny thing was, they were bumping against a whole set of real memories of her ones being dickheads. “And she believed him?”

  Ellie’s voice was brittle. “He’s working with Lircom.”

  Steve’s apathy died on his lips. “Oh,” was all he said.

  “We have to find him. If one of those things, those wolf things…we have to find him. He’s my Da and we have to find him,” she said, beginning to pace back and forth.

  “Love, I don’t mind where you two go,” Bee said before Ellie could babble further. She yawned, to their amazement. “I’m an oul doll and I’ve had enough excitement. I’m goin home. You can drop me off on the way.”

  “It’s not safe-“

  “It’s safe,” Bee said quietly. “Trust me.”

  “On the way to where?” Steve said, changing tack. “Where exactly are we even goin?”

  Ellie stopped pacing. Dawn was breaking on her face, as though the clouds had cleared in her mind. “All this Irish shite…faeries and changelings…fuckin hell!” she raged at herself. “Why didn’t I think! He’ll know what’s goin on! He’ll know something!”

  “Who?”

  “My uncle Dermot,” she said. “That’s where we’ll go. He’ll help us find my Da. Plus, like I say, he’s an expert on all this…we’ll be safe there.”

  **

  “This is a serious criminal offence. You do realise that. And I fully intend to prosecute you both to the maximum extent of the law. You’ll do time for this, which at your time of life Dermot, and with your health…”

  Tony Morrigan rolled his eyes as he watched Dermot Scully poring over extremely old documents. “Does he ever fuckin shut up?” he asked, shooting a hostile look back at the man currently securely fastened to the swivel chair. The basement was lit dimly by the light of candles, and it gave Michael Quinn’s eyes an otherworldly glint that Tony didn’t care for even one little bit.